Finally! --

I've been writing "Monica" for about three goddamn years. I'm so glad I did it. I have kind of a lot to say about it.

1. I didn't give it the full twenty-four-guitar treatment because I'm just trying to illustrate the basic idea. I'm trying to kind of show the dynamic contour. It starts out very quiet, just the acoustic guitar and the voice, and then the band comes in really light for the Cairo and Hong Kong part, and then the solo is loud and rock'n'roll, and then it goes quiet again for the "all the sailors" part. Only it's an intense quiet, a driving little buildup. And then it explodes again for the ending.

2. Speaking of the ending, I'm not sure what to do about it. I was thinking of "Be Mine" by REM, where it ends with playing the chorus without words over and over again. A fade would fit the meaning of the lyrics, but it doesn't feel right for the song somehow.

3. Sorry the "solo" sucks so much. But the idea I'm trying to get across is that when the outro chords come up in the solo, it kind of suggests the riff from the outro without actually being the riff from the outro. I'm not sure how to explain it, so I hope that makes sense. The ending is pretty much exactly like I want it to be, I think.

4. I'm not entirely happy with the lyrics to the verse about Cairo. I think the rest of the lyrics are pretty okay, though. I do feel like something's missing, but maybe it's just because I tried to fit too much story into one little rock song.

5. The stretch from the first "never going to love me" to the solo is all by Tyson. He also suggested a breakdown where it goes into four and rocks out. I'm starting to think that might have been better to make the crash into "the only thing that's left to me" more dramatic. I don't know, I kind of like the idea of the tempo never changing, though.

6. I want a rich vocal tapestry all over this. Like, using a combination of background "oooooo"s and harmonies with the lead vocal to help accentuate the dynamic changes. Especially in the actual "Monica" part, about the sailors and everything. I tried to record some harmonies there, to show what I meant, but I just could not figure them out, so I skipped it.

So, in summary, the key word is epic. I only kind of suggested it here, due to limited resources and even more limited talent, but I think you can pretty much see what I'm going for. Also, I'm sorry it became seven and a half minutes long. I don't know how that happened.

Wait, don't go home --

As always, a bad recording of a possibly decent song. "Used-up Fagged-out Goodfornothing Blues" is a timely commentary on the current socioeconomic situation. Now, I'm not very good at playing the guitar, and I'm not very good at singing, and this song is demanding in both areas, but I promise you that I can do better than this; I just had some technical problems this time. Oh, and the parts where nothing is happening are where solos go.

Same as the old boss --

I think a lot, and I have all these notebooks and no idea what to do with them, so I had this idea. I figured out that I can just kind of carry a little notebook around with me and write stuff that I thought of. So I'm going to start doing that, and then I'm also going to post anything I think is interesting up here. I don't think it's going to be structured or anything, like the sermons I was writing before I came to Japan. It's just going to be some ideas about things. Ideas and things being pretty much all there is. Just, you know, caveat lector -- they're not all going to be winners. So here's the first one:

I've had this idea that's been kicking around in my head for a while. The term I came up with is "teleological crisis," which isn't wholly accurate but does sound impressive as all hell. The idea came to me when I was thinking about CSI. Bear with me:

My last girlfriend really liked CSI. I can't figure out why, because as far as I can tell the show is complete shit. It's just stupid. And David Caruso is the most embarrassing thing you can look at. But, you know, there's no accounting for taste, and hers is already questionable because she was dating me at the time. Anyway. One of the seventy-two million currently-airing CSI shows, the first one I saw, uses "Won't Get Fooled Again" as its theme song. I remember thinking that was an odd choice. But then I learned, somehow, that the original show used "Who Are You" as its theme song. And that actually makes sense, because it's a song that's thematically appropriate for the show. So here's what happened, as closely as I can reconstruct it: they made the first show, with an appropriate theme song, but then suddenly were in danger of not making a shitload of money and had to quickly produce another show. So they had to pick a new theme song, and they picked another well-known song by the Who. Only this one had nothing whatsoever to do with a show about detectives; it just happened to be by the same band as the first theme song. Teleological crisis. The purpose of a custom or cultural artifact was partially (or wholly) misunderstood, and thus the custom was maintained improperly in a way that accomplished nothing.

Or, for example, the electoral college. As far as I know, the two reasons it was started were that the Founding Fathers didn't trust ordinary people to vote right, and to simplify counting votes in a time when ballots were literally just pieces of paper with names written on them that human beings had to read one by one. Obviously neither of those is quite so much of a concern now. But because the practice has ossified into tradition, it's extremely difficult to change. Most laypeople agree that the electoral college doesn't really do us any good, and everyone knows the outcome of the presidential election by the morning after election day -- the day the electoral college votes goes by almost unnoticed. And yet, we keep on doing things that way, on and on.

Neither of those really illustrates what I mean by crisis, though, because they're both kind of dead ends. I said "teleological crisis" because I was thinking of cases where it actually leads to a sea change into something rich and strange. Like the electric wires that are conveying these words to your computer screen. They were originally intended for telegraph signals, which were then replaced by telephones, which were then replaced by the internet. Only throughout all those changes, the basic infrastructure has stayed pretty much the same. The wires have gotten more sophisticated, better shielded, more reliable, and so on, but essentially the system remained a length of copper conducting electrical information between two increasingly complex devices on the ends of it. Then came the crisis, when it was realized that now that we were no longer dealing with actually moving a speaker or a telegraphity clickity thing anymore, so we no longer need actual electricity electricity. And now we have fiber-optic cables all over the globe.

This isn't a particularly productive idea. It doesn't provide us with anything new. It's just a model for thinking about certain moments and events in history, especially cultural and technological history. I guess in the right hands, it could also be a useful model for figuring out what we still need and what we can leave on the scrapheap of Time.

Two posts, one week, no prisoners --

Okay, I said I wouldn't do this, but here's Canto 34 of Ziz. If you want to just read it, just read it. If you want to read me talking about it, see below.

This is the end of the first of three parts of the novel. As such, it's a kind of sub-climax. I think it's awesome, because it's all action all the time and that's something I never really do. There is a major plot event in there, or at least poor Bluto probably thinks it's major, but let's face it: you're not reading it because you're fascinated and want to know where it's going, you're reading it because you know the guy who wrote it. The reason I'm posting it here, instead of just quietly sending it to people like I said I would, is that I expect you to have the following conversation with your friends:

YOUR FRIEND: Dude, this guy you know is writing a book about a giant bird? In verse? What a d-bag.
YOU: Okay, first of all, no one talks like that in real life.
YOUR FRIEND: For true, bro. For true.
YOU: Second, read the thirty-forth chapter of his book.
YOUR FRIEND: Why's it called a canto?
YOU: Because Ram fucking thinks he's Dante Alighieri.
YOUR FRIEND: (reads) Oh, man! I totally get it now! This book is great! Secretly, I've been the head of a huge publishing house this whole time, and I would rather publish this book than have a million billion dollars. Do you know a way I could make that transaction happen?
YOU: (slyly and wittily, with a twinkle in your beautiful little eye) Actually, I think I do. I really think I do.

You see? Now I have a million billion dollars and your irritating fratty friend is publishing a book about a giant bird. Everybody wins.

Happy birthday yesterday, Aziz --

I wanted to say a lot of stuff, but I'm exhausted, so I'll make this brief.

First of all, happy New Year.

Second, as promised, here are the first four canti of Ziz. Lanala requested it specifically, but that was after I'd already started writing it again while I was in Hokkaido. It took me six months, but I got around to it. I think I'm really going to do it. However, I don't think I'm going to keep posting it here, for a lot of reasons, the main one being that it's a pain. I will send it to you by e-mail like a serial if you'd like. Keeping in mind that it might be out of order, if that's how I find myself writing it. I'll send it to a few people that I already know will want it, like Tyson and Ilana and Aaron, so if you want it please let me know. The price, naturally, being that I will then want you to tell me everything you liked and didn't like about it. Please.

It's already 2009, somehow. All things conspire to make my happiness complete.

Already somebody's baby --

Okay, so, here's the deal:

1. "Boy oh Boy" is a terrible recording of what might be a good song. I sang it so badly you have no idea. In my defense, my job is to talk all day, and that's terrible for your voice. It's about gay marriage. Moving on:

2. "The Man Who Bought the World" is actually by Tyson, but I added some guitars to it. I think it's fun. It's a great song.

3. "Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin" is why you're here. I met this girl, and nothing is going to come of it, but I was talking to Tyson about it. And I said it's going to end badly. And he said sure, but you should give it a try anyway. And I went to work, and I thought about it, and I realized something I should have realized before, which is this: for the last six months, I've been trying to stop assuming everything would end in disaster, as I told you. But the thing is, everything is going to end in disaster. That's inevitable. I currently live on an island that, sometime in the next thirty years, is unquestionably going to be leveled by an earthquake and then erased by Mount Fuji (which is a semi-active volcano, as you may not have known). Everything is going to end badly, and there's nothing we can do about it. But the problem was my attitude. It's not my job to prevent disaster; my job is to make sure everything ends in the most interesting possible disaster. So fuck it. I don't feel as good about that as I'd like to, but I can accept it and work with it. And so I wrote this song about Langdon Warner, a man who couldn't prevent the US from dropping two atomic bombs on major urban areas, but could prevent them from dropping atomic bombs on Kyoto and Kamakura, two huge cultural centers of Japan. There's a lesson in that for all of us.

And with that, I'm signing off for a little while. Writing songs recently has become a tremendous effort, and I've found that songs that I write like that are always bad. So I'm going to take a break from songs so I can learn some Chinese and Japanese, travel a little, and write that book I've been talking about. And so I can pursue some kind of interesting disaster with that girl I mentioned.

Next time I write here, I'll have a couple chapters of Ziz for you.

Even if we can't --

I wanted to wait and post this when I'd finished "Monica," but I don't know. I've been writing "Monica" since before I left the States, which, given that 2008 is a leap year, is 365 more days than I like to spend working on a song. So maybe it will appear later, and maybe it won't. We'll see.

"Ram's Birthday Present" was written in under 20 minutes as a joke (which was itself the punchline of a group joke), but I kind of like it, and as you know I can't make something without exhibiting it, so here it is. It's about These Fucking Guys, to whom you can hear me saying happy birthday at the end. Happy Birthday, These Fucking Guys.

"Kalikimaka" is how the word Christmas is transcribed into the Hawaiian language. This is because in Hawai'i, they don't have consonant clusters, sibilants, or the letter r. I saw in the extremity to which the Hawaiian people had to butcher this word in order to make it fit their mouths a metaphor for European culture's historical inability to tolerate any culture less European than their own and the toll it takes on native peoples. But I don't think I really pulled it off. I do sing extra-low, though, which I guess is cool.

I Left My Band in Pittsburgh --

So, I have a couple of things:

First, here's "Those Who Can't," which is actually by Tyson. You can find the original here, but you'll see some differences. For example: one major difference is that Tyson's much better at playing guitar than I am. Another big one is that he's better at singing. I'm always jealous of how inevitable Tyson's melodies feel. Like, it's one thing to write a good melody, lots of people can do that, but Tyson's melodies always feel so right, which is something else altogether. Anyway. You don't care about all the technical stuff I did to this song, and it's only up here because I'm psychologically incapable of making something without sharing it.

Second, here's "Spring Sprang Sprung." This song has been rattling around my head for a while. I keep thinking it's really nice and then thinking it's not so great. I had been thinking it would be like one of those European-sounding songs with an accordion, but then it wasn't. Oh, plus I stole the melody on the "nobody has a thing to say" part (which is to say, the best melody in the song) from a song in one of my favorite movies. But what can you do.

I guess that's it for now.