|
Daily Pop |
| 31 Dec 2015 |
|
|
|
|
FYI to those navigating to my dedicated LiveJournal page: As of August 2006, I have moved my full-length music-related blog posts off my LJ and onto a dedicated blog, MolanphyPop. My LiveJournal, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} dennis_obell, continues as a going concern for smaller, hopefully more freqeunt items, not all of which will be music-related. I will generally continue to keep posts here public but may decide to friendslock a post from time to time. (Feel free to friend me; be warned that I am usually slow to friend back.)Longtime LJ friends, and all-around friendslist addicts, are encouraged to friend ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif){kind=small} molanphypop, which my wife bradamant has helpfully set set up as a syndication of my blog. However, please leave comments at the MolanphyPop blog, not in the syndicated LJ feed.Additional and much greater thanks should go to bradamant for setting up the entire WordPress blog for me at MolanphyPop and migrating four years' worth of LJ entires over there, complete with comments. These are the advantages of marrying a woman who's both a babe and a geek.Anyway, I hope to continue to see you all at both my LiveJournal and at MolanphyPop. Thanks! |
| 8 Jul 2009 |
|
|
|
|
Thanks to the ongoing generosity of our friend kdot and her family, we spent a lovely weekend on Lake Wallenpaupack in Pennsylvania. After a couple of storms on Thursday and Friday, we had near-flawless weather on both days of the weekend. This was at least our fifth or sixth time out there, and as usual, there was sunning, boating, reading and eating galore. I've posted a small selection of photos (Flickr friends and family only; fear not, fellow weekenders, I stuck to non-bathing-suit shots). But the main reason I wanted to share these pix is this jaw-dropping picture right here, which other than a bit of color brightening was not edited or Photoshopped in any way! We discovered last year in the Poconos that sparklers make interesting patterns when photographed at night, but we'd never tried to spell out anything before. I believe it was either bradamant's or kdot's idea to try spelling "2009," and I took the picture, figuring it would be a noble failure. But you could have knocked me over with a feather when I snapped the first shot and the digital camera's screen showed something like what you see here – I screamed with happy shock. We managed three such shots before the sparklers gave out; this one is the second of the three, with the best-formed numerals. Special props to kdot's sister JL for pulling off the "9," the hardest number to form. |
|
|
|
| 8 Apr 2009 |
|
|
|
|
Hey LJ peeps: Fulfilling a longtime request by bradamant, who made the inarguable point that it was a bad idea to maintain a LiveJournal under our mutual last name, I have reinvented my LJ identity. I am now dennis_obell.Dennis O'Bell, for those who are curious, is a fictional character named in an obscure 1970 Beatles B-side. It's a pseudonym I first adopted 18 years ago in college, devised by my friend Danielle Pelfrey, to whom I'd recently introduced that wacky song. At the time, I actually needed the nom de plume: the school's daily newspaper had a rule that editors couldn't write or work for any other campus publication, and in my junior year I wanted to be able to edit both the daily paper's Arts section and the campus rock magazine. So I did both, and Dennis O'Bell was my name at the latter for one year. I've used it off and on ever since. It was even my handle at Idolator until they started listing us commenters and columnists under our actual names. Anyway, sorry for the confusion, and please carry on like Dennis has been here all along. |
|
|
|
| 22 Jan 2009 |
|
|
|
|
This week, the Village Voice released its annual Pazz and Jop poll of rock critics nationwide. I am back in the poll, after skipping it for two years in favor of the Idolator Pop Poll, which no longer exists (budget cuts, man; I'm just thankful Idolator itself, and my column there, still exist). To no one's surprise, the big P&J winners for 2008 were the critically adored TV on the Radio, with the album Dear Science, and the critically worshipped M.I.A., with the late-blooming single "Paper Planes." I have no complaints with either of these picks, because they match my No. 1 album and single picks exactly—here's my ballot. My close matchup with the final results is unsurprising: I am consistently one of the most "centrist" pollees every year, as measured by a P&J-watching dude named Glenn McDonald who runs the data every year to see who matches the big list the most and the least. This year, I rank No. 2, behind only Rolling Stone critic Melissa Maerz. That's actually a slight drop from last year, when I was No. 1. As I mentioned in this Idolator comment, I never know how embarrassed I should be about my ranking—I'm either a great bellwether for mainstream rock-critic taste or the most pointless critic/pollee ever. I've made the Top 10 of McDonald's "Voter Centricity" list every year I've participated in either Pazz & Jop or the Idolator poll (five years total). Because I can't help the way my tastes run, I've stopped fretting about it and have chosen to joyfully await McDonald's number-crunch as a kind of bonus game. And hey, at least I didn't vote for those nice-but-overrated Fleet Foxes. |
|
|
|
| 5 Dec 2008 |
|
|
|
|
This afternoon, I have been invited back on WNYC radio's Soundcheck with John Schaefer to discuss 2008's top singles and albums. Year-end segments are always fun, and I'm looking forward to a wide-ranging discussion. The program starts at 2 p.m., but my specific segment will start after the newsbreak, at about 2:15. If you're in the New York area, WNYC's on 93.9 FM, and they also stream the show live from their website. I'll be live in the studio, same as my last appearance in September. (No more long-distance phone interviewing for me!) Schaefer is reportedly on vacation today, so I'll be talking with deputy Jacqueline Cincotta. If anyone is interested, I'll post a link later with the audio feed, after they've posted it to the website. Thanks to everyone who listened and responded to my earlier appearances, even long after the fact – the feedback is most encouraging. [Addendum, Sat 6 Dec] As promised, here are some links to the audio WNYC has posted. You can hear the streaming audio here. Or if you have an iTunes account and prefer to download it to your iPod, here's a link to the podcast version (warning: autoloads iTunes). This was my longest segment yet (about 23 minutes), and we covered a lot of ground. The host and I ended up talking more about the current charts than expected, rather than the year in review, but it was good fun anyway. BTW, WNYC seems to keep old shows up on their website seemingly forever. Here are links to my August and September appearances. |
|
|
|
| 13 Nov 2008 |
|
|
|
|
I was going to send this just to bradamant, but since everyone's complaining lately of a dearth of LJ posts, I figured I'd throw it up here. (Sorry, online_stalker, but this subject might not interest you.) Anyway, the news from New York City authorities is that bridge and tunnel traffic is down across the board. Here's the part that interests me: “Less Manhattan employment means less traffic across our facilities,” said David Moretti, acting president of Bridges and Tunnels (also known as the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority), who spoke on Wednesday at a meeting of a committee of the authority’s board. After the meeting, he said that the drop at the Manhattan crossings “seems to coincide with the decline in employment base, and therefore traffic is down for that reason.” ...H. Dale Hemmerdinger, the authority’s chairman, said that the drop might reflect the recent failure of Lehman Brothers and the impact of the economic crisis at other financial-sector companies, whose top executives often live in the suburbs. “They would be the highest paid guys and gals who probably would drive and not take the train,” he said. This makes intuitive sense to me. I've been seeing a lot more crowding on my subway commute, and it hasn't abated recently. One of the many reasons I don't go into work until 10 or 10:30 (besides my laziness, and my boss's glorious flexibility) is I hate morning rush-hour crowds. I'm also blessed with an express-train line, the Q, that never seems to get as horribly packed as the 4/5 through the Upper East Side or the F through Park Slope/Carroll Gardens/Cobble Hill. On the Q, I used to be able to take the train as early as 9ish and stand a chance of getting a seat, or at least tons of standing room. However, I noticed about six to nine months ago that, even if I commuted after 10, the subway cars were crowded enough that all the seats were taken, with plenty of people standing besides. Clearly, this was the symptom of $4 gas: people who formerly would have driven (I have a couple of deep-outerborough cousins who think they're too good to take the train) were sucking it up and switching to the subway. Yet here we are two months after the post-Lehman crisis began, and my train's still pretty crowded. The working-class peeps who switched to the subway are sticking with the frugality ritual, even though gas has dropped nearly two bucks. And I guess the type of folks who are my clients—the mega-white-collar types—are disappearing, but that's invisible to me. I dunno, I guess I'm throwing this out there—has anyone else noticed this? |
|
|
|
| 30 Oct 2008 |
|
|
|
|
Four years ago today, I was lucky enough to tie the knot with a lovely-and-brilliant Pennsylvanian in her home burgh. She doesn't seem to have changed her mind about the whole thing, amazingly. Four-year anniversaries—under the traditional, non-DeBeers-fueled list—are marked by gifts of silk or linen. I think, when we exchange gifts tonight, we're both doing the former. 'Cuz I mean, linen...meh. This is going down as a pretty excellent week in the world of bradamant-and-dennis_obell. Her (greater) hometown has a national sports championship for the first time in a quarter-century. We're having a tasty anniversary dinner tonight. We're visiting her hometown friends in Philly and its environs this weekend, including a powwow of boyfriends/husbands who've never hung out together before. The only thing that would make the seven-day stretch that started last night complete would be if, next Tuesday...STOP. Scratch that. We got married three days before Election Day in '04, we left the country for our honeymoon feeling hopeful and...well, we remember how that all worked out. |
|
|
|
| 14 Aug 2008 |
|
|
|
|
Posting live from Croatia, from an Istrian hill town called Motovun...remember I said bradamant and I would be "off the grid" for two weeks? Think again: I am going to be interviewed live on the radio this afternoon (Thursday, 14 August), on WNYC's Soundcheck with John Schaefer. They will be calling me from New York, and I´ll be talking from Croatia. The topic is what I discussed in this Idolator column. Assuming no glitches with the land line I'm using, I'll be live starting around 2:15-20 p.m. Eastern time. If you can't catch the live broadcast, I imagine there will be a stream/podcast on the Internet later. I´ll notify people about that when we are back home. |
|
|
|
| 4 Aug 2008 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 19 Jun 2008 |
|
|
|
|
Guys, do me a favor: go to this Idolator page and vote for "American Boy" by Estelle featuring Kanye West. You'll be doing a solid for me, helping me maintain my bragging rights around my music-blogging homebase. You'll also be defeating an army of hipster-douche MySpacers. What could be better? For the last three weeks or so, my editor Maura has been running a Songs of Summer '08 bracket, and today is the finals. Just before she launched the contest, she asked us regulars if we would each pick a song or two to compete and do little 100-word writeups on 'em. I picked Duffy's "Mercy" (made it through the first round, went down in the quarter-finals) and Estelle's "American Boy." It's funny, I love the Estelle track, but I almost didn't think of it until the last minute, after I'd already claimed the Duffy, and to my amazement no one had claimed it yet. Now, it's a day away from winning the whole thing. That is, unless it's defeated by the tweaky, annoying "Coconut Juice" by the Soulja Boy–like pop-rapper Tyga (who is also rumored to be a cousin of the lead singer of the obnoxious Gym Class Heroes, in case you need another reason to hate him). Every song we've put up against "Coconut Juice" has seemed to be coasting to victory, until an army of MySpace fans of Tyga come marching in an hour or two into the voting and pile in dozens of votes. The song is not the worst thing in the world – it's just dopey and uninspired, a reimagined pseudo-cover of the old Nilsson novelty hit "Coconut" (you know, the "lime in the coconut/drank 'em both up" ditty, which was revived in the '90s in Reservoir Dogs). Feel free to listen to it via the YouTube link on the contest page, but trust me, it's weak. And my girl Estelle has released a perfect summer song: breezy, cool, catchy. It deserves to win. Help a brother out. |
|
|
|
|
|
LiveJournal for Chris.
|
||||||||||||
