Last week Ruby Isle decided to cover the number one song on elbo.ws. It happened to be Shadow Falls by Hello, Blue Roses. We posted about it here. This turned out to be a really fun experiment. In only a few hours we tried to take a beautiful, somber, ambient song and turn it in to a party jam. It turned out so well that I decided to send it to a few friends and they all really seemed to like it. Some people also pointed out that it was a very surreal experiment in that we actually released a cover of a song before the actual song itself was officially released. It really pointed out the immediacy of the musical world we live in where release dates have really become nothin’ but a number.

This week we decided we would take the experiment a little further. We are going to continue to do covers of the #1 spot on the elbo.ws hot tracks chart on a semi-weekly basis until we get bored or the songs get bad. Mark, Aaron and I are then going to blog about it here at kinderblog hq and let everyone know what we did, how we did it and post a copy of the song. Mark will talk about the technical side of the original track, I will discuss what we did to it and Aaron is going to add a graphic interpretation of our cover for each song. We figure someone might find our analysis of these tracks interesting Keep in mind, we won’t be criticizing them, just covering them and talking about the technical aspects of the original songs.

The process itself is kind of interesting since Mark and Aaron live in Minneapolis and live down here in Athens, GA. Thanks to yousendit, we are able to record, mix and master the tracks within a few hours by sending tracks and files back and forth. Then we will post it here and let you have it. The whole thing can really be done in a matter of hours if we have time and are inspired. Obviously, starting with a good song is really going to help!

With that said, this week’s track is already done. Aly Walk With Me by Raveonettes should be up very soon.

Posted by dan on 28 Nov 2007 at 11:55 am

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Some of you may know that I write a weekly entertainment column in the Athens daily rag (and my former employer) The Athens Banner-Herald. I used to post links to my columns on my blog but since I have all but abandoned said blog for this post-eria I figured I would start linking to my column here.

So this is the place to look if you want to read about movies, music, comics, video games, stores, restaurants, toys or whatever else I feel like writing about each week.Read last week’s column HERE 

Posted by ryan on 27 Nov 2007 at 03:39 pm

2 Comments »

I just woke up.

It’s 5:36 PM on Sunday, August 12 and, just as the late-90’s Internet-entrepreneur hype kept reminding us was a possibility, I walked 5 feet from my bed to my “office” and am now writing in my pajamas. The main difference between me and, say, some mythical Internet-paper-billionaire is that I’m not an entrepreneur. The things a I do aren’t all necessarily just for fun but they are certainly activities I’ve chosen to do which is a lot better than having some boss bark at me all day.

But the point of the above paragraph is to illustrate what is the recurring, bothersome and possibly fatal flaw of the “blogosphere”: the false cult of personality attempted by so many “writers” is, even when presented in a down-home, “hey, how ya doin’?” style, winds up being inevitably condescending. With the easy availability of blogs and blogging software, not to mention the lightening pace of the Information Superhighway, any half considered, off-the-top-of-your-head idea can find it’s way to the other side of the world in an instant. Writers wind up telling people all kinds of information because of an assumed relationship between writer and reader. This relationship rarely, if ever, exists, and a quick check on ones traffic stats will indicate this pretty quickly (e.g. You really think you have a relationship when the average time spent at your blog is less than 2 minutes?)

Which is exactly why I started this off by telling you i just woke up. You didn’t need to know this, couldn’t possibly care and this information doesn’t really add a whole lot of context to what I’m writing about anyway. It was merely a cheap way of setting the stage so I could enter the circular logic of what I’m talking about: I started with a folksy, hey-how-ya-doin’ intro as if we’re old friends then used that false-familiarity to engage you in a post about how doing that sort of thing is nearly always a big, ringing bell of phoniness and arrogance.

Maybe I’ll be forgiven this arrogance, though. After all, I just woke up.

Posted by admin on 12 Aug 2007 at 04:52 pm

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I have been hearing about the amazing Iron Man footage shown at Comic-Con for a week now but I finally found a site with a capture of the footage. I still haven’t been able to watch it with sound but it sure looks killer. Check it out for yourself HERE.

Thanks to the always amazing Toys R Evil for the heads up!

Posted by ryan on 06 Aug 2007 at 12:41 pm

1 Comment »

HB: Okay, dudes. We shouldn’t apologize on here, but we do have two movies at home we haven’t watched yet because somebody has had to spend all his time embroidering and can’t watch movies with subtitles. Sheesh. So, if you’re ever longing for lengthy analysis of classic films you feel very guilty for not having seen (or proud for having seen–I just think that’s less likely, you lowbrow rabble), one great place you can go is The Criterion Contraption, a blog by Matthew Dessem that he’s been running for several years while he attempts to watch every movie in the Criterion Collection (DVDs, not laserdiscs). Matthew focuses nicely on a lot of visual elements, complete with lots of stills from the movies, as well as history and where they fall in terms of importance and influence. Also whether or not he likes them. The thing is, he’s only up to #72 (at last posting). And the Collection is at or around #410 (probably skipping a few, as they’re nerds and like to save special numbers for special movies, and also probably because it’s complicated to get the rights to put these things out, and so even if they’ve planned that something will be, say, #218, it might take a while to get it or whatnot). So chances are that he’s either going to clone himself a la Multiplicity or die before he finishes it–which would be sad. Still, like all great plans involving lists, it is ambitious, and we respect that.

It also points up the role of the Criterion Collection as a modern canon, one that’s both bigger and quirkier than most other lists. Some of the quirkiness is dependent upon rights, again, and also probably the people who work there. If you have a big Beastie Boys fan in your office, you’re going to get things like this released, quirking up the canon you’re creating. Their selection of foreign film is particularly good and deep, and their focus on directors is welcome, even when one of those directors is Michael Bay,* because others of them are Dreyer** and Tati and Powell. I’m not saying that I watch everything on every Criterion DVD I buy, but I do buy the DVDs because that stuff is there. They’re kind of like the Norton Critical Editions of the DVD world. If you have to write a paper, or you’re curious, or you finish reading/watching the work of art and have nothing else to do, there’s more for you to explore.

They also prove that graphic design sells. It does to me. Some of their movies, like The Element of Crime, which I’ve seen and really disliked, can have such appealing covers that you want to buy the disc, even if you know you don’t like the movie, let alone if you just think you wouldn’t like it or don’t know anything about it. It’s incredible that this can pry $40-some out of one’s wallet, or come close to doing so, but a great DVD cover can sell even better than a great book cover can. Criterion’s covers for their American and French films from the 1930s and 1940s are some of their best, like Children of Paradise, Boudou Saved from Drowning, and Heaven Can Wait.*** Almost every cover seems to come out of an understanding of the film it embraces (and I later discovered after writing this post, how true that is from Criterion’s own excellent blog, which has a great post from a graphic designer on how he got to the end on two covers), which kind of encapsulates the appeal of the whole collection: it’s a desire for things that are beautiful both inside and out, and, especially, for a set of them. It’s made for the compulsive aesthete. So how many of them do you have?

* I secretly still like Michael Bay a little bit, but NOT this movie.

** We haven’t seen any Dreyer yet, but where else are you gonna get it, right?

*** Jared points out that this last one was painted by Caitlin Kuhwald, an excellent artist by whom we have a couple of paintings. Also that you can buy the cover art painting from her website.

Posted by teambrown on 26 Jul 2007 at 03:26 pm

6 Comments »

Millions of People See the Mistakes You Can Never Take Back

It used to be that you were left disappointed when you sat in front of your computer, opened your browser of choice, and thought, “I want to see something that can haunt someone for a lifetime.” Actually, match.com and craigslist were pretty good for that. But now there’s a site that does that without the requisite STD test afterwards.

Awful Tattoos is just what it sounds like: “A blog about bad, awful, terrible, horrible, regrettable tattoos,” as the subtitle puts it. Each post dwells on some category of tattoo that just shouldn’t have been put to skin. Maybe the tattoo artist’s hand was a little shaky, maybe the idea was just bad to begin with, but it can’t be denied, these tattoos are awful. To be fair, there are a few totally awesome tattoos on the blog, but there’s gotta be something to keep us from losing all faith in the art of tattooing, right?

Posted by Mat on 05 Jul 2007 at 05:43 pm

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