新しい音楽、と。。。

Here are some new(ish) records I like, and you should listen to (in no particular order):

WHY? - Eskimo Snow
The xx - xx
Sleep Whale - Houseboat
Sea Wolf - White Water, White Bloom
Mount Eerie - Wind's Poem
Lightning Dust - Infinite Light
Valleys - Sometimes Water Kills People

Note: this is not participation in NaBloPoMo...

I'm just procrastinating (only time I blog). But here's what I'm working on:

Reading my final book of the school year! That being, Garbage: A Poem by A.R. Ammons. Some parts blow my mind, some parts seem kind of poorly written. I guess I'll have more of an idea how I feel about it after I finish it.

Working (poorly) on two major essays/finals. The first is a little 10-15 pager on nature imagery and character formation in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea. The second is a 20-25 page thing on Moby-Dick and the canon/sociology of literature.

Yes, I chose these topics. I should have just dug myself into a hole.

And of course I've been working at the falafel hut trying to make mad tipz.

That's it, until next time.

新しいのライフ

Summer <3 Mix '09

1. Passion Pit - Smile Upon Me
2. Deerhoof - Snoopy Waves
3. Casiotone for the Painfully Alone - Optimist vs. The Silent Alarm
4. Cotton Candy - A Sentimental Song
5. Belle & Sebastian - Simple Things
6. Shugo Tokumaru - Green Rain
7. Bob Nanna - Blueprint
8. Chad VanGaalen - Clinically Dead
9. Yes Please - Love Probe
10. Asobi Seksu - Blind Little Rain

If you want one, let me know. I'm in The Heights now and I'm writing on my new iMac, but these things are for a different post at a later date. Perhaps not too much later.

一番二千八！

I have a little bit of downtime tonight since I finished a project for my Chaucer class early (Editions of The Canterbury Tales), so I figured I would post something I've been meaning to post for the last 2 months... My top 10 albums of 2008! At the same time, I'll catch up quickly with what has been going on as of late.

Top 10 (I mean, 15) of 2008:

1. Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes
2. Frightened Rabbit - The Midnight Organ Fight
3. Passion Pit - Chunk of Change
4. Dr. Dog - Fate
5. Pwrfl Power - Pwrfl Power
6. MGMT - Oracular Spectacular
7. Lykke Li - Youth Novels
8. Chad VanGaalen - Soft Airplane
   
9. Foals - Antidotes
10. Lightspeed Champion - Falling off the Lavender Bridge
11. Of Montreal - Skeletal Lamping
12. Magnetic Fields - Distortion
13. M83 - Saturdays=Youth
14. Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin - Pershing (Guilty pleasure alert!)
15. Deerhoof - Offend Maggie

2008 promised a lot more than 2009 has offered so far, but I will remain confident that some good stuff will come around later on. So far I've been digging the new Appleseed Cast and Matt and Kim, but not much else. My Music Director stuff at WJCU has been going well as I've been talking to most of my new contacts at aam, Pirate, Planetary, and a few other promotion companies. My replacement is studying abroad in China right now and will be taking over at the end of the semester when I graduate. As much as I'll miss the free stuff, I won't miss the hassle and mass quantities of voice mails and e-mails that I would never be able to respond to even if it were my only job.

I've also been working at the admissions office doing loads of data entry and filing, as well as Fady's falafel palace where it's been pretty slow and people have been cheap. Ah, the economy...

I've been reading a lot for my classes (ligitamately) for the first time in four years, and have also been regularly working out for the first time ever at the local YMCA's. Here's a list of the most recent things I've been reading:

• The Canterbury Tales: I'm taking a Chaucer course and we're reading most of the Tales along with some other poems and things.
• TS Eliot - The Complete Poems, selected prose, & his biography by Peter Ackroyd: I'm taking a course on Eliot and it's a little much. I love some of his stuff but I hate most of it. My professor just likes reading it aloud. We'll see how it pans out.
• A.S. Byatt - Angels & Insects: I couldn't take all of the rants about ants or the incest.
• Kazuo Ishiguro - Remains of the Day: Better than the latter but pretty lackluster. I would rather never read another novel about a butler again unless it's raunchy.
• Plato - Symposium: Changed my life.
• Foucault - The History of Sexuality: What the Foucault?

Other than that, add a little Japanese and then I've got nothing. I've just been waiting for replies from graduate schools to try to stake out my future after May, (EDIT: I was just accepted into Cleveland State!) and have been doing things with Ryan. He recently did a great presentation at Pecha Kucha night called Cleveland 3.1, we hit up the Tremont Taphouse for dinner on Valentine's day, and have been way too addicted to 30 Rock...

And on that note, it's Thursday night so I need to go watch 30 Rock after I down the rest of my White Russian.

Until a few months from now...

PWRFL POWER!

In case you haven't heard of him, I'll give you the info.

A while back I got 2 EP's in at WJCU entitled Electrified Fruits and Extra Ball. Homemade looking things are usually terrible so I wasn't expecting much when I popped the first one in. The first song "It's Okay" came on and I was immediately hooked. Using Google all I could find on Kaz was that he had recently won a contest in Seattle that got him a starring role in an Esurance commercial. Strange. That was it, so I added him on Myspace. Last month I caught him at a CMJ showcase at Crash Mansion along with about 5 other people, and he played a lot of new songs. He was possibly the only person I saw at CMJ that didn't have a computer on stage doing half the work for him. It was kind of refreshing. Oh yeah, plus sometimes he sings in Japanese. But just a little bit.

So, I hope you check Pwrfl Power out. Here's his Myspace, and make sure to check out his top friends. You'll see my face!

Oh, and of course, here's the Esurance commercial:



♪♪♪

CMJ 2008

Here's what I'm up to next week. I'll be in NYC from Tuesday through Sunday. Maybe I'll even take some pictures for once. Here's what's on the game plan so far:







See you there.

ぞうさん、ぞうさん

ぞうさん、ぞうさん
おはなが長いのね
そうよ母さんも
ながいのよ

ぞうさん、ぞうさん
だれが好きなの
あのね母さんが
好きなのよ。

We've been singing children's songs in my Advanced Japanese class. This is a traditional song about an elephant. Roughly translated:

Mr.Elephant, Mr.Elephant
Your nose is long, you know?
That's right, my mom's is
long too.

Mr.Elephant, Mr.Elephant,
Who do you love?
Ah, it's my mother
That I love!

I'm guessing his mother got killed for her tusks. Or am I just thinking too deep into it? And in case you wonder, here's a 1989 creepy kids show with the song. Embedding is disabled so here's the link: clicky.

The Teenagers

Okay, so this may be a little outdated... I'm alright with that though.

Homecoming:

スカンクツロニクス

(Update: iTunes updated yet again and all of my problems are gone. I must have not been the only one.)

Thanks to the iTunes update I'm now incapable of plugging in my iPod or putting a CD in without my computer freezing. This led me to my old CD cases and the millions of burned discs with pink bubbly teenage letters all over them. I feel like I'll be telling my grandkids one day, "One time there was this thing called Napster and you could get whatever you wanted on the Internets for free and then we put the stuff on CD and called it burning!" Because of all of the free time I had back then (oh, those teenage years) and all of the crappy punk rock I listened to (everything imaginable), I have about 5 versions of every song ever written by bands such as, Yellowcard, Thursday, The Early November, and of course Blink-182. I'm super weird about demos and usually like them tons more than the real thing. Lo-fi non-polished music is just a lot easier for my ears to adore.

Anyways, along this nostalgic journey I ran across some local stuff from when I was in middle school and early high school. It's hard for me to even fathom all of those bands and let alone shows that were around the area back then. So I put the CD's into my record player and listened to a lot of shitty stuff but stuff that makes you want to smile, dance and get rowdy. Rubber Cement, Howaboutno, Imperfect, Katty Whompus... Anyways, to make a long story short I ended up listening to the whole Skanktronics album and then remembering their video for Circuit to the Sun. Low and behold, I find the thing on youtube. It's a real masterpiece, let me tell you. So here it is:

夏のミックステープ

I made a mix for summer but the Internet refuses to let me put it up. I think this all stems back to how much Metallica sucks, right? Well, here's the track list anyways because it was good stuff.

Tracks:
1. Frightened Rabbit - The Modern Leper
2. Animal Collective - Water Curses
3. Foals - Cassius
4. M83 - Kim & Jessie
5. French Kicks - Over The World
6. Los Campesinos! - Don't Tell Me To Do The Math(s)
7. Flowers Forever - Wet Diamonds
8. Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin - Modern Mystery
9. New Bloods - The Cycle Song

ミュジクのヅレクター

In my first week of being Music Director at 88.7fm WJCU, I've been confronted by promoters asking "Have you listened to this CD yet? What did you think?". As I dig through the pile, I hope it is a CD with a description of the front that blatantly says, "Sounds like Sufjan Stevens!," or "RIYL: Belle & Sebastian or The Beach Boys!". Sadly, it's the one with a snake on the front, by a band on no label. I lie and they tell me to put it for adds.

Then they ask me what my favorite bands are. (Just a few minutes ago I was screaming Brand New lyrics into my steering wheel with my left foot pounding on the floor and my right fist in the air.) I politely say, The Shins, Belle & Sebastian, The Decemberists, Mates of State, and Death Cab for Cutie.

The thing is, I have this problem with being ridiculously obsessed with music that is nostalgic to me. It's somewhat embarrassing and I'm sure if it was music just coming out now, I would absolutely hate it. Still, lyrics like, "A freight train to the right, feeling that sting of pride, it's fucking with me, it's fucking with you" and "I've seen more spine in jellyfish, I've seen more guts in eleven year old kids," could never be replaced by anything I've listened to in recent years. I could sing every Saves the Day song in my sleep. I can't count the number of times Brand New and Taking Back Sunday lyrics have shown up in texts/IMs sent and received over the past 5 years of my life. Me and Erik used to constantly send them back and forth. Cheshire Cat is the only CD I listened to for like, a year, and the song m+m's still makes me super happy. And of course, "Well I guess it all depends, undergarments."

So, even though I may tell you these are my favorite bands, just know that I can't break away from ridiculous pop/punk/emo/whatever you call it, and that on any given day you can find me in The Heights driving around screaming along to The Get Up Kids. I absolutely love it and I can't stop!



♪ My new job is extremely amazing. I get to talk to people about music all day, get all the new CD's I want along with buttons and posters and shtuff, learn about new, amazing bands, and the list goes on.