Small Change is an album by Tom Waits, released in 1976 on Asylum Records. It was recorded, direct to 2-track stereo tape, from July 15 to July 20, 1976 at the Wally Heider Recording Studio, in Hollywood, USA under the production of Bones Howe.
At the time of the recording of Small Change Waits was drinking more and more heavily, and life on the road was starting to take its toll on him. Waits, looking back at the period said: “I was sick through that whole period […] It was starting to wear on me, all the touring. I’d been travelling quite a bit, living in hotels, eating bad food, drinking a lot - too much. There’s a lifestyle that’s there before you arrive and you’re introduced to it. It’s unavoidable.”
With the album Waits asserted that he “tried to resolve a few things as far as this cocktail-lounge, maudlin, crying-in-your-beer image that I have. There ain’t nothin’ funny about a drunk […] I was really starting to believe that there was something amusing and wonderfully American about being a drunk. I ended up telling myself to cut that shit out.”
But then I heard the quad with the four speakers and I was like this is it, so I got rid of the stereo and got the quad.
I’m listening to this thing and I’m like “Hey this sounds like SHIT!”
So, I got rid of that and got the dodecaphonic with the 12 speakers.
This was more to my liking…for a while.
But the ear gets pretty sophisticated pretty fast and I got rid of that and got the milliphonic with the 1,000 speakers.
And I’m listening to that one and I’m like, “Hey, this sounds like SHIT too! The other one was SHIT one, this one is SHIT too!”
So, I traded that in and got the googlephonic, which is the highest number of speakers you can have before infinity.
Sounds like SHIT!
So, then I said, “Hey, maybe it’s the needle!”
I had the typical diamond needle. I searched around got the moonrock needle, cost me 3 million bucks, but what the hey. So, now I have a googlephonic stereo with a moonrock needle.
It’s okay for a car stereo, I wouldn’t want it in my house.
{ Death In Vegas, Dirt | Directed by Andrea Giacobbe | via Colleen Nika }
{ Aphex Twin - Come to daddy | Directed by Chris Cunningham }
Although humans usually prefer mates that resemble themselves, mating preferences can vary with context. Stress has been shown to alter mating preferences in animals, but the effects of stress on human mating preferences are unknown. Here, we investigated whether stress alters men’s preference for self-resembling mates. (…) Our findings show that stress affects human mating preferences: unstressed individuals showed the expected preference for similar mates, but stressed individuals seem to prefer dissimilar mates.
Music does not express this or that particular and definite joy, this or that sorrow, or pain, or horror, or delight, or merriment, or peace of mind; but joy, sorrow, pain, horror, delight, merriment, peace of mind themselves, to a certain extent in the abstract, their essential nature, without accessories, and therefore without their motives. Yet we completely understand them in this extracted quintessence. (…)
Music, if regarded as an expression of the world, is in the highest degree a universal language, which is related indeed to the universality of concepts, much as they are related to the particular things. (…)
This deep relation which music has to the true nature of all things also explains the fact that suitable music played to any scene, action, event, or surrounding seems to disclose to us its most secret meaning, and appears as the most accurate and distinct commentary upon it. This is so truly the case, that whoever gives himself up entirely to the impressions of a symphony, seems to see all the possible events of the world take place in himself, yet if he neglects, he can find no likeness between the music and the things that passed before his mind.”
In recent years Britain has become the Willy Wonka of social control, churning out increasingly creepy, bizarre, and fantastic methods for policing the populace. But our weaponization of classical music—where Mozart, Beethoven, and other greats have been turned into tools of state repression—marks a new low.
We’re already the kings of CCTV. An estimated 20 per cent of the world’s CCTV cameras are in the UK, a remarkable achievement for an island that occupies only 0.2 per cent of the world’s inhabitable landmass.
A few years ago some local authorities introduced the Mosquito, a gadget that emits a noise that sounds like a faint buzz to people over the age of 20 but which is so high-pitched, so piercing, and so unbearable to the delicate ear drums of anyone under 20 that they cannot remain in earshot. It’s designed to drive away unruly youth from public spaces, yet is so brutally indiscriminate that it also drives away good kids, terrifies toddlers, and wakes sleeping babes.
Police in the West of England recently started using super-bright halogen lights to temporarily blind misbehaving youngsters. From helicopters, the cops beam the spotlights at youths drinking or loitering in parks, in the hope that they will become so bamboozled that (when they recover their eyesight) they will stagger home. (…)
In January it was revealed that West Park School, in Derby in the midlands of England, was “subjecting” (its words) badly behaved children to Mozart and others. In “special detentions,” the children are forced to endure two hours of classical music both as a relaxant (the headmaster claims it calms them down) and as a deterrent against future bad behavior.
Tired out,
not a miracle in days
oh yeah
Deciders for the lonely
Whispering tears
You try out for nothing then you drop dead
Not a miracle in years
Leisure for the lonely
Whispering [this this this] unecessary, unless [this this this] you’re in.
Die and succeed
I say it out loud but you just don’t care
Farewell well well well well well well, til you know me well
Farewell well well well well well well, til you know me well
Girlfriend
We are far from home, I am with you now
I am longing you, I am longing us two
Who bought a miracle sells these fortune tears
December’s death or glory how you want it?
No not a miracle in years
Deciders for the lonely
Wishing death death death, wishes death death death unless
Die and succeed
I say it out loud but she just don’t care
Farewell well well well well well well, til you know me well
Farewell well well well well well well, til you know me well
Girlfriend
Die and succeed
I say it out loud but you just don’t care
Well well well well well well…
Girlfriend
A phoenix is a mythical bird with a colorful plumage and a tail of gold and scarlet (or purple, blue, and green according to some legends).
It has a 500 to 1,000 year life-cycle, near the end of which it builds itself a nest of twigs that then ignites; both nest and bird burn fiercely and are reduced to ashes, from which a new, young phoenix or phoenix egg arises, reborn anew to live again. The new phoenix is destined to live as long as its old self.
Why do some clubbers shake it like a Polaroid picture while others prefer to perch on a bar stool? British psychologist Peter Lovatt, who has conducted rigorous field work in nightclubs, believes he can explain why some booty shaking is hot — and some is not. It’s all about your hormones. (…)
“Men can communicate their testosterone levels through the way they dance,” said Lovatt. “And women understand it — without noticing it.” (…) In women, the link between dancing style and testosterone levels were similar — but the reaction of men was just the opposite.
What do we know about the relationship between mental illness and jazz?
A review of biographical material of 40 famous jazz musicians of the period from 1945 to 1960 excluding those who were still alive, was studied and rated for psychiatric diagnoses according to the DSM IV classification.
Results:
• 10% (4) had family psychiatric disorder
• 17,5% (7) had unhappy or unstable early lifes
• 52,5% (21) were addicted to heroin some time during their lives.
• 27,5 (11) were dependent on alcohol and 15% (6) abused alcohol
• 8% (3) were dependent on cocaine
• 8% (3) had psychotic disorder
• 28,5% (11) had mood disorders
• 5% (2) had anxiety disorders
• 17,5% (7) had sentsation seeking tendencies such as disinhibition and thrill and adventure seeking. This has been linked to borderline personality disorder
• 2 killed themselfs later in life
We tend to say we like what other people like. No-one wants to stand out and risk ridicule by saying they don’t enjoy universally loved bands, like The Beatles… unless they’re trying to fit into a subculture where everyone hates The Beatles.
But do people just pretend to like what others like, or can perceived popularity actually change musical preferences? Do The Beatles actually sound better because we know everyone loves them? An amusing Neuroimage study from Berns et al aimed to answer this question with the help of 27 American teens, an fMRI scanner, and MySpace. (…)
The twist was that each song was played twice: the first time with no information about its popularity, and then again, either with or without a 5 star popularity score shown on the screen. Cleverly, this was based on the number of MySpace downloads. This meant that the subjects had a chance to change their rating based on what they’d just learned about the song’s popularity. (…)
Berns et al interpreted this as meaning that, in this experiment, popularity did not affect whether the volunteers really enjoyed the songs or not.
{ A Billboard analysis of 2009 SoundScan data shows a digital slowdown has arrived. In terms percentage and unit change, digital sales growth slowed immensely last year after three years of steady gains. As the graph below shows, annual changes in digital album and track sales have fallen sharply in the last two years. In other words, there are fewer additional tracks and digital albums purchased each year. | Billboard | Continue reading }
Sometimes songs get ’stuck in our head’. In German, this experience is known as having an ‘earworm’ and a new study shortly to be published in the British Journal of Psychology surveyed the typical features of this common phenomenon.
What particularly struck me was that “the length of both the earworm and the earworm experience frequently exceed standard estimates of auditory memory capacity”.
What is meant by auditory memory here is our ability to consciously remember a short piece of sound or to ‘repeat something back to ourselves’ - often called the ‘phonological loop’ in a popular model of working memory.
This tells us that ‘earworms’ are probably not something getting stuck in our very short-term memory but the reason why such tunes keeping buzzing around our conscious mind is still a mystery.
An abundance of brain scans, experimental studies and case histories has, in the end, failed to answer certain vital questions: What is music? Where can we find it in the brain? Why does it do what it does to us?
The brain is, in essence, a musical instrument—taking bits of material from a world of chaos, then shaping and modulating them into one graceful, lyrical stream. Yet, despite some scientific success in mapping its discrete compartments, it is an organ that resists efforts to render its workings in black and white. Cognition involves processes that are simply too wide-ranging and complex to be assigned to a single anatomical location.
Scientists have had to grapple with this, as well as with what is known as “plasticity.” At a recent conference on “Emotion, Music & the Brain” (…) Concetta Tomaino explained the phenomenon: “Simply put, the brain changes as it experiences and learns.” In effect, those attempting to pin down its internal circuitry are chasing a moving target.
Yet, the plasticity that reshapes the brain as we grow is also a blessing. “The challenge is in knowing how it can change when there is damage,” says Dr. Tomaino, “and then working with the neural networks that are still available.”
