Just A Heads-Up

I can't discuss it in any detail without feeling sad and ill, but if any of you out there are considering, even casually, attending the touring company version of Immortal (Cirque du Soleil's celebration of the music of Michael Jackson) DO NOT DO SO.  Take your money, set it on fire, and then poke yourself in the thigh with a fork for an hour.  You'll have a better time.

And this is from someone who likes Cirque du Soleil (usually) and love Michael Jackson.

The Guru Said Keep Walking

So my question about this is... well. What do you make of it?

I found it on a poker site, of all places. A blog by a fairly serious player; he talked about how he watched it every day to motivate him to train and prepare for poker tournaments.

So then I watched it and the first time I saw it I thought: YES. ROCK ON. And I decided to submit my name to the NFL combine.

By the way, the voiceover is from some guy who styles himself The Hip Hop Preacher. He has quite a Facebook page if you're interested. The video, on the other hand, is from a East Carolina running back named Giavanni Ruffin. He has a twitter feed (I looked into all this on YouTube) that is sort of dispriting and inspring at the same time.  Apparently he's trying to impress scouts in February and make the NFL.

Okay.

My point here is: I don't know, really.  I don't know if this is genuinely inspiring or just kind of...over-manipulated rubbish. I do like the way it builds, though.  And the long pauses in the audio track.  So that you really do want to know what happens to the young man who goes out to the beach.

"Most of you people would rather sleep than be successful" That's funny. And true.

And I like the way he cites Fifty Cent, as if that sort of is the ultimate trump.  If Fifty adheres to this philosophy, what more is there to say?

I don't know. I don't usually watch stuff like this--stuff with so few Muppets, I mean. But this kind of stayed with me.

Interested to hear your thoughts.

Probably worth watching in full screen.

I Am Not Issuing Another Post

Until at least five people respond to the Muppet Video below. At least watch it. And say you have.

Because I know that I, for example, rarely watch videos that are on blogs. And that I've been a bit lazy, putting up lots of non-original material.

But this is non-negotiable. Five people must post some post that indicates that they've seen it, that comments on some aspect of the video that they couldn't otherwise comment on, without having seen it. ("Mama??")

I'm through playing. Word.

I Was In A Funk Today

And then I saw this.

It gave me hope.  I wish Beaker were a friend.  I would want to spend as much time with him as I possibly could.

Tuesday, January 24

This comes from Book I of The Histories, by Herodotus:

[Persians] are accustomed to deliberating on the most serious business while they are drunk, and whatever decision they reach in these sessions, it is proposed to them again the next day by the host in whose house they had deliberated the night before.  Then, if the decision still please them when they are sober, they actd on it; if not, they give it up.  Conversely, whatever provisional decisions they consider while sober, they reconsider when they are drunk.

The first part, I can believe.  The second I doubt.

Ernest Givens Lives

For an old Houston Oiler's fan, this article on the team's notorious "Run and Shoot" offense is irresistible. It name-checks Haywood Jeffries, for God's sakes. How can it not be worth your time?

A sample:

The run-and-shoot was supposed to be dead, at least in the NFL. The offense (at least one form of it) was conceived by Glenn "Tiger" Ellison back in the 1950s, while Darrel "Mouse" Davis developed its modern form throughout a four-decade coaching career that has touched nearly every level of football imaginable. The offense had its moment of glory in the NFL in the early 1990s. Back then, the Detroit Lions, Atlanta Falcons, and Houston Oilers (and the Seattle Seahawks, extremely briefly) ran the 'shoot, which featured four wide receivers and one running back on every snap. The offense used no fullbacks and no tight ends.1 These teams had mixed success. The Lions won 12 games in 1991; the Falcons won 10 and made the playoffs twice during their 'shoot days. But the NFL team that most exemplified the run-and-shoot, in both its glory and its shame, was the Houston Oilers. The Oilers made the playoffs in seven straight years with the run-and-shoot (and fielded a top-10 offense in each season), and quarterback Warren Moon blitzkrieged defenses with his four-receiver aerial assault. But the Oilers never reached the Super Bowl, and they managed to be on the wrong end of the greatest playoff comeback in NFL history. Against the Buffalo Bills in the 1993 wild-card round, Moon threw four first-half touchdowns, but he wasn't able to burn the clock and the defense collapsed in the second half of a 41-38 loss. The Oilers became part of an even more ignominious moment the following year, when Buddy Ryan, Houston's defensive coordinator, punched the team's offensive coordinator in the face.  Ryan was no fan of the run-and-shoot, which he called the "chuck-and-duck." 

Eventually, a consensus formed around the league that a team couldn't win championships with the run-and-shoot, and teams abandoned the offense. Without a tight end or fullback, they said, the 'shoot was "finesse only" and lacked the physical element necessary to win.3 But not everyone agreed. When Hall of Fame safety Rod Woodson heard Houston had given up on the offense, he said: "Tell the owner thank you, and tell the front office thank you. The run-and-shoot got the Oilers where they are, and I think defenses all over the league are going to be very relieved when they hear about it." 

But the run-and-shoot went out of fashion for a reason. In a modern NFL full of tight ends and multiple formations, an offense that limits itself to one personnel grouping — whether it's four receivers and one running back or two running backs and a tight end — can't be successful. The run-and-shoot forced the Oilers, Lions, and Falcons to protect their quarterback with six players; without multiple looks, today's defenses would develop schemes to destroy those protections. Indeed, what killed the run-and-shoot wasn't the playoff failures or the perceived lack of physicality, but rather the zone blitz, which was designed to defuse the kind of six-man protection schemes that run-and-shoot teams used on every down. For a while, at least, everyone around football seemed to agree that the run-and-shoot had died and would never come back. 

But the run-and-shoot never left.

For My Wife

Who will love this.  So do I.  I laughed out loud watching it.  It took me a few seconds, after it started, to figure out what was going on.  But then I got it.  And it's pretty damn brilliant. Recommended in full screen.

"that, in fact, I think, is the great use of suffering"

One of the pleasures of reading Poetry magazine are its excellent critics.  This month's issue features two outstanding critical essays, one by Clive James on the relationship between poetry and craft and another, by Adam Kirsch, on the recently-issued second volume of T.S. Eliot's letters.  I've read four or five reviews of the letters so far and Kirsch's, I think, is the best.  

Of course, Eliot himself is the star of the review (as he should be).  I love both of these excerpts--the first for the power of the imagery ("regarding the world placidly through the fumes of an apertif"), the second for its wisdom and insight into human experience.  In two quotes, you see why Eliot was such a great poet (and why Kirsch is such a good critic).

"...it has often been noted how much Eliot had in common with Henry James—he noted it himself in his self-justifying letter to his mother. Prufrock, one might say, is a younger version of Lambert Strether, the protagonist of James’s novel The Ambassadors—a sexless man of letters, the editor of a mild New England literary magazine, who comes to Europe in late middle age and realizes that he has wasted his life. “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to,” Strether famously exhorts, and it is a mistake that Prufrock fears he cannot avoid: “Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,/Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?”

What made Eliot a great poet was the fact that in the crucial moment, he did find the strength to force a crisis. One of the most valuable and exciting achievements of theLetters is to document that moment, which came in the summer of 1915. After studying at Oxford, Eliot was expected to return to Harvard and finish his doctoral dissertation in philosophy. But as he wrote to his college friend, the poet Conrad Aiken, the prospect weighed on him like spiritual death:

I dread returning to Cambridge . . . and the people in Cambridge whom one fights against and who absorb one all the same. The great need is to know one’s own mind, and I don’t know that: whether I want to get married, and have a family, and live in America all my life, and compromise and conceal my opinions and forfeit my independence for the sake of my children’s future; or save my money and retire at fifty to a table on the boulevard, regarding the world placidly through the fumes of an aperitif at 5 PM—How thin either life seems!

He was willing to do anything, even wreck his life, in order to save it, as he hinted to Aiken in an earlier letter:

Does anything kill as petty worries do? And in America we worry all the time. That, in fact, is I think the great use of suffering, if it’s tragicsuffering—it takes you away from yourself—and petty suffering does exactly the reverse, and kills your inspiration. 

Bowie's Drum Sound, A New Web Site

I'm pleasantly shocked to discover a fantastic, completist Bowie site.  "Pushing Ahead of the Dame" features an intelligent, devoted Bowie scholar ("fan" seems too trivial a word for the effort manifested on his site) writing a critical history of every song Bowie has ever recorded.  It's not done yet (he's not reached the nineties) but all the major albums have already been discussed.  Highly, highly recommended.

Here, for Dez, is a discussion of Bowie's drum sound during "Low," a subject we debated, a little, a few months ago:

“Breaking Glass,” officially credited to Bowie, Murray and Davis, is the most compelling groove on the album, despite it being left in a something of an embryonic state. Murray holds the track together with his fingers: the thudding echoing of Davis’ drums in the intro/refrain, the rolling bassline under the verses, which becomes the lead instrument in the final, vocal-less verse that gets faded out. Alomar’s lead guitar (he also plays rhythm guitar, a drone that Alomar described as his attempt to sound like a Jew’s harp) gets a battlefield promotion to secondary vocalist. His opening pair of riffs, phrases echoing and answering each other, are a more melodic hook than anything Bowie sings. 

And Davis, who Visconti later called ‘the most original drummer I’ve ever worked with,” delivers beats that had never been on a Bowie record before: Low makes Ziggy Stardust sound like it was recorded on paper drums. (It’s as if he’s trying to imitate and yet outplay the synthetic drums on Cluster’s “Caramel”.) The trick was Visconti’s Eventide Harmonizer, which Visconti legendarily claimed “fucks with the fabric of time.” For Low, Visconti used the Harmonizer to sample the drum audio and, an instant later, echo the sound, but with the drums’ pitch dropped a semi-tone. Then Visconti, in his words, “added the feedback of this tone to itself.” So when Davis hit his snare drum, he heard in his headphones the “crack” but the following “thud” never stopped, it just deepened and deepened in tone. Visconti described the latter as sounding like a man struck in the stomach (forever). 

At first, Bowie was unsure about the distorted drum sound, so Visconti sneakily turned down the effect in the control room but kept it on in Davis’ headphones. So on “Glass” (and other Low tracks) Davis is dueting with his echo, in real time. He’s varying the power and length of his snare hits, especially on the one! one! one-two! one-two! pattern in the intro, and seems to be creating the massive synthesized, gated drum sound of ’80s pop music in the process.

This was also, to me, a revelation (I thought Fripp used an Ebow on "Heroes").

While most guitarists that took on “Heroes” had to use an Ebow to get Fripp’s sound, playing a sustained run of A notes, Fripp had worked out the feedback patterns on foot, literally. Standing in Hansa’s Studio 2, his guitar routed through Eno’s EMS synthesizer, Fripp marked with tape the places on the studio floor where he could get a feedback loop on any given note. So four feet away from his amp was an A, three feet away was a G, and so on. Fripp stepped and swayed through the song, his sound owed to a simple cartography.
Fripp ran through three takes, and the trebly nature of his playing (further distorted live by Eno’s EMS) meant that each solo on its own sounded thin and wavering. So Tony Visconti blended all three together, eventually bouncing them down to a single track, to achieve what Visconti called “a dreamy, floaty effect.”
 

"Haircuts I think are the undiscussed topic of our time"

I've written here often of my admiration and ongoing semi-obsession with Brian Eno. His thoughts on art, science, emergence theory and a whole lot of other fascinating junk can be read here. (It opens with a woman talking about totem poles, but that's equally fascinating.)

An excerpt, to whet the wombat:

There are really only four things you can do. You can repeat something. You can re-evaluate something that used to be there and you've now put a different value on it. You can leave something out, and you can put something new in. And putting something new, which is always considered to be the defining act of being an artist, is only one of four, I think. All those other four decisions are just as important. 

Of course, folk music and pop music apparently don't do very much of the latter one, of the innovation one. They are doing a lot of the other ones; they are reevaluating things that were around. They are choosing to leave something out, which can be a very important decision. They are looking again at what already exists; that's the definition of traditional and folk music. 

But because of our sort of enlightenment history of wanting to reward novelty we tend to favor, or dignify, or elevate the forms of art that specialize in novelty. And I think we tend to over-reward them actually, or rather we over-value them at the expense at those other conversational forms of art that are going around all the time around people or between people, like hairstyles, there is a popular art form that nobody talks about except me and a few hairdressers.

Monday, January Something or Another

The long weekend studying American History ends today with, sadly, Reconstruction.  Perhaps no topic in American History is less enjoyable to contemplate.  Dispirited, uninspiring people giving up on any chance of actually effecting the goals for which the Civil War was fought.  Drunkenness, pettiness, idiocy.  It's not going to be an exciting morning.

Above is a video I found on Browser.  I dedicate it to my Wife, who has to spend a lot of her life listening to presentations on Power Point.  I have not had that privilege, but my guess is that the video is accurate.  Feel free, my readers, to let me know if I'm wrong (or add in any missing bits).