So I have this weird indication for when summer begins. I have to hear three songs on the radio, the first is “More Than A Feeling” by Boston. The second and third are two David Lee Roth Van Halen songs. If you live in an area that has block weekends or two for tuesdays or whatever, they have to be BACK TO BACK. Otherwise you just have to hear two David Lee Roth Van Halen songs at any point in time. Those three songs heard on the radio mean that summer has begun. Start your BBQ’s!
Anyway, two points of business to tend to. The first is that Boston’s lead singer died in his home in New Hampshire. The second is that even though I listen to less and less and less radio, I heard “More Than a Feeling” the other day on the radio. This year Van Halen gets inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, so there’s a god chance that summer starts early this year.
So I know that there’s a Rob Blatt out in Los Angeles who is a comedy writer. He’s won awards and has done pretty well for himself so far. He’s got a writing partner named Sam Reigel that I’ve sent some e-mail back and forth to. He’s workd with John Landis in he past, and I’ve exchanged e-mails with John Landis because of this. But recently I found out that there’s another Rob Blatt in Montreal. I don’t know much about him other than that he plays squash and is about three years older than I am.
I’m not giving any links because each time you link to anything, their Google ranking goes up. And I’m attempting to level the playing field as much as possible here… so link to me! In the immortal words of Lindsay Lohan: “I wanna come first.”
Also, if you’re sending me e-mail, it’s rob dot blatt at gmail, if you leave the dot out, you’ll get the Montreal Rob Blatt and if you send it to yahoo, you’ll get the Los Angeles Rob Blatt.
When I read news articles and read statements like this:
“At the Battle of the Alamo people came from all over the US to fight for our sovereignty. Now we are giving it away to the very people we fought.”
This was made in a town hall meeting in Texas about a proposed super highway that would go from Mexico to Canada and would be a quarter mile wide.
Almost two hundred years later, there are people who still hold a grudge about the Alamo? Why not hold a grudge against the British if you’re gona go that far back? How about the native americans? The alamo happened so long ago that the Mexican government has been reformed since then.
Republican Ron Paul, a Texas congressman, says it is part of a drive for “an integrated North American Union” - complete with a currency, a cross-national bureaucracy and borderless travel. “It would represent another step toward the abolition of national sovereignty,” he said.
I’ll be honest, I was reading that statement and North American Currency, cross-national bureaucracy and borderless travel sounds pretty good.
Love, the Beatles record- not the conceptual emotion, isn’t all that great.
They hyped this thing as a mashup record, but from what I can tell you could have done some of this stuff with the two track mixes, they didn’t utilize the multi-tracks all that much on the record and that’s disappointing. With a catalog of music like the Beatles have, you could create some absolutely amazing mashups of the songs. I mean, just look at what DJ Danger Mouse did with The Grey Album, The Flying White Dots did with Dear Prudence and I am the Walrus (I prefer this version to the original) on Staring at the Sky DJBC’s the Beastles and the Beachles‘ Sgt. Petsound’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
With all the amazing bootleg mashups available, this is way too tame. Check out what The Silence Xperiment did with Q-Unit or what Wax Audio did with Thunder Busters. These guys are raising the bar all the time and when a major comes out with something like Love, it’s way too middle of the road to be embraced by anyone who’s seriously into this stuff, but then again they’re after the middle of the road crowd. They’re clearly not out there to innovate. They’re not Girl Talk.
There are a ton of great mashups out there using the Beatles already, and those mashups indicate that some of the isolated vocals (Dear Prudence and I am the Walrus amongst others) and other instrument tracks are out there in the wild somewhere. Love disappoints.
Suggestions: check out Mashup Town/Mashup of the Week and Wax Audio. Wax Audio’s got some awesome AC/DC and Iron Maiden mashups and Mashuptown is where I find most of the new stuff that comes out. I’m no expert, but I enjoy the hell out of this stuff.
I think that’s enough links for one day, don’t you?
