The Infinite Napkin

Spent the other weekend visiting family in SE Colorado. As promised, pics.
Wiley, taken from the step of my sister’s house. The rental car I got in Pueblo can be seen at right. Somehow ended up with the exact same make model and color car that Tracy has. Crazy. The shifter was supposed to be automatic, but in the “D” slot there was a + and a -. Every 20mph the engine went RRRRRRRRRRR like it was working way too hard. A thunk to the + and it settled down. There’s no clutch, but there’s this very videogame-like version of Manual. Weird.

In Lamar proper, where I lived from ages 2-15. The tan building is the old Halliburton Camp that my Dad ran while we lived there. When Halliburton transitioned from Oil Well Servicing to let’s call it Evil, a lot of these camps (yes they called them camps) were closed. The white building to the left was their cement plant. They tell me this was a trucking company for a while, and now it just sits there, framed by a Subway sign.I think this is Holly.
More big sky shots. It’s something I miss. Lubbock had it too.Out at the Lamar Cemetery. Tracy, Jessica, Jerri, and Mom. We were hunting up some tombstones for my neverending genealogy research.
They built a no-kidding coal plant INSIDE CITY LIMITS in Lamar. It hasn’t fired up yet–that’s for the courts to decide. My question is, did the city planners get new Lexuses or something? This thing is the Lamar skyline at night. It’s the tallest thing for miles. It’s just like the little contradictions I use to make cities come alive in my writing. Cities are made with bizarre compromises.

We’re confirmed for the Minnesota Fallcon (the new to me web address: http://midwestcomicbook.com/ ), so all systems are go! Was in Colorado to see the family for several days. Stories and pics and movies to come.

Last year I self-released an hour-long bit of reductive sonic madness called Organelle (wearing my There Goes Neutro hat). It was originally an installment of a radio show on Iowa City Free Radio several years ago (when it was still over by Dirty John’s), and it was a fun challenge. Every two weeks I had to produce an hour of original noise; it was a great way to hunker down and just make stuff.

Somewhere in the teens of shows ICFR picked up a program director who didn’t think people who showed up consistently and on-time for their shows were punk enough, or something. So poof went the show. Organelle was made entirely from an advance frame noise from a Life Of Jesus filmstrip record. It was about two seconds long. I then set about chopping this two seconds into as many pieces I could before the cut lines started to blot each other out entirely.

Enter the instrument I know how to play better than any other: Winamp. With a few touches to the fade-in and out timing (barely thousandths of a second), I played the pieces on random for an hour and there you go.

A single hour-long track is too mean even for me. I hacked it into quarters, and here’s the fourth one. I did nearly a dozen shows for ICFR, but some are more successful than others–laughing via a mike though a toy drum machine sounds awesome on paper. A couple others came out well, though, and I’ll release those too, if only to get spiff covers from the guys.

You can get the disc via the legendary Aquarius Records. Plop “Organelle” into the search box (direct links aren’t so doable) and read the review. A snippet:

Obvious references would be Jeck and Tetreault and Basinski, especially since the main component is record crackle, and damaged vinyl, and the arrangement is a looped assemblage of stuttering chopped up bits, like a rougher more raw Oval. But it’s not just hiss and crackle, the first few seconds of music are also captured, sounding a bit circusy, even more so once they get looped up and tangled. Four long tracks, all movements in one epic and fractured soundscape.
Woozy, trippy, warped and warbly and definitely a bit psychedelic. Super cool!

Coming soon: Remrofsnart and the News.

Got an email today from the folks who run the Des Moines I-Con confirming we’re good to go for a table Nov 7. Carter, meself and Wills Beard and Grant will be appearing.

Also am attempting what is either a genius idea or a genius idea that’s too damn hard to do with my family tree research. There’s a county of some interest for Thomas research and there’s a bit of a wall there. I’ve doped out all the direct provably connected Thomases I can, but there are a lot of Thomases still lurking. Answer? Make a tree explaining every Thomas in that county from 1850-1880 whether related or not. Ta daaaaa! Because I just don’t have enough to do.

The sequel idea for LOST IN THE WASH is taking form. Hooooboy is it ever.

Just bullet points today.