Clever Name Here

Oh look a blog

2010-09-08T23:40:00.000-04:00

No, really, I remembered I had one of these! I even have something semi-on topic to post (although I'm sitting here listening to Alive 2007 by Daft Punk which is an album that has some rather strong associations for me, so I am reserving the right to delve into introspection).

Anyway, in music related news:

I have been on a huge The Killers kick lately. I know I've mentioned in the past how much I hate that I like them. Nevertheless, Day and Age has made it's way on to my car cd (which is a huge deal for me, because I spend a ton of time in the car for work, so I do a lot of my less critical listening there).
I bought tickets to Moogfest 2010 and am eagerly antcipating it. It's a really fantastic lineup of electronic and electronic related artists. Super looking forward to seeing Girl Talk again, the set he did at Bonnaroo '09 was one of the two highligts of the festival for me (the other one being NIN's final North American show). Also Pretty Lights = win.
I've been checking out artists on the Moogfest lineup whom I'm less than familer with, for two reasons. Firstly, I am always up for broadening my musical horizons. Secondlly, I hate it when I have a chance to see a group live and pass it up because I don't know I like them. This happened to me with both MGMT and Phoenix at Bonnaroo '09, and is even more likely to happen at an electronic festival.
I really need to do another album review. I actually have a couple that I have been thinking about for *ages* and just haven't gotten around to writing. Part of the reason why I update so erratically is because I don't have a lot of readers...but I won't get readers if I don't have something interesting to say.

Anyway, aside from The Killers, lets talk about what I've been listening to lately!
From the Moogfest lineup, I've discovered Cee Lo Green. Totally not typical music for me, but I am really liking what I have heard so far:
Cee Lo Green - Fuck You - Cannot stop listening to this song (and also watching the extremely entertaining video). Not quite how to describe the sound - the best I can come up with is modern soul meets hip-hop with a pretty solid dose of electronica and backup vocals thrown in. Just check out the video. You'll know in the first minute if it does anything for you (and if it does, I promise you won't even notice when the first minute has gone by).
Cee Lo Green - Fuck You (Paul Epworth mix) - Another good song with a great video. This one is definitely more soul and less hip hop, again with a healthy dose of electronica. I do have a little bit of a harder time with this one as I am not sure if I would have liked the song as much if it didn't have an absolutely fantastic video (I adore music videos, so it's a real treat when one is as well done as this). With that said, I still have no qualms about recommending it. Check it out, and see if you can guess the part in the video where I cursed out loud at one of the protagonists.

Some more typical stuff for me:
YukSek - Extraball - Great synthrock with a healthy dose of rap vocals (thanks to an appearance by Amanda Blank). I don't know much about these guys - the Extraball video was actually recommended to me on YouTube, and I clicked on it on a whim and was completely entranced. I haven't had a chance to listen to much more of their stuff in detail, but I have liked what I have heard.

Phoenix - 1901- I'm pretty sure I'm the last person on the planet to figure out that, hey, Phoenix is pretty good. I actually caught part of their set at Bonnaroo '09 but at the time I was focused on drinking as much Magic Hat as I could to try to get fucked up before Crystal Castles and Girl Talk started. In retrospect, a poor decision, but what are you going to do. Anyway, Phoenix is a solid synthrock group, and 1901 is the highlight of it's album, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. This one has also earned a place on my current car CD. Side note: Wikipedia classifies these guys as "alternative". What the hell? I could probably write an entire post about how overused and abused the alt-rock label is, but I can tell you right now, when I think alt-rock, Phoenix is not what I come up with. Perhaps I am not familiar enough with the rest of their stuff (beyond Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix), but I just don't see how you could apply that label to them.

Death Cab for Cutie - Cath... - Ok, confession time. I am not a big fan of pure "indie" (which, incidentally, is a term nearly as abused as alternative). I can stomach Death Cab and I like maybe one Modest Mouse song, but beyond that I get bored at best. I actually tried to seed a Pandora station using the two Death Cab songs that I really really do like, and at the end of maybe four or five hours of listening, I had thumbs-downed practically every other song and hadn't thumbs-up'ed anything.
Anyway, Cath... is one song that I really do like a lot, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it's entertaining and well-done musically. Secondly, it's a pretty easy song to relate to - while I'm not about to run out and get myself into a meaningless marriage, it certainly does speak to me about falling into the trap of doing meaningless things just because you feel trapped by circumstance. I feel like I'm possibly not explaining myself as well as I could here but hopefully I'm at least making some sense.

Death Cab for Cuite - Your New Twin Sized Bed - Again, a case of "wow, I totally relate this this". Confession again - I do in fact have a full size bed, and while it's at least partially because I like the space (and because I've always had one), there is certainly the thought of "well if I meet somebody it might come in handy". So far, that has not happened. There's sort of a theme of resignation and longing here that I am right with.

Death Cab For Cutie - A Movie Script Ending - Ok, confession the third - I only kind of like the song here. But I love love love the video. I had actually forgotten how much I liked it until I ran across it in my YouTube favorites while I was writing this post. Again, a case of themes I can relate to, albeit in a more removed way this time (rather than missing a person, I miss having a person to miss (and here I go again into complaining about being single, which is something I generally try to avoid)). Anyway, main bullet point here - solid indie rock, great video. Check it out.

Going to close out this post with a couple of more bullet points:

I am a big fan and user of last.fm, which I have actually been using since it was still called Audioscrobbler. If you don't know of it, the key feature for me is Last.fm scrobbler, a piece of software that sits on my computer, tracks the music I listen to (via Winamp - I think it also supports Windows Media Player, iTunes and foobar 2000 as well as possibly some other players) and gives me access to that data as some nice charts, as well as making recommendations as to new stuff I might like. My page is here if you are ever curious as to what I'm listening to. The "all time" charts don't quite reflect what I am listening to these days, but that's what happens with over 7 years of data to play with. Sometimes I will go a little bit without using it, as I do quite a bit of listening via Pandora at work, in the car or via my MP3 player at the gym but generally I'll catch up and hit some stuff through Winamp at least a few times a week.
If you haven't seen Scott Pilgrim vs The World, you need to. End of story. Great movie, which got me into the rest of the franchise, which is great. The novels (at least the two I have read) are muchly enjoyable, and the art makes me happy. I've also been playing the video game a ton with my roomates, and while it's a bit unpolished (things that hardlock my XBox are lame), it's a *ton* of fun.
On a similar token, I recently discovered the webcomic Alone in a Crowd. The writing is great and the art makes me smile muchly. At some point I might need to do a post on webcomics (I had actually thought of doing that here, but I don't really want to do a giant "super-post".

I think that covers it for now (I wrote a lot more than I thought I was going to!). See you next time!

LOL WHOOPS

2010-08-04T12:43:00.000-04:00

THERE'S A BLOG HERE!

Yeah, obviously I am quite a bit behind on actually doing the 30 day challenge (I swear I had good intentions guys, really!). I will probably try to get caught up on that soon, and I also plan to do a trip report from Defcon (which I actually started writing already, so I really have no excuse not to post at least part of it).

(OT) 30 day challenge - Day One - Guility Pleasure

2010-07-05T20:33:00.000-04:00

This begs an interesting question for me, actually. Where do I draw the line between "guilty pleasure" and just a regular "thing I like"? I'm a whore for a lot of things that aren't necesscarily typical interests for a 22 year old straight male - bad 90s pop music, John Hughes movies (I have seen Sixteen Candles more times that I would care to admit), PBS kids shows, The Killers, and probably a whole bunch of stuff that would make for a much better list that isn't coming to mind offhand. For that matter, there are a lot of other things that I like to do that could be considered a guily pleasure - buying breakfast on my way to work, indulging my insatiable gadgetlust, etc.

Actually, now that I'm forcing myself to think about it, I suppose my real guilty pleasure is pop culture. Like a lot of geeks, I have a penchant for references. My roommates and another good friend recently put an ad on Craigslist to try to recruit some additional people for their pen and paper roleplaying group. When a couple of respondents to the ad came by our apartment to hang out and get to know everyone better, one of them commented on how it was like my friends and I were speaking a different language, because we communicated so much in references. Which is completely true. We have all known each other since midway through high school and have been hanging out on a regular basis for much of that time. Anyway, a lot of those references are not just to things that happens to us as a group, but things that we have seen or watched together. Rarely does a day go by when somebody doesn't reference Futurama or Avatar: The Last Airbender or some other such thing.

Anyway, I have always felt vaugely guilty about liking things that everyone else likes. After a good few years going through school trying to fit in, I eventually stopped caring and started doing my own thing. A couple of years after that, I ended up with a pretty strong anti-establishment streak. I always have a hard time embracing things that are popular or even mainstream. Example: I recently started listening to The Killers. I had always avoided them because they often got lumped in with groups like The Strokes and Velvent Revolver, which were supposed to bring some kind of new age of rock and roll and completely remake the genere. Which is bullcrap. Particularly The Strokes...they are just terrible. Terrible. So I had always avoided The Killers, but a month or so ago had occasion to listen to Hot Fuss in it's entirety...and to my chagrin, I liked it. I liked it a lot, actually. Which was a good lesson - sometimes, things are popular because they're *good*, not because mainstream society is being stupid (although a lot of the time, it is).

That was a lot of words to come up with this: TL;DR - my guilty pleasure is mainstream popular culture (or at least the parts of it that don't suck).

(OT) 30 day challenge

2010-07-05T20:17:00.000-04:00

My friend Megan was kind enough to post a neat "blogger's challenge" on her blog, which was cool as hell and I've decided to rip off. Basically, how this works is for 30 days I'll post an entry explaining where I stand on each of the items in the list below. I'm not sure how we'll I'll do at remembering to keep up with it, and of course I have Defcon at the end of the month - I don't see myself going to the trouble of doing blog updates by smartphone or Kindle. So I reserve the right to double up if I need to.

Day 1: Guilty pleasure

Day 2: What inspires you

Day 3: 5 songs to take on a desert island and why

Day 4: Your image of paradise

Day 5: A thank you to someone who changed your life

Day 6: Earliest memory

Day 7: Your favorite cover of your favorite song

Day 8: Someone you want to see as President

Day 9: 5 things you want to change

Day 10: Describe a dream you had this week

Day 11: Favorite picture of yourself

Day 12: Favorite musical artist's life story

Day 13: A memory that makes you laugh

Day 14: Best mashup

Day 15: A song that changed your life

Day 16: Something you want to do in the next 5 years

Day 17: What you want to be remembered for

Day 18: A picture that makes you feel _______?

Day 19: A passage from a book that has moved you

Day 20: First song you heard by your favorite band

Day 21: Your favorite medium of art

Day 22: Somebody you would die for

Day 23: Most awkward first impression

Day 24: Most memorable moment of childhood

Day 25: Something you would do if nothing stopped you

Day 26: What is love?

Day 27: The meaning of life

Day 28: A moment you remember being completely happy in and why

Day 29: What do you live for?

Day 30: Ways you've grown over the past thirty days.

Flashback to Summer - Bonnaroo 2009 Part I

2009-10-25T20:57:00.000-04:00

I've been wanting to write about my experience at the Bonaroo Music and Arts Festival for a while now, and I figure this blog is a good venue. Keep in mind that I went to the festival back in June, and I was sleep deprived and under the influence of...well, one thing or another for virtually the entire weekend, so this may not be super accurate. Thankfully, my friend and co-Rooer Jeff also did a writeup much sooner than I did (weeks after rather than months after), so I have that to refer to, as well as the captions from the album on Facebook.

So, to start at the beginning. Way back in the summer of '08, I heard about Bonnaroo in passing because one of my WoW buddies, Max, was going and had been several times before. At the time, I didn't think much of it, although reading about it on the website it did sound cool. Fast forward to late January of '09. I had looked at the Bonnaroo site on a whim, and got it in my head that it might be a really fun time to go. A little later, I found out that Nine Inch Nails was playing the festival. Now, for those of you who don't know, I *love* NIN. I don't necessarily listen to them super often (particularly not these days), but NIN (along with a couple of other industrial acts - Assemblage 23, Orgy, Covenant and a few others) were a HUGE part of my last two years of high school. My junior year in particular I listened to little else...and in those days, I quite literally wore headphones ALL the time. There's actually a number of family pictures of me from those days in which I have a pair of headphones around my neck. I went through 3 portable CD players and two MP3 players in 4 years of high school...they took a lot of abuse, simply by virtue of being run and carried virtually ALL the time.
So anyway, the chance to see NIN for a second time (I also caught them here in Portland during the With Teeth supporting tour) was huge for me. And the more I looked at the setlist, the more I liked it - there was a chance to see the Beastie Boys, Bruce Springsteen, Paul Oakenfold, TV On the Radio, and a whole bunch of stuff I hadn't heard of (funny story, the only bands from that list I actually saw were NIN and TV on the Radio). So while I was bored at work one day, I started looking into what it would take to go...at that point, it didn't look good. Bonnaroo tickets don't come cheap (just a hair under $300) and plane tickets to TN were at least $400. I put the idea on the back burner, thinking that perhaps if I came into some money I could make it work, but otherwise I would probably have to shelve it.
A couple of days later, I was doing one of my usual raids and happened to start talking about Bonnaroo with Max at which point I mentioned in passing (ok, semi in passing) that I was hoping to go but didn't think I could afford it with the cost of transport. He was nice enough to offer me a ride down. After thinking for maybe an hour, I went "Waitaminute, you have a chance to go to THE music festival, and you're wishy-washying it? DO IT DUDE!). Ok, I can take a hint from myself. I bought a ticket.

Cut Copy - In Ghost Colours

2009-10-25T14:54:00.000-04:00

Ahh, Cut Copy...one of my all-time favorite acts, and one of the few bands I plan to write about that I've made it to see live...which gave me a ton more respect for them. At their very worst, they sounded as good as the album, and in general much better. That is an impressive feat for an electronic act, as so often there is so much done in post-production that it's hard for it to all come together on stage.

Anyway, onward. Nuts and bolts - Cut Copy is an electropop/synthpop act out of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. In Ghost Colours is their second (and best, in my opinion) album. I first heard about both the album and the band through a newspost on Jeph Jacques' excellent webcomic Questionable Content. Actually, I have heard about quite a bit of music through QC newsposts.

In Ghost Colours is a glorious example of the best of today's electronic music. I've been listening to it since it first came out, and I'm still not tired of it. It manages to be electropop without being depressing (which is why I classify it as both electropop and synthpop - oftentimes the line between the two is whether or not the music is dystopic or sad, but synthpop also conjures up images of bands like Freezepop, which this most decidedly is not). Listening to the album as a whole feels like a glorious journey through a river of rainbows and snowflakes. It's mixed as gapless on the CD, and it's really worth listening to it that way, or at least as close as you can. While the singles are great (and I'll provide some video links later), the album really shines when it's listened to as a whole (which is why I'm not highlighting individual songs).

It starts out slowly (but strongly) and really goes through a whole story. Even after a year, I don't feel like I understand the album well enough to explain it, but it's amazing. If you have any love whatsoever for electronic music, you owe it to yourself to check them out.

Video links:
Hearts on Fire - Offical video here, the first single from the album. Like I said above, my love for this album really comes from the way it works as a whole, but if there were any one song that I really love on it's own, this is it. The video is great as well...I think we all have days like this sometimes.

Lights and Music - Again, official video. First single from the album. This also stands alone pretty well when it needs to, and I feel like it's a pretty good microcosm of both the album and of the band in general.

-A

What's Next For This Blog

2009-10-25T13:45:00.000-04:00

So as you can see, I changed the name and the URL to reflect my new ideas for this blog. My plan is to start writing about music. Here's how that came about: Tonight (well, now yesterday) I made my weekly pilgrimage to Bull Moose to browse around and spend lots of money on CDs. While I was there, I found myself looking though the $2 VHS bin, with a vague notion of "hey, there might be an entertainingly bad movie here and I could watch it and...wait no, shit, I already know somebody who does that (and does it very well by the way, check out her blog here)". But the idea of blogging about SOMETHING stuck with me...earlier this week I stumbled across another friend's blog (here if you are curious) and had to log into my blogger account to post a comment, which reminded me that "oh hey you started a blog too a while back".

Anyway, I was in the car, unwrapping my purchases (very successful run, btw: Ladyhawke - Ladyhawke, New Radicals - Maybe You've Been Brainwashed Too and the movie "Across the Universe" out of the discount bin) and it hit me - I could have some things to say about music. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense...over the last several months, music has become a lot more important to me, and I've started listening to a much bigger variety of different stuff (Bonnaroo helped with that). I was having a conversation about Vitalic with another friend a couple of days ago, where I referred to them as "more abstract than the music I typically listen to". Huh...kind of a clue that I might be descending into the early stages of music nerdery (in the "wow, what an indie nerd" sense, not the "wow, he can play lots of instruments" sense, though I would not call myself an indie nerd either).

Anyway, there is a lot of music that I have been listening to lately that I have stuff to say about, so I figure I'll say it here. If nothing else, it will be interesting to me. I have several albums in mind that I want to talk about at some point:
Oracular Spectacular by MGMT (Time to Pretend in particular is an important song for me)
Ocean Eyes and Maybe I'm Dreaming by Owl City (and Owl City in general to some extent)
Alive 2007 by Daft Punk
Before the Dawn Heals Us and Saturdays=Youth by M83
In Ghost Colours and Bright Like Neon Love by Cut Copy
Dystopia by Midnight Juggernauts
21st Century Breakdown by Green Day (yes, really)
Shout, the Very Best of Tears for Fears by (guess who!) Tears for Fears
Phoenix by Asia
and probably a lot of other stuff, I may regret giving myself even a list that big. I reserve the right to...well, do whatever I want. There is totally music out there that I would like to talk about but not cover the whole album, or whatever else. I'll probably do the odd non-music post too.

Anyway, that's the new hotness. Hope ya'll like the idea...
-A

2009-10-23T11:24:00.001-04:00

Whoops, there's a blog here. Lulz. Heading up to Topsham in a second here to replace a thin client...while I like my job a lot, my least favorite part of it is the "oh shit hardware problem, I have to go on site". Oh well, at least it's a nice day for a drive...

Volume II

2009-06-23T00:56:00.000-04:00

And here I am, back again. Not much to say this evening, but I need to update to keep my agreement with myself. Just been busy with stuff that doesn't really bear writing about the last few days, mainly work, sleep and trying to get over a cold I picked up on my way back from vacation. More soon.

It Begins

2009-06-19T23:44:00.000-04:00

Hello there, interwebz. So, a new blog. What's it about, you ask? Well, everything and nothing. I plan to write about whatever strikes my fancy, but I will try to have a topic of the day when possible, though I reserve the right to post rants as well.

You may be asking yourself "Why should I read this blog written by a fairly unremarkable college student from Maine?". I don't have a good answer for that, other than the fact that I am generally a fairly interesting writer, and I will try my best to keep it that way.

Now, you may also be wondering what my purpose is. That, at least, I do have a good answer to. It's a challenge to myself...you see, in the past few years, my ability to follow through on stuff in general has gotten really bad. So I am going to try to break that habit in some small way by starting this blog, and pledging to you, my readers (all zero of you right now, since this is the first post!) to keep it updated on a regular basis for at least six months or so. In the process, I'm also hoping to get back some of the aptitude for writing that I had in high school. Not that I've gotten terrible at it or anything, I am just rusty.

The second reason is to catalog for myself and others my personal journey, such as it is. Ok, confession time - for the past six months I have done very little other than play World of Warcraft, go to work, and go to class. Not really a recipie for sucess. Now I am trying (sucessfully) to break out of that cycle, get out of the house, and meet some new people. Which, if you know me at all, you know is somewhat out of character.
You may be asking yourself "Was there a catalyst for all of this?". The answer again is yes. I bet you can even guess what it is...if you guessed "he met a girl", you are right in one. I did meet a girl (playing WoW, ironically enough), and did some truly asstarded things because of it, as people are wont to do, and said things ended up being for naught as said girl did not return my feelings, although we did become friends out of the deal (fml same old story as always). But be that as it may, it was enough of a wakeup call to force me to really examine where my life was (someplace very strange) and how happy I was with it (not). So I plan to write about some of the stuff I am doing to get back to normalacy (or as normal as it ever gets for me).

So there you have it. Musings of Alex volume I complete.