Ed Shepp's Excellent Philadelphia Adventure

So I went to Philadelphia for the firsten time last weekend. I took the Bolt Bus down, which was less terrifying than I thought (I'm not crazy about buses; let's not get into that right now), and stayed with my former roommate, and Catner of course (who was not at her nicest). J lives in a great building--walking distance from bars, Burger King, the Liberty Bell, DeVry, the Comcast building, the "funky" part of town, Barnes & Noble, an Amish flea market where they sell dolls without faces, and a pr0n theater. And let it be said that the water pressure and volume in his building (which, by the way, has a 7-11 on the ground floor) is second-to-none. The climate control is also excellent. But let's get to da tingz I learned from my trip, numberliststyle:

1) Philly's not a shithole. Who knew?!!?! Well, Center City isn't.

2) Philadelphia's City Hall looks uncannily like City Hall at Main Street USA in The Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World in Florida. Shit, that took forever to say. Anyway, I think Philly copied it.

3) The Liberty Bell (and I can't even think that phrase without picturing a certain episode of Strangers with Candy) looks like it's made of chocolate. I think they coated it with something, perhaps chocolate, to prevent further corrosion or something, because it's BROWN. And WAXY. The whole thing, not just the bell part. The funniest thing about the Liberty Bell is that it's a national treasure (like yours truly) and is surrounded by 99-cent stores and a petit craptown.

3.5) The Comcast Center is amazing. Well, the lobby is. Behind the reception desk there's a huge LCD wall that plays different animations, sync'd to music, when it's not pretending to be the same wooden paneling as the rest of the lobby. It's really unbelievable. The animations go in li'l segments, and the music changes for each. Actually, "animations" isn't the best term, since there's some filmed stuff in there. Like some great nature scenes--I wish I could look at those all day--and some cool stuff where they used actors/dancers to interact with each other "inside" the wooden panels. Or they would be carrying things across the wooden panels. And speaking of people walking, there are also sculptures of people walking across beams going up a few stories in the Center.

4) Whenever someone speaks Swedish to me, I have this brain gap that feels like about 10 seconds, where my mind processes what has just happened. When I realize that I've heard Swedish, I then have another brain gap where I see if I know what the phrase means. I saw Carl, who is from Sweden, at J's birthday dinner, and ever and anon he would say something in Swedish to me, and I noticed this brain freeze thing. It's only worked so far with real Swedes, however, so I'm not worried about it being some kind of kryptonite that people can use against me. You know, like, "Quick, say something in Swedish to him and grab the apple fritter from his hand."

5) If someone from China claims that Puerto Rico isn't really part of the United States, just mention Taiwan.

And that's the Philly blop for now, gooplers.

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Prince EQ

Beautiful Wikipedia

It's just too wonderful not to mention: I've made it. Almost. Sorta. Not really. But kinda. In my own li'l igloo way. I'm on wikipedia.

No, blossoms, not in myne own entry, but as part of an entry on the song Beautiful Stranger. Yeah, it's small, but it's something. Scroll down to the Cover versions section and you'll see the last li'l blurp about me:

"Indie artist Ed Shepp recorded a cover of the song for his EP The Madonna Within."

And no, I did not do that myself nor did I put anyone up to it. If I did, I would have had them write "The Madonna Within EP." But it's all good. :)

And since the song is on my terapad, which keeps overloading its bandwidth (hmmph. or so it says! Gud på ett hjul!!), here's a link to the song if you wants to downlerd it.

Or you can just hear it here:




Of course, you can also hear it, in remixified formulax, in any of the Blips I've done for Billy Jam, since I'm sorta using it as my theme song with those.

Oh, and one more thing, which is overdue: Click over to Dope Astrology, (for Feb 17) and who's that sexy beast in the Scorpio box???? Yup! ME!!!

And det var allt for now.

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Prince E. Quistvalden av Norwegenmark Trailer Park

Valentoonce.

OK, so my Valentine Blip dropped on Billy Jam's show the other day, and I don't at present have data to make any assumptions about whether people got what I was going for. Billy told me that he got some good comments on it, but I don't know what those were. Some of the comments on the page for the show are interesting: Someone says that the music was taking them back to the 80s, to "high-school." Yes, that's what I was going for. But then did they further get that the songs kept getting more and more recent, and the points-of-view more, erm, disillusioned? Pointing to what one assumes is the tragedy of the whole thing, the narrator who comes in periodically with "Love Tried to Welcome Me"? Let's have a listen to the blip. Hopefully you'll be able to download it from here:



So basically it's a "love story" of sorts, or rather the story of someone who failed to find love, or whatever. Listen to just the songs and I think that's what you'd get. But listen to the song that glues them all together: "Love Tried to Welcome Me." I've always connected to this song, sometimes for the melodrama but mainly because it took an unusual stance: The singer actively disavows Love. Even though he or she may lament his condition, and even admist to being "drawn to sadness," which doesn't indicate being drawn away from Love, but rather could allude to other things, a blueish temperament, perhaps----s/he may do this, but s/he still revels in the lyric, "Love tried to break me" as if it's a success or victory, which it may be. How would we know? So I think when it comes down to it, the song reveals a profound ambivalence about the idea of love, especially "modern" Love. If you look it like that, then you can see a progression in the songs: the first songs in the blip are filled with echo and are effected weirdly and are extreme examples. (Authentic ones, though: "I Love You Just the Way You Are" has a valentine connotation to me because it was on the car radio when my sister and I were so excited to open our li'l heart-shaped boxes of red hots. We must've thought valentine's day was the cat's pajamas. I think I did for a few years.) Then the songs get from middle-to-high school, and they're tinnier, with the bottom end rolled off and the pitch is higher, to make them sound bubble-gummy, and they all sound very naive. The last part of the songs are just a fast forward through disillusionment, since I didn't have time to really build the last chapter. "I Can't Make You Love Me" is the best of the series, but it didn't follow as well as I'd liked. Because who hasn't felt something like that before, really? For comic relief I ended with Creep and then burped in my "extro."

So it's sort of two narratives: an exaggerated one where all this experience with love leads to ambivalence, and an ambivalence that was always there, but manifested in certain ways until the person just eventually accepted his former emotional responses were inauthentic but it serves to elucidate the process by which they become authentic. Hmm, I'm probably not making sense and should be listening to Karpe right now, but there you go. And here's the song itself, that I stitched together from ther various parts. I call It "Love Tried to Lower My Formants" because I lowered the formants on the main voc without changing the pitch, and it's what makes it sound awesome. Click here and hopefully you'll be able to download it without registering.

Hmmm, that's all I can think of right now. Valentine's Day isn't worth discussing (cuz I mean, what would I do, right? It was Saturday: I slept in, I read, I walked around. No differnt from any other good weekend day). Nothing much else is happening. I'll hopefully be in between stuff for a while.

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My WFMU Blog Post

Go read my FMU blog post. I had it quoted here, but blogger is a piece of SHIT and screwed up some html. Anyway, go here and read it.

And to the commenter who put "tl;dr" -- I have an abbreviation for you: F.U.

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