My Bloody Valentine, live!

I saw My Bloody Valentine exactly one month ago tonight.

After about 12 years of being in love with this band, this was a big deal. And it was a pretty great show and a good time out overall. For once, none of my usual social hangups or physical ailments (headaches, backaches, swollen bladder, etc.) threatened to ruin the experience, even through waiting for four hours outside the Aragon Ballroom and two hours at the very front of the crowd.

Good travelling companions, shitty scene kids in skinny jeans all around us, awful opening band, surprisingly quick and unexpected appearance by MBV after them, tears in my eyes a few times, the "Holocaust," after-show milkshakes, that feeling of closure after so many years of waiting for this... but maybe nothing else to say that wasn't already said by scores of fans in the weeks before the show. I'd rather not pour out my deepest feelings or personal opinions about it all here. No one is waiting to read them and every time I've ever shared anything personal online, I feel like I've lost something spiritually.

If I don't have anything interesting to say about this show, I should probably reconsider my future in blogging, or at least step back from this one for a while. It wasn't an amazing, life-changing experience, but I can't criticize it either. Reading comments online about the sound quality of the Aragon, the "boring" strobe lights, or the unadventurous set list just makes me tired of the Internet and blogger culture. What a horrible, distracting waste of time and imagination.

I guess that if it does lead me to blog less, then overall I should have an easier time completely extricating myself from the Internet altogether in the coming months. In that respect, maybe this was a life-changing experience.

video #66: Belle and Sebastian - Another Sunny Day

By the end of this I was surprised to find out that it wasn't an official video commissioned by the band, but one made by a fan. If it wasn't for a school project, it might be easier to admire as a labor of love, but it perfectly captures the mood, the style, the complete mythos of Belle & Sebastian. Perhaps a little too well.

Part of me always wanted this idealized culture (bookish young Anglos on the dole) to become a participatory fantasy in the same way that steampunk, cosplay, or LARPing have. Or maybe I just really like girls in sweaters.

St. Charles, IL: the end?

This massive crater used to be the Manor Pancake House & Restaurant, where my family would go out to eat at least once a fortnight when I was a kid. It stood next to the Fox River on Main Street, and unless you count the Baker Hotel across the street or the clock tower that stands kitty corner across the river, the Manor was the heart of downtown St. Charles. Now you see what's become of it, a beautiful historical building torn down like a common crackhouse. I won't rant any further about this for now, I already said everything that I needed to here back when it was still standing but stood little chance of ever reopening.

I had the feeling this was coming for quite some time, and wasn't exactly surprised when the day finally came. What I wasn't expecting and had not prepared for was this horrible eyesore to suddenly appear on the banks of the Fox just a few hundred feet downstream.



Take a good look at this structure. Click on the picture for a higher resolution shot if you can stomach it. The half-million dollar townhomes in the area were bad enough, but they're positively progressive examples of smart urban planning compared to this luxury condo complex just off Main Street. Just look at those phony rooftops and fake facades. Disgusting. Reminds me of the storefront of Meijer on the corner of Randall and Route 38. In the middle of our current housing crisis, do we need more unaffordable housing, and some as tacky as this giant concrete box? Do people still romanticise loft apartments as hip, trendy status symbols? Do young turks and trixies still crave this urban sophisticate experience, even when it's housed in such a cheap and gaudy-looking giant shoebox? Are there that many potential buyers who want a piece of this lifestyle, but only when it's offered in the minority-free streets of the suburbs?

I used to love this city and every time I'd find myself walking down the street here I'd think about how great it would have been to grow up here instead of the one-horse little hick town 20 minutes to the west where there was nothing to do and nowhere to go. Even now I think about how much nicer it is than Aurora and how wonderful it would be to live here instead, even if I wasn't already working here in the first place. Now it seems intent on cashing in its charming but financially worthless "small town" feel to attract the kind of yuppies who consider themselves just too real to live in Naperville. Also, how many more bars does downtown need? Alley 64? Prop me up bro, I'm so wasted!

Meanwhile on the west side of town, Costco sprung up seemingly overnight, building a spectacularly huge big box of their own next to the new Harley-Davidson dealership. As if that vast, energy-sucking blight on our suburban landscape wasn't enough, permanently scarring acres of land with asphalt and attracting scores of men in midlife crisis from all over the suburbs and beyond. I endured (what felt like) a year's worth of road construction to widen the Randall to three lanes in between Oak and Main Street, which I assumed was being done to simply alleviate congestion. Were they just making way for Costco a year in advance? Why do they need this store? Jewel, Meijer, and Dominick's are less than a mile down the road to the south, and the site of the old St. Charles mall remains vacant and strewn with rubble.

I know, I know. Somebody order me a Whaaaburger with a side of cries! But I've always had sentimental feelings about this town and I can't help but feel saddened by the forces at work in it today.

Pulseprogramming - All Joy and Rural Honey

Pulseprogramming - "All Joy and Rural Honey"

Pulseprogramming: two Chicagoans (Marc Hellner, Joel Kriske), two albums on Aesthetics Records, one CD of remixes, and three years of little to no activity at all. What can you assume when a group goes silent for so long? That they're really so busy in the studio that they can't update their Myspace page more than once a year, or that they just don't give a shit anymore and have moved onto different responsibilities that don't involve maintaining a reputation online? Pretty much every band makes sure to let everyone know when they've called it a day, whether we care or not. So no news is good news, right?

Self-titled 1999 album: microsoundscapes, tiny bells and clicks, a few gentle piano melodies woven into some tracks, no real vocals to speak of except for a few whispers. Definitely a surprise after the positively banging "To the Expert Eye Alone" had made it to my ears first via a magazine compilation CD. Pulseprogramming is a pretty unassuming ambient album, not the kind that gets attention from, say, indie rock fans as a token genre CD that they'll download after reading some good reviews. Not being a landmark release of any sort probably makes it guilty of being aural wallpaper to many listeners, but if you enjoy such gentle sounds then maybe this is worth your time. I've fallen asleep to this more times then I can count.

Tulsa For One Second arrived four years later, displaying a completely different sound, perhaps even more confidence on the part of Hellner and Kriske, if you're inclined to notice or imagine such intangible qualities. The same glitch-induced mellow electronics permeate each track, but this time around they resemble real songs nstead of fractured "pieces" of sound. There's more vocals, even some from Lindsay Anderson, who's lent her voice to plenty of releases on Chicago's Hefty Records in addition to L'Altra and her own solo projects. This was released at the height of the "laptop pop" trend, which the band justifiably could have been a part of without necessarily following in the footsteps of Styrofoam, The Postal Service, et al. The album was too sleepy, too world-weary, too mature to fit in among the freshman-level ernestness of those groups, anyway.

I loved the cover art of the first album and the follow-up took it to the next level with a cardboard sleeve that folded out into a tiny house. Really hoped to get more from this band, and I guess we did with a remix album a year later, but brand new music would have been even better.

So what happened to this band? Not asking for any huge final concert for closure, but at least a bullshit press release or blog statement if they're done for like they seem to be.

But who knows? I saw a brand new Dianogah CD at Borders (!) last night, so anything is possible.

Comcast presents Ecobill

"Congratulations! Every day we're making Comcast.com better and better for customers like you. Now we're doing even more ... so you can do less. Because we've introduced Comcast's Ecobill™ process, an environmentally friendly way to view and pay your bill online that takes less time and uses less paper.

paperless is more convenient!
One less bill in your mailbox? Less clutter? Who doesn't want that? Now, with just the click of a mouse you can quickly review your entire bill from any computer. And we've made paying your bill even easier.

paperless is more green too!
Imagine, by eliminating paper bills (and the envelopes they come in) we'll drastically cut down on the total amount of paper we use. So together, we'll save more trees.

wow, that was easy!
We've also made paying your Comcast bill more green. Just go to Comcast.com/ecobill and sign in. Then, in just a few steps, you can choose to have your Comcast bill paid each month, directly from your checking account. We also have other convenient options that make paying your bill fast and easy."

Three cheers for Comcast! Finally, a company that truly cares about the environment. So many companies today promising us that they're "going green," but at last, here's one that really practices what they preach! Comcast, I raise my canvas grocery bags to you in respect! Sorry, this is the first time I've blogged about anything not related to music, I usually abhor such lazy sarcasm but I'm feeling too cynical to resist it in this case.

Paperless billing? Good job. Now then, do something about all this shit you send to me and every single other unit in this building every single week, junk mail that is apparently impossible to unsubscribe to.

I've lived here for 2 years and have surely received more than 100 of these 6" x 11" fliers. They just keep coming, and there seems to be no way to stop them. Taking your name off their list? Not an option! Actually signing up for the services they offer? You'll still get the fliers every week. For every 1,000 of these that are sent out to individual addresses, does more than 1 go anywhere from the mailbox but straight into the local landfill? Surely Comcast has done the research and has found this carpet-bombing approach of a program to be profitable in reaching customers, even if its benefits are minimal.

I don't have a scale to find out how much each of these fliers weighs, but altogether I can only imagine the tonnage of paper per year that could go into producing these. Factor in fuel spent and man-hours wasted by the Postal Service to deliver each one and you've got an astoundingly wasteful program that merely serves to annoy potential customers, not to mention reminding existing ones how little their continued patronage matters in trying to bring about a stop to this nuisance.



Wouldn't cutting out this waste also cut costs? Is it really bringing in that much business every week? Wouldn't this be the best way to "go green?" It won't be long before everyone sees these empty gestures for the PR moves they are, and when "green fatigue" starts to set in, will the new consciousness emerging in today's consumers be squashed?

Colin Chastain Kellaway - Tell Me My Name

Colin Chastain Kellaway - "Tell Me My Name"

I ripped this song straight from the stream of the entire film on Youtube, hence the sound effects in the middle. It's not the greatest quality but since the soundtrack is long out of print -- probably never released on CD at all and only surviving in a few scratched up LPs -- there aren't many other options if you want to hear this song by itself. Such a cool opening theme, I can't think of anything else that sounds like this.

Image courtesy of this blog.

video #65: Stereolab - Three Women

The new single from Stereolab, sounds kind of phoned-in and isn't getting me too excited for the new album. But the psychedelic animation in this really takes me back, like I'm 3 years old again and watching Sesame Street.

Cex - Retina

Cex - "Retina"

"Accessibility is like, really important to me," said R(j)yan Kidwell in a spoken interlude on his 2002 album Oops, I Did It Again. Kidwell's work as Cex had always stood with one foot planted in the impenetrably difficult world of IDM, but in both his live shows and the confessional, exuberant blog he kept regularly updated for several years on his website he made his desire to break out of the cult-like scene he was trapped in unquestionably clear. Being a solo laptop artist, albeit one of the first to give the genre a real personality, probably wasn't the best route to become the "#1 Entertainer" that he aspired to be. His metamorphosis into a brash but self-deprecating rapper would help him achieve this goal considerably, though the more accessible his work became, the more I lost interest in him as an artist.

Eventually expanding into an actual band with his wife and some other guy, the evolution of Cex from an ambitious and open-minded teenager into a career-minded and predictable young adult seemed complete. And yet... the most recent of his work that I've heard seems to have broken away from conventional pop structures and descended into a claustrophobic blend of mutant dub rhythms and looped samples that was probably never meant to play on, say, Jade Tree Records. Avoiding the indies altogether since his last album Sketchi, he's instead chosen to release much of his work over the past year on... limited-run cassettes from his own website.

The lo-fi, murky vibe of "Retina" feels familiar in the context of these releases, but surprisingly it first surfaced on a 1996 release, two years before Kidwell self-released Cells and four years before Role Model came out on Tigerbeat6. If this is all true, it means Kidwell was only 14 years old when he recorded it. I can't imagine trying to put together a track like this on a bedroom PC running Windows 95, or even a 4-track DAT recorder.

I love any song that incorporates ocean sounds, especially waves and seagulls like "Retina" does. Or maybe it's just be static and sampled baby Metroid squeaks. I can't tell for sure. The production on this isn't anything like the clean, crisp IDM that showed up on Role Model or Oops, I Did It Again, two of the best albums of their era even though they've fallen out of favor these days. A review in Pitchfork asks "Does anybody actually listen to old Cex records?" Okay then: hardly anyone. But does that say more about Cex or about the cynical attitudes of trendy electronic music listeners today? How long before bloghouse becomes the next electroclash?

video #64: Utada Hikaru - Passion

Animated by Koji Morimoto, who also directed the video for Ken Ishii's "Extra."

Neulander - Sex, God + Money

Neulander - "Sex, God + Money"

At this point I'm just trying to catch up with posting twice a week, while dumping a few songs here that I'd probably end up forgetting to post after I reformat my computer this week.

Love this song. Do you like Broadcast? Lali Puna? Um... Laika? Then you'll like this. Very Too Pure-ish sound, can't believe they're really an American band.

video #63: Linkin Park - Breaking the Habit

Directed by Kazuto Nakazawa at Studio 4°C, who also produced the anime sequence in Kill Bill, making him more responsible than anyone for the endless "anime... the next big thing?"-articles that popped up everywhere in 2003. If by the next big thing they really meant the 2 a.m. ghetto of Adult Swim, crappy webcomics, and Erin Esurance, then okay.

Got a free promo of Meteora when it came out from another writer who despised Linkin Park. Too bad for him, 'cuz I'm pretty sure it's the best album from a mainstream, modern rock band this decade (White Stripes and the Strokes aside, since no one under 16 listens to them at all). "Faint," "Numb," "Somewhere I Belong," and this... has there been a better run of singles from a single album this decade? Certainly I was a fan, but between Fort Minor, the long wait for album #3, and the underwhelming feeling I got when I heard "What I've Done," I kind of lost interest in them, though I should give the new (er, 14 months old) album a fair shake first.

Ironically, Linkin Park were the last holders of the unofficial "biggest band in America" title that didn't actually aspire to be living cartoons.

The Isley Brothers - For the Love of You

The Isley Brothers - "For the Love of You"

I don't listen to nearly enough R&B or Motown to know what I'm talking about, but this is such a great song. Always makes me feel so relaxed, so good, and I can play this on repeat without getting sick of it for a long time.

I can thank a crazy customer at Borders for introducing me to this. He wanted to find and order an Isley Brothers collection that had this song on it, and while we were searching through our inventory, he started talking to me about classic R&B, house and techno music, Man Parrish, et al. just out of the blue. After countless hundreds of disappointing and depressing encounters with customers up until this, this guy was genuinely interesting, and I had no problem letting my guard down and giving him my full attention. Then, suddenly he changed the topic, going off about all the fights he'd ever been in during high school, giving me blow-by-blow accounts complete with sound effects. These were long, intensely detailed stories that went on for almost ten minutes each, and since there were no other customers on the floor, no other employees nearby to rescue me, and nothing else pressing to do, I had no choice but to sit back and listen to him recount about all the times that he hit some guy so hard in the chest that he went flying back 20 feet or more. He ultimately concluded that in his prime he could have handily defeated anyone in the state of Iowa in a fight. In the end, I just didn't know what to say to this.

Later that night I went home and Googled his name, which I remembered from the order he'd placed. He'd been arrested several years before for possession of a large amount of cocaine. Still the most memorable and strange customer encounter I ever had, next to the guy with Tourette syndrome who kept calling me a nigger and sticking his middle finger up in my face as I tried to order him some Ace of Base CDs.