Guitarists better than myself

As many of you know, I attempt to play the guitar well. That was semi-false modesty since some of you think me quite the technician. However, as I become more engrossed in the world of online video-posting, I find that there are Japanese 8-year olds and trailer-trash meatheads who play better than I could dream to. I should take comfort in the fact that while I have a healthy happy life/career/marriage/etc..., these "prodigies" spend every living second in their bedroom drilling tabs off the net. But being a perfectionist, I find no solace in this. I am merely intimidated by their prowess.
Amusingly enough, these are the only people whom I fear. Not the genius shredders of instructional videos past (Yngwie Malmsteen, Paul Gilbert, etc..) nor the innovators of today (Andy McKee, Satriani, some other guy). They do not intimidate me in the slightest. Moreover, I am encouraged by their talent and find myself studying them as role models. So why can I embrace Mr. Van Halen and not the Pachelbel's Canon kid?

I think the biggest reason is that I tend to think performers as imaginery people. It's true! If they have ever appeared on television or been professionally recorded, they cease to be a human being and more of an icon. Even at a lower level, I am easily distanced from performers. That is why I am so easily star-struck in the presence of bands I like. I got to meet most of Mastodon at one point and froze up like a popsicle (the cream-filled kind...orange). They were high as kites I might add.

Since they are not human, I can treat them as guideposts. "Yay, I've reached the Slash level, I can now use a wah-pedal!" They are more like skills to be attained; a lesson in a book.

But that fat kid who learned all the Dream Theater solos is someone like myself, a no-name student. He just happens to be freakin' awesome!

Take this kid for example: He's a junior in high school and somehow learned all of Eric Johnson's "Cliffs of Dover".



HIGH-fucking-SCHOOL!

I saw that video and quit guitar for two weeks!

Screw these guys too!



The Pachelbel Kid of course...dick.



Same kid as before. HIGH SCHOOL!



Some fat brazilian guy. Holy crap!



Fortunately, there are heroes out there. They are not my peers, they are teachers and idols. I can deal with that.

These are a couple of my favorites:

Mr. John Petrucci. King of alternate picking:



And with LTE, it makes for masturbatory fun! (I do like the solo at 6:16)



Mr. Andy McKee, throwing most classic techniques out the window. He also has a bang-up arangement of Toto's "Africa".



Maestro Ywngwie Malmsteen, proving that shredding is a classical art:



And I'm off to practice guitar. I am also thinking about returning to take lessons. That would help me, I think.

Speaking of instructional videos:

Who reads this tripe?

Well, after a few millenia, I feel like sharing again. I quit my last job and received a new one selling musical instruments. The cool part is that after only a couple months, they made me manager of a store. The cooler part is that the particular store (as opposed to a particular princeton location) happens to be a frisbee's toss from my condo. Rad!!

Being a manager is a weird experience. I now appologize to customers as if I owned the franchise. However, I have had experience taking responsibility for my actions (as well as others) before.

For instance, my old dormatory used to have a weekly occurance called "Wang Wednesday" during which, we manfolk would prance about pantsless for no particular reason. It was an exercise in humility and perhaps a confirmation of heterosexuality. For whatever reason, I felt the need to perpetuate this institution during my sophomore year. Even though I did not reside in my previous dorm, I spent a good couple weeks trying to encourage its new inhabitants to flaunt their manly endowments. It did not take much. My example led to many amusing encounters, most of which involved me knocking on doors and waiting for them in a naked handstand against their door. I do recall a couple nude somersaults down the halls of a neighboring hall. I did recieve more than one glass of beverages thrown into my genetalia. As a countermeasure, there was a public repremand of this nefarious event and the entire hall was called upon to answer. Though I was no longer a resident of this hall, I felt that I should attend to represent them. The meeting was awkward at best. I made a valient attempt to prove that by prancing about naked we were instilling some heterosexual yet fraternal bond in each other (in hindsight, it doesn't seem very logical). The RA at the time (a black woman I might add) was not warm to the idea, though she respected my articulate arguments, forbade us from such activities.

I don't know why I shared this story. I suppose that I wanted to show that even though I could have very well ditched this hall meeting, as I was not a resident of that particular hall at the time, I chose to show up to that meeting out of obligation. And as immature as my motivations may have been, I think this may reflect my qualifications as a store manager.

Of course this story did not find itself onto my resume, but you can see that I have no problem taking responsibility.

Speaking of masculine activities. Check out this video from the Ukranian hit Vitas. All I have to say is: WTF?

Metal Divas...meh?

I've decided that metal divas are funny. But I like them. Am I becoming european?









Of course, we all know metal girls should sound more like this:



I think, in the end, metal is a man's sport. Sorry, ladies.

Birthday and Butt-Chuckles

I have had a series of very bittersweet experiences with director Mike Judge over the years. While his MTV Liquid Television short-turned-serial "Beavis and Butthead" amused me with its inane banter and subversive cultural commentary, it unfortunately had me snickering like an idiot for three years of my life. That laughter was infectious! To this day, a good friend of mine still butt-chuckles as if it were a nervous tic or speech impediment caused by terrets. Yet Beavis and Butthead was the least of Mike Judge's crimes against my temperment.
More gloriously destructive was his short SNL skit "Milton", which was made into a feature length movie called Office Space. This was a seemingly harmless and hilarious movie full of wonderful quotes, most of which were just "mmmm-yeaaah" and variations thereof. But its message was alarmingly potent: work sucks and office jobs suck your soul out. I found that after viewing it just once, I was ditching classes at school for three weeks. It is for this reason that it has been over four and a half years since I have seen Office Space in its entirety. Why quit cold turkey you ask? Because I had since scored myself a cubicle at the world's third largest fleet leasing company ARI. For the past four grueling years, I have been working in the same workplace as Milton, Dilbert, and even Drew Carrey (shudder). If I were to watch even ten minutes of that damned movie, I would be absent for a month and subsequently fired. I couldn't even allow myself to watch either incarnation of "The Office" for fear of severe depression and/or untimely spiritual enlightenment.

I would like to take this moment (my birthday) to rejoice in my freedom to once again watch Office Space. As of March 23rd, I have no longer been working at ARI. And though it may seem anti-climactic, I have not yet watched my celebratory film. I did see Idiocracy, but that has almost no bearing on anything in my life as you can see from the following excerpt:



The tale of my new job will have to wait as I am still far too excited to take an objective stance as a blogger. However, for my birthday, I'd like to ask all of you readers to take the time in the next week to watch Office Space. Watch the whole thing and imagine how good it must feel to leave that job. That's only half of how good I feel right now.

THANKS!


Despite having an entire blog devoted to video entertainment, I'd like to end it with stating that I've recently become very concious of what a destructive force television is. This next film captures that sentiment. And in the words of Sideshow Bob:
"I'm aware of the irony of appearing on TV in order to decry it. So don't bother pointing that out."

Knock knock...

Who's there? Tommy.

I forget the punchline...it's a The Who joke or something. You see, in the past month or two, I've been gearing up my fingers to be more like Pete Townsend. No, I haven't been downloading child pornography for "research". I've been learning the score for Tommy. Why just tonight, I was playing Pinball Wizard while the rest of the cast danced in 20° weather (as gifted a musician as our director is, he's not too good with the theater's thermostat). Yes, my Tommy chops have been coming along nicely ever since I received the score two weeks ago (finally). Prior to that, I was merely given a recording of the soundtrack and a hyperlink to some terrible guitar tabs and asked to "give it my best shot". Well, I pulled a Hiawatha and shot it into the air and let it land where ever it may. I was greatly anticipating the delivery of the official score as I was not a big fan of playing blindly (no pun intended).

Arrive it did and happy I was. It was slightly less official looking than I had envisioned. For all intents and purposes, it looked completely hand-written. It even had measures printed with cross-outs and arrows pointing to other sections of the song. I have chosen to find this endearing since most of the inserted notes are useful rock-guitar cues like: "SOLO!", "WAIL!", "SCRAPE!" and my personal favorite, "SMASH GUITAR!" No lie folks, it says SMASH GUITAR at the end of a particularly dramatic scene. As much as I wish to be as cool as The Who, I don't think my father would appreciate my smashing of his irreplacable T.F. Morris for a community theater production. Oh well.

Speaking of rocking musicals, I have failed to tell you all of my trip to see Evil Dead: The Musical.

If you are not a fan of the Evil Dead Trilogy, you either haven't seen them or you're a crazy person. Well, it turns out that both my brother and I have wives who fall into either of those categories (kidding-ish). This was very inconvenient since my family had already made arrangements to get tickets to the New York production of Evil Dead: the Musical.

My entire family had been fans of Bruce Campbell since Army of Darkness came out on VHS. We watched the entire series of The Adventures of Brisco County Jr., went to the limitted theatrical release of Bubba-Hotep, and my mother and brother both attended a book signing of "If Chins Could Talk". It should go without saying that we also love Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn. And to a family with two music degrees, the prospect of a musical setting of this horror masterpiece was too good to pass up.

We offered the wives a choice: come with us to see a shlock musical splatterfest or you can choose another Broadway musical and we'll buy the tickets. Wouldn't you know they chose to see "The Color Purple" over "Evil Dead"? Like I said: crazy. But my goal in life, as is my brother's, is to make my wife happy so I woefully went to the musical without her.

My woe was short-lived as I stepped into the theater. The house music was blaring 80's power metal, the stage was lined with evil looking trees, and the front three rows had been completely draped in plastic tarps. You see, this was the "Splatterzone" which bore with it the disclaimer: fake blood may be splattered upon the audience. Oh man...is that cool or what? It was so cool in fact that we bought souvenir white t-shirts ahead of time that said "Splatterzone" on the front and had the "Evil Dead" logo on the back. I knew in my heart that my t-shirt would not remain white for very long.

The curtain openned and I seriously thought I was in the wrong theater. The backdrop was that of a happy forest and looked like scenery painted by third-graders for a church play. Five smiling youth were holding up a cardboard likeness of a car and singing "Cabin in the Woods" very cheerfully. I was worried that this might be a little too "Broadway" and not enough "Sam Raimi" as cute little cardboard animal cutouts panned across the stage to give the illusion of highway travel. It wasn't until one of the cute rabbits ended up as cute roadkill that my fears were quelled. From that point on, the tone of the play remained wonderfully tongue-in-cheek while still being the morbid gorefest that the movies were. There were a couple stupid songs (duh, it's a musical), and a few great ones; my personal favorite being the "What The Fuck Was That?" tango.

After act I, the ushers started handing out (or rather pelting us with) ponchos to prepare for the second act. I caught my poncho, looked at it curiously, then handed it to the next available person. As I scanned the people around me, one couple caught my eye. A man and his wife, roughly my parents' age, were sitting in the row behind me wearing white polo shirts. In a room full of people who mostly looked like the comic shop guy from the Simpsons, they certainly stood out. I saw their obviously plain white shirts and said, "You don't want this do you?" Their reply will forever be etched in my mind: "We didn't drive all the way from Detroit to wear ponchos!" I hope to be just like them when I grow old. My family chanted that quote many times throughout the evening. As we were from New Jersey, it didn't make as much sense, but it was the spirit that counted.

I would love to tell you my account of the Splatterzone but I feel like I would be ruining the show for you. I will let the aftermath speak for itself:













I have not washed that T-shirt yet. If my band ever gets another gig, I plan to wear that shirt. Nothing says death metal quite like a souvenir from a Broadway musical.

Speaking of "Evil Dead"-loving bands, here is a video of Mercury Radio Theater. If you listen closely at the beginning, you can clearly hear me yelling, "YEAH! MUSTACHE!"

Magic!

Top Ten Pop-Rocks

No, I haven't been watching High Fidelity. I just was thinking about a great song and thought it might be worth a minute or two to make a list of my ten favorite Pop/Rock songs ever written. However, I have neither the time nor the desiciveness to really compile a master list. So here are the songs I thought of off the top of my head:

I decided to go from gayest to least gay to steadily increase my street cred as a knowlegable musician:

#10 Alannah Myles: Black Velvet

God help me this song makes me crank up the radio and sing along. This may be the gayest song I love.



#9 Imogen Heap: Hide and Seek

One girl and a vo-coder somehow made one of the most dynamic "acapella" songs I've ever heard. She's cool.



#8 Nine Inch Nails: Ruiner

I get no love or props for the NIN. However, in my youth I fell in love with them and this song stuck with me. Enjoy the film as it is some stupid geek's video for Final Fantasy Bajillion.



#7 Journey: Seperate Ways

This song kicks ass from front to back. It's everything that's melodic and heavy about Journey. But -10 points for air-keyboard playing. Bad form.



#6 Toto: Hold the Line

And your little dog too! This may be the gayest looking band of the bunch (they look like fat lounge versions of Journey to be honest). But this song has a chorus to be reckoned with. A heavy riff with three part harmony as only Toto can provide.



#5 The Beach Boys: Good Vibrations

After Barbara Ann and Surfin USA, they put out this tune. Thanks to some drugs, the Manson family, and a Theremin, this song may be one of the best pop songs of the sixties.



#4 The Beatles: Heavy (I Want You)

This riff gets stuck in my head for days. But something about that original analog recording and the way it builds through static at the end always leaves me wanting more. And what says "I WANT YOU" like some angsty lesbians?



#3 Tool: Aenema

Yes this is a long-ass prog-rock tool epic. However, it may be some of the most petty and bitter of all of their lyrics. In one song it describes everything that sucks about them Californians and why the whole coast should fall into the ocean. "Fuck L. Ron Hubbard and fuck all his clones."




#2 Eric Clapton covering Bob Dylan: Don't Think Twice, It's Allright

This was Eric Clapton's contribution to the Bob Dylan's 50th Anniversary tribute concert. With the exception of the Dogs of War by Eddie Veddar, Clapton was above and beyond the best performance of the night. This also happens to be my favorite performance of his...ever!



#1 Led Zeppelin: Babe I'm Gonna Leave You

Before Chigaco had 25-6-4 and long before Green Day had Brain Stew, Led Zeppelin recording this, the heaviest rendition of those 5 classic notes. It's primal yet romantic. And what says romance like Spock battling Captain Kirk to the death for the love of a woman.



And honorable mention goes to Kansas:



Well, there you have it. I'm sure there are MUCH better songs out there. Feel free to remind me in some talk backage. I don't mind remeniscing. Until next time, here's a take on the most overplayed song in history: