RIP Tom Snyder

I always dug his old-skool teevee charm. He was a natural to follow Letterman back in the day.

tha 411

I'd been to this site a while back, and I ended up back over there via Music Thing (another great blog). I posted a track over there this morning and there's already a nice comment from a fellow traveler. There's all kinds of freaky music for your perusal.

Jellyman

Whatchallknow about some Jellyman Kelly?

straight up church

The almighty Herbie Hancock, back in the day - as far as jazz and funk is concerned, time could have stopped right about here. I love this jam so much I use the studio version as my ringtone.

This is the second half of this performance, with Herbie getting busy on Rhodes, Clav and ARP Odyssey.

Bill O'Reilly is a bloviating hypocrite

Imagine that!

beatbox

The last actual drum machine I owned was the Roland TR-626, a meat-and-taters beatbox with very basic drum kit sounds. You could tune the sounds, though, and it had individual outs for each instrument - a very pro feature back in the day - so you could get all busy with stomp boxes and such. You could (and I did) also MIDI it up to a sampler and use it as a controller.

Lately, I've been thinking about drum machines again - with pads and sliders so I can poke and wiggle. All my beats are built on-screen, using virtual tools like ReBirth and Reason - with considerable editing in Pro Tools. This ain't a very visceral process - all well and good for brainiac IDM grooves, but definitely lacking in the expression dept., IMHO. I've always had a thing for the MPC family of production tools, but they seemed overly complex for my intentions. I didn't need all the sequencer faddle, and I like editing samples on the Mac where I can really see the waveform (especially after all those years of doing it on teeny tiny displays, sometimes with just numbers to go by). Now, though, they've got the little battery-powered MPC-500, and it looks like just the ticket. Beats on the fly, sampling the Moog - oh, the possibilities...being able to work up ideas without a laptop. It's still a bit pricey for this old cheapy (coming from someone who bought a Moog Voyager brand new - with the blue wheels!) but it sure does appeal.

Might just be nostalgia for the old days when options were limited and tools were simpler - some of my wildest tracks came out of an Ensoniq Mirage hooked up to an MMT-8. But I don't really want to go back to those days. Nothing like spending hours editing a sound using a hex display and then losing it to a power spike; of course, nothing beats losing all your soft-synth authorizations when you run an OS update, either! See, recently I updated my G4 to 10.4.10 (does that look as wrong to you as it does to me, seeing as how it follows 10.4.9? Yeah, thought so) and now all my IK Multimedia stuff wants new authorization keys - and I'm too lazy to do it. My Tele never asks for a product key...

prediction: world ends this weekend

Tonight's the night to do all those things you've always wanted to do. That list of things to do before you die? It's go time. Because tomorrow, Gabriel's trumpet plays taps for the naked ape (that's us). Click the link to see why.

linguistic syncronicitousness

I know, that is not a word (the second one - the first one is too a word). But It sums up the phenomenon I sometimes notice where all of a (the?) sudden, all these peolpe are all using the same expression or phrase, as if there's some top-secret listserv that lets all its users know to start using the phrase "thrown under the bus" when discussing political fall guys. Several years ago, the verb "to cockblock" was suddenly everywhere. It was a such a jockish, nakedly predatory thing to say, as if the perpetrator of the act was keeping you from claiming some prize that was, by all rights, already yours. It really rubbed my ears the wrong way.

Anyhoo, what brings all this up is the eons-old division between those who say cut the grass and those who say mow the lawn. I was thinking about this just the other day, when I was actually tending to my own modest parcel. Then, today I was reading the blog over at 37signals when I stumbled upon this thread. Therein, they continue the discussion about mowing and cutting and lawns and grass. From there, I landed here, where they map this kind of thing. The two terms are pretty well distributed across the US, with cut the grass being slightly more common down south. It feels like a bit of a class thing, to me. I think I use both interchangeably.

work it out, y'all...

click this now - NOW!

Witness the unrelenting badassery that is Rashaan Roland Kirk. Bonus: McCoy Tyner, Lenny White and Stanley Clarke. Hell to the yeah...

Hypocrasy, thy name is GOP

Whatever, I'm piling on Vitter along with everyone else. But my point is this: will the GOP please now climb down off of its ridiculous high horse, and abandon all pretense of moral superiority and "values" and quit claiming to the mouthpiece of Christianity? Now that we know that Gingrich was having an affair during the Clinton impeachment, and after the grotesque dethroning of Ted Haggard, and the indictments and prosecutions of several Bush cronies, and the continuing Machiavellian maneuverings of the Darth Cheney and where exactly he sits on the org chart, and the plain-faced doublespeak concerning stem-cell research (about how the President is all concerned about the sanctity of human life even while we wage a pointless war in Iraq)...

I could go on, but I'm weary. I'm sick of it all. Sick of being told for all these years that I'm unpatriotic - why? Because I don't cheat on my wife? Because I don't buy tail from hookers? Because I don't wave the flag and do donuts in my Chevy every time we kill another little brown person somewhere? Because I don't keep my crack pipe behind my Bible? Because I'm not a good ol' boy from a brand-name family with a DUI and a 90 IQ? Because I don't believe the Earth is only 6000 years old (and possibly the center of the Universe)?

American conservatives need to decide if they actually believe in anything other than hating the Clintons and the Kennedys, because their banner has been co-opted by whore-mongering snake oil salesmen and lying chickenhawks.

play like a drowning man

On playing guitar:

If your brain is part of the process, you're missing it. You should play like a drowning man, struggling to reach shore. If you can trap that feeling, then you have something that is fur bearing.

-Captain Beefheart

i(not)Phones coming soon?

If Apple actually does this - and by "this" I mean releases a new iPod based on iPhone's interface and housing, then I just might have to get up on that. If they go one better and leave the wireless networking and Web capabilities, then it's on like Donkey Kong. Til the breakadawn. Then I won't have to buy one of these.

I like it when people are elaborately crazy

Like when they build stuff or make costumes, you know - something that shows effort and thought and maybe some planning. Any friutcake can drop trou and poop in a fountain at the mall, but to string together a bunch of street-corner ramblings and then have them professionally posted on a web site? It's the 21st Century equivalent of Paula Poundstone's old "Somebody wrote that down on a piece of paper!" routine.

Anyway, get well soon, Brit. This world is too cold without you...

Unicyle Man - an American treasure

I wish I'd gotten his name. He was in the parade at Lake Junaluska, in western NC.

I would like to apologize for my recent behavior in NYC

The thing about vampire peacocks is their stealth - who suspects a peacock? Bats, yes. Janice Dickenson, no doubt. But a peacock can roll right up on you and then BAM! you're undead, roaming the earth seeking fresh blood. Didn't see that coming!

So you can see why I had to act decisively. How did I know it was a vampie peacock? Well, it's a little like chicken sexing - you either have the knack, or you don't. And I have it.

And I had to take that bird out.


BTW - what a great band name: VAMPIRE PEACOCK.