adrian is rad

I decided that I wasn’t going to watch TV today.

It’s weird. There are many times that I turn it on and I don’t think I notice. I was like “what am I going to do while eating lunch?”

I decided to read, but something else came up, which I’ll blog about later.

So I went to the tsunami benefit concert at Great American last night. Four men and their guitars. Usually I’ll go to a concert so I’ll miss one or more of the opening acts. Here is perhaps the first concert where I wanted to see everyone that was playing.

First up was Eric Bachmann (Bacchman? Bachman? I’ve seen all these spellings on the internet) of Archers of Loaf and the Crooked Fingers. He fingerpicked a classical guitar and sang in a somewhat strained voice that bears some resemblence to his voice on the Archers records. From the first song, I was impressed. It was nothing like the Archers of Loaf. It was gorgeous, sad music with more than a nod to traditional American music with songs like “Death Train.” If I’d heard any of the Crooked Fingers or Barry Black (which I just found out is his solo project), I would have been more prepared for his “new” style (the Archers of Loaf haven’t done anything since like 1997). I’ll have to check them out now and play them on my show.

Next: Jonathan Richman. I was very familiar with the name and familiar with a couple of his songs, but I don’t know very much about him. I know he was in Something about Mary. And apparently he was the front man for the Modern Lovers. Live, he’s quirky and goofy. He moves his body and plays his classical guitar without a strap (just sort of holding it against his body). He does this goofy bow at the end of a song that reminds me of a someone on the Ed Sullivan show. Sometimes he basically fingerpicks and sometimes he almost plays in a flamenco style. He sang in Spanish, Italian, French and English. He would interject strange things in his songs (”the English part!” before a bunch of “oohs-ahhs” or “guitar!” before a guitar solo). I had a huge grin on my face the whole time because he’s just so entertaining to watch.

Mark Kozelek of Red House Painters (who were active 1992-2000ish) and Sun Kil Moon (the last year or so). I was really excited to see him solo. I’d heard a lot of the RHP and SKM but his solo stuff is what I like best. He came out and asked the fairly young crowd “So when does the school bus come to get you guys?” He also repeated referred to Ben Gibbard as “the guy from the post office.” Then he started playing. Oh my gosh. I don’t know if there could be a better combination of voice, guitar style and songwriting ability. He could really do no wrong solo; he could sing about killing little babies and I would probably think it was the prettiest song ever. He did a “funny” song, as he put it: a cover of “Neverending Math Equation” by Modest Mouse. Done in Kozelek’s style it’s not quite the same.

The man all the girls were screaming for: Ben Gibbard. Sporting an unkempt beard, glasses and scruffy hair, he was definitely the crowd favorite. And he was definitely really good, but I don’t think the best of the night. He opened with a cover the of Archers of Loaf song “Web in Front”. He also covered the Monkey’s song “Look Out (Here Comes Tomorrow)” later in the set. He did a number of solid versions of Death Cab for Cutie and Postal Service songs, including, of course, “Such Great Heights” (which he called a cover of a song he wrote) but also “the Dream of Evan and Chan” (technically a DNTEL song). He said he was intimidated playing guitar after the previous three “of the best guitar players I’ve seen.”

Overall, it was probably the best acoustic concert I’ve seen.

This week’s playlist.

A pretty good flow, I think. It’s sort of hard to make a good cohesive show that people are waking up to after years of doing shows that people were falling asleep to.

You might notice a particular number of bands that begin with A and B. I didn’t get far in the music library before gathering enough music to fill the time.

1. “Brick” by Ben Folds 5
2. “the Sweetest Thing” by U2
3. “mmm bop” by Hanson
4. “Gigantic” by the Pixies

Don’t ask. We had our weird moments.

You can get a large stone church for under $300K. It still has the pews and organ and everything!

Life to you is a dashing and bold adventure

dash·ing
adj.

1. Audacious and gallant; spirited.
2. Marked by showy elegance; splendid: a dashing coat.

We all know that I’m dashing, but who knew my life is dashing.

Jon Werberg put it nicely on Sunday. Some teams just stick with you. The BoSox, the Steelers. It’s the history, it’s what the team represents and it’s to a large extent, the fans. What the team means to the fans. It became national news this fall what the Red Sox means to Boston and the Red Sox Nation.

Pittsburgh is more insular though. The flux of people in Boston, adding to the Red Sox Nation, is not common place in Pittsburgh. But that doesn’t stop every home game to be sold out. That doesn’t stop the largest crowd to ever watch a Steelers home game from showing up in sub-10 degree weather to see their dream team fall.

I haven’t been to Green Bay or Chicago (and I was in Boston when the Patriots won their first Super Bowl), but it’s hard to imagine a city more devoted to its team. Or a city more crushed by their team’s loss. Pittsburgh doesn’t get a lot of good news. The city is bankrupt; the county will be too soon. People and jobs move away. My team—my boys as I call them sometimes—lost and I’m sad. But almost moreso I’m sad for my home town. I don’t think anyone that isn’t a Pittsburgher can understand how much joy this team gave them; the bouyancy that Pittsburghers had during the seasons; and the hopes that were rested on the team.

In the words of fans of the losers that always get so close “next year will be our year.” And I think it may be. Plaxico is leaving but it seems most of the rest of the team will stick around. Roethlisberger may come back from his only loss in the NFL and be better for it; he may have a sophomore slump. Time will tell.

Was I glad I went? definitely. I’d probably even do it again knowing everything I know now.

Mean time, I think it’s about time to put my name on the season ticket waiting list. In 10 or 15 years I may actually be back in Pittsburgh by the time I get them.

So according to a news item at Pitchfork, the guy from Pedro the Lion, David Bazan, and one of the other current members of the band TW Walsh are going to release an album as the Headphones in May on Suicide Squeeze. They’re throwing away the guitars and playing it all on keyboards. It’s electronic, but not electronica so much. Apparently real, non-sequenced drums and such will also appear.

I’m tired now, but I was roaring through most of the day. I had my first 6-9am show today. I woke up at 4:45 and was at the station at 5:15 (showered last night). I pulled some music and then did a three hour show, including such greatest hits as the “motown song of the week” and my “100% unofficial traffic report” which went something like this:

If you’re going from the City to the Peninsula…yeah, good luck. If you’re going from the Peninsula to the City, good luck. If you’re going from the Peninsula to the East Bay or the East Bay to the Peninsula, good luck. If you’re going from the East Bay to the City or the City to the East Bay…well don’t try that. If you’re going from the East Bay to the South Bay, the South Bay to the East Bay, the East Bay to the North Bay or the North Bay to the East Bay, you might be alright, but I can’t promise anything. South Bay to the Peninsula, Peninsula-South Bay, Peninsula-Peninsula or South Bay-South Bay, good luck. And don’t even try East Bay near the Peninsula to the East Bay near the North Bay.

I also got like four phone calls today, which is totally sweet!@#!

Today’s playlist is here.

Andy tells me the band the Kissing Book would go well with my show. I’m going to check them out.

Alright, so I’m crazy.

I bought tickets for $$$ on ebay to the AFC championship game. I bought a ticket to Pittsburgh for $$ as well. Looks like I’m going. Let’s home this guy on ebay is for real and I don’t get utterly screwed.

Pretty much as soon as I bought the ticket I had a bad feeling. I’m not too superstitious, but up until that point I was 100% sure that the Steelers would go to the Superbowl (and win). Now, I’m not as sure. Like me going is going to make the Steelers lose.

Don’t tell the Steelers I’m coming! Then they will still win.

I’m getting in Saturday night and leaving Monday morning. I’ll be in Pittsburgh for less than 36 hours. Pittsburghers, if you want to hang out Saturday night after I get in, after the game Sunday night or have lunch on Sunday, let me know.

Part of me really enjoys being young and dumb and reckless with my money. Another part of me wants to check my bank acounts and formulate a good plan for saving after this.

Here we go, Steelers!

[Update: my dad has the tickets in his hand, so the somewhat sketchy guy came through. I forgot to mention Jon Werberg is driving down from New York to go to the game with me. He lived in Pittsburgh for a bit over a year so he’s got the Steeler’s bug and a few friends in town.]

We had our schedule unveiling tonight at KZSU. I got a bit of a surprise in my new slot. I wanted something that wasn’t as late as my previous show. I got 6-9am Thursdays. It’s got some good points: drive-time listenership, people on the east coast will be awake, and I’ll lose less sleep than with a midnight-to-three show. We’ll see how it goes. I start this week.

You can listen to our streams (and therefore my radio show) on the interweb here

I spent basically the whole weekend doing the MIT Mystery Hunt. It’s a puzzle competition that’s pretty famous at this point. People fly in from around the country and the world to MIT to take part. My team, Project Electric Mayhem (or just Mayhem), has a west coast branch that operates out of the Bay Area. I hunted my four years at the Institute and now this was my second year out here.

The sort of puzzles that are in the Mystery Hunt are pretty intense. Usually it’s just a set of clues with little or no instructions or hints on what to do with them. One puzzle I got was something like this:

Hypoblast
Ohio College
US President
Witch Location
expressed differently
… [35 total clues]

01942
19025
19230
… [36 total]

the list of numbers was obviously zip codes. You look them up and you have 37 cities and states. Then you had to anagram (mix up the letters to get a new word) the city and state pairs and the anagram forms the answer to a clue. For example, look up 19025 and you’ll get Dresher, PA. That anagrams to rephrased which is the answer to the clue expressed differently. Now do this 35 times. Order the produced words in order of the original clues (which was arbitrary, the zip codes were in numerical order) and read down the first letters and you get HERBTARLEKDARRINSTEPHENSORKIPWILSON. And you have one zip code left, 56510, which is Ada, MN. You anagram that and look at the clue and, what do you know, Herb Tarlek, Darrin Stephens and Kip Wilson were each an AD MAN. And that’s your answer for one puzzle.

And there were probably about 120 puzzles this year.

And you take the answer to the puzzles for each round and then use those as the clue to solve meta-puzzle. There was an additional layer of meta-meta puzzles (not strictly true; we ended up calling these “super puzzles”) for each round this year as well.

Here’s a great write up of the sort of stuff that goes on during Mystery Hunt. I remember one year people made Rhett call up Noam Chomsky at home to ask him about a linguistics puzzle.

Mayhem did well. We had all the super puzzles except one solved. We suspect if we’d solved that we would have done a meta-super puzzle with all the answer from the super puzzles (and maybe the meta puzzles), the gone on the runaround in which you try to find the coin, which is hidden on campus somewhere.

Yes, hundreds, if not over a thousand people, do this every year and all for a simple prize; if you win, you get to write the Hunt for the following year. There is no second prize. When the coin is found, you pack up and go home.

Alright. Time to sleep.

[Update: Wally’s got a nice write up of the Mystery Hunt, including a nice piece of writing he did for the Technique.

The eye twitch is back.

When I get tired/ stressed, I get this twitch in my left eye. It’s been going for a while now. I’ve been tired; last week I was a bit stressed even.

Just a few minutes ago I noticed that my thumb was twitching, which I’ve never had before. It’s really strange.

And then (!then!) I noticed that my eye wasn’t twitching. It’s strange. I could handle this apparent trade-off though. The thumb thing is weird, but not immensely distracting like the eye one. It was hard to physically focus my eyes at times.

I am on the rah rah rahdio.

Playlist!

This is probably my last time doing this slot. I’ve applied for an earlier slot. Let’s hope. This one makes me tired.

I’ve talked about Smokey Robinson’s Tracks of My Tears before. I still really like it and I’ve been listening to it a lot. One thing you’ll notice if you search for that song is that Smokey Robinson’s song Tears of a Clown might also come up. If you listen to it sounds quite a bit different (though obviously still Smokey Robinson) but the subject matter is very similar.

I decided to look at the two songs side by side.

They’re both about girls causing an internal sadness. Smiles are an outside facade. Both talk about tears in private; in Tracks of my Tears you can see the remnants of the tears if you look closely; in Tears of a Clown there is no public indication of the sadness. In both he refers to himself as a clown.

I’m bidding (and getting outbid) on ebay for tickets to the AFC Championship game in Pittsburgh. It’s scary. I feel I could get screwed in so many ways. It’s also exciting.

Between this and my adventures on shopgoodwill.com, I’m starting to remember why I used to be hopelessly addicted to ebay.

I was walking around the other day and this phrase and the way of saying it popped into my head: “so sad!” I couldn’t figure out for the life of me where it was from.

Then! Revelation! It’s from a funny Washington Mutal commercial. They made a series of commercials that were quite funny. The acting and writing in all of these are impressive (for non-national commercials).

The basic premise was introducing a character who had some bad personal trait (untrusting, dishonest, etc), demostrate this, show that some feature that Washington Mutual offers gives them peace of mind (or reversed that trait) and then changes the character’s life to display this new trait.

To be more specific, these are my top three:
(you should really watch these, at least the first one)

1. “Tom.” This is where the “so sad!” comes from. Tom has “weak principles” demostrated by him steeling lemonade from a kid’s stand and then throwing the cup on the ground. He becomes honest from his encounter with WaMu. Three scenes of him being honest: talking to a girl at a bar, “I’ve never had a girlfriend and I still live with my mother”; walking in late for a meeting “Sorry, I’m late. I had a job interview. Nailed it!”; and talking movies with guys over poker, “Have you guys scene Steel Magnolias? I was bawling. So sad!”
2. “Geoffrey” Geoffrey is untrusting displayed by a scene where he walks up to a hostess at a restaurant. “Name?” she asks and then he looks suspicious: “Why?” Some identity theft thing makes him more trusting. The kicker of this one is a scene where he enters his house and there’s a robber in black and a ski mask and everything carrying out his stereo. “What are you doing?” The robber replies “Factory recall” and Geoffrey says “Oh. Okay.” Then the robber stands there for a moment before he says “Excuse me.” Geoffrey says “Oh. sorry” and gets out of the way.
3. “Rick” Rick is frustrated with his home loan and brought that frustration to his construction job site. After WaMu he’s much more easy going. He proceeds to pull a few really dangerous practical jokes which he thinks are hilarious and rides a wrecking ball into a brick wall, which he thinks is great fun.

“Debra” is also pretty funny.

I just got heard about and got tickets for what could be a totally sweet concert. Are you ready for the line up? Are you ready? I don’t think you are.

But here goes: Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie and the Postal Service; Mark Kozelek of Red House Painters, Sun Kil Moon and solo work; and Eric Bachman of Bachman Turner Overdrive— just kidding, he’s from the Archers of Loaf. I like all those bands and the solo work I’ve heard from the first two and solo stuff I usually like more than full band stuff, so I’m pretty excited. Additionally, it’s at Great American Music Hall, which is a great venue, especially for the acoustic stuff.

It’s a tsunami relief benefit concert. If benefiting tsunami relief is this good, I should give all my money.

I bought three tickets. Judit? Dale?

Other concerts I have tickets to or will probably soon:

• Early Day Miners 1/25 at
• Mates of State 2/23 at Slim’s (part of Noise Pop)
• the Polyphonic Spree 2/24 at Bimbo’s 365 (part of Noise Pop)
• Portastatic 2/25 at Bottom of the Hill (part of Noise Pop)
• Low with Pedro the Lion 3/29 at Great American Music Hall
• Magnolia Electric Company (formerly Songs: Ohia) 4/30 at Bottom of the Hill

Via my brother and others before that he got it from, there’s a new mash up that’s pretty good. It’s not a mash-up in the traditional sense like the Danger Mouse’s Grey Album or any of Dsico’s stuff, it’s not a mashing to unlike songs, melody of one with the background of the other. This one doesn’t take much talent at all, in fact. I could have probably made this mashup.

But it’s interesting nonetheless. It’s two Nickelback songs, one in the left chanel and one in the right and they match up really well. Note that one was probably pitch shifted and time compressed, so don’t be amazed that it’s in the same key or that the tempo is exactly the same, be amazed that the structure and relative timing of the songs are spot on.

When I first heard of this, I wasn’t going to even listen to it; I didn’t find it that interesting, but hearing the actual mash up is worth the couple minutes at least.

Without further ado, here it is.

A lot of people’s reactions seem to be that this is horrible. I don’t know. I think it’s sort of great that someone can make money twice off of the same song with slightly different packaging. There was never a claim that what was on pop radio was good.

I went to Amoeba today, which means I spent a lot of money on CDs.

CDs I’d heard a lot but didn’t own

• Pinback Summer in Abaddon[1]
• Elliot Smith From a Basement on a Hill[2]

CDs I don’t have but I have a pretty good idea what they’ll sound like and I’m pretty sure I’ll like

• Iron & Wine Passing Afternoon (EP)[3]
• Beulah Demo[4]

CDs that I’d heard good stuff about but hadn’t heard at all

• the Castinets Cathedral[5]

Fueling my recent Motown/ early R&B obsession

• Sam Cooke Portrait of a Legend[6]
• V/A EMI Music Publishing Presents Classic Songs of the Motown Era[7]

Folk

• V/A Selections from the Best of Broadside 1962-1988[8]
• V/A Smithsonian Folkways American Roots Collection[9]

Footnotes

[1] solid 3rd album from computer pop wizards
[2] made my top 17 of 2004. final album from this often depressed singer-songwriter
[3] turns out it’s not an EP (which would be Woman King, which is coming out in February). Rather this is the CD single with the last track from Our Endless Numbered Days. The other two songs on it are solid.
[4] lofi demos of what appears to be most of the Yoko album, which was basically ruined by the production.
[5] a well-reviewed disc on sufjan steven’s asthmatic kitty label.
[6] sam cooke is awesome. Among his fantastic songs are “You Send Me”, “Cupid”, “A Change is Gonna Come”, “Chain Gang” and “Don’t Know Much About History.” Not Motown (his music was put out, I think, by Abkco) and somewhat of an anomoly by writting his own songs.
[7] 4 discs of great music, from the Jackson 5 to Stevie Wonder to the Four Tops to the Temptations to Marvin Gaye.
[8] Put out by Smithsonian Folkways (always a good sign), this is a promo disc for a compilation of the magazine Broadside which published (in sheet music form) many of the greatest folk revival songs. People like Dylan and Phil Ochs and Pete Seegar submitted songs
[9] just a sampler of part of the great American music section of S/F.

I saw Million Dollar Baby last night. It’d been getting good reviews so I thought I’d check it out.

It’s good enough to warrant the praise. I remember after I saw Steamboat Bill, Jr. at LSC (with Marty Marks on the piano) with Wally, afterwards he wanted to leap and bound up the side of the student center, like something Buster Keaton would do. A good movie will make you do that. Today I want to jump rope and get some gloves and a bag.

Another sign of a good film is that it sticks with you. This one is so far. I’m still mulling it over.

The acting is top-notch. Hilllary Swank gives a fantastic performace. The sort of performance were she’d been living the life of the character all her life and someone asked her to do it in front of camera and she said “It’s all the same to me, boss.” Clint Eastwood. He acts almost by not acting. His performance is straight and without frills, yet that’s what it makes it so great; and that’s what keeps this movie real when it threatens to degrade into sentimental mush. Morgan Freeman’s performance as friend-cum-narrator is good, but not as nuanced as Eastwood or Swank.

The story could have stopped at other points or moved in different directions, but the success of the movie is in large part because it doesn’t take the easy ending. Not all the questions are answered. Much like Nowhere in Africa this movie benefits greatly from not telling the audience what is right or wrong, but to lay out a complicated story and leave it to the audience how to feel.

The screen play needs to be applauded as well. It’s told as one story line—no flashbacks, no starting the movie in 1958 and then jumping to present or whatever. Those sort of tricks would have hurt this movie.

Eastwood directs as well and he does a masterful job of minimalist film making. The movie, as well as his performance, are stripped down and presented without Hollywood tricks. It’s all there for you to see and that’s alright because it’s all good.

The film’s not perfect, but the reasons why are pretty nitpicky and I think many of you wouldn’t notice them unless I point them out, so I won’t.

I need to check out Eastwood’s other movies as a director.

City Council plans to work on relationships

Now, John, we know you love Susan, so why can’t you work this out?

It has passed. John, you love Susan and can work this out

This could become a daily thing. It’s so easy!

I won’t be on the air tonight. I’ve been working on stuff at work fairly late and I’m going in early tomorrow to finish up, so the thought of getting <3 hours of sleep was not appetizing so I offered it up for subs and someone took it. Off to bed!

After disconnecting my battery to do the starter replacement that I’ve mentioned before on my blog (and that I’m not going to link, because, honestly, who’s going to want to read me writing about replacing my starter), my radio went into “SAFE” mode, an anti-theft thing to prevent it from being stolen, or, rather, being used, if it’s stolen. Easy to fix if you have the correct code to unlock the device.

I, however, did not. The code I had was wrong. I tried many times (which is a pain, because you need to leave the radio on for an hour between every two tries and considering I almost never drive for an hour straight, that’s difficutl.) I went to the dealership* yesterday and they pulled out the radio, found the serial number and the VIN number (on the body of the car, not on the radio) and looked up the correct code, which is not even close to the code I’d been entering.

As it turns out, driving without music sucks. A couple times, I took out my laptop and put it on the passenger seat and played music from that. So much for silence.

Which reminds me of a time when I was living in Germany. Sam Breuning and I went to the Vienne Jazz Festival (an entirely different story), about a seven hour drive from Stuttgart, most of it through southern and eastern France, passing through Lyon and going a little past. I didn’t have a tape adapter for my car so I couldn’t play any of my CDs and as it turns out, French radio is horrible. My next road trip, down to Stein-am-Rhein, Switzerland skirting the Schwartzwald and hitting Rothenberg o.d. Tauber on the way back, I bought a tape adapter and brought hundreds of CDs.

*I link because they did it while I waited, were nice about it and didn’t charge for which another not-so-nice VW dealer was going to charge $60.

Homemade balloon found

After 1 year (as of today) of owning my 1997 VW Golf, I have driven just over 5,120 miles on it. I thought I’d come in under 5,000 for the year, but I’ve been driving a lot this week, driving to work (because it’s raining, normally I bike), two trips to airports, one to the City, one to Oakland and one to Sunnyvale. It was probably 250 miles in the past week.

I hit 4000 in August sometime, I think. Since I’ve been biking to work in June, I’ve been putting very few miles on it.

I think I should try to put on less than 5000 this year. We’ll see.

So I have this Napoleon Dynamite watch that Andy gave me. It displays the time in a digital format. It also says “idiot” (like in the movie), when one presses the button.

Today I was walking to my car and back in the rain to get something and when I got back to work, well, I guess some water had gotten into the watch because it started saying “idiot!” repeatedly. As it turns out, this is embarrassing in a quiet office.

I ended up taking it off and shoving it to the bottom of my bag, covering it with as much stuff as possible, closing the bag and shoving it as far under my desk as it would go.

I often mishear lyrics and often like my misheard lyrics better than the original.

I often base sets of lyrics off of a single line that I get into my head. Put these things together and I can write lyrics based on a mistake.

The craziest thing is that my misheard lyrics are my invention; that is, I own them and use them however I want.

Examples:
“Have you ever been honest now?” (misheard from “have you ever been all messed up?” from the song “One with the Freaks” by the Notwist)
and the one that caused me to write this post:
“There’s always the East Coast” (misheard from “it’s [blah] [blah] East Coast” from some Archers of Loaf song). I don’t know. I like that line a lot.

And end the season at 15-1. Pretty spectacular.

People in Pittsburgh, if you have a line on a pair of tickets for the AFC championship game, let me know.

(Seam is a great minimalist indie rock band from Chicago, active mostly from 94-99. They’re worth checking out if you haven’t heard them.)

I’ve been listening to Seam a lot lately, especially the middle two albums (the Problem with Me, which I know intimately, and Are you driving me crazy?, which I recognize all the songs on, but am not as familiar with), so I decided to poke around on the interenet to see what was up. I was surpised to see that they still have a website (well a fansite) and that it has some news in the past few years. I had given up Seam as totally bust but they actually seem (get it?? seem!) to have played once in 2003. Crazy. They haven’t toured the US since early 1999, I believe.

And another surprise was that Sooyoung Park, the lead of Seam, is in a new band called Ee. I’ll have to check them out.

There are bands that few people really liked when they were active but now get named dropped a lot. Slint was one of these bands and now they’re having a reunion tour and people are out of their minds. Then there are bands that people liked at the time, like Archers of Loaf and, to some extent, Seam, that no one mentions now. When’s the last time time you read a review that said a band’s sound harkened back to Seam? Weird.

[Update: haha. search and ye shall find. Here’s a review that name drops Seam. There aren’t many however. ]