help!/pick some songs for me to play at open mics in pullman

an open request to my fans (and to-be fans, hopefully):

i want to try to start playing some open mics and short shows around pullman and moscow because i haven't played or written music in six months and i'm about to lose my freaking mind as a result.

that said, i've never actually played less than 10 songs or so at a show and so i don't know how to best concentrate entertainment awesomeness into a 15 minute time slot.  that's where you come in.  i just posted ten of what i think are my most "popular" (if there is such a thing) of my songs on my reverbnation page.  three of them have two different versions posted, for variety's sake.  if you have the time and interest, i'd really appreciate it if you took a listen to the songs and let me know which three or four you think are the best for potential open-mic-ing.

i'm going to mirror this post on my blog and on facebook, so you can reply at either of those places or i guess just email me.

songs can be heard at:

www.reverbnation.com/benbunting or just search for "lazy blazers" on facebook and listen there.

there are probably ways to get to the songs from my blog and my facebook page, if you're especially enterprising.

of course, if you aren't at all interested in this or don't have the time to listen, that's cool too.  i'm just sending this out to as many people as possible to maximize feedback.  so if this is all the further you go, thanks just as much for coming this far.

best,
ben

tweedy/adams massacre

as a side project whilst reading and grading and doing my normal insane amounts of work, i've been working on collecting 128kbps mp3s of every studio track (official albums, unofficial albums, unreleased sessions, singles, b-sides, etc.) of wilco and wilco-related stuff and ryan adams and ryan adams-related stuff into on place on my hard drive. i'm short a few tracks and sessions for each band, but not many (i'm a little music-nerd proud of that). so here's how things stand right now:

3.48gb of RA

3.27gb of wilco

1545 tracks total

81 hours, 45 minutes, and 24 seconds of music total

i'm currently listening to a lot of good new stuff (avett bros., monsters of folk, and stuff), but it's nice to be able to put 81 hours of my favorite two bands on shuffle whenever i want.

also, this (sadly) doesn't include any live stuff not officially released...and of course i have about 250 shows (500 hours?) of RA and 50 shows (100 hours?)...

god, i'm a nerd. but it's funny.

btw, my current favorites of all 1545 tracks are the california and rescue blues 7" vinyls from RA.

EDIT: i feel like i should clarify that i had pretty much all of these tracks somewhere already, it was just a matter of gathering them into one place. i didn't specifically find each and every track painstakingly over the last week or two...

more people chastising us about the environment (good), and radiohead sings about the apocalypse

just saw the trailer for the new-ish quasi-documentary "age of stupid". not that anything like this would ever grace a movie screen in eastern washington, but i definitely want to see it in some other way ASAP.

and since this wouldn't be my blog without a music video tie-in, here's thom yorke performing "reckoner" at the international premiere of the film:

this song seems to come up a lot in connection with apocalypses (?)...check out the fan-made video for the studio version of the song (which i know i've posted before; watch it anyway):

theologians

since i'm on a kick lately of posting lyrics and song videos, i wanted to pass this one along. one of my favorite wilco songs, off of one of the best albums of the 2000s, yankee hotel foxtrot be damned :)

theologians

Theologians
They don't know nothing
About my soul
About my soul

I'm an ocean
An abyss in motion
Slow motion
Slow motion

Illitterati lumen fidei
God is with us everyday
That illiterate light
Is with us every night

Theologians
That don't know nothing
About my soul
Oh they don't know

They thin my heart with little things
And my life with change
Oh in so many ways
I find more missing every day

Theologians

I'm going away
Where you will look for me
Where I'm going you cannot come

No one's ever gonna take my life from me
I lay it down
A ghost is born
A ghost is born
A ghost is born

I'm an ocean
I'm all emotion
I'm a cherry ghost
Cherry ghost

Hey I'm a cherry ghost
A cherry ghost

mason sings about the environment

this is a great song...he played it at the knitting factory last year, but it's unreleased officially. i was happy to find a lot of good quality videos of it on youtube.

bought the new album today. i only listened once, so i'm hesitant to write a review yet. but i like it so far.

EDIT: here are the lyrics to the song, courtesy of birdwingsbeat.com:

Dam the rivers and damn ourselves

Clearcuttin’, watch another tree fall

The situation is bigger than us

But the solutions are all temporary

Ice age information age

Distracted, living life on the phone

We try to live in the present now

But the future won’t leave us alone

It keeps coming

Don’t let the world go black

I am the man with a choice at hand

Stuck in traffic on the streets of the Earth

We are the mind running out of time

With the power to decide what it’s worth

God help us

This is the heart trying to make a new start

Choosing love in the shadow of doubt

In trouble as the bubble fills with rubble

Digging in is the only way out

Keep digging in

Don’t let the world go black

Keep singing

Oh is this the last hour of life

One more chance to make it right

Darkness is close at hand

Help us to understand

Volcano in the town of Chatham

Hot ash raining from the sky

Earthquake in the Golden State

Everybody’s asking why

I’ll tell you

The story changes but the author remains

Mother Earth’s gonna do what she will

On top of a spinning top

Still acting like we’re standing still

Start spinning

Don’t let the world go black

Keep singing

Oh is this the last hour of life

One more chance to make it right

Darkness is close at hand

Help us to understand

Don’t let the world go black

the return of the PC

around june or so, i decided to forego my usual TV-watching as my sole form of solo relaxation and to try to get back into playing video games. this is somewhat complicated as the fanciest console out there that i own is a PS2 (for which i have 2 games), and i have no money, and my computer is 5 years old. this is in addition to the fact that i currently have something like 11 shows on my "to check out" list. but anyway...

i spent most of the summer and now early fall wallowing in some serious gaming goodness. it's certainly more fun than watching TV, but unfortunately it also results on me staying up too late on work nights.

i started off with some serious platforming magic by playing through both lego star wars games and then the lego indy game (which was surprisingly good; i think i liked it better than the star wars ones). from there i revisited the first two prince of persia games, and FINALLY played through the third one for the first time. it was much better than i'd been led to believe, and did a good job of tying the stories of part one and part two together for a believable and satisfying ending (that's coming from one of the few who LOVED part two).

more recently, i tried to play dungeon siege, which i've never finished, only to find that it pretty much only runs on XP. this was part of the reason that i tried to roll my computers back to XP and eventually ended up destroying all my hard drives and having to upgrade to 7 (note: dungeon siege still doesn't work). so those two games are on the backburner.

then i was completely devoured by knights of the old republic 1 and 2. part one might well be the best game i've played in a few years, and while two expanded the first on a more epic scale (a la baldur's gate vs. baldur's gate 2), the rushed end and dropped subplots just sort of pissed me off and made me feel like i had just essentially played 60 hours of star wars RPG goodness, invested myself in the story and the characters, and then been treated to a conclusion that was thrown together in 25 minutes. i'd still recommend both games, though.

now it's on to 1999's homeworld and it's assorted sequels, and from there warcraft 3 (which i've also never played). i'm not sure after that. maybe back to TV. i also have final fantasy 9, 10, and 12 in a closet or box somewhere around here...though i'm sort of afraid to start in on those while i still have, you know, a job and a social life.

i done lost my food memory

i've been writing and thinking and teaching about (and eating) food a lot lately. so it keeps bringing to mind a conundrum i've pondered for a few years now: how the hell did i not starve to death in college?

i seriously do not remember how i fed myself on a day to day basis. i remember eating each of my meals in a fairly regular way before i left my parents house after high school, and ever since i moved into my first rental house in 2002, i've cooked, etc. a decent amount and otherwise bought my own groceries. however, during that middle period for about 3 years wherein i didn't have ready access to a grocery store or a kitchen...how the hell did i live?

i mean, sure, i remember pretty regularly getting breakfast or dinner or something with my friends. i remember my fair share of burrito runs, and pizza deliveries, and trying to turn midnight on-campus snack store food into a meal often enough, but not enough to account for EVERY SINGLE MEAL i ate for years. for some reason it just really unsettles me that i can't remember any of this.

new video re: new mason jennings album

i'm really excited about this album, even though there are 11dy different versions coming out and i don't know which one to buy. goddammit, this is why people just steal music. obviously, i would never steal from mason. watch the video about the music, then buy the music, then listen to the music. enjoy.

trey and the NY philharmonic do "YEM"

to have had an extra arm and leg to give to see this.

this is the shit.

how did i miss this before? trey playing the entirety of "time turns elastic" (the 13 minute phish arrangement, not the 42 minute orchestra one) on acoustic guitar at (i assume) the barn.

Time Turns Elastic - Acoustic Barn Demo from Trey Anastasio on Vimeo.

went to kamiak again this weekend...

...fought a ninja battle...

From fall 09

...watched some tractors...

From fall 09

...saw a storm...

From fall 09

...found the sun...

From fall 09

...and this strange lady...

From fall 09

...and ended the day by engaging in my favorite new subculture: playground bouldering.

From fall 09

From fall 09

From fall 09

why i love ecocriticism

"Regardless of what name it goes by, most ecocritical work shares a common motivation: the troubling awareness that we have reached the age of environmental limits, a time when the consequences of human actions are damaging the planet's basic life support systems. We are there. Either we change our ways or we face global catastrophe, destroying much beauty and exterminating countless fellow species in our headling race to apocalypse." (Cheryll Glotfelty, The Ecocriticism Reader, xx)

cracked on food

a roundup of cracked.com's food-related scary-shit articles.

6 Fake Foods You'll Wish You Didn't Have in Your Kitchen

5 Horrifying Food Additives You've Probably Eaten Today

7 Retarded Food Myths the Internet Thinks Are True

remember the mountain bed

a song this epic and simultaneously simple, beautiful, and sad could only have been written before the 1970s. "remember the mountain bed" is one of my all-time favorites, both as a poem and as a song (woody guthrie wrote the words, but never set them to music, then wilco and billy bragg added some chords for their album mermaid avenue vol. 2). in the last year, this has become one of my absolute favorite songs, and i still can't listen to it without getting that throat-lumping, arm-hair-raising sensation normal people would call "feelings". ironically, it was the first song i ever heard wilco play live (before i had ever heard it or really listened to the lyrics, so i didn't have the ability to really appreciate my luck). i hope i'll be able to hear them play it again sometime down the road.

(lyrics from bemydemon.org):

Remember the Mountain Bed

Do you still sing of the mountain bed we made of limbs and leaves?
Do you still sigh there near the sky where the holly berry bleeds?
You laughed as I covered you over with leaves
Face, breast, hips, and thighs
You smiled when I said the leaves were just the color of your eyes

Rosin smells and turpentine smells from eucalyptus and pine
Bitter tastes of twigs we chewed where tangled wood vines twine
Trees held us in on all four sides so thick we could not see
I could not see any wrong in you, and you saw none in me

Your arm was brown against the ground, your cheeks part of the sky
Your fingers played with grassy moss, as limber you did lie
Your stomach moved beneath your shirt and your knees were in the air
Your feet played games with mountain roots as you lay thinking there

Below us the trees grew clumps of trees, raised families of trees, and they
As proud as we tossed their heads in the wind and flung good seeds away
The sun was hot and the sun was bright down in the valley below
Where people starved and hungry for life so empty come and go

There in the shade and hid from the sun we freed our minds and learned
Our greatest reason for being here, our bodies moved and burned
There on our mountain bed of leaves we learned life's reason why
The people laugh and love and dream, they fight, they hate to die

The smell of your hair I know is still there, if most of our leaves are blown
Our words still ring in the brush and the trees where singing seeds are sown
Your shape and form is dim but plain, there on our mountain bed
I see my life was brightest where you laughed and laid your head...

I learned the reason why man must work and how to dream big dreams
To conquer time and space and fight the rivers and the seas
I stand here filled with my emptiness now and look at city and land
And I know why farms and cities are built by hot, warm, nervous hands

I crossed many states just to stand here now, my face all hot with tears
I crossed city, and valley, desert, and stream, to bring my body here
My history and future blaze bright in me and all my joy and pain
Go through my head on our mountain bed where I smell your hair again.

All this day long I linger here and on in through the night
My greeds, desires, my cravings, hopes, my dreams inside me fight:
My loneliness healed, my emptiness filled, I walk above all pain

Back to the breast of my woman and child to scatter my seeds again