If you buy one album this year … it should really be “Blackstar” by David Bowie. If you buy two albums … then maybe you should add “La vache qui pleure” by Kate and Anna McGarrigle.
But if you buy 23 albums this year, I hope one of them might be my new release, “Clam Fake,” now available on Amazon and iTunes and other places where music is (still sold).
Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre | Tagged Clam Fake, Music, Salon De La Guerre | Leave a Comment »
Dear readers, I returned to music in the latter half of 2015 and my seventh (!!!) album is coming out this month. It comprises 12 new songs of rock and pop and a wee bit of jazz. The record is called Clam Fake, and it drops in a week or so on iTunes and Amazon (as well as other sites like CD Baby). By “drops” I mean it will be released or issued. I have not physically dropped anything. That’s just slang to make me look more hip and knowledgeable.
Those of you who are fans might be surprised by some of the new territory I’m staking out. After almost 27 years, for instance, I picked up an alto saxophone, an instrument I had not put my fingerprints on since I was a teenager. My new interest in this instrument was sparked partly because I wanted to see what a sax sounded like next to a trivially tuned guitar orchestra. I was also mildly curious to see what I could still do with a dear woodwind so estranged from me. The saxophone is the only instrument I’ve actually been tutored on, but I learned nothing about music theory or chords from it. I gave it up partly because I wanted to learn songwriting on instruments like the guitar that I had taught myself so that creativity, discovery and technique could grow together. In other words, I wanted to be a punk and not know how to play the instrument I was playing.
But I was pleasantly surprised in one 10 minute jam that I could not only squeeze music from the sax but do it for some 10 uninterrupted minutes of long, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman-inspired improvisation. This jam became the basis of two songs on Clam Fake, one of which is called “Red Clay Moses” (attached here).
The rest of the album relies heavily on guitar, however, and will be more familiar to my fans (such as they are), though I am also very proud to say that I’ve grown as a singer, guitarist and producer, and that Clam Fake is more listenable all the way through than my previous efforts.
You might have noticed my new songs already in the list on the right. The ones at the top are from Clam Fake, and are interspersed with six outtakes (in a hat tip to the nice critic from the Equal Ground who said I should filter more, I have left weaker songs off the album this time, though I am quite pleased to say that I now boast some 95 songs among my intellectual property, all of which are at home here on my blog).
If you like what you hear on this page, you can hear more on my Soundcloud page, and if you like that too, please spread the word!
Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre | Tagged Clam Fake, Salon De La Guerre | Leave a Comment »
I’m hurting for Paris right now. Though lots of people are, I think New Yorkers who lived through 9/11 (and maybe those in Madrid and Mumbai) are feeling it perhaps a bit more acutely. There’s something about living in a big city. Contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t just make you some jaded creep. You live every day as a certain trust exercise with people in very close proximity. You constantly meet people with different accents and languages and backgrounds and amazing life histories if you bother to ask them questions. To negotiate this kind of maze requires humility and respect and reserve. You are all sitting on top of each other in sometimes cramped conditions and you have to make it work, and that requires in many ways boundless optimism. Your body comes to know patience and forbearance and you marvel that something so big and complex can work at all. To be that close to people and to have members of a sick cult betray that trust, violently, is something that made me physically ill after Sept. 11. And I felt it a little bit again tonight after seeing the images from Paris, a beautiful city I once visited and hope to again.Eiffel Tower
Posted in Global Affairs | Tagged 9/11, attacks, Paris | 1 Comment »
Posted in Life | Tagged Joanna Newsom | Leave a Comment »
–*Lack of mental health care in the United States
–*Confederate flags
–*Marilyn Manson
–*Short skirts
–*Violent videos
–*The Dukes of Hazzard
–*Violent movies
–*Immigrants
–*Young black males
–*Twinkies
–*Barack Obama
–*Low carb diets
–*High fail quotas in our engineering schools
–*Godlessness
–*Unless it’s the god of Islam, in which case we are blaming that God
–*Atheists removing the Ten Commandments from state property
–*The lack of a Second Amendment in the Ten Commandments (after a fact check to make sure there is not a Second Amendment in the Ten Commandments).
–*Them
–*The others
–*The victims
–*Everybody but myself
–*Myself
Posted in Politics, Satire | Tagged Charleston, confederate flags, gun control, mass shooting, South Carolina | Leave a Comment »
Ten theories of quantum physics first introduced on Seinfeld.
You must look at this model!
Are you celebrating heritage or committing mass murder right now? These three college students answered wrong!
Four types of herring you should never talk to on a subway.
Ten ugly children who grew up to be ugly adults.
Why this millennial is not answering your phone call.
Matt Damon is totally rocking this prehensile tail.
You will own this hedgehog
Ten old stars who used to be young.
This schizophrenic millionaire says the earth has already been destroyed.
He knocked down a wall in his basement. You won’t be surprised where the excavators found him.
Ten gay celebrities that came from heterosexual parents.
Why you have to get a reverse mortgage right now (we’ve kidnapped your child).
Ten pictures of celebrities pleading for their lives.
This credit card opens doors for you. I just unlocked somebody’s door with mine.
Cover your ears! Mandrake!
Ten people didn’t know they were bleeding from the eyes, ears, mouth and ass.
Ten poisonous spiders that laid eggs in your ear last night.
The best all time house fires.
This massive sperm fail left a female lawyer’s egg unfructified.
Which of these Nobel Prize winners became shattered post-Nobel Prize award winners?
You’ll never guess what a poorly grounded microphone did to this billionaire.
Posted in The Internet | Tagged Buzzfeed, Clickbait, Confederate flag, Matt Damon, other news | Leave a Comment »
Antonin Scalia’s Not Very Gay Day
By Dr. Seuss
Oh I do not like that jiggery pokery
Or your startling wuz-wuz
Or your Kalamazoo
I do not like your decisions mystical
They are quite egotistical
To say who can love a what
Or a what can love a who
Just ask any hippie
Who is dippy or quippy
If he really believes all of your hippity flippity
That when jiggery pokery is on the menu
By the fish and fowl and hens too
That words will have no meaning
And all the talkers’ talk is puffed to o’erweening
I do not accept words that say more than they say
Is this is or is this not a sunny day?
Or is this is or is this not a rainy day?
Or was this both a rainy or a sunny day?
(Oh how confusing
When we wish to make hay!)
Oh I am so confused by that jiggery pokery
And by all the other justices’ hokery smokery
If marriages were meant to be happy
Then not all the wishity fishities would
Call them quite crappy
The law is the law and it says what it says
And only what is said is allowed in my head
Because Oh How I hate all that jiggery pokery
I will not eat it with a smolting smolt smokery
The law is not concerned with intimate affairs
Any more than my fanny is beloved by my chair
I will not be gay because I’m not obliged to
I’d rather protect rights of the guns, clubs and knives, too
Posted in Politics, Satire | Tagged Antonin Scalia, Dr. Seuss, gay marriage, marriage equality, Supreme Court | Leave a Comment »
Upon hearing a climate change denier rant today that the world’s scientists are involved in a hoax called global warming, I realized something:
The oil lobby, the gun lobby and the tobacco lobby have pretty much all worked their magic the same way: They have helpfully allowed their faithful to ignore the dark clouds of statistics and say, “You’re smarter than the numbers. You are secretly wise because you have intuition the scientists must not have. You know smokers who have lived to age 90. You heard a gun was used in self-defense. You see it is obviously snowing outside during so called climate change.” In this way they have freed you from having to apply your mind to unhappy abstractions and troubling numbers, which tell you the dice are mostly going to roll against you if you smoke, own guns or continue to burn fossil fuels. They let you believe that just by yelling “hoax” you are somehow as intellectual as people who have thought about something deeply or studied the numbers with rigor. Such lobbyists have liberated you from the pain of curiosity, empowered you to stop asking questions, freed you to see every scientist with bad news as a Cassandra, arranged in a conspiracy against you personally. By politicizing a fairly obvious problem, for fairly obvious pecuniary reasons, these lobbyists have taken an issue to you and made it about your personal identity, which, if you lost it, would make you feel helpless, cut off from the Petri dish of family and peers. And most important, these people, with their obvious motivations, tell you it’s all right to be the way you are and keep living the way you’re living. That’s a feeling more powerful than love. You will do or say almost anything they want after that.
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Last year I released an album on Amazon, iTunes and other fine outlets called “Diasporous.” This album includes some of my oldest songs, things I wrote in my ’20s, in probably their fourth or fifth versions.
One of them seemed as if it would never be good, never reach its potential. It’s a punk-pop song, whose strengths are think are obvious, yet I managed to mangle it so many times I’d come to hate it. My first set of lyrics for it were vaguely about 9/11, and a vague song about 9/11 tends to be automatically in poor taste. Either you have a point of view about that day or you ought to shut up. So I gave the lyrics what I realized years later was my strength: a story. And I clarified the melody. And when it popped up in my iTunes queue a couple of weeks ago, I realized: I finally don’t hate this thing I made.
So here it is: A pop song I made that I no longer hate enough to hide.
It’s called “Patriots/Crossed Lines.” And it’s loud, by the way. Enjoy.
Posted in Music | Tagged Diasporous, Patriots Crossed Lines, Salon De La Guerre | Leave a Comment »
–*A video of the weird stuff guys do when they have run out of oxygen.
–*You’ll never guess which celebrity showed up in this woman’s endoscopy footage.
–*This racist meltdown started over a simple misunderstanding about Delftware.
–*This woman videotaped Martians to prove Martians are dicks.
–*This woman put a poisonous spider on her breasts to show how often people scream, “There’s a poisonous spider on your breasts!”
–*This video shows exactly what happens in America today when you turn on a camera in a room with no light source.
–*Try breast-feeding your baby while being on the FBI’s most wanted list. This video shows what will happen.
–*If black women talked like 16th century British pirates.
–*This is how people shriek if you tell them you’ve got Ebola.
–*This is your low self-esteem turned into gamma rays.
–*This is your pre-diabetes turned into gamma rays.
–*This is a potato dressed up like Kanye West.
–*A video montage of 750 sedentary people looking at pictures of Kim Kardashian on their phones.
Posted in Satire | Tagged Buzzfeed, Clickbait, Kanye West, Kim Kardashian | Leave a Comment »
Beauty is Imperfection 