journal . Ben Sommer

Yo Yo Yo

My 'house' is finally in order. It is truly bitchen. That jail bait Martha Stewart has nothing on it. The first floor ceiling has been re-sheetrocked - a pretty hellish job for anyone. And the floor was refinished by a couple illiterate Vietnamese blokes. Not sure if they were even legal - we paid $500 in cash - the only labor we didn't do ourselves. If nothing else, these asian immigrants are extrememly industrious and entrepeneurial. They drove down from Boston, though they advertised in the Plymouth Yellow Pages as though they were local.

For those of you keeping score, I am acquiring more and more of libertarian ideas - thanks in small part to the entertaining Jay Severin and company on 96.9 in Boston. He and his ilk are basically Rush Limbaugh with a baudy sense of humor. Moderate political people like me realize that it is no fun to be a liberal in a place like Boston. You're just another sheep - or lemming, as the case may be (see Massachusett's last election results).

Extremist History

I think being a student of American and English history greatly broadens one's viewpoint. From looking at the prevailing attitude among people highly educated in the history of ideas, politics, art, and philosophy - you'd think that everyone who mattered in history was a liberal. But, really reading history - without a bias - shows you that this battle we wage - between liberal and conservative ideas, and that seems so fresh and invigorating to us - is really an old tired one. People have always bickered about poor vs. rich, tax vs. belt-tighten, faith vs. free will, etc. Reading history gives you pause, and shows you just how hardly special we are. For my part, I totally buy what Churchill says... "Show me a young Conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains. Nearing 30, I feel myself beginning to round this particular curve.

On the pop-history front, PBS's Ben Franklin series was pretty good. His own autobiography was even better.

The Next Phase

I already have 4 songs for the next album in the bag - just need to be recorded (See earlier lyrics - Young Turks, I Married a Prostitute, etc.). In fact, here's a revised version of Young Turks lyric. A little dadaist, silly and punky. Zappa, and maybe a little Beck White-Boy-Rap style to it. The aid of several online rhyming/thesaurusizing tools were helpful...

young turks
forty-odd feet
of kerosine fuel
fires the hot young turks

muscled athletes
jocked up on caffeine
fires the well-hung jerks

pansy wholewheat
a pacifists treat
fires the fat houseworker

my turk of a mule
packing coca paste
could not equel
the yule log fuel fire
of the hot young turks

young turks
stank like camels
hung like chinchillas
burly young gorillas
hair-net latinos
drag racing their camaros

[guitar solo]

young turks
forty-odd feet
of kerosine fuel
fires the hot young turks

courtly quad teats
of seventeen school
girls in their taut clung shirts

pussy-wipped pete
raised on wolverine stool
sired in a low-slung yurt

swarthy vice-squad secretes
nitrosamine drool
fired in the dot com bubble burst

salty cod treats
swimming in the cesspools
expired when caught, hung, and burnt

warty roughshod feet
in mujahedeen school
fundamentalistani turkmenistani

sporty soccer cleat
of propylene ghouls
rikitikitavi

fatty on my feet
stiffy in my bleep
roiling out a burp

printing out a spreadsheet
of philistine boolean
algebra of whatnot and whatnot

The End in Sight

We'll, today I finished the last composing/recording piece to go onto the new Mishmosh album. There's only the drums and a keyboard part to do on a couple of the songs, which will go much faster since I'll have ringers doing those parts. After a Guiness to celebrate, I began mixing down Cloaca Maxima, a tune I was worried about, but which will turn out pretty good. A key effect I've discovered is the idea of a 'Chorus'. The greeks had chanting choruses, which evened-out and projected a block of verse, and lent meaning to the first person plural. Catholic monks perfected the near-unison, monophonic chorus. And in the modern electric guitarists array of creative sound-fudging devices is the chorus pedal, which basically splits a signal into two parts and alternately up-tunes and de-tunes both parts, to give the illusion that there is more than one guitar there. That's the idea I've been using in recording my vocal parts lately. It really fattens up a vocal line, and helps obscure any slight mis-tuned notes. And, I like the way my voice sounds! Friends have told me it has a distictive tone. We'll see what the masses have to say when I start my marketing push. Speaking of...

Viral Marketing

Today I also began what will evolve into a Meat-Eating Marketing Machine (MMM). I start by insinuiating my name into appropriate newsgroups (alt...songrwriter, composer, recording, marketing, etc.). The idea is to create name recognition from the grass roots. The place to start, if you're an internet musician, is with the hardcore Net junkies. Later I'll start posting MP3's onto the major sites, and offer free reviews to other bands at those sites.

I also purchased the domain name for the umbrella company the record will be released under - One True Dog Records. Very weird - forget how it came to me. No I remember - it was a lyric to a song I left half finished - something like 'bang bang one true dog'. For press interviews I could make up something interesting like how I saw a street preacher speaking in tongues and ranting about the 'one true doG', when he really meant to say 'One True God'.