Los Angeles 2003 - 30 July 2003

Being thus a Collection of Music that Mr. Daniel R Stout acquired while in the Famed City of Los Angeles during the Month of July 2003. Peace to All.

TRACKS

1. Ken Nordine - Orange
2. Salt n’ Pepa vs. The Stooges - Push it like a dog
3. Cassius - Under Influence
4. Cassius - The Sound of Violence
5. Basement Jaxx - Jus 1 Kiss
6. Basement Jaxx - Do Your Thing
7. fischerspooner - Emerge
8. fischerspooner - L.A. Song
9. Felix da Housecat - Madame Hollywood
10. Felix da Housecat - Happy Hour
11. Underworld - Confusion the Waitress
12. 808 State - Pacific State
13. A Guy Called Gerald - Voodoo Ray
14. The The - Armageddon Days 12"
15. New Order - Here To Stay
16. Pet Shop Boys - Bet She’s Not Your Girlfriend
17. Felix da Housecat - Magic Fly
18. Destiny’s Child vs. Nirvana - Smells like booty

Special Thanks to Chris, Heidi, Molly, Dan, and Amoeba Music of Hollywood.

Running time: 78 minutes, 40 seconds.

I’m staying here in Silver Lake, an area of Los Angeles that’s just east of Hollywood. Spent the weekend visiting friends and doing some wine tasting up along the Central Coast. As a teaser of good things to come, here’s a photo of Venice Beach taken on Thursday. Click on the thumbnail to see the photo.

Hello, friends & readers —

I’m off on vacation for a couple of weeks to sunny California. I’ll write more when I get back (hopefully with some great photos). Talk to you soon.

Best,
Dan

It struck me recently that I have daily encounters with a number of different operating systems. Is this normal? :) At home, I work with Windows XP Professional. At work, I have Windows 2000 on my Dell desktop and Mac OS 9 on my Mac. I also login to Mac OS X Server on the Mac servers that I administrate. That’s four operating systems.

Today my life got a little easier, because they gave me a new Dell desktop with Windows XP Professional. So that knocks Windows 2000 off the list. I’m definitely feeling the love: yesterday, they brought by a new 18” Dell flat-panel screen for me, and today they delivered a brand-new computer. Not bad. I knew I was getting the new computer, but the LCD screen was a complete surprise.

First off I’ll say I’m not much of a gamer. I own one computer game. But I must admit it’s kind of fun once in a while to blow off steam and be a gamer. My one game is Diablo II, and it’s a fantasy/adventure type game where you select a character to play and go off on “adventures” which consist mostly of slaughtering row after row of monsters and whatnot and then finding some magical treasure. I’m in Act II right now, and I’m not quite halfway into that act. But it’s suddenly gotten really annoying. I came across these rather large beetles and suddenly the sun went out or rather went dim. And now Beckett, my necromancer, is in a dimly lit world, and it’s a pain in the ass. Well, that was in March. After the sun went dim I stopped playing for about three months, though I picked it up last night. Apparently I have to find some temple and destroy the beetle magic. Yeah, that’s what I said: oh, bother. Anyway I’m on a quest to find this temple because I really want the sun back.

When I was a kid, I used to play a lot of computer games on my old Apple ][+, but that’s a long time ago. The games were mostly of the arcade variety, though I was partial to role-playing adventure games like Wizardry (awesome!) and Ultima (okay). For people who like Diablo II, I hear that Neverwinter Nights is good.

I was interviewed by a reporter from the Iowa City Press-Citizen concerning file sharing and music. The interview appeared in today’s (Sunday) paper. You can find it online here.

I headed up to Wisconsin on the 4th to see family, and now I’m back in the city. It was good to get away for a couple of days, but I’ve got a busy week ahead. Next week I fly out to Los Angeles to visit friends and see the city. It’s a nasty, humid heat here, and Chris says that LA will be a dry heat. Anyone have any suggestions of what to see out in LA? I’m brushing up with a couple of books on the city, but any suggestions would be appreciated. Drop me a line via the contact page.

I wrote about eMusic.com back in March, and at that time I decided not to sign up. Recently, I gave eMusic a second look and really liked what I saw. My main concern was that the quality of the MP3 files was low. That has been rectified — they’re 192Kbit now. At any rate, a few days ago I signed up and got a friend to do likewise. We’ve been on a downloading mission ever since!

The main advantages of emusic compared to other pay music services is that there’s unlimited downloads plus the files are in MP3 format so you can burn them to CD’s or do whatever you want with them. The downside I suppose of emusic is that the collection is reasonably quirky — most of the music is from independent labels, but there’s a lot of great stuff there. In a short period of time I’ve downloaded over 900 songs (nearly 4 gigs) — all from complete albums. That’s another great thing about emusic — they have the entire album for virtually everything in their collection.

Here’s a sampling of some of the artists I’ve downloaded from eMusic. I’ve mostly been interested in 80’s alternative, but they also have a lot of rap, electronica, world music, country, etc. etc.

Rainer Maria, FM Einheit, Red House Painters, The Cult, Lush, Gary Numan, Front 242, The Birthday Party, Del the Funky Homosapien, Ride, The Donnas, Bauhaus, Thievery Corporation, The Fall, Pigface, Mogwai, Jello Biafra, Foetus Corruptus, Mojave 3, Belle and Sebastian, Sid Vicious, Love and Rockets, Saint Etienne, Cocteau Twins, The Charlatans UK, Public Enemy, Camper Van Beethoven, The Pixies, His Name Is Alive, Peter Murphy, The Wolfgang Press, Noam Chomsky, Lard, Les Thugs, Pizzicato Five, Pussy Galore, Luna

Braille version of ‘Harry Potter’ weighs in at 13 volumes — CSMonitor.com

I haven’t heard these guys in about ten years, but tonight I’m listening to a greatest hits disc from Lush called Ciao! 1989-1996. I remember writing a review of their album Spooky back in 1991 or so for a zine I was doing at the time called fish. My memory is that I may have a been a little harsh — maybe I didn’t give them enough credit at the time — but ultimately the band never had a very high profile. The four or so songs from Spooky that appear here on Ciao! are all top notch. Great ethereal rock. As time went on, I think their sound became more direct and … louder. Lush is identified as one of the early shoe-gazing bands, but listening to Ciao! maybe the shoe-gazing was just a phase for them. Their later work is more straight forward alternative rock and less layered guitars. Lush, for me, is a snap shot in time. Specifically it reminds me of when I was the music director at KWLC — the perks of the job. I remember receiving a limited edition copy of Spooky with a special fuzzy slipcase. Stuff like that seemed really cool at the time — it was like being part of a special club. And now that I’ve dumpster diving in my memory, I remember seeing Lush once up at First Avenue in Minneapolis — we used to drive up from Decorah for shows in the Twin Cities all the time. That’s just part of being in college I think — exploring new places, exploring new sounds, exploring ourselves.

Tonight I’m listening to an album by Basement Jaxx called Remedy. This is great stuff. It’s their debut release from 1999 and what a great album. The music blurs the lines between house, funk and r&b. When I was a DJ at KRUI, I played “Yo-Yo” on my show and everyone loved it. I quickly started playing more tracks from the album. I’ve heard that their second album, Rooty, is also really good, and it’s definitely on my to-be-listened-to-soon list. Remedy is a good listen the whole way through — there’s too many good tracks to list. I keep returning to this album listen after listen. It’s totally engaging and a hell of a lot of fun.

M. was exposing me to a band that I kind of missed the first time around. We listened to The Final Cut by Pink Floyd over the weekend, and it was good. She made a copy of The Dark Side of the Moon for me. I used to have one Pink Floyd album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, which was their first album. M. says Floyd’s work after Syd Barrett disappeared and Roger Waters took over the band is best. I was in this band in college called Thunder Pelvis, and we played “Interstellar Overdrive” a lot.