My "Down III: Over The Under" Review

The lyrics on this album are so personal and as a native son of New Orleans, they really cut deep. "I Scream" and "On March the Saints" are essentially Katrina survivor anthems. Songs that one can relate to on a personal level are always more endearing than songs about cars or sluts. For instance, think of the first time you heard "Institutionalized" by Suicidal Tendencies when half your friends were committed to rehab centers. It was as if they were making a song about you and your buddies. "Over the Under" takes this principle to another level for us. "We have been through change by the season of the storm"...and there's more to that line than a hurricane, brothers.

Nearly every song has an awesome cadenza that could have easily just faded out, repeating blissfully into infinity but was rather produced in a more live experience format that lends itself to the overall personal presence of the recording. The bass tone is remarkable for it's simultaneous way of standing out while blending in. And in an era where so many drum tracks are triggered, the natural sounding mix of Jimmy's tasty lines are really refreshing. Of all the leads from the Down projects, these are the most ripping, tasteful and feature better intonation than any previously recorded.

The chorus riff from "I Scream" could have been written by just about any N.O. underground musician I know. It just has that vibe that is naturally New Orleans Underground and thoroughly ass-kicking in a pride-filling, southern-sabbath way that just feels like home.
I'm pretty sure that the bridge or pre-chorus with the arpeggios was written by Kurt. It just feels like something he would have written, but, of course, when you have a collaboration like Down, a lot of musical personalities rubbed off. I consider Kurt to be a prolific riffer. The Iomi of New Orleans, if you will.

If I think "Never Try" is about what I think it is, it hits home pretty hard too.
I can think of a lot of old friends that I wish could have heard these lyrics back when and taken them to heart before so much damage was done. Theres a kind of progression here from "Learn from my Mistakes" in the following way...the former was basically saying "this is what it is and it fucking sucks" and "Never Try" comes from another place..one of sobriety that says "don't even fucking go there". "Eyes cried dried.." brother, I know what that's like. This geezer, for one, is glad to have "Never Tried".

"Mourn" is clearly about the heart-breaking Pantera tragedy and deserves a lot of respect for it's honesty and emotional nakedness. Those who didn't know Darell probably won't relate to it on the same level as those who did but one can't help but feel Phil's pain in that tune.
Musically, the swooping bends of the verse guitar part and the pitch change of the bridge are really masterful.

Pain and loss is a recurring theme throughout the album..for instance, the chant of "...regret..." in "I Scream"and we aint talking about Brocato's here, folks. Over the Under is true emotional torture, alienation, loss and doubt manifested into honest, unpretentious, angst-filled sonic artwork.

It's been said that all great art comes from great pain, and this album is a perfect case in point.

Down III : Over the Under -
go and get it, turn it up, turn down the lights and listen and I promise you'll have a cathartic experience that will make you reflect, cry and uplift your spirit all at once.

Click here to order the CD

Download from iTunes (more profit for the artist, ya'll)

Preview tracks from the Down MySpace

"In order to create something, you must first destroy it" - John Lydon

My family's house is finally geing gutted so I'll soon be out of this high rent trap that I'm in. It gives my a lot of pride to know that my son will be the fifth generation to grow up in that home.

I lost a lot from the destruction to the house, including a lot of documentation of my family history that was in there, but I can at least start again and won't have to live paycheck to paycheck as I've been. I've started to redesign myspace sites for bands and so far, it's been pretty fulfilling. I've modified my own (The Elder Myspce) to be more of an advertisement for that service. At my day job, I'm usually relegated to production because I'm so good and so fast at it. It can be tiring because there's very little opportunity for me to flex my creative muscles but hey I can write HTML and CSS faster than I can write English so I guess that's what I get pigeon-hold with.

While taking my son for a the other morning I came across a house that had a make-shift Katrina memorial in the front yard. On it there was a sign that read "The only certainty in life is change" and I guess that about sums it up.

I speak for most people in this city when I say that hopefully, sometimes soon, there will be a period of time with some level of permanance.

Post-Katrina Life

Life since the disaster has become almost unbearable. The combination of low-pay and high rent is making it nearly impossible to support my family. Our car is broken and now I don't have a way to get to work or even enough change to take the bus... phone is cut off...gone several days without a substantial meal...my home was destroyed and there doesn't seem to be much hope of returning to it. Two years later and nothing seems to have improved.

The Lion of Fallujah

Maj. Douglas A. Zembiec, who once told reporters in the din of battle his Marines “fought like lions,” was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery May 16. A crowd of more than a thousand gathered at the U.S. Naval Academy’s chapel to honor the fallen warrior.

Zembiec was killed in action May 10, 2007. He was 34 years old.

One entry from Kapitulik's journals contained an entry he said came from Col. George Bristol. It read, “Never forget those who were killed. Never let rest those who killed them.”

At times during the battle, Zembiec’s Marines tossed grenades within 20 feet of insurgents.

“My Marines have fought like lions and will continue to do so,” he said following the battle. “Ten million insurgents won’t even begin to fill the boots of one of my men.”

May the Lion of Fallujah rest in peace. Your death shall not be in vain.

USMC Source

Wafa Sultan

Stumbled on this great video recently. This lady is awesome. She makes so many great points in this video. Good to know there are some voices like this on AlJazeera.

Transcript:

Wafa Sultan: The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions, or a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality. It is a clash between freedom and oppression, between democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash between human rights, on the one hand, and the violation of these rights, on other hand. It is a clash between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat them like human beings. What we see today is not a clash of civilizations. Civilizations do not clash, but compete.

Host: I understand from your words that what is happening today is a clash between the culture of the West, and the backwardness and ignorance of the Muslims?

Wafa Sultan: Yes, that is what I mean.

Host: Who came up with the concept of a clash of civilizations? Was it not Samuel Huntington? It was not Bin Laden. I would like to discuss this issue, if you don't mind...

Wafa Sultan: The Muslims are the ones who began using this expression. The Muslims are the ones who began the clash of civilizations. The Prophet of Islam said: "I was ordered to fight the people until they believe in Allah and His Messenger." When the Muslims divided the people into Muslims and non-Muslims, and called to fight the others until they believe in what they themselves believe, they started this clash, and began this war. In order to stop this war, they must reexamine their Islamic books and curricula, which are full of calls for takfir and fighting the infidels.

My colleague has said that he never offends other people's beliefs. What civilization on the face of this earth allows him to call other people by names that they did not choose for themselves? Once, he calls them Ahl Al-Dhimma, another time he calls them the "People of the Book," and yet another time he compares them to apes and pigs, or he calls the Christians "those who incur Allah's wrath." Who told you that they are "People of the Book"? They are not the People of the Book, they are people of many books. All the useful scientific books that you have today are theirs, the fruit of their free and creative thinking. What gives you the right to call them "those who incur Allah's wrath," or "those who have gone astray," and then come here and say that your religion commands you to refrain from offending the beliefs of others?

I am not a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew. I am a secular human being. I do not believe in the supernatural, but I respect others' right to believe in it.

Dr. Ibrahim Al-Khouli: Are you a heretic?

Wafa Sultan: You can say whatever you like. I am a secular human being who does not believe in the supernatural...

Dr. Ibrahim Al-Khouli: If you are a heretic, there is no point in rebuking you, since you have blasphemed against Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran...

Wafa Sultan: These are personal matters that do not concern you.

Wafa Sultan: Brother, you can believe in stones, as long as you don't throw them at me. You are free to worship whoever you want, but other people's beliefs are not your concern, whether they believe that the Messiah is God, son of Mary, or that Satan is God, son of Mary. Let people have their beliefs.

Wafa Sultan: The Jews have come from the tragedy (of the Holocaust), and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror, with their work, not their crying and yelling. Humanity owes most of the discoveries and science of the 19th and 20th centuries to Jewish scientists. 15 million people, scattered throughout the world, united and won their rights through work and knowledge. We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people. The Muslims have turned three Buddha statues into rubble. We have not seen a single Buddhist burn down a Mosque, kill a Muslim, or burn down an embassy. Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people, and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them.

End Transcript

My way of thinking is this...if you think of yourself as a moderate, then ask yourself if there is anyone in your ideology that could be considered a scapegoat. For the leftist in America, Rebublicans are the scapegoat. For the moral majority types, it is the leftists and gays who are to blame for everything. For the Germans in 1947, it was the Jews and for the Muslim extremists, it is again the Jews and pretty much all the non-muslims and the more secular muslims. All extremism has to stop.

The greatest lesson that Buddha taught us was that the path to enlightenment was the "middle-way". If you tune the string to tight, it will break and if you tune it too low it will not sound.

People, the "string" is about to break so we had all better find the middle way before it's too late.

First Playground Romp

Marcel's first romp in the playground...very popular with the "ladies" it seems...

CS3 9-Slice Technique

The 9-Slice Guide Feature in both the Fireworks and Illustrator CS3 versions is an incredibly useful feature that will save you a lot of time in producing graphical assets.

Let's take a look at how you can take advantage of this feature in Fireworks CS3.

First, go to the Edit Menu and click on Insert and choose New Symbol. Make sure you click the check box to Enable 9-Slice Guides in the following options box.

This is what the 9-Slice Symbol window looks like -

Next, let's add a graphic element to the symbol. Select the Rounded Rectangle Auto Shape from the Tools palette.

With the Rounded Rectangle Shape selected draw a rectangle in the symbol window and make sure the edges of the rectangle are within the boundaries of the 9-slice guides. Here's what that should look like -


To add some flair to the symbol, select the symbol and click one of the styles from the Styles palette.
In this case, I used the Dark Chrome style.

Now your symbol will look like this -

Next, return to the main canvas/stage window and select the Text tool and add some text to the shape

Now, you can make some copies of the symbol, modify the text on it and use the scale tool to make the symbol fit horizontally with the text without distorting it's corner radius.


Have Fun!

Interview with a 16-Month Old

He says "bye, bye" right before he walks away from the camera. His other favorite words are "pup-pup" (translation:anything with lots of hair such as a dog or his dad) and "kai" which is Hawaiian for "ocean" or an Egyptian High Preist. Oddly enough, that was almost his name but we thought it might be tacky to have a half Hawaiian, half French name. He also likes to throw things down and say "uh-oh". He's a trip.

Lunar Alien Architecture

Not sure if it's real, but it's very beautiful in it's organic nature and very different from our own style of functional constructs. Very much like one would imagine alien architecture..like H.R.Gigers' Alien movie concepts. Maybe too much like that. This is allegedly a city on the moon taken from a cryptic youtube user that I've mentioned before in previous posts. There are very low resolution versions of these images that are available on the NASA website but they look like mexico from the space-station...just blotches of light were there should be no light...especially those on the dark side...are we supposed to believe that this is some sort of crystalline structure emanating it's own light source? Judge for yourself but more information is coming out that our closest celestial body is a lot more interesting than we ever thought.

New Skin

BTW: I've customized the skin for my blog because I got tired of looking at the Simple Bits created skin. There are a couple of elements that I've kept but for the most part, I've loaded all new background images. I kinda like it..it's a bit conservative..perhaps I'll do a more organic version in the future using the Dekonstruct brushes by Keith Bowman. I'm just glad to not see the same skin all the time.

The Theory of Everything

This is a great BBC documentary about what is apparently the long-sought-after "Theory of Everything" for theoretical physics.

Ancient Spacecraft on the Moon

A new youtube user just started posting some incredible footage of what he claims is footage of a secret apollo mission to investigate an ancient spacecraft on the surface of the moon. Retiredafb claims to be a 76 year old Air Force Officer located in Rwanda.
Now I've been a computer graphics professional for over a decade and the footage below looks very good..the interaction of the shadows, lens flares and surface are impressive if it's a hoax.
According to the user, he has limited technical resources in Rwanda and was unable to get the audio right so he added his own captions. He claims the findings of the mission determined that the spacecraft was 1.5 million years old and had been excavated before we did.
He also claims that the government will have be forced to disclose the information by September 2007.
View it and judge for yourself.
First, the stills (which can be seen with less detail in the public missions)-

And the video with much more detail -

CS3 Suite First Impressions

Just got my hands on the Adobe CS3 Suite. I wasn't too impressed with a lot of it but Illustrator is way better with the Flash/Fireworks type features..particularly the Styles and Symbols workflow. They have a dumb name for editing symbols called "Isolation Mode"..that's an attractive name, don't you think? Yeah..it's editing an object oriented graphic by just double clicking on it and they give it the name "isolation-mode"...too funny.

The two things I was disappointed with are the presence of the inferior Info Palette and the range of the Find and Replace tool. I had hoped they would drop the non-interactive Info Panel in favor of the Property Inspector that all Macromedia apps have. When I select something in Flash, Fireworks or Dreamweaver and I want it to to be flushed to the upper left corner of the canvas/stage/page..or whatever, I can select the object, go to the Properties Palette and put the number zero in the x and y coordinates and wham!- the object is is positioned exactly where I want it!

Also, in MM apps like Fireworks I can Find and Replace any property but in Adobe the scope is limited to text-based properties.
I love that kind of control cuz I'm used to dealing with code and I like changing an objects size and position in precise, numeric fashion but sadly, Adobe did not adopt this and the info palette is still just an informative type of feedback rather than an actual interactive control over the properties of an object.


If you want that kind of control, you'll just have to stick with Flash or Fireworks and that's fine with me. I still like Photoshop's brushes and pixel-level controls over Fireworks but for prototyping, Fireworks is still the best with the new Illustrator and any version of Flash coming in a close second.

My Friend, Dr. Michio Kaku

Dr. Michio Kaku is my friend!

Well, on MySpace anyway. I'm still stoked. He's one of my favorite futurists. Hold on to yourself and check out his myspace site and his main site and prepare to have your perception of reality expanded.

New Video of Marcel The Younger

Retro Video Goodness

Yngwie cover of "Carry On Wayward Sun" by Kansas
(dig they way he goes into the Phrygian mode toward the end and the double neck strat).
It's from the album "Inspirations. Is that Tommy Aldridge on drums? Anyway, killer - Ever wondered who really sang the song "Stand Up" from the movie Rockstar?
You didn't really think it was Marky-Mark did you?
Well, it was none other than the mighty lungs of Jeff Scott Soto who is probably best known for the first two Rising Force albums.
Don't know why Yngwie would ever give this guy a pink slip, but here's a video of the Jeff Scott Soto Band doing Stand Up -
Want more retro goodness? Check out this old performance of ELO doing "Mr. Blue Sky" (notice the backup singer...her intonation is killer). I don't know why I like this song but I'm curiously attracted to it. Living Thing and Turn to Stone are out there too but let's not go there, ok?

Google Video Debut of Marcel the Younger

I made a little montage of my son with the camera on my new intel mac book. I love the part where he turns off the recording. There's a little video of him trying to walk and talk. He's awesome.

G Reader Rocking

The idea of marrying email-like functionality with news readers like atom, xml, rss, etc... seems to be a big killer app as evidened by the new Google Reader. Judging by my first impressions of porting over My Google content to the GReader, software incompatibility is starting to seem as antiquated as the horse and buggy. Props to the G Entities.

My old "My Google":
















Now! Enter Google Reader
Migrating same content to Reader (waaay more usable evidenced by this single "initial state" of the app) -



Dayam..talk about situational awareness. Before I was suffering from Tofflerian info overload but the Reader app seems to really alleviate this dilemma.

Does Google need flex to achieve the same kind of rich internet apps and seamless production flow? I'm not really sure but their stuff seems to be faster than anything else (not even going into maps, etc..).

Seems that since they've built their own javascript/xml/css/xml-style sheet/declarative syntax framework, they have hit the interoperability and rapid deployment nirvana state.

I humble before the power of Google. Most of my subscriptions are traditional media outlets (other than the development-related stuff,) but just imagine tons of conspiracy crazy feeds, alternative energy feeds, political and futurist feeds ready to facilitate societal activism and and the inevitable downside of facscist, socialists, & terrorist networking that will ensue. This must be how mac and 60's hippies felt the coming paradigm shift about the occur. Imagine, the multimedia capabilities of something like Reader and it's potential usurping of traditional media outlets.

Shit, I could go on but no one listening, not yet anyway.

L8R,
CEL

Murder City

162 murders, 4 associated arrests and 1 conviction.
Those are the facts. With only half the population of pre-Katrina we still manage to be the murder capital of the U.S.
Tragically, law enforcement has opted to devote the majority of it's resources to traffic duty. Condemning non-violent & clean record citizens to long detentions in central lockup and the Orleans Parish Prison for being in the car with someone with an expired inspection sticker, cracked windshield, riding a bike with only one hand and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Is it worth the resources to put people in jail for two days on a $10 bond when there are hundreds of cold-blooded killers stalking the population? Most people (myself included) are still just trying to re-establish their pre-Katrina lifestyles and get back in front of the ball but now were being harassed to such a degree we're wondering if we should have come back at all.

Happy 1st B-Day to mini Me

My son is one year old today! He should be walking any day now...he stands and balances himself well and claps. He loves to mimic everything mom and dad do.