There isn’t much innovation out there in music videos anymore. For good reason, too: the music channels on TV don’t play them anymore! Why should a label or a band spend (waste) the money on a video when it’s not really a road for promotion anymore? It’s actually not a bad thing: it means that the music and the talent mean more again. Ugly musicians rejoice! This is your time! Of course, I’m (half) kidding.
While those music TV channels are busy shopping twentysomething reality TV whores who will do anything to try and make a name for themselves, the only place to really see music videos anymore these days are on a band’s website or YouTube. Even then, the pickings are still slim - it’s either a bunch of half-naked women in a rap video or a rock/pop band painfully lip synching a live performance.
However, once in a great while, a really good piece of actual art via a music video actually happens! I don’t know where bands get the budget. Maybe they just have good friends who are digital artists. Back in the Tar Hut days, I combed the local art colleges looking for kids who wanted to do music videos for free or for a school project. Never happened, but still. I wasn’t gonna pay for a video!
Anyway, one of the favorite bands of the last couple of years is The New Pornographers. I don’t need to get into how awesome they are, today we’re talking about music videos and they have not one, but TWO doozies from their latest album. If you are at all into art or digital art, watch these. You don’t have to like the songs to appreciate them, although if you don’t like the songs, I will question your taste in music and pass unfair judgement on you. Again, (half) kidding.
I found the use of color in “Challengers” to be subtle and inventive:
I will occasionally turn everyday occurences into games. Mostly guessing games. This occurs almost all the time with my wife, who graciously plays along and does so, I would imagine, just to shut me up. Hah! I’d say about every 5-6 months we bring the collection of loose change we’ve amassed to the store and cash it in. Steph brough this into the store this week and before she left I, naturally, turned it into an obvious guessing game of “how much do we have?”
The stakes, as you might imagine, were HUGE. Whoever was furthest away from guessing the right amount had to make the next ice cream run to Erikson’s. My guess was $74.22. Hers was $91.74. I forget the final amount, but I was off by $10 and she was off by $12. I win! I lose just as much as I win, by the way. One of my old favorites is, when we’re laying in bed, to make her guess what time it is on her digital clock. We haven’t done this one for a while, but I enjoyed that game.
Here’s something sort of related, though. Whenever we’re going to paint a room, we’ll take a look at a bunch of paint samples and then compare notes. We won’t tell each other initially which ones we like. I’ll take a look, then she’ll take a look, then we’ll discuss. Just yesterday I told her it was pretty uncanny that we are almost always pretty close in regards to what we like.
Since we’re about to paint a room that will eventually be one of the boys rooms (they sleep in the same room currently), we’re looking at various greens. To be exact, there were 39 different samples of green in the room. As a quick sitenote, if it was me getting the paint samples, there would have been like 3 samples and I would have chosen in four minutes. But Steph is a very thorough, think-through-all-possibilities person, which is good for the marriage. So there I stood, scanning through 39 different greens and there was one in my mind that I thought was THE color and three others that I would have been fine with.
And what do you know? Steph had the EXACT same four in her head, and the EXACT same single thought about the one color she liked best. That’s something, isn’t it?
Yesterday I picked up The Boston Globe on a morning walk through downtown Maynard and, not surprisingly, didn’t get to read it until about 9:30pm last night. When I did finally open it, I was sad to discover it was a pretty boring edition, with one exception: a very interesting article about human waste. Yes, I just said that. Really, you should read it, because you’ll actually learn a lot about a few things - the makeup of human waste, for one, which isn’t exactly what I was bargaining for when I bought the paper, but still, knowledge is power, right? But you’ll also learn about how it can separated and used effectively for many different things.
Who would have thought human waste was such a valuable entity? It is. And now people in the industrialized world are coming around to what people in third world countries have known (and employed) all along - reusing it saves lots of money! Holy shit, indeed! And no, people, you don’t have to shovel anything out of your toilet or any such nonsense. It can be re-routed and reused via the sewer system, which the article also goes into.
Hey, the robot is here to inform. Poop and pee rules!
So not only is Kelley Stoltz great, he’s GREAT. Check out this, which I just found out and pulled from Wikipedia:
In tandem with the release of “Below the Branches” was an industry first: “Below the Branches” was the first record in history to make an on-package claim about renewable energy use with the Green-e logo. Stoltz tracked his electricity use and with the help of the Green-e program, offset the all the electricity used to record his record with green tags from the Bonneville Environmental Foundation. In Kelley’s words: “Using renewable energy to offset the electricity I needed to power my guitar amps and my recording machines was a simple and effective way for me to do something about my impact on the environment. Green-e certifies that I am buying 100 percent renewable energy. Hopefully, people will see their logo; check into what they do, and make renewable energy a part of their lives, too.”
How about that? And I also remembered that starting last week, our house here in Maynard is now driving all of its electricity, heat, cooling and whatever from 100% renewable energy sources, via an NStar program. That’s right - either solar, wind or all those other methodologies are now powering this house for just a few extra bucks a month.
To close the circle on today’s green post, I’ll attach this totally, insanely great song by Kelley Stoltz, called, fittingly, “Are You Electric?” And no, it’s not about renewable energy.
Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman are two names you have probably never heard before if you’re just a regular consumer of music. But for us music-obsessed nerds, their story is the one we all dream of. Bruce and Jonathan, music geeks galore, connected in the early 1980s through the local music scene in Seattle and ended up starting Sub Pop Records, in an effort to simply better expose the great music they thought Seattle was producing. By 1988, they had an office. By 1991, they had $2.5 million in the bank, thanks to a little trio who called themselves Nirvana. Sub Pop is now celebrating their 20th anniversary and if you want a good, interesting read today, then I suggest you head on over to Pitchfork, where both Sub Pop founders are subject of an excellent interview about the innerworkings of a small record label. A lot of this stuff is exactly what we went through at Tar Hut (besides the, uh, large sums of money they ended up with), so it really resonates for me. But even if you’re not at all into the business of music or independent record labels, it’s just a pretty captivating read to see what they went through and how they reacted to their success and how they adjusted to the post-Nirvana world.
Sub Pop is still a terrific label - by no means a one-hit wonder. Band of Horses, Blitzen Trapper, Fleet Foxes, Mudhoney, The Shins and the GREAT Kelley Stoltz are all on the label and still producing inventive, relevant music. Good for them!
Even though I’ve been playing fantasy baseball for the past ten years now, I’ve pretty much sucked for the last couple of years in most of my leagues except for one (I play in three). So when I heard about Baseball Boss, I tried really hard not to click the link, because based on what I was reading, it was a totally different way to play fantasy baseball. That said, I clicked the link. Of course. And now I’m on it like a helpless crack addict.
In a nutshell, here’s how it works: you start with nothing. You get a free pack of 40 baseball cards, with real MLB players, spanning from 1907 through 2007. You don’t have to be a total baseball nerd to play - each card gives you the basic stats you need to figure out the right lineup. Then you start playing other random people who have signed up for the service, issuing (and accepting) challenges. The more you win, the more “points” and “challenge coins” you get in order to buy more cards and acquire more (and better) players. It’s fricking genius! It won’t be long before I know a bunch of friends and we set up our own league - which is coming soon. It’s less maintenance than regular fantasy baseball and it’s far more addicting (you don’t have to set your lineup every day and watch the waiver wire all the time).
If you like baseball at all, give it a shot. I named my team The Screaming Llamas (hat tip on that one to my co-worker Marc).
