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August 01, 2007
Vertigo
I have a red folder next to me on the couch with about 200 pages' worth of my past in it.
I've been poking around the boxes in my apartment, seeing if there's anything in them that I should keep before they all get moved into storage. In addition to the boxes, I've got a battered gray filing cabinet, full of my old writing. Probably somewhere around 2,000 pages, I think. I yanked a drawer open and started going through it. One treasure I found was a black and white photograph of me and some other cast members on stage in Much Ado About Nothing, circa 1995. It's the only photo I've got from that summer. I was so young! And thin! It's on my microwave now, to serve as inspiration for taking off the pounds I've put back on over the past month.
Then I came across the aforementioned red folder. It's full of e-mails that Pea and I exchanged between January and March of 1998. We met at a Halloween party in 1997, and these e-mails are from the time right at the very beginning of our relationship. Every day for three months, sometimes more than once a day, we e-mailed each other at work. Not little e-mails, either...long ones, back and forth, hashing out our respective difficulties with this new thing we were doing. In between e-mails, we were talking on the phone. A lot of running towards each other and then running away, which is what I remember from that time. It's different having it in black and white, though. More concrete. Easy to see the pattern that was playing out. Bloody peculiar to realize that, just four years later, we'd be looking for a house together.
The patterns stand out, they really do. Each of us setting little rules, then breaking them: declaring a "time out," then being unable to maintain radio silence, sending e-mails about how confusing everything was and how we wanted to see each other more when we'd decided to take a break. Being an "us" and then not. Sleeping together, then deciding not to. Above all, there's a portrait of my great need in all of the words I wrote, and I can remember the state that I was in, how I tried to hold myself back and hide that need so I wouldn't scare her off.
I did scare her off, of course. More than once. But she came back. She came back, and we stumbled off into our future together. We lived together from September of 2001 until May of 2006. It is so very strange to read these exchanges, knowing what I know now. Nine years later, we're back to radio silence, only this time we're maintaining it. No confusion. No rule breaking. No late-night pell-mell drives into Manhattan to spend the night at her place, no trips by PATH train to Jersey City to spend the night at mine.
Who we were is clearly drawn in the e-mails: as people, we remained remarkably consistent throughout our relationship. Not that we didn't grow and change and all those things you're supposed to do as you get older. But the basics are there, plain as day, in every line. Everything that added up to the collapse of the relationship can be found there, obvious with the standard 20/20 rearward focus.
I can say, now, that I'm more myself than I've ever been. I've learned more about myself in the past year or so than I did during the previous decade. I know what I did, I know why I did it, and I know why I tried to do the same damn things at the beginning of this year. In that regard, despite the vagaries of my moods, I am strong.
I've got no regrets, except insofar as my self-ignorance has caused another person pain. It's a bit of a paradox: I wish I could've behaved differently, except that the only reason I know how to behave differently now is because I didn't then. At the same time, I wonder what I'll do now that, in a decade's time, will look just as obviously askew as some of what I read in that red folder.
That is, I suppose, the consequence of being a temporally-bound monkey. I can only strive for authenticity...to use the experience of where I've been to more consciously move to wherever it is I'm going.
Still...it's something of a burden, that folder. It's me, falling in love, in a way that I wouldn't now. I don't berate myself for any of it, but I do feel a certain weight. As though I ought to apologize to myself for not knowing better, for not being able to achieve what I set out to achieve, for hiding, for being dishonest. Make no mistake, I've apologized for those things, to the person most hurt by them. Somehow, it seems like it'll never be enough, and there's nothing I can really do about that.
I think that's enough of this particular pastward focus for this evening. I'm going to put the red folder back into the file cabinet, pick up the guitar, and write some songs.
August 03, 2007
Comments
 Apparently, Movable Type's junk filter has been junking legitimate comments. I've readjusted the settings.
So, if you've commented and have been thinking that I've been ignoring/hating you, 'tisn't so. It's just the software being overzealous.
August 04, 2007
Urk.
August 06, 2007
Where Am I?
I am off musicking, that’s where. It’s an interesting process, well-suited to my obsessive tendencies. I’ve not done much since my freshman effort in June, but once I figured out how to do the drum loop thing, I fell into the late-night sweaty-browed pale-skinned marathon o’ computational music-making. First there was a drum loop that I finally got to play properly. Then I thought, “Well, let’s lay down a scratch guitar part, and see how it sounds.” Then I decided to futz around with some fills, to change up the drums a bit. After that, it seemed like a good idea to add a bass track using this great Steinberg bass patch I found on the Karma. Then I wrote lyrics. I decided it might be interesting to take the acoustic guitar track, copy it, and apply distortion to the duplicated track. While listening to the rough mix on my iPod, I heard a string section. It wasn’t actually in the mix, but I could hear it, in between the rest of the stuff, which is a pretty good indication that it ought to be there. So I put it in. I hear some background yelps, too, so I’m going to put them in as well. I still have to record vocals and backing vocals. There’s a solo that needs doing as well, but I’m still searching for the right synth lead. I may press my long-suffering Kurzweil into service for that task, so it can earn its keep.
I've listened to the rough mixes a hundred times or more, using the repeat function on the iPod. Hours at a time, over and over, so if you do the math, that’s about twenty times an hour for a three minute piece, and I’ve probably gone over it for at least five hours by this point.
It’s a shame that such obsession has yet to produce a work of amazing genius, but then, you need talent for that sort of thing. I do enjoy it, though. It reminds me of my late teens, when I was able to sit in front of my Casio 3000 and program musical pieces into the machine’s step sequencer one note at a time, using its tiny LCD display.
It’s gotten a lot more complicated since then. But when it all comes together, it’s a wonderful thing, in a way that writing isn’t. With writing, it’s just me, and it’s always me, and no one will mistake it for anything else. With the music, it’s like I get to turn myself into a band. There’s a drummer, a guitarist or two, a bass player, a keyboard player, a singer, and some violinists. I become an ensemble, and make a big, godawful noise! I love that.
I shall inflict the cacophonous results upon you anon.
UPDATE:
Good lord this fun.
August 08, 2007
Warble GAK *thud*
Some nights you got it. Some nights you really, really don't.
I've got a bit at the very end of the track I'm recording that is at the absolute top of my vocal range and, try as I might, I couldn't...quite...hit it, either as Roger Daltry or as Axl Rose. My head voice just isn't working very well tonight. Annoying, because the vocals on the rest of the tune are OK. I like most of the version I laid down a couple of days ago but, unfortunately, I recorded it too hot, so it's all distorted and clipped and I can't use it. I think I'm going to have to give my throat a day of rest and then wade back into the mix. The solo's not quite coming together, either...I haven't found the right patch yet, and I'm using a weird tuning on the guitar, so my fingers haven't got the scales locked in on the keyboard.
Ah, well. It'll keep. At least I spent some time in front of the mic.
Writing and music are creative pursuits that I'm comfortable with. I can flail around a bit, and still have some vague sense of where I'm headed, and know that I'll get there eventually. Acting, on the other hand, is a foreign creativity. I don't have the language for it, really, so when I'm off the mark, as I usually am, I don't know where to go or how to describe what I'm trying to do. After class last night, Tony suggest that this discomfort may, in fact, be where I need to go, acting-wise. But I'm so unaccustomed to the discipline that I only half-understood what he meant.
I'm pretty fearless when it comes to such things, and I'm willing to go anywhere with the acting. There's no part I won't try, no character I won't attempt. Moving through this unfamiliar territory is good for me, but it is uncomfortable. That's kind of the point. Get out there and do it despite the fear and the chest pangs.
Actors, as a crowd, are different than writers or musicians. I haven't quite put my finger on it yet and, for all I know, it could just be me: I'm a writer, and a musician, but I don't really feel like I can lay claim to the actor label just yet. Maybe it's because I haven't really been on stage much, and what little work I've done was over a decade ago.
I've got a few more classes left, and then I'll see whether I feel like it's something I need to continue spending money on.
Right now, I'm going to put my Bluebird back in its box, read a bit, and sleep. Tomorrow, instead of hacking into the microphone, I'll finish up chapter four and send it off to the group.
A regular renny-sance man, that's me.
August 09, 2007
You're Not Hungry, You're Just Naked
At least that's what I keep telling myself when the big big urge for the whole pie and the pint of egg-thick premium ice cream crashes down on my head like a hulking pie-and-ice-cream-shaped rock. No no no, I say, that's not what you want at all, and I have to go get soap and razor blades, but this time of night that means going to the grocery store what has all the pie and ice cream and giant cookies the size of dinner plates and cake too, including that good kind with the chocolate bits and the pudding layers, and I just know if I go there now for tha' soap and tha' blades there will be hell to pay and it will be delicious.
August 11, 2007
Warble GAK *thud* II: Attack of the Nasopharynx
Man, this singing business is complicated.
I mean, I've sung off and on for a large part of my life, usually with a guitar, hardly ever into a microphone of any kind, and never in a "Creative Output" type situation. By that I mean for a project, a specific piece of work, where I have to stand in front of a popscreened mic and actually produce something with a certain sound, quality level, and all the right notes in it.
As it turns out, the notes weren't the problem last night. It was the tone. Again, a head voice issue: I couldn't get the singing out of my chest and the middle of my throat. There's a certain resonance in my skull that I can feel when my head voice is in play, and it took me three takes to figure out that it wasn't.
It's a bit of a pain to record vocals in the apartment. I've got a real microphone, a sensitive, a large-diaphragm cardioid condenser. It hears everything. So, before I record, I have to close the windows, turn off the ceiling fan, the refrigerator, and the air filter, take my shoes off so that I don't toe-tap on the floor while I'm singing, and throw Bob into the bedroom. Even then, the room itself isn't the best, acoustically. The bare walls (one of which is entirely covered with mirrors) and pergo floors create a tight reverb, almost like a plate. Which actually sounds kind of cool, but it means that I don't have clean vocals to start with, so any processing I do is always plate reverb + whatever else I'm adding.
If I got much longer mic and headphone cords, I could record in the bedroom, which has carpeting. But I know from a previous neighbor that sound carries well through one wall of the room, and I wouldn't want to subject anyone to that. The other alternative is to use the closet. For now, I think I'll just deal with the reverb.
Chapter four is done and out to the group, all 2,000 meandering words of it. It's an interesting process. I think everyone else in the group has a significant chunk of their project written, between 100-200 pages, or even a full manuscript. I'm writing live, without a net, a brand-new chunk every week, with a minimum of polish or revision. I've decided to treat it like a magazine serial, with a very small readership. Dickens wrote his stuff that way...and I don't really like Dickens all that much, so it's kind of ironic that I've adopted his method. Of course, he actually was writing magazine serials, and got paid to do it by the word. I'm just trying to keep people interested from week to week and remain coherent, plotwise. I'll see what the verdict is this Sunday. I'm a little concerned that I'm starting to flounder a bit. Plus, it's always somewhat more nerve-wracking to submit things that aren't polished, that lack grace notes and eyebrows. But if there's a solid structure in place, I can add the filigree later.
Now, I need to...do things with my Saturday. Must...spend...money...on storage unit.
Aaand I Broke It
One of the drags of having a high-tech studio is that the tech part can get it the way of the create part, which is what's happened.
Basically, I pushed my system to its limits and now I've got to spend some time fine-tuning it, upgrading a few bits of software here and there, and generally being a computer person instead of a music person. Nothing kills the muse faster than poking around in the Systems Preferences folder or downloading and installing software packages. So that's what I'll be doing instead of working on my tracks today. Grr and so on.
On the other hand: it's time to write a sex scene for the novel, which is always fun.
And, as a final note: when I first wrote the sentence above, my fingers typed "place side" instead of "other hand." I didn't notice until I proofed the post.
That's not a typo, that's some kind of minor neurological tic, a smaller version of not being able to recognize faces or thinking that your wife is a hat. Honestly, sometimes I really worry about my brain. Maybe it needs a new software package, too...
From Tang Shi San Bai Shou
 More from 300 Tang Poems.
The Tang period (618-907) is considered the golden age of Chinese poetry. Tang Shi San Bai Shou is an 18th-century compilation of the period's poetry, and was used to teach elementary students to read and write, and to cultivate their characters. Today, most Chinese households still have a copy of Tang Shi.
This piece is by Du Fu.
There lived years ago the beautiful Gongsun,
Who, dancing with her dagger, drew from all four quarters
An audience like mountains lost among themselves.
Heaven and earth moved back and forth, following her motions,
Which were bright as when the Archer shot the nine suns down the sky
And rapid as angels before the wings of dragons.
She began like a thunderbolt, venting its anger,
And ended like the shining calm of rivers and the sea....
But vanished are those red lips and those pearly sleeves;
And none but this one pupil bears the perfume of her fame,
This beauty from Lingying, at the Town of the White God,
Dancing still and singing in the old blithe way.
And while we reply to each other's questions,
We sigh together, saddened by changes that have come.
There were eight thousand ladies in the late Emperor's court,
But none could dance the dagger-dance like Lady Gongsun.
...Fifty years have passed, like the turning of a palm;
Wind and dust, filling the world, obscure the Imperial House.
Instead of the Pear-Garden Players, who have blown by like a mist,
There are one or two girl-musicians now-trying to charm the cold Sun.
There are man-size trees by the Emperor's Golden Tomb
I seem to hear dead grasses rattling on the cliffs of Qutang.
...The song is done, the slow string and quick pipe have ceased.
At the height of joy, sorrow comes with the eastern moon rising.
And I, a poor old man, not knowing where to go,
Must harden my feet on the lone hills, toward sickness and despair.
Of this piece, Du Fu wrote,
On the 19th of the Tenth-month in the second year of Dali, I saw, in the house of the Kueifu official Yuante, a girl named Li from Lingying dancing with a dagger. I admired her skill and asked who was her teacher. She named Lady Gongsun. I remembered that in the third year of Kaiyuan at Yancheng, when I was a little boy, I saw Lady Gongsun dance. She was the only one in the Imperial Theatre who could dance with this weapon. Now she is aged and unknown, and even her pupil has passed the heyday of beauty. I wrote this poem to express my wistfulness. The work of Zhang Xu of the Wu district, that great master of grassy writing, was improved by his having been present when Lady Gongsun danced in the Yeh district. From this may be judged the art of Gongsun.
August 12, 2007
More Rumi
 Sometimes I forget completely
what companionship is.
Unconscious and insane, I spill sad
energy everywhere. My story
gets told in various ways: a romance,
a dirty joke, a war, a vacancy.
Divide up my forgetfulness to any number,
it will go around.
These dark suggestions that I follow,
are they part of some plan?
Friends, be careful. Don't come near me
out of curiosity, or sympathy.
August 13, 2007
August 15, 2007
What? Oh, Hell.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is how I work, folks: long periods where I produce vast torrents of blogorhhea that no one cares about followed by quiescent periods wherein I work up a good head of motivated neurosis so that I can do it all over again.
Patience. There will be more things for you to not read soon.
August 16, 2007
She Pierced Her What, Now?
Part of why I post those little Not writing anything, frak off! entries is because there's usually a better than even chance that it'll prompt me to write something.
As a slightly modded person myself, I've been poking around in the pierced and tatted regions of the web. BMEzine has always been a good resource, and if you've got a high squick threshold, BME's ModBlog usually has something interesting to look at.
Every so often I'll find something that I've just got to know more about, and that was the case when I first read about Ashley Crawford's cervix piercing.
Yeah, take a moment and read that again.
Done? OK, good. Moving on: I've discovered that, the more I explore this or that piece of deviance, the more other threads of transgression seem to weave together. Poke around the bisexual realm, and you'll find the polyamorous crowd. Read up on piercings and other body modification, and you'll encounter all sorts of folks with interesting ideas about gender and sexuality. The farther away from the "normal" you travel, the more you'll find that the extraordinary have gathered themselves into their own little interconnected groups.
So, while I wanted to know what Ashley Crawford might possibly have been thinking when she decided that she needed a bit of bling on the end of her uterus, I discovered that there was a lot more going on than just an extreme mod. Not only has Ashley elected to modify her appearance using tattoos and piercings, she has also fully embraced a concept she calls "post gender." She's altered her secondary sexual characteristics through testosterone injections, and has had a bilateral mastectomy. She's not interested in becoming more male, but in becoming balanced, gender-wise.
As someone who's been both feminine and masculine, she's got an interesting perspective on how the perceptions of others change how they relate to her, including one observation that struck me as personally relevant:
Suddenly I was getting cruised mainly by bisexuals, and they didn’t have this dumb way of approaching sex like too many heterosexual men I’d met. That idea that the woman may be reluctant and the guy’s job is to persuade her to fuck anyway by introducing the idea gradually or just by being persistent... How disrespectful! Of course I’m not saying that all straight people are like this or that all queer people are great at respecting each other’s boundaries, but in my own life I’ve noticed an obvious trend there. These days, I get cruised by bisexuals of all genders, dykes, and the occasional gay man, and it’s very rare for me to encounter someone who doesn’t accept that yes means yes, no means no, maybe means we should talk about what we both want and see if it matches up, and most importantly that having casual sex means we are both sluts and that being a slut is no bad thing anyway. These aren’t difficult concepts to grasp — why can’t more straight boys understand them?
Spang! Between the eyes. As a guy who, at various times, has played that game of persistence, I can tell you that I don't much like it at all. I really don't. I hate cajoling, I hate the sense that pursuit is somehow supposed to prove my "worth," I just loathe the whole wretched, uncomfortable mess. Yeah, "yes" obviously means just that, and "no" means what it means...but it's the "maybe" where everything just goes all to hell for me. With women, anyway. With men, it's always been a whole lot more straightforward (so to speak). So I've got a bit of corollary: Why can't more straight girls understand this?
This does not at all mean that I think I've got the full-and-upfront healthy respectful boundary thing going on 24-7...my fuck-ups in that regard have been quite spectacular. But it's only through acute observation of my failures--or, to call it what it is, obsession over them--that I've learned exactly why I'm uncomfortable in a given situation.
What I've come to realize is that I have certain ways in which I prefer to conduct myself in relationships with members of either sex, whatever those relationships might be or potentially become. Those ways seem right and proper to me. But I've compromised those ways for the sake of the game, because that game, with all of its attendant gender role playing, is what comprises the norm in this culture, and it's easy to play.
I don't want to play that game anymore, and I need to be around people that don't want to play it anymore, either.
That's why I was fascinated by this interview with Ashley Crawford. And yes, there are pictures.
Check it out.
August 17, 2007
Bastard.
In every first novel the hero is the author as Christ or Faust.
-Oscar Wilde
August 18, 2007
Monkey
Floods In Nepal
Hey! I've been remiss here, because I haven't visited Doug's site in a while. But: he's got some friends he made in Nepal while scaling Everest a couple of months back and now they're getting flooded out. Reuters reports:
According to the latest estimates by the Home Ministry and the Nepal Red Cross Society (NRCS), the disaster killed 94 people, displaced over 21,000 families and affected around 333,500 people.
That was last week. It's gotten worse since then, as the diseases have started to take hold.
Now, I don't know these folks, but I know Doug, which gives me a scant two degrees of separation from his buddy Chandra on the other side of the planet. Here's a snippet from the relevant post:
Below is the email that Chandra sent me this morning:
I’m very glad to have your kindly message. Thank you very much. We are safe but my parent who lives over there. And their lands and a little land of mine also blew by floods or water waves. I would like to help them so I am trying. To look some co-operator because they are still in very miserable condition .So if possible please look some co-operator for such people from your side. If you do this work I will be so grateful with you. First you finish your traveling and then you try your best I am looking forward to getting your mail as soon as possible
Have a nice Time, Take care
Your elder brother
Chandra
bye.
If you are interested in donating, please send me an email at tenfinger6strings - at - gmail dot com. I'll work out the details on how to do this once I get a gauge of how many people would like to offer to help. Once I collect all donations, I will post a list of contributors and the total, not individual, amount raised in the spirit of full disclosure, as well as to acknowledge those who were kind enough to help (you can keep your name anonymous if you want). Please forward this post on to any people who you think would be interested in helping who don't read this site (which is pretty much everyone).
As of right now, the exchange rate is 65.5 Nepalese Rupees to the dollar, so a little will go quite far.
Drop Doug a line if you want to help out, and visit his site to see pics of Chandra and the flood.
And of course: if you are so inclined, link to this post or to Doug's to spread the word!
August 20, 2007
Origin Of The B-Word
Nobody likes to use "the B-word." Nobody likes to say it. Nobody likes to acknowledge that it exists. Even those comfortable with calling themselves bi are constantly searching for a better word. So, really, where did that pesky label come from, and why are we stuck with it? Here's a brief history that's likely to frustrate you even more.
1892
The year that bisexuality first appeared in the dictionary (don't ask us which dictionary because it was way too long ago), defined as an "attraction to both sexes."
1914
The year the word weaseled its way into the Journal of the American Medical Association with a rather progressive definition: "By nature all human beings are psychically bisexual--capable of loving a person of either sex." Wow, where's our time machine?
1924
The year some unknown genius proposed changing the word bisexual to ambisexual. Unfortunately, it never caught on, and we've been expected to do both sexes simultaneously ever since.
1956
Nobody really used the label bisexual until the 1950s. The abbreviation bi didn't exist until 1956. How they came up with that abbreviation, we're still researching. We think it may be an acronym for "blithering idiot," coined by a '50s housewife after listening to her husband try to explain why he was sucking face with the pool boy.
August 24, 2007
Ohhhh Lawdy I Neglectful
It's true, I am, it's true. I've always known that there's only a certain amount of total output I can generate during a given week, and it must be meted out among this place, my fiction, and my music. Lately, the fiction has been winning, which is good. I've just finished chapter six of this novel I'm apparently writing, and my output for the past five weeks or so has been a completed chapter each week, generally somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 words. At this rate, I'll be finished sometime next year.
That's better than before, however, when I was going to be finished...mmm...never. So I can handle that. The site does suffer, and I do apologize to my vast legions of readers who are, no doubt, bereft. I know that the August calendar is decidedly lacking in blue numbers.
I won't promise "more later," because that would be wrong.
But there might be.
What The Hell Is That?
 Do we need to call Ghostbusters? Is it the aftermath of a money shot in a gay giant porn flick? Or a gay very very tiny man porn flick? Were there monkeys? Some terrifying space monkeys maybe got loose? And...uh...spooged everywhere?
No! It's Bodyslime, and it's weird and interesting and there's nekkid folks in it. Go check it out.
If you really like it, you can buy some of your very own, though I suspect that it's very bad for carpets, furniture, and fur-bearing animals.
[Via Fleshbot.]
August 25, 2007
Check.
You know what? I'm sick of this crap. I'm sick of being the guy who eats insects and gets the funny syphilis. As of this moment, it's over. I'm finished being everybody's butt-monkey!
Zander Harris
Buffy vs. Dracula
Random Audio Weirdness In A Shoebox
I've got two shoeboxes full of random cassettes...when I was younger, and stoned, I used to carry a tape recorder around to ensure the capture of my obvious brilliance and that of my friends. In the midst of cleaning out random crap in preparation for the move to storage, I came across the collection.
I've got a Plusdeck, which I snagged off of eBay awhile ago and never used. So I stuck it in my old PC, with the idea that I'd maybe convert some of the nonsense on the tapes over to digital, and use it for cartoons or some such thing.
I've also got Tapes...Of...Mystery!!!! These are cassettes with people I don't know on them that have gotten mixed in with my own cassettes over the years. One of them is of some preacher-type person, recorded off the radio. There's about 45 minutes' worth on the tape. It starts out odd...then keeps up with the odd and mutates into just plain weird. As a trial run of the Plusdeck, I've got the first three minutes of it for you right here.
UPDATE:
I have to put more of this up. It's like listening to someone in the very process of losing his marbles...or maybe it's like watching a plane crash. Either way, it's kind of disturbing and funny at the same time. Listen for the bit at around 1:40. More preacher guy here.
August 28, 2007
There Is Nothing Quite So Sad As A Freshly-Baked Pie Being Dropped On The Floor
August 29, 2007
August 31, 2007
Has Anyone Seen My Nailclippers?
Because if you have, let me know. I need them so I can trim the nails on my fret hand, which is annoying me with the buzzing and the incompetence and the hey hey hey I can't play notes.
Also, I seem to have misplaced the pickle jar I keep my inspiration in, so if you know where that is...
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