New Bike Day!

New Bike day.

It's new bike month over here. With the Viner now complete, we of course needed to find Elias a bike. And what a bike we found. An internet-friend of mattio's (and member of the inimitable fixed.gr forum) was selling a well-used but very nice Bridgestone RB-1. The RB-1 has a bit of a cult / cultish following, as it was designed by the maestro of Rivendell cycles, Grant Peterson. It was also a mass produced hand-built steel racing frame, in an era when racing bikes were aluminum or boutique steel (much like the viner, whose frame dates from the same era), sporting an eclectic mix of componentry. If the hype is to be believed, the RB-1 has a multitude of amateur race wins under its belt (chain?). It's a good frame of good steel, with classic racing geometry. And Elias now owns one. We spent the day cleaning it, setting it up, fiddling with shifters (always fun) and then taking a loop around prospect park. E is in love with it, and those kinds of new bike days always make me happy.

What also makes me happy is the Viner. Having gotten used to (and ridden some long and hard rides on) old fluted cranks, quill stems and 1970's frame technology, everything about the Viner just seems... solid. Stiffer. The cranks are more responsive. The bike turns on a dime. The handlebars will duke it out stroke for stroke with the bottom bracket shell in a sprint. The whole vehicle feels more like a coherent machine and less like a fast amalgam of parts. I love the Raleigh dearly, and will still ride it lots, will most likely race it again too. But the Viner is just a whole different animal.

So three beautiful bike now grace our apartment. We're fast running out of room.

Seymour Duncan is such a phenomenal company. They manufacture guitar pickups, and my beloved main strat, "Ella", has been decked out in duncans for years now. I while back, the neck position pickup on Ella died (constant gigging takes its toll), and I recently received a replacement as a gift. I wired the replacement up, and it sounded awful. Scooped and tinny, like something inside the pickup was mis-wound.

Well I just got off the phone with a friendly tech-support dude named Scott, and he was just like "huh. yeah that does sound weird. what kind of pickup do you need? OK, here, just send the one you've got to this address, and I'll get you another SSL-1 asap."

Awesome. Just plain awesome.

Choruses

Sometimes I forget that I wanted this blog to include bits about songwriting... In this latest round of band-work, I've had two songs that I've really worked on. The first is called "Raleigh", and it's pretty straightforward garage-rock song with a cool half-tempo pseudo-chorus. I call it a pseudo-chorus because there are no words to it, there are only lyrics in the verses. It's a concept I've been consciously playing around with for a little while now, and I like the idea, especially in a song where the verse lyrics repeat or reference similar themes. I first tried it for Life During Wartime off of B-Sides and Rarities, where the section that would have been the chorus was instead replaced by a noise guitar line. The verse lyrics rely nicely on each other without having to fall back on a chorus for a main theme:

We spoke our poetry with mouths full of sand
'cause we were both a little seasick from the boys in the band
and if all the great poets are geniuses and fools
then I'm a bastard out there, trying to play it real cool
because if poets are talkers and if talk is still cheap
we should be rolling in money or at least just back on our feet
instead we're brake pedals groping for the floor.

(pseudo-chorus)

You said "baby, that's exactly what I need"
and I said "we'll keep bumping heads if we both stay down on our knees"
because, if givers are takers and if taking's still cheap
then we'll run out of excuses just like we run out of ink
because if all the great lovers are innocent and cruel
then we're the greatest of stories acting like the biggest of fools
we should be brake pedals groping for the floor

There, I felt that a chorus would take away from what is a song with two manic verses in conversation with one another, a structure that would be better augmented with manic guitar squeelees. If a chorus is supposed to be the part of the song that serves as the topic sentence (i.e. the "in case you forgot here's what we're talking about") then this struck me as a sound way to go about it -- leaving it out.

Back to Raleigh. Raleigh is a fast-paced garage-rock song about a very sad thing. The choruses were thus left empty to let it breathe.

If these memories of Raleigh won't let me sleep
Come take back his city
come and take it from me line by line
by line by line by
line up your suitors in chevrolets
and lie on me for days
if I'm missing from Raleigh how can you sleep

(pseudo-chorus)

Knee-deep in the city can't get no sleep
erase your face from the street signs
time and time and time again
line up my suitors on subway trains
to try to take away this pain
500 miles from Raleigh feels like 3 feet

(pseudo-chorus)

And if these memories of Raleigh won't let me sleep
then come take back his city
come and take it from me line by line
by line by line by
line up your suitors in chevrolets
and lie to me for days
You said there's no one in Raleigh how can you sleep?

There, the pseudo-choruses work to keep the energy of the song and the topic of the song together. I'm very agitated in the verses, but the non-choruses are more reflective. Alternate meaning: there's nothing but this (the verse) to say.

The problem that I'm having is that this has kept me out of practice for writing good choruses. Both musically and lyrically. Not really a problem, but an unexpected turn in my songwriting, and its starting to play havoc with the second song I'm working on, whose verses are very sparse and need a (as yet unwritten) chorus for context. I think my next task is to learn to wield the chorus usefully again.

Complete!

175mm cranks, buttery-smooth top-shelf modern drivetrain, wonderfully shaped handlebars; Time to hunt some sprinters.

Excerpts from New Years Resolutions, 2k9

- exceed personal landspeed record.
- close out a bar in a non-native city.
- Get Fucking Published (or at least finish a manuscript)
- Build a Treehouse
- the all-night write (write all night!)
- Fire a large caliber weapon
- Finish a bicycle race in the field sprint
- Overdress

Sesame Street Greatness

Milk Crisis(courtesy of Micah)



Yip


How Crayons are Made

Winning the Internet

Elias just called me over to his desk. He said, "I just won. I won the Internet." Ordinarily, such a statement would perplex me. I was not perplexed at this moment, however, because on his monitor was the following.

This is what happens when you win the Internet.

January

Again I reply to the triple winds
running chromatic fifths of derision
outside my window:
Play louder.
You will not succeed. I am
bound more to my sentences
the more you batter at me
to follow you.
And the wind,
as before, fingers perfectly
its derisive music.

- William Carlos Williams

Today began the long, slow process of getting my lungs and legs back to race-strength -- a process complicated, I'm sure, by the fact that I was only at race strength for about two or three weeks last season. But mattio and I have our eyes on a criterium in Connecticut in March. Matt is fast as hell, he's just sharpening his edge. Me? I have to re-forge the whole damn blade. So late this morning, I slapped the tubular wheels onto the Raleigh, donned my Dad's old wool jersey, and hit Prospect Park.

Now, as far back as I can remember, I've performed poorly in the cold. I get this pain under my tongue, and my breath seems less... effective, for lack of a better word. It used to happen whenever I exerted myself, but that's long since past... I've never been able to get around it in the cold, however. This past Christmas Eve I was talking to my cousin, the jock of the family, and she was describing something similar, saying she had cold-induced asthma. So maybe that's it? Regardless, I've decided, for the meantime, to try to push through it. My lungs were definitely the limiting factor today, and I'm coughing now as I type this, but it ultimately felt very good to get some miles on my legs, reawaken the ten pounds I put on them this past summer. So we'll see. What's the worst that could happen, purposely egging on a possible asthma?

After a few go-rounds, including what would have been a very successful stalking of a carbon-fiber bicycle up the prospect park hill, had my lungs not given out at the apex, mattio broke off and did his thing, and I headed for home. The whole way towards which was spent trying to figure a way to mount a camera with a remote shutter release on my handlebars or helmet, so that I could post all the wonderful sights I see on my various training routes.

Cheers.

Also, this.

bell rock jingle rock bell

Happy Christmas

About this time each year, there would be huge letters outside of the World Trade Center. They were big and silvery and would spell out "Peace On Earth".

I dont know what became of those letters, but in their absence, we seem to have forgotten.

May we all have the peace we need.

Yoko Ono took out an ad in the times last week... "War is over, if we want it."

Happy Christmas.

The Quartet

The trials and tribulations of our beloved Maxwell's Demon are the basis for a short film written by Nick Miede and Zach Zangl for submission to Sundance's ProjectDirect. While Nick says a final cut is still in the works (possibly featuring an end-scene with your very own Maxwell's Demon as 4/7's of the Castro Septet) here is the film as submitted to Sundance. Nick and company, thank you so much, this was so much fun and it looks great!

Period Great.

When dear friends from Academy ask me how life goes in the city, I invariably tell them the same thing. "Great." Not exclamation-point-great, that's the great that comes with a record contract, a book deal or a gallery show, or at the very least a car that doesn't squeak from every joint (Kay knows this dude's girlfriend). But period-great is the kind of great that goes with playing multiple gigs per month, writing in one's spare time, and knowing that your car could still smoke 95% of cars on the road, noises nonwithstanding. Usually, each November, I get sunk in an "I'll never be an artist" or an "I'll never do anything that matters" stink, where the very act of thinking calls forth mental groans and huge gaps of the existential variety.
It's December, and I still have the wintertime blues a bit. Too many of my days are spent writing for way less money than is OK and watching shows on Hulu, not enough of my days are spent building things or writing for free. But by and large...
The band has been writing new songs at a surprisingl voracious pace, and they are sounding better and better by the week. I'm finally writing the songs I want to, getting to lyrics that exorcise the year's demons, and garnering the much coveted praise of my often-more-prolific bandmates. Recently, when those "you're not amounting to anything" devils raise their heads and taunt me about that novel project I still haven't written, I push them aside to start hashing out lyrics. I'm letting my creativity flow where it may with the knowledge that thats all I can ask of it. And I think that's what a lot of it is about. I hope.

Stormy Wednesday

So Kay's brother is in town this week, coming over from the opposite coast and playing a few gigs with his girlfriend Alice, in town from France (the other opposite coast). We've been spending some time with them, and they're great fun. So after practice two nights ago I went over to Williamsburg to catch their gig. They were playing folk-rock stuff with an excellent backing band, two old friends of Kay's brother's.

So a beer or two after the show ended, the musicians were walking back to their instruments and playing along quietly with the jute-box. I'd been talking shop with the guitarist, and after a while, picked up his strat while he was playing around on bass. The bartender must have liked what was happening, because he cut the jute-box, and we launched into a rendition of Stormy Monday. I have not felt that musically "on" in the longest time. The other musicians were incredible, and we just flowed into the song like we'd been meaning to do this all night. After Stormy Monday, The guitarist and I switched, and played a few tunes, eventually the events at hand coaxed Kay's bro and Alice to come back up and polish off a second set. It was awesome.

Met a bunch of wonderful people, friends of Kay's brother from Duke, including a budding screenwriter who works at an auction house to pay for his writing habit, and this wonderful cat from rural North Carolina who studies international law and moved to NYC for a woman who left him. (we had a good long talk about South Carolina girls, as well.) It was also kind of nice to hear some real drawls again.

Last night, I saw Jay's side project, Predator Raw, Bushwick's finest stoner-metal quartet to date, and then caught up with Kay and company, and spent hours drinking and coming up with band names like "Custer's Last Band," and "Fiddle Bighorn".

I finally finally finally got a new cell phone. No more dropped txts, no more "wait, really? you called me?" and most importantly, no more waiting literally 5 minutes for the phone to boot up and find a signal, only to reboot again at random.

My phone finally kicked the bucket upstate, so I ran to Oneonta to get a new phone. The woman at the wireless store asked me for my number, and i realized that its a pretty unique thing to our generation, that our phone numbers stay with us. They become part of where we're from. I'm a 201. My whole gang of friends from way back in the day is made up of 201's. I hang out with a group of 860's, who got their phones back at school, and I date a 757.

heh, just think its kind of cool.