Does anyone know how I can get the last three hours of my life back?

I mean, I know I willingly subjected myself to the atrocity that was the Bachelorette finale. But still, that was one of the most painful and awkward television moments I've ever had to witness. I think it's emotionally scarred me. It's going to take me awhile to learn to believe in reality television again.

Here's something fun I learned about from Salon.com's music critic, Thomas Bartlett.
Providence, RI radio station WBSR has a segment called "Phoning It In," where indie rock people give live performances over the phone and have "awkward conversation," according to the website. I guess so far they've had John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats, Jolie Holland, and Phil Elvrum of the Microphones/Mt. Eerie. How fun. They're streamed here.

You know what's funny? Making fun of a guy at the bar because of his awful hair and huge mustache, then watching him walk up onto the stage because he's in the band. That's funny.

Because suddenly his awful hair and mustache is really cool, just because he's in the band.

But then it turns out he is the band's maracas player. He also does the tambourine and some hand claps.

Does that make him even cooler?

Also funny is the girl in front of the stage doing the Elaine. The only thing holding her back from being as bad a dancer was that she was able to control the use of her thumbs. Just barely.

You could tell she thought she was REALLY GOOD, which made the whole scene that much more pathetic.

The maracas player also rocked out the xylophone at one point. He was really whaling on that thing, little rectangular bells were flying everywhere.

The Deathray Davies were much more rockin' than I'd expected them to be. Apparently they rocked so hard the Elaine girl couldn't control her arms or legs.

Or in the words of George Costanza, "It was like a full-body dry heave set to music."

Thanks, Nicole! March is soooo far away, but I'll survive (somehow). =)

Oh, one more thing- by the (incredibly fast) request by Liz, I've added Bloc Party to the Recommended page- unfortunately, the album doesn't come out in the US until March 22, so the link is just to a pre-order for now. I HATE how Pitchfork puts out reviews of albums based on UK releases and not US ones. Anyhoo, I recommend pre-ordering the album and then downloading it from Soulseek in the meantime to tide you over. It is an extremely good album.

Finally (and this will be the last post on this topic- at least for today), Amazon apparently has SPECIAL graphics I can put up for their discounted pre-order of the new Harry Potter book. Based on my memory of going to a Borders midnight Harry Potter book release party with hundreds of pre-teens dressed like wizards and trees, some people I know may be planning on pre-ordering it again :) . So once I find an appropriate graphic and an appropriate place for that graphic (maybe on the blog), I'll put it up.

Amazonification update: I've converted all the albums on the Recommended Listening page to the new Perfect Face for Amazon links and have added two other (hopefully) subtle graphic links; one on the sidebar that goes to Amazon's music section, and one on the Archived Shows page that will feature a different album each week by an artist I played on my show that Friday. This week it's Ratatat's self-titled album. It's actually kind of cool, it tells you the Amazon price and the cheapest used price available in the Amazon marketplace.

Jeez, they should pay me for all this free advertising I'm giving them!

Oh wait, they are. I've sold out! Huzzah! I've always wanted to do that.

Alright, time to watch the Apprentice before the Deathray Davies show at the Bottle tonight.

Hello to all my perfect face readers!

So, while bumming around on the internet here at work, I've discovered that Amazon.com has a program where I can incorporate them into my website and make some money. Funnily enough, running this website has begun to cost me some of that, so anything I can do to recoup that money is fine by me. Plus, I'm a big Amazon fan, and since most of the links on my Recommended Listening page go to Amazon anyway, it just makes sense.

So anytime you buy something on Amazon after clicking on a link from my page, I get a cut- especially if the link is to a specific product (e.g. LCD Soundsystem's new album) and you buy that product. So in addition to just buying the albums that I recommend on Amazon, if you have any plans to ever buy anything from the website, let me know, I'll throw a link to it on my website, you can click on it to buy that product, and you'll be indirectly benefiting me and the PFFR (no porn. Ok, maybe, if it's expensive porn).

Basically, you are just transferring funds that would have been paid to a large corporation (though a large corporation I admire) and diverting them to a good cause- me, and my quest to expand muscial knowledge for all.

Doesn't that make you feel good?

I think this also give me incentive to start recommending more albums :) . I'll be working on Amazon-ifying the site over the weekend.

This morning's show went extremely well even in the last-minute absence of our special guest (who apparently underestimated the effect of getting up at 2:30 am), though I apparently have no other adjective to use to describe dance music other than "hot." Might be time to beef up my musical vocabulary and stop stealing Paris Hilton's (or letting her steal mine, but whatever). But the voice breaks sounded much more natural than last week's did. Today's lesson: it's good to be prepared, but not overly prepared.

I also took a couple pictures of Megan and I tearin' it up in the studio (well, or laying around in the studio), which I'll put up on the site sometime this weekend.

Alright, tomorrow morning's show is planned out (though not quite as to the word and to the minute as last week's), our special guest DJ is (somewhat) primed and ready to go, and I've got a setlist chock full of hot dance beats to get us through to 6:00 am. It's the last day of the pledge drive, so it's the last time you'll have to hear me say things like "every dollar counts."

Soooooooo . . .

This new Kelly Clarkson song, "Since U Been Gone," is pretty great. Not quite Britney Spears' "Toxic" greatness capacity, but still . . .

OK, methinks I'm going to have to start subscribing to The Believer. This month's issue has an interview with Todd Solondz, whose new movie comes out in April (!!!!), and an excellent concert review of the Arcade Fire.

Again, it's pretty obvious how I've been spending my last hour of work.

And a fun interview with Jack White from The Believer that doesn't once mention his band or his music.

Here's an interesting article on the freakish beast that is Clear Channel from Minneapolis' City Pages.

Woohoo, all done with my taxes! If anyone would like to retain my tax services, I'd be happy to help out . . . for a small fee :) Or maybe for a really good mix tape or something.

The accountant in me hasn't left entirely. I really enjoy doing taxes.

No, seriously.

I just realized while writing up my LGL review that in the post below, I'd written "the mixture of the bad songs and their french accents" when I really meant "the mixture of the bad sound and their french accents." The songs were awesome, the sound was not. My bad.

Spazzy french-canadian art-punks Les Georges Leningrad last night at the Open End Gallery was out of control. First of all, I felt like I'd stepped into a David Lynch music video. The venue is basically an upscale basement show, a large art space converted into a venue by putting a (too low) stage in the middle and a "bar" in the corner consisting of a cooler of PBR and two boxes of wine. A huge parachute is hung over the ceiling covering the stage and most of the room, probably in an attempt to contain the sound, which isn't especially good unfortunately. Other than that there were red spotlights on the stage giving it an extremely eerie glow, especially under the parachute. The band came out in costumes, with singer/keyboardist "Poney P" in a polka-dotted dress and a black wig that fell lower and lower on her face throughout the show, covering the cat whiskers she'd painted on herself; drummer "Bobo Boutin" dressed as some sort of superhero called "La Creature," with LEOPARD HOTPANTS (I saw quite a bit of skinny, skinny ass throughout the show), a cape, a zorro mask, and drawings of weird birds on his chest; and finally guitarist/electronic noise guru "Mingo L'Indien" in this orange and yellow spandex number that covered his entire body (head included, with a felt mustache attached) and just said "superhero" on the front in felt letters. I should add that all these costumes were clearly homemade, and hilarious. You can only imagine what kind of craziness ensued for the next hour. They tried to talk occasionally in between songs, but the mixture of the bad sound and their french accents made it difficult to really understand what they were saying, but it was funny anyway. I'll have a full review up here and on tinymixtapes sometime soon.

I should also add that the outfits in the audience were no less ridiculous than those up on stage. I so wish I'd had a camera. I guess I hadn't been to a real hipster-y show lately, but this was too much. These weren't just hipsters, they were a bunch of kids (all ages show, snap) trying to outdo each other by making the biggest "statement," like the star trek-meets cher boy who was wearing, in order from the bottom up, black velcro shoes (not ironic, just awkward), black tapered jeans, a sequined tunic, large thick glasses with tape on the side, and had a rattail. There was also the boy wearing a polo dress, polka-dotted tights, and some sort of bird mask on his head.

Anyhoo, if LGL are coming to your town soon, it's a must see.

FYI, I've been told that the shows are downloading much faster now, which I'm assuming is due to my buying more bandwidth for the site. So download away!

Damn, I wish this was doing casting calls in Chicago!!!

Tribute went pretty well and is up now; if you have never really listened to the Dismemberment Plan, it's a great overview of the band from beginning to end. Bear with the incredible cheesiness of the voice breaks in asking for money for the pledge drive. I scripted the show out because I knew I'd be too tired to really think, and it's somewhat obvious at points, even though I tried to avoid it. But hey, what can you do?

Next Friday is the last day of the pledge drive, so it will be an hour dance party with a potential special guest with the initials J.B. . . . (if he really thinks he can get up that early)

Alright, my Dismemberment Plan tribute is completely planned out and ready to go tomorrow morning. Listen up! (Or download away . . .)

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

May 7 and 8- Built to Spill @ the Metro

The last band I must see before I die. Huzzah!

Meanwhile, I've been eyeing a shirt that says "good writing is sexy" for awhile at the Nerve.com shop, which is usually found at www.thenerveshop.com, but for some reason the link isn't working today.

Sign me up for official dorkiness, but if you were watching Gilmore Girls last night like I was and noticed Rory's 'Reading is Sexy' t-shirt and loved it--you should be delighted to know that you can find it here: www.buyolympia.com, which features all sorts of Olympia, WA designers and has links to buy music from Olympia record labels (like Kill Rock Stars, etc). I bought the 'reading is sexy' shirt in blue. http://www.buyolympia.com/q/sid=838044398/Item=readingisblue.

See what the Heavenly States have been up to . . . apparently they just became the first band to play in . . . Libya?!?!?

Playing hooky from work today, and getting a new punk-er haircut tomorrow! If my new hair looks good, I'll follow up with piercings and tattoos. If it looks bad, I'll see you next year when it's grown out/faded away . . .

Call WLUW to pledge from 8-9pm CT today and I'll be answering! See membership gifts you too can own here.

Even though I've vowed to never again celebrate Valentine's Day (at least in a traditional way), I won't ignore it completely, mostly because it's inescapable. But I absolutely love this picture that I found- it's from an amateur photographer named Jacob Dobkin in New York who's has a photo blog (www.bluejake.com); he's doing a series on love, and this was one of the pictures.

Bloc Party, the next Franz Ferdinand.

Last night's Low show was good, even though I was exhausted from the radio show and Low's music is not exactly a pick me up. Tim Rutilli, singer of Califone, was a last minute replacement as an opener, and it was interesting to see him go through Califone material alone. I just love his voice though, and it reminded me how weirdly cool that band is. Pedro the Lion was OK, they again skimped on Control, which is their only album that I really like, and none of the new songs really do much for me. Low's set surprised me- I wasn't sure how well their sloooooooooow music would go over in a venue as big as the Metro. Their new stuff is more "rockin," however, and the new stuff came off pretty well and kept me from passing out in between the slower (but still better) stuff off of albums like Things We Lost in the Fire. Mimi's voice is just amazing, I think it sounded better live than on the albums even; whoever was doing the sound for the show did an excellent job, because her and Alan's voices were absolutely crystal clear. I think my favorite moment was "Laser Beam," which is basically just Mimi's voice and a few plucks of the guitar; all 1000+ people in the venue were just completely silent, which wasn't the case during some of the other songs. It reminded me of the "Silencio" scene in Mullholland Drive, which is one of my favorite movie scenes ever.

I'll have a full review up here and on tinymixtapes in the next couple days. Next week: Les Georges Leningrad at the Open End Gallery (Spazzy Canadian art-punk- can't wait!) and possibly I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness at the Empty Bottle, which I haven't been to in almost two months (but will soon be at almost every weekend).

Jesus lives, and he's hosting a radio show in Los Angeles. He's also available by e-mail.

I'm going to pass on this.

"Sunday night's Grammy Awards will include Tim McGraw, Bono, Norah Jones, Alicia Keys, Brian Wilson, Steven Tyler and Al Green, all backed by Velvet Revolver, performing John Lennon's 'Across the Universe.'"

This morning's show went very well- I had two callers! One making a request and one responding to the free tickets we were giving away to the King Kong show at Schubas on the 22nd. I'd never heard of King Kong, but the song I played of them was hilarious- this guy talking about space travel over weird keyboards- and apparently it was enough to entice someone to call in for free tickets at 5:30 in the morning.

The show and corresponding playlist are up now on their respective pages. You might not be able to download the show until after the 13th when my monthly allotted bandwidth resets itself- let me know if anyone has any problems with it after Sunday.

As it says on the homepage now, next week begins 10 days of pledge drive action (HOT pledge drive action) at WLUW with a goal of $55,000 raised. Every show from 6am to 10pm will have special guests, live bands, prize giveaways, and more to entice people to listen and donate. But I won't be left out! Now that I am building a following and all. So next week after Megan's 4-5am all Prince show, I'll be doing an all-Dismemberment Plan show, in addition to talking about the pledge drive and directing listeners to the website to pledge. Should be hot . . .

So during my daily work scouring crappy commercial radio stations all over the country, I stumbled upon this awesome one in Cincinatti of all places, WOXY. It was on the air until last May, and is now an internet-only radio station because clearly a station this cool could never make it in the commercial world. Check it out.

From the news wires . . .

SUPER BORE

On Monday, the FCC received exactly two complaints from viewers regarding Sir Paul McCartney's halftime performance at the Super Bowl. (Janet Jackson generated more than 500,000.)

Both complainers reportedly said they were "bored" by McCartney's 12-minute, four-song set. We are told there is little likelihood of a fine being levied.

We are not making this up.

I just found out Tinymixtapes is getting around 13,000 unique hits a day, and rising! Meanwhile, this website gets like, 10 or 15 a day, which is a monumentally huge number to me. Not 13,000 monumentally huge, but still more than 1 hit a day coming from me. Maybe when my show moves up to a normal time slot, that number will shoot up to like, 20 a day!

So, a few posts ago I mentioned the Caribou/Junior Boys show that the Bottle's got going on June 7. Apparently they decided it still wasn't good enough and added the Russian Futurists to the bill. This is officially an electro-pop lovers dream show, even better than the Mouse on Mars/Ratatat/Junior Boys triple whammy of 2004 and at a far superior venue. And if that wasn't enough, the Bottle has continued it's run of adding a fabulous new show every 2-3 days with Menomena returning on March 4. Some good and hot drool-worthy music should help tide me over until June.

I've decided to write a tinymixtapes article declaring my undying love to the Empty Bottle. If I had any real writing skills, it would be in sonnet form with iambic pentameter.

I saw this coming from a mile away. Somehow "the best albums of 2000-2004" doesn't quite roll off the tongue. I refuse to participate in any sort of look back at the decade until 2010, though I will say that I'd put Modest Mouse's "The Moon and Antartica" on the top of my non-existent list.

I saw Earlimart in the summer of 2003 at the black cat in DC--and looking back I do remember thinking there was a disproportionate amount of people sporting abercrombie....which is even more strange considering it was at the back stage of the black cat (aka tiny, tiny venue). However, I don't remember seeing any pointy shoes or soul patches. Hmmmm......maybe TRL has been giving Earlimart shout-outs lately???

So the halftime show last night with Paul McCartney was definitely the best of recent memory. Just good rock that everyone can enjoy presented in an understated way without ridiculous costumes or awful dance moves. I hope MTV is permanently banned from producing it so we don't have to sit through any more campy Britney Spears/Aerosmith or Justin Timberlake/Janet Jackson-type pairings.

Earlimart show last night was good. They played "The Movies" and a half-assed cover of the Beatles "In My Life," and the singer's voice is oh-so-lovely (as is the singer, although he was sweating profusely). Also, I didn't notice until 3/4 of the way through the show that they had a second drummer in the corner, for reasons I did not understand. The crowd was extremely bizarre, meanwhile. In addition to the usual hipster/indie types, there was a strange contingency of tight-jeaned pointy-boot girls and the men who love them, who apparently missed the turn-off to the gold coast club scene. Quite possibly the most annoying girl on the face of the planet (or at least the most annoying girl of the moment) stood in front of me the whole time, some sort of tall skinny blond sorority type draping herself all over her ugly boyfriend with a soul patch, who was there with four of his friends in matching sweaters (different colors though). Then there was who I will call "Orange-shirted dancing man" in front of me who kept pumping his fists and headbanging- does "In My Life" inspire this reaction in normal people? When he got a beer I thought it might mean he'd have to restrain himself, but that just lead to a slower, more controlled form of the headbang/fist pump. Did someone put posters for this show up in Lincoln Park or something? When did these kinds of people start co-opting my music?

Oh Empty Bottle, why must you taunt me by booking such an awesome show on June 7???

Tuesday, June 7: Caribou (formerly known as Manitoba) w/ the Junior Boys

Oh, how I love thee, Empty Bottle. But why must you make we wait? All the best shows aren't until late April, May and June- hello Animal Collective, Books, Prefuse 73. I'll just have to be tided over by the other 30 shows I'll see before then. Starting tonight with a sold-out Earlimart show at Schubas! If you aren't sure where I am on any given weekend for the next few months, try the Bottle first.

Show is finished and up on the home page and archived shows sections. I appear to be going over my allotted bandwidth for the site. I'm not totally sure what that means, though it seems to be running at normal speeds at the moment. By the way, if anyone ever has any problems or finds any broken/incorrect links on the site, please let me know so I can fix it. Thanks!

T-bar! Just think: you'll be getting a mini-vacation of your own this weekend!! Portland is thrilled to have you, and my friends and I are in the process of deciding where to take you out! woo hoo!

Must . . . stop . . . dropkicking . . . the Faint . . .

Bedtime. I'm thinking maybe some sort of theme for tomorrow morning's show . . . look for it to be up on the website before many of you have probably even woken up for the day!

And Tori- at least you have the utterly uplifting news that in less than two short months, I'll be gracing your presence in lovely Seattle!!!! Now you have something to look forward to, right? I know I sure do, I'm dying for a vacation.

There's a good article up today on tinymixtapes that I edited. I'm particularly proud of the picture I picked out to go with it.

My ipod broke and my neighbor asked me to keep my music down......as if I needed more reasons other then law school taking an ugly turn to be depressed lately.

Work is doing me in today, so I've started an iPod dance party in my cubicle featuring the hot beats of: LCD Soundsystem, the DFA Compilation #2, Erlend Oye's DJ Kicks, and more. It's almost making the day bearable.

Looks like some churches accept Spongebob, just as he is.