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.