satellite west (ms 313) 6th grade math results for the 2006 – 2007 school year:
88% of all general education students – proficient w/ 3’s and 4’s
38% above the district average.
this teacher is awfully proud of his kids.
fuck yeah!
peace etc.
ooxx aa
i purchased yankee hotel foxtrot at a best buy in rochester, minnesota in the summer of 2002…i remember it distinctly because it was one of the last times i remember waking up with the nervous, bubbly feeling of going to a record store to buy a particular album…(sure, best buy is a far cry from a record store, but i was in rochester and there was no other recourse)…this purchase was doubly memorable because chris and i both shared the same expectations for this piece, and we went together to pick it up…we were in rochester with pat and andy, recording our first ep with dave chutka…we each picked up a copy of yankee and then spent the rest of the day tracking…at night we fell asleep listening to it…and i remember going out somewhere in the middle of “jesus etc” and then waking up during the filtered radio samples that permeate the album’s closer, “reservations”…
yankee hotel foxtrot is one of the few albums i remember as being worth all the outrageous hype that it accumulated (and i stand by that opinion to this day)…it also sold well over 500,000 copies which is impressive considering the band offered the entire album as a free download on their website for a full year before it was released…as the riaa continues to harass music fans for downloading music, it’s more than enjoyable that the success of this record puts a lot of the record industry’s reasoning to shame…albeit indirectly, yankee poignantly suggested that the easiest way to sell an album is perhaps to simply make beautiful records…
since yankee’s release in ‘02, i believe wilco have released a couple of albums (i’ve lost track, but i know a new one just hit stores)…all of them sub-par albeit nothing short of pretty good…but 5 years after its initial release, yankee still defines this band…i’ve long said that there are no bands, just records…bands are merely photo albums…endless pages of photographs with the occasional brilliant snapshot tucked away in a corner…sometimes just one song, once in a while a few songs, and very very occasionally a brilliant, ebullient collection of eleven pieces that’s as touching as it is innovative…that’s what i thought when i was lying on chutka’s floor…drifting away to the sounds delicate instrumentation, endless radio samples, and jeff tweedy’s lovely melodies…and that’s what i thought last night, falling asleep to the same…
peace etc.
ooxx aa
the immense process of digitizing my music collection has moved consistently, although seemingly quite slow…i’m always a little surprised when i realize that certain albums haven’t been dumped onto my hard drive for easy listening…after a late-night conversation yesterday, i failed to fall asleep and flipped through my records and imported wilco’s yankee hotel foxtrot, sunday’s best’s poised to break, and piebald’s we are the only friends that we have…all records i haven’t listened to in at least a year (probably more) but each one is cemented as a great piece of work musically as well as holding significant amounts of nostalgic memories…and as we all learned from jennifer love hewitt’s stellar performance in the teen triumph, can’t hardly wait, memories are all we have…my next three posts will document the significance of each of the aforementioned pieces of work…enjoy…
peace etc.
ooxx aa
ps yes, i know. the covers. they’re coming. promise. promise. promise. promise!