Knuckledragger

Scott Lee of DIY music electronics company PAiA has died. The PAiA website currently has a memorial up for him: https://paia.com/ I never made an PAiA kits, but I was a ware of them for many decades. From Theremins to TB-303 clones to full-on modular synthesizers, PAiA had something for any would-be synthesist handy with a soldering iron.

David Allan Coe croaked. I have mixed feelings about this one. DAC was a jackass and utterly full of shit, for many decades. He annoyed other country legends like Waylon. He recorded an album in 1982 with some very questionable lyrics. On the other hand, he had quite a good voice and could write decent songs when he wanted to. Fittingly, he died on Willie Nelson's 93rd birthday. This song sums up his whole career for me. Kind of idiotic and cringe inducing lyrics and gratuitous name-dropping, yet it's also a goddamn earworm. I first heard it on a cassette I had in the 1980s. It had a bigger impact on me than I could imagine.

Fan made C&H remixes are brutal.

I have a (not so) secret soft spot for yacht rock. That one blonde backup singer looks familiar, it's almost like she has... TV appearances that aren't lip syncs are a treasure.

Goddamn size queens.

April 23, 1976, the Ramones released their debut album. Hey, ho, 50 years ago(!) As I snarked in 2016, "Sheee-it, some tiny insignificant punk rock album by a band you've never heard of dropped 40 years ago today. It sold poorly, probably because it didn't have any good songs on it." I know I don't have to explain the significance of the Ramones to the crowd of codgers that is head case. I will be lecturing some mostly uninterested zoomers on the subject.

This is going to be a long walk for fairly little payoff. Everyone knows the 1994 hit film Pulp Fiction, which made Samuel L Jackson a household name and revitalized the career of John Travolta. There's a scene where Quentin Tarantino has a cameo (as he likes to do) playing Jimmie Dimmick. Jimmy has three noteworthy traits: he's the person who the two main character seek out when they need to hide a corpse, his wife (never seen) is black, and he casually drops the N-word (something else Quentin likes to do.) That scene birth the phrase "Dead N-Word Storage" which has lived on on the internet since 1994. Certainly it's popular with people who were going to find a reason to say the N-word anyway, but even outside such circles, the phrase is a cultural touchstone. With that in mind, this meme came across my radar earlier: Even as far back as 1994, I thought Jimmy's kitchen looked very dated. That rage hood reeks of the 1970s. A few google searches later I learned that "Jimmie Dimmick's house in Pulp Fiction is located at 4145 Kraft Avenue, Studio City, California." The property is listed in Zillow and Redfin. It's far older than I'd have guessed, built in 1936. Also it's $2 million, but that's hardly batting an eye about these days. The place has been completely redone since 1994. Very deceptive photo that makes the kitchen look far larger than it actually is. Significantly more realistic shot. Note in both that the range hood (now an iconic screen-used prop) is there in all its glory. The hallway has a print of the Banksy work of the same name (which is so famous it has its own Wiki page.)

Just learned that Michael Kohlbecker died. In the 90s he made pounding hard trance on the then-mighty Harthouse label. I especially like the work did under the Eternal Basement name. I had a whole stack of Harthouse compilations in the mid 90s the EB tracks stuck out even amongst his legendary peers. Later, he'd go on to do ambient downtempo weirdness with a rotating crew of compatriots as the Saafi Brothers. While I outgrew the hard trance sound fairly quickly, the better Saafi tracks have stuck with me for decades. My favorite track by them is still this one: In classic SB fashion, it takes forever to get going and goes on far longer than it has any need to. With that said, I used to put it on whole I was cooking dinner in the 00s. I've mixed parts of it in to my radio show many times over the years. It's got the best shuffling bassline.

Boards of Canada Reveal New Album Inferno. First new BoC album in 13(!) years. Hol. Lee. Fuk. 🤯

Good Lord. He's the Akakichi no Eleven meme come to life.

Tim Apple stepping down to be replaced by John Temu. Oh, sorry! I don't have my reading glasses on. that's John Ternus.

Not a person, but RIP Hampshire College. "Hamster" or "Hempshire" as it was known was always the junior sibling to the other four colleges in the happy valley. Hampshire has been plagued by rumors of financial troubles for years at this point. I grew up going to shows at a couple different Hampshire venues. Phish played there regularly in the late 80s and early 90s. There is a longstanding urban legend that the characters in Scooby Doo are modeled after the five colleges: Fred is Amherst, Daphne is Smith, Velma is Mount Holyoke (these roles have reversed in my observance), Shaggy is Hampshire and Scooby is UMASS. The legend is not true of course, but the parallels between Shaggy and Hampshire are particularly strong. For 60 years, Hampshire was an important part of the landscape of the Pioneer Valley and the Five (now Four) College area. It's sad to see it go.

There's a guy I follow on Flickr who has a Fuji X-E3 mirrorless body. He adapts a variety of old manual lenses to it, which is how he caught my attention. He's got a taste for old and custom tube gear and has a whole album of space heaters and funny wooden boxes.

Mega necro here. Last sumemr I bought an unlocked Android tablet. Today I taught myself how to use Morphe to patch the YouTube and Reddit apps for android. It involved a lot of jumping through hoops that were unfamiliar to me. It took me four tries, but managed to get both working. This means I now have native (or if you prefer, "native") apps for both platforms that support ad blocking. If I'm not mistaken, the YT app now has integrated SponsorBlock support, which is quite something.