Grown ups of the 21st Century! Come Join us... Over Here!

I copied this from Best Revenge's MySpace blog so I apologize for it's brevity and crumminess, but I really couldn't deal with MySpace's editor anymore. So people who give a crap about me or my band, please stick to BlogSpot and Facebook from now on! Without further ado:

Like most other 20 somethings who don't live in hillbilly towns and play townie bars exclusively, we've moved a lot of our web presence over to Facebook because MySpace has become a buggy barren wasteland of spam by terrible bands no one wants to have heard of. So first off, join us there for insight to what we're up to and obnoxious attempts at funny quips about alcoholic energy drinks:

Our Facebook Page

Recording isn't going quite as smoothly as hoped. The big problem is lining up people's schedules to secure a location and gear to knock everything out in a day or two. But once that happens, you dear friends, will be the first to know. We're going to make this shit happen, I swear, for the millionth time. Keep your eyes out for early summertime. We should have some new songs that won't be on the record coming soon too!!

Most importantly, there's some big festivals you all should know about planned!

First is Clifton Heights Music Festival 2. The last one was a blast and you definitely don't want to miss it this time. Twice as big. Ten thousand times as awesome.

Here's a full festival lineup:

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=79682&id=100000697762998&ref=mf

And finally we're playing one of my personal favorite Cincy music events, Cincy Punk Fest 9. We play Friday April 9th around 11:00 PM in the Southgate House Lounge.

Here's some more details about that one:

http://www.myspace.com/cincypunk

Wow... I had some other stuff written down here, but I'm doing this original posting in MySpace's editor and they do not make it easy. Things keep getting erased and I'm kind of over it. It knows I'm speaking ill of it...

Anyway, see you guys next month. Come make it awesome with us!

95% of People are on Fire

I am not living up to my own standards here this year... at least on the blog. Isn't it great that every post starts out that way? It's kind of like coming home. You don't go there often but at least you know you'll get the same thing every time.

Anyway, I'm blaming my lack of posting on extenuating circumstances in life that are none of yer' damned business! But seriously man. Life is upside down, right side up, exciting and miserable all at the same time. It might also help that on Sunday we had another eight or so inches of snow dumped on top of us and as a result, work has been closed and I haven't left the house in two days. In fact, I don't think I've even spoken in these past two days... Does my voice still work? I'm going to test this out.

Nope... never mind. I'm not crazy enough to start talking to myself out loud in my apartment to make sure my voice still works. Then I'll know I've got some mad cabin fever baby! I've spent the past few days pacing back and forth, watching at least a combined fifteen hours or so of 30 Rock and Weeds, and stared out my window wondering if the rest of the world's population is on fire or not. (That's what we fancy big time writer's call an Easter Egg joke).

But what all this sitting around alone in my tiny apartment has given me, is a chance to add another jam to the Rotting Pizza EP which is now pretty close to being ready for the masses. Of all the previous tracks before today's, all that was left was re-tracking some guitars and some light mixing. But a new song has hit me and as part of making that new song I forced myself to learn how to do some pretty legit sampling techniques with the EXS24 sampler in Logic and my MIDI controller. All you have to do is set a hot key to slice a region at the playhead position as the song plays and then tap the tempo as it plays. At that point you've already made the slices for your sample. Then edit a new instrument in ESX24, drag and drop your regions and it has an option to automatically assign them to keys... after that you're pretty much done. It's so simple and awesome.

In other news I awoke this morning to find those goofs on Fox and Friends decided to dig up some survey that they claim "proves" that going to college makes you an evil liberal. They then allowed Tucker Carlson to rant like an idiot about how definitively this un-cited survey truly does prove that college makes you an evil liberal. Check it out if you want to kill some brain cells:

The Biggest Facepalm Moment You'll Have All Day.

Now this would all be fine and dandy if they were joking or actually personally believed a single word of the vitriol that spews from their mouths, but that's not the case. They're paid to spread this propaganda and sadly, I guarantee you AT LEAST five or so kids in this country who were ready to go off to college and actually have a chance to make something of themselves now have a parent going "No son of mine is going to them Librul brainwashing camps!" and will refuse to pay for their child's education when they might have otherwise at least helped foot the bill... Call my logic extreme, but I'm telling you, at least five kids' lives were ruined today by Tucker Carlson. To quote myself and use the world's greatest arguing technique: Prove me fucking wrong.

Curmudgeon Soup.

Alright. I tried to get on the writing thing and I need to admit something pretty embarrassing... I managed to fill a page. Good start. Go me. All right, but here's the embarrassing part... my hand is killing me!

Seriously! I always thought somewhere in the back of my mind, "you know, some day putting pen to paper could go the way of the dinosaur..." Well it truly has my friends. When writing out a single page with a pen gives you a cramp in your wrist that requires an Aleve, then you know shit is pretty much dead. I never thought I'd have to practice writing to actually keep my hands in strong physical condition. Doing it to keep your mind sharp is understandable, but as an actual physical exercise my mind is pretty much blown. I blame it partially on my new journal not having nearly enough margins. Yeah... that's it. But seriously, that is obnoxious when your hand has to keep readjusting to fit stuff on a page? You know!? Do yah?! Naw, I'm totally full of shit.

The whole hand cramp from writing is only half serious though. I also cranked out some new progressions for songs tonight that I'll probably either forget or decide are ridiculous later. One on piano and another on guitar that is half waltz and then suddenly in 4/4. Are you aloud to do that? It kind of doesn't work, I'll admit it up front, but I'm giving it a shot. The problem nowadays is that I get this far over and over and over again, and then vocal melodies and lyrics just never come. It's pretty damn frustrating. I've got nearly a dozen things I've been sitting on that are about a quarter done for a long time now and I want to punch them all in the face for mocking me and not being finishable.

In other news, old man winter is here in full force and I find myself with less and less desire to leave the house as we trudge deeper into the depths of the season. Today at work I was thinking of all the fun stuff I could be doing with my night and how much, but opted to sit around eating spaghetti and beating myself up over writing lyric-less songs. I also thought about how much easier I could get through the next day of being hungover if only it were warm out. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that it's dark when I go to work and when I come home from work and for all I know, because I work in almost entirely windowless environments, the sun never actually comes up. At least in the summer if I go to work at 9:00 and come home at 7:00 the sun's already up on my way and I get a few hours after.

As I dwelled on this on the way home tonight I came up with a off the wall theory that perhaps the reason I'm such a grumpier bastard about winter than all of my friends is because as a year round swimmer growing up January and February were always the most miserable months of the year. Right about this time I'd be getting burnt out when you're expected to be "catching your stride" into the end of the season, and you'd start getting pissed off and annoyed at all the people on the team because you spend all day every day with them and you forget they're actually your best friends, and then I'd be all disappointed because I wasn't living up to my own expectations... not to mention the whole jumping into a swimming pool after coming inside from sub-freezing temperatures and then going back out with your hair still wet. What miserable days those were... but March was always the best. High school season was over and all that was left would be championship meets for the YMCA team which no one cared about. The practices were easy and mostly optional and there was no stress. Follow that up with no practice at all from April to the end of May and warmer temperatures. Spring's the best. Fuck all ya'll haters that like winter for some crazy reason.

I'm 'bout to go hate on some winter by rapping myself up in blankets and frowning while I play video games. And there will be pajama pants... and a bath robe. Oh how there will be a bath robe.

Death and Taxes ma'Boy. Death and Taxes.

Good evening, dear readers. How was your decade? Good I hope? Mine not so much. All these lists I've been reading and watching that reflect on the best worst, most memorable, tragic, sexy, what have you of the last decade have been giving me the Mortality Blues for the past couple weeks. Let me tell you, don't ever live through an entire decade that you're cognizant of. Watching people talk about events that happened in 2000 and 2001 and being that I was in high school and remember those things in detail scared the shit out of me and made me realize two things: I'm going to be dead some day and I'm already losing my hair. I am not young no matter how I act! Shit!

Y2K, 9/11, Bush stealing the election, the start of the Iraq War, Paris Hilton's sex tape... all of these things feel like they happened yesterday when people reflect on them all day and lump them into the same category as the time period that's just now ending. That means "tomorrow" I'll wake up and be in my 30's. Day after that in my 40's, and before you know it I'm dying of old age or in a Mad Max style war over what's left of the world's resources (I'm banking on the latter). It's pretty terrifying stuff, but in the meantime I'm sure this tablet everybody's raving about that Apple is supposed to release will make me decide life is awesome and worth living. Kind of sad huh? But I mean... this thing is supposed to be REALLY cool.

Moving on, let's look back for a quick second on the ways I was trying to improve my life in the past year to make all these days of paycheck earning drudgery worth it. My main "resolution" last year was to write more. I give my self a solid B- on that. This blog was supposed to be the main thing that'd get me writing and it's sitting at a measly 31 posts in 2009 as I'm writing this, so that definitely brought my grade way down. However, as mentioned in the last blog, I give myself extra credit for becoming a more active musician... One solo EP nearly completed, a few new Best Revenge songs, and nearly ready to record these two and a half year old songs. So this year I'm trying to stick with the same theme: Write more. I've got a fancy new journal from Jen sitting here ready to go and begging me to get back in to story, play, and lyric writing because all of my Moleskins have been converted mostly to work related notebooks full of lists of broken equipment, peoples phone numbers, times and dates, etc. that I rarely do anything creative in.

I also had what we call a "Pulse Check" at work the other day and the last question my manager asked was, "What do you personally hope to accomplish in 2010?" Wow! Good one Jimmy P! Way to catch me off guard with a twist on the old "resolutions" question. I told him I wanted to finish recording the Best Revenge EP/Full length since I've been sitting on these songs for years now and that was about it, but I've been rattling around some other things and some are totally tangible definites while others are a bit pie in the sky:

-Finish the formerly mentioned recordings

-Finish the Rotting Pizza EP (I'm on the last track by the way, which turned out being a dub track more-so that hip-hop)

-Ever since watching the film "We are Wizards" I've kind of wanted to do some Harry Potter related project because the "wizard rock" bands they follow in that movie really aren't very good song writers or performers and it made me want to take a crack at it. I also figure doing another nerd themed music project after finishing the Final Fantasy 7 one would help me to start to mold a new niche for solo music projects now that Best Revenge is starting to become a group project.

-That being said I'd need to read the chunks of HP books that I missed out as I read them throughout the span of all of the 2000-ought years to do something like that.

-Get back into fiction writing (finish a short story or play or something that I haven't done since my junior year of college)

That sounds like enough for now and it pretty much covers what I've had rolling around the past few days. Will I improve my grade from this year? Who knows!?

Stick around for the next 12 months to find out dear readers!