MJDAOG

The new 3G iPhones drop on 7/11.  Thoughts on some of the changes:

1. They migrated to the 3G cell network for data.  Nice.  Thank you.

2. They added support for Microsoft Enterprise software.  This is great, but apparently (according to the IT guys at SW), the support for Enterprise works, but doesn't meet the stringent security rules of most corporate email systems.  That sucks- I guess I'll be on my Blackberry until they get that fixed.

3. Price- chopped down to $200 for the 8GB model.  Impressive.

4. Storage- no real improvement here.  I have 53 GB of music alone on my MacBook and I HATE having to pick and choose what I want to load onto a mobile device.  Here's hoping Apple starts adding more memory soon. 

Overall it's a nice improvement... especially the price drop.  I'll be giving away 5 of these for free pretty soon via a contest on the new SW Facebook page.  Going to be hard to let give them ALL away...

I spent most of the last three weeks at my five year Georgetown reunion, then hopping around Europe, and finally in Nantucket for Jay's bachelor party.  Highlights from the road below.  More pix here, here, and here.

Georgetown (5 Year Reunion)

• DJing the Saturday night party. Played the hits from '99-'03, including 'One More Time'
• Going for a run with Seth and seeing Roy Hibbert on O street.  We hollered at him and he gave us the #1 hand signal. We both cracked up...
• Burger madness from Wisemiller's
• Sleeping in the dorms and wondering how the hell I slept on such a crappy mattress for all of Freshman year.
• More than anything... seeing a lot of great people who've gone on to do great things in the past 5 years.  Not to be corny but I was really proud to be a part of the Gtown community that weekend... I had a really great time and realized how lucky I was to go to such a great school with such impressive people.
  
  

London

• Getting a history lesson at the British museum from Dad
• Taking the tube out to the Arsenal stop to see the Emirates stadium
  
  

Stockholm

• Stockholm was, aesthetically, the best looking city I've ever seen- no billboards anywhere, amazing views all over the place (the city is situated on 14 island, connected by bridges).
• First night in Stockholm, going for a walk at 1am and realizing the sun doesn't go down there in June (see pic below).
• Being there on June 6, the Swedish national day and seeing Swedish pride hit the streets
• Taking a boat tour out to an island in the Archipelago and eating some amazing salmon on the waterfront.
  
  

Berlin

• Realizing that our nice hotel room was about 100 feet away from a mega club that was playing Booka Shade until 5am.  Dad was not psyched about this.
  
• Watching the Portugal-Turkey match at a place full of Turks.  Turks are crazy.
• A loooong day of site seeing in which we did just about everything Berlin has to offer and both went to bed at 10pm.
  
• Heading out by myself on Saturday night to soak up the Berlin nightlife... ended up at 2 clubs but enjoyed walking the streets more than anything.  Crazy club kids, tourists, hookers, drug dealers, little kids still up at 2am.... Berlin has it all.
  
  

Munich (Meeting up with Meme & Papa)

• When I was 14, my grandparents took my sister and me to Bavaria for the classic 'expand your horizons' tour of another country.  This year my younger cousins Erik and Kyle are about the same age and my grandparents took them on pretty much the same trip.  I made a point of intercepting them at some point on my trip and Munich was the spot.  It was really great to see them and get to tour Bavaria with them again, just like the old days (hard to believe I'm twice as old now as the first time I was there with them).  The whole experience was sort of a deja vu thing...  we had a great meal at the Ratskellar in central Munich, then went on a castle tour the next day before finishing off the visit at a 5,000 person beer garden for the Netherlands-Italy match.  Great times!
   

Geneva (Portugal vs Czech Republic match for Euro 2008)

• Picking up our tickets at the McDonalds near the train station and realizing we'd been upgraded to better seats.  Pretty shady transaction though.
• Walking around Geneva before the match and joining the fans of both teams in getting hammered and singing songs.
• The national anthems
• A great match that ended up 3-1 with Ronaldo scoring the winner.
• Getting the hell out of Geneva as fast as possible once the match was done.  Seriously a pretty awful place, at least in terms of logistics for an event like that (expensive, congested, etc.)
   

Portofino (Kristen Eshak's wedding)

• Pix here
  
• Insane road coming down out of the alps that was never really on flat land during 100 miles of driving (bridge, tunnel, bridge, tunnel... cutting through the mountains and valleys).
• Meeting up with Justin and Jonathan during the Croatia-Germany match at Bar Miami.
• Going for a run along the seaside in Santa Margherita Ligure- insanely beautiful place.
• Stumbling into a local's lunch spot with the Eshaks to enjoy some of the best (and cheapest) Italian food I'll ever experience.
• Being charged $60 for 2 beers at the James Bond style yacht club we were at and negotiating the guy down to $25.
• Dancing to 'Put Your Hands Up For Detroit' at said yacht club
• Kristen's Wedding on Saturday... probably the nicest wedding I will ever go to.   We stayed up until 6am to watch the sun rise.   Too many great stories to tell here but let me just say that it was an all-time weekend and I was really glad to be there to be a part of such a big moment for my best friends' family.
  

• Pix here
  
• An amazing day at the beach, full of volleyball, beers-bee, bocce, and lots of beer
• Seeing John Kerry at the straight wharf
• Having food/drinks spilled on me not once, but twice (thanks Paul and the bus boy at the Sunday morning restaurant)
• My introduction to the 'Life Is Good' (Stoli Ras, Sprite, Cranberry, Red Bull)
• A lot of stuff that happened on Saturday night that cannot be retold on the Internet, none of which included Jay, who passed out pretty early.
  
• Celebrating the institution of bachelor-hood with one of my favorite dudes- Mr. Jay Brupbacher-Evans.  Special love for Danny B, Bomo, and whoever else was responsible for putting together such a great weekend.
  

I'm back in dat ass and will be at Sweet & Vicious tonight...
I wore the same tux that's on Jim in the pic below to Kristen's wedding last weekend... It's good to have another 6'5" friend.

I'm off to Europe for 2+ weeks... pix and whatnot upon my return.  Enjoy the beginning of summer!

Last week, a friend hooked me up with an advance copy of Evil Urges and I've been absorbing it since.  I think the album is a little ambitious... I really liked where Jacket went with 'Z', where they used Southern rock as a platform to bring in psychadelic and dub reggae sounds.  However, on Evil Urges their ambition seems to lead them a little astray- the Prince-style Funk of 'Highly Suspicious and 'Evil Urges' doesn't really work for me, even if I respect the effort. 

Ultimately though the real reason why Evil Urges leaves me wanting more is simply the lack of songs, which is surprising.  It's always seemed like Jim James could write 10 good songs a year in his sleep but this current batch is just a bit dissapointing.  There are some winners (see below), but there's also a lot of forgettable tunes.  I'd give it a 6.5 on the Pitchfork scale. 

The Highlights:
Touch Me I'm Gonna Scream (1)- a nice groove...
I'm Amazed- sing along vocals and a soaring Jim James guitar solo
Thank You Too!- a great ballad despite some cheesy lyrics
Sec Walkin'- My favorite jam on the record... it sounds exactly like it came out of Nashville in 1973. The kind of song that only the Jacket could write at this point.

It's official... everyone has a beard.  What started as a hip thing in the 'drunken sailor' style of this past fall/winter has now infiltrated everything from the NBA to American Idol.

A while ago I promised some pix from the Verve show at MSG theater.  Here they is...

The Foo Fighters hospitality rider on their current tour (from Jonathan)...

I'm not a video game person but I find the design that goes into virtual worlds very cool.  Seth forwarded me this photo set that Matthew Johnston (not me) put together comparing the virtual NYC of GTA4 with the real live version.  Pretty amazing level of detail...

It's pouring rain here in NYC this morning, and I've just posted Joseph Linello and Sad Kermit videos.  It's a good thing I have a delicious blueberry muffin right now to raise the spirits or I might be inclined to hurt myself... 

Do yourself a favor and listen to the dark, brooding rhythms of Joseph Linello, who only has one question... 'Can you rock with me?'  Justin turned me onto this over the weekend and let's just say I want to do everything in my power to spread the word.  Personal favorites are 'No One Understands Me' and 'Damien (You Better Repent).  Make sure you read the blog too.

Most tech nerds like me know about zazzle.com by now... the site allows you to create custom merchandise in over 30 product categories.  There's no need to touch any inventory or pay for anything up front... you just submit your design and they post your product for sale.  You decide what your royalty on all sales are, and they even handle the customer service and shipping.  Anyways- I had never actually tried to use it until today and was really impressed by how intuitive the process was.  My first t-shirt design for an NERD t-shirt below (I searched EVERYWHERE online for an NERD t-shirt but couldn't find one... Zazzle=DIY & problem solved).

Living in NYC, I see breakdancing in the parks and on the subway platforms all the time.  I've always thought what those guys do was badass and so when a new movie called Planet B-Boy started screening at Sunshine Cinema down the street, I made a point to check it out.  The movie follows the top breakdancing crews from different countries around the world as they compete to go to the 'Battle' of The Year' breakdancing competition that takes place in Germany every year.  There are competitions in a wide range of countries, from Egypt to Denmark to South Korea, with the top 19 crews going to Germany.  The film primarily follows 5 crews- 2 from South Korea, 1 from Japan, 1 from France, and 1 from the US (they're from Vegas).  There's no plot to give away outside of how the competition plays out, which of course I won't touch so I don't spoil it for you.  What I will say is that I really enjoyed the movie and was mesmirized by the talent these kids had/have.  You can see how much breakdancing has been influenced by gymnastics over it's evolution... what  started as something that was a lot of pop and lock moves has incorporated martial arts and gymnastics skills into the mix over the past 30 years.  The asian dudes from Korea and Japan are really taking the gynastics piece to a whole new level- the stuff they are doing is absolutely nuts.

It's interesting to see how breakdancing, one part of hip hop culture, has infiltrated global youth culture the same way that hip hop music has.  Also interesting to think about how the 4 parts of hop hop culture (MCing, DJing, Breakdancing, and Graffitti) have progressed as commercial opportunities.  While hip hop music has become a billion dollar industry, these breakdancing kids and their graffitti counterparts are still stuck fighting over small money.  I guess that's simply a function of how much easier it is to distribute music than it is to distribute dancing or artwork.  Whatever... the movie was sweet.

I'm really feeling the Hercules & Love Affair record.  Track 3 'You Belong' is below.  I'm such a slut for DFA releases...

They're playing with T+T (Tim's Sweeney and Goldsworthy) at Studio B next Saturday the 17th.  I'll be there to enjoy the beats and the new rooftop bar.

This is awesome... http://youtube.com/watch?v=anwlpTgbQTE

A great post from Fred Wilson

Last night I hit up MSG theater with the Eshaks, Corey and Anthony to relive 1998 with The Verve.  We weren't dissapointed at all... Jon hooked up some amazing seats right behind the sound deck, so we had unobstructed views even when sitting down.  I got a good picture of the set list that was posted on the soundboard that I'll post later when I get home.  The vid below is from Haigh Hall in May 98, right around the time I graduated from high school.  Good stuff...

I’m writing this post from a moving bus somewhere in between NYC and Boston.  That’s right, a new bus company Boltbus is offering free wifi on their buses between NYC-Boston-DC.  This makes me giddy, but should I be at all surprised?  We knew this was coming right?  Internet access has recently been introduced on some airplanes and trains and I’d imagine there will be modems on hot air balloons soon enough.

I wonder though, will Internet access be introduced to so many of the areas of my life where I used to just chill out that I’ll eventually lose my mind from the information overload?  I suppose its completely up to me to put the Internet away voluntarily but I have to admit I like being plugged in as much as possible and have a hard time saying no to communications and media.

Hot new music video mix from the Eclectic Method.  I really respect the craftsmanship and the mix itself covers a lot of ground... Feist to Lupe Fiasco.