My first trip to the festival, and to Austin, got off to a good start yesterday. I'm keeping a daily blog over at Indyweek, the music blog connected to a North Carolina alt-weekly edited by my friend and fellow Pitchforker Grayson Currin. Also blogging: famous Pitchfork celebrities Marc Masters, Jason Crock and Paul Thompson. Here's my first post.
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SxSW 2009
marathonpacks' 2008 Year-End Lengthy Write-Ups
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A bit late, I know. But I'm assuming that many people reading this feel like the first day back to work is really the first day of 2009. So. I'll leave my appreciations for School of Seven Bells , Ssion , Women and the Dø to reside on my other blog. Like the past year, this post is a gathering of my thoughts on stuff released this year, singles and albums, that made me think the most. ..
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marathonpacks' Year-(Fri)end Bonanza, Volume IX: Michael Kaufman
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Okay, one more. It's worth it. Michael Kaufmann is writing a science fiction novel that draws heavily on Aztec Cosmology, Sun Ra, Jainism and Mount Meru, hip-hop culture, and the vernacular of spam. He helps put out and promote records . He doesn't understand corn-hole, The Colts, or smoking in bars but he is proud to live in Indianapolis. My list of musical moments, audible and otherwis...
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marathonpacks' Year-(Fri)end Bonanza, Volume VIII: Jennifer Jones
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Happy New Year. The following is the last in the series of my friends' year-end posts. It's also the best one. In case you missed it, my year-end mixes are buried in here somewhere, and my year-end lengthy write-up is forthcoming, as well. Jennifer Lynn Jones is a second-year doctoral student in the Communication and Culture program at Indiana University, Bloomington, focusing on Film and ...
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marathonpacks' Year-(Fri)end Bonanza, Volume VII: Sarah Wyatt Swanson and Ben Swanson
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Sarah Wyatt Swanson plays drums for Tammar (ed. note: the best band in Bloomington), is an ex-employee of Secretly Canadian Records, possesses an MFA degree in Creative Writing, and is currently working at the SPEA department at Indiana University. Since I tend to be behind the times when it comes to buying records, I've made a list of my best live music experiences of 2008 (in alphabetical o...
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marathonpacks' Year-(Fri)end Bonanza, Volume VI: Nate Hileman
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Nate Hileman lives in Chicago and currently handles ad sales for Pitchfork Media. He's spent the last six or so years employed in various facets of the music industry. Besides music, he's obsessed with managing fantasy sports teams and is convinced he could turn around the Pittsburgh Pirates if given an opportunity. While writing this blurb, he mock drafted Matt Kemp and Jay Bruce in the 7th an...
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marathonpacks' Year-(Fri)end Bonanza, Volume V: Jon Hertzberg
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Artist:Robert Towne
Robert Towne Personal Best This is, of course, not a 2008 music release. It's a somewhat obscure 1982 drama written and directed by Robert Towne that was finally released on DVD in early 2008. (You can read my extended thoughts on the film here .) Not only is it one of the finest films about athletic competition, it is also an invaluable time capsule of the late 1970s and early 198...
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marathonpacks' Year-(Fri)end Bonanza, Volume IV: Michelle, Rebecca and Maureen
Michelle Lane is a fashion stylist who lives and works in New York. She used to sit next to Eric in Mr. Rockey's Geometry class. She styled her first music video this year, for Jaron Albertin's "The Lake," which can be viewed here . Au Revoir Simone These girls are dear friends and I frequently collaborate with them as a stylist. We just did a shoot in the Met and ran through all of the dif...
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marathonpacks' Year-(Fri)end Bonanza, Volume IV: Michelle, Rebecca and Maureen
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Michelle Lane is a fashion stylist who lives and works in New York. She used to sit next to Eric in Mr. Rockey's Geometry class. She styled her first music video this year, for Jaron Albertin's "The Lake," which can be viewed here . Au Revoir Simone These girls are dear friends and I frequently collaborate with them as a stylist. We just did a shoot in the Met and ran through all of the dif...
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marathonpacks' Year-(Fri)end Bonanza, Volume III: Josh Olivo/goodhandsteam
josh olivo records music as goodhandsteam . (in no particular order): gang gang dance saint dymphna my favorite album this year. because it's the jam. sounds kinda like it's probably the closest they can come to making a pop record. flying lotus los angeles a good hip hop record in a year of not that many good hip hop records. very minimal bouncy beatmakings. mgmt oracular ...
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marathonpacks' Year-(Fri)end Bonanza, Volume II: Mike Treffehn
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Mike Treffehn is currently wrapping up his MFA in sculpture at Tyler School of Art in Philly. He likes to think that musical obsession makes him "well rounded," but it's not fooling anyone. An Old Friend ReturnsI started getting really anxious about doing a year-end list, because that would mean that I'd have to quantify and place the new Portishead album , which seems like an unrealistic ta...
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marathonpacks' Year-(Fri)end Bonanza, Volume I: The Dudes from "Dwight Gooden Poster"
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(As I do every year, I'll devote this week to posting some year-end thoughts, musical and otherwise, from some friends of mine. My own thing will no doubt go up sometime in the early part of January. In the meantime, my year-end mixes are still there for the taking, btw.) ------------ The following four guys are enrolled in the same graduate program as yours truly. That's one thing. More i...
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Zing @ Fleet Foxes in 3....2....
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(Not because I totally despise them, but just 'cause. Ahem) : Maura : fleet foxes and blitzen trapper both bore the shit out of me Eric : yeah i haven't rocked that blitzen trapper yet but the first one did not much of anything for me or to me or with me Maura : it's like a bad wings cover band Eric : and FF, yeah, there's like one good soft-rock moment there but i can't remember where but ...
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Til' we lose control/System overload
Contra Kanye, not everyone cares to express public grief via extreme vocal manipulation, viz . Syracuse men's b-ball coach Jim Boeheim.
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I've been having this nightmare. A real swinger of a nightmare, too.
A great piece of investigative journalism from Julian Sanchez at Arstechnica (see below) about the dubious provenance of the numbers the U.S. government trumpets re: jobs and revenue lost to crimes against intellectual property (750,000 and $200 to $250 billion). First, I was reminded of John Iselin (as Joe McCarthy) in The Manchurian Candidate , pulling the latest number of DoJ Communists (57...
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Couldn't Tell the Difference 'Tween an "-a" and "-er"
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1. "Let us begin with a simple construct: a solitary slave sings. The singing is heard as enigmatic noise by an overseer on the ship at sea moving somewhere along the middle passage; or heard by a young and enslaved Frederick Douglass, and remembered (differently in the process of reflection and critical interpretation) as he composes his memoirs; or heard by the white abolitionist whose own ...
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Airborne Toxic Event publicity
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I don't care about Airborne Toxic Event as a band (I don't care about most bands, so nothing specifically against these guys), but I do think this recent kerfluffle they've puffed up with Pitchfork proves that there are still ways for indie rock bands--especially those not subject to Brooklyn's non-stop, barely-filtered publicity machine--to imaginatively try and separate themselves from the ev...
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I Kissed Sarah Palin
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"Of course we should have seen Sarah Palin coming. All we had to do was look at the music charts. Which song dominated American radio airplay this summer? Not M.I.A.'s 'Paper Planes,' despite the deserved critical excitement when it jumped into the top five on the back of Pineapple Express; not Miley Cyrus; not the Jonas Brothers; and not even Coldplay. It was Katy Perry's 'I Kissed a Girl,' a ...
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Change is on the cards, but this time it will be hard
"When I am online I am perpetually aware of open-endedness, of potentiality, and psychologically I am fragmented. I make my way forward through whatever text is in front of me factoring in not just the indeterminacy of whatever is next on the page, I am also alert, even if subliminally, to the idea of the whole, the adjacency of all information. However determined I am to focus on the task at h...
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Do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it
No more standin' there beside the walls I have got myself together, baby I'm havin' a ball Long as you're groovin' There's always a chance Somebody watchin' might wanna make romance Instead of carving up the wall, Why don't you open up and we'll talk. We are ready, we are ready for the floor. I can't hear your voice, Do I have a choice? ~~
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