Stop Motion Musician – YourDailyMedia.com.

I’ve never been one who enjoys music videos all that much, but occasionally one comes along that’s done so artistically that I have to watch it over and over again.  Dame Shirley of Bond fame has one out on YouTube that fits the bill for me.  She performs Pink’s “Get the Party Started,” and she does it with her own unique flair.  Go check it out – it’s well worth the watch.

I’m in the midst of a mindless horror at work right now – weeding out two-thirds of the rows in a 2166-row Excel spreadsheet by manually comparing nine individuals columns (out of about 21).  Yes, this is excitement in all its raw form and power.  Oh, see!  I think I just had a goosebump. 

So, I’m doing the only thing I can do and still retain some hope of sanity – the iPod Nano is plugged into my ears while Michael Buble croons away.  Yes, I know what you’re thinking, and yes, Michael Buble actually helps maintain sanity – for some of us old geezers, anyway.  Oh, hey, and there’s FFH.  And I know I’ve got some Marty O’Donnell mixed in there.

Suddenly, this project doesn’t look quite so painful.

My wife unintentionally reawakened my enjoyment of country music recently.  Until a few days ago, radio has been our only option for music in the car.  I think we’d both grown bored with the popular rock stations playing the same songs over and over again, so we ended up on a country station, a country station that now resides on one of my radio’s presets.

We have a CD player in our car now – a birthday gift from me to my wife – and this morning I found one of my Garth Brooks albums and popped it in the player on the way to work.  I’d forgotten how much I enjoy his music.  Garth displays a high level of creativity and artistry with the music itself, and his lyrics always contain a delightful brand of poetry.

I don’t have a lot of country music in my collection – just a couple of Garth albums and a double of Alabama’s greatest hits.  I simply don’t collect much “popular” music since my tastes tend to run more toward Big Band, classical, swing, jazz, etc.  But I do enjoy revisiting country from time to time, though I doubt I’ll ever love the genre – I’m too much of a melancholic personality to want to reside there for any length of time.  Country music sometimes recalls for me painful memories from the past, and being creatures of the past I see little need to dwell on them, as they have no effect on today.  So, by necessity, country music remains a style of music that I tend to steer clear of.

Right now, I’ve got “Fit for a King” running through my head.  It reminds me a bit of a Southern Gospel song you might hear or sing at a tent revival meeting.  If all country music was like this all the time, I think I could listen to a lot more of it.

I’m all for musicians rendering their own remixed versions of the Halo Main themes.  They’re great pieces of music, and it’s huge amounts of fun to see how artists impress their own styles, flavors, and tastes onto these familiar tunes.  What I would love to see, however, is an expansion into all the other musical themes from these games.  Marty O’Donnell has produced a wealth of great musical content with these soundtracks, setting up some wonderful templates for other musicians to reproduce and flavor with their own styles.  So, it would be fantastic to see some of these reproductions branch out to the various other tracks to see what kind of new and interesting work can be produced.  Heck, with a little collaborative effort with ‘the man’ himself, I’d even be willing to bet that completely remixed version of these soundtrack albums could be produced and marketed for the musicians industrious enough to take that challenge to task.  I know I’d pay money for something like that.

My piano was made in 1940.  It’s really in remarkable condition for something that’s 67 years old.  I’ve seen newer pianos that look worse than this one.

It was funny – the first piano tuner I got ahold of today launched into a 10-minute lecture when I asked what his company’s rates were for tuning pianos.  Most of the information was stuff I already knew, things like how the strings are somewhat elastic and stretch over time, how the sounding board has to be checked for cracks in these older pianos before actually tuning, and how older pianos often can’t be tuned all the way up to their actual pitches because the sounding boards (and other parts) might not be able to take the stress of 26+ tons of pressure (each string apparently holds about 200 lbs. of pressure, which was about the only bit he relayed to me that I hadn’t know before).  It was actually pretty amusing to listen to him because he was completely unstoppable.  I am still making phone calls, though, and have another who returned my call who actually sounds more promising than this big music company I called.

I also have a line on some piano teachers in the area who can take advanced students.  Now, I just have to somehow swing the money from my budget (not that the lessons are really all that expensive, but when you’re paying on a mortgage, every dollar counts).

Being a piano player myself, I’m always somewhat partial to music that makes primary use of my favorite instrument.  I’ve also always been a sucker for slower, more lyrical music.  So it should come as no surprise that I really like the music of Fernando Ortega.  For Christmas this past year, I requested a few of his CDs, since I didn’t have any in my collection yet.  I was especially interested in two of his songs – “Grace and Peace” from The Shadow of Your Wings and “Our Great God” from Storm – but I didn’t specifically request them because I didn’t see any reason to be picky.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that I received two of Fernando’s albums, both of which were the very ones I had been most interested in.  Both albums have been active in my music playlist ever since.

Thanks to John Scalzi’s crush, I’ve discovered talented pianist and singer Regina Spektor.  The piano talent alone captures me, but she has a beautiful voice, as well.¹ Her website has a number of her music videos.  I especially liked the one for “Us.”²

I think I’ve just added a new artist to my list of favorites for CDs to collect.

1. She reminds me a little bit of Norah Jones.[back]
2. And that’s saying something – anyone who knows me knows that I don’t generally like music videos.[back]

I’ve been learning a thing or three about simplifying my life.

I’m one of those people who’s curious about and interested in just about everything.  This has always been both a blessing and a curse because it has always made it difficult for me to figure out what subjects and hobbies to pursue.  It’s the sort of thing that gave me trouble in college because I couldn’t decide which major to pick, so as a result I graduated with one major, three minors, and enough knowledge in other fields to technically have given me at least two other minors.  It’s the sort of thing that has always made it difficult to use my free time well because I want to do too many things with those minutes.

But life these days has become incredibly full, so I’m learning to trim things.  It’s a tough process because I don’t really want to trim things out of my life.  But I’m learning that I really can’t do them all, even less so now that I have the obligations of a family and livestock and a property to keep up.  I’m figuring out how to identify those things that are truly my passions and those that are simply my interests and hobbies.

I’ve more or less eliminated everything but my music, my writing, and Halo.  I’ll be getting a piano around Christmas, so I’m eagerly anticipating getting back into lessons and picking up where I left off.  I miss visiting my music, and I’m itching to really nail some ragtime and start learning how to play by ear and improvise.  It was something I was just starting to learn when I had to give up lessons several years ago.

My writing has quite possibly surprised even my love of music as my number one passion right now.  There are so many stories to tell now that I can hardly keep track of them all.  I have a blog to write to, a flash fiction site to run and occasionally contribute to, an anthology project in its planning stages, short stories to write and submit, and at least one good novel idea in the making.  I’d love to see my name sitting on a bookshelf somewhere and be able to give up working a ‘regular job’ in favor of becoming an author.

Of course, there’s always Halo.  I don’t have as much time for video games as I used to.  I do miss being able to play, but there are only just so many hours in a day.  What free time I have is given to relaxing and to some writing.  But I still have Friday nights reserved to join the guys on Xbox Live for some Halo 2 multiplayer action.  Somehow this first-person shooter has captured my devotion, even to the point of joining up with one of the most renowned and respected clans involved with the game. 

These are my passions, the hobbies that I am fanatical about.  All the others I have had to set aside for the time being.  Perhaps one day I’ll have time for some of them again, but if not I doubt that I will even really miss them that much.  There are certainly plenty of other things to hold my attention.

For several Saturdays running now, I’ve been back driving carriages in downtown Indy, and as usual you see all kinds of interesting things during the hours spent circling the streets.  Here’s a few of the things I saw last night:

• Inevitably, there are always a handful of bums and homeless people on the streets.  And, also inevitably, they tend to exhibit some of the most peculiar behaviors.  One gentlemen, early in the evening, began to serenade one of our female drivers, who then looked like she could have crawled under her carriage and died.  Another fellow randomly walked up to a couple of mall employees, who were outside on their cigarette break, and without saying a word, began dancing in front of them, glaring all the while.  Then he walked away, leaving those of us watching stupefied and moderately amused.
• There are always people downtown begging for money.  Maybe about half of them actually look like they need it – filthy clothing, matted hair, actually look like they’ve been living on the streets for an indeterminate amount of time.  Another quarter of these people attempt to earn their income by playing various instruments, the saxophone and guitar being the most common.  The rest, however, look like they got out of bed that morning, took their daily shower, put on their nice clean clothes, then grabbed their plastic cup with two or three quarters in the bottom on their way to stand out on the sidewalk to beg.  Near as I can tell, most of this latter group of people should be able to get a job.
• And speaking of the guys who play sax downtown, one last night was really good.  He seemed to really know how to play jazz and was jamming it up.  The other guy I had to wonder about – has anyone ever told him that what he was playing were the saxophone accompaniments to larger works?  Apparently he couldn’t tell that his ‘music’ held very little melodic value, which made sense, considering he wasn’t actually playing any melody.  Oh, the amusement level there was high.
• I stopped at a light at one point in the evening to see a kid of perhaps 10, 12 years of age rolling across the crosswalk.  No big deal, right?  He was probably roller blades.  Actually, he was wearing roller sneakers.  I’ve never seen anything like this – he had a wheel in the heel of each of his tennis shoes and would lean back on them whenever the ground tilted downward.
• Lamborghinis are old hat by now.  Same with Ferraris, Porsches, and every sports car of every variety.  These vehicles are all too common downtown, especially on the weekends and especially around Formula One.  (I don’t even think those cars are all that pretty.)

That’s just a taste of what I usually see in the course of an evening driving carriages, and it generally only gets more exotic and interesting after 11:00, when the night club crowd hits the streets in force.  One never lacks for entertainment, that’s for sure.