I don't know if you read Frank Rich's column in the Arts section of the New York times, but this week's is right on the money as always. The ending reminds of one of my favorite George W. Bush quotes: "Conservation does not mean we have to do without."
Charles, Max and I saw The Life Aquatic today. I enjoyed it, though I don't feel it had as many great characters as The Royal Tenenbaums. It focused more on the main character, played by Bill Murray, so the supporting actors were all less prominent.
I did think, though, that Anderson's movies split nicely into pairs. While his characters speak and act in the same quirky fashion in each, Bottle Rocket and Rushmore are distinct from the latter two. The early films both focus on a young male (Luke Wilson and Jason Schwartzmann) in love with the wrong woman (a Spanish speaking motel maid and a schoolteacher, respectively). The later films feature an older man (Gene Hackman and Bill Murray) looking to reconcile himself with both his family and his personal and financial failings. Anjelica Huston plays the same role in both of the later movies. All four give the protagonist a sidekick: Owen Wilson, Bill Murray, Kumar Pallana, in the first three. The Life Aquatic provides Murray with a host of sidekicks, including all of his crew, especially Klaus and Esteban, but also Ned, who is both partner and rival. The later two films also feature much more elaborate and stylized design including the costumes and the set design (the house in Tenenbaums and all the Team Zissou paraphernelia Aquatic).
I hope Wes Anderson continues to work in such an oddball mode, and except for some sort of life-changing disaster, it seems unlikely that he would "go straight." Beyond their surface eccentricity, his characters seem able to express very human and basic emotions through an uncommon bluntness, often a fight scene followed by admissions of personal failure, then reconciliation. They, like all movie heroes and heroines, achieve their objective, but in such a compromised fashion that all of his movies end in a state of gentle and oddly encouraging bemusement rather than true celebration.
The Guardian has an interactive Flash guide to the effects of the tsunami on the various Indian Ocean nations.
Well, friends, here is a wrap-up of 2004. I looked through my web archives and gleaned most of this from there.
The short list is the really terrific things, and the long list is good things that didn't make the short list because then the short list wouldn't mean anything. These are mostly new things or things I discovered for myself within the last year. Also, I didn't include things like "Friendship," and "Generosity," and "Free food," because that would be dumb and pathetic and you don't want to read that crap. If you require further explanation, see me; none will be provided here. The lists are not chronological nor ordered in any particular way. As with most things here, if you don't get it or don't agree, that's your fault.
Short List
"Waste of Paint," "Always on My Mind," "Girl from the North Country" at Bright Eyes + M. Ward + Jim James concert
William Bowers, esp. his essay on My Morning Jacket in Da Capo Best Music Writing 2004
New Mexico (Arthur, the desert, etc.)
Motherless Brooklyn, and Lethem in general
Achewood
Radio
Barbarian Invasions
Songs for Drella from the record library
Love "Always See Your Face"
Nebraska
The fact that the Washington (IA) Public Library shows independent and foreign movies
Last Plane to Jakarta
Newsreaders
The Arcade Fire live
Oregon & California, esp. City Lights bookstore
Long List
iTunes/thousands of songs on a large hard drive
Kill Bill, Vol. 2
being 21
The Harper's Weekly Review
Curling
IMS Basketball Team
The Thermals
Dogville
The personality test I took that said I was 0% extroverted
Parties at which I feel comfortable, despite the above
That Camaro reformed as the Olympic Hopefuls, played the Cave and put out a very good album
City of God
Koyaanisqatsi/Philip Glass
Roberto Benigni in Down by Law
Il Posto
Money, by Martin Amis
Distant
Jack's movie
Out Hud
His Girl Friday
Before Sunrise/Before Sunset
Earplugs at shows
The End of the Affair
Minimalism
The Black Keys live
Galaxie 500
Being There
Aphex Twin
Interpol live
Lonesome Crowded West
Junior Boys "Teach Me How to Fight"
Panda Bear
Sideways
Zaireeka, for Rag P's birthday
The Kinks "Victoria"
Listening to The Futureheads debut three times in a row
Tarnation
PY article on Counting Crows
It was kind of inspiring to see all that was good about 2004, and makes me anticipate 2005 which should include more fundamental life changes like stopping my education and moving to a new place.
Continuing the retrospective theme, I finally pulled together what I wanted from the year-end lists. For both movies and music I ranked the lists from most to least essential. I like the lists at the bottom of each category, but they aren't as necessary as the ones at the top. Eventually I'll go through and try to find what I want to watch and listen to in early 2005, but that will probably be after several days.
The Village Voice and Film Comment polls are very similar, but the Voice is restricted to alternative publications, whereas Film Comment has a broader and more inclusive range, so that's why they're at the top and the Voice is at the bottom. I found the individual music lists from ArtForum and Pitchfork a lot more informative than the individual film lists, but that's because the film critics are covering a much narrower field, whether they'd care to admit it or not.
Enough looking backward, time to look forward to the rock shows the rest of the year will provide. You may note that I have updated the concerts page with six concerts for winter term and one for spring. In addition, I believe Jens Lekman will be appearing at the Cave, which is exciting.
I am most enthusiastic this term about the Thermals and the Futureheads. I saw Conor Oberst, Low, and Pedro the Lion last year, so I don't feel an urgent need to see them. I don't know much about the Scissor Sisters other than that they covered "Comfortably Numb," which I assume is better than Korn's worthless "Another Brick in the Wall," and that they made it onto a few year-end top ten lists. I'm guessing the Modest Mouse show will be very crowded, and knowing what it was like at the Interpol show last October, I'd rather not be smothered at First Avenue for hours on end unless I really have to.
Today I programmed the KRLX schedule for the last time. There weren't as many applications as I'd anticipated, but the schedule still filled up.
I was wishing this evening that someone would have made a list of great songs on terrible albums for 2004. This would be like a singles list, except that all the songs would have to be stuck on albums that aren't otherwise worthwhile.
I have been pursuing some sort of free blogging space for after graduation. Blogger seems like the most obvious, but it wouldn't surprise me if the merger between Six Apart (MovableType, TypePad) and LiveJournal resulted in something new and exciting.
Time: Midnight, Thursday evenings
Name of show: Marauding by Moonlight
Genre/Example Artists: Ambient, Post-Rock, Lo-Fi, Slowcore
Brief show description: My Morning Jacket, Velvet Underground, Neil Young, Belle and Sebastian, Pedro the Lion, Aphex Twin, Drive-By Truckers, Interpol, The Mountain Goats, The Thermals, Galaxie 500, Keith Fullerton Whitman, The Arcade Fire
I think I'll trade in my Burton single for one of these next term, ideally hanging somewhere in the lower Arboretum.
On Tuesday I went and saw me some House of Flying Daggers, since I was in the Twin Cities buying tickets. (Incidentally, I will almost certainly be going to the Thermals on the 29th, so let me know if you want in on that action.)
I'm really glad I saw this before it hit video, because the immersive color and design on the theater screen was fantastic. It was at the Lagoon and not, say, Southdale where it would have been overwhelming, but even so the pictures were impressive. There aren't that many locations depicted in the film, but they're all distinct.
We start out in the jail, where everything is dark gray. The uniforms, the halls, the cells, everything is gloomy and brooding. Then we move to the brothel which has ornately beautiful decorations on seeming every surface in the enormous main room where the action takes place. Back to jail for a bit and then the rest of the movie plays out in a variety of gorgeous forest locales. The bamboo groves, the meadow, the intense greens of the hideout of the House of Flying Daggers, the dying leaves, and the blizzard at the end. I'm not sure Zhang Yimou even needs plot or actors, much less characters, to make this a successful film. The choreographed scenes (fighting, dueling, ambushes) are as amazing as you knew they were going to be, but I think the extraordinary attention to color in each scene is far and away the best reason to see House of Flying Daggers.
Also, I finished reading Nobrow by John Seabrook last week, and it was not quite as good as I'd hoped from what I'd read in the bookstore. It wasn't bad, but a lot of the theorizing seemed kind of obvious, even though the author seemed to think he had summed up contemporary American culture in a revolutionary fashion.
I'm now midway through Douglas Coupland's Microserfs, which isn't quite as vitally important to me as his Generation X, but that probably has more to do with external factors than the quality of the respective volumes.
The record library has one album by the Contortions, Buy, and it's just as thrilling as I'd hoped it would be based on the strength of "Contort Yourself," which is on the New York Noise compilation, which I happen to own. According to All Music Guide, they're "the quintessential no wave group." Free jazz saxophone playing plus funk rhythms equals cathartically frenetic noise.
I started the term off with a bang, ie Wolf Eyes. You can see for yourself on the playlists page. The middle section, from The Futureheads through John Lennon, was probably the best. The end got messed up because I played the wrong Rolling Stones song and the Bob Dylan song just cut out. Next week will be better.
First, I beat Mickey Mouse for NES. It is not a very good game, and the ending kind of sucked, too. No thanks to Iago, for inspiring me to play it. I think I did find the game I was looking for, though: Adventures in Magic Kingdom. I used to only use vimm.net to download NES games, but I found another site that lets you download not just five but an unlimited number of games per day. I'm assuming you don't need to do that, so I won't bother linking to it.
Second, I've been looking at various film blogs this evening, and noticed a list meme that had been circulating through a number of them. I replicated it for the first post at my new potentially permanent blog home. You'll be happy to see that you can once again leave comments, as I know you've been dying to do for the past six months or so since they disappeared along with my TypePad site. I'd rather get MovableType and space on a server, but that would take longer than the five minutes it took me to register and set up this Blogger-hosted monstrosity (and it wouldn't be free). I'll be tweaking the look eventually, and probably adding stuff to the sidebar, but I don't mind the appearance as is.
This entry at the Chutry Experiment got me to thinking about my own "cinematic education," if you will, and related topics. Perhaps what most amazes me is how frequently I get to know new people. Whenever I relocate to someplace new, I always envision getting to know a few people in a short period of time (forming a "clique" perhaps, though I'm not terribly susceptible to this tendency) with whom I will do whatever it is I do with friends and acquaintances. This seems to be a woefully inaccurate assumption, since I continually surprise myself by becoming friends with new and different people even though I managed a 100% introversion score on the rather extensive introvert-extrovert test presented to me last spring.
It still kind of stuns me to recall how little I knew about film or how few important (classic or contemporary) movies I'd watched up until somewhere around my high school graduation. I'd never had a VCR of my own and there aren't that many movies I'm comfortable watching with my parents, since they tend to have relatively stringent requirements about what is and isn't acceptable on screen. I also hadn't ever gotten into the habit of going to the movie theater with people, just because. I suspect that I wasn't a complete moron, since I kept up pretty well with film reviews, since I've always tended to read a lot of cultural and media criticism in newspapers, magazines, etc. (In fact, I can still recall enjoying scathing reviews for computer hardware that I didn't really even care about in some geeky magazine I had back when I was 13 or something, and failing to be able to communicate to my younger brother why I thought they were so great.) I think my DVD player was the reason for any increased interest I developed in movies. I can recall that several Netflix rentals had an effect on me; American Beauty and High Fidelity are the only two which spring immediately to mind. I suppose I should be glad that I failed to cancel my subscription before the free trial ran out.
Anyway, the main point (well, sort of) which I haven't actually made is that there are a lot of good film blogs out there, and I don't have time to read them all, which is always a hard sort of thing for me to realize. I can still vaguely recall the unsettling feeling I had when I first realized that it simply wasn't possible to, as I believe Encyclopedia Brown was reputed to have done, read all the books at the public library; it was just something I assumed that I would do, at least until my brain grew enough to do the math that told me that simply wasn't possible. In fact, it was just yesterday that I had to stop myself from trying to start at the first week of the year of All Music Guide's list of albums released, because I wanted to see all the albums released in 2005 so I didn't miss anything. I had to stop myself because, even though I tend to view these sorts of impulses as positive, that was just crazy.
In fact, if you were psychoanalyzing me, I think this desire to assimilate, organize, analyze, and store any and all information, ideas, and mediated or non-mediated experiences probably goes a long way toward explaining a number of quirks of my personality. At least, it probably serves better than attempting to claim that I'm autistic, which has indeed been attempted in some quarters. It should also explain why I don't get bored when I'm home on break without a job, which was a topic that came up if only for a short while this evening.
For lack of any attempt at tying all this together, I'm just going to stop.
It looks like Out Hud is playing the Cave for my birthday. Well, six days afterward. Hooray for Sarah Moody!
I've added the Decemberists to the concert list (9 April) and am growing more excited about the list of albums coming out in 2005. My personal list so far:
- The Books: Lost and Safe
- Caribou (formerly Manitoba): The Milk of Human Kindness
- The Decemberists: Picaresque
- The Fiery Furnaces: EP
- The Headphones (David Bazan): s/t
- Low: The Great Destroyer
- Out Hud: Let Us Never Speak of It Again
- Prefuse 73: Surrounded by Silence
- Trail of Dead: Worlds Apart
- M. Ward: Transister Radio
Yes, I know the Trail of Dead album is supposed to be bad, but there is always a critical backlash after something as big as Source Tags & Codes. I mean, I liked the second Interpol album a lot even though I certainly heard negative things from people whose opinions I respect at least some of the time.
iTunes has a mute function that isn't visible on the interface unless you enter the Control menu. It had me worried for a while, but I'm over it.
Update on my other blog.
There were a few minor technical glitches tonight (seconds of silence, etc.), but those were mostly due to external circumstances, so I'll assume everything will go perfectly next week. I was planning to go with the last track from the Arcade Fire CD after I finished Explosions in the Sky, but it seemed like overkill, so John Darnielle won the spot instead. I hope you enjoyed the EitS/Arcade Fire medley as much as I did.
I had a dream the other night (one of many, in fact) in which I went to see the Explosions in the Sky with my brother, I think, and they were even better than at the Cave, where they were pretty good.
I checked out five books from the library today which all have at least some information on self-avoiding random walks, so that I can do my comps talk on February 24.
Because I didn't want to actually read those books today, I started a Tecmo Super Bowl season with the Oilers. Lorenzo White is underperforming, but Warren Moon has come back from a lackluster first game to lead the league in passing yardage.
I'm very excited about the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy being released on May 6. Perhaps I will go see it after I finish my math comps exam.
Update at the other blog. I'm thinking that until I post everything over there, that space will get the longer, self-sufficient things, while here you will find shorter, less substantial posts.
Remind me never to trade CDs in at Spun.com again. Of the five CDs I sent them, they accepted two, one of which they'd previously rejected because it was "scratched". Those they rejected this time were, for the most part, listened to very little and likely not damaged in any way. In fact, I'd bet if I tried them again they'd go through.
Kottke.org linked to this stunningly colorful photo of thousands of buttons.
Radio: No high points quite like last week, but no low points either. As always, the playlist is posted.
BBC News has a collection of facts and information about life in post-Saddam Iraq.
You may note the updated concert list. It includes four shows for the remainder of this term which I may possibly attend, the two new ones being Rogue Wave on February 19 and Clem Snide on March 12.
Next term is shaping up to be pretty big. Mono and Bloc Party have been added to first week. Also, within a single week, the Triple Rock will be bringing us M83, Animal Collective, and Of Montreal. I'm really, really hoping for a My Morning Jacket show before graduation so I don't have to drive to see them this summer. That, and it would be awesome to see Jim James for a fifth time during college.
Tecmo Super Bowl news: I broke 100 total points in a game. 79-21, 49ers over the Falcons. It was thrilling.
Tecmo Bowl news: I scored four touchdowns in a single quarter. This, too, is very hard to accomplish. Seahawks against the Giants.
I did not know the sad recent history of Nepal until I read this Guardian article:
The King of Nepal seized power yesterday when he sacked the government, put senior politicians under house arrest, declared a state of emergency and put the army on the streets.
King Gyanendra promised to restore democracy and order after nearly 10 years of civil war between Maoist rebels and government forces.
Gyanendra became king in June 2003 [more likely 2001, as stated later in the article] after his nephew, Crown Prince Dipendra, opened fire on his assembled family.
Drunk and high on drugs, he killed his parents, Queen Aishwarya and King Birendra, his brother, a sister, an aunt, two uncles and two cousins, then himself. Gyanendra was in western Nepal at the time.
Nepal has a gross national income of £128 ($225?) a head and is the world's 12th poorest country.
Wow, am I ever into Devendra Banhart's Rejoicing in the Hands. It's one of those things that I've had for a while and listened to before, but it didn't catch my ear until this week. Maybe eventually I will write something longer about it for the other blog, but for right now, I'll probably just play multiple tracks from it tonight on my radio show.
If I were writing something longer, I would compare Banhart's vibrato with M. Ward's, which I think they both use to achieve an old-fashioned sound. Having just listened to the new M. Ward record, which was not very highly praised by the music director who reviewed it, I would say it is very good, if different from Transfiguration of Vincent, and hopefully I will play some of it tonight as well.
I took the database file of my albums sorted by year and put it into an HTML page using a table. It wasn't too hard; it involved a few find/replace runs through the document to format it, but nothing too stressful. I also made another sorted by artist.
I wonder if next year I will go to any indie rock festivals. I'd say it is unlikely this year, but if I'm in San Francisco I could certainly go to the Noise Pop Festival in February. Then there are also Coachella and All Tomorrow's Parties a few hours to the south. The Field Day Festival, which may still exist, would be in New York.
I'm quite taken with LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge". Also I listened to the Death from Above 1979 album really loud on headphones today, and that worked pretty well.
Even though one of the CD players wasn't fully functional, there weren't any technical errors on the radio show other than a few extra seconds of silence here and there.
Now that the radio term is half over, my thoughts are turning, as they often do, to what sort of spectacular finale I can have for ninth week. One idea would be to play the whole Arcade Fire album and intersperse other stuff in there to make it into a 90-minute show. There are probably a lot of other, better ideas.
I managed to get hold of Koyaanisqatsi, so hopefully we can watch that this weekend in preparation for our DVD Fest video.
Also, I worked on my record collection a little bit and saved it under a different file. It will take some while to go through and correct the mistakes.
As this is my space to publish whatever I want, how about I publish this:
Let's hope I never again have, in the space of three days: a mid-term exam, a paper, a comps presentation, and a lengthy math assignment.
Remember 2004? No? Well, you can relive it with the Village Voice's Pazz & Jop poll. Is it even relevant in February? I'm not sure. I don't think Robert Christgau is all that relevant at any time of year.
I tried to implement an index for my record collection page, but it didn't work because apparently you can't use intra-page links with a table. I had no idea about this, and am skeptical that this is really the problem, but I don't know how to fix it.
February 11 has been a great day. A Richard Thompson bandemonium, my belated discovery of ourTunes, and the triumphant return of Mark Richardson's Resonant Frequency column, of which today's is number twenty-two. I think I've read all of the first twenty-one of them at least three times. I actually downloaded all of them, just in case Pitchfork messed up and lost the archive.
Also, my iTunes library got mentioned in the Carl, which was nice, except that apparently I'm requiring a password now to connect to my library. I think that is actually not the case, since I don't check that in the Options, and sometimes people do connect to my iTunes, but I have been having problems for a while. Like how I can't see any shared music for hours after opening iTunes. And like how when I do see playlists, I often only see about three of them.
This should continue to be a great weekend due to Rag P & Ollie at the Cave, Last Tango in Paris at St. Olaf, and Tokyo Story and The Third Man in my room. Also, I mostly only have to read for Film Theory for class, which I would probably do even if it wasn't assigned.
It looks like instituting a password for my iTunes playlist, and then stating the password in the title of my playlist, has succeeded, since there are four people connected at the moment. Thank you, Carl.
Lots of posting going on at the other blog.
Also, there may a new reason for you to listen to the radio from 3 - 6 am (Central) Saturday mornings. I will be doing 3 - 4:30 for the next 3 weeks because it's open and I feel like doing it myself, and Kevin Jackflaps will be doing his thing, hopefully, from 4 - 6 on WXDU.
One last 2004 top ten list, this one from Keith Fullerton Whitman:
birchville cat motel beautiful speck triumph (last visible dog)
blithe sons arm of the starfish (family vineyard)
glenn branca lesson no.1 (acute)
luciano cilio dell'universo assente (die schachtel)
nicholas collins pea soup (apestaartje)
greg davis somnia (kranky)
dna dna on dna (no more)
end. the sounds of disaster (ipecac)
tim hecker mirages (alien8)
glenn jones this is the wind that blows it out: solos for 6 and 12 string guitar (strange attractors audio house)
minit now right here (staubgold)
rosy parlane iris (touch)
philip samartzis soft and loud (microphonic)
subtle a new white (lex)
john wiese magical crystal blah (kitty play)
brian wilson smile (nonesuch)
wolf eyes burned mind (sub pop)
The record collection is beefing up due to ourTunes, eg. I just got Godspeed You Black Emperor's Lift Yr. Skinny Fists after several unsuccessful tries. I won't be able to go all the entries on the record collection page until spring break, but it's in pretty good shape at the moment. Eventually I want to get the label information for each record, but that will take some time. I'm trying to go through all the hosts individually, since it's the only way I think I can count what I've checked and not checked for which albums I might want.
Also, I've really been enjoying the new Antony and the Johnsons album lately. Antony's voice is both unique and enthralling, and the lyrics seem worth paying attention to. Lou Reed makes a brief appearance, and the music doesn't seem far removed from a Velvet Underground-lite aesthetic. (Apparently Antony covered "Candy Says" at Lou Reed shows for a while.) I'd take more time to try to describe it, but I have music to download. Probably I'll try to play some on my radio show this week.
And, I had an idea that for the end of this term I should do a compilation of my favorite music from 1950-2000, and then next term for my last show I would do 2001-2005. I'm not sure about this yet, but it's a thought.
Tonight was easily my least favorite show of the term. The music wasn't bad, and there were a few nice moments, but over all I just couldn't get it together. I think I'd forgotten how hard DJing can be sometimes if I don't think about what I want to play beforehand. Next week I can probably take some time to prepare between my comps presentation and the show.
Two more thoughts: one is that it's kind of depressing how little I can distinguish the music I have from other people at Carleton since so much of the new stuff I have is from the record library. I presume this will not be an issue after graduation.
And: I really want to do an afternoon radio show next term, which would mostly consist of electronic, ambient and instrumental music, and I would take no requests. This strikes me as slightly obnoxious, but also as potentially fun. I don't know how I feel about the restriction, both on content and style, especially since I won't have any more radio shows after this year. Probably I will just end up doing the same slot I've done for the past three terms, which is nearly ideal for me anyway.
This weekend will feature: Dracula, Delicatessen, perhaps Ray, probably karaoke, a late-night radio show, perhaps Kevin's early-morning radio show, a sufficient amount of work on my comps, some games of NES Play Action Football, probably racquetball, some laundry, groceries, and a trip to the Rolvaag Library to check out a copy of Timothy Corrigan's Cinema Without Walls for my paper on the films of Wes Anderson in the context of the (economics of the) contemporary art cinema and auteur structuralism, the one I basically outlined here after seeing The Life Aquatic.
The late Friday night radio show was vastly superior to Thursday evening's, since there weren't any awkward periods where I was searching for a song as I talked and I didn't have to play anything I didn't want to due to disorganization, which is a hallmark of a bad show in my opinion. Also, I found a new electronic/ambient album on Kranky by a band called Windy & Carl, or at least it's new to me. I thought I'd already caught all of their CDs by looking for the distinctive looking promo liner notes in the record library, but this one popped up in the returns pile, so hooray, hooray, hooray.
Okay, this is really the last 2004 best-of list. Unless I find more.
The Wire 2004 Rewind
50 Records of the Year
# Albert Ayler - Holy Ghost: Rare & Unreleased Recordings (1962-70) (Revenant)
# Sonic Youth - Sonic Nurse (Geffen)
# Deathprod - Deathprod Box (Rune Grammofon)
# Animal Collective - Sung Tongs (Fat Cat)
# Devendra Banhart - Rejoice in the Hands (XL)
# Wolf Eyes - Burned Mind (Sub Pop)
# Wilco - A Ghost Is Born (Nonesuch)
# PG Six - The Well Of Memory (Amish)
# Einstürzende Neubauten - Perpetuum Mobile (Mute)
# Arthur Russell - Calling out of Context (Audika)
# Ellen Fullman & Konrad Sprenger - Ort (Choose)
# Brian Wilson - Presents Smile (Nonesuch)
# Akira Rabelais - Spellewauernygesherde (Samadhi Sound)
# Radian - Juxtaposition (Thrill Jockey)
# Bark Psychosis - Codoname: Dustsucker (Fire)
# Dizzee Rascal - Showtime (XL)
# Keiji Haino - Black Blues (Les Disques Du Soleil Et De L'ACier)
# Björk - Medulla (One Little Indian)
# Ghost - Hypnotic Underworld (Drag City)
# Zeena Parkins & lkue Mori - Phantom Orchard (Mego)
# cLOUDDEAD - Ten (Big Dada)
# Sunburned Hand Of The Man - Rare Wood (Spirit Of Orr)
# Ramnn Sender - Worldfood (Locust)
# Alvin Curran - Lost Marbles (Tzadik)
# Madvillain - Madvillainy (Stones Throw)
# Steve Harris & Zaum - Above Our Heads The Sky Splits Open (Slam)
# The Hafler Trio - How To Slice A Loaf Of Bread (Phonometrography)
# Electrelane - Thu Power Out (Too Pure)
# Deerhoof - Milk Man (Kill Rock Stars)
# Antena - Camino Del Sol (Numero Group)
# MV + EE - Lunar Blues (Child Of Microtones)
# Kazuo Imai - Far & Wee (PSF)
# The Streets - A Grand Don't Come Free (697 Recordings)
# Kanye West - The College Dropout (Roc-A-Fella)
# Boredoms - Seadrum/House of Sun (Warners Japan)
# SunnO))) - White 2 (Southern Lord)
# Arcade Fire - Funeral (Merge)
# Anthony Braxton Quartet - 23 Standards (Quartet) 2003 (Leo)
# Rammellzee - Bi-Conicals of the Ramm:ell:zee (Gomma)
# Jack Rose - Raag Manifestos (Vhf/Eclipse)
# Stereolab - Margarine Eclipse (Duophonic UHF)
# Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Abbatoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus (Mute)
# Comets On Fire - Blue Cathedral (Sub Pop)
# Keiji Haino - 'Next' Let's Try Changing The Shape (Swordfish)
# Niobe - Voodooluba (Sonig)
# Soft Pink Truth - Do You Want New Wave Or Do You Want The Soft Pink Truth? (Soundslike)
# Thalia Zedek - Trust Not Those In Whom Without Some Touch Of Madness (Thrill Jockey)
# Tucker Martine - Broken Hearted Dragonflies: Insect Electronica From Southeast Asia (Sublime Frequencies)
# Black Dice - Creature Comforts (DFA)
Yeah, I don't know what happened to the Prefuse 73 show at Carleton on May 14 either, but apparently Grinnell booked them, so we're left to go see/hear Autechre at the Ascot Room instead, I guess.
I have finished my comps talk, so I feel like the term is ready to start winding down. Although we have the option of turning in our math exam tomorrow and thereby getting to leave a question unanswered, I think I'll put that off until the weekend.
I have now downloaded all the albums I need from ourTunes. Now I will check for singles.
I have come up with a rough, but fairly accurate, draft of my playlist for this week's radio term finale. It consists almost entirely of stuff released since the end of last term. I'm counting "Losing My Edge" since it was on the LCD Soundsystem album's second disc, a live track from Loscil that is unreleased, and a Stars of the Lid track that hasn't yet been released except on the Kranky compilation. I'll burn them all to a single disc except one that I have on CD already. It will not be the most exciting show to DJ, but I will enjoy listening to it anyway. That, and I can spend time communing with the record library while I still have my key.
Death from Above 1979 has been added to the spring term calendar, which continues to fill out in a satisfying manner. I think I'll be able to put that in the sidebar of the other blog pretty easily, and just hide all except the five most imminent shows. Assuming I'm not that concerned with keeping my record collection database online, I'll only have to worry about what to do with my archives once I am done with Carleton.
I was also talking with fellow digital music fiends Nick and Adam today, and remembered that my 80 GB hard drive (actually more like 76.3) is filling up fast. I deleted everything but music and I still have only 4.55 GB left. I suspect there are extra files or duplicates in there somewhere, but it will take some serious searching to find them. This means that I will have to either stop putting music on my computer, start burning straight to CD and not keeping everything on the hard drive, or find stuff I'm not really that into and delete it. I've spent most of my music-listening life trying to find out what I'm into, and while there is more of that to come, it may be time to find out what I don't like. Not that it's not good to enjoy a wide variety of anything, but I'm pretty sure I care more about being able to download or rip a hard-to-find Krautrock album than storing six (SIX!) Pavement albums, because I'm pretty sure I don't like Pavement that much, at least not to the tune of six albums. [Side note: Nick stated his distaste for My Bloody Valentine today, which I found more interesting coming from someone who enjoys extended instrumental freakouts, sound texture, and ambience than if the same opinion were from someone who's more into pop songs. He claims to really dislike the vocals.] I guess I will have to try to both listen to stuff I don't know about and get rid of stuff that doesn't seem worth hoarding, because it seems like trying to manage a 250 GB drive like Adam has would be kind of ridiculous if it were anywhere near full, at least with my current amount of knowledge. At some point I might want to upgrade due to sound quality or space concerns, but for now it would probably make more sense for me to get rid of what I don't need; that's more my style anyway.
Also, the Go! Team album sounds really good, so I might have to add that to the urgent music wishlist I'm pulling out of my larger permanent wishlist.
Finally, I was thinking that, since Charles has asked me multiple times if I think I will frequent coffee shops next year (who knows?), I would definitely frequent a coffee shop if it was like the record library except with more couches and beverages, and they played new and obscure albums on a really good stereo, and you would sit there and listen and talk about what you were listening to the other people in the coffee shop. It would be like a cross between a music store and a coffee shop, except the emphasis would be on the experience of sitting and listening carefully rather than rifling through stacks and stacks of albums or just drinking coffee and talking to your friends about non-music related things. I think the place would charge a ton for drinks in order to fund what would have to be an incredible record collection. Maybe this is really obvious and already exists, I haven't checked.
1 Mar 2005
Apparently Stephen Thomas Erlewine sometimes reviews movies for All Movie Guide, at least, he did Goldfinger.
Also, Roald Dahl was the screenwriter for a James Bond film, You Only Live Twice.
3 Mar 2005
I've put up a pre-playlist for my show tonight since I already have it planned. I also came up with the amazing strategy of putting the music on two discs, which alternate the songs in order, so I can still do all the transitions live but don't have to search for things in the record library. I don't know how I didn't think of this before. Anyway, you can look and see what part of the show you want to listen to, I guess. And then you can tune in again tomorrow night at 3 am for my real last show of winter term.
6 Mar 2005
You'll note that I've changed the dates to a less ambiguous notation. This is because I'm putting all of my archives in order. I tried to date the stuff from last summer, and re-sorted the stuff since then that was in backwards chronological batches. I probably won't put any of it up here, because now I'm more concerned about trying to put things in order on my hard drive so I can just move it all to my Tripod space in a few months. I'll try to go through and get rid of all outdated links eventually, but that will take some time.
The concert list will no longer be updated here, since I've got one over at the other blog. If you want to see the whole thing, for any reason, you can just look at the source and see what I've hidden. I think I'll post my playlists to my hard drive or to Tripod, whichever makes more sense. And since I've started going through and getting rid of albums and songs I really don't think I'll ever listen to, the record collection page is just not going to stay current. I'll probably just generate a new one every once in a while and put it up with the other archived stuff.
Beyond that, I don't think I have much reason to post anything here other than updates about where you can find pages if they move.
7 Mar 2005
I think I'm going to go with a monthly system for the archives. I'm also going to give all of the dates their own anchor so you can link directly to them if you want, which should be specific enough for anything anyone might want to be specific with, but the monthly format should be open enough for browsing. It would be kind of cool to have an alternating color system where the background color for each entry was very slightly different from the last, but that might be too distracting or annoying to put in for each of the entries.
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