So, my newish camera has a pretty rad setting where you can grab a single shade, and take photographs in black, white, and the selected color only. Rad, right?


( Read more... )

I take it as a good sign that this one was tough to narrow down. Doggedly, pointlessly, I again note the arbitrary nature of my choice -- when there's an unambiguous best response, I won't ;)

There's a distinct feeling, a slow, rising boil that comes whenever I rediscover a distant snippet of a song heard long ago. I've got a pretty sound-sensitive ( Read more... )

Slow to the game though I may be, I just found the historical precursor to one of my absolute favorite internet things, In Bb.

Click to view

As it turns out, a fellow named Terry Riley, in his pioneering of minimalist/aleatoric music, composed a piece called In C in 1964. From The 'Pedia:

In C consists of 53 short, numbered musical phrases, lasting from ( Read more... )

Naturally, the same qualification as above applies here: to have one song, hated above all others, takes a fair amount of being arbitrary, and is likely just a case of overexposure. Don't get me wrong: overexposure is an extremely legit reason to detest a song. Thanks to night shifts at Trader Joe's and lazy managerial XM Radio piloting, the ( Read more... )

...though how many days a 30-day meme will take me, who knows. Anyway, off we go.

Day 1 - Your Favourite Song

The idea of a favorite song seems almost inherently adolescent to me, if only because you'd have to know so few songs for any honest consideration of favorites to yield a single, satisfyingly unambiguous answer.

To wit: I haven't had a ( Read more... )

Q: My favorite Beatles song is While My Guitar Gently Weeps. What is yours?

********

A:  I haven't a hope in the world to reply with any kind of brevity. The short, kinda lame answer: I cannot, cannot choose a favorite, and honestly, I revel in my inability to do so.

I've run through a long list of okay-no-THIS-one favorites over the ( Read more... )

The problem with trying teach anything you're pretty clearly innately good at: you have no fucking idea how to express what your brain is doing.

Click to view

Seriously, try to learn anything from this.

(Bonus Rachel Commentary: "...he looks like Dana Carvey doing a Paul McCartney impersonation.")

...I think it finally happened. I think this video makes me feel Old.


I mean, I get that the video tells a story of a lonely girl who finds acceptance someplace unlikely, and that it's Sweet And Stuff -- that's besides the point. Each microgeneration is, in part, defined by how they tell that very story.

...but I don't get it.

1. I guess it's now ( Read more... )

5 years ago, The Arcade Fire's Funeral was the ubiquitous, crystalline centerpiece of indie-pop perfection, and I was a jerk.

I was shit-talking with a friend of mine back in Sad Bastard College, and harping on the infantile "C'mon Alex! You can do it! / C'mon Alex! There's nothing to it!" in "Neighborhood #2 (Laika)", refusing to admit that the ( Read more... )

...and sounding out echo chambers. Add mine to the small chorus of those posting to LiveJournal after some significant lapse, wondering who's still here.

So: who's still here? (And sufficiently loquacious to pipe up?)

In Whether You Like It Or Not News: I'll probably start recycling/crossposting my old Tumblr posts here. And, to be fair, if you ( Read more... )