I am writing on this, my birthday, from the place I generally find myself in August/September…  Laid up sick in bed with a respiratory illness.  Since the first time I fell ill with pneumonia as a teenager until today, I have found that most years I get one serious lung infection a year, complete with fevers, body aches, secondary infections, coughing, lungs filling up with fluid, the works.  It’s not a normal cold or flu, it’s something that starts with allergies and asthma and then I pick up some sort of virus and within a few days I also pick up a bacterial infection, and it’s generally only when I have a fever in the 103+ range and find myself unable to breathe that a doctor is wiling to bestow upon me antibiotics, which unerringly clear the whole mess up in less than 24 hours.  

I’m currently running a 100.5 fever on the fifth day of being sick.  It’s my birthday.  I’m bored.  I’m annoyed.  I’m angry.

The thing I don’t get, is why do I have to go through this almost every year?  It’s the most predictable pattern in the world.  I have experienced this at least 20 times.  It’s like clockwork.  And yet, I always go in, I tell them about my history, they tell me that it’s probably a virus and they can’t do anything, I come back a couple days later on the verge of death, and then they give me the fucking antibiotics and I get better after needlessly suffering for a week.  .I need to find a lung/allergy/asthmaspecialist or something.  You would think that with my history any doctor with half a brain in their head would immediately put me on antibiotics to keep me from getting the secondary infection that I enviably get.  

It’s not like I don’t take precautions.  I have a whole regime of drugs and things that I do.  Every third year or so I am successful keeping it at bay.  This year isn’t looking like one of the successful years.  

Most of my friends probably don’t think of me as a car guy.  I don’t have a Chevy belt buckle.  I don’t have a NASCAR hat.  I don’t have many of the identifying characteristics of the American Car Guy.  Hell, I don’t even drive a particularly interesting car.  But the thing is, I’m a car guy.

It started long before I could drive.  Maybe kindergarten or first grade.  It started with model cars.   Specifically, a glueless
“snap together” model of a Camaro Z28  not unlike the one pictured in the lower left hand corner here:

My dad wasn’t particularly car obsessed.  He had a sweet ’71 Chevelle that he sold shortly after he and my mom got married.  He also had a ’53 Chevy at one point that he used to tow his boat (not considered collectible at the time, just old) but cars weren’t his thing.  Cars were more the interest of my Uncle Steve.  Steve had a room in his basement filled with model cars and he talked about cars and loved cars with a passion.  I thought that was the coolest thing ever.  Uncle Steve, for what it’s worth, is my kinda guy in many other ways as well.

Anyhow, I got this Camaro model, then my mom broke it one day by accident and she bought me a new one.  The new one involved glue and paint and I botched the job pretty bad, but I enjoyed it and I started buying more model cars.  I still have a half dozen kits in the basement and every few months I take one out and I paint a couple pieces and I glue a couple more and every few years I finish a model car.  I have three that I’ve built in the last decade.  Not exactly prolific, but I enjoy it.

When I was old enough to start thinking about cars as things to drive rather than things to build, I started reading car magazines.  It was in the pages of Automobile that I first heard of the band They Might Be Giants (http://www.museumofidiots.com/john/articles/880100automobilemagazine.html).  I also started drawing my own cars, learning to draw my favorite cars, collecting Hot Wheels cars, and invented a board game based on toy cars, dice, racing, and automobile collecting.

I developed a love of Formula 1 racing without ever seeing a race.  I read about the races.  I looked at the pictures.  I loved the black and gold John Player Special Lotus cars and the Ferraris, always the Ferraris.  The Testarossa.  The 308.  The GTO.  The F40.  The Mondial.  It really didn’t matter what Ferrari it was, I just loved them.

I also started obsessing over anything designed by an Italian coachbuilder.  Pininfarina. Bertone. Italdesign Giugiaro. Ghia.  And the classic designs.  The Lamborghini Miura.  The DeTomaso Pantera.  The Maserati Bora.  The Ferrari 250 GTO.

In real life, however, I have never owned cool cars.  My automotive history (only including cars I have personally owned) is as follows:

Every few years, I’ve bought a practical car.  Usually a four door.  It’s how I was raised from my Jehovah’s Witness background.  Cars were utilitarian and generally had to be capable of carrying five adult Jehovah’s Witnesses door to door on Saturday mornings.  The closest I ever came to a sports car was the ’07 Jetta.  It was a 2.0 liter turbo, six speed manual transmission, 200hp, 0-60 times in the sub-7s range, red…  I traded it in for my current ’09 Tiguan.  Bought the Mazda for Esther.  The point is, these are not Ferraris.

I still love cars.  My XBox library consists of about 70% racing games.  I have watched every Formula 1 race in the last 5 years.  And now, finally, after all these years, I have actually bought a cool car.  It’s a 1978 Fiat 124 Spider.  Acquired for $300 on Craigslist.

In a perfect world, all restored to it’s former glory, it would look something like this:

But it currently looks like this:

It doesn’t run, it needs to be restored from the ground up, but it’s pretty.  It’s Italian.  It’s impractical.

I’ve never restored a car before.  I’ve never rebuilt an engine or a transmission.  I’ve never welded body panels.  But I’ve now started to do all those things.

Since acquiring the Fiat, I’ve done the following:

• removed the hood, trunk, interior, exhaust, drive shaft, and lots of engine bits in preparation for pulling the engine out
• bought books on the Spider and auto restoration and read them
• bought cheap tools on Craigslist to do things to the Fiat
• bought a second Fiat Spider to be a parts donor

The way this all started (other than the lifelong car obsession) was that I heard about a book called “Build Your Own Sports Car for £250 and Race It” that takes the reader step-by-step through building a clone of a Lotus 7.

I love the Lotus 7.  I’ve wanted to build a Lotus 7 for as long as I can remember.  And this book seemed to make it possible, accessible, basically like making a model car but bigger.  I was thinking I wanted to do this and then Esther said, “Why don’t you buy a car that needs restoration and practice on that so you can learn how to do this stuff before you try to build a car from scratch?”

That seemed like a good idea.  So, I started looking on Craigslist for a sub-$500 project car.  I was looking for something 1960’s-1970’s, preferably a roadster, preferably European.  I found the Fiat.  I’ve loved the looks of the Fiat 124 Spider since I was a kid.  When it came up for $300, I bit.

I have not yet driven a Fiat Spider unless you count sitting in the 1980 Spider as it coasted backward off the trailer it arrived on and steering it into the garage.  I have a list a mile long of the work that I need to do to restore the ’78.  But I’m loving every minute of this.  I have two big model cars to play with.  Someday, one or both of them will contribute to my motoring pleasure.  In the meantime, I have the XBox.

Welcome to a new thing I hope to do, I’m gonna call it Three Listens.  Here’s the rules.  I find some new music from some local band, I give their stuff three listens and document my responses to each listen and them summarize it up with a review at the tail end.  Might be a single, an EP, an LP, but I will give it three solid listens.  The philosophy behind listening three times is as to give the music a chance to do it’s thing.  On first listen everything is new, layers may or may not be immediately apparent, some songs may underwhelm while others may seem better than they are.  On a second listen the landscape should be known, the song should feel familiar.  If it doesn’t that means it didn’t really register the first time, which might not be so awesome.  But a second listen let’s you experience the song without the analysis that sometimes happens during the initial listen.  Listen number three is really necessary to form an opinion of the song.  If there is more there, you’ll want a fourth, fifth, infinity listens…  If I don’t want to hear it again after three, it’s probably not working for me.

Why did I pick this particular song to start?  Because it’s the most recent new single release of a local band that has dropped into my lap but it dropped into my lap because, full disclosure, I’m friends with a member of the band.  If this was a disqualifying situation in which I should recuse myself, I would, but that would seriously undermine this little feature because I know a lot of people who are in bands in the Twin Cities area.  

So who is Ghost Army?  Ghost Army (aka “Go Starmie!” for you Misty-loving Pokemon nerds) is a trio with the requisite social media linkage located here (Bandcamp, Facebook).  Membership currently consists of sex machine Gus Watkins (drums, vox), copulation contraption Merritt Benton (bass), and cuddle bot Chad Stanley (guitar, vox).  They’ve been around, serving the local psychedelic math punk TC music needs, since at least spring of 2012 and were last heard in recorded format on a split EP with Blood Cookie back in ’13.  I have just downloaded the first single from the upcoming Sleepywood Dojo album.  It is called “Angst Is Fucking Boring”.  Let’s check it out, shall we?

Listen #1:

Opening guitars have a great tone, really reminding me of this one King Crimson song from the mid-70’s, but that’s clearly not what we’re going for here, stylistically.  The overall thing I’m feeling here so far is that this song has some balls.  Double-tracked vocals, “you are not the archetype or allegory”, cerebral lyrical content paired with aggressive guitars and pounding drums.  This is working for me.  Anthemic middle section.  I feel like I want to pay more attention to the lyrics on second listen.  I just caught a nice little nod to MBV near the end there and we’re tailing off with some interesting guitar noises.  Clocked in at 4:19 but felt shorter, which is good.  First impressions are positive.  Good vibe, not ornate and overly complicated, nothing twee or precious, not crawling up it’s own ass, just coming out and saying something meaningful and using some great guitars and impassioned vocals and solid drumming to do it.  

Listen #2:

Hadn’t noticed the layer of guitar noise going under the opening riff the first listen.  I like that, adds some menace.  Really listening to the lyrics this time.  Serious ambiguity going here.  Alluding to something without spelling it out, could apply to a lot of things and even though I have ideas what that might be I like that it’s not spelled out.  Lyrics should be open to interpretation and reapplication.  Just before the MBV nod at the end there is some sort of talking I can’t make it.  Not lyrics per se but a nice little bit of randomness that feels significant.  Listen #2 set me up for a desire to hear it one more time. Fortunately, I can do that…

Listen #3:

Still haven’t figured out what the opening guitar is triggering in my brain but really I don’t think I care.  I can already tell that this is going to wear very well.  I am envisioning hearing this at a show, beer in hand, singing along, involuntarily moving legs, arms, head, and heart along to the music.  This would translate well live.  I have no doubt of that. Dammit, coming up on the end.  That 4:19 goes by too fast.  It’s like that fucking Excalibur roller coaster at Valleyfair.  A great ride, big drop, twists and turns, speed, sound, fury, and then the lap bar rises and you’re standing up and somewhat shakily exiting the ride with a smile on your face.

So…  Summary…

“Angst Is Fucking Boring” is not boring.  It’s a well-crafted, tightly executed, kick in the ears that has something for your brain, something for your gut, and something for the rest of you.  It bodes extremely well for the rest of the Sleepywood Dojo release and it has accomplished the purpose intended, namely, to excite interest in the band and their upcoming release.

The Pokemon trainer in each and every one of us should be looking forward to that drop.   I’m gonna go ahead and recommend you give it three listens yourself, feel free to cuss and discuss in the comments.

CD Release party deets and dates and tix are here:  http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2532356

Most nights I set an optimistically early alarm.  I don’t know why I always think the following morning will be THE MORNING that I will wake up an hour or two earlier, take advantage of morning peace and quiet, have a cup of coffee, finish a thing or two, maybe do some writing, perhaps even exercise.  I always assume tomorrow I will do it and today… I did.  Woot!  So here I am, sitting in my new command and control center, continuing my preparations for the work ahead, the work of 2016.

What is the work of 2016?

Music.  Music is the thing.  That and getting my life back into a semblance of normalcy after a significant level of change and disruption in 2015.

One of the things Rhett and I used to do back in The Lavone days was The Naming of the Album.  We would decide we wanted to record a new album and the first thing we would do was give it a name.  This had a certain logic to it, in retrospect.  First, it allowed us to refer to it before it existed.  “I wrote a new song for We Don’t Exist, do you want to hear it?”  That sort of thing.  Second, it gave the project a sort of life of it’s own.  It’s such a little thing, but having a name meant there was an album, even if it hadn’t been recorded yet.  It was like a vacuum had been created and we now had to fill it.  I don’t know how other musicians do it, but this is the way I am used to.  I figure it’s equally possible that I could just say “I’m working on a new album” and record arbitrary songs until I had enough of them and then give it a name, but that doesn’t feel right somehow.

When I look back on the albums I’ve recorded, and those I’ve started recording but abandoned for one reason or another, I feel all sorts of different emotions.  Back in The Lavone days for every Psychotrauma, We Don’t Exist, or Isotope we recorded, there was a Gorgeous, Blues for Disillusioned Rabbis, From Margaret With Regrets or Eat a Speech that fell by the wayside.  On my own there have been several false starts as well.  Phantom VII, The Universal Thump, I Sleep With My Hands In Fists, The Low-Res Record, one could even argue that the completed but never released The Message Will Be Kept falls into this category.  Titles of projects begun in earnest but never properly completed.  Kinda sad but also kinda promising.  Like there is an alternate universe timeline somewhere in which those albums exist.  There is also an element of nervousness associated with launching new projects because of the awareness that not all things begun are completed.

For the last year or so I have had an idea for an album in my head.  It has a title and I’ve been chipping away at it.  This may sound silly, but I haven’t got the music for it yet.  I have some, a few pieces, and I know they are right, but the rest hasn’t come to me.  I’ve been fighting with so many things, home, work, time, myself, and I haven’t been able to do the digging necessary to find the songs yet.  But there is a title.  In fact, there are three projects I have planned for this year and I’m going to commit them to writing here to make them exist just a little bit more in the world.

Firstly… Back in December 2014 I released a short EP called The Coal Room EP.  It was modest in ambition, to say the least.  The goal was to record a straight up acoustic album with two mics, live performances, and very little overdubbing.  And to do most of it in a single recording session.  It worked out nicely.  I already had the idea in my mind for my new “big album” when I recorded it.  I envisioned it as the first in a series of EPs, each recorded with a different set of constraints or parameters.  For reasons that will be obvious in a minute here, I eventually started thinking of this series as the Wolf Pup EPs.  I’m planning a series of at least four.  None longer than 20 minutes.  Wolf Pup #1 was The Coal Room EP.  Wolf Pup #2 is going be called New Old Stock and will be another single recording session project, but electric, and recorded on 4-track.  I plan to track it sometime in the next month.  I’d already have started on it except I’m still getting studio room A configured for recording.

As you can see in this panorama, there is a lot to this room.  From left to right we have the stereo, and a kitchenette behind it (you can’t see it, but there is a microwave and sink and coffee and stuff), then we see where it opens up out into the rest of the house (passing through video game central), and near the hanging acoustic guitar, there is the writing desk.

Continuing the sweep the right we have some guitars and amps and a small storage closet and file cabinet, and then in the way back we have the music desk.

Continuing on from there, we have a massive wall of books and then the drums…  Honestly, I don’t know what to do with the drums at the moment.  They are eventually moving out to studio room B (for Barn) but at the moment they are just kinda piled up.  I plan to assemble them, tune them, and set them up out in my shop for the time being because the shop already has heat, unlike the barn.  Maybe I’ll just move them when I’m going to record drums and leave them the rest of the time.  I dunno.  Or I’ll get some mesh heads and triggers.  Or I will just play spoons instead.  Meh.  Drums.

In all seriousness, though, I do want to get some triggers.  And maybe some mesh heads.  And definitely spoons.

Anyhow, I digress.  The room is pretty much physically setup.  All the furniture is in place, the electrical things are generally plugged in.  The Internet works.  The configuration is pretty solid.  It’s got a nice vibe.  I’m still working on unpacking a few more things and updating software and generally doing table setting and maintenance.  Next I’ll start working on testing signal chains, microphones, acoustics, blah blah blah.  Basically trying to figure out how best to work with my current configuration of gear and room and the like.  Also, I will start digging through my notebooks and voice memos and the rest to figure out what ideas and snippets I have thrown down that I have forgotten about that can be grown into new material.  Oh so much to do…  And all of it FUN.

I’m intentionally burying the lead here…

So, Wolf Pups.  Those are a thing.  1 down, 1 planned, 2 more intended after that.  No set time line.  But why are they called Wolf Pups?  In a second…

The next thing I think is going to happen is recording an RPM Challenge album with Michael Heuer and Ben Ortega over a weekend.  That will obviously take place in February (it’s RPM after all), but I don’t know if it’s one weekend, two weekends, one weekend plus other stuff at our respective homes, or if they whole thing will not happen.  The three of us have never worked on anything together before.  Ought to be sweet.

Then there is the Big Album.  I’ve been mentally kicking this around for almost two years now.  The title is The Wolf Is At The Door, Let’s Invite Him Inside, It’s Getting Cold Out There.  Hence the lead up EPs being called Wolf Pups.  I’ve recorded a number of songs for The Wolf so far but I’m being super picky and rejecting most of them.  I don’t care how long it takes, I want this to be the album I have always wanted to record.  And it will be if I’m patient and persistent.

When I look back over my recording career, certain things stand out as work I’m proud of.  A handful of early Lavone tracks, most of The Frog’s Cheeseburger Poodleskirt album, a song or two from the later Lavone era.  Since ’04 and the solo thing I have really felt hit or miss about my work.  I like most of The Context, Bo Redoubt, and Louder Longer Lobster (which are kind of a trio), but there is a lot of forgettable stuff between ’07-’12 until I did Blood and Scotch/Valentine, which I still love deeply.  Since then I felt like A Man Could Get Tired and The Coal Room were solid and had their moments, but didn’t quite hit the level I want to hit.  That’s what The Wolf is supposed to do.  That’s my goal.

I read that Kevin Shields didn’t record an album after Loveless for decades because he never wanted to make anything that wasn’t at least as good or better.  I love that ethic.  It’s like the opposite of Ryan Adams approach to just keep cranking stuff out.  It’s been a few years since I made something that I was really proud of.  OK, so, I have an album name, a couple actually, and I have a place to make these albums, mostly, so I’m going to be out of excuses shortly.  And that’s a good thing.  New music is coming.  Hello 2016.

The recent controversy over the 14-year-old Muslim teenager who built a clock and brought it to school only to be arrested and charged with making a “hoax bomb” has brought to light a troubling aspect of our modern culture.  It is an aspect of the culture that particularly hits home for me, and it’s not Islamophobia or racial profiling.  I am a white male, and therefore not subject to negative racial profiling.  I am not religious either, and though there are people who fear and/or despise atheists, we don’t have to deal with the ignorant mobs with pitchforks mentality that people in the Islamic community face.  So, while this incident does indeed illustrate the Islamophobia and racial profiling in our culture, that’s not the part that hit home for me.

The part that hit me was…  This was a nerdy 14-year-old kid who is into electronics.  I was a nerdy 14-year-old kid who was into electronics.  I was made fun of, called a “nerd” when the word actually hurt, had my books dumped by bullies and my head kicked into my locker.  Back when I was Ahmed’s age, the vast majority of people didn’t own or use personal computers at home.  Most people had a VCR, but didn’t know how to program it.  The Internet wasn’t open to the public.  My parents had a single land-line telephone for the whole house because we didn’t have cellular phones.  Being ignorant about basic technology to the point where a bundle of wires is scary maybe would have some sense back then, but today we live in a highly technical world.  Electronics, circuits, sensors, all the stuff that makes our computerized world function, have become so ubiquitous that it seems only the most ignorant and clueless person would mistake a clock (even a home-made one with visible wires) for an explosive device.  I certainly wouldn’t expect that level of technical ignorance from a professional educator or law enforcement officer.

It seems likely that some people have feared technology for as long as there has been technology.  I’m sure that whoever chipped the first hand axe faced at least one person who lost their shit over this strange, alien artifact:

Ook: Ook make choppy cutter from stone!  Look!  Help cut things!

Thrag: Ook make bomb!  Ook make bomb!

But I keep reading allegedly intelligent people saying things like, “well, better safe than sorry, it DID look like a bomb after all” and other people arguing about the racial profiling angle, but rarely is anybody saying the painfully obvious thing, namely, NO.  It did not look like a bomb.

I’ll say it again.  It did not resemble a bomb.  Not in the least.

But, you may say, there were wires!

Might I remind you that wires do not explode.  They are inert.

But there was a numeric digital display!  Like a countdown timer!  On a bomb!

Also like the timer in your microwave, or the display on your alarm clock.  Again, numeric displays do not explode.  They are inert.

But, there was a circuit board!  It looked sinister!

Again, not explodey.  Circuit boards are everywhere.  There is one in the machine you are using to read this.

No, it didn’t look like a bomb, it looked like some sort of home-made timing device (aka: a clock), built by a nerdy 14-year-old kid who is learning electronics.  Nerdy 14-year-old kids who are learning electronics have been building similar things for decades.  They don’t look like bombs, they look like clocks.

I’ll tell you what would have made it look like a bomb…  Something attached to the timer that would be capable of exploding.  If Ahmed had painted some toilet paper tubes red to look like TNT and run some wires into them, that would have looked like a bomb.  If he had taken a grey brick of modeling clay and made it look like a clump of C4, that would have looked like a bomb.

See, in order for a device to look like a bomb, it inherently needs to appear capable of exploding.  Only a completely tech ignorant person would look at wires, circuits, and LCD screens and think “bomb”.

I’ll tell you what else looks like a bomb, because it is one.  A glass bottle filled with gasoline with a rag stuck in the end.  No wires.  No circuits.  Very explodey.

Now, I’m not saying that a kid walks in with a bundle of wires and you do nothing.  One would presume that a) his teachers were aware of him, b) they probably knew he was a science nerd type kid, c) they should have been curious enough to look at his device.  If they had seen something that appeared to be potentially dangerous, wires leading into something other than a numeric display perhaps, then they might have been justified in worrying.  But 10 seconds of examination from somebody with even the tiniest bit of common sense would have kept this story from ever making the news.

But no.  We now live in a world based almost entirely on electronics in which people feel that being entirely ignorant of the subject is perfectly defensible and persecuting teenage kids who have more intelligence and curiousity than they do is also perfectly justifiable behavior.

If you are scared of what’s inside your computer, or you see mysterious wires in the hands of a brown person and crap your pants, you are living in the wrong century, my friend.  If you think the rational and appropriate response is for the rest of us to react in fear and loathing because you can’t be bothered to learn something, well, too bad.  The genie is out of the bottle.  Maker culture exists.  Technology is in the hands of the next generation whether they are named Jimmy or Muhammed, and if you don’t want to be a paranoid ignoramus, you just might have to learn to tell the difference between a bomb and a clock.  This goes double if you work in a position of authority.  Your ignorance is your problem.  Stop making it a problem for everybody else.

Hastings is this lovely little riverside town in Minnesota, a bit south of St. Paul. It’s the kind of place that looks like an HO scale train set blown up to real size. You wouldn’t be completely startled to buy an ice cream from Jimmy Stewart at one of the antique stores. I used to live there, in an apartment above an auto parts store, under the highway 61 bridge with a Bob Dylan poster on the inside of my bedroom door.

On the weekends in the summers, local classic car motorheads would roll into town and pop the hoods on their ’57 Chevy Belairs and ’67 Mustangs and ’44 Chryslers and show off all the chrome in the world. There would inevitably be a cart vending mini donuts. This was the place, if ever there was one, for a traveling carnival to come into town and setup the Tilt-A-Whirl and the Zipper and the Octopus and the Scrambler right along the river bank.

Now me, I love carnivals. I love the smell, the sound, the rides, the games. I always have done. And also, I’ve always had a cast iron stomach. I don’t get queasy. You can spin me, flip me, drop me, twirl me, accelerate and decelerate me until my eyes are dangling from my optic nerves and I will just smile and say “please sir, may I have some more”. At least, that’s how I’ve always seen myself. I’ve never feared a death-defying experience.

All this said, one night there was a carnival and all I had to do was descend the stairs from my apartment, walk under the bridge, hang a left at the Mississippi, and there it was. Couldn’t miss it. What’s even better, I had my son with me and he was at the prime carnival age, 10 years old. Promising doesn’t even begin to cover it.

First stop at any carnival, of course, is the ticket booth. You need to buy your tickets before you choose your rides, and this we did, and began scanning the insanity on offer. There was a Tilt-A-Whirl, there was a carousel, there was a Scrambler, there were bumper cars, there was that one ride where you stand against the wall and get spun around really fast and the centripetal force pins you against the wall and your feet leave the ground. And in the middle was the King of the Beasts… The Zipper.

The Zipper is, if you’re unfamiliar, a simple concept. You and a friend are seated in a small metal car, side by side. The car is capable of freely rotating 360 degrees forward or backward. This car is one of several that are attached to a large rotating arm of sorts that itself spins. To make it all the more fun, the cars also are moving along the rotating arm on a sort of track. It’s quite lovely to behold. It is also the ride to end all carnival rides, as far as I am concerned. When I was myself a child, and my brother and I had a chance to ride The Zipper, we always took it. There was no better way to guarantee vertigo and insanity.

On this particular Hastings afternoon, seeing the chance to introduce my son to The Wondrous Zipper, I went giddy. It’s amazing, I said. You’ll love this thing, I said. Holy crap they have a Zipper!, I said. And we got on.

Seconds into the ride the self-discovery began. We started moving and my stomach lurched along with the gears and chains. I gripped the metal bar in front of me. We swung, then flipped, then spun, and for the first time I could remember on an amusement park or carnival ride, I felt nauseous. I glanced to my left. My son was laughing and screaming and seemingly having a great time. I was feeling the color drain from my face and breakfast threatening a second coming. What the hell was going on here? I’m Ryan Sutter of Cast Iron Stomach Fame. I don’t get pukey on rides. This wasn’t right.

Fortunately, I have had some training in Buddhist meditation. I often rely on what I have learned when faced with situations in which my mind and body are not responding to a situation in the way I would prefer. I slowed down time and thought about the situation.

Fact. I like Zipper rides.

Fact. I don’t like being nauseous.

Fact. I don’t get nauseous on Zipper rides.

Fact. I am nauseous on the Zipper ride.

Conclusion: I am doing something different.

I observed myself. Posture? Rigid. Muscles? Tense. I observed my son. Posture? Floppy. Muscles? Basically present. I observed myself. Attitude? Resistant. Outlook? Grim. I observed my son. Attitude? Squirrelly. Outlook? Squee.

Ah.

I see.

Oh well then.

The problem wasn’t The Zipper. The problem was that I was fighting it. I was willing my body to be still while it was being flipped and flopped and looped and flung through the air by a metal deathtrap constructed by carnies when God was a lad instead of just accepting that it was highly likely I would survive and being shaken (not stirred) could be a perfectly valid experience to go along with.

I relaxed. I let go. I gave in to The Zipper.

Immediately the nausea subsided. Immediately fun returned to the experience. Immediately.

The entire ride lasted all of a minute. My argument with the ride and subsequent spiritual epiphany lasted probably 20 seconds. However, despite the brevity of the duration, The Zipper Situation has remained lodged in my mind. I’ve replayed those seconds hundreds of times. Especially when I find myself under stress. When things are happening and I find myself resisting them despite the fact that I put myself in the situation and can no longer control the environment. I get stressed, I get tired, I find myself in a white-knuckle grip on the handlebars of life and I think… Wait a sec. Look at yourself. Breathe. Are you creating your own nausea by resisting That Which Cannot Be Resisted? Could you have fun if you just rode the fucking ride?

And usually, the answer is yes.

My last post was a photo tour of my recording studio, The Nuclear Gopher.  This is a little history and background about it.

In 1980 my family moved into a house in Apple Valley, MN and I was enrolled in the local elementary school.  Our new house had a room in the basement that was almost immediately co-opted for use as a music room.  It was in that room that we attempted to erect a stage to play on out of scrap wood (it fell down) and where we successfully constructed a drum set out of cardboard and ice cream pails and tape.  Rhett got so good on the fake drum set that my parents bought him real drums and he made his on-stage debut drumming “Swing Town” at a wedding reception in a blue tux.

 

Tragically, my parents never took pictures of our fake drums or the early stages of our “music room”, but by 6th grade it had become home to amps and guitars and drums and microphones and our new hobby, recording music.

The music room didn’t have a name yet but a certain character had already started to develop, as can be seen in this early blurry photo.  Car posters on the wall, a rubber hand hanging from the ceiling, and me and Rhett making our entrance into the world as The Lavone.   A few years later, in 1989, we bought our first four-track and decided the music room needed a name.  The name we chose was The Nuclear Gopher.

Shortly thereafter, I took a photography class in high school and took a few photos for that class in the Gopher.  I snapped pictures of the drums, some instruments, and a dark image of the room itself as seen through the door in addition to a picture of Rhett at the Oberheim 4-voice and one of Mike, Rhett and Reed.

I guess I was already starting to feel really connected to the Nuclear Gopher.  By 10th grade, I had ten years of memories of making music in that room.

The years went by, we grew up, and the Nuclear Gopher became more than just a room.  It became an indie record label.  We got a website, we even went digital, but we still worked in the same basement studio.

The last Lavone album recorded in 2000 was, fittingly, recorded in the Nuclear Gopher.  This time, we took a few pictures.

The original Nuclear Gopher room still exists, but it ceased to be a music room when all the kids had moved out and my dad remarried.  The new wife wanted an exercise room in the basement and repainted and cleared out the Nuclear Gopher so it could go back to white walls and house her treadmill.  I last stood in the Gopher hours after learning of the death of Rhett and stared at the empty room, the treadmill, the white walls.  I couldn’t believe how thoroughly the room had been erased of two decades of laughing, creativity, and love.

The thing is, the end of the original Nuclear Gopher, the end of The Lavone, the death of Rhett, all this just encouraged me to push on and rebuild.  When I bought my house in 2006, I started resurrecting the Nuclear Gopher, or at least the spirit.  It’s been gradual, a process of accumulation and work.  I’ve recorded a lot in the new Gopher and it’s gone through several stages.  There was the “mostly empty basement” stage.

By the time Trumpet Marine was happening (2007-08) the room had gotten more stuff hanging from the walls, more equipment, more like the original.

Of course, it’s not all bands and recording and creativity.  Having a music room is fun for a number of reasons.  Especially when kids get loose on drum sets.

 

I have taken lots more pics over the years of the evolution of my studio.  I am sure I will continue to do so as it evolves and matures.  One thing I think I can say without fear of contradiction is that the studio I work in today is truly The Nuclear Gopher in spirit and wherever I go in this world, I’m bringing it with me, even if the walls change.

The Lavone would have loved this place.

 

 

This morning I went out on Holland Lake in Lebanon Hills Park Reserve in Eagan in my recently completed home-built kayak.  It was the second time out in the kayak, the first time I fished from it.

I will admit that I was a tad bit nervous about fishing in a kayak.  I was concerned about losing balance and tipping in the event of a fish.  Well, I can report that this was not a problem, at least not for any of the bass I caught this morning.  In fact, at no point did I feel unstable or unsure while reeling in a fish, and I had a pretty good morning on that score, landing six largemouth bass and an apparently confused bluegill sunfish who thought he could eat a Rapala longer than he was.  Now, none of these were large fish.  Two of the bass were in the 1.5-2 lb range, the other four were a pound or less, so this doesn’t prove much about what would happen if I hooked into a fish with any size, but as a gentle entry to the world of kayak fishing, this morning was perfect.

I gotta say that fishing from a kayak is significantly different, and more fun, than fishing from a bass boat.  For one thing, you can be completely silent.  I managed to sneak up on two snapping turtles engaged in what I can only assume was coital rapture and started filming them with my iPhone (snapping turtle pornography will have a profitable market some day and I will be ready!).   I was basically on top of them before they noticed me.  Got some great footage.

Amazingly, being silent has more uses than filming snapping turtles having sex.  In general you can glide into quiet little bays without spooking the fish and I gotta believe that played some part in my successful fishing morning.  Four of my fish were caught on a first cast while gliding into a new area.  I think I was sneaking up on ’em.

I can’t describe what it feels like being almost at the level of the water while fighting a fish.  I was using light enough tackle that a 2 pound bass could put up a reasonable fight and it was really exciting in a way I have never experienced before on land or in a normal boat.  It just felt more visceral.  I could definitely see that kayak fishing could become rather addictive.  So.  Much.  Fun.