I am Dave Segal

For about ten minutes last night, I was a hero. Earlier in the day, Maya had told me, “I...

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 13:46:08 -0700

For about ten minutes last night, I was a hero.

Earlier in the day, Maya had told me, “I really want to go see the Hunger Games tonight, but no one wants to go with me” with a disappointment in her voice deep enough to cut through the part of me that knew nothing about The Hunger Games apart from the fact that I would never see it unless I was snowed in a cabin with a shitty selection of DVDs or on a Chinatown bus where they were playing a bootleg copy at two in the morning, and say to her, “I’ll go with you tonight!” She was clearly surprised, maybe even a little baffled, but that seemed like a natural reaction to my unflinching sacrifice.

By 11:50pm, after a few calls to round up a posse, a little bit of encouragement to Maya when she seemed to drag her feet about really wanting to go, and an hour of waiting in line, we had great seats in one of her favorite theaters, and I felt unabashedly proud that I’d pulled it all together for her; so much so that I wanted to remind her of how great a guy I was. So when our friends headed to the cocession stand, I said, “I’m glad this worked out. When I heard you say that no one wanted to go with you, I thought, ‘Not today world! Maya will get what she wants!’” But when I came out of my heroic pose, I found that baffled look back on her face. Where had I messed up? Had I pushed the “I’m fantastic” angle too hard? Had I revealed that my selflessness was just vanity in disguise? Had I ruined the whole thing?

“I never said that.”
Her bafflement was now reflected perfectly on my face.
“Noooo. You definitely said that.”
“Noooo. I didn’t.”
“I’m one hundred percent sure you said that.”
“I’m one hundred percent sure that I didn’t.”
“No. I know you said that because that’s the whole reason we’re here.”
“Well, I didn’t say that.”

And then neither of us said anything for a minute. In my head, I stewed over how wrong she was and wondered if her memory was okay and reminded myself that even if she didn’t remember saying that, I was still a great guy and then started asking myself if this is the kind of thing that people who have significant others with Alzheimer’s have to tell themselves all the time.

“Oh! I said, ‘Noni.’”
My whirpool of ponderings ceased, but I didn’t quite see how her words fit in to our squabble.
“What?”
“I said, ‘I really want to go see the Hunger Games tonight, but NONI wants to go with me.’”

… As in her sister, Noni. As in she’d wanted to go tonight, but her sister couldn’t make it tonight, so they had planned to go another time, and I had forced her to ditch out on the perfect Sister’s Night so that I could go with her to a movie I had no interest in seeing.

We laughed about it as the friends I’d roped in to coming came back from the concession stand and we smiled at each other as the trailers started to play and I knew that we were all still going to have a great time, but I couldn’t help think back to how great I’d felt for those ten minutes where I was a hero.

And a quick and dirty Top 10 Albums

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 20:29:27 -0800

I don’t want to drag this out into 2012, it’s the kind of thing I’ll obsess over and not obsessing over this kind of thing is definitely one of my resolutions.

The Beach Boys - The SMiLE Sessions

It’s the first year that you could ever say “it’s been released”, so cut me some slack. Also, even if it had been made this year, it would have been the best album of the year. What were you expecting?
Machinedrum - Room(s)

Every track on here is great. An amazing extrapolation on the sound of juke/footwork music. Absolutely essential.
Nicolas Jaar - Space is Only Noise

A great album in the traditional sense of the word. It’s not just a collection of songs; it ebbs and flows and bangs and boggles.
AraabMuzik - Electronic Dream

Eminently playable. Nothing else hooked me so quickly and never let go. If you ever find yourself in a car at night and you’re not sure what to put on, now you are.
James Blake - James Blake

For some reason, I always find myself listening to this album on airplanes. On the last trip, it finally clicked for me. This album has an inventive patience and fragile boldness on every track.
John Maus - We Must Become The Pitiless Censors Of Ourselves

Continuing with a certain strain of music that seemed to be everywhere last year, Maus overpowers you with the size of his music. Big bellowing emotions with richly deep keys.
A$AP Rocky - Live.Love.A$AP

I still love rap, but I’d like it if there was more worth loving. Thank goodness for A$AP’s first full-length mixtape for bringing back the sounds that make you want to ride around town, speakers on blast, roll on slow.
Weeknd - House of Balloons

I’d write more about this, but I need to get ready for a New Years party, and if anyone would understand that, it’s Weeknd.
Kuedo - Severant

Electronic Insect Hip-Hop. No more, no less. But for me, that’s plenty.
Kurt Vile - Smoke Ring For My Halo

A little bit of a throwback to the Devendra days of college, but coming out fresher than you’d expect due to a torrent of sincerity and obvious passion for playing. It has some weak points as a whole, but the songs you’ll keep on repeat will feel like little albums in themselves.

2011 Year End Lists - Film

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 16:05:00 -0800

Top 10 Films I Saw That I Can’t Believe Made It On To Other People’s Top 10 Lists

Limitless - Ty Burr of the Boston Globe, you’ve got to be kidding me. Did you only see ten movies this year? Because I saw about fifty and this was the worst one.
The Future - I watched this on my computer on a plane, which is admittedly not the ideal circumstance for movie-going, but I also watched Beginners on a plane and it’s in my actual Top 10. The Future, on the other hand, caused me to want the plane to have something serious enough go wrong that we would have to make an emergency landing and I’d have to stop watching. I went in thinking that I enjoyed Miranda July’s previous film, Me You and Everyone We Know, but now I think I was probably just more of a pretentious twit back then.
Super 8 - Sometimes going into a movie with high expectations sets you up for major disappointment. I guess my really low expectations were also too high.
50/50 - Not sure how to deal with the difficult situations you’ve put your characters in? Throw another music montage at it! All better!
Hanna - Apparently, when you make a lethal teenage girl the protagonist of your globe-trotting action film, you don’t have to deal with logic or plot holes! The more you know.
Midnight in Paris - Just because Woody Allen makes a movie every year, it doesn’t mean that you have to like one every couple of years. Maybe if I’d read more the assigned reading in high school I would have liked it more. My B.
Margin Call - Like 50/50, this one takes on a ripe and rich subject just waiting for someone to make a great film about it. Like 50/50, it leaves the subject still waiting for someone to make a great film about it.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes - Did I watch the same movie as everyone else? I must not have, because in the movie I watched, James Franco was one of the main characters and didn’t seem to know he was supposed to give a performance of some kind.
X-Men: First Class - This was on an MTV.com Top 10 list I came across on Metacritic’s year-end round up of year-end round-ups. I don’t know why I’m giving them a hard time about it, because I liked this movie well enough and think it’s a good pick for a Top 10 blockbusters of the year sort of thing. Please ignore.
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol - Brad Bird has set the bar far too high for this to be considered a success in my book. It was fun, but Brad Bird’s previous film was Ratatouille, which is one of my favorite films of all-time.

Top 10 Films I Totally Meant To See Before Writing My Top 10 List But Didn’t

A Seperation - I’ve heard it’s great. I almost caught it yesterday, but then Maya didn’t feel like going. I blame Maya.
Margaret - This movie has done an excellent job at being impossible to see. I don’t know when it was in theaters, it’s not on DVD, and I can’t find a screener online. I’m starting to believe that it’s as much of a myth as dry land.
Take Shelter - I bet I’m really gonna like this movie. The poster looks cool and the main character looks ugly.
Certified Copy - An Iranian filmmaker making a French film set in Italy. I’m looking forward to feeling much more worldly than everyone who didn’t see this movie.
The Skin I Live In - Almost every night for the past two weeks, I ask Maya if she wants to watch the screener of this I downloaded and every night she says “no, but don’t watch it without me.” Blame Maya #2.
Poetry - A slow-burning Korean drama/mystery about a sixty year old woman. Sound boring? Not if you loved Mother, last year’s slow-burning Korean drama/mystery about a sixty year old woman. Sign me up!
Carnage - I like to argue with Raphael about Roman Polanski so I’d like to see this in the hopes that I’ll think it’s great, because apparently he didn’t like it.
Shame - I saw about half of Steve McQueen’s previous film, Hunger, and loved it, but then Kevin saw this one and said it was just okay. So now I really want to see it, but not so bad that I’ve seen it.
The Descendants - I’m not planning on liking this, but I haven’t seen any of Alexander Payne’s films since Election, so there’s always a chance. It’s just that all of his recent movies look like they’re about the most boring parts of being an adult, and I’m still trying to get excited about the idea that I am one.
The Adventures of Tin-Tin - No one’s recommended it, I never read the books or watched the cartoons, and it didn’t make that many year-end lists, but there’s something about how clean and colorful and adventurous it looks that makes me feel like it will have all the fun that Spielberg left out of Indiana Jones and the Shitty Skull — sorry, I meant “Crystal” — Indiana Jones and the Shitty Crystal Skull.

My Actual Top 10 Films

The Tree of Life - This is one of my favorite films of all-time, and it’s the only movie of the year that holds that distinction. There are rumors of a six-hour cut, as there always are for Terrence Malick movies, and, as always, I hope to god they’re true. Show me another movie that has as wide a scope, as beautiful an eye, and as honest an exploration, and I’ll be amazed.
Martha Marcy May Marlene - When I started writing up my personal remarks for this list, this movie was at #7, but the more I thought about it the more I started to realize how great and unique of an experience it had been. It was an uphill battle for me to go see this movie. The title was just … ugh. I could never get it right in conversation just like when Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind came out and I kept calling it Spotless Sunshine Mind … Eternal?, but with enough recommendations and an afternoon where I felt like catching a matinee my fate was sealed. And I’m lucky I did, because it’s one of the most subtly ambitious and finely crafted films of the year. It might not knock you on your ass when you exit the theater, but it’ll stick with you for months.
Drive - Most quiet hero types are just psychopaths whose story gets told from a generous perspective. Drive takes off the white gloves and shows you what’s really going on. At the beginning, you’re not quite sure how the Driver ended up leading such a solitary life and you’re glad when he let’s someone in, but by the end, you realize he had good reason to keep to himself, and find yourself wondering how many stories like this dot his past.
The Artist - A great film of the sort that I’d guess everyone can agree on. I’m a legit fan of silent film so the experience of getting to see one of this caliber new in the theater was a thrill. It’s meticulous, sincere, and, despite all its influences, somehow, original.
Meek’s Cutoff - One of the smallest stories of the year; if I hadn’t read the plot summary in advance, I may have missed that it had anything to do with the Oregon Trail. As the group of pioneers tries to find their way to safety in the unmapped territories of America with only the bare essentials, the film progresses with the bare essentials of story. These people are lost, and there’s not that much more to their situation, and there doesn’t need to be. It’s a cold cold look at the restrained panic that exists when everything is truly on the line.
Attack the Block - If I was in high school, this would have been a movie that temporarily defined my life. I would have left the theater howling, bought the soundtrack at Planet Music, quoted the movie twenty times a day, and all my friends would have done the same. As an adult, I still had a ton of fun, but in a year where Super 8 churned up a ton of press for the return of the kids-save-the-world genre, this was the movie that truly took me back, and not by trying to copy and paste and recapture previously bottled magic, but by pushing forward with the genuine energy of youth.
Fright Night - Easily the most fun I had in a theater this year. I don’t think too many people saw it, but its mix of genuine scares, for real laughs, and legitimately surprising action scenes and plot twists made it one I’m not embarrassed to put on my list. If you missed it, invite a couple of friends over, pop some corn, and have a blast. (I feel like I just wrote a review for USA Today)
Beginners - I’m not entirely sure that Raphael didn’t write this movie. The only reason I can think of that keeps me from buying into my little conspiracy theory is that it lost a little steam towards the end and Raphael’s great at endings.
Contagion - I wish I’d seen this when everyone else saw it, because I liked it, but I’m not sure why I liked it, and I imagine other could have helped me figure that out. Maybe it’s that the film was so different than what the trailer led me to believe. I mean, there were scenes that I thought were going to be the climax of the whole thing that happened in the first five minutes, which almost never happens, and left me way more open to the rest of it than I otherwise would have been.
Moneyball - I didn’t really want this in my Top 10. Like, even now, while you’re reading this, I’m probably still considering watching another movie and then replacing this entry. It was a solid movie with no flaws that jump to mind outside of the one Ben Joseph nailed to the wall, but it also failed to leave much of an impact. The kind of movie you watch and say, “That was really well done … … … Hey! Remember that trailer for The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo? Wanna talk about that instead!?”

Sunset/Sunrise, Part 1

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 10:01:00 -0800

As I watched Meek’s Cutoff with my mom, fiancee, and stepdad on what had been a rainy afternoon in Virginia Beach, I happened to glance out the window to find the clouds scattered enough to let in an odd orange glow from the sun as it made its move toward the horizon that hid behind the trees which rose from beyond the lake that lay at the edge of our backyard. The film, a gripping closeup on the different faces of panic set against the story of a caravan of wagon-riding pioneers lost somewhere off the Oregon Trail, had arrived at one of its several severe night scenes that leave the screen almost entirely devoid of image, so I wasn’t missing too much as a I focused my gaze outside. I hadn’t been back home to Virginia in two years and, after four days in town, I knew this would be the last sunset I’d see there for some time to come and it became necessarily special. I took in what I could and did my best to secure a picture of it in my mind for the foreseeable future.

At 6:30 the next morning, I was in the last row of a McDonnell Douglas MD-80 on the runway of Norfolk Int’l Airport (ORF) preparing for takeoff amid those last moments of night that tend to linger at the beginning of winter days. For me, preparation is fairly simple:

Place hand on fiancee’s hand to relieve the anxiety that tends to come when I’m about to ascend the tens of thousands of feet necessary to get anywhere these days.
Imagine the sort of loving, comforting smile I hope I’d give her if something went wrong.
Look out the window and focus on whatever beautiful views I can find.

Now, being in the last row of any plane means having a shitty seat:

Your seat doesn’t lean back though the one in front of you does.
You’re the last to be served your complimentary beverage.
You’re the last to exit the plane.
If you’re lucky, it smells like you’re about to die of carbon monoxide poisoning.
If you’re not lucky, it smells like someone just took a crap right behind you because they did because that’s where the lavatories are.

On an MD-80, it also means that you have a massive jet engine just outside your tiny window completely blocking your view, so on this particular morning, the best I could find was a small slice of window a few rows in front of me on the opposite side of our fully-booked flight. As the captain pushed the throttle forward, I focused on my sliver of starry sky and saw it touched by the first glow of twilight’s indirect bloom. The wheels lost contact with the tarmac and we climbed thousands of feet before a minute had gone, raising our perspective in respect to the horizon so quickly it caused the sunrise to come like a time-lapse. Soon we were at cruising altitude with the westerly course of our flight and the earth’s rotation combining to change the type of speed-effect on our sunrise from fast to slow-mo. For hours, we floated through the special gradients between yellow, red, and blue that are unique to the edges of day, caught in an everlasting daybreak.

MATH BREAK

Formula for calculating the speed of the earth’s rotation at a given latitude: Speed of Earth at equator (1,674.4 km/hr) x cos(latitude)

Latitude of ORF: 36.89472∘
Latitude of DFW (destination for connection to BUR): 32.89694∘

Average rotational speed of earth between ORF and DFW: 1,372.496352372164 km/hr

Conversion factor for km to miles: .621371192

Average rotational speed of earth between ORF and DFW: 852.829694489143572 mph

Cruising speed of MD-80: 504 mph

Percent decrease in perceived speed of sunrise on flight from ORF to DFW: 59.0973793779428%

December's Curse

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 13:52:22 -0800

    While every month of the year has a character of its own — January tends to be hopeful, March usually seems endless, August is kind of an asshole — all of them remain malleable to man. We can bring our own attitude to each one-twelfth of the year and make of it what we wish. I’ve bent July into the most melancholic month and forced October to be one of romance. All the year long, we’re masters of our fates drawing maps on the pages of our calendars. All the year long, that is, until December.

    There are parties to attend and sweaters to wear. Family to visit and snacks to consume. Miles to go and promises to keep. Twelve of twelve doesn’t care what you have in mind or where you’re at in your life, it has plans and will accept nothing less than your total compliance.

    Whatever your religion, you have shopping to do, whatever your media of choice: music, movies, books, TV, you have year-end lists to consult, whatever your age, you have resolutions to make, and whatever you’ve done with the rest of your year, you have moments to cherish and mistakes to regret.

    No matter what path you carved through the bedrock of the previous three-hundred-and-thirty-four days, so long as you survived, December marks the end of your journey. It is the month of reckoning and we are all at its mercy.

oldeenglish: We’re super-excited to premiere World of Bob, a...

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 13:58:05 -0800

oldeenglish:

We’re super-excited to premiere World of Bob, a new cartoon short we made with our friends at PUNY (the Akon Calls T-Pain guys). It’s about a guy named Jim whose dumb friend Bob has sex with a cavewoman, so now everyone in the future is a descendent of Bob. It’s weird, and gross, and we hope you enjoy it!

A ton of awesome people donated their time to this project — our friend Pete Berkman of Anamanaguchi did title theme, Farsheed Hamidi-Toosi did the music video theme, and our sound editor Craig Hillelson did a bang up job on the mix; and PUNY’s animation is, of course, as gorgeous as always. (Seriously, watch this in HD or at Vimeo if you possibly can — the art is amazing.) This project was a true labor of love for all of us, and we hope you dig watching it as much as we dug making it.

Debuting a cartoon we wrote a couple of years ago! I play the jerk!

From my rap blog. iloverap: A$AP Rocky - WassupProduced by...

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 13:28:00 -0800

From my rap blog.

iloverap:

A$AP Rocky - Wassup
Produced by Clams Casino
From 2011’s LIVE.LOVE.A$AP

     This the only rap song I’ve wanted to listen to for the last two months.

     With the spacious atmospherics of a classic Jay Dee-era J. Dilla track (think ATCQ’s “Get a Hold” or Slum Village’s “Untitled (Fantastic)”) and a massive but empathetic bassline worthy of a cold 80’s pop classic like “Time After Time” already providing the high, Clams Casino just needs to throw down an occasional to metronomic clap and a cymbalic vamp to keep things moving forward, but it’s the times he leaves them off that the song really flies. These moments when Rocky is left to wander off into the foggier parts of his mind are the ones that push the song from a classic head-nodder to a serious eyebrow-raiser.

     A$AP Rocky’s a genuine talent. The kind of guy that’s bound to get better, but shows up fully formed. I mean, as great as the instrumental rides, Rocky lands it so cleanly and with so much originality that any rapper would be making a mistake by taking their own stab at it. “Back once again” is not the way you expect someone to start track four of their first full-length mixtape, but when you find it locked on repeat longer than the “Niggas in Paris” instrumental at a Watch the Throne concert, it starts to make a lot of sense.

DL

Nothing breaks my heart like a forced laugh

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 15:23:56 -0800

See, a real honest-to-god laugh dismantles all the defenses we’ve built up to survive the complexities of social life, and does so with no less than the greatest of ease. Your self-restraint, your anxieties, your vanity, your aspirations, your pride, and your despair all disappear for that moment when you have a genuine, no-bullshit, certified-as-authentic laugh. It’s a brief moment of enlightenment that comes without your permission; a sneeze of joy, a hiccup of bliss. In a fleeting flash, you hold nothing back. Your outward actions match your inner emotions. You become honest without intention, and it’s in the running for “Most Beautiful Thing Of All Time”.

I’m not talking about the odd world of evil laughs or those laughs of assholes getting their kicks at someone else’s expense (assholes that I know we all are from time to time). I’m talking about the good laughs. The ones that come as we connect the disparate dots of life in unexpected ways. The ones where we laugh at our own ridiculousness and that silliness inherent to our group of friends, our family, our country, our species, our genus, our phylum, or our kingdom. The ones that reach out and pull us closer together.

But a forced laugh? A fake laugh? A sympathetic laugh? Woe be unto those who would do such a thing. They desecrate the holy. They profess their love without having it in their hearts. They’re frauds faking something that’s nothing if it’s not honest. They give you a beautifully bowed and ravishingly wrapped box with nothing inside and give themselves another star sticker for being so magnanimous.

At its best, a forced laugh is an attempt at positive reinforcement; rewarding their friend or their coworker or a performer or a stranger-they’re-trying-to-fool-into-being-a-friend with the trimmings of Human Connection without the substance. A fake laugh, at its most admirable, says “There was a lot that was funny about that, not funny enough for me to laugh mind you, but funny enough for me to want you to keep trying to entertain me and certainly funny enough to prevent the possibility of awkwardness. So I’ll give you an advance on a laugh in the hope that I’ll be able to recoup my investment later.” Sure, it might be a white lie but it casts a dark shadow when its caught. It stings much worse than silence, or “I don’t get it.” It cheapens the interaction and makes the recipient of the forgery feel like they’re being bought off in the same way they would if they’d slept with someone on what they thought was a date only to be offered money when they expected a kiss goodbye.

Full disclosure: I’m as guilty of this as anyone. I most often do it when I’ve lost track of what someone is saying while a drift in my own thoughts, but, upon checking back in, find their cadence to indicate that it’s time for me to laugh. Those are the times that I most often give in to the convenience of this crime. You might say I’m a hypocrite; I say I’m breaking my own heart.

5 Albums I've Never Listened To And Don't Really Think I'm Going To But Did Download And Can't Quite Bring Myself To Delete (Despite The Fact That My Hard Drive's Full)

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 14:15:00 -0800

William Basinski - The Disintegration Loops (2002)

Sometimes the thing that draws you to an album is the same that keeps you away. The Disintegration Loops started off, not as an album, but as an attempt Basinski made to digitally archive a set of recently rediscovered ambient tape loops that he’d recorded in 1982. But as the music rolled through the playback head, the tape began to fall apart.

“The iron oxide particles were gradually turning to dust and dropping into the tape machine, leaving bare plastic spots on the tape, and silence in the corresponding sections of the new recording. I was recording the death of these melodies […] The music had turned to dust and was scattered along the tape path, yet the essence and memory of the life and death of each unique melody had been saved, recorded to a new medium, remembered.” - William Basinski

And if that was the whole story, it wouldn’t have made the list. As interesting as the decaying loops are conceptually, I might not even have heard of the album. But that’s not the whole story.

The rest of the story goes something like this: as Basinski finished the recording, as the last loop lost its last note in his Brooklyn apartment, two planes crashed into the towers of the World Trade Center. So as many lost their lives and more ran for theirs, as the country watched on their TVs, Basinski brought his new recording up to his roof and played it for the first time as he watched with his neighbors as the buildings burned and smoldered a mile across the East River.

That’s some heavy stuff to have in your EPK. As soon as I read about it, I knew I had to hear it, but once I had it, I never found myself in the right place to play it. I guess there aren’t that many times where I’m in the mood to relive 9/11 through music, and even though everything I’ve read about the album talks about how beautiful the music is without all the context, there’s so much to chew on with the story itself, so much poetry in its very existence, that its hard to forget and hard to imagine how the music could top it.

So I leave it in my iTunes library, unplayed, but not ignored. I love this album, but I might not ever hear it.

Sex Pistols - Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols (1977)

Yeah, really.

I know it’s on a thousand “best albums of all time” lists, I’m sure it’s in the 1001 recordings I have to listen to before I die, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it inspired some of my favorite artists to make some of my favorite music, but here’s the thing: It’s just not an album you sit back and listen to as a music hobbyist.

You’re supposed to live this thing. You’re supposed to hear it and immediately buy a spiked leather jacket, put wood glue in your hair, and learn how to sew patches on to every piece of clothing you own. One listen, and your next few years should consist exclusively of getting hammered, cursing at your parents, and screaming along to “Anarchy in the U.K.” and “God Save the Queen”, and I just know I’m not going to do any of that.

I’m going to lean back in my comfy little chair, think for a bit about all the music that might not have been without the album and how Odd Future might possibly maybe be the Sex Pistols of our time, put a track or two on an oft updated but rarely used playlist for DJ-ing, and I’m going to completely miss the point. I’ll have become precisely the sort of pompous and contented asshole that I assume the album is rallying against, and that just seems disrespectful.

But I still hold out hope. Somenight, when I’m out with the boys drinking more than than the me of the next morning would recommend, someone will throw it on in our slightly swerving car and I’ll get it. I’ll think, “yeah, fuck the reserved asshole I’ve become!”, and yell, “this is the new me!” I’ll throw my phone out the window and punch whomever’s next to me just for the shit of it. That’s about the best I can hope for and I’d rather hold out for that than feel like more of a pretentious twit than I already do.

Common - Finding Forver (2007)

Like a lot of hip-hop fans of the nineties, I used to love Common. Resurrection had a permanent spot in my CD case for as long as I had a CD case, Like Water for Chocolate was a heavy rotator throughout high school, and I might be the only person I know who legitimately enjoyed Common’s attempt at psychedelic hip-hop on Electric Circus, but, when it comes to Finding Forever, there’s one minor thing that keeps me from pressing play, and it’s not that “Finding Forever” sounds more like a how to book on Tantric sex than a rap album (though that certainly doesn’t help) …

It’s that fucking cover.

I know I’m not supposed to judge a book and all that, but, seriously, what is this? Did he get signed to a record label run by Scion? Was Orbit gum having a clearance on unused promo art? I think I’d actually be relieved to find out they just used a PowerPoint template because at least that would mean no one put in any effort whatsoever. But, god, even the photo of Common is ridiculous. Are the black lines around his head supposed to be a monk’s hood or a pimp’s wig? Add the Lily Allen guest appearance to the mix and it’s obvious this is a massive sellout move engineered to put me off and pull in children and I’m never going to listen to this so I might as well delete it right?

Here’s the problem: one track produced by J. Dilla (arguably my favorite producer), eight produced by Kanye West (arguably my favorite producer), and guest appearances from both D’Angelo (arguably kidnapped) and DJ Premier (arguably my favorite producer). These are each heavyweights. I listen to albums that only one of these guys has co-produced a track on. I can’t just delete it. I mean, I already put the producer credits in the composer field of the ID3 tag, and there’s just bound to be at least a nugget or two of gold on here. I must listen to it at some point.

But on the other hand …

Eghck.

The Flaming Lips - Zaireeka (1997)

So here’s one that I really do want to listen to. Like, I’m actually excited about it, but the question is: Will I? Really? Am I ever actually gonna make this happen?

For those of you who don’t know, The Flaming Lips released a four disc album, and that’s not the crazy part. The crazy part = you have to play them at the same time on four different stereos to hear it in full.

Mind blown. Eight channel sound! It’s brilliant! Groundbreaking! Visionary! Logistically infuriating!

Has an album ever asked for as much prep-work on your part? This makes that time I synced The Dark Side of the Moon with The Wizard of Oz on the MGM lion roar while stoned seem like a cakewalk. Part of the concept is that you have to listen to it with friends in order to get it in sync, thus necessitating a social experience, which would be easier if everybody I knew who had a modicum of interest in making this happen hadn’t already had their Zaireeka party in college and reported back with a unanimous and less than inspiring “it was kind of neat … kind of.” If they’d all come back with spinning hypnosis eyes while repeating “Ich bin ein Zaireeka” then I might have the motivation, but with things as they are, and the fact that the Flaming Lips put out a 10th anniversary DVD with a fifth track of sound that you have to play through your TV (we’re up to ten channels of sound so far), it’s just hard to see it happening. My best chance at this point is to go hang out on a college campus with a big bag of weed until I get an invite, and that’s pretty creepy.

But I can’t delete it. I love weird sound stuff. I’m the kind of guy who goes to La Monte Young’s Dream House, a Tribeca apartment filled with a bunch of speakers blasting out of phase sine waves at you from different directions, more than once and buys a ticket to Transformers 3 with the intention of keeping my eyes closed the whole time so I can focus on, not the incredible dialogue, but the ridiculous sound design. In a big way, this is precisely my cup of tea. So I have to hold out hope even though I think it’s pretty hopeless. Le sigh.

Various Artists - Living Bridge (2008)

I should have done more than listen to this album — I should have been involved in it somehow. I should have been at the release party or made a music video for a song or gotten tossed an advance promo or gone out to lunch with one of the bands or even just told some friends about this awesome compilation that was being recorded right next door to the Olde English office that I spent almost every day at for two years. Maybe it’s already clear, but this is an album I haven’t listened to simply out of guilt and shame.

Living in New York was hard for me. I enjoyed it and loved it and bragged about it and everything, but I always had a sense of not being New York enough for New York. I had a feeling that there were always twenty amazing parties or gallery openings or secret concerts happening just around every corner that I would have been invited to if I’d just been a little more outgoing. Some people find that invigorating; I found it dispiriting.

When we got an office in the industrial section of Williamsburg, Brooklyn (I’m from Virginia, so I always have to make sure people don’t think I’m talking about the colonial Williamsburg of field trips past), I had an idea that it would make us a little more “legit” as New Yorkers, by which I mean it would fulfill the stereotype that everyone had about living in Williamsburg at that time, but that was also kind of true. It would make us part of a community of independent creative types who made music and movies, had BBQs on roofs and threw parties in lofts, but it didn’t. The fact is that you have to be socially ambitious to get involved with those sorts of things, and that was/is one of the things I had/have serious problems with. As time wore on, our office made me feel less like a potential member of that world and more like a fake who was there only by the circumstances of geography. I still remember Missy Popadiuk explaining to me what a poser was in junior high and thinking “oh shit, that’s me.” Being there brought that feeling back and nothing encapsulated my feeling of missing out what was happening in my own backyard more than finding out about this album.

Black Dice, Deerhunter, Blood on the Wall, and other Brooklyn bands of the like that filled this compilation were precisely the sort of acts I tended to load my iPod up with and mark my calendar for, so finding out that they’d all made exclusive material for a compilation of note excited me. But as I read more about it and learned where it’d been recorded, that same old feeling of missing out and failing to be present and being false started to haunt me again. I’d put the album on my iPod with every intention of giving it a good listen, but when I scrolled by it, I wouldn’t stop, and when it came up on shuffle, I’d skip forward. It’s specter loomed larger and larger, and, eventually, I stopped pretending that I wanted to listen to it, but I could never get rid of it because it was still everything I’d wanted to be.

I live in L.A. now, and it’s less of a problem. I recently threw it on my iPhone in case I’m over all that now. We’ll see.

"Did You Try Turning It Up?"

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 13:53:00 -0800

That’s my first question for anyone who doesn’t like a song that I love. I mean, if I love it, every other human with a working set of ears and an open mind should at least be able to enjoy it and get why I’d want to ramble on about the bass line’s backstory for ten minutes … right?

    “Did you try playing it as loud as you’d play your favorite song to your favorite people while on your favorite drug?”

    And I don’t ask to be a dick, though I get that it sort of paints me as one, I ask because it’s a question I pose to myself before passing judgement on any piece of music, be it by the Black Sabbaths, Squarepushers, and B.I.G.s of the world, or the Gershwins, Carpenters, and Nick Drakes. They’re crafting mountain ranges of sound, but, if you don’t play it loud, you’re only hearing speed bumps.

    “Like, did you crank it up so loud that you half expected George Wendt to storm into the room yelling at you to turn it down like you were Macaulay Culkin in the classic, but ridiculous, intro to the “Black & White” music video?”

    Cause if the answer’s “no”, then what are we even talking about? You can’t say you don’t like it if you haven’t even heard it. And if you haven’t heard it loud, you haven’t heard it all.

    See, when you listen to something at a decibel that comes anywhere close to what you might call “reasonable” or, god forbid, “background”, you’re listening to something the musician never intended you to hear. You’re abridging the waveforms and then judging them. You’re judging a city by its airport and a state by its highways. When the artist first came up with the song, it was so loud in their head that it drowned out the rest of the world, and when they closed their eyes while listening to that final mix, it’s a pretty good bet the music was blasting.

    Now you don’t have to crank your Glen Gould records to the point that the background hiss sounds like an instrument in itself, just to the point that his piano is in the room with you. Music started as something that was necessarily played live, with the musician determining the volume for everyone who would ever hear it right there and then. The fact that you can even control the volume is an unintended consequence of electronics manufacturers trying to perfect their products, not musicians trying to perfect theirs, and, so long as we’re trying to judge the music and not the stereo equipment, it only makes sense to give it a real honest to goodness shot; a shot that can’t be compared to wearing dark sunglasses to an art show or trying to read a book from across the room.

    But the choice is yours. Do you want to hear it how its lord intended or do you want to see how soft your stereo can go? Like I said, I know it paints me as a dick, but this is the question I have to ask myself every day.

oldeenglish: Olde English sketch pilot. In 2008, Olde English...

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 11:24:49 -0800

oldeenglish:

Olde English sketch pilot.

In 2008, Olde English decided we were ready to have a TV show, and we started pitching ideas to cable channels. Most of our ideas were for themed sketch shows — my (Raphael’s) favorite was for basically a comedy version of TRL, full of original music videos, interviews with real and made-up celebrities, and youth-skewing commercials (we were about ten years too late for the format to have any cultural relevance, but we still thought it would be a lot of fun); we also pitched a road trip show where every week we film a batch of sketches in a new city as we drive across the country in a big van.

We put together the above reel as a sample of what we called our “vanilla sketch show” — just a bunch of sketches with no framing device. If you’ve seen all our videos, you’re not going to discover anything new here, other than the new intro and themed bumpers we filmed, but if you want to revisit a bunch of our favorite stuff all in a row, here’s a good place to do it. If someone had given us a TV show in 2008, this is more or less what it would have looked like.

The Incredible Power of Harold Melvin & The Blue...

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 16:18:00 -0800

The Incredible Power of Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes’ “I Miss You”

I never knew how many things I missed until I heard this song, and I only heard it two weeks ago. At least I don’t remember hearing it until two weeks ago. I’m sure I’d crossed its path at some point since my dad kept the radio locked on Oldies 95.7 in my days as a non-voting passenger and since Kanye West sampled it on his first production for Jay-Z on “This Can’t Be Life”, which came out smack in the middle of the days when I made it my business to hunt down every sample the liner notes saw fit to mention.

So maybe I had heard it, but just hadn’t gone through the sort of heartache that you have to have gone through for it to make its impact. To be honest, I don’t think I really even knew the depth of my heartache until I heard it two weeks ago in Teddy Pendergrass’s voice. Soon each spin brought back another heartbreak.

From that first pulse of the organ and the deeply spiritual group vocals that follow, I was in a place where the pain I felt was elevated from a demon that tormented me to a god that I was humbled before. It became a song that made me cherish the size of the holes I’d been left with because they reminded me of the greatness of what I’d lost. For eight and a half minutes, I felt invited to wash myself in honesty. I quickly found that eight and a half minutes wasn’t nearly enough.

The first few times I played it, I missed the versions of myself that lived more productive lives than the current one does; the times when confidence was a fact of life instead of a foundation that was being rebuilt.

Then I missed the headstrong heydays of my old comedy group when the only criteria for something being successful was that we all thought it was funny; before the measurement changed to view counts and development deals; when the laugh something got in the read-through was enough to fuel us through whatever obstacles arose.

Later, I missed all the friends I don’t live close enough to to keep up the quality of the relationships we started. I missed being able to see them without going through airport security and anxiety attacks. I missed all the late night chats that we hadn’t had and all the silly projects we never made. I missed being able to help them move and talking to them without having to catch up.

And then, for a while, I missed the family I had before my parents got divorced; the feeling of having a group of people made of the same stuff that I’m made of with their own rhythm of being together. I missed the worst times as much as the best. I missed the 19 years when I believed we’d always be together and that my idea of home would never change. I imagined moments we might have shared in the future and missed those too. I didn’t get mad. I didn’t even wonder why it had to be this way — I got it — I just missed something I had been lucky enough to have.

But there was one sort of thing that stuck out that I didn’t miss. One thing that, even when I thought long and hard about and even though it’s the subject of the song, I didn’t miss: an ex-girlfriend. I remembered the “breaks” and break-ups that my fiancee and I had been through. I recalled how, in those times, I missed her just as much as I missed all the other things the previous plays of the song had brought up, but I didn’t actually feel that pain anymore. We’d gotten through those times, and realizing that started to change the way I heard the song and how I felt about all of these heartbreaks. It erased the hopelessness and replaced it with possibility. So now, as the song continues to play on repeat, I think about all these things I miss and find myself looking forward to the day that might come when I don’t have to miss them anymore; the days when things might not be quite the same, but feel just as good. That’s the incredible power of Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes’ “I Miss You”.

Don Pepino and The Infinite Pizza Sauce

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 13:46:00 -0800

Grocery stores are not a place I go with the intent of contemplating infinity. I go for two purposes:

Obtaining necessary food stuffs to stave off my demise.
Checking off something, ANYTHING, from my “to do” list.

You might note the clear absence of:

3. Pondering the micro and macro infinities of the universe.

So why am I standing in the “make your own pizza” section of Ralph’s grocery lost in a K-hole?

It’s Don Pepino’s fault.

Sure, Mr. Pepino seems like an unassuming little fellow. He has a pudgy charm and a real honest to god gift for wearing a toque blanche, but he also has a can of Don Pepino Pizza Sauce in his hand that features a picture of him with a can of Don Pepino Pizza Sauce in his hand that I can only assume features a picture of him with a can of Don Pepino Pizza Sauce in his hand … and so on and so on until I come face to face with issues that only god should ponder.

Not cool, Mr. Pepino. Very not cool.

If I’m buying pizza sauce, or putting away pizza sauce, or using pizza sauce, I’m busy. And in my busy-ness, I have a simple purpose that allows me to enjoy a brief respite from the constant and uncontrollable contemplation that comprises most of my day. Those moments of solace from myself are not the times I like to get caught up wondering about things like: “If the Don Pepino on my can moves does the Don Pepino on his can move?” or “What happens to all the subsequent if the Don Pepino on my can dies? Does it create a pizza sauce paradox?”

And then there’s the issue of Don Pepino’s laugh.

Why is the Don Pepino on my can laughing at the Don Pepino on his can?

Is my Don Pepino perpetually unaware that he’s doomed to the same fate as his Don Pepino and laughing at the “coincidental” similarity in their positions?
Is my Don Pepino fully aware that he’s in the same situation and getting some sadistic enjoyment from seeing a Don Pepino who shares his eternal damnation?
Is my Don Pepino currently unaware of his hopeless disposition but on the verge of realizing his ego-shattering place in infinity with this laugh standing as the final moment of happiness he’ll ever have?
AM I THE DON PEPINO OF MY WORLD!?!?

This is not why I came to the grocery store.