Archive for 2003

Look at that thing.  Look at it!!!  Is that not the most beautiful piece of candy you ever laid eyes on?  I want it so bad I want to lick it all up and down.

I’m in the market for a new guitar, but I don’t know my guitars very well.  What should I get?  I’ve always wanted a hollowbody Gretsch but I just looked at their website and it’s so confusing… they all look so nice.  I guess I need to just go to the guitar stores and try ‘em out until I find one I fall in love with, huh?  But please let me know if you know more about this stuff than I do.  I need something that sounds fantastic (for the chunky-chunk style that I have) and something that’s relatively easy to play — easy on your left hand I mean, because I don’t have the strongest hands on earth.  Can’t be too big or too little either.  Not too fancy, not too plain.  What do you think?  This thing’s gotta last me a lifetime so I have to choose wisely.  Please advise…

Tonight John and I sat down and played guitars.  We’ve been going out five years and I don’t think we’ve ever done that before!  I just kept calling out tunes and he’d follow along, we did ten or fifteen of ‘em.  It was a lot of fun, we’ll have to do it again real soon.  I need the practice, for my voice and my hands too.  My left hand gets really shaky trying to hold the chords down.  I’d be worried about arthritis except that it’s always been that way when I haven’t been practicing.  Really I just need a better guitar!  My red guitar’s pretty hard to play, and some chords are literally impossible to play due to the worn-out frets.  Maybe soon I’ll be able to get a new guitar… my grandparents sold their house and are giving me and Lucie some money, just because they want to.  Maybe a new guitar is in order… one that I can play without pain, and a new amplifier that won’t literally blow up onstage like my cheapo Peavey’s done, not once, not twice but three times!!!  And a new pair of shoes, that’s the ticket.  :-)

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I got my friend Alyce a little present.  Don’t tell her!!  She’ll find out soon enough if she doesn’t read about it here.  :-D

Not much going on to talk about.  We’re having a garbage strike here in Chicago — glad they waited until summer was over!  The weather’s gotten really wet and yucky, it’s a lot colder than it’s supposed to be.  I’ve got one kitty in my lap and the other by my side, they know what to do to stay warm.  :-) Been listening to a lot of music lately for the first time in awhile, both new and old.  As I transfer my MP3 collection from its CD graveyard onto the new hard drive, I’ve been pulling a lot of them off at random and listening to them again.  Also, the Sigmatropic CD has finally been released, in England at least on Tongue Master.  I’ll be putting up a note presently with links for those who live there or want to pick it up as an import.  It’ll be coming out in the US as well, but I’ll have to check my e-mail to remember when that’ll be and on what label.

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To follow up on the hard drive thing: Rob is so nice.  We took the conversation to e-mail and I finally bludgeoned my way through it. I now have a mongo ext2 hard drive that really works. Never could get vfat happening, dunno why.  I’m still fiddling with fstab to try to get it mountable and read-writeable by users rather than root, but I do have a working drive and that makes me veeeeery happy.  I’ve been petting and massaging this frickin’ drive for over 48 hours now, I think that’s about long enough!!!  Miss Frost, you are supposed to be writing 11 more songs in the next 3 weeks, REMEMBER????  Well, at least I got that other song out of my head finally.

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Whoever hotdak3@aol.com is, he or she has been spamming my comments like there’s no tomorrow.  I’ve been deleting this trash, but I’m getting mighty pissed.  Do you think he or she would enjoy being spammed right back?  Here’s that address one more time just in case: hotdak3@aol.com

One more great reason why I don’t allow comments to be posted here until I’ve viewed them.

I got myself a Maxtor external hard drive to store my MP3s, and want to share it between Linux and OS X.  I was able to format the thing using HFS and have it be writable on both sides, but then I remembered to my chagrin that HFS doesn’t support long filenames.  I don’t want to mess up my MP3s by chopping off their names.  I thought maybe using a FAT32 filesystem might do the trick, but now that I don’t have a Windows machine I don’t know how to format it that way.  Tried erasing the disk as MS-DOS format in OS X using Disk Utility, but then couldn’t get it to mount on either side.  Just don’t know what format to use or how to get it mounted and read/writeable on both OS’s, while still preserving the long filenames.  Anybody have a clue here?

I finished that song today, the one about not being able to finish a song.  (It’s called "If It Weren’t For The Words".) It’s pretty good!  John likes it, and I hope Rian likes it too.  I had to finish it just to dispel the myth that you can’t complete something if you talk about it before it’s done.

Rian’s out of town for the next few weeks, drumming on Ali Roberts’ tour, and I promised that when he got back I’d have some new tunes waiting.  So now I have to get going on another one but I can’t!  The song about not being able to write a song is too fucking catchy, I can’t get it out of my head!!!  Pretty funny huh.

Holy crap, I finally got my name in the hallowed pages of Mojo magazine, how exciting!! October issue, page 120.  It’s just a mention in passing, in a review of the new Pine Valley Cosmonauts, but still.  Over the years I’ve developed a slight inferiority complex over their failure to notice my music — they’re just a really great magazine, the only one we really collect in our house.  I guess I sort of feel like if a band is any good, they’ll end up in there at some point.  Maybe one day they’ll give me a proper review if I ever get off my ass and make another album!  In this review they’re calling me a roots-rocker — do they really think I qualify for that label?  I never thought of myself that way but whatever, I’m just psyched that they know my name well enough to include it in the list of contributors.  I know, I really need to get a life…!!

The Cubs won both games today, so they’re going to the playoffs.  SWEET!!  I’m barely aware of sports normally, but I can’t help but get caught up in the excitement, being a northsider after all.  Whoo-hoo!!!  What a great thing for Chicago.  :-D It’s going to be a crazy night I bet, looks like pandemonium down in Wrigleyville.

So, guess who won the auction for that CD I made for the Rock For Kids mixer?  My number one fan Clay Colt did!  I didn’t even know they’d accept out-of-town bids or I would’ve mentioned that before, but I’m glad he went the extra mile and found out for himself.  It is a pretty good CD, and no I won’t tell you what’s on it.  It’s supposed to be a secret for the winner’s eyes only, so I guess it’s up to him to reveal the contents or keep it to himself if he wants.

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Slugging.  Have you ever heard of such a thing?  Those crazy DCers!  I found it in the most random way possible; I was looking up a question in Google… "How come you don’t wake yourself up when you snore?" Got so entranced by the slugging thing that I never did find the answer to that.

That whole thing yesterday got me really curious about the legalities of doing cover songs.  I’ve done a lot of reading today, which answered a few questions I had and raised a whole bunch of others.  Firstly, when you record cover songs and release them on CD, you don’t need to get any permission, but you do have to pay the songwriter/publisher, everybody knows that.  You’re supposed to get that taken care of BEFORE you even do the recording — whether most people actually go that far that is anyone’s guess, but that’s the law.  (Of course you don’t HAVE to follow the law — lots of people don’t, but you’re supposed to.)

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Speaking of donating to charities, I want to make sure all of y’all in the Chicago area know about the Rock For Kids music mixer they’re throwing tomorrow night (Wednesday) at the Smart Bar.  You can place secret bids on the mix CD I made, plus about fifty some-odd others as well, many of which were done by very very famous musicians whom I’m sure have much better taste in music than I do.  Heheh.  Check out their website for details.  All the proceeds go towards providing music education for homeless children.