Yoga Ball Plinko

Since I mentioned this yesterday, I wanted to follow up with a video to prove that this was actually a thing I did, and not just words I mashed together because internet.

i cover a gillian welch song. in my office, using a shitty webcam. hooray!

here's what i got up to last night between writing breaks:


if you prefer, here's gillian welch herself doing a much better job of singing the song:


and just for shits and giggles, here's the tragically-cut-short ryan adams cover that led me to discover this song in the first place:


also, i found out today that if you type "phish" into youtube search and filter by "videos longer than 20 minutes", wonderful things happen.

stun the puppy, burn the whale!

one of my favorite moments (if not THE favorite moment) of the phish shows i've seen so far...just found some youtube videos of it for the first time.

the last song they played at blossom this past summer was a great version of "squirming coil", which ended, as you can see below, with page alone on stage playing a piano solo.  then, he finished, the spotlight went off, and the lights came up for the night.  great encore.

two versions of the video, neither of which are amazing quality, but they both do the job :)

big red and big blue ARE THE SAME THING

divided christmas sky traveler

i was just remembering the other afternoon how freaking blown away i was when i first started listening to phish and was SURE i'd heard the middle part of "divided sky" before.  eventually i figured out that john popper used phish's melody for his "christmas song", which has listened to every christmas obsessively for almost a decade prior.  incidentally, it's the best christmas song ever, pretty much.  evidence of awesomeness and synchronicity below.

full blues traveler song:


the relevant part of "divided sky" starts around 4:15:

summer of the memes

so i had to explain the "double rainbow song" to a (disgustingly uncultured) friend of mine today, and it reminded me that i'd wanted to write this entry awhile back and then it slipped my mind when i got caught up in fistfighting bears and writing poetry.

this summer was memorable for a lot of reasons (many of which i will someday hopefully get around to writing about before i totally forget about any of them), and somehow the soundtrack to much of the adventure and action was (for some reason) based on three ridiculously addictive/bizarre internet memes.

1) the '60s-era IHOP theme song
this one was introduced on, i think, the first day that john was in pullman.  he innocently mentioned that there was some batshit insane video on youtube of an old IHOP commercial, and so, being the connoisseur of batshit insanity that i am, i had to check it out.  this is what i saw:

WHAT.  IS.  HAPPENING.
why the voice?  i mean, i understand that going to IHOP is an excuse for dressing up in your sunday best and fucking skipping across a field with a huge cloud of balloons clutched in your trembling fist because IHOP is awesome and if you are NOT caught up in a paroxysm of joy at the prospect of panqueques, there's something wrong with you.
however.  this is horrifying.  the singing seems to be slightly off-rhythm from the music, and both are insane.  also, nobody in this commercial GETS PANCAKES.  two people get vaguely italian dishes, one person gets a salad, and the fourth person gets what is obviously a now-extinct giant mollusk pulled from the depths of the sea off the shore of whatever dark, lovecraftian hamlet this IHOP is located in.  thanks, IHOP.  i not only never want to go to IHOP again now, i never want to go ANYWHERE again.

2) nanerpuss
this was introduced to me by lindsey, on the same day as the above commercial.  here's the original:

now that's crazy, but it also has this bizarre, catchy quality to it.  the kind of quality that makes you wake up in the middle of the night sweating, screaming that you are the nanerpuss, and - guess what?! - you like pancakes.  it gets worse:

are you dead yet?  here's my favorite:

this is the one that cracked my world in half.  for weeks afterwards i would literally halt in the middle of a busy word day, and unaware if what i myself was doing would shout "I'M WHAT'S KNOWN AS THE NANERPUSS!  I AM A BANANANANANANA!!!!"  for serious.  it was bad.

3) the double rainbow song
i'm not going to explain this one to you if you don't already know it.  the first video is the necessary context.  the second video is the song.  this song was my ringtone all summer because it is awesome, and surprisingly catchy and song-like and good and i like it.  you should listen.

  

i've already posted this elsewhere, but...

...it's amazing, so whatever.

Wilco - Country Disappeared - A Take Away Show from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

watch m. ward rock the universe

i'm taking a break from syllabus-writing to watch youtube clips, and came across these two which, while not the same performance that i saw in eugene last spring, capture the essence of that performance quite well.  the sound is a little wonky halfway through the second one, but if you like guitar, you owe it to yourself to at least watch the first one.

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

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.

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

dropping a 15-foot stick out of a fourth-story window

check it.

new conor oberst videos

just found these on youtube...look to be from a BBC performance from last year.

i know this song is known as one of dylan's "hits", but it's still one of my favorites. the lyrics in the verses are just brilliant:


and i know i've posted this one before, but i got hellosunshine in the mail today and found myself listening to this album again as a result:

some vids from the gorge, thanks to youtube

here are a few more videos from the gorge shows. these ones were shot by others, with better cameras and/or seats.

mike and trey switching instruments on "makisupa policeman":


"tweezer reprise" to end night two (pretty pedestrian version until kuroda loses his shit with the light show at about 2:20):


mike and trey on the trampolines during "YEM":


and a much better version of the "wolfman's" lightshow/glowstick war than i managed to capture (i believe we were somewhere down by where the gigantic neon blue things are in this video):