Taking Up The Gauntlet
Sep 25, 2003 myMusic
About a year ago, the people at my place of work got together and did a pretty cool thing: they put together a CD of artists who work there, had it professionally mastered and produced, and gave them away for free by the bushload. Today, I have found out that they’re doing it again.
I have until October 31st to submit the hottest track, the most beautiful song, the most spaced-out shit known to mankind. If We Were is too long, the hip-hop I’ve been doing recently is too offensive – perhaps I’ll have to start from scratch.
I find myself wondering if I am up to the challenge. But I cannot pass up the chance to have my track distributed for free to thousands of hip connected New Yorkers. So I guess I’m gonna have to be…
Tuesday Morning Update #12
Sep 23, 2003 myMusic
To start off, please forgive me if the delirium of my raging fever has rendered this post incoherent or merely annoying….
So I’ve been producing and singing on this hip-hop track with rhymes by my friend Lin all week. It’s been a great antidote to my whininess about not getting shit done, because I AM, in fact, getting shit done! I’ve gotten reacquainted with Logic Audio and the whole recording/mixing process, which I had previoulsy decided I hated. And it turns out I’m actually pretty good at it! But it turns out I am also VERY VERY picky.
Especialy when it comes to my own singing, I cannot suffer a bad example to live. I’ll do a take over and over and over again and I will still never like it. However, I’ve come to realize that if I pile a couple of vocals on top of each other, they all start to sound better. Ooh, and it makes me sound like a white D’Angelo. Sweet…
I skipped out on a couple of shows and open mics and what-have-you because apparently the consequences of not resting your sprained ankle enough are inexplicable pains and stiffnesses from your foot all the way up your side, down your arm, and up to the base of your neck two whole weeks later. Bollocks. Throw into the mix the aforementioned delirious fever, and you have a perfect recipe for staying home. It’s too bad too – I was supposed to meet a drummer last night that I found on Craigslist, but I got to 125th St. and I had to get off the subway and turn back.
Finally, I discovered The Love Below, the Andre 3000 side of the new Outkast album, which I have been listening to incessantly ever since I discovered mtv.com’s free preview. Basically, Andre 3000 is absolutely insane and this album is totally mind-boggling. A couple of years ago, I discovered that my constant quest for new music was rooted in a desire to hear the album that I myself would be making if I could get my shit together. Well, thus far, I think The Love Below wins the prize for closest match. I may even have to write (gasp!) a full review of it once I’ve actually got a CD-quality copy…
Talk Like A Pirate Day
Sep 18, 2003 greatThingsThatPeopleDo
Thanks to Etan for letting me know that tomorrow, September 19th, is International Talk Like A Pirate Day. So don’t ye be forgettin’ now, me beauties, or I’ll swab the decks with all of ya. Aar.
Tuesday Morning Update #11
Sep 16, 2003 myMusic
Hmm. Interesting week. I put up an ad on Craigslist for people to play jazz with, as my piano skills have been severely waning. So far, I’ve gotten some promising responses, so that’s pretty exciting. Strangely enough, the very same day I posted the ad, I got an e-mail from a guy I played with only once and haven’t seen for months inviting me to do a gig in October. How utterly karmic.
I skipped out on about a million open mics in the past week or so – couldn’t make it on time, didn’t have anything to play, didn’t want to play the same thing I spent last time, had better shit to do. You know, excuses. But I’m OK with that – more on why in a little bit.
I started work on two tracks, both of them with a kind of cheesy drum ‘n’ bass feel. I don’t know if these two gems will ever see the light of day, or even get beyond the couple of measures they consist of right now, but that’s OK too.
Why? Because this amazing thing called vacation has helped me to realize some things about myself.
I told myself a while back that I wanted to have a 5-track demo by the end of this year. Pretty definitely not gonna happen. I told myself I was gonna go to the Village Underground or some other open mic every week. Definitely has not been happening. I told myself I needed to learn more about design so I could make myself an actual nice-looking website to showcase all my music (i.e. the phantom completions of all the unfinished fragments on my hard drive). What I forgot to ask myself was why.
That’s the big question, the question that people ask themselves every day. Why are we here, we all wonder. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does this cost 500$ to fix when it was working fine yesterday? Why is there music? Why is there love? Why do we care?
Why do we do the things we do?
I try not to expect answers for these questions. But for that last one, I think I should. Why do we do the things we do? Sure there are bills to pay and mouths to feed and time to fill and other people to please and what-have-you. But it’s far too easy to let that sense of imposed responsibilty creep into the things you actually love. Music. People. Joy. Life. Oh, and computers sometimes.
Looking back at these past few weeks of little triumphs and accomplishments, I can pick out the really important moments, the points at which I felt like I was doing what I loved, and doing it for the right reasons.
The thing they all have in common is freedom. They are those moments when I’ve been working so hard to remember the words, and they fall into place, and suddenly I’m just singing. Those moments where a groove is rumbling out of my headphones, and I’m tumbling along the keys at 3 in the morning, unaware of time or space. Those moments where the natural flow of events has led me organically to a place of beauty. Those moments where all else falls away, and the only thing left is pure music.
Those are the moments I’ve been seeking. And I’ve always known that no one’s just going to give them to me. But what I learned this week is just how easy they are to find. You just have to let go a little bit, and there they are. Pouring out of your own mouth, your own fingers, these pure drops of dancing shimmering crystal hang in the air, blinding you to everything else, rendering the little everyday things meaningless.
So I guess that’s the answer. And that’s why it doesn’t matter what goals I work towards, what foolhardy promises I manage to keep. Because it’s not about those things. It’s about those moments, however I achieve them. And when it comes to why?
They are their own reward.
Drum Circles
Sep 15, 2003 Keepers
It has just occurred to me that summer is over, and all the drum circles that appear in the parks all over the city throughout the summer are probably done. And I didn’t go to a single one. Boo.
Tags: Waiting
Taskmaster
Sep 14, 2003 programmingandInterfaces
Taskmaster (screenshot) was my attempt at creating a new kind of to-do list program. All the efforts I’d seen thus far had some major flaws that I felt needed to be addressed.
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itunes.php
Sep 12, 2003 programmingandInterfaces
itunes.php LIVES!
By tying together Amazon Web Services, Kung-Tunes, and a simple mySQL table using PHP, I have managed to speed up album cover lookups on the sidebar there, but more importantly, I’ve got album covers for all recent tracks now! I wrote a
[Update 9/15 2:08 PM: I've fixed a bunch of bugs, including bad character encoding in song titles, database problems with long album titles, and issues with including both frontend pages within the same webpage. Thanks to Etan for catching a bunch of them. ]
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More Licensing and the Tricky Nature of the Law
Sep 12, 2003 programmingandInterfaces
For those you who read my previous entry on software licensing for my itunes.php scripts and actually cared at all, you’ll be glad to know that I’ve made a decision…
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Licensing
Sep 12, 2003 programmingandInterfaces
So today I finished a couple hundreds of lines of code that allow me to do all the nifty album cover and iTunes trickery that you can see in my sidebar and over at itunes.php. I want to release them to the world so that other bloggers using Kung-Tunes can do what they will with Amazon’s vast stores of info. But I can’t find a license that I like!
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Tuesday Morning Update #10
Sep 10, 2003 myMusic
Oops. I knew I’d forgotten to do something.
Not much happened this week. Last Sunday, I went out to Cleopatra’s needle, a restaurant on 92nd St., to check out their jazz vocal open mic. It was pretty cool – the trio was good, and some of the singers had their moments. Definitely an older crowd, but hey, I can hold my own. There was one singer in particular whose name I can’t remember. She sang with a pronounced Japanese accent and had a surprisingly good ear. I smiled and I clapped.
On Saturday, I went to Barnes and Noble to look for a book on Gödel. (Yeah, so I’m a nerd. So what?) I couldn’t find it, but there was an author there by the name of James McBride giving a talk and playing with his jazz group. I stopped to listen to them for a while, realized how much I miss playing jazz, and was about to leave when…lo and behold, the same singer from Cleopatra’s Needle got up and started singing! And playing congas!
This is a sign, I thought. I have to sing tomorrow and talk to this woman. So I reviewed the lyrics to Lullaby of Birdland and Here’s That Rainy Day and set out the following afternoon with charts in hand. I got there at about 5 and signed up dead last on the list. This woman was nowhere to be found. I sat through about an hour of singers when finally, at just a little bit after 6, they ended it. Right before my turn. Nuts.
Thought about playing some covers at the Sidewalk Cafe on Monday to make up for it. Monday morning, walking around my messy apartment, I decided to jump over some particularly obstructive obstacle. I landed, stopped short, and crumpled to the floor. Sprained ankle. Very minor, but I spent Monday night Resting, Icing, Compressing, and Elevating.
Tomorrow, however, I begin my vacation. I cannot imagine the sigh of relief I will breathe when I don’t have to go back to awful tech support and customer service for a whole week. I’m not going anywhere, so I plan to spend my vacation doing a few choice things:
1) Writing songs. 2) Writing PHP so I can get a job. 3) Looking for jobs. 4) Chilling in my apartment.
I am PSYCHED. When I have to go back, I will probably cry. Or shoot myself. Or shoot somebody else.
