Music to My Ears

I recently went on a mini-music download binge and came across some new interesting stuff to listen to. I read a review of Karen Elson's (Mrs. Jack White to those of you who don't know) debut album "The Ghost Who Walks", that prompted me to download it in it's entirety and amazingly enough the girl can sing! Damn multi-talented genetic freaks of nature! Her voice is what I would describe as haunting, and the songs have creepy lyrics and sounds, all in all I like it! It has an old timey quality to it too that I love, especially the song "100 Years From Now". Sounds like you could have played that track off of a Victrola or whatever they used way back in the day. If you want something a little different and dark, this is a fun album to explore.

Next I was in the mood for something a little more light and fun, so I downloaded VV Brown's latest album, "Traveling Like the Light". It has a fun girl group feel to it that makes you wanna sing and dance along to her sassy lyrics about heartbreak and revenge. Oh sweet revenge.

Then I had to download the Dirty Dancing Soundtrack, which was $5 on Amazon. So worth it! I love the movie, and I LOVE the soundtrack. Perfect cleaning the house/singing/dancing by yourself music. Listening to it made me want to plan my fantasy 80's dance movie night. Fantasy because I don't know who I could convince to come to it and not hate me forever afterwards. But ignoring that small detail the lineup would include: Footloose, Dirty Dancing and of course Flashdance. Maybe one at a time would be more realistic...

The last new music of importance that I discovered was the new album from The Dø , "A Mouthful". They are a French/Finnish duo who have some fairly experimental sounding songs on their ginormous 18-track album. There's a pretty wide variety of songs found here, the singer's voice is kind of child-like and sentimental, which I like. She kind of reminds me very slightly of Bjork. But only slightly. The track Unissasi Laulelet an awesome tribal beat to it. I think (Holly, maybe you can confirm) she is singing in Finnish. One of the other more interesting tracks is Queen Dot Kong, a sort of rap-circus mish-mash that is really weird, but also really awesome. It seems like every month I am downloading something new from a French artist. Viva la France I guess!

Oh new music does make my heart sing!

San Diego Zoo

While visiting my sister Lizzie in San Diego, I spent an afternoon at the Zoo. I hadn't been there since I was a kid and it's amazing how maany more displays and animals they have now. Most importantly the giant pandas!!! My other favorite animal at the zoo was the hippos, they were swimming around in the water and coming up to the plexi-glass window and showing their giant teeth. They put on a really good show and I got some fun pictures of them under water. I only had four hours to wander and check out animals, I think I could easily spend the whole day just watching all the intersting and different animals they have. The following are some of my favortie animal pics.

New York

Last month I spent exactly one week in New York City visiting my old college friend Dre. She was busy doing construction on a new bar that is now open so I had a lot of time to wander the streets, people watch and take the city in. I ate lots of delicious food, saw lots of great street art and generally had an awesome time. I think my favortie thing about the city was all the outdoor cafes and restaurants. The weather was warm and balmy, my first encounter with an east coast summer. I can see why people in the south just sit on their porches drinking sweet tea in the summer; it's too hot to do anything else! That humidity just zaps all your motivation. But it being so hot, made a great excuse to stop in and grab a refreshing drink anywhere that looked interesting.

At night I went to a free comdey show called the Big Terrific Show at the Lovin Cup Cafe. It was their two year anniversary and they had Zach Galifianakis as the headliner, but since it was a free show in a fairly small space, it got real hot real quick and we had to bail for fear of passing out. We got to see several hilarious stand up ceomedians though, a great thing to check out if you find yourself in the brooklyn area.

Another night we went out and saw the band Jác after watching a rough cut of their music video that Dre's girlfriend Kate produced with their neighbor. It was awesome to see what creative and motivtaed people can do. The band played at Trash Bar (yes that's a real bar)and they give out free tater tots. Believe it or not this is big a selling point for me. They were delicious tots. The show was great and the night ended with fried green beans. Yum!

Here are some highlights from my new york city walkabout in picture form.