Midwest Shows This Week
In case you missed the mailing list email AND the previous post about this, I’m doing a few shows in the midwest end of this week with Paul and Storm. This will be the last bit of touring before the new year, so I promise to kick out all the jams.
Thursday December 6 at 8 PM
Varsity Theater in Minneapolis, MN
Venue: http://www.varsitytheater.org/
Tickets: http://tinyurl.com/33ez3s
Friday December 7 at 7:30 PM
Majestic Theater in Madison, WI
Venue: http://majesticmadison.com/
Tickets: http://tinyurl.com/2lzhlm
*****TWO SHOWS*******
Saturday December 8 at 7:30 PM and 10:30 PM
Schuba’s Tavern in Chicago, IL
Venue: http://www.schubas.com/
Tickets: http://www.schubas.com/tickets.aspx (scroll down)
Sunday December 9 at 8 PM
Blueberry Hill in St. Louis, MO
Venue: http://www.blueberryhill.com/
Tickets: http://tinyurl.com/2n854r
See you in the audience…
Birthday!
On Saturday I turned 37 and boy do I feel terrific! 37 is the new 36!
I want to thank all the people who sent me nice messages, bought bananas, and paid tribute in various ways. Special thanks go out to those particularly dedicated minions who participated in this grass roots campaign to punch all media in the nuts with the fist of me. We didn’t make it to the Today Show this year, but I bet we made Ann Curry nervous, and I count that as an enormous victory.
Here are a couple of links to things that to me look suspiciously like bday tributes:
Molly of previous uke fame sent in this video of her struggling through Mr. Fancy Pants. I feel the same way when I play it, believe me.
And it wouldn’t be a birthday without a video from Spiff, this one for Chiron Beta Prime. I’m a huge fan of the “Yoink!” sound effect and have just now decided that I’m going to use it a lot more often in daily life. One bunny was harmed during the making of this film.
Even in France they celebrate my birthday, usually by making cards that have a picture of me dressed up like a French zombie mime. Here’s one of those from Jeremsoft, the translator of Re: Vos Cerveaux.
Many thanks to one and all. Onward.
Re: Vos Cerveaux
Whilst carefully avoiding the completion of “My Beige Bear” I found myself distracted by a little side project. I’ve always wanted to record a couple of the hits in other languages just to see what would happen. Jeremsoft (who is French, and judging from the name, an AI) sent me a French translation for “Re: Your Brains” just out of the blue, and while I don’t speak fluently enough to understand everything in it, I caught enough clever translation choices to make me think it was pretty good.
I took a few years of French in high school but never got very good at it. So I spent a lot of time this week mimicking Jeremsoft’s recorded pronunciation, reading a phoenetic version supplied by Rhiannon, eliding syllables past the point of reason, and eating as many snails as I could. While recording I couldn’t help but notice an opportunity in the third verse for a reference to “Alouette,” that famous old French song about plucking feathers off a bird. My first ever joke in French! Vive me!
The result is this new version of Re: Your Brains for French speaking zombies everywhere (yes, even Canada). I hope zat you like eet.
Special French lyrics can be found here.
Doug Morris, Old Person
There’s a profile of Doug Morris, CEO of Universal in December’s Wired. You may read the summary of it on the New York Magazine blog if you’re short on time, especially since they have already pulled the best quote wherein Morris explains why the music industry didn’t just build their own digital distribution network when Napster first popped up and scared everyone:
“There’s no one in the record industry that’s a technologist,” Morris explains. “That’s a misconception writers make all the time, that the record industry missed this. They didn’t. They just didn’t know what to do. It’s like if you were suddenly asked to operate on your dog to remove his kidney. What would you do?”
Personally, I would hire a vet. But to Morris, even that wasn’t an option. “We didn’t know who to hire,” he says, becoming more agitated. “I wouldn’t be able to recognize a good technology person — anyone with a good bullshit story would have gotten past me.”
Wow. This is a CEO? At a record label, now? It’s really true, the reason the labels are so lost in this new world is because they are run by people who are on the other side of the digital divide. They can’t even figure out how to HIRE someone to help them work these newfangled “computing machines.” I bet Doug Morris still has trouble dragging and dropping.
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