Central Village

"I'll never see a dime from it anyway"

Last night I went to Maxwells to see Jesse from Brand New play a solo show. It was very very good and I regret just missing a PATH train and missing the start, but I was there for his question and answer session with the crowd, which, for that kind of thing, was remarkably earnest. He seems genuinely frustrated with a lot of things that are going on in his life, yet feels embarrassed to ever complain about anything because so much has gone right for his band.

Anyway, main point. Last night he gave the best defense of Music Piracy I've ever heard. Quite simply, he said steal away. He genuinely does not care if he sells any records because no matter how many he can move, he'll never see a dime from them anyway. And this is coming from someone who has sold a Million or so albums. He's never gotten anything from them and never expects to. The label pays him up front and he makes money on tour,not from every or any album sold. Granted, it's easy for him to say because he's established himself to the point where he doesn't have to care about Soundscan or rankings or rely on what the label has to offer anymore, but it's for the most part true for anyone who can look beyond the traditional sense of success. He also said he regrets signing with Interscope, a major, tho he admits it was the easy way out and the best way to actually make a living as a musician. Also played some music. Threw in an Archers of Loaf cover and a great version of Leonard Cohen's Chelsea Hotel #2. Fun stuff.

(pic via the Underrated's Flickr)

Siren 2007

Siren!

I have a full review up on Gothamist. Pics after the jump...

Quickly, Fucoustic

I don't have time right now unfortunately to go into detail, but I must put down here that I went to see the Austrian Acoustic Fugazi cover duo Fucoustic last December while I was in Prague and had a great time. I urge anyone with even a passing interest in Fugazi to go out to Don Pedro's tonight and check them out. That is all.

Oh, they won't play Waiting Room. Just a heads up.

Running...

A couple days ago I decided it was time to start running again. I was into it for about a month last year, then got a cold so I stopped and then the weather got cold and I officially shut it down. Now I already missed the ideal restart time in the spring due to massive laziness and I realize I'm getting remotivated right during the hottest and most awful time of the year. But I think I like running when it's hot out. Makes me feel like I'm working harder.

Anyway, point is that I've got that iPod nano sneaker doohickey gathering dust and I need a new jogging playlist. No surprise that what I was listening to last September is not necessarily gonna work again for me now. So this is what I came up with last night:

(Note that I put this together last night with the full intention of getting up this morning and running, and ended up going back to sleep for an hour. Last night was a tough one tho. Tomorrow will be better...)

Sia - Breathe Me
Seriously, just hearing this song makes me wanna run.
Spoon - The Ghost of You Lingers
This is a weird one, but it's kinda trippy and spacey, but with a beat. I'm usually pretty out of it during the first couple songs anyway so I like that.
Pinback - Good To See
Nice, light, and upbeat.
Tegan and Sara - Nineteen
Just a good song.
The Spanish Morrissey song
Don't know what this is actually called. It's that Spanish song that just goes Morrissey Morrissey Morrissey for the chorus. Starting to pick up the pace a bit...
EL-P - The Overly Dramatic Truth
Now we're starting to really get going...
Justice - D.A.N.C.E. (MSTRKRFT Remix)
MSTRKRFT - Easy Love
Quad City DJs - Come on Ride the Train (MSTRKRFT Remix/Mashup)
If I can even make it this far, These three should set a good pace.
Kings of Leon - McFearless
One final rockin push...
Black Lips - Hippy Hippy Hurrah
And the triumphant warmdown.

I don't think I can make it this far in reality, but I'll set to go 3 miles or something and see how it goes. This also all might be a huge mistake, cause if I remember right, I do much better with more chilled out songs rather than these fast paced jams. Those usually just stress me out and make he tired faster. May have to cut that whole MSTRKRFT part altogether to keep it at a better pace.

Summer Thursdays

Busy day in the real world + Slow day on the web equals not much to say. A few thoughts before I take off for the weekend.

This Deerhunter shit is nuts.

Bought Harry Potter 6 this afternoon. Expect to be done with it by next Saturday when the 7th book comes out. No, I'm not even close to some Harry Potter freak. But it's a good story and I wanna know the ending, but don't wanna wait another 2 or 3 years for the movies to finish.

Peter Bjorn and John are playing the (Virtual) Bowery Ballroom tonight. If you're a member, you already got an email about this and if you're not, you can't go, so this is a bit pointless, but nonetheless...

I hope somebody starts a Virtual Brooklyn Vegan.

Party Cake.

Have a nice weekend, everybody.

I'm off Google Reader. Again.

Every 8 months or so I convince myself that I should give Google Reader another go. So I export my bloglines, load it up and I go along my business for a little while and it seems okay, until i realize I'm reading only about 10% of my feeds because the damn thing is so slow. How did Google screw this up? If blogs are this next great big thing, how can this not be a priority? Either get it out of labs already or start over. I don't understand why on a site like bloglines can work so seamlessly and Google can't figure it out. I click on a feed, and all the new posts pop up and i can skim through them as i like. Instantly. No buffering, no loading. I click and they're all right there. Google takes at least 3 and sometimes as much as like 20 seconds to load up for each feed. Then if I've got more than 20 posts to skim, it freezes while it loads the next 20? How do you screw this up? It's especially bad for sites like engdaget, who post 1000 times a day and I don't care about a lot of that stuff, but I like to skim through to see if anything grabs my interest. I can't do that with Google Reader. Let me repeat that. I CANNOT READ ENGADGET ON GOOGLE READER. That's a serious problem, methinks, since there are about 80,000 people who subscribe to that feed, but it goes for all the biggies...Gawker Sites, News Feeds, Chowhound, Slate. I've forced to completely shut them out. I don't have the time or patience to wait, so i don't even bother.

So I'm back to bloglines today and all seems right again. I'm the biggest Google guy in the world. I rely on them for just about everything...email, docs, calendar, homepage. Everything. How can they not fix this???

Harry Potter

On Friday, I watched Harry Potter 1. Saturday, 2. On Monday, I watched part of 3, but passed out halfway through, so i had to watch half of 3 and all of 4 last night, all of course leading up to the midnight release of 5. It's been a good run. I've gotten involved in the story and have a general familiarity of the characters and all that. (No, I haven't read the books and yes, I'm starting 6 now and will read 7 when it comes out.) But watching them all in order like this was a fun way to learn quick. I liked following the progression of the beginning stories, which stand up on their own (albeit relatively shallowly,) to the third, which is a beautiful departure that really takes a step outside the Voldemort story for the most part, then back to 4, which starts off center but really picks up the pace at the end, leading right into 5, which is pretty heavy all the way through.

Even taking itself out of its cult series, Order of the Phoenix was a good enough movie as it is. When you've got nearly 10 hours of character development preceding it, however, it only helps matters, and that's impossible to take out. But while the continuing story is great and getting better, the highlight for me was Dolores Umbridge, who was just about the most effective villain I could imagine. She was the perfect representative of every subtle political undertone brought up throughout the movie. Passive aggressive and self righteous evil with a pink coat and a smile. The absolute worst. It makes my skin crawl just thinking about her.

Anyway, my analysis of the story and placing it within the worlds the books created is worthless since I'm a noob in all his stuff. The best I can offer is that It's a good enough movie standing on it's own. Removed from any context or expectation, it was nothing if not thoroughly enjoyable.

My Unsolicited, Uninfomed Opinion on the iPhone

What can I say that hasn't been said? Well, why I don't have an iPhone. I haven't touched the thing. Haven't even seen one in person. But I'm normally an early adopter, a Mac user, and not 100% satisfied with my current iPod OR Sidekick. I'd usually go for this. My major hesitation is I want faster internet.

That's it.

A bigger hard drive would be nice, but I'm ok with my 1 gig nano so I don't mind switching stuff on and off. I just want my internet to be fast enough so that I don't ever have to hesitate when trying to get online from my phone. I do that on my sidekick all the time. It takes forever to load anything up and I want an improvement.

I'm sold on every other aspect of the phone at this point. I'd even pay that much and sign up for AT&T. But I don't want a fancy internet phone that takes 2 minutes to load up something like ESPN.com. That's like owning a fancy car in Manhattan. What's the point if you can't let loose?

Anyway, My T-mobile contract runs up sometime next year. I'm not breaking contract to get to this. By next summer, is the network going to upgrade to 3G? Or something better/faster? We'll see by then.

Ideally, they will come out with a new iPod by the end of the year that will have wi-fi, safari and the widescreen, touchscreen and everything. I'd pay for that. I'd pay big. This doesn't need to be my phone, but I everything else about it a lot.

Top 5 of the first half of 2007...

It's about that time. A friend just sent around his top 5, and it got me thinking...

I've been going on and on about how strong this year has been for new music, tho when it came time to think up this list, it all came together fairly easily. The top 4 were no brainers, it turned out. #5 was a surprise after giving it a lot of thought, but looking back, this makes sense.

1. Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, are you the Destroyer?
I don't listen to it all that often anymore, but it's still the best this year. By a good margin.

2. Tegan & Sara - The Con
Just wrote about this recently. Nothing's changed.

3. Digitalism - Idealism
Great dance record. Pogo is their pop song, and it's great I'll let em have it, but the rest of the album is just one perfectly timed dance beat after another.

4. Nakatomi Plaza - Unsettled
If there were more bands releasing records like this in 2007, emo wouldn't be such a filthy word. I hope they someday graduate from the basement of the Knitting Factory and gain a decent following, cause they are absolutely the real deal.

5. Modest Mouse - We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank...
A surprise for sure...but when I looked back at what I listened to the most and genuinely enjoyed, this one was above the rest. An honorable mention to Bright Eyes, The Maccabees, Bloc Party, Kings of Leon and The National for all making excellent albums a spent I bunch of time with, but looking back, I think this Modest Mouse record managed to edge them all out. I really liked it. It was everything a great album does for me. Can't compare it to old old Modest Mouse, cause it's different and easier and everything, but judging it on its own, it really stands up.

So that's that. We'll see how this holds up in December...

Video Games

I was back at work today, but don't have much to say. A few video game notes? (Not gonna get into Rock Band just yet...just say that it looks fun, but $200 fun? You can almost buy a Wii for that much. We'll see...)

I'm way late on the bandwagon, but Dance Dance Revolution for XBox360 is a pretty good time. Especially if you're into shit like Chris Brown and Cascada. My favorite, perhaps, is Pendulum by Slam (or Slam by Pendulum...can't remember) I just love how it starts pretty slow and normal then suddenly kicks up into this wild lil frenzy. Anyway, it's as good a workout as advertised. The games got a pretty steep learning curve and it starts out really hard, but I'm getting better.

Big thumbs down for the critically acclaimed The Darkness. Maybe the story gets better, but the controls are dumb and the whole concept is pretty lame. The idea is that your little supernatural alter-ego powers up in the dark...so you walk around shooting out lights the whole time. A neat concept in theory, but shooting out light bulbs is hella boring! And its got a checkpoint safe feature, so you get stuck playing the same section over and over when you die. Having to take 5 minutes every time after reloading to shoot out all the dumb lights was killing me. I returned it after like 3 days for...

Ninja Gaiden Sigma! This is a good game! It's like Resident Evil or Metal Gear solid, but with better controls and no guns. I like that it's such a throwback to an old school beat em up fighter. The story is merely serviceable, but the locales and levels are fun, the power up system is simple enough for me and the gameplay just feels right. It's hard, yeah, but just fun. When I die I feel like it could have been avoided if I was more careful. Only shortcoming is it should have co-op 2 player on the same screen, but I'm okay with that these days.

One other recent impulse was Singstar POP for PS2. It's really not that great a game, but the song list cheesy and amusing enough that I'm sure I'll get my money worth over time. Singing Lifehouse and Hinder songs at the top of your lungs at 2AM is way more fun than you'd imagine.

So what else is new? Play a lot of MLB 07: The Show still (which is a great baseball game. 100x better than the Sega Sports alternatives this year.) I haven't touched my Wii in months. They gotta get a new game out for it of something...