Last night, I was "Center Stage" artist on mixposure.com Saturday Night Rocks internet radio show.

Just in case you missed it I've got an MP3 of my segment of the show.  It's about an hour long.

Here's the Link: 
http://rockscience.net/mp3/..mixposure_csp_4_18_2009.mp3
I may not have the voice for radio, but I sure have the face for it!

Here is the blog about the show:

http://www2.mixposure.com/..MixRadio/blog.php

Ok Internet radio that is....

Mixposure.com is absolutely my favorite indi music site now.   Mike K from mixposure reached out to me from the Cakewalk user forums.    He invited me over and it's been great.

Anyway, Mike K does a live streaming radio show on saturday evenings called "Center Stage" where he features one or two artists, plays their music and does a live interview.  He wants me to do one, so saturday night, I listened in to see what it was like.   I found two things -first of all there is some REALLY great stuff on there.  Secondly it's a really nicely done show.    Anyway, while I was listening in, Mike IM'd me on Skype and asked me to call in to the show.  So I did - with about 5 minutes warning!    He archives the entire show as one giant MP3.  You can download it here:

http://www.guitaristworks.com/iMSRadio/20090307SaturdayNightRocks.mp3

I come in at about 2 hours, 28 minutes.  He and I talk for a while and then he plays FUW.   How cool.

My favorite moment is when I admit that I play in a cover band right after he rants about "Crap Cover bands".   I couldn't resist.

Someone left this on youtube for me out there on the internets.  Ya can't make this stuff up.

"Bob. You got what I call dead fish syndrome. Good music, is like a fish one may catch. Alive and with movement. Your song is like a fish caught an hour ago and thrown on the deck of a fishing boat. Dead fish syndrome. There's no grove in your music. Your music is not composed. You make sounds until repetition has put a tattoo in your brain, Then, you repeat that. Then, you actually produce it. Musicians are like magicians. You need a bag of tricks. You have not a single one. Good tone, bad music"

English is hard to learn.

George Carlin used to rant about why go and do have a different vowel sound.  Really - 2 letter words and we can't even be consistent there.  Can you imagine being an adult and trying to learn a new language with the lack of rules, special cases, and just plain bizarre quirks of this language?  I'd be like "Skrew this!" (In my native language of course).

And yet the rest of the developed world does bother to learn english. 

I took Spanish for two years in High School.  Here is a language with nearly zero special cases.  K, C, S, Z are always consistent as are the vowels.  You can learn a set of rules and be pretty good to go.  Verbs conjugate with very consistent rules.  It's incredibly logical compared to the clusterf&ck that is the queen's english.   I still don't remember much more than Good Morning, and Good bye.

There are thousands of languages in the world.  Many of them in danger of dying out in a matter of generations. I suppose some would consider this a good thing.  I think it's pretty sad.  The vast majority of them are not even written.  We have one of the relatively few organized and documented languages.

I moved to the Boston area in 1998 from a white-bread homogeneous little town called Binghamton, NY.   I very quickly came to love being on the subway and hearing 5 different languages being spoken all around me.  I still love hearing that every day going to work.  My advice to english-only folks is to move to Binghamton, NY.  You can surround yourself in a comfortable cocoon of white-ness, christian-ness and English-ness and you can buy your new home with your visa card.  Please enjoy your new job at the screen door factory.

The one area where I do sort of sympathize with the E-O crowd is with signage.  Not because I'm offended at reading spanish words on signs in public places. (I consider it a late pop quiz for my high-school class).  It's because it's insulting to everyone's intelligence - especially the ESL folks.  I mean seriously... even if you ONLY spoke spanish, don't you think that "yes-no" buttons on the ATM machine would suffice?  Does "yes/si-no/no" really help anyone?   And if you see a yellow plastic man in the middle of the hallway, wouldn't "caution" do it?   I have to say that even without my high school spanish career, I could have figured out "cuidado", "si" and "no".  Even if I only spoke spanish, I'd be insulted by it.   Oy - stop wasting the freeking ink already.

You can speak English almost anywhere.  Can you imagine if you ran into "speak the language er git the F outta the country" bullshit elsewhere in the world?  Can you say no more tourism?  Speaking of tourism, foreigners visiting here have in their minds that they have to speak english reasonably well in order to get by.  Tourists from here going almost anywhere else have in their minds that the rest understand them perfectly with no effort on the tourists' part other than to totally mangle a few polite phrases (which makes the locals pee themselves with laughter as soon as you turn your back).

So let's see...  It's hard to learn.  Yet other developed nations force their kids to learn it as a second language.   Mono-lingual, semi-literate Americans can get away with speaking it almost anywhere else in the world (without being abused).  English is the default language for most international corporations (ie speak the language or find another job).  Most multi-lingual people in the world have English as their second language.  America has the lowest number of multi-lingual people in the developed world.  Other countries let us totally get by without lifting a finger to learn their language when we visit there.

And yet... americans get all pissed off when they have to repeat themselves at the dunkin donuts because the poor minimum-wage slob behind the counter doesn't understand you the first time.

What the hell more do you want man?

aye carumba!

ps: Poor grammar and spelling found in English-only rants is humorous to say the least.  In this post, it's just cuz I don't talk so good.

I may be just a little less cynical in the future.

I'm still pissed that I donated about $500 bucks and they never sent me the car magnet!

 

Check out this video: FUW - the movie



So I wrote F.U.W about a year ago and recorded it. Came out pretty nice I think. I always thought it would be cool to try to make a music video. So I started shooting a bunch of sequences and experimenting with different ideas. My "set" is very limited in that is is essentially my audio recording studio. The idea was to do a rough draft to experiment and then *really* shoot the stuff I liked later with better camera/lighting/etc.

Well then I got incredibly busy at Cakewalk and I had a serious health issue come up which took about 4 weeks out of the picture. Being that november is a few weeks away, I thought I'd go ahead and post what I have. Please enjoy - or not.

-Bob

Until about a month ago, I quietly assumed McCain would be President McCain in January.  I was pretty happy when he got the nomination because even though I'm very lefty/liberal I found him to be the least scary of the republican choices.  And as much as I wanted Obama to win, I really didn't think this current America (the same America that easily lumps Iraqis in with the 9/11 terrorists because they have the same color skin) was ready to elect him.

Things changed:  Obama actually has some very encouraging poll numbers.  And Sara Palin is completely offending me and generally creeping me out.  On the first point, ok I feel guilty for only starting to believe it was possible for Obama to win once I saw others thinking the same thing.  I guess I'm too practical and cynical about how much small-minded bigotry still lives in America.  "In 10 years" I thought "Obama could win - but not yet".

As far as Palin goes, she goes way beyond the normal left/right liberal/conservative socialist/capitalist differences - many of which I can agree to disagree with righties on.  She just plain offends and it amazes me she gets a pass on the stuff she regurgitates (so much for the liberal media).  I've heard at least 5 times in the last two weeks that I am not a "Real American".  It seems that if I'm not a rural redneck, who never questions his government's actions (a freedom), and thinks this war in Iraq is beyond questioning (a freedom) and is convinced that god himself (of course THAT god) is behind our task in iraq - that I don't belive in freedom and therefore am not a real american.  Only a republican could close that logic circle - don't ask me how it works.

I'm incredibly sad to think we're about to reward such thinking by giving this thinker the 2nd highest position in the government.  Kinda makes me feel like I'm really not an American after all.  whoops!

I really really want her foul mouth to shut and go away.  But I won't hold my breath.  Hopefully once she gets elected, she'll be too distracted with all the people, sun, starr, articles that will constantly be visible in the checkout line.  I still think McCain is "mostly harmless" to quote Douglass Adams.

So Sarah, if I'm not a real american, am I just renting?  visiting?  passing through? what?  If that's true, I'll provide the address where you can mail the tax refund.  I figure a half a million ought to do it for the last 10 years or so.  We'll call it even.