Gathering is bad for public health?

5/18/2020

When I first heard that the novel coronavirus was coming to the United States, the only analog from my past I could refer to was hurricane prep or a massive blizzard. The distinction, as I looked forward, was that this shut-down was going to affect the whole country at once. I always believed that the condition, though widespread, would just be temporary. A matter of weeks. As cases and deaths mounted, I could see quickly how wrong I had been. …

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Plans and Schemes, Daydreams

How many friggin’ twitter accounts and subdomains and jobs does a person have to have?

Well, I guess the number is “more than I expected” in all cases. So this post is intended more as a way to explain to myself just what the hell I think I’m doing. The @mpomy twitter account has a lot of music on the mind, but also sports, entertainment, politics, social justice. Then there’s the @mdp_esq twitter account. That’s now got crypto, upcoming lawyer AI project, upcoming data analytics project and also general law stuff, some of which may shade into social justice. These aren’t rules, by the way, it’s just what I’m observing. These two twitter accounts have existed in this fashion for a good little while already.

Now there is an ionomy/crypto podcast, which is hosted on an mpomy subdomain and is described (by me!) as an “mpomy production.” But hang on! Isn’t the subject of that podcast closer to the @mdp_esq persona? Yes, but I don’t care. I’ve already got all this organized in my brain and I don’t want to get rid of the _esq twitter account. Even though it has almost no followers. Maybe I like it that way.

As I talk this out, I realize I need to clarify on both twitter accounts that I, we, are the same person. Gemini stuff. #smdh

There will be more podcasts, which, I guess, will mean more subdomains. Or at least one other. I’m getting outstanding feedback, which is the benefit of knowing and working with a lot of really cool people. Over the past week, I’ve had a single mammoth content plan start to take shape, and there are even early notes, preliminary discussions and some scripting. This could be a work of bizarre fiction, where i need no one elses help, all the way up to a documentary film, which is what I really want to do. The music-related subject will be discussed later, but I feel strongly that whatever happens with the project, there will be a podcast discussion to accompany (or embody) the work. Is that opaque enough?

The idea of merging a pre-existing wiriting idea with a podcast production, especially when music will play such an essential role in the content, makes sense to me. I am not abandoning a project, but co-opting it’s momentum for a better project.

Still on podcasts, I would like to have another project just to discuss music and bring on the amazing individuals who have contributed to my musical knowledge. discuss songs, albums, concerts, etc.

All of these musings are leading me to a potentially significanrt expenditure on pro-level tools/subscription software. It would be a real shame if my eyes were actually a lot bigger than my head in this regard, but the more I contemplated the project (even before consdiering Adobe CC), the more I kept coming back to it as a viable solution. Overkill, perhpas, but that’s how you win. When I asked about podcasting, CC was the suggested solution. I looked up animation, and I immediately got to CC. I dream about making a fancy documentary – and again I see that CC can do the job. So, today i’m going to start the free trial and then decide what I want to do.

And this long running, often dormant, blog will continue in some capcity, particularly for the exercise of celebrating life with music. I feel like this is an exciting moment in the journey, and I can’t wait to see what happens. I’ll probably write about it here.

Time to move on from Google Play Music – FOR REAL THIS TIME

I’m not waiting for Tuesday’s release of the eventual successor to Google Play Music. Ever since the horrendous Google Buzz came and went, and the completely unnecessary and lamentable death of Google Reader, I have known this day would come. And yet, I, like the gullible rube that I am, made my commitment, uploaded thousands and thousands of songs and made Google Play Music an appendage of my very self. throughout my entire post-adolescent life, I have had need of a massive yet portable music collection that needs to be me with me at all times. In the 80’s, this meant a stack of records, which quickly gave way to multiple bread racks of cassette tapes. All the while, I was more interested in the rare bootlegs and b-sides and non-sanctioned, unofficial releases. In Philadelphia (Valley Forge, really) we had a record convention every Thanksgiving where I could find CDs and cassettes of the finest bootlegs from Pink Floyd, Mahavishnu, the Grateful Dead and Gabriel-era Genesis. There is a set of Pink Vinyl from the Roger Waters-less Pink Floyd of the 80’s, and many plain white sleeves containing scratchy recordings of this or that band. Double CD bootlegs, some from radio recordings or soundboards, and some from the audience (complete with ecstatic cries and drug-induced witticisms) could be obtained for $45. $25 for a single disc. And the collection gradually grew and grew and grew.

And then downloading and streaming music came along. Google Play Music arrived as a locker service, which worked fine for me since I had been gradually transferring the entire behemoth of a collection onto mp3 so i could carry it around on my chunky iPod clone. There were actual Apple branded iPods eventually, but the collection was always too big for the storage options I could afford. So a portion was portable and the rest was at home, saved on CDs, CD ROMs, DVDs, hard drives, and cassettes and LPs in the basement.

So when the locker service started, I was well-positioned to spend a night or two slowly uploading all of those mp3’s i had lovingly created from half decades of collecting.

And tonight, I am now DOWNloading all of those titles and more, pulling the data down from the Google “cloud” to be deployed to the Apple “cloud” because Google (a) doesn’t know shit about streaming music services, and (b) doesn’t really care. So, the symmetry of that long, long upload a few years ago, and now a long long download is somewhat poetic.

I knew this would happen. From the very beginning, I fretted about it. I said, out loud to countless people, “Google had better not discontinue this service. If they do, I’m going to be really screwed!”

Welp, I’m really screwed. Replacement service is starting on Tuesday, and the rumor is that Google Play Music will cease to exist by the end of the year. For fuck’s sake!

I had an inkling, recently, that this might be coming. It was not a coherent thought, but more an urge to explore the Apple Music service (using their 90 day promo period) so that I could compare and contrast. Fortunately, it’s fine, it works, it does what it’s supposed to, and there are no significant drawback compared to the Google product. I like having a standalone app to listen with on my laptop, but iTunes is slow and has a confusing layout. So while the overall Apple experience is better because of a more elegant layout (I know, shocking!), I wish iTunes were a bit more intuitive and straightforward in its layout.

Now that expiration of Google Play Music seems imminent, I’m glad I got the hands-on experience of using Apple Music. I treated the trial period as if I were making a switch, so I uploaded LOTS (but not all) of my music that isn’t available on Apple. When I realized that there was not a significant difference in the services, i decided to stay with Google. I think I had an Android phone at the time. As I now prepare to reactivate that account I have no idea if those uploads will still be there.

Google has an option for me to download my whole collection of over 18,000 tracks, which process is currently in its ninth hour and counting. The problem is that all of the tracks are being dumped into a folder with no attempt at organization. The hope would be that I could just drag and drop the whole download into iTunes, but I have a feeling the songs that have already been uploaded will now appear twice. That would be typical Apple. It’s a company that spends so much time trying to make things easy that it often locks out or makes exceedingly difficult any use of its products that deviates from the narrow user experience envisioned by the developers.

Zappa family working towards peace?

From Dweezil’s website – this looks like extremely good news.

We regret that our communication broke down and that things were misconstrued. It may be a bumpy road at times – we are a passionate Italian family – but we have decided to work toward privately discussing issues rather than using public forums and lawyers.

We are hopeful that if any of our father’s fans have felt conflicted, they can join us in the peace of our resolution.

The Mega-Shuff, ep. 1

Stephen Stills – Pensamiento from Bananafish Gardens (1973)

What a song to start off the Mega-Shuff institution! This is the randomness that you worry about with such an experiment, and there’s almost certainly no other way I would have explicitly wanted to listen to this recording. Stills is frustrating. He is a multi-instrumentalist, does all his own stunts in terms of songwriting, producing, performing, and even had the Jimi Hendrix seal of approval. Having seen Stills a bunch of times in the 80’s, I can confirm that he is a prodigious guitar player, a real blues man. He dabbled with mixing the music of other cultures into his brand of popular folk/rock, but he never went as far as he should have with it. As much as I dislike the music of Paul Simon, there is no denying the absolute brilliance of Graceland. Stills arguably had the music-biz juice to execute such a move, if he had it in him, but he was a apparently bogged down by the fame and fortune of his super-group. As much as Stills has given us over his storied career, I can’t help but think there was even more brilliance that we missed out on.

This isn’t the version from Bananafish Gardens, but about six months later, and it’s very similar.

 

Primus – Golden Ticket from Primus & The Chocolate Factory (2014)

There’s no way I would have picked this one and so the deities of randomness and algorithms assert their unyielding will again. My best argument (to myself) is this band’s extraordinary approach to rhythm. Perhaps that’s owed to original drummer Tim “Herb” Alexander returning to the band after a hiatus. That means that return of Rush and early Peter Gabriel solo as major influences – that’s real progressive rock! But, for better and worse, there is usually no space for nostalgia because of the band’s aggressively individualism. I could never argue with the true progressive credentials of Primus – there is a fearless persistence to define their own sound that makes the albums utterly unmistakable. That’s some strong branding. At the same time, there is a delicateness that is missing. When prog and fusion giants roamed the earth, there were moments in the composition that recalled a more primitive form of music, a jazz or blues riff here, a Scottish folk progression there. If used correctly, these forms can provide emotional context to the complexity that, on its own can make some prog and fusion tiresome. While this may be a full subject elsewhere, suffice it to say here that Primus, as much as I want to love everything the band has produced, doesn’t ‘swing’ – a lot of the time. Maybe this is evidence of my lacking a good appreciation of Heavy Metal as a genre. Even here, when Primus has progged out to the extent that this is a full concept album, I still can’t get completely on board.

 

David Bowie – TVC15 from Los Colinas (1983)

I’ve certainly been thinking about Bowie enough recently. As i try to get back into playing a band, it is helpful to learn more well-known songs. Bowie has a ton that check the boxes of fun to play, viscerally appealing and recognizably popular. This particular track is more of a deep cut that i might have occasionally heard on classic rock radio of my youth. What particularly interesting about this version is that it features Stevie Ray Vaughan on lead guitar. SRV’s prominence on “Let’s Dance” is revelatory. The circumstances which lead to him NOT touring with Bowie in support of that album are summarized in this article. I disagree with the notion that Bowie “made” SRV’s carrier, whether indirectly or directly. SRV was going to become the colossus he became, no matter what. The rehearsals for that tour are one of the great bootlegs in circulation. You can hear the entire concert on YouTube.

 

Mississippi Fred McDowell – When I Lay My Burden Down (1968)

When I talk about my experiences in music, there is a clear distinction between music I learned how to listen to, discovering nuance and soulful beauty in complexity and chaos, and music that affected me more like getting a wrench smashed into my funny bone. Sometimes things would just click for me because of what my parents listened to when I was growing up (Bob Dylan, Neil Young), but I didn’t get exposed to too much blues music. And yet it has clicked, possibly because I discovered it at the same time I was trying to lean how to play guitar. Regardless, Muddy Waters and BB King quickly became regular listening. Then I graduated to John Lee Hooker and Albert King. And then, years later, I discovered the North Mississippi Hill Country Blues and the gentleman farmed called Mississippi Fred McDowell. This track appears to be from March of 1968, but I can’t find the name of the other vocalist.

 

Bonnie Raitt – Love Me Like a Man from Ultrasonic Studios (1972)

WHAT A COINCIDENCE! Probably not. Probably proof that there it is more algorithms than actual randomness. I continue to hope that randomness plays some role. I want to see the dark corners of my collection. The reason it’s no coincidence is that in 1970, Bonnie backed up Fred McDowell at the Philadelphia Folk Festival. They became friends and Raitt studied guitar from the undisputed master of the Mississippi Hill Country Blues. Here is the audio for the entire glorious session, which features legends Lowell George and John Hammond Jr. Love Me Like a Man is the first tune.

 

#stephen/stills #Primus #David/Bowie #MIssissippi/Fred/McDowell #Bonnie/Raitt