A glance at my phone showed it to be 43 degrees outside as I stood in Bobby's apartment after having told him that that was the "cutoff" temperature that I used to decide whether to go out and busk or not to.
So, it turned into a Sunday night to record some guitar tracks and to sift through older recordings trying to pick out flawless sections to cut out and then paste into their own files so they could be repeated, have their pitches changed, etc.
I am getting the "disk almost full" message when working with huge Audacity files.
It is time for me to "refine" my collection of data on the laptop.
The Article Above
The article above started out with me Googling "People being mugged for food in Venezuela," after having had that subject come up at the Uxi Duxi, which led me to a list of "25 Places You Don't Want To Travel To Solo" with Israel being number ten and reminding me of having read that Alex in California, blog reader, is considering not only making a trip to there, but I think, settling down and becoming a busker there.
Venezuela was number one on the list.
I seem to be improving in such leaps and bounds musically that I don't really hold much of what I have done in the past in very high esteem.
It's true I have an old hard drive that contains something like 250 gigabytes of music that I recorded on Audacity, that I will hopefully be able to access some day if I succeed in using some kind of boot-repair application to recover it.
I just feel like I am playing probably ten percent better than I was a year ago, and anything I might have recorded back then, I could re-do relatively quickly using the new recording techniques I have discovered.
Back then, I would run through an eight minute song, trying to play mistake free the whole time and then spend another eight minutes playing a second part, and trying to go all eight minutes without screwing up. I could have easily spent five hours on the eight minute song, and it would inevitably have one of the half dozen voices screwing up at any given point in the song.
Now, I know enough to take one pass through the chords that was played right, and then to cause that section to repeat maybe a dozen times while I played the second part along with it with a goal of only capturing one repetition of it where the two parts sounded good together. Then it would be; delete everything except that one pass (called "trimming" the audio) then repeat that a dozen times, so I would have a dozen verses of those two voices being in sync, over which I would play or sing the third part, etc...
I cringe to hear some of my old recording where, say, myself playing the bass track was caught by surprise by the other instruments jumping to the next section and its wrong note hung there for the requisite time for my stoned self on track 4 to realize, woops, it changed there...
Monday Night, 48 Degrees, Feels Like 46
I found one of this guy's paintings marked down to around five bucks...you just have to look around, I guess...
I'm thinking that, if I buy it, I can look real closely at the brush strokes, the thickness of the paint that he dabbed on, the direction of the strokes, how he blended different shades, etc... and probably learn a lot about oil painting from it. That would be worth five bucks all by itself, in addition to me having another cool piece of art to hang in my apartment....
Ironic how some modern artist's stuff would probably be listed at thousands of dollars, while this work, which I would argue is a classic, has been thrown in the discount bin...amazing.
Yeah, you wear a bikini at the "Wailing Wall" you're gonna have a hard time.
ReplyDeleteIsrael has like 1/10th the rate of homelessness, violence that the US has.
Unless you're doing or wearing something that screams that you're of one faction and wave it in the face of another, you're fine. I'm just "ethnic" looking enough to be a sort of blank slate. I had a Chinese guy tell me once, "You're not white!" When I asked him what I "was" then, he said, "Uhh, Italian?" Scots-English and Lithuanian Tatar is just nobody's first guess ...
I look forward to interacting with lots of Arabs/Muslims in Israel because by and large, they're very nice people. Yes, they've got their assholes, and I've met 'em, trust me. But by and large, I'd take 'em over flyover Americans or frankly, non-flyover Americans.
There are art prints and there are art prints. That little $5 print of Van Gogh's work is probably fine, but you can probably buy a book of his stuff that might be printed a bit nicer. I have a weird little booklet in English and Dutch or French I forget, with really wonderful color printing of Van Gogh works. It was like $2 at a library sale. Check your local Friends Of The Library and your local thrift stores ...
ReplyDeleteHey I don't know if you are being facetious about the Scots-English slash Lithuanian, but, of the scant information that was passed to my adoptive parents from The Catholic place, I am exactly half of that; the other half, the Chinese guy might guess correctly, is Italian.
ReplyDeleteThe Van Gogh thing was a bad attempt at humor, like it was an actual painting for five bucks...
I'm not joking, Scots-English on my dad's side, right-wing (but won't own up to it and describe themselves as such, oh no) as hell and Catholic-hating and all that. And on Mom's side Lithuanian and a fair amount Tatar which some Lithuanians are, but of course my mom's sister, still alive in her 90s, has all sorts of unscientific reasons why so many of them are/were so brown, like "they spent a lot of time in the sun when they were young". Uhh, it doesn't work that way. But good Americans are white and they're good Americans so hence they are white; they have to be.
ReplyDeleteMy mom just avoided the sun a lot when I was a kid, but of course we kids didn't know any better and spent all the time in the sun we could.
I remember years ago being in a bicycle club here in this area and of course riding a bike involved being out in the sun a lot, and the browner I got, the less the other people in the club really cared to talk to me ... .by that time I was getting bored with it anyway so it was no biggie.
Getting back to Van Gogh there are artists in China who literally crank out replicas, in oils and everything, of Van Gogh's and others' works, and get about $20 each for them. There's a great YouTube video about this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbZDO5y43ZU
ReplyDeleteHere it is!
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ReplyDelete