As a result, I have an unusually high number of posts this week (which, for me, is… well, two). And I have yet another video to share. Er, yay?

But on top of this, this is something my friends (especially my bloggy friends) rarely, if ever, get to see: what I’m like with an electric guitar. Sadly, this isn’t live audio because our guitar amps clip the microphone, but the music is us, at least.

What are your weekly rituals?

@JayBanzia: You got sick?
@nicopolitan: Yeah. You’re sick?
@TheFoolishHeart: I think everyone got sick.
@JayBanzia: Damn. It’s like a sick party up in here.
@TheFoolishHeart: Sick party at the Red House!*
@nicopolitan: Dude, I went to this party, it was soooo siiiiick.
@JayBanzia: This party is sick.  Everyone’s getting ill.

Sparse participation on the interwebs that began around Wednesday last week can and will be attributed to a recent sickness that overtook my entire household. It wasn’t a bad cold, but just like all sickness it wasn’t entirely pleasant. Having a stuffy head clouds all of my high-capacity brain functions so I was, in effect, some sort of zombie. The infected kind of zombie — not the Romero zombie.

As was the case, no working on music composition (can’t hear very well, even under headphones), no web development (get dizzy when staring at code), no blogging (feeling bad comes across in writing and making comments, you know). And moreover, no watching of the Vancouver Olympics since I don’t subscribe to any kind of TV provider.

So like your average Gen Y male, I resorted to confiding in the one force that was my original babysitter and caretaker: video games. Video games have always been there for me and unlike music, require only eye-hand coordination and not necessarily any high-level mental functioning. And yeah, somewhere along this weekend’s pharmacy run, I did end up buying BioShock 2. I’d squee if it didn’t ignite me into a coughing fit.

But by Saturday I was well enough to be able to rehearse with my newly tricked out Stratocaster! No sickness was going to keep me from taking this one out for a spin. Ok, rehearsal was short in the interest of getting much needed rest, but at least I still got to hear the hard work that went into this guitar a week prior. While the overhauling didn’t come together immediately, after running around the city of LA to fetch a number of parts in different places, and after getting Tek Support‘s … uh, technical support, my guitar sings like a siren and roars like an unholy beast. I can now highly recommend Samarium Cobalt Noiseless pickups with full confidence.

Fun stuff aside, I am easing back into work without a lot of pressure. I’m sweeping up the files from a huge mission critical MySQL Injection (we think… but there are no traces of it) last week. Everything has since been fixed and we are working on sanitizing inputs and I’m making sure all of the files are in the same condition as the restored versions. This paragraph in layman’s terms: easy stuff at work today, thank goodness.

The point of this post: There’s nothing like a little sickness to force your ass into slowing-the-fuck-down. For a long time I fancied myself a workaholic. And while that’s still true, I seem to have rediscovered what defines me outside of work in a real way by doing those things that I love to pass the time, not just telling myself that I am a certain way.

Internet, what slows you down when you’re reeling too fast?

________
*Red House – term used describe the structure, the location, and/or the inhabitants collectively, of a particular house in Los Angeles’s Highland Park. Nico lives here.

nicopolitan: “The more I listen to you guys sit and go through the music production process even while Art‘s still in the composition stage, the more I want to work on my own music.”

TheFoolishHeart: “So write music.”

nicopolitan: “I feel guilty when I work on music.  It makes me think that if I’ve already got time to burn, I should be spending more time getting work done on freelance assignments and pet project obligations.”

TheFoolishHeart: “Fuck it.  Just do what makes you happy.”

nicopolitan: “Oh, they both make me happy.  Making music makes me happy, and working on the internet makes me happy.  It’s just that freelance makes me money–”

TheFoolishHeart: “Maybe just don’t think about money, then. Do what you love, and the money will come later.  Freelance makes you money now, but maybe music will make you money later on. You just have to remember that it’s what you do that defines you.”

Inadvertently, my roommate has packed Greek ontology and a quote from Thoreau into simple, everyday philosophy for living in the modern era and keeping your sanity.

If I hadn’t lived with a bunch of creative types in the same household, I don’t think I would have gotten this idealistic response to the conversation topic.  My parents would say, “Work hard, as hard as you can, and be proud of your hard work.”  My college friends would say, “slow down with the work, you’re fucking crazy.” My high school friends would say… nothing, because I don’t really keep in touch with them.

So this is a short post.  I was just curious:

Given the topic, what does the internet say?

Muse: What are you working on?

nicopolitan: Music! And it feels great. I think I’m done with this track.

Muse: It sounds done. How many others have you finished?

nicopolitan: I have no idea. When you told me about a year ago to work on music for 7 hours spread over 7 days a week, no matter if I was having writer’s block or made insignificant changes, I had stuck with it ever since. I started with an empty file folder and now it’s about… [checks folder size] Wh-… 30 gigs of data???

Muse: But how much finished music have you written?

nicopolitan: I dunno.

Muse: Import the finished ones to iTunes and see what it says.

nicopolitan: [imports songs] Wow. Uh. 74 minutes.

Muse: You can release an album now!

nicopolitan: I can release three EP‘s at this rate — some of them still need polishing, but the end is definitely in sight.

Muse: Feel good?

nicopolitan: Feels weird! Good, yeah, but it makes me kind of antsy.

Muse: Why?

nicopolitan: Well… now I have to figure out how to play these songs on stage.

Muse: Do you have stagefright?

nicopolitan: I’ve never played a solo act before. Oh-

Muse: Oh, shit!

nicopolitan: Stop putting words in my mouth.

Muse: Stop putting your mouth on my words!

nicopolitan: …What does that even mean?

Muse: ……

nicopolitan: ……………

Muse: …so, book a rehearsal space?

nicopolitan: Uh, yes, book a rehearsal space.

I’m not doubting that there are some outright shitty things I have done in my life, and today that all the recent sins have piled up into one big mess.

To be fair, it’s only one big mess, but that one incident has definitely given my checking account a swift roundhouse in its proverbial nads.

Some jackass got a little too close to my car while it was parked on a nearby street at work and broke off my driver side rear view mirror.  No note was left, which means this was a hit and run.

I took a very late lunch today which brought me out to where I usually get my car tuned up, but this time I needed repairs.  Since the car is the last of its line and came out the final year of production, 2006, the part my poor car required needed to be ordered.  I have to return to the shop once it arrives, but I paid for the order to get there.

“Uh,” I say to the service rep, “What should I do about the mirror in the meantime?”

He shrugs and pragmatically says, “You gotta use tape.”

He was kind enough to tape the mirror up for me while I ordered the part at the cashier, but I can’t help but feel that I drove out to the other side of town for a $200 strip of packaging tape.

Now, one has to consider a deeper understanding of the karma principal in order to deduce what exactly caused the world to shit on me.  That is, it’s not the sins I’ve committed having an indirect yet proportional influence on my misfortune.  Rather, it’s an unfortunate event in my present that is shaping my past.  Say what? Yes, cause-and-effect work both ways temporally.  If you’d like to discuss that idea further, I recommend consulting Doniree.

My point is, shitty present circumstance is not making me shrug it off and say “well, I deserved this.”  I’m supposed to look at where I screwed up, learn from the experience, and to NOT SCREW UP in the future. Will that prevent future misfortune?  Probably not.  But it will probably nudge me out of being an lazy omissive ass so that I have less shitty things to consider when I look back on recent past.

Philosophy aside, this does make me temporarily broke.  So, in lieu of going out and adventuring in the behemoth that is Los Angeles, I have tended lately to stay in and focus on writing music, because that’s free and easy and I already know I will enjoy myself.

Maybe I should consider the role of the starving artist.  Only, I can still afford groceries and I know how to cook, so that would probably make me a mildly peckish artist, at most.

I had a good Sunday.

I hope that doesn’t make Monday suck.

I really hope there isn’t a zombie attack.

Series of Tubes
by ritingon

Like a lot of my peers, I'm interested in talking aimlessly and ad nauseam* on more than one subject.

Right, ok so why should that be a topic for an entire blog post? This has already been well established.

For some exposition, I already partitioned off my posts pertaining to musicianship and have placed them here, and that has turned out to be a good thing because it seems that as much as people like the idea of musicians, they don't care to hear about what it's like to be a musician -- or maybe more specifically, they don't care to hear me talk about it.  Moving my musicianship posts to a sub-blog has worked out for me surprisingly well, in that my online world got more organized but also it turns out there were listeners who didn't care to sort through my daily life to find what music I've written.

I'll probably reference musicianship here like I do since that actually is a part of my everyday life, but that's not necessarily the point of this blog. Besides, the more that I stuck with writing in this blog about life in general, or the internet in general, or general life on the internet, the more people were inclined to stick around.

Hypothesis: Talking about musicianship is niche, and writing entries that are more general can engage more people because slice-of-life stories are far more identifiable for the average blog reader than talking about how it took me hours to find a snare drum.

Moving on to talking about work: When I talk about the industry in which I work (interwebs - or specifically, social media), it sometimes interrupts the momentum of anecdotal story-telling, even if that is by and large a string of reminders to myself of what has happened in my social life amidst the fucking craziness of agency life (the kind of life where work follows you home).

The thing is, the anecdotes about working on the internet is its own set of stories, too. I chose social media as a career because it is, in fact, another thing about which I can rattle on and on for hours. However, I didn't need that to take over my entire personality, and in the same way, I probably shouldn't let it overrun this blog.

Enter the Research & Development Clippings blog.

Ah, that feels good to get out of the way. All of my career-related musings can now be found there unless I'll call it universal enough to drop in this main blog.

But this brings up a question I'd like to ask my fellow bloggers:

Do you try to keep life facets distinct from each other or do you mash it all up into one destination? And what are the other things in your life you do with enough passion to start another blog / site for it?

*Yes, that's how you spell it.

If you’re seeing this in a browser, I would also like to direct your attention to the little box in my sidebar that requests sharing music.

Music sharing–in the literal sense and not the elusive incarnation that the music industry can’t seem to figure out how to harness–just got a lot more social, which is the direction I have so desperately wanted it to move for such a long time. I am particularly interested in how SoundCloud offers listeners a chance to be a part of it and lets them COMMENT on the SONG ITSELF. Just mouse over my track above and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Where before it was kind of a pain to try to get people to listen to each others’ music, I think this SoundCloud contraption can really help to change the game. They’re not a game-changer in and of themselves, but they will definitely help move it along if enough musicians catch on.

But at this point I can’t help but feel there is one perplexing thing about me blogging this just now. The company has existed since 2007 so why hadn’t anyone told me about this earlier? Or even linked me to the SoundCloud blog which is chock full of links to useful web-based music tools? Or that SoundCloud hooks up into my other favorite social networking sites pretty easily?

In any case, it’s encouraging to see that collaboration among musicians has been getting the attention of people who are building tools to facilitate music-making. Being able to give each other listens and peer advice from all over the planet is more important than we give it credit. Sure, we’ve had YouTube musicians (which, let’s face it, are 92.4% comprised of acoustic guitars), music software message board communities, and MySpace for a long time, but I like seeing web-based tools go up in the name of music community as the primary interest and not just the after-thought. Drawing attention directly to the music makes the site feel like it has a point and a purpose instead of being just a digital web playground where artists and labels and management and venues litter flyers all over the place.

Neglecting the obvious social networks for music or musical sectors of existing social networks, I think that moving forward I’m definitely going to be using SoundCloud for musicianship and ReverbNation for promoting.

Pretty excited about this. Perhaps excited enough to be motivated to finally getting around to writing some new music.

Now, the next task is to find the right listeners.

But Sunday is rehearsal day, and I’m bringing something new to rehearsal.

My Dad bought a guitar he never plays, so he’s letting me use it provided I swap it with the guitar I’ve been using for the past 5 years.

I’ve been playing one of these:

I have loved the Telecaster to death.  I named it Pandora when I first got it because I snagged it right before my college band was actually getting a lot of attention thanks to the legwork of our lead singer’s work in the local music biz.  He pounded the pavement and got us at least 3 shows a month.  He booked us a tour.  He was a generally good leader.  (He’s in this fucking magnificent band now).

And just like any musician who believes their musical instruments possess a kind of “soul”, this guitar definitely influenced my playing style.  I won’t try to describe it because even though I’m a blogger, that’s a little too self-indulgent.  Not like I think I’m hot shit, it’s just that every musician can kind of describe what they’re doing pretty easily.

BUT NOW I’ve swapped it with the guitar my Dad barely touched.  It’s one of these:

Yes, that is a Gibson SG ’61 re-issue. And yes, it will get a name, but it needs to see the stage before that happens.

And yes, I am ready to bring the fucking rock, motherfuckers.

Though I usually don’t end posts this way because well wishes are Angelaboration‘s gig, I really feel like I should wish this really, really good feeling upon anyone reading this:

May you wake the fucking dead by rocking the goddam daylight out of whatever you can burn in your blast radius.

Report back to me after the weekend.

\m/

Smattering of information! Here:

Nerdness: Remember I was talking the other day about a WP plugin that’ll let you incorporate code into posts? Turns out there is an even better one called Raw HTML, which lets you escape your code pretty easily and effectively. This means that, unlike the WP-allow tags plugin (which actually served me pretty well), this one can be evoked on a case-by-case basis and won’t apply to the entirety of the blog. Right on.

But does it work? You betcha:

Dude… why? Just… why? Not a day goes by where I really wished I had learned Hiragana. And now I may never know why these dudes are getting hit in the nuts by … what appears to be a “nut shot machine”… Why the fuck would you make a nut shot machine? I would never be on this gameshow.

Drama: I make girls cry. I didn’t mean to, really. In actuality it wasn’t my fault since I was only a messenger. I guess that doesn’t matter since I was still a bearer of bad news. I probably shouldn’t broadcast this over the internet out of respect to those this situation involved but let’s just say it has something to do with a missing automobile.

Musicianship: I know I started a musician blog already but I have to ask a question to everyone: If one writes enough sets of music in a number of different styles, are those sets still that one person or can they all count as separate solo projects? For instance, I’ve been writing an electronic shoegaze set for forever, a post-punk set only recently, and a folktronic set for ideas that wouldn’t fit into the other two. Those three styles wouldn’t make sense to release under the same name… or would they?

Corporate Life: The reason I’m so hopped up on coffee is from needing to take work home tonight. A lot of people hate being under pressure, but I am actually quite fond of it. No! Seriously, I’m not being sarcastic! I’m of the mindset that if you have too much to do, it suggests that you have a lot of opportunities to accomplish just as much.

And this is weird for me, because I was totally not an over-achievers in school. My grades prove it.

January: I realize that this is your last ditch effort to screw up my life by making it difficult for not just me but those around me, but you will not succeed if I can do anything about it.

And now I have a bloody nose. What the hell…?