Top 10 in 10 Days

Via Mary Kate McKenna, here are the top 10 most listened to tracks on my iPod.

List the top 10 songs played on your iPod or MP3 player in the last 10 days. If unsure do a sort for “Most Played”…let’s see what we’re all musically up to! For kicks, copy and pass on!

Pacing the Cage – Bruce Cockburn
Demons – Fatboy Slim ft. Macy Gray
All That We Let In – Indigo Girls
Liesl Echo – Ralph’s World
Carry that Weight – The Beatles
Dig Your Own Hole – Chemical Brothers
Everything’s Not Lost – Coldplay
Head in the Game – The Zambonis
St. Louise is Listening – Soul Coughing
If I Had a Boat – Lyle Lovett

(This is actually a combo of my iPod, my Rhapsody accouunt, and one of my home iTunes)

My 15 (cough) Favorite Albums

(very belatedly) Via Michelle Miller…

Think of 15 albums that had such a profound effect on you they changed your life or the way you looked at it. They sucked you in and took you over for days, weeks, months, years. These are the albums that you can use to identify time, places, people, emotions. These are the albums that no matter what they were thought of musically shaped your world.

Okay, I’m down to 20 albums I can listen to in their entirety over and over. I can’t do any fewer. If my steamer trunk is full, I’ll just have to stuff a a few of them in my boxers
1. Bruce Cockburn – The Charity of Night

Luscious music, brilliant lyrics full of metaphor and hard cold dirt. Reminds me of the magical time when I first became a parent

2. Indigo Girls – Come on Now Social

A brilliant mix of styles from Emily and Amy Ray.  Indigo Girls never, ever fail to soothe my soul (except when they’re kicking me in the ass)

3. Red Hot Chili Peppers – Blood Sugar Sex Magick

Reminds me of dancing around naked in my apartment with Jason Martin, volume all the way up, singing at the top of our lungs. My little white ass is tickled pink when I put this on.

4. Rage Against The Machine – Rage Against the Machine

Pure testosterone rush.

5. The Polyphonic Spree – The Beginning Stages of…

Pure happiness and joy. The Partridge Family meets the Manson Family. Reminds me of when my bubbly boy (Ian) was born.

6. Ani DiFranco and Utah Phillips – The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere

Great stories and poetry over Ani Difranco’s funk folk.

7. Beastie Boys – Check Your Head

When the B-Boys grew up a bit and played their own instruments, it was world-changing. This was when I left college, went to work in Theatre in Boston and New York, on my own for real for the first time. Street music every night and strange new food and people. The world was nothing except potential.

8. The Beatles – Abbey Road

Musical perfection.

9. Bob Marley – Songs of Freedom (Disc 4, technically)

Loved when Marley really grew into his own. Reminds me of hanging out in Tucson Arizona with Anna, soaking up the sun.

10. Umphrey’s McGee – Safety in Numbers

Music geeks come into hard times and loss. Reminds me of when Anna died. Hard, hard, hard times. Made it a tiny bit easier for this music geek to get through hard times and loss.

11. The Decemberists – The Crane Wife

So baroque, so complex. Reminds me of starting to date again after losing Anna. Strange music for strange times.

12. Tori Amos – Boys for Pele

Indulgent, quirky, wordy pop. My fave of hers. Reminds me of when Anna and I moved to Chicago, me starting to actually get paid for playing with computers, starting to investigate quirky Unitarian Universalism.

13. Damien Rice – O

I think this record must have sprung from Rice’s soul whole. It’s a perfect record. Reminds me of my life before Anna got sick – 3 kids, nice home, finally finding my stride with my wife.

14. Gillian Welch – Time (The Revelator)

Sparse and haunting. Vocals like a scalpel. Reminds me of driving to Indy to go contra dancing with Michael and Denise. Feeling full up with gratitude for such good friends.

15. John Mayer – Continuum

Great hooky guitar pop. I just love this guy. Me and 250,000 teenage girls. Reminds me of falling in love with Christine.

16. Martin Sexton – Black Sheep

This record is a soundtrack for so much. I just keep coming back to it over and over again (including while writing this post as a live Sexton show came on WTTS FM). I can identify with being the black sheep. And with the glorious message of redemption in the title track.  “Glory Bound” is one of the first songs my fingers reach for when I pick up my guitar.

17. Mr. Bungle – Mr. Bungle

Utterly perverse. Pornographic. Random. And completely brilliant. Reminds me of working as an intern for a recording studio in Indianapolis, cleaning toilets for free, trying to learn the tricks of the trade while sucking up to egotistical assholes.  And what’s not to like about music featuring clowns that rape underage virgins?

18. Primus – Sailing the Seas of Cheese

Goofy bass rock. Reminds me of late college, similar to Red Hots above. Except that Anna kind of liked this one – she even had a copy.

19. Public Enemy – Apocalypse ‘91: The Enemy Strikes Black

Classic old school hip hop. Had a friend who produced hip-hop in college and he turned me on to this. It took a couple more years for me to get it. Loved the loops and breaks. Reminds me of many late nights in the basement of the Stewart Center, making and recording music.

As a musician and a sound engineer, I think I should also get a bit of privilege on this exercise, so I’m listing the following I either recorded, produced, peformed on, or am acqaintances/friends with:

1. Stone Soup – Long Fields

Early college.  My whole world changed when the needle hit the record on this one.  I can remember it exactly like that.  And it really did.  Carrie Newcomer’s first band.  She’s an acquaintance of mine.

2. Icemakers of the Revolution – Number of Days

Mid to late college.  Used to be sound engineer for this band.  Good friends (who I’ve lost touch with, sadly).  Brilliant, revolutionary folk rock by brilliant, revolutionary academics.

3. Michael Lewis/Traveler’s Dream – Overflow

Mid college.  Getting my musical chops on.  Got to make music with my friend Michael, a friend and mentor.  Making this record, the joy was palpable.

4. Slamflowers – Clam Chowder

A record I produced of some friends that I met through my girlfriend at the time, Renee Serino.  Fun straightforward pop music.  Great guys.  Late college

Not much here in the way of high school.  High school was pretty forgettable for me.  I guess there were summers at camp in the woods of Wisconsin.  And then we’re talking Violent Femmes and Iron Maiden and Frank Zappa and ABC.  But that’s a whole other post, I guess…

Thanks Michelle, I really enjoyed this.  Time to go make a playlist out of this.

Out of the Mouths of Alyssa, Ian, and Emma

Redefinition

I saw Mike Huckabee on Jon Stewart the other day.  His objection to gay marriage was that he does not want to redefine the word “marriage”.  Just saw the same argument from Rick Warren, the anti-gay minister slated to speak at Obama’s inauguration.  What I really wish the journalists would ask is this:

“In the event that everyone in the world except you decides they do want to redefine the word ‘marriage’ to include same-sex couples, then what would the actual problem be?”

I mean, do they really expect us to believe it’s a semantic debate?

Maybe we should just come up with a new word that includes same-sex and opposite-sex adult human couples.  Say, “wubwub”.  Then we could just have the hospitals and the insurance companies allow anyone in a wubwub relationship to have full rights.  “Marriage” can just become an antiquated word, like “dowry”.

(photo courtesy of Lin Pernille ♥ Photography on flickr)

What I Know

• Chris and I love one another very much. We never stopped.
• Chris loves my kids like they are her own
• My kids love her
• Relationships are hard
• Kids and I have to come first
• I really enjoy spending time with Chris
• My kids get a lot out of spending time with Chris

That’s about all I know. We all went to the park last week and had a great time just swinging and sliding and watching the bats at dusk. We all have missed all of us a lot. Chris came to the UU Coffeehouse on Friday night and it felt really good to be in her presence. It was a great evening. We had a nice time reconnecting afterward.

So we’re just spending time together. And that’s about it. And that’s about all it’s going to be for the foreseeable future. We’re just glad to have what we have. Sometimes the small things are the best things.

(photo courtesy of zebra.paperclip on flickr)

Disengaged

I’m sad to report that Christine and I will not be getting married after all.  Really sad.  It would be imprudent to provide much detail here on the internet.  But we were unable to see eye to eye on issues regarding parenting.  We still love one another.  And she genuinely loves my kids.  We both brought our own contexts to the relationship.  You start with assumptions in a relationship and you flesh it out, adding clay to the skeleton.  In our case, we found the anatomy wouldn’t support the weight of the structure in the end.

It’s another loss for all of us.  For my kids, for Chris, for me, even for her kids.  In that sense, we’ll be grieving for a while.  We’ve discussed trying to salvage the shards that remain after the structure crumbled, but when it’s not right for the kids, we just have to let it go.

This is another lesson for me in learning to let go.  One of many over the last 3 and a half years.  I’m getting it.

(photo courtesy of Northern Miniatures on Flickr)

The Butterfly Emerges

A little over a year ago, Christine suggested that for our second date, we go and tromp through a field near my work looking for monarch caterpillars that we could take home and grow into monarch butterflies. Needless to say, being the romantic I am, I was I completely smitten with this idea and with her. I still am. Being a city boy from the ‘burbs of Chicago, this was a new experience for me.

We didn’t find any caterpillars in the field (this did not affect me melting into her being and falling head over heels for her), but she did find 3 of them near a garage sale she was at the next week. They all spun chrysalises, one died, and 2 hatched out, much to my and my kids’ delight. What an electric experience for us.

Monarch caterpillars eat and live on milkweed plants. I have a bunch of milkweed plants in my backyard, so I figured finding caterpillars this year would be a cinch. My neighbor came by a few weeks ago and offered to clear out a few weeds along the fence between us, and it turns out he pulled most of my milkweed. So I did not end up with any monarch caterpillars in my backyard, but Christine being the super-nature-wonderkind that she is, found a single monarch caterpillar on some weedy vines growing in my front yard a few weeks ago. We brought it in and put it in a jar with some milkweed leaves (I did still have a few small plants in my tomato beds). It spun itself into a chrysalis in a day or two. We’ve been keeping our eye on it every day and this morning the chrysalis was completely transparent (except for the amazing gold beads on it). So I put my camera on time-lapse when I went to work and caught it coming out on video. It runs at 15x normal speed (it shot one photo every second and runs at 15fps). I think it’s pretty cool and want to just watch it come out in person next year. What a gorgeous animal. Chris and I came here over lunch and released it into my backyard on some mums. Thank you Christine for introducing me to this beautiful and awe-inspiring process. I can’t wait to do it again next year.

She Said Yes!!!

Christine and I are getting married!!! More details to follow..

Ian’s 6th Birthday

Ian’s 6th Birthday

Originally uploaded by Jason Dufair.

My little rockstar turned 6 this week. He’s so exuberant and wonderful and beautiful. He’s all about his friends. He has a true heart of gold. Happy birthday my sweet Ian-bird.

Guitar courtesy of Christine. He is nuts about it! I’m thrilled it stays in tune, unlike his last one.

…also, watch this space. big announcement coming soon

More Hotaru Musings

I realized “Hot are you?” is more fitting than I realized, if read as “Hot.  Are you?”  Global Warming.  Hybrid.  Better-than-thou.  Love me for my sexy hybrid while I save the fecking planet.