Mind Dimension, Mind Dimension, Mind Dimension, Mind Dimension, Mind Dimension, Mind Dimension, Mind Dimension, Mind Dimension...

Hi Everybody,

I'm sick today and writing this blog post from my bed. FYI it's really hard to use a laptop keyboard whilst lying down, in bed, while sick. My WPM has been slashed significantly, and its almost as bad as one handed typing IMHO.

Regardless, my sched thus far has incorporated a.) a lot of sleeping, b.) a lot of coughing, and c.) a lot of crying. Snot precipitation has been scattered throughout the day, thus perpetuating this cold front my body is experiencing. However, I expect things to better throughout the day, with a high chance of clear skies by tomorrow morning.

In the interim, I wanted to bring your attention to a fan fav of mine. His name is Tiga. He is Canadian, which is good because he speaks French which makes him A LOT COOLER than anyone on planet earth. He also makes electronic music, which is crazy because who listens to that shit anyway?

...but the real reason I wanted to introduce you to Tiga is that his humour is quite dry, sarcastic, and, often times, ridiculous. This is an interview with him wearing Crocks. Enjoy!

(WARNING THIS IS LONG, BUT TOTALLY WORTH IT)

"Unfortunately it's not exactly as metal as I would like it to be, and it also talks about my feelings..."

Some people will tell you that Ryan Adams hasn't made a good album in quite some time...and I will wholeheartedly agree with them. The alt-country crooning and Grateful Dead noodlings of Heartbreaker, Cold Roses, Jacksonville City Nights, 29, hell, even Easy Tiger, have been replaced by a consistent stream of too-polished cheesiness that sounds not out of place in a church sermon or an office training video.

Regardless, I'm still pretty gay for Mr. Adams. It's hard not to be when someone is that prolific, that hilarious, that narcissistic, and that BAT SHIT CRAZY. Every few months I check in on Ryan (read: lurk his shit on the Internet), and what I find on YouTube never ceases to amaze me. OK sometimes it ceases to amaze me, but as his music gets progressively worse, his homemade death metal videos get better and better. Here's a recent one he uploaded listing his favorite metal videos on his fictional(?) web talk show, Night Sweats.

Street Meat Homicide

I'm not talking about that binger where you ended up naked in a Denny's storage closet after consuming large quantities of alprazolam and 2-Ci. Those were some intense therapy sessions. Then you freaked out again at Denny's. We found you raping a cheese dog while blowing lines of chicken sandwiches. I'll tell you one thing, your sneeze was All American.

Anyway, I'm talking about that time you had sex with my VCR. And when I confronted you about it, you asked me what time 106 & Park comes on. Well, you better start paying me money, because my VCR is 6 months pregnant.

...followed by DANCE!

Street Photography

So I have been shooting a lot of people on the street... and they don't give me the "all clear" about whether or not this is kosher. I used to never imagine myself doing this. I wouldn't have gone into the realm of harassment or molestation... but I guess I am starting to tread on that boundary.

There is a str33t photographer (forgot the name) that uses a flash when shooting people. This I think is on the extreme end of invasion of peoples privacy on the streets. Flashing someone with a huge strobe is a very intrusive event, particularly if they are caught unawares.

At this point, I don't think I will go that far... but I may eventually do this... if I need to get the lighting just right. But I would imagine by that time I will have definitely gotten beat up. I have already had a number of confrontations.

I think so far I have been yelled at 3-4 times by different people in the past month. One guy at Coney Island just yelled at me because I had a camera around my neck (wasn't even using it)... Then he talked to me and eventually gave me a hug... (it was weird). Another guy yelled at me for photographing this sleeping bum. He told me, "If you have the right to photograph him without his consent then he has the right to kick your ass."

I obviously argued with him about this for a good 5 minutes. Kicking someone's ass is illegal. Photographing someone is not. People don't realize that you can take photos of whoever and whatever whenever you want (as long as it's on public ground). Go ahead and try to take my camera away and I will kick your ass and then sue you for all the suet in Sudan.

This past sentence is illustrative. I am now addicted to photographing people on the street. I (heart) it. I want to go further, faster, narrower, brighter, higher and dirtier than ever before. I see it as a way of continually shaking New York City's hand. Pulling back the curtain on a moment and saving it forever. I am not a brewer. I only bottle.

I have never been motivated to see the decrepit and destitute of NYC. But I am now. I want to greet them or the remnants of their person. I want to see the really real truthy truths, the cultures and concubines, the silly and the somber.

I know this blog is supposed to be about music. So I will give you a link to the best Queen music video of all time. But if you have a camera... go outside and steal the world.

Here is a link to some of my shots (if you want).

Fuck Summer, Let's Fall!

Summer is over. Done. Gone. To say it aloud or read it in print has a certain achiness to it. I'll be the first to admit that I'm an extremely nostalgic person. I pine for the days that never actually existed. I create fantastic realities out of the ether about my past. Put me in Coney Island for one shitty, rainy October day and I'll turn it into a summer spent carousing the boardwalk, eating funnel cake and sipping Coke from a straw, catching glimpses of the summertime girls in their summertime swimsuits, doing sweet summertime things.

But truth be told, summer blows. It's too hot. It's muggy. Bugs are everywhere and the water is still too cold to swim. Who really swims anyways? Sharks are dicks, and they're everywhere. Fucking EVERYWHERE. And Coney Island? It's all Russians, all the time.

Then Fall comes around, and it's all I can think about... Summer: that syrupy season of my long-lost youth. It's not so much a season as it is an ideal. We yearn for it, but it never really happened, and never will. We'll get older, grayer, and gayer, and with each passing year the longing will only get worse.

I'm going to take the next couple of months to cry about imaginary long-lost girlfriends on the beach and old-timey necking sessions. In the meantime, enjoy Real Estate. They're made from real bits of New Jersey...so you know it works. They have a new record, "Days", out on Domino next week.



Here's another track from their self-titled debut on Woodsist (A label I HIGHLY recommend checking out!)



Hurts, don't it?

Oh dog, oh deer.

I fucking love the radio. Not like online radio but car radio as in here I am in a car driving listening to sounds that someone else put on they're called a DJ disc jockey and they spin the tunes. I heard this song and it is ahhhhmazing. It touches me in a weird way, like a great inspiring way that not everyone and everything blows monkey chunks.

Eric Berglund goes by ceo and is formerly half of the Swedish electronic duo, The Tough Alliance. He released his first album last year called White Magic. The entire album is worth a listen but the song "Oh God, Oh Dear" just hits me like a book in the face. A hardcover. The only trouble is it's so short you may want to put it on repeat, which the neighbors might not like.

Get The Funk Outta' Bed!

Working late sucks. Don't try to shrug it off like "I'm a night owl." You're not a night owl, you're human being, and humans need a regular sleep pattern to keep them from hallucinating, dying or even worse, blogging. Personally, I'm coming off of a 5 night stint working as a de facto security gaurd. Since security gaurds are the WORST type of human being, this deserves an explanation.

Last week, my hometown of Williamsport, PA was badly flooded. Living in a relatively mountainous region, it's not good when your exit ramp is looking like a really good surfing break. The company I work for lost power, and once that was restored, the security system was out of commission. So I was recruited (read: forced) to be the guy to stay up from 6pm to 6am, walking around with a flashlight (read: watching movies and rummaging through other people's desks).

After 5 days of not being able to recall the day of the week, I'm finally being thrown back into the pool of 9-5ers (read: 7-3:30ers). The problem is, my circadian rhythm is fucked. So here I am at 5am wide awake, with nothing to do but drink more coffee and, WAIT, WHAT THE FUCK!?!...

Toro Y Moi just dropped a new EP?

As a Luddite-turned-blogger I'm still a bit skeptical of how quickly the internet has sped up our world. What ever happened to the good old-fashioned album-every-year-or-two music world that I fell in love with? Now artists are famous before (if ever) even realeasing a full length.

Or maybe I'm just romanticizing something that never actually existed. Regardless, these days music is being released at a pace that's hard to keep up with, which, while challenging, is very exciting. Just a few weeks ago I posted about Chaz Bundick's latest full-length under the Toro Y Moi moniker, released earlier this year. But yesterday this little nugget of electro-funk-whatever-you-want-to-call-it came out, and I'm digging it.

If Underneath The Pine was a turn in the direction of more traditional instrumentation, Freaking Out is a return to dancey, shake your ass form. It's reminiscent of 80's hip hop and funk, and if you ain't down with that, you ain't down with fun. Now, speaking of fun, I've gotta get to work.

From H to h.

True story. So about a year ago I quit drinking/using drugs. Did I do it on my own? FUCK NO! Addiction is some serious shit, and if you can kick a habit all by yourself, hats off to you. Not many people succeed. So, like of alot people who've tried every possibly way of getting sober unsuccessfully, I checked myself into rehab. What was it like, you ask? It was really, really boring, and consisted of alot of heroin addicts farting and shitting their brains out after eating their first solid meal after years of, well, doing heroin. I also learned about a TON of drugs I'd never heard of before. Did you know there's a whole subculture of alcoholics who drink nothing but vanilla extract? Neither did I. But I digress...

One of the things you find upon getting sober is that you suddenly have alot of free time on your hands that you used to spend either at the bar or hanging out with your annoying transvestite Mexican coke dealer. (Yuck.) You begin looking for healthier means of expression that still fuck you up on some kind of existential level, but don't inevitably kill you. In my case, instead of cramming stuff up my nose, down my throat, or into my veins, I found myself cramming the past 50 years of modern music into my ears.

In a way, you could say that I've started treating music as a drug. It's consumed most of my free time, mental space, and amazingly, in the age of free downloads, money. And like all drugs, everyone has their own personal preference.

In my case, I've found that I like heavy, slow, somewhat downtempo music; music that sounds like it was dredged from the bottom of a stagnant pond filled with warm acid and left to crystalize under the summer sun. Now the word heavy can be misleading. Heavy does not necessarily mean metal. Heavy isn't just a sound. It's an implication. I'll go out on a limb and say that Coast To Coast by Elliott Smith is heavier than anything Slayer ever recorded, because the heaviness I'm talking about isn't what's hitting your ears, it's what you're feeling once you've internalized the song as a whole. I guess you could say that I'm trying to describe heavy with a lower-case H. I'm talking about an abstract feeling, not a theatrical genre of guys in tights and face paint.

That being said, there are some amazing bands out there that, with a little searching, can be found to fit this (wait for it...) heaviness that I'm looking for to replace drugs. Since this is a blog and not a memoir on sobriety, I'll share just two of them with you for now.

First, there's Low. These guys have been around for the past 20 years, the past several of which they've spent with Sub Pop. These guys rock, in a slow, quiet, delicate-yet-heavy-in-their-own-right kind of way. They're one of the first bands to discover that when a crowd is getting loud, turning DOWN the volume will (amazingly) shut people up. This doesn't make them whisper-y pussies, though. In fact, their sound is rock solid. Where alot of bands have trouble tying their arrangements together, Low keeps things very, very tight. When people are talking about Slowcore music, they're inadvertantly paying homage to Low.

This one is from their newest album, "C'mon."


Second, there's True Widow. Why this band isn't more well known is beyond me, because they fucking ROCK. Remember Slowride? Yeah me neither, but apparently that guy decided correctly that "emo" was fucking lame and that woodworking was a better way to spend his time, a point I think most readers will unanimously agree on. After staring at planks of oak and walnut for a few years, Dan Phillips decided to give song crafting another shot, and the result was True Widow. Now, remember that this guy worked with wood for a few years, because that's what comes to mind when I listen to them: walking through a dank, dark forest. This is doomy, gloomy music for those more organically inclined than metal fans. Alot of write ups about them include the term Slowcore, but the band prefers "stonegaze," which seems pretty appropriate, considering everytime I listen to them, which is alot, I find myself gazing at the floor in an aurally induced stony haze. Did I mention that their bassist/vocalist is a total babe?

Here's a joint off their newest release, As High As The Highest Heavens And From The Center To The Circumfrence Of The Earth.


Stay fucked up, kids...