by osmosis

Check out the teaser for a documentary I've been working on this past year…

In 2011, following the birth of his son, David Rosenstein quit his job and began a new life as an urban farmer. David’s vision is an agricultural revolution: high yields of fresh organic produce grown and sold within walking distance of any neighborhood. He began with a working prototype, a soilless aquaponics farm in his own community. The Farm documents David’s labors to bring his crops from seedling to harvest and ultimately onto the plates of his neighbors. This is a film about David’s journey as a farmer, a father, and a global citizen with a very different view of what is possible. It is also a highly stylized meditation on the rhythms of work, the power of ideals, and the beauty of life and growth.

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Patton Oswalt - Christmas in LA

Cut Copy - Take Me Over

The Rapture - In the Grace of Your Love

M83 - Midnight City

Clams Casino - Realist Alive

A$AP Rocky - Demons

Kavinsky & Lovefoxxx - Nightcall

Gang Gang Dance - Mindkilla

Panda Bear - Slow Motion

The Radio Dept - Heaven's On Fire

Jay & Kanye - Why I Love You

Bon Iver - HoloceneMi

The Flaming Lips are selling a 24 hr song called "7 Skies H3" in a real human skull for $5,000.  Pretty standard.

 "It’s impossible to translate the issue of the greed of Wall Street into one demand, or two demands. We’re talking about a democratic awakening. We’re talking about raising political consciousness, so it spills over; all parts of the country so people can begin to see what’s going on through a different set of lens. And then you begin to highlight what the more detailed demands would be, because in the end we’re really talking about what Martin King would call a revolution; a transfer of power from oligarchs to every day people of all colors, and that is a step-by-step process." - Cornel West

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Tracklist after the jump…

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"To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it's because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that's where phrases like "deadly dull" or "excruciatingly dull" come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing's pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly…but surely something must lie behind not just Musak in dull or tedious places anymore but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets' checkouts, airports' gates, SUVs' backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can't think anyone really believes that today's so-called "information society" is just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down." -David Foster Wallce

Amazon

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Playlist after the jump…

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Click HERE to download the mixtape.

Playlist below…

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There's a reason why studios release their best films during "Oscar season."  The last thing you want are people asking, "oh was that released this year?" when picking their year's best.  This fact was not lost on Kanye.  The first few months of 2010 are now a distant blur, and without iTunes "Date Added" feature I'd have trouble finding early 2010 jams.  With so much music flying at us everyday, it's comes down to what sticks and stays - not for a few months, but for years.  Can you remember back to those quant days in the mid 90's when a handful of cds captured you for hundreds of hours.

This inundation of content combined with a move into my late 20's makes for strange list making.  It's become harder to stay in love with an album, so there's a glut of records in the doldrums of - good not great.  To avoid bullshitting, I've stuck to only listing the top 5 records I truly loved, and doing a list of notable records that I really liked.

Top 5 Albums

Robyn - Body Talk Pt 1 I'd call this record a guilty pleasure if it wasn't so damn good. 

Sufjan Stevens - The Age of Adz Sufjan was too smart to continue his ridiculous 50 state concept.  He ended on a high note with Illinois, and now this gem.  If I had a Top Songs list "Vesuvius" would be #1.

Titus Andronicus - The Monitor This record has stayed with me for 9 months now, so I guess it's earned its keep.  I'm a sucker for large beards, civil war themes and Conor O'berst-esque screams.  Hope this album ends up on a lot of best of lists.

Arcade Fire - The Suburbs What do you say about a band that is just so much better than its peers?  If the album alone didn't beg that question, the tour certainly put it over the top.  Whether it's loss, commercially saturated religion or suburban life, Win and company never fail to deliver the goods.

Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy Oh Kanye, the man people love to hate (and for a lot of reasonable reasons).  I just can't shake my love for this man.  Hip hop has suffered a pretty terrible slump over the past few years, and then there's Kanye out there with his fashion sense, art direction, musical mastery… a complete cohesive vision.  It bleeds into the music and creates an experience bigger than the sum of its parts. 

Other Notable Albums (in no particular order)

Liars - Sisterworld

Yeasayer - Odd Blood

Flying Lotus - Cosmogramma

Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me

Deerhunter - Halcyon Digest

Major Lazer & La Roux - Lazerproof

Crystal Castles - S/T

The National - High Violet

an excerpt from Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken

The can itself is more costly and complicated to manufacture than the beverage. Bauxite is mined in Australia and trucked to a chemical reduction mill where a half-hour process purifies each ton of bauxite into a half ton of aluminum oxide. When enough of that is stockpiled, it is loaded on a giant ore carrier and sent to Sweden or Norway, where hydroelectric dams provide cheap electricity. After a monthlong journey across two oceans, it usually sits at the smelter for as long as two months. The smelter takes two hours to turn each half ton of aluminum oxide into a quarter ton of aluminum metal, in ingots ten meters long. These are cured for two weeks before being shipped to roller mills in Sweden or Germany. There each ingot is heated to nearly nine hundred degrees Fahrenheit and rolled down to a thickness of an eighth of an inch. The resulting sheets are wrapped in ten-ton coils and transported to a warehouse, and then to a cold rolling mill in the same or another country, where they are rolled tenfold thinner, ready for fabrication. The aluminum is then sent to England, where sheets are punched and formed into cans, which are then washed, dried, painted with a base coat, and then painted again with specific product information. The cans are next lacquered, flanged (they are still topless), sprayed inside with a protective coating to prevent the cola from corroding the can, and inspected. The cans are palletized, forklifted, and warehoused until needed. They are then shipped to the bottler, where they are washed and cleaned once more, then filled with water mixed with flavored syrup, phosphorus, caffeine, and carbon dioxide gas. The sugar is harvested from beet fields in France and undergoes trucking, milling, refining, and shipping. The phosphorus comes from Idaho, where it is excavated from deep open-pit mines—a process that also unearths cadmium and radioactive thorium. Round-the- clock, the mining company uses the same amount of electricity as a city of 100,000 people in order to reduce the phosphate to food-grade quality. The caffeine is shipped from a chemical manufacturer to the syrup manufacturer in England. The filled cans are sealed with an aluminum “pop-top” lid at the rate of fifteen hundred cans per minute, then inserted into cardboard cartons printed with matching color and promotional schemes. The cartons are made of forest pulp that may have originated anywhere from Sweden or Siberia to the old-growth, virgin forests of British Columbia that are the home of grizzly, wolverines, otters, and eagles. Palletized again, the cans are shipped to a regional distribution warehouse, and shortly thereafter to a supermarket where a typical can is purchased within three days. The consumer buys twelve ounces of the phosphatetinged, caffeine- impregnated, caramel-flavored sugar water. Drinking the cola takes a few minutes; throwing the can away takes a second. In England, consumers discard 84 percent of all cans, which means that the overall rate of aluminum waste, after counting production losses, is 88 percent. The United States still gets three-fifths of its aluminum from virgin ore, at twenty times the energy intensity of recycled aluminum, and throws away enough aluminum to replace its entire commercial aircraft fleet every three months.