Category Archives: Art/Style/Culture
Hotel California guitar solo
Chen is one of the daughters in a “family band” from the Philippines. She —and what I assume are her two sisters and father— perform amazing covers of hit songs. The still to the right is from a 2 1/2 minute video of her playing the guitar solo from The Eagles’ Hotel California. A couple of things about this short video grabbed me. Her obvious proficiency with this guitar solo but even more was the blissed out concentration that you see in the faces of the best guitar players. In the zone?
A couple of questions popped into my head: How long did it take her to master this iconic solo… followed by, Who wrote and first performed it. I went to Perplexity for the following, including reference sources:
According to interviews and accounts from Don Felder and others involved, the iconic guitar solos and dueling guitar parts on “Hotel California” by the Eagles came together in the following way:
- Don Felder originally composed the music and recorded a demo for “Hotel California” at his home studio in Malibu in 1976. On this demo, he improvised and recorded sample guitar solos and parts that he envisioned for himself and Joe Walsh to play on the final recording.
- When it came time to record the guitar solos and leads in the studio in Miami, Felder and Walsh initially started improvising new parts together. However, Don Henley stopped them and insisted they learn and play Felder’s original demo solo parts note-for-note.
- The problem was Felder didn’t have the original demo tape with him in Miami. He had to call his housekeeper back in Malibu, have her find the cassette, play it over the phone, and Felder re-learned and transcribed his own improvised guitar parts from the demo.
- Felder estimates that over half of the iconic guitar solos and dueling parts on the final “Hotel California” recording came directly from the original demo he recorded at home, with him and Walsh splitting up and learning those parts.
- Specifically, Felder played the first half of the ending guitar solo, while Walsh played the second half. They then combined for the harmonized finale section.
So in summary, while Felder and Walsh did collaborate and split the guitar solos, a significant portion was actually Felder improvising alone on his original demo, which Henley insisted they recreate faithfully in the studio.
1949 Ferrari 166 MM Barchetta
Mr. Wolf is no stranger to rare and beautiful automobiles but even he sounds a little impressed by one of his recent jobs.
1949 Ferrari 166 MM Barchetta. 1 of 10 short hood Barchettas, I believe it is roughly the 30th Ferrari built, though I could be off by a large margin – Ferrari information is notoriously cloudy. Serious race history, driven extensively by Biondetti.
The gravity of this thing is incredible, just having it around to appreciate in person, in private… I spent some time each day sitting next to it while having my espresso.
A bit of tinkering, rewiring a few things, fiddling with the exhaust and carburetors, and – the best part – designing and fabricating a battery hold down. The original went missing some time ago.
I asked him what he was doing to a car “now worth something like $10,000,000.”
It’s an odd, push-down-from-above battery hold down, and all of the parts are gone, and no reference photos exist. So I got to spend a couple days thinking, sketching, welding… What would a bunch of scrappy Italians have done in 1949?
Basically, a lot of time and effort to make something simple, unimpressive, and invisible once the battery cover goes on, and I’m thrilled!
He describes the owner as “a very cool old fellow, and a longtime Ferrari historian. Very knowledgeable, really knows his stuff. I once re-jetted the triple Weber carbs with him at 11pm outside a hotel in 45 degree weather, preparing to climb the Sierras the next morning.”
Religious service attendance dropping
More than three-quarters of Americans say religion’s role in public life is shrinking, per a recent Pew Research Center survey — the highest level since the group first started tracking such sentiment in 2001.
A separate Gallup survey published this week found that Latter-day Saints are the only religious group wherein a majority say they attend services weekly, at 54%.
30% of Protestants say they attend services weekly, compared to 28% of Muslims, 23% of Catholics and 16% of Jews.
Jerry Seinfeld: “The Scholar of Comedy”
Excellent interview in The New Yorker by David Remnick. Not sure if the piece is behind a paywall or not but it’s a good read.
“That’s the way you go through life. You only care about laughing and being funny.”
“And I don’t like old people, either. Even though I’m seventy—I don’t like old people. […] They don’t look good. Everything’s going. Everything’s deteriorating. I don’t want to see this. If you want to hang around, fine, but we’re moving on to younger people. I’m with you up to about thirty-eight. If you want to stay, you can stay, but I’m moving on.”
“There were no sitcoms picked up on the fall season of all four networks. Not one. No new sitcoms.”
Clues that you are rich
A lot of rich people don’t even realize they’re rich. Here are some clues:
- You are worried about someone hijacking your car when you drive downtown.
- You can afford things you actually need, like healthcare.
- You don’t use a calculator while grocery shopping, and you don’t use the produce scales in grocery stores.
- You spend money on traveling for leisure.
- You never worry about hidden, snowballing fees or “poor tax”.
- You never have to hustle to work out where you will sleep or where your next meal comes from.
- You can invest in something that pays off later or just simply stock up because buying more is cheaper.
- You don’t hold up the line with your complicated benefits when checking out in the grocery store line.
- You don’t have to worry about logistics, like how you will show up to appointments on opposite sides of the city in one day.
- You shop online.
- You don’t have to worry about your kid’s tech access for school.
- Bureaucratic procedures, such as getting a driver’s license, are not prohibitively impossible.
— It’s Training Cats and Dogs
How Many Pictures Are There (2024)
The following statistics are from an article by Matric Broz at phototutorial.com. The article presents “photography and photo statistics procured with scientific and mathematical methods, including answering questions like “How many photos are taken every day?”
How many photos are taken every year?
- 1.81 trillion photos are taken worldwide every year, which equals 57,000 per second, or 5.0 billion per day. By 2030, around 2.3 trillion photos will be taken every year.
- According to Photutorial data, 1.2 trillion were taken worldwide in 2021 and 1.72 trillion in 2022.
- The global pandemic reduced the number of images taken by 25% in 2020 and 20% in 2021.
How many photos are taken every day?
- The average person takes 20 photos daily. This number is higher among younger people and lower among older people.
- According to Phototurial data, 4.7 billion photos are taken every day worldwide in total.
- By region, the number of photos taken by a smartphone user is led by the US: 20.2/day, Asia-Pacific 15/day, Latin America 11.8/day, Africa 8.1/day, and Europe 4.9/day.
How many images are on the internet?
- 750 billion images are on the internet, which is only 6% of the total photos that were ever taken since most of the photos we take are never shared.
How many images are on Google Images?
- There are 136 billion images on Google Images.
- By 2030, there will be 382 billion images on Google Images.
How many photos does the average person have on their phone?
- The average user has around 2,100 photos on their smartphone in 2023.
- iOS smartphone users have approximately 2,400 photos on their phones, while Android users have around 1,900 photos on their phones.
Other photo stats
- 12.4 trillion photos have been taken throughout history. By 2030, this number will increase to 28.6 trillion.
- Users share the most images on WhatsApp: 6.9 billion per day. 1.3 billion images are shared on Instagram daily, with about 100 million in posts and more than 1 billion on stories and chats.
- 92.5% of photos are taken with smartphones, and only 7% with cameras.
Bleak, Crime Infested Towns In the (Missouri) Bootheel
There is a seemingly endless variety of genres on YouTube, and one that has been showing up in my feed more frequently of late is what I call the “driving tour of small town America” videos. During my many years, on the road in the Midwest, I had occasion to drive through lots and lots of small rural towns, so I’ve found this series interesting.
The video above offers a rather depressing look at four towns in southeast Missouri: Caruthersville, Hayti, Kennett, and Cardwell. Some of the demographic statistics were almost as bleak and shocking as the images.
Tattooed underwear model
This direct mail marketing piece showed up in our mailbox yesterday. Two things immediately caught my eye: the model didn’t look like he spent hours in the gym every day, his body looked more like a normal person’s body. And the tattoos. Lots and lots of tattoos.
According to a 2023 survey by Pew Research, 41% of Americans under the age of 30 have at least one tattoo. And we’re not talking high-grade Yakuza-class fine art here. These tats look like something you could get in the strip mall. Once again, I turned to ChatGPT for some insight on this cultural phenomenon.
Small American Towns
“The country had changed since the last time he d been through this way. Many of the little country towns, which had seemed prosperous, even smug, back in the seventies when he’d last made this drive, had been hollowed out, their storefronts empty, their economies wasted by out-migration, the collapse of small farming, the big box stores; their civic life was composed largely of the high school football team, the big signs painted on the water tank, the brick walls of the low, sunburned buildings: GO COUGARS! GO HAWKS! GO REBELS! On the dusty streets of towns named for nineteenth-century cattlemen, pioneers, heroes of the Civil War, they now saw few descendants of such people, only little clots of dark-skinned men and signs in Spanish. The Indians were slowly reconquering the land, for the white people had everything but enough children, and the children they did have wanted the life they saw on television, not the life of the small American towns.”
— The Return by Michael Gruber