Music Mostly In

3 new things with Music Out:

1. Based on a recommendation in a blog (Walter Jon Williams maybe?) I started watching "Peter Gunn" on Amazon Prime. 1/2 hour detective show, 1958-61. Not too bad. He's not too smarmy. Produced by Blake Edwards, music by Henry Mancini, including the famous theme. Anyway, his "office" is a restaurant named "Mother's", which has a jazz band. The band's female singer is Peter Gunn's girlfriend. So I've been harvesting old standards that they perform. The 1st 4 episodes, I harvested 2: "Don't Get Around Much Anymore", and "How High The Moon", the Les Paul & Mary Ford version of which was number #1 on the day I was born, June 8, 1951. Then went 12 episodes - some of which don't have any scenes in Mother's at all - before getting "Day In, Day Out", which is still in the queue.

2. My friend Lexington live music legend Tom Jordan is 78 YO today, Tuesday, June 23. He always wanted to do "Pennies from Heaven" at jams, and I would always tell him, no way, that is a hard song, 1936 jazz. I went on and worked it up - it is indeed a hard song, 19 different chords in it. I recorded it and sent it to him for his birthday. Here it is:

   I also recorded "Don't Get Around Much Anymore" and tweeted it - it is definitely a pandemic song. Here that is:

   If I get any response, I may do more. I released it yesterday, crickets so far. I really increasingly seem to be irrelevant online, I'm wondering more frequently if I should just go on and give it up.

3. When I bought OnSong I also purchased a lifetime subscription to Ultimate Guitar, for $29.99 maybe. This site is a very good source for guitar chords for songs. As I wanted songs they didn't have, I have started adding such songs there after I figure them out. I think I've added about a dozen songs at this point.

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Oof, no Music In since December. My music library, currently at 21,210 tracks, 61.7 days, lives in iTunes on my PC in my home office in Lexington. I wound up hunkered down in Naples FL, where I just have my MacBook Air. I can add new music to it, and then merge it back into the main library - which I finished yesterday. So now I can rate & review it. Most of the new music here comes from bandcamp. Interesting, the latest Andrew Bird was there. Here goes.

• Half Moon Run, "A Blemish in the Great Light", 2019, 10 tracks. Nice alternative rock. Out of Montreal, been around ~10 years. Vocals remind me a little of The Jayhawks. 4 stars. Here's "Favourite Boy".

• Various artists, "French Disco Boogie Sounds Vol.4", 2019, 13 tracks. Upbeat and poppy, what's not to like? I've started a "disco" genre in my song book, quite often these are fun to play. And of course you can dance to them. 4 stars. Here's "Georgy Porgy (Disco Version) by Dwight Druick.

• Various artists, "The Best of Fado: Um Tesouro Português, Vol. 1", 2003. Just after New Year's I talked to my old friend Jon Packer. He said one of his son-in-laws was Portuguese and a fan and player of Fado music (I think). So I decided to check it out. Per the Wikipedia article it goes back to the 1820s, and:

  fado is a form of music characterized by mournful tunes and lyrics, often about the sea or the life of the poor, and infused with a sentiment of resignation, fate and melancholia.

  Fado music also features a special "Portuguese guitar" which I think Jon said his son-in-law plays.

  The 1st thing I tried wound up being a soundtrack CD: "Focus", by Ennio Morricone & Dulce Pontes, who was listed in the Wikipedia article. It was really dull, I decided not to include it in the library.

  Next I tried the collection above. Decent tunes. I'm not sure about the "mournful" part, they don't particularly sound too mournful to me, but maybe the (Portuguese) lyrics are real mournful. None of the tunes are particularly catchy. I'll take Bossa Nova music for Portuguese vocals any day. 3 stars.

• Nubiyan Twist, "Portraits", 2 tracks, 2019. Per their website, "Future Jazz, Afro-Dub". From Leeds, England, maybe? 4 horns, 3 vocalists, guitar, bass, keys, percussion, so 11 piece. Catchy stuff, more to come. 4 stars. Here's "If Only (feat. Ruby Wood)".

• INEZ, "Voicemails And Conversations", 2019, 21 tracks. The debut album of "Pittsburgh Songtress INEZ". Kind of done in the style of "Miseducation of Lauryn Hill", with short spoken interludes, a radio talk show, children's voices - annoying when they come up on shuffle play out of context. A good 1st album if a little gimmicky. On the fence, but wound up going with 4 stars - I want to hear it more. Here's "Show Me".

• Various Artists, "Two Syllables Volume Sixteen", 2019, 10 tracks. Some chill electronica / dance / jazz instrumentals. I must be getting old, but I love stumbling across this kind of stuff. 4 stars. Here's "Itaru's Phone Booth" by Myele Manzanza.

• John Lennon & Yoko Ono, "Double Fantasy", 1980, 14 tracks. The wedding I played in January I had a request for "Beautiful Boy", by John Lennon. It went in the list and when it came to the top, I found it on this album. This was Lennon's last album before his death. Lennon and Ono alternate songs. I mostly remember Yoko Ono songs, maybe from the Plastic Ono Band, to be pretty sucky, the ones on this album are all pretty good - although "Kiss, Kiss, Kiss" is pornographic. Lots of good tunes, but I took this out of rotation before the other new stuff because I did know a number of the songs: "(Just Like) Starting Over", "I'm Losing You", "Watching The Wheels", "Woman". I think that this is a must-have album for any fan of The Beatles or classic pop music. 4 stars. Here's "Beautiful Boy". I recorded a video of this song and sent it to my grandsons, my daughter already played the song to them.

• John Fogerty, "Blue Moon Swamp", 1997, 14 tracks. I've never been much of a Credence or John Fogerty fan, but somebody told this was a fantastic album and I had to check it out. So I did, songs are OK, but, "I've never been ...". 3 stars.
• Joe by the Book, "100 Years", 2020, 8 tracks. An indie 3 piece from Leeds UK. Kind of a noir feel. 4 stars. This track is a little slow, but it's the only one on YouTube. "Sleep".

• LouReed, "Magic And Loss", 1992, 14 tracks. A concept album. All the song titles have a title and then a parenthetical title? Interesting stuff. 4 stars. Here's the short 1st track overture "Dorita (The Spirit)". I always like a good overture.

• Z.Z.Hill, "Greatest Hits", 1986, 11 tracks. A couple of bands in Naples are doing "Someone Else Is Steppin' In", which led me to this album. Listening to it I remembered I also had "Down Home Blues" in my book - someone had requested it a few years ago. It was 1 of the biggest blues songs of the 1980s. 4 stars,

  Interesting, Willie Miller, an excellent drummer in Naples told me the song was "Steppin' Out, Steppin' In", which caused me to take me longer to find it. Listening to it, it has the lines "I'm a brand new woman" and other female gender references. Turns out it was written by a woman. The great line "I got a new way of wearing my hair." definitely makes more sense.

  I used to transpose gender pronouns to male as necessary when I performed songs. I decided, if Z.Z. can do the song and leave the feminine references in, so can I. I've been working up some girl group songs, particularly Martha and the Vandellas, and it makes things much easier.

• Omar, "The Anthology", 2020, 33 tracks. 2h26m of music for only £10! Never heard of Omar Lye-Fook before, apparently he's been a British neosoul fixture since 1985. 9 albums, 1st 2 in the UK top 20; the highest any of his singles got was #14 in 1991 for "There's Nothing Like This". Many guest artists, not a bad track, dance, dance, dance! I looped it for a week after I got it & every time I got up to go somewhere in the house I wound up dancing there. I bought gift copies for 2-3 people, tweeted about it as the best album value ever, no else seems to like it anywhere near as much as I do. Oh well. 4 stars. Here's I think my fav track, "I Don't Mind the Waiting", and "Feeling You (feat. Stevie Wonder)". Both of these are in my book (and added at Ultimate Guitar). He also does a a cover of "Be Thankful (feat. Erykah Badu)" - this song has been ruined for me by the great version done by SW Florida band Mudbone, video here, which I have appropriated.

• Soccer Mommy, "color theory", 2020, 10 tracks. The 2nd album of hers I have. Chill, laid back female vocalist with nice alternative rock backgrounds. Good stuff, 4 stars. Here's "circle the drain".

• AGBEKO, "D.O.D.", 2020, 6 tracks. Another 11 piece world band, out of Manchester, UK. This shit is so strong. I think I bought a couple of people gift copies of this album, again, no one liked it near as much as I did. The 2 bar, 8 beat pattern David Byrne called "the clave" is featured prominently. Hah, tried to google DuckDuckGo that up and failed, found it in my most excellent review/summary of Byrne's most excellent book! Here's the title track. I thought "D.O.D." was "Death of Disco". Bzzzz, wrong! Apparently it's "Death of Discourse".

• Quincy Jones, "Back On The Block", 1989, 14 tracks. Something told me this was an album I should check out, so I did. It is a good album, but nothing really stood out. 3 stars.
• Giant Swing, "Terra, 2020, 1 track. My Lexington friends Jeff Adams on guitar, Logan Lay on bass, & Keith Halladay on drums add Will Phillips on trumpet for a nice, jazzy, upbeat number. I think I may have played with Will before. 4 stars.

• Van Morrison, "Wavelength", 1978, 11 tracks. I definitely like Van's early rock period and later blues period better than his middle rock period. 3 stars.
• John Prine, eponymous, 1977, 13 tracks. I bought this after his death from COVID in April. I was surprised that the orchestration is very country, complete with a pedal steel. He was definitely a great songwriter. 4 stars. I'd heard people do this song, I didn't know it was 1 of his - it's in the list to go in my book now. Here's "Spanish Pipedream".

That's it through mid-April. Next album needs more listens, so I guess I'm done for now. 14 albums in the unrated queue, I think I need a more aggressive listening program.

Understanding Comics

For my birthday, my oldest daughter Erica the Brooklyn software designer/geek got me "Understanding Comics" by Scott McCloud, 1993, 215 pages. He has a great website.

It is of course a comic book. Very interesting stuff - the science of comic books. If you've ever been a fan of comics or graphic novels, I recommend it to you highly. I'm going to highlight a little of the science.

[I had ~1000 DC comics when I was 12 (1963). My favorites were Flash, Green Lantern, Atom, Justice League, and Adam Strange in "Mystery in Space" comics. Periodically I try to figure out how to read these old comics online and so far have always failed.

I must have wanted some other toy in 1963 because I had a big sale and sold all my comics.

In high school I started reading Marvel, and continued through college. I had 6-7 straight years of Fantastic Four, Thor, etc. Doctor Strange was my fav. I sold those all off to a comic store for $40 when I was preparing to move from Cambridge MA back to Jeffersonville IN in 1974. None of these comics would have been worth much if I had kept them - they were all very well read, never stored in plastic envelopes.]

Definition of "comics":

Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.

A shorter version: "Sequential Art".

Comics have been around for most of human history. Who knew?

Chapter 2 introduces us to The Big Triangle. There is a sequence of 10 slides explaining it on his website - but, too bad, not 1 good image of The Big Triangle. Here's a screenshot of 1 of them; I'll try to explain the missing stuff.

The lower left corner contains photo-realistic images which become more "iconically abstract" as you move to the right. Finally you cross the dotted line and are in the land of text. As you move up you increase non-iconic abstraction - dadaism, cubism, etc. Very instructive.

In Chapter 3 we learn that playing "peek-a-boo" as kids teaches us closure: "the phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole". This leads to defining the 6 types of transitions between panels in a comic strip:

1. Moment-to-moment
2. Action-to-action
3. Subject-to-subject
4. Scene-to-scene
5. Aspect-to-aspect
6. Non-sequitur

Various schools of comics use widely varying amounts of the transition types.

The discussion of "motion lines" is fun. Plus "smoke lines" and "smell lines".

Chapter 6 is "Show and Tell". Again McCloud uses a common childhood occurrence as a teaching tool. This chapter is about how words and images are combined in comics. Oh boy, another numbered list!

1. Word specific
2. Picture specific
3. Duo-specific
4. Additive
5. Parallel
6. Montage
7. Interdependent

I was surprised that he never mentioned the conventions regarding speech bubbles vs. thought bubbles vs. telepathic bubbles vs. ...

Chapter 7 explores the Six Steps in the creation of art in any medium:

1. Idea/Purpose
2. Form
3. Idiom
4. Structure
5. Craft
6. Surface

McCloud's exploration of the paths that different artists take through these steps is really interesting.

As you would surely expect, there are so many striking images in this book. Reading it is definitely 2-3 hours well spent.

Ending With A Bad Taste

1st up, "Interference", by Sue Burke, 2019, 400 pages, 108k words. This is the sequel of "Semiosis", blogged here. I stumbled across that review and noted that I had liked that book, so I decided to read this sequel. A good read. Plotting a little choppy tho. There is almost a prequel, maybe 20% of the book, developing a character who then doesn't play that much of a role in the rest of the book. Then in the main story line, after the narrative thread switches somewhat frequently between various humans, it then switches to the mostly immortal sentient bamboo for most of the last 1/2 of the book. Kind of like having the narrator suddenly become god. Plus the ending didn't seem strong.

2nd, "Iron Council", by China Miéville, 2004, 593 pages, 161k words. The last book of the Bas-Lag Trilogy. After reading the 1st book years ago, I read the 2nd in January and figured I'd finish the series off. Miéville has quite an imagination, very surreal stuff. Kind of a slog, but a (not particularly?) satisfactory conclusion to the trilogy. He uses a lot of interesting words, and some of them are real words, not just stuff he has made up. I should have captured them. I keep meaning to do that, to harvest new words from the books I'm reading. Hopefully I'll get consistent about it at some point here.

3rd, a quickie, my Patreon story of the month from Tobias S. Bucknell "Where the Glass Winds Blow". Set on an extrasolar planet with very little metal, a simple and memorable story.

4th, "Oath of Fealty", by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle, 1981, 313 pages, 90k words. A definite page turner, but ...

On twitter, I have been replying to or retweeting tweets involving covidiots with the tags

#DarwinAwards #EvolutionInAction #MotherNatureBatsLast

"Darwin Awards" goes back to the mid-80s. "Mother nature bats last" I would attribute to Kim Stanley Robinson in "New York 2140". But where did "Evolution in action" come from?

I thought John Brunner from the late 60s to mid-70s: "Stand on Zanzibar", "The Sheep Look Up", or "Shockwave Rider". So I purchased these (I am looking forward to rereading these), searched them, no dice. I tracked it down to "Oath of Fealty". Per the Wikipedia article:

Notable Quote: "Think of it as Evolution in Action"

The book is a quick read, a page turner - but painful. It definitely left a bad taste in my mouth.

I remembered Pournelle as being a libertarian - worse, his wikipedia page says he was a "paleoconservative". He was born in 1933 in Louisiana and grew up around Memphis, and was a man of his times. He died in 2017, age 84.

The book revolves around the huge arcology sitting in a burned out area of LA, and the conflict between the genius ubermensch in the arcology and the mud people outside in LA. The book is dedicated to Robert Heinlein - warning. One of the main characters is the genius ubermensch designer of the arcology, last name Rand - warning. There is a fair amount of sex in the book, a lot of it between the executives, and 1 assistant, in the uber-corporation that owns the arcology - no #MeToo moments involved I'm sure.

White privilege, fascism, patriarchy, white grievance, general hate and smugness. And the female corporate executive gets raped. I really don't like reading about rape. Ugh, I'm tired of writing about this. Here's some quotes:

welfare was a lot less popular than power plants.

...

This whole project could go down in bureaucratic regulations. The way the rest of the country’s going.

...

As long as welfare and food stamps and aid to dependent children and social security and all the other benefit programs pump in money, there’ll be something to steal.

...

The way she dressed would be enough to drive most men nuts if they had to work closely with her, and she must know that.

...

legally he was conceived out of wedlock, and I don’t have any claim on him at all.

...

A dozen hostesses circulated through the crowd; long-legged, pretty girls in their best party dresses, obviously models hired for the luncheon.

...

Half the government is lawyers, and when they make laws they don’t write them in English.

...

The night four of us lucked into a Beef Wellington [That is some fine, fine white folk food!]

...

The TS [arcology] guards might or might not turn you in to the LA cops, but more important they might hurt you. A lot.

...

Did you think we’d leave you for the eaters?

...

then it’ll be my turn with that sadistic bitch. She’s probably a Lesbian.

I was amused by the anachronisms. I guess Pournelle thought they added authenticity, but they definitely didn't age well. And this story was presumably set in the future of 1981??? And Pournelle was a technology writer???

He’s got his office, a DEC computer [I worked for DEC 1977-1980.]

...

It’s a role-playing game. MAN FROM UNCLE hunt club.

...

thankful for the touch-typing course his father had made him take in high school. [Ha ha, my mom made me take it in HS night summer school.]

...

Dump it for them at 300 baud.

...

Makes a pretty big file—” MILLIE, what is the total stored in Rand’s directory?
23,567,892 bytes. [Wow, 23 meg! LOL!]

...

He took a Xerox from his desk

...

the car had a powerful relay system, good anywhere in line of sight to the large antenna on top of Todos Santos [Ha ha, pre-cell phone!]

"Evolution in Action" occurs in the book 21 times - definitely its catchphrase. "Think of it as evolution in action" is 1st quipped by Rand in reference to the deaths of an 18 and a 20 YO who had broken into the arcology and were pretending to be terrorists with bombs, who were executed by arcology security with poison gas. Ugh. Ugh, ugh, ugh.

So #EvolutionInAction is outta here. I have replaced it with #RealtimeNaturalSelection, from the 5/31/2020 Doonesbury cartoon.

I will go out on a limb here and say, I find lots of the current gay/trans/non-binary foo annoying/boring/lame. But at least it is not totally offensive, as this old libertarian white man crap is.