The Toadless Boy

Yes, yes, I got my ears lowered, got in a fight with a lawnmower and lost a bet.

Not since David the Hair Wizard gave me the “Chris Sabo hair cut” in ‘91 has my hair been this short:

I should have known something was up when the haircuttin’ lady said it was her last day.

Artist: Throw Me The Statue
Album: Moonbeams
Release Date: February 19, 2007
***EDIT***: Album art is NSFW. To see the album art as the artist intended it (or to get fired from your puritan job), click here.

Friend (and contributor) Adam always starts his discussion about singer-songwriters with “If I were a band, I would be a singer-songwriter…” Namely, I think he leans toward being Ed Harcourt or Josh Rouse. Well, I’m neither boring nor sleep-inducing (burn!), so I think if I were a band I would be your “bedroom band” as I’ve heard them called. I have an interest in lots of different sounds, instruments and layers and I want full control. If I could play many instruments, let alone one, I would be holed up perfecting my own stuff, laying my own beats before I then collaborated with someone else. This is all assuming I had an ounce of musical talent outside of Rock Band.

Throw Me the Statue is this type of band. One dude making good music with multiple layers/instruments/musical ideas, a la Aqueduct or Beck. He/they cover different styles but mostly swirl around that pop rock sound. I heard good ol’ WOXY play the second song on the album, “Lolita” and had to check him out. I didn’t know which direction the album would go but was very surprised to hear the first song sound like one of the mellower tracks off of a Dismemberment Plan album. TMTS sometimes uses the dry-storytelling-over-Casio-tones style that Travis Morrison used on songs like “You Are Invited.” Other songs have a more upbeat pop sound like a fun Magnetic Fields or Aqueduct song with a little Mike Doughty vocals in there. I’ve read comparisons to Shins on some songs but that just points out how much Throw Me the Statue just sounds like good long-lasting pop.

That album art doesn’t hurt either.

They’re back. At the start of the year, I made a list of things I would like to accomplish this year. I would call them “New Year’s Resolutions” but this isn’t Cathy Guisewhite’s blog. They were of varying difficulty and I gave myself odds on completing them. They range from simple to “learn Russian.” One of them was to post more on this thing and another was to post a mix every month. The mix must be of songs played during the previous month and I have to compile the list by the 15th of the following month. So here goes:

The Title: Thanks to The Soup and my cousin, Jayne and I gained a weird sort of appreciation for Yo Gabba Gabba! It’s no accident because I’m sure the creators are a bunch of hipsters with Sesame Street nostalgia who took too many prescription drugs. At the end of the show, excellent host DJ Lance says “Let’s go back and remember what we did today.” Then he proceeds to drop some mad remix beats of the songs featured in the show earlier. He does some kick ass dance moves to it too.

The Album Art: Another goal for the year was to regularly carry my camera with me. In this instance I was heading down for some lunch on a weekday and was testing my white balance and depth of field in different settings. If you click on the album art above, you can see a slideshow of some of the runners-up.

Ruby (Kaiser Chiefs)
My father-in-law is in a pretty bitching band (Iowa Rock Hall inductees) but one flaw Dave points out about the band is that they play few new songs. Let’s just say BTO’s “TCB” gets the kids going. He wanted some suggestions for new songs by newer bands. I thought this one fit their style well and included keys and playable horn parts.

Salvador (Jamie T)
Jamie T is kinda this bratty sounding reggae-ripping British artist. I honestly don’t care for his album but I love “Salvador.” The off-rhythm bass and drum beats and instrumental and vocal yells throughout really give this song some pop.

It Won’t Be Long (The Hives)
At one point, I was in a store with J and I just spaced out and said, “I have a song in my head and I can’t think of where it comes from.” I hummed like 4 repetitive notes and J tagged it as “That new Hives song and I have it in my head too.” That’s why I married her.

To The East (Electrelane)
My basketball buddy, Brij, and I are in a church league in Solon and we’ve been talking music on the way up. He brought me the Electrelane CD and this was deep in the CD. I started to give Electrelane props for doing what most bands are afraid to do (bury a great song deep in an album). When I tried to track the song title down, I realized the album was out of order. The song is still good though.

Take Her Back (The Pigeon Detectives)

Manchasm (Future Of The Left)
Future of the Left’s first album is better than their previous band (Mclusky)’s last album. I’m taking that as a good sign that those guys are back in my life. I really hope I’m still digging them when I’m old.

I Wish I Could See You (Herman Dune)
This song reminds me of Jimmy Buffett in some way. I hope my next wardrobe purchase is not a Tommy Bahama shirt. I have yet to develop white chest hair to show off either.

The Chain (Fleetwood Mac)
One of the first albums we got when my family got our first CD player was Rumours (nope, all true). I naturally listened to that album all the time because it was there. I knew the songs well but never really loved it. I revisited after some triangulation business brought it back in my life. It is definitely the most listened to album of this year for J and I and it was recorded in the late 70s.

Fight And Kiss (We Are Wolves)
I can totally dance to this song like a bored, white kid, like the goth kids in the “Served” episode of South Park.

Charlotte (Air Traffic)
My friend Sherri made an awesome 2 CD mix of the best songs of 2007. She listed this in her top 7 on this site and I sure like listening to it.

Nobody’s Baby (Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings)
I saw Miss Jones in Atlanta in January. She knew how to put on a show and the Dap Kings were very crisp. Made me kind of miss jazz band. Although, I could never tongue any note well, let alone one a couple octaves out of my range.

Sometimes The Father Is The Son (Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci)
This is some spillover from December. I love this album in the winter time. It came to me the winter of my freshman year in college. One night I was all alone in my dorm room with the cold breeze coming in the window to counteract the radiator we couldn’t control. I had one small light on and I just stood and listened to this. I was finishing my first semester in college, going to see my family after living “on my own” for the first time in my life. I’d be fine with re-living that year except for the grades part.

West Coast (Coconut Records)
Apparently, these are Jason Schwartzman’s songs. “O.R. they?” Adam played this as we drove around rainy Atlanta on my last day there. Every lyric made it sound more like he was playing it to tell me something. ’sabit gay.

Homecoming (Kanye West ft. Chris Martin)
I’m sure this is on 13 year old girls’ mixtapes after some other Kanye song followed by an unfinished live Jack Johnson track, but I still like the song

While You Were Sleeping (Elvis Perkins)

I quit. Before I could get started. In my first week, I got a feel for things and although I was allowed to work with $12000 of camera equipment and eventually get cool assignments like a wrestling tournament weekend in Minneapolis, I saw how much time commitment it would truly be. With a normal job, they agreed that it would be tough to spend the right amount of time on assignments.

It’s pretty amazing that a few students can get together and create a daily newspaper worth looking at at all. I definitely wish I had tried the staff photographer thing when I was in school here. Of course then I knew nothing about digital SLRs.

I’ll be sure to put this on my resume.

My days as a freelance photographer are over (for now). I’ve been picked up* by the Daily Iowan as a photo intern and hopefully an eventual staffer. I’ve been getting into doing more with my camera recently and so I decided to branch out to opportunities available to me. As Jayne always likes to point out, this isn’t like a second job to pay for all of her extravagances; I’m choosing to do this as a challenge to myself.

The Daily Iowan is the University’s school paper and they do it up more like a professional daily than your average school paper. After two years at Miami (of Ohio), I still couldn’t tell you what days the student paper ran. I can certainly say they didn’t run every day and they were considerably smaller in quality and quantity than the DI. Now that’s not to say the Daily Iowan is the greatest paper ever or something.

I’m excited to try some new things out with different equipment, settings and people. Plus I can hide behind the fact that I am with the paper to take pictures of strangers and interesting situations without feeling like a complete camera-toting jackass. So if you see me peeping in your windows at night with a long lens, it’s okay, I’m with the DI.

Today my first official DI photo ran (bottom one). This brings me to my next topic.

I’m debating how to handle all my future work. I’m likely to have multiple assignments a week and could get myself in to some interesting situations as well as straight up boring ones. Either way, I would like to chronicle some of this but don’t want to do it at the expense of this blog.

I’d like opinions. How should I handle my new situation? Should I incorporate my photo work in to this (somewhat already established) blog? Should I keep a separate photo-related blog (with words)? Should I be concerned about blurring the lines between “professional” work and my more relaxed stuff, like stereotypes, political rants, family and my nerd activities? Should I shut the hell up and keep my photo experiences to myself? Let me know what you think.

Just so you know, I do plan on chronicling this somehow. Not everything I do and every picture I take (I took over 50 pictures of people watching TV last night), but the situations I get in and some of my favorites from the assignment. Currently my outlets for such a thing are my Flickr account, this blog and, believe it or not, I’ve been keeping a photo blog secret from y’all for a little while (mostly because I’m trying to come up with a better name and purpose). My main goal with the photo blog is a more controlled environment than my Flickr that only posts pictures I am really proud of, along the lines of a portfolio. I treat each of those shots as a piece by themselves. If I were to include slideshows and stories along with my assignments, I would probably do slideshows similar to how I’ve done them in the past.

I’m totally open to starting a separate blog but want to do it in the right direction. I don’t mind sharing as much as people are interested in. I also am trying to brainstorm to confront the issue of others wanting to see the pictures I take. Like last night, I’m sure some of the party-goers would like to see the end results other than the 1 picture of 50 selected to run in grainy black and white the next day.

*I don’t mean to equate it with a major league ball team hiring me but I’m reading Jim Bouton’s Ball Four right now so it just sounded right.