- Caspar David Friedrich, Moonrise over the Sea, 1822

So spring training is officially in full swing and my beloved Twins are 2-0. Of course, we’re a good month and change away from regular season, but I thought I’d say now that I fully expect another great season from m squad and I only have to sit one more year in the dreadful Metrodome (I took a behind-the-scenes tour of that place a couple years ago and I can vouch for that place when I see it is a major dump in there!).

Just curious if anyone out there is a baseball fan and is stoked for or already dreading their teams’ performance in the 2009 season. As the snow flies in Minnesota, benches are being cleared, baselines are being painted and the hotdog stands are being greased up in anticipation already.

Who’s your favorite team, what do you expect from this year and how many games do you actually go to during the year? Sound off baseball fans, we want to hear from you.

So over the past 18 months or so I’ve become obsessed with finding just the right browser for my tastes. I’ve dabbled with damn near everything from IE8 to Opera to Flock to SpaceTime to Pogo. Since Chrome came out, my search has ended as Chrome has the simplicity I look for in the aesthetics of Safari, the functionality of Firefox and the speed is unparalleled as of yet.

Still, when a new incarnation of a browser makes its way into my inbox, I’m always eager to check it out. Particularly when said browser is the next evolution in my second choice for browsers: Apple Safari.

Apple claims that the software runs 4 times faster than the previous generation of Safari and faster page loading times than either IE7 or Firefox (it didn’t say anything about beating out Chrome).

For iTunes fans, you’ll instantly recognize the “cover flow” feature which shows your browsing history in a series of screenshots that you can flip through, just like your home LP collection (or iPod album cover flow).

As innovative as Apple has been, they seem to have taken a few cues from other browser innovations however. For instance, Chrome seems to be ripe for the rip-off with the style points for the tabs feature; this includes adding the ‘+‘ sign to add tabs and also putting the tabs at the top of the screen rather than underneath the browser buttons. Also like Chrome, your home page can be set to a series of screen shots representing your most frequently visited sites (aptly named “Top Sites”); a feature I quite like… alot. Though with my particular download, this feature seems to be a bit buggy and all of the screenshots are invisible. Something Chrome doesn’t do with this feature that the new incarnation of Safari does, is implementing a feature that shows if one of these Top Sites has published new content since the last time you visited by adding a white star on a blue background that appears in the upper right-hand corner of the view for that site. Nice.

While I’m still getting used to the slightly different features of Safari 8, so far I think it’s a really nice piece of browsing software. Despite the bugs (that I’m sure are either only temporary or only affecting my specific download/computer), it does seem quicker than every other browser I’ve used (except Chrome). The tabs are gigantic and taking some time to get used to; including the “closing X” being on the opposite side that I’m used to and I can’t move the tabs around simply by grabbing them – you have to grab only the corner of the tab to move it. And you can’t move it into its own window like Chrome enables you to do.

If you wanna try out the new Safari, which again, Apple claims is still in BETA (which is code for, if there’re any bugs, don’t complain cause its in BETA), you can DOWNLOAD IT HERE. While it may not be completely up to snuff (so far), it’s worth a go – especially if you’re using that piece of shit called Firefox.

White Rabbits rock my socks. They’re a six-piece indie rock band that released their debut album, Fort Nightly, back in 2007 and quickly gathered a following, touring with the likes of Spoon (who I was fortunate enough to see them play with), The Walkmen, and Kaiser Chiefs.

I was pumped to learn today from their MySpace blog that they will be ready to release a new album in May with TBD Records, which they are hoping is just as dark and original as their debut album. From the official announcement:

After​ spend​ing the bette​r part of two years​ on the road,​ White​ Rabbi​ts hunke​red down in their​ Brook​lyn pract​ice space​to set about​ re-​envis​ionin​g the dark pop of their​ debut​ Fort Night​ly,​ while​ addin​g new sound​s and influ​ences​ to achie​ve an origi​nal work.​ The result is It’s Frigh​tenin​g,​ their​ secon​d full-​lengt​h album​.​ …​ [E]nlis​ting tourm​ate,​ frien​d and songw​riter​ Britt​ Danie​l (​Spoon​)​as producer,​ …​ White​ Rabbi​ts recor​ded It’s Frigh​tenin​g over the cours​e of four weeks​.​ The sessi​ons were recor​ded by visio​nary engineer Nicho​las Vernh​es (​Anima​l Colle​ctive​,​ Deerh​unter​)​ at Rare Book Room in Brook​lyn,​ NY. Takin​g speci​al care to recre​ate the unhin​ged natur​e of the origi​nal demos​,​ the band utili​zed the wide range​ of tools​ in the analo​g-​frien​dly studi​o to shape​ the perso​nal spiri​t infused in the new track​s.​ Upon the compl​etion​ of track​ing,​ White​ Rabbi​ts trave​led to Austi​n,​ TX to mix the recor​d with studi​o wizar​d Mike McCar​thy (​Spoon​,​ Trail​ Of Dead)​ using​ his excep​tiona​l ears to trans​form It’s Frigh​tenin​g into a uniqu​ely rewar​ding headphone experience​.​ The lineu​p remai​ns the same:​ Steph​en Patte​rson (​vox/​piano​)​,​ Jamie​ Levin​son (​drums​)​,​ Matth​ew Clark​ (​drums​,​guita​r)​,​ Alex Even (​guita​r)​,​ Grego​ry Rober​ts (​guita​r/​vox)​ and Adam Russe​ll (​bass)​.​ A U.S. tour will follo​w the May relea​se of It’s Frightenin​g.​

I look forward to catching them again when they go on tour. They put on an awesome, energetic show and their music sounds just as good live as it does recorded. Here’s a song off their old album, so you can get a taste of what they’re like. Give it a purchase, the album is well worth the price.

White Rabbits – The Plot
Link

You can also check out their last.fm or MySpace for more.

The lecture ends, “Slow down. You’re not as long as you once were.” And I had seen so many begin to pack their lives in cotton wool, smother their impulses, hood their passions, and gradually retire from their manhood into a kind of spiritual and physical semi-invalidism. In this they are encouraged by wives and relatives, and it’s such a sweet trap.

Who doesn’t like to be the center for concern? A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase in life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby. … And in my own life I am not willing to trade quality for quantity.

-from Travels With Charley: A Search for America by John Steinbeck

[This is the third in my series of mixtapes that evoke the spirit of auteur filmmakers. I welcome suggestions for future selections. The MP3s available here are for sampling purposes only. Please support the artists by buying their albums and going to their shows. If you are the artist or label rep and don't want an MP3 featured, please email me]

At its best, a Wong Kar-Wai film reproduces the fever pitch of a music-induced daydream. A love song patters out a simple vision that plays out on a rain-soaked windowpane, story fragments form in the emotional ether that each rise of sound elicits, lyrics dipped in nostalgia drip off the song. Nothing is distinct, everything flows into one another, sound, lyric, dialogue, image all smudge together, all rested from the same sublime delight of feeling.

In order to convey Kar-Wai’s unique ear for music, I attempted to restrict myself to music that was first and foremost, musical. This was a very difficult task for me as my inclination is towards lyrics first, music second. If you listen to the songs in films like Chungking Express or Fallen Angel, or more recently with My Blueberry Nights, lyrics are rarely emphatic, it tends to be about the mood that each song conveys as it passes through. However, something like the title song in Happy Together goes against this idea, a carefully placed pronouncement of on-the-nose lyrics, yet even this is sheathed in a musical familiarity that plays on both levels; such is the brilliance of his soundtracks. I have tried to apply the same ratio in my selections, the Nouvelle Vague track being very reminiscent of Happy Together, but on the whole keeping to a softer yet familiar sound wobbling in the background, at times letting instruments murmur to one another, all trying to get at something whimsically, lost in their own pleasure. This mixtape is not so much a return to the music of Kar-Wai’s films, but the promise of something more, possessing the same general spirit but conscious of his recent venture into American landscapes, the music unabashedly American, and lacking in his international variety.

Still I like to think it belongs on the same jukebox that reappears like a ghostly portent in the Kar-Wai universe, alone and musty, wobbling out weepy love songs into the dark and grainy abyss.

A single streamed version of the mixtape can be listened to here Individual tracks are beneath the seat. Read More

There is a brand stinkin’ new band about to take the indie pop punk scene by storm. In the demise of his old band, Stillframe Sky, lead vocalist and guitarist Tyler James, along with another Stillframe Sky alum Johnny Riot, quickly scooped up a few like-minded individuals in Jess Scutella (drums) and T-Woody (bass) to form a new band titled RadioEmpire.

Citing the likes of Muse, Weezer, and Mae as some of their biggest influences, RadioEmpire just announced that their debut show will be in Erie, Pennsylvania on March 14th at Forward Hall, opening up for some pretty big nationally renowned indie pop-punk bands such as The Wonder Years, Mandy K, and In the Day.

Along with the announcement came the worldwide debut of three songs off their upcoming album, titled “Memories pt. II” (a spiritual sequel to an old Stillframe Sky song), “Tour Song” (about the hardships of touring whilst in the indie scene), and a call-out to the hypocrisy of many religious folks titled “Untitled (If I Showed Up at Your Door).” It’s catchy pop-punk at its finest, particularly “Tour Song” which I enjoy more and more each time I listen to it. I highly look forward to their album’s release and I’ll be front row at their debut show, which is only about half an hour from where I’m located.

Do check out their official MySpace, songs included, right here – because mark my words, you’ll be hearing them on the radio before long and then you can snobbishly put your nose in the air and proclaim to your friends, “Yeah, I knew of them before their first album was even released. Poser.”

I usually walk into a bookstore with a shopping list. Titles recommended by friends, books I’ve come across while browsing the net or researching something else. Sometimes they’re easy to find and other times, the shopping is much less successful. But I have a small problem: I can’t seem to walk out of a bookstore empty handed. So when the list is impossible to fill or I simply walk in without one, I resort to stalking between the shelves, looking at book covers and titles. For the most part, it’s the title that gets me (“Salt Fish Girl”, “Rogues’ Wedding”) but sometimes I’m called to something based on the cover design.

For the most part, they tend to be rather dull and uninteresting but once in a while I walk by a book that screams “Pick me up and take me home!” and sometimes, I can’t help myself. It doesn’t happen as often as the odd titles but it does happen (Douglas Cooper’s “Amnesia” is a fine example).

The folks at Abe Books have put together a list that they’ve called “30 Novels Worth Buying for the Cover Alone” and looking at them is like looking at brilliantly designed movie posters. So there is an art to the book cover, if you happen to look for it. My favourite of the bunch is “Beowulf” though I’m also drawn to the cover for “The Chess Machine”. What’s your favourite? Have you ever bought a book because of its cover?

There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don’t believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God – who knows all that can be known – seems powerless to change.

-from All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

It’s been nearly four years since we’ve had a full fledged dose of Whedon’s quirky brilliance. Sure since Serenity there has been a guest director spot on TV episode or two. And sure there’s been his famous sing-a-long blog with Nathan Fillion and Neil Patrick Harris, but we’ve not seen anything main stream that is straight from the mind of Joss himself. All that is about to change tonight on FOX…

Eliza Dushku (who looked AMAZING on Conan last night) will star as “Echo.” A secret agent who has her memory wiped and new skills and memories DNA-implanted in order to carry out specific tasks and missions. Echo is starting to become self-aware of what is happening to her however; meanwhile an outside entity is trying to bring down this technologically advanced house of super secret agents’ network known only as the Dollhouse.

Hey FOX, you had me at Joss Whedon (Buffy, Angel, Firefly). Throw in Dushku and I’m nearly wetting my pants with anticipation. DVR is set, beers are on ice and the lotion is on the coffee table. I await you; Dollhouse.

Other Dollhouse resources:
Official site
IMDb
Wiki

Cormac McCarthy just had his portrait inducted into the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery and during in interview with one of the leading members of the Cormac McCarthy Society, there is mention of a rumor that McCarthy has four novels in the can already. Read the interview for yourself.

WP: McCarthy seems to be hitting his stride at the moment with a Pulitzer for The Road and an Oscar for No Country for Old Men. What is on the event horizon for him?

MP: Despite a few recent appearances and interviews—Oprah Winfrey, the Oscars—Cormac McCarthy remains a private, if not reclusive (as is often assumed), person. McCarthy continues his association with the Sante Fe Institute, and rumors claim as many as four completed novels awaiting publication. One is assumed to be his long-awaited “New Orleans Novel,” although this cannot be verified. Several tantalizing projects related to his work are, or appear to be, on the horizon, from the film adaptation of The Road to another often-discussed project, the movie of Blood Meridian.

WP: Where does he stand in our canon—that is, who can we compare him to stylistically, thematically—or, to extend, will McCarthy be spoken of in one hundred years like we speak of Melville today?

MP: Harold Bloom has said that Cormac McCarthy is the best living American writer. As that’s a category that includes Philip Roth and Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, among many others of renown and considerable skill, it seems fair to say that McCarthy is one of the most important and influential Americans writing today. Charles Frazier and others have frankly acknowledged the influence, and given McCarthy’s early reputation as a “writer’s writer,” it’s likely that he’ll be considered crucial to an understanding of American literature into the present century.

McCarthy has been compared to any number of writers, among them Melville, Faulkner, Hemingway, and even Shakespeare. Some considerable portion of this repute concerns style; McCarthy’s rhetoric is often similar in tone to those earlier writers, or adopts classical or even Biblical cadences. Through his first four novels, ending with Suttree, McCarthy cursorily appeared to be working as a regionalist, a kind of student of Faulkner’s, even where he diverged from him in terms of theme and sometimes style.

Blood Meridian leaves the South in dramatic (some might say epic) fashion, and is a harbinger of McCarthy’s wider concerns. With it and his more recent works, McCarthy more obviously writes in the mode of various genres—the western, the thriller, and even a kind of science fiction or post-apocalyptic thriller with The Road. McCarthy adopts some of the conventions of these genre pieces, both to comment on and subvert them. These more recent works reveal a writer who has always been concerned not with just “the South” or “the West,” but with larger epistemological and metaphysical questions. Engagement with these issues of universal concern suggests McCarthy’s continued relevance in—and importance to—the ongoing discussion that is literature in the United States.

If this is indeed true, I hope these are released soon, because I am almost out of McCarthy material to read and then I won’t know what to do with myself. What will I read? What will I live for? Why would I even bother to go on?

With over 90 categories at this year’s Grammy Award show, we’re not about to post them all. And despite the fact that Grammy voters have probably only listened to about 5% of all the great music out there and simply focus on the “main stream” (what does that even mean anymore?), we’re interested enough around here to at least post the big categories. For a complete run-down, you can check out Grammy.com. Otherwise, feel free to opine on the winners below…

Album of the Year
• Raising Sand, Robert Plant & Alison Krauss
• Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends, Coldplay
• Tha Carter III, Lil Wayne
• Year of the Gentleman, Ne-Yo
• In Rainbows, Radiohead

Record of the Year
• “Please Read the Letter,” Robert Plant & Alison Krauss
• “Chasing Pavements,” Adele
• “Viva la Vida,” Coldplay
• “Bleeding Love,” Leona Lewis
• “Paper Planes,” M.I.A.

Song of the Year
• “Viva La Vida,” (Coldplay)
• “American Boy,” William Adams, Keith Harris, Josh Lopez, Caleb Speir, John Stephens, Estelle Swaray & Kanye West, songwriters (Estelle featuring Kanye West)
• “Chasing Pavements,” Adele Adkins & Eg White, songwriters (Adele)
• “I’m Yours,” Jason Mraz, songwriter (Jason Mraz)
• “Love Song,” Sara Bareilles, songwriter (Sara Bareilles)

Best New Artist
• Adele
• Duffy
• Jonas Brothers
• Lady Antebellum
• Jazmine Sullivan

Pop Vocal Album
• Rockferry, Duffy
• Detours, Sheryl Crow
• Long Road Out of Eden, Eagles
• Spirit, Leona Lewis
• Covers, James Taylor

Rap Album
• Tha Carter III, Lil Wayne
• American Gangster, Jay-Z
• The Cool, Lupe Fiasco
• Nas, Nas
• Paper Trail, T.I.

Rock Album
• Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends, Coldplay
• Rock N Roll Jesus, Kid Rock
• Only By the Night, Kings of Leon
• Death Magnetic, Metallica
• Consolers of the Lonely, The Raconteurs

Country Album
• Troubadour, George Strait
• That Lonesome Song, Jamey Johnson
• Sleepless Nights, Patty Loveless
• Around the Bend, Randy Travis
• Heaven, Heartache and the Power of Love, Trisha Yearwood

RnB Album
• Jennifer Hudson, Jennifer Hudson
• Love & Life, Eric Benét
• Motown: A Journey Through Hitsville USA, Boyz II Men
• Lay It Down, Al Green
• The Way I See It, Raphael Saadiq

At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That’s a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion.

-from The Diamond as Big as the Ritz by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Mix tapes have officially gone to way of the 8-track, and now with Itunes, Ipods, and all those other I-cessories of the computer age, the mix CD has all but faded away too. I remember being in the 2nd grade and desperately in love. I wanted to express these feelings, but giving the girl my Michaelangelo Ninja Turtle didn’t seem to do it for her. I wasn’t much of a poet then, so it seemed to only appropriate way of doing this was through music. Since I was a child and didn’t have any musical talent, I popped in a blank cassette, turned on a local radio station, and sat there waiting for the right songs – songs by the likes of Primitive Radio Gods or Oasis – to come on so I could hit “record.” That was the first mix-tape I ever made, but certainly not the last. As I got older and CD-burning became common place, I would create mixes for parties, for our basketball warm-ups, for certain lucky women. All of the mixes were well thought-out, each song taking a certain spot in the playlist for a certain reason, each song picked on its own merit.

I quote John Cusack from High Fidelity:

“The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick off with a killer, to grab attention. Then you got to take it up a notch, but you don’t wanna blow your wad, so then you got to cool it off a notch.”

It is indeed an art form.

Now, this here isn’t necessarily a mix-tape (in that I haven’t put a whole lot of time into this, and they are all songs I already had uploaded), but I figure More Pop has been pretty quiet lately (my apologies, life is very hectic lately), so it was time to get some music playing to liven things up a little bit.

1. The Walkmen – All Hands and the Cook
Link

2. Beirut – Nantes
Link

3. The Appleseed Cast – Here We Are (Family in the Hallways)
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4. Why? – The Vowels Pt. 2
Link

5. Sufjan Stevens – Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois
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6. Spoon – Chicago at Night
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7. Calexico – Sunken Waltz
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8. Band of Horses – Detlef Schrempf
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9. Grandaddy – Jed’s Other Poem (Beautiful Ground)
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10. Chris Cornell – Thank You (Unplugged Led Zeppelin Cover)
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Remember, if you like what you hear, support these great bands and artists and purchase their albums!

I am guessing most people outside of Canada have never heard of Mary Margaret O’Hara unless you really are a music nerd, in which case you will understand why she is deemed a national treasure, even though her output is virtually non-existent, her live performances even rarer, and her ‘style’ something so terribly original that most would consider her a freak of nature, or at the very least mentally unstable. I am going to be coming back to her music here now and then, I want people to know about her because she is so special. Her album, Miss America, is a masterpiece that sounds wholly original, and although Gord Downie from the Tragically Hip did a killer cover of her ‘To Cry About’ song, nothing can come close to her. The recluse from the scene, sister of actress Catherine O’Hara, notorious perfectionist, I give you Mary Margaret O’Hara: