News You Can Bruise

Sumana and I did a podcast, basically a riff where I try to come up with better filler lines for "Froggy Went A-Courtin'". Special musical guest: me.

Sumana took our huge archive of digital camera pictures and scanned postcards, and made a slideshow video for "The Whiskey Rebellion Activity Zone". Shot in four countries! I especially like the postcard from the Singularity.

All right, let's put some meat on this online bone. After School Special is the album that collects songs I've linked to from NYCB over the past six years, but never archived in any consistent place. It includes the sprawling Leonard/Adam/Kris musical deconstructions of the '80s, the spam songs, the 10-second compilation songs, Frog/Antifrog (finally!), etc. etc. etc. All cross-referenced with the original NYCB announcements to prove I'm not cheating, for some obscure value of "cheating". Enjoy it if you dare.

OK, here you go. The new album is Omne Animal Triste and it's got nine songs you've probably not heard before. Blaaah!

On Tuesday I go up to Worcester to start a band with Jake Berendes. Thursday night the band plays a set in Nicholas Reville's basement. Nobody will be there--will you? This amazing musical event will probably NEVER BE REPEATED in the near future!

PS: our band is called "early internet".

Over at Adam's house with Kris and Kim. We are about to go to the airport. We whiled away the afternoon writing music for spams. We finished two with Adam playing guitar, me singing, and everyone else doing occasionally appropriate backup vocals.

• Hard Like Steel Pk5 (Not Classy Mix)
• Viagra Pro has become available since 1998 and

I wrote one more which I'll re-record once I get set up in New York. Goodbye, California.

For probably the third time in my life, my dreams were accompanied by music that turned out, when I woke up, to be memorable and pretty good. This time it was a Sheryl Crow-type song which, though no Jake Berendes West Covina, was not bad at all. In retrospect, I think the song was about the singer's status as a character in my dream. I think that's a good meme-propagation technique if you're a singer-songwriter trying to make it big in my dreams.

Eventually I'll have enough remembered dream-songs that I can do a real analysis of the musical style and see how it differs from my normal style.

Does anyone else get into a fugue state programming a drum machine where it feels like you're playing Space Invaders or using the old TheDraw drawing program?

I like how Hydrogen makes you come up with names for your drum patterns. Never before have I had to name parts of songs. My names for the patterns of the song I'm working on:

• Bass heavy
• Smells Like Teen Spirit
• Cymbal Mania (square)
• Cymbal Mania (swing)
• So there!
• + Snare
• Take it to the bridge
• Cymbal for bridge
• Another dang cymbal
• The bridge seems to be getting angrier!

I also find myself putting down dummy tracks that give a visual picture of the different parts of the song; otherwise I get confused and forget how long things take. Yes, I'm a worse percussionist than George Michael Bluth.

Now that I've gotten recording to work on my computer I'm having a rare old time actually doing recordings. So far I've recorded two new songs for my upcoming album, which I hope to release next month in time for the ten-year anniversary of the day I bought my first guitar and started learning to play. I'm not totally sure why I would want to advertise the fact that I've been playing guitar for ten years, given my current level of ability, but it seems like the kind of things real musicians do to prove how self-indulgent they are.

Should I release (drafts of) my songs as I complete them, or keep them hidden from you until everything's ready to be released? Also I need to pick a name for the album. This is my first serious musical release in five or six or eight years (depending on what you count as "serious") so I'm a little out of practice with the cover art and the naming and whatnot.

I redid the House song mentioned yesterday with a drum track, and got Sumana to lay down some backup vocals. Here it is: House, M.D.. Includes bonus Stacy's Mom backup vocals joke, because we're still in love with Stacy's Mom (I like songs where people try to justify their unethical or socially frowned-upon behavior, which actually explains this song too). It sounds better than any song I've produced to date, but don't let that fool you; it's actually sillier and more pointless than the majority of my songs.

Incidentally, the drum machine I'm using is Hydrogen, which is wonderful. All it's missing is a cursor that shows you what part of the song it's playing. Also it would be nice to have a little tool that shoves all your note events over one sixteenth note because you designed the whole measure a little bit off.

More book work. Today I was unable to avoid learning about continuations, a topic on which I was for years able to maintain total ignorance. I got my revenge, though, by writing about continuations as though they were a way of manufacturing Pez dispensers.

I also wrote a song. It's an "I Will Survive" type anthem to be sung by Godzilla, and it will go on the next album. I had to give Kevin's drum machine back, and still haven't figured out how to record on the computer, so who knows when that album will be forthcoming. My writing breaks are good opportunities to practice, though.

Well, I didn't write it yesterday, but I'll write it today. My latest toy is my XM radio, which I bought to keep me sane coming back from Arkansas, and which I keep to keep me sane going to and from Bakersfield. It has already paid for itself since I no longer need to buy new CDs for every trip. I recommend it not if you do a lot of driving, but if there are specific days coming up where you're going do a lot of driving, and you dread those days.

Anyway, on one of the trips coming back from Bakersfield, what should be beamed down from the XM satellite but a song called "Cool Off", by New Orleans ensemble Galactic. It was nice, funky, jazzy. But it just went on and on. For minutes! And there were no words.

I don't know how much you know about me, random weblog reader, but I've got to have words with my music. When there are no words, I get cranky and I skip the track or change the station, or I start just making up words and belting them out. In this case the beat was groovin', so I made up words and had impromptu karaoke.

I was in me a boat crash
I crashed into the shore
Flew out of the cockpit
I wasn't drivin' that boat no more

Chorus:
You better cool off, cool off daddy,
Cool off daddy-O.
Cool off, cool off daddy,
Cool off daddy-O.

I was in me a chess match
Moved knight to queen's rook three
My opponent got angry
Started beatin' the tar out of me
He said:

Chorus:
"My name is Kulov, Kulov, daddy,
Kulov, daddy-O.
Kulov, world chess champion,
Kulov, daddy-O."

I was down me in Bolivia
Said some things made some people upset
That's when they pushed me against the wall
Offered me a last cigarette
I said:

Chorus:
You better cool off, &c.

Eventually the guy on the recording started thanking everyone for coming out tonight, so I assume the song was the last track on a live album and its purpose was to "cool off" the audience after a hot jam session. My words are still king, though.

Confidential to Jake: let me know if you're interested in laying down some jazz mix for my goofy lyrics, and I'll send you a vocal track. Think of it as like "What's A Godly Person?", except I know you're doing it.

I recorded a song ("Monochrome") for you tonight, but then I had to wrestle like Jacob with my sound card, and then it turned out the vocals were red at the beginning, and then Sumana said it was too long ("What is it, four verses?" "Uh, three."), and then I came up with a better solo for the pyrotechnic finish, and generally it needs to be rerecorded. I don't know what I can do about the length, though. It's a standard three minutes and by gum it's supposed to be the missing link between the peppy 2:30 grungefest and the half-hour two-sample techno club beat that makes you want to leave, to be anywhere but here, to listen to Donovan or something just to hear a chord progression. I guess the experience has made me bitter. I have passed through the Easy Bake crucible!

OK, starting to babble. Time to turn off the computer.

As has been recorded, I talked to Brendan last night. We talked about avocados, and proposed starting a band called "Underwater Avocado". The band would produce a song also called "Underwater Avocado". The cell phone battery died before we could complete the lyrics, but here's what I was thinking:

Underwater avocado, yeah, yeah
Underwater avocado, bleah, bleah

Could be the big hit of the summer, assuming we could somehow declare it the big hit of the summer by fiat.

As sometimes happens, I'm just putting this dumb filk in NYCB to get it out of my head. (the original, which apparently depicts a world in which it's illegal to go to too many cabarets)

I knew a man named Ramblin' Bob
He saw a big green shamblin' blob
Late at night out on the old flood plain
Well, now he's beseiged by noises
And horrible whispering voices
In the Arkham Home for the Clinically Insane

Chorus:
He's in the madhouse now
He's in the madhouse now
What a shame for one so young
Just a-babblin' words in an ancient tongue
He's in the madhouse now

Today: I finally recorded The Whiskey Rebellion Activity Zone (mp3). Played on the new hybrid rather than the banjo for easiability reasons. I hope you enjoy it. I played around a bit with the stuff Kris likes to do where you try to get rid of "noise", or "the sound of authenticity" as I call it. Let me know what you think, esp. if you think I should lose the harmony on the choruses.

I went a little guitar crazy at Front Porch. I now have a nice little hybrid acoustic/electric, and a gorgeous hollow-body electric. I wanted light guitars, and they're both pretty light. All the hybrids have a clever device built into the body that helps you tune the guitar. I don't know why this is on all the hybrids and only on the hybrids, but it's neat. Why not also add a metronome, and a PDA? And a clock, so it could be sold through the Sharper Image catalog. I'm envisioning an entire integrated sound production system/personal information manager/radiological cleanup kit.

The old electric is still available; I'm going to give it to my grandmother to use in a garage sale, so in the unlikely event that anyone wants it, let me know and I'll rescue it.

I'm going to Bakersfield tomorrow, and I'm going to take my trusty yet battered 5-string electric guitar to the Goodwill and get a fancy new one at Front Porch. If you live near me (or in Bakersfield) and you want to exchange for an electric guitar your right to be picky about the quality of the electric guitar, let me know by tomorrow.

I finished my song "The Whiskey Rebellion Activity Zone" (previously alluded to by Sumana). As far as I know it's the only song ever written in the Cory Doctorow/George Saunders/Ken MacLeod mode. It's also my first song for the banjo. Next stop: recording-it-ville.

I dreamed that Dar Williams played a cover of "Beef". I listened to it on tape, and was excited because I would be able to modestly add Dar Williams to the list of covers of my songs. She was having fun, which is the important thing about "Beef"; that Dar Williams the singer have fun singing it.

Kris mastered the latest Adam/Leonard/Kris opus, "Superstar": download it and let him know what you think. It's not too late to get improvements in (I've got some suggestions myself).

More later, about this and other things.

Writing a song with Adam and Kris is like building and then solving a puzzle. The puzzle is a cool riff we came up with which needs to be filled with lyrics. We try various stupid things until someone comes up with a line catchy enough to use. We build on that line, filling in the blanks in adjacent lines. Eventually we know what the song is about and we can start simply making up lines to fix the plot of the song.

Tonight's ong is good, or so is the consensus. Kris says he'll be done with the production by the end of the weekend.

by Aaron Swartz. As far as I know, no other theme song has a rebuttal (A Google search turns up nothing except the bizarre fact that Crummy is already on the first page of results for "theme song rebuttal"). This must mean NewsBruiser has "arrived", in a sense previously matched by no other thing with theme song.

In other cleaning-out-my-inbox news, the aforementioned-if-you-count-inclusion Seth David Schoen writes:

If one were to remark on the appearance of our area code early in the decimal expansion of pi, one could say

Newsbruiser!
415's in pi!

Then one could debate, per Hempel, whether this helps to disconfirm the hypothesis that pi is not normal in base 10.

And Andy Holloway takes valuable time away from corrupting the youth to write:

Maybe it then proceeds to bruise all news pertaining to the eating of the pie. That news will think twice before it touches your pie again!

NYCB regrets that this correspondence is not yet closed.

I told Sumana the short version of the NewsBrusier theme song and, shockingly she came up with the exact same second line as I did. Together we came up with a few alternate second lines, some of which attempt to actually connote what NewsBruiser does. Examples:

NewsBruiser!
Holds up half the sky!

NewsBruiser!
Blogging on the sly!

NewsBruiser!
Featureful and spry!

NewsBruiser!
Usabili-tie!

NewsBruiser!
Someday you will die!

That last one is useful for putting the lie to Doc Searls' (??? I can't find it anywhere) observervation that "Everybody dies" is an idea never seen in advertising.

"NewMP3Free is not responsible for anything." Yeah, I'll say.

New song, started and in honor of around this time last year: Three Years Ahead of the Japanese

Game update: I have a title, plot and (lame) cosmology for my game. I know how a couple of the puzzles will work (because I already wrote code for them). I have an interesting main character for whom I will enjoy writing interior monologue. I'm feeling some ennui about the project in general but I think it will dissipate once a few more pieces fall into place and I start writing code.

I recorded a great theme and fantasia on "Popeye The Sailor Man", but BeOS won't boot, so I can't put it together. Grr.

csound is great, but its macro processing sucks. I'm going to have to write Perl programs that generate csound scores. In the meantime, you can listen to my still-unfinished csound masterpiece, Annoying Techno Music, from the version 1.1.2pl14 page. That's as much csound as I can stand to do without being able to make repeated phrases into functions. If I pointed you to that file earlier today, it's updated now, with two more measures of annoying techno goodness.

I just realized that if I do The Devil Went Down to Silicon Valley, I won't have to finish the other song that I've never been able to finish. This is a great relief to me. Of course, this presumes that I can finish The Devil Went Down to Silicon Valley, but for Pete's sake, it's a parody of an existing song! I don't think I've ever had to leave a song parody unfinished.

Hey, I'm back again. Although I'm laying low (until after the holidays) for a while so that I don't have to do all the stuff I'm supposed to do quite yet. You know who you are.

This is my official yummy homepage until sampo comes back. I didn't think Andy would move sampo, but there you go. Andy Schile had a plaid dealy, it was mealy, but touchy-feely. That's my theme song for Andy, sung to the tune of the "Andy Devine had a thong rind, it was divine, but the wrong kind" part of Frank Zappa's Andy. Speaking of Zappa, I got Joe's Garage and Strictly Commercial at the CD Exchange in San Antonio. I also got the Goldberg variations and some old English choral songs, but that's not speaking of Zappa.

Speaking of not speaking of Zappa, my grades are in.

• Survey of Roman civilization: A
• CS design lab of horrors: A-
• Logic design of digital systems: B+
• Statistics: B

That's around a 3.5, which is my best quarter in a while.

Okay, okay, I'd better get started on all my stuff. I have to write Segfault code, write idea base code for the LUG, write slides for my class, and write up my huge travelog complete with dadaist observations on billboards and such, and with wacky lists I compiled on the trip such as lists of apostrophe errors and roadkill.

I want to write a song about a rebellion against UPC codes and other forms of classification, a rebellion which inevitably ends in disaster. It's all part of my post-OMP!(25K-4)YOPPO (will I never finish that?) fantasy, the second in my Porcelain Puppy trilogy, Porcelain Puppy Versus Demon Dog. It will be all (mostly) about confusing the subjective and the objective. I have more songs about that than you'd think.

Oh yeah, there's also another big thing, but I'm not going to write about it until I talk to Adam and Kris about it. Oh, it's huge, it's immense. I'm surprised I haven't started obsessing about it. Wait, I just did.

Yes, Leonard's Yummy Homepage has returned. Bigger, bolder, and brassier than ever, the new page on the new server has got more nifty personal stuff than you can shake a stick at. For those who would charge me with narcissism, I say this: I like going to people's homepages and looking at their pictures and seeing the cool things they've done. If you don't like that sort of thing, I have other sites which you can browse and browse without ever learning very much about me personally. If you do enjoy such voyeuristic activities, then in the words of the America Online guy, welcome. You've got mail. 98% of which is spam.

    Hey all you impressionable kids, don't forget to read our special holiday message! Heh heh heh...

    Bleeg! I'm splitting a (ph/f)at 90-minute tape with underground pop sensation Jake "I've lost all underground pop sensation in my fingers" Berendes, he's the man, if he can't do it, eat raisin bran. I want my side to be called First Church of Deranged Sock Puppet, Sock Puppet because, well, it's a funny title. Look for the tape to have its own IRS page, or whatever we're going to replace IRS with, soon.