Here are some OKfacebook style lists of things I really like:
Television shows:
Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Trailer Park Boys
Party Down
Peep Show
That Mitchell & Webb Look
The Mighty Boosh
30 Rock
Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place
Nathan Barley
Children’s Hospital
Wainy Days
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Daily Show
Colbert Report
Mad Men
Jumong
The Wire
The Shield (yeah I know…)
Seinfeld
The Simpsons (seasons 2-9)
Podcasts:
The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe
WTF with Marc Maron
The Adam Carolla Podcast
The Bugle (John Oliver)
Real Time with Bill Maher
Astronomy Cast
Skepticality
The Dana Gould Hour
The Todd Glass Show
Alison Rosen is Your New Best Friend
The Bible Geek
The Human Bible
Point of Inquiry
The Infidel Guy (long gone but GREAT!)
The History of Rome
A History of the World in 100 Objects
Start The Week w/ Andrew Mahr
In Our Time with Melvin Bragg
BBC History Magazine
The Nature Podcast
Conversations With History
NPR Fresh Air
Democracy Now!
Doug Loves Movies
How Did This Get Made
The News Quiz from BBC 4
The Now Show (BBC 4)
Week in the life of the Shag. What day is it? Double therapy again; first I saw my shrink then I went to Pacific Wind Kajukenbo for the open spar. Eddie Peppitone joked on the Dana Gould Hour podcast about lying to his therapist and penned a title for a book Obstacles to Healing and How You Can Use Them!! HILARIOUS. Enjoyed myself at the fights and came away uninjured and inspired. Mike Bowman came with me and fought the whole time. I had a GREAT show with Treefrogs, Saturday at the Laurelthirst. Stayed up way too late (love that sh*t) and got up early for some Sunday kungfu at my place. Monday night kungfu at Stumptown Yoga was awesome. Double Silver’s in attendance, and a new face as well. Now it’s Tuesday. I don’t have any painting lined up. Despite feeling like the girl with the dragon tattoo after paying my taxes, if I never painted again it wouldn’t hurt my feelings. I could use more, and regular bass students, gigs, kungfu students etc. My talents are wasted on house painting!
Friday day I saw my shrink for some mental therapy then went out to Pacific Wind Kajukenbo for “physical therapy”.
Once a month I drive an hour and a half out to Yamhill, Oregon to and spar with 6-10 awesome fighters.
I usually limp away. It’s great continuing education for me. It is inspiring, therapeutic, educational, and humbling.
There are all manner of stylists who attend this event. Punchers, kickers, and grapplers mix it up for a couple hours. If i’m not the smallest person there, I’m usually number 2 or number 3.
Last night I got thrown, kneed in the charlie horse, and armbarred.
Professor Tim Gagnier is very gracious and generous to invite me and include me.
Furthermore, I feel very safe and able to fight at whatever level I need to feel safe and remain uninjured.
Oh my gosh! What a production! I gave up my film maker moniker a long time ago, but we made 20 movies back in the day. I was crazy impressed with this production.
My old singing partner Nichole Cooper, who left to pursue stardom in Nashville, returned recently to shoot a video for her new single Light My Fuse, produced by David Norris of Norrisong Productions and directed by Andrew Rozario.
There were solid gold dancing girls, go go dancers, the coolest band ever, a smoke machine, green screen filming in fancy downtown studios, and freshly felled elk cooked to perfection by Missy Cooper!
It was so much fun to be part of it. Even the boring downtime was just as exciting and fulfilling as could be!
I can’t wait to see the finished product and share it with you!
If you were going to name your band FUNK SHUI you would have to be making a pun on the ancient art of FENG SHUI. Feng Shui literally means, “wind water” and refers to the method of landscaping one’s estate to allow the proper flow of wind and water through it. Controlling the floodwaters is the first duty of the Emperor and controlling the waters on one’s own empire is the first duty of the lord of the manor. The proper placement of trees and the buildings in relation to trees and earth to control the wind is supposed to bring fortune and health to the family that dwells upon it.
The Chinese language is tonal. Tone makes a meaning difference in a word. In English tone only affects the meaning of a sentence. Example: “You have the cat” vs. “You have the cat?!?!?!” Read them aloud. One is a statement one is a question, in the written form delineated by punctuation, in the spoken by tone. Say the word “cat” in any register and it means “cat”. Not so in Chinese. Saying “feng” in a level tone in Chinese and it can mean, “wind”. Say it sharply with a falling tone and it can mean “phoenix”. There is meaning change.
Homophony is rampant in Chinese. In English we spell “led” and the metal “lead” differently but they are pronounced the same. I am counting some 10 “feng” in the first tone each with a different “spelling” (character) and a completely different meaning. That is not counting “feng” in the other 3 tones.
I asked Dr. Jonathan Pease, head of the Chinese Department at Portland State University in Portland Oregon how one would say “funk” in Chinese. First he informed me that his slang was not current, and that it is probable that there is a word for the American music known as “funk” but that he did not know it. Dr. Pease’s specialty is literature and poetry, and suggested a way to construct what he called a “perfect pun”. He took the word “feng” in the first tone, meaning wind, and drew the “sickness radical” around the character for “wind”. The pronunciation remained the same, but now it means “crazy”. He was visibly pleased with himself for the humble man I knew him to be. Our “feng shui” means “crazy water”, which is descriptive of our sick rockin’ funk.
“But Shag, what about the ‘k’?”
Modern Standard Chinese, widely described as “Mandarin” has no syllable finals p, t, or k. Whenever you see a syllable final p, t or k, you are seeing Cantonese or one of several regional dialects. The standard dialect of the humungous China has undergone radical pronunciation changes over the centuries. Although there are no recordings, and the phonetic elements of Chinese are vague, there are ancient surviving rhyming dictionaries and similar reference materials. The rhyming dictionaries are arranged such that one can track ancient pronunciations by noting what words are grouped together that today have no rhyme. Once upon a time the p, t and k was a standard final in the “ru sheng” category. Those finals disappeared and became absorbed by the other tone categories. Short story long, it is POSSIBLE that “feng” was once pronounced, “funk”.
The name of my band is FUNK SHUI. It is based on a Chinese language pun, and has specific characters with a specific comedic meaning. It also has a possible ancient pronunciation connection to the English language pun. If you know of another band named Funk Shui and they are still together by this time next year, please to ask them what characters they have transliterated to arrive at their name and what meaning it translates to.
Here are some preliminary results from a recent photoshoot at the studio of Jared Seger.
The man knows his trade.
What a difference a year makes. Round the sun again y’all!
This Black Friday is last Friday, so Funk Shui is at Biddy’s.
We got Chelsea Luker on sax, Whityn Owen on drums, and Fred Stevenson back on lead guitar.
Pilar French is a local rocker who conscripted me to play on her awesome new record called Deliver. It is one of my very favorite recordings in general and of myself, if I may.
I was also honored to play numerous shows over the last year in cool places like on a boat and down town in Pioneer Courthouse Square at LUNCHTIME!!
So apparently 70% of the internet is Facebook. I’m the last holdout. I had one back in the day, and I recently started a Treefrogs Facebook page that Tracy admins (that’s a verb? Why not?).
Since I’m not on Facebook, I don’t exist. But in typical Sean fashion, i’ll choose obscurity on principle, and make this place my daily feed.
I think I have not posted a blog in long enough that anyone still visiting has probably given up. I guess we’ll see.
I have just noticed that the more connectivity there is the less actual communication there seems to be. People with Facebook pages send messages to me through other people with Facebook pages, even though they have my email, phone number, website etc. Folk with smart phones, the majority I’m sure at this point, seem to be the least likely to return a call, email, or text. It’s a gut feeling. I haven’t collected the data. Could be confirmation bias.
Maybe it’s because of the overwhelming volume of communication they now receive.
So seannowland.com/blog is the new Facebook…for me anyway.
And now…I’m having a nice cup of coffee with breakfast….