Muffin Bottoms [not] Just another WordPress weblog

02/26/2011

Pre-Release for CD Single.

Filed under: Mundane Or Sublime,Music and Stuff — admin @ 9:01 pm

This CD single should come back from the printers in about 10 days. I can’t wait to rack it and stuff.

Please enjoy this music video in the meantime.

The song is Chiapaneca and it’s a tone poem. Read along the first or second time you hear this song and you should be able to envision it.

Cheers,

marco

It is December 22, 1997. A paramilitary group called “Paz y Justicia” rapes and murders dozens of women and children at a prayer meeting in Acteal, Chenalho, Chiapas. One paramilitary chooses to leave. He picks up a little girl, Marcela saving her from harm. But later he is found out in the act of helping her escape to the neighboring village and they hang him after much torture. Aggressively they search for little Marcela but give up after a time. There are other witnesses they weren’t able to kill. Undetected, a young guitarist sits in the bushes; waiting for them to leave. He remembers everything he has seen.

02/08/2011

Not Reviewing David Mamet’s Book ‘Theater’ Just Saying.

Filed under: Academic,Mundane Or Sublime,Pop Culture — admin @ 1:55 pm

0. Storytelling lives on despite our genocide of almost every storyteller before us. Can we survive the next round? Should we?

I appreciate David Mamet’s inquiries in his new book THEATER [978-0-571-25524-5]; but not his awfully snarky tone. Some of what I read in this book is spot on but most isn’t. Here are some raw notes I’ve made as I was reading his arguments. I won’t bother explaining much of each reply’s antecedent. I’m not in any classes this semester and this is NOT an academic paper. Consider it more of a non-traditional and multifaceted response paper. I’ve kept page numbers in case you’d like to thumb through the book yourself and see what specifics might’ve irked me so.

Enjoy.

12. An eagle needs 300 miles. S/he’s survived confinement inside our modern lack of space for hundreds of years now. Notice I said survived and not thrived. This whole chapter [2. Hunter and the Game] tries to say that a play’s entire domain is its audience and that this audience has disappeared. Mamet makes fast work of claiming that the middle class is gone. He must not notice that people at the top of poverty as well as the bottom of wealth constantly insist they are middle class. Well, if enough of them insist it — I hate to break it to you but — it becomes true. So it hasn’t totally disappeared. Shrunk perhaps; or changed drastically leaving so many playwrights behind maybe, but it’s not gone.

42. Winona Ryder, Al Pacino and Eugene O’Neill would NOT agree. See “Hairy Ape” or “Looking For Richard. “ Mamet is claiming that an actor cannot prepare anything for a role. S/he can only read lines how the instructions require. Wow.

57. How do you explain Moliere, then? Hair? Jesus Christ Superstar? Always be political just never let anyone know you HAVE been so. “Should the theater be political,” Mamet asks and tells, “Absolutely not.” Jean-Baptiste Poquelin’s career [this is/was Moliere’s real name] spanned almost as long as Shakespeare’s. That certainly implies he had commercial success with some of his work. I have yet to read something from him that isn’t redressing grievances against Kings or Popes.

72. Mamet contradicts himself often. I won’t pick on specifics. I’ll have to read his other books to see if he’s a real critic or just a complete hater like Christopher Hitchens or P.J. O’Rourke. It’s so easy to write what you hate. Let’s hear what you love. Or has this author removed all of the love from his book like so much negative space?

83. See what I mean about negative space? Author is definitely not an artist. “Most actors pause before each line,” he says and then asks, “Why? Pick up the pace. Nobody pays to see you think.” Sure they do. They don’t like over produced language, but they won’t tolerate undeveloped characters for very long either. Throw me 20 fastballs in a row and I’ll eventually start hitting homeruns and then just quit. An occasional changeup or curveball will keep me in the game.

101. I’ve never before seen someone claim it’s all about money and it’s not about money at the same time. I have now.

106. There is such thing as instant feedback such as rotten fruits and vegetables, boos, moneyback demands and the like. But plays and movies are partly written WITHOUT the audience in mind. Were it not, writers would only produce for a lowest common denominator and therefore lose people like me forever. The current fare would MORE closely resemble the fictitious movie “Ass” inside of the movie “Idiocracy.” What??? You’ve never seen it? Maybe you need to see it, or MAYBE YOU DON’T. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4491313230254736145# Don’t say I didn’t warn you. It CAN get this terrible, people.

116. One of the few things I agree fully with Mamet on! Writing cannot be taught. It can be inspired, and honed but not taught. I believe with all my heart that I was a writer before I was born. I noticed this in 5th grade. It came from having a very cool English teacher. She was over a hundred years old I thought, and she had the wisdom of a million ancient ones. What she imparted on me was not how to write. It was how best you can express yourself. She showed me some tools and technique and stayed excited the whole time. I caught that. I did not catch “how to write” from this Mrs. Laurie; but I did watch myself become a writer under her tutelage to be sure.

154 Were it only about time, Samuel Beckett and Norman Lear would never have had any success; Stanislovsky or O’Neill for that matter. Or is Mamet just a name dropper? I’ll read one of his earlier books and try to find out. In fact what is it about “western” civilization and its obsession with time? Is it a fixation or fetish perhaps? Indigenous storytelling all over the world has little or no regard for (or even a focus upon) time. In a Jeff Barnaby or Sherman Alexie film you will drive yourself certifiably insane if you insist on knowing what happened before during or after some other event. Did it happen? It happened. Tell me again about that thing that happened. I don’t really care if it happened before or after you or I were born even.

Speaking of which, when did David Mamet publish this book? 2010, but the paperback hasn’t even hit the EEUU yet. So for all intents and purposes, no-one-who-is-anyone has read it yet.

12/29/2010

Mike Figgis’ Filmmaking Book Was Great! Here go some excerpts…

Filed under: Academic,Mundane Or Sublime,Music and Stuff,Pop Culture,Tech — admin @ 8:30 am

Here are some quotes from the handy book, “Digital Filmmaking by Mike Figgis.

I really found his first person account of the transition from film to digital (Figgis made “Hotel” and “Leaving Las Vegas” and so many other movies that don’t get named as often) to be one of the best descriptions of not just what’s being done in the industry, but what each of us can do right this moment with what most of us already have!

“Mike Figgis is a man who lives and breathes the cinema… While most filmmakers are content to plod their dreary way from one foregone conclusion to another, Figgis is out there on the edge, joyously pulling off cockamamie stunts.” — Roger Ebert.

Ten years ago the professional camera was entirely out of reach to anyone other than millionaires. And now we have these things that are almost disposable.

One of the great film composers, Morricone, formulated a list of advice to filmmakers and composers. He advised that you should not change the key of your piece of music unless you have a real good reason to — because when you change the key, it makes the audience think something else has changed. the function of music is to UNDERSCORE. We use the word ‘score,’ but what we really mean is ‘underscore.’ The score should not lead but support the film, adding tension and emotional subtlety. It is UNDER the film. I have a huge problem with a lot of scores that I hear, which are definitely not under – they are OVER the film.

Opposed to this is making a digital film, where you should sort of infiltrate yourself into a natural environment, and not try to change it. You don’t stop the traffic, you don’t highlight your presence, you don’t put up a big neon sign announcing the film. It’s rather like taking a stills photograph — in a subtle way, after a while people don’t seem to see you anymore because you’re not shouting, ‘We need silence now!’ Or, ‘Stop the traffic!’ and the director’s not screaming, ‘Who let that person through?’ You just observe the environment sufficiently to knkow where to put the camera, and then you let the environment continue. The actors are then reacting to natural phenomena rather than fake phenomena.

I will never see my footage as an object — a can of film, a tape in a case, a reel of sound, a negative of a still image. Those formats are all poised to disappear. This makes me feel insecure, and I have resorted to spending days making back-up copies of all my information. I have had no choice but to become an obsessive filing clerk. I make three copies of everything I generate, and then I deposit each of the three at a different location. Why? Because in my deeply superstitious pagan mind, I have the notion that otherwise it could vanish without a trace.

What happens in America with mainstream films is that they test the film, and if it doesn’t test very well, the first thing that will be blamed will be the music — hence the hysteria of adding louder and louder strings and making a bigger noise. Maybe the answer would be to take the music off altogether and then test the film, and afterwards start gently adding it back in.

It was Sony, the great innovator, who came up with DAT – digital audio tape, a tiny but highly sophisticated tape. The first record-and-playback DAT machines were very well made, very robust, professional machines, not cheap but not fearfully expensive. And almost immediately the industry accepted it: DAT became THE format for mastering sound. Certain engineers whom I talked to at the time were horrified. ‘The quality’s great, but where’s your security? This is a tiny piece of tape in a plastic box…’ — whereas before, you were using really big four-inch-wide master tapes. DAT wasn’t invented as something to take over as the mastering format for recorded sound, but that’s the way innovation works.

…it means you can shoot at very low shutter speed, plus you can change the aperture to make a very high-contrast black and white image. Which means you can virtually shoot in the dark.

[MY THOUGHT: when I read that; Maybe the jump from 8 to super8 was bigger than any other technological advance yet, except maybe DAT]

—————————————————————————

So yes, these quotes are all over the place, they’re just the pieces which struck me the hardest on my first read.

If you want to see most of them in their own context, almost all the pages are up at:

http://books.google.com/books?id=tTG3luLsbrAC&lpg=PP1&ots=SbKt0JfX9M&dq=figgis%20filmmaking&pg=PA56#v=snippet&q=opposed%20to%20this&f=false

and/or you can buy the book at

For so much more info about Mike Figgis:

http://www.red-mullet.com/home.html

http://www.myspace.com/mikefiggis

11/30/2010

Reply as BlogPost

Filed under: Mundane Or Sublime,Music and Stuff,Pop Culture,Tech — admin @ 9:47 am

Sometimes I go long on a reply somewhere and look it over after hitting send and realize it’s its own blog post really.

Here’s another one I believe stands on its own just fine. (I’ll try to bring forward context as well though.)

Our society is so out of control. We’ve completely lost sight of what matters until we see a great moment in a great movie or something and then we shed what, one single tear that feels like “I get it…” and then we go right back to all the unnatural things in life that we’ve been conditioned through a lifetime to think are natural.

Yikes.

I’m immersed in all these same things, but I try to be mindful at all times of concepts such as “I am not my cellphone,” “I am not my car,” “I am not my hair style,” and “I am not my body type!”

Especially while making art because those are the things that are going to continue past my own words spoken and footsteps taken, etc.

RE:

pic and quote on a friend’s post

“The funny thing is that some people reduce freedom to a brand,” Gaga said between tears. “They think that it’s trendy now to be free. They think it’s trendy to be excited about your identity. When in truth, there is nothing trendy about ‘Born This Way.’ ‘Born This Way’ is a spirit, and it is this connection that we all share. It is something so much deeper than a wig or a lipstick or an outfit or a f**kn’ meat dress. ‘Born This Way’ is about us, ‘Born This Way’ is about what keeps us up at night and makes us afraid.” –Lady Gaga, Poland (Nov. 2010)

And there was an

[IMAGE]

with Lady Gaga with a yellow phone over her left eye.

and my buddy wrote:

So so typical of today’s world: cellphone attached to our bodies as computers control, dictate every seconds of our lives…

[RElated]=[ http://sheepdognationrocks.blogspot.com ]

10/30/2010

Violence Killed Another Friend; I’m Angry and Sad.

Filed under: Mundane Or Sublime,Music and Stuff,News — admin @ 9:45 am

For the rest of my life I will miss Matt Chew who got murdered late last night just walking home from work.

He made some of the best hand-tossed wood-fired pizza at a place called Two Wives and was also an incredibly eloquent DJ.

!

I feel angry/sad/horrified. One of the first new friends I made when I moved back here to southern New England from Oregon in ’05ish ’06ish. He and I have many common friends. Matt was incredibly kind, thoughtful and wise beyond years.

Fellow DJ PKAT PLUR sends up this mp3 because it was known to be one of Matt’s favorites:

http://pkat.plur.ca/plurtrain/ha-p-kore%20sessions/Pkat%20-%20Ha-P-Kore%209%2091703.mp3

10/25/2010

The Making Of Wampum by Marc Frucht

Filed under: Academic,Food,Mundane Or Sublime,Music and Stuff,Tech — admin @ 3:33 pm

The Making of Wampum

Marc Frucht

Anth 3451

Final Paper about Final Presentation.

December, 2009

I chose to learn how difficult it is to make wampum beads by hand in an effort to understand why people who make contemporary wampum jewelry seldom also make wampum beads.

It turns out that even the most skilled artisans can only make one complete bead after about 20 minutes of difficult and dangerous work. Power tools do not cut this time down very much because for every minute you might gain in technology, you lose just as much, if not more to broken shells. If you see beads such as these (and they are not antique:)

there is a high likelihood they will be plastic, glass or wood, but not shell. To be honest, the last technological innovation that has helped streamline the construction of wampum beads was the steel drill. As I’d said before, if you try taking the next step and electrify that drill you must be very careful to use the slowest setting; still you must bear down ever so lightly or a shell will break unexpectedly, wasting all the time you’d put in making that bead.

After I got the hang of drilling my beads, I tried using a Dremel tool at its slowest setting and I never had good results no matter how I would change my technique. I’d get 2/3 of the way into a bead or so, and it would smash, or crack.

Quahogs that people work with traditionally are about 5 inches long and 2 1/2 inches wide, with a very thick shell. It’s rare that you find quahog shells that large nowadays. After this project I learned that Quahogs are much smaller nowadays because just like Cod and Lobsters, they’ve been fished out the past couple hundred years. So the ones that are found in southern New England aren’t very large, and don’t have a very thick purple part. Often times you’re only able to make a bead that is short and narrow which wouldn’t be useful for too many other projects.

I did most of my breaking and cutting on the rocks at Avery Point’s shore in Groton, CT. Then I did most of the drilling and grinding on a picnic table in my back yard on the other side of Groton. Half way through the process on several beads, I learned that it’s best to do all of the work under the water because the dust that comes away from your product is toxic. Since my project was during early winter months, I didn’t have much choice so I kept a bowl of water near and dunked the pieces regularly, and took lots of breaks, but I wasn’t able to do all the work under the water.

I broke the first couple shells into pieces that were much too small. I found I was using a large stone and bearing down with all my might, when I didn’t need to. If you just tap lightly 2-3 times, they will break into something close to uniform rectangular pieces. Not ever piece is usable of course; but if you’re starting from a very large shell (all but one of my Quahog shells were too small to be honest) you’ll get 5 or 6 pieces that might become a bead with the traditional sizes of 8mm in length and 5mm in diameter or perhaps 7mm by 5mm.

There was a seagull who was watching me work for a very long time during one of my project sessions. You’ll see him or her in the video I presented.

http://www.tinyurl.com/MakingWampum

In picking music for the soundtrack I decided I’d only use instrumental guitar and mostly old standards such as ‘Summertime’ from Porgy and Bess, and ‘Rebel Rouser’ by Duane Eddy. I used the melody to ‘Limbo Rock’ trying to give motion to the segment where the bird was flying across the water, but I also noticed it worked well while s/he was walking around on the rocks as well.

I insisted on using guitars that I’ve adopted and reworked by hand to in an effort to match the energy of the project itself. So the two guitars I picked are a bamboo guitar that a friend gave me because he thought it was really ugly. After accepting it, I learned that it was handmade by a guy named Jun Reputana who is a famous luthier near Ceba Philippines. Instead of mother of pearl inlay, he uses shell that he finds on the shore where he lives. It turns out he walks up and down the beach until he’s found just the right shell to go along with the guitar he’s making!

The second guitar I picked was a ’74 Castilla Strat copy, I found in a Goodwill and had my friend Zack in Westerly, RI. do all the extra recondition that I’m not good at. That’s the one I used for the stereotypical NDN sounds that I began the video with as a somewhat comedic ice-breaker.

I’m told the word ‘Quahog’ comes from the Narraganset word Poquauhock and that the Algonquin word Wampumpeag is white shell. No one seems to know what meant purple or black shell; but I have a hunch it’s going to be something like Wampumpog or maybe Wampumpaug. I chose to not include all of that in my presentation because I didn’t want to include hunches. I’ll keep researching and hope I bump into those meanings as well.

I didn’t finish the final two beads I presented on. Some of why I stopped right there was that I was running out of time; but I also recognized that I had enough to present on at that point. And perhaps showing what I wasn’t able to complete has more meaning than if I had in fact come up with my original goal of four beads, two perfectly purple, and two wonderfully white. I managed to drill all the way through one shell and had begun smoothing the cylinder down a little bit more narrow, and I was almost all the way to the other side of the second one when I noticed since I was too close to one of the sides, I’ll have the problem as I narrow that one, that I’ll run out of fiber that can be taken down. So that one is most likely going to crack, leaving me with only the one nearly finished bead.

I never worked with any Atlantic Whelk, because I wasn’t able to find any from restaurants; and no one had a lead on who else I could ask. But I learned that whelk shells give the best texture for a snowy white bead to complement with the all purple ones. I can find whelk meat in Chinese groceries, but not the shell. I’d love to find out someday where it is they dispose of their shells.

Sources Cited:

http://www.nativetech.org/wampum/wamphist.htm

http://www.peace4turtleisland.org/pages/wampum1.htm

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/672397/how_to_make_your_own_wampum_beads.html

http://www.ehow.com/how_5172118_make-wampum-beads.html

http://xingyangaquatics.en.made-in-china.com/product/IbNmPSTUqAYR/China-Whelk-Meat-Slices-4-.html

Brennessel, Barbara. Good Tidings: The History and Ecology of Shellfish Farming in the Northeast. Lebanon: University Press of New England, 2008.

SEE THIS PAPER AS A WORD DOC:

http://www.frucht.org/framesbymarco/ThemakingofWampum.doc

Lastly here are a couple shameless plugs, just because this page ended up higher in google and bing for some reason.  😉

http://www.reverbnation.com/marcofrucht

http://www.oilpanalley.com

10/20/2010

And now… another liberal dose of economic analysis

Filed under: Academic,Mundane Or Sublime,News — admin @ 12:31 am

This post actually began as a FaceBook reply to an old friend who is noticing some of the same things I am.

The Democrats are desperate to prove they didn’t ruin this economy beyond repair. I will actually feel horrible if this does rage into a depression before the 2012 election and the Republicans get away with blaming the Democrats.

It is now a very old dogma that seems to go back well before the “great depression” (there were two more I’m pretty sure were worse than 1929 by the way, in the 1870s and in the 1760s!!!)

The Republicans keep calling the Democrats “tax and spend” which is a half truth at best. Most of the time they must tax us it is because they were handed an impossible situation by Republicans who perhaps do not tax, but outspend Democrats at least 2 to 1!!!

Where on earth do they expect us to grasp that this spending will come from? Whatever Democrat is honest enough and suicidal enough to tax us!!!

Then they play blame the victim like a rapist trying his hardest to tell the judge that she deserved it because her dress was red, or it was low cut enough to almost see a nipple!!!

Do people fall for this every single time?

I wish they’d wake up before this off year election and I certainly wish they will get it before 2012!!!

10/01/2010

Economic Analysis Of a MOST Macro Kind.

Filed under: Mundane Or Sublime,OpEd,Tech — admin @ 8:17 am

I saw the following astute and alert analysis on a friend’s Facebook page today and replied in kind.

In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with looking into the minimum wage in CT to see if it helps people get a job or somehow impairs them from getting a job in CT. It is worth a study. It appears that this may be a taboo entitlement situation to many. It could be possible to keep those at the present minimum wage and hire the new people at a lower minimum wage. I am no expert… I just look at things from different points of view.

I agree with you sort of!

The biggest problem was on or about 1992 when “industry” took a similar look and saw that union jobs had hit a magic 16. The average person with 16 years in a factory was making 16 dollars per hour.

Bosses all over this country decided they needed to cut that down to 10/hr at the end of someone’s career, and only minimum wage at the beginning.

Except for the bosses’ bosses; NO ONE liked that idea.

So instead they downsized/outsourced/closed every single plant in this nation one by one. They hired “middlemen” at about 15 per hour to lead entire teams of people making just a dollar or two more per hour than the minimum wage instead of the 16 that they panicked about in the first place.

Now that almost everyone makes just a couple bucks more than minimum wage they’re panicking again.

Do we want the minimum wage to be only 2/3 what it was last year?

1/3?

This is a very cynical proposition.

These are most cynical times.

Ironically, President Clinton pushed through a pay increase for each new President (Bush then Obama then who…) of about 3/2’s.

At a time when the US economy must shrink 2/3’s if it will survive???

We are in grave danger.

09/29/2010

Poems, Schmoems…

Filed under: Academic,Food,Humor,Mundane Or Sublime,Pop Culture,Tech — admin @ 4:31 pm 
Violence impacted to society;
Embedded in life.
No capo, slide, fuzz pedal or 
Delay - no fingerpicks or 
Teleprompter, just play.
Eugene O'Neill wallops the skipper
With words and rocks the boat,
Frank Sinatra "does it [his] way"
Rooted in divine inspiration,
He claims.
Apple falls on head and
Turns lightbulb on jouncing
Thought, slurping coffee
Like a pretentious snit.
Jogging memory with a
Jarful of Jolt cola.
Orange lentils & linguini
Lodged in a sore throat.
Don't sop the heat of hot chili
With cucumber; use bread: good buffer.

Shelter Wagon is hospitality on a horse. 
Running from river to river
Haven't seen hay for 30 miles:
How come I have hayfever??

Run chasing your shadow
All morning; then you can 
Chase it home all afternoon.

http://www.textfiles.com/magazines/ATI/journal.txt

09/02/2010

Pepsi Cans & Peavey Amps. – by marco

Filed under: Food,Mundane Or Sublime,Music and Stuff — admin @ 6:14 am

Pepsi Cans & Peavey Amps.

A poem by marco

(and also the title poem of a brand new chap book…)


Peanut Butter prohibited.
Protein, fat.
Meat is best, better than
Butter.
Better, not bitter.
Meat, eat. Gnash-Gulash.

Spinach.
Yum.
Spinach and peanut butter.
Why cringe?
Spinach and PB – PB & S.
Peanut butter and spinach???
Hmm…..
Mmm…
Cottage cheese, please.
Loud raucous rock-n-roll music.

Tastes good.
Taste better than the plasma and
Saline I ate yesterday afternoon.
$15.
Mooncheese.
Meunster.
Fun with food/
Rock-n-roll.

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