He is, however, the more famous buckethead. For now.
Thanks, GL, for this edifying and enlightening yet soul-sucking video clip.
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Everyone knows wikipedia. While at times its accuracy is less than gold standard, it is typically the most useful place to begin research on a topic. The least you can expect from wikipedia is a cogent summary and a selection of good links. At best, you have a detailed and thorough introduction. Until recently, I was only vaguely aware that there was such a thing as other wikis. Today, I spent my valuable lunch time spinning through some of it.
For some time now, wiki enthusiasts have been creating wikibooks, which takes the idea of the wikipedia to a new and greater level of depth. I was cruising around the site, and found a wikibook Movie Making Manual. While reasing this manual isn't the same as going to film school or an apprenticeship with Steven Spielberg, it does provide a great deal of insight into the movie making process for someone like your 'ol pal Buckethead who don't know movie making from shinola. Of especial interest to me, being the wordsmith that I is, was the section on screenwriting. While the level of information there is, as yet, still rather sparse, I could imagine that something like this crossed with MIT's OpenCourseWare could be a really cool thing indeed.
Also of use are the vasty deeps of wikiquote, where I found this charming little bit I had been trying to remember for ages:
Listen up maggots. You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We are the all singing, all dancing crap of the world. We are all part of the same compost heap.
Also chock full of grist for your reading mill is wikisource, where you can find among other treasures, John Buchan's Greenmantle.
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No shit, it's Angle Grinder Man. A real life super hero, defending an oppressed public from the evils of malicious traffic and parking enforcement officers.
[wik] Btw, follow the external links at the bottom of the wikipedia article. They are... interesting.
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I assume that you are prepared for the coming Avian Flu Pandemic. If you've listened to the sage advice of the Ministry Bureau for Zombie Preparedness, you already have most of what you need in your Zombie Preparedness Kit. You've got your water supply - one gallon per person per day, for a month. You have non-perishable foods from munchies to MREs. You've stocked up on toothpaste, soap, toilet paper, little sachets of smelly stuff, and other essentials. You've got your generator, and an adequate fuel supply. Flashlights, tools, candles, radios and other survival implements are close to hand. You have plenty of whatever medications you need on a regular basis. For me, that's the twenty four year scotch and a couple cartons of cigarettes, but your mileage may vary. You've packed kit bags for various emergencies, and they are easily accessible or already in the car. You have weaponry: aluminum baseball bat, shotgun, .45, and ammo. And a machete. Can't forget the machete. To upgrade your ZPK to full Avian Flu Pandemic compliance, only a few additional items are needed. Lots of hand sanitizer. Medical filter masks. Rabbit's foot. But you knew that.
One thing you might not have considered is the effect of a global flu pandemic on your stock portfolio. Never fear, though. The eggheads at Citigroup have thought it all through, and offer sound advice on where and when to jump, money-wise, when the grim reaper starts a-reapin. Do I sell my airline stocks? What sectors are sound investments in a mild pandemic that aren't in a highly lethal virulent epidemic? Are bonds a safe haven, or will the collapse of the global trade network place unsupportable strains on the US dollar? Well, now you'll know. We'll be lying in a chaise lounge in the Ministry Catastratorium and Epidemiological Center with the HiDef tuned to bloomberg watching our portfolios rocket into the stratosphere while you are dealing with half-starved and fully mad mobs are wrecking your town and your retirement. Unless you plan ahead. Then you, like us, can learn what a beautiful word schadenfreude is.
[wik] I just trolled through the Ministry Archives looking for the post on the Zombie Preparedness Kit that I was sure I wrote, but I'll damned if I can find the fricken thing. I did find these two posts, but they only mention it, they don't describe it. I guess I have some homework for tomorrow.
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Woot!
Who knew Bradley would beat Pittsburgh? Other than me, that is. Well, "Who knew..." isn't the right word.
"Who pulled out of his ass the crazy idea that..." seems more a appropriate start to that sentence. I apologize for the imprecison.
The NCAA walls will surely come crashing down, real soon now, but until they do, I'm alone in 4th place, with a bullet.
I say again, "Woot!".
And yes, the title of this post works on multiple levels. Thanks for noticing.
[wik] To nobody's surprise, including mine, Ohio State has taken the pipe. Bummer. I'm now #8, with a bullet, to the head. At least I didn't have the Buckeyes winning it. And it could be worse - the two guys who run the pool, no slouches they, has each had his pick to win it all get dusted. So at least I'll probably finish ahead of them.
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Help me out here - would this be an example of correlation, causation, or just a craptacular use of computing power?
From this morning's inbox:
Dear Amazon.com Customer, We've noticed that customers who have purchased The Complete Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson also purchased books by Edward Kennedy. For this reason, you might like to know that Edward Kennedy's My Senator And Me : A Dog's Eye View Of Washington, D.C. will be released soon. You can pre-order your copy at a savings of 35% by following the link below.
While I find that all fascinating, I think it points to the limitations inherent in today's electronic commerce marketing programs. The only suggestions I recall having taken seriously from Amazon (a company, by the way, whose loyal customer I am) are those from the same author as the book which triggered the recommendation. I don't know why that is, it just is.
And I'm reminded of a previous Amazon oddity, found who knows where. The only reference I'm able to find to it is in this entry at a site I'm sure I've never visited until today. I know I originally saw it in a blog somewhere, this past December, and I've convinced myself that it wasn't in an entry from one of my compatriots here at the Ministry, so I'm not going to look back any farther.
Oh, the oddity? If you didn't see it at the time, you might get a chuckle out of it. It was an Amazon search for "laserdisc". At the time, I found it funny enough that I saved it, correctly assuming that Amazon would spackle over whatever glitch existed in their search engine. First page of results, scanned and cropped from an a PDF I retained of the search, below the fold.
[wik] I ought to point out that I'm certain the Complete Calvin and Hobbes collection is worth every penny, even though I've not been able to get my 11 year old daughter to let loose of it long enough to actually read it front to back, four times, like she has.
[alsø wik] Feh. Even saved in an intelligent format, the addition of the picture made the page load too slowly, and I can't see inconveniencing each reader with delays while this post remains on the front page. If you're still curious, however, have a look at it here.
[alsø alsø wik] The Ministry of Future Perfidy can no longer bring itself to care about page load times, the image is restored.
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Some pursuits are more trivial than others. Among the most trivial, NCAA March Madness pools.
Why would I say this? Simple - I participate in at least one, every year, and I'm normally mathematically eliminated by halftime of the "play in" game. What better reason to call an activity trivial than the simple fact that you suck at it? I've no idea why I've done so poorly in most of the last 20 years or so, but there you have it, and it must be due to the triviality of the undertaking (he says to himself).
But not this year, no sirree.
I'm participating in a Toronto-based pool, run by a couple guys whose NFL pool I also joined this past season, and as of 7:30PM Saturday, March 18, I'm tied with one other guy for 13th place out of 75 poolsters. I've given up trying to figure out my odds, say, of beating the poor bastard whose pick for NCAA Champion (Kansas) has already bitten the green weenie. My only clear misstep so far was in thinking Tennessee might make the Final Four.
And my ace in the hole appears to be the (soon to be proven retarded, I'm sure) presumption that my Ohio State Buckeyes will lose to nobody but Duke. In that particular bit of fantasy, I appear to be alone, which will stand me in good stead should lightning strike and I end up correct.
Wait - it just occurred to me why I continue this trivial pursuit: It's just about the only time all year that I find college basketball interesting. It's surely not that, in the abstract, I actually give a care who wins. But now I at least have a specific reason to root for Ohio State against Florida, which has to make me fairly unique, among Texans.
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The original Bob Barker was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1974.
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Talking Heads started out as a group of art-school students fronted by an emotionally distant caffeine junkie and playing skeletal, angular songs topped with disjointed lyrical extursions. But they ended up the 1980s as critically-acclaimed, stadium-filling stars playing a heady stew of Caribbean, African, funk, pop, and postpunk. All along, frontman David Byrne sang lyrics in a high, thin warble that for all their elliptical imagery, seemed to always hunger for human connection. Detachment and confusion were common themes; many of their best known songs, from "Once In A Lifetime" to "Heaven" and "Life During Wartime" were about detachment, wonder, the stultifying effect of happiness, and the bracing emotional wallop of misery.
Rhino Records (who else?) are in the process of reissuing all eight of the band's studio albums in a two-sided DualDisc format. One side is a regular CD containing a remastered version of the original album plus the inevitable bonus tracks, and the other side is a DVD containing a 5.1 Surround Sound mix of the album plus some bonus features like lyrics, photos, and videos. I have to admit that I'm not always thrilled when labels do this - I still have CD players that choke on any disc that doesn't conform to Blue Book standards, and my new copy of More Songs About Buildings And Food won't play on one of my computers. I'm also resolutely old school; DVD content doesn't typically thrill me when appended to an album (more on this later). I'm getting over myself, though... if more bands do what Green Day did with their excellent Bullet In A Bible and release video and audio versions of the same concert in one package, I'll be a happy man. But for now I need to simply recognize that most people younger than even my tender years are perfectly OK with this outlandish new thing they call tech-mology, and just let it rest.
But I'm here to talk about More Songs About Buildings And Food, Talking Heads' second album, originally released in 1978. The name of the album is a bit of joke on the dreaded "sophomore slump," but it's not an advertisement of the contents. Well, "The Big Country" actually is a song about buildings and food, but only obliquely, so I will pretend it doesn't count. Instead, Talking Heads' second album sees them moving away from the very stark and spiky arrangements they used on their debut, and starting to incorporate some of the soul and overtly funky gestures that would underpin their later, more experimental work. Although all the songs on Buildings and Food were written by David Byrne, producer Brian Eno (in his first of many collaborations with the group) moved Chris Franz' drums and Tina Weymouth's bass to the front of the mix. As later proven on their own work as the Tom Tom Club, Franz and Weymouth had a greater sense of fun and of uncerebral playfulness than Byrne. These tendencies were already on display, and their earnestness helps offest the nerdy coolness of David Byrne's persona.
One thing that sets More Songs About Buildings And Food apart from the Talking Heads albums that came after is that it almost sounds unfinished. That's not to say the songs are half-baked (they aren't) or the production job has glaring holes in it (it doesn't), but rather that you can hear the band, especially Byrne, reaching for something new all the time. The band's best album, for my money, is the double live The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads, which includes live performances of some of the material from Buildings and Food. Before I gave the latter album a very close listen, I thought that all of David Byrne's little experiments on the live record - stretching out or smothering his vowels, spastically repeating phrases or chop|ping them in|to harsh syl|la|bles - were a function of his being on stage and looking for a way to do something new with a lyric he's sung a thousand times before. But this is not so - the same kinds of bizarre little tics festoon the original album versions, and the music that underlies them sounds just as spontaneous as it does on stage.
Although Eno had begun to deepen the band's sound with sneaky production tricks, Buildings And Food still sounds like it was recorded live in the studio. This is very different from his later contributions to the band's sound, which would result in complex audio collages that sounded frankly (and gloriously) studio-generated, and that the band would have to work hard to approximate on stage. But for the time being, Eno decorated songs like "Stay Hungry," "I'm Not In Love" and "The Girls Want To Be With The Girls" with judicious and subtle intrusions that don't obscure the band's odd hybrid of postpunk and rigid funk. In fact, Eno's contributions are so subtle as to be practically stealthy, only revealing their complexity under close scrutiny.
Just listen to "Found A Job," for example. Although it sounds at first blush like a simple scritchy and nervous four-piece arrangement with a very dry (echoless) sound, the choruses are loaded with panned guitars and background keyboard flourishes, and David Byrne's vocals suddenly sound like they're coming from a much bigger room. While perhaps not as thrilling as the adventures of later albums, the excellent songwriting and production on Buildings and Food rewards repeated (even... obsessive...) listening, with headphones.
What really elevate Buildings And Food above merely being a step forward from their debut (titled '77) are the last two songs, the famous cover of Al Green's "Take Me To The River" and the airy narrative song "The Big Country". The former was the first time on album that Talking Heads really relaxed into the deep grooves that Franz, Weymouth, and keyboardist/guitarist Jerry Harrison were capable of creating. The bubbling bass line and open textures seemed especially novel after nine straight songs full of twitchy energy, and were a harbinger of the band's explorations in the years to come. On the other hand, "The Big Country" featured possibly David Byrne's most lucid and straightforward lyric yet, presaging the narrative dexterity he would bring to songs on their next album, Fear of Music, such as "Heaven" and "Life During Wartime." Underpinned by an incongruous-sounding slide guitar, Byrne's narrator muses from an airplane about the cities and buildings and fields he sees below, muses on the miracles of production and transportation that tie them all together, and then suddenly dissolves in a fit of what - ennui? - boredom? - self-loathing? Whatever the intent, the lyric is more finely drawn and evocative than anything Byrne had yet done.
For the reissue, Rhino have appended alternate versions of songs - alternate takes of "The Big Country" and "I'm Not In Love," a countryish version of "Thank You For Sending Me An Angel," and a 1977 version of "Stay Hungry" that closely recalls the feel, if not exactly the sound, of the outstanding live version on The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads. None of these additions are particularly essential, but they are interesting for those who are curious about the band's self-conscious evolutionary goals.
What are valuable, though, are the DVD extras. (For the record, that is the first time in history I've had occasion to write the foregoing sentence.) Two live videos, of "Found A Job" from 1978 and "Warning Sign" from 1979, do a great service for those of us who were born too late to see the band in their heyday. Whereas Jonathan Demme's film Stop Making Sense, which chronicled Talking Heads' 1984 tour, presented a band who seemed relaxed and comfortable with a large stage, a gigantic audience, and the funky presence of the great Bernie Worrell on keyboards, the earlier footage shows a much younger, hungrier group far more intent on getting across. That's not to say that the band had become complacent by 1984, but rather that by then they had come to expect everything would go as planned.
The difference can be most easily seen by watching bassist Tina Weymouth. In the 1978 clip, filmed in New York, she is a tiny ball of energy, almost being played by her bass rather than the other way around. She rocks back and forth and stares intently at Jerry and David as she absolutely rips into the acrobatic bass line of "Found A Job." (The bass, too, is high up in the mix on this video, and should forever put to bed the calumny that Tina Weymouth could not play her instrument.) By 1984, she's barefoot and smiling, relaxed and happy as she practically surfs on the mile-deep, funky grooves she lays down. It's not a difference of competence; it's a difference of comfort, and it's a bit of a revelation to actually see the how the band worked together in their early days before MTV, world music, and the acrimony that would break them apart.
As befits a crew of ex-art students, the "photo extras" section of the DVD is well put together too. The mishmash of backstage candid shots and album cover treatments from the USA and Japan is okay enough, but the Western Union telegram welcoming the Heads to San Francisco and concluding "WELCOME TO SAN FRANCISCO WE LIKE YOUR RECORDS BREAK A HEAD -THE RESIDENTS" is just... super cool. Cool also are the numerous lyric sheets in various stages of completion, which probably (though it's hard to tell) give a glimpse into the recondite depths of the creative mind of David Byrne. Also included is the very curious and undated "Self Deconstruction of a Song," an essay about "The Big Country." It begins...
The first thing we hear is a bottleneck/slide guitar. It brings to mind a sound which was originally used in country and western music to mimic violins. It is not meant to mimic violins here but to mimic country and western music. This, along with the initial major third chord sequence, brings to mind a basic, earthy down-home feeling which implies a primitivism and lack of sophistication. (At the same time, in the context of Talking Heads, it implies an intentional primitivism and an awareness of this nievete [sic])
... and continues in the same vein for a few hundred words. While not exactly required reading, it is unmistakably (and touchingly) the product of an art/philosophy education circa 1975, which you can take, leave, or amuse yourself with as the mood takes you.
Finally, the 5.1 Surround Sound remix on the DVD side is absolutely spectacular. Even on my non-surround, ten year old stereo components, I heard details in the production I'd never even suspected were there before. In fact, the full impact of Brian Eno's deft hand on the band's sound isn't fully appreciated until you've heard all the tiny, tiny little complicated noises he packed into songs that on older CD releases sounded fairly straightforward. This new tech-mology scares and confuses me, but I think I like it!
Talking Heads are easy to take for granted. Their songs are perhaps on the radio more now than when they were together. The band are practically iconic, and their videos especially are practically a capsule cultural history of the mid-1980s. But every one of the band's albums contain deeper pleasures than the radio hits we all know. Rhino have long been one of the best reissue labels in the world, even after their acquisition by Warner Brothers, and if the other seven Talking Heads albums have been presented as well as More Songs About Buildings And Food they have a lot to be proud of. Now, if Rhino would only have had the decency to release the album as two discs, a DVD and a blue-book compliant CD (as was evidently done for the European release) instead of the clumsy gimmick of a DualDisc, this package would have been perfect.
This post also appears at blogcritics.org
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After a moderately long hiatus, Actual Facts returns with a fact filled exploration of the world of the Basques:
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