Hank Williams

Hank Williams was kind of like Kurt Cobain, I've decided. I like them both, and for pretty much the same reasons.


Last month, my friends and I participated in a play, "Hank Williams: Lost Highway," put on by the Williamston Theater Company in Lansing at Lansing Community College. I liked it a lot:

1. Actors are great - They're somehow funnier than everybody you know, and are probably at least a novice at everything you do, in addition to being a great actor. And they're tons of fun.
   
2. This play is a story of Hank Williams' life told through a good story and bit of a musical review. It calls for a cast full of actor-musicians, although some have to be more on the actor side, and some more on the musician.
3. Hank Williams' music was great for the song writing (hilariously poor for cognisant phrase length) and well known and widespread in influence in a way I never realized.
4. He had some crazy players that played with him. I got to play with some crazy musicians for this project. Crazy.
5. One of the best musicians I ever met played this instrument, which will be the new focus of this post:

This is a crazy instrument, and I got to spend lots of time with an excellent person who is amazing at playing it and guitar. Triple neck steel guitar = beautiful. Three different necks for different tunings. Excellent.

Burial

(thanks allmusic.com)

My roommate Chris showed me this guy. I don't know anything about this artist, because everything I read said that he went through a lot of trouble to remain anonymous until late last year. I like the approach, and it's great music.

Anyhow, the music is what they call "dubstep," and is probably all sample-based, taking samples from things like lighters and the game "Chrono Trigger." It's slow, it's more rhythmically complex than bass drum quarternotes, and it still makes you dance. I like how dark it is, and how infrequently you get 16 bars of the same thing. The vocal processing is crazy in a really interesting and androgenous way, where he succeeds in making the women sound like men, and the men sound like women. Many of the samples don't line up to beats, there's some pretty funky swinging and syncopation, and it's all real dark. : )

Check it out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubstep
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burial_(musician)

Hobnox - Audiotool

http://www.hobnox.com/audiotool

This is like Reason, but Reason laid out on you basement floor instead of in a rack in your basement. It's pretty fun, and has a strange combination of pretty old things like TR909s and recent things like Monomes.

You connect pedals and synths like you would if you actually had all the hardware. This is flash, and runs real well on my computer at work. Maybe my computer is very fast. Maybe the programmers behind this made it run really amazingly well. I don't know enough about flash to know which, but it's pretty cool and sounds as good as anything else that serves this function. : )

It also lets you record stuff in it and network. Pedalboard and Myspace rolled into one. Pretty cool.

braid

Braid trailer from David Hellman on Vimeo.

I love new kinds of video games like this. I feel like I will spend a good chunk of my eventual future developing new ways of interacting with computers for music or video games. I like : )

I love the art. It looked so nice on my crappy TV, and the videos of it in good resolution look even prettier. So nice, painted, great animation and interaction between elements, and the motion of everything is way cool.

I love the music. Dark Celtic music, if you've ever heard of such a thing, is what I'd call it, and it's very pretty. Further, as you play with time in the game play, the music slows down, goes in reverse and grinds to a halt, giving your experience this really strange complete immersion thing. It's way cool and difficult to articulate.

The gameplay is my favorite though. It is so completely different than anything else that's out there, and so engaging, it's amazing. A reviewer said the game was simple once you changed your way of thinking about using the progression of time.

Breakfast

I really like a good breakfast. One of the children's books I grew up reading was "Nate the Great" in which, the 8-or-so-year-old detective cooks himself pancakes whenever he's got a tough mystery to solve. When my parents decided I was old enough to not burn down the kitchen, I started cooking pancakes, then eggs and potatoes, and then omelets. They're still my favorite, pancakes and omelets, of all foods, I think.

My Saturday morning was great. I'm getting over a cold, so I made some tea; I was half way through this good book, so I read the rest of it; and I cooked a tasty tasty omelet and potatoes. Nom nom nom nom nom nom.

Cats! Specifically this cat.

Pasha: Good cat

Pasha is basically a big hipster. Look at that hat. Look at that nonchalance.
Look at this other picture with the LJ profile-picture-esque profile shot. And look at that snaggle-tooth! He rocks hard, and doesn't care about you. Except that he really does, and is a very nice cat. :-) I like him ok.

USB BUB board!

This may be a silly first post for this new blog, but I just got one of these in the mail two days ago, and it will save me a tiny bit of hassle when connecting Arduino microcontrollers to my computer. I was way more excited than I probably should have been when Paul Badger at moderndevice.com started making these, but I guess I am ok with that. I'm making a new cello effects pedal for my friend Jen, and this will let her use a regular USB cable (well, almost a regular one... a big to small or whatever) to connect to her laptop. I still have to put it together and build the actual pedal and put together the Pd patch, but I still like this a lot! I will post an update about this when I get the pedal done, as I am sure I will like that too. : )