Barry Manilow - Is an accomplished composer and songwriter who wrote and performed the music to his own hits.
Naturally, his most well known hit, "I write the songs" was written by Bruce Johnston of The Beach Boys.
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Irony | Barry Manilow
Barry Manilow - Is an accomplished composer and songwriter who wrote and performed the music to his own hits.
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Friday, March 26, 2010
Kirk | Lucy in the Sky
I apologize for only posting links to videos lately. I hope to get some actual writing done this weekend. In the meantime, here's a classic that I feel deserves more attention. Please watch carefully, there are a *lot* of jokes hidden in here, and for what it is, the attention to detail is stellar!
Monday, March 22, 2010
Cool Ad | Reversed Thinking
I quite like the following advert, not only for the cleverness in its execution but also in the message. As one who appreciates original ideas, after more digging I discovered the creative was copied from someone who copied from someone else. Still, it's impressive. Have a see for yourself:
Propers to Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish
Propers to Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish
Friday, January 8, 2010
Historical | My Brother Plays the Saxophone Because of My Childhood Obsession With Hurricanes
My younger brother plays the saxophone and he's pretty damn good at it. It's something I had always wanted to master, but sadly my high school jazz ensemble had a plethora of woodwinds and I was nudged by the conductor into playing the trombone instead. This is one of many deep, life regrets for me, as music composition is a hobby of mine and I am in love with the sax sound for the lead in my instrumental pieces. Moreover I find it ironic that my saxophone savvy sibling does not compose or play professionally beyond weekend weddings and Bar Mitzvahs . Instead, he spends his days selling industrial pollution control equipment at the family business and slowly going insane. It was while listening to a recording Charlie Parker's take on "Groovin High" I realized that my brother plays the saxophone because of my childhood obsession with hurricanes. At first glance, this may seem like a ridiculous juxtaposition, which it is, but in a moment it will make complete sense.
My fascination with hurricanes and other severe weather phenomena is rooted in the history of the region where I grew up, South Florida. Any young child interested in the world around him ends up learning about local lore from school, museums, television shows, tourist attractions, everything available in his sphere of influence. As it turns out, the modern history of South Florida, from the perspective of Europeans and settlers is a relatively short chapter in the book. Sure there were a few bullet points with regards to its being the home of both a WWII air base and Flipper, but at that point even compared to the short history of the US, nothing had happened there. Keep in mind, this is my childhood, a time prior to Scarface, Hurricane Andrew, and Elian Gonzalez. Thanks to the overbearing dominance of mosquitoes and sub-tropical humidity, until the invention of air conditioning, mangrove demolition, and a regular dosage of DDT delivered en masse by airplane, South Florida was mostly unihabitable to humans, save for the original natives and Ponce de León. Most people fail to realize the fountain of youth was actually a naturally occurring well composed of cool, soothing, Deep Woods Off™.
The other aspect that stands out about the short history of South Florida is the frequency and severity of death and destruction doled out by mother nature in the form of hurricanes. Fortunately, Henry Morrison Flagler, a 19th Century railroad and real estate tycoon (AKA the original Godfather of South Florida) was oblivious to this fact. The first in a long line of New Yorkers to relocate to South Florida, Flagler was so enamored with the idea of not freezing to death (he preferred drowning), he was willing to risk his fortune in a swampland. He built railroads, hotels, and critical infrastructure and initiated the development and expansion of the entire region, from the Florida Keys, up the east and west coasts through West Palm Beach.
Oddly enough, every three to five years during the development, sometime during the summer, it would begin to rain and then suddenly the waters would rise up, the winds would howl, and Flagler's burgeoning empire would fragment and fall into the sea. But Henry Flagler was no quitter, no sir. Rather, he was under the influence of the harsh, unregulated, arsenic-based insecticides of his day. When his hotels were uprooted and then knocked over by a tropical storm, he rebuilt them bigger and better. And when they were finally completed, and subsequently, along with his railroad, smashed over by a 20 foot storm surge the next season, he rebuilt them, bigger and better still, this time atop stilts. And when they opened for business, and the walls exploded during a sustained 130 MPH wind, and the escaped staff expired from having the flesh and muscle sand-blasted off their bones as they ran in small circles, blind and screaming on the beach, Flagler took another hit of Paris green from his citronella bong and ordered another set of hotels. His resilience to recover and rebuild is the reason the name Flagler is found on many of the decaying buildings, crumbling institutions, and collapsing, overburdened roads and bridges of South Florida today.
Hurricanes were the dominant force appearing over and over in the history of my locale. Meanwhile, during the summer seasons we went about our days with the occasional eye watching towards the seas, waiting for whatever might be brewing out there. Even our regular cycle of afternoon storms would be considered severe compared to most places on Earth, with frequent lightning strikes, high winds, water spouts, tornadoes, occasional hail. I didn't think it was unusual that I had probably witnessed more than a dozen water spouts before the age of ten, for example. So it should not be surprising that I grew fascinated with severe weather phenomena: storms, hurricanes, and tornadoes. I recall with fondness the time when I was maybe four and my parents hired workers to repaint the Spanish ceramic tiles on our roof. Part of the process had them taping strips of newspapers all along the roof, perhaps to mask parts of the wall, or maybe to protect the fresh coats from the elements. One night during the process we had a nasty thunderstorm with high winds which resulted in newspaper strips fluttering and flapping against the roof near my window, amplifying the sound and effect of the storm. It was the worst wind noise I had heard up to that point, and I was convinced the sound was from a tornado. I'm pretty sure my screaming kept everyone awake that night.
As I got older, I read books about hurricanes and the impact of severe weather. During storm season, I listened to NOAA weather radio and charted the course of tropical storms from the coordinates given out by the droll voice announcers, not an uncommon hobby in my area. Give me a break, I mean, check out this map that shows a history of all the tracks of Atlantic hurricanes:
See that piece of land on the south east of the US that dangles into the ocean, as if the bible belt unzipped, whipped out Florida, and started to urinate on Cuba? You might notice it's hard to make out on that map BECAUSE IT'S COVERED BY HURRICANES!!! So it was not unreasonable for me to expect any year we would get another one. So naturally, during the entire two decades I lived there as I watched and waited, not a single hurricane came our way. It wasn't until I left Florida and went elsewhere to college that Hurricane Andrew struck two years later, followed by, Opal, Charlie, Floyd, Wilma, etc.
By the time I was in high school, weather radio had been supplanted by cable television's The Weather Channel and during storm season 45 minutes into every hour they ran my favorite segment, the Tropical Update. Not only could I get an up to the minute satellite picture and forecast on storms that might affect my area, there was footage of winds and waves and destruction from any area unfortunate enough to lie in the path of this month's natural disaster. It was of course, impossible to tune into The Weather Channel just in time to catch only one segment. As everything else on The Weather Channel, the Tropical Update was book-ended by the local forecast, a series of computer-generated pages of scrolling and static text blocking out temperatures, tides, barometric pressures, and weather predictions for your local region as well as major travel destinations. There was something horribly comical about the stark contrast between the cold, computerized, emotionless template of the local forecast, immediately cutting to the Tropical Update, which, when a storm was making landfall consisted of intercuts between panicking meteorologists at the National Hurricane Center, and their sad, on-location storm chaser; some poor bastard, drenched from head to toe in a tattered yellow slicker shouting incomprehensible panic into a microphone over the roar of wind and stinging rain, standing knee-deep in rising water and tethered to a shaking telephone pole on a street somewhere in Cozumel. Moments before he is swept away into the Gulf of Mexico and eventually devoured by schools of starving, Portuguese man-o-war jellyfish, it switches back to the local forecast; serene, calm, deep blue background, sunset hues, white geneva font, Pat Metheny Group's "Last Train Home" playing gently in the background as we learn that tomorrow will bring us 85 degrees, winds from the northeast at 8mph, with a change of afternoon thunderstorms.
There you have it, the first inkling of the incomprehensible link between music and weather. My region-born obsession with storms resulted in a lot of hours watching The Weather Channel for Tropical Updates over the course of my teenage years, where I ended up getting a Silkwood exposure to their selection of music during the local forecasts, including the likes of the aforementioned Pat Metheny Group, Spyro Gyra, Rippingtons, Andreas Vollenweider, and others. It's not as if I had intended to discover fusion jazz and I didn't go out of my way to hunt down the music from The Weather Channel local forecasts, but a kid can only listen to a mixture of the Steve Miller Band, REM, The Smiths, Depeche Mode, and UB40 so many times before ejecting and tossing the mixed cassette tape out of the window of the moving vehicle. Granted, it wasn't my car, nor was it my cassette, nor was I the driver, but the girl my parents payed to chauffeur me back and forth to school had only the one and seemed content to repeat it endlessly over the course of the entire year. I found myself searching up and down the dial for something, anything else to listen to, which is when I stopped for a moment on a station called LOVE-94, smooth Jazz and adult contemporary, and there was a song playing that I somehow recognized, but couldn't place where I'd heard it before.
More songs poured over the radio, songs I shouldn't have known, and yet they were familiar, where had I heard them before...? Thwap!!! The sound of palm slapping forehead... The friggin' Weather Channel! I'm convinced the popularity of fusion jazz in the late 80's early 90's in certain populations of the US can be entirely contributed to the musical taste of whomever produced the local forecasts. So I had started to develop a taste for fusion jazz, by accident, and in an era where CD's were a new format for listening to crystal clear, digital music, instrumental modern jazz found it's way into my library. In the same way I was a passive victim of the musical selection on The Weather Channel, my little brother, six years younger than I, was forced to listen to what I did, and his taste in jazz developed earlier and deeper than my own. When his time came to select an instrument for band class, he chose the saxophone and has never looked back, except in mockery at my failure on trombone.
So there you have it, the full story of why my brother plays the saxophone and how it pertains to hurricanes growing up in South Florida. While that may have been the main gist of this parable, it occurs to me that at this point, anyone who knows and appreciates music is terribly concerned for my well being, since modern jazz includes the likes of Kenny G, Yanni, and John Tesh. I thank you for your well wishes, but can assure you that I am safe and have adeptly avoided musical oblivion. While I still enjoy listening to Pat Metheny, my tastes have evolved and refined into the realm of the respectable. The way a recreational drug such as whippets can be a gateway into more illicit usage, such as huffing drag racing fuel, or injecting liquid heroine directly into the tear ducts, fusion jazz was a gateway for me into discovering the likes of Michael Brecker, Jaco Pastorius, Herbie Hancock, Stan Getz, and then eventually Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, etc. I was even able to take a jazz improvisation course for piano back in my college days, for me the most difficult class I have ever attended. As for the sax, I have a little boy of my own now, and one of my hopes is he eventually takes up that instrument. If so, I will take lessons concurrent with his, and then my compositions will feature live harmonies.
My fascination with hurricanes and other severe weather phenomena is rooted in the history of the region where I grew up, South Florida. Any young child interested in the world around him ends up learning about local lore from school, museums, television shows, tourist attractions, everything available in his sphere of influence. As it turns out, the modern history of South Florida, from the perspective of Europeans and settlers is a relatively short chapter in the book. Sure there were a few bullet points with regards to its being the home of both a WWII air base and Flipper, but at that point even compared to the short history of the US, nothing had happened there. Keep in mind, this is my childhood, a time prior to Scarface, Hurricane Andrew, and Elian Gonzalez. Thanks to the overbearing dominance of mosquitoes and sub-tropical humidity, until the invention of air conditioning, mangrove demolition, and a regular dosage of DDT delivered en masse by airplane, South Florida was mostly unihabitable to humans, save for the original natives and Ponce de León. Most people fail to realize the fountain of youth was actually a naturally occurring well composed of cool, soothing, Deep Woods Off™.
 |
| Fountain of Youth |
The other aspect that stands out about the short history of South Florida is the frequency and severity of death and destruction doled out by mother nature in the form of hurricanes. Fortunately, Henry Morrison Flagler, a 19th Century railroad and real estate tycoon (AKA the original Godfather of South Florida) was oblivious to this fact. The first in a long line of New Yorkers to relocate to South Florida, Flagler was so enamored with the idea of not freezing to death (he preferred drowning), he was willing to risk his fortune in a swampland. He built railroads, hotels, and critical infrastructure and initiated the development and expansion of the entire region, from the Florida Keys, up the east and west coasts through West Palm Beach.
Oddly enough, every three to five years during the development, sometime during the summer, it would begin to rain and then suddenly the waters would rise up, the winds would howl, and Flagler's burgeoning empire would fragment and fall into the sea. But Henry Flagler was no quitter, no sir. Rather, he was under the influence of the harsh, unregulated, arsenic-based insecticides of his day. When his hotels were uprooted and then knocked over by a tropical storm, he rebuilt them bigger and better. And when they were finally completed, and subsequently, along with his railroad, smashed over by a 20 foot storm surge the next season, he rebuilt them, bigger and better still, this time atop stilts. And when they opened for business, and the walls exploded during a sustained 130 MPH wind, and the escaped staff expired from having the flesh and muscle sand-blasted off their bones as they ran in small circles, blind and screaming on the beach, Flagler took another hit of Paris green from his citronella bong and ordered another set of hotels. His resilience to recover and rebuild is the reason the name Flagler is found on many of the decaying buildings, crumbling institutions, and collapsing, overburdened roads and bridges of South Florida today.
 |
| Metro Rail |
Hurricanes were the dominant force appearing over and over in the history of my locale. Meanwhile, during the summer seasons we went about our days with the occasional eye watching towards the seas, waiting for whatever might be brewing out there. Even our regular cycle of afternoon storms would be considered severe compared to most places on Earth, with frequent lightning strikes, high winds, water spouts, tornadoes, occasional hail. I didn't think it was unusual that I had probably witnessed more than a dozen water spouts before the age of ten, for example. So it should not be surprising that I grew fascinated with severe weather phenomena: storms, hurricanes, and tornadoes. I recall with fondness the time when I was maybe four and my parents hired workers to repaint the Spanish ceramic tiles on our roof. Part of the process had them taping strips of newspapers all along the roof, perhaps to mask parts of the wall, or maybe to protect the fresh coats from the elements. One night during the process we had a nasty thunderstorm with high winds which resulted in newspaper strips fluttering and flapping against the roof near my window, amplifying the sound and effect of the storm. It was the worst wind noise I had heard up to that point, and I was convinced the sound was from a tornado. I'm pretty sure my screaming kept everyone awake that night.
As I got older, I read books about hurricanes and the impact of severe weather. During storm season, I listened to NOAA weather radio and charted the course of tropical storms from the coordinates given out by the droll voice announcers, not an uncommon hobby in my area. Give me a break, I mean, check out this map that shows a history of all the tracks of Atlantic hurricanes:
 |
| Get out of the way, Florida! |
See that piece of land on the south east of the US that dangles into the ocean, as if the bible belt unzipped, whipped out Florida, and started to urinate on Cuba? You might notice it's hard to make out on that map BECAUSE IT'S COVERED BY HURRICANES!!! So it was not unreasonable for me to expect any year we would get another one. So naturally, during the entire two decades I lived there as I watched and waited, not a single hurricane came our way. It wasn't until I left Florida and went elsewhere to college that Hurricane Andrew struck two years later, followed by, Opal, Charlie, Floyd, Wilma, etc.
By the time I was in high school, weather radio had been supplanted by cable television's The Weather Channel and during storm season 45 minutes into every hour they ran my favorite segment, the Tropical Update. Not only could I get an up to the minute satellite picture and forecast on storms that might affect my area, there was footage of winds and waves and destruction from any area unfortunate enough to lie in the path of this month's natural disaster. It was of course, impossible to tune into The Weather Channel just in time to catch only one segment. As everything else on The Weather Channel, the Tropical Update was book-ended by the local forecast, a series of computer-generated pages of scrolling and static text blocking out temperatures, tides, barometric pressures, and weather predictions for your local region as well as major travel destinations. There was something horribly comical about the stark contrast between the cold, computerized, emotionless template of the local forecast, immediately cutting to the Tropical Update, which, when a storm was making landfall consisted of intercuts between panicking meteorologists at the National Hurricane Center, and their sad, on-location storm chaser; some poor bastard, drenched from head to toe in a tattered yellow slicker shouting incomprehensible panic into a microphone over the roar of wind and stinging rain, standing knee-deep in rising water and tethered to a shaking telephone pole on a street somewhere in Cozumel. Moments before he is swept away into the Gulf of Mexico and eventually devoured by schools of starving, Portuguese man-o-war jellyfish, it switches back to the local forecast; serene, calm, deep blue background, sunset hues, white geneva font, Pat Metheny Group's "Last Train Home" playing gently in the background as we learn that tomorrow will bring us 85 degrees, winds from the northeast at 8mph, with a change of afternoon thunderstorms.
 |
 |
 |
There you have it, the first inkling of the incomprehensible link between music and weather. My region-born obsession with storms resulted in a lot of hours watching The Weather Channel for Tropical Updates over the course of my teenage years, where I ended up getting a Silkwood exposure to their selection of music during the local forecasts, including the likes of the aforementioned Pat Metheny Group, Spyro Gyra, Rippingtons, Andreas Vollenweider, and others. It's not as if I had intended to discover fusion jazz and I didn't go out of my way to hunt down the music from The Weather Channel local forecasts, but a kid can only listen to a mixture of the Steve Miller Band, REM, The Smiths, Depeche Mode, and UB40 so many times before ejecting and tossing the mixed cassette tape out of the window of the moving vehicle. Granted, it wasn't my car, nor was it my cassette, nor was I the driver, but the girl my parents payed to chauffeur me back and forth to school had only the one and seemed content to repeat it endlessly over the course of the entire year. I found myself searching up and down the dial for something, anything else to listen to, which is when I stopped for a moment on a station called LOVE-94, smooth Jazz and adult contemporary, and there was a song playing that I somehow recognized, but couldn't place where I'd heard it before.
More songs poured over the radio, songs I shouldn't have known, and yet they were familiar, where had I heard them before...? Thwap!!! The sound of palm slapping forehead... The friggin' Weather Channel! I'm convinced the popularity of fusion jazz in the late 80's early 90's in certain populations of the US can be entirely contributed to the musical taste of whomever produced the local forecasts. So I had started to develop a taste for fusion jazz, by accident, and in an era where CD's were a new format for listening to crystal clear, digital music, instrumental modern jazz found it's way into my library. In the same way I was a passive victim of the musical selection on The Weather Channel, my little brother, six years younger than I, was forced to listen to what I did, and his taste in jazz developed earlier and deeper than my own. When his time came to select an instrument for band class, he chose the saxophone and has never looked back, except in mockery at my failure on trombone.
So there you have it, the full story of why my brother plays the saxophone and how it pertains to hurricanes growing up in South Florida. While that may have been the main gist of this parable, it occurs to me that at this point, anyone who knows and appreciates music is terribly concerned for my well being, since modern jazz includes the likes of Kenny G, Yanni, and John Tesh. I thank you for your well wishes, but can assure you that I am safe and have adeptly avoided musical oblivion. While I still enjoy listening to Pat Metheny, my tastes have evolved and refined into the realm of the respectable. The way a recreational drug such as whippets can be a gateway into more illicit usage, such as huffing drag racing fuel, or injecting liquid heroine directly into the tear ducts, fusion jazz was a gateway for me into discovering the likes of Michael Brecker, Jaco Pastorius, Herbie Hancock, Stan Getz, and then eventually Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, etc. I was even able to take a jazz improvisation course for piano back in my college days, for me the most difficult class I have ever attended. As for the sax, I have a little boy of my own now, and one of my hopes is he eventually takes up that instrument. If so, I will take lessons concurrent with his, and then my compositions will feature live harmonies.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Monday, December 21, 2009
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