found this via the official unofficial Mudhoney fan site—a video wherein the boys of Mudhoney talk about how much they enjoyed their visit to my lovely louisville. <tear>

now, the really funny part of this story, and something I had previously decided *not* to post about after much debate, was the fact that, during the show and much to his embarrassment, Mark Arm gave a great shout out to the place and people of… lexington. it was a pretty funny incident that had him stumbling over himself trying to save face. perhaps it was the chorus of boos and surprised laughter that clued him in.

that's ok Mark, we love you too!

a cow-orker was asking about Sonic Youth today, specifically for a "best of" type of list. i responded with a limited list and the stipulation that i never feel comfortable picking favorites. i figured, with my resurgence on ye olde bipolar, it might be an interesting thing to pass along.

the following list is primarily made up of my highest rated SY tracks in iTunes, though i haven't rated every track that's in my library, so i don't claim it to be a complete list. i did cherry pick a couple of tracks from among the currently unrated ones, to fill out the list.

Washing Machine

Skip Tracer

No Queen Blues

Becuz

Confusion is Sex

Inhuman

Confusion is Next

A Thousand Leaves

Hoarfrost

Hits of Sunshine

Sunday

Bad Moon Rising

Death Valley '69

Flower

Murray Street

Disconnection Notice

NYC Ghosts & Flowers

NYC Ghosts & Flowers

Dirty

Hendrix Necro

so, if you've never heard of 'em, or you just haven't made up your mind about 'em yet, i'd say these are a really great starting point.

Technorati Tags: Sonic Youth, music, lists

last night, after a two year absence from the stage, saw the re-emergence of Louisville's own Old Man. It was a great show, with some old classics and new hot ones from the album that's in the offing.

The Rud was much the same as I remember (my band also hasn't had a show in quite some time, and we haven't played the Rud for quite some time besides), but now they've settled on the "back stage," which i think is a major improvement from the "mid" stage. The sound is still mushy as ever. I think the Rud's sound system (or sound guys, i'm not sure which) is better suited for simpler acts, like… well, mainly vocalists, poets, plays, etc. I think you throw some guitars and drums in the mix, and the system has to work beyond it's limits to get the sound out there. Which is not to say that it's bad, just that there's some color to it. I still think the Rud is a great place to play, and a great place to see a show.

so Old Man rocked it out, did a superb job, and i enjoyed it thoroughly. oh, and there was a song with neil on the harmonica, putting the folk into "punk/folk." very cool.

following Old Man was an actual old man, alone on stage with his acoustic, strapless guitar, and his haunting voice and often nonsensical lyrics. i think everyone was pretty much alternately astounded and confounded by the performance. some of the lyrics i couldn't make out, and the ones that i could, well, some didn't seem to make any sense at all, as if they were just words stuck together for no particular reason, others made complete sense, but perhaps the most interesting part was that there was a deepness of emotion behind every lyric. in the end, the only pronouncement i could make was, "it wasn't good, but it was awesome." oh, and i told neil somebody should do a study on the guy, see how his brain works.

most of the rest of the evening was spent hanging out with friends, some of whom i haven't seen in several months. it was good to catch up, hell, it was good just to be around them again. it also gave the prick an opportunity to talk about finally making use of the practice space we've had for a month now. hopefully this week, we'll at least be able to get our stuff moved in, which will act as a catalyst towards getting us to the practice space at least once a week to *use* that stuff. i'm looking forward to it. i'm excited by the idea of a "new beginning" for the band, and have been itching to strum the strings for a while. (i'm a terrible guitar player, if i'm not at practice, i hardly ever touch the thing, except to move it from one spot to another.) if all goes well, perhaps we'll be ready for our resurgence party in 6 months or so.

Technorati Tags: Louisville, Old Man, the Rudyard Kipling, stage, show, sound, band, practice, friends

Ahhh…the year-end wrap-up. Where to start? To be honest, most of the shit that happened to me I didn't post about. Why have I been maintaining radio silence? Who knows?

I finally joined the rest of the web-using world and started utilizing digg. I even dugg a post I posted here. Oh…I'm such a whore.

Today I'm bemoaning the fact that we're not a more regularly updated, noticed "blog." I mean…they could have sent us a couple of these, for fucksake.

I've spent an inordinate amount of time listening to Neil Young, lately. Mostly Crazy Horse material. It's speaking to the parts of the brain Brooksie and I have started activating for the new band. Speaking of the new band, it's tentatively titled "Birth Machine." We expect to rattle the foundation of a local venue this spring.

I guess the biggest news of the season is that i had to have Clyde put to sleep (the Thursday before Christmas; it made the holiday even more fun). Some of you long-time readers (if there's any left) will remember Clyde as my beloved cat of the past decade. She had a tumor on her chest that spread to her lungs. Toward the end she was having trouble breathing and would only eat fresh turkey and "catmilk" (speaking of which, I have two things of that stuff left, if anyone needs/wants it), which made us think it was all just some elaborate scam on her part. Regardless, we couldn't take it anymore and took her back to the vet. He gave us the dire news and we all endured a bit of pre-holiday heartbreak.
Needless to say, she's incredibly missed.

Clyde – 1996-2006

while i sit here at work, waiting on a simple answer to a possibly not-so-simple questions from someone higher up the ladder, i figure i'll write up a post for ol' bipolar.

this weekend was chock full of shows. too many shows, as fate would have it. i saw shellac and uzeda friday night. the sound was glorious, the venue was unbearably hot. it all ended up being worth it, though. shellac really kicked out the jams. i noticed that it doesn't really matter what albini does on the guitar, as the rhythm section just locks in and keeps burning along. i think i'd kill for a bass player of bob weston's caliber.
friday night ended up with all kinds of drunken chicanery that i can't be bothered to try and remember clearly.

saturday was another hot one in st. john's for shipping news and wolverine brass. for some reason, that night the sound was fucking terrible. you take the good with the bad, i guess. after that show, i headed over to za's to see arch and buffalo bill. buffalo bill covered motley crue's "wild side." i was most pleased. after that…more drunkeness.

sunday my allergies put the hurt on me. probably the multiple days of drowning myself in second hand smoke. who knows? either way, i ended up having to skip the young widows show. i took some allergy medicine and actually passed out during the car chase scene in ronin. i really didn't know that was humanly possible.

but sunday night, i got my sea legs back under me and was able to hit up the crack of doom reunion show, which was a total blast. i think it even caused more permanent hearing damage to my right ear. always a sign of a great show.

well…i got that simple answer i was waiting on.

wow. what a weekend. probably the most solidly fun couple of days I've had in a while. friday night i ended up at a party in some friends' practice space. lots of booze, lots of other stuff. lots of fun with lots of friends. i was up until about 4am.

and then i was back awake at 9am to go shooting at the knob creek gun range. before saturday, i hadn't shot a gun for a good 10-15 years. i guess it just doesn't come up in daily life in the city. well…at least not the parts of the city i've lived in. despite my long lapse, i think i did decently well. i hit within the circle 11 out of 18 shots (one of them on the right side got ripped off when we removed the target from the box it was taped and stapled to) I fired 20 rounds, but I wasted two shots blowing up a dr. pepper bottle that was on top of my target. here's a gratuitous shot of me glockin' it up.
after that, we went to ernesto's for some mexican and a couple pitchers of dos equis. i ended up getting home a little buzzed and alot tired, so i took a nap.

i woke up from my nap at around 8:30. from there it was out the door to pick up some equipment and then head out to the dead child show. i will go ahead and say that this show had the best line-up of bands that this city has seen in years. pusher, lords, blade of the ripper, dead child…wall-to-wall metal mayhem. i recorded the whole thing. expect the sets to start showing up on transmission3000 soon. after the show, i ended up staying up until 6:30am, generally getting up to no good.

fittingly, i didn't do jack shit, yesterday.

today…back to work. i have to take my car back into the fucking shop when i get off work, as the door handle stopped working about 4 hours after i picked the car up, last thursday. i think i got about 5 opens out of it before it died again. splendid.

ahhh…the best laid plans , and all that. i had intended on posting on monday, once i got back form chicago, but work buried me and burnout reared its ugly head, so here we are at the other end of the week.
my weekend went really well. on friday, we drove up to chicago for the big nerd prom (the chicago comic con 2006). when we got up there (which is skipping the unheard of 7 1/2 hours it actually took us to get there), we stopped in at lollapalooza to see hometown boys my morning jacket rock a few thousand people in the middle of downtown chicago. it was a really nice day for it, too. probably one of the best shows i've seen in a while.

the next two days were all nerd shit. wandering around the aisles of retailers and artists, trying to secure sketches for the ever-growing hellboy sketchbook. an artist i'm a bit of a fan of (dustin nguyen) was there, doing sketches and selling original, published pages for $20. to those that have no clue, that's an insane deal. they usually go for a bare minimum of $75, and on up into the thousands.

saturday night, my travelling companion decided to pass out early in the hotel, so i headed down to the convention hotel's bar, to drink my night away with nerds and comic pros, alike. i ended up meeting some hardcore/punk dudes that had the same general plan (they were from ann arbor). drinks were downed, metal was discussed, jack sparrow was brutally cockblocked (bonus!), hot girls disappeared with the one semi-attractive comic pro, and we ended up out in the parking lot with some older metal dude (who claims he used to smoke crack with al jourgensen), blasting the newest celtic frost. a five man heavy metal parking lot at 4am. not bad.

i haven't really done shit since getting home, really. mostly sitting around, though it feels like i've been really busy. busy doing nothing, i guess.

i've been poking around the internet, trying out some of these new fangled "killer apps." well, i'm gonna talk about two of the newer ones that i've had no luck with.

first off, the democracy player. from their page:

Download and watch all the best internet TV shows and videos in one powerful application. New channels arrive daily in the built-in Channel Guide. Stop squinting at tedious web videos– sit back and watch big, high resolution videos.

well…i've tried loading a few channels and downloading a couple of videos and i haven't gotten it to actually do squat. i still have yet to get it to play one of the stinkin' videos it's downloaded. color me unimpressed.

next up, we have songbird. from their homepage we have this nice summary:

Songbird is a Web player built from Firefox's browser engine. Songbird is open source, will run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and supports user contributed, cross-platform extensions.

the selling point is that it's supposed to be able to play just about anything…MP3, AAC, OGG, FLAC, WMA, etc. sounds pretty sweet. except for when i tried to import my library of music (part of it, anyway). it seems songbird is choking on an initial import of around 10,000 songs. itunes this ain't, folks.

to be fair, songbird is really just a "proof of concept" release. it looks like a really swanky black itunes. as with democracy player, though, i actually have yet to get it to play a file of any sort.

oh well.

they both warrant some watching, for sure, but i'll hold off on playing with either of them any further until they actually have them working.

i have been entirely remiss in my music/band promotion tasks for nigh on a year now. as it turns out, mammon has our first official show (as mammon) tonight at Uncle Pleasants at 9PM. cover charge might be as high as $10, as we managed to get on the bill with Jason Loewenstein and Verktum–a couple of well-known acts.

hope to see you there!

i've finally broken 300 posts (this is the three-hundred-and-first) on bipolar, which is pretty sad, considering we've been doing this almost five full years. brian over there's killing me in the post-count department, despite my recent spate of activity and his recent absence.

which reminds me, brian's been at home ill quite a bit recently, so everybody .

which also leads me to another point. i managed to steal a few hours yesterday and today "cleaning up" the x13design family of websites to eliminate bare email addresses on all the pages. i've realized i'm getting a fuckload of spam mail, and it's probably all because i've had my address right out there for the spambots to collect at their leisure for years. i found a cool little tool online that encrypts the email address and generates javascript code to display the email link. so now, just about every instance of our various email addys has been cleaned up and obfuscated, so hopefully the torrent of spam will subside a bit. it's a vain hope, i know, but every little bit helps, i guess.

the other band wrapped up recording tonight, so next sunday we'll get seriously started on the mixing process. hopefully, we'll also get a few steps closer to picking a band name. rob actually provided a hefty list tonight, and we all picked five of our favorites from his list. here's the result of that:
3 threadbare taken
3 mammon (? possibly taken, found tabs online, a ref in bandreg.com, and a record label)
2 permafrost (dubliners, some reference to an indie band from '97/'98, and a record label)
2 psychosomatic (3 refs, all dead, maybe dead, 2 on bandreg)
2 nexus (here, here, here, here, & about 20 on bandreg)
2 housing project
2 trite (yup.)
2 kitsch (here, here, & about six on bandreg)
1 homogenize
1 midwife

brax and jim have both promised to provide their own lists on sunday, so i'll probably have some more for you then. after we vote on theirs, we'll repeat the process a few times, 'til we finally figure out what to call ourselves.