New Camera!! Meet Herman.

Leveled up my camera arsenal today 10 fold - invested in a Canon Rebel TSi (i believe its the Kiss X3 as the blokes in Japan call 'em) with an 18-135mm piece of glass w/ Image Stabilization. First foray into the fine world of DSLR's for me... can't wait to start getting the good shots now.

Dates are locked in for the big bird now: 1/15 to 1/31. Proceed with the filling of the dates therein. So far, it's Mr. Fuji (yes, r not the t) for the first leg, then Tokyo (early week of the 17th), Nagoya, followed by a romparound in Hokkaido (Otaru? Sapporo? getting naked in the hot springs in a glacier???), then back to Nagoya, with some Mie adventures. Perhaps a trip to the Kansai region? Well, they do have good food there and I like their accent. Nani nonndennen! (what are you drinking!?)

I gotta get back to work though. Burning the midnight oil to reduce the workload tomorrow, which I'm doing from home. Then, Settler's of Catan and *gasp* NEW YEAR'S!

And really, you can't find a finer subject than Conan on HD TV as a subject, right? whoo boy.

Windy

Cold and windy today. Would not want to be in a tall building, nosirree. 24F in a brick building is enough for me. Which begs the question: how high can you get?

Blizzard Kicks off Winter

Old man winter wasted no time at all over the weekend. We had another Nor'easter roll in, which basically dumps a crap ton of snow in a fairly short amount of time. It's been chilly here the past week so sticking to the ground was no problem. Snow started late Saturday afternoon while we were in the city, and by the time we left for a party that evening it had grown to five inches or more. I even broke out my snow pants to wear to the party - zzzhuupp zhzhzuupp zzhuuppp zzhuupp all the way there, which luckily was only a few blocks away. Blizzard continued throughout the party and into the night, and the snow continued to pile away.

Here's a clip I put together from before and after the party:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhlHMl4Lzss

By morning, the snow had stopped, netting us around 8 to 12 inches, with snow drifts up to 3 feet, depending on how the wind blew. And everyone was playing the move the snow game, which is much tougher when you've got nowhere to go with it. Walked around in it for a bit and it was an awesome site. Snow felt like corn starch, all eee eee eee eee. I love how the snow mutes the city.

Music of 2009

End of the line... of the "ought" years. Twenty-ought-nine sounded awesome. So Goodbye, ought-nine: what will we call this decade? The big teens

Out of interest to see how full of shit Pitchfork is, I've taken the time to go through their list of the top 100 tracks of this year. No Scumbag Blues = fail, yet some of their so-called indie glory = total yawn. No JEFF the brotherhood either. And of course they wouldn't know about Bikes... yet.

That's not to say there wasn't good stuff. Of course there was. Most of it I hadn't heard, so I compiled my takeaway here. Ahem.

I've tried to denote songs of the year for given categories where applicable.



98. Future of the Left "Arming Eritrea". Love me some crunchy vacuum cleaner guitar. Lyrics reminded me of the Maxass rant Onion-O: "Eric, get off the roof!"

91. HEALTH "Die Slow". Sheet metal rock. Incidentally, I caught the tail end of their live set but didn't really care.

85. Wavves "No Hope Kids". Loser rock. I like writing songs like this and then drinking some more.

84. Junior Boys "Parallel Lines". Spark it up brutha, and let's head out to Long Island. I like the snare sound a lot, sounds a lot like the Konami snare from old NES games. There's some cool synth bursts here as well.

71. A Sunny Day in Glasgow "Close Chorus" Good use of texture.

68. Röyksopp [ft. Robyn] "The Girl and the Robot" Dance song of the year I've never heard at a club because I don't follow that scene?

61. Atlas Sound [ft. Lætitia Sadier] "Quick Canal" Atmosphere runner-up award.

58. Fever Ray "If I Had a Heart" Darkest song of the year. Alien chick vocals. And a sweet video.

56. John Talabot "Sunshine" Now we're getting to some serious beats. Love the tribal rhythms. Bit crusher curtain flusher.

54. Joker & Ginz "Purple City" Fat rubbery synth lines. Kinda like the Satanic Turd demo from Fruity Loops 3.

53. The xx "Islands" Late night bar music. Last call, then find your shoes.



50. Matias Aguayo "Rollerskate" Inspiring. Want to build a scary castle with legos now.

49. Yo La Tengo "Here to Fall" - Drums. Sound. Great.

42. The Big Pink "Velvet" - Computer beats



35. Micachu and the Shapes "Golden Phone" - was this the sound of nonsense in 2009? if so, very tastefully done. love the keyboard browness and the 8-bit tone banks. Skid marks at the end. Now don't forget to wipe.

27. Four Tet "Love Cry" - Need to pick this up on vinyl. This is the kind of music designed for record players, sending radio transmissions, and building a secret door to a hidden room.

19. Joker "Digidesign" - 8-bit synth rubber bee rolls. And the "doing~!" spoon-like hits spread throughout? win. and the synth part that sounds like "No no no no no no no no!". Brilliant.

16. The xx "Crystalised" - another groove for late night chilled pears.

13. Neon Indian "Deadbeat Summer" - brown beat of the year?

10. Washed Out "Feel It All Around" - pull down your pants song of the year.

And there you have it. None of their top labeled tracks seemed to do it for me.

Tales from The Subway Platform

It's the slapstick you wait a long time for. But when it happens, you can't stop laughing.

It started with a glance, then I saw it. While getting off the 4 train and heading up stairs, I watched the figure of a guy below me, platform level, lose his footing and slip on something. "Gaww!" he shouted, and got bumped and unpopular for messing up the "escape" route for everyone around him. A crowd of people turned and stared: he stepped on a banana peel. On the busiest platform in rush hour traffic. Hah haw!

Book of the morning: Dummies book of Yorkshire Terriers. She was reading the chapter about "Doing the do: grooming". I can only imagine if you read it, you'd learn a thing or two about what do about the bow and those hair braids.

Michel Gondry
I picked up the new Michel Gondry DVD this week, came out in April this year. Another solid 3 hours of music videos, short films, behind the scenes. Here's a good one: Classic-yet-corny Paul McCartney's Dance Tonight, complete with a a rare but totally sweet live cameo of Michel playing drums at the end. Kinda hard to see in the Youtube clip, but it's totally him rocking this disco beat with Paul, and it's way cooler than the song itself. It's the best party ever, a funkadelic version of happy hell, Paul's discotech. Everyone parties hard, and the postal driver goes MIA.


Finally, I heard the news today, oh boy: Chris Henry, RIP. Jesus. Why.

Groove is in the heart!

End of the year. Funny how stressful it makes folks: so much to prepare for Christmas, travel, visiting friends, family announcements, and more. People need to just chill the fuck out, settle their shit down. Bring on the slow life...

Working up my top songs of year list. Starting with going through Pitchfork's top 100 list, lot of interesting stuff there, some good, others head scratchers. Oh, the youth I think. Might be another day or two before that's all together.

Had the holiday party at lunch today. Italian and sweets galore, oh man it hurts to think about at this point. Also had a fun activity where lots of folks brought in pictures of themselves as children and we had to guess who's who. Tougher than I thought, well, everyone got old. Old photos with faded colors, or black and white, for those that lived in the world when it was only greyscale. I'm glad life's in color now.

And wouldn't you know it, R started a blog as well! It's here: http://life-with-r.panyamedia.com/ So for all the stuff that I could be posting about, but don't? It has a home now, as told by R! Leave her some comments if ya can. Dig?

Afro Season

So. My hair fro'd out again. It's been three months since I had my hairs cut. And it's definitely got that bushy bushy thing going on.

I, for one, embrace the bushy bushy. A full head of hair at my age is alright. I work a weird job where hairstyles seem to be accepted in all styles (though no other afros!), so why the ef not?

This time, I decided to name it. So say hello, meet Harris. Previously known as "the Beavis". Also been referred to by a former half-black co-worker as "The Biscuit". It's not a true fro in the sense that it's not curly curly, but shit, it does have some lollipop properties. Everyone can pat it, just not at the same time because my head's not that big. Yet!

This is It

Saw the Michael Jackson movie two weeks ago. Wanted to catch that sucka while it was still in the theaters as I may have missed it otherwise. The question had long loomed in my head, assuming he hadn't died, was MJ physically able to make a comeback, and if so, would it really have been all that? And also, how ridiculous was the set to be?

The flick was entertaining. Hard to call it a complete movie as it really seemed to be the content for an additional disc that would have accompanied live concert footage. Started with the dancers auditioning, the moved on to a lot of rehearsal footage. Here, MJ showed that he was in fact in good shape, moving around like the liquid alien he was. Just trying out ideas it seemed at times, it still looked very complete and would have looked very impressive in the live setting.

For each song, they played one complete musical take and then synced up multiple video takes - sometimes side by side, sometimes part by part (a verse here, a chorus there). Also had some interesting behind the scenes stuff, such as dancers working with trainers, MJ checking out the set, trying out the pyrotechnics, filming the new videos. Perhaps the most interesting was seeing MJ working with the band, working out a very down tempo, dreamlike version of the intro to The Way You Make Me Feel, which may have been the moment that I made me think, shit, this guy's a genius (and an alien!).

The band was huge - two of everything, one on each side of the stage. The hot blond guitarist Orianthi Panagaris completely shredded through the Van Halen solo in Beat It, and there's a scene later on where MJ was all, "This is where you shine. Shine for me".

Set was huge, of course. There were cherry pickers, holes in the floor that could shoot people up, a huge video backdrop that would have featured an all-3D extra for Thriller, explosions, fireworks, a bulldozer, and god knows what else. Hardly transportable, hence keeping the shows in London. They didn't really go into the specifics of the set, but it was easy to get the gist of it all from the movie.

And that's it, this was it. What could have been a comeback of a lifetime turned into an abrupt career end and a huge financial burden for anyone invested - I'm sure any figure there is MJ sized, astronomically (hey, he was an alien after all!)