Peter Sinfield, the lyricist for King Crimson’s first four albums, has toddled off to the Court of the Crimson King. He was 80.
Progressive rockers like King Crimson and Pink Floyd were big on my personal hit parade in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Probably the upshot of taking piano and flute lessons, playing in school orchestras, digging the big-band music my parents loved, and like that there. A “more-is-more sensibility,” asThe New York Times obit puts it.
The single “21st Century Schizoid Man” was killer, you should pardon the expression, since it took actual killers to task with lyrics like “Blood rack, barbed wire/Politicians’ funeral pyre/Innocents raped with napalm fire. …”
Eventually my musical tastes became less grandiose, more stripped down. Even so, I still prefer bombast to bombs.
What, you haven’t heard they have a National Mall in DeeCee?
Wherever shalt thou see a man on horseback, there also shalt thou see a horse’s ass. And sometimes more than one of them, too.
The endless pearl-clutching in the national media over Orange Julius Caesar doing exactly what we all expected he would do has me longing to grab some button-down editor a little lower — by the family jewels — and drag him around the room, growling like a mad dog.
Which of course is what I am.
But that would be wrong. Fun, but wrong.
So I’ll just leave you with that improbable visual and this all-too-probable audio — yes, yes, yes, it’s time for a Shakespearean edition of Radio Free Dogpatch.
• Technical notes: Still loving the Ethos mic from Earthworks Audio; Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones; Zoom H5 Handy Recorder; Apple’s GarageBand, and Auphonic for a sonic colonic. If it ain’t broke, etc. The gibbons and fanfare are courtesy of Freesound. Wrestling action comes to you from an old clip on YouTube. The cartoon tune, “Out of Step,” comes from Zapsplat. All the other bad noise is courtesy of Your Humble Narrator.
Stalking around El Rancho Pendejo, muttering to myself as I ticked off the morning chores one by one, I got to thinking how nice it would be if somebody came around regularly to haul off all the garbage stinking up my skull.
Wouldn’t that be convenient? Just flip my lid, yank out the sack full of bad news, worse ideas, outdated references, and pointless distractions, heave it into a black plastic cart, and roll it down the driveway where someone else has to deal with it.
Hm. Wait a sec. We’ve already got something like that. They call it “blogging.”
A fuzzy Beaver Moon, which I suppose could be considered appropriate.
Betimes I wish I had an actual camera instead of an iPhone, especially when zooming in on something like the last full supermoon of the year.
But then I remember that I’m no great shakes as a shooter and the phone that I already own is exactly my speed. I’m not exactly Ansel Adams. More like Gomez Addams, or maybe Uncle Fester.
Hell, people who know what they’re doing shoot movies — actual films, not TikTok dances or cute-animal videos — using iPhones.
Not me, of course. Because (a) I don’t know what I’m doing, and (2) I don’t really want to learn.
When I was shooting bike reviews for Adventure Cyclist and teasers for Charles Pelkey’s Live Update Guy it was occasionally fun, kinda, sorta. But also complicated, because I was using a GoPro, or a more traditional camcorder — Sony VIXIA mini X or Panasonic HC-V770 — and there’s a whole lot of wobble when you’re recording video and audio in the wild, especially when the production crew is dumber than a bag of hammers and your leading man has a radio face.
Anyway, them newfangled consarned moving pictures do all the work for the audience. When you read or listen to a story, your imagination has to break a sweat. With video it just sorta slouches on the couch with one hand in the popcorn bowl and the other thumbing a phone, checking to see if there’s something better on.
Even the tree seems to be reaching for something out of its grasp.
Anybody else having a hard time waking up all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed?
Maybe it’s a side effect from 10 days of snotlocker drugs. Could be the time change and tonight’s Beaver Moon. But my eyes didn’t open until after 6 a.m. this morning, which is a rarity in these, my Golden Years.
I know it’s not the avalanche of inanities we call the news, because I’ve been ignoring that shit. Oh, I’ll lift the lid for a peek now and then, but the smell is usually a dead giveaway. There’s something down there you don’t need to see.
Speaking of things best left unexamined, after the Great Power Failure I decided to rearrange the tech around here rather than buy a new Mac to replace the 15-inch 2014 MacBook Pro that our local Apple Store “Genius Bar” demoted from a functional laptop into a half-assed desktop while replacing its battery.
So, now, the 15-inch MBP awaits teardown and recycling. The 13-inch 2014 MBP has replaced it in my office, hooked to a 24-inch LG external display and a couple external drives because it has next to no internal storage (I pinched pennies on memory and storage because it was my road-tripper in the Before-Time). And the 11-inch 2012 MacBook Air, which was for traveling seriously light, has replaced the 13-inch MBP on keyboards in the world-famous Infernal Hound Sound podcasting studio.
Both have been updated to the latest versions of macOS they can handle (Big Sur and Catalina, respectively). But man, I gotta admit, these Macs were price/performance compromises from the get-go. And in 2024, it kinda shows.
The MBP rocks a 2.6 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5 chip, while the MBA runs a 2 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i7. Both have just 8GB of memory, minimal on-board storage, and a shortage of ports. And they’ve been rudely awakened all these years later to find that things have … changed.
Hey, I can dig it. Shit looks a little different to me, too. And I can’t always keep up, either.
Y’think Apple will sell me a new Mac and a new me?
Mad Blog Media 