blog my beats

Christmas Playlist

2008-12-03T19:19:00.000-08:00

Wednesday...

2008-12-03T14:57:00.000-08:00

More Inspiration for today

2008-12-01T14:02:00.000-08:00

Random Inspiration

2008-12-01T13:52:00.001-08:00

2008-12-01T13:27:00.000-08:00

2008-08-22T20:24:00.000-07:00

http://view.break.com/534274 - Watch more free videos

2008-06-07T12:44:00.000-07:00

Ladytron - Ghosts at Audio Drums

Wax Tailor - Que Sera (click here to DL song)

2008-02-12T17:32:00.000-08:00

New Job

2008-02-09T13:36:00.000-08:00

I have been preoccupied with a couple new projects....mostly a new job doing Graphic Design. Haven't really had any music inspirations lately...I think Goldfrapp has a new album on its way...ummmm....ok well...I'll be postig more music shortly. Oh and it was Millie Bean's 1st Birthday on Jan 25th...This is from her B-day Celebration!!!

Currently Reading

2008-01-21T09:20:00.000-08:00

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

Global-positioning satellites turn us all into snails. Not just size-wise, either. From above, the newer handheld display screens show the path of our movements through the day, leaving gray-green snail trails behind to mark our passage. After a while, especially around the regularly visited coordinates of home or neighborhood, these tracks begin to cross and recross each other until they resemble less a single, traceable path than a trampled, muddy scribble.
Now imagine that someone has planted just such a tracking device on the setting and subject matter of the modern American novel. We see its regrettable concentration over New York like some dense green fog, darkening toward blackness on the Upper West Side, fading to sea foam somewhere out over Jersey. Nationally, we see the novel densely distributed over residential districts, where endless domestic dramas play out, while thinning -- as novelists shun the intricate workings of the business world -- above our downtowns. But there! streaking from post-World War I Greece like a lone emerald comet, setting up shop in a majestically detailed Detroit for most of the 20th century (with occasional zigzags to present-day Berlin), comes Jeffrey Eugenides' unprecedented, astounding new novel, "Middlesex."
Eugenides' story lies just as far off the beaten path as his setting. The author nine years ago of "The Virgin Suicides," Eugenides has shifted from that book's collective narrator to the most singular hero imaginable: a 41- year-old hermaphrodite named Cal, nee Calliope Stephanides. In order to tell the story of his life, Cal ushers the reader all the way back to the courtship of his Greek grandparents, who flee the Turks' genocidal sacking of Smyrna in 1922 and take ship for America, concealing from their fellow immigrants the secret that they are brother and sister. Cal narrates this generational saga from the vantage of a U.S. Foreign Service posting in gradually reintegrating Berlin, where he, too, is attempting to integrate the conflicting halves of his identity so as not to scare away a fetching Japanese American painter.
Stretched like a bowstring between the contemporary prospect of true love and the incestuous union that activated Cal's genetic destiny in the first place, the 80-year story of the Stephanides clan at first sounds too outre to admit entree. Like "The Virgin Suicides," which tells the story of five suburban sisters, each of whom takes her own life during little more than a year, "Middlesex's" premise initially repels all but prurient interest. Where's the universality, the "rootability" necessary to stimulate and sustain reader empathy?
In Cal's voice, that's where. Funny, humane, endearingly self-aware, Cal takes the book's most potentially alienating feature -- it's told by a boy with a vestigial penis who's mistaken for a girl for the first 14 years of his life -- and turns it to improbable, wonderful advantage. Here's a novel that emphatically declines to state whether it's a guy book or a chick book. Instead, it's the most reliably American story there is: A son of
immigrants finally finds love after growing up feeling like a freak.
And what language, what prose! Lots of novelists write beautifully about diurnal, mundane things, and Eugenides can do that with the best of them. But his rarer power resides in the ability to craft scenes whose freshness of incident matches their freshness of description. Just listen to this paragraph- long set piece, about the casting off of Cal's grandparents' steamer:
"It was the custom in those days for passengers leaving for America to bring balls of yarn on deck. Relatives on the pier held the loose ends. As the Giulia blew its horn and moved away from the dock, a few hundred strings of yarn stretched across the water. People shouted farewells, waved furiously, held up babies for last looks they wouldn't remember. Propellers churned; handkerchiefs fluttered, and, up on deck, the balls of yarn began to spin. Red,
yellow, blue, green, they untangled toward the pier, slowly at first, one revolution every 10 seconds, then faster and faster as the boat picked up speed. Passengers held the yarn as long as possible, maintaining the connection to the faces disappearing onshore. But finally, one by one, the balls ran out. The strings of yarn flew free, rising on the breeze."
It's as old a scene as they come, the departure from the old country for the new, but with an image that takes his characters' emotions and makes them enduringly visual, Eugenides pockets it. One thinks of that great scene in Hitchcock's original 1935 "Man Who Knew Too Much," where the hero snags an unraveling thread from a conspirator's swallowtail coat, so as not to lose track of him at a party -- then watches the villain take to the dance floor, inadvertently weaving all the guests together in the web his movements make.
Eugenides has Hitchcock's great knack, often dismissed as "cinematic" when it's simply good storytelling, of instinctively creating the perfect visual symbol to distill the substance of a scene. This happens all through "Middlesex," including an amazing interlude where Cal's dying father hallucinates a last lap around Detroit in an airborne late-model Cadillac.
Among so many other things, this praiseworthy, prize-worthy yarn succeeds as a heartbroken mash note to the Detroit of Eugenides' birth, a city whose neighborhoods he sometimes appears to love -- as he loves his characters -- less for their virtues than for their defects. Any book that can make a reader actively want to visit Detroit must have one honey of a tiger in its tank.

This article appeared on page RV - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

The Automatics - Gold Digger (click here to DL song)

2008-01-21T09:06:00.000-08:00

Glen Hansard - Lies (Click here to DL song)

2008-01-21T08:38:00.000-08:00

The song starts out slow, keep listening.

Great movie!

Little Dragon - The Last (Click here to DL Song)

2008-01-14T08:45:00.000-08:00

Magenta Lane - Wild Gardens (Click here to DL Song)

2008-01-14T08:34:00.000-08:00

Mulatu Astatqe - Tezeta (Nostalgia) Click here to DL Song

2008-01-10T09:09:00.000-08:00

WATCH VIDEO!

Billy Bragg and Wilco - When the Roses Bloom Again (Click here to DL song)

2008-01-08T08:00:00.000-08:00

Beach House - Gila (click here to DL song)

2008-01-08T07:38:00.000-08:00

LOE @ the Tritone, Sugartown

2008-01-03T21:41:00.000-08:00

Lezzies on E show was so good!!!!!!!

Datarock - I used to dance with my daddy - remixed (Click here to DL song)

2008-01-03T21:34:00.000-08:00

yr mangled heart - The Gossip - Guns and Bombs Trashbags remix (click here to DL song)

2007-12-28T09:33:00.000-08:00

The Raveonettes - Dead Sound (click here to DL song)

2007-12-26T20:54:00.000-08:00

Bjork - Gloomy Sunday (click here to DL song)

2007-12-09T11:21:00.002-08:00

Gloomy Sunday
1933 was a dark year for anyone living in central Europe, as German democracy fell under the Nazis, and her vulnerable citizens fled the crackdown on the opposition, not knowing when they would ever safely return. It was in this atmosphere of shock that Hungarian Rezső Seress composed his most famous song, 'Gloomy Sunday'. As well as being the most popular song he would ever write, it was also associated with a spate of suicides in Budapest, and when the song was translated into English this became part of its publicity campaign in the United States. Since then, the song is as famous for this urban legend as it is for its beauty. Seress himself committed suicide in Budapest in the equally fateful year of 1968.

Lesbians on Ecstasy - Sedition (DL Song HERE)

2007-12-09T08:59:00.000-08:00

Holy Fuck!
Lesbians on E @ Tritone (1508 South StreetPhiladelphia, PA) Saturday, December 29th

NIN - The Beginning of the End - Ladytron J type overdrive (click here to DL song)

2007-11-28T17:13:00.000-08:00

The Lovely Bones

2007-11-28T16:53:00.000-08:00

I am currently working on The Lovely Bones movie...Directed by Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings). The movie is an adaption of Alice Sebold's novel of the same name. Read it, it is a great book. Today I was inches away from Mark Wahlberg...WOOF!!