The Ed of Shepp

An Open Letter to V and Madonna

edsheppsounds@gmail.com — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 23:49:00 GMT

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

FROM BRUN POTATIS TO CHOKLAD PAPEGOJA: DESPERATELY SEEKING STOCKHOLM’S SWEET STICKY CENTER - AN ORANGE BRIEF FROM THE SWEDISH AMERICAN FUTURIMAGINEERING INSTITUT

edsheppsounds@gmail.com — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 01:12:00 GMT

(Click through to read the original post of this on WFMU's Beware of the Blog)

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.

Sounds of Stockholm

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.
Bodeskapet Enkehus: 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 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.

Valentoonce

edsheppsounds@gmail.com — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 01:31:00 GMT

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

The Shepp-Blumberg Audio Consortium's 2008 Holiday Message

edsheppsounds@gmail.com — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 01:31:00 GMT

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

Blip!

edsheppsounds@gmail.com — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 16:51:00 GMT

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

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

edsheppsounds@gmail.com — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 01:36:00 GMT

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 Madonna Within EP (post)

edsheppsounds@gmail.com — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 15:40:00 GMT

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

edsheppsounds@gmail.com — Thu, 29 May 2008 01:57:00 GMT

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...

edsheppsounds@gmail.com — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 03:50:00 GMT

Tonight's episode. Behold...

Beep.
Ed Shepp

This Week in Ed Shepp on the Web

edsheppsounds@gmail.com — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 05:35:00 GMT

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.

edsheppsounds@gmail.com — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 02:53:00 GMT

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

edsheppsounds@gmail.com — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 05:35:00 GMT

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

edsheppsounds@gmail.com — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 05:34:00 GMT

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

edsheppsounds@gmail.com — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 05:35:00 GMT

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

edsheppsounds@gmail.com — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 03:20:00 GMT

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