today’s vegetable

The last bit of resistance has faded. My East Coast roots are apparently no match for the pull of the Pacific Northwest. After a lot of talking, dreaming, worrying, and more talking it comes to this: the von Doom family is moving to Portland.

This photo is freakishly accurate, as long as you’re willing to replace the little boy with a chihuahua and the gun with…well anything that’s not a gun.

Taryn and I have talked it over and feel that Portland’s a good fit for the family. I’ve spoken with a lot of people involved with CASH Music and it seems like a good fit for the organization too. So when I say “we’re moving” I mean everything. My family and I are headed out to Portland, OR in September and we’ll be bringing CASH Music to Portland too.

We looked at a few cities, but in the end Portland had the draw of friends and a great community, with all the West coast benefits of California. On a family level, Portland offers connections, great food, other young parents, and frankly the rents are more affordable than we’ve seen elsewhere. From the CASH Music perspective, Portland has an enthusiasm for nonprofits and social change, there’s a rich tech development scene, and the music community is second to none.

Moving cross country takes a lot of planning. We’re in the process of selling a lot of our stuff, packing up other stuff, and figuring out how to ship the big stuff. (Lots of stuff!) We’ve gotten transfer papers for the girls’ WIC account and we’re trying to figure out health insurance on the Oregon end. The biggest challenge, and the hardest thing to do from Rhode Island is for us to find a place to live.

We’ve been looking on Craigslist for a 3 bedroom place, and it looks pretty realistic that we could even find a small house to rent for $1300/mo or less. That’s a pretty big stretch for us — doing a startup nonprofit doesn’t exactly place you in a comfortable middle-class bracket — so we’re trying to find a rental in a good situation: a known landlord or friend with a house, a great close-in neighborhood, or a nice place further-out that might be less expensive. Any help would be greatly appreciated and repaid ten times over in cookies and curry.

Once we settle the housing thing it’s on to transferring the nonprofit, setting up regular CASH meetups, and all the other parts of establishing the organization as a part of the community. You know…no big deal.

So there’s clearly a lot ahead. Exciting times, but to sum it all up:

Oregon, ho!

My friend John IM’ed a few weeks ago. He told me to check out a dude named Benji Hughes. He even sent a few tracks. First was ‘Tight T Shirt,’ a fun kind of great song that reminded me of Beck. Next up was ‘Neighbor Down The Hall,’ lounge meets crooner meets indie. At this point I’m intrigued and immediately steal buy his debut record, A Love Extreme. It’s great, and all the lighthearted and diverse indie sound is balanced beautifully with a touch of country and some simple beauty in songs like ‘Girl In The Tower.’ I really can’t recommend the record enough.

So naturally I prepped a blog post about how Benji is a direct descendant of Norse gods, an amazing talent who should be immortalized in posters on every teen girl’s bedroom wall. I wanted to call for a movement of fifteen-year-old boys wearing fake beards and growing their locks long. To say I’m enraptured with his wild mountain-man looks balanced against delicate songwriting would be putting it lightly.

But then a few days later John tells me his (rad) label, vosotros, is putting out a split single with Benji featured on the A side over Willoughby on the B. Clicking through I found Benji’s track, ‘Country Love,’ and basically haven’t stopped listening to it since.

When I first started dating my wife I found a photo on the ground. Over seven years, two daughters, and five apartments I’ve kept this torn up, beat up, out-of-focus photo with me. It’s a picture of some trees, some grass, and a hazy sky. It’s the reason I work so hard, the thing I’m reaching for. It’s a photo of a place that I hope to find some day. I have a picture in my head of ten perfect years — I’ll work the other ninety or so to make those ten happen, and they’ll happen in that place in the photo.

Well ‘Country Love’ is the song that goes along with my photo. It became instantly important to me and my story. It’s a simple song, true country music with none of the genre trappings or bullshit cowboy-hat-macho bullshit that soaks through the commercial ‘country’ music. It tells a story, simply, and sells you on the romance of the American South. In your mind you can see Tennessee and it’s a perfect place to be, all the complications and realities of modern America stripped away. Every lyric carries meaning and is sung with emotion. It’s real. It’s full. It’s a wonderful piece of music.

And it’s the song that goes along with my dream.

Benji Hughes – Country Love

Get it: sargentrecords.com

I made this for Taryn one Christmas, probably 2004. I had planned it, clipped reference photos, bought watercolors to stick to the original drawing — thought of everything. Then I waited and waited on doing the drawing, finally heading to my studio on Christmas eve to draw it in a frenzy, hoping it all turned out well.

Even in the drawing we look like kids. Now there are two kids and one less dog. (Miss you, Zombie!) Life, as it does, marches on.

Or: I love you, Mom

Today is Ada Lovelace day, celebrating the contributions of women in technology worldwide. For the uninitiated, Ada Lovelace was a nineteenth century English mathematician, writer, and thinker who is regarded as the author of the world’s first computer program. She focussed a lot of her energy around Charles Babbage’s famous analytical engine, and advanced the concepts by producing its first algorithm — essentially creating the separation between hardware and software.

The idea behind Ada Lovelace day is to celebrate women in technology by telling their stories. And while there are plenty of worthy candidates, one woman in technology stands out more than all others to me: my Mom.

My mother introduced me to computers before I could walk. Even in the late seventies, computers were a part of our home life. Jean “Bonnie” Myers worked as a statistical programmer doing geographic data analysis before that kind of thing as popular in the hipster set. I cut my teeth on write-protect rings for magnetic tape and I mean that literally — those funny colored plastic rings that most of you have never seen were the first toys in my house and apparently soothe the gums like nothing else.

I have early memories of Mom plugging our rotary phone into a modem and waiting patiently as she called up a VAX terminal from our kitchen table. She taught me to type, to think, and to understand what was going on behind the blinking green and yellow cursors.

When I was still just knee-high she’d bring me to her office, show me the plotters and servers. As I got older she explained systems to me, drove the family to shareware centers to copy new programs onto 5.25″ floppies, and taught me to be unafraid to tear into the hardware powering our home computer. The education has continued my whole life. She taught me to use PINE when l was assigned my first email address at UMass, helped me hone code structures as I learned to program, and we talk Internet security to this day.

As a kid I never understood just how cool my mom was because I assumed all mothers were geniuses like mine. She’d bring home ASCII art coloring pages spanning sheets of large-format dot matrix paper. (Clearly something all mothers did.) I was too young to understand all of the interesting work she was doing, but I’m eternally grateful that she made it a part of my daily life.

Now Bonnie oversees an IT department at Tufts University in Boston. A quick look at IT-worker statistics shows that’s no small feat. I’m immensely proud to call her my mother and I’m thankful for everything she gave me — from my worldview right down to my write-protected teeth.

I love you, Mom.

I know I write about Xiu Xiu too much. I promise this is the last time I’ll hammer on about their new record, Dear God, I Hate Myself. But Jamie and company have made something really wonderful in this album. The review that I was working on for this blog turned into the onesheet for the record, so I never posted it. But with the album coming out next week on my favorite label, Kill Rock Stars — well I just thought I’d post everything here.

You can preorder Dear God from KRS here, or get it from iTunes right now.

And it’s a safe bet that if I had posted this here originally it would have contained more swear words.

Read almost any piece about Xiu Xiu and you’ll see words like ‘harsh’ or ‘brutal’ — the same words that appear before ‘truth’ when an unwavering eye is turned on any intimate detail of our lives. Fair descriptions of the themes central to the music, they sit incongruous to the refined, intricate, and beautiful approach taken in crafting the twelve tracks on Xiu Xiu‘s new album Dear God, I Hate Myself.

The two biggest constants throughout Xiu Xiu‘s catalog are honesty and evolution. This remains true with Dear God, I Hate Myself as it delivers a look at responsibility, fear, healing, and societal roles wrapped in rich gothic pop music. The sound is still distinctly Xiu Xiu, but Jamie Stewart‘s vocals are effortless paired with vibrant melodies full of subtlety and the distinct sonic accents expected of this anticipated Xiu Xiu release. The result is a record that proves that art can be pop and pop can challenge you to look inside yourself.

Stewart is joined by new full-time band member Angela Seo on piano, synth, and drum programming; with production handled by Jamie and Deerhoof‘s Greg Saunier. Together they’ve crafted a fully grown sound for Dear God, I Hate Myself with elements from goth and pop that are expertly performed by a crop of brilliant musicians. Saunier himself plays on much of the record as does Ches Smith (John Zorn, Terry Riley, Marc Ribot) who supplies timpani, conga and moog along with a broad range of other instrumentation. Deerhoof‘s John Dieterich is all over a rendition of the traditional folk song “Cumberland Gap” and Xiu Xiu is even joined by the Immaculata Catholic School Orchestra in Stewart‘s ode to heartbreak and healing, “This Too Shall Pass Away (for Freddy).” The title track, one of four songs done primarily on a Nintendo DS, explores the relationship between faith and despair with a layer of commentary provided by the bizarre sounds of the music itself.

Each new Xiu Xiu release has evolved alongside the lives of Jamie Stewart and company. On this record you’ll find more intensity and introspection than ever before, but sonically and lyrically it continues to move forward with a subtly new perspective — hyper-focussed yet aware of a larger, external picture unfolding. The pace of the record grips you, the music offers layers of detail, and the themes focus on not just the past or stark present but hint towards vespers of the future as well. Dear God, I Hate Myself will challenge you and force you to look inside yourself, but only after you get lost in the music. It’s passionate, it’s energetic, and it affects you.

Dear God, I Hate Myself is a beautiful piece of humanist art. It’s an important addition to the growing body of intelligent music from Xiu Xiu. And it’s a brilliant gothic pop record that can stand next to anything.

Both of these free EPs are amazing, recently released, and available for free download. The first, Contemporary Individual by LA’s Superhumanoids, is a two song release. The title track feels like it belongs in a bright scene from Twin Peaks, and both stack up against the best electronic indie rock out there. The other, Man Woman Child‘s self-titled 3 track EP takes the best of glam rock and brings it forward. It plays at a quick pace with some nice guitar work and even nicer decisions in the songwriting.

Superhumanoids
Contemporary Individual


Preview:
Contemporary Individual

Get it: superhumanoids.com

Man Woman Child
Self-Titled


Preview:
Day of Reckoning

Get it: ep.manwomanchild.org