Between the Lines

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I’ve been working on this new song for a while. After struggling with both the words and music for months, I recorded the song at home in December 2014, then brought it to Brooklyn so that brother Kurt could help me with the mix (I tend to use Logic Pro’s default settings for everything, whereas Kurt actually knows what he’s doing), and finally tweaked the relative volumes of the vocal, background vocals, and guitar by myself at home just a few days ago.

I shot the video in about 15 minutes using my black background cloth and my low-resolution Flip camcorder, and edited it with Final Cut Express yesterday.

 

Between the Lines
Words and music © 2014 J. Ochshorn

verse 1. i thought i knew a lot about you
what you’re wishing and how you move in space
where your phone is when it’s missing
from its normal resting place

verse 2. i guess it’s really not that simple
the plot’s not unraveled and much remains unsaid
like a road that’s rarely traveled
like a story half unread

chorus
(no no no) don’t make me guess
(whoa whoa whoa) what’s on your mind
i can’t find the meaning in your symbols and your signs
don’t make me read between the lines

verse 3. what’s the point of this interrogation
when nothing’s been proven with your third degree
you just seem to keep on moving
in and out of misery [chorus]

bridge
please don’t make me jump to these conclusions
or search for sense in your allusions
it’s hard for me to deal with these confusions

verse 4. so i’m looking for a point of entry
unencumbered to a different mode
show me how your password’s numbered
tell me how to break the code [chorus]

My Calculator

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My old calculator recently showed up in a Dept. of Architecture hallway exhibit of faculty “accessories”:

Here’s the text: “I’m interested in the relationship between technology and design. Increasingly, I’ve become more and more convinced that design practice and pedagogy, abstracted from contemporary technological paradigms, are complicit in an ongoing epidemic of nonstructural building failure. The calculator, which I purchased around 1988 when I first started teaching at Cornell, counters the never-ending circus of architectural expression with an attention to the real forces that impinge upon such heroic fantasies.”

Last Night Live

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Well, thirty years sure goes fast. This being the 30th anniversary of a song that I wrote in 1984 and recorded with the rock group, ROLLO, I figured a tribute of sorts was in order. So here is a new, acoustic, live version of Last Night.

See my music webpage for links to lyrics, a Soundcloud upload of the original 1980s ROLLO version of the song, and, of course, lots of other original songs (plus a few covers).

Bad news for Miami

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Miami got two pieces of bad news on July 11, 2014: on the one hand, Lebron James opted to leave the Miami Heat and return to Cleveland; on the other hand, Miami will soon be under water due to rising sea levels caused by global warming.

Only one of these two stories was deemed worthy of coverage by the NY Times.

The Guardian published a story about rising sea levels and their impact on Miami (left); the NY Times worried more about the impact of losing LeBron James to Cleveland.

Summary and critique of latest LEED reference guide (v4)

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I’ve just completed a summary and critique of the latest LEED reference guide (v4) for newly constructed “green” buildings. This is the third such critique that I’ve posted online: my first such attempt was back in 2007 for LEED version 2.2, and my second summary was posted in 2010 for LEED’s 2009 edition. I’ve also posted a table with links to the various LEED sections (“categories’) within the three critiques.

Here’s a sample of my critique from the v4 Introductory section:

U.S. buildings actually produce relatively little CO2, mainly by burning oil or gas for heating and hot water. The big generators of global warming gases are not buildings, but rather the coal-burning electric utilities. By including the CO2 emissions from electric power plants in the category of “buildings,” LEED essentially lets the electric utilities off the hook — their contribution to global warming is barely mentioned in the reference guide. The reason for this is clear: LEED has no interest in threatening the infrastructural basis of corporate profitability by challenging the cheap supply of energy. In fact, LEED is not interested in any form of regional, national, or global planning that might actually address the questions it raises. Rather, it’s ideology is consistent with that of the corporate entities it serves so well, providing as it does a branding tool to validate their “sustainable” and “green” efforts: according to LEED, one must tap into the corporate desire for profitability, and put into motion the miracle of “markets” to solve all problems, one building at a time. In spite of LEED’s claim that the nonresidential (i.e., corporate) “green building portion of the construction market” has achieved a 35% market share in 2010, the planet continues to lurch closer and closer to some sort of disastrous climate crisis, global poverty persists, and most workers still “lead lives of quiet desperation.” But as long as the LEED brand grows, these counter-indications won’t dampen the spirits of the pragmatists in the USGBC (the U.S. Green Building Council is the not-for-profit organization that created the LEED rating system) or call into question their vision of a voluntary, consensus-based, market-driven program.

Crucified (1980 Rollo song)

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“Crucified” was written by Dan Smullyan in 1980; our rock group, Rollo, used to perform it at various venues in New York City, and we recorded it in our basement studio in New Rochelle sometime in the early 1980s. I finally got around to creating this video for the song, which has never before been released in any form. I’m playing keyboards and doing the vocals; brother Kurt plays guitar. As I write in the YouTube description, the visual imagery in the video consists of an animated romp through “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” a triptych painted in oil on oak by Hieronymus Bosch around 1500.

A Whiter Shade of Pale

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Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” (from 1967) is one of the great rock’n’roll classics of all time. Per Wikipedia: “As of 2009, it was the most played song in the last 75 years in public places in the United Kingdom, and the UK performing rights group Phonographic Performance Limited in 2004 recognised it as the most-played record by British broadcasting of the past 70 years. Also in 2004, Rolling Stone placed ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ No. 57 on its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.” I recorded this “live” cover using Logic Pro 9, and simultaneously shot the low-resolution video with my Flip camcorder (I layered multiple copies of the low-resolution video, some of them enlarged up to 500% of their original resolution, to make the HD video in Final Cut Express). [Updated 5/19/14: this is a newer mix of the original recording done in Brooklyn by brother Kurt.]