Independence, MO
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06 February 2011
12 August 2010
The Sneaky Mister: "Umbrella" by Rihanna
For reasons it would take a super-internet-al¹ word count to explain, this restores my faith in music as a viable hobby/amusement.
¹Writing on the internet automatically makes me a sub-literate moron, which is nice, b/c I can make up words instead of searching memory/thesaurus for a better one.
06 July 2010
Dying of Natural Causes
I thought this was interesting article in the New York Times. Apparently there a lot of chairs in major orchestras left unfilled; the Times mentions as a peripheral issue the real heart of the matter: orchestras are not as flush as they once were. This is encouraging.
I grew up on "classical" music. The good people of the state of California spent God-only-knows-how-much on my education in what is really the art music tradition of Western Europe from 1450 to 1950. I am calling the end of Aaron Copland's productive decade in the 1940's the end of the tradition, because that was the last time composers writing standalone music for symphony orchestra really held any conversation with the public. Since then European art music has been alternately parted out to Hollywood and the various museums that comprise classical music: local orchestras, universities, horrifically distasteful TV ads for luxury cars...
Anyway, I developed my guitar technique on classical music. I learned music theory analyzing classical music. And as I advanced as a musician, the less appeal this tradition held. I still have my favorite pieces - e.g. I listen to Bach's D Major Magnificat every Christmas. By myself. And that's the problem - the relevance of this music lies about halfway between Shakespeare and pre-industrial farming tools. I could easily find other people who like the same classical music I like, or I could listen to the music that everyone I already know likes.
fizzle... lost my will to expound... go hear the chicago symphony while you can LOL
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25 June 2010
New Thrift Store Paintings
Photography urge comes and goes lately. It came on in a big way while looking around a flea market/thrift store type place in Grandview.
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23 June 2010
Practice Video Journal 8
I decided to start a video practice journal/blog to keep track of my musical development, which seems to be picking up pace lately after a long plateau. I searched YouTube for "practice journal" and found this gem, which appears to be a couple of deleted scenes from a David Lynch joint. Don't miss 3:09 - LOL.
03 June 2010
29 May 2010
Roy Hargrove & RH Factor - The Joint
Just got home from two gigs in a row - seven solid hours of relatively high energy playing. You'd think I'd be dead tired, but I'm thinking about how much better a musician I want to be. So I'm up watching great player on YouTube. Check out Roy Hargrove.
I saw him as just plain old "Roy Hargrove" (straight ahead jazz) at the Folly when they were doing their great jazz series. He was great then, but I would love to see this "RH Factor" lineup. They are killin here.
24 May 2010
Pat Metheny Jazz Guitar Class - 03 - All The Things You Are
Pat. Mofo. Metheny. You get the impression that this is the song he starts absentmindedly playing when he picks up a guitar. And that he has found something new in the changes every time he's played it. Every day. For thirty years.
His time is so good he almost sounds better with a click on 2+4 than with a killer band. Damn.
19 May 2010
What Separates Us from the Animals
- Tax Evasion
- Relatively Low Curiosity about Smells
- Bars/Glass
- Animal age is computed as a simple product, while human age is calculated by a complex differential equation formulated to make oneself appear as young as is plausible in any given group
- While embarrassment over nakedness has been overcome, embarrassment over dated fashions has gained strength. The evolutionary purpose of this trait is as yet unclear.
- Inability to lick own genitals (so far)!
- That there are no hipsters in nature is a common misconception; some chimps are born hipsters, but in amazing display of social complexity, chimps beat their hipsters into repression with Miley Cyrus brand scented candles from Wal-Mart. Unironically.
- Snooze function.
- This thing separates animals only
- Electric guitars. Frogs play banjo, which of course requires no electricity.
BTW someone (my dad?) took me to see this when I was a wee tot. I’m pretty fuzzy on the details of the plot, but I still remember this song. It f***ing owns. I liked movie music a lot better when it was much more moody and sentimental – songs that set the tone for a fantastic (ordinarily unbelievable), maudlin story. Nowadays Hollywood takes itself waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too seriously; and nothing goes into a movie that can’t stand on its own as a consumer product with mass market appeal.
Read more...17 May 2010
Brutally Repressive, Hopelessly Backward Culture Maybe Not so Bad
Not too long ago I heard an old episode of “This American Life” in which the subject of one of the stories was an Afghan man who had been in love with a girl whom he couldn’t marry because she had no dowry.
Wait – the subject wasn’t really the Afghan man, but the precious little feelings of the sheltered, over-educated, white, middle class media professional “producing” the story. As Ira explains in every episode, “Each week of course we choose a theme and bring you different kinds of stories on that theme, subsequently ditching the story in favor of our emotional reactions and miscellaneous quasi-philosophical musings.” So the Afghan man was maybe the nominal subject.
So this guy from BFA was sooooo in love some offstage girl – they were both about 20 if I remember correctly – and some sheltered, Western, white, overeducated, middle class woman decided to solve his problem by donating a dowry. It didn’t work, and the Afghan dude’s parents made him marry someone else anyway. The parents talked about objections to the son’s choice that nakedly betrayed a espousal of eugenics, which didn’t rattle the reporter half as much as the thought of Romeo not following his balls wherever they led, chasing his true love at all costs. “This is nothing at all like a Sandra Bullock romantic comedy,” the reporter must have thought.
So the reporter asks the guy whether he loves the woman with whom he has an arranged engagement to be married – with whom he has spent relatively little time. The dude says, “Yes, because she is my wife.” And the reporter/producer just lets it hang there, as if it was the craziest thing ever spoken. Of course loving your wife because it is the right thing to do – and lovely and happy and mutually beneficial – is what everyone did up until some time in the last 100 years. You either choose to love your wife because it is the right thing to do, or you pretend to love your wife in front of friends and neighbors because you don’t want them to know that you’re a selfish asshole. It’s what the reporter’s grandparents almost certainly did.
It was so striking to me that this Afghan cab driver, with nothing I would call education and not a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of – this guy was so advanced in understanding beyond our pale American city dwelling friend on a subject so basic to everyday life, the American was blissfully unaware that he was not the one in possession of advanced knowledge.
Okay this next one is not an argument supporting any larger issue or anything of implied importance – it was just a disconnected thought that occurred while watching the doc “Afghan Star,” a chronicle of an “American Idol” knockoff in Afghanistan.
Two of the contestants were women, a move by the show’s producers that was already considered daring. One of the female contestants was very old-fashioned and literally had the support (via SMS votes) of the Taliban – LOL I know, right?! The other was a bad girl who, after she got voted off the show and got to sing one last song, used the opportunity to dance and remove her head covering. The whole country was in an uproar, and this induced a tangential exploration of clothing-related mores. The poor documentarians interviewed a lot of people, trying to get material on why the Islam-influenced culture felt so strongly about ancient clothing rules, but as is typical of such man-on-the-street business anywhere, they only got colorful reassertions of things everyone already knew; nobody was able to argue for the rules or even give historical perspective – just “You have to because it is what you do.”
In this expansive vacuum of ideas, sounds, and imagery, my mind wandered to what it would be like to force American women to cover everything but their eyes. Of course when you daydream about women, there is only one direction in which all hypotheses lead, so I wondered how hot would it be to get a woman in bed who had wrapped up everything but the corneas? Mighty hot, I imagine. You would probably sprout wood as soon as you saw her elbows; and your pulse could be taken visually by the time you had her down to what amounts to business casual in contemporary USA.
So there is an upside. I’m just sayin’...
Read more...15 May 2010
Dysart on KWWL.flv
See a video of my hometown, Dysart, IA with my mom in it (second from the R in the blue hat lineup). Note that the hook of the story is that there are multiple businesses and things to do in this town. Population is sub-1k.
YMO Day Tripper Live
Strangely compelling. WTF is the date on this? Video looks like 1980's, but there is a guy playing a much older modular synth, but the New Wave influence would have worked in the 2000's as well...