D's Journal
precisions
today i was remembering this time when i was a very wee fledgeling and i was with my parents in the french quarter, new orleans, and somewhere we came upon this painter who was painting upon a canvas with very tiny detail- he was in the middle of some scene which entailed a whole wall or road of little red bricks seen from far away, and he was patiently creating the tiny little rectangles with precision and perfection. i came up to him curious and wide-eyed to see what he was doing, and i will never forget- he turned to me and said, 'you want to paint a couple bricks? go ahead..' and i couldn't believe.. i was just this little boy- 'i can't paint..' to which he quickly responded, 'of course you can, go ahead' and i took the brush and proceeded to try to do what he was doing, but was only able to put a couple of terrible-looking red splotches next to his finely tuned rows of bricks. he then said 'good job' and somehow took the brush and made what i had done look natural and in place. unfortunately now all my naivete is gone and looking back on it i can see that he probably was trying to get my parents to buy his art, but back then.. my god.. it was such a huge moment to me because.. here was this stranger who came into my existence and out of the blue took my rapidly-forming perception of what i could do, of who i was, of what was possible, and who led me to a place of fear and showed me that all of those percetions could be broken, that if i thought away from that box i could become more, that in creation there is a safe landing haven for anything. and so the tiniest detail will sometimes make the biggest changes for us. i sometimes, every now and again catch myself feeling like that little daniel, where a stranger will come into my life and make me feel as though my seeming mistakes, my sometimes fearful and highly likely strokes of personness away from the norm, are only part of the loving process, part of the order and beauty i place upon my sphere.
i am thinking right now that i am grateful for you, you all-seeing stranger-artist..
daniel lee fashion tip of the day
sometimes the shoe manufacturing companies' designers have a little too much caffeine and will create a masterpiece of shape, contour, comfort, and design, but it can all come tumbling down when the sometimes last step-- color detailing-- comes along and they get a little schizophrenic. thus oftentimes you may find a great pair of comfortable kicks with fine shape and dazzling style lonely in a clearance bin somewhere because they are of a color hue that will go with no outfit anyone this human race of creatures has owned since beverly hills cop. do not cast your eyes from this remote corner! give these people your shillings and then go home knowing the secret that there are not many pairs of shoes that a good black sharpie cannot cover with subtlety and class.
oakland cemetary
I think it can pretty much be considered a sign of being on a budget when you sleep in your car because you are in no condition to drive it to a place of residence to sleep. Tho I can definitely think of times when there was no place of residence to drive it to. All things considered, I am happy to wake up today to the sunny realness of knowing quite a lot more today than I did yesterday about the people I had been choosing to put in my consciousness.
Last night I ended up skimming the cityline for the first time in who knows how long and feeling good to finally be back in the mass of population and culture and moving and shaking that it is. I found myself at a place called Six Feet Under which is cool enough already, resembling just about the flyest show around, but with the craziest bunch of Southern jabbering friendly folks resembling people in some sort of Lyle Lovett song about Texas, except they were from Mississippi and Georgia and Florida. Anyway I have rarely known such excitable down home bar jukebox crazed alligator tail eating bullshitting fineness. If any one of you ever reads this, thank you for the countless screaming orgasm shots.
So I am glad to be back home in my own space and fully running my own day and hearing stories from my roommate about the state of world order. Or at least county order. Today I met with Heather and gave her all the materials to do the graphic layout of the disc, and I feel smashingly charged that she’s got all the right programs and caffeine and capabilities and enthusiasm and vision.
And I feel an odd sense of newness to everything, like I was so long crawled up in this little rathole so sensitive to other people’s whims and trying to speak with my being but feeling more like a character on a sitcom who is trying to get out something important that the watching audience knows and is waiting for but who can’t get a word in, who is being blindly overtalked and outvoted by the zealous lots blabbering around him. But now I know that most importantly I just need to speak to myself, and to feel what it is around me that gives me goodness and what does not. And I feel that changing. I’m so sick of constantly taking in what and who is bad for me out of some sort of obligation or false sense of self denial as to what it/they are and not even realizing it. I just want to associate with solidness and breathe from my essence and my music and my vibe that I’m just going to spend my time on what is ultimately good for me.
My e-mail was messed up and frozen for a few days, and I think the hacks at lsu finally maybe got it back up and running this afternoon. But I’m really not complaining I used to be one of those hacks working at the computer labs, basically just surfing and melting my brain into the mindless ocean of pixels and going to pick up a virtual welfare check every couple weeks. I think that was my last real, like W-4 job besides teaching. My my.
I’m off to see outsideness. I found in a thrift store this little squeaky rubber toy with a buddha sitting in meditative position in front of a laptop, and that's what i feel like lately with all this lyric layout laptop loopiness. More later.
hands
i think probably a good problem to have is the feeling of overwhelm with trying to have enough time to do what you need to do and spend enough time with everyone you want to before you leave town. i have gratitude in my heart that there exists here things like lakes and newly refurbished houses and jack in the crack and mexican restaurants and two-in-the-morning cooking and places that have been staples since early days of dreamhood and places that remind me that simply everything... everything is rapidly changing. and the original nintendo last nite. i think that's where i left off the video game world was the first nintendo. and i also think there is something to the simplicity of what it was that remains a perfect balanced regimen of everything a video game really should be. we kicked some serious ass in double dragon. and i don't think there was any blood in the ass-kickage either. maybe the pixels are too big.
the show was cool because adam played the drums like a mad bandito. there wasn't much to be done in there except play furiously like mad banditos. and there were people who showed up whom i haven't seen in oceans of time, people whose russian-exchange housemates i've written songs about and people from back in the m's days requesting songs like mullet girl and the like.. we had fun but it was a kinda dark harrowing moody setting too. the next show in b.r. will pretty much be the opposite. anyway it was cool hearing jason's stuff along with the funky beats as well. i actually want to play some show with somebody where we just leave on the pulsating beat of techno, and we just play all our songs to that beat.. whether we have to speed them up or slow em down or what. the entire night to a rave-core flashy soup of exstalicious groove.
the other nite we watched dvd box o' aquateen hunger force till no more consciousness. i like that stuff. and also the way adam laughs at it.
thank you in advance to anyone helping with this process of getting the album ready to go and in people's hands, lots of hands. they're not just for shaking anymore.
we have a monopoly on weird...
just got back from SXSW music conference in austin, and i must say that the place was kind of funny. but i always find humor in places where there is a homogenized alternative. here is an event where there are masses of people roaming and flooding the streets ALL trying to look as completely rock n roll as possible, all trying to earn their weight in originality and marketability, and from a bystander's point of view there was irony in the fact that here is this huge rush of 'fight the machine, we raise our fist to the norm' mentality but really every sweaty indie grungy rocker together in a city can blend into a nice even canvas much like the texture of a chocolate chip mint frup from starbuck's. to top it off there was even the newly-marketed catchphrase 'keep austin weird' slogan being cast everywhere and sold on t-shirts from corners for 18 bux, you know, just to make sure everyone kept in mind that austin is truly different from the rest, that it can't be labeled..(!?) or sold-out.
but after having said that i _was_ able to see lots if inspiring and wonderful stuff and was able to present some sampler cds to people and try to sell my music like everyone else. nice sweaty good time. saw rachael sage play at an interesting bar with free samples of nutrition bars made just for women, i'm hoping not to grow tits, and that was stellar as always given the loud crazy circumstance.
i wished i had a travelling enterrage, because i in the process have developed a new rule for riding through the city of houston. whenever you pass one, the occupants must in a loud and high pitched voice pronounce 'TACO CABANA' and with stealth, and the last one to notice and say must pay the price. the price of course to be decided upon said trip.
so i have finished the recording of my album, and about that i feel wonderfied, but i have come to the point after poring over it so much that i have lost any semblance of objectivity to it whatsoever.
tuesday and wednesday adam and i began filming for the video for 'the importance of being furnished' at this military base/former leper colony where everything is dark and moody and open and surreal, at least to me, and hopefully we got some good footage that doesn't look too... well, that looks like the video for ozzy's 'no more tears'. tho noone can touch the exuberence of zakk wilde taking a guitar solo in whatever dungeon was available with his hair being fanned everywhere and acting like every note gives him immense pain.
anyway one more show and then i'll be off soon. i miss my peach state, and the people in it. but the people here have been quite fabulous as well.
beads of la la la
if i could perfectly bottle the feeling of riding in the back of a truck thru the old garden district neighborhoods of baton rouge after the st. patrick's day parade on a saturday eating red beans and rice from a styrofoam plate looking at the bustling drunken crowds flush with beads wearing silly green clothes and soaking up the louisiana sun with an irish gypsy and talking about nothing in particular, i would.
anyway, i love that occasion, and i'm glad this year i was not repressed enough to miss it. it is good to watch the same people thru many years do what they do and grow so much but then still remain vitally the same people. and i love loving where i come from. a lot of days i do.
wow so where to begin about the album making? i have a mastered copy of my new record in my hands, and though it is not gonna be the final one (we are making our notes on the mastering and reconvening soon for the final version) i feel pretty blatently amazed and intoxicated by the fact that it exists.
middle of last week we spent an entire night just knocking everything out for the final tune, and i ended up singing the vocals at like 5 AM on a night i would never have guessed i'd be doing it. we just kept pushing onward and onward and the tune just kind of created itself until it was time to sing it. the following eve rach came in and played some oboe parts on it and made it soar in a way that normal guitars and everyday instruments could not have.
then came my b-day. can i just say that i very rarely have felt so warm? thank you so much to anyone who called, wrote, etc. i absolutely felt overwhelmed by the fact that all the people who did had the kindness and thoughtfulness to remember me, make me feel good for being 'round. and on that day came the most beautiful package in the mail. i still can't believe what was inside.
and while i was kind of waiting for some on the town fun that day, adam called me in the afternoon wanting to work, and when i took the split second to consider it, there was truly nothing i could think of that i would rather be doing on my b-day than mixing the last songs of my record. so we worked late into the nite on that, and then or the next day we went right on into mastering. i know i came up with the final order on my b-day, and like the others it is definitively the only order that truly makes sense to me. it is like a little puzzle that i have figured out.
lanky came to town on his tour, and last nite we played the neutral ground in new orleans together. bohemian crowd with many different sorts, and not-so-good sound. it was a misty murky night, and we had much more fun afterwards drinking and eating on carrolton making light of the finnish tourists we met and getting the inside on the restaurant workplace scandals. i need to remember to buy beads in a nola tourist shop that say 'u.s.a.' all down them myself..
anyway i have the oddest hours and the funniest schedule that surprises me each day. i hope it continues this way. i would hate actually waking up and knowing exactly what my week was to consist of.
sempi ternam
i got to see the likes of the latuso camp over in st. francisville, and while i think it has been known in the past for wonderful excursions of partydom and debauchery, we just used it this time to get away, talk, read on the pier, play on the guitar, watch dvd drama. we were talking about how on one side the neighbors are nice and friendly, and on the other side are bitter sadist pricks who call the cops any time they can and are just looking for something to take difference in. i was wondering whether this was a pretty good microcosmic representation of humanity too, as long as we were in the place for reflection. but i guess in the end i just like to believe that all humans are basically, originally good and they just do bad things.
went to carrville and pretty much finished up 'starboard' with adam, and it was a crazy process because we had to edit the entire tune and create a whole nother verse just because of my stupidity and lack of foresight when playing the parts. but it made me glad to think of the fact that i am amidst the grace of modern day recording and that we could proceed on with relatively little heartache.
so for the rest of this week we will be attacking the very last tune, and i feel so hyped about this. people will see why i've dropped off the face of the planet, why i've needed this time and space, that i am not lost in the past of my music but have a whole new creed and language to believe in and slice through the jungles with.
thursday is my b-day so if anyone has any good ideas about how to bring in this year with the best of em, get in touch. i wanted to be out gallavanting with my posse in the city i love, but it looks like i will be in the bred grounds for this one.
komets...
last nite hopped up on double shot expresso i finished writing the last of the last, and sometimes i look at these things afterward and i truly don't even know where they came from. like that whole shpeal of tori where she treats her songs like girls that have visited her and who are outside of her- well it's not a load of malarkey at least the way i see it i know that feeling quite well.
and so i feel like if any sort of media saw me bouncing around the house here with my unfettered energy built on excitement about these recordings, i would be cast to the madhouse or the tabloids about strange people doing strange things for sure but i really can only see a glimmer of the outside world right now cast on the wall like the allegory of the cave or something. i don't care.
went to the foge's house last night and eventually got into talking about borrowing a world-class amp from him made by the acclaimed mike kennedy, but we got off on the track we always get on, him telling me how to hugely improve my life by the mere virtue of writing purely accessable hits and me trying to describe to him why i can't just do that. for me.
but i borrowed the amp and i can't wait to crank the thing in the cathedral-type place we are 'bringing the studio to' tonite.
lori and i began the 'my so-called life' boxed set and we were pretty amused at just how different we had become, from the silly lil baboons who once upon a time completely idolized something about that perspective, but now it's funny to watch someone of that age who simply has nothing nice at all to say for the world. rayanne still rocks tho.
it was cool seeing what i had forgotten about the lsu campus too. free-preach alley, i mean free-speech alley has this new addition where it's this little roman-type stone structure where if you stand in the middle of it and talk, and your voice bounces back upon you all huge and weird from a million different directions like you are creating the world or something. really i think the people who speak out there already heard themself like that anyway, so i think it was pretty unneccesary. but i'm sure that's the first thing in lsu funding that is.
i'm off to have some of my father's creole cuisine. i'm sure the starches will calm me down properly.