I’ve started a Clark 8 soundcloud, but this is up on my personal one. Just a 3 chord (well mainly) song about a guy wanting to sing a love song but not quite getting the love part. tuffluv (iPhone demo2) by rseymour
Just added a soundcloud for Clark 8 that is strictly live records of practices, shows, etc. Just stuff you’ll never hear on an ‘official’ release otherwise, but you might like to hear. “Cleanup on Aisle 12″ is a new jam that we are working on.
Total navel gazing! New blog theme. How exciting. …
Clark 8 7″ is all set up and should be getting pressed soon. Need to get t-shirts to print, but the screen is done. No one is probably reading this, but whatever. :-)
The year was… 2000? I was using the fluxbox window manager on multiple screens. Probably running gentoo, distcc… lot’s of magic in those days. dot-com bubble burst, 9/11, choosing to go to grad school…
Led me to much happiness, but away from using Linux on the desktop when my wonderful research group bestowed a first generation MacBook Pro on me.
Well, I was going to make this longer, but in essence, get some cool software from irradiatedsoftware.com/ Like SizeUp or Cinch. SizeUp is more powerful, but Cinch has a better UI. I wish they’d combine the two. Then set your terminal to focus follows mouse with:
defaults write com.apple.Terminal FocusFollowsMouse -string YES
In your Terminal window. Then at least between terminals that you have gridded out, your focus will be under your cursor. Still no explanation why the scroll wheel will work (and not switch focus) and other oddities of OS X. Which aren’t necessarily wrong, just not what I would choose if I were in charge of the OS.
It’s hard to say, though, overall which is a better user experience. I have seen some young whippersnappers with their Lenovo Linux laptops, set up with minimal window managers emulating OS X… but there is a benefit to the limited choices of OS X. I sound like such an old fogey Mac apologist for saying it, but the fact that I can hop on any OS X machine from 10.3-10.6 and have a similar experience, is a marked change from logging into an Ubuntu machine from those same eras.
Perhaps that’s an over generalization, but you get what I mean. I was there with GNOME 1 and KDE 2, etc… and honestly I remember liking KDE 2 more than just about any other GUI ever. But then they had to complicate it, more and more… to the point where I was using blackbox (then fluxbox) …
And around we go.
I don’t know if I actually came up with this Elmer Fudd leet speak, but I have a feeling it happened in the #everything (or #everything2) channel on slashnet in the dot-com era. It had zero google results, so I’m putting it on my blog.
There.
ewh34t
The most recent remix/newish track from We(TM) released on a dj /rupture disc. Not sure when this was actually recorded. I had this sitting in my draft posts for a while. But… yeah… I heard some podcast recently on the roots of dubstep and LFO basslines. I feel like DJ Olive, Lloop and Once11 were some of the first explorers of these beats. As I have written before check the Agriculture for more info, etc.
These days it took me about 10 minutes of watching a youtube video and playing around in Ableton Live 8 to get a somewhat decent wobble. Big ups to the originators. Oh, and by the way, this song, like many of the genre, doesn’t make a lot of sense on computer speakers or small headphones.
So… It’s done, warts and all. An actual compromise, even if ~half the country can’t stand the idea, they may change their feelings when their underemployed friend or family member can afford their medicine/treatment.
Of course there can be the argument that people should have thought about the consequences of contracting MS, diabetes, congenital heart defects and the like before they got them. That we should just let them deal with it. But I’ve seen herds of animals on nature shows that treat their hurt and sick members better than that. This false Darwinian logic of so many individualists seems to drop the concept that helping people stay healthy helps all people.
Ok Fender first.
They got back to me and are hooking me up with some replacement parts. Good on them, thanks Ed! Hopefully they will not make the pickups so weird too. Badly mounted. I didn’t fret too much about it because I’m getting them redone anyway.
So… ah yes, I’m spending money I don’t have (nb: I don’t have any money.) to get Curtis Novak to rewind/rebuild my pickups to honest to gosh vintage style. The pickup shipped with the guitar is quite different from the original Seth Glover Wide-Range Humbucker. I will be sure to review the pickups when I get them back and installed.
Ok, now onto the Text of Light review. I went to the Text of Light site and saw that Text of Light (or these folks playing along with Brakhage films) has been going on since 1999 or 2001 depending on which story you read. During 1997-2001 I would pretty much try and go to anything involving any sonic youth member in nyc… that eventually branched out into Christian Marclay and DJ\Olive (with the entire We(TM) / Subtonic (can’t recall the night) … etc etc.) … but yeah… the first Text of Light shows had Marclay and Olive and others… but regardless, last night it was Lee Ranaldo, Ulrich Krieger and Alan Licht.
Stan Brakhage… Trey Stone and Matt Parker were his students. That alone should be enough to codify/canonize/whatever else into history, but no… the guy essentially founded good experimental film. I have seen a bit of terrible experimental film. It’s sort of like the difference between what a guy who looks at Jackson Pollack and says “anyone could do that” would produce and what Pollack produced. Yeah… he’s nuts. Like… lush colors you simply cannot see on a computer screen… amazing waves of movement, at once the rotation of the film itself and at other times the … gosh I can’t explain it, I’m not into film enough to know the lingo.
So… gear and music and noise I know enough about. Lee Ranaldo was playing his real Fender Jazzmaster (which looks like his custom one that I have, but with a natural headstock and… real vintage pickups), Ulrich Krieger played sax and Alan Licht played a Burns guitar… I wish I was in the plush front row so I could’ve seen their gear, but whatever. They probably all had loopers, Lee & Alan both had fuzz, Alan may have had a tone generator, but it was probably just a memory man… Alan also used an ebow I think. Lee broke out drumsticks, a bow and bells. He also busted out a cell phone and played back perhaps a voicemail through his microphonic vintage pickups (aka one of the reasons I’m getting mine rewound)… Kind of reminiscent of “Providence” from Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation.
The whole event was a great wash of sound… never too loud (well some people left, but that’s a sign of a good noise show imho)… You could still hear some pedals get clicked on… Ulrich used his amplified sax loud enough to feedback and use the clicking of the keys rhythmically.
Alan provided a nice baseline of hums and … haunting hills of tones… as in volume wise.
As it was I really wish I’d went up just to gawk at what gear they were using, but I just went out and loitered around. Kinda hoping to talk with Lee about gear, his signature model fender, how his band mate is doing a split 7″ with TMIAF, etc etc. But he was doing some lame video interview between the two shows… so he never came out before I got booted by this greasy cinefamily guy. I say greasy because his hair was greased back.
But, I did get to tell Alan that it was a good set and then almost get into a conversation about contemporary composition with Ulrich, but that got cut short. C’est la vie.
So yeah, it was a good show… it felt like hanging at Tonic again when I was ~21… except I’m 31 and yeah it still ruled.
Just as a preface, I luv Lee Ranaldo (I was listening to his From Here to Infinity
letta:
Hello Fender,
I recently became (as far as I know) the first person to purchase a
Lee Ranaldo Jazzblaster in Los Angeles. I bought it at Sam Ash and
returned it for a replacement after I noticed that one of the pickups
was installed rotated 180 degrees. Sadly the 2nd guitar I got had
even more problems, but I kept it.
The replacement guitar came out of the box with the pickup selector
switch in the body cavity. Apparently a rather large zinc lock washer
was put in instead of the proper sized washer. I was so interested in
getting the guitar and playing it that we removed the pickguard at the
store and rescrewed the switch on. The nut was hiding in the case.
Then after having the guitar for a month or so and playing around with
setting it up I noticed that the neck pickup cover was skewed in
relation to the coils and base of the pickup. Since the base holds
the pickup to the pickguard, I had to adjust the screws unevenly to
get the cover face parallel to the front of the guitar. This of
course left the coils and base off kilter from where they should be.
I’ve decided to get the pickups rewound so the base will get
reattached to the pickup cover. Yesterday at band practice I noticed
that one of the pickup mounting screws was gone. It had no doubt not
been screwed in enough due to the skewed pickup cover.
So I write asking for 3 things:
1) The proper washer set for the pickup selector switch
2) A screw for the pickup
and finally
3) more quality control on your USA made instruments… the skewed
pickup for example has someone’s initials on it, yet it is clearly
screwed up! This is the 3rd new guitar I’ve bought and the first
Fender. As the only new American guitar I’ve ever had I can say whole
heartedly that it had the worst out of the box build quality of any of
the three. The other two were made in Korea. I will admit that the
color scheme and finish are great. The nitro is already wearing away…
which personally I think is awesome.
Let me know if you need pictures, a serial number, etc.
Have a good weekend.
Thanks,
Rich Seymour
While I’m blogging, quantity instead of quality, I will toot my own horn in the vapid vortex of internet memes and their usually unattributable nature. One day this image went all over the internet blogs like Andrew Sullivan, for example… (he’s gay and used to be republican, but then liked Obama?! Crazy! I think he made a living off of those facts, and writing some good stuff for the Atlantic. I dunno, he’s super indie or something.) Anywayz, he was just one in a line of non-attribution regarding this image…
I, being about a day ahead of internet memes (slower than boingboing/pitchfork/videogum editors, but faster than let’s say… CNN) had already seen this image on some wild clicking spree that I like to call my ‘me’ time in between compiling stuff and removing hair from my head in my research. So yeah, I had seen this image and new it was like a real image, not some 10 minute photoshop done in Aviary or whatever… so I went about finding it again. Unfortunately the history function of web browsers doesn’t work that well when you have like 3 computers with 2-3 browsers installed on each… but I did find it, and alerted the original guy.
Then as you can see in the comments, the original blogger of the pic (who didn’t attribute it) thinks for a sec that I made the pic… it’s as if that blogger is physically incapable of even attributing things properly. Kind of like Mitt Romney saying recently that Bush was responsible for getting us out of our recession. You know what… we, the people, are responsible for that… imho.
More gory, vaporous details in the comments on the flickr page.
You can buy this and some other even way cooler prints from the artist up on etsy.
