Note

This blog has moved to http://street-level.mcvmcv.net!

Shoutout to... pitchfork?

Yes!

"RZA will then select the winner, to be announced August 27. Mic skills are helpful, but not a prerequisite (see: every Cappadonna verse ever)."

Dept. of No One Cares

Shirts with messages that I'll be repping in Japan

  • Amoeba Music (Berkeley & San Francisco)
  • Vladimir Guerrero (Montreal Expos)
  • British Sea Power
  • Argentina National Team (World Cup 2006)

Curating

One possible way to make this blog good would be to make every post an extension of the first, and it would form a collection of thoughts about blogs and blogging.

I use Google Reader to share certain items in my RSS feeds. The process is simple: let’s say I read an interesting item in the Guardian Unlimited Football feed. If I click ‘share,’ it gets marked as one of my ‘Shared Items,’ which changes nothing about the display of this item in my Reader, but adds it to a list—or collection—of other items that I have marked as ‘Shared.’ That list of items, in turn, gets its own RSS feed, so anyone who subscribes to my Google Reader Shared Items will see the GU Football item in their feed reader.

This is exciting to me because it’s a form of instantaneous, perfect blogging. As I said, the blog is a perfect collection. The Shared Items feed is nothing but a collection in RSS form. Sounds like a blog to me. Anyone who subscribes to a Shared Items feed knows that each item is selected, or curated—by a real curator, no less!

We need more people to do this, so we don’t have to do as much work to get our information (i.e. Erlebnis). When I share an item about the Carlos Tevez transfer saga, I've saved you the work of trawling through the Guardian's football feed to find that interesting story. You have to trust that I'll only share the best of the best, but chances are you probably don't care about that anyway, and you can gloss over that item in less than a second. I still get the pleasure out of curating a the item for myself, so everyone's happy.

(In the world of technology, the revolution is always getting dumped for something hipper.) Join the Google Reader revolution!

Play on playa

I love you Matt Barnes, please stay with GSW

Long winded explanation of why I've created a new music blog

If I had used well thought out tags for all of my posts for this blog (which has no consistent subject matter, making it imperfectly imperfect according to my first post), I should be able to create separate blogs for any tag. This is true of the only tag that I actually used, "pitchfork." I could write an entire blog about that website, the secret affection for which I constantly deny to myself, but that would be boring anyway. Until someone writes in begging for an entire blog of my insightful commentary on the state of online music criticism, you'll have to make do with a blog that's theoretically about music. It will inevitably talk about the state of online music criticism, of course, it's just not devoted entirely to that purpose you see.

This should free up some space on this blog for other things, like more posts about the position of soccer within American culture, I know those are a hit.

The link! The link!

Blind leading the blind

From "seaworthy southeast thesaurus":

I agree with Greg Kot that Cappadonna’s fierce rhymes upstaged GZA, anyway.
I wasn't at the show, but this can't be right. Cappadonna? "Fierce rhymes?"

Fireworks

I was walking around San Francisco just as people were starting to set off fireworks in parks or on their roofs. I saw the real fireworks, shot off on the water, from Buena Vista Park. The view was good (obvio) but I was most interested by the sounds. The elevation meant that I could hear low rumblings from the Marina fireworks to the North and sharper explosions from the homier ones to the South. It sounded like San Francisco was being bombarded.

Why do countries traditionally shoot off fireworks? It seems like it's as if to show—look, we can give our citizens the experience of being attacked, but in an entirely safe context. We can afford to blow things up for the entertainment of our people!

Like, zomg (Pitchfork part 2)

Headline in my RSS reader:

Girl Talk Remixes Of Montreal!
What is that exclamation point doing there?

In response to text message "Ken griffy jr of old made baseball beautiful."

I agree. I was at the very last game of baseball played in 1994 before the strike, and he hit a grand slam in a game the A's lost very badly. It's easier to deal with this kind of trauma when it comes at the hands of a special player. Before all of his injuries Griffey was the best player in the game, and had one of the nicest swings around. Even if you hadn't watched him play, you could tell this from his baseball cards. It didn't matter at what point in his swing the photo was taken, he was always perfectly balanced. He might still have a nice swing, but I don't follow him as carefully as I did back then.

Thanks for the text, Sri. Keep them coming. I like hearing about the MLS too, you're a true believer.