My Uncle John’s a wiseass. He always has been. My mother says that when they were kids, they’d be jerking around in church and the older people would turn and around to shush them.

“Shut up!” he’d sneer. “Drop dead.”

He was 11.

At 6, he was charged with escorting their blind grandfather to Babicz Deli. The old boy had been walking up and down Kiefer Street for decades but in the 50s, the town had put in curbs, so he needed a guide to tell him when to step up and down. Payment for the escort service was a pocketful of candy. As soon as my uncle made his collection, he was out the front door and down the street, leaving his grandfather to navigate the curbs alone.

When John got back home, his mother asked, “Hey, where’s Gramps?”

“He’s on his way.”

Growing up, I always knew him as the uncle in San Francisco but he’d come back to Long Island for visits. One afternoon, my older brother Ed came home from McDonalds and our uncle asked what he ate.

“Oh, Uncle John, I was so hungry. I had a Big Mac, extra large fries, rings, another cheeseburger and a large Coke.”

“That’s great, Ed. Why didn’t you just ask them to take you in the back so you could rub your face right on the grill? Save a step…”

Now, the true wiseass, the devout wiseass, knows that there’s more to it than gibes and sheer nerve. On a later visit, a few of us were in my dining room, playing Monopoly. Uncle Bob (John’s brother) was drinking pretty heavily that night and I remember Ed and I being upset about it. Uncle John picked up on it.

“What’s wrong guys?” he asked when Uncle Bob was out of the room.

“It’s just bothering me that he’s drinking,” Ed said, “but I don’t wanna tell him what to do.”

Uncle John looked him in the eye, the way the adults looked at one another.

“Hey, listen. You’re upset because you love him. You care about him, and it’s your house. Let him know.”

Ed chuckled nervously.

“It’s alright.”

I’ll always recall the tension in the air when Uncle Bob walked back into the room. I tore my eyes from my little green house on Baltic.

“Uncle Bob,” Ed’s face was white, “I don’t think you should drink anymore tonight.”

Our uncle was upset. He put the beer down and left the room. I was 13 – still young enough to feel that if you said something that upset a grown-up, you were probably out of line. At 15, Ed wasn’t too far removed from that notion either.

A few days later, Uncle Bob called us. He didn’t yell. He wasn’t mad. He respected our opinion and apologized. It was Uncle John who taught us that it was alright to stand up to an adult and that when you walk through that fear, a measure of self-respect was waiting for you on the other side.

In the spring of 2003, my head was still cluttered from a breakup the previous fall. I called Uncle John.

“I’m not as doomed out as I was,” I told him, “but, man, some days…”

“Well,” he said, “here’s what I want you to do, Brendy (he’s never paid attention to that final “n” in my name). In your mind, okay, think of a giant book. Then I want you to stab it with a knife, right through the front cover. Now, when you open it, the first few pages are destroyed but the knife didn’t damage the whole book, right? As you get further from the front, there’s less and less evidence that the damage even took place. The tears give way to indentations then maybe, what, folds until your pages are clean again but further along, right? The story, your story is a little bit more experienced.”

“Wow, Uncle John. How’d you come up with that one?”

“Some friggin’ girl tore my heart out in my twenties, and that’s what I thought of to get me through.”

It’s no surprise that these days, he’s a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with a practice on Long Island and a master’s degree on the wall. He isn’t one of those “mmm-hmm,” steepled-hands-under-smooth-chin “professionals.” He’s a wiseass. Accent on the wise.

***
More stories by Brendyn Schneider can be found at brendynschneider.com © 2011-2013, Brendyn Schneider, reprinted by Dadity.com with permission. Use or reprint not authorized without permission of the author.

[Hardpop Twitter]

Começaram, nesta quarta (30), as festas do Warung Beach Club na ilha de Ibiza.

As noites do Warung Beach Club, que tem lugar no Club Privilege, contarão com os mais renomados Dj’s tais como: Dirty Vegas, Felix da Housecat, Layo & Bushwacka, Kevin Saunderson, Sharam, Gui Boratto, Babicz e X-Press 2.

A temporada, que terminará a 15 de Setembro, contou com o Dj Chronic e também com o trio brasileiro Life Is a Loop na noite de inauguração.

Assista o vídeo promocional com o line-up do Warung Beach Club em Ibiza, sediado no Club Privilege.

Divulgação

It’s that time of year again, where we all force ourselves to cheer up and see the brighter side of life, and part of that brighter side is giving gifts to all of our coworkers, neighbors, bar tenders, and if we’re feeling super generous, friends and family.

Now chances are that if you know a fan of progressive rock, it’s been a huge pain in the ass to find them an appropriate gift. They already own all the music they want, since they never wait more than 4 hours until after a record is released to get their hands on the limited collector’s vinyl edition with 300 page color art book and band commentary DVD. On the other end, the only things they don’t have that they want cost tens of thousands of dollars (see: Neil Peart’s drum kit from the Test For Echo tour, Robert Fripp’s stage stool, the 2^nd neck on Chris Squire’s 3-neck bass, etc). So you usually just end up buying them something from the Apple store and move on.

BUT NOT THIS YEAR! This year you have the Prog Blog’s guide to holiday shopping for the common prog fan. While things like a gym membership, soap, or clothes that they weren’t wearing back in high school may provide more immediate and obvious benefits, I’m here to help you find the gifts that your prog fan boy or girl (ok, lets be honest, boy) truly desire:

Applications for our iPhone that lets us make music as if we were a 3-year old:

This is why all iPhone drum apps fail

Prog fans, like all dirty hippie creative types, love Apple products and probably had an iPhone before Steve Jobs had one. You can tap into this irrational love for a nominal product by getting them one of the many iPhone apps that let regular douche bags sound like cutting edge musicians.

Bebot (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpgxd8bljtg) is one app that lets you create all sorts of noise just by touching and dragging your fingers across the phone’s screen. You can also add tons of effects to make it sound like you’re doing something much more complicated than randomly pointing at the screen. I will commend the creators of the application here because I think they’ve created something that, by default, allows the user to sound at least as skilled as Sigur Ros.

If this is too ‘artifical’ for someone trying to use their iPhone as an instrument, you can get them Pocket Guitar (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51cWRrZdkwk&feature=related) which will let them remember why they hated their first guitar teacher AND make them sound like a crappy midi file. Or, if they’re a wind player, you can get them the Ocarina app (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdQvSWXaODs&feature=related) which has already been used to play every single song from Zelda about 8 billion times on youtube, shockingly.

Invent a new audio format

'Rubber Ducky' never sounded so good!

Prog is all about one-upmanship. So you can play the guitar AND bass part to “La Villa Strangiato” at the same time AND do it at twice the tempo Rush played it at? So what, I can do that AND play drums!

One thing prog fans love to one-up each other on is the audio format of their music collection. From vinyl to eight track to cassette tape to compact disc to WAV to MP3 to DVD-A to FLAC to OGG back to vinyl again for some stupid reason, we always want to tell other people how ‘pure’ sounding the music we listen to is. No one ever really wins this battle, but we still all scramble to convert our archives any time a new format appears claiming to be the only true way to listen to an artist’s music. Thus, if you want to give your prog fan a special gift, invent an audio format that no one else has. Then present it to them and tell that that NO ONE ELSE IN THE WORLD HAS THAT FORMAT. He or she will probably leave immediately to update their collection, half joyful that they will be ahead of the curve and half shameful that they didn’t have format before you invented it.

If you need help with an idea for what format you want to use, here are a few free ones I promise don’t exist yet:

-Honeycombs full of bees

-Wood

-ACTUAL solid gold and platinum records

-Human flesh (depending on the body part, they may REALLY enjoy this one)

-Waffles

See, it’s easy. And no, don’t worry, they won’t question whether or not the bees moving and stinging the listener is a disadvantage. They should have done a better job preserving the media!

The album cover from In the Court of the Crimson King on anything

The Mona Lisa. If she liked prog.

We love this album cover. We don’t care that it freaks other people out. It’s basically our mascot. We’d paint it on our houses and cars if it didn’t kill the resale value. Honestly, if we woke up one morning and found it had been tattooed across our back, we’d love it. Just go over to cafepress.com and stick it on a shirt or a mug or a bumper sticker or baby or whatever and give it to us. We won’t care that we’re breaking numerous laws by owning an illegal piece of merchandise, and neither should you.

Stuff for an instrument we don’t actually play

How did you know I wanted to start playing Normaphone? You're so thoughtful!

The first thing prog fans love feeling is superior, but the second thing we love feeling is eclectic. Chances are we already own everything we can possibly want or afford for our main instrument (because we all play at least one instrument, DUH), but you can encourage that we waste time on a new instrument by buying us something for an instrument we barely play, or even better, don’t even play at all.

For instance I am a drummer, but I own a guitar that I can’t play for shit. It hangs on my wall and laughs at me whenever I try to pick it up. What I SHOULD do is put it in its case and find someone who wants a great Babicz Tribeca acoustic guitar (mmm blatant shilling for Babicz guitars goes here) so that my roommate doesn’t have to suffer needlessly through my ‘practicing’. However when my sister gave me a Rock Band (mmm blatant shilling for Rock Band goes here) song book for said guitar for one of the various winter holidays my family celebrates, I loved it.

You can do the same for your prog fan. If they have a drum kit sitting in their basement that was left their by the drummer in their last band, buy them some drum sticks (and yourself some ear plugs). If their grandmother left them a keyboard in her will, get them a sustain pedal! If you want to be really creative, get them something for an instrument they don’t even play, like slide lubricant for a trombone or bow rosin for a cello. They’ll get the hint, trust me!

Hopefully now your head is full of great gift ideas for the prog fans in your life. Go forth with new confidence that for the first time since they became a fan of the best music in the world, you’ll have found a gift that truly fits their totally awesome life style. It might kind of be like giving a crack addict a pipe for the holidays, but don’t worry, at least one person always loves an enabler!

Piatek, a wy pewnie planujecie imprezy, odpalacie muzę na cały regulator… w zasadzie powinienem napisać… my Juwenalia w toku, koce, skrzynki pełne win… słodycz!

Dlatego też po długim zastanowieniu… postanowiłem poczęstować was jednak minimalem.:)

SET TYGODNIA #12

Tym razem Robert Babicz i jego promo set. Krótka piłka… ja zmykam na koncert KULT’u
Miłego weekendu ;*

Long live the minimal!

It feels good to be back! I had family visiting all the way from Germany for the last few weeks so wanted to spend as much time with them as possible. Nice little break I needed to refuel and get my motivation into work mode again. How’s everybody doing? Hope all is well with you. I can’t believe it’s been a year since I blogged about my very first ‘Movement’ experience, here we are a year later and I am armed to the teeth for this year’s edition with a three-day pass and lots of interesting material I plan to cover exclusively for all of you, can’t wait! Anyway, while I haven’t taken the time to work on music or update the blog in last little bit, I did manage to occasionally peek for the latest news and cool articles I could post. Here are some of interesting ones I found:

- How would you like to win a set at the Ministry of Sound club in London, UK? Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? All you have to do is submit an hour-long mix to the kind folks at GloryHole Music! It’s that simple. All mixes will be listened and the winner will be announced on their site. All info can be found here, don’t forget the closing date for entires is June 6th. Good luck!

- Beatport has united with Pacha (Ibiza) to bring you this wicked contest. You and a guest will be flown to Ibiza and stay at the luxurious El Hotel for seven nights. Winners will receive VIP admission to Pacha nightclub and affiliated venues during their visit with complimentary dinner at the Pacha Restaurant. To enter participants must be confirmed users of Beatport and subscribe to the Pacha Recordings label in “My Beatport”. The winner will be selected at random and announced at Beatportal on June 15th, 2009. Doesn’t get much easier than this, does it?

- Are you a producer? Legendary Depeche Mode, cited as influence to many of today’s bigs, is looking for talented artists out there to remix their ‘Peace’ record. For more info, please click here.

- DanceTrippin TV has updated their video section, this time bringing you Robert Babicz live from Cocoon. Mr. Babicz delivers his unique style of melodic, techy tunes mixed with elements of acid. Neat video for you to enjoy.

That’s all for today, stay tuned as more updates are on their way…

KMC music è stato nominata distributrice per l’

KMC music è un distributore indipendente di strumenti musicali ed accessori negli Stati Uniti e un produttore di chitarre e parti di chitarra e accessori.

Babicz design Ltd. è uno sviluppatore di prestazioni brevettato basato, tecnologia licensable strumento musicale, compresi la variabile Neck insieme, coppia riduzione doppia ponte e la tavola di compressione laterale armonica.

Robert Babicz a.k.a. Rob Acid is one of the most experimental artists of our generation. His ‘acid’ alias brings us back to the mid 90s era, when techno was dominated by psychedelic and hallucinogenic sounds fitting for the environment. Back in the day, when spinning was all about the music a DJ would play, and where one would be measured by his ability to push the boundaries and create something new, something different. There was no bullshit, just straight partying which later translated into ‘raves’ and started gathering negative media attention. Back in the day, when people went out with one goal in mind, and that goal is to have fun and forget hassles of everyday life. This piece of work should take you back on that very same journey… Present, meet ‘Acid’.

Robert Babicz – BabiczStyle Mix

Sure, we all like the heavy stuff that makes you go wild at the club when you hear it. But there is nothing like dropping this kind of gem in peak of your set and mellow out the atmosphere before hitting ‘em hard again. First time I’ve heard of Joris Voorn was when he came out with ’The Deep‘. Needless to say, I was instantly hooked on his sound. It is very happy yet groovy. I am a fiend for that kind of melody! The track I’m uploading today has been out for a little while, but it was just re-released on Beatport today, so I figured I would let you hear it before purchasing it. Like I always say, I am doing this for promo purposes, and if you like the track you hear, you should support the artist and buy the record! It is only fair to them as they spend countless amounts of time making these tunes for us which we can’t help but adore and listen to. Cheers!

Robert Babicz – Dark Flower (Joris Voorn Remix)