STUFF TO DO...

http://www.soundclick.com/share?songid=11015399 “Free-Range Person,” off the Deathgrass album. It’s Labor Day weekend, and (to paraphrase Woody Guthrie) a lot of folks don’t got no jobs to labor at. I suppose at the Library (today) and the “Rapture Room” (tomorrow), I should concentrate on Failed Economy songs, in honor of Labor Day. I do know rather a lot of them.

That rumored bluegrass band will reportedly have banjo, fiddle, mandolin, bass, and guitar (I’d be the guitar, they tell me—and I can play bluegrass guitar). I don’t know what they have in mind to perform; a lot of my stuff lends itself easily to bluegrass, but bluegrass musicians tend to be thoroughgoing traditionalists. (And traditionals—public-domain songs, in other words—are okay, too. I just think it’s important to avoid covers when you’re being paid. There are copyright issues, even if no one else pays attention to them—and as a writer, I’m kinda insistent on paying attention on principle.) As far as my availability for practice, I reminded them that when you’re unemployed, every day is Friday. Just call. As with the job front, I will not hold my breath. What happens, happens. In the meantime, I have stuff to do.

“Alice” needs that replacement CD-rewritable drive installed; after that, I can make the CDs to send to the Goodnight Kiss Music and Mid-Atlantic song contests. I need to burn a CD of “The Dog’s Song” for a local librarian who’s reportedly got a hyperactive kitten that could star in that music video. (Got to catch them kittens while they’re young. Aslan and Hansolo at home are constant reminders that kittens get big real fast.) And I’ve got a ton of files to archive to free up hard drive space on “Alice.”

I have “Nomad Man from Nowhere” (Ahna Ortiz’ song) to record; I’ll dump the product to the refurbished laptop, to see if my vision of mobile recording is really going to be as simple as I thought. (The way things have gone, I no longer expect anything to be simple.) A thought: the laptop is only four years old. Does that mean it can burn CDs, too?

I’ll approach folks Sunday night at the “Rapture Room” about shooting footage for the video of “Blue Krishna.” Potentially, I’ve got three digital cameras to work with, but I might just use one for simplicity’s sake. If everybody’s local, I can pick up and dump video and transfer the camera fairly easily. In fact, if I can connect the camera to the laptop (I have the software), I could do camera transfers on a while-you-wait basis.

It is time to start assembling the Train Set. I’m waiting on songs from one more writer, but he’s been having trouble sending them—I don’t know if I’ll get them. Don’t know if I have enough usable material, that I can both play and sing, to fill an hour’s gig. Have to see. (And following that, I have all those songs to record, so they’re in the key and arrangement we’ll use for the gig.)

For the Musical Shoes, I’ve got a set of headphones to dismantle, and a pair of shoes to tear into, too (the ear speakers will go in the soles), and a memory card to find for the 50-cent *.mp3 player (which I hope works—I don’t know that yet). Can I use the laptop to program the card? If not, maybe one of the Macs at the Arts Center can do it. There are work-arounds for almost everything—some of them just aren’t easy.

In the course of cleaning the garage (which job is not finished), I have figured out how to about double the size of the 5x7 studio—and still (maybe) leave room to park a car (not that anyone would ever use a garage for that). My excuse for doing the expansion would be that I need to move my old watermaster’s desk (vintage 1906, rescued from the City of Vale) out to the garage, and I need somewhere to put it, and it might as well be used as a desk. And it won’t fit in the studio as presently constituted. Expanding the studio is a tad ambitious project, but I do have the materials on hand. Have to finish cleaning the garage first, though, so I have room to move things around.

Joe