DENISE’S IDEAL DAMN DAY

1.Wake up. Drink some coffee. (awesome example)

2.Play some random piano for quite a while.

3.Do some writing.

4. Make sure I eat breakfast. While I do this I can catch up on all the reading I have to do. The online stuff. I have a tunna subscriptions, websites, MyTwitBook, all that stuff. Then I need to call venues.

5. Then I should write, and record, and rehearse. All day. If I have to run errands, I run them. But mostly, write, record, rehearse. Maybe clean.

 

So I need to time my internet time. That’s just how it needs to be. It needs to get done, but it needs to also be left behind when it starts to take over my life. It’s eating my brain. So ironically, I’m blogging about it. Sheesh …

 

 

 

Something new and Interesting

I have started publicizing these blog posts on Twitter. Sigh. This is my last ditch little effort to be cool. We’ll see how it goes. At some point I will finish writing music and maybe make some videos and stuff. I got a camera and some Worthy Ideas of Entertaining Meritoriousness.

Yeeah!

So that this post is not a complete waste of your time, I will put some goodies in here.

There’ll be something first for the Vegetarians, but if you’re not into this – when it starts smelling like Bacon … well you’d better flee! It’s all rather suggestive so if you don’t like it … bolt now

 

I’m at my Engineer’s house. I can finally talk about him and his going-s on more freely. Like that he has a girlfriend who massages stuff. I don’t like to talk about people freely because it’s really none of other people’s business. That’s my philosophy on blogging anyway.

She actually massages people. That sounded really bad. She’s a professional. We’re all professional here.

Anyway, one of his projects is the Disciples of Sound. He’s doing their CD. He asked my opinion after he played a track. I had just gone to see them live at Headhunters a couple days ago. Headhunters is a club that is located right next to Hoboken Pies somewhere downtown. Apparently, my friend says that it’s the sweet kind of New York pie, rather than the salty one. And that the water makes the pizza. Not here in these pies, but in actual New York. I told him to bring pizza water next time he went to New York to visit his parents. I’d tell him to get his parents to bring me some pizza water, but this guy has sent his extremely classy mother my extremely UNCLASSY list of our compiled horrible band names. When they come here, they fly here in a very small plane. They think that I am weird enough.

I have this fantasy of Mike and I tossing perfect pizza in a pristine kitchen that looks like a lab though. I slide down the fireman’s pole from my library into my studio. Then I go into the conservatory (where the piano is) which is of course connected to my little studio (my studio is not very big because although I am an awesome and famous song-writer composer-performer chickie, I am kind of still a dilletante engineer – having no taste for numbers and no attention span for album names or band statistics or gear specifications). I go through the secret passageway in my conservatory into the kitchen. Why yes, it does look like the one in Clue.

The opinion I gave him on the Disciples sucked, and probably didn’t help matters at all. I can’t give a good opinion of harder bands. I’m feeling pretty shitty about my engineering skills lately you might-could-tell, which is probably why I haven’t really been on the ball about setting up my studio. The lack of fireman’s pole or secret passagway or light-filled-conservatory-with-BadAssed floor-which houses-a-Fazioli could also have something to do with this.

… I haven’t really been doing anything about anything other than learning to play jazz piano. I’m not really finishing songs. I’ve started looking at venues, but you kind of have to comit to that intention. It’s a step. People all around me are mounting major video making campaigns. I’m NOT on the band wagon. I’m freaking out about this. Ack!

But it’s good that I’m learning to play jazz piano. It’s turning me into a bad ass piano player. I know though at some point, I’m going to have to crack open Cubase and deal with my damn problems. I’m going to have to book gigs, and take photos of my self, and videotape things. And have a real recording made of myself.  And finish cleaning out those two rooms so I can put up the friggin soundproofing, which has been sitting there like a constant reminder of how I suuuuuucccckkkk.

He’s editing drums now. Not the Disciples of Sound. It’s funny how he talks. Watching him do drummy-druminator thingys (not the technical term for what he is doing, and part of my problem), leads me to understand a few key things:

1. Saying “cockn’balls a lot may turn me into a better engineer, over time.
2. I really can’t give good feedback on stuff that is “heavy  music.” Seriously. I have nothing meaningful to say. I just smile and look like I have the IQ of a champagne grape. This will not turn me into a better engineer, over time.
3. It would be real helpful if I had two large monitors in my life because having everything out on huge-o screens it AWESOME for big, fat editing.
4. I’m happy I’m a Steinberg girl still (even though I know not what I am doing), and ProTools can still suckit.
5. I LOOOOVVVVEEEE Leslie speakers

 

busybusywrongwrong

I need to be better. I’m not eating, and I’m not sleeping. I need to get ON-IT!.

Apparently, it’s really not very motivating to have your entire psyche filleted by a physic vampire – but there you go.

I’m being really extreme here. I’m totally fine.

I just can’t seem to get it together. Song Fu opens up this week again. ACK! My studio is a SHAMBLES. There’s stuff on Brigit’s Flame to do. I’m not going to even bother to make links. All this means that I pretty much just need to get all this stuff together. Like I say I’m going to do but never really quite manage to complete.

Oh well, at least I have written my complete bio.

 

bloggity-blog-blog-blog

After much deliberation, I’ve decided to import this blog into Facebook notes … hoping it lights a fire under my butt about getting back into this blog – which I am actually meant to be updating more regularly.

We’ll see. I’m not all that fond of the internet, and we’re just really lucky that I don’t lose my cell phone in a bar toilet more than twice a week when I go out to hear a show.

 

Now I Know My “ABC’s” …

No one reads this blog at the moment, except for possibly a few friends who have me squeezed onto their Google readers … 

I am quite thankful for this, for I have found out that wordpress DOES INDEED have a spell check.

It’s that GREAT BIG BUTTON up above the box I’m typing in.  The one with “ABC” in it, and the letters are situated right above a check mark.

I believe that it is scintillating intelligence such as this that will make my sweep of the Song Fu competition a SURE THING …

 

Ex-FU-semoi?

I am working on getting other blogs up to speed, so that I can start actually blogging again.  Am Twittering again like a maniac.  Am not putting subjects in my sentences, a-la, Brigitte Jones – as this seems more cool and reporter-y.  Don’t know if this is the right place to put this, but don’t hardly care.  Am obsessing about Song Fu 2.  Do not know my task.  

I will put me “me” back in this sentence because I’m tired of being pretentious.  Also because  I’d really like to start a paragraph where I declare that I will not organize my email until I get an email declaring my first Song Fu assignment.  It’s only fair.

 

On paper …

I have never advertised any blog that I’ve ever written on.  I have one little signature which I put at the bottom of some emails.  Mostly I don’t like to blog because all my blogs are about not blogging.  Now, my diary entries are about not writing in my journal.  I don’t write in the morning now much either, which used to be my old routine.  I used to be able to count on at least all of the writing routines.  Now, rather than just avoiding a public that wasn’t really ever interested in me, and then avoiding my friends (who have too much to do to listen to my never-changing crapola); I am now also avoiding myself.

I think that “me” is sick of my self-loathing.  It is now causing me to avoid work, even.

It’s been quite a year.  Mostly, I have just sat around staring at people and feeling.  Having strange little thoughts and trying strange little things on for size.  And always, trying to figure out how I could write without nauseating myself with this whining.  I still have not been very johnny-on-the-spot about the writing.

I don’t know what to do about all of that.  

I am very afraid.  There have been some “hard knocks.”  That’s what my dad’s side of the family calls it … the “school of hard knocks.”  I feel bad even saying it, because I live the luscious Western life.  I am fed and clothed and am in the top eschelon of the top 1% or whatever.  I live in a city where bad things hardly ever happen.  I am safe from everyone but myself.  When I want to complain about the “horrors in my life,” it’s really not going to impress anyone that much.  But it’s very scary to me.

On paper, I do not look very brave.  There are a lot of things about my life that look very different on paper than they do in my head.

I’ve decided to be okay with the fact that I’m not perfect.  This hurts a lot.  I want to be perfect.  It feels like giving up.  I didn’t really want to do anything at all unless I had an unshakable plan.  This includes writing anywhere every day.  I thought “I’ll come back and do this-or-that when I am a whole person.”  So I have vegetated.  Waiting for perfection.  I was going to come out of nowhere, a complete being.  If I am ever complete, I will be too old to care.

So I will write some things down and stare at them until they make sense.  It’s important that I keep words spooling out onto the page and that they keep popping up onto a screen.  And that I keep organizing them somehow.  And that they are going through a filter, because I still have my secrets.  I used to not think I deserved to have little things that were just mine.  I am a married woman of 35 … who has blown all her chances at stuff.  I didn’t get to have any mystery.  But I don’t think that’s fair.  I’m sick of being told what to do.

I have rediscovered the simple pleasures of writing this kind of thing in a cafe where all the songs are just stunningly perfect.

 

Armand Assante, Love, and Donuts [LANGUAGE ADVISORY]

I have an Armand Assante bathroom. I’ve been visiting it a lot this morning, because last night, the beer and cigar fairies came and danced in my forest (no, not in my gutter – so remove your mind from it … even though there is no “you,” because this is my second “blog” and I don’t actually believe anyone is reading this so I can actually go relatively unobserved). Let me tell you, it’s pretty liberating to have Mr. Assante looking down at you (from a large poster on the back of the door) while you do your business; as if to say “you really aren’t living right.” He’s doing it with a kindly attitude, as if he cares about your body, your life, your career. He’s got a cigar in his hand – so he knows how it is. He’s being very zen about the whole thing. He just wishes you’d get some exercise … or go to the doctor more often … but whaddayagonnadoaboutit?

I’m writing in here, but I feel like sometimes I’m only writing in here because I’m trying to keep up with the rest of “blog university.” My husband is looking at other people’s blogs and telling me how much more “me” I could be. I know that’s not what he’s doing, but we both agree that I would be more successful if I had more of a “web presence.”

I was working while shoving donuts in my face. I was actually getting a lot done (besides the fact that it’s rather dubious for a “rock star” – ha, ha – to be shoving donuts in her face) and putting in my stuff from the tiny recorder I have this neat thing that I work with where I put all my “input” … jams, thoughts, sometimes “voice-diaries” down. I might integrate it into the blog if I get brave … I don’t know. I know that on lj you can do voice posts … although I’ve never done one. I’m pretty shy about getting my voice out there.