WRONG NOTES: a blog of ear reverence
Wrong Notes collects posts on music, art, culture and fun stuff. Also included: news about the Ear Reverends.
Sasquatch Crowd Panda Girl (May 26, 2008).
· · · good things come to those who click · · ·
Wrong Note photos
I'm about to start posting photos, as another step in the evolution of Wrong Notes.
Since 2003, I've been working on a series of photos titled Crowd Culture, that have always been associated with the Ear Reverends' music. So, images from Crowd Culture will definitely appear here.
Besides my own photos, we also can look forward to seeing photos from others when Wrong Notes transitions to being a group blog!
(Be sure to click the images to see the full-sized version.)
Weng Weng, our regularly scheduled program
Coming back, after my recent day job time-warp, we return to our regularly scheduled program:
I am a pretty big fan of the razor-blade-hat tricks, naturally.
(Wikipedia explains Weng Weng, too.)
Blue Monday
I was thinking about needing to hear / see this myself, but realized it's even more for a friend:
. . . because Monday is a mess . . .
1,000 Recordings
I've had a hectic past few weeks of work in the day job, but a lot of it actually has been music-related.
Some might not know, so I'll note that I make websites by day. It's a traditional life really—by, day I sit by the anvil and bang work-song-rhythms as I forge the web for merchants and artists alike. And, at the end of the day, in recognition of the quality of my craft, I'm paid—not a king's ransom, mind you, but enough to keep me in guitar strings and working patch cables. With some frugality and patience—and when good fortune smiles upon me, I find I can even afford the occasional indulgence, like another microphone. And, so then, by night, I sing and play.
Anyway, over the past few weeks, I've finalized work on, and launched, two huge (or, soon to be huge) music-related websites. I'll describe the first one in a second post, and the second one here (ha!):
1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die is a soon to be released book, by NPR music critic Tom Moon. We've designed, built and now launched the first part of the 1,000 Recordings website, which is mostly just Tom's blog. There's a lot more to the website that will be online in a few weeks—at the very least, as you can imagine, there will be a page for each of the 1,000 Recordings.
I've had the pleasure of reading some of the book, and I am really excited about it—about what it's about. As I think you'll feel when you read Tom's blog posts, Tom writes interesting things about interesting music. So you can imagine this book that has 1,000 interesting reviews / essays about music—it's a cool thing.
One of the things touched on in the book, obviously, is how Tom selected the 1,000 recordings—why he chose certain things, given the challenge of selecting exactly 1,000 recordings. I think this provides an interesting reality-check on the so-called "taste maker" ideal that gets applied to mainstream media outlets, record labels and popular critics. There's really a lot more too it; and the "taste" are really many "tastes" that no one source can "make."
I'll save a bigger critique of the "taste maker" ideal for another time. But, my favorite quote currently on the 1,000 Recordings website is this one from Tom Waits:
Your collection could be filled with nothing but music from Ray Charles and you'd have a completely balanced diet.
We never really understand what we need to hear until we really hear it. We often need others to help us really hear it. But, that's totally different than who we need, or don't need, to tell us about what to listen to, or why some recording is popular or supposedly important. I'm excited about this book because I think it recognizes this distinction.
Playbacks again, I told you so
An I-told-you-so that with an icky side-effect.
It's been more than 4 years (!) since I wrote The future of music playback, wherein I imagined that one possible medium for music in the future would be custom music players (that I called "playbacks"). Basically, the idea was around music player hardware becoming so inexpensive and small that it'd someday become as viable to sell a music fan a whole, physical, mp3 player as it is today to sell her a CD or a collection of mp3 files.
So, I just learned about the new Journey Preloaded MP3 Player, which, for about $40 from Wal-Mart gets you a fancy mp3 player sporting Journey-themed artwork and including the new Journey album as well as "11 re-recorded classics." And, yeah, therein lies the icky factor—take your pick: Journey (in general), Wal-Mart, the new Journey album, or the re-recorded classics. Sorry, if you were eating. . .
Anyway, my main point: I think this is an obvious next step towards a world of music "playbacks." A couple quotes from my original post:
The physical design of Playbacks will be focused on either the symbolic value of an object, or the utility of a user interface, or both. . .
People will collect Playbacks because they are nice, physical, objects to associate with music. . .
People will produce "branded" Playbacks. . .
Musicians and artists make some money designing and selling Playbacks to go with specific music.
You heard it here first!
People miss the future
A grueling work-week, from which I am apparently emerging.
I'll explain more about the work thing in an upcoming post—it's music and arts related. But, for now, just a couple brief things of interest:
In The Future Is So Yesterday, Danny Hillis of The Long Now Foundation talks about Disney's Tomorrowland and how little a connection we feel to the future. A good quote:
. . . [W]e are nostalgic for a time when we believed in the future. People miss the future. There's a yearning for it. Disney does know what people want. People want to feel some connectedness to the future. The way Disney delivers that is to reach back in time a little bit to the past when they did feel connected.
It's a bit of a cop-out. . .
Also, on the Long Now site, an interesting blog post about photographer Edward Burtynsky's proposal to print photographs that will last 10,000 years (to go with The 10,000 Year Clock—the one with chimes composed by Brian Eno). Burtynsky has been researching a method called "carbon transfer print" that uses inks made of ground stone.
. . . Burtynsky showed a large carbon transfer print of one of his ultra-high resolution photographs. The color and detail were perfect. Accelerated studies show that the print could hang in someone’s living room for 500 years and show no loss of quality. Kept in the Clock’s mountain in archival conditions it would remain unchanged for 10,000 years.
Thinking forward to 10,000 years really is pretty mind-blowing. . .
Mr. Smolin / Stew - conversation / interview
My long time friend-hero, Barry Smolin conducts a great interview with my long time friend-hero-of-a-friend-hero, Stew.
The interview, Stew Speaks His (Very Freaky) Mind, has too many good lines to pick out a favorite to quote—it's all good! Nevertheless, here's a quote, just in case, etc:
Stew: I learned how to be an artist from Jews. I was already an artist, but I was closeted about it. And I didn't know anything about James Joyce or French film or the Beats. I didn't know how to wave my freak flag. Jews were born carrying theirs. So being an artist was no biggie. The Jews I knew in high school who would unashamedly describe themselves as "artists" blew my mind and changed my life forever. They read the big books and wrestled with the big theories and dove head first into the continuum and they claimed the continuum. They didn't read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as just a novel. It was a manual for them. All art was an instructional manual. As was French film. And it was that way for me too. We weren't observing; Godard was teaching us and we were taking notes on how to live life. Most shockingly, they wrote songs while their moms cooked dinner within earshot. I never could have done this in my home. I was too ashamed of being an artist. I wrote songs in the basement or in the quiet of my room behind a locked door.
Stew recently won a Tony Award® for his Broadway musical, Passing Strange. I've also heard it's really great. My planned trip to New York keeps getting postponed, so I don't know if I'll catch it on stage :-(
Although I've never met him in person, I've thought of Stew's as being a friend-hero-of-a-friend-hero (and, even earlier, a friend-hero-of-a-cousin-hero-of-a-friend-hero) since I was a kid and got to know Barry via Bernard Bernard, who first played me The Wake and also Stew's early band, The Animated. (I just pulled out my copy of "4 Song EP" by The Animated—going to give it another listen a bit later.)
nearby posts:
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