Never Knows Best

The Missing Cat Poster Blog

2012-01-21T17:00:00.001-08:00

I have started a new blog devoted to posting local missing cat posters, and comparing and critiquing them with regard to their similarities to the various formats of film making.

I would be glad to accept submissions if anyone stumbles upon an intriguing cat poster of their own.

http://themissingcatposterblog.blogspot.com

Skyscraper

2012-01-18T13:53:00.000-08:00

I finished my self-titled Skyscraper album.

You can download it here.

It will be the second release on my cassette tape label, Warm Gospel, when I get around to getting tapes made, which should be sometime in the next month or so.

Let me know if you want a tape, and also whether or not that download link works.

Thanks.

85

2012-01-11T12:03:00.000-08:00

My Top 9 Favorite Releases of 2011

2012-01-01T16:58:00.000-08:00

9. Oneohtrix Point Never - Replica

I remember when I began messing around with samples, and producers like Madlib and J Dilla really began to leave me jaw-dropped with the ways they pieced samples from all different genres and time periods together.

On Replica, Oneohtrix Point Never seems to take all of those short little leftover snippets from the beginning or end of the kind of samples most musicians are discovering now, and blends them so perfectly that, what sounds like a mistake at first, begins to sound like a beat or a melody or chorus.

8. Blouse - S/T

Blouse takes everything that was so new/now about the late 70's and the 80's, strips it of all the crap that didn't stand the test of time, and coats it in a handful of our late 2000's reverb, making the old sound new or the new sound old, or both.

7. Grouper - A | A

On Dragging a Dead Dear Up a Hill, Grouper seemed to float just beneath the surface of a large, lonely body of water, occasionally surfacing for just enough air to dive down for another swim.

A | A is more like laying on your back, staring at the stars, and forgetting that the ground is underneath you.

6. RAJA - The October Series Mixtape Trilogy

This immense trilogy spans 3 mixtapes, and nearly 80 songs. Each song crackles and vibrates through milk crate after milk crate of assorted old records, never straying too far from the soft, established emotion that each tape conjures.

Unlike some beat tapes, these songs feel like complete pieces rather than skeletons or ideas for someone else to pick up on and finish.

Free Download

5. City Center - Box of Sand

Fred Thomas, the man responsible for City Center, makes a lot of music. A helluva lot.

I still don't understand how musicians like this differentiate between what is going to be an "album" and what is simply going to be some side release or EP.

While the production of City Center's 2011 album Redeemer, certainly implies a greater degree of time and work was put into it, Box of Sand better shows Thomas' tendency of messing around with all kinds of new noises with each release.

Free Download

4. Shabazz Palaces - Black Up

I've already said a great deal about this one in an earlier post, and I think it is a good example of 2011's tendency of approaching established genres in new ways. Pushing things forward by looking back.

3. RUN DMT - Dreams

Stumbling its way through surf rock into on-the-floor-of-the-bedroom pop music, a description of Dreams might come a little too close to a comparison to every other one-man, sample-based operation with a copy of Person Pitch gathering dust somewhere in the middle of that milk crate full of records. But such comparisons are getting old enough that they’ve begun gathering dust themselves, and that is kind of the point of nostalgia, no matter how recent—accepting influences, and desiring to be a part of that which we look back on so fondly, and it tends to be a fortunate side effect of sampling.

What Dreams offers is a plunge into an ocean that hasn’t moved since surf-obsessed teenagers started writing songs about it in the early 60’s. The difference is that Run DMT’s Collins is more interested in what is going on below the surface where all the surfing is taking place. Tracks swirl around, ranging from 60’s style pop to drenched, slow-moving drone that reminds us how far we are sinking into this stagnant, beautiful underwater landscape that will be here long after we’ve left it.

2. DJ DJ Tanner - S/T

What I like so much about DJ DJ Tanner is how much it represents my belief that ideas, creativity, and experimentation make for better music than raw talent. Too often, I think the most talented musicians waste it on emulation, because it tends to be easier and more rewarding.

This album (and the various other clumps of music I have downloaded), is an album of ideas, showing the minimalist potential of loops, sampled or crafted, to expand outward as they repeat. That potential carries us through the highs and lows of each track as they drop in and sputter out, passing up the establishment of pacing -- the accepted technique most loop-based musicians rely on in absence of the dynamics of a whole band.

The focus on ideas over production is like DJ DJ Tanner's prolific call-to-arms. Too much attention to detail would only serve to wipe away the dust that establishes the environment of each sample, and leave less time for the kind of ideas that make this release so good.

Free Download

1. EMA - Past Life Martyred Saint

If someone had described EMA to me before I heard it, I don't think I ever would have listened to it, because it is kind of hard to provide a description that does it justice.

It has distorted guitars and drums and music swells, but it isn't really anything like rock music?

A lot of the lyrics are strangely humorous, but it isn't very comical?

As mentioned in the Shabazz Palaces blurb, 2011 was a year of turning previously established genres on their heads. Past Life Martyred Saints sounds so familiar in so many ways, but no one could call it rock, because that just wouldn't quite cover it.

All of the elements that make up this album seem so familiar, but are just strange enough to keep it from sounding entirely recognizable, like a painting hung slightly askew.

The Problem(s) With Music Blogs: Unknown Mortal Orchestra and Gauntlet Hair at Bunk Bar

2011-11-17T17:08:00.000-08:00

Problem 1:

Damn you music blogs for introducing me to a bunch of great music by bands still too small to consider touring anytime soon. I’ve been waiting for a Gauntlet Hair tour since their single “I’ve Been Thinking...” was run through the cogs of the internet hype machine about a year and a half ago.

That anticipation mixed with a headlining Unknown Mortal Orchestra at Bunk Bar two nights in a row seemed too good to not be a misprint.

Problem 2:

The main way discovering new music on blogs is different than, say, the radio, is the translation of the music into text. More and more, my first experience with a band or a song is through reading descriptions and opinions of it. This acts as a music filter not at all based on just listening and deciding if I, ya know, like it.

I have probably spent more time reading about Thursday’s headliners, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, than I have actually listening to them. I’ve never liked funk music, and couldn’t get over the numerous associations made between this band the genre. In this case (and many others I have yet to discover), I was wrong to take the word for it.

Unknown Mortal Orchestra kicked out some very danceable tunes just buried enough in that haze of bedroom pop to prevent them from falling into that rut, appropriately described as “groovy.”

Their self-titled album has since become one of my favorite examples of a band capable of giving a nostalgic nod to the music of the 70’s and 80’s without actually turning around and chillin’ in it.

Problem 3:

By introducing music to fans via text, new reasons for liking a band or a song are introduced. I find myself deciding to listen to a song based on things like what effects the song is drenched in, where the band is from, or what label released the album. In short, I give myself reasons to like or dislike music before I actually have the chance to hear it.

So, when someone noticed all of my anticipation to see Gauntlet Hair channeled into, what I call, my dance moves, and asked me what I thought of the band, I found myself answering with a number of reasons—none of which were simply “They were great”.

No, I launched into a rant about Colorado bands and the DIY venue the Rhinoceropolis, and how much I like it when bands coat their music in so many delay effects that you really can’t single out any one instrument. This is, of course, way too much information to yell into someone’s ear at an already loud show and mostly just causes confusion rather than answering the initial question.

That being said, Gauntlet Hair was great and every bit as fun as I hoped they would be, and every song just kind of blurred into this large, echoey mess of weirdo dance music, which was a solid live representation of their recently released self-titled album on Dead Oceans.

The last thing I learned from this show, which has nothing to do with music blogs or either of the bands: Don’t be the one holding the pipe made out of a pomegranate when the bartender is angrily pushing his way through the crowd to confiscate it.

Never Knows Best Issue 4

2011-11-01T23:07:00.001-07:00

Sixteen pages. All comics, including:

St. Arc
The Quarter Life Crisis
Portland, IA
Skinny Jeans
Mew and Mewtwo

And some random others.

Let me know if you want one, k?

Altered Zones John Maus Interview

2011-07-31T12:21:00.000-07:00

Although, I haven't really grown to like his music quite yet (I'm sure I will), this John Maus guy is kind of becoming my hero. This interview, the way his gestures and manner of speaking is described is like the personification of that really famous Kerouac quote (ya know, the one written on all the On The Road posters). He is surely the least chill "chillwaver" in existence.

http://alteredzones.com/posts/1713/artist-profile-john-maus/

St. Arc #1

2011-07-15T20:09:00.000-07:00

Here is a new comic I am working on that will mostly occur in order and tell some weird re-hashing of all of the myths surrounding Joan of Arc, as if she were somehow canonized while she were living and actually lived in some geographically blurry version of the Wild West and had something to do with the Ark of the Covenant.

I have a lot of ideas for this, so I will try to finish these somewhat regularly, although I am terrible at drawing horses and a bunch of other things, so it tends to take me a really long time to do something even as simple as this little 4-panel deal you see here.

Heaven and Hell and the Coast as the Line In Between

2011-07-13T19:57:00.000-07:00

Multnomah Falls

Devil's Rest

The Pacific Ocean

Angel's Rest

Shabazz Palaces, Pet Sounds, and the Unfamiliarly Familiar

2011-07-02T09:10:00.000-07:00

I, like many others, am currently floored by Shabazz Palace’s recently released album Black Up. Within the first minute or two of listening to it, I could already tell it was unlike anything I had ever heard before, that is, unlike any other hip-hop I have ever heard. I started to think about how strange it is that I can have that thought “This is totally unlike anything I have ever heard” in hearing a song, or a sound, or in this case, an album, yet still bring a specific genre to mind within which to establish the guidelines for what “anything” can mean in that statement. In this case, anything, only means every other hip-hop song and artist I have heard, rather than every song or album or artist or ambient sound I have ever heard anywhere in my entire life.

So, Shabazz Palace’s new album is like something I have heard before—hip-hop. The way Black Up plays out so uniquely using the same, familiar tools hip-hop has been developing since it began is, in many ways, more incredible than musicians using entirely new and unfamiliar techniques to make music actually completely unlike anything anyone has ever heard before, which is certainly something still worth admiring.

There are thousands and thousands of examples of this throughout the history of music, and we can thank these examples for progressing music to where it is now, and establishing new genres when some artist or movement managed to push things beyond those established lines we set up to define genres. The Beach Boy’s Pet Sounds and subsequent Good Vibrations single, in lieu Smile, are classic examples of early game-changers.

I’ve read that “sonic” was the word primarily used to describe the new direction The Beach Boys’ sound was headed as of the release of Pet Sounds. The coining of this new term is proof enough that this album was anything else being made at the time, while still managing to be familiar enough to be called pop music (and, therefore, hold the attention of that delicate demographic of teenagers who practically determined the success or failure of albums released in the early to mid 60’s).

Pet Sounds is of course still mentioned frequently today, due to its own genre-pushing inventiveness and production techniques, often making top so-and-so lists, not to mention spawning its own “Bands Who Are Trying to Make Pet Sounds, Again” lists and claims. But the fact that this claim is often made of other bands then and still to this day, shows that it has become something that is like other things we have heard--all the music effected by it. In fact, it requires a bit of research and listening to understand how Pet Sounds, which has since become so clearly pop music, was new and bold and inventive at the time of its release.

J Dilla’s Donuts is another more recent (and probably more relevant) example of this within the same genre as Shabazz Palaces (and Bullion’s mixtape Pet Sounds: In the Key of Dee is a wonderful combination of the marks left on music by The Beach Boys and J Dilla).

Donuts has been so influential that it spawned numerous Dilla-esque (a J Dilla-specific version of it “sonic”) claims in hip-hop to come, even spreading into other genres as well, including our modern day pop radio music and genres as small and specific as, say, chillwave.

Whether or not Shabazz Palace’s Black Up will have this effect on future music will be left to time to tell. I’m sure no one could justify their claims at the time of the release of Pet Sounds that it would change the way music would be made and heard afterward, although it isn’t a huge step to make when it follows the claim “this album is unlike anything I have ever heard before.”

The difference between the two claims is that one need not justify the latter with anything besides the wonder they experience upon hearing this new musical territory for the first time, and then second time… and third time… and fourth time…

Wise Blood, Holocene Birthday Party

2011-06-09T23:00:00.000-07:00

Wise Blood and Friendly Fires at Doug Fir

I found out about this show because I was obsessively listening to the 5 or 6 Wise Blood songs I could find and download on repeat while I was working my 9-5 temp job I do from time to time, and I thought to myself, "I really like this! I wonder if this band is touring," and sure enough, he had a Portland date on his calendar.

It wasn't until later that I found out he was the opener for Friendly Fires who I hadn't really heard of and didn't like upon investigating them.

But I went anyway, and I was really hoping Wise Blood was still going to be playing solo (I think I kind of explained this obsession I have with solo, sample-based artists in my Dirty Beaches post), but he had a drummer and someone covering all his samples and keyboard playing, which gave the main dude behind the band, Chris, a chance to kind of dance and wander into the crowd and drink too much and smash bottles. He seemed very appreciative to just be playing because he said he usually just tries to get into fights, but instead was offering to sex the whole audience, which was, ya know, nice, I guess.

I ended up leaving early because I just really didn't want to see Friendly Fires.

Doug Fir shows are always really expensive.

Also, I hate paying headliner prices to see the opening bands, but it happens.

Holocene Birthday Party

The best part of this show was when the guy doing all of the DJing for Purple and Green kept pausing his songs to tell the audience to fuck off because he thought we weren't into it or dancing hard enough, and he kept telling us to go home. I kind of thought it was just something he says to get the crowd pumped up and dancing, but he kept doing it during each song, and at one point asked us to imagine that this was the last night of our lives. He slammed his laptop shut at the end and, I think, stormed off the stage without saying anything, although I could just be remembering it wrong. I did feel like the entire room was pretty into it though, so I didn't really see where he was coming from. I don't know anything about being a DJ, and I know very little about making dance music, but it does seem that it would be very hard to get a vibe going that people can dance to if you keep stopping the beat every 4 minutes.

The last band, Miracles Club, was great, and I'm glad I finally was able to see them after noticing their name around the city for so long. They played every song they knew (which was only 6-7, I think), and I don't know if it makes it seem more personal or less professional or if it is just endearing when that happens, but I love it.

I saw most of Blouse's set, and I liked them quite a bit, although they sound very of the time, and by that I mean they have that 80's throwback thing which a lot of bands (and people, too) seem to be doing a lot now, which I am mostly okay with because all of that music being made now sounds pretty good and I really don't like very much of the 80's music it is all stemming from. Kind of like how the remake of Last House on the Left was way better than the original.

The overall lineup for this show was full and good, and it reflected my entire attitude toward a lot of Portland music--there is an awful lot of electronic pop bands here, and I like seeing them all, but it is becoming a bit exhausting. Is this the Starfucker aftermath? I'm honestly asking. I'm still kind of new here and know that I couldn't back up a claim like that if I were to actually make it.

Some Recent Shows

2011-05-23T10:24:00.000-07:00

Witch Gardens, Aan at Bunk Bar

Bunk Bar has just begun booking shows recently (the past 6-8 months), and it has already become one of my favorite venues in Portland, although a big part of that might be due to how close it is to my house and how easy it is to bike to their shows.

I have seen a number of great local bands there already, and they have booked a number of touring bands as well, such as Mister Heavenly (you know, that band with Michael Cera in it), and Handsome Furs, although that show sold out and I ended up just watching through one of the windows, which was surprisingly close to the stage, and they opened up the doors to the venue, so the sound carried outside pretty well. I shared the window with some people from Nebraska who said they had heard of Ames, IA when I told them the story of seeing Handsome Furs at the M-Shop there and Dan Boeckner telling the audience the story of walking around campustown earlier that day and someone in a big truck driving by and calling him a fag, despite the fact that he was walking around with his wife, and I'm pretty sure the entire audience just kind of nodded and thought to themselves, "Yup, that's Ames." And then 3 minutes after telling this Nebraska couple that story, they just kind of started making out right in front of me, which felt kind of strange and mid-conversation to me, since it was one of those we don't know each other so we only say something every minute or 2 but I still consider us in conversation type of conversations.

This show wasn't anything like that, though, and it was part of Bunk Bar's Free Tuesday Shows thing they have been doing pretty consistently for a few months now. I had never listened to Aan, and all I knew was that my roommate told me she had listened to them on myspace earlier that day and that they weren't very good, which is sometimes a really good indicator that I will like it, although this time I thought she was kind of right.

They were pretty cool, and they spazzed out a lot after playing really quietly for a few minutes, which I liked. But what didn't help their case is that when we got there, a different band was playing, and since I had never heard Aan before, I just assumed that the band playing was them, but it turned out to be Witch Gardens from Seattle who were way good and had me thinking they would be a great opener for Times New Viking, who are one of a few incredible upcoming shows at the Bunk Bar, including White Denim on May 29th and Damon and Naomi (from Galaxie 500) on June 1st.

Prescription Pills, Ghost Animal at Holocene

There were additional openers for this show (Period Romance, and one other that I can't remember), but I missed them because... well, because I was baking a strawberry rubarb pie.

There was a very sparse crowd for this one, which must be kind of rare for Holocene shows, because the bands seemed to be kind of doing that tongue-in-cheek type of performing that I take as them just kind of pissed off and fucking around, because they were expecting more people to show up. I could be reading too much into it though.

I felt kind of bad for Ghost Animal in particular, because it was their 7" release show, and I think they are a well-known Portland band, so they were probably expecting more people to be there for it, and the guitarist seem kind of pissed off about something, and that could have been it.

They were great though. Just really simple fuzzed-out pop made with only a guitar, a floor tom and a snare drum. And they did a really great cover of, what I think was, Ceremony by Joy Division (or maybe its New Order), but I only know it because Galaxie 500 covered it as well on one of the bonus tracks for On Fire.

City Center, Swimsuit, Secret Twins at some house show

I saw an address for this show on the City Center blog about a month ago, and I was pretty excited about it, and then the night of the show I decided to see if I could find any more information about it online, and I saw a few websites that listed the same address I saw previously, except in Seattle, and I started to wonder if this show was actually happening in Portland or not. So, I drove to the address and stood around on the street in front of the house for about 20 seconds before I heard a guitar strum coming from the backyard, which seemed to be a pretty good indicator that I was in the right place and that the show was in Portland.

The whole show was bands from the Life Like label (not to be confused with Life Like Records), who primarily just release cassette tapes, which I and I just don't think I am that into the cassette tape thing, but every time they do release a record or a 7", it tends to be really great.

Unfortunately, I missed Swimsuit, and arrived in the middle of the Secret Twins set. The show was in a backyard, where a bunch of people were standing around trying to break this surprisingly resilient wooden chair apart so they could burn it. The bands played in a garage that was filled with bike parts and a bunch of creepy stuff that I'd expect to see as background props for a Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie or maybe that movie Wrong Turn--like axes and buckets filled with weird colored liquids and a mannequin head with a knife stabbed into its styrofoam skull.

City Center played last, but the guitarist, Fred, started the show by saying that the drummer had quit the band to attend medical school, so it was just him and he was going to play a really mellow set, which was still pretty cool although you could tell he hadn't really figured out how to play solo yet, so I don't think he played many songs from their new album Redeemer, which is pretty reliant on having a drummer, and he seemed really sad about the whole ordeal, which sucks.

City Center (along with bands like Baby Birds Don't Drink Milk) is a really weird band for me, because I just think they are so great. Like favorite band great. Or at least favorite album great (City Center by City Center and Eek Shriek Beak by Baby Birds Don't Drink Milk would probably both be in my top 10 if I ever wrote one out). But they don't seem to get that much attention, or at least not as much as say, Animal Collective for Feels or, like Neutral Milk Hotel for In the Aeroplane Over the Sea which would also be on my top albums list. So, after this show, when I met Fred from City Center and I was buying his new record, and I told him I had been looking for a download of it online, but couldn't find one, he said, "It hasn't leaked yet, because no one cares about it," I had this strange feeling because, to me, this is one of my favorite bands, and he probably doesn't have people reacting to his music that way very often (or at least not as often as say, Animal Collective), he probably has kind of this weird feeling toward it--of trying to be really proud of it, but receiving little recognition for how good it really is--and it kind of makes me wonder if they just think I'm full of it when I say, "Hey, such-and-such is one of my favorite albums ever."

I hope not.

Umm, Getting Lost OR I Remember Person Pitch... It Sounds Different Now OR Bands That Play On The Floor

2011-05-07T01:47:00.000-07:00

I remember the first time I ever listened to Panda Bear's Person Pitch. Actually, I remember the first 15-20 times I listened to it. My brother brought it over to my parent's house and we were listening to it in the shop and my dad was smoking a cigar and I said, "Trent, what is this?" and he said "It's the new Panda Bear album. He's one of the dudes from Animal Collective" and then I went back to my apartment that night and found it on Amazon and I bought it, and it didn't leave my cd player in my car for 2 months.

The best thing about that 2 months is that I didn't quite have a grasp on that album the entire time. I remember hearing parts that I really liked and how they faded into other parts, and hearing noises I had never really heard before, and being confused about the process that went into making these songs, and I remember wanting to listen to certain songs, but I had no idea where in the album it was, and I remember the album ending, and my cd player automatically starting it over and me thinking, "What the hell? That was the end? I thought it started over 2 songs ago!"

This was my first good memory of getting completely lost in a piece of music. And I don't mean lost like closing your eyes and swaying lost. I actually mean feeling like "What the hell is going on??" lost.

I don't really have a point to make from all of this. When I wrote this down on the back of a scrap menu at work as I often do because all of my best thoughts come when I don't really have much time to think, I wrote something like "In defense of noise and drone music," which is kind of what I'm getting at, but in kind of a sideways manner, because I am specifically referring to seeing Baby Birds Don't Drink Milk in Portland with my roommates and one of them just did not understand why they played on the floor, and I even get kind of confused and lost when listening to them sometimes, which I sort of explain in this events listing I did for that show:

You could stare at all the instruments on stage for 3 hours before Baby Birds Don’t Drink Milk start playing, and you would still have no idea how those musicians are making that music with these instruments. At their loudest, BBDDM are perched behind a layered waterfall of noise; at the softest, they are sitting cross-legged in a field plucking the only unbroken string on an acoustic guitar. It’s the space in between that leaves you thinking, “I’m going to have to remember this band’s name.”

So, in defense of noise and drone music, to those who don't have the ear for it, which is understandable, there is a certain degree of enjoyment that comes from watching something happen and still not understanding it. It is kind of like "I see it and I still don't believe it."

When you have the same 4/4 beat pop songs over and over again, and then a new one comes out and you can pretty much guess what comes next upon first listen, it is nice to know there is still some really interesting, unfamiliar things going on in music that you can't predict even on the one-hundredth listen.

Beach Fossils, Craft Spells, Soft Metals at Berbati's Pan

2011-05-07T00:40:00.000-07:00

I don't know if this is really true or if it is just an opinion of mine, and actually, I don't really know how much I believe this, and I don't mean "I don't really know how much I believe this" like how most people use it to say that they simply don't believe something, I really just mean that this is something that seems to ring true when I say it, and I just haven't put enough thought into it to justify or refute it, so I'll just throw it out there and see where it takes me.

Actually, first, I want to note that I, when doing these show reports, which I've been trying to be better and more consistent about actually doing, I tend to have some sort of angle, or speaking point which I tie in with the show, so I guess this is my angle for this show. Here goes.

The best type of music is the kind that either makes you feel like your life is kind of put together or makes you feel like your life is kind of falling apart, or both.

This show was a perfect example of this.

I'll admit outright that I worked 8 hours before walking across downtown to go to this show, so I was kind of tired and in a weird mood because I (like everyone, I'm sure) tend to think a whole lot when I actually allow myself to take a walk for a long enough distance to actually justify calling it a "walk". And, on top of that, this whole show was kind of weird before I even walked in the doors, because as far as I knew, Berbati's has not been having shows for a while now due to some remodeling, which I had heard was not yet finished, and when I looked for information on this show on the Berbati's website, the calendar wouldn't load, and I couldn't find anything about it on my Portland show website, and I didn't see anything about it in the newspapers, which usually tend to be pretty good about these kinds of things. So, I didn't even really know if this show was going to happen, and if it was, how much it was going to cost and what time it started. Luckily, with shows, you can pretty much go with the standard "10 bucks at 9 PM" and it will get you pretty far. This was no exception.

Upon walking into the show, I immediately noticed a camera crew. I don't really have an explanation for this. No long paragraph or run-on sentences or anything. They were just filming and taking pictures of the audience. Kind of freaked me out the whole show.

Also, Berbati's is apparently one of those type of venues that takes putting on shows just a bit too seriously, so they have security guards walking around and the sound guy is really professional and proper, which is probably kind of nice, but I have always thought it seems a bit awkward, and most musicians are a bit awkward already, so it kind of just makes everyone uncomfortable.

All of these things contributed, but did not explain the overall eeriness of the whole show, so I'm just labeling this one as one of my weird-for-no-reason shows that happen... frequently.

I don't know why.

I don't really have much to say about Soft Metals, except that I think they are a Portland band, and they are kind of like what I imagine Crystal Castles would sound like if they weren't really pissed off and dramatic all the time.

Craft Spells were great, and apparently who the camera crew was there for. I will have to keep an eye out for what all of this camera-in-your-face-while-you-are-just-trying-to-play-songs-for-these-people footage will eventually be used for.

Beach Fossils was a lot like Craft Spells, and I want do describe them both as sounding a lot like that band Real Estate except with more adolescence. Which brings me back to my "angle". If you listen to Beach Fossils, it is really quite bright, and happy and sunny (or, more Beach Boys than Beach House). That brightness showed up a bit at this show just because, well, it is what their songs sound like. And they are upbeat and it kind of just made me feel like I was 16 and driving around listening to NOFX really loud in my Blazer, which always used to feel pretty good and make me feel like my life was... well, put together, or at least pretty awesome as far as being 16 goes.

The other half of my angle comes from some of the passing comments the singer let slip which kind of painted the picture of a younger band at the end of a long tour, experiencing some sort of hype/fame/popularity for the first time as a band, and being really pretty sick of it. In fact, incredibly sick of it. Touring, fame, everything. This became more and more apparent in the last half of their set when the singer mentioned that the guitarist and the bassist had gotten into "a really bloody fist fight" the night before in San Francisco, but had "made up and became friends again, I think," which they both kind of shrugged about and then they just started playing the next song, from this point, very much in "don't-give-a-fuck-I-just-want-this-to-be-over" mode, which tends to really piss off the audience members that paid to come see you play.

I have found that I really kind of like it, because it kind of takes the acting out of performing music live, and you can actually kind of see how people are or catch a small glimpse of where the music comes from. This happened another time recently at a house show when this band, An Amiable Medley were playing and the lead singer was either drunk, or really emotional, or, likely, both, and he yelled the lyrics "Because you are beautiful, and sensible, and you'll NEVER BELONG TO MEEEEEEE!!!" into the microphone and then threw himself to the floor and punched it, and then threw himself into a shelf and punched a whole in the wall, and then bled all over his guitar, and my jaw dropped and I am sure it was one of my favorite shows in recent memory, for this reason alone.

For some reason, when I see things I like this, it makes me start thinking about myself and... I don't know, maybe being young and angsty and dying my hair black and being really kind of dramatic and emotional, and it kind of makes me think twice about the soft, boring music that I make, and all of these thoughts kind of affect me and put this feeling that the world is kind of falling apart in me, and I love it, and I loved this Beach Fossils show for that reason as well as the opposite of that reason.

So, after they finished throwing themselves around and thrashing their instruments as they finished their last song, they threw their instruments down, the drummer kicked his drum set over, and they all (except for the bassist, who told the audience "thanks") kind of just stormed off stage, and somehow, from their whole set of "I hate this and I don't want to be here" type comments and performing, the crowd thought they were going to come out and do an encore, which was kind of funny.

Please, God, Let This New Dance Be The Next Huge Teen Sensation

2011-05-01T16:19:00.001-07:00

In my recent spelunking through crappy 50's and 60's teen records, I keep stumbling upon this common theme of "Here's a new dance! Here's how to do the new dance! Let's all do this new dance!"

An incredible amount of songs were recorded based on this concept, and from these songs, dances like the Charleston, the Surfer's Stomp, the Mashed Potato, and an staggeringly high number of different variations of the Twist were created.

I hadn't really thought about it much until yesterday when I was listening to "Do The Slauson" by The Pyramids at work. The lady I work with and I kind of laughed about it, and then I started thinking about how hilarious it would be if this trend caught on in hardcore music.

A lot of hardcore music involves very specific dances to be done for specific parts of the song. By no means is this unique to hardcore music, though. Some people jump around and bang their heads and hurt people when they listen to metal. But there is a big difference between metal lyrics telling you to, "Bang your head! Hurt people!" and hardcore lyrics telling you to, "Cross one leg over the other while punching downward with the opposite arm! Do a scissor kick to roundhouse kick! Spin around in circles with your fist pointed outward!"

Kind of funny to think about.

But then, on what seemed, at first, to be a completely unrelated incident today while I was out eating lunch with my roommates, a bunch of people in bell-clad outfits entered the loft area of this restaurant and proceeded to start singing songs as a group celebrating Spring and May 1st and kind of just the goodness of life in general. This reminded me of singing in church or all those scenes in Stand By Me when they are walking along the railroad tracks singing songs together, and it all kind of made me think about uniformity in music for the purpose of sharing of it as a group.

It kind of takes the absurdity out of things like hardcore dancing and casts it in the light of a collective appreciation and our desire to feel like a part of the things that we love, the same way sports fans say "we" when referring to their favorite team.

Dirty Beaches

2011-05-01T15:23:00.001-07:00

I'm getting around to posting this a bit late, but I kind of decided that I need to stay on top of writing down my thoughts and experiences with music and shows and things, because I have a decent amount of them and think about it more than anything else, which has to mean something.

Anyway, I saw Dirty Beaches at the Holocene last Sunday. I submitted a write-up for the show to the Willamette Week which is kind enough to provide us with a weekly print publication telling the people of Portland about most of the interesting things going on in their city this week. They didn't print my write-up, so I'm going to post it here so at least it gets some readership... sigh.

[RUST-COVERED ROCK N’ ROLL] Dirty Beaches is kind of like your dad’s (or grandpa’s) VHS copy of Elvis Presley’s Blue Hawaii—it’s old and the tracking has nearly destroyed what was left of the movie, leaving only pieces of the soundtrack between the crackling, distorted fuzz. Dirty Beaches builds each song from loops of the obliterated remainders of that golden age of rock n’ roll, including the 50 years of decay that rusted out all of the old cars and wiped out all of the hair grease, leaving just enough to remind us why our parents liked all of this crap in the first place.

This show was a perfect example of the shows I always seem to find myself at here in Portland, specifically Holocene shows. These shows consist of a headlining band that was very recently thrown into some sort of spotlight, and they don't appear to have fully adjusted quite yet.

The shows are always reasonably attended, but not crowded, and the bands always seem to play only 6-8 songs and then usually leave the stage without playing an encore because they probably just don't have enough songs prepared to do so.

Tennis was this way. Baths was this way. How to Dress Well was this way. And Dirty Beaches was this way.

By no means am I complaining. I actually really appreciate the simplicity and casualness of it. I'm not sure if it just feels appropriate for the type of music I'm seeing or maybe just for my normal energy and excitement level for shows nowadays, in comparison to being, say, 16 and being so pumped to see Slipknot that the concert is all you and your friends talk about the week before and after, and you even considered trying to collectively skip school that day so you could concentrate all day on "how fucking amped you are for the show tonight."

That being said, the show was what I expected. I was happy to see that he was still playing solo with his samples and guitar and hadn't upgraded to a full band like so many other one-person bands in the past 2-3 years. And he played "Lord Knows Best" which I really like, and at one point he got his greaser snarl on and even pulled out a pocket comb and slicked his hair back, which everyone applauded for and which got me thinking about self-made gimmicks vs. hype-made gimmicks and how everyone (including myself) talks about Dirty Beaches in the shadow of either Elvis Presley or David Lynch or both, which sounds absurd if you have never listened to him, and a near perfect description if you have (although since submitting that write-up, I have been thinking more and more that maybe it is something more along the lines of the Psycho half of The Jesus and Mary Chain's Psychocandy.)

Additionally, I have been experiencing some sort of weird sense of Iowa pride every time I see a band in Portland that is in some way connected with Iowa, typically through the Night People Record Label as was the case with both Dirty Beaches and a band I saw at the Rotture a few weeks ago, Rene Hell. I don't know, maybe that isn't so weird.

Not As Good As That One Time OR On The Scent or Music Elitism OR It's Tough to Like Music and Not Get Tough About It

2011-05-01T15:12:00.000-07:00

Thursday was an interesting day as far as shows and music making me stop and think about things. In a way, I may have finally picked up on the trail of the origins of music elitism, but I could be way off.

Why do I always feel the need to scoff when someone tells me their favorite Animal Collective album is Merriweather? Or why do I usually think it is necessary to let people know when I have opened for the band that they are talking about? And why can’t I let someone just get by with saying “Be My Baby” is a Shirlies song, without correcting them saying it was originally by The Ronettes and that the band they were thinking of is The Shirelles, and then launching into a bunch of history on Phil Spector and Brian Wilson and “Don’t Worry Baby”, which I find to be fascinating, but most people really could care less about?

Well, most of that I can’t answer, but I do have a few insights into certain parts of this overall whole that is my taste in music and eagerness to share it with other people, which we can properly call elitism.

These thoughts began piling up with an in-store performance by tUnE-yArDs at Everyday Music, which was incredible and a wonderful (and cheaper) alternative to seeing them at Doug Fir that night. And the show in the middle of that record store that afternoon would have been just as awesome if that was the first time I had ever seen tUnE-yArDs, but it wasn’t, and I will never be able to hear that band again without thinking about the time they played at my brother and my (mostly just my brother’s, I can’t take too much credit) venue, the Elephungeon, in tiny Boone, IA, and you could just tell then that this girl looping her voice and ukulele and drums by herself and playing keyboards with her toes deserved to be playing for nearly sold-out audiences at reasonably-sized venues that are not windowless basements in a small town in Iowa where no one really goes to shows because there aren’t any (I think there were only 10-12 people there). But she didn’t care, and she played just as hard then as she did on Thursday and she gave me a hug then and she still probably would have Thursday if I had said something about it.

So how are these two experiences different? Why is there some sense of pride over being at that Boone show that I feel like qualifies me as a real tUnE-yArDs fan over say, someone at Everyday Music yesterday afternoon seeing her for the first time, or all of the people at the Doug Fir show? Really there is no difference between the two. It’s music. You hear it, you like it, you listen to it. It doesn’t matter how or when you heard it, and it doesn’t matter how often or when you last listened to it. Why is that so hard for me to accept?

The Starfucker show that night at the Holocene was another example. Trent and I had the opportunity of opening for this band at a poorly attended Vaudeville Mews show in Des Moines. It was great. All of the 15-20 people who were there loved it and I kind of remember surrounding the band, who set up on the floor—people were dancing on the stage and on that ramp that leads up to behind the stage, and the sound was feeding back quite a bit but it kind of just added to this barrage of hazy dance pop music that was blaring outward from the band who were then 6 members deep, I think, and I had to politely ask my brother for all of the money we made for playing the show just so I could afford to buy their record. It’s the kind of show you remember regardless of what bands played and how big they eventually became.

Since then, Starfucker had a song featured on a Target commercial, and although they were selling out shows in Portland before that Des Moines show ever happened, it wasn’t until their next time through the Midwest that they received the kind of reception they normally do in Portland, and that was to a (sold out?) crowd at First Avenue in Minneapolis. Quite the step up.

So, when I found out that all three of the Starfucker shows this weekend sold out well in advance of the day they occurred, I wasn’t terribly surprised. I did, however, think to myself, “That would be way cool if I could see Starfucker the way I did at that Des Moines show every time that I saw them,” and that was what made me start thinking about how we define so much of the music we listen to with our experiences of it, and how we value those experiences and try and keep that band or that music within the bounds we shape for it based on those experiences, because it is nice to think it could always be or feel or sound as awesome “as it did when…”

The tUnE-yArDs show and the Starfucker show provide perfect examples of both ends of this sensation. The tUnE-yArDs show living up to the expectations I had created in my mind from the first time I saw her, and the Starfucker show selling out and making me wish it could still be as awesome as it was that first time. Therefore, when you are standing in the middle of a crowded room waiting to see a band you have seen before under, what you consider to be, better circumstances, how can you reasonably value this experience higher than the previous one? You probably can’t, and when making a judgment call about how everyone else is valuing the current experience based on their reactions as an audience, it would be hard not to cling to your previous memories and de-value this show as “not as good as that one time.”

It sucks, but that reminiscing that sounds a lot like elitist name-dropping is really just the desire to keep this music in that place we made for it where it can always mean as much to us as possible and fill us up our empty us out the same way it did when we first decided to build this place for it and call it our own.

The Quarter Life Crisis: Lost at 5:34

2011-04-25T22:50:00.001-07:00

The Quarter Life Crisis: Modern Literature

2011-04-18T10:58:00.001-07:00

The Quarter Life Crisis: Record Store Day

2011-04-18T00:04:00.001-07:00

Solanin

2011-04-15T23:57:00.000-07:00

Solanin is a manga by Inio Asano. In the afterword of the book, the author says of it:

There's nothing cool about these characters. They're just your average 20-somethings who blend into the backdrop of the city. But the most important messages in our lives don't come from the musicians on stage or stars on television. They come from the average people all around you, the ones who are just feet from where you stand.

This book is about those messages. No one really comes out on top, they all just kind of come out to the side, but it is the way they accept their question marks that separates this one from every other indie comic about people drinking coffee, playing guitar, and asking huge questions about life. It's an acceptance of question marks as part of your own "certainties," kind of like asking "Didn't [insert name] die?" even though you kind of already know the answer, and then finding out something completely new about that person's life.

Read it if you come across it. It is the best piece of quarter life crisis fiction I have seen yet.

Tulips Cover

2011-04-12T13:50:00.001-07:00

Bloc Party - Tulips (Skyscraper Cover)

Alternatively, I made a Bandcamp page where you can listen to/download all the songs I've recorded (and see all of the pretty album art):

skyscraper.bandcamp.com

65

2011-03-30T01:00:00.001-07:00

Postcard Exchange Leftovers

2011-03-27T16:07:00.000-07:00

Here is the postcard I did for ISU Print Society's 2011 Postcard Exchange. The theme was apocalypse.

My favorite printing place came through for me again and printed an extra 2 pages worth of these things for me, so I have some left over. AND, we had agreed on the original 3 pages worth of them costing me $10, BUT since they typically only do huge printing orders for large corporations, they only do check transitions and cash, so they don't have a credit card machine, which means they charge me cash for these kind of things, HOWEVER, I only had a 20 dollar bill and 7 one-dollar bills in my wallet, and none of the employees had change for a 20, so I ended up getting FIVE pages for only SEVEN dollars. AHHH COOOOL!!!

Anyway, if you would like a postcard, I'd like to send you one. All you have to do is give me your address and check your mailbox!

I don't know, life, I guess?

2011-03-07T00:15:00.000-08:00

I've been writing in this journal that my mother gave me for my birthday this year. Primarily (like most journals, I'm sure), it is stuff I don't care to share with anyone, because either it is too personal, too pathetic, or simply seems too mundane after it has been written down, which is probably the appeal of journals in the first place--their ability to make that thing that-seems-like-such-a-big-deal-that-you-have-to-sit-down-and-write-about-it-that-night seem a bit less dramatic and severe, although this could just be the difficulty of translating thoughts into words.

Anyway, this particular entry was kind of okay and insightful (I think) and mostly representative of my life and things in Portland, and I realized that I hadn't posted anything on here in quite some time, so here goes. I hope I don't get all self-conscious about this and decide later to take it down.

I have spent most of my life on some sort of Monday-Friday type schedule, and according to this kind of schedule, Sundays are typically sleepy and relaxed. I think that "nothing" quality Sundays seem to possess has always been a bit sad for me.

Since finishing school and moving to Portland, I have found myself with a far less set schedule--working randomly throughout the week and going out and doing things/staying home according to my mood rather than any sort of "what do I have to do tomorrow" thoughts. But, despite the change in schedule, Sundays still have that same nothingness for me.

Today, I watched movies pretty much all day, which I always feel guilty about doing. It doesn't help that all of my books and music equipment are directly to the left of me, staring at me all day, reminding me I should be doing anything else besides what I am doing at the moment.

I have heard people say that weekends are for relaxing and watching movies (honestly, those two specific things, and I've heard it from a number of people, too), but I don't want to fall into that mindset. I keep telling myself that I will work harder on my next day off, but that reassurance is a bit diluted by repetition and my awareness of how stereotypical that statement is for adults on the edge of leaving their creative years behind them. Eventually, it just becomes "Oh, I'll get that siding put up next weekend" instead of something like, say, "Damnit, I really need to just record this friggin' song, already" or "I really need to do that postcard design before it is to late" or "I really need to finish those comics before the end of the month".

I did go for a bike ride, though, to try and feel productive and escape all these thoughts. I took the same trail I normally do, which runs right along the river all the way down to Sellwood. I listened to Bjork's Vespertine which I had never heard before, and ended up being perfect music for the mood of the whole bike ride and probably just the day (or past month) in general.

When I got to Sellwood, I sat at the waterfront park for a half an hour or so. From where I was sitting, I could turn my head to my left and see a young kid picking up rocks and hurling them as far as he could into the river. He was probably only about 4 years old, so they only made it 2 or 3 feet, and it took, probably, a 240 degree rotation and nearly ever muscle in his body (kind of like a discus thrower) just to get it that far. And to my right, I could watch no less than 8 dogs wrestling in the mud and fighting to fetch the single tennis ball this one guy was throwing across the park for them. So, that was all wonderful.

Last night, I was talking to one of Josh's (new roommate) friends. He was drunk and telling me about giving up things when he was younger, and picking them up again later in life because "life is too short", which I kind of feel is just one of those things people tend to say when they feel a bit embarrassed or self-conscious about their own vices. And after he said all of that, I instantly had the thought, Life is not short enough.

Initially, this was a really sad thought to come by, and it was a bit tragic, I have to admit, that it came to me so quickly. But, I thought about it more today, and I am starting to surround it with some more words that kind of help to make a bit more sense out of it. I think about all of these dead artists and poets and philosophers and how they would only live to be 40 or 50 or so, and I am constantly annihilated at how much they were able to accomplish in their lives and how focused they must have been to do it. Seriously, a guy like Leonardo? It's ridiculous. I also finished my Introducing Sartre book today, and even he, as a more modern example, wrote so much and spoke so much and was constantly and passionately contributing to revolution and the restructuring of society his entire life.

I don't see an awful lot of examples of that kind of work ethic and will to create these days, although it could just be because I am alive and it is kind of hard to look outside of the modern times of which I am a part of, no matter how much I don't want to admit it. It all makes me wonder if people didn't know they had so much time ahead of them to get around to all those things they keep wanting to get around to, would they be more inclined to get up and do them (myself included)?

Would shorter life spans increase the will to live? Or are these modern trends of creative procrastination just the shape of things these days? These questions are nearly the entire premise of the manga Ikigami.

I do know there are exceptions. Orson Welles, for a somewhat modern example, was directing by his late teenage years, and continued directing films for his entire life. He lived to be 70 years old, which is a bit young, but falls in the same ballpark as the average lifespan for people now.

I suppose this barrage of canonical examples of authors and artists that trickle down through the centuries that I end up reading about; some of them were probably just exceptions, too, and in no way representative of the people of their respective time periods, but I think these exceptions are what really make me feel guilty about my own procrastination. I feel like I can handle the idea of a movement--a bunch of different artists from one location or time period or style pushing the state of things forward or outward, or, I guess, just pushing things one way or the other. It is when individuals are highlighted from those movements or concepts that it all starts to seem too overwhelming to me.

It's the individuals who rise up out of the same boredom and societal sickness that I experience and go on to produce an incredible amount of work that I can't handle. And a lot of them produced better work by the age of 19 than I have done yet.

I know it is insane to hold myself to any one of these standards set by any of these individuals who are still known and talked about historically world wide, but I think the only alternative is to accept mediocrity.

Hmm... fuck that.

Neat Zine Issue 3 (Finally)

2011-02-09T23:44:00.001-08:00

Issue 4 won't take so long. Promise.

Toro y Moi Remix

2011-01-19T20:24:00.000-08:00

Here is a remix I did for this Toro y Moi remix contest.

Toro y Moi - Still Sound (Skyscraper Remix)

Tennis - Cape Dory

2011-01-19T16:07:00.000-08:00

Let's pretend the band Tennis is actually called The Tennis Balls, and that Cape Dory was actually released in the 60's as a set of 45's instead of a full length album in the 2010-2011 wave of the return-to-the-coast trend. There would be A-sides and B-sides, and if you've been picking up whatever free downloads you could find of Tennis songs throughout 2010, you probably already know and love all of the A-sides. In that case, the only new material Cape Dory offers is those B-sides, which we probably would have loved as much as Take Me Somewhere and Marathon if we had heard them first.

Cape Dory doesn't falter because it doesn't take any chances, instead choosing to remain directly in the middle of the kind of pop music that will always be that kind of pop music. As such, Cape Dory will only be talked about when it is being played, because there simply isn't much to say. It is a reminder of what the pop music formula used to be before rock and disco, before big hair and drum machines, before Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus.

Cape Dory will be good until something else comes along, at which point Tennis can either chalk up another adventure to remind us of what we would be hearing on the radio if this actually were the 60's, or fall into the obscurity of the occasional random play on iTunes' shuffle.

Ducktails - Ducktails III: Arcade Dynamics

2011-01-19T14:31:00.000-08:00

Listening to Arcade Dynamics is like watching the 2009 remake of Friday the 13th; you'll come out of it thinking, “Well, that was definitely a Ducktails album.”

Matthew Mondanilee, the man behind Ducktails, has no tricks up his sleeve. Using the same guitars, pedals, and drum machine that made up the first two albums, he made another album that sounds like sitting on the front porch, and song titles like Hamilton Road, Sunset Liner, Little Window, etc. go a long way toward reinforcing that sound. The difference is that this time around, the thought of finding something to do has occurred to him. This hint of direction surfaces in the higher fidelity production of this album, as well as the 300% increase in the use of singing.

Do you want to go outside?
Outside's just for peace of mind
Do you want to stay indoors?
Come on man, I'll just be bored.

But, that doesn't mean he has developed any real intentions, remaining delightfully indifferent. It is like being content with spending the whole night at home playing Super Nintendo with your friend, talking about finding something to go do.

There is nothing at stake here, which is why Arcade Dynamics, like Ducktails and Landscapes, will never impress or let anyone down. Ducktails falls outside of expectation, finding relaxation in the pressure-less joy of boredom, and that contentedness is what leads Arcade Dynamics like a tour guide for a staycation.

End of 2010 Music List

2011-01-06T23:18:00.000-08:00

I didn't think I was going to end up doing one of these end of the year lists for 2010 because I simply didn't listen to enough new music in the past year to justify believing that my opinion on the year's music matters, but then I decided that maybe the fact that I was actively avoiding new music this year means the music I did enjoy in 2010 must stand out in some way.

SO, here is my list which is short, in no particular order, and by no means meant to be comprehensive for the entire year of 2010:

Netherfriends - Barry and Sherry

I have never not been impressed with a Netherfriends release. The man behind this band, Shawn Rosenblatt, recently decided to throw in the towel in the working world and try out being a full-time musician the good ol' fashioned way -- through relentless touring, a no-choice-in-the-matter DIY attitude, and any excuse he can find to remain productive, and it all shows on this album.

The self-recorded production is of a higher quality than ever before and the content is larger (though still filled to the brim with shit-talk), but manages to communicate itself as simply as a grade-school student stretching himself as thin as he can in order to raise his hand higher than everyone else in the classroom, in hopes that someone will eventually call on him.

Baths - Cerulean

While every other chillwave band this year was spending their time digging through old records looking for drum machine beats not too overlayed with everything that sucked about the 80's to keep them from sampling it, this kid was taking advantage of the same laptop-makes-it-easy technique as everyone else, only he was creating something a little too heavy to just sit and bob your head to, something more like all of those early hip-hop producers intended when they invented the art of sampling as we know it today.

Baby Birds Don't Drink Milk - Skeletor & Me

Baby Birds Don't Drink Milk are one of the best bands you don't remember you heard at that one house show where you saw them open up for so-and-so but you couldn't remember their name or you didn't understand what they said when they said their band name through their effect-pedaled microphone... and I think they prefer it that way.

On Skeletor & Me, BBDDM dwells somewhere just outside of those late 90's emo instrumentals, always considering a complete collapse into an absolute mess of sound, leaving us wondering if that was the guitar, the keyboard, or the sampler making all of that noise. Yet, despite all of the confusion caused by the quick construction and deconstruction of sound layers, there is still something recognizable that hides deep enough to keep you from putting a finger on what it is exactly this band reminds you of.

Panda Bear - The Singles

Panda Bear is often given credit for inventing chillwave, an honor which he rejected via a stream of 7" singles completely unlike everything everyone loved about Person Pitch.

Candy Claws - Hidden Lands

What a perfect album title. This band seems entirely uninfluenced, instead deciding to explore locations where others only dream of as they stare, overwhelmed, at the synthesizer wall at Guitar Center trying to decide which one will be the easiest to figure out.

Hidden Lands manages to make recorded music sound like jungle acoustics so natural and beautiful that people would even close their eyes to a utopian landscape in order to completely focus on what they are hearing.

Deerhunter - Halcyon Digest

Deerhunter finally made an album that sounds as completely good as the high points in previous albums always suggested they could be. They finally seemed to complete their sound. This album does nostalgia and throwback as well as anyone else without dwelling too long in the past.

Ocean Age - Forest EP

I got really lucky with this one, stumbling upon this band at a show I went to within the first few weeks of moving to Portland. This band is a perfect example of why I wish more music students listened to Animal Collective.

Maid Marian Songs

2011-01-06T18:48:00.000-08:00

I just recently got on board with uploading music to Mediafire, so here is a couple of Maid Marian tunes for download:

Maid Marian/Skyscraper (or Tall Too) Split

Maid Marian - Two Songs Recorded in a Cool Dinosaur Tunnel in Colorado

56

2011-01-05T23:58:00.001-08:00

America: Check

2010-12-16T00:59:00.000-08:00

December 15, 2010

Today, I finished conquering the United States of America. As of 3:00 PM this afternoon, combining separate trips, I have driven across this entire country.

The Pacific Ocean via the Oregon coast rates pretty high.

This was probably the capstone on my "Things I Am Proud of: 2010" list, which I will probably post sometime a bit closer to the end of the year.

2010-11-30T23:45:00.001-08:00

Black Friday: Dawn of the Dead as Non-Fiction

2010-11-27T21:38:00.000-08:00

Another violent Black Friday has left consumers injured and embarassed.

The Oregonian, our daily newspaper, was 4.5 pounds on Thursday. It was filled with that many ads for Friday's sales. It seemed ridiculous and laughable the night before; sad and tragic the night after when reports were written about the going-ons of the holiday:

"Everybody was cutting in line. But there was one girl who was threatening me, so I told her that I'd shoot her," Lattimore told CNN. "I'm not a violent person, but police charged me with disorderly conduct."

Several eager shoppers were trampled Friday morning as they surged through Target store doors in North Buffalo, New York.

CNN affiliate WIVB had a camera inside the Target and captured the drama. People at the front of the line were pushed to the floor when doors opened. The commotion and screams drew additional store staff to sort the crowd out.

"It went from controlled to a mob in less than five minutes," shopper Rich Mathewson told WIVB. "And then it just got nasty."

That last line is almost an exact quote from a Walking Dead comic. Not to mention the fact that this whole concept of mobs of people killing each other to fulfill those consumer desires was foretold as early as 1978 in Dawn of the Dead.

I know most zombie literature is drenched in social commentary, but typically social commentary is meant to draw our attention to our shortcomings in various areas of humanity, not to set the model for how to further those shortcomings.

Watch the video. It isn't so different from some of the scenes from those famous mall-set zombie films, books, and video games.

The term "Black Friday" was created in 1966. It used to refer to the profit made by retailers, like "in the black" as opposed to "in the red". I'm not so sure that old definition still speaks true in the face of the numerous injuries and deaths that occur on this day every year.

Album

2010-11-22T14:31:00.000-08:00

I finished my album. If I ever held a microphone up to your face, your voice is probably on it somewhere.

It will probably be available on tape/cd at some point, so let me know if you want one.

Germany by Skyscraper

1. Swan
2. 18
3. It Takes So Much Time
4. Brave
5. Germany Part 1
6. Germany Part 2
7. Germany Part 3

Download here.

WHOA COOL

2010-11-19T00:29:00.000-08:00

This is the kind of stuff I find saved in random folders spread throughout my computer.

Halloween Candy Claws--Masks and all!

2010-11-18T00:46:00.000-08:00

Apparently these holiday months are a slow time for event catering here in Portland. Therefore, I was given a heaping 5 days off from work to do with as I please. I decided to take advantage of the days off by checking out a couple of shows, doing some unnecessary record shopping, and (hopefully) finishing my album. One song to go!

As posted below, I saw Tennis last night at the Holocene, but before that, I decided to go see Candy Claws again at Mississippi Studios. This was the third time I've seen the band, and each time, the band has been halved. Oh no! Someone is eating all the candy!

I first saw them in Des Moines (another awesome show Trista opened for) where they had 8 members. Apparently, their van had recently exploded and they lost all of their equipment, and they still managed to kill it at the Vaudeville.

The next time I saw them was here in Portland for the Musicfest Northwest Festival. This time they only had 4 members, brandishing new equipment and mostly just playing to a backing track.

A few nights ago, at Mississippi Studios, the once 8-piece band had dwindled down to a mere 2. I had to overhear something that sounded like the mention of members quitting, because I was too afraid to ask about it myself--the remaining 2 looked the part of the whole situation, as if they were just barely holding the whole thing together. So, a combination of that, the unexpectedness of only 2 members, and the fact that when they started I was literally the only person in the audience (people trickled in later) made for a supremely weird show experience.

The drastic drop in members also had a huge effect on the music they played as well. It may have had something to do with the fact that the 2 remaining members were ill at the time of the show, but they opted for a laptop performance (probably not having a lot of other choices), playing what sounded like a complete dance remix of their first album, not entirely unlike their 2 previously released 15-minute songs, Two Airships and Exploder Falls.

I hope all of this doesn't mark some sort of impending doom for this band. I'd really like to see them at their fullest. Ideally, all 8 members with proper equipment, and a fresh outlook, unhindered by months of touring and members quitting.

Of their previous two albums, Kay and Ryan of Candy Claws said:

On our previous album, "In the Dream of the Sea Life," we smashed all the sounds together as if they were at the ocean floor under the huge weight of miles of water... This time around, there's a lot more space in the mix("air" instead of the crushing weight of "water".)

It is this thought and inspiration that goes into each album that I really like about this band. I'd really like to see what the third album would consist of. With the way things seem to be going, I wouldn't be surprised by some sort of fire theme...

Tennis OR Enchantment Under the Sea Dance (Be There or Be Square) OR I'm a sucker for...

2010-11-17T23:17:00.001-08:00

I saw the band Tennis at the Holocene last night.

It is kind of weird how people can just decide to make a band and launch into the music you must hear world from the very moment they hit the stop button on their recording device. Tennis is a perfect example of this. Thank you Deus Ex Hype Machina. This whole situation was highlighted even more by the fact that the band that opened, The Rainy States, has a couple of years of music making as well as 2 albums (I think) under their belt. Unfortunately, they seemed to suffer from the our-guitarist-takes-this-way-too-seriously problem which has plagued bands at least as far back as 1964 when The Oneders saw their 15 minutes of fame with their hit single, That Thing You Do.

(Sidenote: Regarding The Rainy States' set, I heard someone in the audience say, "I think their was an underlying theme of depression" which I thought was pretty funny.)

But, when you're good, you're good, and with some bands it doesn't take 3 albums before people start coming to your shows.

After what seemed like 15 minutes of adjusting the keyboard and microphone height for his 4 1/2 foot tall wife, Tennis played, and it was wonderful. I wish I could have seen them in Des Moines when Maid Marian played with them.

Although the show looked kind of like this:

It reminded me of this:

Or maybe this:

Or maybe this:

Or maybe all three.

I'm such a sucker for all of this ocean-drenched, reverb-packing nonsense that is getting mass produced these days, and I hate that I fall for it. It's kind of like that feeling you get when you realize you are craving a Snickers bar after watching a Snickers commercial.

Skinny Jeans: Seattle

2010-11-08T21:41:00.000-08:00

Marnie Stern vs. Shredder OR Stuck in a rut! Stuck in a rut! OR Mostly crossed-out to-do lists

2010-11-07T17:29:00.000-08:00

Umm... about a million words (probably more) have been written about routines, ruts, etc. Sorry for the, uh, repetition.

Since graduating college and finding my first post-college job, I have found it increasingly easier to fall into routine than ever before in my life. It is too easy to just work when you have to and relax when you don't have to work. I try as hard as I can not to fall into it, but it happens more often than I prefer. I wrote an entire zine about it to keep from feeling stagnant. It kind of worked for a while.

I'm stuck in time-in a rut.
I cannot think.
I cant cant sleep, laugh, or breathe

I'm drawing lines in the sand
Night ranger to make amends
Bigger without boundaries.
Big enough to try.
Bigger than the whole world
Bravest in the whole world

There is nothing like a bit of BRAIN-SCRAMBLING to kickstart a dull state of mind. Sometimes, it can leave you more confused than before, but at least it injects a bit of turmoil and movement into your mind than you can wrestle with and arise from, fist first clenching some radical new motivation, Energy, VIGOR. A REASON TO LIVE!!

In need of a bit of mind-scrambling, I decided to go see Marnie Stern at Mississippi Studios a couple of nights ago. I arrived just in time to miss all of the opening bands and set up time between acts--right in the middle of Marnie Stern's first song.

I can't say a lot about the show without degenerating into explaining how unexplainable her music is. You really just have to hear it. And then add a bunch of reverb and that adrenaline you get when you finally hear the first notes of that song you've been waiting all night to hear (except, for nearly every song).

So i rearrange
And I don't mind the change, I don't mind the change.

And from the bottom up you must draw,
Where blue is the distance
and no one can come along.

Holding back will be forgotten
Holding back will be forgotten

I haven't listened to her new album yet, admittedly, because I am afraid of new music, but I will.

Naoki Urasawa and the importance of the ending

2010-11-02T13:14:00.000-07:00

About 6 months ago, I had exhausted the graphic novel selection at the Ames Public Library, and moved one aisle over and started in on the manga. I don't know very much about manga, so I was mostly just picking out series that:

a) Had a cool cover
b) Had nothing to do with samurai
c) Did not have an unreadably large number of volumes
d) Actually had the first volume on the shelf

By following these standards, I came upon Volume 1 of 20th Century Boys by Naoki Urasawa, which looked something like this:

Described itself like this:

Failed rock musician Kenji's memories of his past come rushing back when one of his childhood friends mysteriously commits suicide. Could this new death be related to the rise of a bizarre new cult that's been implicated in several other murders and disappearances? Determined to dig deeper, Kenji reunites with some of his old buddies in the hope of learning the truth behind it all.

Humanity, having faced extinction at the end of the 20th century, would not have entered the new millennium if it weren't for them. In 1969, during their youth, they created a symbol. In 1997, as the coming disaster slowly starts to unfold, that symbol returns. This is the story of a gang of boys who try to save the world.

And only had 6 volumes on the shelf (I later found out there were 24 total).

Six months later, I have finished 20th Century Boys as well as PLUTO and Monster, two of Urasawa's other mangas.

Urasawa is not afraid of scale. That is, in all three of the mangas I have read, his character base has been no less than 50, the stories have taken place anywhere between Japan, Germany, and America, and the villains have settled for no motive less than the destruction of the entire world.

Impressive stuff.

He has the art of the cliffhanger down to a degree of perfection probably even beyond LOST.

But cliffhangers leave questions, and questions need answers.

While LOST was famous for leaving it's viewers with a boatload of questions, the most important being "Did the creators of this show have this all planned from the beginning, or are they flying forward by the seat of their pants at this point?" Ok, I'm sure not everyone worded the question this way, but ask any LOST fan and this question will not seem unfamiliar to them.

I made the mistake of believing that every single thing that happened on that show was planned long before they ever started filming. I now know that that very idea is ridiculous, but the show was very convincing in the way it connected things early on. I expected the series finale to be perfection--no more questions, no loose ends, everything would make sense in a way that would leave me thinking "I can't believe I hadn't thought of that!" Needless to say, it didn't quite live up to that standard.

It was simply good enough.

I believe that Urasawa's work suffers from the same "High Standards = Inevitable Disappointment" I discovered with LOST.

But, no matter how good or bad an ending is, it doesn't change the fact that I was desperately visiting the library or rental store every couple of days for the next book or dvd. In reality, it is maybe only 1 or 2 bad episodes or bad chapters among the hundreds of others that convinced you along the way that this series worth the time you were putting into it.

How much weight does the ending carry in the overall quality of a work?

Some Pictures

2010-10-21T00:30:00.000-07:00

I finally dug through a lot of my old pictures and found a few worth posting, I think.

In chronological order (to the best of my knowledge):

Trista playing some uke in a dinosaur tunnel, Colorado

The Bonfire of the Vanities, Ames

Recording Studio/trying to copy the attic scene in Kill Bill Vol. 1, Portland

Pie Eating Contest (Daniel tied for first), Portland

The Illest Villains, Portland

Seattle

2010-10-06T15:05:00.000-07:00

The Quarter Life Crisis 0

2010-09-23T15:30:00.001-07:00

The Quarter Life Crisis 2

2010-09-14T23:09:00.001-07:00

The Quarter Life Crisis 1

2010-09-14T23:08:00.001-07:00

Abe Vigoda

2010-09-11T11:53:00.000-07:00

Damnit, Abe Vigoda. I know I can't reasonably be mad at you for changing your musical sound in favor of one you enjoy more, but I kind of am anyway.

You replaced your wildly energetic, youthful sound with generic synths and boring drum machines. Drum machines! You keep getting these awesome drummers and you don't even let them play drums.

Oh well. Another young lover lost to these dance-infused dark ages. They don't stay young forever. At least Skeleton still exists, even if they don't want to admit it.

Never Knows Best Issue 3

2010-09-05T18:12:00.000-07:00

I found a book called When I Relax I Feel Guilty and a book about scuba diving at a garage sale and somehow found inspiration for issue 3 of my zine.

I am not usually this quick about finishing issues but I am unemployed and bored and kind of lonely, so I have a lot of free time.

I'm not sure when I will get them printed, but let me know if you want one and I will send you a copy when they are done. Same deal as before--if you want to donate some dollar bills to help pay for printing, I will gladly accept.

Love.

The Mirror

2010-09-05T00:25:00.000-07:00

I have not had a normal Hollywood Blockbuster movie experience since moving to Portland. By no means is this a complaint.

First, it was The Room, where I was given plastic spoons to throw at the screen when I bought my movie ticket and the audience criticism was like a louder version of MST3K. This movie might actually be worse than Plan 9 from Outer Space which actually holds the title "Worst Movie Ever Made".

Next came, REPO! The Genetic Opera which seems to be a more modern alternative to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The live actors for the movie even gave us new audience members a chance to be in the cast for the night by showing either our best fake death or orgasm. My slit throat, post-death muscle spasm routine couldn't compete with those willing to throw themselves off of the stage, so I got up, dusted myself off, and quietly re-took my seat.

I watched, largely confused, from the dark, back corner of the theater as the actors played their parts while the movie shone on the screen behind them.

(Note: Readers, stick with Rocky Horror. I don't think REPO is going to stick.)

Tonight was the third and only watchable movie thus far--The Mirror by Andrei Tarkovsky. Apparently the film I watched tonight was the only known 35mm print of this film in existence, so that was cool, and it was in surprisingly good condition.

The film was made in 1975, but if every movie made now looked like this one, I don't think I would ever walk out of a theater disappointed. The camera moved through environments like curious, human eyes (somewhat intentionally, I believe, seeing as how the film was autobiographical, and we were largely viewing scenes from Tarkovsky's life). The coloring was warm and soft like a vinyl record for the eyes.

The plot of the movie was everything I like about...well... everything I currently like--thoughts as words and images flowing onto a page with little filtering, cut and paste like sample-based music or a collage made from cutting up a stack of magazines. It weaved through fictionalized scenes of Tarkovsky's past, actual news reel war footage, and voice-overs of Tarkovsky's father reading some of his own poems.

What resulted from this style of editing was hard to follow, but try and imagine your own childhood, fill it out some more with all the thoughts and stories you ever had of your parents, and now try and include the world events that were occurring as you were gaining those young years. It is likely that, as you do this, you will remember a few memories out of order in the process of filling in all the blanks up until where you are right now.

How do you place those memories as they surface?

Never Knows Best Issue 2

2010-08-22T23:37:00.000-07:00

I have finished Issue 2. I am still trying to decide on how I am going to print it.

In the meantime, here is the digital version, split up into parts.

This is kind of how it will look in physical form.

Let me know if you want one of these. I can send you one via the ol' USPS. If you feel like you want to donate a couple of dollars to help pay for printing, that would be cool, but it is not terribly necessary.

Also, I fixed the images for Issue 1 on this blog, so you should be able to actually read them now.

Pitchfork (sort of)

2010-08-21T15:41:00.001-07:00

I finally uploaded my pictures from the Pitchfork Music Festival.

Umm... I didn't really get any pictures of the bands...

This is my nephew, Thurston Miles.

Yes, he is wearing a Moog onesie. Almost as cool as his Daniel Johnston one.

Never Knows Best Issue 1

2010-08-11T22:36:00.000-07:00

I decided to put up the digital copy of Never Knows Best Issue 1 for ALL THE WORLD TO SEE. I had to do it in a few different images, because one image of the whole zine was too big and blogspot didn't let me do it.

I hope it is large enough that you can read it, or at least mostly read it.

You can still get a real copy if you want, just let me know on this blog or email me at:

treyreis@gmail.com

Issue 2 is coming along--I am over halfway done. I am determined to have it done by the Portland Zine Symposium, but we will see. It is finally going to start costing money to print these zines (no more free printing from the college), so we will see how I deal with printing costs on my bountiful income of unemployment (which is a long way of saying $0, I don't actually receive unemployment money).

Maybe the printing place will accept food stamps...

Iowa and South Dakota and Wyoming and Idaho and Oregon

2010-08-10T10:40:00.000-07:00

August 1st has arrived, which means 12-month housing leases in college towns across the country have reached an end. If you are lucky enough to be finished with college like me (or unlucky, looking at it from the job market angle), then you are faced with a decision.

Option 1: Stay put.

Option 2: Sell all of the possessions you have that won't fit into your tiny 2-door car, steal your sister's trunk-mounted bike rack, and hit all of those interstates you've never seen on a 2 day Iowa to Portland road trip filled with 17 hours of driving each day, a mostly unsuccessful night of sleep in the parking lot of a truck stop, and all the food you could scrounge up from your parent's house before you left.

I went with option 2.

The trip really began with South Dakota. As far as I can tell, the whole state of South Dakota exists between Mt. Rushmore and Wall Drug, which, geographically, covers a very small portion of the total state. The rest of the space is spent trying to convince drivers that they will get to the good stuff eventually.

Originally, I had planned on making the trip in 3 days, stopping to sleep in Rapid City, South Dakota and Missoula, Montana. I had found some couches to sleep on through CouchSurfing.net. However, the trip quickly turned into a 2 day driving fest when I hit Rapid City on the first night at 7:30 P.M. and decided I had at least 6 more hours of driving in my system.

After a quick map-on-the-car-hood route change, I decided to pass on Montana and head south through Wyoming instead.

Wyoming is South Dakota with a little more John Wayne and a little less Wild Bill Hickock. The main difference is that Wyoming assumes you are there for Yellowstone National Park, so they don't destroy all of their landscape views with billboards reminding you it is there.

Fifteen hours after leaving Iowa, at about 2 AM. I parked my little Honda Prelude between 2 huge semi trucks at a truck stop in Casper, Wyoming, reclined my seat back as far as all of the stuff in my backseat would allow me to, and attempted to get some sleep. I woke up 5 hours later, chugged a cup of terrible gas station coffee, and sped my way across the vast Wyoming desert-like landscape, assuming by the look of things that I didn't really need to worry about running into a cop to bust me for speeding.

I've heard the wrist area on the raised arm that is northern Idaho is beautiful, but after changing my route to go through Wyoming, I saw more of what would probably be called the shoulder. Idaho is only a little less flat than Iowa. The whole state hides all of its civilization behind rolling hills. Each hill I would climb held the unfulfilled promise that something other than more hills would reveal itself once I reached the top. It wasn't until I began seeing vineyards and wineries along the western border that I knew I was getting close to Oregon.

Perhaps I'm just biased toward my new home state, but Oregon seemed to take the best parts of all the states I had traveled to get to it and rolled them into one wonderful place where the view never disappoints. The feeling of being out of middle-America settled in and my destination finally felt within reach. Unfortunately, my luck in avoiding the police had finally run out, and I was stuck with an unusually pricey speeding ticket (by Iowa standards) within 20 minutes of crossing the state line.

With my willingness to speed gone, I came to the realization that I still had about 5 hours of driving ahead of me. The Google maps estimation of 1800 miles was about 300 miles short, but, at this point, it was Portland or bust. With nothing but my cat passenger and podcasts of Mysterious Universe to keep me company, I powered through the rest of the drive to arrive at my new house in Portland at 1 A.M.

With no bed to sleep on, I passed out on the floor, laying on my stomach because my butt hurt to bad from sitting on it for 17 hours straight. I woke up the next morning to an overcast sky and light rain.

PORTLANDSUP.

Oh Des Moines

2010-07-31T09:14:00.000-07:00

Des Moines is reaching a point where you can go walk around on a Saturday night and probably find something cool going on. This hasn’t happened from lack of trying on the part of the Des Moines residents. Over the past few years, the people of Des Moines have taken every opportunity to pull the city out of the “wear a tie or get out” mindset it has been in since before I was born.

I was hanging out in Des Moines one weekend in July when I realized that all the work I heard Des Moines had been doing was actually starting to show. Denise and I were walking around in the East Village near the capitol building and I found myself genuinely impressed with how much had been done. The last time I really hung out in the area was 4 or 5 years ago when I was going to hardcore shows at the House of Bricks. At the time, the area was just a desert of cube-shaped buildings built on the mess that probably once produced a lot of brick and metal in the earlier part of the 20th century. It was the area on the other side of the river, and once the record store moved and the hardcore shows at the House of Bricks started to suck, there was not much of a reason to venture that far east in the city.

As we walked around while waiting for a table at the sushi place, I noticed numerous small businesses that had moved into all of that empty office space. Clothing stores, bars, galleries and music stores (I even saw one that specialized in guitars and fuzzy furniture) filled the place. We headed past a Jazz festival in the streets, toward the river where Devo was playing on one of the bridges, and we were able to walk down near the water in the new Simon Estes Amphitheater, and from the pedestrian bridge, watch all of the various age groups softly get down to old new wave

It is hard to say how much of this is actually a sign of growth in the right direction. A couple of colorful stores run by hip 30-year-olds in thick rimmed glasses is probably better than more insurance places and upscale clothing stores, but is it a sign of culture change or just another small business bound to fail eventually? This depends on the people.

A city can promote all the hip stores and festivals and social gatherings it wants, but the only way to create culture is to have a growing population of people to do it. Des Moines can name-drop its 80/35 music festival and advertise all of their art walks and talk about how youth-friendly the city is all it wants, but the fact remains that a city needs 20-something-year-olds to fill out an artistic and youthful culture. Unfortunately, the average age in Des Moines is 34.

I heard discussion on Iowa Public Radio about something called the Boomerang Effect and how it relates to Des Moines. The concept is pretty easy to figure out by the name. Kids are growing up in Des Moines and graduating (although the dropout rate is alarmingly high) from its schools and then leaving the state to go explore the rest of the United States, likely with the “I’m-never-coming-back” mindset. A large portion of these kids do end up returning to Des Moines in their early 30’s, because it is a safe place to live, both economically and with regard to family life. The speaker mentioned how important this effect is because it expands the experiences of Des Moines residents and mostly prevents cultural inbreeding.

While the idea of Des Moines residents returning with what they’ve learned in order to make Des Moines a better, safer place to live, artistic culture is not about being safe. The day it becomes that way is the day I stop bitching about the lack of it. Yes, there is place for quiet galleries filled with paintings of the Des Moines skyline, but real artistic culture capable of growth needs the youthful interests and aggression that people just tend to lose right around their 30’s.

(This is a Jeff Bonker painting and I stole the image from Google. Figured I should give credit where credit is due. I hope this is okay.)

While I do appreciate the expansion of youth and artistic culture in any form, my real knowledge on the concept does not extend far beyond local music’s role in this whole process. There are bands and there are bar bands. Des Moines… has bar bands—run of the mill rock that takes no chances. Where is everything else? Des Moines does not quite have the youth (both audiences and musicians) to sustain a real music scene. It has a lot of one-of’s and they mostly just take what they can get.

A real music scene has a lot of similar minded musicians making music of all different kinds, experimenting with all sorts of instruments. This isn’t to say you can’t do a hell-of-a-lot with a guitar, bass, and drums, but you certainly don’t see much done with that traditional formula at the local shows in this city. Most rock music is recognizable, safe, and accessible, and therefore could not possibly be more boring than it is.

Des Moines needs variety. Variety in itself creates a music scene, especially in a musical environment such as Des Moines. Any musicians making unique music in a stagnant music scene are way more likely to cling to any other musicians taking chances with their music. This community of artists creates interest and makes for more hype, larger crowds, better shows, and more support overall for the musicians involved.

Des Moines. You have a big music festival every summer. You have started to get some pretty decent bands to play at People’s Court and the Vaudeville Mews. You’ve turned a few heads and created some hype for yourself.
It’s not much, but it’s a start.

LIGHTNING BOLT

2010-07-15T20:59:00.000-07:00

I once had a dream where I was in some sort of weird venue with colorful walls where some noise band was playing and when I walked to the back of the place there was a pro wrestling match occurring on a makeshift ring with a low-hanging ceiling above it. I woke up thinking what a strange and spectacular place.

Two years later, I start listening to Lightning Bolt and when I read more about them, I find out about the venue they were very involved in called Fort Thunder in Rhode Island.

Fort Thunder. Magical venue in my dream. Same thing.

So, that was cool, and only somewhat related to the fact that I finally got to see Lightning Bolt in Iowa City last night. They played at Gabe's Oasis, which is now Gabe's again after its short span of being known as The Picador.

I will be seeing Lightning Bolt at Pitchfork this weekend, but decided that a small venue is the proper setting for the band. And I am glad that I made that decision.

I had wanted to see this band play to a crowded room since googling images of some of their shows years ago.

They were way loud, and the crowd went apeshit, but I mostly could not take my eyes off the drummer's hands. He played so hard and fast that he actually collapsed out of his drum throne at the end of their set, even after placing ice cubes in his scarecrow-esque mask and dumping no less than 4 bottles of water on himself.

Sorry, I didn't get any pictures, but it was something like this:

sweat power OR all the way to little rock and roll OR how to hardcore dance OR fucked up for president

2010-07-12T14:28:00.000-07:00

I played a few shows with Utopia Park and Valley Tongues in Lawrence, Kansas and Little Rock, Arkansas this weekend.

The Kansas show was in the lobby of the wicked Granada Theater, which had naked mermaids on the railings and was super nice. Baiowolf was the headliner, and they shredded hard and reminded me why I like The Locust, Blood Brothers, Neil Perry, and every other band that just rips their throat open into a microphone.

The Little Rock show took place on a half-pipe in the back of a skate shop and therefore fulfilled a personal dream of mine.

~~Play music on a half-pipe~~

Then we drove all night back to Iowa through can't-see-at-all fog in Arkansas and Missouri.

There was plenty of talk of hardcore, dubstep, teleportation's effects on the world, switchblades, food stamps, fucked up, and farming.

Never Knows Best Issue 2 Cover

2010-06-22T14:26:00.001-07:00

Working on it.

Never Knows Best Zine Issue 1

2010-05-22T15:53:00.000-07:00

There is now a zine for this here blog.

It is a 16-page monster of run-on sentences and brain waves.

Let me know if you would like one and I can send you one using the trusty USPS or I can meet you somewhere in Ames to make the trade, preferably a dark alley or shady parking lot.

neatzine issue 2

2010-05-03T20:01:00.000-07:00

We finished the second issue of Neat Zine.

This one includes:

A bitchin' space print for the cover
3 Stories
Issue 2 of Black Blood Revenge!
Green Bank - a comic about space travel and exploration
A conspiracy theory about the city of Ames and respiratory genocide
A poem/collage

Unfortunately, we ran out of toner on both of the copy machines responsible for printing issue 1 and half of issue 2.

R.I.P. copy machines

From now on, Neat Zine will be printed by taking complete advantage of free black and white printing at the College of Design!!

Get in contact with me if you want one of these and please be inspired to make your own. It is wicked easy and a really good excuse to create things. Love.

Tape

2010-04-30T09:12:00.000-07:00

The songs for Trista and my tape are almost done.

Trista's side is finished. You can hear her songs, Dad Hat and Gift for a Funeral, on her myspace.

I have one more song to record and it will probably be a Beach Boys cover, but my two main songs are done.

The tape is being made on Sweat Power Records with the cool Fairfield doods in Utopia Park.

Whoa! Lots of links.

Here is basically what the tape is going to look like:

Let me know if you want one. ok.

Neat Zine

2010-04-21T14:27:00.000-07:00

The first issue of Neat Zine is done.

It includes:

2 Stories
A couple of pictures
A spliced together comic strip
A conspiracy theory about Swine Flu
and some other cool stuff.

Let me know if you want one. You can also check it out online if you go the Neat Zine Blog to the right on my followers list. Also:

http://neatzine.blogspot.com

Portland (finally)

2010-04-20T14:18:00.000-07:00

I am just now getting around to putting up pictures and some sentences about my trip to Portland. Sorry they are so late.

Either my parents are way good at booking flights or we just got lucky because we had very little standing-around-at-the-airport time. However, we were held up on our flight from Minneapolis to Portland for about an extra hour because they had to run all the way across the airport to find a spare exit sign to put over one of the wings because some hooligan probably stole it, which is both awesome and annoying.

This is Jackie. I sat by her on the plane. She didn't seem to mind--sitting by me or the exit sign fiasco. She was headed to Honolulu which is where our plane was going directly after it dropped a few of us off in Portland. This is kind of a creepy picture of her, but she was really nice and she read some Nora Roberts romance novel while I sat next to her reading The Fuck-Up by Arthur Nersesian.

Trent and Dad got a beer at just about every place we stopped regardless of time of day. The Chili's in the airport at noon was no exception.

One of the many bridges over the Willamette River which runs right through the middle of Portland. The picture was taken from the Historic Waterfront District which, from what I can tell, is insanely beautiful for at least 250 days a year.

I went to the Japanese Garden on Friday which is quoted as being, and I'm reading from the official brochure here, "the most beautiful and authentic Japanese garden in the world outside of Japan."

It rained and shined and rained and shined the whole I time I was there.

I did a whole lot of other stuff too, but it is hard to lug a camera around everywhere without feeling like a huge tourist.

Every morning and evening I mooched a meal off of the company that my parents and brother were having their all-day meetings with. They were all very well dressed and I usually rolled down with bed hair and my crappy clothes. Saturday was the best because it was the big last meal of the weekend for the company gathering, so they took everyone to this French restaurant downtown which only made me look more haggard and out-of-place. We ate most of a decent three course meal which included an endless wine glass. My mind was blown. All the people in this company are really young (like mid to late 20's) and drive ridiculous cars that are always shiny (though that is probably because it rains everyday).

Trent and I went to two shows while we were out there. On Friday night, we saw Acid Mother's Temple at Mississippi Studios. We saw High Places, Bear in Heaven, and Cymbals Eat Guitars at Berbati's Pan on Saturday night. Berbati's has a really weird website for it being a restaurant/venue.

http://www.berbati.com/

Other than that, I did a lot of wandering around and looking up and down and side to side.

The things I learned about Portland that are awesome:

1. It has one of the best public transportation systems in all of America
2. The whole city is incredibly bike friendly, and bikes even have their own lane (painted solid green) on most streets
3. There is no sales tax
4. You are not allowed to pump your own gas. Each station has people that do that for you
5. It typically snows less than half an inch a year
6. The city established a building height regulation in order to maintain the view of surrounding hills, bodies of water, and mountains
7. It is one of the top-ranked cities for public park concentration in the country
8. It has Powell's Books and Everyday Music which are probably the biggest book store and record store, respectively, I have ever seen

Yay, then I came home.

Still moving out there in August.

Dum Dum Girls and The Morning Benders

2010-04-14T09:41:00.000-07:00

I have two shows to talk about with you all. Sorry, I didn't get any pictures of my own to use.

Let's do this chronologically.

I saw The Morning Benders at the M-Shop on Saturday.

Because people I know keep getting jobs at the M-Shop, my opportunity to get into these shows for free keeps increasing, which is great. Thanks everyone!

I hadn't ever listened to this band, but I had heard them mentioned in a few places, and since the M-Shop schedule is usually pretty ignorable, I thought I would at least go to one of the only good shows it is going to get this semester.

Overall, I thought the whole thing was pretty mediocre. The Morning Benders, to me, are a perfect example of another one of those pop bands that I hear once, download, and never listen to again--similar to half of the bands that Pitchfork reviews between a 7.2 and an 8.3 rating. There are just entirely too many of these bands for me to keep up. If it doesn't stand out initially, I have a hard time rediscovering them in a manner that appeals to me. The Morning Benders show was not a rediscovery for me. While a few of the songs were pretty catchy, I enjoyed the noisy, feedbacking, vocal looped improvisation they used to end their set more than anything else. So, their new album Big Echo will probably sit on my iTunes with 0 listens until I go through and clear out my library like I tend to do once every few years. Judging by the crowd reactions, I feel like this will probably be the case for much of the audience.

That being said, all the dudes in the band were really nice. They were friendly and talkative on stage instead of playing some character like, say, the Dum Dum Girls.

I showed up at this show just in time to miss the two openers. Ten dollars at the door and 40 minutes later, I left the venue. While I am a sucker for the Dum Dum Girls throwback to two-minute, catchy-as-hell pop songs, it is hard to feel satisfied with my 10 dollar ticket when the band I came to see only played a 25-minute set (granted they were a great 25 minutes of song). Their show was...distant, and that is not a reference to the piles of reverb that their music does so well. One song led quickly into another and then it was over. There was a band on the stage and a crowd watching it, but the two never really connected. Normally, I don't really have a problem with this, but considering the pace of the whole event, I felt like I walked from my car, through the front doors to the venue and back to the parking lot where I got in my car and left without anything to remember or any song I had to go home and listen to.

On top of all that, the dude at Des Noise mentioned that the Dum Dum Girls were apparently so disinterested in the show that they didn't even put out any merchandise, which I didn't notice.

What is weird about this whole thing, is that, as far as my experience goes, this was actually a pretty well attended Vaudeville Mews show, and at $10 a head, it was probably a relatively worthwhile show for the band, financially speaking.

Oh well. Des Moines, Des Moines.

I am playing with Utopia Park and These Stains Is Us at the Ames Progressive on Saturday. Should be pretty cool. Both those bands will probably rip it really hard after I get my chance to chill everyone out.

Still haven't decided if I am going to any of the VEISHEA shows.

High Places vs. Mankind

2010-04-09T09:17:00.000-07:00

So, the new High Places album, High Places vs. Mankind, came out on Tuesday.

To me, it is a disappointment.

I listened to High Places nearly every morning during the summer of 2009 on my bus ride to my campus job of delivering paper for printing services. If 03/07-09/07 and High Places can be described as morning bus rides when the sun is entering the sky through the cracks between the obstacles of the city horizon, then High Places vs. Mankind is the 3-month period of dull, sunless days that was this year's Iowa winter.

On previous albums, the noises and percussion of High Places bounced around the inside of your skull and kept the relatively short songs moving, as if the song were accompanying a sprint from the top of a mountain through an overgrown jungle and onto the long beach of some tropical island where the waves crash in slowly and everyone smiles and spins in circles all day as to not miss any of it. The lyrics varied from songs about trees and horticulture to songs about outer space.

The bouncing percussion and tropical noises still exist on High Places vs. Mankind but are often buried in repetitive guitars and somber lyrics that could represent the gray skies of boring days. The songs drag, the noises only bounce half as high, and the singing has replaced its youthful hopefulness with post-adolescent confusion and questioning.

If High Places were running just ahead of the storm clouds toward some lunar oasis in 03/07-09/07 and High Places then they have stopped to take a breathe as the storm caught up in High Places vs. Mankind.

You can listen to a few of their songs here:

http://rcrdlbl.com/artists/High_Places/music#From_Stardust_to_Sentience

In that link, you can hear the band at their best with From Stardust to Sentience, followed by a song showing where they are now with On Giving Up.

Music and Art and All the Different Ways to Take It In

2010-04-08T09:19:00.000-07:00

This article by Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney is interesting.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/monitormix/2010/04/the_amateur_vs_the_professiona.html

Largely, she just repeats many of the things that have been said about bedroom music and the Internet, but she mentions a few bands who were amateurs and presented themselves as professionals (James Brown and Nation of Ulysses), and professional bands who present themselves as amateurs (Kings of Leon and The Strokes). While I have no real interest in any of these bands, and no interest whatsoever in musical presentation, her talk of how the Internet and technology have blurred the lines between the amateur and the professional is worth reading.

Particularly, it made me think about music on the internet versus art on the internet. Anyone can upload their music, and anyone can find it and listen to it exactly how it is supposed to sound. Anyone listening to those songs are hearing the exact version of the song that was created by the band.

When translating this into visual art (specifically paintings, drawings, etc.--anything not done digitally), it completely changes. Many artists post their work online, but in this case, the online versions of the art are not the art itself, they are copies of it. Visual art is meant to be seen on a wall (there are exceptions), not a computer screen. A piece of original art can really only hang in one gallery at a time, and can only reach the audience who enter it.

I wonder if people are accepting digital copies of art as originals.

Despite a post for this topic, I really do hate talking about this. People should just create because they have the desire to do so, and they should upload it to the web and put it on walls or play it on a stage if they want to, so others can like it or hate it, and no one should worry about what genre or style they fall into, because however they choose to make it is exactly how it should be made. Brain to paper. No thoughts about its transmission through wires or websites or cultures or time periods.

Okay.

Baths

2010-04-07T11:15:00.000-07:00

This is good.

It kind of sounds like The Books hit Aphex Twin with a baseball bat and then Washed Out came along and cleaned up the mess with a mop drenched in water from the Pacific Ocean.

You can listen to it at:

www.myspace.com/bathsmusic

Or, you can download one of the songs from good ol' Pitchfork:

http://pitchfork.com/forkcast/14076-maximalist/

I hope you like this as much as I do.

Wrestlemania 26

2010-03-31T09:33:00.000-07:00

Yes! A Wrestlemania post!

I'm not sure how it happened, but at some point in my life, I watched professional wrestling and ended up on the side of those grown-up dudes who still think it is awesome.

Two years ago, I watched Wrestlemania 24 at Billy Joe's Pitcher Show in Des Moines. The theater was filled with screaming kids, old men in WWE shirts, and countless tables of people downing pitchers of beer and emptying pack after pack of cigarettes. We sat in the very front corner and had a hard time seeing. In the final match that year, HBK sweet chin music-ed Ric Flair and pinned him to end Flair's career in the WWE (he has now joined TNA, from what I understand).

This year, HBK finally got what was coming to him.

In an amazing match where Undertaker put his 17-0 Wrestlemania record on the line against HBK's career in the WWE, the tables turned on Shawn Michaels, and the Heartbreak Kid was ultimately broken, and forced to say goodbye to the sport (okay, entertainment franchise) that held him in such high regard for so many years. He walked that entrance ramp for the last time as a professional wrestler, and the white-walled living room of a small house in Boone where I watched this year's event saw a few adult eyes well up with tears. I was happy to see him go, but many of the people I was watching this year's Wrestlemania with had been nearly lifelong HBK fans and one even stated that "If HBK loses, that's like my entire childhood is gone".

Despite how laughable professional wrestling can be, it is quotes like that and the professional wrestling experiences I have had in the past few years that keep me hooked. For me, it is just as interesting to watch the 30-year-old lifelong fans as it is to watch the wrestlers themselves.

I don't know where I will be for Wrestlemania 27. I may not even get the chance to watch it, but no matter what happens, I will know that living rooms and movie theaters alike across the country will be filled both adults and kids that can watch and believe that every move is real, every injury is serious, and every match is determined by the best man, not the most profitable.

Iowa and Oregon

2010-03-23T14:39:00.000-07:00

Spring has finally probably arrived.

Jon and I have begun our mission to make the backyard a paradise, but it will probably just end up looking really nice because we don't know that much about gardening. I've already broken one rake and we ripped up all this plastic that the landlords probably put down to prevent weeds from growing... so that could turn out kind of bad.

As it turns out, you can get nearly 100 tomato seeds for only 1 dollar!

I heard back from the Fairfield dudes and it sounds like they want Trista and I to have some songs done for a split tape by the middle of April, which should be do-able. I'll let you know as I finish them.

I'm going to Portland tomorrow for a few days. Trent and my parents will be attending business meetings all day while I explore the city and buy records and see the Japanese Garden. AND THEN, at night I get to eat with them at their business dinners and I don't even have to dress up. What a scam! There is also a very small probability that I may leave Portland with an apartment and a job, though its doubtful. I'll probably just end up with a few leads and places to look when I return in a few months.

I'll take lots of pictures for everyone to see when I get back.

The 82nd Annual Academy Awards

2010-03-08T09:39:00.000-08:00

If I got anything out of last night's 82nd Annual Academy Awards, I learned that I did not see enough movies in 2009. This made me wonder if that was entirely my fault, or if the culturally-lacking city of Ames, well, lacked film culture.

Recently, the once prominent Varsity Theater closed its doors. The Varsity was once the spitting image of what I felt a college theater should be--midnight showings of classic and cult films, art-house films, documentaries, and cheap tickets. But by the end of it, it was trying to hold onto student attention by showing more popular movies, offering nothing more than the big Hollywood blockbusters. At this point, the only advantage it had over the more popular Movies 12 theater was its proximity to campus. But when you are competing with the clean, option-filled Movies 12, by offering only 2 or 3 movies at a time at a closer distance in an already small city, you are bound to fail. So, the question remains, did the Varsity theater close because it abandoned the small, art-house following it had? Or did it close because its student following abandoned it in favor of a larger theater with more, popular blockbuster options?

The only Campustown option that remains now for student movie-goers is the Student Union Board films every week. Let's take a look at the Fall 2009 schedule:

Adventureland
Angels & Demons
The Proposal
Star Trek
Up
Public Enemies
The Hangover
Transformers 2
Harry Potter
Orphan
Funny People
The Ugly Truth
GI Joe
Inglorious Basterds

and the Spring 2010 schedule:

Paranormal Activity
The Invention of Lying
Where the Wild Things Are
Zombieland
Twilight: New Moon
Couples Retreat
Law Abiding Citizen
Brothers
The Blind Side
Up in the Air
Invictus
Youth in Revolt
Sherlock Holmes
Avatar

Needless to say, the whole SUB film program seems to be lacking any real film merit. Mostly run-of-the-mill comedies and action movies, sprinkled with a few of the necessary Hollywood hits that did appear on the Best Picture list (due, perhaps, only to the extension of the that list from 5 to 10 films). They were, however, very well attended on the occasions that I went, so there certainly is a student audience for these kind of films.

It is also important to mention the ol' North Grand 5 (aka the dollar theater). Unfortunately, this theater is nothing more than a 2-3 month late, cheaper version of the popular Movies 12.

And then, in the wake of all these theater changes over the past years, both Hollywood Video and Hastings (which had a wonderful, cheap selection of movie rentals) closed their doors, leaving only Family Video and Redbox for movie rentals. But both of these tend to offer, once again, only those large Hollywood blockbusters.

Considering all of this, it isn't difficult to see why I was hearing of some of the Academy Award winning films for the first time last night, when they were winning their awards. Because of this, I found that the only category I could really justify caring about was (surprisingly) the Best Supporting Actor award. And Christoph Waltz won for his tense-as-hell, animated performance as Colonel Hans Landa in Inglorious Basterds.

I did, however, add a lot of titles to my already long "to-watch" list, which I hope will continue to grow at a faster rate than my ability to view its contents, although, at the rate that Hollywood keeps kicking out crappy College comedies, copycat romances, and crime dramas, I foresee fewer and fewer new films making that list. We'll see!

(Sidenote: The Academy's tribute to horror movies - Cool. The tribute's complete lack of a Romero movie - Not cool.)

Dunston Checks In 2: Dunston Checks Out

2010-03-07T22:20:00.001-08:00

The Iowa State University radio station, KURE, held their annual Kaleidoquiz this weekend. I think 23 teams competed in all in a huge trivia and random-as-hell activity 26-hour marathon in the town of Ames.

Our team was Dunston Checks In 2: Dunston Checks Out. I heard we ended up in 11th place, but we missed the final awards ceremony because we showed up half an hour late. I'm pretty satisfied considering we rarely had more than 7 or 8 people to cover answering trivia questions every 6 minutes, solving trivia montages, performing scavenger hunts, traveling to Minneapolis, and making movies to fulfill random requirements.

We made a How to Make paper video which involved picking up branches and bark, ingesting it, excreting it, chewing it, and flattening it out into paper. Half of the scenes spontaneously disappeared in the footage import process and I had to completely explain the holes left by their disappearance in my narration of the whole thing which I did in one take because the video was due half an hour before I even started the audio part of it. Maybe I'll upload it to this here blog if I can find it. Other members of our team made a music video for Britney Spears - Toxic while I was at work. I'll upload that too, if I can find it.

There were a lot of High Fidelity and Star Wars and Dungeons and Dragons questions which we often got wrong because we answered the questions too correctly and the person taking our answer didn't know anything more than the answer written on the sheet in front of them. Such is the annoyance of KQ.

What I have learned from Kaleidoquiz 2010:

1. Don't ever listen to John Hodgeman's 700 Molemen comedy bit.

2. Just because something started an hour late before, doesn't mean it will start an hour late again.

3. Star Wars knowledge will always continue to come in handy at some point.

4. Morse Code is nearly impossible to decipher without pauses between letters.

5. Boring video is always more entertaining with music playing.

6. Twenty-three different people trying to call a single phone line to answer a question is a broken method of doing trivia.

7. Everything is on the internet if you look hard enough.

8. It is nearly impossible to sit down and watch a movie without falling asleep after you've been awake for 26 hours.

9. College radio is filled with dorks (I have still not figured out why, though).

Here is our video we made from last year, which is still awesome.

A Sunny Day in Glasgow Show

2010-03-04T22:30:00.000-08:00

Trista and I played with Wolves in the Attic and A Sunny Day in Glasgow tonight at the Vaudeville Mews. It went very well. We actually had a couple of songs to play so we didn't just improvise everything and make noise between half-finished pieces of songs. It was probably the most well attended VM show I have ever played.

On the way in, we stole Wolves in the Attic's parking spot, and then later they announced that it might be their last show as a band, which was kind of sad. I have seen that band play in all sorts of basements and spaces, and they are one of maybe 5 bands that exist in Ames that I care about (which is also sad).

A Sunny Day in Glasgow was...okay. I hate to spit out the whole "they-sound-better-on-the-album" thing, but it is kind of true.

Live music is kind of like headphones for your entire body. So, I was excited for this show because listening to their album, Ashes Grammar, this whole week on my way to work at 7 in the morning made my head swim around in some pond made up of the frozen trees lining the sidewalks on campus, the sun failing to break through the Iowa winter cloud cover, and the wonderful, sky-filled sounds of A Sunny Day in Glasgow flowing between my ears.

Unfortunately, their live drums and guitars tended to drown out the reverbed singing and sunny guitar and synth parts that made their album as good as it was (all 22 songs of it). Either that, or they primarily played new stuff and it is much more guitar-and-drum based, which is entirely possible too.

I don't think I have any more shows scheduled. I'm going to try and finish some of these sample-based songs I have in the works, and I might make a split tape with Trista for SWEAT POWER RECORDS if and when that is created.

Vivian Girls in Grinnell next Saturday, and then I'm going to Portland at the end of the month (which I'm still trying to get work off for).

Weekend

2010-03-02T14:33:00.000-08:00

I went to my first masquerade this weekend. Denise made us cool cat masks. It took place in the Brunnier Art Museum on campus, and the whole place was filled with cool prints of Japanese landscapes and Iowa birds. Everyone seemed kind of confused about what they were supposed to be doing at a masquerade, but we had fun.

On Sunday, Trista and I lugged all of our equipment home to record some songs in an attempt to get accepted to play at VEISHEA. We only recorded one song far enough to be satisfied with turning it in (though we may add drums to it later). So, we put one of the songs I just made with my sampler and one of Trista's older songs on a CD with it and turned it in. It could be interesting making gospel-like noise between college rock bands if the opportunity to do so at VEISHEA arises.

If you want to listen to it, you can on Trista's myspace. It's called Dad Hat.
The song I did is called Wet Kids.

The Crazies

2010-03-01T07:59:00.000-08:00

So, I saw The Crazies this weekend.

The film was a remake of a 1973 film written and directed by George Romero, who I continue to like more and more, despite his dive in making quality films as of recently.

You can see the difference in movie posters. They just don't make them like they used to. I think I want to start collecting George Romero movie posters.

The Crazies takes place in a little town of about 1200 people called Ogden Marsh, Iowa. Being from a town of about 3000 people called Ogden, Iowa, I was naturally drawn to this film. The interesting thing is that, apparently, the small-town-Iowa thing drew a whole crowd for this film that I would have never expected. I see horror movies. I love them and I would like to some day write horror movie screenplays. That being said, I have been in the theater for movies like this since I was old enough to buy tickets for them (or clever enough to figure out how to sneak in).

I have never seen a theater this full for a movie like this in all my experiences of seeing zombie-infection films of this type. I'm pretty sure a showing of Cop Out was playing at the same time that The Crazies was and it felt like the general audience of this movie would have been much more at home laughing at the laugh-out-loud, police brutality humor of that film, rather than loving the ridiculous details of a quarantined infection in a small Iowa town gone wrong. I mention this with no elitist tone. I simply use it to question whether or not the name-dropping of Cedar Rapids and the Iowa Hawkeyes in a film is enough to make the casual viewer want to see it.

Overall, I liked the film. I'm not sure if this is because my horror movie standards have been lowered after years of bad horror or if because this was one of the rare cases when a horror remake is done pretty well (Rob Zombie, please stop making movies).

As the story goes, a plane carrying some toxic substance crashes into a small body of water that the town of Ogden Marsh gets its water from. Slowly, members of the town start to go crazy as they use the water, and the American government steps in to quarantine the area to prevent the spread of this "crazy" infection. Surprisingly, the Iowa setting allowed for some pretty nice landscape shots, which made Iowa look as beautiful as it does during its best summer nights, throughout the whole film. Ironically, the majority of the film was shot in Georgia, because, apparently, the filmmakers wanted the state to look prettier than they actually thought it was.

I liked it enough to want to see the original (sometimes known as Code Name: Trixie), but because every good movie rental place in Ames is tanking, I decided I finally need to open my own Netflix account to get access to the kinds of films that the shelves of Family Video do not offer.

Television and Music

2010-02-23T21:44:00.000-08:00

I haven't been watching much television lately. Really, I watch Lost every week and that just about does it.

In the absence of my viewing eyes, TV has gotten way weirder--faster paced, worse advertising, and so forth.

For example, I saw a commercial for, what must be a movie, Despicable Me, and it left me wide-eyed without a thought in my head for it.

This isn't the exact commercial I saw, but it is a trailer for the movie and basically does the same thing:

Is it possible to remove yourself from your own advertising demographic?

Then there are things like NASCAR sponsors and the way they are advertised.

Let's say one of the racers drives a, I-don't-know, Ford (it is possible that no NASCAR racers drive Fords and this is a bad example, but I don't watch racing and I wouldn't know) and this particular car and driver is sponsored by Snickers. Every time that racer is interviewed, he or she will make sure to mention the performance of his "Snickers Ford Car". Does a race car driver saying the word "Snickers" really make people want to go out and buy a candy bar? I would be pretty embarrassed with the American public if this were the case. But, sponsors keep handing out money for these figures to mention their product, so something has to be working, I guess.

Then, there are Geico commercials, which I don't even want to try with, because I can't decide if the advertising is brilliant or entirely absurd.

In other news, there are some pretty good shows coming up around these central Iowa parts.

March 4 - Vaudeville Mews - A Sunny Day in Glasgow
March 13 - Grinnell College - Vivian Girls
March 14 - M-Shop - Bowerbirds
March 30 - Iowa City - Mission Creek festival starts
April 2 - Minneapolis - High Places, Tobacco, Hood Internet
April 4 - Minneapolis - Beach House
April 12 - Vaudeville Mews - Dum Dum Girls

And plenty of other alright stuff coming to the Vaudeville Mews, which is a venue I always tell myself I need to attend more often.

I'm really going to try and make it to all these shows and take pictures and remember things to put into words on this here blog for each and every one of these shows. Actually, Trista and I are playing on March 4th with A Sunny Day in Glasgow, so I will for sure be making it to that one.

Keep it up.

Weirdest Night of My Life i think

2010-02-19T23:49:00.000-08:00

It has been the weirdest night that I can remember out of all the nights I have been alive.

Some combination of everything in this picture, probably. Feels like I just woke up, but I've been awake for a while.

AGE

2010-02-08T13:12:00.000-08:00

I think I am getting old. That is, I feel as though I am an adult or maybe somewhere close. I have come to this conclusion for a number of reasons:

1. Recently, I have started listening to NPR as opposed to popular radio. Talk shows, the news, classical music. One might make the argument that pop radio sucks and that NPR is a good alternative. I would agree, but does pop radio suck because I'm old and have grown out of it?

2. In fact, I don't really listen to much new music at all it seems. Every time a band I like releases a new album, I tend to gripe that it is not as good as their old stuff. Common thing among fans. But when I look at my father, who listens to no new music whatsoever, he seemed to have decided right around his mid 20's what bands he liked, and he still listens to them today, and nothing else, though in a few cases he has expanded his collection of music from those particular artists.

(It is interesting for me, here, to include the band No Age among my favorite bands with overall regard to this post.)

3. On occasion, I lie about my age. It probably doesn't help my case that I usually get away with it, too. I don't understand why I do it. A lot of the time, I am the oldest one in a given situation, and I feel embarrassed about it.

4. I drink a lot of coffee and have trouble functioning during the day without it. I am trying to eat healthier and continue to attempt to drink less soda.

5. I am fed up with politics and feel that I have already heard my life's worth of it. In addition, I have begun to realize why adults pick a political party and blindly vote for it, as awful as an idea as it is.

6. I pay attention to gas prices.

7. I consistently wake up between 6 and 9 AM, which I, in theory, believe is early for people my age.

8. For the most part, I strictly listen to records and I hate most technology. Ipods are convenient, but I don't like cell phones and I'm okay with having to wait to get to a computer to access the Internet. Bluetooth headsets, Ipads, Netbooks, and Kindles are a bit too close to robotic attachments for my taste.

(Sidenote: The word "kindle" to me implies fire, and because the Kindle is a portable, digital book which literature can be downloaded to, it seems to imply further that the Kindle will "burn" books, which, historically and when mentioned in literature, is a bad thing)

All that being said, I also don't really believe in age stereotypes and I think that people should pick up what ever habits or behaviors they want to--no matter how old they are, which is what I have done.

Radio, Books, and Movies

2010-02-04T08:15:00.000-08:00

A lady on Iowa Public Radio's Talk of Iowa today stated her opinion that people today are making films where people in times past would have sat down and wrote a book. She believes that this is the way things are moving currently.

I don't think I agree. Largely, I still believe in the importance of random scrubs (such as myself) sitting down and spending the time to relate thoughts and experiences to others through written word--fiction or non-fiction. Also, I don't think I have the financial ability to go make a movie. While I do occasionally make attempts to write screen and stage plays, and plan to hopefully complete a few in my life, it seems that it would be much more difficult to produce a film from them rather than a short story or novel.

I do, however, accept that, despite how important I believe it is, a lifestyle made from written literature is probably at a point where it will never allow financial success. In accepting this, I am forced to accept that I will probably never make a large amount of money from doing the things that I want to do in life. This is okay, I don't know what I would do with money anyway. Thinking about the near future and the potential of having a salary that is roughly 5-10 times what I make now is hard to comprehend. I'm getting by now on a couple of bucks a month. I'll just have to see how obligations change when I finish college.

In related news, I have really been trying to write more lately. I started a remake of a past short story I wrote and I have also been writing a story through letters to my parents from the point-of-view of me as if I did drop out of college to go explore the continent and settle in a coast city. My roommates and friends are a good inspiration, because they seem to be pursuing the same general lifestyle that I am, and seem to understand the consequences as I do.

I gnabbed an Adolescent Psychology book from the psych building on campus here. It was written in the early 90s, but still seems relevant in many ways today. I found this paragraph interesting:

What are the values of today's adolescents? Are they consistent with the common negative stereotypes of adolescents? According to one view, moral values favoring self-fulfillment have increasingly strengthened , whereas values favoring the welfare of others have increasingly weakened. In particular, there is evidence that the values of college students have become more oriented around personal financial gain and less around meaningful philosophy of life. Thus, current college students may judge selfish actions, especially actions producing financial gain, less severely than college students of prior generations.

This is pretty clear today in the way that the question "What are you going to do with that?" is consistently asked of English, Philosophy, and various Arts majors and rarely, if ever, asked of Engineering or Business-related majors. Even Agriculture kids get more credit than we do, which kind of sucks.

Iowa is the color white

2010-01-19T16:53:00.000-08:00

Trista and I had a show in Fairfield on Sunday. It was the third day of shows celebrating Dominic's birthday. The show went insanely well. I almost feel like a sham at times because most of the music that we play live is improvised and all the practicing I do (which is mostly sitting in front of a computer screen, editing samples) is done for music that I don't play live, but then after we get done playing I don't feel as bad because we keep playing better and better together. Trista's echoey vocals, piano, and organ just add so much, what I call, cloud-cover to the noise that I make. It's great.

The whole night of shows was opened up by this band Caution Comma Lemmy, which was just two guys and the singer wore a gas mask with a microphone built in. At one point, through delayed out vocals, he said he was going to play his favorite Animal Collective song, and proceeded into a really creepy and cool cover of Banshee Beat. He was the first person I've ever seen cover an Animal Collective song.

We also drank really bad coffee at this small coffee place around the center square in Fairfield and I had the distinct impression that all the meditative locals were watching us and taking notes on our behavior. I glanced over the shoulder at a tiny notebook of one of the locals and he was taking notes in as many as 3 different languages including what looked like Korean. At one point, one lady even burst out laughing at something we said that seemed entirely ordinary conversation to us, and then apologized for her outburst.

After the show, we stayed up late and talked about music at Phil and Dom's house in Fairfield. Dominic also showed me this list of unexplained radio broadcasts that really freaked me out, and then I feel asleep on a bed made of chair cushions.

Here is the link to the list of those broadcasts:

http://www.cracked.com/article_18381_the-5-creepiest-unexplained-broadcasts.html

On Monday, we drove to Iowa City so Trista could have a saxophone practice with the director from the University of Iowa. Porter and I talked about the future of pop culture and went record shopping. I found Holland by the Beach Boys, but it didn't include the weird 7" or Brian Wilson's 2-part fairy tale song, which is kind of why I wanted it.

That is all about that.

I heard a radio commercial today filled with quotes from teenagers who were happy with their decision to go back to high school to "get an education" and it kind of got me thinking. The idea (and largely, the wording) of "getting an education" is weird to me. It separates everyday learning from the kind we get in school. As I often quote from a friend of mine, "schools teach us what to think, not how to think," and when you are being taught what to think in the form of "an education" (which is the same thing as a major or field of study in college), it suggests that you can actually "get" an education which means there is a logical end point in which you have your education and can go do something else. This seems entirely opposite from the concept of lifelong learning which everyone actually goes through, and in fact gives your "education" higher value than the learning we do on our own. I hope this isn't actually the case for anyone.

Galaxie 500 is great. They were making what current bands call "glo-fi" as early as the late 80's, and their albums were finally released on vinyl by someone who has the power to make decisions like that.

2010-01-09T22:18:00.000-08:00

I'm back from Colorado. Made a whole list of things we did while we were there but I'll just put up some pictures instead.

Col-oh-RAD-oh

2010-01-05T20:00:00.000-08:00

Chilling in Colorado with D&D. Eating guacamole. We are going to go to Denver tomorrow and I am probably going to buy more records than I need. We will take pictures tomorrow and I will post them and you can see them and they will be nice.

UP is the saddest movie I have ever seen.

I finally got my internship figured out for this coming semester. Ideally, I will be paid for it, which is a huge scam because I can only be on the payroll for it if I am an Iowa State University student, which I barely am anymore. In fact, the only reason I will even be an Iowa State University student anymore is because I am doing this internship. It's kind of like one big circle as far as getting paid goes.

3006 Wood Street and specific others within a 3 block radius will be producing a wicked zine for the Iowa State University campus this semester. It will be compromised of a bunch of random stuff including comics, writings, poems, and drawings. Probably more too. I think it can be my medium for my ridiculous Iowa State University conspiracy theories. I wish I had another word to describe it besides "zine" because someone, at some point, just thought it was a cool word for a short magazine.

They were wrong.

I'll give more information when it is closer to completion.

College

2009-12-15T21:11:00.000-08:00

It seems like only certain majors in college really allow creative freedom. Being a journalism major has been fun simply for the fact that I was able to mess around with school-purchased cameras and audio equipment, but I didn't make anything that I truly wanted to make. Every assignment I turned in was something I found to fit a requirement.

It seems like college should be a huge experience that allows greater freedom from the high school classroom walls, and it should teach you how to think or create instead of what to think or what to create.

The fact that I am now thinking, "Good, college is done. Now I can make something I care about," seems backwards to me. Rightly, the best work of these 4 (or in my case, 5) years should be what you were encouraged to create in the classroom rather than the things you worked on between class obligations.

I hope that colleges out there do exist that encourage true creation rather than guideline-based repetition.

---

I am getting back into writing letters. I couldn't sleep this morning while my brain was forming the outline of a serious letter to an ailing friend, so I got out of bed and wrote it. A few pages later, it was finished, and after some friendly advice, I'm unsure as to whether or not to send it. My general outlook on serious letter writing, the kind that is done to allow the writer real expression he or she is otherwise deprived of, should always be encouraged, because what true harm can come from expressing your beliefs to someone. The only real worst case scenario I can imagine is that they simply disregard the letter and don't reply. We'll see.

The other letter is an unfinished letter I started writing to my parents at the beginning of the semester when I was on a huge letter writing kick. It touches on a few of the things I am excited and worried about this semester and mentions new, budding feelings for a girl who has since become a large part of my life. I was thinking about it last week, and decided it would be cool to finish it now with my current thoughts on the same topics and double-date the letter and send it. That one is happening.

Watched Almost Famous today. That movie is still great, though the raw movie quality actually seemed a bit worse than I remembered.

I'm hopefully going to go finish Philip K. Dick's "Dr. Bloodmoney" after I finish writing this post. It is interesting. It focuses on a bunch of telekinetic civilians living in a post-apocalyptic US west coast, living under a physically degenerating god-like disc jockey revolving around Earth in a satellite. Kind of reminds me of my multitude of 2012-based dreams I had last night.

I am a sucker for anything post-apocalyptic.

San Diego

2009-12-07T10:01:00.001-08:00

I went to San Diego over Thanksgiving break. Having someone to stay with saves hundreds of dollars. I highly recommend it when possible.

I just got my camera back and uploaded some photos.

There are a lot more. We showed up at the airport with 2 digital cameras, Denise's film camera, 2 disposable cameras, and an old polaroid camera.

The end of college

2009-12-06T22:23:00.000-08:00

The end of college is so close now. I have about 2 weeks of classes left, and then this spring I have to complete an internship and then I will be done.

I couldn't be more excited.

I decied that college is not nearly as necessary as everyone makes it seem. I told my mom this and she agreed with me and expressed the same feelings about it as I had, which was nice to hear.

I'm glad that, in a couple of weeks, I can finally have the time to devote my brain to creating things that are important to me. I've always wanted to be a more productive writer, but I never write. I'm not sure if this is actually because I don't have enough time (like I tell myself) or because I just don't have it in me to be a writer. We'll see what happens when I don't have college holding me down.

I talked to a friend from the University of Northern Iowa, and he also has no plans come next August, so we are going to move to Portland and work bad jobs and live in a bad apartment and make bad music and write bad literature. I hope that the combination of all that will churn out something which is good.

Everything is experience. Experience involves feeling. Feeling is good.

Amazing Einstein Essay I stumbled upon

2009-05-08T17:41:00.000-07:00

There is something amazing about being able to say that Einstein and I think alike on something.

Here it is. Enjoy

"How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people -- first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving...

"I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves -- this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts -- possessions, outward success, luxury -- have always seemed to me contemptible.

"My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a 'lone traveler' and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude..."

"My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that for any organization to reach its goals, one man must do the thinking and directing and generally bear the responsibility. But the led must not be coerced, they must be able to choose their leader. In my opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low morality... The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.

"This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor... This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery -- even if mixed with fear -- that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man... I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence -- as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature."