First, thanks to everyone who came out to the show Saturday night. We had a lot of fun opening for Eruption, I think it was among the Jay Rakes Band’s better shows. Eruption is both ridiculous and amazing all at once, and played some faithful renditions of early Van Halen tunes. These dudes are all [...]
alright, so drew sent me this comic . As you can see, it is a cute offering of social commentary on the technological stranglehold on modern society.. or something.
Personally, I thought the picture was funnier than the little boy’s declaration to his father:
So, I suggested to Drew that we have a contest to see if [...]
I guess it depends on how you define “job.” John from Pedestal called me today and confirmed that he would need a bassist for some fill in gigs as their guy is moving to Texas. We had talked previously, and I told him up front that I wasn’t sure how commited I could be. I [...]
So today Kim and I went and checked out Broad Street Books in Ghent, but before I get into that I think something should be made clear:
As much as I oppose big business retail stores, I have to admit, I’ve always had a thing for Barnes & Noble. The idea of a giantic bookstore that is open until 11PM (sometimes later) and has coffee and couches is just a pretty badass idea. My biggest complaint with Barnes & Noble has nothing to do with them being a big corporation or anything like that, it’s just that I despise Starbucks (and even then, not really because they too are a jackass corporation, but because their coffee tastes like ape balls).
So we go into this place, and it looks nice. Huge comfy chairs, a big children’s book section with a cool play area with a big cardboard chess board. Nice stuff, and more importantly, evidence that someone made an effort to create an environment you don’t see often in the modern day bookbox stores like Barnes & Noble. I think the building may have been a diner at one point, judging from the white, hexagonally tiled floor and the circular rust stains running in a row against the counter leaving evidence of chrome diner stools. My other guess is that it was the eatery section of the Rose’s that used to occupy that whole row businesses and the realtor segmented the building when they resold it. They also had some sappy Hallmark-worthy quotations etched on the walls preaching the gospel of reading… in a bookstore…. where people who already know how to read go to buy their books….
So Kim and I look around and we’re kind of impressed with the place. In my head I’m thinking, “Well this is closer to home, and in the proximity of like five coffee sources, so even if I have to get my corporate coffee from Panera Bread, next door, instead of an in house Starbucks, I’m good.” There are still two Starbuckses in walking distance, as well as my first choice of Elliot’s Fairgrounds and lord know what else. I will say that Broad Street has a considerable book inventory for a small shop, in fact, I think they easily blow away Prince Books in just the magnitude of what they have available on the shelves.
As we’re leaving I go and grab a business card at the counter and end up talking a bit with the nerdy couple behind the counter. I say it’s our first time in and they make those weird tupperware-party-lady noises that, I guess, mean “thanks!” Once they start talking it sounds like everyone’s at a tea party and doing Monty Python voices or somethng, but the one question I had to have answered, the one that would keep me out of Barnes & Noble forever was on the tip of my tounge:
So, as some of you know, I’ve been listening to Wayne Shorter a lot lately. I’m not a Jazz musician, but I like to study it because I feel like it makes me a better musician when I play “easier” music. I think of it like training for a marathon, you practice with weights on your feet so you’ll be faster when you do the real thing. Jazz is like weights on me feet, at least academically.
But whenever I get into a musician or band– and this has been the case since I was a teenage metalhead– I like to know more about the people that play it. I guess largely this is due to the conception that knowing what experiences may have evoked the feelings captured in a song, or lyric or whatever, will make me perform the song better. I guess that’s mostly true. So, anyway, I got Kim to track down the Wayne Shorter biography at the library and I’ve been flipping through it here and there.
Wayne, apparently, likes to play word games with people in conversation. For example, when some of the members of the Miles Davis Quintet were discussing the measurements of some women who had passed by, Wayne started in about Astrophysics and planetary dimensions. Many of his bandmates thought he was crazy, it’s not that the associations are totally unrelated, but they’re kind of a stretch (and I don’t think a better description could exsit for the music he was making with the Quintet).
He does this to interviewers frequently, answering direct questions with references to broad cosmic philosophies and spiritual observations. He seems to leave the interviewer feeling somewhat confused and a tad overwhelmed but, as even Herbie Hancock says, it can have a quality of making a simple question seem so much more than it was intended to be.
Herbie also says Wayne plays the horn the same way. That he can make so much more out of a small idea…. and this is what I have been thinking about.
I’m using WordPress blogging software and with a theme called Blix. I like the layout and think it suits my needs best but Joe and I need to fiddle with it a little and see how we can tweak it to make it look a little more original. Basically, don’t get to used to how [...]
