Some Words

I tend to ignore Pitchfork for long periods of time. I feel justified in this by noting that they’ve got Scarlett Johansson’s upcoming album track list as a top article right now. I’m sorry, but no. It’s mostly Tom Waits covers, and even if the man himself approved, I just don’t want to go near that.

Anyhow, knowing that, it’s not so surprising that I sometimes miss bands they cover. This is bad as often as it’s good. A case of the bad would be my missing Rock Plaza Central for as long as I have.

I had an idea today.

GWAR

needs to cover Milkshake

Universe, I am counting on you to make this happen.

Also, I updated wordpress, and broke the tag cloud. I’ll get around to fixing that. Hopefully soon, as in before I forget it’s broken.

New Radiohead, New Radiohead, New Motherfucking Radiohead!

10/10/07

I have been waiting for these guys to come out and show everyone how it’s done again. Now they have it out on the 10th for download, with a goodies box that you can buy as well. What’s more, if you just get the digital version, with no goodies box (which has more music, and some vinyl and stuff), you pay what you think it’s worth. Fantastic!

It’s not a business model that would work for every band, but I think Radiohead might even come out ahead on this, or maybe I’m just going to pay too much.

In honor of this, my work monitor’s video cable has gone wonky, tinting the my computer world a sickly blue.

Who comes to Minneapolis next week? The National

For a while I thought that I would listen their new album, “Boxer,” into the ground. It hasn’t happened yet.

A couple of videos:

The second one is of them on Letterman, which turns out to be a surprisingly good performance for a Late Show gig.

By all rights, the half spoken not really singing thing shouldn’t work, especially when they throw in background vocals. Maybe what I like is that this makes it very singable for guys like me, with little discernible vocal talent.

So, there’s a song, I don’t know if I like it. I really don’t. I must have listened to it 30 times in the past week, and I still don’t know. I bounce around to it while it’s playing. But even as I do, I’m trying to make out the lyrics, and thinking, “These are really annoying vocals.” No, wait, it’s great. Just a ton of energy. I like that.

That’s an incomplete video, the actual chart goes on another three minutes. Youtube doesn’t have it though. The full video is on the Pitchfork “forkcast.”

Battles has Ian Williams, formerly of Don Caballero, and John Stanier, on of the many former members of Helmet. The vocalist is Anthony Braxton’s son. That’s a recipe for something interesting, if nothing else. Their first full album came out last month, despite what the Youtube caption says. I’m just going to link the damn Wikipedia page. If “math rock” became the new pop (exceedingly unlikely) I would be so very happy.

They’re in Minneapolis on the 13th of next month, at the Triple Rock. If they put out half the energy live that they do in that video, it should be a good show.

Yesterday, sitting in my coffee shop, I got a weird feeling. It was like I’d traveled back in time, and was 13 again. It was 1994, and somehow everything rocked but I hated it anyway. Then I realized that the barista had put the new Dinosaur Jr album on. I felt a sudden urge to buy a guitar and form a band again.

It is, for the record, a really fun album. This all makes it sound like a simple nostalgia trip. I think it’s more than that, though nostalgia played a part.

So, I bought an iPod shuffle the other day. The dawning realization that I did not need to carry 80 gigs of music with me (I had told myself that I was holding out for an 80 gig hd on one of them) was the motivating factor. The shuffle is tiny, holds a gig, which for me is roughly 14-15 hours, and runs for 12 hours or so before needing a charge.

Recently I’ve been feeling that a lot of the choice that modern society offers actually complicates things. If I have all of my music available to me at one time, I’m not going to be able to decide. I know myself. I am also likely to spend a lot of time listening to the same small sample of music that I fall back on from time to time. The shuffle actually makes me choose to walk out on to the street with music that I might not feel like listening to when it comes up, and it doesn’t have a screen, which makes changing tracks cumbersome.

I decided that I like that.

I’ve spent a while with it now, and I’m liking my music collection more. After I ditched the random loading, I put fifteen albums I wanted to get to know better on it. Then I listened to them. I didn’t skip. I actually paid attention to the music again. It was not the way I’ve been listening to music for a few years now, and it was good.

Which is all beside the point. Here’s what it comes down to when I think about it now. The Shuffle, with 1 gig, costs $80. The iPod Video, with 80 gigs, costs $350. Unless your musical listening experience is almost solely defined by a need for instant gratification, it’s $270 more, for utility that you probably won’t use.

It was one of those moments where I got a little angry with myself for not feeling that way from the start.

Just a quick little software plug here. The other day I downloaded this program called Peel. What it does is it takes the mp3s posted on people’s blogs and lines them up in a row for you, a musical feed reader. So, basically it takes the frustrating part out of mp3 blogs. It’s free for the moment, though it looks like one day it will be pay. Anyhow, it’s got an iTunesish interface, and feels nice.

It’s cold out. There’s been a lot of snow. I’m on a mission.

James Brown has died. Put his music on and get the good foot this holiday season. It’s what he would have wanted. He probably also would have wanted you to get high, but I’ll leave that choice up to you.

I’m trying to wake my brain up over here, before a bunch of writing. It doesn’t help that yesterday I was fighting off a cold. My friend Brad came over, and he had something, which he was worried about giving to other people. I had mixed up a wild sheep chase and wanted him to try some. Obviously he didn’t want to drink anything significant while sick, but I told him I wasn’t worried, as the high alcohol content would protect me from getting what he got. Every holiday season I try to do something st stupid. I’d say that counts this year, though managing to kill the conversation stone dead three times on Saturday night comes in a close second.

The letter writing went well today. I wrote letters to two old friends that I had largely lost contact with. Each of them got a couple of pages and a Muppet stamp, thank you U.S. Postal Service. My handwriting in printed letters has already improved. I might soon try some cursive. It felt good to write things out by hand again. I have always liked writing by hand over writing on a computer, as it slows me down. I think I create sentences that are less likely to be bloated crap. That may just be me romanticizing it though. When I first tried writing a novel, I wrote large portions of it out by hand. What stopped me was when I had to start moving it into a digital form for editing. In the end I decided that it just wasn’t worth it.

The other day YouTube helped me find a band. Several years ago I had seen a video while bored and watching MTV2. I didn’t catch the band id at the end though. All I heard was that the band was from Canada. For years I thought there was some Canadian band out there that I would just love, if I could remember who they were. I think my memories might have inflated my love of the song. A few weeks ago I looked up all the bands that had members who spent time with Broken Social Scene. Then I went to YouTube and started looking at the videos for these bands. I found it, Elevator Love Letter by Stars:

It’s not as good as I remember, not bad, but not the Canadian revelation I had dreamed of. I wish they’d stayed a myth. It’s always nice to think that there is another band out there just waiting for you to go nuts.

Tonight I started a new project. This is usually a dangerous thing for me. I start new projects too often and as a result not enough of them get done. My computer desktop has dozens of little digital sticky notes all over it, reminding me to do this or that.

This project was to write my friends using paper and pen. It seemed terribly old fashioned, but there is an appeal to that. I’m also horribly bad at writing them emails. Letters will hopefully feel special for both parties. It might even get me out of writing as often as I should, but I dont want to think of it that way.

The first thing I learned while trying to write, is that I no longer have good cursive skills. About six years ago I switched to printing all the letters. This, combined, I think, with my mild dyslexia, is conspiring against me. It is not that my penmanship is simply bad. I will actively think of a letter and write another one. I tried to write a capitol H three times tonight. When I failed to concentrate on my intentions fully, it did not look like an ‘h’ at all. Eventually I retired to printed letters in defeat. I even had to use lined paper. It was a sad moment. I felt like I was in grade school again. However, this has only strengthened my resolve.

I was also thinking, just before I started writing this post, that I was not doing what I wanted to do with this web space. There is a second page, marked stories, which contains some small part of my writing output. I do intend to continue to place things there. The posts on this page, on the other hand, are likely to undergo a substantial change in content. I have been trying to write down my thoughts on current events. This was a fool’s game. I keep up with what is going on, but trying to write about it as well was only drawing me away from the fiction. I had been afraid to write posts that seemed like a diary, or contained on any frequent basis things that would make it sound like a diary. I told myself this was done to prevent myself from looking like the thousands of other blogs out there. The thing is, that is exactly what those other blogs are doing. This web space isn’t going to draw anyone who isn’t either looking for stories, or a personal friend of some sort. A writer of political commentary I am not. I might touch on things like that, but not in any way I intend to be insightful. If you’re here for that, well let’s just hope you weren’t, because I wasn’t helping you. There will likely be less linking in the future as well, though in some ways writing personal observation frees me of having to think of a reason for a link to be relevant. Hopefully this actually leads to better, more enjoyable, posts on the site.

With that in mind…

On my commute several days ago, I was listening to the latest album by Hem. I was driving down 94 and for once I wasn’t in a traffic jam. The sky was overcast and there was just a touch of haze in the sky. I was wondering if listening to Hem stuck me in a demographic with reasonably thoughtful milquetoast middle managers (likely it does). As I hit a rise in the highway, a rush of unrelated memories came over me. All of them related to Canada. I was walking in the Beaches neighborhood of Toronto, listening to jazz. I was doing down a street in Oshawa toward my grandparents house. One of the rides on the Toronto islands came to mind. Then I remembered my grandmother’s funeral and several other wonderful memories which I had forgotten about, all in the space of six or seven seconds. This sort of thing is not unusual for me, but I had not previously associated Hem with any of these things. I have been leery of listening to the album since. It is, never the less, a good album.