adrian is rad

So I’m entering my fourth year of being on college radio, first on WMBR and then KZSU, having started in December 2002, with notable gaps (Fall 2003 and Summer 2004). It’s something I think about stopping sometimes, but even when it’s a difficult time slot (Thursdays 6-9am, alarm goes off at 4:30am), I enjoy it. I missed it both times I was off the air so I worked to get back on the air.

I’ve done some fun things and crazy show themes in the past three years:

• Cohosted some crazy late night shows with Devin (of Night Rally) (and Farhad and Austin). I’d often do my indie show called Tonight I Will Retire followed by an old-timey/ field recording show called Maple’s Lament, which would stretch past 4am. Devin would say hilarious stuff (me: the phone number here is 253-xxxx, him: oh man, that’s a great number) and we’d generally be total idiots.
• Playing the entirety of In the Aeroplane over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel at about 3am.
• An hour of “crushingly beautiful music” (starting with the one am radio).
• an ill-thought-out attempt at “chamber pop two-fers” (from Matt Pond PA to Sufjan Stevens).
• an hour of indie rock songs featuring banjo (through Preston School of Industry, I think).
• almost three hours of oldies when I was so sick I’d asked for, but couldn’t secure a sub DJ.
• my patented 1/1/1 format show. (1 hour indie, 1 hour old-timey, 1 hour motown).
• a show I called “canuck goes totally whack on irish (and some cape breton) music in preparation for st. paddy’s day so break open a guinness or maybe a murphy’s and listen while relaxing with your friends”.

I just applied for a show (or two, actually) for the fall programming schedule. I’ll still be doing my indie format show, but I might be adding a 1 hour slot of a different format. I’ll say more about that later.

I don’t usually rant here, but some people are really dumb.

I run an email list for a friend that’s on Peace Corps so that she can email her updates to just one address rather than 120. People somewhat regularly email this list address rather than her directly, thinking it’s her address. Great. Way to go, pal.

But someone did something pretty spactacularly stupid this morning: he tried to send a 12 MB photo as an attachment to the list. Mistake 1 was noted above. Mistake 2 is don’t try to email enormous files!, especially to lists or people you don’t know.

After this, I sorted my email by size and noticed that multiple people, who I didn’t know, cold (uninvited) sent me things related to my position at the radio station, with attachments over 1.5MB. I realize that that’s nothing these days, in the age of gigabytes and terabytes, but that still bogs down servers and makes things slow. Most email is <15KB, so something at least 100 times larger than that is not good. I take a bit of a offense to this. It’s sort of like someone putting a broken wheel chair on my doorstep; sure, I might want it, but I certainly didn’t ask for it, and most likely, I just have to worry about putting it in the trash.

Okay. Enough ranting. I don’t think it’s becoming.

What’s with soundtracks these days? There are some really good ones!

The latest is the Thumbsucker soundtrack. It’s got about 20 new songs from the Polyphonic Spree and three Elliott Smith songs, one of which (”Troubled” originally by Cat Stevens) is previously unreleased. Here’s the story of the soundtrack, how it came to be these two artists on the soundtrack.

On the first listen, it’s real good!

Steelers lost again those guys on Sunday. It was a close game. Well that’s not really true. Steelers were better for the first half and the other dudes were basically dominant for the second half. They have a bye week so it’ll be a week and a half until I get to see them win again.

The BoSox are a game back in the AL East and tied for the wild card spot. In the last two days the A’s and the Giants got elimanted from the pennant race in their respective divisions. The Pirates got eliminated approximately four months ago.

this could quite well be the longest I’ve had between posts. lack of laptop and being busy have kept me away.

but seriously, did you miss me?

anyway, here’s the playlist for this week.

I played a lot of 90s indie rock on my radio show this week.

And by films I mean that in the literal sense, of captured, originally, on film.

And by documentary, I mean documenting real events.

I saw three recently:

1. NFL Film’s History of the Steelers NFL Films used to have a weekly show called “This is the NFL” and I would watch it many weeks, even before I was much of a football fan, just because they had beautiful footage and the sound, especially of the impacts, was incredible. There’s something about watching football on film that’s great. I liked this DVD a lot. I learned a bunch about the pre-70s Steelers and there were many interesting interviews with former players and coaches and whatnot. I also saw that there is quite a symbiotic relationship and feelings of duty and mutual respect between the Rooneys (the family that owns the Steelers) and the Team, the Team and the Fans, the Fans and the Rooneys. My one sort of complaint about the film was that it glossed over the big losses. An intricate part of the story of the Steelers, at least over the last decade, has been some big losses, I feel. Definitely worth watching if you’re a Steelers fan or a fan of football in general.
2. Low in Europe Dave gave this to me for my birthday. This shows some great footage and interviews of the band on a tour of Europe following the release of Trust. Maybe I just haven’t looked for many interviews of Low, but it seems that they haven’t been interviewed much, so it’s nice to see some more in depth coverage of their lives in this movie. There’s also some great footage of the band playing live; one of my favorites is a couple acoustic songs at a radio station in Frankfurt. The film ends with them playing at the Union Chapel in London, which no longer hosts shows, but while it did was a fantastic place to see a band like Low, as Andy or I can attest to. Worth watching for fans of Low or if you’re interested in becoming one.
3. Drive Well, Sleep Carefully The Death Cab for Cutie tour documentary. This close to 90 minutes of interviews and performances from a tour last year. The interviews seemed a bit lacking and single-tracked, but there’s pretty good pacing and editting between the interview portions and the song portions. The individual performances of the songs vary in how good they are. It’s worth watching if you’re a fan or are just an OC watching hipster.

Dug and I went to see the Giants at SBC Park today. I’d managed to get some basically field-level seats (section 104, row 24, if you want to look it up) off of craigslist for below face value.

It ended up being a pretty exciting game even though neither of us were really rooting for either team. Something like five home runs were hit, the last being No. 705 by Barry Bonds, his second of the season after being out recovering from knee surgery for most of the season. I’d seen Bonds play in his Pirates years and probably saw many home runs by him. Someone’s career home runs 134 and 162 are not noteworthy. One thing you don’t notice from the highlight reels of someone who’s always swinging for the fences like Bonds [note: he's not always swinging for the fences—he hit a on-the-ground single earlier in the game] is what he looks like when he misses. He missed (or foul-tipped) two times in the at bat where he finally hit a home run and it looked like his arms were going to rip out he was swinging so hard. When he finally did connect solidly, the ball had no chance of staying in the park; a quick kayaker in China Basin is now the proud owner of the Bonds Home Run Ball No. 705.

(Wow, I just realized that I’ve seen 8 (Red Sox, A’s, Giants, Pirates, Blue Jays, Nationals, Phillies, Dodgers) teams play at four stadiums (Coliseum, Fenway, RFK, SBC) this year.)

In other sporting news, the Steelers won pretty handily (again) and I happened to notice another team lost today. It’ll be interesting when they face off next week.

Oakland A’s American League Division Series (ALDS) playoff tickets went on sale at 9am today. I bought 6 bleachers seats for either Game 1 or Game 3, October 4 or 7.

The hope, of course, is that it’ll be the A’s vs. Red Sox. There’s a lot that needs to happen first, though.

If it’s not the Sox, I can go anyway or sell the tickets.

Anyone know how the playoff match-ups are decided? Say if the season ended today, who would play whom?

this is a playlist for a radio show.

It turns out that I’m a bit of a liar. I said last week that I’d be taking a bit of a break from my radio show for a few weeks. It’s true that I won’t be doing the Thursday 6-9am slot, but I won’t be taking a break. The opportunity came up to do the 10-midnight (PST) show on Wednesday nights for the next three weeks and I’ll be doing that.

I’m excited to give the evening slot a chance and to not be amazingly tired on Thursdays. I suppose it means that all you east-coasters probably won’t listen online, or might only listen to the first bit.

about not getting mentioned on my blog.

Other news:

• I killed some strange, CPU-hogging apache processes on my server. translation: this site should load faster.
• I’m trying to learn PHP3 (yes, the old version; I have my reasons). Any suggestions of good online tutorials?
• garage sale scores from yesterday: the game of Risk, a super 8 camera, a Weller soldering iron, and a Stockton State ringer T.

I just finished Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa by Antjie Korg (pronounced “ahnt-key kroge”). It recounts the events and stories of the Truth and Reconcilliation Commision (TRC) as told by an Afrikaaner poet and South African Broadcast Company (SABC) radio correspondent.

I’ve been reading it on and (mostly) off since about Christmas. It’s not a quick read, certainly, and it is, at times, overly academic or swamped by the language, but it’s undoubtedly a very important and valuable thing to read. There are many sections that are direct transcriptions of the testamonies of victims and perpatrators that are so effecting that I simply had to put the book down. I also found the sections where she reacts to the events very interesting.

Here’s one such passage:

The proceedings are concluded with the anthem. I stand, caught unaware by the Sesotho version and the knowledge that I am white, that I have to reacquaint myself with this land, that my language carriers violence as a voice, that I can do nothing about it, that after so many years I still feel uneasy with what is mine, with what is me. The woman next to me looks suprised when I sing the Free State version of “Nkosi [Sikelel' iAfrica].” She smiles, holds her head close to mine, and shifts to the alto part. The song leader opens the melody to us. The sopranos envelop; the bass voices support. And I wonder: God. Does He hear us? Does He know what our hearts are yearning for? That we all just want to be human—some with more color, some with less, but all with air and sun. And I wade into song—in a language that is not mine, in a tongue I do not know. It is fragrant inside the song, and among the keynotes of sorrow and suffering, there are soft silences where we who belong to this landscape, all of us, can come to rest.

Maybe this has meaning to me, but not you.

I was just reminded by a voice mail from my parents that today’s my Namenstag.

Happy Namestag to me!

Freuliche Namenstag noch!

I found an interesting site run by the USDA that has nutrional information (for reference) for just about everything (that is a single ingrediant and/ or a raw food). Want to know how much fat a banana has? (about 0.3g.) Are sirloin or ribeye steaks healthier? (sirloin is just about the healthiest cut of steak.)

The information is not organized in the manner I’m accustomed to seeing it, but you can find what you’re looking for if you wade through all the information that you’re not looking for.

Some things, specifically cuts of steak, you need to know pretty specifically about the cut in order to get it to spit out the nutritional information.

According to Pitchfork Mark Kozelek will be putting out an album of Modest Mouse covers.

Mark is known for his work in the bands Red House Painters and Sun Kil Moon, but I like his solo stuff best. He has a penchant for covering bands, having released lots of AC/DC covers and a John Denver cover. As I reported he covers Modest Mouse live, including Neverending Math Equation and Tiny Cities Made of Ashes at the Tsunami Benefit at Great American Music Hall.

The album apparently comes out November 1 under Mark’s Sun Kil Moon moniker.

Kozelek is also touring with Alan Sparhawk of Low as the Retribution Gospel Choir. I missed their show at the Bottom of the Hill Tuesday because my plane landed as they went on. If anyone sees them, let me know how they are. I haven’t been able to find many concert reviews online.

a) I’m doing a radio show tomorrow, Thursday. It came up quick this week because of the holiday.

b) it’ll probably be my last show for a few weeks. I am going to take a bit of a break, I think.

c) I’ll put my playlist here when I have a link to it.

d) Listen here.

Of all the phrases that I heard over the weekend, one that I heard a couple times and stuck with me: “You have nice friends.”

There are many adjectives to describe this group of people, but that one is a good one.

I’m just outside of DC in Silver Spring, MD. My best friend Andy and I both have birthdays right around this Labor Day weekend and it’s a bigish birthday so I decided to make a big deal of it and fly here and invite people. Andy, Dave, Randy, Ian “the Mayour” Collier and respective significant others, along with my parents and brother came out for this Birthday Extravaganza.

I arrived Friday morning and I’m flying back tomorrow evening.

We did lots of fun stuff and some great hanging out.

Highlights include:

• the big birthday dinner on Saturday night with some sort of humorous but also tragic confusion between wasabi and avacado
• DC-9, beers with the friends
• the Washington Nationals game with special appearance of Dale
• cuban dinner with the fam and Ian and Ai-ris.
• delicious and relaxing BBQ at the parl
• Broken Flowers

ok. that’s all for now. have a nice day everybody.

Oh, and Katie, you didn’t scare me. I just don’t “talk” to “girls” “good.”

It was nice to meet all the new people I met this weekend!

The playlist for this week.

And, of course, like always, you may listen on the internet.