For the past two years I’ve been doing an end of the year round up of my favorite record releases.  A top 10 if you will.  Last year I invited a few friends to send me in their favorite picks and by reading their lists I discovered some great records.  This year I’m casting the net a bit wider and sending the request out to a bunch of musicians I’ve met over the past year.  I’ve gotten a few responses already so expect those to start going up soon.

A few things:

+  Matsuri – Endship

My friends in Matsuri are releasing a new album entitled Endship which you can stream HERE.

We played with these guys last year in LA and they put on a very intense live show.  At the end of their set their guitarist began wildly punching the head of his amp after snapping the headstock on his guitar completely off by throwing it at the wall.  It was awesome.

They are about to embark on a west coast winter tour in support of the album so go see them!  And support TexasToast!

+ Octopus Arm

This is a cool idea for a prosthetic but who would actually wear this in public?

+ Pretty Clock

but this quote from the artist gives me douche chills

“Objects like clocks are both prosaic and profound,” says Weil. “Prosiac because of their ubiquity in everyday life, profound because of the mysterious nature of time itself. Time can be reduced to hours, minutes and seconds, just as a clock can be reduced to its component parts. This doesn’t explain time, but in a way simply exposes its mysterious essence.”

More HERE.

For those of you who were unable to get into the sold out Explosions show a few weeks ago someone was kind enough to record and upload the Explosions set in its entirety.  Great sound quality.  FLAC format.  Definitely worth adding to your collection.

Download it HERE.

+ Willy Verginer

I’m going to redirect you to a post over at Kitsune Noir on artist Willy Verginer – reminds me a whole lot of Gehard Demetz’s wood sculptures. I love the bright colors and how he uses the floor as part of the scene.

+ Bike Shelf

Beautiful shelf + bike rack by Knife and Saw.

Great design.  If it wasn’t so expensive ($300 for walnut and $275 for ash) I’d buy it.

The other work on his site is very nice as well.  Looking forward to what this one man design firm creates next.

Twelve O’Clock in Baltimore is a film that explores the illegal dirt bikers that ride around the city’s streets in giant packs.  If you’ve never witnessed riding behind 25 dudes on dirt bikes and ATV’s popping wheelies  on a crowded city street it’s something.  The 1:00 minute mark in the video is such a good shot.

This film explores the illegal practice of dirt bike riding through Baltimore City. Three riders from different neighborhoods are followed through the streets of Baltimore on their dirt bikes. Over the course of the film, their motivations for being part of the group are revealed. As the police are not legally allowed to pursue the bikes despite their being illegal to ride in the city, the complexity of tension between riders and police gets deeper.

The riders, converging from all parts of the inner city, regard their practice both as a recreation and a protest. The dirt bike culture of Baltimore is a primal and energetic response to the tension between social classes. When the riders embark on the city, they suddenly have a platform. It plays on the delicacy of their lives as they know it from their marginalized communities.

Lofty Nathan, the film’s producer, has started a kickstarter page to raise donations for the completion of the film.  Donating even a small amount can get you a copy of the dvd & other bonuses.

Before the video begins it prompts you to enter the address of the home you grew up in and then it generates a unique video for you to enjoy.  Awesome idea, well executed.

+ Who knew that James Franco is such an interesting dude?

-  He’s doing a performance art piece that involves him playing a character on the daytime soap opera General Hospital.

Franco’s General Hospital character is a transparent soap-world portrait of Franco himself: a dashing multimedia artist (graffiti, photography, performance art) named “Franco” who sweeps into town and fascinates, angers, seduces, and generally confuses everyone around him. Like Franco, “Franco” is obsessed with art that crosses over into reality: He re-creates, in galleries, actual crime scenes—until eventually the people of Port Charles come to suspect that he might be a murderer himself.

-  He is currently enrolled in 4 graduate school programs and will be attending Yale for his Ph.D.

+ A gene therapy gel that heals wounds 6 times faster than normal and a nano-tech tea bag that filters heavily polluted water and only costs half a cent to produce.

+ The Touche Amore/La Dispute split is soooooooooooooo good.  Both of those bands deserve the success that has/will come to them.  Download it HERE.

When I started this blog one of my first posts was about me preparing to build a guitar.  Flash-forward two years later and I have finally begun.  This afternoon I cut the body blank out of a joined block of 3/4 inch sugar maple and sanded down the sides.

The cutting took about 30 minutes and the sanding lasted for 4 hours or so…  ugh.

]]> http://stokingtheroots.com/2010/05/08/it-has-begun/feed/ 1 http://stokingtheroots.com/2010/03/31/links-10/ http://stokingtheroots.com/2010/03/31/links-10/#comments Wed, 31 Mar 2010 22:50:13 +0000 Chad http://stokingtheroots.com/?p=2869 + Make Money

Five of the top career fields for the future.  Nothing that surprising, but if you’re looking for a career change then become a nurse.

+ Buy Coffee

and insulate it with an endothermic reaction…

Get a free heatswell HERE.

+ Buy Furniture

Brent Comber

+ How will Obamacare affect you?

Here’s a nice concise rundown of how the new healthcare system will affect you.

+ Late Pass on the Tickle Fight

How did I miss this?

Representative Eric J. Massa, who resigned from Congress amid allegations of sexual misconduct, vehemently denied any wrongdoing during a television appearance on Tuesday even as he described having tickle fights with staffers in a house they shared.

(via NYTimes)

Here’s an awesome 20 minute video of Fucked Up playing a couple of songs for the French (French-Canadian?) website Bandeapart.fm.

After dismissing this band for so long, watching this video really pumps me up to check out their old releases.

+ Gaia in Baltimore

Anyone know where in the city this is located?  More of Gaia’s art HERE.

(via Wooster Collective)

+ Alexa Meade – Living Still Lifes

D.C. based Artist Alexa Meade uses acrylic paints on her subjects to create some crazy live installations.  I feel bad that her subjects have to sit for so long caked in paint, but they do look very impressive.

]]> http://stokingtheroots.com/2010/03/24/fucked-up-gaia-alexa-meade/feed/ 0 http://stokingtheroots.com/2010/03/21/the-meaning-behind-lady-gagas-telephone/ http://stokingtheroots.com/2010/03/21/the-meaning-behind-lady-gagas-telephone/#comments Sun, 21 Mar 2010 16:01:37 +0000 Chad http://stokingtheroots.com/?p=2829 These two articles explore the artistic substance in Lady Gaga’s video for her new single Telephone.  Be sure to watch the video before reading the articles.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This article from Vigilant Citizen focuses on Illuminati references, mind control and the elite’s manipulation of the population via mass media.

Just when I thought I’d written everything I had to write about Lady Gaga, Telephone comes out. An inevitable deluge of e-mails instantly followed, demanding an article about it. So I watched the video and, gosh darnit, the people who wrote those e-mails were right. There are, yet again, a whole bunch of Illuminati/mind control symbols in Lady Gaga’s latest video. I can’t say I was surprised, however, knowing that Jonas Akerlund co-wrote and directed the video. In the article Lady Gaga, the Illuminati puppet (which I suggest you read before this one), I dissected the Akerlund-directed video Paparazzi and its references to mind-control programming.Telephone acts as a sequel to Paparazzi, where Gaga still plays the role of a mind-controlled drone who kills people. This concept is never openly discussed by the artists when they are asked to explain their videos because it is not meant to be understood for the masses. The hidden meaning of the video actually depicts the elite’s contempt for the general population, hence the scene of ritual murder of average Americans in a diner by mind-controlled slaves. Don’t know what the hell I’m talking about? Keep reading.

via Vigilant Citizen

This article from The Atlantic focuses on the video’s theme of socially imposed gender boundaries through the deconstruction of repeated imagery.

Stripping Gaga of her clothes, they also strip her of her persona, leaving her exposed and vulnerable—naked. Her sexuality is on full display, but she’s helpless behind bars—a statement about the trappings of fame (a theme continued from “Paparazzi”) and society’s entitlement to comment so freely about the sexual identity of its celebrities. As the guards are leaving, we hear one address the rumors of her gender, saying “I told you she didn’t have a dick.”

And my favorite quote…

Inspired by the Warhol’s exploration of mass consumer culture and advertising through his Campbell’s soup studies, Gaga and Akerlund challenge the gender stereotype of the “perfect housewife” portrayed heavily in 1950s pop culture, using Wonder Bread and Miracle Whip as their artistic devices. Bloggers and fans are crying product placement—which in the case of Miracle Whip, it partly is—but its inclusion is more likely an homage to her greatest idol, who himself was a living, breathing piece of art.

Herein lies the convenient Catch-22 Lady Gaga has created for herself. Much like Warhol, she has as much a part in feeding into pop consumer culture as she has in making a statement against it. Whatever product placement or triviality exists within her videos can be excused as art under the pretense of her participation in the pop art movement—whether “Gaga” as a product is really who she is or the product of a label is almost irrelevant when you consider that maybe she’s the modern-day Marcel Duchamp or René Magritte. Now chew on that for a second…

via The Atlantic

Jennifer Love Heweit’s new self-help romance book, The Day I Shot Cupid, includes a chapter discussing how Vajazzling helped her get through a tough break up – I bet that’s going to sell well.  I’m sure her publishers were thrilled when she told George Lopez that her vagina looks like a disco ball.

Maybe the next time I’m feeling blue I should bedazzle my ballsack with some led lights or something to boost my self-esteem.