a couple new ones

So a while ago I wrote a post about how inspired and motivated I was to get serious about recording my own music. Such a sentiment might as well have been a New Year's resolution, because I really haven't achieved it at all. Not to say that I haven't been working on some tunes, but for the most part, I come up with some basic parts, maybe a certain groove or riff that I like, but usually don't flesh anything out much past the stage of being a sketch or fragment. It's easy and fun to come up with a bunch of sketches that don't really resolve or have any formal structure. Actually trying to turn them into a song is hard, frustrating, humbling and slightly embarrassing. But it can also be rewarding, especially in those precious few moments where you actually feel like you've got something halfway decent. I've got plenty of sketches that I'll try to refine into actual songs at some point, but for the time being I've only got a couple songs to share. I've spent a fair amount of time tweaking very minor parts over and over to get them to this point, and of course, they still feel miles away from where I'd like them to be. But I think I've reached the point of diminishing returns: I keep putting in more work, but it's getting less and less noticeable.

Note: I do sing in these songs; your ears have been forewarned.

http://soundcloud.com/daustin/left

http://soundcloud.com/daustin/comet

Hope you find them somewhat enjoyable, or at least amusing!

Meeting Friends

A few weeks ago when I was visiting Benny in beautiful Boulder, Colorado, some heavy weather afforded the opportunity to cruise around on the internet and look for entertaining videos. I happened across this video, which is an episode of MTV's "Weird Vibes" featuring the band Holy Ghost! as hosts. There are a few reasons this video succeeds: the whole funky 90s aesthetic is actually executed pretty well here, hitting a nice balance between the use and abuse of nostalgia; Holy Ghost!, in addition to being an awesome band, they are genuinely funny; their dads are pretty cool too; oh yeah and the music and music videos are rad. One song and video that caught both my and Ben's immediate interest was "I'm His Girl" by the band Friends. Neither of us had heard of Friends before, but we were both immediately hooked by the sauntering bass line and the empowered percussion. (Percussion should never be marginalized.) The video is as catchy as the song - roughly speaking, it is about being young and cool and living in New York City. Also, it's about being young. And hip. In New York. Sounds sweet, right? No, not really, but it actually is somewhat satisfying to watch - it is clearly part of the ~~~NYC Scene~~~ without shoving that scene too far down your throat.

Use Your Head(phones)

Some songs just require headphones. Sometimes certain sonic intricacies reveal themselves only when given immediate access to the eardrum. Deeply layered tracks suddenly appear; harmonies emerge, seemingly from no where; the interplay between instruments that sounds flat on speakers becomes compelling through headphones. And the neat thing is that upon finding those little bits of music that are buried in the mix, which could only be discovered with a good pair of headphones and perhaps even a darkened room, they remain ever audible thereafter, even through variously imperfect speakers -- a laptop, for instance, or a car stereo with plenty of noise bleed from the highway rushing by. However, there is also another kind of discovery that can be made -- rather than finding something new occupying some heretofore unheard part of the overall soundstage, you find a certain lack. An absence or a void. It's the recognition of some sort of intangible space in a song. A property of there being something more contained in the song than just sound. It's the air in which instruments and voices can both mix together and still retain their isolated individuality. I'm sure there is some technical process, some cut-and-dry way to engineer this vague, ethereal property, but I feel no need to attempt to demystify the space. Regardless of how it's done, it's very difficult to describe an absence, so instead of going any further down this increasingly abstruse path, I will just share some songs.

Factoids Aren’t Facts

A Defense of Prescriptive Lexicography

I was reading a New York Times blog today – the Diner’s Journal – which features a column called “What We’re Reading”. A few times a week they'll post a variety of links to food-related fare on the web. One of the showcased links was to a list of 20 pieces of trivia about sausages, and the text accompanying the link reads “A few fascinating factoids about sausage.” I couldn’t help but think of a recent conversation I’d had that skirted the intersection of commonly misused words, words that sound as if they should mean something other than what they do, and wordy pet peeves. No, “travesty” does not mean the same thing as “tragedy” and should not be used in its place; “disinterested” is close to but distinct from “uninterested”; an acronym must be pronounced as a word of its own, otherwise it is a mere abbreviation (e.g., NATO vs. FBI).

Learning to Remember

I was in a study hall period in 8th grade when I first heard that a plane had collided with one of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. The room was in a sort of remote part of the school, tucked away, budding off of a lone hallway that comprised the third or maybe even fourth floor of Cape Elizabeth Middle School. I remember a teacher coming into the classroom with a grave, deadly-serious face, taking aside the study hall monitor and exchanging some urgent, hushed news. I can't even remember who the study hall monitor was -- I remember what she looked like: tall with a boyishly cut crop of brown hair that fell just above her shoulders. She was young and taught Spanish, so I never actually had her for a class because I studied French. Her youth translated to an automatic air of almost being "cool", but as I remember she was meanly sarcastic and kind of a hard-ass. But I cannot for the life of me remember what her name is. I guess I haven't thought about her much over the past few years, but now, looking back, every forgotten detail carries a small but significant guilty weight. I know it's unrealistic to expect perfect recall in such a situation, but still, I can't even remember the name of the teacher whose classroom I was in? I can't remember how she broke the news -- it was still in the morning, and I think at that point most of the details were unknown, or at least kept from the students, for our own benefit of course.

The Next Food Network Star

Hi everyone, I’m Chef Daustin and tonight I’m going to share with you a style of cooking that often gets overlooked, but with the right recipes and the right tools, is guaranteed to make some knockout meals! A lot of people think that to be a great chef they have to be able to perfectly chiffonade fresh herbs, brunoise leeks, simmer a mirepoix, create a silky béchamel and somehow combine these techniques to produce a meal that sounds more French than any of its parts. But no, ce n’est pas necessaire. Sure, if you’re running the kitchen of a Michelin-starred restaurant, you’re going to need to know how to parler la langue de la cuisine. And if you’re having a dinner party and cooking for 10 other people, you might want to at least see what Julia Child videos YouTube has to offer. But for most of us, these fancy-shmancy recipes are just plain out of touch. Let’s be realistic – you’re not cooking for 10 people very often. Maybe you cook for 5 people once every couple of months. Maybe. But you – and don’t take this the wrong way, I’m in the same boat – cook and eat most if not all of your meals alone. Sometimes with the refrigerator door still open.

Cooking for one gets almost no attention from today’s cookbook publishers and celebrity chefs. People assume that real cooking entails elaborate preparations for multiple diners whereas cooking alone entails eating halfway thawed hot dogs over the sink; but in reality, cooking for one can be just as elegant, refined and delicious as any multi-serving meals – and I’ve got the recipes to prove it! Read more for a few of my favorites. Bon appétit!

"The Screening Period" - Infinite Rest

Previous Entry: Infinite Rest

 

For something that seems so obscure, so unlikely, so remote it was remarkably easy to find the closest sleep studies to me. A quick google of “sleep study portland maine” didn’t turn up anything promising, so I tried “sleep study boston” and the first hit was to the Research Study Subject Recruitment page for the Harvard Division of Sleep Medicine. For some reason the success of a simple Google search is still able to instill some sense of pride, of self-sufficient (search-sufficient?) DIY know-how. There was a list of about 20 active studies, each with its own tagline and then a short summary of what the study would entail. The taglines offered some paltry information about the studies they were representing, but I think their main function was not to inform, but to lure in potential subjects. One study’s tagline was “Need some light in your life?” Only in the context of sleep studies can such a seemingly innocuous question feel so sinister. And of course there was no indication in that study’s summary that light would play a role in the study, leaving one no choice but to conclude that they would be locked in a room with the lights on for God knows how long.

Infinite Rest

Blogger's note: As most of you probably know, I participated in a sleep study at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston from November 12th to 25th, 2010. Over the next few months I'll periodically be posting the journal entries I wrote while in the hospital. Except for minor spelling and grammatical revisions, I've refrained from editing the journal entries and will be posting them exactly as they were originally, sloppily penned. However, I might end up omitting some of the boring stuff, for your sake and mine. I might even end up scrapping the entries altogether and just start making stuff up. But for now, integrity. And a few posts, such as the following prologue, have been written ex-hospital, to serve as contextual bookends. Hope you enjoy, or at least that you don't fall asleep.


Prologue

Sometime in the late summer or early fall of 2010 I found myself en route to Rumney, New Hampshire for a week, or maybe it was an extended weekend, of rock climbing. I was making the two and a half hour drive from Maine with Tucker, a friend who'd graduated from college a couple years before me and had been drifting between temporary jobs ever since. He wasn't the type to settle into an office job right after school, and as far as I know, he's still floating around somewhere, I think up in the Pacific Northwest now. A couple years earlier I'd driven cross-country with Tucker and a couple other friends. For us it had been an excuse to camp and climb across America and even earn a little college credit for it; for Tucker, it was a rather impromptu relocation, as he ended up staying in Crested Butte, Colorado to try his hand as a ski bum while the rest of us continued the road trip for another week or so before returning home to finish school.

Goy Meets World

Ever since I can remember, my mother has insisted that I’m Jewish. Technically speaking she’s right; she is Jewish herself, and according to halakha this makes me Jewish by default, despite my father’s blond hair and blue eyes. But her insistence was in the face of no particular resistance, which always made it seem kind of odd to me. Age 12, I’d be playing Nintendo, totally engrossed in the pixelated-yet-bucolic fantasy world of The Legend of Zelda, and out of nowhere my mother’s saying, “Danny, you do know you’re Jewish, right?” Uh, sure, whatever, Mom. Could you stop standing in front of the TV? Age 15, making myself a snack in the kitchen, or more likely cycling between desperate searches of the effectively-empty fridge and the nothing-here-but-raisins-and-Ovaltine pantry, when all of a sudden: “This is really important to me: never, ever, ever forget that you’re Jewish, OK hun?” Mom, stop being weird, and why don’t we have anything to eat? Age 17, returning home after a night of clandestine drinking, hoping that no one is still awake, tip-toeing upstairs, almost safe in my room, until I hear a muffled, tired voice reaching out from her bedroom, escaping along with a sliver of lamplight from the crack between door and floor. “Dan, could you come here for a second?” Shit. “Hi honey, just wanted to remind you to always remember that you are Jewish!” Mom, not now, can’t you see that I’m drunk?

the tip of the iceberg

The tip of an iceberg is a metaphorical sign of a relatively small symptom or problem that’s belying something far more troubling. Some fairly straightforward calculations involving the different densities of water and ice and the volume of the former displaced by the latter reveal that the tip of an iceberg is only about 10% of its mass. The rest of the iceberg, 90% of its mass, stays submerged – unseen, but its presence not unfelt. No, icebergs have been unable to successfully hide their true mass from us ever since that unforgettable historical event that has left such an impression on humankind. Am I referring to the actual sinking of the passenger liner Titanic or the cinematic depiction thereof? Well, I’m actually not sure which event has been of greater import to raising overall iceberg-awareness. But regardless of its origin, the awareness is here. Sink a reportedly unsinkable ship once, shame on you; sink a reportedly unsinkable ship twice, shame on me. (And in both cases, shame on the reporters.)

one from the vaults

This is something I recorded back in the summer of 2010, which feels so recent when I think of it, but sounds so distant when I say it. I recorded it in my basement when I had access to an electric guitar and amp, but I have neither now so I can't really do a whole lot of revising -- instead I'll just share it.

http://soundcloud.com/daustin/chill-waving

"musical ideas about musical ideas"

Just over a week ago I saw LCD Soundsystem play what they've called their last show ever, The Long Goodbye. Maybe not as good of a name as The Last Waltz, but at least Neil Diamond wasn't involved. I'm reluctant to say that it was the best show I've ever seen, even if I believe that this might be the case, because I think I said that after I saw the Flaming Lips in 2002, Moe. in 2004, Modest Mouse in 2006, STS9 in 2007, David Byrne in 2008, STS9 again in 2008 and Phish in 2009. Maybe the actual quality of the show is secondary to the experience of being at a show, and this is why almost every show I see seems better than the last. Maybe just seeing live music is more important, more impressive, more memorable than the music itself. Maybe being drunk, being high, rolling or tripping potentiates this effect -- there are certainly shows where I can't remember specifically what songs were played or in what order, but I distinctly remember how I was having so much fun. And then after a few nights of solid sleep you forget how much fun so much fun is until the next show.

But every show isn't as much fun as the last. Some shows are just OK, and some shows suck and some shows are a fucking blast but for whatever reason they aren't a fucking blast. And if you think too hard about what makes a show so enjoyable, you're going to dilute just how enjoyable it is. After all, I think we can agree that a big part of any show that's even slightly enjoyable is dancing like an idiot, and the more you think about dancing, the less you actually dance.

A gallon of wine

Best saved for peaks and valleys,
the soaring highs and the sullen lows.
The effect remains the same:
Bubbles form and pop in your blood,
a rush of warmth lifts you, two inches off the ground.

Floating and sinking,
descending into the clouds.
Wrapped in a blanket -- no,
constricted, head in a vice.
Throbbing clarity found under heavy lids
in a gallon of Paisano.