Me EN ACTIÓN labeling books with a pricing gun. JEALOUS?
This week (the week beginning on Monday, as in business days, as in not Sunday, which for some reason is the default first day of the week in many cultures? and calendar programmes? I intentionally digress) I’ve been working with CTD/CTR/saki as part of my 8th grade internship program thing at school. Like I blogged before, I was tried to work at a big camera store, but it being a big corporation, THE MAN had to put me down (aka: the government doesn’t like child labor). So, my mom’s friend-and-former-business-partner-in-Lounge Ax‘s husband generously offered to take me in for a week at his business (or businesses, rather) for my internship! Yay! I’ve been having a really great time working with his team and learning all about record distributors and labels and stores. Did I mention that I’m working at a distributor/label/store?
I’m working at a record label/distributor/store. On Monday, they put me in the warehouse (the distributor), where I stocked stuff and filled out orders and allocated inventory and ALL THAT GOOD SHTUFF. This handling of four squillion LPs & CDs has, in addition, made me feel like I know / have seen every record put out ever*..? I know this doesn’t make sense, because A) they don’t carry or put out every record ever, and B) um, this doesn’t make sense. But in a REALISTIC sense-making-sense, working at CTD/R/S (I’ll just call it that) has definitely “enhanced my musical knowledge” – now I recognize some of the random music that shows up in my iTunes when I’m listening on shuffle, and I’ve heard of the Puffy Areolas. So, win!
Then-nuh-nuh-nuh, yesterday I helped out with ‘saki’, the record store that those guys are now opening (this week! yowzers!). These duties included alphabetizing and organizing about ten boxes containing like 75 almost completely out-of-order LPs. Each. It took a few hours, but we did it (and today I got to use a price gun [!!!], as depicted above). The store’s going to be killer, by the way.
Today I worked with Kate, who runs the record label side of this biznizz. This involved a lot of spreadsheets, expense tracker things, accounting, y’know. And Smoque. (I’ll reflect on everything I learned later, also.)
p.s. I found a ginormous cinnamon oat cluster in my Honey Bunches of Oats cereal yesterday morning. Look:
Delicious.
Alriiiight. Have to wake up early (but not – later than school) for “work” tomorrow. See ya later crocodile.
* and the opposite. It’s insane how much recorded music there is in the world.
Title: It is both unfortunate and A+ if you know where this is from. Comment or email if you know, pleeease. update: I am not endorsing Insane Clown Posse, nor suggesting that they are a legitimate “posse” in any way (more like a couple). A lot of you got it right!
Yoyoyo! Remember the beginning of last April, during spring break, when I visited Wisconsin with Henry and Hayden? Weeell, having brought my drums, and Hayden his standup bass, and Henry his guitar (normally Hayden = guitar, Henry = bass, but this is the country setup), we decided to record a tune or two in his [Hayden's] basement during our time there. It was a meager little configuration, what with just a single microphone and Garageband to lay it down, BUUUUUT, I think it turned out sounding okay, eh (you haven’t listened yet, presumably, but YOU WILL THINK IT SOUNDS ALRIGHT, alright?)?
This one song – our version of Ray Ray LaMontagne’s “Hey Me, Hey Mama” – took like two days to record, even though we only used one mic and one track; I guess we messed up a lot. In the end, we went with our first take, after all, but instead of being angry at our unnecessary thoroughness, it’s okay (because all we did was have fun with it, anyway)! Please, kind fellows, enjoy.
Back from DC/NYC! One heck of a trip, ’twas. Probably the funnest time of my middle school career (and definitely the best time I’ve ever had talking to strangers on the street / riding a coach bus / getting ripped off by street merchants)! Before I can make a fully-fledged post on it, though, I’ll have to get all my pictures developed and scanned and imported and sorted and edited (in some cases) and uploaded, SOO, I have another trick up my sleeve.
Last Friday, I came across this photographer Jason Nocito‘s website (through Booooooom). I loved his pictures – totally my style, impromptu (or at least seemingly; you never know), film deliciousness [actually, that description kind of only applies to the album I'm going to talk about, so, uh, slight nevermind]. It looks like he does a lot of arteests (Bradford Cox and Cat Power, i.e.), but one in particular caught my eye. “Lil’ Weezy?!” I thought, browsing through his portfolio, “What da crunk?”
(After looking through the pictures..) With my prejudiced attitude toward Mr. Wayne and the general grill-donning like, I was surprised to see such outwardly honest photographs. (Or, just, I wasn’t expecting to see him side-by-side with Cat Power and Bradford Cox.) You could account Nocito or Wayne for this (impossible to tell, really / is kind of an opinion); I guess it’s like that saying, the one about the artist and his tool? Or the disease and not the diseased? Or something like that? I DON’T KNOW, I’m sleep-deprived/sick, but anyway.. It wudn’t what I wud expectin’.
One photo especially struck me (content-wise) and was the inspiration for my last post title. It was of Lil’ Wayne, Lil’ Weezy, holding a hollowbody guitar on a chair, just chillin’. To me, it looked like he was “furr real.” I never once had imagined that he played guitar. Maybe, not even that he was a musician (just a rich dude who raps about hoes and weed). For the first time, I saw him as an un-poopularly-glorified human being.
I had plans to finish writing this unintentionally-thesis-like narrative, but it’s 1 AM now aaand I should probably get some brain-rest. To sum it up: Jason Nocito’s photographs of Lil’ Wayne reminded that music, and everything, is almost always subjective and can be meaningful even where you might not think it is. Plus I really like the way they look. Court dismissed!
Hope this post didn’t/doesn’t come off too pretentious or all-knowing or something like that. Last day of Sunday jew-school tomorrow! Goodnight!
update: Oy, because I posted this so late last night and was rushing to get it out before midnight/when the email subscription gets sent (11-12) – which I failed at – I think I also failed to mention a few things about my opinions on pop moosic and exactly why Jason’s pictures made me remember something. (And that, by saying I realized that Lil’ Wayne is indeed not just a celebrity or, in some opinions, America’s icon of the current state of music, I was NOT saying that I’m going to buy all his records and drink Monster and walk down the street with a posse of ladies [the records and Monster are probably the worst parts of this scenario, however], now. But yeah.)
The main thing I want to make clear is that I am not 100% closed off to “that” type of music. What I wrote last night but couldn’t fit in:
Now, HERE YE HERE YE, CHILDREN. Despite my tainted tweets, judgmental tumblr posts, and long-winded, sometimes-critical blog posts, my mind isn’t completely closed off to “that type of music.” Being my age and an American citizen, I don’t completely have a choice as to whether or not my mind is closed off to the genre (you know, “the genre”). Whether I pull an Old Stubborn Jewish Grandfather and don’t even give it a chance, or become that one dude who is always at Hannah Montana shows (and given that I don’t lock myself at home and survive on Little Bites for the rest of my life), I’m going to hear a little bit of B96 crap or whatever station it is in your city that plays auto-tune generation hits. It is, undoubtedly, the defining category of our culture right now and consequentially everywhere, so I’d be a damned hermit to not be exposed to some.
..And then I planned to go on about the certain pop artists that I really do enjoy (Beyoncé, Jay-Z, hip-hop somewhat-guilty pleasure), and WHY I think they’re good, but I lost my train of thought / forgot the argument I had, plus y’all get the point by now (830 words!). If there were a clear point. Speaking of a clear point, my mom told me today that she misses when my writing was straightforward…? I don’t know how posts with this many parentheses could have ever been that straightforward (queue snare and cymbal)!
Well well well! I realize that it’s been awhile (only four days, actually, but it feels like longer) since I made a lil’ post, and instead of giving you the recently-usual school = busy excuse (which is true, by the way), I’ll just say that today was a SUPER lazy Sunday. All I did was drink a milkshake and watch Legally Blonde with Henry and Hayden (don’t ask).
Taken with my cellular telephone and the Cross Process app.
But an excuse isn’t all! Last night I attended this super-dy-duper-dy formal school event in honor of our retiring principal, who had worked at the school for something like forty years and helped form its curriculum and done all these wonderful things. One could say it was a little bit over-the-top (it ’twas pretty fancy), but fitting nonetheless. It wasn’t really for students, either, but I had to come with our school’s jazz band (we played a few tyunes) and also to play with my friends Hayden and Alaina in our makeshift folk trio.
The night was pretty fun – us children weren’t allowed to have any of the “adult catering” (not everybody RSVPed, they were worried) so we were treated to a separate cove of chicken tendahs (which were still eaten by other adults.. *cough*). I was fine with those (duh! like chicken nuggets but longer!)… Wait, actually, I have no idea why I told you (yes, YOU) that poultry-themed narrative. The rest of the story.. Alaina, Hayden and I didn’t get to play because technical difficulties set the event back some thirty minutes (and knowing fancy ballrooms and such [in Soldier Field], two-and-a-half seconds of overtime would have probably costed that times fourteen hundred squillion dollars).
Being the little genius Hayden is, HOWEVER, he suggested that we play in the parking lot as people walk out en lieu of the fraction of a second we would have had on stage inside. And we did, and unintentionally made eight bucks each (accidentally left a guitar case open! oops!). The camera crew (aka mom with iPhone) only filmed like two seconds of that performance, and that would be a boring video, so, because I kind of structured this post on having some sort of video of us or something at the end, here is us a’practicin’ Will the Circle Be Unbroken while lying on our backs (Alaina claims it promotes good singing). I’m the one in front straddling a guitar.
Hey there person! About a week ago you might have seen some film photographs that I took with an Olympus OM-1 and developed “a la by myself” and posted in this blog. WELL, I was looking at the strips a couple days ago, and noticed these three frames from the end of the reel, which appeared to be mess-up chemical smudges, were actually photos! And the best part: of Mavis Staples! I remembered taking a few pictures of her show at Old Town, but I had assumed those got cut off / lost in the film tank, or something else of that destructive nature. I was really happy to find them (and that I hadn’t accidentally thrown them out!).
In case you wondering (which you were, obviously), the show was totally soul-blowing and great and awesome. Sammy slept for almost literally the entire thing, which was unfortunate for him but I don’t think he would be able to enjoy as much of it having just woken up from a nap, anyway. BUT FR REAL THAT WOMAN HAS GOT IT. I can’t believe that we are fortunate enough to know her / be adopted as her honorary grandson. Her new album is going to be of da toppest notch. Enjoy–
Title: making fun of my dad’s lacking spanish accent + a little bit of John Fogerty’s.
