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…

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…

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…

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 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 …

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 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 …

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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…

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…

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…

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…