Disco Godfather

I've just had one of the most confusing cinematic experiences of my life. It came to me in the form of a netflix recommendations. Typically, I am totally amazed at how wrong netflix judges what films I'll like. Three Men and a Baby?! What kind of guy does netflix think I am?
The same goes for users "similar" to me- I've only found one user who is more than about 40% similar to me.

But the description of this one was just too much to resist:
"Tucker Williams (Rudy Ray Moore) is a former cop who spends his nights spinning vinyl at a disco. When his nephew (Julius J. Carry III) starts using angel dust, Williams pulls out his martial-arts skills and stirs things up. He gets help from Noel (Carol Speed), and together the pair goes after big-time dealer Singer Ray (James H. Hawthorne). Unfortunately, Ray and his men are more dangerous than the drugs they're selling."

If anybody knows this it's my household: there are a lot of really, really bad movies out there with great taglines. And in general, the "Blaxploitation" genre is entirely overrated. Like all B genres, it's plagued with intolerably bad audio, lighting, and especially bad pacing.

This movie's audio is occasionally bad, its got a little filler- lots of overly long intro shots and disco scenes, and LOTS of drawn out "PCP freakout" scenes. But somehow, I loved the film. The lead character's got an almost grandfatherly stiffness about his acting. I came away from this film convinced not only that I really liked the character, but that I would probably really like Rudy Ray Moore in real life.
There are a lot of false-PSA cautionary tale sort of b-films. Most of them are relatively transparent- it becomes obvious their intention is foul after about 10 minutes. But this film made some sort of an honest statement that I can't quite figure out. I came away from the film thinking that Rudy Ray Moore really wanted me to stay away from PCP, to "Attack the Wack" if you will. And just like in most people's lives, his statement about this somehow came out wrong, or a little unnecessarily mixed up. Disco Godfather spends the whole film effectively chasing the "demon" of PCP as she shows up in the hallucinations of those he cares for. In the end, it is only through his forced entrance into the PCP realm of hallucinations that he's able to conquer this demon- and in a hallucinatory scene involving a burst of bad animation he kills the leader of the PCP lab.
You'll leave the film really confused about what the film was really trying to say.
Also interesting is that I'm starting to notice that films called "blaxploitation" were rated much more gently than those designed for both black and white audiences- this one is a wild drug use movie full of foul language and it got rated the same thing as Home Alone. I can only assume that this was racism on behalf of the MPAA in feeling that black audiences were not as sensitive as white audiences.
This is definitely one that needs a little "parental guidance"- unless you want you children to think that the only way to get a friend off of drugs is to take the drug themselves so they can enter the realm and do battle with the spirit of the drug. On second thought, I think even kids can see that that doesn't really make a lot of sense.

End of Summer Mix

Just playing around with some new software I got, and I thought I'd mix and post a bunch of the new music I've been digesting lately.

Another Year,

Started school this week at MTSU. It's my final semester of university classes before I commit the financial martyrdom that is "student teaching."
This campus is an absolute disaster, and it's gotten markedly worse each semester I attend. Tuition goes up, quality goes down, even the basics are screwed up. Parking becomes more difficult, and I'm starting to see regular road rage outburst behavior in the parking lots. This university is an absolute nightmare- don't go here, if you value your education, or you feel like being treated like a human being.
My schedule is horrible, I have a huge break in the middle of it. That means I'm here all day just for 2 classes.
The big bummer is not having ANY time for music now. I've become conditioned to working in privacy for hours on end, and thats a little difficult to work out with somebody else in the house who is completely annoyed by the sound of my working on music. I'm guessing I now probably have about 4 hrs a week in the early morning or late night to work with headphones on.
This is horrible, I have no idea what I'm going to do to make time alone to work on music. No idea.

Sound that Can Kill or Cure.

So today I go to my miserable school(MTSU)'s Financial Aid department and find out that I no longer qualify for any financial aid. Great! My reward for making $5K more this year was receiving $5K less in federal education grants. Let me tell you how encouraging that is.
So now I get to finish school with even more debt than I thought I would. So, I've gotta hustle to come up with some extra money to help me with books, tuition, living, etc. this semester. I figured now was as good a time as any to wrap up my record and sell it.
I decided not to get "pro" reproductions done, because literally every single person I know who has done that has been thoroughly burnt by the process and left with 200 copies of their own record under their bed.
So what you'll get is a CDR with a nicely home-printed cover.
14 Tracks, 51:01 long.
I'm selling for $12 shipped to anywhere in the world- right now. If the orders start killing me with shipping to Fiji or something I might have to add something for international buyers.
BUY IT NOW! (click that button to paypal me) Make sure to include your full address(including country) and email in the forms.

Yours Truly, 2095

This record has always been a favorite, and this song in particular.
I'm still doing a lot of cover material, because I'm still having lots of trouble writing material and no trouble producing...doing covers is just a fun way to keep making music.
deltasleep- Yours Truly, 2095.

Spotnicks!

I just bumped into a really entertaining swedish surf group called the "Spotnicks." Apparently some portion or another of this group is still going, and as they say, "big in japan."

New Methods of Revenue Generation for the Record Industry.

When the original Napster lawsuits began happening over filesharing, they seemed like a publicity stunt, or at least they felt sort of temporary. Maybe it was the novelty of it, but it felt like the internet died a little bit when that mentality began to creep into the next 5+ years.
As a child, I grew up with the internet. As such, the internet feels like something we helped create to a lot of people my age. I painstakingly dug through manuals and documentation to assemble, install, and fix the early computers of my house when computers were a much more annoying and complex ordeal. (Younger users can't imagine having to assign their own IRQ or DMA channel to hardware) The internet was a new domain for the transmission of information, it was like an enormous library of information. It helped peel back the layers of whitewashing from the history of popular culture. Popular, commercial culture in America thrives on the relentless fad machine. The possibility of now digging through unseen commercials, out of print records, and media that was later censored and removed from the public eye has helped a very large portion of internet users like myself come to a better understanding of recent history.
So when the potential of the internet gets damaged a little bit like it has by the RIAA, I feel very strong, personal feelings about it. That ever vigilant hand of corporate media, angry at the loss of their king maker status and their new inability to control the fad machine, has been in constant pursuit of the destruction of everything that makes the internet great. The great shift in money making methods for the record industry in this decade has not been from the sales of CDs to the sales of MP3, as it should have been, but in the shift from the sales of anything to the wholesale creation of profit generating lawsuits. And the worst part is, the US Government is on their side!
The real problem seems to be that the codgers in Congress and the Senate have NO idea what they are even fighting for. Observe the following, now legendary quote by Ted Stevens of AK on the topic of Net Neutrality.

The definition should be imminently clear to any literate person who read the net neutrality link above. And yet, it's not clear to the Senate. Because they didn't read up on it.
Because they don't understand why the internet is important.

Also, notice how I had to include only a video with the audio of Ted Steven's brilliant speech? Thats because I couldn't post the actual C-SPAN footage of his speech, as C-SPAN has copyright protected all video of senate and congressional hearings and sent nasty-grams to Youtube to remove these videos.

Copyright law is so unprepared for the internet, and it will be 50 years before we have enough senators or congressmen young enough to do anything about it!

Only just this week SoundExchange, a royalty tracker of (in my opinion) dubious non-profit status, threatened to begin charging royalty payments to internet radio stations. The originally proposed scheme meant the end of internet radio, a friend of mine who DJs at an internet radio station cited his bill at "somewhere near $50,000" or, about 50 times his annual budget.
I once had the unique displeasure of having an ASCAP executive come and speak to my "Math for Liberal Arts" class at MTSU. He completely hijacked the discussion into a discussion about how "wrong" filesharing was. (and it was a badly cliched discussion- even once resorting to the "loaf of bread" talking points) He also discussed the recent creation of a process of listening to audio on radio and calculating royalties- and how the early tests of it showed so many royalties owed that ASCAP and BMI would be out of business if they actually paid them. But when I pushed him further, he admitted that most large volume musicians have to file suit to collect the royalties they were promised.

So, I'll be giving my record away and trying to work out a live show to make a few bucks with. When you play some sort of psychedelic electronic country niche, you should just take your listeners where you can get them.

I Hate What Politicians Have to Say About Education

My stomach churns as I think about entering a semester as an education major during which a presidential election takes place. The level of ignorance and outright disdain that a lot of politicians and politicos show towards the education system is embarrassing.
All they have is solutions. Every single politicians knows exactly how to fix education. The Republicans want to reward "performance" with higher pay for teachers.


The Democrats want to continue to throw grants and funds at a system they and everyone else know is broken:


It's extremely easy to debate any of these candidates on education. They all ignore the elephant in the room: culture.
It's just not easy to say to a group of voters: your culture is failing your children. Your culture has destroyed the institutions of marriage and family for half of the children in the country. Your culture expects nothing out of children, and rewards them for everything. (every kid on the soccer team is the best kid on the soccer team, and every one of their kicks is wonderful)
There's a reason that immigrant populations from east Asia, south Asia, and Africa do so much better than their native born peers. They're raised in the same neighborhoods as kids who drop out at high rates. They're resisting drugs at a higher rate. Their test scores are notably higher.
They're also typically living in two parent households with parents who have high expectations for their children, and who aren't afraid to check their kids when they screw up.

It's just not a money issue anymore. Yes, there are schools out there that need financial help. Probably all of them. They're run like social security senior citizen's homes. They've got holes in the roofs. Money will fix roofs, but it won't fix attitudes.

I'll throw my idea into the fray as well: Education needs more focus on critical thinking and data evaluation, and less focus on progressively increasing the amounts of junk that gets crammed into standardized tests. Data goes bad, critical thinking does not.
And by more, I mean like an entire class EVERY day for at least an hour.
No skill will benefit children more in an era where anyone can edit the encyclopedia.

Casio Love

I just got a Casio MT-600 and I am in LOVE with the thing. Luckily, it fit the adapter I had lying around from a mostly unused, enormous, Casio CT-640.
It has the same sort of sound as the lower range in the MT series, but it has an ANALOG FILTER! The DCO tones occupy a great sounding transitional space between the MT series of super simple organi-ish tones and the all PCM sample based tones of the CT series that succeeded it.
That means instant classic when combined with an inability to stay in tune, pitchbend, and a really low sample rate, noisy output.
Witness the awesome: MP3
Everything in that mp3 but the drums is completely unmodified MT-600! To get some of the chorus effects I multitracked the same parts with the fine tune knob cranked.
It's not too hot with bass- it doesn't go too low.
I plan to do a mod I found on the interweb that boost the cutoff and resonance limits and brings a control for each out on the front panel. I'm skiddish though, because these are hard to find, and I really like it the way it is. But all these sounds beg for some kind of hands on control.
$2 from a trailer park yardsale.

Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys+ Found Photos

deltasleep- Mama, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys
Also, here are some 8x10's I recently picked up at a thrift store. I haven't modified them in anyway- except my crappy scanner. There's nothing I love more than finding this kind of stuff! They're like sparse poetry or something- they make you generate most of the real interest. Who are these people?
"Invisible Bike" works on the same angle. (not my image, by the way.)

Almond Butter and New Age OCD Parasite Paranoia

I am so boring sometimes. There's a discount food store not far away from me that I'd really started enjoying going to(House of Bargains in Lebanon, TN). We've become spoiled at my house- getting things like Tahini, San Pellegrino, Cashew Butter, Porcini Oil, and high quality pasta sauces for 50 cents a piece.
I often just buy something because it sounds good- whether I'm sure what it is or not. When I get home, I google the product to find some recipes with the ingredient in it.
Today, this incidentally bumped me into a hilarious review of Almond Butter(which incidentally, also clued me in to just how expensive this item really is! )

[click the pictures to enlarge]

Apparently, this paranoia that "non-organic" food contains parasites is widespread. My wife is typically more familiar with these sorts of things, and didn't see this as surprising at all! She claims to have worked with and known several individuals and families who believe this to be true.
Playing on parasite anxiety is certainly far from new- any older American will tell you about the bevy of disgusting de-worming tonics and medicines they were subjected to. Here's the cover of a pamphlet from 1938. It's remarkably similar in tone to much of the material given to those susceptible to "holistic" quackery. The pamphlet was free, presented as science, and entirely an advertisement for products made by this company (Dr. D. Jayne and Son, Inc. whose headquarters in Philly was reputed to have been one of the most flamboyant in the city at its time)

People were umpteen times more likely to have a parasite during this era- and I'll bet it wasn't because of the high tech fertilizer and pesticides used on their crops- or the genetic modifications made to the foods.
The fact is, food paranoia appeals to some deep-seated survival instinct in people. Behaviors related to food safety are base instincts found the same in lower mammals. Taste Aversion being a good example of this: even when you know that you are sick, throwing up a food that you know is completely safe can make you not want to eat that good again for months- or for those who eat until they vomit, never. For most of us, it takes months for the logical part of us to overcome that survival behavior of avoiding Witness the response you are certain to have to this video, which alleges that pork is full of worms:

You know it's probably not true- but it's scary. I am thoroughly convinced that there is no notion, no lie, no belief more attractive than those that fall along the lines of "everything you know is wrong." And by the way, this video is entirely bogus. Calm down.
But so called "organic foods"(organic in scientific terms just means any compound containing carbon) are not subjected to the very measures that hundreds of years of commercial agriculture have developed as a means of making foods safer and easier to cultivate. Ignoring many of these procedures and practices might make your food taste better- repelling pestilence can actually make produce more nutritious. But I think its a long, long shot to say that NOT using pesticides makes food less likely to have pests in it.
Thats just dumb.

Luckily, there's now(finally?) a USDA Organic certification. I cannot imagine the complexity of developing or enforcing such a body of rules. Really, you can just view these as better quality products. If they taste better, eat them. We're lucky enough in the Western World to have people who get paid to check out our food. People who have spent a decade in school studying chemistry so complex it's beyond your wildest New Age fantasies.
I am beginning to really hate the holistic health and new age movements for their preying upon people who are uneducated or mentally ill- but that seems to be the norm for medical quackery in America. Many mental illnesses come with phobias of being poisoned, or of food contamination. Perhaps it's this tendency thats got the moonmaidens of the world pouring peroxides in their peanut butter, and coke on their pork.

Great Streetview Link

"He has no head."

Tell me this is not real!

I have just had my mind blown by the latest addition to google maps. It now features STREET LEVEL three dimension viewing! Think of the amazing amount of energy that went into collecting this data! I can only imagine that the task involved a lot of driving around with a GPS unit and a panoramic camera of some sort. Anyways, it's amazing. Look around Times Square or Las Vegas- lots of places are now available. Its terrifying and amazing.
Also, Las Vegas is a nasty dump of a town.
Here's a car in a driveway in Oakland- you can read the license plates!
WOW

Depeche Mode (with Vince Clarke) - New Life

Carpenters: Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft

I Believe in Music

I did this cover in response to a recent discussion with some friends, during which we accidentally doomed music. I still believe in music, even if theres never a dime in it again. This is a cover of a hopelessly hippie song.
I Believe in Music

First Attempts at Video Editting

Wow.

Great Jaco Pastorius Video set on Youtube

This collection of 10 videos is exactly why I think youtube is ten times the public service that public television or really public libraries are! Also, he reminds me of Mike Meyers so much...
Apparently this was dubbed from a 1985 VHS tape, two years before Pastorius's death.

PS: I'm Gothic

Found in a WebMD magazine in a doctor's office several months ago. This has been on my refrigerator since then, and my wife and I still laugh about it.