I usually don’t post sports stuff, but…
Posted on November 16, 2009 - Filed Under Sports
Given the utter dismantling of Tennessee’s “defense” this weekend by my Ole Miss Rebels (Dexter McCluster, will you move to Vermont and marry me?), I thought I would share this. I found it here, but I doubt that’s where it came from.
If ever a man died too young, it was Marc Bolan.
Posted on November 16, 2009 - Filed Under Daily Eyedrops (Music Videos), Music
T.Rex – Bang a Gong (with bonus introduction by Seals and Croft)
I heard ole Neil put it down!
Posted on November 13, 2009 - Filed Under Daily Eyedrops (Music Videos)
This just fuckin’ rocks.
What’s your favorite Mad Men scene so far this season?
Posted on October 27, 2009 - Filed Under TV Party
My top two:
Share your thoughts in the comments (now fully enabled without logging in).
Wow. Just Wow.
Posted on October 23, 2009 - Filed Under Useless Information
So, apparently, there’s a taxidermist out there who fancies himself an artisan. I don’t know that I’ve ever been so disturbed by something relatively harmless. Turn your dead housepet into something useful, I guess. I don’t know what’s most disturbing, but the distressed look on the critter’s face coupled with the Jesus Christ pose is a good start.
Daily Eyedrops: The Flaming Lips on KCRW
Posted on October 22, 2009 - Filed Under Daily Eyedrops (Music Videos)
This is a long one, but it’s worth it. The Flaming Lips visited KCRW studios last week, and Wayne Coyne was entertaining as always. There’s also a Pink Floyd cover which gives very little hope for their upcoming Dark Side of the Moon attempt, but hey, if Beck can cover whole albums, why can’t the Lips?
Listening Party: Stadium Rock, 90’s Style
Posted on October 22, 2009 - Filed Under Listening Party
[Listening Party is a feature where I torture myself by listening to the entire back catalog of a particular band and share my thoughts/observations. Typically, this will only be enjoyable/insightful to read if you are me.]
Chuck Klosterman’s excellent new book has a chapter about Kurt Cobain, David Koresh and a pivotal episode of Lost. I won’t go into details regarding his conclusions/arguments because quite frankly, you need to read that shit for yourself. It is brilliant.
The talk of Cobain and the music of Nirvana brought up old memories of flannel shirts and ill advised long hair (shaved underneath). So, with some trepidation, I set out to listen to the entire Nirvana catalog. I mean, it’s not cool to like or listen to bands from this era, right?
Bleach, the debut, reportedly recorded for $600, is how your remember it. Cheaply made, poorly written and memorable for one song (”About a Girl” – total Beatles rip-off).
Nevermind, the supposed pinnacle, the breakout, the hype behind “the year punk broke,” is an overproduced mess but also very good. The highlights are not the biggest singles, but rather a song about a brutal rape (”Polly”) and another Beatles rip-off (”Lithium”).
Insesticide was available, but I couldn’t bring myself to listen to this collection of B-sides and rarities. If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it one too many times. Side note, I also could not bring it upon myself to dig up another track released around the same time, ”I Hate Myself and I Want to Die,” which was apparently true. So much for subtlety.
In Utero, also known as the record Geffen refused to release (but only to garner hype for the record release), is actually the highest quality of the studio albums. There are no Beatles rip-offs here with the possible exception of the song about antiquated abortion techniques. The first line on the record is “Teenage angst has paid off well, now I’m bored and old,” which is possibly the most fitting lyric to open any record ever. I have the import version that ends with a bonus track “Gallons of Rubbing Alcohol Flowing through the Strip,” which is actually a good description what the throwaway track sounds like. This crap “bonus” aside, In Utero is an excellent indie-style response to the arguably unwanted success the band had achieved.
MTV Unplugged in New York wound up being the swan song, and I know it’s been stated to the point of being cliche, but this whole performance really does sound like a suicide note. You can hear a life in tatters in every one of Cobain’s vocal tics. The despair is mostly gone, replaced by acceptance of what’s to come. I’ve never heard anything that screams goodbye more than this performance. Cobain picked what he felt were his best songs and sprinkled in songs by his favorite artists.
But it’s the a capella howl at the end of Leadbelly’s “In the Pines” (incorrectly titled “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” on the record) which sucks the air completely from the room. This is Cobain’s dying cough, and it is, quite frankly, the most beautiful sadness I know of.
Closing Thoughts
Kurt Cobain was not a genius. Nirvana was not great. You could argue that Dave Grohl has written as many equally good songs with the Foo Fighters, and while I enjoy that band, I would NEVER put them up there with the greats.
No, Nirvana accidentally became a mainstream phenomenon by playing four chords which don’t normally go together. Their lead singer was a decent songwriter whose influences were obvious in his songs. This singer became a drug addict, married a crazy person and became a curmudgeonly asshole with a good heart. That weirdness added to his mythos when he snuck out of a rehab facility and put a 12 guage in his mouth.
The next day, even at my high school in Mississippi, there were kids who had elevated Cobain to sainthood (and more frighteningly to the level of messiah).
But he was none of those things, and his good music was only very good.
And his bad music was terrible.
From the mind of C. Klosterman
Posted on October 21, 2009 - Filed Under Potent Quotables
One of the minor tragedies of human memory is our inability to unwatch movies we’d love to see (again) for the first time. Even classic films that hold up over multiple viewings — and even those films that require multiple viewings — can never deliver the knockout strangeness of that first time you see them, particularly if parts of the story are willfully designed to momentarily confuse the audience. When a film becomes famous and its theme becomes familiar, that pleasantly awkward feeling is lost even more. Sometimes I want to unknow things.
- Chuck Klosterman from his new book, Eating the Dinosaur
Coffee Talk: Where the Wild Things Are
Posted on October 21, 2009 - Filed Under Coffee Talk
If you haven’t seen Where the Wild Things Are yet, maybe you won’t want to read this or participate in this discussion. For everyone else (all three of you reading this):
The major praise I have seen for the film is how wonderfully it captures the anarchy of Maurice Sendak’s original children’s book while creating a new world for Max to exist in. However, that new world which Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers imagine is wrought with sadness and anger. The film doesn’t give any explanation for this overwhelming sense of melancholy and seems to imply that it’s just part of all adolescence.
I like to think of myself at age 10-13 as a relatively sad and alienated youth. However, I don’t recall being the ball of rage and tears that the future school shooter depicted in Wild Things seems to be on an hourly basis.
So, first, do you agree that this is a major flaw in the storytelling, and second, what are your theories on the source of Max’s rage and sadness?
Obama Nation Abomination: Religious Nutjob Roundup
Posted on June 19, 2009 - Filed Under Religious Nutjob Roundup
In the 80’s, something strange happened. Metal bands were accused of purposefully hiding messages in their songs. You play a song forward, it tells you one thing. You play it backwards, it pledges allegiance to Satan.
When it was proven that the supposed messages were not put there on purpose by the artists and were really just sound waves played backwards that our brains interpreted as English, the whackjobs started to argue that the words were directly embedded into the recordings by Satan.
Which of course, inevitably, led us to a point where Satan’s backward masking has come to include world leaders. Bravo, brave warriors of the truth for exposing the lie of Obama!
Trivia: The “I Have a Dream” speech played backwards reveals the lyrics to Stairway to Heaven.
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