adrian is rad

I’m going to one or two Pirates games a year so I figured I should be able to outfit myself for the event. I was looking at getting the old 70s Pirates high top hat (below) but found a bunch of great throwback caps. I particularly like 1901-06, 1915-19, 1940-41, 1947, and the 70s high top. I think the winner may be the 1940-41. It’s just so classy.

Update: 1940-41 Road Cap ordered. I’ll consider picking up the 70s high top cap in Pittsburgh on the cheap.

CNN/ AP reports there’s a real-life fight club in my town.

I’ll be on tomorrow morning from 6-9am PDT as a fill-in for Matt. Listen live if you’re so inclined.

I plan on saying, repeatedly, “People of the morning rush hour, I have returned! Rally to me!”

Update: here’s the playlist.

So I’ve been trying to get ready for my 100-mile Lake Tahoe century bike ride which is in just over a week now. This week so far:

• Monday: Portola Valley loop (~15 miles, ~700 feet elevation gain) with my 20 lb. shoulder bag
• Wednesday: Old La Honda (3 miles, 1200 feet elevation gain) + Portola Valley (total ~22 miles + 2000 ft elevation gain)
• Thursday: Portola Valley loop

The rest of my rides before the century will probably be:

• Saturday: King’s Mountain + Canada (36 miles, 2800 ft) Update: I ended up doing Old La Honda, circling back down and then doing King’s Mountain + Canada. Total was something like 43 miles, 4000ft elevation gain
• Monday: Canada + Crystal Spring + (perhaps) Portola Valley (~32 or ~46 miles, mostly rolling hills)
• Wednesday: (double) Portola Valley loop
• Thursday: something hard, maybe Old La Honda plus double Portola Valley loop, or Kings Mountain + Canada
• Saturday: light spin up in Tahoe
• Sunday: ride around Lake Tahoe!

I hurt; I’m starting to regret signing up for this thing.

While on the subject of sports, my friend’s ipod excercise idea got patented (by him/ Apple).

I saw the Apostle tonight. I’m not sure why I put it in my Netflix queue, but I did.

It’s a film about a southern preacher who puts his wife’s lover into a coma and then flees to rural Louisiana. Robert Duval wrote, directed and starred in it.

There are few performances where there is no explanation for the transformation from the actor to the character. Which is to say, Robert Duval does an absolutely amazing job as the preacher. He has all the stylistic elements down and acts this complex character very well.

I have a soft spot for the charasmatic southern preaching style and good southern gospel and it’s nice to see it done right in this movie.

Anyway, a well made and well-acted movie. Also, the DVD has a good “making of” feature, but it basically has spoilers in it, so only watch it after watching the movie.

I did a pretty good show tonight. Here’s the playlist.

I’ll be making a return to the Lunch Special as the host on Monday, Memorial Day. The guest will be Ed Carryer, an old prof of mine. It starts at noon PDT.

The other week when Nedelle was on my show, she had a guy named Chris playing some additional guitars. At one point she said to me “He plays in the Curtains and he just quite—well, I shouldn’t say.” And then, I saw this and it all came together. That was Chris from Deerhoof. Not only am I hosting Nedelle, I’m schmoozing with rock stars here people!

• I should go to more risk concerts, fewer good concerts by bands I’ve seen before. For instance, I should see Danielson in a couple weeks and I probably shouldn’t be sad that I missed the Mates of State a couple weeks ago (I’ve seen them 8ish times)
• I’m trying to decide if songwriting taking into account all or almost all of my musical influences is possible. I like a lot of music. I like indie rock, post-rock, old-timey/ early american field recordings, celtic, african, other world music, motown (and other early R&B/ soul), oldies, some hip hop and the list goes on. In the past, I’ve managed to combine some influences together in my songwriting: the Greetings from Johannesburg stuff was largely an experiment in fitting world music ideas into indie pop (“Thaw” is based on the Balinese Ketjak rhythm, “Bitter” has Senagalese sabar drumming, “Nashville” cops a brazilian drumming line, “Drunken” has a 15 beat long beat-cycle). I also combined—in my opinion successfully—motown, indie rock, african drums and a banjo (which I couldn’t really call “old-timey” or country either) on one of the covers contest songs. But really, there’s a ton more stuff out there and floating around in my head. I always thought music had to be segmented a bit. Like Where’s Luke? was the folksy mostly-acoustic group, the Grievance Committee was going to be my post rock band. But many great bands aren’t like that: many of them combine a lot of disparate influences to make their music. I don’t know if I have the ability to do that.
• I’m thinking of trying to write some hip hop instrumental/ base tracks. I’ve been listening to a little bit of hip hop recently. I don’t like a lot of hip hop because a lot of it is a) musically crap and b) lyrically stupid (sometimes well-written but still stupid). Personally, I think a lot of the hip hop paradigms are stupid: songs about smoking pot and being misogynistic toward women aren’t for me. There is some hip hop out there that has good music and that tackles complex issues in the lyrics. I’m getting off on a tangent here. My point here is that a lot of hip hop has crap music and so I’m thinking of writing some hip hop music. I don’t think I could MC well, so I’ll either leave that for someone else or leave them as instrumentals. Any aspiring MCs out there?
• At a certain point I stopped really getting jazz. Most music has tension and release. Often in jazz the tension comes from dissonance in the harmonic structure and progressions. I don’t always find the way this is done in jazz satisfying. (On the other hand, I’ve really come to appreciate some “new” jazz, like Magali Souriau’s “Dersu Usala” which is one of the most beautiful songs I’ve heard.)
• I mostly don’t like this dance indie rock that is all the buzz (and has been for a year or so). It doesn’t get me going.
• I’m thinking of spinning of my music stuff into a separate blog and turn that into more of an mp3 blog. It’s probably be over at the new me. It probably me mostly indie rock mp3s, but I’d love it be a place where I could equally post Sacred Harp field recordings and rare Motown tracks. I don’t know what would be left here, though, as half of what I post here is music stuff and I’ve already moved most of my photo stuff over the godhatesmath.

It’s bike to work day out here in the Bay Area.

I think they’re overlooking an important aspect, here, though: biking from work! I mean all those people have to get home somehow. Perhaps it should be called Bike to and from Work Day.

Am I right or am I right?

it’s back.

I’m working on it a bit more—I’m going to have a link to jump to the results page and/ or a time-based IP restriction (eg you can vote once per IP per day).

I fudged the totals–I remember the percentages and approximate total votes from the last time it was up, so I just make the votes reflect that. I’m wondering if that’s the right approach or if I should start anew.

I’m getting ready to ride around Lake Tahoe and I’m woefully underprepared, I’m finding. I’m also coming out of a period of 7 flats in three weeks, which I thought was resolved on Thursday with my tune-up/ inspection but should definitely be resolved now with my new tires.

So anyway, from Friday through Sunday, I pushed it a bit (not as much as pat, but still), doing 80 miles and about 5000 feet of gross elevation gain. The breakdown was one of these which has some rediculously beautiful parts going down 35 there, and three Portola Valley loops. I ate at In n Out without shame last night. I’m going to take a break until Wednesday.

So I saw John Vanderslice at the Independent again on Friday with Dylan and Gumbeaux. Opening were Laura Veirs and Division Day. The latter was supposed to be Nedelle but she had to cancel, unfortunately.

I only saw about a song and a half of Division Day after I got there, so I’ll just skip to the next bit.

We got there well into the first band and JV (as those of us that are his pals call him) draws a lot of people in his home town of SF, so I was surprised that we could get right up against the stage before Laura Veirs. I haven’t been right up against the stage in forever. I felt like a school boy.

Laura Veirs put out a solid album in 2005 called Year of Meteors. While we had in in rotation at KZSU I played it every week. I sort of didn’t think about it much since then, listening to it occasionally. Laura came on and it was just her; she sometimes tours with a band but I think this part of this tour was just her. It was just her and a guitar and a bunch of pedals. Oh and she had a really sweet drum machine. I should find out what it was. Anyway, she played through her set using a sampling pedal to great effect (much like my friend Jeff Miller does), sampling her guitar, drum machine and vocals and looping. Overall a very solid set. I’ll have to listen to more Veirs.

Incidentally, Laura Veirs is not only talented but she’s very attractive. Basically, I want to marry her.

JV came on after a bit of a break. Once again, he seemed overjoyed to be home after a long tour. He joked around with his band mates and the crowd. He’s touring with the same band two tours in a row for the first time in forever and they sounded pretty tight. They put together a marathon set (25-ish songs) that lasted almost two hours, but it was a good time.

Overall a good time. It would have been cool if Nedelle had been on the bill as well, but you can’t win them all. The only downside of going to this concert was missing Jason Molina across town at the Great American Music Hall and Elf Power over at the Cafe du Nord. Seriously, couldn’t they have scheduled all those bands a couple days apart?

So not only is this a sweet german indie rock blog, but it has a bunch of mp3s of a good band, Beirut, who I previously posted about.