80's music fans, reveal thyselves

Try this quiz out. (Many thanks to KW for this.)

No hollerin' back here

Rarely can 3 minutes and 35 seconds teach us crucial lessons about ourselves and those from other cultural backgrounds, but a highly educational and nuanced video entitled "Curry-n-rice girl" manages to do just that. Watch and marvel as Ludakrishna and Vikram MC poetically encapsulate the complex feelings of familial allegiance and personal quests for fulfillment.

Say it like you mean it

DJEZI, a jockeyer o' disks originally from DC, concocted a tune with the help of Public Enemy, Grandmaster Flash, and the Furious 5 cuts that features an interview with New Olreans' Mayor Ray Nagin subsequent to hurricane katrina. it's pretty cool, have a listen from his website (press "MP3 download whole song, hi-fi" under the title "Sugar Ray Nagin"). This luscious find now based in Orlando just released his second album, Day-maybe my favorite listen at this very second....and this very second. To hear more tracks and an interview, PLACE CURSOR HERE AND CLICK OVER AND OVER AGAIN (if link annoys you like it did me, download from here by pressing "play" after Trampoline House Podcast #3 - djezi presents Day.

Intolerance at its finest moment

Military discrimination has, to my knowledge, facilitated exactly one positive development (I'd be happy to hear if i missed anything else). Apparently, Jimi Hendrix managed to avoid a stint in Vietnam in the early sixties by pretending to be homosexual.

In regular visits to the base psychiatrist at Fort Campbell, Ky., in spring
1962, Hendrix complained that he was in love with one of his squad mates and
that he had become addicted to masturbating, Cross writes. Finally, Capt.
John Halbert recommended him for discharge, citing his "homosexual
tendencies."

This would be hilarious information to unearth about any artistic legend, but with Jimi Hendrix, it couldn't be more ridiculous. An insatiable appetite for women remains one of the cornerstones of the Hendrix legend. Or maybe he was gay and just tried really, really, really, really, really hard to compensate for what he thought was a lack of traditional masculinity. He succeeded in tricking me. Besides that, it sounds like a pretty typical rags-to-riches-to-drugs-to-deathbed rock story...which means I'd find it interesting.

Hopefully 'Informer' is next

I love Snow. Maybe you’ve heard of this anomaly: Paul Anka, the legendary 50’s teenage idol and prolific singer/song-writer, has released an album entitled Rock Swings that features classic 80’s rock songs remade with a big-band sound and lounge vocals. Check out short clips of each of the following masterpieces (click on the colorful voodoo circles next to the songs, for those technologically challenged readers):

1. It’s My Life (Bon Jovi)
2. True (Spandau Ballet)
3. Eye of the Tiger (Survivor)
4. Everybody Hurts (REM)
5. Wonderwall (Oasis)
6. Blackhole Sun (Soundgarden)
7. It’s a Sin (Pet Shop Boys)
8. Jump (Van Halen)
9. Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nirvana)
10. Hello (Lionel Richie)
11. Eyes Without a Face (Billy Idol)
12. Lovecats (The Cure)
13. The Way You Make Me Feel (Michael Jackson)
14. Tears In Heaven (Eric Clapton)

The man who composed the original ‘Tonight Show’ theme and 'My Way' (Sinatra mega-hit) has produced what I think is an innovative, artistic, and simply cool album. I’m sure there’s no shortage of people that feel otherwise and i fully anticipate hearing annoying, supercilious tirades from the more vociferous members of this faction. Normally, I too would loath anything of this sort but I think he infused enough raw talent and ingenuity into these songs to make you focus less on their cultural import and more on their pure musical value (yes, that does include “Eye of the Tiger”). If that sparks your interest, check out this interview with the man himself.

the joys of humidity

So two people walked up to my cubicle this morning and told me outright that I look tired. What the hell! Although my week/month/life has been moderately insane lately, nothing of catastrophic import happened in the last day or two (although I did miss the Ted Leo show at the 9:30 Club…you can read my buddy Jake’s take on the show here) that might render me a tattered and torn person. Not that I really care if people at work think I look tired-I’ve been known to sport the same shirt two, maybe three times in a five day work week…hence,I don’t have much of an image to maintain-but I found it odd that two different people said the same unusual thing, completely unsolicited (a conspiracy, perhaps?).
Curiosity piqued, I stole away to my favorite bathroom, slightly off the beaten track, where many a crossword puzzle has fallen victim to my lack of concentration on work-oriented tasks. The visage facing me in the mirror made that kid in The Ring look like Winnie the Pooh. It wasn’t that I looked tired (atleast in my unbiased opinion), it was that I had bangs! Oh god, memories of my sister’s seventh grade picture came flooding back and pangs of forgotten buckteeth assaulted my senses. They were so perfect too, as though I’d developed an uncanny proficiency with the curling iron after years of dedicated study.
So is it the bangs that made me look tired? I’m thinking so. I’m guessing the first think people think about when they see bangs is a strung out rocker chick in a def leppard video. They did tend to look tired. But they looked damn good in their strung out glory. So although nobody appended the “…but you look good” to their “Phil, you look tired”, I’m pretty sure they were thinking it. I do cut a striking figure in neon pink.

On another note, it’s funny to watch congressmen (and an occasional congresswoman) play baseball. I hope they had plenty of medical personnel available, because I think the arms might leave the sockets before the ball leaves the hand.

Finally, I don't think I have a sizeable cadre of tech savvy bloggers reading my blog, but if anybody knows how to work with the blogger comments coding, please let me know. i've been trying to make my comment section organized in threads for awhile, but i can't figure out how to access the html. Any ideas?

I'm late for lunch, damnit

this is all you get:

1)...and i have trouble climbing out of bed.

2) one of the musical recommendations that was recently offered to me (thanks, Amanda) kicks ass and is available to us, the internet using world, free of charge. Check out the Decembrists live at the 9:30 Club on NPR's website. NPR's posting a bunch of cool shows that come through the 9:30 club. the next such show is Bloc Party (thank you NSA=JA) this thursday. unfortunately, i'll be stalking the decembrists in their hometown of Portland, OR, so i can't go.

3)more things...be a good american and go learn all about the statue at the top of the US Capitol building.

That was an annoyingly and unnecessarily high number of hyperlinks to include on this itsy-bitsy post. deal with it.

Sunday morning thoughts (republished...comment issues)

…yes, morning. A couple things:

My computer is crippled and, by extension, I am crippled. There’s no denying it, computers are an ever-increasingly integral part of my life. Since I can’t afford the computer I really want right now, I had to settle for reprogramming windows onto my computer (chose traditional OS for timebeing). Since ordering it weeks ago (my XP disks disappeared in the bedlam of my one of my post-collegiate moves), it’s yet to arrive and I’m sort of going insane in the interim. Fiddling with a keyboard accomplishes too many important things these days for me to be completely cut-off upon leaving work, including the following: the internet serves as my primary source of daily information (articles, entertainment, weird websites), I also accomplish a fair amount of my communication online, and finally, I pour most of my technical interests and creativity (as my buddy Tony can relate to) into computer oriented activities these days. That’s a lot to go without. Such a stance might alarm or atleast surprise many people who knew me in my previous Stone-age phase, but they need not worry. I haven’t gone over the deep end yet.

Washington is really humid. I perspire alot.

I saw the Old 97’s in concert last night at the 9:30 Club here in DC. First of all, they kick ass and I highly recommend checking them out. Also, that venue reminds me a) how much I love intimate live shows and 2) how much I don’t like way overpriced megashows (although I’ll still go if it’s my only opportunity to see an amazing band) where the people on-stage look like wiggling black lines in the distance. Like other smaller venues I’ve frequented in p-town, anchorage, Spokane, dc, etc, the shows there are almost always cheaper and, without a doubt, much better.

Arrested Development is the funniest show on tv. I don’t really watch that much television, so I don’t religiously follow that many shows, if any. But I guarantee you when the third season of Arrested Development starts this fall, I’ll be watching (all my love to those who pushed for the show’s renewal). I’ve been laughing until it hurts the last couple weeks as I’ve charged through the Season 1 dvd’s. If you’re a late-starter like me on this one, get on-board soon. It’s hilarious.

What's the surest way to determine nobody reads this blog?...

…Aha! Post an entry that practically begs for reader participation. So in the spirit of masochism, here’s the deal. As tends to happen occasionally, I feel like I’ve been stagnating musically as of late. After jamming the same eight or nine albums over and over for way too long, I switched my I-Pod to ‘shuffle’ mode recently just to get some different tunes in the mix. Although this allowed me to rediscover some old treasures, it’s still stuff I’ve listened to before. I need some new beats in a bad way. So here’s where you, yeah YOU, come in. I’m counting on the reader(s) of this blog to provide me with recommendations for where I should take my downloading/music-store-wanderings. In the spirit of giving-to-get, I’ll include some stuff I’ve been jamming…the problem being, of course, that it’s nothing all that revolutionary. But perhaps one or two recommendations might strike an unexplored (or forgotten) chord. So here’s a sampling of my most frequently visited grooves lately, with props given to those who either introduced me to these jams or inspired me to revisit old classics:

-Kill Bill II Soundtrack(Br. Long)
-The Roots- The Tipping Point (K Huh)
-Johnny Cash- Sixteen Biggest Hits: Volumes I & II (Dr. Maher)
-Thievery Corporation- Any and all
-The Temptations- Greatest Hits (VH1 movies=unemployment)
-Beck- Guero
-Irish Drinking Songs- (Imhoff sots)
-DJ Dan- Funk the System (Lorentzen…long, long ago)

The last time I did this (via email) those who responded hooked me up with amazing input and I’m hoping for a repeat performance. So scroll through your MP-3 player and jot down what you’ve been listening to, dig into those hidden vaults and drop some obscure shiznit, or just let me know what you’re rocking these days, regardless of how painful said revelation might be (seriously, I was listening to old Whitney Houston yesterday…yeah, Amanda)! A brief description/plug always elevates recommendations to the next level, but it's not requisite.

Do it for the children.

oh crap, it knows i like cindy lauper...

What I really want to do right now is sit down and pour out a passion-infused entry detailing how I’ve fallen deeply in love with the city of San Francisco. This love is not new, but I think I’ve unilaterally elevated the seriousness of our relationship to the next level. I’m so exhausted and brain weary, however, from almost 3 weeks of constant movement (which explains the inexcusable lack of entries lately) and stiff hotel sheets that I cannot do it justice. It will have to wait. Maybe for awhile.

But I did run into a little tidbit today that I found really interesting. There’s this company in Oakland, Savage Beast Technologies (I really like the fact that they base their name on one of my favorite quotes, check the webpage), that’s working on a really cool project called the Music Genome Project. This project will result in something that’s in essence nothing revolutionary: it will lend itself to a program where if you decide you like a song or an album, it will refer you to other similar music that you might like as well.

What distinguishes this company is the sophistication of their analysis. Instead of relying on something as simple as genre-matching or market research (where they identify patterns of people’s purchases to make connections between shared musical affinities, and hence, make recommendations to those who might not be aware of the other bands), they are attempting to break the songs down into their fundamental musical elements. To accomplish this, they utilize a team of experts highly educated in music theory, along with pretty wicked technology to categorize the music into particular subsets. These subsets might be something like ‘A minor theme with alternating F/G subtext’ or ‘violin coupled with electric acoustic’. This would result in traditionally unmatched music being matched together. A lot of time, this would probably be for the best. It will allow listeners to find that it’s not so easy to dismiss whole genres of music because there are overlapping elements in each. This program essentially digs deep into our subconscious to identify the basic components we like in our music to recommend other similar stuff we probably never would have looked into.

Like I mentioned, this is fundamentally the same thing you’d encounter when shopping on Amazon or at you local Best Buy (a customer of Savage Beast, apparently waiting to incorporate the Genome technology in the near future), but with a MUCH larger inventory of music and more sophisticated methods of matching potentially attractive tunes for anyone and everyone.

In an industry where 3% of the available products account for 80% of sales (which might be attributable to the surfeit of bad music, but, more likely is attributable to the reigning promotional/record companies holding sway over most consumers’ tastes=buying habits), this tells me that the little guys are going to have an increasingly better chance of getting their names circulating.

So if any of my super-cool, band playing friends are reading this entry, keep your eyes out for this technology that’s starting to be introduced and make sure that you get your stuff into their libraries. For people like me, who have always found it difficult to stay up on the mass of underground releases that often times prove the most innovative and interesting musically, this tool should help us stop buying Britney (impossible!) and look into something more worthwhile. In the same vein as blogging and podcasting, I see this tool as yet another weapon for those with talent (obviously not referring to this blog) but short on lucky breaks to promulgate their creations to a wider audience. Even for those without talent, keep in mind that Nelson made millions. It’s the dissemination of ideas that attracts me here. So keep playing that dulcimer because somebody listening to Nickel Creek might just spot you and give you a shove down the road to fame and fortune.