trubbaman

There were short films produced in the 1920s and '30s, like Bessie Smith's immortal take on St. Louis Blues. Those continued through the '40s and were shown in movie theaters along with the cartoons and newsreels and such. They didn't make a ton of them, but they did make some. In the 1950s, as television rolled out across the country, time blocks weren't like they are now - there were five minute blocks, fifteen minute blocks, half-hour, hour and 90 minute blocks that would contain a wide variety of content, some of it some music act in performance. At the same time, Scopitones were popular, which were jukeboxes that played short movies of performers singing the hits of the day. In the '50s and '60s those shorts began to be incorporated into full-length movies so you'd have a band doing a few songs or a bunch of bands doing one or two each, and then some teenage hijinks stitching a storyline together - think Beach Movies or Teenage Romance type stuff, and movies that featured a band like The Beatles or Herman's Hermits or whomever. More productions, more popularity and more available tools meant that bands like The Beatles could do short films for songs and variety shows like Ed Sullivan would snap them up and show them, so there was an outlet for the bigger bands to do that. So no, visual content of music performances and interpretations have been around as long as there has been sound connected to pictures, and Strawberry Fields Forever was not the first time it had been done. The generation of content accelerated as the availability for viewing became more widespread, and once record companies, flush with cash, had the money and the talent and the tools to make these enduring advertisements for a launching channel that would play this content, it exploded. Don't forget that MTV was not an overnight sensation - it started out taking this content, which had been shown on local New York cable and independent channels, to a regional NYC-area audience. It wasn't even a 24-hour channel in the beginning. It took some time for it to grow beyond that area and eventually spread across the country. You may have come across those "I Want My MTV" ads where rockers would say that between commercials and songs - it wasn't picked up by cable systems and it took a couple years to grow into the massive thing it became.

Gotta stoke The Hate. Hate is Money.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4kvD29z2gk&ab_channel=BobDylan-Topic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBcPbkM-c5U&ab_channel=M.O.T.O.-Topic

I was there 1977-1981. We'd mill around the tables in the AC (Academic Center, before the UGL was ready), with that phone book of classes folded and dog-eared, signing up for classes. If we needed 'Instructor Approval' because we were taking something out of sequence, or we needed to pull seniority on someone to get a class in our major, then we'd have to go to the prof's office and get them to sign for it and go back. File the stuff, and then in a couple of weeks we'd get a bill in the mail for $250 or so for the semester. I think adding football tickets was another $50 or $60 but it might've been cheaper than that. Then we'd have to go to the Co-op to buy books and figure out how we'd come up with the $100 that was going to cost us. Probably get a couple egg rolls and a won ton from the cart outside for $1.

I was at that Jandek show as well. It was pretty interesting especially given that the mythology was reaching its peak. The Austin show was his first US performance and it included at least one very highly-regarded avant-garde musician who is really big in the improvisational music world - highly trained in that Ornette Coleman style of breaking down keys and playing only wrong notes and tearing at meter and such. Jandek walked on stage, put a book of lyrics on a music stand, pulled a guitar out of a case, put it on and then played for 60 minutes on the dot and stopped, put the guitar up and left. He only sortakinda acknowledged the audience once briefly but never spoke or looked up except for a couple of glances at the musicians playing at/with him. The concert had that quality that Brian Eno used to experiment with, beginning with dissonance and mismatched meter but as time went on every once in a while this discordant noise would lock together and it produced these incredible crystalline moments that stood out wildly apart from the noise, these bright bits of wonder and beauty that were almost immediately lost again in the noise. At the time, it was fascinating and exciting because no one knew anything about him other than a couple of murky images and some guarded articles with hesitant ‘interviews.’ Now that he’s played so often and has been seen and I guess, figured out to some degree he’s lost a lot of his cachet and mysterious appeal. I haven’t thought much about him in a while, maybe I should check back in and see where he is on the radar these days.

Postponed because Colbert has COVID.

Those backpacks are great, I'm just really over backpacks. I always had cheap, crappy luggage because I didn't fly that much but I finally decided to get something good. I had no idea how much better it is to have good luggage.

We just did a week in the UK and I had plenty with those two, but no room to bring souvenirs or anything like that back. I'm a road dog, I can pack light but adding in something like rain or cold gear would push it pretty hard. Otherwise there isn't that much difference between the US and Euro allowances, not enough to mean much to me anyway. I loved being able to trust that my stuff wouldn't be challenged and I could always have my bags with me, no matter which carrier we were on.

I've been super happy with my Monos Carry-On and my Tom Bihn Pilot. Both of them qualify as carryon / personal item on any airline and they hold much more than you'd expect. https://monos.com/collections/carry-on-luggage/products/carry-on?variant=25396777680960 https://www.tombihn.com/products/pilot?variant=42965521465533

I just remember Mick’s IFB not working and how he got more pissed off with every passing second before he pulled it out and threw it down on the stage.

I was there and had forgotten about DMB too. We were tied up in the ticket snafu so we missed all of Matchbox 20, which I'm not sad about yet. Ended up next to the B-stage down on the track.

It looked to me like maybe they had plans that got caught up in other plans so they flipped Luther’s to someone who couldn’t keep it afloat.

Onion ring loaf... https://houstonhistoricretail.com/restaurants/luthers-bar-b-q/

We used to go to Leo's regularly, in part just in hopes that BFG would show up and surprise us. That was a terrific neighborhood mainstay restaurant and it's missed.