Lost In GroVont

Pants On Fire

The Globe and Mail: U.S. forces fire on Canadian vehicle in Iraq.

A vehicle carrying four members of a Canadian diplomatic mission in Iraq was fired on by U.S. forces inside Baghdad's Green Zone on Tuesday. No one was injured in the incident.

While watching the State of the Union tonight, I boo-ed during talk of renewing the Patriot Act, agreed with his alternative energy plans, thought his educational ideas were optimistic but non-inclusive of art programs, and ignored the rest. I was knitting a scarf.

Tegan and Sara Update

What are Tegan and Sara up to these days...

The other night in New York after the show At the Hammerstein Ballroom I played some of our new songs that we have Recorded for an assortment of people that work for us and hang out with us. Everyone thought that I might be drunk because we don’t usually do that sort Of thing, but no, I wasn’t.

Hopefully, Tegan's journal entry is a prelude to a break from touring to work on a new album. It is about that time. In the past every two years they've taken four months or so in the beginning of the year to produce a record for a fall release.

There is also an interesting article on NCTimes.com: Tegan and Sara share more than music.

Who said it first?

Yesterday at .: chromewaves.net v6.0:

It can't be any surprise that the ease with which people can constantly access and download new music without any real effort has devalued, at least for many, music. If something doesn't cost you anything, be it money or energy, why should you ascribe any real value to it?

The post is full of links to articles by journalists (pro and faux) and musicians who offer their take on the evolution of music distribution in the digital age.

Seven bucks to enter

If you have never been to Cafe du Nord, you should know that the stage is very tiny. But all eight members of Margot & the Nuclear So & So's managed to squeeze onto the stage and match the brilliance of their debut album, The dust of retreat, during a forty minute opening set tonight.

The band is: Richard Edwards' rugged lead vocals underscored by the soft backing vocals from Emily Watkins who also plays the synth and rhodes organ. A cello and trumpet adding so much to the songs even though the instruments were quiet and not at the forefront of the sound. An electric guitar and bass guitar huddled in the corner but still managing to move around a bit. And two percussionists--one at a drum kit, another with a suitcase full of toys.

A highlight was "Broad ripple is burning" (mp3) which is not on their currently unavailable album, but I cut it from their WOXY.com Lounge Acts performance from 28 November 2005.

You can still download three tracks from an earlier post I wrote on the band. The album is going to be re-released in March, until then you will just have to try to catch them live in a city near you.

Hubble, will you paint me a picture?

Hubble's view of Orion reveals thousands of stars

"Orion is a bustling cauldron of activity. This new large-scale Hubble image of the region reveals a treasure-house of beauty and astonishing detail for comprehensive scientific study," said Jennifer Wiseman, NASA's Hubble program scientist.

And this quote from the article makes it sound like the scientists are studying baby animals in their natural environment:

The Hubble Space Telescope also spied for the first time a small population of possible binary brown dwarfs -- two brown dwarfs orbiting each other. comparing the characteristics of newborn stars and brown dwarfs in their natal environment provides unique information about how they form.

You can not avoid the cliche

The Dears have released details on their new album. From the email newsletter:

Lots of strummy, dirty, riffy guitars. Ridiculous drumming and inventive bass-ing. Tons of creative  synthesising. It couldn't be a Dears record without that. There are no strings (thank heaven) and the only brass on the record is Chris from Stars with his F horn on songs like Ballad/Battle of Humankindness. My dad also plays tenor saxophone on a track called Last Breath; he's like seventy-something and apparently still has some chops.

Murray also mentions that he sounds less like Morrissey on the record. Is that good?

Watched Heights and Wedding Crashers recently and this article from Fametracker makes much more sense. Both films are good. Heights is a dark, family drama with good acting and dialogue. Wedding Crashers isn't laugh out loud funny, but if it had been billed as the romantic comedy it is, I would have been less hesitant to view it.

No more boundary-less ant farm to observe. Most of the ants have moved out of my kitchen. I left the house last night to go get drinks, and when I returned, the ants had dispersed.

apologies pour out of me

It has been awhile since I've blogged about a band. I hate to write about what I'm listening to when I'm not listening to anything new. I've been trying to spend less and curb any urge to purchase new cds or vinyl which means less new music. However, I have been listening to the Space Mtn disc a drawing of a memory of a photograph of you a lot lately.

It's dark and moody with Dina Waxman's beautiful voice pulling you in like a blackhole.

The two songs being flung around the blogs are far from the best songs on the album. Hell, I even skip 'em. So here are my two favorite tracks. Try not to tap your foot or bob your head along with the piano on "Oh" and you will fail.

"Oh"

"Undermining"

Space Mtn is from LA, so I don't have any right to complain about the weather up north, but it is hot today and I have ants in my kitchen. Yeah, ants. I've had a pigeon in my kitchen before but not ants. There was only one pigeon and he left once I opened the window wider. There are a gazillion ants. It's like having my own little ant farm on the kitchen wall. While washing dishes, I watched two ants carrying something the size of six ants vertically up the wall. Other ants would come and try to help them, but it only took two ants. You try walking vertically up a wall carrying something six times your size and see how well you manage. And after typing that, I've realized that I need to leave my house more often.

Two Sizes Too Small

Broken Social Scene has updated their Arts & Crafts website with one those annoying flash sites. (I think it was flash before too. Grr.) The site has no new information except for the "Ibi Dreams of Pavement" video.

It has been determined that Charon is half the size of Pluto. The size was determined by measurements taken when Pluto's moon blocked light of a distant star, the technique called stellar occultation. Astronomers also discovered that Charon had little to no atmosphere supporting the theory that "Charon was formed in a collision between two objects early in the formation of the solar system."

Grey's Anatomy now has 3 TypePad blogs for the show. Two are boring and fictitious: written by Joe, the bartender, and an unidentified nurse at Seattle Grace Hospital. The third blog, however, is updated after a new show airs by the episode's writer and is actually interesting. It's full of behind the scenes details and information about how the episode was written.

And if you want to learn something from television, check out the Did You Know section which includes education tidbits from each episode like these:

Living organ donation has become more and more common in recent years. It is possible to donate ½ a liver, one kidney or the lobe of one lung to a relative, loved one or person in need.

GCS stands for Glasgow Coma Scale. It measures three components of consciousness - eye movement, verbal response and motor response.

Why does watching porn help my Aunt Sally cope with her pain? Because porn releases endorphins. It releases endorphins. Vague enough for you? The truth is - we don't know why it works. But, if it does, no doctor will knock it.

As if I need another reason to hate MySpace...

Get out of MySpace, bloggers rage at Murdoch

The 38 million subscribers to MySpace, which News Corp bought for $629m (£355m) last July, discovered that when they wrote to each other about rival video-swapping site YouTube, the words were automatically deleted, and attempts to download video images from YouTube led to blank screens.

Our Lord Is So Neurotic

For someone who is agnostic and not a fan of organized religion, I have a great interest in religious studies. I view religious history in the same I look at science fiction. (For those of you cried "Blasphemy!" just then, you may want to Mark As Read and move along.) I look at most science fiction with a "Wow! That's cool! But it will never happen." cynicism. Many of the ideas laid out in the Bible (rising from the dead, talking bushes, heaven, etc.) seem like great tricks but I just don't believe it. Believe or not, I found myself watching PBS intently last night.

PBS aired the first of three installments of Walking The Bible. It had it's issues. I'm going to blame most of them on a limited budget. However, it was pretty interesting.

Our host, Bruce Feiler, traveled all over the Middle East following the stories told in the Torah and later the New Testament. Feiler is a writer and very passionate about the journey. (Too passionate, I thought. I would have preferred a Ted Koppel-esque narrator. Good news for the Discovery channel.) Feiler's constant remarks about the Bible now being real to him were a bit over the top. (Edit exclamations down to one an hour, please.)

The highlights of the first installment:

• Climbing Mt. Ararat with a local named Parachute, the guy who controlled the mountain. No one could make it to the mountain alive without his permission. Feiler did editorialize that it may be a ploy to control tourism in the area. Supposedly, Parachute found a 5000 year old piece of wood on Mt. Ararat which is believed to be from Noah's Ark.
• The ancient ruins of Harran. (Nothing interesting happens there but it is beautiful to see.)
• Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Feiler, and his "co-adventurer" Avner Goren, started their quest in Jerusalem and discussed briefly the impact of the three religions which existed there: Christianity, Judaism, and Muslim. At the end of the hour, we see the tension when the Western crew is almost denied entrance to Temple Mount by men with guns. (Some of the tension could be a televised contrivance, but the men still had big guns.)

It's PBS so the first episode airs again and again this week with the other two installments premiering on the next two Wednesdays.

End nerdiness. (Wait, I went to the library today too!)

Love's Lost Guarantee

SFMOMA has started releasing "artcasts" for your listening pleasure. You no longer need to rent a tape machine with a headset from 1982 to listen to an "educational" lecture about the art you are viewing. The "artcasts" are released in monthly installments with additional podcasts for the main exhibits.

(I'm going to test this out when I go back to check out the Kiki Smith exhibit again this week.)

The much talked about Rogue Wave album, Descended Like Vultures, was one of the few discs on music blog end of the year lists that I had yet to purchase. 10:01 (download from Sub Pop) is a great track I've listened to on repeat but I hadn't been motivated to purchase the album until yesterday. An excess of credit at Amoeba led to multiple purchases. Besides Rogue Wave, I picked up the Birdmonster EP and four 7" (The Kills, Matson Jones, Mountain Goats, and Mclusky). Of course, I ended up spending more than my credit covered but I expected as much. After a few listens to each, I'm not disappointed with my purchases. Birdmonster is a San Francisco band I should be able to see live in the future and their EP has been pimped in more a few music blogs recently.

Taking the 33 from the Mission to Haight is always an experience. (Will the bus make that knife's edge turn onto Clayton or scrape against the cement wall?) Yesterday, a women across the aisle from me, who had been talking to numerous people I could not see, choose to pull out her crack pipe and smoke a bit in response to the mechanical voice declaring that "smoking is prohibited on all MUNI buses." Lovely. I got off at the next stop, not that it mattered, since I bounded down Haight where I inhaled second-hand weed smoke for several blocks.

If you are looking for a good falafel on Valencia, please try Ali Baba's Cave on 19th. Cheap and good. Other places try to charge you extra for hummus and potatoes but not Ali Baba's. Yummy.

Wartime certainty

A few weeks ago, I posted about soldiers blogging from Iraq. According to this Newsday article the blogs that are not "completely patriotic and innocuous" are being shut down.

More and more, though, U.S. military commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan are clamping down on these military Web logs, known as milblogs.

After all, digital photos of blown-up tanks and gritty comments on urban warfare don't just interest mom and dad.

The enemy, too, has a laptop and satellite link.

Nowadays, milbloggers "get shut down almost as fast as they're set up," said New York Army National Guard Spc. Jason Christopher Hartley, 31, of upstate New Paltz, who believes something is lost as the grunt's-eye take on Tikrit or Kabul is silenced or sanitized.

...

One of Hartley's Web entries on April 24, 2004, carried a photograph of an Iraqi man's partially burned corpse clothed in a bloodied white tunic. Hartley's photo caption was a take on the "I [heart] New York City" slogan. His version: "I [heart] Dead Civilians."

In response, a visitor wrote: "Is this a joke or what? This whole blog gives a bad taste in the mouth."

Hartley replied, "It leaves a bad taste in your mouth? That's sorta the point."

Another blog reader, with the moniker Alberto, defended the shock-blog: "The point of being so graphic it's to see what a war really is. Good blog, keep it up!"

Smoking is prohibited on all MUNI buses.

The Globe & Mail proclaims the violin is the secret of Canada's recent success musically.

In the songs of Arcade Fire, the Dears and Stars, they're an integral part of the composition, not only defining the musical mood but laying an essential part of the harmonic foundation. Moreover, the strings don't sound as if they've been tacked on to the arrangement to add a bit of "class," like the string quartet in the Beatles' Eleanor Rigby -- they come across as though part of the music from its inception.

The article also states that Final Fantasy's new album, He Poos Clouds, is scheduled to be released in May.