Eddie Jefferson, "Zap! Carnivorous" [YouTube]
Inimitable practitioner of jazz vocalese Jefferson adds lyrics about inner city dangers to a fairly melodic, mellow, obscure 1973 Fender Rhodes workout by The New Heritage Keyboard Quartet (Roland Hanna, Mickey Tucker plus drummer and bassist)
New Heritage Keyboard Quartet "full album" (with crackles, worn grooves -- "Zap Carnivorous" is the first song) [YouTube]
The websites I followed in the Bush/Obama years are struggling for the right tone to deal with Trump.
Many just use his name and image for clickbait, to get outraged liberal juices flowing. Professor Juan Cole's Informed Comment site currently has the T-word in 14 out of 40 headlines on its front page. This isn't necessarily cynical but it is mindless.
These earnest lefties confuse cause and effect: The disease is oligarchy, Trump an egregious symptom.
He's also a walking caricature. That's one reason cyber-commentator Lauren Weinstein's attempt at a meme, Trump the Thug (at NATO headquarters), falls flat.
Thug isn't the right word -- clown maybe. Trump did in fact play a narcissistic boss on TV.
Weinstein's GIF misses the clueless unintended satire of the fake-gladhanding-turned-camera-conscious-posing on display in that clip. As macho swagger goes, it's preferable to Hillary Clinton's attempts to talk like a gunslinger -- at least it's funny.
The US system posed a grotesque set of candidate choices in the 2016 election. To personify this failure in one strutting buffoon is ultimately lazy.
Belated RIP to Steven Stokes, an electronic musician who ran Record Gallery in Dallas during the bleak Reagan Years, before moving to Seattle in 1989. (He ultimately wound up in Portland). His record-store-plus-art-gallery was an oasis of "downtown" culture in Dallas's dystopian sprawl of malls, sports stadiums, topless bars, and Baptist churches. Eventually even Stokes had had too much of it: "Nothing's ever going to happen here," he told me just before he moved. I kind of liked the negative inspiration but moved to NYC a few years later (which now has 7/11s and K-Marts).
A boingboing BBS post features reminiscences by a then-teenager from suburban Arlington, TX, who made pilgrimages into Dallas to visit Steve's store on Greenville Avenue.
I lived a few blocks away and bought many vinyl records, a few cassettes, and a painting there. Talking to Steve about music was always enjoyable.
The boingboing piece links to Mark Zuckerberg's crayon scribble site for teens and seniors, which has more info and a "Steven D. Stokes and the Record Gallery" page.
"Collective Rendering" [mp3 removed -- please listen on Bandcamp]
Song made with the Waveform digital audio workstation (a proprietary DAW from Tracktion software that happily works well on a Linux PC).
Many of the sounds emanate from the Collective softsynth bundled with the DAW -- a combination synth and sampler.
The beats are two 808 kits playing in Waveform's "sampler rack" plugins (five samplers, each playing a single beat, so that's ten samplers in all playing 808 hits).
Additional sounds come from sequences played on a Eurorack modular synth, recorded in Waveform, and EQ'd.
