On the Radio…YOU CAN’T SPELL ‘ACERBIC’ WITHOUT ERIC
As some of you may be aware, some of the TRAffIK contributors have started their own internet radio shows Sundays on www.isgoodradio.com Here is the current schedule for now.
Sundays on IsGoodRadio.com
2 pm – You Can’t Spell ‘Acerbic’ Without Eric w/Eric Summer
4 pm – What’s So Funny? w/ Sarah L.
6 pm – Ammunition w/ Siria
8 pm – Cut and Reel w/ Maureen Shampine
You can learn more about the dj’s here and about the shows here:
We’ll give you more background info on all of this soon, and will have a page where you can download all of the previous week’s podcasts. For now check out Eric’s first show (aired 9.13.09) where he touches a little on the Mike TV Mr. T’s Launchpad and Kiss or Kill Club music scenes and the bands that comprised them.
My Music Reality Show Idea
Tuned! Or Scored or F-Majored or whatever.
I have grown weary of television over the last few years. I’ve grown to despise the predictable, trite, formulaic crap the networks churn out. And I think I’ve never really been able to forgive television people for cancelling Firefly, so there’s a lot of television-directed anger swimming around in my amygdala. But, oddly, I’ve been watching a lot of cooking shows lately. Like, a LOT of cooking shows. Hell’s Kitchen, Top Chef, Chefs vs. City, The Best Thing I Ever Ate, Kitchen Nightmares, Top Chef: Masters… All these shows fascinate me. But the one I’ve been watching most of lately is called Chopped.
If you’re unfamiliar with this show, the premise is this: they get four chefs every week (something I’ve been wondering lately: what is the difference between an executive chef and a Master Chef? I can only imagine that they hold a secret tournament every year where executive chefs fight to the death with lime zesters and halibut de-scalers, and the one left standing is elevated to Master Chef status. Mario Batali must be a BADASS with a zester). They give them baskets containing odd ingredients, and they have to make food including those ingredients. For example, one round they might open their baskets to reveal polenta, starfruit, crab eyeballs, and the rare man-eating blood-saffron, and each one is given thirty minutes to incorporate those items into something delicious. There are three rounds–appetizer, entree, and dessert–and one chef is eliminated (“chopped,” if you hadn’t already guessed) after each round, leaving one victor with ten thousand dollars and all his or her limbs intact.
So I was watching this show, and I started thinking how great it would be to adapt it into a musical contest. I mean, let’s be as brutally metaphorical as possible: music-based reality shows are the oozing pus leaking out of the weeping sore infecting the malignant tumor of the wrinkled rectum of the television medium. There’s more to music than emotionally unstable attention whores singing pentatonic melismas to karaoke arrangements of “I Will Survive,” right?
RIGHT? (more…)
New Maximum Donkey Two Ways
I’ve decided to try something a bit different this week. I’m going to write an overview of the New Maximum Donkey show I saw at the Scene last Friday (two Fridays ago, by the time you read this). But as an experiment, I’m going to do it two different ways: first the way I’d normally write something, and second in the manner of a “regular” rock writer/blogger. Who knows? Maybe the way they write things is just more effective at conveying this sort of thing, so I’m willing to try it out. Here goes: (more…)
Classical YouTube Fun
OK, it’s time to unwind a little after the heady soapboxing of last week. I feel like I need to get back to my acerbic roots a little bit after all the preaching.
Now, YouTube comments usually piss me off. But you know what’s even worse than YouTube comments? YouTube comments on classical music! These people are a whole different kind of obnoxious.
It’s good to be moved by music. That’s what it’s there for. But the average classical aficionado who comments on YouTube videos isn’t satisfied by just being moved. He wants everybody to know that he’s more moved and more knowledgeable than you. The typical comment falls into one of two categories: “The Gush” (“This is the most blindingly brilliant thing anyone has ever heard since the invention of ears, and my soul is elevated to the greatest heights of high heaven above, and this piece is why I know for certain there must be a god) and “The Slam” (“Bernstein clearly had no business conducting this piece. The cellos are too loud in measures 34-48, and that tempo he’s pretending is andante con moto needs far less andante and a soupcon more moto”). So I’m going to pick some of my favorite pieces and look them up, and then single out my favorite comments for criticism and the making of fun. Of course, I haven’t corrected any of their typos, because that’s half the enjoyment right there!
Richard Strauss, Ein Heldenleben (Berlin Philharmonic/Simon Rattle)
Comment: “I LOVE this piece. Some of the greatest horn parts written in the orchestral repertoire!!!! I love the Berlin Philharmonic Horn Section, they do such a great job, and I spotted the ever so famous/dredged Wagner Tuba that horn players get to play too at 04:49! 
“
I have no idea what a “dredged Wagner Tuba” is, but I hope I never have to hear one. I’m assuming it’s a Wagner tuba that’s been dragged through the ocean to catch tuna or something. Or maybe a Wagner tuba that’s coated in flour before it’s sautéed or fried. Yum! (more…)
Fetch Me My Box of Soap!
A year or two, back when Myspace was still the place hip young trendsetters went to look at grainy webcam pictures of girls in bikinis, Get Set Go had a pretty sizeable presence on that quintessence of social networking. More than “pretty sizeable,” actually–it was huge for an indie rock band without the backing of empty business suits stuffed with money and cocaine (I guess the technical term is “A&R people). We had fifty thousand friends (only about 25% of whom were robots made of spam and pictures of boobs) and well over a million plays on our little embedded jukebox thingy. Hell, if we’d lived in Myspace instead of the real world, we’d've been hand-fed bitmapped pictures of grapes by callipygian spambots all day, and slept on .gifs of posturepedic adjustable mattresses lined with paypal account numbers. (more…)
Eric’s Favorite Pieces: Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kije Suite
If movies and literature are any indication, high school is one of the easiest times in a person’s life. Friends are made, everyone looks great all the time, parties involving making out occur with staggering regularity, and occasional vampire attacks keep everyone cheerfully on their toes. This was, it may surprise you to know, not the case at all for me. I was confused! I looked terrible all the time! Girls were far more frightening than vampires (the vampires at my high school were usually stoned, and didn’t pose much of a threat)! I had crippled myself socially by electing to play viola in the school orchestra (who would’ve thought membership in the high school orchestra didn’t come with a lifetime membership in the Playboy Mansion Free Handjob Club and the adoration of all who dared look upon me?)! Life was baffling and tumultuous!
Meanwhile, almost a century earlier, Sergei Prokofiev had written his first opera when he was frigging nine years old. Good thing one of us had things figured out, because as it turned out, Prokofiev helped me through all the tumultuity and bebafflement—possibly without even knowing he was doing it! In fact, I used to listen to the entirety of Abbey Road every morning (while eating crumpets, wondering what it was like to be all cultured and British) and fell asleep listening to Prokofiev’s suite from Lieutenant Kije. (more…)