I’ve been doing amateur home recording for a long time, let’s call it a decade plus, starting out with second-hand four-tracks and moving up to cheapo laptops and freeware synth programs. Being the overly-independent type, and the absurdly anti-establishment type, I have avoided the methodology of most of the world around me — the [...]

One of my few goals in life is to someday have a house in the woods — maybe in West Virginia, near my roots in Appalachian Maryland — where I’d have a creaky porch, some humble supplies, and a basement with a piano and some old recording equipment. This would be a place I [...]

The internet may be a timesucking black hole, but I prefer it to some of the alternatives (like tv) because at least you can feel you’re wasting your time in a productive sort of way. The internet, if you sort of squint at it sideways, suggests an infinity of patterns — harmonic resonances of [...]

Speaking of poetry…
I have never written much of the stuff myself, but do write a lot of song lyrics which are kind of similar in some ways (as I mentioned in my last post). I like writing lyrics much more than I like singing, but sometimes the lyrics are pretty perfunctory or just thrown-together [...]

I don’t often read poetry, but I have had a distant wisp of a poem stuck in my mind all day, and spent an hour or so leafing through books of poetry and some general literature compendia, seeking out something that may not even exist. I have more poetry on my bookshelves than I [...]

I’ve always been interested in the English language, and language in general, and linguistics, and the mechanics of language, and its history. So I have been known to waste major chunks of time nerding out to things like the blog Language Log and wikipedia articles about, say, the history of the alphabet.
The alphabet is [...]

This past Memorial Day weekend I was out of town (as per the American tradition), but on the Friday before the holiday I spent a few minutes walking through Arlington Cemetery, thinking about sad topics like the perpetual wars we continue to fight and all the good-hearted Americans who are so loyal to the military [...]

Winter has returned here.
It’s not shockingly cold, but after weeks of warm weather (January is turning into DC’s most pleasant month) it’s hard to adjust. I am not ecstatic about the winter weather, but I have endured far worse, so I don’t really mind a few days or weeks of temperatures below [...]

I have been discussing Christmas lately and I have some mixed feelings about it. I guess, overall, I think it is kind of a mixed-up holiday that awkwardly combines the celebration of the birth of Christ, sort-of-cute traditions for kids, and unsettling consumerist madness. I’m not sure that any of these things belong [...]

On Sunday I sat around for a while listening to old records, mostly ones that belonged to my parents. So my main discovery? Stevie Nicks — yowza! There is a picture of the whole band on the back of Rumours where she is smoldering hot. I was really only familiar with [...]