History of a Band that Never Was

Well, it still could be...

I started playing music when I was a wee toddler, with my Casio Keyboard and a 4-hour drive both ways once a week to Massachusetts, which gave me plenty of time to play as we went to visit family.

When I was 16, I got an acoustic guitar, and when I was 17, I got an electric. I had been hanging out with a group of friends that were a little different than the kids in school, and I still associate with them as my main group of allies. Brian (or Tin, short for Awful_Tin, his screen name) and Travis (we'll talk about Travis later) played together, guitar and drums respectively, but Tin lived up in Westfield so we hardly ever saw him back in those days when we depended on our parents for rides. I played bass when Tin was around, guitar otherwise. Travis was practically my neighbor, so we took to playing music pretty much every day. This is what we came up with...

A few years later, and a lot of drama came and went. Travis and I became bitter enemies over a girl, I stopped hanging out with everyone for a while (because that same girl had infiltrated our bunch!) and generally I kept my nose out of people's business, went to Europe, had a girlfriend for a while, stayed clean-headed for a while, but eventually I had to go back to see what I was missing. Some of my friends were doing drugs I wasn't happy about them doing, and I realized what a mistake it was to leave them all like I had. Without me to suggest, you know, what a stupid idea it was, they just went ahead and did it. Now things are different.

Travis and Tin had been playing with a friend of a friend from South Brunswick. Travis now played bass (like he did as a kid) and Bobby played drums. For two years they worked and played every weekend, only to come up with a mush of clashing noises I could only dare call "experimental." It was a failure of communication, to be honest, and although I knew it was Travis who was to blame for all of this, he blamed Bobby, and Brian fell in line with the dictatorial bassist.

Travis picked up the drums again, and I switched to guitar... now missing a bassist, we wrote several songs of indeterminable length, never complete, never really worked on at all. One beast of a song is finished being written, but the rest never really got any progress. Travis always had "a headache," or was "too sleepy" and some more real life drama with his girlfriend, his own instability as a person in general, and Brian and I and decided we had had enough of Travis, all together, as a friend. We could no longer trust him when he lied to us about having brain cancer, and when we stopped hanging out with him, things stopped mysteriously "disappearing."

Now, Brian and I try to play with Bobby, but he never makes it to band practice for some reason. We try to write songs together, but without a drummer or a bassist, it's hard to make any concrete decisions. We try looking on Craig's list, but the people there, I think, want to do something other than "jam."

So if you know a drummer or bassist who likes odd time-signature changes, psychedelic progressive/classic rock... you know where to send 'em.

Here's some more of our recent recordings:

http://soundclick.com/share?songid=8330231

http://soundclick.com/share?songid=8330228

On a Shoestring...

One of life's most revitalizing joys is to experience the act of being lost. All alone, no friends, no family, no money, no passport, no backpack. Really that's the only way to figure out who you are, if you ask anyone who's done it. But I'm not trying to put down other methods of self-discovery, just that... you know, it takes the cake.

I lost myself in Perpignan, France. I know, seems like I shouldn't know where I got lost, but it's kind of hard to avoid the center of the universe (according to Dali).

My traveling companion and I had just left Amsterdam, where a blizzard was underway in the middle of February, only to emerge from a short train ride from Paris into what could only be described as perfect weather: a slight breeze, warm climate, and friendly people enjoying the friendly atmosphere. So of course I left my passport, ipod, and digital camera on the train. Of course.

My friend Bobby had to go - his medicine was running out and his adventure had wrecked him already. So I bid him farewell - he wasn't so unlucky with the passport.

Turns out in order to get a new passport, I'd have to travel to Spain. Unfortunately, no money. I managed to rent a night out at a local "hotel," if you could call it that. The streets were desolate. Beautiful during the day, Perpignan has several "dry canals" that cut underneath the main plazas, run down the main streets, and are full of palm trees and peculiar grasses. At night, the place is quiet. The city is small, and a historic fortress sits comfortable along its border, almost as big as the city itself.

The next day, I got in touch with my parents, and magically some amount of money manifested itself into my accounts, and I had enough money to get a train. Unfortunately, there were no trains left... nothing. Nothing was leaving the "center of the universe," Perpignan Train Station, at all. While I was waiting to see if anyone had found my passport, a drug-sniffing dog with two heavily armed soldiers patrolled the area. I kept thinking about those reports of dogs who smell fear, and being far from any metropolitan centers, I was a little nervous.

I managed to find a taxi driver that would take me to Barcelona. Not cheap. As we drove south, through mountainous regions of red and white cliffs, I felt the air open up to me. It wasn't just warmer, it was - more ideal for me. My grandfather was born near this region, far to the northwest, deep in the mountainous regions of Spain. (Asturias)

My dad's dad was born in a shack where the animals on the first floor kept the family warm on the second floor. They had to deal with Franco, the fascist dictator of Spain, and after saving enough money as a successful businessman, he moved them all to Cuba, where my father grew up.

Before that, I can't imagine my family ever having moved from somewhere else. They were too poor, but the records just aren't there to prove anything. This region of Spain was famous during the medieval ages for being the very last bastion of Spanish culture. The Muslims from Africa had taken over the rest of the country, converting it's cities into their own, transforming technology and adding their crescents to the churches. A statue somewhere up there commemorates the last King of Spain, before the Reconquest.

Replacing my passport took a trivial matter of 3 days, and while stumbling around aimlessly through the city that breathed through me, I found a poster for my favorite band, NIN. They were playing the very next day, and I managed to find a ticket for face value online. Now having spent the rest of my dough, I grouped up with some rambunctious hostelers and hit the Barcelona night life. Not to be confused with any other city's nightlife, Barcelona truly won over my heart with little Pakistani men selling individual cans of beer and homemade hashish on every street corner, the nightclubs pouring out into the main strip all night long, and the strangest of people calling the city their home.

Unfortunately, this was my last trip to Europe, until I can afford to save up a couple thousand dollars and have at it again. Just to head out, into the aimless wonder of European culture, to say "I feel like traveling South, today," and not to fear that you might end up in somebody's basement, or lose your passport, or god forbid, make friends that last you a lifetime, even if you never talk to them again.

No Audit for the Fed, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Internet

Not too long ago, a certain bill (Federal Reserve Transparency Act HR 1207) was “gutted,” according to its author, Ron Paul. “This is not a partisan issue," he said. "People all over the country want to know what the Fed is up to, and this legislation was supposed to help them do that."

About 15 days ago, a Democrat, Mel Watt of North Carolina, has eliminated “just about everything while preparing the legislation for formal consideration. Watt is chairman of the panel’s domestic monetary policy and technology subcommittee."



The method with which our laws are written should come under scrutiny for it's misleading titles (the "clean air initiative" or "no child left behind") and pork-bellied content (extra provisions written into a bill that could have nothing to do with it and could attach any sum of money from any department to it - such as the bridge to nowhere).

There's a popular joke making the rounds that politicians are like race cars, and they should wear the logos of the various companies sponsoring them. Journalists could be seen as the cars the politicians drive.

Compare these two clips... hopefully you can tell which one is a spoof.





I mean, seriously? "Instead of focusing on the two governorships the Democrats lost, she chose to highlight the two house seats they picked up..."

Thankfully, we still have the internet... oh wait, they have a bill for that, too.

Rant.