Meatmachine.info

You know I like music, you know I like to share it, and you know I love Creative Commons. So it’s no surprise that I would like Jamendo. Part music distribution site, part social networking, Jamendo provides free BitTorrent services to musicians and fans alike, for music that is released unto the commons. I uploaded “Interstate 80”, and in return they provide a BitTorrent tracker of the album in high quality .mp3 and .ogg variants. Sharing made even simpler.

Even though the album has only been up on Jamendo for a day or so, it’s already received one review, in Italian. Atmosferarosa says, as tranlated,

“I said in a previous book review, this is the spring of the punk, we have a truly alternative copy of this musical kind here, played thoughts to the Ramones in beach with the friends, an acoustic guitar, makes it, of the fresh beers, and a lot wants to be amused, with a pizzico of melancholy in bottom to the heart why it is the end of the summer, why the tipa it has let go to you, why you have been fires to you, “the invasion of the cavallette!!” and who more of it has more puts some. Well, you are enters to you in this dream? This is your sonorous column.”

This is my sonorous column.

EDIT: Here’s a link to the .torrent download, in case you’re curious.

.

This wouldn’t be a real blog unless I took absence and from regularly posting, and then returned to apologize about not posting regularly. Well, perhaps if I actually posted regularly as my modus operandi, then I could reclaim the hearts of my inter-networked readers with an eloquent apology, if I actually had readers.

I watched You’ve Got Mail tonight, the story of two people falling in to love, facilitated by the internet. It’s strange to recall a time not so long ago when asking if someone was “online” meant if they had tried the strange new internet or not. Nowadays it seems as though people of my generation will definitely use the internet regularly if they have access to it. Unlike sports, or partying, or playing music, there doesn’t seem to be a division between those who are and those who are not “into it”. Certainly there are degrees of internet usage, from those who devote themselves to their increasingly decorated and populated M-Space pages, to those who read a few news sites every few days, and even to those who try to get the most out of the net by self-publishing, researching, and communicating. Perhaps it is the flexibility and endlessly diverse content that makes to medium so impossible to dismiss.

I watched You’ve Got Mail tonight, the story of a small family-owned bookstore closing as it looses business to a much larger competitor. It’s strange to consider the growing collection of processed trees and ink that I call my own library. It was in the past two years that I began to consider this assortment of books as vital to my persona as my guitar, my bicycle, or my computer.

“Today I Learned” and “Another Journal Comic” will return tomorrow.

.

So the new album has a name, “High-Five Lo-Fi”. Still in progress, it will eventually consist of 20 songs, all of them shorter than 2 minutes long, all of them love songs. I set up the album’s page on archive.org tonight, and updates will follow. The one song on that site that I haven’t posted here is “Plastic song”, and it’s a bit silly.

Plastic Song

DuPont’s got a brand new plastic
a little brittle and a little elastic
it won’t call you at 1 in the morning
leave you wishing you could cry
those plastic guys
what will they think of next

holds its form under hot conditions
more resistant to u.v. radiation
and they say
it will never forget a birthday
those plastic guys
what would we do without them

it knows when you need your space
or if you want to talk about you day
or maybe you just need a little
chocolate
those plastic guys
sure know how to make them

.

3-18-07

3-17-07

3-16-07

3-21-07

3-20-07

3-19-07

3-24-07

3-23-07

3-22-07

.

Wish I could show you all the daily comics, soon enough, soon enough. Tomorrow (tonight?) I’ll be getting on a northbound train, and I’ll wake up in Chico on Saturday. Then at last I will be able to scan in these thrilling images of journaly doom. Today’s (yesterday’s?) page still seems pretty awesome to me, and I hope you (will?) agree.

I woke up to a phone call an hour ago, and I’m not sure I can get back to sleep. Hey internet, want to be friends until normal people wake up? Oh right, there are no normal people in San Jose.

Today I learned that using an RSS reader steals the joy out of the internet. Instead of waiting for 50+ news sites, blogs, and web-comics to load, and then getting to flip through each page checking for updates, I can go right to the 5 or 6 that have updated since the last time I checked. I find myself with so much free time now, damn (the future of) the future.

.

Today I learned that Chris Ware’s indomitable style maintains its stranglehold on my heart, even when animated. Here’s a clip he made for This American Life.

.

Blog slightly redesign’d. What start’d as an attempt to simplify and enhance became a struggle to repair and rebuild. Taking a break when things were falling apart, I try’d to make sense of why I was investing such effort into an ultimately trivial endeavor. Simply, this blog is a frame on which I can present my wares, be they visual, musical, or literary. But shouldn’t these be able to stand alone, without presentation or cataloging?

The underlying structure can be this blog, the old Heartsmacky website, the moniker Meat Machine, comics, or daily entries into a diary. Without a functional framework on which to record, or share, I worry the things I produce may not resound. If I sing a love song in my room, and I never record it for you, did I make a sound?

The framework, or medium, can also enhance the art. For example, The Mountain Goats’ lyrics are more enjoyable to me because within them I can recognize themes, narratives, and patterns that span songs throughout their catalog. I’m glad they decided to express such ideas through song, and to share this product.

Generating songs, or comics, or anything, the goal is to capture experiences internal and external. When I am closer to the end of my life, will these records provide evidence of a life worth living? I know myself to fear the failings of memory, and I know myself to seek a life well-live’d.

Symbolic ideas or emotions, reveal’d to be complex and subtle neural impulses, craft’d into motor-control, transduce’d into communicable mediums, translate’d back into signals chemical and neural, interpret’d as symbolic ideas and emotions; that’s the mess.

.

Today I learned that almost one in three female veterans seeking care through the Department of Veterans Affairs said they had experienced rape or attempted rape during their service. The current war, in which the distinction between the front line and the previously less-dangerous support role has been disintegrated, is producing a new group of female soldiers suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Terribly, the largest cause of these symptoms may be rape and sexual harassment from fellow soldiers.

.

Today I learned that San Francisco is much larger than I thought, that Golden Gate Park is nowhere near the bridge of the same name, and that many muscles in my legs have long since abandoned their original function.

.

For all the text-mongers out there, I’m going to introduce a new daily feature on this here webloggery. Called Today I Learned, it’ll be just that, so…

Today I learned that the universe may actually be a massive string-net liquid, and the mess hits the fan. Perhaps all electrons are not discrete and elementary particles, but exist only at the ends of quantum entanglement strings?

.