Black Mountain — “Old Fangs”

Is it still cool to like Black Moun­tain? I strayed on their last album, but I’m will­ing to come back to the fold if it sounds like this, although I’m not hear­ing the OMG Black Sab­bath freak­out peo­ple have sug­gest­ed else­where. I think I like the Two Lane Black­top vibe of their new video, though. Maybe the ’70s revival isn’t dead yet?

(I hon­est­ly don’t know any­thing about the new album as I fell off the Jagjaguwar/Secretly Canadian/Dead Oceans pro­mo list some­where along the line and nev­er reme­died that oversight.)

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Absorbing “Treme”

It’s way too late on a school night for me to real­ly dig into every­thing I thought about while watch­ing David Simon’s lat­est opus, “Treme,” on HBO. What I have been col­lect­ing, how­ev­er, are oth­er peo­ples’ feel­ings about the show and I am pos­i­tive­ly fas­ci­nat­ed by the response.

I’ll start with the obvi­ous. Lots of peo­ple hat­ed the show! For all sorts of rea­sons! Some of them deserved, some not so much! I’m sym­pa­thet­ic; I enjoyed ‘The Wire’ plen­ty, but only after my wife con­vinced me of its bril­liance and even then I har­bored some angst about the cult of David Simon. He’s arro­gant! Read this great post-mortem with the essen­tial Alan Sepin­wall and you’ll see what I mean.

There are more glib, enter­tain­ing respons­es to the show. I loved the Awl’s shout­ing match. It embod­ies my inter­nal dia­logue — yes, dia­logue — on the show almost too per­fect­ly to admit.

I adored David Raposa’s plea to recon­sid­er trou­bled aca­d­e­m­ic Creighton Bur­nette, even if I nev­er espe­cial­ly cared for his char­ac­ter, par­tic­u­lar­ly because, as a recov­er­ing aca­d­e­m­ic who labored in the lan­guage arts, I can under­stand his pas­sion for oth­ers to share his view, to see the city as he does, to expe­ri­ence it in the rich body of work that has been pro­duced in and about New Orleans.

The only con­clu­sion I can safe­ly draw from all of this is that I need to watch the entire series again, as soon as pos­si­ble, prob­a­bly between episodes of “Mad Men” and “Dead­liest Catch” or what­ev­er you watch in the sum­mer months that isn’t Step Broth­ers on on demand.

(It goes with­out say­ing that I’m one of those peo­ple who LUUURRVEES THE MUSICCCCCC. I lis­ten to it often via the Songs from Treme Tum­blr, which I run through trnt­bl here.)

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Charlie’s First Birthday

Char­lie’s First Birth­day, orig­i­nal­ly uploaded by J T. Ram­say.

What an amaz­ing day! We cel­e­brat­ed Char­lie’s big day with 60 of his clos­est friends and fam­i­ly. Char­lie’s birth­day had a music theme and rest assured that he’s spend­ing his time turn­ing all the love­ly instru­ments he received into per­cus­sion as best he can.

I may be let­ting the cat out of the bag, but pic­nic area #2 on Lemon Hill in Fair­mount Park is a gem; it was like 90 degrees, but the area was nice­ly shad­ed from the morn­ing until well into the after­noon. It was great for stay­ing cool while being out­doors, which makes life eas­i­er on adults and babies alike.

Spe­cial thanks to friends and fam­i­ly who lent a hand in mak­ing Char­lie’s birth­day extra spe­cial. We could­n’t have done it with­out you!

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I Need a New WordPress Theme!

Clean­r’s been great to me. Taught me the val­ue of a clean inter­face, with dead sim­ple nav­i­ga­tion. The prob­lem? It’s not sim­ple enough. Not a year goes by that I don’t real­ize how impor­tant it is to present infor­ma­tion com­plete­ly free from noise when­ev­er pos­si­ble. What does that mean? An end to two-col­umn theme, at least for me.

Thus, I throw myself at the mer­cy of the Inter­net to help me find the fol­low­ing: an ele­gant one-col­umn theme with dead sim­ple nav­i­ga­tion and a beau­ti­ful­ly inte­grat­ed “fol­low” suite where I can plug in links to my Twit­ter, Flickr, and oth­er accounts. To be per­fect­ly hon­est, if Flavors.me offered some­thing akin to Tum­blr, I’d jump in a heartbeat.

Why not Tum­blr, you ask? Too insid­ery for my tastes. Sure, I don’t try to gen­er­ate bat­ty pageviews here at Kens­ing­ton Blues, but I’m not try­ing to impress an arma­da of fol­low­ers either. Influ­ence ped­dling is not some­thing I want to get too wrapped up in out­side of work, if you catch my drift. More impor­tant­ly, I have yet to find a Tum­blr theme that does­n’t make actu­al words seem like unwel­come guests on the page. I think Tum­blr’s great for meme gen­er­a­tion and is home to a lot of fun stuff on the web, but I just don’t think I can com­mit to Tum­blr as my sole out­let online. (Don’t even get me start­ed about main­tain­ing sep­a­rate chan­nels in my per­son­al life.)

Hav­ing said all that, I do appre­ci­ate Tum­blr’s ele­gance. Be gone, use­less blogroll! No one clicks on you any­way! Good­bye, archives! The peo­ple will use search instead! You get the picture.

Ide­al­ly, I’d love to strip the extra­ne­ous ele­ments out of this theme and adapt it for my pur­pos­es. If you’re the sort of per­son who reads this and thinks that is pos­si­ble, let me know!

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A Tale of Two Upgrades

I’ve been pret­ty adamant about how much I love my iPhone. Since Char­lie joined us last year, it’s been my go-to device for all things Inter­net and com­mu­ni­ca­tion. I still break out my much maligned Mac­book for the heavy duty usage, but the iPhone does what I need for the most part.

It’s an old, 2G iphone that came out in ’08. It’s banged up a bit, but the screen’s still intact, which is more than I can say for most iPhones I’ve seen of that vin­tage. I near­ly jumped to the 3G when it was first announced. What can I say, I have a thing for GPS! But now I’m glad I did­n’t. iPhone 4 is the device I’ve been wait­ing for. Can’t wait to get my mitts on it. The new cam­era, com­plete with HD video, makes it per­fect for tak­ing on vaca­tion. Every­thing about it sounds like the phone peo­ple start­ed imag­in­ing once they held and played with the iPhone when it first launched.

Did I pre-order mine? No. Why, you ask? Because of AT&T. What a night­mare! Do I qual­i­fy for unlim­it­ed data at $30 per month? Yes, I do! But do I real­ly need that much? How does this affect the plan I cur­rent­ly share with my wife? There are so many ques­tions about how to get the appro­pri­ate plan that won’t result in gazil­lion page sur­prise bills at the end of the month. Fun!

Buried beneath the inces­sant iPhone 4 cov­er­age was the intro­duc­tion of a brand, spankin’ new Xbox 360! It’s qui­eter, mean­ing I won’t have to set the sub­ti­tles for every movie I watch on the thing. It has wi-fi, which means I won’t have to use a wonky adapter that did­n’t work well enough to keep Net­flix Watch Instant­ly titles from buffer­ing non­stop. But that’s not all: word is that Red Ring of Death will be a thing of the past! Glo­ry be! The best part? I can sell what I have right now for $205 at GameStop, which gets me with­in strik­ing dis­tance of the $299 price tag.

I should have both of these items in house by the end of the month. I can’t wait!

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