The Ed of Shepp

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The Madonna Within EP (post)

		Sunday, 01 June 08 - 10:40 AM (GMT -05:00) By Ed Shepp in General

 

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 click 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 Isla 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

		Wednesday, 28 May 08 - 08:57 PM (GMT -05:00) By Ed Shepp in General

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.

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...

		Friday, 21 March 08 - 10:50 PM (GMT -05:00) By Ed Shepp in General

 

Tonight's episode. Behold...

Beep.
Ed Shepp

This Week in Ed Shepp on the Web

		Tuesday, 29 January 08 - 12:35 AM (GMT -05:00) By Ed Shepp in General

 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

Snapshots of a Mount Dora Christmas.

		Tuesday, 08 January 08 - 09:53 PM (GMT -05:00) By Ed Shepp in General

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

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

		Saturday, 15 December 07 - 12:35 AM (GMT -05:00) By Ed Shepp in General

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

A Very Ed Shepp Christmas 2007

		Monday, 03 December 07 - 12:34 AM (GMT -05:00) By Ed Shepp in General

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:

 

Lessons from American Royalty

		Thursday, 29 November 07 - 12:35 AM (GMT -05:00) By Ed Shepp in General

 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

Ween 2007

		Monday, 05 November 07 - 10:20 PM (GMT -05:00) By Ed Shepp in General

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