Like Amy Changes Hair

Time dances on. I can't believe that tomorrow we leave to go play San Diego pride, for the third year in a row. How can it already be three years? I have to remind myself with things like this blog in order to even keep track of accurate passage of times. Telephone poles and picket fences you know.
Further compound the problem by considering that I've been reading about synchronizing delay times in milliseconds to BPM in music*. Once again I found myself using the internet to do a bit of research on a subject that I have wondered about for years, many years, and when I find the answer I sought, it's really not all that hard. Here I am wondering why I never bothered to look this stuff up before. I guess this was my time to learn this.
That kind of thinking can be a good attitude adjustment but is it really helpful? by this kind of thinking I mean this idea of an ordered universe where we as people encounter the knowledge and experience we need when we are ready for it as opposed to just running about henny penny in the world gobbling bit's this means this and this does that at random intervals. Really, it was pretty stupid of me that I've made recordings in the past and just randomly jogged around a wheel or a knob in order to set a delicate time based effect. Why oh why?
Then I'm reminded well if everyone just used a formula for delay and punched in the BPM and then set the milliseconds to the note value things would sound pretty much the same. Theory everywhere. Theory nowhere.

I made progress last night on some guitar parts, Black Magic Marker seems to be coming along swimmingly, or at least it's starting to float. I feel the beginnings of some actual confidence in my work to a click now, it's hard won but isn't that the best way to win?
I worked on Idiot Light a little also, which isn't to say it was work, mainly practice.
I also modified my rhythm approach to a newer tune "cuffo speech", which I think adds a great deal of punky viability. That could be a huge over estimation though. It felt more fun though. I can speak with total authority over how it felt.
I also took the late night sketch demo for a fun song amy and I made called "Justin Case" and figured out what the hell I was playing. Thats always fun. It's funny to record an idea really fast basically as you write and then be able to go back and actually figure out what the hell you were thinking that moment and carry it through. I find me impressing myself again. The 17 year old me with a very confused look on his face with a guitar in his hands can feel a little better about what he might one day be able to do.

*There is a way to use delay to synchronize echoes to your music. What I do is have the echoes play in time with each quarter note, eighth note, sixteenth note, and so on. Start by figuring the Delay Time needed to synchronize the echoes to each quarter note. To do this, just divide 60,000 (the number of milliseconds in one minute) by the current Tempo (measured in beats per minute) of your song. Which for a Tempo of 120 bpm, you get 500 milliseconds. If you set the delay time to 500, the resulting echoes will sound with a quarter note pulse. To figure out the Delay Time for other note values, you need to divide or multiply. Because an eighth note is half the value of a quarter note, you simply divide 500 by two to get 250 milliseconds. A sixteenth note is half the value of an eighth note, so 250 divided by 2 is 125. See how that works? If you want to find out larger note values, just multiply by two. Because a half note is twice as long as a quarter note, you multiply 500 by 2 to get 1000 milliseconds.

Irene

My mom's mother had a massive stroke two weeks ago. It's been very touch and go for her, and very stressful for her children. She was just moved from the hospital to a long term care facility in Lucas, Kansas, where she is almost assured to spend the rest of her life, however long or not that may be. I don't recall much of grandma in my very early life, in fact I think the first memories I have of her a from pictures instead of natural occurring recollection. I remember her arriving and parking with her then (2nd or 3rd) husband Dean near a large tree at our farm house. It seems all my early memories of her are of them parking at that tree and us greeting them.
My first actual honest to god real set in the matter memory of Grandma came a few years later and it's an intense and vivid memory of a trip we took when I was a child. Dean had just passed away, and my mother, and her sister drove all of their children in one car to Pratt, Kansas to attend the funeral. I remember more about that strange trip then I think I remember from anything else that happened in that two year period, and I have no idea why. In thinking back I remember the ridiculous 80's JC penny outfits we bought that we wore on the way down, silly loud colors and really tacky suspenders. Why did devin and I get matching pants? It's a mystery.
We drove my parents olds 98, or was it my Aunts maroon thunderbird? I remember on the way there being passed several times by a purple truck adorned with the name "Plum Crazy", and passing so many custom cutters traveling with combines in convoy.
To my knowledge Dean's was my first funeral. I was very curious about how it would actually feel to be at a real funeral. I heard about them from my cousins and I'd of course seen them on television. I was curious and scared.
Dean was a large man, in my memory he is 6'4". I don't remember a word he ever said to me nor the sound of his voice. I don't think he had much hair and I'm certain he always dressed in brown.
The first memory of my Grandma Irene is this, and I like it very much and I'll not accept any other memory as first. It to me expresses perfectly something about her nature.
Before Dean's service we entered the chapel, it was just my Mother and her Sister Sharon, Devin, Adrienne, Andrea, Travis and I. Maybe the minister was there, he doesn't matter to the memory.
I was a little nervous about the whole new experience that I was in the middle of, but I wasn't that nervous because we had a good camaraderie going on with our cousins, who always seemed to be a bit more bold then I or my siblings. I remember an ugly shade of green used for the carpet of a pretty much un-memorable Midwestern church. Dean had been cremated, and so rather than the large casket at the front of the church there was a table with a brown plastic rectangle sitting upon it. It only now strikes me as funny that the plastic rectangle was brown.

My cousin Andrea and I somehow managed to work up the nerve to go to the front of the chapel near the table holding Dean's cremains, and the urge to pick him up was becoming unbearable. We were that type of children.
Grandma Irene enters my memory in this moment.
Andrea and I are standing there, looking at the box, Grandma, who I am still a little afraid of at this time approaches and picks up the cremains. She then encourages us to pick them up, even shake them. She identifies with our sense of wonder about how heavy it is, and remarks about how a man as large as Dean could have possibly fit inside such a small box. She was not over come with emotion in that moment. She was actually making the entire moment much less mystical and frightening to a child. I'm thankful Irene was the widow of my first funeral as strange as that sounds, but it helped very much to know that she wanted to pick up the box, and that she understood we wanted to also.
As her life has now entered a very different phase I hope for her that she is still able to relate to the world in that special way she demonstrated to me on that day.
I have grown to believe that life and a beautiful dignity exist together, and no matter what society has lead us to think, that dignity cannot to be removed completely, it can be difficult to recognize but it exists weather you can see it or not. I think that my Grandmother always knew that, and that it helped her survive, I know that sense of dignity is still with her now, and that it is still helping.

Rumble Fishing

This heat is really a bad idea. I hear the lizards are thrilled. I on the other hand have been involved in a serious battle of maintaining some will to live a life outside of the only air conditioned room in our apartment.
Friday was a long day at work, preceded by a night of very little sleep and some strange Robert sponsored event at the palms which had me wearing a razor blade around my neck and a white tank top covered in fake blood. The things we get ourselves into. So it was hot Friday, and work was long and tiring. I came home and slept a few hours then loaded up the guitar and drove SG across town for rehearsal. Rehearsing later at night was pretty fun, I for one enjoyed it. That part of my day was very good.
The progress on new songs is pretty dramatic. I'm surprised at the many varied ideas that are coming out and the relative ease with which they are recalled and executed. I guess it goes to show that still there is improvement in the abilities of the musician, in this case musical memory. I'm hard pressed to pick a favorite tune at this point, but I would say the outro section of "legalese" is right on top for the moment, probably because it's brand new, and I managed to think of the guitar part the first time I heard it, and then play it the first time I picked up the guitar, that was totally a first. Exciting.
Friday I stayed up perhaps a bit too late after rehearsal, which led to a rather lazy Saturday, spent sleeping next to the air conditioner in a blacked out bedroom. I got up towards the late after noon and prepared to play an out door house party. Note to self: no outdoor house parties on days when hells tempature hath invaded the earth. The setting was the same as last month's out of doors house party. It was not as fun to haul all the required equipment considering the current weather, but I still managed to enjoy getting free run of sound control.
Being that the backyard is small and the neighboring apartment buildings tower directly over the stage it makes for a nice volume controlled intimate setting.
I even have had the bizarre chance to use my small amp, an old peavey solid state amp that has not been played out in significant time. In fact, it was the first guitar amp I ever bought, for something like 200 dollars on the day of my very first show with my very first band singe. I hated it for years, thought it was lifeless and cold. I used it on the recording of the SG rarity, Calendar Girl for just said cold and lifeless reasons. I have found though in these two opportunities to make use of it that I have grown up enough to be far more able to enjoy the sounds it makes and with a better idea of settings which make for that enjoyment.
So the show itself was just horridly sweaty. I was just dripping and shining. The songs themselves seemed at least to me to come off well. We tried out a new version of backdoor jesus which we'll be opening with at san diego pride. We also played the new song spoke of above, "legalese", which while not down perfect came off extremely well, so much in fact that we had people wanting to buy the cd that it's on, except, it's not on a cd. Wait people. Food Drinks Music is underway, but buy Free Alongside Ship for now, because it's so totally awesome and worth it! YAY!
Sunday was absurdly lazy as well. I slept like a dead rockstar until about one in the afternoon, then Amy and I watched Rumblefish in the black dark of the bedroom. I LOVED it. Nothing but total admiration for the performances the photography and the sounds. I have to give a shout out to Hoagie Hill on this one, I would never have thought to put it on netflix had it not been for his commenting when he finished mixing the FAS version of lady slipper that it was now "very rumble fish". So thanks Hoagie, I appreciate it.
Following rumble fish I went and bought horrid bad for a person food, which we ate in a ridiculous manner while sprawled in the dark. Fun times.
I then put in another net flix strange one, "The Missouri Breaks". Amy had texted me to ad it one day, then promptly forgot that she ever told me to do that or why she would ever have told me to. I did find it kind of interesting, but it was no rumble fish. Kudos to Brando for being just that odd.
I finally conquered my fear of extreme heat enough to venture out into the front part of the house, which is basically a big stupid oven. I fought hard to maintain a constant flow of ice water. I set up some basic equipment and proceeded to rehearse and contemplate a new song, which we've been calling "that noir song", however I think I may have convinced Amy to name it "black magic marker". The verse is much slower and spaceful than I am accustomed to playing, so it took me a long while to figure out how to play it to a click, and what tempo to set the click too, this problem was confounded even more by a slightly dramatic change in tempo from verse to chorus. I sweated like billy idol in dancing with myself but I was happy to do it.
We ended the day by having dinner with devin and dylan. It was a warm weekend, but I guess in the end I was glad to be alive and living in it.

Moving on Along

Writing, Jamming and demoing keeps plugging on "Food Drinks Music". All of it is head and shoulders above anything I've ever been a part of, and to think I was nervous about topping "Free Alongside Ship". I guess for superstition sake I will make note here that we are no where near done, not even close and I'm already getting all full of ourselves. Not prudent to go running off at the fingers like that.
Amy and I demoed a new number last night, it's got a bit of a cock rock feel to the intro, but Amy sounds like Pat benatar on the Chorus. It's called "The Red State". I'm really into it. I was lucky enough to stumble upon a little riff last night to bring the guitar back from the chorus to the verse in fun way. I love when that happens, gets me all excited to get to play it.

Last Friday we had a fun rehearsal, more of a community affair, attended by the dancers and Marc. We made a Huge breakthrough on the noir number, the chorus in fact. I was noodling on an idea trying to find a way to spice up the song in the chorus section and give it a "spy hunter" sort of feel when Dylan Shrieked with delight at a particular noodle. Had he not been there to do that I most likely would have moved on to another riff and not persued the thought to completion.

The trip to play in Iceland is coming up now very soon. Titter Titter. I'm reading a book by Iceland's Nobel Prize winning author, Halldor Laxness. The book "Independent People" is set on an old time Sheep Farm, and I can assume is based on one mans struggle for personal independence. I'm not all that far into it, but I am really enjoying it and it feel really nice to be back into reading after these last few months of periodical nothingness.
I've been researching in my spare time about Iceland and it's people. I'm so very intrigued. It seems like such an unlikely place.

mixing signals

The toil of the modern domestic man can get a person down, but not I, no I shine under such adversity. Not really. I just wanted to start dramatic. In fact the toil of modern domestic life has recently in fact had me down. Certain important weekly or daily chores have felt very distasteful for sometime, and rather than attend to them I and my life partner have found many outlandish and remarkable ways to avoid them. It had prior to this weekend grown to a problem of extreme proportions. Our area of cohabitation was in a state of complete disarray. I could list all of the grievances we committed against being good clean humans but that would be far more than I'd like to cop to on the internet. I'll instead move directly into an area which is much more positive and refreshing, the facts of our recovery from the doom of neglect.
Friday we went out to a movie with many people, and while this could be viewed as just another evening of avoidance I would like to point out that I viewed it as a mustering of energy. By partaking in such idle distraction we were able to call it an early evening and hit the bed at an acceptable weekend hour, in order to sleep extremely well over an impressive period of time. By Saturday we finally obtained the necessary burst of energy to go headlong into a psychotic cleansing frenzy. The horror need not be explained in detail. Suffice to say that it was much work, and there is still much to be done, but at least now you can see there is in fact a floor in the bedroom.
On top of all this SG has resumed the excitement of labor on the fabulous collection of songs that will become "Food Drinks Music". Amy had a nice burst of excellence which yielded words and melody for a particular tune of Devin's which has been around forever, one which had been in working referred to as "Back Yard Wildlife", as of this weekend it is now being called "Now Unthinkable". Pure Dead Brilliant. I now need to stick a guitar part or four.
Also accomplished was work on "The Collection", which is rapidly becoming extremely impressive, so much in fact that it kept me wide awake last night running it's chorus through my head. I have a fun odd guitar part on part of the chorus that just delights me, Devin was so helpful as to clarify a few notes of it for me, se we know it must be good.
This week is birthday week in our WeHo universe. Ryan and Marc both progress in age by round yearly numbers. Much celebration must occur.
Much Laundry must occur.
Much writing and rehearsing and Demoing must occur.
This time next month I will be in Iceland. How cool is that?
In December I will be in Tahiti. How cool is that?