Things were quiet at Cloudy Labs last weekend, as I took a few days off to go to New York City. Where I had the freakiest hospitality industry experience of my life.

My darling daughter is now a freshman at NYU and is taking Greenwich Village by storm. I’ll spare you a bout of bragging and skip over the fact that she accepted a massive scholarship to a kickass university and was also welcomed to the impossible-to-get-into Gallatin School of Independent Study, and leave it with: she’s awesome, I love her quirky little self madly, and it’s way too quiet around here without seventies funk and blaxploitation flicks blasting from her bedroom.

So, missing her acutely, I found myself in the wee hours of last Friday on a plane to La Guardia, with my 17-year old son in tow to boot. He’s an adventuresome lad who was looking forward to endless pizza by the slice and his first look at the City that Never Sleeps.

The trip was a gas, we wore ourselves out with my now-naturalized New Yorker girl (”What, your feet are sore? We’ve only walked 500 blocks, dad!”) and totally stimulated the New York restaurant and coffee shop economy.

However, with times being tight, my mission of the last few weeks was to find an affordable hotel for two dudes. The best candidate seemed to be The Jane.

The Jane is a 100-year old building on the Hudson river that was once a rooming house for sailors, with a long and colorful history - it even housed the survivors of the Titanic, and you can read all about it on their funky-groovy web site. What their site doesn’t mention is that for some years, the beautiful building had fallen into decline, becoming sort of a derelict apartment house. It’s now in the process of being remodeled into a hotel for those with “more dash than cash”. Hey, that’s me!

So, for the tidy sum of $115 a night, we were able to check in to a tiny room - really almost a closet - that consisted of bunk beds nestled next to a two foot by six foot stretch of carpet and a tiny window. Count us in!

FRIDAY AFTERNOON:

We checked into The Jane around 5:00 PM. Up the stone stairs, over a granite threshold that was visibly smoothed by millions of footsteps, and into the lobby, with its period detail and super-duper old-school reception desk. First impressions: a tad grubbier than one might expect, with work in progress here and there, but really pretty cool.

The desk staff was hip and perfectly friendly - efficient and “real”, no over-the-top fake friendliness here. We were taken up the old-school elevator by a uniformed attendant.

Now that's a tiny hotel room!

We headed down a narrow hallway to our room, and that’s when I got my first experience of… “the smell”. Vaguely familiar and very noticeable, something like old-house and old-food and very bad, though faint. The thought then struck me: staying in a place with hundred-years-of-living smell is going to suck. But thankfully, our tiny room smelled nothing-but-new. Varnish, wood and fresh paint, not even “hotel disinfectant”. Two plasma screens (one for each bunk), a tiny window and a humming air conditioner, hidden by a wooden grate beneath the tiny window. Comfy beds, and two big feather pillows each. We could handle this!

The communal bathrooms were a gleaming study in white & black tile, well thought out with plenty of privacy. Cool.

FRIDAY EVENING:

We headed out to find my daughter. The smell in the hall was powerful, and something did catch my eye, though it’s clear I’ll never be a detective. The odor was strongest at the end of the hall, where the narrow passage opened into the stair & elevator lobby. The last door was different than the others - every door but one was a gleaming study in rich, chocolate-colored oak, but (in hindsight) the door nearest the odor was old, a paneled door with generations of paint, faded to a gray-brown-green, the trim bruised and cracked. Yet it displayed the same antique room number applique as all the others. And in a hotel with such tiny rooms, there are lots and lots of doors.

FRIDAY NIGHT:

Enjoyed the rainfall-headed showers. The hall stinks!

SATURDAY MORNING:

We slept like babies in our comfy bunks, my only issue being that the wall-lamp over my pillow (of course I got the bottom, I was traveling with my son after all) was burned out, making my bed a dark little cave.

Leaving the hotel, we both noticed that the smell was intense. It smacked you as you passed, and I finally recognized it: something dead. Something very big and very dead. But, we were late and we headed out to a cold and misty day.

SATURDAY NIGHT:

Returning to the hotel, you could smell it once you stepped from the elevator, and the hallway itself? Thick, dense odor, something that made you hold your breath and PUSH through.

My son headed for the showers. I went downstairs to see if there was a bar (there was, now closed for renovation… damn!). I shared the elevator back up with a foreign woman, who got off on my floor. As we entered “the cloud”, I said, “I wonder what died in this hall?”

She had a hand over her face, but with the other, she gestured to the strange, old door. There was a bright green sticker on it that I hadn’t noticed today.

A police department sticker stating that the “room was sealed”. In fact, the name of the sticker was “Seal For Door of D.O.A. Premises”. Wow.

SUNDAY MORNING:

I left the hotel while my son was sleeping to grab some coffee. The smell pounced on me as I passed. Insane, thick, dense and dark. The green sticker sat quietly.

Heading back with my coffee in the elevator, I asked the older man who worked the gate and lever about the situation. I was fully aware that (A) whatever happened in that room was the full knowledge of every last hotel employee and (B) there was probably a silly cover story.

“Oh that”, he answered with a vaguely Hatian accent . “Someone came up to check on it, I don’t know nothing”.

Damn. Someone had been dead in a room on my floor for days, had been bagged and carted off by the cops, who then sealed the room. To say I was curious would be an understatement. It seemed totally surreal, vaguely impossible, except for the fact that the smell was simply devastating when you passed that damned door.

Hey, what's the smear?

We stopped on the way out and snapped some pics of the door and sticker, the first time we’d paused in the hall. Fiddling with my camera, the smell was like a heavy, wet blanket. I could suddenly feel meals I’d digested years ago lurching up from my stomach.

I wish I could describe how all-encompassing the odor was, how it seemed to make the lamp in the hall begin to dim, how your visual field of view seemed to shrink, how you could feel a sharp little edge of something like panic (run - get out!) gleaming somewhere in your lower brain. Maybe part of it was the knowledge of what we were smelling.

I noticed a thick, brownish smear across the wood - I didn’t point it out to my son.

SUNDAY NIGHT:

We returned. Smell in the hall is terrible, with an added bouquet of bleach and ammonia… but our room still smells fresh. A window at the far stairwell is open, a big industrial fan blows in front of it, sucking dead-person smell into the night (and, I might add, all through the hall). I have a nice cold beer in bed.

I drift of to sleep with a vague vision of a long hallway terminating at a secret, ancient door where all of life ends. The fact that my bunk is a lightless little cave does not help. But the bed sure is comfy.

MONDAY - EARLY AM:

I head for the bathroom at 6 AM (thanks to my beer nightcap). Regardless of the fans and chemicals, the smell leaped at me, pummeling my sinuses. I held my breath as I returned to our room.

By 9AM, the odor has finally dissipated as I make my morning coffee run down the street. I return and wait for the elevator with a really pleasant maintenance guy. He says “You should have seen this place before the remodeling… really run down”, and explained that there were still residents on various floors, that those rooms were not yet remodeled, even down to the original doors still being in place.

Seeing I had an expert in my grasp, I inquired about the situation on the third floor. “Oh, that,” he replied, “Someone with really bad hygiene“.

I asked if the “hygiene police” had sealed the door. He laughed, leaned closer and whispered, “And some ladies used the bathroom in there, too”.

Now, I’ve lived in 80-year old homes. I’ve dealt with dead squirrels in chimneys, dead rats in walls. There’s only one smell like that, and it isn’t hygiene. “So, that’s the ‘official’ story?”

He laughed. “Yes sir. That’s the ‘official’ story.”

MONDAY 10AM:

The smell has finally receded a bit as we head down to check out. We left our backpacks with the desk (we had a 3:00 shuttle pickup at the hotel) and spent our last day in the city.

Returning for our bags, my son went in to use the bathroom, decided to take a last look, and found the sticker was gone. The entire perimeter of the door was now sealed with duct tape. When the bellman inquired about our stay, I said, “Great, except for that crazy smell”. He looked down and his face suddenly looked like he’d been the guy chosen to clean the room out. He apologized with no further explanation.

Now, I don’t want to get anyone fired, but… hanging around the lobby, waiting for the shuttle, I noticed an employee who will go unnamed and un-described. We chatted a bit, and I thought I’d give it one more shot, if only to get “version seven-B, revision 12″ of the ‘official’ story. Apparently this person hadn’t gotten the memo.

“Oh, some guy died in there. We think it was maybe Tuesday. Older guy, lived here.”

The shuttle came, and we left.

I know you’re asking… would I stay there again?

View from our room down the long dark hallway of death. The green sticker is visible on the distant right.

Good question. Overall, it was a great hotel for our hostel-like needs. On the other hand, the experience had a touch of the movie “Hostel”.

In my opinion, the management failed miserably. Were I running things, police-seals or not, I would have added the duct tape immediately, and covered the entire door with a drop cloth, hiding the sticker (any workers trying to enter the room would see it of course).

I would have moved everyone near the room to other rooms (perhaps they did - we were towards the far end of the hall). I would have contacted every guest on the floor with a suitable cover story - yes, a lie. Just “plumbing trouble” would do, with assurances that their health was not in jeopardy (though maybe it was… I would have checked with health authorities, and again, perhaps they did).

The thing is, most of us are squeamish about death, and having death rubbed so thoroughly in your face is an intense experience. I’d think 90 percent of hotel guests would be very happy to have an explanation to cling to - I think most people would be glad to believe anything plausible.

And looking at the bigger picture: if I ran a hotel that also housed residents - residents obviously nearing the bottom rungs of society, renting tiny rooms near the ends of their lives - I’d institute some sort of program to check up on them every 48 hours or so. Beyond the practical aspect of avoiding a hotel swimming in the fresh aroma of decomposing human beings, it just seems to me like the right thing to do.

Sitting here days later, I find that catching a little “off” smell no longer gives me a giant whiff of dead people (walking into a restaurant monday, just a whiff of something like wet dishtowels gave me a momentary blast of the morgue - funny how the mind works). I picture that darkened hall in my mind and it does seem a little haunting, like a frame from a masterfully done horror flick, better than any movie I’ve yet seen.

But I went to New York because I am so close to my daughter, because the house seems awfully empty without her. I took my son because he misses her too (well, he does love having the bathroom to himself), and I had the joy of seeing him discover the nothing-like-it-anywhere experience that is New York. I missed my wife, and after two trips to the city without her (one being the initial college-move), I decided I’m not going anywhere without her for some time. Ask me my biggest fear, and I’ll tell you straight up, it would be to live and die alone, without love. Some poor guy went to bed and didn’t wake up, and nobody even noticed until the smell got out of hand. Maybe he liked living that way, but I kind of doubt it.

I’m thankful for my family and friends every hour of the day. I don’t need to smell a very-dead person to remember that. But hey, dead guy - I don’t hold it against you. I hope you’ve moved on, to somewhere with a little more space, with someone who cares checking in from time to time.

But if you feel like sticking around, the third floor of The Jane Hotel would make an awesome haunted hallway.

With the return of fall also comes the arrival of groups of guys going on and on and on about their “Fantasy Football Teams”.

Frankly, the words “Football” and “Fantasy” have never seemed to me to belong in the same sentence. To be honest, the only thing I really like abut football is that the grocery store is really empty and you can blow through shopping fast.

So, for guys like me, I present the alternative to fantasy football:

The Fantasy Mormon Polygamy Compound.

That’s right - populate your little row of polygamist cottages with the best crew of “Sister Wives” you can muster. And please keep in mind - unless you have access to a functioning time machine (and you’re cool with the possible damage one could do to the space-time continuum by shuffling hotties around the ages) try to keep yours current - no temporal paradoxes in the mormon compound!

That’s why you won’t see Morticia Addams, Ginger, MaryAnne, & Jeannie, Katherine Hepburn, Grace Kelley or seventies-era Stevie Nicks in my compound. Let’s get started!

SISTER WIFE #1: PADMA LAKSHMI

The former supermodel, award-winning cookbook author and current Top Chef host will be in charge of managing the compound - primarily mediating any cat fights that may occur in my little Mormon heaven. If you’ve ever heard her say “Please pack your knives and go”, you’ll understand how much threat and menace she can project in just one serene sentence. And hey, if she wants to cook up some dinners, the kitchen’s all hers!

SISTER WIFE #2: Maribel Verdú

This spanish art-house actress’ primary duty will be communicating with all the help (this is Texas and I speak-a no spanish, capiche?).

SISTER WIFE #3: Julie Delpy

Wow, another actress! Julie’s french background will be indispensable, as we’ll need someone to “speak with a cute french accent”. She’s got the job.

SISTER WIFE #4: SARAH SILVERMAN

There’s only one woman who can put up with my nonstop spewing of smartassery, and that’s Sarah. Her jewish schtick will go a long way towards enhancing the cultural melting pot that is my polygamist compound. And her wicked and utterly wrong standup material will come in handy when the cable’s out.

SISTER WIFE #5 HILARY SWANK

Yeah, all you ladies don’t get the whole Hilary Swank thing - “Her mouth is too big!” “Her jawline is too hard!” “Her last name isn’t Clinton!” “Her butt is perfect!” Whine, whine, whine. Hilary will be in charge of interior decorating, as she moves her Best Actress Oscars collection from mantle to bookshelf to end table.

SISTER WIFE #6: DARA TORRES

As an Olympic champ and super-MILF, you’d think I’d assign Dara to something like physical fitness & diet consultant, but I have bigger plans: Dara’s job will be to “keep the pool area looking good”. And no, I don’t mean she’ll clean the pool - all she has to do is sit there.

SISTER WIFE #7: GONG LI

The Chinese acting powerhouse will have a crucial place in the structure of the compound: she will keep track of the numerous asian carry-out menus that litter the place, suggesting the best combinations when “everyone wants Chinese”. And, being born in 1965, she’ll be considered the “grown up” of this bunch of post-teen wives (and when she acts up, I can announce that “Gong Li is Chinese for OLDER THAN DARA!” Good times!)

SISTER WIFE #8: TRICIA HELFER

The recent reboot of Battlestar Galactica introduced us to the World’s Hottest Cylon. So what job goes to the blonde who helped destroy human civilization? As long as she wears that red dress, whatever the hell job she wants!

Sadly, there are no authors, researchers, philosophers or academics on this list… I guess I should get out more.

Right before a big birthday bash, I got the itch to get one of those cigar box amps - since there’s always some 3AM jamming on the back deck.

After searching the interwebs, I found the above kit on eBay, from a company called Guitar Fuel. They sell some cool guitar mods and kits - check ‘em out at this link. You can see the video I made with the amp at this link.

I’m no circuits & solder expert by any means, but this kit looked easy - and it was. The circuit board itself is pre-soldered, the instructions are crystal clear - if you’ve ever changed pickups or a pot, you can build it in a half hour. If you’ve never soldered, it could make a nice “first kit”.

I LOVE a little ambience (hell, a lot of ambience) so I found a Danelectro “Fab Echo” pedal for $15 (new!), took it apart and hacked it into the circuit (not a big deal - it comes “before” the amp so it was pretty simple to add). The only other “mod” I did was cosmetic - I took some diamond lath (sort of a heavy steel mesh), rusted it with some acid stain, and put it between the face and the grill cloth for an “old TV speaker” look.

The results were pretty cool - a bunch of half-drunk guys (and one or two over-the-top-drunk) playing some cool tunes into the wee hours while the ladies squealed in delight.

So, it’s a cool little beach-toy, right? Well, yeah, but… try sticking a microphone on the thing. It gets a nice “clean” tone with lots of character. With a good overdrive box, you can play the Beatles’ “Revolution” all day long. Stick a tremolo pedal before it and you can almost see the rattlesnakes & tumbelweeds rolling by. A good compressor on the track and some deep reverb, and damn - it’s sweet. It won’t be your go-to amp, but damned if there’s sounds you can get from it that you just won’t get with plugins.

For the video linked above, here’s how I got some of the sounds:

(All mics for this video were Sure 57s, right up in the cone, through an Apogee Preamp & Converter, into ProTools):

The intro to the video:

Just had the little amp dimed, with an 80’s MIJ Boss Compressor before it. Really got that “squished” stompbox comp sound.

Also, there’s a few strums and notes with the same setup; I don’t have a tremolo pedal so I used a tremolo (vibrato) plugin. Reverb on both tracks was the amazing (and cheap) RedLine Reverb from 112DB.

The intro to the song:

This is the amp with just a touch of overdrive from a Tim Jauernig “Diabolical Gristle” overdrive pedal. I tracked it twice, panned a bit left & right for a fatter sound, with the Fab Echo dialed in a bit.

The main backing tracks:

Pretty much the same - there’s two tracks, in some spots it’s doubled, in others there’s more of a chording vs. notes thing going on.

The solos:

The overdrive is kicked up a notch or four here - and damned if I wasn’t amazed at the great mix of dirt-plus-tone. It’s got some of that “screwdriver through the cone” thing that early bands used to use. There’s a buzzy-ness that I toned down with some parametric reverb, and then…

I stuck Digidesign’s SMACK! on the track. SMACK is great for treating drums, and can sound great on bass - but it really kicked the little amp up a notch. Which shows where the little guy can really shine - stick a vintage or vintage-feeling compressor on the track, and damn - it gets big.

The slide solo:

The slide, and the solo before it, were just single-tracked, with a bit of delay mixed in. I’m not much of a slide player, but that slide sounds massive - like a 10-foot buzzsaw. I was shocked. Again, single tracked.

The after-slide solo:

I had been recording and mixing the song as I animated my way through it, scene by scene. The animation was grueling, and I had plenty of ideas for this section, but decided to just cut it “live” and film it. I did multiple takes of the solo, to the point I had “written” a solo, and could play it again and again. So, I double-tracked it - you can hear it’s not perfect, but I like how it’s vaguely out of tune. The little amp really hops out of the speakers when it’s doubled like that. (I use a Panasonic DVX which has XLR inputs; I can have a backing track playing, stick a 57 on an amp and plug it right into the DVX, and transfer the actual DVX audio into ProTools - it sounds great).

So - what’s not to love?

For forty bucks - not much! At full volume with any kind of boost before the amp (compressor, overdrive, etc.) I had the sense the speaker was really working too hard, and speaker excursion was worrying me. I’d be curious to build one of these with, say, a big, quality car stereo speaker (but where do you find just one?) Even better (and easier) would be to add a speaker out jack and try it through a nice 12″ cabinet. Best would be BOTH - you’d have a fuller speaker out & about, and be able to try different cabs in your playing space. But again, for the price, it’s a bargain, and you could certainly do all sorts of mods to it.

What’s next?

Drinkin’ scotch and playin’ guitar, man! Out on the porch with some friends, food, the wood fire going and the beer ice cold - it’s a just-right volume to bring out the acoustics and still have some twang (or some shred).

And, I’ll pull it out when I need certain sounds, fast & easy. If you see my other vids, you’ll note I’m not really a blues or classic rock guy - I like spacey-yet-hard sounds. But, I want to hear a harp through it. I want to record it hooked up to one of my mighty EVM12L speakers. I want to stick a big ribbon mic on it and see what that does for the low end. I think I’ll have some fun.