Music Monday
(What? It’s Tuesday? Screw you.)
Round two: Priscilla Ahn.
I first met my new favorite half-South Korean (I know so many) through the fantastic Blogotheque project. For anyone confused as hell by that previous sentence, the Blogotheque — Take Away Shows, by another name – is music distilled, a shaky-cam experiment with light, sound, and typically obscure artists. The product is a wonderful thing despite it, a glorious excuse to take an artist, strip away the machinations of a studio, and sling ‘em on the road to do what they do: make music. (See: Arcade Fire in an elevator, Bon Iver in a French alleyway, the Guillemots out on the streets).
And that’s what she does. Priscilla takes an acoustic and sings. And laughs. She does that last one often, an energetic tickling pretty far removed from the mellow sound coming out of her guitar. But what sweet sound it is! She fits nicely in the modern generation of folk singers who seem to build something elaborate out of a scant few components, an idea rarely clearer than when she strums, sings, and chuckles her way until the video ends.
Check her out. I bet you’ll be charmed.
In Defense of the Tweet
Out with it, then: I’ve been converted.
Twitter is awesome. Sure, sure, it’s little more than a glorified list of facebook status updates, but the last twenty-four hours have proven that it’s all of that and a little something I like to call potential.
Take, for example, Don’t Talk to Strangers (and Other Terrible Advice for Travelers) over on Vagabondish.com. I was pretty freaking excited to see the article go live at all, given my respect for the site and vagabonding in general, but the miraculous addition of (re)tweeting has just made me visibly giddy.
Let’s crunch some numbers. As of this time of writing, the article’s been retweeted twenty-five times. Here’s a semi-random selection along with their respective number of Twitter followers (approximated):
1. vagabondish – 5800
2. Lonely Planet (!) – 27,000 (!!)
3. LPUSAstaff – 3900
4. donnadeau – 2800
5. roadup – 1200
6. brianepeters – 3000
7. soultravelers3 – 24,000 (!)
8. TravelIndustry – 5000
9. journeyPod – 17,000
10. travelspauline – 1200
Totaled: 90,900.
First off: holy crap. There’s no point in assuming that every single one of those followers will bother to read the article, but it’s kinda remarkable still to think that at least 90,900 people could take a look at it. Add on to that the readership that Vagabondish pulls in and the other fifteen retweets not counted and there’s only one solution to be drawn: Twitter is awesome.
It gets a surprising amount of hate from techies and antediluvians alike, but anyone floundering about with a career as a freelance writer knows how vital publicity – the kind Twitter provides – can be. Will anything come out of all this? No clue. But it’s pretty exciting stuff for a new kid on the block, and I’m pretty content with leaving it at just that.
Thanks first and foremost to Mike Richard for running the article, and thanks second (and secondmost?) to everyone who read it. And thanks, lastly, to everyone who realized how narcissistic this post is and stuck around regardless. 
Everyone Needs a Friend
…to tell them to stop.
America’s Got Talent, like every other autoerotic show of its ilk, is all about pointing a finger and laughing. Often. Nearly every act, honestly, but who cares? It’s fun. Even inspirational, at times, when shapes and sizes with actual talent strike out onto stage and prove the title of the show is more than a patriotic group hug.
But for every one of these and these, you have this. Watch it. It’s a stunningly sharp example of just how self-deluded people can become — and as solid proof as anything that people like that actually exist. How the hell does that happen? How can a man go through for some forty-odd years — ending up, in the ultimate irony, as a choir director — without anyone pulling him aside for a brief intervention?
It’s not hard. A little cruel, perhaps, but so it goes. The truth hurts. Apparently it never hurt quite enough for our pleasant choir man over here, but let’s hope he’s the exception beyond any rigid rule. So take this to heart, friends of people who suck: say something. For them. For us.
For America.
That Guy. Over There. I Hate Him.
This is what Brian looks like all the time.
You know what’s embarrassing? Firing up your laptop one day — a sunny day, I recall, of happiness and laughter — and seeing this: a blog post devoted entirely to yours truly, extolling both my dry humor and my crappy attempts at regularly updating my blog.
Mortifying, of course. But I didn’t mind too much once the initial blushing faded away. Any exposure is good exposure, or so I’ve come to believe, which left me with only one possible recourse: revenge.
Payback’s a bitch, baby.
Music Monday
(What? It’s still Sunday? Screw you.)
This, ladies and gents, is a completely irregular feature of vital importance. There’s a lot of music out there. Some good. Some bad. Mostly bad, actually, but what the hell — plenty of good stuff is just waiting to be discovered, and I happen to know a few artists you lot should be listening to right now.
Exhibit A: Nujabes. I’d never heard of the guy until I gave anime series Samurai Champloo a whirl and experienced his unique hip hop stylings on the soundtrack. Wikipedia puts a ‘cool jazz’ label on his work, a description I’m more than perfectly happy to run with in lieu of knowing fancy music words myself. And you know what? It works. I bounced around between different ways of saying it, but cool jazz is a perfect layer to throw on top of the incredible warmth his beats generate between my ears.
More than anything else — more than any lyrical adjectives I could produce — Nujabes knows emotion. Every single track of his that I’ve heard inspires a comfortable sensation, often some hazy kind of delight I don’t encounter much otherwise. Early morning, I’ll call it — the warm gray, the sleepy and mellow hours before dawn where everything is perfectly content and everything else perfectly possible.
The emotions run deeper than that, probably further down than I can even begin to understand, but that’s the gist of it. Start here and work your way down the playlist, though keep in mind he has a wealth of tracks beyond this list that are all equally superb. Save Mystline for last, if you can. That one is single-handledly the most beautiful piece of music I’ve ever heard, and thus the perfect capstone for his work.