GGGGRRRRR!!! I hate when politicians (ie Whitman) run on taxes as if they are talking to most of us. Payroll taxes are 33%... period! How many of you own enough stock to cash it out for a million bucks when you feel the need? probably none of you... when rich people do that it's taxed at about 18% those are the taxes (capitol gains taxes, estate taxes, etc) that will be raised. Unless this applies to you, don't freaking worry about taxes.
It's not "big government" that is a problem for us regular folks. It's the big corporations getting away with whatever they want. And cutting their taxes only protects their profit margins, not create jobs. If you tax them fairly they will hire more people so they have enough productivity to make up for their tax "loss".
If corporations and rich people would pay more taxes it would be enough to actually help the people. As it stands now, 33% of $60,000 (a regular person's yearly salary) is a hell of a lot less than 33% of $1 million, and that means the state/country can barely make ends meet for the public good.
A McCain win would have been worse for us. At least there is someone in there thinking about the people. However, the Republican machine in place keeps blocking good things that could be happening. My frustration w Obama is more that he doesn't put the smack down (like Bush did) and say "this is how we're doing things... period.
Sorry for adding a lesson. But it needed to get out.
November 3, 2010
July 1, 2010
[iTunes Killed the DJ Hero] OR [Don't Drop That Beat]
Soaking wet from the sweat running down your face, neck and back. Sticky hot air, with the subtle funk of both the beat and the people dancing to it. The bump of the bass pulsed up through your feet and made home in your hips. You’ve caught a groove. You’re body is riding the rhythm with ease. Almost spiritual. Then, the commander starts to edge into a new groove. You and everyone else in the room feels the change coming on and all know the cipher. The sound waves travel through the crowd, pick them all up and set them gently, but solidly, into the next tune.
That commander the DJ. We have several songs worshiping these masters of ceremony. For some of us, a night on the dance floor is, in fact, ceremonious. I hail from the glory days of the disc jockeys, the 80s and 90s. The days when even using CDs was looked down upon. Any respectable DJ showed up to his gig with several 30-pound crates of vinyl in tow. (This is just how you knew they were at least dedicated to the skill. Who’s going to practically break their back just to look cool?) The crate held message he wanted to give the crowd; the night’s set chosen carefully from a library of records that took years to build.
The young buck DJs holding down the party these days don’t even seem to know their place and purpose in the scene; to hold the crowd hostage on the dance floor. The young partiers reading this might only see the club scene as just that, a scene. A place where you gather to look good in the space you are in order to get drunk and pose for Facebook. Most party people now don’t pay any attention to the man in the booth. The old school partiers call the digital jockeys "DJ Spacebar". The dance floor these days tends to look more like a bunch of first graders crammed together bopping, off beat, to whatever happens to come through the speakers.
So why should DJ Spacebar care what his beats sound like?
Because that’s his job, that’s the craft; flowing seamlessly from one song to the next. They should know how to change the energy and tempo without causing a train wreck. They should be aware that the people who are on the dance floor are the ones who count most. Lastly, recognizing that not every single to hit the radio waves is a good dance beat. Perhaps the party people would actually dance if what they were hearing actually moved them.
You could blame iTunes and digitized music along with the ever growing trend toward cheap, easy and fast. It takes years practicing tricks and juggles, those aren’t supposed to be just a push of a button. So subtle aspects that make DJing art are getting lost in the mix. Even with digital DJ systems like Serato and Itch, if you don’t really know the craft, it usually just sounds a mess.
There are some upsides to this switch to MP3s. Those heavy crates… gone. No more breaking your back setting up for a gig. That library that took years is reduced to just a couple of nights of downloading. You never have to worry about the record skipping. The biggest of all, it’s cheaper. Records are expensive compared to digital music. But taking away the physical and financial investment leaves the door open for anyone with a laptop and iTunes to step in and say “I can do that,” and get paid for it. But I’m sorry DJ Spacebar; you can’t just hop in a booth and start clicking away with your cursor.
For the old school DJs, it’s about developing a relationship with the music you are playing. That relationship begins in the record store while flipping through the LPs. Then deciding which records to purchase, which to leave for next time and then pairing them up with other cuts in the collection for smooth transitions.
DJs that know vinyl talk about knowing the way the grooves feel under their fingertips when they play each record. Newbies who begin on the digital systems don’t know anything about that. They just glare at the screen, mesmerized by the time counter or overwhelmed by the thousands of songs they have in their library. They don’t even look up to see how the crowd is responding.
That’s probably the worst sin of a DJ, to not check in with the crowd, just click, click, click from one song to the next. DJ Spacebar often has ADHD and only plays about 40 seconds of the song before hitting the cursor to the next selection. Since he never looked up, they don’t know how much the dancers were feeling that previous song. He never sees that just as he began to pick up the crowd… he dropped them flat on their faces. How are you supposed to respect that?
The elders who now spin using Serato get a pass because they have paid their dues in records & still have them. Whether they use MP3s or vinyl they take it to the next level, beyond any newbie, just because they've been doing it for so long and know the music so well. Their skill overshadows anything a newbie could possibly think of. The experience of knowing how to use a fader and change levels manually shows through. The old school DJ is use feeling his crowd and he knows just how to pull them back to him. He will still have that song you needed to hear for it to make everything better.
Sure, it’s the music that transfers the energy into the party and the skill of the DJ who holds you captive, but for some of us, it’s deeper than that. For those of us who use the dance floor as a way to release the spirit, it’s still the vinyl that holds, conveys and conducts that energy unlike any other format. The feeling you get from the music is literally different. MP3s are made up of blocks, numbers and squares. They have the tendency to sound tinny and midrange. There’s no bass which sounds abrasive. Vinyl sends off actual analog sound waves and the way your senses and emotions receive that sound is more genuine. It’s mystical from the diamond needle to the vinyl plate; the static; the skips that somehow stay on beat; the dusty fingers; the milk crates of timelessness; the awe disbelief when he actually has that record.
Sometimes, as the song goes, the DJ really can save your life.
That commander the DJ. We have several songs worshiping these masters of ceremony. For some of us, a night on the dance floor is, in fact, ceremonious. I hail from the glory days of the disc jockeys, the 80s and 90s. The days when even using CDs was looked down upon. Any respectable DJ showed up to his gig with several 30-pound crates of vinyl in tow. (This is just how you knew they were at least dedicated to the skill. Who’s going to practically break their back just to look cool?) The crate held message he wanted to give the crowd; the night’s set chosen carefully from a library of records that took years to build.
The young buck DJs holding down the party these days don’t even seem to know their place and purpose in the scene; to hold the crowd hostage on the dance floor. The young partiers reading this might only see the club scene as just that, a scene. A place where you gather to look good in the space you are in order to get drunk and pose for Facebook. Most party people now don’t pay any attention to the man in the booth. The old school partiers call the digital jockeys "DJ Spacebar". The dance floor these days tends to look more like a bunch of first graders crammed together bopping, off beat, to whatever happens to come through the speakers.
So why should DJ Spacebar care what his beats sound like?
Because that’s his job, that’s the craft; flowing seamlessly from one song to the next. They should know how to change the energy and tempo without causing a train wreck. They should be aware that the people who are on the dance floor are the ones who count most. Lastly, recognizing that not every single to hit the radio waves is a good dance beat. Perhaps the party people would actually dance if what they were hearing actually moved them.
You could blame iTunes and digitized music along with the ever growing trend toward cheap, easy and fast. It takes years practicing tricks and juggles, those aren’t supposed to be just a push of a button. So subtle aspects that make DJing art are getting lost in the mix. Even with digital DJ systems like Serato and Itch, if you don’t really know the craft, it usually just sounds a mess.
There are some upsides to this switch to MP3s. Those heavy crates… gone. No more breaking your back setting up for a gig. That library that took years is reduced to just a couple of nights of downloading. You never have to worry about the record skipping. The biggest of all, it’s cheaper. Records are expensive compared to digital music. But taking away the physical and financial investment leaves the door open for anyone with a laptop and iTunes to step in and say “I can do that,” and get paid for it. But I’m sorry DJ Spacebar; you can’t just hop in a booth and start clicking away with your cursor.
For the old school DJs, it’s about developing a relationship with the music you are playing. That relationship begins in the record store while flipping through the LPs. Then deciding which records to purchase, which to leave for next time and then pairing them up with other cuts in the collection for smooth transitions.
DJs that know vinyl talk about knowing the way the grooves feel under their fingertips when they play each record. Newbies who begin on the digital systems don’t know anything about that. They just glare at the screen, mesmerized by the time counter or overwhelmed by the thousands of songs they have in their library. They don’t even look up to see how the crowd is responding.
That’s probably the worst sin of a DJ, to not check in with the crowd, just click, click, click from one song to the next. DJ Spacebar often has ADHD and only plays about 40 seconds of the song before hitting the cursor to the next selection. Since he never looked up, they don’t know how much the dancers were feeling that previous song. He never sees that just as he began to pick up the crowd… he dropped them flat on their faces. How are you supposed to respect that?
The elders who now spin using Serato get a pass because they have paid their dues in records & still have them. Whether they use MP3s or vinyl they take it to the next level, beyond any newbie, just because they've been doing it for so long and know the music so well. Their skill overshadows anything a newbie could possibly think of. The experience of knowing how to use a fader and change levels manually shows through. The old school DJ is use feeling his crowd and he knows just how to pull them back to him. He will still have that song you needed to hear for it to make everything better.
Sure, it’s the music that transfers the energy into the party and the skill of the DJ who holds you captive, but for some of us, it’s deeper than that. For those of us who use the dance floor as a way to release the spirit, it’s still the vinyl that holds, conveys and conducts that energy unlike any other format. The feeling you get from the music is literally different. MP3s are made up of blocks, numbers and squares. They have the tendency to sound tinny and midrange. There’s no bass which sounds abrasive. Vinyl sends off actual analog sound waves and the way your senses and emotions receive that sound is more genuine. It’s mystical from the diamond needle to the vinyl plate; the static; the skips that somehow stay on beat; the dusty fingers; the milk crates of timelessness; the awe disbelief when he actually has that record.
Sometimes, as the song goes, the DJ really can save your life.
May 9, 2010
(dis) comfort
Eos arises to wake Helios to ride his chariot across the Heavens,
As I arise to the invariable dawn of the dilapidated day to come.
Bringing with it an insipid populace to digress,
In muddled masses within their own bemused existences.
Through the mind's eye impeded by an expedited culture,
Intolerable of uninhibited thought;
Or could it be that I am intolerant?
Intolerant of the conventional social life that is the American dream,
Of a house,
Two-car garage,
Wrapped in a white picket fence,
being a wife,
with 2.5 children,
A cat,
Dog,
And a gerbil.
I shudder in fear at this fate of a 'civilized' life,
Wilting away within a growing darkness of the monotonous,
Mind-numbing parasites that are the upper middle-class...
Day after day, their meaningless lives drone on incessantly,
Reminiscent of a pair of twin propeller engines of a DC-9,
Throbbing in thunderous succession.
The very thought of this sort of habitual routine becoming my own,
Aggravates my mind into madness,
Frantically clawing away at the roof of my skull,
desperate to flee from the cubicle working class drudgery,
Until death do us part...
Eos arises to wake Helios to ride his chariot across the Heavens,
As I arise to the invariable dawn of the dilapidated day to come.
I sigh with a heavy heart,
Mulling over endless inquiries of what is,
Can,
May,
Could or could not be,
A pure and true awareness of self.
Is there, no longer, a place on this shallow Earth for a free mind?
Have we as Humanity hit a brick wall?
Who, then, is left to ponder and question
This progression of knowledge and lack of understanding as to why we are here?
What has happened to the ever increasing, theories of what comes next?
Where have all the philosophers gone?
When will selfishness, greed, hate and bloodshed become taboo?
...If ever...
Peace is not a hope in this day and age;
Instead becoming more and more like a deplorable cruel joke,
A might more mythical than a man liviing in the moon...
...Made of cheese.
What has happened to us since the Renaissance?
Is this what has become of the Age of Enlightenment?
Why is every novel idea to come along, now challenged as false,
Before contemplated upon as a possible truth?
How has Mankind become the stagnant, socio-cultural idiot savant it is today?
Will we ever stop with this obsessive compulsive,
Self-gratification to 'upgrade' our lives?
HDTVs, iPods, Blue Ray Discs, Digital Cameras
Or anything else we may come across in the new mega-stores of gadgets galore.
Forget Global Warming.
Forget Starvation.
Forget Disease.
Forget the War.
Forget the Threats of WWIII.
Forget Poverty.
Forget the Hate.
Forget Genocide.
Forget the Exchange of Blood for Oil.
Forget the Dying and Dead.
Forget it All.
Shut yourselves away from the rest of the world,
Hiding within your comfortable suburbanite track homes,
And complain about the REAL problems of your own little worlds:
Rising gas prices,
Raised taxes,
Recession,
The switch to High Definition
And the size of your fucking television set.
Utter nonsense to prattle on and on about,
Sheltering the populace from the callous realities of this newborn century,
Frighteningly evocative of 1984.
Eos arises to wake Helios to ride his chariot across the Heavens,
Illuminating an ever expanding, chasm unto social redundancy.
Michael Stipe sings it best:
"It's the end of the World as we know it... And I feel fine."
As I arise to the invariable dawn of the dilapidated day to come.
Bringing with it an insipid populace to digress,
In muddled masses within their own bemused existences.
Through the mind's eye impeded by an expedited culture,
Intolerable of uninhibited thought;
Or could it be that I am intolerant?
Intolerant of the conventional social life that is the American dream,
Of a house,
Two-car garage,
Wrapped in a white picket fence,
being a wife,
with 2.5 children,
A cat,
Dog,
And a gerbil.
I shudder in fear at this fate of a 'civilized' life,
Wilting away within a growing darkness of the monotonous,
Mind-numbing parasites that are the upper middle-class...
Day after day, their meaningless lives drone on incessantly,
Reminiscent of a pair of twin propeller engines of a DC-9,
Throbbing in thunderous succession.
The very thought of this sort of habitual routine becoming my own,
Aggravates my mind into madness,
Frantically clawing away at the roof of my skull,
desperate to flee from the cubicle working class drudgery,
Until death do us part...
Eos arises to wake Helios to ride his chariot across the Heavens,
As I arise to the invariable dawn of the dilapidated day to come.
I sigh with a heavy heart,
Mulling over endless inquiries of what is,
Can,
May,
Could or could not be,
A pure and true awareness of self.
Is there, no longer, a place on this shallow Earth for a free mind?
Have we as Humanity hit a brick wall?
Who, then, is left to ponder and question
This progression of knowledge and lack of understanding as to why we are here?
What has happened to the ever increasing, theories of what comes next?
Where have all the philosophers gone?
When will selfishness, greed, hate and bloodshed become taboo?
...If ever...
Peace is not a hope in this day and age;
Instead becoming more and more like a deplorable cruel joke,
A might more mythical than a man liviing in the moon...
...Made of cheese.
What has happened to us since the Renaissance?
Is this what has become of the Age of Enlightenment?
Why is every novel idea to come along, now challenged as false,
Before contemplated upon as a possible truth?
How has Mankind become the stagnant, socio-cultural idiot savant it is today?
Will we ever stop with this obsessive compulsive,
Self-gratification to 'upgrade' our lives?
HDTVs, iPods, Blue Ray Discs, Digital Cameras
Or anything else we may come across in the new mega-stores of gadgets galore.
Forget Global Warming.
Forget Starvation.
Forget Disease.
Forget the War.
Forget the Threats of WWIII.
Forget Poverty.
Forget the Hate.
Forget Genocide.
Forget the Exchange of Blood for Oil.
Forget the Dying and Dead.
Forget it All.
Shut yourselves away from the rest of the world,
Hiding within your comfortable suburbanite track homes,
And complain about the REAL problems of your own little worlds:
Rising gas prices,
Raised taxes,
Recession,
The switch to High Definition
And the size of your fucking television set.
Utter nonsense to prattle on and on about,
Sheltering the populace from the callous realities of this newborn century,
Frighteningly evocative of 1984.
Eos arises to wake Helios to ride his chariot across the Heavens,
Illuminating an ever expanding, chasm unto social redundancy.
Michael Stipe sings it best:
"It's the end of the World as we know it... And I feel fine."
May 5, 2010
Treasure
Guard your comfort, dear, guard your heart,
The wealthy have overbought and undersold their memories.
Even if they duplicate your treasures, they still will never love them for the reasons you have learned to.
It's a painful mistake on her part,
to try and become someone just because that someone may be happier, prettier, truly more free.
But she will not learn that.
And out of everything you can give her, you cannot teach her to love herself.
She is Midas in a world of unpolished gold.
And you are a god with no care for shiny things.
Be flattered my dear.
Because your beautiful soul is sparkling never the less.
And she sees it.
And she can't stand that with all her riches she can't buy your happiness.
Even though she thinks you are the kindest soul she could ever meet.
And if guarding your simple joys is the only wrong you are doing,
does this really mean you are more noble than she?
She sees it.
You deserve your treasures, and a true gypsy would never let them out of sight.
But she will give you a chest with lock and key.
And she will help you fill it with goodness.
If you don't want her to know where you have buried that,
She will respect that, too.
Just remember that no money can buy a shovel long enough to dig down into your heart.
Hell or high water, love.
You are so big in her world.
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