Category: Wisecracks
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Other John Davises.7: Up for auction
Diversification: the key to financial success. A cliché to be sure, but one worth following. I am blessed to collect revenue from a vast stream of people who share my name, through a special patent I have placed on it. Thus, a feeling of joy flooded me when Andy Danser, an excellent guitar craftsman who…
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Inka Cola / Holiday Shows
One of my favorite lyrics on our new record uses a nugget I got from a passage in Mark Pendergrast’s great history of the Coca-Cola corporation: in perhaps the perfect symbol of neo-colonialism, the Coca-Cola corporation actually bought out Inka Cola of Peru. The line in the song goes, “Mao’s Little Red Book slandered you…
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Top 40 over 40.18: Peter Hughes and Dipa Ma
I was once listening to an episode of Car Talk on NPR and heard a woman call in to Click and Clack with the following dilemma: she had a Honda that was running perfectly, and that had proven to be very reliable over the years. Nevertheless, she found the car boring. She found herself eyeing…
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On the Radio
(POSTPONED since first posted – see below.) I’ll be discussing my new album and playing some demos and rough mixes from the project on WXDU in Durham, NC on any given Sunday <formerly 8/17> from 6 to 7 pm. You can listen live online at WXDU.org, or if you are local, on your FM dial at…
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Other John Davises.6: John Davis, Shrimper
Disambiguation: the issue haunts all John Davises, musical and otherwise. How to reach today’s web surfing music consumer when your name is ubiquitous? In the record store era, folks had only had to know enough about the alphabet to figure out that John Davis would come shortly before John Denver in the D section. Know enough…
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The Core is Getting Soft.9: Ring my Bell
For many years now, I have been using software in my meditation practice. In Buddhist meditation, we traditionally open and close each sitting by ringing a bell three times. One is instructed to follow the sound waves until they subside, providing a gradual transition in and out of the silent state of awareness. In today’s…
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Unhand Me
From “Major Aranda’s Hand,” by Alfonso Reyes: “Major Aranda suffered the loss of a hand in battle, and, unfortunately for him, it was his right hand…A delicate instrument, [the hand] possesses the most fortunate physical resourcres: hinges, pincers, tongs, hooks, bony little chains, nerves, ligaments, canals, cushions, valleys and hillocks. It is soft and hard,…
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Other John Davises.5: The Day the Dream Died
Dreams. We all have them. We all want to live them. We all suffer from this misguided aspiration when we wake up to the reality of lived experience. Green Day can sing about the Boulevard of Broken Dreams all they want, but they’ve never tasted anything like the intense disappointment I have recently experienced after…
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We Talk About You When You Leave
A guy walks into a hotel restaurant bar in Boston’s Back Bay on an October night in 2003. The staff politely inform him that it is closing time, but that he may order from the full menu and have room service bring his order to his suite. The expensively dressed “gentleman” insists that he be…
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Other John Davises.2: Practice Space Music
In a parallel lifetime, I moonlight as the lead singer of Korn. If you haven’t seen me recently, the ‘locks may seem like a bit of a stylistic departure from the shorter look you can see below at left: Chris from Refrigerator wrestled me to the ground until I promised to grow my hair out…
johnhdavis / inundation records 