Government Issue

GI is waaay under-represented on youtube. This is from an '88 show at Maxwell's in Hoboken, NJ. 2 songs.

Minor Threat

Live from 930 (?), circa '82 (?).

Marginal Man

Live from GWU, '85. Posted to youtube by Mr. Kenny Inouye.

Rites of Spring

Live from 9:30, '85.

Dag Nasty

Live at 9:30 circa '84 (?) w/ original singer, Sean Brown.

Void

Live at Wilson Center, '83.

Slickee Boys

vintage studio video

The Faith

live from wilson center '82. check out the lack of thrashing.

Marginal Man

live from the wilson center '84. this was included on the cd version of double image.

Kingface

More old DC stuff... this is a Kingface video probably shot at 9:30. Yea, I've been trolling youtube.

Teen Idles

Here's an oldie... from 1980 at the Chancery in DC.

R&D got talent!

Here's the latest video from R&D, aka Marty's kids Rosie and Declan. Watch and learn.

Just wanted to make it official

Apparently, my last.fm widget is not behaving like it should... and apparently a capital X choked it at the first line. In other words, my top artist for this week is X. I watched X: The Unheard Music recently on DVD, and really enjoyed it, so I had to listen to some old X. So there. Not really sure why there's a blank line on the first entry of the widget...

Sweat

An old buddy of mine, Joe, has recently finished writing a book about an old band, and a current band, The Fleshtones. The book is titled, Sweat: The Story of The Fleshtones, America's Garage Band. After spending many years doing research in NYC during summers, he was finally able to get a publisher to put out the book. Big congratulations to Joe! I know it was a ton of work and seemed at times like it wouldn't get published. But now, it will be out on Sept. 1st, and is getting great reviews. It's also generating a lot of interest from the likes of Peter Buck, Jesse Malin, and other like-minded musicians (check out the MySpace page to see!).

I've read the beginning chapters of it, and it is truly a great read. I'd recommend it not only if you're a fan of the band, but also if you have an interest in the underground scenes that were happening in NYC in the late 70s/early 80s and beyond. Very cool.

Joe: I know you're stoked!

Here are some links to check out:
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/fleshtonessweat
Continuum Books
Pre-order the book on amazon.com

First Father's Day

It's the end of my first Father's Day, and we all had a nice, if a bit lazy, day. It was pretty much business as usual around here: takin' care of Jane, goin' to get groceries, laundry, etc. My big Father's Day gift was a nice smile from Jane, and it was the first real one she's given me. Well, at least that's what I'm choosing to believe. Other smiles have probably been due to gas, but not today! Today's smile was the real deal, and it was the best thing that happened all day.

Sometimes Liz and I both look at Jane and still find it a bit unreal that we have this baby. But there she is, staring back at us... well, most of the time she's just asleep, but sometimes she stares back.

Silver Spring in the NYTimes

Here is a recent article about Silver Spring's revitalization from the NYTimes. Thanks for sending, Rosana!

A Dose of Art and Entertainment Revives a Suburb

Petition to bring NPR to Silver Spring

Apparently, NPR is considering moving their headquarters to Silver Spring. This sounds like a great idea to me and would complement Discovery and AFI nicely, IMO. The Silver Spring Scene is running a petition on their site to show support for NPR in the Spring. So, if you're inclined, go sign it.

Change to the bloggery

Last night I updated the blog to a new customizable Blogger template. The new template allows you to do a few more things w/ the blog than the old one, but when I changed over I lost my previous CSS changes on the old blog. (Not a surprise -- they tell you that will happen when you upgrade.) So now I'm playing around with the styles, colors, etc. As far as that goes, the biggest challenge for me is trying to keep the blog in synch w/ the old site. And when I say "old," I mean OLD. I built that site in, like, 2000. I don't really feel like updating the site, so it may just be a jarring transition for a while when you move back and forth between the two, eg, when viewing photo slideshows.

But the new template has allowed me to add the last.fm widget you see on the top of the left sidebar. I'm testing out this works/displays, but for now it shows my most often played artists from my iPod and from iTunes. We'll see how well it works. Right now it's not showing very fresh data, but hopefully it'll update itself.

The other new thing is I've added a feed for my del.icio.us bookmarks on the sidebar. The feed itself seems to work well, but I'm not all that stoked about how it's displaying. It seems a bit hard to read -- you can't really tell what things are. I guess I'll continue to play with it. If you have any suggestions, lemme know.

Jane at 4 weeks

Here are more pictures of baby Jane leading up to her 4 week birthday, including some pix of her getting dried off after her first bath. But don't worry, we didn't wait 4 weeks to clean her!

So, as well as being a clean little girl, she's also now more alert and awake more often (as the pictures show). But the biggest news in our house is that she has gained back the weight she lost in the first week since she was born (and then some). And that makes everybody happy.

View slideshow

Loudness War

Nope, this is not a new band -- this is apparently the term used to describe how modern CDs are being mastered louder and louder. I found this to be very interesting, if only on a superificial level since I'm not a sound engineer. Of course, there are two side to how people feel about this, but in my anecdotal experience, after reading the Wikipedia entry, I feel like I can definitely tell this is happening.

One way is just by listening to CDs. For example, Spend a Night in the Box, by the Reverend Horton Heat is very harsh to me. I feel fatigued by listening to it. Also, as mentioned in the wikipedia article, Californication by the Chili Peppers has the same effect on me, as does the most recent issue of Raw Power by Iggy and the Stooges. After reading the article, I feel like I have a better understanding, and appreciation, of when people say that vinyl has a "warmer" sound.

This all came about after Joe, Greg, and I were discussing various settings we could use in iTunes or on the iPod to "normalize" volumes. When I've created CD-R comps for friends or Liz, I usually use Goldwave to "normalize" or level the volumes on the various songs so the CD sounds consistent. You can really tell how things have gotten louder and more compressed by looking at the Waveforms in audio editors. And as far as I know you can only bring loud songs down in volume and not bring quieter songs up in volume. In the same way that you can't make a JPG bigger w/o losing quality, I think the same thing applies. Or that's my layman's observation.

Maybe all this explains the ringing in my ears! ;-)