ANOTHER YEAR OVER

Winter break time-- I'll be back posting in early January.

Happy holidays to you and yours!

Peace.

SO FRESH, SO CLEAN

My iPod has been talking to me again...

This morning on my way to work, it served up Do It Clean by Echo and the Bunnymen and then followed with Keep It Clean by Camera Obscura.

iPod, do you think I'm dirty?

MUSIC FOR BOYS

No amount of year-end persuasion is going to convince me that The Suburbs is a good album.

I will admit, though, that Sprawl II is a larf.

I'm beginning to think I might have Win Butler issues...

I'LL TUMBLE 4 YA

Big ups to Sebastian for helping his team take first place at their gymnastics meet this past weekend down at William & Mary. He won three gold medals overall, including the all around. (Then I spent the first half hour of the drive home explaining that the medals are not really made out of gold.)

Here's his winning floor routine...

YOU AND ME

We got our iPhones this past weekend.

I downloaded a ringtones app, and it's like deep-fried crack to me.

I've made about a dozen or so. Right now my all-purpose tone is the first 5 seconds of We're Not Adult Orientated.



My dedicated tone for when Taeko calls is the opening of Du Og Meg:

She fell in love with a boy
Who spoke her second language
And who lived across the ocean
In the Evil Empire

Which is pretty perfect...

WHO MADE THE GRADE

A ONE-A TOKE-A OVER THE LINE

Over on the other blog, I'm about to drop a reference to Brewer and Shipley (worst tease ever, I know).

Which led me to this. Gail and Dale doing "one of the newer songs" on the Lawrence Welk Show.

Hang around to the end and hear Mr Welk call it a "modern spiritual."

Sweet Jesus...

SMOKE AND LIGHTNING

It took me quite a while to get around to watching Anvil: The Story of Anvil.

I tend to react snarkily to heavy metal of any stripe, from Black Sabbath to, um, Stryper.

But it turns out the movie has a lot to say about the value of friendship and family and dreams. It’s subtle in ways you might not expect.

Hell, by the time they got to Stonehenge (and they did, literally, get to Stonehenge), I was too caught up in the small-scale human drama to get tripped up by the large-scale Spinal Tappiness of it all.

I think the best thing I can say about Anvil: The Story of Anvil is that I rarely laughed…

BROKEN GLASS EVERYWHERE

My hip-hop history?

Well, I can rap about 45% of Rapper’s Delight. Probably deliver about 90% of The Message. And I'm familiar with varying degrees of PE and BDP. But not much beyond that.

I know Kanye West more as a meme-tastic media figure than as an artist.

But all this buzz about My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (10.0! A! *****!) has inspired me to take the plunge.

OK, accolades, plus a $3.99 price tag from Amazon.

We'll see how it works out...

KNOT MUSIC

So while the official release date for the new Stereolab was 11/16, apparently it was available on iTunes about a week prior.

The curious thing is that it’s not currently available for download from Amazon.

Which leads to the question: Does Apple’s business model really get micro enough to cut deals for windows of exclusivity with relatively low-end unit shifters such as Stereolab?

If so, I don’t know whether to lean toward outright awe or plain derision.

Fun fact: Sebastian took a quick look at this cover the other day and thought it was pretty cool that someone would name an album “Snot Mucis”…

ZING! WENT THE STRINGS

New Stereolab released? Check.

Beatles on iTunes? Check.

The musical highlight of my day? Here...

IF YOU WANNA GROW UP

OK, one good thing about the Xbox motion-gaming appendage: it's got semi-obscure new-wave nugget Kinetic by Hilary stuck in my head...

RAKE AT THE (BILL) GATES OF HELL

When all is said and done, I guess I appreciated the irony of that Cadillac “lust for vomit” commercial from a few years back.

Once upon a time, Caddies were emblems of a version of the European immigrant dream (see “The Cadillac stood by the house/And the Yanks they were within” from The Body of an American), and I could see something circular and clean about GM putting a bit of money in the Pogues’ pockets.

That being said, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to reconcile the sandblasting irony of Microsoft using Natural’s Not In It by Gang of Four to sell the Xbox Kinect.

They‘re just utilizing the instrumental opening, but here are the subsequent lyrics:

The problem of leisure
What to do for pleasure
The body is good business
Sell out, maintain the interest
Ideal love a new purchase
A market of the senses
Dream of the perfect life
Economic circumstances
Ideal love a new purchase
A market of the senses
Remember Lot's wife
Renounce all sin and vice
Dream of the bourgeois life
This heaven gives me migraine

Coercion of the senses
We are not so gullible
We all have good intentions
But all with strings attatched

Fornication makes you happy
No escape from society
Natural is not in it
Your relations are of power
We all have good intentions
But all with strings attached
The problem of leisure
What to do for pleasure

Repackaged sex, your interest
Repackaged sex, your interest
Repackaged sex, your interest
Repackaged sex, your interest
Repackaged sex, your interest
Repackaged sex, your interest

The problem of leisure
What to do for pleasure
The body is good business
Sell out, maintain the interest
Dream of the perfect life
Economic circumstances
Ideal love a new purchase
A market of the senses
Remember Lot's wife
Renounce all sin and vice
Dream of the bourgeois life
This heaven gives me migraine
This heaven gives me migraine
This heaven gives me migraine

So, no. Just, fuck no...

PARAN MAUM

Finally got around to watching the slight but sweet Japanese movie Linda Linda Linda.

I’ve long had a soft spot for the Blue Hearts song that informs the plot, but it took Netflix to put the movie back on my radar.

It’s the story of a band of teenage girls preparing to play at a high school festival. They lose their singer, and end up recruiting a new one on a whim— a Korean exchange student who speaks very little Japanese.

The singer is played by Korean actress Doona Bae, who was in The Host (which is an entirely different flavor of awesome). She has a nice comedic touch— Keatonesque, minus the buster.

In case you never feel motivated to see the movie, take a few minutes now to watch the climactic festival performance…

NANKER

I should be nothing but indifferent to Keith Richards' memoirs.

But I read a couple of excerpts this week, and I was actually kind of disgusted. Not morally or ethically or aesthetically-- just sort of boringly disgusted...

SCOTLAND IS FOR ME

The iTunes genius was playing an 80s mix last night.

It hit Don't Talk to Me About Love by Altered Images, which I was sure would be familiar to Taeko.

Nope, never heard it.

Next up was Oblivious by Aztec Camera. Didn't think she'd know it from Adam's off ox.

And of course, she was singing along not 5 seconds in.

Her knowledge of 80s British pop (OK, Scottish pop) is so very unpredictable.

Full disclosure: This post was originally supposed to cover my current indifference to Belle and Sebastian's Write About Love. And in a way, I guess it did...

WE DON'T CARE ABOUT LONG HAIR

This showed up in my box the other day. It's a pic of one of the members of this band.

Can't remember which one...

Accoutrements of note: safety pins (natch), bike-chain lei, choke collar, spray-painted Clash shirt, indeterminate heart-shaped pin, and curling bar from a set of free weights.

HOUSE OF CARDS

Launch

ONE TIME IS ALL I NEED

Taeko loves the taste of coffee, and I really like the way it smells. By reasonable extension, I think you can say that we both like coffee.

Brain Coral and I have a similar relationship when it comes to musical taste. He noted this the other day when he was discussing Everything in Between. His current favorite track is Chem Trails, and he suspected that mine might be something different.

And sure enough, so far I'm favoring the shimmery atmospherics of Katerpillar, and those weird In Utero guitar squalls on Fever Dreaming.

But by reasonable extension, I think you can say that we both like No Age...

COMFORTABLY NUMBER

The 69 Love Songs entry in the 33 1/3 canon is too clever by 1/2...