• 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

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]

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

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

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.

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

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

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

“The theme of health in Nietzsche’s thought”:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/v1x301w338kp2771/

Seasonal affective disorder:

http://www.nami.org/Content/ContentGroups/Helpline1/Seasonal_Affective_Disorder_(SAD).htm

Prevalence of seasonal affective disorder at four latitudes:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2326393

Teen suicide in Seattle:

http://www.king5.com/health/childrens-healthlink/60420987.html

The adult baby:

Charlie Sheen interview:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5aSa4tmVNM

Part of not trying to fool your rational mind is understanding that your adult inclinations are very much tied to adverse childhood experiences you may have experienced. Face those experiences:

http://www.acestudy.org/

Study on risk aversion:

http://www.jstor.org/pss/2118342

“Adam Carolla on the misery of intelligence”:

Rates of despression in women: http://www.nami.org/template.cfm?section=women_and_depression

Depression solemnly discussed on “The View”:

…Versus how it is discussed on “Loveline”:

http://inacewetrust.com/

Short-term memory, the period during which you can decide whether you’re going to keep focusing on something at the moment:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_span

The standard in academic thought on manic depression (I’ve owned and read this): http://www.amazon.com/Manic-Depressive-Illness-Disorders-Recurrent-Depression/dp/0195135792/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_6

Beethoven’s 9th in the theme of Keith Olbermann’s “Countdown”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49zMLGXXIJA&feature=related

PS:  If you’re a male of European descent, discounting DWEMs means demeaning yourself and discounting your potential! Seems reasonable that such an outlook, which, in my experience, is widespread in Seattle, would correlate with depression.