sense of doubt

Though the current project started as a series of posts charting my grief journey after the death of my mother, I am no longer actively grieving. Now, the blog charts a conversation in living, mainly whatever I want it to be. This is an activity that goes well with the theme of this blog (updated 2018). The Sense of Doubt blog is dedicated to my motto: EMBRACE UNCERTAINTY. I promote questioning everything because just when I think I know something is concrete, I find out that it’s not.

Monday, August 19, 2019

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1644 - Top Twenty Mixes - a Musical Monday post for 1908.19

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1644 - Top Twenty Mixes - a Musical Monday post for 1908.19

It took me weeks to assemble this post because of the labor involved in culling through all of my Musical Mondays and selecting the best of the best and listing links all in one place, which is a better way to access them all than using the category links along the right side of the page.

This is a special post as I get to not only collect all the main mixes I have created for the blog, but also write about the mixes, my process, and just the Musical Monday feature in general. If I get ambitious, I may create a master list of all Musical Mondays on the blog since category does not list by links, which would be great if it did. I may also keep this entry updated as I make future mixes, as I have already added last week's mix to the second twenty (which is actually a twenty-two).

I have shared music for years. In my first year of college, I discovered the radio station and became a DJ. I also obtained a cassette recorder and started making mixes, both in my dorm room and at the station, a practice that later evolved to CDs, which I gave away to students as prizes while teaching media criticism (because nusic is part of media). Later, I started making mixes for my iPod and in ITunes, and eventually, with the advent of this blog, I started sharing mixes here. I understand how to create podcast mixes, but I have not yet taken that step, and I may not. I am very proud of the musical features I have assembled on this blog, and so I would like to share most of them, the best of them, all in one place.

Originally, I was going to do a top ten, but this proved too difficult. And so, I have a top twenty, the rest of the mixes, a separate section of ones I made and have used at school, and lastly a few leftovers of good posts that do not have You Tube playlists associated with them.

Also, it's worth noting that there are 183 posts in the Musical Monday category, which include the top twenty, here, the secondary 22, the school mixes that don't repeat (six), and three leftovers, which makes fifty-one total, leaving one hundred and thirty-two posts in the Musical Monday category that feature music but are not themed musical mixes with a You Tube playlist associated with them.

Another purpose for this blog entry is because the list of mixes on You Tube are difficult to search.

Of the top twenty, I did not rank them. I listed them in the order that I created them.

I was going to post cover art and snippets from some of the key mixes, but I don't think those snips would be overly meaningful.

Some of the best mixes repeat in my school list (mixes specifically for a school purpose) that I have shared farther down.

Okay, I lied, a few pictures...

Martha and the Muffins

Instead of posting images or pieces of each mix, here's some comments on the highlights of many plus a few words on those that did not make the top twenty.

I started the Musical Monday thing officially with post #279 in April of 2016. Many of the early Musical Mondays were just whatever I felt like posting that day, such as Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #426 - Musical Monday for 1609.05. And many of these have dead videos as I have not gone through all fixed videos that are no longer active on You Tube.

Rarely did I have a theme, though sometimes, like with #426, I had some thoughts to share on some music I liked, such as Martha and the Muffins (left).

On September 12, 2016, I started naming the focus of the posts, which were not so much themes as the subject matter, such as the first one dedicated to an ambient artist I found called Slow Dancing Society from here in Washington. Posts like that one are more stable as music does not typically come off Bandcamp, so when I embed those, they remain. Also, You Tube changed its embed format in the last five years, voiding previous links.

Though some posts like #475 followed the old format of just Musical Monday and the date, most contained more information in their titles, such as Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #461 - "Liberty" - U2 against Trump - Musical Monday 1610.10, Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #468 - Haunting, Beautiful - Musical Monday for 1610.17, and Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #489 - Go Cubs Go! Musical Monday for 1611.07.

I started making mixes that I re-created as You Tube playlist with Kieron Gillen's best of 2016 music. I listened to this set of forty songs many, many times and have discovered and re-discovered many great artists from his list, such as Anne Marie, Savages, Solange, Jenny Hval, Shura, among so many others and videos like "Ether" by Mogwai and "Nobody Speak" by DJ Shadow and featuring Run the Jewels have inspired me to watch them many times.

Theda Barton

The next mix does not make the top twenty but it ALMOST does, Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #587 - Theda Bara Hollywood's First Sex Symbol - Musical Monday for 1702.13.

Though not on You Tube, this one was also good:

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #692 - Spirits of Place - Musical Monday for 1705.29, which includes a whole article on PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY and this idea of "Spirits of Place."

I am also fond of this one:

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #853 - Drift and Transcend - Nighthawks again - Musical Monday 1711.06

Even so, like the Gillen mix, I was still borrowing mix content from other people. It would be a couple of months before I would make my own mix, a practice I started in WMU study rooms in Sangren while working on homework for courses I was taking, courses I was teaching, and/or meeting with students.

The first of these mixes --

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #629 - America is Waiting, Musical Monday 1703.27 --

provided the banner image and the one below. It starts with the idea of a song, such as the first track from Eno and Byrne's amazing 1981 album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. I started writing about the themes of the mixes with the posts, using imagery to support themes, and trying as much as possible to have songs work together in some cohesive fashion. My system was not perfect, especially since I often let Google make suggestions for what songs to feature, which is just an algorithm prompting me with things I have listened to and things others have listened to.

These mixes are a lot of work. I managed several of them in a row, some of my best, following America Is Waiting with Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #636 - Voodoo In My Blood - Musical Monday for 1704.03, prompted by the incredible video by Massive Attack and Young Fathers called "Voodoo in my Blood," pictured below. I added many stills from the video to the post and again let Google's algorithm machine guide what I posted with new artists I did not know or did not know well, such as Dope Lemon, FKA Twigs, Sevdaliza, and Young Fathers. Often, I would keep with the inspiring artist, so this mix features more Massive Attack and Young Fathers.

Next, I created a mix focused on Cabaret Voltaire and its song "Sensoria." I could not maintain the weekly pace for mixes and so the content alternated. Also, there are stand out collections in the also ran section, not the top twenty, such as a mix from a comic book artist who goes by Docta Foo --
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #608 - Docta Foo - Musical Monday 1703.06; this one, which I like but not enough to make it top twenty, Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #657 - Radio Silence, Musical Monday 1704.24; and even one featuring the Jam, though not exclusively, Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #678 - Days of Speed and Slow-time Mondays - Musical Monday for 1705.15.

Though I did not have mixes weekly, it looks like I had a Musical Monday weekly, for the most part, and sometimes extras on days other than Monday, like my Anne Marie post #673.

I found my groove again for top twenty mixes in June with a Pink Floyd themed one, one inspired by Ani DiFranco, and one starting with a great vintage video from the Fifth Dimension for "Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine." (I am not linking each and every mix mention; find them in the lists below.) All those mixes are powerful and well themed, but the Aquarius one especially has a groovy vibe and as many sunshine or daytime or good day songs as I could find with some intriguing cuts mixed in like, Kawehi's cover of NIN's "Closer" and Art of Noise's "Moments in Love."

And so, I really started to sow my oats with mixes, I made one for Leonard Peltier with many of Robbie Robertson's songs -- Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #734 - Sacrifice (for Leonard Peltier) - Musical Monday for 1707.10 -- using tons of imagery and material found online.

Though I would get choosy with selections for the top twenty in this period with almost 150 from the Leonard Peltier mix to lush mix promoting online radio Soma FM (of which I am a fan) in Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #980 - Be Lush - Support Soma FM - Musical Monday for 1803.12, and then another 100 days until this Housemartins and Paul Weller combo mix Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1085 - Flag Day - A Stone's Throw Away - Musical Monday for 1806.25, and almost 300 days (that's most of a year) until my 1970s teen romance dedicated to Tiger Beat and other fanzines of my youth: A Sense of Doubt blog post #1256 - It's a Lovebeat - Musical Monday for 1807.30, which may be one of my very favorites in the top twenty set.

I am rather proud of the Lovebeat mix, named for the little known but big hit in its time song by the short-lived act Tony DeFranco and the DeFranco family "It's a HeartBeat, It's a Lovebeat," another family group not to be confused with Ani DiFranco, despite the name similarity. I was a huge fan of Tiger Beat and all those kid and family groups in the 1970s.

But the other mixes are also worth a listen. I forgot all about the LUSH mix until I was working on this post, but the "Flag Day" post is one I play a lot in class despite not putting it with the school mixes.

Now, in this period from July of 2017 to July of 2018, I moved out west and got settled, so I can be forgiven for not making any top twenty mixes. For one thing, I was away from my laboratory, those study rooms in Sangren where I could plug my computer into a huge HD monitor mounted to the wall and operate it as a second screen.

http://altcitizen.com/watch-david-byrne-everybodys-coming-to-my-house-american-utopia/

I did resume mixes before Lush, my first 2018 mix in the top twenty with one inspired by Fergie's National Anthem rendition, another Byrne-Eno mix but with their 2008 collaboration Everything That Happens Will Happen Today at the center, a Goldfrapp centered mix with oodles of women artists, a mix crying for help for the incarcerated children at the Mexican border, called "The Black Walls Are Closing In," which is a line from a song by the Chromatics called "Black Walls" which starts and ends the mix with more You Tube suggested songs in between.

Şahmaran - King of Snakes

I am not going to write about all the mixes, as this could go on for a very long scroll time down the page, but I will mention a few more of my favorite honorable mentions, such as the Sevdaliza centered mix -- A Sense of Doubt blog post #1277 - شاهماران Şahmaran - QUEEN of Snakes - Musical Monday for 1808.20 -- and a PJ Harvey themed mix, inspired by my wife's music du jour, A Sense of Doubt blog post #1284 - Bottle Full of Charm - Musical Monday for 1808.27.

I had Gillen's 2017 and 2018 best music lists in here as well as a Steely Dan mix, one of my first single artist mixes, a mix focused on my favorite Beatles song "Let it Be," and more single artist collections for Ani DiFranco, Rickie Lee Jones, Innocence Mission, which I use at school though I did not double list them to the school group. See links to all these in the second twenty list below.

At post #1600, I featured eight songs that I threw together after reading Moby's memoir, which is one of the most recent posts in the second twenty.

Last summer right around this time -- August of 2018 -- I put a lot of labor into two massive mixes, one dedicated to the late great and now defunct Wax Trax music store of Chicago and the music it produced, such as Ministry, Front 242, Meat Beat Manifesto, Revolting Cocks, and others I also added Cabaret Voltaire and Kraftwerk, bands I discovered in pilgrimages to that store. I considered adding Throbbing Gristle, Crass, The The, and others that I discovered there, but I decided to save those for another mix. This mix especially required some curating to fix dead videos.

I did some of that work (some Crass, Throbbing Gristle, and Negatviland) in the next mix, A Sense of Doubt blog post #1270 - God Break Down the Door - A Musical Monday Mix for 1808.13, in which I confronted many aspects of our current "state of the hate nation" in our world. I added the classic scene from the film Network and included a great deal of content about Cabaret Voltaire, Nine Inch Nails' new album Bad Witch, which I included in its entirety at the end of the mix, as well as a long piece of writing from author David Brin that gave more value to the mix entry. I am really, really proud of the content and real social and historical value of both posts and music collections, both of which were some of the longest collections of music that I had made so far (God Break Down the Door is close to 30 tracks).

Those mixes spurred on a renaissance of mix making, though I may not have gone whole hog as I did had I not landed two new teaching jobs, one at Concordia University in Portland, and one in Longview, Washington at Lower Columbia College.

After the craziness of the first two weeks of Concordia as I was hired literally two days before the semester's start, and Rose City Comic Con, which I attended, I started making mixes to play in class, such as a one themed for Tom Waits, which featured the lyrics for "Clap Hands," which is a slashing killer butcher knife excoriating song; one that focused on hip hop and the band Arrested Development along with some of my ideas about appropriation and co-optation, concepts that I rap about in the classroom when I share with students the vital importance of not just African-Americans to modern music but Africans, brought here against their will, and the bulk of that content is in another post about the DEBT NOT PAID; of course, I created a Halloween mix with Bauhaus' "Bela Lugosi is Dead" as the first cut, and I just had to add a track list to the post; a mix that started with King Crimson's "Discipline" (and "Indiscipline") as it's root, to play to students before a test, and then evolves with many '80s tunes from Talking Heads, Kate Bush, Gang of Four, Peter Gabriel, and Devo, '70s Pink Floyd and new stuff by Moby and Mogwai ("Ether" again) -- this one also needs a track list, so I added one; eventually I started adding old mixes I had created years ago, such as Ella Megalast Burls Forever, my main mix of favorite Cocteau Twins songs; and lastly, finishing out my top twenty, is one of the few mixes I had time to do in 2019, for DEVO with a great deal of extra content above and beyond the music.

Going way back in my teaching career, I used Kate Bush's "This Woman's Work" as a writing activity or just showed it in class, so I have a new activity and a Kate Bush mix. I also have a post (not a mix) for a cool writing activity comparing the Jam's "That's Entertainment" to Sandberg's "Chicago."

I invented a mix by request when reading The Watchmen a student suggested a mic with "All Along the Watchtower", and thus was born my mix called Two Riders Approaching - The Wind Began to Howl, which features some COOL Graffitti from the Rolling Stones' video for "Sympathy for the Devil." I added a lot of political content and some students learned new things, like "The Personal is Political," which is not something they knew before.

I needed a mix for Sinead O'Connor, and I made a huge (50 tracks!) mix for reparations and redemption for our role as Americans in the slave trade and slavery.

There's some others I did not describe, but this is more than enough content. Whoa.

Okay, thanks for reading. On to the mixes.

AMERICA IS WAITING FOR A MESSAGE OF SOME SORT OR ANOTHER...

TOP TWENTY MIXES
The top twenty mixes were difficult to choose. They are not ranked, but rather they are presented in the order that I created them.

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #573 - Kieron Gillen's Best of for 2016 - Musical Monday 1701.30

Fergie - National Anthem - NBA All Star Game 2018

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SENSE OF DOUBT STATUS AS OF 0705.04 - 16:45

Sense of Doubt is not currently dedicated to any themes or special interest. The subject matter is mine and may range from comic books to ultimate or from Baseball to feminist-centered media criticism. Until I feel I have enough content for multiple blogs, or until I am seized with a desire to create multiple blogs, this is it, and appropriately so. "Sense of Doubt" came about in Bowie’s Berlin period and the dark, ambient collaborations with Brian Eno. Like the Bowie of 1978, I have my own darkness that steals over me and through me, infecting everything. At the risk of sounding far too melodramatically obsessed with my own self-flagellations, this blog dedicates itself to that darkness, that infection. But it’s fun, too. Hey, I can be amusing? Or not. It’s the way of the [w]rench. Neurosis compelling action in insecure double-checking and misunderstanding evasions. It is my way.

More from the original description text that needed editing in 2015: Furthermore, Sense of Doubt is dedicated to the random. The theme is no theme. Just questions, doubt, and uncertainty. Feel the power of not knowing the answer. So dedicated on the last day of July 2006 by the Galactic Monkey Wrench.

The Galactic Monkey Wrench

This is the logo of the Galactic Monkey Wrench. I was given the nickname Galactic Monkey Wrench in college by a friend of mine who felt that I threw the monkey wrench into the cosmos at every available opportunity. Later, in discussions with my best friend, who is the Lord of Chaos (the Loc), he asked for my title and when I told him, without thinking, he blurted out "the gmr!" Since this was random and we appreciate randomness, I became the gmr, even though technically I should be the gmw. But gmw sounds like a car or some industrial manufacturing firm that makes a strange widget of which one has never heard. This acronym fetish may make no sense to anyone else, but my friend and I are quite driven to provide acronyms for many things. At the very least, it allows us to keep our conversations obscure and often private as no one knows about what we're talking.

Monkey Wrench Books

Chris's books

A Feast for Crows

by George R.R. Martin

This book is a little slower than the others. But if you become invested in this series, it provides key information about the history of Westeros and the lands across the Narrow Sea. It may not contain chapters with my favorite characters ...

A Game of Thrones

by George R.R. Martin

Do I really need to review this book? It's one of the best books I have ever read. Martin is a great writer. All the books are great, and I am loving my time rereading them. If you have not checked out these books, start here and get ready ...

The Golden City

by John Twelve Hawks

These books are immensely entertaining. Treat yourself to some strong writing, great action, compelling characters, and a mix of metaphysics and theology. The ending of this third book, which is presumably the last, is anti-climactic and so...

Pathfinder

by Orson Scott Card

This was a fun book. Not OSC's best but very good OSC nonetheless. The best thing about is the time travel, slowing, and speeding powers of the characters and how OSC engages the reader in discussion of causality and time paradox. For fans ...

Swamplandia!

by Karen Russell

This book came to me via my wife Liesel who discovered it and urged me to read it. Beautifully written with compelling characters and a sense of the magical (yet realistic, somewhat). Funny yet full of the pathos that marks a good if not gr...

Hey, Mom! The Explanation.

Monday, August 19, 2019

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1644 - Top Twenty Mixes - a Musical Monday post for 1908.19

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