MELISSALAND

My new favorite band:

The Big Pink

Check out their latest video: musicfromthebigpink.com

and listen to ‘To Young To Love‘ on their myspace page.

I’m infatuated………………

I really hope that I MIGHT be able to attend this talk on Thursday night at the NY Public Library. (I was planning to be in the City all day today and that didn’t work out, so maybe this is the Universe making up for it)  - anyway, it looks like a really great event.

more info here

**UPDATE** - Apparently, this event is now sold out. Shit. (thanks Luke)

Late at Night by Edward Guglielmino

(image: from Buffalo 66)

Make for yourself a world you can believe in.
It sounds simple, I know. But it’s not. Listen, there are a million worlds you could make for yourself. Everyone you know has a completely different one - the woman in 5G, that cab driver over there, you. Sure, there are overlaps, but only in the details. Some people make their worlds around what they think reality is like. They convince themselves that they had nothing to do with their worlds’ creations and continuations. Some make their worlds without knowing it. Their universes are just sesame seeds and three-day weekends and dial tones and skinned knees and physics and driftwood and emerald earrings and books dropped in bathtubs and holes in guitars and plastic and empathy and hardwood and heavy water and high black stockings and the history of the Vikings and brass and obsolescence and burnt hair and collapsed soufflés and the impossibility of not falling in love in an art museum with the person standing next to you looking at the same painting and all the other things that just happen and are. But you want to make for yourself a world that is deliberately and meticulously personalized. A theater for your life, if I could put it like that. Don’t live an accident. Don’t call a knife a knife. Live a life that has never been lived before, in which everything you experience is yours and only yours. Make accidents on purpose. Call a knife a name by which only you will recognize it. Now I’m not a very smart man, but I’m not a dumb one, either. So listen: If you can manage what I’ve told you, as I was never able to, you will give your life meaning.

— Jonathan Safran Foer, A Convergence Of Birds

(image: Robert & Shana Parkeharrison)

Suzanne by Leonard Cohen

(chase madness. love. all of it.)

I haven’t been to sleep before 4am for almost a week now.

Kevin Drew - Age of Consent (New Order cover)

I was born without the sense of smell.

Dark Was The Night will be released today, Feb 17th. It’s comprised of 31 exclusive tracks and it will be available as a double cd/triple vinyl/download and will benefit the Red Hot Organization – an international charity dedicated to raising money and awareness for HIV and AIDS.

So many GREAT artists included on this thing. Seriously. Check out the track listing:

THIS DISC
1 Knotty Pine – Dirty Projectors + David Byrne
2 Cello Song (Nick Drake) – The Books featuring Jose Gonzalez (playing above)
3 Train Song (Vashti Bunyan recorded, written by Alasdair Clayre) – Feist + Ben Gibbard
4 Brackett, WI – Bon Iver
5 Deep Blue Sea – Grizzly Bear
6 So Far Around the Bend – The National (arrangement by Nico Muhly)
7 Tightrope – Yeasayer
8 Feeling Good (popularized by Nina Simone) – My Brightest Diamond
9 Dark Was the Night (Blind Willie Johnson) – Kronos Quartet
10 I Was Young When I Left Home (Bob Dylan) – Antony + Bryce Dessner
11 Big Red Machine – Justin Vernon + Aaron Dessner
12 Sleepless – The Decemberists
13 Stolen Houses (Die) – Iron and Wine
14 Service Bell – Grizzly Bear + Feist
15 You Are The Blood – Sufjan Stevens

THAT DISC
1 Well-Alright – Spoon
2 Lenin – Arcade Fire
3 Mimizan – Beirut
4 El Caporal – My Morning Jacket
5 Inspiration Information (Shuggie Otis) – Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings
6 With A Girl Like You (The Troggs) – Dave Sitek
7 Blood Pt 2 (based on original song “You are the Blood” by the Castanets) – Buck 65 Remix (featuring Sufjan Stevens and Serengeti)
8 Hey, Snow White (Destroyer) – The New Pornographers
9 Gentle Hour (Snapper) – Yo La Tengo
10 Another Saturday (traditional song) – Stuart Murdoch
11 Happiness – Riceboy Sleeps
12 Amazing Grace (traditional song) – Cat Power and Dirty Delta Blues (playing above)
13 The Giant Of Illinois (Handsome Family) – Andrew Bird
14 Lua – Conor Oberst + Gillian Welch
15 When the Road Runs Out – Blonde Redhead + Devastations
16 Love vs. Porn – Kevin Drew (playing above)

More info here: http://www.darkwasthenight.com/

Order the CD here

Edward Guglielmino - Fail With Me from Jaymis on Vimeo.

Wow. I am just finding loads of good stuff on Vimeo today - I am completely in love with this song by Edward Guglielmino. The video for it, created by James Loveday (Jaymis), is phenomenal.

Both the song and the video are released for free download and use under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

A little bit about the process behind the video from Loveday:

“Shot in my screening room, I used stage blacks instead of a green screen to keep the shoot simple and compact, tiny low powered LED lights from Ikea, and recorded the video to hard drive in Onlocation to obviate capture time.

The shoot itself took about 2 hours. This was followed by 3 hours of fast editing in Vegas‘ efficient workflow, and then transferred to After Effects for around 8-10 hours of post-production. To keep production, preview and render times down I steered clear of keying, noise-reduction and other processor-intensive effects, instead focussing on the quickest techniques I could find to produce the video I had in my head. Despite having up to 20 layers of HD and SD video on screen at various times, the project only took 2 hours to render at 1920×1080, 25FPS (After Effects CS3, Windows Vista 32bit, 2.4GHz, Quad-core, 4GB ram).”

Very cool.

(via: createdigitalmotion.com)