music

Brainwaves

Posted on by grahams

This weekend was the Brainwaves Festival over in Arlington, which was a ton of fun. Jon really did a great job pulling the whole thing together, and while I wasn’t in to every artist, it was great seeing so many different bands. The highlight for me was The Dresden Dolls turning out a great set (even if they seemed out of place in the midst of the other bands on the lineup). Amanda and Brian brought out Edward Ka-Spel (from The Legendary Pink Dots and The Tear Garden) for “Missed Me”. I’m not the biggest Ka-Spel fan (I actually left before his set, closing out Friday, was over, but I was mostly just exhausted).

After a Kelly’s brunch, I made it back to the theatre on time on Saturday Afternoon. This daytime lineup seemed to be mostly noise artists, which can always be hit-or-miss. Fortunately, none of them seemed to take themselves too seriously, which made it more palatable. came out Saturday night to join me, and it was great seeing him again and catching up. Saturday night was definitely my favorite overall night of the show. It was dedicated to Steven Stapleton, who did a “DJ” set playing some of his favorite records. All of the artists Saturday night were enjoyable, but the stand-out band were also the headliners, Volcano the Bear. They had great energy, and while at times they seemed to be in Schtick Coma, they really rocked it out.

I missed the final day of the festival as I had previously committed to heading over to ‘s place for some Nintendo Wii love. He has preordered his and was having a big party to celebrate (and play). We mostly played Wii Sports, Tennis and Baseball are the standout games, but Bowling is pretty cool too. Golf and Boxing were a bit spottier though. Boxing definitely felt like your actions with the remote had the least correspondence to what happened on screen. That, and Corinna kicked my ass at Boxing, so I can’t like it. :P

We played from like noon until 6pm, when and I had to run off to see “Casino Royale”. I really, really enjoyed it, as did seemingly everyone who showed up to the club this week (17 people!). Definitely removed the crappier aspects of Bond for the past however-many years and stuck to spying and action (Parkour FTW).

Worlock, Remastered

Posted on by grahams

Skinny Puppy’s video for Worlock is considered by many one of the scariest music videos. I don’t know about “scary”, but it’s one of my favorites.. It is an assemblage of clips of horror films, and with that inherited all kinds of copyright headaches. I have it on VHS somewhere, but no longer have a VCR to play it with. Even if I did, it’s a late generation dub..

Some saint painstakingly recreated the Worlock video, using modern DVD-quality video where possible (and it seems to have been possible for most of the films “sampled”. It is amazing. Be sure to grab the WMV9 version as opposed to the overcompressed EewTube version. The creator has promised a MPEG-2 version of the video, which should be awesome.

BSG OMFG

Posted on by grahams

Spoiler-free: The past episode of Battlestar Galactica may have been the best of the series. It blew my mind with just how awesome it was… That is all about that subject.

Saturday (after we gave up on the door fiasco) I caught loudQUIETloud: A Film About Pixies, which was great. It’s strange to see how dysfunctional that band is dysfunctional in a completely unconventional way… Tim came out to watch the flick too, which was good, as I don’t get to see him much anymore. Sunday we caught The Prestige with the film club last night, which was pretty good.

You know you’ve been living in a place for awhile…

Posted on by grahams

…when the number of times you run into people you know begins to skyrocket. The past few weeks, Corinna and I have either separately or together run into people we know either through work or the film club… This past weekend we were at Six Flags New England, which is 80-ish miles away from Boston, and we ran into two film club members who were there on a date. The odds of that are pretty crazy, especially given how packed the park was. I normally reserve trips to amusement parks for mildly overcast or even rainy days, but the season was winding down and we had to use the discount tickets Corinna got from Harvard, so we pulled the trigger and went on a Saturday. The park was so packed. The shortest wait was for the Scrambler, but pretty much everything else was a 45-60 minute wait or more. It’s really an unpleasant experience waiting on line that long. One of the best parts of the trip, though, was waiting on line for Superman for 60 minutes, getting in the first car due to the kindness of strangers (who wanted to ride with their friends), and after our ride, the ride broke and we were stuck waiting for maintenance to get out of the coaster.. They blamed it on the temperature change, and had it going in about 15 minutes, but I was so glad that it waited to act up until AFTER our ride. If not for those strangers, we would have been waiting to go and probably nervous about flying off into the river or something

Rewinding a little, last Friday a bunch of us got together down at Fanueil Hall for ‘s birthday. Drinks and food were to be had, but Corinna and I couldn’t stay out all that late due to our Saturday plans. It was great seeing everyone, as always, and we even had a special guest! As of September 1st, I was able to count the number of times I had seen since he moved to Boston on one finger. And that one time was for 5 minutes. But with the Welcome Back party as well as Matt’s birthday extravaganza, that number has increased by leaps and bounds! Rumors are that he will be at Girard’s Wii party next month as well!

Sunday was delicious brunch at ‘s abode, which was awesome. After the brunch wound down, I headed over to the Kendall for my own little double-feature. I caught American Hardcore which was a documentary covering the hardcore punk scene of the early-mid 80s. It was a bit frenetic, which can be expected given the subject matter, but it was great. After that, I met up with the film club to see The Last King of Scotland, which I really wanted to be much better than it was. When I left the theater I was pretty strongly against the flick, but after I settled down a bit I realized that it wasn’t terrible, but it just could have been so much better.

I am a Genius

Posted on by grahams

This may be considered a spoiler, but really I’m dissecting something that happens in the first 10 seconds of last night’s episode of Lost, and it has nothing to do with the overall plot of the episode, so read it at your discretion.

I was watching Lost last night, and at the beginning a new character pulls out a CD and puts it in the CD player. I saw the cover artwork and identified it as Talking Heads “Speaking in Tongues”, but when the CD started playing, it was Petula Clark. A look over at Lostpedia, however, confirms that other people agree with me..

I also noticed that it was a DualDisc, which is a pretty recent technology, and the Heads’ catalog was recently released on DualDisc. Someone over at the ‘pedia, however, said it was a recent Son Volt disc, and I defer to their geekiness. Regardless, both slip-ups seem too egregious, and must have been intentional… What they mean, however, I don’t know.