Jackhammer: a Phil Davis joint

So, I'm just making sure that this video is everywhere I can get it to as it just makes me so happy. Phil is a great friend. He plugged away at this for months while much more pressing affairs like buying a new house and starting a new job/professorship were looming. Make sure to check out some of his other work at phildavis.net .

Love 2: Bear-Salmon Kaleidoscopic Music

An Air album is something else. No matter what album or what situation- the listener will undoubtedly be chilled out. If you just got told by your slick-haired boss to cancel your barbecue plans because he wants you to do some work he hasn’t finished over the weekend or if you were just cut off by a driver talking on their cell phone after waiting in line at a post office for thirty minutes because someone needed to complain about stamp prices or if your health insurance just denied your claim to pay for the ankle you sprained while stepping over the line at the bowling lane, thus losing the championship by 3 pins then you should probably pick up the whole Air catalog. No matter the album or the situation, you will end up lying in some grass looking up at clouds and thinking they all look like teddy bears or large breasts.

Love 2, their latest album, is no different. While writing these words, I’ve already dozed off twice and dreamed of parachuting into piles of rice pudding. I was listening to the album on my way home from the rodeo the other night and I sat, with my foot on the brake, through 3 green lights until I realized my turn signal wasn’t part of the song. The two Frenchmen have been doing this to me for eleven years now.

I’ve never been able to listen to trance music, but nonetheless, I like to be entranced. So when a pop band can figure out a way to divert the repetitive and robotic nature of the genre, I will dance from the knees down while seated. I will enjoy endlessly this music I call, for lack of inventiveness, trance-pop -or for over-inventiveness, cherry-flavored hypno-gravy. Love 2 is like a kaleidoscope, but instead of looking at little pieces of colored cellophane when you peer through the little hole you are looking at lots of bears standing atop waterfalls catching salmon in their mouths as they leap out of the rushing water. Air is bear-salmon kaleidoscopic music.

I just drank a fourth serving of coffee and I feel like I need more. I went to bed at 9:30 last night despite Monday Night Football excitingly being on mute while I ate spicy thai food. I started taking bubble baths instead of showers in the morning. I’m thinking about seeing a Sandra Bullock movie. My mile split-times on jogs are around 47 minutes. I keep being tranquilized and the only real reason I can think of is that I keep listening to Love 2. It’s great. I would recommend this album to everyone I know, but productivity would drop world wide and next thing you know, the government would be issuing some sort of trance-pop bailout and Americans would be blaming the French for something else. “Your music is so dang chilled out! How can we be expected to sell stuff with this cherry-flavored hypno-gravy clogging our blood vessels!?” It might even escalate into war, except everyone would be so relaxed from listening to Air that they would just lay down in some grass and look up at the clouds.

I may be exaggerating the effect of the album a little bit. I may even be lying. However, that’s what makes music such a blissful bubble-bath inducing beauty. People use words to describe it, when really they should be using dance moves- and everyone speaks their own language when they speak in dance-move. I personally described Love 2 with a wavy, tight-lipped head nod move while my friend described it with a one-shouldered shrug-like move and my crazy neighbor used a fingers-are-snakes, full-bodied, closed-eyed falling off a cliff move. We were all saying the same thing, but didn’t really know what each other was saying.

Check out this video to Sing Sang Sung:

WATCH:: Air - "Sing Sang Sung" - Watch more Videos at Vodpod.

Songs for Sticky Heads

We played a few shows with a fine Asheville band known as Floating Action. Ever since listening to them groove their way towards tomorrow I have had this song stuck in my dome piece:

MonsaaaaaaaaantoooooooooOOOOOooooo

45 minutes ago we returned from Food Inc.

I realized the desire to eat a hamburger is a mistake. Someone in a company planted that desire inside my head with a machine that was originally modeled to fill Twinkies and, in the future, will build T-1000s.

I realized that my dreams are going to be more frightening tonight than when I watched Alien at age 10 or when I was visited by a man with a cane and a top hat.

I realized that, according to Michael Pollan, my whole lifestyle is funding the dark side and it tears me up inside like a Tyson chicken breast.

However, perhaps the most shocking thing I saw on screen was this monstrous company stalking soybean farmers called Monsanto. Little is known of the mysterious company, but it is all around us. It owns us... it is us!

Monsanto has the craziest wikipedia history, so crazy, I wouldn't be surprised if it was made up by a crazy vegan computer-science student.

I'll offer a quick Monsanto recap:

founded in St. Louis in 1901 dabbling in artificial sweeteners, caffeine and something called vanillan.
The company starts making all kinds of crazy shit: in the 40s was plastics then came herbicides including DDT and Agent Orange. Monsanto became a top 10 chemical company all the while making things such as NutraSweet and food flavoring. Then, in the 80s, Monsanto goes from being a huge chemical company to a huge bio-tech company when it realizes it can patent a soybean seed that is immune to Round Up (a Monsanto product). Monsanto then sells these beans to farmers and disallows them to reseed the beans they buy and sues farmers for patent infringement.

That is the main story Food Inc. runs with. The film shows a few farmers being bankrupt by the shrewd Monsanto, while others (forced to mask their identities) are blacklisted from purchasing any Monsanto products.

The company seemed so villainous I thought maybe the films tactics were over-dramatizing the situation. Then I read a bit more of the wikipedia... Perhaps the most baffling fact is one more frightening than getting caught in a mutant spiderweb. Monsanto owns the patent for a product called The Terminator Seed. It is a seed that, when planted, the plant will produce sterile seeds, so the farmer is forced to re-buy seeds the following year. The main fear is that these sterile genes will spread to wild plants through pollination terminating all plantlife.

If storytelling has taught me anything, these guys are bad, and will eventually destroy us all when they discover a way to patent air molecules and sue marathon runners for using more of their product than they paid for. Then, once there are no more marathon runners to sue, they'll sue airplane companies for abusing their product, then bakers because they own the bread if it is baked using Monsanto patented air molecules. Then, when they stop supplying air, and people can only live in renegade underwater bubble cities supplied by soot spurring volcanic faults on the ocean floor, and everyone is constantly covered in volcanic ash and chronically coughing from the stubborn volcano air, a grandfather will tell his granddaughter about lost days of sunshine and free fresh air and soybeans that you could pick and plant without a lawyer handing you a paper and taking away your farm... But his granddaughter will be asleep dreaming of being allowed to marry a dolphin and raise a dolphin family.

A new Dawn

So here I am sitting on the sofa getting ready to head to bed when one of those internet flash floods occurs where you find one thing, then that leads to another thing in which you dive into a few new sites and a neat photograph or song ends up sending you on another tangent and then you realize that you want to share these findings with someone, but no one is around, so all that is left is for you to add your own link to the lengthy chain by posting your own page about what has kept you from reading the book you are trying to finish, in anticipation of someone else digging a different hole to stumble upon such things. We are all weaving a web, and I would like to share a few cool covers done well:









Who is this Dawn Landes and how has she suddenly taken over my evening?

Help

http://www.parkthevan.com/help/

After reading this, I thought I should pass it along. The folks at Park The Van are truly great friends and some of the most wonderful music fans I've been able to meet. Its frustrating to imagine a world where these folks aren't putting out albums with a feverish passion hitherto unknown to me and my dancing shoes.

They are offering a sweet Summer Sampler for download on the site to wet your whistle. You will undoubtedly barbecue to it.
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We’re in this for the long haul. It’s times like these where we take stock in what we’re proud of and of why we do this. We’ve had some incredible new records come out in 2009 already, and some more incredible ones set to come still. The times we’ve had here in New Orleans to see our bands play live and stop through town have been some of our best events to date. Not to mention all of the reports from festivals to dive bars all over the country, the current generation of Park The Van artists out there are making incredible records and playing all over the country like crazy. We can’t begin to explain how lucky we are to be surrounded by the artists and fans we've met since we started putting the orange cone up.

Unfortunately though, we’re living in the same economy as everyone else. And it’s really really hard to sell the amount of stuff it takes to keep our business up and running the way we need to in order to keep putting out records and keep supporting our bands. So, we’re looking for your help to pay our bills through some really rough patches right now. We’re not begging for donations here. We hope that you see that we’re offering some great value to you in exchange for some of your hard earned dough to get us through the roughness. We’re assembling super limited edition handmade items, packages to help you dig deep into discovering all sorts of PTV classics, and prices that we hope you see as generous and ultimately worth it.

It’s tough to put ourselves out there like this and ask for your “help” in running our business. We know that everyone has their own sets of problems, and we get that. But the feedback we get from you is that you love what we’re doing here, and that people can see the vision we share for creating label that is based on support and family and more importantly these wonderful artists the important records that make us feel alive. So, here we are and we’re asking for your help. It never gets old getting to work for your favorite bands and artists. Sometimes you just have to try new things.

Thanks for anything you can do to give us a hand here, and hopefully you like the stuff we’re offering! If you feel like it, please help spread the word. This won’t work if we don’t have a hand from you in letting people know that this is available. And, there’s always the idea of doing this as a gift too! Please let us know if your order is a gift for someone!

Thanks for supporting this thing.

Chris, Zach, Kevin, Matt, Corey, Jeff & the entire PTV team.

HOAGIEFEST 2009

http://www.hoagiefest.com/music.php?user=theswims&music_id=54


This is a link to a song about hoagies.... Wawa hoagies.

It is also a competition that I would love to have my dear friends the Swims champion. Then they can throw a party catered by wawa hoagies and we can all dance with the wawa mascot and eat shortis for a year.

It makes sense, because the Hoagiefest artwork is pretty much from the brain of Brian Langan.


get out the vote!