Things that make me laugh...

There is so much personal, and so much funny about it -- I can't begin to describe it...

King Crimson - 21st Century Schizoid Man

Performance by 21st Century Schizoid Band, with Mike Giles, Ian McDonald and Mel Collins from the original Crimson sitting in.

Rollin' Jelly

The music links take you to the page of a file server where the mp3s are located. They can be downloaded and saved or streamed directly from there. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Rollin' Jelly.mp3

This piece is a tribute of sorts to Jelly Roll Morton - a pool shark, hustler, womanizer from the early 20th century who claimed to have invented jazz. Despite his boastful claims, he really was quite a good piano player and influential in his time. I think he'd have liked this slow stride blues.

Piano Concerto Improv

The music links take you to the page of a file server where the mp3s are located. They can be downloaded and saved or streamed directly from there. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Piano Concerto Improvisation.mp3

Another piece from my piano transcription series.

High Level Fugue

The music links take you to the page of a file server where the mp3s are located. They can be downloaded and saved or streamed directly from there. Apologies for the inconvenience.

High Level Fugue.mp3

This is another piece from my piano transcription series. It was originally recorded by Keith Emerson when he was with a band called The Nice for an album called Five Bridges. This version is a transcription of his performance for BBC radio in the late 60s.

Three Blind Mice - Variations

The music links take you to the page of a file server where the mp3s are located. They can be downloaded and saved or streamed directly from there. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Op.1 No.1 The Rat Patrol.mp3
Op.1 No.2 Dance of the Farmer's Crazy Wife.mp3
Op.1 No.3 Mice in Wolves' Clothing.mp3

Opus 1 - Variations on Three Blind Mice

I've always felt a bit wanky about titling my work with opus numbers, but I decided last year that I might start doing that. The problem I have in not labeling things that way is I often change my mind about titles and ultimately end up losing things or having duplicates under a dozen different titles.

The first variation - The Rat Patrol - was composed in the style of contemporary American composer, John Adams. I really like a piece of his titled Short Ride on a Fast Machine and I had it in mind when I composed this. There's also a few discrete references to an ELP piece called Pirates -- kinda a personal joke that would take too long to explain here.

The second variation - Dance of the Farmer's Crazy Wife is as its title suggests. It's a fairly wild variation that extends ideas introduced in the first variation. Incidentally, whenever people ask if I dance I usually say no. It's not that I don't dance - I do. It's just I dance to music like this and, frankly, I'm yet to visit any nightclub that plays music remotely resembling this. So yeah, if you want to dance with me, you'll need to get your dancing shoes around music like this. Oh, and I like to spank to these types of rhythms as well. Just so you know.

The third and final variation - Mice in Wolves' Clothing is a solo piano piece in a minimalist style. There are some subtle metric modulations throughout to alleviate the monotony of the minimalism. The title is something of a musical in-joke that won't be evident in this recording. Originally, the piece was conceived using the Pythagorean tuning system. This system was such that all intervals of a third are 'consonant' while the octave, fourths and fifths (usually the most consonant) are dissonant. The 'thirds' relates semantically to the Three Blind Mice and by making consonant (most harmonious) here ends the cycle of dissonance established in the preceding two movements -- but not entirely, as the Pythagorean tuning sounds 'out of tune' to modern ears. Even in equal temperment, the repetition of certain notes and intervals is such that it alludes to the Pythagorean tuning.

New Piano Music Uploaded

The music links take you to the page of a file server where the mp3s are located. They can be downloaded and saved or streamed directly from there. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Solitudinous is a minature piece that explores some interesting harmonic terrain. It also kinda reflective, as the title suggests, like the mood I'm in today.

Solitudinous.mp3

The Dreamer is a minature piece with some interesting melodic leaps and modal shifts in the chord progression. All of this takes place in just over two minutes.

The Dreamer.mp3

Dawg Tales

What is it with dogs that their whole experience of the world has to be formed through putting things in their mouthes?

These past several weeks I've been very busy with study and so my dawg has not been walked as much as usual. There's quite a large yard that I could lock him in, but doing so makes him inclined to bark at my neighbor -- a man of some mental density that apparently believes my dawg understands his fractured, jibberished English when he calls out, 'Be quiet!'

Yes, he says 'be quiet' and not 'shut the fuck UP!' as I'm inclined to call, not just at the aforementioned barking dawg.

Where was I? Oh yes; dawg chewing things.

I'm not completely insensitive to my neighbor's various mental handicaps nor to his annoyance at my dawg barking at him. So, I am forced to lock my dog in the house for a few hours each morning and afternoon -- the two times of the day when he's most desirous of vocalizing his utter thrill and enjoyment of dawg-life at the world around.

On the one hand, as much as this barking annoys me and makes it difficult to concentrate on study, it's the times when he goes quiet that really set my nerves on edge. 'What's he chewing now?' is a question that will spring to mind.

When I first got him, about four months ago, I dog-proofed the house as much as possible. This was relatively easy to do because it's in a state of half-finished renovation at the moment, which is to say there's very little furniture anywhere and the floors are all bare wood until such time as they can be polished, etc. In other words, most of the house is pretty-much unwreckable with the few things of any value I have safely stowed in one of the empty bedrooms (and all my brother's carpentry tools and the like stowed in the other bedroom).

Anyway, despite the dog-proofing, I resigned myself from day one that a time would come when he managed to wreck something of value -- it was just a matter of time, and I would have to accept it.

Over these past several weeks, while I've been busily working away (my study is in the third bedroom) the dawg has discovered the joys of things left on kitchen benches. This wasn't a problem, until he started growing taller (meaning, at a rate of about an inch a day). He hasn't managed to break any china or glasses (yet) but the other day, he obviously thought a metal roasting pan filled with oil that I'd foolishly left to cool on the stove top could serve his purposes better if it was upside-down on the kitchen floor.

It's a good thing the kitchen floor is also made of wood, like the rest of the house, and if anything, the flood of oil onto it isn't actually all that bad for the timber. Aside from the chore of trying to mop away the excess, this wasn't too bad a problem that couldn't be calmly dealt with.

Then there's newspapers and the occasional cardboard box he seems to find god only knows where? These get put through the canine-cardboard recycling treatment and end up as confetti strewn from one end of the house to the other. Ho-hum. I don't believe I could convince the editors at House & Garden magazine this decorating style is dumpster-chic but, it's only paper, and when I get a day free to do some chores, it'll all get swept away like it never existed.

Then there's the clothes.

Dogs, for those of you who may never have owned one, have this thing for underpants and sox -- preferably with the added perfumery of 'scent d'scrotum' or that swiss-cheesy smell of old sox. Don't ask me why nature has imbued man's best friend with this kink -- it doesn't bear thinking about. Being the kind and loving Dawg Master that I am, I might even let him feast away to his hearts content on them, but they're all I own and I can't afford to be buying new undies and sox every day. He's also had his eyes on my shoes, but so far, his commando raids to retrieve them from under my desk have been unsuccessful.

As you may or may not have deduced from above, the three bedrooms of the house are not in fact bedrooms at all -- two storerooms and one study. I sleep, as I have done since the day I moved in here, on a couch/fold-out bed in the lounge room. Prior to getting the dog, this wasn't any big deal for me. It's somewhere to sleep and it's comfortable enough to suit me.

Once I got the dawg, and seeing as how I got him with the intention of him being an 'inside dog' that would protect my meagre few possessions of value, he slept in his own bed at the foot of mine. The minor downside of this has always been that he likes to rise with the sun in the morning and likes make sure I do too. Again, no biggie -- I like the early mornings and find them a good time to work on college stuff.

As he got bigger, and as is a dog's wont when it comes to doing dog-science analysis on things like pillows and bedding, we played a cat-and-mouse type of game with my bed linen after I woke up. Thus, my earliest daily ritual is to strip the bed of its sheets and pillows and stow them in one of the storage rooms until I'm ready for bed again at the end of the day. Inconvenient, but after the first time I tried washing pillows in the washing machine (and discovered they take like three days to dry!) it's a small inconvenience that I could live with.

Of course, now that the bed is free of anything he can chew, he must have taken that as his cue that my bed, when I wasn't occupying it, would be the perfect place for him to rest his weary dawg body after the exertions of chewing up newspapers, cardboard boxes, underpants and sox, etc. Even though it's a fold-out bed, I have an extra mattress on it that so heavy it's not possible to remove during the day. Thus, I took to defending my turf variously with a large, old suitcase placed in the middle of the mattress. A minor inconvenience, as it turned out, for the dawg and possibly even seen as a chew-treat for his listless moments on my bed.

I then took to more military-styled tactics and set rat traps on the mattress -- not to hurt him, but in such a way that his attempts to climb onto the bed would set them off and the noise of this frighten him out of the thought. I think it took three days before he figured out how to disarm them, and all but one of them has now been chewed beyond any sort of functionality.

Ho-hum. Just another week, I told myself. My studies would be complete and I could then pay full attention to supervising my dawg through the months I know still remain before he grows out of this puppy stage. If he wants to sleep on the bed, it's wrong -- I know, VERY bad training -- but if that's what it takes to get the peace I need in these, my most crucial last days of study for this year, then so be it.

This morning, the now-familiar silence from that end of the house was broken by a sound I hadn't heard before. It sounded like something tearing, but not paper. A quick inspection (and it's a good thing I didn't ignore the sound) and I find the dog standing on my bed -- his mouth overflowing with the inner stuffing of the mattress and huge chunks of it scattered everywhere!

FUCK!

BAD DAWG!

Luckily, the damage was less than it appeared, although I'll now have to buy a needle and thread and stitch the cover back on the mattress. In the meantime, hoping that I could repell him with (what I assumed must be a vile scent for an animal that thinks underpants and sox smell great), I sprayed about half a bottle of old, cheap aftershave all over the mattress and then went back to work in my room.

A few minutes later and dawg, apparently undeterred by my malodorous defense system, was at it again -- pulling stuffing from my mattress.

He's locked out in the yard now, barking at my numbskulled neighbor. My bed is (thankfully) not completely ruined, but I fear it's going to be days before the horrible odor of stale aftershave clears enough for me to sleep on it...

Blog Index

ASTROLOGY

The Sagittarian Factor
Annotated Astrology - Sagittarius & Sagittarius
Sagittarius & Libra
Sagittarius & Leo

BDSM ESSAYS

Is There A Place For Fantasy Storytelling In BDSM?
Patience Is Not A Virtue
Putting The Head Back In Hedonism

BDSM FICTION

Dark Fantasy Trilogy
Forbidden Fruit
The Stalker In Your Dreams

HEALTH & COOKING

How To Bake A Quiche

HUMOR

2+2=4 Right?
How To Play The Saxophone
Joke Of The Day
Letter To Tomorrow
Male Optical Illusion
Thought of the Day (Aug. 21, 2007)
Thought of the Day (Sep. 09, 2007)
Twins
When I Tell Lies...

HUMOR - YOUTUBE FAVORITES

A Human Seal (Juggler)
Branding A Cow
Derek & Clive - Everything Gives Me The Horn
Dudley Moore - Beethoven Parody
Fawlty Towers - The Germans
I Gotta Have More Cowbell
I Will Survive
Life Of Brian - People's Front Of Judea
Monty Python - Cheese Shop
Monty Python - Dirty Fork
Monty Python - Flying Sheep
Monty Python - Golden Age Of Ballooning - Pt 1
Monty Python - Golden Age Of Ballooning - Pt 2
Monty Python - Golden Age Of Ballooning - Pt 3
Monty Python - Hungarian Phrase Book
Monty Python - Idiots At The BBC
Monty Python - Me Doctor
Monty Python - Mrs Thing And Mrs Entity
Monty Python - Not Guilty (with Peter Cook)
Monty Python - Spanish Inquisition
My Kind of Science (iPhone in a blender)
Nothing Like A Good Prank
Peter Cook - Great Train Robbery
Playing Piano With Balls (Juggler)
Prank Call Backfire
Radical Christmas Light Displays
Revenge On A Telemarketer
Stop Motion Drums & Piano


MY MUSIC

A Blade Of Grass
High Level Fugue
Opus 1 - Variations on Three Blind Mice
Piano Concerto Improvisation
Rollin' Jelly
Solitudinous
The Dreamer

Pervert's Music Archive (Quick links to other music files)

MUSIC FAVORITES

A Remarkable Piano Duo
Devo - Jocko Homo (Original)
Hiromi Uehari - XYZ
Keith Emerson - Flying Piano
Keith Emerson - Piano Improvisations (Cal Jam)
The Tubes - White Punks On Dope
Woody Herman - Come on, man!

NON-FICTION

An Elegant Universe
Christmas Island Tales - Part 1
Christmas Island Tales - Part 2
Christmas Island Tales - Part 3
Dawg Tales
How I Broke The Internet
It's All Greek To Me
Ode To Dobes
Planet Of Burning Souls
Putting Things Into Perspective
Science Vs Religion
The Computer As A Musical Medium
The Science of Body & Soul
'Tis The Season
What Is Music?
Writing About Music

PERSONAL STUFF

Brain Grenades
Dr Mister Pervert
Intro-juicing Mister Pervert
Emotional Detox
Is There Death After Life?
My Dawg Aamon
Pervert by Name: Pervert by Nature

PHOTOS

House Of Gnomes
It's What I Do (Gallery 1)
It's What I Do (Gallery 2)
It's What I Do (Gallery 3)
My Hitchcock Impression
Recent Pic
White Shirt

TATTOOS

Tattoo Art (Paul Booth)

Blade of Grass

A tranquil minature piece for solo piano.

Blade Of Grass.mp3

Please note: the mp3 links take you to the page of a file server where the mp3s are located. They can be downloaded and saved or streamed directly from there. Apologies for the inconvenience.

The White Shirts!