Posts (page 2)
What albums are in heavy rotation for you right now?
Peter and the Wolf - Red Hunter's warped folk music + junk orchestra (group of howling, drunk friends banging on cans and shit) + eerie old-timey flavor = really, really good. I prefer the self-titled over Experiments in Junk.
Augie March - beautiful, lush, Australian pop. Uber-poetic and sometimes heartbreaking. I uploaded "Cold Acre," my favorite song off of the new album, which probably won't see US distribution for, like, three years. Fucking record labels! Get on this!
The Long Winters - Putting the Days to Bed. I approached TLW's 3rd album with some trepidation at first and my initial reaction was lukewarm. Slowly, the bulk of the songs earwormed themselves into my brain. "Honest" and "Hindsight" and "Teaspoon" all get stuck in my head for days at a time. Damn you, Roderick.
Page France - a double EP set called Pear and Sister Pinecone. Page France's nuanced, clever folk-pop is carefully constructed using modest but warm components -- acoustic guitar, organs, glockenspiel, tambourine, the pretty backing vocals of keyboardist Whitney McGraw -- while Michael Nau's striking voice lends the band's music an air of sincerity and innocence. More from me on NPR.
Boat - more charming indie pop. Haven't listened very deeply yet but it's made a good first impression.
Gogol Bordello - in lieu of talking about Beirut again and Devotchka again (and don't buy the Little Miss Sunshine track unless you want to hear shredded up instrumental versions of your favorite Devotchka songs, seriously), I've been taking in some gypsy punk rock. That's right. See also: A Tribute to Stesha, for more traditional Russian gypsy music.
Astor Piazzolla - Tango: Zero Hour. A classic in nuevo tango. I'd had a bunch of Piazzolla mp3s on an older computer a while back but I have no idea what happened to them all, so I Primed this off of Amazon. If you liked the Waking Life soundtrack or Tin Hat Trio, you'll love this.
(Hmm, I wonder if I should post a neuvo tango/gypsy/Russian folk/etc. mix to Vox at some point.)
There's also new stuff from Eric Bachmann (on first listen way better than the last Crooked Fingers album), the Mountain Goats (this is definitely a cloudy fall day album and is much lighter on the barnburners than previous works), Chad VanGaalen (I have an animations DVD of his that I won a few months ago that I still haven't watched either), M Ward, and others that I haven't sat with long enough just yet.
Notes:
* I hope this doesn't look too weird on people whose layouts differ from mine.
* Uploading mp3s and then not being able to add cover art afterwards really bothers me.
* So does adding albums that aren't on Amazon (which I did by finding their cover art and the uploading it as a photo.)
Blah blah blah blah blah blah. This is how you make your own question of the day prompt. Thanks to Anil for demonstrating how this can be done on his own blog.
Quick, say something silly you want to share with the world! Click here to answer.
Surreal: Beirut played at McCarren Pool in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY to a few thousand people. Formerly abandoned, the pool was renovated and opened earlier this summer, hosting live music events. This was a free show put on by JellyNYC and the place was packed. Beirut weren't even the headlining act, they were opening for Deerhoof.
Even though Chinatown Brasserie "only" received one star in the NY Times, they make some of the best (and prettiest) dim sum around, thanks to Joe Ng. The food really does look this spectacular in real life. And just looking at the photo is making me hungry.
Of course, the restaurant being a five minute walk from my apartment probably helps, though Dan's lukewarm attitude towards dim sum and the price (regular dim sum costs about half as much as in Chinatown) keeps me from going there too much.
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Lather, rinse, repeat
What's your cell phone's ringtone? What made you pick it?
It sounds like an old rotary phone. I picked it because it's normal sounding, not embarassing, and it was free.The midi file came from my old Sony Ericsson T610. All of the other included ringtones were crap on my new S700i. I transferred it over bluetooth to my new phone via the Powerbook and it worked like a charm.
This is such a common complaint, I don't know why carriers don't include more than one "normal"-sounding ringtone. Well, I know why, they want to charge me an absurd $4 a month for the latest and greatest pop hits in their ringtone stores -- but even then, the pickings are slim in their official stores. The phone manufacturers include basic, normal, ordinary, boring, professional ringtones by default, but the wireless carriers remove them on purpose, being the evil telcos that they are. Bastards.
Just google for "professional ringtone" or "normal ringtone" and you'll see scores of people desperately looking for ringtones that actually sound like fucking phones. Because hearing "Crazy Frog" or "Promiscuous" just isn't professional when you're at a client site, you know?
As far as I know, Nokia is the only one interested in this market by creating new phones that don't include cameras, but do include system beeps and ambient ringtones composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto. But again, I don't see Cingular or T-Mobile being foresighted enough to actually keep interesting, ambient ringtones on the phone before it hits the US market.
For now, we've got soundslikeaphone.com and that's about it.
Via MattBeltJones:
The silicon-virus combined with climate-change-server-meltdown means
that the internet is going to be switched off tomorrow. What 5 things
are you going to print out?
I guess for the first two I'd copy Matt:
- How to make a fire
http://www.m4040.com/Survival/Skills/Fire/Fire.htm - How to purify water
http://www.m4040.com/Survival/Skills/Water/Water.htm - Then throw in First Aid Basics: because I'm no Eagle Scout.
- And a really, really long book. The internet tells me that Clarissa by Samuel Richardson is "one of the longest novels in the English language, but unputdownable." Luckily Project Gutenberg has it online.
- And lastly, this photograph.
My upcoming.org feed gets updated rather frequently but Google Calendar is half asleep. There's a very strange problem in refreshing the external calendar from the iCal feed that upcoming.org generates.
I've found that gCal will add incoming new items, but if previously existing items update then the calendar will not update accordingly. So if I add a new opening band or something to a show, gCal will display the old lineup. Argh.
I love getting new neighbors and finding new contacts on Vox but I'm having a hard time managing the process. Like this email for example:
Dear Kathryn,
You've been added to Adam's neighborhood on Vox!
First off, there needs to be a way to turn the notifications off, and I'm sure that's coming since so many people have complained they were annoyed by the barrage of email notifications.
But my complaint is: I know a bunch of different guys named Adam. How am I supposed to figure out which Adam this is? A simple solution might be to add a last initial or add the email address:
Dear Kathryn,
Messy, but at least I have some context as to which Adam this is. The bonus pony feature might be:You've been added to Adam K.'s (adam@sliceny.com) neighborhood on Vox!
Dear Kathryn,
Of course, all of this might be coming in the near future and I have no way to tell.You've been added to Adam K.'s (adam@sliceny.com) neighborhood on Vox!
Some of the neighbors you have in common are Alaina, Janelle, and Dan. See more neighbors:
http://slice.vox.com/neighborhood/common/309230932048.html
The other big thing is that there's no way to tell who is official 6A staff on the blog pages. Some folks have their @sixapart.com email addresses as their contact information, but not everybody does. And some people put it in their bio page, but you have to click through to their profile to see it. I wish there was some automatic identifier, like how Flickr staff have a tiny "staff" icon next to their names whenever they participate in a forum conversation. It's really disconcerting to be involved in a conversation about Vox and have 6A staff pop in without identifying themselves clearly. This hasn't happened to me, but I've seen it in action. Full disclosure, you know?
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