Could I love him more?

On 1988, july 23, Bruce Springsteen skipped a VIP-arrangement during his tour in Denmark and took a walk down the street. There he met the street musician John Magnusson and asked him if he could borrow one of his guitars. Apparently they played a few songs together while about 50 people stopped around and listened to the music.

Tonight after work I'm trekking to North Jersey to see Matt Pond PA, who have been one of my favorite bands for a few years. I try to explain my infatuation with this band to people and sometimes they get it but mostly they don't. I'll try again.

Basically, I have a preternatural concern for place and time which manifests itself in my tastes in books, movies, art, music, etc. I think in a way this concept appeals to everyone. To hear a song and find yourself transported to a specific place or time in your life is an amazing thing. Its why people dance to certain songs at weddings, for example. But taking a melody and then tying it to a moment is the easiest of several routes to that end. What's far more challenging, and I think noteworthy, is to somehow craft something (be it a song, film, or painting) which is wholly imbued with a sense of time and space from the start.

This is what Matt Pond PA is to me, generally, and why I will travel a few hours back and forth to see them on a Thursday night. There are of course exceptions. I hear Halloween and I'm in an apartment where I listened to it on repeat a dozen times or more. I hear Summer (Butcher Two) and I'm barefoot in someone's wet grass, having a cool drink on a July night. But even better than this are the songs that take me places I have never been, and which make me know feelings that I have no real reason to feel. Musical escapism is my concern here, and it's something for which I have the utmost respect and admiration.



In other news, after a decade with old red, I purchased a new guitar. Expect a new post when it shows up on my doorstep.

Do you like this band too?

Hey look, the last 5 years of my life can be compressed into a 5 minute NPR feature!

Racing in the streets

Happy 60th Birthday, NASCAR. I made you this!

Some mistakes you never stop paying for

Finished The Natural on the train today. I might watch the movie tonight if I feel up to it.

It's been so long since I read the book that I had all but forgotten the level of disparity between Malamud's Roy Hobbs and the one Redford portrays on the big screen. Sitting there, speeding in the dark towards New Brunswick (which, coincidentally, is almost exactly how the novel starts) I couldn't come to a conclusion as to which was more believable.

Currently listening to Springsteen's Seeger Sessions for the first time. Into it.

My master's thesis has been digitized. I wouldn't recommend reading the whole thing unless you need some kind of sleep aid, but someone might find it interesting.

One of my favorite bands and one which I guess surprises some people based upon the bands I play/have played in is Denali. The first time I saw Denali I think was in 2002, when they were touring on their first record. The show was in the Douglass College student center at Rutgers, a small weird space where bands would sometimes set up and play in the small lounge. I knew nothing about them, but a friend's band was opening the show, and a girl I had a crush on at the time had mentioned that she would be there.

The way they sounded in that strange room with the lights turned off is something that I've never really replicated. At that point I had never before seen a band come across so powerfully without screaming, yelling, and jumping up and down. It was an incredible experience and an eye-opening one from a musical perspective.

You can download their original demo for free from JadeTree:

http://www.jadetree.com/mp3/Denali-Demonstration.zip

I just ran out of hard drive space and had to delete some music to make my laptop function again. How embarrassing. It would seem that I can add "external hard drive" to the list of junk I need to purchase. On that ever-growing list I'll rank it slightly below "paper towels" and slightly above "a guitar that I have not been slamming into the ground for 10 years."

Interesting article in the Times today about the almost-universal appeal of my favorite book.

It's all about where you put the horizon...

Checked this out yesterday. Great movie-- bad pacing. To my mind, it starts too slow and ends too quickly. Those issues aside though Casey Affleck plays "awkward young man" like it's all he's ever known, and Brad Pitt is surprisingly complex as the title character. I'll back it.

In honor of pitchers and catchers reporting for spring training I'm re-reading the Natural. More on that as it unfolds.

I guess I am just a heathen still...

What can I say? Sunday will ostensibly be a day of rest but this weekend was ivy league hockey, sweaty basements and broken lightbulbs, long walks in the rain and brief conversations about art. I couldn't ask for more, and I won't settle for less.

I have a lot of favorite bands and favorite songs but the only one that matters is Heathens.

I don't know what I could have written in an e-mail that sparked this, but this was one of the sponsored links on my gmail account this morning:

http://www.besteverbuffalo.com/cms/

Everybody wants to rule the world

50 degree evening in February. Windows open and Tears for Fears on my stereo. Count it.



About two or three weeks ago Flickr, the photograph hosting service/experiment announced that it had teamed up with the Library of Congress. See it in action at Flickr Commons. What this essentially means is that, on a trial basis, Flickr users will be able to tag digitized photographs from the collections of the Library of Congress in much the same way they would tag a friend's snapshot or someone's vacation pictures.

This is huge to me for a few reasons. This past fall I spend a considerable amount of time writing a thesis about how social tagging, of the type utilized on Flickr, YouTube, and de.lic.ious among other places could be a formidable tool in efforts to provide better access to digitized museum collections. I'm cutting out a ton of details, but basically the problem is that museum cataloging has, for the longest time, been approached in a manner that is essentially borrowed from libraries. However the inherent "value" of an artwork or an artifact is one's personal connection to it and its context within the greater scheme of (art) history. This is a context that traditional cataloging rarely provides. But tagging, on the other hand, allows for far greater flexibility and draws from a wider pool of communal knowledge and insight. Its something worth exploring. My main focus at the time was Steve.Museum but given my current line of work (archives) its thrilling to see this attempted on such a scale, and with the backing of the major players in both areas.

Maxim Ryazansky recently updated his website with a few more shots from his "Pursuit of Happiness" series. See them at http://www.foreveroutsiders.com and find out more about the project in this interview. Max has been an acquaintance of mine for years, and his ability to identify and focus his camera on the complete absurdity of American life in the 21st century never ceases to amaze me.

Another face in your audience

I rediscovered this Farside video today. I had forgotten how truly incredible it was. What's the funniest is that this show took place in 1995. I went to shows at this place in high school (so circa late 90s/200) and then I went to a show there last year and in each instance the room has looked exactly the same. Though this show predates it by a few years, Farside's "the Monroe Doctrine" is something that never leaves the rotation.

In other unrelated news, the Giants won the Super Bowl, the Mets have a solid pitching staff, and tomorrow New Jersey democrats will be choosing between a former first lady and an African-American in the presidential primary, largely based on their actual campaign platforms.

Strange times indeed.

Twist of Cain

It is with little to no hesitation that I have chosen to devote an entire entry to the first Danzig record, a masterpiece of over-the-top riffage that has haunted me for years on end. I don't quite know how to explain this one, because it seems so obvious. At some point in your life, you have undoubtedly crossed paths with Danzig, and without question you were perplexed. Who is this short man in a mesh shirt? What am I to do with him? Where does he get off employing such a personage?

The answer to all those questions, and so much more, is in the first six tracks of this record. Twist of Cain, Not of This World, She Rides, Soul on Fire, Am I Demon?, and Mother. The a-side of this record is, I kid you not, a juggernaut of what Lucifer was doing in the late 1980s after he moved to North Jersey.

What brought this post on was hearing "Mother" in a commercial for the Sarah Connor Chronicles during the Super Bowl tonight. I don't know what demographic they're targeting exactly, but to be quite frank, I'm sold.

Whatever happened to the scenes from the future?

This is a new blog. Over the past few years I've had a handful of blogs, and my general rule of thumb is that when the earliest entries stop making sense to me its time to start a new one. So here we are. This one will be slightly different though, in that it will be less centered on personal insight and observations, and more about my perceptions of the world around me, as manifested in books, music, film, art, etc.



We'll begin with the title. "Scenes from the Future" is the second track on the Ivory Coast's "The Rush of Oncoming Traffic." The Ivory Coast was a band from, as far as I can determine, the Boston area. Though the record was recorded 10 years ago at this point, "the Rush of Oncoming Traffic" sounds to my ears like a record that could have come out yesterday, today, or tomorrow. The jangly guitars, hyperactive drumming, and vocals that hover around the correct pitch but never quite hit it all belie a certain maturity and sense of musical self-awareness that runs through the record.

"Scenes from the Future" is one of the standout tracks. The lyrics express a specific feeling of disappointment that at some time we all share when we discover that "progress" as its commonly recognized has nothing to do with monorails, spaceships, and giant glass towers but instead is characterized by changes in infrastructure, the value of the dollar, and other considerably more abstract factors. So in the end we hold up individuals such as Jules Verne, Gene Roddenbery, and George Lucas not only for their creativity, but because they carry on in the face of this universal truth.