When All Else Fails

Welcome, friends, neighbors, enemies, and communists.
You have come to the internet home of the brainchild of Dr. Ue and Professor Mackenzie.
These two young men have set out to create a collection of pieces that will eventually fill a booklet and CD.
There will be musical, visual, and literary works included in their project.
Each work will correspond to a work of the two other types.
Here, they will post their pieces as they are completed.

Musical Things! (MP3)
Literary Things! (HTML)
Visual Things! (JPEG)


Record of creative sessions


The 7th of August, 2003 C.E.
The professor had just arrived back from a 27 hour train ride from Colorado, which he took home so that he could get to his mandatory marching band camp while the rest of his family stayed and enjoyed their last few days visiting Apen. He went out to dinner with Miss Andrea Freerksen and was getting his stuff together for his four day band camp. At the same time, the doctor was out biking around the streets of Glen Ellyn. He had just been to a dinner with the men of his dad's side of the family. The doctor recolected that this was the night that the professor was suppose to be home all alone. He arrived at the professors house and could see him through the window, so he started jumping up and down and waving his flashlight at him. The professor from inside happened to look up to see a beam of a mysterious flashlight that was playing in his window at 1:30 in the morning when he was all alone in the house. Quite shaken, the professor went up to his room to continue packing and trying to ignore the ominous hand that must have held the flashlight. It slowly dawned on him that the only person who could (and most likely would) try to get his attention in the middle of the night would be his close friend and colleauge, Dr. Ue. The professor finally invited the doctor inside, and we soon got to talking. We talked about trains and watches and weapons made out of ball point pens for a good two hours, both of us quite giddy from lack of sleep. Finally, around 3:30 in the morning the professor suggested that we work on a poem. The title, And To Me, My Rubber Someone, came from a scribbled note in an old little notebook of the professor's. We proceeded with a pattern of writing a question and then a statement or fragment that related to (if it didn't answer) the question, always trying to stay very surreal and oxymoronic. Much inspiration was drawn from the books that were to be found on the bookshelves of the professor's dad's office, specifically the responses to the question "Why?" were drawn from four dictionary examples of the word "because". The doctor finally left around 5 o'clock in the morning hoping he would be able to get to bed in time for his parents to get him up to go to Health Track. The professor was left to post their poem and to get ready for his marching band camp running on about three hours of sleep in the past 48 hours.


The 12th of July, 2003 C.E.
The professor went to pick up the doctor around 2 o'clock, because the doctor's parent had taken both their cars somewhere, I don't know where. After laughing at the doctor's dog, Jazz, about barking so much, we messed around with the doctor's brother's new drum set and then we went around the doctor's basement hitting everything with drum sticks and a very weird, spontaneous, interesting, and probably hard to listen to jam session. When we finally made it back to the professor's house, we started to mess around with an idea of the professor's for a song called We Want Lunch. The doctor had brought his mini drum pad synth as well as his guitar, so we incorporated a lot of that into are ideas. We then spent a brief period listening to some Atom and His Package songs. We decided that there was not enough time to really get started on the recording for We Want Lunch, so instead the professor handed the doctor a piece of paper that said, "the wind pulled me forward as I walked" on it, without any explination. The doctor then, without a word, wrote a second line to the poem that eventually became The Wind, the Rain, and Me. As the poem went on, switching off lines between the professor and the doctor, we consulted more and more with eachother. When it came to the doctor writing the last line of the poem, the professor's mom was getting impatient to start dinner, so the the doctor quickly wrote down a random line about being hungry and pi in blue pen (we had only been using black ultra fine point sharpies up till that point). He was in a very wacky mood by then, but he promissed to think about a more serious ending later. Then the professor drove the doctor home, and the doctor's brother complained about him having taken his good sticks that he uses on his kit.


The 5th of July, 2003 C.E.
We met somewhere around 2 o'clock, after the doctor went to a doctors appointment, and the professor practiced driving stick. We then spent a long time talking about left handed musicians, specifically guitarist, and how guitar is one of the only instruments that is reversed for left handed people, although drums sometimes are, which our friend, Hammy (who is a lefty drummer) tells us is stupid, and how it would be really confusing to make a backwards piano for lefties. Then we played around some and talked about more random stuff. Then we decided that we should either get going on either some literary or visual works, since we spent the entire time last time on music, or we could go to Sam Ash, because we were bored. We decided on the latter. So, we went to Sam Ash and the professor looked at the new keyboard that he is considering buying, the doctor tried to get replacement tubes for his amp as well as looked at ridiculous guitars and amps, we both looked at basses because our friend, Joe needs one for our band, Harmonically Incorrect (see bottom of page for link), we both played with the synth drum pads, and the professor deeply impressed the classical music guy who worked there that a teenager could come in, pick up the accordion, and actually know what he was doing. On the way home, the doctor got a call from his brother, who said that he needed to come home. So, the professor brought him and his guitar home and then we both went off and did different things with our evening. In conclusion, we really got nothing accomplished on our project, but we will next time, and we both agreed to work on poems and visual things on our own.


The 28th of June, 2003 C.E.
We met at about 12 o'clock, at the professor's house. The doctor brought his electric guitar, so we spent the first hour or so chatting about the project and then kicking around some They Might Be Giants songs. When we finally got down to buisness, we decided that we needed to at least get one spontaneous recording done for our first meeting. The recording that became Today, started with the professor shooting out some random bendy-chord thing on the keyboard followed by a driving imporvisational bass part over keyboard supplied drums. Then the doctor took many cracks at getting two improvisational guitar tracks above that to work out, but finally we ended up with a product we were happy with. After that it was a simple matter of adding random vocal and spontaneous talking tracks over the whole deal. After this we ate dinner with the professor's parents, I don't remember what we had, but I'm sure it was delectible. After dinner, we sat around some more and played more They Might Be Giants together. For a while we considered calling friends up to see if they wanted to go out and do something. Then the professor had an idea; he flipped open his Spanish/English dictionary to a random English page, with intention of coming up with a song about the first noun that he came to. The noun was: invader. The professor found a bass line on the keyboard that seemed to fit this idea, and then translated it to chords on the accordion. The recording of The Invaders began with the proffesor spewing the first thing that came to his head into the microphone and alternately following up these talking portions by the professor on accordion and keyboard drums or the doctor on the guitar. After we reached a part with a big building A chord, we knew that we wanted to break into a much more musical section, but we were unsure of what to do. So, on the doctor's suggestion we shouted, "Polka!" and broke into a very happy dancing thing, which we were not possitive is a real polka, but we thought it was close enough and oh so hilarious that it didn't matter. The professor then broke out his (or more accurately his school's) flugal horn and added bouncy toots on the off beats, which have already been mistaken for a bicycle horn. It was during the process of recording this, that the professor recieved a phone call from Andi Freerksen in Oregon, but he had trouble talking for he was still laughing too hard about shouting, "Polka!" After finishing this we were feeling quite satisfied with ourselves, and so we chatted some more and then spent a while looking for humorous things on the internet, until the doctor left around 11 o'clock.


Also check out some other things these guys are doing: