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"Intelligent teenagers often listen to heavy metal music to cope with the pressures associated with being talented, according to research."
Thomas Beller meditates on the pleasures of taking an aural time out. At Tyll Hertsens' urging, I began doing this about 10 years ago—it's amazing how much it makes you hear what you normally tune out. Of course, that's not always a good thing, as Beller points out.
(all you ever have to know about life is that little girls are taught to dance and little boys are taught to kick it's all over from there my son is going to get a whole bunch of garbage for his birthday and i'll say here boy play music)
—lines from an old poem, "the green water rocks / make me cry," by me
—lines from an old poem, "the green water rocks / make me cry," by me
I'm not sure, exactly, what the hell I was talking about. I know that it had something to do with the band I was in. We banged on garbage cans, you know, and many of our "instruments" were things we'd simply found around campus, and especially along the Hackensack River,…
SXSW Part 3
So it was definitely the year of the female singer at SXSW 2007. Lily Allen was sassy and backed by a horn section. White dudes hooting on tenors, always a good time. The person I was with turned to me about halfway through and said, "I like this but I can’t tell you why." I took that to be a good sign.
Then there was Amy Winehouse. A total throwback, kind of a modern day version of Ronnie Spector, she's a deep–voiced, tough chick with a keen retro sense, a well developed sense of humor and a killer live act. While the music is a dead ringer for girl group fare from…
Admit it, you've always wanted this to happen.
Folks just keep sending me librarian humor—I love it! The First Post hosts this most excellent installment.
Despite the ongoing post-SXSW recovery problem, sorta like jet lag that will not go away, I managed to stagger forth and see two shows this week both of which were worth the trek.
First up was Ruthie Foster. Say the word "folky" and I'm pretty much outta there. I no longer feel the need to torture myself by attending shows where someone with a guitar, who can't sing or play and has no real material feels it necessary to get up and bore a crowd to death. Join a band people, that way you have somewhere to hide.
Ruthie however is a different story. I saw a bit of her set in Austin…
The process behind yesterday's entry also led me to an old essay by Art Dudley. "Academy? What Academy?!" is special because it was AD's first piece published in Stereophile. Beyond that, and like all of Art's writing, it is special also because of the message it contains. While, on the surface, it's something of a deathblow to what was The Academy Advancing High Performance Audio and Video (what a crappy name!), there is a more important message, one that is just as relevant today as it was when the article was written, nearly ten years ago.
Art gives us his own…