Carcinogen

I forget the comic book artist who said it but the impact of the idea remains: whenever you get a new sketchbook, just draw something, anything, awful and goofy on the first blank page; this frees you up to do anything you like in the pages beyond.

I should have posted this here earlier, but here it is: I started this novella for NaNoWriMo three years back. I recently went through and edited it (just a once-over) because I wanted to get something out there. So I bucked up and put up a Kindle edition:

Carcinogen

It turns out that getting the formatting right is a giant pain in the ass without an actual Microsoft Word-formatted .DOC. Why, Kindle? Why won’t you recognize tab indents from any of the other thousand programs I own that output the Word .DOC format?

Other than that, well– it’s not the most life-changing story in the world, but it’s mine and having that first goofy page inked in makes it a lot easier to go forward. Now I can focus on all of the other stories that have been brewing in my head and let them find their way out into the world.

Add comment February 11th, 2012

Theme Mix Saturday – Of Floods and Puddles

Rain is no stranger to the fungus-fighting folk of the Pacific Northwest. However, this winter brought nothing but droughts, endless bouts of cold, sunny days. Then, a couple of weeks ago, it snowed, melted, and hasn’t stopped raining in the proverbial torrential downpour ever since. Rain is on the brain.

I was sitting at my corner pub the other night– The C Bar– when CCR came playing over whatever passes for a jukebox these days (yeah, CCR at the C Bar, that has a nice sound to it). “Who’ll Stop The Rain” indeed, Mr. Fogerty? And I started compiling a list of rain songs. I met up with my brother Joe later that night and he helped me find a few more good entries, most notably that great Marmalade song. Folks, there are a lot of great songs about crap weather. And a quick search in the iTunes store shows that you could probably make an entire playlist of mediocre songs about crap weather that are all just titled, simply, “Rain” (not to be confused with the South Korean entertainer of the same name).

A couple of concessions were made for a couple of my favorite blues songs (“The Sky Is Crying” and “Texas Flood”) that don’t fit my more strict criteria but they don’t get much more thematically worthwhile than that so: I’ll allow it.

And hooray for YouTube, to enable the curious.

Random Trivia

• George Harrison was allegedly the inspiration for Zeppelin’s “The Rain Song” after commenting to John Bonham that Zep never wrote ballads. Accordingly, the opening two chords are slower but recognizable as the same opening chords of Harrison’s “Something” (Frank Sinatra’s favorite “Lennon-McCartney” song). I also think one could make a rad woodwind quintet arrangement of this song.
• The Beatles’ “Rain” was one of the first songs to use backwards vocals on a record (heard just before the end of the song). This is also my favorite Beatles song. It is really that great.
• A stellar live version of that Cotton Jones track can be found online from their Luxury Wafers session here. I think I like it better than the album version because the vocal parts are less subdued amidst the music but, on the other hand, it runs over seven minutes so it’s not the best fit here. Not with all of these overflowing gutters.
• “Only Happy When It Rains” was recorded in Madison, Wisconsin where June is the wettest month.
• Michael Stipe recorded a new vocal track for the “So. Central Rain” video as he refused to lip sync.
• Eddie Rabbitt’s “I Love a Rainy Night” was twelve years in the making, it having been fleshed out in 1980 after Rabbitt rediscovered an old tape with a fragment of a song that he had written in the late sixties.

This was a really fun mix to make with a lot of chaff on the cutting room floor, good and bad (from purple rains to November rains and everything in between) and may be my favorite listenin’ mix to-date. As always, hitting the little grey arrow at the bottom right will bring up the player; in this case, you’ll be able to listen to most of these songs. Thanks, YouTube!

Add comment January 28th, 2012

Out of Sight

Jack Foley: It’s like seeing someone for the first time… like you could be passing on the street, and you look at each other and for a few seconds… there’s this kind of a recognition… like you both know something. The next moment, the person’s gone, and it’s too late to do anything about it. And you always remember it, because it was there, and you let it go, and you think to yourself, “What if I had stopped? If I had said something?”

“What if, what if?” And it may only happen a few times in your life.

Or once.

Karen Sisco: Or once.

Add comment January 22nd, 2012

Theme Mix Saturday – To All The Girls

It’s Sunday, I know, but I got a late start on this one.

This list started out with a much different idea in mind. To my mind, there were a lot of songs about “the different kinds of people that there are” and I set out to look for those songs. But I started with “girls” and– well, it comes as no surprise that there are a lot of songs about girls.

I then looked at similar songs with “boys” in the title, and there were approximately five. So I decided to go full throttle with a “girls” playlist; there are more than enough great songs to warrant it. As I’m writing this, I’m listening to Vetiver’s “Red Lantern Girls” for the first time in a long time and, wow, it’s a really good and dynamic song starting with an atmospheric build that really draws you in. Good stuff. So now I just have to figure out how to winnow this list down, here we go…

Jolie Holland’s “All Those Girls” fits the theme a little loosely, I’ll admit, but it’s been a favorite of mine lately, so we’ll use it and the Idris Muhammed-sampling “Paul’s Boutique” intro to introduce the theme.

“West End Girls” has to go on here because the chorus has been stuck in my head the entire time I’ve been putting this together. I’m not a huge fan of the song but I’m going with this and “California Girls” under the “obvious choice” category and eschewing “Fat Bottomed Girls” instead. So it goes at the end of the list as a novelty.

The semi-live video for LCD Soundsystem’s “Drunk Girls” is a fairly insane and pretty funny video, too.

Add comment January 8th, 2012

Disappointer…

…is the moniker that I’ve used for a long time for the songs I write, which is how it ended up being my XBox Live tag (see sidebar) among other things, but it started as my “band” name. It’s nice and sardonic and seems to have gone mostly unused, a rare thing for even an invented word in the internet age.

I’ve posted a couple of songs here before but I’ve decided to make the leap and do a bit more with it all. No one becomes a world famous writer/musician/software developer/neurosurgeon/rock star without a little bit of self-promotion unless they’re Buckaroo Banzai, and there’s only one Buckaroo Banzai.

So I’ve been working a bit more on polishing up my erstwhile songs as much as my rough-hewn aesthetic will allow, writing some new ones as always, and generally just trying to make things somewhat presentable. It’s all anyone can do.

To that end, I finally kicked off a site over at the fantastically awesome bandcamp. Ta da:

http://disappointer.bandcamp.com/

Add comment January 7th, 2012