Long Island rockstars and buddies of mine Slothbear are coming up to Boston for a show tonight at the Great Scott! They’ll be playing with The Craters, Speedy Ortiz, and King Cop. More info here.

Boston duo The Great Pattern came into our studio in to play this great live set in December.

As promised, we’ll be posting full recordings of our show online just in case you don’t catch it all live.

See you on Thursday! Well, I won’t actually see you. Or even hear you. But you’ll hear me and that’s what counts.

I’m so excited because I’m about to head to the studio for our FIRST SHOW OF THE SEMESTER! This’ll be my and Cassie’s last semester at WTBU (unless my classes go horribly horribly wrong) so we’re gonna try and make it even more awesome. Also, WE HAVE A NEW DJ! Our former intern and good friend Lili will be joining us this semester as a DJ!

So, listen tonight from 8-10 at http://wtburadio.org

Hello folks,

We have a new air time this semester! We got the schedule and we are fortunate enough to have another 8-10pm show. BUT instead of Tuesdays like it was in the Fall, we will be on air every Thursday starting January 19th. 

Thursdays from 8-10pm. Thursday. From eight to ten. 

And it gets even better. Our second favorite show, Rock, Socks, and Bollocks with Sarah Chen is on right after us! Which is great especially since Sarah is known to be a 12-2am kinda DJ.

It’s gonna be our last semester with Schist that Rocks (*awww*), so we’re gonna try extra hard to give you guys a good show this Spring!!

We won Best Classic Rock Show at the WTBU Awards this semester. Cassie started our acceptance speech with “Would it be awkward to say that we’re not a classic rock show?” Because we’re not. I have statistical evidence, but that’s for another post. Anyway, point is we’ve won an award all 4 semesters of Schist that ROCKS! so we must be doing something right. Also, our intern Alex won an award for Best Intern. I don’t want to take too much credit but, y’know…

Also, we have a cool announcement that we’re not going to announce yet. We’re suspenseful like that.

Also also, we’ll probably be posting some recordings and stuff so keep an eye out for that.

Last week, during our “Bi-annual Thanksgiving Special,” Lili and I took some time to indulge in the most important Thanksgiving tradition of all: playing Christmas music.

In doing so, I just couldn’t help but play a piece of the worst best Bob Dylan song of all, off of his 2009 album Christmas in the Heart. And it’s nothing without its unintentionally funny music video.

A few things about the video:

1) It’s a Polka-ish song by Bob Dylan

2) His hair, oh God, his hair… (not to mention the hat)

3) A fight/chase breaks out from nowhere. And not simply some friendly holiday tussle; this guy throws glasses at people and eventually jumps out a window.

I think Bob Dylan’s Christmas party should go on a list of odd gatherings, along with the one from Midnight Cowboy.

Schist is back, tell your friends.

Yes, that’s right, tell yo kids, tell yo wife and tell yo husband because Schist that ROCKS! is back and using dated references.

We’re moving up to 8-10 PM on Tuesdays starting in September and we’re seriously looking forward to coming back and broadcasting for our awesome listeners. I keep making little notes of things to play on the show and people to have on as guests.

We’re planning on packing our show with at least 25% more awesome while keeping to the same amount of geology jokes (like 2 for the whole season).

Want a couple specifics? I’ve made it a goal to get Mike Watt and John Fogherty on the show (Fogherty will probably be more difficult, but I can dream, right?) and we’ll be posting more content online. We might even spread out onto other websites besides our pages on facebook, tumblr, Neopets, and JDate (I can’t link that one, but you can search for it).

As always, if you have any suggestions for guests we should have, music we should play, things we should talk about, etc etc, let us know!

Lastly, a thank you to Maya Jiminez who’s show “Open Ended” switched timeslots with us. You’ll be able to hear them right after us in our old time slot of 10 to midnight. Our Programming Director Nee-Sa commemorated the swap with this fine picture:

After Michael Vick won the BET award for “Sportsman of the Year,” some folks went crazy. You might know Vick as the Quarterback for the Eagles. You also might know him from that time he went to jail for operating a dog fighting ring. I didn’t know anything about Vick before that, but I’m pretty sure it hurt his reputation a little.

Anyway, when animal lovers saw this guy getting an award they got as mad as one of Vick’s bulldogs (perhaps that’s written in poor taste).

Pretty soon, there were angry posts all over the internet saying that Vick should never have gotten an award because of what he did. Some made it sound like Vick had won an award for his dog fighting rather than for football. Many said that he was a poor role model (which he clearly is) and that this sent a bad message to kids.

In my mind, though, they went a bit too far when they went after the sponsors of the award show, namely Subway. They covered Subway’s facebook wall with things like “Subway, eat death,” suggested that Subway supports animal cruelty, and called on others to boycott Subway until they took back Vick’s award.

Ever the defender of gigantic fast-food chains, I thought I’d point out a few things these well-meaning yet bloodthirsty animal lovers don’t realize.

1) The BET award was for Sportsman of the Year and had nothing to do with Vick’s unrelated past (or anyone else’s like another nominee, Kobe Bryant).

2) Subway was only a sponsor of the awards. They didn’t choose Vick, BET did. Subway has no direct connection to Vick. They didn’t make a commercial with Vick, they didn’t sponsor Vick or pay Vick money or anything. They sponsored BET’s award show and one part of that award show included Vick in a way completely separate from his horrible treatment of animals.

3) Vick won an award. BET gave it to him. BET has no control over whether or not Vick gives back the award, much less the sponsors. Boycotting Subway or BET won’t make Vick give back the award. You’re not really hurting Vick as much as you’re hurting BET and it’s sponsors.
Vick has no reason at all to give back the reward. What’s he going to do? If anything, an apology would just make things worse by drawing more attention to it. As if they would be satisfied with his apology, either. “He’s a dog murderer, but at least he gives in when people on Facebook get angry…”

If you wanted to direct your anger at anyone, I’d suggest Nike, who recently signed a contract with Vick, but that’d still be a bit much.

On a related note, someone suggested that these “activists” are hypocrites because PETA kills animals, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.

It was fun playing music for you folks and I hope you had nearly as much fun as we did. If you listened to our show on Thursday, or the one the week before that, you’d know that we love what we do. In case you missed those shows, no one was scheduled to come on after us so we ended up staying about 2 hours extra, until we had to pry ourselves out of the studio. That’s double our usual allotted time.

It’s far from over, though. We’ll be coming back to WTBU (with a vengeance) in September and we’ll be posting things here and on facebook all summer long.

PS: We also may or may not be focusing more time on our Neopets.

If you’re in or around Boston, I’d definitely suggest you check out the Independent Film Festival Boston. Starting tomorrow and lasting until May 4th, the IFFB will show 93 films that you’re not likely to see in major theaters.

A few that caught my attention:

Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop: a documentary following Conan in the months between leaving The Tonight Show and starting Conan, during which he was contractually prohibited from appearing on TV.

13 Assassins: Takashi Miike’s new epic samurai film that’s got me drooling. 

I’m also interested in seeing some shorts. Short films are always nice because… well, they’re shorter. You go in expecting less and they’re often pleasantly surprising. If you don’t like a short, don’t worry because another one will be on shortly. They play in collections so it’s like 7 movies for the price of one.

Of the shorts, I’ve heard good things about We’re Leaving and I’ve seen (and really enjoyed) All Day Yeah.

I’m somewhat intrigued by Tatooine: “The original Star Wars trilogy re-imagined in glorious cut paper animation.” 1) it’s the whole trilogy in two minutes 2) it’s funny to think of this in contrast with all the re-mastering that’s happened with the original trilogy.

My advice: check out the fest’s website for the schedule and info on all the movies, find some that you’d like to see, and buy the tickets online asap. The tickets are going fast, and it’s cheaper if you buy them online.

Be sure to let us know what you think of the festival and of course we’ll talk about whatever we see on the show!