After the first amendment and the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, my favorite thing in the world is getting free music over the internet, and so it is my distinct pleasure to reintroduce everyone to Hype Machine. This website has been swimming around my consciousness for a few months now; after linking to it from a friend’s Facebook page and I was hooked, instantly. Hype Machine combs the best music blogs on the internet and puts all of the files available for download/streaming on those sites in one place. In the middle of Hype Machine’s homepage you will see a playlist of the most recent files posted on music blogs. You have the option to stream the song (click “listen”), buy it from Amazon or iTunes, or go to the blog where it was originally posted (click “read”). When you click listen, a new window appears and you will find yourself streaming a giant playlist of blogged tracks, beginning with the song you clicked on. If you choose to go to the original blog post, you can read why someone decided to post the track, and sometimes you can download it to your computer.

Listening in order to the blogged songs is a fantastic way to discover new music — people generally are blogging about the music that they love and care about, which means that the quality of music here is very high, and I’ve found that even the bands I have never heard of are worth a listen. Another nice feature on Hype Machine is the search function, where you can type in a band or a song, and the website will load a playlist of just that song or artist. Because blogged songs are often live or rare tracks that people in the know are sharing with the public, the search function is a good way to discover new material from bands that you already like. My favorite recent finds include Black Jack Davey by The White Stripes, Long Vermont Roads by The Magnetic Fields, and — of course — Girlfriend, by Avril Lavigne featuring Lil’ Mama. I encourage you to make you own finds, and to share.

–Dan Steckenberg

The 94th Tour de France kicked off this past Saturday, coincidentally on my birthday (07-07-07, shameless plug). I couldn’t think of a more exciting time for cycling fans around the world; while Team Discovery and CSC and others battle it out in 20 stages as they make their way through France (and often neighboring countries), across the pond, another cyclist is more than halfway through his own tour of the west coast of much of North and Central America. Michal Brichacek, a chemistry student at Wayne State University decided to spend his summer riding some 12,000km from Anchorage, Alaska to Panama. The Cycling For a Cause ride started on May 3rd and the trip is expected to take 120 days, although he was a few days ahead of schedule last time I checked. The ride is entirely self-funded and self-sufficient, meaning he has no true sponsorship nor does he have any sort of support vehicle trailing him. Though he lists skiing as his favorite pastime, he only started biking recently and actually trained by running on a treadmill! He carries forty pounds of gear in his side, rear, and front panniers, which include everything from the basics (clothing, toiletries) to a digital SLR and even a sub-compact notebook.

Being a pre-med student and having seen the effects of cancer, Michal decided the ride should benefit the Lance Armstrong Foundation. In fact, all donation links on the site lead directly to the LAF website. His goal is to raise $1 for every kilometer he rides and despite contributions by his legion of fans — there are plenty of people who anxiously await his funny and insightful journal entries — the jar could use a little more filling. Michal is proudly sporting his yellow LiveStrong bracelet as he rides through Guerrego Nego, Mexico and I am sure he and the Foundation would appreciate any generosity you can spare. Either way, check out his website and you’ll be rewarded with (currently) 64 journal entries with stories of Alaskan bears, giant redwoods, street-side taco stands and thousands of pictures that paint a mesmerizing portrait of the American coast.

And while we’re on the subject of pretentious clouds over the music scene….

If you, like me, have been feeling a little too sickened/jaded/abused to pursue new music with the same passion as you used to, I highly recommend checking out Catbirdseat, the mp3 blog of Ryan Catbird. As head of indie label Catbird Records, Ryan certainly knows his stuff about today’s industry, but more importantly, his pure and transparent love for music is helping me to remember why I used to spend so many hours searching for it in the first place. Catbird’s voice and attitude (which is easily discernible in both the blog and via the unique way his label functions) is perfect for those of us who have started to give up on music because of what other people have made of it, and the mp3’s that litter most of his entries powerfully authenticate his words. If you still need convincing, download one of the mix/podcasts that he posts on a monthly bases, or listen to a sampling of the bands that are signed to Catbird. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself feeling a little bit…saved… because, in case you need reminding, that’s what music is here for.

I hope I get this right, because the press release for this guy was entirely in Spanish and I only sort of understood what it was saying. On the other hand, it might not really matter either way — because I think the most important thing about Hiroshi Tsunoda’s Flamp at DesignCode is how it looks and functions — two aspects that I comprehend entirely if only for the obvious success of both. The Flamp is, first and foremost, a lamp. However, it is also a box, one that carries within its own cable and bulb, making it easily portable. Personally, I’m not really in the habit of toting around a lamp just in case I happen to need one, but if I were — or even if I were just looking for something far better than a normal lamp — I think I’d go for this guy, or one of DesignCode’s other uniquely fun and accesssible lighting options (of which there are 16, each being disgustingly awesome). You can shop for the Flamp and other designs pretty much anywhere but here (*sigh*) but for a full listing of potentials check out the vendor list on the DesignCode website. Who’d've ever thought cardboard and polypropolyne could be so sexy?

I just wanted to give a quick nod to this hilarious t-shirt that popped up recently at Threadless. There’s not much to say about it that you can’t decipher by reading the blatantly clear message that is the shirt. I especially enjoyed the message because it very much echos our sentiment regarding the pretentious cloud that sometimes drapes over the music scene. As of now, there are plenty of guys ($12) and girls ($14) tees in stock, but something tells me there’s going to be a run on these things!

Aussie clothing company Young Lovers recently dropped a few more of their extremely limited edition shirts, and the designs for this set of tees pack just as much freshness as you’d expect from a company based in the land of Heather’s birth. Because only 100 of each shirt are ever printed, you can rest assured that you won’t want to burn yours after seeing it on a fourteen year-old…or on a cougar. Actually, once you do the math (like I just did because I’m brilliant and incredibly gifted in the area of mathematics), the actual possibility of you seeing this shirt anywhere other than on yourself works out to about 000086%, which obviously wouldn’t even matter if the shirt sucked — but they don’t, at all. And for about $50, that’s sounding pretty good.

The Sao Paulo atelier of Estudio Manus is a place of inspiration for all those who enter into the space, and its no wonder: proprietors/artists Caio de Medeiros and Daniela Scorza take ideas from Brazilian folklore and the insights and novelties they come across when traveling to places such as Vietnam and Chile’s Atacama Desert and pass them on to those who are open to understanding any level between aesthetic and metaphoric. I sought out the gracious couple to specifically find out more about their porcelain line, which includes hollow, egg-shaped containers with long handles at the tops which signify growth, cups and salt-and-pepper shakers with wings as handles — in a Portuguese visual play on words — and other pieces they reformat from leftovers at the porcelain factory. Other inventive pieces they showed me are mirrors backed by text from foreign-language books mounted on wooden sticks, an interpretation that points out that there’s a strange and interesting story behind every face, and their dolls, which are created from unconventional sources, like badminton birdies and antique wooden bowling pins.

France-based Oboe Concept represents them in Europe, but they’re readily equipped to take orders by e-mail directly; see the website for the catalog and contact info.