Life

Treats

 

Lately I’ve been treating myself to some new gadgets, the big ones being a CD/mp3 player for my car (I love the comfortable knobs instead of buttons) and a cable modem (we’ve been watching a lot of Family Guy episodes lately). I held out for quite awhile on both, but I finally caved. Also on the way is a headphone amp and mic cables that will complete the recording setup we have in the rock room and allow me to finish up some of these new MrClay tracks (and start work on the next batch I’ve been writing). By the way, Josh and I hereby reserve the name “The French Horns” for future use.

I’m loving the new April March album “Triggers”. Musically all over the place, but mainly candy pop in the vein of France Gall/Stereolab (half the album is in French) with Beck’s “Mutation”-era production and touches of electropop. I think it’s the musical equivalent of a smile. Also playing lately: Pep Love (from the unstoppable Hieroglyphics crew) and Al Green’s “Back Up Train”. Eagerly awaiting a CD from Sweden’s the Radio Dept and the U.K.’s I Am Kloot.

Soon I’d like to get around to linking up all my Javascript/CSS experiments so someone else might find them useful. I make these things all the time but never link them to the site, because I’m lazy

Of all the stories I’ve read on this war, this interview struck me as very interesting. You’ll hear no more from me about it.

Why didn’t you stay?

 

Scientists who study lucid dreaming say that being able to remember your dreams vividly is the first step to being able to realize, during a dream, that it is one. Since becoming a musician, I’ve had plenty of dreams where I’ve heard beautiful songs just to wake up in the middle of the night with vivid details of everything but that piece of music, and last night was one of them.

It’s all fuzzy, of course, but I remember some friends and I (no one I recognize now) were listening to a mixtape that ended with several Holopaw songs, and it was the last song that blew everyone away. I remember it had a couple key changes like the miniature epic “Honeymoonin’ Under the Sea” (by the great Holopaw side project Citra Super), and in the dream reminded me of the powerful Stevie Wonder song “Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer.”. It had such an effect on me that I wasn’t frustrated at all that I couldn’t remember how it went. I was just content to have experienced it. The mixtape also had Ben Folds Five (whom I don’t listen to that often anymore, but they were my gateway band into being addicted to music) and, oddly enough, a video for the Rentals’ “Summer Girl”. The band played in a white room, with cameras close to their hands and microphones, on which there were all sorts of bees, but it seemed routine. I even made a terrible joke, singing “I know I don’t like hives.” — or something like that — to the tune of “I know I’m not your type”.

I guess the idea that Paul McCartney could wake up in the middle of the night with the complete music for "Yesterday" in his head makes me think that this notion, of trying to remembering your dreams, shouldn’t be taken lightly by those of us with a drive to create. And for bad jokes.

Shivering Spaces

 

I’ve got a knitted blanket around me, my feet are cold and the heater running round-the-clock has me dehydrated. I’m ready for breakfast @ the Plaza. So tomorrow is the first Bucs superbowl.. How in the world would I know this? Over the last year, Dan has slowly got me interested in sports — enough to follow Lakers games and know the names of a handful of NFL players and coaches. I don’t even know who I am anymore.

Word on the street is the 307 house of fun and excitement is building a LAN of four PCs, two are being put together over the next few weeks as parts arrive. The new-ish AMD XP 2100 CPU will power the “production unit” in my room while my old PC will be prepped for use as the dedicated “recording unit” in the rock room. No more recording on 4-track, transferring to PC then dragging all types of amps and instruments into my cramped room for overdubs.

Last night I read Dive Into Accessibility, an online book about building more accessible webpages. Most of the techniques I’d already picked up over the last year or two, but a few caught my eye, like this table trick to have content, rather than navigation, be first in the markup (for text and alternative browsers) in simple left-nav table layouts. A great idea if you must use tables for layout..

After an hour of hiding background PNGs and negative margins from IE/win, the pastel theme finally looks decent in that browser. Opera and Moz/Netscape6+ users get the real deal.

Summer Summer Summer

 

I shall use this space to announce the creation of Gainesville’s newest, hottest, most superlative pop band, the High Five 4. After a month we’ve managed to record several demos, dishearten a drummer, miss out on the best possible opportunity to play our 1st show, and have one song described as having “Teenbeat goodness” by Paul, among other accomplishments. “We need a ride home!”

Alexander Pony is the tentative name of Mario & Alex Lopez’s collaboration and it has some sweet songs so I’m pretty excited to be helping them perform several of them live in mid May. I like what my friends are putting together lately.

The Masters of the Hemisphere played Common Grounds in support of their great new album Protest a Dark Anniversary and per usual the show devolved into a drunken heckle-fest. Still Josh and Dan managed to coerce them to play a song of theirs I’ve never heard, evidently called “Glory Hole”. Now, I’ve never doubted their originality, or tact, but it sounded an awful lot like another song called “Glory Days” and was a little blue. Any bands bringing the pop to Gainesville can expect a welcome from me.

Rocking Lately

  • Talib Kweli & Hi Tek “Soul Rebels”
  • April March Lessons of April March
  • Rumors of Paul moving back?
  • Sampson Servo-170 amp
  • Radio shows with Dan
  • Java & class GridBagLayout
  • XHTML, PNGs and Mozilla 1.0
  • Freelance work
  • More rocking than sucking

Sucking Lately

  • My efforts to save money
  • Delta 44 on NT
  • Cable-routing nightmare
  • Running out of room
  • Dan’s luck
  • Writing lyrics

Boring Plaid Edition

 

Three months ago I was crying in the shower. Blissful ignorance turned to shock, disbelief, grief, outrage, curiosity, disgust, contempt, and finally indifference. Supposedly something even worse is around the corner. I just want to play music again.

Today was the last day of class for the semester and the last two weeks were hell. Last night around 3AM I discovered the internet. How many Pitchforkmedia reviews could I read? The Onion’s most/least essential albums of 2001. It’s frustrating reading about all the great music I’m missing out on. Poverty and dialup still suck.

Rocking Lately

  • Pop
  • Moose Live a Little Love a Lot
  • Trash Can Sinatras “Senses Working Overtime”
  • The Bats Daddy’s Highway
  • The MagickHeads “The Back of Her Hand”
  • Claudine “Think of Rain”
  • Beach Boys Pet Sounds
  • Dan moving to town
  • Possibility of visiting Burt in Cleveland

Sucking Lately

  • Jenn, Paul, Raymond & Parish leaving town
  • Sandi’s near death experience
  • Jeff’s computer
  • Poverty
  • Final project documentation
  • Intermediate C++ class filled
  • Organizing CDs
  • Josh’s old job, new job
  • Everything

Amy Amy L, You Rock So Well

Just an ackward shout out to the Aislers Set’s Amy Linton that will, *will* I say, appear in a song on the long-awaited by 4 people debut and final EP by The Seventeenth Century. We rocked Gainesville for about 3 weeks and, damn it, I’ve let the drum tracks sit in the can while waiting for the right doses of free time, mixing equipment and motivation.. and it’s been over a year now. I’ll settle for motivation I suppose–Britt’s tribute to French disco and Godzuki and Dana’s stories of apartment life shall not go unheard for another year.

Songs

Stephin Merritt I am not, but I have so many ideas I’m losing count. Why am I not playing music right now? N-Sync might suggest the use of a B.F.N. or band formation notice. I’m open to just about anything. What do I have to lose, my dignity? Maybe I’m getting too old. I’m too unhip for the popkids, too young to be in the Pernice Bros, oh, and I live in Gainesville, FL.

A Good Kind of Nervous

 

And so I usher in a new era of not working and not arriving to class on time because of not finding a place to park in the mornings. 3 classes, of which ~60% hold my interest, yield me $1800 in loans to make it to Spring. Will I make it? — Can I curb pop music and Subway consumption in order to pay rent? I suppose I will have to cut back, right after the upcoming Beulah / Mates of State show in Atlanta, of course. I already miss my friends at work (a couple days ago was my last day after almost 2 years there) and my friend Sandi, who now enjoys a healthy commute and adventures in Spanish comprehension in Miami. ¿Cómo sobrevivirá ella la ciudad grande?

This edition of mrclay.org is dedicated to the fantastic Lucksmiths album “A Good Kind of Nervous”. On the last brittle stars tour our routes intersected a couple times and I got a chance to meet 2/3rds of them and trade one of our CDs for one of their shirts. Suckers. In other news I’m loving the new Ivy album “Long Distance”. As always smooth and breezy and they seem to be moving in a more dance-pop direction. Lots of great melody and I appreciate the occasional, cheesy drum-loop.

Music

I promised better bit-rate mp3s soon, and of course I lied, but I do have some songs up my sleeve waiting for the right group to be put together. Even though it was sad to end the brittle stars, the tour was a rejuvination of sorts. If I can get another competent pop band together there shouldn’t be a lack of songs — well maybe words.

Down With OOP

Placing the acronym for Object-Oriented Programming in the title of a Naughty by Nature single should ideally secure me sufficient beatings from both the hip hop and coding communities. My classes in C++ and VB I hope will cover a lot of OOP concepts this semester and I’d like to create some smart objects and methods in javascript to simplify image rollovers and DHTML code. I’m learning more about html forms — the Spanish link above submits two variables to the Babelfish translator CGI “tr” using GET whereas their own forms hides the variables by POST-ing them.

Here are we, with a view of mountains
Staring at the floor for hours on end
There’s a world outside that window
And we’re looking at linoleum instead
Another sunset passes us by
We used to sit on our arses
And stare into the sky

If either one of us could drive
We could drive away
And the times of our lives
Could begin today

Look at us. We’re atrocious
We make a meal of every meal
And we browse through travel brochures
But the grass grows brown around these wheels
Take the tennis ball off the towbar
We’ve come a long way
But there’s so far to go

If either one of us could drive
We could drive away
And the time of our lives
Could begin today
What’s there to decide?
And what’s there to say?
If either one of us could drive
We could drive away

Some things might have to change
I wish there was some furniture
That I could rearrange

–The Lucksmiths “Caravanna”

Feeling Deserted

 

Coming home to Gainesville after touring the west coast, I feel like I’ve crashed. I forgot how much I like touring with friends, playing shows and meeting people along the way. I really miss it already, a lot. I’ve made up my mind to move to the west coast come hell or high water around this time next year. One year reserved for getting in all the education I can before the move, probably to Sacramento. The industry seems to be a bit more stable there, and even if the weather isn’t quite S.F., every step outside into Florida heat infuriates me lately. So this year will be about preparation, hopefully seeing a lot of my friends that I have to leave behind, and convincing the least anchored ones to jettison this state as well. If anyone needs a roommate in Sacramento Fall 2002, let me know.

Web Geek News

I’ve begun reworking the tinybadpictures.com layout (working model mrclay.org/newtbp) and it’s coming along nicely I think. The new one will be valid HTML & CSS, which will likely force me to serve NN4 its own hacked style sheet like on the brittlestars.org, but the code is smaller, beautiful and easy to modularize and update. Although I’ve banished the annoying frameset we had for page centering, I think I’ll now use an inline frame to display the big 30-40k pictures so they don’t all have to preload, this will also allow us to have more pics per gallery page. It also means having to provide a seperately generated version for users w/ clunky old browsers. PHP to the rescue again — I can make a link that will cause ?show=all to be appended to all gallery URLs which with deliver a more accessible version w/ all the pics on the page. So my work is cut out for me.

I noticed that the original mrclay.org blue looked a lot darker on the PCs at school so I have to wonder if Photoshop’s gamma adjuster is too light. Then I have to wonder, does anyone really care?

E-bay Auctions

1997 Brutal Scars Promo Poster OOP

Printed before Stella Scar’s dramatic dismissal and 3rd autobiography. Also features a shaven Josh Scar and the tentative title of the BS single released as “Shortcut to MyHeart.txt”. Fans will also recognize this title as the subtitle of Josh’s 2nd biography of 1998. I was told this might be very rare — reserve is 50.00USD.
48″x48″ laminated in cardboard tube
Extended until tomorrow 8PM E.S.T.!
[Image of Josh and Estelle posed in a very sensational teen-pop promo poster]

Featured Artwork

This obscure Warhol piece featured Clairecords empire founder and Studio 54 local Daniel Sostrom.
[5 images of Dan jumping, slapping himself high-5 on various colored backgrounds]
“Five High Fives” (1978) Colorforms ® on detached refridgerator door 36″x62″x5″.