Take the World in a Love Embrace

Get your motor running…beep-beep-beep. I am just now mastering the scan. This opens up a huge treasure trove of possibilities. But first, I must speak of the music. Went over to the bucket this morning, and pulled out this clean non-marred translucent cassette? Turned out to be a solo recording of Scot doing an off-beat(?)arrangement of the "Steppenwolf" classic, “Get Your Motor Running”--c. 1986. The label was specifically marked, “Noise-reduction: OFF.” I’m pretty sure this was done right around the same time as “Owner of a Broken Car” (comedy). Very much the same production quality, and ‘Weird Al-esque’ arrangement.

By 1986, Scot had pretty much finished up with his full-on rockabilly stint. At this point, he was back in school, getting his masters at San Francisco State. He was doing a lot of loopish computer music--“Cocktail Music of the Future,” we called it. He had popped for a semi-expensive ‘Sequential Circuits-six track'. This was a fully programmable six-track sequencer synthesizer; which made it complicated and hard as hell to run--not like stuff that came soon after that was playable out of the box.

Scot was getting back into this very keyboard toward the end of his life, using it for meditational loops. He even made a computer form to record his settings, so I have those settings and hope someday to fire them up. As for the artwork, WOW—so much to say, but we’ll leave it at this. As previously mentioned, Scot sought out interesting surfaces upon which to conduct his art. Again, yeah Bloomington, he would scour the weekly library book sale for maps, music—anything graphic—anything with visual as well as informational tit-bits which would imbue the piece with serendipitous context--be it historical, geographical, political, or just plain elementally interesting.

Today’s art piece illustrates today’s blog entry title, “Take the World in a Love Embrace,” pulled straight out of today’s song. How nice! It is done on a map of the South Atlantic. This is a good piece to click on and blow up after the music. Sadly, I think this map show us pretty clearly (under the artwork) the area where an airliner full of people recently crashed into the sea. Since this is a memorial blog, I extend the circle today to encompass all those whose lives have been impacted by this crash, and to those who have passed—and to anyone else whose life has recently been affected by the crash of death.