I love Lyrics Borns' new album.

It's called Later That Day... and I've only had it for a couple of weeks, but I'm ready to say it's my favorite album of the year, although because I've been so broke I've only heard a dozen or so of this year's new albums. Even so, Later That Day... is a truly original hiphop record, and nearly flawless from beginning to end, and I just can't stop listening to it, so I'm ready to say it's the best. And now, a track by track breakdown of what I love so much

1. Dream Sequence (Intro) - A quick sonic collage of (mostly) spoken-word material from various vinyl sources. It's held together by the concept of a recurring alarm clock buzz and heavenly chorus, giving the impression of repeatedly hitting the snooze button as barely coherent flashes of the last night's REM activity run through your head.

2. Bad Dreams - The first of several minor-key downtempo numbers dwelling on themes of frustration and depression. There's a strong autobiographical feel to these songs, hardly a new thing in rap, but it's seldom that the listener is invited to empathize or sympathize with the MC. Lyrics Born, and a few others, have made a point of speaking from a personal perspective that won't neccesarily be shared by their audience and instead of filling their first-person musings with unbelievable boasts and braggadoccio treating the vocal booth as a confessional booth. Continuing the 'wakeup time' theme from the intro, the alarm clock noise returns at the end of this track. The main lyrical subject matter here is, as the title implies, LB's troubled sleep - his nightmares aren't fantastical horror-movie stuff but manifestations of feelings of helplessness and stagnation.

The opening verse explains it perfectly

"Woke up in the middle of the night
Cold sweat eyes stinging feet clinging to the bedside
Hard pressed just to get a little rest every night
Same shit can't remember last time that I slept right
This situations gotten out of control
With all the stress and confrontation I just might overload
My problems follow me to sleep at night, won't let me go
The more I hide the more they thrive deep down inside of my soul."

Despite the morbid subject matter, though, LB makes a rolling synth-funk bassline the center of the song's structure, alternately augmenting it with Joyo Velarde's gorgeous singing, his own sing-songy rap vocals and DJ D-Sharp's funky scratch acrobatics.

3. Rise & Shine - A continuation of the previous mood, and with as the third song in a row to be about getting up in the morning (or failing to do so) we're threatened with the possibility of a concept album. Joyo's vocals are more central here, singing both intro chorus and bridge. LB lowers his voice to a stage whisper and begins for the first time on the album begins his trademark double and triple-speed emceeing style. This serves (along with the relatively subdued musical setting) to draw the listener in on his verses - I actually find myself leaning forward to try and catch more of what he's saying, and I almost always listen to music on headphones. At about 4:15, though, he starts to move more to a sung than rapped approach and at the same time slows down his delivery enough and refers to classic vocalese scat to rachet up the tension still further. The song ends on an unresolved chord (I think), which makes what comes up next such a relief.


4. Callin' Out - Finally, Lyrics Born lightens up a bit! The tempo picks up, keys change from minor to major, and the menace of the plucked basses and muted horns sampled on earlier songs gives way to a little slapping and chicken scratching. Lyrically, it's just a fancy version of your basic old-school party jam. He doesn't actually say "Throw your hands in the air like you just don't care." but he might as well. Joyo Velarde appears again, this time sounding almost like Sarah Vaughn or Gloria Gaynor in that big, brassy diva way. Say, this is looking like a duet record more than a solo project, isn't it?

5. U Ass Bank - A skit featuring LB checking his account balance and finding out he's broke from the rudest computerized phone voice in history.

6. Cold Call (feat. Gift Of Gab) - His good mood ruined by the discovery that he has no fucking money, LB calls his old buddy and collaborator Gift of Gab from Blackalicious. They commiserate a little bit, but can't really get their conversation on because telemarketers keep breaking into their call. Finally one of them, "Gertrude Werner" outgabs Gift and ends up sending him some unspeciffied merchandise by literally never taking no for an answer. Hilarious stuff for those of us who've put in time in our nations sleazy telephone boilerrooms or for those who've been on the other end of the predictive dialer. What's especially great about this track is that GoG and LB rap their parts in such a low-key and conversational matter that at first you don't realize they're rapping at all. In fact, I've read a couple of online reviews that suggest they aren't rapping. These people are idiots, though. Joyo's on here, too.

7. Interlude - A very short sample of some entertainer (Isaac Hayes, maybe) complaining that life as a music star isn't as glamourous or sexy as most folks might imagine.

8. Stop Complaining (feat. Tommy Guerrero) - Lyrics Born complains, first about taxes, then about critics who blame pop culture for all the ills of the world. More dope scratching from D-Sharp and singing from Joyo Velarde.

9. Do That There (feat. Cut Chemist) - Chemist one of two producers and DJs in Jurassic 5, so appropriately, instead of the disco influence that dominates most of the rest of the record, this track has much more of an old skool hiphop vibe. On the second verse, LB goes nuts in his fantastical storytelling litany of people and places he visits. It's like the worlds longest, funkiest tongue twister. Joyo's still here, but featured less prominently.

10. Before and After - Back to the downer. Beginning acapella (except for some crickets in the background) LB starts by regretting a foolish love affair, then as spooky, heavily echoed synth atmospherics sound in he describes it's magical beginnings, lets the beat ride for a few measures and talks about the mounting trouble signs and finally chronicles the emotional states he went through that led him to break it off. No Joyo, interestingly.

11. Last Trumpet (feat. Lateef The Truthspeaker) - Latyrx returns! The token political song, this one builds from near minimalism at the beginning (just a cymbal and a couple of keyboard bass notes) to a raging orchestral climax, including polyphonic choirs (with Joyo, yet again), tympani, cuica, synthesized horn section, and progressively elevating vocal approaches from the rappers that go from intimate, conversational stage whisper to bellowing full-chested roars. The "O Fortuna!" of hiphop.

12. Pack Up - A straightahead Bronx boom-bap beat with a stuttering blues guitar riff (probably courtesy the pitch-shifted Jimi Hendrix song that provides the intro.) The simplicity of this track relative to the mostly ornate and multilayered sound of the rest of the album makes it stand out, as well as the way that LB takes a minute off from the deep thoughts and just rips it with fierce old-skool bragga shit. It could almost be a Big Daddy Kane track. For only the second musical track on the album, no Joyo.

13. Hott Bizness - This is my JAM! Deeply funky and with straightahead battle lyrics (cont. from "Pack Up") but this time outrageously complex and multilayered. From bar to bar LB not only stacks polysyllabic rhyme after polysyllabic rhyme, but he changes his vocal approach over and over to the point that it almost sounds like different MCs coming in every few seconds. An example of why I love the lyrics here.

"Soul yodelin' overloadin' the court
Audience explodin' blowin' up the auditorium
Ignorin' city ordinance, body parts showin'
But it's normal though, par for the course for Lyrics Born
Your father'd have a cardiac arrest in his cardigan vest
If he saw how his daughter gets when she's partyin' jest
Like New Orleans at Mardis Gras or Rio at Carnaval
Y'all don't believe me? Naw, it's all of the above.
Pour out a little more on the corner
For all the funk we've lost in the art form
I'm at war with y'all
Recording artists making horrible songs
Crack your porcelain jaw
Now come on and sing the chorus for us."

More Joyo on the hook. Seriously, why isn't her name on the album same as LBs?

14. Love Me So Bad (feat. Joyo Velarde) - Oh, NOW you give her a little credit. Well, it's about time, and it's a great song, a reggae-inflected love ballad about the confusion that comes from a new love affair with someone carrying all kinds of torches and baggage. I've read that LB and Joyo are a couple in real life. Hmmm...

15. One Session (feat. The Altered Egos) - The token lame posse cut. Well, I like the name "Altered Egos" anyway. This track and the skits are the only reason I use the fast forward button while listening to this album. Joyo sings hooks here, too, but I just can't get worked up about it. Actually, the beat's not bad, and LBs verses are okay, but his guests are very dull.

16. Nightro - A sonic collage much like the "Dream Sequence" intro, presumably meant to bookend the album and make it cohere. The snippets here are generally about folks trying to end their evening in a nice way - or about finishing a long delayed project. Not hard to figure out what's on his mind here.

17. Hello - I've always found it very peculiar that people place bonus tracks after the 'end' of an album on brand new releases. That conceptual oddity aside, though, this is a nice way to finish out the record. Joyo takes a more important role on here again, cheerfully chirping while LB gets his pep-talk on, obviously trying to end on a high note so the whole package doesn't function as an overall bringdown. Which I certainly appreciate, since I have enough crap running through my own life. It's great that he's not afraid to put his demons out there on wax, and I'm pleased to get some second-hand commisseration from him, but what I really need is to improve my mood. And overall, this album has been doing the job splendidly, not least because it ends in such a chipper fashion.

Anyway, everybody buy this record so LB will be encouraged to make more like it!

Christ, I just looked at my archives, and now I see that I posted the same entry twice yesterday, about an hour and a half apart. The reason for this is, of course, that I barely know what I'm doing. I'll do my best to prevent this from happening again in the future.

Okay, so today I'll publish a little progress report on my classes. Today's class - sculpture with Margo Sawyer.

Our assignment (the second of the semester's three) is pretty straightforward: revise and extend your first sculpture project, only this time make extensive, in fact primary, use of steel as your medium. This was actually less of a stretch for me than for some other students, because a great deal of my first project had been done in steel, so rather than simply try to duplicate my previous work in a different size or multiple iterations or make it more complex or whatever, I decided to use the principles I was working with from the beginning and take them in a more ambitious direction. So, for this to be made as clear as I can make it, I should backtrack to that first assignment.

The first assignment we were given by Margot was to create a piece of sculpture using some kind of 'system' (a remarkably vague word, I thought, and probably deliberately so) as an inspiration and theoretical basis. I chose anatomy, in particular skeletons and muscles as my system. My idea was to rig up a gear and lever arrangement that would cause an 'elbow' to flex. I built the arm's skeleton out of two lengths of steel rod joined by a hinge, which I made myself from square tube, rod, and a tap-and-die process. The steel rod 'bones' were attached to the handmade hinge by bent wire for strength and epoxy for steadiness. The coop duh grays however, was the arrangement I came up with to simulate muscle. I wanted two springs that would compress and stretch in opposition, just as a bicep and tricep do, and I wanted them to take their impetus for movement from the same source. In other words, I wanted a single motion on the part of the viewer (this was to be an interactive as well as mechanical sculpture) to create two opposite forces. To accomplish this, I hit on the idea of using a pair of rags for the springs. When a cloth is twisted, its length becomes progressively sorter until the torsion of the curling fabric begins to force it into looped shapes, further reducing the overall length of the cloth. You've probably seen this when wringing out wet washcloths, or in some similar activity. My stroke of genius was, if you twist two rags in opposite directions, and rig them to turn in the same direction, one will be reduced in length at the same time the other increases. Attach them to opposite sides of the 'elbow' hinge described above, and voila! You have a mechanism that will bend and straighten the joint. Now, this didn't come off entirely successfully. I used a bicycle chain and gears to accomplish the simultaneous rotation, but didn't center the gears properly and didn't place the chain under sufficient tension, so it had a bad habit of coming loose when cranked. Furthermore, the screw-eyes I used to attach the twisted cloths to the gears were not attached securely enough to torque the cloth, but rather the tension of the cloth threatened to unscrew the screw-eye from it's moorings. Nevertheless, I learned a lot about working with mechanical systems and what kind of force different joining methods can withstand.

So, I applied my new knowledge to my current project, due for critique in about a week and a half (Nov. 11.) For this piece, I kept the idea of using twisted cloth as a mechanical force but discarded the notion of manipulating any kind of lever with it. Instead, I want to use the tension of the cloth to distort the shape of a piece of sheet metal. This may seem at first blush to be a difficult task, but I feel certain the cloth is up to it. For one thing, the piece of sheet I wish to bend is quite thin and therefore flimsy - it's only 26 gauge thickness. For another, I'm not going to have to worry about loose moorings for my gears this time. I've welded (or will weld soon) every component into parts that will move as one. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The first step was to build a frame. This I made out of 3/4 inch square steel tube in the dimensions 16 inches by 16 inches by 24 inches. Attached to one of the 16x16 faces is a crossbar of 1 inch square steel tube. I welded all of this together with an oxyacetylene torch It is quite strong, easily supporting my weight (about 230 lbs.) Next, I drilled 9/32 inch holes in center of the crossbar and in the centers of the 16 inch steel tubes on the face opposite it. Then I took a 36 inch length of 3/8 16 threaded rod and cut it into four 7 inch and one 8 inch lengths. These I bored out on the inside end with a 9/64 bit to accommodate the screw-eyes. Finally (so far) I tap and died a thread into the holes drilled in the square steel tubing to match the threaded rod. I also have 3.25 inch long rods ready to weld to outside ends of the 3/8 inch threaded rod, to act as handles. All that remains to be done is to weld the handles and screw-eyes to the twisting rods, attach the screw eyes to the cloths, attach the cloths to the sheetmetal (I have a set of bolts ready for this purpose), and begin turning those handles!

I'll let you know how it goes.

So, I'm officially a blogger now. Hopefully this will light a fire under my ass to actually write on a daily basis and under my own impetus, rather than just barely carrying on a conversation. Lord knows I could use the discipline, as I'm nearly bereft of self-motivation right now. I suppose that reading Leonard's Ludickid.com blog is the main thing that spurred me to take the plunge. He's an extremely funny and productive guy, and while he's smart as a whip I think the thing that really seperates his excellence from my suckitude is my do-nothing way of dealing with the world. He's one of the only bloggers I've seen who bothers to use his online journal as primarily an outlet for creative writing as opposed to a litany of mundane personal anecdotes or political ranting. Not that I have anything against either of those, and indeed have engaged in plenty of both in this life, but Leonard's usage seems more ambitious and it's certainly more entertaining. Now, before this debut entry slops into nothing but a drooling fan-letter to an online penpal, I guess I'd better set down some rules for myself.

1 - Write five days a week, every week. It's okay to take holidays from the blog, but treat it like a second job. A job that doesn't pay anything, but heck, you're not putting that much effort into it anyway, so why complain?

2 - Don't turn the blog into a mere whine-a-thon. It's boring, unpleasant and redundant, and while it may occassionally be cathartic to piss and moan into the internet ether, it's not likely to result in any good writing, and that's why your doing this: to write and write well.

3 - It's okay to post record and video reviews here. I don't have any paying outlet for this stuff, and film and music are important to me, so it'll be good practice to put that stuff in the blog. Same goes for comics, 'real' books, and art shows. Who knows? Maybe I'll become incisive and well-spoken enough on these subjects to make a little loot from it someday. It's a long shot, sure, but I'm reasonably smart and some folks who make loot from such pursuits don't seem to be.

4 - Don't make that the ONLY thing this blog is about. Austin, you're going to need to sharpen up other kinds of skills as well, so autobiographical stuff or fiction writing excercizes or political rants or whatever are going to be not only permitted but encouraged. Just try not to embarass yourself too much - this is a public blog, after all.

5 - Have fun. Be faithful to your task, but don't dread it. You don't have to please anyone but yourself here, so it's not like class, where your work is going to be critiqued and graded. The critiques and grades will (probably) inevitably come of course, this being a public blog, but they won't really matter unless you decide they matter.

So, I'm officially a blogger now. Hopefully this will light a fire under my ass to actually write on a daily basis and under my own impetus, rather than just barely carrying on a conversation. Lord knows I could use the discipline, as I'm nearly bereft of self-motivation right now. I suppose that reading Leonard's Ludickid.com blog is the main thing that spurred me to take the plunge. He's an extremely funny and productive guy, and while he's smart as a whip I think the thing that really seperates his excellence from my suckitude is my do-nothing way of dealing with the world. He's one of the only bloggers I've seen who bothers to use his online journal as primarily an outlet for creative writing as opposed to a litany of mundane personal anecdotes or political ranting. Not that I have anything against either of those, and indeed have engaged in plenty of both in this life, but Leonard's usage seems more ambitious and it's certainly more entertaining. Now, before this debut entry slops into nothing but a drooling fan-letter to an online penpal, I guess I'd better set down some rules for myself.

1 - Write five days a week, every week. It's okay to take holidays from the blog, but treat it like a second job. A job that doesn't pay anything, but heck, you're not putting that much effort into it anyway, so why complain?

2 - Don't turn the blog into a mere whine-a-thon. It's boring, unpleasant and redundant, and while it may occassionally be cathartic to piss and moan into the internet ether, it's not likely to result in any good writing, and that's why your doing this: to write and write well.

3 - It's okay to post record and video reviews here. I don't have any paying outlet for this stuff, and film and music are important to me, so it'll be good practice to put that stuff in the blog. Same goes for comics, 'real' books, and art shows. Who knows? Maybe I'll become incisive and well-spoken enough on these subjects to make a little loot from it someday. It's a long shot, sure, but I'm reasonably smart and some folks who make loot from such pursuits don't seem to be.

4 - Don't make that the ONLY thing this blog is about. Austin, you're going to need to sharpen up other kinds of skills as well, so autobiographical stuff or fiction writing excercizes or political rants or whatever are going to be not only permitted but encouraged. Just try not to embarass yourself too much - this is a public blog, after all.

5 - Have fun. Be faithful to your task, but don't dread it. You don't have to please anyone but yourself here, so it's not like class, where your work is going to be critiqued and graded. The critiques and grades will (probably) inevitably come of course, this being a public blog, but they won't really matter unless I want them too.