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Record of the Day:
Robert Fripp - Network (1985)
I don't have any particular insight into this e.p., which I picked up maybe a year ago. (I am not doing any research here.) It seems to be some tracks from other records and sessions. But of particular interest to me is the first track, "North Star", which has an absolutely stacked cast of musicians: Phil Collins: drums, Brian Eno: synthesizer, Tony Levin: bass, Sid McGinniss: pedal steel ( ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ). But especially interesting is the vocal & songwriting credit by Daryl Hall. I think this is from the Fripp album Exposure. But Fripp also produced a Daryl Hall solo record called Sacred Songs that I'd really like to track that down, and I wonder if this is from those same sessions.
The song with the David Byrne vocal is also pretty good, and I think may be unique to this record.
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It's all good.
But one thing I'm mulling over is the CMS I chose. As I have expressed earlier, I'm no fan of WordPress. Slow, not fun to template, et cetera. I haven't mentioned it by name before, but I guess no need to be cagey; the CMS I'm using is called Joomla. It's an open source PHP "blogging" alternative to WordPress & Drupal. The one no really talks about. More than WordPress, for me it works a little more naturally to sites that aren't blogs.1 (Conversely, as a straight up blogging platform it's a little lacking out of the box.) When I was an independent webmaster (over a decade ago) and needed to spin up small sites that were straight forward to design for and build, Joomla was my go-to. One had to bend WordPress in some ways it wasn't entirely designed to work to make a portfolio site or a small business site. Joomla lends itself pretty easily to this once you get your mind around how it works. And so when I wanted to spin up a blog quick I figured it was a good choice. And in general I've been happy.
But...
Building all this on a 3rd tier CMS platform seems perhaps short-sighted. I mean, if I just want a place to write and revise my thoughts for whomever may find it, sure. I can tangle with the taxonomy of how you structure the site, but it's nothing I can't work with. But as my esteemed co-admin texted me after reading a post "I wish there were a way I could like or respond."
Sure, I could install comments easy enough. But unless I'm just leaving them open this would mean I needed to get people to log in. For the most part people are sick of signing up to sites. So I could use an extension to allow for Facebook, Google, Twitter login but, nope, not touching that for a part time hobby project. And moral objections.
If I could just integrate with the Fediverse. Someone could boost my post. A response on Mastodon would be a comment on my blog.
This week there was "big" news: Automattic, the company the oversees WordPress, officially brought in house a WordPress plugin that ingrates a WordPress site with the Fediverse via Activity Pub.2 Pretty soon all WordPress sites will be able to interface with the Fediverse.
As near as I can tell there is no formal plan for Joomla, or even any real discussion about it. A couple of Joomla independent developers are writing some about it, but no plug 'n' play integration, nothing on the roadmap. If you want to read me getting real "inside baseball" about it I wrote about it on the Joomla forums. But suffice to say unless Joomla steps up it's going to get even more marginalized.
What does this mean for me in the here and now? Well, I didn't really start this endeavor to do serious website development in my spare time. I just want a place to write. But the further I get into this blog, the more posts will need to be ported over to the platform were I to switch. With that in mind, I thought I would give WordPress and this new plugin a whirl. So far, initial explorations have been less than thrilling. It's put a damper on my enthusiasm. Still don't love WordPress, and it seems to have gone some weird places in its effort to be all things to all folks.3 And my first pass at using that Activity Pub plugin did not work. So ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don't have any real answers at this point. I'll keep writing, expanding on my Mastodon posts. If people want to respond, they can always do so over there I guess. I'll create a contact form to encourage "letters from the editor". I'll give WordPress another spin. Perhaps I'll try to spin up some integration for this platform. I suppose I could look at a different CMS altogether, but it has to be self-hosted, and code I can parse even if just as a dilettante.
I definitely welcome any thoughts about any of this.
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1 I don't have any firsthand experience working with Drupal.
2 This is a pretty good exploration of what the purchase could mean exactly.
3 It is easy enough to get back to a classic WordPress environment.
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Record of the Day:
Glass Eye - Bent By Nature (1988)
I've been listening to some Austin, TX bands1 recently, so let me start with this one I picked this up a month or 2 ago. I haven’t fully clicked with it, but I’m hanging onto it. Other than the bargain price I got it for, the reason I grabbed this is one of the members, Kathy McCarty, made an album called Dead Dog’s Eyeball that I absolutely loved in the 90s.
Chances are most of my #GenX mutuals who came up through 80s/90s indie music, or anyone who's seen the Daniel Johnston documentary, is familiar with Dead Dog's Eyeball. If not, you're in for a treat (if it's your kind of thing, granted). If any album first showed the genius of Daniel Johnston as a songwriter it's this record. McCarty & her collaborators re-contextualize the arrangements while keeping the core of the songs. As in, some bands have good songs but if you try to cover them they just sound like crappy versions of those songs. What is enduring about those songs is the way the artists perform them. But Johnston writes really timeless songs that are strong enough to be completely reinterpreted and still be terrific songs. They're like standards.2
Mastodon mutual The Orchid Show put it really well, "I think a big part of why Dan's oeuvre lends itself so well to reinterpretation is precisely because so much of the versions he released feel like fully-realized demos, or otherwise implacably in-between states, which is also probably a decent description for a lot of where he was at internally throughout most of his creative life as well."
This Glass Eye record is fairly different, but also you can tell its the same creative minds behind it. This is post-punk influenced. A couple of people over on Mastodon tell me they were a great live band, and I believe it. Nothing I interests me more in an artist than meeting someone who knows them, or has seen them live, or is super familiar with the records. I think someone else's biases is a fine lenses through which to view music. Since some of my favorite records were "pretty good" when I first heard them, and the pedigree of the people involved, I'm glad I grabbed this, and will definitely keep listening to it.
Dead Dog's Eyeball by Kathy McCarty
Dead Dog's Eyeball by Kathy McCarty
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1 On this, more later. But I had just posted a RofD posts on Big Boys & Poi Dog Pondering.
2 Daniel's records themselves I can only take in small doses. I'm only familiar with the early ones, which is what McCarty is drawing on for this record. And I enjoy the lo-fi aesthetic (natch) but it's not exactly background music--it demands your attention. I had a partner who was very much a fan, so I heard the records a fair degree just because she liked what she liked and played it over and over (most of it was good so I'm not really complaining--shout out to The Gits). And we did see him in concert at Lupo's in Providence, RI and it was a terrific concert. His backing band was good, Dan seemed to be having a great time and was really engaged, and he played a bunch of the "hits". And hearing him perform these songs both solo and with the band really drove home how talented a song-writer he is.
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Listen, "of the day" is going to have to be loosely interpreted. As in, it's the record I'm listening to on the day I wrote the post, not that I'm listening to and writing about a different record every day.
Although it was first attempted as just that: I would listen to a record, either vinyl, CD, or digital download and write about it. This was back in digitallofi.com v1. The idea was inspired by writer Brian W. Collins' Horror Movie a Day blog, which I had started reading early on it its 6 year run1. If he could watch a full movie every day, 365 days a year, and eventually write a post about it, I could certainly do it with a lp album. Alas, I probably made it about a couple months. I even banked like a half-dozen that I had written before I even started publishing them. But after I burned those, I quickly began letting the whole endeavor slide. There were just things I was more interested in writing about, or not writing about but doing (i.e. making music).
And, frankly, some days I just don't want to listen to an album. It begins feeling like a chore. Not the ideal state for enjoying music. Some days I just want to set the iPod to shuffle. Some days I just need to not hear music by other people. So I gave it up and went back to writing about VST plugins and sample libraries. (It was pretty funny that on a site where I wrote mostly about making computer based music I was also pontificating earnestly about Drive-by Truckers.)
Then when I was spending more time on Instagram (post-Facebook acquisition, pre-shittification) I would post shots of whatever vinyl record I was listening to. But, you know, the algorithm there just buried me eventually for whatever reason and the only people who saw it were friends & family2. And I'm pretty sure most didn't particularly care about my vinyl collection.
So when I finally fled Twitter for good in November 2022, setting up shop on mastodon.social, one of the things I did to build a network of mutuals was start posting in the hashtags #vinyl and #nowplaying.3 And I adopted #RecordOfTheDay for these posts, more of a way I can keep track of what I've posted. But since my posts there will auto-expire after a couple of weeks, and in the name of my own writing, photos, let's just pick it up here.
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1 The blog is still going but it's no longer literally him watching a horror movie a day. Just general reviews of horror movies he sees when he sees them. Give him a follow. I don't always jibe with his taste but there's no doubt he has a unique perspective and has forgotten more horror movies than you've seen.
2 I'm not on Facebook--I dumped a long time ago and have successfully avoided it since; well done, me--so Instagram is where I still interact with irl friends and family. It's also where I can "stay in touch" with those Twitter mutuals who haven't acclimated to or joined Mastodon. But I'm on private; I pretty much hate Facegram (especially in the wannabe Tik-Toc era). But since it's the only place online I can see this group in my immediate orbit I can't bring myself to delete my account...
3 That, and posting to #MST3K during a Mystery Science Theater 3000 Turkey Day Marathon were the two things that gave me a true foothold in Mastodon. It gave me a bunch of people to follow and followed me back. From there I've been able to build a network of people. But, as I've said, have a much longer post about all that in the works.
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Record of the Day1:
The B-52s - Wild Planet
For this week's #CDFriday2, I went with a record I picked up at a local library sale for $.50. I almost passed it over because there was a fair degree of schmutz of the disc. But it cleaned up nicely. And I'm really glad I did.
The deep cuts on this are terrific. I'll admit back in the day I didn't really explore the B-52s. tbh whatever affection I had for "Rock Lobster" was drained out by being played to death in when I was in 9th grade. I was into the Ramones and Jimi Hendrix. And by the time I was fully into post-punk a couple of years later, they were pretty mainstream and struck me as kitschy. But one of the best things about getting older is that stuff that you dismissed when you were younger is now something you can enjoy.3
I also noted that I don't have much interesting in the deep cuts in post Ricky Wilson era of the band. In fact, the reason I first pulled The B-52s into my YouTube algorithm was someone posted a link to a video where there were a lot of clear shots of Ricky playing guitar. And looking at the songwriting credits to this its very apparent how important he was in crafting this sound.
And when all is said and done, I'm super happy that a band this weird broke into the mainstream.
One thing I found interesting is that it seems pretty obvious to me that there is bass guitar on a lot of these songs. Now, I can't say for certain, it could all just be in the production--which is just dynamite on this record--but there are songs where the bass is more obviously the Korg you see Kate playing in the video below. And what I'm hearing on a lot of the songs is not that familiar shaped sine wave of a synth/organ, and is pretty prominent in the mix. I have no ethical or aesthetic problem to them using a bass player on the record--completely makes sense to me, plus I love studio production--just interesting to me from a creative perspective.
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1 My Record of the Day is something I started doing on Instagram, posting picture of whichever vinyl record I was listening to at the moment. In fact, I'll do a full post on this rather than cramming it into a footnote.
2 #CDFriday was started by Bruce Levenstein originally on Twitter, but he's since moved it over to Mastodon. Bruce champions the CD format whenever the opportunity presents itself; his collection is no joke. Not to speak for him, but his #CDFriday movement was a way to highlight the viability of the CD format in an era of vinyl resurgence and digital streaming and download formats.
3 I'll definitely be writing much more about this in the future.