Come On - Don't Walk on the Kitchen Floor (mp3)(buy)

Takes three seconds to figure out exactly when and where this comes from.  But who?  What does it take to go from one of the bands of CBGB's "second Golden Era" to  "one of the most forgotten bands of the late-'70s New York punk and new wave scene."  (In the internet age, "most forgotten" almost sounds like an achievement.)

Come On (myspace) were contemporaries of the Talking Heads, and guitarist George Elliott writes of aspiring to join that band's original trio.  Instead he hooked up with some like-minded art students and enjoyed David Byrne's support.  A couple members would collaborate with Klaus Nomi.  (Elliott has 23 (!) albums recorded under his own name or as part of the group "Natalie & Me" streaming through his myspace player.)

There have been a pair of self-released Come On retrospectives:  Most of New York City 1976-80 (streaming here) contains a features a set of seven studio songs and a live set recorded at CBGB's in October, 1978.  Come On 2 includes the single "Disneyland" (also included on ROIR's old Great New York Singles anthology) and a handful of demos.  A set from Max's Kansas City recorded in 1977 is up on YouTube.  Songs are punchy and spare, clipped observations of either mundane events ("Housewives Playing Tennis") or contrivances ("Businessmen in Space," "A Kitchen in the Clouds").  It can be a very limited palette, but there's a lot of stuff that deserves to be remembered.

Goggled frontman Jamie Kennedy has a nerdy brattiness and energy that complements his lyrics' kid's-eyed view.  "Mom and Dad.  They're not my parents.  Can't they use the telephone?"  "I smoke and drink!  I want to have sex!  I'm mature for my age." "I hate Disneyland, Mickey didn't shake my hand, He was taller than I thought, Wasn't friendly, wouldn't talk... Mickey Mouse is a rat!"  He implores "Old People" to turn over cars and set garbage on fire.  He barks himself to the center of the universe:  "A plane passes by, so I take time out to wave.  And I wave Hi!  Hey! Hey! Hi! Hi!  Hey! Hey! Hi!"

At his best, the shrapnel of his frustration will hit something universal and then highlight something particular and mysterious.  "Don't Walk on the Kitchen Floor" (also available as part of Hyped2Death's excellent Homework series) is all guilt and domestic dread.  A hiccupped routine, reprimands repeated or recalled, a feeble lampshade.  This must be the place.

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Pitchfork has had Joe Tangari update his old Africa 100 introduction to African popular music and placed it on their front page.  It's a good quick guide through a few genres, labels, important releases, blogs, and (where available for streaming on Lala) tracks.

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"Jonas Brothers!"

The oOohh Baby Gimme Mores - Batman (mp3)

Two guys from Toronto jump into the wet hole left by the late, lamented DFA1979.  In the live videos featured on The OBGMz' myspace, the duo can sound more anemic than dynamic (dump the guitar, pick up the bass (or at least a bass pickup)).  But their Interchorus EP (offered as a free download) does a pretty good job matching that other band's fuzz and thrash.  "Batman" might substitute horror for menace, but songs like "Step on Emo Kids" ("I'm so sad that nobody likes me...") and "You Got a Boyfriend" ("You got a boyfriend?  So the fuck what?  You got a husband?  Dump him.") bring a combination of obnoxious and sexy that's easier than kindness but harder than clever.

"Batman" was also featured, along with Saul Williams and Earl Greyhound and others, on the free Afro-Punk compilation Fuck Rock Stars.

Batman & Robin - I Feel Pretty Good While Smashing Other People! (mp3)(buy the I'm a Bat!  I'm a Rock and Roll Animal! 7")

Trademark-infringing garage punk psychotherapy session from a pair of Austrians who wear bags on their heads.  Other song titles include "My Hero-Power is My Moustache!" and "Wonder What to Do?  Uh!  No Problem!  I Have the Bat-Belt!"

Of course.

Bitman & Roban - El Hechizo (mp3)(buy The Rough Guide to Latin Funk or Musica Para Despues de Almuerzo)

Bitman (pr. Beatman) is Chilean DJ Bitman (myspace) and Roban is robbing, or sampling.  This was a band (myspace) featuring three henchmen and, on this track, rapper Tea Time.  Tea Time wasn't a pip-pip pinky-up stiff associate of Lord Marmaduke Ffog and Lady Peasoup their squad of crumpets on the old Adam West TV series, but probably should have been.  Lord knows the writers needed another opportunity to mask drug references.

"El Hechizo" translates as "The Spell," btw.

It's a shame the fight scenes in those episodes don't replace the "Zok!s" "Zlonk!s" and "Oof!s" with "Cheeri-Ow!"  and "I Do Say!" and such.

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This new Gil Scot-Heron song is really, really good.  Record comes out Tuesday.

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(Ethan Hawke, Local H fan, via Goldenfiddle)

"THE SIX ANGRY RECORDS TOUR - 1 Lucky Person Picks 1 Awesome Record Out Of A Hat And Local H Plays It In It's Entirety!   It's all in the numbers......To promote their first live DVD-'68 Angry Minutes'-Local H is taking a cue from their sold out, 7 night stand in Chicago and bringing all 6 of their studio albums on the road. Every night, the band will put every one of their records in a hat (sorry, guys. No B-sides); one lucky(?) member of the audience will be selected to pull a record out of that hat-and presto! Local H will play it front to back. On the spot. All that AND a bonus set of choice cuts from the unpicked records. Only question is : Do you feel lucky, punk?"

LOCAL H (myspace) is touring!!!  It has been too long.  Right now there are two quick stretches scheduled through the South and Northeast:

03/06/10 Sat Elgin, IL Road House Elgin
04/09/10 Fri Glendale Heights, IL Shark City w/ Kinch
04/11/10 Sun Louisville, KY Zanzabar w/ Kinch
04/13/10 Tue Tampa, FL The Orpheum w/ Kinch
04/14/10 Wed Orlando, FL The Social w/ Kinch
04/15/10 Thu Jacksonville, FL Jack Rabbit's w/ Kinch
04/16/10 Fri Atlanta, GA The Masquerade w/ Kinch
04/18/10 Sun Houston, TX Scout Bar w/ Kinch
04/21/10 Wed Fort Worth, TX Lola's Sixth w/ Kinch
04/24/10 Sat Otto's; Dekalb, IL
05/14/10 Fri Ann Arbor, MI Blind Pig w/ Kinch
05/15/10 Sat Lancaster, PA Chameleon Club w/ Kinch
05/16/10 Sun Washington, DC Rock And Roll Hotel w/ Kinch
05/17/10 Mon Philadelphia, PA The Khyber w/ Kinch
05/18/10 Tue New York, NY Gramercy Theater w/ Kinch
05/19/10 Wed Allston, MA Harpers Ferry w/ Kinch
05/20/10 Thu Providence, RI Jerky's w/ Kinch
05/21/10 Fri Syracuse, NY Westcott Theatre w/ Kinch
05/22/10 Sat Toledo, OH Frankies w/ Kinch
05/23/10 Sun Chicago, IL Metro

Tickets for the Khyber show are now available.  Tix for the Gramercy Theater go on sale at noon, today.   

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The Kids ARE Alright.

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The internet moves so fast:  Selleck Waterfall Sandwich didn't even have time to beget Zmed Elegant Dining Room Pack Animal and Ian McShane Bagpipes in Space before being stabbed to death by Wilford Brimley Pooping Hot Pockets from a Trapeze.

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A bunch of Criterion titles are going OOP.

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Roman Polanski's 1966 film Cul-de-sac has never been released on DVD in the U.S.; I'm not even sure it was released on VHS.  But it is currently streaming on Hulu.  Not how I'd have chosen to see it, but there's not much of a choice.

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The Haitian Play:  Orson Welles' "Voodoo Macbeth"

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"Some of the planet's best dancehalls and worst roadblocks are here, a testament to two of the country's nighttime priorities: clubbing and government extortion. The capital's CD shops are stocked with charismatic mic-hogs, loudmouths, and humor-mongers belting out tragic stories in the soothing tone of a drill sergeant."

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"I don't like psychology whatsoever: using music like a drug is stupid. One shouldn't do that : music is the product of the highest human intelligence, and of the best senses, the listening senses and of imagination and intuition. And as soon as it becomes just a means for ambiance, as we say, environment, or for being used for certain purposes, then music becomes a whore..." (via Marathonpacks)

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"The only way in which football is American is that coaches, like executives, always get new jobs after failing miserably and that Keith Olbermann ruins everything."

Over the course of several months last year, I inadvertently took part in The Lost Rewatch.  It was mostly to indoctrinate someone else before the show's final season -- because explaining Lost just doesn't work, try it, it does not work -- and partly to scout for details and refill memory gaps.  But it was also the best way to appreciate an astounding accomplishment in storytelling.

(And if you haven't seen the show, you should probably just skip this entry.  There will be casual SPOILERS from Seasons One through Five.  And everything about this show is a spoiler.)

What's impressive is how consistent -- despite the inadequacies and impositions dictated by the process of running a multi-year mainstream network television show -- Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse's work has been.  Six years have spiraled out Big Bang-like from a single event, slowly widening the scope across time and space while placing personal drama against an ongoing debate about fate and free will in an arena provided by two as-yet undefined forces.

Lost baited with its most immediately compelling elements -- a plane crash, the stories of its survivors -- and sustained itself by very carefully disseminating information.  This could seem like a bait and switch for those viewers who came for a drama offering a fictional rebuff to Survivor and eventually found themselves watching something more fantastic than they'd expected; it could seem like an overextended tease for those focused on "answers" -- and to be fair, it wasn't until the producers had secured an end-date that the threat of perpetuated aimlessness had been removed.  There have been an impressive amount of involving stories told along the way, the show would not have worked without those.  But the power of Lost has been its ability to maximize the potency of its intrigue by introducing seemingly random elements and shuffling the viewers and characters through time, sometimes by generating questions out of very little.  The most important answer the show has ever offered was to the subtext behind Chahhhlie's first episode question:  "Guys, where are we?" might as well have been, "What kind of show is this?"

It's a puzzle show.  That's why I'm both dreading and exsplooging with anticipation over this final season.

Revisiting the first five seasons in bulk made the show seem stronger than it was on a week-to-week basis.  Mostly because the continual approach of new asphalt makes it easier to leave potholes behind.  But it's weirdly reassuring in a couple ways that speak to the themes and methods of the show.  Lost has always formally involved time travel by its inclusion of flashbacks; it so masterfully made time travel a practical matter that it could break its dictated format (which intersperses common-time plots with flashbacks) to introduce linear episodes that also jumped around in time.  Watching reruns itself constitutes a sort of time-shifting, it's your own flashback to 2004-present.  It's also easier to accept the show's ups and downs because they've already happened.  It gives you a certain Jacob's-eye view of things.  All the storylines that could have been avoided through simple communication couldn't be, because they've already made those mistakes.  When you are fated to watch that damned tattoo episode again, it's not as awful, because you know a Hurley episode is coming close behind.  You have already experienced the let-down of Season Three's start, and know to get giddy for Season Three's end.

There were a few revelations, the second time through.  Not so much plotwise -- though it was a hoot to see that Sun's pregnancy test early in Season Two came from Widmore pharmaceuticals, fun following Faux-Locke's actions -- as pertaining to how the show's content has settled.

One thing I hadn't considered, for all the fate-flinging and the increased role of fantasy content, was how useless the central characters had become as the series progressed.  Jack was a natural leader at the show's start because he was a practical necessity.  He's often the most annoying person on the show; that's partly because his constant visits to his backstory has left him overexposed (again: tattoos) and also part and parcel with his character.  His self-destructive compulsion to fix things forces him to stick his nose where it doesn't belong... which is basically everything that happens after Faraday shows up.  Jack's inability to change has made him insufferable, if not an outright antagonist.  (It does not help matters that Matthew Fox -- pretty much the show's only star at its start -- is hardly the world's finest actor.)  Early on, the series suggested that everyone who wound up on the island was brought there to confront personal demons.  Often those were presented as Daddy issues.  Jack's issues are as active as his reanimated father; until he's able to participate in some sort of zombie forgiveness ceremony, he's going to seem like the problem that needs fixing.  And because of his increased impotence in the face of matters of time and space and whatnot, I absolutely sympathize with his rationalized urge to blow the whole fucking place up.

(Not that I understand how Faraday would come up with that plan, or why others (and Others) would go along with it.  It seems too obvious that it either presents a trust-betraying paradox that would render too much previous information negligible,  or (as Miles finally pointed out) is what caused "The Incident" in the first place.  But such is the competence of the show that I'm unsure of what they'll serve up next.)

Another:  The show is bad at creating substantial bad guys.  This seems counterintuitive considering how amazing and complex Ben has become.  But in the vast scheme of things, he's ultimately a manipulative, bratty Renfield.  Just like Lost is better at questions than answers, its shadows come off as mostly smoke and spirit gum.  The failure of the early part of Season Three was less inane polar bear cages and hostage surgery than an inability to make The Others interesting in any way.  They were better as whispers.  Even with the sympathy of Desmond's story working for him, Charles Widmore has never been imposing.   He's introduced to Locke in a video where he's ordered someone beat up?  Bah.  Widmore's so hands-off a character that he only became interesting as a trivia bump in the island's backstory.  Keamy was just a brute and a tool.  None of this gives me hope that Jacob's nemesis will turn out to be a satisfying Loki.

The other thing that jumped out -- and this really reaffirmed what became obvious at the end of Season Five -- was that the show's best actor is Josh Holloway.  Michael Emerson's Ben has had all this gristly meat on which to chew, and he's been superb at that.  Terry O'Quinn's managed the lost Messiah inconsistencies well, convincingly going between tortured/confused and Zen Master Fucktard.  Elizabeth Mitchell has such a smart, strong presence that Juliet almost never needed her backstory.  But Holloway, who'd done mostly fuck-all before this show, has made Sawyer work way beyond the run of his character arc.  Sawyer was at first a practical gnat, a petty alternative to altruism and a bad boy romantic alternative to Jack; Holloway was brought on as beefcake and wicked grin.  It would be too easy to say that The Kiss changed everything, and holy crap was that one convincing Kiss.  But really, it was after chain-choking his issues through to the end that he blossomed.  That such a simple thing as domesticity among the Dharma Initiative could bring so much confidence was moving; this is not a show that allows its characters much room for peace.  But Holloway's ease sold the audience on three years of offscreen island life and a romance that could have been no more than a matter of convenience.  That last scene at the Swan site was devastating.

Mostly the Rewatch was pure affirmation and appreciation.

It seems taken for granted that the show's first Season was the best, but I think its most impressive accomplishments have been Season Two, the on-island parts of Season Five, and everything to do with Desmond and Penny.  Season One was a blank slate, and the show proved itself willing to pile sane, strange stuff on while demonstrating an ability to tell interesting stories.  (I'm always impressed at how the Sun-Jin dynamic was manipulated.)  But Two proved that the show had bigger stories to tell, that it was more than just foundation.  Though the only remaining Tailie is Bernard, "The Other 48 Days" was vital in both reapproaching the initial crash from another point of view and incrementally broadening the show's scope.  The knock on that season is that most everything it introduced got tossed, and that its button-pushing ways frustrated the central survivor story in ways both mundane and ridiculousness.  But it was this season that introduced Ben, Eko, and Desmond.  Poor Ana Lucia generates so much viewer anger, but as a bad penny flip to Jack's lucky quarter she personified the dark, cast-off alternative to the first season's chosen castaways.  (It remains amazing that the show is willing to treat its characters so cruelly.  The seriousness and ingenuity of its tragedies can be unsettling.  Though I doubt it's over, how pathetic an existence has been John Locke's?  What greater doom could be dealt than that of Eloise Hawking?)  The Hatch -- which caused the crash and allowed the show to start delving into the island's history -- was not just a time-wasting implementation of iconography, it was a tailor-made faith/reason test for former cubicle-dweller Locke.

And what greater romance could there be than that of Desmond and Penny?  At its worst, Lost overworks its love jones.  The Jack/Kate/Sawyer triangle has been juggled into uselessness, the Sun/Jin separation has been done and done again.  It's nice that Rose and Bernard are a bickering, stable couple, and also nice that they're offscreen a lot of the time.  Fate means that all the couplings were meant to be, but that doesn't make them special.  The connection between Billy Pilgrim Desmond and his persistent Penelope is literally a vital one.  "The Constant" was a sweeping, unique idea that gave firm construct to the common emotional declaration that "I would die without you."

That the off-island parts of Season Five were so dull and contrived almost reinforced the attraction the island can provide.  But the idea to fill in the island's backstory by temporarily dislodging the gang in time was brilliant, exciting.

The most obvious thing affirmed by a second viewing was that storytelling can trump story.  Was there a worse way to force the show into extra innings than the "We have to go back to the island!" turn?  Yet the episode that introduced this was one of the series' best, because its flash-forwards totally brought the mindfuck.  The show has suffered its audience through a lot of missteps.  The juggling of alpha males, the uninvolving love triangle, the redundancies and time-wasters.  There's no excuse for Nikki and Paolo, but they do offer evidence that the show will bury its biggest mistakes.  Loose ends?  Loose ends I can deal with.  The only ones I care about are ones that will prove the show hasn't been lying to me:  The nuke shouldn't change the whole What Happened, Happened axiom.  Aaron and Walt have to be of some consequence.  But I'm not interested in hearing all the answers.

The answers cannot be six years' worth of interesting.  The assembled picture never looks as good as the one on the box, it has cracks all over it and there are bits where the image has been pulled up and you can see the cardboard backing.  When you reassemble Lost linearly, it's only satisfying for those who've been working to solve the puzzle.  It's only nice to see that it can all come together.  So sixteen weeks from now, you know, whatever.  All the arcs will be closed.  John Locke will be a new God of Light or whatever, Kate will be with this guy or that, you will have some contrived explanation for those numbers (there's no honest way to do this and without totally severing the show from reality, because those numbers don't "work" in the real world), and Desmond and Penny and little Charlie had better all be okay.  "You All Everybody" will be blare over the end credits.

But until then, I'm hoping for new questions. Big, weird questions.  Surprises and teases and misdirection and mindfuckery and all the good and evil and time and space this show's got left in it.  Bring it on.

Unauthorized Japanese tuna commercial from 1978.  Still better than Attack of the Clones. (via)

The Standards (Thailand) - The Proposition (mp3)

As the world gets smaller, where can you hide?

In 2007 Brit expat Matt Smith found himself wishing he were in Thailand, and apparently thought Thailand should sound more like 2004 Britain.

Music is an ongoing transfer of ideas, and there's this history -- sometimes great, sometimes tragic -- of ambassadors of flesh and vinyl having pronounced affect on differently connected cultures.  New and amazing things are created.  An influx of Peace Corps volunteers to Ethiopia in the 1960s brings Elvis Presley, Pat Boone, and James Brown; these get married to traditional songs and government-sponsored band formations and produce a new kind of popular music.  Off-duty GIs bring rock and roll to Southeast Asia and it gets synthesized into String and Shadow Music and Cambodian Rock.  RCA's GV Series brings Cuban son to the Congo where it writhes into soukous.

But I don't know that geography offers differently developing cultures, anymore.  Isolation has to be self-imposed.  (As had been the case, to some extent, in Ethiopia.  As has sometimes been the case in America, where for stretches self-sufficiency and self-righteousness seem to erase the idea that our music can be more interesting when it bothers to listen back.)  We're evolving toward a situation where everyone will be confronted by the same information simultaneously.  There will not even be an amusing lag time for trends.  This is not move toward sameness.  We're just developing ways to digest an onslaught of data.  Acting like infants, we adhere to ideas of information as privilege (First!  Exclusive!); acting as adolescents we try to assert our individuality by reacting to it - opining, reworking it as snark, regurgitating it as self-promotion.  As we mature, we'll get better at doing what we're already doing and have always done for sanity's sake:  We'll filter information for matters of relevance and interest and discard the rest.

Obsessives -- people who cling to information already considered and discarded by most -- used to be able to harbor hope of converting the unexposed.  And sure, new generations will still come along, and as everyone necessarily forgets more information faster perhaps obsessives will have more frequent opportunities to re-introduce the objects of their care back into the cycle more often.  But I wonder if they'll wind up biding most of their time online in geographically scattered, listless and satisfied subcultures where everyone can approve of each others' taste and consider it a norm of sorts.

I'm just wondering if "Let's bring this combination of post-punk and new wave to 2010 Thailand!" isn't already an unexciting idea?  Smith formed The Standards with another Englishman named Smith and three Thai musicians, and (backing vocals aside) the tunes streaming on their myspace are solid, familiar-sounding offerings.  What are they listening to in Thailand?  This post about the top-selling artists of 2009 names Korean boy-band 2PM... with mentions of Lady Gaga and the Black-Eyed Peas.  Random sampling of contemporary Thai artists brought me gentle syrupy stuff, more gentle syrupy stuff, a major label (!) all-transgender pop band (myspace), an award-winning band called "Big Ass" (the disambiguation at the top of that Wikipedia page is classic), and bands like Silly Fools or Bodyslam that alternate between straightforward and syrupy takes on regrettable US modern radio rock.

Smith wanted to be a million miles from here, somewhere more familiar.  I'm projecting, I know, but:  Clicking through the Thai bands linked on The Standards' myspace page, and the bands linked on those bands' pages -- the darker post-punk of Revenge of the Cybermen, thrashy garage of the interracial Tender Preys, Tabasco's dance-punk -- I wonder if Thai audiences have, like us, already tried and denied what The Standards are offering?  I know I've been happy to not care what Hard-Fi has been up to.  There are probably tribes in the Amazon that are like, "I'll just stick to my Jam records."  As they have Latin screamed at them in the video below, there are probably kids in Smith's audience thinking, "Aw, man, I just eBayed off all my Kaiser Chiefs CDs.  And now this, again."

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New Vampire Weekend EP.  Due out 3/09/10 from XL.

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"With the Bill Withers influence, we watched this DVD, [the producer] John Fields and I, before we went to Nashville to record. It was of him live, the one with the guitar player in the back in the full white jumpsuit. We watched that..."

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"Vampire Weekend Being Sued by Lesser Known Act, Vampire Memorial Day Weekend"

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Apparently there is a band called "Wampire."

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"Near Dark was a film that I wrote with Eric Red and I wrote it to direct, so I owned it. . . . I gave it to a producer who shall remain nameless, who said -- and I was rubbing two pennies together, I had like half a can of tuna fish and a bottle of stale water in the refrigerator and that was it -- 'I'll give you a lot of money for the script.' I said, ' . . . I don't want to sell it, I want to direct it.' . . . Three days later, he called back. 'I'll let you direct it if I can fire you after the first day of dailies and the first day of dailies has to be a really difficult . . .' [assuming she wouldn't do a good job]. So, I put together the scene where . . . they trap the guys in the abandoned motel and you shoot through the walls and the light...  that was a bet with the devil I could make."

Above is from an odd directors' roundtable in which Tarantino almost sounds like a sedate, Jim Cameron believes his own bullshit, and Lee Daniels says some questionable things about exploitation.  Kathryn Bigelow is brainy, gutsy, and matter-of-fact.

Bigelow and her Hurt Locker screenwriter Mark Boal are ridiculously well-spoken people, and their commentary on that film's DVD may be the only such track into which I've heard peppered words like "ameliorate" and "ebullience."  It's almost impossible not to respect them and what they pulled off in a real independent film on a small budget, and it's a shame the film got treated the way it did at the box office.

But  I have problems with the movie.  The reason I listened to the commentary track in the first place was because it felt like some episodes were exaggerated (the complexity of the bombs, for instance) or like unrelated anecdotes were squeezed in for variety's sake (e.g. the snipers in the desert).  Not that veracity matters in most movies, and certainly Bigelow was trying to communicate a heightened mood, but contrivance in this film does harm to how you relate to it.  Anyway, Boal (who  spent time embedded in Iraq as a journalist) testified that most of situations were based on experience, interviews, or hearsay, so that's what-for as far as that's concerned.

The choice that sort still bothers me is one she probably had to make.  The Hurt Locker is ultimately a character study, but it has to hide that fact to maintain its tension.  She sacrifices insight for mood.  Again, probably the way to go, but at the end of the film I felt more manipulated than illuminated.

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I'm catching up slowly, but:   Ricky Gervais' The Invention of Lying is still my favorite movie of 2009.  According to Movie City News' Top Ten aggregation, the only critic who put it on their year-end list was Billups Allen of the Tucson Citizen (his list is an... interesting one).  Anyway, it's out on DVD now and you should see it.  You should also love it, but I'm not counting on this.

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"One thing I became kinda consumed with this year but never wrote about is my fascination with the feminist blog hustle. Like a lot of kids, especially working class ones who did single-sex education, one of the first things I discovered when I got to university was 'Wow, rich white girls are angry about everything.' I mean, you'd think that the fact they keep renewing One Tree Hill would be enough to keep them placated, but no..."

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"So here's what's gonna happen. You're gonna put out that bag. It's gonna be messy, and you're probably gonna get a bunch of shit on you. While all that's happening, I'll be around to let you know how deeply I disagree with the way you're handling it. Soon enough the bag will be out-although I have to be frank; I have never filled a bag with so much shit before. I mean, woo boy, that is one full bag-and you'll be standing there, exhausted and confused and covered in shit. And that's when I'll take the bag back. It's just the way things go."

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Oh, also wanted to say that Obama's appearance at the House Republican Conference filled me with all sorts of warm fuzzies.  Not because he "won."  He's still a politician, and he certainly avoided/misdirected some points.  But this wasn't about winning and losing, it was about talking and listening, and I sort of love my government when it fools me into thinking that can actually happen.  Also, truth to this:

"Let me say this about health care and the health care debate, because I think it bears on a whole lot of other issues...  If you were to listen to the debate -- and frankly, the way some of you went after this bill you'd think that this thing was some bolshevik plot.  That's how you guys presented it.  So I'm thinking to myself, how is it that a plan that is pretty centrist... all I'm saying is we've got to close the gap between the rhetoric and the reality...

"If the way theses issues are being presented by the Republicans is that this is part of some wild-eyed plot to impose huge government in every aspect of our lives, what happens is then you guys don't have a lot of room to negotiate with me.  I meant the fact of the matter is, if you vote with the administration on something, you are poitically vulnerable in your own base, your own party.  You've given yourselves very little room to work in a bipartisan fashion because you've been telling your contituents, ' This guy's doing all kinds of crazy stuff that's going to destroy America.'"  

I'm happy I have a president I can watch for 90 minutes without getting the blue cringies.

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"Besides, from my rich experience in the entertainment business, crushing disappointment and mercurial conditions are a few of the more charming attributes that keep me chained to the radiator like a neglected but eager puppy.  And when I say business, btw, I mean nothing of the sort.  I write songs and sing them, so c'mon, who the fuck are we kidding?  What I'm trying to articulate is that although I peddle in a low art form and should have done something more substantial with my life, like scraping gum off the asphalt at Dorchester High with my teeth during summer vacation, I am sort of unemployable in any other field.  And the Boston Public Schools aren't hiring.  I checked before I even mentioned it."

Fuck, here's something I was happy to see at like 4am some time last week:  KAY HANLEY NEW BAND.  Palmdale.

"We are going to rise to the middle very quickly." "We're going to go multi-plastic.  We're going to sell upwards of 175 copies of our EP." "There's going to be 10 to 12 very excited people." "At least!"

I didn't mean to bury this all the way down here.  But Palmdale's already been signed, to Oglio Records, and I'll try to bring them up again.

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Cake Shop February:

Friday the 12th - Obits

Saturday the 13th - Obits

Monday the 15th - Scott Lucas and the Married Men

Saturday the 20th - Zola Jesus

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Here is a clip from David Letterman's Muncie, Indiana program on campus station WAGO from April 1969.

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History of Chicago Music, 1908-1980, a 60-song free download courtesy Numero Group.

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Sonny & the Sunsets - "Lovin' on an Older Gal"

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I really wish this record sounded more like it looks.

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"The whole "Wavves meltdown" fiasco was truly disheartening, primarily because this guy was being torn down for the very thing that made him such an exciting prospect in the first place. In the context of a live show, a 19-year-old kid who doesn't give a fuck making music for the first time isn't so interesting."

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Shall I Download a Blackhole and Offer it to You

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MNDR: I'm from Cali. When they would call and say I should take a meeting, I would straight up tell them "Look, I don't have shoes, only flip flops!"  So I was like what the fuck, I have to get shoes.

SB: So you grew up in California then?

MNDR: Actually no, rural North Dakota. My dad's a farmer.

SB: I've never met anyone from North Dakota, so you're my first!

MNDR: Well this is what its like!

*

"From what I understand of her career (and, as someone who hasn't seen more than a minute of The Hills in total, admittedly it isn't much), Heidi Montag is generally regarded as having nothing of worth to offer the world. The release of her debut album earlier this month changed that -- Superficial is the most concise and comprehensive collection of ways people are socially awful today that's available on the market. It reads like a 40-minute mediation on kids! these! days! It is something people will be able to turn to 100, 200, 500 years from now to learn about the wastefulness of the early 2000s. You could actually get an early start by listening to it now and then doing the opposite of whatever she's describing."

*

"I both love and hate William F. Buckley. I just hate Ronald Reagan."

"You have just defined the difference between camp and kitsch."

*

"THE FRESH STEP CAT WAS THERE...IN PERSON!!"

I've had nightmares just like that.  I've had fantasies just like that.

*

I'd put off seeing Across the Universe for a few reasons.  Live-action Beatles films that don't involve actual Beatles do not have an encouraging history.  The mythology of the late 1960s has been amply explored thank you very much.  Julie Taymor has yet to make a bearable movie.  Bono was in the cast.

But Taymor brings smart, bold ideas to her work.  Perhaps she felt too much allegiance to Shakespeare's play or Kahlo's life to make Titus or Frida work.  There was the chance that a musical would finally give her an excuse to follow her inner apeshit all nonstoplike.

I don't know about you, but I miss Ken Russell.  Ken Russell's films were ridiculously uncompromising to the extent that they resembled nothing but Ken Russell films.  His biopic about composer Franz Liszt involved a Chaplin tribute, a vampiric Frankenstein Wagner wielding a machine gun electric guitar, an enormous fiberglass penis, spaceships, laser blasts, and Pope Ringo Starr.

You can't get more that than that.  Well, not without hosing down Ann Margaret with soap suds, baked beans, and chocolate pudding.

Ms. Margaret got a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for doing that.  This was back when men were men and awards were awards.

Universe goes wrong in respecting the baggage of the Beatles and the boomers.  Taymor Gumps her characters along, assuming that their presence in that era makes them worth caring about.  She quilts random tunes together from the band's work, assuming the meaning of the mixtape she's made you is self-evident.  The songs -- rearranged and divorced from their original context -- are often taken literally, both in the lyric-reading and the staging.  (The movie also features character names and lines of dialogue quoted from songs; I'm not sure whether it's insulting or just corny, but every UGH here is justified.)  It's a very one-dimensional approach, and it makes a profoundly strong, varied catalog feel fragile and dull.

So it's a good thing that the drugs kick in.

The important thing here is that Eddie Izzard does not give a shit.  About the song, the movie, anything.  Finally, someone in the movie who understands you.

It's not all awful.  Occasionally you forget yourself and say, "Oh good, this song!" before the shmoe onscreen either worshipfully recites it or worshipfully caterwauls it to death.  Joe Cocker is in it!  Which means he's still alive, or at least was in 2007, and that's nice to know.  But even when Taymor does indulge herself -- and again, my vote's the whole thing shoulda been a giant jaw-drop fuck-everything indulge-a-thon -- it seems sort of tethered and second-hand.  For instance, one of the stronger numbers...

...is a quotecleverunquote way of overlapping "I WANT YOUs," plus the "Another Brick in the Wall" sequence from Alan Parker's old Floyd film, plus "Alice's Restaurant" (which I started singing to amuse myself).  And for all its effort, it's somehow not as engaging as this:

And that movie wasn't exactly anything you want to be looking up at.

The worst thing about Across the Universe is that it allowed me to think that I hated the Beatles.  I was sure I never wanted to hear them again.  Until I saw this guy:

Now I know I'm just in very angry love with them.

This could be a dream, or a series of dreams.

Roy Andersson's You, The Living consists of fifty or so short episodes staged in striking compositions in front of a locked-down camera with a wide angle lens.  There is dullness and anguish, isolation and humiliation, but it's all treated with a strong sense of the absurd and seen through a sympathetic eye.

After his second feature flopped back in 1975, Andersson spent 25 years working in commercials, honing a very particular droll style.  And though the segments here last longer than a thirty-second spot, the director's obviously very comfortable with the limitations of that form.  A great percentage of his playlets pay off, and once you meet their rhythm you can appreciate the care with which each has been crafted.  Scenes are mostly static, sets can be spare,  the palette - beyond the bold brass splash of a sousaphone -- is muted, and movement within the frame is unexcited.  But the image swallows the eye.

Characters are trapped in fixed situations and determined perspectives.  Doomed to deep-focus gags and Dixieland jazz and skits of mundane despair.  There are so many windows, so many expressionless faces staring through them; they're both powerless intruders on others' lives and hopeless victims of their own.  Andersson's world is more awkward and arranged than surreal, but against images bleak and lovely he gives his prisoners some of the promise and all of the dread of dreams coming true.

Just a reminder that Soul Power , the concert-focused companion to When We Were Kings, is out on DVD today.  I wish it were out on three or four DVDs.

Tokyo Jihen, "Kachi-ikusa" ("Victory")

Hey, so this is pretty awful!

The second single from the forthcoming Sports offers no distraction from itself.  Its English is unfortunate: "I want the shock to see how much you kill my mind?"  "I wanna rock you showing how much I get blind?"  Someone in the band must know someone who actually speaks the language, someone who could proofread?  The camp intensity of Shiina's reading only makes it worse.  I'm not even sure "fever" is the word she meant to use?

There are little aural dingbats here and there, but mostly the music is so straightforward that you need something else to do to get through it.  A magazine, a deck of cards.  I do like the Prince-y bridge, and the guitar run near the end that errs toward, then away from, ELO.  But mostly yikes!

Sade, "Soldier of Love"

Technically this is last year's single for this year's album, but by the time it came out everyone was so far along in their list-making that they didn't have an opportunity to put it right where it belongs, smack between "Stillness is the Move" and "Pretty Wings."  Precise without feeling stiff, adorned so as to accentuate its space.  Both her voice and the song's trip-hop drive bring the weight of authority.  Confidence, weariness, hope.

It would be a real tragedy were this to go unpunished.

(Go.)(Discount.)

(info - tickets)

Because Conan's now just one of those failed executives who's been paid tens of millions of dollars to go away.  He's stolen the diaper and stuffed it full of self-potato and the world's #cheeringhimthefuckon.  Suck it, 15% of Detroit.  Mink Snuggies 4reals.

I am not going to spend tonight like last night.  Tossing, turning.  Punching at visions of incompetent, entitled Democrat strategists.  Throttling entrenched Democratic senators for ruining certain opportunity through opportunism.  Kicking at nightmares of smug Republicans who pride themselves on their ignorance, who prize power at the expense of progress.  I will not do that.  I will gather myself and hope against reason that some matter of conscience leads to sane compromise.

I am also not going to make fun of Senator-elect Scott Brown's American Idol finalist daughter Ayla (myspace).  This isn't her fight.  She's just a kid, more or less.  She hits her notes, more or less.

But I will say that those video clips include some of the strongest arguments for universal health care I have ever heard.