April, 2009

...now browsing by month

RPM Music

Monday, April 13th, 2009

People are saying that the RPM Challenge is having some problems and their Jukebox is down (http://stardotstar.rpmchallenge.com). So I thought I’d just include my music here instead. Click on the links to play them or right-click to download. Let me know what you like!

If you listen to only one thing, first try Underground (Track 3). But the popularity scores run something like: 3, 7, 11, 4, 2, 6, etc…

Track 1 – Fairy Godawful
Track 2 – Probably Orange
Track 3 – Underground
Track 4 – Heartbreak Prediction
Track 5 – At Least Put a Sock On It
Track 6 – No Romeo
Track 7 – Little Belle
Track 8 – Gravity
Track 9 – Eight, Nine, Ten
Track 10 – Type A
Track 11 – Including This

Posted in Music | Comments Off

Cowboy Jones: Ranelli’s

Friday, April 10th, 2009

Conspiracies abound.

Cowboy Jones had just finished reading another news piece about more rich people who were now unable to pay mortgages on their big, white houses. This followed a depressing morning where he’d heard a journalist refer to a Connecticut girl, a Cornell graduate, as “middle class”. Um, yeeeah. He needed good, solid food and – especially since it was a Thursday – he headed to Ranelli’s.

Thursday at Ranelli’s can mean nothing less than lasagna with free seconds. Alternate layers of pasta, cheese, and other assorted loving goodness. Did anyone mention the free seconds? Free seconds may be the ideal cure for economic Valhalla in America. Remember, he thought, to drop a line to President Obama at whitehouse.gov about his progressive, new plan.

After solving the urban parking riddle, he always looked forward to seeing if Sarah was working behind the counter. She was the sort of woman whose smile was worth working for. Hmmmm…. Spicy Italian Sausage Sub; Italian Meatball Sub with Romano; the ham, salami, swiss and provolone extravaganza known as the Ranelli’s Po-Boy. But it was Thursday. Lasagna Thursday. With the free seconds. Just like it might be abject heresy to miss the Spaghetti Special on a Tuesday. She took his order and he leaned forward to crane his neck around the register, looking for Rick Ranelli in the back.

He picked up the recent Black & White and Birmingham Weekly, wondered casually at how seriously to take Black & White’s claim that it was “Birmingham’s City Paper”, and sat down at a table in full view of CNN. It was immediately apparent that another tiny drama was playing out at the tables below the television.

The two kids directly under the TV had long-since finished eating. At least one of them looked just cool enough to have known about lasagna Thursdays. But they weren’t smooth at all. The guy with his back to the wall was slumped over the table, rolling the shakers around in his hand, trying much too hard to look uninterested. His partner-in-crime leaned back, earbuds in, but obviously ignoring the music, trying to listen in on the conversation behind him. Cowboy bet there wasn’t even any music.

The expensive suit at the other table – probably a Cornell graduate – looked like the kind of man who could tell you the exact make and model of his shoes. He sipped a drink and excitedly explained something to his companion. Who was probably a musician of some sort, Cowboy thought, watching the way the kids kept eavesdropping. In the know people all knew who Sam Ranelli was. And they may have known that Ranelli might have funded this establishment, at least in part, on overseas goods smuggled into good ol’ America in the belly of his oversized bass drum. At least the musician had the good sense to be downing the world-famous Lil’ Richman, well-stuffed with five kinds of meats and two kinds of cheeses. Whoever he was, he clearly knew his stuff.

Rick Ranelli called his number. Mmmm… Half-price lasagna.

Posted in Birmingham | Comments Off

Poetry: Gasoline

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

Gasoline

For five years now
I’ve lived in a near-constant state of alert.
Diligently mowing the back lawn,
But half-expecting you to walk through my fence gate
With your big smile
Like nothing ever happened.
Drenched in sweat for the moment you finally came back.

Or at work,
Where I glance up,
My concentration broken,
And wonder briefly whether today is the day
You’ll come around the corner.

And of course,
Every time the phone rings,
I silently hope it’s you,
Even though I know you’re gone.

My only concept of heaven
Would be a place
Where the phone rings and it could be you,
Where I look up from my desk
And I could have a miraculous visitor,
Where you still love me
Though I smell like cut grass and gasoline.

Posted in Writing | Comments Off

Mini-canvases: 12 of 36

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

This is the second installment in a series discussing what’s happening with 36 mini-canvases I bought from Alabama Art Supply.

The first of these was the scene in the bottom left. I wanted to do another nature scene, but I’m typically no good at realism, so I stick to being evocative. I liked the way this started and the dots that make up the scene ended up fairly complex. I think there are three separate colors in each area of this one. One thing that repeatedly occurs to me when I’m doing these is that I wish I could be more “big picture”, but I almost always end up doing a lot of little tiny detail work. Am I doomed to be detail-oriented forever? Is that a good thing? The tree was last, but it’s just for scale. It’s not a very happy tree – Bob Ross might protest.

The second painting was the red and black in the bottom center. On a creative whim, I first painted the edges black. Also on a whim, I took my seldom-used fan brush and dragged the black paint towards the center. I liked those shapes, so I highlighted the dragged black paint with some red. It needed a foreground, so I drew the faux chinese symbol in the front. I think it looks like a little stick figure, but it could really be anything. It looks like it’s in motion to me.

This led to the stick-figures in the top left. There may be more of these before I’m done. I’ve wanted to do a whole teeming mess of stick figures on a big canvas for quite some time and here is the mini-version of it. I think it’s a pretty nifty idea. It’s kind of amazing how much emotivity you can wring out of a few lines in the shape of a person. It may be very old school Benetton ads.

Next was the stripes on the bottom right. I green-washed the whole thing – again on a whim. And then fretted about what to do with it for quite some time, while watching MLB opening day. I started tinkering with mixing other colors with the green on my palette and then messed around with these stripes across the canvas. I like the nice, even slants in the pattern here, although the stripes are individually uneven and different. I wish there was a baseball theme to this one, but there’s probably not.

The black and blue in the top right corner is a direct tweak on the earlier painting. There may be more of these; I like them. This time, I just exchanged the red for a somberer blue. Again, a half-chinese, half-stick-figure character in the foreground. And this one’s got birds!

Finally, the top center is a departure. I traced some circles using coins on the canvas and just started playing with the colors. It feels kind of mod to me. I may play around with this theme a little, too. The edges (which you can’t really see) are the same color as the space between all the circles. I like the interaction between all the circular spaces. The space, for me, is as important as the objects. The same is true in music, probably. Discuss amongst yourselves.

Posted in Visual Arts | Comments Off

RPM Album: Tracks 9, 10, & 11

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

Now that I’ve given away my music for the RPM Challenge to friends and many people have had time to hear it and react, I wanted a chance to explain some of the creative process that went into making each track. This post will be the fifth and last which will go into some detail on my thoughts during the songwriting process.

Track Nine – Eight, Nine, Ten

I love the little guitar riff in this song. I’m not afraid to use “lazy” riffs, because I’m just not a very sophisticated guitar player. My mantra is if it sounds good to me, then I’ll use it. I’m not interested in impressing anybody with my guitar pyrotechnics. During the song, its basic chords get dressed up by moving my pointer finger around to give them a nudge towards interestingness. Otherwise, its music is pretty simple.

The only trick with the guitar part is that I tend to rush and accelerate it pretty badly when I play it repeatedly. So it’s the only track on the album where I used a click track for both guitar and drums. It made things a lot easier, but it really does make it feel a little less organic to me. I tend to push through and build everything as I play it, but I think this one doesn’t have that same bloom to it.

I’m proud of a few of these lyrics. Name-checking I-65 was specifically pretty cool. I was envisioning all the hordes of Michigan folks that come through Birmingham on the way to warm weather and the beaches. Using touch-and-goes as a noun kind of rocks. I love the idea of someone’s opposition being “like the second floor”. How do you fight someone ten feet up and made of concrete? The phrase, “Star light, seems right,” just seems to roll off my tongue. I also liked how “Don’t lay down” ends up being used in two different ways by the end of the song. Still, I think this song lacks any obvious vocal hook, which makes it kind of a problem child.

Track Ten – Type A

This is officially the first song I ever wrote and finished. The first fragment for the album, the first lyrics, and the first thing recorded. So I was very much still learning. And then it got buried on the B side of the album with the other dysfunctional children. But I still like it.

The friend that loaned me his drums told me this one ought to become a travel song. So that was the genesis kernel, and it kind of did. Lots of moving around and travel words, especially in the first verse. I think the music is kind of jam band-y.

I wonder if listeners figure out that the point-of-view is meant to morph from the guy getting pursued by the devil and into the devil himself – probably possessing the narrator at some point during the song. Then travelling towards his home, possibly to make his wife or someone else close to him bleed (in some ominous way), just like he did to the last guy. That was my intent anyway. It got more wicked as I wrote it, for such a happyish sounding melody. I’m particularly proud of the curious mystery of what exactly happens to the first guy’s wife. I don’t think the devil would actually kill anyone outright, would he? And I liked the phrase, “Homicide horrorshow.”

Track Eleven – Including This

This song was the last fragment, the last lyrics, and last recorded. For some reason, this was the most difficult guitar to come up with ANY melody to. Seriously. A total pain. I can’t explain why. Sheer agony. I also sincerely hope it’s not an example of the Sensitive Female Chord Progression. It’s a song that’s another example of wanting to add in an F major chord before it’s lost in the mists of time.

Because it was the last song written under RPM’s strict time limits, I got kinda tired of my full week of writing words. But I wrote some. And I don’t hate them completely, but it’s absolutely another problem child. It’s maybe the hardest for me to appreciate and enjoy. I’m not quite satisfied with how it turned out. I do, however, think it’s an easy choice for the last song on the album. Last tracks are usually more “personal” somehow, and I think it is.

All that being said, it’s probably the song that’s currently second- or third-most mentioned as being in someone’s list of favorites. You just never can tell about people and what they’ll like. Which is another reason to create your own art. Just put it out there and see what happens.