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

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...

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

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

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

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

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...

"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.