I Trust My Guitar

This past Monday I had the pleasure of being a guest on Lakota Phillips' talk program Breaking Taboo, which airs weekly on New Dissident Radio. It was the second time I've been on and I must say I really enjoy it. The free-wheeling,  uncensored talk format is a real change of pace from my own freewheeling, barely-censored music show...sometimes I wish that I had a radio talk show of my very own- yeah, like that could ever happen.

Wednesday night I had a dinner date, my third with the same woman. It is more like a slow, meandering walk through a forest than it is a mad race to the finish line...this is a new experience for me. Women sure were a lot easier to figure out back when I only dated alcoholics, but I have a feeling that the slow approach might yield better, longer-lasting results in the long run.

Thursday night I took a look into my larder and saw that I was out of almost everything that could reasonably be considered food...it didn't take me long to figure out that Cheerios and chutney may be alliterative, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they belong in the same bowl, so I headed to the local market, which has been randomly changing the layout of its aisles and contents as they remodel the interior. The milk is...where...there...where...here, whew...the supermarket experience left me simultaneously exhausted and over-stimulated andwhen I finally got home, I realized I had leftover Thai from last night. So I nuked that and by that time it was time for bed.

The office closed early Friday, so I went home and started working on my music show. Then I took a short nap. Then I got up and worked a bit.
Nap.
Work.
Nap.
Work.
 
This went on until about midnight, at which time I took an eight-hour nap.

I woke up this morning and found that I had no blank CDs to burn my show's music selections to, so I dashed off to store to buy some. When I returned, I noticed that last night I'd saved my show files as 96k mp3s, which is too low-fidelity for radio broadcast. I was forced to re-create all of my segments at the very last second and re-burn them as audio files. As a result, I barely arrived at the station in time for my show.

The show went really well but I was disheartened by the lack of internet listeners- my listenership has been slowly but steadily increasing and today's number was so dismal that at first I thought I was looking at my painfully vanishing 401k and not at our web meter. But the DJ who came in after me told me he'd listened to the stream just a while ago and it was noisy and distorted. Hmmm.

Sure enough, when I got home, my recording was totally ruined by digital noise and distortion.

I'd spent two days on it and *poof*, gone forever...but...but...aha! I still had most of the show saved as individual segments!

I threw them into the old mixing bowl, stirred in a few songs that I'd added on the fly during the broadcast, sprinkled it with some artist-promo program IDs and voila! Instant podcast- by instant, I mean twelve hours of repetitive, carpal-tunneling work, but at least it is done.

Tomorrow, while the rest of you drink beer, eat tasty grilled meats and frolic in the sun with your friends and family, I'll be shopping for a mop and new shower curtain.

Then I'll do housework and later on I'll fix some pasta for dinner.

Long live Rock and Roll.

THE NEW BREAKFAST SNOB SEPT.  3, 2011. 

Broadcast every Saturday from 1pm-3pm on WRIR 97.3 FM, Richmond. Podcast here.

Joan As Policewoman- I Was Everyone

Cafebar 401- You Got Something

Michelle Malone- Light of Day

Paula Cole- Road to Death

Sparks- Biology 2

Funkadelic- I Wanna Know

Can- Half Past One

The Tubes- I'm Just A Mess

Patti Smith- The 25th Floor/High On Rebellion

Portishead- Insensible

Massive Attack- Live With Me

HuDost- Glacier

Pinback- AFK

Angelfish- Mummy Can't Drive

Garbage- Driving Lesson

Richard Thompson- MGB GT

Capt. Beefheart- New Electric Ride (Live)

Stackridge- No One Is More Important Than The Earthworm (live)

Mothers of Invention- Oh No/Orange County Lumber Truck

John Cale- Bring It On Up

Jimi Hendrix- Hey Baby (New Sun Rising) live

Chrome- Zombie Warfare

Pere Ubu- Life Stinks

The Kinks- Mountain Girl

Bill Laswell- Assassin

Monday Machines- Ruined Morning (bonus)
I began this re-created broadcast using a very cool program ID that Cary Grace made for my show, so I thought finishing  with a very appropriate song that she wrote for me would be a fitting end to it all.

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