Thing a Week 2 – My Monkey
My strange obsession with monkeys continues with Thing Two of Thing a Week. I don’t know where to begin explaining this one. Here is what I know: The guy in the song has recently had an argument with someone he loves and is trying to apologize. He happens to have a pet monkey, more of a monkey butler actually, whose name is Brian Dennehy. He’s unable to talk directly about his own feelings (the singer I mean, not Brian Dennehy), so he’s projecting his emotional life onto the monkey, explaining how the monkey feels when this or that happens. It sounds like he does this a lot, and it’s probably indicative of a larger problem. It’s kind of a sparse arrangement, drum loop, guitar, bass, and then somewhere in the mix are a few wine glasses. I thought long and hard about the monkey chorus that comes between verses, but finally left it in. This song makes me feel sad and sentimental, despite the fact that it mentions Brian Dennehy (shout out to Dr. Smith, who really wishes he had a so-named monkey butler).
Still trying to figure out if I should make this a separate podcast or just make this blog the podcast. I like the title “Thing a Week” and it’s certainly more catchy than “Jonathan Coulton” but I’m not sure it’s worth all the hassle of breaking it out, posting twice, etc. Right now WordPress is already creating enclosures for linked mp3s, so it should work as a podcast the way it is (and I’m experimenting with the WP-iCatter plug in to get the iTunes tags in there too). I suppose I could set up a separate feed for this post category using feedburner. Or I could just rename this blog to Thing a Week. Why is the internets so complicated!? If you all have any thoughts, let me know.
Artist=Criminal
From Slashdot: joining ranks with the Dave Matthews Band, another group of dangerous rock and rollers have broken the law. A band called Switchfoot has posted instructions on how to bypass the copy protection on their own CD. This is a Sony release, and the copy protection is another SunnComm specialty, easily defeated in any number of ways. Sony of course owns the copyright on the music, so Switchfoot has violated the DMCA by disseminating information on how to pirate someone else’s content. It would be hilarious if Sony sued their own band, but I think they’re probably just going to get yelled at.
In their post, the band apologizes to their fans and and explains that there’s really not much they can do about it. They’re right. Much as I wish it were true, music generally does not sell itself. I think we’re still in the zone where labels are necessary evils (but, like, really evil evils). The person who figures out why all this internetism still hasn’t gotten us to the place where artists can get heard, sold and still make a living without selling their souls to a retarded middleman is going to make a billion dollars.
Thing a Week 1 – See You All in Hell
Well, you asked for it, or rather, I told you that you were going to get it. Here’s the debut thing of my Thing a Week series. It’s 48 seconds long, but I think it has a special kind of quirky charm. The lyrics are taken from a text message that a TV producer sent while having a difficult time on some sort of aquatic shoot, somewhere far away where it’s probably hot and dusty and hard to get around. I found them funny but also a little sinister – there is more than a touch of madness in them. They are sung by my mac (via Text Edit, via Audio Hijack) and mixed with loops in Soundtrack.
I will eventually set up a page as these things pile up, but for now:
Work vs. Play
Well that was a long stretch of nothing, wasn’t it? As you may have noticed, I haven’t posted anything in a while. I think this is because posting here used to be something that I could do to procrastinate while I was at work, and now it’s something I should work on instead of doing other things. This has become part of my non-paying, no-boss-having “job” of leisure. In other words, I don’t want to work, but would prefer to bang on the drum all day. Also, this NYTimes podcast actually kept me pretty busy – I understand now why most podcasts are kind of like unedited live radio shows. You record a 45 minute show and you’re done. All this editing and sound effects and music is really time consuming. But we’re done, and they’ll be posting all three 12-minute episodes on the site tomorrow, just in time to promote the new Funny Pages section on Sunday. Enjoy them. Please don’t yell at me that they’re not really podcasts, because I already know that.
Now then. To business. My new job as a non-job-haver comes with certain responsibilities (which I make up and can ignore whenever I want to). I hereby propose a challenge to myself, which I also accept. To keep the juices flowing, I am going to post one piece of work per week until further notice. This may be a complete song, or it may be some kind of experimental thing, a mashup, a remix, some audio of me eating cheese, who knows. Not every one will be good, or even tolerable. Many of these things will not make any sense to anyone but me, and some of them will certainly suck. But there will be one a week, so that’s got to be worth something.
I’ll post the first item later today (now I have to go buy some fat shorts and eat some lunch), and then every Friday until I can’t take it anymore, or until I am given one million dollars to stop. Get ready America…
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