Jeff S

From 12 to ????

A long time ago, in the company of Erik, I realized that there isn't a Print Shop Deluxe-like, easy template method for a funeral invitation. Not to make light of things which are very serious in nature, like death, but I have always found the idea of a boilerplate Microsoft Word template for a funeral invite, with standard features like a Who/What/When/Where/Why, to be really amusing.

Lo and behold, in reading Printed Ephemera, I discovered such a thing. Printed Ephemera covers the less respectable end of printing history, namely the little things (labels, wrappers, flyers, business cards, invitations) which predated even the printing of the Gutenberg bible. And so:

On the march

Did anyone else notice that Erik's blog is gone?

Interesting how that internet thing works. What are everyone's thoughts on the state of the wandy...I am curious to hear...non-wandyteeth people are encouraged to comment. Does anyone read anything anymore?

Doing The Camel Walk

I am in the process of reading the book Wanderlust, a history of walking. While at a free show where Lyrics Born and RJD2 were supposed to play, two interesting things happened. The first: I saw my childhood buddy, peer of of Ryan S at University of Kansas, Tyler Carmody. Who knows who you'll see when in NYC!
The second was that it rained really hard. Torrential. Unsurprisingly, the book was caught in the rain and is still sort of drying out. But the experience, like a hand of a merciless, free-show hating god, reminded me that I never really recapped the experiences had on the infamous walk taken January 1st of this year. So check that out, I am still in the process of editing it, but I wanted to put it out rather than hold on to it:
The Walk

On the ilikenicethings.com front, we have a new, hopefully periodical, feature called News Mashup (Nooz mashup?). It is all explained on the site itself, but we hope to create works of art/entertainment based on true events deemed important enough to be included on CNN.com and similar news websites. It sounds very high-concept, but click that thang there and it will all make sense.
Whale Balls

And last, I had the pleasure of seeing Tyler again, at another free show yesterday. Beirut, Deerhoof, Apollo Sunshine and others were playing part of a series of outdoor, free shows in the McCarren Park former pool. The bands were great, but I was entranced by the genius DJ Questlove.
He is usually known for his rhythmic genius as part of the band The Roots, but yesterday he played the part of DJ between bands, and the one set of his I saw was amazing.
Anyone who is familiar with me know of my fetish for remixes and covers. Lately, I have even found several reliable sources for good covered/remixed material (on the internet and off), but it would be safe to say that I like them all.
As if totally aware of my desire to get down to the sounds of other bands playing other bands, DJ Questlove did a sonically zen set. For example, he played a traditional-hindi sounding song with a familiar flute line, thereafter seguing into the song that sampled it, Jay-Z's "Big Pimpin'".
But, lest I weigh this blog down with too many words, I will shove off with the mp3 of one of the songs played in his set, an instrumental version of a song which was later covered in the 1980's to mass popular appeal. It should be easy to guess, despite lacking the soulstress' melody on this instrumental version, but the answer is in the jump for curious folks.

The MP3

"Tainted Love" by Gloria Jones, later covered by Soft Cell (and Marilyn Manson, now that I think of it).