So I’ve been listening to my old cassette tapes.

Most people have old tapes of stuff like Hall & Oates, or Styx’ ‘Kilroy Was Here’ (and I have those kind of old tapes, too), but my pile of old tapes is informed by a certain distinction:

I used to work at a recording studio, and during that time I was sort of in a band.

So I have all these old tapes of rough mixes and remixes of music I was at least peripherally if not directly involved in. Today I found a piece of mine I recorded, and it’s much better than I remembered it being.

The piece started and I thought, ‘Oh, geez…. THAT one..’ Then it continued and I remembered the specifics of it. One of the benefits of having the keys to a recording studio is that you can go in there during the night after the real gigs and screw around with all the instruments that were rented for the occasion. In this case, it was a Bosendorfer grand piano rented to record an album by Kelley Gray. You can play anything on such a piano and it sounds good, especially when you’ve got a whole collection of Neuman valve condenser microphones to mic it with.

At the time, I’d been listening to a lot of Steve Roach and Harold Budd, so this thing is a little, ahem, ‘new-agey.’ But we could also say ‘minimalist’ and it would fit. I’ll have to find a cassette deck to make an MP3 of it.

Also on the tape was a really good song by a friend of mine in Houston, one of the folks in the band. Though it wasn’t really a band… We had been one, and then we broke up, but some of us were still working together on music. I think Brett (who wrote this song) was calling himself ‘Suction Prints,’ after a Captain Beefheart song.

Anyway, the song is called ‘It,’ and is a sort of pop reggae thing built around the wordplay between ‘Fought tonight about it’ and ‘Not to fight about it.’ I remember being especially proud of how I mic’ed the drums, played by top-notch session dude Todd Harrison. We got him in exchange for recording a demo of his cover band Wild Onions. THAT band was one group of talented musicians! They could all fart at the same time and it’d be artful.

I miss the studio, but as talented as I was/am with it, it’s just not for me. Too much bullshit to deal with, not enough pay or recognition.

Wall Of Grays

So just as I get over the sinus infection, my neck tweaks! I’m sitting here in an odd posture to keep one little panicked muscle from screaming out in pain.

Hopefully this will end soon.

Help the NSA crunch numbers with ECHELON@HOME.

Let me get this straight. You want to use my computer to crunch the numbers used to analyze the email I send.

Uh, no thanks.

The real problem with the gnutella network is that it’s only as useful as whoever’s connected, and apparently there are no interesting people connected, ever.

Here are some sample search phrases that came to my servent:

Search: ‘pierce’
Search: ‘house of morecock’
Search: ‘american pie mpg’
Search: ‘playboy casting call avi’
Search: ‘playboy girls of the internet avi’
Search: ‘playboy casting calls part 2 2001 avi’
Search: ‘taxi fr avi’
Search: ‘clipse mp3′
Search: ‘lisa lashes’
Search: ‘xxx casting amateur francais avi’

I mean, ok, maybe some porngrabbers might have something more interesting than naked co-eds on their hard drive, but it’s not likely, is it? All the other searches are equally mundane (yes, I look down my nose at porn. but I look.)

So please, please. If you have any decent music, please hook yourself up to gnutella right now, OK?

My friend the sinus infection is mostly gone, though I do still have the sniffles and the standard non-productive cough. This happens to me every year, and it happens the same way.

I went today to get some chicken broth. It’s organic, free range broth. Now, if you’re like me and you buy free range and/or fertile eggs, you probably imagine some happy hens wandering around outside for a while, then going in to lay their eggs in the coop, and then some pot-smokin’ hippie chick comes around and collects the eggs, and when she gets back to the farmhouse she lovingly arranges the eggs in a carton to send to your store before making herself a fruit smoothie with protein powder.

But the truth of the matter is that this pot-smokin’ hippie chick can wield a mean butcher knife, too. From time to time she goes to the coop and, with a malevolent smirk, metes out life and death. “YOU!” she intones, while pointing at the unlucky hen. Gore and carnage ensue, and before long our love-bead of a girl is sucking on the bones of a chicken she recently murdered. Then, later, she’s putting free range chicken broth in a cardboard container to send to your store.

Where it will be placed far, far away from the free range eggs.

Lo, and the sore throat became a sinus infection (as usually happens), and Homer’s brain decided to stop working for a while so that the rest of him could fight off disease.

Thus, and truly, did Homer spend too much time watching TV and reading usenet.

And the Lord said, “Homer, thou shalt drink lots of fluids and carry around a roll of toilet paper with which to constantly blow thine nose.” And so it was done.

I want to meet this man.

(Executive summary: Listen to this RealAudio sample of a sermon given shortly after Sept. 11.)

At the moment I’m fighting off a sore throat. It’s the sort of thing I get when I’m stressed or otherwise exhausted.

I slept much of the day, while my body did battle. Now I feel like I’m underwater, and have to sneeze all the time. I wonder how much sleep I’ll get tonight.

I love dusk during Seattle summers. It starts in earnest around 8:30 or 9, and only after 11:30 have the last vestiges of azure left the western sky. I’m looking out my window and it reminds me of a series of paintings by Rene Magritte, where he juxtaposes a daylight sky over a nighttime scene. As in The Empire Of Light.

All the windows in the house are open. I can hear the neighbors talking about whether they should invite someone to a party. I can see people walking by on the sidewalk, all lost in their own world of destination and Walkman. A delicate schlack-schlack-schlack of a dog being walked, a tiny jingle of a leash against a collar tag.

Things happen here, lots of small things like a dog’s collar tag jingling. It always amazes me, since I grew up in the isolated suburbs, where all you ever heard was the chirping of birds and the distant freeway.

I remember one time a friend of mine came to visit (Hey, Jim.. What ever happened to Sybil?) and she was rather spooked by the silence. “It’s like being in a recording studio,” she said.

US citizen held without charge, denied habeus corpus and legal representation, will face secret military tribunal for the egregious crime of planning something.

American populace seen to be apathetic as their rights go slipping away, since someone said he’s a terrorist.