Thursday, March 21, 2013


Staying Broke protect myself from myself; (how pathetic is that?)
I am sitting at the library, studying Perl scripting and ripping more CDs onto my drive.
I haven't drank in almost 24 hours.
"Get Dat Bum With The Guitah Outta Here!!"
Last night, I didn't even want to play, as I walked around sober, noticing that the revellers seemed particularly stupid and immature as seen through my eyes.
Lights, Camera...Hey, Buddy!!
They were shooting a movie on Bourbon Street and it was kind of disgraceful to see the throngs of gawking celebrity worshippers who couldn't seem to take their eyes off of the "action."
To me, It  was just a bunch of people with cameras and lights and truckloads  of equipment, filming things like a guy getting into a car and driving off (several times until he got it right) but the crowd hung in awe. There were literally stars in their eyes; yes actual terra-ton masses of mostly carbon from billions of light years away were shrunken down and in their eyes, I don't know how Hollywood did that...
I walked through, annoyed by the inconvenience and not even thinking that I would have to Google "New Orleans" and "Shooting some film on Bourbon" just to see if whoever I was walking past was famous enough so that I would have either heard of them; or heard of one of their films or heard of someone whom they acted alongside of once; or more.
At one point, I tried to duck under a kind of crane thing and cut around a barrier and must have come too close to the action or of being seen in the "shot;" prompting some Hollywood type to whistle curtly and motion for me to go back the other way (like shooing a fly).
This was reverberated by several random tourists, nearby, who all had their cam phones rolling; and who piped in with variations of "Get out of the way!,"
I was getting in their shots, for crying out loud!
Everything in their deportment communicated the fact that "some nobody" almost got in the way of the Great Actors (who matter).
"I haven't been to a theater since 1996," I truthfully shot back at them; feeling like I was telling some Polynesian tribe on a South Pacific Island hundreds of years ago that I didn't pray to their huge carved wooden stature.
I went around the other way.
There was apparently no reference to any street musician in the screen-play and, besides,  I probably would have been out of period(.)
My 1960's era army backpack hadn't even been invented, perhaps, when Rob Lowe, or whomever, ran around Bourbon Street, acting like a guy from the 1950s.
Music Review
I have 12 gigabytes of music now; most notable of the new discoveries that I have made being The Dave Matthews Band, and Adele (yeah, THAT Adele...kind of Bonnie Raitte meets Tracy Chapman...) and Tom Waits.

The disappointments have been, to some degree Steve Vai (he is excellent technically but so are Joe Satriani and the guy from Dream Theatre.
Steve just plays music from another planet which I'm not sure I want to visit...),
The Grateful Dead "Workingmans Dead" (is a studio album from before the era of sound production which has spoiled us all with surround sound; and from an era when "Pigpen" was a vocalist/harmonica player; and I have always thought that he just sounds like a drunken gutter-punk -even before I had ever heard the term, and he either clips his microphone during live performances -blame the soundman- or whatever Deadheads were recording onto their normal-bias 1970 vintage cassettes had their levels too high..either way, Pigpen comes off sounding like and amateur.)

*interesting note: I haven't had any trouble ripping CDs onto my hard drive which *technically* is pirating and might be against Federal Law. 
I thought that I had read somewhere that artists had come up with some way to encode CDs so that they couldn't be copied, but maybe technology has caught up with them...
The Grateful Dead CD, which I copied on March 14, I played that night.
At the conclusion of the music, a rather obnoxious voice is heard to say something like "Workingmans Dead, available March 14th [that days date]...Go ahead and STEAL IT!!"
I think I just coincidentally ripped it on the same day of its release, back in 1970...because...they can't do that, can they??
Now, the library is closing.
I guess I will walk the Quarter to see if I am inspired to sit and play somewhere. I have so much new music that I want to learn and to re-invent myself in a way; but it will have to be done on-the-job; unless I establish a much more disciplined practice schedule...

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