adrian is rad

Here’s my radio show’s playlist.

Also, I got it started late and my show went on late as well (Wednesday Night Live ran late) so it’s a bit short this week, but I have the, as I’m calling it, NEWSPECIALFUN:

11 29 06 - I Once Was Canadian (KZSU) (mp3)

I’m fascinated by little perculiarities in our world. There’s a country, which is soverign over a city, which is only 0.2 square miles in size. That’s 108 acres, much smaller than a large urban park. (Also of note with the Holy See/ Vatican is that there are various Vacitan enclaves on separated from the Vatican and surrounded by Italy, including Castel Gandolfo and Patricrchal Basilicas, but they’re sort of like embassies with extraterritorial status.)

People also seem to be fascinated that Lesotho (formerly Basutoland), where my mom spent much of her youth, is completely surrounded by South Africa. Well that makes a lot more sense to me than Büsingen which is a German town completely separated from Germany and surrounded by Switzerland. It is separated by about 1km from the rest of Germany.

It’d be kind of cool to live there though. You get alternate addresses and telephone numbers if you want people to call or write to you in Germany or Switzerland. You also get to live and work in Switzerland without a visa after living there for ten years.

That Beirut show that I went to has has popped up at the Internet Archive.

It’s a really good show, even in repeat. There’s a woman screaming like an idiot next to the guy recording it for the first song and a bit of the next couple, but once you get past that, it’s a worthwhile listen. It’s available in a number of formats, too (mp3, ogg, FLAC). And it’s free.

and it’s warm in here. I don’t want to leave.

I’m getting ready to leave the Phoenix airport and, appropriately, I’m listening to “Goodbye Sky Harbor“.

In the middle of a stream of bittersweet nostalgia, I took a bunch of photos this weekend.

They’re here.

I did a bunch of fun stuff, today, some of which I may write about later, but, for now, it’s all about Paul’s Compact Discs in Bloomfield. Dave and I made the trek over to Bloomfield after a Primanti’s sandwhich this afternoon.

It’s a smallish record store, not giant by any means, but also not shoebox and very navigable. The way it’s laid out and the way things are organized made it easy to look through things. They had a good selection among indie music, including the classic stuff (they had 3 of the 4 Seam albums in stock). They also have a good vinyl (7″ and LPs) selection. Their used CD selection is small and flat-priced (all $8) so that’s not the greatest. The people behind seemed knowledgable (one geeky clerk informed me of a Girl Talk show tonight after I bought the album).

I’d say it’s perhaps on par with Aquarius or slightly lower on my list for small record stores, but that’s saying a lot: Aquarius is pretty amazing and I like Paul’s a lot too.

I got:

• Girl Talk Night Ripper
• Ida Will You Find Me [used]
• Sigur Ros Saeglopur

I was familiar with the Ida and the Sigur Ros sounds good from first listen. I had heard little snippets of the Girl Talk and had read the rave reviews and I figured I should buy it in Pittsburgh if I was going to buy it, given that he’s a Pittsburgh local. I listened to it in the car a few times while driving around today and, I must say, I’m impressed. He takes tiny samples of pop songs, often dozens for each song of his and mashes them together (quite different from a “mash up” in most ways) to make another song. The samples he mixes and the smothness with which he does it, for the most part, are pretty amazing. It’s good music and it’s fun to try to pick out the samples he’s using. Today I definitely heard, among others, Neutral Milk Hotel, the Pixies, Verve (itself a sample), Kanye West, Gwen Stefani, and Elton John. No one’s sacred.

I also found out today that Unwed Sailor has cancelled their tour, including tomorrow night’s stop at the Brillobox, so that’s sad. I was looking forward to that. If I’d know that it was cancelled (I just found out), I would probably have made more of an effort to catch Girl Talk tonight at Belvedere’s. Oh well.

I’m back in Pittsburgh for the Thanksgiving holiday. Today I went up to New Brighton in Beaver County to grab lunch with my friend Chris Atwell. He’s been working at his uncle’s business, Ceramic Color and Chemical Manufacturing Co. They take metals (inorganic chemicals), grind them and combine them in various ways to make pigments, which are largely used in tiles and other ceramics. He gave me a tour of the plant, which is mostly within a very cool 200 year old building and it was a bunch of industrial equipment. Man, I love factory tours. Giant mechanical equipment is my thing.

(Unfortunately, I wasn’t allowed to take any photos of the giant mechanical equipment inside.)

I also think it’s cool that they’re doing what they’re doing: growing slowly, competing on the global market with a family business using local labor. That seems increasingly rare these days.

We ended up grabbing lunch at the Backdoor Tavern up there. (I must admit, I winced after I hit enter in google with the search terms ‘backdoor’ and ‘beaver’ (it’s in Beaver county) thinking I’d get a bunch of dirty results but I was actually able to find the place I wanted.) I got a really solid meatball sandwhich and a Penn Pilsner. The total for the two? $7. In Palo Alto, I might get a mediocre sandwhich for seven bucks…

After lunch, the following sign caught my eye and I had to check out the Rosalind Candy Castle:

That 3ft tall chocolate Santa was like a little person but jolly and made of chocolate. mmmmmm three foot tall chocolate Santa…. (give me a minute here.) I ended up getting a Santa chocolate lollipop and some dark chocolate covered pretzels which my family agreed were excellent when we had them for dessert tonight.

Then I walked through downtown Beaver before coming home.

I put more photos from today online

(How is something so simple like going to the same place and getting a pizza so awesome? Wish you were there, Andy.)

why don’t they just make everyone get naked to go through security at the airports. I’m already taking off my belt and shoes here!

I was delayed there a bit, but here’s the November mix tape. Hopefully there’s enough time for you to download it and get it on to your favorite digital audio player for your Thanksgiving travels.

You can download the zip file with the following:
1. mp3s of the songs
2. liner notes
3. playlist files (iTunes txt file and an m3u file)

(for the iTunes file, simply import all the songs to your library and then go to file->import and then select the song list. you should now have the 2006sept playlist in your iTunes with all the songs in the correct order).

If you want to read the liner notes before downloading the whole thing, they’re here. It starts out with a chunk of great, not super common oldies stuff and then goes into the indie rock. Bishop Allen, Polyphonic Spree, Mogwai and Phil Spector are all represented.

Adrian’s November 2006 mix tape [zip file] (moved to password protected folder)

This’ll be up for a limited time (~1 week) before being moved to a password protected folder.

If you like the artists or songs, I suggest supporting them by buying their music, going to a show, buying merchandise from them or at least telling other people about them.

I started this thing two years ago today.

The blog stats: 691 posts (0.945 posts/ day on average) and 1,056 comments (1.53 comments/ post; 1.44 comments/ day on average) in 32 categories (21.59 posts/ category on average). At last count, the comment leaders (besides me) were Jesse (130 comments) and Milkshake (125 coments). If you don’t count general (613 posts) or the overall music category (278 posts), the most posts are in music (recorded) (114 posts), sports (97 posts) and music (radio) (84 posts). The fewest posts are in music (photography) (2 posts, a new category) and arts (3 posts).

There are 691 posts and I don’t remember them all, but I think some of my favorite posts are in the list category. Lists like

• 4 things I will be pissed off if my mom throws out
• 2 ways I use senses in interesting ways for personal interaction
• 3 habits I have that probably annoy my friends
• 4 songs that Jesse and I played repeatedly in room 42 and are therefore candidates for the room 42 mix tape
• how to celebrate valentines day right

(that’s right, a list of lists! METALIST!)

I also like posts like how to wash and dry your socks and underwear if your crap airline strands you in Las Vegas when you’re trying to get home for Christmas and a couple of the posts where I wrote about my adolescent or past expieriences, like this one about Roald Dahl’s Omnibus and my fifth trip to Germany. The covers contest has come and gone, but now I have online mixtapes to impose on you.

It’s been an interesting experience. Sometimes I’ll start talking to someone (this happens particularly with dug) about something that happened and he’ll just say “I know, I read it on your blog”. I don’t think I’m a particularly good writer, but I enjoy writing here to some extent and I think my writing’s probably gotten better. I try not to take this place too seriously. After all, it’s just me writing about some crap on the web. There are probably a couple people who read this that I don’t know, but I don’t get an delusions of grandeur here.

So, any thoughts? Any of your favorite posts that I missed? Any particularly good or embarrassingly bad adrianisrad moments?

I saw Borat Cultural Learnings… on Friday at the Capitol Drive In in San Jose.

Hilarious, funny, awkward, causing of uproarious laughter. Worth seeing.

I was thinking about how I’d write that it wasn’t offensive—something I’ve heard describing the movie quite a bit, but then I realized I’ve gotten somewhat hard to offend. There are a lot of offensive things said in the movie, but by saying them, it’s pointing out that they’re rediculous and offensive, I think. Then there’s the naked man wrestling.

Just about every time I have an out-of-town guest, I propose going to Amoeba. They half-heartedly agree. I buy seven or eight CDs and they buy one or three.

Yesterday, I went with Liz. According to plan, she got three CDs and I got seven:

• Mark Kozelek Rock N Roll Singer
• Rogue Wave Out of the Shadow
• V/A The British are Coming, Vol. 1
• Polyphonic Spree Wait
• Red House Painters Songs for Blue Guitar
• Pedro the Lion Whole EP
• V/A Songs of the Old Regular Baptists, Vol 2: Lined-out Hymnody from Southeastern Kentucky

There are a couple entertaining videos that I found or ran across in the recent times:

Aries Spears impressions while freestyling. This is a guy doing impressions of LL Cool J, Snoop Dog, DMX and Jay Z while freestyling. It’s pretty dang impressive, though I’m not familiar with DMX at all and only somewhat familiar with the other three. I’m still very impressed. (A couple things of note: a) that’s Live 105, in SF and that’s the same studio where I did the college dj of the week thing and 2) it appears Woody, one of the hosts, is a Steelers fan as he’s sporting a hat and a Willy Parker jersey). (via stereogum)

Peyton Manning Mastercard Priceless Ad. I can see how you might not like Peyton Manning, but man, I love this commercial which started running last year. They have a second, similar one this season but it’s not as good. I laugh every time I see this one.

[Update:] Oh man, I found another Peyton priceless commercial and it’s hilarious too. Also, there’s a blooper commercial from the first Peyton video and the making of (including the actual commercial at the end) a third in the series.

Amazingly the Steelers pulled off another win. Roethlisberger threw for 224 yards in the fourth quarter (out of 272 yards total); he was intercepted 3 times in the first half. I have an idea, Ben: throw well the whole game! I know it’s crazy; just crazy enough that it might work.

You can check out the video highlights (check out the end to see the crappy-but-somehow-it-worked go-ahead shovel pass), the post game quotes, or the rather pathetic game stats.

Sometimes I have to remind myself to remember. It was a bit over a year ago—November 13 last year. FB was a good guy.

My roommate’s pretty dang smart. Incidentally, TV skipping commercials automagically is just about the best thing EVER.

I saw and ad for a touring production of this the other day. Why? Why must ‘broadway’ (or the west end or theatre or whatever you want to call this in general) ruin everything. Check out the ‘video clips’ (sorry no direct link—stupid Flash) on that site if you have any doubt if it’ll be horrible.

Two questions:

1. Has there been any originality[1] on the stage since West Side Story[2]?
2. Does the public demand unoriginal copycat works or does the broadway establishment impose them on people?

[1] Even ‘good’ productions currently on Broadway (e.g. Spamalot, the Producers) are not original.
[2] I will maintain that this is the best musical every made and the movie version is a great movie. What other Broadway musical can hold its own, musically, with the best ‘classical’ works of the twentieth century (especially if you limit it to American classical works)?.

I will let you know: Bam Stain and Drain Cleaner works. I don’t know if my respiratory system will ever be the same but it works.

My radio show, I Once was Canadian will be on in its old time slot this week: Thursday 6-9am PST, due to a visitor.

So, all you east coast people can listen live. I’ll be tired and it’ll be early, so you can listen to my deep, groggy just-woken-up voice on the radio. Tune in!

Do you guys still read this thing?

Everyone:

do I write too much about music? have I alienated you with my incessant talk about music?

do you have favorite types of posts on the old ab.com?

I am here to egotistically proclaim my greatness, but if I can do that while also providing something interesting to read, maybe I can tweak the formula.

Maybe it was growing up during the early 90’s but for some reason I still tune in to Saturday Night Live every week. For a few years, I’d watch up until Weekend Update and then switch it off: during most of the Falon-Fey years it was certainly the funniest thing of the night. Since Fallon and then Fey left, even that hasn’t been all that funny recently.

But tonight I was surprised. The show was actually funny throughout. I laughed out loud during a number of sketches. Maybe it was Alec Baldwin (who hosted) who was great. Or maybe Tina Fey wrote some sketches (she cameo-ed on the show). And it probably wasn’t hurt by cameos by, Tina Fey, Tracey Morgan, Steve Martin, Martin Short (who appeared for about 22 seconds), Paul McCartney (similarly, 22 seconds), and Tony Bennett.

Anyway, funny stuff tonight. Maybe it’ll happen again next week…or again in six or seven years.

I went to see Bishop Allen (their myspace page) on Thursday at the Bar of Contemporary Art. They were the second of three on the bill, the headliners being the Starlight Mints.

If you don’t know Bishop Allen, check out some of their mp3s on their webpage or listen to the ones I’m going to hand pick for you:
Bishop Allen - Same Fire [from June] (mp3)
Bishop Allen - Flight 180 [from April] (mp3)
Bishop Allen - Things are What you Make of Them [from Charm School](mp3)

They’ve announced (and so far followed through with, though sometimes a bit delayed) a plan to release an EP for every month until they release their next EP. I can’t imagine doing this, especially for months when they’re touring. I may or may not have bought all the months EPs they had for sale at the show (January-August). I’ll possibly post a review of all of them later.

Bishop Allen went on after a somewhat clever but ultimately unexciting opener. The stage at BoCA is basically tiny, so the drums were off to one side, instead of the usual behind-the-leadman and the bass player and guitarist were behind the drums. Sort of an odd set up. I feel like I’m fairly unfamiliar with Bishop Allen—I’ve only listen to Charm School a few times and then the mp3s that they’ve offered up for the month EPs, but somehow I went through the set knowing most of the songs they played (maybe all but two). That’s always kind of nice, knowing the songs a band is playing.

They played well. Particularly I liked the versions of “Busted Heart”, “Same Fire”, “Flight 180″ they did. It was a fun and energy-filled set.

After Bishop Allen, the bar cleared out before Starlight Mint came up and continued clearing out throughout their set to the point where about forty people were left. The sound for the first part of their set was really badl; well the vocals were too low for the whole set but sound at the beginning was particularly muddy. They did a number of halloweeny or horror movie sounding songs at the beginning and that, combined with the muddy sound, put me off for most of their set. I must say I liked the last few songs they did.

I’m pretty excited to say that super-local (Redwood City) blog favorite the Light Footwork will be performing live on KZSU’s Wednesday Night Live, its live local band show, on Wednesday December 13 at 9pm (PST). I’m going to be hosting the program. Let me know if you have any burning questions for the band; I can ask them between song.

If you don’t know the Light Footwork yet, check out some mp3s. (Or check out any of the aforelinked blogs.)

Also, Jay (of tLF) and I hit up the Bishop Allen show at BoCA in SF last night. Good show. I’ll write more about it later. Something I was pretty amused by: someone took one of those ‘Visitor’ stickers and filled out the rest ‘to the hipster indie world (please by nice)’.

Once again, tune in to KZSU (90.1FM or online) on December 13, 2006 at 9pm (PST) to hear the Light Footwork. (I’ll see what I can do about putting an mp3 up of the show after the date, but no guarantees.)

Here’s my playlist for tonight’s show.

Also! my NEWSPECIALFUN seems to be working so I have a recording of the show:

I Once Was Canadian - November 8, 2006

Grab it now! It’ll be gone in a couple weeks.

Just two. I had a short ska phase around the end of psychedelic classic rock and before I really got into indie rock. It’s tied in my mind to Boy Scouts and a few kinds who I talked about these albums with or listened to them with.

1. The Mighty Mighty Bosstones Let’s Face It
2. Skankin’ Pickles Green Album

I should listen to them again and see what I think now.

Members of the Columbus Blue Jackets (NHL) are recording a Christmas album.

The article’s interesting, but the best quotes are from the studio owner/ engineer:

In the engineer’s booth, as the players took a break and wiped their brows, DiCenzo commented: “I am shocked. It was not terrible.”

and then later:

“But all of them did way better than I expected. When the key would change, most of the time most of them hit it. I really thought I’d be hitting the Excedrin pretty hard by now”

(via largehearted boy)

I went to ten [1] (rediculous!) concerts in October, so I was pretty busy there. There were a couple I wanted to write about but didn’t and now they seem a bit irrelevant. Well, I’m going to write what I wanted to say about them, in brief, now:

• Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, October 7: You get to see great artists (Earl Scruggs, Gillian Welch, etc.) for free, but you have to put up with the worst crowds ever.
• The Long Winters at the Cafe du Nord, October 13: What Made Milwaukee Famous was entertaining, the Long Winters were good. John Roderick was very entertaining. I took some pictures and put them here.
• The Hold Steady at the Great American Hall, October 17: They’re a bar band. They’re loud and rawkus. Craig Finn was almost definitely very drunk. The vocals were too low in the mix for a band that I like largely because of the deep lyrics, but it was still a very fun show.
• Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy at the Great American, Oct 31: While I was standing outside waiting for some friends, who walked up to the will call booth but Mark Kozelek. I barely avoided turning into a total fanboy and played it cool. Oh and the show: Will Oldham is a fantastically weird guy. Parts of the show were great and parts of the show were a bit boring.

[1] for real:

1. Jose Gonzalez at EBF, October 6
2. Hardly Strictly Bluegrass in Golden Gate Park, SF, October 7
3. Sufjan Stevens in Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley, October 11
4. John Vanderslice at the 750 Pub, Stanford, October 12
5. Long Winters w/ What Made Milwaukee Famous at Cafe du Nord, SF, October 13
6. the Hold Steady at the Great American, SF, October 17
7. Damien Jurado at the Swedish American Hall, SF, October 20
8. Beirut at the Great American, SF, October 20
9. David Bazan at Swedish American Hall, SF, October 27
10. Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy at the Great American, SF, October 31

Friday Night Lights just had Beulah (”Score from Augusta” I think) as background music. That’s pretty obscure.

(And they used Explosions in the Sky later as well.)

This morning I received an email from the nice people at insound letting me know I could pre-order the Mark Kozelek Live double CD Little Drummer Boy Live. A Mark Kozelek live CD? wow! I thought it’d be a Christmas live album. It’s not (but White Christmas Live follows the same fake-Christmas-album-that-only-has-one-Christmas-song-on-
it-and-that’s-the-title-of-the-album model).

From their email:

Just in time for the holidays, Caldo Verde Records will release a limited edition (10,000 North America), 20-song, live compilation from Red House Painters and Sun Kil Moon songwriter Mark Kozelek

I would like to point out that, though 10,000 is technically “limited” in that there is a limit, it’s hardly limited in any real sense. A live double CD for a semi-obscure indie artist? I’m guessing it’ll sell right around 10,000 at most anyway. Indie kids love buying “limited” quantity records&mash;usually out of 500 or 1000— so it’s probably just playing off of that.

It comes out November 28 and it’s $15.99 for a double CD set and insound’s offering 10% off (your whole order!) with a coupon code, which I can tell you if you contact me privately. Mark, if you haven’t seen him live, actually does pretty different versions of stuff live than on the album. I’ll probably buy it because Mark Kozelek can do almost nothing wrong.

Over two years after its completion, I finally posted my Coke Can Birdman Costume on instructables. Part of the motivation was the Halloween Project Contest.

Last night I saw the Penguins play the Sharks last night. They lost in a close and well-played game. It was a fun game to watch. The new young players (by which I mean Evgeni Malkin, Sidney Crosby, Jordan Staal, and Marc-Andre Fleury) are really good, by the way. And if you haven’t seen, the Penguins are actually doing well so far this season.

The Steelers lost again today. They actually seemed to make a game of it until the end there. But in the end, the result is the same: disappointment. The culprit was turnovers again. Blah. Also: post game quotes.

Funny!

(via boingboing)

My radio show’s playlist for this week. Captain Dee co-hosted this special ‘folk’ show.

Also it appears the cron job or as I call it “SUPERMAGICSPECIALFUN” worked and recorded my show automagically:

I Once Was Canadian November 1, 2006 (mp3)

My show starts maybe 30 seconds in.

The mp3 will be up for about two weeks so grab it now while you still can!