- At the beginning of the year I asked about some unusual notes in a
Poppy song, and Bret Victor replied by explaining some music theory and
added, “There’s a rabbit hole on the other side of that
Google search!”
And in fact once Youtube saw that I had looked up some music theory
videos, its algorithm decided that I needed to watch hundreds of them,
which I then proceeded to do.
Am I now an expert on music theory?
Not remotely!
But I did dust off the guitars for the first time in many a moon and
start experimenting with some chords that weren’t power chords,
and tried to come up with some bass lines didn’t just follow the
tonic notes of the guitar chords one octave lower.
Here’s one I’ve been playing around with
recently—well over twenty years ago now, my then-bandmate
sent me a demo of one of his songs, over which I dubbed a bass line:
On Tonight’s Agenda
(Matthew Amster-Burton 1998 / Adam Cadre 1998)Here it is again, with a new bass line I wrote (and rewrote, and rewrote) this fall:
On Tonight’s Agenda
(Matthew Amster-Burton 1998 / Adam Cadre 2020)Is that actually better? Hell, I dunno. But it certainly had a lot more thought (and practice!) put into it.
- One song I never learned back in the ’90s—because,
y’know, not all the chords were power chords—and have
finally learned now is “Bound for the Floor” by Local H,
from their 1996 album As Good as Dead.
I bought that album in Albuquerque, New Mexico, while I was driving from
the old house in Anaheim to grad school in North Carolina.
Along with it I bought another record, Someone’s
Ugly Daughter by a band called Chick.
I’d heard their first single on Beavis and
Butt‑Head and wanted to hear it
again, and back in the 20th century, if you wanted to hear music on demand
you had to buy it.
I still have the Local H record, but I ended up selling the Chick
record not long after I bought it.
One of the songs on it was a cover of Cheap Trick’s
“Surrender”, which I was unaware was a cover until I heard
the original version a few months later in the 1979 movie
Over the Edge, which was playing on the
university’s cable channel.
When Ellie brought up that song in conversation recently, I mentioned
that I had first heard it as a cover by an extremely obscure ’90s
band called Chick.
We looked it up.
It turns out that it was revealed this year that Chick had been a secret
side project of Mariah Carey.
- I don’t have a cell phone, but I do have a landline
phone (seen at right).
One day I heard it ringing, but I couldn’t reach it in time.
By the time I picked it up, bam, dial tone.
So, on autopilot, I hit 🞶69 to return
the most recent call.
No luck—I got a recorded message.
“What do you think this is, 1994?”
(That isn’t literally what it said, but it did say that 🞶69 was not a thing anymore, at least not on my phone system.)
- I’ve had an irregular sleep schedule for my entire adult life,
but this year has added a new wrinkle: I’ve spent a lot of it in
biphasic sleep.
I go to sleep immediately after school—pretty easy when
your bed is inches away from your “classroom”—and
wake up in the evening.
I do my grading and lesson planning until I get tired again around five in
the morning, then sleep for another three hours or so.
Then I wake up again and teach my classes.
By the time they’re over, I am ready to go right back to bed since,
y’know, I’ve only had three hours of sleep.
This is an improvement over last year, when I was getting the three hours of sleep before school but not the five hours of sleep after school. The job still consumes pretty much all my waking hours, but at least I’m not as sleep-deprived. Progress!
- I do not teach at Sir Francis Drake High School in San Anselmo, though
I planned to apply there if I did not get the job I currently have.
Sir Francis Drake High School no longer bears that name, as the school
board determined that due to Drake’s involvement in the slave trade,
his name would have to go.
The school’s current name?
“High School 1327”.
- Perhaps not the ideal verse to post without context:
- I saw that a local apartment building had a number of listings
up.
Apartment #234 was going for $2100 a month.
Apartment #304 was going for $2105.
What do you get for your extra five dollars?
Is that just the premium for getting a view from ten feet further
up?
- My AP classes are about to start a poetry unit. It’s been said that the difference between poetry and prose is that prose is about accumulation of detail while poetry is about finding exactly the right detail. And while I would never have thought of this on my own, it seems obvious in retrospect: of course, if you want exactly the right detail to hammer home exactly how cartoonishly awful our plague year has been, you finish 2020 by having the covids carry off Dawn Wells.
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