politics

Cheer Up, Buckaroos

6 Comments

To my knowledge, George W. Bush has not done the following during his current term of office:

1) Started a nuclear war
2) Publicly flagellated a hobo
3) Quoted Martin Mull
4) Declared mustard a vegetable
5) Allowed creeping brush to overtake his ranch
6) Publicly fellated a hobo
7) Attended a Fugazi show
8) Discovered the secret of immortality and unlimited terms of Presidential office

I was going to make a list of 10 items, but the rest of the things I came up with he in fact has done.

Cheer up, cheer up, cheer up, and make the world a better place.

david patrick kelly, feelies

Reaching Out, Future Post Topics

Leave a comment

Some nice things happened over the weekend.

Andy Aldridge dropped in to say “hi” on a post dedicated to my 3000th visitor. Hi, Andy! To see how great and loving a fanpage can be, check out his A Head Full Of Wishes (*especially* if’n you like the Galaxie 500 or the Luna — there be no greater site).

I also received an email from Stanley Demeski, drummer for the best band in the world saying, “Thanks for the kind words.” Hi, Stanley! And you’re welcome! And you’re wonderful! To hear what I am constantly pumping up, you can pick up a custom, burned CD of The Feelies’ second album, The Good Earth at Twin Tone Records.

However, if’n you don’t feel like spending money due to the high cost of gasoline, you can instead devote a portion of your reserved stock of psychic energy (yeah, I know you have been squirreling some away) to will a full-fledged Feelies reunion into existence. For God’s sakes, tell me if your efforts work! I don’t want to miss it.

This kind of feedback gives me not only encouragement to slosh my feelings, thoughts and opinions onto the Internet, but also to reach out and attempt to make contact with others.

Here’s a few of my “reaching out” ideas currently in the hopper.

1) I outlined my idea for an online application where users can supply a hummed snippet of a song, and others would then try to help the user identify the song. Well, it appears that this concept already has a name — Query by humming. In the cases I have found of this on the web (at NYU for example) the project seems more geared to having a machine doing the song recognition, rather than other people. I am going to try and contact someone at NYU regarding their project, asking them if it’s possible my idea could somehow be integrated with theirs. If a “humming library” could be gradually built up organically by people identifying other people’s song submissions, this could complement their machine-identification algorithm application nicely.

2) The recent movie I worked on that I mentioned briefly had a majority of its scenes shot at the lovely Portage Park Center For The Arts, which was formerly the Nebo Lutheran Church.

The church was deconsecrated before being converted into a neighborhood arts center. I find the concept of a sacred space fascinating, especially the unsacred-ing of it (even the terms of the sacred are interesting — consecrate, desecrate, deconsecrate). I asked the Portage Park Art Center’s director Jennifer La Civita what had to be done to deconsecrate the church prior to the handover, but she indicated that whatever ritual was done had already taken place when she got the building. I’d like to ask various denominations what actions have to take place for a sacred place to become a space of the profane.

3) David Patrick Kelly hopefully has my interview-by-letter racing towards his eager eyes.

Okay, ta-ta for now.

stuff-you-may-have-missed

Pumping Fuel Slower For Your Contentment

5 Comments


The last few times I have filled up our crappy minivan Goldschläger, I noticed something that I can’t easily verify, but something I nevertheless firmly believe is happening.

It struck me that even though the volume of the $20.00 worth of gasoline I was pumping into the tank was significantly less than the amount of gas I would have gotten in return for $20.00 in the $1.50/gallon glory days, it still took roughly the same amount of time to dispense it.

What’s the explanation of this? Why should it take as much time to dispense 6.25 gallons today as it did to dispense 13 gallons a couple years ago?

I think there’s a simple answer. The gas stations are intentionally slowing down the flow of gasoline. For those people who have used a “Pay First” pump, you know that when it gets to the last dollar of your pre-paid gasoline, that the flow of gas slows to a trickle (presumably so you won’t be able to overshoot the amount of gas you paid for). So, we know the technology is there to control the flow of gas.

So, why would they be slowing the gas flow in general? Well, to prevent customers from getting angry. If you filled up your car with twenty dollars worth of gasoline and it took less than a minute to get the gas into your tank, the ri-goddamn-diculous amount of money you’re paying for your fuel becomes baldly apparent.

By stretching out the measly amount of gasoline flowing into automobiles, the appearance is given to consumers that they are actually getting something for their dollar.

So, they waste your time to prevent you from realizing you are wasting your money.

Think about this the next time you wait for your gas tank to slowly fill up with that $3.50 premium unleaded.

adventures in amateur recording, jukebox, rock 'n roll

An Ever-Expanding Universe

5 Comments

Music is very, very important to me.

In my life thus far, there have been several instances where my musical tastes have broadened, hit a plateau, then broadened again.

By plateau, I mean that I was enjoying music still, but I wouldn’t be listening to any unfamiliar music. Maybe I would come to the rather silly conclusion that there was nothing more out there, no more music that I could find to like, or no music that was worth the effort in searching out.

The last plateau happened when our eldest kids were born back in January of 2003.

This was a little different kinda plateau. It was more like all the sudden I had kids. I couldn’t necessarily play just any of the music I wanted. I couldn’t play Song X because its dissonance would make one of the kids cry, or couldn’t play Song Y because it had the word “motherfudger” in it — stuff like that.

Don’t get me wrong, I have played and still play a helluva lot of good music for the kids, but there *was* a limit to what I could play.

As I think about it, just the sheer upheaval that having children causes is probably the core reason why my musical tastes were put on pause. Yes, that last sentence rhymed. No, it wasn’t intentional.

So, my tastes languished a bit, until I started getting into music online. I feel that my exposure to unfamiliar music has grown exponentially with the use of the computer, and the use of a portable MP3 player.

In this post, I thought it would fun to share some of the songs I have only recently been exposed to with you, gentle reader.

Many of these songs are not new. You might know them, you might like them already, you might enjoy them if you give a listen. That’s the music player, over on the right. Pipe up and say something, dammit. Let’s talk about music, alright?

Long live music. Without further ado, here are some songs from my most recent taste-broadening. The links are just to the bands’ respective Wikipedia entries — the song “jukebox” is on the upper-right of the blog.

The Raincoats – Fairytale In The Supermarket
— from The Raincoats (1979)
Wow, this song is so damned snotty. I love it.

Boubacar Traoré – Duna Ma Yelema
— from Macire (2000)
It’s not in English. I have no idea what he’s talking about. It’s still incredibly powerful, even without knowing the words. Amazing guitar-playing, an amazing voice. It is the musical equivalent of melancholy, I think.

The Clean – Twist Top
— from Unknown Country (1996)
If I could be in any band, I’d be in The Clean. A pop band, but a pop band with great sensibilities, inventive musical playing, and the undeniable power of THE HOOK. “Three million people can be wrong, three million people can be wrong.”

Pugh Rogefeldt – Colinda
— from Ja dä ä dä (1969)
You won’t find this guy on the English version of Wikipedia. You haveta go on the Swedish one. This is such a pretty song, with a nice dissonant freakout at the end. Finding this artist was the equivalent of running into a movie theater to get out of the rain, only to discover a foreign film that affects you on a deeply personal level. And no, the foreign film isn’t dubbed in English, and it doesn’t have subtitles.

Can – Moonshake
— from Future Days (1973)
I had listened to German experimental bands like Faust and Neu!, but for some reason never gave these guys a try. Which was a mistake. Moonshake is a shorter, poppy song of theirs, but it’s all good, people. It’s all good.

We Look Like Girls – whap
Well, what the hell, I might as well as put a song recently done by Tim and myself, right? Tim and I have about ten or songs in progress, which are actually nothing like this one. But I like it, and I hope you do, too. No warbly vocals from either Tim or myself in this one! w00t, as the kids say.

word fun

Hello, Russia! I Have An Automobile Of Gold!

7 Comments

Check out the map of this site’s visitors at the bottom.

What the? Do people in Russia not *care* about my random thoughts? Or is it that they are unaware of them?

Perhaps a greeting to them in their native language, courtesy of Altavista’s Babel Fish translator is required to get me on the map there, literally.

Hello! Rainbows are pretty! I have a gold car. You are my friend, and will increase my hit counter. Thank you.

1st English-to-Russian Translation
Здравствулте!! Радуги милы! Я имею автомобиль золота. Вы будете моим другом, и увеличите мой счетчика ударов. Вы.

Translating the Russian back to English
To zdravstvulte!! Rainbows are dear! I have an automobile of gold. You will be my friend, and you will increase my of the counter of impacts. You.

Back to Russian
К zdravstvulte!! Радуги дорог! Я имею автомобиль золота. Вы будете моим другом, и вы увеличите мое счетчика ударов. Вы.

Back To English
To zdravstvulte!! Rainbows of roads! I have an automobile of gold. You will be my friend, and you will increase my of the counter of impacts. You.

rock 'n roll, the police

Message In A Washer

5 Comments

The Police were my favorite band back in 7th and 8th grade.

On a nightly basis, I would sing along with the songs on Outlandos d’Amour, Reggatta De Blanc, Zenyatta Mondatta, etc. During my 7th grade year, they played in the Assembly Hall at the University of Illinois as part of their Synchronicity tour, about 80 miles east of my hometown of Springfield.

I sooooooooooo wanted to go, but I was not allowed. My brother *did* end up going, and brought me back a shirt.

It was nice, but you can imagine how it wasn’t quite the same as being there.

Earlier this year, there were rumblings that The Police were reuniting for a tour, and were going to roll into Chicago at some point in the summer, playing the best ballpark in the world, Wrigley Field.

As you are probably already aware, sure enough, the rumors were true.

I didn’t get around to purchasing tickets for the show, and figured they were sold out.

But yesterday, a coworker came up to me and said, “Hey, do you need tickets for The Police?”

“F*ck you!” I enthusiastically replied. “Are you serious?”

He was serious. He had four tickets he was willing to sell to me for four hundred and fifty bucks. Now, that sounds like a lot, but he was selling them to me for what he had paid for them.

I called my wife all excited about it, then she got all excited about it. As I was riding home on the train, the excitement kind of wore off.

$450.00. That’s a lot of cash. Plus, who were we going to get to babysit our three younguns? The show is at 7:00pm on a Thursday night, and we would probably have to leave Brookfield at least a couple hours earlier than that to make sure we could get there, park, all that crap.

We have had babysitters before, but it’s a big deal trying to get someone to feed your three under-fives and put them to bed.

After briefly discussing it, we both decided to call my coworker and regretfully decline his tickets.

My wife calls me today, finally at wit’s end with all the dirty dishes produced over the course of a kid-filled day (our dishwasher broke about six months ago), especially since she is busy taking a summer statistics class in preparation for her starting grad school in the fall.

So, we’re getting a dishwasher, which will probably cost about the price of the four Police tickets. I’m thinking a Synchronicity sticker would bring some color to our new, drab white appliance.

david patrick kelly

January 22nd, January 22nd, January 22nd

4 Comments

My wife was looking at my blog tonight, and saw my post about David Patrick Kelly’s birthday of January 23rd, and how it was strange that he had the same birthday as my eldest son and daughter.

She said to me, “You know the kids’ birthday is on January 22nd, not the 23rd, right?” After a short, informal ceremony I was then awarded the following certificate:

jung vf fcybgpul?