Neil Fein's Blog

Last night's improv music rehearsal... I think it best to not post when I'm angry, if you know what I mean.

Assuaging my feelings of guilt, I'll be at the Central NJ Song Circle tomorrow, in an effort to convince myself I'm playing out. (To quote the website, it's "A bunch of musicians sitting around playing".)

Last night, I was playing with All The Way, and when I was done, the song's title had changed to All I Remember. The lyric sheet is virtually illegible now due to strikeouts and scribbling in-between lines (the margins are too crowded by now). I think this is a good sign.

I'm not so happy with More, the yard sale song, it just seems kinda eh. There's something there, though. If I can't figure out what to do with it I'll bring it to the Princeton circle next month.

Graz tells me the Internet Cafe in Highland Park is having its open mic on Saturday night, now; and I see a local restaurant (I forget the name, some ribs place on Raritan Avenue in Edison) has one on Thursday nights.

Well, well. Craig is considering a Jaguar. I think he's out of his mind, but... gotta admit, they're nice cars.

Martha's car is doing well so far, and we have some time on that car as she has an extremely low daily mileage. My car is doing reasonably well, considering it's coming up on 100,000 miles.

I've (hopefully) a few years left with my car, and I'm toying with what I'll get to replace it on that day it goes to that great scrapyard in the sky. Frankly, I'm not as thrilled with Saturns as I was back in 1995; my original '95 SL2 was a great car, but the current '98 model doesn't have the same pep to it, it feels like a slightly better Toyota or Honda. I've looked at the Minis, and they look like fun cars, but they use more gasoline (sorry, more "petrol") than you'd think. Of course, Les would be horrified to hear I'm contemplating an even smaller car. (Hi, Les.)

Martha was sick this past Thursday and her car was still in the shop on Friday. I took half a day off work on Friday to clean the apartment.

Judy and Elan stayed for Shabbes and the weekend, and we had a few folks over for our Friday night dinner that they either knew or would enjoy meeting (IMHO, of course).

After ferrying the Riesers back from the Edison train station, Craig and Paula were waiting back in our living room; the JudyElan and CraigPaula collectives haven't seen each other in a while. Martin arrived with Elianna, and Grazina walked in as well. this was a notable evening because ElanJudy also hadn't seen Martin in some time, and Elianna is Martin's latest girlfriend. This is the first time Martin brought around a woman this early in the relationship; interesting with us checking her out and vice-versa, Martin and Elianna not quite EliannaMartin but obviously looking at the prospect. Personally, I was doing my best to leave my high-school preconceptions of Elianna behind, and get to know her afresh. I think I did fairly well at that, and we all swapped stories and played Jewish Geography.

Keeping Shabbes with Elan and Judy was, unsurprisingly, smooth. I accompanied Elan to an Orthodox shul in downtown Highland Park. The Rabbi gave a hyper-zionist sermon at the end of the service; very dogmatic, yet open to interpretation. While I find the politics of this shul and the movement problematic, I can easily see taking Elan there again as the service was good, the congregants friendly, and it seems they're generally a good bunch of folks.

Motzi Shabbes, we watched The Graduate and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?.

After dropping them at the train station on Sunday, we went to an Improv rehearsal. We left a few minutes early and drove down to East Windsor, NJ to see Craig and Paula's new house. Craig and I have been talking on projects for the house.

I was going through some older music this afternoon. Time Runs Ahead, Push, and Welcome Home are all excellent tunes, but need new lyrics.

In particular, All the Way attracts me. It's a song about my old guitar being replaced. The song is a little too heavy-handed. I threw the analogy to a relationship ending too much for my tastes, now. Perhaps pulling some of that and substituting more vivid imagery of a guitar being smashed in the back seat of a car would make it a much better lyric. I took the remains of the guitar and did a Townshend with the corpse in the dumpster.

Martha and I saw the latest copy of Analog on sale the other day, with a brand new story by Michael A. Burstein. Michael is a friend, and of course we've been following his work with interest. He's had a series of stories lately where he's been experimenting with different forms, and this one is no exception. Sitting on the couch and reading at 1am, I see this:

... I returned to my daily quota of words. I recall how sometimes the critiques I received in writing workshops would make me freeze up for days on end, unable to write anything. It pleased me to discover that Lambclear's critiquehadthe opposite effect.

The story is called Paying it Forward, and is about a struggling writer who is being mentored by a master of the field, an extremely well-known and deceased man.

I'm very happy to see that Michael is improving; while, in the words of Lambclear, the story is "good stuff, even if the writing is a bit awkward in places". If Michael is obliquely criticizing his own work here (and I do see a little of him hidden in the stuggling writer), he's very self-conscious of his own flaws, if a little harsh. This story touched me like no other he's written, even Kaddish for the Last Survivor.

It's the concept of helpful and unhelpful criticism that struck a chord, if a dissonant one. I recently wrote about why some criticism is helpful and why some is not, when writing about why I've recently switched song circles. What it comes down to is, does the criticism make the author want to write more? If the answer is no,the criticism is unhelpful, no matter how pointed and well-intentioned.

Thinking back on it, the previous song circle I attended had the effect of not giving very good advice unless the song was a standout, but it did make me want to write more. On the other hand, the circle I've gone to lately tends to give excellent advice, but my motivation to write is less.

Perhaps the lesson here is not that criticism should be both helpful and motivating (it should) but that a writer shouldn't depend on criticism. When writing for a particular audience, I'll tend to come out with songs that are pleasing to those people.

Also: Michael, thanks for writing this story.

Watching the extras on the DVD of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I found a fascinating documentary called "Fear and Loathing on the Road to Hollywood", from the late 70's. I got most of the way through it; Thompson was pretty ambivilant about the Raoul Duke character at this point, as his legend had become considerably larger than life. There's quite a bit more on the DVDs, I'll keep digging.

Martha's doing much better. However, we lost a lot of time today, between that and her not having a car. I took half a personal day today, and I'll be spending this afternoon buying fish and cleaning up the apartment.

Martha's pretty unwell, she called in sick today. I called the auto place, her car won't be ready until Monday at the earliest, and I just heard from Craig that he and Paula will indeed be coming over for Friday night dinner. That makes... nine of us. I shan't be getting much sleep soon.

I mentioned to the group that my set list of original material has grown to just under half an hour. Bruce nodded, Ofer and Grazina didn't have much to say. I got to thinking, as comfortable as it is to be doing comedy, it's not my ultimate goal and it's time to move on. Soon.

I watched Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas last night, while I was waiting up for Martin to call. It's a very strange movie, as is to be expected from a film essentially about Hunter S. Thompson. Or anything from Terry Gilliam.

About halfway through the film, thoroughly immersed in the world of hippies, drugs, and Gilliam, I surfaced enough to realize that the lead character, named "Duke", is similar to the character "Duke" in Doonesbury. Martha had mentioned to me sometime back that Trudeau's character Duke was in fact based on Hunter S. Thompson; having seen this ficitonal analog, I'll have to check out the book -- once the memory of the film has receeded to the back of the brain.

It's disturbing and fascinating at the same time, like grisly auto accidents or the very best stories of self-destruction always are.

Rock Creek
Dance In My Kitchen
There's That Song
I'll Wait For You
Eyes Up Front
She Told It To Me Twice
Never Had A Brother
On the Mall (Processional)

About 25 minutes long, getting better. Three more songs and I'll have a dozen. I'm hoping that, by the end of 2003, I'll have enough material to play short sets on my own.

I just posted this to the group's internal mailing list:

I realize that whether or not Ofer wears fake armpit hair will of course determine whether or not the entire show is succesful. Some perspective, people...?

The fact that I thought it necessary to say this at all speaks volumes.

After discovering that I can add a title to a blog entry, I went back through the posts since March 2002 (when I started this blog) and turned the "titles" I had assigned into real titles; I was using "H4" tags in HTML before that. I imagine thie will let me search on titles at some future time.

I also noticed a few posts about the Greenwich Village Songwriter's Exchange... they're scattered in a few places, and I'll add links in place of this text if I ever figure out how to do permalinks. (Or is that a Blogger Pro-only thing?) My first post [Tue Aug 27 2002] goes on about how wonderful it is. I mention it a few more times in passing, but haven't gone lately. I mention the Princeton Songwriter's group in February 2003, but that's it.

I've for the time being decided not to go to the village-based group, mostly because what they consider a good song isn't what I consider a good song. To the folk circle, a "good song" is mostly in the lyrics. What I'm writing is a form of rock music, with the music and the lyric being equally as important and interdependent.

The Princeton group is closer, much closer to what I'm looking for. While they still write mostly folk music, I've seen them enjoy music for its own sake. They will point out flaws in the lyric, but also in the music. The most I ever got from the Greenwich Village group is a vague sense that the music and the words "don't go".

It occurs that all of this may be a way to avoid an uncomfortable situation. I'll go back to Houston Street sometime soon, just not as a regular.

Let me make this clear, I'm not saying one group is better than the other. I do miss the thorough lyric-thrashing that Jack and co. can deliver, even if I don't agree with their musical choices. And nothing beats an established group. I still have to find that -- or make it.

I've been rewatching the episodes of MASH as they come out on DVD. This is TV that I saw when I was young, and I'm of course picking up more references that I didn't understand as a preadolescent. I'm also picking up on just how much of the show was too preachy or filled with hippie propaganda.

Much that I've read on the net goes along the lines of either: The early shows were wonderful and the show was ruined when it got all dramatic, or the show was fluff until it got all dramatic. In some ways. yes, the show was a two-headed beast, particilarly in the middle years. But I find I can enjoy both.

This cuts to the heart of the arguments that comedy and drama can't go together, or that humor is not a legitimate way to handle difficult issues. I find this bewildering; the entire point of MASH was that humor is the only sane response to an extreme situation. Humor can be drama or satire in disguise. Look at "Life is Beautiful", or "Doctor Strangelove" for excellent examples of this.

Rock Creek: Song is mostly complete, need to finish the bridge as it's still in rough form (2 to 4 bars).

Yard Sale song: This needs a chorus. And a title. Half done.

Welcome Home: I'm unsure of where this one is going to go. Now that I have the 12-string working, I'm hoping I can get going on this again. But I stil have no idea what the song is really about, despite having a rock-solid melody. This has been kicking around my head since 1996 in one form or another.

Ask your name...: Not really a title, just some of the lyrics from the first stab. (I've written three really bad lyrics for this one.) I have a good melody, a great rhythm, and no words. (The story of my life...) I have an idea what it ay be about, but I'm letting it ripen. I'll try to write words soon.


These next three are here to remind myself that I indeed have finished some songs this year:

On the Mall (Recessional): The song is finished, it needs to be orchestrated. Joy!

Never Had A Brother: Song is finished. I'm still learning how to play some of the more intricate guitar bits.

There's That Song: Finished.

We saw "Weird Al" Yankovic last night at the Arts Center in Holmdel, NJ. The stage show is just as good as it was on the "Scissors" tour, with the basic 5-person band. (Lots of sequenced stuff, like horn sections. For most of the performance it was very unobtrusive.) The best part was the medley of songs, some old, some new. Reminds me a little of the Greenwich Village Songwriter's Exchange, in that they constantly encouraged songs to be shorter, shorter, even shorter.

Martha hadn't seen Yankovic before, and I expect we'll be back for the next tour.

I spent much of the weekend finishing up the 12-string acoustic guitar. Here's an inventory of everything I did. I've enclosed links for the places that were particularly helpful. I've patronized these places before and they're good businesses.

Replaced the open tuning machines with Grover minis. Since I had to enlarge the existing holes to do this, it involved using an electric drill which chipped the face of the headstock. I used a gel-like cyanoacrylate adhesive from Stewart-MacDonald to fill in the chips, then sanded it down. I then used a spray laquer to cover the headstock face, thanks to the folks at the Edison, NJ Woodworkers Warehouse for help with that.

Added new nut, saddle, and bridge pins. I decided on String Saver material from Graph Tech for that. While the black pridge pins were a little pricey, they're worth it for the cool, clean look the guitar now has. (It's all made of a black graphite-like material.) That was just a matter of sanding the bridge down to the correct dimensions. When I had sanded the bridge a hair too thin, two dots of superglue held it in place just fine.

Reinstalled the pickup and endpin jack. That's not new hardware, but it's worth mentioning. I've been using a Fishman Rare Earth model in this guitar for some years now. It installs in about ten minutes, most of which is spent trying to stuff my arm into the guitar far enough. Bsed on past experience, it sounds like a cross between electric and acoustic guitar when amplified.

Overall, I think the guitar isn't quite as tinny as it was before all of this. It's still settling down, and will likely be a few weeks doing that. I'll post a picture if I ever take one.

Bruce and I have done some tentative jamming together on the side. Craig has expressed a desire to do the same once he's moved back into NJ, likely in the fall.

I've finally got my Mac working again, so recording is no great obstacle now.

I'm doing my best to limit my role in the improv group to that of music only, to keep my time as my own as much as possible.

I've resumed writing, although I've finally figured out that I'm actually a little afraid of it. (Hard to write those words, it was.) A song every two months, that's my goal for 2003. Let's see, the keepers this year have been "There's That Song" and "Never Had a Brother". If I finish the thing I'm in the middle of, I'll still be half a song behind. Can I regulate it this way? Don't know.

But I'm almost done fixing my 12-string. I think I hear strains of "Welcome Home" calling me, gotta finish that off once and for all.

Ofer has told the group that he'll be leaving after the August show. Martha has done the same. Both are for personal reasons having to do with time, and these are amicable splits. I wonder about Staci leaving as well; she'll be giving birth and have a new baby this fall. The dynamics of the troupe will be changing.

The band in the improv group is doing well. We have myself on guitar, Bruce on drums, Grazina on vocals, and (sometimes) Jeff on keyboard.


We have 6 to 8 songs (two being "emergency" songs if we need to fill time or scare cats or small children) and they sound pretty good. I have reservations about some of the material, but I'm willing to try it all out on stage first. Of course, the songs I wrote are the best. (I wish.)

We had a yard sale this weekend. It's very odd, what people consider worth buying, even for the $1 or whatever we asked. Old CDs, books, clothing, and so on. I think we took in about $20 to $25; not a huge success, but we got rid of stuff that's been hanging around the house for ages.