01 27 10 09:20 |No comments yet Testing 'til failure

Here's the list : 1. Score 3 documentaries for the Biography Channel : Bill Murray, Joaquin Phoenix, Rodney Dangerfield. 2. Re-Hab the leg I broke off. 3. Get Christina's latest work installed and looking great at Tiger Strikes Asteroid. 4. Go to Tokyo for this that and the other thing. 5. Start scoring 2 more shows for the Bio Channel and the Golf Channel. 6. Upgrade the home studio to accomodate all this work. 7. Start building a base for a successful season of Category 5 Bicycle Racing. 8. Record a new record with 'Do You Need the Service?' 9. Celebrate the hell out of 2009/2010 New Years! and on and on and on . It's been a wild 3 months, with no end in sight. This bronco's going to continue to buck I'm afraid, but we've got a firm grip on the reins and great rodeo clowns to bring 'er in.

Tonight is President Obama's first State of the Union Address. I'm not looking forward to the apologizing he's speculated to be planning. This administration goofed not be cause they tried too much, but because they tried too little. So here we are with no Change, and no change.

  This informational image is pretty amazing. Not sure how upsetting it is, seeing as how our 401k and IRA plans are loaded with investments that benefit from the spending extremes there, but it's still pretty funny.

Looking forward to the weekend which has me meeting my new, and first, cycling coach Bill Elliston. We're going to do a Lactate Threshold test and check the power generated by my injured leg vs. my good leg. 

Photos of all the above are viewable. Click the Flickr badge over there --->

Pew pew.

11 15 09 2:02 |No comments yet The work and the fruit and the still of the night

Writing the music for these documentaries has been amazing, and a welcome challenge. I've roughed in a few hundred bits of music to be used across three documentaries covering a total of 4 hours of air time. I've been beating up on my hard drives and instruments to the point of steaming up my little room. The first 'Biography : Bill Murray" shipped out yesterday. It was a great effort from the team to get the master tapes and ancillary stuff in the mail early and safely. Next up is "Biography Rodney : Dangerfield" followed all too quickly by "Biography : Joaquin Phoenix". Between those, my "normal" client work and trying to maintain a training schedule, it's been a hell of a 7 months since my accident. I'm happy to report that the limp is almost gone, and I'm back on the bike commuting into work.

In other thoughts : China has me very worried. We're sending boatloads of money over there by purchasing their products, then having them lend it back to us. Their interest and concern over the pending health care reform has me worried. Do we really want the US health system to be subsidized by a foreign country? I agree with Bill Hicks when he calls the deficit a farse and illusion, until now (it seems like funny money to me). But, China is a very real creditor that can extract payment from us in a myriad of ways. And just wait until they really get cracking in unmanned space exploration missions in the next 50 years or so. Wowza.

Chrissy and I had a great 3 day jaunt to Miami to celebrate the wedding of Trisha and Brian. Check the link to TriianBurbank over there to see their jewelery company's output. Very cool stuff.

10 08 09 2:21 |No comments yet Walking the walk

Chrissy and I left the house at the same time on Tuesday morning. I looked West and saw the sun, she loked East and saw the sun. It was as if fulfilling an ancient prophecy. Sun and moon perffectly inline with the sweet hamlet that is our stretch of McClellan St. It was cool and quiet, leaving for work at 7AM has it's benefits that way. This was also one of the first mornings of me walking without a crutch or cane. Actually I still keep the cane with me for travelling, to aid getting in and out of the bus, but I'm able to walk fairly well without it. My surgeon advised me to resume normal activity as I am able, but not to take up kickboxing anytime soon. And not to fall off of my bike for a year. Which may prove difficult. I was also able to install the new ceiling fan which had been sitting unused since before my accident. Felt good to be up on a ladder getting things done. We've also installed a new bike rack in our living room to replace the hooks that our little cat Babe was able to pry from the wall by hangin on the rear tire of my bike. Yes, it made quite a racket.

I support the proposed calorie tax and healthy lifestyle rebates. I support raising the tax on alcohol and tobacco (which PA has just done). I support tap water consumption, it 'aint gonna kill you. I like a phrase Ryan used tonight, cultural dissonance. There is a massive cultural dissonance at work in a culture that wants universal health care, but doesn't want to be healthy.

There were fireworks directly above our house last weekend at the grand finale of the St. Nicholas of Tollentine festival around the corner. I witnessed the processional of the saints and all. We arrived too late for our annual chocolate-cello cordial, but had a good time saying hello and singing along to "Volare".

By the way, this is hideous and hopefully will keep people from eating in Burger King :

08 05 09 11:51 |Only one comment Do You Need the Service?

I'm appearing on keyboards with Do You Need the Service? on August 18th at King-Fu Necktie. Mercury Radio Theatre is on the bill as well. Should be a nice evening of instrumental denting. Rehearsals have been going very well. I'm looking forward to our recording session at Gradwell House at the end of August. EDIT : the show was an attendence success but a playing failure. I thought we sounded loose and not committed to the music. Commitment to a moment is something I've been thinking a lot about recently. Especially while doing my re-hab for my leg. I've been asking myself if I am fully invested, committed, to what I'm doing at the time.This came up recently in a meeting I had with some creative associates. As a creative, are you investing your time wisely, are you committed to your goal or project? Seems a simple thing, but it's almost too simple. I certainly don't ask this enough of myself. My commitement to re-hab and a successful return to cycling have energized and motivated me in other areas of my doings as well. BTW : a band, 'The Paver' a trio from Chicago opened for us at Kung-Fu. Check them out. They brought the bass driven rock. 

Also, should it be more expensive to be unhealthy?

08 02 09 1:27 |No comments yet Gentle Johnny Way Jingle-Oh

So I built a $200 Linux PC for our living room. Installed Ubuntu and Boxee. Hooked up a $40 MSI Wireless keyboard and we are off to the races. Discovering the latest in French indie music from La Blogotheque. Amazing HD nature footage on Earth-Touch HD. Also enjoying my flickr stream and pandora on the big screen. And finally able to playback YouTube content on a TV. Everything looks and sounds great. It took some doing, but it was well worth it to have access to content w/o having to use a real computer for it all. I think these very specific, well curated, media outlets are the future of entertainment. Despite our whoop-ass Comcast cable package, I can't remember the last time we watched broadcast TV.

My recovery is going well. Slow and steady will win this race. I'm sleeping through the night and haven't taken a pain killer in weeks. Looking forward to seeing my surgeon on August 18th and hopefully getting upgraded to advanced weight bearing. Funny phrase, upgraded to.  I've been cycling 6 days a week for the last 2 weeks. On the trainer, don't worry. Going nowhere slowly, but feeling great about being back on the bike. Using a newly acquired PowerTap Comp power meter to chart my progress back to riding strong. 

Enjoyed a killer dinner at XIX lastnight. Atop the Bellevue Hotel. Oysters we're perfect and the fish dishes were stunning. Glad to be able to welcome Anne Schaefer and Aaron Hedley back to Philadelphia after their long road trip.

06 15 09 2:25 |No comments yet Stomp Clap Stomp Clap

Wow. Not sure how I missed this. Here's Dante's video for "Tucker Stomp" we had a great time making this record in Detroit.  Dante is easily one of the most ambitious and creatively honest hip-hop artist I've ever worked with.

Untitled from Havoc Detroit on Vimeo.

06 05 09 3:26 |Only one comment Every button has a sweet spot

At least that's what I though, as I lay in bed at Hahnemann Hospital after emergency surgery fo my displaced femoral neck fracture. See, the morphine machine had a sweet spot. It would beep after a satisfying click of the hand held control and administer it's gods. The bed's controls also had a sweet spot. I could press across the control without result until I came to that spot in the center that sent my legs up or down to the perfect spot. But there was one button without a sweet spot in the room. The call button, the 'help' button, the 'more endocet, stat' button. I could press and press with no click or beep to alert me to a successfull notification of my discomfort. It was only a few moments later, that the voice of the teacher from the Peanuts cartoon came shuttling into the room via loudspeaker as the voice of the nurses station call center. To make matters worse, the bottons were switched between my and my room mate ( a fidgety leg amputee who insisted on taking sugar packets with his percocet) So my call would alert his nurse and his call mine. And the speaker/microphone system  was so poor that no one could understand anyone. It got to the point on Friday night that I would call for a nurse and just say "bnoogah blah goobah huweay", and "be right there" would be the reply. It was infuriating and funny. Just like this whole temporary disability situation.

Great care at Hahnemann Hospital though. I'm recovering well. I'll post X Ray photos next week after I get the stitches out. Bnogbah!

05 07 09 11:45 |No comments yet The ways of Italian TV

I feel badly for the New England Patriot's rookie linebacker that tore his ACL during a training mini-camp. I feel badly for those arrested while protesting the Army's use of XBOX 360 video game systems to entice recruits to come into their Army Experience Center ( though there is another discussion to be had about why this works and those it works on). I feel badly that there is no US TV coverage of the Giro d' Italia race that starts on Monday.

I feel great about having gone to Detroit for a few days to play a show with Benjamin Teague and Bradley Rhodes. Brad and I spent an amazing 4 days with John Charnota (who made the videos seen below) and Alison Wong (who will have a new website soon). Good music, good times, good food.

We also took in the Graduate show at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Lots of performances and kinetic art this year. There was stuff moving around and people making noise and doing stuff at every turn. I really enjoyed being back on the grounds and saying hello to old friends. Including Elliott Earls who passed on this wonderful still from his latest work "The Saranay Motel", I play the part of record producer Timothy Paul. The film will be released later this year.

This is a great photo:

Our film team "No Right Return" completed our 48 Hour Film Project entry over the weekend. We were given comedy, the artist Dan Crocker, a wallet, and "do you even know what that means?" to use in our 4 to 7 min film. We cam up with 2 news anchors who are forced to report on a pending apocalypse from a TV sales network while selling their products. It's dark and dense, and funny( we think so at least). I'll post it when it is legal to do so. We're hoping to continue our dynasty after winning "Best Film" last year for 'Kitchen Aid" which was one of 18 films from around the world chosen for the 2008 48 Hour Project DVD. It was also shown at Cannes, which is in France, which is nice.

Oh, and I'm playing rhodes and kalimba in a band, Do You Need the Service? With Mark Sconyers, Justin Hallman et al. It's an approachable instrumental project with a lot of potential and good energy. Click here to listen. Stay tuned, and watch those knees!

03 27 09 10:30 |No comments yet Noah and Manny

I called a glass company yesterday about fabricating a shower stall
for us. Got a guy named Noah on the phone.
Noah : "You know how we choose tile guys back in my country?"
Tim : "No I don't, Noah"
Noah : "We take a guy and throw him up in the air so he hits the ceiling."
Tim : "..."
Noah : "If he hits the ceiling, we make him a painter."
Tim  : "Oh, wow"
Noah : "If he falls back down onto the ground, we make him a tile guy."
Tim : "That's terrific"

These two short films were created by our amigo muy importante, John Charnota. Whom we have been swimming with, and jumped off a water trampoline with too.

03 05 09 11:49 |No comments yet Start talking again

It was a great twist of circumstance that put a stranger and I in a room today, and had us singing "LA Freeway" and listening to John Prine sing "Clay Pigeons". I'm lucky to say that most days, I love my job and am thankful for all the people it brings my way.

02 23 09 1:06 |No comments yet A room ful of strangers

This photo of Lenny mssing with the turntable sort of sums up my January and February. Balancing on nothing, almost falling off every few seconds, but touching a lot of things and making weird noises. It's been a hectic and challenging few weeks. But I'm pleased to report excellent progress some very exciting new projects. The Train and Dial is almost done. My solo record, Everything Burns is almost there. Ryan Widger's record is getting there and still giving me the howling fantods. and the North AM demo is taking shape, but is on hiatus until after tax season. I'll have all this up for your listening enjoyment ASAP. Turns out that bourbon is mostly corn, and rye is mostly rye. Oh, and it's illegal to distill in your basement in South Philly.

Almost broke myself snowboarding last weekend with Danno. It was awesome. I haven'e been in a few seasons, so it was real nice to get back on it. Damn box rail though almost broke me in twain. We were the oldest dudes in the terrain park that's for sure. Turns out fluorescent colors are back in, Debbie Gibson is not. They had a house band playing in the bar up there at Elk Mountain. I heard them play Wagon Wheel over lunch, which was very nice. The poconos are good people.The fashion parallels between hipster, snowboard wear and the Culture Club are almost too deep to consider without getting your face all up in a knot. I'd put all three images up here but I'm afraid of opening up a bandana vortex and letting the 4 horsemen of the fashiopocalypse through. 

Below is amazing. Thanks Brad.

01 14 09 09:14 |Only one comment ASUS EEE PC Review : first impressions

So with Christina's weekly commute to teach in Baltimore in mind I set about to replace her aging PowerBook G4 with something lighter, smaller, and faster. My timing was perfect as throughout 2008 Intel has released and perfected their  line of 'Atom' chips and associated chipsets. These processors run faster and more efficiently than anything else and are available for next to nothing. After scouring the internet for reviews and user opinions on these "Netbooks" (as these Atom equipped small laptops have come to be called) I settled on the Lenovo S10, available from Lenovo nicely equipped for around $400. 10" LCD, 1GB RAM, WiFi, 160GB Hard Drive, XP Home.Bam. Done. Lovin' it in Red, but wait. Lo and behold!  Best Buy, a store we never shop in due to the general malaise that sets in over the one here in South Philly, has an ASUS (pronounced Ae - Sooos) EEE (pronounced eeeeeeee, like your falling off something very high) PC Netbook for $199! Oh my. ASUS EEE PC 8.9" LCD, 1GB RAM, 4GB SSD, WiFi, and Xandros Linux for an OS. Gulp. But for $199! I jumped on my bike ran down to Best Buy last night and picked one up. Turns out the box is so small that 2 would have fit in my bag. Got it home and had at it. The hardware is really nice. Rigid chassis, bright screen, nice fit and finish overall. Touchpad feels good, clicks a little rough, but feels very solid. The supplied charger is very small and light. I can hear one tiny little fan whirring away inside. I was able to connect to our home network and the internet in a minute. Upon doing so I was alerted to several updates that were available from ASUS that I should let the EEE install. So I did. Rebooted and was greeted with a flickering screen and no desktop. Hosed the whole thing up. So I wrinkled my nose a bit and broke out the small users manual. Turns out there is a recovery partition on the 4GB drive. So I forced a restart and held F9 which gives me the option to format the drive and re-install the OS. Took about 45 seconds and I was back up and running, this time ignoring the alerts to update the software. So back to square one, I handed it over to Chrissy and let her have a go before I really jacked the thing up by fiddling with it too much. She's used Linux casually on a desktop and on our Nokia N800 tablets so seeing another distribution of it didn't throw her for a loop at all. 5 minutes later she had transferred a PowerPoint presentation, Word document, music and videos to the EEE via SD card to and from both the Mac and PC. She was able to open and edit them using the included StarOffice and MPlayer applications. So far so good. She opened up YouTube and was able to watch videos, which played back perfectly (BTW we have been addicted to this song and video, which we are convinced will end up in the Ronald Chevalier movie.  Here it is :  The speakers on this little netbook sound VERY GOOD, a lot louder and fuller than the PowerBook G4. The screen looks great and the included Xandros 'launcher' application is very easy to navigate. I've read of some users replacing the OS with other Linux flavors, but I think this will do just fine. I ordered an 8GB SD card to augment the 4GB of internal storage, most of which is used by the OS and recovery partition. I'm planning on putting the 4 cell battery through its paces tonight.Overall this is a great little device for basic computing, it's not a desktop/laptop replacement, but rather a devce that lies between. A great tool for her to move and edit data between locations. Looking forward to getting one for me!

12 22 08 10:26 |No comments yet Serving Hamlin for the Holidays

December found me hunting. I enjoyed a great 4 day trip to Bertie County, NC with Brad, Cliff Rowland, and Ethan Call. Boar and deer were our quarry, well, intended quarry as we didn't manage to actually shoot anything. En route we enjoyed an all too brief visit with Brad's parents and picked up some North Carolina Barbeque (yes, it is amazing and somehow feels 'healthier' than other varieties of slow cooked meat). We encountered the slowest, yet kindest Red Apple Convenience store in the world. We got there late and had a round of sandwiches and some beers and aged 12 years while waiting in line. It was amazing. Anyhow, the hunting. We stayed in a small 'cabin'(tin roof and 4 walls) with a wood stove. Much to our dismay, the wood stove was sitting in the middle of the cabin with nary a chimney/vent inm sight. It was getting dark so we attempted to fashion a vent from some old roofing metal (probably noxious) we had found around the cabin. After tying it all together with half rusted barbed wire we stoked it up and settled in for the night. Yup, almost died 2 nights in a row from the smoke and fumes this little stove put out (Number 29 it said on the front of the stove, a name that will live in infamy). There were good times with the stove and bad time with the stove, it was a 'rollercoasted of emotions', as Cliff so aptly put it.  When not hunting we enjoyed meals at the Heritage House (formerly Catfish's), which included a stunning mackrel cake(replete with bits of scale and bone, which I very much enjoyed) and the now infamous 'Corn Sticks' which are bars of rolled corn meal and lard fried to a golden brown and served with butter. I'm trying to think of something humorous about the corn stick, but they are delicous and become their own punchline only while at the Heritage House. We also played a bit of music. Many thanks to Cliff for teaching me some new fiddle tunes and letting me butcher his beautiful 1929 The Gibson Mandolin. There are photos on my flickr page, click the photos link ofer there ------>> for a look see.

December also rang in the premier of 'Homeward Bound : John Mellencamp' a documentary on the Biography Channel/A+E produced by Stage 3 Productions. I had the amazing opportunity to write the original music for the piece and mix the show. It was a lot of fun working very closely with a small, super competent team on a project that let all of us flex a little creative muscle. The show was very well received and is in rotation on the Biography Channel and will move to A+E in January, We hope to make more of them in 2009 so stay tuned. 

All of the above has kept me too busy to make a new holiday record, so I'll direct you to our last effort "Happy Birthday Jesus" by Middle Hill available here. CLICK. It's the 6th item down the page, right click (ctrl+click for macs) and save them to your computer for repeated enjoyment.

Wishing you all a warm and rejuvinating holiday season, and a happy and prosperous 2009. - Tim

11 19 08 12:58 |No comments yet The race to the Waffle House with Hon. E. Wells

Turns out I wasn't the only one amused by the email going around suggesting that I donate money to Planned Parenthood in Sarah Palin's honor and have the thank you card send to John McCain's campaign headquarters. Planned Parent hood received over $768,000.00 dollars in her honor. Awesome. What happened to John McCain over the course of the campaign, huh? He turned into some kind of crazy mutant.

Spent the weekend in NYC at Brad's opening at Larissa Goldston's gallery. It was a hoot. Great work and good times making music and bumming around. Check out LarissaGoldston.com to have a look at his new batch of paintings.

10 29 08 10:50 |No comments yet The Shape of Punk to Come

So I'm hosting a TV show for Comcast OnDemand. Yup, that's right. On camera and all the fixin's. For those of you in Comcast Country (Philly market at least) go to OnDemand > Go Local > Philly Reality > Strange in the City. Strange in the City, sure is. We're a little show in the backwaters of local OnDemand content that features people, places, and things in Philadelphia that may not be on the mainstream cultural radar. It's a lot of fun to make these shows and we hope to be able to make a lot more of them. These photos of me and the crew were taken at Faeriecon 08, a Faerie convention at the Philly convention center. It was a trip. The gentleman and puppett I'm interviewing there are from the Froud family. They did the creature design for Jim Henson's The Dark Crystal and Labrynth. Toby there was actuall the baby that was stolen in Labrynth. And there's the crew. CCFV's finest. Fearless. So check out the show, hope you enjoy it. 

In other news ; the Phillies. Chrissy and I had my folks over for dinner on Sunday night and were startled by being able to hear the roar of 80,000 fans from Citizens Bank Park in our Kitchen! We turned on the tube and experienced the delay between the live roars and the broadcast roars. It was amazing. My sound brain was trying to figure out how many seconds of delay vs. how far the stadium is to our house, but was distracted by sausage and escarole. 

Saw Ed Ruscha on Iconoclasts last night. They showed the piece that Andrea Landau and Chrissy worked on with the Fabric Workshop and museum. Not a great episode. Ruscha is not a very interesting/insightful person.