10:50am on Saturday, just woke up from the longest sleep I've had in two weeks, and I walk out into my front room. I like the way the inset bookshelves along the east wall are filled to the brim on one side by Greg's extensive movie collection, even if I never have any desire to watch "Rock 'Em, Sock 'Em Hockey" or the third season of "Friends" (to be fair that one belongs to his girlfriend), and on the other side by my personal choices of the "best of the best" of my library. Clearly the shelf isn't close to being big enough to house every book I own, but there's enough space for a few dozen, so I picked carefully.

Don't get the wrong idea -- I'm not a character from a Martin Amis novel who has to carefully consider what he displays in his lodgings out of a desire to subliminally charm and woo women. Other than Greg's girlfriend and my sister, women don't come to this house all too often. No, I made the decisions I did because I sit in this front room a lot, maybe more than I sit in my room, because lately I've taken a liking to sunlight and open windows, and trying to organize that in my room is a logistical nightmare due to the placing of my furniture. So I sit out here, on our glorious couches, and I like to let my eyes wander over the titles and remember what I was doing when I first read this or that book; why I bought it; who gave it to me or suggested the author. If I come across something out of place, something I don't read anymore or am embarrassed to ever have owned, it interrupts my reverie, kills my buzz as it were. So I'm meticulous.

Four prevalent themes stand out: music, philosophy, science fiction and classical literature. The Victorian-era classics I'll admit I mostly ignore -- reading Anthony Trollope or the Bronte sisters once is kind of enough for me. I don't deny their talent with words, and I do enjoy some of their works, but generally speaking I simply can't identify with their characters. They're either desperately poor beggars and street urchins, or else they're fabulously wealthy and live in cottages in the countryside and their time is spent determining suitable husbands and wives for one another's children. That's not a narrative conflict, that's a tea party in the Hamptons. Sorry, not for me. Highlighted memory: reading Robert Johnson while lying on a couch at my place at Yonge and Sheppard with last night's rum still running strong through my veins, desperately trying to prepare myself for an examination in a class I'd attended maybe a half-dozen times throughout the year. Everytime I fell asleep I dreamed I was Robinson Crusoe, stuck on an island entirely populated by U of T graduate students. It was the most horrible dream I've ever had.

The rest of the classic stuff is historically important, so I include it. I've got everything from Alghieri's Divine Comedy to Tolstoy's War and Peace, and I've read all of them at least once (except for the aforementioned War and Peace which I'm still trying to get through after ten years of chipping away at it). Mark Twain might be one of my favourite writers ever -- I need to buy more of his stuff, because at the moment I've only got his seminal works. Man, what a smart guy. There's a cat who knew the beauty in simplicity, in honesty, in telling a true story (even if it wasn't true). But I digress. Highlighted memory: I was first introduced to Dante Alghieri by an old friend of mine who fancied himself a poet, and once upon a time he was one. We were standing in Chapters in Newmarket and he asked if I'd ever read Inferno. When I said no, he immediately bought me the entire set. I read it in a week and it changed the way I thought about narrative poetry forever, and would later help to inspire my stage play.

The philosophy stuff is where people start accusing me of doing the Charles Highway "literature-makes-me-look-cool" trip. But the fact of the matter is, to be frank, I took as many philosophy courses in university that my degree requirements would allow. I know on some level it's all bullshit, because it's all a circular argument with no answer, but the hell with it -- I'm foremost a rhetoretician, so bullshit is more or less what I do, and I have nothing but the greatest respect for writers who can twist the words of an opponent's argument to suit their own purposes. Also, some of these guys had really interesting ideas about the world and the existential questions that preoccupy me most days. Kierkegaard's knights of infinite resignation and of faith spring to mind; the idea that you must believe beyond your capacity to believe in something in order for it to be true or virtuous; Kant suggests something similar in his theories on morality. One of my favourite thinkers is still Friedrich Nietzsche, because he made one of the simplest, most beautiful statements regarding his own writing I've ever seen of a writer: "Vademectum, vadetectum." From The Gay Science, it's Latin. Translation: "Follow me, follow yourself." He wasn't taking credit for his ideas; he was acknowledging them as universal truths to be discovered by everyone. That is at once the most humble and most arrogant assertion I can imagine, and I love that crazy old eugenecist for it. Highlighted memory: Christmas, 1998, we were having a friendly get-together at Kym's parents' house, and in the interest of fairness and frugality Kym instituted a Secret Santa policy. My "secret" benefactor was another old writer friend who kindly thought to get me a copy of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. I was fourteen that year, and the first time I read it all the way through it blew my mind and changed the way I looked at life. I read it for a second time ten years later, and it blew my mind again.

Ah, science fiction, perhaps my oldest literary friend. As a child I had my head crammed in books all the time, and because my public, social life was so stilted and misformed, I sank further and further into fantasy worlds, usually built in this or that imagined futuristic universe. My favourite was the galaxy as it was envisioned by Gene Roddenberry in Star Trek, but as I grew older my tastes in science fiction grew far past that single imagining and embraced other, more complex takes on humanity's progress. My current bookshelf is stocked with the three heavywights of "hard" science fiction -- Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. This is not Star Trek or Star Wars folks, this is serious science fiction -- take Asimov's Foundation series, which deals with the concept of psychohistorics, in which prevailing social trends viewed over a period of time and as though they were the expressions of a single organism, can be used to predict upcoming prevailing social trends or macrocosmic actions -- in essence, a scientifically-provable way to tell the future. Heady stuff, man, and not for the Luke Skywalker or Captain Kirk circuit (though I'm not knocking either of those immortal characters). Sci-fi isn't really in my lexicon anymore these days as I focus more and more on existential prose and music, but I still like to go back and read Childhood's End or Starship Troopers now and again. Highlighted memory: my dad introduced me to Clarke when he got tired of hearing me drone on about this week's episode of The Next Generation. I read Childhood's End for the first time when I was still a little too young to understand the implications of what Clarke was trying to say with his story, but it hit me years later when I realized just how much modern science fiction has aped off his ideas.

I know I make a big deal out of music -- and it is a big deal, don't get me wrong, maybe the biggest deal in my whole life. I love music; I love to perform, and the more I do, the happier I am. But at the end of the day, when everyone has gone to bed and the guitar gets put back on its stand, I will go back to my inset bookshelf and visit with the friends who have been with me since I was old enough to delve into their world. I'm a writer, first and foremost, and writers will always be the artists to whom I feel closest. I'll never read everything I want to read in this life -- human history has advanced to the point where I could read eighteen hours a day, every day for the rest of my life, to the exclusion of all else, and not even scratch the surface of what's been recorded by people in history and what continues to be recorded to this day, and sometimes that bothers me. But at least I can pull any book off any shelf every day for the rest of my life, and bask in the words for a little while. It's the words that matter, you know. It's always been the words that matter.

Thanks for reading, as always.

Musicus Updatus

Apologies all around for the lack of recent blog activity; my day job has seen me editing and updating everyone else's blogs to the detriment of my own, and I've been busy with my own projects as well. That's sort of the point of this post.

I know the last post I made was light on content and heavy on self-plugging, so I'm going to try and fill in some of the blanks I've missed recently. Of the personal projects I'm at liberty to talk about right now (there are more coming that I can't really discuss until they're ready to go), the music stuff has been top of the list. Those of you who know me and follow my online activity are aware that I recorded a rough demo of original songs under the name Alexander James at the end of 2008, entitled The Yonge Street Sessions, with my good friend and sometime producer Adam Grant. The recording quality wasn't great; we recorded vocals and guitar on a single track through my little board and into Garage Band, so we couldn't really do much in post and unfortunately the only mic I own (a gift from my ad-hoc P.R. agent Maggie Chu) is fine for live performances but isn't terribly suited to high-definition recording. However, the point of recording the demo was to send a big chunk of my best original work to the Songwriter's Association of Canada for registry (to copyright my work with a reputable organization, so in the event someone else steals it and makes a fortune, I can sue for rights and presumably win), so I was happy with the final product for that reason. The Yonge Street Sessions has been distributed to friends and family for word-of-mouth proliferation and as a thank you to their continued support of my music, and the feedback I've been getting has been largely very positive, despite the shaky sound quality.

I've mentioned before that I work in advertising (sort of), and as a result a lot of the people I work with are talented artists of all stripes, many of whom are musicians or at least music afficionados. Circulating TYSS around the office has led to a number of new musical opportunities, one of which was realized this week. Our company's resident sound engineer, Aaron DeGroot, is only in his early twenties, and already he's an extremely talented music producer with a real ear for detail and a passion for creating extremely high-quality work on a very small budget. TYSS reached his desk and he expressed interest in doing some work with me, especially because the downturn in the economy has led to a deficit of hours at our day job (read: he's bored and wants a project). On Tuesday of last week we got together at the studio he operates out of his home and re-recorded two of my favourite tracks from the demo that hadn't turned out as well as I'd hoped, namely Year Long Day and State I'm In.

I have worked on multimedia projects with Aaron in the past and I already knew we worked well together, but I was pleasantly surprised to note that, despite coming from very different musical backgrounds, we shared the same vision for the production of these two songs. State I'm In is a roots blues-rock number I had originally envisioned as being played with a full band, but given that most of my shows are played solo and acoustic, I had to tool the song to that effect. For the new recording I borrowed Aaron's electric and threw down some fills in addition to the acoustic rhythm, and thanks to the glory of multi-track recording, the track turned out great.

I'm told by friends who dig what I do that Year Long Day is probably going to end up being the "single", so I agonized some over what to do with it. I ended up keeping it essentially as it was, but recorded some harmonies to include on key points of the song. Unfortunately, my inexperience with multitrack resulted in my accidentally upping the tempo, changing the song from an alt-folk ballad into what one friend termed "a lost Barenaked Ladies track"; also, while the harmonies worked technically, it sounds very strange to loop my own voice over itself. As a result, YLD is still a work in progress, but despite its nitpicky problems, I still rather like the way it turned out.

The truly cool part about working with Aaron was that I found it very natural. I am not an experienced studio musician (probably 95% of everything I've done has been live) but Aaron made it very easy to learn about the process. It's going to take some work on my part and just time and experience in general, but I'm very excited to learn more about how to actually MAKE music and not just come up with and play songs. His advice on composition was also very helpful -- he made prescient points without being overbearing, and from what I understand that can be a rare commodity working with independent producers. I was honoured to work with such a talented guy; I don't know if he has anything resembling an online portfolio for his work, but once I get some links together I'm going to post them here. You should definitely check him out.

And I would be remiss if I didn't mention the support and input of my good friend Randy Burlton, who originally showed up to watch a soccer match and wound up making some great suggestions on both tracks. And he carried the beer.

If you happen to be interested, you can hear the new versions of both songs at my Myspace music page. For some reason, Blogger has issues with embedding Myspace URLs, so here it is again:

www.myspace.com/alexanderjamesmusiconline

So that's part one.

Part two of the music projects actually has its roots in an unusual, six-degrees-of-separation kind of friendship that is already several years old. Back in 2005 I was living with a close friend and her fiancee, who introduced me not only to the aforementioned Adam Grant but also to another buddy of his, a talented guitar player from Port Perry called Sean May. The first time I hung out with this guy I had no idea he was a musician, but I was struck by his off-beat sense of humour and his acute musical knowledge. We hit it off and eventually it came out that we both played guitar.

I was far from being a disciplined player at the time, but when I heard Sean play for the first time I realized it wouldn't have mattered -- the cat is a killer musician who would have blown me out of the water even if I was at the top of my game. We started jamming together whenever he was in town, usually for a party or get together hosted by Adam, and eventually it became a bit of a tradition that people would ask us to play this-or-that song while we were fooling around.

A year or so went by with he and I playing more and more regularly at parties, and by this time the idea of forming an official two-man acoustic band with the aptly nicknamed Guitar Sean (I knew a lot of Seans at the time and had to differentiate between them somehow) was beginning to surge to the forefront of my interests. Sean introduced me to a genre of music with which I was unfamiliar -- in some circles it's called filk, though I prefer the term Sean and I have since coined: nerd folk. It's exactly what it sounds like -- folk-oriented music whose lyrical content is in some way influenced by what a lot of people would call nerd culture: science fiction, fantasy, gaming and the like. I wouldn't identify myself as a classic nerd (though I have interest in some nerd topics), but Sean definitely fits the mould -- the only thing keeping that boy from taping his glasses and wearing a pocket protector is the fact that when he plays guitar it's like audial sex.

At any rate, after some discussion we decided to make the band official and dedicate ourselves to developing a unique style based on the nerd-folk premise, so to that end I came up with the somewhat obvious name "Nerds With Guitars" (mostly because I thought the abbreviation N.W.G. was a cute homage to early rap artists N.W.A. because we're basically their polar opposites). The name stuck, and before long the parties at Adam's started to morph into pseudo-concerts featuring "Guitar Sean" and "Big Al" (a nickname I picked up due to some serious weight gain around the same time). We developed a small word-of-mouth following that has been steadily growing since then.

To date, almost all of our recorded work has been cover-based, though we do try to put our own spin on the cover songs we play. More recently we have finally found time to start writing our own material, based on the original premise of nerd-folk. Believe it or not there's a huge subgenre of people that are really into this style of music, but sticking strictly to nerd topics isn't quite enough for Sean and I. The result of our efforts is turning Nerds With Guitars into a filk-ish outfit with a healthy dollop of guitar comedy (the likes of which can be seen in artists like Stephen Lynch or Flight of the Conchords, two of our major influences). The combination of nerd-folk and guitar comedy opens doors for us that would otherwise be closed -- "regular" musicians would be out of place playing at a comedy club or comic convention, but we'll fit right in. With Sean planning a move to Toronto this year, it looks like this project is finally going to start taking off, and I couldn't be more excited. Currently, N.W.G. plays monthly at Adam's "what month is it and what excuse can we come up with" house parties, but as we're working on original material we hope to start playing out and about in the coming months.

Once again, if you're interested, you can check out some of our stuff at the other Myspace page:

www.myspace.com/nerdswithguitars

Everything up right now is live and as recent as February 2009, and while most of it is pretty standard cover fare, if you listen closely you can see where the humour comes in. Like I said, there's really a lot of stuff coming down the pipe in the next couple of months with this project, so hopefully I'll have more to report soon.

If you've read this far, you deserve a medal. In a lot of ways this was just a really extended link-whore post, but honestly, this is where my heart and soul have been going the last few months, and where they're likely going to stay for the next while, so I felt it deserved some fleshing out. I'm really excited about expanding these music projects into the professional realm, and I finally feel like I'm starting to get somewhere on that front. As it stands right now, I'm keeping my eyes peeled for solo venues because Sean doesn't live here yet, so if you know of a good place to start looking or if you're aware of a like-minded band looking for an opening act, please feel free to let me know. You'll get a shout-out when the record goes platinum. No, seriously.

Thanks for reading; next time I post I'll try to write something funny or otherwise engaging. Promise.