The Glowing Edge

Category: Bands & Music

  • Good Zox

    Totally enjoying these guys.

  • living the fantasy

    This has got to be one of my all-time favorite pictures of the Husband, doing his rock star thing.

  • vampire weekend

    Aaargh! I just dowloaded the entire Juno soundtrack from iTunes and cannot justify downloading yet another fabulous new music discovery. So click over to the Vampire Weekend website and listen to the selections they have (on a very nice interface, I might add) in full. Then head to your favorite music network and listen more. Then try, just try, to resist downloading. Can’t do it, can you?

  • year yeah

    I love the way the internet is always telling me “If you like x, you’ll LOVE y!” Because the internet’s (Amazon, Yahoo, iTunes, etc.) algorithms KNOW me. I’m essentially a collection of predictable ones and zeros; there’s really no need to actually meet me in person. So here’s my first playlist of the year, partly (hey! I’m still a human you know) aggregated from utterly mathmatical and perfectly on target internet suggestions.

    1. The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song / The Flaming Lips
    2. There She Goes / Babyshambles
    3. Nothing’s Gonna Change Your Mind / Badly Drawn Boy
    4. Fluorescent Adolescent / Arctic Monkeys
    5. Let It Happen / Jimmy Eat World
    6. Vagabond / Wolfmother
    7. My Name Is Jonas / Weezer
    8. Little Bombs / Dashboard Confessional
    9. Connect the Dots / The Spill Canvas
    10. Message from the Birds / The Bees (U.S.)
    11. Chocolate / Snow Patrol
    12. Thick As Thieves / Dashboard Confessional
    13. You Don’t Know What Love Is / The White Stripes
    14. Keeper / Yellowcard
    15. I Turn My Camera On / Spoon
  • Because it’s Easier to NAME the Band than BE the Band

    Because it’s Easier to NAME the Band than BE the Band

    I recently came across a much folded, notated, starred, scratched out, and circled sheet of notebook paper with the Ice’s name at the top. I left all the spellings exactly as they are.

    List of some cool made up band names

    (circled and starred)
    rage at sunset – nine stars, and signed “by Katie”
    college zombies – three stars

    (circled)
    strictly violent, strictly untamed, strictly untameable, strictly prohibited, toxic violence, pieces of _________, jarred ________, roaring shadows, shut down, untapped power, untamed power, sharp anger

    (not circled or starred)
    spiked, infested, infected, clash, create, prowler, prohibited, untameable, toxic, violence, broken, jammed, thermostat, pieces, starrz, innoscent, criminalized, sharpen, sharpened, symbolized, amplified, amplify

    My comments: I suspect “rage at sunset” received nine stars because girls get more votes than boys, especially really nice, really cute, very attentive neighborhood girls. I have to say that “college zombies” is not going to work for long. What if the Stones had named themselves “The College Stones” or worse, “The Middle School Stones”? Kiss of death.

    Now. The Clash and Prowler are taken, but nice try. I’m also not a big fan of Infected, but then again, I’m a mom who carries antimicrobial hand wash in her glove compartment. All the “strictly’s” are fine, but I have to say that my favorite is the somewhat enigmatic “Jarred _____.” Jarred as in canned, like pickles, or jarred as in collided or bumped? And I’m just dying to know what’s in the blank! Jarred okra? Jarred expectations? Jarred teeth? Oh, the possibilities!

    Image credit: chatirygirl on Flickr

  • i miss my man

    an’ he been gone all week. So I made him a playlist called Get Back To Me. Here it is:

    Don’t Make Me Wait / Locksley
    Do You Want to / Franz Ferdinand
    Sugar Magnolia / Grateful Dead
    You Only Live Once / The Strokes
    Sugar on My Tongue / Talking Heads
    Stickshifts and Safetybelts / Cake
    Come On Home / Franz Ferdinand
    The Luckiest / Ben Folds
    I’m the Man Who Loves You / Wilco
    Road Trippin’ / Red Hot Chili Peppers

    In about another 24 hours he’s gonna be doin’ that time-honored, Brenda Lee Golden Earring Radar Love man-drives-all-night-home-to-woman thing. Except he won’t technically be “shifting gears” since he has an automatic. Still. Ladies and Gentlemen: Golden Earring:

  • Slice of Life: The Perfect Saturday

    For the first time in over a decade I have some Saturdays off. It’s astonishing how wonderful they are, assuming you have no intention of grocery shopping or cleaning bathrooms. Here’s what my fabulous Saturday looked like:

    1. Sleep late
    2. Join the Ice in the kitchen where he’s making a double batch of biscuits. Cook the whole package of bacon at once by using three skillets at once (how very extravagant!)
    3. Enjoy a sit-down breakfast with four-fifths of the family (the First sleeps even later, now that he’s practically a teenager)
    4. Get back in bed.
    5. Watch movie trailers on the internet with all three boys and two cats, who have joined me on my bed: The Bee Movie (all four trailers), Enchanted, Fred Claus, Step Up 2, Dragon Wars, 27 Dresses, The Golden Compass, I’m Not There (the Bob Dylan film), Moondance Alexander, The Final Season
    6. Surf lolcats.
    7. Get up, shower, wear my favorite shirt (Death Cab for Cutie) and jeans. Also Doc Martens.
    8. Lounge around lookin fine
    9. Blog
    10. Read other blogs
    11. Fix Husband’s website
    12. Make tomato sandwich for lunch. Eat leftover bacon. Drink Diet Dr. Pepper with maraschino cherries out of a wine glass.
    13. Pet / annoy cats
    14. Go thorough boys’ Halloween candy. Eat Take 5 bar and Almond Joy.
    15. Eat pizza for dinner
    16. Seuss-a-Palooza! Read to boys: The Sneetches, The Zax, The Pale Green Pants, Too Many Daves (a personal favorite, I used to have it memorized), Horton Hears a Who
    17. Go to be early
    18. Read string theory, quantum physics

    Ahh, perfection. I honestly can’t see any room for improvement.

  • tragedy

    You know all those people whose well-insured million-dollar houses burned down in California? The Husband and I were commenting on the media people who kept referring to the loss of these houses as a “tragedy” (links too numerous to list here). NPR aired a long story about a writer guy who “braved the flames” of the last big SoCal fire and returned to his house in order to recover a nearly-finished novel from his computer; he also brought out a stuffed polar bear, which he keeps as a fond rememberance of his wacky escapade. The emphasis was on the party atmosphere, the thrill of evading the police barricades, and the silliness of what you will risk your life to save. The more the Husband and I discussed it, the more we believed the word “tragedy” to be inappropriate.

    So we turned to pop music.

    Me: Hey, didn’t the BeeGees write about tragedy?
    The Husband (immediately launching into song): Tragedy! When the da-da-da and the da-da-da it’s tragedy!
    Me: I only know the one lyric too. I have to sing “watermelon watermelon,” like I used to for In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. We should find out what Barry and the guys have to say. It could be important.
    The Husband (returning triumphant from a quick foray onto LyricsFreak.com): I have the treasure! Gimme a beat:

    Tragedy / When the feeling’s gone and you can’t go on / It’s tragedy
    When the morning cries and you don’t know why
    It’s hard to bear / With no one to love you you’re goin’ nowhere

    Tragedy / When you lose control and you got no soul / It’s tragedy
    When the morning cries and you don’t know why
    It’s hard to bear / With no one to love you you’re goin’ nowhere

    Me: Mystery solved. Wow, I really feel…cleansed.
    The Husband: Edifiying, isn’t it?

    Did you know that “tragedy” was the word I misspelled (tradgedy) in the high school spelling bee? That was the fateful word that cost me first place. It was so…sad.

  • four men rockin the town


    I’m having a great time making these movies on Animoto. The site is still in beta (can’t upload to YouTube yet, or download to desktop) but I am really looking forward to seeing what it can become. Definitely check their blog and try a video of your own. I pull my resource files directly from my Flickr account. If uploading pictures from your desktop, you’ll want to resize images to 1024 x 768. I use DroPic! to do this incredibly quickly, although pc users may want VSO‘s image resizer (both are free).

  • Love Is A Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time

    Phenomenal. I devoured this book, mixed and penned by Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield, in two late night reads, only because I forced myself to stop and savor the last half on a second night rather than read until the sun rose. Beautiful and anguished by turns, interwoven with the music of love and death and indie-pop music geekdom, Love is a Mix Tape is the brutally honest and tender personal narrative of shy-boy Sheffield’s discovery of his “noisy, juicy, sparkly” girlfriend Renee, their marriage, her sudden death five years later, and the painful aftermath. Each chapter leads off with the contents of a mix tape (that he made, she made, or someone made for them) which ties together the events and memories of each particular theme in the story, drawing from Pavement, Yo La Tengo, Big Star (Rob and Renee played “Thirteen” at their wedding), Meat Puppets, Madonna, The Smiths, Buzzcocks, Liz Phair, Weezer, The Grifters, Nirvana, Sleater-Kinney and hundreds more. Not only the music, but the movie references will let you know you are in the presence of a real live encyclopedic fanboy. Think Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity in real life and true love.