We Are a Part of the Rhythm Frustration

OK, so I lied. I’m a lying liar. I’ll be submitting a track to Anal0g.org’s Wires 7. The track is old shit, like 2002 old. Haven’t decided on which old track I’ll submit; I’m leaving that decision to Jared, who will choose 1 of 3 tracks. I tried to write something new, I really did. Fired up all the music gear, had some great ideas, but the frustration level exceeded my ability to deliver by deadline. So there it is. Glass Door will be representing again on Wires.

Worst foot forward.

So, why the frustration? Isn’t music supposed to be fun? Yes, it’s fun. I can sit at the keyboard and noodle all day. But a quirk of my personality raised its ugly head this weekend. So I can ad-lib as long as I want, but the moment I press “Record”, it all turns to shit. My playing, even though it was smooth and flowing, becomes stuttered, off-centered, mashed keys, skipped notes, the works. Fuckup after fuckup after fuckup.

The recording is in the digital domain, so it’s possible to fix it and clean it up, but doing so is tedious; it is the punishment for screwing up while recording. And there’s the frustration. It’s the same frustration I experience when I’m playing for, singing for, dancing for, performing for anyone else. If I screw up, I screw up big and my mental state changes, like a shock of panic jolts me from having the wherewithall to follow through gracefully as if the screwup was intentional.

I would be the gymnast who would walk off the mat when I inevitably smash my face during a flip. Instead of picking back up with the rhythm and playing through to the end, I’d rather stop then and settle with the low scores.

XXY

So, something occurred to me. I am not a man, and I have proof.

  1. I don’t own a house, nor do I pay on a mortgage.
  2. I am not married, nor have I ever had a fiancé.
  3. My last girlfriend was over a decade ago.
  4. I do not have children (sired, hired, or otherwise).
  5. I hate football. American football.
  6. I dislike sports, board games, video games, card games.
  7. I am the most uncompetitive person you know.

So there it is. There can be no other explanation for my complete lack of manly testosterone-drenched wall-punching ground-standing power and respect. It’s so obvious, it’d take a hermaphroditic transgendered eunuch on hormone replacement therapy to not see it.

Wires 7 Uncertainty Principle

According to my friend Jared, who runs the Anal0g.org Wires music series, the submission deadline for the next Wires release, #7, is Thanksgiving day. That’s two weeks from now. Given that it took me 3 weeks last time to write “Stars In the Window” and a few more days of anguish over the sonic mix before I was finally happy with it (only to have it get messed up during the audio sweetening on the final compilation), I’m not sure I can commit to doing a track. So I’m having doubts about submitting something on this round. Just not feeling it.

I know I’ve recently put together my music rig, and I’ve had some great fun noodling with clean sounds, novel melodies, and the first interesting chord progressions in my life, but I just don’t know if I want to throw myself into the project and stress about deadlines when I have to do the same thing every day at work. Yeah yeah, I know, I know, I’m pulling the “I Have a Life” card. I have to. If Elleinad can do it, so can I.

Jared says Glass Door is a staple in the Wires series, and I’m glad he feels that way. But I’m not convinced enough this round to commit to a new track. Sorry, old friend. A little less radio silence on the chat front could’ve helped.

On Our Old Acquaintances

Twelve years ago, I ran a site called The Farm. It started as a personal site, but grew to encompass the writings of six other people, three of whom I knew in person, one who I met in chat, and two who found us by happenstance and chose to join us. On the latter category, I had the good fortune to be approached by a stranger named Jef Kearns. He was an unusual cat, but wrote good poetry. Our email exchanges were always meaty, and he expressed his extreme interest in the proper capitalization of his name — jeF kearns — for his postings at The Farm (hey, it was our age for personal redefinition, so I went along with it).

I was poring over a working copy of the old site tonight and thought I’d follow up on Jef, see if any hits came up. Boy howdy they did. It seems our old friend Jef Kearns is an accomplished musician, and has published several albums of his jazz flute and soul music, and has done collaborations with other musicians and lyricists there in his Canadian homeland. Well done, Jef! Happy to have known you!

Professor of the Olde School

Ok day. Neurochemicals are in line. On a scale of -∞ to ∞, I rate it a Π.

Still helping my friend Professor Wagstaff move his site to WordPress. We hung out last night to experiment and hash over his hosting options. Looks like his Yahoo! Small Biz hosting account won’t cut it. Yahoo! has a showstopper in that they don’t have support for .htaccess files and most likely don’t support Apache’s mod_rewrite, both of which are integral to WordPress’s permalinks scheme. Without permalinks, every category, page, post and comment would be referenced by an ugly url like http://www.phaysis.com/?p=352. Talk about ugly.

On top of that, Yahoo! is charging him $13 a month for his hosting, and he doesn’t even have shell access, multi-user support, or SCP/SFTP. What is this, 2002?

We’ll get his hosting figured out soon enough.