Okay, I would be the first to admit that the above
heading does not merit an exclamation point. While there are people in
this world who cover The Beatles extraordinarily well (Will
Lee's Fab Faux, for instance), I do them no better than I do
Tiny Tim (the late singer, not the Dickens cripple, though between the
two I do the boy better). Never, however, one to let lack of talent be
over-ruled by legitimate judgment, I have here a couple garage covers of
two of my earlier Beatle favorites,
"Paperback Writer" and
"She Said She Said"
(the latter done mostly because it gave me an excuse to drag out the
Rickenbacker 12-string.). (Click on any of these links to stream these
quick confections.) I'm sure Paul McCartney
wrote "Paperback Writer"
as a dig at John Lennon, who was
something of a paperback writer. It paints a pretty facile picture of a
guy who just wants to make a living writing paperback novels. The song
has been on my mind a lot of late, as I am in a fecund period with my
own writing, cranking out 200 pages of fiction a week. (I'm sure this
wonderfulness will not last forever.) The wife was out of the house one
recent day, so as I am prone to act in the rare moments opportunity
strikes, I slapped my cover together, along with
"She Said She Said".
A NOTE ON THE DRUMS: It seems to me
that the key to pulling off a Beatles tune, other than getting the
vocals right, which I don't even try to do, is to capture the drum
patterns. Not a drummer myself, I rely on drum tab for this, which I
then notate in Cakewalk Producer so I can generate a drum track in midi.
These exercises always give me special appreciation of
Ringo Starr's contributions, which I
believe to be hugely under appreciated. Working with a minimal kit, and
using a less-is-more approach, he like his band mates was stupendous at
playing just the right thing without particular concern for
complexity or showiness. There were certainly far more bombastic
drummers in The Beatles' era, but in that McLuhan-esque sense,
Ringo Starr was the coolest,
offering the greatest engagement impact while providing the least
possible information. - RAR
We lifted this image from
FalseNorthing.com. Not sure where they lifted it from.
Mr. Grumpy
In an effort to spare gentle readers from the
sharp sticks and pointy stones that this site occasionally throws at our
favorite cultural targets, all of our outright negative stuff will
hereafter appear on its own bummer page, set aside for "Mr. Grumpy".
This stuff is always rude and offensive, finger-pointing and filled with
rage and judgment. Or, otherwise put, the best stuff on the site. This
edition Mr. Grumpy picks on Bruce Springsteen,
Steve Perry, Robert Plant, and
Gordon Sumner, who we refuse to call "Sting".
Use this link to go to the grumpiest page in
all of whatever it is we do here!.
Building a Cult Following
Were you under the impression that Lady Gaga,
Jay-Z, The Grateful Dead, and KISS got to the top on sheer talent?
Story on the Artist Management page.
Mawazine International Music
Festival -
Do Lenny Kravitz,
Mariah Carey and Jimmy Cliff know anything about the
North African regime they are supporting?
Story on the
RCJ...
Interscope Records CEO
JimmyIovine
was featured in a recent piece in Rolling Stone, and it was one
of those rare celebrity interviews that actually yield insight and
useful information for people interested in music production and
engineering. READ
MORE...
New Releases on
RARadio: "1,000 Leather Tassels"
by The Blank Tapes;
"We Are All Stone" and "Those
Machines" by
Outer Minds; "Another Dream"
by MMOSS; "Susannah" by
Woolen Kits;
Jim Morrison, Elvis Presley, Michael
Jackson and other dead celebrities / news by
A SECRET PARTY; "I Miss the Day"by
My Secret Island,
"Carriers of Light" by Brendan James;
"The Last Time" by Model Stranger;
"Last Call" by Jay; "Darkness"
by Leonard
Cohen; "Sweetbread" by
Simian Mobile Disco and "Keep
You" from
Actress off the Chronicle
movie soundtrack;"Goodbye to Love" from
October Dawn; Trouble in Mind 2011
label sampler;
Black Box Revelation Live on
Minnesota Public Radio;
Apteka "Striking Violet";
Mikal Cronin's "Apathy" and "Get
Along"; Dana deChaby's
progressive rock
Alvin Lee
won the world over with his blistering filmed performance of "I'm Going
Home" at the 1969 Woodstock Pop Festival. Lee and his band
Ten Years After had only one major hit
- "I'd Love to Change the World" (1971) - and did not leave a huge
legacy in the annals of rock, but then those are pretty strange annals
as any review of the charts page of any issue of Rolling Stone
will show. General music fans will not always recognize the real
thing, though decades later the work of those folks will still
resonate with a passion that transcends time, as powerful upon revisit
as it was upon first listen to those who heard it in the first place.
Alvin Lee's guitar technique was transcendent in that same way, not
mechanical at all but rather an open channel of emotional expression for
which the instrument was merely the voice. But what a voice! Lee was
most famous for his extraordinary power, speed, and dexterity on the
fret board, though metal rails were tangential to his string bends and
nuanced stops that pulled exotic notes from pentatonic scales into his
blues idiom, and did so with heartbreaking immediacy. There are no
wasted notes in an Alvin Lee performance; even his harmonics morph
within themselves to reveal other nuanced tones. Has there ever been
anyone better? Listen to the performance (video below) of "The Bluest
Blues", which is a fitting tribute to the lost Lee, who reportedly died
unexpectedly of complications following a routine surgery.
______________________
Original Political Satire
Screenplay For
Our Paralyzed Times
"The Oracle", a
screenplay by Rick Alan Rice,
Publisher of the RARWRITER Publishing Group, has been registered with
Writers Guild of America - West. Described as The Devil Wears Prada
meets Being There, the screenplay follows a group of White
House strategists under the leadership of a Karl Rove-like character.
When he discovers a pharmaceutical short-cut to fixing his Republican
President's faltering poll numbers, it sets off a torrent of violence
and mayhem not anticipated nor intended, which takes on a further life
of its own. In turns both funny and horrifying, "The Oracle" satirizes
today's Washington D.C. and the paralysis of ideas that has created a
lost generation (The Post-Millennial). In the process it touches upon
virtually every issue of importance in the world today. This screenplay,
which some will consider in the same vein as "Wag the Dog", is
looking for an agent and a producer.
Use this link to open the WGA
Registered draft, or click on the cover below.
__________________________
_________
The Seth MacFarlanization of America
"Everyone else seems afraid to say it, but that
Quvenzhané Wallis is kind of a cunt, right?"
By RAR
That vulgar little Tweet from a
staff member at the satirical Web site The
Onion (at
http://www.theonion.com) during the Oscar ceremony Sunday night,
aimed in a way that is impossible to comprehend at nine-year old Best
Actress Nominee Quvenzhané
Wallis ("Beast of the Southern Wild"), has been properly
criticized by everyone from Fox News to The Onion itself, the latter in
an apology for the unnamed staff member who was responsible. The
offensive Twitter was published on the company's official Twitter site.
While nothing excuses the writer of that Tweet, this twit
suspects that the root of the problem was with the tone that having
Seth MacFarlane host the Oscars created
for the entire event. It was remarkably tacky, the worst in years, in
what has become an increasingly abominable affair.
"We Saw Your Boobs"? This was one of the very musical Mr.
MacFarlane's send up numbers, which seemed to me to make everyone
cringe. There is a lot of boob showing in the movie business, usually
exploitive, but not so much in the films at the Oscar level. MacFarlane
exploited, apparently for the purposes of cringe humor, virtually every
big name female who has ever done a nude scene. There may be
entertainers with whom the Academy members feel an intimacy that would
allow this type of humor, but not from MacFarlane, from whom it came off
as a crudely inappropriate; a brash outsider working an insider's
routine.
But see, a lot of people have lost their sense of what
might be appropriate for the occasion.
I always feel that environment is everything, and the
setting for the occasion of the Oscars has become deplorable in its
functional tackiness that has naturally bled onto the telecast. The
Dolby Theater, which has been home to
the ceremony since the building opened in 2001, and was designed
specifically for the Oscars telecast, just seems bound to produce ick.
It boasts one of the largest stage areas in the United States, 113 feet
wide and 60 feet deep, which provides sufficient production room for
Cirque de Soleil and other large-scale extravaganzas. Designed by David
Rockwell of the Rockwell Group, and Theatre Projects Consultants, the
building is atrocious on almost every level, from its phony facade and
commercial mall entrance to its concept-bare interior. The designers
built box seating along the walls, and a lot of it, which feels out of
proportion to the floor space, which slants up and away and features a
balcony section high at the rear. People are crammed in like Shriners on
folding chairs. With red fabric walls, the interior creates an
impression of faux royal accommodation, but somehow it comes across on
television as self mocking, in the way of a large chandelier in a ranch
style home with eight-foot ceilings, or more to the point, a cheaply
replicated version of a classic opera house. This year's Oscar Producers
Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, whose productions have ranged from
Footloose (1984) to the current Smash TV series, seemed to
have no idea what to do with that awful space, settling for hanging
icicle lights and dangling giant medallions, which shield-like had all
the style of copper sculpture. Everything about that performance space
seems cold and sterile, which apparently David Rockwell thought would
serve its real purpose, which is as a soundstage for broadcast events.
What, you may ask, has this to do
with Seth MacFarlane and that vulgar tweet about young Miss
Wallis that Seth MacFarlane had absolutely nothing to do with?
Somehow it feels to me that MacFarlane had everything to do with
it; that it all feels of a piece, like a terrible convergence of
examples of the awful arc that American culture is on, typified by
undistinguished architecture, functionality entirely to do with
showiness, crude humor, and a general decline in discretion. Judging
from the reviews, largely on Twitter, of course, those whose posture is
anti-establishment thought MacFarlane was tops!
The
soaring rocket that is 39-year old Seth MacFarlane, who earned a $100
million production deal on the strength of his "Family Guy" animated
series, is tied entirely to whatever people find funny about characters
who are unwilling to govern their inner thoughts. That was at the heart
of the humor of his bawdy Ted
movie, which I thought was quite funny, and it is the thing that
characterizes his principal mouthpiece, the animated character
Peter Griffin. The Peter Griffin
character says whatever is on his mind, which is usually only funny
because it is the type of thing anyone might think, but would not
likely say. Usually what he has to say is mean or dismissive, and
the timing of his bluntness is key to the joke. He isn't really
connected and he doesn't really care. In real life saying rude things to
people is seldom funny. On TV, anticipating and then being rewarded by
Peter Griffin's rudeness is somehow satisfying, as in catharsis.
Unfortunately, the room populated by the American television viewing
public is varied without being particularly rich, and it
sits plenty of people who don't get that mimicking the attitude of Seth
MacFarlane's Peter Griffin character is distinctly un-funny.
I suspect that this MacFarlane dynamic is at the heart of
what would prompt someone at The Onion to say something as
thoughtless as the Tweet shown above, quoted in its entirety because to
do otherwise would just compound the stupidity. It is a prime example of
someone getting the wrong idea, which unfortunately seems to be
taking hold in our culture. I see this ungoverned impulse in 23-year old
Best Actress Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence(Silver Linings Playbook), and her casual disrespect for the
great actress Meryl Streep, with
whom she apparently feels on par. When Lawrence fell down mounting the
steps to the stage to accept her award, she admonished those who stood
to applaud by sniping "You guys are just standing up because you feel
bad that I fell..." The comment was ungracious, even if true, and
sounded just like something Peter Griffin might utter. Lawrence wasn't
flustered in the least, displaying something of the stuff of which she
is made, but one wonders if its more disregard for etiquette than steel.
An older, wiser actress might have referenced the moment with humor and
then said thanks for your concern, even if the only reason people
stood was in support of her verve after falling.
As a culture, we seem now to routinely reward
questionable efforts. Django Unchained is vintage Quentin Tarrantino, which guarantees it as an
over-the-top comic book entertainment in
filmmaking. On the other hand his suggestion from the Oscar stage, after
winning Best Screenplay, that this is the "year of the writer" is pretty
weird. Tarrantino is a functionally illiterate high school drop-out, a
former video clerk whose education is all informal, all from watching
videos, one after the next. That is not the high-brow track, however
useful to building your film vocabulary, and so a product of his like
Django Unchained is not really different from a "graphic novel" done
big: a comic book. Like all of Tarrantino's work, Django Unchained
has no real depth, just gonzo entertainment. (Perhaps the seeds of
our cultural decline, along these lines, were planted by the ungoverned
avatar of, what was in his time called "New Journalism",
Hunter S. Thompson, who young people
these days seem to adore.) Likewise, Argo,
which is Hollywood's favorite type of movie - one about itself -
was championed as a triumph of American foreign service heroism built
around filmmakers pretending to be something other than who they are.
The truth of what happened in Iran in 1980, when the story took place,
bares little resemblance to the Hollywood version. It was called the
"Canadian Caper" in the press back when it occurred, but in Hollywood
the star is America, and Canada is ignored, a slight the government of
Canada has noted. The entire U.S. governmental establishment got behind
this thin propaganda, to the extent that First
Lady Michelle Obama announced the award in a remote hookup
(from a secured location). One senses collusion here. It had seemed that
the equally appalling horseshit of Zero Dark
Thirty was going to get the ride on the jingoism express,
but the torture angle just got too messy, even for the Obama
Administration. They no doubt found Argo to be a cleaner bit of
propaganda.
Feistiness on the parts of Academy voters - many of whom
live in a retirement home out in Bel Air - convinced that
Ben Affleck had been wronged for not
getting a Best Director nod, was another big reason that Argo won
Best Picture. The Academy Awards ceremony has devolved into a high
school-level snit match, and many big money people have never forgiven
Affleck for flops like Gigli and Pearl Harbor. So what was
Affleck's response when he finally got to the podium? He credited
himself for getting back up after being down - which
apparently happened for him after winning an Oscar for Goodwill
Hunting when he was very young and didn't know what he was doing.
Seriously, doesn't that seem a little shakey? Immature? Shallow? Self
absorbed? Entitled? One could go on...
Producer Kristina Reed,
who won an Oscar for the animated "Paperman", and who was seated
in one of those ridiculous boxes high on the side of the Dolby Theater,
thought it would be cute to bomb those seated below with paper airplanes
after she got her award (about a guy who throws paper airplanes). Ushers
booted her from the venue, but then she threw a fit and got back in.
This is a first-time minor award winner, who produced something the vast
majority of the world will never see and will certainly not remember,
apparently feeling no compunction about acting with a juvenile lack of
decorum. Like Lawrence, she just should have said thank you and
called it good. But no, in the new reality we behave however we want,
almost as if we are entitled. (Note: For as long as I have been
raising kids, I have been hearing that these young people feel
entitled, in ways I have never understood. Maybe others were right,
sensing a developing wave, though one oddly out of sync with the world's
present capacity for meeting even basic needs.)
There, it seems to me, is the MacFarlane formula:
assumption of entitlement to be a jerk. It is having an impact on
the field of psychiatry, which recently removed Asperger's Syndrome from
the list of psychological disorders. In an odd about-face from most
current practices in pharmaceutical medicine designed to identify and
sell product for new disorders, it has been determined that people with
Aspergers aren't afflicted with any illness, but rather are common
assholes.) Think about it: SilverLinings Playbook scored
nominations (Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, Robert DeNiro, and Jacki
Weaver) in all four acting categories. They depicted a family whose
problems range from violent bipolar disorder, infidelity, and juvenile
acting out, to gambling as a strategy for future security. That is
pretty much the America of today in a nutshell, funny only in a nervous
way should somebody say, with just the right timing, exactly that
wrong thing that everyone happens to be thinking. And for a second
everyone will have a laugh, before we consider what is lost in giving
rein to every impulse we may feel.
Finally, to begin the Oscars telecast we got
William Shatner in full James T. Kirk
regalia, apparently beaming his image in from the bridge of the starship
Enterprise, to underscore the unfunny proposition that "We Saw Your
Boobs" was Seth MacFarlane's default level of humor. In the way
over-long Shatner bit, MacFarlane performed increasingly cute song and
dance routines, with his Twitter reviews, posted on a giant screen
before the assembly, becoming more positive the more old school
MacFarlane went, until finally he was deemed in Twitter reviews to be
acceptable as an Oscar host.
Not surprisingly, people in the Dolby Theater didn't seem
to laugh that much at being insulted in this way. Apparently Seth
MacFarlane felt the need to let them know he was willing to dumb things
down for them, pander for their acceptance as a soft shoe man. These
people in the seats at the Dolby Theater are, after all, the cream
of the entitled, not the common ungoverned entitled watching at
home on TV. They would need to be handled gently, as might one's
grandmother, though everyone is thinking it would be funnier if, in a
careless moment, the old lady were allowed to fall down the basement
stairs.
022513
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Use this Google
search tool for finding artists on this and other RARWRITER Publications
sites. Type in a search name below and press the Search
button. Results show up on the RARWRITER Search Results
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_________
Galeazzo Frudua
How to Sing Like
The Beatles
While the publisher of this site has gone
to great efforts to show how little he can sing like The
Beatles, "Beatles Expert and Luthier" Galeazzo Frudua seems
to know exactly how to do it. He demonstrates this through a
series of YouTube lessons that are wonderful viewing and
quite educational. Anyone really wanting a crash course in
vocal harmonies can pick up a tremendous amount of
information by watching Galeazzo's kitchen performances. He
also offers videos on playing the guitar, using Beatles
tunes for his framework. Check out his breakdown of "All My
Loving" in the video below, and then go to
YouTube.com to find his other stuff. Thanks Galeazzo,
RARWRITER.com believes that you do the world a valuable
service!
_________
My Facebook Friends
Who On
Earth Are These People?
By RAR
I have contacts on
Facebook and
Twitter with whom I share a
special category of "friendship". We don't really know each
other, other than as a hash tag or a page, and
we might not even like each other in any conventional way,
but we get to claim each others scalps because at some point
we accepted a friendship request. I get these on
LinkedIn, too, and
Stage32, and no doubt other
sites, if I stopped to think about it. I don't know the vast
majority of these people. Social networks, after all, aren't
worth much if the user has no one within his or her universe
to blab to, if you'll pardon the grammar.
The traffic on the social networks seems
to break down into a few distinct categories:
FAMILY AND
FRIENDS: Facebook
has been particularly successful as a platform for relatives
to keep each other up to date on what one another are doing.
This shortcut to family devotions produces a steady stream
of vacation snapshots, and pictures of children and pets,
and people tell you about what they are having for
breakfast, and it is the dull hum of Facebook, its somewhat
practical center.
OPINION LEADERS:
Facebook and
Twitter both function as little
opinion platforms for people whose deep thinking runs more
to the brief comment level than to letter to the editor
length.
ADVERTISERS:
There is a certain breed of customer on
Facebook and
Twitter who is essentially just
selling or promoting product.
TROLLERS:
Facebook, Twitter and all the
social networks include a significant amount of traffic
consisting of people just trolling for attention or just any
sort of a personal connection.
I would personally be described as a user
in the first and third of those categories, though I have
never quite been able to square the two. The
FAMILY AND FRIENDS people want
to share with you everything about what they are doing, and
a person can be dragged kicking and screaming into that
pool. That is how I got into the category, though I never
actually post anything myself other than shameless
promotions. I fall into the ADVERTISER
promoting product category, which I have always been
uncomfortable about given the audience for my squeal.
Advertising to Family and Friends seems way too much like an
AMWAY distribution
scheme.
So,
Facebook doesn't really work
for me. Twitter is
better, inasmuch as it has no pretense to being more than it
is, an oozing foam. The shorthand of the Tweet
provides cryptic cover, as if the whole thing is a miss-read
and a misinterpretation by default, or otherwise too
indecipherable to be questioned. I never have any idea what
people are talking about on Twitter, but have noticed that
people who seem otherwise intelligent seem like twits in
that format. It seems to reduce everyone to the mind-frame
of a sniping high school girl. The inescapable conclusion
that the whole 140-character conceit is a sly joke on its
users is almost delicious enough to enjoy, but yet not quite
because to have it be anything you must become
superficially connected to a whole universe of people you
don't, and never will, actually know. So there you are
participating in a game that has hoisted you on your own
petard of whatever motivates a person to participate in the
social network at all.
There, of course, is the crudeness of the
social network returned full circle.
Facebook was designed from the outset as an
isolated voyeur's fantasy, and in a way it has never gone
beyond mining the most melancholy aspects of human behavior.
And as a business model, Facebook,
like Google and
Yahoo and all the rest, have
been mining personal data in most invasive ways, using what
they have learned about each of us as tools against our
defenses in the marketplace.
This volatile mixture of commerce and
personal information makes me suspect that all of this
sharing is designed to serve ends that are not going to be
useful to any of us in the long run. Every day, after all,
is not an invitation to rally for an overthrow of a
dictator. The majority of time, people are just having lunch
and doing the laundry, killing time, and maybe sharing a
grandchild's sonogram, though that last act will inevitably
profile that unborn child in some manufacturer's portfolio
for his or her entire life, as soon as it gets started.
022613
________________________________
Cool Nights in Echo Park
The
Echo and Echoplex
The Echo is located
at 1822 w. Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90026 in downtown
Echo Park. The Echoplex
is located below the Echo, enter through the alley at 1154
Glendale Blvd. Los Angeles.
♪♫KEYWORDS:
Best site on the Web for what is real in arts and entertainment, music,
media, books, writers, film and fine arts, writer, video, MP3, film, art,
books, reviews, links, performance, modeling, news, artist, guitar,
instrument, piano, drum, keyboard, sing, vocal, vocalist, dance,
songwriter
Learning
from Jimmy Iovine
Artist News
The
soaring rocket that is 39-year old Seth MacFarlane, who earned a $100
million production deal on the strength of his "Family Guy" animated
series, is tied entirely to whatever people find funny about characters
who are unwilling to govern their inner thoughts. That was at the heart
of the humor of his bawdy Ted
movie, which I thought was quite funny, and it is the thing that
characterizes his principal mouthpiece, the animated character
Peter Griffin. The Peter Griffin
character says whatever is on his mind, which is usually only funny
because it is the type of thing anyone might think, but would not
likely say. Usually what he has to say is mean or dismissive, and
the timing of his bluntness is key to the joke. He isn't really
connected and he doesn't really care. In real life saying rude things to
people is seldom funny. On TV, anticipating and then being rewarded by
Peter Griffin's rudeness is somehow satisfying, as in catharsis.
Unfortunately, the room populated by the American television viewing
public is varied without being particularly rich, and it
sits plenty of people who don't get that mimicking the attitude of Seth
MacFarlane's Peter Griffin character is distinctly un-funny.
So,
Facebook doesn't really work
for me. Twitter is
better, inasmuch as it has no pretense to being more than it
is, an oozing foam. The shorthand of the Tweet
provides cryptic cover, as if the whole thing is a miss-read
and a misinterpretation by default, or otherwise too
indecipherable to be questioned. I never have any idea what
people are talking about on Twitter, but have noticed that
people who seem otherwise intelligent seem like twits in
that format. It seems to reduce everyone to the mind-frame
of a sniping high school girl. The inescapable conclusion
that the whole 140-character conceit is a sly joke on its
users is almost delicious enough to enjoy, but yet not quite
because to have it be anything you must become
superficially connected to a whole universe of people you
don't, and never will, actually know. So there you are
participating in a game that has hoisted you on your own
petard of whatever motivates a person to participate in the
social network at all.
