A friend of mine and I were, over beers the other night, coming up with names for songs (because naturally, it is more fun to start with a title than tack it on at the end of the compositional process). Here they are:

• She’s in Zagreb - I’m here
• You Might Want to Get Out of the Building
• Gingerbread Rape Scene
• Your Slovak Bitch’s Brains are on my Boot
• Where do you Draw the Line Between Consonance and Dissonance?
• I’d Prefer Seeing the Grand Piano Burn to the Ground
• A Fugue of Screaming Babies Being Slaughtered by Handsaws
• Anything that Rots is Good Fertilizer

They were a bit more amusing when we were drunk.

Cakewalk has been giving me a tremendous headache for the past week. After I thought I had all of my problems solved with my obscure soundcard, everything came rushing back again and drowned me in a thick pool of frustration. It took a while to work myself out of the mire. I should mention that I had a bootleg version of the program and while I am not sure, that could have been one source of the problem. Anyway: yesterday I downloaded and installed this piece of software and after literally hours of fucking around with it yesterday evening and night, I got the blasted thing functional. So I have a working studio at home! Finally. Ironically, soon after setting it up with all of my audio equipment and beginning to record something (not something substantial, but just something for the reason of playing with my new software), I broke two strings on my guitar in rapid succession. I felt that mild nausea as if vomiting was in the imminent future which was the onset of another wave of frustration but succeeded in stifling it. I made a pot of genmaicha and sipped on it with my eyes closed for about ten minutes. It took about an hour to restring my guitar. I decided it was best to not just settle for a new high e and b strings, but rid the machine of the other four dull sounding old-timers. It was a cleansing experience, a bit like meditation, really. I had not re-strung a guitar in years (a mandolin, yes, but that is another story involving black magic, reality alteration and goat entrails), and forgotten how much I enjoyed the whole process.

To Tony: I gave you a project. Now it is your turn to give me one. Let’s not start with something too convoluted (please) since I am terribly out of practise.

Today I met Vesna for the first time in my life. We’d been in communication for four years and I’d almost given up on anything but sporadic email contact. A week ago, she smsed me indicating that she’d be in Prague in one week and asked me if I’d like to meet. Well, of course I replied yes. We only spent about four hours together, most of which was spent browsing the more interesting haunts of the city, but it was thoroughly refreshing. I need new blood in my life (perhaps in my veins, as well), an inspiration to write, play and sing. Though this was a relatively mundane encounter, it is a good omen for the future.

Tony states:

1. How crippled is it?

2. At least you didn’t have to restring an autoharp.

3. I could probably micturate for a full minute, given proper preparations.

4. (unavailable photo)

5. So Soulsplinter, my 5-string, has been non-signalling for the past five years or so. I thought I’d see if I could fix it (Iron Maiden lines being easier therewith due to lower action than Skullwarper’s). Note I have no knowledge of electronics (NKOE). Peered around the circuit board, found no obvious outs or wire breaks. Had brilliant idea to transplant pickups from SW to SS (note NKOE). How hard could it be to snip wires, slip in the pickups, and rethurk them (note NKOE)? Four hours on, I am currently without working low-end stringy thinghy. With solder and the ghost of Bob Moog to help me, I will attempt to get something working this weekend. Oh, also broke an A string.

6. Did you fuck her?

Me?

1. Eh?

2. At least I don’t own an autoharp. It’d be interesting to have one, however. I’ll look around in second hand places. I am sure restringing is big fun.

3. Is this my project or did you forget about that part? (Also, how is your project with the cover songs coming?

4. (nada)

5. Big fun. Electronics piss me off. I need to take my gueetar (still unnamed after all these years) to a shop because there is a short in the ‘in’ plug. I suppose I could try to fix it myself, but I don’t trust me to do such things.

6. Yes

7. I rarely eat yoghurt, anyway.

Tony states:

1. Did you shell out for the registered version? The free download looks to have annoyware.

2. is your starting project, not 3. I don’t think you could do 3. Around 140 bpm is good.

3. “I don’t trust me to do such things.” I should not have skipped that step.

4. That stuff’ll go right through you.

Tony states:

7. Oh, and don’t eat that yogurt. It’s expired.

Since I am unable to do any real work at the moment, I decided to fiddle with my Livejournal Interests for a good while. I’d say I performed a more or less 40% modification. The initial purpose was to rid the list of the more general interests and replace them with more specific ones. For example, I replaced Indian Food with Korma and Vindaloo. The purpose is to define myself in a more explicit manner. Whether I have succeeded or not, I don’t know. It was a mildly interesting amusement, however, which ate away a bit the fog of depression I wrote about earlier. So, now my view is only partly occluded.

I have been thinking to adjust my sleeping schedule. So: my plan was to stay at work all night, a good deal of tomorrow, and crawl back blearily to my flat sometime in the evening to retire. It’s three in the morning now and I don’t know if I am going to make it. Perhaps the portion of the fog eaten away by my idle pursuits on Livejournal has been replaced by exhaustion. I did get up at 16.00 this past afternoon, though, and wonder why I should be so tired after only eleven hours. Maybe all the salami and horseradish I ate earlier stole my alertness. Maybe if I snorted the horseradish, the alertness would return. I should give it a try.

Oouh.

Commentaries:

Tony:

Yeah, doing something works better than doing nothing. And a regular sleep schedule is a definite plus.

I’ve arranged two songs in two days.

Me:

I have a regular sleep schedule. It is just from about 7 or 8am to 2 or 3pm. The daylight hours are waning. I’m not totally nocturnal, so I’d better start going to sleep earlier. Yeah.

Which two have you arranged?>

Tony:

“Julia Dream” (Thu) - just a simple driving piano figure (with sustain pedal!), some backgroundy distorted guitar. Flute part at end. Intended country/western accent when sung.

“Come On Darkness” (Fri) - bass, some hand drumming, 2 dulcimer tracks playing the chords. Sang along with that CD today.

“Only the Good Die Young” (Sat) - slow down a bit & cut out some of the repetition, stun bass, organ lead (prob. 2 in stereo), vox in baritonish range. Maybe strobe light/phototheremin trick for beat. Need to finish transcribing from tab.

“A Smart Kid” I plan to be mostly if not all vocals; “Bee Dream” I haven’t thought about yet, probably incorporate violin.

As my own accompanist, and as a spare-timer, there are limits to what I can do… trying to make ’em distinctive, anyway. I think my aptitudes run producer > writer > player.

Me:

Here's my take on 'Bee Dream'...

C                     F    G
Each of us has in his soul

C                    F          G
A portion of eagle - a portion of mole

C                           F           G    (extra two beats of G)
One soars in the sunlight - one snores in a hole

C                           F    G
The mountain which looks like a prop

C                          F              G
Is black at the bottom and white at the top

C                        F     G
Soldiers surrounded with twine

C                          F             G    (two extra beats of G)
I have to cut through it and claim what is mine

Eb                    Bb
The summit is marked by a tree

Eb                Bb
My double in uniform challeges me

Ab
He says is this tree mine

G
I say tap it and see

C   F G C   F G

C                    F      G
So he drives in a platinum spout

C                             F           G    (two more beats of G)
Turns the tap on and all this jelly comes out

Eb                  Bb
Royal jelly which I stored in this tree

Eb                    Bb
In an earlier lifetime when I was a bee

Ab                 G
Yeah I'm a king bee though my wings be furled

Ab                     G
And my kingdom is not of this world

C   F G C   F G etc...

You might want to use a capo on the third fret or just transpose the whole thing to A (so the Eb becomes C), but it's up to you!

sxaxxen

Tony:

Using a capo is for the weak!

MzoNe:

So does that mean you are going to transpose it or do it in C, big britches?

Tony:

I’ll play piano & violin on it, so I’ll probably just do it in C. I’m good on the chords and structure, but could you pick out the vocal melody for me?

Depression is annoying, especially depression which seems to have no basis. It’s been creeping up on me all day (stealthily, I might say, though I could sense something growing) and has now reached a plateau. It’s hard to think. It’s hard to function. Why? What causes this? It consumes me about once weekly with varying intensities. Should I go on anti-depressants? I surely don’t want to.

Total volume of music

About 500 cds (plus another 500 in storage in Munich). On the hard drive, I have over 30 GB of stuff (mostly ripped cds, but also downloaded thinghies).

Last CD I bought

Opeth - Ghost Reveries.

Song playing right now

аквариум - сварог.

Five all-time favorite songs

(I am only listing things which would be, by most, considered songs as opposed to compositions.)

Slapp Happy - Scarred for Life

Peter Hammill - Touch and Go

аквариум - Маша и Медвед

The Church - The Time Being

Camper Van Beethoven - All Her Favourite Fruit

Five songs I’ve played to death lately

Opeth - Windowpane

Robert Wyatt - The Forest

Slapp Happy - A Little Something

Hamster Theatre - Vermilion Hue Over Lake Lausanne

Neil Young - Pocahontas

Five songs that mean a lot to me (besides the five all-time favorite ones)

(So favourites 6 - 10, eh?)

Porcupine Tree - Shesmovedon

Už Jsme Doma - Ticho

Sir Alfred IV and the Poison Nectar Group - A Melancholy Opulence

King Crimson - Starless

Lou Reed - Warrior King

a reply from? Patricia? Dana? Probably the former.

it is a pitty i can not listen those cds anymore, but i still remember them… King Crimson mainly (…tomorrow i will be crying…) and maja a medved…

I am sitting here alone with my fan at work. The fan is not very conversational, so I came to the conclusion that rambling a bit here would be a good substitute. It doesn’t converse, though it does emit a nice whirring noise that is pleasant and nullifies the stifling silence of the office.

Today has been a relative waste (other than the spinach salad that i concocted earlier, that is). Relative to the weekend and the whole of last week. I awoke at 15.00, stumbled around the flat for a bit, sat down, smoked a cigarette, got up, stumbled around some more, and finally found my way to the shower. I call it a shower, but it isn’t really a shower. Showers are defined by the existence of shower curtains. We have no shower curtain. So it’s not a shower. It’s a bath with an apparatus attached to the spigot which allows pseudo-shower-like functionality. This is not at all unusual in this country. Anyway, after the pseudo-shower, I stumbled around the flat a bit longer, had another cigarette, fed the cats, and set off into the city with no particular destination in mind. I ended up at work because there was little else to do.

Pátek byl zajimavý protože: První, jsem šel do zkurveného Proseku s Patriciou se setkat s Pavlem a Ingridou. Obvikle si vybíraji divná mista. Je daleko z všude a ta služba tam je jako hrůza. Po čtyři piv, my jsme řekli, “musíme jet do festivalu blizko Košire, a je daleko, chapeš?” Bylo pravda, vlastně. Tak, jsme - já a Patricia - odešli. Cesta trvala vícemeně jendu hodinu a konečně jsme přijeli do poslední zastavky nějakého autobusu ve středě nějakého lesa. Slišeli jsme hudbu, tak jsme šli po zvuku. Našli jsme Habosha a Rosteja. Hulili jsme a chlastali jsme a kecali jsme do rana. V sobotu jsme byl mrtvej, ale ještě jsem šel do Iron Maiden.

At about seven in the morning (I am not sure, really), we sat at the end of the bus line which would take us back to Anděl. Habosh, Patricia and I, quite happily bleary, stretched our legs onto the asphalt as our buttocks firmly gripped the kerb. A straggler from the festival showed up and sprawled himself out in front of us, and focusing on Patricia, started babbling quickly in Czech. Once he discovered that Patricia did not speak Czech well, he continued to babble even more quickly at her in Czech. I understood about 70% of what he was spewing (and Habosh, being Czech, understood all of it, of course) and it was along the lines of “Foreigners Who Can’t Speak Czech Fluently Do Not Belong In This Country”, “We Are Better Than You” and some other nationalistic nonsense. As the guy was sitting in the street, directly in the path of where the bus would come, I had the secret wish that it would come at that instant and crush him into the pavement. Patricia and Habosh told me later that they, too, had secretly had this wish. The bus did finally come, but it did not crush the bastard. He continued his diatribe on the bus and finally Habosh told him that his views were absurd and simple minded and to go off somewhere and fuck himself with a very serrated object (velmi zoubkovaný objekt). So that was that.

Habosh had to work at 8 something, so Patricia and I kept him company (so he would not fall asleep) at a pub near Anděl. I don’t know exactly when I arrived home, but I do recall waking up at 17.00 in time to stumble around the flat a bit more before going to the Iron Maiden gig.

After going to the crazily overpriced Iron Maiden gig in the very stuffy T-Mobile arena at Výstavyště full of more than 20 000 heat-generating humans (and one cat), Patricia, Habosh, Rostej, et. al., and I went to a pub to drink beer and smoke pot. During the course of the evening, Patricia began to give Habosh Spanish lessons. He got to learn very important and useful phrases such as “No puedo trabajar porque estoy colocado.” Soon I suspect he’ll be ready for a job interview in Spain.

This has certainly been a fecund month for concerts. Porcupine Tree (ok, at the end of last month), Jaga Jazzist, Waltari, Guapo, Iron Maiden and three festivals full of popular Czech bands that you probably don’t know. Dobrý.

I went with Patricia and Michal to see Guapo last night in a dirty little club in Strahov. It was a bizarre but brilliant concert. I met Michal at 5 and we took the bus up the hill and ended up (como siempre) in a pub whilst we waited for the doors to the club to open. After two beers, Patricia showed up (in all her Spanish splendour) and we continued with a third beer. We were going to eat something, but since, after all, beer is liquid bread, we didn’t bother. We stumbled to the club and encountered the band’s soundcheck. It was, as most soundchecks are, loud. The bassist made particularly lots of noise. We had another beer. Michal provided the prediction that the opening band (Czech) was going to be horrific, but I held on to a bit of optimism (since the opening band for Porcupine tree, whom I saw one month ago, was brilliant). Michal was right. So we went back to the aforementioned pub for 45 minutes. We drank another beer and were offered a joint from friends of Patricia who apparently lived in the area and inhabited the pub regularly (just as she used to). The walk from the pub back to the club seemed very long and surreal (mostly because of the marijuana). Michal talked at length about the widths of the cracks in the parking lot. We arrived and ordered more beer. Unfortunately, at that moment, I had to urinate very badly, so I was away when the concert started. Sequenced bells and chimes raced everywhere (I began hearing them as I was pissing), and as I re-emerged and found Patricia and Michal, two of the members of the band were creeping through the throng with gongs held above them, screaming and ranting (and banging the gongs). One of them (the keyboardist, at it turned out) was painted blue. After that, it was 1 1/2 hours of relentless Zeuhl (with several more gong sequences). I was surprised that the audience (mostly students, probably, in their early 20s) were so enthusiastic. It was brutal stuff. They played their new CD in its entirety and the first ‘piece’ from their last CD, plus an encore which I hadn’t heard. Afterwards, we took the slow, meandering bus from Strahov to Karlovo Namesti and ended with another beer at ‘U Sudu’ (there were other beers and stuff inbetween that I forgot to mention). I was the least drunk of the three of us as we called it a night, so I walked for 30 minutes back to Holešovice through the warm, humid night.

Drunk in the morning. Well, I guess noon is morning for me. Just me and the cats here, and, of course, the ubiquitous wine and freestanding velbloud. I played rummy with Michal last night. It was brilliant. I hope to see Patricia tonight, but hope is a bland thing. I’ve had no dreams that I can recall since returning from Maja. Perhaps the alcohol snuffs them. I should go to work. Oh, GOD, life is bitter and absurd. Now it is time for my final cigarette.

Are lives I live so circulatory? I am here with five friends - five is the maximum I have ever felt that I could relate to. And they talk about the music as Patricia crunches Křupky. I should not be so cynical. Viking attempts to explain about our time in Průhonice and I just returned from the toilet, have realized that I am a stranger, as usual. Viking calls this book a bible; perhaps it shall be, if I encourage all of my friends to scribe within it.

The rain precludes me

As I shiver in this pub

Listening but mute

I am fading away…

It’s been a long problem with me - I cannot associate with people perfictly. You think that you understand, BARBORKO?

http://polaris.fucksheep.org/boc_astronomy_w_stephen_king.mp3 After reading the whole ‘Dark Tower’ series by Stephen King over the last week, I find this nostalgic bit of music. It is not exactly connected, but, for sure, interesting. The aforementioned novels are possibly a bit of pop culture, but I enjoyed them immensely. The characters have a resonant depth, and when each of them died, I was gripped with emotional pain. Maybe it breaks no new ground like James Joyce or Tolkien did, but it is, nonetheless, gripping. When Jake died, I cried. And I don’t usually cry. Oy: “I Ake!” That could be ‘Bye Jake’ or ‘I ache’. If you haven’t read them, it would make no sense, probably. Oh, by the way, here is the original: http://polaris.fucksheep.org/boc_astronomy.mp3

Commentaries:

Tony:

Don’t post spoilers, damn it!

Me:

Wanna beat me over the head with a mallet or what?

Tony:

I will beat on you with a plastic bat or walrus.

It was no mallet, but a magna of illusion.

Me:

At least it wasn’t the Forge of Vulcan.