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joeface
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Posts posted by joeface
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couw already summarized the difference. House is the beat focused, groove infused, sample heavy dance for the sake of dance. No pop story like disco might have.
I prefer deep house because it's usually the most sonically interesting to me. British DJ John Digweed is a great practitioner, though he can get dark as well as saucy. His method of mixing is the smoothest in the world. I like his Bedrock compilation, Fabric 20, Global Underground mixes, etc. Keep in mind this is a direct descendent of acid house and both come out of rave culture, but it's still quality in its own way, imho, if done right.
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I Was Wrong But I Wanna Make it Right - Wynton's tribute to the Electric Miles
What a Wünderfuhl World - Kraftwerk Remixes Satchmo
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Prince on SNL recently,
I think this somehow redeems the recent Sly experience?
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At one point he announced that he was hanging up his drumsticks to pursue a career as a vocalist, but that idea didn't last.
I heard (from my dad who grew up a big fan of Rich) that at one point he wanted to hang up the sticks and take up tap-dancing.
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and here's a knee i though came out pretty good, just letting light values reveal the form and going easy on contour lines... sort of a personal breakthrough i guess. i cropped it from a larger charcoal drawing which i won't post because the foreshortening and proportions are wacked
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these are my first attempts at conte+wash from life drawing class last night... i'd like to say i'm getting the hang of it but i'm not. . . i used the paintbrush as little as possible, conte's a mess enough as it is
(now that i think about it... that's supposed to be a hairbun not a kippah)
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I received an offer in the mail yesterday to subscribe to The Atlantic Monthly. I know nothing about this magazine save what the sales pitch says that came with the offer. To wit:
"What you'll find is a magazine devoted to behind-he-scense reporting,
ahead-of- the-curve storytelling, and must-read analysis of current
events. A magazine The Washington Post called the 'smartest on the
rack'."
Is anyone familiar with this? Opinions? I already take The New Yorker, so would you consider AM to be something of a clone? Is it East Coast centric or more generic in its focus? Cost-wise, the "special professional rate" they're offering is 12 issues for $19.95.
Thanks for the help.
Up over and out.
I suscribe to the AM.
The articles I've read by James Fallows have been worth the price alone, in my opinion. He avoids the ham-fisted perspectives you can tend to get when it comes to the war on terror, national security, Iraq, etc. He seems to have many contacts within the military and intelligence community which allows him to write a worthwhile analysis that deals with the nuances and complexities of the topic at hand.
And love or hate him, regular contributor P.J. O'Rourke's humor is addictive.
I also like how with the subscription you get access to their website, which not only archives all the magazines of the past ten years but also posts selected articles from their vaults from over the past 150 years. Maybe that's typical for magazine subscriptions now, I don't know.
So far I don't find AM to be too east-coast centric. A lot of the topics are of national interest. A couple of issues ago their cover article was on the talk radio phenomenon, and most of the reporting came from interviewing and observing hosts at a major talk radio station in Los Angeles.
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the last three I've acquired and watched:
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here's my foot totally nude. about a 15 minute sketch. this drawing stinks...
these are my feet in the raw. this one stinks twice as bad as the first drawing . . .
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I love art and I'm slowly diving into it in my spare time. No painting for me yet, I've just gone through a beginning drawing class and am now starting up life drawing, which is a pain in the arse. The drawing below is based on a "grid over a photo" type project from my beginning drawing class. It took a while to get this far but I lost patience and didn't finish.
here is my photo on which it was based:
joe
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Anyone have insights as to which jazz artists were fond of which visual artists? (i.e. painters, draftsmen, sculptors, heck even architects?) Or jazz artists that somewhere just mentioned a specific work they liked?
joe
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I wrote this a while back when I first heard about the idea of this Tommy Lee show.
A Crude Hypothesis on Reality Tee Vee
I haven't watched much reality Tee Vee in my time (or much Tee Vee in general for that matter), but I believe I have seen just enough in passing, and read enough commentary about it, to find in it a brilliant concept in how it achieves an unstated aim. All these shows seem to have the same purpose. But to give credibility to my theory on this purpose, general groundwork needs to be laid.
(disclaimer: this is in no way a final statement, or completetly accurate, comprehensive, blah blah blah. These are initial thoughts open to other insights and corrections. I haven't studied much in communications theory, marketing, psychology, etc. so my assumptions may very well be naive or outdated).
We live in a peculiar age in terms of how people might understand themselves. Not just an age of self-expression, but one characterized by introspective self-construction. In large part, people believe that they are responsible to define themselves at very basic levels. Many think or assume that our identities, our respective personhoods, are in some part an empty holding space until each of us fill them in on our own, and then complete a definition of self. To some degree or another all mediums of art and entertainment, but most especially and blatantly the Tee Vee medium, keeping in step of the social climate, seek to facilitate this personal task for us. Every package delivered through television, regardless of its content, has bent to this ultimate goal for the viewer, even though the proximate motives and goals of Tee Vee programming will vary.
TV commercials, sitcoms, news programs, religious programming, televised political events, the mini drama, and so on ... all of them by simple virtue of being television-based, labor under overarching assumptions regarding the ability of a human being to redefine oneself (in this case the viewer) through the right conditioning (in this case the meta-message of the television medium). For more on this, check out a little book "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman, whose analysis is more relevant now than when it was first published in the 1980's.
Now more recently, through competent marketing campaigns, the Reality TV phenomenon has convinced many that this trend is 'alternative' television. In other words, even though we are still processing images and information through the Tee Vee box just like the sitcom and the drama and the commercial, this is fundamentally different from all other Tee Vee because the content is raw and unfiltered data reported from reliable sources coming from the very same world we exist in, not engineered characters from some script writers' theatrically fabricated world.
Well I would argue that this is an illusory effect, it is still a theatrically constructed world with the same aim as every other show and program on Tee Vee. More than that, the reality Tee Vee show exists to promote the reality-relevant nature of all other Tee Vee prorgamming.
If we are the compliant audients which the ratings pollsters need us to be, we become convinced of a constructed reality's relevant realism, mostly because of some variables involved that are emphasized -
- The characters that populate the reality show's constructed world are non-performers (or performers appearing to take on very normal, non-performance roles, like Tommy Lee),
- they have been given a certain space of improvisation to fill with speech and actions and (somewhat) autonomous free will decisions.
- The situations and/or environments which the characters must navigate through are portrayed as being taken from either very ordinary layers of society,
- or on the other hand extremely contrived scenarios which are supervised by very ordinary professionals.
But from here, it becomes obvious that there's very little 'reality' actually occuring. A program divided up by commercial breaks are edited down and framed in ways very similar to any other show. Speech, behavior, and scenarios must be edited and filtered in such a way as to convey the familiar progress, developments, and flow of drama which characterizes staged plays. Miniature scenarios and challenges are highlighted. Personal accomplishments or failures are arranged and structured to fit into their given spaces, so that the viewer can enter the commercial break in the exact same frame of mind they are in during other Tee Vee show commercial breaks. And they will return to the next episode of the reality show for the exact same reasons they will for any other drama or theatrically constructed show. The viewer is being conditioned to learn the pace of life according to television: everything is broken down into intermittent lessons between commercial breaks and between episodes. Nothing is left unresolved ultimately, unless for further dramatic effect.
And like the characters in any other dramatized Tee Vee program, some ultimate goals are accomplished. This ultimate goal, I believe, is the entire justification for the existence of the reality show from the perspective of those in positions with the most control and supervision over the direction and success of their television business.
And that ideal goal is this: At the end of it all, a reality show participant is given the opportunity, or I should say responsibilty, to be interviewed directly by the camera, outside the 'matrix' of their constructed reality/fantasy world, to provide direct meta-commentary. Specifically, this character mostly describes what sorts of feelings they have about particulars. But here is the ideal climax of these kinds of shows: we are told by this character how he or she has learned something new about himself/herself that he/she will carry well afterwards (for the rest of their lives perhaps). In that sense, for any reality show whose participants have to achieve some external concrete goals yet fail, that is immaterial to their purpose. The participants' personal lessons and express feelings are most important. They need to prove to us that a television show changes us all for the better. And this is the inductive proof: it has changed at least one of us.
This is brilliant!!! This is marketing as performance art, soaked in a very pure form of irony. Look at what's going on: the television producers have given back to the faithful television viewers a volunteer from among the very same television audience - ordinary people or people in non-actor roles - so that they can explain to the rest of audience how we are supposed to redefine ourselves through the structured format of television programs. This must appear very uncontrived -- and it does! because the non-actor participants are oblivious to most anything being communicated outside of their own performance -- in order for us to accept the idea that we are simply getting raw and unfiltered, emotionally pure communication of information without an agenda. And so we are especially vulnerable and malleable at this point.
Thus, the hypothetically receptive viewer has either gained tools or have their existing tools re-enforced, by tools I mean something like a low-level mode of submissive cognition necessary for passive conditioning of self through an aggressive medium. I would call television an aggressive medium because its programming is designed to relay disconnected series' of information faster than we can thoughtfully absorb on a real-time conscious level. But often times, the seeming disconnectedness exists in order to obscure the big picture coherency of television: a medium assigning itself the responsbility of providing for the audience a redefinition of self. True this is exploitive, because the express purposes of television shows are not stated in so many large letters. But on a psychological level it is key to relate to viewers at lower levels of cognition so that the impact is lasting.
This redefintion of self is not an end in itself, from the perspective of television producers. It serves the purpose of maintaining an attentive audience week after week, where we discover our world fresh and validate (or challenge) ourselves. And I know this is cliche but still no less true -- the upkeep of an attentive audience serves the purposes of many business alliances involved: fuelling a vibrant consumerism.
Reality Tee Vee, therefore, is the national treasure of the TV syndicates. Because they (purportedly) understand us better than we understand ourselves - we the general public will invent reality where we don't already see it. We will invent identity where we don't already have it.
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Years ago I rented this indie film from the early nineties called "Giant Steps", with Billy Dee Williams as a jazz pianist. Strange little film but actually deals with some elements of music intelligently.
Has anyone else ever see this? I can't remember much about the music itself, I wasn't as much of an acoustic jazz fan back then. I'd love to track it down again but I don't think it's ever been released on DVD.
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I suggest ANYONE with interests in jazz beyond 1957 hard bop check out Stormy Monday.
ah you beat me to it. I second the recommendation for this movie. Among other things there's a Polish free jazz outfit that jam in a couple of scenes, and summarily piss off innocent bystanders lol
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I'll always have a warm spot for Hunter, as Charlie was an upcoming local and one of the first people I saw playing jazz live regularly when I finally turned 21 and was able to go to the (then plentiful) Bay Area jazz clubs!
was that back in the early '90s with Jay Lane on drums? I would have loved to catch some of that. He probably still had a lot of development to go but there must have been plenty of good, raw energy based on what I hear off his first trio record.
As far as comparing Hunter's sound to other guitarists, his later stuff often reminds me of Scofield first, but I'm not an authority on guitarists' styles so that sense of comparison could have very little factual basis as far as I know
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also someone mentioned carter beauford or whatever. i don't listen to that cheesy crap, but my dad does and i have had to go see that band a few times with girls in the 90s and beauford is a great drummer. i was very impressed.
yeah I wouldn't question what he can do but I always question what he should do. I just have never found him very tasteful in the musical context he's in.
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Bill Bruford - despite his reputation, he's not the roll meister, I find his rolls (and grooves often) inconsistent, not so elegant at times.
Carter Beauford - someone take that splash away from him already, he's not Manu Katche nor Stewart Copeland by any stretch. And the overly busy linear beats get really tiring in a folk rock context.
Dennis Chambers - if nothing else, just because he's responsible for all that Beauford tries to be
Mike Portnoy - don't even get me started... the one who tries to make machine gun drumming something cool and sophisticated, save us from this evil!
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I still have a big ol stash boxed away from roughly the same era, mostly Marvel from mid-80's to early-90's... focus on all things X-Men. Some Dark Horse titles were must-gets too.
My favorite limited series was the Havoc Wolverine one, with the wild water color artwork and a storyline from the latter days of the Cold War.
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Spielberg is a great filmmaker but this script, while not as bad as Sgt Ryan, shows that brawn still comes before brains in his movies -
I haven't seen it yet, but this reminds me of an interesting review I read from someone familiar with the novel, the radio program, the '50s flick . . .
Spielberg is usually smarter than this, because this was doomed from the very beginning. Forget that nowadays if Cruise is in the thing, it has to be stretched from something whole to a platform for his posturing.But quite apart from that there were already two excellent achievements for this. First we had the book, which has excellent energy: mechanical beasts as languid swans among us. Consummate language of inevitability.
Then we had Orson Welles on Wells; the radio drama that blurred the definition of sight. Yes, this is about sight and always has been. The 1953 version acknowledged this and took out all the religious stuff and replaced it with things whose sight is lethal. And what things those eyes were! Designed on Mars to emulate beaux art wrapping of what in the fifties was considered the ultimate in high tech vision: the three dots of color TeeVee. The saucers in this case were floating on legs of electricity and exterminated gracefully.
Sure, it was essentially a chase movie, but a chase of an eye following poor souls. What could be more cinematic? On the heels of this our genius in Hollywood decides to take the same material and scrub all the cinematic value out of it. Sure, he could have approached it with the same intelligence as "Close Encounters," which was a French New Wave film about the creative discovery of imagination. It was essentially a movie about movies.
Perhaps he didn't know. Perhaps he just didn't have time: this was pushed up two years ahead of schedule. Perhaps he just didn't care, since all his efforts at intelligent and meaningful film-making just blend into his more mundane commercial successes.
But he does know how to stage a scene that manages motion: the orchestrated motion of camera, foreground and often opposing motion in the background. He doesn't do well in three dimensions and you can see every static storyboard along the way. But when he's good at vision, he's good.
Plus. Plus this gives the opportunity of the extra motion of the swans, which is how Wells described the ships.
But no dance here, no cinematic composition. And no languid ships. These are a cross between the monsters of "Wild Wild West" and "Star Wars." At least they were apt. These ships clunk and grind. They destroy and collect. Their eyes and weapons are different from each other. Instead of being otherworldly, they seem distinctly human, as if they were designed by Lex Luthor.
Okay, so the story changes focus from being about invaders to being about Tom and kids. Even Mel Gibson in his basement was more engaging, and that's pretty damning.
One final insult. This starts the same as the 1953 movie, with a narrator giving background. With Wells always in our minds, who is selected? Morgan Freeman. You may even like his avuncular, low key acting-as-appearance. But as he who introduces doom? No.
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He's talking a bunch of marketing spin, but I'd rather hear Thievery Corporation or St. Germain on the radio than Kenny G and Dave Koz, so this really isn't a BAD thing.
you mention two good ones right there. i hate the label "chill" (like it has a corner on that effect on the listener), but there's a few wonderful things happening in that large canopy of a term.
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Only two,
The Young Ones
The Singing Detective
although I'm American only British TV productions have ever interested me at all. Now I'm just waiting for Max Headroom to come out on DVD.
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Penetration.
That's a good word to describe my criteria as well. But the manner of how my psyche is penetrated is contigent on the particular piece of music.
Dylan can be transformative in his raw poetic presentation, juxtaposed to sometimes pedestrian music (as far as its rhythmic and harmonic qualities). I ain't going to Dylan to be transformed in the same way a good PMG tune can transform me. Then, an electronic piece of music's synthetic exploitation of a ridiculously broader sonic palette, if done well, may hook me into its designs in a radically different way. And I won't even go there for music, per se, rather these deconstructive commentaries on music.
Basically, whenever I choose to actively listen to any piece of music, I am momentarily accepting that world in which that piece of music moves, and the actual musical elements are just references to what kind of world I am entering -- insofar as I am understanding why the music sounds like it does. The experiences will vary from rewarding to insulting, but it's worth it when the gems are eventually found, the ones that can change you in small ways.
Rollins on UTUBE
in Artists
Posted · Edited by joeface
Hehe, in the first vid I can tell that's Omar Hakim on drums just by the very flexible grip. Definitely one of my faves from the usually annoying "pop/fusion" realm.