Around the internet

I've been self-obsessed and school-crazy this last month, but here's a list of interesting things I've been reading:

Bill Moyers interviews David Simon, and they talk all things drugs and capitalism. On a somewhat related note, I'm thinking about watching Homicide this spring.

Cleveland high school kids organize a Take Back the Night rally, which I love.

Loved these photos of rustbelt Pennsylvania

& if there's one thing Ohio needs, its concealed weapons in bars & restaurants.

Survival Horror Public Transit

Since Ryan & I were going to check out some houses for sale yesterday, we decided that I would take the rapid a couple stops further than usual, and he would just meet me at the train station. This seemed like a smart idea, since he was just coming from work, and it was the closest station to where we were going.

For those who aren't regularly taking cleveland rapid transit, a lot of the stations (well, at least a couple) are currently undergoing construction. This includes the Purtitas Rapid station. Where Ryan was picking me up.

While I don't like to think of myself as a person easily rattled by my environment, real talk, I am actually totally paranoid and easily rattled. But aside from that, I think that most people who are not regular users of the Puritas rapid station might be rattled.

Since there's not much around the station besides residential, and some low density commercial (can you tell I played a lot of Sim City 2000 growing up?) I don't think a lot of people from outside the area use the station. Honestly, though, it doesn't really appear that a lot of people really use the Puritas station. It doesn't have the traffic that W 117, or West have before it. The rapid car was basically emptied out by the time I got there. This just added to my terror.

While they appear to be building an entirely new station (which is all silver and shiny in line with the new-ish RTA asthetic) for now, people have to go through the mostly disemboweled old station. As well as some stucture made almost entirely out of 2x4s and plywood.

I suppose this is what it used to look like (thanks Wikipedia!):


According to RTA this is what its going to look like:


You can see the plywood structure as well as some of the old pedestrian overpass in street view:


And the worst part of this whole thing, is that the inside of the old station is pretty poorly marked and partially deconstructed. After walking over the pedestrian overpass from the train tracks you descend into a tunnel that goes under the tracks.



All the escalators have been totally boarded over, and the steps have a pretty significant portion of concrete chipped away. Note the mysterious pool of liquid (I'm thinking blood, maybe) on the floor. And the mood lighting. Seriously, y'all, this rapid station needs a couple signs and maybe a couple light bulbs.

This is the point of the station where I actually emerged, heart pounding.


And this is what that same structure looks like from the outside.


This was what was pretty much running on loop in my head while I was trying to figure out how to leave the station.


Thankfully it wasn't very foggy or near a graveyard or any fissures in the earth or I might have totally melted down. Totally scarier than Centralia.

But no ghost babies appeared, thankfully, even if it did take Ryan basically forever to find the station and come pick me up. And we saw a cute house. One that's closer to the West Park rapid station.

"I couldn't wait for the snow to melt"

The Ground Is Lava is a noodley-pop-punk band from the Akron/Cleveland area. We first saw opening for my friends band Empire!Empire! (I Was a Lonely Estate). E!E!(IWaLE) was playing at what i consider the best venue in Ohio, Akron's The Kling Thing. They were very energetic and a little rough around the edges but they reminded me of Braid. I thought that was pretty awesome. A while later they put out a very promising first record called Freeze Tag. The last track on the record though really stuck with me. While reviving my project For He is The Harbinger of Death covering songs my friends wrote (FTATHOD) I decided to make a version of Good Talk Russ.

Gore Talk Russ by ForHesTheHarbingerOfDeath





The music is all done in NanoStudio. I used my synthstation controller to live track most of the synth lines. I modified the presets to get the sounds I liked. The drums were mostly done by drawing in the sequencer.

I am really digging the chiptune drumset. On this track I made use the delay and reverb to try and recreate the jangly capnjazz type drums Eric provides on the original. The many LFO controls were helpful with all the sparkles on one of the synth tracks.







I tracked the vocals in Studiomini but I am a little disappointed in the app. You can only record from the very beginning of the song and since this song has a decently long intro it took forever to record new takes. Having the lyrics on screen was really nice though. I am currently working on a paul b song and a Matadors of Shame song.

Written while I should have been reading textbooks

I see this ad almost everytime I ride the rapid, and wonder if this is actually a viable career training program or some kind of weird scam. As a fan of talk radio, I was under the impression that its an industry that is fairly hard to break into! I'm leaning scam.

As the end of our lease approaches, Ryan & my thoughts have turned to where we are going to live starting this summer. Though our two bedroom apartment on the westside of Cleveland has been a significant upgrade from our two bedroom apartment in the eastside inner-ring Cleveland suburbs, its really starting to feel a little cramped.



So we've been thinking about buying a house, after we did the maths & realized that the Cleveland housing market (benefits of living in the non-Chicago Midwest!) and our savings probably allowed for it. So we've been spending a lot of time scouring hotpads, which honestly makes it look like almost every single house in NEO is for sale. After 7 years (more like 12, in Ryan's case) of landlords the idea of owning is pretty exciting. Like, you mean we can put whatever screws we want in the wall? Sold.

While it seems that housing for sale in our neighborhood is either more trouble than we want or out of our price range, we are thinking that we want to stay on the westside of town. But, perhaps we might also consider moving to the southside, so that we would then have lived on every side of the city. Unless, as ryan said, we were to move to one of the islands in Lake Erie and thus have lived on the northside. And then, of course, there's also downtown.

With my impending dissertation research (i guess a year and change off is a little outside of 'impending,' though) and the aforementioned housing thoughts, mostly my mind has been on money lately. Fellowships, grants, interest rates, you know. Other than that, Ryan & I have been working on keeping warm, and going to a lot of thrift stores. This, of course, is where I found that great sequin-shouldered sweater dress pictured on the left, which i unfortunately didn't buy since I don't live a life where you can wear that. Or, maybe I do. But I'm not sure how it might reflect on my character to the rest of the world. Probably in a way that makes me appear to have more gumption than I actually have.

Fortunately I was also able to find some boring adult pencil skirts and preppy flats. This hasn't stopped me from trying out new levels of tacky in other venues, like my nails. These was supposedly leopard print, but I think that the turquoise is overwhelming the pink & red. Since, you know, in the photo it basically looks like there is just pink and turquoise. Perhaps I should have chosen at least one neutral color.

"This is the new life, Just like my old life."

Last year for my birthday my little brother drove up from college in a snowstorm to hang out with me. My dear friend Kelly drove down from Michigan in a snowstorm to hang out with me as well. They, Q and I went to Case Western Reserve University's Science Fiction Film Festival (the truly interesting culture of which I'll write about at a different time) to see a movie called Moon.

It was absolutely mind-blowing. An incredible performance and incredible script highlighted a truly fantastic experience. I only managed to catch a single movie this year at the Sci-Fi Film fest, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, so I was feeling a little remorseful about not taking advantage of its proximity and the idea of maybe missing out on another amazing experience like that of seeing Moon.

Then, Quinn says she found something on MetaFilter having to do with Moon. It is called Selene. Which is a hip hop record inspired by the film. The music is taken from songs on the original film score painstakingly crafted by Max Tannone into cerebral hip hop that might be this decade's Deltron3030.

The flow is provided by Richard Rich and it is certainly no Del the Funky Homosapian it might be a poor man's Cex. But the shortcomings really don't matter because Rich and Tannone manage to reproduce all of the awe that the film had originally made me feel. I am partial to Concept Albums when it comes to making music; see 2049, Syscrusher, Casionauts, and so this really hits home with me and I know it will with the other people i know who love Rush, ELO, Madvillain or Coheed.

The EP is just 5 songs and that is perhaps its biggest flaw. The music is at times upbeat, dancy and other times heavy and moribund yet at all times it retains the feeling of impending doom and hopelessness that those familiar with the movie will relate to.

Go watch the movie, its streaming on Netflix, then listen to this EP (its free at seleneproject.com) while drinking some coffee and contemplating your place in this universe.

- DRB

(Yet Another) Snow Day

After starting this during a lull in my activity, I've spent the last week or two totally drowning in writing and work. A strange amount of deadlines seem to be coming around at the beginning of March.

Cleveland is totally snowed in this morning, causing the closing of my school-that-never-cancels-for-weather. When we got up this morning, the windows had been totally encased in snow and ice overnight, which gave it the appearance of a total white out. Luckily there's nothing important I had to go to campus or today!

Thus the morning has been spent listening to the Selene EP (seriously, its really good), working on an abstract, and listening cast offs from my ridiculous sweater collection on etsy (I'm not that into the photos but the design of our apartment and the ridiculous weather is limiting my access to natural light).







The Cleveland Planning Comission recently digitized a pretty cool old (1954) document, "Our Citified County: A Study of Cuyahoga County and Its Land Use Now, and for the Future."[via Cleveland Area History]. Its fun to look through and think about what might have been if we had taken the recommended position on sprawl.

I love this photo of Detroit, taken from Belle Isle. Nothing better than Midwest cities on the water! From Brad Jones' "Love Letter From Detroit" [Via Rustbelt Radical]:

I want these photos of Detroit to be the exact opposite of the ‘ruin porn’ image we always see of Detroit. I don’t think Detroit is pathetic or dead. For starters, I think Detroit is a city with a rich history of fighting for workers rights, fighting against racism, and creating some of the best music of all time.
I was moving out of Detroit after many years and wanted to capture some of the city’s classic (to me) images. I wanted to show Detroit to my friends around the world, and to have some images to remind me of the city while I’m away.

Published in Critical Moment, which also recently published an interesting article on "Black Invisibility in the Black City." Both of these, and the idea of keeping conscious of the way our cities are being representing, brings to mind things previously discussed.

This comic from sassyfrascircus dovetailed well with what Shotgun Seamstress recently wrote, "The Revolution Will Not be Funded." I've been thinking about funding a lot lately (although, honestly, who isn't at a research university?) and this gave me more to think about.

Rex from Savage Minds made a call for people to write love letters to anthropology. I've been pretty delighted by what I've seen so far. Its nice to see people saying nice things about anthropology (what can I say, I love an underdog), especially after that whole science debacle. Its got me thinking about what I might write about anthropology. Maybe later today.

Spring-llusions

Like much of the midwest, Cleveland has been in the midst of a warm spell since yesterday. Awesome, since I was just starting to feel out of sorts about the fact that my birthday is always in the midst of all this disgusting february weather.

Of course, the big warms of midwest late winter/early spring mean the unearthing of a months' worth of garbage and dirt. Note this photo I took of the rapid tracks yesterday morning. I'd forgotten about the collection of Four Loko cans and chip bags that accumulate down there during the last month or two of constant snow cover.

Prior to moving to Cleveland, I had little to no experience with (post-88) hardcore or people who listened to hardcore. Seeing as my punk ethos is much more the hippie-influenced (sorry y'all) folk punk/crust punk, it makes is pretty weird to go to shows. The upside is that it makes for some pretty interesting exploration of NEO hardcore culture / history.

On the internet, all of this is written in this great cadence that seems to have been otherwise totally abandoned with the decline of personal websites and paper zines. Sometime earlier this year i came across this blog that's been digging through ashtabula hardcore history. More recently, I found this webpage (strangely hosted on a zine distro out of san francisco) with write ups of (long past) cleveland punk happenings, and old flyers. There's also lots out there about seminal '77 style cleveland punk. Honestly, though, I don't find that as interesting.

I'm totally dying to find something like this about Lorain County (esp Elyria) hardcore, but this has so far been elusive. As much as it probably makes me sound like a total old timer, I bet theres tons about this on the internet that I just can't find because the internet has now gotten too big. Or it got deleted when they took geocities off the internet last year. Although, honestly, it probably could have been on angelfire too.

For lack of any way to really conclude this, here's some video of the Crucifucks (including, of course, Okemos' epic/infamous Doc Dart) playing in Akron, OH circa 1983.

"...You're mostly what I think about."

Valentines Day Mix




1. Tender Forever - But the Shape is Wide

2. Why? - simeon's dilemma

3. Matadors of Shame - "Because you are, Mitch"

4. Direct Hit! - In Orbit

5. Mixtapes - Sprinkles

6. RVIVR - Cut the Cord

7. Grown Ups - Three day weekend

8. Snowing - Important things (Specter Magic)

9. Lana Avacada - Real Talk

10. Suis La Lune - "Btw, That untitled song on your mixture was for you. I Wrote it when I missed you"

11. I Would Set Myself On Fire For You - So this is our home

12. Kickball - Beard

13. The Thermals - I Called out Your Name

14. P.S. Eliot - Incoherent Love Songs

15. Nana Grizol - Arthur Hall

16. Paul Baribeau - How Could That Be True

17. The Mountain Goats - Last Man on Earth

18. Young Bison - the Death of Michigan

19. Andrew Jackson Jihad - Love in the Time of Human Papillomavirus

20. Bridge and Tunnel - Call to the Comptroller's Office (acoustic)

21. Mount Eerie - Climb Over

22. Fred Thomas - Obvious

23. Childish Gambino - Got This Money (acoustic @ Ace Hotel)

"I ain't got no silver, i ain't got no gold" - Chris Bathgate

Chris Bathgate looks, sounds, and feels like a throwback to some by gone era of music. Bathgate is to midwest folk what Erin McKeown is to tin pan alley jazz. He just leaked the first single from his upcoming record 'Salt Year' (coming in april). As a michigan ex-pat "No Silver" makes me feel homesick in the best way. The banjos on the track make your thoughts start drifting towards appalachia. Hearing the concertina, you start to see immigrants pouring off boats in a developing country, trying to find a new home. Chris' voice is remiscent of some great old orator telling generations of his descendants about his hard times as a young prospector. If the song is any portent of what the rest of the album has to offer we are looking at a sure fire best of the year come the countdown to 2012.
Chris is on tour right now and if you have the chance make it to one of his shows consider yourself lucky:

2/16 - Beachland Tavern - Cleveland, OH
2/17 - World Cafe Live - Philadelphia, PA
2/18 - Kennet Flash - Kennet, PA
2/19 - Pete's Candy Store - New York, NY
2/22 - T.T. The Bears - Cambridge, MA
2/24 - Secret Show
2/25 - The Starving Artist - Keene, NH
2/26 - The Monkey House - Burlington, VT
2/28 - Allen St. Hardware - Buffalo, NY
3/01 - The Bug Jar - Rochester, NY

Here some videos to check out as well:



Creek, Cure Dawn - This was from a show he played at our old house in Lansing which we called the panopticon. He's joined by one Matt Jones on steel resonator guitar and our very own Dr. Girlfriend for some off camera back up vocals.



Serpentine - The official promo video for Chris' last album.

Total downer: A Mix

Over the last several years, I've been keeping a mental list of songs that I find epically depressing for a mix that I planned on giving as a gift to someone. Probably accompanied by a $6 fifth of whiskey. I finally cobbled together some of the songs on my list with others of similar content and tenor, and put this mix together. Considering that most of the songs have a strong heavy-drinking theme, the aforementioned bottle of whiskey would probably be a good accompaniment.