So as I posted previously, I’ll be at SXSW for the Interactive portion
of the festival which is from March 10-14.  I’m still not officially
staying at SXSW for the music festival.  But more and more I’m
realizing that it would be really fun to stick around for at least an
extra day…especially since I’ll work through the weekend at the
Interactive portion.  The downside is that I’m really not sure that I
can swing an extra day or two off work right now…though I’d really
like to…!
Filter Magazine just posted their sponsored lineup for the fest…and it is killer.  Three full days of music, and check out the bands:
Amusement Parks on Fire

Built To Spill

Carina Round

Duels

Earlimart

Eastern Conference Champions

The Elected

Elefant

Illinois

Magnet

Metric

Nine Black Alps

Silversun Pickups

The Cribs

The Duke Spirit

The Grates

the Noisettes

The Subways

Vega 4

I’m having trouble getting last.fm to work with my Yahoo! Music Engine,
but if it was working properly, you’d definitely see Elefant, Nine
Black Alps and The Subways heavily featured in my recent playlist
rotation.  And even though I’ve seen Built to Spill at least a handful
of times, I always walk out remembering why "Keep it Like a Secret" is
one of my top 10 favorite albums…I could listen to "Sidewalk" live
100 times over I think…

Thanks to my friend Greg for sharing this with me.  Did you see Minority Report?  I only saw it once, a few years ago, at the theater.  But I seem to remember them being able to use a screen that let them manipulate shapes in 3D / virtual reality using their hands.  Seemed pretty futurist when I saw it, but here’s the real deal:

And according to the original post, the interaction technology has already been patented by Apple!  The design was developed at NYU.  I need to find out if my friend David’s program (he’s in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU) had anything to do with this…

So I’m quite a consumer of music.  I wouldn’t have a blog that attempts to offer information about new music and my recent listening habits if I wasn’t one.  But for now, I’m soliciting feedback from any readers to suggest new ways to efficiently manage my massive music inventory.

I use both iTunes and Yahoo! Music Engine.  Part of this is out of necessity (I have a Mac at home and YME only works with Windows systems), but I actually like having the options.  And I use last.fm’s Audioscrobbler plugin to capture my song-by-song listening habits across both systems so that it can analyze my tastes and recommend new music to me.  You might notice the last.fm banner on the right of my blog, www.kidsallright.com.  (For now, it isn’t very detailed because I created a new profile for "notrivers" to match my blogging handle…but I’m making sure to listen to a lot in order to fill it out.  Go here for my detailed profile).

YME is great to have at work because it is a subscription service with a pretty good and up-to-date library so I can sample new music while working and decide if I want to buy it later.  Case in point: The Rakes’ fantastic first album, Capture/Release, isn’t even out in the US yet (if you are looking for something of theirs to sample that is available domestically, try their great EP Retreat), yet I can get Capture/Release in a fully downloaded format via YME as part of my monthly subscription for free.  Plus, I’m still a bit of a traditionalist in that if I like an album, I really prefer to own the CD so that I can geek out on the liner notes.  So, generally I’ll sample new things in YME and then go buy it as a CD after a month if I like it enough, and then I’ll rip it onto my Mac at home, putting it on iTunes and my iPod.  With Amoeba’s LA location so near my home, it’s still fun to take record shopping trips every so often.

So, at home I use iTunes on my Mac.  And on my home collection, I’m up to
63.5 GB of music.  (And I’ve still never even bothered to finish encoding all of my CDs…so someday I’m going to remember a lot of music that I have and haven’t listened to in a long time).  I love having such a large library…but here’s where I have trouble with managing my collection:
The harddrive of my Powerbook is only 60GB.  I keep all of my music on a 200 GB external harddrive by Seagate.  The drive I have is fantastic; once a week it automatically backs up all of my data onto the drive.  So what I’ve done is this:  I have the music that I’m currently listening to actually on my powerbook.  Right now, that amounts to probably around 10 GB or so.  That music is of course automatically backed up onto my Seagate drive and kept alongside the other 50+ GB of music that I have.  When I add a new song onto my harddrive, it gets backed up onto Seagate within a week.

I used to manage my music directly off my external drive when I had an older drive (it was a LaCie model, which I wasn’t too fond of…crapped out on me after about 15 months).  But I like having music on my local machine so that I can move the laptop around the house and take it with me (it is a laptop after all)!  Having it tethered to the external drive got to be a pain.  So having the music I’m interested in today as my full iTunes Library and on my laptop is great…and I love the fact that my whole collection is still nicely organized on my external drive.  Except…I’d like to be able to easily say, "I’m interested in Jazz today.  Play a mix from all of my jazz recordings."  But today, if jazz is not on my powerbook, I can’t do that.  I have to go onto my external drive and manually pick out all of the jazz albums that I want to add to my local machine. 

So what I’d like to do is have an easy way to toggle between the library that’s on my powerbook (today’s selections) and the full library that’s on my external drive.  This proves difficult because iTunes doesn’t let you explicitly tell the program which library to use.  You can point iTunes to different Music folders, but it automatically latches on to the local library folder.  If I could simply create two different libraries and point it from one library to the other, I think it would work fine…but I can’t seem to get iTunes to work that way.

So, after this long post, I’m asking for feedback.  Can anyone recommend a good way to manage a full library remotely but still have a small collection of locally-hosted tracks using iTunes?  If so, please suggest in the comments area below.

Thanks!

My sister was in town this past weekend, and while looking for something to do on Saturday night, I stumbled onto this post about weekend art gallery opening receptions in LA on art.blogging.la (abLA).  We had spent our day sampling some of LA’s finest: a pre-noon lunchtime hotdog at Pink’s followed immediately by guacamole and margaritas on the patio at El Coyote…all of which led us to feeling a bit dragged down by evening.  Committed to showing my sister the cultural side of LA (not that Pink’s and El Coyote aren’t LA culture at its finest too!), I flipped through the listings on the abLA site and chose a show opening at the Tropico de Nopal gallery in neighboring Echo Park (1665 Beverly Blvd to be exact). 
The reception was for the first gallery show for LA-based artist Arturo Romo.  The show, entitled "Echoing Chingazos in the Echo Chamber", featured an ecclectic array of art on display — from free standing sculpture to sketch studies of body parts to furniture arrangement to painting to a short video clip of a man walking around LA wearing rabbit ears (which were also proudly on display in their cardboard sculpted glory).

However, as a media geek, the part of the show that impressed me most was Romo’s artistic take on the notion of open/shared content.  Many of his drawings or posters included a photocopied counterpart which attendees could take and collect.  One whole wall included sketch drawings of a cat and a man talking about the nature of postmodernism, etc.  See here, here and here.  (I believe that the cat was officially named El Gato but I might be making that up).  Under each mounted drawing hung a mounted notepad; on each page of the notepad there was a photocopy of the drawing above it.  On the side of the wall, Romo had hung a note saying "Please carefully take a copy".  One of the copies that I took featured El Gato saying, "Why is a replica, transmuted in medium, more appealing than an original?"

My favorite piece of the show may be this drawing of El Gato, or it might be a full reproduction of a telephone-pole style political poster with a header reading "Crystal Brilliance Manifesta" which beseeches to its readers to take on and produce guerilla forms of art.  I greatly admired the poster by itself, with its nice typography and detailed text explaining "the new muralism", "the new street photography" and "the new poster-making tradition" (which is "not new in trechnique nor approach" and which, among other things, read, "Be furiously present as the poster maker / distributor, and become fairly intoxicated by the act.  Keep collections on hand, never let them appreciate in value — and put them up!  Transform your posters into gifts — give them away generously.")  But then I looked down and noticed a stack of about 150 posters with a sign reading "Please take one".  And I did!  Thanks Mr. Romo.  I admire your open content vision.  Good luck with the rest of your exhibition.

My good friend and former coworker Dan Eberle just wrapped shooting on his second full length feature film, called Jail City.  Huge congrats to Dan for knocking out his shooting (and his credit card, I think) in 14 days!  I IM’d with Dan this morning and he’s on cloud nine right now…though also a bit worn out.  I wish I could have helped him out on this project, but Dan is still in Brooklyn and I’m now on the west coast (I’m a Brooklyn defector…).  Hopefully if he gets some bites from the industry on this project, he’ll get to make some trips out west.
I got to help Dan out on his first film last year, called Vicissitude, which he primarily shot over one long weekend…and then worked to piece together follow up shots for a month or so after that (so getting Jail City in the can in 14 days has to feel good). 
Dan actually cast me in Vicissitude…as a thug who he brutally beat and then left in a dumpster.  Ah, I’m getting teary-eyed thinking about my speaking part debut as a trashy drug mule (check out the poster for Vicissitude, with my mug on the left…Dan’s the badass with the gun and the sad bald guy).  But this post isn’t about "Vic" (Dan’s loving nickname for Vicissitude), this is about Jail City, which Dan described via IM as:
garbageconsumer: it looks amazing
garbageconsumer: theatrical quality
garbageconsumer: great performances
garbageconsumer: all the action was good
garbageconsumer: good to great
garbageconsumer: very impressive
garbageconsumer: very polished
garbageconsumer: everything vicissitude was not

So I’m really happy for him…that he’s happy about this one.  For a good read, check out his MySpace page where he chronicles his daily shooting experiences.  I love the post from his last day shooting, "I did it motherf***ers. I did in 14 days what my ‘legitimate’ movie producers said could not be done. REVENGE!"  (If you haven’t used MySpace before, click on the "View All Blog Entries" link to find his actual blog).

Congrats Dan!  Good luck editing and I hope to see the film screening out here at Laemmle’s or somewhere equally cool!

Ok, this is pretty sweet.
This morning, I was reading Techcrunch and Michael Arrington was talking about bunchball, an amazing new service that enables people to easily embed flash games into blogs. And, really, I think that’s about enough said. Check it out, and have fun:

For more, check out bunchball.com.

I just signed up for what will make a nice doubleheader this spring (having just returned from Sundance); I’m going to South by Southwest next month.  I’m going for work.  The interactive conference is really strong this year with a number of interesting speakers.  I’ll be there from March 11-14, so if anyone else out there is going, please drop me a line and let me know (comments gladly accepted below).  I also purchased a film pass and am looking forward to what is usually a really strong documentary lineup.  Unfortunately, the music portion of the festival starts on the 15th.  I’ll probably need to head back to LA to get back to work as soon as the interactive portion is over, thus missing the music fest.  And there are some great bands confirmed for this year.  I noticed that the Editors will be there.  I’ve really been digging their album Back Room lately.  They played two or three weeks ago in my neighborhood at Spaceland during one of Spaceland’s free Sunday night shows.  My friend John and I walked down there…but unfortunately we got there just as the Editors had finished their set.  Normally I’m not too upset about missing a band…but I do hate to miss bands that I really like when they are travelling here from overseas.  Anyway, I’d love to be able to see them in Austin…along with a an overall killer lineup of other bands.  Looks like the Arctic Monkeys will also be making a trip from the UK (now they are a true "it" band, aren’t they?  But their EPs I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor and When the Sun Goes Down are admittedly pretty catchy!  I must say that I’m guiltily looking forward to their upcoming album, Whatever People Say I Am That’s What I’m Not).