Music Music and More Unreality
Sep. 17th, 2005 12:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miko2I've been listening to "The American Song-Poem Anthology" lately. Song-Poems are songs or poems that regular American people paid to have recorded -- usually it was something of a scam, where recording companies and studios on the fringes of the recording industry tried to get people to send them songs or poems that could be set to music, promising fame and fortune and that their song could be the next big hit, when in reality they just wanted to get people to pay them money, record the song as quickly and cheaply as possible, send the records off to the budding songwriter, and that was the end of it. No thought of promoting the music or doing anything further with it, of course. In fact, they generally recorded these things as fast as possible -- sometimes the studio musicians were paid per song -- and they might crank out a tune in ten minutes or less, even when they had to set it to music first. ^_^
A lot of people collect this stuff -- and of course there are lots of "gems" out there to be discovered, since there were never a lot of copies of any one song and those copies may have been sitting in someone's basement or attic for years. Anyway this is a different sort of "bad music" from the two Songs In The Key of Z collections, because these songs are generally recorded by competent studio musicians -- sometimes even more professional musicians who were moonlighting, possibly under assumed names. The fun part is in the loopiness of the actual lyrics... songs about how great Jimmy Carter or Richard Nixon was, songs about what a hospital can do for you, songs celebrating things like the moon landing or everything yellow. One song goes on and on and on about how great it is to have a convertible and a headband. The headband is a very important part -- when his dad tells him that "in my day, I had shoes on my feet, and I had a convertible with a rumble seat", he replies that something was missing -- his dad didn't have a headband!
And then there's the song where some guy tries very hard to rhyme words with "disco": Disco disco disco, I am going to Mount Kisko, I am going to buy some crisco, so I can bake a cake to disco" etc. etc. ad nauseum. Anyway most of this stuff just makes me laugh my head off.
I haven't recieved my Bowie or Billy Idol cds yet, so I may not have a good copy of my current cd song mix ready for tomorrow. And I haven't written anything. I've been very busy building stuff in Second Life, mostly clothing for now.
Last night I did something different. A guy who I met earlier showed off his "space elevator" for me. In Second Life, you can't fly more than a hundred feet or so straight up before you reach a point where you can't fly much higher. But people have found ways around that. One thing I have is a flight stick, that when I hold it in my hand, it allows me to fly very fast and much higher than normal. But the space elevator is something else again... it consists of a bunch of booster rings, stacked one above the other, each of which pushes you up to the next one. You step onto the launcher and suddenly you're flying up and up and up... the ride takes a couple of minutes at least. At the top, he had a small space station waiting. For my first trip he had me sit on a box, and I got to watch my character rotate around and around as I ascended. But when I got to the top, I hit the roof of the space station, bounced back down, hit the last accelerator, bounced up, hit the roof, bounced down, and then bounced sideways and fell all the way back to earth.
A second attempt had me flying sideways after only a partial ascent. I landed in a river under a bridge. After that he told me to just step into the accelerator without using the lift box to sit on. Again I drifted out of the main elevator chute and eventually crashed to earth. On a fourth trip I got all the way to the top again, but hit the roof and bounced and then fell to earth. Finally, on the fifth attempt, I was able to "jump off" or jump forward when I got to the space station. I hit the roof but was able to land on the station rather than falling back down through the open doorway/elevator gateway.
Me at the space station.
My latest avatar, Mint the Mouse. The mouse avatar is one I found at the skymall at Furnation. It was so incredibly cute that I had to buy it. The original avatar design was a girl mouse, but I switched it to male -- on the theory that I want a male avatar to use if I ever actually get around to DJing in Second Life. Unfortunately he was so short and cute that people continued to mistake him for a girl -- one guy with the same last name referred to me as his "sister" and another person referred to me as "Miss Mint", and then the guy with the space elevator said, "Oh, you're a girl? I didn't realize." because I'd had a male human avatar when I'd first met him. So I've been tweaking the body a bit to try and make it more obviously male -- broader shoulders, that sort of thing. Of course I could go for something less cute and make my avatar's gender more obvious, but I love cute in general. I think I was also a bit inspired by a friend I met who was a very cute fennic fox. Which, btw, I've seen a cute fennic fox AV for sale too, I might get that some day. ^_^
This is Mint back on the ground, after I've tweaked him a bit, and added a tee shirt that should also help, lol. The shorts are also something I created last night, proving I can do more than just make a tee shirt.
Actually I made a "Flogging Molly" punk rock skirt and tights two nights ago, then wore them to a "punk rock" dance club contest and won a prize. That was Jalia wearing the skirt, mind you, not Mint.
My goal for the weekend is to get a store logo set up, and rent some space in a mall somewhere to see if I can actually sell anything. So far I've had vendors set up on my own property, but nobody really knows they're there.
A lot of people collect this stuff -- and of course there are lots of "gems" out there to be discovered, since there were never a lot of copies of any one song and those copies may have been sitting in someone's basement or attic for years. Anyway this is a different sort of "bad music" from the two Songs In The Key of Z collections, because these songs are generally recorded by competent studio musicians -- sometimes even more professional musicians who were moonlighting, possibly under assumed names. The fun part is in the loopiness of the actual lyrics... songs about how great Jimmy Carter or Richard Nixon was, songs about what a hospital can do for you, songs celebrating things like the moon landing or everything yellow. One song goes on and on and on about how great it is to have a convertible and a headband. The headband is a very important part -- when his dad tells him that "in my day, I had shoes on my feet, and I had a convertible with a rumble seat", he replies that something was missing -- his dad didn't have a headband!
And then there's the song where some guy tries very hard to rhyme words with "disco": Disco disco disco, I am going to Mount Kisko, I am going to buy some crisco, so I can bake a cake to disco" etc. etc. ad nauseum. Anyway most of this stuff just makes me laugh my head off.
I haven't recieved my Bowie or Billy Idol cds yet, so I may not have a good copy of my current cd song mix ready for tomorrow. And I haven't written anything. I've been very busy building stuff in Second Life, mostly clothing for now.
Last night I did something different. A guy who I met earlier showed off his "space elevator" for me. In Second Life, you can't fly more than a hundred feet or so straight up before you reach a point where you can't fly much higher. But people have found ways around that. One thing I have is a flight stick, that when I hold it in my hand, it allows me to fly very fast and much higher than normal. But the space elevator is something else again... it consists of a bunch of booster rings, stacked one above the other, each of which pushes you up to the next one. You step onto the launcher and suddenly you're flying up and up and up... the ride takes a couple of minutes at least. At the top, he had a small space station waiting. For my first trip he had me sit on a box, and I got to watch my character rotate around and around as I ascended. But when I got to the top, I hit the roof of the space station, bounced back down, hit the last accelerator, bounced up, hit the roof, bounced down, and then bounced sideways and fell all the way back to earth.
A second attempt had me flying sideways after only a partial ascent. I landed in a river under a bridge. After that he told me to just step into the accelerator without using the lift box to sit on. Again I drifted out of the main elevator chute and eventually crashed to earth. On a fourth trip I got all the way to the top again, but hit the roof and bounced and then fell to earth. Finally, on the fifth attempt, I was able to "jump off" or jump forward when I got to the space station. I hit the roof but was able to land on the station rather than falling back down through the open doorway/elevator gateway.
Me at the space station.
My latest avatar, Mint the Mouse. The mouse avatar is one I found at the skymall at Furnation. It was so incredibly cute that I had to buy it. The original avatar design was a girl mouse, but I switched it to male -- on the theory that I want a male avatar to use if I ever actually get around to DJing in Second Life. Unfortunately he was so short and cute that people continued to mistake him for a girl -- one guy with the same last name referred to me as his "sister" and another person referred to me as "Miss Mint", and then the guy with the space elevator said, "Oh, you're a girl? I didn't realize." because I'd had a male human avatar when I'd first met him. So I've been tweaking the body a bit to try and make it more obviously male -- broader shoulders, that sort of thing. Of course I could go for something less cute and make my avatar's gender more obvious, but I love cute in general. I think I was also a bit inspired by a friend I met who was a very cute fennic fox. Which, btw, I've seen a cute fennic fox AV for sale too, I might get that some day. ^_^
This is Mint back on the ground, after I've tweaked him a bit, and added a tee shirt that should also help, lol. The shorts are also something I created last night, proving I can do more than just make a tee shirt.
Actually I made a "Flogging Molly" punk rock skirt and tights two nights ago, then wore them to a "punk rock" dance club contest and won a prize. That was Jalia wearing the skirt, mind you, not Mint.
My goal for the weekend is to get a store logo set up, and rent some space in a mall somewhere to see if I can actually sell anything. So far I've had vendors set up on my own property, but nobody really knows they're there.
