Phish - 12/30/09 (American Airlines Arena)

Set I: Soul Shakedown Party, Runaway Jim, Jesus Just Left Chicago, Dixie Cannonball, Stealing Time from the Faulty Plan, Corrina, What's the Use, Tela, Gone, Rocky Top, Chalkdust Torture, David Bowie

Set II: Sand, The Curtain With, Lifeboy, Back on the Train, Wading in the Velvet Sea, Hold Your Head Up, Love You, Hold Your Head Up, Free, Boogie on Reggae Woman, Run Like an Antelope

Encore: Frankenstein

Google offices

A gallery of Google's offices. A $400 billion company and they are sitting in boats...

Phish - 12/29/09 (American Airlines Arena)

Set I: Golgi Apparatus, Maze, Driver, The Connection, Wolfman's Brother, Ocelot, Reba, Access Me, Divided Sky, Cavern

Set II: Kill Devil Falls, Tweezer, Prince Caspian, Gotta Jibboo, Wilson, Gotta Jibboo, Heavy Things, 2001, Slave to the Traffic Light

Encore: Sleeping Monkey, Tweezer Reprise

New York Times visualization

NYTimes.com traffic on June 25, 2009 (notice the surge at 1:10 when the news broke that Michael Jackson died):

Phish - 12/28/09 (American Airlines Arena)

Set I: Sample in a Jar, NICU, My Soul, Roggae, Undermind, Bouncing Around the Room, Poor Heart, Stash, I Didn't Know, Beauty of a Broken Heart, Possum

Set II: Mike's Song, Light, I am Hydrogen, Weekapaug Groove, Alaska, Backwards Down the Number Line, Makisupa Policeman, Harry Hood, Contact, Character Zero

Encore: First Tube

What's under your mask?

I think that's all of them (via):

@Home Alone

Someone has re-created Home Alone in real time on Twitter, using all 22 characters from the movie (via):

@KevinMcCal Yeah we did. But if you want any...somebody's gonna have to barf it all up, because it's gone. :D

Best Albums - 2009

These are the twelve albums I spent the most time listening to in 2009:

1. Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion: The last great record of this decade, and probably one of the most important to start the century.
   
   
2. The Flaming Lips - Embryonic: A conceptual void that filled your mind with the infinite possibilities of the interstellar battles of good and evil.
   
   
3. Sunset Rubdown - Dragonslayer: Nervous rock and roll that can lift your spirits.
   
   
4. Humcrush - Rest at World's End: Personally, it solidified Rune Grammofon as the greatest record label that isn't known; release the (robotic) hounds.
   
   
5. Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest: Is starting to equalize Yellow House, which I didn't think could be done.
   
   
6. Dirt Dress - Perdido en la Suciedad: Seriously, how much fun can you have in 18 minutes?
   
   
7. Medeski Martin & Wood - Radiolarians II: Their finest in years.
   
   
8. Andrew Bird - Noble Beast: Bird is turning into the next musician that people will refer to a as a "troubadour."
   
   
9. Fever Ray - s/t: Fever Ray's debut was a fine example of videos and visuals supplementing an album and elevating it beyond what it could accomplish alone.
   
   
10. Black Mold - Snow Blindness is Crystal Antz: Not quite sure how this one fits into the grand scheme of things, but it does.
    
    
11. Yo La Tengo - Popular Songs: They just keep getting better.
    
    
12. Califone - All My Friends are Funeral Singers: Like Yo La Tengo, they just keep getting better.

(2008 albums)

Bob Dylan - "Christmas in the Heart"

Fitting, that, in a year where Michael Jackson inexplicably died and nearly took the Internet with him, Brett Favre joined the Minnesota Vikings, and an insane Colorado family tricked us into thinking their young son was flying through the sky in an experimental, homemade air balloon, prompting jokes about Michael Jackson ordering takeout from heaven, Bob Dylan released a Christmas album. I've often used the word "bizarre" to characterize what Dylan has done here to 15 Christmas classics, but in light of everything that has happened this year--including Ocotomom ruining the lives of eight children and people enjoying Susan Boyle--maybe that assessment is a little over-the-top. After all, 100% of the proceeds of this album went to feeding the hungry, and so the Christmas spirit is there and alive. The raspy toad voice on "Winter Wonderland" makes you wonder sometimes, but hey, whatever, it's 2009. Happy Holidays.

"Metal Spiderwebs"

Literally sketchy animation from one of my favorite albums of the year:

The NFL wants brains

The NFL and Boston University are teaming up for brain research (via):

The league now plans to encourage current and former NFL players to agree to donate their brains to the Boston University Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy, which has said it found links between repeated head trauma and brain damage in boxers, football players and, most recently, a former NHL player.

Here's hoping that Chuck Cecil can be persuaded to posthumously join the study.

Beim Chef

Potentially useful device by Roman Singer (via):

"Broom" snippets

Excerpt from The Broom of the System (p. 261):

"Little dude looked like the devil. And what was all that about talkin' about his leg like it was another person? He would like address comments to his fucking leg. What was all that about?

"Lenore's brother has only one leg. One of LaVache's leg is artificial."

"No shit."

"None whatsoever."

Mag+

Mag+ is a digital magazine prototype developed by Bonnier and BERG:



What I find most interesting is that they are trying to preserve the physicality of content--page turning, page orientation, etc-- while eliminating the barriers that come between the reader and the act of reading--page turning, page orientation, etc. What a trick!

STS9 - "Ad Explorata"

It's official: STS9 have become an electronic group that will likely record electronic music for the rest of their career. This isn't really surprising; there have always been electronic subsidiaries peeking out from behind the scenes (Live at Home, sections of Artifact), and they greatly enhanced what STS9 was doing for music. But this complete shift is also disappointing, because it means the end of Sound Tribe Sector 9 as we know them. Up until Ad Explorata, physical instrumentation always came out on top in their recordings. Not anymore, I'm afraid. STS9 have made it pretty clear that, from now on, they are going to cater more to mindless rave culture than they are to a mindful culture of music fans who enjoyed the way STS9's instrumentation stretched past genre into sound.

With the instrumentation gone, songs like "Phoneme" and "Heavy" basically become Fuck Buttons and Autechre songs. That's not to say that these artists are intrinsically lesser than STS9; they just play in realms that STS9 don't belong in. Those realms are one dimensional, made for guys who manipulate buttons and switches for a living. STS9 are guys who play instruments. Zach Velmer on drums. Dave Murphy on bass. Hunter Brown on guitar. Those are the players that would make a song like "Oil and Water" unbelievable. But on Explorata, it's completely believable, because it sounds manufactured, something made rather than inspired. Ditto with "Lion," which was such a trip to see in concert--and thank God we will still have STS9 concerts, where they can't hide behind buttons and switches and must actually play their instruments--but now, it sounds more like brooding robotic cats.

Lung cancer genome

Researchers have mapped the lung cancer genome:

Ozzy on "The Floyd"

Ozzy Osbourne on Pink Floyd in a recent Classic Rock magazine article:

"Some bands were, like, weekend hippies, but Pink Floyd were the big, professional hippies. I can't think of any songs, but I really like their album Obscured by Clouds. That was the soundtrack, wasn't it? I remember listening to it when I was high on drugs. It had those weird bubbles on the cover. The Floyd made good albums; I don't think they ever made a bad one. Dark Side of the Moon is the obvious one."

What a clear assessment.

"Broom" snippets

Excerpt from The Broom of the System (p. 352):

Fieldbinder smiled and continued, "I invite you to realize that this program does nothing other than present us with a protagonist, a coyote, functioning within a system interestingly characterized as a malevolent Nature, a protagonist who endlessly, tirelessly, disastrously pursues a thing, a telos--the bird in the title role--a thing and goal so far, far less valuable than the effort and resources the protagonist puts into its pursuit." Fieldbinder grinned wryly. "The thing pursued--a skinny meatless bird--is far less valuable than the energy and attention and economic resources expended by the coyote on the process of pursuit. Just as an attachment radiating from the Self outward is worth far less than the price the establishment of such an attachment inevitably costs."

Dr. J__ inflated an anatomically correct doll and began to fondle it as it stared blankly. Fieldbiner smiled patiently.

"A question, doctor," he said. "Why doesn't the coyote take the money he spends on bird costumes and catapaults and radioactive road runner food pellets and explosive missiles and simply go eat Chinese?"

The Beatles: 1,000 Years Later

"They invented the thumbs up." (via):

Nearsightedness on the rise

Jim Ray has an interesting thought on nearsightedness (which has increased by 66% over the last 40 years):

This also strikes me as one of those fairly obvious cases of humans actively working against our own evolution. Nearsightedness isn’t being bred out because it’s relatively easy to fix — a pair of glasses or contacts. Even worse, the fix just might be working against evolution in that, at least to some, a pair of glasses is a desirable trait (how else to explain their hipster cachet?). Contacts and even lasik only complicate things further since they fix the symptom but not any root genetic causes without providing any kind of flag to potential mates that your children are going to need an opthamologist.

He also notes, obviously, that the numerous glowing rectangles that we now center our lives around don't help. I've never worn contacts or glasses, but one of these days I know my eyes are just going to blow out.

Tim Duncan's shoes

I had no idea Tim Duncan had his own shoes, much less these shoes:

Nike doesn't care if Tiger Woods cheated

Nike Chairman Phil Knight announced that the company is committed to its relationship with Tiger Woods and that his (Woods) recent infidelity is a "minor blip" in the grand scheme of things. This reminds me of when Nike paid all the fines the NBA assessed Michael Jordan for wearing Nike Air Jordan shoes, except much different.

What are you buying?

In a new social networking twist, blippy.com allows you to publicly post your credit card purchases as you make them, or in other words, provides "a fun and easy way to see and discuss the things people are buying" (because the $6.99 I put on Visa debit last night for a gyro needs to be discussed).

Bogut rinsing off his mouthguard

Mp3s: good enough

It's no secret that CD sound quality trumps mp3 sound quality, but that seems to matter less these days:

In February, a music professor at Stanford, Jonathan Berger, revealed that he has found evidence that younger listeners have come to prefer lo-fi versions of rock songs to hi-fi ones. For six years, Berger played different versions of the same rock songs to his students and asked them to say which ones they liked best. Each year, more students said that they liked what they heard from MP3s better than what came from CDs. To a new generation of iPod listeners, rock music is supposed to sound lo-fi. Good enough is now better than great.

Do survey participants really prefer the antiquated, lo-fi sound? Or has digital music just become so pervasive that an effect of normalcy has set in on listening habits? I think it's the latter; the preference of medium is dictating the preference of message. And that worries me because I think it means that music is becoming less important. The sacrifice of quality for convenience (i.e., Live Phish downloads that are available 6 hours after the show, the original "free" download of In Rainbows) is creating a generation of listeners who are merely satisfied with how their music sounds. In a world filled with awesome technology, why wouldn't you expect--no, demand--better?

Bookfuturism

Tim Carmody from Snarkmarket just launched bookfuturism.com, where he hopes to map the future of reading:

Bookfuturism.com is a digital commons and multi-user blog open to anyone interested in the future of reading. It's also a social network for bookfuturists - men and women who believe that books, bookshops, libraries, publishers, newspapers, authors, and readers have a future -- albeit one that may be radically different from the present -- and who want to participate in that future.

Neat. I'm glad this type of topic is getting its own blog. Despite the rush of new e-readers and the ever-changing facets of online reading, this is still something that is sneaking up on us and needs to be looked at closely.

Silver Trembling Fetus ornaments

Don't know what to get that person who has everything for Christmas this year? Well now you do, because the Flaming Lips are selling Silver Trembling Fetus Christmas tree ornaments through their website:

Animal Collective - "Fall Be Kind"

Fall Be Kind finishes what Merriweather Post Pavilion started in 2009: a jagged shift in the potential of music-making and visual art; a challenge to the way we hear and see music. Fall Be Kind is the pleasant nightcap to a marvelous year in which Animal Collective collectively wrought havoc on the systems already in place for pop music sensibility. From now on, we will evaluate music differently and think more critically about what it can be. Even those people who reject Animal Collective as flamboyantly bizarre will scratch their heads and try to figure out why they don't like this band. Because if you give them just the slightest chance, they will dig their gentle paws into your brain and rewire everything.

There are only 5 songs here--it's an EP after all--but each one represents a unique afterthought, or some type of leftover fume still smoldering from last winter's monumental release. "On a Highway" reeks of that meandering in-the-clouds-stuff that Animal Collective have pretty much patented in terms of music. "Graze" and "What Would I Want? Sky" could stand up to--or maybe even exceed--anything on MPP. They straddle that line between super serious and jovial; they are just as much solid oak desk as they are warm friendly couch. None of these songs would quite belong on MPP, but there's no denying the influence, nor the nagging feeling that the band is gearing up for something else.

"Bastard"

Slow-motion grenade ping-pong, set to music from some group called Metal on Metal...the outcome is not very surprising:

The Noughtie List

December is the time for the festival of lists, and since December 2009 is also the end of a decade the need for lists is even greater. Thus, Jason Kottke is compiling a list of lists to satisfy our burning desire for lists. The Noughtie List summarizes the decade with all sorts of categories.

David Ope

David Ope's Tumblr is quite the mind-trip (via):

Phish - 12/5/09 (John Paul Jones Arena)

Set I: AC/DC Bag, Chalkdust Torture, Stealing Time From the Faulty Plan, Divided Sky, Ya Mar, Sneaking Sally Thru the Alley, Old Home Place, Cavern, Funky Bitch, David Bowie, The Wedge, Bold as Love

Set II: Tweezer, Light, Piper, Free, Sweet Virginia, Harry Hood, Suzy Greenberg, Golgi Apparatus, Run Like an Antelope

Encore: Loving Cup, Tweezer Reprise

Scientific images of the year

Popsci.com has a gallery of the most amazing scientific images of 2009, and if I had to pick a winner, it would be the now famous image of the Atlantis shuttle silhouetting the sun:

Phish - 12/4/09 (Madison Square Garden)

Set I: Heavy Things, Possum, Wilson, Kill Devil Falls, Glide, 46 Days, Bouncing Around the Room, Reba, Dinner and a Movie, Guyute, Maze, First Tube

Set II: Scents and Subtle Sounds, Rock and Roll, Seven Below, Twist, Mike's Song, I am Hydrogen, Weekapaug Groove, The Horse, Silent in the Morning, You Enjoy Myself

Encore: Shine a Light

Phish - 12/3/09 (Madison Square Garden)

Set I: Punch You in the Eye, Backwards Down the Number Line, Axilla I, Taste, Boogie on Reggae Woman, Stash, Lawn Boy, Time Turns Elastic, Back On the Train, Julius

Set II: Down with Disease, Piper, Fluffhead, Cities, Free, Halley's Comet, 2001, David Bowie

Encore: Character Zero

Their roles, today

A past-meets-present photo shoot of some rather famous roles:

Phish - 12/2/09 (Madison Square Garden)

Set I: AC/DC Bag, Chalkdust Torture, Wolfman's Brother, NICU, Ocelot, Brian and Robert, Poor Heart, Sample in a Jar, Peaches en Regalia, Divided Sky, Cavern

Set II: Golgi Apparatus, Light, Slave to the Traffic Light, Tweezer, Joy, Sparkle, Harry Hood, Wading in the Velvet Sea, Suzy Greenberg, Run Like an Antelope

Encore: A Day in the Life, Tweezer Reprise

Killing the hardcover?

Tim Carmody has a great post on pricing e-books:

But cre­at­ing a mar­ket­place isn’t just about sync­ing to a device and match­ing read­ers’ eye­balls to con­tent. You also have to estab­lish, respond to, and even­tu­ally sta­bi­lize read­ers’ and pub­lish­ers’ expec­ta­tions about sales, espe­cially about price.

This is harder than it sounds. How much should an e-book cost? How much should pub­lish­ers have to share with the retailer? Just what are you buy­ing? For hard­cov­ers and paper­backs, these expec­ta­tions have built up over a long time. This tweaked a bit when online sell­ers and big-box retail­ers started offer­ing moderate-to-steep dis­counts over cover. None of this makes estab­lish­ing norms for dig­i­tal sales any easier.

There's always been a ton of debate on the pricing of digital goods, but what I find most interesting about e-book pricing is the conflict it creates between two physical goods, and not just a physical and a digital good. We buy hardcover books because they are the "first," and they fill our bookshelves with large, concrete physical shapes of knowledge and entertainment. Paperbacks carry a similar effect, although it's not as profound (I've always thought of paperbacks as "leftovers," books that you tear to shreds while you consume them; the hardcover is more of a symbol). E-books have completely eliminated the physical traits of the two, and bring the price advantage to the level of the paperback (Carmody fleshes this out well).

Assuming you are not obsessive about the physicality of your books, this is a great deal for you. But at the same time, it kills the storied uniqueness of the hardcover. Could the hardcover just disappear if people are willing to have first access with an e-book? Seems that those who desire paperbacks would have an easier time because they're getting the book for the same price. Ditto with CDs and mp3s: $11 or $9.99 isn't going to break the bank, so you have the flexibility to choose between the mediums. But why would anyone pay $35 for a hardcover when the same story was waiting digitally for them at $9.99?

Tiger Woods incident

Taiwanese animation explains what really happened to Tiger Woods:

Scientists grow meat

Scientists from Holland have grown meat in a laboratory from living pig cells:

The advent of so-called “in-vitro” or cultured meat could reduce the billions of tons of greenhouse gases emitted each year by farm animals — if people are willing to eat it.

I am willing; I have a chili recipe.

"Transference"

Out January 17th (they better redeem themselves after Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga...).