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Friday, June 13,
2003 at 13:59:49 (EDT) |
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Londonderry Air
Not feeling real brilliant today, so let's look to the future:
Tonight, it's BUTZ
at Pianos.
They are a friend-of-a-friend's band, should be really bizarre.
They are drums, keyboards/guitar, and trumpet. I cannot in any way
explain what they sound like. I suppose Captain Beefheart fans may
be interested, but that's not a comparison. I don't know what I'm
saying.
Saturday: Blackalicious at Prospect Park. Then after that I gotta
haul it up to 109 St. for a party to reconnect with some long-lost
friends. We'll see how long I make it. Just thinking about the subway
ride is wearing me out. I'm pretty sure I'm a candidate to get 'rolled'
when I've fallen asleep on the train late at night. Usually I avoid
trouble by going no more than 5 stops away on the 
train. But heading back from that Columbia area all the way to Clinton
Hill is gonna give me ample time to nod off. I should get some No-Doz.
Sunday: The long-awaited, previously abortive recording session.
We have some of the most brilliant minds in music lined up to record
us on Sunday. That is to say, we'll be recording ourselves. We'll
be nailing down some of our newer songs on the Quattro,
so we can actually hear what everybody is doing on a given song.
Is it as foggy everywhere in town as it is outside my Brooklyn
window? There is literally a mist rolling by.
"Stick
to the road, lads. Beware the moors!"
Posted By Jimmy Legs
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Thursday, June 12,
2003 at 13:58:22 (EDT) |
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Is this love that I'm feelin'?
I can't take it anymore. These online personals things are going to
bring about the apocalypse. Now that I'm a single kinda guy, the world
of the unattached has been announcing itself with ever-louder clearings
of the throat. Of course, I'd seen these personal ads cluttering up
the sidebars of many sites I frequent, but only recently have I realized
how evil they are. Now, I love the Internet, I think it's just dandy,
but god help me if I ever sign up on one of these online dating services.
I signed up on Friendster
the other day, with some trepidation, but it seems harmless enough
(and free). Plus I managed to connect with an old friend of mine in
San Francisco (hi Beth!), so it's worth something I guess. But these
Nerve personals
are lowering the bar for any of us who have hope we might find somebody
who can stand us for 5 minutes (let alone 5 years). I liken them to
those dumbass reality shows that deal with love like a commodity that
can be bought and sold, revoked or rewarded.
Today's example is not the most egregious I've seen, but it keeps
popping up on Salon
and The Onion.
There's a picture of a nice young woman, with this sample from her
profile:
Why you should get to know me: "Because I make killer chocolate
chip cookies that go great with cold beer."
Something really bugs me about this. Maybe cuz it smacks of trying
to anticipate what a man must be looking for, i.e., a woman who
can cook and knows men like beer. Hey, she's really onto something!
Who eats cookies and beer? Bleah, sounds like a one-way ticket to
driving the porcelain bus. Is it really a good idea to reduce a
person's personality into bite-sized phrases and fill-in-the-blank
responses ("A LAWN DART is sexy; A PRAIRIE DOG WITH
MONKEYPOX is sexier")? It all seems like the last bastion
of desperate measures. I mean, I'm sure people meet and fall in
love through these things, but it seems to me they're the ones actually
working against the system.
Posted By Jimmy Legs
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Wednesday, June
11, 2003 at 23:20:46 (EDT) |
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You're always happy, happy
Yes, another lovely evening passes with me sequestered in my rooms,
banging out another song.
This new one is, for pretty much the first time since this thing started,
not a pessimistic treatise on why people who are mean to me are jerks.
That's right folks, Jimmy Legs wrote a relatively happy song. I was
talking to A earlier tonight and he mentioned all the songs I've been
writing lately, and, not to put too fine a point on it, told me "Maybe
you should think about writing about something else now." So
this song, while still mired in the same stuff as the others is a
thematic departure. I am expecting to start writing songs about things
that have nothing to do with my breakup, as soon as I can think of
anything else that gets me as worked up. What rhymes with "Ashcroft"?
So who wants to see Blackalicious
in Prospect
Park Saturday night? Smart rap is indeed hard to come by, so
this gig shouldn't be missed. The only downside is Mos
Def was originally scheduled to appear, but we must take the
bitter with the sweet.
Posted By Jimmy Legs
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Wednesday, June
11, 2003 at 15:27:51 (EDT) |
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Pinky's gotta go
For those of you who don't believe how annoying this little cat can
be, I've recorded a little audio of her outside my second story window,
yowling in the most plaintive voice you ever heard.
Sound of cat outside window,
howling (0:18, 293K)
Posted By Jimmy Legs
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Wednesday, June
11, 2003 at 13:59:19 (EDT) |
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Hunting High and Low
Since Google seems to be indexing my site again, I thought I'd finally
put a search function in here. I don't quite
get it, though. I tried a few test searches and it apparently doesn't
completely cover the site yet. But if you get here from a search engine
and the page has been updated, you might be able to find what you're
looking for through the search box.
Posted By Jimmy Legs
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Wednesday, June
11, 2003 at 12:01:13 (EDT) |
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Paris or Split
Again I must sing the praises of the Naked
Angels "Tuesdays at 9" reading series. M and I went
again last night, and again I was majorly impressed by the talent
in that room. While not everything hits its mark (I still can't make
heads or tails of the musical about firefighters and September 11th),
everybody gives the material a shot, so it's all enjoyable. There
were more famous and semi-famous people this time, including Jamey
Sheriden, Kenneth
Lonergan, and Cintra
Wilson, who may very well be my ideal woman. If you saw You
Can Count on Me, you might recognize Lonergan in the fidgety
priest cameo. Last night he performed as Thomas Alva Edison and pretty
much played the character the same way. Well, his strengths lie elsewhere.
Now it seems the problem with the readings is that too many people
are showing up to fit in the Screening
Room's little theater. Maybe they should make a deal with The
Zipper or something. The musical guest last night was David
Clement, who played two songs about getting dumped. He even
prefaced his performance with "At the risk of becoming known
as 'that guy who got dumped', here's another song about getting
dumped." Ah, a man after my own heart. I have been noticing
that the only kind of music I want to listen to these days is the
sort that deals with breakups and broken hearts. Lucky for me there
is no short supply of such songs, and most of Clement's stuff seems
to be about this subject. I talked to him about his breakup and
managed to bring up my own breakup-songwriting connection. He told
me I should be in therapy.
Posted By Jimmy Legs
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Tuesday, June 10,
2003 at 15:28:55 (EDT) |
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Of Enon, Brainiac, Orchestraville and my
one night stand
Thanks to gentle but persistent reminding from Jim,
I am now listening to a lot of Enon.
They are not only a band I should have been listening to more often,
but a band I have no excuse as to why I avoided getting to know them
better. See, Enon is fronted by John Schmersal, a guy I went to college
with. But I'm finally coming around to it: it's dope! Shows how much
I know that I was not even aware there is now a woman in the band,
Toko Yasuda. It's really good stuff, although those little Radio Shack
bleeps still show up from time to time.
This goes on for quite a while, so I moved it to its own page.
Posted By Jimmy Legs
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Tuesday, June 10,
2003 at 10:55:18 (EDT) |
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Here comes indie street cred
Thanks to Jim for the nod on his sterling Art
of the Mix site. I feel a little funny about it, since my music
page is not exactly related to mix tapes, although please feel free
to use any of my stuff for that purpose. Some of the shorter songs
might work well as bumpers between other, more polished work by artists
who do this for a living. In fact, use it for anything. Tell your
friends you wrote it! Annoy the neighbors (works for me). I suppose
I should get all tense about copyrights, but really, who cares? In
the meantime, if you haven't checked lately, keep visiting my music
page if you are so inclined. I've posted some more stuff lately.
I swear you'll hear something you like eventually.
Posted By Jimmy Legs
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Tuesday, June 10,
2003 at 10:42:47 (EDT) |
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Between the bars ... we were out smoking
One minute before the Elliott
Smith show finally started last night I was ready to bolt. We
had dragged ourselves up to Williamsburg at 7:30 and by that point
it was nearly a quarter after 11. That's the same amount of time it
took me to write my concept
album! I was really starting to think they couldn't find the guy,
and were trying to cover by very slowly setting up the stage, first
the chair, then the drums, then the guitar, then his bucket of beer.
The opening guy was like every Open Mic Night guy's wet dream, getting
to open for a famous guy, getting a huge audience because of it, and
getting to bore us with his banal urban folk tunes. Eh, the guy seemed
nice enough, but his vocalizations were a little too similar to Billy
Corgan's for my liking. So we were all tense, and annoyed, and it
seemed like the night was dragging on forever. But Mr. Smith finally
showed up and as soon as he started in, all was forgiven.
After that my only complaint was the crowd that insisted on hooting
a lot and shouting out requests like they were trying to get a waiter's
attention. But little could besmirch his set. Has that guy ever
written a bad song? I don't know why I like his stuff so, I've never
been into the solo singer-songwriter thing. Well, I mean, not until
I started listening to Elliott Smith. Somebody pointed out after
the show that he's about as close as we Yanks come to Nick
Drake, which I think is pretty accurate. Just hope things wind
up better
for Elliott Smith.
Highlight of the evening outside of the show: Scotty
the Blue Bunny (sporting an incrongruous mustache) showing up
and trying to use his rabbity wiles to get into the show. It did
not work. As he walked away in his sheer bunny costume, g-string
all-too visible, he shouted to no one in particular, "I'm not
gay!"
Posted By Jimmy Legs
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Monday, June 09,
2003 at 11:08:05 (EDT) |
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Don't Post When Drunk (this post was recovered)
I can't believe this is only the 9th. This weekend somehow stretched
out into infinity, making my job seem especially insignificant this
dreary Monday morning. This weekend has been full of boozin', floozin'
and self-abusin'. To some degree or another. Friday I abused myself
most of the daylight hours preparing my home to be infiltrated by
strangers. I cleaned the whole apartment, plus I cut the grass (well,
hacked at it with a scythe is more accurate), and made a bunch of
food. The party was my friend A's idea initially, yet he was strangely
absent from the preparations (and now that I think of it, the cleaning
up as well ... hmmm). But he did invite a lot of the people who showed
up. More impressive than that was the number of old chums who came
out of the woodwork for this affair. I think I can safely say I'll
keep in better touch this time around. I know a lot of goofballs as
it happens.
Karma was on our side, as Friday was the only day not saturated
by the rain they should rightfully be getting in the parched southwest.
As you know, the rest of the weekend was not so kind (though it
seems the sun came out yesterday but I was in a basement all day).
The apartment sustained no real damage during the party, but the
guests were like a vacuum. They drank everything that had alcohol
in it (like even the vanilla extract) and they ate everything that
might have been food. This was cool but at 4 in the morning I hoped
for something to stave off the hangover and found only that thing
I bought that was supposed to be cheese, tapenade and sun-dried
tomatoes, all cobbled together in a jello-mold shape.
Saturday found me catatonic. I tried writing a song but got stuck
trying to rhyme "King Fucking Midas" with something. I
was out of it until I got to the Alibi.
Then M and I attended another party, at the lovely home of a sound
engineer who had many suitable-for-framing-style old microphones
on display around the house. I bet Steve
Albini does this too. We hung out on the roof during the 3 minutes
it wasn't raining, and proceeded to get some payback for my party
by eating everything we could get our hands on.
Sunday was to be our big band recording day, but due to circumstances
beyond our control, we were unable to do the one thing we had set
aside Sunday to do. Frustration set in. The only solution: Corona.
That helped for a little while, like always.
The fruits of the weekend are two more songs on the Music
Blog. I'm trying to write as much as possible and get it posted.
Is anybody else doing this? There's some of it on Papa
M's site (who if you don't know 'was the guy in Slint'),
but I wanna find more people who obsessively write songs and then
post them in a low-level form of exhibitionism, as you see here.
My next question is, should I post the lyrics along with the songs?
I got one semi-request for that, so you know I'm gonna do it. I
just like to pretend there is a dialogue going on.
Okay, okay, I'll do it.
Posted By Jimmy Legs
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