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.
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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.
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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.