Letterheady
Before email signatures and customized Twitter themes, people wanting to make an impression with correspondence turned to the gloriously idiosyncratic and oft-outrageous personal insignia stamped onto letters. Letterheady, a new website from writer Shaun Usher, celebrates this lost art of communication with interesting letterheads from iconic figures and corporations of the 20th century including Wrigley, Charlie Chaplin, Einstein, Marvel Comics and more.
(Via Cool Hunting)
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
Marching to Shostakovich
With Shostakovich’s “The Nose” playing at the Metropolitan Opera, it seems a good moment to check in on the world of Shostakovich-playing college and high-school bands. Back in 2006, the composer-critic-blogger Matthew Guerrieri alerted me to the existence of the marching-band Shostakovich underground; he’d come across a video of the Austin Bulldog Band playing part of Schoenberg’s “Verklärte Nacht” and the Scherzo of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony.
(Via Unquiet Thoughts)
Check out some of those bands on youtube – click here and then follow Ross’s links. There is something very wonderful about hearing American highschool bands playing classical music. And it’s not just classical music, they are playing music by composers from the Soviet Union, created during the cold war, with titles like Fire of Eternal Glory. Commie music on American football fields. Music across borders and music across time. This YouTube vid, showcases particularly impressive playing! I might as well embed it:
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
I heard this one decades ago, but maybe you haven’t:
Detritus 33
Warning! Muso joke: What’s the difference between a rock guitarist and a jazz guitarist?
A rock guitarist plays three chords to thousands of people, while the jazz guitarist plays thousands of chords to three people
(Via the music of sound)
How do guitar players change a lightbulb? One climbs on the ladder and changes the bulb and 99 other guitarists proclaim: “I could have done that!!”
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
AT&T Zero phone charger won’t draw power by itself | Accessories | iPhone Central | Macworld
Unlike conventional chargers, the Zero won’t draw power if there’s no phone plugged into it. AT&T claims the Zero, which it developed with phone accessory vendor Superior Communications, is the first such charger on the market. It will go on sale only at AT&T stores across the U.S. in May, and interested customers can sign up to be notified when it’s released.AT&T wouldn’t specify which phones the Zero charger will be able to charge, though spokesman Mark Siegel said it was designed for the carrier’s major smartphones. But its USB interface suggests it will be compatible with the Apple iPhone.
Nice. If every wall-wart ((roadie slang for external power supplies))) had that feature, we would be saving some juice!
Wow, our high school band didn’t sound like that.
dave wrote: “Wow, our high school band didn’t sound like that.”
My high school band did. My high school school was an absolute failure in every way APART from its music program.
The band director was SIMPLY AMAZING: he had a way of pulling astonishing performances out of even the weakest musicians. We would practice on Saturdays in the cold for hours, and no one would seem to mind. When I watched the video above I kinda got nostalgic and misty for high school, because I KNOW our band could have played that stuff, and it felt so amazingly empowering to pull off performances of difficult music.
Our drum line was phenomenal: easily as good as any I have seen. We practiced endlessly and obsessively.
What a rush! After all this time, I still miss it. I can still recall marching through the streets of the neighborhood in the summer time as part of rehearsal. I can still remember the butterflies and adrenaline high of waiting off-field before competitions. “WATCH YOUR DIAGONALS!”
The school was shut down as an academic failure despite its stellar record as a music school.