I’ve been doing amateur home recording for a long time, let’s call it a decade plus, starting out with second-hand four-tracks and moving up to cheapo laptops and freeware synth programs. Being the overly-independent type, and the absurdly anti-establishment type, I have avoided the methodology of most of the world around me — the whole iMac/Garage Band thing. Instead I have mostly used a patchwork of random software on a succession of computers to get results that I am fairly happy with. So her...

One of my few goals in life is to someday have a house in the woods — maybe in West Virginia, near my roots in Appalachian Maryland — where I’d have a creaky porch, some humble supplies, and a basement with a piano and some old recording equipment. This would be a place I could take sabbaticals from urban life, drinking whiskey, playing guitar, writing strange pop music and recording it. I’ve talked about this modest dream lots of times, but I never realized until now that basically what I’ve al...

The internet may be a timesucking black hole, but I prefer it to some of the alternatives (like tv) because at least you can feel you’re wasting your time in a productive sort of way. The internet, if you sort of squint at it sideways, suggests an infinity of patterns — harmonic resonances of information and insight — dazzling multidimensional arrays of facts and ideas and multimedia extravagance. So you tunnel through layers of meaning, right-clicking madly. You know that everything you find ha...

Today DCist highlighted as “ photo of the day ” a scan of a letter about the photography policy of the Department of Transportation. Here in the nation’s capital, there is a lot of conflict between photographers and the various types of security personnel at the various federal agencies, landmarks, foreign embassies, international agencies, etc, etc. I have an opinion about this (pro-photographers’ rights, anti-security paranoia), but thinking about it today I had a different reaction than norma...

Speaking of poetry… I have never written much of the stuff myself, but do write a lot of song lyrics which are kind of similar in some ways (as I mentioned in my last post ). I like writing lyrics much more than I like singing, but sometimes the lyrics are pretty perfunctory or just thrown-together nonsense. And on very rare occasions I have started writing lyrics but abandoned the song, yet kept the lyrics around anyway, somewhere in my brain. What do you call song lyrics without the music? Dog...

I don’t often read poetry, but I have had a distant wisp of a poem stuck in my mind all day, and spent an hour or so leafing through books of poetry and some general literature compendia, seeking out something that may not even exist. I have more poetry on my bookshelves than I would have guessed, and more than I have ever read. Part of the reason that I even have any poetry at all is for moments like tonight, so that on terribly rare occasions I can leisurely look through it, wondering if anyth...

I’ve always been interested in the English language, and language in general, and linguistics, and the mechanics of language, and its history. So I have been known to waste major chunks of time nerding out to things like the blog Language Log and wikipedia articles about, say, the history of the alphabet . The alphabet is pretty interesting. Studying foreign languages gave me a different perspective on the Latin alphabet as used in English. I’ve never studied a non-Latin alphabet language, but I...

For two and a half years I have been using eMusic to get my legal music fix. I thought it was nearly a perfect service. So much for that. Here is what my eMusic account information has to tell me now: We’re sorry that we’ve had to retire your current plan, but we’re confident that you’ll find even more music to love among the many new additions to the music catalog. And of course, you can always choose a different plan by visiting the Plan Options page within Your Account. EMusic is going the wa...

This past Memorial Day weekend I was out of town (as per the American tradition), but on the Friday before the holiday I spent a few minutes walking through Arlington Cemetery, thinking about sad topics like the perpetual wars we continue to fight and all the good-hearted Americans who are so loyal to the military but so strangely unwilling to criticize the wars that endanger said military or the government that sends young people halfway around the world to kill other young people. But the ceme...

So I don’t watch cable news, but the internet tells me that there is some sort of uproar going on over on the libertarian/right quadrant of the political map . Something about taxes, and tea ? Maybe you’ve heard? It’s interesting to see protest and even hints of radicalism coming from the right. On the one hand, it’s frightening as all hell; on the other hand, it’s a pleasant surprise to see people actually acting like they care about something. A month or so ago there was a hullabaloo about cor...

Winter has returned here. It’s not shockingly cold, but after weeks of warm weather (January is turning into DC’s most pleasant month) it’s hard to adjust. I am not ecstatic about the winter weather, but I have endured far worse, so I don’t really mind a few days or weeks of temperatures below freezing. It is February. Tonight I was waiting for the bus, feeling cold and reflective. I snapped some self-portraits with my cell phone to keep myself preoccupied, but mentally I was already adrift. On ...

I am still writing to myself here, as usual, as an online version of “thinking out loud” about my thesis topic. I am gonna post my tentative proposal—it’s something I turned in yesterday—but after a day’s thought, I am thinking that my idea for a case study doesn’t fit with my broader interests. Ugh. Well anyway here it is. Tentative Thesis Title: Out of Frame: How Old Media and New Media Cover Old Europe and New Europe Thesis Mentor: To be confirmed (see below) Synopsis of problem to be investi...

My band, Sutures , played a couple of shows earlier this month — one at the University of Maryland’s WMUC for Third Rail Radio , one at the Red and the Black. It was fun. I am sort of a connoisseur of rock music, and as I’ve stated before, I can tell that we are honestly no great shakes. But people enjoy it, and my friends have fun at the shows. So maybe we will keep this thing moving along for a bit longer. For one thing, it leads to cool pictures. Really, the photo ops are one of the highlight...

Maybe I should ask my loyal readers for their suggestions, too: from Jeff Gerhard to [redacted] @georgetown.edu, date Jan 28, 2008 2:37 PM subject request for advice mailed-by gmail.com Dear Professor [redacted] , I am a graduate student in Georgetown’s Liberal Studies Program, currently working on a thesis proposal for the International Affairs concentration. One of my professors, [redacted] , knew of your work and suggested that I contact you to discuss my thesis ideas. I also looked over the ...

I have been discussing Christmas lately and I have some mixed feelings about it. I guess, overall, I think it is kind of a mixed-up holiday that awkwardly combines the celebration of the birth of Christ, sort-of-cute traditions for kids, and unsettling consumerist madness. I’m not sure that any of these things belong together and for years now, Christmas has never quite sat right with me. I like seeing my family and I like our family traditions, but I think that, unless I have kids of my own, I ...

There is a store on U Street that is named “ 4NX¢ ” and the first time I noticed it took me a few minutes to figure it out. (Here’s a photo of it by Prince of Petworth) Foreign… ex… cent?… Oh! “Exchange!” I should have figured it out more quickly. Thinking about, promoting, and participating in international exchanges has been a big part of my life, ever since I first wandered into the foreign exchange program office my junior year of college and randomly picked out Tübingen as a place to live f...

On Sunday I sat around for a while listening to old records, mostly ones that belonged to my parents. So my main discovery? Stevie Nicks — yowza! There is a picture of the whole band on the back of Rumours where she is smoldering hot. I was really only familiar with the Stevie Nicks image from the ’90s when they re-emerged into the spotlight, and “Don’t Stop” was the Clinton election-party theme or whatever. I’m not saying Ms. Nicks looks bad for her age, but who knew she was once so gorgeous? I...

I got an email from school stating that next week, in honor of Constitution Day, there will be a public reading of the U.S. Constitution by students. Well. My first thought was that this didn’t sound like something a serious university would do, but was more akin to things we did in seventh grade, like the time my class had to recite the Gettysburg Address at the Lincoln Memorial. Then my second thought was, “Constitution Day??” Turns out Constitution Day is a legitimate holiday, of sorts. Wikip...

I’m taking a break from homework to ponder the state of the world and especially the loss of Madeleine L’Engle, the second death this year (following Kurt Vonnegut’s) of an extraordinary author of vaguely-science-fiction books. I didn’t really know anything about L’Engle, which made the obituaries and appreciations feel strange. But of course, I read her books during that curious age that is the target of the “young adult” section of bookstores; I suppose her books may have been scattered betwee...

Frequently in life, your interests in converge in unexpected ways, and I guess that is one of the things that keep this mortal existence halfway exciting. Today I am thinking about Cal Ripken, Jr., and specifically, about the recent news that he has been appointed “ Special Sports Envoy ” for the State Department, a strange position that is kind of a “goodwill ambassador” thang. Presumably he’ll make a fair number of trips around the world, meeting with regular people, teaching kids about baseba...

I don’t believe in any supernatural mumbo-jumbo like astrology or fortune telling, but, perhaps out of sheer capriciousness, I’ve long been fan of the website Facade . Facade allows you to perform all kinds of superstitious readings and introduced me to terms like stichomancy and bibliomancy long before you could look up pseudoscience on wikipedia. I find a lot of this quackery to be pretty entertaining, but if I needed proof that the Facade readings are inaccurate, I found it yesterday. I have ...

So on Saturday night my band, Sutures , played its first show. My bandmate set up a gig at a musical establishment I have been avoiding for the past dozen years in DC, the Grog and Tankard in Glover Park. The Grog doesn’t have the most sterling reputation, and is definitely not hip or trendy. But I didn’t avoid it (just) because it is relatively uncool — I never went there because it is out of the way and no bands ever played there that I have ever heard of. So I was slightly leery of performing...

I didn’t really celebrate my birthday but I decided to go all clich� and get some new ink. The guy who did it was curious about what the design was, and guessed that maybe it was a section of the Metro map. Other people have thought it was some sort of chemistry thing, but actually it is (supposedly) a medieval symbol for “constellation” — my variation on your typical star tattoo. Of course it might not really mean anything, it is just something I pulled off the internet a long time ago. Anyway ...

My niece Brighid interviewed me for school and then integrated some of the results into a poem for my birthday. I hope she won’t mind that I share it here. It’s so interesting to see what my niece and nephew know about me! A lot of it is stuff they picked up from my sister, who of course has known me my whole life, but only really spent a lot of time with me when I was a youngster, so her kids know all these funny stories from when I was really little. I am impressed by this poem — it is mostly ...

table.lastfmWidget td {margin:0 !important;padding:0 !important;border:0 !important;}tr.lastfmHead a:hover {background-position:0 0 !important;}tr.lastfmEmbed object {float:left;}tr.lastfmFoot td.config a:hover {background-position:0 0 !important;}tr.lastfmFoot td.view a:hover {background-position:-85px 0 !important;}tr.lastfmFoot td.popup a:hover {background-position:-159px 0 !important;} I’m playing with last.fm during my brief stop in the office today. They have these playlists that you can m...

Like Axl Rose, I ain’t got time to reminisce on novelties. On the other hand, I am gearing up to turn thirty this week. Yikes! So a little bit of reminiscing is probably in order. I have had various ideas for how to commemorate these three decades of life. Sometimes for birthdays in the past I have embarked upon personal projects to recap my life: wandering around DC looking at all the different places I have lived; sitting for a few days and trying to make a list of all the songs I’ve ever writ...

Yesterday after work I sat down and started playing a moderately obscure Ween song (“What Deaner Was Talkin’ About”) and then I went ahead and recorded myself doing it. How geeky I am becoming! But it keeps me entertained and really that is the whole point. Here it is: Afterwards as I listened back to it, I started to wonder for the first time about the lyrics. What exactly was Deaner talking about? About the wash? About Gene being a king? So I looked up the song on songmeanings.net , the premie...

This song popped up on my playlist a little while ago, and finding the lyrics startlingly approriate to real-world events, I thought I’d share it. I think it’s a lovely piece, and as far as I know it’s out of print (it appears on the Chords I’ve Known EP) so I’ll include the download link . Sparklehorse are one of my favorite artists, but I don’t have much to say above and beyond these lyrics. Sparklehorse : The Hatchet Song Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play...

R.I.P. Kurt Vonnegut. It may not be obvious, but this blog is technically named “Harmless Untruths” (a part of my larger monodrone.org website). This term, “harmless untruths,” comes from Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle , one of my favorite books. In Cat’s Cradle , a strange religion called Bokononism admits that it is mostly made up of lies — called foma , or “harmless untruths.” Still, people take comfort in these lies and find them meaningful. I don’t claim to totally understand the concept, but on t...

So craziest thing last night. I was sitting at home, minding my own business, playing around on my computer like the dork that I am. And slowly it penetrated my consciousness that there was a buzzing sound near me, rather loud, but I didn’t really pay attention until suddenly this humongous bumblebee flew onto the lamp right next to me. Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here . You also need to have JavaScript enab...

All of the best things in life are silly. Most of the reasons to keep on living are absurd. The most striking and touching and humbling parts of human existence make no sense whatsoever. We’re all irrational, stumbling through life, bumping up against one another and muddling through. It’s pretty awesome, in both the slangy meaning of the term and in the sense of “inspiring awe.” We find power and majesty in the unlikeliest places, and I reckon it doesn’t really matter where your source of inspi...

Paradigm I: The Eagles of Death Metal The Black Sabbath of Freak-Folk The Aerosmith of Grindcore The Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young of Chamber Pop The Steely Dan of Post-Hardcore The Doobie Brothers of O.G. Emo The NWA of IDM The Jam of Math Rock The Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow of Nü-Metal The AC/DC of Oi! The Grand Funk of No Wave The Bruce Hornsby and the Range of Downtempo Paradigm II: Reading Lolita in Tehran Lending Lolita to attractive students in Łomża. Feeling incredibly underwhelmed by...

Sick. Ugh. I have been fighting a cold for a week, and today it really knocked me for a loop. I even went and got some medicine, something which I almost never do. And I turned down multiple invitations to go out and be social tonight, opting instead to curl up and cough the night away. Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here . You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. (Boss Hog : Sick) There are lo...

From today’s Washington Post : Clearly our nonproliferation strategy has failed. I trust the UN won’t hesitate to impose sanctions on the chimps, before they share their pointy-stick technology with other rogue species. You’re all familiar with email spam. Some of you may also be familiar with “comment spam”, in which thousands of fake comments are posted to your blog. Sifting through my comment spam, I found this: I am guessing that the spammers are smart enough to somehow figure out human name...

“The years that are gone seem like dreams — if one might go on sleeping and dreaming — but to wake up and find — oh! well! Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one’s life.” — Kate Chopin, The Awakening I can’t be the only one who feels a bit disconcerted about the current state of political affairs. Members of Congress are questioning the President’s policies. Pundits and talk show hosts are openly skeptical about any prospects ...

The other day at practice, my bandmate Rob started playing an old song that we hadn’t played in ages, and I had it stuck in my head for hours afterward. He and I actually had recorded a demo of it a while back, like a year ago, and I was always pleased by how it came out. It is his song, and I just played some noodling acoustic guitar over top of his part, something I pretty much made up on the spot. It was called “Pyramid” but I am not even sure if there are any lyrics or anything. I suppose I ...

Over the past year or so, I’ve heard from a couple friends or family members that my old music popped up on their iPods or in their iTunes. In the back of my mind, I have been intending to redistribute all my old recordings in a more updated format so that anybody else can have their very own copies in their very own mp3-playing devices. And then yesterday I happened to listen to my last “album” for the first time in ages, and I was amazed at how much I liked it. So yeah, I am kinda proud of the...

Mad props to Hewlett-Packard . After I somehow broke my camera over the holidays, annihilating the viewscreen, they offered to replace it free of charge even though it was clearly not within the scope of any warranty. In exchange, I offer them this. Everybody remembers this song, right? I can’t be the only one. Sorry the volume is way down, but I don’t know much about video editing, nor do I really care.

This past week, the DC smoking ban went into effect. I was, and remain, opposed to it. On a personal level, I’m mostly ambivalent, maybe even slightly in favor of the ban. This past weekend was the first to see it in effect, and mostly it was pretty strange, a major topic of conversation for a generally strange weekend that also featured 74° January weather. As an on-again-off-again smoker, the ban rankles a little bit, but also seems like a great incentive to stick to the off-again side. On a p...

Over the past year I tried to get back into the habit of going to rock concerts as much as possible. It ended up not being possible as much as I wanted, but I still did respectably, considering my aging legs and ears. I’ve been tryin’ to remember all my favorite shows of the year (many of them were within the same week or so), and I think I am forgetting some, but this is another good excuse to tell some tales and add some more multimedia links. (Note to self: save thoughtful comments about the ...

So there are trillions of songs about Christmas, but I can only think of two pop/rock songs about New Year’s, the famous one being U2’s “New Year’s Day” and the not-so-famous one being the Dismemberment Plan’s “The Ice of Boston”. (Apparently, there is a song by Death Cab for Cutie called “The New Year”, but I don’t have much interest in it, as seeking it out would be a violation of my irrational scorn for Death Cab and Bright Eyes and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. I’ll explain this later.) In my lo...

Though sometimes I am a little dismayed at the online/digital environment for music, it has occurred to me lately that I have been using the internet to learn about music for a long time, basically for the past 11 years or so. I am actually reasonably well-qualified to offer a historical perspective on music on the web. My current methods of learning about music (among other things, you’ve got your pitchfork and your last.fm and your long list of favorite mp3 blogs ) are the direct descendents o...

In my effort to become a rock star, I realize I need to practice my original stuff, work on my moves, practice pointing at the crowd, etc. I mean, I guess I’ll start with baby steps (like not staring at my hands while playing) and slowly work my way up to Carrie Brownstein/Pete Townshend windmills. I’ve also been contemplating trying to do some videos. Crazy, but intriguing. But I don’t know anything about editing video, though, so here is my first-ever rock video. It’s a little dark, I guess. A...

Here’s one more thing to post. This is a song that’s been around a while, but it sort of evolved through working with my bandmate Rob. This is one of the poppiest songs we’ve put together, which I will take all the blame for. Here is a four-track demo of it, done in Keith’s kitchen with practice amps and electronic drums. I tacked on the vocals at home. Since we don’t have a myspace page yet (or even a settled band name), I’m gonna post this here. “Left Behind” by unnamed project (Teeth Like Tom...

Much like the second Death Star, this website looks rough but is, in fact, fully operational . However, big chunks of it are missing, and it is highly vulnerable to attack, foolishly storing its shield generator on a nearby forest moon. The last post is from something like six months ago, so you know this is not a priority. Yesterday I did some recording with my pseudo-band, and today, as I skipped work to do some writing for school, I felt that a smart thing to do would be to record some more. ...

Why oh why am I feeling this urge to write little commentaries about music when I am supposed to be writing a massive essay on serious issues that I am even actually interested in? It makes no sense. “70’s Manual Worker” · Hood · Structured Disasters , 1997 Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here . You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. Available at this excellent Hood website . I discovered Hood...

A few things lately have led me back to Pearl Jam. I was, of course, a huge fan back in the day. They were probably my favorite band for a while (especially around my sophomore and junior years of high school, 1992-93ish) and they were a big influence on my musical taste and even, to some extent, my political ideas and attitudes. My fanship has never entirely disappeared, but it’s been in steady decline for the past eight to ten years; basically I felt like they peaked with No Code in 1996 and e...

“You mean because a lot of people are standing around glassy-eyed listening to something mumbling in their ear that it’s a good thing?” — “Gussy” Gusterson in “The Creature from Cleveland Depths” by Fritz Leiber Lately I’ve been thinking about getting an iPod. I’m shuddering a little as I type those words, and I’ve decided against it for the moment anyway. But I know it is just a matter of time until I have one, and in a lot of ways, I’m not looking forward to it. I’ve played with iPods now, and...

Hey there. So if people are gonna start stumbling upon this page, unfinished though it be, I guess I should at least introduce myself and give a little introduction as to what I am trying to do here. I have tried to come up with personal website designs before (go check out this one ), never for any real reason, but because I like the web and web design. This time around, I had a couple of actual ideas of things that I would like to do. First off, I wanted to do a more interesting design, and tr...