Mar 282023
 

This started out as just a story about a link I discovered but it turned into its own post. Despite what a shitshow Twitter has become, I still find really good links via the people I follow.

Chad Gracey

YouTube surfaced that Chad Gracey, the drummer from Live, has been posting solo performance play along videos with various Live songs. I wondered why he’d be doing that since it seems a little odd even though I enjoy them. He’s posted roughly 3 songs a month. Turns out that he isn’t in the band anymore and this Rolling Stone article, A Tale of Two Chads, gets into the reasons.

I had stopped following the band with the release of V in 2001. I just wasn’t into it. I was aware of them in the early 90s. A co-worker at Sound Warehouse would play Mental Jewelry at work and I didn’t like it much. Throwing Copper was released when I was living in NY and blew up. I liked “Selling the Drama” which was the first single. Later, I bought the album and realized the entire thing was good in addition to all of the singles that were being played non-stop. I went back and bought Mental Jewelry and played that all the way through for several months. This was just after I moved back to Austin in 1995. They released Secret Samadhi followed by The Distance to Here. I saw them live at Southpark Meadows back when it was a music venue. That might’ve been the last live show I saw there before it got turned into a massive shopping area. I loved both of those records and would listen to them all of the way through. V was the first one where I didn’t do that and that’s where I pretty much stopped following them. They played a show in 2000 or so at Waterloo Park and we brought H. It was just before the release of V and was also a mediocre show. They played ACL in 2017 and I watched the live stream from home. I think I noticed the second drummer but didn’t realize that was the beginning of the end for Chad. I’ve always really liked his drumming so I’m sad to see him part ways with the band under such poor circumstances even if I’d lost track of them after 2000. I always though Ed was a little pretentious but you can’t deny his presence or his songwriting. I have to say that I dig the videos that Chad is posting and hope he lands on something else if he wants to keep playing.

 Posted by on March 28, 2023 at 9:57 pm
Mar 282023
 

The implosion of Twitter since ElMu took over has been pretty epic. I had set a deadline for myself of March 19 to move off since that was the day they decided to force us to switch off of SMS 2FA. I was getting prompted frequently in the Twitter app. I’ve been pulling up Mastodon side-by-side with Twitter to try to add people in Mastodon (my Mastodon user name is in my Twitter profile). It’s a slow process. Mark Cathcart pointed out correctly that Mastodon is not a sure thing since you’re at the mercy of the owner of the server that your data resides. I need to look into that some more. It’s another reason I haven’t completely left Twitter. The death of 3rd party API access to Twitter has meant that Tweetbot is dead and that was a big reason I still used Twitter. It was light years better than the Twitter mobile app. Tapbots has created a mobile app for Mastodon called Ivory, but it’s a subscription model that I had avoided with Tweetbot by staying on an older version prior to the subscription model. I’m basically straddling both apps right now for all of these reasons. I joined Twitter during SXSW 2006 and had a pretty good experience even now which I attribute to curating a good list of people to follow from early on and then ignoring the algorithm tabs like “For You”. I end up picking “Following” on Twitter and Instagram to just see the people I follow and not the bullshit the algorithm picks for me. I’m really getting fed up with Instagram. I’m closer to bailing there than Twitter. But so many businesses use it as a platform for notifications that it’s hard to quit it completely.

 Posted by on March 28, 2023 at 9:28 pm
Mar 282023
 
Danny playing on the rug at the Overlook - The Shining

Much has been said about this movie over the years. I recently read a review of the new insanely expensive book that came out about it. It sounds like a very definitive guide and I might consider purchasing it if they ever make a reasonably priced copy. The article is a nice mix of how it influenced Pixar’s Lee Unkrich, someone I already follow on Twitter and his busting of some of the myths about the film in the course of researching the book. I have previously posted a link to the film that Kubrick’s daughter made during the making of the Shining. I remember seeing it in the theater with my mother and some family friends. I’m pretty sure I was the youngest there and probably shouldn’t have seen it at my age (a recurring theme if you know me). It came out in the summer of 1980, so I was 8 years old. The actor who plays Danny is less than a year younger than me. And to show what a rabbit hole the Internet can be, in double checking Lloyd’s age on IMDB, I was introduced to another documentary called Filmworker about english actor Leon Vitali who was an assistant to Kubrick for 30 years. Now I need to watch that. Apparently it came out in 2017 and I completely missed it. In general, I’m a Kubrick fan at least of the visuals. The actual movies can be hit or miss. The Killing is amazing. I can really only sit through parts of 2001 and Eyes Wide Shut. Same with Clockwork Orange. It’s too much.

I didn’t read Stephen King’s book until later but my mother told me that the book included animal topiaries that came to life that were left out of the movie (presumably because that was going to be too difficult to pull off in the late 70s). It was that one and The Stand that I learned about from her early on.

 Posted by on March 28, 2023 at 12:29 pm