Love is dead

So another far-out psychedlic pop pioneer is dead. Is this God's work? Or is it some sort of ruthless plot by the editors of MOJO to sell special memorial issues? Is a bump in sales for the History Channel of music magazines worth a man's life?
If I was Sly Stone or Brian Wilson I'd be sure to take care of writing my will, and then writing the inferior but far more commercially viable will that will end up being released.

With love

As a Christian, I follow Jesus for his teachings of love and tolerance; it is people like you who make me sick, I hope you die in a lake of fire and get your eyes pecked out by crows, so that you may go to hell and exist for eternity in a lake of fire getting your eyes pecked out by crows.

With love,

Charlie

Pastafarianism, home of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and best new religion so far this century, inspires poetic, idiotic hate mail

Contractually guaranteed to be the only person playing DJ Khaled

FRI 07/28/2006 9:00 PM Buy Tickets Online
TICKETS $5 Or FREE WITH R.S.V.P. TO CHICAGOGOESOFF@SOLIDPR.COM
THE SHOW IS THE RAINBOW | mp3
MY WERE THEY | mp3
VOLTAGE
LIGHT POLLUTION

FEATURING:
DJ BIG BLACKHAWK
DJ MILES RAYMER
DJ JOHN DUGAN


I'm playing records at this pre-Pitchfork thang-thang on Friday. Come out. I will play rap music at you. I will play it at you hardcore.
RSVP for guest list.

And make sure you give yourself time to use up the rest of your stash.

The Little White Lie at the Border is a time-honored indie band tour tradition, one that can save you valuable visa-applying time ("We are only traveling through your country between point in our home country and aren't playing any shows here.") and money ("No, we do not have any merchandise for sale; we are only here to record at a studio in your beautiful, freedom-loving land."), but apparently one that is also more likely these days to get you banned from our country for several years.
Are we really working to personally piss off each individual non-American body on the planet, or just to make everyone think we are?

L0u R33d iz teh r0xx0r!!11!!oneone!!

This and several other works of semi-retarded genius are up on fark.com's Recreate your favorite album cover in MS Paint forum.

The best rapper alive

I think the people at Dunkin' Donuts are in on it.

Is there any reason why I've been hearing "Bette Davis Eyes" so much in the past week? Is it some sort of soundtrack-based revival? A virus written by a fantaic Malaysian Kim Carnes fan infecting the computer DJs at Jack FM stations? A vast right-wing conspiracy? Or simply the universe's cosmic machinery grinding out a series of events designed to get me to favorably compare "Bette Davis Eyes" with these dudes? Somebody help me out.

Weirdo wake-up

If your MySpace bulletin board is all "room for rent in Brooklyn" and "hey come see me DJ at some shitty bar" and you're getting bored with that, you might want to sign up to be friends with CSS so you can start your day off with Brazilian ESL insanity like I do. The following was posted under the heading "TORONTO-CURRY-FACE-GOOD-GOOD":

TORONTO
HOW ARE YOU?

Yesterday was like honeymoon for us. You made us very happy.
Let's do it again in a month or so, ok?
Don't forget that night... I mean yesterday.


AND FOR YOU WHO HAVEN'T SEEN US YET.... YOU WILL.

Lalalalala means I-WANT-TO-PUT-CURRY-ALL-OVER-YOUR-FACE-WITH-SUNSCREEN-AND-LICK-IT-LIKE-THERE-IS-NO-TOMORROW-IN-TORONTO-BUT-THERE-IS-WE-WILL-SEE-YOU-IN-OCTOBER!

Paranoid & pretty

Sparks goes in, dumb comes out.

My new favorite Intonation Festival story isn't even about me. It's about my friend Ralph. For the few remaining people in in the world who don't know him, Ralph looks like this:

Kinda shitty photo, I know, but note that he has a kinda freaked-out afro and he is black.

When I saw Ralph in the VIP tent at Intonation, he was doing three of the five main activities he most often engages in: bumming cigarettes, promoting himself, and dressing pretty decent. There was someone with a pro-looking video camera floating around the tent asking I guess anyone with an interesting haircut if they were in one of the bands playing the festival. I was too lazy to try to impersonate one of the 90 Day Men, so I passed. But Ralph is always on his grind, so the camera guy got a long interview about Ralph's band the Jai Alai Savant, which was not actually on the festival bill at all.
The good story, though, happened later when a white girl tweaking on Sparks cornered Ralph in the tent and asked him, "Are you Gnarls Barkley?" Considering the multi-level abso-stupidity and racial WTF-ness of the girl's question, Ralph's sarcastic, "Yeah, I'm Gnarls and Barkley," reply was probably kinder than she deserved, although for the record he does have a pretty tough "sarcastic" voice.
I didn't hear about the story until a couple days later when I ran into him at the bar. "Yeah, fucking Gnarls Barkley," he said. "I mean, I at least kind of understand it when I get 'are you in TV On the Radio?'"

New rule.

The new rule is that you are not allowed to compare any record or band to another record or band "on [some drug]" unless you have done the drug you are referencing. The other day I saw a quote on some singer-songwriter's one-sheet that said he sounded "like Elvis Costello on angel dust." Which is wrong. Elvis Costello on angel dust would sound like Elvis Costello yelling at a wall. Needless to say, this dude in particular did not sound like Elvis Costello yelling at a wall.*
It really is true that you don't have to do drugs to be cool. I know a lot of good people who have only ever like tried weed a couple of times and decided they didn't like being on drugs, and getting busted on drug-frontin is way worse than saying, "Sorry, I was totally straight-edge until I turned 26 and decided to start drinking martinis because they looked fun," or whatever your experience was. People dropping references to someone "tripping on heroin" give me extreme "bags of sand"-style douche chills.

*Another thing: ODB, Sly Stone, and Shaun Ryder are the only people to have ever made a decent recording while smoking cocaine, so unless you're trying to compare an artist to one of these three musicians, do not say they sound like "[somebody] on crack." Crack doesn't make you automatically start rocking out spazzy, artsy music; it just makes you want to smoke more crack.

Kthnx

I feel kinda chumpish recommending something so completely obvious, but I just subscribed to the Fader podcast, and the newest edition has like every song that's wrecked me at any DJ night in the past month or so, specifically Raje Shwari's "Average Bitch" and "Teri Baaton" by Raghav. Jams is right. But seriously, I feel like yesterday's Red Eye where the two biggest features were about airlines losing your luggage and how if you're thinking about marrying someone you should learn stuff about them. Derrrrrrrr.

Bang on.

Dead Prez has the best merch. What you know about signature lines of soap?
Their set last night at Intonation was wall-to-wall bonkers. A half-acapella version of "Walk Like a Warrior," a cover of "Another Brick in the Wall," the weekend's only onstage commentary on white people hip-hop fans (condensed: It's okay, but you have a responsibility to look out for black people if you're gonna ride for free on their culture.), and the hands-down best banter of the whole fest: "I see these vampires sucking my blood. I ain't wit it."
DEAD PREZ IS OFFICIALLY ANTI-VAMPIRE. DEAL WITH IT.

Jesus Freakin'

Hello.
My review of Andrew Beaujon's book about Christian rock in online here.

Typo of the Day

"NAS: Earth hottest it's been in 400 years, humans responsible"
BoingBoing.net

And then he starts a "who's the world's best spokesperson for global warming" beef with Al Gore.

"Aging": America's hottest new trend?

"30 is the new 20."
-New York Times, Dec. 23, 2004

"Thirty is the new forty."
-New Yorker, Jun. 26, 2006

I don't know which of these is correct--or if 30 is the new anything besides 30--but I feel like just to be safe I should probably buy a new beer bong and get someone pregnant before next year.
Optimally I would be able to do both things simultaneously.

When your MySpace "Pending Friend Requests" folder tells you the truth.

"Currently awaiting approval from Stevie Nicks"
I think in a way I've been waiting for Stevie Nicks' approval for most of my life.
Breakthrough.

The fetishized gun violence web portal is open for business.

My friend Josh ran off with my "Bird Flu" post and dug up some goods on the deejay,Sample King, who sings it. He's got an official website, but the real goods are on his Myspace page, and by "goods" I mean "songs that test the very limits of how much MIDI gunfire can one song contain." To bear witness to "Weh Dem Know Bout That," (he is Canadian, so despite himself he pronounces "about" correctly, if accented) on the beat to TI's "What You Know," is to know exactly how many gunfire samples his friend who produced the song has on his keyboard. Two things Sample King might want to consider are that there are websites out there that you can download things like that from--nothing says "scraping the bottom of the MIDI barrel" like an old-timey whistling bomb--and that shouting out "sniper rifles" and other shit from Goldeneye is the "they feel like bags of sand" of violent rap lyrics.
More artfully (and more Nate Dogg-ingly) done is the Kadalack Boyz' "Never Slippin'" (mp3 link), which starts off with a beat built out of gun-cocking sounds and cannon blasts. When you get to hear a rap song that uses some of the same ideas the Flaming Lips were fucking with when they were still good you call that "an awesome day."

I say, "H5," you say, "N1"!

I don't know that I personally would've put the "Dancin' disease I spread it," line in there (a little too real, dudes), but I fully approve of the insane "shrieking eagle" sound, which I think about 5000x more songs should be incorportating. The latest proof that dancehall can take any trend, fad, or potential globally catastrophic pandemic, and make a song out of it: the Bird Flu song
via the Vice blog. Go here to see the dance that goes with it.

Stop looking like you're going to use that baby to make out with me somehow.

Hi. I'm Common. I stole your baby. Does that make you feel...sexy?

Sex on the Beach without Mr. De

Everyone's already bagging on the new Paris Hilton video (it's a music video this time, not more creepy porn), but that's fine. It gives the opportunity to say the first nice thing on the internet about it: To Paris' credit it takes her nearly one-and-a-half minutes to--by all appearances--begin fellating her co-star in public. Look at the 1:29 mark and tell me I'm wrong.

Because I'm not. I've been watching this thing all day.

Party jams.

Say what you will about the moral/ethical problem of keeping wild animals as pets, but you really can't hate on someone for rolling up on a party in a posse that's partially composed of the hands-down cutest predator in the Sahara desert.
I learned two things over the weekend: that the fennec fox version of yelling "woooo!" at a party is like a kind of meow-y yelp, and that watching people try to hit a pinata with a pair of panties over their eyes is really funny.
Actually, the second part of that isn't as much learning as confirming a suspicion.

An honest piece of truth told with the worst words:

"The real war is between those who are turned on, and those who are uptight."
-Timothy Leary
via Boing Boing

Fierce beards

Ever notice how you never see Al Burian and Gary Oldman as Bram Stoker's Dracula in the same room at the same time?

That’s just what it is, G.

The best rock crit rubbernecking opportunities recently have been Q&As with Ghostface Killah, who has decided to become the worst interview subject ever. There's a certain schadenfreud-style thrill that I get in seeing another journalist having their weakest interview questions backhanded into their faces by a guy who wears a robe in public on the regular.
Also nice is Ghostface getting a little meta on the interview process:
Lately you and many other East Coast artists have been criticizing Southern hip-hop, in particular songs such as “Laffy Taffy.”
Ghostface Killah: Man, that’s all y’all be talking about lately.

Is he commenting on the media's overexamination of artists' gestures, or critiquing the laziness of the pop culture press? Or is he just mad?
"Right now, I say fuck New York. Yeah, I’m from New York, but fuck New York. Because niggas is pussy. They is so quick to jump on the next man’s dick and can’t even deal with what they got in front of they face."
One day I will learn how to hate as hard as Ghostface Killah, and I will become totally powerful. On that day I will buy a robe and a cranberry Snapple and get to hating full-time. It will be the best day of my life.

Does not liking glitchtronica make you racist against nerds?

If you like glitchtronica and Top 40 hip-hop, then this will be your favorite. If you don't like that stuff, I don't know. Eat a burrito. You like burritos, don't you?

A moment of downtime during the Great Internet Indie Rock Racism War of 2006

Hopper: 1800 people come to my blog suddenly now thinking I think they are racists because they are into pavement, not cam'ron.
Me: hahaha
Hopper: whatever, they are.
Hopper: Maybe I should go on a crazy tear and say that "crooked rain crooked rain" is a symbol of the holocaust?
Me: stephen malkmus explicitly endorses the tuskegee syphilis experiments
Hopper: I AM GOING TO PEE I AM LAUGHING SO HARD
Hopper: Gary, the first drummer actually quit once he found out that Malkamus takes shit on known indian grave yards.
Hopper: yelling "fuck you injuns" and stuff.
Me: malkmus will have sex with jewish chicks, but only in the butt
Hopper: I think you should cut and paste it and make a blog post of it.
Hopper: of this, not Steve Malkamus' HASID HATER ANALJAM VOL 3

If it wasn't for press releases I wouldn't know anything.

"We are not supposed to rub food over our naked bodies."
Thank you, art. I was confused on this point.
"Marshmallow Fluff helps create the union between the natural and the inert by its dense, gelatinous consistency metamorphisizing and overwhelming the human and object into one."
Wait, you're just making this up.

Moet or PBR?

Propers to our boy Kanye for taking the hipster neckerchief to its furthest, flossiest end, Louis Vuitton-style:

I wanna seem him get on some nouveau hippie shit next, with like a Jakob dreamcatcher pendant. That would be fly.

Photo by Gina Erdmann of Brooklyn, New York.

Woooo. Woooo.

Do you have a summer project planned?
Mine is putting together a Lifter Puller tribute band, potentially called Lonely In a Limousine, or maybe the Wristbands. I already have dibs on the Craig role, and if Morgan ever comes back from Africa she's going to be Steve Dude, because she wants to play bass and she's always talking about vagina, but if you want to be in it, you should myspace me. We still need a lead guitar and a drummer and we're probably going to end up needing a horn section and some groupies.

Dammit now.

Seriously, why are you riding a tandem bicycle? I could maybe be okay with you doing that if it was a big, consciously dorky cruiser bike, and you were just cruising around looking like a dorkily in love couple. I don't get down with that shit, but I'm not gonna be mad at someone for broadcasting their shit-eating-grin love state for all the public to see. I can even forgive certain instances of couples wearing matching outfits. But no, this tandem bicycle was a slim racing bike that I can only imagine is made out of expensive alloys, and you both were wearing helmets and tight outfits and were hunched over your handlebars all serious-looking. Were you practicing? Are you a tandem bicycling team? I hand't thought of that before, but why would you be practicing on the streets downtown during rush hour? That doesn't make much sense.
What the hell, people?

Just (Don't) Blaze

Following up on Hopper's "Average Homeboy" post, apparently one of my co-workers is more familiar with Blazin' Hazen than the rest of us, and recommends this video. I recommend it if you're looking for a reason to be racist against white people, which this video provides at an average of two reasons per second.

My new haircut

Aren't list entries themselves cliched? Hmmm....

If you don't mind, I'm going to just go ahead and add a couple new entries to the List of Rock Band Promotional Photo Cliches. I'm sure we are all familiar with "The Alley That Our Band Is Standing In Is Meant to Represent Our Toughness," "We Are All On The Couch Together, A Band," "We Are Sitting On The Porch and Something Is Troubling Us or Pissing Us Off," as well as the rarer (but still overused) "This Is Us And This Is The Brooklyn Bridge For Some Reason." But time and evolution, and, ironically enough, the desire to take non-cliched promo photos has led to a rise in the number of band photos in these following now-cliched categories:
"I Am Lost In The Woods and Good-Looking"
"This Field Looks Like It Might Be Perfect For A Picnic, Don't You Think?" (doesn't count if band is actually picnicking)
"Hey Check It Out: We're Doing 'We Are All On the Couch Together, A Band'" (ironic)
"This Disarmingly Personal Photograph Shows that Beneath My Cartoonish Rapper Persona I Am Still A Man, and Human"
"Professional-Quality Upskirt"

I got something. I don't think it's the Look. It might just be a hangover.

Starting off two days in the span of one week with Roxette's "The Look" in my head is no way to live. I was having a conversation earlier today about the lyrics to "The Look". I was trying to remember them, and thought I was maybe half-making them up or just not remembering them right. It ends up that I was correct, and that "The Look" just has some lyrics that make no sense. I've posted them below. Current favorite line: "Naked to the t-bone"

"The Look"
lyrics by Per Gessle

1-2-3-4 walking like a man
hitting like a hammer
she's a juvenile scam
never was a quitter
tasty like a raindrop
she's got the look

Heavenly bound
cause heaven's got a number
when she's spinning me around
kissing is a color
her loving is a wild dog
she's got the look

She's got the look
she's got the look
what in the world can make a brown-eyed girl turn blue
when everything I'll ever do
I'll do for you and I go
la la la la la
she's got the look

Fire in the ice
naked to the t-bone
is a lover's disguise
banging on the head drum
shaking like a mad bull
she's got the look

Swaying to the band
moving like a hammer
she's a miracle man
loving is the ocean
kissing is the wet sand
she's got the look

And she goes: na na na na na na na na

And the He just kind of chilled out.

[God said,] "So because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth."
-Rev 3:14-19
If the "you" in the above quote referred to "salsa con queso," you'd have a pretty good picture of my Wednesday night. And then if God got stoned and watched skate videos, it would be even more accurate.
Truly, the Bible's power of prophecy is bad as hell.

Proof that world music is for assholes?

Probably unintentional publicity-related Goatse reference here.
Apparently all he was trying to do was turn us on to some new world music groups. Who knew?

Poll:

Which part of this rumor is more depressing:
A) That Whitney's (allegedly) gotta wear false teeth because her crack habit trashed her originals, or B) that she (allegedly) has a habit of losing her false teeth around the house during her binges?

Just real quick.

This is a video by a band called From First to Last. The video is notable for containing the most emo thing of all emo time: a beautiful, naked woman puking up blood.

The angel on my shoulder wears a doo-rag.

It's these last fucking couple of weeks of winter that are the tough ones. When you start getting the nice days like Saturday, and they feel like spring, but the next morning it's 34 and sleet, it's like God just saying "pssht" to your face.
I've been trying all winter long to keep my head up. The goal was to make it through one entire winter with neither crippling depression, or medication, the "medication" category including winter-long whiskey comas. I made it all the way through the end of February before a clusterfuck of dramatic situations got a hold of me and started tugging me down. Now I'm limping towards the finish line, bleeding, with little more than the image of Tupac lipsynching "Keep Ya Head Up" in my mind's eye to keep me dragging myself towards the end. I'm not even sure where the finish line is anymore. I figured it would be the first day that I saw girls walking around in tank tops, but that was last week.

Lil' Coldplay: the happening

I had a mustache briefly. I took a shower in a semi-intoxicated state last night and decided to shave down to the mustache-and-chin-beard combo favored by such people as actor Johnny Depp. I woke up today and looked at it and realized that I had made a mistake. I looked less dude-from-Santana than I had hoped, more your-dad-who-lives-in-an-apartment-complex.
-
My new rap persona Lil' Coldplay is going over better than I had expected. Thanks to the band Ester Drang and their milquetoast rock music styles for inspiring it. I am going to thank them in the liner notes to Lil' Coldplay's debut album A Rush of Def to the Head. Did I mention that I'm reviving "def"? Hip-hop historian Jeff Chang, you get a shout out in the Rush of Def liner notes for that. "Yellow, falsetto." That is how Lil' Coldplay raps. "Parachutes, bitches." You see that? The Coldplay fan that was sitting down the bar as I was first exploring the world through the eyes of Lil' Coldplay wasn't so amused. He kept telling me that Parachutes is really a good record. I said, "Yellow" at him a couple of times and he stopped talking about it. "I get you pregnant, Gwyneth Paltrow." Then he started talking about how he looooves to do Ecstasy, and that he's a doctor, and that if you take a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) at the end of your E trip you'll prevent any noticible imbalance in your brain chemistry. We tried ignoring him in a forceful enough way that he could tell that we were ignoring him, but he kept on talking anyway.
Somebody make Lil' Coldplay rich. Soon. He needs a new computer.

Better than our heads, at least.

You could kind of tell that the little Mexican guy on the 49 Western had liquor in the bottle of Coke he was tugging at the whole time he rode. If I had to put money on it, I'd probably say rum, but that might be some subtle racial prejudice. But the way he got all shifty-eyed each time he got ready to drink from it, sort of eyeing the four other people on the bus to maybe decide if he thought we were narcs, and the frequency of the sips, and the look of complete satisfaction he had after each drink, which you only get that look from drinking Coca-Cola on extremely hot days or if there's booze in it; it all added up. Plus the dude had wrapped his bottle in a way-too-large black plastic grocery bag, even though you could see when it poured through the neck that it was a standard Coke-brown liquid.
When I got home I started installing the new shower head I bought, but halfway through had to stop to take a call from a friend on the West Coast in the middle of a suicide attempt. Right now she's probably at the hospital getting her stomach pumped.
The shower head works great.

Work notes from the seminal period that lead up to his groundbreaking essay "Noise Boners".

My blogging's been suffering under the scope of my planned exegesis on the bukkake'd state of the noise scene. The essay's epic as hell. I've already written it about three times, so I should know.
Otherwise my time's mostly been taking up with arguing the journalistic value of the term "rippersville", trying to invent the onomatopoeia of the "bong rip" sound, writing a profile on the guy who played Jason in the first Friday the 13th (available in this week's Reader), and getting on the guest list for Fangoria's Weekend of Horrors convention in Rosemont. Which is basically to say I'm working on degrading the last remaining bits of journalism's virtue that Maxim and the New York Times haven't gotten to.
Meanwhile, a couple of questions for the readers:
1. Is there a way to address the topic of romantic triangles in song without coming of as exceedingly unimaginative and/or self-absorbed?
2. Is the shaved head a) a stylish and practical spring look, b) a blatant concession to one's turning almost-30 and sort of a physical expression of giving up on chasing styles that are becoming less age-appropriate with every passing minute, or c) too gay?
3. Would it be possible to use the spare cycles of a global computer network, a la SETIatHome, to artificially evolve the best mathematically possible onomatopoeia for bong rips?
4. Do you want to go to the Fangoria Weekend of Horrors?

We're like a full two miles out from authenticity at this point. Soon we'll hit international waters.

Some thoughts on Wolfmother (without going into their name):
Wolfmother rips off good bands and their singer has good hair. Really, wanting anything else from a rock band is pickiness.
That having been said:
No, music critics, Wolfmother doesn't sound like Zeppelin or Sabbath. The guitar lines they jacked from "Paranoid" are a red herring; the proper rock equation is "Jet trying to sound like the White Stripes" or the other way around. Confidential to NYC: And no, not "on acid". Probably on pot, maybe even on a lot of it, but their delay-heavy breakdowns lack the sort of frontal lobe sizzle and absolute pedalitrous conviction that mark the music of real acidheads. I'm not mad at Wolfmother, though. They're just the latest pencil tossed at the drop ceiling for an industry looking for an Important band to justify keeping rock at the front of the record stores. I can almost see groups of record executives kneeling together in prayer in a conference room in LA, trying to wish hard enough for a band that will eventually end up in the RnR Hall of Fame. If wishing doesn't work, then they bring out the checkbooks.

They're for when you're trying to sound smart, but then you realize that you're just making words up.

Portland is still the hipster "Big Rock Candy Mountain": the thrifting's good, the vintage-machine arcade serves beer, and everyone you meet is either a DJ or a band. There aren't any streams running with PBRtinis, but you can order one at a club with a tastefully worn-in modern design scheme, so it's all cool.
I came back from PDX with a bunch of photos of a half-dachshund/half-chihuahua named Carl Weathers and the beginnings of a new look. The look involves a camo parka, more jewelry, and possibly a ponytail. I've named it French Coke Dealer after Jessica's description of me the other morning. She meant it as an insult, but everyone knows that Eurotrash drug dealers are a total high-five among middle class white girls with parent issues. I'll take it as a compliment: that's an important demographic.
-
Q: What are the most important tools for someone attempting to write an article after reading nothing but David Foster Wallace essays and Blender for a week or more?
A: The delete key and a bootleg video of The Self Destruction of the Ultimate Warrior.

One out of seven is actually pretty bad

One of my really awesome talents is how I can pick up bits of how a person is speaking to me, little touches of cadence and accent, and incorporate it into how I speak back to them. For instance, the guy selling women's hats on the sidewalk outside of the Bottle last night spoke with a Southern African-American accent, so when I turned down his proposition of gay sex I kind of draaawled it out, y'know? Just kinda letting the vowels run the show. It's the kind of behavior that you read about in the books about the habits of successful people, but I don't read those books. The shit just happens to me.

If I had to spell it out it would be like, "huurrggghhh".

"When it came time to record, it wasn't hard for Stipe to recruit the artists who participated in the project. In addition to the duet with Coldplay's Chris Martin, Justin Timberlake and will.i.am (Black Eyed Peas) contributed a remix of the song that will also be available for download. Also involved were Fountains of Wayne's Adam Schlesinger, who plays piano, and former Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha, who produced the song with Stipe and Arthur at Stratosphere Sound studio in New York City."

In a tribute to the destructive power of Hurricane Katrina, Michael Stipe has created the perfect storm of douche chills. I'm not going to say that this press release makes me fully understand what it is to be a bloated corpse floating around in murky sewage water, but I feel like I'm a lot closer to it than I was yesterday.
This is like the musical equivalent of that scene in Wayne's World where Garth's talking about someone vomiting and the puke chain reaction that it started.

That's money in the bank.

I was thinking earlier about Yacht Rock, and I was thinking about how Jack Johnson is like the Yacht Rock of now. Peaceful vibes, sort of just mellowing out and looking at the sunset with maybe like a pretty girl with a giant bowl of G-23 government-grown turbo weed, that kind of thing. And then I was thinking that Yacht Rock 2004 would be a really good project for the Chicago kids to do. I would play the part of John Mayer, because I have the same ladykilling eyes that he does, and we both play real middle-class blues. Jeff Tweedy could play Dave Matthews because they're both like "the king", and Rob Lowe would make an awesome Ben Harper, because it's either him or Damon, since they're the only black guys our scene pays any attention to. (UPDATE: Rob calls this idea both "hilarious" and "really sad".) I'm not sure yet who I'd cast in the role of Jack Johnson. My first thought is Rob from Pit Er Pat, because he has short hair and seems to be stoned all the time, but I'm totally catching a "peaceful easy feeling" from the idea of a Conor Oberst cameo. I heard that dude has the fucking chronic, and besides he can probably write a full-length off of the trauma of cutting his hair. That's money in the bank.

You can't prove that it wasn't.

I mean, odds are that it was the prad kra-prao I had for lunch, but I'm gonna hold onto my theory that listening to the new Jenny Lewis record will give you violent stomach cramps. Cuz I'm a dick like that.

Food: there is just so much to talk about

When you are deciding on a name for your sushi restaurant, make sure you consider the fact that if you call your restaurant Touch of Sushi, I will associate your restaurant with someone poking me in the face with a piece of room-temperature shrimp, and that will keep me from ever eating there ever.
Food-related note: I am currently hungry. The second-closest place to buy food from my office is the place that deep-fries cheese. Not exactly a good situation.

Close to Chuck

I just snagged a book about Chuck Close from our review pile. I can still remember the first time I saw one of his paintings in real life. I can actually remember the exact words that went through my head at the time: "No fucking way. Oh my god." Not quite the stuff that gets one into Bartlett's, but if you've ever seen his works in the really real I'm sure you know the feeling.
I plan on totally jacking Close's whole late-60's look, as exemplified in 1968's Big Self-Portrait

if I should ever find myself physically capable of growing a decent mustache. Yes, the style-jacking plan involves never wearing a shirt, and yes I know it's sort a molestorfied look, but if Chuck's not sweating it I'm not gonna either.
I'm not so amped on the books title, Close Reading, but I can't really hate. You know there's not an editor on earth who'd let you write a book about Chuck Close and not use some shitty pun as its title.

Money is Still a Major Issue: the Internet's Premiere Financial Advice Blog

I'm putting some thought into putting together a serious, mature drug addiction. I'm across the board less interested in drugs than in previous years (despite Chris Hansen's friends who have been fucking with compounds that can apparently effect visits from Jehovah himself [psychedelics that inspire visitations from J-Hova are apparently not yet available] and Joe Rogan's ringing endorsement of DMT). I'm mostly just interested in knowing exactly where all of my money goes. If I had a drug habit I could definitively say, "I spent all of my money on drugs," an economic strategy whereby my drug dealer would become something like a bank account although one that doesn't allow me to access the money I deposit and also that has an interest in me being addicted to drugs. I'm okay with that, though. Strictly from a financial perspective it could be a good move, adding an element of certainty that my current spending habits lack. As it stands, I finish up every pay period with nothing in my bank, scrambling to figure out where all my money went and coming up with nothing solid to show but magazines, more jeans than I should own, and piles of bright, shiny things.

Super-producer and power seducer.

JR and I are both giving mad props to Lola Ogunnaike for giving us not only a dece, skeptical-ish profile on Scott Storch, but also for one of the Times' all-time most double-entrendrefied headlines.

Celebrate

For the past couple of days my main source of worry is my recent weight loss, which has resulted in some loss of definition in my pecs, but then I got a press release for a Martin Luther King Day foam party out in the suburbs and now I'm just worried that I'm going to go to hell for hanging out with white people.

I'm just gonna write about TV because I'm lazy and I love my TV.

I finally finished out the Lost DVDs, busting through the last two discs Sunday afternoon in marathon fashion in the company of serious homegirl Lara. We blankied up on our respective couches, ordered Pizza Hut, and said "Fuck you," to 2006. 2006 is a dirty bitch, and we will continue treating it as such until it delivers fame and riches unto us. Recognize, 2006. Recognize.
Finishing Season 1 was kind of a bum-out, though. We don't have broadcast TV or cable up in our place (we say "fuck you" to cable around here, as well as to 2006 and a number of other things/concepts), and our current level of in-house computing power precludes me from being able to (legally or not) download Season 2. Either Apple's gotta drop those Intel laptop jams now, or I'm gonna have to wait until next month's Portland birthday excursion and jam on some new episodes at Krystal's. Fucksville.

It is dark in the woods and sometimes freaky.

I spent X-Mas weekend back at my parents' house, off in the woods in the deep, dirt-road rurality. Stuck without a driver's license I get a little too into Dad's fully-stocked basement bar and a little too into the backwoods paranoia that can creep up on you out there. Without around-the-clock near-daylight conditions like we have in town I am prone to nighttime cigarette breaks that involve partial hallucinations. I have in fact seen a UFO out there, have woken my mom up to tell her that, and have had to convince her that I wasn't on drugs. I err on the side of caution when it comes to these freakouts. Until I'm absolutely sure that the piece of ice over isn't a crouching, attack-ready possum, I'm not going to take my eyes off it. I don't know how many of you have any experience being trapped inside of a building by stalking possum, but it teaches you some respect for a marsupial's potential violence.

If you want your iTunes to look like mine

Van Morrison "Want A Danish?"
Bloody Hollies "We're So Anxious"
Blood Brothers "Love Rhymes With Hideous Car Wreck"
Death From Above 1979 "Blood On Our Hands (Justice remix)"
David Banner "Certified"
Dennis DJ & MC Cabo "Tire A Camisa"
Kiss Me Deadly "Dance 2"
Mississippi John Hurt "Louis Collins"
Magnolia Electric Co. "Hard To Love A Man"
John Lennon "Bring On The Lucie (Freida People)"
Mannequin Men "Honey, I'm Dead"
Nightmare of You "I Want To Be Buried In Your Backyard"
the Fall "I Can Hear The Grass Grow"
Mean Reds "Minor Threat"
Xiu Xiu "Bog People"
The Robot Ate Me "Angel In The Snow"
Silver Jews "How Can I Love You If You Won't Lie Down?"
Diamond Nights "Dirty Thief"
Immaculate Machine "Broken Ship"
Celebration "Holiday"
Bloc Party "Pioneers (M83 remix)"
Vladimir Horowitz "Etude In C Minor Op. 25 No. 12" by Chopin

The low-end tech graveyard that we call home.

Despite our plans currently in the works to score a budget-priced widescreen HDTV monitor (the original plan of copping a resonable-sized television that would go on a little rolly-cart having been squashed by the sheer mass of cheap, ridiculous TVs on the market), the technology sitch around Casa Borracho is pretty janky at the moment. JR's iBook took a major shit last week, matching my own iBook's late-summer shit-taking, so we are currently time-sharing a lime-green iBook on loan from Hopper. OS 9.2 in full effect, full-time with the shitty Internet Explorer that is basically like our wireless router broadcasts the internet back to 1985 and we're supposed to blog from there, all discussing how Reagan sucks dick and how in a few years everyone's gonna be wearing Hypercolor sweatshirts. Apple had better release Intel chip PowerBooks before we revert to some Amish-style level of tech around here. I don't want to find myself having a serious debate with JR as to whether zippers are the devil's work.

The Diabolical Clinton Biz

Two of the main points Hillary Clinton made during her couple-a-minutes speech at a Crobar event in honor of her senatorial-not-we-repeat-not-presidential-campaign-she-is-not-running-for-president-seriously-not even-thinking-about-it fund-raiser event at Crobar the other night: the deficit is seriously like WTF, and young people are the future. The remaining point she made is that Chicago is a great city that is great to be in. No mention of the war, and they cleared the protesters away before most members of the press arrived, but my co-workers snagged some pics. The high point of the evening is when Biz Markie induced probably several severe coronary episodes by referring to Hillary over the PA as "Our next president-esident-esident" (complete with Biz-generated faux Yankee stadium reverb effects), then played the intro to "Crazy In Love" as she came out of the secret passage she used to enter the club. The low point was possibly when all members of the press were, immediately after Clinton's speechlet, ordered and, on occasion, shoved out the doors by Secret Service agents. But if you are into being all pissed off at the Man and the Pigs, it was kind of like a secret high point at the same time.

Do not bust that bullshit flavor at me.

We all know how tasty the peanut butter flavor Puffins cereal is, but do not think that just because the peanut butter flavor is the truth that you can go ahead and let them kick the honey rice flavor at you. The shit is heinous and nasty and it will wreck your afternoon, I swear.
Sal Principato from Liquid Liquid's coming to town tomorrow with his new project Electric Skin. You can read my writeup on it in this week's Reader. It's the first time that any Liquid Liquid-related project has hit Chicago, and it should be live. During my research for the article we discovered that Grand Royal's Liquid Liquid reissue is still essentially impossible to find on cd, but due to some weird twist of fate (or some bankruptcy-related inventory process) you can still cop it on lp at Grand Royal Direct. Is it worth twenty bucks to give your record geek bros jealous vinyl-boners? Some people would call it a steal.

America's media-saturated soul hits the club for the evening.

Every straight man in the club was sitting in the VIP. My friend Jillian was celebrating the first anniversary of her lesbian night at the Funky Buddha with a party that featured live goldfish in plastic cups and an appearance by Amanda Lepore. We sat around drinking some vodka-and-juice thing called X-Rated while attractive women made out on the dance floor to house remixes of Snoop Dogg songs. Amanda Lepore's entrance, somewhere around 1 o'clock was part movie star red carpet and part in-store meet and greet; every club photographer in town swarmed to get her picture, along with the gay club kids trying to get a shot of themselves with a club legend.
If you want to be famous for being famous, you have to be willing to make an effort. Becoming a transsexual with Jayne Mansfield tits and collagen lips too outrageously inflated to be compared to any woman living or dead works, or at least it does for Lepore. On paper, at least, she was at the club to perform. She's got a few clubby tracks that she sings on, and her single "Champagne" is definitely the number one best pop song by a transsexual probably ever. But the real reason she was there was to hang out. Hanging out is what she does. She's so good at it that all her singing and David Lachapelle and Heatherette modelling just look like side jobs, the way that everyone else in the place works at Whole Foods or waits tables. The Buddha's VIP section is just a roped-off area in the bar's corner, so everyone could see how the world's most famous professional clubgoer hangs: There's a lot of posing for pictures. There is a sidekick in punk-kabuki makeup and a stuffed animal backpack that may or may not be a conscious throwback to the Party Monster club kid era. There is an enormous bottle of champagne. Beyond that there is just hanging out.
It's hard to put your finger on whatever it is that makes Amanda Lepore compelling, but she is. She's a knot of America's unravelling sexual identity, the artificial incarnation of the blonde bombshell, the heartland's sexual ideal made out of skin-straining breast implants and a surgically-crafted pussy. I think what makes her matter has a lot to do with sacrifice. Lepore's something of a martyr, putting herself on the altar of the surgeon's table so we can all gaze upon the results. Think about it like this: she's Jesus, Andy Warhol is God, and on the edge of the scene in a darkened corner Marshall McLuhan is chuckling into his balled-up fist. It's 2005 and that's not too far from the truth.

The latest public apology.

I would like to publicly apologize for any comments I have made last night comparing graphic designers' overuse of the Cooper Black typeface to Richard Pryor "burning through a huge bag of rock, all ending up in the hospital, covered in burns." Richard Pryor is a comedy legend and an American icon, and I hope my comments did nothing to tarnish his legacy of being high as hell on cocaine.

1000x"Huh?"

Biz Markie is DJing a fundraiser party for Hillary Clinton at Crobar on the 3rd. I want to be there when Hillary and the Biz shake hands and rupture the fabric of the universe.

Weekend tips and cock teases.

There's going to be a good bit of juicy hip-hop gossip hitting the charts soon. I've sworn not to release the actual information, and because in the past year or so I've developed some sort of "ethics" or something I won't actually drop the specific info. But it's kind of rad news if you're into rappers going crazy, which I am; I don't know about you.
Tonight (11/18/05): I am doing a Sparks thing at St. Alfred ( which is across the street from Reckless/Rodan and they sell very fancy kicks) where you can hear super-new music from people on Ghostly and other totally famous labels. RSVP to krabby@stalfred.com. There are also goodie bags.
And after that the Avatars are playing at Beat Kitchen. If you like bands like the Pretenders or the Ramones, or if you own a shirt from a garage rock record label, you should be there.

Class actions.

I need a new coat. I went out shopping tonight, ready to drop triple-digits on some winter outerwear and maybe a Look upgrade. The past two winters I've been wearing the same Gap clearance-rack parka, and I was considering stepping my style up a notch with a nice-looking overcoat-type jam. I generally dress like someone splitting the difference between smacked out Stones and an acid casualty with femme tendencies and too many records. I'm nearing 30, and at some point I'm going to make the decision to either wear nice-looking clothes or go quietly into the eternal record store clerk/Thurston Moore night. I found an affordable, good-looking coat at H&M that actually fits me, and I almost dropped the $150 on it, but decided to hold out, sleep on it for a minute. Earlier in the day I had bought the new issue of Spin and within minutes found myself checking out what Franz Ferdinand is wearing for possible inspiration. It had left me troubled, finding myself in the midst of such a desperate action.
When my co-conspirator/occasional editor/full-time fashion consultant Jessica Hopper swung by I asked her opinion on the coat matter. "You should get a big puffer coat in a bright color. Just go to Rainbow and buy a girl's jacket."
As the universe is eternally drawn towards entropy, so am I ever drawn to tackiness, and the girls' section clearance rack.

He's like the hip-hop Katamari.

Dude, 50's entourage is absorbing entire other rap groups (2nd item).

Lies, Damn Lies, and More Lies

Oh snap! Fuck Napster's ad people, the Bush administration is bringing the real heat on the truth/not truth/are you really going to waste your time thinking about what the truth is (because really, thinking is so booooring)/bullshit-slinging. And fuck whoever says that G.W. Bush has got no talent: as an experiment, get a half-dozen friends or co-workers together and see if you can tell them, "Congress shouldn't pass laws interfering with C.I.A.torture prisons, but the C.I.A. doesn't actually have torture prisons," without either cracking up or breaking into tears.

OhSnap 2.06 beta

Big ups to whoever in the ad agency Napster's hired for their "Have Everything/Own Nothing" campaign that's currently plastered all over our bus shelters. If there's not already an award for advertisements that put the product's un-consumer-friendly features (in this case, the fact that if you sign up for Napster you don't actually own the music you download, but rather sort of rent it for the time you subscribe to the Napster service, and once you quit it you can't fuck with your own music that you paid for) there should be. The next prize in this category will go to whoever comes up with Sony's "If You Actually Legally Buy Our Music We Will Put Malware On Your Computer That You Wouldn't Get If You Downloaded Our Shit Illegally But Fuck You Anyways" campaign, if they have the balls to really go through with it.
In related technology news, I'm developing a program that will immediately place any manipulative emails from your exes into the your junk mail folder, along with an autoreply of an email with an animated .gif of a Mummenshantz guy giving the sender the finger. I'm calling it iThoughtyouknew.

The situation as it stands.

The kids out tonight at the bar I DJed were obnoxious, and it seemed like half of their dance-moves repertoire was "stomp your feet really hard on the ground." The other part was "jump up and down with your hands in the air," so my records were skipping like craziness, and it was super hard to cue shit. But they were moving, so I gave them what they wanted, which was last years indie rock hits, 1999's catchiest rap singles, and half of the Bloc Party remix record. At least they danced, at least I was getting paid, and as much as I questioned their lack of enthusiasm for any black artist after the late 80s I had to respect the way they made a muddy beer mess on the floor right off the bat to wallow in for close to four hours.
The cat's been edgy recently, but that's becoming the status quo. Like anyone whose gone from being the wallflower to being the life of the party she's going through a phase of unabashed whorishness, basking in the fact that anyone wants to touch her and letting anyone who wants to do so. I know I've been there. Maybe you have. But also the barometric pressure is up, and I know it's affecting my knees and I think it maybe was why that one dude had his shirt off at the bar, cold freaking hippie chicks like whatevs. If I've learned anything from watching people the cat will probably keep on this thing for a while and then either move into her own place to get her shit together or get a job bartending. I have to admit that I'm hoping for the latter, because bartenders make a lot of money and the fact is that the cat hasn't ever been able to chip in on rent or bills.

Requisat in Sock

During last night's festivities an unnamed sock monkey was accidentally immolated. Though the fire damaged only the beast's tail, the gruesome extent of the damage and the fact that it stank like burnt polyfiber filling was enough cause to determine the injury fatal. A short ceremony was held in the kitchen, after which the unnamed sock monkey was laid to rest in the trash can, and then shortly after in the dumpster behind the building. The sock monkey is survived by another, unnamed sock monkey and a stuffed animal of indeterminate species named Jose.

Some notes.

- My cat is greedy and lazy and dwarfed by her own sense of entitlement. I will make a great middle-class parent some day.
- For some days I have been contemplating the meaning of Julianne's Flash Gordon reference in her link to my blog. As of right now: still no idea.
- Hip hop is starting to feel just like any other sport to me. I don't follow sports. Can someone start making me a highlight reel? I like highlight reels.
- A coincidence: I was writing a song today and working out what exactly it is about Karen O's vocals that I'm trying to rip off, and I took a break to go downstairs and watch Katrina from Celebration totally head-fake Karen O from a decade and half a continent away. I'm used to watching bands that aren't as good as Jaks, so now I'm all confused. Damn, Bloodsucker, indeed.
- Sub-note: I am only ripping off female musicians from now on. I mostly only give a shit about female musicians these days, and it will be less obvious to people that I'm ripping musicians off if they're women. (What kind of self-respecting male musician steals moves from chicks anyway?) Don't hate the player, hate the patriarchy.
- Sub-note 2: Indian Jewelry is playing at the Mutiny tonight (10/31/05). If you wanna add some real tribal freakiness (seriously on some Spahn-Ranch-scene-report shit) to your Halloween, or if you just like oversized glasses of beer, go check it out.
- New issue of Hit It Or Quit It available now at record stores and Insound. Home delivery is available for single females ISO SWMs into spicy food, hot tubs, and long, drunken diatribes about what the reemergance of acid house "really means".

My morning in country music.

There is a certain note of emphasis in the way that Tad Kubler tells a venue security officer, "Yes, he will be drinking tonight," that can fill one with either intense dread or a terrible, terrible excitement. If drinking had a Pope it would be Tad Kubler. The bad news is that I had to turn down a night on the town with the dudes because I had to be up early. For some reason I volunteered to be at the Hard Rock Cafe at 9:30 this morning to spend the better part of a day watching would-be Toby Keiths and would-be Gretchen Wilsons audition for Nashville Star. It ended up that everyone there were total bros and everyone had a good time except for the people who were crying.

The bad song players.

I thought the whole point of professional DJs is that we pay someone so that we don't have to hear ugly transitions or "Tainted Love". Apparently RJD2 doesn't feel the same way. Dogg, if I want to hear 80s songs that I hate I would go watch my roommate's ex spin, which I don't do, because I hate them. Apparently Juelz Santana's Dipset anthem is the new go-gangsta jam for white kids...oh wait, Hopper just said that. Fuck it.

The season of sweater-tugging.

I was in an emo mood today. I found myself listening to Cap'n Jazz, pitching a story on Norma Jean, and bitching with Teeter about the scarcity of non-totally-ugly My Chemical Romance desktop wallpapers, all while eating a tofu dog. And I am wearing glasses. Yesterday I had a white belt on.
Later on I was wondering if it's more emo to use a Mac or to have to use a PC but really wanting a Mac.

What up NPR?

Hey dudes: Don't be broadcasting spoken-word pieces about some woman's childhood sexual abuse at lunchtime. Seriously. That's fucked up. I am trying to eat some pasta, not get all depressed and grossed out.

On-stage production techniques go nuts; I don't

My first thought when I walked into the Jamie Lidell show was that I was happy that there were seats. The rightness of this idea, and the deeper truth of it, was revealed to me with the show's duration. I actually like Lidell's Multiply, despite the fact that it's a 1+1 genre-melding exercise, more match-up than mash-up, strictly delineated and something like the musical equivalent of a tv dinner tray; no peas in my apple cobbler and vice versa. My problem with his live show is the same as any show involving a dude and his table full of electronics gear: unless that dude is going to lay down serious beats and be mostly ignored by a roomful of dancing people, I'm not going to hang out and watch it.
Last night I played at a singer-songwriter showcase. Before 2000 the singer-songwriter was the most self-indulgent thing anyone could see onstage in a musical context (Performance artists are the single most self-indulgent thing onstage or off in any context). But now there is a new expectation from musicians that their audience should be utterly enraptured by their knob-turning and experimental Xaos pad-tweaking, that that should qualify as a show. I am not enraptured. If I was sitting in a friend's living room, stoned, and they busted out their one man band looped beatboxing project, I would probably be blown away, but I spent over half of Lidell's show trying to check the time on my phone without getting busted by the guy who caught me doing that about 20 minutes into it. I will admit that a dude beatboxing house beats instead of rap ones is a novel idea, but not one that can sustain my interest. Lidell's schtick is that he does half a dozen things at once: beatboxing, singing, tapping out soft-synth beats, playing a little keyboard. It takes a lot of concentration, and I doubt that I could do what he does. The thing is, I don't go to a show to watch someone concentrating. The best concerts that I've seen involve very little concentration on the part of the performer. Either they're too fucking good at playing their instrument or they don't give a fuck and spend most of their time onstage drinking and/or inciting the crowd and/or doing bodily damage to themselves. The performer's freedom from what the technical aspects of what they are doing onstage provides the transcendence that we as an audience do or should demand from a performance. Jamie Lidell's constant multitasking came off more like someone trying to catch up on their email before a meeting than anyone providing entertainment to anyone.
A share of the blame for performances like this come from the inevitable perfectionism that is the outcome of music's computerization. 808s begat Pro Tools which begat a demand, starting with producers and record labels, through musicians, unto the audience, of perfect beat-matched tempos and exact edits, whether in the studio or onstage. Anyone doubting the validity of a performer singing along to a pre-sequenced cd or computer file seems like a Luddite now, and even singers with session backing bands are expected to deliver on-the-dot renditions of their studio recordings. (Did you see Kelly Clarkson doing "Since U Been Gone" on Saturday Night Live? It totally blew my mind because someone seemed to have let the band go and let them do all the feedback and skronk that the song needed to reveal its debt to the Pixies' first two records. It felt super loose and electric and amazing. Seriously.)
The rest of the blame, albeit a concentrated and distilled part of it, lies in the current solipsistic nature of music in our present times. Genres and sub-genres inspired by techno and hip-hop have been a fertile culture for the reproduction and amplification of the cult of personality that superstar DJs and cribs-flaunting rappers developed, losing all sight of the crowd-pleasing elements that both styles of music were built on. When producers become superstars, we're supposed to be enthralled by the act of watching producers produce, a "look at me" tricksterism that's assumed to be entertaining.
I'd rather watch dudes do wheelies. In middle school there were always guys around busting wheelies on their BMXs on the sidewalk in front of the school for any audience who happened to be around for it. You could tell that, just like these me-and-my-Pro-Tools "performers" they had spent a lot of time working out their tricks in private, making all their mistakes where nobody could see them and waiting for the time for them to bust it out and impress everybody. The difference is that a good block-long wheelie on a BMX is like poetry made out of physics, every bit as enthralling and amazing as any modern dance you could cite, with a greater chance of blood being spilled for the sake of the performance.
The other difference between wheelies and watching a guy twiddling knobs is that a wheelie takes up 20 seconds of my time at best, and at the end of it I'd clap my hands and scream out for them to do it again.

Bane's secret genius.

Holy shit, did Bane actually write a song about Texas Hold-'Em poker? An actual, first-person narrative song about playing Texas Hold-'Em poker? And it doesn't rhyme? And it's about Texas Hold-'Em poker?
Thank you, Bane, for writing a song that finally settles the argument of, "What is the worst hardcore song ever?" Now that we all have that to agree on, I'm sure scene unity is right around the corner.

Insane.

One of my favorite things right now is the slogan of the Revolutionary Communist Four Speaking Tour, “It’s Way Past Time to Throw Off the Chains of Oppression and Get With the Emancipators of History!”, a slogan whose totally awesome "Goddmamn it already," cranky vibe more than makes up for the fact that it is way too bulky and unwieldy to be a slogan that anyone will actually ever use. The other one of my favorite things right now is the Campo de Montalban cow/goat/sheep cheese. Imagine a shit-tight 3-on-3 street ball team, where each of the members is one of the type of milks that go into Campo de Montalban, your pallet is represented by the court, and the basketball is flavorfulness and when you eat some of it it's like all three of them are doing insane backwards slam dunks at the same time. Serious.

Farm Aid: the quickest of recaps

The only part of FarmAid that was better than Jeff Tweedy dropping two curse words and a blunt critique of the Bush administration into probably the weirdest live music set CMT has ever broadcast was when John Mellencamp dropped one curse word and a blunt critique of the Bush administration into a live CMT broadcast dudes all over the country had been sitting on their couch waiting for all day. If you're talking strictly the best musical moment, it was the couple of seconds connecting the moment I realized that the guy backing Neil Young up on guitar was Willie Nelson and the moment I realized that Emmylou Harris was walking onstage to join them. I was ensconced in the VIP luxury of the Sun-Times box seats, at approximately the height and angle relative to the stage that you would expect from an out-of-body experience.

"Sales of shit-cheap vodka soar...clips at the top of the hour"

There are two old guys downtown who stand on opposite sides of the street holding signs to warn passing tourists about the powers of Soviet mind control on one corner and, I forget, something like the evils of the Catholic church on the other. Usually the only reaction that they get from passersby are the kind of sarcastic laughs and pointing fingers that any nutbag wearing a sandwich board outlining the structure of the secret ruling class should expect when he goes out in public, but I bet in the coming weeks both of them will get at least a few people coming up, saying, "Jesus, do you know something? Anything? What the fuck is going on?"

A sampling of headlines from CNN.com as of 3 AM CDT:

"Poll shows Katrina's racial divide"
"Police find 8 Ohio kids locked in cages"
"Baby born to brain-dead woman dies"
"Police: NYC firefighter assaults immigrant"
"Chimps killed after zoo escape"

And that's just the front page.
I'm not looking at CNN.com again for another week. Fuck it, I'm not going to look at shit, I'm going to keep my eyes closed so tight that they bleed for the next week and a half because if I see so much as an empty bag of Doritos in the gutter I'm going to lose my shit in a way that could only be described as "completely."
You gotta be at least a little envious of those chimps, though. At least they could reach out and touch the bars they were locked behind, and at least they could get get away from them for a minute of unimaginable freedom before the zookeeper capped them down. Imagine how those minutes must have felt...

Cont'd

A non-specific response to the situation, but TVOTR keeps me believing in the possibility of actual voices being raised in actual protest in actual new and novel ways, theirs being a way that uses the pulse and reverb of a Peter Gabriel song to explore that space where liberal minds go when they're pushed too far by anger and start getting Manson-y. Bonus: the lyrics read like a harDCore song except probably for the part about dosing the pigs with acid.

Responses.

Imagine a blog devoted entirely to excuses why the blogger couldn't update...
The thing is, I got nothing. Everything that could be said about Katrina has been said better than I could, and writing about anything else feels cheap. I was at the bus stop today reading Spin's article on Franz Ferdinand and could barely hold in the, "Who cares?" that I wanted to yell out when I came face to face with the reality of where the drunken antics of rock semi-stars really fits in the eschelons of worldly importance. Consider my life and the would-be rock semi-star antics that it's based on and understand the worldshakingness of that realization. Consider a generation raised in these solipsistic decades under fallen-out hippies and the media empire they've built, and understand how the men who run this country can create this most fecund ground for a revolution without worry, because that revolution simply will not come. Understand how the task of processing tragedy via art will fall yet again into the wrinkling hands of Don Henley, how our demographic's yelps of outrage will inspire nothing more than another night of attempted dancefloor hookups, remixed and unimportant. We've embraced and recombined the aesthetics of all the most revolutionary musical movements since 1962 and shorn them of their revolutionary power by thinking the aesthetics alone can communicate our outrage, but our songs don't dare, don't confront, and end up little more than advertisements for hairstyles. For the first time in my life I kind of respect Conor Oberst and the yelps of outrage that he's been putting on wax, because crafting articulate lines about inarticulate frustration is unfashionable and great. Yelling shit of importance out into the cavernous echo chamber of American youth apathy is worth something, even if, in the end, it does about as much good as the "No War" button that's holding up my bedroom curtain.
What we need is an anthem. Is there going to be a "Kent, Ohio" for every black man whose liberation at the hands of soldiers came by a bullet instead of a seat on a bus? For every black woman raped in the essential hours wasted by uncaring, powerful men? The refugees being sent to detainment camps in Oklahoma, finally on paper as second-class citizens instead of just informally, will they have a song? I will try to write one for them, but I am not a great artist. I'm not sure that anyone else right now is either.

The Mathematics of the Politics of Ecstasy

Just finished the Perfect Panther record. For I think the first time I've made a record without a song about hating myself. The closest is a bit of self-recrimination about not being more active in promoting feminism, I guess, but I don't know. Maybe I'm just feeling better about myself. Or maybe my disliking certain people has finally outweighed my own self-dislike, because it has proportionally, an equal amount of diss songs as the last 50 Cent record, but with several hundred percent more parts that sound like we've been listening to more Nick Cave than we actually had.

"Butthole". Why not?

I just wrote a semi-businessy email re: some dj work in which I compared playing Nine Inch Nails for hipster kids with a finger to the butthole of a someone you're getting freaky with, in that very few people will actually ask for it, but more than you'd expect will go off if you do. For a second I thought it was kind of weird that I wrote that, but I guess it's just par for the course of mid-to-late 2005 when Jessica and I (usually totes up on the creation or early adoption of street-hot slang) are using the word "butthole" more often than any other Americans over age 8. It's like the slang equivalent of grad students working at Starbucks. I told a friend in a band that we titled an interview with him that's running in HIOQI XVIII, "Like A Laser Beam To Your Butthole". For a second he looked like I had told him we'd napalmed his living room.

Better or (preferrably) worse living through chemistry.

I tried to watch the Kinski/Oneida show tonight but I've got allergies and I realized 2.5 seconds into Kinski's set that I don't even have the financial resources to get stoned enough to get down with them. Then again, I barely have the financial resources to invest in a decent sandwich. But drug music's only good when the drugs aren't good for the musician, you know? For as much acid as the Butthole Surfers did, it obviously didn't completely agree with them, and putting the Geto Boys or the first Stooges record on mass repeat is like being friends with one of those people that smokes weed all day long despite the toxic, aluminum-foil-over-the-windows paranoia that comes from it. Without that unbalanced edge you get Donovan or math rock. It works the same way with the fans. The relatively sedate psych-folk revival's got its future pinned on the pseudo-booj market for spendy weed, but you set some kids up on a maintenence regimen of Ritalin and SSRIs, let them grow up to the age where they start fucking with some alternative chemistry on top of that, and you get System of a Down, Mars Volta, and Hella doing arena shows together, which is truly bonkers on several levels. When mallrats have a dozen or so degrees of amped-litude over me on the subject of manic avant-rock, it gives me pause. But I'm not even trying to get it. I'm sticking with super-premium vodkas because I'm trying to be the 2006 Dame Dash.

Oh, The Guilt

I just got done on a final edit of this like real cynical and snarky faux MySpace music industry survey where it was all, "Oh, (inside joke about some band that got really heavily PR-ed and totally sucked) [nudge, knowing smile]". I think I was actually kind of smirking to myself in satisfaction and loading Blogger up so I could post it on my blog when I all of the sudden remembered the war in Iraq and I was like, "WHAT THE FUCK!" You can't realize anything faster than how I realized how utterly pointless my fucking "bands you 'know'" vs. "bands you actually know" equation is. I swear you could almost actually hear me thinking "WHAT THE FUCK!" so hard that it echoed in the back alley behind my building.
Is what's happening to the subculture now like what happened to the hippies? Did we just become the hippies c.1972? I need to read some of the real paranoid Phillip K. Dick stories right now because that shit's starting to make a lot of sense, and I need to make myself a poster to hang on the back of my bedroom door that says, "BURN DOWN THE WHOLE FUCKING SYSTEM" so I stop forgetting that.

Capitalism makes you an asshole.

So the two anonymous comments on my blog today ended up being comments spam for a dating service. Hey, thanks a lot spammers. Way to fucking just go in and ruin my stuff. Do you have parties where after the keg's half gone and people are starting to loosen up and have a good time you hide in the shower and corner people coming into the bathroom to deliver high-pressure sales pitches for time shares in Cancun? Assholes.
Comments are disabled from here on out. Anonymous shit-talkers will have to start using a fake email account. My past enemies have favored Hotmail for this purpose. I don't know how well they liked the service, but maybe they have a Scene Drama quick setup tool or something.

Sometimes it's just all too much, right?

I tore up the plate of the nachos with systematic hunger of a state-of-the-art demolition crew, the desire for nachos being fuelled, sometimes, by the same hunger for negation or wish for an act of destruction to be a creation, for however many fleeting seconds that it happens, unto itself. It's that desire that fuels anything from the bedroom to the dancefloor that we call "tearing it up". At some point near the end of the plate I realized I was composing poetry about nachos. Staring past a chunk of pico de gallo, I realized something was wrong.

Boom

The two most busted-hair people in the club.

The story of me hanging out with Faith Evans is long, and I'm not gonna go into it, but I will say that it starts with me drinking panty-peeler shots and ends with her asking me for my number.

Bummer Summer

Talk about shitty days, though. The weather's like living 24/7 in the butthole of a guy shovelling coal in the engine room of some 1877 Mississippi steamboat, which gave me like THREE pimples, and then Bush does an end run around the legislature to appoint a new UN ambassador who will probably start like at least a dozen wars. How am I supposed to live my active socially butterfly-like life with acne breakouts and the democratic process of our nation eroding like a sno-cone in a piss stream?

The number one song in New York City for the past 20 years.

Another dip in the bubbly waters of flossy clublife last night at the De La afterparty. Guest list and gangsta-grips with the party promoter and a headlock-based hug thing before he introduced us around and bought us drinks. Handshakes with the guy who does Beyonce's house remixes. Afro maintenence tips and anecdotes with a girl named Betty and I thought for a minute that I should go out with her, mostly because we would be, you know, Miles and Betty, which is the type of music-writer shit that I always feel ashamed of whenever it pops in my head, which is basically all the time.
I keep thinking of the club or whatever it was that I hung out at in Kalamazoo, 1998. There was a warehouse north of downtown where all the raves were, and being halfway between the Chi and the D on the I-94 drug corridor everyone came from out of town and packed the place with more people than should have been at a rave in Kalamazoo dancing to better DJs than we deserved. On the ground floor and around the corner there was an office that had been used by a shipping company or something; drywall halls, cheap woodgrain office doors, a big garage. The garage was the dancefloor, all dim-to-nonexistant lighting, old oil slicks and newer water puddles on the floor, some kid from Western Michigan Univ. spinning some shitty soulful house. There was always about a third of the crowd that showed up there that didn't give a fuck about the DJ or the dancing. They broke into the offices to do coke or backrub circles. The socializing happened in the halls and the bathrooms, where people did more drugs and had more random sex. Candy ravers and punks hung out with Australian soccer teams carrying half a liquor store. Around then the tv news was running stories about the dangers and decadance of raves, and pretty much every sin and crime they listed in their items happened at the office every weekend. I pissed next to a drag queen for the first time there. When I finally heard Lifter Puller the next year it was like I had been waiting for years for them to happen.

Real hot.

Yeah, I know I haven't been blogging. Not blogging is what's hot on the streets these days. iBook batteries taking the grande muerto shit is also hot in the streets, so is saying, "Fuck y'all" and going inside where there's air conditioning and acting all reptilian and evil about your air con priveleges, and basically saying , "Fuck y'all" about anything is real hot. Apparently also hot: not giving me My God-Damn Money.

Loved Despite (Or Because) Of Great Faults

I'm at the studio right now, working on a record that will probably earn me less people walking up out of the blue at the Rainbo to comment on it than the picture of me on Cobrasnake where it looks like I'm staring at my friend Anna's tit. (For the record I was so spaced out by the 5am snapshot that if I did even see her exposed boob I never realized it. Not that anyone cares.)

The nighlife pays off.

Once again I said F's on the outdoor music festival and just hit the afterparties, but this time it was work. If the career aptitude test I took in high school had offered "Clubs Journalist/Photographer" as an option (my test suggested "Taxi Driver") I might have figured out sooner that making small amounts of money for staying out until well into the morning partying and yelling at people through a megaphone on the back patio of a condo neighborhood apartment is really kind of an awesome job. As it is I'm going through a club kid renaissance at age 28, although on a considerably nicer scale than the converted-shipping-company-offices-turned-ecstacy-dens that passed for clubs in Kalamazoo 1998.

Summer steez, not summer breeze.

My mix tape is up at Nylon.

The Intonation Afterparties Almost Killed Me

I missed out on Intonation Fest, but I don't really care. I didn't miss out on the swarms of indie girls in from out of town, trolling the afterparties for Band Ass. One girl at Redno I couldn't hear over the music, so she had to repeat it to me in single-word-yelling mode: "OH. MY. GOD. YOU'RE. IN. OUT HUD. AREN'T. YOU." You can imagine how bad I felt letting her down. I helped Liz pick out the famous people in the crowd and she told me how three seperate spiritual healers told her that she is basically going to give birth to the Chosen One. If you look her up and down and think about it for a second, it almost makes sense.
The night before, the Constantines show at the Bottle was balls-deep with Intonationers showing up already hammered. The vibe in there was heavy on the LA/NY indie rock networking with a distinct streak of county-fair-outdoor-concert hedonism running through it. When everybody was holding their arms in the air for the Constantine's breakdown/breakthrough part at least two couples were totally doing heavy public makeouts. I was mostly busy just trying to keep my shit together; Craig had hunted down some guys who would smoke us down and they ended up getting us so high that Craig was afraid of wearing a hat. Between that kind of hysterical retardedness and the effect that the Constantines's live show has on the cripplingly stoned, I was just barely holding on. Not so bad that I couldn't chat up a couple of label people, though.
The Constantines played the song that's made me think more about music than anything else in recent memory, a dead-on cover of Elevator To Hell's "Why I Didn't Like August '93", a piece of three-chord perfection that makes me think (first) how I have become one of Those Guys whose favorite songs are by obscure side projects of not-even-really-indie-famous bands or like the first ABC Diablo seven-inch and (second) how I still can't quite believe that I have an Eric's Trip tattoo. I'd like to word up Brennan Sang for sending me the mp3 of that cover by the Constantines, for remembering a time like a decade ago when I was nuts over the original and for realizing that I probably wouldn't hear it otherwise, since the idea of buying the Believer's music issue (which bonus cd includes that track) makes me want to projectile-vomit blood all over the walls.

They looked like a combination of "I can't believe you just did that" and "I think I just found a dead rat".

If anyone sees Kanye around, could you tell him that I think I have his copy of Double J's hip-house classic (?[!]) "Bless The Funk" and that he can have it back if he wants. I dropped it at a party last weekend and everybody looked at me like I had just diarrhea'd into the talk-over mic. I don't think the kids are ready for the hip-house revival yet, and I'm not sure that I'd want to be involved in starting one either. Actually, tell Ye that I'll trade it for one Roc-A-Fella charm, production on one song for the Perfect Panther album and one exclusive for my mixtape. Who knows, maybe "Bless The Funk" is like his Rosebud or something.

They don't stop selling liquor when things go bad.

Slept through another historical tragedy today. This is becoming a pattern, getting the word that our world has forever changed while I'm wiping the sleep from my eyes and trying to get out of my another-dream-where-I'm-trapped-in-a-mall-with-talking-animals late-morning/early-afternoon headspace. The morning the towers came down I was in a borrowed futon sleeping off a drinking binge with my girlfriend. We got the news from the futon's owner when he came back from class, waking us from a dead sleep at 2 pm. The tv coverage was already in recap mode. Which isn't as bad as my friend Neil. He was living in Brooklyn at the time. During that morning when everyone in NYC was scrambling to locate their family and friends, no one could get a hold of Neil. Eventually around 1 someone got him on the phone. He'd slept through the whole fucking thing. Something about me feels the need to commemorate the important things that happen during my life in the way I feel proper in order to get the maximum amount of Meaning out of each. I mourn dead rock stars with solitary drunken wakes. I wait for the wind to turn my spiritual weather-vanes in the right direction before I let myself put on the important songs so that they always keep their power to underline and italicize certain hours and minutes of my life. I don't know what I expect from history, maybe a phone call ten minutes before the event, "Mr. Raymer, it is essential that you wake up and turn on the news by 8:56. There is something you must see." I know I'm asking too much. Sometimes there's History In The Making and sometimes there's just terror sex on the couch.

What you can learn from someone who shits in a box.

The cat just tears across the whole length of my apartment, up onto and then off of the arm of the couch, getting some just serious air, and the goes right past me and the cat charmer toy that's supposed to be the point of this whole game, and buries herself under the pile of press materials on the living room floor. She pokes her head out with her ears cocked to the side at their most devilish angle, just looking like, "Fuck structured goal-based entertainment. I'm doing me." She can drop some serious knowledge, especially coming from someone who eats out of the garbage.