The Sante book on Paris is coming to its conclusion. Luckily, CS has made some other recommendation that I'm certain will get me through the next couple weeks. One pleasant thing about aging is the time that I make for reading. It is something.
I am trying to return to things that make me happy. I'm not sure if that's a sign of yet another chapter in my ongoing middle-years catastrophe or not. I'd like to believe that I never grew up. I should have pursued a carer in academia, or at all.
I plugged in a series of guitar pedals and small outbound processors today to play my guitar through. It took me about an hour to get it all to sound right. I won't bore you with too many details, but I had a compressor, wah-wah, octave pedal, and then a noise gate with another effects loop running off of that (to a Microcosm), so that I could play clean-ish filtered or with this very atmospheric sweeping looping going on behind me, all gated by the pedal that feeds the amp. After getting it to sound a way that I was happy with - the compressor alone took me about 15-20 minutes to set just satisfactorily - I played spacey lonely arpeggios, harmonics, and muted minor riffs for about an hour. The rest of the world disappeared.
I felt like a kid again. I used to have a studio in my bedroom closet at my parents house. I cleared everything out of there and set up a small mixer, effects loop, and a two track Teac reel-to-reel recorder that allowed me to do two tracks of independent recording, the left and the right individually, which I then mixed to cassette while adding effects to simulate a stereo two-track recording. I would record ambient tracks on cassette and mix those in lightly on top of each mono take, so that when I slightly panned each side it would create an impression of far more depth than was actually there.
One of the favorite things of mine that I ever did was a remake of an old Bauhaus track that had my vocals double-tracked with an acoustic and electric guitar playing different parts, with the electric in a sort of industrial wash when it wasn't hitting the bass notes. I was singing the lead on one track and had the faraway reverb vox on the other. I wish I had that cassette now. A girlfriend - Beth - threw it out the car window one time because it had another song on it I had recorded that she hated. She must have assumed every song I learned was somehow about her.
The thing to which I can not return, no matter how many pieces of cool gear I buy, is a summer of hanging out, playing the guitar, learning new songs, having friends for only a couple years, or maybe only months - becoming myself. You can re-invent but you can hardly re-become. It's all a solitary pursuit once the crowd dissipates.
That's my miscellaneous fact.
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