Music

I understand that a strong community is important to you, even if a busy schedule and certain cultural disparities have kept me from truly being a part of it. I fully support your desire to have a block party every single weekend of the summer, to take over the streets with charcoal grills and picnic tables, Motown and soul. If I get annoyed at the noise sometimes, I remind myself that you are celebrating the… See more →

On the Web

• ZombieWalk Vancouver: The undead answer to Critical Mass. What a completely fantastic idea!
• Hollowed-Out Human Head: Frivolous product design ruffles my feathers.
• Remastered: A fellow Rock Snob laments the age of digital music.
• A List Apart 4.0: A great site made even greater.
• “Imagine five of the top voiceover artists in our country all in one car—mine!”: Hilarious trailer for the 26th Annual Key Art Awards.
• P.E.A.R.T.: A drum machine that plays actual… See more →

I currently have the good fortune to be working on a project in the service of Her Royal Majesty Heavy Metal Music, who just happens to have been my first love. I’ve done work for Her before, but most of it—from junior high notebook adornments to silkscreened gig posters—has been essentially pro bono. Now that She is a legitimate client, with a statement of work, a schedule, and a budget, I’m reminded of something I… See more →

On the Web

• Guitar Shred Show: Learn the way of the exploding solo and become the shredder you have always dreamed of being!
• Picnic Mtn. Book 1: Thirty-two pages of perplexingly hilarious comics for $5.00.
• Live: Shellac: I have passed up a few opportunities to see Shellac. I am stupid.
• The Bearskinrug Store: Kevin Cornell is now selling prints and posters. Buy now—this stuff is gonna go fast!
• Glyphs: Dave Shea examines the awesome power… See more →

Late last year, my friend Scott added a Philadelphia-based band called Chromelodeon to the roster on his Bloodlink record label. The band initially piqued my interest with a nine-song EP called The Dark Sword of Chaos, which was dedicated exclusively to the music from Ninja Gaiden II, the second installment in the greatest video game series of all time. It was clear that these guys shared my enthusiasm for the game, and they brought its… See more →

On the Web

• Punk Rock Purity: Video of legendary graphic designer Art Chantry talking about his work for Sub Pop Records. Read plenty more of the story here.
• Le Building: A French animated short with a refreshingly simple concept and breathtaking execution. Also, don’t miss the making-of video!
• Nike Campaign “Borrows” Album Art: This is fucking ridiculous. I hope Dischord manages to put a stop to it.
• The Hills Are Alive: My first post for Noteworthy tackles… See more →

We have a pretty rad AirTunes setup in the Pixelworthy office, and we all take turns sending selections from our MP3 libraries to the speakers hooked up to it. Amidst the variety of tastes on display, some of us have taken to choosing a theme for the music we play on a given day. If yours is a musical office like ours, you might want to give it a try. Here are a few theme… See more →

On the Web

• 10 Years of Zeldman: One of the most (deservedly) influential figures in web design celebrates a milestone.
• Even Better Than the Real Thing: Imrov Everywhere opens for U2… as U2.
• Goth, Metalhead Overcome Subcultural Differences to Find Love: “What’s gonna happen at their wedding when Danielle starts playing Sisters of Mercy or some shit like that?”
• Jeff Louella: Relaunches with his personal account of the Browser Wars.
• Week 5: The fifth installment… See more →

A musical baton has been passed to me by Stan and Ethan. Who am I to refuse them?

Total Volume of Music Files on My Computer

• 74.79 Gb

The Last CD I Bought Was

• Big Bear: Big Bear
  Throat-shredding shrieks and mathy metal guitar chugging that somehow owes more to Slint than the Dillinger Escape Plan. Amidst all the starts and stops and time changes, it still manages to swing. Refreshing stuff.

(See an up-to-date… See more →

The 48 Hour Film Project was in Philadelphia the weekend of April 8–10, but due to a surplus of applicants, our team was not accepted this year. We decided to make a film anyway. Six films, actually.

Here’s how it happened: Six filmmakers each came up with a basic concept and the six concepts were thrown into a hat. We then each randomly drew a concept back out of the hat and developed it into… See more →

On the Web

• Chris Harding Animation Concern: Wonderfully designed cartoons reminiscent of Gene Deitch-era Terrytoons.
• A Whole New Internet?: Jason Kottke assesses the State of the Web Union
• Guess the Google: A fun Flash quiz game using Google Image Search
• 54 Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena
• Amusement Park in Decay: Three pages of lovely photos (1, 2, 3)
• Five Simple Steps to Better Typography: Sound advice from Mark Boulton.
• Singles Night at Wal*Mart: I think I… See more →

The weather of late indicates that Spring is finally making a gesture of commitment to Philadelphia, and with it, my annual resolve is reborn to get the hell out of the house and find things to be excited about. I’ve been both busy and lazy these last couple of months (a paradoxical combination at which I excel), which, along with the temperature, has caused me to miss the first half of this year’s Philadelphia Film… See more →

On the Web

• Writing, Briefly: Excellent writing tips from Paul Graham.
• Typecasting: The Use (and Misuse) of Period Typography in Movies.
• Frusion Breakfast Brawl: Addictive Punch Out-style Flash game.
• “The Most Expensive Album Never Made”: Detailed history of Guns ’N’ Roses’ doomed Chinese Democracy.
• Pimp My Safari: New online hub for Safari browser customization from Jon Hicks.
• Guess the Dictator and/or Television Sit-Com Character: This online game of 20 (or more) questions is actually quite difficult to… See more →

In the 77 days since I last posted:

I started a new full-time design job at TMX Communications. My face graced television screens nationwide in several episodes of VH1’s ILL-ustrated. I finished the Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Kutztown University that I started ten years ago. I saw Andrew W.K. for the ninth time. I had my 28th birthday. My bedroom was swarmed by dozens of winged ants. I got a cellular phone. I… See more →

The New Wave of British Heavy Metal survives in Philadelphia, thanks to the majesty of Wastoid, whose performance Saturday night at the Pontiac Grille made me feel like I was 13 again. The love of leather and swords and dazzling guitar heroics never left me, but this was a sublime rediscovery all the same.

Spaceboy Music got the new Tortoise album, It’s All Around You, nearly two weeks ahead of its release date, so I did too. I like it, and I expect to like it more as I listen to it more, but there are no great departures from the oft-imitated Tortoise sound to report, and nothing noteworthy about this newest assemblage of ambling, polyrhythmic post-rock that wasn’t already made noteworthy on one of the band’s previous outings.… See more →

BREDSTIK Entertainment made its second foray into frenetic weekend filmmaking, this time for the 48 Hour Film Project, on the weekend of the 19th–21st. Our randomly-drawn and decidedly unsavory genre options, Musical or Western, actually proved to be less of an impediment than the generally intensified circumstances; contrasting our last project of this sort, we had less time, fewer people, and for some reason, we devised a more complicated script. So the result, Lunch Break… See more →

Mike Patton and Rahzel visited the Trocadero and bored me to tears. It’s like this: these are two very talented guys whose respective bags of tricks are only so deep.

Patton, who should absolutely be commended for his below-the-radar noise experimentation and tireless commitment to collaboration, ultimately excels more in the field of mutated pop music, where the established conventions of the genre allow a much more forgiving space for him to repeat himself. His… See more →

The Dillinger Escape Plan played a super cheap four dollar show at the super small First Unitarian Church with the super great Kayo Dot and Medications. This was one of the best Dillinger performances I have seen, which I find myself saying just about every time I see them (and I’ve lost count of how many Dillinger shows I’ve seen). Such a distinction is especially rare amidst musicians of their jaw-dropping technical proficiency, whose opportunity… See more →

I’m not often interested in shows that could conceivably sell out in less than five minutes after tickets have been made available, so imagine my disappointment when that exact thing happened on Friday as I waited in line for Darkness tickets. Now it appears that my only chances at seeing what will probably be the best show of the year are spending upwards of $100 on eBay or winning a radio station contest, neither of… See more →

Okay, here’s a pretty charming concept: You’re a musician who combs estate sales for the personal slide collections of the deceased—family vacations, corporate presentations, educational slideshows, etc. You create stories from the photos, write songs to tell the stories, and project the slides on a screen as you perform their accompanying songs live. You sing and play guitar and keyboard, your wife runs the slide projector and designs the costumes, and your ten-year old daughter… See more →

Okay, here’s a pretty charming concept: You’re a musician who combs estate sales for the personal slide collections of the deceased—family vacations, corporate presentations, educational slideshows, etc. You create stories from the photos, write songs to tell the stories, and project the slides on a screen as you perform their accompanying songs live. You sing and play guitar and keyboard, your wife runs the slide projector and designs the costumes, and your ten-year old daughter… See more →

Philadelphia is in the eye of a winter storm today; the snow and ice already coating the ground will soon be joined by reinforcements. During this temporary absence of airborn aggravation, my inbox is relentlessly pounded by dozens of MyDoom/Novarg messages. I delete them to the tune of Talkie Walkie, Air’s triumphant return to the magical realm of Very Good Music (after vacationing in Mediocre Music with 10,000 Hz Legend).

Meanwhile, Jason Santa Maria has unveiled… See more →

Over the last couple of months, this site has offered its visitors little respite from boredom. I’ll make no apologies for this, since the lack of updates results directly from my own boredom, which is itself respite from my heated, ongoing battle with the coding of the site’s long-overdue web standards-compliant redesign. There have, however, been a few recent occasions that my attention has been occupied by something other than a spot on the wall… See more →

You know, neither my physique nor my personality suggests a similarity to any hibernating animal that I can think of, and yet, this site routinely falls silent at the beginning of winter, as if I had found a comfortable cave in which to reduce my vital signs and nap for a few months. If South Philadelphia hides any such caves, it hides them well, so unless business as usual is a mundane hallucination, it’s safe… See more →

[…] thoroughly mesmerized by a too-short Kayo Dot performance at the Rotunda.

The winter has otherwise mostly kept me at home, though I’ve snuck out now and then to get a laugh from Brendon Small, H. Jon Benjamin, and Eugene Mirman at the Khyber….

I emerge from over three weeks of silence to tell you about The Darkness. If you’re like everyone else on the planet, the band is already old news (as evidenced by a tour spanning three continents that’s nearly sold out through March), but if you’re like me, you had never heard of them before a month ago, didn’t bother to listen to them before last week, and have since compensated for that missed month of… See more →

I remain too distracted to produce contemplative opuses detailing my recent experiences, so here is some brusque vagueness about my tremendous weekend and some recent adventures in cinema:

Kevin Cornell’s bachelor party meant food, booze, billiards, and video games all night at Dave & Buster’s on Friday. The Table’s opening reception for the Land Lines exhibition meant beautiful photographs from Nicki Stager and Micah Danges on Saturday. The Incomparables’ second annual warehouse party meant rock… See more →

Last night, I registered team “BREDSTIK Entertainment” in the National Film Challenge, which works like this: At 7:00 PM on Friday, October 17, we will receive an e-mail with a randomly-generated genre and list of elements (a prop, a line of dialogue, and a character). We then have until 12:00 noon on the following Monday (a total of 65 hours) to create a short film (between 4 and 8 minutes long) in the assigned genre,… See more →

There has been plenty going on, but I haven’t had much to say about any of it. Lightning Bolt, Hangedup, Battles, and Lost in Translation are all great and were all taken in last week. Over the weekend, I saw a bumper sticker that said “Abortion Causes Breast Cancer,” watched my dear friend Mary get married, and cheered as some friends’ 48-hour film submission took 2nd place in the 2003 CAmm Slamm in Baltimore. At… See more →

I pedaled to the Khyber last night to see Stars, my second blind date in as many nights with a Canadian pop band. Once again, the decision was a good one. Live, Stars could be described as an atmospheric Britpop outfit; on record, it’s more of an electro-twee-pop affair, without the detached cynicism. The band does both equally well. You can definitely hear traces of The Smiths and New Order, but somehow Stars’ heart on… See more →

I hadn’t heard Broken Social Scene before tonight. Having recently been informed that the band is comprised, in part, of Do Make Say Think and A Silver Mt. Zion members, the power of Canada compelled me to have my first listen in a live setting. This was such a good idea. As all three bands on the bill (including Jason Collett and Metric) are involved in the same Toronto collective, the stage had a revolving… See more →

Kevin Cornell recently launched Bearskinrug version 4; it is as delicious as might be expected.

Lots of shows lately: The Raveonettes, Luna, Stinking Lizaveta, Mogwai, Andrew W.K. Some scattered moments: Meathead Group A on the TLA floor uses cell phones to call Meathead Group B in the balcony to alert Group B to being given the finger by Group A. “E-A-G-L-E-S!” chants abound. The Troc house lights don’t go up until Luna has played not… See more →

Meathead Group A on the TLA floor uses cell phones to call Meathead Group B in the balcony to alert Group B to being given the finger by Group A. “E-A-G-L-E-S!” chants abound. […] Many a Philadelphia Mogwai fan is apparently uninterested in the low end of the band’s notorious dynamic shifts and sees the circumstances fit to have discussions over the music. After being asked to quiet down by someone who actually wants to… See more →

The Troc house lights don’t go up until Luna has played not one, but three obviously planned encores.

The summer technically ends on September 22 (as anyone eagerly anticipating the redesign of this site should note), but most people pack up their lawn sprinklers and sun dresses after Labor Day, moribundly lumping the whole of September into the Autumn category. Apparently Mother Nature’s embitterment toward this trend compelled her to adjust the calendar herself; it was 65º and raining in Philadelphia this afternoon. The crap weather seems to have followed me back here… See more →

A moment of silence for Wesley Willis, who died at the age of 40 around 9:00 Chicago time Thursday night, August 21st. Visit Alternative Tentacles for more information.

Massive Attack and Mondays don’t mix. My eyelids weren’t giving gravity much of a fight this afternoon.

Last week’s lucky sneak preview was American Splendor, and it was great. An adaptation of the underground comic of the same name, it is an unassumingly unusual film, whose fusion of documentary and dramatization (both factual and fictional) is only occasionally seamless, but nevertheless assiduously works to marvelous effect. It falters here and there toward the end, as… See more →

After redeeming my pass to a sneak preview of Dirty Pretty Things, I somehow stumbled into the wrong theater; when the lights went down and the film began, I discovered that I would be seeing The Magdalene Sisters instead, followed by a Q&A with its director, Peter Mullan. Since Magdalene was one of many movies on my wish list that didn’t fit into my excessively ambitious Philadelphia Film Festival schedule back in April, I sat… See more →

The Philadelphia stop of the Dismemberment Plan farewell tour was last night at the TLA, and the band made it count, playing a setlist-free, all-request show that lasted nearly two hours. It was bittersweet, to be sure, enjoying such a great show and knowing all the while that it would be my last opportunity to see The Plan live.

Every year, I take a trip to Chicago to visit some friends and spend some time in one of my favorite cities. Every year, my trip to Chicago is scheduled to coincide with one or many Philadelphia events that I’d really rather not miss. It’s uncanny: bands, film festivals, exhibitions, and all manner of special events all pop out of the woodwork moments after my plane tickets are booked, secure and relieved in the assurance… See more →

I was going to begin this long-overdue post with a verbose description of the difficulties of keeping a weblog like this: the busier a person is, the less time he has to write, and the larger the pile of experiences to write about becomes. I have opted instead for the succinct description you have just read, which still has not prevented this from being my longest post to date. There’s tons to talk about, and… See more →

Tonight I rode to and from the First Unitarian Church to see Melt-Banana, whose engrossing, skin-blistering noisepunk is still ringing in my ears.

I ventured out to the Friendship House last night, a cool space in North Philly previously unknown to me. DAT Politics made it hop. Espers made it sleep. Lucky Dragons made it buzz and squeak. Nathan Michel made it chirp. Wrist + Pistols made it twang. There was much knob-twiddling and pointing and clicking. It was a long night, but a good one.

My roommates and I have found a rather nice apartment in South Philadelphia. We signed the lease on Friday. We will move around the end of June.

Friday night was unusual, to be sure, finding my Conshohocken cohorts and me receptive to the idea of following our friend Stan (or “Jason,” as he prefers) to a hotel sports bar in King of Prussia to hang out with people none of us really knew. It turned… See more →

I did a stupid thing Monday night: I forgot to bring my camera when I went to see I Am Spoonbender. When one considers the fact that I was actually thinking about skipping the show, the forgotten camera is almost trivial, but, oh, the images I failed to document…

Needless to say, the show was amazing. Drums, synthesizers, samplers, telephone mics, and various unidentified electronic gadgets (analog and digital) were all manipulated live and fed… See more →

Last night was the sixth installment of R5’s “In the Sanctuary Concert Series,” featuring Essex Green, Aereogramme and The Delgados in the sanctuary of the First Unitarian Church (shows at the church are usually in the basement).

Essex Green plays polished, country-tinged psychedelic pop. I’m told their music is the most authentic of the modern psych-pop revivalists, but having little frame of reference from that era and genre, I couldn’t help but be reminded of… See more →