First, MDvto sent me this great Quincy theme tune…
Then, while hunting for that basketball vid from below, I checked the history of this browser and searched keyword "youtube." There were a bunch of interesting vids that never made it to the blog…here they are, random and youtubey. Individually they didn’t seem to warrant a post, but collectively, it’s some pretty good stuff…
– saw a chimney sweep truck on my way to the subway — is that good luck like it used to be in Mary Poppins-era London?
– right after that I saw nuns, which I immediately took as another indicator of good luck, I’m not sure why
– reading this David Foster Wallace piece from Harper’s about proper usage of English and grammar I’m reminded of a time when a bunch of us in High School were trying to explain to someone what an ambiguous pronoun was…we came up with this scenario in which the dinosaurs somehow knew that a meteor was coming to impact earth so they scratched this graffiti that said "A meteor is going to destroy earth! We don’t like it! and that scientists would puzzle throughout the millennia as to whether by "it" the dinosaurs meant the meteor or the earth…we were drunk when we came up with this and just howled at the whole scenario…
– another bit from the DFW piece talks about how language usage follows the norms of a particular community…he makes this point with an analogy, explaining that even though it might make perfect sense for men to be able to wear skirts (cooler, more comfortable, less likely to cause sterility, etc.) in Western culture it would be looked on as some kind of statement. Then right as I’m about to go into my building at work I see a guy in a leather utility kilt! I mean, this is New York, so sure, but it’s the first kilt I’ve seen in the city…I gave him a broad smile, a thumbs up and said "I like your style."
– been toying with some samples and trying to get the whole thing to coalesce and it’s not really happening, but I thought you might get a kick out of hearing a mashup rough draft. Sometimes it’s taking me a million iterations to get something to the point where it’s working, so I had this thought that charting the evolution of the track might be fun…at this point there’s some good interaction between samples, but the flow of the track is a mess…
Sometimes I think if I got a Monome (shown below, played by Daedelus) I could totally rock it, sometimes I think it would be beyond me, sometimes I think it looks pretentious, sometimes I think it totally rocks it futureshock style.
I am kicking myself that I didn’t make it out to the Daedelus/Flying Lotus show at (le) poisson rouge two weeks ago…
Saturday night Maxine and I went out to this new(ish) place in the Village called (le) poisson rouge to check out a performance of Steve Reich’s "Music For 18 Musicians". Reich was one of the founders of the minimalist school of music along with Phillip Glass, and their music sounds pretty similar. Except that I love MF18M much more than I love anything by Glass. Mike H gave me the album ages ago and it pretty much blew my mind. He went to a performance in New York years and years ago, and I remember thinking how cool it would be to see the piece performed live.
And it was. It was really really great. The musicians set up in this weird in-the-round way (you can sort of tell from the pic below) with xylophone players facing each other and pianists set up so sometimes two people can play the same piano, and clarinets, bass clarinets, vocalists, strings, sitting down. The sound system in poisson rouge was fantastic, and sometimes the sounds would be so eveloping…plus, to see how some of the sounds were made was very elucidating. Things that I had thought were electric guitars and feedback were actually clarinets and vocals. Whoa. Quite a performance.
Pretty sweet. I’m on a crusade to find a replacement for my old CDJ system, for reals. The thing is, there’s so much info, and so many different components that plug into the laptop…
this vid doesn’t really show anything I’m considering, but it’s always fun to see man vs machine…
He pauses for a minute. “You know what’s weird, though? RZA lives right down the street.”
“No shit? I thought he lived in New York.”
“Yeah, me too,” he replies. “But I saw him at this electronics store over by here a while ago. I remember thinking ‘Oh…. There’s that guy.’ But then–this is the trip part–I just did a tour with him in Europe. I geeked out at the last show we did and I asked him what the sample from ‘Ice Cream’ was. He was like, ‘I don’t even know, man.’ I honestly think he forgot. That dude is a space cadet–he was in the stars.”
Stumbled across this site yesterday called cratekings.com that seems to be full of great stuff…interview with Nicolay, some RZA stuff, and this cool session with Pete Rock talking about a few of his famous beats…including this bit where he talks about Nas’s "The World is Yours" with 9th Wonder, Just Blaze, Nu-Mark and DJ Revolution…
I love in the beginning where all the producers are listening to the beat and just head-nodding…
Sometimes you see something that gives you a new appreciation for the true definition of a word. Such is this film and the word "archivist". Perhaps also the phrase "vinyl junkie". Worth watching for the first :30 alone.
Sure to become a crazy hyped blog-phenom, I want to hate these teenagers but can’t. there’s something about the song that won’t leave my head. There’s something about the video that embraces hi and low tech. There’s something about the way they both skewer and embrace hipster-ism. Who are these kids?!
Some people are going to hate this stuff big time. But really, give it a minute and let the good times roll over you. Also they kept it to 1:30! They know you can’t take too much of this stuff!
Also fun: watch closely when the whale shows up…there’s a Getty images watermark on the shot! Copyfight!
WOMAN: Oh, you black out in the cab ride home again?
MAN: No…I don’t think I did…
I should note that the building I work in has MTV on 3 floors, so there’s lots of young party-types in the building…contrasting with the tax accountants on another 2 floors…
On my ride in to work I was listening to some tracks off The World According to RZA, a record that didn’t get a US release. It’s RZA going around the world and highlighting a bunch of foreign rappers and hip-hop types…it’s a bit hit-or-miss, but it’s pretty fun, and you really get a sense that these foreign MCs are really giving it their all because they know it’ll have RZA’s name on it. JG and I came across it while doing research for our all-things-RZA talkinwu project.
Here are two tracks from World According to RZA…in the first one, there’s this great intro bit out on the water (the sfx are fantastic) and RZA talks about how he’s against killing whales because he "heard they was here before us, you know?" The second track starts with a typically mighty Ghostface verse before moving on to a RZA verse (I love how he says "cranberry") and then some French(?) rap that is so smooth of flow…I wonder what they’re saying…
Recently I came across a CD of audio from this semi-band project I was in back in something like 1999 or 2000. My pal Bijan and I were gonna both play guitar, and then instead of having a singer, we’d just have a dat player playing these stories that we would record. (I’m sure This American Life was on at the time, but I wasn’t aware of it.) The songs’ dynamics would match what was going in the story…
I only managed to record 3 stories, and we had all of 4 practices before we gave it up. Then I advised Bijan at work that if they didn’t give him a raise he should quit. They didn’t, he did, and the next thing I knew he had moved to New York. It was crazy.
The CD I found has two of the stories I recorded — the third, which was fantastic, has been lost to the aether.
First is Mr. B (initials for names to protect the storytellers)…a guy I worked with a handful of times. A real old-school producer guy, who talked a mile a minute and smoked constantly. He wore all black and was a blast to hang around with. I just figured he’d have a good story, so I got the mic and started recording…his story is split into two parts…the first sound you will hear is Mr. B lighting a cigarette…
In part two, at the appropriate time, Bijan and I were going to start playing J Geils’ "Angel is a Centerfold" and it would slowly get louder and louder as the story went on, before erupting into a massive crescendo at the end! Whatta show it would have been!
Next is J, who worked with us for a while at Team. If you knew her, you’d never guess that as a kid she was chubby and unathletic…Bijan and I were practicing in Team’s rarely used 2nd floor space, after-hours, and J saw us one night and asked what we were up to. An aspiring actress (wonder where she is now?) she said she had a good story…
I’m amazed at how maleable the muppets seem to be when it comes to remix culture…and how great they are. I think it’s really a testament to the imaginative power of the muppets and how purely creative and fantastic they are…
This vid makes me talk like I’m talking about Wu-Tang…where once I might say "that Rza verse is really good, but Ghostface just nails it!", now I say Ernie’s really good, but when Bert comes in, he totally kills it! Nice one Bert.
From the "shreds" series, the first one I saw and the mad classic, Eric Clapton shreds. Post title from some old college-time site we went to that was full of ukelele stuff and how the author loved Eric Crapton (??? can this be right? I can’t remember…Sam Uz, do you remember?)…
this clip made me cry tears of laughter when I first saw it, and it is still amazing…part of the Spiritualized show from Sunday was a bit jazz noodley and it reminded me of this…
On my ride in to work I was listening to some tracks off The World According to RZA, a record that didn’t get a US release. It’s RZA going around the world and highlighting a bunch of foreign rappers and hip-hop types…it’s a bit hit-or-miss, but it’s pretty fun, and you really get a sense that these foreign MCs are really giving it their all because they know it’ll have RZA’s name on it. JG and I came across it while doing research for our all-things-RZA