Every time I drive past the Uptown Theatre on Broadway I think about what a shame it is that it’s just sitting there, seemingly abandoned. That’s why I was glad to read this this morning:
Uptown Theatre Goes on the Block
It’s about time. I can’t wait for that theatre to be restored and start showcasing concerts. It’ll instantly become one of the top venues in the city.
Update:
Sold to Jam Productions.
David Byrne and Brian Eno have finished the album they’ve been working on together. It’s called Everything That Happens Will Happen Today and will be available through their website. It will be followed by a David Byrne tour focusing on this album and his past collaborations with Eno. Go to Everythingthathappens.com for more details.
Also, it’s being self-released without a record label. Very cool. (Although, David’s been with independent labels for some time now.)
If you are even the slightest bit interested in astronomy, you must check out this collection of absolutely stunning images of Jupiter (and a couple of its moons). In fact, even if you’re not interested in astronomy, just go check it out.
Paul Westerberg has a new album/song out: 49:00 It’s only available from Amazon and you can only buy the entire album as one long track. Oh, and it only costs ¢49. That’s right, 49 minutes of music* for ¢49.
In this age of a la carte downloads, it’s an interesting way to get people to not only download the entire album, but actually listen to it in the proper order. One thing, as a musician and music lover, that I lament in the new music economy is the loss of the “album” in exchange for a return to the “single”. There are so many albums in my collection that are best appreciated sitting down and listening to as the musicians and producers intended: in one sitting. I think far too many people don’t do this. And, with the industry moving to a system that favors single purchases over album purchases (something we haven’t had since the 60’s), it becomes difficult for musicians to put together an album thinking about the thing as a whole and how one song moves to the next.
I know when we were mastering Days Go By I put a lot of effort into thinking about the order of songs and how they would move from one to the next. In fact, there were a few songs that I wanted to start right when the previous song ended, or overlapping the end of one song with the beginning of the next. This is something you used to hear quite a bit on albums. The mastering engineer resisted this idea because of how it would sound if you were just listening to one of the songs on its own, and I was out-voted.
Having the entire album as one long track alleviates this problem, and he can still issue singles (particularly to radio stations – which is something I expect he’ll do) of some of the individual songs, if he chooses. It’s interesting to note that the full title seems to be 49 Minutes of Your Time Life, which I think is a succinct way of saying what I lamented above.
At any rate, I can’t wait to get home later and download this track and spend 49 minutes of my life listening to it.
*Amazon actually lists it at 43:55 – I haven’t downloaded it yet to see what it actually is.
Last night I cracked open the Belgian Ale that I brewed a while back. This one’s really good. I’m very pleased with the way it turned out, it’s probably my best brew to date.
We also bottled a Weiss the other night that I brewed a couple weeks after the Belgian. I forgot to post the recipe at the time, so I’ll post it here. I’m doing the same recipe tonight (mostly because I harvested the yeast from that batch and really couldn’t think of anything else to do with weizen yeast). It’s a very simple recipe that I put together based on what I saw in other weiss recipes, and whatever hops that the home brew supply had on hand. Anyway, here’s the recipe:
3.3 lbs. Muntons Wheat LME
1 lb. Muntons Wheat DME
1 lb. Bavarian Wheat malt
1 lb. Carapils malt
1 oz. Hersbrucker 2.4% @ 60 min.
.25 oz. Liberty 4.0% @ 60 min.
.75 oz. Liberty 4.0% @ 5 min.
WYeast #3068 Weizen Yeast
Steep grains in 1.75 gallons of water @ 152º for 35-40 min. Rinse with 1 gallon of 170º water and top off to 3 gallons. Add DME and half of LME and bring to a boil. Add hops according to schedule and add the rest of the LME with 20 minutes left in the boil. Cool and pitch yeast. Ferment at 77º for one week, then transfer to secondary for two weeks.
Go watch Act I at Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog.
(Each act will only be available until July 20, then you have to buy the DVD, or get it from iTunes.)
I’ve been getting some comment spam lately, so I’ve taken a few measures to try to counteract that. The changes really shouldn’t be noticeable (to the few people who actually comment here). I set a 60 day limit for comments on each entry, and I put a delay of 30 minutes between comments. Hopefully this will alleviate the problem.
Sorry to anyone who got spam emails through the comment notification system!
Well, I finally got my new (refurbished) iPod Classic. Yeah! My old one (a 2nd generation iPod Mini) was on its last legs. Don’t get me wrong, the Mini was a hell of a device. If it hadn’t been dropped countless times, and hadn’t had beer spilled on it (and subsequently taken apart to clean), it would probably still be in great working condition. But, it was time to replace it. (I have ordered a new battery, click wheel, and compact flash card (to replace the HD) to try to rebuild it. I might even give it a custom paint job.)
One thing I’ve really been looking forward to (for a long time) is having gapless playback. The Mini was introduced before iPods featured gapless playback. Since I listen to a lot (you have no idea) of live music, not having it has been a major annoyance. I do have some concerts as single, large chapterized AAC files, but that has its drawbacks. Now, it’s not a problem. (I may have to go back to those shows that I’ve “joined” to a single track and reconvert them from their original .flac or .shn into regular AAC or AppleLossless.)
Oh, also there was the issue of deciding which portion of my huge library to load onto the rather smallish 8GB iPod. That’s no longer an issue.
So, why am I disappointed? Well, I have an older iMac that only has FireWire and USB 1.1 ports on it (no USB 2.0). It turns out Apple dropped FireWire connectivity on the iPod a couple generations ago. D’oh! Do you have any idea how long it takes to sync a huge library over USB 1.1? You really don’t want to know. I started syncing sometime between 6:30 and 7:00 PM last night and just let it run. When I got up around 3:30 this morning (for the, ahem, usual nighttime business) I checked on it. It was only up to the L’s (Led Zeppelin) – about 15.9 GB had been transferred. Ouch.
I decided to shut things down and give it a rest. I guess I’ll just have to connect it each night and let it run for a few hours until the whole thing is synced! (Future syncs shouldn’t be too bad, once I get the initial library over.)
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