Whatever happened to my ukulele

This is a fabulous cover of BRMC’s ‘Whatever Happen to my Rock and Roll’, on ukulele. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15e_qI9rvVk&hl=en&fs=1] Here’s the original for reference, for those who don’t know. (props to Syl for the link)

This is a fabulous cover of BRMC’s ‘Whatever Happen to my Rock and Roll’, on ukulele.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15e_qI9rvVk&hl=en&fs=1]

Here’s the original for reference, for those who don’t know.

(props to Syl for the link)

Can’t Afford the Freeway

This is a cover of Aimee Man’s Freeway by my friend Kenny. There’s a longer story about this cover, which you can follow on Kenny’s mySpace blog. In short Aimee held a contest – make a video of yourself covering this song. Ken’s entry is here (make sure you wait for the out takes at […]

This is a cover of Aimee Man’s Freeway by my friend Kenny.

There’s a longer story about this cover, which you can follow on Kenny’s mySpace blog. In short Aimee held a contest – make a video of yourself covering this song. Ken’s entry is here (make sure you wait for the out takes at the end, they rule), which finished in the top ten in Aimee’s contest.

But I post this here not because of that; I post it here because this is Kenny’s new version, recorded in my mother’s living room. The recording is beautiful, and the idea that music is being made in her house would have made my mother very, very happy.

It’s been a huge help to me to have friends living in Mom’s house; they’re able to take care of a lot of the little tasks (and some of the really large ones) that would have been almost impossible for me to get done; they’re getting a place to live, and I’m getting work done for what feels like a steal. Having music played in that old house is like a gift from the universe.

Thank you Kenny. For the music, and for everything else.

ukuleles

This afternoon I went to a ‘ukulele jam party’ at the Poor House Bistro (a remarkably authentic cajun joint in down town San Jose near the Shark Tank). Friends (Kenny, Heather Courtney, DB Walker played, and then the gang from Ukulele Underground jammed for a couple hours.

It wasn’t that the music was good – it was in every sense a jam party. Sloppy, disorganized, happy, slightly drunken. It wasn’t even that they were playing hawaiian music, ’cause there wasn’t that much of it. I think it was just the sound of ‘ukes playing that made my eyes go hazy.

For a lot of reasons, it’s been a fucked up year. Much of it I’ve been buried under work, to the point where having a life seems like a faraway dream. And of course, there was the growing burden of Mom’s care. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see now that it wasn’t just an increasing level of nuttiness, but in fact was the beginning of a sharp physical decline. But it was one more thing I had to do in a year where I’ve felt like I was drowning in un-done work and responsibility.

There was a brief instant when I felt the pressure lift; when I realized that I could say a peaceful goodbye to my mother and let her go, not burden her and myself with a long, miserable struggle, it was like a weight off my shoulders. But the weird elation was short lived, soon replaced with the realization that work was about to bury me again, and that I’d had no time at all to process what had just happened.

If a crisis can ever have good timing, mom’s did. There was a short lull at work, a month or so where we were able to catch our breath. Mom, for once in her life, timed something perfectly. But the window snapped shut far too quickly for me. Plans to combine vacation with work shut-downs evaporated, and of course, my finances are in disarray, with mom’s death and the maintenance needed on her house far exceeding the liquid cash she had when she died. So even if I had time, going anywhere far, for long, is out of the question.

So today, as I sat drinking a beer and listening to ukuleles play, it all hit me, very very heavily. It felt like someone had dialed gravity up.

Hawaii calls me; not just as a physical place, not just as a vacation destination, but as a mental state. And more than anything else, Hawaiian music gets to me. I hear ukuleles and slide guitar, and I can almost feel hot tropical air on my skin.

It didn’t matter that these kids were playing bob marley songs; the sound of ‘ukes is so much a part of my mental Hawaii that I could almost smell the damp earth of Kauai.

It hasn’t been that long since I’ve been there. August of ’07 in Kauai, and before that, exactly this time of year I was in Kona in ’06. But the last year feels incredibly long, and I feet more tired than I been in five years. For the first time since the day I started work at Apple, I hate going to work every day. My weekends blink by and all I can think of is, when is my next day off.

I really, really need to get the hell out of here. I need to have a long time to do nothing.

I always hate entries like this and usually threaten to delete them. Just nobody tell me to fucking breathe, ok?

heros: season 3

I’m stealing my daughter’s one line review of Heros, season 3. “Epic Fail.” You can’t nail it more precisely than that.

I’m stealing my daughter’s one line review of Heros, season 3.

“Epic Fail.”

You can’t nail it more precisely than that.

new favorite band: Portico Quartet

I just ran across mention of these guys on BoingBoing. – Portico Quartet. I think they’re incredibly fabulous. They’re a jazz group with latin and vaguely middle-eastern/indonesian influences. The most distinctive thing about their sound is the use of a hang, a sort of steel-drum-meets-gemelan-meets-flying-saucer. One day after finding them, they’re at the top of […]

I just ran across mention of these guys on BoingBoing. – Portico Quartet.

I think they’re incredibly fabulous.

They’re a jazz group with latin and vaguely middle-eastern/indonesian influences. The most distinctive thing about their sound is the use of a hang, a sort of steel-drum-meets-gemelan-meets-flying-saucer.

One day after finding them, they’re at the top of my last.fm playlist and I’m already wishing they had more albums out.

You can find a number of videos of them on youtube but none with satisfactory sound, so here:

(I finally fixed the above link, you should be able to play it now)

If you dig ’em, though, go buy the cd.

Kenny in New York

My friend Kenny – the guy whose name is actually tattooed under my tattoo (I think that makes us some fucked up kind of brothers), is in New York next week. Words fail me for how much he’d love to have people who’ve heard of him come to these shows. Kenny plays a very personal […]

My friend Kenny – the guy whose name is actually tattooed under my tattoo (I think that makes us some fucked up kind of brothers), is in New York next week.

Words fail me for how much he’d love to have people who’ve heard of him come to these shows.

Kenny plays a very personal sort of singer/songwriter folk; his shows are always entertaining. He’s brilliantly talented, funny, and odd as hell.

Check samples out on his mySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/basement3music – though he’s even better live; his performance always has a crazy energy.

I miss him – go tell him that in person.

Here are the show dates:

September, 28 2008, 7PM at Arlene’s Grocery , 95 Stanton St, NY, New York 10002 Cost : $8

September, 29 2008, 9:30 PM at Shayni Rae’s Truckstop @ the National Underground 159 E. Houston, New York, New York 10002

September, 30 2008 at Banjo Jim’s, 9:30 PM, 700 East 9th Street, New York, New York 10009

mo’c’bell

This is funny in a fucked up pointless way: (via BoingBoing) MoreCowbell.dj is a little Flash app that takes in any MP3, analyses it, and adds rhythmic cowbell and Christopher Walken samples, thus vastly improving it. I didn’t get it to work as far as uploading my own song, but click a couple. They’re worth […]

This is funny in a fucked up pointless way:

(via BoingBoing)

MoreCowbell.dj is a little Flash app that takes in any MP3, analyses it, and adds rhythmic cowbell and Christopher Walken samples, thus vastly improving it.

I didn’t get it to work as far as uploading my own song, but click a couple. They’re worth significant giggles.

In other news, oh my god the week I’m having. It’s like trench warfare in the office the last ten days, and me? I’m the guy wearing the biggest target.

Bring me the head of the fortune teller

God DAMN I love swervedriver. Pisses me RIGHT the fuck off that I missed ’em when they did a reunion tour this year. Nevermind though – just Bring Me The Head of the Fortune Teller:

God DAMN I love swervedriver.

Pisses me RIGHT the fuck off that I missed ’em when they did a reunion tour this year.

Nevermind though – just Bring Me The Head of the Fortune Teller:

Dexter

Ok, so you know there are some things you really, REALLY want to like? Sometimes you’re lucky. Sometimes it’s the food that blows your mind, the book that changes your life, the movie you’ll see again and again, the tv show you buy your friends on DVD. And sometimes you try as hard as you […]

Ok, so you know there are some things you really, REALLY want to like?

Sometimes you’re lucky. Sometimes it’s the food that blows your mind, the book that changes your life, the movie you’ll see again and again, the tv show you buy your friends on DVD.

And sometimes you try as hard as you can, and there’s just nothing there.

I just finished season two of ‘Dexter‘.

Now, almost everyone I know has asked me if I watch it. They all insist I’ll love it, that it’s exactly my thing. And for two years now, I’ve been meaning to watch it, anticipating a macabre, black story, violent, dark, gory and funny.

I had half season one on my tivo and lost it due to a mishap, and then figured I’d catch it when season two ran; then I missed season two for some reason. Finally, after several other shows, Dexter came up in my netflix queue. And I expected to love it.

I didn’t.

The thing is, I really really tried. Because there’s so much to love. Michael C Hall is turning in the performance of his career, and he’s got a strong (if wildly uneven) cast behind him. The writing shows moments of brilliance (or at least vast cleverness); Dexter’s monologs in season one are so clever, and delivered so well, that it feels like a thing of rare brilliance when we hear Hall’s narration.

The first couple of episodes show enormous promise. The premise is fantastic and perverse; the serial killer working as a forensic blood spatter analyst, and killing ONLY bad guys who’ve escaped justice. It plays with the notion of hero; is he batman? is the the punisher? or is he ted bundy with a badge and an elaborate ability to rationalize?

What’s wrong isn’t simple. The show has so many high points. But it seems to match every high with lows.

The best of the cast – Jennifer Carpenter, James Remar, Julie Benz, C. S. Lee, David Zayas, Mark Pellegrino, and in season two, Keith Carradine (and of course Hall) all turn in fantastic performances. Even some of the slightly off-peak performers – Erik King, Christian Camargo, Jaime Murray – are decent enough, and carry the roles, sometimes shining. The trouble is, they’re bogged down by awkward, wooden performances by actors like Lauren Vélez and Judith Scott. The bad performances wouldn’t stand out that much in a great show, but in a show that keeps reaching for mediocrity, they are a hugh problem.

And then there’s the writing. Now, some shows are terribly uneven from episode to episode because shows are, usually, written by some sort of round-robin. So one episode will be terrific, and one weak or clumsy. The dialog tells it; check out any recent season of CSI to see what I mean about alternating good and bad dialog.

Dexter is different. Scene to scene the writing will go from great (Dexter’s own internal monolog) to clunky and awkward, sliding randomly in between. In some scenes in the first season, it seems like different characters each have their own writers.

The real problem, though, is plot. Because the show never comes close to taking this fantastic idea and making it shine. Instead of a dark, avenging angel story, or a beauty and the beast story, or a super-hero story, or a monster-within story, we get a very weak cop show, with one incredibly clever character who talks a lot about how he’s a monster, but never really acts like one.

At first it seems clever; dexter’s notion of who he is, is at odds with what we see. But after a bit it looks like the writers are not doing this on purpose, they just don’t know.

The same can be said of the back-story with Dexter’s father training him, in effect, to be a weapon. It’s brilliant in concept; what he does is exactly what espionage organizations do, finding amoral but trainable sociopaths, and teaching them single-minded loyalty and all the skills of murder. Yet after we watch Dexter trained to be an amoral, heartless killer, he doesn’t act like one, he acts like a wise-cracking marvel hero with a secret identity.

I won’t spoil it for those who have not watched season one; I will say, though, that if you have not worked the ending out for yourself by the eighth or ninth episode, you’re just not trying, and if ANY surprise reveal actually surprises you, you are smoking too much fucking pot when you watch teevee.

The second season was widely rumored to be better. I held out high hopes. Because while season one was deeply flawed, it was also deeply clever, and peopled with good characters and some very appealing actors.

Alas, it’s like they took what worked and jettisoned it, keeping what was wrong. Then they added in stupid plot twists, retcon-like devices, and worst of all, made key characters suddenly start acting stupid.

The season arc is based around Dexter’s cache of bodies being found, and the man-hunt for an un-known killer. Trouble is, we’ve been shown and told that Dexter is fucking brilliant, the best of the best, so good he’s un-catchable. In season two we find he’s been stashing his kills neatly wrapped in bags, all the parts together, in fifty feet of gin-clear miami water, in an area where scuba divers often dive.

The list of what’s wrong with that makes me grind my teeth. I am a better killer than that, and I’m just sitting on my couch.

It only gets worse from there. Dexter makes a list of stupid choices, and key characters suddenly change mid-season, whenever it’s convenient for plot devices. Dexter, it seems, can no longer kill, and the later, finds a twelve-step is enough to stop him from killing. This effectively neuters his character, AND is a 180 turn around from who he was in the first season.

Ok, there are high points. Keith Carradine as Frank Lundy could carry his own show; he’s that good, both actor and role. Jennifer Carpenter, Dexter’s sister Debra, chews up her role. She was a high-point in season one, and she runs with it, turning her character into a sweet, fucked up, sexually dynamic, foul-mouthed dynamo. She’s incredibly *real*, in that she seems so sweetly fucked up, that you want to love her, and she’s so goddamned sexy that you want to take her clothes off and love her a lot more.

And then there’s Jaime Murray as Lila. Ok, she’s not the best actress in the cast, not by a long shot. But she makes up for it, at least early on, because the character is so good that it works. She’s incredibly sexy, wild, crazy, intense, sweet. She is a character out of my own writing, and I was almost instantly in love with her, and all the more every time she flashed her pert little breasts. She’s just as hot as fuck, and I wanted to leap into the teevee and take her.

But of course, the season starts wrong and makes good headway toward really-far-wrong. Characters make stupid choices, police work is done incorrectly, dexter makes mistake after mistake (things that just don’t make any sense). Plot lines – like the new replacement Lieutenant and her cheating boyfriend – are just filler. And in the second half, things flip-flop with certain characters that make no sense, while being utterly, painfully predictable.

At the halfway point, I knew the ending. I kept hoping I was wrong, and groaning every time they made another ‘surprise’ reveal.

The trouble, really, isn’t that the show is bad. It’s that it is so close to being brilliant. Cast, characters, concept, half the dialog, all very good, some incredible. But it’s a fast car with no driver; no editorial point of view, no meaningful story arc, no clear idea of who these people are or what story is being told. It’s fucking amature.

It could have been amazing. It should have been, really. But it’s not. It just barely nails ‘good’.

I’m afraid to watch season three. I think it’s only Michael C Hall and Jennifer Carpenter that will bring me back. He’s that good, and she’s just incredibly, sweetly fuckable.