Wednesday, January 27, 2010

fillmore phoenix



last night was my first experience at the fillmore. i'd been wanting to see a show at this venue for months now, and haven't found the right show to christen my fillmore experience. until last night.

when i saw phoenix on the fillmore bill i promptly set an alarm to buy tickets the moment they went on sale. tickets available at 10am, by 10:05am i had two tickets successfully ordered and the show was completely sold out. i was a bit biffed that 2 tix was the max i could purchase.

at the end of the show, after their third encore song '1901' the guitarist created a diversion on the right hand side of the stage, it was pitch dark with a sliver spotlight on him. meanwhile thomas mars was sneaking to the back of the room via the left side of the venue only to appear spotlight at the rear with mic in hand singing the ever famous "fold it fold it fold it" one more time.

Monday, January 25, 2010

laptopping

we hit up haus, a hip coffee shop with free wifi. a panoramic pic had to be taken.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

purple smoothie



i made a purple smoothie today, and took some video. boy i love the flip vid cam!

Monday, January 11, 2010

playlists vs. mixes

as time passes i am less tolerant to the phrase "you know what i mean".

assuming to know what someone means is a risk, and old people are more risk adverse because they have learned that not every risk is backed by a reward of equal or greater magnitude. even as i puke these sentences into this blog post people will read this and see what i wrote, but in turn assume what i mean. that is unless i explicitly write exactly what it is that i mean.

what do i mean? what am i trying to say? que up the high-entropy mixtape rant!

mixtapes are a thing of the past. tape is an outdated technology for end users, therefore mixtape is an outdated term. therefore most people have dropped the word tape and simply use the word "mix".

personally i have confusion when someone references a "mix".

"do you have that mix that i gave you?"
"is this your bedroom mix?"
"i made my girlfriend a mix for our anniversary"

in my experience these sentences reference a playlist, they do not refer to a mix.

a playlist is a collection of songs. often the playlist contains various artists, songs form different albums, multiple genres, etc. i can see how the word 'mix' can somewhat represent this, because elements of the collection of songs are a 'mixed' bag.

however, as the products of standardized testing that we all are, we need the word that is best used to describe what this is, not a word that does a pretty good job. if the SAT test doesn't give any credit for pretty good answers, neither should i right?

a mix is when the songs of a playlist are blended together. this requires the songs to be beat-matched, adjacent songs overlap ending and beginning. of course there are exceptions to this generalization as music is art and art doesn't have hard fast boundaries, but 99 times out of 100 a mix is when songs are mixed.

why is this important to me? because i've created playlists as well as mixes. it is undeniable that a mix requires more efforts than a playlist. i've made awesome playlists in minutes, it's near impossible to make an awesome mix in minutes. in fact it's near impossible to even make a crappy mix in minutes.

i'm not bagging on playlists. a decent playlist usually has plenty of time and energy devoted to it by the creator to determine the order, the flow, the entire experience. some playlist creators even have rules that are strictly followed when composing the song order.

just don't call it a mix.

The PAN Called...

gene and i shot some video during the break. during the weekend i slapped some music over it and stitched all the shots together.

The PAN Called... from holysocks on Vimeo.

Thursday, January 7, 2010

Sf public library

Guess who's officially a public library card holder!

Sunday, January 3, 2010

make a move here, a move there




i started blogging with livejournal in 2001. i know not exactly when because i either deleted it or can't find it (or livejournal deleted it due to inactivity).

i wasn't too hip to the closed feeling of livejournal, where only registered journalers could comment, thus i quickly jumped ship with blogger in my sights. almost 10 years ago things were different, online storage was not free, nor was it easy and user friendly. so i set up my blog in the fashion that most 'power users' would have set it up. i know this because power users set me up.

i registered a domain, mooched some web space from a friend's ftp, and configured blogger to take care of the rest. i was posting pics and changing my blog layout with custom templates while everyone else was confined to the text only blog posting approach confined in the stale handful templates that blogger offered.

all of this happened about 9 years ago, since then blogging has evolved and my blog unfortunately has not. blogger was bought by google, space on the web became plentiful and free, and my hotshot setup was surpassed by free accounts. today, a new blogger account comes with the luxury of posting pics and vids, customized templates, and widgets! all with your google account which ties to blogger.

so with the turning of the decade(along with a very motivated kick in the pants from jon) i've ported it all over to a new address, a blogspot one.

this turn of the new year i'm turning to a new blog, which is my old blog. of course i named it "am i wrong? (to hunger) II" which is lame, i know.

perhaps this 'newness' will motivate me to change my template more often, and compose posts more often as well. pics and vids are great, but there's something to be said about a well written blog post. hopefully i say what that is this year?

ringing it in

New Year's Eve 2009 from dacurious on Vimeo.



this is how nye happened.