music, culture, discourse, new media
write ups
Visiting The Greenhouse Tavern
Apr 5th
Over the weekend I had a chance to visit my hometown of Westlake, Ohio. I usually make it back once or twice a year. In an attempt to keep with a New Year’s Resolution to spend more time with family, I flew back to visit my parents for Easter weekend.
On Friday night we dined at the Greenhouse Tavern. It’s a relatively new restaurant located in Cleveland’s East 4th Street Entertainment District.
I was impressed with their farm-to-table approach presented in a totally forward-thinking and upscale way. Maybe I’ve been living on the west coast for too long, but I really do believe that farm-to-table sets an example of how we should all be eating in the first place.
Opening almost exactly a year ago, The Greenhouse is the first restaurant in the city to be LEED Certified (LEED certification is recognition that a building’s management has implemented best practices for creating an energy efficient and environmentally sustainable structure). It’s also the first green-certified restaurant in the state of Ohio.
In addition to being green the narrow space is also elegant. It employs beautiful oak flooring from former Ohio farmhouses and barns, reclaimed vintage doors, and salvaged materials from the local business Old School Architectural Salvage. Other local businesses were hired to create furnishings. I learned from Yelp users that the best place to sit is actually in the basement, where you can pony up alongside the chefs and watch the action take place.
The restaurant advocates the Farm to Plate Movement, which means that all ingredients are locally produced. Our guy explained what the wild Ohio ramps were on the menu (think leek meets onion) which he had happened to pick that morning himself. The menu changes constantly to reflect new dishes and ingredients (say, if one of the staff happened to have gone fishing that morning – it would be incorporated on the menu that evening).
In a town known for roast beef and hot dogs, The Greenhouse is inspiring and a total breath of fresh air.
Although I’m a fairly fussy eater and was quite impressed with my experience, one of my favorite aspects of the restaurant was (surprise!) the jukebox. In the basement along the wall is an amazingly retro-outfitted jukebox with those little old-school hand-written cards. The music with funk, soul, r&b and rock singles – it made me happy just looking at it.
Overall, I’m excited for what the Greenhouse Tavern could mean for Cleveland and midwestern cities at large.
Named one of Bon Appetit Magazine’s Top Ten Best New Restaurants in America certainly gives it – and the city – international cred. More importantly is what it implies locally. Restaurants like The Greenhouse Tavern are promoting a practice and mentality that will better dining and best building practices for generations to come.
Let’s hope it catches on.
More:
http://www.thegreenhousetavern.com
Bon Appetit feature (PDF)
New York Times mention (PDF)
Choice Albums of 2009
Dec 12th
There were many amazing releases this year from all genres, ranging from well known artists to the obscure.
Below are my top 10 pics for 2009 as well as a quite considerable list of notable runners-up!
Runners Up:
Doves “Kingdom of Rust”
Bodycode “Immune”
Silversun Pickups “Swoon”
Muse “The Resistance”
White Rabbits “It’s Frightening”
Nosaj Thing “Drift”
DJ Vadim “U Can’t Lurn Imaginashun”
One Eskimo “One Eskimo”
Ingrid Michaelson “Everybody”
The XX “xx”
Volcano Choir “Unmap”
The Antlers “Hospice”
Dead Weather “Horehound”
Neon Indian “Psychic Chasms”
Dead Man’s Bones “Dead Man’s Bones”
Califone “All my Friends are Funeral Singers”
Mayer Hawthorne “A Strange Arrangement”
Monsters of Folk “Monsters of Folk”
Phoenix “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix”
Click here for last year’s choice music podcasts of 2008.
Mining Moof
Oct 25th
Moof.com is one service of many that’s a step closer to granting us an all-access portal to our iTunes music collections from off-site.
A simple .xml export/import from iTunes allows Moof to quickly assess your library, referencing all tracks and playlists located there.
Moof currently pulls content from YouTube. Often, it pulls live versions of songs rather than the original, making it fun to watch video playback while adding a new dimension to the casual listening experience.
The site brings closer the idea of having access to our music collection anywhere, from any device of choice (almost – when am I gonna get access from my car stereo receiver, anyway?). A huge bonus is the ability to share songs and playlists with others.
Some sites like Drowned in Sound and We Are Hunted already do this on cloud-based music streaming service Spotify.
It will be interesting to see if Moof – or a related site – will eventually partner with content providers to enable full-on access to everything in my iTunes library whether it be live versions, remixes, rarities, or originals.
Singing About Songbird
Mar 31st
Note: This article is syndicated at made this for you.
When it comes to media management, iTunes is a staple for handling my music library. A self-professed music junkie, I need a library that’s seamless to navigate, highly organizable, and can accommodate a limitless amount of files in a variety of formats.
I don’t infrequently tie my needs to any particular brand or product line. Although I love Apple products and require them to function on a daily basis, I try to switch it up whenever possible by incorporating tools and technologies from a variety of sources.
And I thought nothing could top iTunes until I discovered what Songbird can do.
Songbird offers the basic functionality of iTunes – unrestricted file capacity and unlimited playlists, navigational ease, import/export options; but tricks it out on many levels.
The open-source software offers total customization of your audio player. It offers plug-ins called “add-ons” that pull in bonuses while your music plays like concert info, data from last.fm, Shoutcast radio, and more. The MashTape add-on looks for related content like photos, video, and reviews from your bands by pulling in data from Flickr, YouTube, and Amazon. Online digital music store 7Digital recently partnered with Songbird to offer full integration. The store, currently in beta, will offer 320 kbps DRM-free MP3 downloads. They also promise to offer custom recommendations in the future based around what you’re playing from your library.
With all of these features, Songbird is a serious contender in becoming a viable alternative to iTunes. The only major downside is that Songbird doesn’t seamlessly connect to AirTunes allowing wireless playback from Songbird to a home stereo. A quick fix is a tool called Airfoil from Rogue Amoeba (the same company that created Audio Hijack). Although it will set you back $25 it seems to do the trick.
Songbird is an open-source, fully customizable music player built on the open-source media framework Gstreamer. You can participate by hacking on the software and trying out new builds before they’re released. A developer Recipe Book offers code snippets for “Featherers” to tinker with.They sell some pretty kick-ass t-shirts too!
Contribute: http://getsongbird.com/contribute/
Get Songbird v 1.1.1 now: http://getsongbird.com/
A Look at Miro
Mar 15th
Note: This article is syndicated at made this for you.
After spending time with Boxee, I decided it was time to explore alternate options for streaming online video to my TV. The back-and-forth between Boxee and Hulu had started to get a little nuts – and ideally I’d like one place to go for all my content without worrying about it unexpectedly going away. In a perfect world, all content owners would offer an RSS feed for me to ingest content wherever I’d like it to go. If the bulk of the advertising lives within the video playback itself, video can freely travel – and the container itself shouldn’t make a big difference.
Cue Miro.
While trolling my Google reader late one night (as nerds like us are wont to do), I discovered the free, open source HD video player that quickly and easily serves up video streams. You can stream videos from sites like YouTube, Comedy Central, CBS, or Hulu (for now); and Miro will upscale to HD wherever it’s offered. The app offers full playback of content from within my media library too; making it a great one-stop for video playback. Very cool. Miro’s real strength though, appears to lie in the ability to host and organize multiple video feeds from a variety of sources.
The simple layout and navigation process resembles iTunes. A sidebar located on the left allows easy navigation of your content whether it be online or local. You can subscribe to RSS feeds and set them to automatically download new episodes as they become available- just like subscribing to a podcast in iTunes. You can even subscribe to a torrent, allowing you to keep all of your vids in one place (I chose a “Miro” directory under “Movies” to keep it clean). After Miro grabs your new episodes, you can easily port them to your device of choice.
The open-source nature of the program means that you can participate in the continual build to improve it. The website offers information for those who would like to write code, become a bug tester, or simply help others get started.
Miro 2.0 is currently free for Mac OSX and created by the non-profit Participatory Culture Foundation. It’s open source and licensed under the GPL (general public license), with the goal to decentralize online video by making it free and open.
Get it: http://www.getmiro.com
Read the blog: http://www.getmiro.com/blog
