Spring is in the air! Maybe not in Spokane, but I hear the weather is nicer in the non-hinterland parts of the country. As it gets warmer, if you’re like me you become more & more drawn to long walks and relaxing drives on scenic highways. And what better to that wash down than some quality audio?

All of these podcasts are good enough to simply sit and listen to, but in all honesty the ideal time to consume audio is when your body’s busy doing something else — just like any talk radio. I even put clips of each show in the doodads after each entry to boot. (The numbered links point to each podcast’s subscription page in iTunes.)

1. This American Life

Though the show is native to radio, not the internet, This American Life regularly dominates the top spot on the iTunes podcast charts when their new episodes drop on Mondays. In its life as a radio show, TAL has won Peabody awards for its journalism, though the show’s focus is less on straight journalism and instead simple storytelling — and following the threads of narrative wherever they lead. Starting last year, they made their first forays into video through a TV program on Showtime, which is equally compelling.

2. The Sound of Young America

Jesse Thorn started his now interview-based show as a random, low-key college radio affair, only for it to grow in quality and popularity until Public Radio International (the same company that distributes This American Life) picked up The Sound of Young America to air nationwide. Thorn interviews a host of authors, internet personalities and comedians of every stripe for the most part, meaning that just about everyone he talks to is someone I’m interested in listening to. Past guests have included Ira Glass, Michael Cera, Zach Galifianakis, Patton Oswalt, They Might Be Giants, as well as a brilliant dual-interview with real-life friends John Hodgman & Jonathan Coulton.

3. You Look Nice Today

Subtitled “A Journal of Emotional Hygiene,” You Look Nice Today incorporates a handful of my favorite internet people to great effect. Ringleader Merlin Mann (who’s already proved his comedy chops with his 30 Seconds with That Phone Guy videos) and his friends Adam Lisagor and Scott Simpson record their pointless, meandering conversations about topics real and imaginary — the four episodes released so far have covered premium nuts, loofahs, merkins, comptrollers, snare-drum-based fitness plans, and possible ad campaigns for fictional women’s deodorant brands. Mix in just a dash of John Hodgman (he provides the non-sequitur act breaks), and you’ve got an excellent recipe. And don’t let the numbering fool you — episode 2 is the first one. [Note: the free-range conversation includes smatterings of swearing throughout.]

4. Downloadable Content

The only bad thing about this podcast, made from the recordings of brainstorm sessions between the creators of Penny Arcade as they write a strip, is that it doesn’t update nearly enough. Though the podcast is essentially a straight fly-on-the-wall recording, which occasionally makes divining the topic at hand difficult — we aren’t privy to whatever it is on their computer screens that one or the other is pointing to. Nevertheless, Gabe & Tycho (or, as they’re known in real life, Mike Krahulik & Jerry Holkins) frequently have unique perspectives on video game issues, colored all the way through with their unique style of baroque vulgarisms. [Note: Take that to mean, they swear a whooole lot, but poetically.]

5. The Bugle: Audio Newspaper for a Visual World

The Daily Show’s John Oliver comments on weekly news of the world with fellow Englishman Andy Zaltzmann, as sponsored by The Times Online of London. Half-serious, half-mocking, all British accents, all the time. This is a fairly recent add to my regular rotation, and I’ve yet to cycle through the entire back catalog, but I don’t need to do that to be able to recommend it. That delicious flavor of crusty, dry British humor of understatement smashed up against Daily Show-style comedy news commentary is like peanut butter & chocolate all over again.

HONORABLE MENTIONS
The Mortified Shoebox Show — Mortified is a long-running stage show that puts adults on the spot reading from their childhood diaries and journals, to decidedly humorous effect. The Mortified Shoebox Show is a video podcast made from their archive of recordings, including gems like 500 Miles to Hollywood and I Hate Drake.

Have Games, Will Travel — Paul Tevis is a game reviewer of a different sort: shunning electronic games altogether, Have Games, Will Travel instead focuses on board, card, and tabletop role-playing games exclusively. The program itself is, admittedly, somewhat dry when Tevis is reviewing and not interviewing people in the tabletop gaming industry, but that doesn’t detract from the quality of his insight. Most of the games he reviews are somewhat indie affairs, but learning about a little-known gem that sounds like a blast to play is one of the show’s prime attractions.

Jonathan Coulton’s Thing A Week — The project now over, Thing A Week was the force that propelled Jonathan Coulton into the geek mainstream and onward into the geek stratosphere as nerd-dom’s go-to troubadour. For an entire year, Coulton released a new, free song every week as a personal creative exercise. One of the fruits of this labor was the song “Code Monkey”, instantly beloved by socially-awkward programming nerds the world over.

The Ricky Gervais Show — Another now-dead podcast, this one features co-creators of the BBC version of The Office, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, along with Karl Pilkington, an associate from their earlier days in satellite radio. Primarily, the show revolved around teasing Pilkington’s ignorance and plethora of surreal opinions with varying degrees of meanness, to the enjoyment of all. Pilkington’s behavior is so perfect as a comic foil that some have suspected him of being a plant; regardless of the truth, The Ricky Gervais show was a beacon of the inane while it lasted.

Wizard rock is in the air. No less than two documentaries featuring the Harry Potter music subculture have premiered in the last month: We Are Wizards (which focuses on multiple realms of Potter fandom) and The Wizard Rockumentary: A Movie About Rocking and Rowling. To my knowledge, The Wizard Rockumentary has yet to air outside of Spokane, so this may turn out to be an emoglasses exclusive. Who knew?

For starters, an admission: I’d definitely classify myself as a fan of Harry Potter. I’ve read the books, seen the movies, attended midnight releases for the books and movies alike. I’d even heard of wizard rock through friends — but I had no idea it was anything like this.

Profiling a geeky subculture is nothing new for a documentary. I remember watching Trekkies in high school, and feeling conflicted afterward due to the way the film treated its subjects like freakshows on parade. The Wizard Rockumentary doesn’t have that problem, though, and makes the members of bands with names like Draco and the Malfoys and The Hermione Crookshanks Experience seem as normal as any mainstream band.

Continue reading ‘The Wizard Rockumentary: A Movie about Rocking and Rowling’

Your patience will soon be rewarded. I believe I have managed to strike the appropriate balance between this place and others.

All it needed was a little crop rotation. Or it might be more like a screen door…

I’ve had some time to think about a few of the things I like recently. I’m not sure when the concept coalesced in my brain, but a lot of my interests can be explained by a love for invented ecologies.

I think that area — the invented ecology — best captures my fondness for the kind of source material that fill the pages of Dungeons & Dragons books. It’s not so much the content itself, which is diverting in its way, but the picture all the books attempt paint together of a coherent world. How else do you explain the sourcebooks on my shelf I may never actually put to use, but that I don’t regret owning for a second?

A well-developed invented ecology is the only reason I can bring myself to stick with most fantasy novels. Most sport average-to-bad prose, but their evocation of a total world is what makes me a fan when it’s done well. Sabriel is young-adult fiction, written below even the Harry Potter level style-wise. Its plot is decent, but its world is original and compelling. And for those few fantasy authors able to turn a phrase, there are cases like the fictional New Crobuzon of China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station, or Armada in The Scar feel as permanent, historied and tangible as the London of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

Maps are like a real-world version of this. They describe real places that grew organically, but still have an element of invention to them. Obviously, maps of imaginary places are even better. Maybe the ultimate are imaginary maps of real places — an idea I can’t quite describe other than as something like remembered geography, or to link to sites like strange maps, or someone’s geographical map of internet communities, or a hand-drawn map of a videogame world. Basically, mixing up the objective and subjective on paper the same way they get mixed up in the brain.

World-creation may be my favorite art.

The answer is, watch a hell of a lot of movies. Apparently.

I’ve had a reviews tab going since last August around this same time, which is shocking. I’ve been far more consistent and thorough about maintaining my movie scores than I have been about anything else of mine on the internets, probably because of the simplicity of typing a name and picking some stars.

Looking at the numbers associated with each entry in the admin panel, I can tell I’ve seen over 150 titles this year — not just movies on DVD and at the theater, but a smattering of TV shows on DVD as well.

Even assuming a nice round figure of two hours for each entry — which has to be low, given single entries for entire television seasons — I figure I’ve spent almost a solid fortnight (two weeks, two weeks) just watching stuff. I’d probably be horrified, if I was somebody else. But I’m me! And besides, I think whatever total would come out for “boredom naps” would be far scarier.

Continue reading ‘If you ever wonder what I do’

Owen Pallett has a knack for taking the songs of others and making them so much his own you’d swear he wrote them. Couple that ability with strong live performances and a loyal fan base dedicated to recording as many of his live acts as possible, and there’s a host of Final Fantasy tracks floating around the internets without any accompanying album — and that’s before you count the original tracks that didn’t make the final cut of one album or another.

Finding them is the chore, though. And given that most of them are recorded live, there’s no assurance of quality when you’re on the hunt. So, here’s a bunch.

THE COVERS — Owen Pallett sings other people’s stuff

“Sweet Fantasy” by Mariah Carey
“Peach, Plum, Pear” by Joanna Newsom
“Paris 1919″ by John Cale
“This Modern Love” by Bloc Party
“No Cars Go” by the Arcade Fire

THE B-SIDES — Owen Pallett sings stuff of his you haven’t heard

Flare Gun
Brand New Song (an untitled work-in-progress)
What Do You Think Will Happen Next?
Hey Dad

THE REMIXES — Owen Pallett tinkers with other people’s songs

“Your Ex-Lover Is Dead” by Stars
“Don’t Ask” by Grizzly Bear
“Black History Month” by Death From Above 1979

As some bonus info for his last album, He Poos Clouds, I found an interview that detailed the connection of Dungeons & Dragons’ 12 schools of magic with the tracks off that album (and a separate website with some more insight). The schools & songs are as follows:

Abjuration – “Arctic Circle”
Illusion – “He Poos Clouds”
Conjuration – “This Lamb Sells Condos”
Necromancy – “If I were a Carp”
Enchantment – “I’m afraid of Japan”
Evocation – “Song Song Song”
Divination – “Many Lives -> 49 MP” {mp3}
Transmutation – “Do You Love”

EDIT: I forgot to note, I also read something online claiming that on his forthcoming album, Heartland, Pallett is teaming up with Beirut’s frontman Zach Condon. Wonderous news, and a brilliant combination!

Also, Stars just pre-released their forthcoming album, In Our Bedroom After The War, online through eMusic and iTunes. A handy arrangement for me, since I used eMusic previously to pick up their remix/cover album as well — Do You Trust Your Friends. September sees In Our Bedroom’s wide release, and they’ve put out a sample track from the album: “The Night Starts Here”.

Gnarls Barkley is known for distinctive live, acoustic covers of their own material. I stumbled across the audio of this particular performace through Derek Bondy’s Facebook profile of all places, and had to find an mp3. Turns out, the original source is a video from a “Live from Abbey Road” music series in the UK.

new version: Transformer (Live from Abbey Road)
original version: Transformer (St. Elsewhere)

Speaking of artists doing covers of their own material, Beirut’s Lon Gisland EP has a great interpretation of Gulag Orkestar’s “Scenic World”. Part of the original album’s appeal is the lo-fi, solo effort put forth by Zack Condon without much outside help, but it’s intriguing to listen to the track get the full-band treatment.

new version: Scenic World (Lon Gisland EP)
original version: Scenic World (Gulag Orkestar)