jon_chaisson: (Default)
[livejournal.com profile] emmalyon and I have been visiting various Boston landmarks the last few days during vacation, so I decided I'd take some pictures of things and places that have influenced my writing over the years, or were at least important to my writing. Enjoy!

There are places I remember all my life, though some have changed... )

I wish I'd have taken more pictures (I would have liked to have gotten pictures of Charlesgate, my apartment in Allston, and a few others), but we didn't have the time. I may grab those pictures from the internet later on and post them in a follow-up, however.

We'll be heading out west to my parents' house tomorrow, so I will most likely be taking more reference pictures as the week progresses.
jon_chaisson: (Default)
Funny thing, memory--it definitely messes with your head.

I've been reading Joshua Foer's Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, and I have to say it's quite the eye-opener. Caveat: it's not a self-help book at all; it's more of a way to explain why we tend to remember the weirdest things, forget seemingly important things, and that our memory may not be as much of a sieve as we believe. It's SCIENCE!

Okay, maybe not completely...but it put a few things into perspective for me, especially considering that over the past few months I've been thinking about why I've been forgetting some things lately (nothing important or worrisome--just things such as what we were planning to do a few weeks from now, something Emm said to me a few days previous, or exactly what week in April I was taking for vacation, things like that). I know I'm not losing my mind or having a mental breakdown or that anything might be physically wrong--on the contrary, I had to explain a detailed procedure to a coworker the other day and was able to do it with very little backtracking.

There's also the fact that I've been delving into the past quite a lot lately for my Walk in Silence project, which has been a mixture of listening to a lot of 80s college rock (in chronological order--I love MediaMonkey's ability to sort it down to month/day level), reading some of my old writings and poetry (I also have a habit of dating my longhand writing sessions, so I know when they were written), a hell of a lot of reading for research, and putting it all together chronologically on a spreadsheet.

This second thing--the writing project--is what's been fascinating me over the last few months. I knew I could remember a handful of events and songs if given the right stimulus--in this case, the combination of the music and writing, as well as looking at the chronology--and it worked in spades. I of course can't remember full conversations or exactly who might have been present at the time, but in this case that isn't completely important. The important thing was that I remembered my mental and emotional state at the time, and what I was listening to.

The reason I bring this up is because Moonwalking brings up the fact that mnemonics tend to be how many people can remember all sorts of things. I subconsciously learned how they worked, interestingly enough, back in the 80s when listening to music. I realized that in listening to certain songs, I'd be reminded of certain specific memories. Most people do this, and use it as a tool of remembrance of sorts, but when I understood how this worked, that's when I started obsessing over music even more--I'd make all kinds of mixtapes for myself, and even a lot of my Flying Bohemian songs were mnemonic in their own way.

One of my many plans for 2012 is to get myself grounded again, and one the ways I'm doing that is returning to some of my older thought processes. Over the course of last year I'd started to notice how much I'd miss the logic connection (that is, "putting two and two together"), or when I'd catch myself not paying attention, or even losing my train of thought. Like I said, I knew it wasn't a physical problem--it was a mental and emotional one. It was partly due to disconnecting from the stress and frustration of life, partly due to a long-standing habit of 'not getting involved' to different levels...a bunch of things. I realized it was time to change all that. Foer's book merely validated what I'd been thinking over the last few months.

This is going to be a long personal project, and one that will definitely take longer than just a year--this will take years, really. Undoing bad habits, relearning thought processes, all while learning new ones. But it's something I'm willing to try out, because I'm mentally and emotionally prepared to do it this time.
jon_chaisson: (Default)


The Old Reliable, the Weatherbeaten, the one and only 'Jonzbox'.

I'm pretty sure this was acquired around 1984--I know I had it at least at that point, as I'd started making radio tapes (that is, mixtapes of stuff taped off the radio) around that time. This wasn't the radio that helped me discover college radio (that was a Walkman I'd gotten for Christmas later that year), but it was the radio used when I started taping things from college radio. It was the radio that taped many end-of-year countdowns. It recorded silly sounds made by friends and family. It recorded nearly the entire Flying Bohemians catalog from 1988 onwards. It recorded nearly all the jeb! jams as well. It played tapes in the side yard while we played volleyball or badminton, or washed the car in the summer, or shoveled the driveway in the winter. It had its original three-foot antenna, graduated to a Radio Shack-bought six-footer that made all the stations come in beautifully, and gone back to another three-footer. If you notice, there's a bit of Scotch tape near 88.1 on the radio dial--at one point I'd taped a strip of paper, where I'd marked where all the good stations were, and the ones I listened to most. WAMH, WMUA, WMDK, WAQY, WRSI, WAAF, and so on. Its spot had started at my desk, and graduated to the top of my bookcase (where my books had been moved, replaced by my burgeoning cassette collection) until I moved out to college. I graduated to a few other boomboxes later on, but this one remained with me for the longest time, until I moved west. It finally came out with me to stay late last year.

It's now in Spare Oom, not currently plugged in but ready to fulfill its duty whenever I wish it. It's still in working condition, even if the cassette door hinge no longer springs open (I have to lean it forward and let gravity do its thing), and the left speaker is iffy. When I used it last, about six years ago, it still played tapes and recorded pretty damn decent lo-fi sound with surprisingly little hiss. I've never had another boombox like it, or one that worked as awesomely as this one.
jon_chaisson: (Tunage)
Happy 22nd Anniversary to The Flying Bohemians! ;)

I may post some music either tonight or this weekend... :)
jon_chaisson: (Default)
So I find that Claudia Christian is going to be signing autographs at WonderCon this weekend.

Why do I tell you this? Not because she was Ivanova in Babylon 5...but sometime in 1997 I was contacted by someone asking me if the name "The Flying Bohemians" had been trademarked, as they were making a movie (with her in it) with that name. No idea what came of it, though...

If she happens to be there when we go on Saturday, think I should ask? ;)
jon_chaisson: (Tunage)
Wow. Sitting through a Love and Rockets three-fer, listening to Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven, Express and Earth Sun Moon, and I'd almost forgotten how much I love those albums. Even more so, how they inspired some of my more acoustic and meandering Flying Bohemians songs from 1989 onwards ("Lift Your Heart Up (In Your Hands)" and the once-recorded "A Dream of Someone" are heavily inspired by these, to the point that I think I stole a few of their riffs in the process).

You know, I'm 39, I may as well grow old gracefully by shamelessly embracing all the retro music I've been listening to lately. Never thought I'd admit to that, but hey--you levitate towards what you love most, right? ;)
jon_chaisson: (Default)
Hot damn, it's been that long already...

Happy birthday to the [livejournal.com profile] flyingbohemians! I'll most likely post more music today!

[TFB] NEW!

Feb. 1st, 2009 04:44 pm
jon_chaisson: (Default)
New post at the Flying Bohemians LJ!

Hey gang, sorry it took so long! To make up for it, I decided to upload a whole boatload of Flying Bohemians music for your enjoyment! Every song I'd posted from the beginning is now available on a compilation. PLUS! Not one but two EPs worth of stuff!

So head on over now and get downloading, because MediaFire and SendSpace only last for about a week or so... :p
jon_chaisson: (Tunage)
...and today starts the first of many posts over the course of the year where I will post songs, comments, liner notes, and other general silliness. Come on over to [livejournal.com profile] flyingbohemians and have some fun!
jon_chaisson: (Athol sign)



A prologue of sorts has been posted at The Flying Bohemians LJ. Please feel free to stop on by and join the club.

There will be snacks, soda, Spree (the Official Candy of TFB), original and remixed mp3s, scans, and maybe even a few pictures.
jon_chaisson: (Default)




more coming soon

jon_chaisson: (Athol sign)
Hey, [livejournal.com profile] head58! Head on over to [livejournal.com profile] flyingbohemians...I put something up there for you. It's nowhere near complete, but hopefully that'll be a start...

Also, check your email in a few...I'm about to send a 'book' your way. ;)

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