mea culpa
I have been bad; I have been remiss; and unlike some, I cannot even claim a takeover by a diabolical frog as an excuse. All right, kids, here is CONTENT.
The record is finished and has been mailed to a nice fellow in San Diego who is going to master it. About a week ago the 12-track broke. I had put new strings on my guitar and didn't clip the ends—what rock star has time to be orderly? While recording I leaned forward and (I think this is what happened; I wasn't really looking) one of the loose wire ends slipped inside the 12-track, sliding through the crack along one of its buttons, and penetrated deep within its innards. Something must have shorted out, as the 12-track turned off and then turned on again. I thought all was well and kept recording until that evening, when I discovered that hitting "record" and then hitting "stop" caused the operating system to crash and give a hexadecimal error code and revert to this alarming command-line interface that I did not know the 12-track possessed and which the average user was certainly never meant to see. Fortunately it was still able to play, and almost all of the instruments were recorded, so I mixed down the backing tracks and spent a few days at Nik's house recording the vocals on his computer while he was off learning German. His mother spent the days cleaning the house and apparently could hear me through the door, since on the third or fourth day she asked me why I was recording.
"It's sort of a hobby," I said.
"Do you just like to hear yourself singing the songs you love?" she asked.
"Oh, no. These are songs I wrote."
"Oh," she said, taken aback. "I actually liked a couple of them."
"Thank you."
"I liked what they were saying."
So, when Billboard magazine wants testimonials, I now have one. I do intend to do something with this web deal shortly. My burgeoning enterprise to take myself seriously as an commercially viable artist has compelled me to register paulkerschen.com, and a lot of the non-blog content will probably move over there. In the meantime I will try to be more regular about posting things here that someone will find interesting, even if (as is often the case) that someone is just Mom.
also
No one cares about the classics any more. Nowadays, who would shout "sic semper tyrannis" after assassinating a president? It would have to be a grad student. And a week later, USA Today would report that "officials from the Department of Homeland Security have yet to release their analysis of the gibberish reportedly shouted by the assassin immediately after the shot was fired. Rumors continue that it is some kind of diabolical Arab code."
