quelquechose

WordPress is awesome. Tweaking PHP and CSS can have a strange calming effect, and make you lose track of time. So, I'm done with the LiveJournal site. I'll keep my account, and occasionally check my friends pages and the zinester communities or whatever. My journal will stay up, but not without this clearly visible:

Go to Quelquechose at it's new home at www.geraldprokop.com/blog right now. See ya LJ.

Prokiev.

I can't get shit off my mind tonight. I entered that place in my head where I just start navigating the same paths over and over again, getting nowhere. I decided to start soldering. I found the project here. It's a looper that uses these little voice recorder toys. You take them apart and wire them up to a simple mixer circuit and 5v power supply. I'm building a case out of a piece of aluminum 2x4 stud.


Here's the board I made tonight, making up the power supply and mixer circuits. A 9v battery powers the mixer and a 5v regulator, which powers the toys. There will be all kinds of offboard wiring going from this board to the toys and all the pots and switches. I built the mixer on a breadboard this morning, and it works. I have some other ideas I want to try with it. One of them involved housing my old DOD distortion pedal in a new case along with a feedback loop device I built, and I could add the mixer circuit to it to blend in the dry signal.


This is one of the toys still in the packaging. They're fun. Get them at Target for 6.99, even if you don't circuit-bend. You can warp the speed of whatever you record. Currently this one makes a high squealy cat noise I made in the car after buying these.

You can argue that things are getting worse for the arts in general. At best, one can argue that things are the same. But you'd have a really hard time convincing anyone (artists especially) that thing are getting better.

I was driving to to work yesterday. I was about to cross the river on Central when I realized that I needed to go to St. Paul. So I turned and went down 2nd. On that street alone I drove past two brand-new modern buildings that house arts organizations: the Guthrie and MacPhail Center for Music. We also have a new Walker Arts Center facility. In these dark times, why are these places growing and getting better?

I think Minneapolis has a fear of anything that doesn't come packaged in a shiny box. Large institutions are selling the idea of legitimacy so that we can believe we're a part of something. Artists, on the other hand, need a community that's more real and more organic. Artistic community cannot actually be created by an architect and a developer. I think the Walker is actually helping to dig Minneapolis' artists their graves. It establishes a threshold of legitimacy that pretty much blacklists any upstart gallery from making a mark. It gives the public a cultural outlet they can trust so that they don't have to be in the know. And now they even have underground parking so your nice car doesn't get fucked with. Who cares that Joe Nobody can't sell his art or get a job? This is capitalism. Survival of the richest.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the music scene. I've gotten one response in my search for gigs, and that response was a 'maybe.' The one show I had lined up at all this summer was supposed to be at the Belfry. The only thing that really keeps me trying is the fact that I don't have any real-world job prospects. I'm still creating in a void. No social life, no money, working for my dad, and trying to record interesting music by myself at home. And every day it becomes clearer and clearer that I'm the only one who gives a shit. Institutionalize that, Minneapolis!

Here's a new song. I wrote the music first and composed it by cutting up the file in Cubase, and then the lyrics came later. Writing songs on the acoustic always seems to put me in a sort of folk-rock trap, so I'm trying to start by writing the drums first. The song itself seems a little bitter:

Somewhere in the old fading light in the sky
we lose ourselves and settle in for the ride
and all our questions turn into dreams
I may be lost but it's not lost on me

somewhere there's an old burnt out light in yr eye
yr selfless shadows helpless watching you die
and I'm still waiting for my dreams to come true
I'm sleeping in what else can I do?

The world's not made for anybody like me
I'll hold my ground until they beat me free
so watch yr shadows cause they're all you got left
what you destroy is what yr living in

In the past week I've hit three open mics and sold two CDs. They pretty much went well. I've been going to work on my own schedule, which means I've taken some days off to work on recording. I realized that I need to relax and not pressure myself, but at the same time work on music every day. I decided I'm going to wait until I have the next project done, and then move. I don't want to relocate with unfinished business.

I'm having a major problem with this whole gigging out thing. I really don't know how people do it and it's a major source of confusion for me. Every time I contact a venue, I don't get a response. I don't really have many friends, much less friends who are musicians, much less friends who are musicians who get to pick who they play with. I can think of one time where I was invited to play a show with someone who I included in the past. On top of that, there are not that many places to play, not that Minneapolis is helping.

I keep reverting back to this idea of playing in the street, just because it's the logical outgrowth of my frustration. Just as I did with the open mics schedule (and completely despite the fact that nobody ever finds out about shows this way and actually show up to them) I'll post any busking dates on my web site.

A song I'm working on:

I know where I am
nowhere again
or on my way back
to where I began

been feeling lately
my best days are behind me
caught in the machine
it's all I can see
no beauty, no truth, no meaning
I'm a number in a hierarchy
a fool on the bottom rung
of a ladder no one can even see the top of

like dreams will fade
in the stupid light of a new morning
I too will fall away
from all that I saved
a fragment, a scrap or something
I set aside for the serotonin
the fantasies of giving up
are fighting for all the things that keep me going

I did not do the Cedar open mic last night. I get there a couple minutes late, and I guess the line starts outside before the door opens and then the list fills up right away. I would've had to wait 2 and a half hours, so I skipped it, and went to the Triple Rock to have a beer, and then went home and set up my keyboards.

I've been recording today. I'm monitoring with an amplifier on overdubs (no headphones), which I never thought to do because of feedback, but you can just monitor the mix and not the performance. It's much less claustrophobic.

I am definitely playing tomorrow night at Galactic--I won't skip out. Besides it starts at 10, so it'll be easy to show up on time.

Granted I'm not the most prolific schmoozer, well actually I really suck at it. But hey, I'm not trying to score a record deal. I would just like to play at a crappy venue, for free, at least once a month. Now I see there's another way.

I'm playing a bunch of open mics, starting this week. I'll try and hit as many as I can find by the end of the month. Check out the website or myspace for details--they're all posted on there.

Here the list so far--more will be added:

• Wed. Apr. 9// Cedar Cultural Center, 7pm


• Fri. Apr. 11// Galactic Pizza, 10 pm


• Tue. Apr.15// Chatterbox Pub, 8:30


• Wed. Apr. 16// Gingko Coffee, 6:30


• Fri. May 2// Anodyne Coffee, 7:30

I started working on songs and recording again, getting back into the healthy habit of plugging the laptop into the Tascam. I have a lot of half-baked tracks on my minitape recorder and I've been building some of them up. I may post some lyrics to one or two of them soon.

Aside from that, my knees got me worried lately because they feel swollen and they pop when I walk around, with the occasional faint, sharp pain. It seems to be a mix of the old hypochondria and pre-arthritic barometric pressure joint reactivity, but I've been taking a mixture of glucosamine, MSM, and chondroitin just to be on the safe side. For years I've had the same thing happening occasionally with my thumb. I bend it and it cracks. Gross. Our bodies are stupid.

My brother's cat was meowing outside his back door last week with a huge hole in its back. I didn't know what to do, so I just brought it to a vet and they stitched him up for $250. He better pay me back. Cats' bodies are gross too. Even worse because they don't seem to mind that their muscle is exposed, they just keep licking it.

My new blog is finally finalized and at its permanent home over at www.geraldprokop.com/blog. I went through all of the code and stylesheets and completely reconfigured the visual theme, which proved to be crash course in PHP, MySQL and CSS. It should be pretty bug-free now. You can link to the posts or subscribe to the RSS feed without a problem.

I'll be phasing out LiveJournal in the next week or so. I'll keep my account online, but I'm going to stop posting here.

OK. Check it out. I'm deleting this Blogger account, and taking my new blog template over to the regular URL at www.geraldprokop.com/blog which will be a permanent home. In case you don't know, I installed WordPress on my server and I'm done fighting with stuff I can't see (i.e. Blogger's hidden code that you don't have access to.) I will be moving everything over this week.

If you're one of my LiveJournal friends, start watching www.geraldprokop.com/blog instead. I will soon stop posting on LJ.

If you subscribe to any feeds of "Quelquechose," you will need to change the address when I move the WordPress files.

Yeah, it's a lot of work to go through for the five people who read this stuff. But I really like being a control freak. Check out the new design at its temporary location. It's been a useful lesson in PHP and CSS. I peeked into the databases that WordPress keeps on my server last night (something I could never do with LJ or Blogger) to see how they work. Now I'm getting ideas for implementing PHP on some of my other pages.

The Belfry Center and Bat Annex, a small, collectively run non-profit art + community space, sent out this in a recent MySpace bulletin:

Dear Members of the Community,

The current location of the Belfry & Bat Annex Library at 3753 Bloomington Ave is currently under duress by the city of Minneapolis. We have been ordered to cease nearly all all of our events because we do not have entertainment or food licenses. This means all of our music shows and Food Not Bombs are canceled at this specific location to avoid fines from the city. When we reached the office that issued our letter we were told that the zoning of our location makes getting those licenses for all intents and purposes impossible. They had a scanned copy of one of our fliers for the March Fest included in the letter and the representative was looking at our Myspace page while we asked for answers. The city of Minneapolis is surveilling our community's actions and events and wants its coffers filled at the price of a collectively and rather simply run arts space and library. A space that thought (somewhat naively) that a 501-C3 wasn't the only way to do this. A space whose building is far from being up to code but had cheap enough rent to be a relatively sustainable commodity in our community. This particular location is no longer right for our goals. The Belfry's 3753 Bloomington Ave location will have to close. The search for a more fitting space is on and in the meantime our money-generating events are canceled, which means we need help tying up loose ends and making rent for the duration of our time at this address. So if you have ever been to a show at the Belfry, checked out a zine, danced till 4, had an event or meeting, looked at the art, or just hung out now is the time to chip in that extra $2 you didn't want to donate the first time around. Benefit shows, volunteering, and donations at the events we will be able to have at this location will be so greatly appreciated by our small collective. This Saturday (tonight!) we will be having an closing party for Alex Kuno's art show, The Miscreants of Tiny Town (see press release below), at 7 pm. We invite you all to come and have fun and we can talk about the future we envision for the Belfry as well as ways to better subvert the capitalistic and suffocating actions of our local government. Thank you for your support and keep your ears open for more updates on the future of the Belfry and the Bat Annex Library.

Love,
The Belfry

This is a perfect example of what people miss when they think about the role of the arts in the community. The arts are being squeezed out and sucked dry. These are places that would never even come up in a meeting on senate appropriations. The grass-roots arts scene is being bulldozed, not by cutting funding, but due to a larger problem.

Having a vibrant arts scene is not about making it happen. It's about letting it happen. Mpls is power tripping on itself. The artists are going to leave. It's becoming a shell. Minneapolis needs places like the Belfry in order for it to keep being what it thinks it is years from now. It doesn't know that.

I go to the Walker and listen to MPR. But institutions like that do less to promote the actual development of the arts here than they do keep "cultured" people feeling smug about living here.

So I switched to Blogger and now I don't think I'm going to keep with it. Blogger is extremely awkward to customize and I'm struggling to override the built in styles and templates. I had to change my hosting operating system so I can use GoDaddy's built in WordPress support. As originally promised, my blog will eventually be available at blog.geraldprokop.com so go ahead and bookmark it now if you want, and watch it. Right now it's a test blog I've been using to figure out Blogger--to no success.

I'd be interested in knowing if there's a way to move a blog, as in, to take old posts from Blogger and insert them into a Wordpress format blog. I can't imagine how this would be done...

What I've been doing lately:
- Paperwork. Mostly my taxes.
- Working an average 5 hours a day on my parents' house.
- Writing quick and partial songs and recording them on minitape. Playing drums with sticks (I normally use brushes).
- Worrying about muscle stiffness. My hands tense up when I play guitar for more than 30 minutes. My joints are starting to ache slightly. If I work really hard at music I may find success in my 40s, just in time to be a hopelessly depressed arthritic old man.
- Contacting places to play in Milwaukee and Chicago. No one so far.
- Researching the prospect of moving to Chicago.
- Researching the prospect of going back to school and taking web development classes.
- Thinking about how silly everything is and wondering why people even try and if I should even bother.

I completed a simple project today. I needed a headphone splitter, mainly because I use a set of headphones that are attached to a long home-made cable, so that I can record in the kitchen, or the other side of the room etc. It gets a little messy dragging that long cord with you when you go back to the board to do rough mixes and whatnot. With a splitter, I can keep one pair of phones by the board while the other is free to roam. Also, in case I ever record with another person it would be helpful if we could both hear the mix! So yesterday I found these simple instructions for a passive headphone splitter. Not a distribution amplifier, which I would like, but they're more complicated. You don't get any gain and there's no volume controls or anything, but it'll work. I went to RadioShack for the parts and threw it together this afternoon.


Front and Back with the components installed. I used a metal plate that I got at AxMan (Surplus store) when I realized that the box I bought was too small to house jacks and those huge resistors. Everything is just open in the back. The resistors are non-inductive 8-ohm 20W, and I used hot glue to hold them in place.

I used a switch to cut the ground coming from output 2, as an on/off. It doesn't work, presumably because I didn't fully insulate the jack from the metal plate. I think I need a DPDT switch to cut the signal from each channel rather than cutting the ground.


Here's the wiring. Pretty simple. I still managed to fuck it up, however.


I installed the thing under a shelf, which is where my monitor will be when I get it.


There it is hooked up. I tried it out just checking into the mic, but have yet to record with it. It seems like it'll do what it's supposed to.

I have yet to finish any complicated projects, but I really enjoy drilling holes, soldering and designing the layout and housing and everything. For this I used regular old silver paint marker. I like it.

The other thing about this project is that if I need to (or want to) I can keep expanding it pretty easily if for more outputs. I have several of those black plates from AxMan!

Something happened to me recently which hasn't happened to me in a long time: I heard a song at Caffetto and it stuck to me. Last I remember it was Iron +Wine (but I didn't know that until I borrowed a random CD from the office at SSCA.) Before that it was Neutral Milk Hotel's King of Carrot Flowers pt. 1. This time, Welcome Home by Florida songwriter Radical Face.

I don't listen to music much. It just naturally happens that way. I don't think music is meant to be researched and shopped for. It's meant to be out in the world, playing at some random place you happen into. Friends are supposed to expose you to music, and it should come to you when your not expecting it.

I've never bought a CD because of what I read on a blog, or because of a clip I heard on television.

I could say a lot of stuff, I suppose, about Muzak or radio, how music is turned into an industry and how we thus become consumers first and listeners second. There's books written on the subject, one of which (Noise by Jacques Attali) I'm getting started reading now.

I feel like music is a source of connection we feel to the world, and to reality, and then to ourselves. That connection is often amputated and rerouted to our system of culture and a very constructed, mediated sense of reality. (Music is constructed, too, but organically.) I think it's safe to say that I feel disconected from the world right now, and now more than ever. To compensate, I dig into myself. I try hard to be happy, but it doesn't work because there's just one person keeping it together: me. Hearing a good song unexpectedly provides an escape from that. An escape from the ridgid brain connections I've forged in order to create myself the way I wanted.

It also reminds me that such exceptions, more than anything, prove the rule. But hey, that's the fault of consumers, giving in to fantasies of control and false individuality. That's another subject.

I used to take an herbal supplement called 5-HTP, which is meant to promote the production of serotonin in the brain, thus providing treatment for depression. I took it off and on, only when I needed it. When I did need it, I would try to take it for a couple weeks at least, and then I would keep taking it until I started forgetting to take it. (If you don't remember to take it, maybe you don't need it. If you do need it, you'll know when.) I started this after I had a breakdown 2 years ago. I tried taking Effexor, which I got samples of from my doctor at the time. It helped. I felt numb. I went to work every day, and watched TV, and didn't mind it. I stopped taking it because it would have cost me $150 a month to stay on it.

I quit taking the 5-HTP a few months ago, just because I didn't feel like I needed it. I was doing fine, albeit on a fine line. Then I got a cold. Once I realized that I could never make up my sick time (even when I'm OK I have problems going to work for my dad. He pays me well, I can't stand the work, I manage to just scrape by) all of my other problems surfaced. I'm making no money on music. I can't get a gig. I can't find a decent job. And I don't have a social life because I'm too broke to do anything, and besides, I should be at home recording anyways. I couldn't turn these thoughts off while I was at work. I never have been able to. Eventually my brain gets tired and just accepts it and I go on with my life. But then it happens again.

Taking a chemical won't change who you are. It won't change your brain. It definitely won't make your life situation any better. It can only promote change. So I'm trying to see what I can change and how I can help myself. I'm just afraid that the answer is to "find a job."

Any job that fits my qualifications does not fit my skills or personality, and vice versa. That's the trap I'm stuck in. I've gone after jobs that "fit me," and I don't get hired, usually because someone more personable is just as available. I was able to slip in to jobs only to get treated passive-aggressively, and sometimes even used as a scapegoat. If I've ever had a job that did not fit this profile, it was low pay and small hours.

EVERY employer wants a "motivated, team-oriented, self-starter," which I can be if I were running a gallery or something. I can't be that while answering bitter emails from dissatisfied Target customers. And I can't pretend I'm going to. What the fuck is the point of that?

I've always known this about myself and that's why I fight against the odds and work my ass off in my spare time, making music, making art, promoting the arts, volunteering, running a zine fair, etc. hoping that it will pay off down the line. The fact is that it WILL NOT pay off--without money. Money to get 100 copies of your CD out to bloggers. Money to spend weeknights at bars networking with the indie rock scene. Money to allow you to spend the afternoon recording without being in a hurry because you're losing a day's work. Money to keep yourself healthy while you're running on overdrive. Money runs everything, and without that backing, no one gives a shit that you have pictures hanging in a coffee shop. Or that you have a CD on consignment at a record store. Or that you have new songs ready to perform on a stage. I've tried really hard, hoping that my trying will lead to me not needing a job as bad. But in order to make anything off of my efforts, I need money. To get money, I need a job that pays me decent wage for full time work and doesn't penalize me for being human (cram thousands of people into a building for 40 hours every week and they're going to get sick, especially when they can't afford to not go to work.)

Based on former experience, the best case scenario is that I will settle for something that will pay me to simply maintain my human existence. If I save anything, it'll cover the hole that I create when I get pissed off and quit. My only life, it seems, is a flat line. It also seems my creativity has been dwindling since I stopped getting student loans and switched to paying them. I made a huge mistake. I invested in myself. I thought being educated would get me somewhere. I didn't realize that you're more prepared for the workforce as a high school graduate than as a college graduate. (Note: I know that college grads are most likely to get the job. What they don't tell you is that it's college grads who get in and get out without challenging themselves who get the job. Prove you can do it and put it on your resume but don't let it make you think you know anything. But remain pliable. You're part of a machine.)

I hesitate to write stuff like this on such a public forum, knowing that a potential employer may happen upon it while Googling my name. But hey, if you thought you wanted to hire me before you read this and now you don't, then the only way we're going to get along is by me subverting. Go find a tool.

I was planning on releasing a new full length CD this spring. While I did get a lot done, it's not finished, and I haven't been working on it. My priorities are forced. Music is a luxury. While I always find time to write songs and play guitar, recording requires a lot of patience. Patience I don't have. It also takes time. If I have any extra time these days, it's not out of creative need as much as it is me being too depressed to go to work. Furthermore, I try as hard as I can to get out and play shows to promote myself, but I'm going on nearly 6 months with no gigs at all. My career is at a standstill while the rest of the world shoots past me, and if I were in my right mind, I would keep fighting. The truth is I'm a wage-slave scraping bottom until it becomes realistic for me to believe I'm allowed to think I am what I am: an artist.

I don't know when the next CD will come out, but hey--it's not like the world really needs another collection of sad songs to bury under it's own capitalist detritus. Hello, machine. Take me.

The last time I felt like this was back in 2006. Somehow 2007 was pretty easy. I guess I had more hope--in myself, in others, in this place. Maybe I was just trying really hard and now I just feel cheated.

I'm skipping work. I feel real, but still worthless and horrible. When I go to work I feel depressed, anger, bitter, and destructive. I get ideas into my head like it might be a good thing to just crash my car into a wall or something. Just for the catharsis.

I told my mom I'm not working for them until I figure something out. I need to apply for medical assistance and go find psychiatric help. Two years and nothings changed.

If you've responded to any of these offering to go out for drinks with me and I haven't gotten back to you, it's not because I don't appreciate it. Drinking and bitching won't help. Let's go out when I feel better!

The Poetry of Recessional Desperation
by Gerald Prokop

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Arranged out of the first 100 job postings in the Sales category on Mpls/St.Paul Craigslist.