100 days of Barack Obama’s Facebook news feed

Via Slate’s twitter stream. o

Those little purple thingies (pistils? stamen? pistii? stamens?) are cool. Sure, now comes the nasal passage/soul deadening pollen, but the beauty!

Taken before the bathroom redo started and effectively rendered my brain and body into mush. How did we do that kitchen remodel all those years ago? I’m working solo on the bathroom, maybe that has something to do with it. It’s not that the bathroom even comes close to what we did with the kitchen. It’s that Heather’s nesting/ADD is kicking in so she’s all bossing me around like I’m 18 again and have energy to burn. Doesn’t she know I’m pushing 90? o

The Banality of Bush White House Evil

Another winning column from Frank Rich. Of note:

“Judge Bybee’s résumé tells us that he has four children and is both a Cubmaster for the Boy Scouts and a youth baseball and basketball coach. He currently occupies a tenured seat on the United States Court of Appeals. As an assistant attorney general, he was the author of the Aug. 1, 2002, memo endorsing in lengthy, prurient detail interrogation ‘techniques’ like ‘facial slap (insult slap)’ and ‘insects placed in a confinement box.’

He proposed using 10 such techniques ‘in some sort of escalating fashion, culminating with the waterboard, though not necessarily ending with this technique.’ Waterboarding, the near-drowning favored by Pol Pot and the Spanish Inquisition, was prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II. But Bybee concluded that it ‘does not, in our view, inflict severe pain or suffering.’”

Mr. Bybee is a Brigham Young University graduate. Also: Mormon. Mormons seem to be all over Bush’s worst, most immoral judgments. Yay for conservatives (especially religious ones) AGAIN! o

UPDATE: From the Washington Post. Still. Bybee Should have stood up for what he believed was morally right. That he didn’t do so makes his impressive CV lose much of its luster.

UPDATE: The Salt Lake Tribune picked up the story on April 29. The comments are gold.

These massive tulips take a little longer to bloom than others in our yard. They are huge. I’m avoiding the obvious subject at hand, which would be a discussion about Georgia O’Keefe ^{1, 2}. My image is only midly suggestive. O’Keefe’s images are all the way labiariffic. o

I am in love with spring this year. This winter was not as brutal as last year, not even close. Yes, we had snow last week, but this week is heavenly despite having a sick Leta. She’s on the ups (we hope) and the weather looks to stay lovely for a few more days.

I shot this one with the Lensbaby and a macro adapter. I’m still getting the hang of shooting right on top of things, but the light this morning was too lovely not to share. I snuck out while Heather watched sick Leta and I grabbed a few shots I liked. o

cover illustration and design by Merkley???

Many of you have asked for original art for I Wish I Had a Raygun and this was it. This is a scan done by RIch, the original drummer of the J-card for the cassette.

This song was guaranteed to turn the party into a huge pit of mosh. When we fired this up, the crowds went nuts. This recording captures a harried version of the vocals and frenetic guitar chuckas. When we started recording the cassette, we’d never actually heard the lyrics to most of the songs. Sure, we could make out the melody, but the words? Forget it. From 1989 until mid-1991, I don’t think I ever could make out lyrics while we were playing live, including rehearsals. It wasn’t until the later shows that we paid for better sound.

During the spring of 1992, we were going to try to make a video to help us get a contract with a label. At that time, ska bands were not a high priority for record labels. Imagine! The video shoot was crazy. We put on a show at the old Osmond Studios (I have no idea what it’s called now) in Orem, Utah. “RBUG” was the song we chose to shoot the video for as it seemed to provide the most topical, compelling story possibilities. This was right before the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles.

The video shoot was billed as a show as well, and it was packed. The door money indicated that we had probably 1,200 people show up. I would guess a couple hundred more, given the way the door was run for that show. At that time the studio owners were renting out the main stage of the studio to a local company who would turn the studio into a dance club. The guys who were shooting the video knew the studio people and arranged for us to have a Saturday night to shoot the video. Bear in mind, there was nothing to in the Provo/Orem metroplex during those days aside from watching movies, dry humping and hosting burping contests. Dance clubs, a mainstay of the 80s had come and gone, but there were always people trying to start another one up. Provo and Orem lived then (and possibly live now) in a state of denial about college students. They didn’t seem to realize that they were/are both college towns. Whenever a dance club opened, it was the place to be. For most of the out of state students who arrived in August and left in April every year, Provo was undoubtedly weirder than it was for me, a northerner from an equally Mormon, but slightly less insane town in Utah. That said, Provo is pretty weird.

Tangent about the Provo/Orem “scene” in 1992 follows:
The studio didn’t secure permits and zoning variances to allow for dancing or live shows. When the Osmonds built the studio in the late 70s, it was in the middle of farmland. As Orem grew, the neighborhood around the studio was one of the nicer areas (I have no idea if that is still the case) of Orem. But the planning commission didn’t do a very good job of foreseeing how quickly the landscape around the studio would change. After the video shoot, the Orem planning commission was trying to shut down the club usage of the studio, which effectively killed the last good venue we could safely put on shows in that part of the state. Me and Merkley attended the planning commission meeting dedicated to discussing the safety hazards and zoning problems. At that point in my life, I was so done with Provo, with the church and the lack of desire for anything remotely outside the safety-bubble-norm that the Mormon culture demanded that I couldn’t help but snicker my way through the meeting. It was a scene straight out of Footloose. Unfortunately, neither Merkley nor I were Kevin Bacon and the club runners said some really stupid things in really stupid ways. The homeowners were repped, in beautiful irony, by a lawyer who was a relation of Merkley. The lawyer had prepared a bound presentation defending why they wanted the club shut down. I’m not sure I possess the ability to portray in words the energy in that room and how insane people sounded. From my admittedly foggy memory:

• “I found six, SIX cans of beer in the dumpster behind the studio.”
• “There is an alochol & drug recovery center across the street. I hate to think what kind of message we are sending by having a dance club so close.
• “When we bought the property and built our neighborhoods, we wanted to be safe from the kind of people who go to these kinds of clubs.”

It was ridiculous. People stated outright lies about music, bands, art and the damage that they do. At one point, I believe I muttered, “Bullshit” under my breath, not in the smartass way but in the “I can’t fucking believe this bullshit” way and was told by one of the commissioners that we didn’t need language like that in the meeting. I wanted to say, “Wake up! Your kids will one day be the ones wanting to get out of the house and do something! We don’t need thought like this in a community where every year 20-30,000 college-age people come to live.”

Never mind the rehab center with recovering drug addicts, it’s the BEER CANS THAT ARE EVIL. BEER! EVIL! The conversation turned racist, xenophobic and even more ludicrous. I think it was this meeting that caused me to realize that if Provo/Orem was the epitome of Mormondom, I didn’t belong. Over the years, this decision has borne out repeatedly and it took a couple more years before I was out for good and a few more after that where I could talk about it without getting angry. While I wish my Mormon friends the best and hope they find the happiness they desire inside the faith, I’ve been happier outside. So much happier. I digress.
End tangent.

Somewhere there are 8mm rolls of uncut film, poorly shot and badly processed that show snippets of our performances. I think we shot the song four or five times and spaced it with other songs so the crowd wouldn’t get bored. To prepare for the shoot/show, Merkley created a set that was amazing. We rented (prior to knowing that we’d be charged) a huge scrim/backdrop painted to look like curtains open at an old time theater. Merkley had a 50s car that he drove onto the stage. It was the first time we’d played in a setting like that and we had a blast.

We didn’t have proper barricades up front, so once we started playing the whole stage moved back about 6 inches. Patatomic, the third and final Herschel drummer, had a look I’ll never forget. I think I told him he needed to calm down for the shoot, even though there was no usable footage, and none showing the terror. The only footage I saw that looked even close to good was high speed black and white slow motion footage shot from a scaffolding above the stage. I’m sure there’s a VHS tape out there with some of that show, but I don’t have it. I wish I did so y’all could see that set and the crowd.

Anyway, “RBUG” stands for Racism Bad Unity Good. I loved playing this song fast and loose. There are two hugely sour notes I played that I should have fixed and didn’t.

Production Notes
The organ sound on this was one I programmed specifically for Swim Herschel Swim songs and helped in the christening of my keyboard the “Cheesemaster 2000″, a reference from an 80s Paul Schafer joke on Late Night with David Letterman. I made a fake logo and taped it to the D-50, covering the Roland logo. After a show a kid asked me if the keyboard was custom made for me. I smiled and said yes.

This was another of the initial rush of songs we wrote when the band started and it has the insane energy that we felt when we played live.

I’ve tried to bring out some bottom end to this song, there was virtually none on the original cassette. Thanks for staying with me this far. Talk talk talk.

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Direct Download – Swim Herschel Swim – I Wish I Had a Raygun – RBUG – Remastered, MP3, 320kbps constant

o

Taken last November when we had our crazy 1.5 day trip to Los Angeles.

That doesn’t seem so long ago. Weird how time does that. o

In 1987, a keyboard was introduced to the mass market by Roland called the D-50. It blended a synthesis technique of sampled attack waves attached to digital synthesizer sounds. So things like pizzacato strings and chuffy flutes (for making new age tracks!) sounded great without the storage overhead of an actual sampler. Bowed strings sounded real and it came with its own effects like chorus and reverb. I can safely say that I yearned for this keyboard like only a few other things in my life; maybe four or five other things. During the summer of 1987 I would go to Guitar Center in San Francisco on the weekend and put on headphones and play for a couple of hours, wondering how I could ever get the money to buy this keyboard. I had fallen hard for Yamaha’s DX-7, even going so far as taking a class at Utah State University to learn how to program it. After that class, I decided to hold off on my lust. Then the D-50 came out.

I moved back to Utah in the fall of 1987 and did a year of community college and night classes to try to get into BYU. The summer of 1988 I stayed in Utah, lived at home with my mom rent-free and temped for the summer at the aerospace firm that builds space shuttle boosters. I got a mailer from a Salt Lake City music store that said they are offering same as cash pricing with 90-day no-interest financing. Not thinking I’d get financing (I think I was making $6/hour or something ridiculously low, but seemed fantastic at the time), I figured it was a complete lark. I was wrong. In 1988 I had the keyboard in my possession. There are three instruments that have changed my life. This was one of them.

With this keyboard in hand, I was able to cover more current music and start to work on sound design, creating my own sounds for the D-50 that I could use in the previously mentioned cover bands Room 13 and Scuba Bus.

When Swim Herschel Swim formed, I was able to use some of my favorite custom sounds for the songs we were writing and it made working for $6/hour, getting up at 5am and commuting out to the rocket building complex in the desert worth it.

This track, “Chevy Bossa Nova” was written in the fall of 1989, I think. If I’m not mistaken, this was one of three songs that the original bass player, Russ Cluff, helped write, including the bassline. I remember holding down chords and being surprised when the guys in the band liked the sound and then we wrote a song that utilized it. I was living in a state of constant amazement that fall. One of the greatest things about Swim Herschel was the first six months or so of songwriting. We were all so happy to be in a band and writing songs and playing these insane shows that were packed by sexually starved high school and BYU students.

Production Notes
I’m not sure who came up with the lets-sound-like-the-1930s idea on this track, but I think it moves the track in a good direction. I would guess Merkley and Rod (lead singer) had the most say in the heavy tweaking. This song was meant to be a crowd calmer after coming onstage and watching the kids get worked into a frenzy. I’ve been to some intense shows (Rage Against the Machine, 1993, one word review: fantastic) and the crowds at our shows would be almost as intense as a metal or punk show. Almost. It was kind of fun and scary to watch. So we’d play this song as a way to let them catch their breath and regroup before the next onslaught of songs at 140bpm.

When we added a saxophone to the line-up the fall of 1990, about a month or so before heading into the studio, it made songs like this even better.

On the original cassette tape, the mastering job was pretty much non-existent. We couldn’t afford a real master job and due to the limitations of the cassette medium, the mastering was all about the treble and there was virtually no low end to speak of. I may be over-compensating with this one, but Logic Express has this sweet bass enhancer for mixing that adds subsonics to existing frequencies. Super fun to play with, but difficult to master. The bass line and the kick drum are battling it out for supremacy. Who will win? Turn up your sub-woofer to find out now!

The synth sound on this track was heavily influenced by the soundtrack work on The Last Temptation of Christ by Peter Gabriel. Highly recommend both the movie and the soundtrack. This sound was one of my favorites, especially through a good PA. It demonstrates the power of the keyboard and gives a great atmosphere to the song that is decidedly not ska and not reggae. The low end was awesome and a good audio engineer knew how to make the crowd feel the bass in their genitals. In the studio, the keyboard got killed in the stereo mix, as we were trying to capture a smidge of reggae influence with the kick drum and the bass. Except we were white guys. Recording in Orem, Utah. At any rate, this was always one of my favorites, just because I was always proud of the sound I programmed and the nice bass line from Russ. At the end of the track, Jeff on bass does some sweet noodling on the bass and you can hear a tinge of jazz influence.

Please forgive my ponderous and highly dubious fake timbale solo in the break down. My inner George Lucas wanted to edit this out, but Rick does some sweet real-time effect pedal tweaking and tasty guitar work in that break and I didn’t want to leave that out. The inclusion of the timbale solo on tape was the second dumbest thing I did in the studio during the few sessions it took to make this album. In our early shows, we needed a longer set and the timbale solo would extend this song out a few minutes and give people a break. It was killed sometime before the original drummer left the band in the fall of 1991.

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Direct Download – Swim Herschel Swim – I Wish I Had a Raygun – Chevy Bossa Nova – Remastered, MP3, 320kbps constant

o

She’s a cute dog. But she’s literally screamingly insane. Literally.

Just when I think I’ve gotten her to LISTEN, she’s off finding the most obscure toy that Leta is definitely going to want to play with next. Coco finds this toy before Leta knows it’s the next thing she wants. Coco brings the toy upstairs, very quietly. Within 45 seconds of realizing that Coco is gone from our presence, there are the panic calls of her name from either me or Heather. She comes running with the toy dangling out of her mouth. If we’ve caught her before the critical moment, the toy survives. If not, we do what parents of dogs and children have done for hundreds of years. Call the lawyers.

p.s. Happy Income Tax deadline U.S. citizens! Go stimulus, go. o

Another Austin, TX night shot. This place has fantastic food and great beer. And it was packed on a weeknight! We almost wanted to move to Austin 20 minutes after leaving. Austin is definitely the only “southern” city I’d consider moving to. The only problems: humidity & summer. But that’s what the beer and margaritas fix, right? o