kazoo solo ftw

dude i think i figured it out. i think i figured out how to finish "a viking's funeral." and it will involve kazoo. i have a pretty nice kazoo that i bought at shades plus in providence* when we were goofing around so many moons ago recording "scutigera coleoptrata." but i really liked the way it ended up sounding. and now that i know what i'm doing recording things, well, i just think it's going to work. i am going to play the shit out of that kazoo. i'll keep you posted.

* i cannot believe that place has a website.

fuggeddaboudit

"oh man. well you need four of 'em, and they're seventy bucks each. and a couple hours of labor. oh yeah man, fuggeddaboudit...lemme grab a calculator."

file that under things you never ever want to hear from your mechanic ever. but too-many hundred dollars later, i'm back in business driving back and forth from queens to long island every day. god damn do i do a lot of driving.

not much else to report. songs are coming along. i'm mentally preparing myself for sleeping in the back of my car at the end of august if we can't find a place soon. which is why it was important to get the shocks fixed, i guess.

this is the lamest post ever. i just wanted to say fuggeddaboudit.

cool ethan's song

i was just poking around the ol' antisocial-box and found an mp3 of the recording i did of "cool ethan's song" from slackers when i was trying to figure out how to work my then-brand-new 4-track. the quality sucks because i didn't know what i was doing. but if i do say so, it's one of the greatest songs ever written. by jason schwartzman himself.

as far as i can remember, i haven't really had this up online since it was on purevolume for a while a few years ago. i'm probably not allowed to just give this away since i didn't write it, but something tells me that this site is safely below the radar of anyone who gives a shit. so...here you go.

cool ethan's song (mp3)

not emo.

here are some things that are not emo:

1. tanning salons
2. champagne
   
3. muscles
4. rob the jew'ry store, tell 'em make me a grill
   
5. europe

anything to add?

it's like riding a bike

at the behest my little bro, we've been doing some light demo recording of the song we've been working on that he mostly wrote but that we've been rewriting together. it's still a long, long way from done. but it's sounding pretty ok.

it's nice to have someone to make you do shit when it seems that lately if you had to rely on your own motivation you wouldn't get very far. and it's nice to be getting back into a routine of playing and singing at least a little bit every night.

the last song to be completed for they're more afraid of you... is "a viking's funeral," which if you've been following along for a very long time you've probably heard a version or two of already. i kept thinking it was done and posting it and then listening and thinking otherwise and taking it back down.

the last thing it needs is a synth part that i just don't know how to do. it's a tiny thing, too. but now that i've decided i need it i won't be happy without it. so umm...i'm working on it. but it might be a while.

change gears. i wrote before about last.fm. it has totally turned me on my ear. i check it obsessively to see what other people are listening to. i spend a bunch of time listening to awesome shit like springsteen and the smiths and endless mike and the beagle club so that people who see my profile will know that i love good things. it's a pretty awesome way to flex your e-nuts. so yeah. one more reminder from me to sign up for last.fm. it lets you do rad shit like this:

bodacious.

i'm melting. meeeeeltiiiiiiinnnnggggg.

things have been slow lately. i started up a blog for myself at work too, which i really force myself to write something on at least once a day. one where i capitalize things, even. see, on here i actually have safeguards in place so that if i do capitalize something accidentally, it'll still show up lowercase. which is kinda like spending an hour on your hair to make it look like you just rolled out of bed. which i don't do, by the way.

i tell you this to explain why i've been less prolific around here lately. or it could be the heat. it is so goddamn hot in new york right now.

or it could just be the recent departure of my get-up-and-go. today i did very little other than read the first three-hundred or so episodes of questionable content, a reasonably entertaining and painfully emo web-comic.

but i suppose by necessity things'll speed back up soon. sean and i have been writing (well, sean's been doing most of the writing) some new songs, which is really lighting a fire under my ass to finish the last of the last batch. and i just officially surrendered my apartment for the end of august so we need to get our asses in gear finding a new place with new cockroaches and maybe centipedes if we're lucky and two bedrooms.

all dressed up no place to go

there are statistics about how many hours of your lifetime you'll spend sleeping but i can't tell you the numbers because i do my very best to forget things like that. i think probably when all is said and done i'll have slept less than the average joe. maybe they can put that on my tombstone.

what i'd like to know is how many hours of my lifetime i'll have spent waiting. it seems all i ever do is wait these days. wait for a phone call. wait on the subway. wait for another phone call. wait at the bar. wait for something to happen. wait for something to happen. does anything ever happen?

the other day a guy on the subway asked my brother if he and i were in a band together. sean said "yeah" so i guess it's official. we're gonna make this back into a band soon. funny thing is that we were on the way to poker night which, for some ungodly reason, was theme poker night. everyone dressed up like a video game character. we went as billy and jimmy lee, from double dragon. sean won like $90. don't tell the irs.

anyhow, i'll try and find a picture for you. it was mortifying.

i am late to this party

have you tried last.fm? sure, you've heard of it. sure, you've seen it come up on google searches when you're looking for lyrics once in a while. but have you tried it? i never had until today. and i'm hooked instantly. basically you install a tiny plugin into your media player and it keeps a running tally of everything you listen to for all the world to see. combine that with a social networking infrastructure ala myspace and you've got yourself a recipe for e-crack unlike any other.

i have been checking out the recommendations of people who like the same songs as me and monitoring the playlists of my two friends all evening. it may sound stupid. it is stupid. but it's also awesome. and i haven't even tried out most of the cool features on there yet. but the neat thing is that the more you use it the more data it has so not only do you percieve it to be cooler as you come to understand it more, it actually evolves into a cooler service the more you feed it. like little shop of horrors.

anyway. if you already use it or if i've convinced you to give it a shot, why not add me as your little friend? here's my profile (which is pretty empty still).

the only downside is now i find myself thinking twice before i put on my hulk hogan record for the millionth time. you never know who's silently judging you.

but i'm going to find ways to integrate this into the watchedpots site, i think. mostly because i'm a huge dork. and as soon as i finish "a viking's funeral" the entire album will be posted up there for all to tear apart and maybe for one or two to like.

she watches the cats

there is a lady in this neighborhood. no, let's start elsewhere. there is a bodega in this neighborhood run by some really nice southeast asian guys who always make a point of telling every girl that comes into the store how pretty they look. and next to that is a pharmacy that i rarely visit and a cell phone store that i've never set foot in and then there's a chinese place and a hardware store that sold me the wrong lightbulb once and then the photo store where i got my passport picture taken and a dunkin donuts.

well, behind those stores is a fenced-in vacant lot full of grass and whatever litter the wind carried over the fence but then abandoned. and cats. there are a lot of cats in this lot. which is why when you get towards the back of the bodega where they have the beer it always smells like cat pee. i think they feed the cats sometimes. or the cats just root through the garbage. and pee.

so there is a lady in this neighborhood. i think she's new. either new or newly obsessed with the cats. because she just stands there on the sidewalk, blankly staring at them through the fence. i've seen her a few days in a row. she doesn't seem to be doing anything with them. she doesn't have anything with her. she just watches the cats. and she looks so sad standing there but i wonder if she is or if maybe she's the happiest lady in queens with those cats and i'm the one who needs to pep up.

i am frozen. and there are big things afoot. someone turn a hairdryer on me.

oh, hello again.

lately i keep sitting down to write and nothing comes out right away so i go play video games instead. or stuff comes out but it comes out wrong. on the fourth of july i tried to write something about fireworks and watching a girl watching fireworks but it was the sappiest bullshit of all time so i junked it.

i'm always proud of myself when i actually can something that i've spent time on. it's important to be a tough critic on yourself. i wasn't always able to do that.

last night i went to a party on a rooftop with a charcoal grill and a giant film projector showing walk the line on the side of the adjoining building and tons of people who had things in common with each other and for once in my life it was easy to talk to people. (but only after the movie. i hadn't seen it before. loved it.) really though, can you imagine anything better than the right mix of people on the right summertime night on a rooftop in new york city with cheap beer and overcooked steaks? because i am trying and i can't.

they're more afraid of you than you are of them will be done soon. i swear to god.

the husky tenor

my friends in endless mike and the beagle club just posted a bunch of new songs from their record the husky tenor which is slated for release in the fall. you can listen to two of them at their myspace and two more over at purevolume. please please do. please. thank me later. the new ones are the two on the top at each page.

i was trying to think of a way to tell you how much i believe in this band, and these new songs. but it turns out the only way i know how is with bad words. and my mom reads this sometimes (hi mom!) so i'll take it easy. this band is so gol'darned good. my favorite band, period, end of friggin' story. willickers. ass-hair.

supercalifragilistic-expialodocious.

and one more for good measure

so since i decided to kill a song that would've come early in the record, i went back and updated all the id3 tags to have correct track numbers again. these are the heights of dorkdom to which i sail. but while i was at it i figured i'd upload the "if these walls could talk" premix which is a fancy-pants way of saying demo. only it really is kinda a premix since i ended up using all that original audio in the final recording.

whatever. you can download 2 versions of that song now and i guess you can decide which one you like better. the premix is available under the "other stuff" section of the music page.