Opening Day

People who know me, know the passion that I live for.

Baseball.

Today was the exciting opening day, the first game of the season. Atlanta Braves visited Washington Nationals in a pretty good game. As usual it takes some time for the players to get into the mentality and stadiums after spring training so they feel a little bit rusty, the weather during these early games tend also to be really cold (which is a big contrast from just coming back from Florida or Arizona in spring training). It was very interesting to see the National’s new ballpark, which had President George W. Bush throw the first pitch. Besides from a couple of home runs and spectacular pitching by the Braves the game wasn’t too interesting until Ryan Zimmermanthe hit a beautiful walk-off home run to end the game in favor for the Nationals. The game was entertaining though like always when Jon Miller and Joe Morgan are the commentators. Now I can’t wait to see Toronto Blue Jays against the Yankees, and Seattle Mariners against Texas Rangers tomorrow.

For anyone interested in baseball I can highly recommend a mlb.tv subscription which lets you watch every game being played, it’s great just coming home and being able to watch anything, there’s usually around 15 games being played every day so there’s always something to watch.

Vancouver in the Studio is online

Here is the link to the project’s website:

http://www.eciad.ca/~vsundin

This project is open to anyone who makes music and is inspired by Vancouver. Please send me an email if you’d like to contribute.

Digital/Acoustic (2)

Today I watched an interesting video from G4TV’s daily Attack of the Show podcast. The segment was called The Loop: Musicians in the Digital Era. A contributor for Wired News, Eliot Van Buskirk and Phil Kay from a Nuclear Free City was invited to discuss the new digital technology of music and how it affects independent musicians. Although interesting, I found the arguments and topic quite obvious, but what I think was the most intriguing point was when they started talking about the physical formats. Van Buskirk argued that people are beginning to go back to vinyl, probably due to that the format is far opposite from digital formats. I think this is a very valid point.

I now recall a conversation I overheard in one of downtown’s record shops. That business is going better due to all the kids that buy frames for record covers, want to buy vinyl because of the ‘cool factor’ of the covers. I like the fact that vinyl starts to get cool again, it’s not just a nerdy collector or a DJ (or a fusion of them both) who gives attention to vinyl, but a broader sense of the public. This will gain the true vinyl nerds because it will probably make less stores go bancrupt.

I was also skimming through a book today by Frank Broughton and Bill Brewster called How to DJ (Properly), I came across an interesting chart of positives and negatives of DJing with CDs compared to spinning vinyl. Although there were many positive notes on why you would want to play CDs the last one said “once you’re bitten by the DJ bug you’ll probably want to get into vinyl as well.” A quote I think signify the physical value of a vinyl record. As a DJ that grew up practicing on vinyl; I find it very hard to accept a strict digital setup. Since all my records are back in Sweden I am forced to stick with a digital setup over here. Playing on a computer is functional, but I honestly find it extremely hard to choose a song to cue up for the next song, since all music is just in a massive library of mp3s, they are all just in a dull list of titles, when playing with vinyl you have a whole crate of large colourful sleeves that you put together for that particular night, you don’t only get the pleasure of sitting home choosing what to bring and imagine what you might play, you also get the sense of where to find them in the crate (an important aspect of DJing, since not finding the song you want to play is one of the biggest nightmares of playing out). So even if more and more DJs play CDs today, understandably to the lower costs and and learning time, acknowledging both formats will definitely make you access a broader variety of music and hopefully that leads you to play better music.

Which one do you prefer?

Kafka

Kafka (1991) by Steven Soderbergh is a strange movie. Jeremy Irons plays Kafka (which he does excellently, like always), set in the very appropriate location of the old district of Prague. The location is in itself a reason to watch this movie, with harsh noir contrasts shot beautifully with black and white film. Kafka’s friend is found dead and he gets involved in an underground resistance group that tries to end a secret set of scientists who do very cruel experiments to human beings so they can create the perfect human. It is hard to explain the story, because it is filled of strange moments, that just have to be watched. Let’s just say Kafka looks more like James bond than one of most famous writers ever made. I can definitely recommend this movie to anyone, it is such a fantastic mix of moods, from horror to action to science fiction, although never really sentimental or romantic (which might fit with Kafka’s real personality).