Lloyd_ZFS768: Hi, my name is Lloyd_ZFS768, please give me a moment to review your information.
 tim fitzgerald: hi lloyd, thanks
 Lloyd_ZFS768: Thanks for waiting. You’ll have to get the original purchaser to contact the point of purchase (Ticketmaster , box office ect.)
 Lloyd_ZFS768: is there anything else I can look into for you?
 tim fitzgerald: yes
 Lloyd_ZFS768: ok
 tim fitzgerald: i want to know what the point of purchase was
 tim fitzgerald: the tickets were a gift, the person who bought them is out of the country
 tim fitzgerald: there must be something distinguishing about the tickets to tell me how they were purchased

 tim fitzgerald: if they were bought from TM, i know the money will automatically be returned to the purchaser and that’s fine.  if they weren’t, i need to do something to get that money because otherwise it will evaporate while they’re away Lloyd_ZFS768: 
Ok, the person who bought them will need to go to where ever they got them to inquire about a refund the reason is..

 Lloyd_ZFS768: that we cannot credit the card of a third party tim fitzgerald: it’s unacceptable that the money spent would be forfeited (i.e. seized by whoever issued the ticket) in case the original purchaser could not handle the refund Lloyd_ZFS768: do you have the order number, name , billing address and last 4 digits of the original card?
 tim fitzgerald: it’s bad enough that the show was cancelled, but you’re telling me you’re just going to take the money unless my friend who is completely unavailable for the next 60+ days can show up and handle the refund.
 tim fitzgerald: no.
 tim fitzgerald: the tickets were given to me.

 tim fitzgerald: if they were purchased at the  box office, i will go there and handle it myself.  if they weren’t, i need to know that as well.
 Lloyd_ZFS768: the box office will refund if that is where they were bought. 
 tim fitzgerald: great.  so lloyd, can you save me an hour of my life going to the box office without knowing whether they sold the ticket, by simply asking for one of these identifying numbers and interpreting it for me?  please?
 Lloyd_ZFS768: Only if you can verify the billing information I mentiond earlier.. This why I said the original purchaser should contact us
 tim fitzgerald: lloyd, i don’t think you’re hearing me, and there is absolutely no reasonable reason why you should be refusing to verify these tickets
 tim fitzgerald: the original purchaser cannot do this.
 tim fitzgerald: i can tell you his name and billing address.  the card number is not something it would make any sense for me to have.
 Lloyd_ZFS768: let me check the show…you may have more time than we thought3.
 Lloyd_ZFS768: I can’t comment on the order its’ self but the show was canceld so the money has probably been given back to your friend already.
 tim fitzgerald: lloyd
 tim fitzgerald: the money would only be refunded if it was purchased with a credit card via ticketmaster
 tim fitzgerald: is my understanding
 tim fitzgerald: without knowing where it was purchased, i don’t know whether it was refunded
 tim fitzgerald: and he is not anywhere that ticketmaster or anyone else could have notified him that this happened
 tim fitzgerald: he has no idea the show was cancelled, i guarantee
 tim fitzgerald: he’s in the middle of africa somewhere
 tim fitzgerald: please just tell me how i can look at this ticket and identify the point of purchase
 Lloyd_ZFS768: you need to contact the person that gave you the tickets. they will know where they got them..If it was us we will refund.
 tim fitzgerald: but you must know, because i already mentioned it several times, that contacting the person who gave me the tickets is not possible.
 tim fitzgerald: so repeating that is not helpful.
 tim fitzgerald: and for that matter, what if they didn’t know where they got them?  what if they were senile and couldn’t remember?  or, god forbid, deceased?  you’d put up a roadblock and, for no reason, tell me you couldn’t tell me anything?  for the love of god, man, why are you making this so difficult?
 Lloyd_ZFS768: sir if I had a different answer I would have told you. 
 tim fitzgerald: so you’re saying that there’s absolutely nothing about these tickets that someone like you could use to identify who had issued the ticket
 tim fitzgerald: not one of the at least 3 serial numbers on this ticket would help you determine where it came from?
 tim fitzgerald: for example, NDL400A, which could simply indicate the venue, or it could mean that it was purchased at the nederlander box office
 tim fitzgerald: or CA277NDL, also seeming to indicate the nederlander in an obvious way
 Lloyd_ZFS768: Sir, knowing the serial numbers will not help because even if I had the order infront of me you would still need to verify the purchasing card number
 tim fitzgerald: there’s also a 12-digit code that looks less interpretable but undoubtedly also is built in a way that someone could look at it and know what it meant
 tim fitzgerald: christ on a crutch, what reasonable need could there possibly be for me to have the billing info?  if it was purchased with a credit card, it would be refunded to that card and there’s no way in hell i could pull anything to interfere with that.  if it wasn’t purchased with a credit card, or wasn’t purchased from you, knowing that also would not help me do anything underhanded.  
 tim fitzgerald: This is just the worst customer service — and I understand you’re implementing a policy, and I feel bad for you that you work for a company that would sacrifice basic customer satisfaction in favor of policies that actually accomplish nothing and protect nothing.  I could have walked away from this conversation thinking positively about Ticketmaster 15 minutes ago with the basic, harmless info I asked for
 tim fitzgerald: instead your policy is that you can’t help me.  for no reason.
 Lloyd_ZFS768: Tim. a supervisor is volenteering to call you. may I have your best phone number?
 tim fitzgerald: great, thanks.  508 xxx xxxx
 Lloyd_ZFS768: ok. i’ll follow up with the sup for you. Are there any issue that I CAN help you with?
 tim fitzgerald: when do you think they’ll call?
 Lloyd_ZFS768: hold on I’ll try to find out
 tim fitzgerald: no, this is literally the only thing i needed.  i hope you understand that this is between me and ticketmaster and you shouldn’t take it personally that i’m so frustrated.  undoubtedly you’ve done all you can, and it’s not your fault that your employer is a monopoly that should have been drawn and quartered by the department of justice like 20 years ago already.
 tim fitzgerald: thank you lloyd.
 Lloyd_ZFS768: ok Tim it will be in about 10 minutes or so. He has another fan he has to finish up with first
 tim fitzgerald: hahah.  are you being ironic, or is fan the word you’re supposed to use for ticketmaster customers?
 Lloyd_ZFS768: I never take things personall;y. I wasn’t born an agent
 Lloyd_ZFS768: no not ironic. that’s the truth
 tim fitzgerald: good, i’m glad.  just wanted to clarify where the frustration was supposed to be directed.  i appreciate you sticking with me
 Lloyd_ZFS768: I understand. Seriously do need anything else from me.. show info or other orders
 tim fitzgerald: hahah no, i’m good.  i avoid ticketmaster like the plague so all the live music i’m seeing this month will be in venues not controlled by emperor palpatine.
 tim fitzgerald: thanks lloyd!  have a good night.
 Lloyd_ZFS768: If you need anything else, we’re always here for you!  Feel free to chat with us here, or if you prefer to send an email to our Fan Support team, we’re at customer_support@ticketmaster.com.  If you would like to complete a quick survey, please click CLOSE below after hanging up the chat. Thanks for being a fan!
 tim fitzgerald: the word fan is insanely condescending; it presupposes that we are happy being TM customers which is not where customer service should start from
 tim fitzgerald: i hope you can convince your bosses to be less of a dick!  good luck!

Top 5 Unfinished Pogo Park Projects in 2010

I have a tendency to come up with really big ideas, work on them for awhile, and then get distracted by something newer and shinier.  Here’s what I never told you about this year.

1. Harvey Mudd
A 5-EP serialized rap drama that was to be in the vein of old radio shows like The Shadow and was going to be a pre- and post-apocalyptic reflection on where we’re going so wrong as a planet. I may revisit this and restructure it in a less ridiculously unattainable way.  There are about 15 beats that were intended for this epic, and I’m still under the delusion that about half of them will end up being used for something.

2. whommp whommp
A house-meets-dubstep project named with an onomatopoeia.  I still really like this idea, but it’s 99.9% the name.

3. The Decency Party
I spent about a month obsessed with trying to come up with a new social and political framework that could, like Marx, be simple yet relevant enough to spread rapidly outside of academia.  Eventually I came up with the basic principle “don’t be a dick” and wrote a manifesto around the outlandish theory that if we just made a point not to act like assholes, we might be able to get somewhere finally.  Then my roommate pointed out that the word “decency” has a Tipper Gore, “family” values connotation.  I couldn’t come up with another satisfactory framing, so I “set it aside”.  Puritans win again.

4. Untitled QuestionBlock and Pogo Park Project
Sometimes things just don’t work out.  Randy Washington and I had big plans.  We created a few pretty great things and had caught the scent of a few others.  We were going to bring soul back to house-hop.  Then he moved back to Denver and got into the glam scene.

5. Welcome to the Future
This one is unfinished in the sense that I ain’t done yet — the due date is Winter 2011.  But don’t be surprised if you see my second proper album on next year’s Top 5 Unfinished, as well.  I’m busily making beats for some particularly dope emcees, not including myself, as well as for myself.  In January I’ll take stock and figure out what I can put together.  Either way, things will happen this year.  They’re already happening.  #yallaintready

In all seriousness, though: we as human beings don’t share much, in a world sliced up by false demographic dichotomies, massively unjust global power dynamics and looming world-reshaping certainties that won’t reflect an even slightly just distribution of harm.  But I do see one near-universal thread, which is that we live at the end of The Great Petrol Binge and no matter how much responsibility you had for creating or perpetuating it — murky even in developed countries just because, well, who do you blame? - the end is going to fuck your shit up.  Climate change is just part and parcel.

Combine this with the vast and endangered potential of the Internet and we live in a deeply crucial time.  In developed parts of the world, we’re making huge choices about the future of the entire planet and yet we can’t seem to have an honest conversation about it.  Even tho we have arguably the most democratic communications medium in human history.

I often feel that we are possessed with a nearly unshakeable form of denial about what’s to come, and I fear not just the consequences of inaction but also the massive systemic shock we will experience when some devastating proof that we’re screwed hits us all at the same moment.  And it’s not that we don’t talk about it, imagine it, reflect it in art, or passive-aggressively express anxieties about it.  We do.  But like our massive collective practice of distraction and avoidance, this apocalypse is all of ours, and until we understand that in common terms, how can any of us really do anything to address it?

Welcome to the Future will be a selfish, totally unenjoyable and massively personally cathartic chart-topping rap masterpiece about how this happened to us, and what I think we’re probably definitely headed for.  It’ll be fun, tho.  I promise.

Camu Tao - Bird Flu (remix featuring Pogo Park) (2010) 

My first impression of Camu Tao was formed during an SA Smash set at the Middle East in Boston.  What I remember, probably distorted from multiple wide-eyed recountings of this experience, was that every time Metro got done with a verse, Camu would start bouncing around the stage with his eyes clenched almost shut,  SCREAMING/SHRIEKING into his mic, which he was curled over while clenching it in both hands.  It was really, really funny — but also a little annoying.  Actually if you’ve ever seen Birdemic it was like how the guns are mixed way louder than everything else, and every time someone fires a round off for no reason it’s actually genuinely excruciating and you sort of can’t stand it, but you also are invested and don’t want to turn it off.  Oh wait, none of you have seen Birdemic.  Your bad?

Looking back he obviously was just doing his overblown falsetto thing that he occasionally does, and if I’d been more familiar with Camu and with SA Smash I’m sure I would have understood that — but I wasn’t, and I didn’t.  

This terribly limited and just wrong as hell understanding was challenged with his soaring, song-making appearance on Blockhead’s “Jet Son”, and the remix with Aesop Rock, and then it was totally obliterated by his song-stealing verse and chorus on “Rickety Rackety” from Aes’ Fast Cars.  Dude’s verse spent quite some time ricketyracketying around in my brain, seekanddestroying any remaining skeptic.

It got deeper when I heard Now You’re Leaving from Prefuse’s Surrounded by Silence, a gem that he deserved 80% of the credit for.  This was my first hint that dude was capable of making music that was unlike any I’d ever heard before.  And I haven’t heard a song reminiscent of it since.

And then his posthumous debut, King of Hearts, came out this year, two years after his tragically young passing due to cancer, and made good on that promise.  It’s unfinished, but it’s complete enough to kick your imagination and inspiration into full gear, to remind you of what it feels like to hear something truly fresh.  It’s probably the record I have listened to most since it came out, by a long shot.

I’m sure that Camu’s verses on this track would have been leagues beyond mine, but here’s my humble tribute, my attempt to give something back I just couldn’t help myself.  I hope it’s an appropriate thing to do; it’s meant in the utmost of respect and admiration I kinda think he probably wouldn’t want me to navelgaze too hard about it either way.

For serious, though — feelings.  Go buy King of Hearts.  You won’t regret it.

“Ice caps, sit tight!” - My first videoblograp.  Please enjoy.

“A Little Trust”, Pogo Park, prod. Kraneum - 2007

In 2006 I found myself in a strange and beautiful city (Seattle) working 18 hour days on a labor of love. One of my fellow grunts, Jamal, was a local.  He was also a really amazingly talented producer by the name of Kraneum. He gave me a grip of beats, many unfinished, with the intent of starting a long-term collaboration. We decided to make an album entitled GOLD NUGGETS, a pun on our lead organizer’s terrible pep talks. We also planned to include a song drawing heavily from the 1-800-Free-Conference-Calls’ “hold” music.  (It was a heady time to be sure.)

Each night after work I would return to my borrowed basement-level apartment overlooking Portage Bay and I would record demo tracks over Kraneum’s beats. Every bit of the passion, tension, hope, and exhaustion of the gig was processed via these dark, synthy, swelling compositions. Looking back, my writing reflected a feeling of resolution that can only be had at day’s end when you’ve “left it all on the road” and have absolutely nothing left to give except to yourself.  

By the time the job ended 40-odd days later, work had started on about 10 tracks, and I returned to Providence to finish writing and recording.  Providence, I would later realize, is totally out of its mind, so while I did continue work on our project… well, I mean, I was in an all-consuming new environment and I was definitely changing, which is a major theme of this track. Several new Kraneum-produced demos came out of my time in Providence, but as my time in Seattle drifted out of the rearview, work on the old ones gradually slowed to a pause.  A very, very long pause.  Using the word “pause” in the same sense as in the fact that the Korean War is technically still being “fought”.

Anyway, “A Little Trust” was one of the few of our tracks to actually come to some sort of finish in Providence.  (“Kids Like Quinn” was another one.  See my first post.)  There is one more track that saw any kind of hand-to-hand distribution, but I’ll save that for another day.

My old friend Drew Simenson lent the ending vocals (recorded surreptitiously during a cipher session) and a Grüvis Malt track lent the title.  The opening vocal melody and lyrics are in tribute to a very moving adaptation composed by my old friend Caitlin Stephens-North (her twin sister Rinny might have been involved too).  

And to whomever stole my AKG C1000 mic, from which I had absolutely the best results of any mic I’ve used, from that disgusting Watermyn basement: you suck, person. I hope you used it to record some terribly derivative and boring noise music leading no one, despite your wildest dreams, to confuse your band for Lightning Bolt.  Thanks for nothing.

“Kids Like Quinn”, Pogo Park, prod. Kraneum - 2007/9

Thomas “Quinn” Quinn was a troubled man.  He’d been terminally ill 14 years by the time I moved into the Back Bay apartment he shared with his girlfriend and a professional trumpeter, Evan.  Evan had lived there for some time before I arrived, but he and I had both ended up at 38 Westland Ave via very friendly Craigslist ads.  We were both in over our heads with the situation, and we watched with doe-eyed shock as Quinn drugged himself into a nightly stupor.

It was the first time I’d been in the presence of a serious drug addict, but the situation was complicated by his illness and so I tried not to overreact.  His girlfriend, Tara, took care of him (with what still seems an unfathomable amount of dedication and durability) and kept his (their) problems mostly behind closed doors.  Still, it went without saying what was going on behind those doors, and yet we lived our busy lives, went to class, work, socialized.  We three had an unspoken agreement to accept Quinn’s decision-making process as something we simply could not possibly understand.   How could we begrudge Quinn a sense of impermanence?  It was just obviously not our place to tell him how to value, how to protect his life.

“Kids Like Quinn” is the true story of one night on Westland when things came to a head.  Quinn nearly died, paramedics were called, anxiety attacks were had.  Evan and I were really knocked out of our complacence by these events, and we eventually all moved out and went our separate ways.

I ran into Evan at the Hynes T station a few years after I wrote and recorded this track, and he asked me if I had heard about Quinn.  I hadn’t.  He told me that Quinn had finally passed after overdosing.  Apparently Tara was doing well for herself, though, which was quite a relief to hear.  

In 2009 I refixed the choruses a bit and brought it to a state I was comfortable with people hearing.  That’s the version I’ve posted here.  Finally rest in peace, Quinn.  You certainly made a big impression on me.  Thanks.

(Update 11/6/11: minor vocal mix patch)

“The Long Emergency” demo, Pogo Park 2007.

I recently uncovered this demo version of “The Long Emergency”, which was released on a Rising Waters benefit compilation and was an opportunity for me to test out an album concept.  It’s the album for which the alias Pogo Park was birthed, in fact, but it probably won’t get made — because I’m working on something much bigger and better.

Either way, the final track that was pressed on the comp suffered from rushing under a deadline — in retrospect, aside from the mix and the chorus vocals, this demo version is far superior and much closer to the execution I’d planned for this track.

The scenario takes a lot from John Titor and a book I read when I was 16.  It was intended to be the intro track, so it’s pretty much all there in the verses.