the green lodge

angel

2008-08-13T17:27:00.008-04:00

[previous posts in this series of close readings of selections from Fleetwood Mac's TUSK - "Over and Over," "Save Me a Place," "Sara", "What Makes You Think You're The One," "Storms," "Sisters of the Moon"]

ANGEL

fleetwood mac - angel

"Angel" follows "Sisters of the Moon" (though I think maybe it's the start of the 2nd LP on the vinyl version?) and, for the first minute or so, it seems like the jaunty, country-rock, and kind of terrible polar opposite of the dark, witchily awesome post-punk of "Sisters" - as I believe Holly has remarked in the past, the cheesy sound of those first few bars can kind of keep you from taking this song seriously at first

yet! it is really fucking serious, as Stevie herself says in the video at the end of this post. the song inexorably, and indeed with painful, profound beauty, is drawn back to the same themes of nihilism and self-destruction as "Sisters," but instead of occult, Lynchian imagery, Stevie's verses anchor us in the the all-too-recognizable world of everyday heartbreak and loss, looking back to an irretrievable past -

sometimes the most beautiful thing
the most innocent thing
and many of those dreams
pass us by
keep passing me by

the second verse in particular is utterly devastating, familiar, and real -

I still look up
when you walk in the room
I've the same wide eyes
now they tell the story
I try not to reach out
when you turn around to say hello
and we both pretend
I'm no great pretender

yet, instead of this memory of love and innocence fading away, into the past, Stevie, hauntingly beautifully and basically crypto-suicidally wills herself into a ghostly future in the chorus:

so I close my eyes softly,
'till I become that part of the wind
that we all long for sometime

and to those that I love
like a ghost through a fog
like a charmed hour and a haunted song
and the angel, angel of my dreams

the line about becoming "that part of the wind that we all long for sometime" just fucking floors me every time, and God knows that I thought of it often throughout the painful month of June, I don't know if I've ever heard anything so poetic and sad and true in my whole life -

and the titular Angel, looming, wordless in the fog, so much like Stevie's dark "Sister" at the top of the stairs in the previous song - and also sooo much like the Sister, the Ghost-Angel is revealed as Stevie's own doppelganger, "that girl was me... just like a ghost through the fog" etc. but while the Angel is ostensibly good, very good, an incarnation of the innocent and beautiful things in Stevie's life where the Sister was a manifestation of the darkness, it leads her to the same personal abyss, a transcendent nothingness, those fucking winds we've discussed in several contexts in this series.

and as elsewhere, the parallels to the Twin Peaks mythology are unmistakable - if the Sister lives in the Black Lodge, the Angel lives in the White Lodge, and, as shown by the appearance of Laura Palmer's literal angel in the Black Lodge at the end of Fire Walk With Me, the two places may be "one and the same." for more on the Stevie Nicks/Laura Palmer connection and a video of the insanely heartwrenching scene with Laura and her angel, please see my previous post, also titled "Sisters of the Moon"

this is the awesome and ultra-compelling contradiction (or non-contradiction) at the heart of Stevie Nicks' profound appeal - the sunny blonde California surfer girl with the beautiful voice and wild heart (and a hopeless attraction to some of the douchiest guys in rock history) is simultaneously the gothy, scorned hag, a kind of 'white witch' in the words of one Josh Cheon. this song and this footage of its recording from the awesome yet sadly brief Fleetwood Mac "Tusk" documentary really gets to the heart of the matter - the interview with Stevie early on where she describes the song's genesis is utterly priceless, hilarious and self-serious and true, and the unearthly passion, crooked teeth, and crazy outfit she's wearing when she sings "like a ghost through the fog" makes for kind of an ultimate Stevie-y Stevie moment -

"I wanted to write a rock and roll song, so it started out being much sillier than it came out. It didn't end up being silly at all. It ended up being very serious."

2008-07-05T16:02:00.002-04:00

(Caption: "Kent Couch leaves his gas station in Bend, Ore., on Saturday, July 5, 2008, riding a lawn chair rigged with more than 150 giant party balloons in an attempt to fly to Idaho. He is equipped with a BB gun and a blowgun for popping balloons if he gets too high and three 15-gallon barrels of cherry Kool-Aid for ballast to release if he gets too low.")

BEND, Ore. (AP) - A man has taken flight in a lawn chair hoisted by more than 150 large helium-filled party balloons in a bid to ride the wind from the central Oregon town of Bend all the way to Idaho.

Kent Couch was wearing a parachute Saturday morning as he kissed his wife and kids goodbye, patted his dog and took off at sunrise from his gas station.

This is Couch's third lawn chair flight in as many years.

He hopes to do better than last year, when he flew 193 miles before running low on helium and had to land in the sagebrush of northeastern Oregon.

june 20

2008-06-27T10:51:00.003-04:00

the nice thing about working from the midtown office is that midtown fucking sucks no matter where you're going home to. my bed left yesterday, with a big assist from mom and dad and the car, but the mattress is still here on the floor, like in the beginning - it's so fucking sad, but weirdly beautiful - I am so blindly in love with this place - to see the house kind of decay into the semi-feral state it was in when I moved in. we smashed a lot of stuff at band practice last night, or at least the other guys did. my fortune was pretty boring or irrelevant at least. there's really nothing left to do but grind it out from here. also, have the most epic party in house history this weekend, you know what it is, we're not going to get rained on 3 parties in a row, we are not that doomed, are we?

june 20th we had maybe the most 'mellow' or actually just weirdly under-attended party in 502 history. sean was in town!, but it rained again, there was a lot going on that night, people were saving themselves for this week? I dunno. once I got over my rain- and party-related anxieties and started drinking things got pretty nice though, with a zany kitchen set by Puttin on the Ritz, gratifyingly incorporating Caitlin's decoy pigeons, and transcendent, dimly-lit performances in Aron's bedroom (in the Casiotone for the Painfully Alone nook!) by Zeke Healy, shredding bluegrass at 502 for the third and final time - and, amazing dude that he is, he even figured out how to play Landslide, allowing me some deep and necessary musico-spiritual closure - and Julianna Barwick, who overcame the repeated ill intentions of the rain gods to play a gorgeous lullabye-set, maybe the coziest, dreamiest performance in 502 evar. I've got some camera-vids but I gotta figure out how to upload them

june 8

2008-06-26T20:08:00.003-04:00

sorry for all those emotions earlier, I'll try and keep it dignified around here but it's fuckin tough. sorry dad and anyone else who had hopes of me handling this like a big strong man or whatever. buck the world! we're having our last band practice, ordering Mr. Wonton for the last time, getting my last fortune - I'll let you know how it goes.

on June 8th we had another magical evening that was unfortunately fucked up by the rain - Puttin on the Ritz played, uproariously, followed by an incredibly special and meaningful set of, YES, Fleetwood Mac covers (sorry dad and anyone else etc) I got to do with Kevin MacFee, one of my oldest and best friends and my old musical tag team partner from high school, as well as Aa's own Nadav on drums. Julianna Barwick was supposed to play too but opted to play last weekend instead.

more from that later, there is so much to say about the 8th and the drama and the fucking emotional blue balls that comes from not finishing fucking "landslide" - maybe today's when the landslide finally did catch up? - but it's better to just watch Lev's "insta-movie," a free-form, lo-fi, short-shot documentary he made about the evening - some great moments and special times for sure, peep that awesome panning shot that latches onto Kevin "Sticks" Shea en route to the kit! every hour is the magic hour at 502, however awesome you guys imagine it must be to live here I assure you it is like 10x as fucking awesome

may 22

2008-06-26T10:51:00.008-04:00

I just suddenly started getting my fucking young buck on over here, bawling my motherfucking eyes out in this dismembered, bleeding room, needing to work through the next 48 hours straight or so on doing impossible things for my job, this is really feeling like a fucking online diary right now and sorry etc but for the record I am pretty far past the breaking point already and I have a very long fucking way still to go, so I really do need everyone around rooting really, fucking, hard for me right now

I've been almost kind of keeping it together for more than a month now, the last time I really lost it like this was the last May 22, def maybe the most amazing, beautiful night ever at 502 when greg reynolds and mariko endo danced in the yard, and the dead science played covers of classic souls songs sampled by the wu-tang clan in the cabaret of my dreams, pictures below, seriously lynchian, sorcerous vibes, this has always been and always will be the house of my dreams etc

another day in paradise

2008-06-24T11:26:00.004-04:00

in sharp contrast to the brutal stress of the actual work going on here, it's fucking beautiful out in the outdoor office today. one of the infinite number of things I will never stop missing about this place is the awesomeness of being on the ground floor and having this nice ground level outdoor space. no matter how shitty things are going, it's always kind of reassuring to be able to step outside your door and smell the dirt, hear the birds, see the bugs, etc. we've got a pretty amazing roof on our new place, which I have not and am never going to talk about on this blog, but no first floor.

Todd just stepped out looked around, saying "another day in paradise," "yeah we've still got a few left." it's true. I'm trying to enjoy listening to Mr. C's classic 2004 Bossa Nova Carnival episode, which I have enjoyed so many times out here throughout summers 05-07, but I'm having a hard time connecting to it

bad fortune

2008-06-23T21:14:00.003-04:00

after keeping them at arm's length for most of the past month, all the heavy fucking emotions wrt the final extinguishing of my home here at 502 are predictably rising up again, and also predictably this is coming at an utterly hellish time work-wise, with all the lack of sleep and dark feelings that come with it. I just ordered Thai food from Thai Sesame - two curries, one for dinner and one for breakfast - and got choked up telling them my address. you can kind of put it out of your mind for awhile sometimes but basically things just get worse all the time

anyway, one of the posts I meant to do before I and this lodge and this blog disappear is to note, for posterity's sake, the uncanny relevance (time will tell wrt accuracy) of the fortunes I've gotten from Mr. Wonton over the past couple of months

"you will make many changes before settling satisfactorily" (back in March, just weeks before the news)

"don't fear! every ending is a chance for a new beginning" (I was and am still maybe not ready for this one)

"through greater effort and hard work a precious dream comes true" (hah hah yeah right)

"everyone around you is rooting for you. don't give up." (this one really got my waterworks goin when I got it a couple weeks ago during a particularly dark moment and again now)

lol

2008-06-20T00:40:00.002-04:00

awesome, lulzy story on the kind of insane yet also really touching relationship between A-Rod and Pete Rose, via Danny:

By spring training in 2006, their text messages began in earnest. And A-Rod is a text-messaging fool. He'll text Yankees players, coaches and staffers ... even when they're sitting 15 feet away in the same clubhouse. He'll text "LOL" when something amuses him, and he'll text :-( when he's bummed. And the first text message from Rose that spring definitely had them LOLing...

anything is possible

2008-06-18T11:58:00.002-04:00

there's a lot to talk about right now. moving out is becoming kind of like alzheimer's - as people, pieces of furniture, etc continue to disappear, my loved one is becoming more and more unfamiliar to me, and my memories, or my memories of memories, are becoming alienating in a weird and sad way. Jeremy from the Voice is going to be coming by a few times in the coming 12 (!!!!) days to document the last days of the magic, which I am really happy about.

so yeah there are lots of pictures and videos and TUSK, as ever, to talk about, but I don't know when I'll have time. this blog is going to die along with the house. mostly right now I just wanted to post a link to Kevin Garnett's post-victory freakout, I don't know when he would have done it but he really seems to be high on more than winning right now, or possibly tripping or something, I don't know but it's awesome - come for the "ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE!!!!", stay for the "you look real good tonight, Cheryl" -

pause

2008-05-29T17:33:00.004-04:00

sorry for the internet silence over here, there are important TUSK tracks to blog as well as pictures and a recap from last Thursday's epic night at 502, also a super necessary review of 502's art collection, but I need to put in a little more time just keeping the real-life wheels from falling off right now

in the meantime, in case you were wondering, Ponytail is still pretty much the best and most exciting band in the world right now afaik - check out this new track "Small Wev" esp ASAP, and reacquaint yrself with the amazing "Celebrate the Body Electric" if you haven't recently/already, have your faith in the power of guitars and voices and indie rock and life etc restored

UPDATE: coincidentally you can download Celebrate the Body Electric over at Paper Thin Walls for a limited time, and you definitely, definitely should

giving

2008-05-14T11:21:00.004-04:00

speaking of Alexis's forthcoming bday, girl is asking friends, family, internets, etc to step up to the plate to sponsor her in this year's AIDS Walk New York - please to helps!

this is frankly a banner year for having friends participate in epic AIDS research-related charity feats - maybe we are growing older, stronger, more generous? I also highly recommend donations to the AIDS Walk of BEN KOPIT as well as the epic extra plus AIDS bike ride from Los Angeles to fucking San Francisco over 7 days and 545 miles (!!!) by DEAN BEIN, both of whom may also be known and notoriously warm-hearted spirits to many of you -

I am certainly bout to break off a chunk of change for each of these noble efforts, wtf, join me if you will

stand back

2008-05-13T23:12:00.002-04:00

so yes I DID go to NOTS (Night of a Thousand Stevies) on Friday, easily one of the least heteronormative nights of musical bliss I've had in a minute - plz see this photoset and this blog for insights into the weird spell under which I have been inexplicably put.* also, vids from the pre-party courtesy of Stevies/FM powerhour instigator-in-chief Holly -

alternately, you can just watch the amazing video for "Stand Back" obsessively, as I have been, and learn everything you need to know about the powerfully, glamorously wounded and witchy vibes she commands - featuring an uncredited Prince on keyboards, no doubt

I gotta admit I'm a little hesitant to post this in the middle of my TUSK-bloshery - while this fresh new wrinkle on my deepening FM/Stevie obsesh is a uniquely exhilarating escape from the increasingly depressing, disappointing shithole of my real life, I gotta acknowledge that the glamorous and, yes, I guess kind of 'campy'/cokey black and silver/gold palette of '80s disco-y solo Stevie clashes slightly with the organically schizophrenic and depressively human blues/greys of Fleetwood Mac and TUSK...

but, really, what choice do I have? can YOU get the fuck over the second verse and Stevie bending back like the willow, or the insane, hallucinatory 1:50-2:10, where the camera pans back to reveal our scorned, radiant heroine stalking a neon catwalk and sprouting lacey angel's wings? witness the intense fucking intensity of the last verse starting around 3 mins in, and in the outro around 4 mins, and tell me you don't feel the urge to share this unearthly passion with all of your internet friends

I can't tell you how psyched I am to add this and "Edge of Seventeen" to my karaoke repertoire, so glad to have an undoubtedly epic karaoke bday party approaching fast

* actually, given my teenage Dungeons & Dragons playing, my lifelong interest in diva-tastic "gay" music and love for "Stand Back," and the various "straight" romantic resonances of Fleetwood Mac's intensely hetero discography and biography in my life, I basically fall under all three of the main Stevie fan demographics! maybe it was only a matter of time? overdetermined!

canadia

2008-05-01T04:23:00.003-04:00

gonna take a little break from all this New York nonsense for a minute - Aa is heading north to play some shows in Montreal, Hamilton, and Toronto with An Albatross, and then all-time fave college show vibe-zone Bard with No Age - details here, for any readers in the area or with friends in the area. real psyched to get out of town but needless to say it will be painful to miss the world premiere of the Kanye power hour at Savalas, courtesy of Thesearepowerfulhours and big Ben Johnson, in town from Cali!

storms

2008-04-28T22:42:00.000-04:00

given the long-awaited and hoped-for shift in the weather away from the sun and towards the rain, and given Jeff & Caitlin's & Emilio & most of the living room's departure from 502land
this weekend, leaving a constant reminder of the mangled home lives that await us all, it is obviously time to get back to

STORMS

[previous installments of my blogging of highlights from Fleetwood Mac's TUSK - "Over and Over," "Save Me a Place," "Sara", "What Makes You Think You're The One," and the special feature "Sisters of the Moon - Laura Palmer and Stevie Nicks"]

fleetwood mac - storms
fleetwood mac - storms (demo)

(you should probably download both of these, tbh. everything here applies at least as much to the demo, which also includes this awesome, halfway through-the-second-verse drum entrance, Stevie's own defiant heartbeat materialized in Mick's genius arrangements)

"Storms" was already pretty much my/the TUSK anthem before all this house stuff hit, and my relationship with the song has only deepened and intensified since. if you are going to download one fucking song from this whole series, you are fucking heartless (and/or happily engaged in some kind of long-term relationship and don't want to think about this kind of dark shit), but you might as well make it this one. on an album full of songs about the complex agonies of doomed, addictive relationships and compulsively morbid heartbreak, "Storms" goes further than any in giving us an almost unbearably intimate window into the heaviest, bio-emotional micro-steps that the irreparable 'wild heart' takes to separate itself from and cauterize these wounds -

every night that goes between
I feel a little less
as you slowly go away from me
this is only another test

every night you do not come
your softness fades away
did I ever really care that much?
is there anything left to say?

no, Stevie, you're summing it up real succinct-like. and has there ever been a more straightforwardly eloquent, devastating expression of the sadness that no mere eye-tears can express, of the anguish that runneth over any corporeal cup, and of the dark, suicidal thoughts and deadly calls that naturally follow, than this quasi-chorus?

every hour of fear I spent
my body tries to cry

living through each empty night
a deadly call inside

the second verse is similarly heavy, if more cryptic, other than the too-true, too-real line about "I haven't felt this way I feel / since many a year ago." skipping ahead to the third 'verse', a kind of genius half-verse that structurally reminds me of the immortal Bacharach/David/Warwick "Make It Easy On Yourself," Stevie leads us to the REAL chorus, for the first and last time. I don't know if I'm just totally under her spell or what, but I can't get over how these seemingly generically-hippie-ish lyrics are transformed into devastatingly powerful, elemental, defiant truth when sung in Nicks's quaveringly passionate tones -

so I try to say good-bye, my friend
I'd like to leave you with something warm
but never have I been a blue calm sea
I have always been a storm

always been a storm
always been a storm
I have always been a storm

yes. yes. yes.

- AND THEN the gorgeous coda, which subtly shifts us from minor-key turbulence to wistful major tones and a quietly emerging percussive undertow, courtesy of typically-understated genius Mick Fleetwood - which, intriguingly, suggest to me at least that maybe Stevie's actually managed to sail away on that blue calm sea, looking back on the tumult and heartbreak she suffered on that disappearing shore... as if! we're like a third done with this shit and it's going to get way darker, for reals, before there's any light. but - how can any human heart not be moved by this elegiac tone, the implicit, heartbroken farewell of "I loved you from the start"

we were frail...
she said every night he will break your heart
I should have known from the first,
I would be the broken hearted

I loved you from the start...

don't blame it on me / blame it on my wild heart

2008-04-25T15:00:00.010-04:00

"said I'm leavin / and you say I don't even know how to start"

there's a lot of non-FM music I've been meaning to post, but I am once again completely consumed by Stevie Nicks-worship, watching and rewatching this awe-inspiring and miraculous video of her backstage before a Rolling Stone photo shoot in 1981, getting her makeup done and suddenly sliding into a passionate performance of a never-recorded early version of "Wild Heart," later kind of a shitty Stevie solo track but this arrangement is pure, heartbreakingly bittersweet FM gold, one of those videos that fills you with a reverent gratitude for the existence of youtube - and Holly's blog, for uncovering it in the first place - I would actually recommend watching this full-screen, like 10-20 times in a row, I dare you not to get goosebumps when she shakes, "I love you, I love you, I love you, I do, blame it on my wild heart" -

this alternate, longer version has worse video quality but gives you a better idea of the spontaneous vibe and the suddenness of the surrender -

as Alison commented via e-mail, "OH my god, amazing. It's so uncanny how famous people can slip between being normal girl backstage getting make-up put on to crazy stevie nicks singing the best song!" yes, uncanny is exactly what it is, an utterly sublime moment and a testament to the intangible, mysterious quality that makes famous people famous and Stevie Nicks in particular a total fucking goddess

a selection of the best comments from the first youtube clip, with the winner in bold

this might be my fave stevie video.she has such a love for the music,and u know its not acting,she just lets go with.or it coulda been the coke,but i hope not

from wikipedia: "The title song, "Wild Heart," was partially written during 1981, and footage exists from a Rolling Stone magazine cover photo shoot where Nicks, while getting her make-up done, sings the work-in-progress to the instrumental line from Lindsey Buckingham's "Can't Go Back" (from Mirage)."

She looks so youthful an Vibrant --she was screwing Joe walsh at the time

Tonight sucked on so many levels..so I knew I could YouTube this clip which I love and be 19 again. I love this clip, it is sweet, innocent and takes me back to long ago happy days..i'd give anything for those again

That was so beautiful! Stevie has such a sweet and natural way about her in this and I couldn't take my eyes off of her. :o)

love this and listen to it so much its all i hear when when i put my head on the pillow at night ........she looks georgous as ever too and am sooooooooooo jealous

that's why i truly believe that best music versions happen outside studios... just love the eye contact between stevie and the makeup girl, completed surrender to her voice...

I just love this clip... I could watch it over and over again every day... In fact, I have been! LoL :-)

This really shows her charisma and charm.
She's got IT in huge abundance,
as much as any performer ever.
A special gem she was, and is.

teh question

2008-04-25T06:56:00.005-04:00

is 502:

a: The Island,

or b: the Red Room/Black Lodge?

i.e. will I lose this magical place and spend the rest of my life plagued by nightmares and obsessed with finding my way back? or does Jacob have a plan? will I flee as an empty-eyed, depraved doppelganger of my former self? or can I escape somehow to the White Lodge? where the fuck is Laura Palmer? etcc

vemix

2008-04-24T09:01:00.002-04:00

sorry about the continued absence of TUSK posts but it is hard to post about "Storms" with this kind of weather - besides, there are other noteworthy aspects of the internet that are also worth your attention -

* NATE aka UNCHAINED née KNIFESTORM et al has taken the plunge into video artistry, and the results, predictably, are great - please introduce your youtube to NUMUW for video and audio remixes of typically well-chosen source material alchemized into typically compelling and uncanny pieces d'art - check out the unsettling kuduro remix and chill, epic prog vibes of his video for Wingdings' "Return to Earth Part IV" -

* LEV and WHITNEY aka BALL DEEP, no strangers to distinctive video sensibilities and unique syntheses of disparate elements, have recently dropped a frankly groundbreaking video of their fan-fiction, "new gaze" remix of globetrotting superstars Vampire Weekend's originary myth, "Walcott" - reimagined as a slow, blissily tragic swim in one of Cape Cod's (?) monster-infested lakes:

neverending

2008-04-22T14:09:00.005-04:00

1 - big ups and lolz and devil horns always and forever to the genius photo-editorial skills of Matt Drudge of drudgereport.com

2 - fuck the haters I freq enjoy reading Mickey Kaus's blog for his relentless and occasz annoying fixation on poking holes in liberal orthodoxy and needling careerist young bucks like Yglesias and Ezra whatsisface. one of the main reasons is his endearing awareness of the bullshittery of all punditry, including a healthy dose of self-criticism that recently produced this frankly stunningly good analogy that completely detonates the hypocrisy of the whole "bitter" controversy, which he had previously jumped all over in a fit of typically Kausian "elitism"-bashing. put a star next to this one dear readers and keep it close to the front of your brain, I'm sure it will be useful for future pointless arguments about this stuff

...The problem for me is that I'm a Vulgar Marxist too. I've always believed that people need to eat, and want to get ahead and prosper. If you give them an avenue that lets them do that, they aren't going to let their religion, their music, their sexual habits, their families or their educational system stand in their way for long. The two most obvious contemporary applications of this economic determinism are 1) China (when the Chinese have a capitalist economy they won't be able to have a Communist government, Vulgar Marxists would say) and 2) the Muslim world (if Islam needs a Reformation in order to prosper in a global market, then Islam will eventually get a Reformation). I agree with both of those propositions.

Does that mean I'm condescending too? It's hard to avoid the charge. If a Chinese Communist Party Official somehow came to me and declared that, no, China would out-compete the West while maintaining Mao-era control over free inquiry, I'd think 'You poor deluded fool. Just wait.' I support Western policies of bringing China into the global marketplace in large part because I think that means Chinese Communism will collapse even if the Chinese Communists don't realize it. Same with fundamentalist Muslims--e.g. Pakistan, when prosperous, will no longer be such a breeding ground of jihadist fanatics. They'll be too busy making money to blow up the world. My attitude toward Pakistan is roughly parallel to Obama's attitude toward rural Pennsylvanians: if the economy really delivered for them, they'd stop clinging to their God. And their guns.

A+, Mickey, for real

3 - a little late on this maybe but goddamn did you see Michelle Obama on Colbert last week? could she be any more of a total fucking babe? what a dress! fuck the haters can we get her in front of the cameras as much as possible? not only is she an obviously real counter to whatever "elitism" etc but there is no way today's America does not want to elect the hottest first couple evar, with all due respect to JFK and Jackie O etc, seriously, there's video, allow yourself to be completely enamored

4 - speaking of being totally Michelle-smitten, this "Hollywood-style" film treatment of a possible brokered convention, by one of the West Wing writers, is seriously fucking awesome! I got a little choked up at the ending tbh! go Wes! kind of a must-read for political junkies and who isn't these days?

tiger

2008-04-18T16:50:00.002-04:00

chien-ming wang is really fucking huge in taiwan

"Baseball has been in the Taiwanese people's blood since it was brought here by the Japanese some 100 years ago," says Ben Shao, press director of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office, "and Wang is the baseball star we've been waiting to pour our hearts into."

...

Now Taiwan's major newspapers charge a higher advertising rate for issues published on a day that Wang pitches, as well as the day after each start. The country's largest circulation daily, Apple Daily, estimates that it sells as many as 300,000 extra papers on days that carry reports of another Wang victory. Endorsements that have come Wang's way include McDonald's, Ford, E Sun Bank (one of the largest in Taiwan) and computer-maker Acer, which claims that Wang's name alone has increased its product sales by 10% and lowered the average age of its consumer by almost four years...

Last year a study in a Taiwanese business journal, Money Weekly, found a correlation between Wang's pitching performances and the fluctuations of the Taiwan Stock Exchange. The report attributed a 25% index rise last summer to Wang's strong June and July. "We absolutely believe it to be true," Shao says of the relationship between Wang's performance and last summer's bull market. "Psychologically, how [Wang] does has a huge effect on the Taiwanese people. If he does well, people are in a good mood, and they go out and spend money. If he doesn't, you walk around and you can see people depressed. It's a very personal matter to the Taiwanese people." (For the record, the country's stock index was up roughly 6%, through Monday, since Wang's first start this season, on April 1.)

sisters of the moon - laura palmer and stevie nicks

2008-04-14T22:55:00.007-04:00

[previous installments of my blogging of highlights from Fleetwood Mac's TUSK - "Over and Over," "Save Me a Place," "Sara", "What Makes You Think You're The One"]

not to go out of order too badly or anything on this TUSK bloshing but I've just had an extremely important meta-breakthrough on the retrospectively obvious connections between TUSK/Stevie Nicks and my official #1 obsession of the past winter, Twin Peaks/Julee Cruise. while not an 'official' song blosh, I thought I should share with you notes on this revelation that were spurred by tonight's obsession with the late-TUSK track "Sisters of the Moon," which I will be blogging in a few weeks' time at this rate, so as to preserve the spontaneous and indexical nature of this short-lived blosh

fleetwood mac - sisters of the moon (demo)

notes on the Stevie Nicks / Laura Palmer connection from the night of 4/14:

after finally becoming totally obsessed with "Sisters of the Moon" tonight and reading through the lyrics etc I'm just realizing how fucking David Lynchian, maybe even specifically Laura Palmer-esque Stevie Nicks is. young, blonde, beautiful, but corrupted and twisted by fate and her own personal weaknesses, irresistably drawn to dark, self-destructive, and utterly addictive pharmaceutical and emotional relationships - not to mention the, ahh, incestuousness of her claustrophobic dependence on lovers who are also bandmates who are just as damned as she is

- think about Lynch's inexplicably, awesomely terrifying and never actually-shown image of BOB waiting under the ceiling fan at the top of the stairs by Laura's bedroom in Twin Peaks, while listening to these lyrics from "Sisters of the Moon" -

intense silence
as she walked in the room
her black robes trailing
sister of the moon
and a black widow spider makes
more sound than she
and black moons in those eyes of hers
made more sense to me
heavy persuasion
it was hard to breathe
she was dark at the top of the stairs
and she called to me

yeah right it's fucking intense! also note, not in "Sisters of the Moon" but in "Sara" and the yet-to-be-blogged but crucial "Angel", the frequent invocation of the winds as a kind of metaphor for spiritual isolation/desolation and unplaceable, distantly melancholic vibes - much as David Lynch carefully and scarily uses wind-y sounds in Twin Peaks and elsewhere. in his recent book Lynch talks about telling Badalamenti to "turn up the wind" when he wants literally 'wind'-ish sounds or just Lynch's weird idea of windy vibes which I am pretty sure are exactly the same as Stevie's ideas about winds. think about the nihilistic overtones of "Angel" -

so i close my eyes softly,
'till i become that part of the wind
that we all long for sometime, yeah

and then think about to Laura's monologue in "Fire Walk With Me," lying on the ground next to Donna talking about how if you fell into space you'd just go faster and faster until you burn up, and no angels would save you because they've all gone away -

THEN think about Stevie Nicks in "Sara" - "you said you'd give me light / but you never told me bout the fire," and then later, "the winds became crazy"

and THEN - yes their shared, sentimental belief in redemption and angels, the sweet and uncorrupted little blonde girls they once were and still want to be despite their hopeless entanglement with the dark side - think of the "Angel" of TUSK and the literal angels that appear/disappear in "Fire Walk With Me," the angels that Laura fears are gone from her life until she is, shockingly, and pretty much unbearably movingly, forgiven by an angel in the black lodge with Agent Cooper, as I discussed frankly and extensively here - watch the video, vibe on the wind-y sounds of beginning, the breathtakingly placid and lonely "voice of love," the shared themes and wardrobes of both Stevie and Laura and the lacy angel, etc.

more on this later, I think this will be a rich vein of TUSK-related analysis as well as a potentially disturbing view of previously unexplored, Herschel Walker-esque regions of my psyche

herschel what / harlan

2008-04-14T22:28:00.008-04:00

jesus christ guess who just became one of my favorite athletes of all time out of fucking nowhere, could you blow my mind a little bit more please what the fuck hersh I mean I had no idea he was even on the bobsled team this is literally insane!!!:

In the just-released book "Breaking Free," former NFL running back Herschel Walker delves into his excruciating struggles with dissociative identity disorder, saying he tried to manage a dozen alternate personalities and that the condition nearly drove him to suicide...

Following a Heisman Trophy-winning career at the University of Georgia, Walker spent three seasons in the USFL and then played 12 years in the NFL with the Minnesota Vikings, Dallas Cowboys and New York Giants. He also was a member of the 1992 U.S. Olympic bobsled team, with an array of other interests that included ballet and law enforcement.

After his retirement from football in 1997, Walker said the disorder began to overwhelm him. At one point, while sitting in his kitchen, he said he played Russian roulette with a loaded pistol...

"Nightline" interviewed Walker's therapist, Jerry Mungadze, who said he met Walker's alternate personalities, or "alters," during their sessions.

"They will come out and say, I am so-and-so. I'm here to tell you Herschel is not doing too good," Mungadze said. " … When he finishes, it would just disappear back in him, and Herschel comes out."

Walker and his ex-wife, Cindy Grossman, were married for 16 years before she knew about his illness, she said.

"Well, now it makes perfect sense, because each personality has a different interest," Grossman told "Nightline." "This one has an interest in ballet, this one has an interest in the Marines, this one had an interest [in the] FBI, this one had an interest in sports.

!!!!!!!WWW!!!!!TTTTT!!!!!FFFFFF!!!!!!!!

also on a much sadder incredible-sports-story note - Joba Chamberlain's dad, Harlan Chamberlain - who now kind of legendarily raised Joba as a single dad and Winnebago indian despite being severely handicapped since the age of 6 from polio, taught him to play ball and everything while working at the state penitentiary etc - is in critical although apparently stable condition due to an undisclosed illness, Joba's taking a couple days off to be with him. thoughts and prayers folks, few deserve it more, and I hope I'm not being too selfish as a Yankee fan to say that I really really want to see him celebrating with his son after Joba leads the Yankees to a World Series win in the not-too-distant future

yankee concrete

2008-04-14T12:57:00.008-04:00

man I am so disappointed in so many ways by the sudden shift in forecast from a week of clouds and rain to a week of sun, not least of which is the fact that I'm losing the perfect and really only appropriate weather-vibe for my "Storms" TUSK-post.

so anyway I will take this opportunity to share this great story from the world of baseball and the endlessly entertaining Yankees/Red Sox rivalry and the magic and meaning that we still believe exists in certain sacred places (yes I'm still talking about 502)

april 11:

A construction worker and Boston fan working on the concrete crew at the $1.3 billion new Yankee Stadium buried a Red Sox shirt in with the concrete foundation under what will become the visitors' clubhouse, in the hopes of jinxing the New York Yankees' new home, the New York Post reported.

Two construction workers told the newspaper about the stunt on conditon of anonymity.

"In August, a Red Sox T-shirt was poured in a slab in the visitor's clubhouse. It's the curse of the Yankees," one worker told the Post. "Nobody knows about it. It's in the floors, it's buried."

The workers say they're now afraid that they've jinxed the Yankees.

"I don't want to be responsible for sinking the franchise," said a second worker, who witnessed the burial. "I respect the stadium."

...Those workers might not have anything to worry about: The team said Friday that the story, while intriguing, simply wasn't true.

"We noticed that the [New York] Post wrote a fun and interesting story about a T-shirt today -- but it never happened," the team said in a statement. "Yankee fans know that burying something in concrete in the basement is never a good thing.

...And if it did happen? Chris Wertz, the co-owner of Professor Thom's in New York's East Village -- a haven for Red Sox fans in the Big Apple -- thought the move was a stroke of genius, according to the report.

"I won't be surprised in the least bit to see that visiting locker room torn up and relaid right away," he said, according to the Post. "This is what makes the game special for baseball fans. It's not a mean thing, but something they will take seriously."

april 13:

A construction worker's bid to curse the New York Yankees by planting a Boston Red Sox jersey in their new stadium was foiled Sunday when the home team removed the offending shirt from its burial spot.

After locating the shirt in a service corridor behind what will be a restaurant in the new Yankee Stadium, construction workers jackhammered through the concrete Sunday and pulled it out.

The team said it learned that a Sox-rooting construction worker had buried a shirt in the new Bronx stadium, which will open next year across the street from the current ballpark, from a report in the New York Post on Friday...

On Saturday, construction workers who remembered the employee, Gino Castignoli, phoned in tips about the shirt's location.

"We had anonymous people come tell us where it was, and we were able to find it," said Frank Gramarossa, a project executive with Turner Construction, the general contractor on the site.

It took about five hours of drilling Saturday to locate the shirt under 2 feet of concrete, he said.

...In shreds from the jackhammers, the shirt still bore the letters "Red Sox" on the front. It was a David Ortiz jersey, No. 34. Trost said the Yankees had discussed possible criminal charges against Castignoli with the district attorney's office...

[Yankees Prez Randy] Levine said the shirt would be cleaned up and sent to the Jimmy Fund, a charity affiliated with Boston's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

"Hopefully the Jimmy Fund will auction it off and we'll take the act that was a very, very bad act and turn it into something beautiful," he said.

[readers interested in cute things may be interested in seeing some Nico Concrete, a loving and burpy montage of hundreds of pictures and audio samples from the first 3 months of notorious Bostonian Wayne & Wax's adorable little daughter-being, a nice reminder of the true scale of human lifey events]

what makes you think you're the one

2008-04-10T12:06:00.007-04:00

OK, let's try and get back to 'normal' here -

[previous installments of my blogging of highlights from Fleetwood Mac's TUSK - "Over and Over," "Save Me a Place," "Sara"]

WHAT MAKES YOU THINK YOU'RE THE ONE

fleetwood mac - what makes you think you're the one

like most of the Lindsey Buckingham-led tracks on TUSK, "What Makes You Think You're the One" starts off kind of abruptly and loudly, making it at first listen (OK, first dozen listens) kind of an unwelcome interruption between the twin Stevie Nicks-led peaks of "Sara" and "Storms." also like most of the Buckingham tracks, once you get past that initial cold water shock, there's a lot here -

first of all, though, it needs to be said - this is an absolute monster drum part and performance by Mick Fleetwood, simple quarter notes that switch between a snare and bass drum played equally relentlessly and hard as fuck. Fleetwood's brutally minimal rhythmic foundation here is the perfect wingman for Buckingham's harshness, hammering home his dream-shattering message (below) with every hit

as Alison points out in her recent comment, it's helpful for us MP3 listeners to understand this as the first song of side B of the first record of the double LP set, and consequently a pointed response to the mellow hopefulness of the Christine McVie side A opener "Over & Over," which asks, albeit cautiously, "could it be me? could it really really be?" - a hopefulness which is disavowed as soon as it's expressed, as Christine reminds herself resignedly that she's asked this question "over and over."

here, Buckingham offers the cynical rejoinder of someone who's been asked the question over and over, mocking the naivete of his partner's belief in the supernatural, mystical powers of love to transcend the inevitable pettiness and sadness of the world

what makes you think you're the one
who can laugh without cryin?
what makes you think you're the one
who can live without dying?

the chorus further demystifies, excluding the possibility of any special, unseen value created by or exclusive to their relationship. it can also be read in a kind of harsh, mocking way - the provisional and ultimately ordinary nature of their relationship is plain to see to everyone, except, implicitly, his partner

every little thing is there to see
every little bit of you and me

however, as with "save me a place," Buckingham admirably elevates all of this above the straightforward denigration of his partner's hopes by turning the camera around to capture his own inadequacies and inconstancy in the second verse:

what makes you think I'm the one
who'll be there when you're callin?
what makes you think I'm the one
who will catch you when you're fallin?

the point is hammered home further in the last verse,

what makes you think I'm the one
who will love you forever?
everything you do has been done
and it won't last forever

so true, yet so harshly, plainly put! if this is the kind of cynical, romance-weary guy Stevie and Christine have been shacking up with - and it is! - it's no wonder their wounded femininity hits back so fucking hard, as we'll see with ~~tonight's~~ tomorrow's post on "Storms."

the breakup

2008-04-06T16:07:00.007-04:00

the coincidence of my Fleetwood Mac/TUSK obsession and the prolonged, bitter, crying-every-damned-day heartbreak I am feeling wrt the imminent loss of my home and my 502 fam and the lovingly textured life I've made for myself here is taking my experience of the album, and my situation here, to new and maybe kind of weird places. suddenly, I too am living with a doomed love, torn between the desire to solidify my memories, savor the remaining happy moments, to cling to a dream destined to be extinguished, and my anger at having all these positive things suddenly recast in shades of such negativity and sadness; the need to channel that anger outwards and, failing that, inwards; the obsessive need to revisit the scene of suffering, to repeatedly pick at the emotional scabs before they can heal.

I wanted to make a note of this up front to enhance the truth content of this ongoing bloshery for the close readers of this blosh, but also to kind of keep it out of the individual song posts, which deserve better.

that said, the synergy of the emotional content for me is intense and maybe a little embarassing - it's been a minute since I've gone through one of these heartbreakathons, I hope it isn't too fucked up of me to be experiencing these feelings over the loss of a relationship with like a "thing" instead of a person, but,

1- a home is not just a "thing," it's a locus and mediator of specific social as well as logistical and Chinese delivery-related relationships etc, all of which will be irrevocably altered and/or lost

2- as I remarked to Steve during one of the more somber minutes of the Timbaland power hour Friday, a big part of the sting of a romantic heartbreak is the sudden catastrophic loss of ego that comes from losing someone that was a major part of your identity, both your own self-conception as well as your social identity (and value!). as Chris noted at the same power hour - and I swear to G I am gonna put in more of an effort to not derail power hours or other festivities with my bummer burden in the weeks to come - he has never really known me other than when I was living at this house, which is definitely true for him - I remember vividly the crazy night we first bro'd down, when I had first moved in, on Lily's birthday in late May 2003 (I am so sorry Lily I can't remember if it's the 24th, 25th, or 26th), back when the walls were pale yellow and I just had a mattress in the corner, and Jeff, who has since become such an integral part of the house after an initial failed attempt (the universe has a way of course-correcting etc), came by with Chris and Jon Posen, 40s and late nite Morrissey riffs! - and is definitely true for so many other of my closest friends. 5 years is a long time, especially in New York. it's like when I busted up my face at that show a couple years ago and looked at the stitches under my lip and chin and realized that I'd never look quite the same, but while minor facial scars are kind of cool, this just totally fucking sucks

I'll probably have to get a new blosh, too. I am pretty sure it is going to be called The Blue Room

update update

2008-04-06T16:01:00.002-04:00

apologies for not emphasizing this on Friday, but Alexis's post includes an important and Weezy-featuring remix of the major and mandatory dance/R&B/pop-rap jam "GOT MY", one of the last works of the recently late + great R&B songwriter (Aaliyah, Destiny's Child, Ginuwine, etc) Static Major, jammed this hard in the van for an hour or so last night

weekend update

2008-04-04T08:11:00.002-04:00

gonna try and get back on the Mac-track soon, I promise. in the interim, some notable things:

* Alexis has posted secret links to more awesome VIBE MUSIC tracks from South Florida. chill tempos, beautiful, pillowy synths, and raunchy lyrics, it's all here and all ready for your weekend

* sick sick sick new track "Throne of Blood (The Jump-Off)" from Seattlebros The Dead Science, with all the melodramatic intensity, relentless intelligence, and terrifying virtuosity you would expect from dudes getting ready to drop an album called VILLIANAIRES. coming to NYC in May, poss even a stop on the closing tour for 502, which hosted the Science a couple years back, yielding "nuzzly" memories. so true!

* after a brief hiatus, Andrea has resumed blogging tips for weathering and understanding the current economic downturn etc, also tips for Disneyland - also, girl is getting some much-deserved exposure on fellow food-blogs as well as a new column over on the LGBT personal finance blog Queercents ("we're here, we're queer, and we're not going shopping without coupons!") - check out her pet food buying tips, pet owners!

* Judd's Timbaland power hour, open to the public @ Savalas tonight, 9:30-10:30. I have rarely not-needed a power hour on any given Friday night, but I gotta say I really fucking need a power hour tonight

on returning

2008-03-30T21:55:00.002-04:00

back from the wedding in Chas (aka Charleston), it was a really amazing, beautiful week, pictures soon. so fortunate to have been surrounded by so much love and the extended familial vibes of the Wolfgangs/Clearys, to say nothing of the impeccable company of the groomsmen and bridesmaids, in general and especially when having to deal with the deeply disturbing news wrt my home

it's weird being back, and crushing to have the feelings of love and warmth etc of coming home to my green room and with little Emilio prowling around on my bed and Jeff and Caitlin enjoying one of their typically ambitious and delicious homecooked meals by candlelight in the kitchen, now suffused with so much sadness and anger at this turn of events. I'm not going to say too much right now - I've got three months of ongoing and steadily intensifying heartbreak to look forward to and I've got to figure out how to pace the grieving.

not to mention I've heard some intriguing things about potential legal options.

not to mention the legendary parties to come.

anyway I am still too stunned and useless from this to write about "Tusk" right now, but Holly has posted some extensive personal reflections on Tusk and Fleetwood Mac in general that are worth your time, inc this especially on point passage:

Fleetwood Mac made me see that human beings are flawed in sometimes catastrophic ways that they can't control. There are unpredictable, sometimes dark, sometimes ominous things that motivate them, and there is a certain beauty to that darkness that is rarely captured.

yes. Steve is also vibing on personal Tusk-infused darkness and confusion. in the meantime, rest assured that I will still be in my room, listening to it, feeling the darkness, etc.

future death

2008-03-26T19:31:00.002-04:00

this just in, we are being kicked out of our beloved 502, home to the green lodge, when our lease expires at the end of June so that our landlord's fucking son can live there. utterly fucking devastated does not even begin to describe how I'm feeling right now.

sara

2008-03-24T23:33:00.006-04:00

(for the rest of the week, the Lodge will be blogged or maybe not blogged from an undisclosed location near the Atlantic Ocean in the US south, where I will be busy working and/or celebrating the imminent marriage of all-star 502 alumni Peter and Heather and/or eating quality bbq.)

SARA

fleetwood mac - sara (single edit)
fleetwood mac - sara (demo)

the more I listen to FM the more I've learned to appreciate the various talents of its non-Stevie Nicks members, but I think it's fair and probably non-controversial to say that Stevie's unique voice - half coquettish California girl, half bitter old witch - is kind of the main attraction, you know? brief internet searching reveals "Sara" to be the #2 all-time favorite Fleetwood Mac song in some online poll, and there's a lot of questions about who exactly Sara is and whatever happened to the 16-minute long demo etc. I can't really speak to any of that stuff and while I don't necessarily not care, the importance of the historical 'facts' of the song kind of pale when compared to the indisputable vibe facts - this song is maybe the purest distillation of both the heady magic of Nicks as well as maybe the emotional heart of the Tusk experience - and made all the more thrilling b/c it's the first lead vocal for Nicks on the album and it's kind of deep into it at track #5, kicking in with that instantly compelling chord sequence immediately after the mellow warmth of 'save me a place.'

re: Stevie Nicks. before I really understood what FM was I thought of Stevie Nicks as kind of this silly old hippie chick that wore a ridiculously lacy, quasi-mystical wardrobe, but you know what I would definitely wear really lacy clothes too if I was Stevie Nicks and got to sing the lines in this one about "undoing... the laces... undoing the laces." so awesome. back then I did not understand that Stevie Nicks actually CAN cast spells with her voice and words, channelling the elements as well as raw feminine emotional energy in a way that is both incredibly alluring and deeply terrifying

wait a minute baby
stay with me awhile
you said you'd give me light
but you never told me 'bout the fire

one of the theories re: who is "Sara" that Holly mentioned in her Tusk post is that Sara is Stevie's aborted baby that was fathered by Don Henley (!?). I can't be bothered to fact check this but I will say that the first couple dozen times I heard this I thought the line was "you said you'd give me life / but you never told me 'bout the fire" and I was like "holy shit, she is giving voice to her aborted daughter singing to her from fucking hell!!!" this is an awesome way to think of it admittedly, but the more correct-seeming lyric with her getting light but then burned by the fire etc is also pure lyrics-as-total-fucking-poetry, and it reminds me of Janet Jackson on the intro to "That's the Way Love Goes" ('like a moth to a flame,' etc), which is a pretty nice fucking bonus vibe to tap into here if you ask me -

also obv note the next line for its similar vibe of elemental potency, enhanced by the incantory, spell-like circularity and repetition -

drowning in the sea of love
where everyone would love to drown

you could maybe criticize some of the lyrics here as kind of vague and hippieish to be honest, and the song is 'just' a kind of relatively unchanging, if gorgeous and driving, backdrop to Stevie's nonlinear vocal riffs - but I get goosebumps and kind of bite my lip every fucking time she begins that verse,

and he was just like a great dark wing
within the wings of a storm
I think I had met my match
he was singing
and undoing
the laces

RAW MAGIC!!! the extended demo version is pretty mandatory, not just b/c it is 8 minutes long instead of just 4 minutes, not just because it has a couple of awesome lines that I sing to myself all the time lately ("I stay home at night / all the time"), but for the utterly, mind-blowingly perfect and revealing way she starts it - "I wanna be a star... I don't wanna be a cleaning lady!" that's where the trouble begins - that star is the light, that star's the fire

re: the production of "Sara" and Tusk. basic internet research reveals that Tusk was one of the first albums to use digital mixing! and Sara maybe more than any track really glistens in a way that sounds exactly what a state-of-the-art rock album in 1979 should sound like - still full of the humanity and darkness of the '70s but with an icy, coked-out lacquer of crisp reverb and lush delays straight out of the imminent '80s that establishes this kind of atmospheric and emotional distance between us and Stevie's cold, burning heart. listen to the infinite-seeming space in the beginning, and how the typically relentless drums and bass suddenly pull you in closer - but not really close. listen to that ghostly, luminescent choir rising slowly up behind her in the second verse, those shimmering, echoing little guitar filigrees falling over the chorus like Stevie's undone laces...

this is the emotional core of Tusk - beautiful moments preserved like flies in aspic, perfect and inaccessible, dead and ready to be pulled apart

significant fortune

2008-03-24T02:36:00.003-04:00

via mr. wonton - we are getting all Kevin Johnson with the Chinese food here at 502 - this is pretty much exactly the fortune I needed to get:

Through greater effort and hard work a precious dream comes true.

updates from the non-tusk internet

2008-03-21T12:41:00.003-04:00

* this simple yet mind-blowing program displays your RSS feed headlines as LOLcats, via WayneReader, I highly recommend dragging the bookmarklet onto your toolbar and trying this out on pretty much any page with a RSS feed. just when I thought the whole LOLcat thing was getting stupid and self-referential and boring, this really reconnects the meme to its fundamental, chaotic, random roots - almost any RSS feed will yield some weirdly hilarious, strangely profound juxtapositions. here is the green lodge as a lolfeed for example.

* umeancompetitor has become unstuck from the internets

* my sister is blogging! it is called 'scarves & chapstick' but could be called 'adventures in substitute teaching and wedding planning'

* e. reeds is also semi-active again on the blog-front, bringing you interesting recipes, professional insights on menswear, charmingly absurd complaints, and raw hypochondria

* this New Yorker piece on Lenny Dysktra's amazing post-baseball career is easily the most hilarious and mind-blowing piece of literature to hit the internet in years, via Jayanthi, mandatory reading for anybody interested in sports or lifestyles but especially for those with even the vaguest understanding of who and how awesome Lenny Dysktra is

meanwhile, in real life -

* tonight rupture and shadetek @ glasslands, see you there

* tomorrow bboyz @ swiss institute, see you there

save me a place

2008-03-20T15:20:00.006-04:00

with all due respect to the Lindsey Buckingham-led interesting and kind of good forays into post-punk on this album, it's not really what we're here for - skipping ahead to -

SAVE ME A PLACE

fleetwood mac - save me a place

"save me a place," the fourth, also Buckingham-led song on the album, starts with a lyric I can really fucking relate to right now

don't know why I have to work
don't know why I can't play

oh man don't even get me started on that shit right now. anyway, the kind of folksy strumminess of this one was a turnoff at first, I admit, but by 0:30 suddenly you're enveloped in this beautifully lush, 3 (4?) part FM choir, irresistibly calling on you to

saaaaave me a place
I'll come running if you loooooove me today

and how could you not? these choruses are some of the most beautiful, warmly tender moments on this album which, I promise you, is about to get increasingly chilly and conflicted and bitter and really fucking Stevie Nicksish in a minute. like the chorus of "over & over," this gives us one more chance to really connect with the intimacy and love that's still part of these difficult relationships even as it reminds us how flawed they are. where has Lindsey gone, so that you have to save him a place? where is he running from? as the next verse makes clear, he is filled with (typical male etc whatever) ambivalence towards commitment, staying in place -

don't know why I have to go
don't know why I can't stay
guess I want to be alone
and guess I need to be amazed

despite the fact that this is an acoustic strummy folk song, the arrangement and performance, in their subtle way, convey the same determination as more muscular FM songs - because despite the quiet, europhic sweetness of that chorus, Lindsey is definitely leaving, his mysterious internal dude-compass propelling him away in search of vague amazements as relentlessly as Mick Fleetwood's typically sensitive-yet-hard-hitting percussion. he'll come running back, he promises. we'll see

over & over

2008-03-19T00:02:00.004-04:00

they call the first song on Fleetwood Mac's stunning and utterly obsessable 1979 album TUSK "Over & Over" because it reminds you that you have been listening to the album over and over and over for the past week and a half

really almost nothing else, as my possibly-suffering housemates will attest. thanks again to Holly for passing this on, it's clearly the Twin Peaks/Julee Cruise of my late winter/early spring 2008, and possibly the greatest album since the "Singles" soundtrack - as such, it will also receive the one-track-at-a-time, close-read treatment that it richly deserves. I'm not going to do every track, but I am going to do all the ones that really matter to me right now, which should cover the next couple weeks of posting for serious

OVER & OVER

fleetwood mac - over & over

I gotta admit, "Over & Over" didn't really register my first few times through TUSK, I kept getting derailed listening to "Sara" and "Storms" on repeat for hours at a time etc. with Christine McVie's typically mellow vocals, the easy-going melody, lazy tempo, etc it is kind of an 'odd' but in retrospect ODDviously perfect way to open an album full of so much darkness and emotional tumult.

this is an album about flawed yet inescapable relationships - as noted in Holly's useful introductory notes, pretty much everyone in the band was sleeping with each other and doing a lot of drugs and dealing with the catastrophic success of "rumours" and writing songs about each other, etc. the songs are full of multiple, often conflicting voices and desires, unanswered questions, naive hopes mixed with heartbroken cynicism, spun in unbreakable circles. and "Over & Over" lays it all out, in McVie's verses and their pleading questions

"could you ever need me? and would you know how? don't waste our time, tell me now"

"don't turn me away, and don't let me down - what can I do to keep you around?"

etc - that so quickly slide into the hopefully rising chorus:

"could it be me? could it really really be?"

before she suddenly, exasperatedly realizes that she's been here before, and had these same hopes dashed, "over and over" ("and over and over and over and over")

- yet the whole song, in its relative warmth and mellowness, kind of conveys that cautious, yet desperately-wanting-to-believe optimism of the "could it be me?", when you kind of know better but still think that maybe this time will be different, which makes it such an appropriate start to the album, a quick taste of the sweetness with clear forboding of the bitterness and sourness to come

ftr, thanks should probably be given to Alison in Sweden PhDista for encouraging me to give this song a closer look in the first place, it wasn't originally going to be blogged but, as usual, she's got a sharp eye for high-quality emotional details, esp when it comes to the Mac. credit also goes to Alison for popping my FM cherry way back on her summer of '01 mixtape, featuring "Silver Springs," which kind of blew me away (and then bitterly haunted me for months after our appropriately intense breakup, thanks!)

8000

2008-03-18T23:46:00.008-04:00

yeah that 77-drummer boadrum jawn was OK I guess but what about this (via Nick Lez)

"The Otomi people, descendants of the Mayan Olmec and Toltecs of Mexico, prophesized the healing of Mother Earth will begin when 8,000 sacred drums are played together. This inscription was found in a cave located on an Otomi sacred ceremonial site. The Otomi people consider sound as a form of prayer and a basis for their spiritual practices. In 2004 the first modern ceremony was held and the prophecy of healing began. To continue the energy of this healing ceremony, indigenous peoples and followers of indigenous traditions worldwide will drum together on Friday, March 21 at 2 p.m. EST. You can participate by drumming alone or with others, while holding the intent of Earth healing."

this Friday folks, 2 PM! bang a can, you can do it at work! be part of something larger than yourselves! etc

[Dan-O, thinking of it that way kind of makes me think of it as a worldwide 'balls' chant, you know? Sarno-style. did we invent that game or what? man we were geniuses when we were kids... definitely gotta post about the 'balls' chant at some point, but not now - it's time for the Mac.]

complex crises

2008-03-18T20:21:00.003-04:00

somewhat similarly, Geoff Styles notes today that $100/barrel oil is, like everything else, global, historical, complexly-determined, and no one, not even big bad oil companies or warmongering neo-cons etc, knows what's coming next. back to our scheduled "Tusk" week in a minute

asterisk

2008-03-18T11:08:00.006-04:00

great and gutsy speech in a lot of ways - calling your grandmom kind of racist, bold! - no seriously it's good, but those two blatantly pandering (I hope) John Edwards-esque passages (note the reference to the 'shuttered mills') where he blames the problems of working class whites solely on their capitalist bosses' 'corporate culture' and 'Washington lobbyists' and blames health care problems solely on 'Washington special interests' etc are terrible, both in their cartoonishness and the way in which it undermines his thesis, which is that we live in a complex world rooted in an inescapable and occasionally really shitty history and that in order to solve social problems we have to stop blaming everything on others (inc other classes, countries, etc), acknowledge and take responsibility for our own role in creating our world, and work with other ostensibly right-minded individuals to make a good faith effort to solve them. uhh, unless you're a white working class Pennsylvanian, in which case you're allowed to wallow in wan 1960s-style paleo-socialism for a bit longer? I liked the parts where he told the truth better.

globalization is continuing to change economies and ways of life all over the world - sorry, America, this includes us, too - at an ever-faster pace in a decentralized process that is an unavoidable cause as well as effect of our technological/social evolution and is impossible to stop, yet also continues to provide us with more and more tools (technological, institutional, social, etc) to help us try and keep up with the pace of change. like race and other challenges of history, it is one that is posed repeatedly and constantly on both personal and macro levels in obscure and literally innumerable ways, and we have no real option but to accept the world-challenge that we don't fully understand, that we are required to answer yet can't solve without others, make our best guess at the solution, never find out if any of our answers were right, and, if we're nice and audaciously hopeful, share good notes with as many equally ignorant people as possible along the way

atlantic studios

2008-03-18T00:08:00.005-04:00

Aa checked into the excellent Atlantic Sound (just down the hall from the smart and bloggy graphic designers in 801a) in scenic DUMBO to lay down some drums this wknd. is it lame to think that live/work/playing in DUMBO seems magical and awesome? it was dusk as I rode in and there was this super loud karaoke sesh blasting out of one of the nearby buildings, it was impossible to say where it was coming from but someone was singing esther philipps's "release me" with inspiring passion and little sense of pitch or restraint, it was a special moment for me

first

2008-03-17T14:19:00.005-04:00

but first, pictures of emilio, my cutest friend and closest confidant. jeff & caitlin brought this friendly yet serious, insanely loveable little guy into the collective life of 502 about a year ago, iirc, and it is fucked up that I haven't shared him with you before now. *

readers, I present to you: emilio in wicker tunnel. you can click to make them bigger, higher res versions available upon request.

* obligatory link to ethan zuckerman lecture on how the internet is mostly for pictures of cute cats. cute cats: web 2.0 = lulz: web 3.0. tho I gotta admit I am feeling a bit of a weird internetty thrill posting these...

you're a rare collector's item

2008-03-17T11:23:00.003-04:00

NEW BLOGWORTHY BLOG: B.J. Rube, of the iconic avant-lounge act Puttin on the Ritz, whose fucking wedding we played in October and I never blogged (need to do a wedding mega-post ASAP), who is probably at least slightly responsible for my 'etc' tic due to his online 'voice' which is as distinctive as his real life baritone, has an awesome new blog "Pukekos" (named for a typically rare and awesome New Zealand bird - appropriately since B.J. himself is married to an awesome New Zealand 'bird'). it is chock full of painstakingly encoded MP3s from dude's extensive collection of compelling-sounding and unfailingly obscure indie rock vinyl. this is one of those super-focused and content-rich blogs, a non-hidden treasure of hidden treasures for those interested in such things

COMING SOON TO THIS BLOG:

- photos from the studio
- one week of nothing but posts about songs from "Tusk"

di genius

2008-03-13T19:20:00.006-04:00

18 year old JA superproducer phenom + a riddim that blends what seems like more awesome of-the-moment sounds, beats, and textures from more continents than I've ever heard together into a seamless whole + 10 minutes of dancehall dudes going crazy with ridiculously awesome, futuristically produced flows = biggest WTF mp3 I've downloaded in a long fucking time - if you're wondering where the bar is at for music in 2008-2009, it is here, and it is scary fucking high. writeup here on Das Fader. see also dude's myspace, especially 'look pan dah gyal deh', utterly sick!! and the recent Sean Paul hit 'watch them roll'. via rrrruptrue - DJing next Friday @Glasslands, see you there?

factory fall

2008-03-11T12:29:00.004-04:00

uhhh so moving on past the surreal news day yesterday (Spitz + 7 new sins, wtf??) -

via Nadav, check out this awesome-seeming upcoming academic(ish) conference on The Fall! with abstracts! some of which seem genuinely interesting! like these -

Paulo Oliveira: “Keep a Full Subs’ Bench: Mark E. Smith’s Take on Management Technique

During the 2006 Football World Cup, The Guardian published an opinion piece by Mark E. Smith where he stated that Sven-Goran Eriksson should follow his approach to team (band) management if he wanted to be successful. This paper will draw on that article and The Fall’s oeuvre to analyse Mark E. Smith’s take on human resources management while acknowledging football’s presence in it.

Owen Hatherley: “Let me Tell You About Scientific Management”: The Fall and the Disciplined Worker

Many studies of the Fall take their cue from Mark E Smith’s tendency to the fantastical, but equally important is a stern, pared-down disciplinarian element. In ‘Birmingham School of Business School’, Mark E Smith sneers ‘let me tell you about scientific management’. This paper will discuss The Fall in terms of Frederick Wilmslow Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management, the tract on the disciplined movement of the worker that helped create Fordism. The Fall, both in music and rhetoric, constantly evoke the Taylorised factory, with Smith as it’s grim, ruthless manager. The endless repetition, the rules against any kind of display of individual technique (‘don’t start improvising for god’s sake’), a puritanical excising of anything superfluous. Also there is Smith’s conflicted view on the worker itself – whether trumpeting his own background or equally frequently denouncing the English working class as bovine, unimaginative and warped by the industrial experience. This paper will explore the Fall in terms of discipline, industry and class – all of which are complicated and contradictory in their work.'

extended Aadolescence

2008-03-07T15:07:00.003-05:00

also of note - we're playing this UNIQUE show this Saturday, March 8 with awes singer/looper Julianna Barwick, who I raved about in this space a few weeks ago. we will be playing music in a basement, which will be recorded and broadcast live on the web via Viva Radio while the audience - you, potentially! - watches in a separate room with video projections from four separate cameras in the room with us. yeah right 'voyeurism' etc whatever I don't really get it either, but maybe it will be cool? see http://www.viva-radio.com/press/adolescentsessions/ for more on the vibe

=== Viva-Radio Presents Adolescent Sessions, with

=== Aa (Big A little a)
=== Julianna Barwick

== doors at 8, show starts at 9 sharppp
== (yes you will have time to run home to watch Vampire Weekend on SNL)

= US$5
= UnionDocs Bodega - 322 Union Ave (corner of S. 1st)
= L/M/J to Lorimer
= myspace.com/adolescentsessions

power

2008-03-07T12:17:00.004-05:00

1 - such a bummer to see Samantha Power fuck up wrt 'monster' etc for all sorts of reasons. like everybody else, I liked her book, def one of the highlights of my undergrad syllabus. this recent interview with her on the appropriately-named UK political talk show 'Hard Talk' is really fucking intense and pretty interesting on lots of levels, not just the tacit admission that election-season talk of getting all the troops out of Iraq in 16 months is, while not 'just' talk, is obviously an aspirational goal to be modified as merited by circumstances more than an ironclad policy promise. I found her presence on his team reassuring and hope that she'll still have a role in any Obama admin when this is all said and done. draw your own parallels to the Austan Goolsbee/NAFTA affair, this increasingly depraved primary is already claiming some unfortunate casualities

2 - on a more positive POWER-related note - Neptunes Power Hour @ Savalas tonite! psyched that this is happening, really intrigued wrt what the vibe will be like, wish I could be there but I gotta celebrate P-Wolf's impending non-bachelorhood, hopin for pix! Alexis has the details

gary gygax

2008-03-05T13:23:00.003-05:00

sad news, and I'm not just talking about the fact that we're gonna have to endure another month and a half of this increasingly stupid Democratic primary -

Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons and basically the whole genre/culture of tabletop role-playing, died yesterday at age 69.

hopefully I'll have some time later to really post adequate tribute to how fucking important D&D was and still is to my mental landscape, cos tribute must be paid - the 'live', tabletop role-playing game is clearly an endangered species that is probably destined for extinction as a weird quirk of pre-internet, pre-good video games late-20th century culture, but I'll be damned if it didn't play a critical role in the intellectual development of an entire generation of male nerds, and if I have any kids nerdy enough to play I'll be damned sure to teach them. GG and D&D taught me so much as a kid, and, if me and fellow 'former' D&D nerds like Tim B and Matricardi and Wolfgang etc can ever get our acts together for our oft-declared ambition to run a really good campaign as the quasi-adults that we are, I'm sure it would be as revelatory as ever.

Wil Wheaton, a good a spokesperson as any for nerds that came of age in a certain era, has some nice words and personal reminiscences, which struck a chord with me and many other nerds I'm sure -

ponytail

2008-03-04T16:30:00.008-05:00

played with these guys and girl Friday in Bmore and Saturday in NYC, made me more excited about an indie rock band than I've been since the days of listening to Meneguar's "House of Cats" on repeat for hours. propulsive beats with a mess of shredtastic, dueling, pop spaghetti western/surf guitar runs on top courtesy of Ken and ex-Ecstatic Sunshiner Dustin Wong, fronted by the awesome pixietastic sparkplug Molly Sigel, easily the most charismatic frontperson I've seen in a minute, who spends most of the set hopping around, eyes half-closed or lifted up to the ceiling and this huge sublime ecstatic smile on her face, so much joy in this band, so inspiring - check out this epic and awesomely illustrative new track "Celebrate the Body Electric" from their forthcoming album on their myspace! definitely go see these guys whenever poss

lots of great pics from the Brooklyn show Sat nite here from Tod Seelie and here from Rebecca Smeyne, also featuring us and the insanely futuristic and impressively lit metal of Genghis Tron, also a video courtesy of Torsten M and a fun pic of us courtesy of Jeremy K up on Brooklyn Veg (really pulling of that trashy NY douchebag look!), I gotta say in all honesty we were really fucking awesome too, crowd surfers, near-vomiting, power, I think things will be OK

i'm a hulkamaniac cuz, period

2008-03-04T14:12:00.006-05:00

pretty interesting and occasz awesome interview of Clipse/Re-Up by DC's Peter Rosenberg, punctuated by some of awk white guy interviewer moments but otherwise a good forum for real talk on VA/MD, rap influences (yung Clipse walking around school with headphones listening to 'Fear of a Black Planet'), politics (Malice really wishes Obama and Clinton could run together and have 16 years, Sand is more an Obama partisan, "it is so gentleman-like when he gives it back to her!"), and, for max lolz and intensity, 1980s pro wrestling, dudes are BIG fans, their reaction to him even bringing it up is priceless ("WHAT.")

(the freestyle is on point too, liva and pusha esp awes, really feelin the foursome)

omgomgomgLOSTwtfomgomgwtfLOSTlostlost

2008-03-03T01:06:00.010-05:00

what if the Matrix was a TV serial set on a lush Pacific island, written by Philip K Dick, directed by David Lynch, and produced by God Himself? this show makes me feel lucky to be alive at this point in human history

[note to Sean I feel like this is too abstract to be a spoiler but if you don't want to risk it please avert your eyes and catch up with season 4 asap]

thoughts: ok so what we call memory is kind of like your sense of time, in the same way that your eyes sense space - it's a weird, non-intuitive way to think about it, but so is the idea that time is a dimension like space is. and like your other senses, your memory/timesense changes with age, usually for the worse, and it can even get injured - or totally fucked up by advanced physics-centric 'side effects' in an unbelievably compelling, ultra-impressive, philosophically breathtaking tour de force of sci-fi storytelling kind of way! I buy this 100%!! these guys are fucking geniuses

anybody that is skeptical about this direction or this show in general can eat a dick! LOST is easily the early front-runner for the #1 most awesome work of deity-level creativity of the 21st century, it has been true since the beginning and it is still true and it is becoming more and more evident in its truth.

if you're going to read one long and extremely thought-provoking thing about last week's amazing episode of lost which is already changing the way I see the world it should probably be this

update: more scientific validation from Popular Mechanics, who apparently has a regular feature science-checking LOST and other shows/movies/etc? via back4000

google reader keyboard shortcuts

2008-02-29T03:46:00.001-05:00

note to self make your web browsing even more efficient

the french touch

2008-02-28T13:40:00.002-05:00

hey while I'm Chris-blogging, I would be totally remiss if I didn't repost his link to this epic-if-interrupted-by-boring-interviews (actually I just skipped the interviews, let me know if I missed anything) recording of a recent DJ Falcon and Alan Braxe set at the Viper Room in LA, bringin us all back to that magical night in mid-October at Studio B -

pretty sure I've recently referenced that night as as 'the last really good time I can remember having,' which is regrettable but almost definitely true. looking forward to escaping this wintry shell, fearing that I'm not ready for it - real glad that we get that extra Feb day this year, March seems intense, and April a world away

top ten crazy asian pizza crusts

2008-02-27T05:50:00.003-05:00

speaking of the wide world web of food, Asian tastes continue to amaze and impress - via Chris Co's google reader shared items, check out these insane fucking pizzas!!! mayonaise-injected shrimp nuggets, cookie crusts topped with shrimp with blueberry dipping sauce, "abalone sauce cheesy lava stuffed crust pizza"... you can't make this stuff up! the awesome thing is that most of these are offered by major, even international chains like Pizza Hut, this is considered totally mainstream behavior for far eastern pizza! instead (ok, maybe alongside) of creating a American-influenced McGlobal food culture, globalization et al keeps fueling new ways for different cultures to express how really fucking different they are

the girl with the most cake

2008-02-26T20:25:00.003-05:00

speaking of internet pleas - Andrea, author of what is shaping up to be one of the greatest blogs of all time, cake-time, needs your help finding a recording of a piece called "Three Dances" by John Cage. art-music loving bros, I know you are out there, anyone have this?

I also have a plea, which is for you to read Andrea's blog on the regs if you are interested in valuable and totally approachable personal finance tips, mouth-watering descriptions and great photos (courtesy of Grace natch) of amazing-sounding restaurants like this Korean fried chicken place, delicious-sounding recipes that even I might be able to cook, kittens in the bathtub, kittens getting adopted, etcccc - as those of you that know Andrea know she a great person to know, one of my very favorites, and it is awesome that she now has such a robust and true-to-life internet presence to know - do not miss!

time eroding, the long night passing

2008-02-25T23:53:00.005-05:00

thx Hanx for drawing attention to this gem from the aforementioned 1993 Steely Dan bootleg - a previously unknown-to-me Walter Becker solo song, "Book of Liars," that I've listened to 39 43 times so far today - come with me, this is a gorgeous, subtly swinging, quietly soulful ballad with really fucking heartbreaking and poetic lyrics and sax licks all over the fucking place -

steely dan - book of liars (live)

from Becker's 94 solo album "11 tracks of whack!" seriously! listen to how fucking sophisticated yet emotional this is! listen to the ache in Becker's voice in that last verse! goddamn this is good does anyone on this internet have the mp3 of the album vers, or the rest of whack for that matter??

spring fever

2008-02-25T16:11:00.001-05:00

highlights from the past week of the indispensable LoHud Yankees Blog by beat writer Peter Abraham

- Spring training is a lot like LOST

- Carl Pavano gets totally pwned by a clubhouse kid after having the fucking nerve to show up at camp for free food, rehabbing, and a per diem etc (see comments) on top of the $40m he's stolen from the Yankees over the past 4 years. has any Yankees player ever been so universally, openly, and basically deservedly hated before?

- A-Rod on Joe G's new running regimen - “It’s a track meet. But I really welcome that. I like that. I’m kind of psycho myself.” no seriously folks he is! I can't help it, his utter dedication to his own weirdness is starting to grow on me

- Tony Peña's crazy new catcher drills! "At one point he had Jorge Posada, Jose Molina, Francisco Cervelli and Jason Brown all lay on their stomachs in a row. Then Pena shot four pop-ups into the sky at two-second intervals. The catchers had to get off the grass, find the ball in the sky and catch it while avoiding each other..."

- Mike Mussina indulging in some cheesy ass decoration - "Mike Mussina’s locker is in a dark corner of the clubhouse, up against a cement wall. To brighten the place up, he hung a poster of an open window overlooking the ocean. Then somebody else hung a curtain over the window and added a little shelf..." the Jack Shepard of the pitching staff! I can't really explain it he just is. update, photo!

- and, in the Times - talk about burying the lede! Joba "walks among the lockers bare-chested, displaying his big tattoos and his little gold nipple rings." Just when you thought this guy couldn't get any more fucking awesome n.h.!

- Phil "Franchise" (expectations much?) Hughes is also fucking awesome! and he's got a blog! online Q&A comin up! this is gonna be a great year, I really fucking love this team again for the first time in a minute. 502mates we definitely gotta get cable for real by April

snow ii

2008-02-22T11:48:00.002-05:00

yessssssssssssssssssssssssssss, working from home on a snow day is indeed the ultimate perk -

[insert picture of snow falling over the yard as seen from the lodge window]

this extremely budd + eno + max/msp album "cendre" by fennesz + sakamoto has been a constant companion this winter and is so very app, every song a field of shimmering, slowly-falling digital snowflakes -

fennesz + sakamoto - cendre (album)

see also the previous julee cruise/snow vibes post -

lost iv

2008-02-21T17:06:00.002-05:00

so fucking pumped for more LOST tonight, last week's was nuts!! this show is really working on all possible levels of satisfaction right now, wowowowowow. for in-depth and on point analysis to get your juices flowing, try this recap and this analysis on darkufo, via the continually on point Alexis

caps and trades

2008-02-21T12:41:00.000-05:00

sad to see J-Kidd go but haven't been paying a whole lot of attention to the Nets since K-Mart left and they kind of got gradually, steadily shittier... but between having been kind of out of the loop and not knowing much about esoteric NBA trading rules, I was pretty shocked when I heard the trade was going to include Keith fucking Van Horn - who is kind of intrinsically funny as a shitty overrated non-European white basketball player with admittedly good cheekbones... but more importantly I thought he had retired etc!?

well, he had, basically, but NOT officially - and, due to the insanely convoluted trades teams have to make to comply with the NBA's apparently retardedly-designed salary cap, the Mavericks actually had to sign Van Horn out of his unofficial retirement for $4m and trade him to the Nets, after which he suits up and sits on the bench for a month and then retires again, $4m richer!! "It's like hitting the lottery" - Slate explains all, as it so often does -

sooo anyone want to riff on the structural similarities between these wasteful distortions and trades for Russian and former Soviet 'hot air' under the Kyoto cap and trade system? no? well, they're there pretty obvious I guess. game on! hoops and carbon markets, where else are you gonna get that kind of blogging twofer?

full circle

2008-02-20T19:02:00.004-05:00

hillary clinton bragged about not owning a TV

(sources: 1, 2)

totallywiredttttotallywired

2008-02-20T12:03:00.004-05:00

worth reading, fellow caffeiends - coffee, like so many of the best things in life, is best enjoyed in small doses and frequently -

the fall - totally wired

whitey

2008-02-19T15:14:00.005-05:00

via linky wayne, a blogging tour de force: stuff white people like - or, more accurately, stuff that bourgey liberal Democrat cosmopolitan hegemonic elite whites like!! barack obama at #7, hello!

despite the high rankings for coffee etc and despite the obv problematic nature of a list like this if you want to be 'serious' or whatever it is actually striking how many of these things I actually explicitly despise and/or publicly denounce on a regular basis, never thought of it as sublimated race self-hate before but who knows? then again honestly most of this stuff is genuinely fucking bullshit! I'd like to think of my hating as colorblind, or at least as motivated by my own unique deep-seated personal failings and fears and no-one else's - I want to live in an America where people of all races can freely loathe 'travel', global 'awareness', yoga, non-profits, going outside, bragging about not having a TV, organic food, film festivals, 80s nights, natural medicine, lawyers, Juno, snowboarding, architecture, the Daily Show/Colbert Report, breakfast places, plays, Netflix, Arrested Development, renovations, difficult breakups, hating your parents, Mos Def, standing still at concerts, expensive sandwiches, Wes Anderson movies, dogs, knowing what's best for poor people, etccc!

PS - don't worry, friends of all races that like any of these things, I do not 'loathe' 'you', was kind of riffing on Alec T's eloquently misanthropic Facebook 'interests'

first viral president first rasta president

2008-02-19T13:00:00.012-05:00

btw here's yr perfect soundtrack to vibing out on the increasingly funny viral life of the Obama candidacy - check out the indispensable True Panther blog's MP3 of a new jam from Ghanian uh dude Blakk Rasta, called BARACK OBAMA (CRUNK MIX). it is crunk indeed, with a generous side of trance-hop, an addictive, fun-to-sing hook as well as an intriguingly heterodox ideology from the US perspective - look out for the racists, end poverty in Africa, also America burn in hell for legalizing abortion!* as discussed with link-sender Steev, it'll be interesting to see if this kind of intensely international, rainbow-colored support freaks out whitey if dude makes it to the general. as Steev said, rastafarianism has no concept of 'tacking to the center' -

also of random note - Obama doesn't have a 'campaign theme song', he just randomly picks an appropriate song from his iPod before each campaign event! this is what I was talking about before - the reason the internet has adopted him as its own is because it actually seems like the guy knows how to use computers and internets and iPods etc. that's kind of the secret slogan of the Obama campaign - Barack Obama is the only candidate that is not your parents! with all due respect to my respectably internet savvy mom and dad (read: they know how to find this blog!), natch. it's a generational thing - he's one of 'us', loosely speaking.

* actually not so heterodox at all - as we were reminded this week, Bush has probably done more than any US president to help healthcare poverty etc in Africa, aaand while abortion (and homosexuality, while we're discussing the rastagenda) are obv still legal I feel like Bush probably made a pretty decent effort to curtail them or whatever, or at least they I'm pretty sure he pandered a bit to the anti- groups when he could/had to. first rastafarian prez, anyone?

spirit of competition

2008-02-18T21:26:00.002-05:00

lest you think I've been doing nothing but lying around weakly listening to ethereal girly ambient music and melodramatic new agey Lynch soundtracks these days - which is definitely mostly true - after dark the soundtrack is generally switching back to the hard-as-fuck new Clipse, which, predictably, is great and getting better with every listen. I can hear jaded friends and bloggers etc saying 'oh it's not as exciting as vol. 1 and 2' and 'the beats aren't as good' etc but I am definitely into and definitely feeling the deepening notes of grimness, determination, and increasingly insular hatred of just about everybody else. this is motivational music, in other words. notes and zshares -

- so yeah, new emotional vibes, also more depressed and disillusioned esp Malice - see Breihan's accurate vibe-reading

- also, relatedly, more just really fucking ANGRY - the dominant vibe is still ice cold, but there are these terrifying interludes on the exhilirating "re-up intro" and "show you how to hustle" where they just fucking yell at you through this megaphone-style distortion, you can really hear their eyes popping with rage, "lookin down at you and with the conviction of God almighty / telling you your crew ain't shit, that's right!!! your crew ain't shit!!!!" , sneering megalomania, "you see it's the natural instinct of man to have this competitive drive!!! to want to be the ELITE"

- the screaming vitriol over the previously mellow Pharrell solo joint "hustle" is utterly sick and kind of a mindfuck besides given their apparent bitterness towards him

re-up - show you how to hustle

- "haters try to block the shine like the clouds / but I Will Wallace scream "freedom" through the crowd" !!!

- seriously one of the best and most insanely balanced rap crews ever, the awesome symmetry and complementarity of the two short, nasally needling Clipsebros alternating with the two gravelly-soft giants of Sand and Liva kind of reminds me in a weird way of ZS in the old days where they had two sax players, two guitarists, and two drummers, and they each sat across from each other and had similar haircuts. everyone fucking brings it on Roc Boys no doubt but check out fucking Sand killing that last verse!

re-up - roc boys

- "ski for all / I said ski for all / Sonny Bono the slopes until the reaper calls" !!!

- so awesome to see these guys totally fucking own Dey Know, and so satisfying to hear this sick beat really done heavy justice to. also, so illustrative to compare it to Wayne's verse on the mostly-shitty remix with Luda, Jeezy, etc, where he audaciously and brilliantly uses auto-tune for, sorrrrry, typical Weezyish free associative rambling bullshit and poop jokes. Sand kind of owns this one too, no?

re-up - dey know yayo

villianaires

2008-02-18T11:57:00.002-05:00

check out this great video for lil wayne's "love me or hate me," courtesy of the impeccably styled and multiply talented Sam Mickens (from amazing Seattle band The Dead Science) and the Villianaires Academy - this is just really super fucking well done, great staging, lighting, wardrobe, tasteful use of blood, subtly funny in parts (huuuuge dollar bill!) but never anything other than a sincere and totally successful attempt to make an awesome video for an awesome rap song

laura

2008-02-17T16:17:00.004-05:00

as far as I'm concerned sheryl lee's performance as laura palmer in fire walk with me is w/o a doubt the best performance by any actor or actress in movie history, it is fucking insane that she wasn't nominated for a million oscars. you should probably not bother watching this if you aren't already familiar, but for those that are - the ending, with laura in the red room with agent cooper, is just devastatingly powerful, this seriously makes me bawl my fucking brains out when I'm in the 'right' mood, as I am this cloudy sunday -

it's her reaction when the angel appears that really fucking slays me, that heartbreaking mix of absolute joy and shocked disbelief - the intense, laughing/crying revelation that, despite all the evil clouding her life, and despite the darkness and self-destruction in her own heart, she is still redeemed

angelo badalamenti - the voice of love

(also, LOSTies may note the, ahhh, extremely direct similarities between this piece and that recurring (though recently rare), stirringly romantic musical theme from LOST)

lulz

2008-02-16T15:43:00.004-05:00

it's what you do things for aka the ultimate currency

barack obama subscribed to your feed

2008-02-15T12:10:00.006-05:00

update: on further reflection, I think I've realized why I love this so much - while my generalized, reflexive cynicism about politics prevents me from really feeling the more earnest variations on the Obamamania 'change' etc vibe, these are all smaller and way more accessible, yet awesome and often genuinely moving examples of everyday heroism that have emotional content I can actually connect with. I mean, I have a hard time imagining what 'change' really could be tbh (though I have an easier time imagining what it's not), but I can totally imagine Barack subscribing to my blog feed, leaving a comment here and there, checkin out the Aa myspace, etc, and yeah maybe he was already making some coffee and made an extra cup for me knowing I would need it, etc. and tbh it is really cool to have a candidate that you can have those kinds of chill fantasies about

via wayne via the secret, non-cheating google console, awesome and weirdly compelling meta-Obamamania net-art -

barack obama is your new bicycle
barack obama listened to your mp3
barack obama left a comment on your blog
barack obama smiled when I mentioned your name
barack obama e-mailed your dad and told him how great you are
etc

half heart

2008-02-14T20:11:00.013-05:00

oh yeah, why not - I was rewatching Fire Walk With Me last week, and finally figured out (maybe figuring out is too strong a word here) what scene this song is from -

angelo badalamenti and david lynch - half heart

- it's from the scene early in the Twin Peaks High part of the movie where Laura meets James in that locker room or wherever and they make out and have that distractingly retarded dialogue about how turkeys are really stupid and she is too or whatever. a little disappointing tbh (though also tbh you also see her boobs for the first time, which is kind of intense - like, not only do we finally get to see the fabled Laura Palmer alive and in action but it's R-rated action! on the whole the beginning of the Twin Peaks section of the movie esp is so fucking satisfying, as Tim so accurately put it) but it's still such a beautiful, schmaltzy, richly melancholic, and endlessly relistenable song, reposted in honor of your val-day, whether it's annoying, pointless, frustrating, terrifying, sad, lonely, aimlessly bummed out, or even just happy - or maybe totally unremarkable and in need of a nice, soprano sax-enhanced vibe, as in your humble author's case -

postscript: OK, why not, I'm watching Fire Walk With Me again, I didn't finish it last time! - the "Half Heart"-scored locker room scene is like this, and typically for Lynch I guess, it seems to get less stupid and more weirdly compelling the third time through:

laura: just kiss me
james: it does matter we're in love
laura: james you don't know what you're talking about, quit trying to hold on so tight... I'm gone, long gone... like a turkey through the corn
james: you're not a turkey... the turkey's one of the dumbest birds on earth
laura: [tearing] ... gobble, gobble... [tremble] gobble
james: laura don't ever leave - I will never leave you
laura: [boobs]

postscript update: jesus wtf why the fuck did I fucking decide to start watching Fire Walk With Me at 2 in the morning this movie is fucking terrifying, that first Bob scene just fucked me up bad and this is only gonna get worse, Leland is PISSED about the cleanliness of Laura's hands

postscript update etc: oh right this is why

full circle: for the record 'Half Heart' appears again towards the end of the movie, at Laura and James's last meeting

bacharach

2008-02-14T19:07:00.009-05:00

Pitchfork, typically ripping off my content without giving me credit much as they give rave reviews to bands that blatantly rip us off in various ways without giving us credit*, has also picked up on the McCainette playlist stuff and a), seems, charmingly, and multiply revealingly, maybe slightly confused that such solidly Pitchforkian taste could be held by a Republican, b) helpfully for sure adds a link to this weighty bit of McCainformation - he's got the endorsement of green lodge music icon BURT BACHARACH. huh! but didn't he put out some kind of schmaltzy anti-war 'what is this world coming to?' or something album recently?? what's his vibe on this? gonna have to wait until I hear what David and Warwick have to say, will try and do some more research on this

* I am just kidding I mean they don't read the blog obv we both just read slate whatever and I am not that salty about their goddamned reviews anymore I guess!

truth

2008-02-14T12:11:00.006-05:00

"I have to tell you all the truth... I have to live with myself. And one day I have to give an account to God and not to nobody else of what I've done in my life. And that's why I've said and shared the stuff with y'all that I've shared with y'all today that I wouldn't like to share with y'all.''

the offspring

2008-02-14T11:55:00.005-05:00

of note - McCain's daughter Meghan's blog, correctly noted by slate etc as refreshingly 'normal', unpolished, and almost completely apolitical (other than a brief note of Johnny Ramone's Republicanism wrt "My Brain is Hanging Upside Down" aka "Bonzo Goes to Bitburg"...!). mostly check out her playlists, which a) seem to be the most prominent feature of the blog so far, b) include really, ah, accessible commentary like "What does it feel like to win the Florida primary? It feels like the Doors song "Break on Through"...", "I've also included some of my favorite songs from classic artists like Led Zeppelin and The Smiths; like my life, wardrobe and approach to this campaign, I love to mix it up,", "this song always makes me want to drink a martini," (whoa-uh!) etc and c) well actually a lot of these playlists are like pretty OK! like she could DJ a night at any random bar in the LES and no one would know the difference. lots of standard indie and hip-hop fare plus some mildly intriguing surprises (Pulp's 'Like A Friend'!, 'Mambo Sun'!, 'Search and Destroy'!) -

and - she's apparently a CC'07 art history major?? news to me. any yung CU readers know her, have vibes to share? I can only guess that she's a big vampire weekend fan

meanwhile, her dad doesn't use computers...?? wait, seriously??

why don't you come over to my house... please

2008-02-12T16:41:00.002-05:00

since apparently all this snow is turning to shitty rain in like 7 hours, and who knows if these are the best snowy vibes we'll get all year?, I would also like to take this opportunity to demand that you take advantage of the opportunity to really fucking deeply feel Julee Cruise's "Floating into the Night" album, amazingly available for free track by track here. without a doubt my #1 obsession of the winter, and an utterly perfect soundtrack for a snowy evening. these first two especially, seriously seriously mandatory:

julee cruise - floating
julee cruise - falling

bonus chiasm flashback!
"a beautiful, tranquilized hybrid of new age textures and vaguely '50sish pop melodies stretched out into ethereal sighs, lyrics by David Lynch, music by Angelo Badalamenti, and otherwordly singing by Ms. Cruise... it's kind of like an enigmatic, melancholy, xanaxed-out Hal David/Burt Bacharach/Dionne Warwick situation, three amazing talents complementing each other perfectly to create a TOTAL VIBE "

snow

2008-02-12T15:16:00.000-05:00

hey this is a decent little snow vibe we've got going here in the lodge, it's about fucking time

pleease please treat yourself to this short and unbelievably vibeable youtube of a recent performance by Julianna Barwick, via PTW, which has utterly transfixed me for much of the past 18 hours, kind of post-Animal Collective vocal looping but stripped down to just the vocal looping and really clean, plus ethereal, enya-but-better-esque melodies that really compliment the wintry vibe in their gauzy iridescence - seriously, could anything be more obviously my shit than this??

myspace etc, interview + songs on a portuguese radio show etc, I think we're playing a show with her early next month, stay tuned!

as if this show couldn't get any better

2008-02-11T23:26:00.001-05:00

speaking of alumni from 'yacht rock' which I hear is back or something but haven't bothered checking it out yet let me know if it's good or whatev but anyway more importantly re: LOST -

doesn't the new pilot dude remind you of a certain

???

10 high quality steely dan bootlegs for download

2008-02-11T17:35:00.000-05:00

right here, it is exactly what the subject says it is, that is to say truly glorious. I saw an awes vid of Fagen in the early 80s playing a keytar wearing a cutoff t-shirt and sunglasses (obv) at a show, it just gets deeper

anyway these links also include a fucking 4GB of video direct from the jumbotron or whatever feed from a show from their summer 2006 tour, which I have such fond memories of seeing more or less TOTALLY SOBER with matt andrea mike nate steve phil lis chris jenna rajiv hank... who am I forgetting? what a great show. I will work on downloading this over the next couple of days and try and have a screening here sometime soon!

michelle o

2008-02-11T13:49:00.000-05:00

nice WSJ profile on official green lodge feminine icon Michelle O, noteworthy just for that but also for

1 - the semi-implication in the article and in the 'interview outtakes' posted online that Barack maybe still hasn't totally quit smoking (update: might be reading too much into it, but the tenses seem a little cloudy...), which is unfortunate from a health perspective but also humanizing and kind of interesting. I've been curious, both b/c I feel bad for the guy to have to try and work on ending a stress-coping addiction in the middle of the most stressful time imaginable and because the (well, almost) total non-mention of his smoking in the press is a nice and weirdly old-fashioned reminder that there are still some lines, albeit totally random lines, wrt personal privacy and respect that they generally don't cross. did you know that Laura Bush is a smoker, too? but there's some kind of deal, spoken or unspoken, where the press never takes pictures of her smoking or asks or writes about it. I'll give 2:1 odds that if dude becomes president, that'll be another barrier that gets broken

2 - the WSJ's casual and totally gratuitous use of "vibe" in a supposedly serious article - not to be too blatantly carrying the torch for the much-missed and obviously ahead of the curve Internet Vibes, but I feel like this sentence would be unthinkable for the Journal in, say, 2005 or 2006, no?

"Friends and campaign aides describe them as a high-powered team built on contrasts: She's the heart to his head, the enforcer to his lapses, regimented to his laid-back, critic to his ego, details to his broad strokes, sarcasm to his sincerity, toughness to his cool vibe."

fuck that w00t bullshit maybe I am just too like not a total fucking internet nerd but I feel like 'vibe' was obviously the true breakout word of 2007

thoughts re: fight club the musical

2008-02-11T11:35:00.000-05:00

uh, via the New Yorker blog, David Fincher is apparently finta do a Fight Club musical? book by Palahniuk, music by Trent uhhh Reznor? sounds totally fucking stupid in a potentially awesome way

as discussed w Wolfgang/Cleary Inc and others the other night, I def think of FC as an 'epochal' movie, maybe I was just young and impressionable (remember vividly having my mind blown by it during the first week of college in 1999, Liz Greene represent!) but I think it really marked a hinge in US popular culture - it was kind of like the official end of not only 'political correctness' in the wider culture but its reflection in the righteous, refusenik, ideologically-policed DIY/indie/etc culture of the 1990s.

Fight Club, in both its content and the form of its presentation (gritty, artsy, yet undeniably slick with an obviously non-DIY budget) was an axe chop through the door between popular and 'alternative', a door that I think was later totally blown off its hinges by 9/11, after which getting hung up on ideals like authenticity and artistic purity/integrity et al seemed not only old-fashioned but totally insignificant in the face of the terrifying present and a lot of people's desperate need to just have some fucking fun. hence electroclash, hence coke rap replacing backpacker rap, hence the vaguely gross feeling you get (or at least *I* get, as a hinge, 1980-baby myself) 7 years later reading Pitchfork watching Juno going to Coachella or whatever et al and seeing all the aesthetic signifiers of music that you used to think had some deeper meaning beyond how it sounds playing in the background while you read blogs being harnessed to such well-marketed, cheerfully corporate endeavors. I think FC was really emblematic of this shift, and its aesthetics and its vibe also really helped to pave the way for the 00s in a lot of obvious as well as not-so-obvious ways -

- and, while I've had a lot of fun over the last few years, I can't help but notice that it's 2008, and we're probably (over?)ripe for another cycle of cultural creative destruction. what's next? I feel changes coming, looking for signs

mothertongue

2008-02-10T05:44:00.000-05:00

worky weekend, given powerful vibes of purpose and spiritual uplift by the music of occasz-mentioned CC'03mate yung Nico Muhly, subject of a lengthy and perceptive profile in this week's New Yorker - between dude and the dynamic Ros/Tomson VW duo, it's really been an acclaimed year for the Columbia music program, no? the article's nice and worth a read, but the part I'm really gonna keep coming back to is -

"In the classical world, it’s, like, bad, or too popular, to produce a lot, but you learn such a lot by listening to a piece and, literally, not being able to stop it,” Muhly told me. “It feels to me more like food, in that sense. People need to eat. You may as well make them something to eat."

- so true, and inspiringly modest! and unlike my generally ambivalent feelings about actual food I'm always hungry for these kinds of pieces, beautifully constructed, emotionally stirring yet pleasingly complex compositions with strong roots in the Christian choral vibes that resonate so strongly with my own experiences with the sacred growing up. all the tunes up on the New Yorker player are pretty great, but the "Mothertongue" "Sanctus & Benedictus" "Keep in Touch" troika is particularly felt -

someone left the cake out in the rain

2008-02-07T14:55:00.000-05:00

via WFMU via PTW, this video of Three Degrees' mesmerizing, beautifully shot, intensely performed, well choreographed (check out the awesome 'whirlpool' move around 6:45 as they transition from the vaguely silly but vaguely sick instrumental break into the epic and sublime coda, camera tracking their hands arching up etc) and wardrobed (sweet green icing dresses) etc big band version of "MacArthur Park" is fucking blowing my mind, as is the song, which I haven't thought about inna minute -

the lyrics are so fucking incredible, I guess they are easy to kind of make fun of etc but come on who has ever combined the totally fucking heartbreaking (the cake is their relationship, a rare and hard to make recipe that baked something beautiful but is suddenly all melty and kind of gross, so poetic and true) with the totally fucking tripped out (wait seriously, what??) like this? it's like the Coleridge's 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner' of pre-Jim Steinman pop disco epics!! highly highly recommended, plz remind me to bust this one out at an appropriately vibed (??) karaoke sesh one day -

spring was never waiting for us, boy
it ran one step ahead
as we followed in the dance
between the parted pages and were pressed
in love's hot, fevered iron
like a striped pair of pants

MacArthur Park is melting in the dark
all the sweet, green icing flowing down
someone left the cake out in the rain
I don't think that I can take it
cos it took so long to bake it
and I'll never have that recipe again

I recall the yellow cotton dress
foaming like a wave
on the ground around my knees
the birds, like tender babies in my hands
and the old men playing checkers by the trees etccc

NJ reppin

2008-02-06T11:22:00.000-05:00

1. just a friendly reminder that the NY Giants are 'really' the NJ Giants

2. take a photograph 'of' New Jersey from anywhere contest - I guess it's a cool idea? creative NJ-centric photogs check it out, via Das Stencil

3. cool NJ t-shirts via Vice, I'm gettin 'NJ ALL DAY' in maroon (not shown) w gold lettering

4. Hillary takes NJ despite the best and somewhat unexpected efforts of certain members of the fam! wish they could just settle this in a game of horse or something at this point for all sorts of reasons (inc LOST-related vibes obv... can't wait for tomorrowowowow)

super tooz

2008-02-05T08:20:00.000-05:00

can we talk about how amazing she looks in this picture and is in general (been meaning to link to this vanity fair profile for a minute)?? man I wish there could be a first-mate debate, Michelle needs to get Bill-level airtime, glad to see the campaign's working on this. I don't think Obama was joking when he was said she could beat him if she got into politics - whatever JFK vibe he gives off is at least doubled by her intense Jackie O vibes, or like Jackie O if she went to Princeton and Harvard and met her husband cos she was his fucking adviser at his first law firm job, so fucking badass and glamorous

also, on a totally different vibe, man McCain is also great how can you not love this awesome picture from drudge yesterday, imagine him as prez! personality goes a long way even/esp when the personality is like lovable foul-mouthed irascible semi-deformed former POW maniac, hard for me to ever really root against the dude, even if he were running against Michelle or like David Tyree etc

also fwiw, this Mitt Romney GQ piece hints at a hilariously American Psycho-esque vibe of incredibly sincere and deep-seated blandness that I could also see growing kind of weirdly entertaining. I know I'm a cheap date, but am kind of proud of us America for finding four fucking reasonable, thoroughly centrist, generally qualified, and basically likable candidates this year. let's do dis!

update for cheap

2008-02-04T20:20:00.000-05:00

UPDATE: "tower of pisa / leanin / in that late-model somethin / lookin for life's meanin"

"treehuggin ass bitch please"

"who fucking with my golf swing / eghk"

"we ain't worried bout nothin / hakuna matata"

"like pearl jam I kill my peers like jeremy / and here I am with open arms like journey" [insert PTW-style snark about how much blogs will love this couplet + added irony of this actually being a blog more or less]

"we the wire season 2 bitches / back to the docks"

"I apologize for the destruct and decay / that was brought upon by my liberace key-play"

"cos I can't wait for skateboard to save me / my house in default / his house paisley / he's not at fault / no not vaguely / he's on a yocht [hilarious British pronounciation] / somewhere with Jay-Z"

[this one reminds me of the last uncompromisingly hard, post-celebrity producer rap album I really loved, Free At Last, ''back without a Just track / tried to reach out and work / but he ain't chirp back" etc]

"pad / a fly bag / a must-have / the porsche / jimmy choos / nice calves / I typecast my broads"

"and the lord don't understand our truth / we gon' never say shit / we the blue man group"

"ginormous!"

it's the natural instinct of man to have this competitive drive

2008-02-04T01:35:00.000-05:00

what a fuckin historic night - perhaps you'd be interested in listening to a little mixtape called 'we got it 4 cheap vol. 3'?? stream (DJ Drama-less!) via re-up gang or download via an enterprising blog that's wasted no time rippin it. shit is pure, icy fire so far, nobody does it better or keeps it realer - the virtuosic and relentlessly hard rapping, intense focus, awesome bravado on full display as usual cut as always by bracingly bitter vitriol, inspiring on so many levels - really appreciatin how well Liva and Sandman complement and set up Clipsebros on these, this gang is tiiiight

a victory for new york sports

2008-02-03T23:50:00.000-05:00

fuck yeah so proud of these g-men, was so fucking satisfying to make Brady and those New England babies look like the overrated little bitches they are - seriously, dude was on the verge of tears towards the end, I'd modestly like to take credit for leading the bar in a big chorus of 'awwwwwwww'. there's no excitement like sports excitement and no non-gay bar situation in which you get so many shots of tequila and hugs from dudes you've never met before and it's totally OK like a triumphant sports bar situation!

afterwards everyone 'woooo!'ing in the street, cars honkin, bros everywhere, and Dav finds this nice fitted Yankees hat that fell out one of the cars, just my size too! I dunno, I took it, accepting it as a gift of fate, is that fucked up? what, was I gonna run down Smith street stopping every car to ask if they'd just lost a Yankees hat? I lost my previous Yankees hat last October while having one of those great drunken convos with Peter Wolfgang up at Columbia after an intense night at Cafe Havana or whatever the West End is now, and it fell somewhere over the wall by Riverside Park. it was obviously a bad omen and sure enough the Yanks lost the next night at that fucking Biblical-level fucked up loss vs. Cleveland with all the bugs etc. finding this way nicer hat tonight under these circumstances seems to augur v well for the baseball season, the new Yankees dynasty, the Chamberlain/Hughes/Kennedy era, begins in 2 months, v soon after Peter's wedding coincidentally! Dav is sitting on the couch recording 'Mossy', inspired by the language of Steev, 2nd album could be in the proverbial can by the end of the month or so? it's an aggressive target. I think that covers everything

maybe I'm still stuck on this whole david lynch vibe

2008-02-02T12:20:00.000-05:00

but can someone please do a movie with a really fucked up and disturbing scene set to rod stewart's "tonight's the night"? is kind of creepy, no? "stay away from my window / stay away from my backdoor too / disconnect the telephone line / relax baby and draw that blind," uh, ok? you can really hear it spiraling into depravity from there, "tonight's the night... ain't nobody gonna stop us now," horrific screaming over the saxophone solo, etc

o holy vibe

2008-02-01T14:04:00.000-05:00

one of the many many pleasures of working @home is being able to fully indulge my love of rainy atmospherics without having to actually leave my house and get wet. snow would be even nicer but I've been craving this kind of mellow gray ever since that tease of a Wednesday morning -

appropriately reverent soundtracks are a must, natch - lately, all winter long really, it's been this recent Robert Fripp live album recorded at a few cathedrals in England and Estonia in 2006, kind of standard frippertronica but with newer, luminescently digital textures and a truly cathedralic sense of space, what more could you want?

robert fripp - at the end of time: churchscapes (album) (YSI)

bowereport

2008-02-01T00:20:00.000-05:00

if you're curious how the VW show went the other night, it was more or less exactly like this and this said

happily and somewhat surprisingly, I didn't even feel that bad for us wrt to the intense contrast between the fairly pathetic crowd and our frankly epic performance - tbh was kind of the shitty break I've grown to expect over the past year, and I'd kind of assumed this was how it was going to go as soon as I heard we were sharing the bill with another act that had, you know, multiple booking agents, management, etc - you know, the kind of professional legitimacy that demands respect in the biz! anyway, was proud of us for keeping it focused and real and musically killin it our first show back after a 3-month hiatus, our prize new jam was bangin and by the time it and the rest of the set was goin down the crowd had definitely swelled to somewhere closer to triple digits iirc. plus if I do say myself the new light show, which I will basically claim responsibility for designing (hint, not bug zappers) and rehearsing over the past week, looked great! pics from Tod soon hopefully

and, of course, regardless of the predictably misguided scheduling, it was tough to imagine anyone caring much about openers for this kind of headliner - having not seen dudes play in about 8 month or so, I was obv expecting but still blown away by the total screaming VW-mania. fun facts, #2 on iTunes album chart, catch them on Letterman tonite, upcoming Spin magazine cover?, etc! in an attempt to get slightly ahead of the 'how high?' curve, I'm gonna predict a Grammy nomination, will give you 1:2 odds if you doubt it. I can only guess at the inevitable backlash going on in some quarters but thankfully don't have time to read it -

instead, though, I highly highly recommend Mike Powell's recent piece in the Voice (via the Breihan post), which I'm pretty sure is the most perceptive, on point thing I've read about these guys so far. typical - I don't know if it's widely recognized yet but I think Mike is one of the best newish music writers in the game right now, definitely wrote the most perceptive, revealing piece about us I've ever read (not a lot of competition there, but, still), centered around his unplanned performance in Aa's most recent Roosevelt Island ensemble last spring, along with, yes, Ezra Vibes! Aa is a launching pad for greatness, what can I say

8 long months are

2008-01-31T17:42:00.000-05:00

over tonight - so fucking psyched for this, it felt like this day would never come! I don't know how I made it this long.* this 8 minute and 15 second recap is absolutely mandatory viewing, literally everything you need to know about the major events of the first 3 seasons, so fucking focused, thorough, etc!

* actually, I do know, I became totally obsessed with Twin Peaks for like the last 3 months, duh

vibe music

2008-01-30T09:36:00.000-05:00

there is this new rap 'micro-genre' comin outta south FL called "VIBE MUSIC" and it is basically like super chilled out, midtempo strip club anthems with pretty synths, lots of hooks and only occasz rapping, what more do you need to know it is obviously awesome - Alexis, as usual, has the details and links you need to understand this important new vibe vibe*

also conveniently a youtube of Snoop's infinitely rewatchable/relistenable "Sensual Seduction" video, which as you probably know by now is one of the best videos ever, and which you might not know (I didn't!) was produced by VIBE MUSIC mastermind Shawty Redd. Doggystyle was what, 15 years ago?? who would've guessed Snoop would still be so relevant, not to mention so fucking avant-garde and awesome, in the 08?

* also in vibe news, I'm sure the frequently missed Internet Vibes is having its biggest day of traffic in a hot minute! we are opening for those Vampire Weekend knuckleheads tonight at the Bowery, excited and totally bracing myself for extreme failure, potential psychological meltdown, etc

final four (three)

2008-01-30T09:26:00.000-05:00

man I gotta say I like all three of the top contenders (Obama/McCain/Clinton) better than anyone running in 04, and even Romney is kind of growing on me with his wholesome-yet-deeply-weird vibe, and how Kerryesque was that guayabera shirt, etc, this election will be totally OK

analogy

2008-01-25T15:01:00.000-05:00

when trying to explain to power-naifs about how amazing and next-next-next-level thesearepowerfulhours.com is, I am occasz asked "wait, so did these guys invent power hour mixes?"

the answer of course is 'no', but only in the exact same way that Babe Ruth didn't 'invent' hitting home runs or that Takeru Kobayashi didn't 'invent' competitive eating. but like those pioneers in their chosen disciplines, thesearepowerfulhours.com takes a concept 'invented' by mere humans and elevates it to a level of artistry and skill that was previously unimaginable. where their predecessors were content to trudge along with their eyes to the ground, scratching out primitive and immediately forgotten footnotes to history, thesearepowerfulhours.com soars above, inspiring us to consider not only drinking but the whole human endeavor in a new light of limitless possibility, and, yes, hope

draft outlines for 2 forthcoming posts re: 90s alt rock

2008-01-24T20:37:00.000-05:00

1. secretly actually the greatest 90s alt rock albums of all time

i. singles soundtrack
ii. urge overkill: saturation
iii. spacehog: resident alien
iv. new radicals: maybe you've been brainwashed too

(am I forgetting anybody? feel free to argue about the order these should go in, aside from singles obv)

2. secrets of the greatest secret tracks of the 90s of all time

i. nirvana 'endless nameless'
ii. guns n roses 'look at your game girl'
iii. urge overkill 'untitled jam at the end of saturation'
iv. I know I am forgetting something major here

maybe one day I'll have what I want

2008-01-24T20:13:00.001-05:00

I'm a little meh on the band name/song title/lyrics but man do I love this song! appealingly scruffy but appropriately mellow two-chord DIY drum machine power ballad (vaguely reminiscent, like so many other great things, of a vibe from urge overkill's 1993 masterpiece saturation, in this case the track 'dropout' specifically) with these really.fucking.awesome vocals on top!!! really raunchily nostalgic, desperately soulful, just barely hinged - imagine a cross between jack black and joe somar? recommend!

update: actually I just realized it's kind of a cross between two songs on 'saturation' - 'dropout' most obviously in terms of the beat and arrangement but also kind of the majestic, yearning melodic qualities and beachside vibes (well, more like poolside vibes in the case of urge overkill, obv) of 'heaven 90210', possibly the greatest alt-rock power ballad of the 90s. I guess there's a major element of Beefheart on the vox too, no? sorry to play 'name the similar vibe' I hope it doesn't dimish their accomplishment here I'm just riffin obv

neptunes

2008-01-24T15:58:00.001-05:00

my earlier comments re: the frequently regrettable n3rd aside, I could not be more excited by the tracklisting for Rajiv's brand new Neptunes power hour mix - this is big, big news, will be truly glorious. thesearepowerfulhours.com always and forever - UPDATE just noticed the awesome parental advisory label, so fucking thorough!
'we don't make power hours. we build them.'

seriously dark

2008-01-24T09:32:00.000-05:00

friends I sense dark times ahead, with twin work and music-work landslides bearing down on me and not having gotten nearly far enough ahead of the curve so far this month. that said, as brutally dark as things may get, apparently this is darker

a carbon nanotube carpet that is apparently literally the darkest thing ever made! the one in the middle obv. the grey looking bro on the left was apparently the previous record holder, doesn't look that dark to me. potential solar applications, fashion (really fucking black is the new black etc), etc

damn good coffee

2008-01-23T12:18:00.000-05:00

one of the less obvious byproducts of my twin peaks obsesh has been the reintroduction of coffee into my daily life in a major way. I haven't really had tea in months, and the daily coffee ritual(s) are becoming increasingly reverent. not to mention Jeff found a motherfucking working coffee grinder lurking in one of our disused kitchen cabinets last night! just smell those freshly ground beans!

and, today - a U of Nevada, Reno chemist has patented a process for converting used coffee grounds into biodiesel! Starbucks could apparently churn out 3m gallons a year from all of its waste, which tbh seems like kind of a shockingly small amount considering how much waste we're taking about (200m pounds!)? I'm a fan of the niche biofuels news story genre but this is kind of disappointing. that said I bet my coffee waste from the work week could at least get me to Williamsburg or whatever on the weekend? tbd

nerdcore

2008-01-22T18:04:00.001-05:00

wow is this new n.e.r.d. track 'everybody nose' kind of awesome for being so intensely shitty in so many different ways at the same time or is it just soooo shitty? it's kind of like ween without the redeeming qualities

resurface 2

2008-01-22T16:53:00.000-05:00

Andrea's new blog, cake time, check it out!

srsly heartfelt and wise words on pressing topics like personal finance, food, important things, and, yes, yes, yes, kittens - last night I got to kind of hang out with Andrea and Grace's five (5!) mind-bendingly adorable new kittens for the first time, it is really too much to even process at once but read the blog and feel the vibe etc

the green bay

2008-01-22T11:14:00.000-05:00

mixed and to be honest not ultra-intense feelings about the Giants' impressive OT win over Green Bay the other night - obv psyched for the Giants and for the chance to beat those overrated goons from New England, but it's hard to feel super good about beating the Packers, esp on their home turf, and even moreso after reading their wikipedia entry! did you know that

...the Packers are the only non-profit, community owned professional sports team in the US?

...the Packers have sold out every game at Lambeau Field since 1960?

...the waiting list for season tickets is over 74,000 people long, which is more than Lambeau's capacity? the entire population of Green Bay is only 102,000!

...the waiting time for season tickets is estimated at about 35 years, so "is not unusual for fans to designate a recipient of their season tickets in their wills or place newborn infants on the waiting list after receiving birth certificates.^[9]"

..."During training camp in the summer months (held outside the Don Hutson Center), young Packers fans can take their bikes and have their favorite player ride their bike to the practice field from the locker room. This is an old Packers tradition dating back to approximately 1957 (the first years of Lambeau Field's existence). Gary Knafelc, a Packers end at the time, said, "I think it was just that kids wanted us to ride their bikes. I can remember kids saying, 'Hey, ride my bike.'" The practice continues today.^[12]"^{seriously, (re)read this inspiring and powerful SI feature on Brett Favre and the Packers and their relationship with the people of Green Bay if you dare, you WILL cry. my heart goes out to all the Cheeseheads on this sad day, if it is any consolation please know that the sacred bond that you enjoy with your team is so awesome in its power and uniqueness that this bummer of a total choke-job by your QB hero is kind of meaningless in the grand scheme of things! you are all winners ('winners')! fuck the Pats!}

beholder

2008-01-18T18:41:00.000-05:00

pretty excited for these I guess - via several prime internet sources - the pic is of a rabbit eye, kind of freaky, no? I still want to get lasik, these come in vision correcting and non-vision correcting versions -

Movie characters from the Terminator to the Bionic Woman use bionic eyes to zoom in on far-off scenes, have useful facts pop into their field of view, or create virtual crosshairs. Off the screen, virtual displays have been proposed for more practical purposes – visual aids to help vision-impaired people, holographic driving control panels and even as a way to surf the Web on the go.

The device to make this happen may be familiar. Engineers at the University of Washington have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights...

two things (unrelated)

2008-01-17T13:19:00.000-05:00

1 - transcendently weird title on this otherwise very satisfactory John Judis piece on why Obama losing NH wasn't due to New Hampshireans and like by extension all of White America being the secret racists you always feared, relax

2 - this oldish Pat Jordan profile of poker great Daniel Negreanu is great, the stuff with his mom is esp cute actually really moving, via Bronx Banter