Summer 2013 Memories

This has been a pretty interesting summer in our family. I'll try to give a complete recollection.

Olivia was planting trees from early May until beginning of August. She made about seven grand. Then she spent a couple of weeks in Thunder Bay before coming back "home" to Hamilton.

Brenda had some really cool gigs. At the time of this writing, she has just finished a week-long stint of lunchtime concerts at Jackson Square, thanks to Johnny Balog and the Music Performance Trust Fund. It's also been a bit of a struggle for her to continue working with her guitar player, who seems to be stuck in a very deep musical rut, and also has an extremely limited sensibility for live performance decorum, and also an extremely limited sense of how to treat a fellow musician with respect. Brenda is looking forward to her last gig with him, but (dang it), people keep approaching her on the gig and asking her (them) to play.

The other side of this is that Brenda has been working with an old Mohawk colleague, Ross Wooldridge. She did a HWETL gig with him in June, and has another exciting show with him and Henry Strong in a couple of weeks down at Williams Coffee Pub at Pier 8. Ross also has produced her "demo" CD with Carl Jennings, which started back in March of this year. The two guys became fast friends, much to Brenda's and my delight. But the cool thing is that Ross is actually a type of musical genius who has been waiting to get his hands on a recording project such as this. With Carl's complicity, Ross has put in over a hundred production hours to make Brenda's recording as good as possible. He believes that the quality of the recording warrants the extra time, and Carl concurs.

So that was Brenda's summer, so far. Oh, I forgot to mention that she has a photo shoot tomorrow with Ivan Sorensen at Whitehern. The image is a big part of the "package" and I'm realizing more and more that photographers are one of the key people in creating a successful brand of yourself.

More to come later, about other activities such as camping trips, etc.

#6 Summer Reading 2013

The guy was an asshole, plain and simple. But smart too. He knew how electronics worked, and he had a very creative, idealistic mind with remarkable sensitivity to design and function. But he was an asshole. People who are inspired by Steve Jobs are people who are probably also of similar ilk. They love to be right. They don't care how you feel; nay, they don't even think about how you feel. They just know what the hell they are doing, and they think it's right and get on board or get out of the way.

Every time I look at that stupid ON button on the top right hand side of my iPhone, I say to myself, "Jobs, you weren't smart enough for me, because I can't tell what the fuck way the stupid phone is facing, and I've had it upside down at least half the time. Did you also design the USB cable?"

Aside from that, I grudgingly admit that my iPhone has a certain beauty. The box itself is something I would have died for when I was a kid. It would have made a great hamster house.

By the way, my son bought me this book as a Christmas gift, and I finally got around to reading it just now, about 18 months later. Now there's a movie out about Jobs starring Aston Kutcher. Critics are saying that it's too much about the company and not about the man. I don't doubt it.