At Hill and Lil's Again....

This is a good place to blog. It's like I'm in some cafe being chic, but not. Hillary is blogging right next to me, which makes this almost like some internet gaming party where people are sitting there doing the same thing.

We're about to watch America's Next Top Model. I haven't seen any of it this semester, which is a shame, but there's some things I need to see much more imminently, like the new episodes of Gossip Girl and One Tree Hill......and Heroes. Ohhhhhhh Heroes.

Today I bought the Deluxe Edition of "Days of Future Passed" by The Moody Blues. It's one of my favorite albums ever. The whole concept of the album is that the songs outline a day in the life of one person. The music alternates between The Moody Blues and an orchestra playing interlude music. The only time they play together is the last verse/chorus of the epic "Nights In White Satin". Man, what a great song. I might also be interested in picking up the Deluxe Edition of Jeff Buckley "Live At Sin-E". Jeff Buckley was so fantastic, and this is just him and his guitar. How wonderful.

More soon. Ashley's coming over here to do her laundry because the laundry is broken in her apartment building. Later....

Cholesterol

So if you haven't heard already, I recently found out that I have high cholesterol. I was told that I had to go on medicine for it as soon as possible, pending finding a doctor here in Boston. Well, the first appointment that I was able to procure out of any doctor in the city was November 5. That's pretty far into the future. So, who knows when I'll be able to get checked up by a doctor. But at the same time, I've been hearing from a couple of people (and my Mom has also heard) that most people who get diagnosed with high cholesterol are told to go on a diet and exercise for a few months before they get put on this medicine. I haven't been told that (at least not yet), so I'm really worried about how dire this situation is.

The even worse problem I'm finding is that no matter where on the internet I look for answers as to what not to eat and all, it's all stuff that I don't eat to begin with. So, my Mom's obvious answer was that maybe it's just how my body is wired. Which would be ok if I knew exactly what the levels were like. Because if my body is just plain producing that amount of cholesterol, it means that my own body is destroying itself, and that really really sucks.

What's even worse is that with this whole not being able to see a doctor right away, I might need to make an emergency trip home to see a doctor in the next couple of weeks. This means an $80 12-hour round trip to go see a doctor. I don't want to have to waste that kind of time.

So, for now, I'm just going to eat oatmeal or cheerios for basically every single meal I have, and hope to God that I don't have a heart attack or a stroke. If you don't hear from me for a few days, it probably means I'm dead.

Sitting At Hi & Lo's...

Laurynn Scholar gets on my ass like a hemorrhoid for not posting blogs as often as possible. Now that we're getting new music for the BIRN (Berklee Internet Radio Network), I'll start posting about new albums and stuff that we're getting in. With any luck, tomorrow I'll get to post about the new Metallica album. That things has really racked my brain. Also, the new Edgar Meyer & Chris Thile album is fantastic, but I might hold of on posting about that until I get to see the DVD that comes with the deluxe edition.

Anyway, this is my last semester at Berklee. It's the 10th. Last time. Crazy, right? I'm excited and sad at the same time. But, I guess that I'd be sad a lot less if I knew that I was going to have some sort of work happening after the semester is over. Having 2 Bachelor's degrees is going to be quite sweet, though. I can't wait until someday when I have my Ph.D. That very likely won't be until I'm about 50 or 60, but I plan on doing it. Most likely in music theory. I'm a rule nazi, so I suppose I'd like to have the highest degree possible in the study of the rules of music. Then I'd just try and break them all. I think that's a very little known fundamental part about why I'm a completist and try so hard to know everything about the things I'm interested in. It's mostly just so I can tear it apart, but I never want to tear things apart unless I know how to put them back together. When Arnold Schoenberg started writing his weird atonal and 12-tone music, his students weren't allowed to abandon strict traditional writing until they had mastery of it. That's what I like to do. I only like to mess with grammar because I have a tight handle on it.

Whatevs......Metallica talk tomorrow.

Guitar Praise?!?!?!

I love the Lord. That's a very simple statement. I made a vow last night make sure people know who I am and what I stand for. More on that later. Again, I'm a believer in Jesus Christ, and am a devout Catholic (most of the time, but hey....we all fall short, right?). But the following dismays me.

Guitar Praise. Yeah, it's Guitar Hero with Christian music. What boils my water is that this isn't some cute add-on to Guitar Hero or Rock Band. No, it is its own little entity. It even has its own controller. Here's the link, if you don't believe me.

No one can deny that Christian music is a huge industry. While the spiritual lift is great, the money gleaned from it is obscene. I guess the first question that anyone can have here is "why not just have Christian music added to Guitar Hero?", and it's a valid one. I can tell you from experience that although the goal of every Christian should be to live our entire lives for the Lord, sometimes people go too far and eliminate completely harmless things from their lives and the lives of those around them. I serve as a counselor at a camp for young people every summer, and one year, they needed to do something with a large group of kids whose activity wasn't going to work out for that hour, and so they chose to show a couple of episodes of Jimmy Neutron. One girl ran out, and when asked what happened, she said that she wasn't allowed to watch Jimmy Neutron. Months later, I had a TV on in the background, and I heard the name Darwin there. A mention of the father of evolution is probably all it takes to get this poor girl to be prohibited from watching a poor cartoon. This is clearly the same thing. Even if there were to be a TON of David Crowder, Tobymac, DC Talk, and Newsboys in the established guitar simulation games, the fact that David Crowder is 8 bands away from Black Sabbath will NEVER fly with very Christian parents. Thus, Guitar Praise.

That being said, let me make my clear statement that I am very wary of this kind of treatment of eager minds, particularly children. Let's take evolution again, although I know it's a touchy subject. Going out and directly saying that intelligent design is the be all and end all is an insult to the intelligence of the children people are trying to raise. If your children are going to believe that God created the earth. Let it happen. But at least let them ask themselves what it exactly was that he created. If you don't do that, someone will get into this talk with them, and make them cry. Again, I'm not pushing the idea that it's all evolution. I'll always wonder and sway and debate until the day I die. But come on.

Guitar Hero is the same thing. Let's keep them away from music. I bet moms would be appalled to find out what kind of influences most Christian bands have. Ramones -> Reliant K, anyone?

If anyone knows, does Guitar Praise support either Guitar Hero or Rock Band controllers? I don't know which games operate with USB.

Don't Call It A Comeback

Alright, from this point on I'm determined to train myself to post more. In 4+ months, I won't be returning to Berklee ever again, and I'll need to keep my dear friends in the loop.

That being said, I'm excited to get back into the city (although I've only been gone since the 15th). I know this is going to be my last semester, but it certainly doesn't feel like it will be. I suppose it'll be a rude awakening come the middle of December when it's time to get out of there.

Another thing I'm excited for is Season 2 of Heroes. Those of you who are like "Dude, don't you mean you're excited for season 3?!?!?!" will be dismayed to know that since I'm not a HUGE fan of watching tv shows in large groups (I tend to miss things when people get excited/laugh too much) I didn't watch the first two seasons when they were aired. I finished watching the 1st season a couple of weeks ago, and the 2nd season came out on DVD today. So I'm going to pop through that tonight and tomorrow, probably (only 11 episodes from the damn writer's strike, so it'll be short). Oh, and I've also caught up on the comics from the 1st season. Wow, those make everything so much clearer. I'm just plain excited for Heroes, ok?!

Also excited for the Chris Thile & Edgar Meyer album that comes out on September 23rd. I've gotten to see a lot of the clips that will be on the DVD from Chris himself, but I can't wait to hear the stuff that ends up on the album. A few people will be getting that CD as a gift haha.

One last thing that excites me...some would call this song "boring", but I think it's terribly pretty.

Essence of the Joker

I'm currently watching a thing on the Special Features disc of the Batman: Gotham Knight DVD that came out a couple weeks back in anticipation of The Dark Knight (which I saw at 12:01 Thursday night/Friday morning). The feature is interviews with the storyline writers for the Batman comics, and they're talking about the functions of all the primary Batman villains and how they work. This is what they had to say about the Joker (keep in mind this is said easily before these guys could have seen the movie):

"When the Joker is written well, he should be terrifying and then he should make you laugh at inappropriate times...and then you should hate yourself for doing it."

That being said, The Dark Knight is thus perfect.

Dammit....

"I'm going to update this as often as possible..."

Yeah, right.

How's everyone doing? I hope you're all splendid. I'm doing well, myself. Just got out of the Saturday edition of the Berklee Music Production Workshop program. After doing my daily duty, I sat through two of the classes, and that was really interesting.

The past 24 hours for me have mostly been me working with the new Apple MobileMe deal-i-o, which keeps all my calendar, contacts, and mail lined up throughout my computer, iPhone, and web server. Basically, what this means is that if someone calls me for a gig at 8:45am, I can put it into my iPhone, and it syncs with my web calendar and laptop calendar within 15 minutes maximum. As I'm trying to use iCal more and more to organize myself as I draw closer to graduation and moving out of Boston to wherever I end up, this is going to be tremendously useful.

More to come soon, including an album review of a girl whose CD I got a hold of, but I'll leave you with this for now...sometimes I want to pretend that JCM just doesn't groove at all, but then I see this:

The Kleenex...

So, I was thinking today; if you're the kind of person who says "can you hand me a Kleenex?", do you say something different if you were to, for instance, buy Puffs brand tissues? Or is Kleenex just the total vernacular?

Standards

As I've probably mentioned to a small boatload of you, I'm playing as an accompanist for Berklee's Stage Performance Workshop summer program today through Saturday. The group I'm paying in is the Jazz group, which handles half of the students. As I listened to this one girl sing "Someone To Watch Over Me", I was actually listening to the lyrics for the first time in as long as I can remember. The bridge was the part that totally racked my brain:

"Although he may not be the man some
Girls think of as handsome
To my heart he carries the key"

The song (written by George and Ira Gershwin) is from the musical "Oh, Kay!", but I first heard it in the musical "Crazy For You", which opened in 1992, and interpolates a lot of Gershwin's songs into a new story. The male lead is a man named Bobby, who is the son of a rich banking family, and in one of the first scenes he turns out to be awfully clumsy and such. Eventually, he dresses up as an awkward foreign play director whom the female lead, Polly, develops a liking for. At one point, she begins to talk about her loneliness, and she sings "Someone To Watch over Me".

I tend to believe that the typical love song is coming to an end. I say that just because all the simple lines are taken, and it would be too cliche to use them again. This is why I hold on to the music of 1958-1963. All those Doo Wop groups, teen idols, and girl groups just had songs that really just said what they meant. I suppose that's because if I can bring myself to do it, I would just love to say things that simply. Think about what Polly is singing there..."he may not be the man some girls think of as handsome". That's true love! He may not be handsome, but he's everything she needs! She didn't need to make some sort of metaphor for handsomeness that involves camels and aluminum or something like that. No, she just says it: "he's not great-looking, but I want him"!!!!

Another good one is "Dream Lover" by Bobby Darin. "Every night I hope and pray, a dream lover will come my way, a girl to hold in my arms, and feel the magic of her charms". COME ON! It's so simple. "Cause I want a girl to call my own, I want a dream lover so I don't have to dream alone"! AH!

The Chantels - "Maybe": "Maybe if I pray every night, you'll come back to me, and maybe if I cry every day, you'll come back to say, maybe"

I'm just throwing it out there. Just say it when you need to. Don't make stuff up, it only blurs your intent.

Recording "Seasons"

As promised, here are a few pictures from inside Berklee's studio B, where we recorded a song called "Seasons", written and sung by Casey Pukl for her friend's first dance at his wedding. It was a cool song that just kept getting better and better every time we ran it through. That, in itself, was a fun exercise because the chart was thrust in front of us only upon entering the studio. Very cool to see (at least personally) how you can drag something like that together asap.

The Rickroll Just Got More Interesting......

So, apparently Ashley Tisdale (of High School Musical fame) decided to record a cover of Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up". Now, assuming that this is a fairly recent recording, someone in her record company, someone working in the studio, the producer, or even possibly Ms. Tisdale herself HAS to have been Rickroll'd at some point. This can only lead to more internet tomfoolery.

Although the original was, in fact, a catchy song, it was only really worth a once through. I approve of the song, but only permit true license to one version . . . by a skinny white guy singing out of the back of his throat.

Welcome to My New Corner of the Web!

After a long time of posting random musings on internet blogs that were designed to talk about my music, I finally decided to start up a blog that's specifically for just general purposes.

If you keep reading here, then you'll be privy to the information that's just me commenting on the stuff that goes on around me. News, music, movies, daily life, special events...whatever. I'm already not entirely sure how interesting this will be, but I'm willing to give it a shot.

To start off, I'll be posting some pictures and comments about the recording session I have tonight for the fantastic Casey Pukl. From what I understand, we're recording a song that will be the first dance for the wedding of one of her friends from high school. Should be a lot of fun. I've gotten to do a lot of good work for Casey before, so here's hoping that this time is no different.

Check back later...