"Wrap It Up"
"Wrap It Up"
Blah blah. Blah blah blah. Blah blah BLAH blah blah. Blah blah. Blah. (Blah.)
No more massive missives for CeeGees.
Gonna wrap these up in a somewhat reasonable amount of time from now on. Really. Takes me too long to write ‘em, takes you too long to read ‘em.
Not that I mind spending the time on my end. But if I’m spending that kinda time, that time commitment carries over to the reader. And making these so damn long is:
arrogant,
boring,
embarrassing,
frustrating,
inefficient,
insensitive,
lazy,
presumptuous,
self-absorbed,
self-indulgent,
unhealthy,
unhelpful,
unproductive, and
unsustainable.
And not necessarily in that alphabetized order, obviously.
But I think I need to write a single-segment entry, every few days. And then do the podcast…every week? Every other week? And the podcast could be kind of a “best-of” from all the entries published since the previous pod, maybe.
Still mulling the details. Feel free to write me at dean@ceegees.org if you have ideas for what would be most helpful/useful/interesting.
But I wanted to write something today, because my birthday is four weeks from today, and I’ve been telling myself for years that on my birthday in 2024 I’d:
have my shit together, and
release an album of my own songs on that day, too.
Which is not going to happen. Definitely not the album thing, but also not the “shit together” thing. Although I’ve been making some pretty big strides the last few weeks along those lines. There’s hope; a path to personal shit-togetherness.
And I suppose there’s still a path for this newsletter and podcast to inspire cultural and communal shit-togetherness, too. Although things seem bleaker than usual, even, don’t they? So I guess I/we will need to remember that even if it’s only a wee-tiny bit of extra understanding we’re able to conjure up here, that’s a small win worth pursuing.
I gotta keep doing the self-indulgent music talk, too, though. And even more self-indulgent: I’m going to try to have an album’s worth of songs of my own written by my birthday, at least. So I’ll probably throw in a mention about my progress with that over the coming weeks…maybe include a link to a demo idea once in a while for your kind consideration.
(SIDE NOTE: I almost wasn’t going to include the below because Soundcloud chops off the beginnings of your songs for some reason now. Unbelievable. But eff it. Here’s a bunch of demos I did a long time ago, which I’ve showed, like, seven people. I do like ‘em, though. I guess just rewind to the beginnings of each song so you can hear the first beat? Sheesh, Soundcloud…)
And I’d also like to go back to some of the ideas I never got around to back when I was first thinking about what I wanted CeeGees to be. In fact, check out this pre-Substack version of CeeGees if you haven’t yet.
I’d especially like to follow through on devoting segments to some friendly and constructive criticism of other media entities and personalities I like but often disagree with, in a section of the site I’d tentatively titled “With All Due Respect…”
So there would be “Blog Save Pod Save America” (Pod Save America), “Realer Time” (Real Time With Bill Maher), “Rumble Strip” (Rumble With Michael Moore), and “The Lefsetz Letter Letter” (The Lefsetz Letter).
I need to come up with one for Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, too. Maybe “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver With Dean Moore This Afternoon?”
Anyway. I hope this Substack can be a helluva lot more helpful than it has been in the past, and a helluva lot less of me saying blahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh whatever-whatever for an hour.
See ya sooner than I saw ya since last time, hopefully!
Yours,
~Dean
P.S. Here’s a list of song titles I want to have done in 30 days. (Self-indulgent!!) None are done yet. A couple are done musically and like 80% done lyrically. A bunch more are done musically and barely have any lyrics. And a few more are kinda-sorta done musically and don’t even have a title, let alone a lyrical thrust yet (the titles in brackets are those ones…not even working titles, placeholder titles…just the nonsense words I mumbled in order to hack together a melody).
If I ever do record a record of these, it’ll be called Slow to Get Up.
I Just Kinda Wanna Cry
[Out of My Hands]
[Weight of the World]
Hooligan
The Referee
[Sailing on the Sun]
No Fair
The Girls I Like Don’t Like Boys Like Me
Least of My Concerns
Callin’ Bullshit
[Only Heaven Knows]