Seattle. Word.

I'm bored in seattle tonight, so I starting poking around on myspace. I have an account there, though I really haven't gotten into the rampant friend collection that seems really neccesary. After about ten minutes of flashing pages and reading up on Charlie's sister's thoughts on marijuana, I got creeped out. Myspace constantly creeps me out. People posting comments about comments about in-jokes of the time somebody got drunk and flashed a gansta sign to somebody else. ech.

so I shlepped over to the almost-recently-deceased friendster, where almost nothing has happened in years, and thought about the testimonials that I would write if I wasn't such a coward:

"Jack is a really nice guy if you can get past his grating awfulness."

"Jenny sure knows a lot of people. I think it's her business.'

It's a good thing I work for a company doing social networking.

Bitterness and loathing reign supreme over the puget sound.

===

I remember living in a city now. It's taken a bit of adjustment after a year or two living with two people in the country. The benefits are obvious - the movie theatre on the corner that plays all the darling little indie films, the many places to get vietnamese food of varying qualities and styles. The sandwich place down the street that serves a roast leg-of-lamb sandwich for eight dollars.

And then there's all these fucking people.

The human buffet isn't actually all that bad, I guess. My problem is that I'm constantly trying to pretend I'm not interested in what they're doing. The crazy woman cursing the sidewalk, yelling at a scrap of paper?. Am I interested? Is the dude in the parking lot just relieving himself or is he after something different? Don't I want to know? Aren't I curious? Of course I'm curious. Any of these events in the country could start a minor brush fire of interest. Flashlights would be taken down from foyer shelves. Boots would be strapped on. The neighbors would know. But here, in the city? Yawn. Move along. The instinct to look away, to feign non-interest, is at least partially self-defense. Even if you want to know what those two down on the corner are selling, you don't really want to see it sold. Less knowledge of the crime being commited around you equals less chance of getting unwillingly involved.

Unfortunately, it jades you rather quickly, and soon most human interaction is just - look away, nothing to see here folks.

Or at least that's my experience.

Trip and Fall

I've started a new web-log devoted to people falling down and hurting themselves:
Trip And Fall.

Would you believe tripandfall.com is taken?

I'm not sure I should be showing this to y'all.

Ok, here's another song-in-the-making post.

[play!] June 19th, I write the verse melody, chorus, and get a basic idea of what the song's about. It's always better when I know quickly what I'm going to say in a song, sometime's I'll dither around with melodies and lyrics for months without having a clue as to where I'm going.

[play!] June 21st, I record a bit on the guitar. No major creative ideas here, but things are progressing with a firm chorus melody.

[play!] Moments later, I come up with the hook. And that's enough to get started recording.

[play!]The "studio" version, I giggled inappropriately a lot when recording it. Also wondered aloud if I had gone nuts. It's so far from done-ness you need a telescope, but I guess I've gotten into the web-ish mood of "publish now, fix later". Ukelele, guitar, bass, foot tapping/amplifier, broom, toy piano, whistling.

(update) June 28th: I may very well abort this one. Sometimes you just come to the point where nothing seems to be working right, and your options are either to force it towards an unhappy completion or just give.

My favorite part to this song is the first verse, which goes "in the gathering of night / with a quickening of breath you draw me tight / and soon nothing is allright / my head just goes out of order", but I find that I've been working that section to death in the recording: removing drums, trying different guitar parts, all sorts of stuff, and nothing is really giving it life - it all just sounds like I'm complaining on tape. Two lines come to mind:

"You had sex with a woman and now you're whining about it?
--kids in the hall

And Tom Waits, who says that if there's one line in a song you really love, take it out - you're trying to hang a song around that line, and it won't work. Which is a really scary thought, actually. Rewriting the best lines in there?

The other thing to think about here is that I've never really finished (recording, anyway) a song I didn't like. Which is interesting, the thought that something can come from your own head, be your little baby in the world, and you just don't like it all that much.

Minor update to that song.

[play!] Rick plays some Mandolin, different/new harmonies, I think maybe a new scratch vocal track, some arrangement changes including an outro.

Where exactly do the scratch tracks end again?

I've been writing a few songs here and there, and when I get an idea I call it in to my account on GCast. I've always done this to some extent, usually using an answering machine's microphone or whatever I can sing into quickly. This gave me the idea of doing a sort of end-to-end presentation of a song, from the answering machine to the full studio recording. This song is the closest I've got, but if you listen to the end of this one you don't get the finished product, yet, but here goes anyway.

1. [play!] April 17th. I'm goofing around with the Ukulele (apparently poolside or some other noisy place) and record this little progression. I have no idea what to do with it, as is often the case, and I put it aside.

2. [play!] May 15th. I can't sleep (timestamp on the file reads 3:30am), and end up milling about the kitchen, and out comes the first verse of the song. I'd like to point out that (a) I finally have an answer for all you people who ask me what I do late at night, and (b) the original idea for the song was "I'm not lonely enough," which I dropped for reasons of possible truth infringement.

3. [play!] May 17th. The song starts to actually become something more than a verse when I realize that the chord progression from April can be sung over, and fits reasonably well with the verse. I'm still on the "I'm not lonely" idea (damnit, now I wonder if I should go back). The second verse is basically salvage-yard material from a very old, unfinished song called "somewhere in the course of the night." Although the bits about the moonlight are new. Not that this is a good thing, invoking moonlight.

(interjection: not sure if I can do this without being incredibly self-conscious. Note to self: deal.)

4. [play!] May 22nd. I get inspired for some reason to go down into the studio:



(it's like a real studio, only messier! (and smaller.))

By the time I start, I'm reasonably firm on the first and second verse, have a reasonable idea of how the chorus goes, and a lyric for the last verse kicking around in my head. It's not that interesting, but here's how the recording goes:

1. Click track. Get the tempo right. I can't tell you how many times I've ended up near completion of a song and find that it's just too slow. It's awful.
   
2. Try to play the ukulele part over the click track. Fail to stay anywhere near in time.
   
3. Add a shaker (I have this paper-weight that I got at CompUSA that I really like, it's all sand and no beads).
   
4. Play the ukulele part, succeed.
   
5. Add hand claps. What song with hand claps goes wrong?
   
6. Add accordion, the little toy one that Charlie bought at some point. It's got a cute reedy tone, my full-size beast would overpower the ukulele.
   
7. Add toy piano, why not.
   
8. Sing the first two verses and the chorus. As usual, I like the first take I do on the first verse, and spend hours trying to get something I like for the rest. Fail. Diddle around with the timing of the chorus vocals until it souds right.
   
9. Double the hand claps, fix the timing of some of them via cut-n-paste.
   
10. Play some bass.
    
11. Sing a lousy harmony to my lousy lead vocal. Note that I could really use a halfway decent mic for vocals. Also note that I'm lazy, and still have to do harmonies for the rest of the verses and the chorus.
    
12. Fill up a soup pot with water, beat on it with a wooden spoon, pitch shift it down, call it a kick drum.
    
13. Stop for dinner.
    
14. Drink too much, pass out.
    
15. Wake up at midnight, realize I'm screwed for the evening sleep-wise, head back downstairs.
    
16. Extend the song past the first two verses and the chorus, again using the wonders of cut-n-paste, creating a little breakdown after the first chorus and another verse/chorus pair.
    
17. The bass sucks, re-do it.
    
18. Invent lyrics for the 3rd verse in about 30 seconds, sing them, bounce the mix down, call it a night.
    

Well, was that interesting at all? Lemme know.

Old stuff.

I dug a few things out of my computer I liked.
===
The last time I saw her, she was complaining about her health. Then she said to me,
all I do anymore is talk about my health.

Maybe next time, if she ever comes back from Brooklyn, I'll run into her again, and I'll run into her, and I'll have to confess that I've been dreaming of her,
unwillingly,
again.
===
My karmann ghia was cursed. It wasn't a muscle car,
it wasn't lowered. All of my mother's friends called it cute.
But it was cursed.

A year ago, I was looking for an antique car; maybe a Mustang, I thought.
All of my friends advised me against this choice. Apparently to purchase a Mustang is to prove oneself to be either a frat boy or a homosexual. The ambiguity of this appealed to me, but I couldn't afford one. Nor could I afford the huge, powered-as-hell old black convertable Mercury, or the beautifil old black-and-white
skylark. Then, driving my mother's car home one night, I saw my Ghia.

It was Red. It was black. It was up for sale. It looked like a porsche. I drove it for ten minutes, and wrote a check for $3,000 to Moto, the Japanese guy who had owned it before. "I know you'll take care of it," he said. "You're a Karmann Ghia lover." I didn't tell him that the only time I had seen such a car previously was when Mike Myers drove one in "So I Married an Axe Murderer". No matter, no matter. Suzanne, my girlfriend: "You just bought it? Did you even test drive it? No? Nothing? Well, cool!".

I drove the thing for about a week before receiving my first parking ticket, in a downtown bus zone, for three hundred dollars. I shrugged it off. This is what you get, I thought to myself, for driving a slightly-flashy car with no hazard lights.
I've always felt that people who believe the universe is out to get them have too much time on their hands, and that they would've prosecuted Galileo for saying that the earth revolved around the sun. These are the people who believe that their toaster geniunely hates them. So when I got the second ticket in the same week, a bullshit little no-left-turn num, I chalked it up to the end of the month and a bored police officer.

Then the car got slammed.

I wasn't even there to see it happen. No one was, apparently. Sometime, late at night in my parking garage, a large vehicular-type mass slammed into the rear end of my little red Ghia, caving in the rear hatch. The attendants at my 24-hour parking garage swear they saw no one. No paint from another car, no bumper marks. Nothing on the ground. There was simply no sign of the fairly large scale ramming that took place. I now had one heavily dented, cute, red and black Karmann Ghia.

I shrugged it off again. These things happen, you know. Insurance won't cover it? Ah well, so it goes. My friends and co-workers were amazed by the zen-like attitude I took, but it was just a front. I couldn't be angry at whoever hit it: there was simply no one there to hate. So I internalized it. I said nothing, but every time I drove, I could only think of how beautiful it used to be. How it was ruined now. I started thinking about the car's history; the Karmann Ghia is a direct descendent of the Bug, the car Hitler had ordered designed for use in the second world war. My car had been imported from Germany; inside the glove-box was a indecipherable little message in German. The message might have read "The SS recommends that you wear your seat belt for maximum jew-killing potential! Drive safe!" for all I knew. A strange guilt had crept in.

Once I convinced myself that I owned a car whose ancestors had beat up my ancestors, Nazi imagry started popping up all over the place. A swashtika drawn in freshly-poured cement. The spiky-haired blond at work revealed that her grandfather had been a high-ranking officer in the third reich. A day at the beach, Suzanne and I snuck into a secluded cove for sex, only to find swashtikas written in the sand. We began kissing, but the air had started to close in on me. We kicked out the symbols and moved on.

By now a switch had been flipped in my head. It was no longer simply the Nazis, those silly clowns, but the Devil himself. He was around, evil was being done, and it wasn't even the stupid humans doing it this time. He came to me as the shell game player on Fillmore Street. Written in my notebooks at the time, in bold, is "Enter the Devil". Eventually he translated himself into my lover. She looked particularly wicked one night in the moonlight, and I asked her her thoughts on the devil. She only grinned with all of her teeth and said "You know my feelings on the devil."

By the time the Karmann Ghia was hit a second time, caving in the front fender (again, no witnesses. No evidence), I was in no great state of mind to care one way or the other. Nevertheless, it seemed to me that something was telling me to rid myself of this automobile.

I took the coward's way out; I parked it at my mother's house. It's sitting there now.