Don't Write Well, Advice for Aspiring Writers

Meetings with Remarkable Men, Part 2

2009-01-18T17:28:00.000-08:00

I want to start with a guy who I met just a few times, who was part of my rpg-group-Scot's group of childhood friends. He and his brother's names both started with C., and if anyone was smarter than my gentle giant friend who was all smart than it was these two. The family just had the right genes for the right sense of smarts. I remember pretty clearly now the couple of times I met him, and it was again - Mr. Shortbus who was the reason I never met him any more times.

The thing about C., the first son was his ability to play Warhammer. Trust me, he had brains in plenty of other departments, and I think still that he was smarter than me, but man when he would start at Warhammer. I may have mentioned that in WH40K at the time, Chaos was the most powerful army - by far.

The problem was that the Chaos army was impossible to play. The units were major expensive, and the stats made no sense. I took one look at a Chaos Marine Warp card, as each Chaos Marine was to individual to really make the Codex, and my first thought was, "What are these stats? How do you field these units?" The Chaos Marines were the cheapest Chaos unit, and it was obvious from the stats that they played nothing like a normal Space Marine.

Another funny one was the Slaanesh figurine. Slaanesh was a hugely powerful and expensive character fig, but no one but this C. ever fielded it without losing it as soon as it was fired on. I called it, "the Void Devourer of Tactical Marine Squads." In general the easiest way to play WH40K was to play Space Marines and field mostly Tac' Squads, but you didn't do that against C., because as if by magic, Slaanesh devoured every Tac' Squad on the board before you could blink an eye.

The thing was that by the time I met C. he was like 15 or 16, and people didn't want to play WH40K against him because he ate them up so bad. Just devoured them into the Warp. He was better at Warhammer Fantasy - even at the time - which by most 'HammerZealots reckoning is a much better game. He rarely lost a fig, played expensive units over quantity, played only weird armies and weird units - and it was just unreal. C. would never have sharked people unless it was for a reason besides money, but he could have made a large income on sharking people at 'Hammer.

So back to Mr. Shortbus. He always called the Chaos army, "gay," and I'm sure that Golden Porker was feebly trying to imply that C. was, "gay." Looking back now, I would have reasoned with the Golden Porker. "Erm... Chaos is the most powerful army, but no one I've ever met other than C. can figure out how to play that army. Stop putting C. down because 'Hammer is his best material." (It was at the time, he was 15 or 16.)

Anyway, Golden Porkers aren't capable of learning, but at least a strong statement could have been made at a more appropriate time. Another thing to mention is that I think both the CB's could do anything I do better than me, if it was where they focused their efforts. They have simply chosen different places to put there efforts. My gentle giant buddy - AM - could wax me in any category - I'm sure - if he wasn't so busy on other projects.

I remember AM sitting with the micro and maco soldering irons and the Radio Shack transistors and making solid-state guitar pedals right from the perf-board that were better than the analogs and the digi's sold on the market. Further, I was a child musical prodigy, but at 15 or so, he had a better ear than me and some skills that I didn't have.

Last time I spoke with him - and between Golden Porker and my own mistakes - plus he gets 200 emails a day and is working on projects that pay money - he said that he had given up the muse of music for the muse of coding. He let me know he cared - after all that went down - and took time from 200 emails a day to send those emails that meant a ton to me for no money down, because that is AM. That is the kind of man he is.

Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to have been born all-heart. I was a lot less hard-edged back even 4 years ago, but I was born to make war, and always was. Experience has hardened everybody, even AM, but I started out as a boy - born to make war.

I guess we need both types of people in the world, but man - I try to imagine AM going "You fouled up, and I'm racked for time, but I'll send you two emails letting you know I care, buddy." He also explained that he would like to send emails back and forth, but even with all the bad-blood, the big reason he couldn't correspond was that he simply didn't have the time to do it.

That was real. Even with all the congealed blood and rotting corpses underneath my bed, he would have corresponded except that - mostly - he just didn't have the time. Alright, final thing. Get this, and then I want to do a real bizarre Optik at the, "Mirror,"-blog.

Someone said to me who knew the Golden Porker from WoW, just WoW, not in person, that in his opinion the Golden Porker was the most feeble-minded and most perverted individual who had ever lived on the planet Earth. That stung, but instantly I thought - "Erm... that might actually be real, I know that guy pretty well."

I can't talk about even the few of the most heinous events I do know about, but what went down with the Golden Hippo was so bad that it pales the mind. I can't talk about it because people let their guard down and got hit by this feeble-minded, fat, weakling, because they didn't realize that they needed to be on guard around something that can barely move and talk as well as your local farm-heifer. The whole world would eat me alive if I even slipped about what went down.

I'm powerful as hell, and I mean that in every sense, but if the whole world goes against me - I'll still fry. Plus, I don't want to make it any worse than it already is. I'd like to be a healing warrior and not a destructive one. I don't want to fry people all over the place. I'd like to benefit valuable people a bit with what I've got to give.

Further, the Golden Hippo has never hit me the way he did some others, because I put the fear in him quick. So when I get thinking creative and smelling his baby-powder and feces, I realize that there are a handful of people who get to draw straws as to who gets their turn first.That isn't me. I'm not even in line for a straw.

If the Golden Hippo sees it, look at the profile pic and pretend you didn't see next time I have to smell dove bars and crap. Further, you're not dead because you haven't suffered enough to die yet, and that is the one and only one reason why. Everyone feels that way. By the way, for those with beef at the albino hippo - who doesn't got beef? - go talk to the CB's or AM if you can turn them up, as they're smart people and might have some creative ideas. I'm not sure who all gets a straw, but I'm not touching dove-poo, because a lot of people get to go first. As the recommendation of a warrior - apply the pressure hard, but don't let him die of shock.

I just realized that I might be broaching blogspot guidelines with a few of the recent ones. I'll tell you - what makes sense to me is to post this because it seems important and then let the site decide. If my pages on the site go down then I'll wait a few months and start over with a bit more discretion. So there we are. I'll go over to to the mirror and do something I want to do, and I'm trying to say it right without going hog-wild. Lay-tah.

More thoughts on the Human Tribe, Meetings with Remarkable Men

2009-01-11T00:07:00.000-08:00

In sociology today, what everyone teaches is that no matter what your ethnicity, if you lived in a certain cultural environment, then you would be just the same as anyone else. To me - this is an apotheosis of bigotry. It is real that even though there are a broad range of human phenotypes - displayed characteristics - that across the globe - human genotypes differ hardly at all.

Blood type, which is probably the most significant measurable human genotype differs hardly at all across the globe, whether in Norway, Kenya, or Beijing. Yet - I feel human lineage and geneaology have an incredible effect on human character. I do not rule out any ethnicity simply as a category, and have met remarkable men and women of any ethnicity you might name. To treat people with only the prejudice that I will measure them as I meet them is a difficult task, but it has given me many gifts in life, and I continue to measure people in this way.

I want to start with two Scots I knew, of two very different characters, but also similar in some way. First I just want to talk about visiting Scotland. Most of the Scots I met in Scotland were quite crude, and proper drunk also seemed to be an average. However, even crude and proper drunk, they were mannerly and seemed to be on average - good people.

Edinburgh, Scotland was one of the most beautiful and cleanest cities I have ever visited. Everything is well-attended and incredibly green. It is mostly so green because it rains about three-quarters of the year. I have a lot of Scotland stories, and it isn't one of my tribes, but this is great material I've collected. So let me start with our first remarkable man.

I was in group-therapy with a guy of true Scottish descent. He was five feet six inches tops, and couldn't have weighed more than a hundred pounds. He had that true Scottish coppery-hair mixed with a lot of other colors. He didn't dye it, and he wore it long even though he was balding, just to be an SOB. That was exactly why he did it.

He had worked in brick-laying for at least 15 years. When he was angry, it was as if that coppery-hair was rising off his head. His face and ears were red, and it was as if flames were rising out of his scalp. My thought would be, "You'd better clamp that trap shut, because a modern Cossack is about to commit fiery murder." I can fight, but I would not tangle with a modern Cossack who can survive laying bricks for 15 years.

It is no wonder to me that the Roman legions were so afraid of the Scots, after meeting that man. The legions usually eventually won over anyone they fought, but they built a miniature wall of China - Hadrian's wall - to prevent having to skirmish with the Scots. I visited Hadrian's wall, and you are in this gloomy, cold place of rocks, crags, and a little brush and moss. Then the legions would find their guards at the wall disappearing.

Then a few weeks or a month later, they would find their brother legionaire's corpse lying around somewhere. Between that environment and the consistent loss of troops, the legions imagined the Scots and their Cossacks as demons rather than human beings. It was an unpleasant emotional experience for the guards of Hadrian's wall. Being sent to Hadrian's wall was like being sent to the Russian front.

It was no wonder that this man in my group was in psychiatric treatment. You do not lay bricks for 15 years without permanently damaging your body. Also, we discussed paganism a great deal, and a Scot is a pagan, no matter how you slice the pie. I remember once that this friend of mine was in group when I later talked about being Christian. I discussed it with the man and he tells me, "I didn't think you were being a liar. I know what you mean." That is brotherhood.

The man also had a wonderful Irish Setter. The Irish Setter is a breed that is usually so inbred as to cause a lot of trouble, and it is a problem breed in the AKC. The only good thing you can say about an inbred Irish Setter is that they are usually dumb and sluggish instead of vicious. A well-bred Irish Setter is worth thousands of dollars, and this man picked up an Irish Setter that was a real dog for very little money.

That was a durned good dog, and it could pick out a malignant character that was threatening its master from 2 miles away. The man had to fight to keep the dog, because malignant characters wanted it taken out of his home. I have a great story from the Hopi tradition about dogs that I've re-worked, but we'll do that at another time. A funny and very true story about humans and dogs.

So my next friend who was a Scot was a friend in my role-playing group. My friend was a very different looking sort of Scot. He was fairly tall and built with a heavy-bone structure, and he had very coarse, darkish-brown hair. His hair caused him no end of trouble. He also struggled a great deal with his weight. His weight was his biggest difficulty in life, and all of his friends watched him as he struggled and we worried about him.

This Scot had done a great deal of work on his geneaology, and he was in fact descended directly from a line of Cossacks. The Cossacks were used as shock-troops by the Scots, and when I talk about how the Scots were mean with a claymore, that was not everything with the Scots and the Cossacks. The thing about this Scot is that there was nothing mean about him. He carried himself with a lot of sensitivity and kindness.

We had a particular member of this group - and anyone who knows my history will know who - who used to frequently remark that "This Scot is so good with women because he acts gay." I can only wish that I had matched this hair-raising individual's number quicker, as it now becomes apparent how bad the situation was. The fact is, my direct response to that statement today would be, "First, Mr. Short-bus, this Scot acts so sensitive and kind because he is a sensitive and kind man. Second, women do appreciate such kindness and sensitivity. In fact, even though we're this Scot's friend - I count him as a brother - we appreciate it that he is so sincere and kind. Third, Mr. Born-to-Lose, this Scot struggles with his weight but he is very good-looking. Fourth, you don't mess with a good man that way - particularly when he has the blood of a Cossack in his veins."

I bet you this hair-raising individual has had a real day of reckoning, or if he hasn't yet - it is in his future. It occurs to me now that this Scot's own hair was beginning to stand on end some days, and flames were rising from his scalp, but it was very subtle, and boy is Mr. Short-bus going to pay. Another point to make is that this Scot loved the women he matched with, and even if these were not traditional or easy relationships, they lasted a fairly long time, and he cared for these women. Mr. Short-bus will never understand what that might mean. You were born-to-lose, and you will never understand the meaning of that.

We'll close this article, but I do want to talk about some other remarkable people I've met at a later date. One thing to remember here is simply this - this Scot was all-heart, and he wants the individual I met - dead. He also wants him dead after he writhes in agony plenty long-enough - first. That is not normal for a man who is all-heart, even if he has Cossack blood. I have another friend from High School - one of the gentlest giants you could ever meet - a genius and gentle to the point beyond belief - and he wants this guy dead in the same way.

This born-loser and I have a connection with each other that is a shame on me, and there is nothing else I can say. Life moves on, but when two good men with that kind of heart want to twist you around in a torture chamber - and want to make sure you don't die too fast under duress - then you are a significant piece of human-waste. Every man becomes a Mongol when faced with that kind of enemy.

As a man, a situation like this becomes intense, and you begin to smell the naphtha, envision burning villages, and start looking for a stout spear. It is part of being a man. Still - there is no pride in violence, and we all move on. Life was never what anyone envisioned it would be, and a good man moves on.

We'll talk the "dog story," next. I do need a break from writing though, because this material is painful for me to discuss. However, I will return shortly.

More on the Human Tribe, Some Thoughts on Asia

2009-01-10T22:29:00.000-08:00

Let me start with some thoughts on Japan, and remember, there is no way for me as an American to politely discuss Japan, but I want to put some things down here. We'll start with a sort of simple story, after first discussing a term. The term is, gaijin, and the meaning is somewhere around, "dirty foreigner."

In Japan today, people do not want to be bigots - and that is average. For an average Japanese person to want to change anything about being Japanese is a massive deal. However, it is so ingrained in the Japanese character to hate anything that isn't Japanese - that it defies the mind. They have as many as a hundred or more polite euphemisms for gaijin, but they all essentially mean that you are a dirty foreigner. Further, as an American, you are the worst possible gaijin of gaijin, and we will go on to explain why through a story.

In the most traditional Shinto belief, the central and most sacred thing is the land of Japan. As harsh as the Japanese Isles are, they are the most sacred thing in traditional Japanese belief. In the most traditional Japanese belief, if you were Japanese and were not buried in Japanese soil - then you went to hell. There were no exceptions. This belief is not as widely held in Japan today, but it is the most traditional Japanese belief.

So - you are a tourist in Japan. You are the member of a nation who humiliated the Japanese in defeat, and dropped large weapons that decimated large numbers of Japanese people, and poisoned some of their sacred land. You are on their soil, and in the minds of almost every Japanese person, you deserve to die. They would slay you immediately without a mark on their conscience, except for one reason. It isn't good manners to slay you. It is improper form. It is disrespectful.

This is why you go to Japan as a tourist in a group, you stick with the group, and you mind your pint's and quart's when you are visiting there. You might disappear wandering around alone, and the American embassy would have trouble finding what is left of you if you were to disappear. The fact is that the average Japanese person doesn't think this is a good thing, but the fact is also that they would like you dead - particularly as an American - because you dare to step foot on Japanese soil after what has happened in history.

This is one reason our world is so fouled up today. No one can forgive or forget what has gone on in our history. This is not confined to the Japanese. None of us can forgive or forget, and so we're hacking at each other with our modern versions of machetes, though we all know that this is not the way the world should be.

The average Japanese person I have met on the Internet is far superior to the average American wandering our nation. This is because the average Japanese person has little luxury. Their lives are very hard. Further, in Japan, everyone lives at close-quarters, and has for many centuries, so manners are incredibly important. The intense concentration of the Japanese on manners makes their lives - livable.

I saw this when I visited England and Scotland as well. People live in close-quarters in England, so manners allow their lives to be livable, and so manners are an expectation in England, rather than icing on the cake. Familiarity does often breed contempt, and many in England see their country going to hell in a hand-basket, but what I experienced in England was a very orderly and mannerly world.

We do exactly the same in America. The gifts we do have we do not notice, and we see all of the American disorders taking us down into an abyss. There is truth to that, but that isn't everything - even about America.

Another story is one I tell very often. I had met a Japanese man on the 'Net, and we corresponded via email for a few months. One other very Japanese trait is to speak very indirectly. That is good manners in Japan. However, I understand indirection pretty well, and the message was, you are an American, and that makes you a take-caker among gaijin. However, we corresponded for some time, and in the end, the man told me that he counted me as a friend.

A thing about the Japanese is that no matter how indirect they are, they almost never lie. They say what they mean, even if they are being oblique in their manner of stating it. Further, if a statement is important, they are deadly serious about the statement. We might try being so sincere in America today.

So - imagine - I am a take-caker America among gaijin, from a nation that humiliated and defiled the Japanese people and their sacred land. I am friend to this man. These are amazing life-experiences that mean so much, even if I no longer correspond with the man anymore. I also recall that one time I deeply offended the man.

I still do not know what I had said to offend the man so badly. The man was ready to find a good japanese saber, fly to America, and hack me into small pieces. Not only was I unaware of what had offended him so badly, but this is a very average Japanese trait. This is true of both Japanese men and women. When a Japanese person goes on the offensive, you better beware. They are a fierce people. A wonderful people, but not to be toyed with.

I won't go into details, but stop at a local library and find a book of photography concerning the Pacific campaign in the second world war. It is a show-stopper. The Japanese fought like demons to defeat us as "dirty Americans," and we were forced to use our own demonic tactics to defeat them. No one can forget. We all want vengeance for what has happened. Our world is a big screw-up because of this desire for revenge.

Let me tell another story about the Buddha. In most ways, Buddhist religion views the first GuatmanBuddha in a way not dissimilar to the way Christians view Jesus. Buddha was also a martyr. However, the most traditional story about Buddha's martyrdom says something about the Asian mind that is not our Western ideal.

The story goes like this. Buddha preached a strict vegetarian diet. He is invited to a meal by a nobleman. Buddha decides that it will be good manners to attend the meal. He arrives at the meal, and the man is making a mockery of him. He has provided pork at the meal. Remember, pork was not very safe to eat in an older civilization.

Now - even though the man is making a mockery of him, if Buddha is to retain good form and have proper manners - he must eat the pork to respect the man's hospitality. So - Buddha eats the pork, gets food poisoning and dies. He was martyred over good manners. This is Asia!

Another wonderful example of the Asian ideal comes from the early Vedas. Across the large Asian geography, the Vedas are revered, although the interpretation of what this reverence means varies a great deal. This is one of the creation stories of the Vedas, and it is not the most important creation story, but it is a very early and sacred one.

So we have Brahma, the creator-god, an archetypal bearded old man wandering his pardisical garden. The irony seems to be that Brahma has gotten rather lazy, and he decides to lounge in a pool in this garden and falls asleep. He is asleep so long that a lotus-seed makes its way into his navel, and he is unaware that the seed has sprouted and bloomed.

In the bloom of this lotus flower that is in the navel of the creator-god is the middle-earth that we live in. The next irony is a later tale of apocalypse, where the creator-god wakes up from his lounging in the pool, plucks the lotus flower from his navel in irritation, and our entire world ends. This tale seems to the Western mind to simply be ironic, comical, and surrealistic. It is considered to be ironic, comical and surreal in Asia, but it is also a sacred story.

This is another one of our screw-ups in the post-modern world, because though we are still hacking at each other with our modern versions of machetes over our disagreements and for revenge - we are also attempting to dialogue about our differences. What makes this attempt at dialogue so difficult ought to be plain from these two stories. The great all-father of their creation myth will unintentionally grow our entire universe from his navel as a flower while he lounges, then bring on the apocalypse by irritably plucking this flower from his navel. The founder of a religious tradition is martyred over good mannners.

This is not the Western mind. So we dialogue with each other without much success so frequently because we simply can't understand each other - no matter what language we are speaking to each other in. To finish up this particular article, let me say something else. In general "post-modern," is a category used to critique our current state of affairs, which is not a pleasant state of affairs.

However, we have made perhaps one and only one improvement in our post-modern age. That is - that because there is so much diffusion of different ideals among ourselves, that we have begun to consider that our way of thinking is not the only way of thinking. At least we can consider that, no matter how badly we want our vengeance.

As far as we know, no culture in the world before us ever considered that other ways of doing things besides their own might have some value. So, while post-modernism is a critique of a sad state of affairs, we might want to have some pride as post-moderns that we can say to a very alien creation-myth, "That tale makes very little sense to me, but I can see that the tale has some value."

It could be a sign of good things to come, instead of a descent of our world into an abyss. No one can see into the future in that way - that was never the meaning of, "prophecy," in any Western tradition, but it could be a ray of hope. The next article is going to be fun, and it will be at this blog. You'll see.

MEtAL! A Hack at the Catalog

2009-01-06T19:07:00.000-08:00

Metal is a big deal for adolescents, and every time I run into one who is metal-ing, I try to remember that I was once an adolescent too, and 10 years ago was when I was 6 or 7 years old. No need to be a jerk about the behavior. Still - when someone gets uppity with me about metal, I'll ask a question - so you're into Industrial - ever heard Ministry or Skinny Puppy? So you know metal, ever heard of thrash and "Kill Em' All" - ?

In terms of metal, Led Zeppelin was kind of the kick-start, but the three big "proto-metal," groups were Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, and Iron Maiden. None of those groups exactly sounds like metal, but this is the roots of the genre. Sabbath has a killer back-catalog, "Fairies Wear Boots" - Judas Priest was sort of like a Clash-influenced ancestor of Tool, and Iron Maiden was fronted by an operatic tenor. They are all killer groups, and a few tracks can be brought down from Gnutella. If you are a real metal-head, grab their catalog on disc, as it will be sure to inspire and inform you in the direction you might want to take off.

Let us start with Industrial, since that is a real big fad these days. If we want to be real technical, what most people call Industrial today is, "Industrial Metal." The oldest-old-skool "Industrial," was a form of electronica. A lot like Reese Saunderson, this guy who performed as "Eraserhead," in Detroit would run some modules and pan the pots, and then include sounds drawn from tape loops.

Eraserhead was the worst warp-head who ever performed. The luude-swillers started coming to his shows, and he was freaking them to the gates of hell on luudes, and then the tweakers started coming to prove people wrong that the Eraserhead was that hard. The tweakers would be running around urinating themselves trying to find the exit to the club in about 15 minutes.

There are almost no recordings around of Eraserhead's peformances, but I've heard a few scraps. It's obvious that the guy was hitting drugs that the best piplines in the world have never heard of. Remember, in some ways this is funny, but you don't run freakers, and Eraserhead was the king of freakers.

The next move in Industrial would have been what most people would tag as, "darksynth," or "darkwave," or "goth-synth," or "goth-wave." The big collective was Skinny Puppy, and "Addiction," and "Assimilate," and "WarlockED," remain some incredibly well-produced tracks. Also, Skinny Puppy ran lives shows better than anything you can get on recording. Skinny Puppy was a freak, but I've got some respect for that group. Eraserhead can burn in hell - and if there is no hell - there ought to be one for Eraserhead - or at least according to the tales people tell.

There were other groups like Front 242 or Meatbeat Manifesto, and I've managed to pull a few of those tracks down a few times. I generally do a spring-cleaning of my iTunes folder periodically, because my OS X BSD gets whiny if my iTunes folder gets too big. I have a lot less problems since I switched from Limewire to Cabos, but since I can grab it again off of Gnutella if I want to hear it again, a lot of things go into the trash and get dumped in order to keep my spaceball-pod in operation.

The next big collective would be KMFDM. The head of the collective was this German guy named Schorer, and he could produce stuff on 80's equipment that people can't produce today. The best tracks come off of the "Symbols," album, and "Megalomaniac," is the real pick. The KMFDM collective had a lot of Nazi overtones, but they were so incredible. One of their songs, "Sucks," mocks their own collective for programming and producing everything so that they can make money without having to work too hard. Another great track was a mid-90's remix of Skinny Puppy's, "Addiction," by the collective, and that track is the best "gothic-electronica," piece ever produced, although it does have a couple of nearly-rans.

KMFDM had already started using sampled guitars, and then in 90 or 91, "Psalm 69," by Ministry came out. First, Ministry had done some glam versions of goth-synth, and the almost unknown, "Twitch," is actually a landmark album. Psalm 69 was an assault on New-Wave Right-Wing Christianity. "N.W.O," and "Just One Fix," are still some of the hardest and best Industrial Metal tracks ever, but fair warning - this is a black album - very - very - sinister. In particular the title track is a monster, and I laugh at it some days - but you've been given a fair warning. So - "Psalm 69," is the first true Industrial Metal album.

I remember a show where a punk-band pulled off NWO. NWO isn't tough, except to get the speed-riff right you've got to have an incredibly fast right-hand. All of us oldster's started chanting, "Praise Jesus," while the song went off like a bang, and you'd have to know Ministry to understand the joke.

If we're talking the first true metal record, it would be, "Kill 'Em All," by Metallica, which was like 86? - 88? - and that was the proto-typical thrash-metal album. Metallica's later work is totally different - and people always want to say, "sold-out." Okay - but if you have the chance to grab for big g's, pay your taxes and put it in the bank? - I myself might be willing to grab at the chance.

"Kill 'Em All," and "Ride the Lightning," and "Master of Puppets," were the albums, and what you hear there establishes the metal genre. There were other thrash groups, but Metallica reigned supreme in the thrash-scene. You also might want to check out "...And Justice for All," a progressive-metal album, and then "The Black Album," their big-seller, does have some great songs on it.

That is really the history section, and I'd like to mention just a couple of other groups. It's occurring to me I may be doubling material again. Oh well. Faith No More, the oldest mass-market Mike Patton group, "Angel Dust," being the album, and "Smaller and Smaller," being the best metal track on the album. They ran a keyboardist, but they are not to be scoffed at. There are other tracks, and you can go looking for those.

Zao, an indie-Christian group that pretty much started metalcore - although they're so hard that most people tag it, "death-core." The pick tracks are "Rising End," and "Lies of Serpents, A River of Tears." Meshuggah, which I mentioned earlier, the Swedish Aryan-metal band with a Yiddish name, the pick album being Chaosphere, and the pick tracks being, "Chaosphere," and "New Millenium Cyanide Christ."

Anthrax is a band that was doing rap-metal in the late 80's. Megadeth, which was Dave Mustaine's money-maker. Mustaine was a great guitarist, who said before Megadeth broke up that he was so sick of music that he didn't even want to turn on a record, but he's in recovery now and works as a studio-session chip-puncher. He is a big proponent of the digital Gibson guitar, which is one heck of a runner, and is also a real SOB to run.

Korn. Life is Peachy. They were actually good when they were underground. The style is pretty different from most metal, because the bass-lines are independent instead of locking with the rhythm guitar riffs. Slipknot. All the kids were raving a few years ago, and I found a cut by the group called, "Duality," that is total tech-awesome, and hints to me that they may have been Christian-metal. Oh and Sepultura. DO IT. ROOTS! Sepultura may be one of my tribes, even though I'm not really a metal-neon.

Fear Factory, just grab a track or two and see what you think, and get the catalog if you like it. Psychedelic glam, horror metal, some electronic elements. Nice stuff. White Zombie. "More Human than Human." Beware, but its a pick track.

Last but not least, the Tool. First off, "Track #1," (not the real name) and Aenima are the two best melodi-core songs ever done. Second, Aenima is the best metalcore album ever cut, just above Zao's "Serpent and Tears." Third, Aenima is some diseased garbage. You'll get leprosy listening to that stuff.

However, I admit to listening guiltily to the stuff because it's so METAL AWESOME - at least from time to time. The follow-up, "Lateralus," is good, but we're moving into progressive-rock territory rather than metal. It's up to you, but look out for sciatica if you buy Aenima or even try a few cuts off of the album.

Some New Approaches To Guitar, Lake Style, Part 1

2009-01-06T17:41:00.000-08:00

I've decided that what I'm going to do is talk about my approach to guitar. First, we have to hit some complex theory about sound acoustics and harmonic overtones, and that is a pain in the hiney to get straight without being overly recondite. Second, I'm still a beginner on guitar, just running my fingers over the board and thinking about what the instrument might mean. However, what I want to try to do is to describe what I've been thinking about with the instrument up to this point, and we'll look at a new breakthrough I just made with an instrument that is a lovable illegitimate problem-child.

So we'll start with what is called, Fripp Standard Tuning. Now, if you tune Fripp-azoid, you have to use the right string tensions, and you need to heavily adjust your bridge and truss, because the upper course are tuned very high in comparison to standard tuning. Really, the Fripp-azoid standard works better on a guitar custom-made for the tuning.

The tuning has some real nice advantages, but remember, a standard guitar with too much tension between bridge, nut and truss can become a destroyed guitar incredibly rapidly. If you want to try the tuning, you may want to go to a good guitar shop and have them adjust it custom, if you can't afford the custom guitar. Also, it would be good to detune the courses before you put the guitar in the case, so that the tensions are relaxed while the guitar is being stored. This stuff causes all kinds of problems, but the Fripp-azoid was the bouncing off point for my own thoughts.

So, the tuning: C2 G2 D3 A3 E4 G4. The advantage of the Fripp-azoid Standard is that you can work in fifths across the board, and the minor-third caveat at the top also makes lead-lines easy to play. Fripp has played almost nothing but the Fripp-azoid for most of his Crim' career on electric guitar, and continues to play it in his work on acoustic guitar. Just remember, applying the Fripp-azoid can be a great way to destroy a guitar.

If you value your instrument, then you need to carefully consider how to properly apply the Fripp-azoid to the instrument. You should never apply the Fripp-azoid to a guitar with a fixed-bridge, unless it is custom-made for the tuning. Say farewell to your standard dreadnought.

Harmonics, Acoustics, and Tuning a Guitar

This is the tough part. We'll try for minimalism, but these are tough concepts. In classical music today, precision instruments in America are tuned to A 440 hz, which is A3, directly in the alto range. In Europe, they tune to an A 435 hz. Now this 5 cents doesn't move you sharp a half-step, although even to my ear, it does sound similar to that. What it actually does is to shift you into a different series of harmonics. If you listen to European classical-music recordings and you're used to American tuning, you can get a bit of an ear-ache listening to the recordings, and I'm sure that is also true in vice-versa.

There are advantages to the 440 A series, and there are advantages to the 435 A series. However, most popular music, even popular music that originates in Europe, tunes to a 440 A. The argument over where to place things with these 5 cents rages on, but for certain types of music, the 435 A series produces a much better sound. Still - let us assume that as a guitarist - you need to tune into the 440 A series.

One of the reasons we tune to this A3 is that it means that all of our overtones in the alto range and above are what are called, "true harmonics." So our resulting higher overtones are simply subdivisions of our fundamental alto A. We want to highlight our melody, and this makes our melodies sound much more clear and tuneful. In the bass-range, we multiply our fundamental A downward, creating, "false harmonics," and this creates a muddy sound in the bass. We have sacrificed the clarity of the bass-range for the clarity of our melodies in the alto and soprano range.

So, if you look back at the tunings that are commonly used in professional-guitar work today, you'll see that not one of them contains a true A3 on the open strings. We have a couple of options if we want to tune into the A3 series. We can tune to a synthetic A3 on the fretboard, which will produce some intonation problems - but can work. The other option is to revise our approach to tuning, and this is another advantage of the Fripp-azoid. You have a true A3 on an open-string - on your 2 string - or in more traditional parlance - on your "second-course."

Revising our Tuning Approach for Guitar

We're going to set out a basic rule for tuning a guitar. You need to tune with a tuning fork. Now, remember, practicality is an issue. If you're at a show, you don't normally have the time to tune with a fork, and its impractical because of the noise in the club as well. So it is often good to have a tuner on your board, and then you can kind of tweak things to get a nice sweet spot with the tuning.

Tuning purely by hertz creates a very brittle sound, so you start out by tuning quick from your digital tuner, and then sweeten her up. This is something else you can use a hognose for, as it is hard to tune from an open-monitor. Keeping things tuned up during a show is pretty important, even if you are going for metal crunch or a hard-rock clash.

It will increase the clarity of your sound a great deal, and most clubs don't run a good PA, and it can save your hiney if you keep things as clear as possible. It is nice to have things as clear as possible in the first place. Still, it really becomes a problem with a muddy PA if you don't sweeten up your tuning between tunes.

So - when you aren't at a gig, you get your guitar out, and you hit the fork, and you tune up. You do this every time you get the guitar out - at least once - whether it sounds in tune or not. Do it multiple times when you're at home for practice. This is a very simple-method of training the ear, and if you keep after it, you can laugh at people with, "perfect-pitch." You will proceed to out-do a good hertz monitor with only your ear.

There are small tuning forks for violins available at your local music-store that strike at an A 440, and they cost maybe 8 or 9 dollars. The sound is not very loud, but they are perfectly fine. If you have the cash, you can shell-out for a proper tuning fork, and those run at least in the hundreds of dollars. I haven't shelled out for one yet, and even though I could use a much louder fork-vibration, the little cheapie-violin fork is working out just fine.

I had come up with a tuning, and it went like this: C2 G2 D3 F3 A4 D4. The advantage over the Fripp-azoid is that we are well within tensions for a standard guitar bridge. Also, the tuning is nearly the same as an old viol tuning. The viol in question was a great deal like a six-string cello. The modern precision-cello is a four-string fretless instrument tuned so: C2 G2 D3 A3.

With a cello you use an A fundamental on your first course, and then tune downward in reverse. The reverse-tuning makes the cello fairly problematic as an instrument, but it is also one of the most beautiful instruments used in standard classical repertoire. The goal with this tuning with an open-A3 is that you will strike your fork, tune your second course, and then tune your lower courses in reverse, and then tune up to your first course.

if you can, find some good string quartet or classical-music that features a cello. You can do a budget recording if you can't afford anything else. I'll see if I can come up with some suggestions for some pieces you might look for on recording.

So I've been running my hands over that tuning with that F on the third course, and I was looking over some things and I came up with a better idea. It is a great deal like a sawmill-tuning, and it places things in a place that is really - really - nice. So after fooling with the problem quite a while, I came up with this: C2 G2 D3 E3 A3 E4.

The only problem is that with a second between the fourth and third course, you get a lot of ninth-clusters with your standard shapes. However, after working over the SOB a great deal, I'm pretty sure I'm sticking with this as the standard-tuning for my principal guitar. The ones I'm planning to tune in other tunings we'll talk about in another article coming up. Next though - we're going to talk metal - and I admit that is not my specialty, but we'll hit what I can, and then we'll probably talk ROCK. So off we go!

Meditations on the Western Tribe

2009-01-04T23:01:00.000-08:00

I cannot remember for the life of me if I've published any of this material - and I'm not going to check! There may be a total repeat of most of this material in another article, and I've just decided not to worry about it. We're going to talk about Classical civilizations, but I want to start from where we originate as a Western culture. Classical civilizations were probably the first time in history in the West when people no longer lived at a subsistence level, as our Appalachians in the last article continue to do. There were superiorities to our civilization in Classical civilizations, some radical parallels, and also - when it comes to engineering - we have changed everything and are far superior.

Let us look back first into the annals of our archaeology in cultural anthropology. Our earliest records in the West are what are called, "Early Hebraic Records," and also the early cuneiform scripts in the Tigris River Valley that is currently in Iran. While the early Hebraic records are pagan, there is already a sense of monotheism developing in these early records. The Hebraides were an apparently very warlike nomadic tribe that lived in the Sinai region, which is one of the worst wastelands on the planet, and apparently always has been.

The cuneiform scripts show both a sense of ancestral worship, and also a pretty interesting cosmology. The Sumer's had one type of deity, whether it was a demi-god, a true deity or an ancestral icon or cultural hero. They simply called all of those a, "spirit." The only differentiation they made between spirits with any regularity was, "clean," and, "unclean." One of the most frequently worshipped spirits of Sumer was the war-spirit Marduk, who - as far as I know - was always referred to as an, "unclean spirit."

The cult of Marduk was one of the worst cults of murder we've ever seen described in history - from what I've read. People hated and feared Marduk in Sumer, and he was only worshipped so much for a reason of geography. Sumer remains one of the most fertile areas of the world, and it was at one time possible to grow incredible agriculture there with no crop rotation for year upon year. This would have made Sumer a place of incredible luxury, except that Sumer has no geographical defenses. So, since the land was so desirable, tribe after tribe waltzed in and destroyed the other tribe utterly for era after era. The conditions of constant war in Sumer were so awful as to be called unlivable in many of the cuneiform scripts.

The place where the Tigris and Euphrates meet is described as the Garden of Eden in the beginning of Genesis, and this is very likely a remnant of some of our oldest Western records. What wound up happening in the West is that the monotheistic bent of the Hebraides records became ascendent. In terms of religion, the three major Western religions are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. All three practice some form of monotheism, meaning that the ideal absolute is a unified creator-god, though in all three religions we see a split between types, names, or even forms of this unified creator-god.

Both sets of our earliest records in the West are probably around 7000 years old, or just a few centuries younger. What comes down to us today in Western Scriptures is most certainly derived from these records, particularly these Hebraic records, although there has been a great deal of transformation of those early records and the inherent ideals contained within them. In the West then, our traditions all stem from what is essentially Hebraic thought, although even the old nations of North Israel and Judea were not exactly what the Hebraides were. The concepts of Sumer were never widely disseminated, although we will see in our discussion of classical civilizations that paganism was widespread in the West.

The next major development in the West comes with the establishment of the Western philosophical tradition, which centered in Greece at around perhaps 2300 or even 2400 years ago. This tradition is largely of Platonic Athens, and is the direct motivation for the formation of the fabulous engineering we are capable of today. Science as a method begins in a very crude fashion at this point, and classical civilization is just around the same age. What we would typically call classical civilizations are Athenian Greece and the Latin Empires up until the formation of Christianity.

The method of classifying lacks some clarity and objectivity, but the basic idea stands that we have in the West a religious tradition that adopted the leanings of this minor Hebraides tribe that wandered this desolate wasteland. Then we have a philosophical tradition that begins with a pre-Platonic philosophy that begins in Athenian Greece. We'll get to more in the next article but those are the things to keep in mind.

Meditations on the Human Tribe

2009-01-04T20:17:00.000-08:00

I thought of another one of my tribes, and really my principal tribe, which is Appalachian, and I thought we might do some culture notes here. Remember, I'm not a bigot, but I have my prejudices and I am no picture of political-correctness. Still, it seems like a good thing to talk about. I was raised in a white, American, middle-class suburban world, but I wasn't a good fit there. As I talked about in an earlier post, I hung with the Puerto Ricans in Middle School, and I'm still proud of my Puerto Rican tribe. Still, I also have an Appalachian identity I think, which may revise some of my earlier statements - but oh swell.

I've done a lot of research on Appalachian life. I have a group of family members - distantly removed on my mother's-mother's side, called the Bucks. The Bucks - this is real - fled to Appalachia during the Whiskey Rebellion, which occurred just after the institution of the U.S. Federal Constitution. The Bucks' family were whiskey distillers, and the government had instituted laws to control and tax the production of whiskey that they took rather great offense to - as most whiskey producers did at the time. Most of those whiskey distillers were in Kentucky, and those who weren't killed in the conflict either decided to comply or fled to the hills.

The Bucks I derive from moved down from the hills and home-steaded in Illinois. They still produce some batches of whiskey and rye for themselves. "Whiskey and rye," is a corn-based sour-mash whiskey that has some handfuls of rye seeds thrown into the ferment. Rye produces ergot-compounds when it ferments, which makes whiskey and rye a bit more than a whiskey treat. It makes it a powerful hallucinogenic draught.

Consequently, the whole Buck family is out of their minds. I went to a family reunion at the Vet Club with my mother one year, and they were hiding the stash of whiskey and rye and smoking cartons of non-filter government issue cigarettes - the kind that say "Cigarettes" in black plain-font on the side. There was also a family member who knew how to make real red-velvet cake with cream-icing. The icing probably contained some lard, and was fabulous even though it tasted like government-issue cigarettes. The clouds of smoke were so heavy that I ate some dirty wings and velvet cake and left in less than an hour, but the experience was one not to be missed. I avoided the whiskey and rye.

Further, the Bucks may be out of their minds and smoke non-filters by the carton, but they live for years beyond the average age of a middle-class suburbanite. Many of them live well into their 90's. When I first saw, "Grumpy Old Men," and the old man is sitting on the bench proclaiming, "Those idiot doctors! I eat bacon and eggs fried in bacon-grease for breakfast, a bacon-sandwich fried in bacon-grease for lunch, and I drink my dinner, and I've outlived 10 of those doctors!" - that is Appalachia. It sums up every word of the Appalachian tribe. When I saw that scene, I nearly fell on the floor thinking of Daddy Buck, the scandal of Penfield, Illinois, stashing his whiskey and rye and stolen cigarettes and probably eating lard and bacon grease when he did't drink his meal. Daddy Buck lived to be somewhere around 93.

Like most Appalachians, the Bucks are of Scotch-Irish descent, and other than the drinking stories - they told a lot of traditional Appalachian folktales that go back to that Scotch-Irish syncretism and living in the hills. I was not able to catch too much more than the drinking stories, but I do remember the sort of atmosphere. Some of the interest I've taken in folk-music, like that "old-grass," I talked about, is derived or directly comes from the history of that Scotch-Irish meld.

Life in the foothills of Appalachia is not easy, and what I'm going to tell you may shock you, but for most of history, some similar pattern was lived by nearly all of humanity. The center of most communities in Appalachia is Baptistry. It is a very strict form of Baptistry. There is no infant baptism allowed. When a young man or woman - who survives - gets to be about 13 or 14, they talk to the minister, and they are asked if they feel called to be Christian. If they do, then they are baptized and given a new baptismal name. Saying no means exile from the community, and this is nearly entirely absolute.

Most people are commonly referred to by some nickname, "Peg," or "Sue," or "Bud," or "Hank," but your second name is considered your actual name. Also, this is no "rinse-and-repeat," form of Baptistry. Baptism is the central piece of Appalachian life, other than marriage, and a second baptism will lead to exile or sometimes - death.

If you are a member of the community, you show up at Church, at the risk of fantastic persecution. The minister is the head of the community, and the local government generally meets and acts through the Church. There will be one Church, and one minister, and sometimes a minister-in-training. There will be some local law authority, and they will have uniforms made by the community or purchased somewhere - but they generally drive around in jalopy's. Generally the only people that will have access to a car will be the minister and the local law enforcement.

Women have a lot of power in Appalachian communities, but they are so constantly pregnant that those who live to be married don't live much longer. Divorce is also heavily persecuted, and legal-separation status is not an option. It is real that if a woman were to walk out of a marriage in Appalachia and not exit the community - sure they will persecute her to death. However, the other philosophy is that if the woman walked out - then you as a man were irresponsible for your home, and you are going to be the one who pays - big time. You better steal a jalopy or have the endurance to run to more civilized land, or you are going to be very - very sorry.

Since women die so frequently in childbirth, the men will take a wife after she dies, and this cycle continues. A man who manages to live to advanced age may have 20 or more children, and they will be farmed out into the community. If you asked a man from this culture about the practice, he might say, "I shor' do miss my first wife. No good man forgets his first wun'."

People live from a vegetable garden, some light livestock, and some hunting and gathering. They make most of what they need, but they usually buy the materials from a place that sells industrial goods. They are constantly hungry.

The other thing is that people of Appalachia are incredibly hospitable and kind if they feel you can be trusted. If you enter such a community - I do not advise it - then even though you would always be an outsider, if they felt you could be trusted they would go out of their way to make sure you survived. However, most people who are not born into this culture arrive on the run from the law. The American government does not control Appalachia well, and most people know that, and a criminal intent is not a good intent to take to the hills.

The community will wait for some nastiness to develop, then persecute the person, and then they take care of them - in a different manner. The most common solution is to beat the person near to death and drop them somewhere where they will be found by the civilized. There are other much more nasty solutions, though the reality is that they are rarely practiced.

Two other problems are when a community is poisoned - usually by syphilis. An already savage life becomes a riot of leprous individuals killing each other, and the end result is the destruction of the entire community. Another thing is that in Appalachian tradition, you do not go up into the higher parts of the Appalachian mountains. The Appalachian mountains are not much more than large hills. They are very old mountain formations. Appalachians do tell tall-tales - I love to tell tall-tales - but one of the more reality-based traditions seems to be, "the hill people."

Apparently there are people who live high up on the Appalachian mountains, and the sightings of them - according to Appalachians - are of people of total madness and deformity. The trope is, "You go up any further and you don't come down." Appalachians are insular, and I understand - utter shock and horror - but many people will live the way of life rather than move to civilization. Some of that is upbringing, and some of it is that the lifestyle does have some value. "Don't rise above your raisin's," is another common Appalachian trope.

The only person who can read in the community is usually the minister. There is one book allowed in the entire community - usually - and it is almost always the King James Bible. It can be okay to visit Appalachia - I haven't - but you can be in danger if you bring any books there other than the Bible, and probably if it isn't only that version, "up thar' into thar' hills."

Because the American government has so much trouble controlling Appalachia, the government may never be able to prosecute your killer or even find your body if things get hostile. Appalachians don't mind a visit, but don't go alone, and be respectful. Further, it is really better to stay away, and I've moved to do so over the years - although to, "find my rutt's" (there is no such diphthong in English) would be a great experience for me.

I'll be back. I might try the metal article, or I might talk about Classical civilizations, as I've studied that stuffin' as well over the years. We'll see. I need a break and some food-age. LOL!

More ELM Music

2008-12-31T18:44:00.000-08:00

It occurred to me just a moment ago that even though I don't have anywhere near all of my loose ends tied up, that it might be fun to talk about some of the other ELM music I enjoy. It is a quarter 'til ten where I am, and I'm looking forward to a New Year. Today was kind of whonky, but I'm getting the excitement I get every year as I starting waiting for the ball to drop in New York City. I'm going to do a nice New Year's post once the time arrives, after I call Mom and Dad and wake them up like I do every year. I also want to do a thing on hard-rock, and then maybe metal. I know post-rock like the back of my hand, but metal is a catalogue that I'm still digging into. Still, we can hit some high-points.

Let us start by talking about Radiohead. First, Radiohead has a bad reputation, so let us get the critique out of the way, and then talk about some really great music they've made. The simple critique is that their albums are so incredibly morose. That would be the basic problem. The thing is, what Radiohead did with, "Kid A," and "Amnesiac," and then "Hail to the Thief," is one of the most incredible electronic productions ever done.

All three albums are fairly continuous. The controversial album title for, "Hail to the Thief," was drawn from a late 19th-century American election that is well-known to have been fixed. I was taught about the event in Advanced Prepartory Civics in High School. Of course, the implication of a relationship to modern day elections was intended, but was not meant to be confined to the Bush Administration.

Some pick tracks off of these records are, "Idioteque," which features a very strange mangling of a breakbeat that can't really be danced to, "Dollars and Cents," and "Pyramid Song," and "Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box," and last but definitely not least, "Like Spinning Plates." The mastermind behind Radiohead is their lead guitarist, who has some kind of advanced music degree, and currently does some string arrangements for the BBC network, and these albums contain an intense sophistication, as well as a very striking commentary on the post-modern condition.

Just for those who haven't done much in the way of sociology or philosophy credits, the post-modern condition would be defined roughly as, "a world where all forms of modernism have been tried and have failed, and where modernism has not been left behind."

The new "In Rainbows," LP was not great, but - Radiohead was trying to go back to, or even really go in a new direction - with music played live on live instruments. Radiohead can play their instruments, and even the Kid A series includes quite a bit of live performance. "In Rainbows," didn't work as an album, but I think Radiohead is right in heading in a performance-oriented direction. We'll have to wait and see if they are able to try another LP on our ears.

In terms of the best of Radiohead, "The Bends," is the album to check out. Radiohead was using a lot of digital treatments on this LP, but they were really performing almost the whole album live with just a few overdubs. It was a landmark album, and sort of "invented," or at least "released," the "indie," genre.

Another two groups, are Eat Static and Ozric Tentacles. Eat Static was the Wynne brothers' electronic programming collective, and Ozric was programmed work with a sort of jam-band in the front of the programming. However, the Wynne brother who performed the guitar played what could not have been a more "hair-metal" sound for his solos, and Ozric is far more intelligent and ironic than the normal jam-band jive.

Some tracks to check out would be, "Arboresecence," and "Saucers," and "Sploosh!" and "Dance of the Loomi," and "Indian Tunnels," and "Afroclonk," (there are two mixes, one by Eat Static and one by Ozric) and "Meander," and "Spyroid," and "Half-Light in Thillai." Their recordings are very hard to come by, and the easiest way to grab tracks is to try those tracks on Gnutella, search both the Eat Static and Ozric Tentacles name on Gnutella. You may not wind up with the tracks I've mentioned, but you can at least try a few things out. Most of their work is out of publication, and most of Eat Static was never published at all. Eat Static is by far the real-er deal, but there are great OZ tracks.

So there are some things to give a shot, and trust me, both groups are very worth it. It is really ashame, because I'd be willing to spring for some STatic if I could find the discs, as the tracks are so ingenious and hard to come by. Perhaps there is hope for the future. I do believe that most of the time, and today is New Year's Eve, so it's a hope I'm trying to keep at the forefront of my mind. I think we're going to METAL, before we ROCK! So, a short-ish metal article next.

Personal Interlude 2: Whoa EMO 2

2008-12-28T02:43:00.000-08:00

First, it upsets me thinking about superbook. Here is a kid born in this dirt-poor family, so poor he didn't have any permanent teeth left hardly at 18, gets a big scholarship for computer engineering, can't hack the University emotionally, manages to squeak into the army (he never used more than one or two cover stories, and that was not one of them) because of his insane computer skills, the army is giving him health-care and patching him up, he's running everyday with the grunts - I would die along with him just thinking about it.

So we're going to hit another issue. I am not going to point fingers or name names, even though I could madly get away with it, but I want to make a serious point. From when I started attempting to contact people on Internet communities 9 years ago, until now, I have been labeled a troll at every community I attended, and then psychologically abused by the staff at the community so they could keep up their illegal con-schemes. I would call that unethical.

Back when superbook was on the 'Net, the excuse for me being called a troll was that I ran with superbook. I will explain to you that I was and am labeled a troll for none of the reasons superbook was. Superbook was in fact a troll, and I am - and was - trying to helpfully participate in an Internet community. Further, when I'm not sure about a post, thread, or guideline, I make a polite request from a moderator or admin. You know what I get? - psychological torment from a pack of self-righteous brigands. That is what I get.

I'll tell you - when a person has a string of not getting along with anyone, I would generally tell them to look square in the mirror. Me - I believe today that I am an ethical and valuable man and that you, guys and gals, are a pack of diseased and abusive self-righteous brigands. For these reasons, the word "congregation," is not in my vocabulary, and "bread that is meat," is a funny joke, because a guy like me with no more than a widow's mite for a tithe and a radical and sincere attitude towards his beliefs has been abused by almost every genre and flavor of cult currently active in the glorious United States of America, and that is only off of the 'Net.

What I've figured out about life is pretty simple. I am compromising with a status of life that is nowhere near what I deserve because of what I've called "bid time," and that this gives me the freedom to say and write and compose and play what I want. Otherwise, no one remembers I exist or cares to hear that I'm a human being, and there is no exception to this rule in any area or person in my entire life. Period. I told my therapist that I would enter the dumpster along with my life's work when I died, and really already had, only to receive some ya-ya drooling, "indirect statements," in return. I do not feel any love people, and I do not want to be a man of hate.

You are people of hate, and people of lies. I will die in that dumpster with your pack of swindles thrown in tow behind me. WHOA EMO! You have mutilated me psychologically to a point where I find it difficult to even survive. I really don't care for your ya-ya drooling anymore, and will die knowing there was at least one good person who lived on the planet - because when I look square in the mirror, I see an imperfect, radical, but valuable and radically sincere man. Have a nice day if you are capable of having one, but if there isn't a proverbial place of torment, you belong there according to me. According to you - me and my work belong in the dumpster. Hello from your marginal dumpster, dear world, and I ask for nothing from your filthy palms.

Well to finish off, one line from a nu-skool version of an old-skool, and one more line:

1. "6 million ways to die, chose one."
2. "Sometimes a man gotta' do whatta' bullet do."

I've got nothing. Help yourself to your luxuries and plenty. You are no one to me, and it has been proven for at least 4 years that I am no one to you. I'll be back with some ya-ya that doesn't deal with this central problem in my life later.

A Tribute to Superbook, Kingpin of Discordians, and Kingpin of Trolls

2008-12-28T01:27:00.000-08:00

I was kicking back a moment and was reminded of a joke between me and my old friends. If you've checked out the KLF tracks, you'll hear them giving the call-sign, "The Justified Ancients of Mu-Mu." There are lots of "mu," jokes, and my friends would always tell me that they could never remember the long-winded explanations I used to give when I'd try to explain why these "mu," jokes might be funny. I'll tell you, I don't try to be this weird, I just am this weird. So let's go back to Detroit.

It's the late 70's and America now is a heavenly bliss compared to America at that time. These guys have gotten done with their bowling league game, just some old manual labor guys in Motor City on a Friday night, and they order two pitchers of beer and some scummy bowling alley pizza. All of the league is going to this new happening mega-church, and they are talking all of their Christian jive. Everybody leaves and two old, balding men in ugly smelly 70's polyester clothes heave a sigh over the last slices of bad beer and scummy pizza, "Do you remember when you used to actually believe in that stuff? You know - guys flying through the air - bread that was meat? - that kind of thing?"

So the two guys get a bowling counter - they still had those back then - and they make up their own satirical religion. They created several lengthy pamphlets that mocked dietary regulations, happy and not-so-happy holidays, public and not-so-private confession, people flying through the air, and a little reference to the Goddess Eris, a rather un-popular and un-worshipped Greek Goddess of scandal and discordance. The best titled of the original pamphlets was, "How I Found the Goddess, and What I Did to Her When I Found Her."

The whole point of the pamphlets was to make a joke, and it was really not meant as too much more than that. They distributed them via a small printer, and it it wasn't for the 'Net, that would have been all she wrote. Oh, and I do have to mention that the principle "sage," of Discordianism was "Malaclypse the Younger," as opposed to, "Pliny the Elder." There were all of these funny mock-religious aphoristic quips by the great, "Malaclypse the Younger," and these two balding beer-drinking bowlers wrote some great material.

So, the original Justified Ancients of Mu-Mu were a satire on typical conspiracy theories. Usually some "Illuminati," or "Annunaki," or what have you is vying against the forces of the GREEN LANTERN for world domination. The Justified Ancients of Mu-Mu were a mock secret anarchist society, and supposedly if you followed the mock-religion of these pamphlets right, you might one day get a chance to join forces with them (RAHR!) against, tyranny - sanity - whateva.

So now we talk about superbook. Superbook was amazing as a 'Netizen on every level. Part one, everyone knew that he was an acne ridden, chump-toothed, obese college drop-out of 19, and he didn't seem to mind. He did mind, but he didn't seem to mind. Part two, he took the name superbook, not just to mock people who worshipped Scripture, but because he noted with his very erudite irony that it wasn't just Christians, everyone had a "superbook."

You know - your pillow book - Anne Rice's Queen of the Durned, or Harry Potter's Goblet of Fire, or Ayn Rand's Anthem, or whatever it happened to be. Part three, he was the worst troll on the Internet by a thousand times a thousand, and he was a catastrophic irritant on every site on the Web during his 2 or 3 year dominion. Part four, superbook used one and only one handle all 3 years, and never played characters, which any other troll would have done to the nth degree. Part five, he was a troll that always spoke in proper english, and he was actually funny and annoying, instead of just merely annoying. Part six, there was nothing superbook could not do with a computer. You did not mention "lost page," or "g/cache," in his presence unless you wanted to be very - very - embarrassed.

I know he is dead today, and the reason I know is that I could go to the front page of any site on the 'Net and find him using the same name, or at least doing the same exact thing that was driving everyone on the 'Net to homicidal and suicidal ideation. He most likely committed suicide, and it is no mystery that underneath all of that irony he hated being ugly, poor, fat, and a washout. He was the kingpin of trolls, and he also professed to be a Discordian. No one else did Discordianism like superbook, and rest-in-peace brother, it was not a good life from start to finish, but you could make even your worst enemies laugh.

I've got more stories about superbook - two really great ones actually - but we'll hang back from that for the moment. I think superbook was someone who considered me a true friend, because once or twice he did let all of the irony down and the thing was, superbook wanted romance, and he didn't have the personality or the looks for it. I did suggest that if he gave it some time he might find someone suitable - and that was real - but like I said, I'd spot the ol' troll from two MAC addresses away, and he is probably gone well over two years now.

More to come. I've got to hit the gas station for smokes! - I'll be calling Dad sometime around 7:30! LOL!

Personal Interlude: Whoa EMO, and A Musical Project That is In My Head

2008-12-28T00:21:00.000-08:00

This isn't a livejournal, and I'm thirty. Further, it isn't very safe to talk personal issues on the 'Net, but I do want to talk very vague about a significant problem in my life. I'm going to mind my pints and quarts and proofread my post to make sure that I don't give anyone else or myself any unhappy surprises.

My big problem is that I ain't got a friend in the world, or at least one I can keep in contact with at the moment. My family is breaking down into bits, and even though my family can be a real wart-hog, I am not cheering and throwing a party about that. Some of my old friends hit either speed or crack, and I can no longer trust them as far as I can spit a 30 ought six shell.

They aren't even the same people. They look like old geezers at around my age, and pig grunts are their first language now. Then I've got some real friends - who I can still trust - but I've got some family problems that keep me from talking to them at all. Also, I'm clean, and I'm not trying to bring anybody down, but my friends do get high still, as far as I know. It is their life and not mine, but it strikes a pretty sharp wedge between me and just about anybody I could trust in my life.

So there you are. The 'Netizens dump my hiney quick, my family is more psychotic than me, my old buddies can't come around, and I've got nothing else except my work, this blog, and my doctor's appointments. I don't feel much love around these 'ere parts, and I don't expect any, which is why YOU still can't comment on my gosh-durned blog. Go abuse some teenagers emotionally at livejournal and stay away from me, because Gwyd takes no abuse from anyone without returning heavy artillery these days. Have a nice day if you are capable of having one.

The Musical Project on My Mind

I've got a book on jazz recordings that I received early on in my freshman year of college, and there are two groups that did some hybrid work of jazz and house music. One is called "The Art Ensemble of Chicago," which was originally an avant-garde free-jazz ensemble, and one is a UK group called, "Pinski Zoo." Get the funny bit: I've never heard even 30 seconds of either recording. However, as I was meandering around early one morning with my coffee and my choke, I recalled the cover of Pinksi Zoo from that book, and it COALESCES (RAHR!), a project I want to call, "Mutant Freaks of D10."

Part 1, is that I'm at least going to need 1 Tele and 1 SG to get the job done, plus most, but not all of that megabucks electronics setup. Part 2 is that I'm going to need a good-sized studio space to run the recording. Part 3 is that if I could actually contact some people, the rest would all fall into place. I want a fairly basic horn section, probably two alto saxes, and two tenor saxes, two trumpets, and then I know a guy who can really play a flugel, and I'd like to try the sound on a few takes and see how that works out.

I do need some bottom-end in the horn section, and I'm wondering if maybe a single, valve-trombone might do. I despise the slide trombone. It is a traditional jazz instrument, it is a traditonal instrument of the classical repertoire, and boy do I hate that sound. It might be possible to try a euphonium of some type, although I know of no-one from the past that owns one. They are very expensive instruments.

The next bit would be that I know a guy that can out-RDJ Aphex Twin when it comes to programming, and he is also a whiz with mic set-ups. So, I let him run some programs, fight a little over and massage the charts, and that would get us in a basic place with the arrangements. Also, I'll comandeer him to mic the instruments.

So I'd be on guitar, and I've got another guy on my mind who - it just is hilarious - same kind of number in some ways - great trained pitch (perfect, really), parents trained him classically but not too young, principal guitarist - but he does not even hear the same music coming out of the exact same speakers as the exact same time as I do. So, when my programmer buddy and I have gone over the charts, then we do Vee vs. Gwee on guitar and see what happens. The thing is, that you can almost personality type people by the instruments they play, and Vee and I are a lot more similar than either of us would like to think, but still - WTF mate? What music is that you're hearing? - on both sides of the fence with Vee vs. Gwee.

I've got a buddy that is a real good rudimental drummer, and I think what I'd like to do is try him on some takes against the programmed percussion, and then maybe move in my Baldwin Studio upright - a piano he loves - and try that upright sound versus the programming on the charts. That piano is a wonderful piano, although it is a real mule-workhorse kind of piano.

I've got a second buddy that can also play a good drum kit, but he generally plays technical metal styles. I would love to talk to him about the project though and see if he gets a glint in his eye. S. like me is someone who gets the mean-evil glint in his eye and then obsesses over his interest until he knows it from top to bottom. He and I bandied around doing a noise-metal production maybe 8 or 9 years back, and it just never came to a head.

Back to my Baldwin, which is definitely not bright and tinkly, and the key action and the pedal action are heavier than those old dot-matrix printers. There was also a guy who knew how to play an auxillary percussion set-up hanging around D10 somewhere, and I might like to try him on some takes, although that would definitely bump up microphone costs if we were going to record him well.

I know a guy who plays a 4-string fretted electric bass finger-style (which is not dumb like with a modern guitar, but is still a bit of an argument) with a nice round tone and good time feel, and then I'd like to see if I could find a guy who could run a 4-string fretless electric bass to play off against, although no one comes to mind right now. I know a few good enough jazz contrabass players in D10 - on call guys actually - but this would not be their project. The project title alone would really turn them away. They're good guys, this is just not their kind of material.

As far as the charts, my goal would be "controlled simultaneous improvisation." I don't want a banana cream pie jam, and I don't want utter noise. I also want to keep the charts fairly simple, and then feature certain instruments during certain sections. I do want to do a large number of takes, but I don't want to get ridiculous about it. I was thinking 8 charts and maybe 10, 10- minute takes when it all came to a total.

I want people to get paid fairly for their efforts, and then my hope would be to hit at least one show with the group at a venue where I don't have to be worried about being murdered. Pretty much the whole project, "Project Collective: Mutant Freaks of D10." I've got another idea I really wanted to lay on my hometown, and tried at Facebook, got ignored entirely, and considered posting some flyers and got worried I might get hurt. So I backed up off of it for the time being, and after a brief interlude, I am going to explain that bit of effort I'd like to make, in service of my community, and for the sake of shameless self-promo. LOL! BRB!

Personal Musical Topic: Robert Fripp and Bill Frisell

2008-12-26T02:34:00.000-08:00

Let's just start with a brief bio of these two artists, and I'm going to explain then why I'm so involved in the music of these two men. However, the article is going to be pretty brief, because one of the major reasons that I'm attracted to the modern guitar has to do with the theory of sound acoustics. I guess I could post the basic material, understanding that probably 100% of any blog audience I might get would understand none of it. I might get a highly-trained musicologist who hits the site by making a bad click, but I've decided to continue to write for you guys and gals instead and just leave the whole business offline for now.

Fripp got started in a group called King Crimson, who had a #1 hit in the UK in 1969 with a track called, "The Court of the Crimson King." Progressive rock was in at the time, and the song also critiqued the royal family, and it made a big splash. After that Crim' went through a lot of different line-ups and concepts. There was a period when they had a horn section. There was a period when an excellent classically-trained rebel named Keith (Michael?) Tippet was a prominent member. However, after "The Court of the Crimson King," Crim' was no longer even a progressive-rock group, but instead an avant-garde music ensemble.

Sometime around Discipline in 1977 or so, Crim' gel'ed into a group that would have a drummer or some percussionist, a Chapman Stick player, and then generally Fripp on rhythm guitar (kinda) and Adrian Belew, a Nashville producer who played with Crim' on the side, on lead guitar and vocals. There have been many permutations of that basic idea since then, including the "double trio," which was two drummers, two touch-style players, and then Fripp and Belew on guitar. Crim' put out what will probably be their final album release in 2005, called "The Power to Believe."

One thing about Crim' was that Fripp was Crim'. More than once, Fripp offered to quit the Crimson group so that the other players could take the group in another direction, and the basic thing was that "Fripp was Crim'." Fripp had very high expectations for the group, and he was also very - "fussy," is close - about live performances and about the sounds recorded for the group, adhering to an internal vision of a sort of "Crim-ethos," for the group.

Life has not been kind to Fripp over the past several years. Fripp had catalogued all of Crim's work that he owned with E'G Records. He owned nearly all of the catalog, and he was hoping that staying on the small E'G label would allow him to retain most of the rights to his music. The entire E'G label was bought out by a hostile takeover, and Fripp is now in litigation to try to retain even just rights to a small part of his catalog - as far as I know at least - because this is an international legal dispute.

So Fripp has lost the better part of his entire 39 year career. Now, I don't want to be harsh, but there is a silver-lining here. Fripp had already started to take an interest in the acoustic guitar at the end of Crim's run, and had commissioned a very expensive custom-built acoustic guitar from a private luthier in Argentina to suit his special needs as a guitarist. He had been teaching master classes to different guitar musicians from all over the world, and that culminated for a few years in a symposium called "The League of Crafty Guitarists," in Argentina.

The thing is that I enjoy Crim's music, but the League's music and Fripp's current concepts about guitar are the best work he ever did over Crim by a real long shot-put. What Fripp is doing interests me so intensely because it uses the modern guitar and a plectrum in a set of musical concepts with a sophistication that approaches contemporary classical music. In many cases, it exceeds the standards of contemporary classical music, because so much contemporary classical is such a horrible sham.

Bill Frisell is a very different kind of artist. Frisell was a chip-puncher in Nashville who also had or has, some jazz chops. His jazz chops are not up to the correct par, but Frisell has gotten the chance to record some of his own music on some small labels, and he manages to integrate a Nashville sound with a jazz sound so seamlessly that you really can't hear the seams.

His best work is on the Paul Bley Quartet's "Interplay," recording for ECM Records, a recording I'll be springing for on the H&B catalog after Christmas. Frisell is also noteworthy for being a very sophisticated musician who almost always plays this beat-up vintage Telecaster, and nothing else. Another great thing about Frisell is his expressiveness as an artist.

With Frisell's work, the emotion is crystal-clear, even in the New Age genre the music hovers within. Further, as an artist his work is incredibly understated. No flashy runs or wild sweep-picking. Usually his music is very mellow and slack feeling, with that Nashville twang and a jazz feel to the harmony.

Anyway, those are my two guitar heroes. Understand, Fripp is known for being a pain in the hiney, very persnickety and a bit obtuse, but Fripp is an ethical guy who stuck to his guns musically for nearly 40 years. Frisell I would say struggles with deep depression, but the guy punched his chip for at least 25 years to get the chance to do a few small-label recordings of the music he loved.

To my way of thinking, it is possible for a musician to be a high-talent and a miserable maggot of a human being, but in general I think you hear a person's virtue in their art music, and I count Fripp, even fussy, and Frisell, slack-key, New Age, and all, as not just musical talents but men with beautiful souls, and they are true heroes to me. The kind of people I would emulate, not just music I would like to emulate.

Anyway, I've left more bits hanging, and there are partial articles needing completion all over the place now, but I'm turning in for a long winter's nap. Have fun with the site, or go to the proverbial place of torment if you like. I'll be back tomorrow (tonight's evening, more accurately) most likely, as I'm warming to getting verbose at this blog. We shall see.

Guitar Heroes, Part 2: Midway Through Skool

2008-12-26T01:14:00.001-08:00

Now we're going to hit the guitarists who come after Chuck Berry, and these are the people that people "yawn," sort of idolize like some molten idol of the Ba'al of Peor. If you ask, "Who was the best guitarist ever?" you'll likely get one of the guitarists off of this list. The era we are in here is maybe mid to late 60's to the late 70's. The thing is that this was a great era for the guitar. It really was. The problem is that there are other ways of looking at guitar than your standard "Jimi Hendrix," or "Eric Clapton," or "Robbie Robertson," type of formulaic answers.

All three of those guitarists were killer guitarists by the way, and I mean no disrespect to any of them. In fact, even though two of them died young, these were not evil men. They were men with real big hearts and real big drug problems, and that is not necessarily an evil man. Clapton managed to get some recovery, and was alive at least a few years ago, and he had recovered enough to be a respectable adult male.

We'll also list some people that few people have heard of, and we're going to list some people that might not even make much sense, even if you've heard of them. We'll talk it over after the list, and we'll have to branch out eventually, because not all of these guitarists are rockers. Eventually we'll get a 'round tuit'.

1. Wes Montgomery
2. Jimi Hendrix
3. Charlie Christian (Early jazz guitarist, more like the early 50's, we'll skip that for now.)
4. B.B. King
5. John Lee Hooker
6. Eric Clapton
7. George Harrison
8. Robert Fripp (Later, later.)
9. Steve Hackett (Also, most likely, later.)
10. Robbie Robertson
11. John McLaughlin
12. Jimmy Page
13. Jeff Beck
14. Brian May
15. Pete Townshend
16. Frank Zappa
17. Stevie Ray Vaughn
18. Duane Allman

We're not going to go into Wes Montgomery much, but Wes Montgomery was, and remains, the best jazz guitarist who ever lived. He studied personally with Charlie Christian, and he mostly recorded with B-3 organist Jimmy Smith in order to put money in the bank. He played most of his own music live at small nightclubs in NYC and recorded next to none of that music.

He was really a re-bop player, and there are one or two recordings, one on the Verve catalog, where he really shows off his stuff. He is the unbeatable jazz guitarist, and all you can do and listen and emulate. What he pulls off is history, and that is often the way with a seminal artist like that. You might be better at playing your own music, but you won't ever re-bop on guitar like Wes Montgomery.

John Lee Hooker is an interesting one. He is very much in the gut-blues tradition. With his music, you get a loose semblance of 4/4, and no more than that, and as you might guess from his stage moniker, the guy had been around more than one block more than a few times. He is also an unreal guitarist and blues artist. There is a recording done when he was well into his 80's of one of his signature tracks, "Boom, Boom, Boom," a track about seducing a stripper, and you can get it off of Gnutella and you should get it off of Gnutella - if you dig guitar.

However, there is one middling reference in the first verse to something far less than humorous, and you'll have to use your own discretion about the tune. No cuss words, no direct nastiness, but it is a nasty tune. Otherwise, how many millions of songs are there about strippers? - and this is not by far the worst version of that one.

Jimi Hendrix. First, forget Foxey Lady and all of your other idols and go to Gnutella and download the LIVE Monterey-Pop version of a song named "Machine Gun," that Jimi never put on an official record during his lifetime. Here is the thing. Jimi works this guitar over in a way at that show that cannot be real, because he is not compressing his sound hardly at all. You can tell because there are all of these incredibly fine variations of volume and tone, and a normal compression setup, even back then, would have annihilated all of those little subtleties. UNREAL GUITARIST.

Second, every track Jimi did is some re-working of a blues form. From his most esoteric stuff to the more obvious blues relatives, Jimi played blues, even if it was psychedelic blues. Machine Gun is no exception. Third, Jimi was trying to get clean off of speed - really - at the end of his life, and he was talking about how he didn't want to lose his entire style, but that he was aging out of exploding amplifiers and all of the sham and glam. Not that Jimi was entirely a sham, but he got done a lot of what he got done by sheer muscle and glamor.

That Machine Gun is a sign of what could have been. It is fun showing muscle - remember - I like to play hard rock - but mature artistry has a great deal of subtlety to it rather than pure muscle. Jimi killed himself by accident with a mixture of the sedatives they were using to ramp him off the speed and a great big bottle of liquor. Jimi was a guy who was known for being "all heart," which means that he was just that gentle, loving kind of man.

Apparently he was even that way on the speed, and the music he could have made. To be blunt, there is not a guitarist I can think of that would be willing to go onstage today with a setup like Jimi used in that live Machine Gun recording, simply because compression is what covers your hiney. There has to be a little compression on Jimi's guitar because of some of the effects he is getting, but he is using next to zero compression. That is guitar, and Jimi was trying to build some jazz chops, and the music he could have made.

We're going to have to split this one, but let us talk about two of the others on the list because of their relationship to Jimi. One was B.B. King. Jimi and King were friends, and King was always a very conservative type of man, and shepherded Jimi as much as he could, in a very sincere way, without trying to take advantage of Jimi. Jimi did not have too many such people in his life. King is a blues player of the very smooth variety. I believe he passed away last year, and he was just an elder.

A very subtle, smooth blues player that never tried for jazz sophistication or more than doing theater shows and playing some blues right up until he died. I guess he must have been well into his 70's when he died. His late recordings are amazing. With King you just have to realize how understated the talent and the personality was, and also, like any great musician, he just got better and better right until he passed away. A wonderful man by all accounts. Struggled with obesity and not with too much else. Ordinary, and entirely amazing.

The other is Stevie Ray Vaughn. SRV was not known as a guy who was all heart. He was known as a psychopath. SRV idolized Jimi, and he met Jimi once. Jimi had an autistic flair from the start, and the drugs accentuated that problem. Jimi was well-known - if he really didn't like someone - he wouldn't bother with a courtesy, he'd just say nothing and meander off. That is what he did to SRV and it broke SRV's heart.

SRV did get clean, but he lost a lot of his virtuousity at playing when he did, got right back on and OD'ed and died, which is unfortunately - kind of a normal addiction process. The big thing is that SRV recorded an instrumental version of Little Wing that is unforgettable, and you figure that the guy had a soul that might have showed up if he had stayed clean and stuck with all the problems that does inevitably bring to someone in recovery. Again, SRV's "Little Wing," it's on Gnutella, and it is a wonder what that man could do with a guitar.

So we'll stop with this part of this part, and hey! - we are going to get further down the wire. I'm going to do a few more of these and then I'll probably talk about my two big guitar heroes, who are Robert Fripp and Bill Frisell. I would like to cover a little more of our late 60's and 70's material, but it will be at least 3 more articles, and I'll do one more and talk about Fripp and Frisell. You'll see. While I'm kicking back for a moment, I'm going to do Jimi's Machine Gun and SRV's Little Wing, and I suggest you do that as well.

Guitar Heroes Who Didn't Use a Joystik, Part 1: The Oldest Skool

2008-12-25T23:58:00.000-08:00

Let me mention just a few guitar players who go way back into history. The latest two were early 60's or late 50's, and the others go back quite a bit farther than that. I'll talk about how to get some of their work and what exactly it sounds like, and then you can kind of figure things out yourself - and that is most often the best way to figure anything out.

1. Leadbelly
2. Robert Johnson
3. Bo Diddley
4. Chuck Berry

Leadbelly and Robert Johnson were both "gut-blues," players, meaning they played on homespun gut-string guitars, and played a very old form of African American folk music that is usually called the blues. Leadbelly played a twelve string, 6 strings tuned in pairs of octaves, and as I remember Johnson played an 8-string, 4 strings tuned in pairs of octaves. Most people's first impression on turning on Leadbelly or Johnson is that they are just wanking nonsense, and there is a bit of a point to that, but trying to emulate the sounds they got is so difficult that "a bit of a point," is all you get.

The thing was that Leadbelly and Johnson both came from terrible backgrounds. In fact, it is pretty likely that in both cases, both of their mothers made their living through prostitution. They had no musical education at all, and they pretty much sat down with this homespun guitar and made it all up based on all of the diverse sounds they were hearing around them. That is the "bit of a point," with this "wanking nonsense," phrase.

The lyrics were drawn from traditional folk-songs, and in many cases they are racier than hip-hop lyrics. Johnson in particular had a wife who had burned him real bad, and half of his catalogue of recordings is of songs about killing an adulterous wife. "16 shells from a 30 ought six," is the name of one of his signature recordings.

Both Leadbelly and Johnson are available on those Smithsonian compilations I mentioned, and it is not a bad idea as a guitar player to sit down with these roots recordings and at least let the sounds hit your ears some. What they are doing is deceptively like "wanking," and in actuality is quite complex. You can also get other compilations specifically directed at people interested in roots-blues, but you need to do your homework, because all of these recordings were done as field recordings. In many cases, you could wind up with an unlistenable recording.

Digital remastering can only save a field recording this old (1910 or 1920 something) to a certain degree, but a good remaster is the only way you are going to be able to hear what these players are playing at all. With roots-blues guitar, you almost never hear someone who is playing a proper instrument. The people were just too poor to be able to afford that kind of instrument.

The thing is also - yeah - Johnson was not an admirable man, but you have to imagine being raised starving most of the time by a prostitute and then having some woman running off with just about everything you owned to top it off. It's not an excuse, but it might put things into a bit of perspective for some people. I've been burned real bad by some women, but I've never been burned in that way. And I like some racy stuff, but I don't think I'll be covering the 30 ought six. That is a bit much, to understate the problem more than just a little.

Bo Diddley is another piece of work, but we'll just talk about his instrument and his music. Diddley hand-built one of the first true electric guitars. This is hilarious, although it isn't hilarious that he was so poor. So what he does, he steals a cello neck from some cello factory in the city, cuts it down and sands it off, applies some scrap metal for frets, and then builds a bridge to a plywood slat. He then takes a set of steel wires, and puts a rusty nail (no joke!) with a copper wire wrapped around it and some kind of battery attachment to make an active pickup underneath the mess, and voila! - the first true electric guitar!

You can grab one or two Diddley tracks off of Gnutella, and it is something else to allow to hit the ears a bit. The thing was, that Diddley wasn't recording traditional rock and roll. He forced his bands to play these jagged polyrhythms, and then he'd chop on his homespun electric and then use a lot of dirty lingo. "Underground," would be a pretty good term. Not many people knew about Diddley.

Chuck Berry was the big hero that sparked off the white version of rock and roll, and Berry liked to jive, but he also had manners when he wanted. Berry was able to have a lucrative career because he would play ball that way - at least in the public eye. The best Berry track on recording is called "Hail, Hail, Rock and Roll." It's a song about sock-stomping at the corn shacks. It's racy, but it's fun-racy, and it is true Nawlin's-style Rock and Roll, which is pretty durned hard to find in recording.

The funny thing about Berry to me is that it's a form of rock and roll where you never lose the blues feel, but I'm always inclined to think "Mr. Berry, that ain't a chord!" - whenever I hear Chuck Berry playing rock and roll. I don't know how he tuned his puppy, but he mostly just jams tone clusters seemingly at random. Still, you never lose the blues feel. Berry also liked to play mostly in Bb because he said it was his best key, which makes other guitar players in your band - far less than happy.

Berry also admitted later in his life that if a night - or even a tune - wasn't going all so well, that he'd glam and show off to keep the show from falling through. Another great thing about Berry was that when it would be his time to feature, he didn't play individual lines, which would have been normal for rock and roll at that time, or even squeal on blue notes very often. Those would be the two normal blues-rock options, but Berry would show off during his feature instead with some kind of tone-cluster arrangement. I don't think anyone will ever figure out even one of his guitar features.

He was a real mischief-maker. However, I get the impression that he might have been a racy guy, but that he was also a pretty good man. That can happen, and I think that is the truth with good ol' Mr. Berry.

I'll be back with more - MORE - MORE! Who needs sleep? LOL!

The Wishlist of Expensive Guitar Gear I May Never Be Able to Afford

2008-12-25T22:17:00.000-08:00

We are going to start the wishlist with the list of guitars I want in my "fleet," although I don't need any more than 5 guitars if I'm remembering right, if I want to get the job done. I am way more interested in playing rhythm guitar, and the only thing I have to temper is a problem I have with not being able to hide when I'm in an ensemble. A rhythm guitarist does get his time to shine, but he needs to be able to be invisible most of the time, and unfortunately, when I'm on stage, I do like to glam.

Glam should be left for the lead-singer and the lead-guitarist in a basic rock band setup. Also, if you are looking for a lead-singer, I suggest you have a dedicated frontman. Look for the craziest possible guy who can sing and act strange when on stage who won't have you sent to a maxi-pen for a maxi-bid, and you'll make a ton of money even without any production value.

So the list:

1. A Fender American Standard Telecaster, with updated pickups and tuned in Nashville Standard Tuning.
2. The same type of Telecaster tuned to a Sawmill Tuning.
3. A Gibson SG Standard tuned to a Sawmill Tuning.
4. A Gibson SG Standard tuned to a C Hardcore Tuning.
5. A Gibson Les Paul Standard tuned to a variation of the Open C Tuning I mentioned.
6. An Adamas-Ovation custom tuned in my own standard tuning.

So that makes six.

Another basic thing that we haven't hit yet is that if you're going to play pro-quality, then when you switch between two very different tunings, a guitar needs a very good bridge and truss adjustment. Learning to adjust a bridge and a truss is not easy. I recommend picking up an old Mexican Strat that will at least play, so that you can monkey with the instrument while you figure out what the words "good bridge and truss adjustment," mean.

The result of this is that you should look at a guitar as, "one guitar, one tuning," if you're going to play at pro-quality levels. What tunings you decide to use exactly would depend on what kinds of sounds you'd like to make, and also what kind of gigs you plan to run. One of the things is that a sound that appeals to one person may not appeal to another. Even people who love underground or serious music don't all purchase the same recordings or go to the same shows, and musicians who are serious about music feel exactly the same about the work they are doing, even if they are punching a chip at a gig they do only because the gig puts some money in the bank.

There are endless variations to the basic tunings I mentioned, and sitting with your instrument and lolly-gagging with it can really get you to some new places. The first hint though is that you have to have some standard places to work from, or you are going to have absolute confusion on your hands. Which shape did what in what tuning? You can get yourself in big trouble.

Another hint is that it is never a good idea to tune strings up - even by a half-step - on a guitar that isn't custom made for those strings to be tuned higher on. Even that half-step raise puts a lot of wear and tear on the bridge, nut and truss of a standardized guitar, and it isn't a good thing to fool around with. You can experiment with trying wires in the wrong places on a guitar, but you should still watch and feel what is going on with your guitar when you do that.

Even a Standard Tele costs 1200 dollars. That is not a great cost for a professional quality instrument, and that Tele is a pro-instrument. However, if you have 1200 dollars to ruin, then I will provide a PO Box number and you can send me a standard Tele. I won't pass up the offer if you have money to waste.

I've been chatting with people who play and love Tele's, and apparently the best place to run with those is the real high-class DiMarzio single-coil pickups. They're a standard active pickup, they aren't cheap, and they get great sound. Apparently they are also a great match with the Tele.

The SG Standard is a bit of a compromise. It gets a better bass and mid response than a Strat, and that is important for a rhythm guitarist, and it is also about the same weight as a Strat. It doesn't even compare to a Strat in the high range. Further, I love playing hard-rock styles, and I know with the amount of pain I experience that I can't wear a Les Paul Standard all night. Further yet, the SG is a bit edgier than the Les Paul.

The Les Paul often gets a Skynyrd kind of sound, and that is not the kind of hard-rock I am going to most often play. And by the way, I wouldn't have said it two years ago, but I'm not much into playing Skynyrd, but Skynyrd does rock. I enjoy their music now.

The Les Paul in the open C would be the least wanted guitar on the list, but it would be good for blues-riffing and some other sort of work-horse situations. I would probably use it very, very little, but it would be a nice thing to keep around just in case. Plus, nothing squeals the blues like a Les Paul Standard in open C, and it is kind of nice to hit a couple of blue notes and squeal them around some. It's glam and showy, and it makes the ladies squeal too. That stuff never does really get old.

The Adamas-Ovation is the guitar I really, really want. Part one is that I'm not a good enough guitar player to justify purchasing that kind of instrument at this juncture. Part two is that I want the bridge, nut and truss set for a pretty strange standard tuning, and I also want the sound hole construction done in a certain way. Most people who play an Adamas order it custom. An Adamas guitar is a bank-breaker in the first place, but what I want is very specific and unusual, and it is going to even more break the bank. 10 or 11 thousand dollars, skinny, that is what I'm figuring, if the Adamas company finds what I want done somewhat easy to do.

An Adamas guitar unprocessed has a sound that is quite a bit like a harpsichord, and you can move things around to get a lot of different sounds, if you have the right electronics in your setup. It is really an electronic instrument, and not an electric or even an electric-acoustic guitar. I want that thing real bad, but when I get geeking I think to myself - "You are really a feeble guitar player still. You don't need a megabucks instrument!" Still, we all have our outsized desires, and I try not to be overly hard on myself today. I'll just go to the Adamas website and drool at the guitar pron and maybe get the old Yamaha out of the case later.

Alright, so now the electronics I want for the setup, although electronics moves so fast that by the time I'm this kind of megabucks player, there will be better stuff being made. Still, if we just take a trip down oversized-imagination lane.

1. The Marshall broad-range small cab.
2. A broad-range pre-amplifier.
3. A limiting head.
4. A two-rack digital limiting logic gate. (There is a UK company that makes a fabulous one.)
5. A Kurzweil Rumor and a Kurzweil Mangler.
6. A switch-pedal setup to change filter-programs with.
7. Two continuous foot-pedals, one for volume, and one for wah-effects.
8. A good quality two-rack voltage equalizer.
9. A standing flight-case style rack-module setup.
10. A hognose-style practice amplifier.

Starting with the Marshall cab. First, Marshall makes the best electric cabinets in the world. Second, I always tune a guitar (except for Nashville tuning) with the bass string at C2, and in that case your show just runs better with a broad-range amplifier. Third, you don't need a large Marshall stack, because you'll be mic'ing through the PA, and that small cab will provide plenty of sound to give you a good mic over the PA.

On the other hand, in a studio, you want the sound fairly quiet, and then the sound will be mic'ed into the board room. After that, you let your sound engineers handle the rest. Well, that is what you want to do unless you want to work in a studio for only 30 seconds, and only one time.

The limiting head I've talked about. You lose some tone, but it prevents overloads of sound. A good one ain't cheap. The limiting gate is really expensive, and I mention "two-rack," because the really sophisticated gates are quite large and used only in a studio environment. That doesn't mean that the piece of equipment is cheap.

Also, a programmable gate is hard to figure out, and there are good presets on the good ones, but you still have to learn the thing well-enough to fit your own shows and work, and it is trial and error, probably for a few weeks a few hours a day to get the thing in order. Running a Tele or an Adamas, I would not want to go without one. The Adamas in particular is very bright and uses piezo pickups and could get you sent to prison for eardrum mutilation if you don't limit the sounds right. There is a further reason I need a really good limiting gate, and the explanation is coming.

The next thing to talk about is a voltage equalizer. Most good venues and studios are wired pretty well, but there can be problems with either power surges or power deficits while you're playing that can bust every piece of your equipment, including your instrument, with a blink of your eyelids. A very good voltage equalizer is not massively expensive, and is going to be a really good buy for you. It is also a very good idea for a deejay to run a voltage equalizer with their kitbag, as a deejay can have just the same unhappy day with his or her entire kitbag for the exact same reasons.

The switch pedals are kind of obvious, but they need to be generalized ones, as my principal filters are going to be rack-modules instead of a footboard. The Rumor and the Mangler are an interesting little tidbit I turned up. The best digital effects processor made in the world today is hands-down the Kurzweil studio DEP, which is really large, really amazing, and really expensive. It is used only in a studio setting, and has been known to make the engineers breakfast while killing their mix.

Kurzweil's point-of-sale largely relies on that kind of amazing, top-of-the-line, cutting edge kind of equipment. However, the Rumor and the Mangler are just around 1000 dollars a piece, and they are single rack a piece, and they are probably the best portable digital processors on the market, for any other price you can name. The Rumor is a programmable digital reverb/echo unit, and the Mangler is a programmable digital fuzz/compression filter unit.

The amazing part about the Mangler is that it includes digital emulations of Ring Modulator effects that are not only programmable, they are also actually usable. ROM effects produce some of the best compression and distortion effects possible, and did even in analog. However, ROM effects also used to produce a lot of broken eardrums and equipment, which holds true even today in digital. The ROM's on the Mangler are usable, but I would rest much more assured about using them if I had a very strong, portable programmable limiting gate.

The hognose is something I can realistically afford when I can afford my first electric guitar. You plug your guitar and a pair of headphones into it, and then you can practice your electric guitar in your rent-controlled apartment at all hours of the morning or the night without getting murdered by your neighbors or getting arrested. It is a really nice buy for anyone who has an electric guitar.

So I'm not a megabucks player than can justify this kind of megabucks equipment, but this is kind of what I'm thinking about in terms of sounds and models and so on. I'm going to take a break to eat a little, and then I'll probably post once or twice more this 26th in the morning before putting myself to bed. We'll do guitar heroes and star guitar tracks next. That will be fun.

Working Over a Guitar, Part 2: More Standard-er Tunings

2008-12-25T20:16:00.001-08:00

I figured out a solution to our first problem. Let me show you some very standard type of professional guitar tunings, and also make some explanations about some concepts professional's use when stringing a guitar, and then we can talk gear. I still can't figure out a way to explain my argument about guitar tuning without beating the bandwagon to pieces, and it is very complex material, so we'll leave that bit be for the moment, and we'll get down to the way you'd see a typical rock-guitar, country-guitar or metal-guitar tuned and strung.

The first thing you need to understand is that no matter what type of guitar you are playing, no matter what kind of pickups it has, and no matter how you are amplifying your puppy, you need to use at least medium-wind strings. It takes a bit more work when you're starting out because you have to build more hand strength, but they play better, they last longer, and they have more tone. It might be better to say, "they produce a tone at all," because even medium-light strings don't sound like much, even if they're turned up to eleven.

The problem is amplified if you're using a light-construction guitar like a Fender, and that is the most commonly used form of guitar, even by professionals, excepting in the case of jazz music. A solid Fender in the mid-price range does not cost like a professional instrument, plays just fine, and is very light and easy on your spinal tap. They are not garbage instruments, but they have their limitations. We'll discuss the point more at a later juncture, maybe even at a later juncture in this article.

Now, an exception to the "medium-wind," rule might be for a guitarist who is doing all lead-work on the guitar. In that case a medium-light or light on your highest strings, string 1 and 2, the ones with wires strung on them, can be a nice thing to put good bends in and get the right kind of squealing effects. On a Fender, you are going to have very little tone in this case on those strings, but Fender electric guitars also respond - across the board - really well in the high range, particularly with some expensive single-coil pickups dumped in them.

So, you won't sound like a loser with medium wounds on 6, 5, 4 and 3, and even lights on 2 and 1, if you are sticking to lead parts. You might even be able to get away with extra-lights on the top two strings, and you'd just have to run the experiment. I have never tried the experiment, and I don't know anyone who has tried it.

Another thing is that most guitarists tune their 6 string to a C2 these days, and one option is to string that 6 with a heavy or medium-heavy string to get the mud out of that 6 string. Some players, particularly in metal when a "big-crunch," is needed, string a heavy on the six and a medium-heavy on the 5. Dimebag Darrell from Pantera used to do this as a lead player, with fabulous effect.

Now, let us disambiguate about Pantera and Dimebag Darrell. Part one, I don't find hardly any of Pantera's lyrics offensive to even the degree of some of the other music I have already mentioned. Part two, Dimebag Darrell was an incredible metal guitarist, one out of a handful of the best metal guitarists ever. Part three, Pantera rocked. Part four - yes - Darrell was shot at a show by some crazy schizophrenic and that is fouled up. Part five, Pantera incited some of that "stuffin'" and there were people who were permanently maimed at Pantera shows other than Dimebag Darell - frequently.

I didn't even want to mention Pantera or Darrell, but he was really the big proponent of heavy strings on the bottom of a guitar and mediums the rest of the way up. Further, you may have figured something out from our disambiguation: That crazy schizophrenic murdered a guy, and that is dead wrong. That crazy schizophrenic does not receive NGRI-status from Gwyd. However, people who wind up getting fouled up that way generally have some of their own rubbish to look through more insightfully, and this case is no exception.

When it comes to rock styles, there are 3 basic tunings you would look at in terms of pro-material. The first is called, "Sawmill Tuning." Sawmill tuning is butt-easy to play rock in, and it creates a very nice sound for both lead and rhythm players. STP used the sound on a solid Fender Tele (Interstate Love Song is an example) and your only problem there is that the combination of the tuning and the very bright Tele sound requires a limiting head and a good digital limiting gate when a fuzz-filter is applied, or you will bust a lot of DAT tapes or people's ear drums if you are using it at live shows. Not a suggested form of entertainment.

So the tuning would generally be: C2 F2 C3 F3 Bb3 (A#3) C4. There are fifteen million variations of the Sawmill tuning, but even though that particular one looks very irregular, playing rock in that tuning is as easy as sleeping in the studio closet. Very, very easy, and what is wrong with a short cut occasionally? - and also a very nice kind of sound.

The next version is a common variation of the Sawmill tuning that has a very interesting character of its own. Led Zeppelin as a group really started hard-rock as hard-rock, although you could point to earlier groups like Cream or the Animals. Many people know this tuning as "Dad-gad," but you will more often see this used today in what most people call, "C-gad." It is an open modal tuning, and there are some real advantages in hard-rock, the principle one being an open root-five-octave on the 6, 5 and 4 strings, which makes it a lot easier to play your standard rockin' "power chords.

C-gad looks like this: C2 G2 C3 F3 G3 C4. This is also a pretty good metal tuning, as power chords get used very often in metal, but in both the hard-rock and metal venue you are going to get a very Dorian-sounding minor-key tonality if you're working the fretboard in an ordinary way. Jimmy Page has repeatedly told people that he used the Dad-gad tuning only a few times in his recording career because of that quality of this tuning. That sound can be fun, but it isn't fun for 3 hours, and even people who don't know what Dorian means might kill you and your security if you play this way for 3 hours. Don't do it. It's annoying.

When it comes to country, most country players play in an Open G Tuning, meaning the intervals are tuned to an Open G-Major Chord. The problem is that if you set it up like so: D2 G2 D3 G3 B3 D4, you get a very weak form of a G major chord because of the bass note being on the fifth of the chord. There is no good tone in Open G Tuning for a guitar in a good range for a normal bass string on a guitar. The solution is to string a wire string to a G3 on the bass string, and that is Nashville Standard tuning. So: G3 G2 D3 G3 B3 D4. I'm going to have to buy a triple-beam and watch out for red lights to avoid the Nashville Ninjas. I'm giving away trade secrets here. LOL!

Actually, I love good Nashville music, the adjective "good," being an unfortunate necessity in front of the "Nashville music"-term. Nashville is the least seedy music epi-center on the planet, and some of the best chip-punchers on the planet do most of their work in Nashville for that exact reason. Further, ethical music production in Nashville takes a ton of talent, and if you are making bread there then you know music real - real well. They do not take nonsense for peanuts in Nashville either, although that is true anywhere among great musicians.

So we move on to metal styles. Most real good metal players actually don't use a typical dropped-C tuning, but there is a common workable variation that produces a good sound, and that is: C2 G2 C3 F3 G3 D4. However, there are better ways of working this out, and it has to do with fuzz-filters.

Usually what a rhythm guitarist in a metal band is going for is a power chord where you can't hear any of the individual notes, just a highly compressed fuzzy power chord sound. A group like Meshuggah took this to the point on their landmark Chaosphere album to where what you hear of the rhythm guitar is a fuzzy, matte sort of scraping. Since you don't need or even want to hear much in terms of tonality, and what you need is crunch, the real way to pull off a metal rhythm guitar is with what is called a "hardcore tuning."

The basic idea would look something like this, although there are schools of thought and many variations: C2 G2 C3 Db3 (C#3) G3 D4. So now you include the 4th string in your power chord, and you get a crunch that is mean-evil because of that half-step and tritone in your power chord. If you use a fuzz-filter in the typical metal fashion, you don't get an avant-garde chord structure, you get a mean-evil crunch.

Another suggestion I just have to make with metal guitar has to do with "low-rider," tunings. The Ibanez seven-string guitar is an awful piece of equipment. Ibanez makes some amazing guitars, but any of their seven-strings are more than underwhelming. The best solution is to find a used Fender Jaguar Baritone Guitar. Fender plans to re-release the baritone make - I think - but it is out of production right now. That Jaguar is light for its tone range, wasn't expensive new, and plays great for the price.

Gibson also makes a Les Paul Baritone Standard, and again, I think there are plans to re-release the make. However, in the industry the joke about the Les Paul Baritone is "5 feet four inches and 140 pounds." It does sound better than the Jaguar Baritone, but it is a real heavy son of a gun. Also, the neck-scale is longer and the neck is wider, and that makes it sound real good, but it is not easy on the hands.

My recommendation is that if you choose to play Baritone guitar, then you need to stick to playing Baritone guitars. That isn't happy, but the strings on the Baritone guitar are far denser, and the neck-scale is completely different. Switching back and forth will be at least confusing, and could at worst lead to you damaging your hands very badly. Still, for metal, a Baritone guitar is the roxxors. Killer crunch, particularly with a hardcore tuning, and that might look something like this: A2 E2 A3 Bb3 (A#3) E3 B4. (My octave notation is getting fouled up somewhere, but I'm close, and I can't figure out where I'm calculating wrong. Sorry 'bout that.) (Author's Edit: I figured out where my octave calculations were wrong. The bottom notes will be one octave lower than originally notated, and the top note also an octave lower, like so: A1 E1 A2 Bb2 (A#2) E3 B3. That is mean-evil, brutal metal crunch.)

Another tuning that works well for blues-style players, or people who play hard-rock with a heavy blues edge is an open C tuning, like so: C2 G2 C3 G3 C4 E4. I know how tempting it is going to be to tune that top string down a half step to an Eb to get a "cross-note tuning," as blues is sort of temporally minor-key - sorta - but try working the fretboard with the major third at the top. Trust me on it. A few weeks of knackering with that and your blues squealing will be making the ladies squeal.

More to come. I'm going to do my gear wishlist, and then maybe we'll talk jazz or - I don't know - we shall see.

Working Over a Guitar, Part 1

2008-12-25T19:19:00.000-08:00

It is really funny, because I had been talking about guitars all last year, looking at different models and that kind of thing, and my mother - bless her heart - took what was probably her tax refund, and we spent 346 dollars or so on a great acoustic guitar for me to learn guitar on. I wound up at Hauer Music.

I started at the Guitar Center at the Mall. A lot of people go ballistic at the mention of guitar center, but it is actually a good store. Their big problem is that their management does not kick meatroid's out when they come in to goof around on the instruments. Otherwise, the sales staff is ethical, even though they work on commission, and they have a large selection of good products.

So I had looked around, and headed downtown to Hauer heaving a disgruntled sigh. Hauer has downright taken advantage of me in the past, but as it turned out, they had the guitar I needed, they didn't fool around, and I got the small amount of accessories I needed. My mother and I wound up 46 dollars over-budget. My mother - bless her heart - did not mind the 46 dollars over. Hauer is probably under new management, judging from the difference in experience, so if you're in Dayton, you can at least give them a shot without heaving a disgruntled sigh.

So, this is the first clue. I had played a FG700S Yamaha Acoustic at the Guitar Center, and it just did not feel right. The same guitar at the Hauer was a perfect fit. That FG700S is a standard dreadnought acoustic guitar without a pickup, is reasonably priced, and plays really sweet. It is a really good beginner's guitar to pick up.

The clue is that no matter what guitar you pick out, play the guitar you are actually going to bring home before you buy the instrument. My guess is that some meatroid damaged that FG700S at the Guitar Center, and I could have saved 50 bucks and a drive downtown if the meatroid hadn't damaged the guitar. Again, there is no use railing against Guitar Center, but the difference between a low-priced, standard dreadnought acoustic with no pickup that has been damaged, and the same guitar that hasn't been damaged was well worth 50 more dollars and a drive downtown. Maybe someone can hire some managers with some sense into the Guitar Center, because every one of the staff members at the Guitar Center is ready to garotte those meatroid's with their guitar strings and wants the problems to stop.

There are a couple of other things that you need for this practice setup. You need a shami cloth of some kind, and you should remember to rub down the fretboard and most of the guitar when you get the guitar out and especially when you put the guitar away. A typical guitar store has those cloths, and will be surprised to be selling one.

The reason you need to do this is that the oils on your hands can quickly rot the strings, the fretboard, and even the surfaces of the gourd of the guitar. I've been very careful with my Yamaha Dreadnought, but I've played it so much that the stain is already coming off of the fretboard after about 5 months of ownership. It will be way worse than that for you if you don't consistently rub the guitar down.

Your next problem is picks. Picks cost a few quarters a piece, and when you first buy the guitar, pick out a small handful, and then you can just drop a few dollars buying another handful or two every once in a while. I prefer a dense, jazz-style pick. The picks are quite small in size, but very hard and very dense, which makes for a very punchy picking action. Those picks also don't clatter in between the strings because of their small size. The only problem with these types of picks is that they have a tendency of shifting around in your grip or outright flying across the room.

I have a rock-style pick made of brushed graphite that is invincibly sturdy in the grip, but it is way too large. If I could find a brushed graphite jazz-style pick, and I haven't yet, then I would be one happy-camper. You can also try playing finger-style. For some reason, classical guitarists insist that finger-style is better, but in my mind this insistence is total hog-slop. Picking is more efficient, it is easier on the hands, you can play faster lines, and you can also get better multiple lines if you do your homework.

I'm at a feeble, "sounds great but is really mostly nonsense," skill level with guitar. However, I get the puppy out and work over the fretboard very consistently. I'm also thinking about looking for a good guitar pedagogue in the area, and we'll just have to see how that might pan out.

This article is plenty long, and what I may do is talk about "gear," next, and then hit the tuning issues. Theory is tedious, even for me, and also, I want to keept it as simple as I can while not losing the meat of an argument I have about guitar tunings. It may be better to leave out my opinion altogether and just show you a few standard things that are often used by the pro's, because my argument has to do with the theory of sound acoustics, and that is a bit much for most people. We shall see.

Last thing, you must buy a copy of "The Guitar Handbook." There are very few good guitar books on the market, and I will notify you when I find other ones, but that book is a must have for someone getting started on guitar. My buddy from High School owned one of the older editions, and I was at the local bookstore right after I bought my guitar and it was like - hey! - I remember that book - it was great! Do yourself a favor on that one.

Interlude: Christmas, and Touch-Style Instruments

2008-12-25T18:06:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas everyone. Today and yesterday were a trial, and both days started out very rough, but both Christmas Eve with my father and Christmas Day with my mother and grandfather turned out to be enjoyable days. It is the tenth anniversary of my entry and exit from the psych ward, 10 years and 3 days exactly, and my depression is - real bad, but I survived another Christmas and I did get to spend some quality time with my family. That is important to me, however tough it can be to deal with my family.

I want to talk about touch-style instruments, because I've done quite a bit of research on them, and most people haven't gotten any real information on them. The original touch-style instrument is the Chapman Stick, and the Chapman Stick company is still owned by the instrument's inventor, John Emmet Chapman. A Chapman Stick runs about 1800 dollars skinny, which is quite cheap for a professional instrument, and Chapman still builds quite a few of the instruments he sells, particularly if the instrument has been custom-ordered.

Your first big problem when you receive a working Chapman Stick is tuning and stringing the beast. Most people never get that far. The amount of time and effort it takes to tune a Stick has led to it being called "the ba*****," or the "witch with a b," in the studio industry. You need a good chromatic digital tuner (not cheap), and you need to buy the specialty strings required to even try to get as far as tuning and stringing the beast if you are set on playing a Stick. You can go over to stick.com and look at what Chapman is saying, and then you can decide if you're enough of a melon-head to give the instrument a try, and if the instrument is a good fit for you, then the instrument is worth trying.

Your second problem is going to be that you need a pretty specific electronic set-up if you are going to get the most out of a Chapman Stick. You need an amplifier with a good bass-response, but the Stick can be used to do other things, so a Roland Keyboard Amp is often not a bad idea, since it gets a good response over a very broad range. If you want or are able to spend more money, Marshall makes a broad-response cabinet, and then you buy some kind of broad-response head for the cabinet.

Further, it explains at the site that you need what would be called a "broad-response pre-amplifier," in order to make the beast work right, and there are cheaper or more expensive versions of those. So, even if you make a pretty skinny-Stick order from Chapman's site, say 2200 dollars, you're are looking at maybe 3000 dollars in electronics if you want to really get that Stick to play.

The Stick has normally been used to play bass parts, because it gets a very round, solid tone at a very low register. It can be tuned to just a bit above the contrabass A on a piano without any muddiness at all. The Stick gets a very punchy attack, which is not a good bass sound for certain types of music, but is great for the studio industry, as punchy basslines have been the in-thing since Bo Diddley. The first reason it gets that attack is that you play a stick by clipping the frets of the Stick at the string, and the sound results from the string hitting the fret. Chapman uses a diamond shaped fret-barre, which makes the instrument a little hardier, and also accentuates that punchy attack.

However, the goal with the Stick was not to make a bass instrument, but to make an instrument that could play multiple parts across a broad range. It is not a hard instrument to play, once you get the beast strung and tuned, but to get the most out of a Chapman Stick requires a great deal of thought, time and effort. There aren't more than maybe 5 professional quality Stick players in the world today, at my last count, and there is a good reason for that.

One of the first people to really man-handle a Stick was Tony Levin, and his Stick playing on Peter Gabriel's "So," album, or on King Crimson's "Discipline," is amazing stuff. Check out "Red Rain," or "We Do What We're Told," or "Mercy Street," or "Big Time," or "Sledgehammer" off of that PG "So," record. It's amazing stuff. As far as Discipline goes, the pick tracks are, "Sheltering Sky," or "Discipline," or "Indiscipline."

Just as a funny note, a Middle Eastern terrorist group once tortured some hostages by playing, "Thela Hun Ginjeet," off of that Discipline album over and over until they went bonkers. That is one terrifyingly ugly piece of music. We will do a Fripp-azoid and a King Crimson spot here at the blog someday, as Fripp is one of my favorite guitarists, and King Crimson is one of my favorite groups. However, even I pass on "Thela Hun Ginjeet."

As far as the best of the best, there is a Stick player named Guillermo Cides, who I believe hails from Argentina and he is the real guy to check out. As soon as you hear Cides touch the Stick, you know that everything is totally different. He does rely on some loops and things to get the job done, but he plays Bach Cantatas and works simultaneous counterpoint lines and all sorts of amazing stuff. The way the notes sound, you instantly know how much better this guy is than any other Stick player you've ever heard in your life. That isn't to insult Levin, who is just a family-guy, and an industry standard player who just punches his chip and doesn't expect any tabloid press. Levin is a good man and a good player, but Cides is the guy when it comes to the Stick.

As long as there are the electronics to build this kind of sophisticated electronic instrument, people will need and people will play the Stick or something similar to it. Chapman himself would like to improve the instrument, but has yet to come up with a way to improve the instrument that matches his vision for his invention. There is one other version of the touch-instrument worth mentioning, and it is called the Warr Guitar.

The Warr Guitar does have some advantages, and the two big ones are "sturdier construction," and "better electronics." However, those two advantages do not go without some explanation, because Chapman doesn't build his Sticks that way for some good reasons, and Chapman is no fool. There are also two big disadvantages to the Warr Guitar, the first one being, "price tag," and the second one being, "a heavy loader."

Anyone who has performed with a true Gibson Les Paul Standard Guitar knows that the 6 or 7 pounds that guitar packs over a Fender Strat makes a huge difference in your spinal tap. That guitar is one of the best hard-rock guitars in production in the world, but it is simply too heavy to play night-after-night without intense discomfort. A Warr guitar is probably double the weight of a Gibson Les Paul Standard, and the Stick comes in at maybe the same weight as the Les Paul Standard - if not just a titch lighter. That makes a big difference when you are doing frequent playing.

The price tag is also a rather disconcerting feature, and "5000 dollars skinny," would be somewhere about right. For a professional quality instrument, that is a pretty average kind of price, but still, saving a couple of thousand dollars for the Stick - which is in most ways better - is not chump change to anyone on a budget, and even a rich man needs to be on a budget. You can run a Warr guitar on pretty much the same 3000 dollars skinny setup as the Chapman Stick, although at some point we do need to do some gear talk, and if you are going for pro-quality, 3000 dollars is a little too skinny for a setup. Takes money to make money, honey!

As far as sturdier construction, it does make a difference, as a Warr guitar will be found by aliens in 3000 years, and the Stick does have a tendency of wearing out in maybe 10 or 12, and that is if the instrument is cared for well. Also, the Warr Guitar instrument has a denser body and therefore gets a bigger tone. That is one reason the Gibson Les Paul "rocks the Casbah," so well, is that it has a very dense body, and that leads to a very dense tone, which is what you want in a hard-rock style.

The electronics piece is interesting. The top-of-the-line Warr Guitars come with two piezo-electric pickups installed, and piezo's get wonderful sound. They are in fact the best pickups made in the world today, and Warr Guitar does not skimp on it's piezo pickups. The Stick uses a passive "acoustic-electric pickup," and this is not a very expensive pickup. However, the upside to those AE pickups is that they don't overload at hardly any volume, and they wear like an old dot-matrix printer. Some of you probably don't remember those.

Piezo's are very easy to damage, and they overload all over the place because of the pickups' high-response range. If you're running a Warr Guitar, you are definitely going to need a good programmable digital gate (BIG MONEY!) and you should probably also turn down from eleven and use a limiting head for your cabinet. You will lose some tone, but with the dense body and the piezo pickups, Warr Guitars really have too much tone.

There is another instrument that Warr Guitar sells, and I am not really a "bass-head," but I've considered buying one someday. They run 22 or 2400 dollars skinny, and it is a touch-style bass setup just about exactly like any standard four-string barre-fret electric bass, plus two piezo pickups. That is a killer instrument. I've thought of some funny tricks to play with the puppy as well, like tuning and stringing everything to one note or to fifths or octaves only to get all overlap on the fretboard. Boy I would like to give it a go if I had 3000 dollars or so to knacker around with. When the cash-flow barge comes in, look for an order from me, Warr Guitar!

Okay, I think we're going to do guitar next, and then we'll hit GEAR! I love talking gear. What we're going to do in the upcoming guitar article is start with some pointers for people getting started on guitar. I'm just gettings started, but I did my homework and I'm willing to let you copy my homework. Then we'll probably talk about guitar tuning issues, as long as the article is not already overly long.

I will try not to really bust the bandwagon with theory when we talk about tuning. However, tuning a guitar is problematic, and the major reason is that the standard guitar tuning is awful. Almost no-one who plays guitar professionally EVER uses standard tuning. We'll have to hit some theory, but I'm working out in my head how we can leave the bandwagon intact as we do. Back in a moment.

Electronic Music 5: For Want of More Comedy, Let Us Hit the ELM

2008-12-24T05:06:00.001-08:00

We mentioned glitch, which is a pretty significant ELM style already. There are different forms of glitch. Evol Intent sticks more to a basic DNB pattern, and uses a lot of horror themes. Some other forms turn the crank up on the bpm until you get this frenetic modulating percussion pattern, and that style originates with Aphex Twin's Richard D. James album. There is only one track on the RDJ album that is too sick to listen to, and it's called "Milkman," in case you test the waters, but the problem is, I get so mad about that tweaker-freaker and that "Come to Daddy," track that I generally ban Aphex Twin from my hard-drive entirely.

Even if you do choose to listen to some of the better stuff on the RDJ album, and that is not all of AT's good work, remember, "BAD FOR THE MIND!" Even the ambient works by AT are of a style that most people call, "ill-bient," and it's like watching "Amityville Horror," or "The Ring," two horror movies that are actually REALLY FREAKING SCARY! Not funny-scary like Freddy Kreuger or some of the Dawn of the Dead movies, I mean way - way too scary - except for special occasions.

Any true glitch is ill enough that it is a stay-away type of style unless you just really want to hit "The Ring," if you catch what I'm trying to say, and Evol Intent is included. However, there is one particular Evol Intent track called "Dieing Time," that quotes from some crazy UK horror-movie, and I've been off my gourd so bad a few times this year that I've been laughing my hiney off at the track. Not a good place to be, but also, "Dieing Time," is also a very understated anti-war protest, so at least the track has some kind of solid ground.

Ambient is another flavor of ELM. That style starts with Brian Eno and Ambient 1: Music for Airports, (1978?) which remains an incredible ambient album, even after all these years. That album uses some analog synth modulations, and a piano-roll style programmed piano part, and that is all, and it is well-worth a listen. It is incredibly melancholy music, but it is also very bitter-sweet. Eno got started in the first incarnation of Bryan Ferry's Roxy Music, and still produces music today.

Eno's music, including Ambient 1, has a mathematical flavor, but Eno was more concerned with the psychological effect of his music than pure serialism. All of his work is really a form of programmed minimalist composition and some people with true conservatory educations have some reason to be very embarrassed. Music for Airports was conceived as, "There isn't much worse than sitting in an airport, and what kind of music might you pipe into such a place?" As far as I know it has never been played in an airport, but that was the concept that Eno started with.

Eno also did a great track called "The Heavenly Music Corporation," with King Crimson's Robert Fripp. The concept was that Fripp would improvise on guitar in the sound-room, and then Eno would use the mixing board like an instrument and improvise with the material Fripp was playing into the board-room. The title track is the one to listen to, and the sounds coming out of the speakers when the track is playing are something else. The music is a form of ambient, but it is also incredibly lush and intense. Very interesting hypnotic type music.

Another group worth mentioning is the French group, Autechre. Most Autechre is experimental and serial, but they did an "ambient-groove," album, probably just to put money in the bank, and I like it pretty well. "Ambient-groove," takes ambient style music, and puts a very slow House groove underneath it, usually at half-time or maybe 76 or 86 bpm.

Finally, there is a performance artist named Laurie Anderson, a true Soho NYC bohemian, who is really a performance artist, but makes spectacular use of programming in her performance art. "Excellent Birds," (the Mister Heartbreak version is the best one) and "Gravity's Angel," are incredible. Again, some people with conservatory educations are producing worthless garbage and deserve a special place in the proverbial special place of torment.

That about covers ELM. There are plenty of artists to dig through, but that is some of the best of the basic field. My eyelids are now getting heavy, so I'm going to take my first Christmas Eve nap, and likely won't be back until this weekend, or at least not until the 26th sometime. More to come at around those dates.

Music Slangin': Let's Have a Good Time

2008-12-24T03:11:00.000-08:00

My inclination as far as EDM goes is that I'd like to do maybe a once or twice a month DJ gig. Problem one is that I would have to DJ a club where I am not going to get hurt, and one of the nicknames for Dayton is "Dodge City." Dayton is not pleasant, but I'll still reprazent Dayton. I've got some Dayton material that will be real funny to hit, but let me just talk about the DJ business for starters.

First off, if I had my druthers I'd run my style, geeza-style electro and fast breaks, and I'd probably go by the handle DJ Invid. There are a couple of problems. People dig geeza - they do - but the intensity and the "queerness," is going to have a club filled with about 5 hardcore fans, and I wouldn't get a single durned gig. I'm not sure what I'd do as far as a "light handle," but I've started putting some records together, and I've got a general plan.

Another thing to keep in mind if you decide to try to DJ is that even the queens don't dig all-sausage parties except on special occasions. (Like Night at the Roxie!) You need to play some music that will keep the ladies in the room, and then the ladies will also hang around because it isn't that they don't dig the masculine stuff - women are not fools by and large - it's just that they want to hear some sweet songs. The other thing is that the guys won't say much, but they like sweet songs too, especially since it keeps the ladies in the room, but also because it's nice to feel sweet sometimes, even for straight guys more macho than I am.

For people looking around, Alicia Keyes, Aaliyah, Destiny's Child, Whitney Houston, these are ladies' types of artists. Good luck getting the LP's of any of those artists, but even though running tables is always better, even now that the best turntables are digital, practical issues will probably force you to run a CD outfit or an mp3 player outfit because of the lack of access to the right LP's.

Anyone who doesn't understand that practicality is an issue with anything can walk out of my show. Go to the proverbial special place of torment. I'll have an audience left, and you'll need 50 extra cents to call someone who cares because the price of a pay-phone has gone up considerably over the past few years in the states.

The thing is that if you can get gigs like that, which are great fun, where you spin just a little serious material and spin the rest as a party, you can get a specialty gig once in a while where people will come to hear your own material. Thing is, you better at least pass the show, because if you blow a specialty gig like that, then you've blown the reputation of your best material. You may not have a great night, but it better at least go off with some accuracy.

The other thing is that I've got a short stack of records at the moment, but if I'm even going to run a party type of gig, I'll need - let's say - 4000 dollars of equipment. If I want to run my own material, I'll need double that - at least - especially if I'm going to produce and mix my own DNB music. That kind of money is not in the cards right now, but I get to thinking - one of these days - and that might be real, who knows? Life ain't fair, and I just put a foot in front of the other one every day. That "one day at a time"-stuff from the 12-steppers has some reality to it.

The other thing is, even disregarding the real material I want to run, you have got to practice. I've got a few records I can run, and that alone means that I have to run cues back and forth between an mp3 player and the records, and it takes a bit to figure out how to cut cues right. Also, if I could get a good kitbag together, it is a real nice touch to run segues between your cues, even at a party type show. It just shows you've put a bit more effort into the show, and also, the show flows a bit smoother.

So that is the basics with that. Alright, so let us discuss geography. When it comes to folk type musics, and EDM is a sort of folk music in a way, geography has always been hugely important. The Motown sound was not Philly R&B, and West Coast Hip-Hop is not Brooklyn Hip-Hop. Taking Detroit as an example for contrast, I was up in Detroit visiting some guys that were doing a Detroit-sound of electro, and I really was stunned. They were not in the worst area of Detroit, but I was hoping the car had armored shielding on it as we worked our way through going to a Thai restaurant, hitting the Dunkin' for a coffee, and hitting an AA meeting.

Detroit as a city would be summed up with the phrase, "survival of the fittest," in my opinion. You have just got to be nails to live through that place for even a few years, and these guys were running Detroit clean, at least at the time. Drugs aren't wholly evil, but I would like to think a few of those guys are still managing to run Detroit clean. They were really good guys.

If we were to sum up our dear Dodge City, it would be, "the craziest krewes on the planet." No one is crazier than any Daytonite, and if someone is from Dayton and won't admit to being crazy, then don't trust them for a minute. We are crazy like foxes, but we are nuts. No one can touch Dodge City when it comes to being ill and being hard at being ill. That is the frame for Dodge City. It is a source of pride, and that may not seem to make sense, but Dayton is my trash-heap and my lunatic asylum, and I'll probably never walk out of here.

So D10 REPRAZENT! Another funny story. I used to go to Suicide Girls. I'm not tattooed and pierced, but I liked a few of the models at the site, and at the time, you could go back and forth with the girls if they'd put up with you. You weren't supposed to "hooks-up," with a girl, that was an unwritten rule of the site that some people couldn't seem to make out, but if a girl liked you she would repeatedly castrate you via your blog or pm and let you mock her back, and also, the galleries were softcore stuff, instead of the usual rapine that drives me near to vomit every time I make a bad click.

The site is ruined, but it was a shining moment in 'Net history. Part of the site was that you would meet and greet with local members, and other than one or two scumbags, we used to have a real heck of a time. I always had to leave early to avoid unintended inebriation, but it was so much fun. The thing was, SG Dayton wasn't big, and so we usually hung with SG Cincinnati or SG Columbus. Cincinnati and Columbus have their own ethos.

However, SGCincy' and SGColumbo' were stunned at how gosh-durned crazy the Dayton members were. They all said it, "Other than the one or two scum they're some of the best people ever, but how can anybody be so crazy! - every durned one of them!" Also, I was going by my foxgemini handle at the time, and they all said, even though I was not doing close to as well as I am now, "We love us some foxy," but also, "foxy is the craziest person we know from Dayton."

Also, there are other Geeza styles in other geographies, but you don't just walk off with the Geeza in D10. Think of it this way, Geeza styles are known all over the states as either the most ill or close to the most ill proper-styles, and we in D10 are the illest on the globe. Remember, when ill is a compliment, it means you're smart, it means you're hard, but it still means that you're a good candidate for a loony-bin. Ill is ill, even when it's a good thang! And dat' is dat'!

There are other D10 jokes. One of the things about D10 is that if D10 is a fit, you can never leave the place. I know person after person who was a true Daytonian who went and made big g's in NYC or loved the weather and the mountains in Colorado, only to show back up in the garbage heap for no apparent reason a few short years later. The maximum leave I've ever seen is about 4 years outside of what I sometimes call "the Maelstrom."

Almost no one converts to D10, and the rare person that does is stuck in this heap forever just like the rest of us. That is Dodge City. I don't want to be overly mystical, but I've seen these patterns over and over with D10'ians.

So that is the home town. The craziest, illest n's on the planet. I'm not a fan of the BIG N word, but I'm using it in a proper place I think. You be the judge.

Another joke about D10. D10 at one time had a real happening funk music scene. Actually, funk groups are still pretty popular in D10, especially considering you'd hardly ever hear a funk band anywhere else in the country today. One of the best groups in Dayton was the Ohio Players. I've met their original drummer, and he was an amazing guy. A gold record, a great hand on the snare, and one suggestion, "don't go near a pen without paying an entertainment lawyer."

So there was a book that came out about the D10 funk scene - guess the name? - "There Was Something in the Water." There still is! LOL! Trust me, it isn't all doom and gloom, but you need a certain mentality not to get crushed in the Maelstrom. Most people show up in D10 on the run from something, take a look down the first street and decide to go run somewhere else. D10 is just not most people's kind of town. Even when people are on the run, one look at the real D10 and most people take off like a mad jack-rabbit.

Okay, I'm hitting the Orange Wedge right now, not the tablet form, the mp3 form, and I'm going to kick back a minute and see if there might be anything fun to say next. Look, I have severe depression, and I get down and I get enraged, but I am not a sour-face or a bitter-face as a general rule. Think of this though, when I was hanging with the SG-krewe, people enjoyed me, even though I wasn't getting tanked, (actually it's better if I don't, trust me, Gwyd Dahmer is the right descriptor) and even as crazy and ill as I am, and no one loves a sour-face or a bitter-face. And, I was fatter than a house at the time and some of the best models on SG used to downright flirt with me - repeatedly - but only if they made sure and castrated me first. I guess it is a safer bet to flirt with foxy if he has no nuts. Ah, the good ole days.

I'll be back. Let me think of something else funny I might add to the blog next, and then we might hit the ELM.

Electronic Music 4, The Faster Break

2008-12-24T01:01:00.000-08:00

Other than the Chemical Brothers and Crystal Method style of fast breaks, which you can tell by the beats per minute, generally around 140 or 130, there is drum and bass. (Check out "Orange Wedge," or "F*** Up Beats," by the Chemical Brothers, and "High Roller," by the Crystal Method.) Now, we need to do another disambiguation. There were some African UK DNB collectives, the real hot ones being London Elektricity, Goldie and Roni Size with DJ Krush. Check out "Bite the Bullet," or "Temper, Temper," or "Dirty Beats," and I'm looking for the London Elektricity mix I like at the moment. If you grab these tracks, keep in mind that even a mixed-up whitey like me can get a good mad on from these tracks. This is real "kill-whitey," material.

That type of DNB is generally called "Jungle," and I love the stuff I've heard, but that is really not my material. I've never actually met a tribe or clique that works straight from Jungle, and if I do I'd like to hear some news, even if I can't get the actual deal. Another thing to keep in mind about DNB is that it actually started with Ragga and Gabba material in Jamaica, and if you're a real DNB artist, then you are generally a UK native. DNB is UK, with just a couple of exceptions.

The stuff that most people dig in terms of DNB is called "liquid." It runs at right around 220 bpm, or even a titch slower, 210, 202, somewhere in that range. Liquid sounds to my ear - and I am not a liquid-triber - but to my ear a great deal like smooth jazz layered over your basic drop-kick rhythm. I do know that part of the reason they called it liquid is that if you hit a liquid show and you were high, the mix sounded to you like you had water on your eardrums. Anyone I know that really knows the DNB has been into liquid, and just like with trance, I do not get liquid. I've heard some good liquid, and it is great, but again - not my material.

The other kind of DNB after those two is mostly called by people who know it - and I do - tech. If you're trying to disambiguate between say "tech-metal," and tech DNB, most people would say, "techstep," if they knew their stuff, because it's a tech style that uses a two-step rhythm. There is one really big problem with tech, and it is called, "way too busy!!!" Generally you want to run the drum-machine at 240 bpm, or you can program at 120 in half of the usual note values, which generally pleases your drum machine a bit better.

If you are a real virtuouso with tech, you scale your bpm back to just about 230 or so, and you better have some megabucks, because technology is feeble when you are trying to pull that kind of run. The best tech artist is actually not a UK artist, and that is Dieselboy. Dieselboy is really a compiler/producer, and Dieselboy can kick the stuff, but still, TOO BUSY!!!

The best track in terms of tech in my mind is called "Accelerate," originally produced by a collective called Break and then compiled and re-worked by Dieselboy on a compilation called "The Dungeonmaster's Guide." However, "Soldier's Story," by Dieselboy is really more the classic, and there isn't a bad track on that compilation. "Soldier's Story," is pretty warped, and definitely for a special occassion. Gnutella has a couple of the tracks, but they are hard to grab, and it is even hard to special-order the full compilation over the 'Net, although I think the recording is still in limited distribution.

If I had the money to get an expensive drum-machine and some kind of pro-tools setup, I could eat any of the tech out there right now for breakfast, simply by being more minimalist about what got served up in the mix. The other funny thing about tech is that there is almost nothing to it. You set up the drop-kick, and with a good machine you can leave it as a preset, and then you fill a cymbal sound, and then you add some sound effects or some pads as filler. You're done. Except for one part, and this is why tech is not as simple-minded as people want to say, and that is - the Reese-bassline.

We head back to Detroit. There was a guy who used to pull "techno," shows in Detroit, and what that meant was an 808 module, and then another Roland module or two. He would program the machines before the show, the audience would all show up on morphine or quaaludes, and then he would let the program run and tweak the pots all night. That is "techno." It isn't good to be a snob, but that is the true definition of "techno."

Reese came up with a way of using a Roland bass-module and a compressor to create the Reese- bassline. What you hear is a bass patch compressed to the point of near ring-modulation, and then the patch is extended as long as you can and you tweak the pots - but not the compression - to get the bassline to modulate all over the place. Getting a true Reese-bassline is the key to tech, and almost all attempts at doing tech don't even come close to emulating the right sound.

Tech' is part of my material because one of the significant forms of tech is called "E-Sassin," which is a DNB form of Shinobi. Look, I am nuts, and I don't care if you believe a word I say, but this is the reality. I can dance E-Sassin, but with all the smoking and the fatigue I experience I can't go a whole E-Sassin tune at this stage in my life. Even at halftime, doing Shinobi to DNB is not easy, and I work myself up to trying occasionally and end up having to back up off of it.

So we finish up the DNB section by explaining that there is a form of ELM called, "glitch," that is sometimes dance-able, and is sometimes pure ELM. Glitch started because the beats would get off-set when people tried good ideas, and someone said - hey! - leave some of the mistakes in! The style is generally a warp-head style, and the Aphex Twin that is actually good is some of the best glitch material, although there are other good groups like Evol Intent. I won't listen to any Aphex Twin as a rule, but Aphex could hit the glitch better than anyone.

Finally, we are finished with breakbeat music, and we are going to explain a hard fast rule. Period. If you have the breaks, you must know at least one style, and at least some breakdancing. If you cannot breakdance at all, then you don't have the breaks. You can't even make electro. Period. There are people that specialize in breakdancing, and that requires incredible athleticism and dedication, but a DJ or an MC has to be able to at least do a little breakdancing without looking like a total fool. You can't know the breaks unless you can dance the breaks at least some, because you know the breaks in your body.

Well, it is Christmas Eve morning, and I have all sorts of family stuff to do today, but I'll be able to get some good naps in during the day, so I'm planning on staying up for quite a while. I prefer Thanksgiving because of the whole "gratitude," idea, and "New Year's," because of the idea of starting a new year all over again, but Christmas is important because of family, even if my family has me reaching for the best prescription hemmorhoid cream I can get a scrip' for. Alright, I'll be back momentarily, and we'll try to have some more fun.

Electronic Music 3, Who got the breaks?

2008-12-23T23:04:00.000-08:00

We've got to start off by doing some disambiguation. The basic breakdown in breakbeat is first, fast breaks, and second, breakbeat. Breakbeat ought to run at just about 110, which gives it a little bit of a lazy feel and also tends to confuse even a good drum-machine. That is sort of the marker for a true breakbeat style.

The next problem is fast breaks. There are two basic breakdowns here, and the first is drum and bass, which is usually just about 210, and that makes some very good drum machines real unhappy as well. Drum and bass is a very specific kind of breakbeat. It's a two-step beat, not dissimilar from what you might hear in Reggae or New Orleans Creole music, punched into double-time. Most people call it a "drop-kick," rhythm. The snare stays happily on 2 and 4, which is normal in any breakbeat style, and then the bass drum kicks on 1 and the and of 3.

With DNB, a problem is getting good variety, because the drop-kick rhythm is pretty constraining, and further, at that speed, and in a sort of just under-keel place, your drum machine gets unhappy real durned quick. Most people have to run multiple drum-machines plus a pro-tools setup to get any work done in DNB, and it can get worse than that on you. Your day generally gets worse when you actually have a good idea.

The other form of fast breaks is a breakbeat that would be typical of what we might call, "electro," and you bump the count up to about 130 or 140. Chemical Brothers, who do have some good tracks, or The Crystal Method, a real killer Latino-Vegas breaks group, are probably the two best at that style. The thing is, you would assume that the DNB would be the real tweaker, since you're running at 210 or so, but the reality is that you dance to DNB in half-time, so the real tweaker is the stuff running at 130 or 140.

Now let me be controversial here, but I want to give some proper respect in the right direction. Every tribe gives the other tribes some heat - right? - but generally unless someone is acting like scum, you give them a hard time - and an adult can take a hard time. I don't mind even being "dis'ed," as long as I'm not being "dis'ed," sick, and I've given heat to guys for dissing competing tribes sick. That isn't the way you work the game.

Hip hop started out as an African-American movement, and I've heard a little of the real stuff, just some pieces here and there, but hip-hop is black. Period. Don't try it. Eminem means something different than you think, and it did before "MC Eminem," took that name. However, lots of people all over the world, some as Aryan-looking and Latino-acting as yours truly, have gotten the breaks, and they've worked out their own way of looking at that kind of music.

That music ought to be called "electro," and in general it has a more complex and sometimes even baroque sound to it than true hip-hop does. That doesn't mean that "electro" is better, it is just completely different. Period. Not even similar to true hip-hop. Further, no black guy from America will give you anything but a piece of the "real" hip-hop, if he "has got the hip-hop," and if he has even an ounce of self-respect. It is a totally closed door. No one would ace his face literally unless they were scum, that isn't the way to play the game, but he would be a total leper if he gave anything away in the wrong way.

So, I'm going to highlight some of the better tracks I've got, but we here at this blog, Gwyd's place, are not going to poke our nose where it don't belong, and we are going to stick to "electro." What some people don't get is that it is fun to give the guy a little "hard-nose," but another part of the game is to give the guy a proper respect when he deserves it. Some people call that "praising," after the gospel term.

So, we are going to stick to electro, and there is "black-DNB," and that is an argument, but I know the hell out of electro, no matter where you're setting the drum machine. "Electro," is generally a huge dis', but it doesn't have to be, and I'm adult enough to take a little hard-nose for being a whitey who does breaks. Just remember, to me music is a religion, or part of it, and I figure if music is sacred to me, then I might want to stay off someone else's altar. I also love praisin' more than dissin', although it is fun to knuckle even a valuable artist's ribs from time to time.

Further, just remember, even with all of this EDM talk, my final destination is, "new music in the classical tradition written for instruments in the classical repertoire." I love dance music, and who doesn't? - and classical music is all listening music these days. So I love the EDM, and also, EDM is cutting-edge, and its enjoyable for me to hang back and groove to a break, or hit the house music I love, and I love that gay house to, and that will get you more than a little hard-nose. I can handle it though, and I'm not a thug about it.

With true breakbeat, in terms of electro, the stuff I work over and study is Massive Attack and Tricky, DJ Shadow, Doctor Octagon and Cypress Hill. Massive Attack generally runs the count at maybe as low as 96, and no more than maybe 100 or 102, and most people call that "trip-hop." Massive Attack got started mid-90's, and was run by a couple of brilliant Austrian guys and was a real mixed bag - Scottish, Jamaican - and a very large collective at that time. Massive Attack can outproduce anyone on the planet by and large, and they manage to get a sophisticated sound without it turning overly busy. There is a lot of different stuff there, some vocal breaks, and a sort of low-key "talkie"-type of rap. Just an endless catalogue of incredible music.

Tricky got started in the Massive Attack collective, and he did his early solo-work with his wife, who had the stage name Maria Topley-Bird. Tricky was what you might call a "warp-head," and that would usually be a bad thing, but it doesn't have to be. His best album is called "Maxinquaye," his first release, and I think the pick track on that record is "Aftermath." Tricky is not easy on the mind, however you slice the pie, and also, at one point there was a great live performance of a tune called "Vent," by Tricky on youtubie. It is worth a look if you're interested. The whole thing was played live without any programming, and it is unreal. Tricky was out of his skull- crazy, but he knew where it was at. I don't know any other way to say it.

Shadow is a different kind of story. Shadow generally only did instrumentals. He worked with two digital Technics and a standard mixer, and then a drum machine and a sampling module. Apparently his record collection was massive, and he would just grab cheap records and find sounds and sample them or spin them in.

His best two instrumentals are called "Mongrel... " (that is a mis-tag but that is the tag on the Gnutella network) and then "Building Steam with a Grain of Sand." Mongrel is one of the best phunckateck's ever dropped, a "phuncakteck" being an incredibly phat-electro beat. The instrumental runs at about 3 minutes, and you'd like Shadow to just spin it over and over it sounds so good.

Cypress Hill is a Latino group from the mid-90's, and the DJ for the group was a guy who is still running records named DJ Biggs. The pearl track is called "Insane in the Membrane." Biggs runs a real short piece of "Duke of Earl," off of a Motown 45, and keeps gripping the 45 backwards to a real tight place, and you wouldn't know what you were hearing really, if you really didn't go over the track real tight. I don't prefer to MC really, but I can body-slam the Insane in the Membrane flow better than the recording. It isn't necessarily that hard of a flow, but it is something I can do virtuouso, and I am a bit crazy, even after all these years of recovery - I still am.

Finally we get to the OCK. Doctor Octagon started out with a group called Jurassic 5, before Jurassic 5 went pop and fur-flopped, and that is all it is now, and I am not afraid to say it. Back then he went by the handle Kool Keith. OCK hooked up with a DJ named "Qbert," and OCK is so ill, that "whack," might be a good term. Ill can be a compliment, but it still means you're crazy, and "whack," is really never a compliment. Thing is that Doc Ock runs things so tight in spite of all that, and also, Qbert warps your head almost worse than Aphex Twin, if not worse. The tracks are "Doom," and "Blue Flowers," and "Earth People." "Earth People," should be reserved for a special occasion - we have those too - and is just as bad on the gasket as Aphex Twin's "Come to Daddy," except that it isn't "DEAD WRONG."

This is another point to make. Being hard and showing some machismo is fine, but "dead wrong," is never a compliment. There is warping a head, there is being goth, and then there is unadulterated, raw evil. "Earth People," warps your head just as bad as "Come to Daddy," without the pint of raw evil. If I ever catch sight of RDJ, I might actually ace his face, even considering the bid time I might do. If I catch him on the 'Net I'm going to ruin him. Period. He was also at one time one of the best producers in the world. It's called crystal meth' people, and a pint of raw evil is the result. Don't tweak.

The thing is, that warping your own head can be enjoyable, kind of like watching "Amityville Horror," or something comparable. Even people that aren't much into head-warping enjoy a warp on the right occasion. The thing is, you don't run a freaker. You might actually get killed for doing that. If you play out a warp, (the lingo makes itself, that is part of it) then you do it and then give the people a break from the action. Boy, that "stuff," makes me angry. If I was running a show, one of those Ock tracks would be more than plenty, and I'd get some walk-outs just for that one. That is considering that Ock is kind of a hero of mine.

So the basics of it is, that my breakbeat tribe would be what is called "geeza," generally. What still goes on, is that there would be these old guys that would squat in these tenements in these crazy areas of town, and they would slang poetry all the time, and people would bring them food and clothes and liquor and other gifts so they could sit and hear the slang poetry. So if you're working a "geeza"-style, you've sat with one of those old men.

It is usually an incredibly unpleasant experience, as the "geeza," usually tries to break you down, and most people don't sit with a "geeza," more than once and then usually not for more than maybe an hour or so. It's a kind of initiatory experience, and the product is something real ill, like Ock. Still, those would be my tribal collections, Shinobi, the KLF, and the Geeza.

Look, trust me, I am not trying to be threatening. I don't like violence at all really, even though I have my bad days. I'm too absent-minded to even own a legal piece, as absent-minded professors lose body parts even to legal pieces. I can fight, but I've fought one time in my adult life, and not even one time more. The guy didn't land a punch, or even touch me. Have to throw that in for the sake of machismo.

Still, I may be hard, but I like living straight and even kind. I want to have love. Even though the Shinobi and the Geeza are ill, and I am kind of nuts, nobody is going to get more than their feelings hurt. I try to even hard-nose with some manners. Also, the KLF may sound real pretty, but it is way harder than you can imagine, and I'm still learning from 3 tracks after listening to them for 3 or 4 years. I don't perfeck' garbage. Anyway, we need to make a cut and talk about fast breaks - both versions - in the next article. Then we'll maybe hit some of my own thoughts about EDM.

Electronic Music, Part 2: At Least What I Know About Trance

2008-12-23T21:57:00.000-08:00

Let us start by talking about a couple of phenoms in the world today, and I guess the first would be trance as a phenom in-itself. No one is exactly sure where trance originated, but from my research I'd guess either the Goa area of Asian India or possibly France. Many wealthy people in the Middle East vacation in Goa, and it is kind of the 'Frisco of Asia. Also, there is a late-House group called "Daft Punk," a very strange glam, psychedelic and satirical kind of House, and the group was playing with beats that were trance beats very early on in the 90's. It could be a case of parallel evolution, and that would be the most likely of the two picks for area of origin.

In America, there was an "x-wave," rave scene for trance, but it was really a very minimal type of event. In Europe and the UK, the movement was so massive that it was causing civil disorder, and the only way you could really know trance is if you had attended the Euro-trance shows and survived the experience. By the way, those are two big "if's." The movement wasn't supposed to be about mutilating your mind on MDMA, but as with many situations, drugs ruled the day and the phenom got more than a little out of hand.

The basic trance beat is a mono-phonic beat. The idea was to have a real big kick with a sharp attack and just the right quick fade that almost totally controlled the stereo-picture, and then to hit the kick on all four beats of a 4/4 bar. The reality is that you only hear 4/4 in trance because we tend to organize music in 4/4 without thinking too much about it, because in reality a trance beat is a mono-phonic beat. Just that kick placed on every whole count, generally directly at or just under 120 beats per minute. Very easy to dance to, and very hypnotic in effect.

The cliche other than that was usually some epic strings and then some cymbal sounds on the backbeat of the bar to create a little interest. That is the basic trance sound, but there is a trance flavor for everything, from more hip-hop influenced styles, to queen styles, to gabber - which is a sort of "heavy metal," trance. There were also goth styles, and there were some shows - generally ill-attended - where they would kick the beat up to around 140 bpm or so and that was called "hardcore trance."

Those were what I would refer to as "tweaker-shows." Someone I talked to recently used the phrase "tweaker-freaker shows," and that is a show that is goth, tweaker, and also full of dangerous freaks. The kind of show that needs a "don't bother showing up unless you want to be durned near killed," on the banner. Those kinds of shows aren't funny, but the phrase-ology is hilarious.

The other phenom is what I call the "tribe phenom." It was always sort of like this, but the 'Net has made the effect incredibly pronounced. I am a pretty solitary guy, but if you would really put a "tribe-label," on me, "Shinobi," which was a Puerto Rican breakdance style that I know just a smattering of moves from, and then "KLF," which is something even a lot of House people don't know about. If you grab the two tracks I mentioned, you're going to hear something that is like a breakbeat, but it really isn't.

It is a House beat, but more towards that "kicky," type of House beat, rather than the smooth R&B groove. Further, KLF has a very specific sound, and the group was large and there are all these elements, but I don't think it gets overly busy. The "Live from the Lost Continent,"-board of "Last Train to Trancentral," is so complex, and every cue and punch is pitch-perfect. The KLF is a very unusual "tribe," to get with, and I know maybe two people who have even heard of them out of the many people I've talked to over the years.

Finally, the KLF group was out of their minds, but rest assured that they weren't talking about bombing the Trancentral. They were a really "queer," group, but they weren't out to blow people to bits. The reference is to the 3 am Trancentral train that runs out of London, and you'll have to try to "get the KLF," if you want to figure out the rest of the references. Remember, I am as straight as liver and onions, but I call myself a, "queer straight." If it isn't unusual, I'm generally not interested in it. That can be a very bad thing - but it is me.

I guess I'd say I pack one more tribe, but we'll get to that bit when we get to the breaks. At least one more, and it has to do with Latino again. The big thing with me is - yeah - it looks like I just arrived at Ellis Island from Sweden, but I have a real Latino type of personality. I really do. I think that is the only reason I got taken in when I was at Stetson the way I did, and further, "got Shinobi'ed," even the little bit that I did.

What I'm getting at is that I'm not in a "trance tribe," and that means that the "trance-tribers," won't tell me anything. I like trance - okay - but I like to know just to know, and that isn't how a tribe works. You don't get to know just because you want to know, you get to know because you've found a niche in the tribe. Period. If you push a tribe too hard where you don't belong, they probably won't literally ace your face, but you are going to be very unpleasantly reminded that you don't belong.

I think the phenom is a good thing, because it gives people a place to work from, but it can be taken to extremes, and when scum like that take things to extremes the way they do, it really ruins it for everybody. Still, the reason I don't know trance is real simple, and that is that I am not a trance-triber. I don't have a trance personality, I don't really get it, and I don't push my luck, which is the way to be with this kind of thing.

I am going to mention the one really classic trance tune I know about. Every trance-triber groans in agony when the track is mentioned, because it was played to death. However, just like certain tunes that come from my tribe that are just the same way, every trance-triber secretly loves the song. It's called "Greece 2000." The best version is the original X-Trance, but I'm only seeing the Oakenfold Ibiza version on Gnutella (KILL OAKENFOLD AND I'M NOT A TRANCER! DIE!) which is horrible. It would be classified as "epic trance," but the way everything works out is like a symphony.

Wonderful stuff, and if you can get away with a short pipe of indigo before you listen, it is a Garden of Eden-type track. I stay away from the stuff myself, but I remember the days when I used to pipe or joint just a teeny bit of fresh indigo. And yes, that sounds like advocating drug use. Everyone experiments, but there is also a time to grow up, and for me, growing up meant, "stay away because every inebriant you touch makes you Gwyd Dahmer." Part two is that I suck down coffee and cigarettes like they're about to be banned, and those are plenty potent as drugs. Trust me.

Next, we hit the breaks, and we are going to have some fun. Big fun. Hang in there, I'll be back.

Electronic Music, Part 1: Introduction and House Music

2008-12-23T20:06:00.000-08:00

I think we are going to have to split this article, but we'll see how wordy the piece gets before I'm done. For starters, and this has happened in metal as well, what people have done when trying to explain the wide variety of electronic music is to split electronic into so many genres that some of the genres only have one group or one track in the genre. To use a metal example, most people call Fear Factory, "tribal tech-metal." Well - okay - but if this is a genre, who else might we name? Fear Factory is pretty good by the way. They are a kind of glam-based form of metal and they make some interesting use of electronic programming.

So we're going to do our first breakdown, and what we're going to do is two and only two categories in our initial breakdown. The first we'll call - for the sake of clarity - "electronic dance music," which I will probably call EDM from here on out. The second we'll call, "electronic listening music," which I'll probably refer to as ELM from here on out.

Most of the time people would call "ELM," Intelligent Dance Music, or IDM. First, you can't dance to any IDM I've ever heard, and the "intelligent," only fits because the pieces are generally incredibly conceptual or mathematical in nature. Therefore, we're calling it ELM here, and not IDM. Period. Have a nice day, if you're capable of having one.

EDM: We Like to Dance, But That Ain't All of It

Now, we are still going to have too many genres, but there is only one more basic breakdown for EDM, and that is according to the drumbeat used in the dance music. The first type would be House, the second Trance, and the third, Breakbeat. I name House first because it is probably the oldest from of EDM, and so let's hit the history of House and I'll list a few tracks you might try to grab off of Gnutella. We'll work it over a little, but House isn't incredibly complex really.

Our problem is going to be when we get to breakbeat, because there are so many different forms of breakbeat, from most of the pop music on the radio today, to all kinds of esoteric weirdness. Plus, breakbeat is also going to overlap with ELM on some level. So let's hit House, which by the way is amazing stuff, and then we'll move along to some of our problem children.

House Music: We Mix "In House"

House starts in Detroit. You've got these two men of African descent from a horrible area of Detroit. Detroit is probably the worst city on the planet today, and back then it was pretty much the same. They'll have to send the Reserves in to get the place back in order. Each one of these men has one edition of the best Technics turntables ever made, even better than the best digital Technics turntables made today, and each one has a massive collection of the old, smooth R&B style records, like Motown 45's or the Thunderbirds.

The guys take these two turntables, and and an analog mixer, and they do some shows at the dance clubs to make a little extra money, mixing everything live to keep the music interesting. The music was different every night, and it was mixed, "in House." The club would pipe a disco-track in over the speakers, and then the men would mix in the R&B groove and play around a little with the sounds using the mixer. This was probably about 1977 or 1978.

One thing I have to hit here is that no DJ has worked straight from the tables without some kind of kit. What these two men were doing in 1977 or 1978 was not very sophisticated really, and they were running straight from these turntables and what is called a "pipeline," which is not a show I would want to try to pull off. So remember, yeah, you can kill some stuff with turntables - you can - but everyone has a kitbag as well as the tables, no matter how well the tables are burnin'.

The next development with House really comes with the "phat 808." The 808 was a Roland drum machine, and it was pretty cheap for as amazing as it was. The module ran around 2000 dollars in the early to mid-80's, and was one of the first drum machines produced that actually worked. The module could do some things that the state-of-the-art machines today can't do, and further, a lot of people run their current machines off of sample packages of 808 sounds. It was just a classic piece of work, and unfortunately, even solid-state burns out someday, and I have heard of no-one that has a working module today.

There were other versions of House, like "House bands," where there would be a live-type group with some kind of kit behind them. Also, once the "808 dropped," House started moving away from the smooth groove of R&B to a more funk-style rhythm with a heavy "kick," in the beat. There is a very slim boundary-line between late-House music, which was sort of hanging around into the early 90's, and true breakbeat, which appeared at probably nearly the same time in the early 90's where House was still hanging around.

Another event was that Europe picked up on House music. Most people associate "House music," with the very "gay," and sort of "New Age," form of Euro House called "Queen House," which was connected with transvestite shows. In some cases, a DJ who knows their stuff will remix the old "Queen House," at those types of shows. However, even Euro House wasn't confined to that type of music.

Alright, so let's make a sort of list. I know House real, real well, but we'll hit some of the better points. One of my favorite versions of House is Puerto Rican House music. I went to Middle School in an area where there were a lot of Puerto Rican immigrants, and Puerto Rican House was all over the place. The other thing about Puerto Rican House is that all of the stuff that I know of is a form of House called, "Booty House," and the stuff is so, so - incredibly filthy.

However, part of the fun back then was that even if it wouldn't air on the radio, no one made any direct references to anything, and instead used all kinds of funny lingo to refer to this incredibly filthy stuff. It was hilarious, because sometimes at my Middle School dances they'd be running Booty House and no-one but the students had any idea what any of the words meant. Further, if you were in the know, you probably had an inside-line with the Puerto Ricans, and yours-Aryan-truly did, which was a big-time compliment.

So the list:

1. Technotronic: "Pump Up the Jam," which was really just a "wallflower call," was their hit, but "Get Up," which is pretty filthy, was by far their best track. The problem is that Gnutella doesn't have the best mix of the track up, so you might want to stick with "Pump Up the Jam," for the time being.
2. B-52's: "Love Shack," is a classic, and they have a better one, but I haven't even turned up the name of that one yet. This deserves a story. The B-52's got started in Athens, Georgia, just hanging around Georgia State University at the same time as the original R.E.M., and they were a Southern gay-house band. They could play, and they were funny, and so dirty that you'll have to hear the track to understand. Their MC was this older Jewish gay who was so "absolutely fabulous," that the BBC show needs to be canned for plaigiarism. Then they had "B-52," herself, a no-talent who could do mod-dancing and would dress 50's mod and shake her cantaloupes at their shows. SO FUNNY! Oh man.
3. Dee-Lite: "Groove Is In the Heart." Slide-whistles, filthy lyrics, Puerto Ricans, and a short rap feature by Q-Tip from a Tribe Called Quest. Get it now! DO IT!
4. Snap: "I've Got the Power." This is a rebellion piece, which was a rarity in House, and features KRS-One. The radio-edit is on Gnutella, but the longer version, almost a full 9 minutes, which is a live-board is way better, and if you knacker with Gnutella bit you can find it. This is great stuff. Also, if you know rap, KRS-One did have a square sound, even for the time, but the flow on this track is very deceptively simple. Kind of a proto-hip-hop piece.
5. "What is Love." If you remember the old SNL skits making fun of poor-phisher-men, then you may remember this track. On Gnutella they have the mix of this piece of Queen House mixed at the "Night at the Roxie," by DJ Antoine (An - twon) as I recall, which is the best version ever done, and a real treat, whether you queen or not. This is the archetypal Queen House track, and the Night at the Roxie remains the most notorious "queen-show," ever pulled off. The Night at the Roxie would have been too gay for me, but it does sound like it was one heck of a good time.
6. KLF: The two classics are "3 am Eternal," and "Last Train to Trancentral." KLF was a UK group, and they were also just this side of hip-hop. KLF stood for "Killer Life Form," and they were a good-sized performance-group with both UK honkies and UK Afrikans in the group, which is unusual no matter how you slice the pie. They have an ELM piece that is incredible that I'll talk about later. Get the KLF!
7. The Bangles: "Walk Like an Egyptian." I'm pretty sure that this was a Puerto Rican performance group. The track isn't a slam on people of African descent. I am good with the lingo, and I get most of the piece, which is kind of a joke on NYC-stereotypes, but I have not gotten the reference of the title and the chorus yet. It is a funny one though. I'll tell you, going to Stetson Middle School and hanging with the Puerto Ricans did help me get the skinny on life a bit earlier than most people.
8. Falco: "Amadeus." This was an Austrian House group, and a definite "gay-core," type of thing. In other words, it's "gay," but it is not easy on the mind when you're high. It's hard for me nearly ten-years stone-cold-sober. Very hardcore. A little fragment of the piece appeared in the "Amadeus," fictional biography movie of Mozart.
9. Suzanne Vega, remixed by DNA: "Tom's Diner." Suzanne Vega, who was a very-talented underground singer-songwriter, wrote "Tom's Diner," to satirize people who write garbage poetry about drinking their morning coffee. Not exactly an exciting read, or at least I've yet to see a successful version of that one. I've tried to write about 30 versions of that one my self! There was this House Dance collective called DNA that remixed the track "House style," and it was so popular in the Dance Clubs that it wound up hitting MTV. Get it off Gnutella and send it to your art-school girlfriend if she's not packing a piece. LOL!

So we'll cut this article here and move on to Trance. Frankly, I know next to nothing about trance except some very basic things, so we'll just have to let someone else educate you better on that one. Still, I can make a beginning at it. We'll do that and then we'll HIT THE BREAKS!

Building a Recording Library

2008-12-23T19:01:00.000-08:00

The first thing I want to tell you should come as very good news. When it comes to popular music, the Gnutella file-sharing network is now legal by precedent in America. The American Supreme Court has tabled the issue for now, but it is very likely that eventually some legislation will be passed that clarifies the actual legality and illegality of the situation with Gnutella.

As far as it goes now, you can't keep a massive library, butthere is no fixed limit. An iPod full of songs is probably okay, and ten hard drives of songs durned well isn't. Further, you can't sell mp3's that you've downloaded, just as you can't sell copies of CD's that you have bought in the store.

The other two caveats are that full-length movies are not fair game, although clips and trailers are okay, and finally that direct person-to-person sharing is illegal. There is a rational reason for you not to p2p as well, which is the fact that direct-p2p sharers allow people direct access to your hard-drive. Remember that most 'Netizens are scum, and you do not want that kind of scum looking directly at your hard-drive.

For the Mac PC, the best Gnutella client is Cabos. The big advantage with Cabos is that it limits the amount of partial or corrupted files that it saves to a back-up cache, which is the opposite of what most Gnutella clients will do, and further that it is very skinny in terms of application megabits. With Gnutella, what you really want to do is to search specific "tracks," and this will allow you to check out different songs. By and large, the actual Gnutella network does not have enough files on it to get a whole album of anything, so if you want the entire recording, you will have to go and buy the entire recording. Otherwise you can be satisfied with a smattering of songs.

If you're running a Mac PC, an iPod Nano is your best bet. Understood that it can only cache a few gigs of material, but they wear out a lot slower because they run on flash-ware instead of on hard-drive technology. Also, if you're going to work out with an iPod, a hard-drive iPod can crash pretty quickly, or will just wear out very fast. Further, the hard-drive iPods cannibalize the batteries loaded in them incredibly quickly, and Apple only offers a full replacement of the iPod when - not if - that happens. They won't fix them, and you will have to buy a new iPod if you are outside of the warranty period.

Apple has lost a ton of respect from me, and when it comes time for a new PC, I will not be buying Apple. I'm stuck with my "spaceball-pod," for now, but when I replace my computer, Apple has lost me as a customer, unless they turn their companies' quality standards completely around. If you're in the market for a new computer, look at the budget, and then buy a standard WinPC of some sort.

A non-proprietary WinPC has some big advantages, if you know someone you can trust who can build one, or if you have a good working knowledge of hardware and software. However, don't buy non-proprietary parts if you haven't done your homework. Further, make sure you buy those parts from a reuptable dealer.

When it comes to the WinPC, there is a cigarette-lighter sized flash-drive mp3 player made by Sony that is a real nice buy, and the product is not very expensize. The largest storage space on that particular model is 1 gig, and it has no screen, but they run maybe 80 dollars or so, and for music listening, they are the stuffin'. The mp3-player also has a built-in radio antenna, and the player is great for exercising. The only downside is that at one point you had to run a proprietary Sony software in order to manage the library and recharge the mp3-player. The simplest fix for this problem is to fix the preferences file so that the software only runs when the player is plugged-in, which is pretty doable even for those without majestic computer abilities.

The new WMP for WinPC is better than iTunes, but the WMP for Mac is a terrible piece of garbage. You'll be stuck with iTunes if you're on a Mac PC, and that is a shame. Also, with iTunes on a Mac, look at the cross-bar and change your palette from the high-gloss "album cover," setup to the regular library function. The setup uses less resources, and you can also get a clearer view of your library by fixing that little widget.

Hear is how I run things, and the setup has some disadvantages, but it also works out fairly nice. When it comes to folk-music, jazz, and classical music, I purchase the recordings, either from the local Borders, or just recently I've started looking into a high-quality Internet-based recording catalog called H&B. When it comes to any other kind of music, I just deal with the limited smattering of songs I can get off of the Gnutella network.

As far as the H&B site is concerned, if you search H&B, or H&B Classics, it should be one of the first two or three hits on a simple google-search. It was recommended by the Penguin Classics Guide, and my Mom and I are going to road-test the site with a debit card sometime after Christmas. It is possible to get into trouble using a debit card on the Internet, but a good trick is to at least open an account on the Internet with a debit card, even if the site looks correct, in order to avoid some very nasty surprises.

I think H&B is going to more than pan out, the site looks amazing, but I do not want my mother or I to have to go to court over a stolen identity. That would probably ruin my mother's finances for the rest of her life. That is how wicked a stolen identity can be, if you do not mind your pints and quarts.

That will pretty much finish off this article, but the final thing to mention is the "Smithsonian Folkways Collections." The collections are mostly field-recordings of different types of American folk-music. The sound-quality is amazing, considering the age of the recordings, and you can generally just find them lying around for 5 to 7 dollars in the bargain bin at any CD store.

Almost any music you can mention is based on folk-music on some level, rock coming from blues, country coming from honky-tonk and "old-grass," and so on, and for the price you just cannot lose. I'm hoping to get the whole series. It's amazing to hear Leadbelly playing a gut-12-string in digital sound, and there are many other such amazing examples even we took from only the limited amount of the series I currently own.

Trust me, the American Government spent big money on this series, and they got this particular project - just right. Also, if you're into podcasts, there is a free Smithsonian Folkways podcast available at iTunes that has a new podcast once a month. I'm not into podcasts much, but some people love them, and for free you'll be exposed to a lot of different folk music and some good commentary on that folk-music.

So I think the next article will be on electronic music, and I have got the goods on this stuff, so wait until you see. Just wait.

Music Post 1: Broad Musical Concepts

2008-12-23T18:06:00.000-08:00

Let me start by explaining some things about my relationship to music. First, when I was a little kid, I slept 3 hours, and talked and was ornery for 23 hours. My parents would inevitably get exhausted, and when I was old enough to put records on the turntable, my Mom would have finally had enough and sit me down in front of the cut-rate Fisher stereo with my Mom's Beatles records and the remainder of my Dad's record collection. Sometimes my Mom would forget I was in front of the stereo, and I would be sitting there - probably age 9 or 10 - for six or more hours before she realized where I was.

I love music, and I always did. Music is sacred to me. Music is part of my personal religion. It is also a language to me, one that I'm still working out the alphabet and vocabulary to, and finally, as with most things, I experience music intensely visually. Music sparks me to see visions, and I am, for better or worse, a very visionary type of human being.

A further thing is, that if you name a genre of music, there is probably some form of music from that genre that I have listened to and enjoyed. For example, I like polka. I lived until about 5 in Milwaukee, and there are a ton of ethnic Poles and Germans there, and if you went to a party in Milwaukee, you would wind up hearing ethnic Polish or German polka music. Polka isn't that easy to play, and yeah, it's pretty lame sounding, and it's old trad-stuff, but polka music is very upbeat and very enjoyable when the music is well-played. Also, dancing the polka correctly is very difficult, and in Milwaukee a small group of people would know how to do so, and that was incredible fun to watch.

Take a very discordant example. There are a few death metal bands I enjoy. I liked Ministry's Industrial Metal attack on right-wing Christianity from 1991, "Psalm 69," and still occasionally hit the N.W.O., or the Just One Fix. A few years back, all the kiddies on the 'Net were raving about Slipknot, and I grabbed some things off of Gnutella, and I really like the Slipknot track, "Duality," which strikes me as Christian Death metal. The song is about terminal anguish, and seems to me to be a prayer to God to "get me out of this mess." I think everything else I've ever heard by Slipknot is total trash, but I love that particular track.

I'm not going to list all of the examples, but to my ear, there is no "bad music," simply because of genre, even pop music, when it is in its proper place. You don't go to the Opera House to hear a "phat 808," and I better not hear one when I'm at the Opera House or I'm going to vie for a ticket refund Also, you don't go to the dance house to hear the opera "Carmen," and you wouldn't get a whole lot of dancing done if they performed "Carmen," at the dance house.

Even when we consider music that is almost entirely programmed, in its proper place, that can be amazing, given some programmers that have used some ingenuity. Nothing beats hearing a proper performer play an instrument or sing well, but you can do things with programming that a performer can't, and in its proper place, programmed music can be totally amazing. Music is so inexhaustible, and when it is in its proper place, and some effort has been put into making the music, there isn't any music that is utterly without value.

I had studied music and been kind of ho-hum about studying it until about 17. My buddies and I used to play chess after school, and I was in the High School library - of all places - and picked out Bernstein's "Infinite Variety of Music," because it sat next to the chess books. The book was taken from Bernstein's early 60's television show that showcased classical music and some jazz in order to try to broaden the audience for classical music. That particular series dealt with how for every musical cliche, there were millions of ways of transforming that cliche into new music.

Bernstein was a very weak, sick man, but he supported not only classical music, but contemporary music and jazz. He despised dodecaphonic and serial music, but did premiere some of that music in his day as the conductor of the New York Philharmonic. He could also conduct the hell out of Mahler, although otherwise his conducting was no more than mediocre.

There were these piano reductions of the music being showcased in the book, and I probably still couldn't play any of them today, so at the time I went and bought cheap recordings of the music showcased in the book. I also tried some of the jazz mentioned. To be honest, I was forcing myself through the recordings and stifling a yawn and my frustration the whole way through.

However, for some crazy reason I formed a desire at this point in my life, one I'm still working on achieving today, and that was, "I want to compose new music in the classical tradition, for instruments used in the classical repertoire." Why would a 17-year-old be so insane, when he wasn't even enjoying the music he was trying out? You have got me, but that was where it all started. I was 17-years-old and I had no idea how much trouble that simple intent was going to cause me.

I don't want to hit a ton of music theory on the blog, and the big reason is that the best way to learn theory is to look at sheet music, and I really have no way of showing you sheet music examples on the blog. If I was running a pro-blog, I would get a coder to work something out for me with Adobe Acrobat and insert pdf clips, but I don't have the money at this point. Still, we will hit some theory, and I'm going to try to remember to keep it simple.

One of the problems about having a great deal of knowledge is that you forget that most of your audience doesn't have the context for the knowledge you are trying to teach, so we'll try not to pile a great big mountain of theory on here. However, even though most people won't do music as a career, almost anybody would like to be able to play a little guitar for their girlfriend, or maybe go "get the led out," once a month playing a hard rock show. I think I can help in that area, and I would like to help in that area.

The other thing to remember is that first, the people who work in the media industry who are ethical are amazingly talented, from top to bottom, and second, that the term "media industry," is usually synonymous with the term, "organized crime." In other words, your guitar playing for your girlfriend may be sweeter than organized crime, and your psycho-rock outfit may be better than the guys getting production value. Keep that in mind and try not to worry too much about the people who are making the bread in media.

I've got three articles planned. One will be on electronic music, one will be on guitar, and one will be on piano. I also want to touch on how to build a good recording library, which will probably be the next piece. Part of learning to play amazing music is listening to music frequently - and again - a man who was totally disorganized at everything has developed some ways of organizing listening to music. So this introduces our basic ideas: Music is one of the most amazing parts of being alive, and any music that is done well is amazing, in its right place. Leave the rest for the listing ship of fools.

Michael Moorcock, the Elric Series, and the End of Fantasy Fiction as Advertising

2008-12-18T02:19:00.000-08:00

To start with, let me say that when I assess an author, that my assessment could be wrong. Further, I haven't read a great deal of what most contemporary authors consider to be the really important contemporary literature. Most of my reading has been in American Gothic, science fiction, or fantasy, with a great deal of Bible and Gnostic Codex and mythology reading.

In other words, let us take an author like David Foster Wallace. David Foster Wallace has an Ivy League Master's degree in some kind of mathematics, and he wrote in his free time, and was eventually published. Wallace really exemplifies the current true post-modern literature in every way. He has a very even-handed, calculated, and simple prose style. His plotting is simple and effective. His characters are very finely-sketched, but they are also portrayed with a very even hand.

Wallace has a love of irony, and uses footnotes in his fiction, generally to scurrilous academic works that ought to have some people thrown out of academia. He is going to go in the history books, and he is a fabulous writer. He is also a very sort of urbane and mundane sort of writer. That is what post-modern writing is generally supposed to be as an art form.

It is also a form of writing that I can read with some interest, but that form of writing isn't even close to my greatest interest, and it is a form of writing I have no intention or inclination to write at any time in my life. Further, from the time when the concept of "writing," entered my life, I never did have any such inclination to write such a form of writing.

Michael Moorcock's writing is more along the lines of the kind of work I'm interested in writing. He started out publishing short stories in a counter-culture pulp-science fiction magazine of some quality called, "Weird Tales," and has been published back to at least the mid-1960's, if I'm remembering correctly. To me, Moorcock is one of the masters of the post-modern short story, and further, he is the first fantasy fiction writer who wrote fantasy fiction not to idealize some idol-figure, but to critique social problems, and further, to tell a good story. He remains one of the few fantasy fiction writers who has ever written that kind of fantasy fiction to this day.

I have "Elric, Stealer of Souls," on my Christmas list, and again, we will see how my Christmas funds hold out. I am about 100% sure that the original short stories concerning the character of Elric and the realm of Melnibone will be 100% better than the Elric of Melnibone novel and its series that I have already read, but we will have to wait and see. To my eye, even though in Moorcock's writing we are in this gauzy, twilit world of near total madness, a nightmare world, and a world of dream images, I would assess that Moorcock is just as post-modern and worthy of historical note as David Foster Wallace. I say this even though two forms of writing could not be more diametrically opposed.

I haven't read the original short-stories yet, but when I start we'll visit that territory, but let us just plunk down with the novella "Elric of Melnibone,"and not without some healthy fear in our hearts. Elric is an anti-hero, and he is the sickest, most hideous anti-hero in any fiction I have ever read. The book "Elric of Melnibone," would be unreadable if the character of Elric was not handled with kid gloves and proper discretion. You would imagine from the description that Elric is some kind of mad-dog character, but that is precisely the opposite of Elric. Elric can be summed up as a character pretty well in two words: total anemia.

Let me re-visit my conversations with my friend D. about anti-heroes, which were very influential on me. I process ideas very slowly, but today I'd be inclined to agree that I would rather center a story on a character that is deeply flawed in some way, but is still heroic. A character who is still a virtuous character. However, even considering that, I cite Elric and the strange psychedelic world he hails from as a key influence on my writing.

The other thing about the Elric works I've read is that by and large this is a character-driven situation, rather than a speculative one, and that is also a rarety in fantasy fiction. In this case, the character driving the short bus into the pits of doom is Elric, and even in the first novella, at around 90 pages or so, we are pleading by around page 45, "Elric, take your big black sword and impale yourself on it, because we would all be a whole lot better off."

I'll describe the character to you, and then we might just analyze what the character means to me a little. Elric is the rightful heir of a dying Empire called Melnibone. The Melnibone have lost themselves, and it seems that at one time they were a god-like race who enjoyed playing with the weaker members of the world of Melnibone like child's toys. Elric is an albino, and he can only stay alive with the aid of massive quantities of medicines.

The real kicker in the novella is when Elric meets the demon-sword, Stormbringer. Now, Elric can stay alive by the power of his great black blade and without all of his "meds," but he can only continue to keep the sword if he allows himself to be directed by its will, and also, he must slay person after person, beneficial or malignant, in order to keep the sword and keep himself alive. The problem is, if we read the cues, Elric would rather not be alive in the first place. Acts of horrible atrocity cause Elric to stifle a yawn, love is meaningless, and Elric's life is really neither here nor there, even to himself.

Elric's foil is his cousin Yrkoon. Yrkoon would be the next rightful heir to the throne of Melnibone. Yrkoon is a total idiot-barbarian, the exact mad-dog you might have expected Elric to turn out to be from my first description. In the end, my judgment of both Elric and Yrkoon is something along these lines: "I don't really want to live, but I'm taking everything else down with me." Yrkoon rampages against everything in sight, and Elric stifles a yawn and chases him around purposelessly. In the end, I think both characters live on to destroy not just themselves, but the entire world of Melnibone.

This kind of setup in terms of character makes for incredibly intense reading. These aren't stories to just pick up for a lazy afternoon, and I imagine that Moorcock was suffering horribly psychologically while he was writing them. However, as it turns out, Moorcock is alive and well today, runs an official website concerning his writing, and there is a possible bid for a movie concerning Elric, although I can't imagine that going over so well, most people not being mature enough to face that kind of absolute degradation and corruption.

Just when you think Elric can't get any more degraded - he does! - and it is a real sucker-punch. However, the themes are very well-handled, and this is not explicit material. It is very mature. It is too mature for most adults, but it is not explicit.

Another interesting thing to note is that Moorcock despises bigotry. He has repeatedly made statements in the past, and even currently at his blog from time to time, about how much of his fiction was written to send-up the barbaric bigotry present in mainstream fantasy fiction. I am sure he is of the "liberal flavor," politically, but as I may have said in another article, I think Moorcock exemplifies what is good about liberalism, rather than that other flavor that needs to be stayed away from. Moorcock is also most certainly an incredible radical, and all I can say is that his writing deserves some real attention from people other than me, in spite of the controversial nature of the topics treated in his fiction.

Another note is that this kind of psychology does exist, and it is called a "micro-suicide." You have an individual who is not openly suicidal, but is involved in self-destructive behavior, and is incredibly malignant to everyone they come into contact with. There are different versions of the basic mentality, but the basic principle of the mentality is the same: "I'm not satisfied with self-destruction, I'm also taking you with me."

Now, think of this. It would seem that Elric is an apathetic character. He cares for no one and for nothing. He doesn't even care for himself. However, if we really think about the character, and I think this was intended, he is an antipathic character. In other words, beneath Elric's demure and anemic character, he hates everything that exists, including himself, and will destroy everything he can as well as himself before the drama is over.

We've had some humor today, and some horror today, and we've got my cross-blog started today with an inital post that concerns some of my psycho-spiritual ideas that will get added to from time to time. Right now I am going to need some nap time, as I have a few things to take care of today in the outside world, and I can't simply sleep the entire day away. We will see how things pan out, because I have a loose-end to tie up with some of my writing process suggestions, some comic book talk I'd like to do, and also some talk about some of the other writers in that ordered list post.

The ordered list explanations will go on for months before I get anywhere near complete with the entire list, and I've already thought of one more book to add, which I'm making a note of on a notecard so I don't forget. However, I'm thinking I may take another few days break before I come back to either of the blogs.

I like to do a lot of internalizing, and I do too much of it, which is why I'm doing a blog at all. However, even with my boundless energy for much of the time, and even though I'm ignoring the reaction of the outside world to what I've said, this takes a great deal out of me and I may take a break. Don't start worrying unless it's been over a month since I've posted, or blogspot cleans me out.

If I do decide to close this blog entirely and stop blogging for a period, which I often do, then I'll make a post so you know I'm alive and well and just hanging back for some time. Well, hope we can feel a bit stimulated, and then when I'm ready I'll add more, and you read what you're ready for at my free sites. "As you like it!"

The Problem I'm Working On as a Storyteller

2008-12-17T23:26:00.001-08:00

As a person I have a very diverse set of interests. I'm a true eclectic. However, I want to focus on my storytelling writing at this point, and then we'll either go back to talking about this list of influences I made, or I may take a nap for the night. So let me attack this as a set of problems, and we'll start with my basic one, and move on from there.

The Gothic Problem

As I've talked about, and as my list of influences might make clear, I have a real great love of the American Gothic style of literature. Poe is my ideal as a prosaic writer, at least when the music of his prose isn't falling into tartuffery, which it never does in his best short stories. If I had to put a point on it with prose style, I would like to get that near-poetic music that Poe achieved with his best prose with just a slightly more stilted contemporary style. I have a very specific sound in mind, and as I go over my writing, that sound has yet to emerge in my writing.

The problem with Gothic style prose is that it almost always lacks clarity and precision, which is why we go for a stilted, short and clear sentence structure in contemporary prose styles. I find that style overly dry. Another problem I face is that I have a tendency of using archaic word order because I spend so much time reading authors like Poe, who in his worst prose used false archaicisms, or grammatical structures that were archaic in his own time.

Another problem with "gothic," as a style is its ubiquity in our culture, as spoofed in my article on comic book history. Camp when done well is of course - lame - but the fun and the irony is in that "lame duck," quality. When "gothic," is done poorly, it becomes lame, and it fails to be effective at all, because that kind of gothic relies on its eerie and sinister quality, in other words, on people suspending disbelief and taking the gothic atmosphere created as serious business.

So as an author, I want to look at something like these original TMNT graphic-novels, with the ridiculous back-story and all of that "lame duck," but also with a grittiness that is very believable, as a group of teenage turtles perform "hardcore," ninja moves on the bad guys. In a story there are inevitable weaknesses, or at least places where one has to gloss over some content to keep the story from becoming, "Bible Tome, Part II," and if done improperly, my audience will find it hard to suspend disbelief, which is a very important principle in any kind of storytelling writing.

That is my first problem to chew on. Here I am, telling you, "I do not want to see even one more frame of a comic-book telepathic-migraine, or even one more cyber-samurai comic-book character with a 5 'o' clock shadow," but I'm also telling you that, "As a writer, I am fundamentally interested in the American Gothic style of literature." It really is my baseline in terms of my interest in storytelling. I look at it and say, "Trust yourself Gwyd, and write what you want, even if it doesn't make sense." To quote the Talking Heads from somewhere mid-1980's, "Stop making sense."

I am going to work with the Gothic style, but I'm not satisfied with just re-iterating all of this ubiquitous, cliched, Gothic style garbage. This is my most significant consideration at the moment, both in terms of prose style, and also in terms of how to tell a story, and I keep taking my notes and doing my "moltings," and we shall all just have to wait and see.

The "Too Many Genres," Problem

I was corresponding with a guy via email recently, and we were discussing how we both loved fantasy and sci-fi, but that we just loathed steampunk. Steampunk as a genre is a sort of gothic fantasy where the magic powers the sci-fi elements, and steampunk makes me want to blow my top only slightly less than a telepathic migraine frame in a contemporary comic-book. It isn't even just that steampunk has been done to death, it is more like that steampunk takes my three favorite genres, gothic horror, fantasy, and science fiction, and then puts them together in all the wrong ways.

One of the better and original steampunk worlds was Warhammer 40K, and I used to plow through the old Rogue Trader book another friend named J. owned and some of the early WH40k codexes, just to read the flavor-text that was mostly there to sell the figurines for the tabletop Warhammer game. Still, it somehow just isn't quite right. To quote a great poem about an English teacher's message from Heaven, "Almost perfect, but not quite."

This guy and I have stopped corresponding just a few weeks ago, but we came up with a speculation: "What would be a way to seamlessly integrate science fiction and fantasy fiction elements, or is that even possible at all?" So there sits that particular toad in my workflow folder, and I'm not satisfied to stop there. What I want to do is more like "Classical mythologies and fables + American Gothic + fantasy fiction + science fiction = something other than the overstuffed grab bag that ought to be - and also, something other than steampunk."

I just loathe steampunk. AAGH! My mind is burning! (Picture Gwyd with head in hands and little disjunct lines poking out of his skull.) I'm considering making a drama portrait and seeing if I can find a piece of shareware that will allow me to put some "emotion lines," and a comic book dialogue bubble into my little self-portrait to host here or at photobucket, just for good measure. I'll see what I can turn up.

I'm writing material while I try to figure out how to get this problem to add up, and I'm mostly working on the prose style problem I talked about previously, as well as just taking some stories and re-working them. I'm reacting to some pieces that have already been written, and that have by and large been written very poorly. Take a few notes, take a nap, read my notes over, write some notes, smoke chokes and drink coffee, take a nap. It's a strange life, but the silver lining is that I can focus on exactly what I want to do, and since I have that freedom - I do. Well, other than raising Caine constantly and not having to accept any responsibility for misbehaving. That would be more like exactly what I'd like to do.

The other problem I've decided to solve is that I'm probably going to focus entirely or nearly entirely on the short-story, and probably not very lengthy short stories. Most of my best works are of precis length, somewhere around 2 or less pages in length typed, but remember that a true precis uses an even more simplistic style of writing than contemporary style. It uses very short sentences and very short structures, and my own short pieces are nearly prose-poems, which is not really a precis form.

Still, I think pieces around that length, or no more than 12 to 15 typed pages, 16 standard font, double-spaced, will probably be my entire story-telling career. I'm also interested in building frames for the short stories, or connecting the short-stories in certain ways, and I dream of a sort of collection of my scribblings and maunderings of several volumes, each story with a little piece integrated with the others, and also, every story in an integrated constructed frame-'verse.

That leads to something I want to avoid. I want to keep my constructs very, very simple. I don't want to do Hobbit and god-horse genealogies and all this garbage like Tolkien did. Trust me, if you think "Lord of the Rings," is unreadable now, then you should have seen it before Tolkien's editors axed that book. I call that "Sauron-block." In other words, you have writer's block, but you just write and write the infinitely long book that has nothing in it of value worth saying.

I found "Lord of the Rings," hard to read, and I've been diagnosed verbally gifted since age 5, so trust me, you are not alone. We'll hit the Tolkien-schmolken later even harder than I am about to do. I do love certain things about LOTR and the Tolkien-verse, and a great big pile of the rest can go in the dumpster like smut, and smut is the proper definition for that great big pile.

I'm not ready for a nap yet, but I've got to find something in this house to eat. I'll be back.

My Own Influences as a Writer, Part 1: Ordered List

2008-12-17T22:39:00.000-08:00

I was going over how I wanted to approach this, and I want to talk about specific works, rather than just general authors. Further, every single author listed here is a problematic author, and I'm going to go into some further explanation with every one - so hang tight. Some of this I may have touched on in another post, but we're going to sort of dig into the pieces of work that really make a difference to me in terms of fiction and storytelling, and I may once again have to split the article in parts in order to make the article or articles a bit less cumbersome. The list is mostly in order from greatest importance to least, but not necessarily very strictly, so just hang on until I get around to the explanations. (Author's Note: I decided to make this post these opening paragraphs and the ordered list of author's and works only.)

So we'll do a nice simple, ordered list with at least one work after the author's name, and no more than three works after the author's name, and then we'll start hashing out the ins-and-outs of what I'm facing as storyteller, one big of my biggest problems being that I have a goal that is currently much bigger than I can solve. We'll get to all of that as we go down the list, and if we're looking at a good door-stop of an article, I'll split the article into parts in some fashion, and then people will find the connections according to the tags, or at least I hope they will.

1. Edgar Allan Poe, "The Black Cat"
2. Michael Ende, "The Neverending Story"
3. Clive Barker, "Imajica," and "Galilee"
4. The Nag Hammadi Codices
5. Ancient Mythology, in particular Sumerian Mythology
6. John Milton's, "Paradise Lost"
7. H.P. Lovecraft, I'll explain that a bit more later, as I want to talk about more than three works, most of whose titles I've been unable to locate, but whose synopses I remember.
8. Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, "Test of the Twins"-Trilogy and "The Death Gate Cycle."
9. The Myst Video Game Series, I've never checked out the novels.
10. Michael Moorcock's, "Elric of Melnibone"
11. Frank Herbert's, "Dune"
12. William Gibson's, "Burning Chrome"
13. Jeff Noon's, "Vurt"
14. J.R.R. Tolkien's, "The Silmarillion"
15. C.S. Lewis, "The Chronicles of Narnia," and "The Silent Planet Trilogy"
16. Octavia E. Butler's, "Lillith's Children"
17. Anne Rice's, "Interview With the Vampire"
18. Stephen King's, "Pet Semetary," and "The Shining"
19. Samuel R. Delaney's, "Dhalgren"
20. Grimm's Fairy Tales
21. Aesop's Fables
22. The Bible, particularly the Old Testament, I read out of the Oxford Annotated NRSV

That is what is coming to my mind at this point, and if I think of anything else, I'll make a second ordered list article. Part 2 will arrive shortly, after I take yet another break.

Comic Books, Part 2: Comic Book Eras

2008-12-17T20:59:00.000-08:00

The comic-books era starts somewhere in the 1940's or so, and the beginning of the comic-books era is called the Golden Age of Comics. Political cartoons and cartoon strips go well-back into the time directly after the Gutenberg printing press, and even to some degree to earlier woodblock prints, but the idea of an entire comic "book," was unknown until then. The typical type of figure in the Golden Age of Comics was Superman, a very clean-cut epic-style hero figure. Another typical figure was Captain America.

On the surface what we see is this clean-cut image and a great deal of camp, but the Golden Age comics were also meant to subtly undermine at least some of the beliefs of mainstream culture. In fact, the original Captain America was eventually banned sometime near the turn of the decade of the 50's for implying and undermining mainstream culture without enough subtlety. All of the ages of comics have high points, even the current one, which most people call, "the Dark Age of Comics," but in spite of the crude art and printing, a very superficial character, and the goofy camp of nearly every single character and comic-book in this period, people who really love "com-books," say this really was - in fact - the very best era of comics - without reservation.

Probably my own favorite character was a very atypical comic-book character called Green Lantern. The goofy green garb, his magical green lantern, defending the Earth from alien villains, the god-like powers of this goofy green lantern, and the Galactic Federation that hoped to receive a better humanity into its ranks - need we say more? Also, Green Lantern was started by the same writer who started the Batman series some 10 years later, a guy who used the pen-name "Daniel Finger." A graphic novel collection of some of the original Green Lantern comics is on my Christmas list, and we'll just have to see how money holds out.

There was a short intervening period, and then in the late 50's, maybe first couple of years of the 60's decade, the Silver Age of Comics begins. Both Batman and Spiderman are sterling examples of the Silver Age. Batman and Spiderman are both conflicted characters, though Stan Lee's Spidey is certainly not as dark in character as Batman, and the people of the towns they are saving from cosmic doom (RAHR!) do not like them very well and are constantly trying to find ways of putting them away for good.

In the Golden Age of Comics, the theme of a secret identity was there, but the hero himself was generally worshipped as a kind of demi-god, and also generally had more than demi-god-like powers. The Silver Age original comics were entirely different in character. Batman was a human with great gadgets, and Spidey was - well - he was a punk geek with spider powers. Not at all your archetypal heroes. Why would someone want to have spider powers? Spidey in particular is a really queer book. Marvel has maintained the "Amazing Spider Man," series pretty consistently, and that particular Spidey is still a great book. However, enough "goth," has creeped in to even that particular version of that book to make real fanatics like my friend C. really, really, angry.

Also we can't help but mention Stan Lee's other big book the Fantastic Four, which again, is filled with some real weird characters. You've got a guy who turns into a big stone powerhouse, a guy whose power is to stretch his limbs like play-doh - need we say more? Fantastic Four was an incredibly fun book, and just as good as Spidey, but don't bother with any Fantastic Four movie. Fantastic Four was supposed to be really lame, but the movies are lame and don't work. Maybe they'll figure one out someday, who knows?

The Bronze Age of Comics begins with "the Incredible Hulk," and "the Uncanny X-Men." In the vein of the "Uncanny book," there were now all sorts of "team books," like "Justice League of America," and that kind of thing iterated over and over. "Uncanny," had a lot of camp left, but now we're starting to get to the "Aagh! My mind is burning!" - frames. (character with head in hands and some lines jumping out, a sort of comic-book telepathic migraine) If I had a penny for every one of those frames that has appeared in a comic since the Bronze Age, I would be trading on the same stock market ticker as Bill Gates. The era itself began sometime in the late 60's.

The Hulk was a different sort of character. He had gotten irradiated at a top-secret government site, and when he got angry, he would turn into a great big green powerhouse troll-beast that would inevitably destroy everything in sight, while somehow managing to accidently beat the bad guys while trashing everything in every frame. I think he was another Stan Lee character, and now we have a hero who really isn't in control over his own powers, and also has a tendency of leveling cities to get the job done, which was also a typical Uncanny theme.

So we have a sort of intervening period that isn't labeled, but sometime in the late 80's we have the beginning what is called "the Dark Age of Comics." The simple reason isn't so much that every comic-book today is so durned horrible, it's just that it is "goth, goth, goth," everywhere you look! Why use normal humor when you can use black humor? Why make your hero actually heroic? Why show some actual "milk of human kindness? Why not? Because it's the Dark Age of Comics! (RAHR!?)

In honor of my friend D., we need to hit the Batman comic books. DC comics is consistently the best of the large comic-book companies on the market, with literary quality comics like the Sandman series and other great titles, but Batman as a comic is now a total loser. Like most books today, the book is split into a lot of different "flavors," and then the special edition series, and so on.

The thing is - sure - Batman started as a sort of anti-hero. He saw his parents murdered as a child and he has become a vigilante to get revenge. He trusts no one - even his allies - and makes all sorts of contingency plans in case they betray him. All of that goes back pretty far into the original book. He is also a murderous martial artist. His gadgets aren't too friendly. He wears a bat costume. You get the idea. However, as I said in the previous comic-book article - originally - for all of that, Batman was recognizably a "good guy." Now, the typical Batman character behavior is sort of Gacy-esque. He acts like a psychopath, and this is without any exception in any of the split books.

The funny thing is that Marvel Comics is notorious for ruining good comic-books and their characters, and DC is famous for its integrity, but when it comes to Spidey, "The Amazing Spiderman," is at least recognizable as Stan Lee's original character, and Batman needs a good hanging at a military tribunal. It is really, really disgusting. My suggestion is that if you love Batman, order the "Greatest Stories Ever Told," series of graphic novels that collects the original Silver Age Batman series from 1 to when the splits started. The art is crude, but it is an actual comic-book with an actual hero, and it is great stuff, from what little I've seen of the series.

That pretty much ends the history discussion portion of the comic-books series. There are some really good comics out there, and the academic community, even if liberal-minded, is very conservative, and the academic community has started to talk about how the graphic novel and the comic-book are in some cases literary quality art. The big problem now is that no one wants to make a comic book unless it is a gothic-style comic book. The result is that you have all of these iterations of cyborg samurai who ought to shave their 5 'o' clock shadow with their cyborg implants and other total nonsense. I even like "gothic," to a great degree - but man - that is all there is on the comic shelf, and that is annoying as hell. Why not an American Gundam McPlayland book? Somethin'.

I'm going to do a little piece on books next, but I want to break for a minute and collect my head about exactly what I want to say and how I want to organize it, and maybe grab another snack. I will be back.

Inspirational Post, Number 1

2008-12-17T18:13:00.000-08:00

I had one of my fits last night, and it is inevitable, that for whatever reason, I will have one from time to time. I release the pressure by just going mad in my house where it is safe, and remembering not to hurt myself or damage anything that might cause me a great deal of trouble. However, as is common when I have a fit, I made a breakthrough this morning after falling asleep for a while. I do get good rest when I do sleep, but I don't sleep very much. That is one reason I often call my fits, "molting."

This is something that occurred to me, and it dovetails but also extends something I have already talked about. What I've said before is along the lines, "Don't worry too much about what you are born with. All of us our born with gifts and curses, and some are born more cursed or less gifted than others. Just work at what you want, and you don't even have to work until you are miserable, and you will succeed at what you are working on."

So it occurs to me last night, sometime around the end of the fit, that to me, there is a mystico-religious extension to this idea, which might go like this, "If you are simply willing to work, and don't quit working for any reason, then you will achieve anything you ever imagined achieving, and even more than you could ever have imagined achieving." Imagine, as I have, perhaps being a God, understanding all or any knowledge, obtaining eternal youth and immortality, healing a broken world, passion, eternal growth, destiny, and true freedom. I believe on some level that what ought to be impossible for us, isn't impossible for us, if we are simply willing to work, and if we are simply willing to never quit.

So for example, I imagine myself as a God, maybe, but I can't smoke less than 2 and a half packs a day in a bad month. That isn't exactly, "God," territory, but I believe, strange or not, that if I continue to work, "God territory," could be entered. Like I said, in a different way, "If you never quit working, you can never fail to succeed, no matter how long that success takes to become real."

That sums up what I'm trying to tell people. Work is a value in itself, not just a means to an end. Think about it, most people who are of some age have had a job or done work, where the process of getting the work done was enjoyable instead of a drudgery. Good work requires some tedium, but the work itself, just doing the work and not worrying about the ends achieved too much, (kind of like Big Al Crow's "no lust for results") can be just as valuable if not more valuable than the product achieved by the work.

People who find work only a drudgery are poor excuses for human beings. For one, they are usually lazy, because no one can work in a state of constant drudgery, and for two, they find no value in their own efforts and consequently, no value in themselves. That is a very miserable place for someone to be, and I've seen many people in my life that never grow out of that basic mindset, that work is drudgery, and that products are everything.

There was this man in Russia around the time of the Bolshevik Revolution named P.D. Ouspenskii, and he had met a very sly but very remarkable man named G.I. Gurdjieff, who had really sparked Ouspenskii's mind into new territory. Ouspenskii was a pseudo-scientist, not even up to par by the standards of science of that time period, but there was something very telling about him that was recorded by his friends. Ouspenskii died fairly young, just under 60, and as he gave his death-rattle, his last words were, "More effort!"

I would like to talk about some of that esoteric thought more, but I'm considering splitting it off to another blog and then cross-linking the two blogs. Blogspot is kind enough to allow multiple blogs for free accounts, and we'll see what comes of that thought sometime here in the future. For now, just work, and don't quit, no matter what happens, and your life is going to head somewhere, even if the paths you walk are a bit crooked.

Finally, Comic Book Land, Part 1: Comics and Gwyd

2008-12-17T16:03:00.000-08:00

I've taken a couple of days break, and I'm not sure what direction we were headed in my last post, but I know I wanted to talk about comic-books and had done some material in-between doing a comic-books post. So, let us visit comic-book world. I'm going to give boldface headings and go through a few points, and then I want to talk about not only my growing interest in comic-books, but where I've at least considered heading with my comic-book concepts. (Author correction: I decided that the article had gone on long enough, and the other bold points will appear in later posts.)

My own relationship to comics' world

I had a group of friends I played D&D with, and they were big-time comic-book collectors, and my brother collected comics to some degree as well. My friend C. was an "Amazing Spidey," fanatic, who liked the old school, frank, open, and earnest Spiderman comic. He didn't have any of the really outrageously expensive Spidey-comics, but he had some back-issues that were worth well over a hundred dollars. For him, collecting the books was as important as reading them, which is something I still really don't have an interest in doing.

My other friend D. was a big Batman fan. My friend D. and I had some intense discussions about anti-heroes, and my friend did not like anti-heroes. Batman is one of the oldest comic-book anti-heroes, a guy with a very dark psychology and a vigilante figure, and that goes back to his origin in the late 1950's, if I'm remembering the dates right. However, even though Batman was an anti-hero, he was recognizably a good guy, rather than a villain as a main character. My friend D. also enjoyed the collection part of comic-books, and again, he didn't have Batman books worth thousands of dollars as individual books, but he had a backlog worth a thousand dollars or more taken all together, and that was part of the fun of comic-books for him.

I took an interest in some of the early X-Men comics story arcs just as "Uncanny X-Men," was retitled and split off into several other books, including "X-Factor," and "X-Force," but I just read the arcs and that was that. One of my favorite character's was a character named "Cable," from Rob Leifeild's, "X-Factor." Cable was a character with very minor superhero powers, and he was a cyborg with a mild telekinetic ability, and a very mysterious character. The "X-Factor," arcs as stories weren't fabulous, but they were good enough, and I loved that Cable character.

Another comic I took an interest in was an early Image comic called, "The Maxx." The Maxx would have been an anomaly for any comic-book company, but was a huge anomaly for Image. Image relied on next-to no-story comics with fabulous design art and high-quality printing processes. There have been almost no Image comics that have had any content up to today. The two principal figures in "The Maxx," were a young woman who had been raped and who was working in social work, and her schizophrenic client, "The Maxx."

The Maxx lived in a surrealist fantasy world where he was a superhero, and when he wasn't the client in this woman's office, the social worker was this tormented spear-wielding figure in the Maxx's world of madness called "The Jungle Queen." The Maxx dealt with radical feminist issues, gender, rape, madness, mental health culture, and poverty, and ran about 30 or 40 issues before it was canned. It was one hell of an amazing book that took a lot of guts to write and publish.

My brother also had the graphic novels of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, and that was a real wonderful series. The great thing about the series was that it was intensely gothic, but also managed to be intensely "campy," at the same time, and that is not a very easy effect to pull off. The basic concept for the back-story was hilarious when considered alone: Some small box turtles and a rat fall into some toxic sewage, and they become humanoid and intelligent, and the rat becomes the turtles ninja mentor, and the turtles head out to save the Turtle-verse from the forces of ee-ville!

TMNT started out as an ashcan, but was eventually syndicated widely in its original form, and then in the early nineties it was a huge fad for a brief shining moment. Also, in the second TMNT graphic novel, there was a crossover with an aschan figure named Cerebus. There is a long article on Cerebus at wikipedia, but it is almost all garbage. No one really knows what was originally in the Cerebus books, because ashcans are printed on cheap paper that quickly breaks down. If you owned a single Cerebus book that was merely in readable condition, it would be priceless, and people who know comics say that Cerebus is one of the best comic series' ever written - without reservation. As far as I am aware, all that remains today is the tiny cross-over in the TMNT graphic novel.

The basic back story to Cerebus is pretty funny as well. There is this man who is a priest who commits a crime, and is turned into this sort of dwarfish, gray-colored hedgehog-like character as a punishment. He wields this little broad short-sword, and he loses every fight he enters in the entire 200 book comic book series. Also, when his emotions change, his body changes shape mildly. For example, if he is angry he might grow spikes out of his head. However, he has no powers that allow him to have any power in the comic, other than the fact that he is very cunning, and that he is a great sneak-thief.

The artist who created Cerebus also wrote the story. He had terminal cancer, and he wrote the story and then story-boarded 200 issues for the series. Further, he did in fact finish all of the comics from 1 to 200 and published them as ashcans before he died just two or three years later.

So, as I said, those were my past interests in comic-books. I've talked about my "mecha' fetish," and I've read a few things over the past 10 years since I've been in recovery as well, which are worth mentioning. One was called "Blade of the Immortal." Blade of the Immortal is a "Japanese art book," meaning that it isn't done in the traditional manga style and treats heavier themes. It wasn't banned in Japan, but the comic-book just barely escaped being banned.

The back story is incredible. The main character, Rei, had a corrupt Daimyo and consequently betrayed his Daimyo. However, in the traditional Japanese ideal, even a corrupt Daimyo had to be utterly obeyed, so Rei is cursed for his actions. He will live as an immortal until he slays 1 thousand and 1 men. The idea behind the book was that every time Rei produced a dead body, which was pretty durned often in every book, the count would go up, and when 1,001 dead bodies as a body count was reached, Rei would die and the series would end.

Unfortunately, the writer of the comic died before the series was completed, and as controversial as the series was, no other writer was willing to pick it up. It is intensely violent, but is also a story of love, fate and passion. I wound up digging through some of the back issues and paid 20 dollars a piece just to read fragments of the series, which is something I would not normally do.

There was also the Akira manga. Now, Akira was banned in Japan, and look - you get older, and you realize - explicit violence isn't "cool." The Akira book went way over the broadband. Way over. However, the premise is pretty amazing. The basic point is this: Akira is a nine-year old with a telepsychic ability powerful enough to eventually nuke-bomb the entirety of this futuristic Tokyo. Two points. Point One: Humanity right now is a nine-year old with a nuclear arsenal. Point two: What if you not only had a nine-year old with a nuclear arsenal, but a nine-year old with a nuclear arsenal for a mind?

I think a re-write of Akira without the explicit material would be a grand idea. It would be necessary to show how much anarchy and havoc that kind of telepsychism would cause, but if the explicitness of the violence was toned as far back as possible, Akira would be literature. These two points are well worth stating, and I would cite Akira as an influence on my own speculations, even though the manga book is some of the most hideously violent pornography I have ever seen in my life. "Take what is worthwhile and leave the rest."

Further, telepsychism as a cliche in any kind of fantasy or science fiction literature is usually used to depict some kind of bigoted ideal of superiority. It is one of the worst possible topics to treat in fantasy or science literature of any kind. However, I'll be honest with you, at some point I am going to treat the topic, when I've collected my thoughts about the psionics/telepsychism concept a bit more.

There was also an Image comic that treated a post-apocalyptic world where telepsychism was beginning to emerge as an ability, and also included mecha' designs. I decided to commit to buying the book, even though there was 8 pages of unbelievable art and nothing else but advertisements in every one of the books. However, after 10 issues, every issue at least two months late, I gave up on the whole thing, and the series was canned after 14 or 15 issues. I have since sold all of my back-issues back to the comic-book trader in the nearby suburb of Kettering.

So, to sum up a little, that was my, "backstory interest," in comics up until very recently. I was never a big collector, and mainly read the books I've mentioned for the art and the story. I do love that you can tell a story with a comic-book and include a visualization along with the text. In film, we have two basic elements, which are sound and visualization, but in the comic-book our elements are a visualization and a text, and I like the form a whole lot better.

One of the limitations of the comics is that most of your text will be dialogue. Actually, usually all of your text will be dialogue. Further, in comic-books, the text has to be very, very simple. If there is too much complexity in the dialogue or the flavor-text, you are left with a garbage comic book. The limitations are actually pretty extreme. For example, in a comic-book, even your main character is going to have a "hook." You will have maybe one sentence to sum the character up, and you stick to that "hook," for however long the series runs, or your character is no longer the same character.

Your other characters will inevitably be handled in the same way, or you will have garbage and not a comic-book. The intimate details of a character that can be portrayed in novel form are simply not going to work in the comic-book form. On the plus side, the design and printing capabilites we have today allow for visualizations that are incredibly sophisticated, and instead of dampening what we might imagine the story to be, the art can augment our experience of the story when the design is done well.

We're just about to finish up this part of the comics segment, and then I will be back with something I've already said, but not so clearly. We're going to do a "new age inspirational piece," and then probably, if I'm not tired, go into some comics history I've dug up. It's only 8:30, and I'm not even close to tired.

One of the things about me, in recent years, is that if a topic interests me, I begin to do some heavy research work on the topic. As I've said, I have early-morning waking insomnia, so when I simply can't sleep I trawl around on the Internet sort of lazily to kill time and just pick up trivia, or sometimes save bits of text and that sort of thing. It passes the time, it is somewhat soothing, and it has helped my art a great deal, as I have picked up quite a bit of trivia that has been useful to my writing and music.

So, I discovered the "history of comic books," and we'll go into that in just a moment. Another thing is that I used to go and watch the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," miniseries with C. and D. and some of their other friends. It was a great television-series, and after getting over the initial contempt that the series was probably incredibly superficial, the truth was that the series was far from superficial. Also, the series had great camp and pop-culture references, and was just loads of fun.

One night after Buffy, my friends C. and D. put on a television series that had recorded a full-season, had been released on DVD, but had never been picked up by a television syndicate, called "Witchblade," starring Yancey as female beat-cop Pezzini, who is unfortunately chosen to wield an ancient artifact of doom (RAHR!) called the Witchblade. The Witchblade normally appears to be some form of steampunk-style gauntlet, but can change into almost any form necessary to allow Pezzini to kick butt and fight the forces of ee-ville in the Witchblade-verse.

The actual comic is published by Top Cow productions. Top Cow is better than Image but similar, high on art and low on content, and further, as you might guess from their corporation name, they specialize in female characters with "abundant tracts of land." Most female characters in comic books are very voluptuous, to make them appear less like young girls, and then of course they hook people with lots of cleavage and hiney action. However, Top Cow makes sure to go way over the normal broadband with "abundant tracts of land."

Other than the fact that the concept of a weapon that can change into any form, from a suit of armor to a shield to a short sword, to whatever, is an unbelievable design idea, I also like the Pezzini character, who is what we might call, "a witch with a b," character. She is the kind of heroine guys would normally love to hate: strong, sassy, not legally blonde, and sometimes downright mean, but she is also, clearly a "good guy (girl)." The comic book storyline is only mediocre, but it has some content, and I was reminded of the television series, and started trolling comics sites and things. I've also bought a Witchblade graphic novel collection just to leaf through and kind of - "see."

We're going to our inspirational piece, and then we're going to do a brief summary of comic history from what I've gathered thus far, and then who knows? - Hey world, it's me!

What is Rational Dissent? - And What That Means to Me

2008-12-12T08:50:00.000-08:00

I'm going to diverge from the comic-book plan again, and we're going to discuss some topics that any-old blog would discuss, but in yours truly's unique, radical, and probably either irritating or outright enraging fashion. Almost every blog on the 'Net discusses politics, and then mixes it by telling everyone how politics and religion are common bed-fellows. At one time, I would have said that I'm not politico, because I consider most people's views on politics downright imbecilic, and that would the definition of "politico," to me. To be more detailed, "Politico: A person with an opinion about politics that a lot of other people have, and nothing to say about politics that someone else hasn't repeatedly stated elsewhere."

Now, maybe being in agreement with other people isn't all so bad, although it's an uncommon experience on this side of the network, but to just say what everyone else says about that agreement, usually in some condemning and worthless fashion, is good for imbeciles, and not for thoughtful people - like me. Another interesting thought, "The unexamined life is not worth living, but it is a great deal like vagrancy, so don't quit your day job!" Proof positive would be what we know of the historical figure of Socrates himself, don't you think?

I guess the reality is that I am really incredibly politico, except that I'm just not bedfellows with any other politico. Probably my main political hero is Thomas Jefferson. I do on some level believe in the American ideal. I'm willing to even call myself a "patriot," when I know a scourge will appear. Thomas Jefferson was a Democrat among the Founding Fathers of the U.S. Constitution, and in his time, he was too radical for the Democrats, and I would argue that it remains the very same way today.

There are a couple of things that appeal to me about Jefferson, the first being what is generally referred to as "agrarian socialism," and the second being his late teachings on tyranny. What Thomas Jefferson envisioned was an entire world of small farm-collectives, that lived by and large on their own agriculture and by bartering with other small farm-collectives for other goods they needed. Not content to be scourged as much as I have been, I would argue that it might be possible to achieve something that Jefferson, living in the time he did, could never have envisioned, which to make a simple label for, might be "small technology decentralized socialism."

The first idea would be that technology be refined and minaturized to the point of being non-invasive. Invasive being defined as, "great tyrannies of black asphalt and filthy cars made by stockholder equity and the lowest-possible bidder." The second would be that this society with its integrated and non-invasive technology be run as small decentralized collectives that operate by the more widely known idea behind "social agrarianism."

The second idea that Jefferson stated is problematic because it's incredibly radical, and the simple reason is that people don't reject tyranny, they are obsessed with it. They fornicate with it repeatedly, and are doing so right at this moment. If people can control it, they do, and if they can't, they scourge it and nail it to a post, throw it off a high cliff, or perhaps feed it a toxic dose of hemlock essence. Jefferson believed in the U.S. Constitution, but what he saw was that as soon as there was an orderly government establishied in America, it began tyrannizing thhe American people, which was supposed to be antithetical to the American ideal.

So Jefferson remarked sadly at the end of his life, but also with a great deal of brutality, "Perhaps freedom can only be renewed, REPEATEDLY, [caps are mine] in the blood of revolution." In other words, someone will have to kill a bunch of people to try for freedom again, but it won't stop there. This is no Marxist Utopia, but a history of tyranny and bloody revolution that will never end. Period. That is how brilliant Thomas Jefferson actually was as a man, whether you are inclined to agree with these ideas of his, or whether you'd like to repeatedly scourge and poison anyone who mentions them.

So we move on to the point of dissent. Let me give two stories, and put up those hate-sites quick folks or your pay-offs may stop arriving: I was raised Catholic, and had a good Catholic education, and was actually quite devoted to religion as a little boy. As a teenager, I rebelled, which is natural for a teenagers, and I realize looking back that I despised Catholicism simply because it made for good talk. So, with two points in mind, I went back to the Catholic Church and lived as much of Catholic life as I could live. The first point, "It could be real." The second point, "It would at least help me to understand what I've made a lot of good talk about and rebelled against if I gave it a try."

So I lived as a single Catholic for a time, made frequent confessions, talked with a vocations director at the local Archdiocese, went to daily Mass when I could and punched my Sunday obligation. As an unusual young man, I experienced what this meant in a pretty unusual way, but what I saw is, "A great deal of this is not just mystico-religious, it is actually sense." After a little over two years, I made some considerations, did some of my introspection, and decided, as an adult this time, "I dissent. I cannot be a man who lives without dissenting from the Vatican." So I re-entered Catholic apostasy as a mature adult, and left the consideration of eternal perdition writhing in a black doom of flames and gnashing my teeth up to my nightmares, and still give it little thought outside of these terrors of the night.

I figured something out though from the experience and it was this, "If you have ideas that others don't have, make sure to say them the exact same way someone else has said them repeatedly elsewhere." In other words, name a group, and dissent is against the code. Thomas Jefferson figured that out when a Constitution intended to install rational order in a newly conceived country WITHOUT tyranny, installed tyrannical order instead almost immediately within his own short lifetime. For myself, I understood that if I was not one with doctrine, or at least didn't pretend to be, I was apostate, and that I might as well be an apostate Democrat or an apostate atheist as an apostate Catholic. There was no difference. Nothing ever was, anyway. And so it has been, ever since.

A second story: I had a friend, and at the time I was practicing Catholicism I had been talking to him infrequently. He was one of the strongest atheists I've known, of the type that feels that anything mystico-religious is utter nonsense. He asked me to see Mel Gibson's Passion movie, and I'll tell you, I think the movie went too far, but the impact of a very realistic visualization of what the Passion of Christ in the Bible describes was incredibly powerful. So, we both toddle off to the bathroom, and I want to tell him, flat out, "I disagree with you on so many things, but don't change your mind about the world because of a movie that was almost 50 minutes too long, and was powerful in part because it was so incredibly explicit. Figure it out yourself. People don't just have a right to be right about things, they actually have a right to be wrong." Or as "neo-conservative," economics professor from University of Chicago School of Economics rather unnoticeably stated, "People have a right to fail, as well as succeed." I don't know how you can call Milton Friedman, who was a more moral individual (whoops! mentioned morals! must be a neo-con!) than my hero Jefferson, and who was also what you might call a radical conservative. Me, I'm your whipping boy world. I guess I should stop playing the martyr.

However, control freaks in the world are inclined to disagree. I'm not an utter anarchist, but this world is ugly, and this world is not free, and the world should not be ugly or tyrannized. Further, imagine a benevolent creator, whether that is nonsense to you or not. Would such a being, even hypothetically, want a world of Isaac Asimovian-robototons? Wouldn't making a few mistakes and even disagreeing with him on a few points be sort of a requirement for benevolence? Wouldn't we cease being human if we didn't make a few mistakes and even disagree with him?

A theological argument for dissent. Only here on this side of the 'Net, and not on your side in my own belief. Period. It may not be true, but I am telling you exactly what I believe to be true, and no person in my life, in my "perception," has ever done that for me, once. Nothing ever was anyway. And so it has been, ever since.

Ah, More Battletech First, then Comics

2008-12-12T05:02:00.000-08:00

I started playing Battletech pretty young, but I was in my mid-twenties when I found a serious group. The traditional way that people played Battletech who were very good at it was to stick to the heavier side of the designs, and to work the game very slow and methodically. The trad guys called it "ground-pounding," and what they did made a whole lot of sense. You used less than your maximum movement rate in order to prevent flanking, and you conserved ammunition and watched your heat-scale, which was a trade-off type of problem, as the ammo weapons built next to no heat but mostly had very few shots for a sustained battle, and at long ranges your ammo weapons missed more than they hit. On the other side, the beam weapons you could use as much as you wanted at the risk of going for a core blow-out like Jay did in that double-kill game.

The other big part of playing the game correctly was called, "ranging." What you had to figure out was what range to keep your opponent or opponents in, so that you could do more damage to him than he did to you. In Battletech, you calculated your damage, but it didn't resolve until the end of the damage phase, and all of the damage resolved simultaneously. What that meant was that no one was assumed to have taken any new fire until the current damage phase was completed, and that meant that if you were going toe to toe with someone, you could get damaged pretty bad bringing him down.

The thing for me was that I liked to play a different game. The trad guys knew that light designs were not useless, but your heavy armor took a beating better, which for a guy like Kay meant just about everything, and it did more damage by far. Kay would play only designs with heavy defensive armor packages, even if the design was pretty horrible, as in the case of the Battlemaster, which tried to do everything at once, lasted for an eternity, but also had so many ammo bins that a bad shot meant the end. Further the design was a 95-tonner, the max tonnage being 100, and that meant that the Battlemaster was inevitably your command mech'. That really was normally a good-thing, as the Battlemaster was an endurance based design, but boy the Battlemaster was useless other than to endure on the battlefield while your other mech's knocked your enemies down.

The only 100-tonner in the Ancient Rules of the Game was the Atlas, and we called it the "BM 'Roid Boy," as it was nothing but a five-ton heavier Battlemaster. It would seem if you just wanted another five tons of defense - but no - the Atlas was the worst mech' design in the original game, and I would have been willing to try to beat it with the second worst design, a light mech towards the top of the light class called the Urbanmech. If things had gone well, I might have been able to succeed. At least the Urbanmech packed an Autocannon 10, which was the ammo weapon that self-destructed Jay's Marauder in that game I told you about. As I told you before, it was by far the best weapon in the game, other than you only got ten shots with it and you instantly lost a mech' if the ammo bin went. Also, the Urbanmech design was very not sexy. That did matter to me at least a little.

The two mainstays of my secondary lance were generally the Wasp design and the Stinger design. If you didn't look close, Why either design? The Wasp had a puny med laser, no range, minimal damage, and a backup Short Range Missile 2-pack, which had about the range of the med laser, a point more damage, and as I'm recalling, 24 or 18 shots. The Wasp didn't have much armor. What it did have - was jump jets, and a pretty good range for the jump jets. Any other design in the Ancient and Hallowed 'Tech that had better jet-range was so lightly armored that you had better think three times before fielding it, not just twice. Jump jets allowed a long move without regards to terrain, and you could land facing any direction you wanted, which made a jump-jet design nearly impossible to flank. Also, a design as light as the Wasp could nearly ignore heat concerns, even with the heat of jump jet use.

The Stinger was even more odd. It didn't have jump jets, had a puny med laser and two Anti-Infantry pop-guns that did no damage at all hardly to a mech', and no one fielded Infantry in the Battletech game, mainly because we wanted to field mech's and blast each other. That was the whole point of the game! However, for a light mech', the thing was a durned brick, and it took punishment that some medium mech's couldn't. That was the thing you would miss when looking at the Stinger's tech' sheet.

Generally I'd want two Wasps and two Stingers in my secondary lance, and the goal was to keep the lance close, even though the Stinger couldn't match the Wasp's movement without the jump jets when in rough terrain. I went through a lot of Wasp designs doing pulls too boy, because even with the maneuverability, the Wasp would go down in about two shots from any high-powered weaponry, sometimes in one shot.

With the command lance, it wasn't always an easy pick. I eventually developed a fondness for the Shadow Hawk and Wolverine designs. The Wolverine was a mid-range medium, and it packed a real nice punch, and had good defensive armor. The Shadow Hawk was towards the top of the medium class, and it was a real weird design. It was real slow, as slow as the Atlas, but it packed an Autocannon 20 backed up by a large laser. The large laser had a very long range and did only okay damage, and was better backed up by an ammo weapon like the AC/5 that had a similar range potential.

The combination of weaponry on the Shadow Hawk was bizarre, but the Shadow Hawk was a nice design. The AC/20 had a very short range, but did more damage than any other weapon in the game. You got five nails with it, and you had to get close. The Shadow Hawk also had nice armor, and pretty low heat as long as you watched that large laser, because it's movement rate was so durned slow. That could cause problems in keeping the Command Lance together, and with light designs you wanted to keep on the move to some degree, because that was your biggest advantage. I fielded the Shadow Hawk often - sort of late in my 'Tech career. Also the Shadow Hawk and Wolverine designs were not the sexiest of the designs, but the trad guys fielded them all the time, and I picked up on why they were fielding them so often.

The other two were the Griffin and the Panther. The Griffin packed a PPC backed up by a 5-stack long-range missile rack. What people didn't get is that in the old 'Tech, you played LRM units to get indirect-fire capability, because they weren't any good in comparison with other direct-fire ammunition weapons, and direct-fire ammo weapons were the strongest weapons in the game. The Panther took a different tack, and it was better. You had a PPC backed up by a 4-stack short-range missile rack, and that did 8 points of damage and had 12 shots, but sadly, at med laser range. Both the Griffin and the Panther were slow, and could take a bit of a beating. My own preferred option would have been to take the more lightly armored Griffin's LRM-5 off and stacked on an Autocannon 5, which was a whole lot better than people seemed to be aware.I think the tonnage would have been about equitable, and the payload would have been way better. However, the Ancient 'Tech did not allow customization, and the game played more balanced if you didn't customize, so our group didn't customize.

Another mech' I liked, was the Centurion, but I never fielded it unless I was experimenting because it was well into the heavy-tonnage range. The trad guys called it "the mule," and it was the best workhorse design. Tons of armor, a good stable and traditional weapons set, good heat-sink rack. Sort of an optimized, but rather boring design, and not sexy in terms of art. I'll tell you though, I was not very good with a design like the Centurion, which required very slow and methodical play, but I could have probably brought down the house with one lance of Centurions versus three lances of just about anything.

Kay and I used to laugh about that kind of stuff. The other thing about Kay was that he didn't just play Tech', trad, boring and methodical, he actually had that kind of personality. Kay could have leveled probably 5 mixed lances with one lance of Centurions, and I would have liked to have seen him try.

I never could quite settle on a Command Mech' for my primary lance, but I'd have to say that the Panther was probably the best of the bunch, except for the slow speed. Another one I just loved was the Assassin. The mech' looked good to me, but no one got the mech', except me. It was the lightest medium tonnage, had a bankload of armor, was slow but had a small jump-jet field, packed a med-pop laser, and an LRM-5 stack with two tons of ammo, which came to about 48 shots with the pack. Honestly, I would have rather fielded four Assassin's for indirect fire than four of the heaviest indirect-fire mech', which was called an Archer.

The Archer was a great indirect-fire design, one of only three such designs in the original game. Any other design that packed LRM's was a design that tried to do it all at once, like the Battlemaster. I considered the Assassin the real beaut' with indirect-fire, and four of those and a good scout lance made for some very unhappy fellows at the end of my 'Tech career. I only fielded that team one time, and that was about the time our group split up, and I walked out. I fielded four Wasps and four Assasins and tagged one of the Assassins as my command mech' with electrical tape.

I then proceeded to establish a forward observer with my Wasps and embarrass two mixed heavy lances with about triple the tonnage of my own lances, by laying LRM-5 indirect fire all over them before my Wasps gave out. I didn't even take any damage to my command lance until I was forced to take the Assassin's in close and finish the scenario. A very nice night for myself, but about a five-hour game, and tension that couldn't be cut with just a butter knife for about 4 of those hours. I did it on a dare, I was sure I'd win, and I did. ERIDANI LIGHT HORSE BABY! Should have gotten the tattoo to go with it. The Eridani insignia was pretty amazing.

By the way, I would love to get a tattoo, but I've decided not to do it at this point. I love the look of a good tattoo that fits the person who is wearing the tattoo, but I'm worried about hepatitis risks, which are more prevalent than you'd think, and I think I'm probably already counter-culture enough. Still, maybe one of these days. I'd like something metallic and science fiction looking, if they ever come up with something like that and it's legal. I'm a radical, but I don't want to have to be on good behavior to eat bug-free raisin bran. It is almost purely self-interest. I wish I could raise Caine more than I do.

Alright, next up, Tim has bitten the comics bug. I will be back shortly.

A Fun Interlude: Mecha' Pron, not the Nasty Kind

2008-12-12T02:34:00.000-08:00

I was kicking back here after a brief nap and then breakfast, thinking about my old days playing a now-defunct game called called Battletech. I've mentioned in passing that I'm interested in comic-books, so I thought we'd take a break from work and talk about Mecha' comics, and maybe some comic-book and gaming sidelights and these sorts of topics. I want to start off with a sort of history of Mecha' books, which starts in maybe 1971 or 1972 in Japan with a manga book called Gundam Wing, and I also want to talk about some real funny stuff about manga books and anime animations in general. However, this isn't to make fun of manga books or anime, which has its "pop styles," and its "don't mention it around me gross-a** pornography styles," and even some parts of the genre that might be called "high art."

Right around or just after the initial Gundam Wing manga book series started, there was a massive Mecha' craze in Japan. A Mecha' is a kind of humanoid-looking warrior-robot, that often has an ability to transform between different kinds of craft. So there it was 1971 or 1973 in Japan, and it was warrior-robot everything, everywhere you turned. In the year 2008, and pretty much since 1976 or so when that particular fad ended, there is now and has been really only a cult-following for Mecha' books in Japan.

The initial Gundam Wing had incredible designs for the robots, and I would surmise one reason that a book like Gundam Wing was conceived is that you can do Mecha' designs with your eyes closed and one hand if you know how to do blocking out well at all. There aren't too many kinds of comic-book design-art that would be easier to sketch out. Gundam Wing had these incredible sketch designs, but it was far more campy and lower quality than the early 80's anime for Voltron, in both Gundam Wing's original manga and later anime forms. The Gundam Wing manga has been resurrected on a small scale, and while there are "split-off," books that are more contemporary and gothic, the main Gundam Wing book continues on its barbarous war of camp and outright lame and "cheese."

The real classic book, with sketch designs for Mecha' that remain unparalleled to this day, was a book called "Macross One." Macross One managed to take on some more serious elements, but if you think back to the Robotech animes released in the States in maybe 84 or 85, that would be some of the art from the original Macross anime. One of the things in Japan about manga and anime, is that the publishing houses make every effort to make the stuff as cheaply as possible. So, as in the case of Robotech, which was released a few years before in Japan, they took frames from principally two old anime animations, but actually quite a few more, and then spliced everything together, and voila! - a brand new anime television series!

The mangas and animes coming out of Japan are filled with that kind of stuff. So let's say you have something like Gundam Wing, where the Mecha's are in fingerpaint primary colors and things, and you want to make Gundam: The World of Darkness... You re-color the basic Gundam frames, steal from your grab bag of gothic franchises that your publishing house also owns, and now we have instead of Gundam McPlayland, Goth Gundam. RAHR! In some cases, an entire manga or anime is simply built from old stuff pasted together without any new material present at all, as was the case with the Robotech anime.

They have other tricks as well. Let's say you want to make a digitally-rendered anime, and in Japan, - again - they will cut costs any way they can. They might take some old art, digitize it, apply a little texture, mix and match some things, take some screenshots from arcade games, and again, a brand-new digitally-rendered anime.

The game Battletech, of which I was the sole master, has a pretty similar origin story. First off, the engine in Battletech was mathematically perfect. No matter how a munchkin min/maxed, it was still a perfect game. It required thought, skill, and it required a great deal of practice if one intended to be any good at the game. It was not a game where one could simply advance and unload and win, if the other player knew the game at all. There were a ton of variables to keep in mind, especially if one was playing more than 2 or 3 of the mecha's against each other. Also, the dice could go wrong on even a great player like myself, and the other guy had a shot at winning, even if he just minded his pint's and quart's and had only played a few games.

The problem with Battletech was that the simulation, while mathematically perfect, was very complex. It could take four hours to resolve a two-player 4 mech' on 4 mech' search and destroy mission, and the guys I played with and I would sweat over the table with graphing calculators all night. The other problem was that Battletech got started in America in 1976 - no joke - and all of its designs were sketch designs thieved directly from Macross One.

The FASA company simply assumed that these Japanese products would never make the United States market, and when those products did make the United States market, that was the end of Battletech. Also, Battletech was pretty much gone even before that, because FASA kept introducing new material that mangled the perfect mathematical engine. My friends and I bought the new figurines, simply because they were fun, and then played by the Ancient Rules of the Game.

I played strictly Eridani Light Horse. The back-story was that the Eridani Light Horse was a special-ops division of the old Star League that used only Mech's of light or light-medium tonnages. You were supposed to get all Veteran units if you played Eridani because you played only lighter mech' designs, but the Veteran units advantage was really massive, deceptively so, and I actually agreed with my group that playing by the normal unit representations was more fair, even though it made it harder to win. Further, in the old rules, the light and light-med mech's were really a fair match for the heaviest mech's in the game, if you knew how to play the game correctly. Most of the guys I played against preferred a mix of heavy-medium's and heavy-heavy's, and maybe one or two assault mech's, but I got so good at playing next to no tonnage that I had to leave the group because things were getting so bitter.

I played pencil, paper and dice roleplaying games, and enjoyed playing them, and I was an incredible Dungeon or Game-master, and I enjoyed running games. However, to be blunt, even though some arena fighting and a small amount of actual lance combat was as good as it got with my group - and I had far bigger ideas - Battletech was my game. If I didn't win that night, it was because my dice were rolling poorly that night, once I got down how to analyze and play the game.

I have never been a big video game fan, and there is a list of maybe eight video games I ever cared enough about to play to the end, or even to spend enough time with to develop some skill at the video game. They have tried to revive Battletech, and other than the first problem that part of the fun of the game was the eye-candy of those Macross One mecha' designs, the game is really now no more than "munchkin-fun." All the skill the game takes is to just advance and unload all of your weapons with the biggest design and win.

Just recently, there was a digitally-rendered full-length Macross anime, and if you look at the youtubie-site, some of the clips people put up might still be there. As per usual, cost-cutting is everything, and a lot of the clips are simply the same footage over and over, much of those clips being overly busy so that the whole frame doesn't have to be rendered in detail. However, there are a couple of original high-quality bits, just 10 or 15 seconds here or there, and the designs are unreal.

Mecha' stuff is a lot like pornography for me - something about the whole "robotic-warrior," vibe. In particular, there is a shot from Macross Zero of about 10 seconds, where one of the alien warriors of massive size is assaulting a base, and these defending mecha's open up a hull and two great big mini-gun gatling guns come out, spraying bullets and shells all over the place. That is what I like to see!

I am going to be geeky and tell one of our better Battletech night stories. Two of the guys who had been playing 'Tech for over 10 years were going head to head one night, and I knew I wouldn't get to play. However, these guys were really good. These guys who were more trad-"ground-pounder," type players, and I was the Eridani hotshot, and I wanted to see what happened when these guys went toe to toe.

They picked out two pretty trad lances, a lance being four of the mechs, medium mechs on the heavy side, heavy mechs on the heavy side, and Kay picked an assault mech for his command mech'. The only unconventional mech' was that one of those guys, let's call him Jay, always picked out a Marauder as his command mech'. The Marauder was the best "a good defense is a good offense," mech' in the game. It wasn't even an Assault design, but it was on the top side of the Heavy class. When that puppy laid down fire it was time to go hiding. We called it "the Beast."

Offensively, only the Warhammer Assault design came close, and that design had a heat-index that made it nearly unusable. The Marauder had a pretty good heat sink rack on it as well, although with those high weight-classes, heat index was always a big factor in the Ancient Rules of the Game. To make it even better, it used the "Officer Enemy Pod," Macross One-design for its figurine, which was way sexy. The big problem with the Marauder was that the thing had armor that made some medium mech's towards the mid-range of the medium class laugh in hysterics.

The mech' was nearly impossible to play, and even if I had been better at "ground-pounding," I don't think I could have ever figured the thing out. I tried a few times, just as an experiment, and I failed utterly to make sense of the design. Jay knew how to use that mech' like nobody I have ever seen, and it was a great design, but not a "safe," design. It was a temperamental beast and mishandling it led to it being destroyed before it could be used.

So, Jay takes the Command Lance to the East side, generally a good play, and in particular on this terrain because there was a great deal of woods to block long-range fire. The other guy, let's call him Kay, decides to accept the pull into the more open terrain. Kay lost a mech' right away from his secondary lance, and Jay shows up out of the woods on his flank, and now, Jay should have Kay eating humble pie, with what we used to call a "brand new heavy," and a brand new Marauder at that on his flank.

Well, Jay gets in range to use the Marauder's afterthought back-up weaponry, and Kay has mishandled this game to a degree that I find hard to believe, because Kay was the most stable and trad of all of the stable, trad players in our group. Because Jay is on the flank, that afterthought weaponry ought to eat Kay's outer flanked mech' alive with no problem at all. That outer-flanked mech' happens to be Kay's lone Assault mech' and his command mech'. So Jay shoots off the Marauder's short-catch, and Kay is running a Battlemaster, which wasn't a very good design but could take a heavy beating. However, Jay is on the flank, and he scores a shot into one of the Battlemaster's plethora of ammo bins, and Kay's command mech' experiences a core-meltdown and goes nuclear.

All seems very bad for Kay, and this seems like it is going to be a one-hour rout in Jay's favor, even when we're done sweating over the graphing calculators. The heat phase of the turn starts. Now, after firing the Marauder's short-catch, which was all beam weaponry, and that was a usual design technique in the old game, Jay has built a high heat index but nothing that should be catastrophic. However, he has to roll five or more on his two six-dice to avoid a spontaneous ammo explosion. He rolls a four, and the Marauder's one ammo weapon, the absolute strongest weapon in the Ancient Rules of the Game, though again - deceptively so - goes shazaam! - and that ammo bin was an explosion that no mech' that carried the weapon could survive when the bin was full. Jay's Marauder experiences a core-meltdown and proceeds to go nuclear as well.

We had a house rule that the heaviest mech' on the field had to be the command mech', and that if you lost your command mech', you lost the game. The game ended after about 6 turns and about 30 minutes. It was a command mech' double-kill in the same turn, and the only double-kill game I have ever seen.

I'm coming back with more comics-stuff. I want to explain my whole take on comics in general, and also how that take has changed significantly over the years, particularly just this last year. I'll break a little, and then I will be back.

The Writing and Artist's Lifestyle, Part 2, Living the Analog Life

2008-12-11T22:24:00.000-08:00

So I've listed a couple of hundreds of dollars of office supplies, and now let us assume that you're starting to put together the supplies I've mentioned. I saw on a mediocre but better than average website, while I was searching for comic-book writing suggestions, the following on that site's banner, "Writing is like vagrancy, don't quit your day job!" There is some truth to that, and I've talked about more than one reason why such a statement contains a great deal of truth. Putting together a couple of hundreds of dollars of office supplies is not easy for anyone who lives in a budget, and for a "writer and a vagrant," it is even less easy. I budget in an office-supply raid every other month, and I never leave the office-store without spending 80 dollars. However, that 80 dollars is in the budget, and I have the things I need without being in debt.

If you are capable of working, then you should work as you set out as an artist of any kind. It gives you more money to buy computer-stuff and office supplies as well. To look at a sterling example, after T.S. Eliot had become noted as a poet who would make the history books, he decided to take a full-time job as a banker, because he felt the job might help him connect with reality a bit better. He wound up a professor at Harvard University. However, the point he made still stands, and even though Eliot's work isn't the greatest English writing ever done, he has a well-deserved place in the history books as a very good writer who had something to say that was worth saying.

Another thing to hit before we start is the loaded word, "talent." I'll relate a story because I think it helps people. I made the mistake of going to school to major in music when I first graduated from High School. It wasn't a mistake because I wasn't talented, or even because the music program was awful, it was just a mistake. In the program we were learning rudimentary skills in every one of my classes, except Jazz Combo, where we were expected to use our skills at least "as-if," we were advanced players. Everyone was discouraged, everyone was dropping out, but we had a real bad seed in my combo. One day this bad seed had just had enough, and it wasn't like we weren't all upset, but he's complaining about, "I just don't have the talent to do this. I don't have what it takes."

I was practicing pretty hard, and I knew this kid was smoking dope more hours than practicing. I was also willingly in drug-rehab counseling that first year of college. Finally, our combo leader got sick of this kid and told him, "A lack of talent can often be cured by some trips to the woodshed." In other words, quit worrying about talent and practice - @#$%.

The reality to me is, you don't have to even be very intelligent to be a good or even a great artist. A personal with severe mental retardation might be able to write great children's books, and that actually isn't that easy to do! I had friends who began instrument lessons so tone-deaf you ran out of hearing when they started playing, and who two years later won national competitions for their instrument.

There are two sides to this equation. First, a writer has to write. "How do you write a 200 page book? You have to write at least 200 pages of words! " I quipped that at a pretensious English major one time, and I hope she commited herself. She should have commited herself years before I quipped that statement at her. If you are a comic book artist, you have to draw comic book art. If you're a musician or a composer, you have to either play your instrument, or compose music. This should be so fundamentally obvious, but it is awe-inspiring how many aspiring artists haven't figured out this simple statement. "An artist has to work at making art."

The other side of the equation has to do with our principle about not driving ourselves insane as artists. Do what you can handle, and take your time when you are tired or upset. For example, I want to be a contemporary classical composer who writes for traditional classical music instruments and who has a basic working knowledge of classical music tradition. That is a very tall order. In particular, I need heavy-duty work on my secondary piano skills. I have the time and the money to take the lessons I need, and I have a couple of teachers in my area in mind. However, I do not have the emotional endurance at this point to be pushed as hard as even an encouraging teacher would push me in those lessons. So, knowing that I would be blitzed and self-commiting to an institution if I took those lessons, I'm taking some time off from lessons. Currently, I'm just doing some simple exercises on the piano and improvising on the piano for enjoyment. I'm also doing some self-learning out of some very good composition and theory text-books.

The Actual Work Part

1. Take your permanent marker and label one of the notebooks you've bought as "Scrap Book Number 1."
2. Take one of your blank books and make a title page in either the area where it suggests a title page, or on the first page of the blank book. Include your name, maybe a name you've given yourself, the date you began writing in the blank book, maybe the time you started writing in the blank book, a title "Journal," or "Diary," at least, but I prefer a title with a caption, "Journal: Life in Slow Motion," and then maybe some other things you want on the title page that seem important to you. Stop there with the diary or journal for a moment, if you feel like obeying the "Gwydion commandments."
3. Start brainstorming in your scrap book. Do not even consider how sloppy or disorganized all of the information might be in that scrap book. Just write in the scrapbook, although timing and dating your entries can be a very good idea. If you see a piece of text you like, copy that in there. Just about anything can go in there. A further suggestion is this, and this is part of not driving ourselves insane when we are trying to make art. Look at it this way, if you write once a month on average, all year, you are not a writer. Period. The same holds true for any other art form you can name. However, don't push yourself to the asylum trying to do it exactly the right way, day in and day out. For a starting writer, writing an hour a week is heads and tails above a lot of people who think they're experienced writers. What you'll find is that you're going to start writing for plenty of hours a week, even if you have a day-job, just because you begin enjoying the process. Further, if you have a day-job, remember to sleep enough to keep a day-job. For myself, once the ball began rolling down the hill-side, I wrote maybe 4 or 5 hours a week without even considering how much work that took. I was also one of the worst writers in the English-speaking world. I don't think that is an exaggeration. I'm unable to work now, and the ball has gone so far down the hillside that I probably spend about 20 hours or more writing every week, and never consider where the time has gone. Practice makes perfect, even when you've had very little outside instruction, and began as one of the worst writers in the English-speaking world.
4. The journal or diary becomes the next question. Always time and date the entries, and take a little more care to be neat and tidy with the handwriting. Also, don't do writing exercises or keep scraps in the journal, because you've got the looseleaf notebooks for scrapwork. Stick to writing about personal things, like how your day went, or your new crush and how you feel about him or her. Stick to those kind of topics. The next thing is, you will make some messes in the journal. Don't throw it out until its full. Take some care with it, but leave the messes in there too. Finally, don't let the journal become "the book of guilt." Write in the journal when you feel like writing in it, and don't get get out the scourge for yourself when you don't feel like writing in the journal. I am very serious, if you begin by writing just an hour a week, you'll eventually be drinking Nyquil so you can get sleep, because you'll be so obsessed with the process.
5. Now this next part presents some difficulty. One thing to do is to sit down with your scrapbook and look at the question, "What do I want to write?" Imagine this, thinking of some of my old friends who loved Star Wars, "I want to write my own better version of Star Wars." I'm serious. Star Wars on its own isn't terrible, and your own better version will probably be a whole lot better, once you've got some writing skills down. Don't worry about plaigiarism issues at this point. Just do the work because you want to do that work.
6. Now you have a specific project you want to work on. Take a label and label one of your notecard boxes. You can take scrap notes on notecards, and you can look at some of the better pieces of your scrap notebook. Label and time and date some other notecards, and take a little more care with those notecards, and then drop those notecards in the box. You can buy dividers for the notecards as well, and it is pretty important to be organized in this case. However, again, nobody is perfect, and some messes are going to be made. What you do is go back to the notecard box and periodically clean up the messes. Yes, this is incredibly tedious, and again, you're trying to do a writing project, not get commited to the asylum, so don't push yourself beyond your limits. However, this does need to get done periodically with a notecard file. You open up the card file and clean up the mess by re-writing and consolidating disorganized cards or by simply throwing out cards you don't need.
7. Another suggestion is that now that you have a project to work on, start collecting materials that relate to the project. For example, you could get the Star Wars books, and books collecting the Star Wars comics, and the Star Wars movies. Then you read the books periodically and sit down with a nice bowl of buttery popcorn and a coca-cola classic and watch the Star Wars movies. In this case, and in most cases, it is best to go over and over the material related to the work you are planning. Also, don't overstuff yourself. For example, if you try to read every Star Wars novel and every comic book ever written, you're going to have a great dumpster of text to read and you'll give up hope. Further, it is really better to confine yourself very tightly to only the material you really, really need to get the work done. If a book you get is useless to your project, sell it back or give it to a friend. So let's say you are a real "Star Wars Traditional." You buy the novels related to the first series released, and the current versions of the first movies released, and you confine yourselves to those and only those. The more specific you can be, and the less material you have, the better off you are going to be when working on this part of the project.
8. Another really good idea is to simply go to the library and browse the catalogue and the shelves, and pick up a stack of books, maybe as many as 10 at a time. Then just look through, "stereo-manual," style and copy bits you find interesting into the scrapbook. If it never comes to anything, that doesn't really matter. However, this is a cheap way of expanding your research without tiring yourself out overly, particularly if you return your library books on time and keep up on your library fees. A little skimming, taking out some scraps, and you will probably find some things to draw on, even if they have no apparent relationship to your project.
9. With books you own, I recommend taking notes in the margin and then drawing things out into the scrapbook or onto notecards. You may want to use pencil, as then you can make new notes if your view on the text changes. Most trade books won't hold up to too much erasing, and I've just decided to keep notecards handy and list the title of the book, the time and date, the page, my reaction, and then I drop those in a second card file I look over periodically when I'm feeling particularly tedious.
10. I am not a magazine subscriber or buyer in general, but if you love magazines, then you definitely need a set of categorized magazine file folders. Drop the clippings you make into the organized file folders in your cabinet. As with the notecard file, consolidation and spring-cleaning are an absolute necessity for filing cabinets, as most sane people can only afford a simple two-stack set of filing cabinets. The same basic idea holds true for newspapers and newspaper clippings.

Now, that was long, and it includes quite a bit of tedious work to do, but don't go the whole hog right away. Keeping only a scrap notebook and a journal is plenty for a beginning writer, and you can just add to your practice when you're sedating yourself to stop writing, which will always happen if you make a good start, and that holds true for any art form. Also, you don't have to do everything the way this is laid out by yours truly, and as you start practicing these things or similar things, you'll inevitably develop your own ways of practicing them. Darn, you disobeyed me.

I am going to come back with the digital portion of this lifestyle, but it may be as long as an hour or so. Hang in there with this stuff, and remember that genius is more about work than being born totally amazing. Doing anything amazing requires a ton of work, no matter how many gifts you are given when you are born on planet earth, and many gifted people never figure out that this is the case. Also, for the scum out there, I quote our old "Nick-at-Nite," friend, Doby Gillis, "WORK? WORK!" I'll be back.

The Writing and Artist's Lifestyle, Part 1, Equipment

2008-12-11T20:55:00.000-08:00

First, you can take this article and say to yourself, "run off with your rules and leave me alone." This article lays out how I manage to organize my writing and music work, and this may not be a set of practices that applies to your own way of managing your work. Another possibility is that you might heavily revise the ideas I'm setting out here to suit your own lifestyle. I'm not incredibly concerned what your reaction is to this article, but I would love to think that I might be a good influence on someone out there who loves writing and loves other forms of art.

Part 1, Analog Equipment

1. Between 4 and 8, 70-sheet, single subject notebooks. I like the single-subject ones because they are cheaper, and there is really no reason to buy the expensive ones unless you just like them better. I also prefer the college-ruled, but I inevitably get home from the office-store with some wide-ruled notebooks, and the extra space to write in does on average improve my handwriting.
2. 3 or 4 pens. I've settled on the Pilot Dr. Grip Gel Ink Pen. Unlike a roller-ball, the ink is very consistent, and unlike a ballpoint, the pens don't require a great deal of hand and finger pressure in order to write evenly. The Dr. Grips pens are about 7 dollars a piece. You can buy better pens, but they cost a great deal more, and I'm really stuck on my Dr. Grips.
3. 3 or 4 packs of pen refills. Sometimes a refill will write all the way to the bottom of the refill. Other times, the refill will get damaged, or simply quit midway through the refill, so I try to keep a stash of them in my house. The Dr. Grips Gel refills come in 2-packs of about 4 or 5 dollars a piece.
4. 2 or 3 blank books. At my local Borders, they sell these large canvas ones with a wide-rule, and they run about 6 dollars a piece before the sales tax is added. However, if you want something fancy, no one is stopping you, and there are blank books of every style and size at most local bookstores, and an even wider variety available on order through the 'Net.
5. At least one small soft-tip permanent marker, for labeling CD's and DVD's. It must be soft-tip or it will scratch the CD and ruin it, and it must be permanent, not water-soluble, or the label will simply rub off.
6. At least one large permanent marker, for labeling your notebooks.
7. Scrapbooking materials. I personally don't scrapbook, but some people really enjoy cutting and pasting text and images and making collages, and that can be a really nice way to facilitate the creative process. There are also "how-to," non-fiction books on scrapbooking that can give you some different ideas about what kind of materials to buy or different things to try as a scrapbook artist.
8. Filing Cabinet. This isn't a cheap purchase, but price the office-stores until they go on sale. It is really indispensible for a writer to have a filing cabinet, and then - part two - start using and organizing that filing cabinet.
9. Hanging Folders. Any kind will do, as long as they fit your filing cabinet. I found some high-quality folders on clearance when I went on one of my office-store raids last month.
10. Folder labels. I have tried the traditional folder labels and found them useless. Right now I am using stick-it note folder labels. There are two problems with them, the first being that the glue doesn't hold incredibly well, and the second that the lable has a tendency to rub off. I'm looking for a better solution at the moment, but I haven't found one yet.
11. A straight-edge. I have an engineer's straight-edge, and I recommend something like it because those lay flat and are of a sturdy metal.
12. A 70-sheet quad-ruled pad of graph paper. You may want to make charts and graphs, or you may want to try your hand at blocking out an image of something you are working on. In general, most design artists, comic book artists and so on, block out their image at least in the sketching stages, and a good pad of graph paper is a good way of blocking things out. Visual artistry is one of the least of my skills, but I do try my hand at it, and I use the graph paper when I want to make charts and diagrams as well.
13. Two or three note-card boxes. I learned to use notecards for long works when I did research papers in both High School and at the University, and it is a really great way of keeping long projects organized. I prefer 3 and half by 5 notecards, but it is up to you.
14. A bulk pack of notecards that fit your notecard boxes. I experimented and now like the un-ruled notecards better. I'm mostly just scribbling notes on them and it doesn't make a great deal of difference.

Part 2, Digital Equipment

1. The minimal computer hardware you need should be able to manage at least a small amount of image files, should get you on the Internet, and should have at least 20 gigs of harddrive space. You can get that for around 600 dollars at Wal-Mart. Understanding that many people are into gaming, you don't need an incredibly powerful computer to do the kind of work we're talking about here. If you want to run a good visual art program with a painting tablet, or do heavy-duty photo manipulations, you need big computer hardware, and you will also need that kind of hardware if you plan on doing high-quality electronic music, but you will pay through the nose. 600 dollars at Wal-Mart will get you into this "lifestyle," I'm talking about here.
2. You need a registered Operating System. I have so many idiots in my life whom I expressly told, "If you pirate your OS, then you will have a computer that doesn't work in fairly short order," who pirated their OS and ruined a computer. I understand the feeling, because Mac OS X is less of an operating system than it once was, Vista works pretty whonky, Linux has no hardware management, and UnixBSD distro's for PC's have no hardware management either, but if your OS for your computer is not registered, you will have a very good door-stop or paperweight left over in fairly short order. Call me dirty words out of my sight, but that is the reality.
3. A registered image manipulation software. I use iPhoto, version 2004, and it imports, resizes, and exports basic image formats. That is really all I need at this point, and an image manipulation software of that kind should run between 40 and 90 dollars. If you pay more for the program, you will get a more full-featured program, and for the minimal amount you've paid, it does the minimal amount of work laid out here. The really fancy image workshops are really expensive, and you really need accessories if you are going to use them properly like a painting tablet, a good digital SLR camera, and also a high-quality external harddrive. The reason for the external harddrive is that high-resolution image files that are stored on a regular user drive, or even an attached secondary drive, have all kinds of corruption problems, and a cheap external harddrive is going to leave you just as unhappy. Futher, you can be prosecuted for stealing fancy image workshops, and you will have gained nothing anyway, since the high-res files you hope to produce will be eaten alive by the unregistered program. Remember, an Adobe Creative Suite seat in a professional environment is at least 5 thousand dollars, and the professional companies buy those seats in bulk. Not only might you end up with a door-stop, you might wind up in jail. Remember to say, "Gwyd told me so, " when the prison guards are putting bugs in your cornflakes.
4. A registered copy of Microsoft Word. Arguably you can get away with a version of GnuWord, but that program is actually more unstable than Microsoft Word, and instability leads to data loss, and data loss makes artists and writers - very unhappy. I do not like MSW, and it is the worst document software on the market that doesn't cost around 2 thousand dollars. I'm sorry, but it's a bit hopeless unless you can afford a heavy-duty computer and an individualized copy of Quark Express. Remember, if the registered MSW will eat whole books off of your computer, and I have been there, then an unregistered copy is going to be even less pleasant. Partial solution to your problem appears in next point.
5. An rtf document manager. The pre-packaged Wordpad for WinPC does not support rtf format, but you can buy a perfectly sufficient rtf document manager for 20 bucks, and I have heard good word about the GNU open-source rtf document managers. The nice thing about rtf files is that they are widely supported, and they are very skinny. A 50 page rtf document is usually around 120 kilobytes in size, and you get next to no data-loss. I use the pre-packaged OS X rtf document manager called TextEdit, and I have next to no complaints about the software.
6. Scrapbooking software. For around 40 or 50 dollars, you can buy a nice little package that allows you to scrapbook on your computer. Again, I don't use one myself, but I'm considering giving it a shot, as I do a lot of things with images and text in my use of the computer. I haven't done enough research to tell you which software on the market is actually worthwhile, but I'll get back to you on it, because I'm kind of in the market for some kind of piece of software that allows one to digitally scrapbook.
7. Adobe Acrobat Reader. Just get the free version off of the Adobe site, as the full registered Acrobat is about 800 dollars, and again, I don't like stealing because I don't like thievery, but further, cracked software is corrupt and can damage your files and your computer, and further, when 800 dollars is at stake, corporations have been known to prosecute. You may cuss me in public, and even build an anti-Gwyd website, but when you have to be on good-behavior to get raisin bran and eat flakes without bugs, you can only say, "That @#$% Gwyd, he did tell me so."
8. Finale Songwriter. The non-professional full-featured Finale is around 350 dollars, but you can get Songwriter for 60 or 70 dollars, last I checked. Songwriter does just about everything you would want to do in a pretty limited way, and the only really horrible thing is its percussion playback and notation. The more expensive programs in between the full Finale and Songwriter add some features, but there is really no point, as what you get is "Songwriter, plus a few lame features." I'm hoping to get the full "home," version of Finale sometime next year so I can try my hand at orchestration and play with percussion sounds and things a bit more. Also, you only get MIDI playback with Songwriter, so the playback is kind of like a casiotone from 1996, but it is still a good 60 or 70 dollars to spend. With the full Finale, you have to add a good hardware synth to get better playback, and those are not cheap either. Don't bother with software synths, you will be unpleasantly surprised at how bad you got scammed.

Basics of Writing Well

2008-12-11T19:21:00.000-08:00

We've gone over why you should write poorly and bribe better if you intend to be published, but for the moment, let us assume that you aspire not to write a "franchise," but to write something like "art," which I must re-iterate will be something along the lines of "art I make for my own sake." There are a lot of things to talk about in this area, and what we need to do first, is to establish your first and most important principle, "It must be simple, if it is going to be effective." Now, your writing doesn't have to be simple-minded, but you need to be very clean and efficient if you want the piece of writing to work. We're going to amplify how to apply our "simple writing is effective writing," principle to specific circumstances, as the general principle and its meaning may not make a whole lot of sense to you without some examples. Just remember, simple is effective, and we'll go through some ways to apply that later.

A first question a young or aspiring author might have is, "What should I write?" That question is not a stupid question. It isn't even close to a stupid question. I recommend either getting out a notepad, or starting a word or text file and simply writing everything that interests you. List love, sex, war, the supernatural, whatever it happens to be, just write down what interests you, and try to make the list you brainstorm as long as you possibly can. Now just leave that file or set of notes aside for a minute, because we are going to hit on a next and rather tedious piece about writing in our next and rather tedious set of paragraphs, and that is "grammar and style."

As a young man who was an anarchist - literally - "take your rules and leave me alone," is not a foreign concept to me. However, we write at least in part to communicate to others, and so we have some basic conventions to apply to our writing in order to communicate effectively in our writing. Most of us do not get a good education in grammar and style at the high school level, and at the University level it is expected you already know how to write in grammar and style, so we as writers often end up with no one to really teach us how to do what really needs to be done if we are going to write well.

One easy way to get a good grip on grammar and style is a little paperback called "The Elements of Style," originally written by a man at around 1915 or so, whose last name was Strunk, and repeatedly updated by Oxford University up until the present day. There are longer books that deal with untying the knots of the terrible ambiguities present in the English language, but even for me, the 90 pages of "The Elements of Style," are not an easy read. It isn't so much because they can take their rules and go home as it is that reading about grammar and style is horribly tedious. You can almost always find a copy of this book at your local used-book reseller for around 3 to 6 dollars, or you can spring for a new copy for around 8 or 9 dollars, and it is really up to you.

While you're considering reading 90 pages of grammar and style, what a party! - let me give you a few pointers here and there. First, and this is really important, don't rely on expressions in your writing. I come from an Appalachian background, and even today when I'm conversing I have a tendency to use an expression for everything I want to communicate. Writing that way, even when you're writing "art my own sake," doesn't really produce "art," and also, that kind of writing really isn't in the English language. You might want to use expressions a great deal in dialogue, as even highly educated people tend to use mostly expressions in their parlance, but trust me, you will get some major results in your writing if you apply yourself to using true English grammar and vocabulary in your writing, instead of a string of expressions.

Let me give an example: "She was ready to walk out that door." Okay, fine. Now, in context, that might be better than what we're seeing of the sentence alone, but what exactly are you trying to say? Maybe you are trying to say that she is suicidal and doesn't want to live anymore. Maybe you are trying to say that she has finally decided to leave her husband. Maybe you are trying to say that she has decided to go on a journey instead of staying locked in her home.

A good exercise is to write just a couple of paragraphs, and then to remove the expressions from the paragraphs. This may be really difficult for you to do when you first start out, but don't let trying the exercise drive you insane. If you can't work out how to re-write the expression as an actual sentence, leave yourself a note somewhere and try again later. Trust me, functional illiteracy is not confined to any local area of the world, and even in many cases, it isn't confined to "lower class," versus "upper class." Try the exercise, and if you can't work it out, then make a note of it and come back to it.

I think it will be too complex to hit specific grammar issues here, but I want to mention just a couple of things. First, with pronouns, read it over and see if you can tell where the pronouns are pointing. Try to be objective, even though you are the one who wrote the piece of text. Alternating names and pronouns works on some level, but even then you can have amibiguities, or you might be able to have a cleaner looking text using more pronouns. The pronoun problem is one of the worst ambiguities in English, and could fill about 100 pages if we were to try to disambiguate the problem completely, and there are books that spend at least 100 pages on that disambiguation.

Second, English sentences should not end with a verb. Normally they should end with a noun or an infintive of some type (an infinitive being a verb conjugated as a noun) and there are a couple of other possibilities that are less frequently used but "legal." Often the way to cure a "verb ending," is to repeat part of the sentence that occurs before your second verb in the sentence. I'm having trouble thinking of an example at the moment, but this is a really common writing mistake. Look in a typical trade paperback, and you should pick out sentences ending with "be," in about a paragraph or two, and if anything is really rotten, then ending a sentence with the word "be," is really rotten. The repetition required is first, a bit more typing or writing to do, and second, can sometimes lead to a Dickens-esque grotesquerie of too many words, but the basic rule is, if the sentence ends in a verb, look to repeat a part of the beginning of the sentence.

Futher, look for passive voice, as this can also often lead to "verb endings." Using passive voice is almost always a mistake. Honestly, I can't even think of an instance when passive voice could be used for effect when it wouldn't be possible to get a better effect using another grammatical form. An example of passive voice would be, "The store had been open for 2 hours when the man arrived at the store." All you need to do to fix the problem is a flip-flop of the direct and indirect object. In this extreme example, it also sounds quite a bit less idiotic. "The man arrived at the store when it had been open for 2 hours."

Another important rule is to not use double-negatives in sentences at all. There are really obvious forms of the problem, but problems with double-negatives can be very subtle and hard to pick out. Your sentence may already mean what it says, but that ironing out of the double-negative will make the meaning clearer, and will also usually make the sentence less cumbersome to read.

One of the problems with "contemporary style," is that ease of readability is by far the focus of "contemporary style," rather than the beauty of the prose. In my opinion, "contemporary style," is too bland. The problem is that prose that isn't very clean and sleek as contemporary style is supposed to be, often turns into what is called "purple-prose." Purple-prose is prose where an attempt to be sophisticated in prose-style turns into tartuffery, and "too bland," actually is better than "purple prose."

A big purple-prose problem is "too many clauses," and yours truly loves the English dependent clause, so he has been through a very hard time with "too many clauses." At one time in English history, it was typical to simply put an entire paragraph into a series of dependent clauses and larger sets of dependent clauses separated by semi-colons. However, even if we might not love "contemporary style," we do not want to go back to that by-gone age.

Here is another one of my broad rules about writing, and that is "read it all out loud." When writing fiction or poetry, this is especially important, particularly when you are looking for a certain music and flow to the poetry or prose. Even in non-fiction writing, where you want technical clarity and precision rather than music, it can help to read the work aloud because it can highlight grammar or formal flaws, or simply flaws in the readability of the work.

So we have two broad rules, and two exercises so far.

The rules:

1. Keep your writing simple.
2. Read your writing aloud.

Also, I mentioned this principle in regards to doing writing excercises, but it also applies to writing in general. That principle is, "don't drive yourself insane doing your work as a writer."

3. Don't drive yourself insane doing your work as a writer.

The exercises:

1. Brainstorm all of your interests, no matter how many, even if the interest doesn't seem to be worth writing about.
2. Write a few paragraphs and look for some of the common errors I mentioned, and try to re-write the sentences to exclude those errors. If you can't figure out how to fix the error or errors, then make a note to yourself and come back and try again to fix the error or errors later.

I'll be back, with a post about organizing a writing lifestyle in just a few minutes, after I make a cup of coffee, and dig into the cupboards for a fresh pack of smokes. No, I do not advocate smoking cigarettes unless you are unfortunately addicted to smoking until you die. I am already addicted to smoking cigarettes in that exact manner.

The Introductory Biography

2008-12-10T10:54:00.000-08:00

I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on June 14, 1978. We moved a great deal for my Dad's career, and I wound up in Miamisburg, OH, a suburb of Dayton. Dayton was my parent's parents hometown. I began studying flute at age 12, jazz piano at 18, and I have also studied classical piano and also the guitar since about the age of 22. At around the age of 19 I got it into my head that I wanted to be a writer, and I was really - terribly awful. I've been writing nearly every day for maybe an hour average since I was 19 years old, and now I'm a great writer.

In December of 1998, I was hospitalized for a psychotic breakdown, attended drug rehabilitation, and I have been in recovery now for just about 10 years. I don't do drugs, drink unless they are prescribed, I don't drink alcoholic beverages, and I don't do "hard-line." I mostly sit at home and write longhand in notebooks and type at the computer.

I don't have any friends, and my family has totally broken down. I'm in psychiatric treatment, definitely for chronic psychotic dhysthymia, and possibly for adult autism, and my psychiatrist and other fabulous "psychiatric helpers," are on a short list of people who would wind up dead if I enjoyed even the thought of going to prison. I see an internal medicine doctor for diabetes treatment, and I do just about everything the doctor and the psychiatric doctor command me to do.

I am also an early-morning insomniac, which is a symptom of chronic dhysthymia. Normally I fall asleep very early in the evening, but I haven't woken up later than 4 am in years. Today I've been awake 10 hours already, browsing the 'Net and typing in my files. My major interests as an artist are fantasy, science fiction, horror, classical literature and other literature, comic books and graphic novels, New Age, philosophy, and the already mentioned classical and contemporary classical music, jazz, and electronic composition.

I've decided to go to bed for a while, but expect yours truly back in the evening, if my evening goes as planned.

The Introductory Post to A Blog that Can't Go Well

2008-12-10T10:15:00.000-08:00

Greetings Internet hoodlums, con-men, scum, pornographers, child abusers, and the rare person on the 'Net looking for a dose of reality and maybe even a little bit of enjoyment. Remember, if it's useless, it's on the Internet, and the transverse also applies, and this blog will be no exception to those global rules of the Global 'Net. I am not going to swear or be explicit on this blog, but the inevitable spleen and controversy may cause my "freebie"-blogspot-blog to be closed next to immediately. We shall have to wait and see. Futher, because almost all people on the Internet are hoodlums, con-men, scum pornographers and child abusers, no one gets to comment on my blog except me. If you are that rare person that really wants to see something worthwhile on the Internet, and maybe even laugh a little, then read on, otherwise, you may continue to be a scumbag who is not allowed to make my life any more miserable by saying awful things to me in order to abuse me psychologically. Have a nice day, whether you are capable of having one or not.

The basic topic of this blog will be writing, and possibly music and music recordings occasionally. However, this blog will not teach you how to write writing that will be published. There are three best ways to get published, in order of significance: 1) Bribe a publisher with as much money as you have. 2) Write as hackneyed, simple-minded, and pornographic material as you possibly can write. 3) Include as much noise in the actual content of the book as possible, as 6 to 800 pages qualifies as a well-edited book in the publishing industry today. If you want to be a published writer, that is all you need to know, but I can insert another 6 to 800 pages of noise if you are willing to pay me for the effort.

As for music, the same exact publishing efforts will put you in a very lucrative position, and I do not discuss that kind of music, even if it means I have to disallow comments on a free blog. Even good "pop music," is not to be scoffed at, but your local CD store is filled with 5 CD's of good "pop music," and 10,000 recordings of absolute garbage, some in DVD-quality format. We may touch on what I consider to be "good pop," music, but I'm principally interested in classical and contemporary classical music, jazz, and sophisticated forms of electronic composition.

Finally, in publishing they've heard it all before, but this time it is real. I am in fact one of the most talented writers, composers and musicians in the country, and I am thirty years old, and would never even be able to get two sentences of my work read, or 15 seconds of my music heard. I do not have a degree and I deserve one, having spent the money and actually having studied, unlike my peers that attended commencement, and I am at least lucky enough to be considered too physically and mentally ill to be forced to work at a fry-vat. The money isn't good, but I do get a lot of free time to make real art, instead of Bible-length tomes about evisceration, sexy young girls and boys, or "cliff's notes," versions of Lord of the Rings.

The next post is going to be a brief biography. I'm going to give you my real biography, but I cannot use my real name or offer a significant contact of any kind, as being honest is unpopular among scumbags, and has led to death threats and all kinds of insane, whacko-behavior, even when I'm not breathing acid as I am currently doing. After the biography, I'm going to make some suggestions as to what "real writing," might be considered, some of the ways to organize making "real writing," and also point out some books that are very nice writing exercise books, and make some other pointers that might get people off on a better foot.

Also, I used to a "Sir Blog-alot, the Blogger Sundae Parfait," but I now generally make a blog, and it falls into disuse, is closed, and I start a new one. This blog comes out of a commitment that maybe someone out there isn't scum and might like a little good material to read, and that it might be a sort of community-action to write a little honest, thoughtful material, which contained a vocabulary of more than 20 words, including slang and swear words. I'll be coming back with at least two new posts and then it will probably be time for a nice, lazy, afternoon nap.