| The future -- it draws closer every day |
[Nov. 16th, 2009|12:51 pm] |
This past Saturday night, I formally asked Shelley to marry me. She said yes (of course!) and I presented her with a flipping sweet ring to seal the deal.
The approximate wedding date is hanging out in early December, 2010. The second Saturday of that month is 12.11.10, in America's far superior way of ordering dates, which is pretty cool. |
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| For Future Reference II |
[Sep. 30th, 2009|11:51 pm] |
Feeder from their 2007 album, Silent Cry.Silent CrySilence the cry, stepping back further
Escape from the mind.
My mind, twisting inside,
Looking for shelter...
Find the divide in me.
Oh my God, what have I done?
One step now, the damage is done.
It's silent without you,
It burns through each and everyday.
It takes my breathe away!
So lonely without you; there's no view
Colors just fade to gray...
It takes my breathe away!
I was so blind I should have seen it
Noticed the life.
My Life, I had to climb,
Stepping up further...
To find the divide in me
Oh my God, what have I done?
One step now, the damage is done.
It's silent without you,
It burns through each and everyday
It takes my breathe away!
So lonely without you; there's no view
Colors just fade to gray...
It takes my breathe away!
They ask too much of us,
But then you always knew.
Just want to live our lives
You know we're trying to!
We put our faith in you,
Our courage and our strength,
To find new ways again
Until this story ends.
It takes my breathe away!
It's silent without you,
It burns through, each and every day
It takes my breathe away! |
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| For future reference |
[Sep. 4th, 2009|10:29 am] |
Underworld featuring D.Ramirez and Mark Knight
Downpipe
To the music of fallin' water
(And I don't mean rain!).
Don't give me that pain,
Don't corner me with that poetry find.
I'm sitting on a rock at the edge of the world,
The red earth and the ocean now below me,
Locked in the distance of erosion
Put a rock on me to stop me from blowin' away.
I'm gonna make you shake, I'm gonna make your hands shake!
I'm gonna make you shake, I'm gonna make your hands shake!
I'm gonna make you shake, I'm gonna make your hands shake!
I'm gonna make you shake, I'm gonna make your hands shake!
It's a new day (it's a new day) and my bass vibrates with anticipation!
It's a new day (it's a new day) and my bass vibrates with anticipation!
And the sky comes down to the ground...
Letting go with love...
And a cellphone rings... Rings... Rings...
(boop boop boop boop be boop)
Las Vegas in my head, tattoo on my mind and
Black brick, black brick walls slide
Past your, past your tired eyes
I'm on a short fuse, I'm on a good day but I'm on a short fuse
I'm shivered at you who can't see me
Woman with a small voice saying
Shall we have a coffee somewhere, sometime, somehow,
Will you come come come come with me
Sounds like I, sounds like I've found my escape!
I'm gonna make you shake, I'm gonna make your hands shake!
I'm gonna make you shake, I'm gonna make your hands shake!
I'm gonna make you shake, I'm gonna make your hands shake!
I'm gonna make you shake, I'm gonna make your hands shake! |
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| The End |
[Jul. 19th, 2009|12:53 pm] |
I'm replacing my LJ and several-months-dead Facebook with a Twitter account. http://twitter.com/Eiriksmal ("Konungar eru fimm," sagði Eiríkr, "kenni ek þér nafn allra, en em enn sétti sjalfr." - from Eiríksmál, the Lay of Eric.)
Add me, as I'm already following Hale and Pong (they were listed on that silly VGM blog that lists as many video game musicians' Twitters as possible. Weird, right?) and whatever. This ol' thing had a good run of what, almost 5 years? Not bad, but I'm just tired of writing to myself. Not to mention that 80% of my posts on here are more appropriate in a 140 character Tweet, anyway. I'll keep this hanging around for the legitimately interesting entries that occur maybe semi-annually.
Oh, and I'll pop in every once in a while to see if anyone else has posted. Something else that rarely occurs. I'll add my obligatory comment that is also ignored and we can all move on with our lives.
Mike: I still need to respond to your post. And read more of your own entries. Oops. =/ |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 16th, 2009|09:01 am] |
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I feel that I need a website proper. But then clear thought bangs my head into an invisible wall and demands to know what I would do with a website. Well.. I don't know. |
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| Read while listening to the Chemical Brothers |
[Jul. 10th, 2009|11:22 pm] |
Though she has persuaded herself otherwise, Truss doesn’t want people to care about correctness. She wants them to care about writing and about using the full resources of the language. “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” is really a “decline of print culture” book disguised as a style manual (poorly disguised). Truss has got things mixed up because she has confused two aspects of writing: the technological and the aesthetic. Writing is an instrument that was invented for recording, storing, and communicating. Using the relatively small number of symbols on the keyboard, you can record, store, and communicate a virtually infinite range of information, and encode meanings with virtually any degree of complexity. The system works entirely by relationships—the relationship of one symbol to another, of one word to another, of one sentence to another. The function of most punctuation—commas, colons and semicolons, dashes, and so on—is to help organize the relationships among the parts of a sentence. Its role is semantic: to add precision and complexity to meaning. It increases the information potential of strings of words.
What most punctuation does not do is add color, texture, or flavor to the writing. Those are all things that belong to the aesthetics, and literary aesthetics are weirdly intangible. You can’t taste writing. It has no color and makes no sound. Its shape has no significance. But people say that someone’s prose is “colorful” or “pungent” or “shapeless” or “lyrical.” When written language is decoded, it seems to trigger sensations that are unique to writing but that usually have to be described by analogy to some other activity. When deli owners put up signs that read “ ‘Iced’ Tea,” the single quotation marks are intended to add extraliterary significance to the message, as if they were the grammatical equivalent of red ink. Truss is quite clear about the role played by punctuation in making words mean something. But she also—it is part of her general inconsistency—suggests that semicolons, for example, signal readers to pause. She likes to animate her punctuation marks, to talk about the apostrophe and the dash as though they were little cartoon characters livening up the page. She is anthropomorphizing a technology. It’s a natural thing to do. As she points out, in earlier times punctuation did a lot more work than it does today, and some of the work involved adjusting the timing in sentences. But this is no longer the norm, and trying to punctuate in that spirit now only makes for ambiguity and annoyance.
One of the most mysterious of writing’s immaterial properties is what people call “voice.” Editors sometimes refer to it, in a phrase that underscores the paradox at the heart of the idea, as “the voice on the page.” Prose can show many virtues, including originality, without having a voice. It may avoid cliché, radiate conviction, be grammatically so clean that your grandmother could eat off it. But none of this has anything to do with this elusive entity the “voice.” There are probably all kinds of literary sins that prevent a piece of writing from having a voice, but there seems to be no guaranteed technique for creating one. Grammatical correctness doesn’t insure it. Calculated incorrectness doesn’t, either. Ingenuity, wit, sarcasm, euphony, frequent outbreaks of the first-person singular—any of these can enliven prose without giving it a voice. You can set the stage as elaborately as you like, but either the phantom appears or it doesn’t.
When it does appear, the subject is often irrelevant. “I do not care for movies very much and I rarely see them,” W. H. Auden wrote to the editors of The Nation in 1944. “Further, I am suspicious of criticism as the literary genre which, more than any other, recruits epigones, pedants without insight, intellectuals without love. I am all the more surprised, therefore, to find myself not only reading Mr. Agee before I read anyone else in The Nation but also consciously looking forward all week to reading him again.” A lot of the movies that James Agee reviewed between 1942 and 1948, when he was The Nation’s film critic, were negligible then and are forgotten now. But you can still read his columns with pleasure. They continue to pass the ultimate test of good writing: it is more painful to stop reading them than it is to keep going. When you get to the end of Agee’s sentences, you wish, like Auden, that there were more sentences.
Writing that has a voice is writing that has something like a personality. But whose personality is it? As with all art, there is no straight road from the product back to the producer. There are writers loved for their humor who are not funny people, and writers admired for their eloquence who swallow their words, never look you in the eye, and can’t seem to finish a sentence. Wisdom on the page correlates with wisdom in the writer about as frequently as a high batting average correlates with a high I.Q.: they just seem to have very little to do with one another. Witty and charming people can produce prose of sneering sententiousness, and fretful neurotics can, to their readers, seem as though they must be delightful to live with. Personal drabness, through some obscure neural kink, can deliver verbal blooms. Readers who meet a writer whose voice they have fallen in love with usually need to make a small adjustment afterward in order to hang on to the infatuation.
The uncertainty about what it means for writing to have a voice arises from the metaphor itself. Writers often claim that they never write something that they would not say. It is hard to know how this could be literally true. Speech is somatic, a bodily function, and it is accompanied by physical inflections—tone of voice, winks, smiles, raised eyebrows, hand gestures—that are not reproducible in writing. Spoken language is repetitive, fragmentary, contradictory, limited in vocabulary, loaded down with space holders (“like,” “um,” “you know”)—all the things writing teachers tell students not to do. And yet people can generally make themselves understood right away. As a medium, writing is a million times weaker than speech. It’s a hieroglyph competing with a symphony.
The other reason that speech is a bad metaphor for writing is that writing, for ninety-nine per cent of people who do it, is the opposite of spontaneous. Some writers write many drafts of a piece; some write one draft, at the pace of a snail after a night on the town. But chattiness, slanginess, in-your-face-ness, and any other features of writing that are conventionally characterized as “like speech” are usually the results of laborious experimentation, revision, calibration, walks around the block, unnecessary phone calls, and recalibration. Writers, by nature, tend to be people in whom l’esprit de l’escalier is a recurrent experience: they are always thinking of the perfect riposte after the moment for saying it has passed. So they take a few years longer and put it in print. Writers are not mere copyists of language; they are polishers, embellishers, perfecters. They spend hours getting the timing right—so that what they write sounds completely unrehearsed.
Does this mean that the written “voice” is never spontaneous and natural but always an artificial construction of language? This is not a proposition that most writers could accept. The act of writing is personal; it feels personal. The unfunny person who is a humorous writer does not think, of her work, “That’s not really me.” Critics speak of “the persona,” a device for compelling, in the interests of licensing the interpretative impulse, a divorce between author and text. But no one, or almost no one, writes “as a persona.” People write as people, and if there were nothing personal about the result few human beings would try to manufacture it for a living. Composition is a troublesome, balky, sometimes sleep-depriving business. What makes it especially so is that the rate of production is beyond the writer’s control. You have to wait, and what you are waiting for is something inside you to come up with the words. That something, for writers, is the voice.
A better basis than speaking for the metaphor of voice in writing is singing. You can’t tell if someone can sing or not from the way she talks, and although “natural phrasing” and “from the heart” are prized attributes of song, singing that way requires rehearsal, preparation, and getting in touch with whatever it is inside singers that, by a neural kink or the grace of God, enables them to turn themselves into vessels of musical sound. Truss is right (despite what she preaches) when she implies, by her own practice, that the rules really don’t have that much to do with it. Before Luciano Pavarotti walked onstage at the opera house, he was in the habit of taking a bite of an apple. That’s how he helped his voice to sound spontaneous and natural.
What writers hear when they are trying to write is something more like singing than like speaking. Inside your head, you’re yakking away to yourself all the time. Getting that voice down on paper is a depressing experience. When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music. This writing voice is the voice that people are surprised not to encounter when they “meet the writer.” The writer is not so surprised. Writers labor constantly under the anxiety that this voice, though they have found it a hundred times before, has disappeared forever, and that they will never hear it again. Some writers, when they begin a new piece, spend hours rereading their old stuff, trying to remember how they did it, what it’s supposed to sound like. This rarely works; nothing works reliably. Sooner or later, usually later than everyone involved would have preferred, the voice shows up, takes a bite of the apple, and walks onstage.
---
Louis Menand on Eats, Shoots & Leaves. |
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| HunGer B Gone. |
[Jul. 8th, 2009|01:23 pm] |
Got bored and did some poking around to see if the weight-loss and almost complete loss of appetite Wellbutrin has stricken me with will go away. Most of the forum posts I've read, people lost maybe 5 pounds, as much as 15. Studies on using Bupropion/Wellbutrin to treat fatties had similar results, with an average weight loss of a little under 10 pounds over the course of 6 - 12 months. GRAAAAAAAAH!! I lost close to 25 and am up to 157 lb, fully clothed. Still 17 lbs. below what I weighed last spring.
It's gotten worse, though, in that I feel hungry again, but I have zero desire to eat. Before, I just wouldn't ever be hungry and, when I was, I could just consume 200 calories and be completely full. So a few months of consuming ~1800 - ~2200 calories less than I need.. Yeah. It shows no sign of stopping and I'm a bit worried that if my dosage is jacked up to the usual max, 600mg (from 300mg), I might waste away into a cancer patient. I am calling my psyyyyyyychiatrist to get an appointment asap as my pills aren't working very well anymore.
It would appear that Wellbutrin works on me for two and a half months before losing a good chunk of its effects. You can't just escalate my drugs ad infitum. Ugh. Well, maybe I could just take more and more until my brain quits working from the rampant amounts of dopamine and norepinephrine. Oh, Dave, lack of dopamine is also present in people with social conditions! You need to see a psychiatrist and get that biznass straightened out. "Sociability is also closely tied to dopamine neurotransmission. Low D2 receptor-binding is found in people with social anxiety. Traits common to negative schizophrenia (social withdrawal, apathy, anhedonia) are thought to be related to a hypodopaminergic state in certain areas of the brain. In instances of bipolar disorder, manic subjects can become hypersocial, as well as hypersexual. This is credited to an increase in dopamine, because mania can be reduced by dopamine-blocking anti-psychotics." |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 7th, 2009|01:32 pm] |
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Hallelujah! California did not restrict or ban new-car colors last week, only added foolish, useless restrictions on new-car window tints. Frakking California, what a blight on the country. We need some more earth shakin' to break their crappy state loose faster than year 20bazillion. |
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| This Isn't Your Father's 80s Music |
[Jul. 5th, 2009|02:14 am] |
| [ | music |
| | All that stuff listed. Spent, like, three hours on it. | ] |
Made my old man a killer mix as I had 80s music on the brain all day today. I call it, "This Isn't Your Father's 80s Music" in honor of Powerlord's link to the latest Strong Bad email. I wrote him this two-page summary so he can know the names of the songs he doesn't like on there. I'm hoping he'll like 4 out of the 20 on there. Only 19 listed as the last is a bonus track. (Salim's Ringtone from Slumdog Millionaire)
Who? | What? | Why? | Style? | Shiny Toy Guns | Major Tom, cover of Peter Schilling’s 1983 song about David Bowie’s fictional astronaut, Major Tom. Got all that? | 1. Sheer awesome. 2. Ripping up Summer 2K9 courtesy of the 2010 Lincoln MKZ using it extensively in their cool commercial. Earth below us! (5.5.09) | Electro/ New Wave/ Synthpop | Gary Numan | Are ‘Friends’ Electric? (May ‘79) | Gary Numan was a two hit wonder – this proceeds Cars by a few months. It’s been covered more than a dozen times. Need anything more be said? | Electronic/ really early New Wave | Joy Electric | The Memory of Alpha (March ’07) | Entirely composed on the Moog, Ronnie Martin leaned heavily on his vocal work to propel this vibrant track concerning the fall of Man forward. | Synthpop, Electropop | Shiny Toy Guns | Stripped, November ’05 cover of Depeche Mode’s 15th single circa 2.10.86 | Really catchy, creepy imagery ripped straight from Orwell’s masterpiece, 1984. Better with the male-female vocal interplay. | New Wave | Shiny Toy Guns | Le Disko (October ’06) | Stark synth stabs, classic electo structure.. This piece could have been released in 1988. | Synthpop/ indie rock/ electropop | Mindless Self Indulgence | Never Wanted to Dance (Electro Hurtz Mix) (3.18.08) | MSI bills themselves as the most terrible band in the world. They are very bad, but manage to write addictive hooks that won’t leave your head. This bangin’ mix amps up the electro elements to an extreme. The synth warbles sound identical to those on the last track.. Hmm..? | Electro/ Alt. rock | Felix da Housecat | Rocket Ride (May ’04) This is from my favorite Felix da Housecat period – he’s deep in electro, but not obnoxious, too minimal, or too vulgar. | Catchy! This Chicagoan boldly blazed on where Chicago House left off after dying. Born in ’71, he was able to grow up in the incredible upheaval electronic music experienced in the mid 80s. He’s been releasing stuff nonstop since the late 80s, constantly remixing, too. He owns several very influential record labels, to boot. | Electro w/Synthpop influences | Innerpartysystem | Die Tonight, Live Forever (9.22.08) | This incredibly gritty, energetic, and depressing-as-all-get-out song is one of my new favorites. “We may not all be pretty, but we feel pretty fake!” Killer stuff not really connected to the 80s. | Alt. Rock/ Industrial/ Electroclash | Datarock | I Used To Dance With My Daddy (Karma Harvest Mix) (late ’07) | Something happy had to proceed that last track. This ridiculous, silly song is by a Norweigan duo following in Devo’s footsteps | Dance-punk/ Electro/ Norweigan duo | Digitalism | Pogo (5.9.07) Yep, my 18th birffffffday. | “Now you have a brighter smile and I think I’m going to like it.” Introspective and interesting. Can you tell a difference between a German attitude and a Norweigan one? | Dance-punk/ Electro/ German duo | Ladytron | Ghosts (5.17.2008) Did you know Devo’s frontman, Mark Mothersbaugh, went on to write all the music for the shows I watched growing up? Everything on Nickelodeon was by him. | Ladytron is largely responsible for bringing back dreampop and electropop. This song is a gentle example of their ability to create new sounds within an age-old framework. The song makes an appearance on the Sims 3, of all places. | Electropop/ Electroclash | The Secret Meeting | Blacker than Blue (The Humble Brothers Mix) (late ’07) | The Humble Brothers (not to be confused with the Dust Brothers, the Chemical Brothers, or the Brothers Martin, whom I also listen to) are awesome. This is an interesting example of THB’s industrial mixed into the “darkwave” genre. | Darkwave filtered through an industrial lens | Underworld | Change the Weather (12.1.89) | Underworld is huge. To quote AllMusic, “Underworld became one of the most crucial electronic acts of the 1990s via an intriguing synthesis of old and new.” | Rock/ Synthpop New Wave | Underworld | Underneath the Radar (2.16.88) | Both of these songs were recorded before Underworld switched from generic 80s to freaking amazing electronic goodness. | Rock/ New Wave/ Synthpop/ | Rush | One Little Victory (3.29.02) | Rush!! The Rush!! Their 17th album and first after a six-year delay. Rush has only improved since the late 70s and this proves why. | Purely modern rock. Very loud. | The Fashion | Like Knives (May ’08) | This Danish quartet sounds funny. I like their goofy lead singer. | Indie rock | Airbourne | Girls in Black (June ’07) | If AC/DC had a better singing voice, this is what they would sound like. Airbourne is also Australian! | Hard rock directly from ye ‘ol 1980 | Utah Saints | Something Good (arranged by Dougal & Gammer, rap by MC Whizzkid) (June ’08) (Original circa late ‘89) | Never heard of the Utah Saints?? Really?? These two dudes practically invented the use of processed samples forming the backbone of a song. It samples Kate Bush from “Cloud Busting” | A freeform hardcore arrangement of an early house song | Justice | Genesis (June ’07) | Justice is very, very popular right now. The problem is… they’re terrible. This is their only tolerable song. You are now way beyond cool. Brag to your sister and brother-in-law about how viciously cutting edge you are. | Electro house mixed with liberal doses of drum ‘n bass and the ubiquitous French weirdness. |
1. Electropop songs are pop songs at heart, often with simple, catchy hooks and dance beats, but differing from those of electronic dance music genres which electropop helped to inspire — techno, house, electroclash, etc. — in that songwriting is emphasized over simple danceability. They often feature alienated deadpan lyrics with a futuristic sci-fi edge.
2. Synthpop is a subgenre of New Wave and pop music in which the synthesizer is the dominant musical instrument. It is most closely associated with the era between the late 1970s and early to middle 1980s, although it has continued to exist and develop ever since. Jean Michel Jarre and Kraftwerk were pioneers of the style.
3. Electroclash is a style of music that fuses New Wave and electronic dance music. Larry Tee coined the term, but DJ Hell from Gigolo Records is also often regarded as one of the pioneers of the genre. The aesthetic is often associated with the 1982 film Liquid Sky.
4. Darkwave is a music genre that began in the late 1970s, coinciding with the popularity of New Wave and post-punk. Building on those basic principles, dark wave added dark, introspective lyrics and an undertone of sorrow for some bands. In the 1980s, a subculture developed alongside dark wave music, whose members were called "wavers" or "dark wavers". The British post-punk groups that inspired Gothic rock provided initial impetus for the movement. As a result, dark wave is linked to the Goth subculture.
5. Dance-punk is a music genre that emerged in the late 1970s, and is closely associated with the post-punk and no wave movements. Many groups in the post-punk era adopted a more rhythmic tempo, conducive to dancing. These bands were influenced by disco, funk, and other dance musics popular at the time, as well as being anticipated by some of the 1970s work of David Bowie, Brian Eno, and Iggy Pop. Influential 80s artists included The Clash, Public Image Ltd., Gang of Four, New Order, The Slits, Billy Idol, The Fall, The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Sigue Sigue Sputnik.
6. New Wave is an inexact term for a rock genre that originated in 1976. The term started as applying to punk rock music. It evolved to cover punk-based acts that mixed in other elements. During the 1980s in the United States New Wave became a catch-all term that applied to new acts in general and synthpop acts in particular. New Wave was basically the reinvention of rock 'n' roll of the 1960s but it also incorporated various influences as well as aspects of mod subculture, electronic music, disco, and funk. The 1990s and 2000s have seen revivals, and a number of acts that have been influenced by a variety of New Wave styles.
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blankis1337's journal
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!
Waaaas?? (um, auf Deutsch.)