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I wish I could say I’ve never had a recording session like this.
Via an email from Guido. I would have liked to embed the video here, but instead of a Flash or QuickTime movie the site only provides a link to a JavaScript residing on their servers. No thanks. Anyway, pretty funny, too true, and blissfully short.
Another fascinating article from the New Yorker: Red Sex, Blue Sex. It turns out that evangelicals and liberals have distinctly different attitudes and behaviors in the sexual behavior of their adolescent children, and not in the way you might expect.
Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.
Of course, as a liberal I find this appalling (talk about keepin’ ’em barefoot and pregnant!), not least because not only is this evangelical group more likely to get pregnant, they’re also more likely to get STDs. The gift that keeps on giving. Of course it follows that both their educational and lifetime income levels are lower as well. Higher divorce rates, too. These are American family values?
But the most interesting factoid in the article was this nugget about those icky (and incredibly Freudian) chastity pledge programs like True Love Waits:
Bearman and Brückner have also identified a peculiar dilemma: in some schools, if too many teens pledge, the effort basically collapses. Pledgers apparently gather strength from the sense that they are an embattled minority; once their numbers exceed thirty per cent, and proclaimed chastity becomes the norm, that special identity is lost. With such a fragile formula, it’s hard to imagine how educators can ever get it right: once the self-proclaimed virgin clique hits the thirty-one-per-cent mark, suddenly it’s Sodom and Gomorrah.
Like I said, fascinating stuff.
Howard Iceberg’s new album is out now. It’s called November Nights, and all proceeds go to benefit health expenses of Abigail Henderson of The Gaslights.
I just got my copy yesterday and noticed that, while the players are credited, there is no info as to who played what on any given track. Since I’m in a unique position to furnish that info, I’ll go ahead and post it here. Just in case anyone wants to know. After the jump.
November Nights
Howard Iceberg & the Titanics
On all tracks except “Eva Marie Saint”: Howard Iceberg, vocals and dulcimer guitar (if you want to know what a dulcimer guitar is, email me at ptomek [AT] kc.rr.com). All songs written by Howard Iceberg. Also, all tracks recorded by Pat Tomek at Largely Studios (my home studio) using Pro Tools LE on a G5 Power Mac.
I Think About You
Gary Paredes: guitars & vocals; Doug Osburn: bass & vocals; Pat Tomek: drums.
The Wrestler
Kasey Rausch: guitar & vocals; Rich Hill: keyboards; Doug Osburn: bass; Pat Tomek: drums.
Disconnected
Gary Paredes: guitars & vocals; Doug Osburn: bass & vocals; Pat Tomek: drums.
Sentimental
Gary Paredes: guitars & vocals; Doug Osburn: bass & vocals; Stef DiFranco: drums.
Eva Marie Saint
Mike Ireland: vocals
(This is actually soloed harmony tracks for an unreleased song called “On the Waterfront.”)
Earth Safari
Dan Mesh: rhythm guitar & thousands of vocals; Mike Ireland: bass & millions of vocals; Howard Iceberg: bass harmonica; Josh Mobley: keyboards; Chad Rex: guitar (and surf guitar solo); Pat Tomek: drums.
Gin and Juice
Chad Rex: guitars and guitar solo; Dan Mesh: guitars & vocals; Mike Ireland: bass & vocals; Pat Tomek: drums & percussion.
Play Me a Slow One
Abigail Henderson: guest vocals; Gary Paredes: guitar; Chad Rex: bass; Pat Tomek: drums.
(Live at Davey’s Uptown when we opened for John Doe and Dead Rock West. Audio from Phil Kline’s video)
Tattoo
Mike Ireland: bass & vocals; Dan Mesh: guitars (including a Tribute To Nirvana!); Pat Tomek: drums.
The Hurtin’ Kind
Chad Rex: guitars & vocals; Tony Ladesich: guitars (inc. first half of solo); Brendan Moreland: guitars (inc. second half of solo) & vocals; Doug Osburn: bass; Matt Brahl: drums.
Southern Comfort
Richard Gintowt: guitar & vocals; Michelle Sanders: vocals.
The Honeymoon Is Over (Tulum)
Gary Paredes: guitars & vocals; Rick Gray: guitar and guitar solo; Doug Osburn: bass & vocals; Pat Tomek: drums.
Thorn
Dan Mesh: guitars & vocals; Mike Ireland: bass & vocals; Jeremy Harmen: cello.
Song of Solomon
Mike Ireland: guitar & vocals.
If there is anything you think should be included in the credits that isn’t here, just send email to ptomek [AT] kc.rr.com. Thanks!
Hey, according to the Gender Analyzer site, there is a 71% chance I am male.
It’s kind of fun. I think it’s pretty clear on most sites whether the author is male or female. A couple of years ago, though, I was interviewed by a local paper about my blog, and the reporter said she wasn’t sure from reading it, and with a name like Pat, what my gender was. So now there’s a tool to let you know in advance—spare yourself a potential social faux pas!
Internet time just flies by, doesn’t it? Earlier this evening I ran into a Wired article on Lonelygirl15. Remember her? It was just two years ago, though it seems like ages now. I didn’t know anything but the bare details of how it turned out, that she was no more real than WWF wrestling or reality shows in general. I wasn’t very interested anyway—it only took a couple minutes viewing to see this was way too slickly produced and acted to be a “real” vlog. Moreover, everything seemed calculated to push the buttons of typical YouTube users of the time, a much younger demographic than mine.
But reading the Wired article now—it’s a great story, about the birth of a new form of storytelling, with all the strange occurrences and coincidences this kind of event always seems to find. I wonder what happened to the team that comprised Lonelygirl15. Are they still working on it, or some permutation of it? (Things tend to evolve very quickly in Internet time) Of course, I’m so out of it that it could well be that it’s still going strong and I just don’t know.
Anyway, I find this kind of thing, the interface where art meets technology, fascinating. And dammit, it’s a great story.
I don’t watch much TV, but I am picky about what I do watch. Recently I switched to Time Warner’s digital phone service because they offered it to me for a ridiculously low price just when I was thinking about switching anyway. In one of those infamous Time Warner deals that totally piss off people who already have the service, they threw in a free DVR and a year of HBO.
So now I’m totally hooked on True Blood, your typical small-town-psychic-waitress-hooks-up-with-local-vampire romance. From the same guy who did the Six Feet Under series, which I still haven’t seen even though it’s re-run on regular cable now.
Tonight I found the True Blood trailer on YouTube, which I feel compelled to post here. It sets up the tone of the series quite well, though unfortunately the YouTube video drops a lot of the frames even in the high quality version—there are a lot of quick edits. Still, the song is there, and that’s pretty damn cool. Anyway, if you haven’t seen it, maybe this will let you in on what people are talking about.
My schedule has been insane lately. Sometimes it’s possible to play in four bands and record people in my studio, get freelance web and interactive work done, and even meet friends at a bar or restaurant occasionally. And sometimes everything hits at once and I can’t help wondering what I was thinking when I agreed to all these commitments.
In the midst of this, last week came news of three friends, from various periods of my life, who were taken from us all and who left holes in the lives of those around them.
Tal Schneider was drummer for a band called Teaser back in the mid-’70s. They booked through the same agency as Airborne, the Top 40 band I was playing with at the time. We would run into each other at the rehearsal hall in Lawrence, KS or at a gig in South Dakota or whatever. Musicians are social creatures, and somehow lasting bonds between those doing this kind of work, especially those on the road for months at a stretch, can be formed in a short time. I was saddened to hear from Teaser’s former bass player, Steve Jordan, that Tal lost his battle with lung cancer last week.
John Kessler was a luminary in Kansas City’s music scene for many years, probably best known for his work as keyboardist in Glow back in the ’80s. I’ll always remember him for his sense of humor, though. He always made me laugh. And we were both big fans of the English band XTC. Sadly, John passed away from complications of a brain tumor last Thursday. A virtual community for friends and family has been formed at http://www.carepages.com/carepages/JohnBKessler.
You never forget the people you went to college with. Those of us who lived in the scholarship hall system at the University of Kansas, way back when, always seemed to have a special connection—probably because the schol halls have about 50 students apiece, who do the cooking and cleaning to keep the place running and thus depend on each other in a way typical student residents don’t. Gary Hardiman was a friend from those days, though we hadn’t spoken in years. Saturday I got the news that he had been found dead in his apartment in San Francisco, probably the result of ongoing health problems.
News like this makes one want to be sure that the hustle and bustle of daily life really means something, that there is a reason for all this, that it’s not busy-ness for busy-ness’s sake. It provides, to use a hoary cliche, a bit of perspective. As Spinal Tap once put it, “A bit too much fucking perspective.” I like to think all three of these guys would have chuckled at that.
Salon.com is running an interview with Obama’s “terrorist pal,” Bill Ayers. It’s interesting for any number of reasons, but maybe you can get some of the flavor of it from the video highlights below.
It would have been a fascinating interview even without McCain/Palin’s desperation move of trying to tar Obama as a terrorist using Ayers as a brush. To me, the most interesting passage may have been when Ayers compared the Weather Underground and the My Lai massacre:
[Walter Shapiro of Salon.com:] But there is a larger question about this period, which was when the Weather Underground was making bombs and taking credit for bombings. As you explain in the book, none of you were getting any sleep, you were all living on amphetamines and you were all constantly talking to each other in revolutionary jargon. In hindsight, how crazy were you then?
[Ayers:] I think we were off the tracks, definitely. And I think we were jacking ourselves to do something that was unthinkable and that none of us could ever imagine ourselves getting into. We were driven, I think, by a combination of hope and despair. And in one chapter [of Ayers’ book], I imagine two groups of Americans. One slightly off the tracks and despairing of how to end this war and penetrating the Pentagon and putting a small charge in a bathroom that disables an Air Force computer. An act of extreme vandalism, but hard to call, in my view, terrorism.
Meanwhile, another group of Americans -- also despairing, also off the tracks -- walks into a Vietnamese village and kills everyone there. Children, women, old men. They kill every living thing, even livestock, and burn the place to the ground.
And the question is, What is terrorism? And what is violence?
WOOOOO HOOOOO!!!!!!!
Did anyone else watch the Stewart/Colbert live special tonight? It was excellent and hilarious. And ran overtime in order to declare Obama the winner when CNN projected it.
This is such a relief. We are in a world of shit and I don’t know how much of it we can actually fix. But it is such a relief to think we are no longer in the hands of people who go out of their way to completely fuck things up.
Quote of the week: I don’t have it in front of me, but apparently Chris Rock said something along the lines of, “George Bush fucked things up so much he’s making it really hard for a white guy to get elected President!”
Amen.
I really need to reinstall Movable Type. I was unable to post this all day, and it only now managed to get through after I got home from the radio thing. FWIW, if you want to leave a comment, just email to ptomek [AT] kc.rr.com and I'll try to post it. One of these days (soon!) I’ll finally reinstall MT and comments will work again. Anyway…
1) Howard Iceberg will be on KKFI community radio tonight, co-hosting Barry Lee’s Signal To Noise program. Several of us who regularly record with Howard will play a few songs live between 8:00 and 9:00. In addition, Barry will play tracks from Howard’s upcoming CD (recorded in my studio). It’s all about the Apocalypse Meow benefit for Abby Henderson of The Gaslights. Abby is seriously ill and a bunch of bands are playing a benefit for her, Saturday November 8 at Davey’s Uptown and Sunday the 9th at the Record Bar. Details and schedule are at the Apocalypse Meow site. Proceeds from the CD, Howard’s first in five years, will go to Abby’s benefit.
2) I will sit in with Howard and Chad Rex at the benefit on Saturday, playing a little light percussion. We go on at 10:30, though you know schedules can change at the last moment in these kinds of things.
3) Although I’m as sick of Sarah Palin and jokes about Sarah Palin as everyone else, this song continues to make me laugh. Via Palined.com.
4) On a more serious note, This American Life ran a couple of episodes explaining the nature, details, and causes of the current economic crisis. Brilliantly reported by Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson. The first show aired September 5, 2008: The Giant Pool of Money. From October 3, 2008: Another Frightening Show About the Economy. Blumberg and Davidson continue to collaborate on the subject at a free daily podcast and blog called Planet Money. This is by far the best explanation of how this mess happened I have seen or heard anywhere.
5) This is going back a few months, but it’s not like it’s gotten out of date or anything. A July 28 New Yorker article by David Samuels—Dr. Kush: How medical marijuana is transforming the pot industry. Whatever your position on medical marijuana, alternative lifestyles, a life of crime, or any number of other topics, this article will blow your mind. It is long—I just counted 26 screens on my monitor—but seriously, it will blow your mind.
6) Before I forget, Hidden Pictures is headlining at The Brick this coming Friday. We have played half a dozen shows now and it’s starting to feel like a real band. We have about a dozen originals plus covers of a Howard Iceberg tune and a Kathleen Edwards song, and plan to start recording an album soon. In the meantime, Richard and Michelle’s pre-rhythm section CD is available on e-Music.