Author Archives: blurb

Music Video: Squarepusher — Dark Steering

Posted:

Reply

In 2000–2001, I was super into blippy electronic music. Squarepusher, Aphex Twin, µ-ziq, etc. I still like it, but I’ve been more into a less harsh sound and have found  Tycho, Washed Out, Daft Punk’s soundtrack work and Apparat to be excellent working music. Today when I was hitting Pitchfork, I saw this insane video from Squarepusher that features LED art designed by him. I’m curious as to how he sees through the helmet faceplate. Hitting cues would be difficult with all that crazy light.

I love this video, and I’m adding this to my Rdio collection right now. Squarepusher is working on an album, Ufabulum, due on the 15th of May.

Via: Pitchfork

Warning, might induce seizure (but turn it up if you like electronic):

 

To the Top

Image

“It’s probably going to get worse before it gets better.”

—Everybody

I’ve heard a form of this from just about every person I’ve spoken to about the direction my life is taking. I keep thinking that maybe today will be the day where I can actually look up and taste something other than awful.

Some days are better than others. Lest you think I’m in a morose funk 24/7, that is not the case. I’m just being honest about my grief. It hurts; somedays worse than others.

In other news? Marlo is at the stage where she says or does something adorable every day. When Leta was the same age, I felt the same thing. And just as with Leta, the timeouts are multiplying. As is the dramatic falls to the floor.

Is there an evolutionary reason for toddler drama? Perhaps a message to parents that it’s time for their toddler to move out of the cave and into their own place?

Daily affirmation: Pull.

People how you doing it’s a new day dawning

Image

Had to sit for a couple of days after hearing about Adam Yauch’s cancer-related death. I recall watching an interview with Yauch and Ad Rock back when the cancer was first announced:

Still finding humor in the face of cancer.

* * *

There are two key Beastie Boy points for me. First, the Beastie Boys long term success was a question for me, especially after License to Ill. I figured they would flame out; another band in a long line of novelty acts. Paul’s Boutique hit and I still questioned. Check Your Head changed it all for me. Definitely their Sgt. Pepper’s. More raw, more everything. Second, it seemed with each successive release that adolescent humor remained front and center. However, the dedication to sonics and sonic experimentation and form tweakery kept them fresh long after more serious rap/hip hop acts fell from view. And, yes, while I landed in their demographic range on paper, I wasn’t a partier in college. Much. To their credit, the Beasties introduced me to the Meters (via an intense conversation with the last drummer of Swim Herschel Swim)1. Anybody who digs on funk and fresh and tight and ass and grooves should run right now and fire up the Rdio/Spotify. Search on “Cissy Strut”.

Pet peeve: That white folks aren’t funky. I refute that misguided noise with the following: two of the tightest mothers who ever turned out a jam on the mighty Stax label? White boys Steve Cropper and Donald “Duck” Dunn. And also? cf: Flea2. All I’m saying is that like everything else in life, skin color don’t mean nothing when it’s time to get down. You either bring the funk or you don’t. Clem Snide said it in “Happy Birthday”:

Well, I hope that your song’s not the “Boys of Summer“
Just because you were both born on that day
And half-Jewish boys make kick ass drummers
But if you need lessons I’ll have to pay

While the Beastie Boys may not have come out of the gate with their funk cred blazing, they dished it out over the next couple of decades. Always something worth getting down to on a Beasties album. Always.

Finally, I caught the video below courtesy of Daring Fireball (start at 2:05):

Yauch at the top of his game. I remember seeing this when it happened and the hubbub afterwards. I still can’t believe that Sabotage was denied at the VMAs. Especially with that insane live performance. It was this performance that recalibrated everything for me, Nathaniel Hornblower included. In 1993, I did a lot of road work with Swim Herschel Swim and Check Your Head was on heavy repeat for a lot of those trips. I remember in 1994, the band that followed Herschel was playing a wedding in LA and we stopped in to Tower Records. Parked out front was a black car, allegedly owned by one of the Beasties pumping out the soon-to-be-released Ill Communication. Bad ass. Even if it was just marketing.

MCA, RIP.

* * *

Title of this post is from the opening track of Check Your Head 3

Finally, the obvious daily affirmation: Life is short: live today like you mean it.

Devoted to the Best

Image

Spotted this on North Rampart in New Orleans while walking hurriedly back toward Canal Street. I believe it’s the Saenger Theater. I had the 85mm on the camera, so to get the marquee and the statuary meant some sacrifices. I have four frames of this building; the above image is the only one in landscape orientation. Here’s the best of the portrait oriented shots:

click image to see a larger version

Moral: stop and let people go ahead if you find something interesting to shoot. I really think that I could have spent another 3 minutes and gotten a much better shot. This is the hardest lesson I continually need to learn. In 180 seconds, I can catch up with any group. I can’t take a better photo once I’ve walked past the subject.

One other lesson is that I clearly need to capture about three times more images than I have typically captured when I travel. Getting there.

Daily affirmation: Don’t give up on yourself, buddy. Stay with it.

Snail Mail

Image

I think the thing I miss about living in old neighborhoods is the porch or door mail slot. In my first house, I knew our postal carrier and he knew me. Really nice guy and made me feel like I had stepped back in time. That house didn’t have an ornate slot like this. But I miss that street any time I walk outside. Maybe I’ll move back into that neighborhood. Or move further into the burbs. It’s all up in the air at this point. And I’m okay with that. Really.

Daily affirmation: Look inside when someone upsets you. Then go ninja.

End of the Day

Image

Took this awhile back. Drove out to the Great Salt Lake on a whim and then realized that I wasn’t going to make it to the shore. I found a log, set up the tripod and slapped on the 12-24mm. I fired off a bunch of shots, fully manual. I need filters to pull off a decent sunset. Instead of filters, I have Lightroom. Out of the camera, this image had the nice sun rays, but was very nearly black across the bottom. I did a lot of work on this one. Mostly spot removal and adjustment brush work. It’s a beautiful mess.

I plan on doing a lot more of these kinds of shots. That’s the thing.

Plan.

Working on it.

Daily affirmation: I will make today great, even in the face of anything bad that comes at me.

Tilted

Image

This little thing was so tweaked that the depth of field couldn’t even get all of it in focus. I think it lends a bit of character. That and the encroaching shadow. Somewhere in the cobwebs of memory I remember a lecture or two about the symbolism of a character halfway in the light. Something about good and evil. Which is the greatest thing about inanimate objects: they live in their own moral-free universe. So the shadow is just a shadow. Unless you want it to be something more. Then go ahead. Get on with your metaphorical/allegorical bad self.

Daily affirmation: The only way shit gets real is if I let it.

If I Could

Image

This shot was only grabbed because I had the big camera at my side. So happy to see this vista, I stopped my car, jumped out and fired off a bunch of frames, hopeful that I captured in the silicon what I had seen in analog. I love the light and this may be my favorite sunset shot of the year to this point. Mostly because of the color and the light behind the center clouds—on top, the still blue sky of daylight, on the bottom, the amber tones of the approaching night. You can’t get the shot without a camera. Noted.

* * *

I’ve had a moratorium on any songs that are either painful or overtly romantic for the past several months. Last night I was hacking away, the girls nestled all snug in their beds, and I decided to be my own St. Nicholas and put on a song I haven’t heard or felt in a long time. In the past, the song has been more romantic than painful for me, seeming to come from a place of yearning rather than outright emotional pain.

Take a breath. We’re going down the rabbit hole into a land of cliches and dark closets full of music that is so personal, it is shared with very few people, if any. Did I mention we are also landing firmly in a place of paradox?

If I was really pure, untainted by commercialism and I wanted hipster cred, I’d say I busted out a weird Bob Dylan b-side, a gravelly Tom Waits bag of rocks or an earnest Neil Young song. But we are not in that place. We are very far from there in a darker, less clear place. If I chose a more indie-accepted musician and talked about a song we could all remember, the journey would not be worth taking. This is a place where you and I will likely diverge. It’s going to be fine.

I’ve got a soft spot for Pat Metheny the size of… Mars. Metheny is a polarizing figure in the music world, but especially to jazzers/jazzholes; either he’s a guitar god and compositional genius or a purveyor of ginned up elevator music. And I hear you on all counts. There’s one song that on first listen embodies these two argumentative sides. “If I Could” from First Circle. Containing the most heart breaking acoustic guitar sound produced in the last 30 years, the melody of “If I Could” is simple, restrained even. The synth pads behind the guitar almost tip the song into an area the hipsters would never dare venture, much less acknowledge even existed.

I heard Metheny play this live in Berkeley, 1989 at a show I attended alone. The notes were all different. There’s something about his note choices in the studio. The live performance was stellar. But the studio version is epic. He laid the tastiest shit down in the studio and he could have retired in full bloom before the sustain on his last notes went quiet. People would still be talking about his work on this song if he’d have retired or died young.

If you’ve never heard of Pat Metheny and you are a fan of the punk, don’t say a word here. Shut up. Walk away. Or go to a thrift store and buy Metheny’s mind bombs, Song X & Zero Tolerance for Silence. Dig on Ornette Coleman exploring the outer realm of consciousness on the former and on the latter, what Thurston Moore called “The most radical recording of this decade [the 1990s]. A new milestone in electric guitar. A challenge to the challengers.” Zero Tolerance was rumored to be an indulgent middle finger to his record label. You go enjoy these records while I’m over here exercising what remains of my fancy liberal arts major words.

For the remaining, if you are a sucker for an achingly beautiful paean to jazz balladry, the acoustic guitar and an unparalleled collection of the saddest, most right notes? Put on your headphones, close your eyes and let the song be the soundtrack to your pain.

Could this be elevator music? Maybe. I don’t care. When I saw this live back in 1989, there was a couple in front of me dressed more hip than most of the yuppies who were at the show, present company included. I was surprised by their attendance. Certainly, somebody had given them tickets to the show and they would be bored and leave? But they didn’t leave. They were into it and snogged super hard when “If I Could” tip toed out into the crisp night and licked our ears; the very first make out session where you discover what barely touching tongue across an ear can do for the senses. I felt the deepest longing I had ever known during every second of that song. The couple in front of me were clearly fans. And this was their song. And it was beautiful. And I was alone.

* * *

Spain, 1987:

* * *

Daily affirmation: Give it a rest. It’s Saturday.

1206

Image

This is a transom. Those numbers are hand painted from at least a hundred years ago. I did a mini-photowalk with a friend and this was one of my favorites. I’ve cropped it at a 10:4 ratio, which is good for panoramic prints. I’m thinking about printing this one for the condo. I’ve got thousands of images at my disposal and I’m paralyzed about printing. Inexplicable.

Thanks to Patrick for the inspiration to shoot this place, even if it was only for a few minutes.

Blurbomat Review: Snapheal

Posted:

10

This weekend, Snapheal is on sale for $9.99 in the Mac App Store!

NOTE: This is not a sponsored post, nor did I receive any remuneration for reviewing this app. I’m doing it for the love.

There has been a ton of great, inexpensive photo editing apps that have hit the Mac App Store since it launched in early 2011. The app that I am looking at today is called Snapheal, from MacPhun.

One of the most difficult and time consuming edits to make on a photo is removing unwanted elements; a person walking through a frame, a torn edge, an errant bird, dust spots, or a compositional element that throws the image off. With Snapheal, you don’t have to pay hundreds of dollars to perform these potentially tedious edits. In my review video, I mention that it might take me 30 minutes to do what I did in about a minute or two in Snapheal. I forgot about the Content Aware Healing Brush. It took only a bit longer, but the price difference for this feature is staggering. Yes, you get all kinds of other pro-level features in Photoshop. But it’s very expensive and has a steep learning curve. I know that CS6 was just announced, and I hope that Adobe has made strides in speeding up Photoshop and leveling the learning curve. But for a quick edit here and there? Photoshop is overkill. Here’s a quick example of Snapheal in action from an 8 megapixel iPhone 4S shot of the sun behind some clouds (and yes, I know I look like hell):

Here’s a quick video from the MacPhun website showing more types of healing:

There’s a lot more this app can do, but I wanted to show in real time how quickly edits can be made in Snapheal.

I’m adding this to my recommended list for inexpensive image editing apps.