I've been really into this band lately.

"Fuck What You Like" by A.R.E. Weapons.

Although I dislike labeling things, especially music, I think this is a great example of modern punk. While it doesn't have the cliche punk sound, style, or fashion, I think it definitely has a punk sound and style. Despite the simple sound of the song, it really makes me think. It has a wonderful, yet simple message, which I think people could really benefit from. Just do what you do for your own reasons without being controlled by what other people will think of you or what you think other people will think of you. Don't do things based on what you think other people will like; a concept that's definitely important when it comes to any creative endeavors.

I think the lines "Fuck what you like, I don't care what you like. Fuck what you like, I'm living my life" stick out to me especially in the context of the vocabulary used in things I've been noticing lately on the internet. There was a recent change on Facebook that I really don't approve of, where pages no longer have a button you can click to become a fan of whatever the page represents, and instead have a button for you to click to "like" whatever the page represents. It makes things much too black and white in my opinion. I think people already think in terms of everything being black and white, and this just makes it easier for them. Everything is now easily organized into two groups. Things they like, and things they don't like.




Obviously the song is not about that, after all, it has been around for a few years now, but I think it applies to the meaning of the song. Look at the top right corner of the Vimeo video player I embedded at the beginning of this entry. It has a button with a heart symbol on it, labeled "LIKE". If you like the video, you're supposed to press that button to let people know what you like. If that's not irony, I don't know what is.

I was disappointed recently when a few people decided they no longer "liked" my music page on Facebook, because I feel it's like finding out people who you thought once supported you suddenly no longer do. Going from someone who supports you to someone who doesn't is quite a significant change for an action involving one mouse click. Although their actions still upset me, it's really not a big deal. It's not for them, so I don't really care if they like it or not. To them it's not about support. It's about what they like or don't like. I don't care what they like, and what they like doesn't affect how I do things, because I'm doing it for me. It's my life.

David Bowie likes cool music.

I was just watching a David Bowie interview I've never seen before where he's mostly talking about my favorite album of his, Heathen. At one point he's talking about how it's important to listen to old music as well as new music. He was saying it's okay to listen to The Beatles, but that it's also important to listen to The Streets, which he practically pulled out of the air as an example of an important modern band. I love The Streets, and it's pretty cool knowing David Bowie thinks so highly of The Streets too. It made me smile.

Here's a really good song by The Streets that was around back when the Bowie interview took place:

nnenn

One of the most creative, prolific, inspiring, and controversial builders in the LEGO community passed away in an automobile accident recently. I didn't really know him, at least not personally, besides knowing he has a wife and two young sons. That's obviously tragic, but since I didn't know him personally, I don't feel like it's appropriate for me to talk about that side of things.

I've been a friend of his on flickr probably for as long as I've had a flickr account (late 2007), which I acquired to share my LEGO creations with members of the community and to look at the creations of the other members that inspire me. I rarely post anything to my photostream, but almost every day I go into my "contacts" section and see what everyone else has uploaded to their photostreams. I've enjoyed nnenn's space ship models for ages, and he seemed to build and upload pictures of them quite often, so I really got to know his work as a LEGO builder. I knew the art, not the artist. He has a lot of fans for obvious reasons, but he also seemed to have a lot of critics due to his controversial techniques like modifying LEGO pieces and using other brands of building blocks. I think even the critics would probably admit the final products of those techniques usually looked great. Being a bit of a purist myself, even I would sometimes cringe when I saw what he did to certain pieces, but then I'd relax and appreciate the model the piece was used in.

It often seemed like the main reason he uploaded pictures of his creations wasn't to show off, but to inspire other people to build, and in that way, more than just his building techniques were inspiring. The attitude was less "Look what I built!" and more "Look at what you can build! Now stop sitting at your computer and go build something too!" And he inspired many people to do just that.

Here's one of my favorite things he's built. I love the combination of colors (something nnenn was really good at) and how he made those rather complicated brick-built designs on the wings instead of sticking on decals.


My flickr "contacts" section will seem much more empty from here on.

Uh oh.

I saw a book downstairs on the counter called "The Psychology of Persuasion: How to Persuade Others to Your Way of Thinking"

That can't be a good sign.

I haven't updated in a long time...

So I guess I'll have to fill you in on what's been going on.

Patrick and Todd and I went to see AFI, and they were amazing. A photographer from the Rochester Insider took a photo of us and put it on the Rochester Insider website along with a couple other pictures of attendees and also of the bands playing. A band called Gallows opened up, but I didn't really like them.

Patrick and I decided to try to get closer to the stage before AFI started playing, because while Gallows was playing, we were leaning against the wall on the side of the room. I know it's rude to be getting in front of other people who were already standing there waiting for the band, but I don't really care. I'm rarely a rude person, and if I want to be closer to the stage to see one of my favorite bands, I'm going to get closer to the stage. Of course, if you can seem a bit less rude, why not try?

So I noticed two females making their way through the crowd of people to get closer to the stage too, so I made the decision to walk behind them. I believe it was a mother and her teenage daughter, and I figured people wouldn't get as annoyed at Patrick and I if we were following these two females. They would get very, very annoyed for other reasons though. One such person got very, very annoyed because as I was walking past her, I stepped on the toe of one of her boots. She was leaning against one of the big posts keeping the balcony up, and she had her feet sticking out really far, so it was her own fault really. I don't think you have any right to get mad at someone for stepping on your feet at a concert, especially when you have them sticking out. The problem was, as I stepped on the toe of her boot and she yelled at me, the mother and daughter I was following had stopped, and I couldn't move forward, so I was just standing on this poor girl's toe, unable to move. She kept yelling at me and there wasn't really anything I could do about it, but give her my "oh well, whatcha gonna do?" face and shrug my shoulders. After a few seconds the mother and daughter started moving again to get closer to the stage. When they found the place they wanted to stand, Patrick and I stopped next to them. I think I really freaked the mom out, because I had followed her all the way to their spot and stood right next to them. I understand how that might seem creepy, but I wasn't following her for a creepy reason, just to take advantage of the fact that she's a female. Okay, that still sounds creepy.

AFI started playing shortly after, and they were so good. Possibly the best I've ever seen them. If not, then the best I've seen them since the first time I saw them. I was very sick and had only just gotten my voice back the day before the show (I had lost my voice for about a week. Couldn't speak above a whisper.), and was concerned I wouldn't be able to sing along, and that if I did, that I'd lose my voice quickly. To my surprise, I sang along the whole show and, if I might say so myself, sounded quite good doing so.

I bought a new AFI shirt, and while I was at the merch table, I had an interesting conversation with the merch guy. I asked him if they carry all of the merchandise with them the whole tour or if they somehow get new merch along the way to avoid having to carry it all over the country. He told me they sell out most of the stuff every few days, and they get new merch shipped to the venues, so it's waiting for them when they get there. They just keep track of what they have and what they've sold so that they get everything they need in the next shipment. I found the conversation to be very interesting, because I've wondered about that for a while. I found it unbelievable that they'd bring enough merch for the whole tour, but I also didn't know what other options there were.

A week before Halloween, my cousin Megan (Patrick's older sister) had a Halloween party. I was going with my mom, and we couldn't go until an hour after it had already started, and my mom wanted to leave early because she had to work in the morning, so I decided to stay for the whole party and then spend the rest of the weekend at the house Patrick is staying at. Right now he's living with his friend Aaron. Aaron also came to the Halloween party. I've met him a few times before, and he's pretty cool. He came to the party as The Red Hood, and as soon as he walked into the room I was blown away by the costume. He had a black pinstripe suit, a red mask, red cape, and purple gloves. He looked like he stepped right out of the pages of The Killing Joke, except his mask looked more like Jason Todd's Red Hood mask than the cylindrical mask Joker wears in The Killing Joke. There was a costume contest, and Aaron won. Interestingly, I was also the Joker, but I was wearing the mask he wore in the beginning of The Dark Knight to rob the bank. Patrick was Iggy Pop. He came to the party with a wig on and jeans, and with muscles painted on his shirtless torso.

The day after the Halloween party, Patrick and Aaron and I walked to Carousel Mall. Aaron decided to leave early to go to some gospel choir performance, but Patrick and I stayed at the mall until it closed. We love being at the mall, and could spend all day there. The next night we all went to Denny's and I had a Texican burger. It was a burger with cooked onions, jalapeno peppers, pepperjack cheese, and barbecue sauce. That thing was delicious. We got some crayons from the front and we each drew Halloween-themed pictures on the back of our paper placemats. Patrick drew a haunted house, Aaron drew a bunch of random stuff including a scarecrow, and I drew Frankenstein's monster. The waiter, who knew both Patrick and Aaron because they're regular customers there, declared me the winner of our drawing contest. We got some dessert to go (I got caramel apple crisp with vanilla ice cream), and we went back to Aaron's to watch some movies. We watched two movies I brought. Clue, and The Road Warrior. Patrick or Aaron hadn't seen either movie. Patrick and I have almost the same taste in movies so I like sharing movies with him.

Lately I've been really busy, because in addition to my part time job as a janitor, I've been painting my uncle's house in Syracuse so it's more presentable for him to sell. The best part of doing that is lunch. A couple different days I've been there, we went to the Green Hills grocery store and I got a couple slices of taco pizza from the deli and some bottles of soda. The first time I got grape soda, and the next time I got black cherry soda.

The music I've been working on recently is for my album. There's a jazzy song I have which has samples of rain and thunder in it. I've been working on a guitar solo for the climax of that song, and it's coming along great, but my fingers hurt from doing the tapping parts so much. I changed the structure of "We're All Lost In Autumn" and have been working on vocal melodies for it. I added this little bit to it (or more accurately took a bit out) so that everything drops out for a measure after the first chorus except for the guitar and then comes back in. It sounds cool, and adds a little more variety to the song. I've also been working on sort of a scrap book for my album. I am using one of my old binders from college, and I bought some dividers for it. I am making each song from my album a section in the binder. I've been putting things in there like pictures or artwork that go along with each song, and lyrical ideas, and also free-writes I do about the meaning or inspiration of each song. When I'm working on a song, I can have the binder open to that song so that I have those pictures and words right there, inspiring me. And I can keep adding more to the binder anytime I want.

So that's most everything I've been doing lately.

Yesterday was rather productive.

I'm changing the name of my music project, and over the past couple months I've been creating profiles for it on various different sites like Myspace, Facebook, Bandcamp... I've even made an Etsy page because I think it would make for an interesting store for my band's merchandise. I really dislike the various online stores made specifically for selling band merch. Having an Etsy account makes it so not only do I not have to deal with those other sites, but it will set me apart from everyone else. I'm very into the whole "do it yourself" or DIY attitude or approach, one of the things I really like about the punk. Unfortunately, many bands wanting to come off as punk do things like have very simple "punk" looking buttons and t-shirts made, but they're made by the big companies that make everyone else's merchandise too, and that punk aesthetic is just a facade, and is really contradictory to what the merchandise really is: simply merchandise made by a company to be sold to make money and that's it really.

The general attitude seems to be "We need to make a shirt to sell, let's just take a black shirt and slap a logo or picture on it. And if we make it look like someone made it with a stencil and spraypaint, it will look very punk!" One of my favorite bands is AFI, and I wish the band members themselves actually put some work into the design of their t-shirts and other items they sell. One of the new t-shirts they're selling in a package with their new album has an octopus on it. Octopi are cool and all, but what does that have to do with the album? Nothing. So since Etsy is all hand-made items, I'm going to be making a lot of really creative items people can buy, things I'd actually find interesting if one of my favorite bands were making it. This includes t-shirts that I will personally print with stencils (designed by me) as opposed to getting them printed by a company or by using cheap iron-on's. I think that would really set me apart from all the other musicians out there who just pay other people to print their shirts for them or use cheap iron-on's. And it would be something I wouldn't feel bad about selling. I'd feel like a terrible person selling someone a t-shirt when I know the graphic on it is going to fade or peel off the first time through the washing machine.

Anyway, that wasn't even the point of this blog entry. I just totally went off on a tangent. One reason yesterday was productive was because I finally have the url www.facebook.com/jacobsshadow on Facebook. They have a lot of ridiculous rules like you have to have a certain amount of fans before you can have a url, and you have to have been on facebook for a certain amount of time. If you have a newer account, it has to be verified. I actually had to get back my old account so I could make it an admin of the page so I could use it to change the url, because my new account isn't verified. So anyway, I finally got the url I want. That's important to me. The url's for all my various sites match.

The other way in which yesterday was productive was the recording I did, which I talked about in my last entry. I didn't know if any of it was usable at the time I wrote the entry, but last night I spent some trying out the clips I recorded, putting them into the song. The first one I did actually had airplane sounds in it. I don't remember there being an airplane when I was recording that one, but apparently there was, because it was loud in the recording. I used two of the six takes in the song, layered over each other, each one slightly panned to a different side. I think it sounds pretty good, and will sound even better when I record the guitar parts for real. For now it's just the demo, which has softsynth guitar sounds filling in for the real guitar parts I am going to record when I'm done writing the song. The recordings of the leaves are a little bit tinny sounding from my camera microphone, but it doesn't bother me. And I'm kind of a perfectionist when it comes to my music, so if it's good enough for me, it's good enough.

To me it sounds like someone walking in leaves on the recording, but maybe that's because I recorded it so I know what it is. I'm not quite sure if just anyone listening to the song when I release it will be able to tell it's someone walking in dead leaves. Maybe I'll let a few people hear it and see what they think.

Anyway, I'm going to be seeing AFI tonight with Todd and my cousin Patrick. It's hard to believe for some reason. I'm sitting here in my room right now, and sometime this evening I'll be standing in front of a stage watching AFI. Should be a good time.

Recording Leaves and ducking under ducks.

I'm home alone for most of today. I had to feed the animals since no one else was here to do it. We have a cat, a couple rabbits, and a bunch of ducks. We used to have geese, but they wandered off. When I was bringing the duck food to the duck food dishes, ducks were flying at my face. I was ducking to dodge ducks.

Most of this autumn has been really wet. It's been raining a lot. Days when it doesn't rain, it's still wet from the day or two before that it did rain. I love rain, but for several months now I had been planning activities I need to do this autumn for my album. One of them includes picking up red leaves for the album art, and I've been doing that. It's not a problem picking up wet leaves, but it would be much more pleasant collecting leaves if everything wasn't so wet. The other main activity I wanted to do was recording sounds for the album. Probably the most important one I planned to record was the sound of me walking on dead leaves to the beat of the outro of the song "We're All Lost In Autumn". For this I need dry leaves. Crispy, crunchy leaves. Not soggy leaves. The last time we had a day where everything was really dry was the day my aunts and uncle came to visit a few weeks ago, and I was thinking about recording it then, but I had to do a lot of cleaning because of my relatives' arrival, so I didn't record then. I've spent the past several soggy days wishing I had recorded that last dry day.

Finally today I decided it was dry enough to do some recording. I prepared. I had the guide track put on CD and in my CD player in my pocket, with my headphones on. I was all bundled up because it's rather chilly outside. I had my camera batteries charged. I went outside and started on the deck. The plan was to press play on the CD player to start the guide track, which I had a four-beat intro on to get the beat in my head before I started walking on the leaves, and after I press play, I'd press record on the camera, and start walking on the leaves while holding the camera. On the 17th beat of leaf walking, I would stop in my tracks, for that is to be the end of the song.

On about the third beat, the ducks started making a whole lot of duck noises. I maybe wouldn't have minded so much but not only didn't I want duck sounds in the song, but they were being so loud I think it was probably drowning out the sound of the leaves under my feet. I walked to the front of the house (the ducks were behind the house), and started recording in the driveway. I feel like they knew exactly when I was pressing play, because each time I'd try recording they'd start making a lot more noise. I got frustrated and decided to walk away from my house. I kept walking down the dirt road until I couldn't hear ducks anymore. The leaves on the dirt road weren't good enough because they were so packed down from cars driving over them.

I walked into the woods. I realize this might not have been such a good idea since I wasn't wearing bright colors and I have no idea whether or not it is hunting season. I really don't pay attention to which times of year it is legal to kill relatively defenseless animals. There were logging trails I haven't walked down before, and I walked very far down them, recording the part several times. Picking up nice red leaves whenever I saw them. When recording the sounds of nature, you really start noticing all the unnatural sounds buried beneath the natural sounds. The subtle hum of the motors in my CD player that makes the CD spin and the laser change position, the vague sound of cars a half a mile away on the main road... At one point I even heard an airplane going by. When you're waiting for an airplane to go by so you can't hear it anymore, it really takes a long time. It's like watching a pot of water on the stove waiting for it to boil.

It was kind of difficult to record what I was recording. I had to make sure I was stepping right on the beat so it will sound right in the song, and I had to be counting the 17 beats so I don't make one step too many. That's more difficult than it sounds. I also have a cold, so I had to make sure I wasn't making any sniffling sounds or coughing. I ruined a couple of takes by coughing. There were also several takes where one step out of the 17, the leaves just didn't sound right. It wasn't enough of a crunch under my feet or something, so I'd scrap those takes. I got 6 takes I think are possibly usable though, and later I'll put them on my computer and see if there's anything I can use.

When I walked back to my house, I noticed the ducks were silent again, still behind the house, so I decided to try recording again there, because the leaves just sounded so nice beneath my feet. I pressed play on my CD player and record on my camera, and by about the third beat, the ducks started making a lot of noise. I know it's just my imagination, but their duck sounds really sounded like an evil cackle, a lot like Skeletor from the 80's Masters Of The Universe cartoon. It sounded like they were laughing at me.