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I Don’t Know Who Umphrey’s McGee Is…

August 24, 2014 13 Comments

…but I’d rather listen to them play Hey Nineteen than listen to Steely Dan play it now. It’s painful to hear Donald Fagen croak out these songs. He never could sing, but it really didn’t matter back in the day. He and Becker wrote these wonderful things, and you understood why he couldn’t entrust them to anyone else to perform properly. Sorry, but now you can’t trust yourself.

Sooner or later it’s not your turn anymore. People take your place. You may not like it, but it’s the way of the world. You could be like Ray Kurzweil, self-absorbed and dreaming of paying bemused men in lab coats to Ted Williams your noggin after you shuffle off this mortal coil, but you’re wasting your time. Believe me, Ray, no matter how much money you pay those guys to Birds Eye your head, they’ll get high after lunch and accidentally kick out the plug while they’re playing hacky sack, plug it back in when they sober up and realize what they’ve done, and when they finally defrost you and sew your head on a used Japanese sex doll with a Pentium chip where your heart used to go, you’ll be about as useful as a Kardashian. Young people take your place in the lineup eventually, and you can go with it, or just turn into an old guy telling anyone that’s willing to listen that you really used to be sumfin’. And Ray, you have no idea how to hit a curve ball, so your frozen head will be completely useless anyway.

Elderly people should command respect for what they’ve accomplished. That’s different than trying to play T Ball when you’re forty. Young people are a barrel of beer, and old people are a fine liqueur — if they’re smart enough to keep distilling their whole life. The world needs mugs of beer and vitality, the same as it needs a digestif after a moveable feast. Serving them at the wrong time ruins the effect.

In a weird sort of a way, performing Hey Nineteen is low-level work. It should be left to the young grunts. Donald Fagen should be running a record company or writing or something, instead of dragging his elderly ass all over the landscape making gargling sounds about feeling old when he was thirty years younger than he is now.

If you’re old and reading this, if it makes you feel any better, I’d be willing to get up a lynch mob of geriatrics to beat some sense into the cameraman, just so we can keep our hand in. 

Like Watching Alphonse Mucha Do An Underpainting: Tim Pierce

August 23, 2014 6 Comments

The Intertunnel can be wonderful if you let it. It’s full of drivel and orthographically-challenged cats, of course; but 1/10 of one percent of it is amazing, and 1/10 of one percent of the Interwebs is more than any human can make use of anyway.

This genial fellow is named Tim Pierce. He has a dedicated website in addition to his YouTube page where I found this video. His webpage will be a big hit, I’m sure of it. I don’t know Tim, but he did me a favor once without trying to, and maybe someday I’ll get to return it.

You’ve never met Tim Pierce either, but you can know exactly who he is without knowing him. He’s played on so many records that have come out of every speaker on earth at one time or another that you couldn’t have avoided him if you tried. I don’t know why you would try. He plays pretty good, don’t you think?

Someone sets up a camera and you get to watch records being made. It’s possible to simply find this interesting for its own sake, or plain entertaining, but if you were trying to find out about the music industry in a serious way, this is like a graduate school lecture. What one man can do, another man can do, as they say, but first you have to know what the other man did.

I’ve always liked people who have one foot planted in art and the other in commerce. All my favorite visual artists from the last century or so are illustrators. I’d rather look at Leyendecker ads all day than Picasso for five minutes.

Snobs believe participating in commerce as an artist dilutes your art. I might point out that Leyendecker devoted only half his time to commerce, and half to art. His customers showed up at his door with a briefcase full of commerce because they knew he had the art they coveted but couldn’t produce if they had a million years to try. A “pure” artist like Picasso devoted one hundred percent of his time to commerce, if you ask me. Self-promotion is not art. It’s an art, but it’s not art.

People that should know better tell me that John Singer Sargent wasn’t a real painter because he painted portraits for money. Filthy lucre. Me, I just stood in front of Lady Agnew of Lochnaw once, and I swear that dead broad was looking right out of the painting at me.

I’m a barbarian, and I refer to her as “Spiro Agnew with Lockjaw,” but even a barbarian knew that the Roman Empire was better than the village of huts he lived in. That’s why he wanted to sack Rome. Duh.

Tim Pierce straddles the line between art and commerce. He’ll play on your record for money. Unlike so many of his brethren, he at least supplies some real art if you supply the commerce. Everyone else just cashes the checks.

Going Out Of Business, Music Industry Style

August 21, 2014 5 Comments

This video is accompanied by a Going Out Of Business sign on its YouTube page:

On
the eve of this milestone release, Belleruche announced that they are
saying farewell, or at least, “see you in a bit”; the close-knit trio
have decided to pursue individual creative and personal avenues after
eight hardworking, exhilarating and globetrotting years of Belleruche.

I remember there was a furniture store in the little town I grew up in. It had a going out of business sign in the window in big, block letters. It was painted on.

Me? I prefer my Minor Swing to be played by actual minors, thanks. 

One Note Piano; One Note Samba; Whatever

August 20, 2014 1 Comment

I love, love, love the presenter. He’s got radio teeth. He doesn’t cotton to those Beatles fellows with their three chords and layaway guitars. It’s a big bus, dude. Plenty of room for everyone. Even a dentist or two.

I sat closer than that to Milt Jackson once. If you’ve never sat right in front of a real vibraphone, you’re missing out. It doesn’t emit sound, exactly; it sprays audio champagne all over the place.

How To Make An Animated GIF From A YouTube Video

August 17, 2014 5 Comments

Well, if you don’t want to get anything done today, go on over to GIFYouTube.com and make animated GIFs automagically with just a little work. It’s fairly easy to get a loop going because you can change the length from one to ten seconds.

  • Go to GifYouTube.com
  • Paste the URL from any YouTube video in the box. Remember to turn off “Share with playlist starting from current video” before you copy the URL
  • Select the Start Time by dragging the cursor wherever you like. It will automatically start from wherever you put it, and you can drag it all around until you get what you’re aiming for
  • Adjust the length of the animated GIF from 1 to 10 seconds to make it loop the way you want
  • You can give it a title if you like
  • Hit “Create gif”
  • Right click on the GIF and copy it to your desktop. If you have an Apple, do Apple things, and may God have mercy on your soul.
  • If you’re new to animated GIFs, they just lie there like a prom date until you open them in a browser like Firefox or whatever. 

I can pretty much guarantee that even though it’s Sunday morning that the servers will be melting, and the Intertunnel will be awash with moderately amusing animated gifs until everyone’s sick of them and the fellows that wrote the few lines of code that it takes to make this happen will be chiseled into the Interweb’s Mount Rushmore, and nothing of value will be produced, or lost.

[If you’re new around here, the animated GIFs are of my sons, also known as Unorganized Hancock]

Month: August 2014

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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

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