A playlist? You shouldn't have...

So basically last night turned in to request night. A few friends of mine were at this big party and talked the host into turning on my radio show for the whole party. Needless to say I was bombarded by requests and shout outs for the entire night. I would have liked to have played more of my music, but hey, I had a room full of drunks listening to my show for the first time, can you say fanbase expansion? I caved and played a slew of requests, giving shout outs to my friends at the party, and basically filling the roll of a party DJ. As you can tell by the playlist, I played a lot more mainstream stuff than I did new stuff, but apparently my efforts paid off. This group of 15+ people is going to make a weekly ritual of getting drunk as skunks listening to my radio show. I'll start easing them into some newer less-than-mainstream stuff in the coming weeks. Here's the playlist. Requests are starred, and the ones with #s are songs I played because I knew the crowd at the party would like them.

1. Tomoyasu Hotei - Battle without honor or humanity

2. MC DJ - Chi-town
   

3. #Nas - Can't forget about you

4. Cake - Let me go
   

5. RHCP - Especially in Michigan
   

6. *Muse - Hysteria
   

7. #Green Day - F.O.D.
   

8. #Ben Harper - Excuse me Mr.
   

9. *Led Zeppelin - Black dog
   

10. Ronnie James Dio - Dream on
    

11. *Stevie Ray Vaugn - Little wing
    

12. #Buckwheat Zydeco - Ma 'tit fille
    

13. *...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead - All white
    

14. #Muse - Exo-politics
    

15. *Nas - Hip hip is dead
    

16. #DJ BC - Whatcha want lady?
    

17. *Matisyahu - King without a crown
    

18. *Weezer - Only in dreams
    

19. *Ben Harper - Burn one down
    

20. The Beatles - Norwegian wood
    

21. *Pink Floyd - Hey you
    

22. Jon Frusciante - The past receeds
    

23. #David Bowie - Life on mars
    

24. #Sigur Ros - Staralfur
    

25. *Pink Floyd - The great gig in the sky
    

26. Tupac Ft. Nas - Thugz mansion (Acoustic remix)
    

It's all good music, yes. Would I have played it all anyway...no, simply because I try not to play songs you can hear if you listen to 102.5 THE BEAR for more than an hour.

Tune in next week, I'm setting up a guest DJ hour with my brother and his girlfriend, and they have fantastic taste in music. I'll blog for real this week too, I swear.

A long time coming

I love this town…I think. But I don’t think this is the place for me anymore. I’m in a major I don’t want to be in taking classes that aren’t for me. I’m still where I am because I’m afraid of the drastic change that comes with transferring schools, or studying abroad, or what have you. Right this moment, I want to take the credits I’m accumulated thus far and somehow apply them at another school that actually offers an intensive sound engineering/production degree program. I don’t want the work and money I’ve put into my college education thus far to go completely to waste. I want to transfer to a school that’s going to allow me to throw my heart and soul into my studies, and that means an intensive audio school. I’m investigating several schools. Columbia College in Chicago, McNally Smith School of Music in St. Paul, and the Institute of Production and Recording somewhere in the cities. There are dozens if not hundreds of schools across the country that offer degrees in sound design, but with the way my GPA looks right now, many of them are out of my league, pending some sort of deep conversation and mind-trickery with an admissions officer. I just want to be passionate about school. I haven’t had that feeling in so long, school to me is a task, it’s something I don’t want to do. That’s not how it’s supposed to be. College is supposed to be a stepping stone into a desired life, not simply a hurdle to overcome before life can start.

I feel like I’m finally at a point where I can leave Duluth. Who knows if I’ll feel this way next week, or tomorrow for that matter. But right now, as I write this I feel like I can leave Duluth and everything I love about it, knowing that I might someday come back, or even meet up with the people that make me love Duluth somewhere down the road. Most of the people that make Duluth so great for me are about to leave anyway, if they haven’t already left. I think I’m done with this town, for now. I want to be somewhere else starting after summer. Hell, maybe I’ll go somewhere else for the summer too. Camp is still an option. I could move all my stuff back home to Minneapolis and work at camp for the entire summer, then set up shop in Chicago or Minneapolis come fall. I couldn’t possibly live with my parents, but there are at least a couple of options open to me already as far as living in the cities.

I’ve had this thing against moving to the cities, because so many people seem to be trying to get me to do it. I want to move to the cities because it’s what I want to do, not because people tell me to. I think I’m getting to that point though. There are a lot of appealing things about the cities, and even more appealing things about Chicago. First of all, the school offers Bachelors degree in Audio Arts and Acoustics. Second, I talked to an admissions counselor at great length yesterday, and even with my poor GPA, I stand a very good chance at getting into Columbia as a transfer student, and a lot of my general ed credits will transfer. Third, every single class in the curriculum made me say “ooh, I would love to learn more about that.” I wish I could say the same for my classes at UMD.

This blog was written in two sittings a week and a half apart. It’s a little disjointed, I’ll post a followup today or tomorrow.

A newer, calmer blog

Right. Glad I took care of that. My apologies for the previous post (if you haven't read it, read it first, it's pretty cranky.) It's amazing what a Cuban Cigar, a bit of cognac and a sunrise will do for one's nerves.

I wrote the last blog, tried to sleep, failed. I grabbed the cigar that one of our regulars gave me last night, poured a glass, and set out for the porch. I realized, seeing the first faint glimmer of sunlight peeking out over the trees, that I wasn't going to get to sleep before work at 10am. I decided to drive down to canal park and enjoy the sunrise, which has thus far been the best decision I've made all day.

It started simple.

Starting to see some development.


This is around the time people start making deep, meaningful realizations. I'm glad to say I made a few myself.


Incorporate some scenery for extra special meaningfulness.


And that should just about wrap it up for the visual stimuli.

Twelve tremendous purchases at Perkins and one disheartening and unnecessary discovery later, I'm here blogging after 20 hours of being awake, 12 spent working. Enjoy your Sunday.

I was robbed

I just finished working for 12 hours straight. I made $65 in tips. I am not very happy. In fact, I would make somewhere near that $65 on an above average Saturday night from 8pm till 3am. Today I worked from 3pm till 3am. Today was St. Patrick's day, and the entire fucking city was drunk in my bar and tipping well. We broke every record we've ever set as far as income and tips. But somehow I still made the same amount of money, despite working 5 hours longer, and much, much harder.
To give you an idea of the amount of people who were drinking at our bar tonight: on an average busy Saturday night, we'll go through maybe 4 or 5 kegs of beer, 7 at the most. Tonight we emptied Twenty Five kegs. That is 3,875 pints of beer, not to mention the gallons of hard liquor we went through. The point here is, the bar made a fucking-shit-ton of money tonight (not to be confused with fuck-ton, or shit-ton.)
I would have made somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 tonight had we not brought in a guy who was given the incredibly difficult task of pouring beer. His only job was to pour beers, because that way the bartenders could work faster. His job in no way affected mine, and he did nothing to make mine easier, but for some reason, the managers thought it would be a good idea to give him a cut of my tips, rather than a chunk of cash independent of my income. This asshole (he's a great guy, I'm just mad at the concept of 'him,') worked from 8-2, didn't wash dishes, didn't restock the entire fucking bar at least 4 times, didn't have to wade through the sweaty drunken masses with 48 bottles of beer in his arms, didn't climb over kegs in a cooler, didn't pick up broken glass, didn't get knocked to the ground by a tall ass drunk guy who couldn't see down past his shoulders, didn't have to fucking move from his little area in front of the taps for 6 hours, and he made $15 dollars less than I did, and in half the time.

FUCK

THAT

SHIT

I cannot type that loud enough, I am fucking livid. So instead of splitting tips with one other guy (who worked his ass off, in fact, for 4 hours longer than I did,) I split tips with two other guys, one of whom had next to zero responsibility, and zero fucking risk. His biggest concern was whether or not he was pouring the right beer. Goddamnit, I came into today expecting to earn some serious cash. When I was handed three twenties and a five after working for 12 hours and then waiting around for an hour and half to get my money, I almost broke down in tears. The management then had this idea that throwing the two real barbacks an extra $10 for the day would make everything peachy. Hell, a bar regular gave me that much to give a piece of St. Patties Day Flair to his friend.

I'm so incredibly upset right now. I'm calling the management in the morning and plan to plead my (and the other real barback's) case. This is ridiculous. I worked my ass off today. I gave up the last free night of my Spring Break, on St Patrick's Day no less, to get shouted at and bossed around by 6 different people, to get spilled on, to *insert all that shit I said before,* to pour my every effort into a job, and not even get paid what I deserve for it.

Update: I called the manager and had a long talk with him. I'm still not happy, but some things make some more sense now. There's a chance something will be changed, if not now, then in the future. I'd love to sit down and have a big ol' argument with the entire staff about this though.

Rain Check

I know you're dying to stay up late tonight to listen to 63hz tonight, but I need one more night of spring break debauchery before I go back to the grind of work and class, so no show tonight. If you're looking for a double dosage of hip-hop and R&B (and lets face it, who isn't) Zozo will be covering my show tonight. 4 hours of block-rocking beats? Who are you to resist?

Or just tune in next week.

Over on that hill

This morning I aced a midterm. A small celebration was in order. I’ve been trying to get out on the ice ever since it was safe enough to do so. I left campus and drove all the way to the very end of Park Point down by the airport (yes, there’s an airport out there.) I walked up the chicken wired-in path through the dunes, which had been completely buried in snow/sand drifts, and was greeted with a breathtaking sight…and I forgot my camera, sorry. The actual beach was no more than 40 feet between the dunes and the ice, but the ice pack extended another 60 or so feet until it stopped at a big pressure ridge of ice chunks. There were huge blocks of glassy-clear ice sparkling in the sun…and I forgot my camera, sorry. I started walking out past the pressure ridge when I heard something.

Nothing.

I heard almost nothing. I was standing in the middle of a huge expanse, yet the sound of the city seemed as if to be coming from a car stereo a block away. I was completely enveloped in peaceful quiet. There was a distinct separation between background rumble (city sounds) and foreground noises like the crunch of the freshly fallen snow under my feet, the sound of the blood in my veins (yes you can hear it, you just don’t know you can.) I don’t think I’ve ever been in a place in nature before when it was that silent. Even at camp during the winter there is always the sound of wind in the trees. But out on the lake with no wind, there is nothing nearby to create sound, and a massive carpet of snow to absorb any stray sounds. This is getting nerdier and less poetic, let me backtrack.

Being in nature has always rejuvenated me. Being away from the city life with its smells and sounds and constant action helps me get a feel for the bigger picture. When you’re in the city, you’re wrapped up in it. You live life in a corridor between home, work, school, some favorite restaurants/bars and some friends’ houses. It’s so refreshing to get away from that self contained existence and to be able to look at it as a whole. As I stood a few hundred feet from shore on the ice over Lake Superior, I could look towards the city of Duluth and see my home, my jobs, my friends, my classes, my roommates, my problems, my joys, my concerns, my fears, my life. It was all within my field of view, way over there on that hill. It wasn’t with me on the ice. I was completely removed from my life for those few moments. It gave me an opportunity to consider all of those parts of my life as a single entity.

I didn’t stay there and ponder it for very long; one can only be removed completely for so long. But what I did glean from those few fleeting moments suspended on a sheet of glass between the Northern Sea and the Northern Sun, was that on the whole, life over there on that hill is pretty damn good. When I measure the positives and negatives, I’m beating the house. I might have some useless classes in a major I’m not too excited about, but they’re almost done and I can do whatever the fuck I want to after I finish. I might have some times when I get lonely and down, but I have some amazing friends that I would hide bodies for, and I’m sure they would do the same for me, no questions asked.

Give it a try. Go out on the ice. Look at the city. Look at (almost) your entire existence as it is right now. You’ll get that feeling in your stomach like you’re falling for a split second once you fully realize the concept.

Or don’t go out on the ice. Go to that place that you’ve got that’s completely safe from the rest of your life. No one else in Duluth (or Minneapolis, or Onalaska, WI) knows about it.

Take a few short moments and remove yourself, you’ll be surprised at what it will do for you.

News Flash

Jennie, the girl with the 9-11pm slot on KUMD tonight called me and asked if I could cover her shift. Hell yes I will.

4 Hours of 63hz tonight people, tell your friends. It's a celebration bitches.


103.3 KUMD

9pm-11pm and 1am-3am TONIGHT.

There is messiah, and his name is snow day

The UMD campus will be closed starting at 2pm today, and continuing on through all of Friday and potentially the weekend. I double checked of course, and KUMD will be on air until the usual end of programming. I'll be hiking, and possibly snowshoeing my ass into the studio tonight, and it's going to be a trip on the hike home. Wish me luck, and you'd better be listening, what the hell else are you going to do? You don't have class tomorrow!

103.3KUMD www.kumd.org

Another blog later today, I promise.