“I’ve smoked well over a hundred thousand cigarettes in my life, and each one of those cigarettes meant something to me. I even enjoyed a few of them.”
Smokers will get this essay (an excerpt from an upcoming book: “Nicotine,” by Gregor Hens). Not sure the rest of will/can.
I never developed a taste for “spirits” but have a hard-to-explain fascination with the endless variety of hooch I see in supermarkets and convenience stores. If there’s no one in line behind me I will sometimes quiz the clerk.
Q: Do all of these sell?
A: Yes. This is primo, point-of-purchase shelf space so they wouldn’t stock it if it didn’t sell. (Even Fireball?!)
Q: Who buys those little “airplane” bottles? And why?
A: Lots of folks. For the drive home. One clerk said she’s seen customers drink on on the way out the door.
In my naive, never-been-a-drinker way, these suggest a “lower class” of drinker than the guy with a bottle of single malt in his wet bar in the den. Maybe there’s danger implicit in this photo that holds my gaze.
This might be an over-simplification but Prison Radio appears to be short (2-3 minutes) recordings made by prison inmates. I’m assuming these are made from phone calls the prisoners are allowed to make. That’s make take on the what, your guess is as good as mine on the ‘why’ but I’m assuming the idea is to give a voice to the incarcerated.
One of the prisoners recording these commentaries is James Keown. Mr. Keown is from Jefferson City, MO, the town where I live. In 2008 he was convicted of murder for poisoning his wife with Gatorade spiked with antifreeze. He’s serving a life prison sentence in Massachusetts.
In one of his three commentaries (Who Are You?) he describes being on the air at one of our local radio stations when, during a commercial break, he was arrested. I briefly met Keown a couple of times but didn’t know him.
I find these commentaries bizarre in a way I can’t quite put into words. Perhaps it’s the distinctive “announcer voice” Keown uses when making the recordings.
UPDATE (1/9/18): Keown has stopped updating his Prison Radio page. Just those three posts back in 2016. His appeal to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court was rejected on October 23, 2017.
Kevin Kelly and Jerry Kaplan discuss an AI future at the 2016 Machine Learning and Market for Intelligence Conference.
Wikipedia: “RKO has long been celebrated for its series of musicals starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the mid-to-late 1930s. Actors Katharine Hepburn and, later, Robert Mitchum had their first major successes at the studio. Cary Grant was a mainstay for years. The work of producer Val Lewton’s low-budget horror unit and RKO’s many ventures into the field now known as film noir have been acclaimed, largely after the fact, by film critics and historians. The studio produced two of the most famous films in motion picture history: King Kong and Citizen Kane. RKO Pictures is also a member of Motion Picture Association of America.”
This image brings back lots of great memories from my childhood.
Wikipedia: “Sound City Studios was located in the San Fernando Valley, amidst rows of dilapidated warehouses. The little-known recording studio housed a unique analog Neve recording console and had a reputation for recording drums. Artists such as Nirvana, Kyuss, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Fleetwood Mac, Neil Young, Rick Springfield, Tom Petty, Rage Against The Machine, and Slipknot recorded groundbreaking music at the studio. The film tells the story of the studio from its early days in 1969 until its closing in 2011.”
Watched this a year or two back but if I mentioned it here I can find no reference. Wonderful documentary about backup singers.
Wikipedia
: “In his seminal work, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Csíkszentmihályi outlines his theory that people are happiest when they are in a state of flow—a state of concentration or complete absorption with the activity at hand and the situation. It is a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter. The idea of flow is identical to the feeling of being in the zone or in the groove. The flow state is an optimal state of intrinsic motivation, where the person is fully immersed in what he is doing. This is a feeling everyone has at times, characterized by a feeling of great absorption, engagement, fulfillment, and skill—and during which temporal concerns (time, food, ego-self, etc.) are typically ignored.”
My buddy Henry has been praising this book for years and I finally got around to reading it.
I took another stab at this tune because I noticed I was paying more attention to the video than just playing the song. And seeing me mauling the uke really doesn’t add much. So I just recorded the audio and dropped in a few goofy stills.
