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The Blow at The MFA

Khaela Maricich, The Blow at the MFA

Adam and C2 came with me to see The Blow at the MFA in Boston back on October 6th. Although I am pretty biased towards The Blow, I think it was the most entertaining concert that I’ve ever seen. You can read Adam’s account here. For those that haven’t heard of it, The Blow currently has one member, Khaela Maricich who sings and dances to original pop music playing on a laptop.

A band called Saturday Looks Good to Me opened for The Blow and although their rock stood in contrast to Khaela’s pop crooning, I enjoyed them enough to pick up one of their albums after the show and I’d recommend giving them a listen if you’re into light, driven rock. You can download some of their songs from their webpage here, or if you just want a quick listen, check out their myspace page. Listening to their music feels like listening to The Polyphonic Spree and more recent songs by PUSA.

The Blow’s live show has changed quite a bit from when Jenny and I saw them earlier this year. In the earlier show, most of the performance was about putting each song into the context of a particular timeframe of a relationship. The performance this time was about still about relationships (since that’s what a lot of the songs are about), but Khaela also talked about how and why she writes songs, and even made use of some props.

Unfortunately, this was the last show of the last US tour where The Blow would be performing songs written in collaboration with Jona Bechtolt, who wrote the music for all of the songs on the albums Poor Aim: Love Songs and Paper Television. Jona left the band in oder to focus on his other band, Y.A.C.H.T. If that knowledge didn’t make everyone in attendance feel special enough, we were also made aware that Khaela’s mom was in the audience.

With the songs written with Jona not being performed anymore, I’m not sure how long I’ll have to go until I can get my next live The Blow fix, or even what it will sound like, but I really can’t wait to here what Khaela comes up with next.

Khaela Maricich, The Blow at the MFA

Both photos used in this post were taken by Steve McFarland (also check out his Flickr) during the show at the MFA and were released under a creative commons Attribution-Share Alike license.

The Blow, Khaela Maricich, MFA, Museum of Fine Arts, Concert, Music

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iPod Nano Commercial

Jenny and I were at Zach and Sara’s house tonight when an iPod Nano commercial came on TV. The commercial features a series of hands moving various colored iPod Nanos around, and they are all playing the same music video (seen below). Zach asked me if I knew who the artist in the video was, and although they sounded familiar, I couldn’t place the band. When I got home tonight, I opened up yahoo and saw that their featured news story was titled “That iPod Nano Video”. From the article:

Queries on “ipod nano commercial song,” “ipod nano song,” and “ipod nano commercial” all jumped over 350% over this past weekend. Seems everyone wants to know who possesses the enchanting voice behind the raspy “1, 2, 3, 4.”


It turns out I have heard the band before. They’re called Feist (see also Feist’s myspace page), and their song Sea Lion was getting good rotation on Pig Radio some months ago, and Karl had mentioned to me separately that as band I should check out.

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The Ladies

Khaela Maricich posted a hand-puppet interview on her blog, The Touch Me Feeling. In the video, the puppets represent two of The Blow’s songs, and the unidentified interviewer is obviously Khaela herself. I must admit, that for all that I claim to be a rabid fan, I obviously haven’t been keeping up with her blog well enough, or I would have known that Jona left The Blow when it happened rather then months later. From what I’ve seen on The Blow’s myspace page and Khaela’s blog itself, it seems like (unsurprising) the path the band will take is up in the air (although I don’t doubt continued awesomeness from her).

Hock It and Hey Boy

I’m posting this as a trackback rather then just a comment because I was certain that I’d ramble on in classic LJ-style, and probably talk more about myself then the video that I meant to write about. Also it seems rude to me to post a comment on an artist’s site pondering what’s going through their head as they create something.

I guess that I really just want to encourage Khaela (there were no comments on her last blog post, despite my best intentions to comment with something). I want to do something more then commenting on The Blow’s myspace page saying that I’m super excited to see them/her in Boston next month, but I don’t want it say something like “Your next album should be a folk album (like you want to make) about the time between when things happening, like how you’re between having Jona in the band and creating new songs”, because that just sounds lame. I buy all of The Blow’s albums that I can get my hands on and I try to go to at least one show everytime The Blow is playing somewhere in New England, so I’m already providing my financial support.

I’d offer my tech support (in the unlikely case that Khaela needs it) because that’s really the only marketable and useful skill I have, but I’m unsure how to do that with without seeming stalker-ish (resume available on request!). I suppose I could help with things like *cough* getting videos on youtube so they get more exposure. But instead I (sortof) just end up here, offering my “support” in the form of a drawn out and poorly written post on an oft-neglected blog.

As my AIM profile has said for quite some time, The Blow is still the best band ever.

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The Trachtenberg Family Slideshow Players

I was reading up on the band King Missile [wikipedia], now known as King Missile III, and saw that Wikipedia said “Trachtenberg Family Slideshow Players member, Rachel Trachtenburg, has served a subsitute bass guitar player for King Missile.” The group name Trachenberg Family Slideshow Players was enough to pique my interest. As the name implied, the group consists of the Trachtenberg family: Jason Trachtenburg, his wife Tina Pina Trachtenburg and their daughter Rachel Pina Trachtenburg (yes, it’s the 13 year old daughter who’s played for King Missile). They perform to a series of slides that they collected from “estate sales, garage sales, thrift stores, etc.” but I think Eugene Mirman sums them up best:

I think the Trachtenburgs are basically like a really fun Batman, where it’s sort of like revenge against not fun, i.e. it’s very fun.

You can get an idea of what their performances look and sound like on youtube, but here’s one of their catchier videos for a song called Mountain Trip to Japan, 1959:

They look like they would be wicked awesome live, so I’ve added them to the list of bands that I check periodically for local regional shows.

Trachtenberg Family Slideshow Players, Trachtenberg, bands, music, slideshow, Rachel Trachtenberg, Jason Trachtenberg, Tina Piña Trachtenburg, Rachel Piña Trachtenburg, King Missile, King Missile III, Detachable Penis, Eugene Mirman

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Transmit’s destructive “replace” function

I recently upgraded my WordPress installation (it was way way way out of date) and I thought it was weird that my old plugins weren’t showing up after the upgrade. It turns out that when I tell Transmit, the most convenient mac ftp application that I’ve found to date, to replace a folder, it deletes the old one and replaces all of it’s contents with the folder I’m uploading. This makes perfect sense in terms of the english language, but it’s not at all how I expect things to work based on years of ftp experience. In Transmit, if I want leave subfolders and files that aren’t on my local copy, I have to choose merge. Lesson: be careful with “apply to all” check boxes when playing with new software.

Transmit's Replace option is destructive

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Half Life 2 Episode 2 and Portal shipping (downloading) October 9th

Although the official website is severely lacking in the details department, I was excited to see Joystiq reporting today that Half Life 2 Episode 2 and Portal (along with Team Fortress 2, which I don’t really care about) will be available on game developer Valve‘s Steam service on October 9th, 2007. The games will also be available on PS3 and Xbox 360 (both of which I also don’t care about). My interest in Half Life started with the stunning visuals and phsyics engine, but I was drawn in by the story. I played through Half Life: Source to see how the mess at Black Mesa started and then played Episode 1 as soon as it was available. Episode 1 leaves you hanging just as much as the end of Half Life 2 does, so I’m sure I’ll have to play through episode 2 just to see what happens next.

Portal, on the other hand, I’ll play to see how it’s perversion of physics plays out. The trailer (see below) generated a lot of buzz when it was first released, and it looks like it could be lots and lots of fun. I’ve marked my calendar with the release date, but 4 months can be a long time. Based on Valve’s past performance, I’m sad to say that I wouldn’t be surprised to see it pushed back in 2008.

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MacFusion

macfusionWhen I was writing PHP, Zach had turned me on to EditPlus [website]. By far my favorite 2 features of EditPlus were it’s light weight and integrated FTP functionality. Matt wrote of how he enjoyed the integrated ftp support in Coda, but I found it to be a bit to geared towards web development for what I usually find myself doing these days. I’ve been frustrated with OS X’s native, GUI FTP support being read-only, which is why I was delighted to stumble upon MacFUSE and MacFusion.

MacFUSE is a port of the FUSE project to the Mac platform by Amit Singh at Google. FUSE stands for File system in USErspace, which, means that it provides a filesystem interface for things that may or may not be actual filesystems without troubling the operating system with all the messy details. The part that gets me excited is that I can mount an ftp site and then read from and write to it from the GUI or command line, but the list of things that can mounted using FUSE is quite extensive. Both FUSE and MacFUSE are command line based, so Michael Gorbach developed MacFusion, which lets you unlock some of the power of FUSE without typing a whole lot or even reading a manual. Now I essentially have ftp access as good as EditPlus’s from almost any application. I have to say almost? because Apple’s Backup program doesn’t like to recognize FUSE drives.