adam @ 404

People of the Earth, you really aren’t cool.

I was searching on amazonmp3 for Econochrist songs, because everyone knows how much I love Econochrist, and I happened upon a multidisc album called Towncraft (Notes from a Local Scene) which looks like it has Soophie Nun Squad on the cover. It looks to be the soundtrack for a movie (likely about Little Rock AR), anyone heard of this? I’ll see what I find out.

Ed: Ope, here we are.

I missed the Menomena show at UW that I bought tickets for. Completely forgot. Work is officially ruining my life.

After viewing a total of 30 seconds of Ms. Spear’s travesty of a performance at the 2007 VMA and discussing the freakshow-like qualities of it with friends today, my iTunes played a most appropriate song late this evening. Please listen to (and immediately discard) this evening’s MTV song selection.

Also, if you want a concert and music release calendar built from your iTunes library, check out iConcertCal. It probably won’t pick out every single concert but it’s pretty damn convenient for scanning upcoming events.

My ipod pooped out on me a couple months back. I’ve been worried about losing my mp3 collection if I ever had a hard drive failure on my mac. Scary stuff. I need to figure out a backup solution. I’m thinking about trying out one user’s solution that utilizes one of Amazon’s web services, Simple Storage Service or S3. Let me get on that one.

Addendum: It took me minutes to setup my Amazon web services account for S3 (it’s quick if you already have an Amazon account), downloaded JungleDisk, put in my S3 info and away I went copying my mp3s into the jungledisk directory. The easiest way to get the files backed up is to run a periodic backup (like once a day). If you notice the backups are causing your network speeds to lag, there’s an option to throttle the backup speeds down so they don’t consume all your throughput. (I’m getting 80Kb/sec upload speeds on a line that is rated at 96Kb/sec, which is pretty damn good considering some of that is taken up by network overhead.) Doing periodic backups is nice since you don’t have to run JungleDisk as a foreground application. A++ I lied about it running in the background. You still have to run JungleDisk to get the automatic backup to start. Kinda lame.

One thing to note is that if you reorganize files around by changing file info, or moving files within the directory, it will delete anything changed and re-backup the files which incurs transfer costs (.20$/Gbyte/month). Luckily, iTunes does a good job of organizing files the first time if you’re downloading from iTunes or importing from CD. With about 16Gb (168 hours of music) of storage and traffic in the first month, I’m looking to spend $5.60 and somewhere around $2.60 every month thereafter if I keep my library relatively static. It’d be nicer if it was half that price, but it’s good enough for peace of mind.

If anyone wants help setting this up, let me know.

“You will rock forevahhhhhh!”

No words could ever rock harder. During the college years, I downloaded thousands upon thousands of illegally (and legally) traded mp3s. Yes, please sue me now. I wish I was still good at that. I spent altogether too much time on #mp3indie on IRC.

There was one song that stands out now. It was a mystery single, standing alone in its remote directory. One which I have never discovered the true source. It was a band that truly rocked me to the core. I found it again recently in my collection, and it still rocks, evoking images of maidens in distress and the coolest greenest fire-breathing, electric-guitar-wielding dragons ever imagined in the history of dragons.

Who was this song performed by? The filename of the mp3 was “Port - Rock Eternal.” Port? There is no record of this band on the Internet? Rock Eternal? What is this song you speaketh ofeth?

I submit to you “Rock Eternal” performed by Port. If you know who this mystery band is, please help me illuminate.

Every Pulp fan already knows this, but I discovered it watching Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire over Thanksgiving Break. And what’s that? It’s that Jarvis Cocker and a couple members of Radiohead appear in the ball scene as a band named Weird Sisters. The music sounded great, I can only hope that Weird Sisters forms in the real world.

I just heard Ian Svenonius (see: Weird World War, The MakeUp, Nation of Ulysses) doing a commentary on Marketplace. He connects the policies of Alan Greenspan’s and their effect on the real estate market to recent trends in band downsizing in movements of 21st Century rock (ie Electroclash). Everything I ever read by him comes off as so far fetched, but he always connects in true intellectual fashion. I am not lying when I say, Ian Svenonius is one of the greatest minds in Rock and Roll today. So good.

From http://www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/Movies/12/17/film.rings.mortensen.ap/:
“In Mortensen’s real-life love life, he once was married to Exene Cervenka, a singer with the rockabilly-punk band X; they divorced in 1997.”

Sounds to me like Aragorn is or once was a punk rocker. Weird. Aragorn is also
the name of a real person who may very well still be a punk rocker. Whoa! Double weird.

2003 has been the year of death. It seemed like everytime I looked at the news or talked to friends another person had died. This was the first year I can remember going to a funeral and being overwhelmed with sadness. I don’t think I can say that it was some getting-older-feeling-mortal effect either. I truly felt a chunk kindof got ripped out of me and I had only known my step mom’s fatherfor about one year.

Now Elliott Smith is dead and I’ve never felt so sad about losing someone I didn’t even know. It’s never been about celebrity status for me, I’ve never found a role model in musicians. But I’ve taken their music. And Smith had an acute sense of the tragic and sad; he had ways of clarifying truth in the stories of his songs that stuck pins through your body. For anyone who has ever sat and mulled over a lost relationship, or a missed chance, Smith was an artist that knew all the right words describe it. He had the ability to make the most mundane things sound like the most beautiful. It wasn’t like he was some sweet folk peddler either, you could still rock out in the mirror with him. At the end of the day, his songs stood on their own.

He reportedly killed himself through a self-inflicted knife wound. And as Krysta said, “How much do you have to hate yourself to do that?” Maybe there wasn’t any hate involved. Maybe he was like any good music artist that has a good sense of the dramatic. But probably not, real life rarely imitates art.

After writing this I feel a bit foolish, like after you wake up after a night of drunken partying and realize what an ass you were the night before. I didn’t know Smith, he could have been an asswipe. But you can’t erase what he did and what he wrote.