It's been two months, almost. Sorry. But times are tough and time is tougher to conquer. I wanted to make sure this got out there, at least in this form. If you live in the Southern California area, don't miss this show. It's going to be funnier than even your concept of funny can accommodate, and all proceeds are going to the funding-deprived (have you read a newspaper?) student association at Cal State. Also, there's beer. Good beer. Lots of it. And some of the better pizza I've had in SoCal.

Tell your friends.

[tws]

Well, it's been another month. It's amazing how time and life both fly like this, but they're not slowing down for anyone.

I've got so many awesome song titles and EP titles. If only I had a band. Or raw musical talent.

I'm a little burnt out right now, mostly due to a number of projects I'm working on right now, both for and eventually-for school and Geography. I'm finding it harder to get to bed at anythign resembling a reasonable hour, so my productivity has taken a hit, but fortunately, there are still great things on the near horizon. Unfortunately, it isn't much I can talk extensively about right now. But what I will share right here is tangentially related.

Thom Anderson's slyly-titled 2003 documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself, used almost exclusively footage from a barrage of films made over the past one hundred years. I just discovered it recently, and I'm completely amazed at how much work and thought went into this 170-minute skewering of ways filmmakers and audiences take his hometown of Los Angeles for granted. It's available on Youtube, broken down into twelve 14-minute segments. Anderson's highly opinionated, endlessly quotable, get-off-my-lawn narrative charm pervades it, and while I found him hard to agree with a lot of the time, I had nothing but admiration for this post-modern love letter to the City of Angels. Highly worth a few of your hours. Video linked via the still image below.



In news I am excited to share, The Casual Geographer will be hitting the "air" on Tuesday at 9am Pacific Time with our first episode of the Morning Show on KBeach Radio. We'll be waxing poetic about all thing geographic, and it should be a good time. Hope you can listen in and call in once I have the studio number (and figure out how to run the board in there. Shouldn't be too hard).

Anyway, hope you're all having great weekend(s). Keep the faith and keep in touch.

[tws]

He is risen!! In other words, glad to finally be posting in 2012. It's been a good year so far; I can't complain about much. For those on board with The Casual Geographer, we are going to record our sixth episode soon, once the three of us are able to get into the same room at the same time (that's the biggest challenge). I think Bret is circling some brewery in Oregon in his car right now, but he should be back in SoCal soon enough.

I'm glad that southpaw shredder Eddie Solis aka It's Casual finally published this video, because I needed something awesome enough to influence me to get off my ass...onto my ass, in front of my computer... and give some kind of update.

For those of you that know me, I'm a big proponent of public transportation. If I can't take public transit to school/work, then I ain't living there at this stage of my life. So, moving to Southern California, a region of the country quite possibly the most stigmatized in the universe for its shitty public transit access, was indeed more of a challenge than a bummer for me. After doing some in situ research, I've come to the conclusion that... well, I think that this song can say it, and express it, much more efficiently than I ever could here.



It doesn't hurt that It's Casual produced an album that probably sounds more like Los Angeles than anything produced this century so far, ferocity and all. From what I've gathered, Solis doesn't have a car, relying on those forms of transportation you see in the video to get himself around. No matter how abrasive (read: the good type) his voice or his chords may be, his message has clearly resonated, gaining shoutouts on the LA Times, Blogging LA, The Huffington Post, El Pasajero, and even a clearly sympathetic (in the tsk tsk NYC way) Generation Records in the Village. It is no surprise that Angelenos are equally pissed about how pervasive the "you needa carrrrr" ethos is in their urban dystopia (or pissed about how the auto industry turned it into a dystopia), and I'm glad that Solis' message is resonating. Yeah, public transportation does suck in LA, but that doesn't mean that Metro doesn't care. Also, that doesn't mean that anyone is too good to ride the train or the bus, which is especially pertinent considering how many 30-something Angelenos have never set foot on a bus or a metro train.  

Now to sit back and wait for "The Blue Line" remix for all of his boys out in Long Beach. I would lobby for "The Green Line," too, but nobody cares about that one. 

[tws]

Check it out. We're particularly proud of this one. By the way, DC people, I'm going to be performing at Saturday, 12/17 at the Capital City Showcase at the DC Arts Center with my friends Mike James and Brandon Wardell. Should be a great time, and you can get tickets here.

[tws]

It occurred to me that this is the first time in the site's 6-year history that I haven't posted anything sentimental or nostalgia-rooted in honor of Thanksgiving. Well, sorry. It isn't that I care any less about the holiday and what it means, but as anyone who checks this site regularly (anyone?) I have had pretty big fish to fry lately. In other words, there hasn't been much to go around here, though I have been writing a fair amount. Maybe my own taste is starting to pre-eliminate the type of stuff that I would 'publish' here? Who's to say? I would probably retire this site if it weren't for the hundreds (well, dozens, anyway) of podcasts and projects archived here for mass consumption. 

SPEAKING OF WHICH, the first three episodes of The Casual Geographer are now up and available at the blog (linked here or on the sidebar to the right). I'm really slow at things. I need to chalk that up as a New Years' Resolution to improve when 2012 arrives. For now, I'll try to keep the "entertainment" coming. And so will iTunes, which has seen fit to publish our XML feed. Subscribe to that here.

Be in touch.