I heard that Donald Trump actually has a daughter named Tiffany, and that she was named after the jewelry store that was next to Trump Tower.
Ellen Degeneres joked that the girl will never know how close she came to having the name "Buffalo Wild Wings Trump."
I should square her cheeks more, and put her in a Yankee's cap, when I have time one of these weekends...
I Googled it, and this is the actual Tiffany Trump (left), and she is back to law school, according to reports.
It is Tuesday night.
Last night, there was a game in the Superdome, between the Saints and the Washington Redskins.
It might have been an opportunity for me to stand at a spot that I like outside the stadium and play "When The Saints Go Marching In," on guitar and harmonica, vigorously, for the twenty minutes or so that it takes the stadium to empty out after a game. But it was raining.
I can remember picking up a quick 35 bucks on a typical game day doing that.
I am almost at a fork in the road where I will either have to approach busking from a more professional angle -set up at the Lilly Pad when it is still daylight, and when tourists walking past can see the artwork I have for sale next to me, and the CD's that I will hopefully have soon, maybe be able to scan a bar-code on their phones to be able to find more of my stuff online for a buck a song or something. And, have a list of about a thousand songs that I could play, so that I wouldn't run out of material. And then, I would have to keep going after darkness falls, and all the way through the midnight-til-2 AM rush which is all I wind up playing lately.
Or, to fork the other way and try to get a job at Trader Joe's, where money would be guaranteed in exchange for hours spent working, and then I could spend a lot of time in my studio, and busk only if I wanted to, perhaps to test out some equipment like Tanya Huang uses, which would be easier for me to buy out of checks that might come every two weeks.
I might as well listen to Bobby from building C on the second head and try to find something "under the table," so as to retain the free status of my apartment, and have "extra" money to use as I will.
It would suck to have to work for five bucks an hour, after paying rent for a place that I never had to before, complacency sets in. Though, that might spur me to light a fire under the asses of the maintenance guys at Sacred Heart and get my toilet and my heating and air unit fixed.
Ten years ago, before I knew how to Photoshop
There are usually brand new heating and air units sitting in the lobby of the place, waiting to go into apartments other than mine. Because mine is still working.
I have to remove the cover and flip the switch on and then shut it off an hour later when it is starting to get too chilly inside, as evidenced by Harold the cat removing himself to the bedroom, but it "works."
I wouldn't be surprised if other residents have figured out how to sabotage the things, maybe to burn out their motors somehow, in order to get a brand new one with a digital display that more resembles the 21st century, than the one I have with the display that looks "so nineteen eighties."
Well, I'm not getting any cat videos produced by sitting here and blogging...
Running into a Trump voter in the wild is *never* pleasant. -Alex In California
Wouldn't it be exciting, though, if the next election is stolen, through the subterfuge of hacking digital polling machines or whatever, by Trump, from an African American contender, and they get caught doing it, and it leaks out through the press that that was what had happened.
And then the people who voted for the African American Democrat candidate, take to the streets in mass protest, demanding a re-election, and smashing store windows and grabbing merchandise to underscore their wrath...
Then, standing upon the principle that he is still acting Commander in Chief,
Donald mobilizes the group of crack soldiers that he has been assembling in South Korea, behind the facade of Kim Jong-un's posturing with the firing of a few harmless missiles over the airspace of Japan, all pre-arranged between those two countries and the U.S.
The troops, all of whom having been vetted, through the army's battery of psychological questions to be the ones most willing to shoot an American citizen "if they had to," a disproportional amount of whom being Caucasians that look like Arnold Schwarzenegger and are from coal producing regions, and Puerto Rico, oddly, could be in downtown Detroit within 9 hours of an executive order having been issued...
Or on the ground floor (because that sounds like something the army
would call it) of any other city where tensions between classes might be
running high.
With training focused upon urban combat (because that is what it would have boiled down to in the streets of North Korea had it reached a boiling point with Rocket Man) these veritable Terminators would work with local police and other agencies to quell the riot, wishing only to disarm and imprison, members of the resistance, with lethal force used only as a last option.
Wouldn't that be more exciting than say, anything out of four years of a Hillary Clinton presidency?
The troops could be instructed to engage anyone who is fighting back, "If they are armed and are showing aggression towards you, fire!" type of thing...
I guess those who fought back against Trump's Army, would indeed be called "the resistance" and the rest, probably something like "Preservationists" -wanting to "preserve" Donald Trump as president...type of thing; they would support the soldiers who occupied their city, helping them to root out the resistance...
If you're not with him you're against him, type of thing. But, do you want to live in interesting times or what?
Again, the focus will not be to kill, but only capture, the resisting rioters and confiscate their weapons.
Then, in the NFL football stadiums turned detention centers, under the watchful eye of Donald on the Jumbo-Tron, they can be sorted out, weeded of illegal immigrants, and what have you.
There also, physical tests may be administered to any found to be receiving government benefits for being disabled, and appropriate adjustments could be made to the ledgers.
Images of their faces, along with their DNA, can be entered into databases, to help with solving cold cases and to aid the public in identifying perpetrators that are still at large.
Either that, or the prosperity of the country will have trickled down to one and all and a nation full of people who have their bellies full and their cups running over will just accept it as, "Yeah, they probably did steal the election but f*** it, I have a great job and I'm looking forward to my vacation, I'm not in the mood to push for the impeachment of anybody right now, I have a great night planned..."
Saturday night, I didn't even go out to busk, as it was close to 11 PM when I got back to Sacred Heart, thinking that I had be be up "early" enough Sunday to make it to the plasma place before 7 PM. Friday night had only produced 6 dollars, after a late arrival and a short gig.
I wound up making it to the plasma place 13 minutes before they closed.
I probably should have busked because the time dragged after I got home and after I had spent what felt like a long time going through stuff on my computer, I looked to see that it was only about 1 AM; I could have had my usual hour and a half of playing in by then, and made around my average of 30 bucks, and still been up early Sunday afternoon in time for the plasma trip.
But, I had eaten a whole box of Cheerios with honey poured over the top, and then had fried up some ground turkey a couple hours later, and noticed, once again that I had a sinking half-depressed feeling upon waking up.
I wonder if the medical professionals who treat people for "clinical depression" have drawn the correlation between blood sugar levels and depression.
Or is "clinical depression" just one of the go-to ailments used by people trying to defraud the government out of "disability" checks? It's easy to fake "I just feel so sad all the time..." and probably gets the skeezer drugs different than the ones that are prescribed for the other darlings, such as back/neck pain.
Maybe the male skeezer could go the back/neck pain route, and get the free narcotics to go with the monthly check, the wife could be clinically depressed, and then they would be in a good position to support their Attention Deficit Disorder and bi-polar children, factoring the child support checks that might come in from all the biological fathers out there who were ensnared by the female skeezer.
Can you tell I just got off the bus from Gretna, as the only white guy on it, both ways?
When I was getting on the thing, the lady in front of me was having a hard time sliding her dollar into the machine. I offered to exchange it for one of the fresh and crisp ones that I had. This delayed things just long enough for a small-ish thirty something black guy to utter a loud "Escuse me!" as he squeezed his way behind me, claiming in a loud voice that he didn't have time for any of the nonsense that he took it upon himself to assume was going on at the machine.
He then added "Out of my way!!" and kept his mouth running for the entire trip to Gretna about, me.
Yup, he was going to run into me out on the street and do all kinds of violence to me, sometime when I didn't have all my white boy friends around me, he called me a fag, made references to Donald Trump, and was basically the "uneducated, illiterate ignorant nigger" that your mother warned you about.
When the bus stopped on the other side of the river and I got up and walked to the front, the guy, who had not stopped gabbing the whole trip, said: See, he's a punk, look at the way he walking. He was ignorant of the fact that the bus was still coming to a jerky halt, and that was why I was walking that way.
I started riding towards the plasma place and was at an intersection when the bus stopped at the light. I looked to see the guy, with his head turned towards me and his mouth moving, from the same seat.
I must say it was tempting to follow the bus and wait for him to get off somewhere and see how brave he was in a situation where I wasn't the only white guy on a bus carrying fifty passengers.
I would have missed out on the opportunity to get the 45 bucks, had I done that, though.
Some fundamentalist Christians would say that "that" was Satan, trying to tempt me and sabotage my plans.
I watched the Instagram video. I had no idea it was like twenty seconds long and didn't have any of the sarcastic lyrics that I remember doing...
The security guard guy, who, perhaps unwittingly posted the most dismal 20 seconds of what had originally been about six minutes, recorded of what I thought jumped out of the Lennon song into something more interesting, was well meaning. But, that being said and: How are you not gonna tell someone when he might want to wipe the coffee stains off the corners of his mouth before he lets someone, excuse me, zoom in on his shit? being asked; He is a very nice guy and portrays a nice picture of New Orleans through the whole of his Instagram.
But, one of his other videos is an equally brief one of chickens being rotated over a heat source. "I'm gonna put this on my Instagram, to show that they've been cooking all day.." he is heard to say on that one. and teams, not team, mind you. To a search engine Click here to hear: A Video of Me Shot By The Security Guy At Rouses Market
Having learned from mistakes made in the past might have led me to at least watch this video all the way through before putting it here. But, here it is, from about 3 months ago, now.
But, it was late in the evening and the security guy saw the guitar on my back and asked me if he could shoot a video.
I really wish I had done one of my original songs, so that the almost two hundred people that have watched it so far would have gotten more than just a cover of a John Lennon tune.
"I just found the next Willie Nelson," was the caption on the thing which I was unable to "embed" here, most likely because it has a "script" on it and Blogger does not allow the placing of scripts in blog posts, in case they are malicious in any way.
Speaking of which, if this blog is indeed "loaded with malware," as Alex in California claims then, I would suspect the "free" mp3 hosting website called Kiwi6 as being a culprit.
"There is nothing free in this world," my father used to say and, by linking to my songs on that site, it may allow Kiwi6 to put in their own two cents by foisting ads upon visitors to the site.
Most people have their browsers set to block ads and such, but maybe Kiwi6 is able to embed some little code into the song itself. I am pretty sure that they have been around long enough and are reputable enough so that they aren't spreading malware.
Still, I am about to investigate Soundcloud as a possible alternative to Kiwi6. I almost feel bad because I have been with them almost ten years, since the time when they only hosted mp3 format files. Now I can post "flac" fully loss-less files for better quality, but have to deal with blog readers being subject to whatever "infected" Alex in California's computer. Now, if I wanted to start paying a few bucks a month to upgrade to a "paid" account on Kiwi6, then I think that might solve the "malware" problem.
But, there is always Soundcloud, recommended by Tim, my caseworker. Who knows how they monetize their "free hosting" enterprise...
Putting it up as a video with just a still photo showing is not the best thing as far as sound quality is concerned, according to Jacob Scardino, who is twenty years old and hence was born with a joystick in his hand, and would know such things.
It was almost midnight when I got the the Lilly Pad.
I managed to play pretty hard for an hour and forty-five minutes or so. Someone put a twenty in my basket, making for a $15.42/hr. outing.
Of course, I decided that tonight, I might be able to get there early, as in less than two hours from now as I sit here.
I got up and made a few samples of the voice of Bob, who is Jacob Scardino's "guardian," and who hosts a radio show on the Christian station, or 800 AM.
Jesus would not be a Democrat, is what I gathered from listening for just a little while, long enough to get a few minutes of him wishing he could personally cast a vote to confirm the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court, or whatever they are talking about on AM radio and almost non-stop on NPR these days...
Other than being in a position to start creating my third work of "electronic music," using samples of Bob, I haven't really advanced my cause much.
The plan was really to see this time as just taking a break in between busking Friday and Saturday nights, there will be plenty of time for composing a duet between Bob and my cat Harold on the slower days.
Sunday, I stand to get, I think 45 bucks for a unit of my plasma. I had to go to get the fifteen bucks Thursday to lay the groundwork for that, and play their little carrot-on-a-stick game.
I'm wondering if they have determined that my plasma is probably alright, considering that I show up looking rather healthy and well rested. At least compared to a lot of the donors in the chairs around me.
I usually assume the ones who keep a pissed-off look frozen on their faces the whole time they donate are mad at the fact that they know they are powerless over the fact that they are going to turn their twenty dollars or whatever into a hit of crack as soon as they leave the place, that, after being ripped off for a dollar (by The Man) in getting cash back, then smoke it and feel high, but a high tinged with remiss over the fact that they know they should get a good meal and a good night's sleep after being drained of blood platelets, wait a couple hours before smoking a cigarette, type of thing, but...
They are angry because "they've" got them hooked on the dope and now "they" are draining a nigga's blood, waiting at the Family Dollar to tax a nigga, and, ain't that some shit, what they are putting a nigga through; enough to piss off anyone!
Then ol' whiteboy comes in the place, wearing that hat so we'll notice him, and smiling like he thinks it's funny what a nigga has to go through!!
"Don't Talk Religion or Politics,"
I have heard it said. This pertained to conversations with mother-in-laws, and, I suppose blog readers, but...
The "dang" Democrats are most assuredly going to run an African American in 2020 who will have a formidable advantage over the incumbent.
Nothing short of Russian hacking will be able to save Humpty Trumpty from "a great fall," or a terrible fall (of '20) if you want to look at it that way.
When Obama ran back in 2008, there were massive drives to register black people to vote. I could Google the numbers and all, but...I remember the volunteers canvassing the projects in vans, offering all kinds of assistance in obtaining ID and then registering to vote.
The fact remains that, they then all stayed home for the run-off between lilyHillary, and the pasty billionaire, but are ready to re-mobilize in droves.
They could pull a black guy off the street and run him, and he would automatically tally to himself the votes of the same people who are convinced that "they" were trying to frame Oranthall J. Simpson, and Bill Cosby ("they're nothin' but gold diggers!") and the same thing with Michael Jackson, who waited on corners for vans to come by, back in '07; handicap accessible, and offering a free hot dog (in some places, honest to God, I read that somewhere) to get on the van.
As long as he has never been convicted of a felony...run him!
Donald Trump is going to have to have to, at least, offer the free hot dog, come 2020- payable upon receipt of the Instagram showing you in the voting booth, pushing the "Don" down.
His rallying cry in the inner cities could be "Trump/Pence 2020: Would You Like Mustard On That?"
If he was smart -and that's a big "if"- he would jettison Pence and pick up a brown skinned VP candidate....
Frontera. A Critical Errror
-posting the one word that popped into my head, since I only have time to post one word, because it is about time to fold up the laptop and try to busk from about 10:40 until after midnight when the food comes in.
Guess what's "right around the corner?"
A bizarre day had me leaving at the middle-of-the-road time of 4:30 PM for the plasma place. I was at the Family Dollar, where I decided to buy a Monster Zero drink to hydrate myself before the plasma donation, but not realizing that it would spend me down to below the amount for the bus fare home.
This was a critical error, as, the donation amount would only be fifteen bucks and then I would have to pay a dollar in order to get the amount of ten bucks back off it, merely so I could get back on the bus.
Jacob texted me that he was at the Uxi Duxi, and I sure felt like turning the bike around and going to join/freeload
I was shaking my head. How can a guy who quit drinking 34 months ago make such an error?
Luckily, I was able to turn to a lady in line behind me who was about to buy a lighter for a dollar, and I bought it for her in exchange for a paper dollar and I was on the 114 out of Gretna shortly thereafter.
@Alex In California: Now that I know that my government smartphone, besides having given the U.S. Census Bureau a way to tally me and my ilk, whose last address was someplace in Florida in the nineties and whose mailing address is a resource center for the homeless; is good for capturing audio when being used as a video camera.
My initial test with the "sound recorder" application in the phone yielded such a garbled "music you hear when on hold " sound quality that I had written the phone off as perhaps not having the right hardware, etc.
But, along with maybe a five minute version of The Guy Who Plays Late Into The Mornings On Canal Street doing a whole song, and after having introduced myself to him and gotten, yes, his name and I guess his permission to shoot a video (maybe he has some arrangement where I would have to like him on Facebook in exchange, or something)...
His job is probably the first one that I would want here, if I were to quit the Lilly Pad.
To play on Canal Street, through an amp so loud that the sounds of your playing ricocheting off of buildings and things, supplies an echo effect.
I supposed a totally deserted and quiet city where you could hear a pin drop would be a cool recording studio for a band to set up and play live.
But that can be achieved in the studio by using echoes panned left and right coming back at different time intervals and then some de-tuning of notes to simulate how a note that has traveled a great distance and then bounced back can be resonating at a slightly different frequencies, due to differences in air pressures.
Reminder to self: Pick up cat food!!
But, it would be satisfying to play at that volume level, no doubt.
The opposite of the Lilly Pad "unplugged" situation where a harmonica played acoustically is at the outer envelope of sounds tolerable to those who sleep there.
At the Lilly Pad, though, I could add amplification in the form of an amp small enough to fit in my backpack to go with a headset microphone, which would be concealed in the harmonica harness thing. This invisible amp would have its effects settings pegged to the max; a setting that would be way too much echo, reverb or whatever if a person were to stick their ear right on the amp but which would function not so much to boost the volume of the singing, but only to add the echo or reverb; so I would be singing at the same volume but would sound like I was in a shower, BRILLIANT!
I would still prefer to do this at the Lilly Pad, rather than go blast out Canal Street, but the divide is not to big.
Speaking of which, I have the money to go to sell plasma tomorrow; or I could stay up working on my next piece of music which will be to add my voice and my guitar to a track similar to the "Unearthed" piece.
This time I will have the added advantage of being able to put a dope beat together, armed with the knowledge that I acquired by putting a beat after the fact to the "Unearthed" thing, to make "Artifacts."
What I hope I have created is my own very customize-able drum machine which will take a back seat to the guitar harmonica and lyric driven stuff which is my bread and butter.
Move over, little doggie, a mean ol' dog is movin' in...
Yesterday evening after I had gotten home and had played the the "Unearthed" song that I put on yesterday's post, I was disappointing by the fact that the Cecilia 5 produced drums were so prominent in the mix.
I had thought it sounded better with the drums more in the background, and thought that I had mixed it that way, and was a bit embarrassed as I listened back with no way to go online and fix it.
So, I was surprised to see an actual positive comment made by Alex In California. I had been thinking "Well, now he is going to have a field day with his criticism; I should have listened to it before posting it..."
Move over, little doggie, a mean ol' dog is movin' in...
But, I guess that might mean that the piece that I have just spent 12 hours on, he will probably hate.
This is what the taxpayers get in return for subsidizing my housing, I guess...give me a room, and this is the stuff that will come out of that room. Now I can just download samples of a black caped night heron squawking, and you wouldn't know I wasn't recording under a wharf by the Mississippi River.
I relied upon my ear, for the most part, which is how Burial, supposedly achieves his "organic" sound. Though...
I remember, as a kid, that there was always something hypnotic about a vinyl record that was warped.
A lot of mine were, because I liked to bring my Panasonic phonograph player, with the full range 4 inch oval speaker, out into the back yard in the morning, where I would sit in the shade and listen to The Beatles "Red" and "Green" albums and others, over and over; round and round.
Until the sun came up high enough to usher in the eighty degree, summer vacation, heat that us Massachusetts people sweltered in, which would drive me indoors, but not before I shut the phonograph player off, to save electricity.
This was penny-wise as far as the few cents of electricity saved, but dollar-foolish as far as the damage done to expensive ($4.99 a pop, back then, plus tax) albums that I may not have rescued before the sun broke the plane of the treeline of the woods behind our house and landed full force upon them from straight down out of the sky.
Listening to a warped vinyl album can be like being rocked to sleep in a cradle, because the warped part comes around at a steady 33 and a third times a minute, and adds its own underlying rhythm to everything.
I could Google it real quick, but I believe there is actually a "warped record" effect that can be applied in digital audio workstations, and I wouldn't be surprised if "Burial" doesn't use something similar.
Otherwise, he would have to be an audio genius to calculate the change in pitch that would be produced by the needle having to travel further over the hump in the warped part of the record, since the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, or in this case the needle staying on a steady plane and not having to travel up and over a hill, taking ever so much longer to cover the same ground. At the very top of the warp the plane would level out, so for an un-measurable length of time it would be in pitch, but then it would start to descend the other side of the mound.
That would present quite a complex problem of trigonometry whereby one would have to find the tangent at the top of the warp and then measure the slopes on each side of it, taking into account that they would be rounded and not linear...and well, yeah, I just don't think some video game addicted nigga with a laptop would have been able to figure that out. Call me prejudiced.
"Artifacts"
About the samples I used, I suppose I'm supposed to remain mum, so that a legion websites and forums can spring up, devoted to people who like to hunt down such things.
But, I will say that the "drums" came from a less than ten second clip of me playing guitar and fake bass (made by lowering the guitar an octave or two) and some of them were made from taking single syllables from words, such as the "k" in the word "kratom," doctored into a snare drum.
There is a sample of Steve Miller inhaling before singing a verse in his song "Jet Airliner," and the whole thing started with me playing a short melody on the guitar and then dropping it down 2 octaves by slowing it down at the same time, which became the bass line.
I guess I have a leg up on those less educated in music theory because I was able to take pieces from anywhere and then find their pitch on the guitar so I knew how much to raise or lower them to work them into the C minor that the song is in.
There were too many happy coincidences for me not to think that my musical ear guided me some.
For example, the blast of full orchestra which can be heard as an "accent" was taken from a movement in a Robert Schumann symphony -one that starts out with a bang, with the whole orchestra hitting a staccato blast. I heard it and thought it might go well in "Artifacts," and it was indeed an E-flat minor chord, and after lowering it 3 tones to make it a C minor, I benefited from the side effect of it thus having become unrecognizable as that chord from that symphony. Harder for the London Symphony Orchestra to sue me that way..
There are samples from at least 3 Steely Dan songs. I was going after the first staccato note from the song "Hey Nineteen," which I intended to somehow put in a loop, but never got to it, having come across the opening notes from the song "Josie," while looking for it, which became the most recognizable thing in the piece.
The samples from "Bodhisattva" are better disguised, and the example of another happy coincidence as, after lowering the pitch one half step to make it fit with C minor, the resultant change in its speed made it fall right on top of the beat and gave it a triplet feel.
I had such good luck that it seemed apt to put the sample of Fiona Apple from an old interview talking about how "a lot of it was luck," when discussing her meteoric rise, back in the early nineties.
I slowed her voice down, making her sound less like herself, and then added a heavy "bathroom" reverberation, making her sound less like herself in a bathroom...
Enjoy.
I'm going to listen back to it before I leave the Uxi Duxi, in case I made some bonehead mistake, like uploading the wrong song.
The Guy Who Plays Late At Night On Canal Street
This video, I made on my phone last week and forgot to post until now...
From last week:
So, this guy, I hear maybe 4 or more nights a week.
Always on Canal Street, and playing through an amp, loud enough to be heard as well as in this video shot from about 50 yards from him. I would describe him as the guy seen sitting with the guitar in the center of the shot.
He has a kind of Chubby Checker, or Fats Domino aspect about him; always dresses nice, but almost always 1950's style.
His playing is a lot like what he is doing in this 51 second clip, but I will append, in his defense, that he had noticed me sitting there with my guitar on my back. I know he has seen me around, but I have never checked him out up close.
He might have been conscious of me shooting a video; and that is an issue that some buskers go so far about as to have a sign that reads: "If you shoot a video, please leave a tip."
The guy plays very smooth music which comes from what would fall into the "gospel" category, though the line between Motown artists who grew up singing in churches and the music sung in churches has become blurred.
Now that I have listened to the thing, I wish I had made a longer recording of him; I guess I assumed that the microphone in a cell phone would produce garbage, and so I cut it short.
It's like music, and it was made by a guy using a program not better than Audacity.
He said that that was what he was familiar with using, and that was why he used it, rather than the more "advanced" programs.
What it boiled down to is that the more advanced programs help composers keep their beats on the beat, by offering a grid where they can place them where they will reside, so perfectly on the beat that they might be accused of sounding machine-like.
It might be that a lot of composers are better off having their samples landing right on the beat, as "machine-like" might be the better option between that, or being left to their own skills and devices in coming up with a beat that sounds better than machine-like.
His beats, described as "off-kilter" by one reviewer, are not it perfect time.
But, they pulse like being on a small boat on a river. I had to admit that his stuff is utterly listenable, so far, at least. I've only heard a couple minutes of the above album.
Apparently the Sun newspaper in Great Britain launched a campaign to discover the identity of the guy. I suppose he could have made his album in his bedroom and released it without ever having showed his face. All he would have to do is partner with some outfit like CD Baby, and he would be able to check his Paypal balance on his phone from the same bedroom and watch himself grow rich.
I have just delved into the world of music composed of "samples" of sounds. I imagine it would be like anything else; in the hands of Mozart, the Audacity editor could be used to produce something that would endure hundreds of years of being listened to.
In the hands of everybody else, those others would be better served to load the Abeltonᶜ digital audio workstation and have their stuff sound no less machine-like than the next guy who's song everybody might be dancing to at the moment.
So, by using Audacity, I am using a knife to whittle away at some mahogany, while others have a machine to do it, using lasers guided by computers, hopefully programmed by someone with a good vision of what the finished bust would look like.
I have done the above recording, and I think that it is "off kilter" but realize that I am one good sample of Christina Aguilera holding a note away from turning it into a real ear-catching wonder. I need to have it stand for something and relate to something that's common to Man, if I can manage that, too.
The idea of using samples intrigues me. Mine should be perhaps of the sounds I heard in the woods when I lived there for so long.
I remember having my tent on a spot in Jacksonville, where there was a pond nearby, the frogs in which being better than a motion sensor in alerting me to anyone's approach. The grey owl with the wing span of about five feet would make sounds occasionally. These sounds, warped and turned into beats, might produce a hypnotic result.
I can't see where a sound that is horrendous to begin with, like a chair being slid across a floor should be the basis for making music.
One cool thing about Burial is that he uses the sound of bullet shell casings hitting concrete as one of his samples. It seems to me that he is finding beauty, even in the scene of someone being gunned down on the concrete somewhere.
"Ive just taken a fatal shot to my chest, but doesn't that sound pretty?" type of thing.
I am feeding Harold the cat one can at a time these days, spaced apart according to when I come by them.
Last night, I played for a little over an hour and made the above amount.
I took a break to move my bike, which I had had to lock up around the corner and out of sight of the half dozen web cams; and then just never went back to playing.
I have a closet shelf full of Disney movies on VHS cassette, and it oil-ifies me just to think of them...
I was in that closet digging around for a button up shirt to kind of change up my look.
Thinking about applying for a job at the Trader Joe's on Veterans Blvd. has perhaps put me in a button up shirt frame of mind.
It is Friday and I blew off a trip to the plasma place for 25 dollars because Jacob Scardino mentioned us jamming again, like we did last Friday at the house of Bob, his guardian. The "M.O.C." (Museum of Crap) Jacob calls it.
But, there has been no contact made by Jacob at this point, and it is getting too late to make the plasma run, given the contingencies that threaten to make it a fruitless trip. It is 81 degrees and feels like 88, with an 80 percent chance of rain.
What is that on my mirror?!?
The twenty five bucks will be there tomorrow, and I guess I will roll the dice, against 4 to 1 odds of getting rained on, and go out and busk in a little while.
Some positive things have happened.
A: Having songs that I once played coming back into my memory (perhaps because of the self-help dialogues that have me imagining the "me" of the past, with all the shortcomings and faults that led to the regrets and insecurities and guilt that I harbor today and which have caused me to miss out on opportunities which have been right in my face all along) is a good thing.
"If you can play 'Misty,' then you can play anything,"
Making that list of 1,000 songs that I could play, were I just to be reminded of their existence, seems to be inching closer to the top of the Things To Do list.
Use them or lose them, might have an element of truth to it, but actually...
Were I to reclaim about 224 songs from the past, then I would be in a position to develop the facility to "sound out" just about any other song that I know the melody to.
"If you can play 'Misty,' then you can play anything," a guy who plays rhythm guitar in one of those Old-Timey bands along with a banjo guy and a trombone, once told me.
This is kind of true in the sense that "Misty," goes through the "cycle of fifths" so that several keys are visited in it. The way the melody flows over those different keys is another study in how melody notes sound against different backdrops.
And there was a formula followed by song writers, especially back in the era of Frank Sinatra et. al. which involved the song going through little blocks of chords which, through cycling through the circle of fifths go into other keys, but the composer is always just a half step slide from slipping back into the original key.
Like in the example above, the E flat major 7th chord on the last line winds up being the E flat 6th which is the same chord with only one note changed.
The composer might have gone right from the first chord to the second like John Lennon did in "Across The Universe," but this progression gets to it by detouring through the C-F-Bflat (each a fifth apart) before it. And, so, it is "jazzier" than the Lennon song.
This same chord progression is in "Yesterday, When I Was Young," by Eddy Arnold, and in "It Was A Very Good Year," by Frank Sinatra. Which is no coincidence, since they are both "wistful" songs about lost youth. "Misty" is wistful in it's own way.
So, making a list of at least two hundred songs will soon be at the top of my list of things to do. I want to have it laminated, even.
I would extend what the guy told me to include that, if you can play "Bluesette," by Toots Thielemans, you could also play anything, including "Misty." That one is even more over-the-top as far as trying to hit all 12 notes in one song.
There was a one hundred percent chance of rain, according to the weather app on my phone. Why would the weather forecasters not just say ninety-nine percent chance of rain? People would still grab their umbrellas and it would allow for the possibility that it might somehow not rain, say due to a cataclysmic event such as an undersea earthquake with the resultant tsunami somehow drawing the rain clouds away.
Right: Harold gives a critical listen-back to our latest studio session.
It started raining when I was on the bus on the way to the plasma place.
I had purposely left my umbrella at home.
I weighed the burden of carrying the thing, while riding the bike, against the odds that I would need it.
At the end of the day, after having gotten pretty wet, I concluded that I need to find a way to tie the umbrella onto the yellow bike.
That way, I could keep it handy, while freeing up my hands.
So, having gotten caught in the rain and lain there shivering as I donated plasma led me to the epiphany that I should rig up some kind of Velcro strapping system or perhaps bring Bungee cords into play, so that the daunting prospect of being encumbered by an umbrella all day would be diminished to the point that I could have the thing available whenever there is a one hundred percent chance of rain, tsunamis not withstanding.
Cecilia 5
If anyone thinks that my music already sounds like this graph (left) looks, then this tool might be for me.
I downloaded the Cecilia application which bills itself as "ear bending sonics" a few months ago, but finally opened it last night to see what it was all about.
It is for producing some pretty ear bending sonics, I have discovered.
My first hour of playing around with the program produced the above. OK, it's pretty boring, but sheds light upon where weird sounds might come from.
Not much else to show for a Wednesday night stayed in, but as soon as I load a few of Harold's meows into this program I might be onto something!
Three Years Ago
Three years ago, I posted what the above is part of.
I was drinking at the time, wouldn't quit for another 3 months.
I can see that I was worried about becoming like Troy, who is another busker whom I am still, to this day, confused with, and whom I have always seen as kind of a warning of what I might look like in ten years should I not stop drinking.
I haven't seen Troy in a couple years now. He disappeared from the scene right around the time I stopped drinking, so maybe he was a "ghost of Christmas' future" who no longer needed to hang around.
I hope I post tomorrow about an awesome Thursday night busking, because, after a stop for batteries and cat food, that's what is on tap.
I played Tuesday night and got a can of cat food and the bus fare to Gretna to sell my plasma, out of it.
I try to block glare in photo of new hat while barfly pesters Erin
This I did, after oversleeping the trip to one of the food banks on the Sacred Heart van at around 11 in the morning.
Do I subconsciously not want to bring the foods into my apartment which the self-help dialogues that I am hypnotizing myself with, are telling me are "dead" and terrible foods?
I will say that, although the dialogues seem to have had the effect of making me stay in at night and work on things other than busking, the have also had the effect of making me, when I do go out to busk, recall more songs that I have once played, but which had kind of fallen, not out of my memory, but off of the tip of my tongue, at least.
Tuesday night, I was only making $3.50 off of scattered groups of tourists, who seemed to be pretty broke, if the fact that they weren't holding any expensive drinks, nor scarfing down any expensive food was any indication. They were like customers "just looking," if I've ever seen them. But, I was able to reclaim the song "A Day In The Life," by The Beatles from a place in my mind where it had had been put in the wrong file, or something.
So, now, I go back to my prune juice and my apple juice and my self-help dialogues for the night.
I at least got the fifteen bucks from selling plasma to go with the $3.52 that I made last night. It is raining lightly now. There is a 100% chance that it would be, according to my phone.
Post frequently; even if it's just a short post to let your readers know that the blog is still being actively maintained.
Post frequently, or your readers will lose interest,
maybe not all six of them, but some might...
I encountered problems uploading the B side to Harold the Cat's single, which I had intended to link here in mp3 format -since mp3 offers "acceptable" sound quality.
It is probably splitting cat hairs on my part to be concerned with the sound quality of my stuff, since, only cats can hear the frequencies that might be attenuated in mp3 format. And, there is a refrigerator and a toilet that needs to have its handle jiggled way in the background, anyways.
I ran out of everything, sort of.
Going to Howard Westra's house to watch football Sunday night and then having to skeeze the dollar and twenty-five cents for the bus ride home, left me waking up kind of depressed Monday.
The Patriots lost the game, and I think Howard's coffee has chicory root in it, as I felt kind of bound up, like my intestines were full of sand -heavy but with no nutritional value, type of thing.
So, I did not go out to busk Monday night, choosing instead to embark upon yet another juice/water fast and cleanse.
I drank prune juice, and stayed in.
The self hypnosis tapes that I am trying to use religiously, may be causing me to choose not to go out and busk, for some subconscious reasons.
Maybe when I get to the second half of the book where "positive affirmations" are used, I will discover a wealth of new-found energy for busking.
Maybe working "smart" rather than "hard" might have me borrowing an amplifier from my friend Jacob and playing real loud on Canal Street to make decent money playing whatever, or maybe even working out a way for Jacob and I both to busk at the Lilly Pad....
