And you thought this was going to be about that movie, didn't you? I know a lot of people love that movie but I plan on never seeing it -- I've reached a point in my life where I can't stand Robin Williams and the three characters he's capable of playing (wacky; too sincere for his own good; insane and menacing).
No. This post, I think, is much better, and yet still related to music. In honor of one of my top 10 bands, Rush, coming to town later in the month, I will be posting daily Facebook status messages leading up to their performance, each of which will be a quote from a Rush song and yet still have a thread of applicability to whatever is happening in my life that day.
You're welcome.
Friday, July 30, 2010
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Evolution of a Computer Nerd
I've always been a little fascinated by technology. It likely goes back to Star Wars for me, seeing that opening scene with the rebel blockade runner being pursued by that star destroyer that just kept getting longer and longer until it finally ended with these huge engines, each of which looked to my nine-year-old eyes to be close to the size of what I imagined Rhode Island was.
I don't think it's too much of a jump to go from all the cool Star Wars stuff into computers. I vaguely remember my mother bringing an Apple IIc home from school for a summer, which may have had a few text-based games like old-old-school Oregon Trail, if that. I remember my aunt and uncle having a computer in Turtle Lake, one that had a few more games on it. By this time video games were creeping into society. Pong, Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Battle Zone, Asteroids, Tempest... the classics. When my friend Todd had another Apple version up in his attic and a text-based, choose-your-own-adventure game, I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
And things just kept progressing. Color printing, with old printers that used dot matrix and ribbons. Video arcades: The standard for us was Aladdin's Castle at the Mariner Mall in Superior, where I once played $12 worth of quarters in an afternoon, which I still feel a small bit of residual guilt over. Atari; the games didn't look the same as the arcade versions, but they were enough to keep us awake until late at night. I remember one year I was so psyched about a game I KNEW I was getting that I waited for my parents to leave, peeled back the tape to carefully unwrap the gift, gently open the box to take the cartridge out and play the game for a bit before putting it all back together and re-wrapping it, making sure I absolutely destroyed the box when I opened it Christmas morning to leave no evidence behind. Unquestionably, I was a devious child.
In high school I took a computer class that was just showing us how to write commands in BASIC. Even in college, back in the late 80s, computers were still largely glorified typewriters for most of us, and since I had a nice electric typewriter I'd been given for high school graduation and a video arcade in the student union, I was content. The first time I ever heard of a FAX machine was in about 1989, and when the girl in my class who was giving a presentation on them tried to explain how they worked, the concept mostly went over my head. (Plus she was really cute, so I may have been distracted from what she was saying anyway.)
My first encounter with the once-almighty CD-ROM was in student teaching, and again, I still didn't quite get it. The school where I was assigned had one computer in the media center that had a CD-ROM drive, and only the media teacher ever used it. I didn't quite get the power of the CD-ROM until I wound up in my own teaching job, and once I saw what it could do, it was an epiphany.
My first personal computer was a Macintosh Performa CD, with 8MB of memory and a hard drive that was so small by today's standards I didn't even pay attention to what size it was. And it didn't matter anyway because I played games right off the discs and saved any work on tiny little floppy disks. My first foray into the Internet was Apple's old online service, eWorld, which was really pretty bare bones but I look back at as awesome now in the same way that some people will romanticize their high school days.
And now today, having gone through 5 personal computers, 6 gaming systems, and 3 cell phones, I'm on the verge of merging all of those devices into one -- my iPhone 4 is scheduled for delivery sometime today. Yeah, it's AT&T. But you know what? I know a good number of people with iPhones, and I have yet to hear anyone complain about the service. In fact, these people have been nothing short of superlative in their praise. I was holding out for the white iPhone 4 for the longest time, but after the news reports had stories about "manufacturing difficulties" and production delays, I got spooked and went with the black one. Which doesn't matter anyway since I already picked up my free case, and it's a nice dark purple one.
So this little thing about the size of a deck of cards will allow me to make phone calls, browse the internet, video chat, e-mail, take pictures, shoot and edit HD video, pay bills, listen to music, organize my life and yes, play games. It will be able to do more than my first four computers were able to do, and it will have more data storage than those first four computers COMBINED.
Technology continues to amaze me. It makes me anxious to see what will be the next big thing someone comes up with. It also makes me hope a little bit that I don't live long enough to see robots go all Terminator on us....
I don't think it's too much of a jump to go from all the cool Star Wars stuff into computers. I vaguely remember my mother bringing an Apple IIc home from school for a summer, which may have had a few text-based games like old-old-school Oregon Trail, if that. I remember my aunt and uncle having a computer in Turtle Lake, one that had a few more games on it. By this time video games were creeping into society. Pong, Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Battle Zone, Asteroids, Tempest... the classics. When my friend Todd had another Apple version up in his attic and a text-based, choose-your-own-adventure game, I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
And things just kept progressing. Color printing, with old printers that used dot matrix and ribbons. Video arcades: The standard for us was Aladdin's Castle at the Mariner Mall in Superior, where I once played $12 worth of quarters in an afternoon, which I still feel a small bit of residual guilt over. Atari; the games didn't look the same as the arcade versions, but they were enough to keep us awake until late at night. I remember one year I was so psyched about a game I KNEW I was getting that I waited for my parents to leave, peeled back the tape to carefully unwrap the gift, gently open the box to take the cartridge out and play the game for a bit before putting it all back together and re-wrapping it, making sure I absolutely destroyed the box when I opened it Christmas morning to leave no evidence behind. Unquestionably, I was a devious child.
In high school I took a computer class that was just showing us how to write commands in BASIC. Even in college, back in the late 80s, computers were still largely glorified typewriters for most of us, and since I had a nice electric typewriter I'd been given for high school graduation and a video arcade in the student union, I was content. The first time I ever heard of a FAX machine was in about 1989, and when the girl in my class who was giving a presentation on them tried to explain how they worked, the concept mostly went over my head. (Plus she was really cute, so I may have been distracted from what she was saying anyway.)
My first encounter with the once-almighty CD-ROM was in student teaching, and again, I still didn't quite get it. The school where I was assigned had one computer in the media center that had a CD-ROM drive, and only the media teacher ever used it. I didn't quite get the power of the CD-ROM until I wound up in my own teaching job, and once I saw what it could do, it was an epiphany.
My first personal computer was a Macintosh Performa CD, with 8MB of memory and a hard drive that was so small by today's standards I didn't even pay attention to what size it was. And it didn't matter anyway because I played games right off the discs and saved any work on tiny little floppy disks. My first foray into the Internet was Apple's old online service, eWorld, which was really pretty bare bones but I look back at as awesome now in the same way that some people will romanticize their high school days.
And now today, having gone through 5 personal computers, 6 gaming systems, and 3 cell phones, I'm on the verge of merging all of those devices into one -- my iPhone 4 is scheduled for delivery sometime today. Yeah, it's AT&T. But you know what? I know a good number of people with iPhones, and I have yet to hear anyone complain about the service. In fact, these people have been nothing short of superlative in their praise. I was holding out for the white iPhone 4 for the longest time, but after the news reports had stories about "manufacturing difficulties" and production delays, I got spooked and went with the black one. Which doesn't matter anyway since I already picked up my free case, and it's a nice dark purple one.
So this little thing about the size of a deck of cards will allow me to make phone calls, browse the internet, video chat, e-mail, take pictures, shoot and edit HD video, pay bills, listen to music, organize my life and yes, play games. It will be able to do more than my first four computers were able to do, and it will have more data storage than those first four computers COMBINED.
Technology continues to amaze me. It makes me anxious to see what will be the next big thing someone comes up with. It also makes me hope a little bit that I don't live long enough to see robots go all Terminator on us....
Friday, July 23, 2010
Live Monsters
A couple of posts back I mentioned how I didn't have a Definitive Album for Summer of 2010 yet, and had been relying on an iPod playlist to fill that void. I'm happy to say this has changed.
Big Head Todd and the Monsters: "Live at the Fillmore." So, so cool.
BHTM have been a band embedded deeply in my library for some time now. If you've listened to adult contemporary radio in the past 15 years you've heard a couple of their songs: "Bittersweet" and "Broken-Hearted Savior" were the two big hits they had right out of the gate before they kind of shook off the idea of following music industry rules and focused on making the kind of music they wanted to. I can remember playing my cassette of the "Strategem" album while working in my classroom after school, way back before I even taught the grade I've been at now for fourteen years. The band is made up of four guys, three of whom have played together through high school and college. There is actually a Todd in the band - Todd Park Mohr, the guy who sings, does most of the songwriting, and plays guitar. Probably why he gets separate billing in the band name, though I don't think his head is unusually large, at least not physically. (David Letterman might disagree; I watched his show one night to see BHTM play at the end, and Dave had a running joke all night that was based around variations of the phrase "Look at the size of that guy's head!!") If Todd does have a big head for the reasons that people would normally attach to that label (and I'm not saying he does; in fact available evidence points to the contrary), then he's earned it. Because the dude knows how to play a guitar. He's got a deep tone you can feel vibrate in your chest. He plays with such little effort it's almost an afterthought. His style, while being refreshingly old-school and basic, has such a thick DNA to the sound it could be easily picked out from any other number of guitar heroes out there. His singing is slurred just enough to show he's singing more about emotion then idea, and his voice sounds like it's been damaged by whiskey and cigarettes in the best ways possible. The music ranges anywhere from bar-band rockers to almost traditional blues to tender ballads bordering on alt-country, and more often than not a combination of those elements in varying degrees. A lot of the songs are written as stories, but not in such an obvious manner they only have one interpretation.
"Live at the Fillmore" is what we old folks used to call a double album, a live set so long that it would take 2 CDs to handle all the music. It includes a few of my favorite songs from the band, but what I appreciate the most about it is how the live versions breathe so much vitality into songs from earlier in their career that came across as kind of lifeless before. The whole album, everything from the playing to the stage banter to the audience reaction, has such a casual feel it sounds like they're just hanging out and playing in someone's backyard, if that backyard could hold 4,000 people. Which would be perfect. Imagine yourself at someone's house, enjoying a summer cookout with a crowd of your friends. Someone puts on a CD that provides perfect background music for the good times your having; music that doesn't grab you by the face and demand your attention, but subtly reels you in until you start wondering, "Who is that? They are good." This would be the album you were listening to.
One of the reasons I downloaded this was because I was already getting the new album they released this summer, "Rocksteady," (also great). I also saw in the newspaper that they will be playing a one-hour set opening for the BoDeans (...eh...) at the state fair this year.
Anybody want to go see them? I'm in. Seriously We wouldn't even need to stay for the BoDeans....
Big Head Todd and the Monsters: "Live at the Fillmore." So, so cool.
BHTM have been a band embedded deeply in my library for some time now. If you've listened to adult contemporary radio in the past 15 years you've heard a couple of their songs: "Bittersweet" and "Broken-Hearted Savior" were the two big hits they had right out of the gate before they kind of shook off the idea of following music industry rules and focused on making the kind of music they wanted to. I can remember playing my cassette of the "Strategem" album while working in my classroom after school, way back before I even taught the grade I've been at now for fourteen years. The band is made up of four guys, three of whom have played together through high school and college. There is actually a Todd in the band - Todd Park Mohr, the guy who sings, does most of the songwriting, and plays guitar. Probably why he gets separate billing in the band name, though I don't think his head is unusually large, at least not physically. (David Letterman might disagree; I watched his show one night to see BHTM play at the end, and Dave had a running joke all night that was based around variations of the phrase "Look at the size of that guy's head!!") If Todd does have a big head for the reasons that people would normally attach to that label (and I'm not saying he does; in fact available evidence points to the contrary), then he's earned it. Because the dude knows how to play a guitar. He's got a deep tone you can feel vibrate in your chest. He plays with such little effort it's almost an afterthought. His style, while being refreshingly old-school and basic, has such a thick DNA to the sound it could be easily picked out from any other number of guitar heroes out there. His singing is slurred just enough to show he's singing more about emotion then idea, and his voice sounds like it's been damaged by whiskey and cigarettes in the best ways possible. The music ranges anywhere from bar-band rockers to almost traditional blues to tender ballads bordering on alt-country, and more often than not a combination of those elements in varying degrees. A lot of the songs are written as stories, but not in such an obvious manner they only have one interpretation.
"Live at the Fillmore" is what we old folks used to call a double album, a live set so long that it would take 2 CDs to handle all the music. It includes a few of my favorite songs from the band, but what I appreciate the most about it is how the live versions breathe so much vitality into songs from earlier in their career that came across as kind of lifeless before. The whole album, everything from the playing to the stage banter to the audience reaction, has such a casual feel it sounds like they're just hanging out and playing in someone's backyard, if that backyard could hold 4,000 people. Which would be perfect. Imagine yourself at someone's house, enjoying a summer cookout with a crowd of your friends. Someone puts on a CD that provides perfect background music for the good times your having; music that doesn't grab you by the face and demand your attention, but subtly reels you in until you start wondering, "Who is that? They are good." This would be the album you were listening to.
One of the reasons I downloaded this was because I was already getting the new album they released this summer, "Rocksteady," (also great). I also saw in the newspaper that they will be playing a one-hour set opening for the BoDeans (...eh...) at the state fair this year.
Anybody want to go see them? I'm in. Seriously We wouldn't even need to stay for the BoDeans....
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