19 October 2011

I will debut two string duo pieces at a private party on October 29th:

• Morbid Waltz
• Variations on a Theme of Corgan

Edit:  Here’s the waltz.  Some double stops vexed the performers but I left them in the score >>

Have a look at the variations  >>
Variations on a Theme of Corgan

20 September 2011

6 September 2011

Live in Isolation:

a semilive session with Danah Olivetree, Jonathan Graber, and Larissa Brown.

Download a .zip of the audio >> here

All Stems (Ready to Fast-Forward Now)

Nobody knows
Nobody knows you

I take lovers over my bent and brittle knee
I break whatever you call that – your sympathy
I make the hollow pride concede
Yeah, I make the hollow mind conceive

There’s a simple question we could ask
But nobody knows to

Nobody knows you
You are the half-truth
On my arm, desire-proof

Ready to tell the world that all is well?
Creaking the words like rusty oil wells
They’ll take what you don’t want to sell
And you’ll take the years they owe in Hell

Nobody knows you

Nobody knows to
You are the half
Like a scar I smile through
Oh, we’re stuck in a damn loop
Oh, we’re stuck
Just continue

Forward, forward, forward, forward
Forward, forward
Forward, forward, forward, forward
Forward, forward, forward, forward
Forward
Yes, forward, forward, forward…

Keep it Real

So take a moment
The moment revealed
Keep it real
Keep it real
Keep it real
Keep it.

Breakfast at Midnight

Firefighters know
Firefighters notice things
Sleeping for the bell to ring

It’s ill-begotten fame
It’s not his real name
I’m some kind of game?

I care because I can’t
I can’t because I care

Will he ever?
Will he ever nod off?
Will he ever?
Will he ever resolve?

& Upon Waking

[instrumental]

Thinking in Tongues

One thinks what one will
Sure do love you all the time

At least eat what you’ve killed
I’m consumed by my desire

I know I want you
I can feel the fire
Dying every night

(It’s in the songs)

Still I love it half the time.

Trinket

[instrumental]

22 July 2011

8 July 2011

You are invited to anonymously assess my personal weaknesses at Nohari Window.

I chose aloof, intolerant, glum, self-satisfied, callous, and impatient.  The ho-hum Johari Window is available here.

7 July 2011

In January, I tried not listening to music for a month.  Now, I will try only listening to my own music (including the demos) for at least the rest of July.  My subconscious forgets that y’all mostly haven’t heard these songs before.  Duty calls.  Got to get them out.  These analyst’s ears and craftsman’s hands have been profligate with the material of lesser writers.

Note:  I will make an exception for An Objective Listen.

18 June 2011

At a recent dinner party, I was ranting on the following topic when someone said, “why don’t you blog about things like that [instead of ______ or _______]?”  Well, okay then.  The topic was:  Hyphenated last names. 

Deeply inadvisable.  Let me explain.  Your name is Randall Higgins.  Your lovely wife is Clarissa Smoot.  In a shortsighted gesture of gender equality, you name your child Samuel Higgins-Smoot, lest anyone forget that offspring are 50/50 genetic composites of their forebearers.

Samuel Higgins-Smoot grows into a lad and meets a young lady of gender-progressive extraction named Margot Doelger-Williams.  What do they name their son, if they want to maintain the “forward-thinking” family tradition?  They must name him the absurd Michael Higgins-Smoot-Doelger-Williams, of course.  And one generation later, Michael will fall in love and produce something saddled with the moniker Joseph Higgins-Smoot-Doelger-Williams-Beerenbrouck-Brown-O’Donnell-Kobernick.  The hyphenated surnames become exponentially more ludicrous and unwieldy over succeeding generations.  Why not list every last gene after one’s Christian name?

Parents:  You are not improving the culture or scoring a victory for anything by giving your child a hyphenated last name.  You are attaching them to something unmemorable and cumbersome, and you are revealing an embarrassing inability to think multigenerationally.  Fortunately, this manifestation of Western self-negation is happening less and less often.

Update:
Let me be more specific.  It’s a manifestation of Western male self-negation.  Western rational men:  undeniably one of the greatest phenomena in the history of the known universe.  (Beethoven, philosophy, capitalism, science, you get it.)  And they’re being erased for lack of baby-making.

Under patriarchy, “bastards” and single mothers cannot be tolerated because they undermine male investment in the next generation. Illegitimate children do not take their fathers’ name, and so their fathers, even if known, tend not to take any responsibility for them. By contrast, “legitimate” children become a source of either honor or shame to their fathers and the family line. The notion that legitimate children belong to their fathers’ family, and not to their mothers’, which has no basis in biology, gives many men powerful emotional reasons to want children, and to want their children to succeed in passing on their legacy. Patriarchy also leads men to keep having children until they produce at least one son.

…

To be sure, a society organized on such principles may well degenerate over time into misogyny, and eventually sterility, as occurred in both ancient Greece and Rome. In more recent times, the patriarchal family has also proved vulnerable to the rise of capitalism, which profits from the diversion of female labor from the house to the workplace. But as long as the patriarchal system avoids succumbing to these threats, it will produce a greater quantity of children, and arguably children of higher quality, than do societies organized by other principles, which is all that evolution cares about.

16 June 2011

The Burning House is a website that asks the question:

If your house was burning, what would you take with you?

Submissions to the site reveal that, faced with the specter of flaming annihilation, many think first of their artistic legacies…  and that many of us are not so much artists as photographers.  It’s remarkable (and meta) how so many people took photos of their camera collections.

Well, here’s my submission.  Dissect at will.  Thanks to G.L. Piggy for his entry alerting me to the site.

Name:  Grant Valdes

Age:  26

Location:  Seattle

Occupation:  Business analyst, songwriter

Website:   www.grantvaldes.com
List:

• My notebooks
• Digital voice recorder
• Ruger MK II
• Contacts
• Music box from a girl
• Pipe, tobacco & lighter
• Pencil, marker & pen
• Prescription sunglasses
• My albums
• Nook
• Checkbook

15 June 2011

Those who know me know that I’ve expressed a wish to play fewer dark, netherworldly, smoke-filled bars, and more beautiful, heavenly, unconventional venues. Here you go…

If you don’t know what  Travelogue: Paris is, head here.

30 May 2011

Vanquishing depression.

Part 2

Alluded to:

Nietzsche’s view of happiness and civilization (“the world is not a hospital”):

http://books.google.com/books?id=4yEDAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA707&ots=U0QBnY1sYQ&dq=nietzsche%20world%20hospital&pg=PA708#v=onepage&q=nietzsche%20world%20hospital&f=false