Blogama: Optimism

Saw these dudes recently here in Brooklyn, reminded me of how impressive rock n roll can be when you see it happening.

And Who Says Politics Are Boring

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Defiant, Elvis loving Governor Blago, with his lego man hair, shows up to nominate a replacement for Barack Obama's Senate seat, whacks the Dems for not taking away his authority to do so, then hands the nominee over to a wild barage of press questions, then pulls the mic back claiming "I don't want to hog the spotlight". Then it gets real interesting at 10:20 in when former Black Panther and current Illinois Representative and minister Bobby Rush shows up from out of the back of the crowd, speaking passionately thru his cancer ridden throat. There's even a lynching reference in there near the end right before Blago confidently strides out of the room as if he's the victor in some strange sideshow.

Ellington at Newport

So I was going to post this in the comments section of Seger's post on Mingus but as I started to write it became a blog post of it's on...

My first jazz record, Ellington at Newport. A fantastic record on it's own right, but the majority of the magic rests in the final song, "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue". The version Duke and his band did of "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue" that night literally damn near set the crowd into a riot. Ellington told Paul Gonsalves (tenor sax) to blow as long as he wanted during the interlude, which Ellington later called "The Wailing Interval" or "Blow By Blow." In what has since become jazz folklore, Gonsalves almost created a riot as he played a tenor sax solo for 27 choruses that stirred up the normally staid crowd into a frenzy. Legend has it that the solo made a striking platinum blonde woman in a black evening dress jump from her box seat and start dancing. This helped serve as a catalyst for the crowd frenzy that grew as Gonsalves continued his solo. The crowd was racially segregated and as the black half started going wild so did the white half. The cops on guard yelled at Duke to stop fearing a riot but he yelled back basically saying that it was too late to stop now.

Unfortunately there's no video of the performance, but here's a video clip I found of Duke and his band (Gonsalves included) performing "Crescendo in Blue" just a few short weeks after the Newport performance. Before this record came out Ellington's career was on the downturn, but after this his music was suddenly reintroduced to a new generation of fans

The Armpit Collection XIII

Mingus Ah Um

"My whole conception with my present Jazz Workshop group deals with nothing written. I 'write' compositions--but only on mental score paper--then I lay out the composition part by part to the musicians. I play them the 'framework' on piano so that they are all familiar with my interpretation and feeling and with the scale and chord progressions to be used. Each man's particular style is taken into consideration, both in ensemble and in solos. For instance, they are given different rows of notes to use against each chord but they choose their own notes and play them in their own style, from scales as well as chords, except where a particular mood is indicated. In this way I can keep my own compositional flavor in the pieces and yet allow the musicians more individual freedom in the creation of their group lines and solos."

This is the first jazz record I really got into. My thinking is that it represents a well conceptualized link between the old (big band swinging type jazz) and the coming (free, improvising intellectual type jazz). There's also a lot of communal blues power in this record. Listen for Fables of Faubus...that main horn melody makes me want to crack open an ice tray, fill up my glass with ice and bourbon.

Springsteen Super Bowl Commercial

Get excited goddamnit! And kudos to Don Mischer Productions for getting it right once again. First Michael Jackson then Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones, Prince, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, and now The Boss. Don Mischer is on a roll, minus the 2004 DNC balloon drop "what the fuck are you guys doing up there" incident of course.

UFO-01 Detector

A friend recently pointed this UFO Detector to me on Amazon.com The product reviews are laugh out loud funny!

***** Astonishing, it works!, January 7, 2008
by E. Jackson
"At first I was a bit skeptical of this product, since my last experiments with UFO Detectors had failed. But I was amazed when the product arrived, and even before I had taken it out of the box, a giant blue Police box landed in my backyard! A scruffy man with a brown trenchcoat told me his gravitational flux capacitor had registered my UFO Detector, and that I needed to be careful with it. I said thanks and waved goodbye, then walked out into a large field. To my amazement, I found a giant spaceship belonging to a man named Han Solo. He called it the Millennium Falcon and offered me a ride, but at that moment my UFO Detector went off real bad, and I turned around to see a giant ship crashing into the ground. A blue alien came out and complained that Moya wasn't running too good. I helped this woman and her crew fix the ship and waved goodbye to all the aliens. Exhausted I went home. And THAT was just the first day! I have had this UFO Detector for over a week now, and have discovered amazing UFO's with it. A giant bug ship named Lexx, , Another strange ship with two buffoons named Lister and Rimmer, and The Star Trek Enterprise! OH MY GOSH! I highly recommend this UFO Detector to anybody who wants an amazing adventure. It's Great! "

The rest of the reviews are just as great.

"One Of The Things That Amazes Me Is That They Don't Seem To Go About This In A Show Business Way"

A wonderful thing happened to Me over Christmas. Besides getting Guitair Hero: World Tour for my Wii I also received my very first Stooges album, the fantastic Rhino reissue of Fun House. It's one of the handful of records I've ever heard that actually lives up to the hype. And whilst doing some Stooges research over the past few days I came across this concert footage from Cincinnatti 1970. Enjoy!

Quiet Reflection

If left alone for an afternoon, there's no telling what my Mac and I will do. I made another song today in Garageband, a minute long instrumental track titled, "Quiet Reflection." Seeing that one can't exactly post a .mp3 on the blog, I went ahead and videotaped the outrageous Xmas display at the gas station down the street, thus making the project "shareable." When the Xmas decorations are put in slow motion with the song, I believe it brings both the song and video more to life. I got inspired to make this after watching this video.

If you go to the YouToobs to see the video, you can click "watch in high quality," and it looks and sounds a little better than how it's posted in the blog.

Young Money (An Ode)

Over Xmas Day, while hanging out in an obscure part of Brooklyn with some good friends, I learned the ways and means of the Apple program "Garageband." I am now a full-fledged music Producer, in the same vein as Trent Reznor, Dr. Dre, and Babyface... I already know how to use iMovie. So today I produced/composed a brief work of art titled "Young Money (An Ode)". I made it for my girlfriend, who I love very much, and is vacationing in Nevis, West Indies... Love enough to dedicate my first 100% Macintosh work of art to. She has no idea how lucky she is...

Redneck Pornography

I can imagine that after a while, the barrel starts to get hot...
Am I right, guys?

IAN MACKAYE ON... COMPUTERS

“It’s fascinating to think that people are spending enormous blocks of time, even without working, in front of these light boxes, tapping on plastic things. They get up after eight hours of intensive work and nothing has moved and nothing has changed but I could just spill some tea on this table and the stain would still be here. I don’t think there’s ever been a point in history where you could spend eight hours doing something and not a speck of dust gets moved. When you cook for eight hours you’ve got a lot of food, if you’ve been sweeping the floor is clean, if you are building something it gets built. Even if you are writing on paper you have paper that’s now been written on. There’s something fascinating about this idea that everything you do it doesn’t exist, it just exists in this temporal form. The information doesn’t exist. I mean, obviously I know that you are here because you wrote to me on the computer and I wrote back so there was a net effect and now we’re here. I’m not saying it’s a bad technology, I just think it’s an interesting idea. What will it do to people mentally? What will happen to our society if they feel like they can’t get anything done? I don’t know."

(source)

Merry Xmas

A Season of Giving, a Sense of Common Purpose

Merry Fucked Up Christmas!

This is cruel cruel cruel. And as he's crying the family just laughs away.

Today My Hate For The Yankees Grows

First they buy my second favorite pitcher, CC Sabathia, for 7 years $161 million dollars (effectively taking the bat away from the best long ball hitting pitcher in the league). Then they pick up AJ Burnett for 5 years $82.5 million dollars. And now they've bought Mark Teixeira for 8 years $180 million dollars. One can only imagine whose next...

Blogama: Your Weekly Address

"The search for knowledge, truth and a greater understanding of the world around us."

Blog # One

"Every story is based on a premise, is the working out of a premise."

Ishmael
~ By: Daniel Quinn

I Want My MTV, Back

Amy Winehouse - New Music - More Music Videos

With all this talk of restructuring the auto industry it's got me thinking that the real industry that needs restructuring is music television, most importantly MTV. Over the last quarter they have seen a 23% drop in their core demo of 12- to 34-year-olds and conversely this is causing ad revenue to dry up. So with numbers falling what's their solution you may ask? Well according to Variety it's "16 new reality shows". Now granted some of these seem interesting (like a Matt Stone and Trey Parker produced show), and they are "going to focus less on loud and silly hooks and more on young people proving themselves" which is always a good thing. Hell, they even go so far as to say that they are trying to create shows for the "Obama generation". But "G's to Gents"? Donald Trump's "Girls of Hedsor Hall" where a dozen hard-partying young women are whisked off to an English finishing school? Sure that may be better than endless loops of Viva La Bam and Pimp My Ride, but here's an idea. How about they play actual videos.

There's less overhead as it's much cheaper to produce. It makes for more enjoyable viewing. And seeing as Music is in the title of the channel it just makes sense. They have enough archived video and new video that they could play a wide amalgamation of material. Vintage clips from the pre music television days, videos from days of MTV past, modern pop radio stuff for the casual MTV fans, indie music, and more interesting bands like Radiohead, Wilco, Springsteen, ect. Maybe do some of those MTV concerts like they used to do. And sprinkle in some musical programing such as "making of's" and documentaries.

MTV used to have a certain feel to it, a certain something that always kept you checking back to see what was the next new thing. I remember the feelings I felt the first time I saw "Smells Like Teen Spirit", or "Closer", or "Creep". I remember staying up late to watch bands perform. I remember watching for hours in hopes of catching Dr Dre. It always kept me coming back for more. But now there's hardly nothing on the channel, minus the occasional stand out performance on one of their award shows. There's an hour of videos in the morning and that's about the extent of it unless your tied up in the soap opera that is Hedi Montag's life. In fact, the best thing I've seen on MTV in the last 4 years (not including awards shows) was seeing Amy Winehouse play a late night concert from the TRL studios about a year and a half ago. So in the spirit of leaving on a good note, I'll leave you with a clip of the last good thing I saw on MTV. Enjoy, and let's hope music makes it back to Music Television.

Sex Ed Rocks