Posted on by mwhybark

Now playing

After literal years, I have finally completed a multiple-library merge and de-dupe on my primary iTunes music folder. At the end of the project, I have about 30gb of unique songs, representing about 750 artists.

As I have been working on this, I have been pursuing a concurrent project to enable multi-zone playback from the primary iTunes machine, a five-year-old Mac Mini which is a part of my A/V stack. This was accomplished via both an inexpensive local-area rebroadcast base station and two satellite speakers (battery or brick power, which makes them easy to tote around inside or outside) and an assortment of Apple Airport Express wifi stations picked up on eBay at $25 – $50.

Overall the project was pretty hairy.

I blew out a 7.1 A/V receiver pretty much as soon as I started it, sometime last year, by hooking up a non-powered speaker to the B speaker outlet and refusing to realize why the amp was shutting down until I actually saw and heard a literal sparkflash and watched a sad curl of very expensive smoke curl up out of the receiver chassis.

Merging four separate 30gb iterations of the same music library is yet another kind of madness and one that drove me to the brink on several occasions. There are many tools designed to assist with this process but none that really easily manage the sheer range of possible variations a tune file can morph into over time. As it is, I am sure I tossed a few uniques along with the 90gb of duplicate files.

Anyway, it’s done, and I can get back to listening to the music, something I found nearly impossible to do with pleasure when the various housekeeping tasks I wanted to address were unresolved. Of course, in the intervening years, I have bought a great deal of music, and the older music that I have not had a chance to listen to for a few years is nearly new again.

So as I play the music, every second track, I’m all, “Hey! This is pretty good! Who is this?”

So now I’m off to track down a universally-accessible iTunes now-playing track publisher. I’m kinda thinking a Twitter publisher might be the way to go. Off to the internet research squirreling!

UPDATE: utter success. Mini now updating playlist via Twitter in protected mode. Inaugural programming: Sandinista, The Clash

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Enchirito!

Years ago, Viv and I saw, once only, a bizarre ad for Taco Bell’s ‘enchirito,’ featuring the word sung by four guys singing in a circular group as the camera panned around their faces.

We both stopped what we were doing or talking about and yelled ‘what was that?“ but the hilarious strangeness of the ad was never to reappear. Struck by a thought – that YouTube is the Facebook of obscure ad clips – I took a look.

I give you: The Enchirito Boys. Note that they are, in fact, named in the context of the ad. Maybe they went on to become Comcast housemates or something.

UPDATE: MT squashed the hell out of the embed, so I just linked.

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Lux Extinguere

RIP, Lux Interior

Roll on, rock on, raw bones
Well there’s still a lot of rythm in these
Rockin’ Bones

I wanna leave a happy memory when I go,
I wanna leave something to let the whole world know,
that the rock n roll daddy has a done passed on,
but my bones will keep a rockin’ long after I’ve gone

Roll on, rock on, raw bones
Well there’s still a lot of rythm in these
Rockin’ Bones

Well when I die don’t you bury me at all
Just nail my bones up on the wall
Beneath these bones let these words be seen,
“This is the bloody gears of a boppin’ machine”

Roll on, rock on, raw bones
Well there’s still a lot of rythm in these
Rockin’ Bones

I don’t worry about tomorrow just thinkin’ about tonight
My bones are getting restless and I do it up right
A few more times around a hardwood floor
Before we turn off the lights and close the door

Roll on, rock on, raw bones
Well there’s still a lot of rythm in these
Rockin’ Bones

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Fog

Oh the clammy fog clings close and thick tonight. Strange that on this day of hope and triumph a ghost story would be the best tale to whisper tonight in and on the Puget Sound.

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Spooooky

KUOW is running a retrospective montage of the past eight years which is creeping me the fuck out. It started by blending audio of the morning show’s reaction to the Seattle earthquake with audio of Gore’s concession and is proceeding forthwith through the litany of shame, lies, wholesale slaughter, theft, union-busting, embezzlement, gaming the stock market, governmental failures, fraudulently waged wars, you know the fuckin’ drill. It is reminding me just how I happy I am to see the back of that goddamn criminal and his evil sidekicks. Jail would be a start. I will certainly cry with rage and relief tomorrow morning.

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Xombies

Exene stumbled fitfully toward John, who had a hard time handling the bass.

Billy’s grin seemed unusually wide. DJ’s skinpounding seemed fragile, on this night. The band forgot lyrics, skipped bridges, generally seemed out of things, distracted, a shadow of their former selves.

Then the cops arrived.

(Originally written as a part of NaDruWriNi 2004.)

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Trumpeter

My ex-bandmate Karel apparently died yesterday. It’s sad news.

200810072106

Here is a portrait I took for a demo cover back in 2001. He was wearing his guitar – you can see the strap on his shoulder.

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THE LAST STIFF COMPILATION…UNTIL

THE LAST STIFF COMPILATION…UNTIL THE NEXT ONE.

Picked this up at Duroc Records in 1980, who knows where it is now. Listened to it over and over and over and over and over and over again. I think I must have grabbed Red Snerts the same day.

It did not really turn out to be a roadmap to the future of rock and pop, but it did lay ground work for a broad ear leaning to quirky stuff. Really looking forward to hearing it again, in the order decreed by Stiff.