Chris Preston and New Aquarius Online

Well, at I least I think it can be. I’ve put some time into changing the look of my site this week. I got sick of looking that generic one that I had chosen when I moved my blog over to chrispreston.com. I wanted something that didn’t look like a rented car and somehow suggested a little something about what I was interested in. I’m not a designer, but at least now when I look at my own site, I feel more up than down. That’s enough for me.

I’ve vowed not to delve into web design anymore because it’s simply not my forte, but at the same time, it’s so important to make a site unique to you, especially if your site is all about you. I guess what sparked me into that direction was how awful Todd Rundgren’s Myspace page is. I couldn’t find a link to information about his pay-per-view concert this weekend. Even though the link was right on the page, I couldn’t find it. That’s just bullshit. When it comes to online presence, Todd gets all the easy stuff wrong. His actual site has a very interesting Flash movie about his career, but nothing else. It was cool years ago. Now, it just looks like a grave site. “Hell,” I thought, “isn’t it better to give a damn?” 

I found a theme (a set of files that change the look of a WordPress site automagically) that purported to make redesigning WordPress sites very simple, but I started to balk at buying it.  As usual, I learned how to change one thing in WordPress, which lead to “I wonder if I could do this and this…” Before I knew it, I was opening files in a text editor and messing about with my default theme, turning it into something else. At least it was free.

I played with this guy Frani Lugo once as a sideman. He was a very talented artist. Here’s a video of me playing bass with him. Aside from his musical abilities, Frani was a fantastic graphic artist and painter. He painted the design on his guitar in the video. I always thought that was so cool. If I could make an instrument my own like that, what a great thing that would be. Sadly, I don’t have that talent. Therefore, when I’m attempting to create a design for something, like my web site, my process is to think of what I’d like, and then start doing what I can. By the time the design is finished, I have something that I’m proud of that reflects the very peak of my abilities and is often nothing like that image I started with.

Such is my lot. It is a worthwhile exercise, since it draws on my unflappable tenacity to learn and solve problems, but I started to wonder this week if it was just a twisted form of procrastination, disguised as productivity. I didn’t record anything this week, even though I’m a musician working on a record. Instead, I was a musician trying to design a website, which is something I vowed not to do again. I guess I’m very complex.

You know the stupidest thing about it? If you subscribe to a blog using Google Reader or some other aggregator, you never see the design of the sites you read regularly.

Back to the music.

I got the new EQ magazine in the mail yesterday. (It’s a mag about audio recording.) Sonic Youth is on the cover. Great. Another act, another record, in which I have positively no interest. This seems to happen a lot with EQ. It’s getting thinner all the time, and it seems like a good half of the thing is always dedicated to articles about the making of records that I’ve had no occasion to have heard. Sometimes I read them, in the hopes that something might capture my interest and that I’ll discover something new. It hasn’t happened yet.

The reason why is because so much of the recording process that’s documented is based upon “trying new things” or “throwing out the rulebook” or some other such nonsense. I call it nonsense because those phrases are usually applied to an artist who has completed an album even though he admits that he seldom knew what he was doing. Either that, or some great credit is attributed to a master producer who had the singular vision that enabled him to hammer the raw talent of the artist into yet another faux masterpiece. It’s a great angle for a recording magazine, which is presumably read by people who know what they’re doing and want to keep learning, isn’t it? Some things just defy understanding.

I tried to read the Sonic Youth piece. I’ve said it before. I don’t like punk. I don’t get punk. Since the “youth” part of this band’s concept is far behind them, I thought maybe something might have evolved. Some hipper-than-thou types make a big fuss over them. I think I got three paragraphs in when the guitar player gets into this thing about how they experiment with alternate tunings and by trial and error come up with parts that sound good together. “From a certain perspective, we still don’t know what we’re doing.”

Whatever, man. Whatever.

I have no use for people who’ve been playing together that long and still think that it’s an aesthetic not to know what you’re doing. I listened to some of the music. Whatever, man.

EQ is supposed to be about recording and they do focus more on that process than just about the music that’s being produced. In other publications, music is supposedly still the focus. However, much to the chagrin of “seasoned” music critics, the role of the tastemaker is now most often given to the blogger, who gives his story about new music for free. The few music publications that owned it thirty years ago now frequently write about what’s buzzing on the blogs.

That’s quite a turnabout. On the surface, it even sounds like a good thing. However, from my perspective, it doesn’t help much at all. I spend a good amount of time looking for new music that I might enjoy. The bloggers, in most cases, miss the point. They tend to rave about recordings that can make no difference in my life at all, that demonstrate a complete ignorance of what’s happened in music and records over the last fifty years. The blogs tend to fixate on music made by people with obviously limited vocal and instrumental ability, hunting around for sounds that for some mysterious way work together and then they call it inspired.

What the hell is that? Where does that leave me? Nowhere exciting. I’ve learned that.

I’m not an elitist, but I’m not in the eighth grade anymore. I need more from music. I’ve looked high and low, but buzz is so often built around bands that are content to be stuck in that eighth grade level of musical development. “Indie” is something I’ve described before. As far as I’m concerned, “indie” is pretty lame. Bad playing, worse vocals.

That’s where the blogs seem to be. It’s almost as if amateur writers and amateur listeners see themselves in amateur musicians and in the process, they find a way to celebrate each other. It must be a very comfortable niche. All you have to do is focus upon being amorphously disaffected and you’re in.

I can’t do it. Eighth grade was such a long time ago.

These people work for Emusic too. I have a subscription, but I really feel like I’m on my own in discovering independent (not indie) music there. I wish they’d get some new writers with an understanding, no, a wisdom, in their tastes. Last week the White Rabbits album was on the Must Haves list. The article I read about the White Rabbits in a recording magazine last month made some big deal about the piano sound. They seemed to think it was unique and cool. The instrument was so old and had been lying around in the studio so long that various objects had fallen into it. They didn’t bother to clean out the piano before they cut the track, so you hear all that junk rattling around. Wow! Clever! Must have? Please. Whatever, man. Maybe in the eighth grade that might have been funny. Not good, not cool, but funny.

I can’t be alone in this, can I? It’s just not possible.

Here’s an eighth grade story…

I don’t know what happened to the guys I played music with in the eighth grade. I don’t know any of them any more. I remember a time when we were playing at someone’s house on a weekday. Maybe it was during some vacation from school. There were no parents around and we could play as loud as we wanted, or at least as loud as our first little amps would allow us to play. We didn’t play well as a band, but I wanted nothing more than to make a go of it.

I was trying to get the guys to focus. I think I wanted them to try “Stairway To Heaven” or “Owner of a Lonely Heart” or something. I knew those bass parts. Then suddenly, one of the guys walks into the room with an armload of magazines his old man had stashed away in the house, full of pictures of naked women. Now, I like naked women as much as anyone, but we were making music here!

Soon, I was alone in the room, playing bass. “From a certain perspective,” I still have the same problem.