Chuck Norris Day

I was reading the student paper here at Purchase. On the backpage someone wrote,

"If there's a Martin Luther King Day, theen there needs to be a Chuck Norris Day."

It's not such a bad idea. A couple of laughs, some roundhouse kicks, our troubles are over...

New Belle & Sebastian

Oh my goodness! Another Belle and Sebastian album!
I must run out and buy it!

Looks pretty sure...

I had a very good discussion with Motti over at the mocca lounge in Tribeca. It looks pretty sure that the mennu method mocca monday show will become a reality. I was thinking of calling it Euphoria: Israeli Psychedelia...

Still working on it.

Got a call from Chicago yesterday. They want to fly me out for a gig in April.

Then there's that spot in Tel Aviv that offered to let me play this summer.

Not to mention the radio station in Tel Aviv that offered to give me a guest spot.

So I guess the mennu method world tour 2006 is looking like a real possibility.

So how do I work New Orleans into this mix?

Return to the Exile

Alright. I got back on Tuesday night and am suffering the worst jetlag of my life. Goodness!

A few words about the trip:

• The birthright group was excellent. I look forward to seeing more of the local group over the next semester(s). As for the Iowans, I was a little choked up when we parted, because I knew it might well be the last time I see them.
• Guy, the guide is quite the guy. He is so much of a person that if you took away a person, you would still have a whole person left.
• Good to see King Joey ruling once again. Tel Aviv makes a better throne than Jerusalem for His Freakyness.
  
• Howard Glanzman still knows how to throw an excellent party, and as the old saying goes: it's better to drink with Howard Glanzman than to Howard Glanzman. Had I known the party was going to get broken up when it did, I would have done a lot more flirting.
• At the rate that I am visiting my family members, I should visit all my cousins by 2013. I urge them not to give up hope in the last scion of Menachem Oded.
  
• Steve Guns still lives, but I wonder what kind of a life it is for him anymore. My old friend is fading fast into a sinkhole of depression and oblivion.
  
• I have picked up another 20 discs or so. More mixes to come. Tops in the bunch? MC Karolina, Shy Nobleman, and Sympozion.
  
• My heart is broken that I am back here in the US. Each day I wonder why I don't live in Israel. Oh yeah, it's that crushing debt. Cut up your credit cards folks! Don't end up like me, pining for the promised land.
• I never did get to crash Kol haCampus while there. I guess I'll have to do it next time.
  

My welcome yesterday was typical. I blew a flat in bumper to bumper traffic on the approach to the Tappan Zee Bridge and had to pull over to the left in order the change my tire in a driving rainstorm. If it wasn't for bad luck, I wouldn't have no luck at all.

I'm in Israel

Need to reach me?

From the US call:
011-972-52-609-2173

Also: stay away from the new years mix, it sounds terrible...

They're on to me!

Have some fun of your own at: http://www.churchsigngenerator.com

Corroboration

So the other day I was driving around listening to my mp3 player, or as I call it, Bartok The Randomizer. Bartok decided to cue up a mix I made a couple of years ago to commemorate a visit from my friend The CorRoborator. It brought up some good memories and I decided that I would post it here. The playlist is erratic and ecclectic. There's Irish music, children's music, meditation, and all kinds of whackiness. So enjoy it.

A Night of Corroboration

Nordic Invasion

Did I mention that I put the Nordic Invasion on my Extras page?

Check it out...

Culinary Creation

I made this colorful appetizer for dinner on Friday night. I was going to make some kind of dish using red, yellow and orange peppers, but apparently the price of those went up due to the hurricanes in Florida. (Remeber Florida? They also had hurricanes, but they get them all the time, so I guess they don't count.)

So here's what's in the dish:
Roasted Eggplant or Eggplant Salami
Red, Orange and Yellow Tomatoes
Fresh Basil
Baked Tofu with Sesame and Flax Seeds

Needless to say, the dish was well accepted.

One Voice For New Orleans

Make Your Voice Heard

This week, Congress will make a critical decision that may singularly determine how a storm-devastated New Orleans will rebuild—and how many of its scores of displaced residents will return to live and work.

Your legislative leaders have the power to fund a rebuilt levee system designed to withstand the most powerful storms. Funding approval is critical to the stability and the security of one of America’s most cherished cities.

Today, you have the power to be a Voice for New Orleans. Please take a moment to send an e-mail to your legislators and ask them to support the future of New Orleans. Let them know that protecting this city is important to you.

Click here to sign the petition.

Feed Me Good Tunes: Tidbits for Hip Kids

I just listened to a really fine post on Feed Me Good Tunes which is authored by jt and Silent K. This particular one was by jt, and it was pretty good.

Here's the setlist with some reactions:

BUSTER RIDES AGAIN, by Medeski, Martin and Wood
I have been trying to listen to more Medeski, Martin & Wood lately. I have a negative association with them and have not been able to properly get into their music. Thankfully I'm getting past that. This is a really decent track.

BLOW UP, by Chicago Underground Orchestra
The Chicago Underground Orchestra was like a steam roller smoothing out my afternoon. It helped create mellow vibes that allowed me to stay focused and on point with my various tasks, all the while nodding my head with that whole "yes...yes...keep on jammin there, Duders..."

ANOTHER PERFECT DAY, by Jazzanova
Nothing bad about Jazzanova. They pop up on various DJ compilations here and there. Thier stuff is all good.

BLIND MAN, by The Lester Abrams Carnival
A fairly interesting choice: Musically sound, but I was not prepared for vocals. But hey, I should be prepared for anything.

SPANISH HARLEM INCIDENT, by Chris Whitley
Sparse, in a good way. All I can hear is voice, guitar and what sounds like drumsticks hitting a folding chair.

Good stuff overall. That's why I really like this MP3 Blog thing. Great exposure to great stuff. I salute you Feed Me Good Tunes!

And while we're on Feed Me Good Tunes:

Grimace Federation - 7 Avec 2, Jah Division - Heart and Soul Dub are deep and wonderful. DJ Krush - Flipshot sounds like the kind of thing that cool late 80's early 90's rappers would rap over. Good instrumental track.

Worst Post Ever

I sent around emails to alert people about my latest mix, The Future. Some folks listened to it and liked it, some didn't like it, and some didn't listen to it at all. I spent three days putting the "liner notes" on the mix together. The reactions to the liner notes were all negative. One reader described it as boring. Another described it as being too long. Most people avoided it in general.

Let me wax philosphical if I may...

Most humans, Americans in particular, have a tendency to try to categorize things. Here's an example. Lets say that you go to a museum in order to take in art with a friend or lover. Instead of looking at the object and taking in its beauty, your partner may ask you questions like, "Who painted this?" "When is this from?" Your partner may make the statement, "This reminds me of..." and refer to another work of art. Kind of like when you see a trailer for a movie on TV, which says if you liked X and Y, then you're gonna love Z. People like to categorize things. This need for organization, compartmentalization and classification can often interfere with a natural sense of wonder, or a sense of, "Wow! Just look at that! It's so nice." It would be far too much to ask of an American to say nothing at all.

The same is true when I play new music for people. The first question is usually, "Who is this?" Followed by, "Where did you hear about them?" And sometimes I get, "What language is that? Do you understand what they're saying? How can you listen to it if you don't understand it?"

So I tried to be thorough and answer the first two questions in the liner notes. It was an effort to preempt the quesions that invariably flow out of the listener.

I guess my conclusion is that people don't really want to know more information about the music, they just want to make conversation, or perhaps they just like to hear themselves speak.

posted by mennu
(Who is presently listening to Stereolab sing in French as they are remixed by Theivery Corporation who reside in Washington, D.C.)

The Future

Here's a track listing for my latest mix called The Future. You can download it here. Don't complain that you can't skip tracks. Should you be really interested, you can buy the tracks or the album. The file is windows media (.wma) and I don't really care if you can't figure out how to download it or if your media player isn't being cooperative. I'm also not going to convert it to an mp3 file for you. I tried, but failed. I also tried to make an actual CD out of it, but it seems that that digital rights management software was working at full force, so although I was able to make an actual CD, most of it was just blank. Oh well, so much for that.

First something about the format of this post, because it's a tracklist made of links. (Mmmm, links.)

• The name of the track will take you to the mp3 blog post that turned me on to the track.
  
• The name of the band will take you to the bands website with the exception of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, whose website first gave me a heart attack and then gave me some seizures. I just checked it again and it seems to have stopped doing what it was doing.
  
• The name of the album will take you either to Amazon or to the record label's website where you can buy the CD.
  
• Then I name the mp3 blog that turned me on to the track, clicking on that link will take you to the blog's current homepage. If the songs they suggested in the past rocked, you can be pretty sure that whatever they are posting now also rocks. These folks are the real dedicated music people. They have reaffirmed my faith in music, humanity, the internet and the intersection of all three. Some of the songs were suggested by an Elf.
  
• And finally, you will see some tracks marked with the word "download." These songs can be legally downloaded for free.
  

And here's something about the music itself: it's the music of the future today. That's right. We are living in the future with our cellphones and the interweb and all those silicon chips and whatnot. So I think it's about time to retire the classic rock you've been listening to since your childhood, forget about the mass marketed top 40 crap, put away your AK-47 inspired gangsta rap and open your ears to something new.

• 1. Nightclothes and Headphones [ft. Laura Cantrell]-Jason Forrest-3:58- Shamelessly Exciting - The Camera As Pen - download
• 2. Lunch for Breakfast- Cassettes Won't Listen-4:59-Mobody's Moving - Scissorkick - download
• 3. Where'd They Get To- Flevans-3:48- Flevans - download - Somebody must have mentioned this somewhere, because I'm not that original. Or maybe I was doing a random search of Professor Frink expressions on google.
• 4. Great Gleiven In a Gladbag!-Professor Frink-0:01- The Simpsons - recorded off of the cable box
• 5. Junior Kickstart-The Go! Team-3:34-Thunder Lightning Strike - I was turned onto this band by an Elf.
• 6. Let's Talk About Spaceships - Say Hi To Your Mom -3:03- Numbers & Mumbles - Think Tank - download
• 7. In Your Mind- Built To Spill -3:46- Ancient Melodies of the Future - shake your fist
• 8. People - Silver Jews - 4:43 - American Water - Not sure where the hell I heard of these guys. Maybe it's cause I'm Jewish? I donno. - download
• 9. The Sun Fell on You - The Prayers and Tears of Arthur Digby Sellers - 3:15- Psalterie - Sixeyes - download
• 10. Be Gentle With Me - The Boy Least Likely To - 3:50 - Best Party Ever - I was also turned onto this band by an Elf.
• 11. Maps - Yeah Yeah Yeahs - 3:39 - Fever To Tell- Indie MP3
• 12. Merge (Dntel Remix) - Grizzly Bear - 3:38 - Horn of Plenty (The Remixes) - The Camera As Pen
• 13. Salvatore Amato - Bell Orchestre - 6:39 - Recording a Tape the Colour of the Light- Alright, so I got the track off The Camera As Pen so I must give respect over here. But the fact of the matter is, I heard them first on Soundcheck, a radio program on WNYC.
• 14. Hey Saturday Sun - Boards Of Canada - 4:56 - The Campfire Headphase - Borrowed Tunes
• 15. Reality Check - Schneider TM - 4:22 - 6 Peace - You know, at this point I'm not really sure where I got this from. I know it was somewhere. Just don't know where. Besides, it's been taking me, like forever to get this post together. I'm assuming that other people who do things like this have some automated system that does it for them.
• 16. Blooms Eventually - Pulseprogramming - 5:25 - Tulsa For One Second Remix Project- Not sure about this one either. Whoa. I must be...oh, wait a minute, I think I got it. These dudes and Schneider are somehow affiliated with B. Fleischmann (see below).
• 17. When It Happens It Moves All By Itself - Telefon Tel Aviv - 3:28 - Map Of What Is Effortless - I already said that I liked them in a previous post. That being said, I was turned onto this track by an Elf.
• 18. I'm Feelin It - Steve Martin - 0:22 - A Wild And Crazy Guy - "I've never felt this way before..." - I just thought it would be a funny and appropriate sample for this spot in the mix.
• 19. Broken Monitors - B. Fleischmann - 7:08 - The Humbucking Coil

Now that is one exhausting and exhaustive post.

Enjoy!

the good one

I was on the phone with my buddy The Corroborator this evening. He called right after I had changed out of my work clothes after dinner. I volunteered to wash the dishes since I did none of the cooking and the other diners have a rather long day ahead of them tomorrow. Anyhow, I started talking with the Corrob, walked downstairs, and started putting away leftovers and washing dishes. Corrob was on his way home from work talking with the hands free device. Half an hour into the conversation I tell Corrob, “You know I’ve been washing dishes pretty much from the time we started this conversation.”

“That’s the good one,” he said.

This is one of Corrob’s greatest strengths, finding wonder in the mundane. I put on my Corrob voice and parodied him, in the deep surfer dude tone of voice. “Ha, ha. Washing dishes and talkin’ on the phone. This is great.”

Telefon Tel Aviv

I was on the telefon tel aviv site listening to some of their tracks. Really interesting and mellow stuff. They have a player that you can click on to hear some of their music. Once you do, you may find yourself wanting more. You can download some of their tracks legally from download.com. I highly recommend "My Week Beats Your Year." It's soooooo fresh.

Stylus Magazine describes them as:

A combination of Pink Floyd’s ambience and Kraftwerk’s domination of the static beat.

The Chairman Stein Stamp

The most popular item dedicated to my erstwhile radio cohost since the "Limited Edition Chairman Stein Stein."

I remember the good old days of the mennu method streaming radio station. The chairman and I would banter freely and flowingly about just about anything while listening to music and making blender drinks at 9:00AM on Fridays.

So, what's the chairman up to these days? You can read about him in this article.

Music Blog Harvest

I've been getting into music blogs lately. Why let record companies and radio stations tell me what to listen to? Why not get a personal recommendation from a genuine music afficianado?

I discovered the whole music blogging thing in an article in Wired magazine. The article mentioned Music for Robots which posts songs and discusses them. The songs are available for download for a brief period of time; something like a week. So I started visiting regularly. Then I noticed on his side bar were links to other music blogs. That's how I found my second favorite music blog: Soul Sides, which has some really deep funk and soul tracks.

Then I found the most robust of the bunch: Diddy-Wa. Here's a dude with time on his hands. The mp3 blog is excellent. There's a radio in the upper right hand corner with a playlist of about a dozen songs, and he has another blog for his mixtapes. The range is fantastic: so many different types of music.

So now I have a new addiction: I keep checking out all these music blogs. I harvest all the mp3s I can get my digits on. Then I found...

The Hype Machine - Audio Blog Aggregator

Great gleiven in a gladbag! I don't know who's behind this one, or if they are human, or android, or some kind of alien or superhero. The Hype Machine links all the music blogs together: when music bloggers post new mp3s, they show up on the Hype Machine. Now I'm rapidly running out of space again, and barely getting any sleep because there's so much great music to listen to.

My freaken ears have never been so happy.

synchronicity

I recently had some major synchronicity happen to me. First of all, what does it mean?

Websters describes it as:

"the coincidental occurrence of events and especially psychic events (as similar thoughts in widely separated persons or a mental image of an unexpected event before it happens) that seem related but are not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality -- used especially in the psychology of C. G. Jung"

Wikipedia is more fun. It gives the following example:

"A well-known example of synchronicity involves plum pudding. It is the true story of the French writer Émile Deschamps who in 1805 is treated to some plum pudding by the stranger Monsieur de Fontgibu. Ten years later, he encounters plum pudding on the menu of a Paris restaurant, and wants to order some, but the waiter tells him the last dish has already been served to another customer, who turns out to be M. de Fontgibu. Many years later in 1832 Émile Deschamps is at a diner, and is once again offered plum pudding. He recalls the earlier incident and tells his friends that only M. de Fontgibu is missing to make the setting complete, and in the same instant the now senile M. de Fontgibu enters the room by mistake."

My synchronicity concerns a play I will be acting in next week. It is a student written play called "Dancing With The Cockroach." It's a play about Jews, vermin and tap dancing. I have a nice little part where I play an anti-Semite whose son is beaten up by Jews. The curtain goes up next week, and I still don't know my lines. I figured that I could record it on my computer and burn it on a disc. That way I can listen to my lines in the car and learn the part on my way to and from work or wherever it is that I drive to. My problem is that the computer will not make discs; it only wants to make coasters. And it makes a lot of them. But that has nothing to do with synchronicity.

So I'm sitting in my parked car reading the play into a headset plugged into my computer. I need to do all the voices so I remember when my cues are. In order to differentiate between parts, I changed my voice for the different characters. I tried to mimic the way the other actors speak. It turned out to be more funny, and thus more memorable than the parts that went well. So I started mouthing the funny parts instead of my own. I realized that the best way for me to remember my lines would be to record someone else mimicking me, or record myself doing my part in a funny voice.

I thought about some clips my roommates and I recorded in high school for some kind of class project. We remembered all the funny parts: the bloopers and the mistakes. For example, my roommate was supposed to read the line:

"I was in the hospital"

But while he was reading it, his voice cracked, and it came out sounding like:

"I was in the haaaaa-aaaa-spital"

We all cracked up over it. In fact, it's a joke that we remembered years after. In fact, I didn't immediately remember what the recording was about, but instead remembered other funny stuff from other recordings. So sitting in my car recording my voice into my computer made these memories from high school bubble up to the surface.

As I got back to my office at Purchase later in the day, I checked my email and it seemed my old high school rommmate tracked me down. I'm not sure how he did it, maybe he googled me. You never know, I have a pretty huge web presence. Then again, you get the interesting stuff by googling "mennu" rather than "Adam Oded."

So getting back to my exroommate who happened to track me down for the first time in, like, 20 years. I responded with a short email using a word or two of our high school banter. I also ask him what he's been up to. His response:

"I was in the haaaaa-aaaa-spital"

Cassette Jam '05

Some Japanese guy has made a page of all kinds of old cassettes. Really brought me down Memory Lane. Or is that Memorex Lane. (Sorry, couldn't resist. I can always edit this out later.)

To the left is one of my favorite cassettes of all time: The Maxell UD XL II. I asked my uncle to buy me a box of these for my bar mitzvah. He got me the 60 minute ones and not the 90 minute ones I wanted. Oh well. Storage has always been an issue for me.

Then again, I suffered various setbacks in personal audio throughout my life. It started with a low budget for music. In the late 80's I really wanted to get into the whole CD thing, but I couldn't afford it until the early 90's. Since then, I have had my entire CD collection stolen twice: once from my college dorm room and once from my car.

Then came the Napster Revolution. Suddenly I could get all the music I ever lost, and get turned onto music I always thought I would like. Again, storage became an issue. My six gig hard drive kept filling up. Instead of deleting I saved up for a CD burner. Every once and a while I would copy off all the mp3s onto disc archives and erase the hard drive. Then I got a second internal hard drive, and then a few years ago, I got an external enclosure for an internal drive. I filled it with an eighty gig drive, and thus, the "Big Momma" drive was born.

"Big Momma" was totally full in a year. And by then I was no longer downloading music. Napster got slammed and as I bounced around from Limewire to BearShare to Morpheus to Kazaa, I noticed that my computer would either slow down considerably or be seized by the effects of a virus or trojan horse or all of the above. Still, I needed more space. There are legal downloads like at web labels like Comfort Stand and the like. My friends have good CDs and I like to digitize them. I even buy CDs from time to time.

So then I got the "Rough Daddy" drive. Two hundred gigs. Again. Full in a year. Still out of space.

On the plus side. I've had a twenty gig mp3 player for about four yers now. It's like a dinosaur compared to the chic mp3 players of today. But I love it. It's thCreative Labs Nomad Jukebox 3. Looks like a CD player. I'll praise it more later, but here's my point: for a person with 200 gigs of music, 20 is really not a whole hell of a lot. The think would get filled up very quickly, and I'm the kind of guy that has a hard time deleting stuff. I mean, you never know when you would want to listen to some obscure track. And then there's the stock stuff. All the Steely Dan for those days, all the Theivery Corporation for those nights, lots of house and dance music which has been known to save my ass at a gig or two...

But recently I've been going through it and making cuts. Removed all but two Fila Brazillia albums: Maim That Tune and Jump Leads. You know what, I also left on Another Late Night. But other albums were not as lucky. I only left on the first four Cafe Del Mar albums, and I feel I could have been more selective with it like I was with the Om Lounge stuff. So now when I hit the randomizer on the Nomad, it does an interesting shuffle that can take you from the 80's to Sondre Lerche to Israeli Progressive to house to Rush.

Well, I'm off to play practice.

And this was supposed to be a very brief post.

Eggplant Salami

While we're talking about food...

Here's another good recipe.