Gluten-Free Saul Pancake Williams

I recently wrote about a new song by Saul Williams, one of my favorite creative people.

Saul was featured in a video on Soul Pancake, the philosophical website started by actor Rainn Wilson and friends. You can watch on the site by clicking here, or watching in the embedded player below:



Although I don't share all of the same beliefs as Saul, this video is quite interesting. I particularly found it interesting when he talked about deep breaths being the relaxing aspect of smoking cigarettes. When he was talking about an innermost power as opposed to a higher power, it reminded me of my own beliefs about many people maybe giving too much credit to God and not enough credit to people. I have faith in the potential of myself and the potential of others.

Pretty Hate Machine cover artwork reimagined.

Nine Inch Nails' 1989 debut album, Pretty Hate Machine was remastered and is being reissued.

Although it's far from being my favorite Nine Inch Nails album, I really like the new cover of the album. Trent Reznor asked his creative director Rob Sheridan to reimagine the original Pretty Hate Machine cover, getting rid of the pink and changing the font. Here's what Mr. Sheridan came up with:

Man tries to kill spider, causes explosion in bathroom.

This article is a few months old, but it amuses me seeing as how I regularly have to fend off spiders.

My favorite part is:
"We're not entirely sure whether the spider got away or not but there was no sign of it at the scene."

Creationism

I bought LEGO Creationary today. I've been wanting to get the game for a while now, especially after the Penny Arcade comic and Gabe's news post about it. Todd and I played it for a few hours and it's a lot of fun. The different difficulty levels of the cards don't seem very accurate though. Even the "easy" cards were really difficult, and I've been building with LEGO for over two decades.

The booklet of rules instructed to photograph models you're particularly proud of before taking them apart, and so I took a photo of the lawnmower I built. As you can see, it was pretty heavily based on the image on the card.


The wheels and axels aren't actually attached but held in with friction. I didn't want to use the tires that came with the game. After building the lawnmower, I noticed there was an example of one on the box for the game, and my lawnmower was way better than the one on the box.

After we finished playing, I was fooling around with the pieces and made Wall-E from memory. Having looked at an image of him now, I'm quite impressed with how accurate my LEGO version is.


I definitely recommend this game to anyone who likes board games and LEGO.

The Cheesecake Factory

Today I went there for the first time in my life.

I think I'm in need of medical attention.

Late Night, with Shawn Smith and Happy Chichester

Shawn Smith made an announcement a month or so ago on facebook that his band Brad would be playing on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, and that if you're "flipping through the channels... and see a large bear fronting a band," that it would be him.


I know of Shawn Smith mostly from his work with Greg Dulli, in his bands The Afghan Whigs and The Twilight Singers, which are two of my favorite bands. I am not that into Shawn Smith's own bands, except for a few Pigeonhed songs, like "The Full Sentence":



There's also a Pigeonhed song from over a decade ago that there's a really wellknown remix of, which I can guarantee you've heard before, even if you didn't know what the hell it was.

Regardless of me not really caring for his band Brad, I wanted to see that large bear on television. I waited patiently until the night of the performance, trying my best not to forget about it. Fifteen minutes or so before I figured the band would go on, I went to my television to tune in to the show and wait. I was having technical difficulties due to the satellite signal or something, and missed the performance.

I finally got around to watching the Late Night episode today. Since that episode is only up on the site until the 27th, and you might not want to watch the full episode anyway, here's a youtube video of just the performance:



I seem to have a talent for recognizing voices, and as soon as the chorus began on the words "stay low," I was thinking "Hey, that sounds like Happy Chichester singing backup vocals." Sure enough, a bit later they showed a closeup of him playing keyboard and singing backup. For being behind a keyboard at the back of the stage and just being a backup singer, he sure got a lot of camera time and closeups throughout the performance.


Harold "Happy" Chichester has also worked with The Afghan Whigs and The Twilight Singers. In fact, he and Shawn Smith were in the first Twilight Singers album, Twilight As Played By The Twilight Singers quite a bit, and sang together on some of the songs. Here's a song called "That's Just How That Bird Sings" where Greg Dulli, Shawn, and Happy all sing:



Shawn Smith's voice is the first you hear, off to the left, and Happy Chichester's voice is the second one you hear, off to the right. I'm sure you can hear why I love their voices. It was cool seeing them on a television show, even if it was actually on the computer.

Annual Halloween Party, Annual Todd

I wrote an entry about being excited about Halloween this year and trying to make it special. My cousin Megan is having her annual family Halloween party on the 30th, and this year I'm actually putting some effort into my costume. I've been working pretty hard on it, and it should be pretty cool, but for now I'm keeping it a secret. Look forward to seeing it though, because after the party (maybe even the day of Halloween) I'll definitely be writing an entry all about it, with photos!

This weekend I'm going over to my good friend Todd's house. I realized the other day that I haven't hungout with him in a year. The last time we hungout was the weekend of the AFI concert last year. In fact, when we hangout this weekend, it will be exactly a year after that concert, as it was on October 16th 2009, and October 16th 2010 is this Saturday. Time goes by really fast.

The NBC Thursday night shows are on tonight. I'm looking forward to the live episode of 30 Rock. Now I'm going to go take a nap until the shows are on. :)

Options - 100 Different Spellings

My friend Brian Asbury recently released the first album, 100 Different Spellings, from his latest music project, which he calls Options.


I met Brian almost 4 and a half years ago when Patrick and I were visiting some relatives in Cincinnati, Ohio. My aunt basically set up a "play date" between us and Brian. He came over for maybe a couple of hours and we talked about music the whole time. Over the years since then, we've stayed in somewhat sporadic contact through social networking sites and e-mail correspondence.

Brian has previously played with various bands and released a few solo albums, but he wanted to try something different this time. He described Options to me as "a networking tool for myself and the musicians I've worked with on many occasions." My cousin Kelly Klein has been a frequent collaborator of his, and she was one of the collaborators on 100 Different Spellings. Her voice can be heard on several songs. Her sister Caitlyn Klein (also my cousin) created the beautiful album cover seen above as well as the digital booklet that comes with the album when you download it.

The music on 100 Different Spellings flows from track to track and is meant to be listened from front to back. A lot of the music comes off as a collage rather than songs, with Brian being the collage artist with his role as producer. Although there are separate tracks, moods, and musical ideas that could be referred to as songs, the project effectively blurs the lines between easily definable endings and beginnings, aside from the obvious beginning of the album and obvious ending of the album 33 minutes and 41 seconds later. This concept doesn't sit well with all listeners, challenging beliefs as to what constitutes as music. The album was described to me by one listener as "just noise" since there was no beginnings or endings.

I enjoy the album quite a bit, having listened to it three times already, and I hope I get to collaborate with Brian sometime, maybe on a future Options album.

For the time being, Brian is offering the album for free, but you can pay what you want for it. He has it on Bandcamp. You can download 100 Different Spellings by clicking on the beautiful artwork above, or you can listen on the Bandcamp music player below.

ExplainMyHeart, a new song by Saul Williams

Apparently, Saul Williams is releasing a new album in early 2011. I seemed to be one of the three people on the whole internet talking about it. That changed when Mr. Williams made a cryptic post on his facebook page with the phrase "De-code My Heart" along with a link called "Volcanic Sunlight".

For reasons unknown to me, I immediately went to youtube and searched for both phrases, and a video came up with one of the images from the Volcanic Sunlight website. It said the video was uploaded "one hour ago". I pressed play, and a song started playing. It was unmistakably the voice of Saul Williams in the song. When the song finished playing, I noticed there was one play on the video. I was possibly the first person on the entire internet to watch it. Here's the video, which is the still image accompanied by a wonderful new song.

It sounds very different from his older music, but I like it a lot.

The percussion in the song made me immediately remember an old Wired magazine interview from November 2008 (almost two years ago now) which was a year after he released his last album. He mostly reflected on that album, but he also talked about some of the newer material that he was working on.

"The focus of the new album is percussion. For all intents and purposes, it’s a discussion of percusson. If I have to label some of the songs, maybe some are dance punk, dicso-y, or prog-rockish, but I really don’t know how to categorize it. Some of it makes me think of De-Loused in the Comatorium, The Mars Volta’s first album — there’s a lot of live instrumentation with a hip hop filter. I lived for a year in Brazil as a teenager, and percussion was always present in my appreciation for music, but not necessarily in my music. So that’s where my head is at."

I imagine he was talking about the album Volcanic Sunlight.

You can download the song "ExplainMyHeart" for free by clicking here. I recommend it. As I said, it's a wonderful song.

UPDATE #1:
It turns out one of the images was a code that needed to be decoded by some fancy device apparently known as a "smartphone" to give you the url to download the song. I have never owned a cellphone, so that all sounds like another language to me.

I also found out that the song or a previous version of the song was featured in a video from over a year and a half ago that I've never seen called Saul Williams: Writer In Residence on Current TV. It's kind of shocking how something can exist for so long right under our noses without us knowing about it.

Update #2:
Saul Williams retweeted one of my tweets regarding my excitement about his new album. :)

Turtle Eclipse Of The Heart

Being a lifelong fan of awesome LEGO stuff and robotic turtles, naturally I loved Peter Reid's and Simon Burfield's turtle factory.



It gets better. The machinery and conveyor belt move! Watch this video:

Columbus Gay.

Today is Columbus Day.

About 518 years ago, three ships mistakenly sailed to the wrong continent, the passengers therefor discovering a completely new continent, which just so happened to be already inhabited by various thriving societies of native people (who are still, after all these centuries, commonly incorrectly referred to as "Indians"). As a result of all this, I don't have to go to work today, and apparently I can buy furniture interest-free.

Today is also National Coming Out Day.

I don't want them to be brainwashed into thinking that wearing these little Speedos and grinding against each other is an equally valid and successful option.