Soundtrack to a wedding

One of the many nice things that came of Kev and Emily’s wedding was their interpretation of the Alaskan “potlatch” tradition, in which the hosts of a large gathering pass out small thank-you gifts to the people who attended. During the wedding reception, they passed out CDs they had made with a selection of songs special to the two of them.

Here are the songs that they chose to represent them at this point in their life:

  1. Billie Holiday: All of Me
  2. Bob Marley and the Wailers: Sugar, Sugar
  3. Crosby, Stills and Nash: Helplessly Hoping
  4. Dolly Parton: Travelin’ Prayer
  5. Lauryn Hill: Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You
  6. Joni Mitchell: A Case of You
  7. Edgar Meyer and Joshua Bell: Short Trip Home
  8. Nanci Griffith: If Wishes Were Changes
  9. Jimmy Cliff: Sitting in Limbo
  10. Tracy Chapman: The Promise
  11. John Prine: Angel from Montgomery
  12. Robin Dale Ford: Where I Am Bound
  13. Super Bass: Blue Monk
  14. Bob Dylan: Shelter From the Storm
  15. Nickel Creek: When You Come Back Down
  16. Arlo Guthrie: Darkest Hour

The Grey Album

Vocal tracks from Jay-Z’s “The Black Album” + samples from The Beatles’ “The White Album” = Danger Mouse’s “The Grey Album“.

Interesting project, which I’d heard about, but have not yet heard. However, as Danger Mouse (the DJ who constructed this project) has been served with a cease-and-desist order, Waxy.org is hosting the .mp3 files.

I’m downloading them now…

(via Mike)

iTunes: “TNT” by Sister Machine Gun from the album Covered in Black (1997, 3:47).

GarageBand is evil

I’ve poked around with GarageBand a bit since I got it, but haven’t created anything major yet. However, it is way too much fun.

It’s also far too easy for me to put together something really, really stupid with it. This is dangerous. Fun — but dangerous.

And here’s the evidence: countrybounce — 71 seconds of banjo and drum loops.

I’m sure I can come up with something better than that given time. But for the moment, this stupid little ditty is it.

Enjoy.

Or don’t.

;)

iTunes: “Must I” by Lizette & from the album This Is (2003, 3:32).

This is so juvenile. I’m very sorry.

My computer doesn’t like my Prick.

I wanted to get my Prick into my computer. It didn’t seem like such a difficult task, should be simple enough, right? So I took out my Prick and put it into the computer.

The computer pulled it in, sat for a moment, then pushed my Prick right back out again.

That’s odd, I thought. It’s certainly not what I was expecting.

So I tried again. In went my Prick — and out came my Prick.

Weird. I thought that maybe my Prick was dirty, so I took it, got a soft washcloth, and gently cleaned my Prick, taking care to stroke in straight lines and not use circular motions. Once that was done and my Prick looked nice and clean, I put it back into the computer.

And the computer pushed my Prick right back out.

Admittedly, I’ve had my Prick for a while now, and it is getting a bit old. Maybe that’s the problem.

I guess I’ll just have to go to a store and get a new Prick.

Marcel Marceau’s Greatest Hits!

As The Apple Turns points out some of the amusing things that happen on the iTunes Music Store:

Yesterday we mentioned in passing that faithful viewer djsteve had purchased a track that cost him the “best 99 cents [he’d] ever spent.” The joke, of course, was that it was the second track from The Whitey Album by Ciccone Youth, which consists of a minute and three seconds’ worth of silence. To tell you the truth, while we’re amused by the fact that Apple is charging 99 cents for a song full o’ nothing, we’re even more amused by the fact that said track contains the usual digital rights management code to prevent you from playing it on any unauthorized systems. And the most amusing thing of all, of course, is that the song has a thirty-second preview.

Well, as it turns out, the Ciccone Youth track is by no means the only all-silent untune for sale at the iTMS; faithful viewers ben, Scott Levin, and Michael Wyszomierski contributed their own suggestions, too. And you know how Apple recently added a bunch of “iTunes Essentials” playlists to the store, such as “Cover Songs” and “’70s AM Radio Classics”? Well, we’ve compiled all the silent tracks we managed to scrape together into the first AtAT Essentials playlist, “To Be Played At Maximum Volume.”

Turn it up! Turn it up!!!!!

iTunes: “Papa Was A Rolling Stone” by Kickshaw from the album Superstar (1999, 6:45).

Only Just Beginning

Only Just Beginning

Jason Webley has a new CD coming out.

There once was a boy who remembered that his heart did not ever really belong to him.

So he tried to give it back to the sky.

The CD will be in stores May 11th, with a CD release party April 30th kicking off this summer’s round of touring.

(via Mike [See you at the release party?])

Living my dreams

For years, as I was growing up, I’d watch various sci-fi near-future films like Freejack, Strange Days, or any number of others where at some point in the movie, for one reason or another (quite likely more for a good soundtrack and/or good eye candy than for any reason really related to the plot) the main character would have to go into a dance club. The club would invariably be dimly lit, hazy, reverberating with pounding electronic beats, and packed wall-to-wall with beautiful people in incredible outfits that were usually some variation of leather or vinyl, often titillating or outright revealing.

I’d always see these scenes and replay them over and over in my head or on tape when they were released for rent, drinking up every detail. These were the clubs I wanted to go to. I wanted to be one of those people, walking through the crowds, relishing the mix of dark sensuality and sexuality that the scenes presented. Where in the movies, these scenes were usually played to put the main character (and, by extension, the audience) out of their element and at some level ill at ease, all I wanted to do was step through the screen and join in the party.

Anchorage being Anchorage, of course, for me it was nothing more than a fantasy. I did my best to find the music, and didn’t to too terribly shabbily — in junior high, when nearly everyone I knew was listening to Whitney Houston, DeBarge, and Bon Jovi on the pop stations, I was digging through the racks of tapes in the store to find Men Without Hats, Shriekback, and Depeche Mode. The only songs on the radio at that period that ever really caught my ear are those that now often get lumped into the “New Wave” category — Pet Shop Boys, Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark, and so on. Soft Cell hit big with ‘Tainted Love‘, and I discovered that the rest of that album, Non Stop Erotic Cabaret, was far more interesting than that simple pop song, with gems such as ‘Seedy Films’ and ‘Sex Dwarf‘ finding their way into my world.

I just want to quickly say how insanely impressed I am with how many of the artists I’ve mentioned in this post are available on the iTunes Music Store. Sometimes it’s just an album or a few songs, but almost every one of these links is a working iTMS link, and even though many of these artists are the more “popular” artists of the alternative scene, I’m still quite surprised that I found as many as I did. Kudos to Apple and the music companies both. As the years went on, I continued to focus only lightly on pop, finding myself drawn more and more into the worlds of ‘alternative’ and industrial music. Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, Ministry, The Cure, Primus, The Violent Femmes, Nitzer Ebb, Sisters of Mercy, Peter Murphy, Love and Rockets, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult — here was the music that meant something to me. Not the processed pablum that the top-40 radio stations tried desperately to convince us that we had to buy, but the darker, twisted, charged, sometimes violent but often tongue-in-cheek wierdness that would never be popular. I loved it all.

So I’d found the music. To give Anchorage its credit, we tried the clubs. The first I ever found was Sharkey’s, a split-level non-alcoholic teen club with top-40 and hip-hop upstairs and alternative and industrial down in the basement. It was the perfect introduction to that world for me. Suddenly, I discovered that even in Anchorage, there were more people like me, and every weekend, this unfinished basement of a building in downtown Anchorage would fill with all the rest of Anchorage’s burgeoning alternative population. There was a big concrete support pillar right in the middle of the dance floor, and while most of the time it just stood there, any time a good ‘mosh’ song started pounding out of the speakers — Ministry‘s ‘Jesus Built my Hotrod‘, for example — suddenly there’d be a mass of people circling around and around the floor, with the pole at the center of the circle, all of us building up momentum until someone got crazy enough to turn around and suddenly start pushing through the opposite direction. Sure, there were occasional bruises when bodies collided, but never any violence, and it was all in fun — we knew exactly what we were in for, and if someone ever tripped and fell or got knocked down, immediately there were arms and hands all around hauling them back up and tossing them right back in the press.

Eventually, Sharkey’s closed, and Anchorage worked its way through club after club. I was fortunate enough to be the DJ at quite a few of them in the 1990’s, and some of my fondest memories from my time in Anchorage are from those days. Standing in the DJ booth, looking out over a sea of bodies dancing and having fun, watching people try to leave the dance floor only to have them run right back on when the next song came on, laughing as they cursed me with a grin on their face because I wouldn’t let them rest. Feeling the energy of the club at its peak — watching the bodies move, knowing that they were there, dancing and having fun because I was giving them what they wanted, getting the charge off of the atmosphere. It’s almost indescribable, but I would leave the club every night incredibly amped, feeling like I’d taken all the energy generated over the course of the night and pulled it all into me, channelling it from the dance floor, though me, back into the music and back into the people on the floor.

Of course, all good things must come to an end, and as times and trends changed, what was left of the alternative scene in Anchorage finally gave up the ghost. Some people had grown and gone on to other things, others had left the state seeking bigger and better things, others had just disappeared into their own lives. Not long after that, I decided it was time to follow my own paths outside of Alaska, and I packed my bags and left, moving down to Seattle.

And here, finally, in a sense, we come full circle. In Seattle, I’ve found the things that had originally started me down these long and winding roads. Not only do I still have all the music that has found its way into my collection over the years, but after a long work week when the weekend rolls around, I can head out and immerse myself in crowds like those in the movies that had caught my eye for so many years. Going to the Vogue on the weekends is very much like I’d imagined these clubs could be all so long ago — the music, the people, and oh, yes, the outfits! The club isn’t as expansive or as lavish as those in the movies (this is the real world, after all, and not a big-budget film), but it has all the right elements, with the definite added bonus of being real, and not just a short sequence on film in a dark theater.

Sunday nights are ‘fetish night‘ at the Vogue. Most Sundays, as I’ve mentioned before, this just means that things are a bit less ‘tourist’ friendly, and you’re more likely to see the more extreme outfits on display (and sometimes, there’s not much to display at all). Occasionally, though, there will be special events going on, like tonight’s presentations by Blue Dungeon. Three times during the night, the floor and stages were cleared, and Mistress Blue and her troupe took over with demonstrations. While I’m not a fetishist myself, the performances are a lot of fun to watch, and everyone involved obviously enjoys what they do (and have done). Once the shows were done, the music came back up, and the floor was once again filled with people out having fun, dancing, flirting, and enjoying themselves.

Tonight, as I left the dance floor and stood against the wall, I had to smile. Years ago, things like this were nothing more than a fantasy, something I’d seen and knew that I wanted to be a part of, but didn’t have the opportunities to take advantage of. Now, though, it’s a fantasy no longer, but a world that I’m part of. A small part, perhaps — while I can go out onto an empty dance floor and dance until I exhaust myself, I’m all too often painfully shy when it comes to actually talking to anyone, and so have met only a few people over the past two years of putting an appearance most weekends — but a part none the less.

And try as I might, when all’s said and done, that’s cooler than I can really put into words.

iTunes: “Cuz It’s Hot (12″)\” by My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult from the album Black Box (1990, 10:17).

March of the Sinister Ducks

Some nights you just find the most bizarre stuff floating around on the ‘net.

Neil Gaiman had a song bouncing through his head the other day, and mentioned it on his weblog. Several people then wrote in to let him know of the location of an .mp3 of the song. After getting permission from the author, Mr. Alan Moore, Neil has quite kindly made the .mp3 officially available: The Sinister Ducks’ “March of the Sinister Ducks“.

Everyone thinks they’re such sweet little things.
Ducks. Ducks. Quack-quack. Quack-quack.
Soft downy feathers and nice little wings.
Ducks. Ducks. Quack-quack. Quack-quack.
But there’s a poison I’d like to administer;
You think they’re cuddly, but I think they’re sinister!
Ducks. Ducks. Quack-quack. Quack-quack.
Ducks. Ducks. Quack-quack. Quack-quack.

I’d never heard of the Sinister Ducks before, so after grabbing the song for myself (and being quite amused by it, I did a little Googling to see what I could find.

What are they doing at night in the park?
Ducks. Ducks. Quack-quack. Quack-quack.
Think of them waddling about in the dark!
Ducks. Ducks. Quack-quack. Quack-quack.
Sneering and whispering and stealing your cars,
Reading pornography, smoking cigars!
Ducks. Ducks. Quack-quack. Quack-quack.
Ducks. Ducks. Quack-quack. Quack-quack.

According to this English/Portuguese interview with Alan Moore, it turns out that this was a small side project of Alan, Alex Green, and David J. (of both Bauhaus and Love and Rockets) in the early 1980s, roundabout 1983.

Nasty and small: undeserving of life.
Ducks. Ducks. Quack-quack. Quack-quack.
They’ll sneer at your hairstyle and sleep with your wife.
Ducks. Ducks. Quack-quack. Quack-quack.
Dressed in plaid jackets and horrible shoes,
Getting divorces and turning to booze!
Ducks. Ducks. Quack-quack. Quack-quack.
Ducks. Ducks. Quack-quack. Quack-quack.

I’m now going to have this song bouncing around in my head for the indeterminate future. I urge you to download it and listen to it yourself — both for the amusement factor in the song itself, and so I’ll be happy in the knowledge that I’ve inflicted this upon other poor souls. ;)

Forcing old ladies to throw them some bread.
Ducks. Ducks. Quack-quack. Quack-quack.
Who could deny, they’d be better off dead?
Ducks. Ducks. Quack-quack. Quack-quack.
Look closely and you will recoil in surprise
At web-footed fascists with mad little eyes!
Ducks. Ducks. Quack-quack. Quack-quack.
Ducks. Ducks. Quack-quack. Quack-quack.

iTunes: “March of the Sinister Ducks” by Sinister Ducks from the album Old Gangsters Never Die (1983, 2:34).