A Commonplace Book

• I’m From Barcelona – 2008 Tour Dates
  The tickets are a steal at only 10 dollars for the best live show around, but I still need to figure who gets the other 3 I bought…

• Adobe Bringing Flash To The iPhone
  Unfortunately Flash will still probably be a nightmare on AT&T’s 2.5G Edge network…

• Everybody Kills Hitler
  Nobody ever reads the rules sticky…

• Google for Non-Profits
  This will require more research, but this could be useful now that I’m upgrading my Literary Society’s alumni database from Excel to a legitimate CRM platform…

• VHS or Beta – 2008 Tour Dates
  Its been a painful descent to watch as VHS or Beta has gone from the disco-glitter guitar licks of Le Funk to the poppy but still fun dance-rock of Night on Fire to the uninspired beige-flavored Bring On The Comets…

Although my ears usually split their time 50/50 between extremely awesome chamber pop and equally terrible deep progressive Balearic house, I do occasionally like to explore the (for me) uncharted territories of “everything else.” Fortunately I have as my guide two music snobs, each in his own right an embarrassingly knowledgeable Virgil in the Hell of the recording industry.

Although Julian Himes always makes for a good source on the Next Big Thing, Buzzy Cohen has the edge when it comes to choice cuts from the past. Suggestions from the former have been available online at the Amie Street blog for some time, but now the latter is taking his show on the road at East Village Radio. I don’t know whether it’s going to be a regular show yet, but the tracklist and link for the inaugural broadcast with co-DJ Jarrett Mason is up here.

Mostly drawing from the catalog and recent acquisitions of EMI Music Publishing, the show covers a pretty wide variety of genres, but sticks close to soul and Motown. Three tracks to keep an eye on:

• Inez Fox – Hurt By Love
• Sam Sparro – Black & Gold
• Eggstone – Marabous

There’s also a direct link to the streaming audio here.

As some of you may know I have a new band with ROSTAM, CHRIS and CHRIS called VAMPIRE WEEKEND (yes it has the same name as the forthcoming film). We played our second ever show last Saturday at the Columbia RELAY 4 LIFE. It was a very positive experience.

I am so in love with modern technology. It’s amazing to look back and follow the footprints that a band has left across the internet from its inception, as pasted above from lead singer Ezra’s old blog here, then through one of its earliest performances, as recorded below, and on to the charts at iTunes and Amazon.

I’m sure there are many other bands besides Vampire Weekend for which you can follow a trail of bread crumbs across the internet as it has developed, but I think this is probably the only one which took its name from something this awesome: