Lit class for the indie kid

I just had this brilliant idea. Think lit class for snobbish music dorks. Every week, a bunch of music nerds, hipsters, and people with beards get together, have snacks, talk about whatever, and then listen to three or four songs from a music player device. Then everyone talks about what they just listened to. Each track gets one or two plays. The focus would be on carefully analyzing each song in detail, championing it or tearing it apart, looking for influences, etc. Alternatively, the model could instead be a book club for music. Everyone listens to a specific album on their own each week or month or whatever, and comes together for dinner or wine or both, and talks about that album in detail.

I feel like much of the modern music experience is so passive, very personal, and perhaps underdeveloped. Like the best authors, there's a lot that music writers put into the songs they make, and you can easily miss it if you're not really informed about the music. A critical discussion can tease out the details you'd miss otherwise. Plus it could help figure out what music is actually worth spending time and money on.

I don't think I'm the only one who misses high school world lit. Right? Right?

Stuff the Internet forgot, issue 1

Every now and again I stumble across something on the Internet I'd forgotten about for a long time. Sometimes it's alive and well, but all too often I have to wave away the cobwebs, and the signs of bit rot are impossible to ignore. I want to remember these things, and I want you to see how cool they are too, so I'll be posting them here occasionally.

Today I unearthed the Internet leftovers of famed supercheerful-electronic group Lemon Jelly. Whenever I need a cheerful melody, their first two albums can't be beat, and the third features some pretty excellent tracks as well. The dynamic duo of Nick Franglen and Fred Deakin were well-known for having zany shows awash in balloons. Sadly, though, the group is on indefinite hiatus, and their site hasn't been updated in a while, though the forum is still hopping.

I decided to do some more excavating and found that Franglen is still making new music, though his most recent colab Blacksand (with one C.J. Casey of Akasha) stands in stark contrast to his Lemony work. Listen for yourself and you will see what I mean -- real dark and echoey and atmospheric.

Deakin, at first glance, seems to have left the Internet limelight circa 2007 rather thoroughly, though glimpses peak through if you know where to look. Then you realize he's just been busy working at his graphic design studio, Airside. They do all sorts of neat things like these funky creatures for Japanese TV station NTV, and these ultracute ultraugly stitch creatures among plenty of others.

So there you go. The Lemons Jelly are twain but do not grieve; for they are doing Good Things and have not forgotten this world.

Professional name

One of my co-conspirators on the project is putting together a tech report, and he asked me whether I wanted to go by Alex or Alexander. This is an important question, since this choice will probably determine my professional name for the rest of my career. I know I'm not the only one who has pondered this question: a prof in my lab changed his name from Michael to Mike about eight years after his first publication, and now is so adamant about being called Mike that he will go out of his way to cross out "Michael" on a nametag and write "MIKE" underneath.

I'm going with Alexander, mostly because my webpage is the number one result when you search for my full name (my single Amazon product review is surprisingly high, somewhere around 19...). I had to think about it a while, though.

The crash

People are dumb. Anarchy is certainly not the answer to the shortcomings of capitalism, and hanging effigies of the only people who understand the system is not a way to solve the problems we're facing. Killing the fools who understood enough to get us into this mess sure would make it hard to get out of the mess after the dust has cleared. There is no way that we can simply legislate the banking system into working again: we need the people who know how to make the gears turn. Furthermore, not all bankers are evil, and I seriously doubt anyone who constructed the complicated financial instruments that imploded with the housing crash did it knowing how hard things could fall.

Anyways, those are my thoughts on that.

Livejournal is for wusses

I felt like a change of pace so I've decided to transition to a new weblog service (blog is so 2006). I occasionally have ideas I want to share with the world so if I'm feeling particularly motivated I'll post them here.