I’m about to head out for a quick jaunt in the blizzard, which I saw referred to today (on Twitter) as snowpocalypse, snomageddon, and snOMG. According to Weather Channel, it could all turn to freezing rain shortly, which would be a bummer.

Snow is supposed to return on Tuesday, the night of Trey at 930 Club. A Galactic gig was canceled at 930 tonight. I hope Trey gig doesn’t get hosed too.

In the spirit of all this, I tried to dig up Trey Anastasio’s “A Case of Ice and Snow” on Grooveshark. No dice. I did find this undated live Oysterhead recording, where Les Claypool pulls out references to “Jerry was a Race Car Driver” and “Reba.”

In the spirit of homecoming, here’s U2′s A Sort of Homecoming. Sounding good. I may have to download that whole record soon.

“Once I pieced all that together, I realized that it’s all human-based: Every bit of our music is human music, for humans, by humans,” he says. “One of the ways I could test whether I was right…[would be] to make music for another species based on their vocabulary. Let’s find out what triggers their emotions, the kinds of sounds they respond to.”

Free time was in tight supply today, but I did manage to make it out on the town.

I need to get back to some musical microblogging soon. This morning I thought it might be fun to try an all bass creation.

Blending syncopated Latin beats with elements of jazz and African rhythms, Brown produced a sound that also derived directly from the music of African American churches. The inspiration led Brown to slow down the up-tempo of disco, which was popular during this period. “I just cut the beat in half,” he says. And to compete with the DJs, who were able to keep people on the dance floor continuously, Brown ignored the traditional stops in a set and began dropping percussion interludes between songs, twining them together so that there were no breaks. He called his new music go-go, “because it goes and goes,” he says.

There’s material in that story for a much longer post, but I don’t  have the energy.

Elsewhere on the topic of go-go, there was a lively thread last night over at Balloon Juice on the best in 1970s funk. Someone nominated this one from Trouble Funk.

• Lawn Boy

• A really, really nice raincoat. This immediately came in handy, as the weather in Washington got very soggy this afternoon.

I also recorded (on the iPhone) some microblogging rudiments. There was some guest sneezing on the track.

Two items this evening.

• That interview with Andy Partridge may or may not send me on an XTC Bender. I’ve just imported “Nonsuch” into my iTunes collection. There’s a record I listened to quite a bit back in college, and here, courtesy of Chalkhills, is probably all you’ll ever need to know about it.

• I’ve been seriously neglecting my musical microblogging. Part of that is that I can’t hook up my MBox to the computer because of operating system issues. This evening, however, I went ahead and put together something. First, I recorded about a minute’s worth of Washington Metro sounds. Then I fooled around a bit with GarageBand. The bass track in here is an Apple loop, by the way. I wish I could play bass like that.

I heard it was you,
Talking ’bout a world where all is free.
It just couldn’t be,
and only a fool would say that.

- Steely Dan

That was the first song that popped up on my iPod yesterday morning, and it fit perfectly with a few reflections I’d been having on last weekend. The 9/12 right wing demonstrations have been pretty well picked over by now, and there’s part of me that’s reluctant to pay much more attention to that crowd, but here’s my view on it for the record.

FBdN son #1 and I set out on Saturday morning for the U.S. Botanic Garden, a lovely spot right near the Capitol Building. I had forgotten the demonstrations were even happening until I saw, from the bus window, a couple of sign-bearers headed for the White House. Then our bus, which normally would have gone down Pennsylvania Avenue, was forced to detour.

We ended up over by Union Station, so we got off and walked over toward the lawn in front of the Capitol. That meant we had to cross the street, right through the parade. Right into the path of the crazies.

We made it past the parade and into the botanic garden, a haven. For anyone who hasn’t been there, I recommend it. It’s an extraordinary building, and like a lot of things in Washington, it’s free. Some of the wingers had figured this out – a few were straggling in to use the very clean and well-maintained restroom. I saw two even strolling around, taking in the flora. Maybe they needed a break from chanting about socialism.

Now FBdN son #1 and I had some business to take care of: playing trucks in the very clean and well-maintained gardens behind the greenhouse. But our haven was upset by all the yelling and bullshit coming from the serious sound system.

One speaker was some sort of activist from Louisville, KY. I guess she’s got a band, because they busted into a song, ‘The U.S.S. of A,’ warning of impending socialism here in the U.S. (government’s going to take over your churches, etc.) She sounded like a bizarro Grace Slick.

I’m with mpomy on this one – I think all of the yelling about socialism is just cover for racism and other ugliness. Communism is dead, practically. And socialism? That’s just stupid. Look at the top 10 ranked countries for doing business, according to the World Bank, and you’ll find such well known socialist hellholes as Canada, Denmark, and Norway. Weighing in at number five, right behind the United States, is the United Kingdom. How they managed that with their system of universal health coverage is anyone’s guess.

So at best these people are just dumb. I wonder what they think when they ride the Metro? That maybe private enterprise would have done it better?

Conservative Protesters on the Metro, September 12, 2009

I also grabbed a photo of a couple of protesters eating lunch at the excellent Cascade Cafe inside the National Gallery of Art, a government-run museum where the price of admission is zip. You still have to pay for lunch, so I suppose it’s not a world where all is free.

Tea Partiers Enjoying a Quiet Lunch at the National Gallery of Art

Finally, I took a quick a video of the right wing protests from the Mall. Down towards the Washington Monument was the National Black Family Reunion. Quite a contrast to what was going on down by the Capitol.

Couple of bits and pieces this evening.

• As the picture shows, there was some serious precipitation in the greater Washington metro area today. At around 4pm, I had a chance to just sit in my mother-in-law’s garden, under a canopy, and listen to the rainfall and thunder for about 10 or 15 minutes. I know that sounds new age, but it was very pleasant. FBdN son #2, under the age of one, was there with me, and he slept like a baby. It’s too bad I didn’t have my iPhone with me, because it would have made some nice recording, perhaps to be woven into a tune like MPomy did with this one.

• Before it started raining, I happed upon my neighbor working on the treebox in front of his house. He had some headphones on, and he was stone cold singing outloud while he worked. Nice. I’m a bit of an expressive listener with the headphones on (the other day I busted myself air drumming some fills to, what else, “Tom Sawyer” on the Metro), so I’m glad to see someone else get into music publicly.

• For anyone interested, I put my iMovie project (of plane coming up to the gate) into the Box.net widget. I think I have a general idea of the sound I want for the original score.