Archive for December, 2008
The Muppets Do Billy Joel
Saturday, December 6th, 2008SamuraiFrog over at Electronic Cerebrectomy points us to this awesome clip of Dr. Teeth & The Electric Mayhem (a.k.a., the Muppet Band) covering Billy Joel’s New York State of Mind:
The clip is awesome for several reasons. First, I’ve never seen it before (and I have the TimeLife issued complete Muppet Show DVDs, so this must have been recorded but never incorporated into a show Best of the Muppet Show DVDs, but this isn’t on it). Second, with the exception of the standard Statler & Waldorf tag at the end, it’s done straight – no anthropomorphic Greyhound Buses or newspapers popping up during the song for our amusement – just the music.
Third, and most interesting to me, they do some really cool things with the song musically. For instance, the bridge is sung in a higher key than the verses, rather than a lower key as Billy Joel recorded it. In Joel’s version, the bridge is a quiet reflection on his time away from New York, and an admission that he misses the rat race and wants back in. The lower key gives us a sense of this “break” from the story. When it’s over, the song returns to a somewhat angst-laden traveler who just can’t wait to get home already, and the key goes back up to reflect the tension.
The Electric Mayhem reverse this to great effect. Floyd sings it as a guy who’s perfectly comfortable being on the road. His travel back to New York is just another Greyhound bus in a string of thousands, and it doesn’t phase him at all. At the bridge, though, the key goes higher as he gets downright mournful (and maybe even a bit annoyed?) about having spent so much time off the road, disconnected from the rest of the world. When his bridge finishes, he sounds downright relieved to be singing about his travels again.
The line to listen for is “Don’t care if it’s Chinatown or Riverside.” When Joel sings it, he means “I don’t care where you take me, just get me there already.” Floyd means it more literally – he really doesn’t care if he winds up in Chinatown or Riverside. It’s just another stop on the tour to him, and he’ll be leaving soon anyway.
I expect this kind of emotional depth from Billy Joel – he’s a consummate artist and a storyteller at heart. But a bunch of felt puppets? Jim Henson and his crew were so much better than anyone else at that genre, it’s staggering. Oh, and we need to remember that there was a real band providing the music off stage, and they had some serious chops too.
Categories: Primetime TV, Words about Music | 2 Comments »
When Film is Free: 11 Things To Do With Your Digital Camera
Friday, December 5th, 2008Via Glenn Reynolds, a link to eleven cool things you can do with your digital camera that you may not have thought about before:
- Tip #1: Photograph a note with your name, address, blood type, allergies, etc. in case you lose your camera or are found unconscious
- Tip #2: Photograph floorplans, mall layouts or subway maps so you can refer to them as you wander about
- Tip #3: Photograph parking lot signs so you remember where you parked
- Tip #4: Photograph something before you take it apart to fix it, in case you want to remember what it looked like before you started
- Tip #5: Photograph license plates of cars parked next to you in case your car gets dinged while you’re away
- Tip #6: Photograph a particular page in the yellow pages so you can keep the addresses & phone numbers with you
- Tip #7: Photograph potentially illegal situations for use as evidence later on
- Tip #8: Photograph Chinese food menus or complex SKU#’s for on-the-go reference(not quite sure how these wound up together, btw…)
- Tip #9: Photograph a recipe before going shopping for ingredients
- Tip #10: Photograph your rental car to document pre-existing dents, dings, etc.
- Tip #11: Photograph yourself when there’s no mirror available
Each link provides a sample picture and some more detail, so by all means – click around.
For the record, I think some of these are cooler than others. The “photograph some data and zoom in on the picture to read it” suggestions (#2, #6, #8, and #9) seem better served by having an iPhone, Blackberry, or some such device. But if you don’t already own one of those, a camera can make due as described above.
Categories: Random Acts of Blogging | 1 Comment »