"Top 50 of 2005" music videos blogpage

Hey people

I ran across this the other day and figured this is as good a place as any to share it. Good time waster if nothing else, and nice to see that creativity still exists in video production (albeit in a non-mainstream venue). Man I remember back when 120 minutes used to be the shit...

The New Radio

A few days ago, a friend of mine sent me a link to Pandora, an amazing music site, and let’s just say I now know why they call it Pandora. It has since opened my ears to so much new music that I don’t even know how to process it all. Just today I found a band called a Azure Ray. A band I am slowly falling in love with.

As if one great new site wasn’t enough, another friend with whom I had shared Pandora told me about Last.fm. While this site is a littler more complicated and designed to do different things, I think a combination of the two is great. Take some time and push the buttons so to speak on this site, and you will be pleasantly surprised by the number of things you can do and the great music that will pour out from your speakers.

Each allows you to find new music that you are likely to enjoy. Last.fm does this through analysis of what you listen to and like (and what others listen to and like). Pandora encodes different aspects of music and determines what you might like based on those factors.

Pandora is easier to use because it takes absolutely no setup and streams music on the site itself. Last.fm uses tagging and has social network aspects, but you have to download the player to listen to music.

I find Last.fm to be better at playing music I’ve heard before and like, whereas Pandora tends to introduce me to entirely new bands.

I am slowly becoming a tech head, and that last paragraph actually makes a bit of sense to me. If it seems like too much info to consume, don’t worry the sites are both easier than that. Both are great sites that allow you to share your thoughts and tastes in music. I have never been a fan of radio, because I felt it was too confining. But now the DJs have become giant computers and thousands of other people who like music similar to me. Have fun. These sites will change your life.

"Black Cab"

I've been really digging on this Jens Lekman fellow of late. I found this link for his mp3 "black cab" which is a great one from his newest album Oh You're So Silent Jens. Check it out and enjoy!

Directions

Death Cab Unveil 'Directions'

Death Cab for Cutie has announced details of their upcoming “DIRECTIONS,” an innovative anthology of 12 short films inspired by each song on the band’s acclaimed album PLANS. Every song will be delivered by a different director. 11 of the videos will be unveiled one by one at Death Cab For Cutie The first of which will be 'Marching Bands of Manhattan' on January 23. The entire collection will be available on dvd to purchase April 11, 2006. Among the filmmakers contributing to “DIRECTIONS” are Lance Bangs, P.R. Brown, Ace Norton, Jeffrey Brown, Lightborne, Autumn de Wilde, Rob Schrab, Laurent Briet and Monkmus, as well as Aaron Stewart-Ahn . Be sure and check the website for more details in the coming days!

The Boy Least Likely To video

I just wanted to share one of favorite recent songs "Be Gentle With Me" by The Boy Least Likely To. It's actually a video, quicktime format. You can find it here. Enjoy folks!

We just don't get it, do we?

This here's a portrait of Luis Vaz de Camoes, the enigmatic and revered figure on whom much of my thesis was based. You might be able to make out that he has no right eye--a result of fighting in Northern Africa while in the Portuguese army. He was well-bred, finding himself frequenting the king's courts and studying at some of the finest Universities that Portugal had to offer in the 16th century. He travelled the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, following much of the same route that Vasco da Gama took during his "voyage of discovery." Camoes, however, ran afoul of the reino in Goa, India, ostensibly for not having paid taxes owed to the crown. He was jailed and subsequently defamed until his eventual return to Portugal. There he presented the king with his masterpiece, Os Lusiadas. This epic poem was immediately well-received and has since become a cornerstone of the canon of Portuguese literature. Many things make this work so intriguing: its form, language, description, mythology, and nationalism all quickly come to mind. But perhaps most compelling is Camoes's "narrative within the narrative"; i.e., the infusion of his personal experiences with Africans, trade relations, and Arabs with the aforementioned imperialistic themes of this tome. The resultant work toes the line between bravado and compassion; between reckless imperialism and cautious expansion. Today it remains a testament to the inherent dangers faced in empire-building, and should probably be on the desks of our current foolhardy administration.

Cat Power's the greatest

So let's kick this whole sharing thing off properly:

Cat Power has a new album out, The Greatest. Check it out on AOL via streaming audio here.

Well you'll have to click a few buttons and maybe get a[nother goddamn] plug-in, but hell it's worth the listen. Opinions?

Mission statement?

I should say first of all that I have recently discovered Elliott Smith's self-titled album (yes, I am that lame and judge me as you see fit, it will be well-deserved) and I would encourage anyone who hasn't listened to it to spend a few nights clacking away on your respective keyboard while listening to it. It really is good. And I apologize for not having known this before because I did have, and liked very much, either/or and Figure 8. No harm, no foul though, right?

Anyway, the important thing is that I was going to create a proper description (sub-heading) for this blog and after spending some time typing, I realized it was just too damn long. So here it is below. I hope this doesn't seem overbearing; I think it is really there more for me to validate its existence. For if this blog is simply self-promoting or redundant, it has no purpose.

So I think the following will help to give it purpose: God knows there are enough fucking blogs out there already that are either a) better-written; b) better-informed; or c) way cooler/way more entertaining. Rather than try to supplant those, this space should act as a sort of public information board like you might find in the middle of college campuses, or near the underground mailroom. Let's try to pass on useful websites, innovative music, and other random bits of information in order to serve (IMHO) the web's purpose: linking interests, both common and disparate, together. Okay, I'm stepping down from my soapbox; now it's your turn.