You can’t force a dance party…

History Mixery. Genius. Hope the archives are intact.

Title Credit: Dent May’s infectious and blogged about: You Can’t Force A Dance Party (link above)

Half of the time we’re gone, but we don’t know where

Top Ten Songs (Right now) About Going or Being Somewhere Else

Old Crow Medicine Show: Highway Halo

Lodi – Creedence Clearwater Revival

Bruce Springsteen – Thunder Road

Sigur Ros – Saeglopur

El Ten Eleven – Every Direction Is North

Tom Waits – Ol’ 55

Wilco – Passenger Side

hmm… three more…
My Morning Jacket – Bermuda Highway

To Live And Die In The Airport Lounge (nah, i just like the title)
The National – So Far Around The Bend

and ten, with the Title credit: Paul Simon, The Only Living Boy in New York

Proof that the heart is a risky fuel to burn

New time waster at 8-tracks.com (thank-god it’s not 20 tracks…):

Title Credit: Songs:Ohia, Being in love

I have made you a mixed tape…. full of songs I know you hate

Stephen and Eliza have a pretty great music blog over here:

with a pretty great post (despite the Bryan Adams typo) on mixtape making and taking back.

Now that that wretched over-hyped, underwhelmed day is past, I’m happy to cover the topic of heart-ache, -fake, -forsake, and -break.

Title Credit: Daniel Ledwell, I Have Made You A Mixed Tape

Take another little piece of my heart – Using parking meters as walking sticks

A little late for hallmark-day, but here is why emusic is my favourite pay-for-digital-music service.

Guess I kinda fit the second profile , but I have favourite albums in most of the groups. Except for the sentimental fools sub-category, interestingly.
Definitely gonna have to dig up a copy of Love is a Mix Tape.

Some awesome multimedia experience was going down at Boulder coffee this evening. Not sure who they were, but MAN they had a lot of equipment, which they did all kinds of interesting things with.

Saw a butt-ass scary flick tonight at The Cinema. 3 bucks (w/student card) and comfy chairs with lots of leg room. Maybe my new favourite movie-going experience. Except for that damn cat, but I guess that’s what allergy meds are for.

I’m so done with today. Too much driving, too much stress, too much worrying about parking meters running out, getting back to class on time, meetings, trying to feed myself in between all that, too much.

Title credits: Erma Franklin, Tom Waits

When the conductor f*s up you can’t blame the symphony

2007 Favourites, dedicated to my very favourite hungry detective, who suggested a Best Of list should be the best, not the obscure:

A Day In The Graveyeard II                     Sunset Rubdown
New Years Eve                                              The Walkmen
Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe*     Okkervil River
The Con*                                                        Tegan & Sara
Go Places*                                                     The New Pornographers
Bitches In Tokyo                                         Stars
People As Places As People*                   Modest Mouse
Whites Only Party*                                     The Dears
The Well and the Lighthouse*                Arcade Fire
Perfect Games                                              The Broken West
Scattered Pearls                                           Casiotone For The Painfully Alone
Nantes                                                            Beirut
Fake Empire*                                               The National
Night Windows                                            The Weakerthans
Put There by the Land                               Great Lake Swimmers
Maps [YeahYeahYeahs]                            Wakey!Wakey!
Seven Day Mile                                            The Frames
Heretics*                                                        Andrew Bird
Los Cruzados                                                Elk City
The Opposite of Hallelujah                      Jens Lekman
This Time Tomorrow                                 The Kinks
One More Goodbye                                    M. Ward
This Year (demo)                                        The Mountain Goats

Now, they are not all from 2007, but they were all new to me in 2007 (minus This Year, which is included because of it’s perfect year end/year start , same goes for One More Goodbye)

In many cases, I couldn’t pick one favourite, so I just picked the song that fit best on the mix. Those songs are starred, and the whole album is well worth a listen, or ten. Others are single tracks of albums I haven’t listened to entirely yet.

Anybody want to weigh in and share yours?
If you want a copy of the mix, drop me a line & a mailing address.

Title Credit: A Day In The Graveyard II, Sunset Rubdown

You know I dreamed about you for 29 years before I saw you.

Top Heartwrenching Love Songs I have Fallen In Love With Over The Years:

# Into My Arms – Nick Cave (Just rediscovered this on an old CD I burnt to listen to while driving around taking pictures while home for the holidays. I remember last listening to it in 2004 or 5. In Brighton, in the parking lot behind the antique store, where I took this:

. Listened to it last night while driving around (home, the long way), after taking night photos of Campbellford. It was so cold, and so empty. An OPP drove by three times and didn’t even stop to ask what I was doing. Yeah for small towns! He probably knows my mom.

# Start a War – The National (yes, I have a huge hard-on for this band right now. No explanation necessary. I’d add Apartment Story if it didn’t seem so redundant)

# Moving Pictures, Silent Films – Great Lakes Swimmers (Just heard this on a movie I watched on TVO tonight about being single, relationships, etc.. It had a killer soundtrack, and I’m gonna look up the other two in Alan Zweig’s trilogy. My favourite part was when he is in hotel in Vancouver, looking back on his 9 day affair with a woman there. He claimed to have had the best hanging-out-in-a-room-listening-to-music night with her of his entire life. Maybe the best in anyone’s life. I hope I have a few more of those nights in my life.)

# Darkness Has Fallen (The entire album is killer, but I’ll stick to my constraints) – NQ Arbuckle (This guy Neville, ah hell, he was born to write heartwrenching love songs that make the girls in the front row sigh)

# Mixkin Dancehall Blues – NQ again (This was the first song, with the opening riff to end all opening riffs, that first did it. It’s more about drinking than heartbreaking, but I think they go hand in hand.)

# Once – Richard Buckner (A boy put this on a mix cd for me once and broke my heart in half. I still can’t listen to it and stay put together)

# Baby Please Stop Cryin – Bob Dylan (Throwback to high school, when my best friend idolized Bob Dylan, and I drove him around to play at open mics and we listened to Street-legal in my borrowed Tempo)

# Beast of Burden – The Rolling Stones (It was in Basquiat, my all time favourite artist biopic, when he comes home with groceries and is fallin’ in love with his woman)

# You and I are a Gang of Losers – The Dears (Again, boy, mix cd, broken heart, “Cause we’ve, we’ve got the same heart”)

# Disco 2000 – Pulp (Why is it so hard to let go of those unrequited crushes that you know are wrong? Tell me, Jarvis Cocker)

# Martha – Tom Waits (see immediately above)

# Left and Leaving – The Weakerthans (“Turned off TV grey” is one of the saddest lyrical descriptions of the sky I have ever heard. Ever. I don’t think it’s in this song, but it’s in one of the Weakerthans songs on this album. This is: “Spring forward, Fall back down. I’m trying not to wonder where you are.” And every birthday card I threw away.)

# River – Joni Mitchell (and the cover by Martin Tielli) (This song got me through the heartwrenchingness of moving 3000 miles from home)

# In the Aeroplane Over The Sea – Neutral Milk Hotel (I hated Jeff Magnum’s voice the first time I heard this album. Then I heard him on the radio while working in the darkroom and have since been through three major infatuations with this album, workin on a fourth.)

I’m sure I’ve got more, so To Be Continued…

So I’m turning on the stereo, and I’m lining up the names, On the mixes I made before you.

This is pretty amesome. Adding it to my To Learn list.

Took my first photo for the Festival of 24 Things today. Took some polaroids and played around with filters and things. Hope I’m not resting too much on art sauce. Could get messy. I have a feeling it is gonna get worse before it gets better, but I guess it is just something I have to go through, like puberty.

I have ben trying to go take some cheesy Campbellford Christmas lights night photos , but every night has been either sleep-overcome, or cloudy, or raining (it has poured here all day. ALL day. I don’t know if there will be any snow left by tomorrow morning.)

Tomorrow night. Definitely.

Doing mom stuff tomorrow. Should be fun, provided all that rain doesn’t turn Southern Ontario into an ice rink.

I have a lost of books I want to get at the library. Wonder if they’ll have them.  Doubtful on the new Eggers, but maybe on White Noise and definitely on any/every Can-lit classic I can think of. Maybe I’ll give Margaret Atwood another shot. Why did Alias Grace have to be so excruciatingly boring and long. Quilts? Really? In a murder novel?

I’m gonna try and take a photo tomorrow thinking about Margaret Atwood and that whole Southern Ontario Gothic nonsense.

Title Credits: The National  – Patterns of Fairytales, from Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers
(They were on the cover of three music magazines on the rack in Chapters, St. Catharines, where we stopped for poutine at Harveys on the way home. And I can’t stop listening to Secret Meeting. Holy eff it’s good.  This place is full of spies.  Also, ‘Available’ (on SSFDL) sounds a little bit like The Cult and a lot like Joy Division. And on Fake Empires, around 1:42, right after the break…best thing I have heard in a long  long time. Click the first link to hear it for yourself. I think that guy has it on his page. Holy crap, I’ve got a monster band crush right now. Sorry dudes.) (And when did this become a music blog, ry?)

I was young and at home in bed, hanging on the words some poem said in ‘31

My sleep schedule is still of kilter. I can’t fall asleep until 4am at earliest, and so I sleep away most of the morning, and sometimes a bit of the afternoon.

Thanks a lot, stuffmaking. Why can’t the creative process function between business hours? Why do I *have* to stay awake thinking about ways to attach transparencies to things and ways to take multiple exposure polaroids with a camera with no tripod mount?

Why won’t I spend the forty minutes it is going to take to make website updates for my *real* job? Do I like waking up with a guilt cloud over my head for not getting it done yet?

If I have so much gaddamn work to do, why am I spending my time listening to mix cds and jotting down songs about making mixes? (The National – Patterns of Fairytales. Art Brut – Sounds of Summer. The Frames – Your Face. And so on)

To do this week:

- print photos
- process film
- buy film &/or load expired b&w film
- clean apartment
- make holiday mix, and INBTJ mix
- make presents for famille
- get snow tires
- price out snow tires for my bike
- christmas cards
- website updates
- post-art revamp notice
- read html/css book
- re-edit my polaroid book, make lulu edition?
- catch-up on emails

enough blogressing.