paul_roboto

More guitars today. I played a fender strat and Gibson SG and I used the SD2 dual overdrive for distortion. For various parts I used an MXR phase 100, ADA flanger, an Ibanez flanger, Boss chorus ensemble, and a DOD echo FX delay.

We reconvened at the studio and began to lay the down the other four songs. Two of those songs were the hardest to play so we found ours selves playing them over and over again. But we got them. The drums were finally done.

We then set up my fender twin amplifier and mic’ed it up. After getting a good sound we started tracking the rhythm guitars. I ran through all ten using my Gibson SG, and the Boss sd2 dual overdrive for distortion.

Day one is under our belts and was pretty productive. For those of you who are interested in the mundane details of recording here's the run down...

There are two basic ways to record an album. One is to set up everything like you would if you where playing a show and then record everything all at once. This gives you that "Live" feel. It can also be tough to mix and if anyone makes a mistake then you have to start over. The other way, and the way that we are recording, is where record each instrument separately. In this method you start with drums and build upon that.

By the time Jeff and I got to the studio Joey (the drummer) and Shawn (producer extraordinaire) where sitting up the drums and making sure that everything was sounding as tough and awesome as possible. This stretches beyond the normal tuning of drum heads and things such as that. Rattling and noise from any drums part must be detected and eliminated. The drum heads are taped to cut down on overtones and ringing. To produce a more pronounced kick drum sound, tape and a thin sheet of plastic was used where the beater makes contact with the drum head. After all this the mics are set up and sound checked.

Once the mics were set up, Nate (bass) and I (Guitar) plugged in so that we could be heard through headphones but not in the room itself and then we would play along with Joey to record the drum tracks. The scratch guitar and bass tracks were recorded for reference, but will not be used on the finished recording.

We warmed up and then rolled through six of the tens song we are going to put on the album. Not bad for the first day.

no witty subject line for this one...but it's still cool. HHGOC is heading into the studio this sunday to begin work on the full length debut. I'm pretty pumped up. We have ten songs picked out and ready to rock.

more to come on this....

Presented here for your viewing pleasure…a pair P. Roboto approved Double features. For me, this is a truly natural thing to do as I find a good movie does nothing if not leaving me longing for more. Upon finishing “There will be blood” I found myself wanting to re-watch “The assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford.” After watching “Harsh Times” I found I wanted to revisit “Training Day.” (These are natural to spring to mind as the former feature very similar cinematography and storytelling style and the latter were written by the same person.)

But that leads me wonder what should be the point of the double feature? Is it to follow an actor/writer/film maker from project to project? Do we instead want to pick movies that explore the same themes and subject matter or do we want to get super esoteric and just pick two movies and throw them together? In the end there is no real correct answer to this obviously. For the most part what I’ve done in picking the following double features are try to find a contrast between the two films in way were they have elements that work together but then they pull apart so that your not re-watching the same film twice in a row.

Number one: Horrifying and exhilarating moments in the fourth estate…

Ace in the hole (Billy Wilder, 1951) and All the presidents Men (Alan J Pakula, 1976)

The cynic double bill would be “Ace in the Hole” and “A face in the crowd” but I’ve decide to flip the script and offer up two different views of newspaper reporting via the dark manipulating power of human interest stories exposed in “Ace in the hole” and the truly potent power of investigative journalism in “All the presidents men…”

Ace in the hole (AKA The big carnival) tells the story of Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas) a shit heel, and down and out newspaperman. Upon being fired from a record setting seven different metropolitan newspapers Chuck lands in the sleepy little town of Albuquerque, where the local paper quickly hires him. Chuck has it in his head that he is one big story away from being back in the limelight. What he’s willing to do to get that story is what leads to the general fucked-upness of the film, which seems fresh even in an age where newspapers are practically extinct.

All the Presidents men is a suspenseful and paranoid retelling of Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) and Woodward’s (Robert Redford) investigation into the Watergate break ends and conspiracy behind it.

Both movies are available on DVD. If you want to make it a threesome also pick up: Shattered Glass (Billy Ray, 2003)


Number two: Teen angst and rebellion at 24 frames a second…

Over the Edge (Jonathan Kaplan, 1979) and Made in Britain (Alan Clarke, 1982)

The world is fucked. What is a kid to do? In the case of the two following films either take it over or learn to deal with the shit. Ahhh…to be young.

Over the edge drops right into the soulless land of 1970’s suburbia, where the parents are more concerned with property values and taxes and other bullshit to know or care about what their kids do. Left to their own devices kids party, “Do some crime” and hang out at the local REC center, all the while getting hassled by the man. But as the adults start to turn on there own children, and the cops begin to go to far, what will the kids do…well, it is called over the edge, right?

Made in Britain (AKA Tales out of school: Made in Britain) concerns Trevor (Tim Roth), an intelligent but completed fucked in the head sixteen year old skinhead who after landing in court numerous times has one last chance to pull his shit together when he’s sentenced to a detention centre instead of real jail. But is pulling his shit together something he’s even capable of doing?

These are both out on DVD, although Made in Britain is a little more obscure so…best of luck. If you want to make it a threesome: Class of 1984 (Mark L. Lester, 1982)

This is like the “Chinese Democracy” of Internet postings. Who in their right mind would go two years without typing word one on their blog? Who would go two years without typing word one on their blog and then step up to the mike and say “Yeah, fuck it, I don’t feel tardy.” Who is that man? ROBOTO, son, that’s who. Don’t call it a come back…

Of course this may beg the question…why come back? Why step up to the grind? Why not step to the new hotness of twitter? The simple answer is…because. It’s as simple as that. I do this because I want to. I do this because right now more then anything else people need to read long-winded rambling self-obsessed bullshit. I do this because twitter be damned, I make my own hotness.

So what has been happening in the short time that I’ve been in semi-retirement? My band HOT HANDED GOD OF COPS is rocking that ass. I’m fixing to dip my toe into filmmaking by directing a script that I wrote. Also…I have grown a beard. In short… shit is about to get real.

10 NRTGU will still be my standard mix of curmudgeonly rants and pop culture references, a little about the band, and I’m sure a lot of stuff about trying to make a movie.

Welcome back. You’re dreams where your ticket out.

In super bring down news....the hardest working man in show business...mr. excitement...mr. please please please me...the sex machine himself...the godfather of soul...Mr. JAMES BROWN has passed away at the age of 73. fuck.

Now I know alot of less memorable stuff has happened towards the tail end of his years, the scandals, the appearance in Jackie Chan's The Tuxedo. But what we need to remember was an amazing showman and musician who crafted some of the greatest soul and funk ever. A Man who at the height of Vietnam took a small touring band and played concert for the service men because he received letters that they didn't hear enough (or any) good music in the shit. A man who played Zaire for free (rumble in the jungle...they were going to sell tickets...but when they made it free, he did stay on and kick out jams.) and a man who was so on it live that he could hear any wrong note that was being played and who played it. A man that was on the DR. Detroit soundtrack.

I don't know if it was a man's world...but i do believe it was co-owned by frank sinatra and James brown.

if you look hard enough today you'll totally find me once again wearing my "Miami Vice" costume. who says I hate recycling?

I totally need a chainmail vest...and I need it for the cost of...say...on the house.

If I had a chainmail vest I would totally rock out the dungeon and dragons and drink mead from a flagon and listen to blind guardian and grow a duster mustache and write the songs that would make the whole world shred and wear a belt over it and ask people if they've checked their mail recently and if they said "NO" I'd tear off my jacket to revel the chainmail vest and then I would yell "Spam blocker, Motherfucker!" and punch them in the face and I'd stop all wars, unless they benefited my chainmail vest and I'd cure cancer and feed the starving children, unless they benefited my chainmail vest and Have a angry dance off with at lest two members on N'sync and I'd totally win because when you do the worm in a chainmail vest sparks fly off the pavement and I'd pilot an airplane and I'd write fan fiction about my chainmail vest and I'd entertain children's parties with my patented brand of political satire and build a false idol in it's image and I'd wear it to bed because it's always been my fear that sometime, late at night, an ork would creep into my room to perform the swoop and squat...and I'd totally buy a van and paint it to look like chainmail too and I'd do an american apparel ad wearing only my chainmail vest, the smile on my face and my fully exposed taint and I'd stop recycling, unless it benefited my chainmail vest and I'd write a hip hop cut about it and get dangermouse to produce and I'd go on "Deal or No Deal" and force a rubber glove over Howey's head and tell them that "no fucking deal is worth the vest, you hear me?! Your deals are bunk!!! Look at this fucking vest! Punch it! go ahead, you'll just hurt your hand, it's CHAINMAIL buddy. go back to Bobbies world." and I'd always pay matinee prices and everyday would be a friday and you could even speed on the highway and the world would be a brighter, shiner, happier place where the birds would sing and the possums would frolic and kids would laugh and laugh and sing and laugh and punch and get good grades and you'd get more pay for less work and it would be a utopia, unless that DIDN'T benefit my chainmail vest.

So....you know...think about THAT when you're doing your christmas shopping.

It's early in the morning, as per usual, I find myself on a bus headed downtown. I have my ipod on and I stare vacantly out the window. "More of everything" by Gashuffer plays as we go over the bridge "Don't rat out your friends" by Orchid plays as we venture closer to downtown. "Loser" by Motorhead, "8th Light" by Blackstar...
It's right as "Fucking your ghost in chains of ice" by Leviathan starts to blair that I look up ahead and see that at the next stop, a smaller stop sandwiched between a busy downtown intersection and the already street parked cars of the people who are unlucky enough to work even earlier then me, not only is there a bus already park at that stop, but an ambulance as well. As we pull closer and the blast beats starts from the black metal, I see paramedics frantic-ly running around an older shirtless man who's laying prone. He's already on the back board and they're doing CPR on him, so obviously he's having a slightly worst morning then I am. Around that frenzy of activity half a dozen people are standing at the bus stop watching this whole thing unfold. Most of them are smoking, All of them look completely unfazed. We pull into the stop as best we can. As soon as we do people start streaming from the other bus like rats escaping a burning tenement and start filing on my bus. If the onlookers on the street looked unfazed, they most not have been on that bus, because all of those people looked like they saw a ghost, and not like a Scooby Doo, spacey space kook, smugglers blues-old man in disguise-type ghost. Clearly what ever happened happened on that bus and all those people saw it up close and personal. It also explains why they filed on to my bus...the other one had to stay there and wait to file a statement.
The bus is deadly quiet. Nobody wants to say anything.
Outside, the free show continues. As we pull away, A man walking his dog walks right passed the paramedics and their patient to get to a sidewalk tree to have his small rat of a dog piss on. Another takes one last drag of his cigarette and flicks it out into the street...but then we're a block away. "Try and Catch me" by Digger starts. Another Ambulance blows past us on the way to the stop we just left.
Nobody wants to think about death before their morning coffee. Nobody. So we all just breath in again, and go back to dreading on work day.

Ok, what the fuck is the deal, man? Curling? Word? Really...Curling? Has the god damn world gone fucking mad? everywhere I turn it's "hey, brah, it's curling!" or "word, son, he put on his slider and started sweeping the fuck out that shit and then the rock went right into-" Fuck that. If you're talking to me and you begin a conversation with a sentence that has the words "rocks", "slider", "Broom", "sweeping score", "TEE" or "stone" in it better end up either really disgusting or have absolutely nothing to do with Curling, because I don't play that shit. only two good things have come out of Canada and they're both the band Rush.

It finally occurred to me that it's been what some may call "a grip" (or maybe a octa-grip, deca-grip or the all elusive poly-grip. rimshot!)since I last wrote anything for 10 NRTGU. My bad. I've been a bit busy with the being a one man army at work, trying to write, trying to rock, and in general doing that damn thing. But fuck it, man, I'm back! The six of you that read this can go ahead and just mark it on your calenders and shit, because I'm going to try to beat my record of a post every two months with the new target of a post...I don't know, I don't want to paint myself into a corner here...Um, a post every couple of...Again, that's a lot of pressure to live up to, you know, me calling my shot and what not, because it can really only end one of two ways...I'm either Babe Ruth and call my shot and make it and run around and be fat and dead, or I'm Tom Berenger and I call my shot and then bunt and I run around and I'm all fat and dead...inside. I don't really want to be dead. I'm alright with being fat as long as I'm still light on my feet like Jackie Gleason, but dead...no. So, i guess, posts to follow.

also:
fuck boxing day. fuck new years. although as a pussy, i'm alright with valentines day. fuck mid-winter break. fuck the olympics (with the exception of the luge, bobsledding, and skeleton.) fuck the new jersey meathook. fuck the remake of "any which way but loose" with the rock. fuck mini-bikes. fuck the american news media.

Ok, that just about catches us up. late.

Times like these are fleeting at best
to hell with the rest
trust is like suicide
what I mean to say is you don't have a choice either way
some things were said but that's okay they needed said anyway
let's forgive and forget
I don't know how far the apple fell and through angry lenses it's hard to tell
but I'll be seeing you in hell

Fill up the parting glass
up off your ass it's time
to make what we have last
goodnight, I love you still
Turn out the lights the party is over
and if you sleep
Sweet dreams

Drink all night and sleep all day and i wake up just in time to work away
I'm out the fucking door - and I'm out of mind
love and sacrifice aren't the meaning of life
don't you see that yet? like you and me hand in hand and so far apart
my heads impaled on christmas ale and shadows from the past
warm thoughts full up cold hearts
like coats coming off at christmas mass

turn off the lights the party's over...

ninety five percent of my house is cleaner then it was since we've moved in, this is both deeply unsettling to me, and cause for some concern. Why? Why clean? Why now? How could this have happened on my watch? I'm dirty, that's what I do. I write from time to time, but mostly I produce waste. As A responsible american I try to produce two pounds of waste for every half pound I consume. This is a full time job, but I thought I was up to it. But, no. I'm not, because our house is really clean now. What the fuck?

Has the world gone mad?

Richard Pryor died today. that's really god damn weak. If you don't know about the ground breaking wit that was pryor...go buy his complete output. He was the man, and at 65 he was still to young to go. we'll miss you buddy, say hi to Bill Hicks and Andy Kaufman for me.

I could have sworn that Link Wray had died, but I saw him today. Actually, come to think of it, he did look fairly dead, but I DID see him. Just today. Downtown, because they have movie shows, downtown! ...and apparently they have zombie Link Wray.

I was riding the number four bus, which for those who have never taken it, makes what has to be the scummiest tour of downtown yet seen on it's way to a only somewhat less scummy tour of first hill, when I saw him. He was standing at a bus stop smoking. His face was a wax covered skull, the color of an old book that had been left in the sun, or a hand that had held and smoked to many cigarettes. His hair was a greasy dyed black mess, piled into a tight pompadour. Not the pomp that you see from those psychobilly cats, or the duck ass of the Fonz, you know the sanitary version of the '50's hellion, but this was the real deal. The beautiful meeting of tough and oily. He was standing with his stick legs crossed into a very awkward "X" position, the left over the right, so that his right knee was digging into his left hamstrings. He had it locked in and he never moved from that stance the whole time I watched him. He had on motorcycle boots, with tight, yet dirty pegged jeans over them. To finish the look he had a weathered Leather jacket on. It's like high school was the grooviest fifty years of his life, daddio. The most disturbing part, after the whole seeing zombie Link Wray at a bus stop concept, was that his hands were either swollen grotesquely, or he was wearing large white gloves that never stopped twitching. When they weren't shaking up by his face as he took another drag of what had to be an unfiltered smoke if there's any justice in this world, he had them down at sides with the hands twisted up and to his back, like the arm position that snoopy had when he would do his little running man dance on top of the piano. He just stood there, being creepy. Being zombie Link Wray.

I bet he only had one lung...one lung and a transfer.

one: it's been a long time since I've written anything...for this. i've been quite busy on other creative things, I can tell you that. P.S. writing a novel is hard. But fuck it, it will be done. It's just going to be done very slowly. Like, Thomas Harris slow. (just kidding, I hope.)

Two: Fuck christmas. There. I said it. Someone had to say it, and it was me.

Three: I have to change my vote for favorite beatles song from "eleanor Rigby." to "here comes the sun" which, I believe makes me a pussy. Oh, well. If it means anything my favorite Pig Destroyer song is a three way tie between "cheerleader corpses", "scatological homework" and "towering flesh." which, I believe makes me even more of a pussy.

It always looks like it’s raining outside of her place. At night, when you look into the bright lights in the distance you see the curtains of rain falling hard and fast. Sleek and perfect the rain comes, shimmering soothingly in the too white light down the way. Not the yellow glow of street lights or the milky burn of a buildings security lamp, these powerful white spots are like fog lights cutting through the darkness as if to warn ships of a jagged coast, powerful in their desperation to save doomed passengers, but instead they get the thankless job of highlighting an endless rain. Rain you’d see in a Humphrey Bogart movie. Rain that X sings about, I’m talking Old Testament rain.

Has it been Forty days and forty nights?

Every night that you’d care to look, there it is. The rain. You look twice, and then maybe you say “wow, it’s really coming down out there.” But it’s not you see. It’s not at all. When you look down at the yellow glow or the milky burn, or the grey of the concrete below…it’s dry. There’s no rain at all. It’s perfectly clear outside, and besides, isn’t this Seattle? Don’t we get enough rain? The thing is, you know it’s there, in the back of your mind you do. If you want to see rain, you can, because it’s her place and it always looks like it’s raining outside of her place. But there are stars in the sky and what clouds there are have that ghostly green reflection of the hillside lights. There are so many better things to look at besides the endless sheets of rain. Really, it’s true.

But then you look out into the distance again…

Man, I've finally remembered why I stopped going and posting on internet message boards so long ago. I guess it's like Lewis Black says about Candy Corn. You know it's awful and it's just going to come back and bit you in the ass, but after enough time has past you forget and halloween rolls around and you end up trying to eat it again...and it still leaves a shitty taste in your mouth. Well I'm done with that shit. Not the Candy Corn, although I am done with that shit as well, I'm talking about message boards. No more. I have to stand by some sort of code of honour on this thing, and the only way I can do that is to cut the ties right now. I'm not going to get into exactly what the straw that broke the camels back was...but it happened today and if you where on a bus over hearing that shit in real time you would totally have to bust out laughing or turn around and talk shit. Since I've tryed the shit talking route in the past and it's like trying to teach a monkey to perform open heart surgery...I'm getting off the bus, laughing all the way. Note to the internet:
just stick to the porn, you're good at that. thanks for playing.

motherfucking Star Wars episode III is out and better then ever. Those who don't like it can insert my balls into their mouths, by choice. Revenge of the Sith is the shit, period. You heard me the first time. go buy it. now. go on. stop looking at the computer. go...come on, motherfucker, the internet will be here when you get back...just go...go...buy...

P.S. order 66. nice.