"Off the Wall" is Deemed Not to Suck

After you play something, you've got to listen to it and perhaps many times depending on how many stab wounds you want to put into yourself.  I've listened to "Off the Wall" multiple times and the lead guitar is not loud enough but I'm ok with it.  I want it to scream but I don't want it to pierce and the latter has been a problem.  You know I can get a much better mix in recording independent tracks but I want it live.   It's on the Ride the Dragon podcast:  Off the Wall (free).

Yesterday I said the audio sucks but really it doesn't.  It's not at all a studio recording but I wasn't trying to make one.  The density of the backing loop is something of extremely high interest to me and I'm curious to know what looper Voodoo uses as he seems to have quite high flexibility in bringing phrases and/or loop segments in and out of it.  Those are the bits that layer up to make the loop.

Yevette heard the set from the other room and she said there was something she really liked.  Um, "Off the Wall" wasn't it.  Maybe there will be time to look for it today.

After all these years, the Galaxy Guitar is closer to sounding like what I always wanted from a guitar than anything ever has.  It seems the colors it can paint are limitless but the touch is crucial.  She is not a sissy girl who just wants to hold hands and look at ducks.  You won't hurt her and she wants you to show her the power before she will come out to meet it.  This is important anywhere on the neck but it is absolutely crucial when you get high up.  If you are timid or afraid, you will die.  Now that is one bad-ass female!

Complex arrangements don't particularly interest me just now.  What I want is to bust through the Gateway with some simple chords and then stay there.  How long it's cool to stay there depends on how much you repeat yourself.  Some repetition is necessary and some is blindingly beautiful but too much is boring.

For the total musical mindfuck, there's when you ask if you listen to it because it's good or just because you did it.  You can amuse yourself all day asking that one.


One thing I did edit was to remove the build-up segment from the tune.  To make a loop, first play some piano, then bass, then maybe some angel voices, then some clean guitar chords, blah blah.  Even for a short loop that can take a long time.  The only other choice is to pre-record it but then it's not live so that's a balance to make.  Some kind of variation of this will definitely come up in the show tonight so we'll see.


For any SL show, I've been using Cat's audio stream as it's exceptionally reliable, etc.  However, it wouldn't be ok to put the URL on the open Internet as I'm not the only one who uses it.  Therefore, I'm seeing some value in getting another stream as then I could post it here and if you are interested to listen, you could tune into it via iTunes, WinJam, etc.  You wouldn't see my studly avatar but I imagine you would survive.

Hot for Teacher

The Vatican had for a long time pretty much of a lock on the attention for pedophilia but that has shifted in recent years.  These days there are so many female teachers banging students that you'd think they're running for Homecoming Queen.  There has been a quite diverse stream of reports of women doing this.  It's a most unusual phenomenon as some are married and quite good-looking.  Why in the world would such a woman want to nail a sixteen-year-old boy.

All this rubbish about rape is Washingtonian hogwash and it will get a laugh out of any man who hears about it with the typical response being that I sure wish I had been raped like that in high school.

Now is she just a walking, talking bundle of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or what.  She was ballin' a fifteen-year-old boy.  Obviously, his life was ruined.

So you've got your basic class of mutant pedophiles who are so sexually-inadequate that they have to find the most vulnerable and defenseless 'partners' and they go for infants and children.  You can't do anything but stab these ones as they will never stop doing it.  (No, I don't recommend the death penalty but these ones are really, really sick and no amount of rehabilitation will cure it nor has it ever.  Therapy may make them safe (possibly) but jail may even make them worse.)

The Hot for Teacher class is very different from the mutant pedophiles.  It probably comes from some sexual inadequacy as well, tho.  Maybe Gloria has something in her dirty little mind and Dagwood is too wimpy to bring it up on his own but Gloria really wants it and can't bring herself to tell him.  Maybe then she thinks I'll get me a Junior because he'll do any damn thing I want.  Possible, I suppose.

So the remarkable thing isn't so much that it happens but rather that it happens so much.  The woman in the pic is just the latest in quite an impressive stream of them.  What it tells me is that a lot of men are, erm, falling down on the job.  But so are women who don't tell them about it as sexual telepathy still isn't generally effective.  Dagwood doesn't have much of a chance if she doesn't tell him.  However, if Dagwood follows a rule given to us by Richard Pryor, he may be able to survive:  "If she ain't sleepin', you got some more fuckin' to do."

The pity of it is that these women get destroyed when they get caught.  They haven't done such a terrible foul but their careers will go, likely a marriage, if any, will go, their money will go, their stuff will go and all for something that will likely make the kid smile every time he thinks about it.

All of this is quite different for men, tho.  When an older man takes advantage of a position of authority to have a teenage girl, there is a different problem.  It's very easy for such a man to beguile a young girl and any other man knows it.  The situation is not the same as the young girl is falling in love whereas the young boy in the Hot for Teacher scenario only wants to get laid.  In the one case Hot for Teacher is manipulating his wanker and in the other the Stud Professor is manipulating her mind.  These are vastly different crimes and need to be addressed from those perspectives.

The story struck me because she looks something like the Fantasy French Teacher from my high school days.  I did some teenage calculation and saw there were no girls on the football field so therefore they must be gay.  There were lots of girls in the French class so therefore this was a good place to be.  The teacher in the French class was maybe twenty-eight and looked something like Hot for Teacher above and sometimes she would wear this slinky black number and ... excuse me, please.  I'll be back in a minute.

Michi Renoir and Reis and Aldo at Cat's Art MusikCircus

There is very little I can write about Maestro Michi Renoir that I have not written already.  Although his set was completely different from the week before, this is what he does.  I admire tremendously his ability to improvise his entire set and I've no doubt I'll be admiring of that skill every time I hear him play.

Hopefully telling you about Michi will encourage you to come to hear him as he is an excellent representation of what Second Life music can be.  There's so much publicity for second-rate karaoke crap but that's trivial and will never push any new form of anything.  Michi Renoir, however, never does anything else.  Every single time he plays, he pushes for newer, better, and more transporting than what he played before.

Michi owns 'sagenhaft' as his name is the first word I think when I hear it.  'Sagenhaft' (pronounced sah-gen-huft) means fabulous or amazing and that's precisely the word I need to describe him.  Try the word only don't say it like you're Colonel Klink, let it roll off your tongue like you actually enjoy the sound.  It's describing something good so feel that.

Michi ist sagenhaft!

Ja!



With Reis and Aldo, it's much the same as with Michi Renoir as there's not much I can tell you.  I do know they will playing live in Italy somewhere next week so it will be two weeks before they return to Cat's MusikCircus.  Of all the performers I've met in SL, Reis and Aldo probably have the most active RL performance schedule with live gigs and out-of-town recording sessions.  See Aldo Brizzi's Web site for more on his musical collaborations:  Aldo Brizzi

Reis sings some of their songs in what my limited terminology would be a 'high soprano' and this sounds like something that would never work against the deep, deep bass and percussion Aldo is giving us but it's perfectly natural and perfectly beautiful when you hear it.  Reis is a lovely Brazilian woman so don't you worry about her singing low and sexy when she likes but it's an extraordinary thing when she goes high and Aldo goes low.

One thing you know for sure will change every week is Reis' stage costume.  She finds the most spectacular ones I have ever seen and you can see what she does with them.  As always, Aldo backs her and wears his business suit.  It's a cool business suit, tho ... of course it's Italian.

"Mormon Sex and Brine Shrimp" - Reverend Silas T Sasquatch (video) - NSFW

Let's dedicate this one to Andrea as she probably thinks I have forgotten about her.  She was a great fan of Sasquatch so here he rides again ... with Mormons and brine shrimp.

The Day We Fight Back

Today is a day of world-wide rejection of the arrogance of the behavior of the U.S. in general and the NSA specifically:

General Keith Alexander did nothing to make America what it is as that came to us from Thomas Jefferson.  I have not seen one damn thing from General Alexander that it any way supports anything I ever read from Jefferson.  The choice is yours.

The Ditto Looper

Learning of the kit others use can save you a bunch of money either in showing you hardware that would work well for you or reminding that, damn, I'm sure glad I didn't buy that piece of junk.  Loopers are fascinating to me as I very much appreciate the technology but it varies tremendously from one unit to another.

My choice for a looper is the Boss RC-50 which has now been replaced by the Boss RC-300.  The newer model didn't strike me as radically different from the original so I'd look for a used RC-50 for cheap if I were shopping.  This unit is characteristic of the high-end loopers with a billion buttons and knobs on them.

The Ditto looper is an alternative to devices that require a PhD before you can even look at them.  It only has one button on it.  If you have been saying loopers are too complicated, this one might be your answer.  It doesn't have the capability of a multi-phrase looper but only the best will use multiple phrases anyway.

There's one disadvantage to the Ditto is that it's tiny.  While there are some aspects of coolness to that, the problem is that you have to put it on a pedalboard or it will be flying around like Dumbo in a windstorm.  It's a minor concern and I raise it because I don't have a pedalboard and don't want one.  I use multi-function devices so I don't need a pedalboard.  There are all kinds of arguments one can make in favor of doing it one way or the other but they are boring and will make your teeth itch.

The Ditto looks like a fairly cool gadget, particularly if you're just starting with looping.  Lefty Unplugged uses one so there's your pro endorsement.  I've heard him use it multiple times and I can tell you it works smoothly, quietly, and effectively.  You can get one for about $130 US from Guitar Center, etc.  For feature / function / price comparison, you might want to check it out in comparison with a Boss RC-2 which you will find is more expensive and very much less elegant.

"Off the Wall" - Silas Scarborough (audio podcast)

Probably you think I'm a good distance off the wall already so anything I consider "Off the Wall" will probably be expected to be a little strange.  So it goes with this one.  The chords / structure / beat are simple and are very similar to "For Shan Chard" from some weeks ago but that aspect of it doesn't, at the moment, interest me that much.  The object is to get through the gateway and stay there as long as possible.  If we do it right, maybe we don't have to come back.

I'm not interested in lyrics to tell you where we're going as you've been around, you already know.  I'm not interested in some clever chord changes to bring you up to this anthem bit in the middle.  I don't care about posterity or MTV.  This is about getting there now and being there with you.  What happens tomorrow is irrelevant.

I want to know every color a note can possibly be and there will be difficulties doing that as, well, amplifiers will blow up, etc.  I'm not exaggerating as I couldn't even count the number of amplifiers I've destroyed in my life.

"Off the Wall" is very much an attempt to find all the colors but the trick is that adding them all together just makes white and then you've got "The Partridge Family" with the music that killed David Cassidy.  (He isn't really dead but he's a lost drunk.  He flipped when a girl died at one of his concerts and it wasn't at all his fault but the fact that it happened really hammered him.)

(Ed:  can we fast forward to the part where you say the audio sucked?)

Quite so.  Yes, the audio sucked but it's for me a tolerable level of suckage so I put it up on the Ride the Dragon podcast.

When I was sixteen or seventeen, I wanted to know what music looks like.  At different points in my life I've tried devising systems that would work toward this but all would have been so violently expensive that there was no sense in continuing.  I do believe it is possible to see music and I will keep trying to find the best way to do it.


Geeks only beyond this point

There are many music visualizers but the ones I've seen, for the most part, are simple waveform analyzers that typically generate some type of kaleidoscopic color pattern.  That's pretty but there's no intelligence.  Even if each 'music image' generator is driven only by one instrument, it still won't know what note was played.  (If you're an ultra-geek with a lot of money and want to contest that last, there's room for discussion but it's not the point.)

If you capture the MIDI traffic from any MIDI-compatible instrument, you'll get as close as possible to a definitive, machine-readable definition of the note.  With this information, you can compare what has been played previously to whatever depth you think is musically useful and then you can make a 'judgment' on the 'quality' of this note.  This drives the decision logic as to what type of display will be presented next.  Almost all instruments have MIDI counterparts so this means the entire band could be represented through independent graphics processors which, for the huge investor, could be fed to a common graphics processor for the overall 'view' of the music.

Unless you're ready to put at least a million bucks on the table, there wouldn't be any point in even dealing the cards.  I'm dead serious and I can do it.  I have decades experience as a large-scale project manager.  Although I have no intention of doing any programming, I've written machine code for multiple platforms up to IBM z/OS.

So, you don't think there's a market.

Let's review:  every old geezer rock'n'roller who can still stagger onto a cruise ship is going off to the Caribbean with the Baltimore Bridge Club or whatever to do those rock the islands cruises.  They spend more money on those boats than the first Pope spent on the Vatican so do believe they can afford to put high-tech visuals around them.  When the other boat just has big-screen videos of the stage and your boat has the ultra-video from Music You Can See, who are you going to call.

Untolerable Bohemian Does One Hell of a Fine Job at Cat's Art MusikCircus

You've seen multiple reports I've written about Untolerable Bohemian's performances but this was, hands down, the best so far.  His electric guitar has been hovering in the background for some time and we did hear it recently ... but ... last night Untolerable came out to play.  For well over half an hour he was getting into one jam groove after the other and going off into explorations.  That may seem like he did a lot of tunes but that isn't what I mean.  Actually he did four or five pieces but all of them flowed with the same kind of exploratory vibe and it was excellent.

Introspection has been given a dirty name by social networks.  In fact, introspection is now synonymous with the self-adoring / self-pitying crap on social networks but what it really means is something you already understand or you wouldn't be here.  Untolerable's play last night was highly introspective and it was fantastic.  This isn't about self-absorption but rather about opening a gateway to another world.

Singing is very important to Untolerable and I don't know how he will weave that into his original jams but that's a challenge before him as a musician and ours is to listen and enjoy.  For my part, I want to encourage as much as I possibly can what Untolerable was doing last night as I considered it some profoundly beautiful musicianship.

Musical Meandering in a Mellifluous Midnight Melange

No, of course that title doesn't mean anything, Dagwood.  When you smoke cheap reefer, strange things happen.  However, I haven't smoked any cheap Texas reefer today so maybe it really does mean something.

I played for about an hour and a half last night.  There was nothing scheduled but someone was a bit bummed over various things.  That someone was not me as last night I had smoked some cheap Texas reefer.  Since I could not share any of the cheap Texas reefer with my friend, my next thought was to get loud and blow stuff up.  Even when you are miserable, explosions are cool to watch.

Estimating the suckage in my music is close to impossible.  I haven't even a small idea of what people think of it.  People rarely say anything and you can see from the blog that no-one ever writes anything.  One saving grace is that no-one ever says YOU RAWK when I play as there would be no choice after hearing that other than setting the guitar afire and then stabbing myself with a fork.

Nope, I'm not whining, it's just an unusual state of existence.  The only answer is to play whatever the hell you like and hopefully people will stay to listen to it.  They did last night and that seriously is the number one measure for me of my musical suckage.  If they stay maybe I don't suck but if they leave then I definitely do.  If they stay, you still don't really know whether you suck but there is at least a chance that you don't.

I listened to part of the recording for the show and thought, yep, you suck.  Yevette said it didn't suck ... but she is biased.  I will try to listen to it when I get back later ... or I'll take a nap before the shows by Michi Renoir / Reis and Aldo this afternoon / evening.

There will also be a report later about Untolerable Bohemian's show last night at the MusikCircus as he was kicking it up most impressively.

Highlights in Electricality at Cat's Art MusikCircus Last Week

First of all, if little blue dancing unicorns would not be happy in a venue, why would you think you would be happy there.  Little blue dancing unicorns are always welcome at Cat's Art MusikCircus.

lefty Unplugged chose as his Mode of Electricality, a Fender Telecaster.  An electric guitar is not the same as an acoustic instrument.  There's no point in comparing them as they don't sound the same, they don't play the same, blah, blah.  So going out into an electric lead guitar line is an adventure if it's not typically what you do.  I can report lefty pushed out quite strongly as he was playing it way up high.  When you get up the neck, the nature of the guitar will come through.  It's important with any note you play but they can get 'thin' at the high end of the neck on a lesser guitar with lesser pickups but the tone lefty was getting was excellent.  This is one fine-sounding guitar and I hope to hear it again soon.

There all different Modes of Electricality this week as Laralette Lane got into it too.  She recently got an electric guitar and she wouldn't say much about it except that it's not an expensive one.  (Those weren't precisely the words she used.)  While Lara didn't sound like she expected too much from the guitar, it sounded very good nevertheless.  Lara doesn't use a host of guitar processor gadgets so she gets very much the native sound of her guitar.  It had a good rich tone to it and made a quite a good change of things so I'll be looking forward to hearing her do it again and to find out what she will do next time.

Here are Voodoo Shilton and Mulder playing together.  This was not at Cat's Art MusikCircus but I wanted to hear Voodoo dual-streaming and this was the opportunity for it.  This was electric, acoustic, and a kitchen sink.  It wasn't Voodoo alone doing it as he does that anyway but Mulder was doing it too and the result was a fascinating mix of instruments that didn't sound in any way restricted by their use of the dual stream.  I heard them doing a good long jam that was expressive, emotive, and every beautiful thing you could hope from the medium.  These guys are maniacs and it was very cool to hear them.

Just in case there's any doubt, in my book maniacs are the finest kind of people.

Tapping the Ogallala Aquifer for California's Water

Lake Mead water levels have dropped ninety feet since the Drought in the West started about ten years ago and the SNWA (Southern Nevada Water Authority) estimates it will drop another thirty feet by 2015.  Assuming that happens, Federal restrictions will apply and water will be rationed to Arizona and New Mexico.  They do not say what will happen in California but one thing they will not be doing is drinking water.  (SNWA:  Winter water yield falls short)

Lake Mead is, in large part, the water reservoir for California and other states.  It's essentially the same thing as referring to the Colorado River since Lake Mead filled when the Colorado River was dammed and the river's headwaters aren't far away.  Given the rate of consumption and the lack of seasonal snowmelt to replenish it, how long Lake Mead remains a lake remains to be seen.

The answer to California's water problems doesn't come from Lake Mead, it's just a buffer that is preventing those problems from being a catastrophic emergency right now.  Should the drought continue much longer, the water will be drained off and then you will have a problem you just don't want to see.  I have no forecast for how long that will take as I'm not a fortune teller but the level of the water in Lake Mead is not Fox News, it's science.  A great deal of the water is already gone.

Today's solution is quite extreme as what they may consider is running a pipeline from the Ogallala Aquifer to supply the southwest in addition to the midwest states that are drawing from it now.  The Aquifer is one of the largest in the world and it's underneath at least three or four midwest states.  (WIKI:  Ogallala Aquifer)

Other than the outrageous arrogance of this solution, there's another problem in that the Aquifer is down by about ten percent from its levels in the fifties and the rate of consumption has increased over recent years, apparently due large to coal, oil, and gas extraction, many of which processes take a great deal of water.  Given the increases in oil extraction in the South Dakota area, those demands will very likely increase.  It appears, at current levels, that it would take some centuries to drain the Aquifer but California can shorten that process enormously.

Tapping into the Ogallala Aquifer doesn't solve anything but it's just the sort of Washingtonian boondoggle that they enjoy in situations like this.  There is probably no other group of people on the planet more capable of spending vast amounts of money on things that just don't fuckin' work.  My favorite whipping example is the F-35 fighter as they've spent countless billions on that piece of crap already and guess what ... it still doesn't fuckin' work.  (This is not exaggeration.  There are many problems with the aircraft and the Defense Department admits them.)  The F-35 is the perfect example of the U.S. in the New Age:  there is no need, no application, and no demand.

Rather than writing science-fiction solutions, the technology for desalination plants has existed for decades, it's effective, and California needs it right now.  But, sure, let's build some more fighters.  That makes sense, doesn't it.

"Tres Cabrones" - The Melvins (video)

These guys play some seriously whacked-out music but what fun is music if people don't play whacked-out stuff.  Herewith, The Melvins:

Pro-tip:  If anyone calls you a 'cabrone' in Mexico, run away.  This is not an invitation to afternoon tea and tacos.  Back when you could go to Ciudad Juarez without an AK-47, a hooker called me a cabrone.  She wasn't thinking about afternoon tea and tacos either.  But I digress.