An Achewood Cartoon: Lyle Crushes Teodor's Budding Appreciation of the Grateful Dead



The views of the cartoonist are not necessarily those of the blogger. I actually like a rather large number of Dead songs. I used to have a pretty meager opinion of all those live Dead tapes since WMSE used to broadcast about 3 hours of hissy low-fidelity audience recordings every Friday evening... However, the Dick's Picks series and live things I've heard from archive.org and even more esoteric locations have led me to concede that they could, indeed, make interesting and accessible music in a live setting... There have been some very nice legit archive mainstream releases in the last couple decades, too. The compact disc format, and digital storage, transmission and manipulation of music in general, has served the Dead's Live legacy well, in my opinion. It's nice to not have to turn the record over every 17 to 22 minutes, for one thing. Also, the average tape deck generally provided pretty average sound reproduction, whereas the average CD player and computer sound card deliver performance to drool for by 1970's standards. Relatively inexpensively, too. Don't you think? Or don't you?

Self-Improvement

Heh. Or something. The book was co-written by my old high school friend, Tom Potter. I'm still only about halfway through it, because I keep getting sidetracked with other books and such. The India Pale Ale is one of the better IPA's I've had: adequate bite but not aggressively bitter. Lora found some Brooklyn Brewery products at a supermarket of the upscale variety while visiting Rochester Hills for New Year's. We also sampled the Brown Ale, which was, again, one of the better examples of the variety I've tasted. Reasonable hoppiness, and not as caramel-sweet as many brown ales. They also had two other varieties, but the flagship Brooklyn Lager was beyond its "Best If Served By Date", and in fact, the bottles were dusty. The problems of distributing specialty beers over an extended geographic area is discussed in depth in the book. (It's called Beer School, by the way, since the flash kinda washes out the title.) In hindsight, I wish I'd at least wiped the dust off the bottles. Oh, well. I'm enjoying the book, but have a bit less interest in entrepreneurship than, perhaps, the target audience here. If it gave a more well rounded "what was going on with the protagonists outside of work" picture, I suppose it would be a different book altogether. And, the Steve & Tom Autobiography probably would have been a tougher sell to the publisher.

Okay, that's the rambling blog post for the month, just under the wire.

Where Am I?

Some Random Album Covers

Status Report



Ha. Well, just a little levity from R. Crumb to interrupt the ennui...



Okay, naptime!

It's Under Control



From the Wigu cartoon here. Or read The Case of Atlantis! from the beginning...

What can I say? I relate to Quincy Tinkle on almost the same level as Bob Parr aka Mr. Incredible from The Incredibles:

Paddington Rose



(2001-2007)

Some "Goats" Dialogue From The Archive

Diablo (holding drink): That red dude! He's the one who gave us those spooky demon matches back in New Jersey.

Fish (Out of beer glass, sitting, wide-eyed): The matches that burn space and time. The matches that Toothgnip wants. Do you still have those?

Diablo (holding drink): Yeah. They're in a safe but uncomfortable place. One of these days I'm going to have to get myself some pockets.

(Diablo is a chicken, you see. Fish, is of course a fish. I think he's a Pisces. Probably working for scale...)

Time Magazine Makes An Observation

"Achewood", "Penny Arcade" and "PvP" are among the internet-only comics mentioned in an article at the Time magazine website last week...

In one story arc a wealthy pleasure-loving cat named Ray dies and goes to hell, where he's forced to drive a 1982 Subaru Brat and gets drunk with legendary bluesman Robert Johnson at a Best Western. This kind of thing never happens to Garfield.

Read the full article here, or just click some of the webcomics links on the left.

Oh, and another recent add to my regular web browsing: "xkcd", which occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).

Plunderphonics

John Oswald is a Canadian avant-garde composer and conceptualist who was involved in audio splice 'n dice years before the ubiquity of computer sound cards made mash-ups the the domain of so many DJ's, music lovers and tech geeks.

"Plexure" is a composition Oswald created in 1992, constructed entirely from brief fragments cloned from thousands of mostly pop recordings from 1982-1992, the first decade of the compact disc era. It's built on a structure that begins with the slowest songs from that time (mostly ballads and blues), and proceeds gradually to the fastest (bluegrass and speed metal).

Since Plexure's release, Oswald has continued to play with, tweak, and refine the piece, resulting, more than ten years later in "prePlex". The original bar-of-each-song version of "prePlex" was about 33 minutes long. But, Oswald thought there were parts that worked, and parts that didn't; he wished to hear a version that in a way, swung all the way through.

Lengthy rounds of editing, throwing out material, listening, and making further improvements ensued. He couldn't listen to the thing right through without stopping the playback to change something. Finally, he began playing back "prePlex" all the way through without stopping, for himself, and for others. After a few minor adjustments, he decided it was working like accelerating clockwork, and ready to be heard by the world. Which is not to say that there won't be more revisions before the track ends up on vinyl and DVD.

In its current "final" form, "prePlex" is fourteen minutes and twelve seconds, not necessarily just the intros, but often recognizeable samples of a whole lotta different songs, blended, mixed, morphed and organized into a composition of steadily increasing tempo. The original 1993 CD version included artists such as Aretha Vanilli, Bing Stingspreen, Bo No Ma, Sam & Deee-Lite, Sam & Dead, Engelbert Costello, Ice Garfunkle, Bolton Chili Overdire, Moody Crue, XTZ Top, John Lennoncamp, Bee Jesus, B.T.O'Conner, Sinead O'Connick Jr., Twisted Steely, Axl Galas, 9 Inch Monkees, Bo Dire, Percy Faithful, Joni Cocker, Superloaf, Jon Bon Elton, Little Keith Richard, Twisted Kross, Madonna & Englishmen, Fats Bono, Spinal Top, Dire No More, Doobie Osmond, Debbie Idol, Frank Sinappa, Allman Dominoes, They Might Be Grateful, Anthrax Squeeze Factory, Halen Oates, U-52s, Depeche Mould, AC/Dylan, Marianne Faith No Morrisey, Blondie Sabbath, Ozzie Osmond, Cheap Pixie Peppers, Beastie Shop Beach, Lynrd Lovett, Cream Styx, Jerry Harry, Jello Bellafonte, Milli Fudge, Ozzy Loaf, The Captain & Terence, Joni Shithead, Spiro Giants, Stevie Ray Vangelis, Jethro Byrne, Mariah Cocker, Sound Garth, Yo Yo McCartney, T.L.C.& C. Meat Factor, Whitney REMTV Hammercamp, Bonnie Ratt, Alannarama, 10,000 Nine Inch Megasmiths, Bobby Bon Jackson, Julian Lennox, Paula McCarey, and Kool Mo Chuck. Yeah, I hear a lot of that!

Click to read more about "prePlex" and other Plunderphonics projects...

And here's the "Save As..." option.

http://www.plunderphonics.com/

http://www.pfony.com/