Tap Tap and Pete and the Pirates both seemed to slip by mostly undetected, but somehow I managed to catch them both on PitchFork and have been recommending the Pete and the Pirates album lately. It took me a little while to realize that perhaps it’s not just one of those quirky things that only I like. I think a track came on in the car over Mardi Gras while my ipod was on shuffle, both of my friends in the car asked about it and I guess I realized that perhaps it has a bit broader of an appeal that just inside of my own head.

Tap Tap is a little more on the obscure side, I think. I believe Lanzafame was a side project of the singer of Pete and the Pirates, though it sounds more like a 4-track demo than anything. But it’s got this quality that I really picked up on when I got heavily into Grandaddy a few years back… It’s very sincere and without pretension, something that goes a long way with me.

If you haven’t heard either of these projects yet, check them out:

Pete and the Pirates – Lost In the Woods

Tap Tap – 100,000 Thoughts

Dang bruh, I can’t believe it was just mardi gras. Even as I was going to parades, and we went to a LOT of parades, I felt like I was still waiting for it to hit me. We had house guests and many friends in town, but it seemed like it was always still a few weeks away. Not that there was any shortage of king cake up in my house and at the office. I’ve been a total glutton for king cake since like the day after christmas or whenever they start selling. My diet only got worse as people arrived in town and every meal became fried shrimp.

The crowds this year seemed bigger than last year and everything felt a bit more hectic. We live about a mile from the parade route and wound up walking to quite a few parades from here when it was just too crowded to try to park any closer. I’ve got a friend who lives 2 blocks off of the Uptown route, too, so we saw a few from his house, but he lives in “the box” — the area of the city that gets blocked in once the parade starts going — and we couldn’t always get there.

One thing i noticed this year was a general lack of mardi gras music all around. I couldn’t find it on the radio — not even WWOZ — and I neglected to put it on my ipod and control my own MG music destiny. And now the time has passed.

I did, however, have a costume! Here are some pics:

Black man, president.
Mom says “what’s gone happen now?”
Don’t listen to her.

This is my least favorite thing:

I am certain that these bore everyone but me…

A haiku:

Boughs arched over streets,
Roots push sidewalks to and fro.
Oak trees rule the day.

Uploaded – 12\118-6
Originally uploaded by jvanpelt

One more finger down, counting the number of times I’ve seen snow in New Orleans. This was for real, soft fluffy snow too, not the sleet that’s passed for snow in years past. I think it was about 34 degrees.

My mom was convinced I wouldn’t have work today. “You don’t understand dawlin, when it snows in New Orleans EVERYTHING shuts down.” Not Peter Mayer.

Paying it forward
Is still 4 bucks for coffee.
Just not your coffee.

I went to Radio Shack this morning to buy a new cassette adapter for continued car-stereo ipod goodness. (My old one recently broke.) When I got in the car, I realized that it was made to fit the iphone as well. Yay! I couldn’t even find one of those at Best Buy. Thought you might like to know.

I got into isan really heavily around the time that elise was born and a lot of their technique and sound really influenced my music in that period. In the evening I would sit at my desk with elli, when she was so small that she still fit on the sofa pillow in my lap, and we’d listen to the song Cathart and others like it as she’d just relax and fall asleep on my arm.

A few interesting notes about isan – I had recently finished reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace when isan’s album Lucky Cat came out. Isan had set up a Yahoo Group for themselves, basically a predecessor to a MySpace page. I noticed the song Kittenplan A on their album and asked if it was named after DFW’s character Anne Kittenplan, a minor character from the book.

While Kim was pregnant with elise someone gave me a couple of free tickets to a Depeche Mode show. The highlight of the show came while they were playing music over the P.A. before the band started, and I heard this song, Skink, playing. It sounded incredible. Kim and I were probably the only people in that crowd to recognized the song.

ISAN – Skeek from the album Beautronics

need to remember this link to as3isolib for future reference