Oh, good gravy! We started a PODCAST! It's called "Wonky Records Conversations" and we have a buncha ideas about what we'll do with it. The first episode is now available to listen at, it's a, um, conversation between Half Zaftig singer Shawn Farley and co-producer/engineer Darin Di Pietro, as they took a break from mixing the new Half Zaftig album Life Like Luster last Saint Patrick's Day. You'll learn the status of the new record, you'll hear a chunk of the new song "Handbasket", and you'll hear Darin's untold secrets of the Mona Lisa! Go get it, it don't cost nuthin'!

Point your RSS aggregator HERE, or SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST in iTUNES!

I was all like, "Whoa", like Keanu. But I didn't end up linking to that story here, because I forgot or something. Well, the Debate Of The Big Brains continues between Andrew Sullivan and Sam Harris, with Harris observing the following in his latest missive:

"And is it really so difficult to imagine one's own nonexistence? I think it might be easier than advertised. Presumably, you don't find it hard to accept that you didn't exist before you were born, so why is it so difficult to believe that you will cease to exist after you die? Think of all the times and places where you now aren't: The 14th century got along fine without you (well, not so fine). If you are in D.C. at this moment, you are utterly absent from every other city on earth. There are people walking the streets of Rome right now, carrying on without the benefit of your company. Is your absence from just one more point in time and space really so difficult to imagine? (This time and space argument doesn't originate with me. I believe I've borrowed it from Douglas Hofstadter.)

Or imagine dying in parts: what if you had a stroke that damaged your visual cortex-where would your faculty of sight be thereafter? If a priest said that your visual self had gone on to heaven before you, would you believe him? What if another stroke caused you to lose your ability to speak and to understand language-do you think that your eloquence must survive in some immaterial form? There is simply no question that brain damage can cause any of us to lose the specific faculties that constitute our conscious selves. Why is it so hard to imagine that we can lose all these faculties at once?

Or consider the analogy of sleep: each night you fall asleep and surrender your subjectivity to oblivion. You probably do this quite happily-indeed, you will be miserable if you fail to do it. Perhaps you believe that we all remain subtly conscious even while deeply asleep (this might be so), but if you're like me, you awaken each morning without any sense of having lived for most of the night. You already know, therefore, what it's like for your experience of the world to cease. Is a permanent cessation really so difficult to imagine?"

So like, I'm all, "Whoa".

Now finally having heard The Arcade Fire, I can say that at least they do not suck. The album sounds to me like what you'd have gotten had Brian Eno teamed up with Phil Spector to produce Bruce Springsteen in the 70's. It's pretty OK. Not great, but worth a few repeated listens at least. I don't know if I'll fall for this band the way I did for Cave In last year when I heard them.

Cave In is way better than The Arcade Fire. But I don't feel gyped out of my ten bucks. That's something, I guess.

So that means all you gold-diggas gotta stop leaving me messages on my cel, yo.

Peace.

I have gotten burned SO MANY TIMES over the last couple of years when I've given in to the "hipster flavor of the month" and bought some new CD by some "FANTASTIC" new band -- only to find the music contained therein to be... uninspiring.

I've got a stack of CD's that includes works by Modest Mouse, Death Cab For Cutie, The White Stripes, The Shins, Wolfmother, and others of their ilk that I'll probably never actively listen to again (though I admit there are several White Stripes tunes I like a lot). This week's model is The Arcade Fire. I'm pretty sure I haven't heard them at all yet, and even though their new disc is for sale real cheap at Best Buy, I'm having a hard time pulling the trigger on it. I want to be open-minded, I buy around 50-60 discs every year at least, and I'd say 80% of those are NEW albums, many by NEW bands (the rest include reissues, and albums by artists that have an established track record with me).

So I haven't heard The Arcade Fire. I probably should go to iTunes or something and hear some samples.

But I am tired of getting burned by boring new bands. I am tired of the music press getting all excited by "lyrics bands", and I am tired of falling for these groundswells of delirious praise and buying albums I don't particularly enjoy. Yes, it's nice when some clever wordplay comes my way via a pop song, but GODDAMMIT it's called MUSIC, and MUSIC is what should MATTER, more than what the WORDS are. And all these new bands tend to write a bunch of really unexciting, derivative crap that mostly sounds like stuff I've already heard. I don't CARE if the lead singer has NICE HORN-RIMMED GLASSES and a BED-HEAD HAIRDO and manages to plaintively mumble some literary in-jokes over the same kind of shimmery backdrop that R.E.M. perfected back in 1982. Where are the great MELODIES? Where are the bands that fucking ROCK?

That's what I want to hear. It's not fair of me to assume this because I haven't heard them yet, but I have this feeling that The Arcade Fire do NOT rock. Seriously. CAN a band that named itself... THE ARCADE FIRE... can such a band really, really... rock? I ask you.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Those summers of 1980-82 were pretty fantastic movie years if you were a kid. I was 10-12 years old, and it seemed every single year there were more great movies I'd get to go to with my Dad on his days off. Raiders Of The Lost Ark. The Empire Strikes Back. Blade Runner.

But E.T. was special, and I remember the first time we went, taking my then 4-year-old sister along. What I remember most was how at the end of the movie, she was absolutely inconsolable. Sobbing. Dad carried her out of the theater on his shoulder, and I remember walking out behind them, trying to comfort her, which was a good thing for me to do, because it allowed me to collect myself. Because I had been just as affected by the movie, and I had tear streaks running down my face, too. At least trying to calm my sister down gave me a way to focus on something else, and gave me time to get myself together before we got out into the bright light of day.

The essay I linked to gets it right. This is one of the greatest depictions of what it's really like to be a kid ever put on film. It contains what I consider to be a couple of the greatest performances by child actors I've ever seen, from Henry Thomas and Drew Barrymore (who was the same age as my little sister!).

I can't watch the movie with anyone else in the room because it still gets me. I blubber like a baby at the end, even now as a grown man, even though I know what's coming, having seen it many, many times over the years. I have no idea how the movie plays to kids today, certainly many of the effects are dated-looking. But there's magic in them, something that was made obvious by Spielberg's ill-considered "update" of the movie in 2002. Yeah, they gave E.T. a CGI-enhanced face, but it doesn't make him look more "real." I found the "updates" distracting, though some of the additional scenes were nice. But that version of the movie is a curiosity. The one to watch is the 1982 original, still as brilliant today as it was back then.

We're at the part of the process that drives me the most crazy. I just so desperately want to be done, and Darin is working very diligently to make that happen. But I notice my patience gets short, which has nothing whatsoever to do with anyone else. There are only so many hours in a day, and as Darin says, you don't want to rush the mixes out there. Once you put out the record, they are out there in that form forever, and you want them to be right. So I end up in this weird state of desperately wanting to be finished, desperately wanting to be able to think of something else, to DO something ELSE, but then I take home a set of possible "release candidate" mixes, and find problems with them. Because they aren't yet quite right. So that means more notes for Darin, more changes, that sort of get what I'm looking for - and there are often times where I can't really articulate what it is that I want to hear. Only that I'm not hearing it yet. This has to be pretty frustrating for DDP as well. He can only make the changes that I ask for; it's not his fault if I don't know what I want, or can't explain what I want. So it must be annoying for me to come in and listen to some new mix and make The Big Frown and not be able to say what the issue is.

I've lived with most of these songs for a very long time now - shouldn't I know how they should be? Maybe the frustration is hearing stuff come back to me exactly how I thought they should be, only to discover that my Grand Ideas aren't going to work. Then what? And what? What the what?

Can't I just be DONE yet?

Darin's doing a great job. Stuff is sounding great. The artwork-in-progress for the package is coming together. And yet and yet and yet.

I've been through this before. It's been the same every time. I wish I could take some joy from this part of the process.

But I've learned that these are the days that just need to be survived, he said, with a huge dollop of pretension and over-importance.

What can I say, this shit is important to me.