The Ed Shepp Blog Experience

Lena from Palesteena, by Nils Harning

2011-07-29T08:21:00.003-04:00

Urryone [everyone] go download the song I did with my Nilsmonster. It's sort of Tin Pan Alley meets Ed Shepp Production Techniques (with supersized bass, courtesy of the crappy earphones which are my only way to monitor the sound). Click here to download either the average quality (128kbps) or high quality (320) mp3:

Lena from Palesteena

Flerp!

Songs of Inspiration for People Who Are Hurting

2011-07-07T13:40:00.002-04:00

Are you hurting? Good. Because now the hurt is over.

Behold the new EP from saint-at-large Ed Shepp, Songs of Inspiration for People Who Are Hurting.

This revolutionary EP, this seminal moment in the history of music, exists to bring comfort, inspiration and even a smile to the masses of the world who are going through the hardcore ish that life sometimes throws our way. If you're hurting, this EP is for you.

But how do I know if I'm hurting?

Good question. 5589 out of 5590.5 psychotherapists estimate that everything that everyone ever does is because they're hurting. So if you've done something today, odds are you're hurting, and that you're not alone. In double-blind studies at medical research centres all over the globe, listening to this Ed Shepp EP led to FULL REMISSION of hurting symptoms in ~99.47631% of patients diagnosed by world-class psychologists with world-class hurting. That's 99.47632% better results than placebo, psychotherapy and throwing phones.

If you're hurting, this EP will help you deal with your ish. But don't hoard this wonderful gift for yourself, like an investment banker or Madonna. If you know someone who's hurting, play it for them too. Here are a couple examples of who this EP can help:

-- Are your neighbors having loud sex, keeping you up at night and destroying quality knitting time? If they are, it's because they're hurting. Play this the next time they're making all that noise. They'll be smiling, and you'll have spread Peace on Earth.

-- Is your coworker being a dinkus, or do you want him to think that you think that he's being a dinkus and that you're punishing him for it? He's probably hurting. Don't punish him with Celine Dion or Diamanda Galas. Relieve his hurting by playing this EP on repeat.

-- Have you been torturing political prisoners but not been able to get information? Maybe the problem is that they're hurting. Play them this EP repeatedly, and they might finally talk.

-- Is your wife constantly bitching at you to take out the trash, even though if she'd stop painting her nails for a second she could just do it herself and not spoil your communion with The Simpsons? She's hurting. Play this EP at a volume that will drown out her complaining. And feel peace.

There are many more uses for this world-changing EP. Explore the EP and find them yourself. You will most definitely be relieved of your hurting, and you will be bringing positive energy into the world.

Songs of Inspiration for People Who Are Hurting, the new EP by Ed Shepp. Spread the love.

-- Bob Dylan

Download average quality (128kbps) quality links by clicking on the track names below, or download high-quality (320kbps) mp3s by clicking the song icons beneath the track listing.

Songs of Inspiration for People Who Are Hurting

1. Can't Take That Away (Mariah's Theme)

2. Beautiful

3. I Don't Want to Wait

4. My Heart Will Go On

(download)

Happy New Flerp!

2011-01-28T23:10:00.001-05:00

Well it's that new time of year, flerps. That time between the colander new year, Chinese new year and my birthday that seems to say: It's still OK to send out your new years greetings and put up your new years posts. Wait too much longer and you just might be a

wet

noodle.

In that spirit, I'm putting up two newish audio glerplets! For a limited time only!

First, we have duh. The new years greeting:

A Happy New Year Blorgp from Ed Shepp

The inspiration behind it: Once, when I was feeling GABAbundant, I was listening to that song I'm Yours. And I really listened to it, and I found the last verse quite moving. It metaphorically expresses something quite nice. I bet it would work well in a new years song. So I grated Auld Lang Syne onto it and made my new year's card for 2011, which like all my cards is now just a piece of audio that I post when the time is right. So there you go. Keep it arbitrary.

Second, here's a single! w00t! Well, here's the abbreviated version of the single you can get on iTunes. Click here to get the full version on iTunes. Do I have to spell it out for you?! Anyway, here's the quick 'n dirty blipversion. It's about one of the hottest trends in fear today, bedbugs.

The Bedbugs Song (quickndirty mix)

So those are the glerplets.

Beep!
E

Julmonster, by Ed Shepp

2010-11-13T00:44:00.004-05:00

(Click on the picture to hear the Julmonster commercial.)

Introducing Julmonster, the holiday home fragrance by Ed Shepp. A frenzy of fir, green leaves, spices, leather, woodsmoke and musk, Julmonster is unprecedented, indefatigable and emphatically undeniable. Intense enough to be smelled from outer space, but intimate to enjoy in one’s one home. In small doses.

Julmonster. Experience the ferocity.

…if you dare.

Freedom

2010-10-04T12:18:00.009-04:00

I suppose, since I just finished the book last night, that I should put up my thoughts about Jonathan Franzen's Freedom before I read any more reviews of it (Why do I do this? I read/listen to/watch something and then see what other people thought!?!) or let too much time pass. Why am I putting up my thoughts about the book? I guess it's just because I can, because it's not because the book changed my life (maybe that remains to be seen--I did just finish it last night) or that I think it has something extremely important to say that people need to hear (I'm thinking of those nonfiction books that I want people to read. Against Love, for me, falls into this category) or because it will improve the world. I guess I just want to tell people that the book lives up to the hype, and that y'all should read it, just as I would with a superior movie or taco salad or something. So here we are.

Like I just mentioned, I have to do this now, while the book is fresh in my mind. Because I almost feel like I'm in a state similar to mourning. I choose that word deliberately, because most of us who have read about the book are aware that there is a death in it. And that this death may feel like it's too convenient for the story or that it's improbable. Maybe. And maybe the character wasn't as completely fleshed out as the others (maybe not; I'm not a literary critic), but those criticisms didn't bother my enjoyment of the book. And the way the character's death is dealt with in the end is still deeply affecting, and I think that it justifies the entirety of the subplot. Just to lead to the book's final sentence. So there!

Now I'll get into a rehash of what I wrote for the review on linkedin, perhaps with some additions. Keep in mind that, as I said, I'm no literary critic, so if you're expecting a synopsis of the plot and quotes from the book and trenchant analysis and all that gawizzlywozzlyfinoo, then you might want to read the many fine reviews that exist out there in the literary landscape. I'm sure they're there (see that? I may not be a lit critic, and I may be stupid as a pile of doll hair, but at least I can respect the difference between they're, there and their. Recognize, b9itches! Not me---recognize the words!!! There, I saids it.) at the NYTimes and BBC and the Guardian la la la.... All those places. So, well, yeah.

I bought this book a while ago, and let it sit for a week, maybe two, daunted by its 562 pages, and finished some shorter books before even thinking of tackling it. When I started it, though, I was very pleased to find that it reads with the same breathless, page-turning pace as any Stephen King book or trash novel (for the dim bulbs out there, this is a GOOD thing). 300 pages into it I realized that I didn't want the book to end. I wanted it to stretch out to thousands of pages. The story lines and how they're presented--it's so compelling that you don't want the journey to end.

I was surprised to find myself gasping aloud at twists I didn't see coming, becoming excited to see plots begin to intertwine and become clear, and (most surprising of all) to find myself weeping during the last chapter, most especially at the final sentence (although after the final sentence, perhaps bawling is the more appropriate word; I mentioned there's a death; the bawling I felt conspicuously mirrored, although in a milder fashion, the experience I once had upon hearing that someone close to me had passed). The book is, above all, heartbreaking, but not in the sense of an all-consuming tragedy. (It's not Dancer in the Dark, which I confess to not having seen, but which was described to me as the opposite of those films that are nauseatingly sweetness and light and preposterous happiness. Apparently DitD is more preposterous despair. Well, that's how it was described to me.) I could venture to say that the book has a happy ending, in so far as it can, with the nature of the characters and, let's face it, the nature of this life.

I doubt I even have to mention it, but the book is more than heartbreaking--it's brilliantly, virtuosically written. (Is that a word, virtuosically? Well, it should be, if it isn't.) All the characters felt imminently real, as if I knew them well. And I felt like I could also see parts of myself in most of them. A few characters in the book are only briefly sketched out, but those are minor characters. When I think about how the characters are so fully developed, each having hir own psychology and quirks and flaws (if not voice--sure, maybe Franzen doesn't vary their individual voices enough, and yes, one character's autobiography reads just like Franzen's writing, but my though is, "Who cares?! Suspension of disbelief, people." Besides, her autobiographical excursion is long and necessary to the story. I'd rather read it in Franzen's voice. AND a character does note later that Patty, the autobiographer, expresses herself very well. At least Franzen doesn't torture us by writing the characters in dialect. One of the character's has a slight Indian accent. Franzen doesn't write in her accent when he gives her quotes, and thanks flunking cod! I've always found that distracting and annoying, and I'm very glad that Franzen does not do it in this book.), I can't helprecalling a quote from Fernando Pessoa, when in describing a store clerk's suicide, he notes that there are characters in books that are more real to him than the faces he sees every day on the trams or in the streets. Pessoa had characters like the ones in this book in mind. I can tell you that I feel more intimacy with Patty or Walter Berglund than I do with a lot of people I saw every day at work or on the subway. It's Franzen's uncanny ability to describe human feeling and illuminate his characters' inner worlds that makes them spring off the page and make them real to you. Some, I think, have said that his characters are unlikeable. I didn't find that at all. I found them human, complicated, real. There were even a couple I was rooting against, which I think added to the novel's feeling of realism.

I realize that I'm not conveying here the full extent of Franzen's accomplishment in this book. His humor, his incisiveness, etc. I refer you to more competent reviewers for those points.

Now that I've read all 562 pages, I'm a little sad to be finished with it, a sadness I liken to the end of a great holiday (and, of course, which I relate, perhaps too much in the moment, to the grief of bereavement). I have another fiction book waiting to be read, but I may wait a day or two for this experience to wear off before venturing into it. Especially since the other book could almost certainly never compare to Freedom.

On a purely semantic note, I also have to mention that it felt strange, just after I finished the book, to be at "the end of freedom."

In conclusion, if you read nothing else this year, read Freedom. You will not be disappointed.

Beep!
E

2010-10-03T00:00:00.001-04:00

Read This Article

2010-08-14T13:23:00.002-04:00

An excellent article in Slate, and for once the comments (thus far) are not idiotic!

http://www.slate.com/id/2263912/

2010-07-11T12:44:00.001-04:00

Aiiiight, it's out there on the iTunes, y'all. My aromachemical/perfume-inspired album, If I Can't Make A Perfume Then I'll Make An Album. Go buy it here. To support my struggle. And if you don't buy it for me, then buy it for Mark Baratelli, who improvised the piece called Caramel Furanone 3%. Or Nils Harning, (min fästman, by the by) whose voice is used in Harningal (the theoretical aromachemical that bears his name). Here's the link.

Interesting that after I'd sent the album to CDBaby and all, it occurred to me: "....but I CAN make a perfume!" Not meaning that I'm such an amazing and imaginative perfumer that I could make the next Red Delicious or Fergilicious Eau Fraîche (did you see what I did there?), but rather in this sense: Why CAN'T I make a perfume?* Everyone's doing it; the chemicals are available; you don't need a 100-acre factory in New Jersey and 700 billion dollars in an a marketing budget to introduce a fragrance. You don't need Saks or Bloomingdales or TJ Maxx or anything like that. Not when you have facebook and the interwebs. (to go further--why does it even have to be a perfume? It could be a home fragrance, or, rather, "olfactory art." Not unlike the sonic art I've done. I think you see where this is going. I think people saw where this was going years ago, before I did...) But anyway, yeah. I just wanted to point out what I saw as the ironing there.

A shame I finished/lost interest in the project before I could do Cyclopidene, Cyclal C, Indolene, Koavone or Labienoxime 10%, but hey. That's just how it be happen, yo, 'n stuff. Besides, I have a feeling I'll be making more audio pieces dealing with smell anyway. I mean, how could I go through life without ever doing a piece inspired by cis-3-hexanol or Stemone? Glerp. Yes, glerp indeed.

Now go buy the album. For my struggle.

Beep!

*Quick note from a regular 30something to any aspiring anythings: If something's important to you, there are ALWAYS going to be people (sometimes everyone you know) telling you that what you want to go can't be done. That it's crazy, that you're living in a fantasy world. I haven't achieved much, but I can't remember anything that I did achieve that anyone believed in but me. Listen to people when they're ripping your ideas, and know that anyone who's attempted anything heard the same. "You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus." -Mark Twain. I found that quote at the beginning of a chapter in a book by Michio Kaku. A physicist, not a motivational speaker. So there.

I Know What You Did Last Midsommar!

2010-06-25T12:20:00.001-04:00

Click here to get to SAFI's piece from Midsommar in Battery Park 2009.

It’s Midsommar time again, y’allz. So to mark the occasion, Nils and I, as the Swedish American Futurimagineering Institut, are uploading our coverage of last year’s Midsommar celebration in Battery Park, NYC. Enjoy, and glad midsommar!!

(Click here to download an outtake, with Nils singing the midsommar song. The quack quack one.)

-Ed Shepp & Nils Harning

Gendered Fragrances

2010-05-21T23:49:00.003-04:00

So I've always thought that the idea of gendered fragrances were stupid. But today I had to go to a wedding event, so I chose my "inoffensive masculine," Equipage by Hermes. (This is in contrast to my offensive, or potentially so, masculines. That is, Yatagan, Halston Z-14, or what's left of it, and perhaps Lauder.) And as I thought about it today, I recalled my view of the past couple decades of gendered fragrances: that the idea behind them was stupid, and that it should be done away with. But then I thought: Wait, maybe not. Maybe gendered fragrances, for the moment, are a good thing. Because they force you to wear certain frags at certain times. Which , of course, force you to NOT wear certain frags, essentially making them taboo.

Example: I could definitely NOT wear the Lauder Private Collection Tuberose Gardenia that I found at at antique (!!!!!) shop recently; and I couldn't wear my Spellbound by Lauder either. I'd be forced to wear Equipage or Bel Ami or something like that. And I thought: Is that such a bad thing?? Maybe it's a good thing. In that, at least, if I wore a "women's" fragrance, it would still be transgressive. And if society had abolished the idea of gendered fragrances, there wouldn't be any transgression. If there are gendered frags, at least you can still raise an eyebrow by wearing against type (if you're a man; if you're a woman wearing a masculine, I genuinely don't think anyone would actually notice). And that's something. They say that when there's a repressive "moral" environs in your society (think 198os; now think Madonna), then you can really easily draw attention to yourself by violating said moral code.

So maybe the idea of gendered fragrances, for the moment, isn't such a bad thing.

Sure, it's a half-baked idea, but what would you expect??? I'm not a professor paid to come up with bullshit! If I were, this entry would be a HELLUVA lot longer and include a LOT more bigger words. And probably some Shakespearean quotes too! So there! Anyway, make of it what you will. It was just a passing thought that occurred to me while listening to David Sedaris today.

Flerp!

The Aromachemicals Series

2010-02-17T15:08:00.001-05:00

I suppose I would be remiss if I didn't mention the nascent collection of soundpieces that's been spilling out of my brain onto my computer. I'm referring to it as The Aromachemicals Series, and it looks like it may grow into an album, which would allow me to use a title that I thought up some time ago: If I Can't Make a Perfume, Then I'll Make an Album! We'll see how it develops.

So I've been posting them as they come along. So far I have three:

So far I've just been putting them up on The Neld Adventure, so go there to hear them. But I suppose I'll put them on music sites or whatever eventualish.

Beep!
Ed Shepp

The Neld Adventure

2010-01-22T20:30:00.005-05:00

Aiiight, everyone go look (now! not later!) at The Neld Adventure, at http://neld.tumblr.com.

For the more digestible introduction, check out Nils's Introduction in Nine Parts (which should have shown up first, but I couldn't figure out how to make the draft thing work). The picture below will sweep you there:

For the longlongLONGLONGLONGLONGLONG-ass prose introduction, which I don't think I have to even say is mine, click the beautiful picture below.

Here's to one helluva 2010.

Beep!
Ed Shepp

Mount Dora

2010-01-06T18:25:00.003-05:00

Click on the (above) picture of my dream house to read The Daily City's excellent coverage of me hometown, Mount Dora (known as "Mount Whora" to students of Eustis "Useless" and Tavares "Ta-fairies" highs school). Beep.

Good King Wenceslas

2009-12-18T18:37:00.002-05:00

Everyone download Good King Wenceslas right now. Nils Harning on vocals, Ed Shepp on electrospazzle.

And there's always the rest of the Christmas canon here.

Flerp!
E

An Open Letter to V and Madonna

2009-11-04T15:07:00.006-05:00

This is an open letter to V and Madonna. There's no easy way to say this (because I'm actually quite stupid), so I'll just be as plain and waldervacknerian as puquistibly turrilicious.

V: Yes, you, V. The show. The remake from of the iconic miniseries-cum-canceled-series from myne youth. When I heard they ("they" being "those Hollywood types" or something to den där effect) were remaking you, I was joyous. Then crestfallen. Then irritable. Then flatulent. Then hungry. Then drinky. Then sleepy. Then bored. Then smelly. And only the joyous part had anything to do with you! But then I thought more about you, and it occurred to me: I need to be working on that show! Then, a few minutes later, a fatter truth belly-bumped me: I had it backwards! YOU need ME to work on you! Now, I won't go into how I adored the show as a middle-schooler, and how I ran around pretending to be John (but really pretending to be Diana), and how I quoted it for years and how I even had the COMIC BOOK and read the paperback book The Florida Project. And I won't go into my "qualifications," because, as multiple comments on my resume have apparently proven, "irrepressible genius" isn't a very precise descriptor. At any rate, for my sonic abilities, you can check out my show on WFMU, The Ed Shepp Radio Experiment, or have a listen to my audio stuff, or just check out A Very Ed Shepp Christmas. For my visual abilities, just check out my facebook photos. They look good, don't they? I'm actually 57 years old. For my acting abilities (although I think I'd rather be behind the camera), just check out any Madonna movie. I guarantee you my acting couldn't be as bad as hers. (I love you, Madonna, but it's true. You stink up the screen like an open jar of skatole.) (Yeah, I'm into perfume chemicals. So let's do a V-inspired scent opera, why not then?!? Think it over.)

So I'm not going to try and convince you that you need me, even though that would seem to be the piont of this open letter. I'm just throwing this opportunity out at you like pieces of expensive pastry to a gaggle of expensive ducks, bred for their smooth bronzey beaks. So look me over, dammit! You want a resume? Well, I want an island in the Caribbean, but I'm not getting that. Help yourself to some belligerence, however. That's free. BUT--if you want just a brief overview of myne history and all that crap, have a listen to the piece I did to put in my next letter, the one to the King of Sweden:

About Ed Shepp

Well that's the squizz. It's all on you now, V. Don't disappoint! And now onto you, Madonna.

See here's the thing, see. A friend of mine, number 081993, was squawking one day about how Mariah Carey was coming out with her third perfume, and Hilary Duff with her second, or whatever the numbers are, and Celine has one and gobble gobble gobble nibble nibble... And then he wondered aloud why you haven't yet come out with a perfume, and it got me thinking. I assumed that you were planning to come out with one eventually, but were waiting for the right perfumer to work with. So I thought, "I should write an open letter to Madonna and introduce her to Calice Becker, my close-personal-friend-in-that-fictional-character kinda way. Or maybe whoever did Tom Ford's stuff. Because his perfumes are bombastic, and I think that would work for Madonna. After all, she supposedly likes Youth Dew and Fracas, two bold fragrances. Now do I want to go to Taco Bell again or take a bath?" But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I should simply suggest myself as the perfumer. Do I have experience? UGH! What IS it with this "experience" thing with you people?!?!?! I've blended Christmas scents at home and managed to stink up the whole house a couple times (sotolone's one HELL of a molecule, yo)--that counts, right? Yes. But more important than experience, I have PASSION. And BOREDOM. So I have, like, all day to daydream about your fragrance and frustrate the perfumers and compounders with my endless iterations. (See the links above for all the rest.) Choose me, and while I can't promise that it will be a blockbuster, I can promise that it will be something. And unforgettable. Isn't that all you need? Have your people contact my people. No, wait--I don't have people. Just contact me directly. KTHXBAI!

Well that's the gist. I'll be waiting to hear from both of you.

Beep!
Ed Shepp

Christmas Come Early

2009-10-20T14:16:00.003-04:00

(click it)

(And if you don't like it, DROP DEAD.)

The Ed Shepp Pandora Experience

2009-09-29T22:48:00.002-04:00

This is The Ed Shepp Pandora Experience. It is the pilot episode, season launch. It is the raw, unedited Ed listening to Pandora, and periodically telling you about how he listens to Pandora. At teachable moments. There's always one special guest to every episode: YOU. Now listen, [general audiences-appropriate term of mock derision].

Beep!

From Brun Potatis to Choklad Papegoja: Desperately Seeking Stockholm's Sweet, Sticky Center

2009-07-07T15:12:00.006-04:00

(Note: To read the orignal post on WFMU's Beware of the Blog, click here. )

Ed's note:

Welcome, comely and prudent reader, to the debut publication from the Swedish American Futurimagineering Institut (SAFI), our Orange Brief. SAFI is a genuine-fake-maybe-real-but-probably-phony-except-for-real-but-you-never-really-know-these-days-anyway culturobstretrical organization with a life-changing mission: to build bridges of understanding between the American and Scandinavian peoples. And in so doing, heal the universe. To achieve this we use the power of Ultramultiscience, a new way of thinking that fuses multiple disciplines—sound, embalmery, competitive eating—into a gel that, when mixed with bleeding-edge scientificalism, unleashes transformational power not seen since Nutella met Bisquick. Wielded wisely, it can fuel cars-that-go-boomlike engines toward a more pumpkinlier future.

This Orange Brief is a patent-pending hydron-condensed version of the SAFI Orange Paper*, a 200+ lb nectarine of cunt-punching erudition, bursting with scratch-n-sniff pop-ups and double coupons. The design is no laughed-so-hard-you-shat accident: Its brainfeel mirrors its subject matter—strange and familiar, wordy and unreliable, cursory, broad-brush, mythically sextronic. Loosely unarranged, it takes you on a fluid, urinelike journey into insight, contemplation and that feeling of release when the brain freeze abates. It assumes an "asymmetrically interactive" posture; you're thus encouraged to connect its themes to their oft-repeated parallels in convenience store hot dog theory. A "necessary cliché," as it were

Like an artistic masterwork or courtesan selling stew, the Brief will screw each reader individually. But a basic overview of it might help you feel less afraid: Parts I and II pop out of the brassiere of History to feel through the Experiment in blind boob Braille. Part III is your Dark Patchouli Mistress, buttplugging you into the bicycle-rich tumult of modern Stockholm straight from the scribbles of my notebooks. Part IV drives you up the mountain, forces its conclusions on you at Céline-point and grins smugly as you gaze upon the beauty below in the cupcake afterglow of the Acknowledgments.

Behold your adventure, taut and energy-conscious reader. Good reading, and may pumpkin's indecent ambrosia glide down your throat into your soul, filling you with oily orange Ecstasy.

(Click here for my "Sounds of Stockholm" mp3 that contains some of the audio research from the Experiment.)

I. ABSTRACKGROUNTRODUCTION

For millennia, the idea of Sweden has enthralled the world's imagination with shots of hardbodied Vikings, ass-chapping winters, barbaric seafood concoctions, and fuck-off-style horned headgear that's perfect for when you're hung over and cranky. In modern times all this whimsical filligriboobery has ripened into a single prevailing stereotype: Sweden is a country of well-mannered blond beauties who celebrate high taxes, addictive pop hooks, cradling regulation, hard booze and isn't-that-dangerous? rituals involving candles. Until recently, this view was universally accepted. But a look beneath the latexy surface reveals that it completely misrepresents Swedish culture—the candle thing is completely safe, apart from a miniscule number of yearly burnt hair incidents (which, notably, fall well below average BHIs in the 63 NATO countries). Since a central centerpiece of SAFI's mission is to deglistenize the myths about Scandinavia and America, while simultaneously extolling their positive realities (muppetacular languages for the former and unlimited pizza buffets for the fatter), I, Researcher Ed Shepp, braved to conduct SAFI's first transcontinental Experiment: an observational visit to Stockholm, the self-described Scandinavian City That Almost Everyone Knows Isn't In Germany. The porpoise of the Experiment: To capture Stockholm's hot cultural jizz fresh from the spout, and use it in three ways: 1) as a launchpad to inform future research, (2) as a basis to issue edicts for change (3) as raw material for another bizarre Ed Shepp-style blog entry.

To prepare for the Experiment I baked the following recipe, with half the ingredients, for half the time and at half the temperature, for consistency:

Firstly, following my Facercise® instructor's practice of finding truth through bulleted lists, I created numberless agendas catalogues outlines timetables canons indices lineups and dockets. 37,000 pages of dots and fragments about everything conceivable: foods to eat weddings to crash snakebites to fake ways to wear a fake shit-stain on my pants and bring up the topic of Hitler at inopportune times. Purselessly I listenumberumerated until my consciousness reduced to only a beating heart composed not of living cells but of spreadsheets. From the tendrils of dusk to the fists of dawn, I steeped in this moment. Then I ripped the lists to shreds like so many paternity suits and flung the vodka-soaked mess on the Denny's floor and lunged to ignite it before security showed me out. And there in that life-giving parking lot, I willed myself to absorb all the lists and recall them instinctively when needed, like the street whore recalls the car of the plainclothes cop, before shapeshifting back into rat form.

Aquitionally, I gulped down many salty loads of advice, most of which reiterated the same plan: "Get laid a LOT!!" While such advice was adequately helpful, like a rubber butthole, I needed meatier counsel. Then finally one ghastly, grim and ancient raven volunteered an instruction that scraped the eye-boogers from my consciousness: "Assemble of your mind the Void," it crowed, "and ever you are given the tender, rejoin, YES! YES! YES! 'Fancy a herring-lingonberry-reindeer popsicle?' YES! 'Escape to Skåne for a Druid ritual and return riding atop train cars drunk on herring-reindeer vodka?' YES! Come to my flat and star in my movie, Herringly Insatiable: An American Annabel Chong in Sweden?' YES! And while, frankly, his examples seemed to me properly queer, the philosophy behind them gripped me like a crackhead octopus (or maybe just a crackhead), and I vowed to live it with the same devotion I live the Holy Orangitude of Brand Ed Shepp.

Further, I endeavored to annihilate all expectations I had (keeping, of course, a respectful fear for the cuisine, as one would for God or an ugly baby) and submerged myself in galaxies of disinformation, all to avoid creating My Own Private Stockholm in the gallbladder of my brain. Every night I drank Ukrainian amounts of a Nyquil-bacon mixture to corrode any preconceptions I'd formed. I appeared nude on Slate, wearing a blank foundation. (Remember, podiatry-aware reader, that it is only possibly to eradicate ones preconceptions to an certain limit. Brainwiping is an inexact science, like anal bleaching. Residue always remains. For more on residue, see Dr. Robert Mariah Carey Olson's seminal work, Streaks on a Microscope.)

Lastly, I'd like to introduce you to my Jonah Lehrer Magic 8 Ball. (For the unaware reader, Jonah Lehrer is a modern-day oracle, who provides counsel to people in need with his books and articles, through the lens of "science." His book, How We Decide, changed my waiting-in-the-airport-for-my-flight experience forever.) Sometimes, when faced with a novel challenge and neither a night of Correctol nor a chat with the mole people brings me clarity, I consult my Jonah Lehrer-branded Magic 8 ball. This was one of these times. You see, succinct reader, my adademinicity and scollershrimp have always served as my Achilles flaw, and I wondered if it would behoove me to approach my Experiment less intalectiually. I conferred with the JL8B, and it validated my intuition: "Let your emotional brain guide you," it said, "and you will absorb what data you need. Insight will surface, and bubble out like peroxide on a scab. Allow it to percolate and unfold, and it will bless you a unifying theory. Or a cowlick." Yes, his messages are incredibly long—thankfully the ball contains only one. Well, that's Banana for you!

II. MATERIA EXPERIMENTICA

The Experiment headquartered at fellow SAFI Researcher Nils Harning's laboratory, located in the dense thicket jungle of Södermalm. The central location permitted travel by the foot to all of Stockholm and the close proximity of the public transportation (known Stateside as "the shitbox"). The laboratory itself sported a Cluttered Gothic Trailer Kitsch theme, with, like the exotic dipping sauces at Burger King, a Swedish accent. As for Researcher Nils, if I were pacing a masturbatorium in a velvet jacket, smoking into a Dictaphone, 100 years ago, I might say that he had an artistic bent and involved himself in the theater. The Experiment spread itself over five days at the outset of summer and had no itinerary, thus allowing for 1) maximum serendipity and 2) the ever-lingering spectre of diarrhea.

III. INCOMPLETE EXPERIMENT NOTES UNORDERED IN BLANK VERSE

Wu Tang Clan on flight! Swede from Philadelphia! Owner of purple ukulele! I'm smelling omens. The shitter's right behind me.
Famous Swedes on airport billboards. Dolph Lundgren is an engineer?!?! Note: get MFA in 'sexiness engineering.' Matriculate at Karolinska Institutet.
Checkmate. 7-11 victorious. Prize: ubiquity. Loss: Duh. Raise another glass for invasive species. Skål!
Souvenir crap carts renew me. Thank you, Floridian heritage. I burp a silent blessing.
Pistachio polymer chemasterpiece. Fashion me into tongue and pour your green sugar on me forever.
Tree sign: "Caution: Deer Ticks" or "Gay Gnome Sex Ahead"? "Gay Gnome Sex"=verbal MSG.
Borgerskapets änkehus: Once: "Home for Upper-Middle-Class Widows"; Today: punchline.
Buildings that aerially resemble a hammer & sickle. Everyone's gotta rip off Disney World. Sheesh.
Researcher Nils knows EVERYONE! ...So why hasn't he taken me to the elf underworld yet?
Katarinahissen? I'll wait for the space elevator, tacksa meekay (Thanks Bark Maratelli for that spelling). Or taxi mocha (thanks Japanese friend of Nils!)
Sample sale. Goo-goo-la-la-shi-shi-frou-frou-ding-dong. Pronounced: "Ock-NAYuh." Spelled: Acne.
Gorgeous Gothik Lolita. Too nice to hate on. Stockholm Syndrome?
Smell of Stockholm: rain, earth, white flower, crumpled up in a can of Glade Lilac Spring.
Youths in shadows. Flickering light. Sounds of partying. Eurovision theme song. Not gay. Not gay?? NOT GAY?!???!?!?!? Not gay.
Stockholm has enough streetlights to create artificial dawn? Or could that be REAL dawn at 2am?
If news shows in other countries were food, they would be good Belgian waffles. Not stupendiferious ones, but delicious anyway.
Election signs: everywhere. White tennis shoes: ditto. Starbucks: Oubliette.
Yogurt? YES! Granola? YES! Cashews? YES! Too-thick milk! WHADAFAAAH???!!! ...Oh. "Yogurt."
Plastic flamingo. Do they know it's Christmastime at all?
Does oxytocin stain?
State liquor store: great selection, always crowded, closed on Sunday. THAT's a business model I can get behind!
Shower?? Shudder!!
"American style"=thisiswhyyourefat.com
Giggly girls: annoying in every language and culture.
40 kronor and my Big Mac is STUCK to the BOX?!?! Bitches need an exchange study program in Harlem.
Black pudding: Apple butter if it liked horror movies.
---Hey guys, let's rent a Hummer stretch limo and drive around fucking in deserted parks!! Yeah, let's do it! While we're still teenagers! I've got Hummer fever!---

[ALTERNATIVELY]

---God, Mr. Eriksson is such an amazing boss, renting a stretch Hummer limo and driving through deserted parks. He's so classy and sophisticated. I think I'll give him a hummer later on. Oh, I feel his hand on the back of my head! Maybe sooner than I thought!---
"It's just too good here. It's too good in Sweden." I KNEW it. I KNEW it would be said sooner or later.
Lost! Help! Key won't work! So many ways to have a breakdown—how can I lose??! Wait! Random stranger from doorway. Lends me cell phone without eye-rolling. Explains to me how to dial locally! Valeriee, these are not people. They are angels.
Swedish hipsters DJing on boats. ...And we're back.
Noise music. Yawn. Wait! GIANT VIKING HORN?!? Fireworks from deep inside my bosom.
There's a Göteborg affliction of saying "or" after everything. If anyone can pull it off in the USofA, Ed Shepp can.

IV. FINDINGS and CONCLUSION

1) Bathrooms in Sweden are wrong. Exhibit A: Researcher Nils's. Behold the showerhead hanging lonely on the wall, unprotected by any curtain, door or tub. So when anyone takes a shower, the whole room showers with him, including the toilet and the gnome. This is wrong. Showers are one of the 37 experiences in life that live up to commercials: Orgasmic explosions inspired by hair conditioner are common. Stripping its defenses from the hostile world is to devolve the shower experience from that of a private sanctuary into one of a chambre of horror, reminiscent of those rooms where people were sprayed with hoses in prison or psychward movies. Imagine, pithy reader, attempting to enjoy a shower while struggling to avoid drenching your Naughty Dentists of Prague 1987 calendar or your 2-lb bag of Cheetos or the Readers Digest with the invaluable conversation tips, to say nothing of the paintings and the Mary Lou Retton commemorative plates. My scientific conclusion is that every bathroom in Sweden urgently needs renovation, and immediately. SAFI is presently in talks with DANIEL (not Mavis!) Libeskind about this important matter.

Note: Another Swedish-bathroom abomination exists, one that scrapes against the pinkest depths of inhumanity; but we at SAFI believe that its enormity demands nothing less than a direct communiqué to the King. Thusfore, hereinly it will pass unmentioned, like Aunt Tula's heart-stopping farts at Easter dinner. You didn't hear or smell anything.

2) Coffee in Sweden is wrong. Exhibit B: At every restaurant and coffeeshop I graced with my orangeness, milk flowed copiously, like a union of menstruating hippies. But half-and-half, in unspeakable contrast, was nowhere to be seen, its absence lingering like a fat ghost's fart. If you, price-wise reader, take your coffee as I do, with enough fat to lubricate every subway car in London, you will find yourself spasming and seizing in disbelief when you realize that no half-and-half can be had in Sweden. As both scientist and saint, I feel it my duty to speak out against this inhumane condition. Everyone, no matter how goatlike his airspace or gnu-like her countenance, deserves the lardicious comfort of half-and-half, in coffee, pee or any other nutritious beverage. Further research may reveal whether the void of half-and-half plays a role in explaining why the people of Stockholm appears so skeletal and undernourished compared to Americans. (Note: The adipose deficiency of Stockholm's residents is striking. Unprecedented and impossible, like skidless Saturday panties. Consider my experience with public transportation: Over multiple trips on different types of transport, I never once encountered another passenger's flesh spilling over her seat into mine. Not one person exceeded the seats' already lean capacity. In a deeply personal place, this saddened me. How desolate to never feel the plush, unsolicited caress of a fellow commuter's muffin top! It's been said that Stockholm can be a cold place, and in some ways, this rings all too true.) SAFI vigorously recommends that anyone moving to Sweden import a live-in cow to ensure that abundant cream is always on hand. Some h8ers in the medical community may brand drinking cow cream directly from the teat unsanitary and dangerous, but we at SAFI just call it "French."

3) Despite their emaciation, the people of Stockholm exhibit a statistical supersaturation of slammin überhotness. The factors that account for this are uncertain; perhaps the city sustains an mammoth sprawl of modeling schools; perhaps the contentious link between herring and hotness may contain more validity than previously thought. Surely intensive research is warranted.

4) The thoroughness of 7-11s colonization of Stockholm is staggering and strange. The phenomenon seduces you in stages: It perplexes, overwhelms, paralyzes, then transfixes, alarms and appalls, and finally soothes inexplicably, as if some neuronal Pixie Stick broke in your crapstorian lobe, slathering it in synthetic sweetness. Compounding the oddity is the Fanta-commercial-subtle slogan trumpeted from every 7-11 in Stockholm: "Coffee. FOR REAL." Judging by its flavor, the coffee's authenticity was indeterminate, but Stockholm 7-11s' coffee experience, compared to its American counterpart, leaves much to be desired. Example: American 7-11s are required by the Church of Neon Ubiquity to offer a vast selection of flavored coffee creamers. In Stockholm these creamers were inexplicably absent. All things ill-considered, however, this researcher must concede that if being able to get a Slurpee on every corner (even if it is a green tea-peppermint-jingleberry-salmon flavored one) is not a sign of an advanced society, then I don't know what is.

CONCLUSION: Further research is vital. (Indeed, it has already begun—this researcher is presently wearing Björn Borg underwear, measuring its putative advancedness.) Five days might suffice to grasp the phenomenon of Dolly Parton, whose wigs, layed strand-to-strand, could cover the entire land mass of Scandinavia six times over. But alas, It is a sorely inadequate timeframe to attain understanding of the culture that has given us Roxette, Absolut, IKEA, and herring gelato. Multiple projects are presently in development by SAFI's think tanks, and the many targets for study ensure a bright future for SAFI, and the Universe as a whole.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I'd like to thank everyone who made this research voyage possible: SAS airlines, Newark and Arlanda Airports, orbitz.com, Jesus for all he does for me every day--you da man!, CandyApple Sharonta productions, L'Orilivia Shite Management, Sharon Levine, the most patient editor on earth who will wait through the longest stretch of constipation known in the Western world, Avril--guuuuurl, we gonna do spa day again soon w00t w00t!, the borough of Södermalm, repreZENT!, WFMU, Courtney L. for all the hours you spent with me on the phone when I was freaking out or not--you are my therapist, the State of Florida for bringing two so amazing people together as my Mom and Dad, so they could then have ME. Oh yeah, and those two others. I love you, Mom. Peace up, A-Town down, Dad. No, I don't know what that means. Ummmmmm, let's see. I don't want to miss anyone but don't freak out if I do cuz guys, this is like crazy, ok?! A sincere thank you to the madwoman raving on the street: you gave me new life. I choose you. The entertainment you give the world can't be measured. Maybe in minutes. I'd like to thank all the great people on the World Wide Web who talked to a little American with a big dream. Thank you V and Nena and Mount Dora and Lake Square Mall and Burger King for the solid foundation you gave for my EdSheppness. Thank you to Tallahassee. And thank you New York for being such a shithole—if you never stank like you do or were loud and crowded like you are, I may never have needed the escape to Stockholm. Peace, my Stockholmies for speaking English with me and for pretending that they way I pronounced "meat balls" sounded like I was saying "butt balls." Thank you, SAS again, for the two complimentary alcoholic beverages! Thank you, other passengers, for not getting sloshed like I did. That's so crass.

And if these were real acknowledgements, I'd of course thank Researcher Nils for everything. And to D (and everybody) for putting up with my lost-sleep crabbiness.

Lastly, thank you Ed Shepp. You did good, beeyotch. You had a good trip and good things to say about it in your good epistolary piece. Rock out with your good self! W00t w00t!

*An Orange Paper, which can only be issued from the Swedish American Futurimagineering Institut, can be compared, for the unfamiliar reader, to a "white paper," in which it shares many characteristics, one of which being the gravitas and "officialness-n-stuff" connoted by the concept. Moreover, like many whites paper, it is neither white nor on paper. The most salient divergence, however, between the two is the name: The Orange Paper. And of course, if printed, it would appear on orange paper. A less immediately evident aspect of the Orange Paper is that it also exudes all the unique aesthetic and genius connoted by the color orange.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This has been an Orange Brief from Swedish American Futurimagineering Institut.

Coming Soon

2009-06-01T16:06:00.003-04:00

Not to worry, gnooplets. Although it's been a few days since I've returned from Stockholm, a blerg entry will be forthcoming soonenly. So stop yer fretting! Sit tight, it's coming [ghost voice] soooooooonnnn......

(Dammit, I've probably just built it up too big. Quick tamp down your expectations!!!)

E

Ed Shepp Receives Medal of Kindness from Kingdom of Norway

2009-04-04T20:45:00.010-04:00

OK, so here's a bit of news that I just can't let pass without sharing it with the wurld: I have received a Medal of Kindness. Technically it's from RJ in Norway, who sent it to me because I'm sending him the new Prince CD, because it's not yet available in Norway, but I find that it's just easier for people if I tell them that it's from the Kingdom of Norway. (Is it still a kingdom? I know more about Sweden's govt than Norway's.) I got it in the mail a couple days ago, and it was a surprise. I almost thought the medal got into the package by mistake, but when I asked RJ, he told me that he gave it to me because I deserved a medal for my kindness and to go with my crown. And when I thought about it, I couldn't help but agree.

And believe me, after today I feel that I have earned the medal. Have you ever been to the post office in SoHo? No? Well, have you ever been to a crappy post office? I'm sure you have, and let me tell you: today SoHo was the worst of the worst post offices. Not only did I wait over a half an hour to mail a $3 package (because if you're sending a package overseas you have to put a customs form and someone behind the counter has to ask you if there's anything fragile or dangerous in it; meaning, you can't just drop it in the bin), but there was a guy in front of me in line who decided that his goal for the day was to be an asshole. He kept bitching to everyone in line in front of him about the guy who was mailing 30 packages. Yeah, it was a pain in the ass, but talking loudly about him in an effort to shame him doesn't help anyone in the real world. The guy was talking so loudly I feared that fisticuffs might develop! But what I feared more was that the guy would turn around and start whingeing to me. Luckily he didn't; I was sort of hoping that I looked strange enough that he thought I was a freak. After all, I was wearing me medal. Nonetheless, while in line I was trying to think of a strategy to use to deflect this person's complaining should he try it on me. I wondered if it would work if I told him that I don't speak English. Could I conceivably look "European" enough for him to believe it? And if he did, would he then start bitching about "immigrants" or tourists? I think if he turned around, I wouldn't have pursued that strategy, because frankly, it's never worked with solicitors. And this being New York, some wipe would probably try to "interpret." I guess I'd have to pretend to speak Old Finnish or something. Odds were that there were Spanish, French, German and Swedish speakers there. But luckily I never had to suffer him.

But let me tell you: it was absolutely horrible. There were weird smells, ugly people, ugly accents, that annoying guy with all the packages, and those postal workers, who are sooooooooooooooo slllllllllloooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwww. Like unnecessarily slow. I've worked foodservice at theme parks and tourist traps in Florida, peeps, so I know when biatches are operating slowly. I didn't see any reason for the slowitude, but I had a theory: If the subways are a proof for the theory of evolution, then the post office is sure evidence of the persistence of lobotomies. I really think there oughtta be a sign in the post office that says something like: "Postal Service Employees Have Undergone Prefrontal Lobotomy." But enough of that.

I mentioned that I was wearing my medal. Well, you should have seen me. The picture in this entry is my rendering of what I looked like. I was wearing my red sweater with a black shirt and checkery tie, and tightass H&M pants with my medal and sneakers. The look that I was going for was "Supervillain cheerleader who is fundamentally good." Let's break it down: The sweater is a v-neck with white stripes. It feels very cheerleadery to me. If I pair it with chinos, I get the "cheerleader on a yacht" look. So it was the centerpiece. But instead of pairing it with the white shirt, I decided to pair it with a black shirt! :O That's how we get the "evil cheerleader" look. It's kind of like when you're watching a sitcom or Jem or a Mariah video: the "evil" version usually looks no different from the regular one, except ze's wearing black instead of white or has dark hair. Or cooler makeup, in the case of a cartoon. Ze's usually not very evil either, conspiring to "steal the cake" instead of something that you'd actually call evil. Anyway, so that's that. The supervillain comes in serendipitously: My glasses sit a bit crooked on my face, and it usually kinda frustrates me. But it totally works for the supervillain if you picture him as one of those who is hot-but-goofy in real life (the goofiness is supposed to connote a slight "offness" about the villain, sinister in the sense of sinister meaning left-handed) and usually becomes suave when costumed as the supervillain. I'm thinking Cillian Murphy in Batman, but I don't think he actually had crooked glasses. But think of that with crooked glasses. And, of course, the clingy pants from H&M, which fit into the look because they're not jeans, so they're more "wholesome," but they undercut the wholesome cheerleaderness by being too tight and fitting too sexylike. They're also ARGUABLY too young for me, so I bet there were people leering at me on the subway for that reason. But my thought was just like, "Yeah, biatch, I'm a 30something man rocking out a cheerleadery outfit and pants that fit tight AND a Medal of Kindness! You're just hating cuz you don't have a medal! Suck it!" And I say arguably because, while I may not have a great body overall, I've always had pretty good legs. Even for a guy. Because most men have what you might call "good legs" since men don't have cellulite and they typically don't deposit fat in the legs; but my legs are good even for a guys, if I dare say so myself. But enough of that.

So I think I'm going to be incorporating my Medal into my regular wardrobe. And if not my regular wardrobe, then definitely the "occasions to wear my Hermes tie" wardrobe. Because how can you get a Medal of Kindness and not wear it?!? I especially need to wear it because I have an unfortunate history of knowing h8ers who would go so far as to say that I am UNkind in public! Yes, the nerve! But I think my Medal of Kindness (and one from NORWAY no less, where you'd assume people are nicer because they have space and Norway has all that money, etc....) proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am in fact a kind person, even if I don't typically fawn all over people and kiss their asses. Another reason to wear it is when I do something very nice. Invariably (or maybe just with h8ers) when you do something very nice someone around you says, "What are you trying to do, get a medal???" Well, the next time someone says this, I can respond with: "I don't need a medal for kindness. I already HAVE one."

Incidentally I don't yet have a picture of the Medal, but I shall post one when I'm able to take a snapshot. I have no picturey phone, and my digital camera is on the fritz. And that's all for now.

BEEP!
E

Notes for Stockholm. 1.

2009-04-02T22:50:00.004-04:00

OK, so I'm going to Stockholm for a few days later in the year. Thank the cods the lowest airline prices of a century coincided with a time when I could actually buy them. Thank you, codz!!!! So I've started to begin to intend to endeavour to try to make lists. Of the stuff that I need before I go and stuff I have to remember and gaga woo woo. This part is important, the having protocols and goals. Because let's face the pickles here: a trip to Stockholm isn't just something you do any day. It's not like Jones Beach. And since there's always a chance that I'll never even get to Europe's shores again, I better make this shit COUNT. So one thing I'm doing is declaring it, to myself, as my birthday, Christmas and Halloween present and Easter basket all in one. And maybe even a really good birthday, like my 50th birthday present. (That might be a good idea; so when I reach 50 and, codwilling, a coterie is fawning over me asking what I want for my 50th birthday, I can say, "I've already had it, and I had it when I was 36.") That way I'll be determined to make it fun, because it's got a lot riding on it. Some people live their lives like that, you know. They put so much cathexis into being "a good woman" that they can never let themselves believe otherwise, because it's too costly. Yeah, so yeah.

Another thing I'm doing is basically the same thing as the first, but more the core of the matter: I'm just promising myself that I'm going to love it no matter what--if it rains, if it snows, if it goes all Cloverfied... Anything except missing the flight or some crap like that. That you can't make fun. And another thing I'm doing--and this is turning into a list of its own--is making it into some kind of social experiment. And probably recording it all too, cux I might as well make audio magic out of it too, right? But back to the social experiment. Yes, this is definitely going to be part of it. Hmmm, maybe 'anthropological observation' would be more fitting a term. Anyway, I'm going to observe any little thing I can think of, and I'll have to think of it before I go, and notate it. This all sounds way more highfalutin and smart than it is, but go with me here. So I'm trying to think of stuff to observe. And I've come up with two thoughts so far. So this will be the beginnzing of a bunch of lists, if not here than in my mind. Especially when I'm feeling contemplative. May it birthate many more lists.

(I think my 2Q:09 resolution will be to be the kind of person that people make lists about. Then someday 40 years hence I'd like to be talking to someone who is a close friend and have hir say to me, "Do you remember the Count of Boobookabooshkoo? He must have made 60,000 lists about you, he felt so strongly about you. For a summer there he had a staff of 1600 just sitting there paid top dollar to make lists about you all day. He had the country's best poets working for him. You know, like the person who wrote Toxic. Remember they were all published a couple years later and every contributor named a co-poet laureate of the country? It almost got a Nobel.")

NOTES FOR STOCKHOLM 1

--Look at the old people. You know how old people here, even the rich ones, look just ground down and beat the shit out of? See if they look that way there. Here's a rich, developed country with a good safety net and a populace with a reputation for good behavior at home. (Wow, Sweden really does have a good reputation, doesn't it? I suppose it can only be good for me to like it, right? I could imagine someone saying, "You know Ed? I used to think he was hopelessly godless, destined to blaspheme 1,000 things before he even wakes up in the morning? Well, did you know he likes Sweden? I always thought he'd want to live in some genie bottle lounging on rugs and inhaling and exhaling nothing but pure, overpowering pleasure. But maybe I was wrong--maybe he can live in a small town and behave like the good kids. I'm gonna introduce him to my friend Jesus again.") So add all these things together and surely you'd find "a good place for the elderly" in there somewhere. It just goes with the territory. That said, if that were the only thing that mattered to me, I suppose I'd be all about Japan, because they respect their elderly there. I think. But who wants to go through all that schooling and pressure?! And isn't that where they have suicide waves? Nej, tack. But more importantly, I think if life there really is easier because of social welfare and everything else, I'd expect the older people to not look as eroded as they do here. We'll see.

--Check out the rats in the subway. Are they huge and brawny, big as cats but a little icy and reserved? (Because it's becoming a cliche that they grow 'em taller in rich parts of Western/Northern Europe. Because they really do grow taller. And there's that Swedish cliche about the guys being tall and blond and built. So if the people grow bigger, do the rats? Are they well-nourished too?) Are they blond? Is there language very musical and heavy on the 'r' phoneme?

--Make more notes later. Bloggerate this so you don't lose it.

FIN

So that's my forsta list, in progress. More to come if I think of something and am not too lazy to put it up.

GLORP! (it's not the new beep, exactly; but I end my emails with various single-syllable such words, so I'm being colloquial here. But I'll beep anyway. BEEP!)

E

Flerpglerp

2009-04-01T22:36:00.002-04:00

Oh, cod. Blogger, look what has become of you. Not only do you have "followers" on your template page, but you also have "monetize," as in "click here to monetize your blog." Must you escort us down that road???? Antyganoo...

I have something to say! -Jerri Blank, Strangers With Candy.

I'm sure that I am a supergenius ultraexpert at something, but that this something doesn't yet have a name or definition. And since I can't pin it down exactly, I think it may be completely undiscovered, and therefore in need of invention. I have a suspicion that it's not a single trait, but rather a complex, or to coin a word, a parallex. If it were a medical condition, you might call it a syndrome. One of these days I'm going to give it a name and educate people about it. It's good when you've educated people so much that they think they've heard of it on Oprah instead of from you. Or when they say, "Did I tell you that Fularka has Glammertybork's Artstasia?" when they forget that you INVENTED G.A.! So I'm going to define this set of traits, and maybe monetize it. Of course, the existence of the syndrome prompts one to ask...

Is this a parallex that is a positive mutation in human evolution? Is it a superior genetic trait?

:O

(Yeah, I made an emoticon.) (I farted too.) (Not really, I just thought that was funny.)

You know, I don't like the word mutation in that context. It has such a bad connotation. We should think of positive genetic mutations as adaptations. Because it describes it better. I read about some study that came to the conclusion that experience can alter your genes--e.g., if you have years of musical training, your offspring may inherit a certain aptitude for music, apart from their exposure to it as infants. How's that? That experience causes your DNA to change? The article seemed to imply that was part of the study's conclusion; but I doubt it. Experience/environment can cause your gene expression to change, however, and maybe that's how things get passed on. Who knows?? I'm just flexing my Cassadega lobe here.

The point, and I don't really have one, being that perhaps this parallex is a superior genetic adaptation. We won't know the specifics of it until it's studied at length, however. First I need to name it; then people need to parse it out, describe and categorize it; finally scientists need to locate the specific genetic sequence responsible for it, and what other effects it has besides giving rise to the parallex. For example, do the genes that code for the parallex also leave one susceptible to the pleasures of pumpkin pie?? Maybe someone with one or more of the genes turned OFF is resistant to pumpkin pie. Of course, that would be silly now, wouldn't it? Because it would seem preferable in evolutionary terms to like pumpkin pie--it is calorie dense, and therefore it would be good to have in a famine. ("No bread? Well then let them eat pumpkin pie!") It is also sky high in beta carotene. It may have traces of calcium and protein. And the preservatives in canned pumpkin mean that it will always be around. AND pumpkin pie MIX is great straight-from-the-can. So clearly liking pumpkin pie is a superior genetic adaptation. But I think I'm getting ahead of myself here, because there's nothing at present to tie pumpkin pie susceptibility to my particular parallex. It may be indicative of a completely separate parallex, which is also a desirable genetic adaptation. Oh, so much to know, and only one me. Le sigh...

Glerp
E

Ed Shepp's Excellent Philadelphia Adventure

2009-02-23T22:45:00.006-05:00

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.

Beep!
Prince EQ

Beautiful Wikipedia

2009-02-19T19:08:00.006-05:00

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.

Beep!
Prince E. Quistvalden av Norwegenmark Trailer Park

Valentoonce.

2009-02-16T23:17:00.002-05:00

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.

BLOMP!
E

My WFMU Blog Post

2009-02-02T18:34:00.006-05:00

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.

Beep!
E

More Crap About What's on My iPod

2008-12-16T23:05:00.002-05:00

You know, I think about this all the time--the music on my iPod. That, smells, a certain concept of place, and the weather. That seems to occupy a lot of my mental real estate lately. So let's have a listen to what else is on my iPod (the mini now, not the shuffle. The mini with a one-day battery life. Vad hände????). I'll just go through and yap about whatever seems yappable.

Apple Juice Kissing - DeeLite. (Hmmm, I noticed that I mentioned this one before, so I'll keep this short.) Sometimes DeeLite feels like therapy. You listen to it and you're like, "Oh, this is how chill people think." And I love how it's romantic and even cliched at parts but still sexy and laidback. I even look dreamy when I listen to this. This is what La Isla Bonita should feel like (all of them--Madonna, David Hasslehoff, me....)

Sufjan Stevens Christmas songs. Oh SHIT these are good! I have to admit, I didn't really want to life SS, because isn't he some crazyass Catholic Mormon Baptist shaman? AND he's really good looking AND talented AND young AND in this hipster community?!? But anyway, I heard I think that Illinoize album a while ago and liked it, but didn't go far with it. But this xmas album--it's absolutely transcendent! The song I have on right now, "boogie to the elf dance" or something, the lyrics are just amazing. Not flowery or complicated, but just straightforward, original and sincere. Did I say original? Because WHERE else could you hear a lyric like 'Your sister's bangs--she cut them herself"??!?! It's brilliant! Especially because it's not thrown in there clearly randomly in an attempt to seem clever. Also: "Kmart is closed..." It's not thrown in to be a smart-ass like it usually would have been. It describes this small town he's talking about (that's how I read it anyway). "What a great day..." "Tell all the neighbors there's cookies to eat..." OK are these supposed to be ironic and corny?? I don't think so, which is what makes them so great; because the way he sings them, you can totally see it, you can believe this is a real situation. The complete opposite of the trite phoniness of someone like Celine Dion. I think part of the effect of this song is that 1) SS isn't the most amazing singer there's ever been (he's not BAD, but he's not Jennifer Hudson) 2) the music is odd but it works: banjos, what sounds like a piano recorded in a living room 3) this almost smalltown music-theater quality of the arrangements; and I think there may be kids singing on some of the songs, except that here they sound natural. This almost sounds like it could have been recorded in someone's living room at Christmas. Or maybe a super-idealized family-room. Oh, and I also like how he goes, "There's a lot to shout about" but then instead of talking about Jesus, which is what you expect, he says that "Santa Claus is coming to town." Now how's that for being inclusive?!

And since I mentioned that song, let's also mention All the King's Horns. It starts out just these small delayed bells, and it sounds quite like that one all-bells song on Bjork's Vespertine. Of course, then these really cool, interesting, strange flute-like(?) sounds come in, which just sound otherworldly, but also kind of sound like an animal. It's hard to describe, but you really get the sense that "All the King's Horns" was a perfect name for the song. Moving on...

PSA, by Ed Shepp. Damn. This is the kind of thing that I listen to and think, "I did THAT???!" In a good way. It's just fantastic to look at or hear something you did a long time ago and forgot about and be amazed by how much you like it. And I like this. And I can remember doing it, with these really blunt instruments. It's still fascinating to me how you can get some of the best results in sounds and images with some of the least functional tools. Anyway, moving on still...

The Raging Swedes podcast. OK, I don't get this. I can hear some foreign-language stuff and understand why it's funny, but this is passing me by. It just sounds like a bunch of guys sitting around, eating(!!!!), talking over each other sometimes, coughing, and I'm like, "Wha??" iTunes made it seem like it was popular. Maybe I'm not getting it because it's in another language. Maybe there's a reason why they open with Kitaro. Who can solve the mystery.....

Hair, Japanese Cast. Oh, dear. Well, the funniest thing about this (it's the main song, about 'gimme a head with hair...') is the first part. The line "gimme a head with hair." You know how in English the guy takes his time with this part, because it's supposed to sound langorous and sexy? Well, this is the one time a Japanese translation lived up to the stereotype: there are like 32 syllables here, and it sounds ghastly. The rest: not much better. Is Japanese just a terminally unsexy language? The real weirdest part of the song, however is this: When you think of Japanese people, don't you think of people who work really, really hard to get shit right? Like, they all play the cello and they went through crazyass high schools and shit, right? So if you hear a Japanese song, you expect no vibrato and you expect it will be chromatically perfect on the pitch, right? Well, maybe it's supposed to be off because they're playing "American," maybe not. Whatever the case, they don't sound in tune. Maybe they are, but I expected something like When Does Cry or some crazy auto-tuned country song. (It's really disturbing when every part is tuned like that.) Anyway... the next song is the American version. I have to admit, I just love this song. Apart from the musical, which I'm not as crazy about as I thought I could be. It's a sexy song. Too bad it's from Hair. You listen to it on the subway and Abigail Dupont-Mortimer Johnson&Johnson Snickers Van-Cartier Clinton is all like, "Hmmph. He's listening to Hair. What a filthy hippie!"

Jingle Bells by the Carpenters. This song is such a masterpiece it baffles me. It's so perfect I know there was some intelligent design behind it. Brilliance like this doesn't just happen. I think the greatest thing about this song is that it comes off genuinely creepy, like it would be right at home in a horror movie. It reminds me in tone of the Jingle Bells (was it Jingle Bells) from the One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest movie. It's extremely over-earnest and has a lot of instruments that were used in television or movies way way way way back in the day, so that it already sounds like a parody of itself. Then way they sort of make the strings and horns "talk" is one example of that. You sometimes hear it in Disney movies. And the vocals: It starts out with Karen Carpenter sounding like she always does, but then at the end of the first verse, at "is to ride," comes in this chorus that sounds like it was recorded on a tape player, recorded from some children's special--actually most of these vocals sound like they are from a TV special. Then a crazy chorus of women in head voice, some guys singing and doing that ghastly harmony people do, and sometimes just letting all the air out on the word "bells." Then an instrumental bit in the middle, with this high-pitched horror movie sound that is so high it sounds a little out of tune, just because the frequency is so harsh. Then the chorus takes us out, but some guy is so far forward on the mix, with this chorus effect on his voice (and of course he doesn't sound as good as the background singers), that it just adds yet more to the creepiness factor. And then it ends in a hollow crescendo.

Phantom of the Opera, Wing. Honestly, what's there to say about Wing? The concept is so straightforward: a really, really bad singer who really, really thinks she's good. But in this case the concept works. I've never been crazy about this song, but damn, this recording is GOOD! Those horns sound so real and full! And the strings so lush and, well, real. And in the second verse this HUGE timpani! But it seems like the horns really do it. They just sound so great. You can almost pretend that Wing is, like, the king of Korea's first mistress and that this is the royal orchestra playing just to humor this beeyotch. But anyway, about her singing: Yes, it's terrible, and here's why: 1) if she ever lands on a right pitch it's pure luck--she's flat here, sharp there, and oftentimes just singing different notes altogether. The end is problematic for me: she is getting higher than she was progressively, and then just parks. I wonder if in the original song, which I don't know well enough, whether the singer keeps going UP, but Wing just stops because of her lack of ability. In this sense I could see her hearing HERSELF as going up, but not in reality. 2) Her voice is tight as a drum, and she just has wretched technique all around 3) She never even approaches a vibrato, and honestly she seems to be singing in a non-western scale. Sometimes there are these really weird notes or almost-trills that she does that sound like Asian music. 4) Her accent is like sandpaper. It's weird how you can hear her accent most at the end, when she's supposed to be singing an 'ah' phoneme, but is just making a sound, and it sounds like it could be a non-Western vowel sound, but maybe it's just straining.

Carol of the Bells/What Child Is This, Point of Grace. The music: beautiful. Absolutely breathtaking. And also natural-sounding. All this until they start singing. Then the music takes a back seat and isn't really interesting anymore. Of course, AFTER they finish singing, the music swells again and goes out really interesting, in this great church-bells-pealing sound. But then, these girls also are not Jennifer Hudson, so if the music had stayed interesting they whole time, they would've been drowned. I'd like to hear someone who could really, really sing perform this. But I'd prefer a good instrumental.

The Magic of Christmas Day, Celine Dion. I really can't say enough about this song, about the myriad ways that it is bad and good and could be great, but I will not say anything about it now. I will merely award it an honorable mention.

Beep!
E

The Shepp-Blumberg Audio Consortium's 2008 Holiday Message

2008-12-14T19:52:00.005-05:00

Happy Christmas, y'all! And in the spirit of the holidays, I give you The Shepp-Blumberg Audio Consortium's 2008 Holiday Message.

Everyone clap for Christmas!!

Beep!
E

Me Wish List

2008-12-08T23:27:00.004-05:00

Here's me wish list, in case anyone out in the ether wants to get me anything:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/34S6YM2X6Z90W/ref=wl_web

And if you still need xmas sounds, here's my Ed Shepp xmas sound page, back from last year!

BEEP!
Ed Shepp

Låt den rätte komma in

2008-11-28T09:45:00.004-05:00

OK, so I saw that movie, Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In), the other day, quite by accident. (And if you want to know how to pronounce the title in Swedish, click this to hear from forvo.com) I happened to be at the Angelika the other day, and everything looked crappy or depressing, so when I saw the movie was in Sweden, and the ticket person (who thought that new Woody Allen movie was good--WHAAAAAAAAAAAAA?!??!?!?!? She MUST have been kidding when she said she thought it was "complex" and said it was like "Woody Allen grew up." The movie is ridiculous) confirmed that it is in Swedish, I thought "Hey, even if it's retarded, at least it won't seem TOO stupid since it's in another language." So I saw it.

And I'm totally going to spoil it for you here, since you're not going to see it. As I understand it, there's an American version being made, due out in 2010. Make no mistake: It. Will. Suck. And it will avoid everything controversial in this version.

OK, so what happened in the movie? Well, I came in a little late, but I think I got the whole thing. As much as I could, I suppose, since there was stuff that I missed. I will say one thing before I tell the plot: There was a point where the girl in the movie was talking to someone and I thought, "This would be really cool if she ate him." How bout it got really cool! Anyway, here we go...

So it takes place in Sweden somewhere, apparently Stockholm, though I wouldn't think that even Stockholm gets so cold as to be covered in snow and freeze the lakes over and all. It starts with 12-year old blond boy, and he's talking to some girl who looks a lil unkempt. I thought it was going to be a story about a guy befriending a homeless girl, because he gave her a Rubiks cube and I thought they were in a bus station (they were outside). But she's not homeless per se--they're neighbors. Fast forward fast forward--you see an attack happen under a bridge, and you're like, "Is that that girl?" Fast forward--she's over at his house and says, "You have to invite me in." That's when you really get the inkling that she's a vampire, because everyone knows that you have to invite vampires in. (However, not everyone knows this. My friend ---- in Atlanta used to have Mexican workers living with him. They were afraid to go into his basement because they thought there were vampires down there. Uhhh, duh. There can't be, because you have to INVITE them! How uneducated!) Anyway, and this is proving to be a really short synopsis, blond boy is being bullied at school, so he tells Eli (the vampire) about it and she says she can help. More on that later. In a REALLY good plotline, Eli bites this woman but doesn't kill her, so the woman starts becoming a vampire. She goes over to someone's house, where this guy has, like, 900 cats, and they all start hissing at her and then all these computer-generated cats jump on her and start biting. That was freaking hilarious. But it's not over yet! She goes to the hospital, says she wants to die, asks someone to open the blinds on a sunny day, and when he does, a dummy version of her bursts into flames (see the picture). That was awesome. In another plotline, the man Eli lives with turns out to be a pedophile, and he gets caught having kidnapped a boy and he pours acid on his face. Then he falls out of the window at this hospital and his head brakes off. OK, back to the blond and Eli: blond wants to go steady with Eli, and she says something like, "What if I'm not a girl?" OK, you think "she's not a girl, she's a vampire." But it turns out she's both a vampire and a castrated boy. So how does blond react? He reacts like he does to everything in the movie: he doesn't. He seems nonplussed by everything. When he sees her scar, he just shrugs. When he asks her, "är du vampyr?" he might as well be asking her if she got her haircut. And later when this guy says he's going to poke his eye out with a knife, blond seems to have no reaction. Hmmm. I don't know if it's underacting or if it's a Swedish thing. It comes off like the latter. Anyway, so now that we've gotten most of it out of the way, let's finish: Blond fights back against a bully; the bully's brother comes back with a knife and, well, you know. So he's holding him underwater, and you see the blond through the pool cam. he's underwater and losing his breath and all, and then you see a pair of shoes through the water. Then you see the forearm of the guy who's holding him underwater. Yep, Eli has come to save him. Then at the end they go away together on some train. Oh wait--I forgot one thing. There's a scene after he knows she's vampyr, and she's at his house and he's like, "Why can't you just come in? Why do I have to invite you?" so she just comes in. And then starts bleeding out her orifices and her pores. Then he says he invites her in and they hug. And yeah, it's weird when you think that you're watching two twelve-year old kids covered in blood going steady and one is a vampire but is also a boy.

So you can see how they're going to change everything in the American version. More love story, more "defeating the vampires." The girl will probably be caught, and if not, there will be crappy sequels. More good vs. bad. I can't even imagine. The color will probably be richer in the US version--in this version, it was this washed-out wintry palette. It works considering where it's set, but I always prefer bold, rich, splash-right-off-the-screen color.

And that's the movie. Quite strange. But entertaining.

Beep!
Ed Shepp

Community Service

2008-11-22T20:42:00.005-05:00

OK at the moment I would like to do some community service. Because I care about people. For this lecture I will be discussing some of the contents of my (crappy) iPod shuffle. Read on, and learn.

1. Hidden Place, Bjork. song#4
This song is interesting because it shows us very clearly a certain geocultural internal genre: The Cold Weather music genre. When you hear a song like this, you have to imagine that you're in some huge, icy, dim, snowy scene. Bjork is from Iceland, for the cave dwellers who may be reading. In Iceland it's always cold, even in July. So this is where Bjork lives, physically and mentally. This is the sonic equivalent of the song's mindset. Think of the second verse, (if you can call it that): "He is the beautifulest, fragilest, still strong, dark and divine. And the littleness of his movements hides himself. He invents a charm that makes him invisible, hides in the hair..." Now, does that say "Nordic myth" or what? Yesh. So this is what cold weather sounds like: lush orchestrations, "soft" sounds, especially with a mythic lift to them, higher instruments, lots of chorusing and thickening; lots of reverb. It's definitely NOT the quick-cut, silence-punctuated with futurism like some electronic music.

2. Piece of Me, Britney #5
This is an unfinished song, but it points to what's ahead. It's unfinished because, clearly, it is. It's too spare; it needs more flourishes. I had a feeling the vocoders were supposed to be more front and center; this sounds like a scratch track. Also, the instrumentation: you can tell listening to the end that it was going to have more flourishes, maybe "17th century" style flourishes, but the album got leaked before they added them and it was released thus. But it is a good groove, isn't it?

3. She Bop (remix) #7
Probably the best remix ever done. The sounds, separated, sound so fresh here. And the new sounds! I remember when I was younger, hearing this and thinking there was something seriously salacious about it, but not knowing why. Well, it's the percussion that sounds like toilet seats slamming and the bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bop metallic sounding thing (it would work well with a 70s vocoder), and maybe more. But I remember I would blush listening to it, and this was before I know what "she bop" meant. But in terms of the sexiness, I have to say: the breath thing, probably going for sexy, doesn't do much. It's just another rhtyhm, and you end up wondering why the breath is so short. But seriously, for too many reasons to get into, this is the best remix ever made.

4. Apple Juice Kissing, DeeeLite. #9
I just love the naturalness of the rapped part, and the casualness of the music that really makes it sound like summer. I swear, they must've recorded this album in Tahiti. This represents an almost subtropical genre, in contrast to Bjork's frozen landscape. It's so casual. It really feels like a summer day. I do have to say, though, I'm not entirely sure what "apple juice kissing makes me roll my hips" means, but it's cool. I have another song from that album on here, and it has the line, "No interruptions, we're all alone. Cuz I don't have a cellular phone"--talk about a casual summer, even almost hippielike, lyric! Love it!

5. Unemployed in Summertime (can't remember) #13
I really like this song. It's by someone in Iceland, but she manages to, for the most part, make it sound like a lazy day in summer. Examples of lyrics: "Let's get drunk on Saturday, walk up Primrose Hill until we lose our way.... Sorry, don't get mad at me--I just did the sex quiz in your magazine. You're my best friend in the world.... Unemployed in Summertime, only just turned 21. It'll be OK. Unemployed in Summertime, we don't need money cuz we're young..." Ah, just listening to those, you feel like you're 21 again and don't have a care in the world.

6. Christmas in Hell. Some Holy Roller Prodigy. #21. I downloaded this from soundclick. It's some child prodigy's interp of Carol of the Bells. He's also from a holy roller family. The song starts out OK, with a weird inversion of the melody, but with pretty much the same baseline, of Carol of the Bells. Unfortunately, it never really moves on from this. It just builds and gets louder and more aggressive and then fizzles, without exploring more territory, so it ends up basically in the realm of Really Good New Age song, but nothing better. It could have been more, but the idea, of dubious nature to begin with, isn't developed. Furthermore, what exactly does the song mean? Is it that Hell is torment? If so, you're using YOUR OWN composition to signify torment? And it's not dissonant? What does the Bolero-type build mean? That Hell's agonies constantly increase? But you're using your composition to illustrate those agonies. And moreover, the only thing agonizing about the piece as written is that the part is in a minor key. What's so menacing about that? The original song is in a minor key. But it's most important that it doesn't go anywhere, and that's, apart from some very minor misses, is what keeps it from being great.

14. Zombie Jamboree/Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, Rockapella. #22/23
I love this choir shit. Just love it. And damn, those Rockapella beeyotches got skills. They MIGHT be good enough to sing on Broadway. But we can't really know, because the particular rules their songs follow don't allow for much original emotional interpretation. One thing I like about the HYaMLC is the occasional Perry Como Special quality that every now and then comes in. Love it! I'm not sure of the very discernible delay effect they have on it--it's pretty, if a bit thick, but why not just hear them the way they sound? Which reminds me--Christina Aguilera: what you really should do? Put out an acapella album with no filtering on the vox. That way we can really hear you sing.

15. "The Magic of Christmas Day" (?), Celine Dion #24
I think I can truly say that this is the only song I know that I like "ironically." Of course I also like it straight, but not all of it. It's amazing to feel this way about a song. First of all, the irony part: Cod, these lyrics are insipid, in so many parts and so many ways. I should say this, though: the character in the song, I wish I liked ANYTHING as much as this bitch likes Christmas. DAMN! eg: "Christmastime is here, our waiting is done." WHO is sitting around WAITING for Christmas, plucking out her leg hair and biting her nails to the bone?! Crazy. And: "...that everyone feels, it's the magic of Christmas Day." What?!??! The MAGIC--what exactly IS this "magic of Christmas Day"??? Really, it's just another day. Sometimes there's magic to Halloween, but not Christmas.

The refrain: God bless us, everyone. The good and the bad, the happy the sad. God bless us, everyone. Here's to family and friends, it's good to be here again. OK, the happy/sad thing is lazy writing. But the 'here's to family and friends...' actually succintly wraps up what we really think about Christmas in a way that's not cheap or maudlin or altogether too cliched, even though it's a little bit beer-commercial.

The bridge: That woman's voice! It gets so WEIRD!!! She goes into an upper register here, and it just sounds freaky, like an alien duck. Especially on "it's easy to do." Crazy. The bridge, OF COURSE, unfolds into an instrumental part with, you guessed it, a saxophone. The biggest Christmas cliche ever (in a huge nest of cliche upon cliche, which is the style of every Celine Dion song), and it doesn't even fit the rest of the song. Like, you expect it in Merry Christmas, Baby, but not in this song which is trying to be soaring.

After the bridge, a repeat of the chorus, then another repeat. But with the second repeat, her lead vocal starts the chorus and full volume and then fades WAY into the background while another line continues as the lead at the lead volume, but it's just the most ghastly thing you've ever heard. It's supposed to be her riffing a bit and getting emotional or somehting, but we all know that the Dion does NOT do this well. This is Dion at her duck best, because she says 'God bless us all,' which ALMOST sounds like she got overwhelmed emotional and just said it, but falls short. Then she just makes sounds in the scale but seriously sounds like a duck. Is that a French thing? And then the lyrics she chooses to repeat as the song fades? "good and the bad, happy, the sad.." Sheesh, how did you choose the most banal lyric when there actually were other better ones, or ones you could have improvised, Celine?!? Uck, it's failings like these that make me certain that Celine Dion will NEVER be able to strike a genuine emotional chord for a sophisticated audience. But then she's so wealthy now, what does it matter to her? Celine, please retire so we can remake your songs in a few years? And while we probably won't match your level of technical who's-it-what's-it, we will sure as hell put more emotional movement into your songs!

17. Sternfall (two songs) #25 and 26
I know someone in the band, but I gotta say: they're amazing. They really hit the note of what they're going for, which is, I'm not sure: I think polka/yiddish/germanic type music. They sing in Swedish, Yiddish and cod knows what else, and you can't hear a song withou thinking they really hit the mark: They seem to use natural instruments, but they're processed a little, it seems, to make them richer. The vox have little processing evident on them: On Goldene Pave, you can hear some echo, and you can hear some pitch correction on the English song, but mostly it's like hearing really well-recorded acoustic music recorded at someone's party or something.

18. Sveriges Radio #28-34
These are selections from Radio Sweden. Godmorjon Varld is first, and while RS said it was comedy, it doesn't sound like it. It sounds like a Swedish "Morning Edition"; it could be all fake. If it is, that's pretty amazing. The second, can't remember the name: Funny. Song parodies, "cooler" sounding Swedish, and a part about drive-bys that's really funny but I don't feel like explaining now. Then a couple documentaries. I like the beginning, with the dramatic music and the thickened voice going "Du lyssna pa sveriges radio. Det har ar P3." You can totally understand it, and when you hear it, you're like, "oh THAT's how 'har' is really said!" Then: Mammas Nya Kille, which is just hilarious for so many reasons, partly because every now and then you catch some Swedish; then cuz of the guy who goes into English sentences all the time and you're wondering if he's supposed to be an American cuz he sounds all cocky; then the voices that they put on for the characters, which you laugh at even though you don't know what they're saying, but you do catch that they frequently address the host by name and pause before speaking. "Bengt..... Ja blah blah blah"

21. Winter Wonderland, hellogoodbye #40
I love this song. I love how it's sparsely and straightforwardly arranged, with the natural instruments playing counterpoint to the overdistorted voice we hear, and the natural, toy-sounding keyboard, with the very, very clear jingle bells. I like the vocal, but I don't believe for a moment that he's as sweet and innocent as his vocal. That said, he does do VERY well with the word nose in "though your nose gets a chilling." It really sounds like a little boy. That said, while his vocal is interesting, he's really not that GOOD, per se, as a singer. But then we need more singers that aren't tuned to death out there.

22. [speaking of tuned to death] Come Clean Rain, Hilary Duff #41
I like this song, it's like the songs I would listen to in high school. Pure candyfloss. It has its moments--at the beginning and in the bridge, when it does that beat speeding up thing and has some pitch variation in the echo of "rain fall." And the vocal is interesting, because you KNOW it's tuned to death but largely don't hear it. EXCEPT at the conjunction of the last two syllables of the song, where it's EXTREMELY evident, at begiiii----ning. Right at ning. I heard it the other day, and I can't believe I'd never noticed it before.

23. Karpe Diem, Swedish/Danish/or something Nordic rappers. two songs #42 & 42
From the very limited exposure I've had to Swedish rap, these guys sound so good. they seriously sound like a couple of young, tanned, golden haired guys you hope that Sweden is populated with. Admittedly, Swedish rap sounds really forking weird to Americans, just because it sounds strange, but these peeps do some cool production stuff with their songs. In the beginning of one, they sing a line from a Beyonce song, mentioning Beyonce by name. It's also kinda strange how they put these chorus effects on their voices. I just wonder if they'll still sound so good after their voices change.

And that's the community service beep for now!

Beep!
Ed Shepp

Blip!

2008-11-22T19:53:00.002-05:00

Well, I had a little blip on Billy Jam's show the other day, so since it's done aired, I figured it would put it her for downloadage. Here's the link to a 1280kbps mp3 of the blip:

Ed Shepp Blip - Outsiders

Beep!
Ed Shepp

Bgornce

2008-11-03T20:34:00.002-05:00

I'm pretty sure my mom is the only one who even sees this page anymore (hi Mom!), but just in case anyone lands on it serendipitously, here's the latest bgornce:

If you're by a computer tomorrow on Election Day between 9 & 10am Eastern Standard Time, pop on over to wfmu.org and hear my special Election Day episode of The Ed Shepp Radio Experiment, starring a bunch of people and me. And if you were in the show, no, I won't send you a copy. But here's that link again: http://www.wfmu.org/ed-08.html

And remember, Vote or Don't. (And don't let anyone tell you that you can't complain if you didn't vote. You can always complain. Some people do nothing but complain. That's intelligent design for you.)

Glomp.
Ed Shepp

Dead Computers, Greyhound Duchesses and a Fund for Destiny's Ed

2008-09-29T19:45:00.007-04:00

What a weekend. While the grönt is pretty much gone from mitt hår, and the mold in the bathroom is as under control as it will get (I suppose), my computer died. I MIGHT be able to grab some of the files from it to restore, but I'm not at all hopeful. The lesson: NEVER ever ever ever ever buy a Dell. I reiterate: Never buy a Dell. I reiterate once again for the search engines: Dells are crap---NEVER buy one. I'll extend that to all PCs, as a matter of fact, since I'm sure that the computer died solely because it was perhaps 1 hour over warranty (which means it lasted probably 50 minutes longer than it usually would have). So now I'm planning to replace it with a Mac. (Did I mention never buy a Dell? Because if you're googling Dell and see this, take heed. DO. NOT. BUY.) Olyckligtvis, shelling out all the money for a Mac will obliterate any plans I had of visiting the land not of my ancestors: Scandinavia, specifically Stockholm or Copenhagen. Sigh. :( So I've created, "Save Karen"-style, a donation link where anyone can plop in donations for me to buy a plane ticket. If not in November, then in February, as a birthday present. If everyone just puts 10 cents into the fund, I'll have enough to buy half a donut. But if everyone puts in 20 dollars, or 100 dollars, or 800 dollars, then I'll have my flight. And if everyone puts in $60,000, I could actually fly first-class. Anyway, here's the button link. Go on, click it! Go on, click it! And if you donate a goodly amount, you can receive one of the following gifts: $50: a copy of my CD Five, since I have about a jillion left over, and a DVD with all the Ed Shepp mp3s I can scrounge up, including all the separate mixes from The Madonna Within EP and my cover of Umbrella. $100: The same discs, with a small home perfume oil sample with notes of caramel and spiced pear. $200: The CDs/DVDs, the home fragrance, and Ed Shepp T-shirt, and I'll hang out with you for 3 hours and inspire you with zillions of ideas and bombast you with personality. (This is really only available to people in the New York area, but it's transferable and won't expire for a long time. Of course, said hanging out must occur in a public place, and not one of those crowded bars that I hate. And you can video/audtiotape it, but you cannot use the footage commercially.) $600: Everything mentioned before, and I'll put you in an Ed Shepp Radio Experiment podcast. $900: Everything mentioned before, and I'll record a song about you. So there we have them. Donate now! Donate now!! Click the button below:

Ok, so that's the fund. Now back to just a mention of more things mundane. I saw that movie The Duchess last week. It stars Keira Knightley's face and a metric ton of $7000/yard fabric. I think I found it good. I say "I think" because it seemed like a good movie, but something about it left me a little empty; it felt a little incomplete. It may have been the pacing--at times I felt like I'd been watching it for 14 years, in some weird Groundhog Day-like accident of timespace. At other times I actually felt moved. And at other times, I actually felt like.... (wait for it...) ....I felt like I could believe in Love. Interestingly, one of the main things you take from the movie is that you can't believe in Love-with-a-capital-L. Love does not conquer all. Sorry, Virginia. The movie is a BBC production, by the way, so you don't see any gratuitous T&A, which I suppose is all well and good, because Keira Knightly doesn't seem to have much of either to offer. Someone i Sverige said that she needs to engage in a cake-eating marathon. and while I couldn't ever really not endorse such a thing, she just has such a pretty face.... Why ruin it so soon? Time will have its due soonly enough. And speaking of her face, one of the people I saw the movie with, who, it turned out, was fond of using archaic language and making arcane references that no one who was in our party got, kept marveling at it, saying that she looked "like a greyhound." Uhhhhh..... what exactly does that mean??? Greyhounds are beautiful, to be sure, but it's not exactly, er, "customary" to compare a beautiful woman's face to... a dog. I think he meant she looked beautiful; but it's just an odd reference. I wish I'd countered with something like, "Actually, I think she looked quite like the Weimeraners that one photographer does--you know, the ones posed like people.... with human hands." Oh yes, and another thing about the BBC-ness of it: one thing you can say about most Hollywood movies is that the post-production people know their way around color correction. Have you ever seen Elizabeth: The Golden Age, for instance? Those colors POP!! Like BLAO in your face!!!! I don't think I've ever seen orange so.... ORANGE. So Hollywood does a great job with bold, amazing color. This movie does not offer that. Yes, it's beautiful, and you can see the gorgeous colors in the expensive fabrics, but the color doesn't leap off the screen and whack you in the face with a metaphorical frying pan.

All things considered, it was a good movie. I don't know if I'd see it again, though. Mark Baratelli thought it stunk, but I never felt like I got out of him his reasoning for why he hated it.

Anyway, that's the gzoomce for now. More beeping coming at ya laters. And don't forget to donate, you cheap pigeonhead!! (LOVE ME!!!!!!)

Beep!
Ed Shepp

The Bitching Hour

2008-09-21T01:05:00.004-04:00

It's no secret. I hate New York City. I've been here too damn long, and I've grown to loathe the place. And it seems to give me a new reason to hate it every day. And yes, I would move ---but for the forseeable future, barring some miracle, I'm trapped. So to everyone who says, "If you hate it so much, why don't you just leave?" I say, "Go fuck yourself with a hot poker, then jump off a building and die alongside your tired cliches."

Reason of the week: The F train. What's the point of the F train? Lately they've been suspending service and deciding to skip stops willy-nilly. Why have the train at all?!? I've walked 20 blocks at least 3 times in the past week. So in case you were wondering, Brooklyn is every bit as infuriating as Manhattan, just for different reasons. (Naturligtvis, this got me wondering what the subways were like i Sverige. So I asked people for their opinions and pictures, figuring that I'd hear the usual refrain: "The trains are horrible; they're never on time......" I heard the opposite from EVERY PERSON: "The trains are extremely efficient, always on time, clean...." and the pictures of the stations were DAZZLING. You have no idea. And looking at them, I can be nearly 100000000000000% sure that they don't stink of urine and godknowswhatelse the NYC ones stink of. But that's for another entry.)

Reason of the day: I thought, "Well, the world is going down in flames, so I might as well indulge that long-held fantasy and become ...blond. Or at least a lighter brunet." So I went to a salon. A SALON. And I pointed to the shade I wanted, which was actually DARKER than the maximum lightness I could achieve with a single process (because a double process was ludicrously priced, considering my hair length). I pointed to an ASH shade. ASH means the hair has a color like ASH. ASH is what's left over when you burn something. It's GREY. It's not colorful. So ASH in hair terms means a very subdued hair color. Basically the POLAR OPPOSITE of gold. I pointed to ash and had confidence that the person knew what she was doing, since she's a fucking hairstylist and her own hair was colored. Moreover, she was Japanese, so I figured she had experience with high-lift bleaching. And I told her, "I have a lot of red in my hair, so I want an ash shade." But I was confident it would come out nice; and all the books say that if you want to lift 3 shades or more, you should go to a professional, which is what I thought I did. So it gets all finished, and voila! My hair is a reddish golden brown*. WHAT! THE! FUCK! In fact, it was only a litte MORE gold than when I used a fucking bottle of L'Oreal True Brunettes, at $9 for the box. So I got BETTER results at home than from a salon?!?!?!?? I'd expect to come out with Puerto Rican orange in Tallahassee, but not in New York. Now I have to either apply shitloads of blue-green temporary color in the hopes of creating grey or verdigris or doo-doo brown; dye it darker; shave it off; or bleach it again (paying even MORE money for a salon is out of the question). All because I had confidence in a frickin' salon.

The first thing to take from this story: Don't go to Hisako Salon on 7th avenue. The second thing: Don't ever bother with a salon. Have a friend bleach your hair and figure out how to tone it on your own. You'll get better results for cheaper. I've had my hair dyed professionally twice now, and both times were total disasters. The first was when I had it done plum in college. Well, the person never got the black off the ends, so I went back twice to have them correct it and ended up with a pile of fried straw on my head. The second was today.

So thanks, New York, for giving me enough reasons for 40 lifetimes to despise you. I always thought jokingly that the best thing about living in New York would be leaving it, but now I think it's actually the truest sentiment I've ever had.

(Of course, I'll probably think completely differently tomorrow. Probably because I'll be high off toxic bleach fumes from trying to kill the mold in the bathroom. YAY, New York!!!! You're SO Sex and the City!!!)

And that's today's bitching hour. For more bitching hour, just talk to me any day of the week.

Beep
E

*Duh, the picture is a rough approximation. No, there's NOT a button in Photoshop that magically changes your haircolor to exactly what you pictured in your mind. Life is not that Barbie video game, Sherella.

The Horrible Truth!

2008-08-14T21:08:00.002-04:00

Behold the horrible truth that is I, courtesy of Mark Baratelli and L'Oreal:

http://textingwhiledriving.blogspot.com/2008/08/ed-shepp-performance-artist.html

:O

Beep!
Ed Shepp

The Great Apartment Search of 2008

2008-07-04T23:03:00.012-04:00

This is the story of The Great Apartment Search of 2008.

After four years of living in my great li'l room on the UWS (or maybe it was Harlem or Morningside Heights--who knows...), the time had finally come for my roommate to go off to business school, leaving me to find another place to live. Sigh... To help me in my search was my friend Mark Baratelli, who was going to fly here in June and look with me. Initially I was hopeful about that, but there was a miscommunication: For some reason, I was under the impression that Mark was taking a break from the tour he was on, and would only be here for a week. When he got here and said he'd had auditions lined up, I thought, "He's only here for auditions! I am shocked and appalled!" So I decided it was time for me to at least start the search for a room and at least cover my bases.

I thought a good enough place to start was to create a person-seeking-room ad and put it on craigslist. After all, that type of ad had worked for my friend Lorenzo; it had never worked for me, but I guess there could be a first for anything, right? So I decided I would put up an ad, but I better try to sell myself a little--mention some selling points (the fact that I like animals; my collection of artificial Christmas trees) and illustrate them with photographs. Some of the photos I, er, 'adjusted' for comic effect (eg adding Nicole Kidman and other celebrities into pictures from my parties), but most of them were just adjusted for vivid color. (Yeah, I'm all about color and contrast.)

The plan, after I'd composed the ad (which I did here on terapad, to make formatting and cutting and pasting easier), was to put it up and then tell my roommate to send it to gawker as a tip. I figured if they published it, it would make it that much easier to find a place; frankly, however, I thought the odds of it actually being posted were one in a zillion. But that was the plan. Here is the ad as it appeared on craigslist:

Easy-going guy seeking room in Brooklyn or surrounding area

Hi there! I'm Ed, and I'm seeking a (cheap) room in a safe part of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Jersey City or Hoboken. I'm looking to move at the beginning of July, possibly mid-July, but I'd consider moving sometime in June if necessary. I'm quiet, creative, wacky, laid back, respectful, tidy-but-not-OCD-about-it, interesting to talk to, and not constantly at home. I'm hoping to find a roommate I can get along with--not a best friend, but someone that hopefully will become a friend. It would be great to find someone creative, especially someone into music, podcasting or video art--perhaps we could collaborate on things. On that note, let me tell you a little more about me:

I don't have any pets of my own, but I am an animal lover. I grew up around dogs, and now I live with a cat, which is my roommate's. Here's the photographic evidence:

I also read, so it's pretty likely that if we move in together we'll have something to talk about. Or we can share books. I also have a few DVDs. Let's have a look at some of my books and DVDs now (you'll notice that I'm an Amy Sedaris fan; hopefully that means that we have a similar sense of humor):

I like to consider myself cultured and broad-minded. Behold me in Paris reveling in the local cuisine:

In addition to reading, my hobbies including making the occasional CD and doing some radio. I had a show for a while on the air on WFMU called The Ed Shepp Radio Experiment. Once I get settled in a new place, I plan to go back to doing the show in podcast form. If you're interested in audio and the like, maybe we could work together on brainstorming themes and coming up with ideas. Who knows? Here are some bloops about my show and CDs and a snapshot of a column I wrote once upon a time for a Swiss newspaper:

And while I'm often pretty quiet, I do like to have fun, and I'm certainly not opposed to the occasional party. Here are some snapshots from parties my roommate and I have hosted in the past few years.

Here's me with Tionna Smalls of Talk Dat Ish Entertainment and my friend Jason:

And here are some pictures of our regular friends at some of our parties:

But enough about me. Let's talk about what I can do for you.

Firstly, I have a few concrete things that I can offer if I find the right roommate. I have a globe, a never-used Sonicare toothbrush, some never-used teeth bleach, and a small bottle of perfume (which I tried to give away as gifts, but people didn't want them because they thought it was something I made myself and therefore cheap and crappy. Actually, it was Marc Jacobs's Grass, which I put into smaller bottles so I could give more away. Alas!) Picture below:

If those aren't appealing, well, I do have a teensy bit of skill in Photoshop, so I could help you, say, make your Christmas cards or whatnot, maybe like in the picture below:

If that doesn't interest you, how about this: I do volunteer at a radio station, so I have access to gajillions of mp3s; how about a DVD of a few gigs of new, old, weird, obscure, or whatever music? Or how about a podcast dedicated to you? All possible for the right roommate situation.

Oh, and one more thing. Check out the fake Christmas/holiday trees (and jack-o-lanterns) I've got. Who could resist?!?

But if ALL THIS doesn't move you, consider the plea from my two pets-who-don't-poop (also known as uglydolls):

OK, so if this intrigues you, and you think I might be a cool person to live with, and you have a cheap (like seriously cheap, like under $700 cheap) room, email me at helpedfindahome -AT- gmail -d0t- com. I can give you references if you need them too. Or you can also email me if you think it'd be cool to collaborate or hang out or what not.

Lastly, if you really feel that you need to learn more about me, you can check out my links below:

www.myspace.com/edshepp
www.wfmu.org/playlists/es
edshepp.blogspot.com

Thanks! Hope to hear from you soon!
Ed

So I finished making that post Sunday night, and then Monday morning created the craigslist ad, which I immediately sent to my roommate with instructions to send it to gawker. I really didn't think they were going to publish it--I mean, it's not a celebrity sighting or anything like that--and I checked the site periodically through the day to see if it did get published, but no such luck. I did, however, start getting a few responses from the ad, so it seemed to be working out. (I didn't really expect to get responses from the ad anyway--I didn't think people actually checked the "rooms wanted" section, or wherever I posted it--but my friend Lorenzo had had luck with craigslist postings like that, so I figured it was worth a try. Anyway, I went home thinking it hadn't been published, but that everything would work out anyway.

Imagine my surprise when my roommate told me that gawker had published the ad, apparently while I had been on the subway home. It was entertaining reading the comments. Some were funny--someone compared Catner to an ocelot (had to look that one up); some weren't so funny, like the person who criticized the picture in my article where I'd put my Amy Sedaris stuff. The comment implied that I was trying to look unique by displaying the fact that I appreciate Amy Sedaris, when in fact that would make me anything but unique. Do I need even to say that the comment completely missed the point? Because if I'm looking for a roommate, shouldn't I stress what we have in common, rather than what makes me unique? So yeah, that's why I showed the Amy Sedaris stuff, rather than, say, The Secret of Scent or that book I have by Slavoj Zižek.

Here's the gawker post, sans comments:

urban anthropology, craigslist, tionna smalls, top

Please Help the Awesomest Kid Ever Find Awesome Roommate

Meet Ed Shepp! He's looking for a home in "a safe part of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Jersey City or Hoboken." A cheap home. Like, cheap. "Like seriously cheap, like under $700." As we learn from his Craigslist posting, he's friends with Tionna, for one! (Our popular erstwhile advice columnist, Tionna Smalls.) He is adorable, dragging out all his media and tchotchkes for digicam show-and-tell! In an effort to be servicey, we procured a roommate reference for him, straight from Ms. Tionna herself:

Says Tionna, pictured with Ed, below: "Ed and I definitely know each other. That picture is from his amazing Christmas party he had in NYC. I think you should definitely feature this on Gawker. Everyone is looking for a roommate and he would be a fabulous one especially because he is a talented musician. He is definitely fabulous."

Cool! In case you are also looking for a new place, here are the things Ed likes to read: "Let's have a look at some of my books and DVDs now (you'll notice that I'm an Amy Sedaris fan; hopefully that means that we have a similar sense of humor.)" Also (not pictured): "Here are some bloops about my show and CDs and a snapshot of a column I wrote once upon a time for a Swiss newspaper."

Won't somebody help him out? He has references!

[Craigslist]

So that was the post. I was a little taken aback at being referred to as a "kid," since I don't think I've fit into that category for about, oh, 15 years, but it was cute. Needless to say, after that post went up, the responses started to flood in, which of course was great. I also, however, emailed everyone I knew to check out the post. After all, it's not everyday someone like li'l ol' me gets on gawker, right?

And then one thing started leading to another, and I found other people who were looking, and eventually had assembled a coterie of about 6 people who were all doing some part to look for a place. It was also at that point that things got a little awkward with my friend Mark--after I explained to a friend that he was here for the week looking at places, he clarified that he wasn't here for just the week, but indeed until the end of the month or however long it took. Oh. That turned out to be good news, though, because I genuinely would have liked to find a place with people I've known for some time, rather than any a stranger. But I figured that whatever will be will be, and decided to look both with Mark et al. and on myne own.

Moving on then.... Since I'd sent news of my gawker mention to everyone, and everyone included Pseu Braun, she posted my mention on the WFMU blog, which must have thrown some extra traffic toward the post, and did in fact result in another person joining the group of us looking for a place. Here's Pseu's post:

WFMU's Ed Shepp Gets Gawk'd

<>WFMU associate, Ed Shepp in actual time as his reality begins to fold in on itself and create ripples into the fourth dimension. You see, this brilliant and perpetually excited young man (and by young, I mean younger than me) innocently placed this innocuous ad for a roommate on craigslistnyc. Who'da thunk the postiest-post mawdernz at Gawker would finally pick up the hotline on this guy (can you say HELLO??) years after his radio listeners, Time Out NY and Vice mag have, creating what Ed would surely term "gwakloads of melisma"!? I''ll simply disregard the faint essence of attitude-doody and rightfully bitter New York renter's comments on the Gawker blurb and push my way to the front to proclaim that Mr. Shepp is absolutely genuine in his pursuit of a reasonable rent-share and was even willing to learn about *gasp* New Jersey pricing! I swear if I thought he wouldn't mind my regular drunken caftan'd and turbaned tirades ala Ruth Roman/Susan Hayward I'd move Ed into my spare room in Jersey in a Beep! Maybe this Other Ed Shepp can help our boy find his dream digs.

Posted by Pseu Braun on June 10, 2008 at 10:56 AM in DJ Crap, New York City, Pseu's Posts, The Internet | Permalink

And thus the search began. I got an email a few days later from the person at gawker who'd done the original post, asking for an update when I found a place. So I'll skip all the search details here and go straight to the update, which excerpts my email update:

making it, craigslist, not afraid to be servicey, urban anthropology

We Helped the Awesomest Kid Ever Find an Apartment for Under $700

In an attempt to be servicey (and atone for our sins), we posted the awesomest Craiglist apartment-seeking ad ever—it was a riot of nerdy kookiness. Musician Ed Shepp (our erstwhile advice columnist Tionna Smalls' buddy) was absolutely deluged with responses! To refresh your memory, he was looking for something cheap, "like seriously cheap, like under $700." (In case you think that's impossible, come to my place—I have achieved it.) Read on, because Ed has, too—"Thanks in great part to Gawker!" He's also included a computer rendering of what he hopes to turn his backyard into, complete with a menagerie of plastic lawn ornaments.

"I found a home! I dropped off the deposit last night, so it's all on the level now. It's in Brooklyn, at the 15th St. Prospect Park stop; it's under $700 (actually a great price, but I don't want to publicize that widely). It's a great brownstone with two cool roommates, Haiyen and Lindsey.

I didn't have to look at many places, either. Here's how it went down:

My first two places: the buzzer didn't work at the first, so I stood around looking a tourist or something, wishing I had a pink cake to cry into...

Then my friend was having lunch at some restaurant, and the waiter told him that there was a room avail in his building. We saw it that night—a GORGEOUS loft in Bed-Stuy, right off the Morgan stop, I think... The rent was something that came out to just over $500 for 4 people (and we had 4 people), so I said, "We want it."

This I said in front of someone we'll call "Blustafson," a very good-looking but quiet guy sitting playing on the computer. The person leaving the apartment said that "technically it's Blustafson's call, because he's here now..." And I had to whisper, "Is that Blustafson?" I think he finally looked up at this point, and the temperature dropped 20 degrees in the room.

...The next place I looked at was a $500 room... It was also in an interesting neighborhood, right on the Nostrand stop on the A, which felt in some ways like a Caribbean version of Canal St. I went into some great sneaker store and got these awesome sneaks for $19.90. A lot of great sneakers for uner $20. Don't know how they do it—don't care.

Then I went in one of those cheap stores that sell everything, and they had deodorants that I'd never seen marketed in mainstream stores and shorts for $5 and the like. Then I went into this oil and candle shop—because I'm a scent nut—and I was looking at the large selection of oils, and I asked if I could smell them. The guy said they were "not for perfume; for special purposes." But the perfume oils, of which there were a MUCH smaller selection, were on the other shelf. I turned back to the "special purposes" oils and he reiterated his previous point, adding that they were for "religious purposes." Oh. I should have known, considering one was called "voodoo."

The next day I saw the place I got—a gorgeous brownstone on the outskirts of the Park Slope area."

Congratulations, Ed! Oh, but one caveat: the house comes with this:

So that was that. Obviously it's not the comprehensive account of every place I looked at and doesn't mention any last names or such, but it's the gist of it. What it leaves out is one apartment that I looked at in Ridgewood (a referral from Maria Levitsky) that I considered but ended up not taking in the end; and also a great place in Washington Heights which I was pretty much settled on taking with my friend Mark before I saw the place in Park Slope. Since I'd pretty much expressed my interest in that place before taking the Park Slope one, another awkward moment came up when I had to say that I'd found another place. Later it became even more awkward when Mark decided he'd rather not take the Washington Heights place (which I still think is a great deal). Luckily, the room in Ridgewood was still free, so he took that. So in the end, it worked out. Sorta. For some of us. Um, yeah.

And HERE are the pictures that I sent but didn't make it into the gawker update:

Behold my new roomies, Lindsey and Haiyen:

And Haiyen on a mechanical bull, and a shot of the house, obviously taken in cooler weather:

And, of course, not to be remiss, I should mention the coverage of the whole thing on my friend's blogs:

Mark Baratelli

Jason Atkins

And that's the story of the Great Apartment Search of 2008!

......AND if you've made it THIS FAR in this crazy long entry, enjoy the very brief video Mark Baratelli took of me out-singing Celine Dion:

Beep!
Ed Shepp

radio show + mp3s + CDs + myspace + article + all the other links

Ed Shepp - The Madonna Within EP

2008-05-19T20:05:00.059-04:00

Aloha, gzeeplets! Welcome to the post for my latest offering, The Madonna Within EP.

OK, Before we get to the story behind the project, here are the mp3s. Click HERE to download a zip file of the entire EP, encoded at 128kbps (~20Mb). Or cl ick here to download the zip file at CD quality. OR click below for the individual songs---click the 320kbps link to download the high-quality file; click the 128kbps to download the average-quality file.

1. Beautiful Stranger (320kbps) (128kbps)

2. Love Tried to Welcome Me (320kbps) (128kbps)

3. La Isla Bonita (320kbps) (128kbps)

4. I'm Not Cool Enough to Listen to the White Stripes (the Madonna within mix) (320kbps) (128kbps)

And a couple alternate mixes:

5. Love Tried to Welcome Me (Softly) (320kbps) (128kbps)

6. I'm Not Cool Enough to Listen to the White Stripes (the Madonna without mix) (320kbps) (128kbps)

There we go. Now let's talk about the EP. Overshare time!

What's an EP? According to Wikipedia, "An Extended play (EP) is a vinyl record or CD which contains more music than a single, but is too short to qualify as an album." I grew up in the 80s, so I remember having vinyl records--12-inch dance singles (which sparked my lerv for remixing & glitching), a Footloose picture disc, and that David Lee Roth EP with Just a Gigolo on it. When I bought it, I thought "extended play" meant remixes; but no, for some reason it meant "4 songs or so." Whahappah?! At the time I was a li'l peeved, but it must've stuck in my mind, because "releasing an EP" became one of those things I always wanted to do in my imagined popstar life, like doing a "concept album" or a spread in Playgirl or coming out with a line of vitamins or something.

Why Madonna covers? Well, why not? I love doing cover versions--they're often pretty quick to put together, and you can put your own spin on them; plus, (and this is just my theory here) people can be more easily persuaded to actually listen to them. Not to imply that I'm putting myself in the same league as these people, but I heart the various versions of Smells Like Teen Spirit, Umbrella, Baby One More Time, etc. I also love the different versions of Like A Prayer, like Bigod 20's and John Wesley Harding's versions. Which brings us to the other half of the question--why Madonna? Well, again, I'm a child of the 80s. Behold me in my full 80s horror (this picture is from a Prince-inspired idea I had of wearing only purple, white or black. Ugh. I still remember someone making a joke about me wearing "disposable clothing.") So anyway, yeah, I grew up listening to Madonna songs. And I had (and still have, sigh) friends obsessed with Madonna. (I reiterate---sigh.) Also, her music is so ubiquitous that pretty much everyone knows or likes at least one song. Furthermore, they're not exactly the most difficult ones to sing--I don't think Madonna has ever put gwakloads of melisma into any performance.

Moreover, I already had ideas for Madonna covers. One idea was for a version of Nobody's Perfect. I thought that it, with its out-of-control auto-tune, sounded something like an artificial intelligence experiment gone awry. The song is sung from the point of view of a robot that's just been given emotion which it cannot control and massacres all the scientists developing it. Of course, then the robot feels sorry and sings the song about nobody being perfect. I thought it would be cool to remake the song like that, with audio clips to suggest the backstory. It was actually on the list of songs to do, but I decided eventually not to do it, because the song (let's face it) is pretty dull, even if it has a backstory and all that. Another song that I wanted to do but didn't make the final cut was Like A Prayer--I wanted to combine the acoustic guitar sound of the John Wesley Harding version with a hard beat like the one I used in Swamp. I ended up not doing that one because I didn't feel as strongly about it as the other songs. As for other songs I might have liked to do, there's Inside of Me and Bedtime Story, the former because it reminds me of a few people who've died, the latter because it's just such a cool song. But since I didn't have much of a point of view for those songs, and not much to really add, I decided not to do them. Oh, and I always thought it would be fun to do American Life (such a bad song--I wonder if the song she stole it from [allegedly--fascinating and bizarre link] was any better), but I sort of incorporated that into La Isla Bonita, so yeah.

But enough of the songs I didn't do; let's talk about the ones I did...

Beautiful Stranger. [click for lyrics] I just think this is a great song. It's one of my favorite Madonna songs--I love the arrangement, and if I'd not done it, I might have thought that I had nothing to add to it, that it was absolutely perfect the way it was. Now that I'm finished with it, of course, I'm very pleased with how it turned out, and I think I brougth my own aesthetic to it. Why did I choose this particular song? Well, I know that it had become something of a 'signature song' for me, but I can't really explain why. Partly because I sang it all the time at the radio station while waiting for files to process or whatnot. Partly because I like to change the lyrics to make them Ed-centric. Example: "To know Ed, to know Ed is to love Ed... You're Ed-vrywhere I go...." In the end, the song becomes something of a song about myself, as if I'm the beautiful stranger. Or as if there's a part of me that is a beautiful stranger to myself. I suppose you could read a lot into that if you wanted to. One of things that I'm reminded of when I think of that interpretation of the song is when my friend Mark was learning the song Where or When for an audition. ("And so it seems that we have met before, and laughed before, and loved before... but who knows where or when?") His vocal coach told him to sing it as if he were singing to himself. I kind of like singing Beautiful Stranger in that way--it's an interesting interpretation. Oh, and one more reason why I chose this song: I've already performed it, sort-of, live on The Ed Shepp Radio Experiment as part of one of the fundraising shows I did. Another reason why it's a signature song of mine. I thought that since I've performed it already, I might as well do it right and make a big production of it. So I did. And I even name-checked my hometown at the end. ("You came here from Florida, and brought the beep from Mount Dora...") Booyah!!

The processing in the song: I fell in love with a lot of the instruments that I used to create the song. I love the choir-type voices, the celesta-type sound which I wanted to sound like a toy piano, the brass-type sound that you sometimes hear in it, and of course the tubular bell (one of my all-time favorite sounds; so is the "boing" sound effect in "dancing all over the place"). I'm also very pleased with all the beeping, and most especially with the timpani that comes in around the "Ed-vrywhere I go" parts. Ever since I heard a timpani used in both Bjork's Human Behavior and the bottom heavy dub mix of Madonna's Human Nature, I've always wanted to use the sound in something. I think in Beautiful Stranger is makes the song even more fun. Oh, and the drums: these were just drums I was using as a temporary file to check out the vocals and stuff; I hadn't intended to use them in the final mix. But the more I listened to it, the more I liked it. The song is at 122bpm, so I think a driving beat works pretty well for it. So I kept the drums mostly simple, and I'm really pleased with how they came out.

Love Tried to Welcome Me. [click for lyrics] OK, I must confess--I can relate to this song. Sure, maybe it's not the best, most moving song in the world, but in that tumultuous time when I was dating and all, I found that the song really spoke to me. I guesss in a way it still does, as I realize that finding a relationship and getting married just isn't important to me like it seems to be to other people. To paraphrase Bjork, I definitely enjoy solitude; perhaps I'm overly wedded to my own independence. Or perhaps I'm just rambling. Anyway, I've always felt this song was under-rated, so that's one reason I wanted to record it. Another reason would be that I have very little somber pieces in my repertoire, so I thought this would be a nice addition.

As for the processing in the song, I originally wanted it to sound very natural, but, as I am wont to do, changed my mind as I worked on it, going with a very electro sound. I'm very pleased with the vocoded parts. I also like the instrumentation, which in my head started out as a very simple recorder-type instrument playing the parts. But when I heard some of the wind instruments that I could use for the song, I chose to use a flute and piccolo for the main parts of the song and went with an electronic sound for the baseline, which alone sounds very haunting (you can hear this more in the softer mix). I flattened the echoes a little too to try to give the song a more 'blue' feel.

La Isl a Bonita. [click for lyrics] With this song, I wanted to re-imagine it as a tragedy. The backstory here is that we have a transgender "woman" (male-to-female) sitting in a run-down apartment, despondent over something we don't know. We hear the sound of her refrigerator humming and various household noises, plus a television set in the background. We hear her crying, and from the television set we hear an announcer talking about a story to air at 11 about the "new hallucinogenic drug ravaging the transgender community." (I'm amused by the idea of snorting Calgon), and it's supposed to make those who use it, at least the MTF transgender ones, feel "like The drug is called Calgonreal girls." Then the announce says, "And now back to Tyra" and we hear The Trya Banks Show (a show which arguably epitomizes depressing, brain-dead daytime TV, and one which presumably would appeal to the transgendered, since Tyra Banks, with her wigs and being 9 feet tall and all, is practically a drag queen herself). Interestingly, I think in the clip she's talking about one of her biggest beauty secrets, which is, go figure, Vaseline. Anyway, the woman in the song mutters (of course), "Calgon, take me away" (I couldn't resist that one) and snorts it. Quickly thereafter the music from the song fades in and she starts singing.

I meant it to be evident that this girl isn't relating to this song because she's actually been to any sort of tropical island, so I mangled the Spanish wherever I could. Except, of course, for the title, which pretty much everyone knows. I want to convey there that she's clinging to a corny Madonna song to escape her reality, but she's also conflating the song's content with her reality. Under the influence of this new drug, she believes that she's been to this island. At least, until, she gets to the bridge of the song, where we hear the song start to collapse (the vocoded background vocals flatten, etc.) as she gets to the line "...a boy loves a girl." Here she crashes down from her high, from two factors: 1) the high doesn't last very long, which I guess in a sense would make it like hallucinogenic crack and 2) the realization that she is not, in fact, a girl at all, which is a buzzkill. At this point you hear her break down again (and you hear Tyra talking aboug Spanx) and she snorts more of the drug. Then the music fades back in and she resumes singing.

I tried to make her sound as if she were breaking further with reality as the song continued, but that she was also connected to her sadness. So she's not "high" in a traditional sense; she's more in a "mixed state," some combination of despair, euphoria and agitation. Anyway, at the very end, I thought that nothing (nothing but nothing) could convey her despair more than a rendition of the rap from American Life. Cuz really, is there any lower point than that? And the last line about nothing being what it seems helps illuminate her experience; but mostly I liked the idea of adding that because in a pop music sense it's almost the very essence of tragedy. Can we agree that the rap in American Life is the worst thing Madonna has ever done (musically, at least), tongue-in-cheek or not? (I would even include "Wild Dancing" here.) Discuss.

A note about processing: You'll notice that the vocals in the song are not pitch-corrected within an inch of their life. This is intentional. The singer is not supposed to sound good. So I just sung the song in in one take, with no practice. Not that I had to worry about sounding bad enough--I'm far from a good singer. But I definitely did NOT want the song to sound like a good singer trying to sound bad. I've heard that so many times before, and it's tiring. I like the way my version came out--I'm sure it's cringeworthy to someone with good ears, but it's not supposed to sound good. As for the instrumentation, I wanted it to sound lush, and even disorganized toward the end. I also wanted it to build every time it began, since the music isn't real per se, but only part of the singer's hallucination. I did a lot of doubling of instruments to try to get the right sound, and for the most part I'm pleased with it, especially the part where the full drums come in--the effect I was going for there was this: when the bass and the drums first come in, they're supposed to sound puny, so I gutted a lot of low frequencies from the bass guitar and kept the drums low in the mix. So the listener is supposed to think it sounds crappy, but then be surprised when the full drums and bass come in. I hope I achieved that. Unfortunately, I don't feel like I really achieved the full effect on some of the vocals--I wanted there to be more echo in the end, to really give an impression of 'otherworldliness,' so to speak, but I just didn't have the time to delve enough into that, and I feared it would muddy the mix beyond recognition. Alas! Maybe with the next song of this sort....

I'm Not Cool Enough to Listen to the White Stripes (the Madonna within mix). [click for lyrics] I'm not sure that you can really call this a cover version. It's inspired by the beast within mix of Justify My Love, (hence my "Madonna within" mix and EP title), in which Madonna basically read excerpts from the Book of Revelation and interspersed them with some lyrics from JML. The music in the mix is actually pretty boring--some sitars I think, the sample of Madonna wailing from Erotica (although it sounds awfully good to be Madonna; kind of like the wailing in Paula Abdul's My Love is for Real, which is actually not Paula Abdul but Ofra Haza. I'd always thought as much, but I figured that it was so drowned in reverb that it could've been Abdul's crap voice. Anyway, as far as I know this remix pre-dates auto-tune, so I have my doubts as to whether Madonna herself sung that part). And the beat was from another rather uninspired remix of JML. So I redid the music with loops, rather than try to re-create any of it. Also, I didn't use any of the JML parts, but instead used my song I'm Not Cool Enough to Listen to the White Stripes (Vote for Angelyne) from my CD Superpowerpusssy. It's a song which is absolutely self-explanatory, as it simply states that I'm not cool enough to listen to the White Stripes and exhorts the listener to vote for Angelyne to be the governor of California. If you look at its success as an Angelyne campaign anthem, it's a total failure, but that's fine. It was a song I created while I was just learning how to use Cubase on a friend's laptop, and it served as part of the inspiration for a ditty that I made for WFMU's Pseu Braun called The P is for PsuperpowerPseu Too (which also combines elements from The P Is for Pussy and Superpowerpusssy.) So anyway, since the music is very different and the "remixed" song is as well, I wouldn't call this a cover version in the strict sense. But I will say that I made most of the same choices in interpreting the text as Madonna (or whoever coached Madonna) did, with a few differences, some of which work well, some not so well. One example of something we did differently is that I like to pronounce the word "blasphemous" as [blass-FEE-muss]. I just think it's funny; it might be hard to hear in the song, though.

One thing that I really like about the song is the way the ending of JML and InCEtLttWS parallel each other. In JML, it ends with the quote "What're you gonna do?" from the song. Mine ends with "Are you cool enough?" which actually ended the original version as well. I like how that turned out.

But since this isn't a cover version in the strict sense (since Madonna certainly cannot be credited with writing the Book of Revelation, although I'm SURE she tried to change a few words or something to get a co-writing credit! :P ), why did I choose it? Well, ever since I first heard it, I thought it was one of the coolest ideas ever. And I always wanted to do something similar, or maybe even copy it outright for an episode of The Ed Shepp Radio Experiment or something, but I never had time to do the latter, and I couldn't think of any way to do the former which would come out as well as JML. I also have a fun memory of the song from college, when my friend Tavares and I, who were the only people who knew the words by heart, walked through campus speaking them in unison, looking like lunatics. So anyway, since I couldn't think of a way to make the idea myne own, I thought, "I'll just do a cover of it!" And so I did. I have to admit: I had a concern about omitting the line that says "the slander of those who say that they are Jews, but they are not..."; but I chose to leave it in. After all, it's not my words--I'm covering Madonna, who was covering the Book of Revelation. And frankly, I don't know that the phrase is explicitly anti-semitic. It seems to me that the author, John, was saying that Jews who'd rejected Jesus constituted a "synagogue of Satan," not Jews or Semites in general. I can see how some people might find the wording offensive, but let's face it, people, the text is thousands of years old and has been translated a zillion times by people with almost as many agendas. Who knows what was said back then? So today we end up with a potentially incendiary line in a song that no one will really take seriously, but creates some juicy controversy (at least it did for Madonna--obviously an intentional move on her part, and more savvy than Michael Jackson's pathetic "kick me, kike me" lyric intended to stir up a ruckus).

A note about lyrics: Basically, I just said what Madonna said. Or, rather, what I thought she said, because I already knew the song by heart and didn't feel like checking them. Yeah, I can be lazy. So I probably got some of it wrong. I guess that would put me in the grand tradition of people passing down holy books, then.

And now the processing: This was a fun song to do, because I like working with loops. The biggest challenge was to give them variation. While I think everything's in the same key, there is a bit of variation there. I think the song is listenable without being too boring. Another challenge was making the spoken parts loud enough to discern. I put a LOT of compression, probably too much, on them, and maybe forgot to apply a de-esser. But I really shouldn't talk about processing so specifically, because I'm sure the whole EP, and maybe everything I've done myself, is littered with technical errors. So to any engineers reading this and thinking about how to express your criticisms, suck it. Another vocal note: Everyone will notice that the chorus is not pitch-corrected. In fact, it was a "scratch vocal," something I just put in as a placeholder and meant to redo later. But when I heard it with the spoken parts, I really liked how it sounded. I think there was a bit of distortion in some parts of it, but that's minor. Also, the way I did it, off pitch and all, reflects almost identically the way I did the original song--basically, I sung it before I had any music done and hoped for the best. Interestingly, though, if you compare this song and the original back-to-back, you do hear a slight improvement in my vocal control, because in the original the last time I say "I'm not cool enough to listen to the White Stripes" I flatten to some strange place, which sounds pretty cool to me but almost certainly dastardly out of tune. My voice also cracks a little. I'm a bit more consistent here, although I would have liked to replicate the cracking and flattening more. Alas.

WHEW!!!!!!!!!!!!! That's a helluva lotta yakkin! I hope I covered everything; if not, maybe I'll come back and add more. Or ask me questions if you want, or leave a comment. I'd expect that if any hardcore Madonna fans actually listen to the songs, I'll probably get some mean, evil comments! :P Hell, that comes with the territory. In the end, though, I hope someone out there likes what I did. It was a fun project--more time-consuming than I thought, but also more fulfilling than I thought it would be, considering the songs are Madonna covers. I guess I should also note that I finished the project (actually was forced to finish it before I'd have liked to) because of sad events, so to some this may seem like an odd time to be dropping a CD (of sorts). But it really has to be done before I get down to apartment-hunting and all that. Thanks to everyone for your kind words, incidentally.

And since I'm thanking peops, I just want to give a shout-out to everyone who gave me feedback or acknowledged the project. Thanks! That means a lot. I'd also like to thank all the peops who did NOT acknowledge the project--that says a lot. Thanks to Andy for asking me how it was going, even though he couldn't care less about Madonna covers. :P And thanks to Craig at Little Pioneer Cider House studio for those great sounds.

In closing, I hope you like the songs. No, I hope you LOVE the songs. Or HATE them, and send them to everyone you know raging about how you hate them. :P And that's that. And that's the beep for now.

Beep!
Ed Shepp

radio show + mp3s + CDs + myspace + article + all the other links

Remembering Dad

2008-05-19T20:05:00.030-04:00

Well, I guess this is as good a time as any to put up this post. I meant to post it earlier, but I couldn't find the words. What's more, I still can't, so I'll just say what happened: My Dad died a couple weeks ago. He was older, but it was unexpected for me. So I've been down in the FL for the past week for the memorial, etc. This post is to remember Dad. And since we've been going through old photo albums over the past few days, we might as well remember, mostly, through pictures. The one on the left, for example, was two Christmases ago. Dad was carving the turkey, as he always did. And, as always, it was "the best turkey ever." [Insert whistle sound effect here.]

So who was my Dad? Well, that's a hard question to answer, and impossible to convey to anyone who didn't know him like we did. He was complicated, private, occasionally moody, stubborn and difficult and absolutely a product of his upbringing. He wasn't the best at emotional displays, and he was, up until a few years ago, pretty hard on us kids. He seemed, to me, to have depressive episodes, but he never spoke about them. He had an interior life that he kept absolutely private--toward the end of the week, for example, we found some old journal entries he'd written and tucked away in a closet. They were only partly illuminating--mostly a lot of rambling and conjecture, like pretty much anyone's journal entries; but they did show that he had concerns we never knew about. I don't find that particularly out of the ordinary.

People ask if I was close to Dad, and when they do, I think 'he wasn't close to anybody.' In fact, as a family, I would say that we're not as tightly knit as other families are. For example, we don't call every week or anything like that. From my point of view, that doesn't mean that we don't love each other--it means that it's understood that we do. But back to being close to Dad--we had a strained relationship for a long time, the distance arising from a number of factors that I needn't get into here. But that distance faded over the past few years as he got older and mellowed, and as we got out of the house and matured. And I guess as I came to the realization that your parents are just people like anyone else; they do the best they can; they love you, and mostly they don't show it in the idealized ways that fictional TV parents do. No one's perfect, and you can't blame people for that.

Anyway, one thing that I can say for my father is that, while he wasn't always good at communicating it, he was devoted to his family. He loved all of us and wanted us to do well. I think he wanted something for us that he wasn't able to achieve for himself (even though he achieved a good bit). It's incalculable what exactly that was, but in the end I don't think it's relevant here. The point is that he did love us, and I think he grew to be proud of us. And we loved him. There were good times; there were bad times. There were misunderstandings and there were cultural divides which were difficult, if not impossible, to bridge. But through it all, we loved him. Actually, I can only speak for myself here, because I only know my experience: He was my father, and I love him. And I feel like I grew to understand him better as the years went on. I think it's a shame that he passed only a few years after we'd all started to get along best. I'll miss him.

OK, so let's look at some old pictures.

This was from his high school yearbook, if I'm not mistaken. He was on the basketball team--that was very important to him. I think he hoped that my brother (who is very tall) would become a basketball player.

Here's a 70s-looking photo. Not sure where it was taken.

I like this picture here. It's him with us kids, and a glass of scotch. Funny. :P

Obviously this one was from a birthday celebration for one of us. I like the look on Dad's face there. I'm probably reading into it, but it strikes me as a look of wonder, wonder at one's own children. For me it seems to show that he had a great deal of love for all of us.

This is Dad in the nursery. Obviously it's a much more recent picture than the others, so this is more the Dad I remember from when I was younger. Here he looks genuinely happy. I think working in the nursery did make him happy, and proud of what he and Mom accomplished there.

This is Dad with me at my college graduation. He was genuinely proud. (And damn, I was thin!) I wish I hadn't taken off my cap and gown as quickly as I did--we didn't get any pictures with me in them, and I didn't realize how important that could be.

And this is the picture we used as the centerpiece at the funeral. I believe it was taken last Christmas. Dad had long since mellowed by the time this was taken (I think after we kids moved out and got relatively settled, Dad worried less and was a bit more peaceful), and I'd like to believe he was more content. He was getting older, so he had trouble getting around, but you could always tell that his spirits were lifted when we kids came home for Christmas. He's happy in this picture, and I'm sure as time goes on I'll remember him like this--during the happy times.

That's all I can think about writing for the moment. There's so much more that could be said, but I think that this will suffice for a public forum. But anyway, to end on a lighter note, since we're looking at old pictures, behold my glamorous Mom from back in the day:

And that's the beep for now. I'll be posting again soon, because I actually do have a new project to announce. But that will be in a few days. So for now, I'll say, see you soon.....

Beep!
Ed Shepp

ADDENDUM: I said before that it's impossible to convey who my father was to you if you didn't know him. So maybe I didn't convey that he was certainly a loving father at times. All my memories of him when I was very young were good. I had nothing but love for him. He was a loving father, amazed by his children. Things were more difficult in adolescence--they always are. (The fact that I was, well, different from the other kids made adolescence for me an altogether more difficult time--the secrecy, etc.... It was a different era, and thanks cod things have changed some.) And I don't know if he had the emotional capacity to, say, apologize for the times he was cruel; but I'm sure he felt bad about them. In his later years, though, he seemed to have come to terms with whatever demons he'd been struggling with before; he was kinder, and more loving, as far as someone of his generation could be. One good memory of him I have was from last Christmas--I made a list of the things I wanted as gifts (it's a tradition), and one was new eyeglasses. I didn't expect them to buy me those, because that would be ridiculously expensive. But they did. Dad drove me to get them and paid what I think ended up being $400 for new pairs. Perhaps I shouldn't have been, but I was happily surprised, maybe even touched. One more thing: Mom told me that near the end, when he was in the hospital, Dad expressed a lot of gratitude (something he'd never been good at) to her for visiting him in the hospital, as if he didn't expect that she would. My Mom can't understand that, but it says more about what Dad thought about himself than what he thought about Mom. I'd hate to think that Dad lived with a sense that he wasn't deserving of love.

Another unrelated thing that I probably should have mentioned before: I got a lot of my sense of humor from Dad. My love of nonsense syllables, my stories, etc. There's a lot of Dad in my first CD, Bling. I just thought I'd mention that. And that's the beep.

The Films of Myne Life...

2008-03-21T23:41:00.002-04:00

Tonight's episode. Behold...

Beep.
Ed Shepp

This Week in Ed Shepp on the Web

2008-01-23T19:07:00.001-05:00

This post should be entitlized "Last Week in Ed Shepp on the Web," but my time machine ain't ready, so i can't go back to 7 bags o' Cheetos ago when I shouldzda wrote it. So anyway.....

Everyone go here (http://www.podcastpickle.com/cast/18241) and listen to me on the Lady Raptastic podcast! w00t6!!!! (If you recall, I had Lady Raptastic herself on The Ed Shepp Radio Experiment some time ago.) It's #85, "Selling Bananas." It's a really well put-together podcast, so y'allz should listen 'n stuff. Go there now!

And the other li'l Ed Shepp bloogp on the Web this week, which I discovered serendipitously. It's called Een schizofreen is wel alleen (click here), or something or other. It's this Dutch (?) page that I came across while image-googling myself one day, and it features as its main picture the negative of something that I posted on flickr a while ago. It's basically an illustration someone drew of me in a Starbucks. The artist was presumably a homeless person, and after drawing it and asking for my donation, he said something about Thorazine being worse than crack. I used to have an entry about it up on this blog until I cleared out some of the old entries. (And, of course, someone elsewhere on the Web mentioned it pejoratively on a blog, seemingly implying that the fact that I actually set foot in a Starbucks discredited everything I said and made me a horrible person. Which just goes to show that there's always someone out there to twist your most innocuous words to fit some agenda...) Anyway, that's where the image came from, but from looking at the site (and I speak no Dutch), I don't think that's actually explained there. So what we have here is a Dutch site about schizophrenia and other disorders, with a picture that says "Ed Shepp" beside it. Hmmm, I'm not sure how I feel about being a paragon of schizophrenia in the Netherlands. It's almost as bad as when the person who recently cut my hair told me that I looked as if I "knew a lot about computers." What could it all mean....

And that's This Week in Ed Shepp on the Web.

Beep!
Ed Shepp

radio show + mp3s + CDs + myspace + article + all the other links

Snapshots of a Mount Dora Christmas.

2008-01-06T20:06:00.000-05:00

Happy new year, bzeeplets! Here's a briefer-than-Britney's-briefs recaplet of my merry little Mount Dora Christmas, in pictures! (Click to enlarge.)

Ahhhhhh, the sun and warmth. The weather was just like it's pictured above--warm and mostly brilliantly sunny, but with the occasional passing cloud. The kind that softens the light and brings up half-forgotten memories, the kind that you can't explain in a briefest-of-brief blog entry. (Have you ever seen Dogville? Remember how the narrator would say how "the light changed in Dogville" and everything looked fundamentally different? Kind of like that. But both more quiet and less boring.) So I shouldn't have to mention that I spent lotsa time outside. A little bit exploring...

...And I have to say that some parts of the "estate" look really cool. The parts that have fallen into disrepair and taken on something of the look of "ruins." I like those. I always wondered why we used to mow the lawn and all that--why not just let everything overgrow? Maybe one day I'll be able to be "that crazy guy who lives in the weed-infested property" after all. Sigh...

...Most of my outside time I spent reading, however. I read Luca Turin's The Secret of Scent and marveled as the chemistry flew way over my head, and then I read The Corrections, which I can't recommend highly enough. And I never read fiction, so believe when I tell you it's a goodun. Above we see the deck where I absconded to when the sun in front of the house got to be too much. Behold the blooming Christmas cactus! w00t5! Then there's me snapping a shot of myself, and then the patio furniture from Ethan Allen. Or was it KMart?

Apart from a new door and a tear in the patio screen, the outside of the house hasn't changed much. Inside, however, change is afoot, starting with the kitchen, which has a whole new look. It's top left, and I guess it would be called "French," for a number of reasons, one of which I want to say is the red, but since when did the French have a claim on crimson?! To the right of the kitchen above we see the laundry room, which I'm showing because I love the "I hate laundry rooms" wallpaper. Me, I think I love laundry rooms, because I'd love to have one in myne apartment. I think I'd do laundry a lot more frequently if that were the case. Or maybe not? Below the kitchen is the current incarnation of my room, which now has two beds to accomodate us kidz when we're home. At the bottom right is also my room--this was once my glorious dresser, adorned with all my glorious crap. No more. My sister's stuff has overtaken a lot of it. But there's still stuff to see here: the green cylindrical thing atop the dresser--I made that in some highschool pottery class. I was going for 'craptacular,' and I dare anyone to tell me I failed. On the top shelf, you can see a piggybank I got when I was five and a li'l woodcut thing-with-a-mirror face shaped like an Ed. But back to the kitchen for a moment. The parentals want to sell the house one day, but to do so, they feel that they need to tone down the major theme of the house, which seems to be: The 70s! Behold our bathroom below:

Needn'st more be said???

On Christmas Eve, we made asukes (pronounced "a-SOO-kees"), which as I understand them are Lithuanian Christmas cookies. It's a tradition--we made them every year when we were kids. The steps are outlined above: 1) Roll and cut the dough into slices with slits in the middle. 2) Fold the slices into the asuke shape, which resembles... what, a flower? I've never thought about it. 3) Fry 'em up! 4) Coat them in confectioner's sugar. The fifth step, which I didn't list, is to leave them for Santa. Well, some of them. There's the recipe in there if you can read it. Make a batch and lemme know how they turned out!

Yay, Christmas Day! Presents, eating (my brother helped my mom with the turkey this year, as you see above; the turkey came out great, cooked in a new oven and all. As for the presents, I got new glasses! Goodbye, scotch tape! And lots of other good stuff. I think the best Christmas gift was just the quiet and warmth of the days I was home.

And above we see a li'l mishmash of miscellany. In the upper left, we see what I call the "plates of contention." These are plates my mom was going to buy, but when we got to the store and looked at them, it turned out that Dad didn't like them, and proclaimed that they looked like plates one "took out of a neighbor's garbage can." So mom didn't get the plates, but neither did she let it go, mentioning them again and again and again and again and again over the next few days. Eventually, after looking at (what felt like) an endless array of other plates, Mom decided just to get the plates she originally chose, realizing that no one was as invested in the plates as she was. And that it would be a tragedy of epic proportions, for all of us, to not buy these plates. To the right of the plates are two scents: a nearly empty bottle of Baldessarini that I left at home last year so that I'd have some left in case I ran out of the aftershave (it came in a gift set) before Christmas, which I did. The other was a (nearly empty, again) bottle of Crabtree & Evelyn's Noel, which I found under my bed, of all places. If I'd known about the bottle, I wouldn't have gotten a new one. Alas! Bottom left: some candy I got when we rented movies from Blockbuster. You know candy vampire teeth? This is a candy GRILL!!!!! Ha! And bottom right: An ornament commemorating a contest that I didn't win back in elementary school (which only now makes me wonder why I keep the damn thing). Here's whahappah: We entrants had to draw a Christmas-themed picture, and the winner would have the picture printed on an ornament. I don't remember who was selling the ornament or whether it was for charity or what, but who cares--I didn't win. My drawing came in second or third or fourth or something; the judges said it was too "cluttered" or "busy" or "complicated" or "dripping with genius that no one will be able to appreciate for centuries"..... who knows what the exact phrase was.... But being in the top something, I got to visit the ornament factory and a copy of the winning ornament. What the hell do I want that for?!?! I reiterate--HMMPH!!!!

....And that brings us to January in the Northeast, which is little more than one big hmmph. A hmmph that extends through February and into March, and doesn't fully get outta your system until May. With only Celeditude to break the wintry drear. Sigh.

And that's the Christmas-in-pictures beep for now, gnorplets!!!

Beep!
Ed Shepp

radio show + mp3s + CDs + myspace + article + all the other links

This Festivus, the Only Tears Will Be Tears of Asthma

2007-12-14T21:21:00.000-05:00

The buttery custard aroma wafting up from the crotchless panties I've had on for eight days can mean only one thing (actually one of a few things, but whatevz): Festivustide, that glorious time of eggnog, blackouts and handmade plush toilet seats, is here and in full sling! Wheeeee! So before you overdo it with the tequila & run-on sentences and come to wondering why your butt hurts and everyone's reading letters to you begging you to "please get help today," let's recap the best bits so far of this holigay season---those involving ME, Saint Prince Edlurg Quistvalden Shepp of Norwegenmark Trailer Park, Pumpkin Point, FL!

Let's start with the party that all the aromaddicted sound sculptors 'round here have been quacking about for weeks: myne and myne roommate's Christmanukwanzaamadestivus Party 2007, which farted nutmeggy joy into the beepsphere last Saturday the 8th of December. Yes, everything you've heard is true, except the stuff about the little people, the jenkem, the meat clothing, the seizuregasms and the backdoor administration of zinc tablets. That was all misguided hype--a Festivus lesson: never trust a 'slightly irregular' Thai blow-up doll with your PR, no matter how 'edgy' what 'she' tells you to write sounds after a few Tang-No Doz-kombucha concoctions. So yeah, none of what you heard was true, EXCEPT...... that oober-fantastic author/advice columnist/entertainment maven Tionna Tee Smalls (pictured above, with ME!) graced us with her boobtastic presence and dispensed wisdom to everyone coherent enough to listen. And since I'm name-dropping, Stephen Guarino of The Big Gay Sketch Show also attended, as did Quinn, inventor of the "touche-accepted" phraselet, and, of course, the inimitable Boo. And you can see all of them here, wearing the Grey Wig of Truth, which I force everyone who enters our fungal abode to try on. Beeptacular it all was. Beeptacular.

Also beeptacular was the next big event of the month, which also included Tionna Smalls! It was her book signing/reading for her debut work, Girl, Get Your Mind Right! on Wednesday at Mixx lounge. If anyone out there hasn't met Tionna and has any doubt about her talent, you need to attend her next event. In fact, you owe it to yourself. Plainly put, the girl has charisma. I was there with blogger Jason Atkins, and at one point I actually said to him, "She's going to be a star." (In the successful media maven sense, not the America's Next Top Moldy Porkchop one.) I'm not exaggerating here; I only exaggerate about pink. And chartreuse pleather handkerchiefs. But back to Ms. Smalls--she was engaging, hilarious, late and made everyone feel welcome and special. And I must say, her prose is clear, straightforward and at turns even lyrical, if that word means what I think it means, which is "pretty like Christmas." After reading, Tionna gave us all I [Heart] Tionna Smalls shirts and her peeps freestyled. Again, a truly beeptacular evening.

And that brings us all up to date on the season's haps for this year, which is good, because I'm, like, tired n stuff. Typing all these keystrokes so late at night is exhausting, as if my body were manufacturing some natural kind of melatonin on its own or something. So that's the beep for now.

Happy Festivus! (And remember that you can still get lots of Ed Shepp holiday mp3s at this page here. Now with more jinglesparkleglowness! Click through, dabnabbit!)

Beep!
Ed Shepp

radio show + mp3s + CDs + myspace + article + all the other links

A Very Ed Shepp Christmas 2007

2007-12-02T19:11:00.000-05:00

Announcement time, bgoopters! This post is all about letting y'allz know that I have a new Christmas song out, the first Ed Shepp song (per se) in some time. So go listen and download it! It's Winter Wonderland, Ed Sheppified. Yay! It's at my myspace music profile, my soundclick. and other spots; get the highest-quality version by clicking here and a lower version by clicking here.

And if you're hankering for other Ed Shepp Christmas songs, including the released-and-unreleased classics All I Want for Christmas Is You, Last Christmas, Event to Remember, Dance of the Sugarplum Beepner (soundclick link) and The Christmas Story (soundclick link), go to this page here. I also plopped up Holiday Gift Ideas, a segment from a 2006 Christmas episode of The Ed Shepp Radio Experiment. So to reiterate, that's all on this page here. The Winter Wonderland lyrics area also there, even the part about "we'll have lots of fun with Mr. Snowman until drunk Lindsay Lohan mows him down..."

And while you're at it, check out my new xmas pics, courtesy of photographer extraordinaire Kenneth Pietrobono. View them here at flickr, here at myspace and here at facebook. Here's a li'l sample of the pix:

And that's my big announcement for the moment, glipsters. On the video front, I came across a vid where someone incorporated part of my piece called Thanksgiving Thoughts, off of Bling, as part of her Thanksgiving message. When she cuts the song off, she gives this look of "I have no idea what the gazoonce is going on"--could that be in reference to my piece? Hard to say. Link here.

And that's the beep for now, zoopsters!

Beep!
Ed Shepp

radio show + mp3s + CDs + myspace + article + all the other links

Lessons from American Royalty

2007-11-20T20:43:00.000-05:00

Ahh, November--such a wonderful month 'tis this year. The leaves are {finally} changing, the weather {finally} cooling down, the seasonal dysphoria {luminously} still at bay, and wisdom {unpredictably} bursting forth all around like little turkey coffin births. Just over the past few weeks, I've absorbed a few half-baked lessons myself from American royalty. Let's talk about them now.

1. Quiz question:

What does {serious} money smell like?

A] A new trailer fresh off the lot
B] Low-ammonia hair color from the A&P
C] That fresh $20 bill they give you at the plasma clinic
D] The Estee Lauder offices on 5th Avenue

Answer: All of the above, of course! But most especially, D] The Estee Lauder offices on 5th Avenue.

A couple Wednesdays ago, as part of a Sniffapalooza event, I got to go up to the corporate offices of Estee Lauder and have a gander at their new offerings, which included their Private Collection line and some collectibles. And talk about a experience. Let's start at the beginning.

The glamntacular began as I walked into the lobby of the 5th avenue building (Trump Tower? Is that the one with the FAO Schwarz on the ground floor?), and there to greet us were two young women from Estee Lauder. They were dressed identically in some ivory ensemble with taupe shoes, with lots of makeup and blonde hair pulled back into tight pony tails, kind of like classy updates of Robert Palmer's backup band, only with clipboards instead of guitars. Of course they were also almost blindingly gorgeous. So, Dad, to answer your question about whether there really are girls in New York like the ones in The Devil Wears Prada, yes, there are.

The glambots took us up to the 40somethingth floor into the corporate office, where more glamnbots roamed and we were treated to coffee, Pellegrino, cookies and other snacks while we waited to be led into the original office of Estee Lauder herself. The waiting room was impressive--lots of desaturated blue and old-fashioned furniture and the like. I thought to myself, "I could get used to this." Then I thought, "No, wait. Actually, I don't think I could. I would need to modernize a bit, splash some uurnge around, maybe some LED lights." After a few minutes, a part of us were led into EL's office, where Aerin Lauder herself showed us the new stuff.

That office--yowz! Now that was a glamn attack. The first thing you noticed was the narcotic floral smell, possibly tuberose with gardenia and maybe some lily. Next was the overload of periwinkle, gilt, trompe l'oeil and general luxury. It was fascinating listening to Aerin Lauder talk about the new line and her grandmother and all, especially with all the photos around. And the view of Central Park was breathtaking. It was a bit overwhelming, I must say, and of course for a little while there I did have that Radioheadly "what the hell am I doing here?" feeling. But that may have been the stain on my shirt talking (which I didn't notice until after I'd left the house) (not that most of my clothes aren't stained in one way or another) (but I don't like to think of them as stains--let's call them "birthmarks").

Then we left EL's office, and I had some more coffee. Someone asked me if I was a collector (cue Radiohead), and shortly thereafter I left.

So what's the lesson in this? Is there even a lesson, or is that whole "lessons from American royalty" thing just a way of bracketing the entry? Firstly, yes, there's a lesson. Secondly, how dare you. The lesson, and remember I told you they were half-baked, is thus: I realized as I walked away from that 5th avenue building that after seeing all that glamn and flash and mon-ay, I don't think I'll ever be impressed by yuppies again. So the next time you feel intimidated or out-classed by someone with a bigger bank account, think this: "This beeyotch may have money, but s/he's no Estee Lauder. I bet hir toilet isn't even solid gold." And there you have it, lesson 1.

2. Quiz Question.

What does superstardom look like?

A] A $700,000,000,000 diamond-and-African baby-studded ball gown worn on the red carpet
B] DD breasts + a 12-inch waist + lips like innertubes on a face that doesn't move
C] The revolving door at a new agey rehab clinic with its own Pinkberry inside
D] Monster shitloads of straw-like blond(ish) hair extensions

Answer: Hmm, I guess we have another all of the above here, but what it looked like to me on Black Friday was D! D! D!!!!

It was sometime after sundown, and I was walking from Pier 1 on 5th Avenue (what is it with 5th avenue?!?!) up to Bath & Body Works. I pass this store called Intermix (which I'd never really noticed before), and there were all these photographers and gawkers outside, so I thought I'd hang out and see who the fuss was all about. A few more people were wondering, because one of the photogs kept answering, "Linn-zay Low-hong." (He had a weird, maybe Chineseish accent that I could barely understand.) Whahappah?!?! Lindsay Lohan?!?! I stuck around for probably 2 hours (actually 20 minutes) and strained to get a glimpse. I finally did and walked in. I think I got about 5 feet away from her (she was apparently with her mom and sister or something) and just kinda stared for a few seconds. She was gorgeous, wearing all black and tons of eye makeup with a mountain of blond hair that was simply too gargantuan not to have been a weave. I was starstruck, and it's the only time I've ever been so. It was kind of tacky when she noticed me gawking and mouthed, "Hey, you got any blow?" but whatevs. (OK, that part didn't actually happen.) I wish I'd had a camera--I might have dared to ask her for a picture (probably not). But since I didn't, I just kinda walked out, hung out a little more and went on my way.

What's the lesson in #2? Guess what? Same as #1! The next time you're intimidated by someone, tell yourself, "This person might be zaboobulous, but s/he's no Lindsay Lohan."

For the third blooplet, I'll just tell you the lesson outright: Ed Shepp is a megaspectacular super-being who is so ahead of his time it gives him diarrhea on a semi-regular basis. Here's the backup for that lesson: I was noodling around gawker a few days ago, as is my wont, when they had a story on that bearded guy who wears women's clothes, with the following quote, quoted from elsewhere:

"Andre," said Mr. McKenna, "you look amazing!"

ACTUALLY, he did not say it in quite that way. It happens that the adjective "amazing," pronounced with a bunch of superfluous vowels, is how fashion types, and also certain urban gay men and also one or two tuned-in heterosexual copycats, lately express their approval. Amazing has replaced such locutions as "genius" and "major," which today sound even more old-hat than "fabulous."

And of course when I read that my first reaction was, "Way, whahappah!!! I was obsessively saying amazing years ago, AS THIS BLOG ENTRY ATTESTS. I must be totes part of the cognoscenti & stuff!!!" So this lesson was really just re-affirming something I already know, that I am living the trends years before they happen, so many years that no one but me ever makes the connection. But now we have proof, so there you go.

Whew! That's all the lessons for now, and thanks cod, because that took forever to relate! One more thing, though: I'm so glad to see Lohan and Foxy Brown in the news (but when's the Lohan NOT in the news?!), since I name-checked both of them in my new xmas song (yay!), which I'll postannounce shortly.

And that's the beep for now, gzooplets.

Beep!
Ed Shepp

radio show + mp3s + CDs + myspace + article + all the other links

Ween 2007

2007-11-05T21:24:00.001-05:00

So these are the pix of me en de l'costueme from Halloween 2007. Unfortunately there are only two, the rest of the shots marred by a virulent strain of MRSA, manipulation-resistant shitty angles, which left me looking like Perez Hilton after a Big Mac bender. So what was I? I was Prince Quistvalden of Norwedenmark, patron saint of the decadent overprivileged. There's not much to the costume, and--you probably won't believe this--I actually threw it together at the last minute, when suddenly the Spirit of Halloween washed over me like gingery-vanillic spooge. Or a teensy seizure-stroke in my pumpkin lobe. Sexylike. Basically I wore my I-feel-spunky shirt with a tie and blazer (some of which was bedazzled with rhinestone earrings from Tiffany's. And yeah, by Tiffany's I mean Claire's), my de-riguer crown, lots of smoky guyliner and a bunch of silver glitter under my nose, which you can't really see but was meant to suggest that I had been snorting diamonds. I have to say, it was the best I've ever felt in a Halloween costume wearing so many clothes. I may have to dress like that all the time.

So was it a successful Halloween? Well, no one approached me with any reality show, VH1 commentator, Nigerian bank account transfer or pumpkin frappuccino offers, and I awoke the next day fully rested with only one faintly salacious incident, so you be the judge. I am, however, open to do-overs, so if any of you sexy people out there wanna hang out with Prince Quistvalden for a night and make a young royal's Halloween dreams come true, drop me a line.

And that's the Halloween beep for 2007.

Beep!
Ed Shepp

radio show + mp3s + CDs + myspace + article + all the other links

Halloween Bloop

2007-10-30T21:11:00.000-04:00

Look at what appeared in the lobby of our building just a few days ago. It's one of those things that people typically put in their yards, but since this building has no yard.... well, yeah. It looks like it's supposed to be this snow-globe type thing (inflatable plastic), but instead of snow, little grey bats swirl around inside. The "bats" actually look like half burnt newspapers. (We had big bonfires at the house when I was a kid--the half-burnt pieces of paper from then are my frame of reference. DAMNZ, those fires were fun!!!! If your family didn't have big bonfires when you were young, you missed out.) The thing seems to run 24/7, and it's pretty loud. You can hear it down the hall, and it sounds like either a clothes dryer or a leaf blower. The verdict on the thing: Unexpected as it was, it's the coolest thing ever.

And now for a Halloween audio nugget. It's me version of Edgar Allen Poe's Annabel Lee. Added stanzas courtesy of The 80s. Click the thing in the lobby below for the mp3. Beep!

Beep! Happy Halloween!!!
Ed Shepp

radio show + mp3s + CDs + myspace + article + all the other links

Leave Britney Alone!

2007-09-18T10:37:00.000-04:00

Today's audio nugget: A li'l blip I threw together featuring the [currently] most famous hysterical Avril Lavigne lookalike, Chris Crocker. Click the audio nugget icon for the homage, titled (obviously) Leave Britney Alone.

And now for a more personal note. Britney (because I know you're reading this), I know you've had a difficult week, what with the tabloids and all, but I just want to say to you: Thank you. Thank you, Britney Spears. Thanks cod for you, Britney Spears. You took what would've been a crap week (work, September 11) and made it magical, and for that I am grateful. Anytime I felt bored or down, I checked the sites for the latest news, comments or videos about your performance, and upon reading them I felt better. You have provided a wonderful service, Ms. Spears, bringing laughter to every American. You are a true hero. Bless you, Britney Spears.

Beep!
Ed Shepp

Umberella

2007-09-02T18:48:00.000-04:00

Well, beeplets, everyone and hir brother has done a cover version of Rihanna's Umbrella, so I had to make one too. Click the audio nugget icon to hear the Ed Shepp version! w00t!

Beep!
Ed Shepp

My WFMU Blog Post, Highlighted

2007-07-11T13:12:00.000-04:00

Everyone go check out my post on the wfmu blog, gooplets!!! (Click here) But since I know you won't, because you're all hewers and hatrs, I'll give you the highlights here:

I spotted That Guy Who's In Everything over the weekend... I bet I'd be offended if someone addressed me as "that guy who's in everything" and didn't know my name... And who cares what Hugh Laurie is like?! He's not like Gregory House; maybe he's really funny, but lots of people are, and it's not like I'm gonna be hanging out with him at 8:30 two Fridays from now in the East Village and need to be sure whether Thai food is completely out of the question because I heard he's allergic to lemongrass... Aaron Eckhart doesn't live in North America, North America lives on Aaron Eckhart's chin... Pitt's chin is smaller and rounder, more feminine, which makes me wonder whether a woman's preference for Pitt versus Eckhart shifts according to what part of her menstrual cycle she's in... I watched my first episode of Blue's Clues today. Is it me, or does the host, "Steve," look like he's performing "under duress"... I kept thinking there must be someone off camera aiming a gun at him or something... Paula Abdul (I call her Babbadoodle) is the epitome of the deluded, narcissistic, cracked out celebrity that we all thought was only an archetype invented for dramatic films and tabloid magazines... And you get the sense she believes her own crap. I wonder whether she connects a pipe from her ass to her face and masturbates while inhaling her own farts too... I suppose one thing you can say for Babbadoodle is that at least she didn't go into "rehab," which seems to be the thing to do this year, burning through Hollywood faster than double-strength anal bleaching cream...

And that's the beep for now. Go look at the original post, dammit!

Beep!
Ed Shepp

radio show + mp3s + CDs + myspace + article + all the other links

4th!

2007-07-04T21:35:00.000-04:00

Happy 4th of July, gzooplers. Here's my Americana audio nugget for today:

The Star Spamgled Banner, sung by Ed Shepp

And that's today's beep.

Beep!
Ed Shepp

Videupdate!

2007-06-25T21:30:00.000-04:00

Sos I was obsessively comparing my google results with those of minor local uncelebrities one day and happened upon this video. It's a performance by Funkanometry SF (click here for their myspace) called The P Is for ? And the finale dance was to ...whahappen? Yup, myne very own modern classic, The P Is for Pussy. w00t!!! Awesomexcellent, isn't it?

And in case you like the song, but hate, ahem, that word, I ended up making a censored version of it when someone asked if there was a safe version of it around. So you can download The P Is for ----- here if you want.

That's the beep for now.

Beep!
Ed Shepp

radio show + mp3s + CDs + myspace + article + all the other links

Just some blips

2007-06-11T22:23:00.000-04:00

Nothing to really talk about right now--show's off for the summer, so is House, and nothing exciting is going on. So I'm just posting a couple of blips for no particular reason.

Well, I've finally gotten around to reading Bitch, which I really think ought to be titled Beeyotch, and I wonder why I never really peeped into it before. I've read the other Wurtzel books (except for Radical Sanity--but then who's read that?!), but not this one. Which is weird, considering that she wrote the thing during a huge, extended Ritalin/cocaine binge, part of which took place in Florida. So you know it's going to be chock full of, well, everything! Sure, sometimes it seems to ramble (she came at the Samson & Delilah story from so many different angles that I wasn't sure what I was supposed to take from the chapter), but every now and then there's something either funny or interesting or confirmatucious of something I thought/knew. Here's something confirmatucious:

It seems that when people deal with the word in binary oppositions, choosing one thing only because it negates another, they are inevitably startled by the discovery that the quest for something completely different has only given them more of the same. That's why Oedipus killed his father and slept with his mother while doing everything to avoid that fate.

That's right, goonatches. My light reading contains references to Greek mythology and all that shizzle. I wonder if I could use this book in a show. There's a whole chapter essentially on Hillary Clinton; it could come in handy if it weren't so outdated (the book's copyright is 1998). But since I mentioned the Clinton chapter, here's an interesting li'l bit from it:

Of course, what is interesting about all this speculation on Hillary's possibilities is that they are precisely the assumptions and ambitions you project onto a gifted youngster, a very bright child, or an adult--no older than twenty-five or thirty--who is thought to be so full of promise. These are not really the kinds of things you say about someone who is full-grown--unless, of course, that person has somehow failed to live up to expectations, or just plain failed and disappointed by any measure. Because all these notions--serving on the Supreme Court, heading up the State Department, getting an elected office, maybe becoming the first woman to chair the Arms Services Committee in the Senate, or perhaps withdrawing to the academy and achieving tenure at some law school or having a chair endowed in her honor for the study of family law or children's rights--all of these grand ideas are pie-in-the-sky dreams. As far as Hillary is concerned, it ought to be clear to everyone that these dreams are gone--not deferred; they are gone completely. But it doesn't matter, because she has surrended it all to wifedome. Looking after Bill Clinton has been her job.

Aha! What a difference a few years can make! If Hillary Clinton could have been so decisively written off roundabout a decade ago, maybe there's hope for the rest of us. I'll beep to that!

Another blip: I smelled the new JP Gaultier fragrance the other day, Fleur du Male, and I gotta say--Bravissimo! Or, in other words, Hell fuck yeah! I wasn't expecting to like it, because I think Le Male is vile pollution; and since Fleur's bottle is shaped like the original, I feared its scent would be more of the same too. But since it had fleur in the name, I thought I'd give it a try. And I'm glad I did--it's quite different from Le Male. It's very floral, and actually kinda feminine, but not like, say, Oscar or Paris or Gio. It's nearly all orange blossom (with some hay and a fern accord), and some people seem to be shocked about that (A man's fragrance that's mostly orange blossom! Gasp!), but I don't see why. Gazillions of men's fragrances have orange blossom, so what's so shocking about that?! Actually, Fleur smells a little like Joop! to me (the intense sweetness). And it seems distantly related to those cheap orange-blossom single note scents that a lot of Spanish men seem to wear. At any rate, I don't think the scent is all that feminine, and even if it were, so what?! Really, you could wear a woman's perfume any day and probably no one would even notice. Unless it were, say, Oscar or Paris or Gio. I may have to pick up some Fleur one day--you can't deny that, with all its orange blossom, it's a great Celeditude scent. Beep!

Lastly, I might say a blip about Paris Hilton. Something I overheard today: No one knows where Osama bin Laden is, but Paris Hilton is in jail! Something a friend told me: Paris Hilton has become Bush's America: spoiled and brash and confident in her ability to elude consequence and limit, until finally it all crashes down, and she is left to do only that which she fears the most and finds absolutely unbearable, which is to endure the tyrannical threat of parents and pet owners alike: "Sit there and think about what it is you've done." As for me, although at first I was cheering her return to the slammer, now that I realize that most people wouldn't have been sent back (overcrowding in the LA jails), I feel a little bad for her. (Her teary scene made me sad for her.) Not only is she being made an example of, but now she has to be the target of everyone's rage about class/money in America. And all the venom is a bit hard to stomach. Moreover, I can't imagine that Paris Hilton herself understands any of it. I'm not terribly worried, though. Fortysomething days is nowhere near long enough to stamp out Paris Hilton-level skankstrionics. Maybe no amount of time is. Like a nearly nude, night vision, banality-spouting Phoenix, Paris Hilton shall rise again!!!

And that's the beep for now.

Beep!
Ed Shepp

radio show + mp3s + CDs + myspace + article + all the other links

Urbles Day

2007-04-25T13:37:00.000-04:00

Today is Urbles Day. Because there's nothing really going on, and when there's nothing going on, you just kinda say "urbles." What's up? Urbles. See?

So since there's nothing going on, I'm providing all yallz with an audio nugget. Today's audio nugget is from a friend's blog. I abridged the text a bit, excising the extraneous and political stuff, so the world could have the distilled audiessence. Download it, play it to your friend and comment til dawn. Click the audio nugget icon below for the mp3.

In random news, I'm looking for a room to rent, to move in either late July or early August. Target location: somewhere in NYC, preferably Manhattan; roundabout Astoria, Queens; not-too-far-out in Brooklyn or Jersey City/Hoboken. So if you can find me a cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap room with sane and cool people, I'll make a whole show about you on The Ed Shepp Radio Experiment. Facebook or Myspace me if you know of something.

And speeching of ESRX, this week my special guest is podcast phenom Lady Raptastic. She's always entertaining and occasionally offensive, so tune in. You know the times. Don't you? (Thursday, 6-7pm Eastern time, WFMU91.1FM or wfmu.org)

That's all I got for you now, geeplers. Here's the nugget and peace out!

Beep!
Ed Shepp

radio show + mp3s + CDs + myspace + article + all the other links

I Won't Play Leapfrog wiTh You Because You're tOo Unstable

2007-04-05T13:27:00.000-04:00

One supposes this post should be a more in-depth examination of the trip to Europe, and that I should post the pix that I took from my disposable camerae. But it's not. Because I haven't scanned in the photos yet, and I want to do the in-depth recountation audiologically. But since I mentioned the photos, I have to say: DAMNZ, they look blurry compared to my roommate's digital!! From now on, I guess it's finna have to be digital.

So what's up, then? Well, Spring is finally inching its way through the door and shooing away Winter with its pollenny goodness. And that means that my winter doldrums are at last lifting. One result of that is that I've begun partly filling in my playlists again. Another is that I've decided to get all back up in neurogenesis's grille; I'm re-reading the Seed article that sparked the Seedling Project, and I'm bringing neurogenesis back. Someday people will look back at this year on wonder: "Ed Shepp made atheism cool AND brought neurogenesis back in the same year!" My next show will be on that article too, because I think it should be required reading and common knowledge.

But THIS week's show is all about the book A Perfect Mess, which is kind of a pro-mess polemic. And that's one of my pet causes, so I'm very into this show. In fact, there was too much material for it, so I had to cut some and not include others. And that brings us to your audio nuggets for today, which are two li'l bits from the show that I had to cut because of time. One is part of "the history of mess" and the other deals with stochastic resonance and manufacturing shoes. Click on a nugget to listen:

And those are the nuggets. There's actually a whole other segment that I couldn't put in the show, but I'm not uploading it because it's not yet cut. For the rest of the mess, tune in to the show tonight at 91.1FM or wfmu.org. 6-7 Thursdays. The show tonight also features a listener-remixed theme courtesy of Kevin Burrows. It's actually one of two he sent in. Tonight's is the Isle of Sheppy remix, as opposed to the Bog of Shepp remix, which I aired last week. Tune it, bgootches!!!!

And that's the beep for now. Stay tuned to your Ed Shepp provider for more beeps as they arrive.

Beep!
Ed Shepp

radio show + mp3s + CDs + myspace + article + all the other links

A (Not-so-)Petit Euroecap

2007-03-27T15:27:00.000-04:00

It's 70 degrees and sunnyish today in the Apple, and I smell like fresh cut grass. ...so why am I petit bleu? Because it's the first day back in the daily grind since St. Patrick's Day.

No, I haven't been drunk in a ditch in outer New Jersey. Or driving around providing impromptu and unwanted grief counseling, as I am wont to do. Neither have I been sitting in bed trying really hard to astrally project (I stopped doing that at 16). Nor have I been held hostage by some crazed ESRX fan à la Misery. None of those things. I, gzeepsters, have just returned from my and my roommate's European Excursion 2007.

Way, whahappah?! you say? Votes fer sleazleries!! It's true! The roomz and I blipped over to Amsterdam on the 17th, gwazzled over to Paris shortly thereafter, and returned just yestertag. And now I'm back in the daily grind. Which explains why I'm a bluelet. Because I'd rather be back on the Continent, eating cookies and frites in Amsterdam and speaking miserable, broken French in Paris. So needless to say, I've been sighing considerably. Here, why don't you sigh with me right now--[inhale, now go:] Siiiiiiiiiigh. There. OK, now that we have the sighing over with, I guess I should move on to the inevitable question: "How was your trip?"

I think I'm still processing the whole thing, because all I can really think of when people ask that is, "It was what it was." After that, I just mention a few anecdotes. I don't have a full narrative yet. I suppose that will come when I develop all the analog pix I took and sift through all the recording I did there. (Yeps, I took along two recorders and plopped a lot onto tape. I hope it's not all megaboring. Sometimes taping like that can snooze.) For now, however, since there are some pix up from the trip, because my roommate took digital (Amsterdam / Paris), I guess I'll give a teensy recap, and then prolly explore the topic more in depth in a show or something. OK, here we go...

Amsterdam was first. We arrived Sunday morning, and explored the city. It's a beautiful place--I wish we could have seen more of it, but we were only there for a few days. Navigating it was confusing, first because of the sheer disorientation of being in a different city, but also because every street looked so similar to me. By the third day, however, I felt much more at home and was able to recognize some places here and there. The city has a look to it, but I don't remember exactly what I kept comparing it to. It has lots of bridges and seemed quaint and rather quiet. Everywhere were people biking. Lots of blonds, shizznitloads of tourists (especially loud UKers), about as many sex shops and coffee spots as there were souvenir traps (but not ONE Starbucks or B&N!!!).

We saw the Van Gogh museum, the history of the city museum, the Anne Frank house (where I sent a video card to myself--I couldn't think of anything to say, so I just said 'Go wildcats!' Yeah.) and did some boat tour. We also went to a bunch of li'l bars and cafes and talked to people. We had our hands washed at Sabon. We ate lots of frites and McDonalds (I was on the chizzeap, bizzlio!). I tore a contact lens the second day, but was able to replace it without a prescription (I also got some Zovirax lip balm, which is available there--oh yeah, I had a bitchin cold sore, which is only now going away). I also got a cute li'l bag and the cheesiest umbrella you ever'd seen. I got some shoes in a department store where they also had light boxes. Light boxes!!!!!! I recorded someone saying douęche bågage, but for some reason it was difficult to get people to say fer reazlies (which morphed into fer sleazlies, then fer slizzleazlies, eventually to something like votes fer sleazlizzologies, before it broke under its own weight). Someone touched my hair, we talked to some rowdy UKers from the Midlands, it snowed, we ate at a froufroulala cafe and I watched a cracked-out German soap opera in which someone was raped and Ching was rejected. Yes, CHING!!! (If you know this show, please email me. We can talk about Ching.) AAAAAAAAAAAND I watched this most amazazing National Geographic special, which was actually one of the highlights of the trip, if not my life thus far. It was either about the Vikings or Stonhenge, but it was seriously life-altering. I realized while watching it that I WANT TO DO THAT!!! I want to make programs for National Geographic or the History Channel. Or at least voice them. So if you have an in for that kind of thing, e/myspace/facebook me. It's now on the list. Nearly everyone spoke English and was friendly (not so much for the cashier who was all snootylike when I took a picture of the "retard capsules" on the pharmacy shelf), and the euro coins were annoying. McDonalds had no breakfast sandwiches. Techno was everywhere, and mingled with 80s (Tell It to My Heart, I Heard a Rumour) in the bars.

And then after 3 days it was off to Paris. We arrived in the afternoon and took the subway to the hotel, which the roomz said was smaller than it looked online. Paris was much more like New York than Amsterdam--more crowded, faster-paced, ruder. I must have expected something different, because I was a bit disappointed initially, in addition to the new-city disorientation. Then I was frustrated when we went to an internet cafe and none of my passwords worked. Because the keyboard is different!! Whahappah?!?! I never did get used to the keyboard, but by the next day I felt much better overall. We walked the Champs-Elysées and stopped into a few shops (all the men who worked in Sephora were wearing makeup), saw the Louvre and Notre Dame, trekked to Versailles (it's just like Dangerous Liaisons, but HUGE), went to the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower and saw Montmartre. Far, far fewer people spoke English in Paris, so a lot of the time I had to make my cracked out attempts at French. For example, when we were in Montmartre, we couldn't find any of the places from Amélie (well, I couldn't--J kept saying, 'this is it--she ran up here' -- I don't think he even saw the movie), so I decided to ask someone. My broken French: Excusez moi--Savez-vous où le café de... Amélie?? The person [seemingly] didn't know. It was kinda fun being the stupid tourist that could only speak in tardo phrases. That said, I did better than I thought I would with the French, and I think I could pick it up in a couple months if I lived there, maybe sooner.

Unlike in Amsterdam, there was a Starbucks in Paris. Good thing, too, because those European sizes (yes, portions are smaller there) just weren't cutting it in terms of morning coffee. They were good, however, for through-the-day coffee, which apparently was pretty big in France. Coffee was everywhere--you could tell it was a way of life. Hint for travelers: "French coffee"=espresso; "American coffee"=espresso with a little milk (but not as much milk as an American would use). And on the food tip, one McDonalds had breakfast, but only one thing; yes, I had a napoleon and croissants; hellz yes, I had pastries; yes, I had escargot; no, I didn't have frog legs; yes, you should order a Cuba Libre instead of rum & Coke.

The subways were OK in Paris, but as in NYC, cabbing it would be better. Unless you really love those Madonna H&M ads, which seemed to be in every station. The buildings in Paris--take parts of the Upper East Side (especially Museum Mile) and extend them into an entire city. Lots of motorcycles. The catacombs are cool as hell, and much bigger than what you see on the tour. The Centre Pompidou, from what I saw, is cool. Frederic (who lervs WFMU, and was actually wearing the Ed Shepp Is Love T-shirt from the 2006 marathon) works near there, and we met up and ate in what seemed to be some weird hybrid of spaghetti restaurant and shi shi frou frou la la gay bar. I wish we'd known people in the city, because after 7pm we didn't know what to do except go to bars, internet cafes or watch dubbed-over American TV in the hotel. I know there was stuff going on, however, because when we were in the Latin Quarter one night, near the Sorbonne, there were zillions of young kids making a ruckus on the streets. Actually, there were zillions of younguns period. How do they all afford it?? I couldn't decide whether all the beautiful people in the streets were beautiful because they were: French, young or rich. The homeless people were charming and cute, but only because they were foreign and had things like "S.V.P. J'ai faim" on their signs. One of them had on better jeans than mine. The weather was kinda crapply, but who cares--it was Paris! There were too many Americans.

Then we flew back and here we are.

The whole time I was comparing the cities to what I knew here, and enjoying the whole being-a-tourist thing, which is a huge thing with me, having grown up and worked extensively in a tourism mecca. There were a couple times when I wanted to say, "I know I seem retarded, but I'm not actually stupid. It's just that I'm not used to this place." Also, I was always asking myself, "Could I live here?" Well, of course I could. I think I'd prefer the pace of Amsterdam, but I think there'd be much more to do in Paris. And I'd like the challenge of becoming fluent in the language--to really have to think on a daily basis. As for culture shock, there wasn't much of any. American culture was everywhere. In Paris the TV shows were dubbed, but apart from that, it saturated the place. That was kinda unfortunate, because I wanted to feel like I was a world away, in a strange and different place. Hard to do when the same stars are in the news, the same Renee Zelwegger poster is everywhere (with only a few words translated), the signs are in English, and Pizza Hut, Starbucks and McDonalds are all over. I was a bit disheartened that I wasn't blown away every second by the realization, "I'm in Amsterdam/Paris!!!!" I wanted to feel bowled over, to spin around the streets throwing random objects in the air, but it was more like when you meet a celebrity--you don't feel as zowied away as you think you will. I did, however, always enjoy the feeling that everything was "the same, but different," as in the street signs, the shops, etc.

And now I'm back. Did the trip change my life? Knock me out of that rut I've been in? Well, (surprisingly) I don't feel any different. Before the trip, I was a bit nervous that I was going to fall head-over-hells in love with Europe and become some insane Francophile or something, but no. I'm not buying any French language books or maps of Amsterdam or any of that. Perhaps over the week, as I get back into daily life, I'll see if anything in me has been shaken up. At least I have something new in my mind to reference, so maybe that will help me creatively or something. And at the VERY least I have a few things that I can say, "I got it in Europe," and that's kinda cool in a way.

So that's my not-so-petit recap of me and the roommate's trip to Europe 2007. w00t! Oh, and if you're reading from Amsterdam or Paris, or Stockholm, London, Barcelona, Reykjavik or a beach in Southern Italy, drop me a line (email / myspace / facebook)!!! Next time I go, I want to have peops to hang with n stuff. And that's all for the beep for now, gnooplets.

Hmm, I feel much better now.

Beep!
Ed Shepp

radio show + mp3s + CDs + myspace + article + all the other links

Happy Names Nuggets Day!

2007-02-15T14:24:00.000-05:00

It's Names Nuggets Day at The Ed Shepp Bl0g Experience! That means that I have two audio nuggets for you, each 1-minute tributes to a particular superubermegahyperultrasuperduperstar. Click on the pics to the left to hear them. One tributes Kiki Kannibal, the inimitable, constantly imitated scenestère who brought back stripes*--the guest vocal blorgp is from Angelifornia, and it's sampled from the upcoming episode of The Ed Shepp Radio Experiment where we meet for the first time beyond the myspace. The other is my tribute to Lilian Gish, inventor of the plasmibionic butter churn. Because I've always loved the word gish. Gish! Go on, click on the corresponding pic to hear them. What, you don't know who is who??? Is you retardeb? Click before you embarrass youself furver.

Beep!
Ed Shepp

radio show + mp3s + CDs + myspace + article + all the other links

*Note: This is widely disputed. Some say that she copied Audrey Kitchin. It's also disputed whether she's 14, 19 or 28 years old and whether she's from Florida or Flevoland. One thing, however, is widely agreed on: Hatrs only make her more famous.

Valentine Freedom on WFMU

2007-02-13T17:30:00.000-05:00

Everyone click on the picture to read my post on WFMU's Beware of the Blog.

There's also an audio version of the entry, which you hear by clicking here.

Beep!
Ed Shepp

radio show + mp3s + CDs + myspace + article + all the other links

Treasure These Commemoratives Today

2007-02-08T18:07:00.000-05:00

Ladies and gentlemen, a great woman has left us. Today Anna Nicole Smith left her earthly vessel and ascended to the great Pharmacy in the Sky. Anna Nicole taught us that no matter where you come from, no matter what your name is, you can do anything you set your mind to, whether that's being a topless dancer, posing for Playboy, marrying an ancient bagillionaire, being a mess on basic cable or being the face of a brand of iffy weight loss pills. Anna Nicole Smith was truly an inspiration.

Now you can remember Anna Nicole's inspiring example with my special Anna Nicole Smith commemorative plates (artist's rendering upper left). These plates reflect the spirit of Anna Nicole herself--classy, timeless and always appropriate. Handcrafted from the finest store-brand paper plates, these commemorative treasures are each individually painted one-by-one by hand with premium Crayola markers and can be personalized with your message. On the bottom of the plates, you'll find the Ed Shepp Originle label, your seal of Quality. These plates will last for weeks-to-years, and add some needed ritz to your crappo china collection. Order a set today, for the low low price of $599.95. You'll receive a set of 4 premium Anna Nicole Smith Commemorative plates and 2 cups, made from only the highest quality Bengalese styrofoam. You and your family will cherish them for years to come. Order now! Order now! Order now!

Order now!

Beep!
Ed Shepp

radio show + mp3s + CDs + myspace + article + all the other links

Ed Shepp Thanks the Beepters

2007-02-06T11:36:00.000-05:00

This is just a quick beep to all the loverly EdSheppsters out there who took the time to wish me a happy Celeditude. Thanks, beeplers! You did your part to make this year's Celeditude the best of the nascent millennium. I'm sending fragrant blessings from my cinnamonscope out to all y'allz as I type. I wish I had time to thank all of you with a traditional 10th street salute, but since I dothen't, I'll leave you with a li'l audio blip (click on the blip below to get to it!). This blips comes from the original, uncut ecordation for last week's episode of The Ed Shepp Radio Experiment, entitled In Which Ed Shepp Responds to a myspace Blog Comment. (Yep, I really was responding to a comment.) Being, obviously, too blue to air, this was excised from the final cut of the show. In it, I discuss a berquance from the film Dangerous Liaisons (the one with Glenn Close).

And here's the blip:

Enjoy!

Beep!
Ed Shepp

radio show + mp3s + CDs + myspace + article + all the other links

Loving Hugh Is Easy Cux We're Both Beautiful...

2007-01-29T10:07:00.000-05:00

In honor of Hugh Laurie winning yet another well-deserved awarsh*, I give you today's audio nugglet:

Hugh Laurie
written by Jason Stratham of The Cold Inclusive
Read by Ed Shepp (which if you're reading this blogsh, you kinda oughtta know by now, beeplet).

Enjoy!

Beep!
Ed Shepp

radio show + mp3s + CDs + myspace + article + all the other links

*awarsh (n) [uh-wawrsh]: Merteuillian construction of award. The source of the construction is the movie Dangerous Liaisons, with Glenn Close as the Marquise de Merteuil, in which she tells the Vicomte de Valmont: "Come back when you have succeeded with Madame de Tourvel, and I will offer you... a rewarsh [reward]."

Myne Act of Contrition

2007-01-23T14:58:00.000-05:00

Hi. Thanks for coming here.

Shhh, don't speak.

This is my confessional. I know it doesn't look like much--like some cardboard box that I threw a black veil over--but this is a holy place. Everything that happens here is between you, me and the backlit Nomi Malone picture on the chamber's ceiling. We praise you, Nomi.

I have something to confess, something horrible. Something that, if discovered, would render me untouchable, like a moldy piece talking tofurkey jerky. Something worse, in the world's eyes, than all the deadly sins combined, even the sin that dare not speak its name: Jessica Simpson. I have chosen to open myself to you because you are the only soul who is compassionate and merciful enough to look beyond my vile transgression and heal me with your pure, bootylicious love.

Hear me now with pity and patience, for now, to paraphrase Flaubert, it's on and crackalatin.

I...

like...

to.....

listen.....

to.......

....the Dawson's Creek song.

No, don't look at me! I don't want you to see me like this, so dirty and shameful.

But it's true, it's all true. I like the Dawson's Creek song. I don't know how it happened--one day I was mocking it with friends, singing "Doo doo dooooooo do dooo doooooo.....," then before I knew it the chorus would randomly recur to me during the day. Soonafter I got a copy of it and began occasionally istening to it, "ironically" (or so I told myself). Eventually it, like some satanic Soloflex commercial, wriggled its way inside of me, throbbing, pulsating, pumping me sardonically with lubricity. I started listening to the song all the time--I would wake up to it, play it all day at work, then receive it all night, until I collapsed, exhausted and drenched with sweat, from rocking back and forth to it for hours. I would repeat this the next day. I would sing it too--in elevators, in bathrooms, in the shower... I would tape myself singing it and experiment with singing harmony to it. I would have other people sing it. I would drag friends to Mexican restaurants so I could request it from the live mariachi band. I would crash weddings and impersonate the singer, just so I could assault the guests with the song. It got to the point that I was keeping a journal in which I expounded on the new meanings that I would discover daily within the song. All I could think of was the song; it had become my entire existence. I was to humans what Lohan's nose is to blow: a gaping hole, sucking everything into its warped universe.

It wasn't until 2 weeks ago that I saw what I had devolved into. It was 2am, and I had been rocking along to the song in my room and composing letters to the editors of several major newspapers, demanding that they stop suppressing this life-changing song and filling envelopes with Shower to Shower. Because editors tend to have foot odor. Well, I accidentally got a bunch of the powder on my face, when I miscaculated a dance move and plunged headfirst into a bowl of Spring Breeze. I went bathroomward to cleanse myself, and when I looked in the mirror, the sight before me was unrecognizable. And ghastly. There I was, in my Paula Cole wig and costume, my face coated with ghostly white powder and my body soaked with sweat and urine , smelling like bouquet of flowers on the floor of the 136 st. subway station. In that instant I saw at last what this song had done to me. I broke down and the floor, sobbing, wailing, wiping the stains of the toilet bowl and repeating, "I don't wanna do what his father, his father, his father, his father, HIS father did!"

I don't know how long I stayed like that before a holy light shone from deep within the toilet bowl, and a serenity washed over me like pus from a weeping sore. Then the spirit of Nomi Malone herself appeared to me, rising from the toilet bowl like a celestial, barely clothed pop tart. She blessed me, forgave my sin and told me to confess it to the most compassionate soul I know. I praised her and reached out to her, but she said only, "Bitch!" before doing a dance move with her arms and silnking with a swoosh down her porcelain altar into heaven.

For the next week I fell ill, into a joyous delirium, and the week after I built this confessional. And now I have brought you here, and revealed my disgrace spread-eagle. Now, in the spirit of Nomi, I will remove my garments and accept your forgiveness physically. Remember--you are doing Nomi's work; you mustn't hold back. Take pity on me, but please...

don't be gentle.

Beep!
Ed Shepp

radio show + mp3s + CDs + myspace + article + all the other links

Epistelary Beeps like Frozen Sparkles, Six-Sided

2007-01-17T15:18:00.000-05:00

Dearest Arpogenia,

My, what a difference a day makes! One day it's all warm and rainy and womblike, so you crack the window, take a few handuls of fiber tablets (mmmmmmmm, good stuff!) and retire, hoping for dreams of Hugh Laurie and ylang flowers... the next morning you wake up in a frozen brown mound after one long nightmare, in which Paris Hilton stuffed you between the massive fat rolls concealed by her hypergravitational girdle, where a nonstop loop of The Day After Tomorrow III played. Which is worse, Paris Hilton, tofurkey jerky or an unidentified gas smell?? At this point I don't think anyone could say.

Yes, we're undergoing a huge cold snap here in the (cr)Apple. All the Christmas oranges and lemons have frozen solid--which, luckily, makes them great for pelting slow pedestrians with. You should see them when they slip on the ice and slide down the big hill--it's just like a life-size pinball machine. Doesn't Markie Post have one of those? I suppose she'd have to, with all that Night Court coin, right? HAHAHAHAHA LOL! But seriously, it's damn cold here--I went out to mail something at around 1pm, and the music froze in my headphones--Electric Youth, no less!! I thought that song was a scorcher. It melted my heart; I figured it could withstand 19 degree temps, right? Wrong. So what did I do, you're asking? Thanks for asking. Here's what I did: I removed my earbuds and decided to put them someplace piping hot--my backyard downtown chocolate muffin oven, if you know what I'm saying. And what I'm saying is: my butthole. Li'l Brown Eye. The Panic Button. I stuffed them there and squeezed as hard as I could, remembering what Sensei always said: Backdoor squeeze make big geyser heat (especially when Debbie Gibson's involved, right?!?!?!?). Sadly, that didn't have quite the effect I was hoping for. After some minutes I took them out, and saw that they had crystallized into diamonds! Sigh. I handed the dazzling blinglets to someone passing out Spanish herbal weight loss pill fliers and continued walking, making the music in my head. I guess I should have known better, especially after last Wednesday, when I ate a bunch of corn and then egested several hundred thousand pounds worth of flawless topaz on Friday. ...Or was it amethyst? I'll ask Shlomo next time I'm in the diamond district. He sells all my jewels. I don't think he gets the best prices, though--I'm always giving him diamonds that I'm sure are worth thousands, and then he comes back with a Happy Meal, asking for change! I really should investigate that. Note to self: Biopsy Shlomo's brain next Monday. Get Greg House in on this.

Still, cold or not, it's absolutely gorgeous out today. The sun is gleaming, much like those earbuds I just gave away, and the smell of burnt tires fills the air. That's because the glare from the streets is causing all the taxicabs to smash into each other. But don't cry for them, Arpogenia, because I've always made a point of lecturing them on driver safety every time I go to that Pakistani place with the $2 noodle bowl. (You know the one--the noodles have that curry-with-a-hint-of-urine flavor? It's that one we ate at just before you sprouted that frog limb for a week.) Did they listen? Obviously not, even when I talked the same gibberish to them that they do with each other. You could say they're getting their just desserts--I'm selling pies on the corner of Park and 30th (right outside the OTB where found your last husbands), and everytime some taxis crash I go and throw a pie in each cabbie's face. It's kinda like when they sing Happy Birthday to you at Olive Garden or the rest area. Or, when they used to, you know, before the ...unpleasantness.

And that's really all I have for you. Everything else is much the same. Still trying to get that wax-museum-where-the-statues-are-made-of-white-chocolate-and-butt hair started, and I think I may be close to a breakthrough with that: I met a swarthy middle eastern businessman who promises me every night that he'll invest lots and lots of money in the idea. And then he drops a barrett and, well, I think you know what happens from there. I wish he'd stop doing that, but whatever. Sensei also used to tell us that Path to Wisdom have many stop on Hershey highway. I always keep that in mind for those three minutes that I'm counting the Cheeto fragments on the floor--God, there are a lot of crumbs down there--I really oughtta get a mouse. I will say this, though: if I don't see some money soon, I have a feeling that one middle eastern businessman is going to have a 4-inch diamond Where the Wilde Warts Are!

That's the beep for now. Kisses! Give my best to the toilet bowl the next time you purge.

Beep!
Ed Shepp

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Less Hate, More Mercy

2007-01-14T01:17:00.000-05:00

Well, another weekend comes to a close and, of course, I have diarrhea. Does anything more need to be said about that?

Let's go over the days.

Friday was all about Pseu Braun. She was in a bad mood and was projecting it all on to me. I was telling her about my friend Parshan, and how we would go to bars where he would then flirt heavily with unconventionally attractive people and then we'd both go home. And I would say to him, "Why aren't you going to go home with that guy? You seemed to really like each other." But then Parshan would say he was kidding the whole time. I told Pseu that I thought he was embarrassed to like someone unconventionally attractive, and was not going home with him because he didn't want me to see it. (You know, how sometimes someone does it for you, but you're with friends, and they don't think ze's cute, so you pretend you don't either?) And I even reiterated my philosophy: whatever does it for you does it for you, and you should follow your own desires irregardlessly of what others think. Then Pseu loosed her bomb: You're a cock block. That's what she told me. A cock block! Imagine!

I told her that I am certainly no cock block; that it was my friend's insecurity that kept him from hooking up, not me. Yet she still continued to pour blame all over me like vitriol glaze, saying that I should have been "supportive" of my friend, saying thing like, "You go, girl! You go get some! Hellz fizzuck yeah! Uh-huh! I'm goin this way, and you're going that way, to the boom boom room! Hellz yeah!" And I'm like, Wingapo?! What, I have to coddle people? Ludicrous. I mean, I'll be supportive, but come on, I only cheerlead for $1,000 an hour, and usually that's for Asian businessmen.

But that's not all! I was also telling Psue about this new book I'd seen called The Science of Orgasm. As I ungastan it, the book says that you can have all kinds of different orgasms--brain scans have revealed that just touching some parts of the body can elicit orgasm. And that people who are paralyzed below the waist can also experience orgasm--I had no idea. Well, Pseu said to me: Duh, I've always known that. And I was like, Why didn't you tell me? And she's like, I didn't want to have an uncomfortable conversation. And I'm like, We're having the conversation right now, and I'm not uncomfortable. I just couldn't believe that she would have this kind of information and not share it. Isn't that the type of information you share with people? "Hey, check it out: you can have an orgasm just by being touched." That's the kind of thing I would want people to know. I guess I'm just more righteous than Pseu Braun. Hmmph.

Later, I was discussing the whole cock block thing with my roommate, who remembered one time when a friend of his did a mercy fuck. And I was like, What a good deed! A mercy fuck! So I'm calling for 2007 to be all about mercy fucks. Less hatefucking, more mercy fucking. Everyone go out and do one mercy fuck this year. And no, that does not include me, because we all know that I have been celibate for some time (yes, voluntarily) and intend to remain so. I'm righteous, you know, which is exactly why I should be the person to head up this movement. Everyone spread the word and the clap.

Lastly, an audio moment. I'm getting addicted to this having-audio-to-post-with-entries; it's awesome. So today's offering is this little thing I read in Black Book magazine. I think it's excerpts from a story called The Lonely Doll. Click here for the file. And remember Dead Palestinian Girl, that piece by Mark Baratelli that I recorded my slam version of? Well, here are Mark's versions: #1 and #2.

And that's the beep for now, gzooplets.

Beep!
Ed Shepp

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