i know where my taxes go while my taxes know nothing about me

last night was the beagle club show. i swear to god those guys get better every single time i see them. they opened with "mr. miller's opus" (listen to it over at my mog page), which i think is the best song to come out last year (period), and a great opening track. and they never looked back. i'll write more about how wonderful they were soon in a more visible place than this remote portopotty on the fringe of the internet fairgrounds. i might even post a picture or two.

drew and the medicinal pen (or you can just call him drew) opened. he opened their last show at goodbye blue monday (which i wish i lived closer to) as well, and he's a really nice guy that's really coming into his own on stage; last time i liked him, this time i really liked him. i picked up his cd and i'll spend some time listening to it tonight. the beagle club guys tell me it's really good. he's having a cd release party this weekend that i wish i could go to.

and now, if you'll allow it, i'll plug myself a tad. green dragon podcasted another one of my songs today...new york city this time. i really can't thank him enough for that. you can check out the podcast here (.mp3 link). if you feel like it, leave him a comment mentioning that you liked hearing it. that'd be rad.

bite size bonus

a cool thing happened this morning. if these walls could talk got played on today's edition of green dragon's bite size bonus podcast. it might not be the first time this stuff's been podcasted, but it's definitely the first time anybody's let me know about it and i'm quite thankful for the exposure. other bands featured on today's podcast include...bloc party. no big deal.

go here to check it out.

here's a link straight to the mp3 file.

my fingers smell like metal

for the first time in i-don't-know-how-long, i just spent two straight hours playing the guitar. it had been so long, in fact, that i spent the two hours in question trying to relearn how to play all the songs on they're more afriad of you than you are of them. so now i can play them again, slightly less well than i could a year ago. i'm a schmuck.

i'm removed enough from it now to admit to you that i've never been happy with the way a lot of things on that record came out. bits and pieces of songs, mostly. but basically all of a viking's funeral drives me crazy. i got overzealous and i got carried away trying to make a song rock hard with a programmed rhythm section and a lot of compression and reverb. but truthfully (and you're just going to have to take my word for it for now) it sounds much much nicer on an acoustic guitar. maybe with a real piano, too.

which brings me to some exciting, albeit slightly speculative, news. rob, the ivory tickling of whom you can hear in i spin forever and scutigera coleoptrata is moving to new york city from san francisco in june. i can't promise much since we've only talked a little bit about it, but i'd be lying if i said i wasn't excited at the chance to play again alongside one of the most talented, intuitive musicians i've ever had the pleasure of knowing. allow me to elaborate: both the keyboard parts mentioned above were recorded in about three takes. i brought a portable recorder out to the piano rehearsal rooms back at brown university, told him what chords to play and slapped some headphones on him, and the rest is history.

so, if he can find any time for me when he's not engrossed in his theoretical physics phd program (show off), well, it'll be pretty cool. i'd love to record some songs with him in which the piano is more than a pretty afterthought. stay tuned.

also. it's the time of year now on new york where the sun is right in my eyes as i make my way home from work on long island back to brooklyn. it's probably for the best that everybody slows way down since nobody can see, but it also means it takes me forever to get home and i have a lot of time to think about things. this evening a lyric from a song sean was working on a while back kept popping into my head: "the sun's in my eyes, interstate 95..." i should make him play that for me again. we can make something of that.

if you can't tell, i'm really thinking seriously again about playing music. it's about time.

oh shit! i almost forgot the whole reason i started writing this post, which was to tell you that if you're around new york, endless mike and the beagle club are playing on thursday (that's the 29th) at a really cool bar in bushwick called goodbye blue monday. sean and i will be there.

they just stop working

there's a recurring theme i've had in my dreams for some time that's been increasingly prevalent lately. anyone who makes a habit of interpreting dreams is welcome to chime in here.

my legs just stop working.

i'm usually doing something completely unexceptional like walking down the street, when something on the ground will catch my eye and i'll squat down to get a closer look. and then i'll realize that my legs won't unsquat. i can only stand again and keep walking when i've dragged myself to a staircase or something, when i can swing myself out over a ledge with my arms and let gravity stretch my legs out again.

the other night i went to kick a soccer ball and my foot bounced right off it.

weird, huh?

let's get on the same page

• i got my hair cut. short.
• that grey hair really is sneaking up on me.
• i'm in san jose now for work. but as i think i've probably said before, the inside of a conference center looks mostly the same no matter where you go. same with airports and hotel rooms.
• i do, however, have a king-sized bed in this particular room. last night i slept sideways.
• i am sick as a dog and i can't seem to shake it.
• there are forklifts whizzing by me every few seconds, which is pretty cool. did you ever see that german forklift safety video? it's awesomely bloody and campy and i never did find out if it was for real or not but it sure is awesome.
• i'm in computer transition. it's not really an excuse for not writing on here since transition or not i am very rarely more than 30 feet from a keyboard. it should, however, make the music recording process a bit easier this time around.
• i do, eventually, plan on recording some more songs.

dublin: everything else

here's the rest of everything i scribbled in dublin. i feel like a butthead for being to lazy to type this out for so long.

last night we ate at eddie rockets (like johnny rockets, only eddie's). surely a very expensive market research study is behind this. [turns out they're not connected. who knew?] Similarly so for tk maxx. [who are connected to tj maxx.] i ordered the atomic burger in desperate search for some spice (they don't seem to like spice very much here) and even though it had jalapeños and chili on it, it was still...middlingly spicy. but delicious.

we've done a ton of tour bus rides. some of the drivers tell the same jokes as each other ("if you look closely at the ground level of the department of defense, you can see de-fence!") but they're all quite funny and it's a surprisingly effective way to see some things you don't have time to see up close. i'd recommend it to anyone.

you can walk pretty much everywhere here in about 10 minutes. the crosswalk system is mind-boggling, so everyone jaywalks. which is dangerous if you're always looking the wrong way for oncoming traffic. on more than one occasion we could have known first hand what it would be like for a double-decker bus to crash into us (to die by your side...). the walk signals here make laser gun noises to alert you that it's ok to cross the street.

i've taken a lot of photographs of buildings. and statues. i've already forgotten the stories behind most...but they sure are nice to look at. it's a beautiful city. you can see basically all of it from the guinness storehouse's "gravity bar," which is only 7 stories up.



guinness is like budweiser here, which is funny. they have branding in the windows of almost every pub. it has the same effect on the locals, it seems, as budweiser's stateside omnipresence has: people who order guinness seem to me to be people who only drink guinness. everyone else drinks cooler beers, like bud and heineken. crazy world.

we toured the dublin castle today, which remains a functional government building. strange to think that ireland has only been a completely sovereign nation for 85 years. they've had a woman president since 1995 and will until at leat 2014. cool.


saw a fish & chips place that apparently springsteen himself has visited (lots of other famous folks, too) but we'd already eaten chips at a different place across the liffey, about a 10 minute's walk away. [too bad really, apparently burdock's has the best fish & chips in all of ireland, if those reviews are to be believed.]
it was supposed to rain the whole time we were here. we fly out tomorrow morning, and no rain yet. [it did rain the morning we left.] it's been about 40º - 50º F, too. which is outright balmy compared to nyc lately. i'd really like to stay here a while longer.

dublin: first impressions

god damn, i am miserably bad at following through with my promises these days. blame crackdown. here's the first bit of pictures and some scribblings from my recent trip to dublin. i've tried to remain faithful to whatever it is that i seemed to mean at the time.

(most of my pictures look like this. i have no idea what it is.)

i find myself eavesdropping a lot. on every conversation i can, actually. i like the accent, i guess. and how they call people "lads" instead of "guys."

(molly malone statue at grafton street)

our hotel room is nice. the bathroom sink has a shallow basin and a faucet with comically aggressive water pressure, which makes for a pretty cool booby-trap.

(looking out over dublin from the top of the guinness storehouse. i'm getting my hair cut really soon, mom.)

the city's centre (see what i did there?) doesn't have many (any) tall buildings.

there don't seem to be any investment bankers lurking about here.

(the black stuff.)

the street signs (when there are any) are right on the corners of buildings and they're really easy to miss. it's easy to get lost but the city seems small so thusfar it's also been easy enough to get found again.

(awesome neon sign in temple bar. why indeed.)

jetlag

i sure have missed you. i thought about you a few times while i was gone, even. "gone where," you say? well, for the first half of last week i was bumming around in the waldorf=astoria*. long story short, a free room came by way of my girlfriend (work related), and there aren't many things that i like more than sitting around and doing nothing, which is exactly what i did there while she worked. then at night we had some nice dinners. i didn't take a single picture of the place. so...imagine a hotel room. that's what it looked like. the rest of the events that transpired there need not be repeated.

and then we took off for a weekend in dublin. regular jetsetters, we are. and i did take a lot of pictures in dublin. i'll be posting a bunch later. i scribbled a bunch of notes to you while i was there, too. i'll spend some time later in the week decoding from those pages what it is exactly that i meant to tell you. i figure wherever i can, i'll include pictures to break up the babble. that'll be keen.



so i'll catch up with you soon with some irish shit. right now, it's bedtime. work tomorrow, you know.

* did you know it's a hilton hotel? gross.

pestilence

tragedy and danger have befallen the house of lords (which i've recently decided is what i'm calling roddy's 6 gallon tank) in the form of the dread pirate ick*. our brave little hero is currently undergoing treatment that turns his water blue. his only public reaction to the matter thus far, predictably, has been "this is bullshit." he has no further statement at this time and i ask that you respect his privacy as he deals with this matter in the only way he knows how: the manly way.

"this is bullshit."

* ick is really a parasite called Ichthyophthirius multifiliis, not a pirate.

unsubstantial

in the (far too) well recorded history of blogs, there have certainly been many updates the are...unneccessary. this is one such entry.

i've been casually playing around with php, mostly out of boredom. soon most of the pages on this site (not the blog, though) will be in php instead of html. i'll probably start making the easiest stuff live tonight. i'm more than a little excited, honestly. because i'm more than a little nerdy.

continuing right along this gnarly path, i got rid of the unsightly counter at the bottom of this page for something less...asenine. google analytics. i can't say enough nice things about it. or about you, strangers and friends, who come here. thanks to google analytics i now know that by a very narrow margin, more of you use firefox than use internet explorer. i am so proud of you. i'm beaming.

my friend adam, who is doing a lot more with his life than i am with mine, started a blog this month. he's a good writer and he's in peru doing interesting things so he's got plenty to write about. if you're looking for one more thing to read during the day, consider stopping by.