I haven't posted in a while...

... but there's a reason for that.

The fact is: Nothing of real importance seems to have happened since my last entry, as far as politics goes. The military government in Honduras is still in power, but the hubbub in Iran seems to have died down.

A couple days before I wrote my last entry, I read of the Indian government sending paramilitary soldiers into Midnapore to flush out a parallel government the Naxalite Maoists set up after driving out the police and the revisionist CPI-M cadres. Very titillating, but there has been zero follow-up coverage since then- Well, there was one article that said that the pro-government forces had entered Lalgarh, the center of the uprising, but that doesn't say much.

I can say, hopefully the Maoists soundly rout their attackers, gain control of India, and raise the red flag over New Delhi, but that's about the extent to which an isolated first-world keyboard-revolutionary can do... It's too bad. At the very least, I wish I could send them a care package full of hammer and sickle shaped cookies, but alas, even that is out of the question.

Besides the lack of interesting events to comment on, I've also been sidetracked with other, personal conundrums. I'm transferring to a different college- It's going to be the same silly garbage I had to put up with at the first one I went to, but at least I'm not paying out-of-state tuition.

And then, there's my creative projects. If you've been paying any attention to me at all, you'd notice that I write music, draw, and create videos, as well as write cynical political rants. Well, recently, I went out and purchased an accessory for my Kurzweil K2600 keyboard that relays the audio signal from the keyboard to the computer's sound card via MIDI. I would be able to rephrase that last sentence in incomprehensible audio technician jargon if I had paid attention in those boring electronics classes I took, but I don't care- the point is, this makes creating music a lot easier for me, now that I can record loops and use them in Acid Pro 4.0 (the program I use).

This raises new problems, though. In the past, due to the limited amount of software and hardware I had to work with, the music I produced was different, and focused much more on using loops creatively to create an interesting sound collage, rather than writing a catchy tune. Now that I can make a clean recording of the sounds coming out of my keyboard, I actually have to come up with chord structures, melodies, bass lines: the whole gamut.

It's not that I'm not up to the task. I've been working hard so far, and almost finished one piece. However, as opposed to my earlier audio experiments, these 'more structured' pieces take a lot longer to create.

Oh yeah, and I have to write lyrics. I guess I'm very self-conscious about things I write that don't follow the traditional prose structure- With prose, as long as you have a decent vocabulary, know the basic tenets of grammar, and have something interesting to say, you are guaranteed to produce something of at least some value. Poetry, or lyrics, have a much greater risk of seeming hokey and overly pretentious.

For an example of good lyrics, I'd point to Skinny Puppy. Well, they're not good in the traditional sense, of rhyming couplets, but they have an interesting stream-of-consciousness style, which reminds me of the ramblings of a paranoid schizophrenic, yet they still manage coherency- It's a sort of dark word painting that goes along perfectly with their sound and dystopian image.

In the video medium, I haven't done anything new since my V.C. Funk remix, which I uploaded a couple months ago. I feel I need to start an entirely new paragraph to describe my next big project, so so be it.

Audio: The audio for this new project will be a distorted time-streched mess. I have a soundfile- It was originally a recording entitled 'Weiner Farm' by a bunch of kids from Michigan, but I ran it through soundhack, doubled the length, and now it sounds great- perfect for frightening small children.

Video: The visual component of this problem is a photoshop file with mural-esque dimensions (the height is the same as a youtube video, and the length is really reallllly long), of a whole bunch of unrelated objects and psychedelic backgrounds that bleed into eachother, including a nice landscape with a tree on it, a man wearing a monocle, the overmind from 'starcraft', a volcano, and some abstract stuff. There will be more, but that's all I've drawn so far. Once I've finished the drawing and imported it into Sony Vegas, my video-editing program of choice, I'm going to use the green screen feature to superimpose an upside-down panoramic photograph of Paris at night in the background.

So yes, these are the reasons why I've been lazy. Sorry. Now, I've got to go do something else. I might write again in a couple days, depending on whether something interesting happens, or not.