Sometimes the absence of something can just feel like a hole in your chest that's impossible to fill.
Daily
Earn tokens by exchanging your time. Some people get more tokens per-while than others, but this does not correlate with the importance, difficultly, or impact of your your contribution. If you have a lot of tokens, you can use them to make more tokens. If you don't have a lot of tokens, your tokens are only really ever exchanged for goods and services. Almost every time you choose to exchange your tokens, some of them will go to the government and some will go to a bank.
And on it goes, forever.
Message apps should allow a real delete, without the weird 'message deleted' substitute. Stop being such a snitch bitch.
We'll be lucky if I don't bust out crying
Steve Albini died.
There aren't that many people in music that are truly good and ethical. It's a pretty gross industry in many respects, where labels get between artists and their fans to extract money, and huge artists who have been able to use their power and popularity to close that gap will release endless vinyl variants and charge utterly absurd prices for tickets to their shows.
When asked to produce Nirvana's third album, Steve agreed on the condition that he would be paid a flat fee and not accept royalties. Some would see that ethical stand as 'losing' a huge amount of money, but he never believed he had any claim to it in the first place.
Across countless albums, he established a sound that people would strive for but never quite attain. The drum sound in particular was clean but never sterile and this woulc carry into his own bands.
I have a ticket for Shallac, he longest running band, for the beginning of June. While it's a shame this isn't going to happen, I am incredibly lucky to have seen them a couple of times before. Next time I write about a ticket stub, it's clear what I'm going to choose.
Cinematic Orchestra, Barbican Hall, London, 6th May 2007, £20.00
Barbican Hall is maybe the finest venue in London, with large comfy seats and perfect acoustics. Even with the room being as large as it is, every performance I have seen there has felt intimate.
This was long enough ago for memory to be very faded (this is going to be a theme in these posts) but I remember the quality of every song, with the musicianship and the production being flawless. However, I cannot stand their most popular song 'To Build a Home' so I was squirming in my (large and comfy) seat by the time it came around.
Beastie Boys - Paul's Boutique
I have an original pressing, and it's in pretty good shape. I have no idea where it came from, but it smells like old records. It's cheap and thin but sounds alright. The entire album is a collage of samples, and in my opinion, surpasses Three Feet High and Rising; the other sample heavy album of the time.
I was lucky enough to be at the unveiling of the Beastie Boys Square sign at Ludlow and Rivington, where the cover image was taken. It looks barely anything like that anymore.
When watching Armstrong and Pantani ride away from their competitors around the turn of the century I wanted to believe it was real. Surely the cancer survivor and a legitimate national hero wouldn't cheat, right?
Watching Pogačar puncture and crash at a the bottom of a climb, end up 25 seconds off the back of the peloton, and then ride back to the front, attack, and win by around 25 seconds is something I want to believe is legit, again.
Ironically, the same climb was the scene of Pantani falling foul of a mechanical at the bottom before riding back through everyone and winning.