Low Level Bureaucrats 3 update

Today, I am continuing the work on Low Level Bureaucrats 3. With many of the main characters already in place, so far it has been an exercise in organization--it seems to go better when I plan it before I go full steam ahead writing it. So far it’s main inspiration comes from the recent gubernatorial election in Maryland, where (then) incumbent Bob Erlich’s strategy seemed to be to shit all over Baltimore. It didn’t work.
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New Davey G and the Keyboard show announcement soon! Keep an eye out!

Catch up on the Low Level Bureaucrats Saga!


www.daveygandthekeyboard.com

A Secret Glimpse into the Davey G Studio

Slowly I’ve attempted to make the compromise between “me” time and putting effort into the Davey G. projects, like getting my studio together. I now have two keyboards, a broken chair, a karaoke machine, a half-broken big tape recorder I’ve had for 15 years--all within reach from said chair.
This is where I work hard on my new songs for my next album: Chairman of the Keyboard. And the one after that, which I will call Songs I’ll Apologize for Later.
I know what you’re saying: “This is what you call together?”

http://www.daveygandthekeyboard.com

notes on songs, What I Can Learn From Weird Al

Working on a little Davey G. Sampler, for local jukebox play. Not a big project, not for sale or anything, just something I’ve been thinking about. It’s funny to think about all the songs I never play anymore, and how different (at least, to me) the new songs are from the days of the Generica cassette.
I wrote a new song yesterday, with the help of the Casiotone, based on a joke that has been in my head for years. I want to write a lot of songs and then cut out the crap. So far, the process has yielded about 8 songs I like, and about a half dozen that could go either way. One thing: Weird Al, whom I greatly admire, has a habit of making even his not-that-funny songs hilarious, all based on his energy. Just watch the Eat It Video sometime. While the song is funny in it’s own right, the video is double-plus funny because of the absolutely over-the-top dead seriousness and energy he puts into it. He is silly, but he means it.
I could learn a lot from that.
www.daveygandthekeyboard.com

Davey G Writing thoughts...

I’ve come to realize that the way I write has changed over the years. Whereas I used to write the way that I spoke, now I seem to write more the way that I think, with all the messiness of human thought, non-sequiturs, random references, etc.
I’m pretty much writing every day now, and it is easy to get into patterns that only make sense to me. Though I primarily write for myself, it is still nice when other people can get the jokes. Or maybe keeping with my sort of cult status, I need to store those random little gems in my stories or songs that maybe only a handful will understand, a la Matt Groening. It’s tough. In this, I see yet another reason why it is so hard to achieve financial success in any creative field: you drive yourself crazy thinking about what people will like, as opposed to what you want to do.
I realize relatiblity is something I need to keep in mind when I write. I have never wanted to be one of those “look how clever I am” writers, incomprehensible or boring. I would like to write clear, plot-driven stories that are funny with funny characters but that make sense. After all, what good is writing shit that nobody gets? Unless of course it amuses me. (You see the problem.)


Eat the Corn Flakes, Karl.

www.daveygandthekeyboard.com

Books/Roving Mars

Stuff I’m Reading:


Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet by Steve Squyres.

I have always been interested by Mars and this book promised to follow the journey of Spirit and Opportunity, the two unmanned rovers that landed on the planet in 2004. Steve Squyres was the principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rover Mission, and this book starts with the earlier failed proposals before he finally got the call with this mission.
Squyres discusses things like the politics of NASA, budget issues, and the natural animosity between scientists and engineers--which is the result of the two having very different philosophies. The Engineer operates under the “get it done” real world approach whereas the Scientist hopes to reach for the skies, at times leading to unworkable ambitions. After much discussion it was decided that the best way to approach it would be to use two different Martian rovers, to build a redundancy into the system should one fail (much like my two keyboard system!).

Part two is all about the development of the rovers. As this mission unfolds the scientist vs. engineer gap must be closed to make them succeed.

Part three then takes a day by day look at what happened on the mission, from launch to landing on Mars. You really feel Squyres’ triumph when Spirit lands on Mars and his pain when they lose contact with it later. The rest of the book takes from his journals as the two rovers drive around doing “science stuff” and taking pictures. The pictures are great, the writing is heavy-scientific but aimed at the layman (there is a glossary in back) and overall it is a good read.
As a big Star Trek fan I look at things like this as the baby steps man will take on his way to greater things…like warp drive and visiting planets with blue aliens that Captain Kirk can bang.

www.daveygandthekeyboard.com

Re: Talking Head Closing, last post

One more letter about the city paper’s awful, asshole-ish treatment of the Talking Head Club owner was printed today. Here it is.

Unless someone else writes a really good letter, I will now move on from this subject--I just felt it was really important that everybody see the response to this "article."

www.daveygandthekeyboard.com

Casiotone CT 380

A generous benefactor has given the Davey G. Project a new keyboard, a Casiotone CT 380, which is comparable to the Kawai X20 I use now. It’s a really great machine and has opened up all kinds of new possibilities for bad pop songs. It also has assuaged my secret fears about what would happen to my act if something were to happen to my Kawai x20 (which, in fact, already has one back-up, and is kept in a secret location so that the two will never be together and suffer the same fate in case my house were to be broken into or burn down or whatever)--now I know that I can play some of the songs on a different machine. Or I could actually learn to play the keyboard better. But as one of my musician friends once said to me, “Yeah, I’ve been saying that for ten years.”


www.daveygandthekeyboard.com

Re: Talking Head Closing

City Paper published some of the feedback about this Talking Head Club smearjob of last week, which I wrote about on 1/6.
Here's the link to the letters page.
http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=13122


www.daveygandthekeyboard.com

Crazy Keyboard Solo!

I think anytime I have new material I don’t really feel good about it unless my gut reaction to listening to it is “Oh my God, that’s awful!” As in, just plain wrong.
Two new songs I’m working on: Childhood Pain (I’m a Bucket) and Bad Posture. I guess expressing the angry/funny things together is what is appealing to me right now. I wrote the first one on a long Friday at work and the other I just wrote during my practice yesterday.

www.daveygandthekeyboard.com

Talking Head Club Closing

I realize this is a day late and a dollar short, but I had a few words about the demise of the Talking Head Club, a place at which I'd played a number of shows in the last 2 years. They were always good to me, fair, and made me sound great. They were never hard to deal with and they deserved to succeed, because as many of us in Baltimore know, there are precious few gatekeepers of music and culture in this town--it was nice to know that one of them was not an asshole. While it is gone now, hopefully it will come back later and be better than ever.
And by the way, here's this ridiculously irresponsible article in the City Paper about this. As you read it ask yourself this question: does this guy really deserve to have his (fairly mundane) legal troubles aired publicly, simply because he is someone who runs (ran) a rock club--something that loosely serves the community and was a great venue for bands like me? And how would you like it if your little secrets were aired like this? Fuck fuck fuck fuck the City Paper!
http://citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=13102

Low Level Bureaucrats 3 update

I am continuing work on Low Level Bureaucrats 3: the End of the Trilogy. Part of me really just wants to say screw the structure and just have fun with the jokes. But what are jokes without structure? So here I’m goofing on the fact that I’m writing another sequel.

Politics was bullshit, as far as Karl Love was concerned. He had tried manipulating politics to achieve his goals and been thwarted far too often: first, as mayor of Pittsfield, caught ripping up parking tickets; then, as advisor to the mayor of Beatown, he was caught…ripping up parking tickets. Then sidetracked as a case of Freudian Slip kept him locked away for over a year, then drafted to fight the good fight for legalized gambling, thwarted by the thugs from Las Degas. It was all just so contrived. Politics never got him anywhere, just wound up with him managing to escape at the end and leaving the door open for a sequel. But now, after having read “The 7 habits of marginally effective people” he knew that he had an addictive personality, and big issues with co-dependency.

But he wasn’t Karl Love anymore. He was Kyle Jones. And Kyle Jones was a new man who didn’t care about politics. All that was left now was to destroy the city of Beatown, to close out the loose ends of the last several years of his life.

www.daveygandthekeyboard.com

Happy 2007!

Happy 2007!

“Hello, I’m here to destroy your life”--a zine about bad roommates. That’s the new name of the project. I have one submission so far, and I invite more people to do the same.

In modern society, it is often practical and expedient to find a like-minded individual with whom to share a living space and expenses. This ‘zine is about when that arrangement goes bad.
Keep your eyes open…
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Stuff I’m Reading (hopefully a new feature of the Blog for 2007)
Better For All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity by Harry Bruinius. This book is about the eugenics movement in the early part of the 20th century, and about how much stock people put in the idea of superior breeding: trying to breed out negative traits through forced sterilization of inferior and feeble-minded individuals. Inevitably, it caused many to play God and many who were not defective mentally or physically were affected. And then there was the effect of the Nazi Party, which was the main contributor to the death of the movement (along with the death of the men who developed the idea) who ironically used many of the same rationalizations for their actions from what had been going on in America.
The main thing I got out of this book was that I think people from so-called lower classes make our culture a hell of a lot more colorful than ones from “superior breeding.” And that there is a slippery slope whenever anyone tries to fuck with biology. After all, I saw Jurassic Park just like the rest of you.

www.daveygandthekeyboard.com