The Light of Day

Less blogging, more doing.

That’s my excuse.

For now.

See all y’all as soon as the bug hits again!

How low tech can be cutting edge

Excuse my, uh, “calligraphy” for a moment.

Ow, ow, ow. *shakes wrists*

I just don’t have the endurance for that anymore.

Anyway, the point isn’t that I have any desire to do a handwritten blog, and I will likely never do that again. But think about how strange it is that we get sentimental for “low tech” or “old tech” things, how there’s always a “golden age” to look back to. But none of that old stuff ceases to exist, or even ceases to be available. If you really want to shoot a movie on 8mm film, you can, though it’ll be a little pricey to get the film and develop it. Not prohibitively, though, if you really want to. Key words there: really want to. The only thing we’re ever truly being sentimental for is the lack of an excuse to be lazy. The fact that we’ve paved all these shortcuts doesn’t mean the shortcut is the only — or best — way.

But what truly makes “low tech” interesting now, is that we’re in this higher tech environment. You can not only shoot 8mm film, if you really want — but you could, if you really want, shoot 8mm film of a person sitting in a Starbucks with a laptop computer, wearing a Trogdor t-shirt. Which you could never do when 8mm was actually a sensible way of preserving memories.

Today, we can run a Mellotron through Autotune. We can sample a cassette. All these things we can do, but just don’t think of doing, because we’ve convinced ourselves that all our old toys have been replaced with new toys. Guess what? All your toys are still there; they may have moved to a higher (more expensive) shelf that you’ll need to climb a little (or get mummy to help) in order to get them down, but they’re still there. You have a shitload of toys. Do you realize how much “play potential” you have afore ye now? Do that “relationship” math again. Five toys is ten potential combinations, six toys is fifteen… and that’s only counting pairs of toys.

Tip: do “relationship math” in your head:
Take the number of people in the room, and imagine that number on the left.
Subtract one, and put the new number on the right. (If 7 is on the left, 6 is on the right.)
Whichever number is even, cut it in half. (Cut that 6 down to a 3.)
Multiply the left number by the right number, and you’re done! (7 x 3 = 21 relationships.)

It’s like this: there you were, in 1980, or 1985 or whatever, saying, “okay, if only I had this and this and this”, and now you’re waking from a deep freeze, realizing, hey, I have this and this and this!! All you’ve lost track of is why you wanted it. Once you remember, you’re all set!

Anyway, there’s a reason I wrote all this. Ask me to elaborate later, and I will. Ask me not to elaborate later, and I will anyway, just to spite you.

Follow-through

I suspect that my blog would be a more effective tool (CATEGORY ALERT!!!) if I followed through by consistently providing updates of the things I wrote previously. This would also make me appear to have an attention span of more than a few seconds.

Without even peeking at my blog, I’m going to pull a number out of some dark and dirty place, and that number is…

Five! Ah, the comforting sound of men and women singing an octave apart… and when we’re little kids, we don’t notice how thumpy the tom toms are. (Why do I suddenly have an urge to listen to Hair?) So anyway, without further ado, here are quick follow-ups to my five most recent posts, from oldest to most recent…

1. First “final” mix of Rival Big Bang. I’ve noticed that, within my album tracklists, there are some things that are more absolute than others. Within those lists, I’ll often find pairs of songs that are, in my mind, absolutely inseperable. You know the kind: Heartbreaker and Living Loving Maid. We Will Rock You and We Are The Champions. Well, in my case, one such pair would be What Do You Think Of Yourself? and Rival Big Bang. Those two songs are married to each other. So what I should be doing is making videos of these pairs as “mini suites”. And just think, these “mini-suites” will fit into the YouTube ten-minute limit (which for some strange reason doesn’t apply to everyone… hmmm…).

2. Open letter to Republicans. Some masochistic force within me made me watch a thirty-second Mitt Romney campaign promo tonight. By the six second mark, he had already said something negative about Democrats. By the 15 second mark he did it again. Only 30 seconds to talk, and at such loss for something constructive to say that the time has to be padded out with broad insults. But the greatest insult was that his voice was dubbed. You know the sound of a hollywood movie, where every time someone talks, it sounds like the microphone is a few inches in front of the actor’s mouth, even though there’s no microphone anywhere in the shot? Makes you wonder what else was fake about it…

3. I’m so tired. The “night crew” paid a visit to Cats and Critters this evening, because Emily Junior is gonna need to get fixed up, and she’s gonna need to take some meds for at least a week beforehand. I took the whole darn cage along, so Ralphie had a chance to check out the scenery too. Em Jr. is still acting sociable and energetic — but nonetheless, now would be a good time to send some positive energy her way. Thanks!

4. Possible video: creating drum parts. Maybe I can go ahead and shoot this. The main thing holding me back is how to get the camera to pick up the sound as I’m working, so I don’t have to sync it up after the fact… I suppose I can just turn my speakers on. Can’t do that for vocal sessions though. Other videos that I want to do: a video at the Fender Rhodes where I discuss chords, and a video at the desk of improvised doodling, cutting shapes out of colored paper, making some kind of “paper puppets”, and generally making images inspired by music without knowing ahead of time what they’re going to be.

5. My results on the equal loudness test. I finished doing what I had to do to create my vocal limiter/de-esser effect, which is both functional and theoretical, in that I’ve tested it, but not on vocals. Don’t forget, that post links to a site where you can test yourself to see how you perceive volume at different pitches. It’s useful stuff to be aware of when you produce audio of any kind.

Well, that certainly felt responsible! Let’s do this again sometime.

Site wonk-i-ness

Adjusting to the new hosting. Growing pains. Stay cool, waterbabies.

2 years!!!

As of this coming tuesday, the sixth of november, it will be two years since I changed the default wordpress first post from “hello world” to hello squirrel, intending to delete it shortly thereafter, and never quite getting around to doing so.

So, like, the thing to do would be to say “happy second birthday, keithhandy.com”, except I’m sort of cheating, because I didn’t start posting here regularly until several months later. I tried to get some of my LiveJournal friends to continue reading me as I migrated, but apparently they were more in love with LiveJournal itself than any actual human beings posting on it.

It sucked to have to lose some readers, but I’m glad I made the leap. Now, after some time, I have new readers (some of whom vanish for weeks at a time, but eventually come back and catch up). I have a permanent, final destination to lead back to for any other social sites or blogs I participate in — an actual “presence” — and I feel like I can write to whoever in the world is interested, instead of a stagnant circle of friends with a known set of common interests. My posts are readable and searchable forever, and people still go back and read the older ones.

I’ve tried over time to make this site more helpful and inspirational for any of you that have a pet project or labor of love, and I’ve heard some encouraging feedback about my progress in that direction. But also, the site is becoming a central point of organization for my projects. Even though, at close range, I appear to jump from project to project without finishing anything… if you look over everything on this site to get a broader view, you can actually start to see my patterns, the relationships between my projects, and how I ultimately do get stuff done. You can start to connect the dots, in other words.

When you get a chance, go back to hello squirrel, and leave a dumb, meaningless comment. It doesn’t have to be about squirrels… but it doesn’t have to not be about squirrels either. You can say “happy birthday”, or you can just imply it. The main thing is that you take a quick trip back to 2005, and say, “hello, 2005″. It’ll be fun. You’ll have a good time.

Well, hey, it can’t possibly be any less fun than taking one of those LiveJournal quizzes.

Commenting

Recently someone told me in an email that they weren’t sure how to leave comments on this blog. I’d been wondering if the theme was confusing anyone; it may seem obvious to us blogosphere addicts, but for the rest of the world (say, for example, my mum), I think I need to make an adjustment to the theme soon. Edit 11:46 PM: Done.

In the meantime, if you’re among the confused, the number next to the title is how many comments there are, and clicking on it will take you to them.

I also think I should create a separate web presence, for people who might like my work, but aren’t necessarily interested in the mental process behind every eighth note. I’m not sure what that would be like, but now that you know how to leave a comment, you can share your ideas with me.