bottles and cans

A strange series of events gained momentum and struck me upside the head with the force of dozens of domino bricks this past week. I am not sure where to start, so I will flush it out in a nice rambling nonsense as the beauty of it is that there is no place for Order, there is no start or finish, and it continues to evolve as I write, post and reread these words.

A few months ago I conceived a podcast idea that matured into Human Trampolines. Well shux, I suppose I first thought of it about a year ago now, but it stewed about in my head and in email conversations before any true action ever took place. Like many ideas, I feared this one would never gain enough momentum to get lift. I suffer from laziness, procrastination, and a slew of other slothy sludgy smudges. They are shackles that when viewed with hindsight bring me a good deal of shame. However, this idea had wings. My glorious friends came forth with glorious stories of glorious songs and the podcast became something real. It existed on the internet and in people's ears and as people listened it may even cause them to react to any certain incident differently than if it had not lifted off and flown. While it is simply a minor 15 minute podcast with only 4 episodes to date, it was a grand accomplishment in my mind to have HT and it's website and the idea of people enjoying the episodes the same way I enjoy the podcasts that I enjoy.

Then the world turned a few times. The sun came up and went down... It happened quickly and while the enjoyment was still there, many other things came and went through my head that caused the enjoyment to be a little less noticeable. Faces and delicious meals and scores of sports games on the television all joined the HT enjoyment in my mind similarly to how the Whos joined hands in Whoville. More and more it built up and more and more the sun set.

Finally last week rolled around. Another beautiful moment took place. As the Social Network was being celebrated at the Golden Globes, I utilized Facebook to its most glorious potential: contacting friends you may not normally contact to try and get the word out. With little fear of my privacy, I asked friends if anyone would be interested to contribute to HT, then posted a link to the site. The next day I had an email in my inbox with an attachment.

Now this podcast was just a small tiny thing. About 50,000 of them (total guess) are posted to iTunes daily and about 6 billion people swim the Earth and about 3 trillion dollars are made up. Size is an important factor to be constantly thinking about. You can think you are big or you can think you are small, but really you are just you and everything is moving so fast, it is hard to judge and be certain. Seriously.

Ok- back to the email. It was from a young student at NYU who I had met in Los Angeles and is a big fan of the spinto band. There was an attachment alongside the email. He sent me a story (channeling his inner Woody Allen) for the podcast. Now, if you don't know about the podcast, read this quickly. I haven't posted his story online, but like most of the episodes, it is based around a song that affected him. That song is Oh Mandy by the spinto band.

Now I have heard many people sing many praises (and criticisms) to the spinto band in all shapes and sizes and that is not what is great about this.

This young man proved that everything in the universe has a place and is connected and moves in and out of form and lack of form constantly. Here we are, billions of us, sitting around, blogging, sleeping, making cocoa, and it will all eventually collide. I love it. It is why I like to read the credits in movies- I probably won't know any names, but I might and that gives me evidence that there is a connection flowing from all atoms to all atoms. Events all happen. Some have reasons and some don't, but we can't question that they will happen. What we have to do is make more events happen. We have to work hard at it. The most minor of things all take shape and connect and each is necessary to the next. It is best to not view events as chores, but rather as opportunities. We have a lot at play here and I'm not sure I explained it very well. Let me try a new paragraph:

A young boy fell in love with a song and then, years later, told the story about falling in love with the song on a podcast about songs you love created by a guy who is in the band of the song he fell in love with and was, quite honestly, growing tired of the song the boy fell in love with, but then the boy and his story inspired the guy to realize that songs and love and everything are not to grow tired of, they are all puzzle pieces or intertwined hands or (damn- I'm going to say it) grains of sand.

Get it? I honestly can't even grasp how blown away I am by it all. I'm not sure why... This blog post didn't even really get it across. Just trust me.

At the end of Kim Cooper's 33 1/3 book about Neutral Milk Hotel's In an Aeroplane Over the Sea there is a quote from band member Julian Koster:

I think what Elephant 6 meant for us is very simple: there's something pure and infinite in you, that wants to come out of you, and can come out of no other person on the planet. That's what you've got to share, and that's as real and important as the fact that you're alive. We were able, at a really young age, to somehow protect each other so we could feel that. The world at large, careerism, money, magazines, your parents, the people at the rock club in your town, other kids, nothing is going to give you that message, necessarily. In fact, most things are going to lead you away from it, sadly, because humanity is really confused at the moment. But you wouldn't exist if the universe didn't need you. And any time I encounter something beautiful that came out of a human somewhere, that's them, that's their own soul. That's just pure, whatever its physicality is, if the person can play piano, if they can't play piano, if they're tone deaf, whatever it is, if it's pure, it hits you like a sledgehammer. It fills up your own soul, it makes you want to cry. It makes you glad you're alive, it lets you come out of you, and that's what we need: we desperately need you.

______


I thought that was nice.

______

Collins also mentions that the 8 minute song Oh Comely was played once in the recording session of In The Aeroplane Over the Sea and only once. Jeff Magnum, with his guitar, sat down, started what was meant to be a warm up- where he would only play the first verse- but then carried on for all 8 minutes and 18 seconds while the rest of the band stood amazed in the next room... and then they kept the take, and threw some overdubs (horns, backing vocals, a bit of percussion) on it and that was that.

Listen to this sledgehammer:

setting goals

True Story:

I sat down today with a pen and paper and wrote down a little phrase that is supposed to help me win Life. I had scribed "Short Term Goals:" as my pen arose from the paper. Just at that very point a *twing* erupted from beneath my belly button. With hunger interrupting my list of goals I went to the pantry for a fresh jar of Dry Roasted Peanuts. If you like salt soaked snacks, you know what a dry roasted peanut is. It is what happens to the peanut man on the Planters container after he runs an ultra-marathon and is covered in peanut-man sweat, then roasted. These nuts are a favorite snack of mine.

As I stared at my pending list of goals and my freshly opened jar of dry roasted peanuts, a question arose regarding my existence. Could I consume an entire 16 ounce jar of dry roasted peanuts right at this very moment? Seems like a good goal, and since I only had about an hour, it would have to be short-term. I decided to write "eat entire jar of peanuts" on the list just for a laugh, then started eating the nuts by the handful.

It was a hot day, and I wanted to take this goal, like most life-goals, very seriously. I filled a large glass with tap water to make sure the salt would dilute and I wouldn't get too dehydrated or whatever. I also realized, quickly that this goal was attainable. A few handfuls in, and the nuts were already below the label. It had only been a couple of minutes, so I sipped some water and took a deep breath of summer air. Within that warm summer air was the smell of success. I could see why people write whole books about achieving your goals... It feels great, even if you haven't finished the task... achievement, it's like being repotted in a bigger pot because you have grown and your roots no longer fit in the small terra-cotta container, they need a bigger one to spread out and conquer.

At the 15 minute mark the jar of nuts was half gone. No problemo. I picked up my pen again to think of more goals I could crush, but before jotting anything down- the phone rang. It was a friend who had been without power calling me to tell me about how the power was back on. We chatted for a bit as I popped a couple nuts here and there. Upon completion of the call, I realized something- I had procrastinated!

My peanut goal had lost 15 minutes without really consuming much more than a dozen or so nuts. I thought about why I even wanted to do this and if it was worth it. Calories and salt intake are all issues people I know think a lot about. I was on the verge of consuming 3000 calories and somewhere around a billion milligrams of sodium. What sort of effect would that have on a 28 year old person? It was no big deal to NOT eat the nuts. Nobody saw me make the Short Term Goals List, and not a soul would know if I just crumpled it up and threw it in the bin, BUT, for some reason, I felt compelled to motor on. I did not want to look in the mirror and see a failure, and since there are a good 6 or 7 mirrors in my house, it would be unavoidable.

I sat back down and raced through the next quarter jar of nuts. I was well on my way when I felt as though the nuts were taking effect on my stomach. My body was thinking there was enough salt in my stomach, and wanted to let me know. It was an odd feeling of nausea mixed with failure. No no no! I thought. Continuing through the jar, I saw completion of my first goal take shape.

The jar was polished off in about 40 minutes. I didn't eat the salt at the bottom because I don't really consider that part of it- Part of putting one's mind to a goal and achieving it, which felt nice.

I lifted the pen and crossed "eat entire jar of peanuts" from the top of my goals list.

More Sports Posts

You know what? Considering how sports-addicted I am, I really haven't incorporated the love to the blog. Today, though, I had a thought that may need a bit of flushing out here.

Why are sports set up to have everyone but ONE team be considered a failure. There is the WORLD CHAMPION and then there are the losers. Such has been swirling in my head since the Philadelphia Flyers, led by Chrissy Pronger, fell a few shifts short of the Chicago Blackhawks in the quest for Lord Stanley's Cup.

The Blackhawks were a young, fast odds on favorite at the start of the playoffs to hoist the cup, while the Flyers barely squeeked in on the last day as a lowly-seeded underdog. Sure enough, Chicago outlasted the fly-guys and were crowned victorious, but not before the fly-guys sent all us fans on a 3 week ride as exciting as you can ask for from a sports team. They overcame and overcame at a clip only seen in Rambo movies and Martin Luther King documentaries. They deserve something more than being "runner up".

Professional sports is nothing more than a business. A 60 year old hippy told me that just last night. We all know it, quit denying it... The payday is the most important thing. SO- what sense does it make that only 1 team can be the winner. Since the green-backs are the ultimate goal and winning brings in the green-backs, shouldn't we try to get more winners. I think the Flyers championed something... Maybe they deserve a bit more than Eastern Conf. Champions hats. They shouldn't have to go home to their lonely wives with anything less than the ferocious appetite of a champion. They earned it.

Sports though- it's a shit show. Rings and crowns and sneakers that sell for too much. All the hilarious absurdities of it all and all I can think of is how great the Flyers performed. I never expected it. I listened to a few men on the tele-box who seem to sound like they know what they are talking about discount the Flyers every night for 3 weeks, and all the Flyers did was show those greasy fake-tanned suit wearing blabbergasts that they could play hockey and could probably out skate any Yamaguchi in a Mickey Mouse helmet if it came down to that. Tension and pressure are part of ice hockey, but they are also parts of mystery novels. The Flyers became Sherlock Holmes like it was nobody's business.

So- when routing for your team. Whatever team it may be; the Blue Rocks, The Orange-bomber, the Bearenstein Bears, Snoop Dogg's little league team, the crazy South-African dancing soccer team- remember victory is one thing, but there is more to sport than just ending up the champion. There is the roller coaster, there is the camaraderie, there is the edge of the sofa sensation, and there is the fact that eventually... maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday- everyone will make the statement, "it kind of weirds me out to think I'm X years older than all these dudes."


oop- PS edit... I wanted to mention that I also lost two bets and won 2 bets during the playoffs, all of which I think are worth noting.

Bet 1: 2 Boston v. 7 Flyers round 2 of the Eastern Conf. Playoffs. I bet a friend here when the Flyers were already losing game 1. I had been trying to get a hold of this friend to place a bet, but neither of us are that great at answering our phones. Finally- the night after game 1 I get a phone call from my friend. Earlier, we had sort of agreed to bet, but the stakes were set at the loser having to drink any pint of booze the winner presents him with. Since the Flyers were already in the hole, he gave me odds... He would take a swig out of the pint he bought me... which would have probably been jagermeister. (Note- this bet was washed clean after a double or nothing was placed and the Phillies refused to score runs on the Red Sox the following weekend).

Bet 2: the Penguins v. Flyers bet: wait a sec- these teams didn't meet up in the playoffs!? Well, they almost did, but the Penguins were one pedicure short and couldn't get past the canadians in the second round. The last few years I had lost cases of beer (that ended up being less than cases of beer) in a Flyers v Penguins bet with a Pittsburghian pal. This year, he figured Montreal could beat the Flyers, so I wrangled a (as of yet to be drank) case of beer from the Flyers shellacking of the Habs.

Bet 3: I bet a friend who grew up in this area, then moved to Chicago that the Flyers would beat chi-town. Stakes- loser buys the winner dinner. Sure enough, after many a text message- I think I am buying a steak covered deep dish pizza next time I am in Chicago. I should mention that this person suddenly became a blackhawks fan after growing up in Flyer country.

Bet 4: this bet was made with another Chicago transfer. The stakes are the most interesting part. The loser of the bet (me) will have to buy a drink of the winner's choice and present it to a bar patron, also of the winner's choice. So apparently next time I have a drink in Chicago I am going to have to buy a sea breeze for whatever man has the most tattooes at the bar. Does that make sense? ah geez... screw it.

The new birds in town

Can you see the beast in the distance of my car mirror in this photo:
It's a peacock. I saw it strolling down the road the other day and I realized it was going to be a kooky day. Unfortunately, by the time I reached for my camera to take this picture, the bird was so far away, it was almost as if I had only dreeeaaaammmed it.

Anyway, from there, I received a phone call from a friend. She was looking for someone to head up to Lancaster with her to stock up on some chickens for her coop. I am fascinated by both chickens and Amish dudes. "I am in."

"Turn left once the power lines end." Was the only direction we had, but we found the farm alright. Again, I missed the photograph where the farmers were tossing the chickens in the car with wings flapping and feathers flying, but in this photo you can see that it was Wear Something Blue Day to support blue bears.



For my help in the chicken pickup, I was awarded two chickens to call my own. This was great news, because Badger was upset when he heard that our chicks wouldn't be laying eggs until the fall. We let one chicken ride shotgun home.

When Badger got word that new friends arrived, he made himself at home.


The new chickens tower over the chicks. I don't know if I like it. I saw one throwing its weight around, blocking off the feeder from the little chicks. I think once they all live together for a while, the bigguns will be friendly to the liluns.

renovate

Just changed around the look here at the web journal. The old title has bugged me since day one. I can never think of good titles, and the idea of a dog eating corn was just too much. I love dogs and I love eating corn, so perhaps putting the two together made sense at one time, but dogs don't eat corn.

I had been hoodwinked. Somewhere along the line I thought to write a blog, you need to have some kind of clever title that doesn't really make sense. One of the fun things about this blogger site is that you can hit a link that takes you to random blogs... well, most of them have random titles.

Not here anymore though.

A funny story about this site you are visiting right now. It was started in attempt to get PR people to send me free music. In exchange for a blog post, I would reach out to press folk and see if they would send me music I wanted to hear. Brilliant idea! But as the blog blobbed into its current shape, I have learned that writing about music is more for pompous dickhead know-it-alls. I have a very hard time judging someone's art, and could only write about music I liked. Although I did piss on the Kooks a few years ago, I think music should be celebrated 100 times and critiqued zero times. Let Mel Kiper Jr. do all the critiquing in the world on college football prospects. Run the well dry Mel, run it dry.

So here we stand. A simple little blog written in a simple little home, that has an important purpose as it allows me to every now and again reflect back upon old posts and say, "wow- on August 20, 2008- I must have been feeling like a dick."

Chick update

So the chickens are survivors. We sighed a breath of relief this morning as all the cluckers still had their heads. There are a few bets going around the farm as to what date the first chicken will get killed. Chicks just gotta say, "That's pretty fucked up."

So, with all these thoughts of predators and losing bets swirling in my head, I drank a bunch of cold ones last night while watching the Flyers game and every time I had to whizz, I moseyed out to the coop and pissed a nice little PBR smelling perimeter to help a little. Badger pitched in a few times. At slumber-hour, Badger stayed up at my feet looking out our bedroom window at the coop. I don't think he slept at all. At around 1am or so, he woke me up barking up a storm. "Oh geez, here we go," I thought. I looked out the window and could see a little light coming from the coop. While half asleep, I imagined the whole back wall had fallen out. I cursed and ran out in the yard in my bare feet and boxers through the urine swamp, only to realize the light I was seeing was the window of the coop and a little crack on one of the door hinges.


I had forgotten that feeling of bursting awake and jumping out of bed into action. It was awesome. By the time I realized the chickens were safe, standing half naked in my yard, my heart was racing. I took a deep breath of fresh air and something came over me. I lifted my head, staring up at the stars. The moon was shining and a slight breeze tickled my chest hair. Badger and I stood there, planted like two sentinels. With our heads lifted toward the final frontier, we both let out a primal scream. Howling at the moon I became one with Badger and the chickens and the great mother.

I no longer fear the predators. Weasels and foxes know. Snakes and rats know. Bearded dragons know, and now I know. We are all little chickens waiting to get eaten. Standing under our heat lamps and pooping in our food. Waiting for our big boy feathers to replace our little baby feathers and then laying eggs to be scooped up and served with Canadian bacon and English muffins:

one world.

Out of the laundry Room into the Fire

So it's a big day over here at blog HQ. The chicken coop has passed the home inspection and we are dumping our 2 week old chicks into it. We aren't exactly sure how old they are, but we bought them when they were bite sized and that was 2 weeks ago.

Since I have gained a good bit of knowledge from other bloggers writing about their backyard chickens, I thought I would take a moment to write about my coop building and chicken raising experience thus far.

We went with seven, which has proven to be difficult. I always count them to make sure they are all there and regularly only count six. I have a short panic until I spot the seventh, usually huddled up in a corner or blending in underneath one of the others. They all fit much nicer in the coop we have been working on for them then they do in a metal tub atop our laundry machine.



Perhaps my favorite part of our chicken experience thus far is watching Badger, the puppalupagus, obsess over the birds. They are his new best friends. He watches them endlessly fascinated at their every move. He will lick them and nudge them with his nose, but he has never hurt them. Below are a few shots of Badger over the last couple weeks:

saying hello in the living room

saying hello in the laundry room (their usual home)

and guarding the chicks in their little temporary pen.

Badger and I helped the chicks move into their new home today. I've read a good bit about chickens over the last couple weeks and the one consistent fact is that they regularly get eaten by any of the following predators; raccoons, foxes, opossums, owls, rats, weasels, pterodactyls, and snakes. It is a tough life. With this in mind, we tried to build a safe home for the chicks, but at the same time realize at least half (if we are lucky) of these little buggers will probably end up being the punchline in a Roald Dahl story. That is what makes the move a scary one.


As you can see above, the structure is nearly finished. We just need to stake up some chicken wire in the run area, and bury the extension chord (for the heat lamp). Badger is standing in front of the door. Once the pen is wired, you will be able to open up the small door, to allow the chickens to come and go, or the two large doors to clean the coop and collect eggs. We built the coop off the ground to protect from predators and allow more space, underneath the coop, for the chickens to muck about in the pen. The whole structure is 10 feet long, 4 feet high (at the corners) and 4 feet wide. The coop itself is 3 feet by 4 feet.

Here are the front doors. We salvaged the awesome wood from the barn on the farm when a good bit of it collapsed under the snowmageddon. The hinges were donated from a friend and are one of my favorite parts.

This little door will be open during the day with a ramp down to the ground so the chickens can come and go as they please.

Then when it is time to clean out the coop or collect eggs we can open up the whole wall. The chord in the back is for a heat lamp and the hanging feeders (one for food and one for water) may end up underneath the coop once the chickens grow a bit more. Behind Badger's head is a nesting area with 2 boxes and a little roof. We haven't installed the roosting pole, but we did add the little roof deck above the nesting boxes for some more chill space for the chicks.

You can see the nesting area a bit better here. There are two wooden slats that slide in so you can either have one big nesting area or two smaller ones, whichever the chickens prefer.

The chickens immediately seemed to enjoy looking out the window which is good. I am a bit worried that this window will be the weak link when predators come looming, but I think it is totally sealed.


Here are a few more photos I took today of the chicks moving in:

I believe this is an amber link. We have at least 2 of them, and maybe 4 of them.
Maebe came to say hi, but I think she would eat them, so I drop kicked her.

I'm not sure what kind of chicken this is, but she is much smaller than the others.

I think the one in the back there is a Rhode Island Red, but I can't be sure of that either. She is also pretty small.

shake it
Wish us luck.

What Jeni said

I think there is a fine line between "criticism" and "judgment". To me, a critical person has room to alter their perception. A judgment has weight and permanence.

I don't get many comments here on the blog, so I wanted to thank Jeni for chiming in with the above statement regarding my "critique" of Alice in Wonderland. She makes a great point and I feel a bit better about it all.

I think what Jeni meant to say though is that judgment day is coming- a day when critical minds and judgemental minds will all be stepped on by terminator feet. Giant waves of napalm will be viewed at and no one will take the time to update their blog about how the napalm should have been hotter or the wave taller or the ashy skeletons more ashy. We will all just run for our lives and hope our loved ones don't become terminated too tortuously.

Critics are cartoons, judges are jokesters and we are all just people pointing in different directions. There is no reason for me to write this. It will only be scanned for vitals by the mother-terminator and then used against the human resistance. It is obvious to me. On a day like today, the sun was shining, the blossoms were falling and not once did I breath in and say, "man, this air smelt so much better in 1997." This is because I can't time travel! I am not from the future and can't go to the past. I will not crouch naked and awaken atop a crater in a seedy part of 1997 telling myself how awesome the air smells. If I could, I would make a bet on the Phillies to win it all in 2008.

I just looked it up. Judgement Day isn't until July 11th 2029. The Phillies could win another one by then. I will have just celebrated a 48th birthday and would not have judged anything in a good 20 years. I will be telling my niece about how happy I am she became a Phillies fan despite growing up in Boston and maybe we should travel to the moon when the Phillies play the Moon Men in an upcoming Orbit-League exhibition. She will probably tell me that she prefers a good pitching matchup and dislikes all the 4,000 foot home runs that are hit in low gravity. On this day air will smell of injected fragrances that remind us all of ex-girlfriends and people will constantly be cringing. The wave of napalm won't be so bad after that.

Luckily for them, the Phillies will be on the moon on judgement day hitting homeruns and the napalm will only look like a fireworks show from their vantage.

What Sam Drinks

So one of my favorite things is finding out about the blogs friends may keep. Something new to read from someone I know or love is like getting a fortune with my cookie.

I've long admired the words of my friend Sam, and now everyone else can as well.

Check out his new web journal, This Is What I Drink.

Sam has made me a fan of beverages just by listening to the way he talks about them.

"What I drink. It's not something I thought very much about until a few years ago, but it really does mean a lot to my life. Food obsession is something that's easier to accept. We have 24 hour networks dedicated to the preparation/eating/ceremony of food. But beverage obsession, not so much, as it always seems to play the sidekick. I understand why. It's a quick sip in between chews, laughs, memories and not the main course, and despite loving a well cooked meal, I'd argue the drink is just as important."

Sam- this reminds me, we need to get that home brew recipe cooking.

Alice left me feeling unpure

So what do I know about films? I can't critique them. They all have their target audiences and I usually write criticisms then delete them, then write about how I can't write them.

All I know is that one of these two things has changed:

-Tim Burton's genius
-me

20 years ago, Edward Scissorhands came out. I was a child. Nowadays I just scoff at shitty dialogue, wish movies weren't so predictable, and complain about how fake stuff looks. What happened?

I can enjoy everything. I don't need to judge it all. A lot of people worked hard on that movie and created a work of art. Who cares if it ends with a battle scene and silly dance and then a really bad song. Wonderland is a real place. I love it. I will think of 20 impossible things before breakfast.

I'm stumped

Just had a bit of a realization that I am going to try to work out via this blog post while Saints/Cowboys pregame is on mute.

I recently invested in a terabyte hard drive for my laptop. I had a friend show me a similar drive that contained 600 gigs of mp3s that I had to have. Everything I ever wanted was there and available for the taking. The external hard drive cost me $110 after shipping and handling. After copying the drive and figuring a subpar way of hooking my laptop to my stereo, I have been enjoying the likes of Al Green, Os Mutantes, and lots of Django thanks to copying a music mecca made into mp3.

Just now, while listening to my new top play (Vince Guaraldi's Christmas album) I had a moment of realization. I bumped into this article on the Wired blog and realized I just made a poor decision. While the hard drive is filled with great Beatles rarities and Zappa interviews, as far as the music goes, I could have subscribed to one of these music networks and gotten a far greater amount of tuneage for a much better price.

I had always swiftly scooted these subscription services aside. The idea of paying a monthly rate for such a service seemed silly. I could buy the albums I wanted to hear and stream samples of other songs on blogs. Then, when I invested an amount of money that could have garnered me a year of Rhapsody or Napster usage, I realized that music ownership is on the way out.

I'ma just riffin here, but riff with me.

By buying a harddrive with maybe 30 gigs of music I really want and 400 gigs of music I will listen to once and delete, I'm not sure I really gained as much as I once thought. Plus, I am essentially breaking laws of copyright in the process. As a musician, I don't really get upset about illegal downloading as it is a waste of energy, but I still make jokes and occasionally utilize the phenomenon as a persuasive pity point. As a broke person with a love for music, I find myself downloading albums I want to hear all the time. This thievery is a weight I would like to take off my second hand smoke filled chest.

SO- a great way to have done this could have been to sign up for Rhapsody or Napster or anyone of the other applications out there that help support the industry that has supported me for the last few years. Instead, I invested that money on a digital brick that holds all the same information and will undoubtedly break before the next real wet season.

still just riffin here:

I think my problem is that I wanted to OWN all these songs, but I'm not sure why. I essentially paid the money I could have invested in a music service (and to a lesser extent; music culture) to some silicon valley hard drive manufacturer so that I could own a bunch of music. And that is the problem... yup, in the last two sentences I think I realized that my mistake is that I didn't go with music socialism. Perhaps some sort of hard wiring in my yankee brain caused me to denounce the idea of just sharing songs online. I demand ownership of these songs, even if I have to steal to do it! It's so messed up in my brain, that I think when I read over this blog post it wont make any sense.

I'm going to think about this a bit more and report back.

Early conclusions love the idea of one giant music network that everyone shares and logs into, but it seems anti-American at the same time, which I also love. Man- I'm really quite shocked at this revelation... probably guaraldi/rum-induced.

Jackhammer: a Phil Davis joint

So, I'm just making sure that this video is everywhere I can get it to as it just makes me so happy. Phil is a great friend. He plugged away at this for months while much more pressing affairs like buying a new house and starting a new job/professorship were looming. Make sure to check out some of his other work at phildavis.net .

Love 2: Bear-Salmon Kaleidoscopic Music

An Air album is something else. No matter what album or what situation- the listener will undoubtedly be chilled out. If you just got told by your slick-haired boss to cancel your barbecue plans because he wants you to do some work he hasn’t finished over the weekend or if you were just cut off by a driver talking on their cell phone after waiting in line at a post office for thirty minutes because someone needed to complain about stamp prices or if your health insurance just denied your claim to pay for the ankle you sprained while stepping over the line at the bowling lane, thus losing the championship by 3 pins then you should probably pick up the whole Air catalog. No matter the album or the situation, you will end up lying in some grass looking up at clouds and thinking they all look like teddy bears or large breasts.

Love 2, their latest album, is no different. While writing these words, I’ve already dozed off twice and dreamed of parachuting into piles of rice pudding. I was listening to the album on my way home from the rodeo the other night and I sat, with my foot on the brake, through 3 green lights until I realized my turn signal wasn’t part of the song. The two Frenchmen have been doing this to me for eleven years now.

I’ve never been able to listen to trance music, but nonetheless, I like to be entranced. So when a pop band can figure out a way to divert the repetitive and robotic nature of the genre, I will dance from the knees down while seated. I will enjoy endlessly this music I call, for lack of inventiveness, trance-pop -or for over-inventiveness, cherry-flavored hypno-gravy. Love 2 is like a kaleidoscope, but instead of looking at little pieces of colored cellophane when you peer through the little hole you are looking at lots of bears standing atop waterfalls catching salmon in their mouths as they leap out of the rushing water. Air is bear-salmon kaleidoscopic music.

I just drank a fourth serving of coffee and I feel like I need more. I went to bed at 9:30 last night despite Monday Night Football excitingly being on mute while I ate spicy thai food. I started taking bubble baths instead of showers in the morning. I’m thinking about seeing a Sandra Bullock movie. My mile split-times on jogs are around 47 minutes. I keep being tranquilized and the only real reason I can think of is that I keep listening to Love 2. It’s great. I would recommend this album to everyone I know, but productivity would drop world wide and next thing you know, the government would be issuing some sort of trance-pop bailout and Americans would be blaming the French for something else. “Your music is so dang chilled out! How can we be expected to sell stuff with this cherry-flavored hypno-gravy clogging our blood vessels!?” It might even escalate into war, except everyone would be so relaxed from listening to Air that they would just lay down in some grass and look up at the clouds.

I may be exaggerating the effect of the album a little bit. I may even be lying. However, that’s what makes music such a blissful bubble-bath inducing beauty. People use words to describe it, when really they should be using dance moves- and everyone speaks their own language when they speak in dance-move. I personally described Love 2 with a wavy, tight-lipped head nod move while my friend described it with a one-shouldered shrug-like move and my crazy neighbor used a fingers-are-snakes, full-bodied, closed-eyed falling off a cliff move. We were all saying the same thing, but didn’t really know what each other was saying.

Check out this video to Sing Sang Sung:

WATCH:: Air - "Sing Sang Sung" - Watch more Videos at Vodpod.

Songs for Sticky Heads

We played a few shows with a fine Asheville band known as Floating Action. Ever since listening to them groove their way towards tomorrow I have had this song stuck in my dome piece:

MonsaaaaaaaaantoooooooooOOOOOooooo

45 minutes ago we returned from Food Inc.

I realized the desire to eat a hamburger is a mistake. Someone in a company planted that desire inside my head with a machine that was originally modeled to fill Twinkies and, in the future, will build T-1000s.

I realized that my dreams are going to be more frightening tonight than when I watched Alien at age 10 or when I was visited by a man with a cane and a top hat.

I realized that, according to Michael Pollan, my whole lifestyle is funding the dark side and it tears me up inside like a Tyson chicken breast.

However, perhaps the most shocking thing I saw on screen was this monstrous company stalking soybean farmers called Monsanto. Little is known of the mysterious company, but it is all around us. It owns us... it is us!

Monsanto has the craziest wikipedia history, so crazy, I wouldn't be surprised if it was made up by a crazy vegan computer-science student.

I'll offer a quick Monsanto recap:

founded in St. Louis in 1901 dabbling in artificial sweeteners, caffeine and something called vanillan.
The company starts making all kinds of crazy shit: in the 40s was plastics then came herbicides including DDT and Agent Orange. Monsanto became a top 10 chemical company all the while making things such as NutraSweet and food flavoring. Then, in the 80s, Monsanto goes from being a huge chemical company to a huge bio-tech company when it realizes it can patent a soybean seed that is immune to Round Up (a Monsanto product). Monsanto then sells these beans to farmers and disallows them to reseed the beans they buy and sues farmers for patent infringement.

That is the main story Food Inc. runs with. The film shows a few farmers being bankrupt by the shrewd Monsanto, while others (forced to mask their identities) are blacklisted from purchasing any Monsanto products.

The company seemed so villainous I thought maybe the films tactics were over-dramatizing the situation. Then I read a bit more of the wikipedia... Perhaps the most baffling fact is one more frightening than getting caught in a mutant spiderweb. Monsanto owns the patent for a product called The Terminator Seed. It is a seed that, when planted, the plant will produce sterile seeds, so the farmer is forced to re-buy seeds the following year. The main fear is that these sterile genes will spread to wild plants through pollination terminating all plantlife.

If storytelling has taught me anything, these guys are bad, and will eventually destroy us all when they discover a way to patent air molecules and sue marathon runners for using more of their product than they paid for. Then, once there are no more marathon runners to sue, they'll sue airplane companies for abusing their product, then bakers because they own the bread if it is baked using Monsanto patented air molecules. Then, when they stop supplying air, and people can only live in renegade underwater bubble cities supplied by soot spurring volcanic faults on the ocean floor, and everyone is constantly covered in volcanic ash and chronically coughing from the stubborn volcano air, a grandfather will tell his granddaughter about lost days of sunshine and free fresh air and soybeans that you could pick and plant without a lawyer handing you a paper and taking away your farm... But his granddaughter will be asleep dreaming of being allowed to marry a dolphin and raise a dolphin family.

A new Dawn

So here I am sitting on the sofa getting ready to head to bed when one of those internet flash floods occurs where you find one thing, then that leads to another thing in which you dive into a few new sites and a neat photograph or song ends up sending you on another tangent and then you realize that you want to share these findings with someone, but no one is around, so all that is left is for you to add your own link to the lengthy chain by posting your own page about what has kept you from reading the book you are trying to finish, in anticipation of someone else digging a different hole to stumble upon such things. We are all weaving a web, and I would like to share a few cool covers done well:









Who is this Dawn Landes and how has she suddenly taken over my evening?

Help

http://www.parkthevan.com/help/

After reading this, I thought I should pass it along. The folks at Park The Van are truly great friends and some of the most wonderful music fans I've been able to meet. Its frustrating to imagine a world where these folks aren't putting out albums with a feverish passion hitherto unknown to me and my dancing shoes.

They are offering a sweet Summer Sampler for download on the site to wet your whistle. You will undoubtedly barbecue to it.
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We’re in this for the long haul. It’s times like these where we take stock in what we’re proud of and of why we do this. We’ve had some incredible new records come out in 2009 already, and some more incredible ones set to come still. The times we’ve had here in New Orleans to see our bands play live and stop through town have been some of our best events to date. Not to mention all of the reports from festivals to dive bars all over the country, the current generation of Park The Van artists out there are making incredible records and playing all over the country like crazy. We can’t begin to explain how lucky we are to be surrounded by the artists and fans we've met since we started putting the orange cone up.

Unfortunately though, we’re living in the same economy as everyone else. And it’s really really hard to sell the amount of stuff it takes to keep our business up and running the way we need to in order to keep putting out records and keep supporting our bands. So, we’re looking for your help to pay our bills through some really rough patches right now. We’re not begging for donations here. We hope that you see that we’re offering some great value to you in exchange for some of your hard earned dough to get us through the roughness. We’re assembling super limited edition handmade items, packages to help you dig deep into discovering all sorts of PTV classics, and prices that we hope you see as generous and ultimately worth it.

It’s tough to put ourselves out there like this and ask for your “help” in running our business. We know that everyone has their own sets of problems, and we get that. But the feedback we get from you is that you love what we’re doing here, and that people can see the vision we share for creating label that is based on support and family and more importantly these wonderful artists the important records that make us feel alive. So, here we are and we’re asking for your help. It never gets old getting to work for your favorite bands and artists. Sometimes you just have to try new things.

Thanks for anything you can do to give us a hand here, and hopefully you like the stuff we’re offering! If you feel like it, please help spread the word. This won’t work if we don’t have a hand from you in letting people know that this is available. And, there’s always the idea of doing this as a gift too! Please let us know if your order is a gift for someone!

Thanks for supporting this thing.

Chris, Zach, Kevin, Matt, Corey, Jeff & the entire PTV team.

HOAGIEFEST 2009

http://www.hoagiefest.com/music.php?user=theswims&music_id=54


This is a link to a song about hoagies.... Wawa hoagies.

It is also a competition that I would love to have my dear friends the Swims champion. Then they can throw a party catered by wawa hoagies and we can all dance with the wawa mascot and eat shortis for a year.

It makes sense, because the Hoagiefest artwork is pretty much from the brain of Brian Langan.


get out the vote!

Envelopes

At a good friend's recommendation, I purchased a book by Harriet Russel online the other day. It was shipped and turned out to be the Baltimore County Public Library's copy of Envelopes. While, someday, I may return the book- for now I am going to enjoy Russel's challenges served up to the British Royal Mail.


The envelopes featured in the book challenge the postal service to complete a maze, solve a crossword puzzle or decode a pictogram in order to decipher the destination. It is great. I'm starting to wonder if when a man told me he once mailed a slice of pizza to a friend in California, he was telling the truth. Postmen love these sorts of things. This summer, I am going to keep my eyes open and try and find a few things to mail afar. See some of my favorite envelopes below: