Month: February 2014

Posted on
by

This past weekend was a pretty productive one.  We have had a leaky faucet in our kitchen for some time now.  The garbage disposal under our kitchen sink had a crack in it that the previous occupants had “repaired” with duct tape which had also begun leaking.  When we had a professional plumber out here to look at the situation, he balked at even touching it without bringing it up to code.  Nothing in our house is up to code.  The house was built decades before such codes existed.

So, after much procrastinating of my own, The Kitchen Sink Project could no longer be put off.  Esther’s brother Clint came over and evaluated things and we talked.  Esther and I talked.  Finally, Esther and I went to Menards with a list of things to buy.  We knew we wanted to replace the trap under the sink but we read that s-traps were no longer code.  We couldn’t use a p-trap because the drain pipe went into the floor instead of the wall.  Also, none of our plumbing is vented.  A book we found on plumbing offered a solution which involved building a small locally vented riser that you could drain into with a p-trap.  It looked like a good solution so I bought the stuff required to do it.  I had never worked with PVC and solvent welds before but it looked easy enough.  We looked at new faucets and picked a Moen that was one of the pricier models there.  We figured that last time we went a little on the cheap side and regretted it so we held out hope that the new faucet wouldn’t leak or have low water flow (two problems that plagued the old faucet).  We went with a 3/4 HP Barracuda garbage disposal which, to me, seemed like a minor bit of overkill.  We don’t put much down the disposal and that thing looks like you could use it to dispose of a body.  But, as became clear later, much of it’s bulk is because it’s nicely sound proofed to run quieter.

There was metal drain pipe coming up from the floor under the sink and I wasn’t positive how best to connect to it so I bought two options.  When I got home and started removing the old pipes it became clear that the metal pipe was just sort of jammed into a plastic drain pipe downstairs and therefore was completely pointless.  I removed it and wound up just connecting the PVC to the black plastic stuff in the basement.  Also, I found an elbow that was not welded together properly in the basement and fixed that.  The disgusting muck that was in that pipe will haunt my dreams until the end of my days.

By the time everything had been removed from under the sink, the new drain pipe (with vent!) was solvent welded together, the new garbage disposal was installed, a new sink drain was installed and a new faucet was installed, it was pushing 10:00.  I had made a few runs to Menards to return this or pick up that but I had basically done a good job with the initial pick list of parts.  Things were looking solid.  It was the moment of truth.  Esther turned on the faucet and, lo and behold, no leak!  Excellent water pressure!  Lots of flow!  The pipes didn’t fall apart!  The disposal ran!  Everything worked as planned!  Much rejoicing ensued.

The following morning I went downstairs to inspect my handiwork.  It felt good to have accomplished a task like that, something I had previously considered to be beyond me.  I looked under the sink.  Uh oh.  Drip.  Drip.  Drip.  The p-trap was leaking.  Out came the wrenches and some teflon tape and 10 minutes later, no more leak.  No leak the next day, or the next.  I guess that shouldn’t have been too shocking.  Nothing is ever perfect.

Riding high on my success as a Mario Brother, I decided Sunday was a perfect day to make sounds in the Nuclear Gopher so I headed downstairs with some coffee and started playing the guitar a bit.  I had an idea in mind that I would record an Abbey Road style medley of a bunch of songs that I’ve partially written in the last 3-5 years but never recorded.  I wrote down a list of titles.  I can’t remember how many there were.   13 or 14, I think.  I started figuring out the chords for one of them and then got distracted playing with a silly little toy synth I have called a Korg Monotron.  My god that thing is great.  Noisy, spacey, delay and feedback and woop woop woop,  Before I knew it I was hitting record and 20 minutes later I had a bed of crazy synth sounds to play with.  I’m not sure why I thought the next thing to do was to take this little stereo-condenser microphone I have that connects to an iPhone and walk around the house and the neighborhood for 20 minutes recording whatever sounds took place.  So, that’s what I did.  Went out to the driveway, walked around the street, came back in the house, played with the dogs in the yard, made some coffee, basically recorded a bunch of found audio trivia.  At one point the dogs barked really loud.

I pulled that audio off the iPhone and put it on my laptop and overlaid it with the synth.  Then I duplicated it and offset the copy by a minute or so.  Then I applied two very different delay effects to each track.  One generated low, droning, scary movie style sounds and the other high, weird, jarring sounds.  I put the low delay track into automation write mode and did a track of playing with the feedback and delay time knobs, essentially performing the delay plugin as a synth instrument.

By this point I was thinking, hey, RPM Challenge is this month and I need 35 minutes of music.  This is 20 minutes of sound (I hesitate to call it “music”).  It just needs to be 15 minutes longer.  So, naturally, I slowed it down until it was 15 minutes longer.  Voila!

Now I really had something.  35/36 minutes of droning space synths, insane delay effects, coffee grinders, traffic, and dog barks.  Perfect.  Miley Cyrus will want to record a cover, no doubt.  What else could I do?  The obvious next step was to grab a guitar, plug it into my trusty Pod HD500X effects unit, and record start playing with the looper.  OK, so, that wasn’t the obvious next step.  I thought I was done with the thing and thought I was moving on to playing guitar for fun, but when I found some chords and a little riff I liked and was having a good time with the looper I thought, hey, let’s try all this together and see.  I liked it.  So, I went ahead and recorded that.  A bit later I noticed that there were parts of it where something almost like a song appeared briefly and laid down some drums.  At this point I was tired and that was a good excuse to stop.  Applied a little phaser and delay and reverb to the drums, a little AX to the master channel, rendered stem tracks, put them on GDrive and invited Michael and Ben to contribute to the mess if they felt so inclined.  I called it Nininger after the Minnesota ghost town near Hastings, which was a failed city planned by the charming but slightly daffy Ignatius Donnelly back in the 1800’s.

That, my friends, is a weekend.

Posted on
by

Tonight I am making my debut on stage with the band Robots from the Future.  The first time I heard about RFTF I formed the mistaken impression that the band consisted of Keith Lodermeier, Reynold Kissling and Mitch Miller, played new wave nerd art rock, and had been around for a few years playing shows and putting out CDs.  I believed that the description of the band at http://robomofos.com was mere marketing hype:

Robots from the Future is a group of pan-sexual, shape-shifting android butlers, born in the future, residing in the present (your present) in Minneapolis, MN, and they love run-on sentences, and running on sentences. You’d think that beings with the ability to travel great distances in space and time wouldn’t have a primary location but robots get lazy. Just think of all the crazy implications they’d have to deal with once they got back to their own time. They can engage in coitus with their ancestors and not have to deal with having never been born—or being born more than once—if they just stay put in the past. That’s how it works.

Clearly absurd.

It was not until I saw them perform at Cause a while ago that the truth was revealed to me.  After their set I spent some time speaking to Keith and told him that I enjoyed their performance.  Keith politely inquired if I would be interested in performing with the band on keyboards.  Seeing as how I was the proud owner of not one, but two (music) keyboards, ten fingers, and a fairly decent amount of alcohol in my bloodstream I said “sure!”.  Little did I know what would next befall me.

It started innocently enough.  An email, a list of songs, a couple of CDs, then a practice with Keith to go over the parts.  But the second practice is when things got weird.  I arrived as I normally would, keyboards and gear in tow, and knocked on the door to the practice space.  The door opened but it was no longer the practice space I remembered from the first visit.  The room was at least three times too large and there was a tennis court that had definitely not been there previously.  Keith was nowhere to be seen, but his hair was there, shining silver and moving as if attached to an unseen body.  Suddenly the room reverted to a more typical practice space and there stood Keith as if nothing had happened.

“Oh.  Ryan.  You, ah, weren’t supposed to see all that quite yet,” he said.

“What was all that?  The room!  The tennis!  Your hair!”

Keith let out a long sigh and said, “Transdimensional room, tennis is the official sport of the future we come from, and my cloaking system doesn’t work on my hair.  I was trying to fix that.  Look, if you’re going to join this band, I will have let you in on all of our band secrets, eventually, but there is something you must first do.”

“What?”, I asked.

Keith replied by placing his right hand around his left wrist and with a fluid motion, twisting his hand off.  He held the disembodied hand out towards me, it’s finger pointing at my forehead.  Circuits and electricity glimmered in the stump of the left wrist.

“You must be transformed as we have been transformed from the flesh of man to a robot.  Only then will you be able to truly comprehend the scale of our mission to this time.”

I froze.  The room began to change again.  I turned for the door but it had disappeared.  Behind me, two lights shimmered and Reynold and Mitch appeared brandishing laser rifles.  There was no escape.  I was trapped.  I wanted to play with the band.  I had my keyboards with me.  I had learned most of the parts.  And I was curious about these strange alien beings.  But I did not wish to be transformed into an actual robot.  For me, the price was simply too high.

“You never said anything about being turned into a robot!”, I protested.

“It’s right there on our website.  Are you saying we are liars?” Keith’s eyes blazing with a cold blue light.

“No, no,” I stammered.  What to do?  I had to think fast.  I turned and looked to Mitch and Reynold for some sort of salvation, but they had laid down their lasers and were now engaged in playing some sort of robo-tennis and seemed entirely disinterested in the proceedings.  Then, an idea struck me.  I had seen enough Futurama.  Could I?

“I brought beer!”, I said, and hoisted a 12-pack.  The robo-tennis stopped.  The blue light faded from Keith’s eyes.  All three robots said, “Cool”, in unison and each extruded a bottle-opening appendage from a different location on their bodies.  Practice resumed and they agreed to allow me to retain my human form under two conditions.  First, I let them replace my mushy organic brain with a shiny new metal positronic one.  Second, that I let them upgrade all my internal organs and bodily structure with new indestructible robotanium pieces.  These seemed reasonable enough concessions to me.  At least they weren’t making me into a robot.  Thank god for compromises.  Who says robots from the future are unreasonable?  You should see my new bottle opener.  Very convenient.

Posted on
by

It’s Saturday morning, around 9:15, as I write this.  My morning so far consists of coffee, the Internet, dogs, spinning old Springsteen vinyl, wearing my TARDIS robe, and a little reading and writing.  The conspicuous thing missing from my situation is guilt over the fact that I’m NOT out in a beige minivan, dressed in a moderately-priced suit and tie, carrying a book bag filled with Watchtower publications, with 4-5 of my “brothers” and “sisters”, looking for doors to knock on.  It’s been nearly 10 years since my Watchtower de-conversion.  Nearly 10 years since I tore my old life down and built a new one.  Nearly 10 years since I last knocked on a strangers door to offer them the Good News about the New Order.

I would be lying if I said I didn’t sometimes (rarely) miss the door to door bit.  I know, I know, crazy right?  If you met me in the last 10 years, or if you were never a Witness of Jehovah, you might think I’m a loon.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t miss being a Witness in general.  And I would never again want to give away my blissful-coffee-laden-sunshine-through-the-living-room-window relaxing Saturday mornings to a publishing company with delusions of granduer, but door to door was a very interesting experience.  It was the sort of thing that sucks as an obligation but is so weird and unique that when you stop doing it you basically will never have an experience like it again.

If I had never gone door to door I would never have encountered my first conspiracy theorist kook, a lovely old man with shining eyes who Freaked.  Me.  The.  Fuck.  Out.  Raving about which countries on earth today were descended from which of the 12 tribes of Israel, telling me about how Satan was appearing to world leaders under the guise Matreiya and you couldn’t take his picture but then offering to show me a pic 10 minutes later.  Connected via pre-Internet BBS systems to an underground community of pre-X-Files wackaloons and just dying to share all of his intel with two teenage Jehovah’s Witness kids to open their eyes.  I still don’t know how the dude figured out where I lived and left me a book on my front step the next day.  Probably used his spy network.

If I had never gone door to door I would never have seen how so many people live.  It’s amazing how more accepting of the lifestyles and economic circumstances of other people you become when you sit in as many strange living rooms as a Witness does.  Trailer parks and apartment buildings, McMansions and laundromats, anything on the territory card is fare game for a car group to “work”.  It’s like having permission and an excuse (albeit a lame one) to peek in everybody’s house and satisfy your curiousity.  Of course you begin to see patterns, you look for them.  Signs of children, signs of pets, signs of the personality of the householder, anything that might give you a chance to have a good conversation with them.  An opening, an “in”.  

If I had never gone door to door I would have a harder time dealing with rejection and disillusionment.  Imagine that every day you spend a few hours trying to convince random strangers of something that you think is the single most important thing in the world, a thing that will save their lives, and you fail at it every time.  100%.  Total and complete failure.  99% of the time you are told “I’m not interested” or “I have my own religion”.  The other 1% you get a flicker of interest, they take a set of magazines, or they’re bored and agree to talk to you for a few minutes.  You get your hopes up a little, but the tiny flicker never once turns into a new disciple.  What do you do?  Do you feel like a failure?  No.  You learn the Edison trick.  You learn that you have not failed, you’ve successfully discovered 10000 ways that don’t work.  You’re out there to discover if people have the right heart condition to join God’s People.  If they do not, you’ve successfully illustrated that fact.  It’s a win every day.  Talk about an experience that will help you develop resilience.  I had mornings where I sat in the car at the end of service and everyone in the car joked about how “at least no dogs/hoses/baseball bats were used on us today like that one incident with Brother/Sister So-and-So” and “we visited a lot of people today, left some magazines, you never know if a seed was planted”.  

Since I stopped going door to door I have occasionally daydreamed about going door to door as a normal person with no message to sell.  Altering my presentation from something like “Hello, my name is Ryan and this is my friend <Friendy> and we’ve been out this lovely morning visiting people in your neighborhood to ask them their thoughts on pollution.  Do you think mankind will ever find a solution?” to something more like “Hi, my name is Ryan.  I represent nobody and am selling nothing.  I’m not religious, political, or commercial.  I’m just here because people are interesting to me and I wanted to say hi.  If you ever feel like having a casual conversation about the total weirdness that is being a sentient being in an uncaring universe, or, I don’t know, cars or food or peregrine falcons or whatever you think is interesting, here’s my email.  Could be fun.  BTW, I love what you’ve done with the Elvis commemorative plate collection.”  I mean seriously, how could you respond with “Not interested” or “I have my own ____”?  Nobody does that.  Nobody meets random people for no reason with no agenda.  It’s too bad.  If we all went door to door for literally no reason, the people who go door to door selling candy bars or magazines or vacuum cleaners or soap or politcians or religions wouldn’t be the only ones who get to meet everybody.  

Will I show up randomly at your door some Saturday morning to talk about shoes?  It’s unlikely, but it doesn’t mean I won’t sometimes think about how sweet ass that would be.  Tell you what, if you ever want to form a “car group” and work “territory” going door to door for absolutely no reason other than to say Hi, lemme know.  We may never do it, but it would still be fun to chat about.

Posted on
by

My first encounter with Neutral Milk Hotel took place in 1997.  I was working at Mortenson Construction as a contract software developer writing a time-tracking application in Visual Basic.  I really wanted to be doing Java work but the language was too new and nobody had any jobs available.  I was 23 and in my third year working as a software developer.  On the day in question, I was sitting at my desk, listening to a streaming Internet radio station (which was quite a big deal at the time).  “Song Against Sex” from the album On Avery Island started to play and immediately grabbed my attention.  I wrote down the artist and the album name and as soon as I could I bought the CD.  I wasn’t disappointed but it wasn’t earth shattering either.  The remainder of the album, while good, didn’t grab me as much as “Song Against Sex”.  Still, when I heard a new album was coming out the following year, I picked it up right away.  That album was, of course, “In The Aeroplane Over the Sea”, and I thought it was perfect from beginning to end.  I had a new favorite band.

As you may or may not be aware, the Neutral Milk Hotel story then got weird.  The album got off to a slow start commercially, but started to gain a reputation and following and the more popular NMH got, the more band leader Jeff Mangum was kinda freaked out by it.  It reached a point where the band went on hiatus and that seemed to basically be the end of them.  Over the years the influence of the album grew and people waited and waited.  In 2011 an EP of “new” NMH material (recorded between 1992-1995) was released as part of a box set.  In 2012-2013 Jeff played his first tour since NMH went on hiatus and I saw him play at the State Theater, and it was really great, but, it wasn’t Neutral Milk Hotel.  Last night, however, I finally saw Neutral Milk Hotel perform for the first time.  I was not disappointed.  It was a great night, a great show, a lot of fun.

But here’s the thing…  I’m 40 now.  Mangum is 43.  As fun as it is to see this band play after the long wait, they were playing music almost exclusively written when Jeff was between 24-28 years old.  I know he’s been very busy in the intervening years and I sincerely hope he’s happy and healthy, but I will confess to a slight bit of disappointment over the fact that instead of getting new music from the band, they basically spent the night on nostalgia.  All the cool lo-fi/indie/junk-rock stuff was up there on stage.  Quaint old acoustic guitars, singing saws, Moogs, a lamb lamp, outfits that looked hand sewed or knitted, banjo played with a violin bow, toy electric saxophone, lots o’ brass instruments, and the whole zany lo-fi freak folk vibe was exactly what one would expect from a NMH show circa 1998.  Jeff even had a great big huge beard that pretty much fit the current hipster scene perfectly.  Truth is, in many ways NMH is the Velvet Underground of today’s alt music, the progenitor, the band that influenced a thousand bands with their one groundbreaking album.  NMH belongs with bands like The Velvet Underground, New York Dolls, and Modern Lovers as artists who came and went and then became hugely influential.  So maybe, I am saying to myself, just maybe, it’s better that they don’t tour.  When they recorded Aeroplane, the world wasn’t ready for them.  If they dropped a new album today, the world would be waiting.  A different world, with a musical landscape shaped by their music.  Could they even put out an album that could make people happy?  If it didn’t sound like Aeroplane, if it ventured into new territory, people would reject it because it was different.  If it did sound like Aeroplane, people would compare it to that album and it would pale in comparison because they’ve spent over a decade playing and replaying that one.  The hiatus wouldn’t have had to hurt NMH if their last album didn’t turn into such a legendary thing, but it did and the longer time goes by the more they have to deal with the shadow of that album.  I personally wouldn’t want to have to deal with the shadow of something I made when I was in my mid-20’s for the rest of my life.

I think the solution is obvious, but I doubt it will happen.  A new album or two, fresh material, then a tour in which they don’t play all the favorites.  One or two for fan service, fine, but challenge their audience to accept them today, for who they are, and leave the nostalgia bit in the past where it belongs.  Divide some of the audience.  Do a Dylan and go electric.  Whatever.  Just, as Eno says, “discover your formulas and abandon them” or as the writers say “murder your darlings”.  If they were to do that, I would be with them every step.  They could do a 7-inch with Daft Punk feat. Beyonce and I would be OK with it.  I don’t want to live in my 20’s forever.  I don’t want to look backwards too much.  A little nostalgia now and then to remember the journey is fine, but the past can be a trap and I only hope that Jeff and the gang get bored with playing Two-Headed Boy and find out what they have to say today and then start to say it to their new audience.

 

My fingers are crossed and I’m pulling for them because, dammit, they’re still one of my favorite bands.