An off-and-on hobby of mine has been making mix CDs. The magic of the Internet got me into some mix trading circles, and I assembled a good 30 or so mixes for people, or just myself. Some of my earlier experiments found their way to artofthemix.org. Few of those were distributed, but they do show how I developed my style. Now that I have some free time on my hands, I’ve decided to get in on the mix CD thing again. In putting together my latest batch of mixes, I’ve thought about what makes a good mix. I think I’ve hit on a few key ideas.

The key thing that unites all of these ideas is that the creation a curated experience—not just hitting shuffle on your MP3 player. Mix CDs needs to do more than just be a collection of songs, they need to provide an experience, on par with the best albums in your collection. They need to stand on their own as individual works, not just as collections of parts; works that show off more than what songs you have. The best mix CDs show something about their creator, too. What follows can help with that.

The Basics

Theme

Every good mix CD has, at its core, a theme, which will let you define the songs you put on your mix. If you’re just throwing songs on a CD willy-nilly, you’re not really making a mix. A theme doesn’t have to be anything complex or fancy. “Songs that make me happy” is a good, basic theme. “Songs about travel,” or “songs with funny lyrics,” might work as well. Some of my favorite mix CD themes have been “songs that have questions for titles,” “songs that are the first song on their album,” and “songs about food.”

It helps to have a theme that lets you cast a wide enough net to fill the majority of a CD, but is specific enough to tie things together. One of my most difficult mixes to make was a “days of the week” mix—with songs referring to each specific day of the week. I had to expand the concept slightly to songs that talked about yesterday, tomorrow, and the week as a whole, just to fill things up. In general, it’s better to err on the side of caution, and have a less specific theme that you can whittle down. It’s easier to remove songs from a mix than to add them if you’re out of ideas.

Flow

In this fancy-pants digital age, making sure your mix CD has “flow” is far easier than it was in the cassette tape days. ((Admittedly, those days were before my time, but when you recorded to a cassette tape, it was a damned time consuming process. The digital music revolution makes the process much easier, but also encourages laziness. The point of this essay is to encourage the art to go back into it.)) What is “flow”? It’s making sure your mix transitions from one song to the other in a way that isn’t jarring or disjointed. ((Of course, jarring and disjointed may be something you want to use for effect. It depends on the theme and structure of your mix. A quiet, slow tune leading into a high-energy, loud song can serve a mix well, when done right.)) If you’re putting your mix together in iTunes or whatever media player you use, you can easily rearrange tracks to make sure things match up nicely. While assembling a mix, I often play the last 20 seconds or so of a song just to make sure it matches up well with what follows.

Protip: Be conscientious of silence at the beginning and end of tracks. A song with 4 seconds of silence at the end can wreck flow. Some media players let you adjust the start and endpoint of a song. If yours doesn’t, you might need to actually edit the file. I recommend Audacity for this task. This is also useful for incorporating live tracks which may have commentary and other non-musical stuff that breaks things up.

“Flow” isn’t just on a track-by-track scale, either. It also can modulate the disc as a whole. Your mix can start quiet, slowly building in intensity and speed along the tracks, or it can be up-and-down, or anywhere along the spectrum. The flow has to be there, however, so it doesn’t just sound like you put an iPod on shuffle. Mix CDs require attention to detail. Of course, the flow of a disc as a whole is largely dictated by…

Structure

Structure is actually more of an intermediate tip, but if you’ve gotten good with themes and flow, you should be ready to tackle a slightly structured mix. Structure is intrinsically related to flow, and a mix with good structure has to balance the flow of the songs with the overall mode of the mix. A good example of a mix that would require serious structure is a Narrative mix. Here is a self-created example. Each song has its place in the overall story, and are structured to provide a narrative, while still providing flow.

On a less rigid scale, a structure for a Mix CD can help to reinforce the theme of the mix. Often, I like to start off mix CDs with a song that epitomizes the theme of the mix. A mix I created for a convention happening in my hometown of Philadelphia began with the theme to “American Bandstand” which tied together both the theme of songs by Philadelphians, or about the city, with the historical connection to Bandstand and the long tradition of rock and soul music in Philadelphia. ((This mix then switched into the sardonic “Philadelphia” by Atom and his Package, which pokes fun at this city in the way that only a local can.)) Another good way to add structure to a mix is to group related songs together, relating by subject matter, tone, artist, or any other criteria—making sure to pay attention, of course, to flow.

Advanced Tricks

Filler Tracks

For lack of a better term, “filler” tracks can help strengthen a mix CD. They can reinforce a theme, provide flow between disparate tracks, or break a disc up into sections for structure. One of my favorite mixes, “Come On and Buy It”, themed around commercialism and business, used a selection of short advertising clips I had by Raymond Scott. Another mix, themed on science fiction, included quotes from the show “Futurama” to break up songs. Filler can be almost anything: comedy clips, audio commercials, very short songs from a CD. As long as it fits the theme, go for it.

Introductions and Conclusions

As a variant of filler tracks, it can help to start and end a Mix with unique and distinctive tracks. A mix CD themed around New York City, for example, may begin and end with different versions of “New York, New York”. ((I’m actually using this trick on a mix CD for an older friend who wants a disc of his favorite songs. As he asked for the two different versions of “New York, New York,” it made sense to do it this way.)) Short instrumentals, clips from movies, any sort of sound that matches the theme of the disk can help bring the listener into what your mix is trying to do.

Manually Editing Songs

Though alluded to in the section on Flow, actually editing songs can be a great tool to really take your Mix CDs over the top. You can utilize this trick to do all sorts of neat effects, ranging from simple crossfading, to creating medleys of songs. Manipulating the audio of your mix CD tracks is an absolute power tool. Use it wisely. I tend not to bother, but I know it has its place.

Don’ts

Please, please, please do not do any of the following:

• Ignore your audience. If your buddy Bob is getting into Japanese Noise Rock, then go hook them up with it. Your mom might not be so into it.
• Crossfade every song into each other, especially if they don’t crossfade right.
• Forget to include CD Text, or at the very least a printed track list for people to put into their media player.

Putting it over the top

If you follow all of the basics, you’ll have a great mix. If you do some of the advanced tricks, you can have an amazing mix. If you give it cover art, package it nicely, and deliver it, you’ll have an spectacular mix. ((If you’re making a Mix CD for your significant other, or would-be-significant-other, you darn well better at least package it nicely.)) A clever title helps too: I like to use lyrics from songs that fit the theme. Don’t just hand over a bare CD, either: get a jewel case or make your own packaging. If the effort shows, the impact will be there.

In Conclusion

What makes a mix CD great is a combination of thought, style, and content. The entire point of the above is to force you, the mix CD creator, to think and to put effort into your creation—make it something of value. The ultimate mix CD is a statement, not just of musical tastes, but of creativity and mindset. The easier it is to do something, the easier it is to half-ass it, and such is the inevitable consequence of the otherwise awesome digital music revolution. ((“Digital music revolution” used here purely for lack of a better descriptor.)) If this screed convinces just one person to put some effort into a mix, then so much the better. Give it a try. Make a mix CD. Share it with someone. Enjoy the reaction.

The summer of 2005 was a tumultuous one for my digital life. Following a brief, and fairly unsuccessful attempt at freelance web design—not the smartest thing to do while being a full time student and a part time worker—I decided I needed a new computer. The original plan was to purchase a laptop. As a Linux user, my needs were modest. I wouldn’t be playing fancy, processor intensive computer games except SimCity 4, and I wouldn’t be doing much more high-end tasks than simply running GIMP to do image editing. Yet, as I pondered the situation, certain things were pushing me towards the Macintosh. Many of my geekier online friends, some of which are pretty solidly hardcore. ((To give you an idea, one of them now works for Dreamhost, and could write shell scripts in her sleep with one hand tied behind her back, with a Dvorak keyboard.)) On top of this, the Mac had long since ditched the “Classic” OS for the shiny, Unix based Mac OS X. The UNIX skills I had learned from my Linux days would not go to waste, after all. What pushed me over the edge, however, was [Merlin Mann](http://www.merlinmann.com), and his [articles on Quicksilver](http://www.43folders.com/2007/03/28/getting-started-quicksilver). ((Some of these, I should actually go back and read over again. I really would like to automate more stuff on my Mac.)) There was nothing like Quicksilver in the Linux world. I had to have it.

With $600 to spend, I rolled the dice, and chose the bottom-of-the-line G4 Mac mini, with a 512 MB RAM upgrade. Along with it, I purchased an Apple Keyboard to replace my [beloved IBM Model M keyboard](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_M_keyboard) ((The IBM Model M is, without a doubt, the greatest keyboard ever made. Other keyboards have their partisans. I know [John Gruber](http://www.daringfireball.net) stands by his vintage Apple Extended II keyboard, but nothing is quite like a Model M. The darn thing was built like a tank. The key caps were two pieces, so you could rearrange to, say, Dvorak, without breaking a sweat. It clicked, loudly, so you always sounded productive. What’s not to love? I currently rock an aluminum Apple Wireless Keyboard, and it’s almost as good, just too quiet.)), a necessary investment the IBM lacked the Command key. Within a week of ordering the mini, Apple refreshed the line, making 512 MB of RAM standard. Apple immediately refunded my upgrade cost, which earned them brownie points from the get-go. Waiting for it to arrive was the hardest part, but at last, come late July of 2005, I found the Mac mini at the door, when I left to go to my summer class at the Community College of Philadelphia. I had to be patient.

Once I had set everything up and copied over all the data from my old computer, I connected my digital camera to transfer over the photos that I had neglected to transfer for months. As soon as the camera turned on, iPhoto opened and displayed a message asking if I would like to transfer my photos. I did not have to install anything. I did not have to configure anything. I did not have to perform an arcane set of commands to make sure I could access the files. ((While using Linux to get photos off of my camera, I had to open a terminal session, switch to [root](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_user), run gphoto2, and then change the ownership and permission for every image. This was due to some sort of quirk involving USB device permissions, and it was a pain in the rear to do.)) I could have cried when it finished. After all, it was 2005—why should I have had to bother with arcane terminal commands to do something so mind-numbingly simple?

The Mac mini was my primary computer for nearly three years, even as the entire Macintosh line went Intel. I upgraded the mini to a full gigabyte of RAM, and added a 250GB external HD. Before starting at Temple University, I picked up a refurbished, last generation iBook G4 to take to classes, and used the two machines in tandem. ((Oddly, this iBook had a problem with the main exhaust fan—it didn’t work. I didn’t figure this out for over a year, as the machine didn’t have any problems unless I kept it running somewhere that would let the heat build up. Another piece of electronics built like a tank.)) When my roommate’s computer died in 2008, I lent him the Mac mini, and I used the iBook as my primary computer for over a year. In May of 2008, for graduating, I got a MacBook—my first Intel Mac, and it’s still here. I’ve drank the Kool-Aid, and I like it.

The weekend of November 19th, I had the unique experience of engaging in time travel—twice—while on a trip to New York City. Apparently, at times, the auditorium at Irving Plaza ((Well, I suppose it’s now the Fillmore East at Irving Plaza, but nobody calls it that any more.)) serves as a portal to another time, though the same place. In this case, one trip, that of November 19th, took me back to 1978. The next night, I ended up two years later in 1980. What brought these strange phenomena to the fore? What force brought me into that mystic chamber to send me into the distant past, before I was even born, before I was even a speck, before my very concept had even formed in the minds of my parents? Only one force could be so powerful: [DEVO](http://www.clubdevo.com).

In celebration of the long overdue remastering and re-release of their most famous albums, 1978’s _Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are DEVO!_, and 1980’s _Freedom of Choice_, DEVO went on a too-brief tour of two-night stands. Each night featured the full performance of one album, and a brief encore set. Far from just being simple concert performances/museum pieces, they took the opportunity to use these shows as an excuse to relive the past fully, replicating the costumes, stage sets and choreography of the respective album’s tour, though with a dose of modern technology to make the job easier. When combined with tight performing, and a band more enthusiastic than I’ve ever seen them ((My previous DEVO shows are 2004 in Central Park, 2005 in Atlantic City, and 2008 in my home town of Philadelphia.)), it may as well had been time travel to the days when DEVO’s live show was at its peak.

On the first night, the show began with a required viewing of the short film [_In the Beginning Was the End: The Truth About De-Evolution_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_About_De-Evolution), ending with the video screen rising to show DEVO in their yellow radiation suits and 3-D glasses, bursting into “Uncontrollable Urge”. The stage was covered in black plastic sheeting, and the lighting was suitably low-tech and retro. Dominant colors of orange, yellow, and green bathed the band in sickly shades as they ripped through the album with more ferocity than I’ve seen in most younger bands. Even the crowd was intense: from the first note they pushed forward like a wave. My sternum, pressed against the barrier in front of the stage, came close to snapping from the pressure. By the time the band reached the final song of the record, “Shrivel Up,” the time travel was complete. You can see for yourself.

The next night, the process repeated with the band showing three music videos: “Girl U Want,” “Whip It,” and “Freedom of Choice” before the screen rose for a modernized recreation of DEVO’s 1980 tour set, and the band themselves in gray jumpsuits with red duct tape details—and the requisite Energy Domes. Bob 1 even brought out the [once lost custom, blue potato shaped guitar from the 1980 tour](http://boojiboysbasement.com/bobguitar.html). After a brief moment for a man in a doctor’s outfit to indicate the song’s track number, ((This was one of the few new elements to the show.)) the band launched straight into “Girl U Want,” and did not relent. By far, the most amazing part of this show was seeing DEVO perform songs that they’d never performed live. Half the album had never left the studio, including the remarkable “Ton O Luv” which I gained a new appreciation for in concert.

Each night showed a different side of DEVO. Night one showed the punky, raw, dirty DEVO from the post-industrial wasteland of Akron, Ohio, relying on distorted guitar, thudding percussion, and manic energy to drive the music. Night two showed the smooth, futuristic, synthesizer and bass driven DEVO most people know. All of this served as a wonderful appetizer and summary of what makes DEVO great, as they prepare for their first new album in twenty years. ((Supposedly to drop on April 1st, 2010, but that could have been a gag. It is confirmed that DEVO is playing Coachella, which is mid-April, so the album should be out by then.)) From the perspective of a hardcore fan, it’s also a great exercise in revisiting these albums that I’ve listened to so many times. Side two of _Freedom of Choice_ always stuck me as slightly weaker than side one, but not any more. Check out the performance of “Cold War,” which was my least favorite tune on the album until this show.

The entire weekend was something amazing and special: a once in a lifetime experience that I will not soon forget. To watch your favorite band relive their glory days in such a remarkable fashion is something out of a dream. Ten years ago, if I told my adolescent self of what I got to experience, it would meet a look of pure disbelief. I leave you with a few links to photographic evidence of these amazing concerts. Just look for the heavyset guy with the energy dome and goatee: that would be me.

* [My photos on Flickr](http://www.flickr.com/photos/sanspoint/sets/72157623225997780/)
* [Metromix](http://newyork.metromix.com/music/essay_photo_gallery/devo-irving-plaza/1622477/content)
* [Brooklyn Vegan](http://www.brooklynvegan.com/archives/2009/11/devo_played_fre.html)

All my life, as far back as I can recall, I’ve been on the heavier side of things. Blame it on what you will, though I assign it to the dangerous combination of easy access to large quantities of tasty food, ((My mother is a wonderful cook, and as she often had to cook for a family of 7, often made far more food than an appropriate serving would be for one growing young lad. Living on my own, I’ve had the same issue of quantity cooked versus quantity to consume.)) and an often sedentary lifestyle. For most of my adult life, I’ve fluctuated between 200 to 215 pounds depending on the season and my mental state. Since moving out on my own in November of 2008, however, my weight has gone up to over 230 pounds at my highest point. This brings, of course, downsides. It’s unpleasant to feel like the wind is being pushed out of me when I bend over to tie my shoes in the morning. It is uncomfortable to feel my belt dig in to find a hold for my pants. It presents a situation to be rectified.

My weight hasn’t been a dire health hazard. My most recent checkup proved as such, as the doctor evaluated me to be in pretty good condition. ((Blood pressure good, cholesterol on the highish side (195), but still reasonable, and every other basic test showing me to be in little danger of keeling over and dying in the near future.)) Over the years, I’ve actually maintained a very philosophical attitude towards my spare tire. I’ll joke about it when talking with thinner, healthier friends, and damn it, it’s sincere humor. If I can’t laugh at myself, then who can I laugh at, anyway? This would seem to be the first year I’ve bothered to take the whole weight loss enterprise with a bit of sincerity, and with a legit approach beyond simply “eat less, move more.” ((This approach, however, is the foundation of how I’m trying to shed the pounds.))

Eating less is the bigger part of it, which is translating into keeping track of calorie consumption. Thank whoever for the [Lose It! app for the iPhone](http://www.loseit.com/). Lose It! calculates the number of calories per day one would need to consume to lose _x_ amount of weight, with a plan of losing _y_ pounds per week, based on age, height, and other basic factors. ((In my program, I’m looking to get down to 180 pounds, losing 2 per week. Right now, this is allowing a daily budget of about 1800 calories a day.)) Combine this with a database of food and calorie information, it allows me to keep tabs on the things that pass through my lips. There have been some shockers. ((One little chocolate covered donut hole is bloody 80 calories!))

The other thing I’ve decided to do differently is a promising myself joyous rewards at different milestones. I’ve decided on the following:

1. Below 215 pounds: Purchase a six pack of St. Bernardus Abt 12 beer.
2. Below 200 pounds: Allowed to order an absurdly bad for me meal. ((I’m not sure if I’ll make this pizza and wings, or a cheesesteak and wings.))
3. Hit 180 or below: Go out to a really nice restaurant for a really nice meal.

It’s early yet, but I think I should be able to buy myself the beer by the end of the month. It’s a start. I’ll be evaluating whether I can afford to get a gym membership next, but even if I can’t, I’ll probably step up the exercise end of things soon. The [Two Hundred Situps](http://www.twohundredsitups.com/) plan sounds like an appealing start for home fitness.

This post marks, I believe, the fifth attempt to find something to do with this domain. I’ve had sanspoint.com since the summer of 2002—seven and a half years of content ranging from daily minutia, “lifehacks”, fiction, and essays on literature. Nothing I’ve tried has sustained my interest for a very long period. It’s not for lack of trying, and it’s not for lack of desire to write. [I want to make that “clackity noise”, and tell stories.](http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/169873399/clackity-noise) The hardest part, as always, is sitting down and doing it. ((This is complicated by my current situation of working two jobs, and having limited free time. I suspect it’s less of an issue of finding the time, and more of using the time I have better. More on that, I expect, in the future.))

It’s both embarrassing and amusing to [go back in time and read the earliest things I posted on this site](http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.sanspoint.com). [The Wayback Machine](http://web.archive.org) has provided a number of snapshots of my college years, few of which are flattering, though this is biased. In the intervening years, I’d say the best thing I ever wrote for this website is [my essay on the death of David Foster Wallace](http://www.sanspoint.com/archives/a-more-substantial-series-of-thoughts-on-the-death-of-david-foster-wallace/). For this attempt, I have decided to begin with a blank slate ((This will be, if I recall correctly, the fourth attempt at starting with a blank slate.)), retaining only that particular essay as a static page.

Ultimately, I expect that this will be an experiment in making the “clackity noise” that [Merlin Mann](http://www.merlinmann.com) harps on about. If there is a constant, as always, I know that part of the first thing I wrote on this domain remains true.

>I’ve never been good with welcome messages and similar things for websites. Therefore, this will be the best welcome I can give.

Please join me. I expect things to be interesting.