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Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

Every Day Will Be Like a Holiday

Posted in Music, Video, tagged , on November 24, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Thanksgiving. 

 It would be pretty easy to meander into maudlin territory when writing about such a day so I’ll spare you that today.  I will say that I am thankful for many, many people and things in my life and try to keep that in mind every day.  We often overlook those things which give our lives meaning and depth and focus instead on the negative aspects of life.  What we are not.  What we don’t have.  What we haven’t done.  Too much time is wasted with these thoughts, especially given the limited time we have in this world.

So, today, I ask that you look at your life as though it were a painting in a frame.  See it for the beauty it holds, the colors and texture that are present.  It may not be a Rembrandt, but what does that matter?  Appreciate the uniqueness of it and treat it as the  precious thing that it is.  Treat yourself and the world around you with respect.  Today and every day.  Then every day will truly be like a holiday.

Here’s a song that carries the theme amd title of this post.  It’s from William Bell who recorded on the legendary Stax/Volt label.  I love this song and can’t get it out of my head whenever I stumble across it.  Enjoy and have a great Thanksgiving.

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Blue Moon

Posted in Music, Painting, Recent Paintings, Video, tagged , on November 15, 2011| 2 Comments »

I have a lot going on this morning so I’ll quickly show you this new piece that I call Blue Moon (You Saw Me Standing Alone) , taken from the lyrics of the old song.  There is something both restful and dreamily melancholic in these blue nocturnes.  There is also a wonderful sense of harmony created by the different blue tones in it coming together.  It may be a small piece, only about 4″ by 8″, but it has visual oomph, particularly in the way the blues hug the texture of the sky.  The color thins near the top of each ridge then pools darker in the depressions creating a nice rhythm in the blue night sky around the white eye of the moon.

Speaking of things  dreamily melancholic, here is a video of the Cowboy Junkies’ take on the old standard.  This version is from 1988 but the song has had many interpreters since being written in 1934.  Most probably remember the Elvis version but I have always  liked the exaggerated depressive quality in this version.  Plus, the person responsible for this video did a great job in putting together some nice mmon footage.

Have a great day!

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11-11-11

Posted in At the Movies, Music, Neat Stuff, tagged , , on November 11, 2011| 3 Comments »

Most people think of anything that falls on the eleventh day of the eleventh month as being a time to commemorate the brave men and women who have served in the Armed Forces.  That, obviously, is a wonderful tribute to their sacrifice and is a worthy use of this day.  But this year, there is an added element to the gravity of the day.

This day in this year, 11/11/11, Nigel Tufnel Day.  I believe this has something to do with some apocalytic countdown attached to the Mayan Calendar. 

Nigel Tufnel was, and is, the lead guitarist for the band Spinal Tap, the heavy metal rockers who were the subject of  the celebrated film mockumentary This is Spinal Tap from director Rob Reiner back in 1984.  As played by Christopher Guest, Tufnel is best remembered for the part of the film where he is showing his guitars to Reiner and explains why the dials on his amps all go to eleven rather than ten, the normal top number on most numeric dials.  It is a classic bit.

The film has become a classic, deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the Library of Congress in 2002.  The film popularized the mockumentary style and Guest has made a great series of films based on this format of a traditional looking film dockumentary using a reperatory of actors and improvised (and often very funny) dialogue.  Best in Show, A Mighty Wind  and Waiting For Guffman are all exceptional examples.

So, today, at the clock strikes the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of this eleventh day in the eleventh month in the eleventh year of this decade, I will first say a silent thank you to honor the service of all the troops, past and present.  Then I will plug my guitar into my amp and turn it up to eleven. 

I can’t embed the actual  that started the ball rolling for Nigel Tufnel Day but you can watch it on Youtube by clicking here.

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Wicked Game

Posted in At the Movies, Current Events, Music, Video, tagged , on November 8, 2011| Leave a Comment »

I was going to write about an essay that I read in the magazine Foreign Affairs by George Packer titled The Broken Contract.  It’s a summary of the timeline for the growth of the wealth inequality in our country that has recently started coming to a head, focusing on congressional actions that have enabled this disparity.  I had some problems with some of his views but overall found the article to be very enlightening and downright depressing in the end.  So I decided to not go any further into it this morning except to say that the country has definitely lost sight of the  contract of social responsibility implied in Packer’s article. 

 According to Packer, if the world were represented by the movie It’s a Wonderful Life ( we are quickly heading into the holiday season, after all), the most egregious actions of the greedy Mr.Potter have become the accepted norm and are no longer subject to any sort of public shaming, as they had once been.  George Bailey would be even more helpless to the economic and legal machinations of Potter. 

That’s my analogy, not Packer’s. 

Anyway, that’s as far as I want to take it this morning.  Here’s a little music to fit the tone of this subject, at least in title.  It’s Wicked Game from Chris Isaak from back in 1989.  Hard to believe this song is that old.

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Dock Boggs- Lost and Found

Posted in Music, Video, tagged , , on November 6, 2011| 2 Comments »

Saw a PBS documentary on the history of the banjo in American music last night and qhile it wasn’t the greatest documentary I have ever seen there were a few stories that really stuck out for me, primarily the story of Dock Boggs, who lived in the minig region that straddles southwestern Virginia and eastern Kentucky, was born in 1898 and as a young man picked up the banjo and developed a distinctive style of playing.  In the late 1920’s he gained a bit of regional fame with his music and recorded 12 songs in two separate sessions.

Then his career died in the dust of the Great Depression and he pawned his banjo and headed back into the coal mines, his music put away for what he thought was forever.

Thirty years passed and folklorist/folk musician Mike Seeger, brother of folk icon Pete Seeger, was seeking out Appalachian music to document in 1963 and remembered the impact of those few songs from Dock Boggs’ past.  Boggs was surprised when Seeger sought him out because he thought nobody remembered those songs from so many years before.  Fortunately, Boggs had recently purchased a banjo and had been practicing for a few months.  Seeger convinced him to appear at a folk festival in Asheville, NC and after that his career was revitalized in the folk revival of the 1960’s.

He recorded three albums and toured, playing folk festivals including an appearnace at the Newport Folk Festival, until his death in 1971 at the age of 73.  He left this world knowing that the gift he was given had not been completely lost in the coal mines.  I think it’s a great tale of a life’s passion lost and found.  Could be the subject of one of his songs.

Here’s an older Dock Boggs playing one of his classics, Country Blues.  This version is a bit more sudbued and a little less ominous than the original, recorded when he was young and still living a hard-drinking, brawling life.  You can hear the original here.

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Colors

Posted in Music, Painting, Technique/History, Video, tagged , on October 30, 2011| 1 Comment »

I’ve been back in the studio for several days now after a period where I was engaged in doing some maintenance projects around here.  I have been progressively worse at compartmentalizing the tasks in my life so that when I work on something outside the studio I find it difficult to work for short periods in the studio on those days.  As a result, once I am back in the studio I sometimes fall out of rhythm and have to find ways to regain it.  For the first day or so, I seem to flounder around and everything seems just out of sync and flat.  Throw in a material failure like I mentioned in yesterday’s post and it gets to be frustrating.

Yesterday, I finally turned back to my old ally, color.  It seems that whenever I feel this creative frustration color is inevitably the answer for me.  I don’t worry about what I am creating, simply start creating blocks of colors.  Colors that are familiar to me and combinations that I haven’t used for a while.  I aim for bold and dark-edged color then begin manipulating the gradation of the block to create a contrast within it, flushing out the flatness of the last few days.

 It has to be intuitive for me, just grabbing colors and throwing them in.  I’ve never used a colorwheel , never really tried to understand them.  Whenever I have looked at them, the colors never made me want to see or use any of them.  To me, they seemed to take out all of the emotion of the colors and make it dry and tasteless.  I found that by using my own colors and taking the time I could find the emotion in the colors through this exercise.

It’s amazing how this simple exercise in color cleanses away the stifling feeling that had been there before and prods some hidden creative impulse.  Suddenly, momentum is born and begins to move forward.  Rhythm is nearly regained and I look forward to jumping back in today.

Here’s a little Sunday music with a title that fits this post.  It’s Colors from Amos Lee with an assist from Norah Jones.

 

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Hogback Heaven

Posted in Early Paintings, Music, Video, tagged , on October 21, 2011| 3 Comments »

Looking through some old work, most of which was done early on while I was still forming my technique and style and before I showed my work publicly, I came across this oddity that I noted as Hogback Heaven.  It’s a goofy little scene of a rough hewn home and yard somewhere out on a back country road, the kind of place that I often passed years ago in my treks on the backroads around my home area.  All that is missing here from my memories of those places are a barking hound and a toddler in a sagging diaper playing in the gravel of the driveway. 

Whenever I come across this piece, I have to smile.  I don’t know if it’s the subject or the crazy electric feel of the cobalt blue sky and hills and the red neon outlines of the house and ground.  I’m still trying to figure out where that color came from.  Maybe it’s a smile of embarassment that this little painting is hovering in my past.  But there’s something in it that makes me not want to destroy it. 

I wanted to set this post to some fitting music and in my search came across this other sort of oddity.  Called Yiddish Hillbillies, it’s a vintage 40’s era cartoon that has had the soundtrack replaced ( in a very clever and coordinated way) with a song from Mickey Katz.  Katz was a comedian who specialized in Jewish humor, with Yiddish-tinged song parodies of contemporary songs of the time being his specialty.  Think Borscht Riders in the Sky or Sixteen Tons (of Latkes).  While much of the Yiddish-tinged wording goes over my head I do enjoy the klezmer feel here.  A note on Mickey Katz:  His son is actor Joel Grey which makes him the grandfather of actress Jennifer Grey.

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A Star Spangled Controversy

Posted in Music, Opinion, Video, tagged , on October 13, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Jose Feliciano at the 1968 World Series

In 1968, in that turbulent year that saw Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinated and war protesters rioting in the streets, there was a controversial incident at the 1968 World Series.  It seems so minor in the scale of retrospection but I find it very interesting and symbolic of how we as a people resist the inevitability of change.

In October of 1968, the musician Jose Feliciano was asked by legendary Detroit Tigers broadcaster Ernie Harwell to perform the National Anthem a before one of the World Series games in Detroit between the Tigers and the St. Louis Cardinals.  Feliciano performed a slow and slightly jazzy version, much in the style for which he was known.  Little did he know, it inspired a storm of controversy.

This was before anyone had performed stylized versions of the song, before the crashing fury of Hendrix’ version or any of the myriad other versions since.  It is said that World War II vets were throwing their shoes at their televisions and the network switchboards were swamped with angry calls.  Soon, many radio stations refused to play Feliciano’s music altogether and his career went into a tailspin that took three years for him to overcome.

When I hear the version now, I am mystified by the reaction of the time.  It is a respectful and lovely version, perhaps not as bombastic or as confident as some like in their national anthem.  And certainly not as ridiculous and disrespectful as some versions since.  But we were a country in turmoil and our confidence was surely shaken by all that was happening around us.  The world seemed to be changing every day and in ways that seemed out of the control of the average person. 

 Much like today.

Here are two short videos.  The first is Jose Feliciano telling the story and the second is the recording of that performance from 1968.  Tell me this isn’t a beautiful version of the song.

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October

Posted in Favorite Things, Music, Video, tagged , on October 1, 2011| 2 Comments »

October.  The calendar turns once more and all thoughts of summer are put aside.  A time for preparing for the coming winter and enjoying the coolness of autumn with all the color of the changing leaves and the softer light.  A time for reflection on a year that has went by all too quickly.

The woodcut shown here is one made for the month of October in Edmund Spenser’s 1579 work, The Shepheardes Calender, which was a collection of 12 pastoral poems depicting the month-by-month life of a shepherd of that time.  I would include a few lines but, quite honestly, I struggle to get through any of Spenser’s archaic verse and don’t wish that on anyone on a Saturday morning.  I do like the woodcut, however.

Here’s a little easier to absorb interpretation of the month.  It’s hard to be;lieve it has been 30 years since the album October was released by U2.  Here’s the mood piece that serves as the title track for this album.

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Low Rider

Posted in Music, Neat Stuff, Video, tagged , on September 24, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Another one of those looking-for-one-thing-and-finding-another moments.  I can’t even remember what brought me to this picture but I stopped as soon as I saw this.  At first, I thought it was some spaced out lowrider with a see-thru hot tub on the back.  I mean, it’s tricked out with flashy rims and it looks like the front end is starting to buck a little. 

Then I realized this was no ordinary lowrider but was, in fact, the PopeMobile.  It kind of took me aback for a second, the idea that the Pope had somehow converted to some sort of lowrider high priest, calling himself Joey Ratz and cruising the streets around the Vatican in his souped up Benz.  Just an odd image that seems a bit out of place.

Anyway, it got me thinking about the song Low Rider from War, the classic 70’s hit that had an infectious rhythm that still clicks today.  Here it is with a video of some real lowriders doing things I don’t think Gottleib Daimler or Henry Ford ever envisioned.

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