The joy of playing trills in obscurity 

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I still think Beethoven's Diabelli Variations are the greatest and funniest diss tracks of all time.

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Giuseppe Verdi’s Don Carlos, or Joe Green’s Mr. Carlos

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It's weird how academic music writers describe passages as 'schizophrenic' when it's just a shitty flute solo. 

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Someone once corrected my pronunciation of 'Bach', using that hocking phlegm sound and looking into my eyes the same way my old cat did when I accidentally caught him taking a shit. 

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Favorite Pinball Machines: Twilight Zone, Medieval Madness, Jaws, Indiana Jones (William 1993), Funhouse, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Godzilla. I dreamed growing up to one day buy a Twilight Zone, probably my only material goal; still have that dream on a good day. Currently obsessed with the new Jaws premium since it's my favorite movie. I like pinball because I don't think about anything else while playing; the same feeling when playing super fast piano stufff. Like I said to Beethoven when we went to the exotic pet show: "Hey Ludwig, the exotic pet show, it's like a game of pinball: I feel like I don't know where my Balls are going, I just know I always lose in the end." 

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Two important things I learned about writing music came from watching Jaws all the time as a kid: 1) Don't show the shark too much and too soon. 2) If you're creating a giant open musical landscape, you need to put something in the foreground at least once to give it scale. "Will you go to the end of the pulpit, please? I need something in the foreground to give it some scale."

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I wish I had a rich benefactor who wanted musical filth of the highest quality. 

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My favorite note is a wrong one played with confidence. Then just Houdini that shit

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In middle school I had six or seven Rage Against the Machines t-shirts. My sister even made me one of those 90s college hats but it read RAGE and under the line Rage Against the Machine in smaller font. I saw them live when I was 13 and remember being thrown really high in the air by a bunch of people with a giant blanket/parachute thing during Killing in the Name. Great memory. ​​

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If I was in an orchestra, I'd play the oboe/English horn part from Seal's Kiss from a Rose during tuning and intermission.

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The big mental illness outreach orgs stress 'recovery' and it's mostly bullshit for those with severe mental illness. I was asked to stop speaking for one because I didn't actually have a 'support team,' instead speaking about daily management and finding meaning/humor in a lifelong struggle.

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When depressed, I imagine the late English actor James Mason at my rural local Walmart customer service counter returning a faulty leaf-blower.

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“Paul, I know you said Bach was a great composer, but I have a friend at school who said Willie Nelson is the greatest composer ever... and my friend plays drums with jazz brushes.” - student, 7 years old

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There’s a place where I lived that sold music instruments and guns. I so wanted to look at the pistols and ask how much for this here flute.​

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I have a psychotic disorder but I don't think I'm mentally ill or divorced from reality. I live in a country of staggering levels of socio-economic inequality, all currently controlled by a criminal class of corporate and political sociopaths, celebrities who do credit card commercials and see themselves rebellious wearing a silly outfit to the Met gala. 

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May we leave this place knowing we are good, knowing we are loved, and knowing we are not alone. 

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I like how intentionally dumb and trite Mozart can be at times for the sake of the whole composition and also the audience. I also like how he wrote music with poop and sex jokes and was a better musician than all of us.

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I once honored the cat that saved my life with a cat music video mashup of Khia's 'my neck, my back' , Franz Liszt's 'Totentanz/Dance of Death', added visual fx and dedicated/sent it to a former professor that abused animals. 
 

Remember in It's a Wonderful Life when George wasn't born, so Mary ended up being a librarian. With Glasses. And it was suppose to be all sad. It would have been amazing if Clarence the angel said, "I'm sorry, George. You weren't there to save Mary from a life love of reading and fostering literacy in the community."

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I want to write an essay on modernist composers obsessed with [0146] all-interval tetrachords and show how some tried so desperately to avoid allusions to blues/popular music in their works, even though 0146 is imbedded in the blues scale. My favorite is when the attempt goes too far and they break away from a developed, formulated compositional scheme and the music and focus kinda falls apart. You don’t fool me, scaredy britches. Trifling. 

 

My music dream is to write a version of The Aristocrats joke for narrator and orchestra. Use cheap virtual instruments and play it at an open mic in town.

 

Just so you know, play Beastie Boys’ Sabotage vocals around 1/4 speed and it syncs well with Barber’s Adagio for Strings.

 

I get frustrated with life and whisper to myself "The world is not enough, getting and spending..." then remember that's not what Wordsworth wrote, that's just the title of that 90s James Bond movie I never saw. 

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I just can’t quit you, Arnold Schoenberg. I don’t even like listening to you most of the time and you’re still one of my favorite composers. I find it difficult listening to others without also considering them through your prism. I discovered, through you, that I don’t have to necessarily enjoy something/someone to consider them good.

 

Sometimes it doesn’t get any better than Wagner operas, before the singing starts.

 

The cover for Billy Joel's album of solo piano music looks like a score published by Schirmer, but I think it would’ve been cooler and funnier going universal edition all lower case and traumatized post-World War 2 style.

 

Remembering when old tv sitcoms shortened their opening credits for later seasons/reruns for the extra 15 seconds of commercial revenue. Remember how the Full House theme awkwardly cuts from mid verse to the ahhhhh transition to chorus? 'Yeeeeeah, I do, too' - Marky Mark. Sometimes I just put on my c-pap mask and pretend to be Marky Mark hoping to audition for the role of Bane in Dark Knight Rises but messing up lines saying stuff like "Nobody cared who I was until I put on zuh Gud Vibwations" Makes life better. 

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I have fun occasionally updating composer essays/letters to everyday speech like people do with the bible. I first started Arnold Schoenberg's 'In Memoriam to Mahler' but written in the style of Samuel L Jackson's Jules from Pulp Fiction. I hope to someday make a book of this stuff with different characters. 

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"It was a dark and stormy night, and Whole Foods was playing The Wildflowers' 'One Headlight'...."

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Most modern country singers sound like they hired the dialect coach from the Cold Mountain movie. I’ve never heard that accent in the wild. 

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a decade later and I still can't figure out how to permanently delete the silly U2 album that came with the apple phone. It just keeps coming back, help

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I want to be T-1000, but also with gaseous metal, not just liquid. 

 

Listening to Sublime's 'What I Got' and weighing the pros and cons of after singing “I can play the guitar like a mutha fuckin' riot” he instead just played something shitty.

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Whoa it’s Charles Ives on tv uh no it’s just a Hobby Lobby commercial with some old guy talking about celebrating the true spirit of Christmas.

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Sometimes I just sit around and think about all possibilities for the secret chord that David pleased the Lord with. I once told that to a psychiatrist and he said 'any will do', but then said he personally thought my music sounded bad, was cheaply recorded, and quite unrelatable, like I was trying to push people away.

 

I miss watching music videos with burning trash cans.

 

I always seem to confuse Brahms, Karl Marx, and God from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

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