Rush: Beyond The Lighted Stage (2010)

Recently watched this very enjoyable documentary film based on the career of Canadian prog-rock power-trio Rush. I've only very recently discovered this band and become enchanted with their unique brand of virtuoso geek-rock (I highly recommend the album "Moving Pictures", and the song YYZ in particular, as a starting point for anyone interested in checking them out).

Here are some rock superstars that I can identify with: intricate musical arrangements and cerebral lyrics covering a range of sci-fi and philosophical themes. No drugs and groupies for these guys: as we see in the film, when they board their private jet they're much more at home whipping out a book and catching up on some reading.

Worth noting are the brief interviews/soundbites from the likes of Billy Corgan, Kirk Hammett, Les Claypool, Trent Reznor, Jack Black, as well as members of Dream Theater, Rage Against The Machine, Pantera, and Foo Fighters -- all of whom claim Rush as a major influence.

Billy Corgan's comment was quite interesting and resonated with how I have (or rather haven't, until recently) perceived the band:

I believe that when people step back and actually really look at who the great bands were, [Rush] are one of those bands. But somehow they were never popular enough that they get commonly name-checked as one of the great bands of all time. A lot of the other stuff has been over-explained: Zeppelin has been over-explained, the Beatles have been over-explained. It doesn't tell the whole story. You can say "why was this band marginalized -- what was it?". It doesn't matter: at some point, they're there -- and somebody has to explain why they're there.

Jack Black's praise is more light-hearted, but no less gushing:

Rush is just one of those bands that has a deep reservoir of rocket sauce. A lot of bands have only got so much in the bottle, they use it up sometimes in one song. These guys were the real deal: their bottle was so big, and so filled to the brim, they were shaking it literally for decades ... and still there was sauce coming out.

The Godfather, by Mario Puzo

The Godfather by Mario Puzo

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I read this book after picking it up on the cheap at a local second-hand book sale. Having seen the movie quite a while back I thought it might be worth checking out the book on which it --- and the whole Scorcesi/De Niro/Pacino/Pesci gangster genre that was eventually to follow --- was based. Full disclosure at the outset: I was never a huge fan of the film -- I found it long, slow, dated and just a bit all over the place. I'm very happy to say, however, that none of these criticisms apply to the book. It's long, sure, but it moves along a cracking pace with scarcely a dull moment. It manages that elusive combination of being both a compulsive page-turner and a richly crafted story.

Compared to the film, the book provides a lot more depth on the various characters and their motivations. Thus we get a much fuller and more satisfying description of the evolution of Don Vito from exiled orphan to all-powerful Godfather (including the flashback storyline that was presented the second movie, The Godfather II), while tangential characters such as Luca Brasi, Johnny Fontane, and Lucy Mancini are rendered as more than simple 2D cardboard cut-outs.

Bottom line: highly recommended for anyone with even a mild appreciation of gangster movies. It's the canonical masterpiece of the genre and (unlike the film) doesn't feel like it's aged a day.

View all my reviews

Drawing wood

A couple of photos of the spanking new recycled wooden floor that we recently got put in the living and dining rooms...

The floorboards are recycled West Australian Karri (sourced and shipped over by the Gekkos-in-law). The installation was carried out by a taciturn, but highly skilled, team of Japanese tradies, and took about 4 days.

The fun part was getting up- and downstairs on an extension ladder through a bedroom window during the 24 hour period while the gloss finish dried. The final result is worth the torn flyscreen...

Also notice Gekko's paintwork: the walls are "whisper white" and the skirting boards are "stowe white" (my business card is "bone" and even has a watermark. But that's another story --- one that I'll be happy to recount just as soon as I've returned some videotapes...).

It's a cliché, but I feel compelled to remark on how amazing is the transformation that can be effected by a simple lick o' paint and change of floor covering.

Meanwhile, outside...

1. All little bit of paving (mine is the cement-strewn bit at the end):

2. Vegetables growing rampant -- the Day of the Triffids is coming soon...

3. Some shelves I put up a while back to capture the sunlight. We're growing strawberries there for now...

"The Fall of Hyperion", by Dan Simmons

The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Abandoned at around the halfway mark...

I'm sorry, but i'm afraid it's just too darn long! 90% of the prose seems to trundle along wasting time on irrelevant, inane detail -- dispensing the interesting stuff in agonizingly sparse doses. I gave up when I realized I didn't care enough about the resolution of the increasingly convoluted plot to turn another page.

View all my reviews

Screen Dumps: a brace of steaming torrent turds

Date Night (2010)

Tina Fey and Steve Carell ham it up in this rom com / blundering action flick which features a few easy laughs and an amusing cameo from a topless Mark Wahlberg. I liked Ray Liotta's turn as a mob boss (he seems to be maturing nicely into this role) and William Fichtner (the weaselly van Santz from "Heat" who was despatched so satisfyingly by Bobby De Niro) is always good for a laugh (although the pole-dancing scene near the end was way overdone and one of the films most cringeworthy moments). Both Fey and Carell are deservedly successful on the small screen (I'm a big fan of Fey's "30 Rock"); this effort demonstrates that this is no guarantee of success on the big screen.


Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)

It looks like the runaway sucess of last year's "The Hangover" has got the Hollywood clone factory running in overdrive as a series of decreasingly funny "buddy flicks" roll off the conveyor belt. With this one, you can just imagine the cretinous Hollywood agents pitching it to their studio bosses: "it's like Hangover but with sort of a Back To The Future twist.. but, get this, instead of a Delorean, the time machine is a hot tub! And instead of starting in the eighties they're going TO the eighties!"

It's not a terrible film but the returns in this genre are diminishing rather rapidly and I hope the studios take the hint. One thing I did enjoy was Crispin Glover (George "I'm your density" McFly from the original Back To The Future) as the hapless bellhop destined to have his arm severed.

Can I join you Jerry B...?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yxTNIi2g14&feature=related

Awesome funk bass/guitar jam featuring guitarist and producer Nile Rodgers. LOVE that Strat!

"But Beautiful", by Geoff Dyer

But Beautiful: A Book about Jazz by Geoff Dyer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As the title suggests, this is a beautiful, unique little book. It's a great tribute to jazz in both content and form. In content, as it is a series of semi-fictional vignettes taken from the lives of some of the great jazz musicians; and in form, as Dyer takes some (often skeletal) facts and improvises around them, filling in the gaps to craft stories with details as they could have been. The writing style is gritty but tender and has a very authentic feel. I'd highly recommend this to any fan of good music and good writing.

View all my reviews

George Benson @ Sydney Opera House

On Saturday we saw George Benson perform his "Unforgettable Tribute To Nat King Cole" show at the Opera House. It was a masterful performance and a very enjoyable show. It comprised two quite distinct parts: the first two-thirds was Benson singing Nat King Cole classics with a large Count Basie-style jazz orchestra, while the last third (what he called the "Benson Party") saw him break out the guitar and play a selection of his own songs.

The Diamond Age, By Neal Stephenson

The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Brimming with edgy, interesting futurologisms (the nanotechnology ideas are impressive given the book was written in the mid nineties), but as a story it doesn't work very well. Stephenson gets bogged down in fanciful, pointless detail which, combined with the disjointed, perspective-jumping narrative makes it really tough going (I laboured through on this, my third attempt at the book). To be honest, it's been a while since I've struggled as much to keep focused on a book all the way through. The ending seems rushed, leaving many of his (very good) ideas under-explored.

View all my reviews

Nobby & Wayne

Another human-interest story brought to you by Gekko:

I just read that former England and Manchester United midfielder Nobby Stiles has sold some of his 1966 World Cup medals in order to help fund his retirement. Apparently, he had hoped to leave them to his sons but, obviously he needed the cash. The good news is that they were bought at auction by Man United, who paid up almost 200k pounds and will put them on display in the club museum.

I found this kind of touching at first, until I started to put this into perspective. Because only a week ago, I read another story in The Guardian involving another Manchester United and England player and a figure of around 200k pounds. A couple of differences: in that article, the player involved hasn't won a World Cup with England (indeed, he was an instrumental part of possibly the lamest England performance ever in this year's tournament). And the 200k was his new weekly salary.

Hyperion, by Dan Simmons

Hyperion by Dan Simmons

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

pretty decent sci-fi yarn. the quality of writing is above average (for sci-fi, that is) and there are some interesting ideas.

View all my reviews

My Place, by Sally Morgan

My Place by Sally Morgan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was on the curriculum when I was at high school, and deservedly so. Should be required reading for all west australians...

View all my reviews

Parce que je t'aime, by Guillaume Musso

Parce que je t'aime by Guillaume Musso

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Another schmaltzy effort by Musso with his trademark jaw-dropper twist (I won't spoil it but, um, try to imagine a cross between The Sixth Sense and The Matrix and you'll be on the right track... actually, I guess I have spoiled it). Still, it was an enjoyable read and good fodder for francophiles looking to maintain their reading chops.

View all my reviews

Dirt Music, by Tim Winton

Dirt Music by Tim Winton

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Tim Winton is to Western Australia what Charles Dickens was to industrial revolution London, and this is another very enjoyable read. I didn't find it as memorable as his epic Cloudstreet, but that's by no means something to hold against it.

View all my reviews

The Guitar Diaries #12 (Season Finale)

Last week's lesson was a return to form after the below-par session of the previous week (more on that below). We reviewed the use of the diminished scale and went into it in a bit more detail. We also discussed sweep-picking and went over a couple of cool exercises, before finishing up with another jazz standard, "All Of Me".

The application in which the diminished scale appeared was in the song "(Up A) Lazy River", in a part where the chord progression goes from E flat major to E diminished. The suggested scales for improvising over these chords were E flat Lydian followed by E diminished. It works well because the two scales share a number of important common tones.

Like the diminished seventh chord, the diminished scale has a nice symmetry to it. The diminished scale is formed by alternating tone, semi-tone intervals, resulting in a scale with eight notes. You can think of it as a diminished seventh chord with an extra note added a semi-tone below each chord tone. Or, as I realised during the lesson, you can look at it as two diminished seventh chords a tone (or semi-tone) apart. This idea forms the basis of a cool arpeggio lick that the teacher showed me (and which prompted the interlude on sweep-picking technique).

By the way, sweep-picking, for the heathens, is a technique for picking single notes across successive strings in which you "sweep" across the strings, in a kind of controlled strumming motion. It's distinct from the usual "alternate" picking, in which you alternate between up and down strokes between successive notes. Sweep-picking is usually considered as a kind of "advanced" technique (it's the kind of thing you read about in Vinnie Moore or Paul Gilbert columns in Guitar World magazine). When mastered, it allows you to play the kind of blistering 3 octave arpeggios that make you wanna reach for some hair spray and spandex (or so I'm told..).

On that note, Steve came off with a classic quote during the sweep-picking discussion. I jokingly commented that I wasn't aware that sweep-picking was commonly used in jazz playing. He jumped on that remark, saying "Aw yeah! Jazz players were sweep picking way before bloody Frank Gambale -- he just went and made a pig of himself with it!"


Anyhow, this lesson brought to a close the initial 12 week run of "The Guitar Diaries". I had decided during the week to take a break and then cast around for another teacher. There were a number of reasons for this. Firstly, after three months of weekly lessons I've amassed a fair amount of material but have been steadily falling behind; a few weeks off will provide a much-needed breather in which to review and assimilate this stuff. I've also stumbled on another rich seam of learning material in the form of the Musician's Institute series of books. There are a few things there that will give me plenty to chew on for a while (in particular, I'm loving Ross Bolton's "Funk Rhythm Guitar Essentials"). Of course, learning from books is no substitute for regular interaction with a teacher, but I figure a kind of "study break" is a good idea (and probably will be at regular intervals going forward).

Another issue that came to the fore last week was the slightly erratic personality of the teacher. While there's no doubts about his ability as a player, there are times when I've found his attitude a little negative (a hint of jaded bitterness) and his personality a bit overbearing. In last week's lesson this was exacerbated by the fact that he'd obviously had a couple of drinks before the lesson. Now, while he was by no stretch of the imagination intoxicated, there was a noticeable edge to his mood that kind of soured the lesson and left me feeling a bit disgruntled. So, I figure a break is a good idea. As I say, I'm thinking of trying out another teacher and see how that goes. I won't rule out going back to Steve, but for now I think it would be good to get a fresh perspective.

Stay tuned for TGD Season Two...

Steve Vai - Where The Wild Things Are (2009)

Watching Iron Maiden's "Flight 666" recently has put me into the mood for checking out music videos by some of my old favourite guitarists/bands. Cue Steve Vai's 2009 dvd/live album "Where The Wild Things Are".

It's a typically impressive effort that brings back some memories from the two live shows I was lucky enough to catch in Perth (1996 and 2005 IIRC). A lot of the material is, understandably, from his more recent albums and thus not really familiar to me (I kind of zoned out after "Fire Garden"). He has once again surrounded himself with a band of high calibre musicians, and he gives each one of them ample opportunity to show off their talents during the show.

Highlights are many, but for me probably the single most enjoyable track was the searing rendition of "The Audience Is Listening". It's the track that, if you had to pick just one, best sums up what Vai is all about and what's he capable of.

Gripes?

Well, I find some (okay, most) of his dialog to be a bit on the cheesy side -- it's like he's trying too hard to sound like a normal rock'n'roll kind of guy (I still remember his cringeable anecdote about Britney Spears from the 2006 show). While I'm at it, the same problem also afflicts his lyrics -- e.g. the song "firewall". On such occasions he'd be better off sticking to the percussive scat singing that he does quite well.

Another minor peeve was his hair style -- it seemed to be at that "awkward" length and he was constantly wiping it out of his face in a vaguely effeminate way.

But overall, it's a good watch and sure to please fans of top shelf guitar shred.

The Guitar Diaries #11

Last week we looked at a jazz standard called "(Up A) Lazy Rizer" by Hoagy Carmichael. It's a lovely tune with some really interesting "chromaticisms" (in particular, the flat 9 over the opening G major chord). We worked on a basic comping rhythm using the 3-note "freddie green" chords from the previous week.

We also got into improvising over the changes. This is pretty hairy due to flat 9 mentioned above, and requires basically focussing on a new mode for each chord. (e.g. over the G major, play C harmonic minor, as this gives the G major with flat 9; over the C7 play C mixolydian; over the F play F lydian and then at one point E diminished.)

I found this improvisation fairly tough and, to be honest, it seems a little premature. I am working on getting my scale fingerings down -- and it's coming along, albeit slowly -- but it seems a bit soon to be leaping into improvising within the diminished scale! And it's pretty hard to get a feel for improvising when you've only got 4 beats before you need to leap into a new scale/mode. But I guess it's good to get some idea for "where it's going" -- even if I currently can't improvise worth a damn, at least I'll have a vague notion for how the scale patterns I'm learning are going to come in useful..

"A Demon of Our Own Design", by Richard Bookstaber

A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation by Richard Bookstaber

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

well written and very relevant. has particularly good description the blossoming and subsequent tailing off of statistical arbitrage -- with insight you won't find in some of the other recent, dime-a-dozen journalist books ("The Quants" springs to mind).

The author also makes a cogent argument for a simpler financial marketplace and against yet more layers of regulations. His point is that extra regulation merely adds more complexity, thereby increasing rather than decreasing the chances of a future crisis. The examples of Three Mile Island and the ValuJet crash are particularly illuminating here.

One gripe was when he discussed the economic service rendered by so-called "liquidity providers" (market makers). While I agree that someone providing a two-way market, and thus exposing themselves to risk from price movements, I do not see how the argument applies to trend-following "high frequency" traders, who essentially front-run genuine orders and profit from the resulting price "momentum". In reality, these operators are mere parasites, profiting from their privileged access to the market (through expensive "co-location" agreements with the market operators and sophisticated IT infrastructure). Far from providing liquidity, these guys are sapping it -- "liquidity vampires" wouldn't be an inapt appellation. It's an important distinction and one that could have implications for market stability (witness the recent May 6 "flash crash" in the NYSE).

View all my reviews

It puts the lotion on its skin...

A little gem from a few years back that I just rediscovered (well, M- rediscovered it and mentioned it to me, but as we're all anonymous here I may as well claim credit...): the song "Lotion" by The Greenskeepers.

It's well worth checking out on YouTube. The song is a tongue-in-cheek homage to the character Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs and is very funny. I love the chorus near the end alluding to the scene where BB starts to lose his temper: "oh put the lotion in the f**king basket, bitch, put the lotion in the basket..."

The Guitar Diaries #10

The main "takeaway" from my latest lesson was the idea of comping using minimal-istic three note chord voicings on strings 6, 4 and 3. The archetype for this style is Freddie Green who apparently played pretty much nothing but this type of comping during his 40 years with Count Basie's orchestra.

We covered a few different progressions to get familiar with the idea, including an old Guitar Player lesson by Lenny Breau.

Iron Maiden: Flight 666

I watched this documentary/concert film the other night. It tells the story of the "Somewhere Back In Time" world tour (which I was lucky enough to catch at Twickenham in July 2008).

The tour was quite an achievement: flying on their own plane (Ed Force One), with vocalist Bruce Dickinson as pilot, they covered 50,000 miles in 45 days, performing 23 shows on 5 continents. (This doesn't count the European leg of the tour which they did later in the year.)

It's an interesting and very enjoyable watch -- definitely a must-see for nostalgic Maiden fans. What stood out above all is how the guys have basically stayed close to their roots and are very down to earth about it all -- a stark contrast to the self-absorbed, prima donna antics of Metallica as seen in Some Kind Of Monster.

Garden Pics

(1) Potato patch:

(2) Planter boxes: the tall plants in the background are snowpeas (L) and broad beans (R). In the foreground are parsnips, swedes, spinach, rocket and a bunch of other things I can't remember..

(3) In the rockery at the back there is a lime tree. In the foreground is the recently-completed stormwater drain in front of the retaining wall. The two lengths of drain are joined under the cement by 90mm plastic pipe, and at the far end another pipe joins up to the pit at the back corner of the house. It seems to be doing its job so far based on a couple of recent downpours -- but only time, and a few really decent inundations, will tell.

Jump Back: New Apple iPod Shuffle Restores Fanboy Faith

A while back I ranted at length about my disgust at the 3rd incarnation of the iPod Shuffle (you know, the one with no buttons and the required apple-branded headphones blah blah blah).

Well, it looks as though Steve Jobs may just be an Interim Solutions reader, because the latest iPod Shuffle has just been announced, and guess what: the buttons (and basic design of the third generation model) are back, baby! With the important addition of playlist capability -- allowing you to go beyond a single amorphous 2GB randomized list and cater for different moods.

At 69 aussie big ones, this is once again looking like pretty good value. The simple, robust design really is ideal for jogging or the gym.

For now I'm still persevering with my 3g model, but it may soon be time for this fanboy to upgrade...

P.S. Another major upgrade is the new nano, which has an all-touch screen face. I'm less impressed by this since it represents (a) more power needed and thus shorter battery life, (b) a bigger area to get scratched, and (c) harder to change songs/volume with the iPod in your pocket. I do like the fact that it includes a radio (something that is standard with most other brands but which Apple have obstinately refused to include in most of the iPod family).

The Guitar Diaries #9

Last week's lesson was another mixture of revising previous material and introducing a bit of new stuff. The new stuff included jazzing up the Mr PC progression by adding more passing chords, some basic improvisation based on simple motifs starting from each chord root note, and a few more arpeggio ideas in the harmonic minor scale.

The Guitar Diaries #8

Last week's lesson was a bit of a mixed bag:

1. Started off by reviewing the "Mr PC" tune and happily it was sounding better -- I was managing to get my "swing" on :-)

2. Introduced some new ideas for comping using chord shapes based on stacking intervals of diatonic fourths (instead of the thirds that comprise regular triads and seventh chords). We went through shapes involving 3 and 4 notes, all starting on the fifth string. 

One interesting thing is that when you start on minor or half-diminished tones (i.e. A, B, D, E when in the key of C Major), you get a stack of four perfect fourths. Thus, instead of a dissonant or melancoly sound, you get a more neutral, open sound.

For the major seventh tones (C,F) --- as well as the dominant seventh (G), if you include 4 tones --- you stumble on a tritone at some point in the "stack" of fourths. Of course you have to, since two perfect fourths on top of each other make a minor 7 interval -- so if you want a major seventh, one of them has to be an augmented fourth. For the dominant seventh, the tritone is the interval from minor 7 to major 3rd (8va).

These shapes seem to have quite versatile applications in comping. As an example, in the tune Mr PC (which is becoming something of a workhorse) we looked at playing the root C and D fourth stacks instead of Cm7, and the Fm7 and Gm7 stacks in place of Fm7.

3. Arpeggio shapes: introduced a bunch of root 5 and root 6 seventh arpeggio shapes. These were more-or-less familiar but I wasn't "fluent" in them, so I've been practising them during the week.

4. "Yesterday" (by The Beatles) chord melody piece. He gave me the sheet music but I haven't had a chance to start working on it. It sounds a fair bit more challenging than the "twinkle twinkle little star" one that we did a few weeks back, so it should be fun.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Gripping, harrowing, moving --- and all too believable...

View all my reviews

Hung, drawn and quartered?

So I just read that we may have a hung parliament...

What's that all about? I didn't know Ron Jeremy was running as an independent... Does this mean we're in for a bout of Stag-flation???

Or does it mean we've collectively woken up and decided that the only good politician is one that's swinging from the rafters? Not something we're likely to see this far from Kandahar, but maybe it would be a fair outcome. It would be one way to introduce a bit of much-needed accountability into the political process...

Re: Another interesting read from Zero Hedge

Every once in a while, I read something on Zero Hedge that rises above the usual bearish doom-mongering that is the site's bread-and-butter and makes a convincing argument that really hits home. This is from the supposed founder of "Reagonomics" Paul Craig Roberts (original link here), on what can be done to prevent the US going completely down the gurgler:

 

Here is what can be done. The wars, which benefit no one but the military-security complex and Israel's territorial expansion, can be immediately ended. This would reduce the US budget deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars per year.  More hundreds of billions of dollars could be saved by cutting the rest of the military budget which, in its present size, exceeds the budgets of all the serious military powers on earth combined. 

US military spending reflects the unaffordable and unattainable crazed neoconservative  goal of US Empire and world hegemony. What fool in Washington thinks that China is going to finance US hegemony over China? 

The only way that the US will again have an economy is by bringing back the offshored jobs. The loss of these jobs impoverished Americans while producing oversized gains for Wall Street, shareholders, and corporate executives. These jobs can be brought home where they belong by taxing corporations according to where value is added to their product. If value is added to their goods and services in China, corporations would have a high tax rate. If value is added to their goods and services in the US, corporations would have a low tax rate.

This change in corporate taxation would offset the cheap foreign labor that has sucked jobs out of America, and it would rebuild the ladders of upward mobility that made America an opportunity society. 

If the wars are not immediately stopped and the jobs brought back to America, the US is relegated to the trash bin of history.

Obviously, the corporations and Wall Street would use their financial power and campaign contributions to block any legislation that would reduce short-term earnings and bonuses by bringing jobs back to America. Americans have no greater enemies than Wall Street and the corporations and their prostitutes in Congress and the White House.

The neocons allied with Israel, who control both parties and much of the media, are strung out on the ecstasy of Empire. 

The United States and the welfare of its 300 million people cannot be restored unless the neocons, Wall Street, the corporations, and their servile slaves in Congress and the White House can be defeated.

Without a revolution, Americans are history.

The Guitar Diaries #7

Lesson numero 7 saw us briefly reviewing the ear-training from the previous week, in the form of a quick informal test -- most of which I nailed. There was an amusing misunderstanding at one point when he played a descending interval. I was saying "major second, major second" to his increasing exasperation ("mate -- it's decreasing, listen!"), but just as my conviction was beginning to waver, he realized what I was getting at and said "what a minute: what did you just say? ... Ah yeah, okay. You're right -- but I was thinking of it as a minor seventh.". I was correct, but I should have specified that I meant it was descending, so that the first note was a major second above the second one.

We then went back to the jazz standard "Mr P.C.", and I played the melody (which I had learned during the week). Right away we encountered some "issues", the discussion of which took up the majority of the lesson. This is fairly basic stuff, but absolutely key, so I was happy to be covering it:

Two-bar count in: this is a real "band practice 101" thing. When he asked me to count us in, I just went for "1-2-3-4-", but apparently the "standard" way is a two bar count, where you count beats one and three of the first bar (saying "one, two") and then all 4 beats of the second bar ("one, two, three, four - "). This is familiar  -- for me it seems to conjure up images of fifties music like Chuck Berry (am I just thinking of Back to the Future here?) -- but it took a little bit to get comfortable with it. And of course, being put under pressure to get it right doesn't exactly help you relax into the groove! As usual, I was over-thinking it as well: at one point, I was getting hung up on the fact that in the first beat you say "two" on beat 3.

Swing feel: in my first rendition I played the tune with a bone-dry straight-eighths feel which, of course, sounded pretty lousy to the teacher's jazz-trained ears. I can't blame myself too much, because I had listened to Coltrane's original recording and it sounded pretty straight to me. However, the difference is that he is playing it at a much higher tempo. The teacher explained that there is not just straight vs. swing (i.e. triplet feel), but rather a continuum. It's a matter of feel, but in general, the faster the tempo, the less "exaggerated" the swing. So that kind of explains why the recording I listened to didn't sound like it had as much of a swing feel (but listening more carefully it isn't just straight eighth notes either).

Aside:  the teacher pointed out an interesting discussion of this in Mick Goodrick's "The Advancing Guitarist". Basically, it expresses the concept of "swing" in terms of the relative duration of the first and second note in an eighth-note pair. "Straight" eighths has 50-50, "triplet feel" has 67-33 (i.e. played like the first and third note of a triplet), and in general "swing" is somewhere in-between. He mentions 55-45 as a typical value. Less frequently, you also hear 75-25 (where the eighth note pair is played like the first and fourth note in a sixteenth note group) which has something of a latin feel. I realize this is an attempt to quantify something that most musicians do by "feel" -- and it's certainly not a substitute for that -- but I find it very helpful to be able to think of it in this way.

So, we spent a fair bit of time just counting in and playing the basic melody. I think what's required is lots of playing (along with myself, on the loop station) to get a good sense of "feel" happening. And, just as important, lots of (critical) listening.

The final thing we looked at was playing chord tones over the Mr P.C. chord progression. I know what I'm trying to do here, but I need to become more familiar with the arpeggio patterns for Cm7, Fm7, Dm7b5 and G7. As always, practice practice practice...

The Guitar Diaries #6

Last week's lesson was a slight change of pace. The primary focus was on ear training, and involved much more talking and listening, as opposed to actual playing.

For me there has always been a certain mystique about the concept of "playing by ear". I grew up in that generation of players for whom guitar tab was the default way to learn to play your favourite music. Reading the precise transcriptions of the military-precision riffs in Metallica songs just reinforced the natural feeling that trying to learn this by ear was futile. And so there'd you be, hemming and hawing over such nuances as whether this or that power chord should be played with just root and fifth or whether the root one octave higher also needs to be played (when in fact with sufficient distortion you can't tell the difference anyway!). But without the transcription you were basically helpless. The net result was that you could play some pretty cool riffs, but you didn't really develop as a musician.

Over the years I have picked up a rudimentary ability to figure things out by ear. I can tune my guitar by ear (so I'm not at the absolute lowest rung of the ear ladder -- whew!), and with a bit of trial and error I can reproduce basic melodies. I can also sing in tune (within my rather limited vocal range) -- an ability that in my case is certainly not to be confused with havnig a good singing voice!

But that's a far cry from having a well-developed musical ear: I can't reliably recognize all intervals (I seem to struggle with tritone and minor sixth and beyond), and I'm not too good at recognizing different chords (and wouldn't have a hope of distinguishing different voicings). But, hopefully, that's all going to change with a bit of practise.

The end result is certainly worth aiming for. It was rather impressive watching the teacher mention a tune, then start playing it more-or-less flawlessly (though slowly, obviously). The idea that you could just hear a tune in your head seems like a key part of what being a musician is all about. And who knows, one day I could be like Jack Butler mimicking Ralph Macchio's solo (as an aside: for my two cents, he got far too little credit for what was a extremely worthy effort on the fly!).

Anyway, back to the present: the initial goal is to become comfortable identifying intervals. To keep things simple, I'm concentrating on recognizing intervals played in ascending order from a fixed middle-C base note (3rd fret, 5th string), and staying within a one octave range. To help with recognizing musical intervals, the recommended approach is to identify examples of each interval from tunes you are very familiar with. Here are the interval - tune associations that I'm using for now (unless otherwise specified, the interval is between the first two notes of the given tune):

minor second (1 semitone): jaws theme, beethoven's fur elise.

major second (2 semitones): for this one I just think of the second note when you play an ascending major scale. "Happy Birthday" is also a good one.

minor third (3 semitones): acoustic version of layla (eric clapton unplugged); smoke on the water (deep purple).

major third (4 semitones): when the saints go marching in.

perfect fourth (5 semitones): here comes the bride.

tritone (6 semitones): the simpsons, maria (from west side story -- this was suggested by the teacher; I wasn't familiar with the tune, but this interval was proving troublesome enough that I went and listened to on youtube).

perfect fifth (7 semitones): this is probably the easiest to recognize. star wars theme is the best one for me. "flintstones" (descending order) is also good.

minor sixth (8 semitones): vangelis 1492 theme, last of the mohicans theme, piano tune from "the sting".

major sixth (9 semitones): "man in the mirror" (descending order), "my bonnie lies over the ocean".

minor seventh (10 semitones): a tough one for me... the only tune I could find was the warbly theme from the original star trek. I may try to find a couple of others.

major seventh (11 semitones): another tough one... the first and third note in "somewhere over the rainbow" is good. Another one is "moon river", when she sings "i'm crossing you in style": the interval between "i'm" and "crossing".

octave (12 semitones): the first and second note in "somewhere over the rainbow", the chorus of david bowie's "starman".

I wrote myself a little Mathematica Demonstration which has proved very handy. The great thing about ear training is that once you get switched on to it, you find yourself "practising" whenever you listen to music, or even just walking along replaying a familiar tune in your head.

So what am I complaining about?

According to a recent survey, my current and former employers are the two best places to work in the financial services industry!

I'd guess that this result is pretty much accurate as regards my current employer. But the GS result smells a lot like a fishy concoction of spin and fear of not following the party line...

Two great music sites

Jazz resources

http://www.thejazzresource.com/

Ear-training

http://www.good-ear.com

Loop station

As a kind of delayed birthday treat for myself, I recently splashed out on a Boss RC20XL loop station. This is a really cool toy that allows you to record short pieces of music and have them play back. I've been having a lot of fun laying down rhythms and playing lead over them (all the old favourites have been trotted out: Fade To Black, Stairway To Heaven, Sultans Of Swing, ...); it's also great for playing two-part sight-reading pieces. 

It's got a basic drum machine built-in and a very clever "loop quantizing" feature that truncates your riff to the nearest measure. This is handy since getting the timing right without it is a bit of an art form. There are a few other bells and whistles that I haven't yet explored fully: you can adjust the tempo of loops after recording them (which has a potentially useful application in slowing down songs to figure them out; you can record songs via the "aux in" input); there is also a "reverse" feature that allows you to play loops backward (this seems a little gimicky: apart from figuring out the opening of Metallica's "Blackened", I can't think of much other use I'd have for this for the time being).

Having previously dabbled in GarageBand and Logic Express, I was initially reluctant to fork out for a loop station since, in principle, you can get the same functionality on the computer. However, having used it for just under a week, I can attest that it's night and day: having the pedal on the floor makes it so much quicker to record and have it start playing back.

The Guitar Diaries #5

Last week's lesson was something of a reality check, in the sense that, for the first time since starting these lessons, I had the feeling of not having done enough practice since the previous lesson. Partly as a result of this -- and partly because my abilities at this stage are, frankly, pretty limited -- I foundered badly when called on to play rhythm on the "mixolydian blues" track from last week. 

This was meant to be a chance to try out the new voicings for 7th, add 9/11/13 that I had been shown. 

Instead, I froze like a deer in headlights and reached lamely for the standard root 5 7th chord voicing. To compound things, I then proceeded to strum a weak, half-hearted rhythm so tepid that it would make a beginning student of Ernie Ball's "Easy Big Guitar Chords" blush. My feel sucked, my tone sucked... enfin bref: I sucked.

I wasn't able to offer much in the melody department either: I limped through two repetitions, stuffing up in several parts and relying on the sheet music/tab in front of me. But I'm not going to beat myself up too much about that one: it is a fairly challenging piece and, IMHO, doesn't actually sound that good even when played well, i.e. by teacher (though perhaps that was just lousy my rhythm playing putting him off...).

As I say, it was a bit of a reality check: a far cry from the heady times of last week's comparatively decent rendition of "Model T Ford Blues", and a wake up call that I have a lot of practicing to do if I'm to get the kind of results I want. The good news is that I feel like my newfound self-awareness of my suckiness is in itself a step forward. I'm getting a much clearer idea of what I need to practise, and how it should sound. 

Anyway, after the demoralizing review of "mixolydian blues", we covered the harmonic minor scale and the harmonized 7th chords you get from it. This is really cool: alter that one note (minor 7th -> major 7th) and you alter the 4 chords containing it. Thus (in the key of C minor/harmonic minor):

Root Minor Harmonic Minor

I C min 7 C min/maj 7

II D min 7b5 (unchanged)

III Eb maj 7 Eb maj 7#5

IV F min 7 (unchanged)

V G min 7 G 7

VI Ab maj 7 (unchanged)

VII Bb 7 B dim 7

Note the VII chord goes from dominant seventh to diminished seventh as you move Bb up to B. The main effect, though, is that the V chord is now a dominant, rather than minor, seventh.

As an application of this, we are using the jazz standard "Mr PC" (John Coltrane), which is is a great little tune. The idea is to improvise using different scales during different parts of the chord progression. The harmonic minor scale is to be used over the II-V-I part since the chords already fit this: D min 7b5 - G 7 - C min 7 (hmmm, apart from the last one...).

jazzguitar.be

Seems like a great site:

http://www.jazzguitar.be/jazzguitar_licks.html

Volatility Smile Lecture Notes

Pretty decent lecture notes on the modelling of volatility by Emanuel Derman:

http://www.ederman.com/new/docs/laughter.html

When it pays not to know your times table

I suspect this is probably apocryphal, but it's a nice little allegory on the role of luck in life:

For almost two centuries, Spain has hosted an enormously popular Christmas lottery. Based on payout, it is the biggest lottery in the world and nearly all Spaniards play. In the mid 1970s, a man sought a ticket with the last two digits ending in 48. He found a ticket, bought it, and then won the lottery. When asked why he was so intent on finding that number, he replied, "I dreamed of the number seven for seven straight nights. And 7 times 7 is 48."

(source here)

Birthday guitar goodies

After the long, tortured wail of "Oh God, Nooooooooooo!" that always accompanies Gekko awaking to find he is yet another year older, this year's birthday afforded a pleasant surprise in the form of a couple of gifts from his better half. Recognizing the recent renaissance in his interest for all things guitar, she had paid a sneaky visit to Billy Hyde and bought him a super-cool D'Addario guitar stool (it swivels!):

She also picked up the Hercules wall hangers that Gekko had ordered a while back. These bad boys allow your guitars to hang by the neck just like in the store and have a cool locking mechanism that holds the guitar place when you set it on. Highly recommended!

The Guitar Diaries #4

In this week's lesson we covered some more chord shapes for dominant
sevenths, ninths, eleventh and thirteenths. The last 3 of these are
constructed by taking a seventh and adding, respectively, the second,
fourth or sixth note of the scale. The addition of these notes adds a
different colour to the sound of the chord. A cool, and practical,
application of these chords is to play the C Mixolydian scale (C-D-E-F-
G-A-Bb-C) where each note is at the top of one of these chords. I was
also shown several combinations of these chords that work well for a
blues-style rhythm.

I've also got another little blues piece to chew on. This one is a
"Mixolydian blues", with a straight sixteenths feel. There's a lot
more notes than the one from last week, so it will probably take a bit
more work to learn.

The Guitar Diaries #1-#3

Have decided to start keeping something of a record of my weekly guitar lessons -- the following is a catch-up from the first three weeks...

Lesson #1

Reviewed basic major scale patterns (I already had these pretty well nailed), picking technique etc (I was encouraged to use a thick pick -- so I've traded the 1mm Jim Dunlop for the smaller, thicker Dunlop Jazz III).

Introduced triad shapes across, and up and down, the fingerboard. Covered major, minor, diminished and augmented. The three inversions (I-III-V, III-V-I, V-I-III) were considered. Moving from one inversion to the next is achieved by raising the lowest note an octave (so that it "leapfrogs" the other two to become the top note) or conversely by lowering the highest note).

Augmented triads are an interesting case because the three inversions are identical, which happens because the three notes are evenly spaced throughout the octave. (As an aside, it's interesting to think of what you get from all such symmetric decompositions of the octave: firstly, the octave interval itself (the most trivial: a note and the same note an octave higher); the tritone interval (two notes six semi-tones apart); the diminshed seventh chord (4 minor third intervals); the augmented triad already mentioned (3 major third intervals); the whole-tone scale (6 notes each a whole tone apart); and finally the chromatic scale (all twelve notes, each a semi-tone apart). Mathematically, this simply reflects the different ways to factorize the number 12: 1x12, 2x6, 3x4, 4x3, 6x2, 12x1.

Lesson #2

Covered basic 4-note shapes for seventh chords: major seventh, dominant seventh, minor seventh, minor seventh (flat 5). Also introduced a fewer other chord shapes: added ninth, open triad voicings.

A good way to practise these shapes is to play them for each note in the major scale, moving up the neck. 

Also learned a nice "bossa nova" rhythm that works well with the V-I-III-VII shapes on the bottom four strings (EADG). The two bass notes are played alternately with the pick, while in between the fingers play the two high notes.

Was given a chord melody arrangement of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" to help become familiar with the chord patterns being learned in the contextof an actual song. It would be fun to take other simple tunes and attempt my own chord melody arrangements (Ernie Ball books have some nice ones... -- it could be nursery rhyme heaven/hell!).

Lesson #3

Looked at the inversions of seventh chords up/down the neck. This is quite interesting, because on the guitar you can't generally play "closed" seventh chords (i.e. I-III-V-VII), since the fingerings would be, well, unfingerable. So instead you play something like I-V-VII-III, where the III is one octave higher. Now, you can move this up the neck through a sequence of inversions, by moving each note to the next higher one. Thus, you get the following inversions:

    I-V-VII-III -> III-VII-I-V -> V-I-III-VII -> VII-III-V-I

Some of the resulting patterns are familiar as fragments of barre chord shapes, a couple less so. The III-VII-I-V shape on the ADGB strings is a bit of stretch (particularly for the major seventh), but sounds quite nice.

One thing that I noticed sounds cool is when you take a major seventh voicing, C let's say, and move the root note down to the seventh. You get a melancholy-sounding E minor chord. Then change the note that was the seventh in the original chord up to the root, and your back to the major seventh sound.

We also did a simple 12 bar blues piece called "Model T Ford Blues" by, you guessed it, Robben Ford (it's from the GIT course notes -- I think he used to teach there). I had a lot fun practicing this one -- it has a really bluesy sound and you get to pour as much "feel" into each note as you can (I was imagining myself Ralph Macchio in Crossroads -- complete with gormless slack-jawed facial expression :-). It's basically in the B flat blues scale, though a couple of times the major sixth note (G) is played, which has an interesting sound. I'm not sure what the harmonic significance of that note is -- but it sounds cool.

paranoid transpotter

choose a career.

choose building your personal brand. be the ceo of me.com. leverage your contacts. grow your network. be a team player. just do it. onwards and upwards. if you can dream it you can become it. short/long/medium term goals.

shall we do coffee? stick something in my calendar. 

choose working smarter not harder. have you got much going on? don't reinvent the wheel. low-hanging fruit. the squeaky wheel gets the grease. don't be a hero. be pro-active. take the credit. who's quarter-backing this one? LET'S PUT THAT ONE ON THE BACKBURNER.

squeaking greaseballs.

choose connectivity. slowly scrolling through inbox on blackberry in elevator. powerpoint presentation. netbook on the train. put it in an email. did you copy me on that? what's your ETA? can you re-send that report pls --- thx. your mailbox has reached its 100MB limit. looping in. circling back. going forward.

going nowhere fast.

choose managing expectations. Q3 key deliverables. WE PROBABLY DON'T WANT TO GO DOWN THAT PATH.

choose looking busy. appearances matter. late night email; cc the MD. slowly scrolling through inbox on blackberry in elevator. i think he's a partner. face time. extra spreadsheet masking open web browser. never leave before the boss. working longer not smarter for now: eyes on the prize. 

we should definitely catch up for that coffee. does 2mw am work for you? 

choose networking. clear throat with authority. a good, firm handshake. eye contact. body language. small talk; polite but assertive. a people person.

choose relationship business: client-facing. build the franchise; synergize. KYC: know your client. light-touch regulator. wall-crossed. in-house. managing conflicts when they arise. putting out fires. damage control. LET'S PUT THAT ONE TO BED.

choose performance-related. value-added. annual review. comp day. what are your numbers? dancing in the cubicle; going places. high five. weeping in the stalls. head-hunters; jumping ship. survival of the fittest: darwinian; sun tzu.

choose work-life balance. pret-a-manger. lunch at your desk. leaving now -- home by 10pm. too tired to make it/too tired to fight about it -- ha ha. fitness first backpack. burger king/mackey d's. vending machine. holborn station, northern line. armpits soaking, trousers chafing. extraordinary market conditions: annual leave cancelled. 

choose frequent flyer. business class upgrade. express shuttle; 15 pounds/15 minutes. time is money: you're worth it. plasma, blu ray, 3DTV. sky tv, pay-per-view. premier league, corporate box. user pays. HD content.

choose exceeding expectations. well-positioned for broad-based growth. outperformance; incentivized. 2/20. best-in-class. 

monkeys on a typewriter. darts at a newspaper. lemmings over a cliff.

choose taking a view. thanks for the market colour. risk-adjusted outperformance. stress tested. ten sigma event. too big to fail. global downturn. leading indicators. green shoots; v-shaped or double dip? the recovery story. lagging indicators. 

mine's a decaf skinny soy latte. grande, please.

the global growth story. burgeoning middle class. first-world living standards. sweat shop. multinational. organic growth. commodity-driven rally. consumer culture. growth by acquisition. there's an app for that. climate-gate. tea party. small government. atlas shrugged. where do you want to go today? hell in a hand-cart. 

that being said. it is what is. go with the flow.

choose a career.

Everything You Need to Know About Global Warming in 5 Minutes

I just stumbled upon this essay on the global warming "debate". It's refreshing and cogently argued --- all the more so because it's written an investment manager, Jeremy Grantham (who seems like one of the few smart-and-decent guys in the business). I've shamelessly cut and pasted the bulk of it below -- the better to spread the message! (You can find the original here; If you enjoy getting angry, also check out some of the posts that this article stirred up from irate red-neck tea-baggers...)

1) The amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, after at least several thousand years of being quite constant, started to rise with the advent of the Industrial Revolution. It has increased by 40% and is rising each year. This is certain and straightforward.

2) One of the properties of CO2 is that it creates a greenhouse effect and, other things being equal, causes the temperature to rise. This is just physics.

3) Several other factors, like changes in solar output, have major influences on climate over millennia, but these effects are known, are observable, and have been allowed for in current models. Critically, there have been no important changes in these other factors over the last 100 years.

4) The doubts arise when it comes to the interaction of CO2 with other variables in a complicated system, especially water vapor. It is impossible to be sure whether the temperature will rise slowly or rapidly. But, the past can be measured. The temperature has indeed steadily risen and is well within the boundaries predicted for the man-made effect. But the forecasts still range very widely, from a harmless negligible rise to a potentially disastrous +6 degrees Fahrenheit or higher within this century. The main danger of the CO2 interaction with water vapor is the high probability that it will cause a great increase in severe precipitation episodes.

5) Skeptics argue that this wide range of uncertainty lowers the need to act: "Why spend money when you're not certain?" But since the penalties rise hyperbolically at the tail, a wider range implies a greater risk (and a greater expected value of the costs). This is logically and mathematically rigorous and yet is still argued.

6) Pascal asks the question: What is the expected value of a very small chance of an infnite loss? And, he answers, "Infnite." In this example, what is the cost of lowering CO2 output and having the long-term effect of increasing CO 2 turn out to be nominal? The cost appears to be equal to foregoing, once in your life, six months' to one year's global growth – 2% to 4%, or less. The benefits, even with no warming, include: energy independence from the Middle East; more jobs, since wind and solar power and increased efficiency are more labor-intensive than another coal-fired power plant; less pollution of streams and air; and an early leadership role for the U.S. in industries that will inevitably become important. Conversely, what are the costs of not acting on prevention when the results turn out to be serious: costs that may dwarf those for prevention; and probable political destabilization from droughts, famine, mass migrations, and even war. And, to Pascal's real point, what might be the cost at the very extreme end of the distribution: defnitely life changing, possibly life threatening.

7) The biggest cost of all from global warming is likely to be the accumulated loss of biodiversity. This features nowhere in economic cost-benefit analysis because, not surprisingly, it is hard to put a price on that which is priceless.

8) A special word on the right-leaning think tanks: As libertarians, they abhor the need for government spending or even governmental leadership, which in their opinion is best left to private enterprise. In general, this may be an excellent idea. But global warming is a classic tragedy of the commons – seeking your own individual advantage, for once, does not lead to the common good, and the problem desperately needs government leadership and regulation. Sensing this, these think tanks have allowed their drive for desirable policy to trump science. Not a good idea.

9) Also, I should make a brief note to my own group – die-hard contrarians. Dear fellow contrarians, I know the majority is usually wrong in the behavioral jungle of the stock market. And heaven knows I have seen the soft scientists who lead finance theory attempt to bully their way to a uniform acceptance of the bankrupt theory of rational expectations and market efficiency. But climate warming involves hard science. The two most prestigious bastions of hard science are the National Academy in the U.S. and the Royal Society in the U.K., to which Isaac Newton and the rest of that huge 18th century cohort of brilliant scientists belonged. The presidents of both societies wrote a note recently, emphasizing the seriousness of the climate problem and that it was man- made. Both societies have also made full reports on behalf of their membership stating the same. Do we believe the whole elite of science is in a conspiracy? At some point in the development of a scientific truth, contrarians risk becoming flat earthers.

10) Conspiracy theorists claim to believe that global warming is a carefully constructed hoax driven by scientists desperate for ... what? Being needled by nonscientific newspaper reports, by blogs, and by right-wing politicians and think tanks? Most hard scientists hate themselves or their colleagues for being in the news. Being a climate scientist spokesman has already become a hindrance to an academic career, including tenure. I have a much simpler but plausible "conspiracy theory": that fossil energy companies, driven by the need to protect hundreds of billions of dollars of profits, encourage obfuscation of the inconvenient scientific results.

11) Why are we arguing the issue? Challenging vested interests as powerful as the oil and coal lobbies was never going to be easy. Scientists are not naturally aggressive defenders of arguments. In short, they are conservatives by training: never, ever risk overstating your ideas. The skeptics are far, far more determined and expert propagandists to boot. They are also well-funded. That smoking caused cancer was obfuscated deliberately and effectively for 20 years at a cost of hundreds of thousands of extra deaths. We know that for certain now, yet those who caused this fatal delay have never been held accountable. The profits of the oil and coal industry make tobacco's resources look like a rounding error. In one notable case, the obfuscators of global warming actually use one MIT professor who also defended tobacco! The obfuscators' simple and direct motivation – making money in the near term, which anyone can relate to – combined with their resources and, as it turns out, propaganda talents, have meant that we are arguing the science long after it has been nailed down. I, for one, admire them for their P.R. skills, while wondering, as always: "Have they no grandchildren?"

12) Almost no one wants to change. The long-established status quo is very comfortable, and we are used to its deficiencies. But for this problem we must change. This is never easy.

13) Almost everyone wants to hear good news. They want to believe that dangerous global warming is a hoax. They, therefore, desperately want to

believe the skeptics. This is a problem for all of us.

I also found Grantham's take on the GFC particularly interesting and, again, right on the money (from his Wikipedia site):

"I ask myself, 'Why is it that several dozen people saw this crisis coming for years?' I described it as being like watching a train wreck in very slow motion. It seemed so inevitable and so merciless, and yet the bosses of Merrill Lynch and Citi and even [U.S. Treasury Secretary] Hank Paulson and [Fed Chairman Ben] Bernanke — none of them seemed to see it coming.

I have a theory that people who find themselves running major-league companies are real organization-management types who focus on what they are doing this quarter or this annual budget. They are somewhat impatient, and focused on the present. Seeing these things requires more people with a historical perspective who are more thoughtful and more right-brained — but we end up with an army of left-brained immediate doers.

So it's more or less guaranteed that every time we get an outlying, obscure event that has never happened before in history, they are always going to miss it. And the three or four-dozen-odd characters screaming about it are always going to be ignored. . . .

So we kept putting organization people — people who can influence and persuade and cajole — into top jobs that once-in-a-blue-moon take great creativity and historical insight. But they don't have those skills."

The Frank Zappa Guitar Book

Just stumbled on an online copy of this out-of-print songbook:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/3265734/frank-zappa-the-frank-zappa-guitar-book-v6

 It's now the stuff of legend (among guitar fanboys at least) how Steve Vai was hired out of Berklee by Frank Zappa, and given the job of "transcribing" his guitar music. Perusing pages of the above book, you'll get a feel for what a super-human feat of musicality this was on the part of the young Vai. Check out the freakish rhythmic groupings (with ratios like 7:4, 6:5 all over the place). He even transcribes the feedback notes for goodness' sake! And there's not a hint of guitar tablature -- just traditional notation.

It's a feat that seems all the more hardcore -- and therefore cool, in a way -- because it is presumably so pointless: there are probably a handful of guitarists in the world, if any, who would have the ability, much less the inclination, to attempt to perform these songs based on the sheet music. Surely it would be easier to just listen to the original recording to work out the phrasing -- and to hell with trying to parse all those hemi-demi-semi-quavers!

I read on Vai's wikipedia site that during some early live performances with Zappa he would challenge the audience to produce sheet music for him to sight-read on the spot; scrolling through the above book it's hard to imagine that anyone would have been able to stump him.

World Cup Wrap: The best team won, but...

Okay, I'll say it up front: Spain deserved to win against an ugly Dutch team playing ugly, thuggish football. And given that they had previously defeated Germany -- the only other serious contender of the final four (with apologies to the gallant Uruguay, but it's true) --- it's hard to argue that they aren't worthy world champions.

¡muy bien!

But I refuse to embrace this result --- as football fans around the globe seem only too keen to do --- as a victory for the "beautiful game". Typifying the band-wagon jumping narrative that has already developed is this, from a hack in the Sydney Morning Herald: "Spain, as always, had the bulk of possession. But this time they struggled to do anything with it."

Ahem (cue my best Ricky Gervais, head tilted, hand to my ear): you wot? This time they struggled? Big bones? Yeah, big bones covered in meat and gravy!

Seriously, though exactly when in this tournament have they not "struggled"? Let's take a look, shall we? 

Firstly, the group stages: the Rojas limped into the tournament with a 1-0 loss against a stubborn but mediocre Swiss side. They turned this around with a 2-0 win against central-american minnows Honduras and a 2-1 win against Chile (a solid but hardly top class team -- as evidenced by their subsequent 3-0 drubbing against an uninspired Brazilian side in the last 16). This left them winners -- by goal difference -- of arguably the softest group in the competition.

Spain's path through the remainder of the tournament can, remarkably, be summed up by one scoreline: 1-0. Against Portugal, Paraguay, Germany and, finally, The Netherlands. That must be some kind of record in itself -- it's the kind of parsimonious efficiency that would make the Italians envious. But it's hardly the stuff of football romance.

By constrast, look at the scorelines produced by the less-lauded Dutch and German brands of football: 4-1 (Germany-England), 4-0 (Germany-Argentina), 2-1 (Holland-Slovakia), 2-1 (Holland-Brazil), 3-2 (Holland-Uruguay). I managed to catch most of these games, and can attest that the scorelines reflect the exciting, drama-filled contests that they were.

In contrast, for me at least, the Spain matches were every bit as dull as their scorelines suggested. Probably the biggest excitement was the flurry of missed penalties against Paraguay -- a farce that, let's be honest, could easily seen them eliminated had Paraguay converted their penalty in the first place.

I know, I know: it's all about their "passing game". Yeah, I get that. They certainly do a good job of dominating possession, but watching them stroke the ball around with seemingly no desire to carve out a clear-cut chance just isn't that interesting. It's like the football equivalent of a pathetic Romeo who wines and dines his date at all the fanciest bars and restaurants, then at the end of the night makes a polite excuse and leaves just when it's time to go upstairs for coffee.

Ultimately, my take on why Spain won is more prosaic: they won because they were so damn hard to score against. And part of the reason for this is due to what they did when they didn't have the ball: namely, that they harried and closed down their opponents and prevented them playing their game. Come to think about it, maybe this is the only reason why Spain won at all: for a team that can only manage one goal in a match, even when they are enjoying 90% of the possession, the only way to win is to defend very well. And get a little lucky (but no, let's not go there...).

For my money, the most enjoyable teams in this tournament (excluding the entertainment value of England's hapless showing) were Germany and Argentina. Germany, because they play a dynamic, attacking kind of football and are refreshingly clear of big-name prima donnas. Argentina, because Messi is one of the few superstars that seems like a humble, likeable character, and because they were passionate in competition but ultimately gracious in defeat.

Anyway, that's it for another 4 years. Bring on Brazil 2014, and bring on a more mature German team that by then may just be the perfekt football machine. Vorsprung durch Technik.

Clash of the Titans (2010)

Just watched this Greek mythology-themed action epic, a shameless remake of a film by the same name from the early 80s. It stars Russell Crowe II (aka Sam Worthington) as the heroic demi-god Perseus who goes on a quest to kill the fearsome Kraken (pronounced with that epic-sounding long "a" -- like hearken) -- a feat which, somewhat inconveniently, can only be accomplished by first heading down to Hades and retrieving the head of the Medusa and then using that to turn the Kraken to stone. Of course, I'm just outlining the broad strokes here -- along the way there is much fighting to be done against such nasties as giant scorpions.

Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes ham it up delightfully as deity brothers Zeus and Hades, and recent Bond-girl Gemma Arterton provides some top-shelf eye-candy as the demi-goddess Io.

I haven't seen the original, but it seems a safe bet that the special effects in this one are an awful lot better. Indeed, the special effects are very impressive and, for me, that alone justifies the exercise of remaking the film. We've reached the stage where the most far-fetched nonsense dreamed up by classical Greek imaginations can be rendered vividly and realistically on the big screen.

All in all it's a fairly enjoyable romp through well-trodden fantasy action-epic terrain. As you'd expect, there are a few cringeable bits of Hollywood dialogue (Perseus' "just don't look at that bitch" when he's warning his men about the Medusa was a good example), but it's not as bad on that front as I might have expected.

My one major gripe (other than Sam Worthington's wooden Australian-tinged accent) is with the title of the film: the "Titans" in question have supposedly been defeated by the "Kraaaaaaaaaaken" long before the events in the film and, as far as I could tell, have basically not much to do with anything. I feel obliged to flag this by way of a warning to any purists of Greek mythology: if you go into this one expecting to see Titans clashing, you'll be disappointed. Still, it is a good title, and in any case the fault resides with the makers of the original version.

Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe

I recently read -- and can heartily recommend -- this nineteenth century American masterpiece. It's the book on African-American slavery in the southern United States; when published, it actually helped to precipitate the events that led to the Civil War and, ultimately, to the abolition of slavery.

One particular character that I found intriguing was the "slave trader". These rough-and-ready individuals plied their trade by buying slaves at auction -- and in the process, often tearing mother from child or husband from wife -- then selling them on at a profit, sometimes transporting them interstate to do so.

These traders were ruthless, calculating characters. As portrayed in the story, they had no particular feelings about the whole slavery enterprise -- they were just in it for the money. I was eerily reminded of their modern-day counterparts in the financial markets.

There does seem to be something universal about the niche of the trader: the quantities being traded change over the centuries, but the essential characteristics remain. With only a modicum of imagination, you could easily take the following quote as describing sub-prime mortgage brokers pre-GFC:

But who, sir, makes the trader? Who is most to blame? The enlightened, cultivated, intelligent man, who supports the system of which the trader is the inevitable result, or the poor trader himself? You make the public sentiment that calls for the trade, that debauches and depraves him, till he feels no shame in it; and in what are you better than he?

The book also provide us with the origins of the expression "to be sold down the river": often, slaves would be bought and taken from a relatively comfortable existence in a state such as Kentucky, and sold "down the river" to plantations in, say, Louisiana. There they would often be worked essentially to death under barbaric conditions.

It's grim, sobering stuff, and one of the more powerful books I can remember reading.

Gekko gets his geek on

With his better half away at work these past few Saturdays, Gekko has found himself with a newly rediscovered freedom to explore his inner geek. Here's just some of what he's been up to:

DEVASTATOR

Having clung tenaciously to many of my childhood toys, I recently had the idea that some of these might make pretty decent ornaments.

The pride and joy of my quite large Transformers collection was the complete set of Constructicons -- the six Decepticons that combine to form the gestalt super-villain called Devastator.

Twenty years in cardboard box limbo has left many of the moving parts loose and prone to flopping all over the shop, so some judicious use of modelling cement was called for to keep everything in place. Also, his right elbow joint had been severed, so I decided to carry out some reconstructive surgery using modelling putty, which was touched up with purple paint.

The end result is quite cool:

For those who may care, the Constructicon team is made up of Scrapper (the captain; right leg), Mixmaster (left leg), Scavenger (right arm), Bonecrusher (left arm), Long Haul (torso), and Hook (head/shoulders).

Bonecrusher actually belonged to Big Brother initially, and was once torn in half by an angry young Gekko during some dispute (I've forgotten the details, but I seem to recall that this act had been pre-empted by some scrunching/tearing up of paper). Scavenger was the second acquisition (both of these were while we still lived in St Mary's in Sydney's outer west). The remainder of the set came on Christmas 1986 (by that time, we had moved up to Gosford on the NSW central coast) -- one of those classic childhood Christmases where your eyes just pop out of their sockets when you see the presents arrayed under the tree (I also got Galvatron and Metroplex -- so it was quite a harvest that year).

It's amusing to reflect that Devastator now resides roughly halfway between these two original points of purchase -- having travelled to the other side of the planet and back again in the meantime...

PRACTISE RIG

With the recent revival of my guitar playing, I've taken the trouble to set up my practise environment to be as convenient as possible. Here it is:

You'll recognize the good ol' Ibanez RT650, still going strong. For amplification I'm using a 15 Watt Marshall MG Series together with a Zoom G2 effects pedal.

Notice the curly guitar lead (by Bullet Cables) --- it was a little pricey, but it's so much neater than regular cables and very low noise. You wouldn't think it, but it stretches out to something like 9 metres.

Also, note the customized powerboard: I added a little switch so that with a single touch I can turn the whole setup on/off. This is particularly useful because otherwise the pedal transformer would continue to draw power even when the pedal is switched off.