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.
12 August 2010
The Sneaky Mister: "Umbrella" by Rihanna
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...
DJ Earworm - United State of Pop 2009 (Blame It on the Pop) - Mashup of ...
A new level of mashup. I have to assume that this DJ is also a talented musician. In my mind, this is the knockout punch against the argument that DJing isn't a musical performance.
14 May 2010
On the American-ness of Apple Products
At the introduction of the Apple iPad, for some reason that doubtless stems from some arbitrary event within the realm of professional journalism, people suddenly became aware of current global manufacturing conventions. The iPad is assembled in China, just like pretty much all competitively priced consumer electronics. Just like consumer electronics have been for many years.
The heart of this favorite media topic is the old “Buy American” [Uh-MRRR-kin] saw. If you don’t understand at a glance what’s wrong with this argument, then Sherlock Holmes infers that you passed macroeconomics with the help of that dumpy girl you strung along with smooth talk until the end of the semester; shame on you.
The dumpy girl isn’t impressed with news reports on Chinese assembly of allegedly American products [organist hammers on diminished chords as mustachioed villain appears]. And she is unimpressed with Larry-the-Cable-guy-in-a-Three-Thousand-Dollar-Suit union leaders issuing statements about the immoral, unethical theft of American jobs.
The parts in any electronic product featuring new technology come from all over the world, and the final product will be assembled somewhere where a laborer’s time can be had cheaply. That formula hasn’t changed much since the advent of the steam ship. If you’re wondering why iPods can’t be assembled in the USA, look into how and why unskilled labor has been legislated into extinction here. Apple didn’t create this environment - the whole of corporate commerce in its entire history isn’t solely responsible - Apple merely operates in this reality. And if they want to compete with e.g. Sony, they have to play by the same rules as Sony. Sony also farms out assembly of most products to Asian factories where people work much cheaper than would anyone in Japan.
The more interesting facet of the relationship between Apple users and our American-ness is how readily we are willing to accept a virtual universe that is ruled from the top down with a heavy hand. When I recently started teaching guitar lessons again I bought an iPod touch as a low-cost alternative to a new notebook computer. I was amazed that I had to bow on bended knee, pledge allegiance to iTunes, and give a credit card number before I could even boot the device. WTF?! More recently I bought a new motherboard and memory for my desktop computer. I went out of my way to get something based on the same chipset so I wouldn’t have to reinstall anything, yet iTunes informed me that I had used up one of my allotted 5 syncs, that I had a few left, and I had better watch it. And by the way, I had to start over with iTunes. This was the only piece of software that didn’t make the transition to the new hardware. I understand how this is done – iTunes is keyed to some piece of uniquely identifiable hardware on the mobo (probably the network card) and the new mobo looks like a new computer to iTunes – but that understanding does nothing to ameliorate the annoyance.
This is what bugs me about Apple – the audacity to dictate every little detail of how the hardware is used; you get the impression setting up your iPod in iTunes that the device actually belongs to Apple and you are allowed to use it at their pleasure. Even more it bugs me that it doesn’t bug others. And worst it bugs me that it didn’t bug me enough to immediately return to Best Buy for a refund. I am not used to cowing to someone else’s will for my stuff, be it guitars, cars, or digital devices. If I don’t like the way a guitar plays I will hack out the neck with a chisel and build a new one. If I want to quad-boot my computer to Ubuntu, XP, Vista, and the minimal OS that came with the motherboard, try to stop me. But with my iPod, so far I have been content to grab my ankles and suffer through. The iPod, unlike any other device I’ve owned, is actively resistant to any kind of customization. At all. Period. Stop asking if you know what’s good for you.
- You can’t get direct access to files on an iPod.
- You can’t write your own software (apart from the draconian approval process through iTunes)
- Assuming you go through the trouble of getting your software approved, you can’t move data on or off the device except wirelessly through HTTP
- iPod is suxxorz
I think my problem is that I object to everything about the iPod on principle, but I have such abundant disincentive to do anything about it. For one thing, I had very low expectations for the device in the first place. I basically wanted a looper and a metronome for guitar lessons, and nothing else. So when that much worked flawlessly – plus I found Beatmaker, 4 Track, and Xewton Studio, the Blue stereo mic and its software, not to mention all the useful apps and entertaining distractions that all run without issue – it became very hard to look at the iPod as anything but a great solution to a particular need.
It turns out that there is a way to open the OS and make the hardware available to yourself. It is called jailbreaking and it a software hack that gives you control over basic things like the filesystem and execution permissions. So it turns out the iProducts are American after all.
If I really wanted to burn through an entire afternoon reading tutorials and other documentation, then fiddling until it worked, I could jailbreak my iPod and I would be back in control. But I’m not going to, and neither are most iProduct users. I suspect that this is how things have always been; most Americans don’t hot rod their own cars or wind their own guitar pickups or hand build additions to their own homes. It’s probably always been a small percentage, and I take great comfort knowing that that small percentage is still beavering away iPods, hacking them until they are free and self-determining. And covered in bland, melty cheese. Wearing logoed T-shirts and baseball caps. And loud and fat and ignorant. So proud [wipes tear].
Read more...Lawnmowers, Plug Up
Two questions burning a hole in mind this morning.
Why are mower mufflers a single, ineffective layer of inline baffling when it would be relatively cheap and easy to bring the motor's sound down by 30dB with an auto type muffler? Are manufacturers really that cheap? Even higher end mowers have the same loud output. There must be a reason, but I can't find an answer.
WTF is with the substitution "plug up" for "plug in"? Is it regional? The first place I ever heard it was at the Monday jazz jam at the Blue Room (before I got my house gig up the street at the Juke House). I assumed it was part of jazz culture, but since I've heard it all over. What is its etymology? Who uses it? How long can I stretch out this research to avoid doing any actual work?
13 May 2010
Quebe Sisters Band halftime at Dallas Mavs
If there's anything NBA fans love, it's Country Music, Pre-Bebop Swing, and the early 1950's. The Mavericks cover all the bases with this halftime show.
Amazing ensemble singing, especially considering that they are on 3 separate mics. I wonder if they mic them the old fashioned way in other venues. Total time machine.
12 May 2010
LOC to Store All Tweets for Posterity
I heard a story on NPR outlining Library of Congress' plan to archive all of Twitter as an important source document of our time.
It occurred to me that what would be far more useful to future historians is some proof of our near-absolute inability to discern what is meaningful. A better source document to archive might be a short wire story with a headline like, "Twitter's Entire Archive Headed to the Library of Congress."
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/09/nation/la-na-twitter-20100510
18 March 2010
16 February 2010
Honestly, have you ever seen such a thing? If you are looking for a great time-killer at work, read the comments in Stryper videos. It's a complete universe.
03 February 2010
31 January 2010
Allen Hinds
Allen Hinds. I actually lost a job to this guy once - on my friends' CD.
Honestly he did a better job than I could have at the time. And he has only gotten better in the 15 years since. Check it out - so much soul in so much kickassness.
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
Finally saw "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs." It absolutely owns. I had written it off as another POS constructed under the Poochie Paradigm, but after the 1M'th time I heard how great it was, I granted it 10 minutes' audience.
This animated kids' movie satirizes a lot of things that actually had it coming, from disaster movie cliches to mainstream news media. It even cannibalizes its own genre with touches like a sidekick animal that is a dumb animal.
It even kept getting better in the credits, which featured the following old school simple pop song. I think the one thing that stands out about the whole movie is that it is obviously guided by individual vision; it wasn't hashed out in a committee under the direction of Bad Taste Guy Who Signs the Checks. There are lots of gags that are just existentially funny that made it into the production, lots of touches that don't advance a rigidly formed three part dramatic plot or fit hackneyed joke guidelines - and this song is over the credits because someone liked it or commissioned it or whatever.
I suppose it is possible that this artist was channeled into the movie production as part of some entertainmedia superconglomero-vertintegrational-promosynergy stunt, but it still seems like a great complement to the movie - a real, old fashioned, sincere, goofy pop song.
