changes

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

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"

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"

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...