4:37 a.m.

All of New York City is a drunken circus right now. Tourist couples in too-tight clothing are arguing on the steamy, desolate streets of Midtown. The cops are responding to a scene of apparent violence at a club in Astoria, trademark red and white lights everywhere. Yellow cabs and livery cabs are ferrying drunks in any possible direction in all boroughs. Lights are still on in many homes. Even our usually quiet one-way street is jammed with pairs of headlights competing for asphalt. Everyone is awake or outside because they can be.

Amid these many chaotic scenes, the INFRASTRCTURE boys return home via the upper deck of the Queensborough Bridge. We have completed a marathon 12-hour recording and arranging session in a fancy Manhattan studio 400 feet above the hoochie-laden streets. When you play for that long, which I don't usually do, awakeness goes away and all that remains is muscle memory and punch drunkenness. You lock into your fellow musicians and the equipment you are using and you try to make something good.

Tonight, we made several very good things. A lot of remixing is required before we can share, and we didn't record vocals, but we're very proud of what we achieved. We need some serious sleep, though, before we can appreciate it.

It was also nice to find freshly baked brownies when E. dropped C. and me off at home. Things are finally beginning to work.

Next Episodes

I'm crazy busy with work and the next few projects that you'll see here. More specifically:

Untitled EP. An incarnation of INFRASTRUCTURE will be getting together in NY this weekend to start recording an EP. The oversimplified track titles, according to recording priority, are "Climber," "Busted," "Cul-de-Sac People," "Misery," and "Home." The personnel will be Erich Rastetter on keys and rhythm guitar, C. Bellinger on bass, Greg Caputo on drums, and myself on lead guitar. All of the personnel are angry young men from Queens. The band will sound like a combination of early Elvis Costello, early ZZ Top, and Wilco. What can I say? We're white people.

UP. Very soon, the blog switches completely over to a chronological retelling of the trip Dan Meade and I took to the Upper Peninsula this past June. Photos will serve as the main narrative element, with text filling in only where necessary. Any posts I've already put up will be re-posted to fit the narrative/chronological order of the trip. There are some really good photos in this set.

The Fall Excursions. If art-traveling is fun, why do it only in June? I have to clear the days off, but it looks like I'll be meeting up with some friends in SoCal, hosting the third annual College Point Class Conflict Pub Crawl in Queens, and putting together ABBQI, the first open-invite barbecue roadtrip to the Hill Country of Texas.

Read on (or listen, or view), or join me on one of these trips.

2.

I think it would be awesome to do a dropped-D cover of Aimee Mann's "Freeway" into/out of Warren Zevon's "Jungle Work."

3: Rob Bellinger

would rather be a realist than a total phony.

Fulfillment in Wallyworld

Beyond the ghastly railroad suburbs* of southeastern Connecticut lies a place where people focus on their lives and not their careers, a place without ties to Boston and New York, a place where every other building isn't 30% parking garage and you're never more than 5 miles from a commuter train. That place is central Connecticut, and it's where a few of my good friends live and have lived.

It's also the home of Barnowl Studios, a rehearsal studio located in a sprawling, formerly industrial complex in Wallingford. In the dimly hit hallways of Building 14A is a community that blurs the lines between music and business, art and artistry. Having only found the place on MySpace and Craigslist, Erich and I thought we'd give it a shot.

Entering a "cheap" rehearsal studio means truly entering rock world. Empty beer cans, cigarette smoke, very low lighting, improvised sound dampening devices like old carpeting and foam blocks. It is in these environs that songs are written and performed. As indie rock and death metal and whatever else (often Latin music in Boston and NY) scream out from behind closed doors, I chuckle at how uncomfortable certain people I know would be in rock world.

Whenever you enter a studio, you wonder about what kind of room you'll get. Will the bass drum be destroyed and the cymbals ripped apart? Will the room smell like piss or weed? Will giant rats run up and down the brick walls as we play? I've seen and smelled it all.

At Barnowl, it's only $6 per hour to practice in a shared space (i.e. a space used by other bands at other times). Said space had a fully equipped drum set, a huge ass bass amp, plus some stuff we pilfered from another band, like a tiny Fender tube amp and a cheap old organ hooked up to a huge Fender amp.

We settled in fast and began casually working on a few songs and arrangements. As we played, people came and went, including a huge metal dude who wanted to try my Ampeg bass. Suddenly some young dudes who had heard us playing came in. One asked if he could play drums with us. We did a few of our tracks with me on electric, Erich on his newly wired acoustic, and this dude Jesse on drums. Shit sounded awesome. We got some serious compliments from the bystanders on these unfinished songs and then blasted out a crazy rock organ trio jam.

When we finally stopped playing, we realized we had been in the studio for four hours. Ryan, the owner, loved our story of meeting halfway at his place, and he wasn't even going to charge us for the session. We made a donation anyway.

This wasn't a show. Our arrangements and lyrics for the songs we worked on weren't even done. No one sang. But it was great to try some tunes out on other musicians, even with one other musician.

We're planning a rental car return trip to Wallyworld with CMike on bass and we'll see if we can get our new friend to sit in on drums again. Things felt good on the long ride back to Boston; the glacier continues to move.

*Stamford!

View from the Whitestone Bridge, New York City

I took this shot from my parents' minivan as they drove to Boston for the first time in five years and three months, last weekend.

I grew up just beyond the left extremity of the frame in the Queens neighborhood of College Point. In this shot we've got some gravel barges coming down the East River and a freight train crossing the Hell Gate Bridge in the background. LaGuardia is just out of site beyond Riker's Island.

From ages 14-17 I commuted to Regis High School in Manhattan, buried in the Upper East Side skyline behind the Hell Gate Bridge.

The repeated journey from one edge of this frame to the other and back is basically what my entire life is about.

Drinking Advice from Long-Lost BFF

"Bob, as my best fuckin' friend of 25 years, I have to tell you: get fuckin' Crystal Light and vodka. You go to the store and get fuckin' Crystal Light--anyone sees you getting it, says something, punch them right in the fuckin' mouth. Get Crystal Light Lemonade and vodka. It's like five fuckin' calories and you get fuckin' hammered."

--CK, via telephone, August 27, 2008. Almost exact quote.

update

family in boston. homebound for a while. many, many new photos and ideas coming soon.

Five Weeks

In the past five weeks, I've been to Portland, Maine (2 days), home (45 min), Edmonton, Alberta (3 days), home (2 days), Bloomington, IN (3 days), home (2 days), NY (4 days), home (2 days), Miami (2 days), home (2 days), Philadelphia (3 days), NY (x days), and now what?

How does anyone expect me to keep doing this? How do I expect anything from myself? Why am I still in a groundlessly good mood? Where am I sleeping tonight?

"willing to bet that this is just a phase"

quoth a colleague re: my being in a band.

27 Years STD-Free

Two Evenings on the Mississippi

Because I'm extremely stressed and am experiencing typical life conflicts, I'm uploading twenty pictures of Mississippi River traffic that I took in New Orleans this March. That was a good trip with what I'd call creatively used downtime. Between convention and dinner, I'd walk down to the riverwalk, buy an Abita draft in a plastic cup, and sit down with my camera. Just like my adolescent days in McNeill Park in Queens, though I wasn't a beer drinker then.

Go to the photoset for more detail.

One Month To Go

In this very productive 26th year. Four year blog anniversary has passed, too.

I

really don't believe how easy lives can be.

You don't even know what is about to happen to you.

Between the 900 photos I took in NC this weekend (including like 3 undeniably awesome ones) and finishing writing the Infrastructure EP, some cool new stuff will be here soon. I am also working approx. 3-4 jobs.

It seems I will be doing an overnight trip almost every week this summer. So far, two of them are not for work.

Sense of Shock

I think I've just figured out why I can't grow up. It's the unabating sense of shock that I can do that which I do. I suspect from reading many copies of the USA Today on the road that this very sense is instilled in dozens millions of American children from childbirth. But the sense I mostly got from my birthplace was that you work, reproduce, attempt to "build equity," die. Not necessarily in that order.

My sense of shock is one that I had to learn to feel, and it will give way to some form of greater confidence that I don't have yet. Many significant things I've done thus far have had question marks attached to them--usually before, but sometimes after the fact. It often felt that I was getting a great bargain or setting myself up for a challenge I was not worthy to face. I could go to Regis? I could go to college? Tufts? I can sell things? Market things? Write songs? Write stories? Learn photography?

I've been doing all these things and many others. They keep me up at night. I barely sleep. I need to keep pushing the envelope, artistically and professionally. I will not consider myself fully developed.