Monday, June 12, 2006

those who find themselves ridiculous sit down next to me

It might seem like it, but I haven't fallen off the face of the earth.

I haven't posted here in over a month, and I have almost nothing to say.

I've been monumentally busy with hockey. Going to the games, writing the blog. I'm obsessive about it. Thanks to the team's success, and my insano mad-man devotion to it, the blog over there has really taken off. When I started writing that thing back in July of last year, I was getting about 40 page loads a day. These days, I can hardly believe my eyes when I look at the statcounter and it tells me I had two days last week where I hit close to 700, and I never get less than 300. Every once in a while, someone comes along and says nice stuff about me, and I've gotten a few mainstream media shoutouts. That's almost as exciting to me as the Canes run to the Cup final. Speaking of which, The Canes are up 2-1 in the best-of-seven Stanley Cup Finals against the Edmonton Oilers, and this is very nearly the only thing I care about right now. When it's all over, the summer months will be less blogtastic over there, and I should be able to resume my writing here.

On Saturday, I went to my friend Bill's house to watch the road game. He had a really fancy, elaborate setup with a high-def projector showing the game on his garage door. We treated it just like it was a home game, cooking brats on the grill and drinking beer in the parking lot. Only the "parking lot" was more like his driveway. The game had an unfavorable end, but the event was fun.

After the game, I thought about driving back from north of Raleigh, but Bill and his wife Beth talked me out of it. Bill and I stayed up for a while watching some of his music dvds. James -- Getting Away With It -- live, which was from the last concert that great band ever performed. We just watched a bit of it, but I really liked it.

Somehow, this got us to watching the Björk Volumen collection, which invariably led us to a discussion about the brilliance of Michel Gondry (including his feature films), Chris Cunningham, Spike Jonze, Stéphane Sednaoui, and anyone who's ever directed her. This led to the bringing out of the Director's Label Boxed set (Volume 2), featuring the works of Sednaoui, Jonathan Glazer, Anton Corbin, and Mark Romanek. We finally settled in on the Glazer collection, which is really awesome.

We had a good time hanging out, watching music videos and all that. For some reason, though, Bill didn't have any of the live Björk stuff. Tonight, I watched, from my own collection, "Live at Shepherd's Bush Empire", from 1997. It really is quite amazing. Quite amazing. I highly recommend it to everyone. Even strangers. Especially strangers. Worth the price of admission are "Headphones", "Possibly Maybe" (with slightly modified, better lyrics) and "Violently Happy". Hard to believe that was almost 10 years ago. Jeez, I'm getting old.

Coming in the very near future -- an exciting post about me clearing out my text messages.

Now playing:
Wilco --Yankee Hotel Foxtrot Demos

4 comments:

Bill Purdy said...

I kinda get a kick out of your habit of using random (well, in this particular case, not so random) song lyrics to title your posts. I'm thinking of doing something similar, like titling my posts with subject lines from spam emails. This post, for instance, might be called: "This is Most Modern Way not to Cover in Shame," but would not likely mention "ro ck hrd eRE ctions" or "all ngiht PLE a sure" at all.

DeepDiscountDVD.com has low prices to begin with, and is offering an additional 20% off this week plus free shipping with the coupon code "SUPERSALE." I mention this because I (and you) can get the Medulla video collection delivered to the mailbox for $7.99, and Live at Cambridge (or Unplugged) for $13.30. Alas, Shepherd's Bush isn't in their inventory, though it probably wouldn't be too hard for me to drum up a copy from Amazon.

I feel a bit guilty for not owning any of Bjork's live DVDs. She is one of my favorite artists, and Volummen one of my most-watched DVDs (and also has the curious distinction of being the first DVD I ever purchased).

Oh, and if it makes you (or your regular readers) feel any better, Lord Stanley has kept me distracted from posting to my own blog since April 17.

Hans said...

Personally, I stole your idea of using song lyrics to title posts, except that I chicken out and make 'em relevant. I also stole your idea of posting once in a blue moon. Or maybe we both had that idea independently of each other, or we're monumentally busy with other things or something.

But what I really wanted to comment on is the fact that you're listening to the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot Demos. It took me a while to really get familiar with them, but I've found that I really never listen to the studio release anymore; if I'm listening to that record, it's the demos. They're fantastic is why.

Hawkeyi's Blog said...

Bad Luck , Oilers win game 5, series back to Edmonton, Who's that touching the stanley cup?
Seriously, I loved the canes right up to when we learned they were to play our home town Oilers... I'll go back to being a Rod Brind Amour fan once this series is over... If the Canes win it all, our hats off to them, your city, the fans and your hockey team are the best in the East! good luck

d-lee said...

Hans.... Absolutely. YHF Demos are WAY better than the studio release. And I think I stole the blog title/song lyric idea from Reid in the first place.

Douglas ... That's me in the picture. I have to respectfully disagree with your "bad luck" comment. The Canes didn't look very good late in the game, and they deserved to lose. If you get a PP opportunity in overtime, ESPECIALLY one that could clinch the Cup for you, you should bury it. If you turn the puck over like that, it's not bad luck. It's bad hockey. Please visit my hockey blog for LOTS of hockey talk.