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Steve Albini’s letter to Nirvana

Posted on September 27, 2013 by matt

A letter Steve Albini wrote to Nirvana about producing In Utero has been making the rounds. You can see it here.

“My first choice for an outside recording studio would be a place called Pachyderm in Cannon Falls, Minnesota. It’s a great facility with outstanding acoustics and a totally comfy architect’s wet-dream mansion where the band lives during the recording.”

This is also great:

“I would like to be paid like a plumber: I do the job and you pay me what it’s worth. The record company will expect me to ask for a point or a point and a half. If we assume three million sales, that works out to 400,000 dollars or so. There’s no fucking way I would ever take that much money. I wouldn’t be able to sleep.”

In other Nirvana news, Kurt Cobain’s family is putting his boyhood home in Aberdeen up for sale perhaps to tie into the 20th anniversary and reissue of In Utero (although maybe that’s just a coincidence).

The house was last assessed at around $67,000. They are asking for $500,000, but included in the purchase price is Cobain’s old mattress. I’d say it’s a steal.

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Portlandia Season 2 Filming Locations

Posted on September 5, 2013 by matt

Portlandia
Portlandia (photo: David Beach)

Portlandia season 2 first aired over a year and a half ago, so here’s a timely post about the locations.

I left out the residential homes. If you want to repeatedly petition the people who live there to ban plastic bags in Oregon or force them to watch The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari you’ll have to find those addresses on your own.

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star wars locations

Posted on July 23, 2013 by peter bell

With the release of Episode 7 of the Star Wars franchise set to release in 2015, here’s a list of locations associated with Star Wars Episodes 1-6.

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ernest hemingway locations

Posted on July 16, 2013 by peter bell

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in Oak Park, IL on July 21, 1899.  The son of a physician (Clarence Edmonds Hemingway) and a musician (Grace Hall-Hemingway), Ernest spent the summers of his youth in northern Michigan where he learned to hunt and fish, as he began to develop a habit for writing stories.  Later in life, Hemingway’s journalistic endeavors gave way to a prominent literary career.

Hemingway’s sparse and direct prose become more pronounced when compared to the writer’s larger-than-life public persona.  His writings often reflected his adventures, experiences that spanned several continents.  Here is a list of locations associated with the iconic American writer, Ernest Hemingway.

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new space locations

Posted on May 29, 2013 by peter bell

Elon Musk and President Obama

The phrases “NewSpace” or “new space” are catch-all descriptors that refer to a set of ideas and a collection of companies that are revolutionizing the way humans view space travel by privatizing space exploration for entrepreneurial advancement.

The proponents of NewSpace are as varied in their ability, intention, and methods as any other nascent industry, but their companies seem to have common guiding principles: lowering the cost of space travel, driving towards specific innovation for financial gain, and focusing on increasing human presence in space.  Some major figures, like SpaceX’s Elon Musk and Planetary Resources’ Eric Anderson, are unabashedly direct when they describe their intentions to colonize Mars.

In our stockholder-appeasing corporate culture, it’s easy to forget that at one time business was the main incentive for exploration and technological advancement.  From Christopher Columbus’ spice hunts to the railroad’s insatiable appetite for timber and mining, much of human history’s quest for the great beyond was usually done to make a buck.

While the thought of bringing this track record of environmental destruction and genocide to outer space may cause a little bit of apprehension, it’s outweighed by the realization that the entirety of human civilization exists on one asteroid-prone, environmentally-precarious, WMD-laden blue marble.  It’s good to know there are actually people out there doing remarkable- nay, other-worldly– work.  Here’s a list of locations where space dreamers roam.

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