The Evil Twin Theory

2005-02-23T16:17:00.001-05:00

Yeah, I know, I've moved. It's not that I forgot to tell you, it's just that I'm trying to be something else. Not that I was misrepresenting myself before, or that I am now, but more that I've been in this place for four years and I've accumulated a lot of emotional baggage, and I've grown up a lot, and I'm not dumping you, in fact, I'd really like to take you along with me. There's room in the car. Come on over. The new place looks like ass, but a fresh coat of paint and a couple of decent rants and whatnot and it'll be as good as new.

Besides, we've kind of outgrown this place. Look around. It's a mess. We'll always have it -- in fact, we're taking the whole joint with us -- but it's time to try something new. Like To Much Joy said, "Every great band should be shot/before they make their Combat Rock." This is the right thing to do.

Come on over. You might even like it.

BLASPHEMIN'

2004-10-05T16:15:00.000-04:00

BLASPHEMIN'

We all know that the Christian Right has done an absurdly bang-up job of getting the word out about how all them Northern Liberal Intellectual types are looking to kill everyone's babies, outlaw Jesus and fuck you in the ass. Yeah, dude, whatever. Only on weekends. The rest of the time, we neo-zionist cabals are merely plotting to corner the world banks and ratchet up the gold standard until all anyone can afford is tofu salads and arugula friggin' soy shakes. After that, it's a short step to government-mandated cross-dressing, race mixing, bestiality and armageddon.

Sorry to come clean like that. I could never keep a secret.

So it's curious that that same incredibly vocal and effective lobby has said absolutely nothing about the hurricanes that have ravaged Florida this year. If those storms had hit San Francisco, Pat Robertson would be jerking off under his desk with glee rattling his blessed denture-polished piehole off on every mainstream outlet he could buy or blow his way onto to talk about how the Lord's mighty wrath against the sodomites had been brought to effect, and it was Good.

But what about the proportionately God-fearing and perfectly nice people of Florida? (Laugh it up at your peril; we're all God's children, and you'd be a fool and a fascist to think otherwise.) What hath that same God wrought against them? And where's the high and proper moral outrage among the Lord's self-appointed bouffanted spokespeople about this one? Did the Floridians commit some sin that warranted their summary wiping-out by the four metaphorical horsemen?

Frankly, I'd take this as a warning, Florida. Your task is to do better by the Lord this year, or else --

Well, I don't know what else that poor state would have to endure that they haven't already. Locusts? No, they got tons of those. Plagues? Ditto.

Sheeut, I'm at a loss.

Look. I feel for you guys down there. Stay strong, Florida. And have you considered eating babies and sodomizing each other? Because that sure seems to be keeping the hurricanes away from North Gomorrah, California, just fine.

MOTOR PSYCHO

2004-10-04T13:11:00.000-04:00

MOTOR PSYCHO

Normally I love summer best of all. The toxic shit just floating in midair waiting to stick to your face, the laminated feeling you get after three and a half minutes of not showering, hundred and thirty in the shade arms-away-from-your-body hot, that sweet bouquet of piss, vomit and car exhaust that fills the air like a prom night debutante's slovenly didn't-sleep-at-home-last-night great-aunt just got in the elevator with you, man, Johnny Mathis got it backwards. The middle of summer is the most wonderful time of the year.

That said, the summer of aught four has had about as much creativity as your average episode of Hope & Faith. I don't know if it was the big push to get some songs done that wore me down, or that the pit of loneliness that runs so deep it connects me directly with the twenty-seventh circle of hell is giving me a case of heartburn no Tums could fix, or what, but I've never been so glad to get on with things in October like I am right this moment.

So to that end, here's Motor Psycho, a song about -- well, it's basically Born To Run as sung by Travis Bickle. It's just a little something to warm your cockles on these cool autumn nights.

Rock over London, rock down Chicago.
Tums. For the tummy.

BUSH/CHENEY '04: NEVER FORGET POLAND!

2004-10-01T13:40:00.000-04:00

BUSH/CHENEY '04: NEVER FORGET POLAND!

The State of Florida has released a sample election ballot.

And after last night's debate, someone's already snapped this up.

If the consequences of what's going down weren't so dire, I'd laugh my little ass off.

UPDATE/PUNCHLINE: Now it seems Poland is forgetting the USA.

HIGH CONCEPT

2004-09-29T17:00:00.000-04:00

HIGH CONCEPT
or, BARFLY: THE ANIMATED SERIES, featuring the voices of JOEY LAWRENCE AND MARTIN SHORT! IT'S GOLD, PURE GOLD, I TELL YOU!

Says here that both Melissa Etheridge and The Barenaked Ladies are getting their own comedy series next year.

Etheridge is going to play a lesbian mom trying to raise a friend's child with her best bud, a straight guy. Unless each episode ends with her singing a song, I can't see this one taking off. (Unless (unless!) she can really act, and maybe not even then.)

The Barenaked Ladies, on the other hand, are going to be hosting some kind of cross-format thing. This one could last, if people will accept what TV Guide will be calling "The Return Of The Golden Age Of The Variety Show." I go back with them a little, but I don't think that changes my opinion here. They're a versatile, accessible, fun bunch of dorks who won't feel the need to upstage whoever they're on with. Everyone in the band has a slightly different personality, and if it's winds up being some cross between The Carol Burnett Show and Hee Haw, then it's got a chance.

Normally, I'd be way bitter about these people succeeding, but frankly, I don't know when I'd shoehorn the time in to shoot one of these damned shows. And besides, I don't think America is quite ready for a breezy yukfest about a Canadian-American writer who spends most of his waking hours drowning his sorrows in shallow martini glasses (until the paycheck dries up, and then it's PBRs the rest of the week -- I can change brands, as product placement in my very public personal life is everything; shit, I'd even drink Michelob if the price is right*), who diverts himself from his moribund existence (there's occasional outspurtings of ecstasy, sure, but let's call this misery in the air here) by sharing bon mots with his just-barely-more-gruntled would-be Pulitzer laureate friends at either punk rock karaoke or trivia nights, or barring that at various watering holes in or around Lower Manhattan and inner Brooklyn or Queens, waiting in vain for his muse, an abusive apparition (who, if we were casting, would be played by, oh, Julia Duffy** or someone equally condescendingly hot), to return for long enough to get some random piece of work finished.

Actually, there's an idea there.

I wish 'em both luck. If you need me, I'm listed.

*Oh, relax. I wouldn't drink that piss at gunpoint.

**That link to vidiot.com is not affiliated with this Vidiot.

MOVIE RAPIST DIALOGUE GENERATOR

2004-09-27T11:53:00.000-04:00

HEH HEH. I LIKE A GIRL WITH SPIRIT.

Last week I worked quite a bit of overtime, which was kind of a drag as I'd gotten used to a relatively bucolic schedule of wander-into-work-when-I-bloody-well-feel-like-it and wander out the first time everyone who might miss me (because, see, the real reason I go to work is because everyone misses me!) turns their heads away at the same moment.

But last week was crazy, actually really morning-to-night crazy, which was a little extra unfortunate because last week was also the fourth anniversary of my starting this blog. (I'm sorry, I'm late, baby. I got you a little something nice, but it's back at the homestead.)

Actually, I can do better than that, if I get me some help. Here's some from
The Movie Rapist Dialog Generator. It's actually rather cute and low-key, given the subject matter. Think of Billy Zane in (-- hell, in anything) saying this stuff.

ATTENTION REMIXERS!

2004-09-16T13:41:00.000-04:00

ATTENTION REMIXERS!

If you haven't seen Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism yet, and you've stopped on Fox News this year to do anything other than gawk at their gall, you might want to give it a watch. Jim Gilliam has conducted a serious amount of research, and created a fairly airtight (and pretty entertaining) thesis about how and why American cable news got ugly over the last 20 years.

And now, Jim is giving away the full recordings of all the interviews he conducted, for your listening and remixing pleasure.

Listening to these interviews scares me as much as anything. It shows how inadequate our checks and balances are in the media these days, how an awful lot of people seem neither a clue about, nor desire to hew to, the standards of journalism, and where that steep decline began. The first step to changing the tone of what we see and hear, and what's being reported or ignored, is to spread the word. So go forth and multiply the message, brothers and sisters, and send me your best stuff. I'll have the opportunity to play it at some very influential parties over the next few weeks.

(Speaking of which: I'm playing a show tonight. Come on down.)

[via Devoter]

OUT IN THE FIELD THERE'S A DOG PLAYING FRISBEE

2004-09-10T11:45:00.000-04:00

HIS TAIL WAGGED SO HARD IT WAS KNOCKING HIM OVER

While listening to this song of mine, go look at these pictures of dogs and frisbees.

This could have been the video shoot for that song. It's exactly what I was trying to get at.

There's no snark in this entry. Sorry. It's about the unrestrained joy, and I'm by turns jealous and uplifted by these pics.

It's Friday, and Summer won't last much longer. Go outside this weekend and do something beautiful.

[Also, I don't thank the Blue nearly enough.]

DEVIL HORNS - THE HISTORY

2004-09-09T14:35:00.000-04:00

NOT JUST FOR SATAN ANYMORE

If you're planning on coming to my show next week, it'll be important that you know exactly how to make proper devil-rock horns (index & pinkie only -- the thumb changes everything unless you are, in fact, deaf, in which case it is even more important you come out and watch the most electrifying live performance since Elton John stopped doing a mountain of coke every morning before breakfast).

To that end, here's a fairly well-researched history of the devil-horn signal in rock. The consensus seems to be that Ronnie James Dio was among the first, though George Clinton gets a serious nod as well.

The best part of the article, though, is that Gene Simmons, that master of humility, claims to have invented it himself, and in the course of his research, every other person Steve Appleford interviews for the article (Lemmy, Lars Ulrich, Dave Grohl) just openly scoffs at him.

"He should know better," [George Clinton] says, with a laugh. KISS and Parliament-Funkadelic were both on Casablanca Records in the ’70s. "Our costumes were made at the same place," he adds. "And we had ours made there first!"

GIG ANNOUNCEMENT

2004-09-08T15:56:00.000-04:00

IN OTHER NEWS!

I actually have a gig booked in the city. This is a rare occurrence, and even rarer that I'd tell you in advance. But it's going to be me and a bunch of people from the L Magazine jumping up and down like idiots while playing the rock and the roll.

Thursday, September 16 -- 10pm
The Baggot Inn
82 W. 3rd
(between Thompson and Sullivan, in the West Village)
Come if you can. I'll be playing a lot of these songs as well as a few things off of this fine recording (which, incidentally, makes a great Rosh Hashanah gift, so you should buy 6, one for each of your toes, you hot little freak).

Plus, the odds of hooking up with a sexxy Williamsburg hipster without actually having to visit Williamsburg will be as good as at any time since, um, since Dave Eggers stopped returning my calls. (Bitch.)

SUNDAY BLOODY SUNDAY by GWB

2004-09-08T13:49:00.000-04:00

WE EAT AND DRINK WHILE TOMORROW THEY DIE

In light of my cover of American Ruse (the rest of this site is going to seed like Melanie Griffith at the end of a stressful weekend alone with the dogs, but thanks to a few of you spreading the word, that one song is the most downloaded song from this site so far this year. Thanks. Seriously. Now go listen to the original stuff I've put up there too. It's even better, if you can believe it.)

Oh. Here's George W. Bush doing a U2 cover. For real. It's quite well done.

(News: Two new songs of mine are mixed and await my being home to make sure they're okay before I upload them. And more are on the way. Promise.)

[via Devoter]

COMMUNITY CALENDAR.

2004-09-01T14:24:00.000-04:00

COMMUNITY CALENDAR

Just a couple of things:

I remixed American Ruse to push the vocal and the rock-trash vibe a little. It's a little sexier now. So if you haven't listened yet, go on. It will change your life completely and irrevocably, for three minutes and twenty-three seconds.

I'm hosting trivia tonight. This evening's rounds include: Delegate-Baiting Through History, Do These Handcuffs Match My Outfit? Protesting As Fashion Statement, and a visual round on poorly-cooked meat.

How can you beat that for a Wednesday night? You can't.

And while we're making lists, here's 1001 Things To Hate About The Convention.

DONG. FUCKIN' -- FUCKIN' DONG.

2004-09-01T11:03:00.000-04:00

AND YOUR LITTLE DOG, TOO.

Mister Resin has a question for you. Answer honestly.

THIS WEEK, IN A VERY SPECIAL EIPSODE OF AREA 52...

2004-08-30T14:17:00.000-04:00

THIS WEEK, IN A VERY SPECIAL EPISODE OF AREA 52

I know. I talk about Area 52 a lot. Even after taking the summer off to get out of the house and, y'know, pull my head out of my lower intestine, I still think about the project more than anything, even though I'm going to have to go two-a-week to get to my initial goal of 52 songs recorded and released this year.

No matter. I'm paying at least a little lip service to Quality. You're welcome.

This week's song is American Ruse, which is, that's right, an MC5 tune. (Go hunt down the original after listening to mine. It's so damned earnest in that late-60's-rage that the kids are picking up these days.) I messed with the arrangement a little, but I didn't want to lose the message of the song, which was why I did it in the first place.

You have full permission to trade these songs (actually, please do), but especially this one especially. Go tell someone.

(For other songs of protest, check out All Songs Considered, NPR's call for political songs.)

YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION?

2004-08-24T12:15:00.000-04:00

AIR LENNONS (or, YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION? YOU SURE?)

So it seems Nike (they're a shoe company, apparently) is going to put out a line of sneakers commemorating John Lennon. They're going to be called "Peace Chucks." They'll have John's autograph on the heel, and lyrics from Imagine on the toe.

Imagine all the punks
kicking your poser teeth in,
wearing shoes of peeeace
yeeoo-hoo, ooo

The fact that Yoko Ono, godblessher (full disclosure: I still have a Christmas present she gave me a couple of years ago, a basket of undrinkably bad teas from around the world. It's an obvious regift, sure, but thanks to the fact that the tea really sucks, I'll probably hang on to it forever), decided that this was a good idea doesn't bother me. That's her job: to maximize the value of John's estate and his legacy moving forward. She has done spectacularly well at this, especially since he died, almost a quarter of a century ago now.

"John Lennon" long ago stopped being a pure artistic totem to become the real British Elvis, commodified and iconized until you can barely see his original shape under the multiple layers of hegemonic sheen. Which I can live with. Idols are there for killing and canonizing, and then you find new idols to feed into the sausage maker. Right on.

The only part of this that really bothers me is that they're going to be Chuck Taylor All-Stars. My shoes.

I knew this was going to happen when Nike bought out Converse. My sacred sneaks, which I've worn about 350 days a year every year since high school, are going to become a series of museum pieces for celebrity necrophiliacs.

I can't blame Yoko or Nike too much, I guess. Part of their job is to administer their property, which means sell the rights for a good price when one comes up. It sucks from a purity-of-art standpoint, but how much boycotting do you really want to do?

So fine, retrofit history for commerce. Sic transit gloria mundi, whatever and ever, amen. Iggy's selling Mercedeseses or whatever. That'll keep him in whatever drugs he's doing to keep himself from doing drugs.

And now some kids'll be wearing Air Lennons. Sorry, "Peace Chucks."

It sounds so dirty. But again. I can deal. I might even get a pair myself. Because you know, I'd love to be as high as John got, even if only metaphorically, and if the shoes do it, then well, you know, we all want to change the world.

DOES SHE DO BIRTHDAY CAKES?

2004-08-23T14:39:00.000-04:00

DOES SHE DO BIRTHDAY CAKES?

In the spirit of caganers and other semi-religious art from the earth, I humbly offer you the occasionally scatological human sculptures of Karin Frank.

(It's not terribly safe for work, but it is work checking out if you can get to it.)

Her pieces aren't all about bodily fluids, but many of them show a humanity that's genuine and endearing. (Some of her portraits at the bottom of the page are really sweet.)

You can find other tiny perfect experimental sculptures here. [via]

FANFIC ROCK AND ROLL: HARRY AND THE POTTERS!

2004-08-23T12:15:00.000-04:00

ROCK THE LIBRARY!

Fresh from their hit record, Voldemort Can't Stop The Rock!, I offer unto you: Harry And The Potters!

It's too easy to dismiss these kids as site-specific kidlit nerds and walk away from them, but after listening to their songs, there might be a future there if they ever decided to get their heads out of J.K. Rowling's diamond-encrusted output device and into some other arenas with more gravitas, like, say, oh, actual girls, the politics of the personal, or GG Marquez, or whatever Weezer or Ben Folds isn't singing about anymore (I've kinda lost track this last couple of years, anything good? It's possible, I'm sure).

As a band, they don't totally suck! Check out the delightfully emoish "The Human Hosepipe" and the almost-Kraftwerk-y glee of "The Wrath Of Hermione."

As far as my own recording stuff goes, well, hm. I'm clearly trying too hard to make shit sound good to my little ears, which is why I've been sleeping all weekend instead of going out to the cool Saturday night party and, much like Paula Radcliffe in the marathon yesterday, I hit the wall and had to have a bit of a sit-down at the side of the road. I do have songs, though, and I'll be home all week. I've been neglecting you all for too long, and I understand why you don't come round anymore. Not you, but you who isn't reading this. Fuck you if you're not reading this sentence. Or this one. Everyone else (this means you) shares my love always and forever.

Honestly, I'm trying to suss out which would be more spiteful: to get back on my personal musical or litterary horse and rock out in full alarming, cock-baring effect, or go into politics. (The cock line is going to kill me, so it seems I've made my decision.) I know, sure as I'm typing this and you're reading it, that teen-wizard geek books are not going to be my legacy to the world. That's okay. Really. I'll keep working on this stuff, perhaps I'll drink more, and you'll hopefully see more of my work.

Meanderingly, T.

NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE

2004-08-18T09:15:00.000-04:00

WE'RE NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE

I'm such a sucker for this shit.

Rob Harvilla takes each of Black Sabbath's records and syncs them, Wizard of Oz / Pink Floyd style, with various movies.

"SUCK ME!" Ozzy thunders as Amélie searches for Monsieur Bretodeau. Dude, this is a romantic comedy.

Some other movie/album combos I'd like to try:

Run Lola Run / New Day Rising, Husker Du
The Color Purple / Blood and Chocolate, Elvis Costello
Orgasmo! / Orgasmatron, Motorhead
Glitter / The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, David Bowie
Deliverance / Hangin' Tough, New Kids On The Block
The Passion of the Christ / Dare To Be Stupid, Wierd Al Yankovic
The Wall / Don't Bore Us, Get To The Chorus! Roxette's Greatest Hits
Field of Dreams / We're the Meatmen and You Suck!, Tesco Vee and The Meatmen
The Jerk / That Nigger's Crazy, Richard Pryor

NEIGHBORHOOD HOCKEY FIGHTS

2004-08-17T11:57:00.000-04:00

NEIGHBORHOOD HOCKEY FIGHTS

It warmed my heart.

Two teenage kids in the street last night, both very -- well, Mexican-looking anyway, outside the excellent bodega on my block that has no signs in English, circling each other, maybe a dozen guys around them, either cheering them on or telling them to cut it out it ain't worth the trouble, but they looked fairly evenly matched, just two kids going at it, no guns, not even a knife, it's cool, you know, they're just blowing off a little steam on a cruddy muggy summer night.

Then one of the kids lunges at the other, and very neatly, as if he'd watched and learned from the masters, the other kid absorbs the initial blow, steadies himself against his shoulder, reaches behind him, grabs the back of the guy's oversized t-shirt, pulls it over his head, and starts punching him in the face repeatedly.

The fight was effortless, and over in about 20 seconds. Tie & Bob would be totally proud of the kid, and I'd totally pick him first for any pickup game in the neighborhood.

UNMISSED CONNECTION

2004-08-11T13:52:00.000-04:00

UNMISSED CONNECTION

Usually the subway ride to work carries a virtual guarantee of base frustration and a gentle erosion of my faith in the human race, but this morning was different.

It always makes me feel good when I see a stranger reading a book written by someone I know. It's happened a couple of times with people reading Caren Lissner's books, and this morning, on a not-terribly-packed train, there was a cute redhead reading what looked like a pretty dogeared copy of Jim Munroe's Angry Young Spaceman.

I mean, I could have said something to her (like what?

Hey, that's a cool book! That's so great that you know about him. Did you know I was in his last novel? Or maybe the one before that, gosh, he writes 'em so fast, eh? Yeah, I was maybe kindasorta in it, well there was this one conversation between him and some guy at a zine fair, and it was exactly like a conversation he and I had once upon a time, and so that could have been me in that teeny bit part on one page of that book, and yeah, isn't Jim Munroe great! So like, can I touch your hair? It'd sure be keen if I could just kill your boyfriend and move into your living room, wouldn't it!

Exactly.

), but sometimes it's just nice to let moments like that be.

Besides, I'd really like to make those moments seem normal to me, as my friends all become more successful, and I stand on their shoulders and see as far as they let me, and we all get a little bit closer to our collective goal of calling the tune for a world that is getting only smaller as we all grow into it.

STEVEN SEAGAL'S MP3 SAMPLES

2004-08-10T21:43:00.000-04:00

DOWN WITH RHYTHM or OUT WITH TALENT or MARKED FOR DEATH

While I'm putting my musical stuff back on the rails, go on over and listen to the dulcet tones of the great action hero and martial arts master (I should have probably capitalized that bit, but hey, then I'd have to add Philippines political player and alleged mob informant[*], and that wouldn't be so cool, maybe) Steven Seagal.

(Route 23 especially is pretty hot.)

(I guess this story wasn't true after all. Bummer.)

PolSpy - Canadian Political Observation

2004-08-09T14:28:00.000-04:00

FUDDLE DUDDLE

Being Canadian and, erm, over 30, the header pic at PolSpy of Pierre Elliot Trudeau made me smile until my cheeks met behind my head.

That was a true statesman who wasn't afraid to kick some ass, literally or figuratively, to get what needed to be done done.

Unlike some current robot knobtwisters on the market these days, when Trudeau told you to go fuck yourself, not only would you go do it, but then your bad self stayed fucked afterward.

WHAT I DID ON MY SUMMER VACATION

2004-08-09T13:44:00.000-04:00

WHAT I DID ON MY SUMMER VACATION

I went outside.

It was nice.

I'll be back shortly.

I swear.

Caren Lissner on Class Warfare at Sleepaway Camp

2004-07-15T14:33:00.000-04:00

A VERY GOOD LISSNER

The most excellent Caren Lissner woke up, put her clothes on, went to work, and wrote a piece on the superficial meanness of teenage girls at sleepaway camp.

Sorry about the pun.

Another "Tony Hightower," this time in Reno

2004-07-15T12:55:00.000-04:00

RENO 411

This ain't me, but I have to play this place.

Right at the moment, I know of two other people who are using my name in the entertainment field. One is a singer who's worked with Lionel Richie on a couple of records, and the other one is a semi-professional wrestler who does occasional heel work in Pennsylvania for 5 Star and other indie wrestling circuits around the country.

Indie wrestling is cool. I can totally identify with going all out in a high school cafeteria with 35 people sitting in folding chairs who are there as much for the spectacle of something happening in their town as for anything you might be actually doing. I'd write him a theme song, but I suspect he might want something a little more grindcorey than what I've got in the pipe.

Let me get on that. (Get me Lionel Richie. Let's hook this baby right the fuck up.)

A NEW CAR!

2004-07-09T17:38:00.000-04:00

A NEW CAR!

In a stunning validation of all that I hold dear to my heart, spleen and other organs, you fine voters chose me as the winner of last week's Songfight for my paean to the ineffectiveness of beer goggles, In Full Effect.

If you voted for me, thanks. See how good it feels to pull for a winner?

Next week's song, Let It Be, should be up by the time you read this.

Belgium Doesn't Exist!

2004-07-06T13:01:00.000-04:00

BELGIUM DOESN'T EXIST!

I had a dream last night that I was talking to Alanis Morrissette.

She looked like this sixtyish woman, with slightly translucent skin and dimples that threatened to take over her face when she smiled. We were in this tiki bar on Eighth Avenue that I used to go to a lot more often in another life, or at least earlier in this one. A Norteño song was playing on endless repeat, and the bartender, who wore an uncomfortably tight-looking dress, would put a nine-dollar Maker's Mark in front of me every time the song ended. I was aware of how drunk I was getting and how needlessly expensive it was, but I wasn't feeling it.

She was three or four seats away, far enough so that we had to talk loudly to hear each other. I can't remember what we were talking about, but it was something about how the kids these days don't understand how important science is to a balanced formal education. The incongruously Valley-girlish way she'd pronounce the phrase "Ehrlenmeyer flask" was utterly charming, and she found a way to work it into the conversation in more ways than I thought possible.

I had the feeling I'd met Alanis before, like at my senior prom, or when we were both washing dishes at Mr. Greenjean's in the late 80's, though I didn't bring it up. Clearly she didn't know who the hell I was, so I figured I was just making it up in my head. Also, we were the only two people in the place who weren't undercover cops. The place was full of well-groomed men in denim shirts, talking furtively into their wrist-phones.

At exactly 3:00 in the morning, the music got louder, and people started dancing in the back of the bar. The doors were locked, but I knew a way out. I was smashed, and the floor was suspicious of my feet. Alanis and I had reached a natural break in the conversation, and she was now dancing with a very smart-looking elderly man who looked like a cross between Omar Sharif and Cesar Chavez. They moved quite well together, foot over foot, shoulders moving to and fro, their eyes locked, it was lovely to watch.

It was only after I had crawled through the window in the men's bathroom that I realized I'd left my wallet behind. It was empty, though, and I didn't like the damned thing, anyway.

Stern

2004-07-02T10:39:00.000-04:00

HOW WEIRD

After Dick Cheney's outburst last week (not to mention the crumbling public opinion of the as-the-stomach-turns of the "Howard Stern profanity scandal"), they're still going ahead with prosecuting him?

Look. Stern's a dick, and I listen to him for about ten minutes every three or four months, just to make sure I still don't like him. Yeah, Howard is like radishes for my ear hole. But I'm pretty sure he never actually says any of the seven words on the air. Why would he, when coming up with stupid 4th-grade euphemisms for genitalia and various sexual acts is so much fun (not to mention still phenomenally lucrative)?

And if he's not speaking actual profanity, then what's the big deal? Someone said something semi-racist on his show? Oooh, it's a good thing the FCC doesn't monitor Hannity or Scarborough or Limbaugh or Savage or Grant or those other jokers this closely. We'd have nothing to listen to except Jay-Z remixes. Actually, Maybe I could handle that for a few minutes at a time.

If Cheney isn't fined and censured for his outburst on the floor of Congress... well, I was going to say it's just proof that their hypocrisy is no longer a secret and their dog-wagging is no longer holding water, but that train left the station years ago.

BLACKOUT FILM FEST

2004-06-28T11:11:00.000-04:00

QUICK PLUG-SLASH-NOTE

The Blackout Film Fest is sending out a call for short films about last year's blackout to be shown on Saturday, August 14th.

If you were in the Northeastern quarter of North America that day and you have a videocamera, do yourself and them a favor and put something down on tape for them.

I have a dilemma about attending (It's the same day as Lebowskifest NY! What's a fella to do?), but I do believe I have an idea for something I could put together for this. (Details to come. I'll need a little help with people reading stuff on camera. Once I figure it out, I'll let you know.)

HINTERLAND WHO'S WHO

2004-06-28T10:49:00.000-04:00

HINTERLAND WHO'S WHO

If you grew up in Canada and are over about 15 years old, you probably have some memory of these short films profiling the vast array of wildlife to be found across the Canadian wilderness. The eerie flute music and subdued narration describing relatively nondescript animals were in such sharp contrast to Marlin Perkins and his occasionally vicious action-packed version of the wilds that it kind of defined in my little-kid mind one of the differences between being Canadian and being American. (Yes, SCTV did a great send-up of these things. How could they not?)

Anyway. The Hinterland Who's Who series is now online for your viewing pleasure. Have something warm and put your feet up and dig some chill wilderness action.

[via]

CANADIAN-AMERICANS IN THE NEWS

2004-06-25T10:58:00.000-04:00

TO BOLDLY SPLIT AN INFINITIVE (or CANADIAN-AMERICANS IN THE NEWS)

This spring has taken me by my already-ripped collar and shook me violently, like a neglectful babysitter on a hidden camera, into some kind of whiplash-induced hyperconsciousness from which the earthly issues of my life have somehow cracked loose and crumbled off me. Change, always a constant, has shifted into some new gear these days.

I’ve needed a reordering of the senses. Or rather, I too have needed to get my groove back.

When the news came down yesterday that Ben Folds was putting off work on his new album to finish the latest record by the Great Canadian-American Actor William Shatner (entitled, deliciously, Has Been), something told me the world was about to take a turn for the better.

When I got pulled unceremoniously out of a job I really liked to go back into the belly of a corporate beast I really didn't like (I'm back in the same building I was in for the last two-plus years, a biannus horribilis, and that's the first and last time I'll look up a phrase in Latin to post here but you-all deserve it, you smart and sexy blogreader you, don't think I haven't noticed), I thought, perhaps someone's saying something pertinent to me that I'm not hearing.

Not that I believe in any of that supernatural claptrap. The voices in my head speak only to me. If you want to leave them a message, send me an email. I'll pass it along.

My point is that in the last six weeks or so, my life has turned upside down, and while I'm not doing what I want (certainly this entry isn't going where I want it to go), I'm moving forward. Area 52 is back in full effect again, I'm putting a band together and booking shows, I'm writing again after taking a couple of months off of that, and outside, I've started noticing the streets swimming with happy people hanging out in the all-night heat, listening to salsa or techno or metal or klassik rokk or good ole American guitar pop like what I play, and all the shit that had congealed in the pipes of this town and the inside of my head over the last six months really feels like it's starting to break loose. Finally.

So thanks for continuing to come by here even when I drop out for a minute, even when I don't make much sense, even when I ramble on like a shitty Zeppelin tune you never want to hear again. And thank you for being cool and giving a shit. Unless you don't. Then piss off. We're partying here, and we don't need another pooper.

UPDATE FOR TONY, WHO NEEDS ONE

2004-06-23T03:14:00.000-04:00

UPDATE FOR TONY, WHO NEEDS ONE.

You might think I've fallen and I couldn't get up, that maybe I was one nosy postman away from being on the cover of the Daily News in that garish block-letter type I've grown to hate since I moved to New York:

KILLED SOFTLY WITH HIS SONG:
Canuck Hermit's Half-Eaten Corpse Found Naked On Toilet
Neighbor: "He died doing what he loved"

That would be true, but even truer is that I've been actually upped the physical training and focused on the new job (always good).

I never thought I'd be away this long. I'll have rantings of social and political import shortly.

But right now, I'm just celebrating having finished a new song.

Here are the lyrics to the newest song in Area 52, Sincerity Machine.

Now, I'm off to bed. Good morning, Planet Earth, wherever you are.

STANLEY CUP FINALS - CALGARY, TAMPA

2004-05-28T06:00:00.000-04:00

THIS IS ACTUALLY ABOUT THE STANLEY CUP FINALS.

I've been to both Calgary and Tampa, and both places seemed kind of soulless. Calgary I'd been through a couple of times on tour (you didn't see me there, because Fast Forward magazine ran an incoherent and rant-heavy interview where I basically said that people should only listen to Leonard Cohen and drink in their own houses, which may not be the worst thing you could say but it won't endear you to the locals. I was new to the whole being-interviewed thing, but they didn't care when I came back through the next year even enough to spell my name right in the small print listings. Fuckers), and the impression I had was that they rolled the streets up at about 9:00 at night, and if you took a wrong turn more than 400 feet from the river, you'd get stuck in a huge labyrinth of neighborhoods where every house on every street in the whole city was identical.

Seriously. It felt like Houston without summer. Some people apparently like that.

Tampa, on the other hand, was not much better. At least there there were lots of Cubans, so the music was good and there was the benefit of waking up and having those greasy ironed ham-and-pickle sandwiches and thick sweet coffee in the morings while the old men got out of the neighborhoods and off to their jobs before the fratfucks and their cheergirlies rolled out of bed. I don't mean to stereotype, but really, between about noon and three in the morning, there wasn't anyone else on the streets of Ybor City, where I happened to be hanging out. (I didn't know any better.) It was all the wretched fuck-you excess of New Orleans with none of the attendant culture to make it bearable.

Still, the beaches were nice, and I got to see major league baseball in a large warehouse with all the character of a freshly-looted Wal-Mart.

As of this writing, the Stanley Cup Final is tied at one game apiece. Based on my personal experience of the two cities involved, the series is going to degenerate into a soulless free for all, with otherwise colorful goons from both teams dragging the pace of play down to a glacial crawl, making the goaltenders, Nikolai Khabibulin and Mikka Kiprusoff, solid players with very little English-speaking ability between them, into unlikely heroes unable to deliver decent soundbites to the average xenophobic American sports goon.

The series will hinge on whether Jarome Iginla can resist the temptation to beat the living tar out of every Tampa Bay Lightning player who shoves their stick in his face. I really like Iginla. He seems like a great kid with a solid head on his shoulders. But I fear that he's being forced to learn too much too fast here, and come his next contract negotiation he'll get traded to the New York Rangers and never be heard from again. (Can we maybe get Theo Fleury out of detox and up there to convince him otherwise?)

Last night, Kiprusoff played about as well in the net as I do on Saturday mornings, letting in shots that no self-respecting five year old would have allowed past, while the rest of the Calgary Flames in front of him played as if they'd rather have been watching the American Idol finale. I know it's not Baseball or English League Soccer, but don't these guys make enough to afford a Tivo, for pete's sake?

My point being, unless the Flames find some energy in the raucous home audience they're now going home to, this could be a mercifully short series. I hope for Iginla, Vincent Lecavalier or Martin St. Louis to be the deciding factor, because that would mean that talent would carry the day. But I'm not optimistic. The Lightning will win this in six ever-more-boring games, and the league will lock everyone out next year, and no one (aside from myself and Adam and maybe a few scattered others) will really notice until after the NFL season ends.

God bless sport, the last best opiate of the masses, capturing the imagination of Gomez and Morticia Q. Public in ways that old standards like politics and popular music can only dream of.

I'm off to bed now.

Ego-Ideal - towerbrave

2004-05-27T12:20:00.000-04:00

WHAT? WHAT?

While I'm pushing my offline spatial perceptions around like Val Kilmer in the desert, check out who's back with a new art blog. Towerbrave makes wonderful stuff out of household items, and sells the illustrations all over the place. Her repository awaits your perusal.

morgan spurlock has a blog (doo dah, doo dah)

2004-05-17T19:49:00.000-04:00

GOING NUGGETS FOR McNUGGETS!

Morgan Spurlock (the director of Supersize Me, a movie that allegedly does for McDonald's what All The President's Men did for Nixon) has his own blog.

It's mostly a lot of talk about the frenzy of the press junkets and aw-shucks of being a first-time filmmaker whose flick is getting some fairly serious buzz, but it's fun to read how little he expected of the hype he's getting.

NOT ONE FOR THE GREATEST HITS COMPILATION

2004-05-17T15:35:00.000-04:00

NOT ONE FOR THE GREATEST HITS COMPILATION

Some housecleaning:

It might not be the best week for the kind of aggressive back-&-forth you've come to no longer expect daily from this space, as I'm making a feeble attempt to look for work while getting outside in this glorious muggy new New York summer. (I know. I have more money than Google, loftier goals to pursue, and time is the one thing I can't buy more of. Well, maestro, that's where you're wrong. I'm working on a deal with Kronos his own self for a deal that would end the passage of time forever, thus assuring immortality for anyone who wanted it. Again, you're welcome. Maybe then I'll get the movie made.)

Besides, Jon's off hiatus. So that takes the pressure off the rest of us. Show the man some love, quick while he's still all aglow from the odd chemical reactions in his belly and you can find him in the dark.

The next Area 52 song will go up tomorrow. My voice is a little messy, and it hasn't been a priority today.

I know, I'm not making sense. Hey, look! A trippy hand trick!

PROPS WHERE THEY ARE DUE

2004-05-13T12:59:00.000-04:00

THE GIANTS WHOSE SHOULDERS ON WHICH I AM STANDING

Thanks to Candee, who knows more about this stuff than any human should and who I really should link to just because, I found out today that the gorgeous painting from which I shamelessly stoleded the above detail is called Tiki God, by Mark Ryden. The rest of his stuff, it turns out, is just as pretty.

That's Mark Ryden. Buy something from him if you got the dough, and tell him you saw him here first. Unless you seen him before.

I don't know, I just find shit. People send shit to me.

I have shit.

(Blogspot seems to be having issues today. Try reloading it a few times.)

YOU CAN EAT OFF MY FLOOR ANY TIME, BABY

2004-05-12T13:54:00.000-04:00

YOU CAN EAT OFF MY FLOOR ANY TIME, BABY

You know, it always goes one way or the other when you lose a job. Either the grand panorama of possibilities open up like Anna Nicole Smith on her wedding night and all the things in your life that you haven't been paying attention to become possible again, once that 40-plus-hour yoke is lifted from your back and you can sniff the sweet, sweet air of midday freedom. Or shit just fills up your day and even though on the face of it you're less busy, you look up at the clock and go "Son of a bitch. Is it really 4:30 again? I should shower. Nah, it's only Tuesday."

Anyway. I'm proud to announce I've not watched a minute of daytime TV yet, I've been drunk before noon only once in the last three days, and my house is spotless. I know, you care. I know.

Well, to bring you up to date: aside from recording and drawing, oh yeah and stalking Marisa Tomei (where does the day go?), there's not been much. Oh, but I have been working on setting up my life a little better.

So have you seen the great return of Dong yet? Apparently he's joined the cool patrol and is officially fourth in line to marry Julia Roberts. Move on up, brother. Cash them alimony checks. And welcome back.

If you want to get out of the house (this goes for New Yorkers only; for everyone else, the house arrest remains in effect) I'm hosting trivia at Dempsey's tonight. I think it's time for another round of "What's That Smell?" Get those olfactory senses running. I've started eating the cheeses already.

2004-05-05T18:05:00.000-04:00

DECAPITATION IS ALMOST NEVER NOT FUNNY

I know there are some of you who have visited this page looking for that video of the cat getting decapitated by the car. (I'm not linking to the ad. You can find it in the article I link to below.) Yeah, I saw it, and yeah, I think it's funny. But I don't get the outrage.

There are two things here. One is that it's advertising. Never mind that Ford disowned it, they commissioned it in the first place. The ad is doing its job, and reaching more people than anyone ever dreamed. They even got me to link to it, and I've been resisting for literally months by now. (This commercial is ancient in internet years. Please don't go somewhere else and tell more people about it. They already know.)

That said, this rant is a spot-on assessment of how people react to the damned thing.

The ad, it's a bit of a litmus test. It's a bit of a smack upside the worldview. I love animals. I would never harm a single one, no matter what a wicked commercial depicts or how many hundreds of canned tame domesticated pheasants the vice president slaughters in an afternoon of sucking up to Antonin Scalia. Then again, I also eat organic, free-range meats. Frequently. Life, it be messy and absurd and contradictory.

I might be the last person in New York City who doesn't have a cat -- I hate the little fuckin' things -- so I saw the thing, chuckled, thought "they had to release this on the net, no one else was going to ever see it," and went on with my day.

And still, every week, someone else discovers it and goes apeshit about it. Why can't you let the ad just die? It's obviously fake (You ever chopped the head off a cat? There's a lot of blood), so why the big to-do?

Oh right, the second thing. It's called outside. If this ad really bugs you, you might want to try going there. See how real people act, see cats not getting mutilated (much), see flowers blooming and people yelling at each other and other people falling in love and eating street pretzels and cabs honking at jaywalkers and indecisive people clogging the stairs to the subway. You know, reality. It's a gas.

2004-05-05T09:23:00.000-04:00

IT'S ITS OWN PEDANTIC LITTLE WORLD

I'm coming clean here again: I love commas. I have never, in my life, had an editor, of fiction or journalism, who told me to insert more commas into my sentences, no matter their length, number of needless prepositional phrases, or, to be frank, if I may, clarity.

Many people are hardcore grammar nazis, and I respect their fundamentalism and unwavering belief in the importance of rigidity in the wielding of language. But I'm of the opinion that languages are living, breathing things, and the point of language is, above any other, to get your message across the divide between one brain and another. As long as you do that, if someone throws an extra comma or misplaces an apostrophe somewhere, then the fabric of the language is not destroyed.

I'm glad the New York Times, that standard-bearer of linguistic propriety, has seen fit to address this continuing sea change in how people -- not just writers or pundits, but sign painters, e-mailers and other people who haven't actually won Nobels or Pulitzers -- use punctuation and syntax:

When The Times opts for CD's rather than CDs, it's considered house style. But if a shopkeeper mislays an apostrophe, the kind of people who worry about whether anal-retentive has a hyphen are quick to criticize.

I have one friend who is irked by grammar and punctuation errors to the point of distraction. His constant gripes make it easier for me to not worry so much about following the Chicago Manual of Style to the absolute chapter-&-verse fucking letter, and simply concern myself with getting the point of what I'm saying out onto the page (or screen, whichever).

The person on the street in 2004 talks differently from a similar person in 1954 or even 1984. That's how it's supposed to work, and to deny people their right to mangle the language is to deny progress. Sic transit gloria fucking mundi. Of course, if you can't understand what someone has written, then that's bad language. But a sign in a window that says "CARROT'S 89 CENT'S" isn't going to bring society to its knees. Stop pretending it will, okay?

2004-05-03T08:59:00.000-04:00

HUH! I'D LIKE TO MEET HIS FATHER

Two links about Eli glory:

* At Kerryoke.com, which is pro-Kerry but about as guileless and they-can't-be-serious-can-they as you'd think, they're organizing karaoke parties for The Candidate at which people sing parody lyrics of various songs. This is fine, but they only have 17 songs they've rewritten (even though one of them is a Warren Zevon song, but those lyrics redefine ham-handed), and on that list is, let's see, "Santa Claus is Coming To Town," "Bring Back My Bonnie To Me," "Woman from Ipanema" (I've never heard that one. Did someone who's never heard the original PC that title up?) and some song from "The Dobbie Brothers." The original composition really shouldn't count, as it defeats the whole point of karaoke. You're supposed to know the song in advance, at least a little bit. (I break this rule every Monday night.)

Sadly, no New York Kerryoke functions are planned. Bummer. I guess the gorilla suit stays in the closet this election cycle. It's your loss, America.

* Also, apparently, Elizabeth Wurtzel got accepted into Yale Law School. Has she ever succeeded at anything in her life, aside from convincing publishers that her incoherently pathetic junkie-slut ramblings were saleable? I'm sorry, I'm hating the playa, aren't I.

Yes. Yes, I am.

[via]

2004-04-30T15:52:00.000-04:00

ONE STOP SHOPPING

Spam of the week. Jesus, what cojones.

Hello!
After buying our software we give you a pack of chi ld po rn.
Afte wathing the porn
We advice You Download & Buy our Brand New Software!!!

Aside from the usual spelling quirks and the fact that they expect you to buy the product twice, what I hear them saying is: "We are so sure our cure for cancer works that we'll infect you with cancer and then cure you! Whaddya say?"

2004-04-30T12:03:00.000-04:00

SHEENA EASTON, PUNK ROCKER

When I make my first billion (I'll be leveraging Google stock for the next few months; once the IPO wave breaks, I should be deep into nine figures at least by the end of the year), like all nouveau riche billionaire types, I'll buy myself a sports team. I'm thinking maybe the Brooklyn Nets (they're in New Jersey now, but we're talking soon, not now, and of all the New York area teams, I figure that's the one where the owner's going to go bankrupt or to jail first).

Now, here's my plan. I'd move them to Queens. Where? Well, how about Forest Hills? I mean, really. Who uses that tennis stadium there, anyway? Tennis Players? Really. It is to laugh. Besides, the US Open runs in early September, and after that the Nets could totally move in, and we could change the name to...

The New York Ramones.
The uniforms would be all black & white, the in-house music would be the best in sports, and we'd save a ton on stitching the names on the back of the jerseys.

Speaking of which. Try out the Ramones Name Generator. Shockingly, I'm Tony Ramone.

2004-04-30T09:12:00.000-04:00

THREE VERSE BLUES SONG IN 25 WORDS

I've had mad awful job issues this week, and sleep deprivation is nearing record levels, even for me, and someone last night swapped my voice with that of Ken Nordine's while I was sleeping, so I sound like a really, really shaky Grinch. (I know, that was Thurl Ravenscroft. Whatever.)

That said, I'll be at the WFMU Record Fair tomorrow, singing and carrying on (and not buying anything; pending joblessness. You know.), and I'd love to see you there if you're around.

2004-04-28T12:08:00.000-04:00

IT IS POSSIBLE THAT IN THIS ELECTION YEAR, ACTUAL "DOUCHE BAGS" ARE GETTING UNDESERVED BAD PRESS

I have the distinct and sublime privilege of being a right-handed english-speaking college-educated white male in a society that still allegedly rewards such undeserved head starts with an extra twenty percent on top of our wages and the knowledge that no one is going to belittle us with backhanded compliments like "Well, he's not bad... for a white guy," even if it's true or they're actually meaning to be demeaning.

Which, of course, happens all the fucking time.

But part of what being male means (and rest assured I don't exactly dwell on this) is that I don't have much occasion to see some activities and items in the course of my daily living.

For example. Feminine hygiene accessories in general, and (deep breath) douches in particular. (I know many women don't use douches or even see them neither, and there's some question about their hygienic upside and possible side-effects downside, but at least females are more in the potential target market for such things.)

Now, if you'll allow me, I'm going to stop talking about feminine hygiene products for just a moment (I know, it was just getting interesting, sorry) and talk about the Presidential election.

Theres a lot of bad PR streaming out about John Kerry these days. That he's a pompus narcissistic gold digger who does whatever's politically expedient and cares more about his image than the political process. Which is kind of rich, considering where those stories are all coming from. (Google some variations on "Sources close to the Bush campaign" or "an unconfirmed White House report indicates" and see the kind of crap they're spewing.

This bullshit about Kerry lying about his extensive and dangerous military service is especially egregious, coming from someone who lied to get out of any work he's ever had to do, right up to today, and who couldn't even complete a one-weekend-a-month tour of duty in Alabama because he was too hammered and coked up to find the base.)

So yes. John Kerry is a douche bag, but I'm voting for him anyway.

And better a douchebag than an openly corrupt, morally bankrupt fascist.

See, the little metaphor matches the big metaphor. Sort of.

[via]

2004-04-28T09:18:00.000-04:00

THE CITY THAT NEVER SLEEPS

This morning I was literally the only person on my train who wasn't sleeping on the ride in. It's not that long a trip, and it's the milk run, with stops every eight feet between Astoria and Midtown, and even at that it's 20 minutes, maybe a half hour if there's some to-do under the East River.

Also, it wasn't like this was 5:30 in the morning. The sun was up, it was a quarter to nine, and all the working gurls and guys were nodding off in their undrank coffees like someone had pumped chloroform into the car. I half-expected ninjas or some evil menace to get on at some point and rifle everyone's purses & wallets, but the closest thing even visually to that kind of hello-there was a bunch of Goths who got on at 36th St. They were all apparently going to the same place, as they sat four wide in an empty three-seater and curled up against each other like newborn puppies.

If it wasn't for the guy on the one side of me who, while not exactly snoring, had some sort of septum issue that made him hiss loudly through his nose, I could have shot a pastoral scene in the place. Hell, maybe I will.

2004-04-26T01:05:00.000-04:00

NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW

It's Monday, which should mean a new song is up for your perusal, and that's the case. I'm starting to worry about overproduction in these songs, which is kind of funny because in terms of recording style, I'm basically dictating the song to a pterodactyl with a chisel. It's a wonder that you can hear anything, let alone understand it or like it.

See, I'm much better live. But until I book some shows in your town, which at the moment is a project with which I could use a little help, these quaint little recordings are all we have.

Listen and let me know if these things are any good.

And speaking of pterodactyls, here a lovely site for those who have a fetish for being stomped by dinosaur feet.

It's quite safe for work, unless someone where you work is into being stomped by dinosaur feet.

You're welcome.

[dinos via]

2004-04-23T16:04:00.000-04:00

PRODUCT PLACEMENT FOLLIES

I've been playing a little bit with the new Google G-mail system, and it looks okay, although it's still very clearly not ready for prime time yet. It can't import mail from other clients, you can't save drafts of emails you want to send later, and the cursor occasionally thinks for itself. (I want my cursor to be like me at work. I'm aware that I'm not paid to think, and every time I do, it turns out badly. So I don't. And everyone's happy. Well, except that I'm looking for a job now. So, uh, never mind. Bad metaphor.)

But the upside is huge. It's a much better interface, the storage capacity is sick (1GB instead of, what, 6MB with your average freemail), and if I could run my main domain mail through it, I'd be freaking with glee.

Oh, hell, who am I kidding. I am freaking with glee.

Write and say hi, and let me know if you're paying attention or not or whatever. Let's test this puppy.

2004-04-22T11:04:00.000-04:00

HAPPY EARTH DAY TO YOU

New song is up at Area 52. The only reason it's called Emily Post is because Dear Dotti didn't have the right cadence. (Sorry, Dotti, babe. I'll get you next time.)

Blender Magazine: 50 Worst Songs Ever (The full list is here) is actually pretty accurate, although I would switch out "Little Miss Can't Be Wrong" for "Two Princes," and a lot of these acts are more to be pitied than hated (The Rembrandts had no idea that their little tossed-off clapfest would become the national anthem of 30-year-old teenagers who were holding on to sixteen as long as they could, and I actually like "Shiny Happy People").

Still. Right Said Fred are still together, and still touring. What, as Nietzsche used to say, the fuck.

2004-04-21T11:23:00.000-04:00

OH, THE MANUFACTURED DRAMA!

Two things. One. I've been ordered* not to go on hiatus until dong comes back, but since he's apparently working on a schedule similar to mine (he'll come back when leg warmers and painter's pants come back in style, which is soon, sadly), I'll have to keep on keeping on here, despite all indicators pointing to now being a very good time to take a break and work on this other large project I've got perkulating.

Two. This week's Area 52 song, Emily Post, is currently recorded and not mixed. I'll probably post it later tonight, like late tonight.

Three. I need a job. Anyone know who's hiring? I have a big fat bulging resume, a journalism degree and a whole lotta love for the right place. My lifestyle has just gotten blingier and I got needs, and the life of a bon vivant is not going to fly for very long.

2004-04-14T10:20:00.000-04:00

PURDY PITCHERS

I posted a few pictures I took on Monday of some of the fine, fine people who went to Punk Rock Heavy Metal Karaoke at Arlene's Grocery on Monday night.

Like any great photography exhibit, you'll notice the pictures are arranged alphabetically by first name. And since you probably don't know these people, that'll be a real help.

You're welcome.

Oh, What's Punk Metal Karaoke? Check here. It's a world of fun. You should come.

2004-04-12T15:21:00.000-04:00

ALL THOSE MATCHBOOK COVERS WERE RIGHT! I CAN DRAW! SORT OF!

My first real work of aht might not be the transgressive monsterpiece that the bastards at the Times might have expected, but it's not like I have a ton of experience with the brush. In fact, the last time I wielded a paintbrush in anger was in my teens inthe Muskokas, and it was in the middle of a gravel driveway over the face of one of my brother's unconscious friends. I had great power and desire to do evil, but I too was intoxicated, and it was close to 4:00 in the morning, and it being out in the middle of nowhere there was only the moon for light, and so I made up his face to look like Gerry Cheevers' goalie mask. This sounds bad, but I was doing it in watercolor and we were beside a lake, and so after the walk of shame in the morning and a quick swim, he only had the gravel-pattern on his face and whatever hangover he had to remind him of the fun he'd had the night before.

So, in that light, I present unto you Nude Sitting Still At The Red Lobster, courtesy of Mister Picassohead.

2004-04-12T08:29:00.000-04:00

LIVING LARGE ON AN EXTRA $100 A DAY

In case you were wondering, here's some background on how to bribe your way into any restaurant.

No doubt the tip-starved hosting staff at these places is thrilled to see this piece, and I'm sure it'll be helpful to some scenefuckers looking to make a good impression with whoever might be impressed with a prime time seat at Balthazar or Alain Ducasse, and I'll use this information as soon as I have the extra fifty bucks to stuff in someone's pockets just to sit down for water & breadsticks.

But even at my richest, I've never had that much extra bling to spread around. Which means I've learned to cope with the second tier of restaurants, where the food is plenty fine and the servants are still somewhat snooty, and you get all the trappings of haute kweezeen without having to sell vital organs and live in a refrigerator box under a bridge to subsidize it.

"I know a place" is a vastly more appealing phrase to me than "Can you get me in?"

See, money comes & goes. But knowledge is power.

(But Tony, you're just jealous.)

You're so right.

2004-04-09T11:52:00.000-04:00

THE ROCK WAS BROUGHT, AND SHARED

Thanks to everyone who came out to see me play last night. I'm getting better at telling people about this stuff, but if you didn't know, please don't be insulted. I don't know how ready for prime time I am yet.

I have this fantasy where I just show up one day and blow the doors off the house, and all my friends are shocked that I'm as good as I am. Until then, though, I'm just some smartass with a lot of potential.

I hate the word potential. It means stuff you haven't done yet. The mere mention of damned word makes me miserable. But it is what I know. So I keep woodshedding long after I'm probably good enough to make a living at this stuff again (I did for a couple of years, so I know I can do it).

Anyway, it was an excellent night, and I hope to do it again. Thanks for continued listening and giving of a shit. I'll take it from you any time.

2004-04-09T08:34:00.000-04:00

THAT'S WHAT SHE WANTS

There are eight hundred quadrillion flash videos out there, but this one is fantastic. The music is really cool, the animation is black & white lo-fi perfection, and you really feel the flow and emotion of the piece. I'm a little bit blown away.

She wants to be A New York Girl in Baghdad.

2004-04-08T10:38:00.000-04:00

WHAT ARE YOU DOING TONIGHT?

This is my formal invite to get you-all to come down to see the official playing of (most of) the first CD from the Area 52 project. Come down and bring someone you love. Yeah, it'll be that kind of show.

Here's the specs.

Thursday, April 8 (tonight!)
8:00 pm
Baggot Inn
82 West 3rd St (between Thompson & Sullivan)
(If there's a cover charge, it will be minimal.)

After the show, there may be hockey watching, or maybe bowling, depending on how y'all feel. Maybe we'll have a sit down with tea and shortbreads.

I like shortbreads. But first, the rock shall be brought. By me.

Question this wisdom at your peril.

2004-04-08T08:17:00.000-04:00

THE GREAT WHITE WATERFALL

Milk bags. It's a Canadian thing. I might have thought it was odd as a kid, but now I look at it and think, who thought that was a good idea? Is the amount of trash you save by serving milk in a plastic bag really worth it? (Yeah, probably, actually. They're way cheaper to make, use and reuse than jugs or cartons, as long as you're not a total hamhanded klutz.

So no, then.)

If you've never used milk bags before, and you plan on moving to Canada, Here's a how-to for drawing milk from a bag.

Needless to say, there's nowhere else I've heard of on Earth that delivers milk in flimsy plastic tubes, and it certainly never made it to New York, where a sturdy container is the sine qua non of proper milk delivery. (According to ITV, they do it in India and Switzerland, and they've tried it in England. I stand corrected.)

I miss them, in the way you miss anything figuring prominently from childhood, but I remember the mess when a bag would rupture at the supermarket and some poor sot would have to hose down the rest of the bags and clean out the dairy case.

Go ahead and laugh.

2004-04-07T11:18:00.000-04:00

FRANKLY, I'M NOT THAT POLITE

This handy-dandy guide to walking in New York City is actually written fairly straight for TMN, and even though it doesn't factor in bicycle traffic (bikes are the fastest thing in the Manhattan street; they're vastly more agile than even pedestrians are, especially walkers who aren't paying attention, which is, sadly, most of them), it's a solid primer if wandering around NYC bothers you.

One other thing. Of course cars can kill you, but drivers in this town are as courteous and aware of their surroundings as anywhere I've ever been. Seriously. It's the pedestrians that are the dangerous ones, and following even these rules can only help make that better.

(What we really need is something like the WALK RIGHT! coalition. I'm way more scared of some dumbass on foot accidentally pushing me in front of a bus than I've ever been of cars that rarely get up to killin' speed, especially in Manhattan.)

2004-04-06T17:19:00.000-04:00

MY LUNCH HOUR

"So. What happened here?"
"Oh, Lieutenant, thank god you're here. It's horrible. Horrible."
"Alright, suck it up, officer, there's a lot of blood here, but it ain't Iraq. Tell me what happened."
"Well, the suspect was in the drugstore, over here in the Insipid Greeting Cards and Shitty Candy aisle, and that 'I Will Go Down With This Ship' song came on the muzak, and all of a sudden he screamed, let me get this quote right… Ah yes. He said, 'Clumsy trite little fucking metaphor, fuck this song and the whores that play it every eight fucking minutes.'"
"And then?"
"And then he opened a box of Bic pens and started carving people up. One witness said it was like he turned into the Hulk or Godzilla, some evil angry green thing. You know, it's odd how much blood a simple 29 cent pen can bring out of someone."
"Mhm. Is the suspect in custody?"
"That's him in the squad car. He's been screaming and beating his head against the interior of the vehicle for over an hour."
"He hasn't calmed down much, has he -- ooh, that's gotta hurt."
"Yeah."
"I hate that damned song too."
"It's unlistenable."
"Who does it? Dido?"
"Frankly, I've had no desire to even find out."
"You know, It's kind of justifiable, actually."
"The homicidal rage, sir?"
"Absolutely. My heart goes out to him. Listen. Clean him up, and take him home. Poor guy's suffered enough."
"With pleasure, sir."

2004-04-05T02:39:00.000-04:00

FINALLY (UPDATED)

Two (Deux! Zwei! Due! Dos! Ni!) new songs are up at Area 52. Under The Subway is a breezy little Christmas ditty about everyday apocalypses and salvation therefrom.

Also, there is the F word in it, in a place where it makes two internal rhymes and an alliterative declaration. I can't remove it even if I wanted to. Which, as it happens, I don't.

I'm mixing a version tomorrow with the offending word bleeped out for radio play (don't want the few deejays who play my stuff on air to get fired, because that would be, what's the word, oh right, counterproductive), oh and the bass will be in tune at the end. I have the technology, and I hear that shit helps, though I like the cacaphony at the end so maybe I'll leave it be. Funk as puck, brother. Bite my big shorts. So's yer ma. Epatez, little queen bee. Booyah.

And so on.

The other song, a Leonard-Cohen-meets-George-Thorogood thing called Tanzania, went up tonight too. L'Chaim, y'all.

Let me know what you think.

Oh, one more thing. I know this place has become a lame place for me to vent about the rigors of my recording schedule and the obstacles in the way of same, and I'm goshdarn sorry about that. But the election ain't for another six and a half months, Trivia and hipsterfucker parties won't reenter my life until next weekend and then only sparingly, and I got lots of other excuses, many of them possibly valid, for being so single-minded.

If I didn't love you, would I be humiliating myself like this, week in and week out, in front of you?

No, I wouldn't. So take your lovin' like a grownup, even if'n you ain't.

Good night and sleep well.

2004-03-31T08:03:00.000-05:00

WHY ALL MY CRAP IS STILL IN BOXES

So on this, the week I move, I'll be at two (two! two!) trivia nights. Last night, at the Baggot Inn (where I'll be playing a week from tomorrow, incidentally), we won handily in a thinned out field (we being Steph, her friend Jen, The Anonymous Outsider, this guy Matt, and two of Matt's friends). We drank like sweet vaguely competitive dilettantes we were, and won 25 bucks! You'd be proud, mom.

Tonight I'll be hosting another trivia night at Dempsey's in the East Village (2nd Ave. between 3rd & 4th Sts.). My carefully crafted questions on "Homeless Guys Courtney Love Has Infected" and "Places To Put A Hamster" are going to stump even you smartypantses.

But there will be booze, much of it free, especially if you win. Like, I think I mentioned, we did yesterday.

2004-03-29T12:48:00.000-05:00

YESTERDAY, IN BRIEF

The move went well. A two hour operation become seven tedious hours of grip-and-wait, with twice the number of trips. Heavy lifting, except I have no furniture to speak of aside from a kitchen table and a bed (now broken). The rooms still echo. I am a poor man. I have nothing. I can only give my heart.

They finished the renovations. Place looks fantastic. New stove, fridge, bathroom, cabinets. Cleaner than clean, and huge! Jeezus, I could install bleachers. Thanks to everyone who helped. (Vidiot and Val make that list easily, though my cousin Richard sacrificed his car (and a rare quiet Sunday with his new baby girl) to lug shit around and brave Midtown traffic all day long. He has more patience than me. He has more patience than ten of me.) New landlord, slightly older friends. I'm not worthy.

Leather-clad Valkyries shaking it to Parliament made up the welcoming party. There was more beer than we knew what to do with. We broke the bed. I lost a nut. Out cold by nine. Missed a party and a Zambonis show.

True, every last truncated fucking word of it.

Ultra-jaded outsider rants to return in 5. 4. 3.

2.

2004-03-26T09:34:00.000-05:00

FANTASTIC NEWS

I didn't know they had actually solved the murder of Mia Zapata. I hadn't heard of the Gits until someone played their album with Joan Jett filling in for Mia, who'd been raped and murdered in Seattle a few years before. That record is amazing, full of the savage beauty that comes from a great band playing through their collective grief.

But they actually found the guy who killed her. It might not be justice, but it sure as hell is closure. Right on.

2004-03-25T21:38:00.000-05:00

OUR NATION TURNS ITS LONELY EYES TO YOU (II)

Noam Chomsky has a blog. Of all people.

This is cool as much because there aren't a lot of bloggers I know who aren't in the 18-to-40 age group, and Noam is, what, a hundred and six years old, as it is that Noam Chomsky is blogging.

He's a dry writer, and some weeks he'll be as lofty and opaque as anyone, but (and I love that I get to use this line) no linguist is more cunning.

2004-03-25T11:02:00.000-05:00

THEIR NATION TURNS ITS LONELY EYES TO YOU

It's news items like this one that convince me that Jon's hiatus is temporary.

Who else would have the guts (literally) to keep on top of the continuing spread in popularity of deep-fried chocolate bars?

Now that the Brits have discovered them (and if that ain't a natural culinary fit, then what the hell is), it's time to sell them on my newest idea: mashed potato wrestling.

Book the commercial time now. All we need is a celebrity spokesbot. (Ah, get Kylie to do it. That creepy looking little minx'll do anything.)

2004-03-22T16:34:00.000-05:00

TRESS TEST

Chucky! What the hell did you do to Kimya's hair?

2004-03-22T11:53:00.000-05:00

TOUR DIARY

The show at Mr. Beery's in Bethpage on Saturday night was a sickeningly fun affair, with an absurd amount of shots being devoured and more musical styles than any freeform radio deejay could possibly handle.

Mike Ferrari can always be counted on to be a genial and stellar impresario, and despite the fact that the evening was running two hours late, he kept the crowd interested with lots of schtick and nonsense. And the place was actually packed. There was video and audio recorded of the evening's festivities, which was a good thing because I couldn't hear myself over the din of the mullet people in the audience, and I'd love to know just how croaky and fucked-up my voice was. It's always heartening when people I don't expect to like indie music are way into it, and this was no exception.

I think I might have killed a guy. It was all in fun, though. And he did give me ten bucks.

I was scheduled to go on at 11:30, but it was well after 1:00 when I finally got up. It didn't matter, though. No one left, and everyone was right into everything that happened. I could have made armpit fart noises for a half-hour, and it would have been fine. (That might be because I went on right after the energetic Imaginary Bill, who are my favorite Long Island band, bar none. But I think it was more that everyone was, and I'm quoting here, "screwed, blued & tattooed, dude," and would have moshed and groped each other to anything that wandered up on stage this side of, oh, Tiny Tim. Maybe even him.)

So like I said, the show was recorded, and if anything is listenable, I'll post it. But I honestly wouldn't know.

I got home close to 5 am on Sunday morning, which meant that Area 52 wasn't updated until about that time this morning. Yes, I'm bragging. No, I don't have a right to.

I'll push my next show (Thursday, August 8th at the Baggot Inn) a little later. But now I have to pack for the big move next weekend. And reclaim some sleep hours. That didn't happen at all this weekend.

2004-03-22T07:54:00.000-05:00

'SCARY KITCHEN SCORNED BEEF HASH': CRUDDY SIGHT GAG, OR INCISIVE COMMENTARY ON MAD COW FEARS & YANKEE OBESITY?

I loved Wacky Packages as a kid. They were part of the whole Cracked magazine playground culture deal when I was in the third grade, and just learning how to play hockey and talk to strangers without them taking my lunch money.

It was the kind of indicator that made separating the Cool Patrol from the eventual comic relief artists and Dungeons and Dragons aficionados easy. I remember sunning myself on the concrete ground of some friend's apartment pool one hot summer afternoon, having gone through so many packs of baseball & hockey cards & Wacky Packs that our sweat smelled like that crappy hard pink gum. I delivered the Globe and Mail for a few years as a kid, so for a kid I was flush with money, which I spent on packs of all these things, and sharing them with my friends probably stopped me from getting beaten up a lot more than I was. (It all comes back. Those were the days, my friend. We thought they'd never end.)

You always think these things stop existing when you stop being a kid, because well, they're no longer there. But it turned out that by the time I and my friends had discovered them, they weren't being made any longer, and the Havenbrook tuck shop where we were buying the things was thrilled to be selling off aging overstock. But I remember having a Coffin-Mate and a Jail-O stuck inside my hockey helmet, not to be cool, but because I was fidgety and that seemed like the right thing to do.

But now they're going to try and bring them back. I suspect this is going to sell to a lot more grownups than before, if only because in their heyday, it was the zany 70s, an era where everyone dressed like clowns and listened to bouncy stupid music and felt like they had no control of the greater world around them, and just needed the one-off dumb gag... yeah, actually, this is a good time for them to come back, ain't it. Or perhaps, in this the golden age of Photoshop, we should make our own. (Fark/Something Awful contest, anyone?)

2004-03-19T12:33:00.000-05:00

TALK ABOUT OVERDUE

It's only now that they're setting up a real Jazz Museum in Harlem, possibly next to the Apollo theater, where it bloody well belongs.

The museum will feature performances, storytelling and interactive exhibits from modern players and scholars, and should be a boon to the local community as well as filling a cultural gap that's been around forever.

Before this, if you wanted to make a New York jazz pilgrimage of any kind, what was there? Pay thirty bucks to see some hit-or-miss flashyfingered hotshot at the Village Vanguard or Birdland? Really, there was very little. In New Orleans, by comparison, virtually the entire French Quarter has become a jazz-age study hall, and places like Pete Fountain's, Tipitina's and Preservation Hall stand as places where you can see, learn and absorb what was happening fifty or seventy-five or a hundred years ago while still seeing top-notch contemporary stuff.

New York hasn't had a consistent place where the best of then and the best of now could be shown in proper contrast, and hopefully this place will fill that void.

[Two WSJ articles cited in one week does not constitute a trend, okay?]

2004-03-18T15:44:00.000-05:00

IT ROCKS, IT ROLLS, BUT IT AIN'T ROCK AND ROLL

So here, as promised, is a sort-of review-slash-reminiscence about Eugene Chadbourne's show last night, and a similar show he did with Mojo Nixon a little over ten years ago, which got me into playing music in the first place. Now, Mojo's retired, I'm slogging it out, and so is he. God bless him.

Just because it reads like I shat it out over my lunch hour doesn't mean I -- okay, actually, I did. But it's still worth a read, if you've ever had an inkling of what the guy actually sounded like. If you're happy just knowing there are people who sound a little freaky and impressionist, without having any time for it, believe me, I understand.

Aaron and I really should start a zine for this stuff.

2004-03-18T12:57:00.000-05:00

A FURTHER DISTRACTION

I got a big long review of the Eugene Chadbourne show at Tonic last night a-coming, but until then...

I didn't know Tony Millionaire made cartoons for Saturday Night Live. The humor's a little dark. I warned you.

And speaking of SNL, and we were, here's a list of Weekend Update jokes that were cut for various reasons from the live broadcast after the dress rehearsal. They do read good as one liners, some of 'em.

[via con dios]

2004-03-18T08:15:00.000-05:00

SET AT SERIF, AS SAFIRE STATES

An impressive collection of celebrity palindromes to kick start your morning.

[via Caren, whose latest book I'm reading right now.]

2004-03-17T17:24:00.000-05:00

SOMEONE'S GOTTA NOT MIND THE STORE

I should have mentioned it before this, but my monkey-pal Dan the Walrus has left his worldly belongings and is off on a trip around the world. How Phineas Fogg of him, or nobler yet, how totally Marco Polo of him.

Anyway, he's in India as I type this. I'm jealous beyond adjectives.

Oh yeah, and he's keeping a blog while on the road. It's fun just pronouncing the names of the places he's visiting, let alone reading about them.

2004-03-17T08:27:00.000-05:00

A HUGE PORTRAIT OF NANCY REAGAN FILLED MY DREAMS LAST NIGHT

There were a million posters all over the place at the Women's National Republican Club for the launch of Content, a architectural mindfuck book-cum-magazine exploring Rem Koolhaas' post-jadedist social-construction fetish. The hall looked like a political rally, and despite the fact that there was precious little in the way of food (hipsters, like any army, travel on their stomach, and none of us were going far on teeny chicken satay skewers and cucumbers), the bar was open, which kept the conversations between the other writers appropriately lubricated. Which for an operation like this is a bare minimum.

Now, I'd never heard of Herr Koolhaas before (he's as teutonic as you'd think in person, with all the ironed corners and stern clockworky precision in his movements you'd expect of an accomplished German Architect), but this book is typical Taschen, superglossy, oversized by half, and perfect for creatively blocked layout types to have a serious wank over. Every page looks like it was ripped from a different ad agency, and it hurt my eyes when I tried to read more than a couple of pages at a time.

It reminded me of one of those hippy-dippy books by Buckminster Fuller or someone from the '60s that weren't so much books as pieces of clip art and provocative photographs and slogans and aphorisms that were supposed to open that third eye & expand your mind into new and transgressive frontiers. The one I remember was Vietnam and astronaut-heavy, full of the-present-sucks-but-dig-the-future-oh-yeah-the-glorious-fucking-future.

This one is exactly the same, but about four times as big, with 9-11 and Mars substituted in. It'll turn a nice profit I'm sure, and you'll never hear about it again.

Oh, if it wasn't for Stephanie and Ron, I would have drank a lot more and left a lot earlier. Thanks, I think.

2004-03-15T09:46:00.000-05:00

MORE PROOF I AIN'T LIVING RIGHT

This man is the super in my building.

I could kvetch here about how I'm going to have to explain to the management assessor that the stains all across the ceiling are not my doing but that of either the person living upstairs or the decrepit condition of the pipes, which wouldn't be an issue if my super were more reachable, which is part of why I'm leaving for brighter, more spacious pastures. And if I'd known my super (My! Super!) was keeping spammers in business almost singlehandedly, instead of tending to the job I (and the rest of the building) pay him apparently about $40,000 to do, I'd have smeared goat blood on his front door or something (probably a nasty letter-writing campaign, but really, same diff) long ago.

But I'll save the standard New York City Tenants' litany for a time when I have even less to write about than right now.

Because what really tans my haunches is that apparently, the best way to get an article about yourself in the Wall Street Journal (and have one of those neat-o pointillist daguerrotype portrait thingys done of yourself) is to simply be real gullible and fund people who make everyone's life hell by their very obnoxious existence.

It may not be better in the new place, but I'll settle for different.

2004-03-12T12:18:00.000-05:00

HEY, CHECK IT OUT

I've been shamed.

Last night, this touring band from Ireland going on right after me brought an entourage of happy drunks and apple cheeked maidens to my show, and they were a pretty good band too. Apparently Vidiot was there, but I didn't see him. (I'll give him credit for attendance, though. The three increasingly agitated cell phone calls were a big ole hint.)

I was scratchy and hesitant, with stage rust I have no business having, even after six months. My guitar sounded like a ukulele, my voice resembled Jack Nicholson's at the end of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, all slurry and kill-me-now-chief. But the place was lovely, I got paid, which is always nice, and though I was fully prepared to take all my new frie-ends out afterward, a mess of people took off at the end of my set, so I was even in bed at a decent hour, which of course makes the baby Elvis very happy.

2004-03-11T11:19:00.000-05:00

I'M PLUGGING THIS PRETTY HARD

If you're not planning on Digitally oscillating the single serving soup dispenser, Having an arm-wrestle with the Lighthouse, Moisturizing the bunny, Scratchin' the crotch trombone or Assaulting the one-handed air guitar tonight, come on down to the Baggot Inn and have a listen to what the hell I've been doing this year.

I'm on at 7, which means there'll be plenty of time to, oh, Bludgeon the Staff, Wake Bubba, or Jack your Johnson afterwards. Or have a friend do it for you. Hey, whatever unblocks your tackle.

[link via]

2004-03-10T09:07:00.000-05:00

CANUCKLEHEAD
(Warning: Hockey)

My heart goes out to Todd Bertuzzi.

Not because I approve of the hack job he did on Steve Moore. It was a move that transcended simple words like dumb and wreckless and fell into a zone of deep, dangerous insanity, which I only hope and assume was temporary. Bertuzzi is a quality player, which makes this all the more surprising.

But now, his deep talent for scoring and playmaking, his well-earned reputation as a leader both on and off the ice, his marketability as one of the better power forwards in a game where good ones are rare, and some of the remaining shards of goodwill that hockey has over the other major sports have largely evaporated. People who don't know anything about hockey will point to this incident and talk about how hockey is a game for uneducated goons, ultimate fighting with sticks and knives on your feet, where you can break someone's neck because they knocked out one of your guys a couple of weeks ago and people will merely shrug, suspend him for a while, and move on.

What hockey needs is a serious charm offensive, and with the looming lockout, I wish I could be more optimistic that it's gonna happen.

2004-03-08T10:25:00.000-05:00

IF I OWE YOU AN EMAIL, READ THIS.

I know, baby, I done you wrong.

I been distant and actin' all funny, beng inconsistent at best (and nonexistent at worst) in this space, letting your messages go through to voicemail, ignoring you when you got real gripes about things like my hygiene and the stale turkey from Thanksgiving that's still in a Ziploc bag in my fridge and that now has the consistency and color of a mypetfat piece, I rented Deuce Bigelow Male Gigolo even though we just watched it last week, it's your birthday tomorrow, right? Whaddyamean, last month? Really?

Aw, shit, I'm sorry, baby, I just forgot. My mind has been elsewhere.

You know what it is, right?

I been thinking about music all the time, just making music, getting it into magazines and onto radio stations, into people's ears and heads and asses and spleens and chuck taylors and living rooms, and I been going a little crazy just trying to get on top of the flow, you know?

It's just coming, like a geyser, like a waterfall, like -- a third metaphor involving water would be great here -- a torrent, sure, okay, a torrent.

The songs are just coming one after the other. Old ones, new ones, reggae, death metal, ska, nose-harp tone poems, fuckin, everything just oozing out like a, whatsit, a catharsis, yeah, a catharsis. I had a bad year last year, baby, I don't know if you know how bad. Didn't get nothing done, hated my job, lost a lot of chi, baby. That ain't no good for nobody. That's why I set up the song-a-week thing, so I could at least point to something and go, well, at least I got some shit done this year.

And its working, sweet jumping elvis in graceland but it's working. I got a new job better than my last shitty one, I'm moving into a new apartment the end of this month that's huge, like, huge, like, bleachers-in-the-living-room big. I been working on my act in a secret location in Soho for my upcoming shows, and compared to last year, I'm rockin' like Dokken.

Now all I gotta do is get back to you, which I hain't done. And for that, baby, I lay myself prostrate on the ground before you in hopes that you might forgive me.

Much love to you and yours, Tony.

(PS - This is all true, every last jive-heavy word of it.)

2004-03-02T11:13:00.000-05:00

GIVE IT UP FOR... FIDELITY SCAB!

Brian Whitman created a script from a survey he did a couple of years ago that spit out Ten Thousand Statistically Grammar-Average Fake Band Names.

I like Secretarial Pagoda and Hornet Chewer, but then again, any Kurosawa reference gets me going.

Okay, no, I don't know what I'm talking about.

[via A-Rock]

2004-03-01T08:45:00.000-05:00

AREA 52 UPDATE

I knew weeks like this were a-coming.

I've been working ahead, trying to get more than one song done in a week, because I was a Boy Scout for all of three months (my mom couldn't afford a uniform and I remember even in the third grade thinking the whole conformist vibe was kind of bogus, especially since when I was eight years old I figured I'd be about where Mel Gibson is today, if you catch my messianic drift, and no, I don't know what went wrong, aside from the whole reality-kicking-in part. You don't have to say it, I already know), and in those three months the one thing I learned was that sometimes being prepared is a good thing.

So I've been working ahead for a rainy day, and this week it rained in Area 52. I wrote a sweet little song about seeing a friend of mine in a TV commercial (for a very embarrassing product that propriety forbids me to share, for the moment), and after fucking & mucking with it for three days this week, it just wasn't coming. There are two breaks in the middle that, despite the round-the-clock efforts of the greatest minds of my generation, remained unfilled.

I hate that.

So I got home from this Oscar party last night, thinking less about how sick I got watching Renee Zellweger squint and wince and preen through her speech and more about what-the-fuck-now, and then I realized. The Song About Drowning!

I stayed up all night remixing it, and I present it to you here. Enjoy the pants percussion, yet another Innovation By Necessity(tm) here at Nero labs, and the best guitar solo I ever played.

Being coherent at work is for wusses.

2004-02-27T09:12:00.000-05:00

AND WHAT EXACTLY IS A LOVE SPONGE?
NO, WAIT, I DON'T REALLY WANNA KNOW

I haven't listened to the Howard Stern show for more than eight minutes in the last three years. I spend enough time in my life dealing with six year olds obsessed with being repulsed by their own peepees and those of others, and quite frankly my life is too short to hear a bunch of uptight people carry on about it on the radio.

Also, commercial radio in general is a soulless wasteland of shrill screaming punctuated with ad jingles masquerading as popular music. If something interesting happens on commercial radio, it's a bloody accident, and you can bet it won't happen again. (I listen to WFMU, XFM and the CBC, if you want a recommendation.)

But that said, you gotta give it to Howard for being an original. If the revealing of one nipple (which, I'll say again, isn't anything a baby hasn't seen up close) can cause the FCC to bring an entire industry to heel, and if Clear Channel can push even the big pieces of their empire in a baldfaced and clumsy political attempt to stay in the FCC's good graces, then the people running mainstream media are even more out of touch than I thought.

Thing is, the political posturing is gonna work. Which sucks worst of all.

They've been making hangars full of money off people like Howard for decades now (he makes something like a half-million bucks per market he's syndicated in per year, so not only is he able to retire any time the exhaustion gets too much, but think about what his bosses are making off of him), but apparently he only became offensive last week, and the President of Clear Channel had never heard the flagship morning show on his network before, and now he's suddenly "ashamed" by what Howard's been doing since the mid-eighties. Do these people even buy their own line of bullshit?

Down at the UPS Depot last night while I was waiting for a special package from Latin America to arrive, I had a conversation about this with some homeless guy who apparently is doing a massive business in pirated computer equipment. Hey, I'm not judging.

"I been listening to Howard since he came to New York back in 1983," the guy was saying. "They're saying he's gotten worse over the years, but that's bullshit. He's in the getting worse business. He's supposed to be bad. If he doesn't get people angry, he doesn't have a job. That's what's so great about him."

"But can't he fight back? He is the King of all Media, right?"

"Yeah, well, the King done got de-posed." And he laughed and stuck his tongue out.

2004-02-24T08:18:00.000-05:00

THE SECOND-LAST TEMPTATION OF, UH, RUSSELL CROWE

It finally hit me, after weeks of media bombardment and foofaraw about how horrible Mel Gibson is for trying to make his little God movie as if it was the greatest story ever told or something. It was in front of my face the entire time, and I know I'm far from the first to get this, but that doesn't matter. The light just went on.

It doesn't matter one whit what Mel Gibson thinks.

Sure, he has more money than, well, God and he's always tanned and he's got a great ass and he blew eight hundred billion dollars on making some pre-Vatican II-literalist movie about how things "really" "went" "down" a couple thousand years ago. Well, great. I hear there's buckets of blood, and no one speaks English, and the Jews don't come off all that well. Whatever. It's a movie. There'll be a flurry of stories in the next couple of weeks, it'll do boffo opening weekend box office, and it'll close after a month, having made its money back. The wave will go back out to sea, ashes to dust, and what'll piss off America next?

How about a sequel?

-- The Apathy of the Other Christ --
See, here's the story. Jesus had a twin brother, Jesse, who couldn't be bothered to get into the messiah business full-time, but he kind of hung out, did portraits on the boardwalk at the resorts along the Sea of Galilee, chilled with his pals, Jim the Best Friend of the Baptist and the St. Luke's brother, St. Bo, smoked a little weed (okay, a lot of weed) and cranked out a few tunes on his lyre, like:

There's a hole in my brother's hand
Where all the money goes
Jesus Christ'll die for nothin', I suppose[*]
After the crucifixion, Jesse walks the earth, sleeping on couches and, I don't know, solving crimes? Sure, solving crimes, using his Dad-given powers, even though they've eroded from disuse, and eventually he and this hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold named Molly Magdalene settle down and open a roadside falafel stand and they live happily ever after in obscurity. And… credits.

I bet we could get Russell Crowe to do it. He's an Aussie-American contrarian sonofabitch who doesn't give a shit what you think, and not only would he do it just to piss Mel off, with him attached we'd get all the money we needed to do it right.

Right, of course, means shooting it in Jersey (Hey, it is the promised land, isn't it?) with whoever we could find.

Get me Crowe's agent on the phone. This is gonna be huge. And by huge, I mean miniscule.

2004-02-23T18:43:00.000-05:00

JUMPING AND JUMPING AND MISSING AND MISSING

Oh, and this week in Area 52: Frisbee, a second consecutive song about happiness. That streak ends after today, but seriously. Two in a row. That's, like, unprecedented.

In recording this week's song, I realized yet another way my year is going to change the face of modern music as we know it.

See, what Sidney Bechet did for the cornet, what Jimi Hendrix did for the electric guitar, what Walter Ostanek did for the accordion, what Ed Hamell has done for modern folk, I, Tony Hightower, aka Chico Amadeus Bangs, shall do for, among many other things, the kazoo.

Go ahead, laugh now. They laughed at Beethoven and Bill Gates, and one couldn't hear the taunts and the other one, well, he made out okay too. Neener neener neener.

The bus to the glorious future is leaving, and I'm driving. Are you on it?

2004-02-23T16:54:00.000-05:00

YOU MISSED A SPOT

I have no axe to grind with Norah Jones. She's a fine singer, a decent writer and, considering her pedigree, a total overachiever. She's way, way better than Edie Brickell. You can quote me on that. But I can't help thinking that maybe she needs a teeny dose of reality.

From this NYT story:

"I've always loved to read, but sometimes I go for a year without reading a book because I forget to, or I don't have a book that I can get into easily,'' she said. "Recently I've been reading a lot more."

Now, she's 24 years old. If she sometimes goes an entire year without reading a book, then she hasn't always loved to read, has she?

Look, I'm glad she's literate, and TV rots your brain. (I'm living proof.) But if you're forgetting to read for a whole year, then maybe you need something more than a little piece of string around your finger to remind you of what you've allegedly always loved to do.

2004-02-20T09:43:00.000-05:00

NOT FOLLOWING BEISBOL BEEN BERRY BERRY GOOD TO ME

I didn't expect everyone I knew to carry on endlessly about the Vietnam records of various Presidential hopefuls, or Super Bowl breasts, or Outkast or Dave Chappelle or whatever forever. And I know that this is Yankeetown and that baseball is everything to a lot of people I know, despite the fact that the season doesn't start for another month and they play 81 home games, which virtually no one I know can go to because you'd have to knock over a Brinks truck just to be able to buy a seat, even one high enough up that it requires an oxygen tank, and a cup of beer foam is eight bucks and a hot dog the size of my pinkie is another six, and -- they play eighty-one of the damned things, so how much does a midweek circle jerk in June matter?

But still, I understand. History. Civic pride. Championships. Lore. I get it.

But I'm tired of the fawning over Alex Rodriguez. He seems like a decent guy, and a hell of a player, and he makes almost as much as God and he loves his momma and eats his vegetables and they'll build a statue of him and school gonna be closed on his birthday. Great. Good on him. But -- enough.

On top of my work with the homeless and my forays into the worlds of curling, ballroom dancing and particle physics, I'm also a sports guy. Now, I know you hate sports, but you noticed I didn't ask you.

I stopped supporting baseball after the '94 strike. I figured any sport that cared so little for its fans that it would destroy the one thing every one of those fans stood for rather than give up a few precious dollars wouldn't care much if I stopped bringing my occasionally hard-earned dough to the table. Yay them. (This mindset is going to be challenged come next year's NHL lockout, but I have a few months to come up with a justification for that.) Anyway, it's been 10 years, and I don't see anything that convinces me to come back. A-Rod might make the world a better place, with the whole prodigal son come home to Gotham with the bags of cash and the whatever-it-is-he-does, but I ain't gonna pay none of that $252 million contract.

I'll go see the Brooklyn Cyclones at Coney Island, though. I'll even go to Newark to see the Bears if someone's up for that. After all, it's gonna be a long summer.

2004-02-17T17:28:00.000-05:00

IT'S A HELL OF A DRUG.

Having seen enough of the world that it was kind of almost a crime against my own experience that I hadn't been to Chicago yet, being so close and so big (yes, honey, I know you know what I mean), I went this weekend for my brother's birthday.

I landed expecting deep-freeze temperatures, and it turned out to be merely cold, to the point that I was sweating a little bit under my less-than-I-thought-I'd-need number of layers. I called my brother's buddy with whom I was staying, and with whom I spent the entire weekend (he was doing the occasional romantic thing with his wife, and what the hell was that all about?), which seemed like a large investment on his part, especially considering it was Valentine's Day weekend and his boyfriend stayed away pretty much the whole time. (At work, but still.)

First thing, we hit a drag bar with my luggage under the tables, and watched Steadman Graham (or an eerily close lookalike, minus about 40 pounds, but it really could have been him) giddily pass each performer singles, fives & tens in exchange for kisses, cheap feels and, in one case, simulated cunnilingus.

And how often does one get the opportunity to see Steadman Graham going down on a drag queen? Well, it was a new one for me, alright?

There were about four other bars that night, and I vaguely remember vomit being involved, but there wasn't anything on my clothes in the morning, and I was still on speaking terms with my captors, so everything was fine.

We watched Chappelle's Show (the infamous Rick James episode), from which we quoted liberally to everyone we met in town over the rest of the weekend. Pure fuckin' art, that man. It's a real wonder we didn't get the crap beaten out of us for the number of times we walked up to total strangers and asked them what the five fingers said to the face. (It's not the question, but rather the slap and the ensuing dance, yelling "Cold Blooded!" that tends to piss off the strangers.)

We kept moving, from Division Street to Michigan Avenue to Halstead Street (I saw as much of gay Chicago as I ever expected to see in a whole lifetime), from discos to neighborhood dives to the top of the John Hancock building. There was a detour to the Art Institute, and the only thing I really wanted to do that didn't happen was getting out to see some local bands. But it didn't really matter. It was a whirlwind trip, and I prevailed upon my captors enough as it was.

I feel like I met enough people that I could probably win the Illinois primary. It was the most fun I could expect to have by myself on Valentine's Day, and I'll go again when it's warmer, I promise.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some work to do.

2004-02-13T08:09:00.000-05:00

AREA 52 UPDATE

I posted next week's song already, because it's Valentine's friendly and because I can.

Go and download it, and if you like, share it.

The site seems to be getting a little more popular lately. The novelist Caren Lissner said something nice, as has Brad over at Antifolk Online (If you're feeling good about life, go get the Anti-Up zine now. My track on the accompanying CD won't be the only one to bring the proverbial it, I promise.)

Also, I wanna say hey to Jay at Hiphopmusic.com. That's a great site, with lots of thought and wit, and his attitude rocks.

Thanks to them, and to you.

I'll be celebrating our dead presidents by getting rid of a few of them on the streets of Chicago. (I should tell my booking agent that Chicago in February is known as not setting up my schedule properly, but I guarantee you my posse will rock no less hard for the chill.) Much of the weekend will merely be spent indoors.

Also, food and alcohol might be involved. One can hope.

Now, brothers and sisters, friends of the revolution, go forth and hug someone you love tomorrow. And today.

2004-02-12T14:52:00.000-05:00

HATING THE PLAYER, NOT THE PLAY (II)

Why in the world do we need a reasonable guide to openly decadent music? (Okay, "Scum Rock." I'll play along.) Not that it's even comprehensive. Where's "All Right Now" or "Too Drunk To Fuck," fergodsake?

This is halfway between two good ideas: either make a top-50 list with a sentence each abut how fucked-up these songs (and the people who sang them) are, or do a real essay on each of them, and make it a series. As an editor, I'd love to see 750 words on how jaded Exile-era Liz Phair was, or the story behind Dee Dee Ramone writing "Chinese Rock," especially if some of them could be written the same way Lester Bangs wrote about "Maggie May," fleshing out the story in the song until you can feel a bit of perspective and pathos for the people involved.

Because, my most excellent friend, the real point in this piece as I see it is to chronicle the veneration of degradation that has twisted the whole I'm-sure-the-Germans-have-a-word-for-it that has transformed Rock and Roll into the ever-less-relevant cultural dinosaur it is today.

2004-02-12T11:54:00.000-05:00

THEY ALL LAUGHED WHEN I RENOVATED MY BOMB SHELTER

If you thought Amercan foreign policy was anything other than a total disaster these last couple of years, the latest Mars photo shows just how far word has spread.

[via Looka]

2004-02-10T10:47:00.000-05:00

DON'T PLAYA HATE, -- WELL FINE, GO ON THEN

Look. No one's telling Roddy Doyle to like James Joyce, although you would think there might be a feeling of kinship from one idiosyncratic Irish literary guy to another (even in Ireland, where there have been a few of 'em, those types don't grow on trees), but to rip Ulysses for being sloppy is like ripping "Louie Louie" for having lyrics that are hard to understand. It's kind of part of the point. And who was going to edit that book, anyway? Hell, he could barely get people to read it in the beginning.

"People are always putting Ulysses in the top 10 books but I doubt any of those people were really moved by it." ... Doyle was dismissive of the "Joyce industry", saying: "They'll be serving Joyce Happy Meals next."

Roddy. Dude. You're an amazing writer yourself. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and The Van were transcendent, and both made me cry in places. We could easily be celebrating the centenary of your birth at some point too. But if you're fishing for publicity by trying to start some east/west blowdown showdown, don't take on Joyce. It's like attacking the Sphinx; the French have already shot his nose off.

No, that's not right. But even though he was a deeply flawed writer in many ways (sure he was sloppy, and he didn't finish his points sometimes, and you have to read his books out loud if you really want them to make any sense), getting all up in the Joyce Industry and calling for Happy Meals isn't going to win you any converts. The only people who'll notice are the hardcore Joyce fans. (Of which I am definitely one. Homeboy writes like I think. He follows threads into places I never seen a writer go, before or since, he mixes his pitches and styles better than Dizzy Dean, and no one who ever put pen to paper loved language as obsessively as he did. Ulysses might be more head than heart, but it made me laugh and cry and puke and wank like great literature bloody well should.)

The secret of a good rivalry, Mr. Doyle, which you'd know if you followed the saga of Pac & Biggie (or Sharon Osborne v. Billy Corgan, or even Uri Geller v. The Amazing Randi, even), is to pick on someone you can take. Sure, you could have a go at G.B. Shaw, or Oscar Wilde, but if you wanna start a Irish Lit turf war, what about Seamus Heaney? He's got a Nobel prize, but you could totally kick his ass. And you know, he might even play along. And in a couple years you two could kiss and make up and everyone sells more books. Win, win, win. Three bars. Cash in, cash out. Exeunt.

[link via Maud]

2004-02-09T08:21:00.000-05:00

IRONY-FREE MUSIC MISSIVE AHEAD

Two things I noticed watching the Grammys last night:

1. Justin Timberlake's song didn't completely suck. Perhaps it was because he was surrounded by the best Cuban Jazz players still alive (people like Arturo Sandoval and the rest of the nameless band, who moved very well) and had the good sense to stay out of their way, he was a half-step above tolerable for the first time in, like, ever. I don't think his keyboard was even plugged in, and he's not the sharpest cheese in the shop, but I'm beginning to belive that one day, in the distant future, he might figure out how to genuinely not suck.

This is a seismic change in my worldview.

2. Outkast are really, really fucking good. Sure, they have as much booty & bling as the next act, but there's a joy and bounce to the music they make that I don't see all that often any more, not even in places you'd expect to see it, like punk or Latin music. (To compare, Jack White looked -- workmanlike, I guess. He was fine, they rocked hard, but it sure as hell didn't match Outkast's Solid-Gold-Marching-Band glee.) Those guys must be burning through money like water, but they do look like they're enjoying themselves.

I missed much of the show last night, as I was trying to program this drum machine I found. (I did catch Celine Dion's mic meltdown and McCartney's playing 2 bars of Yesterday on tape from home like the aging vaudevillian he is, but I missed the Zevon tribute. Was there one?) I was hoping I could make something funky to play behind this week's song, but all my beats are a little too Laibach and not enough lay-back. Also, I was going through my freezer and found a couple of those single-serve gin things from my last flight and I figured now's as good a time as any other time. Which admittedly didn't help my sense of rhythm much.

Further research is required.

2004-02-06T08:25:00.000-05:00

On top of gunpowder, the helicopter, the mechanical drill, the parachute, and everything else he invented (not to mention that I hear the guy could paint pretty good), it turns out Leonardo Da Vinci also invented plastics.

Seems he did some trick with resins and made some substance that we now know as bakelite.

Bastard. He left nothing for the rest of us to invent, except for piddly shit like Flow-Bees and locking spaghetti pot strainers. Also, I bet he had terrible abs. See, he wasn't focusing on the important things, now, was he. Mhm, yeaup.

[via Dangerousmeta]

2004-02-05T15:47:00.000-05:00

FEIGNING APATHY
or, GOOGLE AS FREUD, DUDE

Not that I care about this stuff, really, but: Lovely Asses?

2004-02-05T08:14:00.000-05:00

A BRIEF NOSTALGIA SPASM, AND WE'LL BE ON OUR WAY
What was the last TV show theme song you really wanted to listen to? I'm talking about songs written to be theme songs, as opposed to, say, REM's "Stand" or even Warren Zevon's "Even A Dog Can Shake Hands" (which was the theme to the excellent and very short lived Hollywood-insider fuckyou-satire sitcom Action, about which there's precious little information out there), just to name two.

The reason it's on my mind is that I co-hosted the trivia night at Dempsey's last night, and one of the songs in the audio round was "Keep Your Eye On The Sparrow," from Baretta, which is such a git-down funkified thang that it made Sammy Davis cool all over again in a way that even Frank and Dino couldn't really pull off. (Those poor schlemiels were relegated by then to A-Very-Special-Love-Boat style purgatory for most of the 70s, until everyone realized they were gonna die soon and they got dragged out for their farewell tours and Lincoln Center love-ins and whatnot. Sammy… well, Baretta's up on murder one now, and Sammy's as dead as all his friends. No, wait, is Joey Bishop still alive? Oh, right, I forgot, I don't care. Besides, Joey's best work is probably behind him at this point anyway. But I severely digress.)

The 70s were a real glory age for theme songs. Chico and the Man, Welcome Back Kotter, Barney Miller, I'm sure there were others. Nowadays, what? Friends? What? I mean, I love the Six Feet Under theme music, but it's not the most hummable thing in the world.

See, what I'm really doing here is fixing to write one of these suckers myself. Anyone wanna pitch me an idea for a TV show they're working on?

Because, really, I need more stuff to work on. Also, I could use another hole in my head.

2004-02-03T13:14:00.000-05:00

HE GOES IN & OUT & IN & OUT

Item: Nude Accordionist Calendar Takes Off [via Jon]

One of the Super Bowl ads that climbed just this far under my skin (no, not this one, with which I'm finished for the moment) was an ad that implied that Jimi Hendrix was one soft-drink choice away from being an accordion virtuoso instead of a guitar god.

The implication was that that would have been a bad thing, and I'm not sure I follow that.

Dig, if you will, a picture.

Woodstock, Monday, August 18, 1969. The end of a mind-blowing weekend of mud and humping and getting high and communing with your fellow man, man. And music, yeah, oh yeah, the music was great, all weekend, man, Country Joe, Sha Na Na, Santana, fuckin, like, everyone was there, man. The toilets backed up, tents leaked, everyone slept in filth, but it was alright somehow, y'know? Because everyone was into it, man. You know? You know.

And the end of the weekend is coming, and everyone's dragging their dirty dopesleepy asses out of the muck and starting to pack their stuff, whatever they brought, and out comes the last act of the weekend, and it's Jimi, his fro out to here, tassels hanging off his sleeves hanging down to his knees, and he's got the biggest accordion anyone's ever seen. A full 88 keys on one side, and 88 buttons on the other, hazy purple inlay, the word FOXEY in mother-of-pearl up one side, a fine, fine work of art. The two hundred thousand people close enough to see the blood in his eyes can feel the heat coming from the stage, and he has yet to play a note.

Suddenly, with a flex of his shoulders, he pulls the first chord out of the instrument. Ten long, strong fingers, starting slowly, authoritatively, bringing the crowd to a halt, right in their tracks. A short trill, and then silence for two, maybe three agonizing seconds, and then a single note, high, gaining in strength and pace until it fills everyone's consciousness, and then down a third to the next note, and then the major chord that starts the Star Spangled Banner.

As people recognize what song it is, what Jimi is doing to it, they get it. He's telling the story of America, note by note, his hands pulsing and flying up and down the keyboards, his skinny shoulders shrugging under the weight of his great instrument like Atlas himself. He interjects the sounds of war, the rockets red glare, and everyone still in the garden is transported to that battleground in 1814 that inspired Mr. Key to write the song in the first place. The reedy sound of the accordion is both fife and drum, and Jimi is our new bandaged hero.

He plays eight and a half minutes, and when the final chord is squeezed out of Jimi's accordion, there is a moment where everyone catches their breath, still digesting that immense moment of sound. There's no need for Jimi Hendrix to light his squeezebox on fire today. He made his point, and even in scratchy film footage viewed three and a half decades later, the force of his performance remains untarnished.

Since his death a little over a year after that day, millions of kids have picked up the accordion, learned its nuances and capabilities, how to squeeze feeling and emotion from its ivory keys and rubbery bellows.

And this calendar sells a hundred times as many copies out of every music store in the universe, and this ain't so outlandish-sounding, if you think about it.

2004-02-03T01:44:00.000-05:00

ALRIGHT, I'LL PLAY.

I gotta preface this by saying I read On The Road at a very impressionable age, and did a lot of bus travel both for music purposes and just to get the hell out of town for a few weeks or months at a time. I lived in Vancouver for six months, and my brother lives in Minnesota. And I don't feel like I've seen barely a damned thing in this country yet. That said.

My "visited states" map is here.

(Create your own visited states map)

2004-02-02T11:36:00.000-05:00

THE GAYEST SUPER BOWL EVER!

And you thought the NFL wasn't never gonna acknowledge the homoerotic subtext in football. Well, if a nekkid dude getting tackled by a big muscular linebacker in front of a billion people ain't gonna open a few eyes, then what in the world will?

Then again, I was at a top-secret gathering of Nobel Laureates and high-ranking government officials watching the game in a granite bunker in a top-secret location about 400 feet below the surface of the earth, and even though we were viewing it on a screen created for watching the Mars expedition, none of us (not even Vidiot, that little eagle-eyed whippersnapper) noticed Janet Jackson's little Girls Gone Wild imitation. (There's no doubt in my mind that the flashing episode was planned, if only by Janet herself; she knows enough about both wardrobe and large-scale promotion that I can't believe she'd let something like that happen by accident. And Timberlake may be a dim little pony, but he knows how to play along with stuff like this.)

Seriously, I didn't know what had gone down until this morning. Props apparently go to the cat-quick prudes in the truck, who caught it before the impressionable kids in the flyover states accidentally saw something that only babies are allowed to look at up close.

And I haven't been able to find the source, but I heard that they opened the retractable roof during the halftime show because they were afraid the performances of Messrs. Diddy and Timberlake would suck so incredibly hard that the roof would fall in.

But it all turned out okay, they played the second half, one Metroplex's team beat the other Metroplex's team, and apparently there was rioting in Boston last night! With deaths and everything! And while I'm not as pro-death as I'd like to admit to myself, it warmed my jaded little heart that they have so little to cheer for in New England that even multiple Super Bowl victories can still whup the locals into an orgiastic murderous frenzy.

The world is a wonderful place.

2004-01-29T15:55:00.000-05:00

UNDERAGE HOOKERS AT THE SUPER BOWL

So let me get this straight. The RIAA sues a 14 year old girl for downloading a few Jay-Z tunes, and then in order to pay her legal fees, she does an ad (which will air during the Super Bowl) for Pepsi, a company that happens to be sponsoring iTunes, which (not to mince words or anything, but) is a pay-to-download service which only serves to perpetuate the current openly corrupt major label model in which the artist gets about ten cents of any dollar you spend on their music?

And they only get that much if they're not currently in debt to their record labels in the first place. Which weeds out even most major label artists. So maybe Jay-Z, to use this girl's favorite example, is getting that ten cents on the dollar. Great. His fridge'll stay full of Heinekens and jello-pops or whatever he does ads for. Bully for him.

But this goes beyond fucked up and into something like legalized extortion. This girl got squeezed for three grand, and now she's out there selling herself to pay off her "debt."

"This ad shows how everything has changed," says Mitch Bainwol, RIAA chairman. "Legal downloading is great because fans are supporting the future of creative work in America."

What rot. The only creative work I see being done here is in the marketing departments and law firms, who have left the real world, where many music fans might not want to give all their personal information to some online retail service to listen to just one song, and traveled into some kind of bizarroland where one corporation's lawyers taking a few thousand dollars from a teenager and then making her sell her dignity to another corporation to pay that money back is (and I'm quoting here) "sassy" and "a wink at the download hot button."

My gripe is not necessarily with iTunes. Hey, it might work out for everyone involved. It's the fact that the RIAA and their corporate partners think this is so damned funny that they're making a snarky ad using the victims of their own litigation.

I'd rather give my music away than let these bastards take a penny from its proceeds. Which means I'm in the wrong fucking business.

(Sorry. This just chaps my haunches.)

[via downhillbattle]

2004-01-19T19:36:00.000-05:00

A WICCAN'S BAD-TOUCH ZONE, AND OTHER COLD THINGS

Here I thought my Canadian (and Canadian-positive American) sistren and brethren were a hardy bunch.

I dragged my sorry ass (not to mention the ass of a very special ringer to whom I was hoping to feed a little local raw meat of the hockey-playing variety) out to the rink in Chinatown early Saturday morning, and despite the fact that compared to last week, when the temperature was measured in Kelvin and your breath molecules would visibly slow down as they reached the outside air, it was bikini weather on Saturday, with temperatures almost up to freezing and a thin layer of snow on the rink looking almost like virgin sand, nobody else showed up.

We sat there, having cleared off the bench area with my goalie stick, letting our coffees grow cold, thinking about what kind of shopping we might want to do, until we were positive that no one was coming, and then we went to this bakery on Baxter Street for the Chinese version of cup-of-coffee-piece-of-pastry, and got on with the business of a typical Saturday, which really means a lot of laughing at tourists.

The rest of the weekend had slightly less drinking than one might guess, but it was quite nice. And now that I'm alone in my apartment again, the walls closing in like a Star Wars Trash Room, I can get back to the business of cranking out songs.

Oh, by the way, new in Area 52 this week: the Earthquake Blues. I sure hate songs which use elemental forces as metaphor, and this sure ain't a blues song, but I don't much mind this one. It won't sound like anything else I do this year, I can promise you that. I couldn't make another song that could hide behind a beat like that if I tried.

One other thing - I love Dawn's quote about the songs so far:

The music I've heard of his isn't quite catchy enough for me, which, as I've tried to explain to him, very likely means it is perfect for many other intelligent and discerning music fans. Put another way, we can't all aspire to the greatness of Herman's Hermits, but some of us can approach that of Tom Waits.

I am happy to take that as a compliment ~~I'm not sure~~ she meant to give...

...and note that if by some coincidence I'm approaching the genius of Tom Waits, then I wouldn't know which peak to climb next. Peter Noone's genius would be as good as any. Although I don't think I can write a song like "Mrs. Brown, You've Got A Lovely Daughter," until I get me a ukulele. Add that to my shopping list.