That's too bad. I really enjoy watching post-modern jukebox on YouTube. They have some killer vocalists in front of great players.

ampfixer
That's too bad. I really enjoy watching post-modern jukebox on YouTube. They have some killer vocalists in front of great players.

They are very, very good.
 
Things might have been different under other circumstances. I simply reached a point where I overdose'd on pop culture and entertainment - it's not just one thing. There's too much music everywhere, too many covers of the same darn songs, too many remakes of the same darn movies, to many people rebooting the same films, too many people sharing the same junk and quoting the same stuff.
 
You reach a point where you are sick and tired of a song but it's only just beginning because every body wants their turn on it. The whole thing feels like a grade school talent show.
 
It's so saturated that it's just meaningless. I have a hard time believing that people can even get excited about a new Spiderman or Batman movie - and yet every few weeks the craze begins again - even though the sole pretext for the movie seems to be to update the hero's costume, make it less colurfull and more Batman-ish and to play with image treatment and desaturate the whole thing.
 
It's disposable, so I've decided to spare myself the effort of picking up and putting it in the garbage - I just avoid it. I don't need more Star Wars or another version of Adèle's last single. 

Hi there Rain,
if you get tired of the bubblegum pop crap like me, then let me turn you on to ambient, drone, new age music. There's a lot of interesting, variety, experimental stuff going on that I think you might actually like some of it.
For example, Steve Roach, Michael Sterns, Jeff Pearce, Jeff Oster, etc. Just too many creative artists to name...
There's even some really experimental, glitchy type of electronic music, but I really don't care for that.....
And of course, this is the type of music I compose is ambient like my last album, Interstellar Love and many others which can be found over at
http://darrenrogers.bandcamp.com/
 
If interested, I can probably pop you a list of other great new age/ambient musicians I think you might like, esp. guitar musicians:)
 

Rain
 He was just about to peak when I was completely blinded by the flash of an iPhone - two ladies in front of me were having their picture taken together by a friend. I just couldn't believe their sense of timing. Whoever let those idiots in the VIP room...

 
I have a friend who has a wedding photography business. They're having to issue requests to the guests not to take photos on their phones because ceremony shots are being ruined by people whipping out not only iPhones but frigging iPADS as the bride walks down the aisle. You just want to start laying into these people with a cricket bat. 
 

 

Rain
I also realized in this week that, even if I have a tremendous amont of respect for him, I really don't like Prince much. Most of his songs appeared to me to be little but a simple melody on top of a riff and a groove, going on for 4 or 5 minutes without ever modulating, the simplistic melodies themselves being far from memorable in most cases. The few songs which evolved a bit more seemed pretty mediocre - nothing to write home about.

I think some artists are more about a groove than anything else. A lot of Talking Heads songs seem to consist of multiple tracks of funky riffs and rhythms played over and over on a loop, that they've brought in and out with the mute button at various times in the track. You have to be in the mood for it I guess. 

See?  A trip out among the unwashed masses is usually ruined because of the unwashed masses. 
 
This is why I'm staying home on a Friday and hanging out with my favorite little buddy Corbin. 
 

 
(Neither of us cares that he belongs to my roommate.  LOL!)

I think this was my 5th time out in 2016.
 
3 times at Cirque du Soleil, 1 at a goth night because our good friend was DJ'ing and we hadn't seen him in ages, and Prince last night.
 
If not to accompany my wife, I would probably not have went to any of these. 
 
Booze is 5 times too expensive, music is 5 times too loud (and I get to really chose neither) and there's at least 50 times as many people as I care to see. Because I have a very low and soft voice, conversation over loud music demands a lot of energy. And I have alienated myself by spending all my free time studying and reading - it just feels awkward to try and make small talk.
 
I just spend hours wishing I was here with a good bottle of my favorite wine, my Schubert cd's and my books.

At least until I'm drunk enough so that my inner Woody Allen steps down and my inner Ozzy comes out. 
 
Plus I don't dance. In all honesty, the only reason I went to bars when I was younger was to meet girls. The music and the booze is always much better at home, and there's no guy standing in the corner of the bathroom and handing you paper towels, expecting a tip.

I cannot stand most bars. The last time I went out to a bar it was for the birthday of a friend of a friend, and the place we went to was toe-to-hell packed to the rafters, it took 15 minutes to get served, they were playing the most godawful music at full blast and you had to literally shout 2 inches from people's faces to communicate, and even then you only got about 50% of what people were saying. I was stood there, sweating, hemmed in on all sides by yelling douchebags, trying to shout banal small talk with all the power of my lungs at someone I really had no interest in talking to. It was horrible, and I think I left at about 9:30pm. Said my goodbyes and just walked out. The looks on everyone's faces - "you're GOING? When we're having such an awesome time?" It's at times like that I feel completely alien to humanity due to the fact that so many people are seemingly enjoying something which is excruciatingly irritating to me. But then I start to thinking, maybe none of those people are enjoying it either. They've just been conditioned to believe that unless you give the impression that you love loud music and people yelling crap to each other over overpriced, watered down drinks, then there's something wrong with you.
 
And then there are those bars where there's a wall of widescreen TV's showing sports. Again.....hell.  
 
I think the only bar experience I've ever enjoyed was many years ago after a harrowing day's climbing in the Lake District, where I almost slipped to my death scaling Scafell Pike in the snow, and then we took a wrong turn on the misty descent and ended up walking 5 miles in the wrong direction. About a mile from our camp we stumbled into this homely looking rustic pub, exhausted, frozen and soaking wet, and there was no music, there was a big crackling fire and real ale. And a few rosy-cheeked farmers dotted around the room talking at sensible volumes about perfectly sane things, like sheep dip and pig feed. I honestly felt like I was back in the womb. 

The only bars I feel comfortable in are English-style dart bars. 

 
 

 
all the best,
 
Kenny

This part of Scotland has a complete lack of what I know as a 'proper pub'. There are either bars where guys go to get hammered and watch footy, or hotels where you feel out-of-place if you're not eating a 3-course dinner.
 
The village I came from in England had 3 excellent pubs, all within walking distance of my house, no TV's, just good ales and atmosphere, food if you wanted it, occasional live music. On any night of the week I could wander down there and find at least 4-5 people to have a chinwag with for an hour or two. I do miss that.
 
I read that pubs are closing down at a rapid rate in the UK, so I expect it'll all be a rose-tinted memory one day.