Big Wind – a set list for Hurricane Sandy

I hope everyone is having a safe Hurricane Sandy.  I am in Framingham MA having moved away from my residence on Wingaersheek Beach in Gloucester MA.  Because I live 100 steps from the ocean, I thought it was a good idea to move away from the storming ocean for a few days.

I’ve seen a lot of Sandy here – increasing winds, downed branches & trees, closed roads….  In other words,  I was driving near the time when it was stupid to be driving (very few were on the road but I wreak of confidence!).   We had a blackout, I readied myself for that, and then an hour later, the lights went on.  Very nice.  Lots of limes and cachaca, a perfect muddler, Tupperware shaker.  Yes, all that.  Many have it much worse.

I’m having all kinds of computer & telecomm problems between the new cord for the new iPhone 5, its $29 adaptor, the failed adaptor in my car, the fact that Jupiter rotates in the wrong direction, etc.  AT & T makes life difficult for my iPad use as these scoundrels insist on the identification of where I have “service,” where I am billed, whether I am Michael, E. Michael or Edward Michael and which of my addresses (two in MA, one in NJ and one in TN) I use.  I can’t keep this stuff straight!  I keep writing more and more complex melodies o be used as passwords.    In addition to that, I’m supposed to know where I live?  Send help.  I can’t do the mundane  :  )

I was living in New Jersey for the last big hurricane – Irene (2011)  –  to hit the Northeast.  In preparation for that disaster, I thought it would be a good idea to put together a set list of songs about big winds.  All of the songs from my Big Wind set list were in my iMac.  I also wanted to feature songs from many styles, and some non-obvious  wind songs.  (I omitted The Association’s “Windy,” for example.)

So, here is my 2011 set list reprinted here for your meteorological  and emotional comfort.  May you have as many smiles with these songs as did I.

Annuit Coeptis

 

Friday, August 26, 2011

Pompton Lakes, New Jersey – a day before Hurricane Irene arrives

In honor of The Big Wind (and Rain), I thought I’d compile some of my favorite songs about wind into a set list.   These songs are carefully arranged by my mood – what I want to hear and what feels right following each song.  The styles often don’t flow according to those who restrict themselves to a single style or two.  But I restrict myself to music and sound that I can perceive – I love as many varieties of music as I do varieties of food, people and geography.

Here goes:

1. Florida Hurricane – St. Louis Jimmy

2. The Wayward Wind – I have & love 3 versions – Neil Young, Gogi Grant & Patsy Cline

3. Let The Wind Blow – The Beach Boys

4. Parry The Wind High, Low – Frank Black

5. Like A Hurricane – Neil Young

6. I Hear The Wind Blow – They Might Be Giants

7. The Eye Of The Hurricane – Herbie Hancock

8. In The Wind – Johnny A.

9. March Winds Goin’ To Blow My Blues Away – Carter Family

10. A Pillow Of Winds – Pink Floyd

11. Summer Wind – Frank Sinatra

12. Summer Wind – Desert Rose Band

13. Hurricane – Bob Dylan

14. Hurricane Eye – Paul Simon

15. Hickory Wind – The Byrds (BR5-49 version is also great)

16. Smoke In The Wind – Walela

17. Inherit The Wind – Elvis Presley

18. Trade Winds – Frank Sinatra

19. Blowin’ In The Wind – Bob Dylan

20. Little Wind – Geri Allen

21. Night Wind – Benny Goodman

22. I Talk To The Wind – King Crimson

23. (I’m Not) A Candle In The Wind – Tammy Wynette

24. Temple Of The Winds – Bill Bruford’s Earthworks

25. Prairie Wind – Neil Young

26. Idiot Wind – Bob Dylan

27. Ill Wind – Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong

28. That Ol’ Wind – Garth Brooks

29. Listening Wind – Talkin Heads

30. Santa Ana Winds – The Beach Boys

31. Teenage Wind – Frank Zappa

32. Tahmizyan:  A Cool Wind Is Blowing – Kronos Quartet

33. Third Wind – Pat Metheny

34. Twistin’ In The Wind – David Byrne

35. Aprilwind – Pat Metheny

36. Blow Wind Blow – Dr. John

37. Blow Wind Blow – Muddy Waters

38. Catch The Wind – Donovan

39. Cast Your Pod To The Wind – They Might Be Giants

40. Dust In The Wind – Kansas

41. Easy Wind – Grateful Dead – (God bless Pig Pen!)

42. My Oklahoma Home (It Blowed Away) – Sis Cunningham

43. G-Spot Tornado – Frank Zappa

44. Any Way The Wind Blows – Frank Zappa & The Mothers Of Invention

45. Blow Away – George Harrison

46. Four Strong Winds – Neil Young

47. Gone With The Wind – Sun Ra

48. Shelter In The Rain – Stevie Wonder

49. Blowing Down That Old Dusty Wind – Woody Guthrie

50. A Mighty Wind – the last song from “A Mighty Wind”

Please feel free to add your storms, Norm.

 

Igor Got Game: A Musical and Legal Comparison of The Beastie Boys and Igor Stravinsky

Igor Got Game:  A Musical and Legal Comparison of the Beastie Boys and Igor Stravinsky

Today I am beginning my trip to New York.  It was going to begin with a stop at the Natick Mall for the only reason I go to any mall – an Apple store.  My iMac won’t play DVD’s and my 13 inch MacBook Pro won’t even turn on.  The laptop died about 30 minutes after I made the appointment at the Genius Bar for the iMac.  It was as if it too wanted attention and injured itself so they could visit the Genius Bar together.  But I canceled this as I now won’t be gone for 4-5 days as I had planned due to Frankenstorm.  I’ll bring the computers to an Apple store closer to Gloucester at some other time.

I’ll be in New York to speak at the 2012 IBS/CUNY Kingsborough Community College Media Conference.  One of the best things about this conference is its location on Oriental Blvd on the Atlantic Ocean.  My best and most expensive app, Navigon, indicates that the location of 2001 Oriental Blvd. is 3 ft. from Oriental Beach on the Atlantic Ocean.  Smile smile!!!  It is so nice to speak with a view of the ocean.  I’ll be in the building on the left in this photo.  And the water will really be that blue.  :  )

On Monday, I would have  spoken to a Corporate Social Responsibility class at 10 AM, and then to a Writing for Radio & TV class at 2 PM, both at William Paterson University.  I had prepared some really fun stuff – there really are enough examples of corporate social irresponsibility in the music and entertainment industry – but that will have to happen at a later time.

But Frankenstorm has changed that.

And now…something completely different.

This was the title of a presentation I gave at several conferences one century ago.  I loved what I was finding when analyzing the Beastie Boys new album at that time (1999) – Hello Nasty.  For one, they had sampled the music of Igor Stravinsky and Stephen Sondheim and found ways of connecting both Stravinsky & Sondheim.

I’ll return to this subject in the near future and possibly post this paper in installments.

Here is the abstract to that presentation:

“Igor Got Game:  A Musical and Legal Comparison of

The Beastie Boys and Igor Stravinsky”

E. Michael Harrington

1999

A B S T R A C T

Igor Stravinsky’s “Pulcinella” (1918) drew heavily upon music composed by Giovanni Pergolesi and others in the early 18th century.  The Beastie Boys, an extremely popular rap/hip hop music group since the mid-1980’s, in their best-selling CD, Hello Nasty (1999) drew upon the music of Stravinsky by means of the digital sampling of Stravinsky’s “Firebird.”  Both of these “borrowings” share important similarities and differences.  Furthermore, these borrowings shed light on several seemingly unrelated disciplines and fields of study.  These include music composition and the nature of creativity and originality, the intellectual property law of different times and societies created to protect authors from appropriations of their original works, the means by which borrowed music may be used and transmitted (sampling, digital streaming, MP3, etc.), and the business (financial, licensing, retail, broadcast, etc.) considerations involved in such borrowings.  Although neither Stravinsky or the Beastie Boys were alone in using preexisting music in their compositions, the manner in which they have borrowed in these specific instances is historically significant.  In addition, these borrowings, taken as a related whole, constitute an important educational paradigm by which we can better understand the definitions of creativity, and originality, and how these definitions have changed and remained the same in light of today’s legal, cultural, economic and technological developments.

Using the Beastie Boys’  Hello Nasty, and Stravinsky’s “Firebird” and “Pulcinella,” this presentation will demonstrate the advantages of a more multidisciplinary – creative, technological, legal and business – approach to the understanding and teaching of  music in the 21st century.  Classes which can be positively enhanced by such an approach include music appreciation, music theory, music composition, business, intellectual property law and technology.

Baseball and Music – The Right Songs for the Right Season

I thought of calling this post, “15  Songs for the Soul.”  But that thought lasted for two seconds.  Elvis Costello’s great lyric from “Alison” came to mind, and rescued me:   “I’m not going to get too sentimental like those other sticky Valentines.”

I also liked the title, “I see St. Peter wave ,” but decided against that too.   If you don’t know, that is a short phrase from a song by They Might Be Giants.   “I see St. Peter wave” then led me to the rest of the song which burrowed its way perfectly into this post.   And I love the messages the songs below convey.  They are perfectly suited for this day, don’t you think?

I’d love to get reactions to these songs in this season.  :  )

To quote ELVIS COSTELLO again (re this post):

“MY  AIM  IS   TRUE”

*   *   *   *   *   *

I’ll only write a baseball post this once (in 2012) but because I love music and baseball, I thought I could fuse the two, especially because this is prime time baseball season with the 2012 World Series about to begin.

Music, and music with words, can make us connect with our emotions.   Our emotions can become more intense through and with music.  We can use music to heighten our feelings, to subdue our feelings, to bring us out of sadness, or even to take us down a more languished and lugubrious path.

Have I mentioned that I am from Cambridge/Boston/Framingham?   I love New York City – visited it hundreds of times, lived in midtown Manhattan for a lot of 2004-2006 (51st & 7th Avenue), and in nearby NJ from 2008-2012.  These few facts are central to why and how I constructed today’s post.

The New York Yankees lost four (4) straight games to the Detroit Tigers (their final loss came last night) and will not be in the  2012 World Series. New Yorkers view winning the World Series as a birthright.  Bostonians, on the other hand, do not have any kind of birthright but we get great joy when New York sports teams fail.  I think the sports fan enthusiasm with NYers and Bostonians are nearly genetic in origin.  According to contemporary health and medicinal talk, what we have are PRE-EXISTING CONDITIONS!

So with that in mind, I offer some music for New Yorkers today on this bleak day, the morning after a $200 million team collapsed into darkness….

 

 

T H E Y   M I G H T    B E    G I A N T S

C H O P I N

 T U P A C  

B O B     D Y L A N 

H A N K    W I L L I A M S

E L V I S    C O S T E L L O

T H E    M A V E R I C K S

T H E    P O L I C E

 

 

I would be remiss if (I love cliches like, I would be remiss if) I didn’t offer some music for Bostonians today as well.  With that in mind, let us pray (no, I won’t use that cliche) —-  let us turn to some more music:

 

 

T H E     B E A T L E S   

B O B    M A R L E Y

R O L L I N G   S T O N E S 

U 2

O K L A H O M A

E A R T H,  W I N D   &   F I R E

T H E    C O W S I L L S

 

Have a great weekend!

University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, flamboyant red shoes, Harvard Law School

I knew this day would happen – I just didn’t want it to happen yet – happen today.  What’s the thing I’ve sort of dreaded?

The ocean temperature has finally dropped into the 50’s!  It’s 59 F this morning.  The air is 59 F and feels 59 F, both by the Weather Channel’s standards and mine.  I’ll go see what 59 F salt water feels like soon.

And if and when the day comes that I can no longer walk in the ocean barefooted, or shoed with my flamboyant shoes (essentially, barefoot), I’ll deal with it.   (If you want to see my flamboyant red shoes, there’s plenty of footage – shoe-age – in Socialcam, or you can see them here:   http://bit.ly/RWQNmy )   I don’t know about wetsuits. Maybe it will be time to research those, or ask the next wet-suited person I see in the ocean.

Today will be a long but exciting day.  I’ve got projects to work on, USPS mail to await (am I a voter or not?), and a lot of talking to do.

Late this afternoon I’ll be speaking to students at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh.   The subject will be copyright and music – some real nuts & bolts stuff from my perspective.  Because I’ve been in the middle of a lot of copyright issues, questions and disputes, I’ve been forced to think and make decisions.  It’s always amazing to think that federal law is used to evaluate and appraise someone’s creative expression – that the law would say EXPRESSION X is of more value and worth more “protection” than EXPRESSION Y, and that I’m asked to do the evaluating of expression.  Fun and humbling.  In the same way that teaching/professing is fun and humbling.  More than just humbling, it’s quite an honor.

This will be my second time speaking to students at UWO.  “UWO” – that’s a cool acronym.  It makes me think of EMO, which is sort of an acronym.

I hope to be good enough that there will be a 3rd time for me at UWO.

30 minutes after that ends, I meet with a class online, for 60 minutes, then a break of 30 minutes, than another online class for 60 minutes, and then I’ll know more about the state of the baseball playoffs.  There were times in a distant past (Stone Age pre-Internet days) when I’d bring a little TV to a class I was teaching, turn on the baseball playoffs with no sound but the TV facing me, and profess away.  When things got exciting, I’d turn the TV to let my students watch too.  Today, I’m in a nice house, the TV is much larger, and the Atlantic Ocean is on both sides of the TV (the TV is between two large windows) and I’ll be sitting in my only expensive piece of furniture – my Herman Miller Aeron chair.  Life doesn’t get much better the this, does it?  :  )

Another aside – a Harvard Law professor and friend invited me to lunch yesterday.  I got to see his office in the incredible new Wasserstein Hall.    (How cool is it to see a United States Supreme Court Justice – Elena Kagan – with big blades about to cut a ribbon?)   I was not surprised to see how Harvard Law treats their faculty.  He had a Herman Miller Aeron chair just like mine.

Some of my next ideas for this blog are:

  1. start out a-talkin’ about what’s on my mind – the temperature of the ocean and times for the tides, mostly  :  )
  2. delve into more music, technology, law and business news – the sale of Sprint, Apple rumors, etc.
  3. respond to friends’ questions and comments
  4. figure stuff out – copyright and creative expression being a big part of that
  5. get interrupted with better ideas and suggestions (this again is where my friends come into it)

Onward!  I hope we have an excellent day!

Annuit Coeptis