Category: update

The longer I observe the world of politics, sports, and other “very public” types of human pursuit, I am struck by how many problems or solutions come down to four-function math.  Like Edward Tufte demonstrating that the simplest form of x-y plot predicted the Challenger disaster… Sometimes the simple approach yields the best data.

Barry Bonds is in court for lying about steroid use.  My opinion is unequivocal: he knows what he used, when, and why.  The media, on the other hand, is stuck in a 1950’s muscle-mag fantasy about performance enhancing drugs.  They think it is about muscled up freaks.  While it is often about muscled-up freaks, they are either amateurs, or they are “hogs” who are too narcissistic to stay on a normal “program”.  Barry Bonds, and this is conjecture, was both a “hog” and he knew a few things:

• He was good at baseball
• He consistently hit X number of homers for Y at-bats
• He had a projected career of Z years
• He had to have A number of at-bats to break Aaron’s record, R
• and He could see B number of at-bats per season if healthy

The keywords in that scheme are “years” and “healthy”.  For an NL player, health is everything, because they can’t hide you at DL if you are too slow or too stiff to be an effective fielder.  You have to accumulate your numbers as an every day position player.  So he could easily have formulated:

R = (X/Y)*(B*Z)

which is the his projected home run percentage time his total career at-bats.  If you watched him stumbling around like a dancing bear in his one World Series appearance, then you know that there was good reason for desperation.  Even with his questionably natural physique he was booting balls and failing to catch up with routine flys.  And he was still a few years short of reaching that record.  Next Stop: Better Living Through Chemistry!  Anyone who goes to a juice-shop like BALCO,  and gets the one-on-one services of  “ultimate wingman” Greg Anderson is probably not guessing about his regimen (I mean zero chance).

Whether the feds can make it stick is another question entirely.  But my point here is that people in the highest reaches of their profession are not known as having a blah-blah-blah attitude about the source of their livelyhood.

All of this is to say: even if Barry’s ego liked to see a muscled-up freak of nature in the mirror, the calculator on his cellphone was all he needed to know about catching Hank Aaron.

Check out my photo blog HERE.

I’ll be putting up samples of what i am doing now, as well as samples of older stuff. The first photo post is definitely OLDER!

hope ya dig it.

A great horned owl paid us a visit and I blew my chance to get him on tape. Luckily he was still in the neighborhood this evening, but farther away. I managed to grab a sample of him, and thanks to digital editing i was able to isolate his call and get rid of a lot of noise. Owls have pretty good pitch! My feeling is: this is a big damn owl. It sounded like a linebacker calling out a defensive play last night when he was about 50 yards away. the neat thing is that I was able to call him and get him to respond. Sandy thinks my owl calling skills are pretty badass. The dog… well he isn’t too sure about owls.

Here is a sound file. It is an AIFF and is about 750k.

Enjoy!

Ok, maybe not RAWKS, BUT DAUMMMM, I went to see the Wesleyan (CT) Gamelan Ensemble and the attendant Javanese shadow puppet play, and it was a really good time. 4 hours of uninterrupted gamelan music. The ensemble works in “shifts” and some of the musicians are at their instruments for hours. The only downside is that the venue was really uncomfortable for a not-so-flexible person like me. Next time I’ll nab a less cramped space. But still, this is the kind of music i can really sink my teeth into. I think that an ensemble like the New Haven Improvisors Collective could do a lot with this format. The pace is the opposite of rushed. And the puppeteer, Sumarsam,… he doesn’t take breaks. No.

The performance was dedicated to the memory of David McAllester, who was a key figure in the creation of the ethnomusicology department at Wesleyan. I have to think that he would have been pleased at the crowd and the performance.

On December 8th and 9th Doot! converged with Eugene Chadbourne for a few gigs in New Haven.

See pics HERE

We had a blast and despite the weather we had good turnouts for Eugene. The DOOT! Camera Crew taped the Cafe Nine show, and the Doot Micro Mobile recording studio managed to capture the Buttonwood show in stereo! So some of that may be making an appearance soon. Don’t hold your breath because DOOT! is now in deep R&D mode in anticipation of an appearance at Zappanale 17 in 2006.

Yeah, that’s right. The latest thing in hard-ass psycho jazz is here. DOOT! is a band/project/lifestyle that I’ve been putting together with drummer Stephen Chillemi. Stephen and I played in Doctor Dark, and are having loads of fun making bass and drums sound like a full band. You can also check out Stephen’s promotion/label outfit, Cholly Hoss Productions and keep up with the Doot! experience there. We have a few shows coming up in early December, and you can get more ifo at the DOOT! homepage.

That is my advice “du jour” for Governor… uh… President Bush. With W’s latest collapse under duress I think that he might want to be careful about badmouthing the “soft bigotry of low expectations” because right now it is the country’s low expectations of him as a president that is keeping the enraged peasants with pitchforks and torches away from Crawford. It might be reverse bigotry, but it is bigotry none the less. Nobody expects a silver spoon fed chickenhawk to be a man when the time comes. We expect lies, excuses, and diversionary tactics. To me, that is the lowest of low expectations. Poppy might have bailed him out of bad business decisions, DUI charges, active military DUTY, and gawd knows what else… But a phone call to daddy ain’t gonna fix this mess. If I have a good piece of news for the president it is that I have been looking to God more often thanks to his incompetence. Faith based initiative, indeed.

While on that topic:

I got a lot of fantastic positive comments from fans at Z16 and I was flattered and proud to be part of bearing the Beefheart torch, but it was often difficult to absorb. The more I play the music of Captain Beefheart the more I realize that it is not jammy, or free form, or loose. It is very controlled linear composition. You change it, it isn’t the same. It loses power and it loses the message. I have never considered myself to be a perfectionist in any area, but this gig brought out my inner perfectionist.

Playing in Doctor Dark was simultaneously one of the most uplifting and one of the most degrading musical experience of my life. I was able to attempt to play the parts of a man that I consider to be one of the true “lost greats” of the electric bass, Mark “Rockette Morton” Boston. I was able to attempt that with players who were also trying to fulfil the promise of other amazing musicians: John “Drumbo” French or Art Tripp or Robert Wiliams, or Bill Harkelroad, or Ry Cooder (yes, THAT Ry Cooder), and Don “Captain Beefheart” Vliet, and a lot more. All this despite a lifelong desire not to be in a cover band, or a blues band, or to churn out bass riffs behind some guitar wanker. That desire has been my mantra since the Carter administration, so it isn’t like I had some kind of epiphany last week.

Ultimately I found that some of my strengths worked in a positive way, some in a negative way, and that if I didn’t watch myself my love of music could be used as leverage to put me in a position to betray myself.

My fellow Doctor Darkians know the deal but for the record: Zappanale 16 was my last gig with Doctor Dark. The feeling is one of melancholy with an elation chaser. My hope is that by making the decision honestly and promptly there will be an overall avoidance of regret. I know. Fat Fucking Chance.