Salt Pepper Ketchoop For Here Or To Go?

Andrew Sullivan Nails It.

The king is dead, long live the king.

Glocally Newark  is a site I stumbled upon after reading an article over at the always-excellent daily newarker.  The folks (folk?) over there are doing a stand up job reporting back on various cultural type things happening in Newark.  So far there’s a pretty strong slant on the downtown side of things (as is to be expected, downtown Newark is where shit happens), but it seems like the site has nothing but potential.

Catch me over on the food posts making comments.

Here’s to their continued success

Apologies in advance for the long and seemingly offtopic post, but I’ve been trying to figure out this solution for many years and finally having done it makes me happy.

Now that the weather is starting to cooperate, I’ve been working on figuring out the best way to access my music library from poolside.  I wanted to get it done without wasting any money on a unitasker media playback system like a squeezebox nor did I want to be stuck using apple’s stuff with an airport express.  Here’s my setup.

Hardware:
Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver
3 Sets of rock speakers    Snagged these for 25 bucks a pair a few weeks ago.  Mega Score!
A/B Switches
Old Dell Inspiron Laptop
Logitech Harmony 880 Remote Control
Iphone

Software:
Songbird
Songbird Remote Pro Iphone App
NTFS Link

First step: Route everything through the receiver.
Easy enough.  The onkyo badboy has a “zone 2″ option that allows me to play two different zones of speakers at the same time (because you know, the name isnt self explanatory), so the outdoor speakers were all connected to zone 2.  I have an a/b switch that allows me to choose which speakers get music outside.  Not much to explain there either.  It’s a big yard so being able to turn off certain areas (like the ones close to the neighors) makes life easier.    I added an activity to the harmony remote that allows me to control the volume level without having to be in the line-of-sight to the receiver.  That’s kinda clutch. 

Step two: Control the Library Remotely 
I wiped the laptop a few weeks ago in order to make it work as a little media server.  The music, is scattered across a bunch of other PCs, external hard drives, etc. across my house.  I needed a program that would let me pull from all the different sources in order to manage the library, and one that had a suitable remote interface for the iphone.  Itunes got knocked out real fast.  It’s a evil monstrous resource hog and it doesn’t support watched folders and has issues with networked tracks and it doesn’t update the library when things are removed and… well fuck itunes.  That’s enough.

The other two options, then, were media monkey and songbird.    I’ve been using media monkey for a long time and love it to pieces.  It’s far and away the easiest way to manage a big library across a network, so it was a solid and obvious choice from the outset.  The only problem - the remote.  iMonkey is a fully featured remote app for Media Monkey, but it’s frigging ghastly, expensive, and a pain in the ass to set up.  I don’t want to have to run separate software on my computer in order to control my media player, and if I do, I don’t want to have to fiddle with ports and IP addresses and sundry every time I try to get it up and running.  Sorry media monkey, I love you but for this one you lose. 

That brings us to Songbird.  I had fiddled with an early release of the program but was turned off when I couldn’t use it to manage my iPhone like i could with itunes and media monkey.  For this, though, it’s more than perfect.  The one thing I found tricky was getting it to watch multiple folders.  In order to do this, I had to install NTFS Link and create a special folder on my desktop pc with NTFS junction points.  What that does is trick songbird into thinking that every junction point is a subfolder in the main folder, and it then goes and watches and indexes every one of the folders.  Sneaky!

Getting the remote app up and running was a breeze.  Just a simple extension install within the program and I was on my way.  The ui is beautiful, and it pulls info from mashtape to do photo slideshows and artist information along with album art et al.  It’s a little tacky to have to pay $4 to control an open source application properly, but whatever.  It is what it is.  I’d also like to see search integrated into the app but whatever.

Now listening to my music outside is a breeze.  If you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go out to my pool and sip a lemonade, read Brillat Savarin’s Physiology of Taste and listen to the new Fat Freddy’s Drop Album.   I recommend you do the same.  At your own pool, not mine.

Had to halt the music posts to talk about these crazy awesome ceramic sculptures I just stumbled across.  Eva Funderburgh is a ceramic artists based in Seattle.  I found her work yesterday after looking at her brother Dan’s house tour at design sponge.  Great stuff.  I can’t quite pinpoint what it reminds me of, but it feels sort of like a cross between something out of star wars, where the wild things are, and something that would have come out of the tar pits on Denver, the Last Dinosaur (how’s that for an awesome 80s pop culture reference?).  Anyway check out more at her flickr site.  More after the jump. Continue Reading

Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears - Tell em What Your Name is. 

I run the risk here of falling headfirst into #116, but I don’t give a damn because this is a great great album.  It’s not blues, it’s not rock, it’s not soul, it’s not funk.  It’s some crazy bubbling amalgamation of all of the above.

Basically, if they redid animal house tomorrow, Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears could stand in for Otis Day & the Knights.  The whole album has that rip-roaring juke joint feel to it that makes you want to drink like a fish and run off and do questionable things with questionable people.  I can’t speak to the authenticity of Joe’s lyrics but I also don’t think that really matters.  It’s not a cerebral album , it’s a fun one. 

It’s an absolute steal right now for 5 bucks on Amazon.  I can’t praise this enough.  Go get it and let it power your more raucous summer evenings.

Smoove & Turrell - Antique Soul

RIYL: Michael Mcdonald, Otis Redding, Kraak & Smaak, Quantic

I hate the term northern soul.  It’s one of the few terms that has less to do with where the music originated and more to do with the audience it later garnered.  It’s a strange anomaly.  That being said, Smoove and John Turrell made names for themselves in that whole little scene and have transcended it with this new album.  Jalapeno is always stronger than strong but this latest offering goes above and beyond.  It’s a great, funky, soulful piece of music that, even with its fair share of covers and samples, doesn’t come off as too derivative or forced.  Be sure to check out “The Difference” which takes the Second Crusade sax sample from Queen Latifah’s U.N.I.T.Y. and turns it into an updated doobie brothers song; and their driving, funked up cover of 80s acid madness “Don’t Go” by Yaz.

Back in the days before trademark infringement suits and internet record shops, labels used to use RIYL stickers on the jackets of their albums.  RIYL stands for “Recommended if you like…” meaning that a person who liked a particular artist would likely enjoy the music of one such other artist.  Come to think of it, Pandora runs almost entirely off an RIYL engine.

There’s a metric fuckton of good music coming out lately, and lots of it can be related to other artists.   I figured I’d take a second and shed some light on the stuff i’m digging the most right now.  I’ll be doing this all week.

 Boxcutter - Arecibo Message

RIYL Burial, Squarepusher, Tipper

Now I’ve made absolutely no secret of the fact that I am decidedly not a dubstep fan.  I don’t get the appeal, but I know great music when I hear it.  This is great music.   All the artists I listed up top are wonderful, groundbreaking musicians, but they can get a little bit too “intelligent” from time to time, which makes the music a bit less palatable.  The same could be said for boxcutter’s earlier work.  This one is much more down to earth and is just a great, listenable album with a variety of different shapes, tempos and moods.

1. This is easily the best article I’ve read about the evolution of the music industry in all of 2009.  Seriously, it hits so many good points that I have very little to add.  If you have any interest in music and how to monetize it in the future, I recommend giving it a read.

2. Mexico looms.  Less than a month away from my trip and I am busting ass to get in shape.  To help me stay focused, I joined the April Body of Work Challenge over at Social Workout.  Catch me blogging over there about how fat I am trying to not be.  If you’re into it, join up and you may be able to win some prizes.

3.

The ridiculousness in that photo is unfathomable.  Is it just me or does Berlusconi bear a striking resemblance to Dick Vitale?

Love it.

Get one here.

Earlier this week, I managed to reconnect with a friend in Spain who I lived with as an exchange student 10 years ago.   We got to reminiscing about the trip, and later on I happened to remember an art print that I bought at the Prado.  It was “Saturn Devouring his Child” by Goya.  For some reason, the painting resonated with me at the time.  Instinct says that as a 16 year old high school student, it was probably just because it was a dude eating a kid, but I like to think that I was a bit more refined than that.   It just so happens that the painting is still resonating really hardcore right now. Anyhow, by some happy coincidence, pop surrealist Luke Chueh has remixed the Goya painting into his trademark style for his new show, “From Light Cometh Darkness” out in LA. Chueh has long been one of my favorite contemporary artists so to see him take on, and do justice to, a classic like this warms my cockles.  I’m not gonna be able to get out to LA to see this stuff, so hopefully they’ll have prints available.  Superb blog Arrested Motion has more preview pics.

Closer to home, worth checking out are Elger Esser @ Sonnabend, Yoshitomo Nara @ Marianne Boesky, and Myoung Ho Lee @ Yossi Milo.