Save the Robot – Chris Dahlen

So these songs are amateurish, unprofessional, they come from someone who couldn’t even play “Buffalo Gals” on the uke a month ago – and that’s just two chords – and now, can almost string three chords together, on a good day. But. If you’re curious what this RPM thing I’ve been working on sounds like, you can hear three songs our official profile page.

“Jerry Hall” – It’s short. I sing.

“Grey Goose” – Alfonso assembled this from stray uke and accordion stuff from our session the other night. I think it’s a really nice piece.

“Sukey You Shall Be My Wife” – My favorite song from the cuts I worked on by myself. I just rerecorded it tonight, to get a beefier take on the final album.

As much as I disparage myself and this project, as I flip through the CDs I just burned, I’m kind of amazed to think this is an entire album of music that I made. Sure, it’s only 15 minutes long. But there are a few songs on here I’m really proud of, and the performances came together well enough that I can hear what I was going for when I listen to them. “Sukey,” “Little Jumping Joan” – these are really cool songs that feel exactly the way I wanted them to. Even though vocals would be nice, the uke performance hangs together by itself. These really accomplish what they set out to do.

I know if I had more chops and talent I’d be harder on myself, and I’d be working all night tonight polishing all the final details – but listening to this, I’m just like, “Damn.” And I’m ready to crash, and hand it in tomorrow.

UPDATE: I posted for more tracks, as well as the lyrics – which are all Mother Goose rhymes that we appropriated and in some cases, mixed around for this project. You can read the lyrics here.

UPDATE 2: My friend Seth Fortin has posted his entire album for download. He’s a braver man than me.

From the press release:

“Watching Major League Eating is like watching poetry in motion” says Bill Swartz, Head Woof at Mastiff. “Professional gurgitators have the grace of ballerinas yet the brute strength, mental focus, and intestinal fortitude to push their bodies and minds as hard as athletes in any other extreme endurance sport. Victory is sweet and defeat can be well, really, really messy. It’s an experience we’re proud to help bring into the home.”

Major League Eating is due out on the WiiWare service on May 12.

So I haven’t posted my RPM updates, but I’ve got good news: I’m going to finish. I have nine cuts in the can and I’ll probably do the tenth tonight. My fingertips have callouses. My brain’s fried from practicing. And best of all, I even sang on a song – “Jerry Hall,” all four lines. And I don’t hate my voice.

Last night my bandmate Alfonso Fabrega and I met at the office where we work and played for an hour and a half. He played squeezebox and percussion, and I played uke and twirly wind-tube thing. (One of the songs is called “Tube Shanty.”) Playing together wasn’t easy: the uke and squeezebox don’t share a cultural heritage, and when you’re both amateur musicians, it’s hard to find a common vocabulary. Pat Metheny once joked that bassist Charlie Haden was such a great accompaniest, your mom could bang on a piano and Haden could make it sound like music. We could have used him last night.

At the same time, we had a lot of fun. And we got some great takes. One of the pieces I’d had trouble playing on my own, “My Mother Said I Never Should,” sounded great with Alfonso improvising over it. We had fun with a couple other pieces, jammed on the chords from “Buffalo Gals,” and also screwed around and made some mistakes. It was a lot of fun. I’m hoping we can do it again.

So I’ve got nine of the ten cuts on my Flash drive right now, and Alfonso has a few songs of his own that we’re going to bring onto the album. We’ll be bringing it by the Wire office first thing in the morning. And I’ve been listening to it? And I really like what we’ve got! Even the songs that are just uke sans vox really came together for me, just the way I’d been hearing ‘em in my head. If I had more time, I might try singing some more.

I’ll post a couple cuts here when we’re done. And like I said earlier, I owe a copy of this thing to anyone who ever got a bad review from me. I should send Travis Morrison a copy and make sure Pitchfork makes room for his review. It’s the least I can do.

I don’t write about comics. That’s why I like them so much. For the past few months some friends have been taking me to Jetpack Comics in Rochester, NH, a great comic store with a terrific e-mail list. (The back-and-forth about whether Joss Whedon’s blowing it on Runaways is worth the free subscription.)

But here I’ve got this blog, and here I have all these observations banging around in my head after years of not keeping up with comics. So here’s a starter: when did comic book characters start reading comic books?

Garth Ennis’ Preacher never read a comic book. If he met a grown-up who read comics, he probably would have decked him just for the sake of it. But in Ennis’ new series, The Boys, several scenes take place in a comic book store. There’s also a comic book store in Fables, and references to books in Y: The Last Man, and Ex Machina (where the hero flashes back to his youth as a comic reader). These superheroes are pretty damn relatable to their readers: like their readers, they sit around and read comic books, when they’re not saving the world.

Yesterday I picked up issue one of Mark Millar’s new book, Kick-Ass. If you’re tired of post-Watchmen meta-comics where the whole question of why anyone would put on a costume and run around saving the world is turned over and over again, and in fact, discussed in length right in the comic – well, you might struggle with this first ish. The main character is a young kid who loves comics. He argues on the greatness of Joss Whedon’s run on Astonishing X-Men. Later, he puts on a costume and gets his ass kicked – that’s the good part. But making a character who’s so much like the nominal reader of the book seems sketchy.

This is a problem that I’ve noticed big-time with web comics, where they’re so close to their readers – so directly dependent on them for t-shirt and strip ideas, so closely in touch via forums and e-mail – that sometimes it seems like they might as well be sitting in a room together gabbing. The in-jokes and shout-outs flow really easily.

I’ve written a lot about how artists in today’s economy should go straight to the fans. But the fans don’t really want to be chums with musicians or cartoonists or writers: they want to be transported and awed. The artist is supposed to think of stuff they can’t imagine. They should relate to heroes in a really distant, mythical way, and not because they like the same run of comic books. Yeah, I’m throwing out wild generalizations here – and actually, I liked Kick-Ass, enough to give it a couple more issues. But come on, guys – don’t these people have anything better to do than read comic books?

(By the way: I’ve gotta agree that Whedon’s blowing it on Runaways. Seems like three months since the last issue came out, and when I bought this week’s I couldn’t remember who the hell half these people were – and I didn’t care. But I do agree with Millar about Whedon’s X-Men – they’ve been better than not for sure.)

Another clip from this week: I interviewed master axeman Bill Frisell for The Wire newspaper (not to be confused with Wire magazine), to talk about his recent Disfarmer Project and preview his upcoming show at the Stone Church. Mike Disfarmer was a portrait photographer working in the ’30s – ’50s in Heber Springs, Arkansas, and Frisell was recently commissioned to compose a suite of music around his work. We talked about the origins of the project and his trip down to Heber Springs to research Disfarmer (whose pics you can see here).

I interviewed Frisell in ‘93 for The Chicago Maroon, and it was interesting to speak with him again 14 years later. Some musicians are totally non-verbal – they hate talking about their music, or talking to reporters. Many people, if they get to be stars, are too verbal – they know exactly what to say and when to drop a quip and an anecdote, and the challenge is to get them to say something that they didn’t say to the last ten journos who were on the phone that afternoon.

It’s safe to say that Frisell is non-verbal about his work. He doesn’t appear to overanalyze or overstrategize his projects. At the same time, he often has an eloquent and natural way of talking about what he does. This quote, about his method for writing music to the photographs of Mike Disfarmer, was my favorite.

At a certain point, I just lose myself in the music itself. Hopefully it has something to do with, or relates in some way to this guy and these photos. But there’s a point where it just kind of jumps off into … musicland.

Fantasic guitarist, wonderful musician, and really nice guy. Here’s a YouTube clip from David Sanborn’s Night Music in the ’80s. I listened to this song, “Little Brother Bobby,” on Lookout For Hope so many damn times in college …

New clips:

- A new “Save the Robot” column on GameSetWatch on my experiences with the “girl game” My Horse and Me. Really not such a bad game.

- Over at The AV Club, I’m still blogging Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. My enthusiasm for the show comes and goes. It always seems this close to having me completely hooked, and then its attention wanders off somewhere, and so does mine.

Nobody’s ace at every genre of game. Real-time strategy whizzes may have crap aim in a first-person shooter. Adventure and puzzle games take a certain passion usually found in the kind of people who sit around filling out Mensa applications. But it seems like everyone’s expected to be able to play a platformer. Maybe it’s the prevalence of old Mario games in so many people’s childhood memories, but the ability to jump, duck, stomp, and climb seems like a must-have talent.

N+ is a platformer – and it’s a really, really hard one. And it’s been busting my butt for the past few days. In fact, yesterday I earned my first achievement in the game – for dying 1,000 times. I die again and again and again. And I’ll admit that the “boom” sound effect you hear when you’re blown into rags sounds pretty neat. But still: I’m sick of dying.

I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out exactly where I go wrong. My biggest problem is mastering the exact amount of pressure to apply during a jump and then applying to repeatedly. For example: there’s a map called “Upstream,” that demands you make almost exactly the same jump eight times in a row, with enemies coming along while you’re trying. I am incapable of doing this. I could try again and again but I’m sure I’ll never get it. I always overshoot a little, or hit it wrong, or I bump into one of the enemies. I’d like to think practice would help, or that my concentration would improve, or I’d get used to the controls – or maybe I just need to relax, since it’s clear I get tenser and tenser every time a slight false move turns me into meat. But I tend to think there’s no hope.

One thing I admire about the game is that it requires grace. In some platformers, you can limp your way along – hesitate before a jump, take your time before you try your next move. But N+’s toughest maps require a constant, fluid motion. This is not a game you can fumble your way through. I just wish I were that graceful.

(To try the original, free version of N, download it here.)

UPDATE: After browsing the Gamespot forums I see that a lot of people spend 1-2 hours mastering a map. Sounds like that’s just part of the drill. So I have no excuse … I should just be trying harder.

Let’s say you finish BioShock. You play the whole game from start to finish, and the whole way through, you spare every single little sister. This is the ending you see.

Okay. Now, you finished the game – but you’re wondering, what if I’d killed the little sisters instead? What would I have seen? Do I have the patience to sit through this whole damn game again? No need – you can just go to YouTube, where you can see this video:

Gamers seem to be flocking to YouTube, not just to post videos of themselves doing crazy-ass things, but to capture the basic cutscenes and endings of a game. The byzantine plot of Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer yields several possible endings, and replaying the thing would take you 15 – 20 hours. But looking them up on YouTube is easy.

Naturally these are spoilers – which is the problem. Some people like replaying RPGs to try new paths, and uncover new content. And of course, some people just cheat and read walkthroughs to see what they missed. After I beat Planescape: Torment, I looked up plenty of walkthroughs and forums to read about the subplots and alternate characters that I missed. This wasn’t as much fun as replaying the game and just looking harder. But on the other hand, reading about a story element doesn’t ruin it as badly as watching it on the little screen, which leaves you absolutely no surprises.

Some of us love to play games to get static content – to dig up plot points and revelations that actually surprise us. If someone’s already YouTubed it, what’s the point?

I have trouble writing about myself. When I started this blog, I said I wanted more practice with “voice.” What that meant was, I wanted to spend more time going, “I think this, I think that, listen to me, blah,” until I got comfortable with it – comfortable, that is, with making my perspective part of the story, whic his to say, admitting that I’m just sitting here rambling to you.

It’s been good practice, but it hasn’t been easy. Before, I spent too much time kind of passively laying out arguments for the reader to pick up, or implying opinions instead of hammering people over the head with them. I kept imitating the New Yorker, for all the good that did. (And I’ve noticed their writers are getting chattier by the month, anyway.)

But now, partly thanks to this blog, I’m a lot more likely to stick myself in a story and go off from there. I admit my faults – in fact, I’m pretty willing to look like an idiot if it helps the piece. And setting up a kind of persona is crucial to being a writer. The more people recognize you, the more likely they are to follow your work. And relate to it.

At the same time, the biggest problem with writing “as me” is that I’m not that interested in myself. I’ve lived with myself something like 34 years. I get sick of myself really easily. I hate my photo. Hell, I hate my voice. And I don’t feel like presenting myself consistently. Sometimes I feel like writing about music, sometimes I get sick of that and turn to games. Sometimes I want to be the wacky guy, sometimes I want to take something seriously. And sometimes I just want to disappear completely. Some of my favorite pieces involved going out and find something that really caught my imagination, and learning something about it to put in front of the readers, whoever they turned out to be. There’s no “I” there.

In my new GameSetWatch column, I’ve taken a voicier, more personal tact – starting obviously with the column about why I wanted to become a lesbian dad. I’ve had fun with this approach, but hey – some days I still get sick of myself. Having a persona gives me another wrench for my toolbox, but I’m starting to think I need more quotes from other people, too. They’re probably a hell of a lot more interesting.

This afternoon Karen Marzloff, one of RPM’s co-founders and core organizers, reminded me that one of RPM’s goals is to leave you a better musician than it found you. In my case, mission accomplished: I went into this month knowing diddly about how to play the ukelele, and now, well … today, I spent a couple hours just learning how to strum on the upstroke. ‘Til now, I’ve only been strumming downwards. But one of the songs I’m working on got really unwieldy this way, so I finally swore to get the hang of it. I haven’t mastered it yet, but mixing some upstrokes with the down has added more variety to a couple of songs. Plus, I’m finally learning one of the most basic things in the uke vocabulary. Bravo!

I didn’t make much headway last week, but this weekend, the family was gone and I had plenty of time this afternoon to practice. I made a quick demo recording of “Little Jumping Joan” – and listening to it, I’m still aware of all the things I could be doing better, but I’m going to keep plowing ahead. I also sketched out a couple of other songs, which brings my total to seven or eight of the required ten songs. This is the week that Alfonso and I are going to get together and do some more recording, as well as adding parts to some of these songs – so if I can play well enough to lay down the uke parts, the multitracking fun can start. I have one of those tubes that you whip around your head to make an eerie droning sound – there’s one at the start of English Beat’s “Dream Home in New Zealand,” for the few of you who remember that song – and I also have the toy piano.

And, of course, someday I’m going to have to sing this stuff.