Album releases!!!!! (Bandqlamp version)

In honor of September 9 being the most common birthday, here are two new albums getting birthed:

Salad Spinner

I sequenced all the bass lines and a lot of other things and used general computer wizardry to make a pop album. Mostly. Features songs about watching Password Plus while washing the dishes, finding kitchen accoutrements on the side of the road, inventing new alphabets during Lutheran confirmation, missing Verlaines shows and falling asleep on the train home, electric pencil sharpeners, and riding a cargo bike in 105 degree heat.

Gelatin Duplicator

What happens if I decide to make an album where every track has prominent ring modulator? This is it.  Songs about buying orange drink from a vending machine, falling asleep on the highway, falling asleep to Maya Deren films, buying expired produce, and ancient printing technology melting during the heat dome.

If you would like physical CD copies printed on an Apple //c-ImageWriter II combo and an IBM Wheelwriter 5 respectively, drop me a line. I'm done selling things (well, aside from charging $1 on Bandqlamp) but we can work something out.

Archive.org versions to follow soonish. 

COMING SOON

I've got the Apple //c out and you know what that means. Right?!!? Watch this space!

Catching up with August part 1

In August we had half a mind to fly somewhere but didn’t have enough PTO. So we stayed in the Northwest and drove the Wondermobile to Centralia, WA. 

What a weird place! We stayed in the charming, lovingly restored Centralia Square hotel (formerly an Elks lodge) and our boy looked out at the non-stop trains with religious zeal. The place is just starting to gentrify - the McMenamins hotel, far inferior to the Centralia Square, the foot soldier of gentrification - and now there are retro arcades, natural-food shops, goth gift shops with a salesman wearing a monocle. The trains constantly roar through Hub City. My son delighted in telling me which one was an Amtrak and which one was a freight train, even before they showed up.

The Centralia Rollerdrome. With a name like that it has to be awesome, and indeed it is. Largely untouched by time and beautifully kept. My rollerskating spouse was in total heaven, and thanks to the bouncy house, our kid was too.

I bought a copy of Margo Guryan's Take a Picture at the Amazon-returns bin store (who returns that?!) and now "Sunday Morning" is stuck in my head forever.

After that we drove down to the central Oregon coast to escape a heat wave in Portland. Good idea except that everyone else was doing the same thing, so we hung suspended in an eternal traffic jam in Otis. But when we got to our destination it was twilightly and cool and misty. Despite not sleeping the first night (no thanks to the drunken bros falling asleep with the TV on at nuclear volume above us) we got to swim in Lake Marie and walk in the mist and drink good wild cider and listen to sea lions ork-orking and walk and watch the fierce surf on the rocky shore and walk. It was good and surreal and necessary.

Wreckless Eric _Le Beat Group Electrique_ / library CD sales

I love trawling the CD sections at library book sales. They're cheap, buying things supports the library, and sometimes they have great albums that were withdrawn after not getting checked out enough. Among them: Wreckless Eric's _Le Beat Group Electrique_, thanks to whoever purchased it for the Ledding Library. Great stuff, recorded quietly in a living room with a cardboard box for drums. Warm, low-stakes, charming:

 

Also useful: buying trashy 80s CDs that I want to listen to but that I know will follow me forever on the algo. So instead of having YouTroobpf keep asking me, hey, do you want to listen to Bleears for Flears's _Songs for the Big Blare_ again? Remember that time in August 2025 when you listened to it twice? Instead, I can put my laser vinyl into my laser vinyl machine and experience the shiniest version of that shiny 1985 sound without being hounded about it. It is weird to hear it at the correct speed - I was genuinely expecting the first song to be a full half-step lower, thanks to my crummy mid-80s tape deck and its unreliable dubs - but still kind of a pleasure, especially "Heed over Hells," whose bass line I had not paid sufficient attention to the first time around.

Foster Soiree / Bridge Pedal

Yesterday we went to the eternally rapidly gentrifying Foster Road for the Foster Soiree. Always interesting to see what's coming in and pushing out the sketchy businesses that dotted the area when we lived there. We got to hang out with Friend of Tape Mountain Alison D, whose Xtreme Twee business empire continues to get weirder and greater, get very nice kulfi-flavored ice cream (dairy for JL, non- for me), check out a new record store (not my thing) and the new-ish book store Word Virus (very much my thing).

Today I did Bridge Pedal, in which one bikes across most of Portland's bridges and tries not to crash into bicycles in front of one. Today JL and the boy also did the kids' ride - he needs a bigger bike very much - and I was able to catch up with them after I finished the main ride. I was so proud of how well he was keeping to his lane and not running over smaller children. It felt good. 

People had speakers on their bikes, which is... a choice. Here are my awards for best and worst songs overheard:

BEST: When I got to the finish line, someone was playing Shonen Knife's "Cycling is Fun" (the original and better version) Obvious choice, right, but a delightful song and the timing couldn't have been better. I shouted "hey!" along with them and startled another rider.

 

Left-field choice: Someone was playing Buffalo Springfield's "Broken Arrow" on the Marquam Bridge, a mysterious twisty banger from my dad's record collection, and somehow not among the top search suggestions on YouChoob:

WORST: Mötley Crüe's "Girls, Girls, Girls," the audio equivalent of shitting in the pool. 

Decades Week / Moomin / In the Mood for Love

It is Decades Week at my son's summer care camp. Yesterday was Sixties Day, so when I pulled up on the bike, he and his friend were hugging trees and saying "I'm a hippie!" Today was Seventies Day. The googly eye fell off his pet rock Alexander, and on the way home he mentioned that disco didn't suck, disco was great. I've taught him well.

Thursday is apparently Nineties Day. His comment: "That's when everyone was rich!" JL and I both had to explain that, no, not everyone, dear.  

We've been going through Tove Jansson's Moomin books as bedtime reading. Man do they hold up well. So delightful, so timeless. Revisiting great kids' books decades later with a great kid is just the best.

Cinema 21 is showing the 25th anniversary restoration of In the Mood for Love. We got babysitting from my mom and caught it on the big screen. Gorgeous, super sad, and the soundtrack sounded great. So interesting to see it 25 years later with that much more life experience under my belt.

Bike update / Sluggo Is Lit

After dealing with a lot of weirdness with my olde and well-loved #1 bicycle (a Soma Double Cross of unknown age that I've been riding for over a decade), I wanted something that would just go in all conditions without the endless issues associated with a high-mileage bike. So I bought a mega-clearance belt-drive dealio from the Tr*k clearance store. Man is it smooth, and I was glad to find that it isn't substantially slower than the other one. I've ridden it all over the place in the last couple days and it has responded admirably. A joy.

Speaking of mega-clearance items: Last night I went to watch my incoming-8th-grade nephew play bass in a driveway with his jazz combo as part of Milwaukie Porchfest. He was great and I'm super proud of him, of course, and Porchfest is the best thing. But what I really want to talk about is my Sluggo Is Lit rebooted-Nancy shirt. I wore this absurd piece of clothing to the show and people flipped. Everyone wanted to talk to me about it. Then I talked to my nephew after the show and he said that he couldn't stop looking at it while he was playing. So if you like being the center of attention at junior high schoolers' jazz driveway concerts and you fit into the limited sizes that are still available, then go throw TopatoCo a few bucks.