Ahh, now this is more like it.

as long as your inside my blue veins

I got a flickr account for my new cell phone. Filling that with pictures here.

I overheard two conversations at Sweet & Vicious on Spring St. last night in which individuals were talking about website investment opportunities. One was a site for "financial management social networking" and the other for "music sharing social networking". For the love of God people. Please shut up. Stringing together the buzz-words of three years ago, purchasing a domain, and hiring an outsourced Indian developer to build you a flash(har)y website doesn't mean that anyone is going to give a shite. I'm pretty sure that the future of innovation doesn't begin in bars filled with privileged 20-somethings looking to make a quick buck, however - so I won't take what I overheard to represent the future of technology. --

I've spent a lot of time listening to sleepy southern/alt-country type stuff so far this summer. Lots of Wilco, My Morning Jacket, Mojave 3, Iron & Wine, Drag The River, Crooked Fingers, Sun Kil Moon, Centro-matic, etc. etc. Strange that it comes at a time in which I'm missing my first Insubordination Records Fest in four years. Am I really getting old?

blue veins at bonnaroo. check out the intro to steady as she goes.

Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen.
- John le Carre

good read

My car was parked about 25 yards from where the old Westinghouse building in Newark collapsed this morning. It was a rare display of luck on my part to have not been closer at the time. My office is on the opposite corner of the building, and up here on the 16th floor we've had a pretty excellent view of the rubble and crushed cars. Wish I had my camera handy.

Seth does a good job of putting all of the issues with the music industry into one, (mostly) concise speech and Nine Inch Nails releases an instrumental album using a slightly altered version of the Radiohead model. I haven't been able to stomach the last three Nine Inch Nails albums, but this instrumental stuff isn't half-bad. Track 4 on Ghosts I sounds like My Bloody Valentine on acid, which works for me this morning.

Last night, as I struggled through my birthday hangover to finish my homework I overheard quite a bit of the Oscars as Marissa watched in the other room. I'd occasionally get up, frustrated by the annoying online homework system that my professor uses, to watch an acceptance speech or performance. During one of these breaks I was lucky enough to catch Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova perform their song from their movie Once. I hadn't heard anything about this movie, or much about The Frames in quite some time, so it was great to see such a great guy getting the acclaim he deserves. In his honor I'm pulling out an old myspace blog entry that I wrote about The Frames in 2006

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Thursday, March 16, 2006


In 2000 I went to go see The Gloria Record, the band that was made up of some of the dudes from Mineral, at The Middle East, in Boston. I went by myself, as I did to most shows around that time, and took my place on the back wall to watch the opening bands. Around that time the local openers in Boston at these types of shows were beyond bad, so I wasn't expecting much. The singer from TGR came out and introduced his "friend Glen Hansard, of The Frames" and urged everyone to listen closely. Just a dude with an acoustic guitar and a microphone, humbly dressed in poor fitting jeans and a blank gray t-shirt, the crowd seemed unimpressed. As he began to play the crowd seemed to grow obnoxiously loud and more engrossed in their conversations about... well, whatever the fuck it is that people at emo shows in 2000 talked about.

I could immediately tell that this guy wasn't some rich trust fund asshole from BC or BU, though. It was hard to hear over the jerks in the crowd, but it was plain to see that he was the real deal. He started with What Happens When the Heart Stops and by the time it was finished I'd made my way to the front and was up against the stage. A bit bugged by the conversations, he announced in a thick irish accent "hey, you know... i've got these songs and i came here to play them for you. it doesn't bother me if you're not interested in listening to them. but if that's the case, can you please step the fuck outside into the other room?"

Some people left, some people stayed. But it definitely got quieter. From there, in order from "For The Birds" he followed up with Headlong and then Fighting on the Stairs. I can't remember what he played after that. But I know that by the time he'd finished his set, the people that stayed were all in shocked silence during the songs, and in unified applause in between. He was egged on for an encore and was only the second of four bands playing. He never came back out. Two songs into The Gloria Record I opted to head back home before the Mass Ave (#1) bus stopped running.

I forget about The Frames from time to time but when I'm reminded of their existence I'm always reminded of that great night and throw on For The Birds and am still in awe at how great it is. Glen's playing solo in New York this weekend. I think I'm going to go. Maybe I'll even go by myself, you know, just for old time's sake.

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(I never did go to that New York show...)

I proposed this idea as part of a paper I wrote on digital music in 2002. Six years later, I think it's a lousy idea. I can't imagine why anyone would choose to purchase music this way on a regular basis. Why on earth would you want to drag yourself to the mall to plug into a machine that's no more capable than your home PC w/ iTunes installed to buy music? I can understand why a handful of Borders marketing execs sitting in a conference room would think that this is a good idea. After all, the business of selling plastic discs is dying and they still have revenue numbers to hit. However, if they have illusions of this type of music selling becoming a new norm and making up for what they're missing in the modern era of music sales, they'll be in for a rude awakening. This is a glossier version of the impulse candy rack at the supermarket, at best.

They're onto an idea, but unfortunately boring hell...