Month: October 2023

Sleep!

The Portly Politico2 Comments

Ever since I was a small child, I get very grumpy when I am sleep-deprived.  My brothers would tease me about how angry I would get after about 8 PM, which usually just made me angrier.

As an adult, sleep deprivation tends to make me grumpy and nihilistic.  It’s not a good combination, and I struggle at times with despair (a terrible sin, because it fundamentally fails to place faith in God and His Provision) as it is.  Combine extreme exhaustion with a bad, or even just particularly stressful, day, and I can be downright insufferable.

Such was the case last Friday, 6 October 2023.  It was perfect storm of a day:  I released a new album to Bandcamp, which saw me awake at 3 AM to publish for Bandcamp Friday; I had to build out an entire pep band setup for a school pep rally in about forty-five minutes; and I had myriad Homecoming day responsibilities, including sound checking the choir (they sang the National Anthem Friday evening) and calling the game.  It all meant a long, exhausting day, one that left me drained mentally, physically, and spiritually.

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Open Mic Adventures LI: “Bigfoot Boogie”

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I released Spooky Season II: Rise of the Cryptids last Friday, 6 October 2023.  Sales were… disappointing, but actually exceeded my normal sales, so I suppose I am happy about that.

Regardless, I am proud of the album.  Most composers are not appreciated in their times, and my instrumental music is definitely “niche.”  I enjoy the process of composing, editing, and publishing music, so that’s something.

But I digress.  This week, I thought I’d feature the opening track from the album, “Bigfoot Boogie.”

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Monday Morning Movie Review: The Exorcist (1973)

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On Sunday, 1 October 2023, I had the opportunity to catch 1973’s The Exorcist on the big screen.  It’s the fiftieth anniversary of the film, if you can believe it; it debuted the day of Christmas the year my Dad graduated from high school.

That was astonishing to me.  I’m thirty years younger than my Dad (to the year), and was born twelve years after the film’s release.  That said, it was very much a part of the Zeitgeist of the early 1990s.  To be clear, I did not see the film at that tender age—thank goodness!—but it was spoken of in hushed whispers as “the scariest movie of all time.”  I vividly recall my older brother telling me how he stayed up late to watch the film (he was probably a young teenager at the time) on television, and how it scared him so much, he couldn’t sleep.  Powerful stuff!

I saw the film years later—I don’t recall when or how old I was—and while I found it creepy, I didn’t understand all the hubbub.  Yes, it was an excellent film, but “the scariest movie of all time?”  C’mon.

Then I saw it on the big screen.  That experience changed my assessment of the film and its horror substantially.  In the dark, in the theater, the film’s incredible cinematography and effects demanding my full attention, left an indelible mark upon my mind—and, perhaps, my soul.  I get it now:  The Exorcist is terrifying.

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Lazy Sunday CXXIII: Festivals II

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Yours portly has been hitting the festival circuit pretty hard, and I’m heading up to the SC Bigfoot Festival this weekend as a vendor.  In the spirit of autumnal fun, here are my recent festival posts:

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

SubscribeStar Saturday: Pee Dee State Farmers Market Plant & Flower Festival

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

Festival season continues apace; ergo, my reviews/travelogues/retrospectives/self-indulgent recaps of said festivals roll on as well.  If my use of the word “ergo” hasn’t turned your stomach, read on.

Last Saturday, 30 September 2023 I attended the Pee Dee State Farmers Market, which was hosting its annual Plant & Flower Festival.  I learned about the festival from, of all places, YouTube ads, featuring our long-serving Commissioner of Agriculture, Hugh Weathers.  Commissioner Weathers has held his office since 2004, and I’ve seen his name most of my adult life on gas station pumps (there’s a little inspector’s sticker that bears his name), but I’d never seen him until these commercials.

That uninteresting fact aside, I needed to pick up some pumpkins for carving, and I figured buying some Certified SC Grown pumpkins was the way to go.  There was also the added bonus of taking in another festival on a crisp, autumnal morning.

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

October 2023 Bandcamp Friday: Spooky Season II Out TODAY!

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Special Note:  I will be donating 10% of all gross sales for TODAY, Friday, 6 October 2023 from my Bandcamp page to the Music program at my little private school.  That includes my new album, Spooky Season II: Rise of the Cryptids, which released today.  It also includes purchases of my full discography (just $20.89) and merchandise.  If I make 50 sales of any kind today, I’ll double the donation.  If I make 100 sales, I’ll triple the donation.

To celebrate another Bandcamp Friday, I have a brand new release:  Spooky Season II: Rise of the Cryptids!  It’s ten tracks and nearly fifteen minutes of music, so it’s 3.5 times longer than Spooky Season.

Like Spooky Season, Spooky Season II: Rise of the Cryptids features full scores for every part, as well as around 130 MBs of bonus content—videos, pictures, and even some live performance footage.  It’s my most feature-packed release ever, and it’s only $5!

Also, look at this sweet album cover:

Bigfoot - Album Cover

It’s the finest quality MS Paint can provide!

Speaking of my last release, Spooky Season, a collection of seven new compositions with a spooky, autumnal vibe, hit streaming platforms on Sunday, 1 October, but is also available for purchase via Bandcamp!

Spooky Season is just $5, and includes full scores and individual parts for every track—a $28 value!—plus a bonus track.  It’s also crammed with videos, handwritten manuscripts, and other goodies.

The first Friday of a bunch of months in 2023—February, March, April, May, August, September, October, November, and December—will feature this pro-indie music observance, a day on which Bandcamp waives its usual 15% commission on sales.

In other words, when you buy my music, almost 100% of it goes to me, instead of almost 85%.

Currently, my entire discography of eleven releases is $20.89, a savings of 50%, which is not bad for eleven releases.  That’s $1.74 per release—not too shabby!  To purchase the full discography, click on any release, and you’ll see the option to purchase all of them.

You can also listen to a ton of my tunes on YouTube (and it’s free to subscribe!).

I’m also selling all of my paintings for $10, with free shipping in the United States, regardless of how many you purchase.  They’re one of kind, so once a painting is purchased, it’s gone.

I’ve also joined Society6, a website that lets artists upload their designs, which can they be printed onto all manner of products (like this throw pillow, or this duvet cover).  Why not get a bookbag with a mouthy droid on it?

I only get 10% of the sales made there, but some of the stuff looks really good—I really want these notebooks with my “Desert View” painting on it (now SOLD!).  Some of them are straight-up goofy, like this church doodle I made celebrating the presidential pardon of Roger Stone (the description for the piece is “Anger your friends with this doodle commemorating the presidential pardon of America’s most dapper political operative“).

I have a few new paintings in the works, and hope to be attending the South Carolina Bigfoot Festival to try to hawk some of my works.  We’ll see how that goes!

My first book, The One-Minute Mysteries of Inspector Gerard: The Ultimate Flatfoot, is $10 in paperback, and just $5 on Kindle.

My second and newest book, Arizonan Sojourn, South Carolinian Dreams: And Other Adventures, is $20 in paperback and $10 on Kindle.

Finally, after I finish Offensive Poems: With Pictures, my planned third book, I’ll be uploading those doodles to Society6 as well.  I have high hopes (perhaps naïvely) for this book, but we shall see.  The doodles are some of my best work—and in glorious color—and without notebook paper lines!

Thanks again for your support!

Happy Friday!

—TPP

TBT^2: Mahler’s Composing Shack

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Ah, yes—autumn.  Music sounds sweeter, food tastes better, girls look prettier.  What is it about the autumn that rings everything in a warm, golden glow?  Is it the coming crispness in the air?  The shorter days, the chilly nights?  Or perhaps the leaves falling from the trees, the continuous cycle of death and renewal circling ever onwards?

Whatever it is, it’s a great time to compose and play music.  As I noted last year, it’s “the time of year when my personal creativity seems to spark.”  Indeed, the sequel to Spooky Season (now on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube), Spooky Season II: Rise of the Cryptids releases tomorrow, Friday, 6 October 2023 on Bandcamp.

I’ve been using a free trial of Noteflight to compose lately, and I’ve really enjoyed it.  It’s very robust, although it (surprisingly) lacks some of the depth and breadth of sounds as my ancient copy of Cakewalk 3.0.  Unlike Cakewalk 3.0, however, it will run on a modern operating system, so it’s good enough for me!

I don’t have a nice, tidy composing routine like Gustav Mahler or Beethoven.  I kind of jot down ideas in my music journal when I have a few spare lines of staff paper, then try to expand those motifs into full pieces (or just compose twelve-second pieces—ha!).  Then I slap everything into Noteflight approximately whenever I feel like it, or when I’m on a composing tear and can’t stop!

With that, here is 6 October 2022’s “TBT: Mahler’s Composing Shack“:

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Myersvision: The Great British Baking Show

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We all have our comfort foods.  Mine are probably mashed potatoes and my Mom’s meatloaf, or perhaps her barbecue chicken.  She also makes an incredible chicken casserole.  Pretty much anything she cooks or bakes is comfort food, I suppose.

But what happens when comfort foods collide with comfort television?  That’s the case with Audre Myers‘s review of a beloved Netflix series.

I won’t spoil the scones any further.  Here’s Audre on The Great British Baking Show:

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Open Mic Adventures L: “Lament of the Lizardman”

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The Roman numeral “L” means “fifty,” which means I’ve been writing these Open Mic Adventures posts for nearly a year now.  It also means I couldn’t pass up the alliterative opportunity to have the Lth edition feature “Lament of the Lizardman,” which will appear on my next album, Spooky Season II: Rise of the Cryptids, due out on Bandcamp this Friday, 6 October 2023, and on all streaming services one week later, Friday the 13th (mwahahahaha!).

For those that don’t know, the Lizardman of Lee County is a local cryptid here in the Pee Dee region of South Carolina.  He is most strongly associated with Bishopville, South Carolina, which is a mere twenty-minute drive from my place.

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Threads (1984)

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Other than a trip to the Pee Dee State Farmers Market (more on that this Saturday), I spent most of Saturday playing Civilization VI and watching horror movies on Shudder.

Just when I think I’ve exhausted Shudder’s extensive offerings (seriously, I watch it so much, I find myself rewatching movies I’ve already seen, sometimes multiple times), they throw me a total curveball and deliver up something fresh—and genuinely unsettling.

A side effect of watching a ton of horror movies is that one becomes desensitized to them fairly quickly.  I’m still not a fan of gore-for-the-sake of gore, but I’m accustomed to it.  As such, I like horror that is unsettling, and there’s not much of that these days.  A lot of modern horror is snarkily self-referential, and Shudder seems to love to show lots of feminist horror.  Some of that is actually okay, but does every horror movie have to be about the loss of personal identity when a mother raises children?  Come now.

So it was refreshing to watch the made-for-television film Threads (1984), a stark depiction of the aftermath of a series of atomic detonations in England.

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