"The blog is dead, long live the blog!"

This is it, the official end of "Batholudens." It was a medium-length, pretentiously-named journey. A new, hopefully longer, and plainly-named journey is available at my new website, danbandstra.com.

That website even contains a blog of its own.

Even more excitingly, you can subscribe to that new blog at this rss feed.

Things are all a little stark over there right now. Relatively well-proportioned, but stark. However, as an added incentive to visit, there is a new song up.

Great Historical Writing

"As former President Richard Nixon pointed out in a magazine article not long ago, when a country has the blahs, it sometimes takes something exciting, like a war, to get everybody together again, hup-hupping along. And that is very true. Germany is an example. After World War I, everybody sat around cabarets getting drunk and perverted. When they got mad at Poland, they all felt better."

–Mike Royko, "Panama – the Ideal Enemy," May 7, 1976.

Faraway and Foreign

This book is highly recommended. By the way, I readily admit that blood and seawater have different saline concentrations. This fact was known to me even as I wrote the song. Here is a riddle: to what extent does this discrepancy affect the truth value of the song? The answer:

∆truth=±6.8

If you got a different (incorrect) answer then you may show your work for partial credit. Here is the song:

No. 31 Blues (Tell Her From Me)

I promise the title of this song had nothing to do with Mersenne Primes, gallium, Jeff Burton, or Actium. What does that leave?

Sarah You Been Scarce

From P.G. Wodehouse, "Jeeves in the Springtime:"

Bingo told me all this in a husky voice over an egg beaten in sherry. The only blot on the thing from his point of view was that it wasn't doing a bit of good to the old vocal cords, which were beginning to show signs of cracking under the strain. He had been looking his symptoms up in a medical dictionary, and he thought he had got "clergyman's throat."

From E.B. Shuldham, "Chronic Sore Throat: or Follicular Disease of the Pharynx: Its Local and Constitutional Treatment:"

When I have very lengthly statements to make, I have used what is called egg-flip– a glass of sherry beaten up with an egg. I think it excellent, but have more faith in the egg than the alcohol.

I have more faith in a sore throat than my regular singing voice, but only because it's more likely to make me sound a little like Jack Elliott. Here's a song:

Image Source: Bob Fahey's Web Site

The Very Thought of You

The song at the end of this post is my attempt to write in the "Dream Pop" genre. This is a genre worked by, inter alios, David Lynch. Here is the other song of this type with which I am familiar:



This song features prominently in an important (and, obviously, disturbing) scene in the show "Twin Peaks." The tune (but not the vibe) of the verse happens also to resemble Harry Shearer's theme song for "News of the Digital Wonderland." You can skip directly to the theme song in this episode of Le Show.

Harry Shearer's song isn't really Dream Pop, and neither is mine. I only say that because I largely worked it out during a hypnopompic reverie last week, from when I was asleep after the alarm went off until halfway through my morning shower. Here it is:

I Like The Noise You Make

Ten-dollar words like "preternaturally" rarely fit in any time or place, let alone in the second line of a song. It's a special occasion for a nerd like me:

Riding and Breathing

The inception of this song is only partially attributable to the current influence of Larry McMurtry.



Image Source

Once A Painter

Was that . . . a key change? I hope the rift in the space-time continuum is mended before any more untoward phenomena manifest themselves in our quadrant.

Little Machine / A Place To Land

The following song, "Little Machine," completes the album known to kids these days simply as "Hupp." Please note that it was not my original intent to rip off Henry Thomas, only a happy accident upon listening to the aural artifacts created by one of Apple Logic's trashier effects and trying to whistle along:

The next album begins, surprisingly enough, with a title track. Thus, both the album and the new song are called "A Place To Land." Here is the new cover, in all its glory:

And here is the new song, in all its pulchritude:

Don't Let Me Stop You

"It was said that American-born Father Joseph saw the hosts of Heaven 'laboring,' as the Shakers called these movements and exercises, and gave the vision to his people that they might use it in their worship. He was entirely lacking in natural ability for such dancing, but had such a keen desire to attain perfection that the 'floor boards of a vacant room over a shop on the premises were said to be worn smooth by his constant practice in these exercises.'"

-Cook, Shaker Music, 26, citing White and Taylor, Shakerism, 101.




Image Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Special Way I Feel

I recently checked "Happy Traum's Flat-Pick Country Guitar" out of the library, and my consultation with that book is largely responsible for the functional use of bass runs in this latest recording.

Not that I pretend to virtuosity by any stretch of the imagination. People who think they're virtuosi tend to look and sound like this violinist I saw on PBS a few nights ago. He played eighties pop hits with a full rock-orchestral backup, not to mention light, video and fog-machine effects. He seemed very satisfied with himself and his whole operation. His fans also seemed rather pleased with what went on. Their rapt smiles fascinated me in an anthropological sort of way. I doubt I will ever be so pleased with myself, either as a musician or as an audience-member. If you listen to the following song you might guess why:

Put This Round On Me

Like anyone else in America these days, I've been told to ask myself what Jesus would do. The question is not as hypothetical as it tries to sound. In other words, the historical record is clear: Jesus actually did things. He lived a fairly mendicant life and then he was killed. He also said what He would do if He were in our shoes, viz. sell everything we owned, give it to the poor, and follow Him. He wasn't kidding, either.

If we're not going to follow these straightforward instructions exactly, then we're supposed to apply them to every little situation that comes along, rephrased in the following way: "What would Jesus do if He were me and He didn't want to get rid of all his stuff and die?" Here is a possible answer to that question, as posed while sitting in a bar:

You Are Worth It Now

I was about due for another track, and so here it is. Let me tell you, I came this close to playing the whole thing on the banjo instead of on the guitar. Fortunately for all concerned, my banjo chops are simply not up to spec., so the project relied as usual on the ministrations of C.F. Martin and co.:

Molly Stranger

After recording this song, I remembered that when I was playing guitar in middle or high school, I used to dislike the sound of the top strings because they seemed too high or shrill. (Music-induced deafness has taken the edge off this a bit lately.) With this post as evidence, if this here song becomes the number one hit single in the world, when they do the "Behind the Scenes" secret expose, they will say that my autistic avoidance of the top half of the guitar's range is the source of my genius. I will laugh, because the true source of my genius is ***post edited to remove profanity***

Chris

I felt the need in this song to say the name of a person. However, one of the major pitfalls in folky-type music is when a song is obviously written in the voice of a man to a woman, or vice-versa. It can complicate the situation when someone else sings the song.

This can go wrong, as when Joan Baez sings, "If you were a carpenter, and I were a lady, would you marry me anyway?" Obviously he would, on economic grounds alone. Leave that song to the gents or sing it as written for an up-to-date gay-marriage message.

On the other hand, when Sophie Zelmani sings "Most of the Time," the effect is pure genius. As the song says, "Most of the time, I wouldn't change it if I could." But then she does change it, and she sings, "I can survive, I can endure. I don't even think about – him." When she breaks the rhyme, it feels like she's doing what Steve Earle once threatened to do, viz. standing on Dylan's coffee table in her cowboy boots. It is a good thing.

There is a third way, known as the "Kristofferson Gambit." So maybe it's in his honor that I thought of the androgynous-enough name, "Chris."

"Hupp" Will Go The Song

I think this might be my first ever use of a title track. I should have added in the drum kit to make it a more radio-friendly single.

If You Need Time I'll Give You Mine

Things we only realize post-mortem: a song can be the fault of the chapter you're editing all week (and the subject matter thereof).

Honey Did You Make

Note that this song ends with an impersonation of someone barely keeping his head above the water. Here is a pictorial representation for good measure.

"Hupp" will go the song.

Not much sooner promised than delivered, at least a down payment. Here is the start of a new album, called "'Hupp' will go the song." There are no guaranties, but maybe one of the later songs will go "Hupp."

The first track is "The Good Ship Bessie May:"

The Old Mechanical

Roland Barthes: "A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem."
Thomas Mann: "A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
I never expected to hear such reasonable things coming from Europe. Here's a song:



At track number ten, that pretty much wraps up this album. No word yet on the next one.

Image sources: Wikipedia/Life, respectively.

Don't Play the Game

This is the latest song. For something different, I made a music video. I learned three things in the process:

1. The iPod Nano has smooth edges.
2. The iPod Nano is rugged.
3. The iMovie is a very good and quite straightforward movie editor.



(All the non-me footage is from the Prelinger Archives.)

Here's the Bandcamp version, for them as care:

What Kind of Labor Shall I Find

Yes, I got a new watch. No, the watch alone was not enough to mark me as a nerd.

Magnesium

Songs have to deal with repetition in two ways: First, they are ideally sung and played over and over again, at different times and places. That's the kind of use one tries to design for. Second, there is inevitable repetition within songs. At the very least, the rhythm guitar part and bass (if any) will play the same pattern from one end to the other. That's ok, part of the weave and texture of a song. But when a single lyric or guitar lick is repeated, the effect for me is almost literally ad nauseam, as if I'm about to have a seizure unless I turn the radio off. This by way of apology for the brevity of my songs. I'm just trying to make something that will stand up to a few years of wear and tear.

Image Credit: oldcomputers.net

Please, Bartender

The River

Thanks to the following contraption for part of the sound of this track:

Jenny By Our Side

This is the face that I thought of after writing this song. Something Stoical, Roman, and scorched-earth seems implied:








Image source: National Archives of the United States

Like a Song

For those of you wondering, the argument to which I refer is story of Dion and Theon (or Tibbles and Tib). If I can't be pedantic, then what is a master's degree good for?

Little Home

If this song is an art-historical statement, it's meant to be taken at face value, just like songs about labor and military history.

Induction / The Jump of the Money Changers

I recently used two things that hadn't lately found their way into my songs– a proper refrain and a medium-weight guitar pick. It was so refreshing just to bang out the chords for a song (instead of pretending to be able to do fancy stuff on the guitar) that it felt like the start of a new album. So it was:



The new song is called "The Jump of the Money Changers." Here it is:



Presumably, more songs will follow in the medium-to-distant future.

Runaway

Now that I'm reading Thomas Mann, there's no telling what the next song will sound like:

Magical Thinking

"What's good for him is good for us all!"

I finally figured out why the government gave a bajillion dollars to Goldman Sachs instead of doing something sensible to help the economy.* (I'm ignoring the trite observation that the executive and legislative branches of our government do what they do because they've been bought and paid for by the banks they're bailing out.) It's actually a case of magical thinking, which is the confusion of causes and effects.

It's true (and not even totally bad) that every time something huge happens (like war or economic growth) banks and bankers make money. That's because large activities require the movement of money, banks facilitate that movement, and you don't muzzle the oxen while they're out threshing the grain. But, if A (any large economic or social phenomenon) causes B (the enrichment of bankers), it is not the case that B causes A. Our benighted leaders are under the impression that B is the necessary condition of A, when it is only a result. It is not even inevitable that bankers will get in a year more money than a thousand working people would make in a lifetime, only that they will make some money.

The president and congress believe that because the hubristic morons at banks took hundreds of millions of dollars during the good times, giving those same morons hundreds of millions of dollars now will bring the good times back. They are like the gambler who, remembering when he won big on a horse while wearing his pink shirt, wears that same pink shirt every time he goes to the track because he thinks it will help. I presume that most of these politicians were required to take some kind of elementary logic class while they were in law school. It is unfortunate that they figured logic, like geometry, is something that is never actually useful in real life.

*A sensible course of action might be to pay Americans to do something productive and necessary like rebuilding and improving the country's infrastructure– roads, bridges, electrical grid, fiber optic in rural areas, and public education (K-12 and state colleges). Communal infrastructure happens to be the proper responsibility of the government. It would also fix the actual problem in our economy– that nobody is buying anything because nobody has a job or money.

**Image credit: Honoré Daumier, "Gargantua," from www.histoire-image.org.

Waiting For You

This song was laterally inspired by Robert Browning's "The Two Poets of Croisic" and apotropaically aided by the well-timed chewing of Corina.

Your Shoelace Is Untied

While shopping today, I had a minor out-of-body experience. I was looking for blackboard supplies– new chalk and an eraser. The school where I’m an adjunct supplies only jagged little nubs of chalk and a completely ineffective white-board eraser. I now understand the eraser shortcoming, since no store in Hyde Park offers actual chalkboard erasers, the kind made out of felt that remove writing instead of smearing it around. I’m guessing the reason is that chalk is thought to be, like tape-recorders and typewriters, obsolete. Everyone in the modern age is either using powerpoint or– to use my new circumlocution for dry-erase boards– wearing the lady wig:



After finding chalk but no eraser, I walked home along a quiet street and felt that my shoe was untied. I bent down and tied it. When I straightened up, I noticed that I had been standing or squatting in the same place on a slightly unfamiliar sidewalk, where no one else was walking, to the side of a driveway with a one-car garage, in front of someone’s back pantry window, for probably ninety seconds. Anyone who saw me would think I was scoping the place out for a burglary. I realized that my excuse, if someone asked, would sound weird: “I was tying my shoelace.”

When was the last time I ever saw anyone tie their shoelaces in public? It must have been years. Tying your shoelaces is an obsolete activity from the fifties, like repairing a TV or mailing a personal letter. It isn’t done anymore. People wear shoes all the time. Why don’t I see at least one or two a day hunched over, fiddling with their laces? It could be because the urban youths in my neighborhood wear their sneakers as loosely fastened as their pants. It could be that people drive more and walk less, putting less strain on their laces between the times when they tie them leaving the house.

Most likely, my own loose laces were the result of wearing shoes that are almost worn out. It’s not just that I’m a week away from the time when I start to feel the pavement without the mediation of my sole, it’s also that the laces have worn their tracks smooth over the leather of the upper, so that there’s very little to grip and keep them from unravelling. You don’t see too many people in the same situation because old, worn-out shoes are another obsolete remnant from different times. Shoes now are either so top-shelf that they last forever, or they are so cheap that you are supposed to throw them out in a month. (Or– in my experience– they’re both expensive and ephemeral.)

The rarity of shoes that are neither too cheap to last for a day nor everlasting occurred to me when I saw a piece of yellowing paper that I had inserted in a book a year earlier. Old, yellow paper is another obscurity, like vacuum tubes. If a piece of information is only supposed to last a few days, it either goes on the internet or it is printed on a receipt that you throw away when you empty your pockets to change pants. If something is going to last any longer, it gets printed on the most expensive, archival, acid-free, time-proof, boutique paper that retailers can force you to buy. It’s a rare bit of writing that’s supposed to last somewhere between six months and five years, like the notes I scratched on a 3 by 5 card before putting that card into a library book that I had to return today, just as it’s a rare shoe that’s designed to last more than a year for less than a thousand dollars.

Yellow Line

The Grass and the Dirt

The writing of this song overlapped with the reading (still in progress) of Walker Percy's "The Second Coming." I think I'm going to like that book.

I'll Be Sorry

The best thing to say about this song is that the whole time I was writing and recording it, I felt like I had never done any such thing before. Beginner-mind, even if it is a neurochemical illusion, is an enviable state, in pursuit of which I am liable to spend or waste my entire life.

Here's the song (the eponymous of this post) that I'm talking about:




Here's another song, by way of a lagniappe:

Dan Reeder

It's been a long break from this blog. Some things have happened– from the crappy to the fairly cool. None of this concerns you, qua reader. I wrote a song, more on which at another time. And then I found out about Dan Reeder, the way people find out about anything these days. Listen to this:



or this:



Never have I been so OK with repetition (which normally triggers a seizure of rage in me). Never have I felt so thoroughly that I just have to start over. In other words, if each of ten angels kicked me in the head tonight, this is the kind of music I would hope to make in the morning.