have you lost any plastic caps recently?

"have you lost any plastic caps recently?"

for the second straight day, we've got the plumbers here, and they're trying to figure out why our tub won't drain. after attempting every plumber trick to beat the clog, a plastic cap lodged within the pipes seems to be the most likely culprit, but i know i'm hoping that's not it. that would require him to potentially cut into the ceiling of the apartment below in order to get to the pipe.

damn.

last few days have been action packed. had the big show with munk friday night and had my brother in town for the weekend. the show went awesome. here's a great flash slideshow of the night, and here's another picture of me from sooz from exploit boston! lots of people i hadn't seen in awhile were there, which was seriously cool. corin ashley kicked ass opening the night, and the motion sick were really great, too. all around a fun night.

saturday we went to fenway park and wandered the stadium for the first futures at fenway game, which was tons of fun. beautiful day for a doubleheader, and the vibe at the park was so awesome. i'll get a couple of pictures posted.

last night, t max and i were going to go to pawtucket for another pawsox game, but it rained all day so we opted out. i kinda thought the game would be called, as it had rained all day, it had rained the night before (causing them to call the game after 5 innings!) and it was supposed to continue to rain all that night. but i later found online that the game had actually gone on! pawtucket lost.

t and i will go another time, definitely. last year we went and had such a good time we never even went to our seats!

this is a rather utilitarian post... i'll try to make sure the next one is more interesting!

showtime!

tonight's the big [munk] show! bill's bar, boston, doors @ 9pm, 21+ and only $5.

munk got coverage in the boston globe's sidekick section, including a big photo, right on the cover! the show is also being broadcast on sirius radio monday night and on second life. more info on munk's website.

so anyway, last couple of days have pretty much been work and quick evening rehearsals. last night we watched the new king kong after i got back from rehearsal. very good -- my only issue with it was that i felt it could've been a little more economical. several scenes could have conveyed the same information in half or quarter the screen time. didn't have to be as long as it was (over three hours!). but beautifully shot, and the fx were phenomenal. excellent movie.

busy weekend ahead, starting in a few hours! gotta pick up my brother in a little while from the train station, then it gets busy. it'll all be a lot of fun!

time to do some dishes.

weekend adventures in greenery and audio scenery

so friday i sat in with gato malo again, and much fun was had. due to the number of musicians wolf expected, including another keyboard player, wolf suggested i do my signal processing thing. unsure of what exactly i was going to do, i packed my analog modeling synth, my kaoss pad, a green bullet mic and a bunch of cables and i headed out to the abbey, picking lexi up on the way.

the show was a lot of fun, if quite kaotic to start. once i settled into a signal processing groove, my sound contributed better to the rest of the ensemble, where at the beginning it kind of overpowered the band with disorder and noise. i was at times shaking maracas with my right hand and working knobs on the synth with the other, causing tenor extraordinaire paul ahlstrand to inquire why i didn't bring digital shakers instead.

afterward, we picked up indian food on the way home and enjoyed a tasty dinner!

saturday, i spent the afternoon at obrien's at the MassCann benefit, supporting mike and the cause as well as voodoo screw machine. totally good time.

today, some chilling out, playing with sounds and computer games and reading one of the new books i picked up last week.

starting to get a little hungry now...

does america have talent?

i'm wiped today. should've gone to bed earlier last night, but lexi wanted to see who was going to win America's Got Talent (we were watching the rebroadcast on Bravo). "if bianca doesn't win, i'm gonna... i'll... well, i'll do something..."

she was pissed when the show ended with no announcement of a winner, as i suspected would happen when regis announced that the phonelines would open soon for america to begin voting ten minutes before the end of the show. sure enough, it was not the final show but a rebroadcast of the night before's show. so lexi had to go online and find out who won.

she came to bed and said "i know who won."

"who?"

"i'm not telling! you'll have to look it up yourself!"

"i can tell by your lack of outrage that your girl won!"

"..."

anyway... that show is so funny. it's very predictable in that piers is just about always the villain -- "i don't know what you were doing up there, but it wasn't entertaining at all" -- while hasslehoff and brandy are almost always the cheerleaders. anytime someone is decent, hasslehoff says "you have cut to the heart of america, and that's what this competition is all about." goddamn, it was a dude snapping his fingers!

granted, i can't snap my fingers like that. but i probably could if i really put my heart into it. but now my heart is damaged, 'cause too many of these performers have cut into my heart, so there it is.

the funniest thing to me is hearing hasslehoff say things like "that was perfect" or "you didn't miss one note" when it was obviously not perfect and the only reason they didn't miss one note is 'cause they blew past the one and ran it up to 12 or 15.

but i gotta hand it to that bianca girl -- she's got a huge voice and great pitch. she can be a monster. here's hoping she develops into something awesome.

*****

oh, tonight i'll be sitting in again with gato malo at the abbey lounge at 7:30. tomorrow over to o'brien's for the masscann show, which will include a performance by my buddies voodoo screw machine. gotta go represent, support the cause and dig the great music. VSM are never lacking in serious entertainment value. plus, they're comprised of some of the sicker musicians in the area.

plus there's almost always fake blood.

wednesday

just got in from [munk] rehearsal a little bit ago. stuff's sounding really good. psyched! bill's bar next friday -- august 25th!

nothing much going on the last few days. mostly been working on some sound design for the show. i mean, i could just pick presets and use them for each song, but where's the fun in that?! that's right -- there IS none. so i'm building a bunch of sounds for the tunes. some crossover, you know -- this split patch might work okay for that song as well as this one, but i'll create a duplicate of it and modify it to that other song's needs. stuff like that.

keeping the rig nice and simple, too. limitations are creativity's friends. besides, working this way is tough enough within the 'limitations' of the korg analog modeling synth i'm using. don't really need to complicate things too much further.

the red sox won tonight! no detroit sweep at fenway. that's good. plus the yankees lost, so we pick up a game.

i think that's all...

great bbq!

saturday night we had barbecue at Soul Fire, this new place in allston right on harvard ave.

AWESOME.

it was so good i had to go back for take-out last night. one of the cooks and the girl behind the counter remembered me and said hi. he told me he's going to watch for me coming in in sweatpants. (the night before, lexi told him that my endorsement of the place was "i'm going to need to get bigger pants.")

really good stuff, and the people there are really nice as well. it's very exciting to have such good barbecue close by.

i was going to play softball sunday afternoon, but i got caught up in coffee, red sox and sound design for the coming [munk] show. sox won, the coffee was good and i got some good stuff done. come to the show (friday, aug 25th, at bill's bar) and see and hear for yourself!

al and batman

so neil got the part!

he gave a call yesterday afternoon bringing the good news, and then the three of us went out to the abbey where i'd be sitting in on keyboards with gato malo.

that was a lot of fun. al was there, and it's always fun to see him. i mean, who sits in a dive bar waiting for a rag-tag bunch of musicians to play while nursing a bourbon, chasing it with a beer and simultaneously following a red sox game and a nabakov book? and he's a polack, too, just like yours truly! seriously, you gotta check out his plastic cheese band celebrations of st. stanislav's day -- polka all night, baby. al also got pretty far in minor league baseball from what i understand, and he's astonishingly smooth and smart between the foul lines at softball games.

so anyway, the band was comprised this time by dan cantor on the drums, kentucky jim on the upright bass, ken fields on sax, me on organ and of course wolf driving the boat with that voice and that guitar. got into some fun territory, one song practically dissolving into some kind of free jazz/ noise rock exploration while somehow remaining danceable, only to morph back to something dripping with bourbon and blues.

al yelling from the table - "who are these guys?!" and dancing with whomever is nearby.

following the show (leah deemed us the sexiest band she's seen in some time; i won't argue), neil, lexi and i went to S&S for some dinner. excellent food, but as usual we ordered with our eyes and ended up with the inevitable leftovers.

note to self: use the inevitable leftovers somewhere.

today we saw talledega nights: the ballad of ricky bobby, which was quite good. but i don't think it quite reached anchorman's level of hilarity.

but what do i know? today's thrift store diversion netted us austin powers: international man of mystery and batman: the movie - the 1966 adam west/ burt ward movie, also starring friggin' burgess meredith and the rest of the original tv show villains! i'm all excited typing that, so take my taste for what you will.

okay, it's time for dinner. barbecue, i think.

** cue the homer simpson drool sound **

and... cut!

audition time

last night, neil calls me telling me he's got a last minute audition for little shop of horrors! he'd be auditioning for the role of audrey II (the plant), which he is absolutely perfect for. big booming voice, over-the-top silliness factor but still threatening.

(neil is also known as thermos x. pimpington, plus he is my partner in crime -- more appropriately, i'm his straight man -- in larry banilow)

because of the last minute nature of the audition -- "it's tomorrow at 6:45" -- he had no time to prepare anything, and so he thought of singing "crazy little child" by alice cooper, which had been covered by banilow. we already knew it, right?

well, i had to re-remember it.

it didn't take long, but he had to get an mp3 emailed over. i commit everything to memory and, i suppose in order to commit the next show/ series of songs to memory, i can easily lose them again once the need to know them is gone. i sort of soft-memorize them, as it were, like songs written on a chalkboard that's committed to this job and erased at the end of the day.

i'm always juggling multiple chalkboards, too.

the audition went great -- neil has a great presence, so i had no doubt anyway. it was a fun diversion to throw into the week. hopefully he'll find out positively in the next couple of days.

slated for the weekend:

• friday night i'm sitting in on synth with gato malo at the abbey lounge. gato's got a friday night pub stage residency this august, and so i'll pop down there, see who else is in the band and put my own spin on everything. we'll see what happens. i usually strike a kind of eno pose, running the output of wolf's guitar amp through synths and processing it into some strange curtain that hangs behind the band.

• sunday afternoon rehearsal for [munk], with whom i'm going to be playing at bill's bar on august 25th. that's going to be a blast. really great musicians pulled together for the band, and i get to further my whole eno-esque wanderings, triggering loops and putting up more curtains.

• otherwise some mixing for the forthcoming onlyone single, following my red sox and of course hanging with lexi

the brand new blog

so here i am, finally adding a blog again to the site. i'll try to add to it rather regularly.

tonight i'm meeting with johnny from anushka pop, who's also a photographer, to do some photos in my studio. very excited about this, as i've been wanting to get some decent photos in the studio for awhile. probably since i broke it down, added some new gear and rebuilt it in another room.

you know what? i really don't have anything more to say right now... this is just to launch the new blog. testing... testing... the test begins... NOW!