we want those flashing lights

So that Colin Munroe track I posted a few days ago?  Here's the video for it which I've been posting around the internet....  Pretty cool, no?  Guess who else thinks so?  Mr K. West himself.  No joke -- he just posted it in his blog! OOOOOOOOH YEAAAAAAAAA.

And in case you missed it last time around, you can DOWNLOAD THE TRACK FOR FREE HERE:  Colin Munroe -- (I Want Those) Flashing Lights

you learn something new every day

Did you know that the G train has a schedule?!!?!?!?

Neither did I. Too bad it actually doesn't ever, you know, run, let alone on time.

great weekend, really.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Too sick to blog, Meg? Really? Really. I think my body wanted to make up for all the sleep I've denied it in the past year all at once so it smacked me with a stupidly high fever and knocked me unconscious for 36 hours or something. Anyhow, enough disclaimers. The one productive thing I did do in the past five days (other than infect the internet with Colin Munroe's video -- check it out at the Frontside youtube!) was watch "The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen)", which was actually probably the best film I've seen in at least six months, and if you haven't seen it, you should probably Netflix it. Like, right now.

I guess I should be pretty excited about this giant summer festival on the East coast this summer, All Points West Festival, to be held at Liberty State Park, no? From August 8th-10th this summer, Lady Liberty is going to be looking down on a different type of huddled mass yearning to be free -- the sweaty, beer-soaked, raucous rock show crowd. And though nothing's actually been said but everybody keeps mumbling *cough*Radiohead*cough* as the most likely headliners, as they declined Coachella because the lack of public trans makes it uber eco-unfriendly, and the metro area certainly has tons of public trans. But, to be honest, I'm not as psyched as I ought to be -- I've never really been much of a fan of the giant sweaty field festivals. I can tolerate sweat and beer spills and crowds in dark sketchy basements when the band is four feet away and the sound is great, but somehow straining my ears above to hear a few notes of my favourite songs wafting above the sweaty masses has never really appealed to me. Sun stroke and the inevitable dust bowl or mud pit that results from the whole thing -- nooooo dice, my friends. No dice.

In other general news, this morning I talked another new-New-Yorker into buying these seriously amazing little credit-card sized maps of lower manhattan and the MTA subway system from this store called Tiny Living over on 7th between 1st and A. You can get them of basically any neighborhood or public trans in the city, and they're seriously the most useful thing ever. I want to personally buy a drink for whoever invented these things. You know how you think you're all slick and you know the city like the back of your hand because you've been living here for years, and then suddenly for some reason you realise you've actually never walked down this random street in the West Village because since you graduated from NYU you've spent the past three years between the Bedford and Lorimer stops on the L and forgot that it went further west than Union Square? This makes that not so embarassing, because you don't have to, you know, ask someone and thereby reveal that you're lost, or even worse, pull out some huge tourist map, just discreetly glance at a little card in your wallet. I picked a bunch of these up for the Frontside guys when they flew out here for CMJ (some of them had never been to NY before!) and I mean, they all got back to Vancouver in one piece, so I guess it helped them out.

Apple kills off those little plastic discs we used to spend our allowance on in junior high school

So the entire computer-using world has been freaking out all day over Mac's Keynote Live presentation, including the new MacBook Air -- the smallest/lightest notebook ever, yada yada yada (check out the advertisment for it at here at Valleywag.)  Gary and I were sitting here reading about it as it all leaked, and this whole no-CD/DVD drive thing is probably the gutsiest move ever. Our first reaction -- whaaaaaaaaaaat? OH MY GOD, THAT WAY YOU HAVE TO BUY FROM iTUNES AND HAVE NO REASON TO BUY CDS IF YOU WANT MUSIC ON YOUR COMPUTER. And then they announced iTunes movie rentals, and when you think of this in conjunction with Netflix's recent announcement about movies being available online... Is the average consumer ready, at this point, to entirely forget about those little plastic discs? Maybe not yet, but it's definitely a huge slap in the face to tangible media.  Apple's basically saying that the age of CDs and DVDs is over or will soon be over -- and they're doing what they can to hasten the transition.  

And have you read all this stuff about the new iPhone? It's like Facebook plus Radiohead, seriously. Basically, if you're savvy with that kind of thing and want to write an app or widget for the iPhone, you can submit it to Apple, and then users pay-as-they-wish for them, and you go home with 70% of whatever profit you make (and I'm assuming obviously Apple takes the other 30%). So programmers get to feel that they're freelance developers for Apple, potentially get thrown a few bucks for their work, and meanwhile Apple probably gets some rights to all this new software and is automatically in on the loop for whatever new innovative stuff is being developed for their hardware... It's pretty crazy to think of your phone as now being full of user-generated content.

Cupcakes and Kanye remixes

So apparently I am way behind on jumping on this bandwagon, but somehow I had managed to never visit Magnolia Bakery on Bleecker Street until this weekend.  Oh.  My.  God.  I really think that might be the best street corner in all of New York -- cupcakes and Marc by Marc Jacobs?  Yes, please.  Either way, if you haven't been there either, I seriously recommend.  You can only get a dozen cupcakes at a time, but they're only $2 each and you basically go in there and fill up your own little box, and then probably just walk across the street to the park to eat them there.  The red velvet ones were my personal favourite.  

 

ANYHOW.  Enough about cupcakes, even though I'm definitely sitting here in the office looking out the window at the Empire State Building dreaming about them...  This week it seems like we're all about Colin Munroe here.  He's worked in the past as a producer for a lot of hip-hop acts and is actually kind of a big deal there, but his solo stuff is much more what you'd expect from a lanky white guy, which is to say much more indie pop-rock.  A few months ago he made a pretty rad stop-motion video for his song "World of Pain"  (check that out here at the Frontside YouTube) and his solo album "Don't Think Less of Me" comes out this spring, but he hasn't abandoned his love of hip-hop.  In fact, he just came out with his own version of Kanye West's "Flashing Lights" -- pretty cool, if you ask me, and his indie-boy vocals work suprisingly well with Kanye's beats and orchestration.   Download it for free below.... and the video soon to come!

DOWNLOAD: Colin Munroe -- (I Want Those) Flashing Lights 

or check out Colin @ Myspace

YouTube killed the television star?

So I knew YouTube was actually a really, really big deal when my mother (who has been known to call me for assistance in checking her email) mentioned it at the Thanksgiving dinner table, and today, TechCrunch reports that YouTube has seen an EIGHTEEN PERCENT increase in viewers in the past TWO MONTHS alone, and other sites such as Crackle have seen traffic double in the past months.  Is the writer's strike to blame?  Sure, I doubt anyone's sitting around consciously thinking "Well, hey, my TV machine is lacking creative and amusing content these days, and I really don't want to watch reruns of Law and Order: SVU for the 8491th time, therefore I am going to use the internet machine to access video sites to suck up these lazy afternoon hours today," but the timing does seem awfully coincidential.

This of course, is pretty exciting to those of us here at Frontside's online department -- aside from wasting all our time on YouTube anyhow, a lot of our artists have some pretty awesome videos online and, hey, if you're not watching A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila on that channel that was supposed to be about music videos or something back in the 80's, maybe you'll want to check out our YouTube channel instead.