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Everything posted by Jim Alfredson
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Playing Scooters in Flint with Greg Nagy, Glenn Giordano, David Uricek, and Ray Goodman. 7pm.
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I'm obsessed with this record lately. If you don't have this, you need it. Future of jazz organ on this bad boy. Brian Charette is the BOSS.
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Uhhhh what record?
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Yeah, same question. Never seem to be able to see anything but text with these status updates (like the previous one referencing David Gilmour's birthday).
Not sure if it's a pic that I'm missing, or a link -- in any case, status updates only seen to show text only (fwiw).
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They are Facebook status updates. The record in question is Brian Charette's Alphabet City.
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Playing the Wilson Center in St Johns tonight with Jim Cooper on vibes and Jeff Shoup on drums. 7pm
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"Distressingly, it’s exactly routine work that once formed the basis of the American middle class. It’s routine manual work that Henry Ford transformed by paying people middle class wages to perform, and it’s routine cognitive work that once filled US office spaces. Such jobs are now increasingly unavailable, leaving only two kinds of jobs with rosy outlooks: jobs that require so little thought, we pay people little to do them, and jobs that require so much thought, we pay people well to do them.
If we can now imagine our economy as a plane with four engines, where it can still fly on only two of them as long as they both keep roaring, we can avoid concerning ourselves with crashing. But what happens when our two remaining engines also fail? That’s what the advancing fields of robotics and AI represent to those final two engines, because for the first time, we are successfully teaching machines to learn." -
The main problem with a wide swath of the American public and perhaps the human race in general is not necessarily intellectual stupidity (though there's plenty of that to go around) but more destructively emotional stupidity. In other words, a lack of empathy and compassion. Which is ironic considering the majority of people consider themselves members of a faith that is supposed to be built around empathy and compassion.
Fear seems to override all of that, however; the reptilian, fight or flight part of our brain that reacts automatically to perceived danger which is the manifestation of not being in control of your own life. This leads to stigmatization and demonization of large groups of people for being 'different' while glorifying those like ourselves, those stuck in the same morass, as we scapegoat the 'others' in a feeble attempt to exert power in the face of our own powerlessness.
It takes more than book smarts to see through the ruse, a ruse that dishonest leaders, businessmen, entertainers, marketers, etc. use to their own advantage. It takes self-awareness and self-control as well as self-confidence. But more importantly it takes emotional intelligence. -
A beautiful piece (if unfortunately on a site that looks like it was made in Netscape in 1992) from Dave Stewart (Egg, National Health, Hatfield & The North, Bill Bruford) on Keith Emerson.
http://www.davebarb.com/dsbgemerson.html -
More thoughts on Emerson: It's really easy to dismiss ELP as the pinnacle of everything that went wrong with progressive rock in the 70s and how the excess and pretentiousness of the prog scene ushered in punk rock. And there is certainly some truth in that. I was teased mercilessly in middle and high school for being into ELP. They were NOT cool at that time.
But you know what's harder to admit? That those three kids (and they were kids at the time of their debut album... Palmer was 20 years old, Keith and Greg only 26 and 25 respectively) made some incredible music with passion and creativity and experimentation and audacity and freedom and yes, ridiculous chops. And they were unabashed about it. "Yeah, motherfuckers, I can play classical music and I'm a rock star and I'm going to be loud and in your face and play a synthesizer the size of your goddamn car. And when I'm done, I'm going to write a concerto and perform it while spinning end over end on a concert grand piano in front of a stadium of fans. Fuck you." What's more punk than that?
RIP Keith Emerson. -
I made you a cake for your birthday, Judith Bridger, but then we ate it without you. I blame the children. Happy Birthday!
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After we were finished tracking drums for the next THEO album, Kevin DePree asked me to play a little Hammond on one of his student's drum covers. Check out 10 year old Emerson playing some swing! How cute!
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Oh, Melissa Gilbert, your email headers know the way directly into my heart. "Are we still planning on meeting tomorrow?" Yes, yes, a thousand times YES! Ah, Half-Pint, all these years of unrequited love are finally about to come to a glorious end...
... wait, you sent this to how many people? It's just a fundraising campaign for your congressional run? Son of a bitc....