To all of my readers:
I just wanted to apologize for any confusion caused by the recent "Please Enter Username and Password" pop up you may have encountered when visiting my blog. I protected my twitter account, but didn't realize that would affect my blog readers. This has since been fixed, and you should have no problem. For the record, if you thought you wouldn't be able to read my blog without a password, your fears are understandable but I want you to understand that I would never do that to my readers. I'm a believer in free access to information. Not that I'm into pirating music or movies or books, but there's a fine line between justifiable protection of content and greed. Anyway, you would have been able to read my blog but not my twitter feed unless you 1) had a Twitter account and 2) were an approved follower of me. Now, you should be fine.
I also wanted to talk about ads. I know that ads can be annoying, but I've allowed them on my page because if, for any reason, you click on an advertisement on my blog, Google pays me a little bit of money. Now, I've been doing this for a year and a half now, and so far, I've made a whopping two dollars and forty one cents. But, you know...it's a minor source of income. Actually, I have not received this money because they won't send a check for less than fifty dollars. So, twenty-two and a half more years, I should be getting a check.
Another change you will see in future posts (and also added retroactively to older posts) is a new way to monetize my blog. This one I really like, and I think it might actually garner a better payoff than Google Adsense (the ads you already see). It's called Amazon Associates, and what happens is that I can link to a product sold by Amazon and if you, my reader, clicks on the link and then subsequently buys the product, I get a commission on the sale. I won't be posting random links, though. I talk about lots of literature, film and music on the blog, so whenever I mention something, I'll link to it on Amazon. And yes, I am aware of the irony of a partnership whereby Amazon might pay me money after I lamented the way they handle the vinyl they sell. And let it be known that I would much prefer you to go buy books and records from local book and record stores, but you can always get a great deal on Amazon and many of us (myself included) will continue to buy products on Amazon.
So, with that being said, I will now demonstrate this new feature.
This past Saturday (April 17th) was Record Store Day. I went to Euclid Records and picked up the new Broken Bells LP on Vinyl. And it's freaking awesome, as I said before in my review. I also found a copy of The Best of Buddy Rich on vinyl (a Best-Of which was never subsequently released on CD) and Kathy looked through to bargain bin to find a copy of the American Graffiti Soundtrack for two dollars. Sweet deal! I highly recommend you celebrate Record Store Day next year. And no, going to the music section at Best Buy and picking up the new Justin Stupidface Beiber CD does not count.
Discussed in this post:
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Wednesday, April 07, 2010
Float Trip
Well friends, the calendar is telling us that it’s early Spring, which is a time of year I generally love; baseball and cycling seasons start up, the days get longer, I can open my bedroom windows at night and hear the breeze stir the magnolia out front…my moonroof opens and lets in a wind which cools instead of freezes…the aforementioned magnolia tree explodes in shades of pink which then rain down on my front lawn, causing me to blog about it and make my readers question my sexuality…and summer is right around the corner, of course.
But that’s just what the calendar is telling us. And while baseball and cycling seasons are just starting, and the days are getting longer and my bedroom windows are open at night, the hot air coming in my moonroof, the browning magnolia petals on the lawn and the thermometer tell us a different story. They tell us that Summer is upon us. Or, rather, they’re telling us that if it’s Spring already, brace yourself for one hell of a nasty hot Summer.
Hot weather, I can mostly handle. My car does have a/c, as does the house and my office. I own shorts and sandals and t-shirts and the ice cream truck comes down my block at least once every other day during the months of June through August. But there are certain things I like to do in the summer which involve being outside, you know, where there is no air conditioning as a rule, and I’d like to be able to do those a) without collapsing from heat stroke and b) alongside my wife who is, as I mentioned before, pregnant, and who is therefore likely to be extra sensitive to things like heat indices firmly ensconced in the triple digit range.
One of my favorite ways to cool off on a hot day is to indulge in a cold treat. I believe I have mentioned before how I adore Fitz’s Root Beer, a locally brewed root beer of which I had cases shipped to me when I lived in Minneapolis. And fortunately for me, Fitz’s is sold at the local grocery stores around here, so even in the middle of a ridiculously hot night, if my wife (or I) start craving it, I can run to Schnucks or Shop n’ Save and pick up a 4 pack. Of course, if we start craving it during regular business hours, we could always run to the restaurant where the root beer is brewed and pick up a frosty bottomless mug or a heaping root beer float.
Of course another way to cool off is to go to Ted Drewe’s, which serves up some of the best Frozen Custard around (and the best Frozen Custard on Route 66, I should assert). They’ve got so many flavors to choose from, I still haven’t tried them all (and the combinations, OH! the combinations!!). They even serve up a great float, which makes you believe their vanilla custard was engineered specifically for such a purpose. It’s that good. And if they’re closed, again, I can pick some up at the grocery store.
Now, there is a travesty in St. Louis when it comes to these two items; I have yet to find a restaurant that serves a Fitz’s Root Beer/Ted Drewe’s root beer float. To that I say, “What the hell, St. Louis? This is a serious problem we need to solve right away.” Look; when you go to Fitz’s, they serve you up a root beer float made with their amazing root beer and a very generous helping of Edy’s or Breyer’s ice cream (I can’t remember which, but I know it’s one of those). Really, Fitz’s? I mean, I guess it’s not generic Sam’s Club ice cream, but still. And at Ted Drewe’s, when you order your float, you get Barq’s Root Beer. And I guess, I could give these two places some leeway; Fitz’s chooses an ice cream that everybody can get their hands on, so they know what it tastes like with other root beers and they can tell the difference between other root beers in a float and theirs in a float. And it works the other way for Ted Drewe’s; everyone who’s had a root beer float has probably had a scoop of vanilla in a Barq’s root beer, so give them that familiar root beer with the unique floating mound of frozen custard. But…you other places? What’s your excuse? There are plenty of restaurants in St. Louis which offer Fitz’s Root Beer on their menus, and just as many serve Ted Drewe’s with their desserts. But the places I can think of that serve both do not serve them together (these are mostly places like Blues City Deli or Mom’s Deli which serve both of these in individual containers out of stand-up coolers). But think of it; this is the ultimate St. Louis dessert. The only way to get a more ultimate St. Louis dessert out of a frosted glass mug would be to liquefy a Gooey Butter Cake, and raise your hand if you think that sounds satisfying (Dad, you and your brothers need to put your hands down right now). Now, I have not been to every restaurant in St. Louis, so maybe there is a place that serves this amazing concoction (so amazing, it makes a cynical atheist like myself admit that if Heaven exists, it probably tastes something like a Fitz’s/Ted Drewe’s Float), but I haven’t found one. The only way I have ever been able to enjoy one of these is to purchase the two items separately and combine them at home. And you should try it, yourself. Right now. Don’t live in St. Louis? Come visit, and I’ll join you. Because nobody likes to drink alone, even if it is a root beer float.
But that’s just what the calendar is telling us. And while baseball and cycling seasons are just starting, and the days are getting longer and my bedroom windows are open at night, the hot air coming in my moonroof, the browning magnolia petals on the lawn and the thermometer tell us a different story. They tell us that Summer is upon us. Or, rather, they’re telling us that if it’s Spring already, brace yourself for one hell of a nasty hot Summer.
Hot weather, I can mostly handle. My car does have a/c, as does the house and my office. I own shorts and sandals and t-shirts and the ice cream truck comes down my block at least once every other day during the months of June through August. But there are certain things I like to do in the summer which involve being outside, you know, where there is no air conditioning as a rule, and I’d like to be able to do those a) without collapsing from heat stroke and b) alongside my wife who is, as I mentioned before, pregnant, and who is therefore likely to be extra sensitive to things like heat indices firmly ensconced in the triple digit range.
One of my favorite ways to cool off on a hot day is to indulge in a cold treat. I believe I have mentioned before how I adore Fitz’s Root Beer, a locally brewed root beer of which I had cases shipped to me when I lived in Minneapolis. And fortunately for me, Fitz’s is sold at the local grocery stores around here, so even in the middle of a ridiculously hot night, if my wife (or I) start craving it, I can run to Schnucks or Shop n’ Save and pick up a 4 pack. Of course, if we start craving it during regular business hours, we could always run to the restaurant where the root beer is brewed and pick up a frosty bottomless mug or a heaping root beer float.
Of course another way to cool off is to go to Ted Drewe’s, which serves up some of the best Frozen Custard around (and the best Frozen Custard on Route 66, I should assert). They’ve got so many flavors to choose from, I still haven’t tried them all (and the combinations, OH! the combinations!!). They even serve up a great float, which makes you believe their vanilla custard was engineered specifically for such a purpose. It’s that good. And if they’re closed, again, I can pick some up at the grocery store.
Now, there is a travesty in St. Louis when it comes to these two items; I have yet to find a restaurant that serves a Fitz’s Root Beer/Ted Drewe’s root beer float. To that I say, “What the hell, St. Louis? This is a serious problem we need to solve right away.” Look; when you go to Fitz’s, they serve you up a root beer float made with their amazing root beer and a very generous helping of Edy’s or Breyer’s ice cream (I can’t remember which, but I know it’s one of those). Really, Fitz’s? I mean, I guess it’s not generic Sam’s Club ice cream, but still. And at Ted Drewe’s, when you order your float, you get Barq’s Root Beer. And I guess, I could give these two places some leeway; Fitz’s chooses an ice cream that everybody can get their hands on, so they know what it tastes like with other root beers and they can tell the difference between other root beers in a float and theirs in a float. And it works the other way for Ted Drewe’s; everyone who’s had a root beer float has probably had a scoop of vanilla in a Barq’s root beer, so give them that familiar root beer with the unique floating mound of frozen custard. But…you other places? What’s your excuse? There are plenty of restaurants in St. Louis which offer Fitz’s Root Beer on their menus, and just as many serve Ted Drewe’s with their desserts. But the places I can think of that serve both do not serve them together (these are mostly places like Blues City Deli or Mom’s Deli which serve both of these in individual containers out of stand-up coolers). But think of it; this is the ultimate St. Louis dessert. The only way to get a more ultimate St. Louis dessert out of a frosted glass mug would be to liquefy a Gooey Butter Cake, and raise your hand if you think that sounds satisfying (Dad, you and your brothers need to put your hands down right now). Now, I have not been to every restaurant in St. Louis, so maybe there is a place that serves this amazing concoction (so amazing, it makes a cynical atheist like myself admit that if Heaven exists, it probably tastes something like a Fitz’s/Ted Drewe’s Float), but I haven’t found one. The only way I have ever been able to enjoy one of these is to purchase the two items separately and combine them at home. And you should try it, yourself. Right now. Don’t live in St. Louis? Come visit, and I’ll join you. Because nobody likes to drink alone, even if it is a root beer float.
Thursday, April 01, 2010
Welcome Friend to New Administratrix Post Home
Hello friendly! This domain web site for now has being taking over. Google acquired Blogger 2006 and for since sold to new exciting Web Development guru Flying Dog Super Media Group! Posting this for benefit of readership. Now!
These blog has been selected to hold Welcome Message with certain number other blogs (for list see example of media) due to high traffic areas of interest (New Zealand, USA, No Canada) via Google Analytics (Patent Pending). These blogs are to be in future maintained by and through old offices of adminstration except for to have parent company affiliated messages periodically.
These blog been chosen for high usage of key words in search for "music" "books" and "vinyl" for which customer base greatly enthusiastic and reading. Connected to socialist media outlets (spacebook profile, tweeting machinery with bird logo, sexy fun time chat site negatively impact) very productive for multiple hits and increased marketing output.
For one day of every month or two, site specific messages to be generated by new parent affiliate office company as message to readers for what to be buying in store. Links to be provided (please Click Here for preview!) to new amazing fun interesting stuff!
Are we enjoying the fun yet? But there is more for to be coming!
Beginning January of year twenty hundred and elevent, please register for website priveleges including comment feature, reading feature, pay feature. All major credit cards accepted or call new toll free number (not yet available for calling from US land or cellular telefony) to pay by autotake debit or personal check numbered above three thousand twelve.
Future inprovements may conclude:
-Open Source Development platforms.
-User created content (via yourtube and wikipeople)
-Contests Galore!! (Win free Television upgrade!)
-Chocolate covered raisin cereal
Please continue checking back for more of fun times and good stuffs! Until next times!
Zarniwoop Van Harl, President, Megadodo Publications!!
hugging_Kitten.jpg
These blog has been selected to hold Welcome Message with certain number other blogs (for list see example of media) due to high traffic areas of interest (New Zealand, USA, No Canada) via Google Analytics (Patent Pending). These blogs are to be in future maintained by and through old offices of adminstration except for to have parent company affiliated messages periodically.
These blog been chosen for high usage of key words in search for "music" "books" and "vinyl" for which customer base greatly enthusiastic and reading. Connected to socialist media outlets (spacebook profile, tweeting machinery with bird logo, sexy fun time chat site negatively impact) very productive for multiple hits and increased marketing output.
For one day of every month or two, site specific messages to be generated by new parent affiliate office company as message to readers for what to be buying in store. Links to be provided (please Click Here for preview!) to new amazing fun interesting stuff!
Are we enjoying the fun yet? But there is more for to be coming!
Beginning January of year twenty hundred and elevent, please register for website priveleges including comment feature, reading feature, pay feature. All major credit cards accepted or call new toll free number (not yet available for calling from US land or cellular telefony) to pay by autotake debit or personal check numbered above three thousand twelve.
Future inprovements may conclude:
-Open Source Development platforms.
-User created content (via yourtube and wikipeople)
-Contests Galore!! (Win free Television upgrade!)
-Chocolate covered raisin cereal
Please continue checking back for more of fun times and good stuffs! Until next times!
Zarniwoop Van Harl, President, Megadodo Publications!!
hugging_Kitten.jpg
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Album Review: Broken Bells Self Titled Album
James Mercer and Brian Burton are two great forces in the world of modern pop music, though you may not recognize their names. Mercer is the front man for indie-pop icons The Shins, and Brian Burton has been associated with The Black Keys, The Gorillaz, Gnarls Barkley, Beck, and is the genius behind the critically acclaimed and infamously banned The Grey Album. You may know him as Danger Mouse.
Six years ago, these two met and discussed a collaboration. The timing was not right until last year, when they entered into Burton's studio stocked with an array of musical instruments, beers, ambitions and their respective genius. Had the result been released last year, my Top Fifteen Albums of the last decade would have had a slightly different look. The result is Broken Bells, a tidy pop album which deserves a spot on your shelf. Or hard drive.
What's strange about the combination of these two artists is where each comes from; Danger Mouse is primarily a producer who favors heavy studio work and post=production on his projects, while The Shins' style is mostly stripped down and easily reproducible in a live setting. The good news for Broken Bells (which is the name of the "band" as well as the album) is that the heavy production can be carried to a live setting (as they have proven on late night television and at this year's South by Southwest music festival. This is the result of a careful selection of musical instruments; if the sound could be produced by a mechanical instrument rather than an electronic synth machine, it was.
Tracks like "The High Road," "Your Head is on Fire" and "October" offer a kind of synergy of 80's synthpop, 90's techno, and 60's rock. And with everything Danger Mouse is attached to, there is a hip hop undercurrent. All of these genres meshing at once could be disastrous, but in Burton's hands and with Mercer's musicianship and wonderful voice, the end result is not a melting pot but a well mixed salad. The last track, "The Mall and Misery" fades into its component chord progression, played on organ and then instead of landing for the finish, it seems to vanish into the air. It left me strangely satisfied and yet hungry for another listen.
This album has the potential to land the underrated and soon-to-be much coveted honor of the "I'm o.k, I'm all write Best Album of the Year" award. It's the first serious contender to have been released (have you heard the new Spoon album, because I find it fair enough and also OK Go's new album is great but not competitive against the band's music videos). Burton and Mercer put together a band to support the album, but they haven't as yet made plans beyond late-night television and SXSW. Here's hoping they'll continue to tour, and that they manage to find their way to the St. Louis area. I missed The Decemberists last year and since Sunny Day Real Estate and Conan O'Brien both deemed St. Louis unworthy of visiting (why, CoCo, why?), one can only hope for a treat like Broken Bells.
You can listen to the whole album at NPR Music's Exclusive First Listen through the end of the month.
I can't find it now, but All Songs Considered host Bob Boilen did a chat with Burton and Mercer about the album, and it was released as the ASC podcast before they began their SXSW coverage. You can listen to their performance at NPR's SXSW Music Showcase Live at Stubb's BBQ here. Much like The Decemberists did at Stubb's last year during the festival, Broken Bells played their entire album live. It's not as good as being there, I am sure, but if you like the album but are skeptical of how it would sound live, give it a listen.
Speaking of bands playing music festivals, I would like to take this moment to congratulate Pokey LaFarge and the South City Three for landing a spot at this year's Newport Folk Festival. This is a pretty big deal if I do say so myself, and I'm very excited for these guys. My father and I were eager to attend the show, but it looks like that will be a no go for me at least, as the festival is in August and that's when the baby is scheduled to arrive. As much as I love Pokey and the SC3, baby takes precedence. With luck, NPR music will cover it and podcast it and I can continue vicariously living through NPR Music's Bob Boilen and Robin Hilton. Seriously...how do I get a job like those two have? Totally unfair.
Six years ago, these two met and discussed a collaboration. The timing was not right until last year, when they entered into Burton's studio stocked with an array of musical instruments, beers, ambitions and their respective genius. Had the result been released last year, my Top Fifteen Albums of the last decade would have had a slightly different look. The result is Broken Bells, a tidy pop album which deserves a spot on your shelf. Or hard drive.
What's strange about the combination of these two artists is where each comes from; Danger Mouse is primarily a producer who favors heavy studio work and post=production on his projects, while The Shins' style is mostly stripped down and easily reproducible in a live setting. The good news for Broken Bells (which is the name of the "band" as well as the album) is that the heavy production can be carried to a live setting (as they have proven on late night television and at this year's South by Southwest music festival. This is the result of a careful selection of musical instruments; if the sound could be produced by a mechanical instrument rather than an electronic synth machine, it was.
Tracks like "The High Road," "Your Head is on Fire" and "October" offer a kind of synergy of 80's synthpop, 90's techno, and 60's rock. And with everything Danger Mouse is attached to, there is a hip hop undercurrent. All of these genres meshing at once could be disastrous, but in Burton's hands and with Mercer's musicianship and wonderful voice, the end result is not a melting pot but a well mixed salad. The last track, "The Mall and Misery" fades into its component chord progression, played on organ and then instead of landing for the finish, it seems to vanish into the air. It left me strangely satisfied and yet hungry for another listen.
This album has the potential to land the underrated and soon-to-be much coveted honor of the "I'm o.k, I'm all write Best Album of the Year" award. It's the first serious contender to have been released (have you heard the new Spoon album, because I find it fair enough and also OK Go's new album is great but not competitive against the band's music videos). Burton and Mercer put together a band to support the album, but they haven't as yet made plans beyond late-night television and SXSW. Here's hoping they'll continue to tour, and that they manage to find their way to the St. Louis area. I missed The Decemberists last year and since Sunny Day Real Estate and Conan O'Brien both deemed St. Louis unworthy of visiting (why, CoCo, why?), one can only hope for a treat like Broken Bells.
You can listen to the whole album at NPR Music's Exclusive First Listen through the end of the month.
I can't find it now, but All Songs Considered host Bob Boilen did a chat with Burton and Mercer about the album, and it was released as the ASC podcast before they began their SXSW coverage. You can listen to their performance at NPR's SXSW Music Showcase Live at Stubb's BBQ here. Much like The Decemberists did at Stubb's last year during the festival, Broken Bells played their entire album live. It's not as good as being there, I am sure, but if you like the album but are skeptical of how it would sound live, give it a listen.
Speaking of bands playing music festivals, I would like to take this moment to congratulate Pokey LaFarge and the South City Three for landing a spot at this year's Newport Folk Festival. This is a pretty big deal if I do say so myself, and I'm very excited for these guys. My father and I were eager to attend the show, but it looks like that will be a no go for me at least, as the festival is in August and that's when the baby is scheduled to arrive. As much as I love Pokey and the SC3, baby takes precedence. With luck, NPR music will cover it and podcast it and I can continue vicariously living through NPR Music's Bob Boilen and Robin Hilton. Seriously...how do I get a job like those two have? Totally unfair.
Monday, March 08, 2010
Complaints and Then Traditions.
I have received several-not complaints per se but, comments I think we'll call them-lately to the tune of "Your last couple posts were way too long!" To that, I say, "Dem's da breaks, kiddo."
But really, here's a good summary: Downloaded music okay. Physical media better. Vinyl records best. Electronic books stupid. Physical books awesome. Electronic media mixed bag. Easy for new players to the media game. And finally, iPad stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid.
I hope that clears things up a bit.
I know I have talked about my family a little bit in the past. I count myself lucky to count myself amongst not only my parents and sister, but also amongst my sister's husband, their two little girls (link), my wife, her parents and their nine other children and their various and varied family members. There are a lot. Six brothers, three sisters, five sisters-in-law, one brother-in-law, three nieces, two nephews and one more nephew to be born in the next three weeks (so, you know, by the time you get around to finishing my last two posts and this one, that kid will be halfway through with his doctorate). So that's a lot of family for me to keep tabs on.
Add to that, I have close friends who I consider family. Sure, some of that family I may not see all that often, or call consistently, or...wait, now I look like a bad friend/relative. Anyway, I am getting to a point. That point is that with all this family plus the time that these families have spent together (separately and together) comes a slew of traditions.
The traditions range from the weekly to the annually and all other sorts of permutations. I think that traditions are important when building and maintaining a family, so I'm going to talk about some of my favorite ones.
Sunday Dinner - Growing up in my parents' house was kind of...odd. I don't intend that to sound mean, but, for most of my childhood, the house was in a constant state of flux. Not the household, but the house itself, the brick-and-mortar and four-walls-and-a-roof house. One of my earliest memories is of my dad and my uncle Tim working together on remodeling the bathroom. Then together (and with the help of other uncles from both sides of the family) they tackled the deck, tore the old one down and built a new one (which still stands). My sister and I had bedrooms upstairs in what had been the attic but which had been (as my father would say) remuddled into living space. But it had lackluster insulation and no air conditioning, which meant it got ridiculously cold in the winter and unbearably hot in the summer. Winter wasn't a big deal, really, because there were always plenty of blankets. Summer, however, usually meant camping out in the couch in the living room. After a while, I just moved permanently onto the couch. My sister, however, got her own bedroom; what had been the dining room was remodeled into a bedroom and I couldn't understand why she got it and I didn't (at the time, anyway, but now I get it; she's a girl and she was entering those teenage years and I can't think of a better place for a teenage girl than locked up in her own room...haha, kidding Mo). What this meant was that we were now short a bedroom for me and a dining room. We ate a lot of our meals in the living room, which is where I slept.
Anyway, eventually the remodeling process took a huge leap and we had a real life second story to the house. Finally, I had my own bedroom and my own closet and I moved off the futon in the living room and onto a twin bed (later replaced by the futon, which is currently in the basement, and if you're a regular to the blog you've seen it as I am sitting on it in my video blogs). My sister's old room (which, remember, was the dining room) became the living room and we started working on turning the living room (and my parents' old room) into new space. The front half of the living room was going to remain living room, with my parents' old room becoming the rest of the living room. The old back part of the living room was going to become the dining room. But that took a few years. Meanwhile, we had a table in a small room we called the breakfast nook (a sun porch leading out to the deck, which, again, is still there to this day) but we ate most of our meals, again, in the living room. The temporary one. It wasn't until I was mostly done with high school that the whole project was finished. I don't want to make it look like my parents were lazy or anything like that, they just worked when they could and when they could afford it, and when you've got two kids to raise and you're looking at paying for them to go to college maybe, and my mother was in school for a majority of that time and working full time (I did it and I don't know how she did it because I was stressed enough without two kids to take care of), so it went slow and steady. And though I sometimes went without a bedroom, I never went without a bed and though I sometimes went without a dining room, I never went without dinner. So I'm not complaining.
The final piece of the remodel came after I left for college (attempt number one). The summer between my first and last semesters at the University of Minnesota was filled with tuckpointing, new driveway and no kitchen. That's right, that summer my parents remodeled their kitchen, which needed it, trust me. The old one was, shall we say, retro in a very not-cool-retro-but-actually-held-over-from-the-seventies way. The appliances, too (aside from the oven, which had been replaced due to the utter failure of the oven door of the old one, which is a long story I actually won't go into here, surprisingly). But, what that did mean was that summer is written in my memory as the summer of the grill. We grilled almost every meal we ate. We had a charcoal Weber kettle, my late Grandpa Rauscher's Char Broil gas grill, a Coleman camp stove...it was all set up outside on the deck. We ate so well. And we had a brand new refrigerator in the room that had been the dining room and then became my sister's room and then was the living room (side note; that room has actually been very many rooms since my parents moved in; dining room, bedroom, living room, kitchen, office, music room, storage room, pretty much every room my parents have in that house aside from the bathroom), so we had a good summer eating in the relatively-new-dining room. I went back to college before the counter tops arrived.
I am getting to Sunday Dinners here. When I moved back-well, no. After I moved back, actually, and my sister was living with Kevin (who is now her husband), she would come back and eat dinner with us on Sundays. It was nice. We had a kitchen, a dining room, a living room, all functioning. All those meals we had eaten in the living room in my youth, not to detract from them because the food was uniformly good and the company some of the best the world has to offer (sucking up to the family much? Elliot, do you need money or something? No, I promise, it's all part of the literaryness of the post), there is something about gathering around the table with the family once a week and catching up. We kept this going after Kathy and I got married and we moved into our apartment, and it's a tradition that has grown. My sister and her family spend alternating Sundays with her husband's family, which is only fair. We'd probably do the same it weren't distance prohibitive to drive to Kathy's parents' house just for dinner once every two weeks. My grandmother Mary Beth (my mother's mother) joins us. Other extended family members have come. Of course my sisters' girls come along with their parents. And whenever one of Kathy's family members is in town, they tag along as well. Basically it's a great comfort to me to know that each week, I get to spend one meal sitting at the table, laughing with my parents and spending time with people I love.
Gay Schnucks - Okay, having ended that last tradition on a sappy note, I'm going to go for funny now. And no, you didn't read that wrong, that says Gay Schnucks. Schnucks is a supermarket here in St. Louis (I'd link to them but 1. they're not paying me to and 2. I don't think they'd be too keen on any publicity that is preceded by the qualifier "Gay") which is quite nice in its selection, location and hours. The closest one to my parents' house is about a five minute drive and it's open 24 hours, which is helpful to someone planning a get-together in the midst of the holiday season.
That's right, Mom, I'm talking about our Christmas Eve tradition.
Early in the morning on Christmas Eve (or, really, generally late in the evening on Christmas Eve Eve), my mother will do the last minute shopping for the annual(ish) Christmas gathering she and my father host. This gathering consists of my mother, my father, myself, my wife's self, and some other selfs who are wont to comment on the blog occasionally (hi Bridget). This past year it grew in scope to quite an overwhelming proportion, so maybe next year it'll be toned down a smidge. Anyway, the last minute shopping takes place at the aforementioned nearby Schnucks, and the four years I was in high school (and the next couple years after when I lived at home), I would accompany my mother on this shopping trip to provide moral support/push the cart/keep her company. The reason this Schnucks is called "Gay" Schnucks is because it is located near a vibrant gay community, and many of the shoppers you see there are in fact gay couples. The first year I accompanied my mother on this trip I was fifteen, and as I recall this was the first time I had heard the store's unofficial nickname. I thought little of it; so what? Gay people shop there in large, noticeable numbers? Good for the boys! But we were there so late that they made an announcement at a quarter to two in the morning stating that if you had liquor you wished to purchase, buy now or regret it later. Or something to that effect. My mother indeed intended to buy several bottles of wine, so she left me with the list and the cart and rushed to buy the wine in one bulk purchase, promising to return so we could continue shopping together. This was not my first time alone in a grocery store, but it was the first time alone so late at night in a grocery store. I, again, didn't think much about it.
Until...a creepy man started tailing me. Smiling at me, but not in a "Oh, I'm just being polite and we made eye contact" kind of way. More in a, "So...come here often?" Kind of way. I smiled in a way that I was sure said, "No, especially not this late because generally I have a curfew and I'm only fifteen and my mother is just getting some wine. Really, I'm awfully flattered but, as I said, I'm fifteen years old and also, not that there's anything wrong with that but I don't play for that team. Did I mention my mother is just buying some wine? Yeah, she'll be right back any minute. I appreciate the smile, you have lovely teeth for sure but, honestly, I'm fifteen and you're kind of creeping me out and you're standing in front of the milk and I really need a gallon of it so if you could just, say, shove off in a totally different direction, life would be a lot less stressful for me at this moment in time." I'm not sure how it came off, but eventually he wandered away.
You'd think I'd have been deterred by this, but no. I kept coming back. At least five more years. And every year, I think, "Oh, I should go help my mom. This time, though, I'll pick up the wine myself and leave her getting the rest of the groceries."
Weier Family Classic - My wife's family is large, as I said, but they're also spread out across five states (Nebraska, Minnesota, Iowa, Colorado and Missouri). With ten children and a branching family tree, it's difficult to get everyone together. So several years ago, they initiated the Weier (and that's pronounced like the conjunction for "we are" or, if you prefer, like the last name of US Figure Skating pretty boy Johnny Weir though spelled differently) Family Classic. The idea is that each year, the family gets together and holds a contest of some kind, and the winner gets to take home a trophy which is as tall as my wife.
The first year, it was a fishing challenge, and the trophy went to my wife for catching the biggest fish. She wasn't even using bait. And the fish isn't a legal fish to catch, as it's endangered. Of course it's endangered! It bites unbaited hooks (this one bit hers not once but twice). The second year it went to my niece Morgan for "Best New Attraction" (they scrambled for a category that year). The third year (my first participating year, as my wife's fiance) we went bowling, and the trophy went to my wife's brother Joe for getting the most strikes in a row. The fourth year we bet pennies on a minor league baseball game (we were each assigned a batter and for each hit they got, everybody else gave you a penny for a single, two for a double, etc). This contest was held a week after I had married Kathy. And I won.
We've had lawn olympics, rock-paper-scissor tournaments and Diet-Coke/Mentos fountain contests. It's a good way to get the family together and see each other at least once a year. It's been a couple years now, as families have grown it's gotten even harder, but the trophy (wherever it now resides, I can't remember) beckons to each of us. There are those who still lust after it, upset that startups (like myself) can just stroll in off the street and claim the title. They're still waiting for their day. For past champs like myself, we miss the thrill of competition. Also, there's always food involved. Really, ridiculously good food.
Olympic Ribs - This is a relatively new tradition. And by relatively new, I mean it's only happened once, and that in the very recent past. Though it has its roots elsewhere.
The roots lie in another tradition that Kathy and I started; Each night, before we go to sleep, we generally watch one or two episodes of M*A*S*H. You know that show, right? It's been in syndication for my entire life almost, held a viewership record that stood until the most recent Superbowl for most viewers watching a single program (the series finale in 1982). Alan Alda, Jamie Farr wearing dresses, Harry Morgan, Korean War...you've got it now I'm sure. Well, there is an episode in I want to say Season Two called Adams Ribs, in which Hawkeye (Alan Alda) is sick and tired of army food and calls a BBQ joint in Chicago and orders forty pounds of frozen ribs and two gallons of barbecue sauce, then has to have his tent-mate Trapper call up a girl he used to know in Chicago to pick it up, pay for it and put it in a box marked "Medical Supplies-URGENT!" and send it to them in Korea. Every time we watch this episode, we crave ribs.
One night, the craving hit us so hard we called in an order to Applebee's and I picked it up. The ribs were...disappointing. Another time, we had our own barbecued ribs at my parents' house (for a Sunday Dinner). And in 2008, a few days after we watched this episode some friends of ours came over to watch Olympic Gymnastics, and they offered to get dinner. They asked us what we wanted, and we told them, duh, ribs! So we recently started watching the series again (for the nth and not the final time), and two days before the Vancouver Winter Olympics opened, we saw that episode. We knew that we would be glued to the opening ceremonies on that Friday (because we're suckers for that kind of stuff) so we decided to get ribs and watch them. So we did, and I decided that regardless of when the last time we watched that particular episode of M*A*S*H was, come the 2012 Summer Games in London, we will be ordering a slab of ribs from Bandana's BBQ here in town, with some cole slaw and potato salad, and we'll watch those opening ceremonies while we stuff our face with ribs. That's the kind of tradition Kathy has no problem getting behind.
So why bring up all these traditions, anyway? Surely these things would have been more present in my mind over the holidays or directly after the rib-sauce-soaked opening ceremonies? Well, sure, but we've had other things on our minds. My digital music/book rant one of those things, maybe. Watching the Olympics, perhaps. But mostly, we've been preoccupied with the thought of incorporating a new family member into these traditions. This isn't just idle speculation, either. Come August 19th or thereabouts of this year, I'm Not Just o.k., I'm not Just All Write, I'm also a father. Which makes Kathy a mother, and that way we keep it all in the family. And that means the blog might take on a little bit of a different character (again, link for some perspective).
So you've all got that to look forward to. Who's excited?
I know I am.
But really, here's a good summary: Downloaded music okay. Physical media better. Vinyl records best. Electronic books stupid. Physical books awesome. Electronic media mixed bag. Easy for new players to the media game. And finally, iPad stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid.
I hope that clears things up a bit.
I know I have talked about my family a little bit in the past. I count myself lucky to count myself amongst not only my parents and sister, but also amongst my sister's husband, their two little girls (link), my wife, her parents and their nine other children and their various and varied family members. There are a lot. Six brothers, three sisters, five sisters-in-law, one brother-in-law, three nieces, two nephews and one more nephew to be born in the next three weeks (so, you know, by the time you get around to finishing my last two posts and this one, that kid will be halfway through with his doctorate). So that's a lot of family for me to keep tabs on.
Add to that, I have close friends who I consider family. Sure, some of that family I may not see all that often, or call consistently, or...wait, now I look like a bad friend/relative. Anyway, I am getting to a point. That point is that with all this family plus the time that these families have spent together (separately and together) comes a slew of traditions.
The traditions range from the weekly to the annually and all other sorts of permutations. I think that traditions are important when building and maintaining a family, so I'm going to talk about some of my favorite ones.
Sunday Dinner - Growing up in my parents' house was kind of...odd. I don't intend that to sound mean, but, for most of my childhood, the house was in a constant state of flux. Not the household, but the house itself, the brick-and-mortar and four-walls-and-a-roof house. One of my earliest memories is of my dad and my uncle Tim working together on remodeling the bathroom. Then together (and with the help of other uncles from both sides of the family) they tackled the deck, tore the old one down and built a new one (which still stands). My sister and I had bedrooms upstairs in what had been the attic but which had been (as my father would say) remuddled into living space. But it had lackluster insulation and no air conditioning, which meant it got ridiculously cold in the winter and unbearably hot in the summer. Winter wasn't a big deal, really, because there were always plenty of blankets. Summer, however, usually meant camping out in the couch in the living room. After a while, I just moved permanently onto the couch. My sister, however, got her own bedroom; what had been the dining room was remodeled into a bedroom and I couldn't understand why she got it and I didn't (at the time, anyway, but now I get it; she's a girl and she was entering those teenage years and I can't think of a better place for a teenage girl than locked up in her own room...haha, kidding Mo). What this meant was that we were now short a bedroom for me and a dining room. We ate a lot of our meals in the living room, which is where I slept.
Anyway, eventually the remodeling process took a huge leap and we had a real life second story to the house. Finally, I had my own bedroom and my own closet and I moved off the futon in the living room and onto a twin bed (later replaced by the futon, which is currently in the basement, and if you're a regular to the blog you've seen it as I am sitting on it in my video blogs). My sister's old room (which, remember, was the dining room) became the living room and we started working on turning the living room (and my parents' old room) into new space. The front half of the living room was going to remain living room, with my parents' old room becoming the rest of the living room. The old back part of the living room was going to become the dining room. But that took a few years. Meanwhile, we had a table in a small room we called the breakfast nook (a sun porch leading out to the deck, which, again, is still there to this day) but we ate most of our meals, again, in the living room. The temporary one. It wasn't until I was mostly done with high school that the whole project was finished. I don't want to make it look like my parents were lazy or anything like that, they just worked when they could and when they could afford it, and when you've got two kids to raise and you're looking at paying for them to go to college maybe, and my mother was in school for a majority of that time and working full time (I did it and I don't know how she did it because I was stressed enough without two kids to take care of), so it went slow and steady. And though I sometimes went without a bedroom, I never went without a bed and though I sometimes went without a dining room, I never went without dinner. So I'm not complaining.
The final piece of the remodel came after I left for college (attempt number one). The summer between my first and last semesters at the University of Minnesota was filled with tuckpointing, new driveway and no kitchen. That's right, that summer my parents remodeled their kitchen, which needed it, trust me. The old one was, shall we say, retro in a very not-cool-retro-but-actually-held-over-from-the-seventies way. The appliances, too (aside from the oven, which had been replaced due to the utter failure of the oven door of the old one, which is a long story I actually won't go into here, surprisingly). But, what that did mean was that summer is written in my memory as the summer of the grill. We grilled almost every meal we ate. We had a charcoal Weber kettle, my late Grandpa Rauscher's Char Broil gas grill, a Coleman camp stove...it was all set up outside on the deck. We ate so well. And we had a brand new refrigerator in the room that had been the dining room and then became my sister's room and then was the living room (side note; that room has actually been very many rooms since my parents moved in; dining room, bedroom, living room, kitchen, office, music room, storage room, pretty much every room my parents have in that house aside from the bathroom), so we had a good summer eating in the relatively-new-dining room. I went back to college before the counter tops arrived.
I am getting to Sunday Dinners here. When I moved back-well, no. After I moved back, actually, and my sister was living with Kevin (who is now her husband), she would come back and eat dinner with us on Sundays. It was nice. We had a kitchen, a dining room, a living room, all functioning. All those meals we had eaten in the living room in my youth, not to detract from them because the food was uniformly good and the company some of the best the world has to offer (sucking up to the family much? Elliot, do you need money or something? No, I promise, it's all part of the literaryness of the post), there is something about gathering around the table with the family once a week and catching up. We kept this going after Kathy and I got married and we moved into our apartment, and it's a tradition that has grown. My sister and her family spend alternating Sundays with her husband's family, which is only fair. We'd probably do the same it weren't distance prohibitive to drive to Kathy's parents' house just for dinner once every two weeks. My grandmother Mary Beth (my mother's mother) joins us. Other extended family members have come. Of course my sisters' girls come along with their parents. And whenever one of Kathy's family members is in town, they tag along as well. Basically it's a great comfort to me to know that each week, I get to spend one meal sitting at the table, laughing with my parents and spending time with people I love.
Gay Schnucks - Okay, having ended that last tradition on a sappy note, I'm going to go for funny now. And no, you didn't read that wrong, that says Gay Schnucks. Schnucks is a supermarket here in St. Louis (I'd link to them but 1. they're not paying me to and 2. I don't think they'd be too keen on any publicity that is preceded by the qualifier "Gay") which is quite nice in its selection, location and hours. The closest one to my parents' house is about a five minute drive and it's open 24 hours, which is helpful to someone planning a get-together in the midst of the holiday season.
That's right, Mom, I'm talking about our Christmas Eve tradition.
Early in the morning on Christmas Eve (or, really, generally late in the evening on Christmas Eve Eve), my mother will do the last minute shopping for the annual(ish) Christmas gathering she and my father host. This gathering consists of my mother, my father, myself, my wife's self, and some other selfs who are wont to comment on the blog occasionally (hi Bridget). This past year it grew in scope to quite an overwhelming proportion, so maybe next year it'll be toned down a smidge. Anyway, the last minute shopping takes place at the aforementioned nearby Schnucks, and the four years I was in high school (and the next couple years after when I lived at home), I would accompany my mother on this shopping trip to provide moral support/push the cart/keep her company. The reason this Schnucks is called "Gay" Schnucks is because it is located near a vibrant gay community, and many of the shoppers you see there are in fact gay couples. The first year I accompanied my mother on this trip I was fifteen, and as I recall this was the first time I had heard the store's unofficial nickname. I thought little of it; so what? Gay people shop there in large, noticeable numbers? Good for the boys! But we were there so late that they made an announcement at a quarter to two in the morning stating that if you had liquor you wished to purchase, buy now or regret it later. Or something to that effect. My mother indeed intended to buy several bottles of wine, so she left me with the list and the cart and rushed to buy the wine in one bulk purchase, promising to return so we could continue shopping together. This was not my first time alone in a grocery store, but it was the first time alone so late at night in a grocery store. I, again, didn't think much about it.
Until...a creepy man started tailing me. Smiling at me, but not in a "Oh, I'm just being polite and we made eye contact" kind of way. More in a, "So...come here often?" Kind of way. I smiled in a way that I was sure said, "No, especially not this late because generally I have a curfew and I'm only fifteen and my mother is just getting some wine. Really, I'm awfully flattered but, as I said, I'm fifteen years old and also, not that there's anything wrong with that but I don't play for that team. Did I mention my mother is just buying some wine? Yeah, she'll be right back any minute. I appreciate the smile, you have lovely teeth for sure but, honestly, I'm fifteen and you're kind of creeping me out and you're standing in front of the milk and I really need a gallon of it so if you could just, say, shove off in a totally different direction, life would be a lot less stressful for me at this moment in time." I'm not sure how it came off, but eventually he wandered away.
You'd think I'd have been deterred by this, but no. I kept coming back. At least five more years. And every year, I think, "Oh, I should go help my mom. This time, though, I'll pick up the wine myself and leave her getting the rest of the groceries."
Weier Family Classic - My wife's family is large, as I said, but they're also spread out across five states (Nebraska, Minnesota, Iowa, Colorado and Missouri). With ten children and a branching family tree, it's difficult to get everyone together. So several years ago, they initiated the Weier (and that's pronounced like the conjunction for "we are" or, if you prefer, like the last name of US Figure Skating pretty boy Johnny Weir though spelled differently) Family Classic. The idea is that each year, the family gets together and holds a contest of some kind, and the winner gets to take home a trophy which is as tall as my wife.
The first year, it was a fishing challenge, and the trophy went to my wife for catching the biggest fish. She wasn't even using bait. And the fish isn't a legal fish to catch, as it's endangered. Of course it's endangered! It bites unbaited hooks (this one bit hers not once but twice). The second year it went to my niece Morgan for "Best New Attraction" (they scrambled for a category that year). The third year (my first participating year, as my wife's fiance) we went bowling, and the trophy went to my wife's brother Joe for getting the most strikes in a row. The fourth year we bet pennies on a minor league baseball game (we were each assigned a batter and for each hit they got, everybody else gave you a penny for a single, two for a double, etc). This contest was held a week after I had married Kathy. And I won.
We've had lawn olympics, rock-paper-scissor tournaments and Diet-Coke/Mentos fountain contests. It's a good way to get the family together and see each other at least once a year. It's been a couple years now, as families have grown it's gotten even harder, but the trophy (wherever it now resides, I can't remember) beckons to each of us. There are those who still lust after it, upset that startups (like myself) can just stroll in off the street and claim the title. They're still waiting for their day. For past champs like myself, we miss the thrill of competition. Also, there's always food involved. Really, ridiculously good food.
Olympic Ribs - This is a relatively new tradition. And by relatively new, I mean it's only happened once, and that in the very recent past. Though it has its roots elsewhere.
The roots lie in another tradition that Kathy and I started; Each night, before we go to sleep, we generally watch one or two episodes of M*A*S*H. You know that show, right? It's been in syndication for my entire life almost, held a viewership record that stood until the most recent Superbowl for most viewers watching a single program (the series finale in 1982). Alan Alda, Jamie Farr wearing dresses, Harry Morgan, Korean War...you've got it now I'm sure. Well, there is an episode in I want to say Season Two called Adams Ribs, in which Hawkeye (Alan Alda) is sick and tired of army food and calls a BBQ joint in Chicago and orders forty pounds of frozen ribs and two gallons of barbecue sauce, then has to have his tent-mate Trapper call up a girl he used to know in Chicago to pick it up, pay for it and put it in a box marked "Medical Supplies-URGENT!" and send it to them in Korea. Every time we watch this episode, we crave ribs.
One night, the craving hit us so hard we called in an order to Applebee's and I picked it up. The ribs were...disappointing. Another time, we had our own barbecued ribs at my parents' house (for a Sunday Dinner). And in 2008, a few days after we watched this episode some friends of ours came over to watch Olympic Gymnastics, and they offered to get dinner. They asked us what we wanted, and we told them, duh, ribs! So we recently started watching the series again (for the nth and not the final time), and two days before the Vancouver Winter Olympics opened, we saw that episode. We knew that we would be glued to the opening ceremonies on that Friday (because we're suckers for that kind of stuff) so we decided to get ribs and watch them. So we did, and I decided that regardless of when the last time we watched that particular episode of M*A*S*H was, come the 2012 Summer Games in London, we will be ordering a slab of ribs from Bandana's BBQ here in town, with some cole slaw and potato salad, and we'll watch those opening ceremonies while we stuff our face with ribs. That's the kind of tradition Kathy has no problem getting behind.
So why bring up all these traditions, anyway? Surely these things would have been more present in my mind over the holidays or directly after the rib-sauce-soaked opening ceremonies? Well, sure, but we've had other things on our minds. My digital music/book rant one of those things, maybe. Watching the Olympics, perhaps. But mostly, we've been preoccupied with the thought of incorporating a new family member into these traditions. This isn't just idle speculation, either. Come August 19th or thereabouts of this year, I'm Not Just o.k., I'm not Just All Write, I'm also a father. Which makes Kathy a mother, and that way we keep it all in the family. And that means the blog might take on a little bit of a different character (again, link for some perspective).
So you've all got that to look forward to. Who's excited?
I know I am.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Part Two: A Little More About Digital Music, and Finally I Talk About E-Books
Just a couple of things about part one; I was wrong about the number of computers which can be set to one iTunes account. I said three, but in reality it's six. Also, I just want to talk about borrowing and lending music. I used to let my friends borrow my CDs all the time, and in turn I would borrow theirs. In that way, I got to listen to the music and make a tape of it for my own use and my friends got to do likewise. But most importantly, it wasn't just the music. I got to see the album cover, the liner notes. I love liner notes. I love the special thanks. I love the funny stories that are sometimes hidden. I love it when the band puts the lyrics in. I love the artwork that might be in there as well. And the album cover, which I mentioned in passing; I love album covers. Album covers can be an artist's conception of the album. The liner notes help the band color the music a little more. When I download an album, I miss the liner notes (I get a very small .jpg of the album cover, which is not the same). And while I can easily share the music (with DRM-free iTunes, I can make as many copies as I want), my friends don't get the liner notes or album cover either. Now, there are exceptions; two albums I bought on iTunes were iTunes exclusives, which came with a .pdf of the liner notes. But that's the exception to the rule.
Okay, now, on to the E-Book.
Much like digital music, digital books have advantages over physical books. Production costs are lower as you only need to create one file to sell multiple times. They take up much less space than a physical book. All the same things I mentioned before.
The only problem here, though, is that Amazon dominates the market and (until recently) has set the price. They became publishers and sellers, which meant that they got a double cut of profit because they held the digital rights. Now, this is very similar to what Apple did with iTunes pricing; the price was set at ninety-nine cents a song by Apple, not by the record companies (of course, with the record companies, they would have set the price much higher but would have lowered it in the ensuing litigation and PR nightmare when we went from $20 a CD to $13 because they admitted to price gouging...). The problem is for the publisher and author with the E-Book. There's a different sense consumers seem to have with digital books over digital music. The idea is that digital music is worth just as much (or almost as much) but that a digital book is worth a third as much as a real book.
A short tutorial on book releases: Before the advent of the E-Book, major releases were first sold in hardcover form, which are the most expensive to produce and thus the most expensive to purchase. The MSRP on these books is generally $30 or so, depending on the size of the book (both physical size and expected sales, in that smaller sized books are less and larger-expected sales books are more expensive). Big box stores like Wal-Mart and Target often offer these books with a 30% discount, which they can eat because they make money elsewhere (though that just reflects the regular price, not any promotional new-release sale which might knock another 3-7% off the price). Bookstores also offer discounts, though they are generally not as deep. Amazon falls under the big-box price model, often offering even deeper discounts than Wal-Mart is able to give consumers. When a major release goes to paper back, it often goes to what is called Trade Paperback. Trade Paperback books have a high-quality binding and generally hold up to multiple readings rather well. Discounts offered are of equal percentage to those offered on hardcovers. After a successful hardcover and trade run, books then go to the mass market paperback format, which is a cheap binding. Most of the Stephen King and Michael Crichton books you find in airport bookstores are the mass market paperback versions. These have a MSRP of ten bucks, but are generally offered anywhere from three to ten dollars. For a book that sells well, this transition from original hardcover release to mass market release can take about a year.
When Amazon set the price for books on the Kindle reader, they set the price for new releases at $9.99. So, here's what you've got; New Release CD comes to $14.99. Same album on iTunes costs $12.99. Net difference of two dollars, which is a fair difference, though considering most stores sell new release albums for as little as $9.99 the first week of its availability, so it's kind of a toss-up. New Release Book comes to $29.99. New Release E-Book comes to $9.99. That's a difference of $20. Again, most stores offer a discount the first week of availability, but not two-thirds off. That's a major chunk of change to account for. And publishers are furious.
Why are publishers furious? Well, publishers and authors are saying that this pricing model creates a diminished value in the eyes of the consumer. Instead of $30, a new book is only worth $10. Physical book sales are already dropping in favor of electronic book sales. Consumers are less willing to pay for a physical book when they can get the other one for much cheaper, and physical booksellers are asking publishing companies for a price break to compete with e-books. Publishers can't give them the break they are asking for without losing a lot of money.
So the problem isn't really the e-book, but the pricing. This has caused many publishers to pull their books from the e-book market.
The general consensus is that the pricing model that works for the music industry does not work for the publishing industry, because the original models were not interchangeable. A CD is a CD is a CD. Granted, there are differences between some releases; I bought the Limited Edition debut album from Franz Ferdinand, which came with two discs. It cost more than the original, single disc edition. But there is no real production difference between an album's first pressing and it's third pressing. But a book is not a book is not a book, as I explained earlier.
Strangely enough, the architect of the music industry's new model, Apple, seems to understand this problem the most. And now, the iPad.
What a ridiculous product the iPad is. Everyone remembers the movie Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and its less-successful and unfortunately titled sequel Honey, I Blew Up the Kid, right? Well, here's what Apple did; they contacted Rick Moranis to see if he still had at least one of the machines from one of those two movies (I never saw the third of the series, Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves so I don't know if he built a third machine or if he was just using the original first one). Turns out, he had the machine from the first movie, which made things a little difficult. See, he had to first find a baseball, or a glass Coke Bottle, or something, to disable the laser. Then he had to reverse the polarity, or something. Then Steve Jobs took a specially modified iPod Touch with AT&T 3G access but no telephone and placed it in front of Rick Moranis' ray. Moranis turned it on, and zap! the Ipad was born.
Basically, the iPad is kind of useless. There is no reason for anyone to buy one, if you ask me. It's not powerful enough to replace your computer. It's not portable enough to replace your iPod. It doesn't have a camera. It doesn't make phone calls or even voice-over-IP (VOIP) calls (like Skype and Vonage). In fact, all the functionality the iPad provides can be provided by a combination of a netbook (a small, feature-light laptop), a Google Android phone (which can become a 3G modem for your laptop at no further cost to your wireless plan) and some other e-book reader. The iPad's only advantage is that you get all this in one device. But, again, you have to pay $100 extra to get the iPad with 3G access, then pay AT&T a monthly fee beyond whatever you're already paying your wireless provider to use the 3G access, and then you've got no multi-task functionality, no flash support, and then you're dependent on the Apple iBookstore price structure.
Okay, that lat part is actually something I kind of like. As I said, Apple understands that you can't iTunes the publishing industry (yes, I just used iTunes as a verb). Unlike it did with music pricing, and unlike Amazon did with e-book pricing, Apple went to the publishers to set prices for e-books. And an amazing thing happened; Publishers cut Apple a deal, of sorts. See, the publishers are aware that having spent money on a reader, consumers won't want to spend $30 on a new e-book. They understand that the reader represents an investment which should have some sort of pay off, and they understand the payoff comes with the prices of the books. After all, it is true that a digital file should cost less than a physical book. But less than ten dollars? No. Not right away, anyway. So the iBook has a tiered price schedule, meaning new releases cost more and older books cost less. The tiered price will likely change in direct correlation to the hardcover/trade paperback/mass market publication of the particular book. The digital files will be cheaper, but publishers will still make enough money to pay the author.
Of course, since I formulated all of this in my mind, Amazon has relinquished pricing control and agreed to a similar pricing model, which is a testament to Apple's dominance and brand-loyal following. The Amazon Kindle is the dominant e-book reader, a position Amazon knows it will hold until the iPad is widely available, regardless of price. The more consumers who purchase their e-books for the iPad, the more lucrative it will be for the publisher to make their books available for the iPad. We've already seen publishers pull their books from Amazon. Their pricing model was going to be a problem.
So, unlike the digital music file, there are problems for producers of the media with the e-book. But Apple has taken steps to include the producers in the process, so that problem may be taken care of. For the consumer, the benefits are similar to that of digital music; storage takes up no physical space beyond the space of the reader you're using. And while prices aren't as cheap as they were for new releases, it is still cheaper than a physical book.
But that physical book. I love books. I mean, I love books. See?
And those are just the books on the one bookshelf (the new, amazingly awesome one with glass doors on the bottom three shelves, and which carries my favorite books on the top three and our prized books behind glass, like our signed Alan Alda books and my battered/beloved paperback copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and so forth). See, what I love about books far outweighs the inconvenience of having to store them. But I don't really see that as an inconvenience. There's a great film, Auntie Mame starring Rosalind Russell. In it, there's a great line; "Books are awfully decorative, don't you think?" And while that line is spoken by a character who you are meant to instantly dislike, and is an indication of just how vain and stupid that character is, there's a grain of truth to it. Books are decorative. I just happen to also read them. I will admit that the books behind the glass doors are arranged to be aesthetically pleasing, and not in alphabetical order (like the other bookshelf) or grouped by genre (like the top three shelves of the new bookcase). But I do read the books.
Something else I love about books is the fact that I have signed copies. See, in the fall of 2008, Lee K. Abbott read at Webster University. I got a chance to meet him and he signed a copy of his short story collection All Things, All at Once which I mentioned in my top books of the decade post. Lee K. Abbot could not have signed a digital copy of the book.
One day, when I was in high school, I climbed out my bedroom window onto the roof of my parents' sunporch. I was carrying a book, I can't remember which one but I have a sneaky suspicion that it was either Cather in the Rye or Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic by Terry Jones (wrap your head around that one!). I dropped the book to the deck below. I retrieved it and the book was not damaged. Try doing that with an e-reader.
Another problem with e-books; writing. When I give somebody a book, I like to write them a note in the book. And when I read a book that is mine, sometimes I like to make a note in the margin, just a thought about a character or an idea or plot point. It's a habit I picked up in college.
The last advantage of physical books is that physicality, the ability to let friends borrow or to borrow friends' books. It's that not having to transfer files from one device to another when I upgrade (there is no real physical correlation to this, except for moving books from one bookshelf to another or packing up and moving to a new living space). And once I buy a physical book, the publisher and the store can't pull it from my hands. This is something that has happened to Kindle owners, ironically with digital copies of George Orwell's 1984. Granted, owners were refunded and Amazon changed its policy, admitting that the deletion was stupid. But still...it has happened and could happen again.
So, many of the same advantages and disadvantages between digital music and digital books. But one thing I haven't touched on yet in this post is the independent author, without an agent or a publishing deal. You'll remember that with an independent musician, it is fairly easy to at least place your music in the iTunes and other digital music stores, much easier than it is to place a CD in a department store or record store. And while it is harder for a writer, it is still possible to place an e-book in the e-book store. Though, with Amazon, it is easier to sell a physical book than it is to sell a physical CD, because unlike iTunes, individuals can sell books (provided the book has a valid ISBN) on Amazon. Lightning Source, Inc is a good source for self-publishers to sell their books on Amazon, since they work with Amazon to print-to-order your book. Lulu offers a similar service with e-book publishing as well. Again, like an independent musician using iTunes, an author using these services can do the online equivalent of putting their book on the for sale shelf next to all the best-sellers. And in the case of Amazon, selling your book there means you are selling your book at the world's largest bookstore.
Well, there you have it. iTunes, iBooks, e-books, Kindles, iPads, iPods, Nooks, and rants. One last point I want to make; I like the portability of digital music. I like having 800 songs on an iPod in my pocket. The average length of a song is about three and a half minutes, or so. Sure, that's more music than I can listen to in a day, but it's nice to be able to have that many to choose from so I can skip something if I don't want to hear it. The Kindle, depending on which one you own, holds between 200 and 1500 books (200 is a low-ball estimate by a consumer, 1500 is a high-ball estimate by Amazon itself). Now, really, how many people (besides English majors) read more than one book at a time? And of those few who do read more than one book at a time, who reads 200 books at a time? It just seems excessive. Also, I'm sure that if you have been reading this post in one sitting, you are painfully aware that staring at text on a computer screen (because that's what these e-readers have, computer screens) is not easy on the eyes. So not only will you not be reading 200 books at once, but it will probably take you even longer to read those 200 books, and you'll need corrective eye surgery when you're done.
I've kind of decided that I'm an analog guy living in a digital world. I prefer movies shot on film over digital; I prefer manual film 35mm cameras to digital. I prefer Vinyl to CD and .mp3. If it were feasible, I'd prefer watching movies with a reel-to-reel film projector rather than a DVD, but again, not feasible (but I prefer DVD to streaming over the internet). I prefer a stick shift over an automatic transmission. I do prefer to type on a computer, but I admit to having a strong affinity for my Royal typewriter. When it comes to plugging in an electric guitar, I prefer tubes to solid state (and ten points to the first person who a. understands that reference and b. is not my father) and will always favor a wood fireplace over a gas fireplace. That having been said, perhaps I'm not all analog. I am a social media user (facebook, twitter, Google Wave and Buzz, and an early abandoner of myspace). I watch most of my television on Hulu (though I hate the lower quality) and I do use Netflix streaming. I don't know...I guess there are certain things that belong a certain way. There's a point at which convenience isn't reason enough to take something on, in my opinion.
Oh well.
Okay, now, on to the E-Book.
Much like digital music, digital books have advantages over physical books. Production costs are lower as you only need to create one file to sell multiple times. They take up much less space than a physical book. All the same things I mentioned before.
The only problem here, though, is that Amazon dominates the market and (until recently) has set the price. They became publishers and sellers, which meant that they got a double cut of profit because they held the digital rights. Now, this is very similar to what Apple did with iTunes pricing; the price was set at ninety-nine cents a song by Apple, not by the record companies (of course, with the record companies, they would have set the price much higher but would have lowered it in the ensuing litigation and PR nightmare when we went from $20 a CD to $13 because they admitted to price gouging...). The problem is for the publisher and author with the E-Book. There's a different sense consumers seem to have with digital books over digital music. The idea is that digital music is worth just as much (or almost as much) but that a digital book is worth a third as much as a real book.
A short tutorial on book releases: Before the advent of the E-Book, major releases were first sold in hardcover form, which are the most expensive to produce and thus the most expensive to purchase. The MSRP on these books is generally $30 or so, depending on the size of the book (both physical size and expected sales, in that smaller sized books are less and larger-expected sales books are more expensive). Big box stores like Wal-Mart and Target often offer these books with a 30% discount, which they can eat because they make money elsewhere (though that just reflects the regular price, not any promotional new-release sale which might knock another 3-7% off the price). Bookstores also offer discounts, though they are generally not as deep. Amazon falls under the big-box price model, often offering even deeper discounts than Wal-Mart is able to give consumers. When a major release goes to paper back, it often goes to what is called Trade Paperback. Trade Paperback books have a high-quality binding and generally hold up to multiple readings rather well. Discounts offered are of equal percentage to those offered on hardcovers. After a successful hardcover and trade run, books then go to the mass market paperback format, which is a cheap binding. Most of the Stephen King and Michael Crichton books you find in airport bookstores are the mass market paperback versions. These have a MSRP of ten bucks, but are generally offered anywhere from three to ten dollars. For a book that sells well, this transition from original hardcover release to mass market release can take about a year.
When Amazon set the price for books on the Kindle reader, they set the price for new releases at $9.99. So, here's what you've got; New Release CD comes to $14.99. Same album on iTunes costs $12.99. Net difference of two dollars, which is a fair difference, though considering most stores sell new release albums for as little as $9.99 the first week of its availability, so it's kind of a toss-up. New Release Book comes to $29.99. New Release E-Book comes to $9.99. That's a difference of $20. Again, most stores offer a discount the first week of availability, but not two-thirds off. That's a major chunk of change to account for. And publishers are furious.
Why are publishers furious? Well, publishers and authors are saying that this pricing model creates a diminished value in the eyes of the consumer. Instead of $30, a new book is only worth $10. Physical book sales are already dropping in favor of electronic book sales. Consumers are less willing to pay for a physical book when they can get the other one for much cheaper, and physical booksellers are asking publishing companies for a price break to compete with e-books. Publishers can't give them the break they are asking for without losing a lot of money.
So the problem isn't really the e-book, but the pricing. This has caused many publishers to pull their books from the e-book market.
The general consensus is that the pricing model that works for the music industry does not work for the publishing industry, because the original models were not interchangeable. A CD is a CD is a CD. Granted, there are differences between some releases; I bought the Limited Edition debut album from Franz Ferdinand, which came with two discs. It cost more than the original, single disc edition. But there is no real production difference between an album's first pressing and it's third pressing. But a book is not a book is not a book, as I explained earlier.
Strangely enough, the architect of the music industry's new model, Apple, seems to understand this problem the most. And now, the iPad.
What a ridiculous product the iPad is. Everyone remembers the movie Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and its less-successful and unfortunately titled sequel Honey, I Blew Up the Kid, right? Well, here's what Apple did; they contacted Rick Moranis to see if he still had at least one of the machines from one of those two movies (I never saw the third of the series, Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves so I don't know if he built a third machine or if he was just using the original first one). Turns out, he had the machine from the first movie, which made things a little difficult. See, he had to first find a baseball, or a glass Coke Bottle, or something, to disable the laser. Then he had to reverse the polarity, or something. Then Steve Jobs took a specially modified iPod Touch with AT&T 3G access but no telephone and placed it in front of Rick Moranis' ray. Moranis turned it on, and zap! the Ipad was born.
Basically, the iPad is kind of useless. There is no reason for anyone to buy one, if you ask me. It's not powerful enough to replace your computer. It's not portable enough to replace your iPod. It doesn't have a camera. It doesn't make phone calls or even voice-over-IP (VOIP) calls (like Skype and Vonage). In fact, all the functionality the iPad provides can be provided by a combination of a netbook (a small, feature-light laptop), a Google Android phone (which can become a 3G modem for your laptop at no further cost to your wireless plan) and some other e-book reader. The iPad's only advantage is that you get all this in one device. But, again, you have to pay $100 extra to get the iPad with 3G access, then pay AT&T a monthly fee beyond whatever you're already paying your wireless provider to use the 3G access, and then you've got no multi-task functionality, no flash support, and then you're dependent on the Apple iBookstore price structure.
Okay, that lat part is actually something I kind of like. As I said, Apple understands that you can't iTunes the publishing industry (yes, I just used iTunes as a verb). Unlike it did with music pricing, and unlike Amazon did with e-book pricing, Apple went to the publishers to set prices for e-books. And an amazing thing happened; Publishers cut Apple a deal, of sorts. See, the publishers are aware that having spent money on a reader, consumers won't want to spend $30 on a new e-book. They understand that the reader represents an investment which should have some sort of pay off, and they understand the payoff comes with the prices of the books. After all, it is true that a digital file should cost less than a physical book. But less than ten dollars? No. Not right away, anyway. So the iBook has a tiered price schedule, meaning new releases cost more and older books cost less. The tiered price will likely change in direct correlation to the hardcover/trade paperback/mass market publication of the particular book. The digital files will be cheaper, but publishers will still make enough money to pay the author.
Of course, since I formulated all of this in my mind, Amazon has relinquished pricing control and agreed to a similar pricing model, which is a testament to Apple's dominance and brand-loyal following. The Amazon Kindle is the dominant e-book reader, a position Amazon knows it will hold until the iPad is widely available, regardless of price. The more consumers who purchase their e-books for the iPad, the more lucrative it will be for the publisher to make their books available for the iPad. We've already seen publishers pull their books from Amazon. Their pricing model was going to be a problem.
So, unlike the digital music file, there are problems for producers of the media with the e-book. But Apple has taken steps to include the producers in the process, so that problem may be taken care of. For the consumer, the benefits are similar to that of digital music; storage takes up no physical space beyond the space of the reader you're using. And while prices aren't as cheap as they were for new releases, it is still cheaper than a physical book.
But that physical book. I love books. I mean, I love books. See?
And those are just the books on the one bookshelf (the new, amazingly awesome one with glass doors on the bottom three shelves, and which carries my favorite books on the top three and our prized books behind glass, like our signed Alan Alda books and my battered/beloved paperback copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and so forth). See, what I love about books far outweighs the inconvenience of having to store them. But I don't really see that as an inconvenience. There's a great film, Auntie Mame starring Rosalind Russell. In it, there's a great line; "Books are awfully decorative, don't you think?" And while that line is spoken by a character who you are meant to instantly dislike, and is an indication of just how vain and stupid that character is, there's a grain of truth to it. Books are decorative. I just happen to also read them. I will admit that the books behind the glass doors are arranged to be aesthetically pleasing, and not in alphabetical order (like the other bookshelf) or grouped by genre (like the top three shelves of the new bookcase). But I do read the books.
Something else I love about books is the fact that I have signed copies. See, in the fall of 2008, Lee K. Abbott read at Webster University. I got a chance to meet him and he signed a copy of his short story collection All Things, All at Once which I mentioned in my top books of the decade post. Lee K. Abbot could not have signed a digital copy of the book.
One day, when I was in high school, I climbed out my bedroom window onto the roof of my parents' sunporch. I was carrying a book, I can't remember which one but I have a sneaky suspicion that it was either Cather in the Rye or Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic by Terry Jones (wrap your head around that one!). I dropped the book to the deck below. I retrieved it and the book was not damaged. Try doing that with an e-reader.
Another problem with e-books; writing. When I give somebody a book, I like to write them a note in the book. And when I read a book that is mine, sometimes I like to make a note in the margin, just a thought about a character or an idea or plot point. It's a habit I picked up in college.
The last advantage of physical books is that physicality, the ability to let friends borrow or to borrow friends' books. It's that not having to transfer files from one device to another when I upgrade (there is no real physical correlation to this, except for moving books from one bookshelf to another or packing up and moving to a new living space). And once I buy a physical book, the publisher and the store can't pull it from my hands. This is something that has happened to Kindle owners, ironically with digital copies of George Orwell's 1984. Granted, owners were refunded and Amazon changed its policy, admitting that the deletion was stupid. But still...it has happened and could happen again.
So, many of the same advantages and disadvantages between digital music and digital books. But one thing I haven't touched on yet in this post is the independent author, without an agent or a publishing deal. You'll remember that with an independent musician, it is fairly easy to at least place your music in the iTunes and other digital music stores, much easier than it is to place a CD in a department store or record store. And while it is harder for a writer, it is still possible to place an e-book in the e-book store. Though, with Amazon, it is easier to sell a physical book than it is to sell a physical CD, because unlike iTunes, individuals can sell books (provided the book has a valid ISBN) on Amazon. Lightning Source, Inc is a good source for self-publishers to sell their books on Amazon, since they work with Amazon to print-to-order your book. Lulu offers a similar service with e-book publishing as well. Again, like an independent musician using iTunes, an author using these services can do the online equivalent of putting their book on the for sale shelf next to all the best-sellers. And in the case of Amazon, selling your book there means you are selling your book at the world's largest bookstore.
Well, there you have it. iTunes, iBooks, e-books, Kindles, iPads, iPods, Nooks, and rants. One last point I want to make; I like the portability of digital music. I like having 800 songs on an iPod in my pocket. The average length of a song is about three and a half minutes, or so. Sure, that's more music than I can listen to in a day, but it's nice to be able to have that many to choose from so I can skip something if I don't want to hear it. The Kindle, depending on which one you own, holds between 200 and 1500 books (200 is a low-ball estimate by a consumer, 1500 is a high-ball estimate by Amazon itself). Now, really, how many people (besides English majors) read more than one book at a time? And of those few who do read more than one book at a time, who reads 200 books at a time? It just seems excessive. Also, I'm sure that if you have been reading this post in one sitting, you are painfully aware that staring at text on a computer screen (because that's what these e-readers have, computer screens) is not easy on the eyes. So not only will you not be reading 200 books at once, but it will probably take you even longer to read those 200 books, and you'll need corrective eye surgery when you're done.
I've kind of decided that I'm an analog guy living in a digital world. I prefer movies shot on film over digital; I prefer manual film 35mm cameras to digital. I prefer Vinyl to CD and .mp3. If it were feasible, I'd prefer watching movies with a reel-to-reel film projector rather than a DVD, but again, not feasible (but I prefer DVD to streaming over the internet). I prefer a stick shift over an automatic transmission. I do prefer to type on a computer, but I admit to having a strong affinity for my Royal typewriter. When it comes to plugging in an electric guitar, I prefer tubes to solid state (and ten points to the first person who a. understands that reference and b. is not my father) and will always favor a wood fireplace over a gas fireplace. That having been said, perhaps I'm not all analog. I am a social media user (facebook, twitter, Google Wave and Buzz, and an early abandoner of myspace). I watch most of my television on Hulu (though I hate the lower quality) and I do use Netflix streaming. I don't know...I guess there are certain things that belong a certain way. There's a point at which convenience isn't reason enough to take something on, in my opinion.
Oh well.
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
Entry 217: In Which Elliot Gives His $27.34 (that's $.02 adjusted for inflation) on Digital Music and the EBook Phenomenon. Part One - Digital Music
This started out, originally, as a post about why I think the iPad is the most ridiculously disappointing and useless gadget ever to be released, but I revised it (twice) and instead came up with part one of a two part blog on the digital revolution in both the music and publishing industry. I will still lay in to the iPad with unfettered avarice. This is a long post and is only part one. Ye be warned.
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Well, readers, I've had a lot of time to think of the ebook revolution, and with several recent developments in both the pricing and platform wars (and yes, those events are intertwined), I figured now is as good a time as any for me to give you my views on the ebook. But before I delve into the digital book, I want to look at the first industry to really go through what the publishing industry is currently going through; the music industry. And I know that the news publishing industry really took the first hit from the internet's game-changing motif but I'm not one to beat a dead horse, or at least not that particular dead horse, and I know that the film and television industry are just as embroiled in the "new media argh! the old ways don't make sense anymore what do we do what do we do whatdowedo!?" fiasco but the music industry seems to have almost got it figured out and the publishing industry is on the brink of doing so. So. Let us begin with ebooks, work our way through music and not mention ebooks again until another post.
For those at unawares, an ebook is simply an electronic copy of a book. It could be something as simple as a book's pages having been scanned as a .pdf file which you could carry around on your laptop or store on your desktop/portable hard drive/jump drive, etc., or it could be a platform-specific file purchased from an ebook store (such as Amazon for their Kindle reader or Barnes & Noble's Nook reader or Apple's iBook for the incomprehensibly named/engineered/featured/priced iPad). The point is that, like the .mp3 music files (and other similar extensions for audio files) and their effect on the music industry, the ebook is poised to change the publishing industry forever.
This comparison is important, because the publishing companies and distributors of ebooks are taking their cues from the music industry, which was really the first industry to go through this digital shift openly and publicly. So, I want to give a brief rundown of my feelings regarding digital music files. Remember, readers, that I have spent the better part of the last two months involved in a terrible ordeal in an attempt to procure a copy of Sunny Day Real Estate's Diary Remastered on vinyl from Amazon.com (side note update: finally gave up and walked into Euclid Records in Webster Groves, walked out three minutes later with a completely brand new and unblemished copy of said record on Sunday, thus ending the eternal struggle) so it should be clear where I stand on the issue at hand. Maybe.
Look, there are a great many advantages to both consumer and producer of music when it comes to the download. For starters, the cost to the record company of delivering, say, the copy of The Decemberists' 2009 release The Hazards of Love was less than one cent (probably). I purchased the album on iTunes, using a gift card I got for my birthday. As I understand it, record companies (or an independent artist, for that matter) pay a fee for each track available from their catalog on iTunes. However, they only pay the fee once per song. Let's say the cost per song is twenty cents (it's not, at least, I don't think it is, which shows you how well researched this particular post is). That would mean that the record company paid iTunes $3.40 to post The Hazards of Love. The album was then made available to download to iTunes users for $9.99. Once the album is downloaded once, it's already brought in more than the production cost (granted, the money goes first to Apple, who takes a cut and then to the record company, which takes a cut and then to the artist so it takes more than two downloads to pay the fee), and once it's downloaded a hundred times, the relative producer cost of each unit sold is so small, it's almost negligible. I am simplifying, of course, because the record company has to pay recording costs, marketing, touring, etc, not to mention they're still producing physical copies. The point is, it's very cheap to make one digital copy and sell it a hundred (thousand, ten thousand, hundred thousand, etc) times. In fact, the more you sell, the more profit you make on each sale. When you sell a physical product (vinyl record, CD), you get the same profit each time. Let's pretend it costs the record company five dollars to produce a CD and seven for a vinyl record. The CD then sells for twelve dollars at the store and the vinyl for twenty dollars. For each record, the company makes the same profit. Actually, look at my example in the light of my battle with Amazon; the record company only sold one copy of the vinyl album at $20 (after the store's recouped its expenses and a small profit, the record company probably recouped plus a dollar or two) but they produced three copies. With physical products come the possibility of physical defects in the products. It is beneficial to record companies to sell more digital copies than physical.
Really, in looking at this business model, there doesn't seem to be any drawback to the record company. But what about the consumer? Well, there are benefits to the consumer as well, namely portability. I own a few hundred CDs and am building a meager vinyl collection, but my digital music collection resides in the 10+ gigabyte neighborhood (at the height of peer-to-peer, before iTunes opened a store, I knew a guy who had 140 gigabytes of music on two 70 gig external hard drives, so my collection is relatively small). Much of the music that exists on my computer also exists on my shelves, though there are exceptions (music purchased as downloads, free downloads from artist websites, CDs ripped from friends or the library and, yes, Napster 1.0 era downloads which have been transferred through at least five computers now). My CDs and vinyl records take up a lot of space (in the last year, I had to buy a new CD tower and acquire a stand for the record player which had space to keep my records). But my digital music exists on my computer. Files do not have any physical mass, they only take up what we call "space" on a hard drive (or, again, a flash drive/external device such as an mp3 player). So why do I continue to clutter my already cluttered house with vinyl and CDs? I'll get to that. But the benefit is clear; space and portability. I once read an article online (tried finding it, but can't) about how hard it would be to carry all the music that a sixteen gig iPod holds if you carried it in different formats, and even carrying CDs (and, mind, just CDs, not the case and liner notes) would have required a large vehicle and a fully trained and accredited OTR trucker, not to even bring up vinyl. Also, even though Apple recently introduced tiered pricing, charging more for new releases and popular music while lowering the price on other tracks, the price is yet another benefit of the download. A CD generally costs more than a download of the same album (assuming you're downloading legally) and, another benefit, you can buy right from your home and not have to wait in line at the record store or wait days (or weeks) for the album to be shipped. Depending on your connection speed, you can start listening to the album in seconds.
But unlike the record companies, there are a few disadvantages to the download (some of which point to advantages of physical media) for the consumer. The most pressing problem is one of physicality. Sure, I bought a copy of The Hazards of Love, I mean, money was exchanged, but I can't run my hands over it. The benefit is also a disadvantage. In days past, being able to listen to my music was contingent on the proper function of a piece of electronics. I had a Magnavox boom box in my bedroom growing up, with a radio/cassette/CD. I'd pop Sunny Day Real Estate's LP2 in at night, hit play on the CD player, and fall asleep right before "Rodeo Jones" came on. One day, the CD player broke. That was okay, though, because I also had a Phillips portable disc player (not a Discman, that name belonged to Sony) with a set of headphones (the player had a belt clip, like I would go running with it or something...) and also, there was the CD changer hooked up to the component stereo in the living room (side note: my parents were never the kinds of parents who shouted "Don't touch my stereo!" which was stereotyped in sitcom after sitcom...no, my parents encouraged me to touch the stereo as long as I used it appropriately, i.e. listening to The Beatles or Queen or Paul Simon and not for listening to gangsta rap or conservative talk radio). If one of those broke down, I always had a back-up and a way to get my music from one to the other. Now, for listening to The Hazards of Love I am almost completely dependent on the proper functionality of my computer. I say almost completely, but even that isn't true. I make an audio copy of every album I download via iTunes in case I want to listen to just that album in my car or on the home stereo, not to mention that I periodically back up my music files onto DVD-R. But, even with that there is a problem. I do not do this immediately every time I download a new track. There may come a time (knock on wood) when I haven't done either since downloading a new track and bam, my computer crashes beyond all hope (this actually did happen, sort of, in 2007, and more on that in a moment). I'm sure The Geek Squad can recover files from my hard drive no problem,they've done it before, but the problem I ran into when my old computer crapped out was that I had never de-authorized that computer with iTunes. One account can only be authorized on three computers at one time. I have only one working computer authorized for my account, but iTunes thinks I have two. If it happens two more times, I'm screwed for the music I've already purchased. That is another problem; the music could disappear and the consumer has no recourse but to purchase it again. Thankfully, having backed up everything I download on both data and audio discs, I am fairly certain I can work around this should it happen, but still. A good reason to still buy physical CDs: when you get a new computer, your CDs will not have to be authorized to work on yet another computer.
Another disadvantage to the consumer is sound quality. This is the big one for me, and the big reason why I am falling in love with vinyl. Digital compression of the music flattens the range of tones. This may sound strange, but I've tested it. Using the same pair of really nice Sony headphones (the kind that cup your entire ear in a gasket), I listened to Sunny Day Real Estate's "8" off LP2 in the three formats I currently own it. I started with the CD copy (not through my computer but through a stereo system). Next I went to the digital copy (not imported from the CD but a HQ download direct from Sub Pop records, via a download coupon in the vinyl copy) and finally the vinyl copy. I found the digital copy to be better than the CD copy (though it is possible this has more to do with the digital copy being from the remastered re-release and the CD being the original release) but neither compared to the low-end range I got with the vinyl recording. The warmth is missing when the files are digitally compressed (either on CD or .mp3...before anyone points this out I know iTunes downloads are not .mp3 files but in this case the file came from the record company and it is definitely in .mp3 format). The only reason for having the digital file is, again, portability. I can fit eight gigabytes worth of music on the iPod my wife is so graciously letting me borrow for the time being which is equal to half of my music collection, roughly. I don't have the space for half of my CDs in the passenger compartment of my car and my car stereo does not play records. For listening at home, I prefer CDs or vinyl to digital every time. And, though I'm sure you could determine this on your own, I prefer vinyl to CD. But vinyl has its own special problems, which I won't go into now except for the one problem that pertains to the matter at hand, and that is portability. I do not have one of those fancy USB turntables which can import your vinyl tunes into your computer. I don't even have one of those less-fancy turntables which can take your vinyl records and burn them to CD. My turntable was manufactured before I was even born and sat in my parents' basement collecting dust for several years, abandoned in favor of a direct-drive BSR turntable with one of those record-dropping arm dealies and a needle that didn't need replacing. Despite the drop in sound quality, I do like having music with me in my car. Since I listen to more music in my car than at home (I drive for work...), it behooves me to buy either CDs which can be imported to my computer or to just buy digital files. The Sunny Day Real Estate records are awesome because they came with coupons for free digital copies. Note to record companies; please do that if you release your content on vinyl.
One more disadvantage exists; retailers. In the same way that national record chains and department store chains killed the local record store, so too is the digital download killing music departments at national record chains and department store chains. Remember that for every album sold on iTunes, that's one less physical copy sold (theoretically...there is a psychological thing happening there, though, in that many people don't think twice about buying an album download but the same people would probably decide against buying the physical product in the store, but let's pretend it's a one-to-one correlation). Many stores can help make up for this by selling iTunes gift cards, but the profit gained by the store on a ten dollar iTunes gift card is much smaller than the profit gained be a twelve dollar CD. Some stores have tried to get around this (Amazon is an online model, Wal-Mart a brick-and-mortar model) by setting up their own download store in opposition to iTunes. In my former capacity as Entertainment Specialist at Target, I was prepped for the launch of a Target-branded download store which was set to compete with Wal-Mart's eighty-eight cent download store but the Target store never got off the ground. When I asked about it, I was told that the reason it fell through was because of Target's existing relationship with iTunes. Apple threatened to pull exclusive deals from Target's stores, which was a very real threat. Since iTunes had opened its store, department stores saw a steady decrease in music sales volume. The only consistent performance in the music department at Target was seen in the iTunes cross-promotional merchandise. There were often deals in which if a customer bought three CDs off a specific rack, they received a free fifteen dollar iTunes gift card. Or there was the new-release deal, in which a new release would be available at Target with a Target exclusive code to download free extra content through the iTunes store. As these deals were a good profit stream for Target, the plan for the download store was abandoned. Even Wal-Mart's eighty-eight cent download store (the prices have since gone up, though are still pennies cheaper than iTunes) struggles against the giant that is the Apple iTunes store. Apple is a relative newcomer to the game of selling music, yet because they were the first major player in the legal-download field, they are able to muscle established companies which have been selling music since before Apple was even founded.
So, that's the music industry model and the problems I see with it. There are other problems, as well, and other benefits. Notable among the benefits, I just want to add (because this will be vital when I delve into ebooks), is that the .mp3 revolution has made it easier for an outsider, independent artist to place their music in the same store where people are buying all of their music. Before the advent of the download, the only way for an unsigned artist to get their music heard was to gain exposure through playing out as much as possible and releasing a demo tape to a local radio station and hope the song gets played or that they get noticed by someone with money (or at least a line to the money). It was expensive to sell your music to your fans at your shows because you had to front the money for the recording studio time, mixing, mastering, copying of media, printing of media, etc. You had to pay for each CD you sold at your show before you knew it would sell. But now, with sites like myspace music, iLike, and others, it is very easy to reach a fanbase. Myspace lets you post your music for streaming, free of charge for either you or your potential fan. And with iTunes, there are services such as TuneCore which distribute your music to iTunes for a fee. Before the internet, the .mp3 and iTunes, it was difficult enough for an independent artist to get on the shelves at a local record shop, never mind national distribution. But now there exists the digital equivalent to an unsigned band's latest album sitting on the shelf next to established artists. So again, the digital music revolution is a mixed bag.
Stay tuned, I promise by the end of the week to actually talk about ebooks! I have some strong things to say, though keep in mind that I could basically just repost exactly this and change some key words around. I promise I won't do that, though. It will be at least 89% new material.
===
Well, readers, I've had a lot of time to think of the ebook revolution, and with several recent developments in both the pricing and platform wars (and yes, those events are intertwined), I figured now is as good a time as any for me to give you my views on the ebook. But before I delve into the digital book, I want to look at the first industry to really go through what the publishing industry is currently going through; the music industry. And I know that the news publishing industry really took the first hit from the internet's game-changing motif but I'm not one to beat a dead horse, or at least not that particular dead horse, and I know that the film and television industry are just as embroiled in the "new media argh! the old ways don't make sense anymore what do we do what do we do whatdowedo!?" fiasco but the music industry seems to have almost got it figured out and the publishing industry is on the brink of doing so. So. Let us begin with ebooks, work our way through music and not mention ebooks again until another post.
For those at unawares, an ebook is simply an electronic copy of a book. It could be something as simple as a book's pages having been scanned as a .pdf file which you could carry around on your laptop or store on your desktop/portable hard drive/jump drive, etc., or it could be a platform-specific file purchased from an ebook store (such as Amazon for their Kindle reader or Barnes & Noble's Nook reader or Apple's iBook for the incomprehensibly named/engineered/featured/priced iPad). The point is that, like the .mp3 music files (and other similar extensions for audio files) and their effect on the music industry, the ebook is poised to change the publishing industry forever.
This comparison is important, because the publishing companies and distributors of ebooks are taking their cues from the music industry, which was really the first industry to go through this digital shift openly and publicly. So, I want to give a brief rundown of my feelings regarding digital music files. Remember, readers, that I have spent the better part of the last two months involved in a terrible ordeal in an attempt to procure a copy of Sunny Day Real Estate's Diary Remastered on vinyl from Amazon.com (side note update: finally gave up and walked into Euclid Records in Webster Groves, walked out three minutes later with a completely brand new and unblemished copy of said record on Sunday, thus ending the eternal struggle) so it should be clear where I stand on the issue at hand. Maybe.
Look, there are a great many advantages to both consumer and producer of music when it comes to the download. For starters, the cost to the record company of delivering, say, the copy of The Decemberists' 2009 release The Hazards of Love was less than one cent (probably). I purchased the album on iTunes, using a gift card I got for my birthday. As I understand it, record companies (or an independent artist, for that matter) pay a fee for each track available from their catalog on iTunes. However, they only pay the fee once per song. Let's say the cost per song is twenty cents (it's not, at least, I don't think it is, which shows you how well researched this particular post is). That would mean that the record company paid iTunes $3.40 to post The Hazards of Love. The album was then made available to download to iTunes users for $9.99. Once the album is downloaded once, it's already brought in more than the production cost (granted, the money goes first to Apple, who takes a cut and then to the record company, which takes a cut and then to the artist so it takes more than two downloads to pay the fee), and once it's downloaded a hundred times, the relative producer cost of each unit sold is so small, it's almost negligible. I am simplifying, of course, because the record company has to pay recording costs, marketing, touring, etc, not to mention they're still producing physical copies. The point is, it's very cheap to make one digital copy and sell it a hundred (thousand, ten thousand, hundred thousand, etc) times. In fact, the more you sell, the more profit you make on each sale. When you sell a physical product (vinyl record, CD), you get the same profit each time. Let's pretend it costs the record company five dollars to produce a CD and seven for a vinyl record. The CD then sells for twelve dollars at the store and the vinyl for twenty dollars. For each record, the company makes the same profit. Actually, look at my example in the light of my battle with Amazon; the record company only sold one copy of the vinyl album at $20 (after the store's recouped its expenses and a small profit, the record company probably recouped plus a dollar or two) but they produced three copies. With physical products come the possibility of physical defects in the products. It is beneficial to record companies to sell more digital copies than physical.
Really, in looking at this business model, there doesn't seem to be any drawback to the record company. But what about the consumer? Well, there are benefits to the consumer as well, namely portability. I own a few hundred CDs and am building a meager vinyl collection, but my digital music collection resides in the 10+ gigabyte neighborhood (at the height of peer-to-peer, before iTunes opened a store, I knew a guy who had 140 gigabytes of music on two 70 gig external hard drives, so my collection is relatively small). Much of the music that exists on my computer also exists on my shelves, though there are exceptions (music purchased as downloads, free downloads from artist websites, CDs ripped from friends or the library and, yes, Napster 1.0 era downloads which have been transferred through at least five computers now). My CDs and vinyl records take up a lot of space (in the last year, I had to buy a new CD tower and acquire a stand for the record player which had space to keep my records). But my digital music exists on my computer. Files do not have any physical mass, they only take up what we call "space" on a hard drive (or, again, a flash drive/external device such as an mp3 player). So why do I continue to clutter my already cluttered house with vinyl and CDs? I'll get to that. But the benefit is clear; space and portability. I once read an article online (tried finding it, but can't) about how hard it would be to carry all the music that a sixteen gig iPod holds if you carried it in different formats, and even carrying CDs (and, mind, just CDs, not the case and liner notes) would have required a large vehicle and a fully trained and accredited OTR trucker, not to even bring up vinyl. Also, even though Apple recently introduced tiered pricing, charging more for new releases and popular music while lowering the price on other tracks, the price is yet another benefit of the download. A CD generally costs more than a download of the same album (assuming you're downloading legally) and, another benefit, you can buy right from your home and not have to wait in line at the record store or wait days (or weeks) for the album to be shipped. Depending on your connection speed, you can start listening to the album in seconds.
But unlike the record companies, there are a few disadvantages to the download (some of which point to advantages of physical media) for the consumer. The most pressing problem is one of physicality. Sure, I bought a copy of The Hazards of Love, I mean, money was exchanged, but I can't run my hands over it. The benefit is also a disadvantage. In days past, being able to listen to my music was contingent on the proper function of a piece of electronics. I had a Magnavox boom box in my bedroom growing up, with a radio/cassette/CD. I'd pop Sunny Day Real Estate's LP2 in at night, hit play on the CD player, and fall asleep right before "Rodeo Jones" came on. One day, the CD player broke. That was okay, though, because I also had a Phillips portable disc player (not a Discman, that name belonged to Sony) with a set of headphones (the player had a belt clip, like I would go running with it or something...) and also, there was the CD changer hooked up to the component stereo in the living room (side note: my parents were never the kinds of parents who shouted "Don't touch my stereo!" which was stereotyped in sitcom after sitcom...no, my parents encouraged me to touch the stereo as long as I used it appropriately, i.e. listening to The Beatles or Queen or Paul Simon and not for listening to gangsta rap or conservative talk radio). If one of those broke down, I always had a back-up and a way to get my music from one to the other. Now, for listening to The Hazards of Love I am almost completely dependent on the proper functionality of my computer. I say almost completely, but even that isn't true. I make an audio copy of every album I download via iTunes in case I want to listen to just that album in my car or on the home stereo, not to mention that I periodically back up my music files onto DVD-R. But, even with that there is a problem. I do not do this immediately every time I download a new track. There may come a time (knock on wood) when I haven't done either since downloading a new track and bam, my computer crashes beyond all hope (this actually did happen, sort of, in 2007, and more on that in a moment). I'm sure The Geek Squad can recover files from my hard drive no problem,they've done it before, but the problem I ran into when my old computer crapped out was that I had never de-authorized that computer with iTunes. One account can only be authorized on three computers at one time. I have only one working computer authorized for my account, but iTunes thinks I have two. If it happens two more times, I'm screwed for the music I've already purchased. That is another problem; the music could disappear and the consumer has no recourse but to purchase it again. Thankfully, having backed up everything I download on both data and audio discs, I am fairly certain I can work around this should it happen, but still. A good reason to still buy physical CDs: when you get a new computer, your CDs will not have to be authorized to work on yet another computer.
Another disadvantage to the consumer is sound quality. This is the big one for me, and the big reason why I am falling in love with vinyl. Digital compression of the music flattens the range of tones. This may sound strange, but I've tested it. Using the same pair of really nice Sony headphones (the kind that cup your entire ear in a gasket), I listened to Sunny Day Real Estate's "8" off LP2 in the three formats I currently own it. I started with the CD copy (not through my computer but through a stereo system). Next I went to the digital copy (not imported from the CD but a HQ download direct from Sub Pop records, via a download coupon in the vinyl copy) and finally the vinyl copy. I found the digital copy to be better than the CD copy (though it is possible this has more to do with the digital copy being from the remastered re-release and the CD being the original release) but neither compared to the low-end range I got with the vinyl recording. The warmth is missing when the files are digitally compressed (either on CD or .mp3...before anyone points this out I know iTunes downloads are not .mp3 files but in this case the file came from the record company and it is definitely in .mp3 format). The only reason for having the digital file is, again, portability. I can fit eight gigabytes worth of music on the iPod my wife is so graciously letting me borrow for the time being which is equal to half of my music collection, roughly. I don't have the space for half of my CDs in the passenger compartment of my car and my car stereo does not play records. For listening at home, I prefer CDs or vinyl to digital every time. And, though I'm sure you could determine this on your own, I prefer vinyl to CD. But vinyl has its own special problems, which I won't go into now except for the one problem that pertains to the matter at hand, and that is portability. I do not have one of those fancy USB turntables which can import your vinyl tunes into your computer. I don't even have one of those less-fancy turntables which can take your vinyl records and burn them to CD. My turntable was manufactured before I was even born and sat in my parents' basement collecting dust for several years, abandoned in favor of a direct-drive BSR turntable with one of those record-dropping arm dealies and a needle that didn't need replacing. Despite the drop in sound quality, I do like having music with me in my car. Since I listen to more music in my car than at home (I drive for work...), it behooves me to buy either CDs which can be imported to my computer or to just buy digital files. The Sunny Day Real Estate records are awesome because they came with coupons for free digital copies. Note to record companies; please do that if you release your content on vinyl.
One more disadvantage exists; retailers. In the same way that national record chains and department store chains killed the local record store, so too is the digital download killing music departments at national record chains and department store chains. Remember that for every album sold on iTunes, that's one less physical copy sold (theoretically...there is a psychological thing happening there, though, in that many people don't think twice about buying an album download but the same people would probably decide against buying the physical product in the store, but let's pretend it's a one-to-one correlation). Many stores can help make up for this by selling iTunes gift cards, but the profit gained by the store on a ten dollar iTunes gift card is much smaller than the profit gained be a twelve dollar CD. Some stores have tried to get around this (Amazon is an online model, Wal-Mart a brick-and-mortar model) by setting up their own download store in opposition to iTunes. In my former capacity as Entertainment Specialist at Target, I was prepped for the launch of a Target-branded download store which was set to compete with Wal-Mart's eighty-eight cent download store but the Target store never got off the ground. When I asked about it, I was told that the reason it fell through was because of Target's existing relationship with iTunes. Apple threatened to pull exclusive deals from Target's stores, which was a very real threat. Since iTunes had opened its store, department stores saw a steady decrease in music sales volume. The only consistent performance in the music department at Target was seen in the iTunes cross-promotional merchandise. There were often deals in which if a customer bought three CDs off a specific rack, they received a free fifteen dollar iTunes gift card. Or there was the new-release deal, in which a new release would be available at Target with a Target exclusive code to download free extra content through the iTunes store. As these deals were a good profit stream for Target, the plan for the download store was abandoned. Even Wal-Mart's eighty-eight cent download store (the prices have since gone up, though are still pennies cheaper than iTunes) struggles against the giant that is the Apple iTunes store. Apple is a relative newcomer to the game of selling music, yet because they were the first major player in the legal-download field, they are able to muscle established companies which have been selling music since before Apple was even founded.
So, that's the music industry model and the problems I see with it. There are other problems, as well, and other benefits. Notable among the benefits, I just want to add (because this will be vital when I delve into ebooks), is that the .mp3 revolution has made it easier for an outsider, independent artist to place their music in the same store where people are buying all of their music. Before the advent of the download, the only way for an unsigned artist to get their music heard was to gain exposure through playing out as much as possible and releasing a demo tape to a local radio station and hope the song gets played or that they get noticed by someone with money (or at least a line to the money). It was expensive to sell your music to your fans at your shows because you had to front the money for the recording studio time, mixing, mastering, copying of media, printing of media, etc. You had to pay for each CD you sold at your show before you knew it would sell. But now, with sites like myspace music, iLike, and others, it is very easy to reach a fanbase. Myspace lets you post your music for streaming, free of charge for either you or your potential fan. And with iTunes, there are services such as TuneCore which distribute your music to iTunes for a fee. Before the internet, the .mp3 and iTunes, it was difficult enough for an independent artist to get on the shelves at a local record shop, never mind national distribution. But now there exists the digital equivalent to an unsigned band's latest album sitting on the shelf next to established artists. So again, the digital music revolution is a mixed bag.
Stay tuned, I promise by the end of the week to actually talk about ebooks! I have some strong things to say, though keep in mind that I could basically just repost exactly this and change some key words around. I promise I won't do that, though. It will be at least 89% new material.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Review and Interview: Andy Kohnen @ the Sci Fi Lounge, January 21 2009
Welcome to a new feature on the blog! The other night, I went to a show at the Sci Fi Lounge and met up with a good friend of mine from my Webster University days. Ostensibly, I just went because a buddy of mine was playing, but I also went to get a musician's perspective on playing this type of low-key local show. And low key it was, at least the venue. Don't rely too much on your Google maps or your mapquests or your GPS to find it, and also don't rely on your intuition because mine led me astray not once but twice. Just get to the general area and make a few blind turns the correct way down one way streets that you think are the wrong way and all of a sudden, you will come upon your destination. And once you get there, go to the side door (upon which you will find the only Star Trek memorabilia I saw the whole night, a sticker advertising the 2009 film's theatrical release) and marvel at the pinball machines. Just marvel.
The walls are covered in Star Wars models and action figures. There are televisions hooked up with video game systems including PS2, NES, N64 and what I think is one of those plug and play Atari systems. Free Wi-Fi, comic books, board games and one dollar drinks (soda, coffee, tea, water-no liquor license here despite the deceptively placed Schlafly sign) create an atmosphere ripe for the nerd in all of us. And then there's a tiny stage.
There were about five acts, including a man named Paul Frazier who played between acts, announcing the others as he went (totally check out his awesome videos here. Most of the acts, with the exception of Mr. Frazier and the last two acts (Andy Kohnen followed by...can't remember the group's name, but the lead singer's name was Lola) played a type of angsty acoustic rock that borders on goth rock but with a bit too much emo influence, and please remember I'm coming from a mid 1990's definition of both Goth and Emo.
When Andy took the stage, the crowd lit up (after all; the show was billed as "Andy Kohnen and Friends" so most of the crowd came to see him). People reacted to songs such as "Boston" which appeared to be a crowd favorite. But I fell myself for some of his newer songs. The heartfelt "1997" is a little rough for being new, but it shows great potential. I felt special affection for his song "Poster World" which is based on a play Andy starred in a year ago.
The show felt a lot like the venue; loose, relaxed, a place to go and be with people and have fun. I'd probably go to another show at this place, if for nothing more than to try and beat my friend Emily at Mario Kart.
In addition to the show, I also got a chance to ask Andy some questions afterwards.
I'm o.k.: How do you write a song?
Andy Kohnen: I try to tell a story, or retell a story from my life. Something that has a basis in fact.
OK: How do you measure your success as a musician?
AK: Once, I opened for Tally Hall, which is a national touring act. We didn't even ask to be put on the show, the guy putting it on just called and said we'd be a good fit for the show. That was pretty cool.
OK: How many people do you wish your music could reach?
AK: As many as possible.
OK: How many is enough?
AK: I'm not sure. I play for myself, really. If one person reacts, that's cool.
OK: Would you rather your most meaningless song reach a hundred million people, or your most meaningful song reach only a dozen.
AK: Wow. I don't know. A lot of people like my song "Boston" and I don't really like it anymore, but I'll play it because people like it. But...I guess a dozen.
OK: For you, what do you get out of performing?
AK: It's just laying my heart out there, you know? Whatever the audience takes from it is fine with me. I play for a reaction, but I don't expect one.
OK: You sing a lot about yearning for love, as opposed to just love. Why is that?
AK: I've never experienced love, so I think it would be hypocritical if I wrote about it. There's a musician, Jeff Rosenstock, who writes a lot about growing up but not feeling grown up. I'd love to write like that, but I don't know if I'm there yet.
OK: You mentioned tonight that when the webcast may have been lost, that worse things have happened to you at a show. Like what?
AK: Well, once, I was playing a show at this terrible place called The Red Sea [writer's note: it was a pretty scuzzy place] and only three people showed up. I tried to make a joke with the bartender and he totally ignored me. I don't know if he actually ignored me or if he just couldn't hear me. And the first time I played here [at the Sci Fi Lounge], I was playing and everybody was talking. Nobody was listening to me, and I got nervous and started screwing up.
OK: That's kind of counter-intuitive, don't you think? People ignored you and...
AK: And I got worse. Yeah, that's weird.
Well there you have it.
I have some big posts coming, so keep looking. They'll be here soon.
The walls are covered in Star Wars models and action figures. There are televisions hooked up with video game systems including PS2, NES, N64 and what I think is one of those plug and play Atari systems. Free Wi-Fi, comic books, board games and one dollar drinks (soda, coffee, tea, water-no liquor license here despite the deceptively placed Schlafly sign) create an atmosphere ripe for the nerd in all of us. And then there's a tiny stage.
There were about five acts, including a man named Paul Frazier who played between acts, announcing the others as he went (totally check out his awesome videos here. Most of the acts, with the exception of Mr. Frazier and the last two acts (Andy Kohnen followed by...can't remember the group's name, but the lead singer's name was Lola) played a type of angsty acoustic rock that borders on goth rock but with a bit too much emo influence, and please remember I'm coming from a mid 1990's definition of both Goth and Emo.
When Andy took the stage, the crowd lit up (after all; the show was billed as "Andy Kohnen and Friends" so most of the crowd came to see him). People reacted to songs such as "Boston" which appeared to be a crowd favorite. But I fell myself for some of his newer songs. The heartfelt "1997" is a little rough for being new, but it shows great potential. I felt special affection for his song "Poster World" which is based on a play Andy starred in a year ago.
The show felt a lot like the venue; loose, relaxed, a place to go and be with people and have fun. I'd probably go to another show at this place, if for nothing more than to try and beat my friend Emily at Mario Kart.
In addition to the show, I also got a chance to ask Andy some questions afterwards.
I'm o.k.: How do you write a song?
Andy Kohnen: I try to tell a story, or retell a story from my life. Something that has a basis in fact.
OK: How do you measure your success as a musician?
AK: Once, I opened for Tally Hall, which is a national touring act. We didn't even ask to be put on the show, the guy putting it on just called and said we'd be a good fit for the show. That was pretty cool.
OK: How many people do you wish your music could reach?
AK: As many as possible.
OK: How many is enough?
AK: I'm not sure. I play for myself, really. If one person reacts, that's cool.
OK: Would you rather your most meaningless song reach a hundred million people, or your most meaningful song reach only a dozen.
AK: Wow. I don't know. A lot of people like my song "Boston" and I don't really like it anymore, but I'll play it because people like it. But...I guess a dozen.
OK: For you, what do you get out of performing?
AK: It's just laying my heart out there, you know? Whatever the audience takes from it is fine with me. I play for a reaction, but I don't expect one.
OK: You sing a lot about yearning for love, as opposed to just love. Why is that?
AK: I've never experienced love, so I think it would be hypocritical if I wrote about it. There's a musician, Jeff Rosenstock, who writes a lot about growing up but not feeling grown up. I'd love to write like that, but I don't know if I'm there yet.
OK: You mentioned tonight that when the webcast may have been lost, that worse things have happened to you at a show. Like what?
AK: Well, once, I was playing a show at this terrible place called The Red Sea [writer's note: it was a pretty scuzzy place] and only three people showed up. I tried to make a joke with the bartender and he totally ignored me. I don't know if he actually ignored me or if he just couldn't hear me. And the first time I played here [at the Sci Fi Lounge], I was playing and everybody was talking. Nobody was listening to me, and I got nervous and started screwing up.
OK: That's kind of counter-intuitive, don't you think? People ignored you and...
AK: And I got worse. Yeah, that's weird.
Well there you have it.
I have some big posts coming, so keep looking. They'll be here soon.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
A Treat
I made this video in the Spring of 2006 for a Fiction workshop I took at St. Louis Community College - Meramec. I may have mentioned it in passing back then.
Wednesday, January 06, 2010
Fourth Blogiversary
Four years ago today, your friendly writer started blogging.
Thanks to all of my readers for the past four years, and here's to many, many more!
Thanks to all of my readers for the past four years, and here's to many, many more!
Tuesday, January 05, 2010
The Ordeal Continues
Not sure what the ordeal is? This will answer that.. All caught up? Good.
So, on December 29th, Amazon authorized a return and e-mailed me a shipping label for said return. The deal with the return is, I have ten days from authorization until the authorization expires. The shipping label was for standard UPS Two-Day ground shipping. On the morning of the 30th, I dropped the package off at the local UPS store (literally a mile from my house). Now, I packaged it up in the same box they shipped it to me in. Perhaps I should explain how it was packaged; the box was a foot and a half wide, a foot long, and about four inches deep. Not conducive for shipping a record in, really; even packed to the gills with plastic air bubbles, the record could bounce around in the box. This is one of the problems with Amazon's record sales; they don't know how to pack a record for shipping. As the dominant recorded music medium for the better part of the twentieth century, I'm sure that at some point there were shipping containers designed specifically for a record album. Think of all those Time Life records flying through the mail in the seventies and eighties (one of which, a Benny Goodman collection, Kathy and I bought at a record shop in downtown Chicago last month). Imagine if those had been packaged so that they would bounce around in their containers.
Anyway, I just packaged it up in the same packaging, hoping to make a point when they get it and open it and realize that the record has been bouncing around in this box all its merry way from St. Louis to Hebron, KY. So I dropped it off on the morning of the 30th. The clerk told me it would be picked up at either ten in the morning, four in the afternoon, or nine that evening. According to the tracking site, at 9:53 PM that night, the package left the UPS store. At 10:15 that same night, it arrived at the UPS shipping hub in Earth City, MO. And then it sat there until January 4th. Five days it sat no more than twenty-six miles from my house. Hebron, KY is a five and a half hour drive from my house...I had three days off work. I could have taken care of it by now.
I understand that we had a holiday to contend with, but really? You delivered my first return to Amazon.com in exactly two days, the second day being Christmas Eve. You're telling me, UPS, that your trucks and planes sit grounded and idle New Year's Eve, New Year's Day, Saturdays and Sundays? I will give you New Year's Day and Sunday. So it finally left Earth City on the morning of the fourth, and then arrive in Lexington, KY at two in the afternoon. Good...I Google mapped it, and that's no more than two hours driving in traffic.
The morning of the fifth, it left Lexington, KY and arrived in Cincinnati, OH shortly thereafter. I was appalled, but only until I learned my geography a little better. Cincinnati is just on the Ohio side of the KY/OH border, and Hebron is just on the other side. It's not even a half hour drive between the two. So this package arrived, just shy of a week later, in Cincinnati at four this morning, and then at five-thirty was scanned out for delivery.
It is now eleven o'clock at night on the fifth. Why the hell has this package not been received by Amazon yet? Now not only do I not want to order vinyl from Amazon anymore, I barely want to order anything from Amazon. But they've got me locked in with this return-refund-on-the-gift-card crap. I think I found something that I need to buy which is about the same price as the record; for Christmas, my sister, her husband and my two nieces gave me Wii Sports Resort, and it came with one Wii Motion Plus accessory. We want another one, and I figure Amazon probably sells a lot more of those in a month than they sell vinyl records in a year, and it's a relatively small and popular item, and since Kathy and I decided we were already going to buy one, I'm just going to buy it using my gift card and buy the record from Euclid Records or Vintage Vinyl, end this terrible loop. But I can't do any of that until the package is delivered. Judging by how it's been going, I estimate another week before Amazon gets it.
So, on December 29th, Amazon authorized a return and e-mailed me a shipping label for said return. The deal with the return is, I have ten days from authorization until the authorization expires. The shipping label was for standard UPS Two-Day ground shipping. On the morning of the 30th, I dropped the package off at the local UPS store (literally a mile from my house). Now, I packaged it up in the same box they shipped it to me in. Perhaps I should explain how it was packaged; the box was a foot and a half wide, a foot long, and about four inches deep. Not conducive for shipping a record in, really; even packed to the gills with plastic air bubbles, the record could bounce around in the box. This is one of the problems with Amazon's record sales; they don't know how to pack a record for shipping. As the dominant recorded music medium for the better part of the twentieth century, I'm sure that at some point there were shipping containers designed specifically for a record album. Think of all those Time Life records flying through the mail in the seventies and eighties (one of which, a Benny Goodman collection, Kathy and I bought at a record shop in downtown Chicago last month). Imagine if those had been packaged so that they would bounce around in their containers.
Anyway, I just packaged it up in the same packaging, hoping to make a point when they get it and open it and realize that the record has been bouncing around in this box all its merry way from St. Louis to Hebron, KY. So I dropped it off on the morning of the 30th. The clerk told me it would be picked up at either ten in the morning, four in the afternoon, or nine that evening. According to the tracking site, at 9:53 PM that night, the package left the UPS store. At 10:15 that same night, it arrived at the UPS shipping hub in Earth City, MO. And then it sat there until January 4th. Five days it sat no more than twenty-six miles from my house. Hebron, KY is a five and a half hour drive from my house...I had three days off work. I could have taken care of it by now.
I understand that we had a holiday to contend with, but really? You delivered my first return to Amazon.com in exactly two days, the second day being Christmas Eve. You're telling me, UPS, that your trucks and planes sit grounded and idle New Year's Eve, New Year's Day, Saturdays and Sundays? I will give you New Year's Day and Sunday. So it finally left Earth City on the morning of the fourth, and then arrive in Lexington, KY at two in the afternoon. Good...I Google mapped it, and that's no more than two hours driving in traffic.
The morning of the fifth, it left Lexington, KY and arrived in Cincinnati, OH shortly thereafter. I was appalled, but only until I learned my geography a little better. Cincinnati is just on the Ohio side of the KY/OH border, and Hebron is just on the other side. It's not even a half hour drive between the two. So this package arrived, just shy of a week later, in Cincinnati at four this morning, and then at five-thirty was scanned out for delivery.
It is now eleven o'clock at night on the fifth. Why the hell has this package not been received by Amazon yet? Now not only do I not want to order vinyl from Amazon anymore, I barely want to order anything from Amazon. But they've got me locked in with this return-refund-on-the-gift-card crap. I think I found something that I need to buy which is about the same price as the record; for Christmas, my sister, her husband and my two nieces gave me Wii Sports Resort, and it came with one Wii Motion Plus accessory. We want another one, and I figure Amazon probably sells a lot more of those in a month than they sell vinyl records in a year, and it's a relatively small and popular item, and since Kathy and I decided we were already going to buy one, I'm just going to buy it using my gift card and buy the record from Euclid Records or Vintage Vinyl, end this terrible loop. But I can't do any of that until the package is delivered. Judging by how it's been going, I estimate another week before Amazon gets it.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Top Fifteen Albums of the Decade
There are omissions to this list, I assure you. In fact, there are so many omissions to this list that I almost don't want to post it. The thing is that many of these albums (in fact, most of them) I hold in almost equal regard, so saying that number one is better than number fifteen is accurate but saying number two is better than number three is just barely accurate, by very teeny tiny degrees of measurement. I limited myself to fifteen, but this list could have easily contained fifty. I also limited myself to five honorable mentions without explanation. Okay? Okay. Share your thoughts.
15. In Your Honor - The Foo Fighters
Picks: "The Best Of You" and "Friend of a Friend"
The Foo Fighters have been around for a long time now. Their debut album came out in 1995, and they have released a steady stream of moderate to great albums since. They're consistently satisfactory, often good, sometimes amazing. Frontman Dave Grohl took a gamble releasing In Your Honor as a double CD. In fact, this is more two different albums than one complete album. The first disc is hard rocking, classic Foo Fighters, and produced a number of singles. But it's the second, acoustic disc that earns this album a spot on my list. Listening to it, you can hear Grohl's artistry and shortfalls all at once. "Friend of a Friend," a track off the second disc, is Grohl at his most emotionally raw. Listen to it and you find yourself remembering that Grohl was the drummer for Nirvana, and that he probably wrote this song about Kurt Cobain, which gives the album's title more weight. The only major issue I had with this album was the Sony DRM that came with it, which opened up your computer to easy virus infection and prevented you from listening to this fine music on your iPod. Thanks, Sony, for making us buy it twice. Oh, wait...you recalled the discs? Yeah, I never turned mine in...guess I missed that boat.
14. Franz Ferdinand: Limited Edition Bonus Disc - Franz Ferdinand
Picks: "Jacqueline" "All For You, Sophia" and "Words So Leisured"
Franz Ferdinand is a fun band to listen to, but especially their debut album. They sing songs not about love or romance, but about the parts of relationships that precede all that. They sing about the things we do to each other. They sing songs with vague homo-erotic undertones. The only reason I specifically put the limited edition is because of the song "All For You Sophia," which is a frenetic musical tribute to the assassination of Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand and contains some amazing lines; "Bang bang Gavrilo Princip/Bang bang Europe's gonna weep" and "Bang bang history's complete." Nicely steeped in history and well written to boot. Franz made a misstep with their follow up, sadly, but this remains one of the best debut albums of the last decade. Also on the bonus disc, a second version of "Darts of Pleasure" is presented with a slow tempo bearing the name "Words So Leisured" and that is worth a listen.
13. Hot Fuss - The Killers
Picks: "Andy, You're A Star" and "Believe Me Natalie"
Another fantastic debut album of the last decade, The Killers brought glamour back to rock 'n' roll without bringing any kind of parody. Much like Franz Ferdinand, The Killers sing of many of the same subjects (including the vague homo-erotic undertones). What The Killers brought to glam rock was actual artistry, for the first time since David Bowie and Queen held sway. Of course, their next album smacked of Bruce Springsteen (which is not a bad thing, per se) and their most recent album may have that terrifically annoying tune with the line "Are We Human or Are We Dancer?" in it (that's not even grammatically correct in the least bit), but I still take this one on road trips because it's just so much damn fun to listen to.
12. Silent Alarm - Bloc Party
Picks: "Helicopter" and "So Here We Are"
Oh Bloc Party. You showed such promise with this album. "So Here We Are" especially showed me that you were an up and coming musical force to be reckoned with. And tunes like "Helicopter" and "Banquet" showed your versatility and fun and...and then, well, maybe it was just too much to live up to. And that's why you called it quits. I wish that instead, you had released another album as awesome as this one. Maybe you'll reunite in a few years and spark that magic again.
11. Come On Feel the Illinoise - Sufjan Stevens
Picks: "Come On Feel The Illinoise!" and "They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!! Ahhhh!"
Sufjan Stevens (and that name is pronounced Soo-fi-yann)embarked on an epic musical adventure when he released Greetings From Michigan and, after the heavily Bible-themed Seven Swans released Illinoise. Rumors begat rumors which eventually stated that Stevens planned on recording an album for each of the United States. It was going to be great; each state would have its own flag, bird, motto, quarter and now album. But sadly, it looks like Illinoise will be the last. Maybe the rumors weren't true (and they were not) or maybe, Stevens realized that if he did one for each state, D.C. and the Territories might feel jealous and then he'd have to record some more, and all the travel/research not to mention songwriting for more than fifty albums might put a bit of a strain on him and kind of a noose around his creativity. But if he had to stop somewhere, I'm glad he stopped in Illinoise because the first time I heard "They Are Night Zombies!!" posted on a friend's livejournal (which I am pretty sure she hasn't updated since facebook became her everything) I rushed out and bought* this album. And a good thing I did, too, because each tune on this album is at least half as good (which puts this album in good musical standing). So why number eleven? Well, what I like about this album is the cohesiveness; each tune is about the state of Illinois, or its history, or some aspect of it, in some way. But that is also its downfall. I love albums with a theme for some reason, but to base an entire album on a state does seem a bit heavy. Kudos to Stevens, though; any other artist I can think of trying to pull this off, they don't show up on my top fifteen.
10. Kid A - Radiohead
Picks: Whole Album
Radiohead started out as a straight British Rock 'n' Roll band of the Nineties with their first album Pablo Honey. They gained notoriety with their song "Creep" which to this day I still get chills if it comes through my speakers and it's been a while since I've heard it. They solidified their standing with The Bends and that albums' seemingly endless depth. With OK Computer they took a slight tip toe down an experimental lane, with tunes like "Subterranean Homesick Alien." And on this, their fourth album, they sprinted down that experimental electronic boulevard. This wasn't just a new album, it was a reinvention of the band. It was a gamble, and it paid off in a big way. There was a chance that fans would not follow this new direction but Radiohead plunged onward, unwilling to sacrifice their art for its consumers. It was enough for Rolling Stone to name this their pick for album of the decade, so it worked fairly well. And while my favorite track wavers between "Kid A" "Idioteque" and "Motion Picture Soundtrack" I urge you to listen to this album as a whole.
9. Tradin' Dollars for Dimes - The Rum Drum Ramblers
Picks: "I Feel It Too" and "Ain't Happy With You"
Many of my readers may be scratching their heads on this one. "The Rum Drum who whats?" "Tradin' whats-its for whatchamajigs now?" For those of you not in the know, The Rum Drum Ramblers are a folk/blues band based in St. Louis affiliated with Big Muddy Records, and this is the album they released in fall of 2009. They busk, they sing, they play, they rock. They sound like they could be grizzled old blues men, but they're in their mid twenties. These three young men are masters of their craft already, each doing amazing things with their respective instruments (upright bass, guitar, and one man supplying lead vocals, harmonica, washboard, snare drum, tambourine and much more). I could very easily have also included their 2008 8-track Hey Lordy Mama Mama Get Up and Go along with Tradin' Dollars but felt like that may be giving them too much to live up to. I will admit to being a bit of a sycophant when it comes to these guys.
8. Eisenhower - The Slip
Picks: "Airplane/Primitive" and "Paper Birds"
The Slip is a Boston based group with roots in the jam-band scene, but they operate in relative obscurity. I myself would never have heard of them if I weren't a subscriber to NPR's "All Songs Considered" podcast. But they're a fun band to listen to, though fair warning that in order to get to the best this album has to offer you have to get through the first track "Children of December" which is strained and flat and does not do well to introduce you to the rest of the album. Tunes like "Even Rats" and "Airplane/Primitive" showcase the groups' diversity and the album is tied together at the end with the outro to "Paper Birds" which does a very nice job of referencing other tunes on the album without it turning into a gimmick.
7. We Have the Facts And We're Voting Yes - Death Cab For Cutie
Picks: "Company Calls" and "Scientist Studies"
Before Death Cab for Cutie broke out onto the scene big with Transantlantacism in 2003, they released this gem of an album which follows a loose conceptual theme throughout. In fact, if you listen close, the album seems to tell a tale about an unexpected, welcome but ultimately doomed love, taking the journey from friendship to the next level, to betrayal, to that stage where politeness takes over, and then ends in sorrowful longing. The juxtaposition of tone between "Company Calls" and "Company Calls: Epilogue" is the best example of the depth this album carries itself. Possibly Death Cab's most underrated album, give me We Have the Facts over Plans or Transatlanticism any day (full disclosure: I have not heard Narrow Stairs all the way through).
6. The Crane Wife - The Decemberists
Picks: "The Island" "Yankee Bayonet (I Will Be Home Then)" and "The Crane Wife 1 & 2"
The Decemberists might, with the help of a handful of other bands who have gained notoriety recently, someday be credited with saving the album from the ninety-nine cent song download. This folk-rock band has brought great artistry with them. Exhibit A is The Crane Wife, an album which can be characterized by what I have started referring to as the Three L's: Longing, Legends, and Loss (I could throw a fourth L, with Love, but that's not surprising as probably about 90% of all songs are about love of some kind). The story of The Crane Wife is a Japanese legend which gets not one but two retellings on this album ("The Crane Wife 3" begins the album, "The Crane Wife 1 & 2" comes toward the end). This legend is filled with longing and loss; the second track "The Island" does what the Decemberists' next album would do start to finish: tells a story in musical movements like a symphonic piece. "Yankee Bayonet" feels like war-torn lovers writing letters back and forth. There is even a song about the German siege of Leningrad during World War II. Frontman Colin Meloy does not typically concern himself with writing pop songs, but rather with crafting folk songs which tell stories. You must listen to this album. You will thank me later.
5. Good News For People Who Love Bad News - Modest Mouse
Picks: "The World At Large" "Ocean Breathes Salty" and "The View"
On a bad day, nothing picks me up better than this album does. It's actually a strange effect it carries, since for the most part the lyrics are dark and cynical. Take, for instance, this line from "The View": "As life gets longer, awful feels softer/it feels pretty soft to me/And if it takes shit to make bliss/then I feel pretty blissfully/If life's not beautiful without the pain/well I'd just never ever even see beauty again." How could that make a person feel good? That's the magic of this album for me. Maybe they knew people of a certain pessimistic temperament would love this album. It's full of bad news, really, but I love it. Pay close attention to "The World At Large" which is a beautiful piece of music. Unfortunately for me, thanks to my friend Tyler's senior video project at college, I can't hear the closing tune "The Good Times Are Killing Me" without seeing a floating skeleton doll anymore, which makes me kind of have a bad day. So I listen to the album again.
4. Riverboat Soul - Pokey LaFarge and The South City Three
Picks: "Claude Jones" "Hard Times Come Hard Times Go" and "Bag of Bones"
Pokey LaFarge is another local boy, like the Rum Drum Ramblers. And again, by local "boy" I mean that he is younger than I am (which makes him a boy, I guess). This album, released in the fall of 2009, is not Pokey's first full length album but his first with The South City Three, his backing band. Pokey is on Big Muddy Records as well (for the time being) and, Big Muddy being a smaller label, there is generally a lot of crossover and familiar faces in their bands, so it seems fitting that the South City Three contains two of the Rum Drum Ramblers (and the third Rambler has been known to jump onstage with Pokey and the SC3 on occasion). But where the Rum Drum Ramblers are blues-folk, Pokey is bluegrass. His songs tell stories of bootleggers ("Claude Jones"), allude to the troubles we conjure up when we think of depression-era music ("Hard Times Come Hard Times Go") and he even sings of love. At times, Pokey can seem whimsical, but taking one listen to "Bag of Bones" will show you just how serious these young musicians can be. Again, I may be a bit sycophantic with Pokey and the Three, but it's hard not to like these guys. Trust me.
3. Frances The Mute - The Mars Volta
Picks: Whole Album
Remember, a few notches down the list, when I said that The Decemberists and a handful of other bands were helping to bring back the album? The Mars Volta is one of those bands, and Frances The Mute is an example of how they are bringing the album back. This is an album you cannot listen to in pieces (and the fact that the record company pushed for "L'Via L'Viaquez" as a single (the album version is twelve minutes long) shows just how ridiculous a record company can be. Frances the Mute tells the story of a woman in search of her biological family, and switches from English to Spanish and leaves no room to breathe between the tracks (in order to maintain continuous sound, the vinyl versions locked themselves into a closed groove at the end, repeating the same measure of music until physically stopped and flipped). While this album may be a little heavy, it is evocative of the progressive rock bands of the 70's and 80's who wrote rock symphonies instead of two or three hit singles padded with filler material.
2. How it Ends - DeVotcka
Picks: "The Enemy Guns" and "Twenty-Six Temptations"
Nick Urata's voice haunts me. Listen to the way it strains on "The Enemy Guns," the way it bends ever-so-slightly, the way it soars into the stratosphere and lands with authority on "Twenty-Six Temptations." Listen to this album's title track and I dare you to not be moved. You may know this band (and may have heard a part of "How it Ends") if you've seen the film Little Miss Sunshine, as they scored the film and used some of their existing music. What is most amazing about this band is their eclectic instrumentation. This album has standard pop fare-guitar, bass, drums-but also comes with sousaphone, trumpet, theramin, accordion, melodica, organ...the list goes on. Sometimes they play and sound like a Mariachi band; other times, they sound like an Eastern European street band and still other times like a rock band. This is a group to keep your ears tuned to. Need more proof? Check out their cover of Siouxsie & The Banshee's "Last Beat of My Heart" on DeVotchka's Curse Your Little Heart EP.
1. The Hazards of Love - The Decemberists
Picks: Whole Album
Amazingly, The Decemberists get to be the only repeat band on my list (you may recall how well NBC was featured on my Television list, and how much I must love Pixar from my Film list). If The Crane Wife is exhibit A in proving the album is still alive, The Hazards of Love should be Exhibit N, as in "No need for further exhibits, you've got the jury fully convinced now." Here is what I suggest you do when you give this album a listen: 1) Turn off or unplug your telephone so it will not ring. 2) Make sure you have just had a well-balanced meal before listening. 3) Get yourself a really nice pair of speakers and lock yourself in the room with them. 4) Put this album on and listen to it, start to finish, once. 5) Reflect; hum the tunes that stuck with you while you go about your regular business. 6) Wait two or more hours. 7) Repeat as necessary. I'd say "The Decemberists did it again!" but that's not true. If they had done "it" again (it, in this case, referring to how very great The Crane Wife was) then this would be an accomplishment of a much lesser degree. No, this time, The Decemberists outdid themselves in the studio and then went on to outdo that on tour. That's right; due to the integrated and seamless aspect to the tunes on this album, and their knowledge that at best they could only turn one of them into a single ("The Rake's Song"), the band went on tour to support this album by playing the entire album live at each show. And after the whole album was played, the band would continue and play some of their earlier work. And it wasn't just the idea of the album that carried this to the top of the list; the story it tells is interesting, the characters as well rounded as a loose rock opera would allow, and filled with such beauty and danger that every time I listen, I hear something new. Listen. Now.
Honorable mentions:
In Rainbows - Radiohead
Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not - Arctic Monkeys
( ) - Sigur Ros
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot - Wilco
Diary: Remastered - Sunny Day Real Estate
Yes, I am well aware that a remastered version of an album originally released in 1994 has no business being on a "Best of the Decade 2000-2009" list, but I felt bad their one offering for the decade (2000's The Rising Tide) didn't come close to making the cut.
So, there you have it. My best-ofs for the decade. I hope in ten years, blogging is still cool enough that I'll feel like doing this again will be worth it.
Happy New Year!
===
*Of course by "bought" I mean that I may or may not have obtained it through what may or may not have been an illegal file-sharing network.
15. In Your Honor - The Foo Fighters
Picks: "The Best Of You" and "Friend of a Friend"
The Foo Fighters have been around for a long time now. Their debut album came out in 1995, and they have released a steady stream of moderate to great albums since. They're consistently satisfactory, often good, sometimes amazing. Frontman Dave Grohl took a gamble releasing In Your Honor as a double CD. In fact, this is more two different albums than one complete album. The first disc is hard rocking, classic Foo Fighters, and produced a number of singles. But it's the second, acoustic disc that earns this album a spot on my list. Listening to it, you can hear Grohl's artistry and shortfalls all at once. "Friend of a Friend," a track off the second disc, is Grohl at his most emotionally raw. Listen to it and you find yourself remembering that Grohl was the drummer for Nirvana, and that he probably wrote this song about Kurt Cobain, which gives the album's title more weight. The only major issue I had with this album was the Sony DRM that came with it, which opened up your computer to easy virus infection and prevented you from listening to this fine music on your iPod. Thanks, Sony, for making us buy it twice. Oh, wait...you recalled the discs? Yeah, I never turned mine in...guess I missed that boat.
14. Franz Ferdinand: Limited Edition Bonus Disc - Franz Ferdinand
Picks: "Jacqueline" "All For You, Sophia" and "Words So Leisured"
Franz Ferdinand is a fun band to listen to, but especially their debut album. They sing songs not about love or romance, but about the parts of relationships that precede all that. They sing about the things we do to each other. They sing songs with vague homo-erotic undertones. The only reason I specifically put the limited edition is because of the song "All For You Sophia," which is a frenetic musical tribute to the assassination of Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand and contains some amazing lines; "Bang bang Gavrilo Princip/Bang bang Europe's gonna weep" and "Bang bang history's complete." Nicely steeped in history and well written to boot. Franz made a misstep with their follow up, sadly, but this remains one of the best debut albums of the last decade. Also on the bonus disc, a second version of "Darts of Pleasure" is presented with a slow tempo bearing the name "Words So Leisured" and that is worth a listen.
13. Hot Fuss - The Killers
Picks: "Andy, You're A Star" and "Believe Me Natalie"
Another fantastic debut album of the last decade, The Killers brought glamour back to rock 'n' roll without bringing any kind of parody. Much like Franz Ferdinand, The Killers sing of many of the same subjects (including the vague homo-erotic undertones). What The Killers brought to glam rock was actual artistry, for the first time since David Bowie and Queen held sway. Of course, their next album smacked of Bruce Springsteen (which is not a bad thing, per se) and their most recent album may have that terrifically annoying tune with the line "Are We Human or Are We Dancer?" in it (that's not even grammatically correct in the least bit), but I still take this one on road trips because it's just so much damn fun to listen to.
12. Silent Alarm - Bloc Party
Picks: "Helicopter" and "So Here We Are"
Oh Bloc Party. You showed such promise with this album. "So Here We Are" especially showed me that you were an up and coming musical force to be reckoned with. And tunes like "Helicopter" and "Banquet" showed your versatility and fun and...and then, well, maybe it was just too much to live up to. And that's why you called it quits. I wish that instead, you had released another album as awesome as this one. Maybe you'll reunite in a few years and spark that magic again.
11. Come On Feel the Illinoise - Sufjan Stevens
Picks: "Come On Feel The Illinoise!" and "They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!! Ahhhh!"
Sufjan Stevens (and that name is pronounced Soo-fi-yann)embarked on an epic musical adventure when he released Greetings From Michigan and, after the heavily Bible-themed Seven Swans released Illinoise. Rumors begat rumors which eventually stated that Stevens planned on recording an album for each of the United States. It was going to be great; each state would have its own flag, bird, motto, quarter and now album. But sadly, it looks like Illinoise will be the last. Maybe the rumors weren't true (and they were not) or maybe, Stevens realized that if he did one for each state, D.C. and the Territories might feel jealous and then he'd have to record some more, and all the travel/research not to mention songwriting for more than fifty albums might put a bit of a strain on him and kind of a noose around his creativity. But if he had to stop somewhere, I'm glad he stopped in Illinoise because the first time I heard "They Are Night Zombies!!" posted on a friend's livejournal (which I am pretty sure she hasn't updated since facebook became her everything) I rushed out and bought* this album. And a good thing I did, too, because each tune on this album is at least half as good (which puts this album in good musical standing). So why number eleven? Well, what I like about this album is the cohesiveness; each tune is about the state of Illinois, or its history, or some aspect of it, in some way. But that is also its downfall. I love albums with a theme for some reason, but to base an entire album on a state does seem a bit heavy. Kudos to Stevens, though; any other artist I can think of trying to pull this off, they don't show up on my top fifteen.
10. Kid A - Radiohead
Picks: Whole Album
Radiohead started out as a straight British Rock 'n' Roll band of the Nineties with their first album Pablo Honey. They gained notoriety with their song "Creep" which to this day I still get chills if it comes through my speakers and it's been a while since I've heard it. They solidified their standing with The Bends and that albums' seemingly endless depth. With OK Computer they took a slight tip toe down an experimental lane, with tunes like "Subterranean Homesick Alien." And on this, their fourth album, they sprinted down that experimental electronic boulevard. This wasn't just a new album, it was a reinvention of the band. It was a gamble, and it paid off in a big way. There was a chance that fans would not follow this new direction but Radiohead plunged onward, unwilling to sacrifice their art for its consumers. It was enough for Rolling Stone to name this their pick for album of the decade, so it worked fairly well. And while my favorite track wavers between "Kid A" "Idioteque" and "Motion Picture Soundtrack" I urge you to listen to this album as a whole.
9. Tradin' Dollars for Dimes - The Rum Drum Ramblers
Picks: "I Feel It Too" and "Ain't Happy With You"
Many of my readers may be scratching their heads on this one. "The Rum Drum who whats?" "Tradin' whats-its for whatchamajigs now?" For those of you not in the know, The Rum Drum Ramblers are a folk/blues band based in St. Louis affiliated with Big Muddy Records, and this is the album they released in fall of 2009. They busk, they sing, they play, they rock. They sound like they could be grizzled old blues men, but they're in their mid twenties. These three young men are masters of their craft already, each doing amazing things with their respective instruments (upright bass, guitar, and one man supplying lead vocals, harmonica, washboard, snare drum, tambourine and much more). I could very easily have also included their 2008 8-track Hey Lordy Mama Mama Get Up and Go along with Tradin' Dollars but felt like that may be giving them too much to live up to. I will admit to being a bit of a sycophant when it comes to these guys.
8. Eisenhower - The Slip
Picks: "Airplane/Primitive" and "Paper Birds"
The Slip is a Boston based group with roots in the jam-band scene, but they operate in relative obscurity. I myself would never have heard of them if I weren't a subscriber to NPR's "All Songs Considered" podcast. But they're a fun band to listen to, though fair warning that in order to get to the best this album has to offer you have to get through the first track "Children of December" which is strained and flat and does not do well to introduce you to the rest of the album. Tunes like "Even Rats" and "Airplane/Primitive" showcase the groups' diversity and the album is tied together at the end with the outro to "Paper Birds" which does a very nice job of referencing other tunes on the album without it turning into a gimmick.
7. We Have the Facts And We're Voting Yes - Death Cab For Cutie
Picks: "Company Calls" and "Scientist Studies"
Before Death Cab for Cutie broke out onto the scene big with Transantlantacism in 2003, they released this gem of an album which follows a loose conceptual theme throughout. In fact, if you listen close, the album seems to tell a tale about an unexpected, welcome but ultimately doomed love, taking the journey from friendship to the next level, to betrayal, to that stage where politeness takes over, and then ends in sorrowful longing. The juxtaposition of tone between "Company Calls" and "Company Calls: Epilogue" is the best example of the depth this album carries itself. Possibly Death Cab's most underrated album, give me We Have the Facts over Plans or Transatlanticism any day (full disclosure: I have not heard Narrow Stairs all the way through).
6. The Crane Wife - The Decemberists
Picks: "The Island" "Yankee Bayonet (I Will Be Home Then)" and "The Crane Wife 1 & 2"
The Decemberists might, with the help of a handful of other bands who have gained notoriety recently, someday be credited with saving the album from the ninety-nine cent song download. This folk-rock band has brought great artistry with them. Exhibit A is The Crane Wife, an album which can be characterized by what I have started referring to as the Three L's: Longing, Legends, and Loss (I could throw a fourth L, with Love, but that's not surprising as probably about 90% of all songs are about love of some kind). The story of The Crane Wife is a Japanese legend which gets not one but two retellings on this album ("The Crane Wife 3" begins the album, "The Crane Wife 1 & 2" comes toward the end). This legend is filled with longing and loss; the second track "The Island" does what the Decemberists' next album would do start to finish: tells a story in musical movements like a symphonic piece. "Yankee Bayonet" feels like war-torn lovers writing letters back and forth. There is even a song about the German siege of Leningrad during World War II. Frontman Colin Meloy does not typically concern himself with writing pop songs, but rather with crafting folk songs which tell stories. You must listen to this album. You will thank me later.
5. Good News For People Who Love Bad News - Modest Mouse
Picks: "The World At Large" "Ocean Breathes Salty" and "The View"
On a bad day, nothing picks me up better than this album does. It's actually a strange effect it carries, since for the most part the lyrics are dark and cynical. Take, for instance, this line from "The View": "As life gets longer, awful feels softer/it feels pretty soft to me/And if it takes shit to make bliss/then I feel pretty blissfully/If life's not beautiful without the pain/well I'd just never ever even see beauty again." How could that make a person feel good? That's the magic of this album for me. Maybe they knew people of a certain pessimistic temperament would love this album. It's full of bad news, really, but I love it. Pay close attention to "The World At Large" which is a beautiful piece of music. Unfortunately for me, thanks to my friend Tyler's senior video project at college, I can't hear the closing tune "The Good Times Are Killing Me" without seeing a floating skeleton doll anymore, which makes me kind of have a bad day. So I listen to the album again.
4. Riverboat Soul - Pokey LaFarge and The South City Three
Picks: "Claude Jones" "Hard Times Come Hard Times Go" and "Bag of Bones"
Pokey LaFarge is another local boy, like the Rum Drum Ramblers. And again, by local "boy" I mean that he is younger than I am (which makes him a boy, I guess). This album, released in the fall of 2009, is not Pokey's first full length album but his first with The South City Three, his backing band. Pokey is on Big Muddy Records as well (for the time being) and, Big Muddy being a smaller label, there is generally a lot of crossover and familiar faces in their bands, so it seems fitting that the South City Three contains two of the Rum Drum Ramblers (and the third Rambler has been known to jump onstage with Pokey and the SC3 on occasion). But where the Rum Drum Ramblers are blues-folk, Pokey is bluegrass. His songs tell stories of bootleggers ("Claude Jones"), allude to the troubles we conjure up when we think of depression-era music ("Hard Times Come Hard Times Go") and he even sings of love. At times, Pokey can seem whimsical, but taking one listen to "Bag of Bones" will show you just how serious these young musicians can be. Again, I may be a bit sycophantic with Pokey and the Three, but it's hard not to like these guys. Trust me.
3. Frances The Mute - The Mars Volta
Picks: Whole Album
Remember, a few notches down the list, when I said that The Decemberists and a handful of other bands were helping to bring back the album? The Mars Volta is one of those bands, and Frances The Mute is an example of how they are bringing the album back. This is an album you cannot listen to in pieces (and the fact that the record company pushed for "L'Via L'Viaquez" as a single (the album version is twelve minutes long) shows just how ridiculous a record company can be. Frances the Mute tells the story of a woman in search of her biological family, and switches from English to Spanish and leaves no room to breathe between the tracks (in order to maintain continuous sound, the vinyl versions locked themselves into a closed groove at the end, repeating the same measure of music until physically stopped and flipped). While this album may be a little heavy, it is evocative of the progressive rock bands of the 70's and 80's who wrote rock symphonies instead of two or three hit singles padded with filler material.
2. How it Ends - DeVotcka
Picks: "The Enemy Guns" and "Twenty-Six Temptations"
Nick Urata's voice haunts me. Listen to the way it strains on "The Enemy Guns," the way it bends ever-so-slightly, the way it soars into the stratosphere and lands with authority on "Twenty-Six Temptations." Listen to this album's title track and I dare you to not be moved. You may know this band (and may have heard a part of "How it Ends") if you've seen the film Little Miss Sunshine, as they scored the film and used some of their existing music. What is most amazing about this band is their eclectic instrumentation. This album has standard pop fare-guitar, bass, drums-but also comes with sousaphone, trumpet, theramin, accordion, melodica, organ...the list goes on. Sometimes they play and sound like a Mariachi band; other times, they sound like an Eastern European street band and still other times like a rock band. This is a group to keep your ears tuned to. Need more proof? Check out their cover of Siouxsie & The Banshee's "Last Beat of My Heart" on DeVotchka's Curse Your Little Heart EP.
1. The Hazards of Love - The Decemberists
Picks: Whole Album
Amazingly, The Decemberists get to be the only repeat band on my list (you may recall how well NBC was featured on my Television list, and how much I must love Pixar from my Film list). If The Crane Wife is exhibit A in proving the album is still alive, The Hazards of Love should be Exhibit N, as in "No need for further exhibits, you've got the jury fully convinced now." Here is what I suggest you do when you give this album a listen: 1) Turn off or unplug your telephone so it will not ring. 2) Make sure you have just had a well-balanced meal before listening. 3) Get yourself a really nice pair of speakers and lock yourself in the room with them. 4) Put this album on and listen to it, start to finish, once. 5) Reflect; hum the tunes that stuck with you while you go about your regular business. 6) Wait two or more hours. 7) Repeat as necessary. I'd say "The Decemberists did it again!" but that's not true. If they had done "it" again (it, in this case, referring to how very great The Crane Wife was) then this would be an accomplishment of a much lesser degree. No, this time, The Decemberists outdid themselves in the studio and then went on to outdo that on tour. That's right; due to the integrated and seamless aspect to the tunes on this album, and their knowledge that at best they could only turn one of them into a single ("The Rake's Song"), the band went on tour to support this album by playing the entire album live at each show. And after the whole album was played, the band would continue and play some of their earlier work. And it wasn't just the idea of the album that carried this to the top of the list; the story it tells is interesting, the characters as well rounded as a loose rock opera would allow, and filled with such beauty and danger that every time I listen, I hear something new. Listen. Now.
Honorable mentions:
In Rainbows - Radiohead
Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not - Arctic Monkeys
( ) - Sigur Ros
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot - Wilco
Diary: Remastered - Sunny Day Real Estate
Yes, I am well aware that a remastered version of an album originally released in 1994 has no business being on a "Best of the Decade 2000-2009" list, but I felt bad their one offering for the decade (2000's The Rising Tide) didn't come close to making the cut.
So, there you have it. My best-ofs for the decade. I hope in ten years, blogging is still cool enough that I'll feel like doing this again will be worth it.
Happy New Year!
===
*Of course by "bought" I mean that I may or may not have obtained it through what may or may not have been an illegal file-sharing network.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
I Haven't Forgotten...
...about the top albums of the decade. I am writing that post in spurts and will post when I am finished.
However, first I wanted to vent about something that just happened to me.
You may recall my undeniable love for Sunny Day Real Estate and especially for Diary, their first album. You may also remember that I mentioned how the band had released remastered versions of Diary and LP2 this year to coincide with their reunion tour. You might remember, too, that I said they were available on vinyl. And finally, you probably forgot that I told you that I received LP2 Remastered on vinyl for my birthday. What you definitely don't know (because I haven't told you yet) is that for Christmas, my friend Beth gave me Diary Remastered on vinyl the Saturday before Christmas. The very next day, I put it on my turntable and lowered the stylus onto the record. I waited for the needle to find the groove. I watched as a really nasty warp kicked the stylus up and off of the record. I swore.
I called Beth up just to ask where she bought it, and she told me Amazon.com. So I called Amazon, and set up a gift return (I was trying to set up an exchange, but apparently the guy I was talking to did not understand that concept). So, I printed out the shipping label, sent it off on the Tuesday before Christmas. On Christmas Eve, I got an e-mail saying they had received the package and that I had been refunded with a gift card, so on Christmas Eve I ordered the album again.
So today, four days after Christmas and a good ten days after I received the album as a present, I checked the tracking status of my order and saw that it had arrived at my door. I had to stay late at work, which of course made the anticipation nearly kill me, but I waited it out and returned home two and a half hours late. I ate dinner, took a shower, threw in a load of laundry, talked to Kathy, then unboxed the record, removed the shrink wrap, put the first record on the turntable and lowered the stylus onto the record. I waited for the needle to find the groove. I watched as a really nasty warp kicked the stylus up and off of the record. This time, I really swore.
It was then I noticed the condition of the album cover; the upper left corner is all mashed up. This thing looks like it had been shipped from Seattle to Kentucky to St. Louis to Kentucky to St. Louis. In short, I am fairly certain Amazon.com shipped me the record I just returned to them as broken. Which means I will have to wait another four business days at least before I can listen to my record. Considering Friday is New Year's Day, that translates to at the very earliest I will be able to listen to this record next Tuesday, nearly two and a half weeks after I got it as a present.
I asked when I authorized a return this time if I could get the refund on my credit card rather than as a gift card. No can do. I asked, "What if the same thing happens again?" Then the same thing will happen again, and I can get the refund on my credit card if when I check out the next time I buy it with my credit card. That means I will have an Amazon gift card to spend, sure, but this is the only thing I am wanting to buy right now. Sure, down the road, I will buy something else on Amazon, but it's not like I was planning on buying a movie at Best Buy and might as well buy it online and get the record at Euclid Records or Vintage Vinyl here in town. I don't plan on spending they money, you know?
I guess the moral of this story is, if you're going to buy vinyl records, don't buy them on Amazon.com, buy them at a local record shop. If you're unlucky and don't have one of those anymore, you'd probably have better luck opening a local record shop yourself rather than ordering vinyl from Amazon. If you don't have the means to do this, you'd probably have better luck driving several hours to some other locality's local record shop. Bottom line, this experience has taught me to never order vinyl from Amazon again. I will gladly order DVDs, books, and other crap. But never will I ever order vinyl from Amazon.com. EVER. /End Rant.
However, first I wanted to vent about something that just happened to me.
You may recall my undeniable love for Sunny Day Real Estate and especially for Diary, their first album. You may also remember that I mentioned how the band had released remastered versions of Diary and LP2 this year to coincide with their reunion tour. You might remember, too, that I said they were available on vinyl. And finally, you probably forgot that I told you that I received LP2 Remastered on vinyl for my birthday. What you definitely don't know (because I haven't told you yet) is that for Christmas, my friend Beth gave me Diary Remastered on vinyl the Saturday before Christmas. The very next day, I put it on my turntable and lowered the stylus onto the record. I waited for the needle to find the groove. I watched as a really nasty warp kicked the stylus up and off of the record. I swore.
I called Beth up just to ask where she bought it, and she told me Amazon.com. So I called Amazon, and set up a gift return (I was trying to set up an exchange, but apparently the guy I was talking to did not understand that concept). So, I printed out the shipping label, sent it off on the Tuesday before Christmas. On Christmas Eve, I got an e-mail saying they had received the package and that I had been refunded with a gift card, so on Christmas Eve I ordered the album again.
So today, four days after Christmas and a good ten days after I received the album as a present, I checked the tracking status of my order and saw that it had arrived at my door. I had to stay late at work, which of course made the anticipation nearly kill me, but I waited it out and returned home two and a half hours late. I ate dinner, took a shower, threw in a load of laundry, talked to Kathy, then unboxed the record, removed the shrink wrap, put the first record on the turntable and lowered the stylus onto the record. I waited for the needle to find the groove. I watched as a really nasty warp kicked the stylus up and off of the record. This time, I really swore.
It was then I noticed the condition of the album cover; the upper left corner is all mashed up. This thing looks like it had been shipped from Seattle to Kentucky to St. Louis to Kentucky to St. Louis. In short, I am fairly certain Amazon.com shipped me the record I just returned to them as broken. Which means I will have to wait another four business days at least before I can listen to my record. Considering Friday is New Year's Day, that translates to at the very earliest I will be able to listen to this record next Tuesday, nearly two and a half weeks after I got it as a present.
I asked when I authorized a return this time if I could get the refund on my credit card rather than as a gift card. No can do. I asked, "What if the same thing happens again?" Then the same thing will happen again, and I can get the refund on my credit card if when I check out the next time I buy it with my credit card. That means I will have an Amazon gift card to spend, sure, but this is the only thing I am wanting to buy right now. Sure, down the road, I will buy something else on Amazon, but it's not like I was planning on buying a movie at Best Buy and might as well buy it online and get the record at Euclid Records or Vintage Vinyl here in town. I don't plan on spending they money, you know?
I guess the moral of this story is, if you're going to buy vinyl records, don't buy them on Amazon.com, buy them at a local record shop. If you're unlucky and don't have one of those anymore, you'd probably have better luck opening a local record shop yourself rather than ordering vinyl from Amazon. If you don't have the means to do this, you'd probably have better luck driving several hours to some other locality's local record shop. Bottom line, this experience has taught me to never order vinyl from Amazon again. I will gladly order DVDs, books, and other crap. But never will I ever order vinyl from Amazon.com. EVER. /End Rant.
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