Yes, in spirit of my neverending corniness, I am writing in my comeback post only to say that I intend to play CATCHUP and what better way to announce that then the classic, American staple of >>>>>>>>>>>
Ah, where would one start, so much has happened! So hard to believe that the last post was in November!
Things that have happened and I have yet to put here... well, let's see, there's Louisville, more Blitzen Trapper, Z and Cesca, Gypsy music, Napa, new gear, songwriting, new gear, UofL basketball, new classes, and more, in no particular order.
So, yea, I am living, breathing, and in the next few days, I will dump a bottle of Heinz upon these pages.
It's so dumb, really. The whole purpose for this blog was for myself to be able to document my own thoughts / sentiments. Yet, I keep finding it complicated to document them once I am caught in the moment, and wait until later when they are almost evaporated from my head.
I will do my best to recollect all the accounts. Let's see how much I succeed.
Speaking of Blitzen Trapper (last post rant), they just recently released yet another album! It is called American Goldwing and I downloaded it from iTunes. It is also available on Amazon MP3, but iTunes offers a bonus track (and yet you pay two dollars more!)
American Goldwing Album Cover
It seems that Eric Earley and the boys have been quite busy. It feels just not long ago they released the colossal work of art that Destroyer of the Void album was. Following their trail, I had noticed that they had not stopped touring, yet somehow they found time to put out yet another compilation.
The first impression of the album: 7 stars out of 10.
The album seems to be a definitive separation of Blitzen Trapper from the rest of genres that they dabbled, and further into the hardcore prog rock that they emanated throughout their previous work.
I used to enjoy their folksy and acoustic pieces, and I miss them in this American Goldwing.
The album opens with the extravagant Might Find it Cheap, an epitome of prog rock with heavy riffing and an exquisite 12-string-acoustic lead that is bound to induce flashbacks of a golden era of rock and roll.
What seems to be the beacon piece of the album, Love the Way You Walk Away, is my favorite song on it. It possesses certain elements of a country ballad, coming both from its vernacular as well as the rhythm guitar play.
As with Destroyer of the Void, American Goldwing keeps a theme throughout the album, yet with each song paying an homage to a different substyle or a different artist. For example, Your Crying Eyes (song 4), to me, resembles even some David Bowie sound.
The lyrical prowess of Earley is still heavily present, and quite enjoyable.
There are a few mellower songs on the album, but we are certainly not getting another acoustic, "murder ballad" such as Man Who Would Speak True (Destroyer of the Void), or Black River Killer (Furr). And, we are certainly not getting a grandiose folksy piece such as Furr, or even Tailor. This is my personal bias. If you are a die-hard prog rock fan, you will get more out of it. I find it somewhat monotonous.
I would still recommend it and would buy it again, knowing what it was about.
Recently, my favorite, local radio station had shut down. It was called 101.9 WRXP, The Rock Experience, and it was headlined by Matt Pinfield, and his co-host Leslie Fram.
Matt Pinfield in Village Voice
For a while, this was my main source for obtaining new music. Their show was promoting smaller bands from all over the country. They would always have a guest band or artist that would perform in the studio. We (my wife and I) learned of so many bands that we ended up going to see live in the area: Rocco DeLuca, Audrye sessions, etc. They would also promote local music, featuring a weekly session called "Local Licks" and during this time they would play bands from the local, tri-state area.
Evidently, their show was not only about new R'N'R, new bands, local bands. They played plenty of ol'school Rock and, with the musical historian Mr. Pinfield at the helm, their selection was exquisite.
Now that their gig is up and gone (Pinfield is back on MTV2 for 120 Minutes), I found myself in a very frustrating situation - here we are, in one of the most affluent metropolitan areas in The World, and I could not get a good radio station. Well, this statement should be qualified. I could not find a good station that goes out of their way to promote and preserve good music. That sounds so pompous and esoteric, but take it as you may.
When I lived down in the Philly area, my favorite stations to listen were the College radios, especially the Ivy Leagues' - UPenn and Princeton. Heck, I learned about Spoon on Princeton's 103.3. Up here, I tuned into Columbia, Seton Hall, NYU, and found nothing appealing on the waves. Nothing.
After this debacle, I turned to my trusty Pandora. Pandora had become my favorite means of obtaining new music.
However, by poking around the Interwebs, I found that there are still some good sources around the U.S. that invest themselves into preserving good music.
One such station is WNRN in Charlottesville, Virginia. I subscribed to their YouTube channel after seeing many of my favorite bands and singer/songwriters featured in their studio (e.g. Delta Spirit, Blitzen Trapper, Ellis Paul, Jesse Malin,etc.) I started checking out new artists I'd find there, and going out to see them live, when they come through the area. I, thus, discovered really cool new music like Head And The Heart.
Now I get alerts about their uploads in my YouTube account and check them out religiously. Great acts appear constantly and good music flows my way.
So, what the hell am I talking about here? What is this rant? What is this preservation and promotion of good music bullshit that I am spilling?
The way I see it, it is the modern-day radio DJ's responsibility to show us up and coming music acts, all entwined with reminiscing of what good music we've had in the past. And these reminders should consist of playing the obscure pieces of great bands as well as the most widely known ones. We've all heard "Like a Rolling Stone" on a radio show three bajillion times; play us something like "Talkin' New York" or "Masters of War". Those lesser known pieces that defined the artist in his/her era what they really were.
Surely, the media landscape has changed so much in this digital revolution and we can all recur to Podcasts, Music genome projects, instead of our local radio - but the job of the DJ is still the same.
It should also be said that I tend to not discriminate against musical genres. Though I have been lately, heavily leaning on the side of folk-rock, alt-folk, alt-bluegrass, indie-rock, indie-folk or whatever similar labels are applicable, I can enjoy anything from a good country song to a trance groove.
On another note, my cousin showed me this station in Louisville, KY that seems to be doing the exact same thing.
91.9FM, Louisville WFPK. They stream and play a plethora of great rock, blues, indie music, folk.
Why can Louisville, KY have a great station that will play Head and The Heart, and NYC does not???
The two of us were in Manhattan one day, and we visited MoMa. We made it a point to see their house collection which is impressive, since it has been a while that we'd seen it. I forgot the Marcel Duchamp pieces that they possessed. I find them ingenious, though I understand that readymade art is an acquired taste for a visual art neophyte, much like myself.
Duchamp: Bicycle Wheel (MoMa)
After a few drinks and some music, I began some ramblings on Duchamp in our taxi ride home. I elaborated with an inebriated, incoherent exploration of the genius behind Fountain (or whatever limited knowledge I had on the subject), and I kept insisting after perceiving mild indifference on her part, which pushed her to utter that epic quote above. It really tickled me that she used the word "urinal", in her outburst, because of the simplicity that Duchamp achieves in the abstraction of the urinal itself.
The urinal's metamorphosis happens somewhere between our ears, without much intervention from the artist itself, but a careful placement of the title.
Duchamp: Fountain
The truth is, without even having studied nearly the amount of Art History that I wish I would have, I am certainly curious about Dada, in the most romantic way possible. I am infatuated by its origins, and its evolution.
The movement started as a revolution in sub-bourgeois circles in central Europe, and it propagated to the US and Asia as well. The rebellion against the bourgeois capitalism and its tendencies for arousing conflict pushed artists, bohemians, intellectuals to convene in small circles and share their satires and parodies in as many forms as possible.
Thank you, Duchamp, for giving us the Fountain to drink from, for many years to come. We don't care about you, or your damn urinal.
The biggest loss in humanity has to, unequivocally, be the onset of, or transition to, apathy.
Apathy, the way I process it, is much more wretched than hate. There is a certain connotation of care in hate. You hate, therefore you manifest a feeling. Merely thinking about the person you hate evokes a feeling. Yes, this feeling is hate, but feeling nonetheless. Perhaps you just hate them because you wish they were different, perhaps they wronged you in a way, perhaps you were indoctrinated into the mentality of hatred by your lousy parents, or perhaps you were just born a hateful, fundamentalist, ultra-racist piece of shit. However, you do harbor a feeling for a person. And it is better than no feeling. This, I call "care".
Evidently, the subject of your hate would not agree with me and my, albeit arbitrary, assessment of which is better and which is worse. Assuredly, I retain only a globalized, sociological view on this subject, for the purpose of this post.
Recently, I had a person in my life (with whom I interact on a daily basis) transition almost the entire spectrum of this, so-called care. I went from not knowing them to liking them, from liking them to disliking them then hating them, from hating them to loathing them, and ultimately to simply not caring at all about them, and largely ignoring them.
This actually made me sad. No one had to announce this to me. There were no fanfare, banners flying, no big announcement with an even bigger speech. One day I just realized that the care in me, for this person, is gone. They did and said things that I just ignored. And this is a fellow human being, for crying out loud! Yet, I could not bring it out of me to care anymore. This person's presence evoked no feeling.
I am not going much further into the external circumstances that we were in, this person and I, but it suffices to say that those circumstances exhaustively aided this onset of apathy in me.
This is what I call the transition to apathy.
If you actually do not care for someone, initially, then I hold that there is no loss. But if certain feeling for a human existed in you, but progressively evaporated and is no longer there, that is the loss.
Where, do you think, did that feeling go?
You may have heard me say in person, or read my ramblings on this blog, about how I hate people. I truly do hate people. I just wish they weren’t the dumbfuck sheep that they are. Just walking around is one disappointment after another, seeing the ridiculous things that we do without putting half a mind to our everyday actions. One slip-up and I hate you, yep.
However, as an individual whose path I have not yet crossed, upon the initial meet-and-greet, I always give one the benefit of the doubt. In my mind, based on your behavior, you might, then, move in either direction – I might like you or dislike you. But now I >>know<< you and I certainly have a feeling for you.
What must transpire between us for me to lose that feeling?
And that is merely speaking about those we know. What of those we do not know at all? Where does the feeling begin? Does it begin with apathy or does it begin lopsided on some scale of care?
A couple of fundamentalists flew two planes into 3000 innocent people. Do you not loathe them? Hundreds of thousands of Somalis are suffering under famine and villainous paramilitary groups. Do you not sympathize? We’ve never even met any of these multitudes and multitudes of people, yet somehow they evoke feelings in us. How does it happen that we grow apathetic, then? How does one say “I just simply don’t give two shits about that?”
I signed up for a Songwriting class. I have been dabbling in this for too long with no aim and I decided that it would finally be reasonable to get some direction, or expert advice, or even just plain old tools to add to my arsenal.
I plan on blogging about it to document my experience. I will post here my weekly findings and other things related to it, as I do my homework assignments, think about what we learned, etc.
I signed up with Gotham Writers Workshop, a community of educators in creative writing of all styles.
I am attending a 10-week long course of 3-hour classes running once a week. My classes are on Wednesdays and they have a parallel course running on Tuesdays.
The first class was this past Wednesday.
The teacher is great. I tend to be very judgmental of educators in general. Subconsciously, I have found myself always trying to discredit them. It's sort of a defense mechanism built into us – if you are to participate in my edification, what makes you think you are qualified? Once they pass that barrier of mine, they are the Law, and I tend to absorb their every word.
I won't disclose the name of my instructor, because I didn't really consult with him. He has decades of experience in the business. He has written for all sorts of singers – from R&B to country, and anything in between; for film, for commercials, for pro-bono purposes, for pretty much everything. He has written hits for Gloria Gaynor, and Alan Jackson and he is currently signed as a songwriter for BMG. He has a cool dude aura about him, but he speaks very articulately and eloquently, utilizing a very rich vocabulary, which usually appeals to me.
The first class was good. I was twelve minutes late, no big surprise there. We are eight or nine students in a small room. It is very personal. I missed the introductions. I heard the teacher later say that we have a lot of musicians in the room. I am curious about who plays what.
The class was mostly about general introduction and history of songwriting in America. Then we went into most common structures of songs (particularly popular songs) and towards the end we touched upon ideas of initiating the lyric writing.
I expected that a lot of the initial material was going to be a refresh for me, since I've read some Rikky Rooksby books, and similar material from the Internet and other sources. However, I got from the class exactly what I expected: among the piles of repeat material, I learned some gems of very interesting, basic songwriting knowledge, that was very new to me. This, in and of itself, is already worth it all.
If I were to find one downside to it all, it would have to be the extensive listening of popular songs, that the teacher enforces in order for us to recognize the patterns and structures that he teaches.
I am not yet sure that this is a true flaw. I will wait to see if it is really bothersome or not. We do have three hours in this class, every week, so I seriously doubt it.
One interesting find on a personal note is – although I generally stay away from popular music and tend to not believe that the commercially-acceptable patterns (in any genre of art) are nourishing to artistry - I accepted the fact that some popular patterns taught are necessary. In music, an artist has a mere few minutes to capture a listeners attention, and convey a message. Our minds, as listeners, have simply been programmed over the years to recognize patterns that have been ingrained in us and are more pleasing, recognizable, and we tend to favor them. With this, I agree. As much as we would all like to make our art be unique and stand out, there is also the duty that we have, that is: communicate your message.
We have some homework to do.
We have to: a) write no less than two verses of a twelve-bar blues song; b) write two or three (no more, no less) titles for future songs – these titles must be accompanied by a paragraph, each, explaining what the concept of the song is. The blues song verses can be just recited, can be sung, can be sung along to an accompanying instrument, or can be even pre-recorded and turned in to the teacher to play in class.
It is Saturday now, and the homework must be ready on Wednesday. I have some ideas for the blues song, but nothing concrete. I will use some time right now, and get started.
I somehow crawled up into some sort of wellness blog limbo.
By following comments, and their respective owners, from a friend's blog, I found my way to a whole world of self-proclaimed savants of mental, physical, and spiritual well being.
I must admit that I found some inspiring blog posts and inspiring personalities. However, one pet peeve that got down to my subcutaneous tissues is the formulated post title.
"Seven Ways to Covet Love Today"
"3 Amazing Ways Sorrow Can Fulfill You"
"57 Angles to Lay a Brick"
"11 Ways to Wax a Dolphin"
Evidently, these titles above are fictitious. But, what is it that makes people believe that their writing will be more attractive if they apply this formula to their titles? Is it those lame, self-improvement books, the likes of which plague the shelves of Borders?
One of those lame books, I am reading right now. Perhaps therein lies my real frustration.
