Reporting from the still-in-progress basement studio on:

THE STATE OF THE BOOTLEG BLOG: From 1998’s Wafers and Wine EP, I offer downloads of Apartment D and Seachange. Both songs were written for Carl Liss’ first feature-length film.

THE STATE OF THE STUDIO: I spent most of my vacation last week fine tuning bryanthomas.com and thehiddencity.com, but I had also hoped to finally finish setting up the studio in the basement. I got most of what I wanted done with the Web sites (blogifying for easier site management and syndication) but I got stuck on the studio when I started going through old audio cassettes and camcorder tapes. The good news is that I’ve got a lot of fodder for Bootleg Blogging. The bad news is that cataloging old tapes takes a long ass time, so most of the recording gear is still mothballed. Which means I’ll have to continue using the Edirol R1 for recording new stuff, solo-acoustic style (which is how I recorded Sam). For now anyway. I have four songs in mind to record this week, and that may or may not include a solo-acoustic version of a song written for the forthcoming Dan Sorensen project. I consider Edirol-blogging my way of gigging without actually picking up a phone to beg convince a club to give me a gig. (Gig blogging?) Wish me luck.

THE STATE OF THE NEWS: It sucks. A little worse every day. So lately the energy that went toward maintaining Reality Based News has been re-directed to posting Albany arts news at TheHiddenCity, which is so much more uplifting than linking to, for instance, this nonsense, three years after a nation of zombies cheered President Codpiece’s declaration of mission accomplished. Sigh.

THE STATE OF THE KID: New pics at Chez Zoe. She gets a little cooler every day.