One year ago today: February 19, 2018, peanut butter & jelly, not toasted.
Five years ago today: February 19, 2014, no Eagles, no Knoppfler . . .
Nine years ago today: February 19, 2010, been fine since!
Random years ago today: February 19, 2009, musically a slow day.
Okay, guys. I overslept and feel like hungover. The naked lady is in the addendum. Move fast, I’m not leaving that picture there for long. This is a family show, but anybody who hasn’t seen naked women by now isn’t living on the same planet. She’s a cutie, or at least she was in 2008. How about those tents of homeless camping on the sidewalks of San Francisco? I was about to feel sorry for them when a reporter went through and collected their feelings about minimum wage and illegal immigration. Now, let them live there. The only pity is the few who dare to speak out against the ruination going on are also caught up in the mess.
I inject a disc starring that weirdo Englishman Rowan Atkinson. He’s proof the Brits have their share of Eddie Albert and what’s the name of that Captain on Gilligan’s Island? Anyway, being English, he gets away with not acting because it seems funny the way they do ordinary things over there. It’s an action comedy about turning England into a huge prison camp. It’s based, methinks, on a scenario of what might have actually happened without Brexit. Imagine, letting the Belgians or French dictate who moves to London.
Ha, the states that hate have filed against Trump’s wall, led by California (equivalent $19.89 hourly) and New York (equivalent $21.88 hourly), where the welfare rates are many times higher than a minimum wage job. The press is monopolized by the commie left so they went freaky with the count of 16 states. The reality is at street level, there are no real protests. No outcries. No panic.
Put in perspective, 34 states did not file and that is a healthy majority. Up goes the wall, and once it is in place, trying to tear it down would escalate very quickly. That’s why the commies are so desperately attacking it so fanatically now.
I rode my one-speed up to the coffee shop. I had some shopping to take care of at that mall anyway, and this was a nice day for it. Utterly lovely bicycle weather. I passed the neighbor’s yard just a couple blocks from here and I am so jealous. Look at this flowers. This is something I got to have. Instead, I got home and weeded around my lilies and African spears. I think he had it professionally installed, since there were no flowers there two weeks ago. If so, I don’t feel so bad because I don’t intent to cheat. For me, real flowers or nothing.
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Scott Houston, that’s the name of the guy who teaches the easy piano course. I’m about halfway through, and he’s right about easy. You can fake most of the chording on piano by a few simple techniques. Like guitar, they fool most people. However, I don’t agree with his advocacy on comping. He states it is the proper way to accompany someone who is soloing. I say don’t comp, but rather invent a line that reinforces and complements what is being soloed. Houston is, I think, referring to comping as done in jazz trios, where it is expected. My connotation is the guitar or piano player that uses the same chop in every song all night long. That’s where I draw the line. Comp, and I fire you.
I play what the audience likes and the audience is King. However, he mollifies by recognizing that to play professionally, you did the work yourself, you put in the hours and years. And you deserve whatever applause and credit you can get. True. I’m only suggesting if you play what the crowd wants, you’ll get more applause and forget credit, you get big bills in the tip jar.
Houston delivers an excellent passage on motivation. He’s seen the same 97% failure rate I have, because people only want to do the part that is fun. His analogy is basketball. Kids spend hours shooting baskets because it is fun, but drop out upon discovering to get professional, you need years of drill, and more years learning the fundamentals. He goes on to say that you can’t play music well if you don’t emotionally connect to it. But I say otherwise. I tend to connect with the audience, not the music, and to that end will play their favorites. The tip jar is for keeping score. True, I don’t play certain types of music, but show me a reggae bar or a disco bar within 100 miles of here. I prefer to play country and seek out that venue.
I’ll give this guy a fair shake and visit his web links. If his techniques work for me, I’ll be impressed. I’ve had plenty of bad experiences jamming with guitarists who play music I’ve never heard before, but they are stumped when I ask what “feel” the bass line should have. Walking, rock, blues, country, just give me a rough idea. Often, it would seem I am the first bassist who has ever asked them that question. Just do what you feel, they say, but don’t like it when you do. My keyboard is set up, so this won’t take long.
Later, I see the millennials have been at work. The book lists all kinds of free sample links, but now, they are no longer free. You get that when millennial “efficiency experts” go to work. They can’t invent anything, so they muck around with what’s already there. One of the big draws to the site was the free examples. Now they want $19.95 to even open the pages. Fortunately, there were enough pirated copies on youTube to see what Houston is doing. It’s the easiest way to play piano, heavy 7th on the left hand, many scale tones on the right. It works, but it bores quickly. Also, that style works best for non-country and non-rock music. He uses a lot of II-V-I progressions and I can’t think of a single tune I’d listen to that uses that.
I’ve got another booklet on crime detection. You should, given the opportunity, read a few of these. Why? Because there is a large undocumented history of men wrongly convicted by “evidence” that they could have had disallowed if they had been aware of how faulty the “scientific testing” was. The cases that spring to mind were early instances of men condemned to death because there were human blood stains on their clothing. Too many of them worked in situations where it could have been their own blood, but the testing could not tell. They were basically tricked into denying it was blood. For which of us remembers every time we swiped a small nick or puncture on a sleeve?
Then again, criminals with any brains are clustered around movie studios. They don’t really exist much in the real world, that is, if you discount politicians, bankers, and others who legalize their dastardly trade. But I was a criminal, there are a vast number of things you could do to protect yourself from malicious prosecution. For example, if was going to rob a bank before it opened, the day before I would go across town to a location that was open at that hour and leave my fingerprints all over the place. Why? Because it there was technology to determine what day the prints were left, the police are not using it. This is one example, in real life you should carefully layer your clues. Oh, and if you testify that you were elsewhere, the police will follow that up—make sure you have an independent witness present so the evidence is collected objectively.
ADDENDUM
I gave a listen to the music Bradford says he’s learning the bass lines to. Terrible instrumental music, made on the cheap. You know, home recording studio gear and a bunch of twenty-ish men dressed in college duds hung up on one musical style. The dreary group, Lettuce, I listened to their Album called Trillogy. Well, tried to listen. I gave up after enduring the first five minutes each of “The Lobbyist” and “Phyllis”, although I would have had a go at Phyllis.
Next was Vulfpeck. More tedious instrumentals in the same vein. “Beastly” and “It Gets Funkier”. The first title is appropriately named and the second, well, it doesn’t. The music sounds like what people who had too many lessons would come up with. A mishmash of styles clumped together by great musicians but in the end product lacks synergy. It reminded me of old Jazz jams in Hollywood musicals. The big band of variable members with bizarre nicknames and creepy habits. Each piece of music continues until every last one of them, particularly the bleary-eyed oboe player, has had a 45-second piss at the solo trough.
I can’t believe I just said that.
I’ve finally given up trying to find my old scout pal, Bill. He had an uncommon enough last name, but even the Internet was no help. I found whole family groups from Michigan to Alberta, some with the identical name, but nobody ever knew of good old Bill. Last I saw him, he was the guy who took a mechanics course at the local college.
Me and the gang took up a collection and bought him a $20 garage creeper as a joke and grad present. Hey, that’s like ten times the price today. I’m tempted to try one more lead, which is to post for his whereabouts on Craigslist. I mean, we were scouts and jammed music for ten years so he didn’t just disappear. The snag is that others would know I was looking and get in touch. People I have purposely not spoken to in forty years.
And that’s your nude picture, A LIMITED TIME OFFER. Told you she wasn’t going to undress herself. My hands were just a blur. That looks like me lurking in the far left corner. Well, I have to salute the flag, don’t I? This photo gets replaced in 24 hours.
