The Blog

The other day I was shooting on a Silvercup stage and couldn't help gawking at a wall filled with signatures and graffiti from guest stars on NBC's 30 Rock, which was shot there. Two of my favorites, Tom Hanks & Moby:

I was stunned recently by the rhythmic interplay between Sting's bass line and sung line on the song Roxanne. I literally had to stop walking, close my eyes, and concentrate to really grasp it all. This song is a master class on how to coordinate a few musical elements and yet never become boring. See also Stewart Copeland's shifting the snare from beats 2 & 4 to 1-2-3-4 at around 2:50. Pure Genius Anyway, If you're like me you have to see it to believe it, so I set about to score them out. Here's a few measures with the guitar part thrown in.

When asked to document his inspirations as a photographer, Kyle Dean Reinford decided to shoot other artists doing their thing. 

From the Fader Magazine photo story, he caught me at home studying the score of a new musical.

Some people bake. Some drink enough to forget. This is my story: Yesterday my agent received a fairly flat rejection from a high-profile director on an upcoming project involving music. Vague enough for you? Over the past month I'd worked countless hours on a pretty random collection of instruments for the show, and its tempting to think it was all for not. Except that it wasn't. In honor of my last month's work I made this:

In Order of Apperance

Guitar

Banjo

Clarinet

Trombone

In a brilliant New York Times Op-Ed, Tim Kreider offers the following fill-in-the-blank form letter for artists:

Few words capture the spirit of Christmas-in-England like this photo and text from the back of a Christmas with Ronnie Aldrich LP:

If you were a rich, jet-setting dreamer for whom the holiday time of Christmas offered a week of snow-white pleasure at some fabulous winter resort anywhere in the world

If you spent your day on skates and skis, and rode over mountain passes in a cable car and met a beautiful girl you wished to later wine and dine

If you both skied by torch light that night and were caught in a storm and took shelter in a log cabin to wait out the weather, and there was a phonograph machine there

Then, this is the record that would keep you both in love. 

Somewhere in the third year of music school a student realizes they can use their burgeoning skills of music notation for good or evil. Today I use mine for good and put an end to a nagging childhood debate. As Vanilla Ice points out in the video below, the bass lines for his Ice Ice Baby & Queen + David Bowie's Under Pressure are not identical. But didn't you always wonder what the difference was? Here they are notated:

I play a bunch of different instruments; violin is not really one of them. Yet anyway. 

Photo: Jeff Riedel 

For writers, the abstract rule that that introduces restrictive elements and which introduces nonrestrictive elements is probably less helpful than the following simple test: If there needs to be a comma before the rel. pron.,  you need which; otherwise, you need that ... Misusing that for who or whom, whether in writing or speech, functions as a kind of class-marker—it's the grammatical equivalent of wearing NASCAR paraphernalia or liking pro wrestling.