THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

It started with a gift of two JBL Control 25 speakers, and by "gift" I mean "borrowed" -- a.k.a. "will never return" -- from an obsolete tech detritus pile at work. I may have snagged more than two gifts, of course, but the raw footage proving such a claim remains elusive. And after installing the JBL speakers into the upper corners of the music room, and after installing speaker stands for the rear speakers I already had, and after making the hard choice between a big-ass bean bag and a comfy leather recliner to properly center myself in the audio field (R.I.P., big-ass bean bag), there was only one missing piece: the Apple TV 4K unit. So for me, 2024 was the year I streamed a lot of music in Atmos through Apple Music, surrounded by new tunes and old bops in thrilling new dimensions. Some might say you don't need surround sound, 'cos the two ears + two speakers modality has been dandy for a while now, but that's like saying you don't need ...

  For nearly seven years on the button, Courtney and I lived on Perch Lake, just outside of Gaylord. Right next to Perch Lake was The Natural Golf Course, eighteen holes that twisted and turned through the best nature that the 45th Parallel could offer. The picture above is the view of the first green, and if you left the wooden bridge to the right and briefly ambled through the woods and over a rusted metal fence, you'd get right to our old driveway. Every now and again, an errant golf ball would appear at the edge of our property, like a single egg laid by an itinerant duck. Of the three major elitist sports -- golf, tennis, skiing -- I golfed because the barrier to entry was pretty low and the interest in golf on my Dad's side of the family was high, from playing the sport to watching it on television on the weekends. As spare clubs were abundant and my growth spurt had yet to overwhelm statistical norms, my grandmother would take prepubescent me to the Roscommon driving ran...

Upon reflection, I’ve had a fortunate life in the area of work. As a freshly minted teenager, I would visit Evergreen Park Grocery and dream of someday working there like my father did, and at the age of 14, I got $2/hour to live out that dream, such as it was. From there, I yearned to try other occupations, from record stores to teaching, and I’d be chuffed to tell Young Erick that both of those things happened in due course. ( Oh, and Young Erick, one of them got you to meet David Bowie, and one of them got you to own houses and cars, so I’ll let you ponder on which one was better. ) I even got to DJ a bit here and there, and while it never hit the heights of a professional radio gig, it was certainly better than the summer I played preset cassettes on my boom box for a nerd camp dance while my unrequited crush stayed in her room. What I never crossed off my professional life list was acting, either regular or voice, but while I still yearn for that big breakthrough -- seriously, ask...

If you capture a life in a eulogy or memorial service or blog post, what kind of superficial shitty life did they lead? It’s impossible for one with any sort of life that was rich and full, like lightly touching one dangling thread and saying you knew every feel of the fabric and every shape of the garment.  In the beginning, there was Phyllis Ann Lacey, the eldest of four who lost her dad at an early age. She loved and lost, made and mended, danced and laughed, studied and sassed, listened to music and played music and sang music, and had the best childhood one could have in spite of circumstances and surroundings that were less than idyllic or ideal.  Then, just under seven months before I came on the scene, there was Phyllis Ann Haight, a teen mom from St. Helen in a time and place where either was a challenge. A wife and mother, a friend and a traveler, continuing her education in school and in life, an inquisitive spirit searching for the next challenge and the next adven...

Here are two graphical representations of data related to guns in the U.S.: In the above, you'll see that the biggest American issue with gun-related deaths are  suicides , with the biggest at-risk demo being non-Hispanic white rural males aged 65+ with a history of military service and ownership of more than one gun (and at least one handgun). Do you know anyone who fits that demo? I certainly do. In this demo, you can make an argument for mental illness being a factor if one considers a mood disorder (esp. if you want to get historical and look at involutional depression , although that label it a bit of a dusty relic), but it's just one of many factors at play in suicide. " But we're not talking about suicide, you insensitive fuck ," you might be thinking right now. " We're talking about little boys and girls shredded into bags of lifeless meat by a murder with over 1K rounds of ammo at his disposal ," you vehemently hiss in my general direction, ...

From my History of the Rock & Roll Era class comes this brief glimpse into the art of the mash-up . While some form of embryonic mash-up existed since the early days of recorded music -- either as tape-driven sound collages or musique concrète -- the advent of sampling in hip-hop opened up the creative floodgates, as the end of the 20th Century offered three landmark recordings that significantly advanced the art form as sampling moved from analog to digital. First came the landmark "Pump Up The Volume" by M|A|R|R|S (a U.K. #1 single from 1987): Following the single release of "Pump Up The Volume" -- as well as the sample-heavy album work of hip-hop producers Prince Paul (De La Soul) and The Bomb Squad (Public Enemy) -- Endtroducing... (1996) by DJ Shadow and Since I Left You (2000) by The Avalanches were LP's built entirely from samples, often taking years to produce. Here's "Frontier Psychiatrist" by The Avalanches, which takes the sa...

There used to be a time when I would prep for a "Best Of ______" list by searching and researching, documenting and revising, and remembering and forgetting. I spent a lot of time listening to music and watching movies and series, to be sure, but this year I just couldn't muster the time or concentration to remind myself that 2021 had some serious high points in cultural artifacts. It did, of course, but still. What follows is less a rank order than a document of feeling and preoccupation. Some preoccupations and feelings were stronger than others, of course, and if the past is any indication, I'll find some cool 2021 shit in 2022. But for now, a moment in time: ALBUMS Shame – Drunk Tank Pink / The Weather Station – Ignorance / Mogwai – As The Love Continues / Black Country, New Road – For the First Time / Jane Weaver – Flock / Robert Plant & Allison Krauss – Raise The Roof / Lindsey Buckingham – Lindsey Buckingham / Hard Feelings – Hard Feelings / Duran Dur...

Ever have your life changed for the better by the actions of one person? In the fall of 1990, I attended Central Michigan University as a 19-going-on-20-year-old academic junior(-ish) with one eye towards chemical engineering without really knowing what that was, living in the dorms with the slightly younger and significantly shorter kids, and going home most weekends to DJ high school dances and hang out with my girlfriend from my prior stint at Kirtland Community College. Until that point, my personal experience with record stores was slight; I typically hit Traverse City when I needed music for gigs -- Camelot Music in the Cherryland Mall, or New Moon when I ventured downtown -- and I had briefly worked at a Lansing area Believe In Music for a few weeks in the fall of 1988 while I half-assed stumbled my way through a term at Lansing Community College.  But with my third-floor room in CMU's Herrig Hall being right around the corner from a honest-to-dog record store (or two, if yo...

  Over the past couple weeks, two different David Bowie tribute albums have hit my eardrums, each with interesting takes on Bowie's material. From the British label BBE,  Modern Love features artists of color connecting with Bowie's catalog. Curated by DJ and music executive Drew McFadden and BBE founder Peter Adarkwah, the covers compilation was assembled to highlight the influence of Black music genres like soul, R&B, jazz, funk, and gospel on Bowie’s diverse catalog.  “I felt that the connection between Bowie and R&B, jazz, funk, gospel and all things soulful, had never really been explored before — at least not so much in covers, which tend to lean more towards rock and pop,” McFadden explains. “Certainly, there’s been plenty of Bowie covers over the years, but none that have really tapped into what seems to have been a big part of his core musical style and direction.” Speaking of other directions, the Italian jazz trumpeter Paolo Fresu recently released Her...

(picture from the 4 July 1943 Detroit Free Press ) He was always "Grandpa John," even though he wasn't my biological maternal grandfather. He was the third and last husband of my mom's mom, and I would see them on holidays and one week during the summer, when I would stay with them in their small brick house on Outer Drive in Dearborn, MI. "Grandpa John" wasn't grandfatherly in any sense, but he did have a cluttered basement with a working bar and cool collectible Jim Beam bottles, so being of kid of some imagination, I didn't mind the visits. John mostly sat in the den, chain smoking and drinking, semi-watching television while he fell in and out of sleep. When I was young, I just thought that's what old dudes did. Later, I found out there was more to the story. From a 1943 citation: The President of the United States takes pleasure in presenting the Navy Cross to John T. Yaksich (336911), Private, U.S. Marine Corps, for extraordinary heroism ...

In psychology, the Dunning-Kruger effect refers to the predictable tendency of people to overestimate their own abilities, including intelligence and expertise. Here's David Dunning with more: In the domain of rock 'n' roll, you can see the Dunning-Kruger effect in action when you see people who "get" a song without even remotely understanding the meaning. And while that's been around as long as rock 'n' roll has been around -- the multiple misunderstandings of the '60s garage rock classic "Louie Louie" by The Kingsmen is but one example -- the '80s kicked confident ignorance into interstellar overdrive. Gather 'round the screen while I give you two examples: Bruce Springsteen -- "Born In The U.S.A." (1984) The title track of Springsteen's most massive commercially successful album -- putting 7 (!) singles into the Billboard Top 10, although none made it to #1 -- has lyrical content that's pretty straightfor...

One of the curiosities about conspiracy theories is that they usually start with some nugget of fact. For example, among other things, the QAnon crowd believe that there's a gaggle of Democratic pedophiles that traffic children. As someone who's taught Human Sexuality for over two decades, the research is clear that the typical pedophile is a married heterosexual male with low social skills and children of his own, and those males can be of any political stripe, be they Democrat or Republican or Wiccan, so I have no doubt that a percentage of pedophiles would be Democrats.  That said, there's far more evidence that Republicans are more likely to be sex offenders, just like there's easily verifiable evidence that compared to Democrats, it's Republican Presidents who explode the national debt and decrease the value of the stock market, it's members of Republican Administrations who are tried and convicted of a wide variety of crimes, and it's Republicans polit...