It was not less than a month ago when my departing roommate Chuck played me a couple of songs and videos off of the toobs from a band called MGMT.
On my recent trip to San Diego and back, I've been hearing the song Kids all over the radio now. It's possible that people with some knowledge of new music releases hates this band by now and that Kids will become the new Hey Ya! but I really liked what I heard when my roommate played me a couple of their songs including Time To Pretend, which I initially confused with Kids and my favorite retro-funk wonk Electric Feel which reminds me of the days when I used to wear butterfly collars in Elementary school and listen to Yarborough and Peoples on something called a 12" vinyl record. MGMT's music is catchy and kitschy and reminds me a bit of the more primarily punk-oriented Crystal Castles album with all of its Commodore 64 chip tune sensitibilities.
As always, your mileage may vary. You may like Terrorcore, noise, speed metal or music that makes your teeth bleed but some may find this group's psychedelic pop freshman song collection Oracular Spectacular kind of alluring, even with lyrics like, "I'll move to Paris shoot some heroin and f**k with the stars" from Time To Pretend which apparently they performed on David Letterman in Jan. of 08; I wonder what they did with that line when they played on television? Did they cook with the stars?
Next flash in the can artists or real gems? It's hard to tell this early but I'm a songs person and I liked a couple of this band's songs right from the start and the others are starting to grow on me as I listen to the album through a second time. I think people will remember this album and artist years later as at least a small bump on the radar of musical evolution.
MGMT - Oracular Spectacular (Buy this if you like it)
I just got back from the solo eight-hour jaunt down the coast of California to see my dad's new place (see photo) and with the exception of the lack of cell service from his new digs, it was a great place to be for Christmas this year, far away from the communal, hippie-share lifestyle of the house I've called home in Oakland for the last twelve years.
I rented a car from Enterprise, as I've done many times in the past, and my friend Tony over at the car shop called them on my behalf to get me into a better car for the trip.
What I didn't realize abot Monday after 11 or so was how few cars would be left to rent but when I got to the office in Oakland, it was clear from the barren, tundra-esque empty parking slots that slim were going to be the pickins for this year's solo vehicular flight down to the northern part of San Diego County.
When I heard that I was going to get a Dodge Caliber, I said, "a Dodge what? I've never heard of that car before or seen what one looks like." At first glance, the car doesn't appear to be too much to look at either.
The vehicle looks like a squashed down version of one of those SUVs that the American car companies were so fond of before gas prices rose to over $4 and dropped back down again and the the economy opened up its trap door in the floor and gobbled up the remaining money and diginity from all of the struggling brick and mortar stores and essentially killed the car business for the foreseeable future.
The Dodge Caliber R/T though proved to be a real sport on the eight hour road trip. The Boston Acoustics sound system with a sub-woofer and nine speakers as a manufacturer feature made Los Angeles freeway traffic bearable on the trip down and back with the hand full of assorted CDs that I brought with me. This rental didn't have the EVIC module installed (Electronic Vehicle Information Center) which for a short week's rental, is probably for the best.
The reviews I've read of this car's handling and performance aren't that great but the stereo, the cruise control and the especially peppy 4-cylinder engine made this car a nice choice for the trip down. I guess I was right when I said "this Dodge Caliber is growing on me" at Enterprise RAC.
My dad and his wife and I all went out to the movies and to breakfast a couple of times in it and I just wanted to crank the stereo up to show them how good it sounded but I knew that no one else would care as much as I did about how great it sounded.
I just had an idea: When I give people copies of the three CDs of music that I've done over the years, I should rent this car and take them on a three hour drive so that they can hear all of the subtle nuances I heard when I was making it. It's too bad you can't request a specific car when you rent from Enterprise. If I could, I would choose this car just for the stereo alone.
I am an avid Macintosh fan. If that's not already clear from reading my blog, I want to say it for the record. I'm geeked about the new Mac OS aptly titled Leopard coming next Friday the 26th of October and I'm also excited about the new Logic Studio 8 I've been playing around with lately, although I could use a new Mac so that I can play back my songs on it.
Where I work currently, we encourage people to use Macs for many reasons including the fact that you can actually have the Mac OS and Windows running side by side using Parallels software [Coherence mode is awesome!]. Another reason we recommend that new employees get Macs is because they have lots of extremely useful tools under the hood like BSD for starters and a terminal application appropriately called "Terminal" where Mac users can access the Unix kernel and configure their computers via a command line interface.
One of the questions that comes up often is "how can I share files with other Mac users or Mac computers on an internal network at home or at work?" At some offices, this might be more complicated because of Windows networking issues but with the three Macs I have here in the office or the two I use at home, this is so simple it's kind of hard to believe that I haven't been taking advantage of this feature for years.
To enable file sharing, go to the Apple Menu > System Preferences and click the Sharing Preference pane in the middle of the window under Internet & Network. If everything is set up correctly on your local network, click the Start button on the Sharing Preference page's Services tab and wait for it to finish the startup process.
Default options here are probably best but you can add additional services if desired in the services area.
To share files, make sure that the Firewall is Off under the Firewall tab. If you want to share your internet connection, click the Internet tab and click Start. I have never personally used the Share Connection option but I'm sure there's a good reason to have this feature and that someone somewhere is using it right now. Unfortunately, this feature is outside the scope of this blog post for now.
So, back to the important details. How is the shared Mac accessed from another machine you ask? First you need to know what the address of the shared computer is. By clicking the Sharing Preference pane with the Services tab selected, if Sharing is enabled [Personal File Sharing should definitely be checked as well] some text that says the following appears near the bottom of the Preference pane window when Sharing is the currently selected preference pane and when File Sharing is enabled:
"Other Macintosh users can access your computer at afp://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/ or browse for "username" by choosing Network from the Go menu in the Finder."
So, from any other computer that is not explicitly blocked from accessing other machines on the network, the address is what is specified in that sentence.
From another networked Macintosh computer, choose Connect To Server from the Finder's Go menu. Enter the address that appeared in the shared computer's Sharing Preference panel and click the + button to add the address to the list. Keep in mind that if you're network is running a DHCP server [dynamically allocated internal IP address server], this address will probably change often so it might be necessary to recheck it the next time you want to connect to the shared computer. If you try to connect to an address that worked previously, double-check that the address has not been changed since the last connection was made.
Once the address has been added to the list, click the item in the list of Favorite Servers and then click Connect. You will be prompted to enter a username and password for the remote machine.
This brings up a separate issue. It will likely be necessary to create accounts on the shared computer so that you can access all of the folders and drives associated with it. Go to the Apple Menu > System Preferences > Accounts Preference pane and enable Guest access, or create new accounts with specific access rules as necessary. Guest access will allow you to see the Public folder and the Share folder with restrictions on many folders.
In the Accounts window click the Lock to change settings for a given user account or to add Guest access to your computer. keep in mind that with default settings, only the Public folder that appears in your user's home directory should be accessible to other users unless you log in as you from the remote machine. Also noteworthy is the drop box folder where guests and other users that are not you can drop files and folders for you even though they can't see the contents of the folder.
Good luck and happy sharing on the Mac.
I think this tune still needs some more work with regard to the levels of the individual parts but here's a little sample of what I've been working on lately. This is an MP3 converted from Reason after exporting it directly as a 24-Bit, 96K stereo AIFF file. I then custom tuned the Ozone 3 Mastering Plug-in with the tape saturation simulation effect to get a warmer sound in Peak before I bounced the file with the plug-ins to disk. After the bounce, I encoded the file with Peak to a 320K MP3 file at the highest and slowest encoding speed just prior to exporting the file from Peak.
I think some of the sounds could stand to be a bit louder in the mix but this is yet another sonic experiment. I think I might need to subdue some of the drum parts in the upper mid range of the frequency spectrum and accentuate some mids in the sound clouds that occur here and there during this under six minute song.
All of the drums sounds are Roland TR-808 samples taken from a collection that a friend of mine and I created at Naut Humon's recording studio in San Francisco many years ago for some synthesizer/sampler project. I think they sound pretty nice but I wish I could get my mixes a bit louder without introducing a lot of breathing or pumping like I hear on so many rock/pop style records. Oh well.
Here's the link to the file in case you missed it above:
Okay, I admit it. I'm a geek. A Nyerd. I actually bought an iPhone. The funny part is, someone else stood in line for it and then called me the night they were released and asked me if I wanted one because they had bought two. I said yes, went to his house the next day and wrote a check for $648.42 for the 8 GB model and carried it around with me all day while my friend and I were shopping in the Haight and various other places, looking for melodicas and other unusual, money loser musical instruments.
When I got home, I couldn't resist launching the new version of iTunes [7.3] to see how the activation process would progress. For me, it was painless and without a single glitch. Within 10 minutes of me syncing the Nokia to my computer's AddressBook app, I was up and running making calls with the iPhone with all of the numbers from my Nokia on my iPhone without even so much as a single hiccup.
I really like the phone but carrying around a piece of equipment that has an orientation sensor and a myriad of other sensitive pieces and parts, you get kinda nervous about dropping it. I bought a couple of cases and decided on the Contour clear case that covers the iPhone and includes a belt clip that the sheathed phone clicks into. You have to be careful when you, ahem, pull your pants down with the phone clip in your pocket or belt as the clip will find it's way out of your pocket and the case and phone go crashing to the floor; Hopefully, from not too high of a perch but still, dropping a $650 dollar phone is not a good idea, even if there are videos that show how sturdy the iPhone is on PCWorld's website.
So, the iPhone is awesome. Seriously. It is. Unfortunately, it's also a first generation phone [well, second if you count that Razor thing] and Apple still has the option to revamp the entire interface if they want to since it's a phone with only one button on the face, two on the side and one switch. But seriously, there are some features that a more mature phone company like Nokia have included on their higher-end phones for some time now.
Some of the missing features include video and audio recording, customizable mp3 ringtones, the lack of a Salling Clicker remote control widget that allows me to control all of my computer's iTunes track selection, volume and playback controls from my phone [one of the coolest apps for a phone ever] in addition to providing support for a crapload of other features like iPhoto slideshow controls, Keynote presentation slide controls, iTunes muting/pausing when the phone rings and setting my status in iChat to Away when I move out of Bluetooth range.
Other items that are not supported now but might be in the future include voice dialing, although, this feature was always a pain in the arse on my Nokia. There was some special mode that had to be entered via some secret key combination before I could bark commands at my phone and even then, the recognition of my voice was not always spot on.
I really liked the fact that the alarm clock feature on my Nokia would tell you how long it was until the alarm would go off from when you set it [such as 7 hours 56 minutes until 8:30AM]. At one point I had a crapload of games on my Nokia but the MMC cards [thinner than SD Cards] kept getting corrupted and there's no easy way to back up the Nokia to my disk. The Nokia did have built-in memory and an MMC card slot for adding sounds and photos.
I do have to be fair and say that the video recording on the Nokia was terrible and almost unwatchable but I have seen some phones with fairly good quality recording capabilities. I hope Apple gets on the video recording feature soon. When making calls, the keypad and pause buttons were really nice. Having a speaker phone is great too but the marge calls button; that's new and nifty. My Nokia has a speaker phone feature too.
Visual Voice Mail is kinda neat but I don't get that many phone calls so I don't usually have a lot of voice messages. I also noticed some minor artifacts in the audio recording that sounded like low bit rate or compression in the voice message playback. Compression and low bit rate are hardly discernable by most non-audiophile folks so that's no big whoop.
I did run into one somewhat annoying aspect of the iPhone/iTunes/iPhoto connection; if you have your photos on an external drive and you don't have it handy, you might not be able to sync your phone, if it contains pictures and you want to sync. I had this problem occur when I added a bunch of contacts to my Address Book and a couple of photos on my iPhone. When I connected the iPhone, iPhoto launched and said that it couldn't find my library so I said Cancel [the other options were Find or Create new]. When I launched iTunes, which is where all of the syncing takes place, the iPhone didn't appear in the list of devices in the left column on the main iTunes screen.
Other than these few items, the phone seems to be really well put together and I've been having fun surfing for wikipedia pages while out with friends or watching You Tube videos from home via the WiFi connectivity that's built in; My Nokia didn't have WiFi although I am positive that current models of the N Series from Nokia do include this feature.
Now, if the iPhone just had HSPDA 3G compatibility instead of EDGE 2.5G, we'd start to see some reasonable internet access speeds over the air.
On April 20th, 2006, I posted a similar version of what follows to my Tribe blog just before switching over to Vox as my primary blog platform. "Four Twenty" as it's pronounced by those in the marijuana culture is the social equivalent of a holiday and some of these folks even stop whatever day dreaming pot smokers do daily at 4:20PM to take time out to smoke pot, not that regular pot smokers need an excuse to smoke.
At the time I posted it, I was hoping to present to all pot smokers, or former 420 freaks, several reasons why this practice seems kind of silly. I've come to realize however that this is a fruitless endeavor. Don't get me wrong though. The Bay Area loves its marijuana and I'm not personally anti-marijuana per se. I just don't think it does much good for people in the long run. Medical marijuana use is great for those with terminal illnesses but I've seen lots of people fool themselves into believing that they're not addicted to smoking pot, or that it's not adversely effecting their lives. When you can't go out to a party or a club because you've gotta go score from your dealer so you can get high before you can be seen in public or feel comfortable, something's just not right.
I don't smoke pot myself but I do think that most drugs including Cannabis should be legalized so that the drugs can be regulated by the state and federal governments. People should be appropriately punished for harm or injury that is caused by their negligence when intoxicated by a controlled substance but make the drugs themselves legal and maybe you cut out the allure of that particular substance. Telling people they can't have something leads to people wanting it, especially when it's narcotics, and there are those individuals who profit from the illegal sale of various illegal substances and these folks typically aren't the nicest sort of people. Shady business ensues.
Here's the updated version of my 2006 post about "four-twenty" day:
Cannabis-culture enthusiasts everywhere typically celebrate today's date [April 20th or "Four-twenty"] and especially celebrate by smoking pot at 4:20PM today for some unknown reason. All of this occurs allegedly because of some kids at a San Rafael High School [The Waldos?], according to Snopes.com, High Times magazine, the Marijuana-logues The Straight Dope and Wikipedia.org's Cannabis culture page, that would meet at 4:20PM to smoke Cannabis or "pot" with their friends.
Prior to the internet and all things networking, lots of urban legends about the number and its use in marijuana culture traversed and traveled through the Cannabis culture grapevine [the stemline?] and these false stories have been passed around for generations by Cannabis culture enthusiasts. The most famous legend about this special, dare I say "magic" number is the story about the police code for "pot smoking in progress" being represented by the number 420 in Oregon or Washginton state is my personal favorite [you know, like 187 is a code for homicide?]. The wikipedia page used to have more urban legends outlined on the page but I noticed most of them have been removed after reviewing the page this year.
- Here's the updated wikipedia.org link that outlines the agreed upon origin of the expression of this particular date as a special day in Cannabis culture.
* It's interesting to note that editing of the Cannabis culture wikipedia page by new members has been disabled. Too many kids dying to add their $.02 to the wiki page I guess.
- There's also a couple of infamous events that occurred on this date including the Columbine High School massacre, the downing of a Korean Air passenger plane by the Soviets and the beginning of the French Revolutionary Wars.
- There are also some famous and infamous births that occurred on this day; most notably in the negative column for an overwhelming majority of folks being the birth of Adolph Hitler in 1889. Thanks a lot for that one oh Great Architect of the Universe!
The neutrality of the text on the Hitler page, at the time I originally posted a link to it on my Tribe blog last year, was in dispute but the page seems to have settled down since then. It's really too bad that Hitler didn't get into art school. Who knows what would've happened with the world had he gotten in.
- A well-known prophet named Muhammed, the founder of Islam, was born on this day in 570 too
- Here's a short list of noteworthy 4/20 birthdays with their birth and death year, where appropriate:
Adolf Hitler 1889-1945 [huge asshole]
Muhammed 570-632 [prophet]
Napoleon 1808-1873 [guy who liked to stick his hand in his shirt]
Tito
Puente 1925-2000 [percussionist]
George Takei 1940 [Star Trek, Heroes actor]
Ryan O'Neal 1941 [actor]
Edie Sedgwick
1943-1971 [cousin of Kyra, Factory Girl, Warhol film actress]
Jessica Lange 1949 [academy award-winning actress]
Crispin Glover 1964 [actor, writer, hipster]
Luther Vandross
1951-2005 [singer]
Don Mattingly 1961
[baseball player]
- The link to the complete April 20th birthday list on Wikipedia
- And finally, the link to the number 420 itself on Wikipedia, mostly mathematic information about the number four-hundred and twenty
Puff.. Puff... Give... Don't mess up the rotation!
This might come as a shock to some folks but some of us don't know as much about our computers as we would like to and when some obvious question that no one nas ever asked before comes up and you figure it out, it's always nice to share with others what you discovered. Some people reading this post might be saying "well, duh!" when they've finished reading it but some folks will appreciate what I'm about to enlighten them about.
First of all, if you're not a Mac OS X user, this post won't interest you. Move on to the next one, unless you have some geeky, maudlin curiosity about how the other [and in my opinion better] 10 percent of computer users lives and breathes. Or, maybe you just want to ask the same question about the PC to find the answer and decide once again that your choice of computer is still better than the Mac, despite what you've heard from your programming friends. By all means, go ahead. Be a PC user. I don't care. If you wanna use a craptacular OS, good right ahead and be my guest. And please don't leave me any comments about Mac vs. PC because I just don't care. Get a job at Microsoft and suck on Bill's tit all the way up to Redmond if you want.
Now that we've gotten rid of the PC punters, has anyone ever wondered if there is any logic to the order that your computer connects to a given network like say, the Internet?
Someone came by my cube at work the other day and asked me if there was any rhyme or reason to the order that Macs connect to a given network, more specifically in most cases meaning the Internet, or as one of our glorious politicians likes to describe it, "the Series of Toobs" or "The Toobs" for short; Don't put a big truck on "The Toobs" either; Senator Ted Stevens says the truck might get stuck on the Toobs.
While I was trying to figure out the cryptic art of file sharing last night I stumbled on a feature that I hadn't noticed in the Network System Preference Panel that answers this very question of what order the OS uses to connect to the Internet given multiple available interfaces.
Go to the Apple Menu > System Preferences: Click Network and select the Network Port Configurations item from the Show pop-up [PC users: drop down; why is the PC terminology so negative?] that appears below the Location pop-up on the Network preference panel.
On this page, you can check and uncheck Port Configurations that you want or don't want active [Built-In FireWire for Networking? I guess that's a possibility but not for me and Blue-tooth would be a last resort connection option; dow to the bottom for Bluetooth]. I disabled Built-In FireWire by clicking its checkbox to uncheck it.
After enabling what you want to use to connect to the Toobs via a "Network" dragging the items in the list up or down determines the order used for each interface to connect to the network. Logically, if I have an Ethernet cable connected to my computer, I want to use that pipe over my Airport connection because Ethernet is much faster and AirPort or 802.11g/b/a/n is much slower.
So... Built-In Ethernet to the top. AirPort second even though that's the one I'll be using most often at the house followed by Bluetooth and finally Internal Modem for when I go back in tech time to beautiful Prescott Arizona to visit mom and have to slide down the 56K toob known as dial-up. Yuch.
So, if anyone ever asks if there's any logic used to determine which port or interface to use to connect to the Internet or a *network* I can answer that question for a Mac user. I have no idea how this all sorts out on Windows Vista or in XP though. I'm sure someone has already posted this note for PC users somewhere.
This weekend, I got a bug in my proverbial bonnet about getting a ping pong table for the house to go into the new multi-purpose area that was previously a storage area in the unconstructed warehouse that I've called home for almost 14 years now.
The only problem being that most ping pong tables are green and the freshly painted multi-purpose room has a medium blue floor with white walls except for the foam green walls and trim around the bedroom near the back door of the place. The French doors are white to offset the trim being foam green. I guess a ping pong table that is green would go fine in there but I just thought if it were blue it would be a better fit with the room colors.
Off to craigslist I go after a brief internet search turned up lots of way too expensive tables that are for much more serious players than the ones I'll be matched up against. Surprisingly, I found a good deal of ping pong tables for sale and even found a blue one in Alameda which is right around the corner from our place.
So, I called one party in North San Jose and then emailed back about the blue one in Alameda. Both were around $125 and I had to come get them. Ping pong tables don't fit in a normal sized car.
When I received an email back from the Alameda ad, the girl who replied said that someone had already called about it and was coming on the weekend to have a look. I waited until Sunday to see if they would actually show up and when I saw that they had, I decided to get off my arse and head over to Sports Authority to see what they had on offer.
When I arrived, I had a hard time finding the section where they were but eventually, I found a nice gentleman who answered all of my questions and even went to look in the back to see if there were any more of the cheapest model they sold, which looked like it was blue.
After several minutes, he came back and sure enough, they had one left. I set the wheels in motion and he got me started on the paper work for the brand new table that was only $149, or about $25 more than the two used ones. No clue as to which models the used ones were.
First, I had to call U-Haul and see if I could get a truck on short notice. I call the 800 number and eventually get someone on the phone. They say someone will call me back within a hour so I wait for the call and wait to ring up at the counter since I'm in no big hurry until I hear back from U-Haul. After telling the Sports Authority checker I was in no hurry, it seemed like all of San Leandro and the surrounding burbclaves descended on the check out line from out of nowhere in the store and eventually, I decided I should get in line and pay for the danged thing. Then I realized that I had no paddles or balls so I went to get those too.
After paying for the table, paddles and balls, and getting my O'Hana Hawaiian Barbacue on next door, I finally got a call back from U-Haul and the race was on. It was 3:00PM and I had to go home, pick up my roommate, drive over to the U-Haul, drive to the store and get the ping pong table, return to the house to drop it off, return the rental to U-Haul and have someone pick me up so that I could get home to put it together. Wuff. Amazingly, the plan worked with plenty of time to spare. I had until 5PM on Sunday when U-Haul closed or I would've had to drop it off and push the keys through the slot but I managed to get back with the truck to U-Haul by about 4:30PM. Now back to the house for the assembly.
Some assembly required in the case of this ping pong table, interestingly called The Shadow, was a horrible understatement. I have to ask this question every time I see these assembly pamphlets. Who makes these things? They are terrible! The diagram was so convoluted that I couldn't see straight after trying to figure out which bolt was #9 in the book and then checking the hardware guide for a 1 and 1/2 inch hex bolt, not to mention the safety strap blow up diagram which was essentially undecipherable and useless. After all of that hassle, the legs wouldn't go down correctly, so back to the drawing board some more, trying to wiggle and figgle bolts, washers and nuts until the legs would sit just right.
Next, the attachment of both sides of the table basically required three and a half people to complete. Someone to hold each side and someone else to screw in the name plates that said "The Shadow" on them which also connected the two halves of the table together. Even the safety latch instructions were ridiculous. How is it that the people who write these things see fit to compress what should be four pages and at least two diagrams into one page with only one diagram? And we're supposed to figure all of this stuff out without a magic decoder ring? Sheesh.
The legs still don't stay collapsed all the way onto the back of the table when its folded up and we haven't gotten to play ping pong yet as the floor was painted last night for one last coat but hopefully, tonight or tomorrow evening I will be able to enjoy the fruits of my labor this weekend that began at around 2PM on Sunday and after the 3 hour assembly of the table and ended around 10PM Sunday night. There are sore muscles on my body that I forgot I had.
I was on my knees so much putting this thing together that I inflamed my right knee again. I had a serious click in imy right knee when I bent down on it for months and once in a while it gets really sore and I can barely walk for a few days. So, now I'm now crippled from this damned ping pong table assembly nightmare to boot! Maybe the $75 delivery fee plus the $30 for assembly of the thing would've been worth paying for after all. Hopefully, we'll be playing ping pong sometime before the end of March, provided that I don't need arthroscopic surgery.
I was lucky enough to get tickets to Autolux headlining the Friday 3/2/07 Noise Pop night that went off at San Francisco's The Independent last week. According to the Noise Pop pamphlet I picked up at Amoeba, Autolux's sophomore album is in the finishing stages and fans in attendance on Friday were given a glimpse into the Future Perfect follow-up album with one or two tunes off the new compilation getting some air during their set. After what I heard on Friday, I can't wait for the new album to hit the stores.
For my friends and I that went to the show, the evening was mostly a band marathon because Oakland locals Death of a Party, Montreal's musically whimsical Malajube and the Joy Division-inspired Snowden all played before the main act ever got off a note.
Oakland locals Death of a Party played a few catchy tunes and featured an exceptionally mobile and at times, seemingly frantic lead singer although several of us commented that the band's sound wasn't all that original in this day and age of bands like The Lovemakers, The Killers, The Bravery, and Louis XIV, already making the rounds on the airwaves. I give the band credit for getting the party started with some energy though and for the fact that the lead singer was sick. Aren't we all right now though? [A-chew!]
After Malajube's set, it was time for Altanta, Georgia's Snowden to take their best shot. This band was a lot different stylistically than Malajube with a more straight forward, lunging beat and chugging rhythms. Their sound could be corked down the vein of Joy Division or Joy-wannabe's Interpol, if they all were taking anti-depressants and had forgotten the rest of bottle. Many reviews have compared this band with The Cure as well but I don't see the resemblance at all. Jordan Jeffare's guitar and vocals, and Corinne Lee's smooth moves, slick licks, backing vox and incredible good looks were reminiscent of the good ol' days of 80s music; New Order, Depeche Mode and so many other bands that were not only stylish, but had the chops and the tunes to keep up with their fashion sense.
The only complaint we all had about the night was that the mixing especially for the vocals from out vantage point at stage right never seemed to be quite right. Either the vocals were too quiet or the guitars were too loud and we witnessed a lot of finger pointing from the bands on stage to the off stage mix engineer while the bands were playing. Autolux bionic-armed drummer Carla Azar even leaned over to say something to the side engineer about someone's level on stage. None of us were quite sure what the front of house engineer was hearing but I hope it was a lot better that what we were hearing from our position.
Snowden was the surprise of the night with the smokin' hawt bass player Corrine Lee who was duking it out with her bass and the floor all night. She has some smooth stage moves for sure. Jordan Jeffares might not win the So You Think You Can Dance contest anytime soon but the So You Think You Can Write Good Songs competition he's got covered and the energy from this band was hot and heavy. Chandler Rentz' kick drum was one of the largest I've seen other than at a Van Halen show and the sound was indicative of its size. Rentz got the beat and kept it strong all night long until Jordan Jeffares introduced the headliner Autolux and we waited yet again for the change over to occur between bands.
Autolux's first album includes a boatload of really unique sounds in between the songs and some very specific guitar noises that can't be replicated exactly like the album sounds and I wouldn't want it to sound exactly like the album anyway. What they did do was put us into a dreamlike trance state with a couple of new songs and the majority of 2004's Future Perfect album including Plant Life, Robots in the Garden and Sub Zero Fun to name a few.
What many people were saying after the show as we walked out was, why didn't they play Here Comes Everybody, their radio hit that originally turned me on to the band via Live 105's Soundcheck show. Towards the end of Autolux's set, someone asked from the crowd "What can I expect from this show!?" and bassist/vocalist Eugene Goreshter replied back: "I don't know... You'll just have to wait and see" and shortly after that, Eugene sat down near his cabinet on stage as an effect-drenched drone emanated from the speaker while former Failure guitarist Greg Edwards was working on some part of his rig that must've been an integral part of the show.
After about 15 minutes that seemed more like a half hour, the band resume playing the last of the set songs and after the vibe killing mechanical failure, I think the band wanted to pack it in and hope for better luck at their next show. Here Comes Everybody does have a very specific sound for it's opening riff that might've been difficult to simulate without Greg Edwards' complete guitar effect compliment in working order and shortly after the last song was over, I saw one of the backstage managers give the universal throat slit sign to the front-of-house sound guy, and the lights came up.
All in all, it was a great night with the exception of the minor Autolux hiccup, the moron who decided to voice his concerns regarding his expectations for the show and the tool set of drunk frat guys in front of us that were either swaying about two feet across the view of the band in front of us or talking amongst themselves about some ridiculous female related nonsense or some homophobic rant or other. We all ignored them and their inebriation and enjoyed the exceptionally intimate show. I hope we get to see Autolux in such an intimate environment again someday and that they feel better about playing the one song we all missed at the show.
I've been reading and hearing in the local media a lot lately about the bee populations in this country being severely diminished by an as yet unknown disease, or diseases. The preliminary name for the phenomenon is Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD. What's also strange is, I didn't see a post about this on the usual sites but via a media TV station I watch locally here in the Bay Area for nightly news. I guess it's possible I missed the post about the bees on boingboing which is where I would've expected to see a post like this but why isn't anyone else freaking out yet?
Probably because we all still have food in the form of fruits, vegetables, flowers for Valentine's Day, etc. Well, if the bee problem doesn't get resolved soon and the massive amounts of bees dying or disappearing continues and escalates, we're all gonna be a lot closer to having to eat Soylent Green people crackers rather soon folks.
Has everyone just gone to sleep? Is it all of that prescribed medication? Sometimes I feel like I'm stuck in a horrible Orwellian daytime nightmare novel and Aldus Huxley is my roommate and he's trying to keep me hepped up on goofballs so that I won't actually care about what is really going on around me. And then I pop back into reality and realize that maybe the nightmare is better than having no bees, no honey, no almonds, no fruit, basically about 2/3rd of our food supply.
The bee problem should be agenda item #1 for a lot more people than it is right now. The whole bee population issue could be a great novel idea too. What happens to the world when the bee colonies start dying? Is it a bellweather or the international canary in a coalmine? What will it take for people to wake up and realize that things are starting to go crappy right now? Not in our children's generation...
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darinmarshall said:
thanks for the compliment. It's nice to know someone's actually reading my blog. I don't post often enough these days. read more
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matokie said:
very nice! it reminds me of classic carl cox. read more
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eric said:
[this is good]hey, thanks! i thought i was pretty clever with quicksilver ctrl-space 'grab' to run the full-blown Grab.app and then a... read more
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