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.
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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.