The Realities of Aging.

Fear mortals, for the night of Dracula's power approacheth. One centimeter of receding hairline a day.

I refuse to accept this. I'll get hair plugs if I have to.

'How stunning are the changes which age makes in a man while he sleeps!' murmured Mark Twain darkly one morning after seeing his newly bedraggled, ruin of a face in the mirror. That's what I imagine evoked this quote from no prolific reader's favorite author. My body can relate Mr. Twain, though its complaints have less to do with my face (which some still feel makes me look 23) and more to do with my legs (which some still feel makes me look like I accidentally locked myself in my room for a month). 

And other things, if I'm honest. So I made a New Year's resolution (cue jeering snickers) to not necessarily work out every day mind you, but at least make an appearance at the gym. Note the significant distinction. You see I have faith in my capacity to make that first step happen every day. I don't believe for two seconds that I would actually follow through on BOTH steps more than three days straight. Yet, I do believe that if I only think of the first step and commit to that, that some logical part of me will awaken enough from that journey and urge me in the door once I reach my location of choice. Time will tell.

Those aren't Star Wars socks. I have no idea what you're talking about.

So I did leg day and ow. I'd forgotten how much I don't  like going to the gym. Then came that moment afterwards when you finish, feel so good, and write a revisionist history in your mind about how you think the gym is great, only to realize the next morning when it's time to go again just how untrue that sentiment was.

Still, go I must. If not for my own health, for the sake of the small degree of athleticism required for competitive musical performance. I mean, If I can't dance like Beyonce while playing like Charlie Parker without breaking a sweat or losing my breath, do I even have a realistic shot at anything in life? No, definitely not. Certainly nothing music-related. I doubt I could even get hired on as a garbage man without making a pronounced self-adulatory hip-thrust.

All that aside, it's increasingly crucial for exercise to factor in as a part of my daily routine in order to improve regulated breathing, support, lung capacity...and y'know, to prevent the inevitable future back problems everyone with 4'0 long legs suffers without regular maintenance. 

The George Lucas in me surrenders.

I don't like collaborating with other people over my creative ideas. When I have a vision for some improvisational fun I hog it the same way I did flank steak those rare days my parents put it on the table. 'It's mine, MY OWN!' And no one else can touch it! You could put a refugee fleeing ISIS at the same table with me those days and even then for every slice they took, a part of my soul would have died.

People who say love is the stuff dreams are made of never cooked this properly.

Well reality collided with my vision of fun the other day when I realized I can't both act and move the camera at the same time in the music video. Before admitting defeat I literally day-dreamed about how awesome it would be to have an extra set of long, invisible arms so I wouldn't have to get anyone else involved.

In the end it behooved me to get an extra cameraman so I dragged my soon-to-be-married brother down to a few filming areas and had him do the three or four beats on my schedule. He was unexpectedly competent, a phrase much more frequently used to describe me than him. I don't know why I ever doubted his ability to swivel a large object on a fixed platform. I mean just look at all that studly swagger.

"I'll swivel you as suavely as I did that fossil of an HDV."

At some point, we possibly went a little overlong. He kept cursing under his breath, muttering,"There wouldn't be so much time for him to waste if HE would get married too...", and "If I ever get home to my sweet fiance I'm going to hang a charm on my phone, warding away loafers with too much equipment and playtime." Someday brother, someday. Despite all that, it was still a pretty good time, and the footage turned out great even in the low-light environment.

I'm pretty sure my i5 can shoot better in low-light conditions.

My mouth. In great pain it was. Thank you silver nitrate.

So if you're like me, as soon as you start really digging deep into your vocal practice you wake up a week later with a canker the size of Lake Erie sitting right on one of those skin folds next to your uvula. The flap that ALL your food touches and all air grazes as it passes through.

Every

Single

Time.


It's the worst. And it gets bigger, your head feels like it's about to explode, you forget everything, you start walking into stuff. And before you know it, your whole mouth is consumed by the most annoying and least life-threatening virus of all time. What's worse, if you like all things citrus and sip any quantity of orange juice exceeding half a teaspoon, a nuclear war erupts inside your face, leaving no survivors in its wake. It's the most brutal apocalyptic experience your mouth can feel, aside from gingivitis, certain types of fungal infection, herpes, blisters, pizza burns, cavities, root canals, any trip to the dentist that doesn't have to do purely with aesthetics, and so on.

So maybe it's not the worst, but it's pretty far up there. Especially if you sing, or like to eat three times the quantity of food your recommended daily intake suggests. Every time I ate something I could hear Alec Guiness muttering,"It's as if millions of nerve endings cried out, and were suddenly silenced...I fear something terrible has...-" Then me interrupting with an inflectionless but strongly pronounced, "OW."

I was going to just wait it out like I always do and bask in the misery, but the planets aligned this week and I found myself sitting in a chair while an experienced individual basically burned a small crater in my mouth where the canker was and left me feeling remarkably relaxed, at ease, and without symptoms (six hours later, mind you. Five and a half for me, cause' genes. Thanks Mom&Dad <3). I was even more surprised at how little it hurt. I've felt some remarkably painful things in my life, but this was not one of them. It didn't feel hot really, or sharp like a needle. It just felt like a little more pressure on a painful spot for like, two seconds. That was it. Barely as bad as popping a pimple.

I'd post pictures, but since I know one of my readers is already feeling woozy because of the above description, we'll have to forgo that happy opportunity. Sorry!


Anyway, yeah. Have the worst canker in the world? BURN that sucker! With a licensed professional, y'know. See a doctor, it's easy. They all know how to do it.


Cheers!


-Merk

Music Video Preview

I'm trying to be a bit more expeditious these days, so here's a preview of what's to come. I hope you like the video!

P.S. Sorry about the sound quality, but blogger doesn't like videos bigger than 100mb. The final product will sound much better on YouTube.

Writing Screenplays is HARD.

I've been writing a screenplay for 'Dance That Noise Away'. Holy shlamolie. My appreciation for all things Spielberg has been augmented with each beat, scene, and act I've struggled to make in an entertaining, coherent way. It forced me to start perusing the internets for interviews and school sessions featuring analyses of cinematography's best directors and their methods. Writing for a camera and associated scenes is hard man! Learning the jargon and techniques isn't particularly difficult, just time consuming, that's not the hard part. The hard part is realizing how many awesome options there are for filming in a modern age and deciding from that myriad of options which one works best not only overall for each act, but  each scene. Filling every single beat in a way that feeds into one's overall vision of expression. And I mean, me writing this stuff and complaining about how hard it is is the gym equivalent of me going to the gym and complaining about how hard it is (haven't worked out lately), but it's still enough for me to recognize the hard work that does go into something masterful, like pretty much everything Steven Spielberg has touched. And Mad Max: Fury Road. =)

So yeah, three hours into writing and my head feels like it's going to explode, but it's a good kind of stress. I'm loving it.

Dance Music

For your listening pleasure, I give you 'Dance That Noise Away.' It was inspired by Christmas music, or rather my futile attempts at writing it. A few days ago I was trying to put together my first Christmas song, and I looked inwardly, delving deep for the welling of Christmas cheer that only we Mark Henderson's possess in such abundance so as to create the perfect, festive spirit in modern musical form. Well there was nothing in there.

So after beating myself over the head with my foot (twice) and angrily staring down my keyboard with all the wild west charisma I could muster, I gave up, ate some amazing homemade blueberry french toast crafted painstakingly by yours truly (carefully following all the instructions I read on allrecipes.com) and I spent twelve hours making this instead *behold the awesome*. It's been a lot of fun putting it together and seeing people bouncing up and down, back and forth when they hear it for the first time.

It's been so well-received by friends and family that I'm actually going to attempt a music video. It'll be my first try at anything like this so be prepared to plug your nose as the youtube reel starts playing a year down the road, but I expect it'll be a fun time regardless.

Cheers!


-Mark


P.S. I've updated the Henderson Roofing home for hosting music. I'll still keep posting on the other site, but soundcloud.com seems like the way to go these days and I like their user interface so.....sorry, Kiwi6. I'm not leaving you, but I have to be honest- this alliance of ours has been reduced to the sad state of dalliance. Still, you'll always have a soft spot in my heart for being my first. You never forget your first.

The Good, the Bad, and the Inept

PC Provo people. Remember that name. I say that with only your interests in mind (and maybe the tiniest bit because I need to redirect my anger in healthy ways)- if you ever own a PC and need to take it somewhere then please please do not take it there. My gaming computer has been sitting there since mid-may and my studio computer has been there for over a month now. They are awful, can't manage simple update reconciliation or keep promises, and worst of all- they can't do their jobs after having received degrees in their field of study.

Now, moving right along- as you might have guessed that leads to the bad news that my work is on hold until I go back and take my machines like a mildly annoyed mob boss -my cousin will provide the muscle I obviously lack- and hopefully we'll get those things fixed and hop back on track.


Now, good news: there's more pictures of fun concerts I've been doing with the Wild Apples! Perhaps more pertinently for this crowd- I've worked on my music in spite of the absence of the compy and have a total of four different songs I'm toying with. I've modified my approach to songwriting to where I'm going to be writing one per week and at the end of a lengthy composition period I'll keep and refine the good songs and toss away the dross. I imagine there'll be a hundred songs or so before I can find a few specks of gold floating to the top of my sand pile.

Winging it with the Wild Apples, and Other Stories

Hey there,

I've got some good news, bad news and fun news. So let's get to the fun stuff first and distress ourselves at the prospect of facing bad news in any order while trying to enjoy the present reading.

The lead singer of the Wild Apples (who you should follow here on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WildApplesMusic) featured center stage is the creative power behind this group and all their songs, and he generously offered me an ongoing opportunity to travel and perform at various venues in the state. This is a picture of a performance we did at a tight little joint called Kilby Court June 10th. We're due for another more local performance in two and a half weeks at Muse Music. It's been good to delve back into performing again, so I guess this qualifies as both good and fun news. Maybe that'll help offset the bad news that's already causing cramps, headaches, and ulcers in all of us as the inevitable doom draws nearer.

Good news first- I've been working on a goal of writing one song per week, followed by a review of several dozen of these songs and selecting which to keep. So far I have two down for the past two weeks and I'm looking forward to writing many more. I've been expanding my listening material, working on joint projects with other musicians and have been more productive in the creativity department than I've been in years.

And for the bad news- my studio crashed, the computer won't boot and I've discovered a hardware problem that may take some time to be fixed before I can use it again for writing music, which especially a shame when you consider the timing- I had just received Finale 12 in the mail so I could write out pieces and share them with my musicians when the crash occurred and the blue screen of death reared its ugly head. That said, the computer is in the shop being repaired, I still plan to go forward with writing a new song per week regardless, and I'm still performing with the Wild Apples and working with other musicians on new material.

And there's my update for the day, hope you're all doing well!


-Mark

MDH Studios Location

Good thing I don't roll much when I sleep huh?

I wanted to show you where the place lives and how compact it is. The studio centers around the computer there in the middle. The audio interface is the box on the right of the digital clock with all the wires going in and out. Then there's the instruments, and the gloriously cheap sound system which is loud and strong enough for me to hear anywhere in the apartment and cost me less than fifty bucks. My favorite part is this whole set up fits inside a roughly 4x4 foot location which means I can take it anywhere except most public restroom stalls. If I wanted to, I could bring all of this to performances and set it up with relative ease. The computer is built to fit into racks which is the next investment on my shortlist of tools to acquire before concerts start in January. So for those of you in Utah, you can expect to see this with me wherever I go, especially since, realistically, the sound I want to produce in concerts will be limited to the computer's output and filtering.

All the minutiae is packed away, except a number of my music books, which are left of the sub woofer surrounded by reading material. It's a lot of fun working in this little space, and I like that I can just roll out of bed and have this sucker up and running in less than a minute.

Well there you go. This is the place, the new breeding ground for several people's ideas hopefully. We'll see what comes of it.


-Mark

Site Upgrade

I've started giving the place something of a makeover/overhaul. The store is now fully operational. You can buy songs for a dollar on third-party sites or buy it here for a quarter since I can set my own prices. Woot for that.

There's also a functioning audio player in the music section, and there will be for each new release. There's also a malfunctioning audio player at the bottom of your screen in case you hadn't noticed. It seems to stop playing forty seconds into whatever song so that's got some cleaning up to do, but otherwise this is how things are going to look for the next nine months with a few exceptions. 

The Webisodes tab has been removed. I'm guessing you've figured out what's going to replace it. 

If something goes awry, aside from the faulty mp3 player down there, let me know and I'll get to work on it. Enjoy the new digs, and I'll see what I can do about getting a new clip up in the next few months. 

-Mark

Update: Store completed ahead of schedule. It should work perfectly.

HELLO, Minions!

This is a test post, so you can just get a tiny taste of how incredible I am, instead being utterly overwhelmed by my amazing Marketyness.

:)

p.s. My sister wrote this.