I can’t figure out too much about her, except she makes fake stock photography, goes to noise shows, and does remixes of Oneohtrix Point Never. I don’t know if she is “real” or not, but right now I don’t care, because this video is definitely real:

“Born This Way” is for:
gay men, straight women
theists
poor people
rich people
black people
white people
beige people
cholas, orientals
Lebanese people
Orientals
the disabled (?)
lesbians, transgenders

“Born This Way” is not for:
straight male atheists
Israel-born Jews
bigamists
cholos
the middle class
professional athletes
Eurasians
American Indians
switch hitters

I caught “…Baby One More Time” on MTV or VH1 or CMT this morning and was struck by Britney Spears’ over-enunciation throughout the whole beautiful thing. The director must have been like “Listen Brit, if you don’t stick your tongue out on every syllable no one will know what song you’re singing.” And Britney was like “Okay that’s why you are the director.” EDIT: She does this all the time. I never noticed!

Tracklist:
Acid Washed – “Acid Washed (Danger Remix)”
Hot Chip, Bernard Sumner & Hot City – “Didn’t Know What Love Was” (Single Version)
Abe Vigoda – “Throwing Shade”
Rye Rye – “Sunshine” (Feat. M.I.A.)
Gala Drop – “Rauze”
Deerhunter – “Helicopter (Diplo & Lunice Remix)”
Runners – “Stay Frosty”
Seeland – “Black Dot, White Spider (Ghostape Remix)”
Acid Washed – “Acid Washed (Danger Remix)”

Another mix! Here’s the tracklist:

Sistol “On The Bright Side”
Wolf Gang “Back To Back”
Psychobuildings “No Man’s Land”
Thread Pulls “Weight”
Lay Bac “Stay Out Tonight”
Computer Magic “Hiding From Our Time”
Botany “Waterparker”
Gold Panda “Same Dream China”
North Highlands “Steady Steady”

The transitions are much more abrupt this time, because I wanted to use all these songs but the tempos were all over the place (from like, 75 bpm to 150 bpm). That Wolf Gang song is my favorite, thought it came out earlier this year. I added in an extra beat and sped it up more than it should be, because Mark heard the faster version first and said he preferred it when I tried to slow it back down. Great song either way. I had on the playlist I was working from (before I laid the whole thing out) playing in the background when people were over for Mad Men, and four people asked what that song was. Kind of a big deal, considering they were mesmerized by my Halo game at the same time. I really like all these songs, but that Wolf Gang song is the kind of song you hear and then go home and tell your roommate you met someone new.

Sufjan Stevens “Too Much”
Matthew Dear “You Put A Smell On Me”
Escort “Cocaine Blues”
Small Black “Photojournalist”
Aby Ngana Diop “DIEULEUL-DIEULEUL”
Sugar & Gold “Bodyaches”
Local Natives “Wide Eyes (Teen Daze Remix)
Tone Tank & Scott Thorough “Crack Selector” (Feat. Kool A.D. of Das Racist)
Pao Pao “Liberia” (Feat. Prizes)
ceo “Come With Me”
Sufjan Stevens “Too Much”

I mentioned, briefly, that I like to tag music as I’m listening to new things. I have been tagging some things that, to me, would just sound good on a mix. Here’s that mix in one almost-continuous beat-matched track, with some extra beats and things thrown in. I based this around Sufjan Stevens’ “Too Much,” which I like very much right now. I want to do this once a week, but we’ll see how it goes. Let me know if you’re interested in having this as a larger, higher bitrate MP3, or even divided by tracks into a gapless album, because I can definitely do that.

PS — Too Many Teeth was the original name of my blog / domain name, before I had to become more ‘professional.’

Right now I’m working through a playlist of several hundred tracks from different sources: Email attachments, CD rips, RSS feeds, Etc. A lot of this listening is a job. And like any job, I’ve thought about how to organize and streamline it. It would take a lot of time and screen shots to go through the applescripts and filters I’ve written for iTunes, but I thought I would share a few basic ideas/tips that I use for getting through the pile. This works best for getting through lots of unknown/new artists, tracks you’re curious about but not committed to reviewing or writing about or even keeping yet.

1. Create a folder or playlist and treat it like an inbox.
Just like it’s inconvenient to check multiple applications and sites for your various email accounts, it’s inconvenient to stream music on Hype Machine, find MP3s scattered around your laptop/iPod, hit play inside every RSS feed in your feedreader, etc. At least for me it is. So I have one playlist on iTunes that anything new must go to. I download anything I want to listen to, rip CDs and put them in that playlist, add podcast MP3 streams, etc., and it all goes into that folder, which automatically adds tracks to the playlist.

This doesn’t work for stream-only tracks, which is probably why I don’t usually listen to stream-only promos.

2. Decide what happens to music once you listen to it. Make rules.
Is one listen enough to decide whether to keep something or research the band a little more? Is five listens? How about keeping, deleting, or re-listening to tracks once you’ve rated or tagged them as worthwhile? This is especially important for the blind listens, when you’re just trying to discover new stuff.

3. Make a smart playlist with those rules and filters. This is the playlist you will listen to.
My playlist says that tracks must come from my inbox playlist, and that they must be unrated (plus six other, less important rules). This is my “new music” playlist. This works best in iTunes, but I know other players have filters.

4. Make yourself a ‘trash’ playlist to go with your inbox playlist.
This is how you know what to delete. Make rules for this as well — if you skip a song more than three times, if you rate it below two stars, etc. Once in a while, go to this playlist, select all the tracks, hit option + delete, and get rid of the tracks permanently. I’m not precious about keeping whole albums, so this doesn’t bother me, of course.

(Bonus Tip) If you’re using iTunes, listen to your playlist through the iTunes DJ function.
If you make “unrated tracks” part of your filter criteria, then the song you are listening to will stop playing if you rate it during playback. If you are listening to the iTunes DJ, it won’t stop playback. Just set the “Source:” (bottom left corner) to the playlist you need to get through to work this way.

(Bonus Tip) Download the NPR script from Doug’s Applescripts
Here’s the link, but it’s down right now. This script will make it so that, once an hour, iTunes will go to NPR.org, download the latest five-minute hourly news update, and queue it after the currently playing track. It’s like creating your own NPR station. I call mine WBRR (Worst Blog Rock Radio).

There’s so much more I could mention about tags, filters, applescripts, hot keys (I made it so I don’t have to switch to iTunes to rate tracks, just hit option + apple + number to rate tracks) that I think makes all this even easier, but I got it all from Googling. You can too. Plus, that stuff is so specific to the way I listen to music, I doubt it would be useful to that many people. Anyway, I hope the rather general (though, admittedly, iTunes specific) things above help you. EDIT: I’ll try and do another post soon with download links to scripts and actions that couple help. Just have to organize and upload them.

The piece starts out with this:

Before we begin, let us be clear: We speak not of the Rivers Cuomo that was, nor of the Rivers Cuomo that is, nor yet of the Rivers that shall be. We speak, now, of the Platonic ideal of a Rivers Cuomo: The Rivers Cuomo you have never met, nor ever can meet, nor can ever be sued by (subsequent to writing a blog post that uses his name quite a lot), but who lives, nevertheless, within your brain. Specifically, if you happen to have grown up in the 1990s, and are heterosexual, and also a girl.

And then breaks up into headings like “Seduction” “Consummation” “Couples Therapy” etc. and spends a lot of time exploring the idea of Rivers Cuomo as the secret boyfriend we ladies wished we had at some point in our pre/teen years.

I had to turn off the rest, because that is not how I related to Pinkerton at all when I first heard it, or when I listened to it in college. Obviously my relationship to Pinkerton is complicated, but not because I loved him then discovered he was a creep, or even because I related to him and then was repulsed (further complicating things, of course, is that I am still working on the 33 1/3 Pinkerton book, to be published posthumously). But it is a bit closer to the latter. The latter is harder, and tons more interesting to me, because if I believe that I was a Pinkerton fan because I related to it (him? Or the him that is part bio, part stolen from Harvard classmates, part fictional character, part Capt Pinkerton), and now it makes me uncomfortable, then I have to work on the reasons why I related to it. But I do not feel cheated by Pinkerton or Cuomo.

Also I have a lot of notes (some on books, some song-by-song reactions, some free-associated, some labored over) about Pinkerton. I found this from some early notes (I think I was trying to sketch out why I thought I was qualified to write about Pinkerton):

I understand how desire can transform into hate or apathy. I understand that sometimes a collection of charcteristics [sic] can stand in for any sort of real attraction. I understand desire as purely a way to satisfy a lack of honesty or to fill in a self-loathing. To let that self-loathing form an inverse proportion to a capacity for love.

Also later, a pretty cryptic line: ” I never found an outlet for that paralysis.”

The paralysis above refers to the further above, a basic relating-to-boys paralysis, not my Pinkerton fandom. My natural reaction in middle school to hearing Nirvana and Weezer was to buy a guitar and insist on lessons, not crush on guys that looked like Kurt Cobain and Rivers Cuomo.

I will stop here, since I have the book to write. I will say, however, that I haven’t written anything so far about My Personal Relationship To Pinkerton. I’m sure it’ll show up, but it’s still not the most interesting aspect of Pinkerton for me, so I doubt it would be to anyone else. I’ll re-read the piece this weekend.