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More Preachers

It’s rainy, so I’ve been playing with my sound equipment. More televangelist samples from youtube, played and tweaked via the Akai MPD26 midi pad device. Drum beats created with DrumBeatz app for Google Chrombook, channeled into Korg KP3 for distortion and then into Garageband. Two tracks — drums and preachers.

Oh, I passed my 1st kyu test in Aikido.

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the Brain

Recent political happenings make if very hard for me to maintain the state of mind I seek.  So difficult to not get sucked into the arguments. But thus far I have pretty much stayed centered.

I think I’m going to do a 2-week news media and social media blackout though. I feel like I’m reaching my limit.

 

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Henry on the Election

As my millions of readers know, I am a fan of Mr. Henry Rollins. Like anyone in the public eye, he stumbles from time to time, but overall I think he gets things about right.

So I enjoyed his LA Weekly article published today.

Right now I have some friends who are all up-in-arms about President Obama’s upcoming immigration policy announcement. “It’s unconstitutional!” “It’s Tyranny!!!!” Sorry — needs all caps. “IT’S TYRANNY!!!!!!” Sorry — needs red too. “ITS TYRANNY!!!!!!”

There. That’s better.

Not sure how the decision to not deport otherwise law-abiding hard working people is tyranny, but I guess I’m just not very smart.

So here’s my take on this. If the President is indeed violating the law, overstepping his constitutional authority, or whatever, the Republicans can and should impeach him and successfully remove him from office. If, on the other hand, he isn’t, and they don’t impeach him or the court says they are full of shit and sides with the President, then the Rs can and should eat themselves a big family-sized can of Shut The Hell Up stew.

However, here’s my prediction. Keep in mind, I am not a professional pundit. I’m just another crazy guy on the interwebs with a blog. Hell, I’m not even mad or upset while I’m writing this.

The Rs will not impeach him, because they know the President has not committed any impeachable offense in his actions regarding illegal immigration and deportation. They will not impeach him. Instead, they’ll continue to rant about how power-mad he is, and how he ignores the constitution.

If they do find the gonads to impeach President Obama, I will of course change this post and take the appropriate measures to ensure that Google and Bing cache the updated (corrected) version.

 

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Crisis on Infinite Convergences.

DC comics is planning yet another reboot of their entire Multiverse. This article talks about it a bit. 

I was around for their first foray into Multiversal Rebooting – the Crisis on Infinite Earths. This happened back in the late 1980s. It was an attempt to consolidate the roughly 1 million different “Earths” — or universes in a multiverse – into roughly one such universe. The notion was that DC comics continuity had become too complex for writers or readers to deal with.

If memory serves, this was a pretty cool mini series. Strike that. They killed off Barry Allen (the Flash). He saved the multiverse, but died in the process. That sucked. He was my favorite DC character. But other than that it wasn’t too bad. They seemed to still sort of honor the old continuity somewhat.

But of course more dimensions eventually appeared. Or that is my recollection. Barry died for nothing.

So in 2011 DC again rebooted their comics with this New 52 thing. Kind of like starting from scratch with characters you already know, but trying to modernize them a bit.

Yeah, I’ve written and bitched about his before.

I’ve written about how I hate the new flashy artwork and “Marvel-ization” of the DC universe.  I don’t like Superman wearing some kind of armor. WTF? He’s Superman, right? He doesn’t need Kryptonian armor to be his costume. Etc, etc, etc…lots of shit like that.

So now they are going to apparently but not for sure ditch the New 52 — to be replaced with what?

Here is my recommendation. Same as it was last time I wrote about this.

The only thing DC has done in many years that has been worth reading was the Kingdom Come graphic novel mini series. In this series they didn’t seek to modernize the characters. If anything, they went BACK. It was genius. They simply connected with the real essence of each character, portraying them as the modern gods they are intended to be.

That is where they should go.

The number of dimensions doesn’t matter. None of that matters. What matters is the core essence of what makes these characters great, and finding writers and artists who can connect with that. The rest of the creative staff can go write 50 more X-Men titles per month.

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Nerd Report

OK, last night I watched the latest episode of the new “the Flash” TV show, the Flash ran up the side of a building, then he ran on water. Then at the end they introduced Grodd, the super gorilla.

Then I watched the latest episode of Constantine. It was great too.

Both shows are great. I love being able to watch them at my convenience on Hulu.

That is all.

 

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More noise on the way

I had the morning off, so I took some time and grabbed a few more funny televangelist sound clips and imported them into the Ableton project I reference in the previous post. Lots of fun. I have solved a few little problems, and am gaining more understanding of the software — like maybe .005% of it. But enough to have some fun.

akaiAs you can see in the pic, the Akai controller has 16 drum pads, 6 faders/sliders, and 6 knobs. The drum pads can be used to “play” the software instruments, such as drum kits, synths, etc, that come with the software, or as I have been doing each pad can activate a sound clip you have imported. The knobs and whatnot can be assigned to control other things, like volume, effects, etc.

This is really pretty addictive.

And then there’s the controls of the Akai itself, that I haven’t even really gotten into. Apparently you can control the software from the Akai, if you know what the hell you are doing — as in calling up programs and profiles you have saved. It’s not a big deal since I will never be “performing live”.

So, here’s the really fun part. I’m running the software on my 8-year old 13″ MacBook. I got the 3rd party replacement battery from my mom’s old MacBook, and it will actually hold a charge. This machine has 2 gigs of RAM — the bare minimum needed to run this software. The software has crashed once, but overall I’m happy I can even run it. The 3rd party batteries are shitty. They aren’t quite the same material as the real Apple replacement battery, and they don’t fit as well either. But they are about $30 rather than $130. At this point I don’t think it is worth spending $130, or really any money, on this old machine, since a new MacBook Air is not that expensive. But man, given the bullshit we have dealt with on the broken MacBook Pro, I really really love this old computer. What a fricken workhorse.

 

 

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Swaggart

I am finally spending some time learning to use the Akai MPD26 pad controller I got a couple of years ago. The device can do a lot, and I’m using it with the very complicated Ableton Live 9 DAW software. So there’s a huge learning curve.

My interest is simply using it to activate one-shot or looped audio clips, but as I learn more I get additional ideas for ways to use it for noise “music”.

Generally I like using actual hardware instruments rather than computer samples, but I can see where this could get very addictive. With the computer and a controller, the possibilies are really endless. I could even use my hardware instruments to record samples into the computer for use with the pad controller. So yeah — endless possibilites to may totally non-danceable sounds to offend the sensibilities of normals.

Here’s the first experiment — one clip on one drum pad, with some effects assigned to a couple of faders and knobs.

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Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine

Saturday night I met some friends down at a bar called Three Links, in Dallas, to see Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine.

2014-11-09 00.47.44Like a lot of skaters my age, I’m a long time fan of Jello, from his work with the Dead Kennedys to his spoken word material. About 7 years ago (has it been that long? wow!) I saw Jello do his spoken word, so there was no way I was gonna miss his show with his new band.

First, a few words about the first of the opening bands, The Interrupters, a very good punk/ska band from LA. I’ll be honest, I’m not a ska fan at all. I usually think it’s dumb and hate it. But I really liked this band. They had a really good sound. As soon as I heard their first song I was happy and full of hope for the future. Seriously.  You can learn more about them on the link above.

OK, on to Jello.

Jello is old, and fat, and I don’t know  where he gets enough energy to do what he does, but he does, and it is pretty incredible. He was all over the stage. Classic Jello. The new material is extremely good. When you hear it, it is very clear that Jello wrote all the Dead Kennedy’s stuff. It’s the same, with a little different sound from a more talented band. Yeah – more talented. I love the Dead Kennedys music, so that’s not a put-down. But this new band, the Guantanamo School of Medicine, is just a much more experienced band what still manages to deliver the energy of a bunch of young kids.

Here’s a link to the new album….JELLO BIAFRA AND THE GUANTANAMO SCHOOL OF MEDICINE –  White People And The Damage Done. As you will see from the song titles, Jello’s songwriting is still pretty hard-hitting.

Three Links is a small-ish bar/club. Not tiny, but not huge. I would say it qualifies as “intimate”. The sound was good for all the bands. It was open to the street, so there was some nice fresh air to cool the crowd. The band came out, and after the first song Jello demanded (in a classic Biafra rant about “why are there fucking TVs on at every bar”) that all the “fucking TVs” be turned off. The bartenders complied, and the show went on!

2014-11-09 00.14.47When the second song began, the slamming up by the stage started, and the chaos grew, and it could have been 1985. There’s nothing like the surge of a slamming crowd. (Sorry, I can’t use the term “mosh”. It sounds stupid and comes from violent metalhead morons). It was good-natured yet still somewhat threatening mayhem, which Jello seemed to love, flinging water bottle out into the crowd. This continued through the whole show.

Before a lot of the songs Jello stopped to talk politics for a few seconds, usually as an appropriate intro to a song.

Jello threw a few Dead Kennedys songs into the mix. Kill The Poor, California Über Alles, Nazi Punks Fuck Off, and Holiday in Cambodia. They are, after all, his songs. They sound good, and of course the crowd went even more crazy. The new songs are great, but those old songs are formative for a lot of people – no getting around it.

As a 50-year old delinquent, it was just so great to see this at an all ages show. Young kids, old farts, skaters, punkers, nerds…all mixing it up in a club small enough to feel like things were real.

OK, time to wrap this up.

They played for very close to two hours. A very very very short break before a 4 song encore. Two hours! That is kind of rare these days, I think.

All in all, a fun time. So great!