#34 – Dave Matthews Band

- Roy Peter Clark teaches you about the serial comma. Read it and learn, friends and scribes.

- It annoys me that I have missed the Newport Folk Festival four years in a row. I’m going next year, damnit! Stereogum has pictures.

- Best iPhone app: I am rich. It costs $999.99, and doesn’t do anything but display a glowing red ruby. Genius.

- Today’s horrifyingly stupid product: Eyelid jewelery! Yes folks, now you too can dangle miscellaneous things from your contact lenses.

- Hey hipsters: How about this for vintage? A pair of Levi’s from the 1890s.

- Skip business school and earn the “personal MBA” by reading the books on Josh Kaufman’s 77 best list. Sweet. Seems I’m already on that track. Oh wait, Pitchfork’s News and Iris Murdoch aren’t on Kaufman’s list?

- Horrifying chart showing how much Americans have changed the daily diet since 1970. [NYT via kottke]

- Cool music video from Bat for Lashes [thanks, mikefro]

- Perfect performance of Blue Ridge Mountains by Fleet Foxes, if you can stand Letterman’s terrible introduction:

Yesterday I had a bizarre altercation on Boston’s Green Line. Given that they have no real standard for boarding people since introducing the CharlieCard two years ago, I walked in through one of the doors and selected a nice, sunsoaked seat in the rear of the train.

Of course, two minutes after all the doors closed the siren from Revere operating the train demanded that I come forward and tap my card to prove I’m an upstanding citizen, yada yada.

So I do this, leaving my leather messenger bag on the seat. I beam a tellingly apologetic smile at the conductor, who responds with a cough that sounds like motor oil mixed with Carlton 100s, and mosey on back to my warm spot in the sun.

Upon returning, I watch a girl my age throw my messenger back to the floor and plop down right where I was sitting. She gave me a look that said nothing and everything all at once: “What?,” simultaneously installing her headphones as I stood next to her, suited and lightly perspiring.

So the lesson here is: one idle messenger bag does not a person’s seat make, at least if you live along Beacon Street.

- Fleet Foxes are dominating the interwebs. Stereogum offered its praise, and Pitchfork put up a few videos on P4kTV. I prefer some home movies shot at Schuba’s:

- Howie Day is doing okay, if this performance from mid-July is any indication. Hopefully the new album is a bit of a return to form for him:

- As predicted, Ryan Adams & the Cardinals announced a small fall tour with nods to a new album due out “at some point” during the fall. I’m catching them at the BofA pavilion in Boston, but you should try to see them at one of the more obscure venues.

Also, in case you were wondering, Ryan is still culturally relevant and alive:

Regardless of varied judgments as to my cultural relevance, i am thankfully alive and exercising my joy in creating. i only hope anyone who hears, reads or sees any of my contributions will permit the work to speak where i cannot.

via the dot com

Dear Chicago – Ryan Adams & the Cardinals (7/29/07, Chicago Theater via archive.org)

- Sasha Frere-Jones has a piece in this week’s New Yorker with a near-perfect subtitle: “Coldplay’s expanding gas.” Settling comfortably somewhere between cautious praise and exhaustion, Mr. Frere-Jones hits Chris Martin and cohorts square on the head when he reflects on the band’s recent free concert at Madison Square Garden:

There Martin was, onstage in his Little Bummer Boy outfit, skipping around and waving his fists. Except the crowd wasn’t going wild, and the music wasn’t calling for a celebration. Though the audience was obviously delighted to see Coldplay appear, the energy in the room remained fairly controlled throughout the set, even dipping to indifference at points. Which made Martin’s moves seem that much more canned. It felt as if he’d done the entire show in a mirror, down to the self-deprecating wisecracks. In one of his increasingly suspect apologies, Martin told his American fans, “We come over here, we steal your women.” That’s right. If anyone in the audience had forgotten, Chris Martin is married to an actress named Gwyneth Paltrow. She’s American. Maybe you’ve heard of her. No? Well, did you know that “Viva la Vida” went to No. 1? No? It’s O.K.—Martin told us, by way of thanking us.

No, dude, thank you.

- Daytrotter has an interview with and the requisite perfect performance from Bon Iver. Please read and listen. Here’s a bit of their praise for Justin’s work:

If you hang a dirty, stinky shirt or pair of pants in a closet for long enough, they don’t stink anymore. It’s the same principle – in a way – that’s incorporated into the touching and heartrending work that Vernon wrote and recorded for For Emma, Forever Ago, a record that is as stunning in its natural grace and shape as any that’s come into this world in the last five years, maybe longer.

Also in the New York Times.

Mr. Matthew Pond

So I have to correct my previous post about matt pond PA, my favorite band. They are not going through any kind of pseudo breakup, but rather fighting the good fight as plain old matt pond PA. This according to the affable Mike at Altitude Records:

I have been fielding calls and e-mails from nervous fans wondering about the status of matt pond PA. MATT POND PA HAS NOT BROKEN UP! In fact, the band is in the studio this summer working on new material, of which there is plenty! The band is doing all of their own recording and mixing this time around (guitarist/keyboardist Chris Hansen is a seasoned studio engineer), and the songs I have heard so far are bright, clear and gorgeous, if I may say so myself. If all goes according to plan, you can look for some new songs as early as this fall!

Great news! The Dark Leaves did have a MySpace page, but it has since been removed. Glad to hear it. I didn’t like the name The Dark Leaves, anyway.

Measure 3 – matt pond PA

Just some really great songs I’ve been listening to recently:

Young Love – Mystery Jets

Elizabeth – Ryan Adams & The Cardinals 

Ragged Wood – Fleet Foxes

Re: Stacks – Bon Iver

Brand New Colony – Ben Gibbard

Sleepy head – Passion Pit

Weird Fishes – Radiohead

[early morning commuters image courtesy of Mark Daniel Lowen]

I’m on vacation in Florida and will return shortly. Here I am outside of the nauseating Star Tours ride in MGM:

About to hurl

I must admit, I lied. I told you I wasn’t going to get an iPhone 3G. I kicked and screamed and cried about AT&T’s price gouging on the device, and bemoaned the lack of “new” features just because I have a blog and therefore am entitled to a little whining. 

But thanks to the miracle of eBay and a little common-sense concept disguised in fancy economist jargon called profit margins, I am the proud owner of the aerodynamically organ-like 3G. 

Like brothers on a hotel bed, except one of them is going to live with some lady in Canada.

If you are a current owner (“early adopter”), you might want to think about selling yours on eBay. The bubbly concierge at the Boylston Street store told me that prices are only going to increase on used original iPhones, but that was before anyone figured out how to unlock the 3G. 

Do you need an iPhone 3G? No way. The 2.0 software update should’ve made your old iPhone kick some serious ass. How cool is Remote, or Urbanspoon, or the program that turns your eye into a myriad of shapes when you hold it up to the camera? In fact, the 3G really doesn’t improve anything — except voice clarity. The people I call can actually understand what I’m saying, I get reception in essential places like my apartment in Boston, and I needn’t worry about the occasional gust of wind on Beacon Hill killing the mood. Still – if you can sell an original iPhone, get twice the amount of cash required to by a new one, and can stomach AT&T’s ridiculous plans for data devices, then I say divide and conquer. 

As of this writing, 8gb unlocked iPhones from the first generation are selling for nearly $500 on eBay. $500 for a year old product! I have one of these in my basement in Delaware. Think it’s worth anything?

- Thrillist sends you a daily email and tells you how to be cool, regardless of what city you live.

- New Death Cab video for “Cath…” One of four songs on the new album that are absolutely outstanding (the other three being Grapevine Fires, Bixby and No Sunlight).

- Blackberry etiquette reaches all time low for Boston rental agent:

Hi we can definetly set up a time for Saturday I just have a couple questions to see if I have any other listings that might work for you what is the maximum you guys can spend on rent what parts of town would you like to be in anything you can tell me about what your looking for would be very helpful thanks and I hope to hear back from you soon

- Sub Pop, the best record label around, turns 20 years old! I wish they would do another free iTunes sampler. Last year’s was superb, and Brooklyn Vegan linked us to their Single’s Club, but it’s $75, and my AT&T bill is too much to afford that. Damn.

- 25 well designed book covers. Cool. [EW via Kottke]

- Oobject is “…like a Billboard chart for gadgets”

- Google’s treading on Second Life’s territory with Lively, a new avatar based virtual world app due out later this year. [WSJ]

- Wind power guy T. Boone Pickens (who happens to have the best name I’ve ever seen) is using Facebook to drum up support for his interesting campaign.

- Mad Atoms wonders what will happen when the record store clerk – an iconic fixture in society – finally dies. Some potential replacements include sushi chefs or the “long haired asshole” at Cinefile.

- My Morning Jacket is going Ryan Adams on us (har har funny prolific musician joke har) by working on a follow up to Evil Urges a month or two after it came out. Nice.

Coming soon – these daily links are getting a little too disorganized for my OCD tastes, so all 5 of you that read this are going to start seeing a breakout of links between miscellany and music stuff. Don’t be alarmed.  

I hate AT&T. The service is horrendous, the EDGE network is a joke, the customer service abysmal, and the website impossibly confusing. The meters don’t update correctly to show my voice usage, they track data as though I should actually care how many gigs I’ve transferred on my unlimited data plan, I can’t receive pictures or media texts on my iPhone because they won’t enable the technology, etc.

But nothing irks me more than the “but what about us!?” stance they’ve taken with the release of the iPhone 3G. Rather than working with Apple to position the device at a price point that works for both companies, AT&T is taking its sweet revenge on new adopters by slamming them with high monthly fees. Combined with Apple’s sexy marketing, this is a recipe for consumer misbehavior of epic proportions.

Worse are the confusing rules regarding current iPhone owners who want to upgrade. You can upgrade, but only once, and after that you’ll have to pay to break the contract, rather than being afforded the option of just renewing several years out.

Apple has shown that it can revolutionize any device or service – and in most cases sets the standard for design, ease of use, and power of platform. The problem is that it is forced to work with companies that share only the vision of big profit – not of products that work the way they are supposed to, or rates that make sense, or excellent network coverage.

When Apple debuted the $.99 song in the iTunes Music Store, critics dimissed the plan as a failure; a ridiculous price to pay for a single song. Now most online music outlets clock in at around that – those that offer less, like eMusic, have poor selection and have trouble attracting ‘subscribers.’ Apple did it right from the start, and other companies floundered after trying to recuperate from years of poorly orchestrated subscriber-based and usage-based music programs.

Yes, the iPhone is a revolutionary device. This is the stuff from which James Bond is made. But AT&T believes too fervently that they’ve found gold. The nickel-and-diming of the plan options by AT&T makes the iPhone 3G a dangerous buy for people who think they can afford it. Be ready to shell out at least $75-100/month.  I won’t be surprised when the debt chasing and missed payments catch up to the billing folks at AT&T, making the overhead of supporting this device too costly in the long run.

This consumer misbehaver won’t be buying the iPhone 3G this time around. I’ll keep my logical plan and still scratch-free old skool iPhone. Here’s hoping it lasts another 2 years. I’m waiting for Steve Jobs to get so fed up with AT&T that he just buys it, shuts it down, and opens Apple Wireless – with bars in places you didn’t even know existed.