1/31/10

End of month one.

Instead of seeing The Hurt Locker last night, I ended up seeing this:

And I must say, that it was one of the best 'horror' movies I've ever seen. There was an ideal mix of dark comedy and decent scares, and it had one of the most kickass and satisfying endings to a movie i've seen in a long time.
-
several of my friends came over today for a festive party, in which there was conversation and pasta. We also spontaneously shot an experimental video. It's GOING to be the most successful video on YouTube, because it's the greatest thing that's ever been committed to tape. not even an exaggeration.

it's a complete exaggeration.

but it will be uploaded onto my channel in the hopefully near future.
-
After my amazing three-day weekend, it's back to school tomorrow. Let the hellish second semester begin. 3 AP tests, SATs in June. Fuuuuu-But then summer shall arrive and I will be free to do whatever I want, since I'm probably not going to have a job again. Because I don't have a car to get to the job. Because I have no means of getting a car. This is going to be a great summer, the last few months I'll have with the vast majority of mes amis.
-
i've made it through the first month of this blog, and I'm extraordinarily proud of this. I want to thank all of you guys for the 690 views this blog's gotten in the past month, that's simply OUTSTANDING. It's all y'all that keep this thing going.

See you in February. (!)
~-~

1/30/10

gimme shelter.

for 4 hours today, 7:30 AM - 11:30 AM, several members of my school and I were volunteers here:


Our main tasks were to prepare food boxes for families of five to six people, organize the food that was delivered, and make sure that people took just what they were supposed to. (my station was the dessert station: you can take something from the shelf, and something from the box. no sir, just ONE thing from the shelf.) some people managed to get away with taking a couple of things off the shelf, but I didn't stop them. Most of the food came from a local supermarket, and a pretty good amount of it was fresh and healthy stuff. (vegetables and fruits galore...)

I was expecting to see a lot of sad, embarrassed faces take the food that was offered, but instead they were generally happy and friendly. I managed to make conversation with a few of them. One was forced to come into the shelter 10 weeks out of the year because he could only work 20 hours a week at his job during the winter. Two people that seemed to be a couple couldn't decide whether they wanted a black forest cake or a cheesecake. They asked me which one I would take, to which I replied the black forest cake, because cheesecake makes me nauseous.

This all gave me an entirely new perspective of those in need. It not only made me appreciate what I have more, it also made me realize that a lot of what we can donate goes to nice and grateful people who just happen to be horribly down on their luck.

Also, during a work break, we got into this incredibly indepth conversation about all of these conspiracy theories and weird thinkings. Like, how someone fell asleep in the middle of a crop circle once and it doubled in size the next morning, and how 9/11 could really be a hoax, and how since thoughts could potentially hold matter and enough people hold belief in a God, God could potentially exist due to our thoughts combining to produce a single entity. That was fun.
---
A little more work on my mix has been completed today, and I think I know the direction that it's going in, which is quite the excitement.

I must be going, I'm seeing the Hurt Locker and playing Mario Kart with a couple friends.
'til tomorrow!

~-----~
Post script: I took a nap today for the first time in forever. This is how it made me feel.

1/29/10

+_+

I just need to post something today. I have an hour to make my video and edit it. I need to go to bed early tonight because I'm going to help out at a soup kitchen eaaaaaaarly in the morning. We're leaving at 6:20.

A little more progress on my mix but that's about it.

More thorough post tomorrow.

~-~

1/28/10

Dirtchildren

i'm currently working on a continuous mix called 'dirtchildren.' i'm three songs in, and it's sounding pretty decent. it will probably be up on here for listening purposes once finished, as illegal as that potentially is.

i'm just that badass.

i've been developing my songs more today, (Dogs/Worms/Everyone, En Attendant... (Un), En Attendant... (Deux), You Look Like A Freemason) and I've decided that tomorrow's gonna be spent recording. this means that i'll spend half of my day doing nothing and then the other half thinking about recording, and maybe getting one or two tracks down at most. i'm in this kind of demotivated period right now. my alreadyweak singing voice has kind of left me as of late, and I'm kind of upset about that. We'll see how tomorrow winds up though. It could be very productive or a gigantic fail.

song of the day: Rousseau by Pinback. the epitome of chill.

---
midterms are done, so now i can be as long-winded as I want!

too bad this blog ends here.

just kidding.

JD Salinger died today.
I don't think I've ever told the Internet about this.
A few months ago, my friends took a ride up to Cornish, NH, the residence of JD Salinger. Their objective: to meet JD Salinger. I was invited along for the ride, but declined, knowing that he was a recluse and we would probably be turned away.

They weren't turned away. They actually got to meet this legend in his own house, this man who would never accept interviews, who had lived in seclusion for nearly 6 decades. They thought that they wouldn't find him at first, since the people at the Cornish Country Store 'didn't know of his whereabouts'. But they managed to find his house, sit down and talk to him.

I think the reason he was accepting of them is the fact that 5 young boys just showed up at his doorstep, unannounced and uninvited. This is exactly what he wrote about in Catcher in The Rye: being young and spontaneous. it MUST have clicked with him when he saw this. And that's why he let them in... that day, I stayed at home, doing absolutely nothing of importance.

R.I.P., you legend.

~-~

1/27/10

Birthday shh.

11:00 AM:
In:
30 minutes - I will be at Robert Nesbit's house, constructing lunch with a few people.
In 3 hrs, 30 minutes - I will be at track practice, doing a speed workout.
In 5 hrs - I will be going out to dinner with my mom.
In 8 hrs - I will have recovered from all of this activity, and will be studying for my french midterm.

And eventually, I'll be opening the presents and what have you.

Today's a great day for a birthday. It's sunny, it feels warm even though it 's 41 degrees outside. The fact that it's been so warm has been concerning me as of late, but not today. Today, there's an exception to everything. It's days like today, not just my birthday, but sunny days in general, that make me love life. Sometimes it feels GOOD to just be aware of your existence, to be alive. To be able to stand outside and stare at trees and clouds. We are electrons that somehow formed into these fibers that somehow formed into these nerves that somehow formed into a living, breathing, self-aware entity. I'm self-aware, and aware of every precious moment I have and I know that there will be so many more before I run out of those moments. Today is January 27, 2010. It's never gonna happen again, so I need to make the most out of it.

gotta go. bixby's here.
!-!

5:00 PM
I'm back from track and ready to go get a snack.
But first, here are some thingz!

1) My friend, Eliot, has an absolutely beautiful music blog that you should certainly check out. His latest post is on Animal Collective. *automatically fangirls*


2) Song of the day, Jeremih's Birthday Sex (obligatory):

3) This is the greatest commentary on a Pokemon movie that I've ever witnessed.

PEACE + BLESSINS.

1/26/10

BitchHaus

this is how german people would pronounce 'Beach House'.

song(s) of the day:

Zebra by Beach House


and 10 Mile Stereo by Beach House



Now, I'm not really a big fan of this band. I've just spent a big part of my day trying to get into them. I can see why some people would like them, but I'm just not connecting with the music. Her voice is beautiful, the music's pretty, but it's too low energy and slow for my tastes. They never bother to extend their tempo past crawl, and it makes me very impatient. I did, however, manage to like these two songs off of their brand new album 'Teen Dream'. And by the end of the week, I'll probably be obsessed with them, being the good little hipster that I am.

I managed to conduct my first piano lesson today, with marginal success. Luckily she's a fast, semi-independent learner. She essentially took it upon herself to keep playing the basic patterns over and over again. We managed to get halfway through a single book in one day. and I'm sure she'll be up to the 'I can play anything!' speed pretty soon. it's exciting, i like teaching. not a career avenue i would pursue, but this is a nice little side project.

"Well I'll go to college and I'll learn some big words, and I'll speak real loud. Goddamn right, I'll be heard. You'll remember, that kid who said all those big words he must've learned in college. - Modest Mouse's Bankrupt on Selling."
Time to study more. Until midterms end, these posts are going to be quasi-concise.
~-~

1/25/10

neW lyRiCkS!

the song's called 'en attendant... (deux)'. the first part's like a little instrumental piece. i've been doing a lot of instrumental stuff recently because my uncle has offered me the potential position of scoring one of his short films (!?). so i've been doing like really quiet, mood pieces. below is part two. french to english translations provided.
---
on a loaded ship
with a baseball bat
i wait.

Death, we are not afraid
on this, our Judgment Day
So come.

Fight back best we know
with our guns, bats, stones
venez-y. (come here.)

No food for three days
All those who remain
are tired.

Frenchmen sing a prayer
"Oh mon Dieu, mon Père (oh my God, my Father)
Pourquoi (why)

Avez-Vous me faire ça? (did you do this to me?)
Pourquoi
Avez-Vous me faire ça?"

En Vous attendant... (waiting for you)
En Vous attendant...
toujours. (always)
---
I think it's either about like an apocalyptic scenario or the revolutionary war or something. up to you. the last lines were initially about

despite my crazy study sessions, i ended up with a 69 on my calc test. wah. studying up some more to do better on my midterm. need to look up my Riemann sums and integrals.

song oF tHe SONG oF tHe song of the DAY:

Vitamin C by Can. undoubtedly the catchiest song of the 1970s.


midterms start tomorrow. wish me luck! or don't wish me luck, whichever you prefer.

~-~

1/24/10

*deep, meaningful title*

i just wrote like 10 paragraphs about this weird project that came into my head in the shower. it entailed me not going to school for 16 days while i maintained homework and made an album. then i realized how stupid it all sounded.

today was another one of those days where nothing eventful happened other than my track meet. our school got 2nd overall, our 4x400 m team got 2nd overall, our 4x200 m team got 3rd overall, and there were a lot of impressive individual performances. Ian won the 1000 this time, Ben got 3rd in the 600, Josh got 3rd in the 300. and a good time was had by all. (the end)

on the bus ride back, a few of us made sentences that had to be constructed so that each word begins with a consecutive letter of the backwards alphabet. that was a TERRIBLE explanation. here's an example:

"Zippers yearn x-rays with verve, unless telemarketers slap RachelRay, quickly pleading other nifty musical lyres knife JesseJackson in his gonads for every diaper consumed by Americans.
"

for some reason, we determined that Rachel Ray and Jesse Jackson were one word.

so then after they made the sentence, it was my job to try to make sense out of this sentence. this is what i came up with:

essentially, the only time that zippers want lively x-rays is when telemarketers smack Rachel Ray. the telemarketers have to also be begging for a certain musical instrument to stab a certain reverend in his balls for every time an American citizen either (eats or purchases, it's up for interpretation), a diaper. it all makes sense.

that's what happened today.
---
well i need to go suffer through another long, painful studying session. a demain, mes amis.

~-~

1/23/10

vial of hope and a vial of pain

i set up my recording studio today, and tried recording 'you look like a freemason', but without any success. i'm ok with it. in essence, i was really just trying to adjust to recording vocals and piano simultaneously. because now i have a second mic, which has many, many advantages about it.

i think the reason i couldn't record today is because it's a new song and i haven't really figured it completely out yet. probably gonna have to play it another 15-20 times before i can record it proper.

and i plan on incorporating drums and other sounds into this. i want layers now. for all this time i've been listening to music with layers, and yet i've never done it myself. I want to make music that you can hear four or five times and find something new about it each time. more effort, but more satisfying.

---
i saw Arcade Fire's DVD "Miroir Noir" today and ended up loving it. At points, it felt like Vincent Moon and Vincent Morriset were taking waaaay too much creative liberty with the film, focusing more on visuals than the band itself. On most occasions, they only play half of a song before cutting to a new scene. But when there's actual footage of Arcade Fire recording and playing live, we finally get to see the primal intensity, the perfectionism, and the camaraderie that all combine to make a truly fantastic band.

arguably the coolest part of the movie: when the mix focuses in on Richard Reed Parry absolutely beating the shit out of a couple of drums and a cymbal. awesome because a) you wouldn't hear it in a concert because i'm PRETTY sure the drums weren't mic'd and b) he's playing on beat. it's not just for show.

^the clip in question^

get it if you can. it's pretty much what inspired me to record today.
---
now i need to study and go over to Robert Nesbit's once more. Hoping Rob posts a video today.

~------~

1/22/10

Madness of Mules

I'm probably going to eat at a place called The Rusty Hammer tonight. Upon hearing my dad's recommendation of it, I did a quick search on urbandictionary, since it sounded an awful lot like something that would be on urbandictionary. and i was right. gross.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=rusty%20hammer&defid=1842766

Tonight there's a pep rally at my school. Mules Madness, they call it. Being the mildly antisocial person that I am, I'm choosing not to attend.

Reasons:
a) almost nothing happens, other than talking to the people around you.
b) i don't think it's necessary to pay in order to talk to a few people.
c) When something DOES happen inbetween the 15 minute hiatuses, we watch people win prizes, while occasionally chanting our school's communistesque chant "N-H-S! *foot stomp* N-H-S! *foot stomp*". not exactly appealing.
d) the games that precede the pep rally won't even be fun to watch, because the school we're playing against is like 3000 times smaller than ours. which is saying something. (good job in advance, team)
e) i have to make a video on TOP of blogging (that i still have yet to start)... friday's are difficult for this reason in the first place.
f) i'm too COOL for pep rallies, obviously. /blatant sarcasm

i've come up with a couple of titles for my previously untitled songs. 'En attendant...' which translates to 'While waiting...' and 'You Look Like A Freemason'. I have no idea how the latter title came about, I just know that it sounds fancy.
---
For future reference: Trigga Hiccups by Menomena goes absolutely flawless into Underground by Ben Folds Five, for the next time you decide to spend 38 hours making an hour long mix.

This reminds me. This is gorgeous sounding.



And while we're on the tangent of music sharing, I found out about the song below (called the Coloring of Pigeons by The Knife) through a certain Anthony Fantano. (http://youtube.com/theneedledrop). A word of caution: it's 11 minutes, very minimalistic, and has operatic elements to it. But i've determined that I like it, because it really does feel as if you're walking through a dark forest:
http://theneedledrop.blogspot.com/2010/01/mp3-new-collab-from-knife.html

all i'm asking for for my birthday, i've determined, is Beloved by Toni Morrison (really really liked Song of Solomon) and The Road by Cormac McCarthy. aaaand a little more money towards my piano, which is slowly turning into just spending money. *stupid consumeristic mindset*

(also. optimization problems hurt my head.

Question: A sheet of cardboard 3 ft. by 4 ft. will be made into a box by cutting equal-sized squares from each corner and folding up the four edges. What will be the dimensions of the box with largest volume?

Answer: .57 x 1.86 x 2.86. somehow.)

i need to go run off and make a video now. I'm stealing Robert's ideas of describing a bunch of things. (they need to realize that if they keep using copyrighted music, our channel WILL be taken down. see http://musicfromblueskies.blogspot.com for proof.)

~-~

P.S. Tonight's Conan O'Brien's last night on NBC. I can not wait. Hopefully he ends up spending like $10 million dollars of NBC's money and just gives the best, most epic send-off ever.

SO MANY ELEMENTS TO THIS BLOG, MY GOD.

1/21/10

Waltham System

Day 21. SIX DAYS UNTIL MY BIRTHDAY

i need to make this short. i have a lot of math studying to do. i'm not ready at all for this test. going to fail.

in fact, this is all i'm going to say today. nothing that revolutionary has happened. rob's coming back to school tomorrow, and it turns out that it WAS a sinus infection. so yay for the 3kewldoods hiatus that never existed?

I DUNNO WHAT TO BLOG. today's the first day where i feel as though i don't have anything to say. so instead i'm just gonna kind of. yeah.

SOMETHING OF MORE SUBSTANCE TOMORROW. INCLUDING A VIDEO.

~-~

1/20/10

le chasseur du bois

IMPORTANT UPDATE: 3kewldoods is on a temporary hiatus (already. Jesus.) until things can get back to normal. Robert's video just wouldn't upload this week, and Rob's been in and out of the hospital. He was having a chronic headache, went to the hospital, one doctor said it was a tumor at first but then he said it was his sinuses but it's apparently neither of those two things. So he's missed two days of school and is missing another one tomorrow for more tests and shots and god-knows-what. We just talked on AIM, he seemed to be fine, but he's apparently on 'so many pain killers'.

So since those two aren't in a position to upload at the moment, I feel as though it'd be best to just let the channel sit for now. I'd rather have us doing this as a collective instead of just me making videos by myself until god-knows-when-things-get-back-to-normal. I could do that on my own channel.

EDIT: Robert's video finally showed up today. I guess we're going on with it!
---
today was alright. i discovered that i nearly have a full EP worth of material. Here's the rundown:

1. Untitled Song (4-4.5 minutes long)
2. Triumvirate #1 (short interlude)
4. Untitled Song (5-5.5 minute song)
7. Triumvirate #2 (another short interlude)
5. Slow Clap (actually recorded, short song)
6. Untitled Song (6.5 minutes long, formerly called Nightmare)

I apparently need to work on titles.

The three untitled songs are very sporadic, they go through several changes, no distinct verse or chorus in any of them. Not that any of my songs follow verse-chorus-verse structure anyways. i have the attention span of a 5 year old, essentially. The problem I'm having though is that The 1st two untitled songs have kind of similar elements, and I tend to hate when that happens. A little more ironing out, and then

I need to spend a good solid half hour reconstructing my studio, it's been unplugged since Christmas. And now I have another mic, so hopefully recording piano and vocals at once shouldn't be an issue. This will make things go literally twice as fast, and it'll probably make things sound better. I tend to emote in my vocals more when I'm playing piano at the same time.

---
if you'll excuse me, i have about 30,000 hours of undone homework to get done.

but first, cinq choses plus:
1. coke zero's rather tasty.
2. my painful sore throat's making a comeback.
3. the title of this blog directly translates to 'the hunter of wood'. it was the name of some french folk-indie-country song by some french canadian band that we had to partially translate for our french final.
4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4-EAiNewsQ&feature=sub
HENRY GREEN WAS BORN TODAY!
5.

THATS IT

~-~

1/19/10

SAWNG!

this is the first time i've written a song in a-a-ages. not sure if i have a title, feel free to suggest any you might have.
---
She came into life
With a pretty smile
On her stupid face

And every time they tried
For her to cut her hair
She would kindly decline

She came into life
With a pretty smile
On her stupid face

And her hair just grew
Until the locks, they bled
Into outer space

And in outer space
No one screamed
But they all thought

Come on ride the wave.
Come on ride the wave.
Come on ride the wave.
Fill my waaaave with light.
My liiiiiiiight with air.
My aiiiiiiiiiiiiiiir with trees.

With branches spiraled upward
Quickly turning into spiders with their
We won’t come down e’er mentality.
We won’t come down from here mentality.
Acrophobic arachnids
Slimily smiling simply smiling at their fall.
---

in other news, today has passed by uneventfully. midterms are next week, and i'm desperately trying to prepare for them. 1.5 more years in high school. yipes.

there's this big deal going down in the state south to me over a senatorial seat and how it will impact health care reform. unshockingly, if the republican side wins, health care reform will take a striking blow. and if the democratic side wins, health care reform will probably be passed through the senate. both sides are dumb. Martha Coakley (D)'s quoted as saying "There are no terrorists in Afghanistan" and Scott Brown (R) supported an amendment against emergency contraception for rape victims. So either way, we're going to have another bumbling idiot occupying precious space in our lovely bipartisan federal government system. Three cheers for participatory democracy.

5 more things: (soon to be a regular staple on this blog, possibly)
- i need to make a mix CD filled with old school Modest Mouse for Richard Nesbit.
- i feel fat for not running for the last 2 days.
- meowth is my least favorite pokemon.
- i have unreasonably short hair all of a sudden.
- you can count to 512 on your fingers using the base 2 system. look it up.

~-~

P.S. This blog-every-day project has already outlasted Rob Bennett's blog-every-day project. winrar.

1/18/10

SemiMicropost

Tiny, tiny update because I still have a massive health project that I've barely started.

I started a new song today, and I've done about 10 pages worth of work today. All while wasting time on the internet.

Dr. Strangelove was one of the greatest movies I've ever seen. "Mein fuhrer! I can walk!" I might watch it again on the internet tomorrow.

I wrote a short, one-page story for English. The only guideline is that it had to be one page and we had to have 4 instances of parallelism. (With... with... and with..., he waited.)
---
With silence, with patience, and with fear, he waited. As he sat up straight on his bed in near perfect darkness, he chanted under his breath “This is it. This is it.” He knew that he had heard a door slam despite the fact that he had locked all of his doors, and he certainly wasn’t expecting any company at this late hour of the night. So he grabbed his shotgun, took off the safety, and sat on his bed, waiting for whatever could be behind door number one. He knew it wasn’t a new car, or a new hot tub, or a new spouse. It was the Grim Reaper behind that door, breathing his icy breath, ascending the stairs leisurely, and filling the house with his rotten odor.

“This is it.” They were just three short words, but they were all that he could speak. Next to him, his wife was lying down, not snoring like she usually did. My beautiful wife of 52 years, I’ll make sure this killer won’t get to you, he thought. Your face is so pale in this light. You used to be so much more vivacious and alive in your younger years. You used to laugh, you used to sing, you used to dance! What happened to you? What happened to us? He heard the doorknob turn, and he cocked the shotgun.

Instead of a killer or the personification of Death, it was the police. He managed to shoot one round at a cop, but he missed and was soon overtaken by blue, yellow, and black uniforms. As he was rushed out of the room, he caught one last glimpse of his wife, the two bullet holes on her visage gleaming red in the moonlight.
---
I showed it to someone and she jokingly asked if I needed help, because yeah, it is a little twisted. But her asking that made me paranoid, and I hope my teacher doesn't think i need help for writing it. I certainly wasn't depressed or upset while writing it. I really just see this as trying my hand at being a creepy writer.

Back to this health project. Peace + blessins.

~-`

1/17/10

Dr. Strangelove

My nickname, and the movie I'm about to view with Sir Dr. Cpl. Robert Colin Nesbit, Esq. III. But at this moment, Robert's beating Classic Mode on Super Smash Bros. Brawl on Intense (after 4 or 5 continues... n00bh4xx). He's on Master Hand right now.

Just looked at the track results, and yes we did get DQ'd in the 4x400 relay, and yes it's my fault. *beats self up* I went into lane one when we were supposed to transition from our individual lanes to lane two. rawr. But in any case, we ran 3:51, which is good for us. And I managed to get a personal record in the 300, 40.9. And Ian managed to get second in the 1000, which was all at once surprising and awesome.

So that was essentially all that happened to me today. I was gone from 11:30-7:30 riding up to Maine, cheering on my team, running, and then riding back.

The (amazing) barn concert from yesterday is up in (nearly) its entirety on the 3kewldoods channel.
Start Here:



and eventually, if you end up watching all 10 parts inbetween, you'll wind up here:



And I want to thank the late Martin Luther King Jr. in advance for his incredible contributions to civil rights and the day off tomorrow.

Robert just beat Master Hand. Took a few times.

~-~

1/16/10

My ears hurt.

Prolonged exposure to loud, repetitive, tinny noises is never a good thing. And yet for close to an hour and a half, I smacked the living crap out of my ride cymbal, and now there's an incessant ringing in my ears.

But it was worth it. The concert was essentially a huge success, minus the late start and the failure at playing Sandstorm.

There was Lady Gaga and there was rapping and there was a strobe light and there was of course plenty of wrock. I played four songs, two of them covers (At The Hop - Devendra Banhart), and whenever I said anything, it was awkward. Because I'm generally an awkward person. But those went well, except for All Day Long because I decided to set it to a crappy setting that didn't work at all with the song. In comparison to everything else, it was downtempo and slow. My act was surrounded my a cover of Party in The USA and RP Beatz, after all. But I was proud of it, for once. I actually had a live show that went well for once, in my opinion.

Dumbledore's Army had their best concert. We say that everytime, which is definitely a good thing. Spirits are always high.

There was a good turnout of new people and they ended up getting into it, which made us ecstatic. Rob pumped them up to no end, serving as the leader of the band and the conductor of the crowd. Other than a complete mess-up of Felix Felicis on my part, we played very well. We got loud very often. It was a beautiful show.

I need sleep, ANOTHER track meet tomorrow. I better run faster. Otherwise I'm gonna kick myself in the teeth.

~-~

1/15/10

Luna Lovegood > Sliced Bread

Here's essentially my blog today. There's no point in me repeating myself , really... on top of the fact that i only have 7 minutes left to post before it becomes January 16... now 6 minutes...



Voila.

I'll be posting my reflections on the concert tomorrow.

~-~

1/14/10

Haiti, mon pays.

I was going to blog short today, but I'm so disillusioned with everything and I need to explode.
---
I can't believe people.

We take too much for granted. Tonight, some 14-year-old girl with bleach blonde hair and a jonas brothers t-shirt will alternate between her english homework and facebook and her phone, her only light being the gentle comforting glow of her computer, with a bottled water on her desk, twee pop blaring. she hasn't talked to her parents all day. she's not even aware of the thousands upon thousands of Haitians who are sleeping near the crumbled remains of their houses. The thousands upon thousands who sleep tonight in a mass grave next to people they never know, and never will know. While I watch the constant coverage on ABC. well all i see when I see ABC is an alive, American human body who is there, RIGHT in the center of the disaster, idling and talking about how horrible it is instead of helping people. what the viewers won't see is the reporter going home after he's finished reporting, going home to the 14-year-old with the bleach blonde hair and the jonas brothers t-shirt.

i see people on facebook, joining groups that swear that 'for every person that joins, we'll donate a quarter to haiti!1' and '$1 TO HAITI FOR EVERYONE WHO JOINZ'. these groups are all lies, hoaxes to create gigantic facebook groups. to boost their egos and take advantage of this horrible, horrible situation. and people think that they're helping. they've helped, and they don't need to do anymore because they're sure that they have a quarter going to Haiti. I'm sure we're losing tens of thousands of dollars of aid through this.

it hit me when i was eating dinner. I had finished my rice and my roast chicken, and all I had left was my salad. It hit me. And I ran downstairs. My mom asked what was wrong, and I told her that I couldn't eat salad while millions of people were without water or food. it hit me. that it was haiti, but not just haiti. i did a project on world hunger for health class, and i know that at least 1.02 billion are hungry right at this very moment. that was just a statistic until now. now i can't eat or drink or go to the bathroom without feeling guilty.

so after it hit me, i went downstairs and i just played piano. i envisioned the moments directly after the earthquake. the silence, the suffocation under the bricks. the song on the piano started off real quiet, it came out of nowhere, complete improvisation. i imagined myself crawling out from the rubble to the chaos above. it got a little louder, but it was still quiet. disbelief. and then the realization comes, the music gets louder. and then the aftershock hits, and the song hits its climax. and then near silence again. this isn't a dramatization, this is what i saw as i played the same theme on the piano louder and louder and louder. it's going to haunt me tonight, and tomorrow, and for a long time.

ignorance is bliss is bullshit. some things we NEED to know, and what we need to know is that we need to help. Not just Haiti, but Africa, India, the thirdworld. I was having a conversation with a friend yesterday, and he told me that if every person who earned over $120,000 gave 10% of their earnings to charity, and something like $80,000-$100,000 gave something like 5%, and everyone else gave like 2%, poverty would be eliminated. i'm not entirely sure if those figures are correct, but it was something close to this that he told me. the people making $120,000 would still have $108,000, the people making $80,000 would still have $76,000. they'd still live comfortably enough. but we can not give. there's something intrinsic about human nature that prevents us from giving more than pennies to people who need it. and i feel sick.

there's an advertisement with someone screaming "THAT'S A LOW PRICE." on my TV right now. it's for staples. and the Haitian people pray quietly for help. 'Mon Dieu, Mon Dieu, aidez-nous. je vous en prie."

donate.

~-~

1/13/10

Shortening, Sweetener, and to the Melting Point

i'm blogging in blue today. spicing things up a wee bit. like cilantro.

i have to be brief today because i still have a good 100 pages to read. x_X_x

essentially, i had a track meet that went on for way way way too long today (3.5 hours), and i'm extraordinarily exhausted. i didn't run well, but overall the team ran well.

and that's all i feel like saying today. i would say that i'll compensate tomorrow, but i have a math meet and a bunch of homework that will keep me occupied until like, 10. so tomorrow's gonna be short as well. friday however...

but i still love you.
unless you're a guy.
then we're just bros.

(song of the day: the most trustworthy tin cans by maps and atlases)

~-~

and a moment of silence for haiti, please.

1/12/10

Day 12

pages left to read by thursday: 170
songs on dumbledore's army's setlist: 25
distance i'm running at my meet tomorrow: 400m ≤ x ≤ 1200m
days until teen jeopardy test: 49
---
sorry self from 8 years ago, it's time to embarrass the crap out of you.

11-30-01
Dear Diary,
I've got Emily back on my side. I'm going to Stephen's party at Jokers tomorrow... I'm going to a Kirkwood Corners [at the time, the nursing home where my mom worked] party. I have a special relationship with Henry. He's so cool! We have a dance routine called "Smoogahoogavich". Don't tell anyone I said this. I think Emily is the most wonderful person ever. We are about to enter a new month. December. Yippee! Tony Hawk is what I want for Christmas. I think I'm a martian. Because whenever I look in a mirror... my face is shaped like a martian. A.M. places like school are bombing [?]. I feel like going on strike so bad about that. I NEED NOW 8 (cd)!! I want to get baptized. I hate Sam/Cody. No interest in them at all. Brand new gel pen. You like? I gota new book light. You like?
---

Today was one of the best days I've had in recent memory, primarily because I discovered that my crappy keyboard could be kicked down an octave. which is fantastic news, because the lower register on the keyboard sounds so so so much better. I can actually play most of my own music on there if it's an octave lower, so i might not need to spend $900 on a digital piano... yet.

I also realized that since Dumbledore's Army has a show on Saturday, I might be able to play a couple songs. I have in mind a cover + one of my own songs, probably All Day Long. My friend Eliot recommended that I gig more, and this is a perfect starting point.

And I also realized that my cover of Anyone Else But You by the Moldy Peaches is at 16,000 views. not sure how that happened. someone must just go to the page and refresh it twenty times a day or something for lulz.
--
universe effuses
through a tiny little hole
where it concentrates
and concentrates
and enter's michael's soul.

la da, la da, la da.

the cat sent out letters
with a simple strangeish statement
that the kids wrote on
the walls and all the
counters and the pavement.

la da, la da, la da.

yes, lyrics are, at a glacial pace, popping into my head. these are to the middle section to that song i've been toiling over for some time now. i need some for the beginning and the end and it could very well be finished.
--

That's about it pour aujourd'hui. I need go watch TV history, potentially the last American Idol season premiere. whoohah!

~-~

1/11/10

Spontaneous Bachelor Rant, other crap

short blog today. *everyone rejoices*

My day: i have 220 pages to read by thursday, i found out my dog has a benign tumor, and jeopardy wasn't on due to some stupid senatorial debate. verdict: bad day, despite the fact that my dad provided me with a homemade, delicious chocolate chip cookie ice cream sandwich.

currently, i'm waiting for robert's new video to load and in the background i can hear some horrible cover band doing horrible covers of Chicago songs on the Bachelor. Which is a show in which thirty materialistic, rich 25 year old girls swoon over a successful 35 year old guy, pretending that they're in love so that they can get air time on TV. practice their acting skills, make it look like they're actually viciously competing. stir up some nonexistent drama, lie about their backgrounds, lie about others backgrounds. for the almighty dollar. "I've never loved anyone more than I love him. (even though I've only known him for a week.)" "My heart's been completely broken. (it hasn't.)" fake, fake, fake.

all of this while he cheats on every single one of them off-camera and gets his heart broken in the end because no one really loves each other on the show and it's all an act.

GREAT tv.


^would be a better show^
---
look up the poem 'cartoon physics part 1' by nick flynn. it's pretty awesome.

~-~

1/10/10

i'm not tired, i'm not tired, i just sleep.

well, today was alright. i saw the hangover for the first time, and, despite the fact that i've heard almost every single quote from it through either facebook groups or conversation, it was still quite entertaining. i ran slower in the 300m than i wanted to, but i got a brownie melt at mcdonalds and an everything bagel at the bagelry and life felt a little better. despite the fact that i couldn't find the trashcan at the bagelry and looked like a gigantic idiot, because i was essentially staring at it the whole time...

...i suffer brainfarts far too frequently.

---
while at the bagelry, brandon, kelsey, emma, and i discussed brandon not running spring track. we argued that he's been running throughout his high school career, and that he should finish with it. he argued that he'll never have another chance to be on a baseball team. despite the fact that he would just be a manager and wouldn't actually play on the team. we also argued that we wouldn't be able to hang out any more (brandon, kelsey, emma, and i have been running buds since last year's spring track season) since he drives us everywhere. he argued that he had another group of friends that he hasn't gotten to hang out with on the baseball team due to his track schedule.

i all at once understand where he's coming from and don't understand where he's coming from. running gets pretty boring and repetitive, and i can understand that he would want a change in pace. but he's making a huge sacrifice, and he would essentially be letting the whole team down by not running, since he's been running since fall, his freshman year. he's also gone through the most improvement out of any runner in the history of our school. he brought down his 5k time from over 30 minutes to just over 20 minutes. so why not finish what he's started?

it's ultimately up to him, not us, and i just realized i've written far too much about this, and most people reading this don't even know who brandon is.

---
i really want to get this goddamn song finished. i've been toiling and toiling over it and i still don't have it finished. it evolves enough, but it takes too long to evolve, and there need to be more interesting parts in it. i don't even have a name for it, ffs. maybe i'll go all post-rock and give it some long-blown name that has no relevance whatsoever to the song. like 'today is wednesday but yesterday was thursday'. or 'Pour Champagne et les autres'. or something. STUPID CHRONIC WRITER'S BLOCK.

i'm done for today. if you got to this point of today's blog, give yourself a pat on the back. i'm certainly impressed you got this far. here's a picture as your reward:



~-~

1/9/10

Maps & Quesadillas & Lots of Links

Today has been immeasurably boring. The two places I've been today are at the piano and the computer. More development on a song, but that's about it. i would have liked to have seen Youth in Revolt today, but i'm not quite 17 yet and too imp to sneak into an R-rated movie. alas.

I found out that Dumbledore's Army's suddenly playing a show next Saturday. This is mildly concerning to me, since a lot of the same people are apparently attending, and it's going to be more or less the same music that we played the last time we played there. Which is still majorly Harry and the Potter covers. I don't want us to stick just to being a cover band, and I don't think any of us do. But we've been finding it relatively difficult to write songs. We have one good, full-length one penned, but that's still a long way to go before we can just play our own material at a show.

I just watched half of the documentary "Walmart: High Cost of Low Price" and it left a bad taste in my mouth. That's all I want to say about that. Here's the first part of it on YouTube, you can follow the rest of it by checking the related videos.




Luckily, there's ashens to make the day suck a little less:



And there's a new video of mine to make the day suck a little more:



Maps & Atlases 2005 EP "Trees, Swallows, Houses"

8.5

While math-rock isn't really my thing (This Town Needs Guns is essentially the extent of my listening to the genre), I picked this album up because I had a few extra bucks in my iTunes account and I had heard a few good things here and there. Little did I know I was picking up a masterpiece.

Prepare to have your head spun. "Trees, Swallows, Houses" starts off with what feels like 30,000 notes being played in the span of 2 seconds. "Everyplace is a House" is technical, dynamic, and most of all, infectious. The band leads the listener from one musical thought to the next seamlessly, all the while maintaining an immense energy that is held back at points and then unleashed at others. This is more or less the way the rest of the album passes, but it's undoubtedly a great introduction of what's to come.

The album doesn't let up its ferocity until 'The Ongoing Horrible', a simple and short song that contrasts greatly from the first two. Here, Dave Davison's (yes that's his name, don't poke fun now) vocals shine as he plays an acoustic guitar in an unusual fashion and an occasional twinkling of electric guitar fills both channels. Sonic bliss. video here:



After this brief respite, the album lunges at you again for a bit, this of course being an enjoyable, fun, intense, unpredictable, exciting lunging. The great thing about this album is how consistently in-your-face it is. The most frantic part of the album shows up with "Stories About Ourselves", and this is where the musicianship between the quartet feels the strongest. In order to play a song like this, you need to know exactly what the other members are doing, and they shine in this aspect. A sicknasty bassline that puts Flea to shame and a sweet handclap breakdown makes it a personal favorite.

At the end of "Songs for Ghosts to Haunt To" the album finishes with a hush: the band exhausted, fingers cramped from incessant tapping, hands worn out from smashing drums to pieces. The band all must be on their way to carpal tunnel syndrome.

The album works so well due to its brevity. If this album was full-length it'd feel like a little too much. The songs are very similar, and repetition would start to sink in at some point. But you never feel that on this album. Instead, the ideas still remain fresh by the end of it all, and you walk away satisfied.

If you're looking for some high-energy, fast music that's not grating on the ears, you should get this album. It gets me pumped.

---
On that note, I'm gonna go to bed early. I need to make sure I get 8 hours for my track meet tomorrow, and it's been taking me an hour and a half to fall asleep.

~-~

1/8/10

Activivty of the Paranormal Variety

I just saw Paranormal Activity, and I was pretty impressed. I think there could have been a little more build-up leading up to the final scene, but otherwise it was decently freaky. The alternate ending was better than the original by a long shot, it legitimately made me scream while I was kind of unphased at the original ending. Damn you, Stephen Spielberg.

I put sugar on Brandon's pizza and blamed it on Kelsey. He almost poured water on her head as retaliation. She's mad, and we're now looking for another horror movie to watch, without much success.

I still haven't managed to conjure up my video yet, and I have a mere 3.5 hours to do so. Everything's been filmed, but the editing's gonna take a little bit and I doubt that I'll have it ready by the midnight deadline. Which will mean a punishment. The problem I'm going to have with making a video every week is coming up with decent enough ideas so that they're still quasi-entertaining. That's another reason I stopped making videos: after the autumn sessions, i was completely drained of ideas. I was looking at my older videos and I noticed that the first videos were decent and then the later videos were not-so-decent. I was doing the same thing over and over and over.

We're no longer looking for a movie, now we're just kind of... sitting. It feels kind of weird blogging while I'm at someone's house, with other people, in the same room. But that's just determination, right? But since I'm at someone's house, that gives me license to cut this blog short! WOO!

I'll embed the video on this post if I think of it/I have the time. And album review tomorrow. Candidates are Wolf Parade's first album and Maps and Atlases first EP. Did I already say that? I think I did. But it's the truth. DA TWOOF.

~-~

1/7/10

The philosophy of trespassing

this is something i started thinking about today. i was taking a shortcut from my school to my house behind a healthcare facility and an apartment complex. and whenever i take this shortcut, i'm always worried that an employee or resident there or someone's gonna see me and tell me that i'm trespassing. so i started thinking.

trespassing is essentially saying 'you can't exist here. please exist somewhere else.' which, when you think about it, is kind of silly. if i'm not doing anything harmful, what deep-seated pain am i causing by walking behind the back of your building? i'm just innocent matter moving through space-time. i guess it boils down to people being excessively possessive of what they own, an intrinsic flaw with humanity... i wish i could dig more into this tangent, but that's where it ends for me.

in other news, i figured out today that the one thing i'm good at is parallelism. in english we did these little things. "the grumpy old man, who didn't have the heart for rollercoasters, who didn't have the legs for walking around all day, and who CERTAINLY didn't have the patience to sit on the kiddie rides with his grandchildren, looked on yearningly as his wife and offspring headed off into the theme park." and "there was something about the letter, its faint scent of perfume, its tears around the edges, its frantic handwriting."

it's getting dark and i need to play some music. *runs off*
*an hour passes*
alright, i'm back. i managed to hybridize two of my songs, but that was about all i could accomplish. because my throat problem is still very existent and still very bothersome. the worst part is that i have hyper salivary glands, so i'm swallowing spit like every 10 seconds. if anything, it feels like it's starting to worsen. it used to just kind of an irritation, but now it feels like my throat's being paralyzed every time i swallow. and last night, i got 5 hours of sleep like i have for the last 3 out of 4 nights because i've been coughing incessantly. my parents called the doctor's already, but they just said it was a cold symptom. bull. shit.

my mom just checked, there are white spots on my tonsils. so it's probably either tonsillitis or strep. woop.

in the meantime, i'm gonna do the single calc problem and the french exercises that were assigned to me, fight through the pain to eat my stuffed pepper, and then go to bed early enough so that i can manage 8 hours of sleep. AIE.

~-~

Post script: this makes absolutely no sense:

1/6/10

Hamster Butt Disease

^ I swear to god I overheard this being said in study hall today. ^

The majority of today was spent writing music, because that's all i can seem to do as of late. I can not write any lyrics for the life of me, and i think it's due to the fact that i'm not so... angsty as i was before. Although I have come up with some brief bits of lyrics, I'm struggling to find where they would fit in anything I'm working on right now. But in any case I'm developing a long song and several, much shorter songs right now. Two songs are done, one's an instrumental and the other's a long 3-part thing. If I work hard enough, I could probably get something out before the end of the school year at this rate.

Other than writing music, I had a pretty miserable speed workout (10 hill repeats, had to keep jogging inbetween. x_x), and I got the schedule for the AP exams. Nerves are wracked. I hadn't worried about the tests that much until now. I'm gonna study my face off over the next few months, starting in a couple weeks, which probably means that the quality of anything i post on the internet until the tests in may is going to suffer exponentially. which is poopy. yes. i said poopy SO THERE.



^three books that i should probably own. since i'm a dummy.^

i'm only gonna do album reviews on weekends from now on, i've determined. this is due to the fact that i have a decent amount of homework every night and this kind of takes up a decent chunk of time as isssss. I'm pretty sure I'll be reviewing Maps & Atlases' 'Trees, Swallows, Houses' and Wolf Parade's "Apologies to the Queen Mary".

TTFN

~-~




1/5/10

gettin' down wit da sickness

now playing: lyon by pinback

*cough* i'm sick, like i seem to perpetually be. it's an odd kind of sickness, though. it hurts when i swallow, and i had a random bloody nose this morning. wah. despite this, today was a decent day. i managed to have several epiphanies during my 2-day practice AP Chem test, so I might have scored decently. and i have absolutely no homework, which might leave some space for a proper vlog today on my channel. this will be the first time since... october of 2008 sounds about right.

What's partially inspired me to get back into it is the fact that my friends at school are starting to get into it as well. I brought up 3kewldoods yesterday. Robert's video came out very well and he seemed to like doing it, and Rob expressed in his blog (robbennett34.blogspot.com) that's he also pretty amped to start doing so. He's been watching some vlogbrothers and 5awesomegirls and loves the concept of collab channels. He also blogged today about people not exactly understanding his newfound interest with the youtube-o-sphere, which is exactly how i felt when i started making videos.

I'm gonna keep it short today, because I don't really have all that much to talk about other than that. Nor do I really want to do an album review today because I exhausted myself yesterday with the Atlas Sound review. S'bye! *mexican wave, somehow*

~-~

1/4/10

day the fourth

one minute i'm standing outside the postmaster's office waiting for my passport picture to be taken. the next minute i'm watching my mom eat smartfood through the sideview mirror.
---

the shirt i'm wearing right now:

how i feel about wearing this shirt:

---
i'm starting up a collab channel with a couple of friends (rob bennett, rob mant). we're called 3kewldoods. http://youtube.com/3kewldoods robert just posted the first video, and it came out great. ch-ch-ch-check it!!

it's basically going to be a channel where we challenge each other to do various things. we determine which challenges we do by rolling a die and then they're performed on camera. it's nothing jackass-esque, it's just like 'make the whole video using subtitles while using appropriate hand gestures'. stuff like that. if it keeps going, it should be fun. although video making + blogging + school + track is bound to be a little much. we'll see how i handle it.
---

after writing that little bit o' blog, i went downstairs and worked on this song that's been bugging me for a while. it won't get written. but the music was developed a little more, and i have a couple ideas for lyrics. they're a little too dark for me though, so i'm probably gonna reconsider. it feels good to start formulating music again. i want to put out an EP this summer. a little ambitious, but i'd certainly like to try.
---

i feel like i have more to say, but nothing's popping out at me. so here comes the album review. *jet plane noises*
Atlas Sound's 2009 LP Logos
7.2

This album really frustrated me, because I failed to see why the album was so critically acclaimed. it's certainly a good album, and i certainly enjoyed listening to it. but there's something that prevents me from giving it a particularly high rating.

the album starts off quite well with the etheral "The Light That Failed." An acoustic guitar plays over several layers of noise as Bradford simply croons "the light that failed...". the latter part of the song hangs on to one chord just giving way to 'An Orchid'. I have a problem with this song as well as a couple of others on the album, because they just seem to meander and just end before they really amount to anything.

THE WORST point at which this happens is on the title track, the last song, Logos. The song's catchy, the song's rolling along, it goes off on a tangent and then it resolves and when you think you're about to get hit hard with something good, a great ending to sum up the album and go out with a bang, it... fades. rather suddenly. i understand that it's different, but it's gotta be one of the most disappointing album closers i've heard.

I do love the content on here though. Bradford has created some great music and even on the songs where the inevitable anticlimax feels overbearing, I find myself bobbing my head and enjoying every second. The songs where he has guest stars (Walkabout, Quick Canal) are the two standouts on the album. Walkabout with its light 60s feel-good aura and Quick Canal with its seemingly never-ending drone that immerses you as it builds and builds and builds. Kid Klimax features a nifty little loop while the song swells over Bradford's crunchy vocal as he croaks "oh my, god. oh my, god." it's a song that effectively haunts.

so this gets a 7.2, which is the equivalent of 8/11, which is how many songs i dig on the album. easy enough.
---
THIS WAS SUCH A LONG BLOG. SEE YOU TOMORROW.

~-~

1/3/10

Woes

so someone (ben, he's pretty awesome. just saying) just gifted me an album on iTunes. but in order to download the album he gifted me, i had to update to iTunes 9. after a little hesitation, i downloaded. after the 20 minutes it took to download, i opened up the music store page to get my album. this is one of the first things i saw.

and then this:


it's like they're assuming that every album and every song is under 10 characters. and the worst part is that you can't adjust the size of the boxes so that you can see the whole title. it's an extreme inconvenience that i just can't get over. on top of this, if you're on an album page, you can't click to see all of the songs by the artist. you either have to do a search of the band and then click on 'all songs' or go to the artists page and then click all songs. and on top of this, gone are the days of personalized album and artist pages. why they would consciously change these things is beyond me.

this has probably already been brought up 1000 times before by other people, but this should be changed. i can live with most internet related changes after awhile (SEE YOUTUBE), but this is just poorly executed.

---

on top of this, my passport for my trip to canada is due in to my french teacher next week. and i haven't even started the application process. this hit me like 3000 tons of bricks the other day and now i'm panicking. we'll hopefully get things taken care of tomorrow so i can at least tell my teacher that my passport's being processed. *fingers crossed that everything works out*

---

as for music, i've been mulling over a song for a while but i still haven't mustered (mustard, colonel mustard, kernel, popcorn, movies, blu-ray, stingray, Sting, the Police, the SS, Adolf Hitler. /stream of consciousness) up any lyrics for it yet. i might do that today after i take care of all of the homework i haven't been arsed to do over vacation.

no album review today, i've been at this for some time now. i might do Logos by Atlas Sound tomorrow.

~-~

1/2/10

lava love

my friends made a band called the honest abes. they wrote a love song about a lava lamp. you can hear it here: http://myspace.com/thehonestabes

---
this is lame. i was planning on going to my track meet and then playing a show at Border's in Concord with Dumbledore's Army. Both of those things were canceled due to snow.

So now I'm sitting here, waiting to confirm plans to see Avatar. Not in 3D hopefully, because 3D hurts my eyes, it's a cheap gimmick to make more money, and if the movie's good, it should be fine in 2D anyways. (Edit. I saw it in 3D [didn't get that bad of a headache], and I didn't really like it. It was very well made, but the story took from almost every action movie ever made.)

here is ANOTHER picture! just to spice up life a little more! this doesn't happen very often.

YEAH!
---
animal collective's 2000 LP "Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished"
8.8/10
The long songs on this album are great. They all have these fanciful, Peter Pan vibes created by the skittering drums and the everpresent keyboard. All of these songs have a similar sound, but they all have different structures. On top of that, they all have elements that make them their own. The whiteboy funk breakdown on Bat You'll Fly, the sad acoustic outro of La Rapet, the freakouts on April and the Phantom. And the lyrics on these songs are beyond psychedelic. On La Rapet: "Meat was on the bone, but the children huddled and devoured/Keep them in the home let their minds go where their bikes cant take them."

I of course have to bring up the closer, Alvin Row. This is a pure epic 12 minutes. This song has a frantic intro, a roaring, uplifting climax in the middle that made me jump the first time I heard it, and a sample of a child's voice at the end, all sandwiched between what we've been hearing for almost an hour. this song sums up the sound created on the album to a T.

This album fails in its shorter songs. 'Everyone Whistling', 'Untitled', and 'Someday...' all feel far too much like filler. They're listenable if you're listening through the whole album, and they actually help to break up the sameness of the other longer tracks, but they're skipworthy if you're listening to your music on shuffle.

Any fan of Animal Collective should probably consider owning this. It's surprisingly accessible and I've written way too much about this. So I shall stop there.

Ademain.
~-~

1/1/10

BED2010

or Blog Every Day 2010 or, Futile Attempt at Improving Life (FAIL) or, the time I got bored and decided to start a project that i won't finish.
---
yes, for some reason, i have a strong urge to blog every day this year. i think the reason's the fact that i blogged a mere 36 times in 2009. which is pretty poor.

i know i will not accomplish this, but i like the idea of at least starting it. seeing how far i get. it could very well end tomorrow or next week. but i feel like it's possible. it's a lot more of a reasonable goal than nanowrimo. i got like 2000 words into that last year. but there's no word limit on blogs, so it seems far more... feasible's the word.

and i know that people blog every day in the first place, so this is no big feat. but meh. that's all i say to that.

meh.

----
i've been buying a lot of music recently. so i figure a good way to start bed2010 would be to review some of those albums briefly. and here we go.

broken social scene's 2002 LP 'you forgot it in people'.
9.5/10
i fell in love with this album pretty quickly. although no two songs really sound alike (what do you expect. there's a billion people in the band.), there's this overall relaxed mood set by it that you can really get into. the only time the album gets crazy energetic is with the crash-cymbal triggerhappy songs 'KC Accidental' and 'Almost Crimes'. From there, it just coasts, taking you through these soundscapes that are at times smooth and tropical and at other times downtempo and melancholy. One of the best albums of the last decade, any music lover should own this, blah blah blah. GET IT.

and that's it for today.
~-~