bindlestiffs

Meanwhile...

2012-11-19T09:36:26Z

Meanwhile, on Two Kilos of Bread:

This: 46/2012

This week, we aww'ed at some cute R-rated movies, Gary Shteyngart's dog, and prairie dogs. Polar bears gathered together and we watched. NaNoWriMo produces some great things and some absolutely awful things too. We saw our obsession with DSLR's in a comically poor light. The GOP got some advice, 'photos' of the Petraeus affair were leaked, a cute co-ed got stuck in an alley, and China is building something intriguing. We went the wrong way and we cried 100 times. And finally, China's biggest viral star is...a dude from Wisconsin.

Music 4 Mondays: Amanda Palmer

If you're like me (and I pray [ironically as I'm a card-carrying atheist] for your sake that you're not), you heard of the Dresden Dolls, knew that they were avant-garde and thrilling in some vague, critically-acclaimed way, but had never actually heard any of their music. They'd get referenced by other musicians in interviews and critics compared whatever band they were reviewing to them, but they never seemed to be played on any outlet. And until the past couple of years, I allowed music to come to me rather than hunting things down like an ancient hunter-gatherer on the savannah trying to get his spear into a tasty okapi. Who has time for that? I's gots bill to pay, man! Leave me alone!

Mornings Are Awesome: Let's Meet Xi Jinping

This: the Week in Review

2012-09-16T14:20:43Z

Why you should check the cover before going to print.
Seriously, you are beautiful. Put down the hair product and let's go.

Mother Nature's killer angel, Typhoon Sanba, will soon punish Korea for opening the Pandora's Box of Gangnam Style parody videos, so we are busy getting the Breadome ready for the storm. Gotta make sure our stash of vintage cosplay porn isn't ruined. But do not worry your ugly misshapen head, Danny W. Vogel of Clearwater, Florida, we will never not have time to give you your weekly recommended dosage of vitamin U(rls).

If this week were a kangaroo, and if you believe in the infinite universe model of...the universe...then somewhere in the vastness of all that is, was, and ever shall be, there is a place where this week is a kangaroo...

Anyway... if it were a kanagroo, then in its pouch you'd find these bonza joeys:

¤The sheer awesome wtf-ery of Polish kids' shows

¤Embrace the madness of Snoophullu and the squirrel children horror of Mama

¤The lolcat video to end all lolcat videos

¤A creative and stupid way to pay a ticket

¤The creepy beauty of animated gifs

¤The answer to the question 'Should I check my email?'

¤The continuing adventures of Batgirl Detective

¤Alan Turing in two games, Monopoly and Magic: the Gathering

¤And BLEEP BLAP BLOOP offers evidence about whether boys or girls make better sci-fi sounds.

Read the rest of it on Two Kilos of Bread.

O Canada

2012-07-01T16:41:30Z

Canada Day can be a frightening, conufsing time for Americans. To help you through this troubling period, we have prepared a guide for interacting with our cousins to the north. And remember: they may look and sound similar to us, but snow and syrup run through their veins. So yes, Canadian blood tastes great on pancakes. Oh, and Canadian bacon...mmm...

http://twokilosofbread.com/index.php/mornings-are-awesome/171-o-canada

Music for Mondays: YACHT

2012-06-04T13:57:15Z

(this is an updated version of a previous entry)

The band YACHT (or Y▲CHT) comes to us from Portland via Texas and LA. They might not be the best lyricists, but their music's catchy and fun (e.g. 'Dystopia', 'Paradise Engineering'), with a couple you'll want to skip (I'm looking at you, 'One Step').

I first learned of them on NPR's All Songs Considered podcast. You can see their Tiny Desk Concert (which is, as we've noted before, an awesome series) here.

-Read the rest of the article on Two Kilos of Bread-

Glitter, Blood, and ... Something White and Gooey

2012-06-02T18:57:52Z

I posted about the Flaming Lips/Erykah Badu remake of "The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face" over on Two Kilos of Bread. If you haven't seen or heard about it yet, I suggest you not eat for 30 minutes, then click and check it out.

Orgasms and Gait

2012-06-02T12:46:33Z

Researchers are crafty devils. If you ever find yourself in a research position, definitely use your funding to excuse watching women's asses as they walk across the room, or check strippers' ovulation/money rain correlation, or anything else that would be considered creepy if you weren't wearing a lab coat. FOR SCIENCE!

Read about it on Two Kilos of Bread.

Music for Mondays: The Naked and the Famous

2012-05-28T14:56:28Z

(this is an updated version of a previous M4M)

Not this.

During my last trip to the motherland to secure precious Coney I-Land coneys and frozen custard, I happened upon "Young Blood" by The Naked and Famous.

Being that Tulsa was in a hundred year heat wave, my brain had partially melted and I cannot now remember if I heard this song on commercial (i.e. Clear Channel or Shamrock) radio, or if it was on the Risk! podcast. Either way, I slammed the brakes on the rented Nissan in the middle of Peoria and proceeded to hunt for signs of nearby wi-fi. A clump of fixed-speed bikes. The hawk-like ornamentation on a shirtless dude's back. Truckers' hats in pristine condition atop expensively mismanaged coifs, followed by piercings and bushy beard. The pack of hispters, when not in motion - such as performing a Critical Mass bike ride, or ironically playing Jenga - often rest near available streams of wi-fi where they can use the hot-spot to digest freegan-foraged nutrients and update Foursquare.

Read the rest of the article at Two Kilos of Bread.

Music for Mondays: Thao Nguyen

2012-05-21T02:56:59Z

Maybe I just have Vietnam on the brain after seeing the Epic Nguyen textbook prank, but I woke up with Thao's song Yeah, So On and So On playing on repeat in my head. There are worse ways to wake up (True story: while sleeping on a poorly-patched air mattress in a yurt in the Mongolian steppes, I am awakened by something on my chest.It takes my eyes a moment to adjust to the gloom. When they do, I see that Pikachu is sitting on me.)

My introduction to Thao came via the always-interesting Tiny Desk Concert on NPR. She had a young, folksy, slightly-awkward vibe that made listening to her very inviting. If you want to label her, she'd fit in the female singer-songwriter group with Regina Spektor and Rilo Kelly, but I find sound a little more laid back and breezy. Fraught or frenetic would not be adjectives to use with her. Like a good singer/songwriter, she knows her way around lyrics. One favorite of mine: It was brave to play, it was an honor to lose. Or I am going away, but not away from you. I have learned the difference between the two. Nothing groundbreaking, but enjoyable. When she sings, it always sounds like she enjoys what she's doing.

Read the full article on Two Kilos of Bread.

Essential Listening: Books

2012-05-15T14:36:57Z

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a nerd in possession of a mobile device is in wont of a good podcast. And for such nerds, it is the best of times.

Let's get our definitions clear. This category is specifically about book reviews and readings. We'll save podcasts about authors and writing for another day.

Man Booker is a name for a Dick Tracy character, not a book award.

This is a category that is close to my heart, (somewhere in the costomediastinal recess). As you may know, Americans are not eligible for the Man Booker Prize, which is why I haven't been short-listed. That and I haven't had a novel published. Yet!

In anticipation of my future literary success, I kept close tabs on my soon-to-be enemies, er, colleagues. In fact, book podcasts were my gateway drug into the seedy world of online audiophilia. It all started with the Washington Post Book World podcast. My interest in the subject outlived that winsome lass, sadly. But as gateway drugs always do, I moved on to New York Times Book Review and Selected Shorts and Libravox and Books on the Nightstand and Book Lust and and and...

What can I say? They're all great. Choosing the one essential podcast for this category, that's about as hard a task as man hath ever undertaken since the Deluge. "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known."

Essential Listening: Books - The New Yorker Fiction Podcast

If any publication knows fiction, it's the New Yorker. Name an author and there's a sporting chance that they got their break in its hallowed pages. And it is this hallowed history that makes the podcast essential. The setup: an author who's been published in the New Yorker selects another writer's story from the archives to read aloud, followed by a discussion with fiction editor Deborah Treisman. Freakin' fantastic. My personal favorite (another Herculean task, picking that) is The Colonel Says I Love You by Sergei Dovlatov.

Music for Mondays: The Moldy Peaches

2012-05-14T10:10:24Z

All you need to know about the Moldy Peaches is that they are an ultra lo-fi, mostly-defunct duo whose biggest claim to popular fame is having a song in the movie Juno.

Want more? Okay, check out these lyrics for Downloading Porn with Davo.

Now that's what I call good music!

Sleepin' in a van between A & B
Suckin' dick for ecstacy
Paid a 70 year old hooker to make out with me
Now the "get high shack" is just a memory

Downloading porn with Davo
Downloading porn with Davo
Put a latch on the door so Mama don't know
That I'm downloading porn with Davo

Tried to buy your love, but I came up short
So I fucked a little waitress in exchange for a snort
My girl's got a dick hangin' out of her shorts
Me and Eric in the bathroom with the weather report

Adam Green and Kimya Dawson formed The Moldy Peaches in the halcyon days of the Clinton era, when our only concern was making sure everyone properly dry cleaned their dresses lest they endanger the free world. They've been associated with the anti-folk music scene, and are probably best remembered for their whimsically homemade albums. After the band went on hiatus in 2004, Kimya has had a bit higher profile, releasing a children's album called Alphabutts in 2008 and popping up on soundtracks here and there. Adam Green has a number of solo albums and plays in Regina Spektor's band, which is pretty damn cool.

And here's a little trivia nugget for you: Kimya means 'silent' or 'silence' in Swahili.

Hay Fever

2012-05-10T15:45:07Z

Music for Mondays: The Low Anthem

2012-05-07T14:11:15Z

NPR's All Songs Considered introduced me to this weeks M4M, The Low Anthem. If you're not familiar with All Songs Considered, and you're inclined towards music outside the mainstream, you have to check it out. Fear not, even though it's on NPR, it's not just jazz. They get into world music (which is a shit descriptor, like all the music outside of the English-speaking world is a single style), sub-genres, emerging genres, and everything in between. And their Tiny Desk Concerts really bring some of these bands to life.

From The Low Anthem website

The Low Anthem hits one of my happy buttons, having a mixed boy/girl line-up. On top of that, their most recent album, Smart Flesh, was recorded in a defunct pasta factory in Rhode Island. The cavernous space gives their tracks a subtlely haunting, lonely aspect that really resonates with their pained lyrics. If you read the reviews of their two studio albums, you'll see that many critics did not care as much for Oh My God, Charlie Darwin as they do the most recent release (Charlie Darwin was praised in many outlets when it was released, though). Certainly Smart Flesh is more cohesive and brings a consistent vision to the album. They clearly know their craft better. That said, I prefer Charlie Darwin. The title track is fantastic. And for my money, To Ohio is their best song. It has such a sparse, melodic presence, I will sometimes put it on repeat-1 when I'm writing or walking through the urban wasteland of Seoul.

If you're in the mood for something folk-y, you could do a lot worse than The Low Anthem.

Official Page: www.lowanthem.com

On Facebook: facebook.com/TheLowAnthem

On Twitter: twitter.com/thelowanthem

Essential Listening: Science

2012-05-02T15:56:09Z

Podcasts. Billions and billions of podcasts (say this in Carl Sagan's voice). In our lifetime, we cannot hope to listen to one tenth of one percent of extant podcasts. And every second, new podcasts are uploaded to the vast infrastructure that is the internet, several hundred hours of audio every day. Whole universes of knowledge and humor and pathos and crap, so so much crap.

We turn our ears to the speaker and yearn for sound waves to excite the thousands of cilia in our cochleas. When the podcast suits our tastes, the neurotransmitter dopamine is released, giving us a feeling of reward. Not unlike what happens with sweet and fatty foods, alcohol, and cocaine. Assuming we have a fairly typical mesolimbic system in our brain, the feeling of reward will increase our desire for good aural stimulation. The more we consume, the greater discernment most of us will apply to listening. Low quality work, boring narratives, repetition, unwarranted crassness, tension without payoff, these will not satisfy us.

Now, for many of us, we will experience a great deal of reward when we listen to something both entertaining and educational. Learning and fun, these are well established recipes for greatness. And what can be more educational than science? Fortunately, there are many, many science-related podcasts in our sliver of the universe.Unfortunately, we do not have an infinite amount of time in which to partake of them. So we must discern those that will cause us the most dopamine release. We can speed that process up through recommendations and reviews. Or by merely accepting what we say here (recommended).

---

Okay, so Carl Sagan-y shenanigans aside, picking the essential science podcast has presented quite a challenge. There are a number of good science efforts, and there are a number of things that might be considered in the science category, like RadioLab and Professor Blastoff. What about skeptics' podcasts? Are they science? They cover science to quite a degree. Something like Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is almost entirely science, but they are technically approaching the subject from a skeptical point of view.

So, with this in mind, I've decided to do a separate entry for Essential Listening: Skeptics.

Without further ado, a tie...

Essential Listening: Science

This Week in Science - An irreverent review of the week's science and technology news, with neuroscientist Kirsten Sanford and Justin Jackson.

Star Talk - Neil deGrasse Tyson's podcast, and nothing Neil deGrasse Tyson does is not completely awesome.

Music for Mondays: Dengue Fever

2012-04-30T13:07:34Z

Horrible, fatal diseases can be fun. And not just for the horribleness and fatality. Case in point: the band Dengue Fever.

Based out of L.A., Dengue Fever is fronted by Cambodian karaoke legend Chhom Nimol, who was recruited by brothers Ethan and Zac Holtzman. She sings most of their original music in

Dengue Fever is spread by mosquitoes and social media.

Khmer, evoking the feel of Cambodia's surprisingly awesome 70's rock scene. To the degree that this era has seeped into American music conscience, Dengue Fever is responsible. A documentary about their critically acclaimed tour through Cambodia, Sleepwalking Through the Mekong, played a role in that, as well as their compilation of popular Cambodian artists Dengue Fever Presents: Electric Cambodia.

Not every song on their 7 albums works, especially when Zac takes a more central role. They're at their best when the songs cleave more closely to the heyday of Cambodian rock, though oddly enough 2 of my 3 favorite songs are in English.

If you've never listened to them or heard Carter-era Indochina rock&roll, you owe yourself a listen, if only to see what it's all about.

First, one sung in English.

And one in Khmer

Essential Listening: Storytelling

2012-04-25T01:03:37Z

This happened awhile ago, around 2009, give or take. Back then, if I had my earbuds on, I was listening to music. And I had my earbuds in a lot. There were just so many things around me that I didn't want to hear, from the freaky-permed ahjummas popping gum in their mouths, to the incessant saccharine drone of K-Pop painting every sidewalk in the city, grating scooter honks, pigeons cooing, neighbors fighting: the white noise of city life.

A moth.

The Moth.

Then something happened. Maybe I was listening to an archived episode of This American Life. Maybe I heard an interview with someone involved. Maybe it just permeated the ether. The details are fuzzy; there was a lot of drinking back then. Somehow or other, I became aware of The Moth. People telling true stories, live (when they were recorded), and without notes. Some were funny, some were vulnerable, some were enlightening, all were pure ear candy. It would not be terribly hyperbolic to say it changed my life. Well, that might be a bit hyperbolic, but I can say without reservation that it had a deep impact on me.

Immediately, I got hooked. I hit Subscribe in iTunes and probably listened to at least ten episodes that first day. Very quickly I had exhausted their archives and, like every addict, I started scrounging every nook and cranny for more. I was jonesing hard. I found a few more recorded segments here and there. I read interviews and transcripts. There was nothing I hadn't uncovered, distilled, and consumed. I still needed more. I turned to other sources, hoping for the same high. There was Risk! with ex-State alum Kevin Allison. It was good, occasionally better than The Moth, but different in its focus and tone in some ways. Every episode of The Moth consisted of segments from their live shows in New York and elsewhere. By contrast, Risk! began as a podcast and featured stories recorded in studio, at least initially. It has now grown into workshops and live shows and a host of other ventures.

But Risk! was not enough either. I found Storyworthy. I found Story Collider. I found podcasts that were quite different but still had strong narrative structure, like RadioLab and 99% Invisible.

Still not enough! I began considering how to organize something like The Moth here in Seoul among the expat and English-speaking community. Luckily, someone else got to it before I had to do it myself. Thus far, I've done two live storytelling events. While I was not the best storyteller of either night, I was also not the worst. Perhaps more importantly, those experiences changed the way I view storytelling in my fiction writing as well. And that is, in the end, what I am here to do.

Essential listening: storytelling - The Moth

Other storytelling podcasts worth considering:

Risk!

Story Collider

Storyworthy