New Worlds Fair

2011-11-09T22:36:00.001-06:00

new years resolution: revisit this blog.

The Aughts In Review (An Introduction)

2010-02-04T18:28:00.003-06:00

I wish I could have formed a musical narrative out of my life from 1990-1999. What a journey: Queensryche and Red Hot Chili Peppers and Metallica and, shit, I won't lie, some crazy ass hair metal as well, all culminating in Fugazi, Tortoise, Belle and Sebastian, and, shit, I won't lie, some pretty fucking interchangeable indie-rock bands that really don't mean shit or matter much (Versus, anyone?).

So, it's ten years later and 2000-2009 is up for grabs. A narrative is begging to be written, a narrative that I can see broad swathes of but it's the details that make the story. For all I know, the narrative is false (as a narrative written in 2000 would have been for the nineties) but try I will and try I must.

This is not a ranking, this is not a list. This is a snapshot: severed from any context, just a sound that reverberates from release date into the present.

The Aughts In Review.

2010-02-04T12:39:00.000-06:00

2009-07-07T21:21:00.001-05:00

Everyone should own this album, the album of the year: Diagonal.

Interlude #4

2009-06-15T17:14:00.004-05:00

I think it was the gold tabby or maybe the lean black cat. Or maybe both, I can't tell. Did you have one or two cats? I cut it with my knife along its side and wrapped it in a towel and hid it underneath the bushes. He just wouldn't die. I kept crying and hoping each spasm would would be the one that would let me sleep. I tried to save his life but couldn't stop cutting. You walked inside our house holding the blue towel. I thought I'd brought it in and washed it. I thought I'd put down the knife.

Interlude #3

2009-06-15T16:18:00.003-05:00

Grocery store, half empty, haunted, inching closer to death, smells of rot. Hanging a tuxedo in the employee area for the corpse to have something to dress himself in when metaphors fail. Walking home, chimes ring and the wind picks up and branches beat against windows and passing company becomes craven allies and fair weather friends. Midnight dalliances marking time, three to a bed but one to dance. No one ever comes when they say they will.

Interlude #2

2009-06-15T15:46:00.004-05:00

Drawing maps, building a geography. An overpass here, a fast food drive thru menu on the side of the road boarded up and left alone, the restraurant long since faded into shrubbery faded into forest. Hints of music, a measure there and a measure there, decorate the trees like tinsel.

Interlude

2009-06-15T14:17:00.004-05:00

Coltrane's Blue Train playing through the speakers. The dishes are being washed, the hum of water threatening to overpower and at the same time intertwine with the music. Lunch cooking on the stove top, another chime in the chord. As always, remembrances lay heavy, tainting and fulfilling, a snare and high hat girding it all. A different geography is formed from these disparate strands.

Romancing The Stone, I guess...

2009-02-14T19:57:00.003-06:00

I'm not sure what I want or even what I'm supposed to write here, on days like this. Last year was a video clip of Jawbreaker but this year leaves me wanting. The desire to reflect upon passions spent or passions yet to be spent just doesn't seem to move me. I seem to be in one of those moods.
Let's give Tadeusz Rozewicz, "...a poet of chaos with a nostalgia for order" (Czeslaw Milosz), something to say, to plant his mark:

Draft of a Modern Love Poem

And yet white
is best described by gray
bird by stone
sunflowers
in December

love poems of old
were descriptions of the flesh
described this and that
for instance eyelashes

and yet red
should be described
by gray the sun by rain
poppies in November
lips by night

the most tangible
description of bread
is a description of hunger
in it is
the damp porous core
the warm interior
sunflowers at night
the breasts belly thighs of Cybele

a spring-clear
transparent description
of water
is a description of thirst
ashes
desert
it produces a mirage
clouds and trees move into
the mirror

Lack hunger
absence
of flesh
is a description of love
is a mondern love poem

But maybe a poem is not your thing. I mean, really, are we sixteen years old living in the 1920s? I think not! What are mere words when we have songs! Songs! Let's lower the lights, ligt a candle and open a bottle of wine. Look deeply into the eyes of the one you love...

I'm bored. Have a happy valentine's day...

Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000)

2009-01-26T22:52:00.003-06:00

Joe!

Well, well, well. Right now I am actually using this letter as an excuse to procrastinate learning lines, not that I wouldn't write you anyway-it just becomes more sweet when it's used to combat another encroaching evil. I say evil but I really do love the play I am in. It's called Crow and Weasel, and I am a Mountain Lion and a Grizzly Bear & stuff. I am now officially an English Major. I was flipping through a copy of American Poetry Review and I noticed some new stuff by Yehuda- "I am not like a flat, wily spatula"-I thought he was dead; I guess not. I have yet to run out of steam in my Leonard Cohen infatuation. My favorite are his psalms-Book of Mercy. That was all rather desultory. Please forgive. Tell me if you're taking any classes this semester. Or what you're generally up to. I am not going to go on anymore. I will, however, close with a poem I wrote the day before yesterday.

I found this letter in a stack of papers that haven't been looked at, paged through, pored over, studied, reviewed, or tossed aside in over seven years. I didn't even realize I still had this letter, one of two surviving records of the correspondence carried on between a handful of artistes scattered through out our fair country after graduating from high school. Reading it, I remember how taken I had been with the writings of Yehuda Amichai, the first Israeli poet to write in colloquial Hebrew. It's hard to believe we'd write about poets in our letters and then include our most recent attempts to ape our betters with barely literate scribblings of our own. It seems so quaint, so naive. As if anyone outside of university english faculties had any care in the world for poetry anymore.
Anyway, I re-read this letter this afternoon and knew, in the twelve years that had elapsed since the writing of this note, that Yehuda Amichai had to be dead. And dead he was, for eight long years. My hero, my idol, the Thomas Wolfe to my poor, poor Kerouac had been dead for nearly a decade and I never knew. What a poor disciple I make.
So let me set things right on this day, eight years, four months, and four days after his death:

Yehuda Amichai, born in Germany in 1924 but raised for the most part in Palestine, was a soldier who fought in too many wars. He was a poet who loved, too much, his country and his wives. He could not escape or, to an extent accept, the fact that he never faced the pogrom that ravaged through Europe in the 1940s. He was the first poet to write in the newly resurrected Hebrew language and helped pull it kicking and screaming out of dusty tomes and scrolls. He was emotional, but emotional like Sam Spade: always putting up the brave face, the cold front.

National Thoughts

Caught in the homeland-trap of a Chosen People.
A cossack fur hat on your head, you--
Offspring of their pogroms. After those things,
As ever.
For example, your face: slanted eyes
Of sixteen-forty-eight, forty-nine, thine. High
Cheekbones of a Hetman, chief plunderer,
But the mitzvah dance of Hasidim.
Naked on a rock at dusk,
Under the water canopies of Eyn Gedi,
With closed eyes and a body like hair. After
Those things, as ever.

Caught in a homeland-trap:
To talk now in this tired tongue,
Torn out of its sleep in the Bible: blinded,
It totters from mouth to mouth. In a tongue that described
Miracles and God, now to say: automobile, bomb, God.

The square letters wanted to remain
Closed; every letter a locked house,
To remain and to be enclosed in a final D
And sleep in it forever.

(from Poems of Jerusalem)

Diagonal - Diagonal (2009)

2009-01-26T16:32:00.003-06:00

Wielding the influence of King Crimson, Peter Gabriel-era Genesis, and Harvest Records brand of progressive rock as if it had the same cultural cachet as Gang of Four or Wire, England's Diagonal deliver an album delightfully retro yet still undeniably contemporary. In this time where Post-Punk has been aped to the Nth degree for nigh on 20 years now, it's good to see someone digging out muscular prog and pastoral folk and using it as a weapon to hammer us out of our musical complacency.

A.C. Newman - The Slow Wonder (2004)

2009-01-13T22:04:00.004-06:00

"he was tied to the bed with a miracle drug in one hand/in the other was a great lost novel..." - The Miracle Drug

When Mass Romantic, the first album from Canada's New Pornographers, came out it was, like, the summer of 2001 I think. I remember rocking out to it in my living room through the Sony PlayStation and the TV 'cause we didn't have any portable CD players. The doors and windows were open and I was drinking gin and tonics. My Slow Descent Into Alcoholism was still ironic. I was heavily into power pop and anything that had random syllables like "ba," "fa," or "la" for lyrics. It was all the crumbling remnants of the twee period I'd gone through during the last year, year and a half.

Then a couple of planes crashed into The Two Towers, inadvertently causing my house to burn down and, by the time Electric Version, their follow-up album, arrived, so had my need for power pop and The New Pornographers.

Fast-forward a few years and I'm sitting at the poker table chasing a King high flush with one more card still to be dealt. Needless to say I'm on edge with all my money on the line and Jason yelling at me in one ear and Trey in the other. There's some kinda spazzy hardcore playing and I can't fucking think. Then Jeff changes the music. The A.C. Newman solo album that had been out for a year and a half maybe and which I'd heard once, if at all, and wrote off. More of the same. This time it was manna from heaven. I felt relaxed, placed my bet and let the final card come. The Ace. My King high flush became an Ace high. I had the nuts. Bets were made and I took 'em all.

For ten minutes, The Slow Wonder was the greatest album ever made.

2008-12-31T02:41:00.003-06:00

I've been so lazy, neglectful. I've been at a loss for words. Turns out all my readers want to know more about Watchmen or something as they all come to my flu-medicated reactions to the Watchmen trailer that appeared in like July or something. I'm at over 1,000 visits and none of them care. The bastards.
Anyway, I'm getting sick again and there's no new trailer to keep me warm inside. My boy Philip is blogging and I dig it even though, at times, I don't get it. He makes me interested in Basketball. Styledevice is his name at the blogroll so if you like The Watchmen and you like NBA, you should check it out. Or if you like skateboards. Or bass players. Or guys who work from their home. Post-hardcore. DJ-ing. guys named philip. my boy.
Well, enough about Philip, let's talk about me. I'm jamming to some King Crimson right now. I'm rethinking the purpose of this blog- something more along the lines of my initial ramblings about history. Whatever. I didn't write about Watchmen so you probably never read it.
You guys suck. One line of dialogue and you have to google it. The film nerds of the aughts fucking blow.
If anyone reading this is going to see Ralph Bakshi at the Alamo, ask him a question for me: Who sings the song at the end of Wizards? It's been killing me for like 25 years and I need to know. I need more information about this soundtrack.

"It's possible that Rambo is even more violent, but Punisher: War Zone spreads its violence out like jam on an English muffin,"

2008-12-02T18:01:00.003-06:00

Is The Punisher waving at a little girl supposed to be funny or touching? Hard to say. But I do know how I feel about The Punisher holding a little girl in his arms while he shoots a handcuffed guy in the face with a shotgun at close range. I feel good about that.

Devin Faraci has seen the new Punisher movie and deems it good.

Yo! My Favorite Music of Aught-Eight!

2008-11-27T13:09:00.000-06:00

Joe Johnston Turner's Fabulous Records of Aught-Eight

1. Opeth - Watershed
2. Portishead - Third
3. Ancestors - Neptune By Fire
4. Nachtmystium - Assassins: Black Meddle pt. 1
5. Graveyard - Graveyard
6. Blood Ceremony - Blood Ceremony
7. Baron Grod - Baron Grod
8. Brothers And Sisters - Fortunately
9. The Sword - Gods of the Earth
10. Korpiklaani - Korven Kuningas
11. Testament - Formation of Damnation
12. Crom - Hot Sumerian Nights
13. Saviours - Into Abaddon
14. Dub Trio - Another Sound Is Dying
15. Asva - What You Don't Know Is Frontier
16. Ascend - Ample Fire Within
17. Raphael Saadiq - The Way I See It
18. Jex Thoth - Jex Thoth
19. Black Widow - Live (DVD)
20. Swedish Death Metal by Daniel Ekeroth (book)
21. Get Thrashed (documentary)

Honorable Mention

1. Robin Thicke - Something Else
2. Gnarls Barkley - The Odd Couple
3. Darkthrone - Dark Thrones & Black Flags

Reissues

1. Mellow Candle - Swaddling Songs
2. Michael Moorcock & The Deep Fix - New World's Fair
3. Pogues - Look Them Straight In The Eye And Say...Pogue Mahone
4. Amebix - No Sanctuary: The Spiderleg Recordings
4. Suzy, Led Zeppelin, And Me by Martin Millar (book)
5. Lonely Werewolf Girl by Martin Millar (book)

2008-11-12T21:04:00.002-06:00

so it seems i've been "tagged." meme this and meme that. i haven't been this memed since the first time i read grant morrison's "the invisibles." anyway, i got it from my boy corey at his spectacular Awesomeness For Awesome's Sake so let's let Mr. Canacorn do the talking:

Well, well, well, looks like Becca tagged me with one of them there meme thing-a-ma-bobs that are all over the internet. This one’s about movies…and Lord knows, I love me some movies.

Here are the rules according to Blog Cabins:

(Oh, real quick, rule 3 looks all imposing and bossy, but once you figure out not to use any films from the Star Wars, LOTR, Indiana Jones, or the Narnia series, you’ll be fine).

The Rules

1. Pick one film to represent each letter of the alphabet.

2. The letter “A” and the word “The” do not count as the beginning of a film’s title, unless the film is simply titled A or The, and I don’t know of any films with those titles.

3. Return of the Jedi belongs under “R,” not “S” as in Star Wars Episode IV: Return of the Jedi. This rule applies to all films in the original Star Wars trilogy; all that followed start with “S.” Similarly, Raiders of the Lost Ark belongs under “R,” not “I” as in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Conversely, all films in the LOTR series belong under “L” and all films in the Chronicles of Narnia series belong under “C,” as that’s what those filmmakers called their films from the start. In other words, movies are stuck with the titles their owners gave them at the time of their theatrical release. Use your better judgement to apply the above rule to any series/films no
t mentioned.

4. Films that start with a number are filed under the first letter of their number’s word. 12 Monkeys would be filed under “T.”

5. Link back to Blog Cabins in your post so that I can eventually type “alphabet meme” into Google and come up #1, then make a post where I declare that I am the King of Google.
6. If you’re selected, you have to then select 5 more people.

so, i'll let you link back to his jazz to get his alphabet while i take the time to line up mine, the criteria being the first movie i can think of begining with said letter:

Aliens
Barberella
Chronos
Don't Look Now
Elephant Man
Fight Club
Gangs of New York
Hardware
It's Alive
Jack's Back (g-d I love that movie [too bad i haven't seen it in years {it probably sucks now-ed}])
Kickboxer
Live and Let Die
Manhunter
Night of the Creeps
Octagon
Presidio
Q (you know what i mean you larry cohen fans...)
Revenger's Tragedy
Ssssss
Towering Inferno
Unbreakable
Vamp
Watership Down
Xtro
You Can't Take It With You
Zombie

i'm not "sending" this meme to anyone. if you read this and want to contribute, follow the rules and link Blog Cabins and myself. that'll do the trick.

rock on and rock hard.

joe

art flicks are as redundant as "according to jim"

2008-11-02T14:34:00.003-06:00

In this German-language film, Angela (Andrea Schober), a sickly, physically challenged teenage girl, lures her dissolute upper-class parents, their respective lovers and an assortment of employees and hangers-on to the family's country estate for a weekend of cruel and revealing parlor games. Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

g-d i'm sick of art-films with the same tired plot.

(from a recommendation from netflix. a movie i'll probably never watch unless it helps get me laid by a rather highly attractive woman.)

Battle Of Evermore

2008-10-28T18:31:00.002-05:00

i'm happy living where i live. i could do a better job selling scripts if i lived in cali, but, well, thems the breaks. then i read this

Across The Universe (2007)

2008-10-21T00:15:00.001-05:00

A film that lacked the courage of its convictions but still worth watching. Full review coming soon.

Live Blogging The Debate (or, When You Were Mine)

2008-10-15T20:18:00.002-05:00

8:19: it's no longer raining. the smell of reality is drowning out the smell of sawdust. like everything else these days, the smell trawls up memories that should remain at the bottom of the river. my memories are my own. they are not yours.
even if you were there at the time.

8:25: i love the sound of the cello.

8:43: i found the video. it seems we spent half of '03 looking for it. someone else had it. someone else always does. i still haven't found out whatever happened to seth. he was always such a good kid. and he owned the camera. it was so hard to find someone with a camera back then, now all you need is a phone.
i still don't have a phone.

8:59: can you really believe that chinese democracy is really gonna come out this year? i can't quite tell if i'm excited, disappointed, or both. part of me wishes they all od'd in 1989 when they were supposed to. legends are born that way.
not this way.

9:10: horse.

I Can't Get Next To You (Another Shot Of Whiskey)

2008-09-17T21:22:00.005-05:00

i feel that this day is far too clouded by death. in a dream last night, my family and i haunted the dirt roads of small villages Russia. Solzhenitsyn was the ghost that haunted our encounters with vampires and Baba Yaga's vengeful hut. the mother to my both son and husband found love and escape in death's romantic grasp.
this entry was supposed to be my review of the new documentary "The Gits." a film far more defined by the death of mia zapata than the band it attempted to honor; a band i discovered and embraced right at the cusp of shuffling from "straight-edge" to "alcoholism." i remember first hearing the band at Jackie's house when i was young lad of 16. her hair was the deepest blue and i have never been in love with anyone as i was in love with her. she died in 2002 of a heroin overdose. all i remember from that day was how beautiful she was and that i never wanted a drink as much as i did listening to "Another Shot Of Whiskey." it wasn't until five years later that i finally consummated my love of Jackie and the ideal of drunkenness. i was wearing a shelter shirt (to make the ironic even more ironic; almost to the level of foreshadowing; more likely it was just nemesis making itself known-another little hint another little taste of foreshadowing.) that was the last time i saw her until i was one of six people at her funeral. i can't not remember that funeral every time i listen to The Gits. nemesis.
They finally caught Mia Zapata's killer.

"Another Shot Of Whiskey" w/ Joan Jett filling in for Mia Zapata:

this brings me around to the second half of this failed obituary. making the past contemporaneous of the present and the future. Jackie played me The Gits and i played for her The Temptations. i remember the song. jeebus, i was so passive aggressive. it hurts my feelings to think back on those days. i played for her late sixties Temptations; especially "I Can't Get Next To You." the line that killed me, the line that meant so much to me, the line that she was supposed to understand: "I can live forever/if i so desire/but all these things i can do/but i can't get next to you."
Norman Whitfield died today.
i've got friends who know me as "the metal guy." i 've got friends who know me as "the hardcore guy." i've got friends here and i've got friends there. very few know me for what i am and what i will always be: i love motown. after the beatles, motown is the end all be all of popular music (see the new raphael saadiq album.)
Norman Whitfield.
the story behind "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" is the reason why music nerds exist.
"Cloud Nine"
"I Can't Get Next To You"
"Psychedelic Shack"
"War"
"Ball Of Confusion"
"Smiling Faces Sometimes"
"Love Can Be Anything (Can't Nothing Be Love But Love)"
"Papa Was A Rolling Stone"

baba yaga seems always just a few steps behind me so let's get everything right when we get the chance:

Norman Whitfield (1940 - 2008)
Mia Zapata (1965 - 1993)
Jacqueline McQueen (1973 - 2002)

changes

2008-08-29T01:28:00.002-05:00

another day, another week; another month, another year. a convention is winding down as another is winding up. frustrated that bill the cat was not nominated once again. is it too late for us to get this guy 'cause, dammit, that's how you give a speech:

i could really us a beer right about now

2008-08-19T23:15:00.002-05:00

as always, i wear boredom on my sleeve like a badge or a patch, like some civilian variation on rank. "i've earned these stripes! i've earned these stripes!" anyway, the dry recitation of facts does not "a something interesting to say" make so let me list as list does....

Alison Poole (aka Lisa Druck [aka Rielle Hunter]) does not really exist!

her father doesn't exist as well.

"Totalitarian regimes – the Nazis, the Soviets in 1980, and now the Chinese – desire to host the Olympics as a way to signal to the world their superiority. China believes that it has found its own model to develop and modernise, and its rulers regard the games in the same way as the Nazis and Leonid Brezhnev did, as a means of "selling" their model to a global audience."

so how do you do this? you hire Albert Speer Jr.

i'm even more bored now than when i started.
i'm gonna go eat a taco.

"I Am What I Am but Not All That I Can Be"

2008-08-14T00:48:00.002-05:00

i've been on vacation from the written word. please bear with me as i drink my drink, read my read, watch my watch and fuck my fuck. i got plans and i got dreams. "i could've been a contender!" fool's gold, fool's gold.

the word is the word: everyone should read The Good Fairies of New York.
everyone should be watching Mad Men.

a long time i ago, maybe not in this blog but, perhaps, in another, i urged you all to get Aceyalone and RJD2's album Magnificent City.
the shit's the bomb.
so let's let the connection commence:

as far as i'm concerned, that's the last great hip-hop tune. but play closer attention to those beats. if you owned the album you know where i'm going with this:

now buy the fucking album.

"The world will look up and shout: "Save Us!" and I'll whisper... No"

2008-07-17T23:06:00.003-05:00

i'm in a fever dream; collapsing in a shower that took far too long for me to realize wasn't getting me any cleaner, just more wet. a fever and dehydration. sleeping far too much yet not deep enough to matter. 1986 queuing up inside my head, past the usual targets of 2001, 1997, 1983, and 1975. i sleep, i dream, i hope, and i pray. ayn rand dreams a cleaner more streamlined form of nightmare where inkblots reveal more and less than our deepest darkest desires. it's always five minutes to midnight somewhere while america dreams of ultimate deterrence dressed in blue like the blue on the flag smoking a cigar and laugh, laugh, laughing at us, at them, at everyone. tired cliches come ramping up into iconic imagery. black freighters cut through the jungian waters of our sleeping selves. piracy, murder, and even cannibalism mirror what we see on the page, the story we tell ourself is our lives. who watches the watchmen? who? we do.

march 9th, 2009

Indians...

2008-06-26T01:38:00.001-05:00

i'm up in the air of course. it's one of my favorite bands. what do you guys think? comments are open....

The Rip

2008-06-25T23:03:00.003-05:00

the biggest disappointment of the year is the selection of "machine gun" as the lead single for the new portishead album. seriously. me and everyone one i know didn't care for the song out of the context of the album (get that, after hearing the album i loved the song but, stand it alone, and it fucking blows. that's what we in the industry call an album cut.)
i'm using this as an introduction because, so far, i think Portishead's Third is the album of the year. i think everyone should be listening to its dark rumblings from the hipsters to the heads. it's fucking awesome.
i said i was done with video blogs but i'm going to have to break that promise cause i can't tell this story without them. so bear with me and spend a few minutes watching and listening to music......

......anyway, i was never much of a radiohead fan. "creep" is and was and will forever be lame. i missed out on The Bends like i missed out on bush's second album. the closest i got to it was the song "talk show host" on the Rome And Juliet soundtrack. it was pretty cool. my friend, mentor, and all around swell dude, James was really excited by the release of the upcoming radiohead album, OK Computer. whatever. his tastes were good so i watched the world premier for the first single, paranoid android.

not to put too fine a point on it, i was floored. sitting in our television room with a bottle of guinness in my hand, i'd found that the sense of scope had returned to rock while still maintaining the post-punk feeling of claustrophobia.
never had i watied for a new album like i did for Kid A.
i try and i try and i try but i still think radiohead are a bunch of chickenshits and, like wilco after them became tribute bands for their influences.

so let's skip ahead a few years later and the new portishead comes out. i fucking love it but it seems to stiff amongst the populace. the imagination is not captured like it was with paranoid android. machine gun is released and everyone goes "wtf? where's the hooks?" so let's play pretend and we know nothing about the new portishead until this single/video is released:

this is the song that made me fall in love with the new album. i couldn't understand why it wasn't the first single.
you know who fucking agrees with me?
radiohead.

now get out and buy Portishead's Third

The Old Man's Back Again

2008-06-24T21:15:00.003-05:00

one of the more poignant and striking forms of humor in the twentieth century has been the communist jokes from during the time of the soviet union and the warsaw pack. related closely to jewish humor, it is self-deprecating and caustic; very rarely is there a happy ending.
i've been collecting these jokes for years, always ready to follow a link or flip through a book to get a new one.
anyway, here's a list of The Top Ten Communist Jokes.

my favorite:

Three workers find themselves locked up, and they ask each other what they’re in for. The first man says: “I was always ten minutes late to work, so I was accused of sabotage.” The second man says: “I was always ten minutes early to work, so I was accused of espionage.” The third man says: “I always got to work on time, so I was accused of having a Western watch.”

read them all...

i could never take the place of your man

2008-06-21T01:47:00.004-05:00

drunk. bored and tired. i have so much nothing to say and such a need to say it. so bear with me as i take what i hope to be the last video blog for a while...

anyone who really knows me knows that past the death metal, thrash metal, black metal, hardcore, post-hardcore, and indie rock that i'm known to listen to, what i really, really love is prince.

seriously.

worship the ground that motherfucker floats over.

the man can perfect a genre by writing only one song that fits it. it's like an "oh what is this new wave thing people keep talking about...theis so-called "power-pop"? okay i think i get it....so it sounds a little something like this, i think?"

the best fucking new wave song ever written.
sorry elvis costello but he wipes you up....

(funny how it took cyndi lauper to sell it to the white world...)

white on white violence

2008-06-07T04:06:00.002-05:00

i just spent 20 minutes reading about mayo versus miracle whip.
i'm just saying.
i've never been big on the whole salad dressing issue. hamburger's are ketchup and mustard. so the real issue is BLTs, potato salad, and tuna fish.
i'm pretty up in the air on it all.

She carries my confusion in the pocket of her jeans...

2008-06-05T00:39:00.002-05:00

"these dreams go on every time i close my eyes."

it's funny how we can simplify everything in our lives. i was metal and then i wasn't. i read stupid fantasy novels and then i didn't. i was a good student and then i wasn't. we edit all the fumbling, bumbling, tumbling moments in between. the scraggling, scratching, scheming, selfish need to manufacture a new sense of self; an identity only to be repudiated twenty years later.
i remember my sophomore year of high school and skipping the last period of class with craig and buying records and eating chinese food. my musical definitions were being cemented and i really had no say in it. years later i would always say that i was into the descendents but, to tell the truth, i never knew shit until i saw this video on 120 minutes:

water under the bridge. scott reynolds was gone after that album but a die had been cast and All became the new musical quest. turned out they'd played with brian christner's band so mike and i had something to feign bonding about. but this song broke my heart, breaks my heart, and will forever break my heart until there's nothing left to break:

now it's the future and i'm bored and old. new music seems far too beholden to the fashion industry and i try to remember when we'd laugh at funny hair and men in women's jeans. scott reynolds (best singer for all) now lives in austin and chepo from gomez plays the bass guitar for him. no one buys his album even though the song "angel" (not a video to be found) is fucking killer and the flaming lips are all over his album.
them's the breaks.

Unsatisfied

2008-06-03T22:51:00.002-05:00

i used to be able to say a lot with words. you know, the whole poetic spill your guts out and amillion screaming teenage girls fall madly in love with you and about twelve screaming guys wish they were you.
these days i can't just seem to find the time.
i can write about the dream i had the other night with you in it. it was swell. then i woke up. i went back to sleep trying to dream of you again and instead i dreamt only of you.
ad infinitum.
anyway, if a picture is worth a thousand words, then consider this video my first self-indulgent novel:

Feels Good To Be Jesse On The Inside

2008-05-21T21:12:00.002-05:00

days and days fly by yet time always seems to stand still. this here blogging is a bad habit i can't shake off. so, here we are, in lieu of deep thoughts and earthy ruminations, with another "one hit wonder wednesday."

there's so many things to say about these guys. within their chords lay my life experience. bashing my head(s) to slayer and minor threat. intellectually challenged by fugazi. feeling pretentious and arty with bands that run the spectrum from drive like jehu to antioch arrow.
but nothing gets me in the throat, that place that seperates us in between the brain and the heart, like these guys.
do they count as a one hit wonder?

only if you count this song...

but there was also this song; it still breaks my tiny wrinkled heart...

but my love affair begins here (two covers, the sabbath is cool but the bomb isn't dropped until two minutes in)

anyway, my favorite song (dawn can't decide) is lacking in the video department so here is my second best "one hit wonder" moment by the lemonheads: tom morgan's the outdoor type.

this song is dedicated to you....

Teenage Kicks

2008-05-08T00:15:00.002-05:00

so i hereby shatter the bottle of champagne i've been saving for a rainy day upon the steely thighs of the battleship "Abigail Adams" and christen this day, forever more, "One Hit Wonder Wednesday."

i have this half assed love for this band. a certain weakness for ulster. i remember when they did an in-store at waterloo and i did a few rails in the bathroom with the chick in the band all stephen glass style.
anyway, when this album came out, NME heraled them as the second coming of the stiff little fingers. who cares, i'm still curious whether Ash is prot or catholic. anyway, here's the closest they came to a hit in these here united states:

Poultrygeist

2008-05-07T01:31:00.002-05:00

i hate festivals one and all be they film or music (unless it's called fun fun fun fest, then i am in unabashed hypocrite mode; like i could give a fuck.) anyway, my boy lloyd kaufman (toxic avenger) has shown up mr. de niro's own festival by picketing it in costume (blood and all) from his latest movie Poultrygeist (which, to be fair, i haven't seen yet but, based on the soundtrack alone for this possessed fast food chicken restaraunt horror movie cum musical, i still haven't decided what the best movie of 2007 is.) this shit is the bomb so read the rest of this very short article

hat tip: The Abattoir

Blown A Wish

2008-05-07T01:06:00.001-05:00

all i know is

graham better get 'em to play fun fun fun fest

B

Dead Child - Attack

2008-05-05T02:01:00.003-05:00

First off, just to get it out of the way, I don't believe in the idea of "hipster metal." not at all. and if you twisted my arm enough to make me give an example of it, i'd yell sunn not the sword. but that's neither here nor there. we're talking about aging indie rockers putting out a metal album. and here's the rub.
if this album was any good, i'd bring up how easy it was for the metal community to embrace the, at the time, very non-metal glen danzig. i'd talk about my growing realization the punk, hardcore, indie rock and all their brethren were just another form of metal. that it fucking rocks, if it makes you bang your head and forget your job, then it's fucking metal.
but it's not any good. the riffs truly are a lead balloon. the singing wants to be rob halford but instead settles for the tim owens version of jello biafra. it's just fucking boring. all this from a guy who wanted this to be good. who needed this to be good. i mean, jeebus, it's dave pajo. if anyone from the indie-rock world was gonna make a great metal album, it'd be the guitarist from slint
and it turns out i was half right.
dave pajo has made a great metal album.
it's called Spiderland.

"Goodbye Captain" by Slint (off of Spiderland):

The Majesty of Rock

2008-05-05T00:21:00.002-05:00

June 7th, 1992. When the history books are written, chronicles are chronicled, and the tales are told and retold, embellished and emboldened, that is the day will be remembered and remarked upon. Within a week of watching this, I'd shaved off my long hair and within the year kicked metal to the curb. In other words, this is the earliest playlist i can find to my first 12o minutes on MTV:

June 7, 1992
Source for this playlist: Mike W.
Host: Dave Kendall
Guest: Andy Partridge and Steve Wynn

Jesus and Mary Chain - Far Gone and Out
Buffalo Tom – Tailights Fade
XTC – The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead
New Order – Fine Time
Pale Saints – Throwing Back the Apples
Ride – Twisterella
Sarah McLachlan – The Path of Thorns
Faith No More – Midlife Crisis
Steve Wynn – Drag
Charlatans UK – Weirdo
Jane’s Addiction – Classic Girl
Steve Wynn – Caroline
The Spent Poets – Dogtown
Social Distortion – Cold Feelings
Tree People – Something Vicious For Tomorrow
Simple Minds – Waterfront

(last several minutes cut off)

I know it's not the first, but it's probably the only one with The Treepeople video in it and that I remember seeing-if only cause it caused me to cut off my long hair.

the funny the is how fucking lame that episode was. don't get me wrong, some of those songs are classics: buffalo tom, faith no more, the aforementioned Treepeople, and Social Distortion; but the rest are compost for the dustbin of history (mixed mtaphors and all.)

Now, for comparison's sake, let's look at the playlist for Headbanger's Ball from the saturday closest to the above 12o minutes:

Tora Tora/Saigon Kick/Suicidal Tendencies 6/13/92
Roxy Blue - Rob The Cradle
Lynch Mob - Tangled In The Web
Iron Maiden - Be Quick Or Be Dead
Guns N' Roses - Novemeber Rain
Metallica - Wherever I May Roam
Ozzy Osbourne - Road To Nowhere
Def Leppard - Make Love Like A Man
Vince Neil - You're Invited But Your Friend Can't Come
Pear Jam - Evenflow
Faith No More - Midlife Crisis
Suicidal Tendencies - You Can't Bring Me Down
Spinal Tap - The Majesty Of Rock
Tora Tora - Amnesia
Van Halen - Top Of The World
Monster Magnet - Medicine
Ministry - Jesus Built My Hotrod
GWAR - Gor-Gor
Warrant - Down Boys
Babylon A.D. - Bad Blood
Saigon Kick - Hostile Youth
Temple Of The Dog - Hunger Strike
Slayer - War Ensemble
Galactic Cowboys - I'm Not Amused

e Cris

really, it's no contest sure there's a lot of hair metal, some good (lynch mob, saigon kick, galactic cowboys), some bad (warrant (even if it's my favorite warrant cut), tora tora, roxy blue), but look at the others: Iron Maiden, Metallica, Faith No More (see the overlap), Suicidal Tendencies, Monster Magnet, Gwar, and Slayer. sixteen years later, i'm far more likely to want to watch this:

or even this (if i need to be easily amused about bands i used to like):

than to watch something like this:

okay, maybe not that one, it's a bad choice. it's got a groove that i like. so how about i'd rather watch those bad metal songs than watch this bad alterna song:

actually, i forgot that i kinda liked that song too.

man, maybe they're all good. maybe metal is just easier to laugh at. maybe stupid brit-pop/shoedaze bands wish they had half the personality that a good proggy hair metal band had. maybe, as always i'm just a confused sixteen year old kid looking at music television for some kind of identity and validation.
whatever, at least i can go on record for hating this song for nigh on 16 years and looks as if no amount of rose tinted nostalgia is gonna change it:

and of course, XTC's fucking awful Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead is nowhere to be found. fuck them. i can't even find they're video to fucking laugh at.
i'm pathetic.

mad love to:
altmusictv for their 120 Minutes playlists
The Headbanger's Ball Fan Site for the Headbanger's Ball playlists

Always The Quiet One

2008-04-15T01:44:00.002-05:00

britpop killed one of my favorite bands. everyone had to rip off some english band from the sixties so as to project this air of "cool britania." it's cool, i guess. outside of blur's cheekily "song #2", no one wanted to admit an influence from the former colonies. the wedding present broke up. david gedge got married and formed cinerama, a vastly boring band. but david was happy.
i guess.
then he got divorced. i quote (inaccurately of course) "the difference between breaking up with someone then and breaking up with someone now is that, now, i have to sell a house."
the wedding present reformed and recorded the album Take Fountain. i didn't care for it all that much at first. i even missed seeing them at emo's (and i'll always have megan to till me how much i fucked up on that one). now i can't stop listening to it. and all you jawbreaker fans, this album is the closest you're gonna come to follow up to "Dear You."
anyway, these are the reasons why you should own The Wedding Present's "Take Fountain."

and, i'm afraid a recurring favorite, the true jam off the album

i'm not lying. buy this album.

A Pretty Girl Never Lights Her Own Cigarette

2008-04-13T01:33:00.003-05:00

i remember painting the room yellow. hanging the christmas lights along the top of the walls. where they connected with the ceilings. drinking shiner and the occasional tequila shot. taking the occasional hit from the bong. of all the colors in the house, i have to take credit for the yellow. i was at the time caught up in oscar wilde, robert w. chambers, and all the other late victorian/early edwardian writers. an empire at its prime yet anticipating its fall. the color yellow represented for them decadence. and decadence was an idea, a theme, that, privately, i attempted to invoke. or did i? i'm not sure anymore. sometimes i feel as if i am projecting backwards my reminisces. sometimes i mistake yesterday for tomorrow thus letting my tenses fling forth out of apathy. or maybe antipathy. caught up in the throes of obsession. desire thwarted yet never mitigated. a continual open sore that it seemed only powders could attempt to salve. a scab continually peeled back so as to feel the healing begin again and again. i wonder sometimes where everyone else has gone. we were all the best of friends yet never speak anymore. as if seeing or speaking to each other again will conjure up all of our collective misdeeds; that the wrong word spoken at the wrong time will make everything that happened then true; that we'll all be locked in a past that has become our future. if we can collectively ignore everything we did, everything we said, everything we thought we could still hope to have a future.
who am i kidding. there is no future here. this perpetual present is wearing me down. there truly is no tomorrow just as there truly is no yesterday. i feel it in my bones just as much as i feel it in my soul. each new pleasure is tainted by the taste of what could have been; of what was. i painted that room yellow. i painted it with all my dreams, hopes, desires, and everything that defined me. i long to believe that it's still there, underneath the whitewash we used to paint over it.

once there was a way to get back home...

2008-04-08T01:36:00.002-05:00

as always i'm looking for something to say; something to write about. and, as always, like a prophet in the old testament, i'm left wanting; and i'm never gonna drive like jehu.
i've officially grown old. new people have appeared at my house and i'd rather they left than get drunk with them.
bastards.
i'm making this up as i go along.
my retrospective ass.

they should be killed. i'm just saying, that's all.

2008-03-27T21:51:00.002-05:00

so.
yeah, i've been away for awhile (or is it it a while? i can never keep it straight. or strait. fuck me.) anyway, i took some well deserved time off from the internet (i.e. the internet i've been stealing quit working for me consistently enough for me to waste more than about two hours trying to get and stay connected) and did things like read books and realize that, with the right set of antennas, i can get more than one channel.
"ohhhhh, sweet more than one channel......"(drooling)
so i'm back with just a quick bit. a link of sorts. from Cracked magazine (the poor man's MAD or also one of the best sites on this whole interweb) a list of the six endangered species that just aren't endangered enough.

i quote (from #6, the GoliathBird Eating Spider:

As if a giant spider that can bring down a moderate-sized flying animal wasn't bad enough, it's one of the "hissing bastard spiders" (that's actually its full scientific name), the creepiest creature to exist outside of a horror novel. At this point, evolution clearly just started piling in everything nasty that could possibly fit: Its spit can dissolve flesh down to the bone AND it can shoot invisible hairs that cut your eyes and mouth. While the "intelligent designer" theory has lost steam of late, the "sadistic bastard creator" theory is single-handedly supported by the existence of this creature.

No messing around here--there is an entire part of the brain designed to keep us the fuck away from spiders, the "arachnid response" to anything horrifically alien that must be destroyed. The only reason this abomination isn't already extinct is we can't find enough Navy SEALS prepared to go near the damned things. Heroes? Psh, the only reason those bastards dismantle nukes is because the "Jobs Available" list at the base reads: a) Single-handedly engage the entire terrorist forces of Mujhadikkaklikkastan or
b) Seriously guys, one of us needs to kill those fucking spiders. But I've hurt my leg. Signed, Rambo

Speed of Blood

2008-02-19T00:05:00.001-06:00

Gallhammer - Ill Innocence

As one of the few Waterloo employees who's spent about an equal amount of time amongst both the the metal and the indie-rock communities, I've never understood why the two just don't get down and make love more often. I mean, when i was a kid, crossover was all the phase. Bands like, D.R.I., S.O.D., and Corrosion of Conformity were showing just how much metal and hardcore had in common. It was fun. I mean, hell, we all know that it was J Mascis's band Deep Wound that inspired a bunch of chaps in Birmingham to form Napalm Death which, in turn, helped inspire a bunch of dudes in Florida to create death metal, right? I could play Celtic Frost's first album to someone who'd never heard it before and tell them it was an eighties hardcore band and I'm sure they'd believe it. Hell, I remember when I bought my first Celtic Frost tape it was only because I'd saved up money to buy Fearless Iranians From Hell (awesome San Antonio, TX crossover band) and someone else beat me to it (irony of ironies, that guy eventually became my roommate and is currently playing bass in Austin's great alt-country band, Brothers and Sisters.)
Anyway, this all brings me to Japan's Gallhammer and their second album "Ill Innocence." Taking their inspiration from the proto-Celtic Frost band Hellhammer and British crossover band Amebix, these three Japanese women have forged an album that, though the press refer to them as "black metal" ( a term that has increasingly come to describe less and less), stands head and shoulders above all their "fellow" revivalists today (I'm looking right at you Municipal Waste; a cut-off denim vest does not a classic album make.) With a dash of Oakland's Neurosis (also influenced by Amebix), a bit of what I hear is Dischord era hardcore, and, giving the press their due, some black metal vocals all laid over a simple crossover structure, you have a band that, based on how many times I've listened to it, should have been my number one album of the year in 2007.

Bop Til You Drop

2008-02-16T22:31:00.004-06:00

february is now reaching its expiration date; the smell is a bit stale. the rain, the wind, the cold and hail all conspire to keep me locked in this cage. i shaved my beard and a sink full of hair clogging the drains means that it must be saturday and time for another installment of "headbanger's ball."

let's kick things off tonight with a band called Drunk Horse. Born and raised in the swamps of oakland, ca, these intrepid souls kepp rocking even though it seems as if no one's listening. their last album "In Tongues" was fucking awesome, made my top ten for 2005 and sold just a little to the better side of nothing. Already out of print, it can be gotten for a steal on amazon.
this little clip is from 2004 and, after you watch it, will understand why it makes a perfect introduction:

so anyway, elijah's gotta couple of kids and so drunk horse exists in that weird nebulous "are we a local band or are we a touring band cause we never tour anymore?" state. so cyrus, bass player extrordinaire fills his time now in kemado records' Saviours. Made up of members of hardcore band yaphet kotto, these kids have made the first album in serious contention for my top ten list of 2008 with their album "Into Abaddon."

so, anyway, i'm a big fan of anthrax. whether as a tool of terrorism, a killer song (see above) or one of "the big three" back in the eighties, i'm all cheer. so, for all of you fans of "an acute disease in humans and animals that is caused by the bacterium Bacillus anthracis " (wikipedia) this block is for you:

anyway, we all seem to have been asleep for about ten to fifteen years and as we've woken up, so have all the bands from days gone past; some for bad, some for mediocre, and some for good. At The Gates, of course, is for the good.

anyway, i had an idea for what would come next when i chose the last clip. but, of course, we're all slaves to the fates. i couldn't find a good darkest hour clip (the best american at the gates tribute band) but i di find this

i don't really care what other folks have to say. you guys can all go off in your little corner and argue yourselves blue. in my world, the greatest thrash song written:

and we close this night off with a song that, though not "metal" meant just as much to me musically and, in a metal sense, very visually. i think it may have been the video i saw either before or after the first time i saw "another state of mind" on USA; i'm soory but rick springfield is punk rock in my mind

like willie nelson and julio iglesias once said.....

2008-02-14T22:26:00.001-06:00

so i'm slingin' it solo like a kingsly amis character about 2/3s through whatever book it is you're reading.
but that doesn't mean i can't wish you and your loved ones a happy valentine's day.

"remembering when is the lowest form of conversation"

2008-02-11T21:05:00.001-06:00

it's a little weird when i think back on that night. there is virtually no friend i still speak to today that i was friends with before that night and almost all the friends i have from temple that i still speak to today, i met after that night.
josh neland and i drove up to copperas cove to go see some bands play at lil' vegas. the austin band gut was playing and they completely kicked my ass. i went out of my way to never see them again so that nothing would ruin the experience of that night.
flickering lights, small stage small room, children packed like sardines and...oh that guitar sound. there's still been nothing like it.
joe turner on a nostalgia kick (different show but same time period):

Buddy Russo (1932-2008)

2008-02-11T19:41:00.000-06:00

people come and people go; it's a fact of life. some people leave a larger mark upon the world than others but, still, a mark is made. once, in the distant prehistoric past, i wanted to consider myself an actor. i even went to school for it a bit but, like all things in my life, i have no true follow through.
but that's not important.
what's important are the things that point you in the direction you want to go. for me it was one scene in a movie that came out the year i was born. in a perfect world where the lowest common denominator doesn't rule all that he can see, i could find a clip of this scene on youtube but oh how the gods fail me.
anyway, this scene takes place at the dinner table post-supper. the father is a man of responsibility, almost more than he can shoulder. times are tough. he's stressing and his young son is picking up on it, mimicking his actions. the father soon notices and begins to play along, escalating into a monster face making his son break into laughter.
-"Come here. Give us a kiss."
-"Why?"
-"'Cause I need it."

roy scheider is everything i've ever wanted from an actor and Jaws is the movie that, outside of All That Jazz, got the most out of him. at the same dinner table, when he's made up his mind to cut open the shark that may or may not have eaten "the little kinter kid," the way he opens the bottle of wine over hooper's objections, pours a proper amount for his wife, a proper amount for hooper and then fills his tumbler to the brim is beautiful.
this was an actor who could do his job and do it well without speaking a line. a man who knew how to let his gifted but scenery-chewing collegues shine yet still keeping our attention. robert shaw gets all the love for his milius written speech about the indianpolis (heavily rewritten or adlibed by playwright shaw himself, depending on what story you choose to believe) and it is a good speech (he'll always be the standard i judge henry VII by, eat your heart out tudors) but brody has the most succinct line remembered by all:

"you're gonna need a bigger boat."

rest in peace
Roy Scheider (1932-2008)

Famous Blue Raincoat

2007-12-31T20:47:00.000-06:00

I'm at a loss for words these days; these years. so quickly the slid off my fingers onto the page - like dancers on the stage; gene kelley on the street corner, an umbrella in his hand. now they mover more like the sick and the broken; twitching and shaking with parkinson's disease, never seeming to truly fit into their respective spaces.
All of this is an explanation of sorts, an apology. i have not written to you in many a year and i hope you've noticed my absence; at least in passing. these things take time and i find that i have too much of it; time to change each word two or three times over; time enough to rob it of any meaning; time enough to stifle its soul.
I had a dream last night. as dreams go, it was rather plain and listless but it still had a certain charm to it. you were in it. it's not so often that you appear in my dreams these days and when you do it's usually in full make-up and a dress of metaphor. but this one, this one was all you.
When i was younger, much younger than i am now, i woke up one morning with a crush on amy grant. yes, it's silly i know, but it's true. for a full three days i was consumed by my desire for amy grant. i wasn't into christian music at all (just the opposite, in fact, as i had just got my paws on motley crue's shout at the devil) but here i was. anyway, it passed. probably to be replaced by stacy keifer, the love of my fifth grade year.
Anyway, in this dream, i'm at work and it's close to christmas and we're busy. amy grant comes in looking for "her first record" on vinyl for her daughter. all of my desire for her comes rushing back. i spend the rest of the day trying to hunt down that album.
That was my dream. i told you there was nothing to it - bland and boring. but i woke up feeling the desire that i felt when i was eleven. i'd forgotten what that kind of desire felt like. i'd missed it much as i have missed you.
Even now, i watch as these words grow stale. i'm fighting the urge to go back and erase them all, pretending, and through pretending making, these words never existed.
While we're talking about our childhoods, remember when spider-man got married? it was twenty years ago and i was twelve and only had been collecting comics for a few years and spider-man for a few years less than that. john romita jr. did the art and david michelenie provided the words; at least in the issue i had, the one where peter parker proposed to mj. i still had that issue until a few years ago when my house burned down. peter wanted to get his old microscope back and ended up fighting gangbangers and, somehow, this made him realize that he wanted to get married. it makes no sense but every kind of since then. anyway, i'm rambling. my point is, it's gone. all of it. the powers that be have arranged it so that peter and mj were never married. ever. my whole history of reading spider-man is gone. none of it ever happened. it's like it was all a dream.
A dream. heh. i made a funny.
It's all a dream. i'm just gradually waking up. tomorrow it'll be no longer now but then. and you'll still be there.

Ballads At The End Of Time

2007-11-15T22:01:00.000-06:00

waiting to cross the street; sixth and lamar; five o'clock traffic, car locked behind car locked behind car; the one in front of me has a sign on the door: "mohair dolls/classes/supplies"; i'm astounded that a) there are mohair dolls and b) there's enough demand to make them that there are classes in how to make them and a company to do that and to sell the supplies needed to do so. there is a niche for everyone in this new economy; if you have a talent or a skill there is an opening for you to fill. i have no talents, no skills; nothing marketable that is. is there a demand for history? i'm reminded of a passage from The Solitudes by John Crowley:

Pierce shrugged, raised eyebrows, shook head. "You know," he said, "when I was a kid I sort of thought that when I became a historian, what I would do, what historians did, was practice history-the way a doctor practices medicine. Maybe because the uncle I grew up with was a doctor. Have an office, or a shop..."
"'Keep thy shop,'" Barr said, "'and thy shop will keep thee.'" He made in his throat the famous Barr chuckle, plummy, chocolaty. "Ben Franklin."
Pierce drank. In the dark of the bar, his old mentor was unreadable. Pierce was fairly sure that Barr's kindly but justly lukewarm descriptio (couldn't call it a recommendation) was chiefly what had kept Pierce from moving automatically into a slot at Noate, and thrown him on the open market. "How," he said, something-not the drink-warming his cheeks suddenly, "would you do it? Practice history. If there weren't Noate."
Barr considered this a long time. The drink before him seemed to glow faintly, like a votive lamp before Buddha. "I think," he said, "that I would take some job, some job I was suited for-my father was a tailor, I worked for him-and I would listen, and discover what questions people asked, that history might answer, or help to answer, even if at first they didn't seem to be historical questions; and I'd try to answer them...."
"Questions like...."
"Questions that come up. I remember there was an old woman who lived over my father's shop. She read cards, told fortunes. She was a Gypsy, my father said, and that's why people went to her. But why, I asked him, do people think that Gypsies can tell fortunes? History could answer that. Give an account, you see." He set down his finished drink; his grin had begun again to grow, his chuckle to rumble in his throat. "The only trouble would be that damn tendency to generalism. I suppose that the first question I tried to answer would lead me to others, and those to others, and so on; and there being no publish-or-perish sort of pressure, no impetus to stop asking and start answering, I might go on forever. End up with the History of the World. Or a history, anyway." He took, with plump fingers, the olive from his glass, and chewed on it thoughtfully. "Incomplete, probably, in the end. Unfinished. Oh, yes. But still I think I would consider myself to have been practicing history."

maybe there is a demand for history; maybe that is my talent: why DO people think gypsies can tell fortunes? maybe it's time i began to practice history; i've had enough practice.

Invincible

2007-11-10T00:37:00.000-06:00

this is how the middle-brow works, you see: so many thoughts, so many ideas. i keep waiting for that special chip that lets selected thoughts save to the hard drive of my computer; my walks to the liquor store will then forever retain their poignancy.
i was walking to the store trying to wrap my mind around the idea of a blog. what will be my narrative, my theme? forever defined by the blogs we read and knowing that our, or at least my, mind doesn't work that way. a passage kept running through my brain and i couldn't figure out where i read it:

Imagine if talking pictures hadn’t been invented in 1927, but eighty years later, in 2007. Do you think Hollywood studios today would conclude that they needed to hire house composers and full orchestras to accompany the drama with symphonic scores? Something we take for granted about the form of modern talking pictures—dialogue accompanied by orchestral music—arose from a particular kind of cultural aspiration that no longer exists.

then, somehow due to that combination of walking and thinking (and then i'm reminded of kenneth in the episode of 30 rock where once he's told to talk and walk at the same time (in a nice jab at aaron sorkin) he is incapable of doing both), i remember an essay on the twentieth anniversary of allan bloom's The Closing Of The American Mind by Mark Steyn (from which the quote above is taken.)
and then i think, briefly, on The Closing Of The American Mind, that much maligned and much overrated book. the first part of this book is pure genius; an older man angrily making his good-byes to world that has passed him by. while there is much to disregard, there is also so much to cling to. i admit, my copy of this book is heavily underlined. it also gave us Ravelstein, the only book by saul bellow which i have not only read all the way through but read more than once.
i think about saul bellow for a bit; his friendship with martin amis; martin amis's friendship with christopher hitchens; christopher hitchens run in with saul bellow at a dinner at the bellows's house where he was invited by martin amis; martin amis as kingsley amis's son; kingsley amis; kingsley amis as friends with robert conquest; robert conquest as definitive historian of the great terror of soviet union in the '20's; robert conquest as womanizer and poet; robert conquest and kingsley amis as friends with anthony powell; anthony powell as the greatest english (as in england) writer of the 20th century.
then i open the door, walk into my room, and decide that what the world really needs is the video to the movie the legend of billy jean:

Champagne Supernova

2007-11-09T20:15:00.000-06:00

i don't know if this is going to work; the whole blog thing. it's nice, as a lark, when visiting myspace but, as a stand-alone, i'm not really sure. i feel like it needs a purpose, a vision, an idea to govern it and, as we all know, i'm no good at the vision thing.
anyway...i'm sick and just, for the first and maybe last time, got to live out a decadent rock star moment by spraying a nearly full bottle of champagne all over my room. i hope my dvd player and television still work and my trades don't become too sticky. so, while wading through the lake of champagne that is my carpet, i have discovered my new favorite blog: Horror A Day. it's by "some guy" who loves horror movies and has decided to watch one a day and write about it. pretty fucking simple. here he is writing about The Descent which is one of the best horror movies in years:

The great thing about the movie is how scary it is before the damn monsters even show up. I legit yelped the first time I saw the film at a particular shock scare early on, and the scenes of the girls getting stuck in tiny passageways as they navigate the cave system are pretty terrifying as well. Plus, Marshall is a master of subtle reveals, giving the film enormous rewatchability (check out the scene right after the cave in, when Sarah is looking around with her flashlight - there's a monster's hand or something without a single musical sting or scream to accompany it). Like the best survival horror movies, there are nature elements as well as the monster/killer to worry about, and Marshall's script never lets one really overshadow the other.

Plus, it's gory as hell. Those cannibalistic humanoids that dwell under the ground (I wish they had a simple acronym to use to describe them) spray their innards everywhere when killed, and they have a knack for likewise killing the girls as gorily as possible. Again, Marshall succeeds in both areas - he's made a chilling psychological horror film, AND a splatter film, and whether you consider it one type of film or the other, it works just as well. I should note that some folks believe the monsters don't exist at all; that Sarah killed her friends herself. And while I don't buy into this theory, it certainly has some evidence to support it, and gives the film another level of interpretation.