Andy Gapin

I got to see MC Lars at Asbury Lanes last night. It was a pretty good time overall. I had never been there, but the venue is a bowling alley and you can bowl during the show which was awesome. It’s an old bowling alley so you have to keep score yourself on paper. This doesn’t work when no one in your group knows how to do it. We mostly just messed around and had fun instead of bowling for real. Overall, it was a pretty neat venue, not the best I’ve been to, the sound was kind of crappy, but it could have been worse. Out of the two bowling alley venues that I’ve been to, I liked this one less. Nothing is going to beat the Fireside.

MC Lars himself was pretty decent. If I had guilty pleasures, he’d be one of them, but I don’t let myself feel guilty about liking things. He played with a band behind him which I thought was pretty awesome. He still had some audio being played from a disc, but the guitar, bass, and drums were live. He also had a DVD playing on a projector behind him that had images synced up to his lyrics. It was pretty neat.

He played a couple new songs, but mostly it was the setlist that I was expecting. His stage presence is super cheesy, but I basically just see him as a really smart dude who knows a lot about music and wants to have some fun doing something unexpected while not being afraid to be a huge geek. I can support that.

Of the three times that I’ve seen him, I think that this was probably the best even though the average age was…abortion.

The last couple of weeks have been very exciting at the radio station. We took on three gigantic projects this summer: rebuilding our production studio, adding a computer based automation system, and building our new transmitter site. Things have been a bit crazy because of it, but at the moment, the priority is the transmitter site. We’ve spent a lot of time working on the stuff on the ground there lately; from grounding the entire shack that the equipment is in to installing the equipment and hooking it up, it’s been a busy time. But it’s been super exciting!

This week, the tower rigging crew came to climb the 250ft tower on Rutgers Livingston Campus that we will be broadcasting from. On top of the tower, we installed a 25ft mast where our antenna now lies. It was very exciting to see all of this finally happen. We’ve been working towards it for years and it always just seemed like some distant dream that we’d never actually reach, but we’re almost there!

Last night, we flipped the switch on the transmitter so we could test out the new signal. Everyone got in their cars and drove in opposite directions.

I went out towards the Amboys. I hopped on 440 and took it out to rt35. We were completely clear the entire way to 35 and we sounded AMAZING. The quality of the signal was incredible and it was loud. The current (old) signal requires the listener to crank up their radio and they are lucky if they got a stereo signal…even in Highland Park! If there’s no static, it’s a miracle. But the new signal was clear as anything. I got on 35N to start and took it up through Woodbridge. My car has a small stubby antenna, but it seemed like 35 was going to mark the edge of our signal. I then turned around and went all the way down to Keyport. I was able to pick us up the entire way! Some parts were a bit staticy and we started to go in and out a bit in Perth Amboy and Woodbridge, but we were strong through South Amboy, Old Bridge, Aberdeen, Sayreville, and into Keyport. I would have gone even further since I was still getting us very well, but I was starting to run low on gas and needed to head back to the station to do my show.

It really sounded great. I’ve never been able to drive so far and still pick up the station. If I were a random listener, at no point on rt35 between Woodbridge and Keyport would I have to turn off the station because it got too staticy.

Going south down rt27, we could be heard in Princeton. Going down towards rt22, we could be heard in Bridgewater and Branchburg. I’ll try to get a map to post of our estimated coverage based on last night when I can get my hands on the one that was drawn up last night.

All in all, it’s just simply amazing how much of a difference there is, both in sound quality and signal strength. It’s all very exciting. Now, the hard part is going to be waiting the next month until October 6th when we will be officially throwing the switch and broadcasting from the new site.

Here are some pictures from the groundwork at the new transmitter site. When I get a hold of the pictures from the rigging, I’ll throw them in the slideshow as well.

Here’s the playlist from the show this week. Pretty good show overall.

A couple pictures of me riding a mechanical bull…

I got to see half of Harvey Danger play an acoustic set at Maxwell’s in Hoboken last night. It was awesome! It was seriously one of the best, most fun and entertaining sets that I’ve ever seen a band play. You could tell that they were having such a good time and were constantly making jokes throughout the whole set…jokes that were actually funny. Sean Nelson’s wit an showmanship on stage is definitely something that is very refreshing and not matched by many others.

For the encore they pretty much just made the crowd, of which there were only about 35 people, pick the songs that they wanted to hear. They were honoring just about any request regardless of whether or not they remembered how to play it.

Here’s their setlist for the night…

1. Wine Women and song
2. What You Live By
3. Old Hat (which turned into an awesome medley of other peoples’ songs)
4. Moral Centralia
5. War Buddies
6. Jack the Lion
7. Carlotta Valdez
8. Cream and Bastards Rise
9. Pike St/Park Slope
10. Same As Being In Love
11. Sad Sweetheart of the Rodeo
12. Defrocked

Encore:

1. Carjack Fever
2. Human Interactions
3. Woolly Muffler
4. Loyalty Building
5. Meetings With Remarkable Men

And here are two random, but awesome pictures that were taken in Hoboken…

Another great radio show tonight!

I think I’m starting to remember why I started doing The Playlist in the first place. For a while I was getting really bored with doing an all new music show, but over the past few weeks, I’ve learned how to have fun with it again. I’m really glad too. I think that it definitely comes across over the airwaves as well.

Here’s my playlist for this week…

Ben Lee decided that he would cover all of Against Me!’s latest album, New Wave. His reasoning is…

A couple of weeks ago I downloaded the new “Against Me!” album “New Wave”. I didnt really know too much about this band but had been reading lots of good things about it, and my friend Tegan sings on it.

fell in love with the album. Really. Like, couldn’t stop listening to it. As heavy and gnarly as it sounds at times, it is unmistakably a pop masterpiece. Listening to it on the way to Australia, I wondered to myself how these songs would sound acoustically.

A couple of days later I was on a flight from Sydney to Melbourne and had the thought “I’d love to cover this album.” The whole thing. Beginning to end. So I did. Anyway, here are the results. If you already know the original album, I hope these recordings shed a different light on it.

It actually sounds pretty good for the most part. Most of the songs sound really good acoustic and with Ben Lee’s voice. A few sound stretched a bit, but it’s still pretty cool. “White People For Peace” sounds completely natural, like an anti-war folk song from the 60s. “Animal” and “The Ocean” are also very awesome.

Punknews.org has links to a stream of the all of the songs as well as a downloadable version of the album.

It took four different theaters (another story for another time) to finally get to see this, but it was worth it. This movie lived up to all of the hype. Even after seeing previews for it since pretty much the beginning of the year and wanting to see it as bad as I did, I was not let down.

I’m pretty sure that I didn’t stop laughing from the moment the movie started until well after I walked out of the theater. The jokes were definitely of the crude and dick variety, but that kind of works out because most of mine are the same way. The humor was probably a bit more geared towards boys than girls because of all of the dick jokes and how the entire movie was focused on high school guys trying to get laid. It was kind of like American Pie if American Pie was written by Blink 182. Not a bad thing at all if you’re a guy like me. With lines like “you don’t want girls to think you suck dick at fucking pussy” and calling a character whose name is Foggle “faggle” it definitely plays out like a Blink 182 album. There were also a few elements of Scrubs style humor in it as well with characters going off into a daydream about the possible outcome of a scenario.

For me the movie reminded me of tons of things in my own life. A lot of the dialog reminded me of conversations with my own friends; the ridiculous making fun of your best friends over the stupidest things and giving your friends terrible advice that you know would never work on how to get with a girl. They even use a joke that I say all the time. One of the characters mutters to himself “fuck my life,” which is something anyone who is friends with me knows I say all the time.

The casting was perfect for the characters as well. Michael Cera, Jonah Hill, and Seth Rogen have all yet to let me down and played their characters flawlessly. With them still being relatively early in their careers, I can’t wait to see what else they do. There were also a few other random cameos by smaller actors that I love.

Overall, I’d rate this movie somewhere in the realm of a perfect 10. I really want to see it again sometime soon. The jokes and quotable lines came faster than I could take them in. By the time my brain had finished putting itself together after exploding from one joke, nine others has passed already.

Brilliance.

I just had the craziest ten days of my life. I was busy doing awesome crap everyday from the moment I woke up until I went to bed and with not much time between going to bed and waking up again. It was awesome though. Lots of fun.

I think I got to spend at least a little time with all of my friends, family, and people that are important to me which is always great. I think that was the best part actually. Though, now I’m completely exhausted. I did tons of driving and most of the time only had time to run home from one thing, grab some clothes to change into, and run back out the door to go do something else. I definitely packed too much into not enough time…and didn’t get to shower nearly as much as I would have liked to have.

The only thing that really sucked was driving to and from Wildwood by myself…well, that and getting slightly lost in Philly causing me to miss my friend’s band. Two+ hours in each direction on the highway really gives you a lot of time to just think…which is about all you can do when you’re in the the car alone that long.

It’s interesting how things work sometimes. I was just reading this article online about how to live better. Nerdy, I know, but I subscribe to the RSS feed for a site that has all of those cheesy articles about how to do things better, improve yourself or be more productive. Cheesy, yes, but I kind of enjoy them and sometimes it’s nice to be reassured about how you live when you can go down these lists and realize you already do most of them.

While I was reading this article I was also talking to my friend online. He was complaining about hating his job (we work together) and I was trying to say some things to make him feel a little better. At one point he was talking about how he barely gets by with the money he makes and I said to him, “being thankful for the things that you do have is much more productive than worrying about what you don’t have.” It’s something that I truly believe, but interestingly, two items down from where I was in the article I was reading was this:

78. Be Grateful — So you don’t live in a mansion and drive a fancy sports car. It’s easy to get caught up in lamenting the things that you don’t have. Take a moment to reflect on all the things you do have. You might find that you are richer than you thought. Focus on these things that you can be grateful for each day.

I kind of thought it was funny, I hadn’t read ahead or anything and I didn’t consciously know that that was there, but it’s almost exactly what I told him literally seconds earlier.

Things like this happen to me all the time and it makes me think a lot about things I learned in all my psychology classes in college and how they can cross with philosophical ideas. In psychology there is this concept of “priming” that suggests that when you are doing things, your brain cues up other things that are related. When you think about something or someone says something, not only does your brain react to what you just took in, but it also cues up ideas and concepts that are close to it. It can also happen when you unconsciously take in input. Your brain might cue it up or make that information available to you before you even know you took it in.

So in actuality, what probably happened is that my eyes saw some of that text without me consciously knowing it and it primed the idea for me. But what gets me is that even though this is what happened from a scientific point of view, philosophically, why did it happen at that particular moment? The moment when I was talking to my friend about something related to what I was about to read. How is it that just seconds before I got to read that part of the article, a logical place came up in the conversation for me to say practically the same thing that I, at least not consciously, had no idea that I was about to read?