Saxophone player in 8th st. RW station, uptown entrance. 1:23 a.m. Tuesday Oct 13.

Come On, Bombs by Benjamin Apple (me)

I wrote/improvised a song about a guy who’s so world-weary he wants the apocalypse to come every time he gets upset. It’s not great, but it’s the first full song I’ve written since I think 2003. I think part of the reason I’m uploading it is to embarrass myself a little so that I’ll feel challenged to improve.

Oh, my wife doesn’t love me
So come on bombs,
Come on bombs
And drop down from the sky
To explode

I’ve lost my job
So come on bombs,
Come on bombs
And drop down
Oh, drop down
And explode

My stick shift is broken
My car cannot change gears
Can’t change gears
So come on, bombs
Come on, bombs
Take us out
Take us out

Who left this milk out?
It’s gone bad
Oh, come on, bombs
Come on, bombs
Come down, drop down, fall down

Oh, I don’t like the color yellow
It seems like everyone wears yellow
Oh, drop down
Swing low
Oh bombs, swing low
To explode
To explode

What’s today?
It’s Thursday
But I thought it was Friday
I thought it was Friday
Oh, bombs, drop down
Drop down, drop down

The other night Rob Stern and Alan Starzinski came over to “sit on comfortable couches.” What’s that word for someone who parks their car outside your apartment and calls you on the phone to hang out? Ah, yeah: “stalker.”

Cut to 30 minutes later, we’re recording improvised songs that are twice as fun to record as they are to listen to. One of our more successful attempts, “Atlantis,” features Alan as the son of a missing “Atlantis specialist” who leaves his dog to go find him. Rob is a unicorn. I am the guitarist and a bad impression of Devendra Banhart.

My favorite line is from Rob: “I am a unicorn! I’ve been to Atlantis, I can tell you about it: it is great!”

Slow motion sounds #2: Jonathan vacuums, Mary growls. August 20th 2009, 10:51 p.m. in Knoxville, TN. 10% speed, +12dB volume.

Slow motion sounds #1: Washington Square Park cricket. August 3rd 2009 around 3 a.m. About ten and a half seconds of audio playing at 10% speed and 34dB amplification. (Still pretty quiet, so headphones recommended)

The most bizarre and interesting rant I’ve ever heard on the subway. Yesterday’s WMD quote was from this recording. Also, I really like the guy’s voice! Listening to it I feel like I’m playing a Half-Life-style video game and he’s guiding me through a level.

Adam Bozarth (as Ridley Township’s 13th district alderman Allen White) cracks us both up while shooting LNI #138.

The line that made us laugh this hard will most definitely be in the final edit. Hoping to finish by this weekend.

Washington Square Park, May 2nd around 8:45 p.m. Two middle-aged white men playing Three Little Birds on guitar and singing. The louder of the two men was coaching the other as they played. At 1:23 a heavyset black woman approaches and takes a seat to my right. Around 2:00 she starts singing, and has a great voice. At some point a very sad-looking Indian woman asks for my permission before taking a seat to my left, but it doesn’t pick up on the recording. I don’t know why she asked before sitting down - maybe she was so sad she expected strangers to shun her. Duration: 3:25.

Edit: My mom listened and pointed out that you can hear the Indian woman ask to sit down around 1:43. Hearing her voice again makes me wish I’d started talking to her and found out if she needed anything.

At the end of March, SMIRK was two matches away from being the first improv team to be retired from the Magnet Theater’s Inferno competition. We had to go up against The Assembly, who everyone knew was a great team, and who had won the most Inferno matches other than SMIRK. Our friend Alan Starzinski couldn’t make it to the show but wanted to either congratulate or console us, so around the time he knew the match would be over, he left me these two voicemail messages.

We did win, and went on to retire, and since then only drink out of golden things.

This one’s long.

This evening I was walking north on University Place when I passed a fruit vendor who had an interesting sales-yell (:05, but the best is towards the end at 3:35). I couldn’t discern any words in it, but it seemed to have syllables, so maybe his accent was just very strong, or it could have been in another language. I grabbed some wall, hit record, and waited for a few good yells.

While I was recording a customer (guy around my age) bought some fruit, handed the vendor two bills, and quickly walked away. The fruit guy immediately called after him (3:00). The customer turned and said frustratedly, “I just gave you one and another.” The vendor held up the second bill, which was a 20, and said “Twenty dollar.”

The customer came back, replaced the 20 with two ones, and walked away. The vendor yelled after him again because he had now given him three dollars, but the customer called back, “I know! That’s for letting me know.” The customer kept walking, and the vendor chuckled, “One dollar, twenty dollar.” (3:15)

Right then my roommate Josh came down the street, so I stopped him and said hi.

Edit: I just realized the timestamps aren’t much help because the Tumblr audio player doesn’t have a time indicator. Don’t know what to do about that. Also, man, my voice sounds nasally.

I asked Dan Chamberlain (We Can’t Live In a Cave, amfmpm.org) if he’d lend his voice talent to Late Night Interview’s opening credits, and Dan delivered a pitch-perfect voiceover that adds a lot to the show. He sent me about a dozen variations, all of which are great, so I’m sharing them here with Dan’s permission. This edit includes all takes. I’m tempted to ask Dan to provide a different “Television” for every broadcast.

In other LNI news, we now have a Facebook group, a YouTube channel, and an iTunes Store video podcast. Next broadcast should be up around the end of the month.

I’m visiting my parents’ new place in Knoxville, Tennessee, and the crickets sound way different. It’s like they’re whistling.

Whenever you walk into the sun room they go quiet - they must have either great eyes or great ears - so you won’t hear them for the first few seconds of this recording.

The town of Swarthmore, PA uses a fire horn to alert its volunteer fire fighters. It’s tremendously loud. When it bursts from out of nowhere and rolls around like thunder, you do a quick survey of your life because you think that the world is ending. Both of my maternal great grandmothers lived in Swarthmore when I was a kid, so I often heard the horn at full blast, and sometimes I could hear it while lying in my bed a couple of miles away in Secane.

When you Google “fire horn,” on the first page is a complaint from an elderly person who says Swarthmore’s makes her heart rate jump.

Edit: My favorite part of this recording is towards the end after the police sirens come in, when you hear what sounds like birds singing, but I don’t remember for sure.

Sometimes when a train stops on the tracks because of a delay, there’s total mechanical silence. Normally the humming ventilation system, whining electric motors, and shrieking steel wheels combine to create a constant background noise which insulates you and your thoughts from other passengers. When the train’s various systems shut down, each train car becomes just a room in which people are sitting, and you have this sudden awareness of the people around you and what they’re doing.

The other night my uptown 6 train stopped in between 33rd and Grand Central and this is what happened. We were stopped for almost ten minutes, and I started recording it just a minute or two in. You can hear everyone’s too-loud iPods, the unscrewing and re-screwing of bottle caps, and the conductor radioing frustratedly with whatever communications hub functions as the MTA’s nervous system. My favorite part of the recording is from 4:50 to 5:50. This woman wearing headphones starts moaning softly to herself for no apparent reason, quiet but audible. Then an MTA worker radios on behalf of our conductor, “Somebody? Anybody?”

One of my hobbies is phonography, which is just making audio recordings, especially of things that aren’t planned/prepared. I have a few different recorders, but recently I found an iPhone app that records what I’d call “pretty okay quality” audio, so now I don’t ever carry around my field recorders. This kind of sucks because now my recordings are all less than great, but it’s worth it to not have to carry around one more breakable badget.

Last night on the way to Queens for my team’s variety show, I noticed that my 7 train car had a mulfunctioning closing-door sound. When I exited at Vernon-Jackson I stood by the door to record it.

I prefer this to the normal sound, and I think that if safety weren’t an issue, we could have seasonal and holiday remixes.