Number Fifty. Also: Friday!

Managing the schedule seems to be the theme of my return to the States. I'm trying to coordinate my return to Italy, double timed, while also trying to hang out with friends and shop for Christmas gifts. (Hint: I haven't shopped for Christmas gifts yet.)

I would say it's hard to take some time out and look back, but it's not. Slowing down is the easy part. Speeding up again is what's hard. I started this blog on the idea that I'd hammer out my commitments and figure out the schedule later and so far, it's worked. I mean, more followers would be nice, but my place is not to bemoan how few people have this thing on their Google Reader or whatever. My place is to write interesting things, on time, and according to a schedule. I've done that and there's been fifty so far, three a week, usually on time.

I might have cheated with the night I went to the Bane gig and came back (posted at about 3 a.m. Rome time), but I would like to think everybody cheats at some point. Also: With the exception of Emmy's update (former Overkill writers get together to jam on one of my main riffs in Overkill is a great feeling), this has been a pretty solitary project. Which, again, I'm not complaining. I could use a chorus of other voices, for sure, but that, at least for three months, this has been a success. Whether I can keep it going for a year or not is, oddly enough, up to me and no one else.

Which isn't as scary as I thought it would be. But it's another thing on the schedule to manage. I was re-reading my diary from, God, 30ish months ago now and one of the things I knew I had trouble with and didn't do was sticking to a schedule and doing work/writing in advance of a deadline and not right before. The problem, as any procrastinator knows, is not that procrastination doesn't work, but that it does. There is a spark borne of terror and it is a more reliable spark (or at least one that's easier to start) than the spark of sitting down a week or so out and trying to bite off a little chunk of the project.

I can look at today, though, and say, honestly, that I have kept a schedule for three months. It's not epic or earth-shattering. No presses ought to be held, but the next goal is clear: 100.

(Well, 51 is the more immediate goal. To 51!)





Why Barlights by fun.? Because I like the song and I'm going drinking with my friends for the first time since I've been back in...huh...less than an hour and a half. (I'm not even home!) Better get going then. Ta!

And All That Jazz

I went to a jazz bar Saturday night. I'm a music fiend, as if you couldn't already tell. So. I was there, and I was having fun, listening to a group of musicians (in suits and ties) play, and it was then that I realized something that shouldn't be important, but in the provincial squalor of my mind, made sense: I couldn't tell if what I was listening to was good.

I was operating under the assumption that the performers were at least respectable, since the place looked neatly appointed enough (an upper floor, with understated low light, black couches and wall-mounted coat hangers), but because I never listen to jazz, i was basically clueless over whether the music I was hearing was the real thing. Even worse, I was overheated and dehydrated, so the longer we stayed, the more I started getting irritable. The set up was this: three guitarists, one of which was absurdly talented (playing an electric, naturally) and the other two basically there to keep the song going (on acoustics), a bassist (as in stand up) and a person who played clarinet and the saxophone.

Here's how a song went: The really good guitarist would lead the other two, and then as soon as the song got past the second verse/chorus he'd go off for a minute and a half guitar solo, with the other two guitarists repeating the same part of the song for 90 seconds. Which, okay, he's a really, really talented guitarist. Props to him. But there wasn't really much interaction between him and the other two guitarists. Even during the jam session part, in which he would trade parts with the saxophonist, he never really let either of the other two guitarists pull lead.

Occasionally, the bassist (least prominent in the mix) would get a solo, which felt a little more deliberate than the spectacular, finger tapping solos of the guy on the electric. But while getting increasingly irritable and dehydrated, I tried to work over the idea that I could like something even if I wasn't sure it was...fashionable. Okay, being my age, dressing in black and going to a jazz bar is fashionable enough, but it's almost a cliche within itself. I felt like a poser.

And maybe that's not the right word, but I was out of my element and I felt my posturing (regardless of sincerity) was immediately telling. I'm used to knowing what to expect from gigs, to the point where my behavior is basically off-hand. But even in trying to critique the performance I saw I'm...also painfully aware that I know nothing worth mentioning about jazz. It might all just be the return of my punk rock comfort zone trying to regain its lost ground. It didn't sit quite right, which may have been influenced by sitting uncomfortably myself.

I've gotten very comfortable in my little punk rock bubble and I hadn't gotten it musically punctured in a damn long time. I don't want to say it was a great experience all around, but it feels a little bit refreshing in retrospect to be that uncomfortable again. It's keeping me on my toes and next time I'll think ahead enough to get dinner before I do it again.






Have I introduced you to fun. yet? (Yes, a band called fun..) I would bet overworked arts editors everywhere secretly want this band to die for using a period at the end of their name. Anyway. We're all better off that arts editors haven't, because fun. play a kind of psychedelic pop that's surprisingly...short. There's only one song over five minutes and that's the last one, which, historically, is the place to put 5+ minute songs for normal bands.

And, of course, I'm not giving you that one. Have "All the Pretty Girls" instead. The opening is playful and there's a guitar solo I don't mind near the end. I'll say this for the song. It's chorus is "all the pretty girls on a Saturday night" and I love it bouncing around in my head, despite the fact that I normally loathe the very traditional expression of "girls on a weekend/night/not daytime" theme. It's probably a single by now, and if it isn't, the parent label is braindead and asleep at the switch.

Press play and thank me later.