My modest proposal for a divided America’s future.
As our 2008 dog and pony show election draws near, America is more divided than ever. What's worse, for all the better efforts of people on every side of the fence, the consensus remains generally intolerant.
maybe this noble melting pot experiment has boiled over. there's such a mutual loathing between so many groups of people that it seems silly to explain to either side that we're all carbon-based life with the same capabilities for emotion, empathy and thought. we all have the same basic needs and they can all be met living off of the land as we've repurposed it thus far.
so it's time. let's get out the tape and draw some lines. build a few walls. close a few airports and we'll all concentrate on our respective strengths while respecting the rights of others more since... well, there's now a 50 foot wall separating us.
meet the new five republics of amerikuh. choose your republic wisely. it's permanent.
The Republic of Redneckania
bible thumpers, evangelicals, old testamentoids, mormons, farmers, meth cooks and "simple folk" - you probably can stay right where you are. other than your currency (and a long-celebrated reunion of church and state) you know live in the Republic of Redneckania). You may electrocute the retarded. You may beat, imprison and torture the minorities and homosexuals who weren't smart enough to relocate. You may teach Creationism without fear. You may whittle away your days making needlepoint and collecting Precious Moments figurines. This is the return to the better days / dark ages you've been clamoring for!
EXPORTS: Grains, Vegetables, Crystal Methamphetamine (it's legal to make here), Meats, Dairy
The Republic of Barronia
A virtual industry hub. Considered "North Mexico" by their neighbors, Barrionia rivals even China in terms of labor costs. This is not "where we put the Mexicans" - this is "where the Mexicans want to be." A very separatist, unassimilated culture that speaks their native tongue and lives without fear of persecution by angry, white, laid-off workers (who demanded unionized pay and benefits to do one-fiftieth the work until the demand for them was eliminated). You may bedeck your 86 Astro Van with as many Murray's Auto Parts ground effects kits as you like without looking silly. You may blast accordian music until 4 AM without those annoying white people calling white police.
EXPORTS Manufacturing, Milling, Food
The Republic of Ghettopolus
Do you profit handsomely from the exploitation of your own people? Do you lack the morals that come with being raised in a nurturing, family environment? Do you contort your hands into some weird cryptic shape every time another person walks by so they understand that they are on your sidewalk? Hope you like the warm weather, because you're packing your bags for Ghettopolus. Unencumbered by such previously troubling things as "the law" and "prison" - you may live here in complete freedom to shoot, kill, rape, murder, steal, beat and harm anything you see fit. Drugs? Oh yes, sir! With major seaports in the former states of Louisiana and Florida at your disposal, you'll be making all kinds of new friends. Oh - we're not divvying this up by color or city of origin either. You guys figure it out. It'll be musical chairs - with really bad music and lots and lots of semiautomatic gunfire. You might want to build a few extra hospitals.
EXPORTS: Drugs, Human Organs. The two things our next Republic desire the most.
The Republic of Republicana
It's like a country club. A really big country club. My dad. Your dad. Our dads. They can let Bush be president until 40 years after he chokes on his tie and fritter away their days golfing. The NYSE remains here and Republicana will remain as the guard of the old trade. In other words, pretty much everyone else has something they want. Not that they'll use it right away. They create holding companies for all the computers and potatoes made elsewhere and then use it in a high-stakes form of annuities and investments. Did I mention they'll play lots of golf? Look out Ghettopolus, they're going to try to buy your homes out right from underneath you. Don't sell out. Shoot them.
EXPORTS: Money. Innovations in argyle patterns and double-breasted suit patterns.
The Liberal Republic
I call somewhere in Oregon. First rule of the LR is that if you're a douchebag, you're exported without much question to the place you belong. The idea is free trade, free living, free speech, free exchange. Democracy without socialism. Everyone does their part and everyone gets a piece. The white 35 year old marketing guy lives next door to the married homosexual circus midgets who live next door to the... you get the idea. It's a utopia in both aruged definitions of the word. But we get the ocean (after we're done cleaning it up), the orange and avocado trees and the entertainment capital. Pot smoking? Legal. Gay marriage? Legal. Abortion? If you have to. Schools? Free and excellent, all the way to the university level. Combustion engines out. Alternative fuels in. (we'll trade a lot with Redneckania). It'll be grand.
so before you must flame me for being so baldly divisive and racist (though race, sex, creed and lifestyle have nothing to do with this, the fact people cannot stop perpetuating their stereotypes might) - just ponder it for a while. If nothing else this would kickstart the nations cinderblock industry for a while.)
The year was 1990 and, like most kids weaned on the mixed messages of Saved By The Bell, Just Say No, Black Flag and their first few LSD experiences - i had become listless. Not so much at the antiestablishment 101 mainstays like high school gym coaches, jocks, my parents or the school full of well-heeled, obnoxious rich kids i'd recently been plucked from Toronto to endure in well-to-do Lake Forest, IL. It was more at what they did for fun and entertainment than what they represented.
Like virtually all metalpunk kids, I was in a series of absolutely terrible bands from 8th grade onward. From butchering Sex Pistols covers to embryonic attempts at actual songwriting - it was all pretty bad, but what was worse is it lacked purpose. Sure, we'd play out. Parties, the usual community Battles of the Bands, bla bla blah. A tree fell in a forest every time. Meanwhile, a vital, huge music scene lay just 20 miles to the south and nobody really seemed to notice.
Even then I had cultivated a taste for the extremities of music genres. Sure we all listed to slayer, metallica, etc - but once I heard Obituary, Deicide and Napalm Death I was absolutely hooked. As a drummer it was fun shit to listen to because of the blast beats and Kenyan foot race double bass work. And lest we forget, that shit was offensive. When your mom says "what's this song called" and you can reply "Oh, this one's called 'Entrails Ripped From a Young Virgin's Cunt"" and not be lying? Well, that's a good day in suburbia.
I answered a few different ads in the Chicago music weeklies and eventually landed in a a couple different death metal bands - but was eventually recruited into a then-forming group featuring members of Eyegouger and some other band who's name i totally forget, though in the inner-inner circle of Chicago's fledgling death metal scene, people actually seemed to care.
So if you thought Cannibal Corpse song titles would set off my parents (they did), imagine when I decided our basement would be a fine place for the now-named death metal group Disinter to rehearse twice a week. Gone were the high school classmates butchering "Harvester Of Sorrow" and in were 4 25-30 year old guys from Chicago - none of whom seemed to mind smelling like a rancid cross of stale beer, bong water and the trappings of generally poor hygeine.
Within a year we were playing different places around Chicago and I can't tell you how fucking rad it felt. I was a skinny little punk kid with no tattoos and a mohawk who preferred to play the more "punk" 4 piece kit instead of the 15 piece monstrosities usually associated with the drummers of that genre. (My theory for all those toms and cymbals was that you could get as drunk as you wanted and never miss). So initially the "community" was sort of quizzical and mistrusting of this weird kid in their midst. Thank christ i could play like a motherfucker. Maybe not the best, but one of the fastest.
So while the bands of my high school classmates readied their cover of "Under The Bridge" for talent show, i was playing shitty metal bars, drinking all the beer i could get down and never get id'd (at 17 that really feels like a big deal) and scam skanky metal women who would get me high and make out with me - blissfully unaware of the felony they were committing with a minor.
We even recorded one really shitty demo in 1991 before I left for college, more crappy bands and a warm, fond memory of being Lake Forest High School's "Most Likely To Get An Endorsement For Double Bass Drum Pedals" and learning how to write entire songs in the Cookie Monster's native tongue.
Why the band (in it's 5409235th lineup change, but still playing hard as ever 18 years later) has chosen to post this demo on their site is beyond me - but for the brave and intellectually curious - it can be found right here:
i thought i'd just respond here to some questions i've been replying to a lot lately.
1: do you have anything new coming out?
as temulent? no. i haven't worked on drum and bass for a while now. after starting some new stuff back in september 2007, i listened to the roughs again at the beginning of this year and didn't like it. i thought taking a few months away from drum and bass would rekindle my interest in producing it but it really hasn't.
2: when is the new obliterati coming out?
i have no idea. we dropped the ball and nobody really seems to want to pick it up. myself included. the dwindling marketplace for vinyl has made it less and less rewarding to fight the good fight. but really there's nothing going on behind the curtain. the powers that be in making those records have all been very distracted with other obligations. i will not speak for my partner on this, of course - just how it seems to me.
3: are you dj-ing in _________ any time soon?
no. djing has always been a way to perform out my own material and since i'm not doing any new material you'd be hearing pretty much the same songs as you did a year ago. so really no point there.
4: how's grayson treating you?
like a one-year-old. he's almost as irrational as i am by now.
5: any other projects in the hopper?
i'm pleased to say very much so yes. i'm not saying shit until the first ep is done, but early on it sounds like neurosis, the velvet underground and ride got together to write some funeral music and godflesh did all the engineering. it's been awesome to work on music from a guitar/bass/drums angle and to try to use slow speeds to convey the same aggression, manic downswings and postcards of hopelessness that temulent tracks used fast speeds to achieve. i mean, that's not really me. i'm not that guy... mostly thanks to the notion i've always had the benefit of being able to pick up whatever instruments are lying around to expose and eviscerate the dark days into a tasty 100-calorie on the go snack. (see: disposable art)
you. yes, you. if i could steal you away from your busy schedule of standing around the middle of a hill sizing up a man-made handrail in the middle of a mountain for just five minutes to read what i have to tell you, you can then return to trying to convince anyone and everyone what a badass motherfucker you are for riding a snowboard.
when i started snowboarding twenty years ago, many of the things you take for granted simply did not exist. not only was the equipment primitive by today's standards, we thought neon stripes in the clothing and funny hats were cool. that's a shame, but please don't let it discredit what i need to tell you here. back then about 1 in 25 ski resorts would let you on the hill. even then, many had restrictions, such as keeping you to one area or making you pay to get some sort of certification that said you were qualified to ride amongst the throngs of unqualified skiers. sounds ridiculous, i know.
even after you were allowed on, there was still the nagging issue of those pesky skiers. you see, they didn't much care for sharing their precious mountain with anyone but themselves and it made for lots of riffage. i have been the unfortunate participant of brawls and fights simply over the choice of winter sport, had numerous things thrown at me from a lift chair, etc. there are hills to die on, as the saying goes, but some 400 ft dump in upstate new york is not one of them.
so naturally back in the early 90's there was a little bit of a kickback. i certainly was not one to instigate, but if i felt put upon by the two-planking populace, i would repay it pound for pound. but i generally felt that all of that strife was taking away from the purpose with which we had gone to the mountain, which was to actually ride our snowboard.
but to all of the seventeen year old puppy-dogs with the bulldog attitudes, you weren't there and thus have absolutely zero entitlement to be a dick to anyone within earshot simply because they're not in your immediate circle of friends. show some respect to both the sport and the people who coexist with you on the hill. there's more than enough room for everyone. try to understand that your presence on the hill is not a birthright and if you perpetuate all the negative stereotypes about the sport, you're just being another selfish xbox-weaned asshole kid of the 1990's who doesn't appreciate shit.
one other thing, jibs and bonks were created on non man-made obstacles. it's much more satisfying to find your own unused picnic table or fallen tree or whatever to use as a railslide instead of the one the resort painted orange and set out for you. if you're as rebellious as you like to dress and talk and think you are, why not ride like it?
see you on the hill. i'll be the old guy on the 163 passing your dumb ass at about 30mph.
a few posts below i wrote a mostly anecdotal account of surviving an impromptu day of airline hell on the way to a gig 1200 miles away with a rather heavy flight case of records in tow. an important thing of note is i was an unaccompanied business traveler doing his best to navigate a day of tight connections and terminal hops to make it to said evening's "business". i needed nothing more from my airline than for the aircraft to land in its scheduled destination in a timely manner - and, preferably, not become engulfed in flames if at all possible. (3 out of 4 flights didn't explode... i suppose they get a 'C'?) Nay, get on the plane, huck my vinyl into the overhead compartment, flip open my laptop and nerd out for a while was all i asked.
two weeks ago i had to fly to detroit to play with ronin at an event. given how close it was to thanksgiving, i had decided "fuck it, this is thanksgiving," and bought mia a ticket on the same flight so we could go back as a family and visit with grandparents friends, et. al. when booking air travel from st. louis, there's about a 98% chance that you are either flying american or southwest, as they both hub out of here.
for as long as i've been djing other people's fine cities, i have become very familiar with southwest. they are the choice of penny-mindful promoters all over this god-fearing land of ours. and i certainly don't expect at my lower-case-c level of drum and bass celebrity to have my balls carried for me on a silk pillow from gig to gig. i just get on the plane and that's that. i only ask you get me there and back, pay me what we agreed to, and, if i'm crashing on your couch, please don't let me wake up at 6 am to your tweaker girlfriend furiously masturbating across from me on an easy chair. i'm a married man, after all. (yes, true story.)
southwest should adopt hellraiser's tagline "demons to some, angels to others." you know what? i like not looking at my boarding pass trying to remember if i'm in 14-b or 13-f three times. and i had pretty much believed them when they said they were the "family airline." but it seems they've lost sight of those family travelers and decided to pursue the 'business class.'
so if you've flown their winged greyhounds, you know the score. in a huxlerian strata system plucked right from brave new world, you are given a boarding group. you're an alpha, beta, gamma or delta. those 30 travelers who check in first are given the temporary sensation of being amongst the chosen ones and are allowed to board first - getting first pick of those prized aisle seats or exit rows. and by the time god's little monsters, those forsaken deltas are allowed aboard, it's a safe bet you're in a row over 20 and that you're in a B or an E - plopped right between a 310 woman with psoriasis and a cold and a seven-year-old whose parents had decided to seat him 12 rows away. the only people who defeated this whole system were the old, the infirm, the maimed and - the most put-open of all afflicted: the parents traveling with a small child.
for anyone who's ever complained about sitting near a small, screaming infant while encapsulated in a steel germ tube some 6 miles above the earth's surface - please allow me to shed some light. your situation may suck, but mine gargles and then swallows. contrary to what many consider my temulent persona, i don't actually enjoy pissing people off for personal sport. and beyond that, i don't like to hear grayson crying. not only do i not like to see him wanting, suffering, or in pain - but it's also really really fucking loud. and once he's on a roll there's not much you can say or do to convince him to stop. he's 9 months old and cannot really be reasoned with.
so anyways, the idea behind the industry-standard practice of preboarding is that, well, in the chipper voice of ticket counter women everywhere: "this will allow a little extra time for those requiring it to get down the jetway and settled." if you've ever tried to go for a jog wearing a toaster oven, eight sweaters, a complete set of golf clubs and a half-completed model airplane, that's about what it's like to travel with an infant. beyond the double-humped camel's worth of cargo a small child may at any point require, you have the infant themself - who are already out of their comfort zone. by this point in the day they've been pulled in and out of their stroller eight times, poked in the face by overzealous other people "who just love babies" and changed once or twice in a dirty ass airport bathroom.
whether you board 1st or 131st, the plane will take off at the same time. it will land at the same time. it's how we spend the hours between take off and landing that determine much of whether or not a flight was a positive experience or not. if i have to cram into middle seat with the impatient remainder of the plane's inhabitants vying for space up my ass crack, pushing and shoving, huffing and snorting at every single inconvenience they encounter - it's going to really suck for everyone involved.
so i wonder why southwest... "The Family Airline!" has done away with preboarding... without, you know, making any sort of effort to tell anyone about it. those alpha's, infinitessimally self-entitled in their super special boarding status bitched and moaned to the point southwest relegated family's to AFTER the a group boards. it's called "A and a half" by some. I call it "Fuck you, i will never fly your cut-rate piece of shit airline with my child again." To read the voices of some of these people online, i'm personally of the mind to begin mailing my dirty diapers to their houses. i get that some people hate children for their own misanthropic reasons, but that does little to change the fact people do breed AND travel in the same lifetime. and unlike my screaming, unconsolable child - you are old enough to know better.
if ever presented with a situation where air travel by southwest is required with my child, i do apologize in advance to all the patient people - but i am going to take my sweet ass fucking time getting on the plane. my wife and i will then actively seek out the person on the plane who looks the most averse to the presence of infants and plop down immediately next to them. sorry about that.
meet future 86 - who, according to their website are "...the perfect Saturday night party band with rebellious music that demands you to get up faster and rock harder than anything else out there today." granted, that's relative. i trolled through their site, past the corny olan mills attempts at band photography, around the MakeAWish foundation site design, and straight to their music - which sounds like something a younger Mandy Moore would have even passed on. we're talking disneyfied utter crap as heard through nine mood stabalizers here. vapid, overly dippy and happy and without point. (it should be said that the band echoes a sentiment once uttered by sellout exwhoredinaries SmashMouth - "In an era where most bands are writing songs about their misfortune & whining about how miserable life is, Future 86 embodies youth the way it's meant to be")
future 86 were contacted by a local production company in their native astoria, ny area to see if they would modify one of their cheerful little ditties for TimeWarner's cable "Triple Play" package and shoot a music-video style commercial in exchange for some filthy lucre. having watched the spot below, i can only imagine they used several smiley emoticons in accepting the offer. shit, the singer probably signed the contract with a heart in it somewhere.
it's okay to watch it a second or third time while your brain tries to really process what you just saw. it's even okay to think for a brief second that the singer's sort of cute. (watch it again, she's not. still unsure? watch her dance. okay? good. onward)
here is the original song. if you'll indulge me, let's do a blow by blow of just how much and how badly these lyrics were modified to shill for the cable industry.
original
commercial
woke up this morning
woke up this morning
no sunshine on my head
cable's triple play in my head
woke up this morning
craving tv and internet and phone
couldn't wait to get outta bed
is what i said.
i said i can see it
one simple connection
yeah, my life's happiness
one low price all on one bill
but i know that i want it
only cable's triple play has it
oh yeah, i want it bad
only triple play gives me that thrill
stretched upon my bed
hi-speed internet (nothing's faster)
hear the panic putting in my head
HDTV (nothing's clearer)
looking down at all that's left undone
cable, digital phone
i just want the sun
so i can talk all day
i want it all...
i want it all...
as you dry your eyes from uncontrollable laughter and disbelief, take notice that not only did the numbskulls in this death-by-saltines group agree to this, they're proud of it. damn proud of it. it's on their website - which may be part of their contract agreement (section 13b. band will big up this crappy ad campaign during the term of this agreement). so you want to talk selling out? this raises the bar. this beats metallica's black album hands down. this is a group that couldn't make an informed decision to save their lives and who can't wait for their next opportunity to shill another good or service for meager compensation.
there is a HUGE, and i mean ENORMOUS difference between writing music for money, cashing your check and getting back to what it is you'd be doing already instead of showing up for work... and taking your own song, rewriting it into a (bad) jingle, shooting a terrible commercial for it (which i'm told airs every 20 minutes on their network) and then actually being excited about it. in this professional's opinion, this is a group beyond help. it doesn't help that their music sounds like a wedding dj in hell's half acre. so to recap: selling your work as a musician? good. selling your modified music? bad. real bad. i don't care how many whitney houston remixes or bisquick ads i've done - there's no soul to sell there. arguably, there's none here either.
Currently
listening
:
Goodnight Sellout
By
Plow United
Release date: 26 July, 2005
because the IRS is making my life shitty. specifically, because i neglected to report a lot of earnings related to music production in years past and they've become... let's go with "concerned." and their "concern" makes them really interested to come up with a really large number with a slashed out "s" in front of it to make them go away.
don't buy my records, i will never see a cent of that. buy some mp3's. i'm going to add a lot of non-ohmresistance bits (as those are sadly not under my control). if you filetrade them afterwards you truly lack a conscience. all proceeds go directly to the "No More IRS - Annoyance Defense Fund" and not my coffee habit. pinky swear.
as virtually every musician who has ever shopped there will tell you, the guitar center chain of stores is the most maddening experience of one's music career. the emergency stop in for a 12" snare head or some .13 ga strings can quickly turn into a thoroughly realized, malevolent rendering of your own personal hell.
when i go to hell, i imagine it being my ability to play, write and record music being placed behind a counter. to get there i must walk through a football field of genetically compromised, middle american numbnuts mangling the simplest passages of korn songs through a practice amp. and then, just when i think i've made it through the worst part, i realize that i will need the assistance of an actual employee to simply hand me something - but they're all on the phone extolling the relative merits of their own personal setups.
last night was the final straw. i'm working on this heavy metal project for a client that involves cutting a lot of music, real fast. metal has drums. drums require a lot of work to set up and record properly - more so than my time and resources allow for this. but where there are analog problems, there are often digital solutions that are never as good as the real thing done right, but way better than the real thing done "almost right." the kind folks at fxpansion have a modestly priced software instrument called "BFD" (big fuckin' drumkit) that, in the right hands, is virtually indiscernable from the real thing in the finished product.
with a 2 week timeline to bang out 10 original cuts of music that all sound different, that is to say, it's not ten songs by the same artist in the same studio with the same engineer (despite them all being done by me in one studio in the time it takes some major label albums to mike up a fucking floor tom) - i needed to run out, buy said software (it being a friday night) and have it installed by saturday morning to get cracking. in saint louis there are plenty of places to run out and buy vintage tweed amps and whatever, your options for pro audio software are limited to... (cue omen music) guitar center. hell on earth. land of lost toys. where bad gear goes to die and taco bell cheddar slingers can become managers.
foolishly i figured, let's just call... check if it's in stock (unsatisfied with their website's assertion that INDEED IT WAS) and blow on down there. past the garbled cover of "Freak On A Leash" from the kid in a slipknot shirt playing an untunable dean guitar through a $40 combo amp. around the heavy metal neverwas rock idol talking about opening for overkill in 88 to the asst. manager. into pro audio where you will never find less than three random dejections of urban trash playing preset beats on a a drum machine. to the counter, where after the "sales representative" finished up his phone call about mic stands, walked right past me without acknowledging my presence at his post. i grab sales representative number two and held his attention for long enough to communicate "i am here to buy something and then promptly leave." fascinatingly enough, this actually got me a real human being to help within another five minutes. let's at least be thankful the area i was waiting was at least a decent distance from the "death by deftones" fugue in the front, as being played by corky thatcher's lesser-coordinated second cousin.
you would hope this would be simple enough. you say you have it. here i am to buy it. i am not here to haggle over the price or ask for any perks. you locate for me what you say you have, put it in a bag and i will hand $215.03 in return. it's commerce one oh fucking one. i was handed the wrong thing. "this is an expansion pack, i need the actual software".
"no, that is the actual software," my nappy-headed technology expert informed me. i used my index finger to politely underline the area of the box that clearly, i thought, said "Expansion Pack - Requires BFD1.5 or higher". "oh, it isn't?" he backpedalled. "no, i believe it isn't."
"Awww, okay - imma git my manager," he told me, disappearing into the back area of the store where apparently managers converge to work on their air of self-importance between lungfuls of paint thinner and nitrous oxide. Manager appears. Begins ticking away at the chiclet keyboard terminal in front of me with a bereaved look - "Yeahh.... It says... we have one... but i don't.... see.... where.... we... have it. Well, let me call the other store." At this point in our failed transaction i was perhaps willing to see what they could do to accommodate my needs. It's Friday night on a Labor Day weekend so my options are profoundly limited. So here's what they're offering: You can pay for the software here and then go pick it up at our other St. Louis location, roughly 25 miles away.
"Well, that's certainly, at least by definition, an option," i replied to the manager. (This executive role, i should point out, is being occupied by a 25 year old with probably not too much experience... at anything.) "How about this for an option: I will pay for the software now, and your other store gets it couriered to my house tomorrow morning." "Well, that's not going to work - we don't ship stuff from the store, you have to go onli..." "No, i'm not suggesting you 'ship' it. I'm suggesting you use one of twenty possible resources - from putting it in a taxi to personally dropping it in a fedex bag and writing off the expense... as a manager you should have that sort of executive ability, no?" "Yeah, I don't know... if you want me to put it on hold for you up there we could take a deposit down here and then..." "
Listen, the sale's not happening for you. No commission. You fucked up. Not me. Your store is full of shit and I drove far out of my way to run in and dedicate five minutes of my busy day to purchase something you said you had. You don't have it. You could get it to me fairly easily, but you're not going to do anything to keep your customers happy. I'm thoroughly aware i was not buying a bentley, but i wasn't buying a large pizza either. Those $200 software packages run on $2000 computers with lots of other wires, blinking lights and big expensive shiny stuff that YOU SELL. Surely you must recognize my needs will not be forever quashed by this single purchase. I wasn't here asking for directions, no need to treat me with such disregard.
That is not the first time i have received the crap service the store has become the benchmark for, but I guarantee it will be the absolute last. I don't care if they sell human kidneys and mine fail. No fucking chance. I may not make my entire living from music production anymore, but i still make and reinvest several thousand dollars a year from it. Several thousand dollars that Guitar Center Store 4928 or any other one will ever see cent one of. Fuckheads.
i can't help but notice more and more dj's are doing their entire sets off laptops live. this is where i feel like maybe the times are changing and i don't find myself wanting to adapt. and for anyone out there who thinks dj's in my line of work just hit a green button over and over again to start another tune, this is not the case. beatmatching in a loud club on a random set of decks that have been out of whack for a while, or a set of cd decks you've never used before, all while mixing them together - it's not easy. if only there were software that would catalog the bpm's of my entire mp3 collection and automatically line the tunes up for me. oh wait, there is.
okay - so i can take potshots all night about that but really what i miss is that this removes what's already not a that-interesting performance. some people like to watch the dj. personally, i do not, but i know why some do. but watching someone check their email for an hour? geigh. and for all the arguments for it - it just seems so cheap. like a drummer showing up to a gig with a recording of himself on a laptop and plugging it in.
this is not referring to those who are doing live shit with controller surfaces, that shit's cool as hell. if i had the time i'd be learning it. sucked to play last night and see that by the time old grandpa got on deck the tables weren't even properly hooked up.
first thing i should say here: when it comes to djing or playing out - i do not miss shows. only when i have been assured of complete impossibility or my time being wasted / not paid for / being spent in jail will i give up the ghost.
and so - my first time putting on the temulent hat since grayson was born (i put a kabash on all bookings since january) was going to be relatively simple - at least that's how it looked on my flight itinerary. early plane to minneapolis, connect, hop to boise, idaho and be there in PLENTY OF TIME to catch a nap and a good meal.
and it would have been that easy had my first flight not caught on fire. there's a classic brainbender that keeps those on hallucinogens busy for hours. "does a plane go up in flames or does it go down in flames?" a former bandmate of mine had solved it one day and it held true, and that is "the flames will go up, but the plane will go down." we were all of ten minutes in the air when the little dial-a-vent dealies above started spewing scalding hot, 'thats not a good smell' smell into the cabin. this was accompanied by a loud grinding sound in the belly of the plane and four separate, repeating alarm sounds.
i am not a hysterical person and don't often immediately leap to conclusions like "we are going to die." in fact, of the 140 people aboard save for the pilot, i would have to hazard i was setting the curve for serenity. this extends to the flight attendant who got on the intercom sounding like she had a cockroach in her vagina. eschewing the employee handbook's policy for remaining calm and business-as-usual in the face of small disasters, she hysterically told us we were returning to st louis (the hairpin turn the plane had just made sorta gave that one away) and to "please, PLEASE buckle your seatbelts and tighten them AS TIGHT AS YOU CAN." sure, that'll keep your travelers calm. i'll just watch the inflight movie instead of the black smoke that is belching out of the right wing of the plane. (did i not mention that? there was black smoke belching out of the right side of the plane. it looked exactly like the volcano stench in the plane smelled.) can i have another pillow now?
unsurprisingly to a few more seasoned travelers, we landed back in st louis - greeted by a tickertape parade of emergency response vehicles and fire trucks. and we sat. and we sat. and we sat. it was 100 deg plus on this fucking plane and there was not a soul who wasn't sweating like a whore in church. the plump, aggravatingly swishy flight attendant flitted his way back to my seat to inform us we had no news, but we may just try to fix this plane - which i really doubted.
but remember - i'm not just trying to get somewhere, i'm trying to get somewhere so i can get somewhere else. but when dealing with air travel - you had better be somewhere when you need to, otherwise you are catapulted into a very unpleasant netherworld called "at their mercy." Northwest Airlines had set up a folding card table at the gate to help us get rerouted (forty five minutes later when we were aload to slosh through our own sweat to get off). i was third to last to deplane, waylaid by a father in the aisle seat who had to berate expedia on his phone while literally smacking the shit out of his crying six-year-old. okay, so that was out. me and my 35-lb record case hucked it through the terminal and back to the ticket counters.
a little tip for male air travelers who need a favor from their airline. flirt. it's not whoring, but it's not NOT-whoring. find the insecure woman at the counter. use that same long-overlooked, predatory instinct lions use to spot sick antelope. find her and wait for her. begin the conversation and request for help in earnest. when she begins ticking away at that commodore 64 keyboard of hers, start looking at the funbag section of her company issue blouse. (it's located just beneath the cravat and to the left of the wings). let her catch you. look away. look back. smile. be nice. she'll help you. or totally fuck you over. but at that point "fucked over" is about the best you're going to get from anyone else, so you may as well blow on the dice and hope.
see the first line, i do not miss gigs. i already have a bruise on each outer thigh. i need a record case that's either padded on the outside or has a set of wheels. or maybe i could start spinning cd's. wait. i hate spinning cd's.
so through a combination of luck, self-whoring and that rare elixir known as airline mercy - i managed to get a slapped together itinerary that involved three airlines and three connections with about no fudge room at each one. minneapolis was the whore of them all. that airport needs an airport. i had 15 minutes to get from gate g18 to gate c32. and in minneapolis, there's a suburban mini-mall between every three gates, just in case you needed to stock up on gap clothing or chanel perfume on the way to your destination. i beat the gate closure by all of 3 minutes - plopped down next to a guy who talked endlessly about his youth hockey team to an untterly disinterested adjacent woman for the better part of three hours - and tried to sleep, knowing full well it might be the last time i got to try until 12 hours later.
oh, let me just remind you i did this full tilt run through the airport carrying a 35 lb flight case with a rubber handle and ball corners. and, true to my first statement - i would make this gig.
speaking of, the promoter, scene and crowd were not only extremely nice and accommodating, but made the whole 12 hours previous worth every bruise on my leg. the show itself was a blast. good, dirty, punk rock as fuck and loud as hell. those in attendance took the beating really well and i enjoyed giving it to them. jimmy, the man with the master plan for this party, specifically wanted little ol' me to headline it and it would have sucked to let him down just because one of my flights caught on fire.
so let's add flaming aircraft to the list of things i've fought through to make it somewhere i said i would be in a timely matter. this now includes force-feeding a guy in a geo metro crystal meth as we drive up a mountainside in a snowstorm and a hundred other "well, you don't see that every day things". good thing i like my work.
"dying felt so god damn good today" - dax riggs, 'pagan love song'
by premise alone, this little rant is trite and ironic. this is about bad habits, or rather, this is why my bad habits do not mesh well with the bad habits of others. it bears mentioning i'm not what many would categorize as being in any way a patient person. i'm known to snap at people over things others would let go. but that's just me, and we're not here to talk about me. we're here to talk about the people who get in the way of my bad habits.
in a little over two years i've truncated my list of no-no's from everything from hardcore drinking, coke, meth, every pill from demerol to adderall to mdma to excedrin, questionable morals (and probably some others i don't remember) down to caffeine and nicotine. that's all. coffee and cigarettes. a $25 mall-grade social worker would more than likely brand this as projection, that is to say, i just filled the holes with commercially available and socially accepted vices the same way most 12-stepper lunatic zealots are shooting up pages of the bible into their brain stems. and while it's perhaps a little bit accurate in some small way, i think i drank just as many cups of coffee and smoked the same pack of cigarettes every day. (in between blowing rails and anally violating any capuchin monkeys guests had been kind enough to leave around).
so it's fair to say i'm a little bit of a hoarder. even running remotely low on either freaks me out - the way your mother sucks ass to drive anywhere with if your gas tank is even approaching the dangerous 1/4 tank mark. and if i'm out? yikes. those little white devils the RJ Reynolds tobacco / foodstuff megacorp has me so preoccupied with are just that - and so too am i without them.
i cannot tell you just how many times i have found myself 2nd or 3rd in line at a liqour store, quick-e-mart, gas station stuck behind someone who's buying lotto tickets. this is the worst situation on earth for someone with the nicotine jones. i'm already itchy and irritable. if it's between the hours of 8 am and 10 pm i'm probably in a hurry or late for something. and i'm in no mood to let my habit and schedule be waylaid by yours.
but there he or she is, gambler crackhead eyes darting over the many rows of brightly colored cardboard and the dancing LED display behind the counter, enumerating today's state-run false promise divided neatly by one million. this isn't gambling, of course. they'll be the first to tell you that as they nervously fuddle through their belongings to produce a 90 day gambler's anonymous coin. it's just "having a little fun." i get that. nothing beats spending 10 minutes scratching at silver matte with a coin or indulging in some 1-60 numerology. but hey - compared to child pornography or trolling online for upskirt photos, this is a less despicable habit - provided you could wait to get to the comfort of your own home to do it.
my mind is made up by the time i reach the counter every time. 'lemmeeget toopacksuh marlboroultralightonehundreds' is only three words and the whole exchange, including conversational politeness takes roughly nine seconds. you compare this to the meandering, indecisive process with which these jackasses use to siphon through their entire paycheck and maybe you'll sympathize with just why it sucks so fucking bad to stand behind it. say what you want about cigarettes and alcohol and coffee and whatever else but at least nobody's burned through $100 for a bunch of receipts with little dots on them, or that icky scratch off silver shit all over their coffee table to go with the trashcan full of useless cardstock.
see, we couldn't get ink for a while because of the pregnancy. well, i mean - i could technically go but would face the wrath of the wife... who had firmly insinuated a family-wide kabbash on the art.
but thankfully, we're in the clear and so - for a little anniversary treat we got some trees.
for anyone who plans on asking "doesn't it hurt to get that area done?" the answer is a resonating "yes". not the worst i've had (that'd be my sternum) but it was not exactly two and a half hours of root beer floats at the local ice cream parlor.
mia was very helpful in helping out this past mother's day. you see, our son is bright for 4 months of age but maybe not so bright as to totally know what makes his mommy and daddy tick. (though a few nights of uninterrupted sleep would be the best damn present either one of us could ask for.)
so grayson, if you're reading.... mommy sure did love her necklace from Tiffany. here are a few suggestions from Daddy this year to make your inaugural Father's Day all that it can be!
ddrum maple 4pc shellpack in 'pocket' configuration Some new Paiste Signatures and hardware while you're out eradicating all your chances of private college.
esp kh602
i know daddy already has like ten guitars. there's room for a few more, even if he sucks at playing them and always just uses the one that looks like it was half eaten by a shark.
Digidesign ProTools HD3 system. Let's get a new Mac Pro to hold those 3 cards, i don't know if Daddy's old g4 can support the weight of all that DSP. This is the best shot you have of actually investing in your future.
sometimes you need a different kind of cerebral work to kill the hours. for me that's been a refinishing a guitar and essentially building it up from scratch. none of the parts have ever been connected to each other before.
the body is a jackson dx hardtail that was purchased off ebay for one cent. the seller forgot to put "jackson" in the title and it went undetected. jackson tends to finish their korean/indian made guitars with so much nitrocellulose that it's ostensibly made from plastic. it took over 4 hours, 10 sheets of 40 grit paper, 4 60 grit drum sanding sleeves and two paint respirators to completely strip it to wood. the neck humbucker cavity has been filled in.
mind you, this is a work in progress. the body and headstock have been stripped to wood. from there a desert camo fabric was secured with contact cement. after 8 coats of water-based sanding sealer i've done a rough cut of the headstock, body and pickup cavity. next is a lot of wet sanding with 800 grit paper, several more coats of sealer and a tighter trim of the fabric. (the sealer turns the fabric to basically a candy coating).
after a quick buff on the headstock i'll be applying the factory logo on transparency film and suspending it in several coats of sealer.
as this is my first attempt at a fabric top, i don't expect it to come out perfectly. i tend to work fast and sloppy... one of my boston terrier's hairs will live forever between the fourth and fifth coat of lacquer by the pickup. i also use cheap tools and i use them badly. but i don't play nice guitars and i run them to sound aggressive as fuck. if it comes out a little haggard it'll give it some character.
many thanks to the people i know who've given me the inspiration and advice on how to make this work. not a lot of people try refinishing in fabric and it's tricky as shit... but in the end if you take $150 in parts and materials and turn it into a one of a kind instrument that is all your own it's just more satisfying to hear those gutwrenching detuned B chords out of something you put 100 hours of your life into instead of the same guitar center ibanez as 9,999 other people.
there is all manner of prerecorded music for your newborn or infant. i'm sure that mountains of research goes into making the decision that mozart being played by toy pianos or whatever is the best stimulation for your young rabblerouser's mind.
mia and i don't take the exact same approach. she likes to sing grayson the monster ballads box set. mind you, i didn't much care for the sacharrine strains of poison or tesla's crapfest fantasias in Gmaj when they first proliferated in 1988. but that's "her thing". i have mine. we've tried pretty much everything out of the itunes library until we landed on squarepusher.
not all of it - but tom jenkinson's delirious drill beats and ever-shifting edits really seem to engage him. every little burp and blip and crazy-ass switch up makes him look around and grin. nuts.
so yeah, squarepusher is good for your infant's brain. or maybe it's squarepusher is NOT good for your infant's brain. it's one or the other. we'll have to see.
Currently
listening
:
Hard Normal Daddy
By
Squarepusher
Release date: 27 November, 2001
