WalMart.com has the widest selection of karaoke backing tracks I’ve ever seen. All for $.88 each.
I know this because DeLaine called me today in dire need of the backing track to Allison Krauss and Union Station’s “When You Say Nothing At All” for a wedding she’s singing at this Saturday. I was charged with finding it. A quick Google search revealed the answer. And by the way, no, the karaoke selection at iTunes is severely lacking. Leave it to Wal-Mart to fill the niche.
I’m having a hard time putting into words a very common scenario in debates. So here’s an example:
Issue: Gay Marriage
Side 1: The sanctity of marriage must be protected. Gays must not be allowed to marry.
Side 2: Marriage is already falling apart as an institution. Might as well let gays marry.
Granted that’s not the entirety of the argument (the main thing is the relative morality of gayness), but I hear it a lot. The “might as well” defense. Here’s another example:
Issue: Further development along polluted river
Position 1: The river must be protected. No new development.
Position 2: There are already a lot of worse developments along the river. Might as well build another.
Is “defeatist” the proper term for Position 2? I guess the slope can get slippery where relative measurements enter into it – say if the river is 90% polluted and the new development will add 1% more pollution to it. But as a general principle, isn’t the “it’s already bad, so let it get worse” argument a bad way to go? Am I wrong? I guess it depends on how much of a stake you have in the issue. Personally, I find the sanctity of marriage to be largely irrelevant in contrast to river pollution, but that’s just me.
Heath sent me this, and I think it articulates some things that might be helpful for others to read:
I thought I’d write to tell you that I’m glad[1] you’re moving to New York. I’ve thought for some time that you would come to regret it if you talked yourself out of moving. Measured against your obviously strong desire to go, the “practical” concerns you were allowing to keep you in Little Rock were paper tigers at best.
I was reluctant to state my position before you made up your mind[2]. I’m leery of giving advice unbidden, and I wouldn’t have desired to do so even if you’d asked me. The giving of advice is fraught with pitfalls, when you think about it. It seems to me that the only time we can take advice is when the decision isn’t self-interested, and then what does it matter? When decisions are ego-involved is when we need an outsider’s perspective, but it’s also the time when we’re least likely to view it with clear eyes. And so the asking of advice is reduced to fishing for encouragement, confirmation, or validation. You ignore advisers who dissent, or else you turn them into a “bad guy.” I mean, what’s the point?
Still, there’s one thing I would like to address, and that’s the question of what happens if things don’t work out in New York. I’ve had several conversations with you where you’ve expressed concern about failing; that is, you seem to think that if you move somewhere and it doesn’t work out, then you’ve failed somehow. I don’t really think this is true. I know that this is a fluffy position to take, but I think that you never really fail without thinking it so. Put differently, there’s no such thing as failure, though there is success. If you have a good time and learn some things, that’s success, no matter what others might think. If you have to move back to Little Rock (or just somewhere else; there’s no reason it has to be Little Rock), the only way that can be taken as slinking back in failure is if you act like you failed[3].
Then again, this last paragraph doesn’t really look like advice to me, which lets me off the hook, I guess.
The topic of a favorite rant (one I’m sure Mary Beth has grown very tired of) is the conservative assumption that change can only make things worse. “Sure, you’re not likely to lose by keeping things the same,” I argue, “but you’ll never *win* that way.” The fun thing about this rant is that fear of change is something I’m guilty of too, so I come off like a total hypocrite. So anyway, I’m happy[1] you’re making the leap.
Heath
1) This is a strange usage. I’m not really glad you’re moving per se; I’m vaguely intellectually satisfied. That’s not really the same as being glad. My feelings actually lie somewhere in between not caring at all and slightly annoyed that it will be inconvenient to visit you. But that’s language for you — when accuracy is needed, it inevitably lets you down.
2) I started thinking about writing you an encouraging email weeks ago. I was still gathering up the gumption to write it when I saw the blog entry announcing you had made up your mind.
3) Spiteful folks would say you were fooling yourself, but fuck ’em.
The details of my road trip plan mentioned below are to venture forth to these destinations and persons west:
Dallas: Owenses, Odegards, Allison/Rodney
Austin: Rixes
Dalhart: To witness and photograph John Todd Drive, named for my grandfather
San Diego: Meredith
Los Angeles: David, Mary, Nikki, Erin
San Francisco: Erika, Amy
Seattle: Matthewses, Eberts
UPDATE: Roslyn, Washington – aka Cicely, Alaska from TV’s Northern Exposure
Salt Lake City: Matt, Zoe
Laramie, WY: Heather
Oklahoma City: Harrelsons
Kansas City: Kevin, Michelle
St. Louis: Durhams
Blytheville: Molly
Memphis: Chris, Christy and newborn Colter
And then back to Little Rock. On the way out east I’ll probably stop in Memphis a bit, then:
Nashville: Shelley, Glen, Bryan (he may still be on tour with Steve Vai, though!)
Huntsville: Amy/Jeff
Logansport, Indiana: Jamie
Pittsburgh: Nikki
Roanoke: Trina
Washington, D.C.: Tracy
So there you have it. It will all most likely take a month or so if I can afford a leisurely pace.
The trouble with having an eventful space of time in your life is that you’re generally too wrapped up in it to stop and write about it.
Weekend before last I went down to Flora-bama with my mom, sister, brother and their kids. A full day of driving, there and back. Two actual days for me of vacation. During that time, I had the opportunity to talk with my family about…where I am.
Ever since October I’ve been debating the relative merits of moving to New York. I’ve always thought about moving to a major city. The primary impediments were: no network of friends, no money to make the shift, and a reluctance to give up what I have here. Over the last 10 months, each barrier has been slowly peeled away. In October I fell in with a bunch of musicians and made new friends. In February my grandfather passed away, leaving each of us kids a tidy sum of money. And June brings my brother’s divorce and the sale of his house, meaning that he can take over my mortgage and I don’t necessarily have to sell my house, plus I can store my stuff in the garage. I have the option to take it back. In addition, I told my boss about all this last week and he said the door would always be open if I wanted to return. So now I have a substantial safety net, and no reason not to try.
So I’m going. As soon as my office can find and train my replacement.
I’ll delay my actual departure for a few weeks to take a road trip out west, before packing up a few basics and taking a leisurely jaunt to various destinations before landing in the city.
In other news, last weekend we had a yard sale at Heather’s on Saturday, and I went up to Harrison to see my friends Tiffany and Jessie, who were in town from Rhode Island. Pictures here on Flickr.
Polite society frowns upon asking questions of people regarding their personal finances, but today I made up a nice way out. I was talking to my friend Bob about how much his rent is every month:
Would you mind giving me a frame of reference by revealing how much your rent is? If you’ve got a secret deal with the NSA or Witness Protection, I understand completely, “Bob.”
Feel free to try this at home.
I’ve been a subscriber to Guitar One since 2000 or 2001. I always appreciated its dedication to lessons and learning, where Guitar World is more of a rock rag aimed at guitarists, and Guitar Player until recently skewed toward an older demographic. Guitar One in many ways took the place of my favorite magazine, Guitar (formerly Guitar for the Practicing Musician, which died around 1997). And so now Guitar One is dead. I learned this when I received a copy of Guitar World in the mail. The second page insert informed me of the demise of my preferred magazine, and that the two magazines, owned by the same publisher, have been fused to some degree.
But it’s just not the same, and now I have a subscription through November 2008 to the crappiest guitar magazine in the world. This is a rag that regularly hosts beer chugging contests between its staff and famous guitarists. This is a magazine that I subscribed to up until 1993 when Frank Zappa died, and they put Dimebag Darrell on the cover. Dime’s cover article featured a list of his tour-bus supplies in which he listed “acid – for long bus trips.” That so incensed me that I tore off the cover.
Granted, I was 17 and prone to melodrama. Now I’m not sure what I’m going to do. I’ll probably test drive a few issues. There’s an offer for a refund, so maybe I’ll look into that.
I heard a commentator on NPR this morning point out that sport is the only entertainment field where excellence is rewarded. If you’re really good at a sport, you have a far better chance of being financially compensated for your skills than if you were a musician, actor, artist, etc.
At first that statement really bummed me out, but then I realized it’s kind of a crock. Of course sport rewards excellence. Sport is the most simplistic of fields; excellence can be most easily defined there, even quantized. It’s almost binary: you’re either very fast or you’re not, you’re very agile or you’re not, you can throw a 90mph fastball or you can’t. Despite what the classical music crowd might have you to believe, music is not like that. Just because you can play “Flight of the Bumblebee” at an insane tempo does not mean that you are musically excellent. “Excellence” is a variable quality. Bob Dylan is excellent. Itzhak Perlman is excellent. Try quantizing that. The same goes for artists and actors. There’s a great deal more relativity to the notion of “excellence” in those fields.
I forget the commentator’s name, but his perspective seems common to older generations. I gather that their world seemed aesthetically simpler than ours. Perhaps it was less diverse. I am reminded of a great conversation that I heard on one of my dad’s old tapes of Groucho Marx’s You Bet Your Life. He had an older gentleman and a young woman talking about music and the older gentleman rambles on about classical music and how it represents beauty and truth, and the girl just says “but you can’t jitterbug to it.”
A few years ago I discovered a particular LP. One side was Otis Redding. The other side was Jimi Hendrix. Both were performances from the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. Until this month, that record has always been a little-known secret. It has never, to my knowledge, been released on CD. But now, as of last week, it’s available as a full-length concert DVD from Criterion (the people who know how to do DVDs real fancy)!
I don’t want to sound like a salesman, but dammit everyone and their pets should see and hear this thing! First of all, it’s one of the only surviving color presentations of Otis Redding performing live. And he’s backed up the legendary Booker T. and the MG’s (Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn, and Al Jackson, Jr.). This is the stuff:
Will R&B ever be that good again? Sadly, I doubt it.
The first window to the world was invented in 1884 by George Eastman. Photographic film allowed pictures to be more conveniently taken, copied, and transferred around the world. Photographic film was quickly adapted for use in inside motion picture cameras, and “movies” were born. In conjunction with the newspapers and magazines of the early 20th century, photography allowed many folks to, in a primitive sense, travel the world without leaving town. Motion pictures offered a similar and somewhat more advanced experience at the local movie house. We had a window to the world.
The second window to the world arrived around 1928 when Philo Farnsworth demonstrated the first working television system with electronic scanning. This went on to shape the TV sets of the next several decades. By the 1950’s many modern homes had television sets that allowed them to see the world without leaving home.
The third window to the world came in 1993 with the development of the first web browser, Mosaic. The Internet and the World Wide Web had previously been text mediums primarily. What Mosaic and later web browsers did was allow for more convenient and widespread transmission of digitized images. By 2000, Web-enabled home computers were pervasive for modern homes.
So this is where we are. Will there be a 4th window? If I had to guess I would say that the second and third windows will fuse somehow. We’re in the process already; I know I tend to watch TV shows on the Internet more than I do on the television.