Karaoke

March 19, 2010
I had a few great karaoke experiences this week. On Saturday night, our crew traveled to Koreatown for the classic room rental and sang and screamed into a microphone to various selections from our cultural history. The background music is cheesy MIDI accompaniment, and the words are superimposed on ridiculous Korean films, but it is still one of the most fun activities I can think of participating in with my friends. There is something very intoxicating (besides the copious alcohol consumption) about belting out a song that you've listened to passively hundreds of times. When you are given license to…

Charango

March 13, 2010
When I was in Peru, I was entranced by this 10-stringed instrument and found a workshop where I watched a craftsman making these Andean ukuleles. I had to have one. It is a beautiful instrument with a haunting sound that I had heard forever in the subways and streets of the world, often accompanied by a flute called a zampona. My charango makes a cameo in my latest Record recording, around 2 minutes in. Peruve it!

Propellerhead Record

March 11, 2010
This blog is written irregularly for sure, but when almost two weeks go by with no word from me, I am concerned. Where have I been these first few weeks of March, if not dutifully transcribing my every move on the ORG? It turns out I have been in front of my computer for most of that time, playing with a new piece of software that is SO MUCH FUN! I have been a user of Propellerhead's synth rack emulator Reason for a long time; it is an amazing studio tool with unlimited sound synthesizing potential, but it has always…

Music!

February 27, 2010
When I first heard Fela Kuti, I was a senior at Middlebury and it sealed the fact that I needed to visit West Africa as soon as possible, which I did eight months later in Ghana, Burkina Faso and Mali. Unable to visit Nigeria then, I was transported on Wednesday to Lagos (sort of...) on Broadway and treated to some great Afrobeat courtesy of Antibalas and (an actor portraying) Fela. He was an incredible character and fierce musical guerilla warrior, constantly antagonizing his oppressors and receiving due punishment. The music he created is hypnotic and powerful, wise and inspiring, and…

Mad River Glen

February 24, 2010
The Backwardest Mountain is The Best. It is some of the most challenging skiing on the East Coast, with steep gnarly pitches over rocks and through trees covered in the best moguls (thanks to their no-snowboard policy) all serviced by a double and a single chair. While every mountain around it is owned by a ski resort mega-corporation, Mad River is cooperatively owned. It is an amazing ski experience. Eastern skiing definitely means contending with ice and trees and other natural objects impeding your progress, which makes it a very technical exercise, but also makes it more exciting and MRG's…

Vancouver Winter Olympics 2010

February 18, 2010
I love this. They have had some issues to be sure with uncooperative weather and malfuctioning zambonis and torch hydraulics and DEATH! But when it happens, it is some of the most beautiful expressions and extreme limits of the human body imaginable. In competition, emotions run the gamut from highest highs to lowest lows and in the Olympics, they are telescoped to planetary proportions. Two of my favorite events are the Downhill and the Halfpipe and yesterday had both, with Americans Lindsey Vonn and Julia Mancuso - both stunningly beautiful ladies! - winning gold and silver and Shaun White proving…

Sydling St. Nicholas

February 15, 2010
I choose to live in the city for many reasons, mainly its efficiency and culture, but there are also some crucial deficiencies to life in Brooklyn, namely tranquility and nature. Luckily, I have some very special homes away from home, one of which is the lovely village of Sydling St. Nicholas in Dorset, England where Alaina's grandparents reside. This is beautiful countryside of rolling hills occupied mostly by cows and sheep with tiny human hamlets in the valleys. In the city, it is the immensity of our buildings that inspires me; in the country, it is the immensity of space.…

Copywrong

February 10, 2010
In my music classes, I love to sing an old Australian folk song called Kookaburra: Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree Merry merry king of the bush is he Laugh Kookaburra Laugh Kookaburra Gay your life must be It's a nice melody and a beautiful round and I had never known who the original writer was until yesterday. Marion Sinclair wrote the song in 1932 and died in 1988, with publishing rights currently held by Larrkin Publishers, who just won a lawsuit against the band Men at Work claiming copyright infringement for a flute solo on their classic 80's…

Hacked!

February 10, 2010
The Supergood ORG was hacked recently and I apologize to anyone who was randomly redirected away from the site. Luckily Matt at Bluehost Help Center worked it out, finding the offending code in my Wordpress Theme and eliminating it. I'm not going to take this cyber attack personally, and I am assuming that this is not a declaration of war on supergoodness, but it is still frightening how obviously vulnerable we are to dorks...

Democracy?

January 23, 2010
Ever since I celebrated what I considered to be one of the greatest political victories of all-time, it has been a constant losing battle. Obama's victory felt like such a reversal of bad trends that had consumed our country during the Bush administration, but since that peak in November 2008, we have been subjected to more of the same; more bailouts, more troops, more gay-marriage defeats, more inaction on climate change. On Tuesday, my home state of Massachusetts dealt me a blow by electing Scott Brown to fill Ted Kennedy's seat. When Kennedy died, I cried. He was a a…