Blah Blah Blog

Radio star.

Yeah, right.

How about the "only in his tiny little mind" star?

Anyhoo, this just in from Mr. Liss.

From: cliss@bane-of-bryan's-existence.com
Sent: Thursday, March 31, 2005 12:39 PM
Subject: "Babylon" is Finished! And it's great!

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I just wanted to send word that Nate and I recieved the final edit of Bryan Thomas' "Babylon" video from the post-production house in NYC.

We are more than pleased; we are thrilled with the final piece. Scott's editing efforts were certainly worth the wait.

Where I derive the greatest satisfaction is that everyone's talents are clearly present, from Gina's set design to Dan and Jonesy's lighting work. It was a truly collaborative effort, all of which has finally been rewarded.

Bryan isn't too bad, either. ;^)

Nate and I are creating a version that carries a credit roll at the end; this is what we want to send out to you. A few people (i.e., Bryan Thomas, Matt Fabiano) will be getting the current version ASAP, for obvious reasons.

Please send me any change in addresses so that your copy is sent to the correct location.

I can't thank you all enough for your time and patience. I hope all is well with your lives.

Sincerely,

Carl W. Liss

Also: see if you can guess the name of the Albany poetry queen who dropped me this note this morning.

P.S. Tess wants to have a party for you and the video. I heard you protested. Give it up, you can't fight both of us. Let us do this for you or while she is putting a curse on you, I will be beating your narrow ass. K? Love ya...

To which I reply:

Narrow?

Labels: music

It's official. I'm the worst audio engineer on the planet.

Julia hides in plain sight. She's rough. Prole-like, even. (But don't tell her that. She'll cut you.)

She's also a bit bottom heavy. But that ain't necessarily a bad thing.

And she'll never be as bottom heavy as Jennifer.

(See ya at Why Can't I Be You Friday night at Chez Tess?)

Peace,

B.

Labels: music

Still no glasses. Headed to Dr. TJ Eckleburg's today though for the hookup, thanks.

I posted MP3's of what I hope are the final mixes for the new song "Out," which I wrote and recorded last week for my brother Jason's new short flick In the Alley. They're for Jason's ears only - unless you can figure out the name of the directory they're in. Which shouldn't be too hard. Have fun guessing. (Hint: It's a top-level directory. And it's in the alley.)

It was supposed to be a love song. And I guess it is. In as much as a love song can include a line like "When you and me is up and outta here/then we won't be niggas no more." In the chorus, no less.

Also: after I tweak the final mix on "Julia" tonight, she'll be done, too.

Both "Out" and "Julia" should be online for real Friday night. Just in time for "Why Can't I Be Ye, Three."

Went through the usual recording hell this weekend to get to the finish line, natch.

For one, I got in a fight with a piano Thursday morning at 3 a.m.

And lost.

I also broke a bass string just as I was about to record the line for the evil "Big Man" theme. That turned out to be a happy accident: it forced me completely change what I was going to play, and the result is decidedly more evil. Overdrive overdrive overdrive: it sounds like a broken bass with all that fuzz and buzz.

But while I'm happy with the outcome, there was certainly a lot of fear and sadness when the string first snapped. Indeed.

Labels: music

The bad news: my glasses snapped in two last week. Still haven't had a chance to replace them. Busy busy busy. Put out his eyes. Apologise.

The good news: thanks to a lot of late night sessions in the home studio, the new song 'Julia' is almost done. Acoustic and electric guitars, bass, a simple 4-on-the-floor kick drum, lead vocals and yet another army of backup vox. I'd like to add piano and/or organ, but something is telling me to keep it simple. I'm actually deconstructing the mix for the second movement of the song, when initially I thought I'd be building it up. Uh-huh.

What's slowing things down is that I'm simultaneously building a coupla mo' songs: 'Out,' which will serve as the main theme for my brother Jason's new short flick In the Alley; plus the bad guy theme for the same project; plus the tentatively titled 'Jealous' that's going on top of the drum tracks Dan Sorensen laid down for me a few weeks ago.

And those are just the tunes I've actually started multi-tracking. Waiting in the wings is a second drum track from Dan (no lyrics yet but the beginnings of a melody) and a solo-acoustic version of 'Babylon' that I think will finally put Spy Love Box to rest.

I have Friday off, and that's when I plan to finish recording all of this stuff. Especially the piano that drives 'Out.' The engineering end of things scares me. Maybe I should say right now that I meant for the piano to sound lo-fi.

So there you have it: I'm gonna try and record it lo-fi. Edge! Grit! Warts and all! I meant for it to sound bad! That makes it good! Indie, even!

Wish me luck.

Labels: music

That is the question.

After much toying with the idea of an official CD release of Spy Love Box - and even after the rush and satisfaction and sense of closure that's come with recording 'Julia' as the final track on the project - I'm back in the "it's only available for download" camp.

Feels good to be here.

At a later date, I may elaborate on the merits of professionally mastering and duplicating the record. For now, let it suffice to say that the songs are already out there for free. As is the cover art (which will be updated come April 1). And the video will be online, too - which weakens the incentive for releasing Spy Love Box as an enhanced CD.

So as of now, Spy Love Box remains online-only.

You think I should release is for real?

Convince me.

Labels: music

From Knight Ridder, on the president's Rolling Thunder Social Security Revue:

Jon Paul Surma, a 24-year-old businessman from Rolling Prairie, Ind., said he was tapped for an appearance with Bush after he raised his concerns about Social Security at a town hall meeting with Rep. Chris Chocola, R-Ind.

Surma, who works in his family's garbage-truck business, said he'd like to eliminate Social Security, but he didn't mention that politically explosive idea to Bush. Instead, Surma focused on his belief that he'll never receive his promised benefits - a concern that dovetails with Bush's contention that younger workers have little reason to fear changes in Social Security.

The night before their appearance with Bush, Surma and the other conversation participants held a dress rehearsal with a White House aide who played the role of the president. While Surma and other participants said they were never told what to say, the practice session and the interviews that preceded it reduced the likelihood of any surprises.

White House Communications Director Nicolle Devenish said screening out opponents helps ensure a "productive discussion."

Emphasis mine. A ringer who wants to kill Social Security is part of a panel discussion on "strengthening" Social Security. An audience bused in from out-of-state helps ensure "productive discussion" - yet the news reports as if the audience is made up of locals.

If you support the President, and you think this kind of orchestrated government propaganda is okay, and you think I'm obsessive for dwelling on it, picture this:

It's 2009. Hillary Clinton is your president, and despite her setback when she was First Lady, she's now ready to make nationalized health care a reality. But a "nationalized" health care program doesn't test well in focus groups, so President Hillary directs government agencies and the media to refer to it only as a "personalized" health care program. The Health Department begins sending out video news releases informing the public about "personalized" health care. Local television news stations are airing the spots as if they're from an objective, legitimate news source. All thanks to your tax dollars. President Hillary hits the road with a stylized talk show/infomercial selling her health care plan. Everyone on stage is a ringer. Their answers are rehearsed the day before. The entire production is run by MoveOn.org. The local news outlets report on the events as if they're open forums with ordinary Americans. All thanks to your tax dollars.

This is the precedent that's being set now.

I'll say it again: it's not the policy, it's the way it's being sold.

Go read the whole thing.

You may also want to try the earlier draft of the article.

Peace,

B.

Labels: in the news

As if to underline my previous post on the Orwellian nature of today's government, a coalition of media organizations has designated March 13-20 as Sunshine Week in a bid to shed light on what a whopping 70 percent of Americans perceive as the U.S. government's increasingly restrictive access to public information.

But in addition to the many stories you'll be seeing here and there in the news this week about the government's ever-growing resistance to letting the public in, you're probably noticing a number of stories about the shady tools the government is using to output information.

Or disinformation, to be precise.

Witness: the fake news videos your tax dollars are paying for, dumped onto lazy local television news stations with rah-rah reports on government policy. (The Government Accountability Office - the investigative arm of Congress - recently denounced video news releases as "covert propaganda"; the White House response yesterday was basically, "Thanks for your opinion. We're gonna keep doing it anyway.")

Witness: the farcical Social Security road shows that are so scripted that participants gather a day in advance to rehearse their praises for Dear Leader. (It helps them "say things clearer," says a member of the Orwellian-named FreedomWorks, a right-wing advocacy group handling production duties and audience recruitment.)

Witness: the practice of planting fake journalists in the White House press room to conveniently change the subject during those rare occassions when the questions from the corps actually have some substance. (The fake White House journalist who's been in the news lately received security clearance despite using a fake name and moonlighting as a male prostitute.)

Sigh.

I'm the first to admit I'm not a big fan of this administration's policies.

But worse than the policies are the way they are sold, which is incrementally chipping away at the very foundation of the greatest nation on the planet. Newspeak. Fake town hall meetings. Propaganda passed off as objective news reports. Planted, fake reporters.

And while I'm glad to see that these ridiculous tactics are being exposed to the general public as part of a collective effort, I can't help but say:

"Duh."

And: "Too little too late."

Maybe if the press hadn't been so - afraid? lazy? indifferent? status quo? - when these stories needed to see the light of day, we wouldn't even need a Sunshine Week. I don't want to paint 'em all with one brush - that I've known about this stuff all along is proof enough that someone must have been reporting it - but damn.

Damn.

To that end: 16 days to Julia.

Giving the Daily Show a run for their money in the fake news department, this is Karen Ryan reporting.

Labels: in the news

Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?

I wonder if that's how supporters of the current White House administration feel after perusing the cynical 160-page Republican strategy piece by pollster/marketer/language master Frank Luntz - recently leaked for all to download.

Cheated.

PDFs | HTML

The farmers are feeling it. The AARP is feeling it.

The brazen bait-and-switch. From an administration that claims to put trust and loyalty above all.

Are you next?

Mind you, nothing in the Luntz document is about substance: it's all just how to sell, sell, sell it. Image is everything. Appearance is everything. Language is everything. Convince the people that you're selling what they wanna buy. And you're selling it cheap. Pay no real price, everything so nice. Sell. Sell. Sell.

Look - I know that politics is politics, it's dirty business, everybody does it. Whatever.

It's the science of it these days that kills me. There are no accidents.

Orwell said that the Newspeak employed in his novel 1984 was a distillation of language "designed to diminish the range of thought."

Is Luntz's "New American Lexicon" any different from Orwell's Newspeak?

Designed to diminish thought? Diminish debate?

Elimintating words from the lexicon when they don't work in his focus groups?

His "words that work" and "words that don't work?"

Language as a tool of control?

Encouraging Republicans to "resist the temptation" to use "facts and figures?"

Resist the temptation to use facts?

Man.

I mean, I'm just digging into it, and it READS like 1984. Like O'Brien's big explanation to Winston of how the machine that is Big Brother works.

"You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature."

But it doesn't get more cynical than this. Witness, from Mr. Luntz's strategy document:

"The defecit is a touchy subject for both Republicans and Democrats - your supporters are inherently turned off to the idea of fiscal responsibility, and Democrats see nothing but hipocrisy. The trick then is to contextualize the deficit inside of 9/11 and the war in Iraq, which Republicans sometimes do, but not early enough in their answer."

A "trick?" 9/11 is a "trick?"

Let's re-write the first part of that last sentence for Mr. Language:

The crafty procedure we should employ to deceive or defraud so we can spend even more money we don't have is to bring up the subject of the murder of 3,000 innocents on September 11th.

Which is not to mention the death of 1,500 American soldiers in a nation that had nothing to do with the murder of 3,000 innocents on September 11th.

And yeah, check your dictionary: "trick" connotes deception.

Frank Luntz is a master of the language.

He knows what "trick" means.

There are no accidents.

Think about that the next time someone invokes the tired "9/11 changed everything!" bit when they're losing an argument.

Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?

VIDEO: For a peek behind the Luntz curtain, go to PBS Frontline: The Persuaders and click on Segment 5, "Give the People What they Want." Fascinating stuff. Scary, but fascinating.

Labels: in the news

I know the listing on the "Shows" page is a little slim. As in no nada nuthin'. But there's a lot going on behind the scenes. Here's what I'll be working on the next few weeks:

• Recording the final two songs for the "Spy Love Box" EP;
• Inventing some songs to layer on top of drum tracks Mr. Dan Sorensen has laid down for a collaborative project with Frank Moscowitz and several local songwriters and musicians;
• Inventing a theme/score for my brother Jason's latest video short;
• Finally getting Jason's video short "Famous" online;
• Some your-work-is-never-done tweaks under the hood of the site;
• Lining up the ducks for an official release of "Spy Love Box;"
• and, um, Babylon video stuff as it comes in.

I'll keep you posted on the progress at this very web site. Yes indeed.

PS: That article also mentioned Common, and oh, don't get me started. Common disappointed me big time a couple-few moons ago. While I understand that pimping product is just about the only way for major-label artists to actually see green these days, you don't have to sell out by bastardizing genius VietNam-era protest songs to pimp Coca-Cola - made worse by Common and Mya's irony-free declarations that they aren't sell-outs.

(Uh-oh... BT's got a blog.)

Labels: in the news

Lightweight articles on pop culture trends are annoying in general. But nothing is more annoying or consistently as ill-informed as the stupid article on trends in hip-hop "positivity" that's been written and re-written every six months since Arrested Development appeared on the scene in the early 90s.

But in a long line of such bad articles touting what America wants so badly to hear - that thug rap is dead, that anti-bling is the new thing - this one is about the worst I've seen.

I mean, can we really call Kanye West a beacon of relentless positivity in a hip-hop waste land?

This ain't to hate on Kanye. Because I know that "Jesus Walks" earned him a Grammy. But was it songs like "The New Workout Plan" that actually got him signed?

Like the above article, this one seems to think "Workout" is about "the challenges of being health-conscious in a bling-bling-driven society." But it's the exact opposite. Witness:

"I just want to say thanks to Kanye's workout plan, I was able to pull a NBA player
and like now I shop every day on Rodeo drive."

The. Exact. Opposite.

And what part of the workout instruction "give head" is unclear? Has this guy only heard the clean version? Is it so hard to Google a lyric before writing an article for a major publication?

And by the way: it ain't just a black thing, or a hip-hop thing. I resent the underlying implication in these kinds of articles that once we get hip-hop artists to stop acting like so-called niggers, America can be America again. Dress the niggers in Ralph Lauren and all will be right in the land.

Please.

Crap culture is everywhere.

For every conservative Fox News pundit decrying Pepsi for using Ludacris as a spokesperson, there's a hypocritical Fox TV network that's getting fined by the FCC for airing soft-porn in the family hour. All under the auspices of hypocrite-in-chief Rupert Murdoch and his so-called conservative values pimpin' News Corp.

(Which is not to mention the not-so-soft-porn phone calls that holier-than-thou married pundit is making to an unwilling assistant young enough to be his daughter. And Ludacris has the last laugh.)

So yes, the same Fox clowns wincing at the sight of materialistic new-money Negroes on "Cribs" are bringing us "The Swan" every week. The same pro-marriage (read: anti-gay) network that is making money off of "The Swan" is destroying marriages in the process.

Crap culture is everywhere.

I guess I'm sensitive about this cuz I come from the Richard Pryor School of Raw and Real. Whatever the medium for your art, if you're going to be raw and real, do it for a reason. Have something to say. Self-examination above all: yourself, your society. Have something to say.



I'm reminded of Pryor's short-lived TV series. Every fight he and co-genius Paul Mooney had with NBC over content was for a sketch that had something to actually say. Not just booby talk, like Howard Stern, whose only socially redeeming value seems to be his fight for the right to talk about boobies. Not just the mean shock humor of making fun of people more famous than us, which is all that Saturday Night Live seems to offer these days. Even South Park, which is much smarter than its critics will admit, seems to be more about counting the number of times they can get away with saying "shit" on-air in a 30-minute episode. Complete with counter.

Again, this ain't to hate on Kanye. It's just an observation that people are either overlooking the X-rated tracks on his record, or X-rated just ain't considered X-rated anymore.

Either way, America eats it up. Like salad.

Have something to say.

Labels: in the news