the performance began with Il Sogno, Costello's score to a ballet production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. then he got up and sang a bunch of his own songs, including ones recorded with the Brodsky Quartet and Burt Bacharach. he finished the set by putting down the microphone for the last song, projecting his voice and getting the crowd to sing along. i've seen Elvis before, but this was a really special show, made even more so by the Irish coffee i chugged at intermission.

thanks neil for the heads up on goblin cock. check out that video and tell me that's not a mighty stoner riff. i ordered the cd!

UPDATE: Goblin Cock are playing in SF in March.

SF gig watch (check upcoming.org for details):

Aug 18 - Dinosaur Jr.
Aug 25 - The Lovemakers w/ Death of a Party
Aug 31 - Thor, Slough Feg, John Cobbett
Sep 09 - 3 Inches of Blood, Diecast, If Hope Dies, Hightower
Sep 11 - The Decemberists with Sons and Daughters
Sep 12 - The Decemberists
Sep 13 - Flogging Molly
Sep 16 - Film School, Boyskout, Full Moon Partisans
Sep 29 - M83
Sep 30 - Acid Mothers Temple
Oct 19 - Calexico, Iron and Wine
Oct 29 - American Analog Set
Oct 30 - American Analog Set
Nov 03 - Metric, Death of a Party, The Lovely Feathers
Nov 13 - Death Cab for Cutie, Stars
Nov 25 - Children of Bodom, Trivium, Amon Amarth

posting from the leather chair in Pete's apartment in Brooklyn. 3am and all is peaceful and quiet. i am very comfortable.

the Lovemakers are playing in San Francisco this Friday night (July 1st) at Mighty. dunno what time. if you can't make that, perhaps you can catch them one of the subsequent Fridays in July during their residency at Cafe Du Nord. i'll be at every one of those shows. they are also playing a charity event at the Playboy Mansion on July 23. tickets only $550. shit, if i lived in LA i'd be there - only time i'd ever be allowed to set foot on those grounds, i'm sure. i'm looking at you, Mark.

let me just say that i am extremely fucking frustrated with .Mac. since i upgraded my PowerBook and two G5s to Tiger, .Mac calendar sync has not worked. changes to one iCal instance are not reflected in the others after sync. in a fit of rage i deleted all of the calendars in the PowerBook's iCal. now no matter what i do i cannot get any of the calendars that were supposedly synced to .Mac by my home G5 to show up on the PowerBook.

i guess this is just an ass backwards additional bit of motivation for me to get Cosmo's CalDAV support working ASAP, so that Apple will begin to have a reason to add CalDAV to iCal. imagine if we had to sync email between computers rather than using IMAP (and POP before it). the current state of affairs is just ridiculous.

speaking of sync - my Treo 650 showed up in the mail last week. once i was all moved into the new apartment i chucked the old 600 with the dying screen, set up Bluetooth on the 650, and used Missing Sync's iSync conduit to copy the iCal and AddressBook data from my home G5 to the phone. now that is what sync is for - when you have a device that spends most of its life offline and/or has a generally slow and flaky internet connection. luckily with the impressive Missing Sync tool, everything JFW'd and i have all my contacts, events and tasks on my phone.

i also set up VersaMail (which now does IMAP and supports SSL for both IMAP and SMTP - yay!) and VeriChat, which continues to be both simple and extremely cool. it's the one Palm app that seems to be able to stay running even when you switch to other apps. too bad the fucking scrollbars don't seem to work on the 650, and i have to tap any icon 2 or 3 times before there's a response. also there seems to be a problem with pssh on the 650 so that you can't import SSH keys. i really hate typing my passwords on the Treo keyboard. finger cramps!

for several weeks i've had a problem playing AACs from my G5 to the Squeezebox2 devices attached to various stereos around the house. after just a few seconds of playing any particular track, the buffer would empty and the song would start skipping unlistenably.

i finally got around to emailing Slim Devices' technical support staff. the solution turned out to be installing LAME for iTunes, which the Slim Server is able to use to convert AAC on the fly to 320kbps MP3. for whatever reason this makes everything JFW. and hell, i can't hear the difference anyway. well, yeah i can, i guess - i can actually listen to the damn music now :)

i'm listening to the new Pharaoh Overlord album, and i keep hearing things reminiscent of World of Warcraft sound effects. like the whistle you hear when your hunter summons his pet, or the undescribable noise of jumping off the gryphon/wyvern/bat after you just flew from one zone to another. i'm not sure what to think about that.

i made an iMix of songs that were referenced in the Blue Monday comic books. it's not comprehensive, because i've only gone through about half of the issues, so there will probably be a followup at some point, whenever i finish sorting the rest of my comics.

semi-monthly wishlist update. yeah yeah, i'm a little late to the party with some of these. i haven't been paying much attention to music lately. how can i catch up? what do folks read to keep up to date with new music? my only source is the Aquarius Records newsletter.

(stuff i bought)

CHEVREUIL Chateauvallon
GUENTNER, MARKUS 1981
STARS Set Yourself On Fire
KAISER CHIEFS Employment
SUBARACHNOID SPACE The Red Veil
THIEVERY CORPORATION The Cosmic Game
VENETIAN SNARES Rossz Csillag Allat Szuletett
PHARAOH OVERLORD #3
APPRECIATION Healing The Father Wound
BLOC PARTY Silent Alarm
EARLY MAN s/t
G.A.T.E.S, THE Total Death
SIXTEEN HORSEPOWER 16HP (DVD)
REGGIE AND THE FULL EFFECT Songs Not To Get Married To
BRITISH SEA POWER Open Season
MAGNOLIA ELECTRIC CO. What Comes After The Blues
QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE Lullabies To Paralyze
V/A 12" / 80s
ISIS Oceanic: Remixes / Reinterpretations
MOUNTAIN GOATS The Sunset Tree
SLOUGH FEG Atavism
STYX The Complete Wooden Nickel Recordings
FALCONER Grime vs. Grandeur

ps: i buy at Aquarius whenever possible, but i use Amazon when necessary.

heh, from Aquarius Records New Arrivals #209, a recent split 7" with Caninus (pit bull-fronted metal) and Hatebeak (parrot-fronted metal). i want a cd ep!

CANINUS / HATEBEAK Wolfpig / Bird Seed Of Vengeance (Reptilian) 7" 4.50
Oh crap. It's here. It was indeed only a matter of time. A canine / avian metal meeting. Or something. On the one hand/paw/claw/side, there's Hatebeak, the grinding death metal juggernaut, fronted by lead vocalist Waldo, who just so happens to be a parrot! On the other, there's Caninus, a thuggy, metalic hardcore mosh pit bull of a band, fangs bared, leashes swinging, ummm, tails wagging. Yep, Caninus is fronted by tag team vocalists Budgie and Basil, both of whom happen to be pitbulls. If there was EVER a record made for AQ customers it's this one!!! Caninus is in full grind mode on this split, with spastic hyperspeed drum machines, buzzing lightning bolt guitars and Waldo's unmistakabe squawk. Caninus counters with some serious moshworthy metallic hardcore, bordering on death metal, with HUGE downtuned riffs, blasting drums, and a wicked array of snarls and growls and barks. And if there was ever any doubt, both bands ostensibly being joke bands, these guys are definitely true metalheads as the whole release is steeped in metal injokes. The Caninus cover art is Napalm Death's Scum album cover, except all of the people in the original are now dogs! The Hatebeak side is titled Bird Seeds Of Vengeance, named after the Nile album Black Seeds Of Vengeance, the cover depicting Hatebeak vocalist Waldo facing off against a bust of King Tut, the whole cover surrounded in Egyptian filligree. And then on the inside there is a photo of Waldo perched on what they purport to be the Spear Of Longinus, the actual spear that a Roman soldier used to stab Jesus in the side when he was on the cross! And then there's the Caninus lyrics, dense with metal / hardcore parody and written from the point of view of a dog (obviously)! Hatebeak declare "Avian Victory!" while Caninus proclaim "Go Vegan" as well as "Fuck You New York Post and New York Times" and in their thanks list give props to PETA, an animal shelter and even a pet supply store!! THE ANIMALS ARE NOW THE (METAL) MASTERS!!

Tim Bray recently blogged about moving his music collection from CD to hard disk. yeah, most of us have been talking about this for a while. i myself have ripped my entire 800+ cd collection twice already and, having lost both of the previous disks (one failed without backup and the other is still in Australia), am doing it again.

what's interesting about Tim's discussion is that, unlike most of us, he considers himself an audiophile. he presumably spends lots of money on expensive home stereo equipment to enjoy his hobby, and he doesn't want the playback technology cutting into the quality of sound. apparently the most worrisome part of the process is the digital-to-analog conversion, and he's done some research into the options at a range of prices, narrowing them down to the following three: 1) Mac Mini USB to external digital-analog converter (DAC) attached to stereo; 2) Airport Express to external DAC; 3) Squeezebox (which has a built-in DAC or can talk to an external one).

now, i've used both Squeezebox and Airport Express (AE in my living room, Squeezebox in my kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom), but i've never used a DAC. and hey, let's face it, i rip my cds at 192 kbps, so i'm not exactly going for audiophile quality. but if i felt like it i could pay Slim Devices $1k to rip them losslessly, and it's satisfying to know that i could reuse the same gear, potentially only having to add a high quality DAC, in order to get really great sound out of my expensive stereo and speakers. not that i'm going to. but i could if i wanted to. is my point. i guess.

remember the ridiculous larp video with the guy running around yelling "lightning bolt! lightning bolt! sleep!"? well, somebody replaced the audio track with Bon Jovi's "Blaze of Glory". the absurd-o-meter hits 11. i thought i was over being embarrassed by gamer antics, but i guess not.

update: somebody else did it better, with a slayer soundtrack and some awesome special effects as well. keep em coming!

2/25: Entombed at The Pound (tix)

2/26: High on Fire, The Fucking Champs at 12 Galaxies (tix)

the rest of Noisepop looks uninteresting (well i'd see
Bettie Serveert at Café Du Nord on Friday if Entombed weren't playing then).

\m/

saw Camera Obscura at the Great American tonight. so cute and charming. they messed up the encore and blamed it on some goofy indie rocker in the front row who was clapping out of time, so they brought him on stage and made him clap in front of the whole hall. ran into Elise and Jesse there - always nice to see friends again after a long absence. walking back up Polk the show, it occurred to me that i'm really happy to be back. the jury's still out on living in Oakland, as far as the social life goes, but with a car, and a couple of free evenings not at the club, i think i've got it covered. so if you haven't seen me in a while and want to get a drink or go for a hike, let me know.