The point is that the way I discover music is part of what makes that music important to me. When you’re sharing music with your friends, if you’re anything like me, it’s critically important how that music is presented. Weaving together the perfect mix that has meaning, mood and a great flow. There are thousands of ways of doing this however most of the mixtapes that old girlfriends’ ex-boyfriends made for them, that I’ve heard, totally miss the boat.

There are some pretty specific times to make a mixtape and each time calls for a different technique. Admittedly, most of them have to do with girls, but it isn’t the case all the time. These are examples of actual mixes I made for actual people over the past seven or so years. Each of these playlists were made for their own purposes, which I will explain.

The names have not been changed to punish the guilty.

Some of the mixes will be incomplete. Some songs listed will be left out because I might not have the proper rights to add them. That’s cool though because these mixes were made because of individuals, and they belong to them. If you want to hear all of these songs…happy hunting. Every one of these songs is my favorite song ever, in addition to all of my other favorite songs. If you don’t like it, talk shit. My music is way better then yours.

I put these playlists on Spotify, so you’re going to need to get that to play them.

Mix For The Girl You’re Into

This is for when there is a girl you’re kicking it with and you what to throw her a hint. This is the first, and most widely used mixtape scenario. You want to be frank without coming on too strong, so you start with something like Devo’s Girl U Want. Follow that with something heartwarming and energetic, with maybe a touch of sadness. At this point it’s easy to get wrapped up in the sappy stuff, and you definitely don’t want to freak her out, so put on some nonsense that could be construed as suggestive; like Hang Out by Thurston Moore. After that you want to really drive the message home. You have to be careful if you mellow out the mood at the end, because you’ll kill it if you tone it down too quickly.
Mix for the girl you’re into
Girl U Want – DEVO
Jinx Removing – Jawbreaker
Head On – Pixies
I Love Your Brain – Frank Black and the Catholics
Hang Out – Thurston Moore
I Only Want You – Eagles Of Death Metal
It Takes Time – Muck and the Mires
It’s Hard to Turn Me On – Quasi
If It Wasn’t For You – Handsome Boy Modeling School
Hot Wire My Heart – Sonic Youth
I Can’t Stand It – The Velvet Underground
I Want You Around – Ramones
I Am Pentagon – Make-Up
Valentine – Old 97′s
Ambulance – TV on the Radio
The Long Road – Tiger Army
Forget the Flowers – Wilco
Into Your Eyes – Lucero
Say Yes – Elliott Smith

Mix For The Girl Who Has Great Taste In Other Music

Have you ever met someone who knows as much, and is as passionate about rock and roll as you are but listens to like 90% classic rock bands? In this case you want to put together a mix of your oldest favorites, less old favorites and some out-in-left-field joints. The point of this one is to introduce her to bands she may or may not have heard of, but probably doesn’t listen to. This is a tricky one to pull off because of all of the different sounds you need to put together and still impress a rock chick. You have to cover your favorite parts of the spectrum, while keeping in mind the kind of music she likes. You have to mirror her taste but be unique enough so she says something like “Who sings that Boogie on the Beach song? I’ve seen that in a movie.”
Mix for the girl who has a great taste in other music
Teen Age Riot – Sonic Youth
Iehiro’s Dilemna – Goblin Cock
Arctic Snow – Burning Brides
Patti Smith Math Scratch – Thurston Moore
Guero Canelo – Calexico
Never Too Late – Slim Cessna’s Auto Club
Suspect Device – Stiff Little Fingers
Trying Too Hard – Crimpshrine
Boogie on the Beach – Red Elvises
Baby Blue Sedan – Modest Mouse
Above the Clouds – Gangstarr
Devil in Jersey City – Coheed and Cambria
Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots Pt. 1 – The Flaming Lips
Cold Blows The Wind – Ween
Overkill – Ministry
I’m Waiting for the Man – The Velvet Underground
Öngyilkos Vasárnap – Venetian Snares
Pitseleh – Elliott Smith
Desastre Natural – Tomahawk
Stormy Weather – Pixies

Drinking Songs for the Boys

When people say they hate a certain type of music it usually means they’ve only heard the most shallow of the genre. They probably haven’t heard a lot of the bands that don’t have a wide circulation. Usually they say Rap and Country. This is a country mix so if you’re going to have a closed mind about all that then you can skip it. I made this one for my very good friend Whiskey Mike, so we have it in the truck when we go fishing. He’s Iowa farm raised and we would listen to a bunch of Willie Nelson,  David Allen Coe, Conway Twitty and all that. I brought along a Lucero CD one time and he started to bug me about all of the Americana I had. This is what I came up with.
Drinking Songs for the Boys
Pop Country Really Sucks – Hank Williams III
Hangover Daze – Shelby Cobra
No Depression – Uncle Tupelo
High Noon in Killville – Angry Johnny And The Killbillies
Tomorrow Morning – Drag The River
All Sewn Up – Lucero
The Girl With the Golden Hair – The Rio Grandiose
Barrel Of My Gun – Slim Cessna’s Auto Club
Piss Up A Rope – Ween
Drunker Than Satan – Horatio Lee Jenkins
Crawlspace – Calexico
Medicine – Drag The River
Forget the Flowers – Wilco
Whiskey – Angry Johnny And The Killbillies
Guns Bitches Brawls & Bottles – G.G. Allin
The Bottle Let Me Down – Merle Haggard
I Gotta Get Drunk (with Merle Haggard & George Jones) – Willie Nelson
Redwood – Calexico
Last Song About Satan – Slim Cessna’s Auto Club
My Best Girl – Lucero

Mix for Your Girlfriend (or wife)

One of the best mixes you can make is a mix for your girlfriend. You spend a ton of time with her, and you’re always monopolizing the stereo. She’s the best girl ever, so she doesn’t mind. You want to always bring your best jams because, face it…you’re going to be pissed if she wants to turn it of…or worse, put in that same shitty Morcheeba CD that she loves to listen to over and over. This is an easy one to put together because you’ve been listening to these albums with her for months. You know your favorites, her favorites and you know how to put them together. This one is up-beat, smart and just a little bit sentimental…because that’s how she makes you feel.
Mix for Your Girlfriend
Acceptable In The 80′s – Calvin Harris
Because You’re Young – Cock Sparrer
Hero – Sixer
Other Day – Free Fall
Tell Me A Story – Samiam
Jump In The Fire – The Night Marchers
Stukas Over Disneyland – Dickies
Race for the Prize – The Flaming Lips
Twist And Crawl – Death In Vegas
Visit Colnel – Thee Oh Sees
Love in a Trashcan – The Raveonettes
Tomorrow World – Squarepusher
Rewind – Cylob
Cahlottel Mittnacht – Devotchka
Loved Despite of Great Faults – Blonde Redhead
Lilac Wine – Jeff Buckley
Girl – Built to Spill
Dog With Sharper Teeth – Daisy Chainsaw
The Holiday Song – Frank Black Francis
Mind Contorted – Daniel Johnston
Poor Little Raccoon – Angry Johnny And The Killbillies
Coolest Little Monster – Electric Frankenstein

If you recognize one of these mixes as one I gave you one time – but you don’t recognize the story that goes with it – it’s because I gave you a copy of a mix I made for someone else…harsh.

Please let me know what you think of this little guide and I would be stoked if you added your best playlists to it too.

                          

I started this blog pretty much right when I was laid off in February of 2009. I intended it to be a place where I can talk about how awesome I am at the Internet so people would want to hire me. I’ve been employed now for nearly a year and this joint has been collecting dust for about seven months…see how that works out? The time and motivation slipped through the folds of my brain into chasm 13. Not all of my motivation, mind you; just the motivation to blog.

I work in digital marketing now so blogging should be part of my makeup, but sadly it isn’t. I published two successful photoblogs last year and managed to get them off the ground with nearly no time spent on putting actual words on the screen. I also mess with SEO and Social Media all day, every day, for the company I work for. So how have I gotten by for this long? I have been relying very heavily on the hep of others. Meanwhile my time is being taken up by a bunch of different tasks, plans and events, which happen to be what I sat down to talk about today.

I suppose the first things to address are the two web sites I launched in 2010.  I can talk ad nauseam about the time I spent running around through the streets of this city or that. Whether it was Boston, Denver, Richmond or anywhere else, the  city street was always my first love. I feel most comfortable in the city…any city. When I moved back to Denver, in November of 2004, I was flooded with the most vivid memories of growing up here. I was exploring Capitol Hill, Uptown, Downtown, LoDo and all of the other neighborhoods with the newness of discovery that I felt each time I would explore a new city. The difference is that I recognized these streets. They looked a lot different then I remember them to be in the late 80s and early 90s. I left in 1994, just six years after LoDo got its designation as a historical district. There was no Beta and whatever the Sports Column was then, it certainly was not the best place in town to pick up last-call tricks. Oh how times have changed.

I wasted unknown hours loitering on 13th and wasted untold dollars on records and t-shirts at Wax Trax, back when they had four stores on the block. Buying sunglasses and shit at Fashion Nation or Imi Jimi, before Tom Hollar was murdered. I ended up living in Capitol Hill for nearly six years after I moved back. I scurried around in the same familiar alleys that I smoked pot and pissed in since I was 14 years old. The difference is that this time I had a smartphone and Twitter.

If you’re reading this then I’m assuming that you know that the rest is history. If you don’t know, then too bad. The story is still too fresh and I tell it too many times. To make a long story short; with help, motivation and inspiration from Amber, Meaghan, April, Jeremy and a few others I created Unseen Denver. I was on the fence about developing this website, mostly because I never imagined that anyone could possibly think these images were as awesome as I thought they were. I realized how cool people thought this idea was at SXSW later that March.

Allen and I had just gotten into Austin and we had dinner with some Denver friends. At the table P.J. told me that he was stoked for Unseen Denver and he felt like he was experiencing the beginning of a “I knew them back when they started” thing. I spent the following week in the filthy streets of Austin Texas, listening to live rock and roll for hours a day… Now I’m just rambling.

Since then Unseen Denver has had 74 different contributors and continues to get more images emailed to her every single day. We (her and I) have a Contributing Editor, mentions in the Denver Westword and even a shout out in the New York Times….Holy shit, right? I also started working with my very old friend Igor from Driven by Boredom on the New York version: Unseen NYC…more on that another time.

Unseen Denver is a year old now and it’s time to fucking party. Through this mini adventure of website management I have met some truly incredible people. Two of these people you will know as Tim Davids and Rachel Romero. This coming Saturday, March 5, they are joining forces to produce a party, the likes of I have never been involved with. Big Top Denver is going to be full of bands, emcees, artists, booze and the very best crowd that you will find this decade. Check out www.bigtopdenver.com to see all of the badass videos and fliers they put together for this joint. I asked them if I could celebrate Unseen Denver’s birthday at their party, and they gave me a media installation at the event and a spot on the flier.

This blog post was supposed to be about the different things I am involved in, so here they are:

1. Full time job
2. I’m back in school
3. Unseen Denver
4. Unseen NYC
5. Residual freelance
6. Podcast

Number 6 is a very slow moving project that may never, ever see the light of day. If it doesn’t come to fruition, I will always look back at it as a crime against my ambition.

                          

For a long time I’ve wanted to write about some of the incredible people I have met throughout my misadventures. I finally bit the bullet and told a story about my friend Igor a couple of posts back. It was a lot of fun to write, and I learned that if there’s nothing to write about, I know I will always have a wealth of stories to tell about the unique people I have met…and there have been many, trust me. I am having a ball with these, so you can expect to see more in the future. For now, here’s some background…

When I moved to Colorado from Virginia, I did so with one carload of my possessions. I left VA for a variety of reasons; the biggest one being that I couldn’t find a job. After my clothing store closed I was pretty destitute and I had a lot of trouble finding a job. I came across a roadblock like this from time to time.  This one found me living out of my car on the streets of Virginia Beach, not even able to get a part-time job at 7-11. I knew it was time to pick-up and move on.

The first office job I ever got happened about a month after I moved back into Denver. It was a domain name registrar in a small brick loft upstairs from Paris on the Platte, on 15th. The company was called DomainSite and we also ran a younger registrar called name.com out of that office. Soon after I was hired we moved into a much fancier office in Lowry, where I spent the next four years.

The owner of these companies is a man named Bill Mushkin. Bill had lived a life much, much different than mine. It was hard for me to relate to him at times, at least partly because of those differences. I’m sure I took him by surprise from time to time too. Bill’s kindness, shrewd business sense and marked individuality is pretty amazing. I saw my boss weather strife both in business and personally. In good times, as well as in bad, I got to see Bill use his skill and authority to carve his business out of intentions as good as the values that they were born from.Throughout my tenure at this job I learned a lot more than the domain name racket.

Bill’s uniqueness shines through everything he does. Anyone who knows him can bear testimony. He took me in and made me a part of his company, almost literally off of the street. Four years later I had knowledge of what I wanted to do and I was headed in the right direction.

Here are a couple of things that I learned during that time.

1. Beware of overspecializing
   It’s hard to find your way by a single path. If you have the ability to create something large, you should already know how to manage the little things. It is also true that that in order to reach vast depths, you have to start in the shallows. Bill has been, among other things, a Wall Street trader, college professor  and also founded a few wildly successful (and some starkly different) companies.
2. Learn to adapt
   When water comes out of the faucet it takes the shape of the container it falls into, filling each angle and curve. It can be a tiny drop, or a gigantic ocean; vapor, fluid & ice. Striving to be a successful, real-live, human company that serves an international customer base while maintaining a small staff with high morale… you have to adapt. If you can separate certainty from your path, when you overcome one obstacle easily, you will have already overcome every obstacle you will encounter.
3. Do not compromise your identity
   Specifically I mean matters of business and making your living. Businesses can be large or small, and industry continues to evolve with a life of its own. A freelancer who serves a handful of clients is not entirely different from an established company in a global marketplace. The difference comes in that the larger a company gets, the slower and less maneuverable it becomes.  Individuals are able to move more quickly and are less predictable.  Knowing one’s self, and one’s own strengths and limitations come only with practice. Every moment is a decisive one and a slack mind can equal certain defeat.
4. Own your style
   Style is relative. There are old styles, new styles and different styles in every way of thought. The most efficient method of developing your own style is to clearly understand the styles of others. Morals, ideas and reasonable people will always conflict, no matter how you choose to act. Some will try to actively understand style, but still fall far from the mark. It is natural to misunderstand people, and small misunderstandings become large ones. If you are  cognizant of your ethics, and you pay close attention to the intentions of others, you will avoid dangerous faux pas.
5. Appreciate nature
   No, I don’t mean go hiking. Nature is circumstances and it is chaos. It is incalculable; it has no beginning and no end. Nature is complete and unhindered freedom within the bounds of Natural Law. Only by knowing the nature of circumstance will you have the ability to develop strategy. There is rhythm in every situation. Once you have found this rhythm you will come to solutions without effort.

I’m hearing a lot more buzz about name.com around town lately, and I think it’s great. Name.com is sponsoring local nerd events and is keeping up an incredibly fun and friendly social media presence. I like seeing new people getting excited about my old company and I thought it was important to also know about the CEO, social leader and loving father who was responsible.

Thanks Bill.

Image above © name.com 2010

                          

Keeping these little guys alive has made me incredibly interested in growing plants. It seemed such a natural thing to do, however I knew so few people who did it. When I moved into my place on Capitol Hill, I planted a grand garden in the two and a half foot strip of  dirt in front of the building. By the end of the summer I had -no lie- 12′ tall sunflowers with 8″-10″ faces, brown-eyed Susan climbing the walls, tomatoes, three kinds of peppers, corn and even a pumpkin patch.

My freshly planted city garden. 11th and Clarkson Street Denver, Colorado; Spring 2006

In 2009 I did a 5 month SEO internship with nationally recognized SEO strategist, and all-around great dude to know, Everett Sizemore. Besides being a search engine optimization wizard he was also the original organizer of the Greater Denver Urban Homesteading Group, had a hooked-up backyard garden and hopped town to go back to simple living at his own farm in Virginia.

That did a bunch for my plant bug, and I knew that growing greens was going to be part of what I did for now on…all I needed was a new apartment…and all I needed for that was a new job.

Then I got all that… I have a new job (newer then my last crappy job) and also a new apartment. The job I have happened to be a really great resource for not only home and urban gardening but also sustainable living and solar products & information. So here I am, stoked to have a sweet job working in an industry that A) has a lot of cool shit that I’m into, but also B) has spent the last 30 years providing eco-friendly options for consumers who choose to reduce their impact on the world they live on…or because it’s trendy…or because they’re our stockholders. The truth is, I really don’t care why as long as it’s clean and fair.

I digress…

When I mentioned to my boss that I was going to start a vermicompost bin in my new place, she took me to the product shelf and showed me a Worm Factory Home Composter and told me I could use it. Vermicomposting is composting with worms. It is touted as clean and odorless, so you can do it indoors. I’ve never been afraid of a little dirt and worms, however I can’t say I’m the best at keeping things clean. I suppose it will be a learning experience in a handful of subjects.

Worm Factory on my porch

Currently my compost bin is set up on my balcony. The instructions said that the worms do best in temperatures between 40-80 degrees. The week after I set it up Denver had a string of 98-100 degree weather. I put the bin in the wrong corner of the porch, in the direct sun. A week later I think I killed all of my worms. I have since found a more suitable, shady corner of the porch for the worm bin. The first batch of kitchen waste I put in there has been mellowing in the sun for a week, but there is still no odor. It started to become dry, so I added a glass of water to add moisture. Next week I’ll go back to the garden store and get more worms.

Since I have no compost, and likely no live worms left, I don’t have a lot to say about composting. Getting ready to compost is pretty awesome though…

I love to cook tasty food. If you know me, you know this. As I was learning how to cook I was cognizant about how much plant waste you throw away. All the carrot peels, onion heels, herb stems and everything else I don’t use now go into the compost bag. The secret to not having a stinky compost bin is to not use anything fatty or any animal by products. I don’t eat a lot of meat so it’s pretty easy to keep the waste separate. Currently when I fix meals I keep a paper bag lined with produce bags. I’d love to get a sweet bamboo kitchen compost collector, but this will do for now.

My makeshift kitchen waste collector

What are my plans for this big bucket of worm shit? Plants! Bonsai, container gardens, herbs…it’ll be epic.

                          

Nate (Igor) was the first blogger I ever met and I always kept up with what he was doing. I was a few years out of any kind of party scene and he was in New York photographing these amazing parties. We kept in touch and I have been helping him out with his web projects on and off for years. I didn’t realize his reach until last summer, when I was in visiting my mom in Falling Waters West Virginia. She was asking me about the projects I had done and I brought up Igor. I was shocked, and a little mortified when she told me that she knew about his blog and reads it all the time. Well fuck what you heard because my mom reads Driven By Boredom.

Photo by Igor VA 200?

Richmond Virginia was an awesome town to live in. It was truly the definition of punk rock, as in it wasn’t uncommon to be walking down the street in The Fan and pass a couch that somebody set on fire, in the middle of the night. If you’re into Missy Elliott, Avail, Municipal Waste, Steve Earle, Pig Destroyer, Neko Case, Mae, GWAR, Lamb of God, Day By Day, Strike Anywhere, The Neptunes or (dare I)…Bruce Hornsby, then you might already know that Virginia is a party all the time. Our upstairs neighbor hung out with Igor and we all kicked it together from time to time. Igor had a web site, and I thought that was pretty cool.

Igor never drinks, except for once a year on his birthday. I’d love to tell you about that time, but I was out well before he was. One of my favorite Igor party tricks was hot dog swallowing. At one of my house parties he got into a hot dog swallowing contest with my friend Kimmy. Kimmy was a 7 foot tall, bleach blond bombshell. Daisy dukes, horn-rim glasses and covered head-to-toe with tattoos of cars and weapons. This girl was in it to win it, like she had something to prove. Igor smoked her by gutting 6 whole hot dogs in a row. It was truly Epic.

The Gaskets

Not long before I left Igor started managing a goofy little pop duo called The Gaskets. He started shopping them around at Richmond open mic shows, and before too long they were getting booked… to open for motherfucking “Weird Al” Yankovic. They released a couple of albums, and played a bunch of shows. One of the two, Teddy Blanks, went off on his own and recorded a really cool  cover of Headache by Frank Black. You can still hear it on Teddy’s MySpace page.

Erotica LA 2009

You’re either made to live in Richmond, or you were bound to visit. Not to long after I left town, Igor set off for New York City to make The Gaskets stars, I think. What happened was a bit different. We didn’t stay in touch too much, however he’s a big Miami Dolphins fan so there was always a lot of shit talk at football season. The Gaskets broke up and Igor started focusing a lot of attention going to these sweet parties and taking tons of pictures. After years of plugging along he ended up developing a pretty solid following. His work became more and more popular, and he started getting contracts at music conferences, film festivals and Andrew W. K. shows.

Off Broadway Awards After Party

Kuato

This is the part where I just spent over an hour looking through Igor’s pictures, trying to decide which ones to talk about. I’ve went way over my time budget for this blog, so I’m just going to list my top 5 favorite Driven By Boredom photos in no particular order.

• Robert Redford checks out Andie MacDowell’s boobs
• The porn star with the freckles (NSFW)
• Lou Reed
• Cortney Love
• Re-Re-Penetrator zombies (NSFW)

So now you know Igor. If nothing else, subscribe to Driven By Boredom in your reader for a while. If you have a weak constitution, a closed mind, freaked out by extreme sleaze or anything like that…don’t sign up for his Christmas card list. Who knows though, my mom’s into it. Wussy.

                          

After 17 months of funemployment, I have a real job…sort of. I’ve had some stints of underemployment in the past, but after nearly a year and a half of experimenting with freelance I am pretty happy to get back into an office. It has been really hard to continue to be motivated and creative without a people to work with. That and I was always broke. Quite honestly, the poverty was way easier to handle than wallowing in my crummy apartment every day. I eventually came to the conclusion that the two might somehow be related. It’s a contract however, so I get all of the benefits of working, but with none of the benefits. At the same time, with just two or three days worth of change left in the bowl, I decided that I could stand doing my own taxes in exchange for a desk and a chair.

My title is Web Video Manager, however I don’t really think that describes what it is I’m going to be doing very well. I will be managing social media and SEO for a network of real estate professionals owned by a charismatic Canadian small businessman. The project needs a lot of work, and it’s clear that they need some help creating questions and learning how to answer them. I also have a folder full of real estate videos to edit and publish, which is the video part of it.

They seem to be very successful in their field, however it seems that they’re been far less knowledgeable about the type of marketing I have been exposed to. They see the benefit of using PPC to find leads and have had success building a decent foundation, but I don’t think they know what to do next. That’s where I come in. It’s been a confusing week or so, but I think I’m starting to get the hang of it. There are a good amount of challenges ahead for this bad boy. There’s a ton of empowerment and also a lot of responsibility. It’s also very difficult to communicate with the CEO.

Wish me luck, if anything.

                          

Another idea I had was to talk about music. The problem with that is I have no idea how to approach it. Music is such a big part of how I’ve chosen to live my life, that trying to think of the whole thing in terms of one topic is staggering. I could break it up into a series of multiple blog posts, but let’s be honest.. I’m not that motivated to write in this blog. However, Iron and Wine’s cover of the Flaming Lips Waitin’ For A Superman just came on the iTunes, so maybe that’s a good place to start.

Ironically enough this song has been popping up somewhat often lately. I made a comment on Twitter recently that this song is one of my favorite covers ever recorded. I really have no idea why. I’m not even a very big Iron and Wine fan. The Flaming Lips are one of my very favorites. There’s something about a really classy cover of one of your favorite songs that can really get under your skin.

I was born into music. When I was a boy my dad was a DJ for a number of rock and country music radio stations throughout Colorado and the southwest. Some of my earliest memories are of listening to records with my dad and my big sister, in our run-down little duplex on 7th st in Grand Junction. My mom’s influence had me singing. Church choir, school choir, show choir, musicals, you name it. When I left Arvada, CO for Nashua, NH in 1994, I left behind three different choirs.

The mixture of choral sensibility and rock and roll idolatry sent me on a on a hell of a journey. I was discovering bands like Nine Inch Nails and Front 242 on my own. Through my friend’s older brother I discovered things like Oingo Boingo, Consolidated, Ministry etc. which led me to Teletunes on channel 12 in Denver. I slithered into the front range underground and incubated my tastes in all ages places like Ground Zero on the Hill in Boulder and Mercury Cafe Downtown.

Local punk rock was where I was at, and I wasn’t going anywhere. I was a 16 year old punk rock terror. Running away from home to live in the city streets and going to local, all ages shows every weekend. It was like that until I moved east.

Brefore you ask, No…My name is not Bojangles, and I’m not going to sing and dance for you, so don’t even bother entertaining it.

Punk was the deal for the rest of high school. Remind me to tell you about the time I went with Merrimack’s finest psychobilly 3 piece, The Brain Bats to headline a show at CBGBs. It was an epic show with real, live, New York City punk rock blood, booze and leather.

I was going to shows at places like The Rathskeller in Boston, and the Elvis Room in Portsmith, NH and I was discovering a new type of asshole…Muscle-headed hardcore kids. I wasn’t used to the way these pricks enjoyed shows. I had been going to violent shows for years, but these guys weren’t even trying to be polite. Even my small size wasn’t stopping them. I lost interest in being at live shows with bullies, and after The Rat closed in 1997 I lost interest in rock music all together.

Enter Ross; one of the worst influences I have ever crossed paths with and, to this day my very best friend. I had gone to rave parties before, my big sister was a rave queen in Denver in the very early 90s, and I had gone with her to a few. But nothing could prepare me for what this dude was about to introduce me to. I began going to underground parties, and giant massives in around 1997-98. I moved to Boston shortly after that and – with some of the closest friends I have made in all of my life – threw some of Boston’s most memorable underground parties for about three years.

I keep threatening to write down some of the stories that came out of these handful of years. I came out of it with a vast knowledge and love for Techno, House Drum & Bass and Breakbeats. We partied all over Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Maine, Rhode Island, Philadelphia, Baltimore and DC; sometimes Chicago, Detroit and up to Canada just to dance to our favorite DJs from all over the world. I read books, bought documentaries, listened, studied and talked about nothing but electronic music and rave culture. The music was fascinating, new and everywhere I went I met folks who had been to our parties.

Power Surge Production Loft, South Boston. Fall 1999

I left Boston for Virginia in the early 2000s. In Richmond, there was almost no electronic music. Besides that, my roommate and most of my new friends were tattoo artists…not a lot of Detroit Techno in Richmond tattoo shops, believe it or not. Before very long, I was back home to dirt and rock and roll. Living in the town that spawned the likes of Avail, Lamb of God and GWAR was like gutter-rat Disneyland. There was always an amazing show at a filthy bar, and PBR was cheaper than water. I developed a marked taste for drinking songs, murder ballads and good, hard-living country music. It’s also when I began to explore Hip-Hop. I left RVA to open a store in Virginia Beach, and that’s when working began to take more of my time than music.

I rolled back into Denver in the Fall of 2004. I had been on the most incredible ten year adventure, and it was time to go back upstream. Within a year of being here, I met Joe from Chicago and Eric from Atlanta who were both DJs in the late 90s. Around 2005 or 2006 a bunch of us grizzled old schoolers decided to put together a Denver Drum and Bass crew, and through this I’ve been able to stay close to music through my 30s.

I think that ended up being a pretty good post about music. There’s really no way that I can explain how I lived my life, or tell stories from my past without music. Likewise it appears that I can’t talk about music without talking about my life. It has been my compass and sextant throughout all of my land-locked voyages. If there’s a common complaint from every ex-girlfriend I’ve ever had, it’s that I talk about music too much.

                          

This year I have immersed myself in social media. My little local Twitter community has been awesome, and I have made some close, new real life friendships. All of my business prospects have come out of the primordial social media soup as well. I have also been invited to work with a small, local nonprofit group through the friends I have made through social media.

My psychic junk-food has become cool and creative blogs this year. I’ve found a bunch of really interesting ones, and some that are not as great. I’ve found a lot of really cool art, music and tons of unique information. I’ve created a list of my very favorite blogs.

Without further ado…

Trypnotik Top Five Coolest Blogs of 2009

1. Pink Tentacle is far, and away my favorite blog of 2009. This English language blog out of Tokyo finds some of the most interesting art, music, technology, and generally bizarre content I have seen on the Internet. I encourage you to follow the Pink Tentacle Twitter timeline for some of the stories that didn’t make the cut.
   Notable Posts:
   • 18th-century ‘Hyakki Yako’ scroll (for sale)
   • Upstairs at Kitaro’s: Mini monster peepshow
   • Manga-style illustrations by Shohei Otomo
2. TasteSpotting is a anthology of recipes from countless blogs from all over the internet. I can zone out for hours clicking around and reading through these recipes. Then I think about my 100 sq ft Capitol Hill troll kitchen and I die a little bit inside.
   Notable Posts:
   • Mushroom Hot Pot Recipe – Kinoko Nabe
   • Mussels in White Wine
   • Goat Cheese and Basil Stuffed Tomatoes
3. Dude Craft gathers images and stories from craftsmen. Paul Overton has a clear passion for design and craftsmanship. Dude Craft features a lot of amazing cut paper, found objects, cars, steampunk and other things people make that will blow your mind.
   Notable Posts:
   • Tire Art – Where the Rubber Hits the Soul
   • Papercuts: Stop Motion by Andersen M Studio
   • Puzzling Acorns
4. Mostly Forbidden Zone is a bizarre and sometimes macabre anthology of mostly vintage media. Much of it is completely removed from its original context.
   Notable Posts:
   • How to avoid dry, unruly “jungle hair”
   • The first Thanksgiving Morning
   • Children must have IRON for good red blood!
5. Nerdcore doesn’t get a whole lot of attention simply because it’s mostly in German. If you like looking at really unique, off the wall and nerdy stuff (or you can read German), sift through the massive amount of weird shit they dig up.
   Notable Posts:
   • Gilles Barbiers Real Life-Superhero-Rentner-Sculpture
   • Che Trooper-Sculpture
   • IY Steampunk Arcade feat. Frankenstein

That’s it, there’s the five. This took way longer than it should have. I spent so much time wandering around these blogs and all of the content tangents that were inevitably taken. Pardon my brief close, but it’s late.

Honorable Mentions:

• Indexed
• Driven By Boredom
• The Art of Manliness

                          

As the video went on I caught little details here and there.  The link manager was the first detail I noticed.  It gives you standard categories for your links and allows you to record paid link transactions.  This stuck out to me as very intuitive, even though I have never purchased a link in my life.  To a seasoned professional, that one could be a no-brainer, however it struck me.  It served as an example a well thought out, deliberate attempt to make their system as useful possible.

Of course that’s what every online business wants to accomplish, but this is probably the best model I have seen.  The video goes on to describe more features, SEO tools and what they do.  The coup d’etat was when they described their help platform.  Each page has Help and Feedback links on it.  Clicking Feedback will make a text box appear that allows you to send bug reports and feature requests.  The Help link gives you help related to the page that you are currently on…brilliant.

My goal is not to give Raven’s services a rousing endorsement.  Raven’s little video just made me think about the customer service model I worked on during the years I worked for Name.com.

I worked in the customer service department at the ICANN accredited registrar, Name.com for a bunch of years.  I went to my interview in a small, two room loft above Paris on the Platte, just off 15th st in downtown Denver. There were 10 people working there at the time: Randi, Scott, Ben, Dave, Sam, Michael, Owen, Reggie, Ravi and Bill the CEO. The company was nearly 2 years old at the time, and I was hired to help Ben and Randi in customer service so Scott could begin to concentrate on other things as well.

Nearly everything we did was manual, and almost nothing was automated. Registrar transfers, authorization code requests, account transfers, fraud prevention, etc. It was pretty much all done by hand.  It could get to be very tedious at times, but it was a great way to learn about regulations, rules and processes involved in domain name registration.  It wasn’t quite a well-oiled machine, but we knew what we were doing and there was something new to learn each day.

When the platforms were created for Name.com, and their separate, sister company DomainSite, the system was clunky, and not very scalable.  As we grew, we had to change the way that our system worked.  That became a chore.  The Developers were already busting their asses on other stuff, and bug fixes, feature requests and other tweaks were sometimes difficult to get done.  At times it was frustrating; for both us in the department, but more so for the customers.

In my four years there my biggest pet peeve was answering the same questions over and over and over again.  If I had a nickel for every time I explained how to change your name servers, via telephone and email, I would likely have made more then the sum of my quarterly bonuses.  When Name.com overhauled its interface, and became the flagship company (prior to that, DomainSite got more attention), one of the things I worked on was rewriting the Help section.

My goal was to help develop a system that made it so customers wouldn’t have to contact us. The problem is that I had no idea how to do it, and not create more work then what Development was able (willing) to do.

• Make the Help section bigger?
• Put an FAQ link in the main menu?

It appears that Raven has begun to solve that issue, and better than I have seen so far.  Of course highly specialized SEO monitoring and strategy management tools is a vastly different customer base than a domain name registrar.  Their customer base is much less broad, because their product is much more specific.  I’m sure it is easier to know what a customer would want in such a specific field.  The model is a slam-dunk however.  It offers their users very precise, automated help without having to contact support.  If you do want to contact support, they are right there; One click away and on every page.  I just wish I had thought of it while they were remodeling the Name.com web site.

I am not trying to compare the the way the two companies do business, or trying to sound critical of Name.com.  During the time I worked at Name.com we went from a two year old start-up, in a drafty brick loft, to finding ourselves within the top 30 ICANN accredited registrars in the industry (there are almost 900 ICANN accredited registrars worldwide).  I simply saw the way that Raven created their Help system, and it just happened to be the idea I was looking for.

                          

As I was fixing the image for this post, I got a random tweet from a friend of mine that was tailored just for this entry, it seems. It’s a Nietzsche quote that says simply:

you need chaos in your soul to give birth to a star.

I have excuses though, plenty of them. I’ve been struggling with all of the work I’ve had to do all summer, and it feels great. I don’t know when I’ve ever been so busy, and I’ve gotten fairly, if not significantly behind in nearly everything I’m currently involved in. I really enjoy having so much to do though. It’s just becoming difficult to keep my deadlines. It seems I may have gone in each of the directions that the crossroads alluded to in my previous entry.

The summer hasn’t been a complete wash, however. I have been camping; fly fishing, gone on vacation to West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Washington DC and New Hampshire. I have hung out with all of my close friends, got drunk with some people I haven’t seen in nearly a decade, and yes… even found romance (albeit short-lived, but it was truly lovely while it lasted).

I have been getting somewhat steady work from Syntropic Music. I am redoing their main Web site, which looks like crap right now (yes, that’s all my fault). I’m not really sure where all of the technical trouble is coming from. I am using the same template as another project, with a few tweaks, but for some reason the Syntropic install is all screwed up. I am currently working with David Pennington, Syntropic Music’s Director, on moving Web servers, and cleaning up everything that has messed up.

I finished up a site for Syntropic Music’s flagship band, Gription. Besides that I am doing some digital brand management consulting for them, trying to help consolidate all of their domains at one registrar, and attempting to convince them to move syntropicmusic.com to a server that I am more familiar with.

Working with Syntropic has truly been a pleasure. I met David via social networking, and we became friends pretty easily. When Syntropic Music needed to change IT strategies, I was the guy they called. There is no better way to learn the best ways to work with clients then to begin by working with someone whom you already have a bond of trust.

I started school once again, and once again I have plenty to complain about. This time around is much different however.

Before I start bitching about how much being in college sucks, I have to give a big, giant thank you to Miss April Gosling. She is a super-duper book nerd, and I would never have been able to pass World Literature without her help. April is a fabulous poet, and a wonderful friend. Please check out her blog Social Curettage at www.aprilgosling.com.

So World Lit is taken care of, but I’m having trouble with JAVA Programming. I have never been challenged at this school. Furthermore, the last beginner programming course I took, C++, was a total crock. The instructor showed us the programming language once before, and the only time we used it was a copy and paste exercise the very last day of the class. JAVA is much different though. The instructor is engaging and fun and he is plowing us through the material like a champ. The problem however is that I underestimated the value of the class, and I gave it no attention. Now I’m kind of hosed, and have been playing catch-up for the past few weeks.

Speaking of catch up, I have Igor‘s web site to finish up and a Denver Marketing project that I need to do as well.

Probably not last, and certainly not least, I’m in the middle of a bad ass internship at a lifestyle company called Gaiam. I am working under Everett Sizemore, who is the Manager of SEO Strategy there. The company is fantastic. The people are friendly, and the office is immaculate. I never thought I would work within an office until Name.com. Now I work in a cubicle. For as much as that goes beyond my punk-rock sensibilities, the situation couldn’t be more comfortable.

I could go through all that I have been learning since I started, about a month and a half ago, but I’ll spare you. I started blogging about the things I’m picking up. I would be honored if you would check it out.

Beginning SEO is a project I started in the second week of my internship. I had a little bit of time, and I thought blogging would be a fine way to gather my notes into something that is helpful. Of course, I’m behind on that too. I’m working on overhauling Meaghan Gosling‘s web site, Art of Behavior. You can check out what I’m doing for her at Beginning SEO.

Please, follow Beginning SEO on Twitter as well: www.twitter.com/beginningseo.

So if you’ve been holding your breath for a new blog entry, which I know you have been, here it is along with my apology. You are not the only one who I’ve been neglecting. Since this spring I have been more motivated then ever… if only temporarily. The goal is permanent laziness; however I have to bust my ass now in order to be able to afford that later in the future.

I am dying for some free time, however with any more of this, I’m sure to give birth to one hell of a star.