(Spring 2007)

In February of last year, I was approached by Albert Cook to write the score for a zombie movie he had been filming. The project had started out as a simple trailer for one of his film classes at the University of Colorado, but he had decided to see the project through, and by the time I became involved, it had ballooned into a 48-minute near-feature-length behemoth.

I was delighted to have an opportunity to write some action/adventure/suspense film music since I hadn’t really done too much of that. Little did I know the project would require me to write, in addition to the dramatic underscore, a death metal song, a country song, a punk-rock song, theme songs for both a news show and cowboy show, and yes, even a one-minute opera to be performed by Styrofoam packing peanuts. (Now there’s something you probably have never seen before!)

All in all, I composed about 30 tracks of music for the film, and have since compiled a soundtrack album which is available for listening at Last.fm and SoundClick.com.

Some of the tracks on the album are:

• Zombie Blood Chaos – this is the theme of the film, although it only appears in its entirety on the DVD menu. My brother Luke Banta improvised the vocals for this track, and I cobbled the song together out of his shoutings. Matt Beckemeyer laid down the guitar tracks and, in the process, helped pen some of the licks.
• 

  Packing Peanuts Sing the Transformation Opera

  Zombie Girl – this one was written by Sam Cooper, and also features Sam on vocals, guitar, bass, and drums. Thanks are due to Jeremy Averitt who let us use the equipment in his basement to record all the tracks. All told, the song was conceived, written, performed, recorded, mixed and mastered over a period of about four hours while Sam was in town for a day.

• Zombie Party – this dance track was done by Chris Stibrany.

Other people who helped me out on this huge project were Shenandoah Davis, who sang the soprano part for the Transformation Opera; Aaron DiVesta, who laid down some saxophone and flute on a couple of cues; Josh Moore, who was the drummer on a couple tracks; Jocelyn Holst, who let me borrow her equipment while I was recording the live instruments and vocals; and my dad, Bob, who let me take over his basement while I was making all this noise.

The film debuted in June, 2007 on campus at the University of Colorado, and later appeared at the 2008 Backseat Film Festival in Philidelphia, PA, winning an award for Best Drinking Movie.

Listen @ SoundClick.com – The Film’s MySpace Page

Last year, though, was incredible. For me. It was interesting to go back and read some of my old posts while the Red Sox were winning their first (recent) championship. I think it’s pretty clear that my pleasure was mostly vicarious. Hell yeah I had a great time, but it was mostly derived from being amidst so many tortured Boston fans who were going nuts. The Sox were never “my team.” I’m a Colorado sports fan through and through. But the Rockies sucked goat nards at that point.

That’s why last baseball season was so special. No, the Rox didn’t go all the way, but they did vastly outstrip everyone’s expectations. And they gave us something to cheer about into October. Beards were grown; beer was consumed; voodoo dolls were stabbed. And, being one of the Rockies faithful, I got to be one of the genuinely exuberant fans this time around, while others got to ride my wave. I like to think me and a few other Rox diehards put on a good show.

The best part of the whole experience was going to game 4 of the NLCS at Coors Field, you know, the one where they clinched the pennant. I’ve often, in conversation, characterized it in one or both of the following ways: “the best night of my life,” or “like winning the lotto 5 times in a row.” Let me break it down for you. We bought the tickets for a modest playoff-ticket price, without knowing what the circumstances of the series would be at that point. Game 4 seemed like a logical choice, since the fourth game is almost always pivotal in some way. Little did we know that the Rox would complete the sweep in this game and clinch the NL pennant. Even more little did we know, we had been assigned the best seats ever. Or at least, the best playoff seats I could ever hope to afford on my starving-artist budget.

Best. Seats. Ever.

We arrived at the game early to catch some b.p. and get settled. We were assigned row 6, so we figured we would be pretty close to the field. As it turned out.. well I like to call them “Bartman seats.” If there had been a pop foul hit to right field, we could have snatched it right out of Moises Alou’s glove. If he were playing in that game. Which he wasn’t. But you get the idea. One of our great pleasures that evening was watching the people around us file in, see their seats right on the field, and shout, “No effing way!” just as we had done when we first came in.

When the game began, the left fielder and player nearest to us on the visiting team was Eric Byrnes, a former Rockie who had recently earned the title of most hated Diamondback in Denver by saying things in a press conference like, “I also don’t think the Rockies have outplayed us, because they haven’t. Not even close. They’ve had a little luck go their way.” My favorite part about the whole ordeal was that he was completely right. But just because something is true doesn’t mean you should say it. (“You’re fat!” “Did you know that your head isn’t perfectly round?” “You spent three years on that? It sounds like the Olympic hockey team skating around on a giant chalkboard!” etc.) Basically all he accomplished was to give us some great fodder for screaming and heckling him the whole game. A couple of my favorites: “They’re not booing you, they’re saying Boo-yrnes!” and, from my brother, “Hey Byrnes, your show is worse than Frank TV!” (if you watched any of the NL playoffs on TBS you would know why this is funny). About a week later when, as a member of the broadcast team during the pregame of the first World Series game in Boston, Eric Byrnes said “I don’t want to get booed out of another city,” we laughed; we like to think we had a little something to do with that.

When the Rockies were out in the field, the player nearest us was Matt Holliday, one of the most beloved figures of the playoff run in Denver, and an NL MVP candidate. Holliday would go on to hit two bombs in the game and be chosen the MVP of the series. We had plenty of stuff to shout at him too, including (being the practical-minded fans that we are) chants of “Sign-with-us!” And, of course, Matty signed with the Rox again in the offseason, so we like to think we had a little something to do with that, too.

The crucial inning turned out to be the fourth. The Rox were down 0-1 at that point, with two out and runners at second and third. Rookie Franklin Morales had pitched a very solid 4 innings to that point, but Clint Hurdle decided they needed to get those runs in, so he sent recent call-up Seth Smith to the plate, who, since he had been added to the roster, didn’t seem to know how not to get a hit. The guy that was seated in front of us didn’t seem to think this was such a hot idea. We reassured his that Smith would come through, but the guy still didn’t seem convinced. Well, a bloop double, an error, a hit and a Matt Holliday 3-run home run later, the Rox had put a 6-spot up on the board, and our new friend turned around to us and said, “I owe you guys some beers.” Hell yeah.

Basically from that point forward, the D-Backs (or D-Bags as we called them all night, affectionately) were all but buried, and so we just yelled ourselves hoarse and enjoyed every moment as the historic evening played itself out, and the Rox captured the first ever Major League pennant in Colorado baseball history.

When the game ended, a large mass of people came out of the left field tunnel for the ensuing celebration. A few network cameramen rushed out of the tunnel and proceeded to train their news cameras directly on us in the stands! We gave them what they wanted by shouting into the lens for about 30 seconds. When they finally averted the cameras and walked away, my brother looked at me and said, “Dude, we were so just on television.” This was later confirmed by a few people who had been watching the game at home.

Jarodd Belton the Mighty

The night continued with running down the streets of Denver pounding on the hoods of cars, and then poking our heads into a few bars. I should mention that with my disgusting Todd Helton goatee that had been growing since the beginning of the streak, and my worn Rockies cap that I have had since their 1993 inaugural season, there may actually have been a few people in Denver that night who were drunk enough to mistake me for the real Todd Helton. Hard to say really. Nonetheless, it was a great time. It’s hard to top the unity that arises in a city from a big sports victory.

Anyway, the proverbial lottery winning would wrap up a few days later with the Boston Red Sox rounding out the other half of the World Series matchup. That is basically the matchup that I had been proclaiming would be my dream World Series, and it, too, came to pass. However, to truly have been my dream series, it would have needed to at least go five or six games. We knew the Sox had the better team, but we stuck by our Rox, because stranger things have happened (*cough*NYGiants*cough*). They just couldn’t muster a single victory in the Fall Classic, and the glorious 4th game of the NLCS that we had attended would prove to be the last game they won last season. Still, after the initial disappointment in their World Series showing wore off, it was hard to be too upset by a season that had shattered all our expectations, and given us so much excitement.

So that’s the story of my NLCS experience, recorded for posterity. Definitely one to tell the grandkids someday. It seems that there are so few days like that, where for an instant, it seems like all the stars align to truly give you a moment to remember and cherish forever. This was definitely one of those times. For me.

I had a whole different point that I wanted to make about baseball that I never got to, because I got sidetracked and now this post is too long. But I will type that one up soon, so stay tuned!

As you can see, I have a new location for my blog. I’ve been floundering about without an internet home ever since the sad failure of the gep-blog idea. But I’ve found some excellent free hosting by the people at WordPress.com, who I love by the way, and am using my glorious 3 GB of space to resurrect my old blog. The weird part is they won’t host media files unless you pay, so all of my music is (hopefully not too) irritatingly liked offsite to SoundClick and other places. So, you can still listen to everthing for free, they’re just not all conveniently hosted at the same location.

I still think gep was a great idea, so if any of you old gep people want an account on here and the ability to post things, I’m all for that. Just let me know. I’m just glad that this is a more permanent location, so if I accidentally don’t post for, say, a year, it’ll still be waiting for me when I get back. I’m just hoping it doesn’t become a festering cesspool of spam like the last one did. We’ll see.

Speaking of which, I haven’t posted a blog in nearly a year, so I have lots of new stuff to share. It should be good times adding all that stuff.. hopefully you’ll check in from time to time!

Also, you will note in the sidebar that my brother and I have started a webcomic. I have no idea how regularly we will update it, or how long we will be able to keep making it, but we really wanted to make use of his uncanny talent to add hilarious dialogue to pictures. Right now we are brainstorming good titles for it. Anyone have any good ideas? Please post comments with good ideas! If we get some good ones maybe I’ll have a vote or something.

Well people, It’s great to have a home on the web again! I’ll be seeing you around this general area at some point or points in the near to distant future.

To me, our president’s main job is as a symbol of the American populace. He has a bunch of advisors to tell him or her what to do regarding policy. So basically, I’d just like to have a president who represents the American people well. I’d like him or her to be charismatic and sound intelligent. And I’d like it if he or she didn’t piss a lot of people off when they said things.

We have a lot of work to do to repair our image in the eyes of the rest of the world. It seems like they regard us as lazy, fat, and stupid by comparison. Well never fear, because today I was squeezing into a pair of jeans, and I thought of the easiest, simplest way to fix this problem.

See, the problem isn’t me, and the fact that I’ve gotten fatter. The problem is the pants. I could totally still fit in the same size pants I wore in high school if those size pants were just a little bigger!

Let me be a little more specific. The problem lies at the Bureau of Standards, where we need to think about updating our units to the 21st century. The trouble isn’t that Americans are fat, it’s that our inch is too short. We take inflation into account when it comes to things like the economy, why shouldn’t this principle apply also to our measurements?

And here’s the beauty part: nobody has to know! We’ve been refusing to adopt the metric system for a reason, people. We can make our inch just a little bit longer, our pound a little heavier, but keep all the conversions the same. This way, by our English System units, we will slim down, while the rest of the world stays exactly the same. This means an immediate boost to our national reputation! And without any extra effort on the part of our people.

Well hopefully our next president and his or her advisors will take this idea into consideration. Because really there are very few drawbacks that I can think of. Just guys, when you’re measuring your “length” use the centimeter side.

One such logical fallacy that I found interesting is the “slippery slope” argument. A classic and recent example of just such an argument has been applied to the concept of gay marriage. “If we allow people of the same sex to get married,” the reasoning goes, “then we are relaxing our moral standards and our definitions of marriage. Before long, our standards will continue to lapse to the point where people will be marrying the duck from the pond down the street, or their shiny new plasma TV, or the abstract concept of whimsy.”

When I first heard this concept, I must say I was rather convinced. I mean, it is only natural that, if everyone knew that gay people were being allowed to marry, they would want to marry their favorite dog or tree or chair. I know I would marry all kinds of stuff if it were legal and would earn me a tax break. Provided of course that there was love.

However, today I am wiser for having read about the holes in this logic. The explanation was pretty technical, but here is the way I understand it.

Say, for the sake of argument, that you allow yourself to be convinced by this “slippery” argument that same-sex marriage is bad for our society, and you go ahead and allow them to ban it. That’s fine; it doesn’t really affect you, whatever. A few months pass. Now they come out with a new, similar argument, for why they should also ban man-woman marriages. This seems a little weird, and it means that you can’t get married, but the logic seems sound, so ok. Let’s ban it. Next they go after sex. And then what? Hugs? Handshakes? Friendship? Pretty soon you can’t talk to people on the street! A little while after that, you’re not allowed to even look at another person! Can you imagine trying to buy groceries without looking at anybody? I sure can’t!

So when you think about it in these terms, slippery slope arguments are a pretty severe problem. In fact, if you’re allowing yourself to be persuaded by this sort of reasoning, you’re actually contributing to the extinction of the American populace. We need sex in order to procreate and sustain our citizenry! Do you want that on your conscience? I know I don’t! And that’s only one example of what you’re contributing to.

Hopefully I’ve impressed upon you the importance of being able to identify these problematic arguments, and that next time you hear such an argument, you’ll be able to identify it and further, understand how it is trying to destroy the fabric of our society by snowballing out of control. Thank you for reading.

Oh yes, and for those who are wondering what tautology means, well, every single statement is tautological, unless it’s not.

The NY Sun also publishes all of their puzzles online, so anybody who is interested in giving it a try can do so.

It should be available sometime this morning at the following URL:
http://www.nysun.com/crosswords/subscriber_puzzle.php

or can be downloaded for use with the free Across Lite software at
http://www.nysun.com/crosswords/puzzle_dir/archive_dir/nys070129.puz

Well good luck to you all. Let me know what you think if you get a chance to try it

I am currently a member of an indie-folk-rock band called The Body Electric (MySpace page). A little while ago, we released our 2nd EP, and it has been met with very positive feedback. It was recorded and mastered by world-class audio technicians at Rokbox Analog Fidelity in Boulder, CO, and we are very pleased with how it turned out. It is available for free sampling at several intarweb sites, listed below, so if anyone is interested in checking it out, please do so! We have been selling the EP at shows and it is also available as an mp3 album at SoundClick.com.

Last.fm
Garageband.com
SoundClick.com

It’s been a great experience being part of the local indie scene. I’ve considered myself to be a musician for much of my life, which for the most part has entailed trying to create music for myself; that is to say, as a creative outlet, to keep me from going insane. It’s a whole different world trying to make the leap to having music be your trade, however, because now, in my case, I still try to pour my heart and soul into everything I create, but at the same time, I can only sit back and hope that my creations will somehow speak to others with even a fraction of the profundity that I feel when dreaming them up.

This is why it’s such a wonderful thing to see people out there supporting us in our endeavors. On the one hand, we’re all a bunch of starving artists, more or less fresh out of college, and so every bit of support we receive goes so far to helping us be able to go on with what we’re doing. At the same time, the support tells us that what we’re doing is reaching people on some level, and in the end, that is what most makes the effort to put on shows and create new music worthwhile.

So all in all, it’s hard not to feel encouraged about the direction we are headed as a band, and the direction I am headed personally as a growing musician. It’s still so early on in the process, and it’s impossible to say what the future holds, but I hope to be able to continue making music and touching people for years to come.

Thank you so much for every bit of your support through the years.

I recently sold my first crossword to the New York Sun. I’ll definitely make a post when it gets close to publication time so everyone can try it! It’s a Monday so it shouldn’t be too tough.

Anyway, to celebrate, I’m gonna post up a few of my first fill attempts just for some solving fun for anyone that wants to try them. I was learning while doing these, so they’re not the highest quality, but they might still be fun to do.

So I’ll start out with the first one I submitted to the LA Times. I wasn’t really expecting for it to get picked up because the theme is a little specialized.. and it was rejected for precisely that reason. Some of you blog folks might definitely get a kick out of it though.

All That Jazz – Across Lite Format – PDF Format

For the Across Lite version, you’ll need this free download, which will allow you to work the puzzle on your computer. Alternatively, you can download and print the PDF version for a pencil/paper version.

Enjoy!

At McDonald’s, you can buy a hamburger for 89¢, a cheeseburger for 99¢, and a double cheeseburger for $1.

Using some serious math that I’m not going to explain because you won’t understand it, this works out to 10¢ for a slice of cheese, 88¢ for a bun + ketchup + 2 soggy pickle slices and some minced onion, and 1¢ for a beef patty.

This should make you wonder about some things.

EDIT (3/13/06): Never mind. This educational game pretty well explained everything to me that I wanted to know.

Interestingly, I felt like I should add a disclaimer after that paragraph about how I’m not a generally morbid person. It just makes you wonder about living in a culture where stuff like dying and pooping— that everybody does, mind you— isn’t supposed to be talked about for whatever reason. I think there is, in fact, a great deal to be learned by examining these topics.

Anyhow, rather than discussing my beliefs and what weird metaphysical awesome place you end up to make you feel better about dying and all that philosophical junk that just leads to religions and arguments, I’d like to talk about what happens to you after you die here on Earth. Besides rotting. I don’t really feel like talking about rotting because there’s plenty of that going on in my refrigerator and it’s frankly sort of disgusting.

I have been rather fortunate in my dealings with people to have not lost anyone to whom I was very close over the first long portion of my life. I find it rather understandable that the people who lose family members and best friends when they’re in the process of growing up would have a lot of very sticky psychological issues to resolve. I think I can definitively say that even as recently as 2 or 3 years ago I was in no shape so deal with such a life-altering occurrence. Fortunately, I never had to find out just what a difficult process it would have been.

This said, in the last year I did lose two persons, with whom I was fairly close for rather disparate reasons. In the interest of preserving their memory in the way that is most meaningful to me, I will talk about their respective legacies, now that I am at least a few months removed from their passing and I can level-headedly compare and contrast my own memories with the newspaper clippings and memorial services.

Shadows of Samantha Spady

Not too long ago, a very smart man wrote a very smart book. The name of the man is Orson Scott Card, and the name of the book is Speaker For The Dead. The idea that inspired Card to write the book was that of speakers who travelled about and spoke about people after they died. The speaker’s job, however, was not to eulogize, but instead to discover and tell the truth to the best of their ability, no matter how painful. Now I first read this book when I was in middle school I believe, so I found it mostly boring. However, I’m quite glad that I did, because given the events of the last year, it’s nice to know that someone else thought of this before I ever did.

As I said before, Samantha Spady’s death was college-related. For those of you who have been to college recently, you may have surmised what this implies. She died of alcohol poisoning after a long night of partying, at the age of 19.

For the uninitiated, here is the way that college works these days. Parents send their kids off to live in a place (where parents aren’t) for rather extended periods of time. For many of these kids, this is the first time that this has ever really happened; so, as you may expect, they don’t really know how to deal with it. What ensues is a several year period where the kids act in a very kid-like fashion. I don’t want to say “stupid” … well ok, I do. They act stupid. Now as a parent or friend of such a person, more or less all you can do is be a good influence and hope that they make it out okay on the other side. Understand that for every you there are several hundred stupid-acting kids telling them to do exactly the opposite of whatever you tell them. So you don’t give up giving them advice, you just realize that it’s going to take them a little while to sort out the good advice from the bad, and stabilize themselves. In any case, most of the kids come out of this little phase and make it to adulthood just fine. Unfortunately, a few don’t. Sam happened to be one of the unlucky ones.

Any student death tends to be highly publicized, and even more so with someone as popular and well-liked as Sam. It’s probably not difficult to imagine, based on what I have said so far, that there was quite the media blitzkrieg after her death. I actually didn’t find out about it until about a week later, because I was in the process of moving to Boston at the time, and had no internet access or TV. Much had been written by the time I sat in Berklee’s media center those long hours, wading through article after article, trying to piece together what exactly had happened.

It is a surreal, surreal experience reading about someone you knew in the news like that. It’s weird seeing their life encapsulated in a few short paragraphs. I think the thing that makes it the most weird is that the person about whom is being written is not the person you knew. Or I should say, it is about the person you knew, but it has been heavily edited and carefully worded to the point that it no longer resembles them that much. And as I was reading all that stuff I knew that to the majority of people, this is Sam’s legacy. This is what they know about her; in fact, all they know about her. And it’s not her.

The first wave of press about the event included all of the positive things people had to say about what a wonderful person she was. “Almost perfect.” “Never made a mistake.” Typical responses to any sort of personal tragedy. The next thing that happened were that some investigative reporters got turned loose to try and do a bit of dragging her name through the mud. Trying to make her look like a wild party girl and get a different and more interesting angle on the story. Then came the rush of anger from the first-wave people, tempers flared, letters were written, and it got ugly.

I think it ends up this way with a lot of problems when you get a lot of people involved. You get people on one side, and you get people on the other side, and they’re too busy fighting to see that the solution is somewhere in the middle. The first-wave people weren’t talking about Sam, and the second-wave people definitely weren’t talking about Sam, the real Sam was somewhere in the middle. And interestingly, the people who realized this weren’t really part of any waves, most likely because their story wasn’t nearly as interesting to people who, without the help of waves to tell them what to think, probably wouldn’t have cared that much.

In any case, in the time that has passed, Sam has become an acronym, a week, a foundation, and a concert, among other things. In short she’s been sainted, turned into a sort of martyr for the cause of student alcohol education and awareness. Not that I don’t think that this is a worthy cause. I’m just not sure that if you had asked her, she would have told you that she wanted to be remembered for the way she died. It’s probably much more use to everyone who knew her to remember who she really was and how she lived.

This is what Orson Scott Card knew that I didn’t in middle school. The eulogies and newspaper clippings and concerts and foundations are not the person. It is wholly unsatisfying to remember them as these shadows of the person you once knew. It is much more useful to have someone try to capture the essence of what that person was. It’s more important to know the truth, so you aren’t left to wonder. It’s more important for someone to try to replicate the Samness of Sam, so that you can say, yes, that is her. Now people can know.

A bit longer ago, there was another very talented man, who made a very interesting painting…

[I've decided to split this up in at least 3 parts, since it has gotten very long and is taking me a while to finish writing the subsequent chunks. Part 2 should be done in a couple weeks. Maybe.]