December 2010
31 posts
101 – She’s Leaving Home – The Goff Sisters (with their Mum & Dad) » The Beatles Complete On Ukulele →
thebeatlescompleteonukulele.com
The first time I heard this song I was fifteen, and it blew my mind.
I wrote an essay for The Beatles Complete On Ukulele, my favourite post-album musical project, and it was published a couple of days ago.
I learned a few things from this exercise:
- If I’m excited about something I’ll get it done on time.
- It takes at least three weeks of false starts to begin writing an essay.
- I’m not good at writing longform. I was aiming for 2000 words with this one, and struggled to hit 1700. I’ve never been one for padding.
- You can find way more original multitracks online than I thought.
Anyway, you can read the essay here. And make the most of it – I think I’m going to be writing short stuff from now on…
“Brilliant foot-tapping music AND a warm do-gooding feeling in your belly? Christmas win.”
—#shehateswrapping is track of the week on The Girls Are
Confessions of a Mass Man — New Enquiry →
thenewinquiry.com
This is scary. Especially the last paragraph:
At some point, the niches will become so small that they will exclude everything that didn’t emanate from our own consciousness. It will be as Ortega feared. We’ll all end up qualified experts on ourselves, and nothing more.
I have yet to figure out what my grand plan is for 2011. Twenty Ben went incredibly well, but the future is looking rather vague. It’s tempting to spend the year really getting into something. A creative project, maybe. Or just learning everything there is to know about something (not myself). But it’s true that the niches are getting so small that it’s almost not worth becoming an expert, especially when you know how easy it is to find information on the web.
Bah, humbug.
She Hates Wrapping (A Christmas Cover)
She Makes War and I Hate Mornings
Laura and I recorded an awesome cover of Christmas Wrapping by The Waitresses (probably the best Christmas song ever)!
It’s up on Bandcamp as a free download, and we’re encouraging people to donate a few quid to Crisis instead of giving us money to buy pointless retro iPad apps.
“By providing us with new ways to share what we’re doing right now, the real-time web also captures something we might not have created otherwise: a permanent record of the event. We’ve all been so distracted by The Now that we’ve hardly noticed the beautiful comet tails of personal history trailing in our wake. We’ve all become accidental archivists; our burgeoning digital archives open out of the future.”
—Archive Fever: a love letter to the post real-time web | mattogle.com
Play
“the thing about art, it’s kind of a one way deal. the person makes it, and you have to deal with it, or not. i think self-centered people may perhaps have a hard time letting this control go. for some odd reason, many folks think that artists are interested in hearing opinions about set lists and other business decisions. kind of like armchair quarterbacks {jocks}. it’s amazing to see giant groups of people struggle with, and subsequently not be able to affect, decisions from artists. it just doesn’t work that way. {okay, i suppose it does happen in some realm that i have no interest in, where the art is focused-grouped, but i just pretend that shit doesn’t even exist.}”
—I think I know why you are not into music anymore by Danny Barnes (via Instapaper)
Life is hard. Here is someone.: mouseblogging. →
meaghano.com
I have a mouse in my apartment which I find very disturbing/terrifying for the obvious reason(s) (the main one being that it will crawl across my face when I sleep at night). I have seen it three times.
Once I was sitting on my ___seat writing with my headphones on and I saw it scurry through the…
Sometimes you just have to blog. And sometimes it’s hilarious. Love it.
“
Tommy used to work on the docks
Union’s been on strike
He’s down on his luck
It’s tough
So tough
Tommy reflects that
Maybe collective bargaining
Isn’t all it’s cracked up to be
The well-fed bosses
Of his so-called union
Earn white-collar salaries
But thanks to them
Tommy and his mates
Never seem to have any work
Gina works the diner all day
Whilst the basic salary isn’t great
A combination of overtime shifts
And generous tips from customers
Who appreciate good service
Amount to a pretty decent income
Inspired by Gina
Tommy decides he’s fed up with
Being a docker
And becomes a cab driver
He enjoys being his own boss
And not being at the mercy of workshy colleagues
And because he can set his own hours
He has plenty of time
To pursue his passion for music
(And his customers provide lots of material for songs!!!)
Tommy and Gina’s relationship
Has never been stronger
And each of them feels
Much more fulfilled on
An individual level too
An unexpected composition
- Me: I still don't really trust them, but I'm going to go for a flat white.
- Barista: Good choice! I'm the chief component of the flat white!
- Me: Really? You're hot milk?
- Barista: What?
“Ballads are the despair of forward-looking pop students. Not that they are irredeemable: there are cool ballads, and ballads with a vital pulse, and ballads with distinctive tunes or interesting words. But again and monotonously again, the sticky, sweaty, vacuous ballad reaches to the melting hearts of housewives who prefer the lowest when they hear it, and accordingly it soars to the top like a jetplane made of golden syrup.”
—William Mann, ‘The Beatles revive hopes of progress in pop music’, The Times, 29 May 1967 (in The Lennon Companion, ed. E. Thomson and D. Gutman, 2004)
