Very tired; keeping this short.

So last night's Unwigged & Unplugged show was amazing.  Elvis fucking Costello came out to sing "Gimme Some Money."  I'm not even sure I can describe "Stonehenge" - I took a very shitty camera phone pic which does not do it justice.



Was very excited to listen to the new Grizzly Bear this morning, but for whatever reason I couldn't quite get myself into the right frame of mind.  So I listened to the new Phoenix record instead and HOLY SHIT IT'S AMAZING.  It's absolutely what I needed to hear right now.  I've been listening to so much weird shit over the last few months and while I've been enjoying it, I haven't really been inspired by it.  This Phoenix record, though... wow.  

That is all.

Was in the middle of a long recap of last week's staycation, and something got screwed up and it's all gone, and LJ didn't save the draft.  Phooey.

Staycations are wonderful, but when Monday finally rolled around it really just felt like a very long weekend.  Which is fine; we actually kept somewhat busy, even when we were slacking.

To wit:

Monday was Movie Day.  We watched Slumdog Millionaire (amazing) and Benjamin Button (I loved it, especially on Blu-Ray - Kath wasn't as crazy about it), and then decided to trek over to the movie theater, where we watched Wolverine (fucking horrible) and Star Trek.  I've never been a Trekkie, by any stretch of the imagination, and I'm not even sure I would qualify as one now, since this re-boot is basically throwing certain key elements of canon out the window.  But GODDAMN, I loved that movie, and wanted to go back and watch it again, and I cannot wait until it comes out in Blu-Ray.  

Tuesday was Package Delivery Day, so we bummed around at home waiting for the doorbell to ring.  My keyboard was delivered on Saturday, but the stand I ordered with it was re-rerouted and finally arrived late Tuesday afternoon, along with a spiffy new toaster my mom got us as an early anniversary present.  I think we watched The Wrestler while we waited - I didn't love it as much as I'd hoped I would, but it was still terrific.  And then we went out to a lovely dinner.

Wednesday was Get-Stuff-Done Day.  We did a much-needed book purge (as our bookshelves are literally overflowing - this is one main reason why we sorta want a Kindle) and dropped off a bunch of books at a neat little bookstore we recently discovered in our 'hood.  We were also prepared to get started on a CD-reorganization project, but our local Staples was out of the proper supplies. 

Thursday was Spa Day.  We spent all day at the Spa Castle, an amazing facility that's about 15 minutes by car from our apartment.  It would be even better if they served booze, but that's OK.  Kath got a 90-minute Swedish massage while I hung out in various saunas and steam rooms; then we had lunch and hung out in the personalized jacuzzi pools upstairs.  There's lots of nakedness in the locker rooms (which are obviously not co-ed), which was disconcerting at first but after a few hours of rest and relaxation, you sorta stop caring.

Friday we kinda just hung out.  We attempted to hang out on our groovy back porch, but it was hard to relax because our dogs are constantly trying to eat leaves and paint chips and bugs, and we're too paranoid to let them.

And the weekend was the weekend.

Neko Case's "Middle Cyclone" is my early front-runner for album of the year.

That is all.

I was stuck inside all day waiting for the FedEx man, who didn't show up until 6:30pm (!); my keyboard stand is still somewhere in the aether.  But at least my new baby arrived, safe and sound.  It is FABOO.

2 things I'm excited about:

1.  Kath and I are taking a much-needed staycation next week.

2.  This should be arriving at my apartment tomorrow.

1.  My aunt Hope (my stepfather's sister) passed away on Sunday morning at the age of 63.   She was in great health, great spirits, and then suddenly she was in the hospital with pneumonia and meningitis; she spent 5 weeks in a medicated coma, and slowly fell apart.  Her death is as tragic as it is horrifying.  The family is in a great deal of pain, shock and bewilderment.  

2.  Between that and the sudden burst of pollen in the air, I've been feeling pretty shitty.  I've also been feeling like a fat fuck; I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror yesterday as I waited in line for lunch, and my slight but supple moobs left me feeling ashamed.  While I was upstate this weekend for the funeral, I bought myself Wii Fit; I need to get in shape, but I also need to trick myself into doing it, because I am a lazy bastard.  I've been getting up early the last 3 days and getting into it; I have broken a light sweat but that may just be because it's been fucking crazy hot in our apartment.

3.  I have been in a deep Genesis obsession for the last month or so, and it was starting to drive me a little bonkers.  But I've found a great tonic for it - I've now become fully obsessed with Mastodon's "Crack the Skye".  I've never been one for heavy metal, but these guys are fucking amazing and it's way more prog than I was expecting.  I'm not sure if I'll get the earlier albums, though; everything I've read is that this one is less thrashy and more tune-ful, and I must admit I'd rather listen to that instead.

I'm still wondering what I'm going to do with this journal.  In the meantime, I'm on Facebook.

Sometimes I go whole days
listening bored, half asleep
I won't say anything
that's worth a thing to me
One day, suddenly, time
took a turn that once felt so brief
I blinked to see polite ghosts fading quickly

What begins as an unguarded
train of thoughts slowly can become
an addiction to the slumber
of disconnection and the resonance
of memory that no longer has a shape
but keeps you numb through
the hours tills gone is another day

Be aware, my darling
these things I say I mean
are just traces of something
I long to feel again
I see our time expand
in the air almost forcibly,
spreading thinner till it dissolves completely

I think I'm at the point in my life where there is no such thing as a "guilty pleasure" - I like what I like, dammit, and I care about what I like.  I've spent a lot of time and money cultivating my cultural appetites.  And I'm 33 - I ceased to be "cool" about 10 years ago. 

That said, there are things that I like that bother me; not because it could make me look "uncool" or whatever, but because I can look at it objectively and know that it totally sucks and I still like it anyway.  

I've been listening to The Samples all morning.  The Samples have tortured me for years.  I first saw them on the H.O.R.D.E. tour in the summer of 93, as one of many opening bands for Phish, the band I was ultimately there to see.  There were a bunch of bands at that show that I subsequently became fans of, now that I think about it - that show singlehandedly thrust me into the jamband scene.  I was pretty obsessed with Bruce Hampton and the Aquarium Rescue Unit during my first few years at college, and of course Blues Traveler, Big Head Todd, um, the Spin Doctors before they totally sucked, etc.   The Samples were basically The Police, if the Police were neo-hippies who had terribly generic lyrics.

That's really the thing about the Samples that bothers me so much; they very possibly could have the worst lyrics of any band, ever.  They make me feel better about myself as a lyricist, which is saying quite a lot, because I hate my lyrics so much I've basically stopped writing altogether.  And the other thing is that 99 times out of 100, I never listen to the lyrics - I'm almost always focused on the music, the arrangements, the playing, even the vocal melody.  I only focus on lyrics if they're really good (Dylan, Malkmus, Beck) or really bad.  The problem with the Samples is that the vocals are front and center, and the singer has a somewhat distinctive voice, and he sings these endlessly banal cliches with such sincerity and honesty that you really can't ignore them; and so what drives me crazy is that even though their lyrics sound a lot like lyrics I wrote in high school and subsequently discarded as being too cliched, they do sometimes transcend the white-boy pop-reggae thing; some of their songs are absurdly catchy, and they're recorded really well, and it takes me back to that amazing summer, between high school and college, when I felt like I was on top of the world.

Christ, their lyrics suck. 

A quick rundown:

1.  My long-overdue trip to the dentist this afternoon went much better than expected.  I was expecting my dentist to tell me that she was going to have to remove my face from my body; in actuality, even though it'd been 2 years since my last appointment, I was actually in better shape today than I was then.  

2.  Finally watched "Synecdoche, New York" yesterday while I was home sick, and I don't have enough adjectives to describe what I thought about it.  Suffice it to say that I've got the Blu-Ray and the shooting script at the very top of my Amazon wishlist. 

3.  Was at my dad's (and his wife's) gallery opening this weekend in upstate NY (I probably should've invited some of my old high school buddies who are still in the area, now that I think of it).  They had quite a large turnout and they even got some sales out of it; I'm quite proud of both of them.  If you're interested, info can be found here:  http://dalyvoss.com/

4.  I'm again trying to not live or die by every Yankee game this year; it's hard, though, especially when your two biggest acquisitions suck it up during the opener.  But whatever.  The new stadium looks fantastic and I'm sure I'm going to end up slurging on tickets, and I'm sure we'll have a great time regardless of the outcome. 

5.  I can't stop listening to Genesis, pre-Invisible Touch.  The new remasters are fucking phenomenal.  Speaking of remasters, I'm sure by now you've heard what the Beatles are doing...

The short film I was composing music for is finally up and running.  Please check it out and vote for it (if you're so inclined!)

Humilikey

If you're a Facebook friend of mine, you might already know this:  Kath and I are sorta kinda maybe thinking about moving to Brooklyn. 

We dearly love Astoria, which we definitely haven't explored enough; and we especially love our apartment, which is easily the best place I've lived in my 16+ years of NYC living (!); but we miss our friends.  I especially feel terrible for making anybody make the long trudge out to our place, and I am very much aware of how much I've missed by not making the trip out to Brooklyn, what with the social anxiety and the stomach issues and the long long train rides.  

The other thing lurking in the back of our minds is that we may one day have kids, and even though we currently have a 2BR there's no way we could have a kid in our current place.

We're not going to be doing this immediately; we've got at least 6 months left on paying off a loan that we took out to help pay off our credit card debts, and the money we spend on the loan is money that could get us a better place when we do move.  Kath is also in a local dodgeball league here.  And if nothing else, I'd love to spend more time at the Bohemian Beer Garden this summer while it's still within walking distance. 

But as I said before, I miss my friends.  And I think that being closer to them, thereby making it easier to see them, would go a long way towards helping me out with my aforementioned anxiety issues.  And in this economy, prices are coming down; I'm seeing lots of interesting options on Craigslist, and I'm sure if we decided to go with a broker we'd find even better options.  (I'm not as anti-broker as I used to be - we found our current place through Century 21, literally hours after the owner put it on the market.) 

So:  if you happen to hear of a small-dog-friendly 3BR in a good neighborhood for under $2000 (which is apparently possible and not a joke, according to Craigslist), let me know. 

I'm not doing the Popless challenge in 2009, but I have stopped reading Pitchfork, and I've noticed two things - my reckless music purchases have slowed dramatically, and I find that I'm enjoying the music I do end up buying a hell of a lot more. For example, this AV Club feature on that most esoteric subgenre of music called "power-pop" came to my attention yesterday afternoon, and ultimately resulted in me downloading Shoes, "Black Vinyl Shoes" and Big Star's "#1 Record/Radio City"...

...which I'd never heard before.

Everyone talks about Big Star in these hushed, reverent tones (which is odd, considering how joyous their music can be), but my first exposure to them was "Third/Sister Lovers," which could very well be a great album but is pretty goddamned strange when you're expecting to hear something quite different.  And as it turns out, what I was expecting to hear on "Third" is what I ended up hearing on "#1 Record", which is fucking fantastic.  As if you didn't already know.

1.  Finally finished the music for the short film I was working on; the producer seemed very pleased about how it turned out.  It's being submitted for at least one competition; if it makes its way onto YouTube, I'll post a link.  I was contemplating just putting the music up on my vox site, but I think it would be better to hear it in its proper context.  In any event, HUGE sigh of relief that it's over. 

2.  Kath and I devoured most of Season Two of the Wire yesterday, taking a break in the afternoon to see Watchmen.   I'm gonna give Watchmen a B-.  It was incredibly faithful to the source material, almost too much so - the sex scene was a little bit over-the-top, and also reminded me that while I love Leonard Cohen as a lyricist/poet, I've never been a big fan of his actual music.  I have to wonder what the movie is like for people who've never read the original comic; there were quite a few Watchmen noobs in the audience and for the most part they had no idea what the hell they were watching.  Also:  when we were coming out of the theater, we saw that there were quite a few families who'd taken their 6-year-old children to see it.  Patton Oswalt had a great bit about how, because The Dark Knight was PG-13, there's going to be a generation of sociopathic killers in 20 years who had nightmares about Heath Ledger; I can't say that a 6-year-old kid is going to be traumatized in the same way from Watchmen, but, I mean, Jesus - there's profanity, graphic violence and naked boobies and supernatural peener, not to mention the complete and utter destruction of New York City; that's gotta be a lot for a little kid to take in, right?

3.  Back to The Wire - holy shit.  Season Two might not be as strong as Season One, but it's still pretty much ruined every other TV show out there for me.  Perfectly cast, perfectly written, carefully plotted, great performances all around; it's funny and horrifying and sad and gripping and makes me absolutely terrified of going anywhere near Baltimore.

There's a million things going on right now, and I hope to get into them later today; but I am finally allowed to formally announce the release of the record I was working on last year.  I did most of the piano/organ on it, and while I didn't write any of the songs, I did have a pretty big hand in the arrangements.  We recorded it in the same studio where Sufjan Stevens recorded "Illinoise"; I got to play the same piano! 

Anyway:  please to enjoy Ali Hoffman's "This Side of Morning," which you can mess around with here: http://wingcourtrecords.com/

I can't watch the Oscars; Kath is watching it in the other room and for some unknown reason I'm totally avoiding it, except whenever I hear her giggle or something and then I come in.  The Pineapple Express skit was pretty good, and Ben Stiller as Joaquin Phoenix was fun, but the singing/dancing shit is just agonizing.  As it happens, I missed most of the nominated movies this year, so it's not really that big a deal.

I've been doing some recording today, and I finally succeeded in figuring out how to get a certain thing to work, but now my guitars just sound like shit.  I've got a fun loop running right now in spite of that, a cross between The Forms and Radiohead's "Pyramid Song", but I'm not going to mix it down just yet; I'd like to see if I can turn it into something a bit more substantial.

Saw Will Ferrell's one-man show last night, "You're Welcome America", which I'm sure will be on TV at some point; it's amazing.

I'm a little too ADD'd right now to finish this post.

1.  Kath and I had previously attempted to watch Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me not once but twice, both times without having seen the original show, and both times we gave up about halfway through because we had no friggin' idea what the hell was going on.  Now that we've seen the original series - well, up to the end of what would constitute Season 2, Part 1 - we decided to watch the movie again, and suddenly it all became crystal clear.

We also watched the movie's documentary feature, and aside from being bizarrely edited for no discernable reason, it was pretty interesting and very refreshing to see that the actors in David Lynch movies are often as confused about what's going on as the audience.

THUS ENDETH MY TWIN PEAKS POSTING.  Probably.

2.  My Xbox 360 died suddenly on Monday night; it wasn't the dreaded 3-ringed RROD but just one, but in any event the thing is toast and I have to send it in for repairs.  Which is probably a blessing in disguise, as I've got some music projects starting to take shape.  And also because a friend of mine at work lent me his copy of Final Fantasy 7, which I'd never played before, and now I'll have lots of free TV time to mess with it.

3.  I don't really have anything to say about the A-Rod story; as a Yankee fan, it sucks, and that's as far as I'm going to let it impact my life.  But I will say this - the New York sports media might be the most self-righteous group of holier-than-thou asshats in the universe, and it's more or less impossible to exist in NYC without seeing the 120-pt headlines blaring in your face all the time, and it makes me sick.  As if there weren't a hundred other more important things going on in this world that are legitimately worth freaking out about.  Jesus Christ.  Mike Lupica, you're on notice.  If the media had only been this concerned when Bush was still President, shit might have actually gotten DONE.

So this is just something I was fooling around with tonight; it's pretty much just me experimenting with Reason 4 and some of its new synths.  I think it's clipping a little bit; I probably should've taken a little more time to make sure the levels were ok.  

Originally posted on jervo.vox.com

This time last year, I was surging on a wave of post-Giants-winning-the-Superbowl excitement and adrenaline because I had signed up for the RPM Challenge.*  I ended up failing the RPM Challenge rather badly; at the time I chalked it up to technical difficulties (which was certainly true), but with the benefit of hindsight it's pretty clear to me that I was fucking around with technology that I didn't know how to use instead of just sitting down and writing.  I did get 2 or 3 recordings out of it, but certainly not the 40 minutes I was aiming for.

I'm not doing the RPM Challenge this year, either, but that's not to say that I'm not plotting and scheming.  Last week I downloaded the ProTools 8 upgrade, and tomorrow I should receive my Reason 4 upgrade.  It's true that I should probably get a new external hard drive (because PT8 is not playing nice with my current drive, for some strange reason), but I'm finally at a point where I don't have any other technical limitations except my own rustiness with the software.  My PC can handle everything I've been throwing at it.  I've been kinda tinkering a litlte bit over the last few days, mostly just in terms of getting familiar with the newness of PT8 and getting reacquainted with all the stuff I'd forgotten how to do. 

All this is in service of.... what, exactly?  I'm not sure.  I've not really done any recording in a long while, and nor have I done any writing.  I think I needed to take a bit of a mental break; I had been writing myself into death spirals and taking even the smallest step felt like some herculean effort.  But I'm feeling ready to start making stuff again.  I don't even necessarily care what.  I've been listening to nothing but Dosh for the last few weeks, so I would expect that I'll start by messing around with loops (which is something that PT8 is supposedly really good at, finally), but I'm not going to pigeonhole myself into writing in a particular voice, which is something that I've always done and which has always left me feeling somewhat strangled.  I'm just going to do it.  

Updates to come.


*(The RPM Challenge is the musician's answer to the author's November Write A Novel thing, whose proper acronym is escaping me at the moment.  NaNoWriMo?) 

I guess I haven't been updating here the way I said I was going to.  It's been hard for me to notice, though; I'm constantly updating Facebook and Twitter with the stuff I used to post here.  Feel free to find me on FB, then, if you need to look at stupid crap. 

My buddy Scott came over last night and saved me about $300 in anxiety and PC-related costs; he upgraded my RAM situation from 1gb to 4gb and tweaked up my start-up processes and already my PC is just humming.  I finally have no legitimate excuses to avoid using ProTools; I've now got enough RAM to be able to deal with pretty much anything I know how to throw at it, and it also means I can play eighth note high-hat patterns in BFD for more than 3 seconds without it crashing.   Good times.

Of course, because life is about balance, my Blackberry is suddenly crapping out and freezing.  The Storm has had a bunch of upgraded OS leaks over the last few weeks, but I've been reluctant to try them out because I don't know what the hell I'm doing.  Something's been bugging the hell out of it over the last 24 hours, though, and it's annoying as hell.

I'd love to talk about last night's Lost, except I don't really know what I'm talking about.  My history with Lost is as follows:  my wife is a huge fan and gave me a Season 1 crash course right before Season 2 launched.  I made it through 2 or 3 episodes of Season 2 before getting incredibly frustrated with the non-stop cliffhangers and the seemingly incessant commercial breaks.  I missed Season 3 entirely, but for whatever reason got back on board with Season 4 and now I'm totally hooked.  Obviously, though, I don't really know anything, which is why we constantly pause the live show and I ask Kath endless questions about what we just saw.  

Having just finished the first season of Twin Peaks, though, I feel like I'm ready for anything.  And last night's Lost episode was pretty goddamned fun, even if (like me) you have no idea what's going on.

1.  The one good thing about the Giants loss yesterday is that I finally have my weekends back.  The part of my brain that cares about football can go back to sleep.

2.  Kath and I have been catching up on some classic TV that we've never seen; in late December it was "Fawlty Towers", and right now it's Season 1 of "Twin Peaks".  As a first time viewer of Twin Peaks, I must say that I'm shocked and amazed that this show was on network television in 1990; if this were a brand-new show, it would still be ahead of its time.  It's dated, but wonderfully so, and all the performances are spot-on.  We are both infatuated with it, although we've heard from numerous sources that Season 2 is pretty terrible in comparison.  A couple quick observations: 

• Detective Truman is a dead ringer for former Yankee OF Paul O'Neill
• If they were to remake this show today, the dopey sherriff would be played by Owen Wilson
• The funeral scene?  OMFG.

3.  We watched "Burn After Reading" yesterday, and I'm kinda surprised it bombed as hard as it did; we both loved it, and Kath generally doesn't like Coen Brothers movies. 

...and a Happy New Year to you all.

I've been at work since 8am this morning and could very well be here until midnight, for all I know.  Good times.  My body is stiff and sore from playing Rock Band with Kath for literally 10 hours in a row yesterday, which was a fantastic way to start the new year but which has also made today pretty goddamned rough.

I didn't do any end-of-2008 meme, or at least, not yet; work has been crazy for the last few weeks and since most of my LJ posting is done (t)here it's hard to know when I'll get that much time together to do one properly.  My big plan for 2009 is basically just to get my shit together - to be fitter, happier and more productive.  And I'd like to post here on a more-regular basis; I'm not entirely sure why I've abandoned this space recently, other than there hasn't been a whole lot going on that's terribly interesting. 

Part of getting my shit together, though, is figuring out whether or not I'm going to go Popless.  The Onion's AV Club had a fantastic feature last year, where one of its music critics went a whole year without listening to anything new and instead went through his entire music collection from A-Z.  I've spent an absurd amount of money on music for the 3rd year in a row and this cannot continue, not to mention that I've got an absurd amount of music that I haven't listened to in years, or, really, ever. 

I'm not sure I have the discipline or the self-restraint to go through with a Popless year, though, and to prove it I just looked at Metacritic's 2009 Release Calendar just to see what I'd be missing.  Going Popless through March means I'd be missing the new AC Newman, Andrew Bird, Mos Def, Morrissey, Neko Case, and U2 albums; the rest of the year could feature Blur, Peter Gabriel, the Avalanches, MF Doom / Ghostface, Massive Attack, New Pornographers, Postal Service, Stars, Tortoise, Wilco, the Wrens.  Jesus Fuck.  

Maybe I'll have to make a few allowances here and there.  

In any event - I do sincerely hope that 2009 finds you all well.  Just think - Obama will be President in less than a month.  For all the anxiety we all went through last fall, I feel like I've totally forgotten that Obama is going to come in and start getting shit done.  Then again, since the election, the world has basically gone to shit, so I suppose it's understandable to forget to have something to look forward to.