DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I’ve created drum tracks for four songs by a local songwriter named Michael Capella. His material tends to be folksy, occasionally wandering into the country.

The last of the four songs is an exception. It’s a bit of an epic, for this genre anyway, clocking in at nearly 6 minutes. It’s more complex than most singer-songwriter tunes I’ve heard, with frequent dynamic shifts, solo breaks, syncopated rhythms, surprise choruses, etc. Knock one beat off of any bar in the entire song and it would just about qualify as acoustic progressive rock. (By which I mean, in part, the song is entirely in 4/4.)

I liked it immediately. It fills that uncomfortable chasm in my mind that can only be bridged by complicated music.

I was especially excited about the prospect of coming up with a complementary drum track when I heard the song’s ending, which literally screamed for a drum solo. I mean, sure, I’m a drummer and I hear these opportunities every four bars. But this one couldn’t be missed.

The composition process started as it usually does; I typed up an arrangement chart to map out the various sections of the song, with time and vocal cues. These notes became obsolete quickly, as page became covered with scribbled notes, none of which I could read at 137bpm.

So, I retyped the chart, incorporating the important new directions and omitting the cruft.

A week later, the new page was covered with another round of scribble — new details, new ideas, changes. By then I’d memorized the first half of the song, but still I wasn’t able to play one clean take; I couldn’t decipher my notes quickly enough while playing. It’s a concentration issue that I have not yet mastered. (Can you concentrate on one thing, keeping your mind from wandering, for six minutes? (I know people who can’t get through a sentence.))

The next step was to ditch the one-page detailed arrangement chart for a handwritten 2-page outline in large block letters, legible from three feet even with my failing eyes.

(It was supposed to fit on a single page, actually, but it overflowed. Conveniently, the first line on the 2nd page corresponded to the point in the song where I moved the ride pattern to the china cymbal on the right side of the kit, which — even more conveniently — was the only other place I could hang the 2nd page of notes anyway.)

With this expanded guide (and a few more trials, natch), I was able to record several clean takes.

I overdubbed the outro drum fills. At first, I recorded each one individually, then stitched them together digitally. But once I was finished the result sounded sterile and lifeless, so I chucked it and played them again, straight through, except for that hairy double-bass-triplet one in the middle that I can only nail occasionally. I feel a lot better about the result, which you can hear right now (you’ll have to imagine the guitar part):

Let It Ring (drum outro, rough mix) (Copyright © 2005 matthew mcglynn)

I can’t publish the whole tune, but you’ll be able to hear it when the CD comes out next Spring.

(The other three Capella tunes I worked on will be on a second, or rather a first CD, which should be out in November Spring, 2006.)

According to the Independent (article was originally here but now pay-per-view; see archived copy here):

Toxic chemicals in the New Orleans flood waters will make the city unsafe for full human habitation for a decade, a US government official has told The Independent on Sunday. And, he added, the Bush administration is covering up the danger.

In an exclusive interview, Hugh Kaufman, an expert on toxic waste and responses to environmental disasters at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), said the way the polluted water was being pumped out was increasing the danger to health.

The pollution was far worse than had been admitted, he said, because his agency was failing to take enough samples and was refusing to make public the results of those it had analysed. “Inept political hacks” running the clean-up will imperil the health of low-income migrant workers by getting them to do the work.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone with a memory; the Bush Administration did the same thing after the WTC attacks in 2001:

In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center, the White House instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to give the public misleading information, telling New Yorkers it was safe to breathe when reliable information on air quality was not available.

That finding is included in a report released Friday by the Office of the Inspector General of the EPA. It noted that some of the agency’s news releases in the weeks after the attack were softened before being released to the public: Reassuring information was added, while cautionary information was deleted.

Hugh Kaufman has worked at the EPA for 30 years. He investigated Love Canal in 1977. His credentials as an expert on toxic waste would be difficult to question.

In contrast, President Bush is well-known for suppressing and distorting science to suit political ends.

In a radio interview with Living on Earth, Kaufman describes the scope of the problem:

…first of all you have a large amount of hazardous materials in the area. Industrial discharges to the sewers have now been released. Sewage that would go into the sewers and into wastewater treatment plants, all of that is being released. You have oil and gas from gasoline stations, and waste oils that have been released. You’ve got household hazardous materials; you’ve got pesticides; you’ve got chemicals. There’s a lot of hazardous materials storage areas in the area. So what you have is a witch’s brew of water that not only contains bacteria and viruses from sewage, but you also have heavy metals and other toxic hazardous materials.

Any sane recovery plan will need to address these problems.

Dear Gov. Schwarzenegger, Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, Sen. John Campbell, and especially Assembly democrats in the pocket of labor unions, plus the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the State Building Trades Council:

You suck.

Sincerely,

matthew mcglynn

The BBC has published a Flash (!) version of the old Infocom text adventure based on the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

That was the first and only Infocom title I ever bought. I’d poked at a few pirated copies of the Zork series and maybe Planetfall, but never played seriously or with any intention of finishing. Although I did download the instruction set for winning Zork I in the fewest possible moves, because I thought that was an important thing to have handy. (Geek trivia note: as it’s largely a series of one-letter instructions and short commands, the whole thing fit easily onto a couple lines of text on the BBS screen I downloaded it from.)

So I played the H2G2 game for an hour or two… got off the planet, got the fish in my ear, and got frustrated. I don’t think I ever ran the program again. I didn’t have much patience for games, much less games that lie to the player.

But now, thanks to the BBC, I can relive all my adolescent frustration for free, online, with pictures!! — a real change of pace considering the game’s ancestry.

Now I’ve spent about 20 minutes at it, and I can’t even stop the bulldozer. Clearly I was a cleverer guy at age 17 than I am now. Note to self: all those jokes about killing brain cells in college may have, in retrospect, been less funny than originally believed.

The BBC site also contains an interview with Steve Meretzky, the programmer who worked with Douglas Adams to create the Infocom game. (The interview alludes to the great difficulty of the Babel Fish puzzle, suggesting that, 20 years ago, I downloaded the solution to that from the BBS, too. Hmph.)

Pictured is the remains of a mature heirloom tomato plant: one lone tomato sitting in the dirt where the plant used to be.

WTF? What happened to my tomato plant?

The garden is fenced, so the deer can’t get in. The raised beds have hardware cloth (gopher wire) underneath. And as much as I hate the neighborhood turkeys, I can’t honestly blame this on them; it’s not their style. (They’d have wrecked the whole garden, and then crapped in my work gloves.)

The other five tomato plants were untouched. This one appears to have been sucked into the ground, whole, shedding the one tomato we hadn’t picked yet on its way down.