WJLC Charts

Okay... so I've been wanting to do this for awhile. I'm indulging the metaphor that I've got my own radio station since I have started cramming tons of music into an ipod over the past few months. I'm up to over 2,000 songs at this point, and I like having a reason to talk about music, so periodically (maybe weekly if I can get my act together) I'm going to release something I used to compile for my college radio station, the charts. This week the charts are starting out with a pretty simple format... who's getting the most spins, and what are five relatively recent things added into rotation (either ripped from ye olde CD collection or newly discovered). Enjoy!

Top 10 (Heavy Rotation): listings show artist - album (single or singles)
1. The Shins Bluegrass Tribute - The Shins Bluegrass Tribute (New Slang, Know Your Onion!)
2. Ween - Shinola Vol. 1 (Gabrielle)
3. The Mountain Goats - The Sunset Tree (This Year, Dance Music)
4. Josh Ritter - The Animal Years (Good Man, Lillian Egypt)
5. A.C. Newman - The Slow Wonder (On the Table)
6. Chris Mills - Wall to Wall Sessions (Escape from New York)
7. Spoon - Gimme Fiction (I Summon You, I Turn My Camera On)
8. The New Pornographers - Twin Cinema (Sing me Spanish Techno)
9. Johnny Cash - At Folsom Prison (Folsom Prison Blues, 25 Minutes to Go, Jackson)
10. Old Crow Medicine Show - OCMS, Big Iron World (Wagon Wheel, James River Blues)

New Adds:
1. Modest Mouse - We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank (Dashboard, Steam Engenius)
2. Withdrawal - The Perfectionist Blacklist (Decompression, Nova Breeze)
3. Iggy Pop - Lust for Life (The Passenger, Lust for Life, Neighborhood Threat)
4. Gillian Welch - Soul Journey (Wrecking Ball, No One Knows My Name)
5. Loretta Lynn - Van Lear Rose (Mrs. Leroy Brown, Portland Oregon)

Quick Sloppy Writing

So, I've looked a bit at my last post, and it was very poorly written. Everybody in the movies I was talking about did, "a great job" or was really neat or cool. Granted, I was trying to get out the door, writing the post was an afterthought, and I really mostly wanted to say, "hey world... I just saw these cool movies and you should check them out too."

That all said, I thought it was worth elaborating a bit. I think that Children of Men is remarkable in a visual sense, both because of the choices to make the movie with many long takes, and lots of beautifully captured moving, fluid scenes. The whole thing feels very well composed, and the performances of Clive Owen and others are part of that composition. They fill this bleak landscape with a weariness that is pierced with hope, and that quality is something I found very powerful throughout the movie. Some scenes and events are remarkably awful, but the whole thing doesn't feel overwhelmingly doom & gloom.

As for Mother Night, again, there's an interesting mix of the comic and the tragic. Alan Arkin and Nick Nolte are truly great throughout, and John Goodman's normal schtick works remarkably well. I've seen some pretty blah (breakfast of champions) translations of Vonnegut's work for screen, and I think this one is pretty remarkably well done in keeping his odd, but enjoyable, light but world-weary narrative quality.

OH! Almost forgot

Movies!

This week I've seen some amazing Movies. WOW! Really good week for movies:

I finally saw Babel... and it's very good. It's bleak in many ways, but extremely well done, and I highly recommend it (unless you're already feeling down because it's not a feel-good-happy-go-lucky breath of fresh air kinda movie... yes I got tired of hyphenating just now). So, Babel was a pretty good start, but even better is the next one!

Children of Men. Okay, seriously this is an incredibly good movie. Again, not super happy but I feel that it's far from a bleak (bleek?) film. It's so incredibly well done, and so visually striking, that I hope you check it out, if you haven't. Clive Owen turns in a great preformance, Julianne Moore is great, Chiwetel Ejiofor is also very good, and Michael Caine is pretty great too... very well done.

Finally, before I watched either of these, I celebrated Alan Arkin winning the oscar this year by adding a whole slew of his movies to my Netflix cue. Soon I'll have Catch 22, but earlier this week I saw Mother Night, and man was it good. I've never heard much about this film, but it's very well done, a truly well told story, and it's full of good preformances, including a great turn by Nick Nolte as the main character. He's an actor I can't say I've ever found incredibly remarkable, but he does a great job in this. Arkin is great too, as is John Goodman. I would recommend this almost as highly as I just recommended Children of Men... and with that, I'm going to jump off my movie soap box.

Have a great night! Oh, and if you like the band Modest Mouse, you should check out a band called Withdrawal... just found them this week, and they're great too! (I hope that link is good.... I'll have to check it later)

And a Maundy Thursday to you

So... in about five minutes I'm running out the door to meet up with Lyndsey and some folks but before I run out the door... I thought I would make a quick post about, let's face it, nothing really. I only realized in recent years that many folks have never heard the term Maundy Thursday, and today I added more people to that list. I guess lots of folks just call it either Holy Thursday or Thursday because it's no biggie. It was always a striking day to me growing up because it's a really bleary and sad church service.

Not sure where I'm going with this... ah yes, I'm going to find Lyndsey. Maundy Thursday to you all, and more soon!

By the way, if you watched the Cheney video and were disappointed, I was too when on the third or fourth time watching it I realized there is a secret service-looking suit to his right at the start of the long shot panning back. He's still creepy, right? Okay, good, I'm glad we agree on that.

Okay, I'm out.

Cheney Stands eerily 50 feet away during Bush press conference

Wow... CSPAN... great job here. Is this video not eerie? What is Dick Cheney doing over there, and is he as isolated in the rose garden as he seems? I saw this posted on Daily Kos and found it so bizarre and unusual that I had to re-post it myself. Anyway, it's completely random, but enjoy. Lots of video on the olde blog right now. Maybe more to come. If you haven't seen it, check out Alanis Morissette's "My Humps" video. It's the most viewed video on You Tube today, but it's worth your time mostly for the hilarious dancing. More soon, happy Tuesday!!!

An interview with Phil

Okay... so this is the interview with Phil. Great stuff. I find the whole situation pretty inspiring overall... and would welcome thoughts and reactions. Enjoy!

Vote Different

Alright... so here's the ad, in case you missed it. My post below this provides some more background on why I'm posting this. It's interesting and fairly well done. I think the best thing about this little webhack is that it's provocative... it makes me think, and want to talk to people about who's running... and in that way, I think it's a good thing.

Things that make me happy

Happy April everybody!

The month is off to a good start, as Lyndsey and I had a very restful weekend and I'm pumped to get down to work today. Also, having completed a generally successful conference last week, I'm now ready to get down to some non-conference-related work including promoting the release of my company's new book project (more details to follow)... but for now I'll just say that pre-orders are possible on Amazon!

In other interesting news to start the month, I learned on Friday that I know the guy who created the Hillary 1984 ad. Okay, so if you're not a super-crazy political junkie who bounces around the political blogs a few times a week... you might not have caught the thing, but it has received over 3 million hits on You Tube, so I know some of you must have.

Phil, the creator, worked with me for a little while at KaBOOM!, and was technically on our kickball team (although, like a number of players on our kickball team, I don't think Phil actually played any kickball. At one point he claimed he was allergic to grass). I'll post both the video he created and an interview later today, but I was pretty psyched to hear about this. Mainly, I was psyched because the ad that caused such as stir struck me from the get-go as a smart and well done hack... nice to know that the guy behind it is a pretty down-to-earth, reasonable, smart dude.

Okay, that's all for now. I'm off to do that whole digging into work thing.

+ John

Couldn't resist posting the other one

Snow Ball 2
Originally uploaded by Chambo25.

He looks like a gremlin in this picture! Yay for action pics!!

Seattle Here I Come!

Snow Ball
Originally uploaded by Chambo25.

Dear Seattle,

I've never met you before, but on Saturday I'll be flying out. I'm pretty excited. I have heard good things about your coffee, your atmosphere, and your grunge music. Okay, so maybe the grunge music thing isn't as current as everything else. Anyway, I think it should be fun.

See ya soon,
John

So... yeah, that's right, I'm headed to Seattle on Saturday night for a conference that my company is putting on from Sunday through Tuesday night. My flight back leaves Wednesday mid-day so I'm hoping to do a tiny bit of exploring before I head east... we'll see how that goes.

Meanwhile, this past weekend I snapped a couple awesome pictures of Chester playing one of his all-time favorite games, "Snow Ball" There are a couple others up on Flickr if you click the link below the photo on this post. I'm hoping to edit and post some other fun things soon too.

I hope that everybody has a wonderful day as it continues to act more and more like spring here in New England. Funny, I believe today is officially the start of spring. I, for one, am pretty excited about that.

Signs of hope

News can get me excited sometimes. Especially when it's news about people who often seem crazy to me acting more sane/rational. As someone who grew up religious and still identifies as such, I'm continually disappointed by the strange and seemingly sick things that people do with organized religion. It's not a new phenomena, and it's not particularly American or Christian. Heck, all of what I'm saying is ridiculously basic.

Anyway, here's some reason for hope: Evangelical leaders are fighting over the fact that many many of them want to focus on some issues that fall more on God's agenda than the Republican Party's agenda. Such as preventing torture and the destruction of God's green earth. I guess I don't necessarily always look to the evangelical community for hope, and to be fair, I've never been part of their community so I am sure there's lots I don't understand. I know that many evangelicals are very service-oriented, which I find extremely admirable. Anyway, this story struck me as one about sensible people speaking up.

Amazing, right?

I thought it was pretty cool.

Climate Science Smears won't break-a my stride

So... today apparently the NYT ran a smear of Al Gore, and Grist (good stuff) did a pretty great rebuttal. Unfortunately the distribution of Grist doesn't really rival the NYT... so I thought I'd toss their piece up here. Feel free to check it out.

Meanwhile, in other news, it's a beautiful day in CT. I had my window open all morning, and then I realized that while it is beautiful outside, it's not quite warm enough for that yet. Still, it's a great day here, and I hope it's just as sunny and wonderful where ever you are.

It's world music day here. I've recently uploaded a bunch of stuff onto my ipod that I haven't listened to either in a long time or ever (some CDs I picked up while working at the college radio station and never gave much time too).

Happy new discoveries and rediscoveries include:

• Manu Chao
• Ephat Mujuru (who plays one of my all time favorite instruments the mbira (pronounced marimba)
• the Mahotella Queens
• Amadou Et Mariam
• Los de Abajo

Also on the list of things I've gotten back into listening to this week are the following (non world music) bands:

• Pretty Girls Make Graves
• Lucero
• the Magnetic Fields

and my favorite new I-don't-care-how-cheesy-it-is-to-like-ipod-commercial-music band, the Fratellis. I can't help it, Fathead is just too catchy. I can't resist.

Good stuff. Yay for good music on a nice day.