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Rocket Bomber - linking to other people's stuff

Rocket Bomber - linking to other people's stuff

The Real Story is better than the Movie, and it was a pretty good movie

I’m not sure exactly where or why I came across Almost Famous again this week — the click trail on that one has to be convoluted, because for the most part I was researching bland mass-consumption European Pop of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.

Having happened upon the movie again, though, it seemed like an excellent topic for an extended YouTube excursion, especially with the Academy Awards tie-in:

Cameron Crowe accepts the Oscar® for “Almost Famous”

The moment we all remember is the solo-slow-clapper of music videos, Tiny Dancer

Cameron Crowe interview (ignore the French subtitles)

The great thing about “Almost Famous” is that it’s based on a true story, which you might have heard once or twice a dozen years ago and then promptly forgot. The band ‘Stillwater’ in the movie is a fictionalized composite, I’m sure, or at least will always be presented as such for legal reasons, but the band I think Crowe used as his primary inspiration when writing the script has to be the Allman Brothers. Here, read the article yourself, from the December 6, 1973 issue of Rolling Stone, The Allman Brothers Story

Allman Brothers Band – Live- 2-11-70 Fillmore East (audio only) (1hr11min)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1XfYC9Dq1I

Allman Brothers – Live – 9-23-70 Fillmore East (33.8min)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eqSFMOZxeY

Since the point of the exercise is to feature some great music documentaries, here’s the great music documentary: History of Southern Rock (1hr4min)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_E1I-ERdJYU

If you only have enough time to watch one video, I’d make it that last one.



How to Build a Better Block

filed under , 27 February 2014, 11:34 by

It is with some sadness that I relate the ‘death’ of an online video: previously hosted on Vimeo by The Municipal Art Society of New York (where there is still some great video), I regret to inform you that The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces – The Street Corner from William H. Whyte (author and pioneering urbanist) was taken down following a copyright claim.

Ordinarily, it wouldn’t matter (even to a ‘fan’ like me) but I had embedded the video in a past blog post and used it to illustrate several arguments on how people actually use public space.

Fortunately, I was able to track down a pair of YouTube videos that, while lacking the charm of Whyte’s 1980 film, managed to communicate the same points. I very rarely edit six-month-old posts—heck, I’m hard-pressed to do more than fix typos—but the “Lifestyle Destination” post is one of my longer essays (and one that still gets incoming traffic off of Google) so I felt it needed the addition-slash-correction.

Since you’re not necessarily going back and reading my archives, though, I thought the new videos might be worthwhile to pull into a post of their own:

George C. Stoney’s How to Live in a City (1964), “architectural critic Eugene Ruskin guides us through unique locales which illustrate the fine line between organic and sterile urban spaces. It all depends on a place’s ability to attract and sustain, even if only momentarily, a sense of community.” (18.3min)

George Morris, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, Market Square (12.2min)

I only used those two to plug the gap — but why stop there? This may come as a shock for those who think YouTube is only a resource for skit comedy, cat videos, and music*, but at this point everything is on YouTube — well, everything except 1980’s The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces – The Street Corner by William H. Whyte. And Game of Thrones.

While I was on the urban-studies-kick, here are some other short films, presentations, and documentaries I found:

Urban Design for Successful Cities: Alexandros Washburn, September 2012 TEDx talk (25.4min)

How To Build a Better Block: TEDxOU – Jason Roberts, January 2012 TEDxOU talk (18.2min)

- great title. you might have noticed, I stole it.

A City Is (Not) A Tree: New Models of Urban Space, Gino Zucchi, April 2013 (1hr57min)

Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature – Douglas Farr, 2009 (1hr20min)

* Isn’t it amazing that the most popular and widespread ‘digital music service’ is actually YouTube, and it’s free? I know because I spend *hours* on YouTube looking for music – it’s like a research tool — strike that, it *is* a research tool, as this post and others of mine capably prove.



Donald Fagan, Jazz Piano

filed under , 27 February 2014, 10:50 by

This “Sunday Morning Music Docs” mini-feature (Yes, I know it’s Thursday, but I’m playing a bit of catch-up here) was posted to my twitter a few weeks back — it’s not a long, multiple-video slogfest with commentary like the last two outings I reblogged here for your enjoyment, but it is 126 minutes of shop talk and piano jazz featuring Donald Fagan (of Steely Dan).

Not everyone’s cup of tea (or slug of whiskey) but for those who like this sort of thing: well, we like this sort of thing -

Donald Fagen Concepts For Jazz/Rock Piano

Steely Dan & Marian McPartland – Piano Jazz (audio only)



Post-instrument Music

filed under , 23 February 2014, 11:45 by

[This batch features creative personalities & modern music, so fair warning: occasional bits of NSFW language are lurking in the links ahead. Don’t play YouTube videos at work.]

Once upon a time, I was a snob — still am in some ways, about some things — but the starting point for today’s excursion is the bias I used to have for “real” music, over electronics and sampling.

From the age of seven, I studied music. I wasn’t all that serious about it, and I wasn’t overjoyed about practicing, but I took lessons for 4 years until I was old enough for the school’s band program, and then I was a band geek for 14 years (yes, that includes 5 years of college). I play saxophone (I started on violin, but that’s a different story) and from jr. high on I played in jazz band and started a parallel ‘education’ by listening to the original versions of the swing hits and jazz standards we were murdering in class. Once you start digging, Jazz is deep – and Jazz also didn’t stop in 1958 or 1962 or whatever, it kept going (and keeps going). Jazz left the small smoky clubs, went back to the dance floor, responded to the rock-music-thing, picked up some R&B, and became Funk.

You can argue with me on that one, I guess, but it’s true. Free doctoral thesis here kids: Listen to anything with a horn line, and that music is a direct descendant of 30s swing – the instrumentation is the same, the only thing that changed was the definition of ‘popular dance music’.

Anyway – I was a musician, and kinda proud of it even though I’d never be a professional, and I like the output of other musicians. I listened to a lot of Soul, and Funk, and when some of the first Hip Hop albums came out, with the scratching and snipped-bits and ‘recycling’ and I thought, “Hell, there are a lot of session musicians out there, why don’t they hire some already? It can’t be that hard to get some guys into the studio for an hour to lay down some tracks to rap over.”

I was so wrong about the music, and where it was coming from. I feel so white.

##

In the 30s, there wasn’t recorded music in clubs, they needed live music. So you could pick up a cheap horn in a pawn shop and get some gigs (no matter how bad you were) and learn on the job and if you were good enough, you could eke out a living.

In the 50s and 60s, you could pick up a cheap guitar in a pawn shop, learn 4 chords and fool around, maybe fool around with friends in your garage and form a band and try playing the tracks you heard on the radio.

Imagine being so poor you can’t afford a guitar. Imagine living in a highrise or brownstone and not having a garage to practice in. Imagine living in a neighborhood so poor your schools don’t have music programs, and in 80s Reagan America where no one gives a flip about how poor your schools are. Imagine loving music and not having an outlet for it.

All you have is excellent taste, a huge stack of your parents’ 60s soul and 70s funk records, and a turntable. You become a DJ, spinning the old tracks of other people — because the clubs still need ‘live’ music even if they don’t need the big band anymore. And then, over time, and with the introduction of the crossfader — we see the invention of a new ‘musical’ instrument.

Even if you’re biased for ‘real’ music from ‘real’ instruments and see Hip Hop as derivative, merely recycling the best bits of older, ‘better’ music — the best bits of the music are still there and if you open your ears and listen you’ll find the art in the transformation. If you go see a live DJ, there’s no mistaking that what these musicians are doing on the turntables is a performance.

Add in some new electronic tools and digital sampling technology to automate some of the ‘loops’ and now we can really stack and rock it: Two turntables and a drum machine become a freakin’ orchestra. Layering tracks in a studio or on a laptop may be more like composing music, as opposed to playing it, but there’s no denying the music part.

I used to be a snob. I came back around. Enough of me talking about me, though: Let’s check out the music.

##

I’m going to ramp you into this slowly

Early, 1988 Documentary about Sampling (8.6min) – YouTube source is apparently Aussie TV, but I hear Kurt Loder so we can be pretty sure this was originally produced for MTV News and might predate ’88 by a year or two:

If there is such a thing as ‘Sampling 101’ the first class of the course is on the Amen Break, “the world’s most important 6-sec drum loop” (18min)

A short track (3.5min), Eclectic Method’s Brief History of Sampling, with plenty more examples — inputs and outputs from several decades and genres

Still up for more?

Scratch, “A feature-length documentary film about hip-hop DJing, otherwise known as turntablism. From the South Bronx in the 1970s to San Francisco now, the world’s best scratchers, beat-diggers, party-rockers, and producers wax poetic on beats, breaks, battles, and the infinite possibilities of vinyl.” (1hr28min) — it’s the longest documentary in this post but if you only have time to watch one, watch this one:

The skills of the DJ are more than just scratching, something that gets glossed in the Scratch doc; it actually starts with beatmatching, syncing two tracks (adjusting speeds/tempos and matching bar patterns) so one can be played seamlessly into another, or in the case of a mashup, one played over another (which, with skill, can be done live — the mashup was born in the dance club, not on YouTube).

Quick Beatmatching – DJing For Dummies (5min)

The Scratch doc led me to a new appreciation for what the DJs and turntables can do, and the amount of work, preparation, and music education required — oh, it’s not about reading music anymore, you have to know the music. Following a few more links, I found a YouTube show called Crate Diggers — the folks from Fuse get a DJ, get them talking about the music, get them talking about the records, and follow them around inside their vinyl collection.

I couldn’t pick just one. Have five:

Evidence (12min)

DJ Babu (12min)

DJ Toomp (13min)

RJD2 (17.5min)

DJ Jazzy Jay (15min)

Thanks for reading. Hope you liked. One more video to play us out — Eclectic Method again — this track is called Cultural Funking Overload



Average words for average people

filed under , 18 February 2014, 12:09 by

“And I advised them to consolidate their brands into a single web shop. Because when you sell average products for average people, it’s practically impossible to achieve any usable conversion rates for each brand on their own, but combined you can create scale.”

“Note: The opposite of this, of course, is to be a niche channel from the start, during which you use your uniqueness to make people feel special, which in turn allows you to connect and leverage your market. But you can’t do this with without cool products.”

Thomas Baekdal (whom you all should be reading anyway) said this as part of a much larger discussion of how digital adoption (and the lack thereof by older folks) is creating a generation gap — Not a new point, mind you, but Baekdal expresses it well and we all need a reminder anyway. If you spend all your time online, sometimes you forget that even though Grandma is on Facebook she uses the web, and technology generally in a way that is very different. Grandpa uses his iPhone to make phone calls (can you imagine) and there’s the old saw about how neither of them can program the VCR, which is kinda true but also a joke made obsolescent by things like Tivo-style DVRs and Netflix.

…which is all beside the point – or at least the point I’d like to make.

The reason I pulled those 4 sentences out of Baekdal’s article and presented them out of context is because I think he’s saying something important about writing, too.

Book authors and bloggers need to think about what the product is, and who’s “buying” (literally buying or just reading). “Average products for average people” describes many, many blogs on the internet, no matter what the subject or focus is. What we write about can be the most amazing thing you guys, really the best but the writing itself is merely average. Informational. Journalistically bland, short because it needs to be short and not boring, but boring in its own way because too much style-for-its-own-sake obscures the meaning and makes your blog unreadable.

“And I advised them to consolidate their brands into a single web shop. Because when you sell average products for average people, it’s practically impossible to achieve any usable conversion rates for each brand on their own, but combined you can create scale.”

I think this is why we see blogs staffing up and why someone ever thought “platisher” was a term that had to be coined. [aside: No. – longer aside: A so called platisher is just another publisher, though one that is smarter about how readers read and prefer to interact with their content. The blogging platform is nice but has as much to do the with bones-and-bolts of writing and publishing as glossy magazine paper.]

The new publishing companies that are attempting to settle in the unpopulated space between blog and magazine are consolidating brands and voices to produce usable scale.

Keep that in mind. Now go read Baekdal’s post, “The Generational Divide” because I know you passed over the link the first time. Good, thought provoking stuff there.



The Electronic Sound

filed under , 16 February 2014, 14:01 by

I’ve gotten into the habit of sharing music documentaries on my Twitter account on Sunday mornings — a youtube-version of the “long read”, or perhaps more like the magazine insert in the Sunday paper. In my never-ending quest to find suitable blog content, I thought I’d repurpose the material to post here — and no doubt, some of my readers might prefer the convenience of a single bookmark (for later listening) even if they’ve already seen the links in my twitter feed.

This week I was inspired by the TR-808. Roland is bringing the legendary box back, after a fashion, as part of their new ‘Aria’ line. If you haven’t heard of the TR-808, that’s fine, just give a listen below:

“Roland’s genre-defining trio of sound boxes”, BBC Radio 1 feature (1hr), the TR-808, TR-909, and TB-303. (If you only have an hour today, I’d queue up this one.)

Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer gear demo (6.6min)

Roland TB-303 Documentary – Bassline Baseline (19.8min)

The 808 and 303 were not initially successful upon their release. Roland made about 12,000 or so 808s from 1980 to 1983. The technology was quickly “superceded” by other, newer units from various manufacturers, and the 808 was priced about a third as much so in some ways meant the Rolands were seen as ‘cheap’. The initial unpopularity and quick obsolescence actually built the ground for later success: The 808, 909, and 303 were sold used, and (while still hundreds of dollars) were much more affordable for struggling musicians.

Listening to the output of the 808 actually send me down a research-rabbit-hole than ended up with sampling culture and vinyl collectors — which I’ll post next weekend. On another tangent, though, I was inspired to learn more about the analog synth technology of the 70s and 80s:

The Shape of Things That Hum first aired by Channel 4 in the UK during 2001. (1hr22min)

The Museum of Synthesizer Technology (51.7min)

Moby’s Drum Machine & Synth Collection (12min)

Adrian Utley (Portishead)’s Synth Collection Tour (12.1min)

The last couple of links are from Future Music Magazine. They have a fantastic YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/FutureMusicMagazine and if you’re still interested in the topic, I’d watch of few of their’s and start following links in youtube’s right sidebar

Memetune Studios in London, UK (13.8min)

“Watch as Benge creates modular magic using his amazing stash of vintage and rare, modular synthesizers” (22.6min)



Is Staffing Up the Only Way Personal Blogs Will Survive?

filed under , 29 January 2014, 20:09 by

“Successful personal bloggers gain followers based on how they present themselves, and their readers stick around because of the close relationship that is established through those personal touches. On the other hand, building a staff of writers might be the only viable option to continue to grow and develop on the scale that is required once a personal blog reaches a certain level of success.
“For Joanna Goddard, hiring on more writers to A Cup of Jo was the necessary next step in order to expand and take on more projects related to the blog. ‘For the past seven years, I’ve written every post, which has been wonderful, but I started having bigger ideas for posts and series that I simply didn’t have time to pull off on my own,’ Goddard told Racked. “As your blog gets bigger, the workload naturally grows, too. You have more advertising meetings, you have more reader emails, you have more of everything. So it can get overwhelming for one person.’”

Is Staffing Up the Only Way Personal Blogs Will Survive? : Racked, 28 January 2014

##

of note. for reasons.

see also : The newsonomics of why everyone seems to be starting a news site : Ken Doctor, 29 January 2014, Nieman Journalism Lab



Kickstarter ground rules.

filed under , 29 January 2014, 18:45 by

Let me start with a link:
Kickstarter Lesson #77: The 10 Reasons I’ll Back a Kickstarter Project : Jamey Stegmaier, 28 January 2014, Stonemaier Games stonemaiergames.com

click it click it click it click it

…and I’m fairly adamant that you really need to read it because I’m about to shamelessly rip off most of the content of that post

Not all of it, and once again — go read the original for context — but damn if Jamey didn’t nail it and I find little to add to his list.

##

Here’s the edited version:

1. & 2. Art and Design
3. Value: “…make me an offer I can’t refuse”
4. Engagement: “I need to know that you are an active participant in your own project.”
5. Uniqueness
6. Competence: “I need to trust that you know how to deliver on your offer.”
7. Passion: “I need to believe in you, the project creator.”
8. Generosity: “I need to see that this isn’t all about you. You can show me this by backing other projects, by not constantly asking backers to do things for you, and by demonstrating on blogs and podcasts that you’re not there to promote your product, but rather to add value to other people’s lives.” [note: wanted to quote that one verbatim. —M.]
9. Quality: “I need to see that you have a quality product by hearing what third-party reviewers have to say… In fact, I even just need to see that you had the foresight and courage to put your product in a third-party reviewer’s hands—they don’t have to love it for me to want it.”
10. Pliability: “I need to see that you are somewhere between 90 and 99% percent finished designing your product…but not 100%. 100% to me is [just] a pre-order system.”

##

Damn fine list. Put me down as a co-signer.



One blogger was harmed in the making of this post.

filed under , 27 January 2014, 16:32 by
YouTube Doubler

Saw the video on the right over on Tested – thought it could use a soundtrack, played around a little bit with YouTube Doubler and so.

Here’s a link to share:
http://youtubedoubler.com/by1o

(one blogger was harmed in the making of this post following multiple exposures to Celine Dion without proper auditory precautions.)



← previous posts          newer posts →


Yes, all the links are broken.

On June 1, 2015 (after 6 years and 11 months) I needed to relaunch/restart this blog, or at least rekindle my interest in maintaining and updating it.

Rather than delete and discard the whole thing, I instead moved the blog -- database, cms, files, archives, and all -- to this subdomain. When you encounter broken links (and you will encounter broken links) just change the URL in the address bar from www.rocketbomber.com to archive.rocketbomber.com.

I know this is inconvenient, and for that I apologise. In addition to breaking tens of thousands of links, this also adversely affects the blog visibility on search engines -- but that, I'm willing to live with. Between the Wayback Machine at Archive.org and my own half-hearted preservation efforts (which you are currently reading) I feel nothing has been lost, though you may have to dig a bit harder for it.

As always, thank you for reading. Writing version 1.0 of Rocket Bomber was a blast. For those that would like to follow me on the 2.0 - I'll see you back on the main site.

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