I’m a lousy friend, and I haven’t mentioned that MC Frontalot‘s new album Final Boss has been out for over a month. I think it’s his best album yet, and I’m not just saying that because I’m on it, dropping phat rhymes. You can download Wallflowers for free, and then you can purchase and download the whole album once your mind has been sufficiently blown. The whole album is fantastic, but I especially love Shame of the Otaku(teaser MP3) and Diseases of Yore(teaser MP3). I’m also intensely jealous that Front got Scott Campbell to do his cover art. Scott Campbell is awesome.

After you’ve heard the entire album, including my skit about vocations, you’ll have a new appreciation for this album cover, designed by Lore Sjöberg. Did I mention that it was awesome? It looks like I didn’t, so: it’s awesome.

Finally, MC Frontalot is going on tour, and he’s totally coming to your town … as long as you live in one of the towns on the tour schedule.

If you are of a certain age, there are probably three seminal music videos that blew your mind at one point in your life: Money for Nothing, You Might Think, and Take on Me .
(Sigh. Okay, fine, and the extended version of Thriller. At least I’ll admit it. Shut up.)
Anyway, my friend Jun (who is also of a certain age) sent me this literal version of Ah-Ha’s Take On Me yesterday. I was amused, and thought I’d share.
BEHOLD!

After years of various things coming up and draining the funds we’ve squirreled away to work on the house, Anne and I are finally able to afford to have some much-needed work done on our house (thank you, everyone who bought Happiest Days!) We should start sometime in the next seven days, and somehow the preparations have ended up including some serious de-cluttering around stately Wheaton Manor.

De-cluttering is probably pretty easy for most people: you just take a bunch of old shit and throw it out, right? It’s not that easy for me. I attach sentimental value to just about everything.

A typical scene:

Anne: “What’s this?”

Me: “I can’t throw that away! That’s a a coaster that I made from a menu from a roadside diner I ate breakfast at with Dave in 1990! Look at the coffee ring!”

Anne: *Facepalm*

It’s a good thing I don’t own a snakeskin jacket. I’m getting better, though, and I’ve reached a point in my life where it feels better to jettison this stuff than it does to keep it. There are all sorts of philosophical reasons for this, I’m sure, but that’s not what this post is about, so fill in your own: “____________________.”

Ooohhh! That’s very insightful. I hadn’t thought of it that way.

So. I have a lot of music on CD, because the only thing I love as much as books is music. I have a huge and diverse collection, because I’ve liked just about every kind of music at one point or another in my life, and since it was never pop music crap that hasn’t had time to become ironic, yet, my CD collection is pretty fucking awesome. If I, uh, do say so myself.

It takes up a lot of space, though, so I’m going through it, ripping most of it to various hard drives, instantly backing them up on other hard drives – just to be sure – and moving the physical CDs to the garage, where I’m happy to give their care and feeding over to Top Men.

Over the weekend, I ripped about two dozen ambient CDs from the early nineties, (which I think was the golden age of ambient music) and listening to them on shuffle has found the nostalgia portion of my brain, and poked it with a sharp stick.

I seem to have these emotional growth spurts about every five or six years, and this music connects me to the one I had in my early twenties, when my friend Dave and I would stay up all night listening to records, talking about art and politics and philosophy. (I credit Dave with my love of electronic music, because he worked in the music industry at the time and kept a steady stream of interesting stuff flowing into my hands for several years. I never would have heard a single record from Silent if Dave hadn’t worked there, and 76:14 would just be a little over an hour and sixteen minutes.)

I was in drama school around this time, so I was surrounded with artists. I spent most of my time (free and otherwise) with writers, photographers, actors, and musicians, so this particular emotional growth spurt was entirely cultural. Ambient music was the soundtrack, because it provided a lush and layered backdrop to everything we did, taking and giving focus whenever necessary. (I suppose that’s why it’s called “ambient”, duh.) Perhaps not coincidentally, it was around this time that I completely rejected what I described as American fast food culture. I may have been a little bit of an insufferable intellectual artiste for a brief time, as well. Ahem. I look back on some of those days with embarrassment, and I know that I owe a lot of people apologies for . . . stuff I’d rather not talk about, lest we all be forced to confront the things we said and did when we were 20. Though I shudder to think about how even more insufferable I would have been if I’d read Ishmael then instead of years later when I was more mature, I still look back fondly on those years of growth and discovery, as they were eventually woven into some of the most beautiful parts of the tapestry of my life.

You know, people always ask me if I ever lived the rock and roll lifestyle (wink wink nudge nudge) when I was young and famous. The truth is that I didn’t, even on the three (yes, I can count them) occasions when some girl creature literally threw herself at me. (SCARY! AHH! WHAT DO I DO?!) When I was a teenager (and there were plenty of teenage stars fooling around with other teenage stars, oh the stories I could tell you but won’t) I was too nerdy and too into RPGs. When I was in my early 20s, I was too insecure and too into books and music and very deep things that really mattered. If I could do it all again, I wouldn’t change a thing, though. This may shock some of you, but I’m glad that I fed my mind instead of my libido.

Gross! Too much information.

Anyway, when I mentioned on Twitter that I was ripping all these CDs, and how weird it felt to confront the advances in technology that made it possible (all in 140 characters!) a few people wondered what, exactly, I had in my collection.

I’m always happy to share this type of music with people, and if I have an opportunity to turn people on to music that really opened my mind (without the assistance from any chemical or mind-altering substances, I always feel compelled to add) I always seize it.

I’ll point those of you who are interested to a portion of a post I made in 2005 (my god, how is it that it simultaneously feels so long ago and so recent to me?) about ambient music. The “it” I refer to is an ambient song I made in GarageBand called Lakeside Shadow:

If you like it, you’ll probably like some of the artists who influenced me over the years: Woob (especially 1194, and especially the track strange air) Dedicated (especially Global Communication, also called 76 14), and Solitaire (especially Ritual Ground). Also, Instinct Records (still alive) and Silent Records (sadly, tragically, defunct since 1996) released an amazing number of genre-defining ambient discs in the 90s. And now, just to prove how hardcore I am, I’m going to throw out Pete Namlook, and the FAX Label, but their stuff is far more experimental than the rest of my list, and isn’t what I’d use to introduce a new listener to Ambient music.

Finally, if you can find it, Silent Records put out an incredible record called Earth to Infinity (I think in 1994) which was pulled shortly after it was released, due to some sampling issues. I think it’s one of the greatest ambient recordings of all time, and don’t ask me for it because I’m not going to jail for you, Chachi.

I think I could have said “incredible” a few more times. Allow me to emphatically pulverize this dead horse deep into the ground: if you only get two ambient records in your whole life, they should be 1194 from Woob and Earth to Infinity (holy shit there are two available from Amazon). If you can only get three, add 76:14, and thank me before you touch the monolith and journey beyond the infinite.

Okay, as I said in 2005, most of my ambient CDs are from Silent, Instinct, and Caroline, and I have a metric assload of FAX recordings that I don’t listen to very much any more. If I were to expand on the artists and albums I mentioned three years ago into a list of essentials, I would add Pelican Daughters‘ breathtaking record Bliss, Consciousness III (or Lunar Phase) by Heavenly Music Corporation, and the 2295 compilation from em:t.

If you’re intrigued, and want to know what some of this stuff sounds like without waiting, please go directly to Magnatune, and fire up their ambient mix. They’ve got artists over there, like Robert Rich and Falling You, who make truly incredible music. (I really think I need to say incredible and really more. Really.) Soma FM has magnificent downtempo and ambient streams, as well. Groove Salad and Dronezone rarely disappoint.

The thing to understand about ambient, though, if you’ve never heard it before, is that it’s slow and deliberate. It takes its time. It doesn’t work in the car, and it doesn’t work if your brain is cranked up to eleven. It’s best enjoyed when you can relax, and let it fill the room around you as you slowly sink into it and out of yourself, like you’ve stepped into a giant gelatinous cube.

Hrm. Maybe that’s not the best way to describe it. Go ahead and fill in your own: “______________.”

Yes, that’s it. That’s it exactly.

I have a folder of mp3 files that’s called ‘weird audio.’ Most of it is stuff I ganked from WMFU’s 365 Days Project, but there’s also a few gigs of bizarre and rare recordings I found during several late night trips down the vinyl sharity blog rabbit hole.

Mostly, I chop these things up to make RFB Mixtapes, but from time to time, I put the folder on shuffle play, and enjoy a truly weird experience, including music from Telly Savalas, interviews with Burt Reynolds, strange commercials and PSAs, and tons and tons of 1950s and 1960s Hi-Fi muzak.

Today, I shuffled the folder for background music while I prepared an audition, and stopped for a five surreal minutes while I listened to this recording of Leif Garrett welcoming you, lucky 1970s teenage girl, into his fanclub.

I’m not sure what I like more: how obviously Leif Garrett is phoning it in (it sounds like he didn’t even bother to read the ‘personal welcome’ someone wrote for him before recording it) or how clearly you can hear him flipping the pages while he reads it.

I wonder if the poor hapless soul who wrote this thing ever listened to it, and cried out, "My words! My beautiful words! He ruined them!"

Anne and I took Ryan to see Elvis Costello and The Police at the Hollywood Bowl last night.

We bought our tickets months ago, and got the best seats we could afford. We took the shuttle from the Zoo to the Bowl, and were in our seats about ten minutes before Elvis and The Impostors took to the stage for an hour-long set that was just fantastic. He didn’t play Lipstick Vogue, which is my all-time favorite Elvis tune, but he nailed all the other songs you’d expect him to play. Sting even joined him for Alison, which was pretty cool.

Did you know that Elvis Costello is 53? He was rocking it out like it was 1988 instead of 2008, and was clearly having a good time. Also, his keyboardist plays a Theremin. A Theremin! How cool!

He only played for an hour, and by the time he was finished, the Bowl was filled to its 18,000 person capacity as night fell.

The Police took the stage, and opened with a wonderful version of Bring On the Night that just sounded great. It started out softly, built to a powerful crescendo, and created a wonderful sense of anticipation for the rest of the show: The Police had clearly come to rock us.

I forget what they played next, but I recall thinking, "Man, they just sound awesome!"

This was around the same time that the woman behind me got on her cell phone and started calling everyone she knew to tell them how awesome Sting sounded.

I was annoyed, but thought I’d just wait it out. Once she went through a few calls to share her excitement with people who couldn’t be there, she’d quiet down, I figured.

I was wrong.

The calls quickly turned from "I’m at the concert and they sound awesome!" to "So, what are you doing this weekend? Oh my god did you see [some stupid gossip thing.]?!"

I paid $60 for my ticket, before the Ticketbastard fees. Surely this woman had spent a similar amount of money. She really wanted to spend the show shouting into her phone?

Two songs later, I couldn’t take it any more. I turned around and said, "Would you please try to talk a little more quietly?"

This is when I saw that she was near the bottom of one of these 32 ounce sangrias they sell at the Bowl. Perfect.

"Hold on," she said into her phone. "What?"

"I said, would you please talk a little more quietly? You’re really loud."

She rolled her eyes at me. "Whatever, dude."

Something in me snapped. Before I knew it, I said, "Hey! I don’t want to listen to your fucking phone calls. I want to listen to the Police."

Her eyes widened, like she wasn’t used to people standing up to her.

Did I mention that she was probably in her mid-40s? Yeah, that’s important. She was absolutely old enough to know better.

"WHAT?" She said.

"I paid sixty dollars to listen to The Police, not to listen to you."

"Well I paid seventy," she said, petulantly.

"So that makes it okay for you to be an inconsiderate asshole?" I said.

"Oh my GOD!" She said. I seriously felt like I was dealing with a child.

"Just be quiet, please," I said, and turned back around.

For the next twenty minutes, this woman loudly complained about me to her equally drunk, equally idiotic friends. She kicked my chair. She clapped her hands next to my head. She screamed like a teenage girl in a Beatles concert film.

In other words, this stupid asshole made about a third of her concert experience — seeing The Police! — all about trying as hard as she could to ruin it for me, because I’d asked — politely — for her to just be considerate of the people around her.

I ignored her the way you’d ignore a child who was having a temper tantrum and she eventually got bored and stopped. Just in time for the stoners to show up in front of me.

I want to break from my complaining about this crap for a second to point out that The Police put on a tremendous show. They’ve been playing the same songs for thirty years, but like Elvis Costello before them didn’t show any obvious signs of "we’ve been playing this song for thirty years" fatigue. They sounded great, it was clear that they were having a lot of fun and enjoying each other’s performances, and their energy was great. They were most certainly not phoning it in, and if we hadn’t been surrounded by assholes, it could have been one of the greatest shows I’ve ever seen.

So, the stoners. Yeah, that was awesome. I don’t go to a lot of concerts because the goddamn stoners drive me crazy, but these people — again, clearly in their 40s — were constantly sparking up like it was 1977 and we were at a Dead show. As they got more drunk and more high, they provided a nice balance to the asshole woman behind me. And by balance, I mean perfect equilibrium.

If I hadn’t been there with my wife and son, I would have left, because it was so irritating. It’s a shame, because it really was a fantastic show, even if they didn’t play Synchronicity II, which is my favorite Police song ever.

I’ve noticed something in the last few years: the older the audience, the greater the number of assholes. It seems like younger people are more passionate about the music and more interested in enjoying the performance, while the older audiences (around my age, I guess) are more interested in getting fucked up and acting like idiots who are, for some reason I have yet to comprehend, are entitled to be as obnoxious, self-centered and inconsiderate as they want.

At least the idiots weren’t there for Elvis Costello, so the entire night wasn’t miserable. I just wish people would be more considerate of others, especially when we’re all together in what is supposed to be a pretty awesome shared experience.