Pretty Boys and Pretty Girls - Book of Love

Quintessential American electronic dance pop from the 80s, but alternative pop.  Not something that fit well with the top 40 of the time, and that's good.  It stays fresh over time.  I saw these guys live at University of Rochester.  They were great.  Different than anyone I had seen before, both in music and in setup.  There's nothing complicated about their songs.  Simple, well-produced, well executed. Fun and light hearted too.  The machine groove of this song in particular really impressed me.  I've long had an idea that one pull of technopop dance music is the feeling of giving oneself away to the beat, in the manner of an automaton or android.  Tranformation into a machine, a desire for perfection.

Yoda - Al Yankovic

Ru-Jun's current favorite song (based on Lola by the Kinks).  I've memorized the lyrics and most night she asks me to do both Yoda and Lola,

First week

of the new semester. Science going very slowly. No time at home this week for music either. So it goes...

What Do I Know - Saga

Saga showing their poppier side in 1985.  I didn't keep up with much of their stuff after this, but I really liked this song.  Probably had something to do with the detatchment I was going through in my early college days (well all of my college days pretty much).  Pretty scary thinking back, how much development I still had to do as a person even in the early 20s.

Smooth Operator - Sade

[link] I have a thing for Sade.  Always have.  Always will.

Absolutely Immune - Act

Lush dance pop.  Among the lushest.  Great chords.  Great layering of sound.  Claudia Brücken is powerful.  This is from 1987.  The clubs I went to at that time played alternative pop like this, and DJing consisted of mixing one song into another, not creatively mixing stuff into new compositions, which is what DJing has come to mean since then.  There were dance mixes of songs meant for clubs.  This particular song was pretty much club ready as is.

We Are What We Are - The Other Ones

1989, my senior year at college. I was still MTV deprived and MTV was still playing music videos then. Saw this really cool video and was mesmerized. It's a great song. Deceptively simple chord changes. Incredible vocal.

Behind the Wall of Sleep - The Smithereens

One of my favorites of theirs. Also a pretty easy learn. The "the" in the song title should really be an "a" in my opinion.

S.O.S. - Abba

Abba has a lot of really great songs, from a purely pop music standpoint, no matter what you think of their pop cultural status.  This is my favorite.  Multiple hooks.  Really well thought out transitions and instrumentation.  Vocals are sparkling and rich.  These guys could write and produce songs.

This is scary.

Soybeans Susceptible to Man-Made Materials in Soil. Specifically nanomaterials that are already in consumer products.  I'm not surprised by this.  We are stuck with these things.  Now we've got to hope that this doesn't become a serious or irremediable threat to our food supply.

Co-sleeping

Seems so maladaptive for the adults involved. So inconvenient that the co-sleeping urge/need wasn't purged from our lineage eons ago.

science gives way to teaching

starting next week, a lot of the time anyway
I'm way behind on getting ready for the teaching...

The Human Jungle - The Jazz Butcher

College radio was really into these guys in the late 80s, early 90s.  They seem to be in the XTC/Camper Van Beethoven/China Crisis vein of quirky, intellectual rock, with jazz and funk influences.

possible setback

I've been breeding a bunch of Drosophila melanogaster third chromosomes, from five populations along the East Coast, from one X:2 background into another through a four generation crossing scheme involving balancer chromosomes.  The new background has white+ on the X and they are coming from a white- background.  In the current generation I'm seeing white eyed males when I should not see them.  The simplest explanation, which would not be good, would be if the new background stock (Ral[303]; Ral[303]; TM2/TM6) is contaminated with a white- X chromosome. If this is the case then the stock contains recombinant chromosomes and about a month of work would have to be discarded and restarted.  A less likely possibility would be if the above Ral 303 stock has a high incidence of X nondisjunction in females and the white- males are X:0.  This would not pose a problem to the stock or the lines because these males are sterile.  I'll probably know in the next two weeks as I collect the next generation whose mothers are from the Ral[303] stock.

Send Me and Angel - Real Life

From 1983.  Bought the vinyl 45 of this (which means it is packed up in the basement or on a shelf somewhere in the house).  Great pop song with a gothic edge.  Still sounds great after all these years.

Music and Wine - Blue Six

Love this deep house track.  The chords establish the atmosphere.  The rhythm touches are subtle.  Very nice mid tempo atmosphere. A great ride into the night.

Benny Benassi - Love Is Gonna Save Us

Don't remember how I found this a few years ago.  But I went for it in a big way.  Unlike autotune, which I hate, the vocal effect in this is terrific.  Very atmospheric.  The break is not my favorite, but the main A part of the song has such a drive that it doesn't even matter how it is broken up.  If I were a club DJ, my instinct would be to take tracks like this and literally make it a different planet on the dance floor.

She's in Parties - Bauhaus

Bauhaus's sound and look became quite polished, and Peter Murphy's voice translated well into pop.  This set a sound for a lot of bands like the Bolshoi and  Blancmange and even extended into the huge mainstream sounds of bands like Depeche Mode and Erasure.

The Passion of Lovers - Bauhaus

From 1981.  By many accounts, these guys originated the goth idiom in rock in pop, although it is arguable that hard rock in the late 60s and 70s had a lot of the elements lying around (Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper, the black magic references in Led Zeppelin, just to name a few).  Bauhaus injected punk/raw-postpunk elements, which was novel.  (I don't see the aesthetic connection with the Bauhaus artistic/design style, but that's OK). The vocal (and deep, echoing production) is there, which seems to have started everything off.

Blue Water - Fields of the Nephilim

[link] Fairly mainstream Goth, complete with the imagery.  The zombie-esque lead vocal seems to be a prerequisite for the main line of this genre.  Pure and literal.  Doesn't do as much for me as some of the earlier posted songs...

Bittersweet - New Model Army

[link] Kind of in the same vein, but even more drive from the rhythm section.  The punk side of goth.  Really like the base line here.  This song is a very sharp and thorough expression of a strong musical idea.  It gets there.

Inside Out - Into a Circle

Another one off the Goth compilation.  The only thing I could find on YouTube is this compilation - it's the second song (just a clip of it).  Great verse hook.

Hex - Specimen

Another one in the Gothic Rock 3 compilation.  Dance-gothic with a little glamminess thrown in.  Pure atmosphere.  It's right in the chords and synth lead.  The B part is especially nice.

Lucretia My Reflection - The Sisters of Mercy

Their material becomes fairly redundant fairly quickly (not unlike their fellow Yorshirian goth-oid rockers The Cult in that respect), but The Sisters of Mercy mined a very tight wavelength of gothic rock to produce a very big sound, grandiose in its heavy, romantic poetics, which is what goth is all about. Here is one of my favorites of theirs, Lucretia My Reflection.

Walking On Your Hands - Red Lorry Yellow Lorry

I forget whether it was in Durham or Madison, but at some point in my days of going to used CD stores I picked up a 2 disc compilation called Gothic Rock 3.  There were a lot of great tracks, some fairly obscure (at least to me).  Here is one (from 1986).  I would love to get the first two CD sets in this series.

Monastic mode

Me. Alone in lab. At the scope. Collecting/sorting/scoring flies.  Notebook to my right.  How I best like to do science.  Doing it a little bit these days.  Not enough though...

My Favorite Led Zeppelin album

Houses of the Holy, from 1973.  Amazing from start to finish.

The Song Remains the Same
The Rain Song
Over the Hills and Far Away
The Crunge
Dancing Days
D'yer Mak'er (pronounced 'Jamaica' BTW)
No Quarter
The Ocean

One of the best album covers of all time, as well.

The lab

The lab still needs a lot of cleaning up.  There are a lot of things from when things came to a halt in 2010 that need to be cleared out, including most of the material in the freezers.  I am slowly getting around to things, mostly clearing out the space that we use the most: the fly and computer benches and the bench where we video behavior and one molecular bench.  We are doing a lot of phenotype work on two projects, the elegans/gunungcola project and the melanogaster project; myself, Rocio, and a group of undergraduates working with me.  They are both huge projects and everything we are doing is working well.  I just need more time there.  When summer runs out, my lab time largely runs out...

Stairway to Heaven - Led Zeppelin

The grand daddy of all hard rock songs (ballad and otherwise).  Learning it and should be able to come up with a passable derivation.  Not simple but not as complicated as I thought.

No technician

Other than Shian-Ren on a part-time, volunteer basis, I've never employed a lab technician.  These days I manage everything with my own hands (we are not doing cloning any more or much molecular stuff these days other than fly DNA preps).  I've never wanted to worry about keeping a tech supported.  It's pretty impractical in terms of my own schedule.  But I like being in the lab and I have things streamlined enough (am gradually cleaning up the lab from the remnants of the way things were during the first eight or so years) that things go OK.

Some people meditate

My substitute for that is to do repetitive manual labor.  Mostly in the lab but elsewhere too (dishwashing, lawnmowing).  It lets me think.  I'm sort of notorious about this around the department.  It's also because I've never hired a technician (don't want to without long term support, which doesn't exist).  Good for the soul and good for the mind...