Charley Crockett's new album Live From the Ryman has been on repeat the past couple of days for me. I absolutely love it. Which got me thinking about whether or not I should, or even could, compile a TOP something-or-other list of the greatest live albums of all-time.
Driving home from my Dad's this past Sunday, I thought I would only be able to put together maybe 10 albums at most, and I thought there wouldn't be any that I would need to cut, but as I started digging through favorite artists of mine and whether or not they've released any live albums... I realized there are quite a few live albums worthy of being on a Greatest of All-Time list, and I don't think I've ever done a list like this before. Earlier incarnations of my website I used to do fantasy super groups of musicians, or playlists like I was doing with the last incarnation of the website. I might do more of those types of posts, but TOP (insert number here) lists are going to be a new thing going forward.
You may notice the numbers floating on top of the album covers, well, I'm using Topsters to generate the image, but I've also spent the past 3 or so days noodling around in JavaScript to come up with some reusable code that will slap numbers on top of a Topsters generated image, and since I've gone to the trouble of coding it, I may as well use it a few more times. Maybe I can refine it and add some more functionality to it down the road, will probably even do a separate post talking about the code (though, pushing it to github would probably be better). In any case...
Not sure if this will technically be a review of the album... But it's the one album that I've been listening to a lot lately. I only had a mild fascination with Pierce the Veil when they first came out. After I'm done ranting about music today, I'll talk a little bit about MTK Ultra tomorrow, which is a web comic I'm working on and developing.
There are probably a dozen different draft posts that I've written where I talk much more in-depth about cannabis. As of the last incarnation of berkough.com though, it has never seemed to be the right topic to bring up or talk about, ever. I have a lot of things to say about the plant, I just feel that a lot of people tend to think of marijuana as being a juvenile and lazy drug that people indulge in. But the plant is sort of from two different worlds, and it always has been. With legalization happening across the country, I feel that we're finally getting to a place of reconciling the two plants; the herbaceous flowering annual, and the psychotropic drug—a near perfect propaganda dichotomy. The truth is obviously much more nuanced than evil weed or a miracle plant. Nothing is ever just black and white, it's Joseph's amazing technicolor dreamcoat with different tones. When viewed as a medicinal herb—in the same way as St. John's Wort or Echinacea—the effects are moderate. You would never swallow or consume an entire bottle of Echinacea, right? The same is true for cannabis, the dosage is different for every person. So you have to learn how to control your intake. But the beauty is that it's impossible to overdose on cannabis, the worst that will happen is that you get a little too paranoid, or you fall asleep.
Going back to at least Bill Clinton, it has been in the mainstream zeitgeist that even though the plant was illegal (or still is for some), it still plays a non-threatening role in a lot in our early lives, the late teens and early twenties, at least.
