Buy Yogi albums!
half-pint demigod (2005)
at CDBaby.com
Salve EP (2003)
at Amazon.com
at CDBaby.com
Any Raw Flesh? (2001)
at Amazon.com
at CDBaby.com
Sister Sites:
HalfZaftig.com
Wonky-Records.com
MySpace
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| 10/28/2003 |
| Homeward Bound |
Ah, so much to write about, so much is on my mind. So much has happened since I last had Internet access it makes my head swim. However, since I'm back at the library in Virginia, checking mail and preparing to point myself west, I'm not going to go into all that today. I will say that on Saturday my sister had the most beautiful wedding I can ever remember attending, and then that night I got so blindingly drunk that I was reduced to spending the entire next day huddled under a blanket in my hotel room, wishing for death. Some fun, eh?
Like I said, now is not the time to go into these things in any detail. But the wedding went off without a hitch, the happy couple leave tonight for their honeymoon Across The Pond, and it's time for me to get my butt back to the west coast. This month has been incredible, with many lessons learned, much perspective gained, many friends seen, several sadly unseen. But it's time to go home. The next time I write here, I will be back in Snoqualmie.
I must not let this day go by, however, without extending congratulations to my buddy Bryan Beller, who today officially releases his first solo CD to the world, View. I play on the track "Projectile", and I urge you to purchase a copy for yourself. The album is almost entirely instrumental music, chock full of incredible compositions and performances. Go buy it, OK? |
| 10:55:56 AM |
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| 10/22/2003 |
| Get Me To The Church On Time |
The countdown to my sister's wedding seems to be speeding up... today, we arrive in tiny Rockport, Massachusetts where the ceremony will be held. There's lots of running hither and yon to airports to pick up people arriving for the weekend's festivities. I've mostly kept out of the fray, as the bewildering arrays of "To Do Lists" and "Must Call NOW Lists" and such are enough to send one into an apoplectic frenzy. Last night, however, I did help out with the "cake topper," the little figurines that sit atop the wedding cake. My sister and her fiancee being the type of kids they are, their cake topper are action figures of Han Solo and Princess Leia. My job was to paint the hair of the Leia figure red, and that's what I did. An uncanny resemblance has resulted, if I may say so myself. If I had a camera, I'd post a picture of it here, but alas, no such camera exists.
Today is the last day I can reasonably expect to have Internet access until after the wedding, so this will be the last blog entry for a while. Next Tuesday, I'll be pointed back west, and I'll hopefully be able to scrape together some final road entries. And then it's back to the Mission! I know already that I'll be really glad to be back, even as much as I've enjoyed this trip. |
| 7:27:37 AM |
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| 10/15/2003 |
| Meeeeeeemries... |
I'm typing this to you from a workstation at the Potomac Library in Woodbridge, VA, a library I've been coming to, usually to research one hated school project or another, since I was about eight years old. We've just finished up a nine-and-a-half hour drive today from Atlanta to Woodbridge. Very uneventful overall, when you're on the east coast the scenery doesn't really change a whole lot on the highways. We stopped for breakfast at my beloved Cracker Barrel somewhere in North Carolina - a southern chain of goodness that doesn't exist at all on the west coast. Breakfast bliss was mine.
We're going to chill here for a day or two before driving to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia to visit my Dad over the weekend. These next few days are easy ones before the crazy week we're sure to have in New England starting next Monday.
No good road stories today, really. Cool autumn weather has finally showed up and I'm glad of it. It seems crazy to have to drive around with the AC on in October, but we had to do a lot of that on the first leg of the journey. After eating mostly nothing but road food the last week, I'm feeling fat and lethargic. I'm missing my band. I'm missing my little dogs.
I listened to most of the new Living Colour disc today - I think it will grow on me. As always, they are sonically daring, and from what I heard while I was really paying attention, they got some phenominal vocal performances out of Corey Glover this go 'round. Vernon's tone is still a mud-fest zone, though - and I have no idea what to make of their (tongue-in-cheek?) cover of "Back In Black." AND they did a cover of "Tomorrow Never Knows," too. SIGH. Oh well.
Gonna go drive around in the old home town for a bit - and fight off the memories that show up. And hope that the Sox don't lose to the fucking Yankees this afternoon. |
| 1:18:05 PM |
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| 10/14/2003 |
| Ten States In Four Days |
Greetings to you from Kennesaw, Georgia! Today is a rare day off from driving and also happens to include internet access, so I thought it prudent to dash off some thoughts about the road since Friday. I've seen ten states since then: California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennesee, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.
We left Studio City, California in the late morning hours on Friday, and made it through the Mojave Desert unscathed. It was still uncomfortably hot for a Wimp of the Northwest like myself, and we made sure to enjoy the air-conditioned comfort of the Protege 5 for that section of the journey. While driving in Arizona, of all places, we ran into the only rain we've encountered thus far, and were treated to the roundest, fullest, most bestest rainbow either of us can remember seeing. We arrived at our destination for the day, the Grand Canyon, under a beautiful October full moon. After checking in at a hotel in Tusayan, we decided that it would be a rare thing indeed to be able to look at the Canyon under such a bright full moon. The Park itself was completely dark as we drove to the first viewpoint we could find. I saw what appeared to be a large tree very near the right side of the road. As we got closer, I realized that most trees I've seen don't have powerful chest muscles, nor do they stare back at you. The "tree" was in fact the largest deer I have ever seen, at least that's what I thought it was in that moment. It was actually an elk, with a huge spire of antlers on his head. He was big enough that he probably could have kicked the car into the Canyon without breaking a sweat. We remain grateful that he didn't choose to do so.
The Grand Canyon by moonlight is ghostly and surreal, and would require a greater wordsmith than I to describe properly. I'm glad we took the opportunity to see it at night, though. The next morning we came back to the South Rim to have a look by daylight. I sat on the edge and pretended I was Kevin Kline. Mileage for Friday: 565 miles.
But there was more driving to do! In fact, Saturday was the most brutal day we've yet done on this trip, as we didn't stop until we were out of the Texas panhandle, finally bedding down for the night in Elk City, Oklahoma. We didn't do much in the way of stopping on Saturday, we just kept the pedal down, listening to mix CD's, and later game 3 of the New York vs. Boston series. We drove through Texas in darkness, and managed to spot a falling star, which thrilled us as it burned it's way over the highway. Mileage for Saturday: 815 miles.
Sunday we actually had a destination in mind: Memphis, Tennesee. A friend of Heather's offered us shelter at her place, and we wished very much to take her up on the offer. We decided as we approached Oklahoma City that we should stop and see the memorial at the site of the Alfred Murrah federal building that Timothy McVeigh destroyed in 1995, killing 168 civilians. I couldn't imagine another time that I'd be in Oklahoma City, so it seemed a perfect time to see the memorial. We spent about two-and-a-half hours on the grounds and in the museum. It was a sobering experience. I recommend it highly, but be ready for what you'll see and do there - by the end of the museum exhibit it became all-too-overwhelming for me, and I had to get out of there. My favorite part of the memorial is how they closed off the street where McVeigh parked his bomb, and it's now a large, block-length reflecting pool.
After that, it was a pell-mell express through Oklahoma and Arkansas to get to Memphis, where we arrived at about 11:30 PM. My sister's cell phone had died somewhere back in Texas or so, and the directions we had from Heather's friend were less than accurate, so we ended up driving around Memphis for two hours before finally finding her friend's house. Mileage for the day (including those last two hours in Memphis): 672 miles.
Yesterday we got off to another leisurely start, and we had another destination in mind, Kennesaw, Georgia. The drive was uneventful, and thankfully much shorter than every other day so far. We dipped briefly into Mississippi before landing in Alabama, a state I'd never before set foot in. Somewhere around Birmingham our mission became the location of a radio station carrying game 4 of the Sox/Yankees series, and we would ocassionally catch one for a few minutes. Before the game was over, we had arrived in Kennesaw. The mileage: 427 miles.
Today is a rare day off for visiting with family, and tomorrow we'll be back in our ancestral home of Woodbridge, Virginia where we'll spend some low-key days before heading up to New England.
Road trips rule the world. I guess I'm about halfway through my journey now. Six days of total drive time thus far, starting in Snoqualmie, Washington and ending up in Kennesaw. Approximate total mileage: 3,627 miles. Phew. |
| 8:49:42 AM |
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| 10/10/2003 |
| L.A. Stories #2 |
Gruno's show was really, really, fun to do. I was more relaxed than when I did my None Radio appearance. The format is looser, more easily changed according to whatever weird tangents we wanted to take. I got to request a lot of fun music, and it was great doing a show like that with Chris G.
I actually spent a good amount of time with Chris on Tuesday and Wednesday. After I drove out to his place in Pasadena, we went over to see his lockout practice space, which was nice and sizable. Chris got a cell phone call from one of the contacts through which he's trying to land a day gig when we got there, so I kind of wandered around out front while he took the call. Band types, even fairly early in the day, were filtering out of the building. To kill some time, I went to a nearby pay phone and made some calls of my own. While on the phone I spied a slinky little band minx slink out of the building, California-toned midriff bared in the warm sun - ah, California girls, I thought to myself. When Chris was done with his call, I asked him if he had seen her, and he smiled a knowing smile. Turns out she's at the rehearsal space a lot, she's a singer in a band that she'd actually approached him to audition for. As they talked, he asked her what she did for a living, and she looked him right in the eye and said, "Oh, I work 24/7. I'm an outlaw."
Ooooohhhhhhh.
On Wednesday we went tooling around in Hollywood, and Chris showed me his old digs at Musician's Institute, where he went to school for a while. We also stopped in at Amoeba Music, the coolest record store I've ever seen in my life, and I picked up a CD by local LA band Powder, who Gruno played on his show the other night, and Chris G saw live the other week. Chris thinks they are destined for stardom, if not greatness. I liked the tracks I heard on Gruno's show. I also picked up Living Colour's new album Collideoscope, but I haven't had a chance to listen to that yet.
And yesterday was final errands with my sister day. We went all over the Valley attending to some final things, and then caught an afternoon screening of Mystic River, before she went and had the finishing touches done on her wedding dress, which is one of the items we're taking with us across the country. Yes, I saw my baby sister in her wedding dress. She looked gorgeous.
SIGH.
So today we head east, making one of our only "tourist" stops of this trip, to see the Grand Canyon. I've never set hide nor hair in Arizona before this. The great journey begins. |
| 7:44:50 AM |
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| 10/6/2003 |
| L.A. Stories #1 |
So, the current pattern in Los Angeles weather is that you wake up to gray skies, and then by about mid-day the gray burns off and it's beautiful and sunny. Not bad.
So obviously I made the trip down the coast with no trouble. I overnighted the first night in Yreka, California (the lady at the Super 8 I stayed at pronounced it why-REEK-uh). But wait - backtrack a bit, to me just backing out of the garage into our driveway in Snoqualmie. I'm sitting there, loading up the CD changer with stuff to listen to, and I casually glance to my right. In our front yard (which is a tiny little patch of grass I might add), is a baby deer. Munching away on the clover growing there. This is at
about 1:00 PM in the afternoon. There's a little pathway that runs up the hill just past our yard, and walking down this pathway are THREE more deer, two adults and another baby. They're just stopping and munching, walking in that delicate deer way. See, where our neighborhood now stands, it used to be dense forest land, and there's a lot of forest still surrounding us - though there's a lot less now than this time last year, because they've been
clearing a lot of it to start new housing developments. So I've been seeing a lot more displaced deer these days, but usually at night. This was the first time I've seen a whole gaggle in broad daylight, standing on our tiny front lawn. Little Pete the dachshund thinks of himself as the Guardian Of The Path next to our house, and if he hadn't been crated at that moment, I'm sure the sight of a whole family of deer would have sent him into an apoplectic frenzy. So that was my experience with Bambi and Company, just as I was leaving the house.
I arrived around 8:30 at my sister's in Studio City (though of course, as is my custom, I got lost on the freeway first). Almost immediately upon my arrival I was whisked off to Mann's Chinese Theater (yay!) to see Jack Black in "School Of Rock." It was a fun little flick, recommendable purely because of Jack Black's fierce commitment to his role. Not great, but I laughed a lot.
Yesterday afternoon I pre-taped tonight's None Radio program with Rich Pike, Bryan Beller, and Joe Travers, and it was lots of fun. Although I gotta say, most of the really interesting conversations were had while the music was playing, not during breaks when we were "live." I allowed myself to be talked into partaking in some mind-altering substances before the taping
began, so I was a lot more mellow than I expected to be. Rich was very kind at letting me play some stuff from my albums and talked a little about that stuff; I find that I'm not yet comfortable when in a situation where I'm supposed to really "pimp the merch." I was glad, therefore, to be in the room with Bryan Beller, who is promoting his soon-to-be-released album, View, and has no such compunctions. He is a marketing force of nature, and I realized I need to take a page from his book in that regard.
I'll write it a hundred times: "I should NOT be embarassed about promoting my work. I should NOT be embarassed about promoting my work."
Then last night I and my bro-in-law-to-soon-be went to the Improv Olympic West to catch an improv show featuring my old grade-school buddy and Second City Main Stage alum Craig Cackowski. He's just relocated from Chicago here to LA in the last year, and I hadn't had a chance to see him perform since before he moved to Chicago ten years ago. It was great fun to watch him, and have a
beer or two with him after the show.
Tonight is Gruno's show, and Chris G is going to do that one with me, so that will be great. But before that: I have to get fitted for a tuxedo. My first ever. Pray for me. |
| 10:15:02 PM |
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| 10/3/2003 |
| Late, As Always |
Taking off on the first leg of the Farley's Last Stand Tour, '03. I'm only four hours behind my intended schedule for the day.
The blog entries for the rest of the month will be from the road! This is going to be fun! Yay!
Don't forget to listen to None Radio and Gruno's Guilty Pleasures this week, as I'll be on both shows.
Next stop: Los Angeles! I hope something good is showing at Mann's Chinese. |
| 12:58:26 PM |
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| 10/2/2003 |
| SIGH. |
All I can say is, the 1995 Seattle Mariners lost the first two away games against the Yankees in their Divisional Series.
They then beat the Yanks three straight games, and advanced to the ALCS.
It could happen. |
| 4:06:57 PM |
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| AUUUUUGGHH!!! |
Like Charlie Brown, always sure that THIS time, THIS time, he's gonna kick that football... I watched Game 1 of the Sox/A's series.
I should've known better. I'm not watching tomorrow's game. I can't take this. I'm really glad I'm going to be on the road a lot during the playoffs this year. If the Sox advance, it'll be out of sight out of mind, until I can catch a score somewhere. If they lose, I don't care who wins the goddamned World Series. Hooray! A perfect solution.
They lost on a squeeze play. Un-freaking-believable.
Hey, audio is coming sometime tomorrow! I finished up my cover of "Only Shallow", which I'll post in its entirety (I spent like, what, three hours total on it), and then I've made a medley of the "Soft Palate Demos," or what I was calling the "Palate Cleansing Tunes" of August. I'm giving them to the band before I take off Friday, we'll see if they like any of 'em when I get back. These are all demos, right? So I don't know if any of the stuff makes the next album, OK? Hopefully you'll be entertained by the little snippets. |
| 12:47:20 AM |
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| 10/1/2003 |
| The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year |
Alright! It's now officially the best month of the year, and baseball playoffs are in full swing (no pun intended, eek), and I am just elated that they started off with the damnable Yankees and the boring-as-all-holy-fuck-let-somebody-else-in-that-division-win-already Atlanta Braves LOSING their first games of their respective series at HOME. HA HA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!!
I gloat now because I know full well how the tide may turn against me.
I watched parts of all the games today, flitting aboot the house, and at least two of them were really entertaining. I happened to be watching part of the Atlanta/Cubbies game when the cameras were panning over the crowd during a pitching change - the crowd was doing the infamous "tomahawk chop" thing, trying to get the Braves to come back and win the game through sheer unified psychic will. You know, that stupid chop thing, foam tomahawks and all, is really embarassing to watch. I can see why Native Americans get offended - and isn't it pretty 20th century to be naming million-dollar professional sports teams after ethnic slurs? I mean, imagine the uproar if someone tried to name their team the Alabama Darkies, or the Mississippi Tar Babies. Or how about the San Francisco Chinks? I have a feeling that might cause a ruckus. Only inertia prevents these teams with getting with the program. No "tradition" is worth these ugly reminders of less enlightened times - I mean, watching a crowd of several thousand wealthy WHITE Atlantans waving foam "war hammers" in unison was pretty ugly. Yeesh.
Tomorrow I try to survive the first game of my beloved Sox against the accursed A's.
I also intend to finish up something I started up today (yesterday, now): I recorded about 60% of a cover of My Bloody Valentine's "Only Shallow." I was so bummed about my September doldrums and my public acknowledgement of my defeat at the hands of same that I just jumped into this idea - I've been wanting to do a version of that tune forever, and the thought of doing something music-related really excited me, and so I laid down some rhythm guitars and all the vocals. So tomorrow I'll throw down the bass, do some more guitar overdubs, polish up the drum programming, and mix it! I've been listening to it over and over and over and over as I type this, but that's just because I love that song so much, not because I did anything spectacular with it. In fact, it's going to end up being a pretty faithful version of the original, except it's me singing it. I'm gonna post it as an MP3 when it's done, and I'm also going to do a short medley of all the other tunes I did last month as well. I figure I've been writing about all these songs so much you might be interested in hearing pieces of what I'm up to. |
| 1:37:21 AM |
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| WHOA! Wonky.Net 3.5! I Got Some 'Splainin' To Do! |
Um, so yeah, look! Everything's sorta different around here! There's an awful lot of stuff for me to finish before I can really feel good about calling this a true site overhaul, and thus increase the Wonky Version Number all the way up to 4.0, but, I figured I wanted to get what I've done thus far posted now, before I go off and get lost in America for a month. Mostly what you're seeing here is a big 'ol facelift. I'm sure I'll tinker like mad with things before I'm done, but as you can see, I've mostly been busy stripping things to their most bare selves... very little in terms of graphical bells n' whistles, almost no silly Javascript extravaganzas from days gone past. I figure... why? In the end, Web sites are about collecting information, and all the silly flashing words and whatnot are just a distraction.
Well, that's the story I'm currently sticking to, anyway. I'm sure I'll change my mind and redo everything in Flash or something before long. Post at the newly renamed Wonky.Forum and let me know what you think of the facelift. |
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