Thursday, August 13, 2009
The angels sing in Echoplex harmony today ...
...Because Les Paul has left the studio.
A thousand times more influential than Michael Jackson could ever be, and he won't get one one thousanth the media coverage on his passing.
Rest ye well, sir. And thanks for billions of musical memories from
A thousand times more influential than Michael Jackson could ever be, and he won't get one one thousanth the media coverage on his passing.
Rest ye well, sir. And thanks for billions of musical memories from
millionsof musicians you touched.
Labels: Arts, culture, guitar, in memoriam, Music, music business, recording
Thursday, August 06, 2009
Freedom of Speech
In order to more fully portray the vileness of the assault on democracy being propogated by Nancy Pelosi and the White House communications office, I'm going to discuss it in the context of this great Norman Rockwell painting, Freedom of Speech.
The painting depicts a 1940s version of Everyman: a working man, by his tidy but informal presentation, and the lean strength of his frame. He could well be a farmer - Rockwell frequently portrayed Middle America in his art. Note the wear and tear on his hands - aged well beyond his face. The figure has a bill or program or agenda in his pocket, and is looked up to and apparently admired by the citizens - citizens - surrounding him, young and old alike.
The painting, for those who may not be aware, was one in a touching series of paintings depicting the Four Freedoms as constructed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Freedom from Fear, Freedom from Want, and Freedom of Worship were the others.
Now, when you or I see this painting, we see an admirable figure, a leader, a great American. We see a citizen speaking his mind, an American posessed of the God-given, inalienable right to freedom of expression. We see discourse and debate. We see what America is all about.
The modern Libtard, represented by Nancy Pelosi and the White House Press office, sees a manufactured mob.
This is pure poison. Pelosi and her enablers have simply declared rhetorical war not just on the Republican party, but on the electorate itself.
Their attitude is nothing short of a big 'F***k You' to the American people. I cannot overstate how vile and dangerous modern libtards are. They need to be opposed at every turn. They need to be made to feel the heat until they see the light, or driven from office. They are bigger enemies of America than McCarthy could ever dream of being. For all his faults, at least McCarthy loved his country and the things that made it great.
You and I look at this painting and see America.
Pelosi and Obama see a threat.
Splash, out
Jason
The painting depicts a 1940s version of Everyman: a working man, by his tidy but informal presentation, and the lean strength of his frame. He could well be a farmer - Rockwell frequently portrayed Middle America in his art. Note the wear and tear on his hands - aged well beyond his face. The figure has a bill or program or agenda in his pocket, and is looked up to and apparently admired by the citizens - citizens - surrounding him, young and old alike.
The painting, for those who may not be aware, was one in a touching series of paintings depicting the Four Freedoms as constructed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Freedom from Fear, Freedom from Want, and Freedom of Worship were the others.
Now, when you or I see this painting, we see an admirable figure, a leader, a great American. We see a citizen speaking his mind, an American posessed of the God-given, inalienable right to freedom of expression. We see discourse and debate. We see what America is all about.
The modern Libtard, represented by Nancy Pelosi and the White House Press office, sees a manufactured mob.
This is pure poison. Pelosi and her enablers have simply declared rhetorical war not just on the Republican party, but on the electorate itself.
Their attitude is nothing short of a big 'F***k You' to the American people. I cannot overstate how vile and dangerous modern libtards are. They need to be opposed at every turn. They need to be made to feel the heat until they see the light, or driven from office. They are bigger enemies of America than McCarthy could ever dream of being. For all his faults, at least McCarthy loved his country and the things that made it great.
You and I look at this painting and see America.
Pelosi and Obama see a threat.
Splash, out
Jason
Labels: Arts, culture, health care, Obama, Pelosi, Politics, Rockwell, The Left
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Credibility and Happy Days
From the wonderful Cynthia Yockey:
I agree.
I'm not one to want to destroy a career over a one-off joke. But I'm getting awfully tired of the libtards getting away with murder, and this idea that prominent libtards get into their heads that there is no accountability or consequence for their vilest public statements.
Letterman will be ok. He can go to cable TV, like Larry Shandling, or something. He's made his money. He'll be fine. And the Late Night show will be much, much better with almost anyone else in there. Letterman was never that funny to me.
Take him down.
Funny, because the other day on Althouse's blog, I commented that if I were Willow's dad, I would have publicly challenged Letterman to a duel. Then again, I'm old-fashioned that way.
It would have been hilarious watching Letterman weasel out of that one.
Splash, out
Jason
I did not watch the TV sitcom Happy Days very often, but one of the shows made a lasting impression on me. It encapsulates why all of us who are outraged at David Letterman’s vile rape jokes about 14-year-old Willow Palin and his unfunny, degrading remarks about her mother, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, must get this bully fired from his show on CBS.
As you may know, Happy Days was about the high school days of an all-American, clean-cut boy, Richie Cunningham, his family and clean-cut friends, and his family’s tenant, the motorcycle-riding, womanizing, leather-jacketed drop-out known as The Fonz, or Fonzi.
Well, in one show some bullies have been harassing Richie, so The Fonz meets him at the soda shop to teach him his technique for intimidating other tough guys out of beating him up. The Fonz demonstrates his technique by looking his opponents in the eye, getting angry and red in the face, and then furiously tearing off his jacket and throwing it down on the ground in order to prepare for the fight. At that point, his opponents look frightened and hurry away.
So, just as Richie is confronting his own tormentors and angrily taking off his letterman’s jacket, he and Fonzi note that the tormentors are unimpressed and stand their ground. Fonzi is startled by a flash of realization and pulls Richie aside and says, “I just remembered! For this to work, you must have once hit someone.”
Well, getting David Letterman fired is our version of scaring off future bullies by having once hit someone.
I agree.
I'm not one to want to destroy a career over a one-off joke. But I'm getting awfully tired of the libtards getting away with murder, and this idea that prominent libtards get into their heads that there is no accountability or consequence for their vilest public statements.
Letterman will be ok. He can go to cable TV, like Larry Shandling, or something. He's made his money. He'll be fine. And the Late Night show will be much, much better with almost anyone else in there. Letterman was never that funny to me.
Take him down.
Funny, because the other day on Althouse's blog, I commented that if I were Willow's dad, I would have publicly challenged Letterman to a duel. Then again, I'm old-fashioned that way.
It would have been hilarious watching Letterman weasel out of that one.
Splash, out
Jason
Labels: Arts, culture, International relations, Palin, Palin's Vagina, Television
Sunday, June 07, 2009
Apparently, women who teach child yoga classes for a living are having a hard time making ends meet.
Surely the end times are upon us.
This part's just precious:
Feuer’s ex-husband pays one-third of her rent, and she had been counting on the money from the after-school classes to pay her share for July and August. “I don’t know how I will make it through the summer,” she said in an e-mail message. The bottom of the note read, “Sent from my iPhone.” The call of semidesperation via a high-tech status symbol is an emblem of the gap between the past and the present for many of urban America’s self-employed.
Wow. Looks like a reject from the Overwriters' Anonymous meeting. George Will, Call your office!
Most businesses fail. She is fortunate, in that she only has a few grand in capital investment in the business. I talked to several retail business owners this week who aren't sure how they'll make it through the summer, and each of them are sitting on inventory worth upwards of six figures.
Some, I think, will pull through, with a little luck, assuming their loans don't get called in a hurry. Others need to be put out of their misery before they destroy their owners' lives even more.
Speaking as a former freelance writer, I can relate, and I love folks who do this kind of independent work. But they aren't really entrepreneurs - which is why so few freelance writers can write articles that real entrepreneurs - the kind who understand capital investment, intrinsic value, leverage, asset protection, insurance, liability and exit plans can understand.
Oh, geez... of course! The writer is Emily Bazelon! A well-known liberal! No wonder she doesn't understand!
A freelance writer has a lot of freedom. But with just a few exceptions, they have jobs, not businesses. Your occupation pays you only so long as you work in it. Once you quit, you have nothing to show for it but a thick portfolio that no no one will pay you for. No exit value, no useable book to sell, no residual income, no way for a successor to pick up where you left off.
They create jobs, not businessess. So these are freelance workers, not really independent business owners. THey have some of the BENEFITS of owning one's own business - the freedom to control one's hours and working environment. And potentially they may gain some tax advantages (but at lower income levels, those aren't REALLY worth that much). But for all their efforts and freedoms, they aren't really creating anything of lasting value for themselves.
Every freelance writer, graphic designer, programmer, or artist should read a book called the E-Myth.
Chris Jagers notices the same confusion I did.
Well, yes. As a freelance commercial writer with a strong financial industry specialty, I billed out significantly higher on an hourly basis or per-word basis than I did on staff. Why do you think people hire staff writers??? When work slows down, I was way more expensive than a staff writer, so I didn't get the call. Them's the breaks. And all the freedom I had to work at Starbucks or from a lawn chair at the beach (and yes, I did both!) comes with a trade-off.
You can always tell a libtard because their underlying assumption is that tradeoffs like this don't exist in a real economy - and so when the tradeoffs actually DO rear their ugly head, they get smacked in the face by the surprise, and then they write articles for the New York Times magazine describing the tradeoffs that are immediately and intuitively obvious to all right-thinking individuals from the very beginning, thinking they have some magnificent insight.
Meanwhile, everyone who's ever even THOUGHT seriously about making a payroll skips right past their drivel.
Good God, Katz! Why on earth would it be? You COULDN'T set up such a system if you tried. The adverse selection would be off the charts! These independent contractors are SOLELY responsible for their own employment and their own business development. If it were possible to construct some kind of unemployment insurance for these people, the New York Freelancer's Union has the economy of scale to do it. Let them try. Jeebus. Will someone whack these libtards with a clue bat already!?
Brilliant. Let's make a name for it. I suggest we call it "savings."
You know, I have a theory - that any conservative needs to have 30 IQ points on a liberal in order to land an equivalent job. Take Megan McArdle, for instance. Megan's not perfect, and I've seen her screw up in print. But she's easily got 20 or 30 IQ points on 90 percent of the other blogger/journalists who write in her space - and has a much stronger background. But she's not a reflexive liberal. If she had the same views she has now, but wrote with the same sloppiness as the liberals there (and everywhere else)[*cough cough* SULLIVAN!!! *cough cough*], she would have been given her walking papers.
I see the same thing with journalism all over the place... Conservatives have to play major league level ball to get the same bylines and gigs as intellectually-slovenly liberals who have next to no experience outside of college.
If this 31 year old kid now responsible for GM were a conservative, he'd be grunting it out proofreading documents for a law firm in DC and fetching coffee for the partners. But he's a liberal, so he gets whisked up to the stratosphere.
But back to our regularly scheduled train wreck:
I think I'm beginning to see the problem!
Now THAT is a fine statistic, and some fine reporting by Miss Bazelon! More like this, please! You'll make any editor proud.
Bottom line, though ... If you're on food stamps, and you live in New York, and you have a baby girl, and you're on track to make 15,000 this year, and last year, you only made 30% more than that... how on earth did you think you could afford an iPhone?
Ah. All your friends had one. It's part of the the independent contractors/creative workers' uniform.
Maybe I should send this woman a copy of the E-Myth, and a copy of The Millionaire Next Door. Or send them to Emily Bazelon.
I wonder if she'd read them?
I wonder if she's ready to understand them?
Splash, out
Jason
Surely the end times are upon us.
When Feuer started teaching yoga four and a half years ago, when she was 38, it seemed like the perfect entree to a life of free agency. Feuer spent most of her 30s working for her husband’s goth record label doing publicity and promotion. When they divorced in 2005, she wanted a job that gave her some of the same independence that he had. “I’d watched my husband go into business for himself, and I felt like I could do it, too,” she said.
Yoga gave her the same pure, elated feeling as dance, which she had done professionally in her 20s. She spent $4,000 on a 200-hour yoga training course — paid for with a home-equity loan — and then more to specialize in prenatal, mommy-baby and kids classes. Many of her prenatal students came back to thank her after giving birth. She could pick up classes from a half-dozen studios, gyms and schools, and she could arrange her schedule around the needs of her son, Sasha, who is almost 7. Since Feuer did not work full time for any employer, no one gave her health insurance or other benefits. But she earned between $35 and $65 a class, and students paid more for private sessions.
This part's just precious:
Feuer’s ex-husband pays one-third of her rent, and she had been counting on the money from the after-school classes to pay her share for July and August. “I don’t know how I will make it through the summer,” she said in an e-mail message. The bottom of the note read, “Sent from my iPhone.” The call of semidesperation via a high-tech status symbol is an emblem of the gap between the past and the present for many of urban America’s self-employed.
Wow. Looks like a reject from the Overwriters' Anonymous meeting. George Will, Call your office!
Freelancers still have the trappings of middle-class entrepreneurship. But the downturn is eating away at their livelihoods and the identity they thought they chose when they decided to work for themselves.
Most businesses fail. She is fortunate, in that she only has a few grand in capital investment in the business. I talked to several retail business owners this week who aren't sure how they'll make it through the summer, and each of them are sitting on inventory worth upwards of six figures.
Some, I think, will pull through, with a little luck, assuming their loans don't get called in a hurry. Others need to be put out of their misery before they destroy their owners' lives even more.
Speaking as a former freelance writer, I can relate, and I love folks who do this kind of independent work. But they aren't really entrepreneurs - which is why so few freelance writers can write articles that real entrepreneurs - the kind who understand capital investment, intrinsic value, leverage, asset protection, insurance, liability and exit plans can understand.
Oh, geez... of course! The writer is Emily Bazelon! A well-known liberal! No wonder she doesn't understand!
A freelance writer has a lot of freedom. But with just a few exceptions, they have jobs, not businesses. Your occupation pays you only so long as you work in it. Once you quit, you have nothing to show for it but a thick portfolio that no no one will pay you for. No exit value, no useable book to sell, no residual income, no way for a successor to pick up where you left off.
They create jobs, not businessess. So these are freelance workers, not really independent business owners. THey have some of the BENEFITS of owning one's own business - the freedom to control one's hours and working environment. And potentially they may gain some tax advantages (but at lower income levels, those aren't REALLY worth that much). But for all their efforts and freedoms, they aren't really creating anything of lasting value for themselves.
Every freelance writer, graphic designer, programmer, or artist should read a book called the E-Myth.
Chris Jagers notices the same confusion I did.
The instability of freelancing isn’t new. Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist, points out that the share of workers who have standard full-time jobs with benefits has been shrinking since the 1980s. But in the past, temporary and on-call workers — everyone from data-entry employees to construction workers — were hit hardest by downturns.
Well, yes. As a freelance commercial writer with a strong financial industry specialty, I billed out significantly higher on an hourly basis or per-word basis than I did on staff. Why do you think people hire staff writers??? When work slows down, I was way more expensive than a staff writer, so I didn't get the call. Them's the breaks. And all the freedom I had to work at Starbucks or from a lawn chair at the beach (and yes, I did both!) comes with a trade-off.
You can always tell a libtard because their underlying assumption is that tradeoffs like this don't exist in a real economy - and so when the tradeoffs actually DO rear their ugly head, they get smacked in the face by the surprise, and then they write articles for the New York Times magazine describing the tradeoffs that are immediately and intuitively obvious to all right-thinking individuals from the very beginning, thinking they have some magnificent insight.
Meanwhile, everyone who's ever even THOUGHT seriously about making a payroll skips right past their drivel.
Meanwhile, unemployment insurance is still largely structured as it was when the system was instituted during the Depression. “Unemployment insurance was designed in 1935 to give temporary support to the classic male laid-off worker,” Katz says. “It’s not set up for the circumstances we see today, with a lot of people freelancing.”
Good God, Katz! Why on earth would it be? You COULDN'T set up such a system if you tried. The adverse selection would be off the charts! These independent contractors are SOLELY responsible for their own employment and their own business development. If it were possible to construct some kind of unemployment insurance for these people, the New York Freelancer's Union has the economy of scale to do it. Let them try. Jeebus. Will someone whack these libtards with a clue bat already!?
At the Freelancers Union, Sara Horowitz is pushing for a new kind of unemployment protection fund that would cover the self-employed by helping them put away money that they could draw on in times of need.
Brilliant. Let's make a name for it. I suggest we call it "savings."
You know, I have a theory - that any conservative needs to have 30 IQ points on a liberal in order to land an equivalent job. Take Megan McArdle, for instance. Megan's not perfect, and I've seen her screw up in print. But she's easily got 20 or 30 IQ points on 90 percent of the other blogger/journalists who write in her space - and has a much stronger background. But she's not a reflexive liberal. If she had the same views she has now, but wrote with the same sloppiness as the liberals there (and everywhere else)[*cough cough* SULLIVAN!!! *cough cough*], she would have been given her walking papers.
I see the same thing with journalism all over the place... Conservatives have to play major league level ball to get the same bylines and gigs as intellectually-slovenly liberals who have next to no experience outside of college.
If this 31 year old kid now responsible for GM were a conservative, he'd be grunting it out proofreading documents for a law firm in DC and fetching coffee for the partners. But he's a liberal, so he gets whisked up to the stratosphere.
But back to our regularly scheduled train wreck:
In April, Lisa Feuer sent me another message from her iPhone: “I’m at the food-stamp office now, waiting.” For months, she had been putting off this trip. Feuer’s grandparents were Jews who immigrated to the United States from Vienna in 1939. She grew up in a small town in Illinois, where her parents taught public school. She has an undergraduate degree, having majored in sociology as well as Russian and Eastern European studies, and a master’s in multimedia arts.
I think I'm beginning to see the problem!
Venkatesh is picking up this kind of unexpected neediness in his research. He has four welfare caseworkers around the city who keep track of the clients who come in to ask about public assistance. “I wanted to understand whether ‘nontraditional’ welfare clients started to file paperwork,” Venkatesh wrote in an e-mail message. “Nontraditional means white, for Manhattan.” In 2005, the caseworkers reported that 5 percent of those who came to their offices were white. This year, the percentage has jumped to 26 percent.
Now THAT is a fine statistic, and some fine reporting by Miss Bazelon! More like this, please! You'll make any editor proud.
Bottom line, though ... If you're on food stamps, and you live in New York, and you have a baby girl, and you're on track to make 15,000 this year, and last year, you only made 30% more than that... how on earth did you think you could afford an iPhone?
Ah. All your friends had one. It's part of the the independent contractors/creative workers' uniform.
Maybe I should send this woman a copy of the E-Myth, and a copy of The Millionaire Next Door. Or send them to Emily Bazelon.
I wonder if she'd read them?
I wonder if she's ready to understand them?
Splash, out
Jason
Labels: Arts, bloggers, Economics, economy, Emily Bazelon, finance, labor, The Left
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Susan Boyle, Considered
My review, crossposted from a comment thread on Althouse:
The raw talent is extraordinary. I think there's no doubt about that. I was also impressed by the emotional range between Cry Me a River and the song she sang on BGT.
She hasn't yet tapped the talent she has. I suspect she can be much, much better.
The Le Miz song was probably not the right song to showcase her talent. As someone here mentioned, her voice vanishes in the low registers. This song has a lot of riches to be mined in those parts, and as a listener and musician, I'm always more interested in what a singer or musician does in the low registers and quiet moments than in the crescendos.
All singers crescendo alike. Especially on talent shows.
I think she could get a good deal more power out of her lower range, with some training. She uses her 'head voice' a lot, but she's not harnessing her abdominal power to push those notes through.
She tends to sing on the sharp side of the note. That's not a terrible thing in some instances. A lot of singers do it. It can help you stand out from an ensemble. Concert violinists will tune to A = 442 instead of 440 for this reason. It gives you a bit of sparkle.
But she should be aware of what she's doing.
If I were coaching her, I'd work to develop the ear just a bit to rein in her tendency to go sharp, wean her away from relying exclusively on her head voice, in order to give her some gas in the low registers. I'd look for material that better matches her range. (I think she might have some headroom left on the top. We haven't heard her full range on the topside yet.)
I'd also encourage her to depart a bit more from the usual Broadway sound. All those folks use the same vibrato, they use their head voice too much, and they all sound alike these days.
Back before contact mikes, you couldn't get away with the headvoice. You had to reach the floor mic, or no mic at all. The head voice didn't cut it. Singers had to nail it from the diaphram.
Then came the contact mics, and weaker singers could get bigger roles. In Ethel Merman's day, some of these people would still be in the chorus.
In baseball terms, she' a good AA ballplayer, with a good fastball. But a lot of kids can throw hard.
To hit the bigs, a good pitching coach needs to help her get the ball over the plate, and teach her a big league slider.
Splash, out
Jason
The raw talent is extraordinary. I think there's no doubt about that. I was also impressed by the emotional range between Cry Me a River and the song she sang on BGT.
She hasn't yet tapped the talent she has. I suspect she can be much, much better.
The Le Miz song was probably not the right song to showcase her talent. As someone here mentioned, her voice vanishes in the low registers. This song has a lot of riches to be mined in those parts, and as a listener and musician, I'm always more interested in what a singer or musician does in the low registers and quiet moments than in the crescendos.
All singers crescendo alike. Especially on talent shows.
I think she could get a good deal more power out of her lower range, with some training. She uses her 'head voice' a lot, but she's not harnessing her abdominal power to push those notes through.
She tends to sing on the sharp side of the note. That's not a terrible thing in some instances. A lot of singers do it. It can help you stand out from an ensemble. Concert violinists will tune to A = 442 instead of 440 for this reason. It gives you a bit of sparkle.
But she should be aware of what she's doing.
If I were coaching her, I'd work to develop the ear just a bit to rein in her tendency to go sharp, wean her away from relying exclusively on her head voice, in order to give her some gas in the low registers. I'd look for material that better matches her range. (I think she might have some headroom left on the top. We haven't heard her full range on the topside yet.)
I'd also encourage her to depart a bit more from the usual Broadway sound. All those folks use the same vibrato, they use their head voice too much, and they all sound alike these days.
Back before contact mikes, you couldn't get away with the headvoice. You had to reach the floor mic, or no mic at all. The head voice didn't cut it. Singers had to nail it from the diaphram.
Then came the contact mics, and weaker singers could get bigger roles. In Ethel Merman's day, some of these people would still be in the chorus.
In baseball terms, she' a good AA ballplayer, with a good fastball. But a lot of kids can throw hard.
To hit the bigs, a good pitching coach needs to help her get the ball over the plate, and teach her a big league slider.
Splash, out
Jason
Monday, April 06, 2009
Fiddle blogging
The great John Hartford.
The Force was strong with this one.
The Force was strong with this one.
Labels: Arts, culture, fiddle blogging, fiddles
Sunday, April 05, 2009
Guitar blogging
Pepe Romero,
Recuerdos de la Alhambra.
The sound isn't the greatest, but crank up the speakers, find a quiet place, and listen in. It's worth the effort.
Watch him wring every last drop of music from every note. Masterful. This is how it's done, kids.
Splash, out
Jason
Recuerdos de la Alhambra.
The sound isn't the greatest, but crank up the speakers, find a quiet place, and listen in. It's worth the effort.
Watch him wring every last drop of music from every note. Masterful. This is how it's done, kids.
Splash, out
Jason
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Fiddle blogging
Two reels from the great Chicago player Liz Carroll:
Also, for a more subtle beauty, don't miss this beautiful slow reel.
Also, for a more subtle beauty, don't miss this beautiful slow reel.
Labels: Arts, fiddle blogging, fiddles, Music
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
The definitive movie on the war in Iraq
Tuesday, March 03, 2009
Cool military photoshops of famous paintings
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
I felt bad because I had no shoes...
...until I met a man who had no feet.
...So I asked him, "got any shoes you're not using?"
Splash, out
Jason
...So I asked him, "got any shoes you're not using?"
Splash, out
Jason
Sunday, March 18, 2007
The Persian Mirror looks at '300'
