Red Redone

(image courtesy of dasgamer.com, a website I've never been to.)

I'm not a musician, but I have no doubt that it's very difficult to pull together a finished album. You (individually or collectively) work for so long composing melodies, sketching lyrics, marrying elements, trial-and-erroring your way to three to five minutes you're satisfied with. And you have to then do that nine or more times to successfully generate enough material for an album. Not to mention the time and energy put into recording and mixing processes and all that other stuff that makes no sense to me. Figuring out how to order said material in the finished product must get only a fraction of the attention that every other element gets.

You probably know Weezer, even if you aren't into music made after 1980. They've had some pretty big hits and some stretches of pop culture relevance for 15 years now. If you have any affinity for them, you probably already know this basic timeline: two stellar albums in the 90s, band goes on sabbatical, comes back in 00s with four more albums. The reactions to the latter tend to vary between "very good" to "serviceable yet patchy" to "wretched."

As someone who is generally more forgiving of their later work, I picked up (if you can pick up an iTunes download) their most recent album, Weezer (aka The Red Album) (which would be their third self-titled/color coded release, making them the most successful alumni of the Peter Gabriel school of album naming). Though it felt like it should have been their strongest post-Pinkerton album, listening to it left me with a strong sense of "meh." A lot of it was great - a few really nice rock songs, and some more intricate (relatively) things that hearkened back to their heyday. But it didn't really hold together, with some songs not passing muster (I'm looking at you, Heart Songs and Everybody Get Dangerous) and Brian Bell's contribution leading to awkward and heart-breaking comparisons to Uncle Kracker.

Thankfully, I threw out the extra dollars in my purchase to get the expanded edition, which had five extra songs. In this batch were two excellent, quirky songs based around animals and death (Pig and Spider), and the best song they've done since their heyday (Miss Sweeney, an awkward yet touching song about love and/or sexual harassment).

I have no idea how these were kept off the finished official record. Clearly, somewhere along the line, somebody dropped the ball. Thankfully, I'm here to help Rivers Cuomo & Co by telling them how they need to re-arrange things for any future pressings of the album. So here you go, the improved running order for The Red Album:

01. Dreamin'
02. Troublemaker
03. Pork & Beans
04. Pig
05. Cold Dark World
06. The Spider
07. Automatic
08. Miss Sweeney
09. The Greatest Man That Ever Lived
10. The Angel And The One

Why I Am Awesome: I am better than established musical artists at assembling their albums.

Why I Am Not Awesome: None of Rivers, Karl Koch or representatives at DGC Records will return my calls or emails.

Roxanne? Sorry, You Do Have To

In the process of slowly making my way up Vermont Avenue tonight, I sat at a red light. (I don't know what the cross street was - somewhere around the low numbers, maybe Beverly.) I patiently waited for the pedestrian light outside the passenger window to switch from white walking man to blinky orange hand to steady orange hand. The light above it, aimed at the cross street in front of me, switched to yellow then to red.

And a-one, and a-two...

My light turned green. I took my foot off the brake and rolled forward. I wanted to get home, but I wasn't rushing. My whole car was in the intersection and my foot still had not hit the gas. Which turned out to be good.

I caught motion out of the side of my left eye. Instinctively, I hit the brake. Which was also good, because when I turned my head I saw a late-90s maroon luxury car bombing through its red light and zooms across the street. Seriously, he had about four full seconds of red light before entering the intersection with extreme prejudice. I leaned on my horn, hoping the sound would act as both a warning to the other cars around me and to give an aural "screw you" to this crazy dude. The car in the lane to the right of me didn't stop as quickly as I did, and came within two feet of smashing into the back of the red-light-runner.

Why I Am Awesome: Thanks to a combination of good instincts, solid peripheral vision and dumb luck, I did not end up in a twisted wreck in the middle of an L.A. street. Which I'd call a good thing.

Why I Am Not Awesome: I ignored my following instincts to slam my car to the right, track down this moron and pull a GTA on him, throwing him onto the street and kicking the living crap out of him. Which I, of course, would never have actually done. But I could have at least written down his license plate number and report him, in the hopes that some sort of punishment would come from his reckless driving. But instead I just kept going straight and went home. It might not have been an intelligent plan, but you have to admit that pursuing a medium-speed chase to track down this evildoer would have been pretty awesome. Maybe next time.

Academic Cycles

This week, in addition to launching this fabulous blog, I also started up a new job. It's nothing fancy - it's a work-study position in an academic department at the university I'm attending for graduate school. I worked as a teaching assistant in this department during the fall semester, but thanks to a confusing maze of college policies, politics and pollution (of the intellectual variety), the professors weren't allowed to hire me back.

Which has led me to sit at the front desk of this small department, answering phones and sorting mail and directing visitors to where they need to go. Tomorrow I'll get to work on updating their website. As a student position, it's very decent. I loved teaching, but from the standpoint of doing my own work for my classes, this serves as a very viable alternative. I'll spend less time working for this job than I did teaching but make the same amount of money. Not a lot of taxing work + free time to dig into stuff for my own classes + a solid pay rate = quality job.

Plus, having become friends with the people who work in the department (and who are over-taxed on a daily basis due to a lack of practical support from other professionals), I feel honestly rewarded in helping them out. I feel better about this job than any one I had in my undergrad years, and I liked my undergrad jobs.

Why I Am Awesome: new job, making decent money, helping out friends and not having it interfere with my school work. I probably couldn't have scripted a better position for myself, and you know how much I love scripting perfect things.

For the past four years, before taking the masters-program leap, I worked in university administration. The benefits were solid, the hours respectable, and I never felt in danger of being downsized or laid off. But more often than not, the job(s) would be hellish. Over-educated professors clashing with under-educated administrators, none of them having a clue how to maintain a decent organizational structure, but having the clout and the budget to do anything they want...except give you that raise they promised.

Have you ever heard the pithy aphorism that the reason the politics in academia are so vicious because the stakes are so small? Well, it's true. And you know who gets hit with the most shrapnel from that viciousness? The unassuming little guy who only took the job to make some money and take some free classes, the one who never wanted to carve out a career path and who just wants to do a good job and leave at the end of the day feeling fine about his life. That's who.

(By little guy, I am of course referring to my relative position on the job ladder; sadly, the stress of these positions did not stop my from eating and cause me to drop 50 pounds in an unhealthy yet svelte-inducing manner.)

I won't bore you with stories about my escapades - they're probably more whiny than anything else, and part of me still thinks I can use them for something worthwhile in the future. But it's fair to say that when I packed up my cubicle (not an office, couldn't be an office, the world would end if they gave me an office) back in August to head west and start school again, I told myself I was free from the anchor of my crappy jobs. That I wouldn't continue down this path. That the last place I would ever find myself again was back in a desk in a university department, answering phones from behind a three-foot partition.

Why I Am Not Awesome: I spent at least fifteen minutes today thinking I might never, ever be able to leave this horrible track I have set for myself due to a lack of focus and strong initiative. I pictured myself someday ending up with office window lettering declaring me the Associate Dean of Super Not Awesomeness. And the worst part was I thought of all of this after I left work, which means I didn't even get paid to think about it.

The Debate

Over St. Patrick's Day weekend 2007, the bachelor party I co-organized for my friend Brian went down. Ten friends made their way to Montreal, most of us from Boston but one flying in from Michigan and another from the Bay Area. The clockwork travel arrangements hit a serious snag when the only serious winter storm of the year hit on the Friday we were leaving; flights were canceled, surprises ended up sprung earlier than anticipated, a 5 hour drive became almost 11 hours.

But by midnight on St. Paddy's Day, all 10 of us were sitting in McLean's Pub, enjoying the oddly delicious burger-with-cream-cheese special and watching a member of our crew offend a suburban mother and her teenage daughter. (He had arrived the day before the storm, and had spent the entire day drinking and watching college basketball; at midnight, he loudly demanded that this poor woman tell him if the French word for 'douchebag' was 'sack du douche.') The weekend proceeded just as any gathering of male friends in their late 20s should, with some good drinks, good food, gambling, reminiscing, roasting and a dash of strippers.

(Note: if Brian's now-wife is reading this, there weren't really any strippers. We spent most of the early morning hours in Future Shop, staring at their HDTV selection.)

Why I Am Awesome: this party would not have succeeded without my planning. I served my co-best man title well, and as we checked out of the hotel I got to have one of my best friends in the world tell me he got exactly the bachelor party he wanted.

Things didn't look so hot on the Thursday night. As the week had progressed, the weather forecast had evolved from "meh, we'll be getting a couple of inches," to "there will be some accumulation," to "STORMTRACKER 2000 predicts that few will survive this, the ultimate revenge of Mother Nature." With two attendees already in Canada, and two others flying in from separate parts of the country, the whole trip looked on the verge of crumbling into disaster.

As the chief organizer, I sat in my darkened bedroom, with the sickly blue glow of WBZ's 11 O'Clock news flickering around me. Despite my girlfriend Lisa's best attempts to assuage me, I became convinced that I had screwed up the entire operation. I was the one who had picked this weekend. I had decided to plan a surprise around flights arriving without delays. I had gotten my hands on a simple plan, and since I was involved it had, inevitably, all gone to shit.

In other words, I threw a woe-is-me hissy fit. When Lisa pointed out gently that I was being completely ridiculous, I stormed out of the room, tearing a swath of destruction in my path.

(Destruction might be overstating it. This wasn't, like, a pre-Another-Brick-In-The-Wall-III flip out where I smashed the TV and threatened to toss a loved one out the window. I did slam the door to the bedroom as I stormed out to the bathroom, causing two chips of paint to fall off the door. But if you think Lisa has ever let me forget them, you are horribly wrong.)

Why I Am Not Awesome: Despite every positive element in my relatively quite privileged life, I felt the need to somehow try to blame the shifting of cold fronts and winter weather patterns on my own karma. In addition to a bachelor party for a friend, I decided to throw a whiny and immature pity party for myself. And I have the blood of two paint chips on my hands; and that blood will never wash off.