Music industry still singing the blues - Yahoo! News

Two headlines popped up on my "yahoo! news" this morning. I linked the first above.

The headline right below it?

"Ashlee [Simpson]:'I Am' No. 1" (the article is about Simpson's new CD being #1 in Billboard sales right now.)

Is it so hard to see the correlation? Nobody wants to buy the perfectly packaged crap [a la Simpson] the music industry has been feeding consumers.

This may seem backwards, I mean her CD is number 1. But, the point is that music sales are way down, and even if her sales are number 1, they're still pitifully low especially considering how much money her label put up to market her. (my guess would be $2 million or more, but that's just a guess)

This may only seem relevant to me, but you can go back to whatever you were doing, now.

something to feel good about

I've recently been spending a lot of time the web-site linked above. If you haven't checked it out yet, do so now.

This guy...he's my kind of guy.

swishswishswishswishswishswishswishswish.........

I don't cry much. My mom does. My wife does. Even my sister has become more and more of a crier as she gets older. I cried uncontrollably when my dad died nearly 12 years ago and it was a pretty sad state of affairs when petey died a few months ago. But, those sort of things are allowed.

When I do find myself tearing up, I fight pretty hard not to let anybody, even holly, know what's happening. We've even got into fights because she'll ask me if I'm crying and I get mad because I'm not. (but, sometimes I am...)

Sometimes, in movies, it's just uncontrollable. 90% of the time it's the actual music in the movie. This irritates me so much, because my mind knows that I'm being manipulated by another musician, but there's no stopping the emotions...

Then I heard this sound. It's just a weird little sound that's almost more mechanical than musical in its rhythm. I've never felt my brain seem so small and useless in trying to come to grips with what this little sound actually means.

This strange little sound made it difficult to keep others from noticing tears in my eyes.

Jeffrey Overstreet on "Serenity"

1) I watched the TV series of Firefly last week and dug it.

2) Since I dug the show, I decided I wanted to go see the movie, Serenity which is a movie kind of finishing the show that got cancelled after one season. Dug the movie too.

3)I've been spending a lot of time on Jeffrey Overstreet's web-site lately. He's a writer and a critic from Seattle who approaches movies and music and art in the way I think more people (christians) should.

In other news, I have a gig this coming Saturday. I was really hoping to work up some new material for it, but about now, I'm just hoping that I can hammer down this stupid allergy crap enough to make it through. We'll see.

Librarian Rediscovers Beethoven Score - Yahoo! News

I don't really have anything to say about this, but I think that it's cool. How cool will it be to actually hear this piece of music performed now?

reading list

I've got so many books going right now that it's getting stupid:

Searching for God Knows What - Don Miller
Through Painted Deserts - Don Miller
The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkein
In Other Words- Artists Talk about Life and Work by Anthony DeCurtis
The Message-I've had this sitting in the bathroom and been reading it while...(ahem)...my daily constitutional...

and today I just got A New Way to Be Human by Charlie Peacock from half.com in the mail.

Today, I spent most of the day riding in the truck to take a piano to Oklahoma City. Instead of making some headway on one of the books listed above, I started re-reading The Story We Find Ourselves In by Brian McLaren. I think I got about 3/4 of the way through it. (it was a long day).

NO WAY!

So, after chillin' with Joan Jett last weekend, James and I kept talking about the movie she starred in with Michael J. Fox back in the '80s called "The Light of Day". James ended up finding it at the library and so the shacks and powers got together tonight to watch it.

It's really not worth hunting down unless you're really interested, but I remembered liking it when I saw it before and it wasn't that bad.

I particularly liked this part where the band was hanging out at their old regular club and there's this cheezy techno band playing on their stage. In the dialog, the band is called "The Problems". "They used to be called The Sins, now they're just called Problems..." The band was actually a trio: two guys playing keyboards/computers and a lead singer front and center playing a synth-drum pad...AWESOME!

THE CRAZIEST thing about this is that as we're watching the credits at the end of the movie, they list all the members of all the bands in the show & TRENT REZNOR is one of the guys in Problems! If you don't know who Trent Reznor is, he's a pretty hard-core industrial artist producer who, among other things, produced Marilyn Manson and wrote the song "Hurt" that Johnny Cash redid.

If you could see this band "Problems" and knew who Trent Reznor is, you'd know why this is so outrageously crazy.

hmmm...

A friend sent this to me, and it made me stop to think:

"If you jog in a jogging suit, lounge in lounging pajamas, and smoke in a smoking jacket, WHY would anyone want to wear a windbreaker??" - unknown

C.S. Lewis

"What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects --- with their Christianity latent. You can see this most easily if you look at it the other way round. Our faith is not likely to be shaken by any book on Hinduism. But, if whenever we read an elementary book on geology, botany, politics, or astronomy, we found that its implications were Hindu, that would shake us. It is not the books written in direct defense of materialism that make the modern man a materialist; it is the materialistic assumptions in all the other books. In the same way, it is not books on Christianity that will really trouble him. But he would be troubled if, whenever he wanted a cheap popular introduction to some science, the best work on the market was always by a Christian. The first step to the reconversion of a country is books produced by Christians."

(God in the Dock, "Christian Apologetics," C. S. Lewis)

I find little nuggets like this all the time and wonder if Lewis would be nearly as popular with Christians if they had any clue about what he actually said. Lewis' words, written some 40 years ago, speak intelligently in critique of issues that many still can't get figured out today.

It seems telling that there are no voices of reason and intelligence standing out in all of the Christian publishing industry like Lewis or Chesterton did at one time. If there were somebody out there smart enough and reasonable enough to actually have something to say, he/she is constantly feeling pressure to "write more little books about Christianity", which, of course, will never make any impression on anybody outside of the Church's walls.

"A CBA (Christian Booksellers Association) survey released at the Convention shows Christian-product sales by CBA member suppliers through all distribution channels to be just under $4.2 billion for the year 2002..."

Congratulations.

immutable truth

The older I get, the less important it seems to me to hold a great number of "bedrock" beliefs. There are a number of things that I believe strongly and passionately, but I have less and less faith in my own perspective and my ability to completely understand any given topic. Consequently, I think a key to learning and growing would be staying open to possibilities that my own conclusions may need tweaked as new information presents itself.

However, this morning I realized one particular truth that I don't ever believe will be tweaked. If I ever have kids of my own, I look forward to passing this bit of wisdom on to them and hope that it will become a part of their lives as it has mine:

Picky people pick Peter Pan peanut butter. It's the peanut butter picky people pick.

Live it. Love it.

shack & the blackhearts...and joan jett

So, last Friday, I was knocking around the house a little depressed because I kept thinking: "I need to make some money this weekend. How am I going to make some money this weekend? It's already friday, I can't book a gig, I can't book somebody in the studio, and there are no piano moves needed." Then, I get a phone call.

It's this guy, Hal, whom I've met once, who has a limo service. He says that his business is crazy busy this weekend with Bikes, Blues, and BBQ in Fayetteville. They're shuttling people back and forth from Dickson street and all sorts of things. They've also got the contract for shuttling around the for big band performing at the Amp on Friday and Saturday night and they're short one driver. Would I be interested in driving a 15 passenger van down to Fort Smith to pick up Blue Oyster Cult from the airport on Saturday? He can pay me somewhere between $15-$20/hour and he can get me tickets to the shows if I want.

ummm...YES!

So, Holly and I went to see SteppenWolf & Joan Jett and the Blackhearts on Friday night! Steppenwolf were not that great, especially since they didn't have a bass player and the bass was sequenced. But Joan Jett ROCKED!

So, then in the middle of Joan's set, (actually right as she was starting "I Love Rock-n-Roll", Hal comes and finds me and says there's been some scheduling changes and asks if I can take Joan & the Blackhearts to the airport in the morning before heading to Ft. Smith to pick up Blue Oyster Cult.

ummm...YES!!

So, I needed some money and the work I found was to drive around rock stars. It could be much worse.