one week from today one of the most glorious television shows is set to premiere its 3rd season, you ask what show is that...lost, my friends, that show is lost. i am very eager to see exactly how they are going to pick up after the cliff hanger of a season finale. i will tell you one thing though the lost camp has been far from silent since the end of season 2. even before the end of season 2, some brainchilds in the lost camp quietly or subconsciously released as psuedo-reality (you be the judge) game called the lost experience which ran from the beginning of may beginning with the unvieling of hansofoundation.org until last sunday when the last code was released giving you a full video confession of the numbers, 4 8 15 16 23 42, actually mean...creepy.
while we're riding the wave of creepiness there's a character you need to know about, rachel blake or her lost online alias, persephone. in her blog she appears to be a student hanging out overseas for the summer but in reality she's investing the hanso foundation. over the summer she's released a number of video blogs about her investigations and most if not all can be found on youtube from the user thelostfiles. i've made it through most of them and they do answer a lot of questions but it gives lost and the hanso foundation a disturbing sense of reality.
when you are done with that you can download this word docwhich is a timeline of the island straight from the 1800's when the black rock crashed on the island. mind you it's all theory but it's definately a good read.
when you've read that you can catch up on the lost experience game by reading up on it at wikipedia
it's been a whirlwind week, 3 amazing concerts in 3 days, a religion paper, finance homework and a a crashed route sheet but the week has finally ended for me. i sit here waiting for my ipod to update its "gapless" playback or whatever that means so i can leave for a long weekend back in the homeland of lexvegas in order to see my buddy travis off to n. ireland where he's gonna change the world. so in my period of waiting i was browsing one of my favorite apple rumor websites, the the unofficial apple weblog to get the daily news and stumbled across this little easter egg. abc is giving away a million downloads of the season finales of lost, grey's anatomy and desperate housewives for flippin' free. abc is calling it the million hit lowdown but i'm calling it wicked sweet 2 hour tv shows for my ipod. you too can get in on the fun by clicking the link below:
this past week i saw sufjan stevens, kings of leon and muse in three straight days, i like to refer to it as the trifecta though. the other bonus was i only had to pay for the sufjan show, again music business sweet! but more on that later including some sweet short video clips. but for now the only thing standing between me and the horse capital of the world is 213 miles of beautiful asphalt.
the updates continue as this site struggles towards completion. the "who is aaron?" and "projects" sections are now up. remember the "europe" section went live a couple days ago, however, both the europe and project sections are still in infancy and are in need of serious updates so stay tuned.
ah yeah, as a reminder all old posts are demoted to the "archive" section. only current post are kept here at the home page. i try to run a tight ship here at aaronsawyer.com
ok ok ok, another section has birthed, and the brand new europe section is up and live, wahoo. this a collection of my blogs posted on my myspace page from my euro journey from summer 2006. please grab some popcorn or blood sausage if you're so inclined and enjoy
ok, the archive section is up and as stated earlier, all previous posts/updates/entries can be found there.
so a little about me, i'm a student at belmont university in nashville, tn and as nearly 8 million college students around the country and well world, i'm a member of the facebook. well recently the facebook did a bit of a redesign called the "facebook feed" or "news feed" or something to that extent. either way it turned up the online stalker volume to the paranoia inducing volume of 11. now every action is time-stamped and you can get the down-low whenever your "friends" update/change/join/do anything to their profile. this has caused quite a stir among colleges that several university newspapers are reporting on it. even time has an article on the subject. when talking to my sister she thought it was rather funny that this facebook redesign was the biggest news at nearly every college around the country.
in further news concerning nashville, i'm blessed to work for a company that hooks a brother up by getting into some wicked sweet shows for free. or for selling merch, but practically free. last week i got to check out chris thile's new act, the how to grow a band, at local venue, the belcourt. during the encore he played a wicked sweet rendition of radiohead's "morning bell". well thanks to fans and youtube, you too can enjoy this wonderful cover.
alright so i swore this wasn't going to all be about music so here's my attempt or commentary on pop culture.
darwin.
chuck darwin if you will, you know one of the bright minds in a little thing we like to call evolution. for those of you who haven't fully evoloved of maybe have never sat in a science class evolution could be described as the continued growing and adaptation of a species followed by chuck's brilliant description of survival of the fittest. well sadly for you scientific sorts this isn't going to be a biology lesson. today or this evening because the sun has set and my bedtime is around the corner, our topic of lecture will be the evolution of song and the survival of the fittest version.
living in nashville surrounded by a plethora of songwriters and working in the industry i get the priviledge to witness the evolution of song on a daily basis. it's great to see a song from it's inception and grow into the final and loved version that we hear on that glorious compact disc (or vinyl if your of the elitist type).
exhibit a:
let's start with a better known band then work our way down down down. first up we have a british band better known as coldplay. in 2005 they released an album called x&y. on said album a certain track known as "talk" was about midway through the line up of songs. despite the admitted rip-off of a kraftwerk song entitled "computer love", coldplay struggled through song evolution with this track. the first version has a different verse and overall feel, it is not until later in the song until we find ourselves in familiar territory. i'm partial to the unreleased version but you be the judge for yourself.
Coldplay - Talk (Unreleased)
Coldplay -Talk
bonus:
Kraftwerk - Computer Love
exhibit b:
the next specimen in our evolution of song is none other than mr. sufjan stevens. here we have two versions of the song off of his latest album, the avalanche.... now i guess that whole album could be it's own argument on song evolution however this song, "adlai" is different. i can't determine where in the chronology of mr. stevens when exactly it was written but i located it pre-avalanche and when it was known as "adlai stevenson". the main difference is that the shortened title "adlai" has the post-illinoise fingerprint of sufjan orchestration.
sufjan stevens - adlai
sufjan stevens - adlai stevenson
exhibit c:
our final exhibit is the evolution of the extended version. of the billions extended versions out there i bring to the table a lesser known one from my favorite band, radiohead. a while ago i stumbled upon the treasure chest, davey jones chest no less, of radiohead b-sides and rarities called towering above the rest..sounds like the title of an oasis album but i'm going to wager the band had nothing to do with it seeing that the only place you can find this is in the depths of the internet or on a lesser known mp3 website allofmp3.com. anyway i bring you an alternate mix and extended version (by a whopping 30ish seconds) of the closing track off of amnesiac, "life in a glass house".
radiohead - life in a glass house (full version)
radiohead-life in a glass house
welcome back to the redesigned, stipped down less bloggy aaronsawyer.com. i don't know what my vision for this site is going to be, probably random mindless posting concerning music and other life/culture anecdotes. it could be up one day and down another, hopefully we'll find a psuedo-consistent middle ground with cool new content, but the gist will probably be that the most recent post is on the front page and all others can be found in the archive link..oh yeah, none of the links work save the "contact" link and i couldn't even tell ya if that is a valid email address.
many thanks to reese for inspiration (read: much copying) for the code and even more thanks to creatext for aid in a poor poor html coder like myself and especially no thanks to apple's textedit crappy software in the developement of this website. more to come.