I am going to be taking my 4 year old daughter to see Wall•E this weekend as a right of passage. Her older sister got to go to her first movie (Cars) and now it is time for my little one to get to go. She has told her grandmother that there is no talking in the theater - only whispers, and that there is no laughing either. I will have to convince her that it is all right to laugh, especially at such a potentially good movie as Wall•E.

Athanasius Kircher first described the cat piano in his landmark 1650 work Musurgia Universalis. In order to raise the spirits of an Italian prince burdened by the cares of his position, a musician created for him a cat piano. The musician selected cats whose natural voices were at different pitches and arranged them in cages side by side, so that when a key on the piano was depressed, a mechanism drove a sharp spike into the appropriate cat’s tail. The result was a melody of meows that became more vigorous as the cats became more desperate. Who could not help but laugh at such music? Thus was the prince raised from his melancholy.

Credit to www.kirchersociety.org.

Oh those good souls

One of my wife's favorite bands is Starsailor (Thanks King AdRoss for the tip). We have enjoyed listening to their music on the road and find it is a good compromise between our divergent tastes. I have taken a renewed interest in Soccer lately, even watched a match on the Soccer Channel – Portsmouth v Manchester United. I am amazed by international soccer and the sheer devotion it garners. I think only college football in the U.S. holds a candle to such fandom. So. Soccer and Starsailor? Here you go. Put them in the blender and you get "Starsailor play football at Anfield." So I guess Mashups are not just for music. Remember MTV the Rock and Jock Celebrity Basketball or Baseball Games? Or how about the Hollywood Knights? I bet that was the beginning of the end of many of their careers. I am all over the place tonight.

This is the Show

I was really surprised to see that two of my favorite bands from my college years are still going strong and turning out live performances. I was equally surprised to see that they offer limited edition CDs of these live performances. I am not talking about a limited edition of 50,000 that you would get on Amazon for a couple of bucks more than a standard CD. I am talking about very custom almost handmade recordings. I hope to see more bands going this route, 1) to get around the crappy recorded bootlegs and offer something tangible to the true fan that pays for more and generally buys more and 2) to stave off their extinction. Some bands have made a 2nd life by being a band that stays on tour. I mean, who really wants the Steve Miller Band to go back into the studio?

Fox News remixed Video

Let's face it. Fox News is a very polarizing topic to most people. I am in the take ’em camp while some people I know are in the leave ’em, burn ’em, ban them camp. But I’m sure we can all agree to meet in the middle for a little ad-busters meets EBN type vid right? Frankly, I think Shep has never sounded better, “Jaime, Major, Molly”. Whatever the artist's intentions were I don't think this is what culture jamming had in mind when it is at its best.

Rock the vote - Walken style

This is either a major hoax, wishful thinking by a fan, or the sure way to get my vote! No hanging chad here - just a clear punched hole for Walken! I would love to see those debates on tv. Take all the best moments from Walken over the last 20 years and let him drop a few of those lines on the other candidates - I would be on the floor in hysterics.
“Sicilians are great liars. The best in the world. I'm a Sicilian. And my old man was the world heavyweight champion of Sicilian liars. And from growin' up with him I learned the pantomime. Now there are seventeen different things a guy can do when he lies to give him away. A guy has seventeen pantomimes. A woman's got twenty, but a guy's got seventeen. And if you know 'em like ya know your own face, they beat lie detectors to hell. What we got here is a little game of show and tell. You don't wanna show me nothin'. But you're tellin' me everything. Now I know you know where they are. So tell me, before I do some damage you won't walk away from.”

Cool Lists?

BITD, Dave Letterman's Top Ten lists were watercooler talk (pre-Seinfeld). For those that had the top 5 desserted island album list, I thought Nick Hornby's High Fidelity was a great read since I was in the habit of making such lists at the time. It is now a prerequisite that at the end of the year, media bows down to some holy grail of listery and produces some that are barely interesting enough to be a list, some that are only interesting if you consider the source, and some that are just band-wagon regurgitation. Have you seen any lists that have merit? I really like website lists for all the links, cause you never know what you might find at the end of a click.

Reminiscing about LA

One thing that I am going to try and do is not just grab content from the blogs and wikis that I hit daily. Sure, they are great for unique stuff that I would have never seen by surfing, but I also want to chronicle what I encounter now, and when mining the past. I got to thinking about the time I lived in Los Angeles (1995-1997) and some of the places I would go out. Now, to backtrack, the reason I started thinking about this is because I was updating my album art in iTunes (pet peeve to leave the listings blank - gotta have art, album, genre, rating), and had to go to Nina Gordon's website to get info on her wonderful cover of "Straight Outta Compton". Digging through her site I looked at where she had toured/played and saw Largo listed.
The name had slipped away from my memory until seeing it then, and it brought back a flood of memories, seeing Jon Brion play on Fridays or Colin Hays or Aimee Mann joining him for a tune. Check out the audio tracks on the Largo site and if you are in LA ever, check out Largo on a Friday night and enjoy!