Look how many amazing things there are in this headline, I can find at least four that just sound fantastic:
Mexico finds cocaine haul hidden in frozen sharks
This story is wild. they found over A TON of cocaine! Check it:
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexico’s navy has seized more than a ton of cocaine stuffed inside frozen sharks, as drug gangs under military pressure go to greater lengths to conceal narcotics bound for the United States.
Armed and masked navy officers cut open more than 20 shark carcasses filled with slabs of cocaine after checking a container ship in a container port in the southern Mexico state of Yucatan, the navy and Mexican media said on Tuesday.
"We are talking about more than a ton of cocaine that was inside the ship," Navy Commander Eduardo Villa told reporters after X-ray machines and sniffer dogs helped uncover the drugs. "Those in charge of the shipment said it was a conserving agent but after checks we confirmed it was cocaine," he said.
Drug gangs are coming up with increasingly creative ways of getting drugs into the United States — in sealed beer cans, religious statues and furniture — as Mexico’s military cracks down on the cartels moving South American narcotics north.
Sealed beer cans?! Maybe there’s a way to get the stealth beer involved…
There were a bunch of interviews done with the people who film and produce all the BBC natural history stuff, and I’m going through the transcripts to find bits…lots of highlights there too, but this one stands out:
There’s another wonderful story in East Africa of a tribe of people, the Akumba, who have learned how to collaborate with a bird in order to get honey. [11:06:58:03] Now, this is a bird that will lead them to honey. Um, the, the people can’t smell the honey, the bird can. But the bird cannot access the honey because it’s only this very small size. The people can access the honey. So the bird will sing a song and lead these people to the honey, to a, to a hive. And then the bird waits patiently while the people get the honey out of the hive, and the people have learned that if they give the bird a little bit of honey, that the bird will do it again. So that’s an amazing relationship between man and nature.
1. saw an ad for gin on my way to work this morning that said "she had never been so delighted by a cucumber"…can’t decide if I love this ad or hate it…
2. talking to my friend A on Sunday, and she drops this gem…
A: "Oh, you must meet this friend of mine, you guys are so similar I’m sure you’ll be great friends."
JJG: "That’s a tough thing to say to someone, it puts pressure on this meeting so when it does happen, there’s supposed to be something happening, and it sort of assumes that you’ll connect with people who are like you, and anyway, aren’t we all kind of unique?"
A: "That’s so funny, you know I told myself I shouldn’t even bring it up with you, because I told him the same thing, and that’s exactly what he said."
3. also, check this out…the ending is especially good…this may be my new go-to on the beach…
This month’s banner (sorry for missing a month, by the way, but aren’t you glad you don’t have to look at that eye photo any more?) is on 3rd st near 3rd ave in Brooklyn near our apartment. We actually saw it there when we moved in 2 years ago and I’ve been meaning to take a photo of it for ages…also cool ‘cuz 2 years ago we didn’t quite know the whole Wall St collapse was coming, but whoever painted this seems to have willed it to happen…
you can’t tell so much from the banner, but the letters are HUGE on that abandoned building…
UPDATE – if you’re not seeing the new banner hit refresh a couple of times until it shows up…
Tomorrow my mom goes in for surgery and it’s being done by a robot! Sort of. In a strange coincidence she told me about this DaVinci machine (not the telecine one, you tv folks) that’s going to assist in the surgery and it had just been featured on Grey’s Anatomy a couple of days prior…I told her I’d post the clips for her, so here they are…
lots of people apprently have seen this, but I never did…it’s good, I love the whole ytmnd thing…
my dad gave me a great geeked-out book on language and linguistics for Christmas…it’s like the most amazing, uh, bathroom reading…you come out of there with stuff like "Hey Maxine, did you know that of languages with no relation to other languages, Korean is the most isolated?" Lately I’ve been reading about what the author calls "garden path" sentences. These are sentences that seem to go one way but then suddenly force you to change direction due to the syntax. For some reason they really tickle my brain. This is my favorite, chew on it a while:
The old man the boats.
Also I came across this the other day and I just watched it over and over and over until I was in a pleasurable trance…something about that flip is so appealing:
ps they accepted our offer on the house in Williamsburg (Brooklyn)! we’re all jacked up and getting readt for months of paperwork and follow-through…you’re all invited to our house-warming, we’ll let you know when…
Part of our Musicwood doc is going to be musicians performing on acoustic guitars. We’ll use this to weave the music through the film, and to remind you exactly what it is these guys are fighting for, you know? So we’ve been approaching pr folks for Sting, Neil Young, Glen Hansard, etc. But Maxine came across this great unsigned artist named Sergius Gregory, and it turns out he’s based in Alaska! So when we flew out there to shoot, we flew him down to where we were and arranged to spend a day filming him in various (fantastic) locations:
in the rainforest, in a Native American Clan House, on a dock…
Here’s a cut of his performance in the forest…we won’t use the whole thing in the film, but we wanted to put it together because there was such an amazing feeling when he played this in the forest…I get chills just thinking of it…
hopefully some of that comes through…
UPDATE – Sergius is about to release a record (or something) so he’s asked me to take this down temporarily…seek his record out! Buy it! Support the music!!!!
As a kid I remember certain VHS tapes that my sister and I almost wore out from viewing so much:
– The Court Jester recorded off the UK’s Channel 4
– a marathon of Gallagher borrowed from Aunt Helen and Uncle Bill (kids love the watermelon smashing)
– a holiday Space Ghost Coast-to-Coast special
– a marathon of Kids in the Hall taped off a Comedy Central KITH Mother’s Day special
Watching this KITH clip, I was surprised by the fact that I could almost do this entire monolgue from memory…even now there are certain KITH bits that I use in my day-to-day conversations ("Time moves forwards! Not backwards!") that I’m sure people aren’t picking up on, that I’m doing just to amuse myself. This clip is still great.
We’re back from Alaska, and whatta trip. I don’t know if you can read this flyer, but it’s for a marathon on Prince of Wales island, where we did a bunch of filming for Musicwood. I don’t know why the guy running it is carrying a gun, but they sure do like their guns up there in AK. The trip was amazing — cable cars, 500 year-old trees, a ferry to a barely inhabited island, Native Americans carving totem poles, interviewing logging company guys, a Native American tree ceremony, the felling of a giant tree (Timmmmber!!!), flying in a tiny sea plane, listening to Sergius Gregory playing guitar in the forest, etc. Amazing.
But also this one thing happened and for some reason, even as it was happening I kept thinking "I want to write this down." So here it is, raw, no revision. Maybe it’ll become a short story, not sure.
This one was recorded by my old suite-mate Pat & I, no clue why or how, but I do remember him doing the lip-flap and thinking it was funny…still do, it sounds like avant-garde idiocy…
This is one of the piano tracks I recorded myself. When you recod with a 4-track, it records stereo right and left, and then essentially the stereo right and left of the other side of the tape. That’s where the 4 tracks come from, get it? So if you’re recording 4-track onto an old tape that already has music on it, you have to record over every track, otherwise you can get weird leftover stuff that plays backwards because it’s coming from the other side of the tape. I know, it’s confusing to explain, you kind of have to experience it. I’m only explaining it so you can get a sense of what’s going on in this track. This is a (kind of long) improvisation I recorded (in D minor?) in a practice room. I’m pretty sure it was meant to be straight, with no overdubs or anything, much like that first track I posted last week. But when it came time to mix it down, I was on acid.
I remember at the time I was really impressed with myself, I thought it sounded like some kind of heavenly choir, or other-worldly voices were mixed in there and I was sort of amazed that this is what I had recorded. That night, still on acid, I played it for Jack’s roomate and his friend (who were both on acid as well) and it blew their minds. They couldn’t believe I had made this. Hell, I couldn’t believe it either. It was confusing.
The next day I realized what I had done. My piano bit is in there, and then some kind of sped up overdub coming from a stray track that eventually turns into some backwards Led Zeppelin that I was trying to record over on the other side. Also Jack’s 4-track had this built-in reverb which I had cranked up so it does indeed sound otherworldly and odd. It’s almost 6 minutes long, and all kind of clashes together and sounds a bit like a mess to me now. But I bet if you took acid it would sound amazing.
This last one I can’t stand, but Jack requested it. I think it’s maybe the second thing I ever wrote with lyrics, and I’m trying to do this spoken word thing, and the lyrics make me cringe terribly and sound very immature to me now. Yuck.
I knew I was going to save this one for Friday. So last semester of my senior year of college I had electives open and I took an Audio Production class. The teacher wasn’t that good, but I got a lot out of it and it was a blast. The projects the prof gave us were good, he just wasn’t very good at explaining things…i.e. performing the role of the teacher. Ask Dan R., he took the class with me. The good thing the prof did though, was make us learn all the analog ways of doing things before bringing us into the digital world. So we were splicing tape with razor blades, making tape loops that were held in place with pencils and so on. It was great. I have this experimental tape loop piece but it’s only on reel-to-reel 1/4 inch tape, so I’ll have to transfer that later.
Even once we made the move to digital, the system was so crash prone that you couldn’t do a very long piece, you’d have to stitch several short ones together. We used the system to "master" the first Raygun Theatre album (also on cassette) and I can remember it was a glitch-plagued nightmare, increasing Jack’s every distrust of the digital world.
But what I have for you is my final project for that Audio Production class. I can’t remember what other people did for their final projects, but here’s mine. It’s an 8-minute acoustic guitar rock opera of the story of Samson and Delilah.
My favorite part is the bit in their duet where they start singing at the same time. She’s going "Samson" and he’s going "Delilah, aww I love ya" — I’m still proud of that bit. Delilah was sung by Molly, the girlfriend (now wife) of my pal Pat H. She knocked it out of the park, the piece really comes alive when she enters. She even nails the absurdist ending that I tacked onto the story, she was great.
For some reason I think my sister is going to love this track.
It’s been so fun posting these, maybe I’ll continue a little into next week…
(first image that shows up when you type "happy take trash head toe" in google images)
I was using these MIDI machines they had in the college music lab — you could play a piano/synth that was hooked up to a computer and it would transcribe it into musical notation — and showing Jack how great it was. I then went further and demonstrated how you could type in lyrics and they would appear below the music. I was just typing nonsense to show how it worked, and for some reason I typed "I’m a happy take take the trash out with my head. Head of a toe head." No idea why, they were just the first words that popped into my head and anyway, I was just trying to show Jack a feature of the software.
Jack started laughing like to bust a gut. He thought that phrase was so damn funny, we printed it out and somehow that night recorded this track. Now I don’t know if you know about bouncing tracks on 4-track, but you can do this thing where you record 3 tracks of stuff and then mix it down onto 1 track. You can then record 2 additional tracks with that one and mix THAT down to another track. In this way you can pile track on top of track on top of track. The only issue is that the first stuff you record will get pretty buried in the mix.
Jack and I came up with this idea to record the main phrase as this singer who was in a club and the crowd slowly gets it and starts to sing along until everyone’s doing it at the end. When we recorded the voices of the club’s crowd, we decided that each one would be someone we admired who was at the club. For one take, Jack did Bowie and I did Tom Waits. He did Lou Reed and I did Black Francis. He did Screamin Jay Hawkins. I can’t remember the others, but there are a bunch in there. We also added the sounds of glasses and other ambient stuff to really make it feel like a club. It makes me laugh every time I hear it.
This is the kind of stuff we did when we were bored.
My friend Sandy had given me an acoustic guitar that he found in the trash somewhere and I was trying to learn how to play. Then this strange thing happened where my Aunt Helen ended up with an electric guitar and amp at her house because someone owed her money and they gave her the guitar as collateral. I found out about it somehow and asked if I could borrow it and she said sure but that I would have to give it back if this person ever paid her. I took the guitar and worked harder I had this idea to write a song for every chord I learned — not an original idea (see: every punk band ever), but fun.
"Winter of 1849" is a 2 chord song and Jack and I recorded it on 4-track (surprise) in his freshman dorm room late one night. We added all these other misc sounds to it (trying for Tom Waits and failing), and other random voice sounds and mixed it into this short weird stew. Jack does the "Oh Yeah"’s. We drank a lot of beer that night and ate a lot of chocolate chip cookies (not recommended). Once I got back to my own dorm room I threw up and then this girl I knew came over and stayed the night. This was the point where college started to get good.
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