6/9/05
I know, I know. Dave’s been a lazy blogger. I’m on it. You know what happens – you get hit by those early summer doldrums. That’s the part of your brain that’s still habituated to the idea of three-month-long summer vacations. That you’re sitting at your desk and it’s final exams year-round is a shock that never quite manages to fully evaporate.
When we were kids, we thought that Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer in a Day” was pure fantasy – how little we knew.
Shake it off, shake it off. Focus and try to put words together in a sentence.
Anyway, band stuff: mind our appearance, we’re under construction. The sound of the expanded “Meddle” line-up was so boss that we’ve decided to try to apply that to Copper Man proper. We’ve added Ansley Lancourt (Bran’s twin) on guitar, Bran’s taken over bass, and I’ve moved to keys. While I’ll admit that I’m going through bass withdrawal, the last few practices have begun to bear very promising results. The sound is more lush and intricate; maybe if you’re good boys and girls, I’ll post some rehearsal songs.
The drawback for me, personally, is the backache of my loyalty to vintage keyboards. I simply can’t deal with the sound of a synthesized piano. A synth is a synth, and a piano is a piano. So, when we want the sound of a Rhodes, that means I have to cart around something roughly the size and weight of the coffin of an adolescent boy. Curse my unwavering aesthetic purity! Curse my throbbing sciatic nerve!
Next time, I’ll reveal how I’ve abandoned my faith and bought a Roland VK-8 organ synth, and how you, too, can live a completely hypocritical life and still sleep at night!
Anyway, Summer 2005 is Copper Man’s woodshed time, so look for us back out on stage, larger and in charger, around August.
In the meantime, I promise to post to the blog weekly. Every Friday, there will be something new here. Something pedantic and misguided, but new.
Other stuff:
Back in April, I took a class in Flash. Ah, the mysterious Flash! Anyway, that’s another topic I’ll write more about, but I did want to share a few photos from the facility. The class was held at one of those weird industrial parks that are an odd aberration of the late 20th century. This one happened to be off in the middle of a field, with the field itself being in the middle of Connecticut.
In the classroom, just to make sure that you, as a student/cog, were feeling properly motivated, were hung three of those un-ironically Soviet derived “Work is Great” posters. Bear in mind, these were presented in a row, for maximum impact:
I don’t get the logic behind these ‘inspirational’ posters. If someone in my workspace put poorly executed corporate propaganda up like this to motivate me, my only motivation would be to quit and instead pursue subsistence farming. The effect isn't inspiring, it's downright depressing.
On a more cheerful note, I discovered there was a sex ed class down the hall, and they had their own set of motivational posters:
See you next Friday.
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Link: Courtesy of Kristen, some scientific gloom n' doom for you: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/origins/univ-flash.html