Blues School

Earl's Tune - Errol Garner by boberwig

 I had no idea Errol Garner was a brother. One of the ladies at the rest home asked for this tune, Earl's Tune, and now I'm schooled in the playing of blues. If my father was Garner or Ray Bryant or even merely listened to Garner or Bryant, then I'd play like this today. But no, I got a psychotherapist and now earn a gold medal for mentally masturbating. So I've got 40 more years to devote to playing in this style. (or about 8 if I die when Garner did)


I'm not a Jazz snob. Misty is a song I've probably tried to play for ten years. I took a piano class once and this was the song I was supposed to accompany a singer with. It was terrible. And I remember reading Errol Garner as the author and not researching anything about him. I figured he was white because the lyrics are real margarine flavored. (Garner didn't write the lyrics) But no, now I see him playing his own melody and I understand. To discredit songs like Moon River is to discredit Garner because while Mancini isn't a blues musician he wrote during the same period and all those songs are lumped together. Misty is one of the all time classics with All of Me and Ain't Misbehaving and Some Enchanted Evening. You can't play lounge piano without knowing this song. You probably won't play it like Garner but you have to appreciate the tradition of lounge piano. I will post my recording of it when I get to the real piano at the old folks home.

Don't Shoot The Piano Player

I tried about 10 takes of this song hoping one would be good enough to put it rest but invariably I fumbled over one of the licks. I'll memorize before I can actually play it right...but for now this is the "before" video to compare what I will play in a few weeks of practice so I can go to the press room and impress the jazz snobs.

News Cycle

The predictability of our chew toy mentality and devotion to the lap dog media is grotesque. I force myself to watch the television to see what America is being spoon fed like fat babies with Gerber juice flowing out of our mouths and down our gullets. So, the nation has borrowed its limit, 16.5 trillion. I'm tempted to fillibuster my own ego in the pursuit of justice but the truth is that none of it is real. It's all a manufactured "event" to keep media whores occupied until the next mass murder or celebrity divorce. My disappointment in American mythology is so deep that it can't be salvaged. We live in a false and phony nation full of mysticism and superstitions and sports fanaticism and lip service to Jesus with an unread bible in one hand and a rifle in the other espousing peace through mystical dimensions.  There are over 7 billion people on Earth. 400+ million Americans. A million could die from flu outbreak this year and it wouldn't even turn the population graph line down. We are the ant colony that immediately forgets about the tidal wave of Big Red soda that drowns our habitat. The reality is that we're all redundant except to our own fabrications and the media feeds our false acceptance of the lies.

The common response to the Oggy Problem is that a quest to rescue wolves from Shell Oil or learn Hindu ballads on the Ud is pointless because it doesn't recognize reality. But my rebuttal is that those with loose lips and chicken scratch intellects only suck on the medium hot salsa of the world and ignore the countless arrays of picante. Basically, monitoring their own toes in the limitless cold water of reality to the depth that they can accept and then imposing their own shallow delusion onto others. It's all disgusting to me as are the television programs that horrify me. This is mass media and I will turn my back on it one day but it's like studying the cartel trade of broken virgin whores and then playing dominoes on slippery barstools of defeat with a crooked smile under sightless eyes.

So there is no solution as long as media influences reality perception. If we even took the $17 trillion debt as reality and accepted that the stars and stripes are like that junkie stoner kid you meet at a Phish concert who has a stolen credit card and he is buying everyone cool stuff and you can sleep in his luxury suite hotel for free. That's the reality of our negligent pride. The entire premise of America is to outlive our pimp so eventually we can fuck and give blowjobs to addicts in the cold alleys of our grotesque indifference and keep all our money. Maybe, we collectively hope, the pawn store will burn down and we can scavange the debris for our blood diamonds. We pawned our children to spread disease and pollution to every corner of the continent and then we hired marketing executives with counterfeit money to wed strippers wearing assless chaps made from Kickapoo Indian chief hides to promote the glossy new world as progressive and the manifest destiny of our nightmares. Congratulations. I always wondered how the Germans living outside the death camps rationalized their inaction. Now I know. They read the propaganda pamphlets and made excuses. Don't cause trouble. Don't ask questions. Protect your own. Fear the unknown. And they have a point because the American and Russian Liberators only made the citizens dig mass graves as their punishment for doing nothing...while the Nazi soldiers definitely would've executed them all. And that's the painful product of indifference and the demise of sad repose: it usually is safer to be the coward and after 40 years of an environmental holocaust we've manufactured the most indifferent citizenry with Fox news puppetry in our assholes making our mouths move like Kermit the Frog. The collusion is complete and the ironic generation now mocks rape...because that's their defense mechanism in an insane culture. Everything is a greater symptom of madness that becomes one more illness to ignore in our all u can eat buffet of greed.

But that's the road the media wants to invite me down. They want the futile conversation, the rant, the blog, the fillibuster; they goad people to revulsion because that's the best strategy handed down from Socialist Republics and propaganda specialists. "Ensure the public never has a moment of peace unless we manufacture that peace. Always keep them on uncertain ground." In two weeks, Fiscal Cliff...now Borrowing Limit. Next in line...Asshole Propositions Balls for Shit Legislation. It's excellent think tank strategy but I'm a hippie with conspiracy theories as my breakfast sandwich so pay no attention to me and keep watching American Dad and Football.

Mad Without Him Blues

Look no further for awesome pre-rock blues...ridiculously good. This song is in my fakebook and I'll stop at nothing to learn it.

Hottest Brand Mascot Ever

Me encanta

The chips were ok. too salty.

Seriously, is there a contest between the cheeto cat and the hot latina? Conchitas are the Mexican Frito chip. Fritos don't have a mascot for some reason so I'll have to put her up against the Cheeta cat. You can sort of tell the cat is male by body language but he's not camel toe sexy.

I'm bored.