Category Archives: video

Something is Happening Here but you don’t know…

Sometimes you realize that Time is Passing You By, but there are ways to get yourself Up to Speed again, like deconstructing this (some Extra Help at Wired):

(once again, I’m rediffusing something that Everybody Already Knows About, just in case you don’t…). To further confuse/inform yourself, immerse yourself in these two:

Any Student of Americana surely needs to include Liam Kyle Sullivan in the Canon: liamshow.com and Liam’s YouTube videos will be efficacious, but caution is probably advised in the where and when… Still, Let Me Borrow That Top, Muffins and Text Message Breakup strike me as Contemporary Cultural Essentials.

Vicarious flight

Amazing what a bit of geekery can do:

Amy Walker introduces herself

via BoingBoing, which probably means that everybody has already seen it, but just in case you haven’t:

One may ask just what a native speaker of each dialect would identify as bogus, but one doesn’t need to really.

Hodgman on hoboes, redux

…and what-all you can do with a single image, backgrounding a culturally significant Fabrication:

See also link to reading of 700 hobo names and illustrations too.

Wooten Bros

Darryl Landry sent me the link to this, in response to yesterday’s excess:

…and I’ll bookend it with

I don’t find these as incomprehensible or inaccessible as the Die Like A Dog example, perhaps because I dimly grasp what the musicians are doing.

Deceptively simple

Echidne of the Snakes sometimes includes links to YouTube musics. This one has a pretty remarkable guitar accompaniment by Senegalese wizard Hervé Samb, whose fingers are unfortunately not clearly seen in the video. His MySpace page has some more examples of his playing, but I haven’t found any recordings for sale just yet.

Gliss

About 5 years ago I happened upon a Glissentar

in a music store where I ummmm just happened to be (happens a lot…) and didn’t resist. For those unfamiliar with the instrument, it’s sort of a baritone oud (in terms of its string setup, with 5 unison pairs and a single bass string), fretless, with piezo pickup. I haven’t really tamed it to my purposes, for reasons that I don’t quite understand, and a couple of days ago I came close to deciding to sell it (not something I am in the habit of doing with instruments –I buy them, and have them). I’ve reconsidered that rash decision, and now I’m thinking about new departures I might assay instead. Since my chequered musical career has been almost entirely acoustic, I’m pretty clueless about what happens and could happen when an instrument is plugged in, but I guess it’s not too late to learn. I’ve found several YouTubish bits that suggest possible directions starting with Robert Godin himself talking about the glissentar:

But how can a player actually use the instrument? It’s interesting to see Michael Vick’s guitaristic approach, but it’s not what I want to do myself:

I’m more attracted to Fatih Ahiskali’s approach to the instrument as a variety of oud, and his chops are pretty impressive (he uses both the traditional oud plectrum and an idiosyncratic finger style):

and this, where he ventures into classical guitar repertoire:

and THIS one is really spectacular: