Louis C.K. has done a bit for a number of years called ‘Hilarious’. Basically he talks about how hyperbolic everything speaks these days. Every joke is ‘hilarious’. Any event even mildly interesting is ‘amazing’. And then, of course, he spends five minutes giving an ever escalating series of penalties and tortures for offenders. Prog rockers? Epic, of course! But my pet peeve is ‘awesome’; which Webster’s describes as ‘inspiring awe.’

As Louis so rightly points out, if you start with everything on the top shelf, there’s no place left to go.

The thing that wears one down after a while, in any kind of modern music is the constant pounding. The lack of contrast.

COMPARE AND CONTRAST

One reason I always jumped at the chance to play Cuban music was the huge contrasts. There’s no drum set, so the bottom is held down by a guy playing a double bass (typically this old thing called an Ampeg Baby Bass, which is made out of aircraft plastic.) And unlike pop music, the bass […]

N.B. It has been pointed out recently that if possible, I am ranting even more psychotically than usual. I blame it on the weather… which in Seattle and Dublin has been the most crappest in perhaps a century. There hasn’t been more than 48 hours of straight FUCKIN’ SUN all year. And I can’t take much more of this. Even the littlest things drive me nuts. For example, right now some schmuck conductor is waving his arms and taking the Brandenburg #5 -way- too fast and I want to find him and stick his snippy little baton right up his ARSE for ruining my Chi. This whole global warming thing has come at a really inconvenient moment and I’m fairly well put out.

I can no longer hide it: I hate Harry Potter. Always have. I’ve tried to avoid coming out about it, but I can’t take it any more. I rant a lot about the decline of culture and the whole Nietschean weakening of humanity. And yeah, people like […]

The other day I was listening to the local NPR station (I’m being purposely vague, simply because I don’t want this to come across as a schpritz against the individuals or the institution. The points I wish to raise are generic.)

Moving right along. So the generic local events host was chatting with the generic local movie reviewer and he was recommending to her a DVD TV series that had just been released (apparently there a new Dr. Who emerged from The Tardis.) And he just happens to mention how he had ‘loved it since he first saw it last year.’ Which the show host thought was odd because—get this, the movie reviewer is quite fond of mentioning that he disdains ownership of a TV (trés Seattle.) So, she happens to wonder… how does the guy watch the show a year before it’s released on DVD? Bittorent of course. And what was intriguing is how off-handed he was about it. If the generic show host hadn’t mentioned it (delicately of course–one […]

I’ve been scanning all kinds of old music of mine… exercises… articles. Getting rid of pounds of old sheets. And I have mixed feelings about it. Although it’s great to be, as Travis Bickle would say, ‘organisized’, there’s a lot to be said for being surrounded by books and papers—literally stumbling across things to read as you try to find what you’re really looking for. But again, it’s important to have a clean desk.

Now there’s a lot of talk these days about a ‘filter bubble’ and an ‘echo chamber’. For example:

The Filter Bubble.

And I know what this guy is talking about. I see this all the time now with friends, fans, co-workers. It’s getting easier and easier to not only be isolated from what’s really going on, but also to be exploited by this insularity; to be a tool of ‘the man’ in a very Huxley kinda way.

And the more one goes paperless; the more one relies on the computer as a single portal for information, the […]

Just listening to Brahms 2nd Piano Concerto. Coincidentally, there’s this pretentious guy from the New York Times on the radio who has the snotty ones to rank The Ten Greatest Composers Of All Time!. What a prat. (And note my envy. He’s getting paid to do something I do all the time. But I’d never have the snotty ones to rank them. At least not in public. Unless I was getting paid, of course.)

But then it got me thinking about losing a few pounds. Because the next thing on the radio is a story about how America has the fattest people on the planet. (Curse you BBC! Thou enabler of all things ADD!)

So we’re all fat, right? OK… everyone but you.

And the reason we’re fat is because our bodies were not genetically designed for all the abundance we have at hand. By now we all get that, even as we reach for that next Ho Ho. We’re wired to look for that sugary goodness. And it’s so easy to […]