Meatmachine.info

I’ve been busy lately. I haven’t been too busy to blog, but I’ve been having trouble writing anything that doesn’t come out reading awful, but that’s beside the point. Instead of blogging I’ve been recording music.

Last year I planned to release a new Meat Machine album which was originally going to be titled 20 under 2, then High-Five Lo-Fi, and finally just Year Two. But the end of the year rolled around predictably and the album, no matter the title, wasn’t done. I had recorded 12 songs in as many months, but wasn’t completely happy with any of them. The longer it took to finish working on new songs the less satisfied I was with ones recorded earlier.

With some unwitting motivating from another songwriting friend though, I’ve decided to start anew. The album will be titled The Carrot and The Microphone and will feature many new songs, along with new versions of older tracks not on Interstate 80. In the past few days I’ve already recorded 6 of the 28 (oh wow!) planned songs, and am so far quite happy with the results. This is a new kind of thing for me, being able to record a song and not instantly loathe the way it sounds.

In some kind of attempt to avoid jinxing myself from completing yet another hypothetical album, I’m not going to post any of the new songs until they’re all done, at least for now. Instead, I’ll leave you with two covers I’ve recorded recently.

The first is a cover of Engine, originally by Neutral Milk Hotel.

The second is a cover of Pure, originally by Mirah and Ginger Takahashi.

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I took the “Coastal Starlight” train back to Chico from San Jose, and for once it got me home on time.

Right before leaving my mom’s house, my brother and I recorded this version of The Magnetic Fields’ song I Think I Need A New Heart. Enjoy!

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I’m in Los Gatos this week for Christmas with family, and I’ve been playing around with my mom’s DSLR. Here are some photos I don’t hate, and more can be found on my flickr.

My grandmother is always always rubbing her eyes.

Here I am with my brother, after giving him a copy of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, a wonderful book that contains this awesome chart.

For fun, he & I recorded a cover of Safe Travels by Peter and the Wolf.

Apparently I’ve started collecting red robots.

I’ll be hopping on a train Sunday night and getting back to Chico in the wee hours of Monday morning, back to work, and back to school in a month. This has been a nice mini-vacation so far.

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34 degrees outside this morning. A long-sleeveed wool shirt under my jacket and some ragwool gloves kept most of me warm, but my toes still froze.

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Why? is fast becoming one of my favorite bands, and the video for A Sky For Shoeing Horses Under is nice. I love me some low budgets and glowing eyes.

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“The IBM Glass Engine enables deep navigation of the music of Philip Glass. Personal interests, associations, and impulses guide the listener through an expanding selection of over sixty Glass works.”

Via Alicia.

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Via Jezebel

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Some loosely associated ideas that have been camping in my head.

I like Twitter. I remember when I first heard about the service, it was during a real face-to-face conversation outside of a popular Indian restaurant. I wasn’t a big fan of the idea at first, I felt like it didn’t really provide a new or interesting channel for communication, and that it would likely be consumed by superfluous socializing a la Myspace.

It wasn’t until I actually started twittering that I found value in the service it provides. The “micro-blogging” format allows for easily composed (140 characters or less) and readily consumed (online or via mobile) points of information about people. Each of these little bite-size facts about a person can not only provide entertainment and camaraderie, but also help to form a better image of who that person is.

When you know someone really well, it can be as if you have a relatively accurate model of their behaviors in your head. You can make predictions about how they would respond to certain situations. This model is built upon all of the interactions you’ve had with that person; each experience can be likened to a single point within a constellation.

The more experiences you have involving this person, the more points you can plot into the space of who they are. Shapes and volumes take form, and you can anticipate what kinds of reactions fall within or without of the likely range of their behavior. When they do something unexpected, the new outlier point of information changes the shape of their constellation.

Hopefully, the more points of information or experience you have, the closer your model of that person comes to representing reality. For example, I feel like the model of my brother that lives in my head is fairly accurate. I know it is likely only as good as it needs to be to fool me, but it’s probably one of the most accurate models I have.

One thing I’ve always found very attractive, and I’m sure I’m not alone in this, is when a person surprises you by being sharper, braver, more talented, or more quick-witted than you thought they were. These little surprises are wonderful, and they extend the shape of constellations in a good way. The shape extends in the direction of respectability, or beneficence, or some other admirable quality. Of course, the same can be said for points of information that reveal the shape of someone’s character to be less appealing.

In closing, They Might Be Giants.

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It’s taken me a couple days to decompress from my trip to Portland. Visiting my brother was really wonderful, and I feel like I get to see him grown in some new way every time I see him. I think we both agree that we’re turning into cool adult brothers, just like we imagine our father and uncle were in their mythical twenties.

It was reassuring that our relationship didn’t devolve into petty or asinine bickering, the way it can when we’re both around our parents. In fact, we both recognized that between us we share a diction that is highly specific, condensed, and interesting (to us at least). I don’t remember the exact details of the conversations he and I had while I was there, but I know I couldn’t have had them with anyone else. In this spirit, the two of us made tentative plans to go in on a joint blogging venture, some kind of dueling keyboards scenario. Hopefully we’ll be able to get the project rolling shortly.

We went to see the Oregon-centric handmade bike show that is Manifest on Saturday, and then caught the final dozen laps of a ‘cross race through a torn down insane asylum on Sunday. Unfortunately, only a few of my photos from the trip came out decently. Luckily, pdxcross.com took plenty of classy photos of both Oregon Manifest and the Villebois CX race.

Upon wise suggestion I’ve been listening to more Sufjan Stevens lately. The song You Are The Rake from A Sun Came! is easily my favorite so far.

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Rain has returned to Chico, and after a few months baking in the sun it’s exciting. Hot soups taste better, sweaters are welcome again, and light everywhere has changed. Moments after getting home and sitting in my new (used) comfy reading chair the sound of rain on my windows put me to sleep. I haven’t been getting much sleep lately, but I’ve made a nice new friend.

Raining In My Heart

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