Stacks

Forgive me, father. It's been two months since my last confession update. When I was in high school, I had a computer science teacher who tried to describe a stack (the data structure, that is). Her first analogy about a stack of lunch trays in the cafeteria didn't work. The "A-Ha!" moment for me came when she was describing how to recursively move through a stack. "Have you ever been cleaning your house," she asked. "And you go to another room looking for something to help you tidy up the first room? And then you notice something in the second room that needs to be straightened up before you can return to the first room?" I got it.

Unfortunately, my personal life feels like I've got an unmanageable stack right now.  I'm working my way through it, but it's frustrating.  Here's a slice of the stack right now.

I want to play my guitar.  Before I can do that, I need to unpack all my music gear in the basement.  Before I can unpack all my music gear, I have to put walls up in the basement because if I unpack before I put walls up, I'll have to pack everything back up so stuff can be out of the way while we work on the framing and drywall.  Before I can put walls up in the basement, I need to figure out when my brother in law Jimmy can help me with it.  Before I can do that, Jimmy has to finish patching all the holes we made when we replaced the air conditioning.

There's a lot more.  It seems like every project has some sort of dependency that's keeping me from getting to it.  Like once Jimmy is done patching holes and spackling, I should probably paint all the walls downstairs.  But we ought not to do that before we have everyone over for Christmas, lest I create a mess that can't be cleaned up before everyone gets there.

In this way, every time I have free time at home, I feel anxiety because there is a metric assload of things that need to be done, but most of them can't be done until something else is done first.  Some days, I feel like saying "Damn the order in which things should be done."  Maybe I should just break into the middle of the stack in the interest of getting stuff done.

I will have a week between Christmas and New Year's, where I can take some time to address some projects and maybe cut the stack down.  We'll see.

Speaking of free time, there isn't much of it.  So there's not a heck of a lot to report when it comes to new personal developments.  I'm still very happy spending time with my family, but sometimes feel like I'm stuck in second gear and can't get into third, because I'm the type of person who needs to feel like he's always making progress on multiple fronts in order to feel fulfilled.

It helps to have a wonderful wife and an amazingly cute daughter.  Here's a recent pic.

I showed this pic to a client recently.  She said "She looks like Cindy Lou Who!" (from the Grinch Who Stole Christmas).  Funny, because someone stopped my wife a few weeks ago in a store and said the same thing.

I should learn to take it easy and count my blessings.

Guitars, Beer and More Guitars

Last night, I was invited over to the Fifth Avenue offices of Future US, where I got to hang out with some friends from Guitar World.  We were treated to a night of listening to terrific playing from some of the longtime contributors to the magazine.  With beer.

This was really cool for me, because I got to meet some of the guys whose bylines I had seen in the publication for years and see them play - Andy Aledort, Jimmy Brown and Paul Riario among them.  Editor in Chief Brad Tolinski was there, too.  It was doubly cool when these guys hung out with us after putting on a classic rock clinic that featured some great tunes from the Allman Bros, Pink Floyd, Led Zep and Guns N' Roses.  These guys are really passionate about their guitars and their playing.  Jimmy Brown in particular spent some time talking with me and some of the guys about vibrato technique, custom mods he made to his Gibson SG and tips for getting the most out of practice time.

It was a great time.  Thanks to everyone at Guitar World for making it happen and for inviting me.

New York's Free Daily Papers

I'd like those advertisers who place ads within New York's free daily papers to devote a minute or two to thinking about how their message is perceived in those vehicles.  One of the things I'm struggling with is that in a world where The New York Times and other non-free papers are struggling to stay in business, these free daily papers continue to book business and distribute their product.  An ad in the Times enhances a brand - I'm not so sure about how people perceive brands that advertise in the free dailies. Consider for a moment that the best a free paper can do is tell you how many copies are printed and distributed.  "Distributed" in this context, though, takes on a different meaning than the one many media buyers might be used to.  Many of the papers are dropped off at kiosks.  A great many are literally shoved into the faces of subway, bus and rail commuters as they make their way to work.  Often, it's done in a rude or pushy fashion.  That the garbage cans on any corner where the paper pushers are handing them out tend to quickly fill up with copies of the paper is testament to the notion that many commuters really don't want them.

There's the environmental impact of wasting so many trees.  Then there's the drain on public resources - we pay sanitation people to empty public garbage cans, and we pay people who have to pick up copies that are simply discarded in the street.  Piles of the papers end up abandoned in phone kiosks and in the middle of the sidewalk.  Someone has to get paid to collect the trash and get rid of it.

Not to mention that we all pay a cost when we stand in line, waiting to enter and exit the subway.  When we get to the top of the subway stairs, or to the main exits from Penn Station, we find that the reason we've been held up is that there is a bunch of paper pushers crowding the tops of the stairs, pushing newspapers in people's faces.  The MTA spends money reminding people to quickly exit the landings of escalators once they get to the end.  And yet, the free dailies are paying people to stand there and push their product, holding up the lines for everyone in order to distribute a product that a lot of people don't want.

Some of these papers pushers are downright rude.  Today I stopped under the awning of a place I visit frequently for a coffee or egg sandwich, just to get out of the rain.  I was told rudely by a paper pusher (and in colorful language) that I needed to get out of the way so he could give out his papers.  On a public sidewalk.

And that's the straw that broke the camel's back, and what prompted me to write this post that's been ruminating in my head for a few years.  From time to time, I know marketers stop by here to read some of my blog posts.  And I just wanted to remind those people who care about their brand that they ought to consider steering clear of the free dailies.  You might not be getting what you're paying for, and it might not be presenting your brand in the most favorable light.  Consider underwriting other vehicles.

Reviving My "Musical Career"

The earliest I can remember music and computers beginning to come together was when I was a kid playing with my Commodore 64.  I can't remember the name of the program, but it allowed me to input music scores and edit them, and the computer would play them back in this weird square-wave tone.  Just a few years later, I was introduced to MIDI by my middle school music teacher, and that started a wave of my own little pet theories about how music and computers would eventually come together.  No, I never foresaw the rise of MP3, but I did wonder many times how we might use computers to record our musical ideas.  I also wondered (probably after my drummer didn't show up for the umpteenth band rehearsal) when computers could allow one person to record drums, bass, keys, guitar and vocals. By the time I moved out of my parents' house, I had a lot of those tools.  When I bought my first serious PC, I also bought MIDI and digital audio interfaces in the hopes that I could spend some time getting the ideas out of my head and on to some recording medium.  For a short period of time, when I was living in Manhattan, that's exactly what I did.  I would do consulting work from my apartment on the Upper East Side, spending time looking at dot com business and marketing plans, improving them and collecting checks from clients for most of the day.  At night and with whatever free time I had, I'd record stuff.

At a turning point in my life, I took a full-time job at an ad agency that had previously hired me as a consultant.  Lots of time that I used to spend on recording became time I'd spend at the office.  Then 9/11 happened, I started my own agency and then moved out of Manhattan and back to Long Island.  I got married.  I moved a couple times.  I had a kid.  I still have all the gear, but little time to use it.

I have a lot of gear - stuff that would make many studio rats salivate.  Guitars, keyboards, computers, giant piles of rackmount gear, a P/A system - you name it.  It's all sitting in my basement waiting for me to get back to it.

There are times I think about what it would take to get back into it.  My wife jokes with me about it.  She says one day I'll come home and find it all sold.

That's just the thing.  When all the home improvement projects have died down, when Kate is sleeping upstairs and Lauren wants to watch Desperate Housewives, I want to go down in the basement and get some ideas out of my head and onto a hard drive.

Right now, everything in my basement is pushed toward the middle of the house, in giant piles.  It hasn't moved since the mold contractor completely upended everything.  Everything is clean, but it's all sitting in a big room with four concrete walls and miscellaneous air conditioning ducts hanging all over the place.  I rarely go down there because I know about all the other things that need to happen in the basement before I can even THINK about setting up:

1. We have to finish the air conditioning.  Hopefully, that will be done in a week or two.
2. I have to coat all the walls with Drylok.  There's a big 5-gallon pail awaiting me in the garage.
3. I have to have a fight with my wife.  Yeah, I know.  Basically it goes like this - I shared my proposed floorplan for what I think the basement should look like and it doesn't match what she thinks it should look like.  I requested we put up some sheet rock for two small rooms with a sliding window between them - A room for the computer and the board and some studio monitors, and then another room for miking up instruments and such.  The second room could double as our exercise room.  I dunno where this is going to net out, but my vision doesn't match my wife's.
4. I should probably replace all the sheet rock the mold contractor took away.
5. The electrician needs to figure out what's going on down there.  Wire outlets, get rid of some wires left over from when the previous owner had satellite TV, install some lighting and a bunch of other stuff.
6. Maybe put in some flooring.

So there's a bunch of stuff that needs to happen before I can even think about setting up.  Add to this the list of projects that probably need to get done before I can attack THESE projects and the notion of sitting down to record a song seems light-years away.

Still, I'm really looking forward to one day having a studio again.  It's how I always pictured my life - Working hard at a job, taking vacations with the family, doing the Dad thing, but spending some time making music when everybody's asleep or the kids are outside playing.  One day I'll get there.  It's just so far off in the distance.

It's really ironic.  I always thought the tough part would be getting all the gear together.  "Oh, man, how am I ever going to afford that Mac Pro?" or "How am I going to mic a Marshall combo so that it sounds like a wall of stacks?"  It was never "Where am I going to find the time?" or "Where am I going to find the space for all this stuff?"  For a while, time and space were all I had.  Now I've got all the gear and no time.