Go check this out.
What a crazy fun summer!

Summer

It's summer. I'm in New Haven again. The problem with sporadically blogging is getting back into the swing of it. What do you say? Does anybody even read this anymore? Probably not. No problem.
I'm at Exploration Summer Programs again this summer, working as the computer guy again. This is good. So good, in fact, that I'm going to be working for them full-time starting in September. Right now I'm just one of the summer employees. So that means move to Boston (Jamaica Plain, of course), have a salary and health insurance once again, pay off some of that impending college debt, put money toward retirement. The plan is to move in to a house full of musicians in a neighborhood full of musicians with musicians and record more albums and generally be a better musician in my non-computer-guy time. Then I want to bike across the country. Interested? In two or three years? Give me a call. Or email.
I got a new laptop. This is a real boon for me, because it's the first time since early in the France experience that I've been able to keep all my thoughts/music/data in one place, which means that things like blogging and recording music and taking photos and what-have-you are much easier. Its keyboard lights up in the dark. It makes me happy.
So yes, Boston. Music. Computers. What you would have guessed if you were guessing, basically.

Update

I've added translation features to the blog. This is basically the funniest thing ever. Check the sidebar.

Minnesota, Chicago, Whatever

I'm in Minnesota now. You know, hanging out with Anna, seeing all of my newly dumbfounded recent-grad friends, in addition to the old-school graduates who've been dumbfounded for a year or two now. I'm gradually re-accumulating my stuff, so that I can put it all in one place for once in my life. I found my classical guitar and all of my cool music books here in a closet. Sweet. Minnesota is nice, in the way it's always been. The trick is not to be fooled when you visit during the warm months into thinking that the climate is livable. Because it's not. It's the arctic circle.
There's a radio station here in the Twin Cities that is rockin'. It's an NPR station, but it plays cool and new, generally hip (if not often rockin' to the max) music. Go check it out, because you're wasting time anyway, and you know it. Among the recent few bands they've played (off the web site): Spoon, Sly and the Family Stone, and Thievery Corporation. That's not bad for a radio station. Plus they do a webcast. Go listen. I'm going to submit my stuff once I've got it in totally awesome CD format for them to sufficiently digest.
By the way, stop and ask yourself, "Self, am I sufficiently pimping Donald's CD to my family and friends?" If the answer is no, your horoscope will start telling you bad things. It's written in the stars, bitches.

Y'all should check out Esther's Blog. Especially if you know her. Actually, you should really only check it out if you know her, or want to know her, because it's like this one: news for people who cared before they got here. And if you don't write anything for long enough, even those people stop caring. Esther has Lyme Disease, which gives her mad street cred. And she linked my blog, so I've got to link hers. Tight, yo.

I'm going to Minnesota tomorrow. This is part of a larger trend of not being able to spend any significant hunk of time in one place, uninterrupted. I haven't been in Potsdam for longer than a week at a time, really, without having to do something like drive to Montreal/Ottawa/Toronto/Boston/Rwanda. It's not like I want to complain about it, because really it's cool that I get to do things like hang out in exotic Canadian cities, but it kind of blocks my flow, you know? Like, throws a wrench in the gears of my flow. Plugs the pipe of my flow. Thumbs its nose at my flow. That kind of thing.

I swear that one of these days I'm going to put up pictures of the guitar I'm building. Probably when it's done. My digital camera pisses me off; this probably has something to do with why I don't use it very often. You have to hold it funny and tell it you love it just to make it take a picture. And it has to like the way you framed the shot, or it turns out sepia. Fucking sepia. Gross.

Minnesota, here I come!

Some News

I'm now employed as a real-time person. Well, I will be in September, anyway. So it's off to Boston, I suppose. In other financial news, I'm back up on CosmoGIRL.com because apparently I'm good-looking and I stand to win a thousand bucks for it. You should really go and check it out. Because Anna also wins a thousand bucks if I win. That's two thousand dollars between us, all because you clicked your mouse (once a week until I win). And let's face it, if you're here and reading this, you're procrastinating anyway. Go and make me a winner!
There's something about seing two big burly truckers lounging in a pit stop on highway 401, eating burgers, and speaking French. Ah, Canada.

Lots of Time

I just realized, as I wrote the title of this post, that some people write "lot's" when they mean "lots," and that this has always bothered me.
But I digress...
It's been a while since I last wrote, I suppose. This isn't to say that I haven't been busy. Because I have. I've been building a guitar, for instance. This is like the most exciting thing ever, the concept of having something so complex and personal, and having made it myself. You always develop this rapport (pronounced rap-poor) with your guitars, and it seems like if you make the guitar yourself, you've already got your best friend there with you when you play. Plus it takes the music-geekiness to a whole new level, which can only be good. He said, as though it were inherently true.
I'll post pictures of the progress of my new guitar in due time. Right now I've got a functional but no-frets neck and a body-shaped hunk of swamp ash (that's a type of wood, people). All in due time.
I'm also about finished with the next album. In fact, you can go download all of the tracks right now if you want. That was a link. You can click on it. And then you get my new music for free. The site is http://seasac.gotdns.com/UglyByNow/latiflearned in case you want to type it in yourself. The tracks I'm giving away for free are the unmastered mixes, which, being MP3, are of a lower quality than the CD is going to be. I'm going to make a production run of the CD after I get the cover art all squared away and the final mastering (sweetening) done. Then you all can (and will!) buy it. I'll make a web page for that to make it easy on you. Independent musicians. It's more effort, but it's worth it.
Other news in my life: I'm singing (tenor) in a church choir. I fixed my bike. I bake like 6 loaves of bread a week. I work construction all day every day and it's tiring. I'm learning how to play pieces by Heitor Villa-Lobos, the Brazillian guitar composer genius. I recommend his stuff.
I'll write more frequently now. I'm in the swing of things. And it occurred to me today that I've been neglecting my friends since I got home. I'm on it.

To Clarify...

Here's the question posed to me, regarding my survey about love:

Do you feel our culture idolizes LUV and ignores reality OR did you mean that common love, i.e.: awareness of our interdependent existence, is being weakened by sex and violence in the media?

(That's Tim Weld who asked me that, by the way)

I initially wrote that I think we've got love all wrong because I just had this really bad feeling about it, and the time that feeling hit me coincided with me writing my last blog entry. Like, I was mentally processing all of the things that people have said to me about love lately, and was coming up short of a satisfying conclusion. Which would lead me to say, have we got it all wrong? Or to use Tim's vocabulary, is something getting in the way of our experience of common love (awareness of our interdependent existence)? I would say that our culture (our media, among other things) idolizes some sort of mishmash of love with other emotions or states, like attachment or commitment or sex, but is that the only problem here? I guess, Tim that I'm asking both of your questions, in an effort to get at the root of a problem that I can't articulate clearly. If that makes your response any easier.

I've been wanting to go to bed earlier and earlier the longer I'm home. I started out on a roll, capable of working all day and then doing errands and minor jobs until it was time for bed. Now, it takes me a couple of days to get anything done, if I do it at all. Because, after you work, well, you've got to eat and then shower and then eat some more and then you got an hour or two and then you start really getting tired. This is that routine I mentioned. On the one hand, I appreciate the slowing effect it has on life, but on the other, it can be disturbing to eat up a day so proficiently. Next week I paint, so I won't be so strained at the end of the day.
I don't have any new sweet music links, as I alluded that I would downstairs on this page. My computer in this house is really noisy! I can't record on it. Fortunately, Anna comes into town in three days (!) with her totally sweet computer, which I will use. That last track that I put up was recorded in New York City on my brother Ryan's laptop. It turns out that all you need is a powerbook, and everything is dandy.
The guitar I'm building is started. If anybody has the blueprints for a Fender Telecaster (69 thinline), I'd appreciate it. Sweet. I'll post pictures of the progress of that. Fascinating.
Does it ever occur to anybody out there that maybe we've got this love thing all wrong as a culture? Let me know. I'm doing a survey.

New Web Space

Life in Potsdam continues as normal. Going to the coffee house to hear acoustic guitarists sing old pop songs. Practicing my own guitar, in preparation to do the same. Working a lot. Baking bread. Making waffles. It seems like when you set up a routine, the whole point is to *not* have anything too untoward come up in your path. The problem with leading an easy (or maybe straightforward would be a better word) life is that you don't have anything about which to complain. Or, put another way, having few problems doesn't force you to think about solutions. All this is an obtuse way of saying that I've got nothing to say.
I have been at work, though! I found a new web space for my photo page. Which means that I'll be able to post more photos and such, in addition to meaning that all of my old photos that were up on the internet previously are now accessible. I still need to update the main page, though. It's http://www.freewebtown.com/donaldlatif for those of you who didn't catch that link up above. Go check it out, and confirm that it's just like you remembered it! I'm excited.
The new album's almost done. I have a feeling that my next post will have a sweet link to a whole bunch more music by me.

Back in Potsdam

I finally made it back to my hometown. The ol' permanent residence. Among the changes here: there's a new wine bar downtown. The CD store/cafe has become the CD store AND the cafe. I have an apartment in a house across the yard instead of my old bedroom. Other than that, it's pretty much like I left it. That's one of the things to love about this place. It's so calm and detached and changeless. Although Walmart's coming to steal it all away from us. People here as everywhere are all to willing to throw their money away and out of the county/state on cheap shit that they don't need or that will break. But enough about that.
I won that CosmoGIRL contest. Thanks for voting for me, for those of you who did. Now I need to win a big one, that happens in May. So come May, go out to CosmoGIRL's Web Site and vote for me every day (or as much as you can if it's more than that) until I win a thousand bucks. Come on, people. It's going to be awesome. Let's give Macalester College a name in the world of people who are socially acceptable. I'm in it for the college, really.
Presently, I'm working construction, which is great in that it's satisfying, meaningful work. It's just that you're always sore and tired, and usually hungry. But it's good, in the way an office job will never really be.
It's time to go eat lots of food.

I'm in Toronto. It's 12:30 AM. I wish that I could say that I'm doing something super-edifying, like reading poetry or writing songs. But I'm not. Not really. I'm in the final stretch of this funny online competition where I'm voted hot or not by teenage girls (see last post). Fabulous. My competitor (his name is Dawson. I mean, come on) cheats, but I've got a lot of good friends watching out for me. I'm still in the running.
I put up a new track for you all to listen to. I've got an album shaping up here. Anybody want to do cover art?
Toronto! Once apon a time, a friend (his name is Tom) and I were trying to get from Montreal to the hamlet of Potsdam, where we reside(ed?). But starting in Montreal, all of the highway signs pointed to Toronto. "Toronto, 400 million km" and the like. Toronto... Toronto... Toronto... But no United States. It's like they don't want you to find it!
But once you're here in Toronto, it's agreeable enough. My dad has a wonderful apartment in the super-nice part of town, so I feel privelaged simply by walking out of the front door. Been spending my time taking in movies, lazing about, coolin' out maxin' relaxin' all cool and all shootin' some b-ball out by the pool. There's a spa. And a gym. Boo-ya!
Thanks for votin' in this contest, to those of you who did. Congrats to Kjerstin, who's getting married!!! The first, the trend-setter. Way to go, lovely. You guys are awesome.
And that's our show for the day. As it says on the lid of the mayonnaise jar, "Keep cool. Don't freeze."

Battle of the Boys

The States, baby! Yeah! I'm back. And, actually, I'm not techincally in the States. I'm in Canada. You know, the *other* country in America the North. It took me going through Utrecht, Amsterdam, Boston, and New York to get here. Not to mention Potsdam, which is the ol' home town, through which I passed yesterday to get to Ottawa, where I am now. I'm going to Toronto on Sunday and then back to Potsdam to work like a dog and eat like a king.
Boring! Let's see... what's not boring?
First off, big fat props to friends Theo Marks and Mintje Whose Last Name I Do Not Know and Pascale LaFountain amd Ryan Greer for letting me stay in their places along the way. Without you wonderful people I would have starved and frozen and generally been uncomfortable and tired all of last week.
I made a couple of calls to the States from the Amsterdam airport and it cost me over $100. Watch out for making credit card calls anywhere at any time. You will be violated, in a quite uncomfortable way. Fortunately for me, I just found out that it wasn't $200 (!), because apparently some of the exceedingly large charges made to my card were fraudulent, which is rockin'. But not too rockin'. I'm still hurting.
Big news! I've been entered into CosmoGIRL's (a magazine for young teen girls, naturally) Battle of the Boys contest. It's like one of those hot or not contests, where you choose between two guys and decide who's hotter. But if I win, I get $1000. So on march 28, every one of you need to go to:
http://www.cosmogirl.com/guys/battleoftheboys/competitors/0,,,00.html
and vote for me, so that I win. That would be sweet in so many ways.
Anwyay, more stories will trickle out later, as always, but I wanted to put something down now that I'm home and the internet's stable.

Today worked out pretty well. We slept until around 11:00 (which is unusual for me, almost entirely unheard-of for Anna). After a breakfast of sweet condiments (jam and nutella) on toastie breads, Anna went to the gym (she signed up there a couple of days ago to combat the eventual boredom when I leave town), and I went to get emails with the computer. I sat myself in a good spot in the sun close to home and thought "wouldn't it be great if I got the internet here?" and I checked and I did! Score. So I figured out how I'm going to get back to the States, precisely. I leave in a week.
!
A week! Crazy!
And I uploaded a couple of new songs.
It was such a beautiful day we decided that we couldn't spend it indoors. We made up some chorizo sausage-and-gouda-on -baguette sandwiches, got a bottle of wine, I grabbed my guitar, and we went to sit in the park. Some wine and sandwiches later, I pulled out my guitar and I'm strumming and singing, and this group of three people about our age come over and just sort of hang around while I'm playing. This happens often, so I payed it no mind. Then they started humming, at first softly, so that I barely noticed, then louder. I offered them some wine and we sat there and I played and they sang and we drank wine. It was so warm that I was wearing sandals, and I had to take off my overshirt.
Since then, I've been sleeping. Chili for dinner and now off to a friend's to watch a movie. Worked out pretty well for a Wednesday.

Hey, this is pretty cool.
My friend Paulo put up some of the Ugly By Now stuff on a web site called ccmixer.org, where people can trade samples. Then some other guys took samples from my guitar and put them into their own tracks. There's this one and this one. I'm so flattered right now.
Also, I'm appearing, apparently, in the June/July American edition of CosmoGIRL! See if y'all can spot me.
cheers,
Donald

If you're reading this, it means that Anna and I just got back from our (just over a) week-long trip to Brussels and Venice. We can do that, you know, because we're in Europe. And you're (most likely) in the States. So there!
I'm probably glad that I'm back on a real computer, instead of an internet cafe one. I'm probably desperately trying to record a few more tracks before I lose access to the recording setup that I've got here (somebody else's computer). I'm also probably packing and mentally preparing for my return to the States, which will happen in a couple of weeks.
We probably had a wonderful time, visiting monuments you'll not see soon and eating food to which you wish you had regular access. Things like real pommes frites and Belgian beer and real Italian food from real Italians. Aah; a place where a soda is assumed to be an Italian Soda. Just like how toast here is French toast (not really) and kisses here are implied to be French as well (I haven't done any research into the matter). Beats Freedom Kisses any day of the week. But possibly not Hershey Kisses. Especially those caramel center ones that they've got.
At any rate, it's probably good to be home, even though the trip was probably really sweet and edifying and exhilarating and such. Please write, because we're probably lonely/sick of each other after a week together with nobody else. But don't write physical letters to me, because they'll get here about the moment I reach the States. If you want to write them, send them to the Potsdam address. But now I'm really getting ahead of myself, aren't I?
-Donald 02.16.2005

-Update 02.27.2005
Yes. All of what I wrote before I left is true. I would like to add that pizza in Italy is a billion times better than pizza in any other country. The trip was really great, mostly involving walking around for twelve hours a day, pausing only for local food treats (see above). Three weeks or so left in Montpellier! So begins the crazy countdown, where time loses its relativity and all of your experiences seem like a blur. Followed by culture shock on re-entry, then eventual boredom, followed by renewed desire to leave the country again. Boy, I really have a tendency to get ahead of myself these days!
-D

Assume that there is a heaven, and assume that most decent people go there when they die, like in the movie Ghost. Say you're Demi Moore and your love for your dead boyfriend has just been validated because he re-appeared to you after killing your potential murderer and then ascended to heaven. So there you are, certain that the man you love is dead, is no longer with you, just went to heaven. Furthermore, you're pretty certain that you're going to go there, because, you know, you don't covet your neighbor's wife or eat too much or anything like that. So what do you do? How do you live the rest of your life? Alone? Because you know that if you find another lover, and he goes to heaven as well, then when you get up there, there are going to be two guys who love you and they don't know each other and then what have you got?
Therefore, heaven is either a big faceless orgy, or we're already in heaven and when you die, that's it, because it would just be too complicated otherwise. Which isn't a huge loss, because how great can heaven be if you can't have sex there unless you're married? Is the main appeal of heaven the fact that there are no demons torturing you regularly and the central air works? Because I'd take no afterlife to the prospect of that one. Basically, how could heaven be any better than life here on Earth, for better or worse? Why not act as though we're already there?
Therefore we should all have more orgies. You only get one chance.

People are just locks and keys. Some people are closed up tight and they're just waiting for the right key to open them. Some locks have just one key, and there's only one copy. Some locks can be opened by just about anything; even a paperclip or a fingernail will do the trick. Some locks can't even be locked, and sometimes this causes trouble.
There are big ornate keys with jewels and gold. And there are specialized keys with six sides that open very fancy hard-to-open locks. There are plain keys about which nobody thinks twice, but that everybody has on their chain. And there are blanks that have lots of potential, but require some changing to really work. And there are master keys that seem to magically open up all of the locks on the block.
I got a new pen today, but otherwise it's been uneventful. In honor of my new pen, the digital ink stops here and I'm off to write a letter.
-D

I was talking with an acquaintance last night, whose main line of conversation was that she misses "emo people." This is what she said. After some probing, I found that this means that she misses cliques. She misses how at the lunch table in high school, everybody sat with their own group, and intermingling was kept to a minimum because in the world outside of your lunch table there is nothing to find but ridicule and possible rejection. She misses going to concerts with everybody dressing and acting and living and fucking and caring the same way. People who are "So LA" because they're always dropping names. People who wear dreadlocks and mean it, damn it!
At first, my inclination was to slap her in the head, and vacate the premises. But seeing as how the premises was largely occupied by good friends, who would most likely be disconcerted by me whacking their flat-mate and running away screaming, I decided to take the high road, and give what she was saying some thought, in an effort to possibly prolong the inevitable slappage.
It's a funny observation she made, and it's a strange, but valid, thing to miss in France. Because here, simply by being born and raised French, you undoubtedly dosubscribe to a certain set of preconceived notions. Wine is worth caring about, as is food. Strangers are to be regarded with caution. It's important that every time you leave the house, you're dressed like the mannequins in front of the stores downtown, whether it's the haute couture look or the vintage subculture look you're sporting. Everybody takes a break at lunch, and on Sunday, everything's closed down, and this is a good thing. It's called having a culture, and it's something we're missing in the States. In order to have a culture in the States, you've got to be an "emo person." Or a jock or an artist or a bohemian or a businessman or a New Yorker or whatever. You choose it and you be it, and for the while that you are it, you subscribe to it more or less fully. And you can potentially move on, change genre, if you like. Unless you're born into another culture, like, for example, your parents are immigrants and you speak a second language at home, or perhaps something less drastic, this is your option in the States. Because we don't agree on things like schedule, food, language, religion, whatever. It's a good and bad thing, because it's by nature an ambiguous thing.
But there's no real getting around being French. With rare exception, it's a culture of people who act in a certain set of ways. Which isn't to say there's not variation, especially between regions (for example, between here and Paris). But their look is just that, a look. At the bottom of that, they're still French. And we're still American. Which means we can understand your culture, and adopt it, but we'll never really own it like you do. And perhaps it's silly to miss that superficiality, but it's something that is lacking here, so it's not outright wrong to do so. It's just a little weird.
We did both agree, however, that Icelandic music is the coolest thing ever. Basically everything that comes out of Iceland is solid gold. Check it out: Bjork, Sigur Ros, Mum, the list goes on. Their government actually funds good music. When do you think our government's going to jump on that bandwagon? Four years? However long it is, it's too long. So the moral of my story is, give me some money.

Practicing to be a jazz guitarist is hard work. Duh. Lately, I've been finding that the technique is a real bastard. I admire classical musicians, and their static licks. When you encounter a hard run in a classical piece, you can rest comforted in the knowledge that you can just practice it, thousands of times a day if necessary, until you get it right. And because you're in the classical mentality, you're never going to play it absolutely perfectly and you'll suffer a career full of guilt for not being a music-producing emotion machine and you might as well just commit suicide right now, but at least you have the discrete nature of what you play. You play the black notes on the page.
But it's different for a jazz player. You have to practice and practice, sure, but, what, exactly? You have to know your standards, yeah. That doesn't take very long, and in fact, you can play songs that you've never even heard as long as they're in your book when you're on stage, or whatever. No, you just sort of have to practice for contingencies. "What if the song I'm playing has this crazy chord in it, and there I am stuck with nothing to play? What if I want to play really fast all of a sudden, and my fingers won't let me?" You just have to be prepared, and it's frustrating. I guess this is why it's best not to practice jazz alone, if you can help it. Jazz, like all other addictive habits, is best practiced in groups, in relative moderation.
Man, I gotta get somewhere where I've got musician friends. This country is in some crazy alternate music dimension where bad house and cheesy everything else reign. Well, to be fair, one can hardly blame them for making cheesy songs. Have you heard the French language?