not falling down

I got the new Ben Folds EPs, finally, after shaving some money off the Cool T-Shirts section of my budget.* Sunny 16 is great music, but Speed Graphic… it’s like he walked into the studio and said “I, Ben Folds, will now write five songs deliberately and specifically to make Brendan Adkins of Louisville, Kentucky twitch and squirm with joy.” It’s a pretty perfect disc. I think it just may have replaced Acoustic Dance Party as my favorite twelve-inch ever. Well, assuming I’d bought either of them as a twelve-inch. Which I didn’t. But still.

Anyway, yeah, like that stuff a lot. I also got the Bens EP, after already having everything on it for like a year. I always thought Grandma’s Genius should cover “Bruised,” but I think “Let’s Pretend” would be better now.

* You mean you don’t?

“I’m sick, you couldn’t measure my dick with six rulers

Hold up, chula, I’m all about gettin loot

But I knock that boot, if you out to get poof”

Yes, but what length of ruler? Maybe they’re half an inch long! Are the rulers glued together? Perhaps the rulers are broken, or made of elastic, rendering their measurements inscrutable. Or I don’t know, maybe his really was a useless, meter-long penis.

I attempted to rap this song, a few minutes ago, and Maria laughed at me before insisting that if I ever make a rap video, it’s important that I portray my hardcore posse playing Dungeons and Dragons. “Put like softly-lit, slow-motion shots of dice rolling in there,” she says. Maria knows way too much about this stuff, man, I don’t play those nerd games. (”You forgot the slutty girls!” she yells, reading this. “The slutty girls are key!”)

If Grandma’s Genius does (as was once the plan) get signed to No Limit and accumulate a purpose-free onstage posse, though, I’ll get them some copies of 1st Ed AD&D at which to gaze sagely. Yeah, the ones with the demon clutching a hot chick on the cover. That’s old school cred, there.

Went out to deliberately bond over Ultimate Frisbee with the Project Improv Apprentices tonight, and after a few practice rounds, ended up on a team of two (there were only five of us there) with the other Old Guy, Greg. I’m twenty-two, Greg is twenty-seven, Nicole and Evan are eighteen, and Richard is nineteen.

And we beat them, ten points to one, despite the fact that they always knew exactly where the frisbee was going. Old Guys ROCK.

Also, as of tonight PIA (which was temporarily, and horribly, called Red Peanut) is officially named Street Legal. This is pretentious, but it’s like choosing a band name: when it fits, pretentiousness is no object.

Yesterday was my very last class at Centre, which isn’t nearly as impressive spelled out. It was also the first of two Short Story reunion concerts planned for the end of the year, and we sounded damn fine, and it was the first and last time I cheated the system here at school.

Centre students are required to attend twelve cultural events per year, as designated arbitrarily by the administration, in order to better ram the humanities down our throats. Even more than that idea, which I mildly dislike because I don’t like ramming, I can’t stand the way in which credits are assigned–there are one or two people collecting these colored cards outside the door when you leave, and if they happen to cut out early, you’re screwed out of your credit. Granted, there are around forty a year, but when the count starts getting close at the end of spring, it can be a dangerous thing. Not getting twelve credits means a pointless one-hour F credit on your transcript.

Tuesday was the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra concert, the last convo of the year, which I had to attend because the aforementioned stupid system kept me from getting credit for two other ones to which I’d already gone. The only problem was that they suddenly moved up the start time of the concert to right in the middle of the Jon and Brendan / Jon / Short Story show.

Cheating at convos is a time-honored practice among Centre students. Most convos are boring and sucky and packed with old Danville townies, and people have other things to do most nights. You’d think that such widespread corruption would invite a reassessment of the system, and possibly a correction (like, say, a freaking ID scanner), but instead it just means that it’s impossible to get credit for a convo without a card, even with multiple witnesses.

Like I said above, I’d never done it until yesterday, when things just went beyond my control. So at 7 I left the show, went and got a card, and left through a side door. We played the rest of the show, and I returned to Newlin and idly surfed the interweb from the design studio until I heard the applause go off. Then I went downstairs, handed in my card and went on my merry way.

I’m a cheater. Except not really, because I earned the credit already. What law does that fall under? Conservation of convocations?

Rhymes aside, I finished Blind Loop. I can’t play it all consecutively right now, because I can’t play piano, but if I can get it put into a MIDI program I’ll try and post a playback here. Thanks to everybody who said you liked it!

Two hours of sleep last night, as I stupidly stayed up until three before I even realized that I still had to do my homework. I say “stupidly” because I wasn’t even staying up for any specific purpose–I just hung out with Michelle and Jessica and David, beatboxing and rhapsodizing about the Neptunes. That’s college, I guess, but then I thought I was supposed to get good at time management someday. Ha ha ha!

That wasn’t exactly the best night to skimp on sleep, either, as today was a big day: not only our biggest crowd at Chalk Circle, but my first ever show as the drummer for Grandma’s Genius! And it rocked! We’d practiced together on exactly one song, which we didn’t end up playing, and the PA was crap, which made for a frustrating beginning. As it turns out, though, once we got started we had a pretty flawless forty minutes. We’re good at this!

Then, just as we finished our last song (BNL, “Brian Wilson,” where I get to go crazy thundergod at the end), the first drops of rain started to fall… all over the band that had earlier refused to swap us time slots.

That’s right. God loves Grandma’s Genius more.

(Also, found while searching for Neptunes sites: Conch is their specialty!)

I’m living in a small apartment with some of my best friends, apprenticed in a trade I find fascinating, dating an amazing girl, working with a dream cast on a play that really excites me and playing in one of my favorite bands. It occurs to me that these are probably the best days of my life.

I put a lot of my daily recorded life into correspondence with Audrey now, which means that I don’twrite as much of it in here–partly because the urge to journal is satisfied, and partly becauseI’d feel guilty just writing the same things twice. I’ll try to make up for that soon; I thinkit’ll help once I (finally) write a backend interface for this thing so I don’t have to upload andupdate the SQL manually.

As seen camwise, I got Drew’s (old new) CD today, and what I’ve heardso far is shockingly good. I’ve mentioned his music in here before, and I always liked the cheesylow-quality mp3s fromhis old site, but the CD is high-res, listenable indie pop music. It’s kind of like a combinationof the Flaming Lips andRhythm Method. (What you say? You haven’t heard of Rhythm Method? Of course you haven’t! That’spart of the PLAN!)

Working backwards in time, the play is over and I have my evenings to myself again, which is asalways a strange feeling. I’ll get back to my lazy habits soon enough, I’m sure, but right now Ifeel obligated to work from 7-10:00 out of sheer habit.

The final two shows were much better than Thursday and at least as good as Wednesday, and I cameaway from the end of the play so satisfied with what we’d done that I decided not to try out forthe spring play. It’s going to be amazing, I know–it’s Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and it’s Patrick at the helm, so it’d beexcitingly mad even if he weren’t adding enormous puppets and masks. Part of me regrets that Iwon’t be able to work under Patrick as an actor–it’s a hell of an experience–but I won’t act onthat stage again. I had my time in the spot and I’m out. I’m really just looking forward towatching the show.

That pretty much brings us up to date. Anybody want a Swiss Cake Roll?

So last night I accomplished one of my life goals: playing music, live, with both members of Grandma’sGenius! Jon and I have played together for years, of course, and Chris and I played severaltimes during GSP 2001, but last night was thefirst time we’d all played together (literally–we went on sans practice).

We actually sounded really good, especially on the Guster covers (Demons and Airport Song). We all wished there was a way torecord it, but none of us had the equipment handy (or in fact at all). I kind of messed up myfavorite Jon song, Tennessee, by trying to play keyboard on it; it may have been an omen when thesustain pedal on my piano broke a few hours before we went on.

Even so, there was nothing that sounded bad and quite a lot that sounded good. I think they mighteven hire me as their touring drummer! (Note that by “hire” I mean “permit.”)

every one of you isfired

I like the fact that I no longer have to synchronize journal entries with IdiotCam© updates, and that I don’t haveto worry about my fans (all both of them) missing an entry and not knowing to go back to see it. Of course, this makesit likely that the journal entries will become sparser and less interesting, along the lines of your typical blogger. Oh well.

(Mom: you may wanna stop reading here.)

The purpose of this entry is this. Hear it.Know it. Fear it. Show it. RHYTHM METHOD ARE COMING AND YES WE MEAN THAT THE DIRTY WAY

(Almost forgot to mention that my primary roommate madethat, because he is King of Sick Beats. It still counts as Rhythm Method because I was a “consultant,” and because it’sfucking weird.)

feed the walrus

So, um, this looks a little different. In case you didn’t notice.

Short Story rode (rode) again last night, for thefirst time since, um, last May. It was impromptu, and it wasn’t all of us–Darren was tutoring and Garret was in this”other city”–but we picked up instruments together for the first time in almost a year, and we sounded fine.The MC girl called for a second round of applause, and later that night there was a post clamoring for a Short Storyreturn on the Centre phorums. I think people liked it.

The thing is, though, that’s not what felt best about it. I’ve tried my hands at a lot of different ways of makingmusic–choir, piano lessons, snare–and the fact is I’m not a natural. I accept that. But within what ability I have,it’s about the best high I can get. Saying “I play bongos” sounds a bit silly, which is why I try to class it up by saying “percussion,” but either way it’s raw andvisceral and soulful and cool. I love acting because it entertains people. I love writing code when it’s fordesigns like this, or for games, because they entertain people too. But beating the hell out of my hands on rawhide issomething I could just do forever, for no audience but four other guys on guitars.

That’s what felt good last night, down in the basement, guessing at how to play “Psycho Killer” and doing it live ten minutes later. The pretty girls in the dark didn’t matter.The applause didn’t matter. What mattered was that playing with my band still feels like dancing and knowing how.