Dumbland

I have recently been watching a series of videos either about David Lynch or David Lynch has made that are on the internet. I find David Lynch to be a rather interesting and intelligent artist. He is my favorite film maker. David Lynch is one of the few film makers who understands the bullshit that is American pop culture and can be able to show you how stupid it really is.

Lynch made a video about his thoughts on the iphone and is set up as a spoof iphone commercial and I find it to be rather hilarious.



David Lynch has also made a cartoon called "Dumbland" that he shows on the internet that is very abstract and ridiculous. The cartoon itself appears to be weird, offensive, absurd, and non-sensical. You could say the same thing about who the cartoon is about, which is the average amercian capitalist consumer. I give Lynch kudos for creating "Dumbland" and showing how stupid the conformist, lathargic, wal-mart shopping, suburbia dwelling, supposedly patriotic, materialistic American is, and showing how absurd that lifestyle is. Below is episode two, I've seen 8 episodes so far and I don't know how many there really are.

Electric Feel

I was motivated today and had plenty of free time so I added a couple more songs on my myspace page. By request I added another The Smiths song being "Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want." I was also feeling a little frisky so I haphazardly did my own acoustic version of MGMT's Electric Feel.

If interested in checking them out my myspace page is:
http://www.myspace.com/williamcovert

I intend very soon to put some more political and social stuff up on here.

Girlfriend In A Coma

I was stressed out today from the whole Rick Warren debacle with Barry Obama, and I've been pouting about how to deal with fundamentalists.

To get my mind off of politics I was messing around with my brother's digital recorder and for fun recorded my version of one of my favorite The Smiths songs "Girlfriend In A Coma." The older I get the more of a The Smiths fan I become, and I don't listen to much Brit Pop, but I really enjoy their sound and it's a different genre of music for me to dabble in.

I posted the song on my drum dominated myspace music page at
http://www.myspace.com/williamcovert

Most people don't know I play guitar and seldomly attempt at vocals.

WTF Rick Warren!!!

Today I read that Rick Warren will be giving the invocation at Barry Obama's inauguration ceremony and all I can ask is why? Why Rick Warren? Rick Warren is an idiot, and not only an idiot, but he's scary. He is out of his mind. I am fucking sick and tired of these evangelical bastards who think they have some moral superiority over the rest of us.

I've had it with these evangelicals trying to get political influence and trying to control and determine our morals in an effort of conformity and elimination of individual expression.

I can't believe Barry Obama would be doing anything with Rick Warren. Where are all the Obama is a Muslim people now? Rick Warren should be paying taxes up his ying yang for all the support he gave to proposition 8 in California. It's just ridiculous how these churches try to influence politics for their own so-called "moral" agenda. Rick Warren compared gay marriage to incest, pedophilic marriage, and polygamy. He is the Anita Bryant of our time. I don't know what else to say right now.

Here Comes The Flood

Well after some mental sidetracking I had due to sudden and not so great events in my life I believe I am back to thinking clearly again.

I think I'm ready for change in most if not all aspects of my life. I really think I've become a different person through my experiences of the past couple months. I don't mean I'm different in a good or bad way.

Who is William Covert? No one is. I'm not William Covert, I'm a living creature who changes and I'm not the same creature I use to be. It's strange how we use names to identity things. I have friends, enemies, family, and acquaintances who know me as William Covert or Bill Covert or Will Covert. This identity given to me in reality means nothing. I hope people can relate to me more on terms of my actions and personality rather than my given identity. I was named after my great-grandfather. It's hard to develop your own identity when you're named after someone else.

In naming myself, I recognize who I am.

Right now I sum up my life in 3 phases:

1. I was young and had hope and innocence.

2. I got older and tried experiencing the world as best I could and lost my innocence and in turn lost my hope.

3. I accepted who I am now and what my life has been thus far, and have a new found sense of hope.

Now being in phase 3 I feel ready for whatever is next. I am respledent in divergence.

I am very excited to make new music. I can just hope for the best. We begin again, constantly.

I never give my friends enough credit for the impact they have on me to remain hopefull.

Three ways to discover our faults: ask a friend; ask an enemy; recognize a fault in others.

Suffering is our experience of the distance between what we are and who we wish to become.

Suffering is necessary, unnecessary or voluntary.

I Advance Masked (A Poem For Knowledge)

Can it be true that music might redeem our fallen world?
Can it be true that music can heal our world?

Silence is our friend, silence is our friend.
If only WE CAN LISTEN to our Friend.

Silence is our friend, if only we can say Hello. Say Hello to our friend, and hello to ourselves.

Love Cannot Bear that even one person be denied its place in paradise.

Music is our friend. Is our friend reaching out to You?

Death And All His Friends

I've been doing some thinking the last couple of days and reflecting on a lot of stuff. I've done maybe more reflecting than a 23 year old should, but oh well. So I've been in my thoughts, and I got a song lyric stuck in my head, and I don't know why. Usually I don't pay much attention to lyrics, I couldn't even tell you most of the lyrics from songs my band plays. Of all of the bands to get lyrics stuck in your head from, I can't get lyrics from a Coldplay song trapped in my skull. I use to really really really hate Coldplay, I still don't like anything they've done besides their new album Viva la Vida, which I never would have originally ever listened to if it wasn't produced by Brian Eno. But anyways, the last song on the album has a line that goes

"No, I don't want to battle from beginning to end. I don't want to cycle or recylce revenge. I don't want to follow death and all his friends...

And in the end we lie awake, and we dream of making our escape."

Those lyrics really sum up what i've been thinking about. Anytime someone dies young and unnatural it tends to make people reflect. Knowing someone that use to live a block away from me, and I went to high school with, and use to come to my house and me to his house numerous times is now dead, just makes the world seem strange. Life is fragile, and I think more fragile than we tend to realize. I was listening to this Coldplay and these came up and like it felt like synchronicity. It was just so odd that I was listening to a band I never normally listen to, and I just happened to be listening to a song dealing with death and it felt like a Jungian moment.

The other lyric about lying awake and dreaming of making escape, I related to, but for different reasons. The biggest thing I've had on my brain recently even more than death is I met someone who I like, but I don't know if the feeling is totally mutual. So I've been not sleeping much this week just thinking about the possibilities of what is my life now and what may or may never be depending on some decisions. I feel like I'm in mental waiting room, but for the chance of a positive outcome it's definitely worth the wait. I've been plotting about making my escape out of Michigan to Chicago, and now I just have to act out my dream.

Acrylic Waltz

The past two days I have spent a good deal of time messing around with my brother's 16 track Yamaha digital recorder, and I have some fruitful results from that chaos. I put a new song up on my myspace page www.myspace.com/williamcovert that is a newly recorded song I just finished today.

From this previous weekend it had got me thinking about different types and kinds of music, and I started messing around with drum beats that were in 3/4 time signature or what classical dancers would call a waltz beat. Out of messing around with a waltz beat I wrote out some drum parts and recorded Acrylic Waltz. Some parts of it are polyrhythmic where I take a 3/4 beat with my feet and play 4/4 on top of it with my hands or vice versa. I had been listening to a lot of Bill Bruford and Gavin Harrison recently (more so of Gavin because he's on the cover of this month's Modern Drummer Magazine) and both of them were influence in my drumming on the song and the whole idea really to play in an odd non 4/4 time signature for the base of the song. I'm hoping to maybe get some more music recorded and online as well, I don't know though we'll see how the creative process goes.

Artist or Aficionado?

I have been thinking to myself the concept of artist or aficionado. I have always viewed myself as an artist and as a creator, but am I wrong in my views? I think a lot of people I meet tend to see me more as an aficionado rather than an artist. I have a strange obsession with art, specifically with music, and when I tend to really like something I research the hell out of it to know everything I can about it. I did a 50 page thesis paper in college of Bill Bruford, who is someone most people haven't heard of, but over the past six years is someone I've spent a large part of time researching and listening to and analyzing his drumming style.

I use to think my compulsive reseraching on artists I like and of music in general was always a plus, and I thought it just helped me as an artist and made me more well-rounded. Then I started to think would an artist really give a shit about all this shit and care about what all these other musicians and artists have done or are doing? Wouldn't an artist just care about his art? Now it's got me thinking where do I exactly fall into this as far as artsist or aficionado.

People tend not to like aficionados inclduing myself. Aficionados tend to be self-righteous assholes, who feel they are better than you because of their scholarly like knowledge of a subject or thing. They tend to be pompous and pretentious and boring to talk to because they tend to steer a conversation into a realm of talking and thinking that they have more knowledge of than whoever they are conversing with. That's one reason I change my major in college and got out of being a music major, because a lot of them were assholes who thought they have some kind of musical blue blood and it drove me crazy.

I have now come to the conclusion that even in my personal pursuit is to be an artist, what I give off is the personality of an aficionado and that sucks. Most of my friends think I'm pretenious and think that's how I want to come off to people, but it isn't. Even in my band I have been called pretenious, that should have gotten me thinking right then and there, but it didn't. I got into another long winded Beatles arguement with no end in sight, and for me I don't care to change people's opinions with words anymore. An artist doesn't communicate his/her art in words, he/she communicates with his/her art. I think maybe because I was out east and not playing gigs full-time or playing with a band full-time it sort of drove me to communicate more with my words than I'm use to, and I need to get back to focusing on my music and if people don't like it oh well. I'm thinking back on the last couple months when I get into some heated muscial debates that were pointless in making heated and I feel like an idiot for it, I feel more like a pompous aficionado than an artist and that's a feeling I don't like or want to have.

I think what drove me to become a pompous musical asshole is because of the music I play and like. As a musician you want to be liked because you want fans. Nobody wants to play to an empty venue. Is it art if no one is paying attention to it or even recognizes it? I think the wanting to be accepted as a serious and good musician drove me to intensely ridicule music I don't like i.e. The Beatles out of some jealous I have for the lack of my own mainstream musical success. Being a fan of progressive rock bands like Emerson, Lake, & Palmer doesn't help either. Keith Emerson himself said that the reason people didn't like ELP was because they were too good at their instruments. I think I started to adapt that virtuoso like cynicism of I'm too good and play too hard of music for people to understand, and I was really in the wrong and I usually never admit when I'm wrong. A real artist doesn't care about mainstream attention or care about what other people think of his/her art. Robert Fripp one of my musical heroes always said, "Never become so popular that the public take an interest in you." Now realizing my faults in my musical pursuits I hope to become less pretentious in my musical career and in my personal attitude and personality. In making myself more humble I'm thinking about going out on a limb and starting to listen to and feel out music that I would not normally listen to or know much or anything about. I feel the drive to go into unchartered musical waters will be good for me, and hopefully will influence me in a new way and get the creative juices going. Will Bill abandon rock music for some other musical form? Maybe I'll end up abandoning drums all together and focus my energies at synthesizer or chapman stick who knows what time will bring.

I will say this new drive to discover music I wouldn't normally listen to has given me a new foundness for the group Battles and their music. I think they're a great rock/electronic hybrid and could be a window to the future of how rock music can carry on as a form of innovative and creative music. For those unfamiliar with their music, which I'm still becoming familiar with below is a link to what I've seen thus far as their best performance from the tv show Later With Jools Holland. Their use of electronics especially the way they "treat" and synthesize the vocals I think is pretty cool and definitely original. What do you think?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSkU5GJmtXc

Urban Landscape In December

Sometimes walking through the streets of the city, I see all the faces of the winners and the losers. That was one of many thoughts I had walking through the hustle and bustle of Chicago this weekend. I had quite an interesting and long weekend.

Besides travel time I spent pretty much my entire weekend in Chicago, and for being a city I have lived less than an hour away from for almost 20 years of my life it is still much a mystery to me. I more I learn about Chicago, the more I learn how little I had known/understood of the city. I was in Andersonville, Wicker Park, Logan Square, and Humboldt Park over the course of this weekend. Five days ago if you asked me if I had ever been to these areas of Chicago I would have said no, but I actually had been to all of them or the vicinity of all those areas before and didn't know it until I was in these areas again this weekend, and realized I had been there before and I've even played shows in Wicker Park and i didn't even know that. My ignorance of the city astounds me. That ignorance has gotten me thinking about what else am I ignorant about and don't know, and it's almost a scary thing to think. I am ignorant and don't know it? It's almost something not even to think about, or I don't know how to go about thinking about it. How do you know you're ignorant until you've been presented with information/facts/news that confirms your ignorance. I almost see it as enlightening because now I feel more perceptive about my surroundings and is making me think I need to open up even more to try and make myself educated and well-rounded. I will get back to ignorance...

All and all is was good weekend. I hung out with a new friend of mine in Andersonville and had a lot of fun. Saturday night was the first time I got together with Ben Joyce and his band whom I'm going to be recording drums for in less than two weeks on his album. I got a little out of my shell though at a couple points during the weekend and was a little un-Billish. Usually I tend not to say or do much around people, which causes people to think I'm disinterested in whatever it is going on. This weekend I was trying to impress my new friend and come off as a cool guy, and then I was also trying to impress Ben Joyce and his band and come off as a cool drummer. Thinking about how I normally come off and am normally introverted, I did not want to seem or come off as disinterested or disinteresting to my friend or the band. My problem in thinking was I was trying not to be myself to impress others this weekend, when I got to where I was this weekend by being myself. I kind of stabbed myself in the back, and I hope didn't do any long term damage. I was hanging with my friend, and at first I was like really kind of intense and like hyper or something, I don't know I can't even describe it, but I wasn't being me and I was probably being annoying. I finally just stopped trying to act cool and just stopped overanalyzing my behavior and I got a lot more comfortable and finally like went back to myself, and then continued to have a really good time hanging out. He was a really cool guy, and I really hope to hang out again, but I just hope I didn't annoy him to death and I was interesting enough to hang out with again.

After hanging out with my friend I had my first full-band practice with Ben Joyce and his band. I was kind of nervous because I got hired on as his studio drummer to record his album, so I was still in a position that if things didn't go well in these first practices that I could be replaced. I was really out to impress, which might not have been a really good idea. When we started to practice I went guns blazing, I was playing like Keith Moon, I was all over the place and doing a lot more drum fills than the music called for. I had auditioned some of these songs and in the audition I played more of a groove/jazz style and didn't do a lot of fills and played the beat, but for some reason I abandoned that in practice and went to a more wild and free-form style, and I could tell things just weren't clicking. After a few songs, I had gotten more comfortable with the guys and the songs and went back to a groove based style and then everything started to click and really started to groove. I still don't know how they really feel about me as a drummer, and for me it is kind of a weird situation because I'm use to playing in and forming bands with friends. Being like a hired hand, an auditioned musician as it were, it makes it seem more professionally and not as foot loose and fancy free. It's something I'm still getting used to, but they did like me enough to ask me to join the band permanently as their drummer and play with them beyond the recording sessions. So that made me think, I at least did something right. Ben Joyce already has a news years gig booked in downtown Chicago, so that's cool and maybe I'm just over-thinking everything. It was a very surreal weekend, and I hope is start for good things to come in the future. With new years around the corner, I just have this feeling like maybe I'm turning some corner in my life and I'm entering a new, beatiful, and cool world. So we'll just see what happens.

The Drive To 2011

Why am I here and who am I? Those are questions I have asked myself, and can only assume are questions that all or near all of us ask.

I am a musician and my pursue in life thus far has been to play music professionally while I'm here. I have often pondered to myself should I be doing other things, are there other things I should be pursuing instead of music? Having thoughts of doubt has distracted me from the discipline and joy I want in my life. In order to remove these negative distractions I am now on The Drive To 2011.

The Drive To 2011 is my focus on utilizing my potential for doing positive and quality acts to myself and others between now and January 1, 2011. The Drive To 2011 falls under Four guiding principles:

1. There is no correlation between Quantitative and Qualitative Acts.

2. Any Qualitative Act effects others; and has a ripple effect.

3. As long as you yourself do Qualitative Acts you will positively effect people; and as long as there is life there is the chance for Qualitative Acts.

4. As long as there is life there is Hope.

My perspective given these principles and personal expression is a qualitative leap inwards expands outward towards others. I am driven to utilize my potential to create a more positive world for myself, those around me, and hopefully everyone. The Drive is my attempt to bring abstract thinking to a concrete world.

I believe through music I can have a huge impact in creating qualitative acts, and leave a positive effect on others, which in turn will increase the chance of more qualitative acts towards even more people. Thus as long as I do good acts there is hope, but first in order to utilize my potential for good acts I have to feel good about myself. This has taken me a long time to do, but I'm finally at the point where I feel good within and am ready to redirect that goodness externally as well as internally. The Drive To 2011 is my life now and my desire to create more hope in an increasingly hopeless world.