Latest Entries

Racing Towards Zero – Day 4:
Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66 – Cinnamon & Clove

Oh, college, how I thank you for your formative years. As part of my education in the field of “Starving Student”, I learned of the many splendors thrift stores had to offer. Furniture, clothing, artwork, dinnerware… you could find almost anything you needed, and for affordable starving student prices, to boot. On top of all that, walking through a good thrift store is like walking through a museum of design through the ages… if you’re ever in the Pacific Northwest, do yourself a favor and stop into a Value Village. There are few thrift stores like it in this great land of ours.

And what else do you find in thrift stores? Music, my friends. Sweet, sweet music, music the likes you would normally never come across. I was introduced to fantastic things, like holiday albums put out by tire companies, the amazing canonical work of Burt Bacharach, and, as with this, Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66.

To tell you the truth, what really drew me in were the album covers. The photography, and typography, and composition! I hadn’t seen anything like it before. They were pieces from a time before “computer graphics” and “desktop publishing”, and they were fascinating.

This track, which I’m surprised I hadn’t listened to yet, is off of Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66′s second album, Equinox. I believe I recorded this off of the original vinyl, using a turntable I bought at a Goodwill in Portland, for about $5.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Racing Towards Zero – Day 3:
The Jungle Band (aka The Duke Ellington Orchestra) – Maori (A Samoan Dance)

Hah. I see that the beast that is my iTunes Library isn’t going to make this easy on me. After days of listening to nothing much, today it decided to play all sorts of fantastic things, as if mocking me, saying “As if you could pick a favorite!”. But did it not see the picture of Gandalf with his ‘Staff of Smart Playlisting (+5 Dexterity)’?!!

You know, these days it’s hard to remember a time when music was… well, music. It didn’t have anyone hitting anyone, baby, one more time, or going on about places where streets had not yet been named. And this music without words, it wasn’t like it is today – all sultry saxophones, and John Tesh. No no, it was the fun, get-up-and-shake-your-tailfeather music of yesteryear, and Duke Ellington was one of the masters. He was also, as the kids say today, “epic”, having released just about 80 albums in his lifetime. Eight. Zero. And that’s only under his own name. Today’s track was originally released under “The Jungle Band“, a pseudonym for the Duke Ellington Orchestra, which released over 25 albums itself. (For the record, Coldplay is up to 5)

Blended in with Beck & The Flaming Lips live on KCRW, Deltron 3030, Nick Cave and 2Pac was this toe tappin’ number from 1930, “Maori (A Samoan Dance)”:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Racing Towards Zero – Day 2:
Sandy Beach Surf Coaster – PIANO MAN

Hey wow! Remember Sandy Beach Surf Coaster? What? Oh you know, the Japanese ska-punk group from Aichi, Japan, home EXPO 2005? No?

Well there I was, sitting, wondering when today’s pick would pop up, and as soon as I heard their heavily-accented English, fuzzy guitars and skapunk beats, I knew this was it. Plus I’m a sucker for covers. I remember getting a hold of this album, when I went on a grand quest to discover where ska, while laying dormant here in the US awaiting it’s triumphant revival, was alive and well in other parts of the world, and in Japan it’s still going strong.

So, I present to you, PIANO MAN by Japan’s own Sandy Beach Surf Coaster:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Racing Towards Zero: The Unheard Songs Playlist

Having moved around as much as I have, at some point I thought to myself, “Why am I lugging around all these CDs when I can harness the power of technology!” I don’t remember how long it took, but I digitized my entire library of CDs, and a large library it was. Years of working in a music store and having friends with radio shows had left me with more plastic discs than an AOL warehouse, and through hours and hours of effort, they all worked their way into digital format.

The only downside to that, however, was that I was left with a massive, creaking, unwieldy iTunes library. There were playlists I’d open where a balrog would appear to block my path, it was that bad, that deep, that complex. Out of necessity I’d become a huge fan of ‘smart playlists’, since they gave me the best chance at keeping in touch with my music — what I heard, what I liked, what I hated, etc. I was feeling pretty good about things.

But music, like water, never stops flowing, and the iTunes library continued to grow. I forget what it was exactly, a beam of light through a church window, seeing a baby laugh for the first time, maybe a ‘Hoarders’ marathon on A&E, I don’t know. But something inside me said, “Do not add any more music to this hungry, hungry hippo until you have heard every single song already awaiting you.”

So that’s what I did. I decided that my “Unheard Songs” playlist was going down. I would listen to, and perhaps rate, every single song hiding in there, unheard, in the shadows. And I mean come on… have you listened to music lately? There’s a lot of crap out there. There’s a lot of crap everywhere, so what are the chances every single song I had was a wonderous gem? I soon realized that there were some stowaways hiding in there, taking up precious hard drive space. And so my journey began.

There were a lot of songs I forgot I had, a lot of great things, like Leadbelly’s album of children’s songs, or a cover of “Love Hurts” by the The Phi Mu Washboard Band, a Georgia State University sorority band from the 60′s. Or those old karaoke recordings from Japan, featuring my friends and I masterfully performing your favorite hits of the 80′s and 90′s? But there were also… other things. Random terrible techno remixes of already terrible songs, minimalist experimental tracks featuring nails on chalkboard and metal clanging, or the Pogues’ “Metropolis”…. I have no idea what they were thinking there.

So songs have been coming, songs have been going. Great songs get 4 stars, OK songs get 3 stars, songs that may be useful get 2, and anything that’s a waste of hard drive space gets 1 star, to be deleted when the playlist is empty.

This has been going on for a while now, though I forget exactly how long. Today, though, I checked the count, and it tells me I have approximately 31 days left until I finish. That’s just about one month, and since our fine month of May is coming to a close, I have decided to share one track, every day, with you. The best track of the day. I cannot express how completely random of a selection it is, so I’m very curious to see how that nets out as my project comes to a close. And you, fine friend, reap the rewards!

Check back tomorrow for the first of 31 tracks, curated from the mysterious shadows of my iTunes library. It’s kind of like sticking your hand into a magical bag of music, where you’ve got a 50-50 chance of pulling Communist anthems from Russia, or Alabama folk songs, or a Hello Kitty Christmas track, or Frank Sinatra, or Sleater Kinney, or… wait, is that still 50-50?

A Little Bit Like the Future

The Apple iPad - the thing I didn't know I needed

I should start off by saying that when the iPad was first released, I really wasn’t interested. As a graphic designer and web developer, I didn’t really see a need for it, and a lot of the techno-savvy internet felt the same way. Apple made a device for the large consumer market, a device that would give them everything they need for the basic computing experience. It wasn’t for me, and I came to terms with that.

And then it happened. A client called, and said, “So you know this new iPad thing, will our site work on it?” And then another, and another. Somehow Apple’s marketing convinced my clients that it was going to be, to paraphrase Ron Burgundy, “kind of a big deal” and through them, convinced me as well.

My impressions so far? Impressed. If you’ve used an iPhone, the quickeness of it is kind of shocking. It flips and spins and pinches and zooms with fluidity I haven’t seen on another device yet. The iBooks app is nice, and all my public domain ePub books from Google Books synch right up through iTunes. I’d love to get a PDF reader on here eventually, because it’s perfectly suited for reading.

One thing that really amazes me is that, after using it for a bit, you can tell this thing was designed. I mean, they put some serious brain power into it. The first time I held it, I touched my thumbs together across the screen and realized the width allowed me total control. The proportion is almost cute. On its side, the keyboard is about the same size as a regular keyboard and, as with the iPhone, after a short adjustment period I’m typing as fast, if not faster, than I do on a real keyboard.

So I’m a fan. I went from not wanting one, to needing one, to accepting it into my life. It may not have been the most direct marketing path Apple beat to my door, but whatever it was, it worked.

And now it’s time to making things ready for the iPad, so the next time a client asks me if their site will work on the iPad, I can tell them “As a matter of fact, it already does.”

- Sent from my iPad

And then there was this…

For my birthday this year I decided to give myself a blog. I don’t like to make promises, especially when it comes to blogging, but one thing I will say: I will never in the life of this blog make a top <enter number here> list. I will not re-blog.

For you, my reader, I will create content, as opposed to just passing along something someone passed along that someone passed along. So, hopefully you will find something good to read, especially if you’re interested in design, media, and the world around us.



Copyright © 2004–2009. All rights reserved.

RSS Feed. This blog is proudly powered by Wordpress and uses Modern Clix, a theme by Rodrigo Galindez.