The Midnight Inquirer

A few treats from our friend Jon Moses:

Pepi Ginsberg- Red

Red was recorded on a waterslide outside of Philadelphia. It was mixed inside the belly of a schoolboy who ate too many Mike and Ikes and was mastered while dangling from a rope swing shadowed by an ancient willow tree. Eventually it reached my hands, when I bought it at a concert in Rochester. Since then, I have listened to it while shaving, checking my email, playing board games, cutting out paper to make a party invitation and writing a review for the album. It seems to go well with all those things and I can only imagine what would happen if you turned it on during a tickle fight that escalated into a naked dance in a meadow.

Back to the show in Rochester… Upon seeing Pepi Ginsberg perform and tell stories and laugh and become flustered because she had too many things she wanted to tell the audience, I could tell she had a sincere talent that would hopefully translate and beam through on her recordings. Her smiling face and bouncy persona were perfectly ensnared by Dr. Dog's Scott McMicken at his studio in Philadelphia. Acting as producer, McMicken must have utilized a bit of recording equipment not unlike the ghost capturing device from Ghostbusters and placed it right below the microphone, then boosted the midrange.

After listening to the album, I feel like I'm buddies with Pepi and that maybe she will give a ring tonight… just to talk, or that maybe we will bump into each other at the corner coffee shop and have a chat about the good ol' days. Either way, it's pretty exciting to hear someone's personality put to tape.

Man Man Rabbit Habits

I found this review that I never posted but always meant to. sorry for the delay.



Man Man's Rabbit Habits:

I have the urge to encase myself in bubble wrap and leap from the top step of the 47th floor of this office building. While tumbling down I will press play on my discman and hope the ride doesn't skip the CD too much. The album playing will suitably be Man Man's new hatchling, Rabbit Habits. It will fit nicely. The thumping and bouncing and complex chaos will go nicely with a staircase plummet. I say this and realize it is tough to envision this statement to be complimentary, but try to envision a pain-free ride down a staircase- the disharmonious flight of arms and legs flung about in every direction as heads go over heels again and again for flight after flight. Add a bunch of crazy facial hair and a bloody butcher's apron to this image and you have this man man record.

The fact of the matter is, Man Man exist in a universe very few other bands venture towards. A place where filet mignon is served with baked beans and everyone drives purple cars with eight-ball shift knobs. It's a lovely place and I like to visit, but don't know if I could live there. The order and regularity that most of us live our lives with seems to be tied down and locked in the basement. It's entirely frightening and what makes Rabbit Habits such an amazing listen.

'pillers: Day 18

good news folks... One of the monarchs is on its way to the real world. The cocoon hatched yesterday and I searched around the house trying to find the butterfly. It was nowhere to be seen and this made me a little upset. I imagined it trapped behind the fridge or pawed to death by the cat and again started to think my whole plan to follow the metamorphosis of these little pillars was cruel and ugly. Then, while punching the clock, I received a phone call from my G. She said she had located the most amazingly friendly butterfly of all time. The butterfly inquired how to break through the screen, and we decided we should just open the window for it.

So we opened the window and off went the butterfly to drink the nectar of freedom.

'Pillars: Day 16

It has been a tumultuous course traveled with the caterpillars thus far, and today, for some, the journey has come to an end. Two cocoons hatched last night after about 2 weeks of metamorphosis. What should have been a glorious moment of rebirth, not unlike the rebirth of Brett Myers on the pennant-bound Phillies, ended up being a rather unsettling moment.

The two 'pillars that hatched, ended up being totally messed up. They looked like they just played chicken with Chuck Yeager. Their wings were all twisted and they stumbled about as they tried to find their footing in the terrarium. It was heartbreaking. I immediately grabbed a knife and cut the lid off the Ocean Spray jug. I scooped up the two monarchs with a spoon and placed them on a basil plant outside that I thought they might like. They were alive, twitching back and forth, but I did not see any way in which their wings would ever function. They must have crumpled like newspaper in the many falls within the bootleg housing I put them in. Between the kitten knocking them over and the winds from the storm on Saturday, those cocoons went for a trip.
Here's the thing though: there are still 3 unopened cocoons that I have to deal with now. I tried using scotch tape to tape them upside down on a straw, then wedge the straw, so they could dangle upside down, but they kept slipping from the tape and I was worried that too much slipping and falling would be more detrimental than if I just laid them on the ground in the open. One of them is stunning right now. It is translucent green and you can see the nearly mature butterfly wings through the cocoon.
I placed these 3 cocoons carefully in the base of a potted plant in our kitchen. I thought about just putting them outside, but I think I need to see if they make it, hatch in full strength, and flutter onto my nose as I am sleeping and plant their eggs in my nostrils, thus curing my hay fever.

A few hours have past now since I placed the two mutilated monarchs on the basil plant on our back porch. Surprisingly enough, one of them has disappeared. I gave a good long look for it's orange wings all around where I placed it, but it must have healed up and flown off or been eaten by a bat. Either way, this is good news.

'Pillers: Day 12

Well, not so much to update from the caterpillar estate set up in my windowsill. I think they have earned a formidable foe. Our kitten, Maebe, has pillaged their land as if it were a catnip farm and shown no remorse. The pillers all formed cocoons on Friday, except for a few that died, and I figured by now I would have some beautiful butterfly salad to serve at my dinner party. Instead, they are still cocooned and I don't know if they are ever coming out. The kitten has scared them into hiding. They are living the caterpillar version of the first part of What About Bob, and they need Richard Dreyfuss and his son to teach them the world is full of adventures, you just need to jump off the dock. The kitten won't eat you.

here's what the kitten will do though:

The kitten has knocked all but one of the cocoons from the top of the eclosure when she batted it off the window sill and the whole terarium took a toxic spill down to the ground. The 'pillers in their little puberty-pouches all sit on the bottom of the Ocean Spray bottle. This will add to their character according to this site (which further prooves that there is a website for just about everything). I don't think I can get in there and scotch tape them up, so like my grass, I'll let 'em lay and hope for the best.

I'll be posting again when the pillers hatch from their cocoons. I'll try to get some photos and post them up here.

dot com

Boom!

that's the sound made when the internet entered the homes of people around the world back in 1996. You may have heard it referred to as the dot-com-boom... but it sounds more like boom.

I have been hearing the boom a lot lately as we have been working on spintoband.com's Tuesday updates. It has me quite excited as the site looks, feels, and delivers like a big steel toed Paul Bunyan stomping through the Dakotas. It booms.

It's exciting to piece together this site for a lot of reasons. Primarily, we are attempting to create fun content explaining what the spinto band is about (for new fans) and what our new album is like (for old fans that know we are a goof troop). It has roots in marketing the band. All the content is updated in hopes that every week, people will be reminded that the spinto band exists and has a new album coming out soon.

Next Tuesday should be extra special. We are hoping to reincarnate the Roy Mask competition that was so successful a few years back. With all sorts of new ideas being tossed about, it will hopefully make a splash. I'm not sure if people are too attached to RSS feeds and auto-content that they may not even return to the site unless overheard in a chat room. we shall see.

I can't focus on this post right now, but really wanted to write on the excitement the new site is serving me for dinner. It's like a giant pile of mashed potatoes. Suppose the butter didn't melt eh?

cookie cutters and Koufax

The bean counters at BlogSpotINC. make a few recommendations to their blog-keepers every so often to keep things running according to plan in the blog-o-sphere. What a lot of readers don't realize is that the blog-o-sphere is very volatile and if there aren't a certain number of blog posts involving certain topics, the whole shebang could end up drifting into the ocean. If you touch upon all the majror topics, you get a gold star from the King and whomever gets the most gold stars gets to share a sandwich with Sandy Koufax at a web 2.0 conference in Vancouver at the end of the year. I've hit upon most of my goals for this quarter. I have plenty of music posts, I talked politics the other day, and I've had some self reflexive posts that I regret posting 24 seconds later. The one thing I need to win that sammy with Sandy is a post about kitchen tips. Well peep this little shot of egg frying for the future:
You may know that I have a crooked stove. Nothing you can fix with a matchbook under the leg either... any pot on our stove will collect oil on one side because it is on a friggin' slant. This makes cracking eggs into a pan a pain. If anyone else shares the troubles of a crooked cooker, I recommend getting a cookie cutter out next time you want to make a pretty looking fried egg. Just crack the egg into the cutter then wait a bit then eat it on some toast with a little s and p.