Here is Carl Orff’s “O Fortuna”, the opening piece from Carmina Burana.
rhodes plus moog equals gritty theme
This is a theme I came up with back in, let’s see…1990. I hadn’t actually practiced it in about twenty years (not that it needs practice, it’s kind of a make it up as you go thing). The Moog was stashed in a suitcase pretty much the whole time, and the Rhodes probably wasn’t set up for more than a few months off and on. I simply had no place to play.
Now I’ve got my little recording studio, I can start working through the backlog of tunes that I used to have, but that never got recorded. Enjoy!
isn’t over till you do it like i say
What…did someone say the lolcats craze is over? When was that? I’d have sworn it was the next big thing!
Why have you killed me again?
Okay. NOW, it’s over.
7th Duke of Uke to Open Britt Festival
The Seventh Duke of Uke has graciously accepted the honor of performing the first notes of the 2013 Season of the Britt Festivals!
No, seriously. The Britt Medford Office opens for ticket sales at 9AM Thursday the 16th. That’s in less than two days. And I’ll be there at 9AM, playing for the benefit of people who wait in line for tickets. I guess it’s on the sidewalk but they’re setting up a sound system and like some palm trees or something? Yeah. Bring us a pitcher of mojitos, will you?
In other news, the Seventh Duke of Uke has been bitten by a dog.
the unkempt herald
Everyone goggled in disbelief as the herald struggled to rein in his disfigured horse. With only one leg, the horse had hopped from Sri Lanka to the Netherlands. Throwing this exhausted horse to the ground where it instantly expired, the herald proclaimed, “an urgent message for the Commander at Andalusia”.
Some people muttered in whatever language they speak in Holland, “you would be fortunate indeed to get a message to Andalusia from this place, unless you have wings to fly like a bat, because we don’t know where Andalusia is and we care nothing what may happen there, besides which we care nothing for you.”
This is typical of the Dutch. They see a miracle, and they would much rather see a chicken try to climb up on an orange barrel. That would be pretty entertaining. Heralds come up seven or even eight or nine times a day; heralds are generally disliked.
Chickens, on the other hand, produce eggs. The Green Mountain Boys didn’t bother with eggs; they took delicious beef jerky. What they didn’t know is a subject for another time.
The main thing to remember is, everyone goggled in disbelief. Thank you. This is important.
sweet the rain’s new fall
Here I am playing and singing Morning Has Broken (the Cat Stevens version, not the original hymn). This is my first video where I actually recorded the performance on a recording studio and then dubbed the recording over the video. I clipped out forty seconds in the original take where I had made a mistake.
In all, it took me about two hundred hours of work, because my recording studio came from an archeological dig, and my video production system is free software running on a computer I bought with box tops from Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. I had to connect it all together with baling wire, duct tape, and plenty of cursing. Seriously, MacGyver would have been stumped. I crave to tell the story of my hilarious technical difficulties, but it would make a trilogy of feature-length films, and I’d still have to leave a bunch of stuff out.
Eh, I’m a musician. Suffering for my art, and all that.
a purposeful grimace and terrible sound
Chickens get a bad rap, probably just because they’re edible, and nobody likes to think they’re eating someone cool. But chickens are actually pretty cool. For one thing, in every chicken beats the heart of a giant rampaging dinosaur. If you listen carefully to this video you can hear Godzilla’s great great great …. great grandson singing in the yard. His name is Timid Tina, and he’s gorgeous.
In other chicken news, a chicken recently got in my house and laid an egg in my bed. That counts as sex, if you think about it.
you don’t know Jack
This is kind of a placeholder for a post I’d been planning about Jack Pierce. Jack and I crashed a big party at the Tualatin Country Club. Or rather, I crashed the party and Jack got someone to buy his ticket. So I wanted to tell that story. It was a rare case where I showed myself brave, and didn’t end up getting beaten half to death. In fact, some rich dudes bought me drinks.
I also want to tell Jack’s story. Jack is physically repulsive. Jack is falsely accused. Jack is crazy. Jack is tragic.
Jack is also gone. I don’t expect to see him again. He left a bunch of crap in my yard. Sometime I’ll write about it.
Jack, asleep in the cold
your humble narrator
One of the cool things about being a profoundly introverted social retard is, you get to learn all kinds of fascinating relationship stuff that people half your age have known for years. Awesome!
For instance, I was in a bar talking to Robbie DaCosta the other day, and he told me about a cool trick for dealing with hot chicks. “My friend says, when you wake up in the morning after spending your first night with a beautiful woman, you should always say ‘hey babe, I’m totally into you, but you farted like six times in your sleep and it was almost too much for me’. It keeps them humble. When you’re involved with a hot chick, you’ve got to do whatever you can to keep her humble.”
Made sense to me, so I tried it right away. I went up to the hottest chick at the bar and said, “hey babe, you know I’m totally into you, but you just farted like six times and it fucking made my eyes water.”
Sure enough, it made her humble. She humbled right out of there, and I got her bar stool.
Now, if only I had the self-confidence to order a beer…
