It’s funny, I interviewed and did a Photoshop test at Studio3 on Thursday of last week and then one of the owners called me on Friday night, leaving a message about needing someone unexpectedly for the coming week through the end of May. He called me again Saturday at 9:30 in the morning. He said that they had been interviewing and testing people for future projects that would require help and that it just happened that this project came up. He was very kind and said that he felt I was a good candidate and he even said I was over qualified and that he’d understand if I turned it down, but it worked out: I needed some freelance work to pad my portfolio (plus I love retouching) and Gwynn and I needed a legitimate excuse to motivate us to get our own baby sitter, finally.

In other news, Gela broke the world record in the “Hanging onto the Shower Curtain Rod, After a Bath” event, this evening. The standing record was 4.5 seconds and tonight she held on for 7.47 seconds, thus beating the previous record by over 1.4 seconds. That record was set back in 1987 by one Daniel M. Jabowski, from Ellington, CT. Danny was 1 year and 5 months at the time.

Good night.

Here’s what I bought this afternoon:

• Blood, Sweat & Tears: Greatest Hits
• David Bowie: Starting Point
• Dire Straits: Brothers In Arms
• Elton John: Honky Chateau
• Elton John: Madman Across the Water
• Jeff Beck: Wired
• Joe Cocker: Mad Dogs & Englishmen
• Procol Harum: A Whiter Shade of Pale
• The Rolling Stones: Hot Rocks 1964-1971
  

I was disappointed by some of the things I saw today, though. They had a copy of Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline, but when I looked at the album it had deep gouges going across both sides, like some literally took a knife to the surface of the record; it was obviously unplayable. They were asking $5 for the album, which tells me that someone saw the cover and slapped a price tag on the jacket without looking at the actual vinyl. It was pretty sad.

We had some free time, so we all went down and watched the show. I remember there was a really mellow Grateful Dead-esque band named Jambay, who’s CD I may still own. One of the other bands was Rage Against the Machine. All the members of the rhythm section of the school’s jazz band were metal heads (as shocking as that might seem) and we were all blown away by RATM as Zack de la Rocha screamed “You’ve got a fucking bullet in your head!” and Tom Morello made sounds with his guitar that were other worldly, using only pedals. Their performance was so raw and vibrant…they had the whole crowd getting into the music and the message it carried.

I was sold. I plopped down the last few bucks I had and bought the cassette they had for sell. Even the black and white cassette cover was crazy; xeroxed stock quotes littered the cover as a background, with “RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE” floating above the stock quotes in bold, all caps sans serif font and rotated at an angle . There was an unlit match, that had been hand taped to the cover, as a finishing touch.

According to the bio on the official Rage Against The Machine webpage, the band recorded, produced, and released the 12 track cassette in 1992. A very impressive 5,000 copies of the tape were sold at shows and through their fan club. Most of the tracks on the tape later became the rough sequence of songs for the band’s self-titled, major label release on Epic records. Three songs on the cassette have never been re-released.

I had an entire home’s worth of stuff sitting in storage for almost a decade. Last year I had all that stuff shipped to me from El Paso. A couple of night’s ago I was going through the boxes, looking for a bunch 4-track recordings I made back in my youth, and I stumbled across this:

The tape still played and sounded just like I remember it sounding on that long bus ride back to sunny El Paso. It’s funny to think that now anyone can slap together some drum and bass loops on their computer, sing a few lines, add some effects, and then burn a CD of their work, all with very little overall effort. Knowing that makes me appreciate this tape just a little bit more.

“Discipline” isn’t weighed down by tons of samples or prominent background noise like in The Downward Spiral or the textures in some of the cuts on The Fragile. Instead the song is a light mix of vocals (lead and background), club like beats, piano, fuzzed out bass, and some very subtle atmospheric effects which only appear toward the end of the song and are pushed way back in the mix. The track reminds me of the song “Only” from the With Teeth album, in that both have roughly the same beat and that fuzzy and distorted bass line that seems to have become more common in Nine Inch Nails’ songs. With hi-hats signaling every beat, the song sounds like something you might hear in a club, leading me to think that this song has a lot of remix potential for dance DJs.

Surprisingly, the track has a raw and under-produced feel to it — there are a couple of unintentional sounding false starts in the vocals. It’s actually pretty interesting, in my opinion, that it was released (even if it was only via the web) with those quirks, since I’ve always read and heard that Trent Reznor is quite the perfectionist. Maybe now that he’s freed himself from the binds of contractual agreements, he’s loosened up a little bit and feels like instantly sharing his creations, even when there are little, Bob Ross inspired, “happy accidents” in them. I’m all for this, it’s better than the past alternative: waiting years for a single, tightly produced, label “OK’ed,” track.

Overall, this new offering by Trent and company is a pretty straightforward pop song and a nice teaser of what is, hopefully, to come.

Speaking of limited releases, The Black Keys album “The Big Come Up,” is now available as 2 sets of limited color pressings via Alive Records. The 2 albums are pressed in pink and yellow and each is limited to 500 copies.

I’m slowly getting away from the whole colored vinyl thing, because it’s been my experience that most albums sound pretty crappy on colored vinyl — my copy of The Beach Boys’ limited edition Pet Sounds LP set was horrible and that made me very sad. However, a few of the colored pressings I’ve gotten from Southern Lord records sounded pretty damn good. Maybe’s it’s just the luck of the draw.

Gela this past Sunday, at 1 year and 2 days old:

It blows me away. She went from barely moving and hardly able to keep her eyes open to walking and trying her best to talk. I once was able to hold most of her body in the palms of my hands, now I grunt when I try to lift her up.

She’s turned my world upside down and made me see everything in so many new ways. I could never imagine how significantly she’d change my life, specifically my outlook and my goals.

She’s the greatest thing I’ve ever been a part of.

One talked about the adrenaline he gets when he fights to which the other responded that he doesn’t even get adrenaline rushes when he fights anymore, he just laughs. The whole conversation seemed to weigh on upping the last sentence spoken by the other: you punched someone? I got shot at! You got shot at? I shot as some fools. You shot at someone? I know a dude that tried to blow up his school, so they expelled him from the state. (I’m not making the last one up…they didn’t arrest the guy, they expelled him from the state.)

Slowly the conversation got more and more inline with gangsta stereotypes: talk about being shot at, drive-bys, various gangs in the area, people they know outside of the city and state who are in or started gangs, how other local gangs are lame, random theories about the gunshots they heard last night and whether they were AK-47 shots or whether the shooting was done with a “MP,” since a real gangsta needs to know the differences…cause seriously, I know I don’t want to get hit with a blast from an AK-47, but getting shot with an MP, not so bad.

Anyhow, at one point one of the kids was talking about how he was totally going to kick some other dude’s ass, “just now,” but the bus showed up and he couldn’t pop the kid because he’d miss the bus. The bus we were riding comes every 10 mintues, which I seem to recall being plenty of time to talk trash and throw some punches before walking away shaking from the adrenaline referenced earlier.

My favorite part of the conversation, “So that dude you were going to fight, he’s goes to a public school, right?” I took this to imply that the well dressed and well spoken gangstas were private school kids.

Gwynn (my wife), Gela (my daughter), and I ran some errands and we visited our friend Jeni, mostly to hang out and catch up and, a little, because Jeni wants me to re-redesign a logo for the plumbing business her and her husband, Brad, own.

I designed them a few logos a while back, then they decided to change the business name; which they ended up not doing, and finally they decided they’d like to go a different direction with the look and feel for the logo. Here are the rough logos we stopped at before the ‘almost’ name change back in September 2007:

It was cool hanging out, sketching ideas, and brainstorming. We ended up staying there almost 3 hours. When we got home I spent about an hour and a half or so doing some research and rough sketches of some of the ideas and themes we talked about. I’m not sure how it’s all going to turn out, but some of the concepts we all came up with have potential.

At 9:30pm or 10:00pm I decided I wanted tortillas, so I did what any self-respecting tortilla wanting person does: I made some tortillas. I used the recipe from “How To Cook Everything” by Mark Bittman. His recipe is:

• 1 1/2 cup flour (plus some for rolling the tortillas out)
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 2 tablespoons lard/butter/oil — I used Canola oil
• Water to make dough
• Profit!

They turned out alright, maybe a little too flour-y, but they didn’t take very long to make at all. My tortilla desires have been fulfilled.

Fast forward a few days, several glasses of iced tea, and a lot of research later and here’s my newly updated blog. Of course once I figured out the bigger picture, like using my own header image or using a custom background for the page element only, the little details started to kick my ass…like, how to make that whole header image a link and why that custom page background didn’t seem to be repeating correctly. I found work arounds to most of the problems I encountered.

The majority of the changes I made were to the style.css file, which is how it’s supposed to be. I made very minor changes to the header.php and index.php pages. Here are some tips for those that encounter the same problems I did:

Making a Header Image a Link

Per the WordPress Codex, find the <div id=”header”> link in header.php (it’s toward the bottom) and change it to this:

<div id=”header” onclick=”location.href=’http://www.your-url.com/’;” style=”cursor: pointer;”>

Page Background Image Issues

You have the option to have a tiled/repeating background image either for the entire page of your blog (the area to the right and left of this content, the empty white space) and/or you can have a page only (the content area of your blog posts and sidebar, like this page is set up) tiled/repeating background image. As you can see I chose to use a page background, so when I designed the site I set it up so that the header, the Screaming Ink graphic, would blend with the page body and then with the footer below. I had little splash marks tying everything together, to make the page appear seamless. I didn’t use the standard background tile that has all four sides equally tiled so you can repeat it without seeing a pattern. I specifically wanted the ink splatters running the length of the right side.

For some reason the background image didn’t start below the Screaming Ink graphic and the effect was jarring, since there were ink splatters that were not lining up. I spent hours changing the settings for the header and the page in the style sheet; I added padding and changed margins to no avail. Finally, I realized that the page tag is actually for the whole page. Essentially, the page background starts at the very top of the page, not underneath the header, like I had thought. My header is 129 pixels tall, so my background (which is much taller than the header) had 129 pixel hidden from view behind the header. I fixed this in Photoshop to make them appear slightly more seamless.

So remember: Unless your header and reapeting background image are the same height, your header is hiding part of your background image.

That’s pretty much all I can remember right now, since those are the most recent things I dealt with. It was a fun learning experience and it took a lot of patience. There are some minor tweaks I still need to make to the typography, but those can wait for a few days.

The album is a series of covers, which can usually be a pretty hit or miss affair, but not in this case. Each song is a showcase of her singing and guitar playing. The album just about covers the litany of musical styles one can think of from standards to modern pop. The songs never sound trite or forced and her voice is soul crushing at times — I mean that in a good way. Check out this audio clip at LastFM of the song “Autumn Leaves.”

Her rendition of “Over the Rainbow” is the best version of the song I’ve ever heard performed; it’s simultaneously haunting and upbeat, that dissonance sets it apart. I’m still blown away that anyone can naturally sound that good without ProTools or vocoders. If you still have doubts, watch this live clip of her perfoming the song:

So if you like bluesy female vocals, with a slight jazz edge to them, check out Eva Cassidy. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.