Growing Archive of Anonymous, Strange Stories

Earfl.com has recently launched a website that aims to archive the "juicy secrets" - received by phone, of as many people as they can. I've not yet decided whether I think this is creepy or fascinating, or whether I even like it. But it does have that crucial car accident quality of "you can't look away" to it.
Stories are archived under categories, and participants are typically responding to a prompt something like "tell us something you'd like to forget" or "what is a secret you have been keeping for someone else." I haven't heard anything really graphic yet- but I'm going to go ahead and assume it's out there. The prompts tend to dig pretty deep into "I would never tell anyone this in person" kind of territory.
Since the stories are completely anonymous, you never know who is pulling your leg, but I think most of the stories I heard were believable. If you get a bored moment, you might want to check it out some time.

Great Way to Learn Mixing

Now, I'm sure that this is not "kosher." But I stumbled upon one of the best learning experiences and interesting exercises I've ever had. While browsing about a torrent search, I noticed that you can actually find multitrack WAV bundles of some songs. Right now I'm playing with "Heard it Through the Grapevine"- it's actually just 8 mono tracks! I'm also gonna be playing with Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" when it's done.
Grapevine is really interesting because that great drum sound that I've always liked so much is so much different than I thought it was! Upon listening to it in isolation, it's really distorted. It's really interesting how much the recording carries the illusion of "stereo image" without actually being in stereo. I truly have no idea how you do that. I think that the sound I really like from these recordings is coming from lots and lots of instruments playing the same parts- and it really carries the effect I desire with or without panning. The whole mix is overdriven, but there doesn't really sound like there's a lot of EQ or compression- really any effects at all. This leads me to believe that these sessions really are as simple as they're fabled: nice hardware and no fuss. It sounds like these setups weren't tweaked to be exactly right, nothing was made perfect, tons and tons of noise and people talking in the background, etc.
It's an interesting experience and you should play with them if you are interested in recording or music.

Rebirth of the 1970's

So, it's a recession, gas crisis, a couple of really lousy presidents, American car makers struggling to downsize their fleet fast enough to meet demand for high efficiency vehicles, etc. There are a lot of things going on that make me think my era is going to resemble the 1970's. Not the least of which is an economic recession and a strong public outcry to end a foreign war that's been going on too long. It makes sense that the hobbies and interests of depressed eras will have a lot in common, and that economic recession will have americans looking back to see what others have done for fun or money when there wasn't a lot of either around. It seems like people's style starts to get a little more ornate and rich- less of the clean square lines of the 1950s, 80s, and 90s and more of the embellished edges. People start to see things like music and art in a different light- it's hard to take music seriously when you have so many people with real, serious, problems. So I expect to see a lot more dancing, and a lot more sounds of disco and folk. Probably even some "ironic" take on using an actual string section for disco strings in music.
I'm not the only one who has had this thought on my mind for awhile now, apparently. I'm seeing a total resurgence in late 1970s obsession with the 1930s. I'm also seeing things like rollerderby, silver-era stereo refurbishing, movies about the 1930's, rollerskates(not blades), and knee socks popping back up(or is that Bremerton?). I am even seeing 1970s furniture(probably the worst thing about the 1970s) start to get bought up and repainted. I assume everybody else sees the bigger picture when they start a rollerderby league- but they may not. So what I'm wondering is: what are the musical signs of this stylistic change?
I know it's still 3-5 years off, but the rumblings are here now. And if you want to make a buck from it, jump on board.

Cafe Campagne is on the Ball!

So, I just happened to be comparing stats with my wife's blog yesterday, and I noticed a referrer from an email inbox at Cafe Campange. Apparently they have some kind of service that's emailing them every time some sort of review goes live on the web for their restaurant. I'm going to choose to believe that, and not that they are trying to send cease and desist notices to anyone hosting bad reviews...
But I'm pretty impressed that somebody followed that link to my blog in under 24 hours from it's being posted. So now their probably going to follow another link just to read this. I should add them as a tag to every post from now on so that they have to read my blog.

Finally, A Trip to Seattle!

So, my wife and I finally mustered the courage to try and figure out that darned ferry system. We were so happy that we could walk from home to the ferry, then from the terminal on the other side we could walk to all kinds of things in Seattle. Round trip for both of us, the tickets cost $13.40. It's pretty fun to be able to navigate a city without a car. So much less stress- I would HATE to have to find parking down there, and it would have been considerably more expensive to drive there than take the ferry. We ate lunch at Cafe Campagne . It was about $25 for both of us to eat, and the food was the best I've had since we got here. I got a lamb-burger with aioli, roasted red peppers, greens, balsamic onions, and french fries fried in duck fat. She got a tuna baguette with an olive tapenade and greens, with a couple fennel-y gherkins on the side. Service was great! We were really braced to meet the kind of jerks you meet in touristy urban areas. Instead, everybody we met was just as nice as they had been in Portland. Got coffee at a little place called the "Chocolate Box." It was adorable inside, but their roast was a little too blonde, and the baristo let half my espresso run down the drain. That's after they forgot my order and served 3-4 people before me. But I was impressed at some characteristics of the house blend- it can be tough to get a lighter roast without making it too tart.
It was a great day. We didn't have the money- but we needed something to remind us why we went through all this trouble. Seattle feels so full of possibility and variety. I felt like I had poked through every nook and cranny of Nashville. I had gotten to the point of getting the Nashville phone book to look for random things to do- and not finding much in the way of anything that interested me any more. Seattle has so much left to see, and so much of it is within a pretty quick walk and a relaxing ferry ride of my front door.
So we're a lot happier about our decision than we were yesterday.

Almost Settled In.

So, this weekend it got hot. I went to turn up the AC, and I found it was not working. We thought for SURE that this house had AC, since the thermostat had a switch for it. Well, before I made my angry "the AC is broken and my house is 85" call to the property managers, I went downstairs. Where I found that the copper tubing that should go to an AC unit instead ends welded shut about 3 inches down.
So it was 90 outside all weekend and we have a house with no AC. We went to Wal-Mart to grab some fans, and we find everybody else in town is doing the same thing. Apparently air conditioning is not a real common feature in housing here, so we didn't get totally duped by an owner, we just should have known that most houses don't have it. So I'm assuming that it doesn't get this hot very often.
I got another flickr account, so to keep up with photos I'm taking you can use this link:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/28121631@N02/
Catchy URL, I know.
We got a ton more stuff out of boxes this weekend, namely the LP collection, but it's hard to want to do anything in weather like this. The basement is really nice, so we moved a lot of stuff out of the sweltering and now unusable upstairs and down there. My new job is a blast, and I look forward to it most days.

It's So Beautiful Here

Took a walk today at Scenic Beach Park in Seabeck. We were amazed at the drive there and back- the clouds cleared up at we came over a big hill and we realized that mountains had been there all the time. It was about 65 at 4:00. No rain today, either!
Every last little space is full off moss. According to a sign by the beach, this park is home to octopi, oysters, a lot of unique crabs, and whales. I didn't see any of them though. The woods are new-growth green, and full of tropical looking purple, fuscia, and orange flowers. I ate a couple salmon berries that were growing near the path- the bushes don't even have thorns! A lot of the trees go hundreds of feet high, and are coated with mosses all the way up. These woods are going to be SO full of fungi in the fall. All the fallen trees, silt, loam, and moisture will be the perfect environment.
It's so strange being in a forest where I can't identify even a single plant. I'm not just in a new ecosystem- I'm in a new biome.
I can't wait to see what I can grow in my yard, and I look forward to being able to afford some plants to play with. The new house won't have a lot of yard, but it'll have enough space to play with a little.

Day 2: Western Nebraska through Wyoming and Utah to Idaho.

Yesterday was amazing. Nebraska was so very boring, but it was like the instant we crossed into Wyoming things got really interesting. Snow capped mountains and enormous wind turbines. Saw a TON of Antelope, birds of prey, and prairie dogs. We didn't realize how cold it was until we hopped out at a rest stop wearing sandals and t shirts. Wyoming is the neo-nazi capital of America, too. Every single bathroom had nazi graffiti, I saw nazi tattoos, nazi bumper stickers, even a nazi biker gang.
Then we got into Utah, and it was the most beautiful place we'd ever seen. All in all it was an amazing day until the very end. We got tired at about 8- the usual time, and we decided to find a hotel. We drove almost 200 miles until we found one. So right now we're in Heyburn Idaho, and I anticipate us getting to our destination by tonight! Can't believe there's only 12 more hours left!
Can't believe I'd ever be excited that my car trip only had 12 hours MORE to go.
Took a lot of pictures today, I'll upload some tonight or tomorrow.

Smells Like Steak

Right now it's early morning at the Ogallala Nebraska hotel I'm staying at. I could smell steak the whole time I was here, because the hotel is between two steakhouses and a truckstop steak place. We got a steak at some kind of cheesy tourist restaurant- The Golden Spur. The food was really pretty good, but the service was awful. We sat next to three Parisians who were making fun of how fat all the waitresses were. They were also explaining, in great detail, what the cuts of meat on the menu meant. They seemed to think it was really cool to throw peanut shells on the floor.
Nebraska was a boring, boring drive. Nothing but flooded fields as far as we could see until just the last little shred of our trip.
St. Louis was terrifying to drive through- in the middle of the white knuckle death ride we were taking through town(St. Louis has exits and merging on BOTH sides of the road) they have a full motion billboard showing...a girl eating a sandwich. 50 feet of enjoying a sandwich.
I'm looking forward to some of today's drive, because Google Earth shows us going into some more interesting geography. Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska were so boring.
I can't wait to upload the picture I got of yesterday's hotel. Their were a couple of cars on bricks outside of it that looked like they had been their since the 60s.

Tomorrow is the big day!

I just finished a paper plate dinner on my front porch. I can mooch wifi from a neighbor, but only from the front porch of my house. This time of year the weather is so miserable here that you can only be even reasonably comfortable at night- I'm still a sweaty mess from the humidity-it's 85 at night!
We are pretty sure we have crossed every t and dotted every lower case j on our current place- and I've requested a pickup of the two storage containers that have dominated the view from my front window for a day and a half now. I cannot believe how much junk we have- if I ever make a move like this again, I will sell every last thing I own.
I landed a job- tolerable pay and it actually sounds like fun. It involves working with technology creatively with kids, a perfect match for me. I'm surprised anybody hires on a phone interview, but then years of telephone diplomacy for UPS have honed my phone skills.
We're consistently surprised with how casual and relaxed everyone is that we talk to on the phone. I really feel comfortable being myself around people from outside the south and I forget that sometimes. Victoria has two interviews scheduled already- I think she's a shoe-in for either job.
I just heard what sounded like a horrible motor cycle crash in the far distance on the highway.

So tomorrow morning I will drag my tightly wound apartment manager through the place and give her the keys. We'll hit the road with some cash and with any luck we'll be in town by the 9th or 10th of June.
Can't wait to see what happens! Now I have to get back to scraping up the last remaining tasks on this apartment. I was not entirely honest when I said we had dotted the lower case j's.

deltasleep

Things We Lost with the Death of the Record Industry

I spend a lot of time bidding good riddance to the record industry here. That's only because, for whatever reason, I only consider the last 20 years when I talk about the record industry in the context of copyright management. But the generation of producers before the ones that drove the industry into the ground are a real loss to American culture.

Jobs: Goes without saying, but a lot of jobs got flushed. Oh sure, you can technically still get a job arranging strings or horns, but it's even less likely now than it has ever been. And in the present climate, you no longer get to just be an arranger. You've got to be an arranger and a producer and most importantly, an entrepreneur. At least the record industry had management to think about this stuff for us. But listen to a recording like Harold Melvin and the Blue Note's Don't Leave Me This Way. You've probably got to employ 2-3 people just to place all the microphones and maintain the equipment. Then there's a string arranger, 3-4 string players at least, and the list goes on. I seriously doubt that those string players were also trying to hold down a full time boring job and use social networking sites to promote themselves. Because there was a larger organization to be part of, they were able to specialize.

Quality: I'm not saying I don't know a lot of brilliant independent engineers and producers. I'm saying that I don't know many of them who get to work on a Neve board the size of Minnesota with a plate verb and a 2" tape setup. Without the institutions that were record labels, it's nearly impossible to afford the quality facilities that existed in the past. These resources were completely squandered by the 1980s, however. Take a listen to a Duran Duran record if you want to hear the miserable, flat, blurry sound that I'm talking about. I blame cassettes, the only medium I reserve more hatred for than CDs. The era of digital instruments brought about a lot of real opportunity to expand the options for the musician. Instead, they were used to do crappy approximations of what we were doing really well for the preceding 30 years. They put a lot of people out of a job, and they reduced the quality of recordings dramatically.

Freedom From Choice: The options available to the average listener now are so enormous. Most mp3 player users spend the entire time fiddling with them. I wonder if a song even gets finished anymore. Fact is, the way the human attention span is, having 300 songs just means that what you're listening to isn't quite the exact song or mood you'd like to be listening to. The average schmuck had fewer choices in the 1970s than he does today, and those choices were higher quality. When I listen to Tears of a Clown and I imagine that it used to be popular, I imagine a society with a lot more dignity, and a lot higher standards than the society that made "Soulja Boy" a number 1 hit.

People choose music that they think is a vice, that they feel is bad for them. It sold metal, it sold rap. If you want your kid not to listen to this stuff, tell them it's good for them. That it will make them smarter. Given the option of choices they perceive as negative, the public typically takes them. The record industry acted as a tastemaker, and for some time they did a pretty good job. Once their work in this department became so awful though, public contempt toward them started building. But thats like hating a baker who made something so delicious and bad for you. On the other hand, that might not be as absurd as it sounded before cities started banning trans fats. Anyways, their obviously miserable taste turned the entire peripheral industry against them.
Ultimately, I think that the real killer of the record industry was this decline in quality. But I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater here. Most of our society's greatest recordings were made with the help of a system that was dying a slow painful death when my generation put it out of its misery. I still won't miss them, because I can't forgive them for the 1980s and 90s.

I'm Just Going to DO IT!

After much deliberating and wimping around worrying about things, we've decided not to be cowards, and just to move out West. Kitsap County Washington, to be exact. For less than the price of a house in the Nashville area, we can rent one with a bay or lake view in Bremerton or Port Orchard. Jobs pay better, the food is better, the politics are better, the schools are better, and hopefully from there we can make a better decision about whether to move to Seattle or Portland.
Map of Our Trip
Our trip will lead us through: Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, South Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho, and Washington. I'm allowing 4 days for the trip by car, 5-6 if by van. I'm budgeting about $1100 for gas alone. By my estimate, to stay entertained the entire time I will need to burn about 36-40 CDs, haha.

So, in about 30-40 days, I need to:

paint 2 rooms back to boring, flat white.
Get a binding quote on moving 1100 sq ft of junk.
notify my old job- I'll actually miss those people the most.
notify Los Cuates that this will be my last order or Tacos de Asada.
do some phone work on getting a new rental property
fill out every public school system in the area's application(which are all crappy, and all different)
complete my application for a WA teacher's license
throw away the junk I don't want
collect tons and tons of boxes and packing material
buy long range walkie-talkies
buy a second GPS
get a credit card(groan)
fill out the paperwork and begin fighting with my landlords about what I owe them.
clean our townhome from top to bottom
find some way to effectively store and move about 400-500 LPs and 100 45s.
Consider whether to sell my truck or drive it all the way across the country. (gas mileage calculations and the gas cost weighed against the value of the vehicle)
Turn off the cable, power, water, YMCA, and hopefully get out of a couple of lousy cell phone contracts.

yikes.

It Starts.

Well, turns out that the lady who came by a department meeting to talk about our records was wrong. Or the person on the phone was wrong at Records.
They say that there is "no way I can learn whether or not I graduated on the phone or on the web. I need to come by window 12 in the A building. "
If the lady at the meeting was right, then I did not successfully graduate. If she was wrong, I might still get my degree in the mail sometime around the middle of May.

The Worst Feeling in the World

Ok. I just finished my federal Stafford Loan Exit Interview. Their budget calculator estimates my annual discretionary income will be $-14,000.
I'll be paying either $178/mo for 30 years or $308/mo for 10 years. For a job that pays $30,000.
I also found out that those programs that help teachers repay student loans only apply to Perkins loans, and not Stafford Loans.
So, all that whining about feeing bad about not getting to make music. Forget that happened.
This is the worst feeling in the whole world.
I've got to leave teaching, because I can't afford to do it.

Today is the Day

Today is the day I find out whether the patched together, hacked up transcript I have at MTSU was effectively processed by the office of Records at MTSU. My experience at MTSU has been demoralizing and negative.
MTSU manages a Soviet-style bureaucracy of an unbelievable scale. For instance, today on PipelineMT (MTSU's online student access to transcripts and registration) there's a message that transcripts will be unavailable until May 7th(which you'll notice is today's date). MTSU's real talent has always been telling students a plan, how things are going to happen, and then changing them without notifying them. In my time at the University, maybe 3 years, my "sheet" (classes I have to take) has changed upwards of 3 times. On not one of those occasions was I notified within a semester. Each time I went to my adviser with what was apparently now an old sheet.
Urban legends float around Universities in situations like these. My department, Elementary and Special Education, did such a poor job disseminating correct information that these myths took hold on a huge scale. Most people think that an upper division form/list of classes to take, is a contract. Wrong. MTSU reserves the right to change that sheet right out from underneath you at any time. They all come with an expiration date, and woe unto those who sign onto the sheet near the time when they are changed. Now thats not to say that they can't change it in between listed change times. And it's not to say that you should even expect to find a sheet available. In my 3 years at MTSU there has been either no upper division form, or a "draft form" for three semesters.
So I'm sitting here, with a knot in my guts. I know that I have done every single thing I can do to get a degree. I know that all the t's are crossed and there should be no problem. I also know that I've done that three times before and arrived at records to find nothing of any kind on file for me. Apparently those three times were "bad times to submit files to records." They were changing computer systems, so, I kid you not, "almost everything submitted in that time was completely lost." I know that in the end, there's every real possibility that MTSU will pull one last stunt. I completely expect it. I'm already planning the tirade will deliver, finally, after all this butt kissing. After all the times MTSU has asked me to go and pretend to be a really sweet guy who just happened to have his sub forms screwed up or lost for the 3rd time. This time, I will not be so sweet. Yeah right. I know with that fat, lazy bunch of desk chair Bolsheviks in- cubicles covered with Garfield and Cathy cartoons- the only way I am going to get anything done is to act like they're really doing me a big favor.

MTSU has been like an abusive relationship for years now. Anxiety about this experience has dominated my life for nigh on six and a half years. I've spent the whole time saying "what did I do wrong? who should I have talked to about this? how could I have know that this changed? how can I take control of this problem and monitor it so this doesn't happen again?"
I'm done. MTSU: I can't wait until our divorce papers are official and I never have to think about you again. Nothing will make me feel more free than to never have to think about you again.

My Wife Has a Blog

Just thought I'd mention that my wife has a blog as of this afternoon. I think she's totally hooked on the concept.
You can find it here:
EauMG

First Song in a While

After about 5 months of 70 hour weeks, I am done with student teaching! It's going to take me years to fully understand what just happened to me... but, I'm alive now and I've got a little time to decompress.
Dark Desert
Wrote this dumb song today, just because I hadn't recorded anything or picked up an instrument in months. I forgot how much I missed the challenge and creativity of recording.

Caught!

This morning I woke up to the sound of pipes being hammered on. Or the sound of water hitting a large glass table on the patio, or was it as terrible rumbling in the attic...
My squirrel that has been terrorizing the house and boring holes into my ceiling was stuck in a trap in the attic. Except the pest control man got fired by the apartment people, and nobody even knew the trap was in my attic. I waited all day for a call back from the pest man to see if he wanted his trap. So finally I just got out the gloves and drug the cage full of blurry rodent panic out of the attic, removing half of the insulation from the attic and dumping it on my sink.
I left it on the landlord's steps.

Still not dead

Just wanted to drop by here and let friends and family know that i'm not dead- i'm just miserably busy. I've completed the first half of my student teaching experience, and I start the next half this monday. I dread it beyond belief- 8th grade math at an inner city middle school. It's almost comedic how similar this is to a Chevy Chase movie, or a nightmare. I can't wait for this to end. There seriously is no job on earth that i wouldn't take over this if it paid the same.