I’m sad that the blog has been a little stale lately but I’ve got a lot of stuff going on recently. First off - I’m traveling to Israel for 10 days on a birthright trip through Sachlav. The entire trip is paid for by Taglit-Birthright and we have an outrageous itinerary planned that will take us throughout the entire country and on trips such as kayaking in the Jordan River and visiting the Wailing Wall. Also, I decided to rent a cell phone in Israel so I won’t use use my BlackBerry while I’m there. As I mentioned in this post awhile back I want to enjoy my vacation and stay away from e-mail and Twitter.

For those of you that haven’t heard, when I return from Israel I’ll be moving out to San Francisco to pursue internships at both a PR firm and a software startup for the summer. I’ve visited the city by the bay several times over the past few years and fell in love. I can’t wait to get a feel for the lifestyle out there and figure out if it’s somewhere I’d want to be when I graduate next year.

I plan on taking an unbelievable amount of pictures in Israel and I will be sure to post them here when I return.

Just updated my Muxtape with tracks I’ve been listening to recently. Notable tracks are “Pity and Fear” off the new Death Cab for Cutie album and “Echoplex” from Nine Inch Nail’s latest free album The Spin which was released last night. Also sprinkled in a few tracks from Ghostly Swim which I wrote about recently.

The full tracklist:

• Nine Inch Nails - “Echoplex”
• Michna - “Triple Chrome Dipped”
• Death Cab for Cutie - “Pity and Fear”
• The Beta Band - “Number 15″
• Santogold - “Lights Out”
• MSTRKRFT - “Easy Love”
• The Roots - Criminal
• Ben Benjamin - “Squirmy Sign Language”
• Mux Cool - “Night Court”
• Cut Copy - “Nobody Lost, Nobody Found”
• MGMT - “Kids”
• Vampire Weekend - “Exit Music (For a Film)”

Busy month, so I didn’t get to watching as many films as I would have hoped. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is as beautiful as it is poetic, quite possibly Julian Schnabel’s best piece. Lars and the Real Girl only reinforces my love for Ryan Gosling’s acting, putting two of his films (Half Nelson and this) in my top favorites. I also watched Annie Hall again, it’s been years, and can’t believe how similar Larry David’s comedic prose are to Woody’s. To think the two will be in a film side-by-side next year really gets me excited.

• The Diving Bell and the Butterfly ★★★★
• Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead ★★★
• Lars and the Real Girl ★★★★★
• Atonement ★★★
• American Gangster ★★★
• Reservation Road ★★
• Annie Hall ★★★★★

This eclectic release from Adult Swim and Ghostly International has seen some heavy rotation on my iPod in the past few days and I wanted to share. If you don’t know Ghostly, they are part record label, part art gallery with an emphasis on digital forms of creation and distribution. Here’s what they have to say about the compilation:

A genre-busting 19-song collection, stretching the entire Ghostly International galaxy, Ghostly Swim explores the Avant-Pop style that the Ann Arbor/New York City label has been been championing for the past 9 years. Ghostly Swim features artists like Matthew Dear, Dabrye, Tycho and Aeroc and features new signings like UK cult band The Chap and NYC producer Michna.

I highly recommend giving this thing a listen, it has introduced me to some great artists and a new approach to music in general.

Check it out »

The current state of the Internet is a confusing one. When Web 2.0 emerged, it was all about creating profiles, making friends and conveying your personality to as many people as possible. Now, the constant introduction of services and the growing number of profiles any given person holds is getting overwhelming. Aggregation services like FriendFeed for profiles and Techmeme for news try to help wade through this mess — but in my opinion, have only created more noise.

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This is unbelievably cool. Robert Hodgin of Flight404 created this stunning visual interpretation of Radiohead’s “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” using an application he built that incorporates beat detection. On top of that Hodgin went the extra mile by manually inputting every single snare hit, high hat, literally every beat and it took him over 6 hours. The result is really cool and trippy - I recommend viewing it in full screen.

Weird Fishes: Arpeggi from flight404 on Vimeo

[Via Jakob Lodwick]

This is a guest post by Becky Clawson.

Peter Spellman of Music Business Solutions talks about the impact of negative word of mouth in his latest newsletter:

I listened to a story on NPR this afternoon about the negative impact of bad word-of-mouth. Very scary. The basis for the article comes from research by the Wharton School of Business. They found that 1 out of 2 customers has a customer service problem when they shop. Worse is the fact that they then tell friends, family, and colleagues about it and embellish the story in the retelling. The overall result is that 1/2 of those that hear the bad news story won’t shop at those places they heard about. Ouch! Those that improve on the situation certainly create a business advantage.

This is so true–at least as far as I can relate. Last summer, my hard drive crashed, and after searching the Web for a nearby certified store, I found a shop and took it in for repair. They were friendly, informative, and timely in their turnaround. Great. But a few months ago, my hard drive crashed again, and this time, I asked my peers where they recommend. I told them about my prior visit to the local repair shop–no complaints to speak of–but everyone I talked to insisted that I definitely should not bring it back to Shop A. “They’re terrible. They’re always messing things up. Everyone knows that. Go to Shop B.” And so even though I had no bad experiences with the Shop A, I went to Shop B because I trusted that their bad reports were legitimate, and I just didn’t want to take a chance that I might suffer the same. Am I any better off? Who knows. Shop B did an adequate job, so I’m no worse off.

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Photo Credit: Phawker

Where else would one expect the hipster-funk dance party quintet of Hot Chip to play in Philadelphia besides the Starlight Ballroom? An inevitable traffic jam of road bikes inundated N. 9th Street but we breezed right inside the sold out show with a little friendly name dropping and made a beeline to the bar. The scene was every bit as one would expect and the venue as always was ablaze with pent up excitement. A few minutes and several beers later, the band casually walked on stage, picked up their instruments and got right down to it. We were there to dance, and Hot Chip brought the party.

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Totally forgot to post these. No time to go in depth. Definitely check out Lust, Caution and Into the Wild.

• Mulholland Drive ★★★
• Into the Wild ★★★★
• Oldboy ★★★
• 30 Days of Night ★
• The Hoax ★★
• Lust, Caution ★★★★
• Arrested Development Season 3, Disc 2 ★★★★
• Blade Runner: The Final Cut ★★★