Mashups: If You Can't Beat 'Em, Do Them

I've been very busy, creating over 50 instrumental and vocal mashups, specifically mixing new music with 80's music.... Here's an example....

Tons more at my website:

A Musician's Thoughts on Tech and Trash

Image via Wikipedia

My favorite band for the past 5 years has been Porcupine Tree, a British progressive metal band that's been around for 20 years.....
A couple samples, if interested....
Halo      Shallow     Your Blackest Eyes

Lead Guitarist, and mastermind of the band Steven Wilson was asked about the shape of the music industry...

Difficult to say. This is the worst time in history for the music industry. Everyone agrees on it, artists and labels - everyone involved.
I believe that ultimately what will happen is that recorded music will become something no one will pay for. People will expect to get it for free, even now a lot of people don't think about buying music, just to download it. Recorded music will become an advertisement for the live show. I already see it in Porcupine Tree concerts, where the attendances keep on growing, and the record sales as well, but not in the same proportion.
People get to know the band from downloading on the internet for free but they pay for the shows. This has a positive side, because it means that bands who play real instruments, and can manage a good live show will survive, and the kind of manufactured artists like Britney Spears won't. These are interesting times....

Anesthetize (DVD + Blu-ray)Anesthetize (Ac3)

.......It struck me that in the 21st Century what's replaced race relations as the number 1 concern for young people is a kind of terminal boredom, a generation X thing, it's the blank generation. It's exacerbated and accelerated by living vicariously through gadgets. Since I was a kid in the 80's the amount of technology that's around now is unbelievable. The worst thing my parents were probably worried about was TV, and we only had 4 channels in the UK back then!
But now we live in the information technology age – with the Internet, Ipods, cellphones, Playstations, and Xbox's. You have the proliferation of TV channels, digital TV and MTV and it's various imitators. You have lowest common denominator stuff like American Idol, Big Brother, Cribs, and all the other similar shows.
It seems to me that no one's really trying take notice or take gauge of how all this stuff is affecting the younger generation. You know, what kind of human beings are we going to turn out?

  ----Steven Wilson

I couldn't have put it better myself, so I didn't try.... Music is dying a most unflattering, slow, painful death, and it's hard to watch, and even harder to listen to. Like Wilson, I want to go deaf when I hear most of the stuff out there, especially rap. How about you? Do you think today's youth are actually HEARING the music? When they have no physical contact with the band, such as an album or a CD to own, they simply delete it from their iTunes playlist, move on, with the attention span of a flea....and forget the whole thing happened...  He just wrote a guest editorial in September about music reviews.....found here

"Great music journalism is an art in its own right. It places music in a historical and cultural context while revealing the passion and personality of the musicians that made it. It reaches out beyond the music to the core of the human condition, just like the music it is about. "

The Most Alive Man In The World

If this video hasn't gone viral, than it will soon... Unbelievable... gorgeous... thought-provoking....
To see the video, you must be a Facebook member... This is almost worth joining the service for..

The video is here on Facebook.

Caddyshack's 30th Anniversary Trivia

Not by any means, a top 50 movie favorite of mine, Caddyshack still is a must-see movie... My God, I am old... 30 yrs? Anyway, here's Trivia Fact No. 1:
1. Bill Murray's classic "Cinderella story" moment came from two simple lines of direction. Harold Ramis asked Murray to play the scene like a kid who pretends he's a sports broadcaster; Murray asked for a few rows of flowers and then improvised. He did the scene in one take, too.

The other 29 are over at Moviefone

The Search For The Funniest Screen Names

One of my favorite sites is Gizmodo, because the readership is pretty literate and funny.. One of the screen names on there made me spill coffee on my keyboard.. Korean Abdul Jabbar....That got me thinking.... and then I did a short search for other witty names.... a few I found amongst the crap:

iris wishkey
mexyback
Lactose_The_Intolerant
daft.vader
not eurotrash
DeucheBagalo
IHopeThisNameWillFi
My Pretty Pwny

I then discovered there are wise asses who name their wi-fi networks... creative names... which can be seen here.

My Favorite Guilty Pleasure of 2009 Returns: Dating In The Dark

Could I BE more embarrassed? I watched all of last season's 6 episodes of the ABC-TV reality series "Dating In The Dark," and was surprised a network would only order 6 episodes of a show...and bummed that there weren't more... I'm not a reality TV freak... but this... is safe voyeurism in its purest form... not even the people we're watching can see each other...



The Concept? 3 guys, and 3 girls spend a weekend in a special house, separated into two groups, and occasionally, each guy and girl get to go into a pitch black room, to get to know each other... At the end, they get to finally see each other, and then decide whether to date again in the real world in the future...  You see more REALITY in this show, than most others.... Guys, like the moron presented in the teaser trailer try to hit on the women, and the women are free to react facially to the nonsense...since no one can see their expressions, but the viewer.... a vital social cue that we don't normally get to see.... I've never watched Big Brother, because it seems like there are just 16 actor wanna-be's who are looking for FAR more than their 15 minutes of fame... Dating ITD seems more genuine.... (ABC TV Monday, Aug. 9  8 p.m.)

Best of YouTube in 4 minutes?

 With the semi-intriguing movie about Facebook coming out soon enough, someone created a fake trailer for a film about Youtube.. And it should get made... but in the meantime, hold on to your hats for a whirlwind tour of the YouTube experience....

Back When America Actually Dreamed Big

I discovered, then forgot about, then re-discovered a website/blog that highlights lots of vintage photos of America..... One reader summed up the impact of photos like these:  

  "Having been so used to seeing this time period only in black and white it's almost surreal to actually see it in colour..." Obviously.. the main pic on this post is b&w, but click here and here for a ton of COLOR  vintage photos...

The Detroit River circa 1910. "Sinking cast section of Michigan Central Railroad Company tunnel." Detroit Publishing Company glass negative. View full size.