:: Why The Kimono Is Beautiful ::

:: Monday, April 29, 2002 ::

Had a delightfully low-key weekend. Anne went to Falmouth on Saturday to paint the fence and do some cleanup, in preparation for the big bash we're hosting for her parents' wedding anniversary. [Anne brought the invitation card home the other day, on the front of which is a picture of her natty looking dad and oh-so-youthful mom standing at their cake, at the beginning of their extraordinary, profound, moving, ongoing life together. I got surprisingly choked up when she pulled that out of the kinko's box.] Gabriel had his first Brookline High crew meet on Lake Quinsigamond and was gone most of the day. Andrew was up to his typical weekend of eclectic social intrigues, including going to a Paint Ball war and walkabouts w/ his lacrosse stick. So it was mostly Quentin and me, reading on the back porch, playing basketball, walking to New England Comics. Saturday night we had a fine bachelor dinner of halibut followed by a walk to J.P. Licks; the entire evening flush with all the astonishing, narrative, inventive stuff that just pours out of these boys and is among the crowns of creation.

And they're such unabashed dog lovers. I've been thinking about that a lot lately for some reason. Andrew and Quentin especially. Like it has this moral/spiritual dimension; ala Dickens, or something 19th century. Reminds me of the story in the Bagavhad Gita about the guy who walks to heaven with his little dog following him. At the gate, he's told he can come in, but he can't bring the dog. So he says, 'Ok then, I guess I'm not coming in.' The next day he tries again. He gets the same answer from the gate keeper. So he says, 'But I love this dog; and that love is the thing I trust most in this world. So I can't leave the dog behind.' Again, he's turned away. The third day he arrives and the dog reveals himself to be Krishna and the man is, of course, exalted for his unwavering fidelity, not to the dog so much as to the love he felt for the dog. Anyway, it's so easy to picture Andrew similarly holding out; though he'd be much more inclined, seems to me, to get forensic or jesuitical with the guy. Quentin is more likely to have offered something like the exquisitely boiled-down formula from the Bagavhad Gita.

On Sunday I started recording 'Trap Door Blanket'; a song I originally wrote for Inner Beauty. I don't think we ever played it out; but we recorded it, right at the end. My only problem with that recording was it was much too fast and it thrashed. The new version is at the demo tempo and also has piles of Hawkwind/Acid Mothers Temple synth density, as compared to the guitaristic original.

And, Steve, thanks so much for the encouraging blog this morning.
:: 11:13 AM [+] ::
...

Last night Anne and I went out to a great restaurant in the North end with Josh and Zack, as guests of Zack's parents. Zack's dad was up from Va. for the week, attending a conference on Gastroenterology. His mom had just arrived so that they could spend the weekend in Boston hanging out with Zack and meeting some of his pals. Food and company were both excellent; and Z's dad even told us a few of his favorite gastroenterologist jokes. I, of course, asked him if he knew Mark Leyner's book. He, of course, knew of it and, probably a good thing, hadn't read it. For some reason they weren't interested in joining us for some pubcrawling after dinner. So we parted at Haymarket, they to catch the T at Government Center, while we headed into some bar that looked like it would at least have darts, but didn't. Eventually we came back to my house. Anne went to bed and Zack and Josh and I went down into my basement to trade songs and play around with my studio gizmos. Josh trotted out a whole batch of new stuff he's written for his next record. Some really excellent, ambtious, distinctive, hook-filled music. After that we tracked down Pandolfi raging like a visigoth at some completely out-of-control party in Allston. Chris told us there were instruments in the basement so we ducked out of the first floor pissing contest and sardine scene for a 'jam'. Pandolfi on tubs, Hickman and I on left-handed electrics and Ritter singing 'Cotton Fields Back Home'. It must've sounded something like the first rehearsal of The Shaggs. Eventually nature took its course and the police threw everyone out. We remained obliviously downstairs, macheteing our way through the dense bamboo of 'Cotton Fields' until the police found us as well.

Officer: Do you guys know that this party is officially over?
JM: No, sir, we didn't realize that.
Officer: Well it is.
JM: Are you saying, sir, that we're not any good?
Officer: No. You're really good. But the party just ended.

I thought he was a pretty funny guy under the circumstances. Good thing, too.

Here's 'See,' which I think is done. Needs to be remixed, but I like the simplicity of it. Alesis QS-8 upright bass sound rules.
:: 4:12 PM [+] ::
...

For those with wifi pcmcia cards in their laptops, head on down to the Trident Bookseller Cafe on Newbury Street. They've got Free Mobile Wireless Access, provided by NewburyOpen. T1 backbone. Paul and I are gonna have all our meetings there. I should say either there, or in Boston Harbor aboard Paul's boat, since he's now got Boston harbor set up for mobile wireless.

What a gorgeous giftday. Think I need to go for a walkabout; no, rollerblade-about, in search of the elusive situationist urban adventure yoga. You know the one.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mountain Prank

You wake up early
Not quickly

You lie for a while
In your commodious damp.
Slip out of night garb
And lie for another white while.

Naked then, within the gaze of
Breeze, spoors and motes
The planks are king's lumber
And creak;
For a bannister, a rope.

Think --

Once inside that dress
Tie
Or winding sheet
You're just
The first
Of your old species again

What if instead you started walking
In whatever direction
Spring is pointing?

:: 11:03 AM [+] ::
...

[This is cool. For today's bit of blogging I can just paste in the account of last night I just wrote up in an email.]

More epic raging. After an evening spent first at an MIT sponsored forum on 802.11b mobile wireless (serious nerd-headery; literally, if you take into account paul's showing up with a wireless antennae poking up through his acryllic baseball cap), then a wine-drenched business dinner, I dragged my colleagues over to the cantab to introduce them to my roistering bandmates and the overarchingly surreal cantab bluegrass 'scene'. Zack, Chris, Josh Ritter and I played pass-the-mandolin and butchered an impressive variety of songs (I personally bushwhacked those campfire favorites 'we can work it out' by the beatles and magnetic fields' 'busby berkley dreams'). We stayed until they booted us. I bid my colleagues fond adieu and after a period of time spent vaulting parking meters and kung fu kicking tree branches, a crew of us proceeded to some nearby party hosted by a young woman who ended every declarative sentence with a question mark and filled every syntactic lacuna w/ the word 'like'. By the time her neighbor came to the door for the 2nd time to complain about the noise I knew it was time to say goodbye to 4/23/02. To my knowledge, Zack and Chris are still there.

And, drat. I noticed this morning that I had accidentally made off with Flynn's capo. That keeps happening. I stole Josh Ritter's a couple of weeks ago. What's up with that?

And here's Bridget doing true slack omega justice to 'Violet'.
:: 11:51 AM [+] ::
...

What makes a man start fires? Here's a thing you see all the time but never, in my experience at least, w/ a woman as the protagonist. I'm jogging down Comm. Ave (by those spermy whatever trees) and a guy in an Accord slows and stops to parallel park in an open parking spot. Perfectly legal. He's got his blinker going and everything. Suddenly this guy in a Chevy Cavalier pulls up right behind the Accord and starts wailing on his horn. The asshole in the Cavalier is beet red, of course, and he pulls up closer and closer to the Accord until he's blocking the spot; even though it's self-evident what the guy in the Accord is doing. For 30 seconds, i swear, the Cavalier guy is just leaning on his horn, scowling, grinning, it isn't clear, even after all the cars behind the Cavalier have gone around these two and there's absolutely nothing preventing the asshole from moving on. Nothing, of course, except a uniquely male psychopathology. Or, I suppose, some kind of stone-age genetic hangover. But just seeing that kind of murderous rage over absolutely nothing can make various desired global outcomes seem utterly hopeless. The only consolation I guess is it does get all my affirmative-action-in-politics juices flowing. Yeah. I'm, like, writing in Lysistrata for governer. Don't tell Warren Tolman.

What makes a man start fights? Last night we had this excellent raging argument at the dinner table about the thermostat. I won't bother getting into the ludicrous specifics, but the thing broke down into the following factions: Andrew, me vs. Anne, Gabriel, Quentin. Afterwards Andrew and I decided that the only way to really settle this thing was to wrestle the other three. Big mistake. Anne, of course, could've cleared the northwest passage, and Gabe is 6'3" and rows crew everyday. They pretty much pulverized us, despite our having gotten the thing going with a brilliant sneak attack. Quentin and Stan (the dog) vaguely help whoever's losing. But it was to no avail. We got thumped.
:: 12:01 PM [+] ::
...

Tonight, through Wednesday, we've got a convocation going to see if we can't get this elusive funding thing nailed down. My buddy Ted is facilitating. Should be pretty fun. Really.

This morning I took Andrew to an episcopalian monastery on Memorial Drive. For a few moments he thought he might like to become a monk when he heard that they get to read all the time and that they allow dogs as pets. In the early 21st century, it seems appropriate for people like me to refer to ourselves as failed or lapsed atheists; instead of the other way around. Like any thoughtful late twentieth century coming-of-ager, examining the ravages of human culture, I've had my moments of peering into the abyss. But through it all the answer to the Great Meta Question -- why is there something instead of nothing at all? -- seems to require a hopeful, big, mysterious answer w/in my eccentrically wired up bio-system. The best description of something like my kind of hope-with-doubt theology I've run into recently is in this review by Freeman Dyson of a book by an anglican theologian that endeavors to get highly specific about Christian eschatology. The whole idea seems nutty; and Dyson does a good job demonstrating why.

Spent a bunch of time Friday and Saturday recording. Inspired as I am by madmen like Todd Rundgren and Prince, who create 'bands' all by themselves, I even did a one-man funk song on Thursday night. I'll stick it up here later. For now, here's an amazing version of 'Dandelion' that Bridget did on Saturday. As usual I was babbling about what I wanted and she was just nodding and paying no attention, but listening to some of the example stuff I was playing. I'd recorded just the drum track and a piano. Finally I said, 'Wanna try it?' She says, 'Ok,' and steps up to my totally cool Earthworks omni and just lays down this spot-on one take version of my fantasy saucer-eyed, valiumed-out 60s-styled bossa nova grrl.

I've been getting lots of really cool email, both from old and new friends, that I wish I could publish. But that's not really possible, I think, the heyday of elly.org notwithstanding.

[Oops, I just listened to the Dandelion mp3. There's some trash in it from somewhere in the transfer process. I'll fix it later. Gotta run to a biznis dinner w/ some of my best friends, who also happen to be my current business colleagues. I figure that's the only kind of business colleague one should have if one can get away with it.]
:: 5:26 PM [+] ::
...

Congratulations Hugh on your wedding. Paul: take lots of pictures. I need a Hawaii fix.

------------------------------

Let Go And Feel The Apples Falling

The chemistry of wave emission and reception
Is a self-selecting organic process
With which we interact.
We message one another.
Things open up
Like an old steamer trunk
Sitting in the middle
Of Pandora's cindery living room rug.
Last night again I cried away
Most of an evening for you.
In the morning it's better.
My Inner Scientist likes to
Turn the thermostat down to about 2 kelvin
And watch what happens to the dog.

:: 11:34 AM [+] ::
...

Music, Pt. I:

I've played music almost my entire life. It's a unifying thread. I remember when I was five I went to a birthday party at the Ellis'. They had a piano. Their mother, Jane, was a lounge singer of some local renown. (My lounge band would one day accompany her.) Timmy Hillman, also age five and later keyboardist for my high school band, sat down and played some music. Maybe "Heart and soul". I forget. Whatever it was, it blew my mind that he was able to do this. For the rest of the party I just sat at the piano, trying to recreate what Hillman did. It was frustrating and exhilarating.

For some reason, maybe because we didn't have a piano, maybe because Cream looked so cool, I cathected on guitar. After a couple of shitty guitars (one of which, BTW, a tortoiseshell plastic thing called "The Tiger", may be the only thing my proto-beat father ever bought me), I got a white Fender Telecaster. I used that for about a year, until I'd saved up enough money to buy a Gibson SG. I used the SG for about the next 20 years. It's the only inanimate object I've ever loved. I still have it, though I don't really use it much anymore. It needs a fret job and some other stuff. When I play electric guitar, I use a Jerry Jones.

In my town, my band had a virtual monopoly on gigging. Starting in 8th grade, we basically played every high school dance, house party, summer beach dance, town band concert there was. Since this was the early 70s, the drug devouring audience was like an extra member of the band and in many ways the drop that crystallized the saturated solution. As long as we were seismically loud (we were) and kept some kind of propulsion happening (we did), we could play practically anything and the audience would just keep swirling in an uncritical collective torporous private haze. Our sets would last about an hour each, and consist of 1 to 3 songs, usually improvisationally elongated cover versions of songs by Led Zeppelin, the Mothers, Van Vliet, Traffic, MC5, Cream. I try to imagine us sounding like Can. We'd play the head, and then each member would play a solo for however long he'd want. We performed this routine again and again, at least once a month, for five years. To Sandwich teenagers between the years 1969 and 1974, our presence on a stage at some Town of Sandwich teen dance was as assumed and unquestioned as the arrangment of the objects on the American Flag. [to be continued][maybe]

-----------------------

Last night, after about 300 slices of Q's birthday cake, I played at the Cantab w/ my boys, the Frank Drake band. As mentioned previously we were in sub-optimal shape. But we were, y'know, pumped anyway. Art and I showed up first. We ran a sound check on his butchered voice. It was fine. I don't think we ended up having to scrap anything altogether, though I think we switched around some singing to let Art off tenor on a couple things. Zack showed up next and was a fist-pumping virginia banshee already. Chris showed up last scarfing pizza and looking exactly like he'd just flown in from a debauched weekend in Dublin. Matt Glaser was joining us on fiddle for some tunes and he showed up w/ just enough time to run a few things for him to have at. Then we took the stage and we saw that the soundman was this guy who's Art's bete noire. Sure enough, the sound, always bad in the cantab, was so bad Zack started mumbling about grandaddy's hatchet. In fact the two guys at the board could have been Ray Milland and Rosie Grier, attached. The one guy, a fine fella who could run a fucking chautauqua on how not to do sound (perhaps even learned the art from me), seemed not to understand the role equalisation plays in helping or hindering feedback and was merely sliding levels in and out of the abyss. Eventually he had to shut my guitar off entirely, not just in the monitors, but in the house; so all my inspired mahavishNuGrass spasming was lost in the swirl. welladay, o welladay... Afterwards we, well, z. and I, roistered and wassailed w/ others until 1:30 or thereabouts. Then I came home, ritually incinerated my smoke clothes and slept the bohemian sleep of the just. In my contented dream-state I may have dreamed these lines from Stevens' An Ordinary Evening in New Haven. I hunted them down this morning: "Reality is the beginning not the end,/Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega,/Of dense investiture, with luminous vassals." So it goes.

Bridget says she was stumbling wraith-like around Cambridge w/ a party divining rod at about closing time, having sung her song at Passim, it bringing her by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Cantab Lounge and Environs. That would have been an ambulatory yoga. Speaking of whom, this former (like, one week ago) luddite now has a laptop, can do mp3 yanks and seems to be boning up for CTO at transtechwebfuck. Not sure what they do there at transtechwebfuck.com, but I assure you the domain's still available and can be had for only fifteen semolians/yr. True.

Here's Bridget singing Dandelion w/ me (i couldn't get timmy hillman) on piano. The piano's too loud and my goldbergian transfer process (you don't want to know) attenuates stuff like crazy. But it's still cool. I'm transposing up a minor 3rd when we do it for full tilt real.

Carolyn agreed with me that the trees blooming on Comm. Ave. smell spermy. What kind are they?

Lastly, I just got this email from a fan at www.kimono-nishijin.com:

Dear Sir

We have set up a japanese kimono shop site.
If you are interested in Japanese costume, not only kimono but obi, tabi, hakama, hanten, etc, please visit us.
If you appreciate our site, could you please think to have a mutual link with us?
Thank you.

Best regards
Naomi Ushiro

:: 12:44 PM [+] ::
...

I was talking to Watts yesterday. [More on Watts later.] I hadn't checked in for a while. He gave me a hot tip about bouncing tracks on my Roland VS1680 while retaining the effects. This can be important because the 1680 has limits on # of effects you can use in a given tune; in fact it's pretty easy to wind up at mixdown w/ all the many cool mix settings completely inaccessible. This technique solves the problem by allowing you to basically re-record a track w/ the effects burned in.

Watts' other hot tip was that I should run out immediately and rent The Thing With Two Heads, starring Rosey Grier and Ray Milland. I wouldn't have believed this film was real or possible; but imdb proves it. It's a low budget sui generis masterwork, featuring academy award winner Milland (i shit you not) as a dying bigot whose head gets attached to ex-LA Ram Grier. According to Watts, the near-deranged audacity of the acme "special effects" alone is pay-any-price worth it.

Most importantly, today is Quentin's birthday. He came running down the stairs this morning to excellent, customized breakfast, hyacinths perfuming the first floor and quickly solved Anne's treasure map/puzzle and located a retro-looking, gold-colored Schwinn Stingray scooter. For lunch he wanted sushi, so he and I strolled over to the local shrine, Fugakyu, sat at the sushi bar and talked comics and music. Tonight we have a party. I should have a nice cake and ice cream hangover by the time Frank Drake takes the stage at the Cantab. That and the fact that Art emailed to say he blew his voice out Saturday, plus Chris P.'s just getting back from a Lost Weekend in Dublin, means this otta be a damn special night indeed.

------------------

I wrote this a million years ago when Gabe (who's now 6'3") and I would walk up and down Beals St. with me alternately holding his hand and carrying him. Totally un-selfconscious, Quentin still holds my hand when we're out walking.

---

Haiku For My Son

Holding hands keeps us
Tight; but I love your arms, 'cause
They go around me.

---

And here is a song I found recently, rummaging through old tapes. It was written, I think, the day after Q. was born, certainly while he and Anne were still in the hospital. The lyrics are here. 2nd verse has a reference to John Berryman's The Ball Poem. Like most of the 4-track stuff from back then, the quality is 'Thing With Two Heads' low-fi. But the feelings aren't.

Quentin, my son and my buddy, I love you so much.
:: 10:59 AM [+] ::
...

I wrote something to Dave about community and got blogged. Dave's going to China and doing a web journal for the Boston Globe. Dave's maybe the other guy in Brookline who would be around to answer a door during the day. Except he's not being a bohemian drop-out, he's busy being a writer. So maybe he'd have the doorbell on gag.

Last night we went to dinner with friends and fellow san francisco ex-pats Bette and Dan. Wendell was there. Wendell is vaguely legendary, in some nerd circles at least, for having created TaxCut, the stunningly successful comeptitor to TurboTax, with just one other guy. They did it for a bunch of years and then sold to H&R Block. We actually tried to buy them at Intuit; but it didn't work out. I met him at some restaurant in Palo Alto during the Intuit/TaxCut courtship, having no idea he was a buddy of Anne's from college. Anyway, now they're doing a more low-key thing: some kind of divorce-ware. As Dan, Wendell's partner, once explained it to me, his motives were a) provide a tool that would discourage people from divorce by showing them the grim wealth-destroying underpinnings of divorce; b) to empower women, who are typically behind the 8-ball, resource-wise, in these situations. Having been on the sidelines of some divorces recently, I'm not so optimistic about motive a). But, for the same reason, I think b) is a slam-dunk. The rest of his time Wendell spends hanging out with his kids, taking them to lessons, playing music with them, etc., and working his garden like a madman. He's got one of the truest, heartiest laughs you'd ever want to hear.
:: 3:37 PM [+] ::
...

Chris emailed reminding me about a discussion I was having w/ good ol' Emory Winship a few years ago about my 'monadic deadlock' theory. Here's a succinct version of it, from an interview I did in 'The Hold':

"In 25 years we'll have reached the "monadic deadlock," a cultural saturation point where technology will have made the means of production and distribution so cheap and democratized that everyone will be emitting and few if any will be receiving. I look forward to doing my part."

Paul was telling me Tim Berners-Lee once told him his biggest disappointment with the internet was the ratio of readers to writers; i.e., too many readers. Heh. Funny.

And FUCK. I got Curt's email about Charles Simic reading at MIT thursday night too late to take action. But that's ok because it's about the only thing I missed this week. Now that I'm bohemian I go out carousing every night. After practice Wednesday, went to the local pub with Art and Zack and Sidbag and got roped into a damn trivia contest, instead of driving Z. into a crinkle-skinned frenzy in payment for email insolence as planned. We were rolling until tv and sports. Thursday, Anne and I did some more pubcrawling. We kept running into people we knew everywhere. I'm always surprised by that. Last night we made the scene at Flynn Cohen's birthday extravaganza, hosted by Greg Tucker-Kellogg. Bluegrass musicians are fine good wholesome folk. Though Flynn's hardly a cornponer. He cut his teeth doing out composition at Mills. There was a picture of him in the Globe a couple days ago, which I'd direct you to but the Globe doesn't do any pictures in its Big Loser archive. It was an article about home recording. Amen. Wait, here's the next best thing: Anne just handed me a pic of our band playing w/ Flynn sitting in on fiddle.

Apropos (of home recording): Bridget came over to sing yesterday. She was kinda late so finally I looked outside, because she's always losing phone numbers and street addresses. Sure enough, I saw her wandering around on the wrong side of the street, ringing random doorbells. Which of course was hopeless. With my being the only bohemian in Brookline and all, no one else was home. But the singing was great. I'd been a tiny bit worried, in part because the stuff she typically does is big-voiced bluesy folk something or other. But her voice is very beautiful and adaptive. Which I knew, actually, cuz the first time I saw her was in a circus video singing 'Hi Lilly Hi Lo' as a creepy little-girl from a county fair out of a dali-leering-like-vincent-price dream. She's a fine mimic, which is good since I'm asking her to sing slacker; low in her range, like exile-era liz phair. I may have something to put up from what we did. I need to go listen to it all. She's going to sing 'Violet,' though I'll need to raise it a whole step. We also did 'Tempt Me,' but didn't quite get a 'b' part nailed down. Also 'Dandelion,' which sounded pretty yummy and 'epic poem', which could have been a keep, except I bolloxed the levels, so there's not enough presence. 'Dandelion' I'm also going to raise a whole step and re-record. We did some other stuff; I forget what. Maybe I'll put some of these experiments up later. Maybe I should ask first.

But I can't believe I missed ol' Simic. Rats.
:: 1:04 PM [+] ::
...

Had dinner with dear friend and colleague Steve last night. We talked about funding the company some, but also had a good time w/ Bjorn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist, which I haven't read. We also got around to personal stuff. Ominous geopolitical backdrop. Feels like the omen-fat act I of Julius Caesar, with all that terrestrial and celestial weirdness harbingering bad things to come.

CICERO Why, saw you any thing more wonderful?
CASCA A common slave--you know him well by sight--
Held up his left hand, which did flame and burn
Like twenty torches join'd, and yet his hand,
Not sensible of fire, remain'd unscorch'd.

It's been like that. And I've had all these conversations in the last couple of months that swirl round and resolve in the small, human, dover-beach comfort of who we love and by whom. So I've been walking around making eye contact, sending precipitate emails, gratuitous even, like a smiling Herzog. (Sorry everyone.) But I think to myself: We're here. You know. Quick now. Here now.

And if you think I'm making this all up: Look at the email I just got:

>May 5 - 8:00 pm
>Center for Astrophysics
>See Mars, Saturn and Venus form a perfect triangle, recreating the view
>that some believe may have guided the Wise Men as the "Star of Bethlehem."
>Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge,
>MA 02138
>

Well. Here's the chart for 'Tempt Me'. The demo is in G, though I wrote it in A. That's because, as currently envisoned, it'll have somebody singing an octave above and A seemed a little high. But I haven't actually tested that yet.

:: 1:53 PM [+] ::
...

I've been fooling around with varieties of religious digital manipulation. Here's a straightforward fragment of my song 'What An Idiot' backwards and looped. I'm not completely sure how I'll use this yet. But i think it's pretty.

Someone stuck a sticker on the edge of the computer table. It's upside down and says 'dumper'. ?

I don't read web diaries much, but if I did I'd say my favorite is/was elly.org. She appears to have gone on hiatus. She's been doing this forever. Since I lived in SF. I found her site at cyborganic. I forget how I knew about cyborganic. Maybe from geekcereal. Or via my friend Jill from Intuit. Jill made the scene. Anyway, elly had a cam and a clear-prosed, confessional diary, elegant layout (i think we tried to hire her at my last co.) and some other stuff; notably, this cgi email bruiter thing that would grab a random email sent to her from a stash. Refresh and you'd get another. It was kind of an outrage, netiquettely speaking. For one, it wasn't all stuff from anonymous assholes. Much of it was pretty personal stuff from friends. And yet, and yet... it felt okay; because it was so out in front that any correspondant knew going in what the rules were. Still, it probably made some of her friends squrimy. I bring it up because it inspired aspects of my samba 'Tempt Me'. Which I'll put up later. I'll even put up the chart. Then everyone can play it. I'm kind of waiting on a whole batch of songs until I've got some poppy girl or other to sing the poppy parts.

I wonder why I prefer 'Delete' to 'Backspace'? Meaning, if I'm editing something, I'll position in front and 'Delete' vs. behind and 'Backspace'. You?
:: 10:23 AM [+] ::
...

By popular request: Quentin's q-list of the 20 best bands of all time.

This unholy mess is an old demo I'm trying to beef up into releasability. I feel like I've got to use a few of these; I like many of them (and there are hudnreds) for their spontaneity and for what they capture about my state of mind during the most creative period of my life, running around, taking nietzsche at his word and pushing everything that was falling. The problem is all this stuff was recorded as quickly as was humanly possible, in piss-poor conditions, in order to have an artifact. For the band to hear, but also because I knew the next day I'd be on to another one. This one is 'Dick Nixon's Dream of a Naked Dental Student' and the lyrics are here. It's one part of a dyptich that also includes 'Clarence Thomas' Dream of a Naked Dental Student'.
:: 2:25 PM [+] ::
...

Gosh. I googled Mayuko. Yipes.

Went to a pre-lunch/lunch meeting today near harvard square with a really nice ex-lotus nerd, helping us refine our 'message'. I feel so liberatedly bohemian walking around all the time while everyone else is spooting back and forth to drudgish cube golf shirt pilot-ville. Meanwhile, Quentin tears off to school each morning, hair down his back, ever-present safari hat on, one red sock, one green. Head firmly implanted inside his imagination.

Here's the music-only for a tune called 'Return To Plainclothes'. It lacks the wacked vocoder recitation of this poem. It does however use some of my new sound toys. Oh, and I think I need to sell my mini-moog. I should try ebay maybe. But I'm kinda luddite about selling it that way.
:: 4:59 PM [+] ::
...

Yes, I'm definitely thinking that for now I'll keep a diary of the Poppy Girl recording here. I think Art talked me into calling it 'Why The Kimono Is Beautiful' at some point during Zack's rager the other night. I just wish I could find that damned poem. It's gone. It was for my friend Mayuko Hino. [Wonder what happens if you try googling her? Wait, is Google named after Barney?] Though the concept here is older. Anyway, in classic fashion I set out this morning to record one song, 'John Yetman,' and ended up writing a brand new one. So of course I recorded a demo of that one instead. Alas. The beautiful words are here.

Zack's party did rule, as judged by the vagaries of my recall. Got home at 5 a.m.. Violet dawn. Got up at 8 a.m. to start family Easter Sunday day. Were the mad Pandolfi bros. really pummelling Zack and me in the living room?
:: 6:15 PM [+] ::
...