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:

~-~

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.

~-~

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.

~-~

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:

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

~-~

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*

~-~

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.

~-~

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.

~-~

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.

~-~

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.
~-~