Archive for the ‘Music’ Category
“February 3rd” can make your day…
Posted in Music on February 3, 2024| Leave a Comment »
Weeknote 37, 2023
Posted in Libraries, Music, Politics, Quotation, Weeknote on September 16, 2023| Leave a Comment »
§1 Lunar Days
“As the summer turns / I seem to fall away / Gaps in the light / The Lunar Days…”
§2 The Lion Sleeps Tonight
Which cover version is better? Anne Reburn’s five-part self-a capella? Or They Might Be Giants’ rock re-intepretation (featuring Laura Cantrell)?
§3 What’s the Matter with Kansas?
Small Kansas town summarily fires two library staff for making an LGBTQ display.
It…wasn’t an LGBTQ display.
§4 Quotation
“The weird, artsy loner gets the girl in movies because movies are written by weird, artsy loners.”—Unknown
Weeknote 36, 2023
Posted in Music, Sports, Video, Weeknote on September 9, 2023| Leave a Comment »
§1 So much for that…
A headline in the February 9, 2020 New York Times: “Oregon Learns to Love a Rivalry,” about the Ducks’ new rivalry in women’s basketball with Oregon State.
A headline in the August 5, 2023 New York Times: “Ever-Shrinking Pac-12 Loses Oregon and Washington to the Big Ten.”
How fickle love can be!
§2 I don’t mind this video / wasting all my time…
A perfect transformation from PostmodernJukebox.
§3 Post-punk will never die?
I welcome any evidence of the survival of post-punk music.
§4 The Standard Model of Particle Physics
After watching this video (produced by that gem of philanthropic endeavor, Quanta), I believe I have a foothold at the bottom of the learning curve one must climb to understand the Standard Model. Which is further than I had gotten in my prior half-century.
Weeknote 35, 2023
Posted in Music, Weeknote on September 2, 2023| Leave a Comment »
§1 A basic question
“Does learning that something you have read or heard about this topic is wrong make you reassess the rest of your understanding? If not, why not?”—Unknown
§2 “…I daresay a lot of other blokes felt likewise”
Every now and then, something reminds me of the blinkered self-importance mocked in this Doonesbury comic strip from the week of the 1981 Royal Wedding.
§3 Fixing the skill tree
The article from a competitor to The Onion brings to mind the day I played “The Sims” in a way that matched my real life as closely as possible, then changed how I lived my life when I saw how it affected my sim.
§4 Yes! We Have No Bananas
A song that comedians were still making jokes about in the Seventies first became a hit 100 years ago.
Take on Meh
Posted in Music on August 29, 2023| Leave a Comment »
An AI song simulation (of “Paul McCartney” singing “Take on Me”) worth a second listen! The wait is over, much sooner than I had expected.
Unlike many other song simulations, this one picks a song that the singer might actually sing, and renders the performance close enough to one way the real Paul McCartney might sing it that it demonstrates how strong of a vocalist McCartney can be. The simulation layers McCartney’s voice and style over the pattern of Morton Hacket’s original rendition of the song with a-ha, and the result rewards the listener, even though Hacket’s pattern is a clear mismatch in several places for how McCartney would have actually sung the song (for example, the AI unnecessarily pinches the “Paul McCartney” voice to match Hacket’s straining for high notes, even though “McCartney” is singing those same lyrics well within his range).
Even with that substantial constraint, the simulation entertains, and provides a pleasant platform for imagining how a real McCartney rendition of the song would sound.
Weeknote 34, 2023
Posted in Music, Pets, Sports, Weeknote on August 26, 2023| Leave a Comment »
§1 Spain 1, England 0
“Send a message to the fleet, they’ll search for us in vain / We won’t be there among the reaches of the Spanish Main…”—Al Stewart
§2 Don’t Speak
Like Pomplamoose, PostmodernJukebox gets its transformations so very right from time to time. (Bonus points for the cover’s Lesley Gore reference.)
§3 Bottoms
The latest high school sex comedy has two lead characters who are supposed to be high school seniors. The director cast two women who are 27 years old in real life.
§4 Happily chatting of Chaucer
Whatever is causing the joy radiating from J. Draper in this video, may it long continue!
§5 Pets or hostages?
How many cats truly enjoy living indoors, and how many have a feline version of Stockholm Syndrome?
§6 Hot Mess
Dodie’s love life might be a hot mess, but her song about it is not.
Weeknote 33, 2023
Posted in California, Music, Weeknote on August 19, 2023| Leave a Comment »
§1 Dance like Fosse / Dance, dance like Fosse…
“Talk to Daddy” from Season 2 of Schmigadoon! is a brilliant piece of jewelry, and Dove Cameron’s facial expressions are the gem at its center.
§2 A pleasant throwback
The new track “Tioga Pass” by Yussef Dayes (featuring Rocco Palladino) would have been played by the better radio stations in 1979.
§3 In the wreckage of what was expected to be eternal
The author of this essay is roughly my age and grew up in roughly the same area, and he expresses feelings roughly similar to some I have had over the last 7-8 years.
Weeknote 32, 2023
Posted in Books, Music, Politics, Sports on August 12, 2023| Leave a Comment »
§1 Rock and metal genres
Becoming a Rate Your Music member is a great way to learn about the multitude of genres that people have imagined for sub-dividing rock and metal music, and this video (unrelated to RYM) can serve as a quick introduction.
§2 Book
David Orr had enough top-notch ideas and insights to write a superlative New Yorker essay, but instead produced the bloated, rambling 172-page book, The Road Not Taken.
§3 X’ed out
White South African buys and destroys major communication channel for Black Americans.
§4 College Football
My interest in college football has steadily declined as I age, and the destruction of the Pac-12 has killed it altogether. The Pac-10 I grew up with was the perfect conference: Five pairs of traditional rivals. What a waste.
§5 Pink Panther
The “Pink Panther” theme the way it was meant to be played: By a double bass quintet.
§6 Coffee
Starbucks Vanilla Sweet Cream Cold Brew Coffee tastes like the milk left over after eating a bowl of chocolate-flavored cereal.
§7 Quotation
“The reason why smartphones rule the world is because they do more jobs for more people in more places than anything in the history of mankind.”—Ben Thompson
Weeknote 30, 2023
Posted in Music, Weeknote on July 29, 2023| Leave a Comment »
§1 Pomplamoose
Pomplamoose and friends show their chops on “Shotgun.”
§2 Hot Hot Heat
In the 2000s, I thought of this album as “Get In or Get Out” and nine tracks of filler. Listening to it again now, I’m less impressed by “Get In or Get Out,” but hear a lot in the rest of the album (especially “In Cairo”) that I missed back then. It’s not a great rock album, but it is a solid listen.
(My mind insists on regarding every band that peaked after I turned 30 as still a fresh new band, so it was a bit of shock to remember that this album was released 21 years ago.)
§3 When Sesame Street meets Black Mirror
An all-time classic from the MetaFilter comments section.
§4 Observation
Poor reading comprehension and a quick temper are a bad combination, especially when social media allows instant posting.
§5 Quotation
“The urge to comment on events immediately, as they are happening, before we have the information necessary to evaluate them, is corrosive.”—Ken White
Weeknote 29, 2023
Posted in Music, Weeknote on July 22, 2023| Leave a Comment »
§1 Life’s unexpected turns
If a fortune teller had told awkward and unpopular high school student Janis Joplin that someday a famous French fashion firm would use songs she would sing to advertise their wares, what would she have thought?
§2 Lyric
“You might not like it now but you will / You might not like it now but you will / The future will not stand still…” Adam & The Ants deliver the quintessential New Wave lyric in “Don’t Be Square (Be There).”
§3 Walking away from Hollywood
HBO’s decision to cancel the fifth and final season of Westworld killed my interest in ever again following a multi-season narrative series from Hollywood, and Steve Shives asks why studio executives don’t understand that sort of reaction.
(Hat tip to MetaFilter for the link.)
Weeknote 28, 2023
Posted in Music, Python, Quotation, Weeknote on July 15, 2023| Leave a Comment »
§1 Python
A habit I’m working on breaking as I learn Python: Skimming lightly through the introductory material because “I already know that.” No harm is done by remaining open to the possibility that I don’t.
§2 “Skilljacking”
“Will Truman” is the pseudonym of an ordinary gentleman with an extraordinary pen, which he wields without mercy in this parody of how business journalists discuss paying for labor.
§3 Mario Lanza
This album was #1 on the Billboard album chart for 36 weeks in 1954-1955, but has been more or less forgotten. Learn why an earlier generation loved it!
§4 Lalo Schrifin
According to musical historian Ted Gioia, composer Lalo Schrifin’s inspiration for the rousing motif of the Mission: Impossible theme was the Morse code for “M” and “I”! He gave a beat-and-a-half to each of the two dashes of the M and a beat to each of the two dots of the I, then set those five beats to a 5/4 rhythm.
§5 Quotations
“Therapy isn’t about being happy, it’s about honestly knowing who you are, and then picking a suitable life. Every day you must consciously choose who you are. Choose.” — “The Last Psychiatrist”
“When an expert writes a book for the public, he is writing for an audience largely unqualified to assess its claims[.]” — Charles Lambdin
“To operate efficiently and effectively, the Nation relies on the flow of objective, credible statistics to support the decisions of individuals, households, governments, businesses, and other organizations.” — The Office of Management and Budget of the United States Government
Weeknote 26, 2023
Posted in Economics, Music, Quotation, Weeknote on July 1, 2023| Leave a Comment »
Copying an idea from Mita Williams…
§1 Python
At 12, I taught myself BASIC programming. Can I repeat the trick at 52 with Python?
My plan: Work through Allen B. Downey’s Think Python, letting each section sink in before moving on. Once I’ve finished that book, see where I am and decide what to do next.
Downey’s implication that most programming instructions can be classified in one of five ways fascinates me. (Those five basic classifications: input, output, math, conditional execution, repetition.)
§2 Fusion
A blog post originally written in 2012 (and updated in the meantime) to argue that nuclear fusion will never be used for energy generation, not for the scientific reasons doubters usually raise, but for economic ones.
§3 Music
The story goes that Charlie Puth made this track in 2014, then disowned it years later when jerks mocked it. If he would release it as a single, I would buy a copy.
§4 Quotations
“You can’t beat an ideology with evidence. The ideology controls the rules of evidence, not the other way around.” — Tressie McMillan Cottom
“His determination to tell it like it is has been hampered by his towering ignorance.” — source unknown
Amy Winehouse, 1983-2011
Posted in Music, Obituaries on July 23, 2011| Leave a Comment »
In the wake of Amy Winehouse’s death, many people (intending wit, I suppose) have said that she should have gone to rehab. They miss the point of the song, and miss it in a characteristically American way. In the United States, we see problems as fixable. But many problems cannot be fixed, they can only be borne. And sometimes they become unbearable.
A toast in gratitude and sadness to the memory of Amy Winehouse.
Central European melancholy
Posted in Music on March 10, 2009| Leave a Comment »
Three songs that go well together:
- “Vienna” by Billy Joel
- “Vienna” by Ultravox
- “Leipzig” by Thomas Dolby
Favorite songs of 2007, #1-25
Posted in Music on December 26, 2008| Leave a Comment »
To continue listing my favorite songs added to my iTunes in 2007…
25. “Kick Out the Jams” by The MC5
24. “Time and Tide” by Basia
23. “Green Tambourine” by The Lemon Pipers
22. “Draggin’ the Line” by Tommy James
21. “East Bound and Down” by Jerry Reed
20. “Dizzy” by Tommy Roe
19. “1st Things 1st” by Phantom Planet
18. “Condoleezza, Check My Posse” by The Majestic Twelve
17. “Five O’Clock World” by The Vogues
16. “All Those Years Ago” by George Harrison
15. “She Bangs the Drums” by The Stone Roses
14. “Windy” by The Association
13. “Long Distance Runaround” by Yes
12. “Goodnight Vienna” by Ringo Starr
11. “This Never Happened Before” by Paul McCartney
10. “16 Military Wives” by The Decemberists
9. “Getting Away with It” by Electronic
8. “Don’t Shoot Me Santa” by The Killers
7. “The Road to Morocco” by Bing Crosby and Bob Hope
6. “God Bless the Absentee” by Paul Simon
5. “Sentimental Lady” by Bob Welch
4. “C’est si bon” by Eartha Kitt
3. “Somewhere Only We Know” by Keane
2. “This Town (Mint Royale Extended Remix)” by Frank Sinatra
1. “Any World (That I’m Welcome to)” by Steely Dan
Superficial Cat 