Buddhist Marketer

In Other URLs

Other stuff by yours truly:

• Music, memory, and British chicks
• How to organize your AdWords keywords
• Pretty notebooks; Neruda’s “Childhood and Poetry”

Let us wish 2009 a gentle good bye.

St. Patrick’s Day, 1998

Discovered a printout to a mix I made during spring break of my junior year in college.  I believe this actually was a cassette tape mix (!) as I don’t think I owned my minidisc player until senior year.

1. Sarah Vaughan’s “Misty”
2. Velvet Underground’s “I’ll Be Your Mirror”
3. Iggy Pop’s “Success”
4. Lush’s “Sweetness and Light” **
   
5. Jane’s Addiction’s “Obvious”
6. U2’s “Even Better than the Real Thing”
7. The Sundays’ “what do you think?”
8. The Pharcyde’s “Passing Me By” **
   
9. Lush’s “Starlust”
10. Mono’s “Life In Mono”
11. Poe’s “Fingertips”
12. chemical brothers’ “Alive Alone” **
    
13. Lauren Christy’s “Walk This Earth Alone”
14. Catherine Wheels’ “Delicious”
15. Oasis’ “Wonderwall” **
    
16. No Doubt’s “Excuse Me Mr.”
17. Tori Amos’ “Siren”
18. The Sundays’ “I can’t wait”
19. Pulp’s “Like a Friend”
20. Pancho Kryztal’s “Silent Treatment”
21. Future Bible Heroes’ “Hopeless” **
    
22. David Garza’s “Slave”

These tracks were definitely in heavy rotation that semester — my clove-smoking, tea-drinking semester.  Had you visited my dorm room, you probably would have heard one of those songs playing.

The asterisked tracks can still get me to that reminisc-y place, but to paraphrase Alec Baldwin, I’ve got more things to do these days than rock black turtlenecks and pen angsty zine pieces about imaginary lost love.

I guess it was “fun” to be able to get wrapped up into music back then, but perhaps that obsessional quality prevents a different kind of getting wrapped up — the getting wrapped up in the kind of real life that involves actual other real live human beings.  And as it turns out, non-imaginary life is not — sorry Bono — better than the real thing.

Weak Beatz Killa

Shout out to Champaign-Urbana native Jan Lo a.k.a. DJ Lomang for killing it in Beijing this past Saturday.  For those who do not know:

Jan Lo (aka DJ Lomang) has been dropping that unadulterated booty-jiggling music on dancefloors across the US since 1998.

Yes, yes that was his Gangsta Moose Mix that I put into the rotation for my ten year reunion’s Friday night playlist.

And yes, yes this is a picture from Saturday night in Beijing.  And yes, that is Ghostface Killah.  And yes, he did tell his manager afterwards, “Yo fuck that. We ain’t performing in Shanghai unless DJ Lomang comes! For real. He needs his own room in our hotel. All the same shit! Otherwise fuck Shanghai. We going straight to New Zealand…”

And yes, this is a picture of me and my slightly-excited armpizzle (Bree; am I wearing one of your shirts here?  Or was this a shirt from my lil sis?) with none other than the DJ himself back in the ‘07 when he was still killin’ it stateside.

Congrats, Jan!!

Matty Charles’ new album comes out 10/30

One of my favorite artists in the whole wide world is Matty Charles, whose music was put on my radar as his bassist, Josh Stark, is the oldest son of my ‘god’mother Neal, the ‘N’ in ‘ANP’.  When I lived in Brooklyn, every Sunday evening I’d hop into my Jetta and drive over to Pete’s Candy Store in outer Billyburg to experience the intimate live show.

As a marketer, I know that people are more likely to buy Product X of Quality N if it’s framed against Product Y of Quality Less Than N.  As a human, I love to sing, an experience I treasure all the more for its concomitant demons that I had to slay.  So, here:  you can play this YouTube video while reading the rest of this post.

The song I am singing along to is “Valentine Song” by Matty Charles and The Valentines from their 2003 album Land Beyond the Sea.  The lyrics — and the lyrics are one of the reasons I love Matty’s work so — start out:

Would you be a flower just for me
When the days are short & cold
and I won’t have to face the darkness all alone
if I have you there to hold

* Swoon *!

From his MySpace page (bolding mine):

If you want to know where I’m from, all you need to do is listen to my music. I don’t hold well to the idea of mere geometrical placement but the land is one of long rains and low clouds, stolen from the past and lurching unsteadily towards the future. In fact, the place of my childhood no longer exists. It’s an old brick building that has since crumbled. It’s a framework upon which I hang my thoughts and my feelings but it’s impossible for you to see just as my own vision of it has grown dim and unreliable.

My haunts were junk stores, old movie theatres, used book stores, rooms containing boxes and bins of old records and the people who would hang around looking for something exceptional in those dusty catacombs. Most of it was garbage but occasionally the needle would slip into the groove and colorful flowers of music would grow right out of the speakers. The clock would stop and so would the rain and monotony would cease to exist for a while. Most of my life happened internally and this is how it’s always been.

With any luck, my strategic inclusion of my own novice singing alonging butted up against Matty’s own have made you fall in love with his music too.

I am so grateful for artists like Matty who reach deep inside themselves and place palms out to the universe so that the rest of us can experience the ways in which they see the world.  And when their vantage point seems sympathetic to my own, it makes me feel like

I won’t have to face the darkness all alone.

Come to think of it, I think this is why I write.