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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Author: Karel Kerezman

  • And knowing is half the write-up.

    Things you may find interesting:

    • When writing about popular music, album titles should be in italics and song titles should be surrounded by double-quotes. Apparently I’ve been doing it wrong for… oh, let’s not go into how many years. The important thing is that I know this now so I can lend some stylistic validity to the written version of the Summer Music Project commentary.
    • The terms “flat” and “sharp,” when referring to musical notes, are apparently known as “accidentals.” I have not yet been able to discern the etymology for this usage; it seems an odd choice of terminology. An “accidental” is something you play deliberately in almost any piece of music, after all.
    • If you want a hint about what I might be prepping for the upcoming SMP mix, it may be worth perusing my Last.fm profile. (Of course, as soon as I post this I plan to muddy the waters considerably by listening to a whole bunch of different artists.)

    Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have been awake for an awfully long time and I’d like to soothe my brain with notes both natural and accidental before I seek my slumber.

  • Summer Music Project 2008: Week Two

    I only ask fifteen minutes of your time, this go-around. The music is modern, innovative and toe-tappingly good. As a bonus, there’s a whole lot less of my aimless yammering to suffer through. What more could you ask?

    By next week I’ll probably have the A/C unit in the window. That’s probably going to put a halt to the voice work for the duration of the project, I’m afraid. I had a hard enough time eliminating the outside noise with all of my windows shut, and the air conditioner is altogether too good at letting the outside world into my bedroom. How’s that for planning, eh?

    That’s okay, though. I spent half of my time tonight just trying to hunt down the worst of the clicks and pops. Future weeks will be orders of magnitude easier to assemble if all I have to do is mix tracks and write up some color commentary…

  • Five days later, only one has listened.

    I’m not even certain that the only download of the Genesis mix from Friday actually involved a live human being, given that the hostname in the logs doesn’t look particularly legitimate. My only problem with this theory is that I’m not sure how a robot would click on the audio player widget. I could be wrong, of course, and the sole listener is certainly welcome to chime in.

    So. Do I bother cranking out the other thirteen if nobody at all gives a damn?

  • Touched By An Atheist

    Taking up a worthy challenge, I present George Carlin on Mad TV in, “Touched By An Atheist.”

    (The Python-esque disclaimers are just icing on the cake.)

  • So long, you cantankerous old man.

    Well, here’s news I didn’t want to wake up to: George Carlin died yesterday.

    Let’s be fair and note that this wasn’t entirely unexpected. He suffered from heart problems for quite some time, and it’s not like he was some spring chicken. He made it to 71, which is a fair bit past my own life expectancy given my genetics.

    But still, this is sad news for me. Carlin played a significant role in pointing me toward my current fascination with the power of language for good or ill. He changed his style significantly at several points in his career but at every stage he liked to point out the silly and, later on, the sinister aspects of how we use words in America. Analyzing and understanding the why behind someone’s choice of words is a large part of critical thinking as applied to individuals and society.

    Lest I forget: He also made me laugh. A lot. I’m a big fan of laughter. Hell, I still have portions of his routines stuck in memory, to be recited at appropriate times. Well, mostly appropriate. Okay, sometimes.

    Anyway.

    I think it’s time to grab a few more of Carlin’s comedy albums from eMusic…

  • Summer Music Project 2008: Week One

    Welcome to summer, friends.

    I’ll warn you right from the get-go: This one’s a bit wordy, in part because of some introductory material that won’t need repeating. Future installments should feature roughly half the amount of jabberjaw on my part. With that out of the way… let the festivities commence!

    Believe it or not, I had this thing done four days in advance. My plan is to have two more in the can by next Friday and maintain an at-least-one-week buffer through the course of the season so I’m not doing last-minute panicky stupid things or (worse) dropping weeks. Anything’s possible, they tell me…

    I have no idea whatsoever how this is going to sound on different speakers or headphones from mine, and that scares me because I know how lousy the headset microphone I’m using really is. What might kill this whole project faster than anything is that I might just not be able to stand the lousy production quality anymore.

    Oh well. Worse come to worst, you’ll get music mixes with written commentary. That counts for something, I hope.

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