Crazy Leftovers

A month or two ago I caught an episode of Everyday Italian on leftovers where Giada De Laurentiis, sexy goddess of Italian cooking, did this crazy spaghetti pie thing, Torta di Pasta. Last week I went out for Italian and got mediocre spaghetti, which I barely ate. Tonight I got ambitious and went for the Torta. I don't have a broiler in my crappy hotel room, so I just flipped it in the pan and grilled it (or is it frying?) on both sides. It landed sort of half-way between an omelette and pizza. I think Giada could pick hers up but mine's not quite solid enough for that. Anyway, it's still frickin' delicious. And the kids can pop a slice in the microwave for a great anytime snack! tagged food

Acoustic Duo Music

In early January, before my friend Adam rolled off the current project, we sat down to do some super-rudimentary recording of some of the songs we'd been playing in our (roughly) weekly guitar sessions at the hotel. It was one microphone sitting in the room a few feet away, and consequently pretty poor quality. It was also the first time we'd tried recording anything, so we were hardly at our best. The recordings are still sort of worth listening to if you're bored (or if you're Adam or me). (Actually, maybe you need to be both bored and either Adam or me. Anywhere, here it is.) The numbers represent the take numbers. Non-consecutive numbers are due to extremely bad takes in between. (I mean REALLY bad.)

• Cathy's Clown (can't stop, 4) covering the Everly Brothers
• BreakInTheClouds (remember anything, 5 6 or 7) covering the Jayhawks
• PassengerSide (falls apart, 8) covering Wilco
• PassengerSide (again, 9)
• TwoOfUs (alright, 10) covering the Beatles
• DoYouBelieveInMagic (now, 11) covering the Lovin' Spoonful
• DoYouBelieveInMagic (13)
• BreakInTheClouds (scared, 14)
• BreakInTheClouds (fivesh, 15)

The low quality of the performances and recordings probably guarantees no one will have a problem with these being posted, but if you've got a bug up some hole, just let me know and I'll remove the thing.

Where have I been?

Wherever. But heavens it's been a long time since I posted.

• I had an exciting time last Sunday -- you're going to laugh -- burning a CD. I used WaveBurner Pro (which comes with Logic Pro) to burn myself a super-sweet driving disc:
  • The Arcade Fire's 'Funeral' in its entirety,
  • all six of the Okkervil River tracks that they have up for download on their web site,
  • and some odd Akron/Family track from their split with Angels of Light.
  WaveBurner Pro allows you to visually arrange the CD by having tracks overlap. You can control the way they cross-fade (if at all) in detail, and place the CD track divisions precisely. The whole mix would have been eighty minutes, forty-nine seconds if not for my smooshing the songs together just a bit, which ultimately cut the playing time by about 2 minutes over the course of the mix. The highlight is where Okkervil's 'The War Criminal Rises and Speaks' runs directly into their 'Red' with feedback from the first song in key with the second. WaveBurner also supports writing CD Text, readable by the CD player in my work rental car.
• It looks like I'll be in the Philadelphia area for work for quite a bit longer.
• My roommate Shana suggested last night that she and I start a band. This indicates a reversal of her previous move to conciously give up on music so that it would stop weighing on her as one of a thousand things she should be doing.
• I haven't been doing music stuff as much as I'd like, and that weighs on me.