leftovers

As many of you readers know, I am a huge fan of Tiffany. Yes, that Tiffany, the red-haired teen singer from the 80's who hit big with her covers of "I Think We're Alone Now" and "I Saw Him Standing There," as well as her own song "Could've Been." I fell in love with her way back at the tender age of 10 (yes, she will be featured in my "How I Fell in Love With:" blog series eventually) and I have followed her career through the ups and downs. In 2000, she released an amazing and critically-acclaimed album called "The Color of Silence" which revitalized many of her life-long fans (many of us belong to the "True To Tiffany" Yahoo Group) and won many new ones. She began touring constantly and I have been lucky enough to see her live many times now. Following that album and the many hurdles that came with it, she released a dance album most recently called "Dust Off and Dance" and is now set to release two alb...

It was an exciting and productive weekend, and I think I made the most of the extra day (President's Day was Monday). On Friday night, Brandon, Marc and Ben came over and walked down to the $3 theatre with Dylan and I to see Borat. Everyone but Brandon had already seen it once before but we were all excited to see it again. Afterwards, everyone was pretty tired but I wanted something to eat so I walked to 7-11. While I was walking, I called my friend Myles who told me he was going to the Palms because Keoki was DJ'ing there. Even though it was already after 1am I decided to walk down and meeting him, and I'm glad I did cause I actually had a great time, and it was the first chance I'd gotten to hear Keoki spin. (Most people know how obsessed I was with the book and movie "Party Monster" which Keoki was a big part of). The next day, Dylan and I met Brandon out in Malibu at Hoagie's home, aka Seamonster Sounds, to begin work on Food Drinks Music, the third a...

This is a photo of the "Ranch House" (see previous blog) that was sent in to me by my cousin Travis. This photo was taken right after the second floor bedroom addition was completed. ( correction: it was actually taken after the flood, hence the overgrown weeds and lack of cars in the driveway. Thanks, Travis for the info!) You can see parts of the original house behind the addition. This is the South side of the house, and technically this would be considered the "back" side. Around front, facing north, is a porch that spans the entire width of the house and a more "formal" looking door which leads into the foyer which, on the left, has a staircase going up to the second floor hallway, and on the right opens into the formal living room. Of course, back in rural Kansas, folks rarely utilize the front door of a house, opting instead to enter through the backdoor. I don't know what it is that has created this phemonemon. I know the house I grew up in w...

I am working on taking two poems my Grandma Irene wrote, which I have set to my own music, and recording it. The song is called "Recurring Dreams" and it's an eerie coincidence that I have been having a recurring dream of my own lately. The dream doesn't actually repeat itself completely, but the situation is always the same and there are similar elements in each one, with one part of it always occurring in each dream. The situation is that I am living in the "ranch house" which is the house my mom's sister's family lived in for a short time right before she (Sharon) and my uncle Gene divorced. It's a huge, turn-of-the century home that had been in Gene's family since it was built. It is a giant cube, with a basement, a main floor, upstairs, and a very large attic on top. There was also a more recent addition on one side of the house that included a large family room, bathroom and utility room. Later, a bedroom was added on top of that...

My college years were not a time where I discovered a lot of new music. With the internet going from a strange mystery to a daily addiction all within my freshman year, I was spending a lot of time researching the bands and artists I had been listening to since childhood, discovering new facts about them and even some unknown albums. I remember sitting in the computer lab in Tomanek Hall at Fort Hays State University and discovering that Tiffany had an album released in Asia called "Dreams Never Die" that I knew nothing about, and that the Thompson Twins had gone on to form a new band called Babble which had put out an album called "The Stone." So, with all this excitement and the fact that I was pretty much completely busy with school and work during this time, it's no wonder that I mainly stuck with what I knew throughout this period. A few notable exceptions of bands that I discovered while in college include Garbage, Whale, and the band that I'm going t...

I have been shamed into blogging today, since both my brother and sister have already done so. I realize I have written considerably less lately than I had been doing previously; I guess I was "on a roll" so to speak for a short while and now I'm back to my usual sporadic ways. This weekend was full of ups and downs, the biggest down being that I attended the memorial service of my coworker who died tragically in a motorcycle accident on January 25. I had only known him for a few months but I got along with him very well, and I was with him just before it happened. The service was very emotional and difficult for everyone involved. He was only 34 and by all accounts was a very carefree, gentle, happy and optimistic person. We need more people like him in the world, not less. Since moving to Los Angeles, I've known five people close to me who have passed on. Both my fathers parents, my friend Rex, Robert (who was Dylan's mom's boyfriend), and now Alex. ...

This past weekend was a busy one, and was capped off by a Sunday trip to Malibu's Seamonster Studios, where my band Shitting Glitter is putting the finishing touches on some b-sides for our forthcoming single and preparing our plans for recording "Food Drinks Music" - our third full length album. The recording this day mainly involved Brandon's guitar parts for the b-side entitled "Delay" which was an old demo that had been kicking around for a couple of years. I thought it would make a nice addition to the "Slut Buffet" remix single so we dusted it off and are finishing it to sound pretty great. While Brandon spent hours perfecting his guitar riffs, I spent my time shovelling dirt from the hillside driveway that leads down to the home/studio of Hoagie, our friend and co-producer. Over the past few years, dirt has slid down the side of the hill and covered a foot or two of the inside edge of the drive and I wanted to help out since Hoagie always...

Sixteen days into the new year and I have = just returned from a trip to my parents home in Johnson County, Kansas. Some meaningful things have happened, which have put me in a state of mind to consider destiny and direction. While in Olathe, I dug deeper than ever before, excavating long forgotten memories resuscitated by sentimental artifacts from my youth. I perused letters from ex lovers, examined my collection of nametags from various places of employment during high school and college, and watched hours of home videos. Quickly my visit was coming to an end, but with only a couple of hours left before my departure, my mom told me about a box of my grandmother's poetry which she had saved when my grandma had to be moved to a nursing home last summer. I had always felt a special connection with my grandma Irene, and when I was young we used to wrote poetry together and she was always eager to read my work. In recent years, I have felt guilty for not staying in correspondenc...

With the new year came three new (and two fairly new and rediscovered) CD's that I obtained that I have been extremely fond of lately. Belinda Carlisle - "Voila" - her new album (released next month, suckas!) is a collection of classic french pop songs (yes, sung in french) from the 40's - '60's. It is really an amazing album, her first in over a decade, and the arrangements and production are very full and rich. Some have described it as being similar to Massive Attack and Portishead, which isn't exactly accurate but does give sort of an idea as to the overall sound. CSS (Cansei de ser Sexy) - This is a young band from Sao Paola Brazil who are signed to Sub-Pop here in the states. Apparently they gained notoriety in South America primarily from photos of themselves on various photologs and eventually got around to recording an album. The album is actually tons of fun and the broken-english lyrics are extremely fun to sing along with. "Meeting P...

So here it is, the beginning of a new year, and it happens to be the year I turn 30! (Yikes!) I rung in the new year at Hamburger Mary's in Newport Beach because my band had just finished playing three sets there. I will now briefly discuss that experience. We were very happy before the show. First, our hotel room was much bigger and nicer than the hotels we usually get to stay in. It even had a separate bedroom in addition to the bed in the main room. The venue was great. The stage was big and we got our own backstage dressing room. We got to eat for free before the soundcheck. After soundcheck, we got ready in our room and finally came out to play our first set around 9:15pm. There were not as many people there as I would have expected, but I was told by two different waiters that they were expecting a full house. We started with "Mustache Rides Five Cents" and went through the entire set, only dropping one song ("Calendar Girl") so we played 8 songs...

Now I will share with you a very distant and very bizarre memory. It was a time in my life where I lived in fear. I would shudder each time the phone would ring. I would have to run as fast as I could to get to my aunt's house from main street when it was night time. The way it all began was an innocent childhood prank. My friends and my brother and I thought it would be funny to call the operator from our town's pay phone and ask silly questions, many involving a recently deceased woman named Ruby Drake. We would call and ask a question, laugh hysterically and hang up, then call again once we had regained our composure. A short time later, my mother informed me that the KBI (yes, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation) had been sniffing around town, inquiring with local parents, searching for a team of youth who had been committing telephone fraud. Yes, apparently making prank calls from a pay phone was a serious offense, and the KBI was out for blood: my blood. After that...

I hadn't been able to blog about this because it involved a Christmas gift, but I have been completely absorbed with memories of my first band, Singe lately. You see, I decided to produce a short documentary, a la "Behind The Music" to give to my brother Brandon. While working on the project, a couple of amazing things happened. The first was that I called my uncle Ronnie to help me find audio, video, or photos that may be useful for the film. A couple days later, I opened an e-mail from him which contained three Singe recordings, one of which I am sure that neither Brandon or myself had even remembered doing. Two more e-mails followed, equally full of surprises. In all, there were 8 tracks which comprised what we had come to call "the lost Singe album:" Transformation Through Decay . The other thing that happened was that I relived a bunch of memories that I had completely forgotten about for many years. I remember buying the guitar from some guy who live...

I know it's cheesy, tacky, sacreligious and just plain silly but for some reason I do love December, the holiday season, and pretty much for all the wrong reasons. Well, one reason that isn't wrong is the weather here in California. Alternating between "ALMOST" cold, and warm/sunny is just the ideal situation for me. I hate the hot summer weather, but this is just perfect. Secondly, I love shiny, glittery light-up decorations and such, and there is plenty to be found this year. I'm disappointed with myself for not having already gotten a tree and putting up my decorations but I have been rather busy. Which also leads me to what I've been doing that has kept me so busy. Well I am working on music with my band Shitting Glitter, and I have been playing the piano quite a bit more than usual. The other night, I loaded all the demos for the next Shitting Glitter album on to my iPod, hooked that in to my piano, and played along to each song. I was stunned just...

My car hasn't been starting and it's stressing me out. I am able to get it started with a jump, but otherwise it just makes a very pathetic attempt to start and doesn't go any further than that. The lights do still come on, so I don't think it's the battery. Tomorrow, Dylan will jump me in the morning and I'll drive it to the shop. I don't want to dwell on the negative, so I'll talk a little about the holiday weekend. We drove up to Granada Hills on Thursday afternoon to Dylan's sister's house for the first portion of Thanksgiving, which consisted of appetizers and the singing of "happy birthday" to Dylan before we finally had to get back on the road and head to Victorville. We finally got there in the evening and I was so starved by that point, I probably could have eaten the entire turkey by myself. The meal was prepared by a guy named Oscar who looked scary but was very nice. He did an amazing job with the food. Afterwards we...

It is with no small amount of restraint that I attempt to tell this tale without going completely overboard and writing a full-fledged novel. It was, after all, The Thompson Twins who became my first "favorite" band. Although I had dabbled in collecting beginning with Tiffany (I collected all her cassingles and kept them in their own separate carrying case), the Thompson Twins are what started a lifetime of hunting and gathering pop music relics. My earliest, haziest recollection of the Thompson Twins takes place back when my cousin Travis and his family moved out to a very large ranch house and I was helping him unpack, or more likely just obsessively snooping through his belongings. I remember being particularly interested in his "Dynamite" magazine collection. "Dynamite" was one of those full color pop-culture/eductational rags that cool grade schoolers ordered from one of those Weekly Reader type book club pamphlets. Although the magazine was s...

The title of this blog entry is the title of a song. Actually, it was a poem written by my Grandma Irene, and back when I was in high school I put the song to music for her, and recorded it with me singing the vocals over a keyboard preset beat and some really cheesy instrumentation. Last July, just a few days after I had flown to Kansas to visit her and the rest of my family, she suffered a major stroke and is now in a nursing home. She can't really speak or communicate very well other than basic functions like smiling or touching people's hands. My aunt Sharon lives in the same town where my grandma is staying so she visits her often. When my mom and her siblings were cleaning up my grandma's old apartment, Sharon had found the cassette tape that contained "Daydreams of Youth" and played it for her, much to my grandma's delight. Sharon came up with an idea that I could transfer the song onto a compact disc and design an insert for it so it would look l...

I was raised Methodist, and in the town I grew up near, most people my family and I associated with were also Methodist. My grandparents went to the same church I did and we were all very active in it; my grandpa had help build the church and my parents both taught Sunday School, as had my grandma. I think I'm one of the few people in the country, or at least one of the few gay people, who wasn't traumatized by religion. In fact, to be honest, I had a pretty positive experience with my church in general. The worst I can say about it was that it was usually pretty boring and, as a child, it seemed incredibly "uncool" at times. I did go through a couple phases in my childhood where I began to wander down that road of becoming a jesus-freak but luckily it never went too far or lasted very long. I'm always very proud of the fact that even at a very early age I began questioning (and hence, understanding) religion. Once when I was at my grandparents house, I hel...

Only in LA: I just read that yesterday, David Lynch sat himself at the corner of LaBrea and Hollywood Blvd., with a cow on a leash, and a giant banner of Laura Dern that read "For Your Consideration." There was also a banner that read "Without cows, there would be no cheese in the Inland Empire." Inland Empire, of course, is the name of Lynch's new film, starring Laura Dern. I haven't seen the movie yet (as far as I know the only local screening was at the Arclight for $20 a pop) but I do plan on seeing it eventually. I became a fan of Lynch's through the early 90's television series Twin Peaks and have watched every movie he has put out since then. (I will write my "how I fell in love with: twin peaks" blog sometime in the future). I really wish I would have found out about Lynch's impromptu meet-and-greet a day earlier so I could have actually gone and met him. My office is very near to that intersection and I could have use...

Celebrating the new democratic majority of the house (and now the senate!!! woo hoo!) has been a fun and exhilirating experience! In the few short years since I've been actively participating in my country's politics and government this is the first time I've felt like there was good news or hope for the future. When I first became aware of politics, it was because of my anger over the state of the nation under George Bush, who I had previously only thought of as incompetent in an embarrassing yet harmless way. Then I started to pay attention (thanks in large part to my boyfriend Dylan who opened my eyes alot after we started dating) and realized that it wasn't funny, and it wasn't just embarrassing; it was dangerous. When the dire situation in the white house even starts to spread out through the most innocuous sources of pop culture, it's time to say "Houston, we have a problem." After learning the facts, I was still naive enough to believe ther...

Today is November 7, Election Day, and the first thing I did after leaving the house was voting. I proudly wear my "I Voted" sticker and a red and white shirt today (I don't own a full on "stars and stripes" shirt, thank the lord!). Obviously I voted primarily for all the Democratic candidates, and I researched my choices for propositions and what not by consulting the Stonewall Democratic club's website as well as the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce (whose Legislative Action committee I'm supposed to be serving on, but haven't made it to a meeting in some time.) Anyway voting is fun and exciting especially when good news is forecast, so I'm anxious to see the results tonight. I was once a very apolitical person, having gone through the various phases of making up excuses for not voting: "my vote doesn't count," "I don't know anything about politics," "the elections are rigged anyway"... etc. Until I final...