I just read a blog post detailing why the same mistakes keep popping up, even after hours of study. It is written with classical guitar study in mind, but to me it's applicable to a much wider area of learning. The gist is that you should not be afraid to make mistakes, but take them in your stride and learn to carry on, instead of looking back and trying to learn from them.
So make mistakes and don't try to learn from them, try to live with them.
Zaaf
Back in July 2007, I posted a short blurb on The Mob Stories. Now they've got a few new songs out, which rock. Although they don't, because they funk. Only that's not a real verb, so they rock funk. My favorite is Big Dick which is quite catchy and almost incomprehensible.
Give 'm a listen,
Zaaf
A few months ago Fake Steve Jobs posted a blog about todays music. Here he waxed lyrically about listening to an album of Robin Trower called Robin Trower Live. I immediately searched for it on the iTunes Store, but it was not available there. Luckily, after a few weeks I found a similar album called Bridge Of Sighs it on bol.com.
After it arrived, I immediately popped it in the CD player. The moment I heard the first beat, I was sold. This is a classic guitar power trio from the early seventies, reminiscent of Jimy Hendrix and Fatal Flowers. The music is raw and pure and somehow strikes a nerve that most modern music misses.
Give it a try,
Zaaf
Since long I've been enjoying the podcast delivery of the radio show Andermans Veren. However, they decided to stop this due to rights issues. In short, they need to pay BUMA/STEMRA (Dutch ASCAP/BMI) a license fee, but they don't know how much.
This is the letter I sent them (in dutch)
Re: Podcasts stoppen.
Naar aanleiding van uw bericht over het stoppen met podcastweergaves van ondermeer Andermans Veren, zou ik u het volgende willen meegeven.
De afgelopen twee jaar heb ik met heel veel plezier gebruik gemaakt van de podcastservice van de AVRO om uw programma Andermans Veren te beluisteren op een tijd die mij wel schikt (namelijk 's middags in de trein naar huis). Mede hierdoor ben ik in aanraking gekomen met een keur aan kleinkunstartiesten die ik anders nooit zou hebben gekend, of waarvoor mijn waardering veel lager zou zijn dan nu het geval is. Hiervoor mijn hartelijk dank.
Dankzij uw podcast heb ik ondermeer CD's aangeschaft van Mylou Frencken, Alex Rouka en Boudewijn de Groot. Tevens heb ik door het enthousiasme meerdere theatershows bezocht van artiesten waar ik anders nooit naar toe zou zijn geweest.
Door te stoppen met uw podcastservice, verliest u mij als luisteraar. Dit zal voor u als organisatie waarschijnlijk niet een heel groot verlies zijn. Voor mijzelf is het ook geen groot verlies daar er genoeg podcasts zijn om het Andermans Veren-gat op te vullen. Degene die wel verliezen bij het stopzetten zijn de artiesten, daar ik nu niet meer blootgesteld word aan nederlandstalige kleinkunst.
Om Kasper van Kooten te citeren:
"De artiesten verliezen en dat moet jullie een rotzorg zijn." (uit "De Ziekte van Download").
Ik hoop dat u een en ander in overweging neemt bij het besluit om weer door te gaan met podcasting. Wellicht is het goed om te bedenken dat podcasting, net als radio, bijdraagt aan de populariteit van een artiest.
Hoogachtend,
Zaaf
This morning, Tuesday, I listened to Adam Curry's Daily Source Code podcast and one of the songs he played was called Lost Opportunities by The Mob Stories. A six person band with two funky ladies. Give 'm a listen if your into funk.
Zaaf
Three weekends ago I, together with some other musicians recorded the music to 6 choir tracks. Two weekends ago, the choir voices where recorded. Last weekend, amids the busy kids, I edited the video clip for one of the songs, called "Maak het Stil", or "Make it quiet" / "Silence is Golden". With two video cameras and spread over two weekends, I took 71 minutes of video with 171 separate clips. The bulk focussed on Maak het Stil. It took me 10 hours to learn Final Cut Pro and edit the clip into something worth viewing. It is still in draft, so don't be too harsh.
Zaaf
For the past twenty years or so, I've been carrying my music with me. First I had cassette tapes on various walkmans, then I carried CDs with me on portable CD players. Five years ago I bought my first iPod. The big change was that in the years BiP (Before iPod), I had to choose which music to take with me. AiP I could have it all. Every morning BiP I stood in front of my CD collection, or my cassette collection before that, and chose the albums to take with me. I've always been an album person and I rarely bought best-of albums. The main reason for this is that I like to hear all the numbers in the context the artist intended them to be. That's also the reason why I do not like shuffle mode on CD players. It messes with the artist intent. And so, BiP, I listened to complete albums sequentially before changing them in my player. AiP, after I switched everything to my iPod, I continued to listen to complete albums, manually selecting them from the menu. That is until I discovered that I could select shuffle per album. Now the tedious task of standing in front of my CD collection was taken over by the iPod. When I now click shuffle songs on my iPod, I get a randomly selected album which I then can enjoy. And because I have only my music on my iPod, its all good music. So it doesn't matter what album it selects.
Today I've got a song planted in my head from my youth. I know the tune. I know part of the lyrics and I've got a desire to add that song and the album it comes from to my music collection. The only problem with this is that I cannot find that album in the stores anymore. So I can't get the cd. It is not available in the few second-hand stores in my town, which presumably comes from the fact that it's a good album. The online stores do not carry it because the music label it was on does not provide it to iTunes c.s.
This leaves the p2p networks as a last resort. However, since the album was released only on vinyl, there are almost no ripped to .mp3 versions of it. I can find a few songs from it, but this particular song is unavailable.
This is exemplatory of a lot of music of my youth. The international artists are often available online, but the local artists aren't. The music industry must have a huge back-catalog of music available only to them and to no-one else. And all they do with it is letting it rot in a cellar, where they could make some money out of it by selling it online via iTunes. On the one hand they talk about how p2p networks are killing them and stealing their profit, but on the other hand, they cannot provide the music to the soundtrack of my life. This feels like very inconsequential behaviour from the music industry. Could we please change that?
Oh and the song? It's "Later is allang begonnen" by "Het Klein Orkest".
Zaaf
I've always understood the Bob Marley lyric "No Woman, No Cry" to mean something like: "Please dear woman of mine, don't cry, everything will be alright." So now I'm without a real desktop I'm testing to see if this can be extended from women to computers.
First of all, I'm happy to report that my G4 is undergoing some major surgery and is supposed to be up and running end of next week with a complete new logic board. So the "everything will be alright" part of the lyric should turn out just fine.
However, currently I'm using my rather ageing TiBook G4 667MHz (aka Gigabit Ethernet), which I purchased in March 2002 and there are things I sorely miss on this setup, so there is some reason for prolonged sadness. For starters, I can't take it with me, because my wife is now using it too. She brought home some Excel files from work and proclaimed that this computer was faster than the one she uses at work.
The main reason for my sadness though, is iTunes. I have a large list of podcasts that I listen to on a weekly basis and I have my subscriptions tuned just so that I can listen to (or view for that matter) all podcasts during the four days I commute to work. I sorely miss watching Happy Slip, or GeekBrief. And I miss listening to Anji Bees multiple podcasts, CC Chapmans Accident Hash and Adam Curry's Daily Source Code. I provided me with ample opportunity to listen to my own music catalogue. I cannot wait to get the play count and skip count synced with iTunes again to do some music library re-factoring on it. I don't know how other people do it, but every time I listen to a song and I find something is wrong with it, I make a mental note to update it in iTunes. And in at least 10% of the cases I do something about it. Here's a list of mental notes I've made:
To the tune of "House for Sale" from Lucifer with Margriet Eshuijs and Henny Huisman
Bank for sale.
You can read it on the sign.
Bank for sale.
It was yours and it was mine.
And tomorrow some Scotsman will be doing some sort of deal
In the office filled with memories, we used to share.
So sad.
Zaaf
Just this morning when sitting at my desk at work, a colleague dropped by and started to ask me something. Now, I completely forgot the question, but what I do remember is that I had to turn off my iPod to hear him out. During our conversation, the song that I stopped in the middle off, kept on playing in the back of my brain, repeating itself over and over. It was (and still is) a happy sounding song and so I told my colleague about it. Somehow he was unhappy with the fact that I mentioned the song, because just mentioning it made sure it stuck in his brain too.
Half an hour later, with the song still firmly planted in my head, I head down to the coffee corner where I overhear my colleague saying: "I have this song in my head which I cannot get rid off. Someone sang to me "I'm crazy like a fool. What about daddy Cool?".
Let's hope that by tonight the whole company is singing Boney M.
Zaaf
