Categories
Work

Career-Limiting Move

When using your company-assigned laptop to make presentations, remember to disable your pornographically-themed screensaver (and yes, the video below is not safe for work):

Categories
Music

“Before the Music Dies”: The Full Documentary

In an earlier article, Branford Marsalis’ Take on Students Today, I posted a video in which jazz.funk sax man Branford Marsalis talked about his music students. His first lines in the interview are:

What I’ve learned from my students is that students today are completely full of shit.

That is what I’ve learned from my students. Much like the generation before them, the only thing they are really interested in is you telling them how right they are and how good they are.

I mentioned that the interview comes from a documentary titled Before the Music Dies,  a documentary film in which filmmakers Andrew Shapter and Joel Rasmussen “traveled the country, hoping to understand why mainstream music seems so packaged and repetitive, and whether corporations really had the power to silence musical innovation.”

A reader named “Tomas” said in a comment to the article that Before the Music Dies was posted in its entirety on Google Video. You can watch it in the little video window above, or at a larger size on its Google Video page. If you really care about music, whether as someone who plays it or simply enjoys it, watch it; you’ll find it’s two hours well-spent.

You can also buy the video on DVD for US$14.99 or download it for as little as US$2.99 from the Before the Music Dies site.

Categories
In the News

Tina Fey as Sarah Palin in “Saturday Night Live’s” Skit on the Vice Presidential Debate

The folks who said that Sarah Palin’s performance at last Thursday’s vice presidential debate didn’t leave Tina Fey any material were wrong — she killed in the opening skit, turning Palin’s perky but content-free non-answers into pure comedy gold. If you missed Saturday Night Live this weekend, you can enjoy the skit by clicking on the image below:

Tina Fey as Sarah Palin in the SNL "Palin-Biden Debate" skit
Click the picture to see the video.