John & Belle Have A Blog

Ben is going to let me go into space

Belle's baby bro Ben works for Bigelow Aerospace - cool job, eh? And he really came through with a great X-Mas present for Mei Mei this year: a 'real' NASA spacesuit, accompanied by an official-looking letter. Mei Mei interpreted it very seriously, per the title of this post. I Photoshop, accordingly. (Click for larger.) Thank you, Ben!

More pics under the fold.

Moustache Rides of Understanding: 5c

From the comments to this Reiham Salam post:

The interests of Gay men are generally diametrically opposed to that of straight working class men.

For gay men, who are often wealthy and occupy niches in which they dominate, i.e designing, entertainment, media, etc. their self-interest is lower wages for blue collar work (which in turn lowers their prices when they subcontract that work, be it stagehands or carpenters). Along with general restrictions on straight men, i.e. a culturally hostile environment, particularly encouraged among women [?! I'm afraid he's talking about sexual harassment and marital rape laws, sadly.].

The more straight men are unable to have sex with women [he's clearly speaking from experience here], the more it is hoped they will substitute gay sex (as happens in many Muslim countries with severe restrictions).

Of course the interests of straight and gay men are irrevocably hostile and mutually exclusive. How can this be surprising?

Particularly on Immigration (blue collar men hard hit by low wage competition) you can see this. The well known hostility among Black men towards gays is another clue — that does not happen by accident and IMHO represents real interests in conflict. [And here I'd been thinking socially disadvantaged groups often scapegoat those even less powerful as a way to deal with their own low status!]

Gay Marriage as a proxy — i.e. show of strength for gay men’s ability to push things through — is like the Orangemen and Catholics battles over who will parade through a street in Ulster. Silly on the particulars, meaningful over who has the most power.

Let me tell you, here's nothing a gay man loves as much as paying straight, blue-collar stagehands poor wages. It means he can put on more shows for less money, and as fully 76% of gay men work in the Broadway-Industrial Complex, you know that's a bread-and-butter issue for the homos.

I love it when right-wingers manage to tie liberals and feminists together with islamofascists; they're working together to make decent straight men have gay sex!!! Damn them!!! A glance at the ranks of the fallen Republicans of the last year make it pretty clear that we're winning. To quote Tom Friedman, "Suck. On. This."

Africa

The other day I heard a (terrible) song that sampled Toto's "Africa", which sent me on a little internet hunt, during the course of which I found this interesting article:

So when we were doing ‘Africa,’ I set up a bass drum, snare drum and a hi-hat, and [percussionist] Lenny Castro set up right in front of me with a conga. We looked at each other and just started playing the basic groove — the bass drum on 1, on the ‘and’ of 2 and 3. The backbeat is on 3, so it's a half-time feel, and it's 16th notes on the hi-hat. Lenny started playing a conga pattern. We played for five minutes on tape — no click, no nothing. We just played. And I was singing the bass line for ‘Africa’ in my mind, so we had a relative tempo.

“Lenny and I went into the booth and listened back to the five minutes of that same boring pattern,” Porcaro said. “We picked out the best two bars that we thought were grooving and we marked those two bars on tape. We made another mark four bars before those two bars. Lenny and I went back out; I had a cowbell, Lenny had a shaker. They gave us two new tracks and they gave us the cue when they saw the first mark go by, where Lenny and I started playing to get into the groove, so by the time that fifth bar came, which was the first bar of the two bars we marked as the cool bars we liked, we were locked, and we overdubbed shaker and cowbell. So there was bass drum, snare drum, hi-hat, two congas, a cowbell and a shaker. We went back in, cut the tape and made a one-bar tape loop that went 'round and 'round and 'round.

It's suggested that this was one of the first loops ever used in a pop song. The degree of care and studio wizardry that went into such an essentially vapid (yet great) song is extraordinary:

“We recorded 24-track with lots of slaves,” Paich continues. “We got it from Paul Simon, who I think was the first to do it. As soon as he did the rhythm track, he would put the master away so it wouldn't get worn down and you'd make another 24-track tape for vocals, one of guitars, et cetera, and we made a lot of those. By then, I had my first little 24-track studio [dubbed Hog Manner] at my house, which was a Trident flexi-mix console, two JBL 4311 speakers and two Ampex M1200s, and we messed around doing overdubs there. We were recording 30 ips, non-Dolby, if you can imagine! There was a Yamaha instrument called a GS1, a prototype for the DX7, which at that time was the new little digital synthesizer, so the kalimba sound you hear is that. And we used a CS80, which is very unique....

It was a time when we wanted to experiment a lot,” Lukather recalls. “We lived in the studio. It was before any of us were married and had kids, so we rented a Winnebago and had it in the parking lot at Sunset Sound so we didn't have to go home. We would record all day and all night and if anyone wanted to sleep, they could go into the Winnebago.”

Greg Ladanyi then came in to mix the album. “I think we used three 24-track machines for ‘Africa’ and ‘Rosanna,’ which was something a little bit ahead of its time,” he says. “We were at the Sound Factory. We had to mix ‘Africa’ in sections because the console wasn't big enough — it didn't have enough faders for the amount of tracks that were on the record. We had to mix sections and I had to edit the 2-track together to complete the mixes — the verses got mixed, the chorus would go by and then once the verses were mixed, we mixed the choruses and cut the choruses into the verses. The guys in the room were involved in moving faders because we had no automation on the console then. I would be mixing and I'd have Lukather on one side of the console and Paich or Porcaro on the other side of the console and we would do the rides all live. We kept doing the mixes over and over until we got the rides the way we wanted to hear them.

I think I've mentioned before that I know Heather Porcaro, who is...I thought she was Jeff Porcaro's daughter, but it says in the article he died in 1992, so it must be Joe Porcaro. She is a super-awesome person and a very talented musician in her own right. (Her grandfather was a jazz musician too, so it's a family thing.) I love the idea of all of them in the studio, bent over the faders, all nodding at each other: now, sliiiide. The funny thing is that I always assumed there was nothing but synth keyboards in there when there was actually a world of groovy percussion instruments and actual flute solos. All hail sleazy LA studio rock!

Christmas Day

We went to the Botanic Gardens after opening presents.

Merry X-Mas!

Here's Mei Mei singing "Rudolph" (mp3).

And Zoë singing "Jingle Bells" in Mandarin.

And Zoë sings a stanza from "Misfit" (from the Rudolph special).

And Mei Mei hums along to the theme from "Miniscule" (French short animation series).

Confunkshun

I bet you haven't been listening to enough Confunkshun lately, have you? The song "Early Morning Sunshine", off 1980's "Spirit of Love" is one of my favorite funk/rare groove songs ever. No YouTube available, so you'll just have to enjoy "Too Tight" up in here. Pantsuits11!!!1ONE!

OMG this video is awesome. So much Bay area-specific greatness.

Into the Woobs

Obviously all the X-Mas action is in my post over at CT. Free printables!

Still here?

OK, here's Mei Mei as the ghost of Christmas present:

And here's a story Zoë wrote:

And here's her latest art breakthrough. This work is entitled "Japanese Lady". She's eating sushi, as you can plainly see. The coloring was done in Photoshop. Daddy's job is to make the 'ants' appear so she can color between the lines perfectly.

Last Time

And as long as we're getting all Singapore nostalgic, check out this great flickr photoset of pictures from Pulau Ubin. Now just a sleepy island Singaporeans visit on the weekend, it used to house thousands of people working in its quarries and rubber plantations. I particularly like this one and this for the women's outfits, and this gives a nice sense of the place.

Hip, Happenin' Tiong Bahru

Hey, there's a whole blog related to Tiong Bahru, a hip Singaporean neighborhood. Tiong Bahru has some of the country's oldest government-built housing, constructed by the SIT, precursor to today's HDB (housing and development board). The flats are walk-up rather than having lifts. Many of them are in quite poor condition since they were considered undesirable for many years. Now people are finally cottoning on to the charm of these older flats, and restoring them in quite appropriate ways from what I've seen. (This is in contrast to Singaporean shophouses, many of which have been gutted and modernized in a somewhat destructive way.) Singapore has long had a focus on the future so intense that many nice things from the past are left behind. And as rich as Singapore is, many of its citizens are only one or two generations removed from serious poverty; poor people are not nostalgic about the dresses their auntie used to wear, or the way their grandma's flat looked. They want new!! With Italian leather!!! Nice to see people coming around to the pleasures of restoring and remembering (even the recent) the past. (I don't think the lady in this post in on board, though...) Click round through the FAQs links at the side of the blog to get a feel for what it looks like. It's really a great little neighborhood.

In Which Two Capuchins Are Justly(?) Defrauded of Their Pâté

I was trying to find out more about traditional Philippine houses of the bahay na bato type, and learning they often had an 'azotea' I attempted to learn about that also, with the result that I found myself reading The Former Philippines Through Foreign Eyes, by Fedor Jagor et. al. I will amuse you by quoting from Chapter VII:

[A convento and the parish priest.] I passed the night in a convento, as the dwelling of the parish priest is called in the Philippines. It was extremely dirty, and the priest, an Augustinian, was full of proselytish ardor. I had to undergo a long geographical examination about the difference between Prussia and Russia; was asked whether the great city of Nuremberg was the capital of the grand-duchy or of the empire of Russia; learnt that the English were on the point of returning to the bosom of the Catholic Church, and that the "others" would soon follow, and was, in short, in spite of the particular recommendation of Father Llanos, very badly received. Some little time afterwards I fell into the hands of two young Capuchins, who tried to convert me, but who, with the exception of this little impertinence, treated me capitally. They gave me pâtés de foie gras boiled in water, which I quickly recognized by the truffles swimming about in the grease. To punish them for their importunity I refrained from telling my hosts the right way to cook the pâtés, which I had the pleasure of afterwards eating in the forest, as I easily persuaded them to sell me the tins they had left. These are the only two occasions on which I was subjected to this kind of annoyance during my eighteen months’ residence in the Philippines.