Thing a Week 1 – See You All in Hell
Well, you asked for it, or rather, I told you that you were going to get it. Here’s the debut thing of my Thing a Week series. It’s 48 seconds long, but I think it has a special kind of quirky charm. The lyrics are taken from a text message that a TV producer sent while having a difficult time on some sort of aquatic shoot, somewhere far away where it’s probably hot and dusty and hard to get around. I found them funny but also a little sinister – there is more than a touch of madness in them. They are sung by my mac (via Text Edit, via Audio Hijack) and mixed with loops in Soundtrack.
I will eventually set up a page as these things pile up, but for now:
Work vs. Play
Well that was a long stretch of nothing, wasn’t it? As you may have noticed, I haven’t posted anything in a while. I think this is because posting here used to be something that I could do to procrastinate while I was at work, and now it’s something I should work on instead of doing other things. This has become part of my non-paying, no-boss-having “job” of leisure. In other words, I don’t want to work, but would prefer to bang on the drum all day. Also, this NYTimes podcast actually kept me pretty busy – I understand now why most podcasts are kind of like unedited live radio shows. You record a 45 minute show and you’re done. All this editing and sound effects and music is really time consuming. But we’re done, and they’ll be posting all three 12-minute episodes on the site tomorrow, just in time to promote the new Funny Pages section on Sunday. Enjoy them. Please don’t yell at me that they’re not really podcasts, because I already know that.
Now then. To business. My new job as a non-job-haver comes with certain responsibilities (which I make up and can ignore whenever I want to). I hereby propose a challenge to myself, which I also accept. To keep the juices flowing, I am going to post one piece of work per week until further notice. This may be a complete song, or it may be some kind of experimental thing, a mashup, a remix, some audio of me eating cheese, who knows. Not every one will be good, or even tolerable. Many of these things will not make any sense to anyone but me, and some of them will certainly suck. But there will be one a week, so that’s got to be worth something.
I’ll post the first item later today (now I have to go buy some fat shorts and eat some lunch), and then every Friday until I can’t take it anymore, or until I am given one million dollars to stop. Get ready America…
Week One – Boy, Am I Bored!
Just kidding. This not working thing is awesome. It’s thrillling just to have time to run errands in the middle of the day. I still kind of feel like I’m on vacation, but I suspect that will change when I run out of money. I should really make some sort of a list of projects. And then do them. Many thanks to all you kind souls who have posted and emailed words of encouragement.
Speaking of which, my old pal John Hodgman and I are working on a couple of podcasts for the NY Times to promote their new Funny Pages thing in the Sunday magazine. John is editing the humorous essays portion (there will also be a comic strip and some serial fiction from Elmore Leonard). Not sure there’s going to be a lot of room for JC sauce in this sandwich, but you should certainly expect some kind of “theme song” situation, and of course the standard Hodgman-Coulton magic a la our Little Gray Books podcast. I should mention, it doesn’t look like there’s actually going to be an RSS feed, which technically makes these things NOT podcasts. Also, there are only three of them, and they’re all going to be posted on the same day, Saturday September 17. I know. NOT podcasts. Look people, I just bake the funnycake, I’m not going to tell the Old Gray Lady how to serve it up.
Katrina Relief
If you’ve been waiting until you could safely buy a CD without any money actually going to me, now is your chance. CDBaby has just set up a way that all their artist can donate profits from CD sales directly to the Red Cross Disaster Relief fund to help victims of hurricane Katrina. I’ll be donating all my profits for the month of September. While this won’t be a huge amount of money, hundreds of CDBaby artists are doing the same thing, so together we may actually do some good.
If you’d prefer to donate directly to the Red Cross, you can do so here. Not to make you feel any more guilty than you already do, but it really sounds like it sucks down there. And I am familiar with the calculus of small donations, so believe me when I tell you that moderate amounts of small donations will most definitely add up to moderate amounts of money – I can only imagine what enormous amounts of small donations might do. You can change the world in a tiny way…
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