Poetry...

Most of the time, I don't think much of poetry. Often, when asked, I'm like, "poetry, pfft. Whatever." But sometimes I remember that I actually have a favorite poem, and I get the book out and read it. It doesn't make me want to write poetry--I tried once for a class and it was a little like trying to teach a car to make love to a baby deer: hard to do--but it makes me want to write better.

So here is the super-nerdy part where I share my favorite poem with you. It's called "The Bear," by Galway Kinnell, and it has everything! Poop, blood, death, um, blubber...bears. Yeah.

THE POEM!!!!

Well, we did the Austin City Limits festival again. And we did it better. We had plenty of money, which meant we could buy delicious cold water whenever we wanted. And delicious snacks a-plenty. This year's lineup was fantastic, and all in all better than last year's. Spoon was fantastic as always, and the Fiery Furnaces were awesome, doing almost all of their songs in completely different ways from the albums. It was like a whole different Fiery Furnaces Experience. There was a band called Pong that was cool, and Built to Spill rocked. The Arcade Fire was amazing, with 9 people on the stage all playing different crazy instruments and banging on things. The black Keys rocked harder than a guy playing guitar and a drummer have any right to. And then...

There was one band to rule them all...

The Decemberists

(Sorry, Murf, it turns out they ruled in Concert.) Colin Meloy of the Decemberists was funny and clever, and was the first person to ever say "pathos" on stage at a rock concert. The Decemberists managed to get almost ever one dancing to an ever-faster rendition of Hava Nagila in the middle of one of their songs, and then told everyong to "scream like you're getting swallowed by the whale when we give the signal." The signal, we were told, was one that one guy would clamp his arms together, sort of like a whale's jaw. But when the moment came, that guy appeared on stage with a giant pair of cardboard jaws, complete with paper bloody flesh streaming from between the teeth, and the jaws swalloed Colin as he sang and the audience screamed and moaned and screamed for a long time. Also, we learned that if you do not do what the singer of the Decemberists tells you to do, the song will not go on, as we found out when he kept shushing everyone and motioning for them to sit down, until everyone was quietly sitting while the accordian played, except this one guy who refused to sit, and he got a lot of beer cans and water bottles thrown at him. Chump.

So, if you can, go see the Decemberists, since they rule. Also, go see the Arcade Fire and the Fiery Furnaces at all costs. Also the Black Keys. And next year, when the tickets go on sale for cheap before the lineup is even announced, everyone should just buy three-day passes and come down without hesitation! Or you may miss some of the best bands around! Chumps.

BAM! Bloc Party is on that stage, and they rocked hard, and poked fun at Oasis, who was about to go on on the stage next to them. Everything looks hazy from the dust.

This is what happens when you take a picture at night using a flash in a field that hasn't gotten any rain in about a month and 60,000 people are walking around on it. That's right, the strange haze is the flash reflecting off of the dust, which hung in a layer about 15 feet high at the end of the day and looked almost like fog. Except it was dust. I wished I had a bandana or a painter's mask to put over my face! Most of the time you didn't notice, though, because you were rocking so hard. And drinking lots and lots of water. You know, because of the heat.

Dusk is a beautiful time at the Austin City Limits music festival. This dusky picture was taken as we sat on the ground on a blanket waiting for Blues Traveller to play. Why is dusk so nice? Because that's when it stops being A FREAKING 105 DEGREES!!!

The last day of the festival was the hottest day of the year, with the temperature hovering between 107-108 degrees, and not a cloud in sight. We huddled under a tiny umbrella all day, and I got heat exhaustion! I had a fever of 102, muscle and joint aches, and a headache! All from the heat! Man! I didn't even know until I got home because I was rocking so hard!

Here is what you need.

You need the CCS64 Commodore 64 emulator found here. And then you need to go to the website of Paul Slocum, of the band Tree Wave, and get his Cynthcart program in emulator form, found in the middle of this page as "cynthcart.prg" (Check out the two Tree Wave tracks while you're over there, they're great. And check out his other gear. He makes music with a printer!)

Figuring out the C64 is a bit strange, since it is an ancient computer running on something like DOS. Read the page about what the buttons do on both sites (for the emulator and the cynthcart). So you can figure out how to load and run the thing (if I can do it, you smarter more technical people surely can. I have faith.)

Anyway, this gives you a synthesizer program powered by the 8-bit glory of C64 sound, which is way cool. You use the qwerty keys line and the numbers for black and white keys, and the space bar is for whammy. There's also different wave forms, LFO, portamento, and three-note polyphony. All in 8-bit, of course. Who needs a fancy synth when you can make these sounds for free? And soon you will be like me, considering hunting down a used Commodore and putting the program on that, for even more authentic crappy sounds.

I recorded a demo to get you excited about shitty sounds. Listen to it here.

The only problem is, if it's using my computer's audio output, how do I play along with music recorded on my computer at the same time? Hmmm... some sort of splitter maybe. Or get the thing onto my laptop...

Nerds unite!

Non Dorky Part.

Lisa, my sister, is engaged to Nick, after many years. Congratulations to those crazy kids! Bailey the dog is very happy about it. Also, I suppose they (Lisa and Nick) are happy about it. And my mom. And me. Probably some other people to. Maybe you are. Man! I should write some sort of engagement song, like I did for Andrew's birthday. But do people want an event such as that commemorated with obnoxious lo-fi music? I cannot say, for the world is surely full of mystery.

I got this email:

>From: 2SweetTim
>To: Michael
>Subject: Wallaperz
>
>Yo! I need new wallpaperz for my dizktop!
>You find any old pictures you made and
>thought were long lost on a mysterious
>disk lately??? I need thems!1 My girl is
>coming over an I got to cover up the pron
>wallpape!!!!!
>
>2sweet

Yeah, 2SweetTim, I have just that.

Old Wallpaper I made and found recently

Dorky Part.

I've been listening to a lot of video game music, and music inspired by video game music. Now, when I say video game music, I don't mean new music. I mean real video game music from the days of old, when they were beepy and powered by strange little sound chips bleeting out square waves and triangle waves and awkward drum noises. You know, the good stuff. (I'm such a dork, I drove to class the other day listening to a CD of Sonic The Hedgehog Music.) And I'm waiting for James to mail me my copy of midisoft, so I can make some crappy sounding music of my own. In the mean time I thought I would re-try Fruity Loops.

I tried Fruity Loops before and it didn't do much for me, but I think I was looking at it wrong. I thought it was some program that easily allowed you to drop some dope-ass techno and dance beats with great ease and a slick sound. Which it does, and pretty well. But that's not my thing too often. Now I'm looking at it as a tool to sequence and alter samples into a song, and that is much more interesting to me. I loaded up all the clips of sound I recorded in Europe and it sliced them into little bits that I can repeat and change the pitch of at will. I'm starting to better understand how music like Four-Tet is made. Now I want to go out and record all sorts of things and load them onto my computer and see what I can chop together.

Today I did my first Fruity Loop thing that I really liked, so I'm putting it up. As per all the video game music I've been listening to, there are lots of boops and blats, and most of them are sampled from a commodore 64. I didn't sample them, I don't have a C64, but someone out there did, and I kindly used their samples. All of the drums and strange noises are C64, and they rock. The bells you hear is a bicycle bell I recorded in Amsterdam, actually, that I sampled the heck out of all over the place. The lady you hear and the train were in belgium, and waaaay in the background are some droning monk chants from Amsterdam, too. The lead synth sound is the Moog, behaving semi-nicely today.

From A Balloon, Over A Wide Sea

I shall continue to strive for old-school video game boopiness! Especially since I haven't come up with much in the way of lyrics, even bad lyrics, in a while. Ah well. I still have square waves!

Well, since Andrew did it, and I have nothing better to post, I will post old midi songs, too. I mean, Andrew reminded me how charming midi compositions were, so I dug through countless CDs of backed-up data till I found my long-lost midi compositions, along with several by James and a bunch by murf. I can't compose new ones at the moment, because I have lost Midisoft. But let us reflect on these, which come to us from the past.

My first listen told me all of these were made before I had taken a music theory class. Behold my lack of musical knowledge as you listen! Though I love major 7ths, I apparently didn't know how to make a major 7th chord back then. And I was definately coming from more of a pop sensibility than Andrew, with his dense, strange compositions. In comparison, mine are like naps in flower beds, under rainbows with only three colors. Lame! Anyway, what will these sound like on strange computers with different sound cards? I don't know, that's part of the midi-adventure.

ambian3
midnight at robot castle
organ
the baby that saved the universe but killed himself
theme from super space baby v2 (James did some of this one)
the princess at the end of the fair
the saw
The Spacestation Song
Andrew's DNA (the original musical tribute to Andrew! All 16th notes! The score makes the pattern of the double helix in parts, if you look at it! How dorky!)

And some by James, since he ain't got a web presence to post, and I have the files! Mwa ha ha, I'll post them whether he want me to or not! But really, they're more interesting than my songs, anyway.

J7
jw3
jw4

And then there's the collaborative effort of Murf, me, and James. Murf is the cool first 38 seconds or so, I did the lame slow part in the middle, and James did the weird parts at the end. Why didn't Andrew ever add a final movement you ask? I don't know. He probably should, though.

Liaku's Robot Tiki Loungejat

Whoa! Who really wants to listen to this sort of thing?