Smart Energy

“Today I lost my best friend,” guitarist Steve Cropper wrote on his Facebook page. “The World has lost the best guy and bass player to ever live.” Cropper, who was on the same Blues Brothers tour in Japan, said Dunn died in his sleep. Dunn was 70.

Listen to this guy walk the bass! Awesome fingerstyle guitar playing.

This is hilarious.

We saw Tower of Power last night at the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival at the University of Idaho (KJ and I are both alums) in Moscow. They started at 11 p.m. and funked the house till 1 a.m.

I love what Larry Braggs, the lead singer, had to say last night about the group’s 45th anniversary DVD: “We know you college kids are broke and are gonna copy it. We’re kinda OK with that. It’s your parents we get mad it for copying.”

I directed and photographed this new video featuring a couple friends of mine who just graduated from WSU and started an organic farm just outside of Pullman. My colleague Phil Cable did the wonderful editing.

Here’s a cool rap video urging you to stop using all that plastic. This is in keeping with Plastic Planet, a documentary I reviewed here a while back. This video also puts me in mind of another film I reviewed, Gas Hole — which so totally missed the point about fossil fuels that I didn’t bother posting it here on Smart Energy (but you can read the review on Curled Up with a Good DVD).

So I’ve turned into a time lapse junkie and KJ seems to think it’s pretty cool, too, so here we go again. Just what we need: another project.

I’ve always loved t/l, especially of plants growing, but until recently it’s been expensive to produce decent footage. I mean, you have to leave a camera in a field or the woods for some period of time, taking it out of production and risking it being stolen. Recently, though, I was lucky enough to meet Roger P. Hangarter, a botanist at Indiana University, and an expert and artist of the time-lapse medium. He’s a scientist… and an artist!

He told me to give PlantCam a try. It’s cheap and produces an HD-ish image. It’s early days yet and I’m still learning how to best deploy the cameras, but here is an early effort that isn’t too dumb. This is about 5 days worth of images compressed into 50 seconds. Warts and all.

Holy crap, Eric Skye cooks. I’ve been listening to him for a few months now after getting on to him via a guitar mag article. Today I just got his solo acoustic album, “For Lulu.” Tis amazing.

His String Trio is hot stuff, too. Check out this 6+-minute version of Skye’s composition, “Happy Cake.” Skye bakes the cake, and the mando solo is the shit!