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Airport bloggin'

2010-01-25T23:35:01Z

Just chilling right now, at O'Hare, waiting for a flight. I set my homepage to smoothlou.com (which I recommend to you as well!) in an attempt to force myself to add things to it. So far, not so good. What better time than waiting for an aeroplane then. And what town am I lucky enough to be leaving for? If you guessed "Indianapolis" you're right. Also, if you guessed "that seems pretty boring" you'd be right too. I've got my lunch of champions (read: Gardettos original recipe and a Coke Zero unnamed soda) and sitting beside me in my laptop bag is my handy AKAI LPK25 portable keyboard. This thing is fantastic; I've been messing with it for about 3 days now, and since I'll be somewhere I know next-to-nothing about, I've got nothing better to do than to start cranking out the jams. I've been performing shows using other, more talented people's instrumental tracks for years, and I've never recorded any of these songs that I really like, so I'm making beats for them that will essentially, at first, be total ripoffs sound-alikes. What can I say? The best way to learn anything is to start with what you know and move forward from there. If it works out, I'll post it here in a few days. If it doesn't, well, I won't quit my dayjob after all.

Sleep Writing

2010-01-10T18:38:10Z

So I fell asleep early last night, watching True Blood Season 1 (which I'm still on the fence about) and slept for ten hours, which is about twice my usual amount of sleep these days. When I woke up, I was feeling like Sookie Stackhouse, but the only thoughts swirling around were my own. This is about the sixth or seventh time that I've woken up with this feeling in the past year. I have a song in my head that was playing in my dream and I’m pretty sure I made it up on my own. These aren't songs I usually write; once it was a Spanish song about the sleepy resort town of Puerto Escondido, MX in the vein of Carlos Santana. Last night, it was a song about wishing you (the proverbial you) were dead. It was in the vein of Chris Daughtery or some similarly rock-type voice. I don't really understand how these things work, but every time it happens, I want to write it down when I wake up. Saddingly, the song disappeared into the ether of my mind as I wrote this blog post up, but I'm currently looking to work on a rockabilly-country type tune that's been sitting in my head for the past year or so. I remember dreaming I was in a rough and tumble bar (think Roadhouse) with the song playing on the jukebox when my then-girlfriend stabbed me in the back. I woke up to find I had fallen asleep on a set of nail clippers. 2010 is the year of no more excuses -- I don't care that it's not my musical style, I just want to get it together and spit it out. If you're a musician type and have even the most remote knowledge of this musical style, please hit me up and we'll work on it as soon as possible.

Here's a rouuuuuuugh version of the song as I worked on it with my brother. Let me know what you think or contact me HERE. Thanks.

At My Best in Love

So, I lived.

2010-01-05T02:23:57Z

So It's 2010 and I lived to fight another decade. New Year, new Lou. I hope everyone had a good New Years; I spent it with people who enjoyed vomiting as much as I enjoyed Avatar, which is to say, not too much, but either way, there were blue creatures involved. And everything looked like it was really happening...

I promise you like I promised a dear friend: 2010 will be the year of living well to spite my enemies, the number of which seems to grow as I grow older. I'm working on my photoshop skills, as you can see here. They're, well, okay for a guy who's a human beatbox (as long as you don't count Scribble Jam's inaugural Beatbox Champion A-Train of course).

There's a glut of podcasts coming your way in t-minus 3-2-... well, soon. I don't have an internet connection at the crib -- part of being a member of the working poor I guess. We have new podcasts from horror movie director Tony Wash, old school Smoothcast regulars Robert Gallegos (see if you can spot me in this Johnny Rev video you lucky devil), Kevin (KO), and many more... not Mandy Moore though. I mean, don't get me wrong, she's great too, but if Carrianne can't book her it won't work out...

Dear 2009 - Good Riddance

2009-12-31T04:37:24Z

New Years Day is the greatest of all holidays -- the comradery, the optimism that breaks the soul-crushing monotony of real life, the mandatory smooching (!), the poor dancing by well meaning drunks, and did I mention the arbitrary nature of the whole thing? We choose one day out of all of them to say, "RESET, let's start it all up again and see how we did over last New Years Day" Well, last year at this time, me and my live-in girlfriend were in a bad way and couldn't work it out. We split up just a few weeks later after trying damn near everything we could think of, and if you're reading this right now, you probably know that I've been known to get obsessed over girls, and this one in particular. She broke my heart, I broke hers, we split up, then the heartache set in. I tried to move on, I moved out, I found out who my friends were, I lost some weight, I learned to drink my feelings, I questioned my own feelings, I questioned the motives of everyone --literally everyone-- that I knew and trusted and cared about for years!

2009, you broke me man. You kicked me in the knee and peed in my eye, and you told me again and again to just give in and lose and die... But I wouldn't do it, and with the sympathetic ear of people who love me, and people who held me up and carried me when I couldn't go any further (and I hope you know who you are), I made it through. Or at least, I hope to! Honestly, the year is still 24 and-a-half hours from completion, and there's a chance, as miniscule as it may be, that I still might not make it.

So reader, if you wake up on 12/31 to the infotainment news channel of your choice, and there's a story in the local briefs about, gosh, I dunno, a bus full of chimps smashing into an apartment and the lone tenant being crushed by the bus and subsequently trampled about the face and neck by the aforementioned great apes, know that it was me, and that I died doing what I love -- watching monkeys trample things.

And to 01/01/2010 12:00:00.01, you are the starting line for what I hope and pray will be the year I've been working up to my entire life, and in the event that anything major and noteworthy (or, let's be honest, miniscule and blogworthy) happens in 2010, YOU blog reader, friend, confidant, YOU will be the first to know about it.

Sincerely,

Smooth Lou

Work Blogging

2009-12-29T18:52:29Z

So I always thought I'd be at this job until two weeks after I was dead. Strangely enough, I may be working from home (read: unemployed) in a few weeks due to layoffs, blah blah blah. Itwas at first frustrating, then unbelievably freeing to think of what can be accomplished without a 9 to 5. I mean, I would need to wait for unemployment to kick in (meaning I won't be Quitting my Dayjob, as I've been oft told not to do), but it could mean I would finally be able to actually devote my time to this whole entertainment thing, which I've felt would be a good idea for a while. I have an agent now, and she'll be hopefully getting me gigs (for what dear reader, I will leave you to guess) once I have time in the day to audition for them, and I've been learning to make beats so I don't have to wait for slowpoke producer types to out-slowpoke me. In the meantime, I've always got The Smoothcast as an outlet for comedy, and I'll have some beatbox videos and other random silliness up soon. Did I ever tell you my story about The Fat Boys? I might have the story (and accompanying video) up in a little bit. Watch this space!

Merry Christmas!

2009-12-25T17:42:49Z

Hey everybody! It's Christmas time! I got a great gift today; a LiveScribe Pulse Pen, which is essentially a computer stuffed into an oversized pen. I just opened it up and will mess with it shortly; hopefully it will be chock full of awesome. I recorded a great podcast last week featuring two great guys, Mike Chorvat and Chris Insidioso from Treaty of Paris that you can find up top under the "Smoothcast" link. It's very Christmas-y, and it definitely gave me Christmas Spirit where I had none before. I celebrated with the fam last night, and we enjoyed some great food, including Jaques Pepin's stuffed Pork Tenderloin on Grape Tomatoes which came out as well as an oversized ape (read: me) would be able to do on his own. I'm exhausted, and ready to chill, but I'm headed out for more Christmas shenanigans today. Normally, Christmas is my movie day, but instead, I'm steady bloggin', watching The Simpsons Season Seven with Audio Commentary set to "ON" and getting ready to figure out what the heck to do with this magical future pen. Hope everyone's having a great day!

The thing about having a website

2009-12-22T19:24:58Z

I was probably 19 when a friend of mine told me he could build me a website. I was impressed by the whole concept; this was during the era of pets.com you see, and everyone thought a website could make you money. I had an inkling of how to make money (which I guess I still do now), which was, at the time, to throw together a site, add some merchandise and some pictures, and that would be the end of it. Well, that was 10 years ago. How do you think it went? In the amount of time it's taken to get to this point, I've made about negative a thousand dollars at this point. In asking myself what I've learned in this amount of time it would have to be, a website is just like having a puppy. You have to feed it nearly once a day, or else it just falls over and dies. And with that dear reader, I pledge to you to bring you new exciting content as often as I can. Keep your eyes peeled for whatever it is that I'm currently working on, including the comedy/musical showcase I call "The Smoothcast", new songs that have been taking me longer than I would like, but I'm hoping you'll enjoy, and some hilarious observations in blog form. I'm just sitting here in the dark, pounding on my keyboard, trying to avoid every pitfall that's tripped me up and pushing forward until I get something done. Hope you like it!