President Drumpf

Nut Job  Looney Tunes  Egghead  Knucklehead  Nincompoop  Nitwit  Blockhead  Jack-a-Ninny  Fool-a-gape  Bozo  Booboo  Yah-hoo  Doofus  Dum Dum  Nimrod  Twinkie  YoYo  Buffoon  Ding Dong  Cretin  Dweeb  Dingbat  Sicko  UberMoron  Douche  Wazzock  Chumpy   Blowhard  Hobo  Donny Drumpf  & my personal all-time favorite:  PURE APPLESAUCE

All Things Must Pass/ Tower Records documentary

Back in my high school days (33+ years ago), a Friday night ritual for me was driving to a Tower Records store to check out new music on one of those listening stations. There was a Tower on El Cajon Blvd by San Diego State University. The other store was downtown, closer to the Sports Arena. Then in college I often stopped at the Tower in Mountain View (San Jose/ Santa Clara area) halfway between Fremont and Santa Cruz, almost every weekend on my drive back to school from the visit home with my family in the Bay Area. I got mostly cassette tapes or singles of bands like Depeche Mode, Yaz, New Order or Tears For Fears. For some reason I didn't listen to many American groups at the time, the mid 80s. Camper Van Beethoven and Pylon were a few exceptions.

I remember once visiting the Tower Records in New York City, 4th and Broadway I think in 1991, which also was the last time I talked to Carlos Tabakoff, who was a music director at KZSC-FM, the radio station of UC Santa Cruz. He got a job at CMJ in Manhattan and moved there the same year I started working at Portland Stage in Maine. I was shocked to hear that he passed away recently. Back then I was delivering some sound equipment and called him to see if we could meet somewhere. I had to drive back to Portland with the company van that day so couldn't stick around and Carlos said he can't believe that I'm "dissing" him like that. I didn't even know what that meant at the time. Carlos was probably my same age, or possibly even a few years younger. I can still hear his Brazilian accent and see that coy smile/ smirk on his face. He was a sweet and charming fellow with an extensive knowledge of the international music scene. We would talk for hours about all kinds of music.

I moved to Atlanta, Georgia in 1994. Boy was I glad to find a Tower Records store in the Lenox Square in the Buckhead area. It was conveniently located in a corner next to Bally Fitness, not too far from the exit off I-85, and close to Buford Highway, where we go for Vietnamese food all the time. I'd go there maybe twice a month, sometimes more when I was working on certain shows to get sound effects CDs, soundtracks, blank tapes, magazines, stickers and the free Pulse! magazines. I was in a couple of issues of Pulse! magazine-one of those DIDs (desert island discs) lists- and favorite world music recommendations. I remember like it just happened last year. How is it possible that twenty some years had just gone by in a blur? 

Needless to say, I was extremely saddened when Tower Records went bankrupt and suddenly closed all their stores including the Lenox one in 2006. Seemed overnight, without any warning. One weekend we woke up, and there was a "Going Out of Business" Sale. Tonight as I was surfing the TV and came across a documentary on Showtime entitled All Things Must Pass, I could really identify with the heart-wrenching commentaries by the employees who were let go after working there for 30 years. Tower Records was like a close favorite faithful family friend to us music aficionados. Many fans of the store mourn its passing. We were devastated. It was the first time I heard the term No Music, No Life! Recently I heard my nieces and nephews saying No Wi-Fi, No Life and it amused me to no end.

But just as George Harrison sings All Things Must Pass, life must go on...  
Nowadays, we could just peruse and get whatever we want/need online at the interwebs and you can do almost everything with a few clicks on Google. But you just cannot replace that tactile intimate feeling when you're in the store browsing the record albums, touching the cassette tapes, reading the books, the zines and the posters. You know, the good old golden days. Now I sound like a grumpy old man. GrandPa. Gramps. What I learned from the documentary was that there're currently 85 Tower Records stores still in operation in Japan today. Eighty five! And they couldn't keep just ONE store open here in America?

Waterdrop Dash 5K 2016

Mile One @Chattahoochee Nature Center in Roswell.

Mile Three, almost at the finish line.

Temple of Art - trailer GRIT

Ding Dong, Scalia is dead!

When Bette Davis was told that Joan Crawford had died, she replied, 
"Well my mother always told me to speak good of the dead. Joan Crawford is dead. Good."
So to paraphrase Bette Davis:

My mother always told me to speak good of the dead.
Antonin Scalia is dead. Good! He lived a long, hate-filled life.

(I lifted the last line from a friend, Amy D.  Hope she doesn't mind.)

Project 366

16/366

17/366

18/366

Day 12-14 of Project 366

Day 12  Camouflage. Create or alter something so that it disappear into its background.

12/366

Day 13  Use tea leaves or tea bags (used or unused) or even just liquid tea (in a cup or not) to create something today.

Day 14  Make something microscopic. How small can you work? Can you make something that requires a magnifying glass or microscope to see?

14/366

15 minute workout

http://videos.aarp.org/detail/video/4136656625001/the-aarp-15-minute-workout---aarp?cmp=SL-DSO-OUTBRAIN-DESKTAB-MULTI-VIDEORSS-VIDEO-VIEWS_The%20AARP%2015-Minute%20Workout_1132597082_4804907&linkBaseURL=http%3A%2F%2Fvideos.aarp.org%2Fdetail%2Fvideo%2F4136656625001%2Fthe-aarp-15-minute-workout---aarp%3Fcmp%3DSL-DSO-OUTBRAIN-DESKTAB-MULTI-VIDEORSS-VIDEO-VIEWS_The%2520AARP%252015-Minute%2520Workout_1132597082_4804907

Day 11

Day 11  Work on the other hand. Pick a medium you're comfortable with, then work with your non dominant hand-if you're usually favor your right hand then only use your left hand and vice-versa.

11/366 (used my left hand only)

David Bowie passed away last night so this is a sort of tribute from me. Today I'm calling all of our 5 cats Ziggy. Been listening to Slacker Radio's Feature Artist Top 33 station all day long at school. When the kids heard me play this station instead of the usual Kidz Bop Kids station, I told them that an icon in music for the past 50 years had just died. They said: David who?

So these are my favorite songs, in no particular order (from all of his 27 previous albums), I haven't heard his latest release which just came out last week:

• Sound & Vision
• Rebel Rebel
• Changes
• Modern Love
• Under Pressure
• Starman
• All the Young Dudes
• This is not America
• I'm Afraid of Americans
• Tonight
• Ziggy Stardust

10/366

Day 10 Use only water as your medium/inspiration today.

10/366

Day 8 and 9 of Project 366

8/366  Right foot & Left hand on Yellow Pages Phone Book

Day 8  Transform an old book into something new by cutting, folding, gluing, and so on. 

Day 9  Make something with your breakfast before you eat it.

9/366  Banana Nut Cheerios cereal

7/366

Day 7 Today make a stencil and use it in your work.

7/366  Stencil on gray cardboard (right hand)

6/366

Day 6 Look in the kitchen and work with the first fruit or vegetable you spot.  It could be in the form 
of juice, jam, or even canned.

6/366  Before 

6/366   After (2 peeled clementines)

5/366

Day 5 "What do you collect?  Work with a collection of objects you have in your home.

Day 5/ 366  Another hour went by playing in the studio.

4/366

Day 4 "Take a five-minute walk, then make something using whatever materials are available where you've ended up. Leave it there for someone else to discover, but be sure to document it first!"

4/366  For Kevin McNamara 

Day 3/366

Day 3- Make something out of paper, but don't use scissors or glue or draw on it. What now?

Found some scrap tissue paper and decided to weave the strips using a warm/cool color combo. It was a challenge not being able to cut with scissors or use any glue. The hand ripping of the hand was not easy as tissue paper is very fragile and sensitive. An hour went by quickly.

3/366

Project 366

Day 2 - What's your favorite animal? Use it as your inspiration today.

My cat Georgia. Saw the contour of her profile and it resembles the thumbs up of my left hand so I decided to draw from observation. Will come back later for another project possibly morphing her head into the fist and her ear is the thumb.

2/366

366 Project (A Daily Creativity Journal)

2015 is gone with the wind in the new South.

Day 1  "The first step is the hardest, so start small today and make something that fits in the palm of your hand using only the materials in your immediate environment."

I am going to make something every day for the next 366 days since 2016 is a leap year. Here is the first project of the year. It's relief collage using bottle caps, hot glue, colored pencils and construction paper crayons on a piece of scrap black mat board. The focal point is the tiny red hand from a beer bottle cap. I think I'm going to make the HAND the motif. Will see how this is going to work out in the next few projects. The only rule is: there are NO RULES!

1/366  My Right Hand

Year End Favorites

So it's 2016 New Year's Eve. I decided to compile several lists of favorites, not just for this year but my all-time favorite music artists and film score composers. Why? Just because I feel like it.

Music artists/ Groups:

1. Nina Simone
2. The The
3. Beastie Boys
4. Supertramp
5. Violent Femmes
6. New Order
7. Pixies
8. Dead Can Dance
9. Beck 

Film Composers:

1. Ennio Morricone
2. Thomas Newman
3. Carter Burwell (Coen Bros.)
4. Danny Elfman (Tim Burton)
5. Michael Kamen (Brazil)
6. Ryuichi Sakamoto
7. David Holmes
8. Alexandre Desplat
9. Antonio Sanchez (Birdman)

Cities

1. Portland, Oregon
2. Portland, Maine
3. Madison, Wisconsin
4. Asheville, North Carolina
5. Chattanooga, Tennessee
6. Burlington, Vermont
7. Santa Cruz, California
8. Seattle, Washington
9. Boulder, Colorado

And one more thing... 

A note that I reposted last year from Neil Gaiman:

Be kind to yourself in the year ahead. 

Remember to forgive yourself, and to forgive others. It's too easy to be outraged these days, so much harder to change things, to reach out, to understand.

Try to make your time matter: minutes and hours and days and weeks can blow away like dead leaves, with nothing to show but time you spent not quite ever doing things, or time you spent waiting to begin.

Meet new people and talk to them. Make new things and show them to people who might enjoy them. 

Hug too much. Smile too much. And, when you can, love.

Adele - Hello Parody (Hella Cravings)

XMAS

• Have Yourself a Very Sweaty Christmas!
• Baby, It's HOT outside!
• Let It Rain, Let it Rain, Let it Rain....
• Told You So- Al Gore  
  

The War on Peace

The GOP Debate (aka the War on Common Sense) is currently on CNN featuring Ding-Dong, Buffoon, Nincompoop, Nitwit, Jack-a-ninny, Twinkie, Doofus, Nimrod, and Knucklehead.

Almost forgot the kids' table, the opening act, another debate earlier tonight with four other candidates: Bozo, Fool-a-gape, Yahoo, and Dum-dum. Boy, all the egos on one stage in Sin City.

There's a kid named ISIS at our school. I realize that Isis is the Egyptian Goddess of Magic and Life. We also had someone named Jihad a few years back.
Live and let live. Different strokes for different folks I guess. Whatever.

Lighten Up, MoFo!

A reminder whenever I take myself too seriously

Make America Hate Again

 Trump the Chump - 2015

Green Friday

“The things you own end up owning you.”

Old School Social Media

Make America Hate Again

An open letter to Sheriff Jolley: taking Harris County, GA back to Jim Crow one sign at time

Make America Hate Again-    Vote Trump the Chump

(Breaking Bad) Jesse POV

Breaking Pulp Fiction Bad

Breaking Bad // Pulp Fiction from Jorge Luengo Ruiz on Vimeo.

Surfing isn't a matter of life or death (it's more important than that) Dale Webster's Mission

F*ck That!

Modern Art Simplified

Words to the wise

Hello GAE teammates!....

Next week, we'll be playing kickball on Monday, basketball on Tuesday, tennis on Wednesday, volleyball on Thursday, and free-form ultimate frisbee on Friday...You do not need to know how to play any of these sports, just dress to impress and don't be tardy to the...party.

Remember to badge in by 7:15 am... Orange is NOT my New Black yo....  That is all...

Thanks,

Throwback Thursday

Soon, very soon, my dear boy.

Do It!

N.W.A.

Straight Outta Canton: Ninjas Wit Attitudes

Hello, is it me you're looking for?

Cool Art

Unknown by Simon Stalenhag

Last Week of Summer Break

I live between Olive Garden & Rednecks.

THE  SELFIE  STICK

SHHHH.....BE VERY VERY QUIET.. I'M HUNTING WABBITS

Rocky Terrain

JEKYLL  ISLAND    7/11/15