Category: Music

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Podcast Diet

Podcastlogo Podcasting changed my life.

There, I said it. Melodramatic, but true. When free time is whittled down to razor-thin margins, something’s gotta give, and media consumption is often the first luxury to go. And, speaking for myself, when I’m tired at the end of the day and give myself an hour of couch time, I’m not exactly predisposed to turn to the news. “Man vs. Wild” is more like it.

The one chunk of time I get all to myself every day is the daily commute (by bike or walk+train), which amounts to just over an hour a day. A few years ago, commute time was music time, but podcasting changed all that.

With a weekly quota of five hours consumption time, didn’t take long to subscribe to more podcasts than I could possibly digest before the next week rolled around. But I continue to hone the subscription list. Here are some of the podcasts I’ve come to call friends:

Links are to related sites – search iTunes for these if podcast links aren’t obvious.

– This Week in Tech: Tech maven Leo Laporte used to do great shows at ZDTV, now runs his own tech news & info podcasting network. I appeared on his TV show a few times back in the BeOS days; now I’m just a faceless audience member. Show gets rambly and too conversational at times, but they do a good job of traversing the landscape, and there are plenty of hidden gems. Frequent co-host John Dvorak drives me crazy, despite his smarts.

– Podcacher: All about geocaching, with “Sonny and Sandy from sunny San Diego, CA.” Great production values. Love it when the adventures are huge, but get bored with all the geocoin talk (unfortunately fast-forwarding through casts and bicycling don’t go well together, especially since losing tactile control after moving to the iPhone). Still, lots of tips, excellent anecdotes, and occasional hardware reviews.

– Radiolab: I’ll go with their own description: “On Radio Lab, science meets culture and information sounds like music. Each episode of Radio Lab. is an investigation — a patchwork of people, sounds, stories and experiences centered around One Big Idea.” I love what they do with sonic landscapes. I can’t think of a better example of utilizing the podcasting medium’s unique characteristics. The shows are mesmerizing, and welcome relief from my tech-heavy audio diet.

– This American Life: Everyone’s favorite NPR show. Excruciatingly wonderful overload of detail on the bizarre lives or ordinary Americans. Your soul needs this show.

– Slate Magazine Daily Podcast: They say it would be a waste of the medium’s potential to just have someone read stories into a microphone. I beg to differ. I don’t have time to read Slate, but love their journalism. I’m more than stoked to receive a digest version of the site through my ear-holes.

– FLOSS Weekly: Another Leo Laporte show, but in this one he gets out of the way and lets his guests do the talking. All open source, all the time. Usually interviews with leaders / founders / spokespeople for various major OSS initiatives. Great interviews recently with players from the Drizzle and Django camps.

– Stack Overflow: Who woulda thunk a pair of Windows-centric web developers would have captured my attention? But great insight here into the innards of web application construction. Geeks only.

– NPR: All Songs Considered If you’re old-and-in-the-way like me, feeling like your musical soul isn’t get fed the way it should, you could do a lot worse than subscribe to All Songs Considered – annotated rundown of recent (and sometimes not-so-recent) discoveries that remind you why music is Still Worth Paying Attention To.

– This Week in Django: Part of the reason I’ve been so quiet lately is that I’m deeply immersed in Django training, having inherited a fairly complex Django site at work (more on that another day). This podcast is pretty hardcore stuff, for Django developers only. Can’t pretend to understand it all, but right now it’s part of the immersion process, and is helping me gain scope on the Django landscape.

– The WordPress Podcast: I spend more of my time (both at work and at home) tweaking on WordPress publication sites than anything else, and this is a great way to stay abreast of new plugins, security issues, techniques, etc. Wish it was more technical and had a faster pace, but it’s the best of the WordPress podcasts.

– Between the Lines: Back in my Ziff days, I worked for the amazing Dan Farber, who’s still going strong at ZD. This is my “check in with the veteran tech journalists” podcast, and is a serious distillation of goings-on in the tech world. Always a good listen.

Obviously there’s no way to fit all of these into the weekly commute hours, but I try. No time to digest more, but dying to know what podcasts have you gripped. Let me know.

Music: Minutemen :: Storm In My House
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The Long Tail in My LR

Fried from a long day, then with a client until 11:00, much-needed couch time. Overwhelmed myself with Olympic opening ceremony last night, couldn’t take more. Then remembered – wasn’t Tivo about to grow a YouTube gland? Checked in and sure enough, a bazillion new vids were there, waiting to be inhaled.

As expected, video quality isn’t great blown up to HDTV size, and audio is sometimes out of sync with the video, but the range of human experience at your fingertips is mind blowing. Started with a few Captain Beefheart clips, moved on to Django Rheinhardt, then to Jacob Kaplan-Moss talking about Django at Google HQ in 2006. I’d never watch an hour-long video at the computer, too restless for that, but this works.

The long tail is in my living room.

P.S. Thanks to the WordPress dev team for creating the WP posting client for iPhone, which I’m tapping away at now – wallowing in luxuriant tech.

“The ink is never dry on these babies.”

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Tooth Imprints on a Corndog

Recently at Stuck Between Stations:

Cassette-Hand-1-Tm Tooth Imprints on a Corndog: Me on fortuitous audio collisions: Tape print-through effects, the Backyardigans, Dark Side of the Rainbow, and Scandinavian jazz weirdo Solveig Slettahjell.

Hotter Than July: A Summer Playlist: Roger Moore on Dick Dale, Tuareg rockers Tinariwen, Blitzen Trapper, The Kinks, The Replacements, and more. Which tracks are fueling your summer?

The Residents: Music for Melting: Roger Moore gets re-acquainted with a classic arctic chill. Have to admit, it’s been probably 20 years since I’ve listened to this, but now he’s got me digging through Residents back-catalog too.

Bo Knows Qaddafi: Roger Moore eulogizes the late great Bo Diddley, and relates the gunslinger’s sometimes embarrassing politics.

Carrie Nation: Roger Moore says ex-Sleater-Kinney guitarist cum ThuderAnt Carrie Brownstein is his favorite American rock guitarist of the last dozen years. I personally don’t “get” Sleater-Kinney, but do dig her writing at Monitor Mix.

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Sixth Annual Matthew Sperry Memorial Festival

2008Sperryfesttn matthewsperry.org is a site I maintain in honor of a musician friend who was tragically laid down by a car while on his bike five (wow) years ago this June. Every year, Matthew’s musician friends gather forces and put on several days of amazing benefit shows in the Bay Area. Details on the Sixth Annual Matthew Sperry Memorial Festival have been posted, and this year is shaping up to be great.

The festival tradition of commissioning new works for large ensemble continues with a page from Matthew’s composition notebook: Treasure Mouth, which requires a band to follow along to lyrics as fast as they can be written out for them by others — call it improv karaoke.

Music: Fela Anikulapo :: Mr. Follow Follow
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Obama’s “Big Pink” Problem

Opg2.Jpeg Recently at Stuck Between Stations, Roger Moore on Barack Obama’s attempt to shake his image as a closet Pink Floyd fanatic and the “Us and Them” mentality that has dogged Roger Waters. Meanwhile, Floyd’s inflatable pig floats out of control into a neighboring golf course.

Hillary Clinton noted that “there is no clear evidence that Barack Obama is an America-hating Pink Floyd fanatic. As far as I know.” “But let me tell you,” she continued, “during my administration, we’ll have no time for laser light shows, ponderous guitar solos, vague anti-capitalist lyrics, and 23-minute songs about albatrosses. From day one, we’ll be rolling up our sleeves for the working people of America, pausing only for some Carly Simon, James Taylor and maybe a few aromatherapy candles.”

Also: Roger on Thao Nguyen’s “Bag of Hammers”

Music: Curtis Mayfield :: Stare And Stare
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Cachao’s Legacy

This week at Stuck Between Stations: Roger Moore on the lasting influence of Cuban bassist Israel Lopeze – Cachao’s Legacy: Two Nations Under a Groove:

Although Cuban bass virtuoso Israel “Cachao” Lopez took his final breaths this week, it’s hard to imagine this humble giant, who played in more than 250 groups from the 1920s on, as not having a pulse. Cachao would have been legendary even if he had retired around 1940.

More at the site.

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Rickrolling Yngwie

This week at Stuck Between Stations: Rickrolling Yngwie (me) on StSanders’ sublime video overdubs of guitar gods Yngwie Malmsteen, Eric Clapton, Steve Vai and Eddie van Halen with his own obviously skilled but painfully bad guitar solos.

Already we’re seeing spin-offs. It’s one thing to watch Eric Clapton’s face and fingers scrambling after bad college-level jazz, but what do you do with real jazz? Check the great Oscar Peterson quartet ripped to shreds by an equally talented pianist calling himself Tibenham:

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CD Cover Meme

Barbeue-Pork Righteous CD cover meme image pool happening on Flickr these-a-days.

1. First, you’ll need a name for your band. This will be the first article title on WikiPedia’s random page selector.

2. Now for the all-important album title. Grab the last four words of the very last quote on the quotationspage’s random quote selector.

3. And of course, the album art. Yours will be the third picture, no matter what it is, on Flickr’s most interesting page.

Run your elements through the Photoshop sausage grinder, emulating the style of an album you already own (if you like), and out comes an album cover that looks like it could be at home in the Indie or Alt.Whatever section of your local record store.

To get yours into the pool, you’ll need to join the pool, then go to your uploaded image and click the “Add to pool” link right above it (I’ve always thought Flickr made the process of playing in photo pools unnecessarily complicated).

I made one.

Music: Son House :: Empire State Express
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River

Hancock Herbie Hancock’s tribute to Joni Mitchell “River” is gorgeous in every way, and wholly deserving of its recent grammy (one of only two jazz records to have won Album of the Year in the past 50 years, yeesh). Tina Turner, Leonard Cohen, Norah Jones, Joni herself, Hancock’s lush keyboards, horns by Wayne Shorter… what more could an old Joni head want? The kindling power of the album inspired Salon’s Gary Kamiya to write a moving muse on the duality of rock and jazz in his life

Luckily, around this time the rest of the high-culture spinach on my plate started to taste better, which encouraged me to stick with jazz. I had known, in a dutiful art-history way, that Cézanne’s landscapes were better than pretty ones by some officially accredited hack; now I started to actually see them and like them. As a sophomore in high school I had bought an old 78 rpm set of Debussy’s “Iberia” because I thought it was an antiquarian ticket to cultural gravitas; now I realized that you got an incredible rush out of the end of the first movement. The kicks started getting easier to find. The same thing happened with jazz. The dusty old high-culture drugs kicked in there too. I might have started out listening to jazz because it was good for me, but the more I did, the more I realized that I liked it. Those schmaltzy tunes turned out to conceal beautiful modulations — quieter, less obvious than those in rock, but with a complex logic that grew on you. As I learned to follow the mathematics of jazz, I started to be able to listen without so much interior strain.

Worth a read.

Music: Herbie Hancock :: Solitude