Hey all, I'm leaving this blog behind as I move to a WordPress installation on my own website.
Check it out at www.erichirsh.com/blog
Saturday, August 09, 2008
Sunday, June 10, 2007
I am a hit in Iraq
I realize I haven't posted in over a month since I said I'd post more often. In fact, I don't think I've even told anyone about this blog. Yet. Anyway, here's an email that Catherine forwarded me from her good friend Tryg, who
a. has always enjoyed my remix of It's Carrboro! by Brian Risk and Billy Sugarfix
b. is currently deployed in Iraq
"Also, last night I was smoking hookah with our interpreters, and brought out my iPod for some chill music. They absolutely hated any kind of jazz. On a whim, I put on Eric's song about Carrboro and they LOVED it. They wanted to know who it was so they could go buy it, and couldn't believe that it was just some guy I knew who did it for fun. Then they proceeded to be impartial towards everything I played that I thought was similar (2 Skinee J's, Beck, some other stuff). So tell Eric - he's a hit in Iraq. "
Awesome.
a. has always enjoyed my remix of It's Carrboro! by Brian Risk and Billy Sugarfix
b. is currently deployed in Iraq
"Also, last night I was smoking hookah with our interpreters, and brought out my iPod for some chill music. They absolutely hated any kind of jazz. On a whim, I put on Eric's song about Carrboro and they LOVED it. They wanted to know who it was so they could go buy it, and couldn't believe that it was just some guy I knew who did it for fun. Then they proceeded to be impartial towards everything I played that I thought was similar (2 Skinee J's, Beck, some other stuff). So tell Eric - he's a hit in Iraq. "
Awesome.
Thursday, April 26, 2007
eric goes web 2.0
Spurred on by contributing to the Four String Samurai blog, I think I am going to start blogging about music / being a young musician again. Instead of starting a new blog I'll keep working in this one. The title is still appropriate. The passion I have in those two posts from two years ago is the same. Though now I feel a little calmer and more refined. And I don't want to delete those previous posts either, I think it's interesting to go back and look at those and compare to what I'll be writing now. Some of the concerns I expressed two years ago are no longer relevant, and some of the questions I posed to myself then have now been answered. Though, in a funny way, this feels like a gapless continuation (the only thing missing are day-to-day details).
I kind of wish I could blog through my website, but it doesn't really support that feature right now (sooner than later I need to hire someone to totally redesign it), and this might get too personal for a "professional" News page anyway. Almost every single improv comedian I know also works for some nifty tech company or non-profit and keeps a really active blog. I think that is pretty cool.
You will notice that I use a ridiculous amount of parenthetical asides.
Really, honestly, I want to start an audio blog of in-progress compositions and quick/funny beats and ideas I have in Digital Performer. I think that is called a Podcast. So maybe I should start a podcast instead? Would you subscribe?
welcome back,
E
I kind of wish I could blog through my website, but it doesn't really support that feature right now (sooner than later I need to hire someone to totally redesign it), and this might get too personal for a "professional" News page anyway. Almost every single improv comedian I know also works for some nifty tech company or non-profit and keeps a really active blog. I think that is pretty cool.
You will notice that I use a ridiculous amount of parenthetical asides.
Really, honestly, I want to start an audio blog of in-progress compositions and quick/funny beats and ideas I have in Digital Performer. I think that is called a Podcast. So maybe I should start a podcast instead? Would you subscribe?
welcome back,
E
Monday, August 22, 2005
so much everything
There is so much everything in the world. It is such a grand wonderful beautiful thing, but mind boggling-ly hard to navigate.
Even in music alone, there are so many cultures and aesthetics out there. Jeff and I were talking about "when does a vernacular music become an art", specifically bluegrass/newgrass (which is kind of in the 1930s if it was jazz; a Charlie Parker is going to come along and totally revolutionize the music in the next 10 years), but also turntablism and hip hop culture, and pluralism in classical music. I want to hear the really good stuff from all of it, but I certainly don't have the authority or time to dive deep into it. I want someone to surface from the cultural depths and point me in the direction of the leading artists in each genre.
Check out www.music-map.com and type in any artist you want. It's such a cool little tool, a fresh new way to get to new music in a "six degrees to kevin bacon" sort of way.
And tonight, Brevan came over and we just listened to new groups from Puerto Rico and Cuba. Stuff I barely know anything about yet. It was all so amazing. The Cuban aesthetic is: playing music is your life, you belong to one band, you practice six days a week, and you become the tightest band in the world. What else is there to do?
All of the music was either latin jazz or timba but from a fresh non-New-York perspective. It sounded like nothing I'd ever heard before. When was the last time you listened to music and said to yourself "this is amazing, my ears have never experienced anything like this! I mean I can hear some influences, but their spin on it is so crazy!"
Well that happened to me tonight listening to Klimax, http://www.timba.com/artists/klimax/index.asp
and Los Van Van's (http://www.vanvandeformell.com/) latest album which is still only availible in Cuba and select sketchy shops in Miami.
I am politicaly apathetic/moderate/conservative (depending on the day) but one thing I will surely hate on the Bush administration for is their fucking travel restrictions on Cuban musicans and products.
Anyway, that's all. And it says to me, why specialize, why just end up being another slavishly career-oriented musican. There is so much out there in the world that most people don't know about yet it is so stunningly beautiful. You just can't deny the existence of a supernatural being when you get such good vibes from complete strangers thousands of miles away or in the mountains of North Carolina forging breathtaking traditions that make everyone feel good. It makes me happy and inspires me to learn more, to retain artistic integrity, to explore less-travelled roads.
Oh and today is my half birthday.
Even in music alone, there are so many cultures and aesthetics out there. Jeff and I were talking about "when does a vernacular music become an art", specifically bluegrass/newgrass (which is kind of in the 1930s if it was jazz; a Charlie Parker is going to come along and totally revolutionize the music in the next 10 years), but also turntablism and hip hop culture, and pluralism in classical music. I want to hear the really good stuff from all of it, but I certainly don't have the authority or time to dive deep into it. I want someone to surface from the cultural depths and point me in the direction of the leading artists in each genre.
Check out www.music-map.com and type in any artist you want. It's such a cool little tool, a fresh new way to get to new music in a "six degrees to kevin bacon" sort of way.
And tonight, Brevan came over and we just listened to new groups from Puerto Rico and Cuba. Stuff I barely know anything about yet. It was all so amazing. The Cuban aesthetic is: playing music is your life, you belong to one band, you practice six days a week, and you become the tightest band in the world. What else is there to do?
All of the music was either latin jazz or timba but from a fresh non-New-York perspective. It sounded like nothing I'd ever heard before. When was the last time you listened to music and said to yourself "this is amazing, my ears have never experienced anything like this! I mean I can hear some influences, but their spin on it is so crazy!"
Well that happened to me tonight listening to Klimax, http://www.timba.com/artists/klimax/index.asp
and Los Van Van's (http://www.vanvandeformell.com/) latest album which is still only availible in Cuba and select sketchy shops in Miami.
I am politicaly apathetic/moderate/conservative (depending on the day) but one thing I will surely hate on the Bush administration for is their fucking travel restrictions on Cuban musicans and products.
Anyway, that's all. And it says to me, why specialize, why just end up being another slavishly career-oriented musican. There is so much out there in the world that most people don't know about yet it is so stunningly beautiful. You just can't deny the existence of a supernatural being when you get such good vibes from complete strangers thousands of miles away or in the mountains of North Carolina forging breathtaking traditions that make everyone feel good. It makes me happy and inspires me to learn more, to retain artistic integrity, to explore less-travelled roads.
Oh and today is my half birthday.
Thursday, August 18, 2005
Allow me to introduce myself
Well, holy crap, here I am. I thought I'd be the last person to
a) buy an iPod
b) have a blog
a-HA! I have already deluded your expectations by setting up a sentence which suggested that I have done both things this summer. Yet only one is true. I probably will be the last person to jump on the iPod bandwagon. But this is a blog, so it looks like I have sold out to the current trend of spilling your guts so that your friends might vouyeristically have a better understanding of you without ever having to talk to them.
My family went to go help my grandfather move into an assisted living home this past July (my grandmother, his wife, my father's mom, had died a year before). Cleaning out the master bedroom, we found Shirley's diaries. She had written an entry every day of her life from the 1950s to a little before her passing. That's over 40 volumes and 123890348905 words about life. It was very detailed stuff, very observant, a chronicle of events: not much like the stereotypical diary of today's teenager who will one day look back on most entries as either overly melodramatic or scarily suicidal. This is all to say I've never been much for writing (or recreational reading for that matter), mainly because my brain moves too fast for me to articulate things with my hands on paper or a screen. And when I do talk about my feelings and complicated concerns and interesting stories, it's mainly to Katie, who is fast becoming my other half. Which makes a diary practically unnecessary.
But a blog is not a diary and you can use it for specific things from verbose heady philosophical ramblings to unfounded political opinions to... well those are the only two things I can think about blogs right now.
Anyway, I think that to understand Eric Hirsh, should one be interested, is to get beyond the facade of friendly, bright, talented, musician (not that it isn't genuine), and discover the staggeringly troublesome amount of thinking, planning, worrying, and organizing that fuels both his daily existence and his life goals.
I promise to never talk in the third person again.
It's all because I think too much. Not necessarily in a bad way, not just the kind where you overanalyze a situation and fret. The good kind where you have lots of nifty ideas floating around and they are all connected and you have a good self-understanding about how all the things you do are connected and affect each other. The kind where you refuse to walk into a project or an opinion or a person without assessing its significance in a larger cultural context.
Couple all of this with the conflict between a desire to be more self-confident and a fear of egotism in favor of extreme humility, stemming from a nice Christian upbringing and an awkward middle school era.
My suspicion is the next few entries are going to seem very professional, as in, all I will talk about is a music career and past feats and future goals. Don't worry, it's not all I think about in life. There is friendship and love and spontaneity and eating and helping those in need and all that. But you must understand that the focus is legitimate because I am kind of gonna be a senior in college.
Yep, everything before this was an introduction, the first blog topic is I'm a Senior!?!?!?!
I am not about to reflect on Carolina Blue Skies and the Old Well and School Spirit and I don't want to leave all my dorm room friends and dining halls (all with the subtext: this person is not yet ready for the real world). No, I don't subscribe to much of that hooey.
But two weeks ago I realized I would be a senior in the large senior class sense. OK. But tonight Steve called up and was wondering if I wanted to help set up a jazz jam session in the Cabaret, which I think is a great way to keep our small little jazz program alive and a way to connect it to the campus community. And Steve said that he felt like it would be a good thing to do since we are the jazz seniors and we need to pass on the torch. This gave a new meaning to the phrase "I am a senior" because, like it or not, I am one of only three "main" (read: actively pursuing a jazz career) seniors in the jazz department. Which, like it or not, is some kind of leadership role, only because of how small the program is. The last time I thought about senior leadership, it had something to do with captains of high school cross country teams and whathaveyou. So there it is, I am a forerunner, a senior.
This leads into a lengthy discussion of what I want to do in my time left at Carolina, whether or not I can/should do it in two more semesters or three, the road ahead, the towering indifferent city of New York, and the status of the Musical that Dana and I are trying to write and produce.
Are you allowed to use real people's names in blogs? I'm not saying anything secret or naughty about them.
But the first entry after this will be an assessment of the summer, since it was a Plan B summer, a transitional summer, a ride the wave and see what comes your way summer, a lackluster summer, an Awesome House summer.
Remember that fear of egotism I mentioned? Writing this blog is scary because it's about me and I really really don't want to come off as an asshole. So please let me know if I do.
In a spot of computer-nerd-iness, I compare this blog endeavor to a program. All you friends and acquaintances out there in the world interact with the user interface and sometimes the high-level functions, and I am documenting the development of the low-level functions and weird structures that are my modus operandi for the public to enjoy and/or pick apart.
So, welcome, enjoy, don't get freaked out, and let me know you're out there should you feel inclined.
a) buy an iPod
b) have a blog
a-HA! I have already deluded your expectations by setting up a sentence which suggested that I have done both things this summer. Yet only one is true. I probably will be the last person to jump on the iPod bandwagon. But this is a blog, so it looks like I have sold out to the current trend of spilling your guts so that your friends might vouyeristically have a better understanding of you without ever having to talk to them.
My family went to go help my grandfather move into an assisted living home this past July (my grandmother, his wife, my father's mom, had died a year before). Cleaning out the master bedroom, we found Shirley's diaries. She had written an entry every day of her life from the 1950s to a little before her passing. That's over 40 volumes and 123890348905 words about life. It was very detailed stuff, very observant, a chronicle of events: not much like the stereotypical diary of today's teenager who will one day look back on most entries as either overly melodramatic or scarily suicidal. This is all to say I've never been much for writing (or recreational reading for that matter), mainly because my brain moves too fast for me to articulate things with my hands on paper or a screen. And when I do talk about my feelings and complicated concerns and interesting stories, it's mainly to Katie, who is fast becoming my other half. Which makes a diary practically unnecessary.
But a blog is not a diary and you can use it for specific things from verbose heady philosophical ramblings to unfounded political opinions to... well those are the only two things I can think about blogs right now.
Anyway, I think that to understand Eric Hirsh, should one be interested, is to get beyond the facade of friendly, bright, talented, musician (not that it isn't genuine), and discover the staggeringly troublesome amount of thinking, planning, worrying, and organizing that fuels both his daily existence and his life goals.
I promise to never talk in the third person again.
It's all because I think too much. Not necessarily in a bad way, not just the kind where you overanalyze a situation and fret. The good kind where you have lots of nifty ideas floating around and they are all connected and you have a good self-understanding about how all the things you do are connected and affect each other. The kind where you refuse to walk into a project or an opinion or a person without assessing its significance in a larger cultural context.
Couple all of this with the conflict between a desire to be more self-confident and a fear of egotism in favor of extreme humility, stemming from a nice Christian upbringing and an awkward middle school era.
My suspicion is the next few entries are going to seem very professional, as in, all I will talk about is a music career and past feats and future goals. Don't worry, it's not all I think about in life. There is friendship and love and spontaneity and eating and helping those in need and all that. But you must understand that the focus is legitimate because I am kind of gonna be a senior in college.
Yep, everything before this was an introduction, the first blog topic is I'm a Senior!?!?!?!
I am not about to reflect on Carolina Blue Skies and the Old Well and School Spirit and I don't want to leave all my dorm room friends and dining halls (all with the subtext: this person is not yet ready for the real world). No, I don't subscribe to much of that hooey.
But two weeks ago I realized I would be a senior in the large senior class sense. OK. But tonight Steve called up and was wondering if I wanted to help set up a jazz jam session in the Cabaret, which I think is a great way to keep our small little jazz program alive and a way to connect it to the campus community. And Steve said that he felt like it would be a good thing to do since we are the jazz seniors and we need to pass on the torch. This gave a new meaning to the phrase "I am a senior" because, like it or not, I am one of only three "main" (read: actively pursuing a jazz career) seniors in the jazz department. Which, like it or not, is some kind of leadership role, only because of how small the program is. The last time I thought about senior leadership, it had something to do with captains of high school cross country teams and whathaveyou. So there it is, I am a forerunner, a senior.
This leads into a lengthy discussion of what I want to do in my time left at Carolina, whether or not I can/should do it in two more semesters or three, the road ahead, the towering indifferent city of New York, and the status of the Musical that Dana and I are trying to write and produce.
Are you allowed to use real people's names in blogs? I'm not saying anything secret or naughty about them.
But the first entry after this will be an assessment of the summer, since it was a Plan B summer, a transitional summer, a ride the wave and see what comes your way summer, a lackluster summer, an Awesome House summer.
Remember that fear of egotism I mentioned? Writing this blog is scary because it's about me and I really really don't want to come off as an asshole. So please let me know if I do.
In a spot of computer-nerd-iness, I compare this blog endeavor to a program. All you friends and acquaintances out there in the world interact with the user interface and sometimes the high-level functions, and I am documenting the development of the low-level functions and weird structures that are my modus operandi for the public to enjoy and/or pick apart.
So, welcome, enjoy, don't get freaked out, and let me know you're out there should you feel inclined.
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