Bart McPherson Weblog

This is my first attempt at doing an image transfer using acrylic medium. It’s three separate transfer layers on canvas board and acrylic paint.

Okay, so my Word Press install is now at 2.5.1. At least one thing on the site is up to date.

The spring semester is now over. I finished it with an A in 2-Dimensional Design and a B+ in 19th Century Short Stories. It’s back to the MBA classes this summer. I’m taking Business Statistics and Management & Organizational Behavior. Sounds like fun, huh? I’m glad I took the time to refresh my brain after the accounting and economics bashing I took last fall. I really want to get back into being creative and not just being analytical all the time.

Yes. Yes. I know. Like 95% of all the other blogs out there this one is out of date.

I plan on updating the Wordpress installation soon, so after that more stuff should be coming up.

Quick update. Took the semester off from business classes. I took an art and a literature class this semester. My brain was fried after last semester, so I had a couple of classes to refresh my senses.

I’m still doing the show on WCSB. Sundays from noon to 2 PM. Streams on the web, so you don’t have to be in Cleveland to listen in.

Here are my top 25 albums of 2007. They are the albums I think were the best from this year. These are items I’ve actually listened to, so there are probably a ton of artists/releases from this year that belong on the list that I just never got a chance to hear. You can always send your stuff to the station for me and the rest of the programmers to spin if we like it.

25. A Place to Bury Strangers - self-titled
24. The Cave Singers - Invitation Songs
23. Tunng - Good Arrows
22. Wooden Wand - James & the Quiet
21. Steve Earle - Washington Square Serenade
20. Jens Lekman - Night Falls Over Kortedala
19. The Shins - Wincing the Night Away
18. The Apples In Stereo - New Magnetic Wonder
17. Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
16. The New Pornographers - Challengers
15. The Scotland Yard Gospel Choir - self-titled
14. The Afternoon Naps - Sunbeamed
13. Boris - Rainbow
12. Caribou - Andorra
11. Iron & Wine - The Shepherd’s Dog
10. Dreadful Yawns - Rest
9. Thurston Moore - Trees Outside the Academy
8. Shout Out Louds - Our Ill Wills
7. The Avett Brothers - Emotionalism
6. Great Lake Swimmers - Ongiara
5. The Sadies - New Seasons
4. Arthur & Yu - In Camera
3. José González - In Our Nature
2. Frightened Rabbit - Sing the Greys
1. Okkervil River - The Stage Names

Honorable mentions go out to the following bands. (Sorry, good stuff. I just can’t fit it all in.)
Buffalo Tom, Citay, John Doe, Dungen, Feist, Meat Puppets, Robert Pollard, Two Cow Garage, John Vaderslice, David Vandervelde, and Mary Weiss.

I did some queries against the database I use to keep my playlists.

I confirmed what I was thinking. My tastes in music are evolving. I’ll be posting my top 25 picks for 2007 in a couple of weeks. It should be quite a diverse list.

Below is a chart of the top 30 artists I’ve played since I’ve had a show on WCSB (and the # of plays they received this year).

You can see that The Pixies took a huge dive in number of plays. This year’s plays only makes up approximately 4% of their total plays on the show.

Here’s a chart of some of the artists I’ve played the most this year (compared to their overall plays).

This year you’ll notice a couple of the top artists are brand new to the show in 2007. My tastes appear to be shifting toward mellower, folky stuff. Now, don’t get me wrong, I still love the noisy, feedback drenched guitar stuff. It’s just not as prevalent in my show as it once was. I have also started to play more types of artists on my show. I played over 500 different artists this year on the show.

I have gone through these musical evolutions before. I was once an industrial music fan. I’ve seen Ministry, KMFDM, and Nine Inch Nails live, but I couldn’t tell you the last time I listened to any of their albums.

I imagine more changes will come. Frankly, I’m glad that my tastes in music are evolving. Otherwise, I might still run around in a Flock of Seagulls t-shirt.

This weekend we went to Toronto. It’s a great city to visit, and I imagine a great place to live.

The main reason we went up was to see Elliott BROOD at Lee’s Palace. They were great. Much louder than I expected them to be, but they still sounded great. They played their “hits” and a few covers (Johnny Cash, White Stripes, and Neil Young). The opening bands were rather disappointing. Plants & animals and Corb Lund.

Before the show we had dinner across the street from our hotel at the Beer Bistro. Had a great Quebecois beer Blanche de Chambly.

The next day we explored the city taking the subway and street cars. Visited the shoe museum and their Little Italy neighborhood. I picked up some CDs at Soundscapes.

The people in Toronto were very nice. Very polite. It seems to be a “live and let live” type of town. Where in the U.S. it’s “I live at your expense” or “I’ll sue you for making me feel bad”. Workers looked you in the eye and said thank you instead of grunting and wishing you weren’t bothering them.

And of course coming back to the U.S. you’re treated like a criminal right at the border.

Canada, I miss you already. Still don’t understand the appeal of Tim Hortons, but I can get past that.

Next week my show Stand Clear of the Closing Doors will be kicking off the 2007 WCSB Radiothon. Radiothon is the once-a-year pledge drive for WCSB.
WCSB is the student run radio station at Cleveland State University. The money donated during Radiothon helps the station keep equipment running, purchase music, and pay for other miscellaneous costs. The university basically pays for the FCC license, provides space, and keeps the lights on. The rest is up to our generous donors.
Listen in on Sunday, November 4th at noon for the kick-off of the week long event. Please donate to keep alternative radio broadcasting in Cleveland and on the internet.

I fixed the playlists page. I had mucked it last week.
I’m using a PHP plugin in Wordpress and it doesn’t like the fancy editor that comes with Wordpress.
This week I resigned from the Friday night rock rotation. There’s enough people on the rotation that I can do it without feeling guilty. I am however thinking of making my Sunday show into a rotation show.
I work at CSU, so driving down a sixth day is getting silly. I would love to be able to do a show right after work, but those spots rarely come open.
I’m still mulling it over, so I’m not sure if or when the show will change.

Well, the GMAT is over and I scored as well as I could hope for. Hopefully I don’t have to take it again. The DBA program requires a GMAT score from the last 5 years. We’ll see if I can finish the MBA within 5 years going part time.
If you’re planning on taking the GMAT I recommend the Princeton review guide. The Kaplan guide really isn’t as helpful.

This Monday I’m taking the GMAT. I’ve put it off for quite awhile, but since I’m now working at CSU and get to take classes for free I’m finally going for it.
I’m not looking forward to the math portion. This summer I took the MBA math for dummies class. The class is actually called OMS 500 or Mathematics for Business. I did this as a preemptive strike. If you score under a certain percentile on the GMAT you have to take the class.  I figured I’d take it before the test so I could to brush up on math, and if I screw up on the GMAT I’ll already have the class done with.
So this weekend I’m doing some last minute reviewing of a couple GMAT guides. Sunday will be a day of rest. I have the radio show and then we may go see the Simpsons movie.