for those about to rock

looking for a thread (yes, i'm going to post here occasionally)

2008-05-27T10:36:00.000-07:00

my company moved its boston office over the long weekend. as i've unpacked my shit, i came across an old piece of paper covered by 3 little sticky notes with the names of different movies scrawled in my wretched printing:

sticky one: 'the longest yard,' 'charley varrick,' 'night of the living dead (90),' 'logan's run,' 'the gauntlet'

sticky two: 'gator,' 'death wish 4,' 'hercules in ny'

sticky three: 'cabin boy,' 'color of money,' 'disorganized crime,' 'serpico,' 'rosemary's baby'

that's it. no other context.

it has a name

2008-05-16T10:06:00.000-07:00

the new music blog: house lights soundtrack

fire

2008-05-14T09:22:00.000-07:00

complacence: just good enough; whimsy; the deliberate promulgation of symbols (ribbons a-plenty) and -isms as substitute for exercised human decency; rationalization of "me" and "my needs" (the reason that self-awareness is so important culturally now is that it's a slick way to break with the baby-boomers; somehow, the implicit logic is that self-knowledge makes naked self-interest more ok); marginalizing anything that threatens dandyism by deeming it too serious or angry (fear), or dismissing it with a roll of the eyes or a twirled finger at the side of the head; obscurantism as a substitute for substance.

funny that "purging" and "purgatory" are knotted together at the latin root.

meditation is its own kind of purging.

exercising is a whole lot of fat burning.

fire is a symbol of revolution. purification written on the grand social scale.

that's all preface to a change that's relevant to the blog, and while i'm shooting myself in the foot a bit by being vague, it's unintentional, and i can assure you that when i have a name for this new thing i've got, i'll let you know what it is.

thanks, jim

2008-03-31T09:17:00.000-07:00

pursuant to this post, here's someone saying a lot of things that are true (bolding is mine):

"By no means are those disparate cultures [moneyed white preppydom; afropop] natural bedmates. The best African and Caribbean pop is a joyful celebration of life issued in defiance of oppressive political forces, poverty and disease, or pretty much the exact opposite of the inspiration for the soul-searching of most preppy artistes. This is not to say that preppies can’t make great art. But Koenig is hardly following in the footsteps of J.D. Salinger, John Updike or John Irving by illuminating the profound emptiness hiding behind the cheerfully privileged facade; he is celebrating the superficialities.

“As a young girl/Louis Vuitton/With your mother/On a sandy lawn,” Koenig sings of an object of his affections in “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa.” “As a sophomore/With reggaeton/And the linens/You’re sitting on… Can you stay up/To see the dawn/In the colors/Of Bennetton?”

And let’s not even talk about the obsessions with Cape Cod and geeky academic trivia (“Oxford Comma” is a song inspired by the correct use of punctuation, while “Mansard Roof” pays homage to an architectural style famously seen on the Louvre), or the attempts to “keep it real” by contrasting such nerdy references with calculated name drops ranging from worldbeat pioneer Peter Gabriel to foul-mouthed rapper Lil’ Jon.

“Calculated” -- ultimate, that word is at the heart of what bugs me most about Vampire Weekend, and my gripes crystallized at SXSW, where the band members were ubiquitous, walking the streets wearing their Dockers and polo shirts, with white cardigans casually but carefully tied around their necks — in Texas, in the day time, with a temperature of 92 degrees."

hahahahaha

2008-03-28T09:08:00.000-07:00

look at this first.

10 things white people like

if i was to add a number 11 to this list, it would be: "self-awareness and playing with one's hair to look cute and thoughtful when mugging for the camera"

some pretty heavy IRONY there, given that this is the site creator we're talking about, eh folks?

if i was to add a number 12 to this list, it would be: "the veneration and sexualization of the slacker nerd."

see, my problem with this site (more specifically, the popularity this site has garnered) is that it's content to merely present these things. as is de rigeur, it spoon feeds its patrons with the most surface level observations WITHOUT implying any kind of stance, any kind of urgency, any kind of argument, any kind of significance or conclusion to be drawn from its content.

it's more empty navel-gazing junk along the lines of those vh1 "i love the __'s" shows. it's the stereotypical bad stand-up comic who has to tweak his voice when delivering a joke because the observation it contains is so baldly apparent (white people like impersonating this guy). it's subversion with training wheels permanently fastened on.

there's no palatable sense of, good lord, we're in TOTAL FUCKING CULTURAL INERTIA AND HAVE BEEN FOR WAY TOO LONG AND WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?!?

it's lazy. it's cowardly. it doesn't present anything new. it encourages complacence of thought. and ultimately, it galvanizes the acceptance of the essential herd mentality it purports to lampoon.

but hey, white people just love being in on the joke, so it's harmless, right?

i am trying very hard to not let this bother me

2008-03-25T08:07:00.000-07:00

and yet, i can't help it.

something about this -- "opening dawn: fans up early for baseball" -- reminds me that in spite of loving baseball and knowing that the red sox are going to be my team for the rest of my life, there's this weird provincial constriction to being a fan of the sox that has nothing to do with (or at least, should have nothing to do with) how the players play the game, or really with the game of baseball in general.

it's like, i read this article about people packing into the bars in the early hours of a weekday morning to watch their team, and then, quite unbidden, those stomping chords that open "i'm shipping up to boston" go rattling through my mental jukebox (remember when the music people called 'punk' actually went for the jugular?), and oops, here comes boozy, brawling sully, red-faced and full of piss and vinegar, and somehow this more than any physical danger he could possibly represent makes him a man to be given wide berth, a man to be accorded a tacit respect, i guess, and yes sir, here comes some anonymous, crowing, drunken floozy wearing a pink red sox cap and hanging on sully's arm, and her volume will have to be tolerated by one and all because she'll put out some sloppy sex, things revert as they always do to form, bobblehead dolls, remdawg, wally, dunkin donuts, "-ah" everything, f-ing shaughnessy, real salt of the earth people, boston traffic, everything's a-ok, we're all marching belligerently without a care in the world, aside from the satiation of the loudest of our screaming hungers, onward and forward towards death.

this is what it calls to mind. it's hard now to imagine starry-eyed kids with big league dreams getting psyched for little league, and memorizing more numbers than a nasa engineer could hope to cram into his brain, and i don't think of elder figures passing along first-hand accounts of moments that have fallen through history's cracks to eager, reverential listeners, and i don't feel these sweeping, overwhelming senses of tenacity, of triumphing over adversity, of blurred racial and national lines, hands joined in the brotherhood of the common goal, because so many meaningless and certainly less vital elements of the game and of a team are amplified so greatly.

yahooism's been written about a million times over, and i certainly have nothing new to add to the discussion, but man, it just sucks when, just as has happened with music, politics, comedy, etc., yet another means by which the individual can make a healthy connection to the collective is co-opted, and the experience's innards get yanked right out so that all we're left with is a mold, a rigid, systematic way of creating expectations and reacting to outcomes. any fandom surely hedges on doing this and occasionally does indulge, but hardly ever to such a pervasive and overarching extent, and perhaps that's the price we pay for success.

maybe this speaks to my own generally foul mood, and that's really alright with me, and just like everything else reverts to form, i might as well welcome comments that speculate on my own unrelated creative, professional, social and romantic frustrations in life, because of course those must inform any observation i make that leaves a bitter taste in readers' mouths (i guess if i was in better frame of mind i'd merely think these things rather than write them?), and it's much easier to deal with an argument or observation on tangential grounds than it is to meet it head-on.

the kills' new album is really, really awesome

2008-03-18T12:49:00.000-07:00

good review here ... i'd write one myself, but i've got a full plate with a certain video game blog challenge.

it occurred to me

2008-03-11T07:58:00.000-07:00

this morning in the shower that the alarm screech most alarm clocks emit (i think we all know the one) has the exact same attack/rhythm as the shower scene stabbing music from the movie 'psycho'.

it works.

bacon burrito

2008-03-07T12:12:00.001-08:00

game time

2008-03-06T07:25:00.000-08:00

got a fresh link sandwiched in between the old ones over on my sidebar: 8bitreview.

the site's still in the nascent stage, and i think its format may go through some changes as it gets bigger, but basically, it's a videogame-oriented site that culls tasty/offbeat game news, hosts forums for users to use to schmooze and reviews games new and old (and given the wii's virtual console function as well as the ridiculous abundance of hand-me-down games and systems available through ebay, freecycle and the like, it's in this latter regard that 8bit is likely to usefully distinguish itself from other sites of its ilk).

my friend tim, who's a talented writer and a learned gamer scholar, has posted a bunch of quality content on the site (and being mr. modesty, i almost hope he doesn't read this, because he'll do his best to contradict me), and i'm hoping to help out with some game write-ups as well.

give it a click, drop by the boards, stay awhile.

"HERE WE GOOOOOO!!"

2008-02-15T08:14:00.000-08:00

there's a nice old guy who works as the bostonNow hawker mornings at the porter square stop.

you can tell he upholds an old school work ethic; i.e., a job. no matter how big or small, is a thing to be valued, and deserving of one's best efforts.

he operates with the rapid-fire style of salesmanship of an olde tyme newsboy, belting out, but not quite hollering, his pitches in the general direction of every commuter as each enters the station.

he projects with gusto. it's as though he's offering up free cups of crucial coffee, not these cheapo rags that'll be used later to soak up spills on the seats of the trains.

he has a catch phrase: "here we go!"

it's even better when you consider that he tailors it to be context-specific at times:

- the day after the patriots lost the superbowl: "alright, spring training's starting up soon, here we go!"

- on a rainy day: "bostonNow! nice and dry! here we goooo!"

- to me as i bolted through the porter T entrance late to work and aimed myself at the escalator: "alright, on the run, here we go!!!" (holding out a paper to me like he was passing off a baton in a relay race)

he's kind of awesome.

vampire weekend

2008-02-14T09:49:00.000-08:00

it's charming when the haves pay tribute to the have-nots.

i'm still here, sort of

2008-02-13T08:16:00.000-08:00

been a little lean on the writing here these days ... part of the reason for this being that i'm wary of falling off the horse the minute i get back on after having been off so long (and as i read "let us now praise famous men," which my good brother scott got me for christmas, i'm absolutely humbled by young james agee's ability to meditate on a moment in an environment and just stretch it out through time and space, and i feel tremendously self-conscious as a writer when i consider prose and its potential in this light), and part of the reason being that i've been awfully busy in other areas of my life.

one of those areas is the music department, and it feels like jamie and i may have finally found the vocalist we need to round out our band. she's got lots of band experience, she has her own equipment, she sings with oomph, she jibes with us on the personality level and she's got a professional attitude. we've got a second audition lined up with her this week, though i've already got a very good feeling about things based on our first meeting.

tentative: if we maintain this momentum, i think there's a good chance that there'll be an acoustic show in which we debut some original tunes/perform some covers in the near future. rest assured i'll plug it here.

i'm realizing that i'm at my happiest in life when i'm working towards attainable possibilities.

anyhow, acknowledging that there's been a dearth of new material here, and just because you deserve some good reading, i'd like to direct your attention to my sidebar:

elliott's resurrected his blog under a new name: this is l.a., not boston.
he's a great writer, and i'm looking forward to reading new stuff from him.

my buddy robin has started up a travelblogue chronicling his asian tour: 5 bucks.
expect some good mayhem.

finally, my very handsome friend alex has boarded the blog train: scallion pancake.
he's got one of the best senses of humor out of people i know, and i'm hoping that he starts updating the damn thing with some actual entries.

great moments in the history of dramatic turn-arounds

2008-02-08T09:50:00.000-08:00

charles sheen at the 0:00 mark; from "major league"

daltrey at 0:20; from the who's video for "i'm a boy"

mr. fuji and don muraco at the 1:00 mark; from "fuji vice"

finally, the apotheosis and absolute standard bearer, jack lord at the 0:18 mark; from "hawaii five-o"

probably the only context in which i could say i like dr. timothy leary

2008-01-23T12:24:00.000-08:00

probably my favorite passage from "room full of mirrors: a biography of jimi hendrix"

2008-01-17T13:58:00.000-08:00

so while en route to toronto with the experience in 1969, hendrix was busted at canadian customs when mounties found heroin and hash tucked away in a piece of his luggage. here, the author, charles cross, is summing up the trial on the resultant charges, which took place in december. for the sake of context, this is how dire his case, which could have resulted in a lot of jail time, appeared on paper: since he couldn't deny that the police found narcotics in his possession, jimi's defense basically rested on the notion that a groupie managed to slip the party favors into his stuff unbeknown to him ... testimony in his defense amounted to "well, gifts of drugs are common from groupies."

anyways, emphasis here is mine:

" ... the case went to jury, who deliberated for the longest eight hours of Jimi's life. They returned a not-guilty verdict. Jimi said it was 'the best Christmas present I could have.' He flew back to New York AND IMMEDIATELY GOT EXTREMELY STONED ON HASHISH."

a little music for yous

2008-01-15T11:12:00.000-08:00

one of jamie's buddies posted a rough recording of one of our (me, jamie and mike) songs on his blog.

it's nice to have a tidbit of what we're doing available to anyone who's curious about the music we've been making.

"whelp, yer a day late and a dollah short!" - awesome regular at this bar in belchertown i used to go to

2008-01-04T11:28:00.000-08:00

was in the store yesterday and saw that golf digest had tiger woods on the cover and thought to myself, "they really should just change their name to 'tiger illustrated'".

that would make a good onion headline.

well, about ten years ago, it would've.

sorry.

hello writing group

2007-12-22T07:24:00.000-08:00

you could call her bazooka betty
based on those big butts she smokes
like she wants to cram nicotene years
into every last breath
like her overstuffed pocketbook with the hoops
where tobacco flakes cake the bottom
and hard candies and crinkled wrappers
are caught up in a tempest
could she open up her bag
and catch a ride home on the winds
she'd have to take with her
those buses she always takes
wrapped in the neon pink jacket
worn season to season to season
and all the drivers' names
she keeps stored in jars
behind her big tinted glasses
along with the rest of the world

the haunting of me

2007-12-18T08:41:00.000-08:00

if you have comcast cable, you're probably familiar with the on demand service, a tivo-style feature that allows you to view a bunch of stored programs and free movies. you can find an awful lot of fun stuff on there, and the number of free movies on tap is surprisingly generous.

so this past saturday night, it was time for a little creature double feature.

first up was the devil's rejects. i remembered hearing some good things about it, and i was hoping i was in store for a fun, freewheeling romp with lots of carnage and a bevy of one-liners as charming as they would be lame.

nope. what i got instead was a movie that plods along, step-for-step, the tracks laid down by the old texas chain movies and spends altogether too much time congratulating itself for delivering debauchery that is neither as effectively shocking nor gruesome as it would have you believe. i do get why horror fan boys would dig the movie and the clear homage it pays via throwback, though, and i have to admit i enjoyed watching bill forsythe once again tear into the role of depraved character with his usual relish, this time playing a self-righteous small town sheriff with a bone to pick with titular characters. looks like diamond dallas page had fun in the small role he played, too.

the second movie was a ghost story called the haunting of julia (aka full circle).

i'm kind of a sucker when it comes to supernatural horror flicks from the seventies. there's something hardwired into this kind of movie that stirs me up on some level ... maybe it's in their soundtracks and the queasy feeling those typically rubbery synths induce, or maybe it's in silences (muted soundtrack, no background noises) that can cause small eternities to seep into your mind, or maybe, at the risk of getting too heady for my own brizzitches if i'm not doing so already, it's in the tint of the visuals, which gives these films' characters and environments a weird verisimilitude.

even a BAD 70s ghost movie can be strangely compelling to me, and the haunting of julia would probably be just that -- a straight from the mold, tepid thriller with forgettable characters and scares coming squarely on the usual beats -- if it weren't for a couple of things:

1 -- mia farrow, who plays julia, is terrifying to look at. only sissy spacek (thinking 'carrie') and shelley duval (thinking 'the shining') could give her a run for her money, and

2 -- the movie is bookended by two incredibly unsettling scenes.

within the first 3 minutes of the movie, we get to watch mia farrow's young daughter choke to death on a piece of apple at the breakfast table. this is an agonizing scene to sit through, and it only gets worse when julia attempts an improvised tracheotomy as a last resort. much of this scene is up on youtube if you'd like to upset yourself.

for the sake of limiting spoilers, i won't get too much into the details of the last scene, but the fact that the majority of users on the imdb page make reference to it is testimony to its power. the camerawork and the final lingering shot that it sets up are gripping, and absolutely worthy of hitchcock.

that last scene is pretty unforgettable, even in spite of my best attempts to do so. see, when i watched it this past weekend, i remembered that i had actually seen it before ... about 20 years ago. when i was around 8, i was flipping through the television channels one day and landed on this last scene as it played out. i was mesmerized, even though (or perhaps because) i was missing the context of having seen the rest of the movie leading up to it. and for a good few weeks after seeing it, i remember, i played it out in my mind over and over again, hoping that chewing on it for long enough would eventually make it lose its terrible flavor.

i guess i managed to bury that memory somewhere down the line, but not so deep that seeing that scene again didn't pull it right out of the grave. it's that affecting.

still, seeing it in context and with maybe a little bit more wisdom under my belt, i was able to detect a poignancy to it (just as some of the folks on imdb have), and, taken in its proper perspective, this boogeyman has finally ceased to be.

eerie?

2007-12-08T08:47:00.000-08:00

i snapped the below picture at the airport t stop one day after my guitar lesson with the turkish tornado and self-proclaimed turkish spider-man (long overdue post on him soon).

the picture is of a photograph from the 1920's of three boys sitting on a bench along a path in an old boston park. the scene runs along one of the walls of the subway platform, and it caught my eye as i waited for my train.

what grabbed my attention was the little guy in the middle. the kid looks remarkably similar to what i looked like at his age. here was a little me, circa 1926.

the coincidences didn't end there. to the kid's left is a boy that looks like a young scott. it's not even a stretch. and to the kid's right is a boy who, upon close inspection and with perhaps a TAD stretch in light of the bushy-lookin eyebrows and cleft chin, could pass for a young justin.

am i going out on a limb? can YOU see it?

[update: the pic was taken in 1910. the setting is belmont park.]

laughs, right on

2007-12-08T07:57:00.000-08:00

truth

my favorite jimi ever

2007-12-06T07:49:00.000-08:00

at the 1:30 mark.

i know he's only reacting to how out of tune his guitar is, but i just look at that expression on his face and can't help but think, "oh shit, he's getting psyched up to conjure something mind-fuckingly awesome, and we'd all better watch out." it's that flamboyant, larger-than-life boogeyman-ish jimi from foxey lady, comin' to get us all.

then, later, he just takes the cream and turns it into something nasty.

(also, notice subliminal george harrison at the 4:04 mark?).

i just picked this up, and as you can probably guess, i can't wait to dive in.

this really deserves a full rundown,

2007-12-03T14:11:00.000-08:00

but i'm getting to this a little late in the day, and so i'm just copying and pasting a missive i sent the old prospector earlier in the day about my experience at the kool keith show at harper's ferry on friday night:

mike g and i got pretty good buzzes going before the show.

there wasn't a huge crowd, so we were able to get right up front

my buzz was big enough to tell me that it was a good idea to stage dive in the middle of kool keith's set

towards the end of the set, kool keith was pointing at me and saying a bunch of stuff ... no one remembers whether he was dissing me or giving me props for my redd foxx tee [ed. note: i actually, genuinely like redd foxx and sanford and son, and have since i was young]

after the show, mike gee and i jumped up on stage for photo ops and all. there was this groupie (the one in the picture with me) who was selling keith on coming to an after-party in central square. he had his hands full with her, but when she went to get her friends to take a picture of her, a bunch of us on the stage jumped into the shot, and mike snapped that pic. kool keith handed me a pen that he'd been using to autograph cds and said "i think this is yours" (it wasn't)

[necessary post-script: the groupie and the hard sell on the after-party were like something out of a made-for-tv rock star biopic. a little surreal to see that in person.

also, kool keith having a normal conversation with someone sounds exactly kool keith rapping. not remarkable, but funny to have the voice that raps "Keith look in the club for your celebrity jump shooters / Tall lean men who can't read books to they kids need tutors" on record be the same voice that tells you he has your pen, and here you go.]

toilet humuor

2007-11-29T11:09:00.000-08:00

when i walk into the office bathroom and find that all 3 stalls are occupied by men doing their business, the phrase that literally ALWAYS asserts itself first in my mind is "muderer's row."

does anyone actually give a damn that people named matt damon "sexiest man of the year"?

2007-11-15T11:51:00.000-08:00

i sure as hell don't.

bread before bombs

2007-11-13T08:00:00.000-08:00

one of my coworkers is married to a u.s. army soldier who recently began his 2nd tour in iraq. within her department and the other ones on our floor, she organized a drive for cookies and other treats to put together a goodwill package to send to him and his company.

i was floored when she showed me the unoccupied corner office where she was keeping all the donations. you should've seen it. wall-to-wall, piles of brown grocery bags full of plastic wrapped dishes of homemade chocolate chip, boxes of oreos and those new cookies that are part candy bar stacked high on the desk. i noticed that somebody had even included a cookie recipe (kudos to them for using brown sugar) along with his or her donation.

i don't bristle or scoff at culturally-approved tokens of patriotism like i would've when i was younger and angrier, but all the same, this office crammed with sugary goods donated by a diverse group of people, many of whom will recede into anonymity after signing their names to the card that'll accompany the package, struck me instantly as so, so much more symbolically powerful than a yellow ribbon could ever be. empathy transcending politics.

lifetime problems

2007-11-08T07:22:00.000-08:00

the escalator that carries you down to the turnstyles at porter square station has been out of service for a week or so.

in the past two days, i've noticed that the maintenance crew working on resuscitating said escalator are wearing what appear to be 3-mile island containment suits, sans masks.

the eternal refrain/excuse for the constant need for maintenance / inexplicable delays in service / why the t doesn't run past 1 am, when bars are releasing their patrons to the rest of the world: "the t is the oldest subway system in america. we need the extra money from every fare hike we implement just to keep the service up and running. we need the time that we earn by not operating past 1 am in order to make the necessary tweaks and checks on the trains just to be sure they'll be functional come 5 am."

somehow, the fact that the guys working on a mere escalator, one of the most peripheral component of this service, require what seem to amount to containment suits summed up the sad state of affairs for me.

this is a system whose complete overhaul is long overdue. it's a dam that keeps springing new leaks every single time someone plugs an existing hole with his finger.

the saltiest of salts

2007-11-07T12:18:00.000-08:00

it's always going to be the salt that's on the type of soft-baked pretzel you get at a carnival or sporting event.

a study in the effect of contrasts.

i really liked it when burger king started spraying their fries with potato bits

2007-11-07T09:06:00.000-08:00

yes, i know they're a bit doughy. i like that. they remind me of french fries i used to get when i was younger and went to this place.

that's how french fries were at the town sq. diner, and that's what i became accustomed to tasting when eating french fries. i learned to like them.

and there's just something to familiarity.

office gold, vol. 2

2007-11-07T08:43:00.000-08:00

jumpin' jack flash - the rolling stones
sweet emotion - aerosmith
movin' out - billy joel
oye como va - santana
you're so vain - carly simon
stayin' alive - the bee gees
sweet caroline - neil diamond
night moves AND hollywood nights - bob seger and the silver bullet band
in the midnight hour - wilson pickett
long train running AND what a fool believes - doobie brothers
time of the season - zombies
hello, i love you - the doors
get down tonight - kc and the sunshine band
pretty woman - roy orbison
overture/long time - boston

the laws have changed

2007-11-07T08:17:00.000-08:00

guys in the locker room yesterday were talking about the pilates classes they had taken

then again, there's yoga, so it makes sense

the negativity because

2007-11-07T08:00:00.000-08:00

sometimes people aren't afraid of passion

and

aren't you aware of a droning?

it's like the low end is a ghost

when it could be a beastly thing

but no, it's actually a wimp

there's a pretext of conquering with inspiration

but it wants nothing more than, with glistening doe eyes,

to drag us down into a self-obsessed normalcy

mediocrity.

i refuse to believe you're tormented

2007-11-07T07:35:00.000-08:00

at least your clothing choices are made easy.

oh, and you'll probably get some cheap lays out of the deal, too.

if i had control over time, i would speed it up and bring the imminent ice age in store for you and your kind hurtling forward.

ok, i've caved

2007-11-07T07:34:00.000-08:00

last call on a lost classic

2007-08-07T12:12:00.000-07:00

in addition to a crippling hangover and resultant reassessments of my own mortality, i also brought home an unexpected treat from my insane weekend in western mass: a copy of "Liquor Store", a song i wrote with broktune that i've been looking to snag a copy of for the past four years or so. after thinking it had been forever lost in the sands of time, my buddy dan barnes, who was one half of broktune, revealed that he had a bunch of old demos kicking around, that liquor store was among them and that he would be kind enough to burn me a copy to take home.

i was elated; i think it contains a couple of the best guitar passages i've ever come up with.

i remember the song's genesis occured in the spring of 2003 over sunday night beers at the office, the greatest bar in northampton ("sorry, i have to go in to the office today, honey" / also, dollar drafts of the special 'willard's brew', which was just pabst in disguise), with my buddy tom, the other half of broktune. he sang me a vocal hook that kelly, his girlfriend at the time, had come up with a night or two before. i dug it ... it had an obvious sing-a-long quality to it.

from there, things moved quickly. that week, i believe, one night after work while taking a piss, i came up with the bassline we used for the verse, and being fortunate enough to be at home, i grabbed jack melcher's bass to hammer it out before i lost it. i came up with some chords shortly afterwards, and could hear them working best with a slow, ambient articulation on the wah-wah pedal. then, the chorus guitar part dropped into my lap out of nowhere during a jam session with the broktune band. armed with these things, tom, dan, kelly, jack and i went to record the song with our friend scott from hands and knees at his shelburne falls home studio.

i believe jack came up with the bass for the chorus on the spot.

the steel drum sound you hear at the beginning of the song comes from a cool pedal ukelele greg had in his collection ... i can't remember whether i used his ukelele to record it or if i just fed my axe through the pedal to play the part, though i'm leaning towards the latter.

sorry for the big 'behind the music' dissection -- this isn't like sgt. pepper's or anything -- but i love how this came together as a collaboration of friends, and i'm really proud of the guitar parts. Click the liquor store link above for your listening pleasure.

"liquor store" personnel:

rhymes -- corpus crispy, awetisdick, kelly
shoop-a-doop -- kelly
guitar/ukelele? -- jon
bass -- jack melch
beats/production -- scott-o-matic
hand claps -- corpus crispy, awetisdick, jack melch, jon

an extra-special thanks to mr. dan tobin for hosting the file.

what's wrong with this picture?

2007-08-03T12:01:00.001-07:00

i stand corrected

2007-08-03T07:26:00.000-07:00

steve miller's 'jet airliner' was a cover of paul pena's original.

makes it no less ridiculous hearing steve miller sing that line, however.

kind of cowardly

2007-08-02T12:02:00.000-07:00

that lyric from 'jet airliner':

" .... I dont want to get caught up in any of that
Funky shit goin down in the city"

fat chance you would've, steve

more awesome t-shirts

2007-07-31T13:54:00.000-07:00

10am-ish, monday, south station, 'the kids these days ... '

- the tee itself was a standard fare black flag shirt with the classic band logo, but it was worn by a three year-old boy. he was accompanied by a woman (mom? auntie?) who appeared to be the type that would've decked him out in a mickey mouse tee and pants bought at kids 'r us.

4:30pm-ish, sunday, inbound c-line train from coolidge corner, 'smoking.'

- woman wearing an all black t-shirt that bore a solitary graphic on the front, the traditional 'no smoking' sign with one noticable difference: there was no line going through the smoking cigarette. smoke 'em if you got 'em.

11:45am-ish, saturday, downtown crossing area, 'simple truth'

- older fellow wearing an all aqua-blue t-shirt with a single green word on the front: 'stress'. i did a triple-take, but couldn't find anything else on the shirt save for that word, rendered in a blurry manner that made it appear to shake and with cracks (stress fractures?) running through the middle of it. if those breaks weren't there by design, then i guess we have a case of life actually enhancing the art it imitates.

at any rate, how much you want to bet that old guy's awesome?

deep into the purple

2007-07-18T19:21:00.000-07:00

at the end of the day, my friend and coworker jay forwarded along a bunch of youtube clips of live performances by deep purple.

that sent some good memories pouring in right away. i first got into the band in earnest in my senior year of college when i chanced upon a cheap used copy of '24 karat purple' at mystery train records in amherst. i only knew of their bigger hits, but the price was right and the album title was clever, so i gave it a shot. it wasn't long before that disc became a mainstay on my portable cd player, providing a soundtrack for awesomeness wherever it went. i was consistently blown away by the deep grooves, abundant hooks and ian gillian's sustained, androgynous wails. a couple of years later, my friend mike and i went to the bank of america pavilion after he lucked into a pair of tickets for an incredible triple bill featuring deep purp, thin lizzy and joe satriani, and i quite literally jumped out of my pants when dp ripped into 'speed king' (granted, they were too baggy and i was belt-less, butt still).

when i listen to deep purple now, what strikes me most instantly is that many of their best songs (thinking 'woman from toke-a-yo', 'smoke on the water' and 'highway star') commence with one of the five-piece laying a foundation for a good four bars or so before the other instruments enter in sequentially; the sound has the effect of an anthropomorphic factory in a cartoon coming to life. i really, really love that.

i guess some 24 karat purp's coming to work with me tomorrow.

P.ublic B.roadcasting's S.cary

2007-07-12T08:47:00.000-07:00

oh, the places you'll go when boredom spurs you on to plumb the limitless depths of the internet.

there's a whole gaggle of clips you can find on youtube that feature old logo sequences, particularly of the interstitial kind that run at end of television programs.

in and of itself, that's hardly remarkable; the web's littered with vestiges of pop culture's past that have no significance beyond the simple fact that they existed, and which get thoughtlessly tossed off like waste bound for the slag heap. however, this particular strain of videos merits pause, for they owe their notoriety not just to naked retro obsession, but to their capacity to terrify.

that's right. as the below clips show, these tiny 4-5 second clips of corporate logos and station call letters are SCARY.

i've got my own overwrought theories on what makes them frightening (as far as the examples here go: the viacom logo presentation jostles lingering fears of mutually-assured destruction left over in the collective unconsciousness from the cold war; the pbs logo suggests something sentient but inorganic, a la hal from 2001: a space odyssey; the paramount television one is, well, ok, that's just coming to kill you), but at the very least, it's hard to deny that there's something vaguely disturbing about many of these old logo sequences.

the number of comments you see online attesting to that inarticulate terror is staggering. hell, the viacom logo's scariness is widely-acknowledged enough to have earned the nickname 'the v of doom' (in fact, if you search "v of doom" on wikipedia, you'll be automatically directed to the viacom entry; if that's not enough, check out its entry in the urban dictionary).

it's a phenomenon. and, like any phenomenon that gets its start on the web, it's spawned parodies and parodies of the parodies. the one i've included as a final video here is basically slaying a boogeyman.

listen,

2007-07-09T13:13:00.000-07:00

effective immediately, i'm on the lookout for a third person to fill out my 3 bedroom somerville apartment for the fall.

currently, you've got me, and then you've also got aaron, sushi chef extraordinaire and probably one of the nicest and best people to ever walk the face of the earth.

if you know of anyone off the top of your head who's looking for a place to live come september 1st, send him or her my way.

a better holiday than the fourth of july is the fifth

2007-07-05T08:03:00.000-07:00

because it's my brother's birthday. plain and simple.

smash hits

2007-07-03T09:29:00.000-07:00

- i go away on an extended absence, then i come back and spend more time writing about what i was doing and what my intentions are for future blogging than i do actually writing. none of that here.

- you should see these new mike's hard lemonade ads that are plastered all over the boston subways. they've got a guy decked out in threads with retro sensibilities (70's-style, natch; he looks like an extra from those bacardi and diet coke commercials) with an eyebrow cocked slickly and a big, insincere smile (essential: he's a fool and he's in on the joke all at once) holding up and displaying, almost asserting, a bottle of the stuff (and if this were actually a television commercial, the next shot would be a close-up of the bottle with a burst of sparkle and a magical twinkle noise -- maybe could i get work in hollywood?).

at this point, this shit is beyond rote; it feels like obvious, winking subversion -- subverted subversion, really -- was the last thing to have been written into our culture's genetic code. can someone/something please, please, PLEASE come along with something universal and undeniably revelatory, something without a hint of irony, to induce the birth of a new cultural moment?

- on a related note, do you think maybe that an unctuous twit who almost always tweaks the tone of his voice so that what he says smacks of smarm and condescension, and who otherwise carries himself like an embittered ivory tower scholar who's been assigned to do field work among the plebeians -- do you think maybe that that same guy who loudly goes out of his way to let everyone know that he's above this and as such doesn't care what anyone thinks of him is actually the very same guy who cares the most out of anyone about what other people think of him?

- on another related note, i like jack white. i read a snippet of a recent interview with him somewhere in which he basically called insincerity an act of cowardice. i'm glad that the white stripes are critically and commercially successful.

- large iced coffee with cream and no sugar from boston beanstock. it tastes like coffee ice cream, but it's not.

- in fact, any pastry item i've ever had at BB is also tops.

- i've been lucky enough to have been introduced by a neighbor to the masterful guitar playing of danny gatton. to lean on an old cliche, he's the greatest player no one's ever heard. if you're interested, you can find footage of his playing on youtube.

- f. scott fitzgerald wrote 'the great gatsby' at the age of 27. at the time, he claimed in a letter to his publisher that he was at the height of his abilities as a writer.

neil young debuted 'heart of gold' in concert at 26. that line: 'and i'm getting old'.

sometimes i feel like i want to make a mark on this world. sometimes, though, it feels like the world isn't worth it, knowing that it can be such a lonely place that it's actually tempting sometimes to wonder whether it's somehow possible to be nowhere at all.

that's not a cry for help. i guess all i'm saying is that some time out of mind would be nice.

a separate peace

2007-06-04T10:15:00.000-07:00

on a dismal, stormy monday such as today, it feels good to look back at some of the pictures i took of venice beach and to be able to recall the serenity i enjoyed during my two hours spent on a secluded spot i staked out by the shore; a warm quiet suffusing the afternoon; a moment in the kind of repose those corona tv commercials capture by making the static wash of waves lapping the shore and the occasional cawing of seagulls seem like non-noise, the wet clink of beer bottles emerging from a bucket full of ice as a loud reality check that actually serves the dream in the end.

back in the saddle for now

2007-05-30T14:22:00.001-07:00

sometimes, my ambitions eclipse my ability to seize the day and follow through. sometimes it has to do with sheer the size of those ambitions, other times it comes down to the mitigation of stifling circumstances, or perhaps conflicting ambitions, and then there's the times when it's a little bit of both, as has happened in the case of my intention to furnish a real blow-by-blow summary of my time in los angeles.

as more and more extrablogular obligations have piled up, and as more and more time has passed since i returned and blurred my powers of recollection, my trip -- along with the many, many things i did in my time on it -- has loomed larger and larger on my radar, and has come to represent an increasingly daunting prospect.

thing is, i intend to follow through on a summary no matter what.

the solution, then? a series of quick, bite-size strikes over the next week and a half or so.

there i am at dodger stadium for a game vs. the san francisco giants. having never been to a game outside of fenway, there was something a little surreal to me about being in a ballpark where the fences surrounding the outfield and bleachers were so low -- fat barry bonds never cleared them, though he did belt a dinger into the stands on his first at-bat (maybe even on his first pitch, if i remember right) -- and where crystal blue sky and palm trees created a postcard backdrop and neon graphic billboards and booming stereo sounds gave the air a video game surge.

come to think of it, it was more than a little like being physically present in one of those silicon ballparks that i'd gotten acquianted with in old nintendo 64 baseball titles. maybe that's just the 22 oz. beers i had at the game talking through hindsight, though.

zombie march? ok, argh! (next, back to talking about la)

2007-05-14T08:32:00.000-07:00

the roger/jessica rabbit zombie duo was brie's idea, having been inspired by her purchase of the red sequined dress at the goodwill. the chunk missing from my ear was her touch, too, as was the accompanying make-up job. neat, huh?

you'd be surprised how many people thought i was actually supposed to be a mouse, given that rabbit ears and a fluffy tail are suggestive of, uh, rabbits, not to mention how the rest of my costume and my companion were suggestive of a specific character.

my favorite mistaken identity, though, came courtesy of some guy who thought i was the energizer bunny. that would've made for a GREAT costume, when you think about it.

field notes: the coup

2007-05-04T10:31:00.000-07:00

led by a strutting, burly mc who resembles the boondocks's huey in looks and politics and whose booming lines sometimes conjured chuck d, the coup delivered what i consider the surprise smash performance of coachella.

since the kind of deep, distorted grooves they use reminded me of some of the sounds we're making in my own band, i paid close attention to the dynamics of the performance and how they affected the crowd, hoping i could glean some strategies for approaching our own tunes and live sets.

conclusions:

- even if he or she is a ripping six-string prodigy, do not have your guitarist playing extended solos on every song

- do feature guitar and bass doubling one another in lockstep fashion

- do not mix straight-up r+b tunes into an otherwise heavy set

- do feature a beautiful, energetic female vocalist who slam dances and gyrates along with even the heaviest numbers

- do not get so caught up in your performance that you lose track of the whereabouts of the monitors on stage (see 1st video below)

- do flow without missing a beat if you do, in fact, take an accidental tumble (again, 1st video below)

- don't go pull an ed kowalcyzk (of the band live) and have a full-blown seizure or something on stage, but do, however, allow for moments where you lose yourself in the euphoria of live performance, as people watching will sense it and feed off of that energy whether they like or not not. there were moments where i sensed that boots riley, being the skilled showman that he is, had even the initial non-believers of the crowd in the palm of his hand

here's a snippet of the coup's coachella performance, followed by a full video of a great song they performed at a different show to give you a sense of what they sound like:

inaccuracy in journalism

2007-05-03T12:04:00.000-07:00

perhaps inspired by my near brush with smug, lisping rolling stone pop writer rob sheffield in coachella's vip section on saturday night, i've been reading different professional takes on the festival and placing them within the context of my own experience. some things aren't jibing, which just goes to show that you can't believe everything that you read (or that, in merely bringing such inconsistencies up, i'm still bitter about not being able to find a steady job as a writer).

a few things:

ign's recap of sunday's performances/the roots: the roots played the riff from sabbath's 'iron man', not 'paranoid', as this article notes.

pitchfork's recap of the festival/rage: begrudgingly, pitchfork is giving props to a mainstream act whose initials are NOT 'j' and 't'. this is a surprise. what isn't so surprising is that while this write up is very bold and floats the irony of millionaires advocating for the oppressed, nowhere else in the festival write-up (or anywhere else on pitchfork, for that matter) do you see someone address the irony of millionaires advocating for the depressed.

at any rate, rage's volume was NOT an issue; we were on the outskirts of the massive crowd, where the volume was still powerful enough to send ripples through our clothes and blow back the music being performed on the other stages. if anything, it was that their playing was sloppy coming out of the gates and a little bit off here and there further into the set, which i'm surprised very few journalists actually picked up on (and this is coming from someone who happens to have been absolutely floored by the musicianship at ratm shows in the past).

rolling stone's rage recap: specifically: "There were signs that this reunion may be fragile: the band didn’t display much affection for each other on stage, with Morello and de la Rocha never quite making eye contact."

ok:

-having seen rage twice and watched countless live bootlegs, i can say that they very rarely make eye contact on stage. it's pretty much all business.

-this journalist must've hightailed it out of there before the very end of the set, when the band stood with arms on each others' shoulders and waved to the crowd.

-finally, there's this performance which took place a couple of weeks before coachella:

i don't know, they look comfortable with one another to me.

l. a. stories

2007-05-03T08:05:00.000-07:00

i spent a little over a week in sunny, smoggy la, where i visited my friend elliott and along with him hit as many of the local cultural and historical hot-spots as possible, and i'm still riding on a big high from this restorative vacation, so i'll be recapping my trip here over the next few days.

i have no narrative vision in mind, and i suspect that the expiration dates on my memories of the many experiences i had will vary with one another enough to make a chronological summary too risky, so i'll be attacking this in a piecemeal fashion.

a sister piece to this (or perhaps mine is the sister piece to his?) may be found on jesse's blog, where he recounts our weekend at the coachella festival, which was the culminating experience of my trip.

awesomeness: super deformed jon and elliott

then, ribs

2007-04-19T11:11:00.000-07:00

i've been spending a lot of idle time lately youtubing footage of people barbecuing meat. sometimes, music videos just don't pack the kind of soul-satisfying zip i need to sustain me through the day.

anyways, i thought the one posted above was interesting.

observations:

1) if you listen carefully enough, it becomes pretty obvious that whoever wrote that first accompanying theme really liked himself some 'day tripper'.

2) the bbq sauce of choice here is kraft. out of all the big brand name sauces out there, kraft's is one of the most blatantly mediocre.

3 the narrator's voice sounds like a complete affectation. some words and phrases this guy probably did his best to keep in the back of his mind during filming: 'texas,' 'bold,' 'grease-stained,' 't-bone steak,' 'big,' 'dust,' 'smoke,' 'strong black coffee,' 'cowboy' and 'sam elliott's wizened-but-durable seer/drifter through time.'

in fact, i think i may have found the culprit in action and on camera just a few clicks away:

guns

2007-04-17T09:07:00.000-07:00

i listened to a call-in radio talk show as i turned in for the evening last night, and was genuinely perplexed when i heard several callers make the argument that yesterday's virgina tech massacre is testimony to the need for loosening up gun control and making firearms more readily available to the average citizen.

there were the expected invocations of the 2nd amendment, presuming as always that tenets put in place by a bunch of slave holders and misogynists proffer incontrovertible philosophical and moral high ground.

what really got me, though, was when these reactionaries tried to qualify their argument by claiming that further shootings could've been averted following the initial murders if other students had been armed.

ignoring that the existence of guns is ultimately predicated on the function of ending life with as much ease as merely pulling a trigger, and that making firearms more readily available is only going to bolster the likelihood that massacres like this occur in the future, one could say that yes, there's a chance that yesterday's death toll would've been smaller if other students were packing.

then again, there's also a chance that yesterday's death toll would've been smaller if dorm and classroom security had been tighter, not to mention what might've been avoided if virginia tech administration had been more responsive in warning the campus of what was happening.

the argument that lenient gun control restrictions are a foregone, sensible means of creating a world where ordinary citizens have access to effective self-defense is just very, very strange to me. how come tasers and other less lethal means of self-protection are always ignored in this type of discussion?

when you're drawing on the slaughter wrought by a SUICIDAL maniac as evidence that we need to make firearms easier to obtain, doesn't the killing power of guns -- and the resultant deterrent quality inhered therein, which is the prime difference separating guns and less lethal devices capable of incapacitation -- essentially become a moot point?

guitar hero 2 ... and didier deux?!?

2007-04-11T11:19:00.000-07:00

i think that most compulsive behavior stems from the same part of the psyche.

i think that the instinct that urges a gambler to repeatedly buy scratch tickets, hoping against hope that one last game will be the one that hits, is of the same ilk as the one that spurs on a junkie to continuously seek out fresh hits in vain attempts at re-experiencing the bliss of his first high, like the needle of a record player skipping on the same groove.

i also think that this is an incredible oversimplification of the nature of addiction, but this is only a blog, and if it helps get us on the same page in thinking about what could drive me to play the same song on the xbox 360 version of guitar hero 2 to 2 1/2 to 3 hours in a row into the wee hours last night, then that's merit enough for me.

i wish i had sidebars to separately lay out gh2's interface and scoring system, but i'll do my best to sum them up briefly here before moving on:

the controller is a fisher price-style miniature electric guitar featuring 5 colored buttons on the fretboard and a plastic-wedge strum bar located where the pick-ups would sit on a genuine six-string.

the game's action takes place on a vertically-scrolling virtual fretboard, where color-coded notes cascade like tetris pieces. in order to play them, you need to depress the corresponding colored buttons on your ax and stroke the strum bar just as they pass the lowest fret and drop off-screen. the higher the difficulty setting, the more notes the game throws at you and the more scoring opportunities you have.

there's also an external system of scoring in place on xbox live that rewards points to a player's online profile based on the completion of a variety of specific challenges that vary from game to game. in guitar hero 2's case, they range from unlocking venues to playing a song note-for-note to earning a massive number of points on a given tune.

the achievement whose pursuit proved to be my albatross last night is the eddie van halen award: successfully hit half a thousand notes in a row in a given song.

some songs contain less than 500 notes, so i pursued this prize by playing nirvana's 'heart-shaped box', which contains over 700 on the medium difficulty setting -- relax, i didn't have to count: there's stat screens in the game where you can find this shit out -- and presents few of the fleet-fingered demands found on songs later in the game.

i spent around the first ten times through the song experimenting to figure out the most economic and comfortable fingering patterns for navigating the note sequences. since there's only four drastically different sections to the song, i played with a few simple variations before settling on hand and finger positions with which to approach for the entire tune.

i spent the next hour coming achingly close to achieving my goal. nervous flinches of my strumming hand here and cues missed by nanoseconds there repeatedly killed my efforts. i found that the furthest i could make it before going off the rails and having to start the song over was right around the end of the guitar solo, where the cumulative note count came out to around 475.

along the way, i was picking up on some trends in my failed attempts; i sometimes hit the strum bar hard enough for it to recoil and register an unintended upstroke, and while i generally breezed through the busy choruses flawlessly, i had trouble settling in comfortably enough on the moderate pace of the verses to be consistently precise. i found myself ping-ponging between polar states of tense anticipation and forced zen calm. it was maddening.

i spent the second hour sitting poised at the edge of my bed a few feet from the television, thinking that closer proximity would help me internalize what was happening on the screen.

i was right, but not in the way i had hoped to be.

halfway through another fruitless effort, i noticed that the virtual fretboard was turning a dull red. not coincidentally, i think, i also noticed that my eyes felt remarkably dried out from focusing so intently on the same screen for so long.

after failing again, i lay back on my bed and rubbed the crust out of my poor peepers. when i opened them, i saw that the corrugated swirls of plaster in my ceiling were MOVING. if you've ever tried one of those visual tricks you've probably been forwarded on email at work, wherein you stare at the center of a rorschach test-style pattern for 60 seconds and then quickly direct your gaze at a white surface, you might have an idea of what i experienced.

the game was in my head. i had degenerated into the kind of casualty that the legal mumbo jumbo and medical warnings at the beginning of every video game manual attempt to steer you clear of becoming.

i stepped outside for a smoke to clear my mind.

when i came back in, i knew that i'd passed the point of no return. to preserve my sanity, i had to complete the achievement before i turned in for the night.

a half hour later, at about 1:30 am, owing to dumb luck or divine intervention or the stone steady hands of catatonia, i nailed 500 notes in a row. 600 and change, to be more precise.

satisfied and exhausted, i stepped outside for one last smoke to crown the successful session.

when i got out onto the porch, i noticed a fluffy white cat sitting on the stairs a split second before the door shutting behind me scared it away, and, for one insane split second, i was convinced that my eyes were playing tricks on me again, and that what i had actually seen was didier, our finicky french cat who spends most of his time outdoors but who also happens to be a dark tabby.

thankfully, i spotted real didier patrolling our front hallway as i came back in.

incidentally, there's a separate xbox live achievement for gh2 that awards you points for nailing 1000 notes in a row on a song.

i'm wondering if i'll manage it without going off the deep end, just like one of those missed notes dropping off-screen into parts unknown.

erin go blarg

2007-03-18T10:37:00.000-07:00

- 1 white chocolate and macadamia nut cookie

- 1 sugar cookie with irish green sprinkles

- 1 brownie-ish pastry thingy

- pieces of leftover oatmeal and raisin pancakes (from 2 weeks ago, yes)

- 1 entire 85% lindt excellence extra fine dark chocolate bar

- 1 big, juicy via lago cheeseburger with lettuce and tomato

- 1 side of crispy, lightly-salted french fries

- 1 hershey's skor bar

- 1 jumbo boston red dogs hot dog with ketch and must

- 1 mcdonald's crispy chicken snack wrap with honey mustard

- 1 chicken lo mein at wok n' roll (in spite of a name that might lead one to think otherwise, this is pretty high quality american chinese food)

- half an appetizer-sized order of ridiculously good boneless barbecue honey ribs, also at wok n' roll

- 1 fortune cookie

- 1 double shot of whiskey

- 1 12 oz. guinness

- 69 oz. of sam adams

- 1 half a brownie

thoughts of topping this next saturday, bed.

actual writing to come this week

back by popular demand

2007-03-06T09:35:00.000-08:00

- 1 pecan tart from boston beanstock cafe. like a minature pecan pie, though with a tempered sweetness. taste? good. i did, however, make the mistake of nuking it for 45 seconds, which made for a sticky, molten mess,

- 1 1/2 oatmeal and raisin pancakes with butter and maple syrup, buttered wheat toast, one serving of dope home fries, one cup of oatmeal with raisins, most of a bacon, tomato and cheddar omelette at johnny d's,

- one pint of murphy's stout, one pint of sam adams cherry wheat (don't worry about it; i drink one of these only once in a while, and i don't think i've ever had it on draught, which was certainly worth a shot), two boneless buffalo chicken tenders, two handfuls of tortilla chips and salsa, 1 pile of tender bbq beef brisket, one small serving of mac and cheese and a piece of fried cornbread at the sports depot in allston,

- 2 harpoon winter lagers and two russell stover's chocolates at jk+bethany's, where jk trounced me in three straight games of pool,

- 5 (?) slices of papa john's sausage sensation pizza (two or three kinds of sausage, red + green peps, onions), 1 slice of cinnapie and about 30 oz. bud light

i became a god of thunder with the resultant gas. then, bed.

bnh

2007-02-24T22:45:00.000-08:00

i really like the brand new heavies.

i only own their self-titled album,which i picked up maybe a year, couple years ago. until a minute ago, i'd only listened to it at the office, with volume set low enough for it to melt into hub-bub, detectable only by ears pricked looking for it. this was before i discovered headphones, in case you're wondering.

but wow, listening to it at home right now, with volume set to a truly audible level, i'm really impressed by how consistently awesome the guitar playing is. not mention how well the instrumentation in general creates these ridiculously beautiful textures that swing so perfectly.

there goes the neighborhood

2007-02-23T09:48:00.001-08:00

blood lust

2007-02-22T11:06:00.000-08:00

lately, i've been seeing lots of ads for the movie 'zodiac' on the sides of buses and plastered on billboards around the city.

given that the reality of the zodiac murders is relatively tame when taken in the context of modern celluloid's fixation on creative, grisly dismemberment, as exemplified by horror-thrillers like saw, hostel and hannibal rising, i keep wondering whether the movie makers behind zodiac will embellish certain details in an effort to keep visceral pace with such big, bloody money-makers.

most of the murders attributed to the zodiac killer were shootings. does that open the door for exploding heads in the movie version? how about the one confirmed knifing in the zodiac case? will that be depicted in a loving slow-motion close-up?

will they go so far as to distort the truth to satisfy blood lust? i think it's a good question.

newman/fast eddie felson vs. george c. scott/the devil

2007-02-07T08:33:00.000-08:00

"Tell your boys they better kill me, because if they just bust me up, put all those pieces back together, and then, so help me God, Bert, I'll come back here and I'll kill you."

i really, really, really need to pick up a copy of the hustler posthaste.

b.ring y.our o.wn b.ombs / b.ombs o.ver b.oston / i guess i'm late to the party

2007-02-02T16:13:00.000-08:00

basically, if you're going to tout your methods for disseminating advertisements as 'guerilla marketing', then you kind of come off like a bunch of sissies who won't go down with the ship when you issue a sheepish apology to the demographic whose attention you've captured, as Interface, Inc. does on their website.

"their lawyers made them say that!"

sure, but what're they ... sheep?!? why'd they need to get lawyers in the first place? these guerillas couldn't stand on principle alone?

but wait, what about these rabble-rousers?

yes, i think most people got that the hair comments were intended as a form of ironic protest*, but who or what, exactly, was it directed at? the police? homeland security? the media? the segment of bostonians that DARED get pissed off at these two because they had a hand in fucking up the commute and the city's collective psyche for a portion of a day, unintentionally or not? or was it meant to address the situation itself, the fact that there was so much hoopla made over this?

why not take the opportunity to explicitly voice a specific protestation? why would you foresake that opportunity to sacklessly preach to your hipster choir and put a 'those that are cool enough to get it and those that aren't' (by the way, your movie's gonna suck) spin on a news event that might have potential to get the general public -- especially people who were still sitting on the fence about this -- more pissed off at the oafish inefficiency of their governing bodies and public safety machinery than at you?

oh, that's right. your lawyer told you not to say anything. 'baa-baa!! baa-baa!!'

then again, i guess it makes sense that you're left with nothing genuine to stand on when you've submitted yourself to the irony camp, which trips over itself to subvert every pop culture conceit and generational value since time immemorial, and you have to approach every one of life's endeavor's with a lame fixation on how things can be flipped on their head. sincerity becomes a toxic substance to be carefully and fearfully held at bay.

wow, so many people in the world genuinely suck.

* and if they HAD to go this route, couldn't they have done with a little more variety? like, maybe they could've talked up their love of the band foghat or how cool keds sneakers were in the 80's, or speculated on why vanilla ice had those weird racing stripes in his eyebrows.

games i really like

2007-01-25T14:20:00.000-08:00

revenge of shinobi, bionic commando, super dodge ball, oblivion, tekken series, most castlevanias, streets of rage 2, contra 1 and 3, guitar hero, resident evil 1, 2 and 4, god of war, mortal kombat 2, mega man 1 and 2, super metroid, phantasy star 2 and 3, shadowrun (snes and genesis versions), zeldas, super mario bros.s, rock n roll racing, ninja gaidens, street fighter 2, wcw/nwo revenge, killer instinct, gears of war, the conflict series, devil may cry 1 and 3, metal gears, tenchu 1 and 2, final fantasy 2, 3 and 7, double dragon 1 and 2, river city ransom, 3-d world runner, most tony hawks, galaga, gradius 2 and 3, goldeneye 007, all star baseball 99, tomb raider 1, tetris

brain numb, jon no write today

one of the good things related to the below news

2007-01-23T08:06:00.000-08:00

is that jesus and mary chain is also reuniting for the coachella festival.

not only is that good in and of itself because, hey, they happen to be great, but also because:

1 -- like rage, they are great in spite of there being a contemptible demographic present in their fan base (in rage's case, meatheads to whom it would make no difference if zach de la rocha was screaming home decorating tips culled from an issue of martha stewart's living; in jmc's case, hipsters, particularly hipsters who are too young to remember jmc and who will nonetheless profess how much their reunion means), and

2 -- rage wrote songs that were 100% irony-free and embraced empathy and compassion over solipsism every time, and as such there WOULD'VE been a concerted hipster effort to write their reunion off as a cheap grab for cash (the point to be driven home that it is impossible for people in the world to sincerely care about other people in the world), had it not been for jmc's reuniting for the show as well.

HOLY FUCKING SHIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2007-01-22T13:54:00.000-08:00

rage against the machine to reunite

coachella, here i come!

pardon me?

2007-01-14T22:10:00.000-08:00

i was outside on our porch, minding my own business and smoking a quiet cigarette, when i saw a fat skunk skittering along the sidewalk across the street.

then, i heard a rustling in the bushes in front of our house. i looked down to see a smaller skunk
tromping its way towards my neighbors' house.

i sniffed for stink, but didn't notice any.

"good," i thought a moment after it had passed, "it saw that i was keeping to myself and left me alone."

then, a second later, i smelled a faint, needling odor.

and then, for one insane split second, i was actually offended.

"gyahh!!!! daaah!!!! argh!!!"

2007-01-12T13:35:00.000-08:00

arnie in constant pain after leg op

shit police / the 'c' in 'c-line' stands for 'crap' (or 'caca', if you're comfortable spelling that with c's and not k's)

2007-01-09T18:27:00.000-08:00

boarding the c on my way to park street tonight, i noticed a hefty smear of dried, tan-colored stuff in the bowl-ish recess of one of seats.

not being a fan of suspicious-looking substances of questionable origin, i steered clear of the seat and stood in the open, seat-less area by the windows.

when the train opened its doors at the next stop, i surveyed the faces of the boarding passengers to see how they would react to the seat with the brown frosting. there's just something really fascinating about how people deal with the unsavory components of their scenery, especially when those components are inanimate, and it would be far easier to just ignore them than acknowledge them as offensive, and especially when folks go with the feigned indignation routine, and especially when they do so in front of a captive audience of strangers.

unfortunately, i was deprived of my intense people-watching. one of the first to board, a despondent-looking young woman wearing headphones, promptly plopped down on the soiled seat.

had she not looked so sad, and had i been possessed of liquid bravado at the time, i might have taken a cue from these good samaritans, and said something like:

"hey lady ... [measured pause and eyes screwed up in disdain for effect] ... you're sitting in crap."

then, i think i would've had a bonafide social experiment on my hands!

the big solution

2007-01-09T14:18:00.000-08:00

to iraq, social security, terrorism, global warming, partisan gridlock, disturbances created by christians and white trash and other people who really can't be as smart as those of us who've earned a college degree, voter apathy, corporate fleecing of hard-working americans, etc.:

get stephen colbert to give one of his big, insincere smiles.

HONESTLY! i swear, we'll all feel better about ourselves and the state of affairs in the world in the morning.

fun game to play walking around the city

2007-01-09T08:44:00.000-08:00

i call it "bluetooth or crazy?"

the name's pretty self-explanatory.

a victorious new year

2007-01-02T08:32:00.000-08:00

because i had a winning dose of self-awareness at the outset of last year, i set myself up with a series of achievable resolutions.

taking stock of the new year, i'm gonna review what i've done and think a little on what needs to be done in the coming year:

culinary

-learn to enjoy seafood, or at the very least condition myself to tolerate more of it. tried scallops for the first time the other day. shocked to find that the consistency's not globby and pus-like, but rather tender. doesn't taste too fishy, either. i think i can manage to eat these things, especially if they happen to be wrapped in pig fat.

-find more vegetables that i actually like, and perhaps take to eating salads like any big boy should. hmmm. need another crack at this.

-refine my recipes for bbq pulled pork. learn some new ones. some success here. tinkering with the basic recipe i always use. i have lots of new sauce recipes at my disposal, too.

-become damned good at grilling steaks. not much success here, but i have expanded my general cooking repertoire to include a few new things -- pecan pie, dope macaroni and cheese bake. here again, i have some fresh material to draw upon over the coming year.

health/fitness/appearance

-no more smoking, or at least cut down to the point where i'm able to limit myself to one or two if i happen to be drinking. need another crack at this one, too. went fairly strong for a time ... would have a couple during the week, then smoke at my leisure at times i drank. then went through a period where i was up to a pack a day. then went back down to a point where it was maybe 3-5 a day. back to about a pack a day, but i don't think that this'll stick for too long. want to at least bring it back down to that 3-5 a day level, though in talking with elliott, i found out that just cutting it down doesn't really have that much of an effect -- you just end up destroying your lungs at a slower clip. cold turkey's the way to go if you're to actually give your lungs the room they need to breathe and regenerate healthy tizzissue.

-limit the number of times i'm up partying past the time they start playing the national anthem on tv to once a week. done very well in this department, particularly since i moved to somerville (and especially if i cease being such a dork and up my stipulations to twice a week for friday and saturday nights ... with that as a measuring stick, i've done REALLY well).

-take up yoga classes under the tutelage of my friend jen (certified instructor) or boxing classes at bsc. another crack needed. at the very least, i'd like to take a trial yoga class to see what it's all about ... need to make time for that.

-drink lots and lots of water. think i did. need to drink more regardless.

-rein in my saturday pig-out sessions a tad. avoid eating like a horse that's been liberated from a p.o.w. camp. fuck it, i'm just striking this one from the record entirely.

-shave at least every couple of days. keep the beardal stuff neatly-trimmed. little success here, though i did manage to grow a good desert island beard over the time i had the flu, and i've been maintaining THAT pretty well.

-settle on a hair-style and get it cut often enough to maintain it. i decided that i look best with my hair short, and have done an adequate job of maintaining it.

-new this year: get better about brushing my teeth.

-new this year: schedule a physical with my damn doc.

enrichment

-read more books in lieu of playing video games, preferrably lots of non-fiction. oops. buying an xbox 360 didn't help much in this department. still managed to gets lots of good reading done, and am looking forward to even more with what i've got on my plate for the coming year.

-spend more time watching the history channel. i don't have cable, really.

-listen to lots and lots of new music, especially in the styles of funk, jazz, hip-hop and guitar pop. yes: pandora and youtube, both free services, have been invaluable to me in this regard.

-become a more dedicated blogger. i think i've done a fair job here, but you're the best judge, dear reader.

guitar/music-making

-buy used vehicle for transporting all my guitar gear. didn't need one, considering the practice space i eventually found is green line-accessible. and now that i'm practicing in my basement, there's no immediate need at all.

-regularly study guitar theory. yes. studying with bilgehan tuncer, the turkish tornado, who merits his own post soon, i have done just that.

-continue refining guitar chops and technique. yep, see above.

-write really good bridges to tie up loose riffs and passages i've got kicking around. yep. been stumbling on some, writing others, patching up new songs with old riffs and have done lots of collaboration on finalizing tunes with my drummer, jamie, who's got an excellent sense of arrangement and has contributed parts to things i've written and brought his own great songs to the table.

-buy a half stack. not a priority, at least not until i'm playing out regularly again.

-buy a stratocaster. see above.

-update my effects collection. well on my way in this department. bought an envelope filter and a dedicated tremolo and delay pedal. thinking i'll need to add a dedicated chorus and flanger, plus maybe a whammy pedal to round it all out.

-play music with other people. a big step forward. played lots with jamie over the second half of the year, and jammed with a few different bass players.

-form a damn band. need to get a bass player locked in first. then it'll be time to track down someone to fill the vocal shoes. and then ...

-record a demo. and then ...

-play out live. doing so in september with jamie and justin has only whet my appetite for more. and there will be more, believe me.

pj's

2006-12-29T23:06:00.000-08:00

the pajamas i got for christmas are in a packaging that calls them a "men's sleepwear set".

wrong. they're pajamas.

there's a story

2006-12-29T23:04:00.000-08:00

about david ortiz that has always moved me.

what got me to thinking on ortiz was a recent globe feature i read about his charity work. i haven't thought much about the red sox in general since they started coming undone last season.

try as i might, the best i could do with the razor sharp internet research instincts i've honed on the job was to find what i THINK is a pretty accurate account of the events surrounding that story, the core of which which i feel i originally learned about on a post-game tv interview.

the spot-on particulars are probably unimportant. at the very least, you could find a comfy home for the story in that area that shitty sportwriters allude to clumsily (and which i'll try to lay out explicitly here, albeit even more clumsily), placing it somewhere on the crossroads where history remembered and myth believed in the heart tango with one another.

what i think was important about the story is contained in this piece of the account i've referenced above:

"But whenever I think of David Ortiz, I think first not of his great homers or his many clutch hits(although they spring quickly to mind as well) or his gap-toothed grin but of the stories his teammates told after the 2004 comeback against the Yankees--that Papi had seen fans in tears in the stands the night before during the Yankees' 19-8 Game 3 rout, and remembered the fans' heartbreak in 2003, and it had touched him enough to comment to teammates that he wanted to find a way to turn things around, even if he had to do it by himself."

i feel i remember it a little differently, though this account doesn't seem to mess with essential details; it just might've missed one. i believe those tears -- the ones that are important to the story, anyways -- were shed on the cheeks of one red sox fan ortiz happened to notice in the stands at yankee stadium in the immediate aftermath of game 7 of the 2003 alcs.

i think it was a woman, not that the detail is objectively important. in spite of the damon-mania that would've made her unremarkable (yes, pink red sox hats, ok?), i think it just struck me somehow at the time that it was "her" tears ... perhaps it jostled some definitive sense of classic chivalry in my mind. anyways, it's that gender distinction that makes me think i probably have my memory right.

so. just, the bond. just, the sense that there was a pact that pure, elemental empathy asserted into existence.

ortiz found his fire in her eyes. that's the important part. that's what i want to think (and think i CAN think) he tapped into when he surveyed the disasterous scene after game 3 of the 2004 alcs, the memory flaring to life like the chunky embers of fireplace logs shedding ash to reveal that there's more to burn.

fuck this. i'll will it to happen. if the others fail, i will still make sure we succeed.

maybe the late inning heroics that papi engineered to do just that, leading his team on to an unprecedented 4 game comeback sweep against their historical rivals, had more to do with the fact that he's a record-breaking hitter. maybe it's more that he has fate on speed dial.

whatever the case, the truth lies somewhere on that crossroads of sports and what it is to be human, and everyone is free to lay claim on a spot of that generous interpretive turf.

and, being human, i'll go and chalk it up to the latter.

beating me to the holiday party punch

2006-12-27T12:26:00.000-08:00

ka went and wrote a post that tackled a holiday theme that i had wanted to write on and tagged all the arguments that i had been plotting out for it in my head.

i had regretted not putting down the post when it was still especially topical, but i think the coincidence here alone is enough to refer you to ka's post, not mention the fact that i think that she happens to be an excellent writer and that this is an excellent piece of writing.

the godfather

2006-12-26T09:16:00.000-08:00

i'll leave the wide-scope tributes that rightfully encompass brown's long, storied career in the capable hands of the folks that are more familiar than i with the man and his staggering output.

i do know that if it weren't for james brown, i wouldn't be playing or enjoying the guitar nearly as much or with anywhere near the same approach as i do now, nor would i be listening to music in the same way, with ear and body attuned to the almighty groove. his resonance in pop music specifically and pop culture generally was and is absolutely seismic.

thanks so much, jb.

everyone should watch and enjoy trump taking rosie o'donnell apart

2006-12-21T14:18:00.000-08:00

here's the background story, if you need it.

here's an unrelated video of rosie and some despicable behavior if you need help getting pumped to watch trump destroy her:

and here's trump administering the brilliant coup de grace i speak of:

and back to hating pitchfork, in spite of the fact that i will continue to link to them and enjoy a lot of the writing on their page

2006-12-20T09:21:00.000-08:00

here we have an entry from pitchfork's top 50 albums of 2006 feature.

bear in mind that, you know, a 'best of' list like this ought to maybe go out of its way to posit, ESPECIALLY for the sake of those who haven't heard some of the entries, why out of the thousands of albums released in a year, readers owe it to themselves to get cozy with the elite selection staffers whittled it down to. you'd think that'd probably apply even more so in the case of an album that's glaringly, uh, recognizable among the bargain bin nuggets enumerated. i guess you'd be wrong.

because i'm bitter that i can't write for pitchfork, and generally miffed on a more puerile level that i don't get paid to write anymore, and because it's my blog and i'll go ahead and pitch the damn fork here myself if i so please, i sprinkled outraged, invective commentary throughout in bold, angry italics.

on that note, this is also worth bearing in mind: i'm not taking apart the album in question. my opinion in that regard is inconsequential. my aim here's to back up a claim i made in an earlier post about how the positive appraisals in pitchfork tend to be weak, and so this is essentially nothing more than criticism of a piece of writing's failure to fulfill an expository obligation that it bears, being a piece of criticism itself. take the jt loving/bashing to the boards if you like.

on with the show:

25: Justin TimberlakeFutureSex/LoveSounds[Jive]

Justin Timberlake has a powerful, serpentine voice, but it's not suited for superhuman r&b pyrotechnics. It has a soft, timorous vulnerability [granted, from what i've listened to. we'll see if this is assumed to be an inherent good because it implicitly recalls michael jackson], a lost-little-boy quality [cute]. When he sings about heartbreak, he sounds like he wants to crawl into a hole and die. When he sings about dancing, he sounds like he's seeing nightclub lights for the first time. When he sings about pimping, he sounds like a kid playing dress-up [oops, the mj comparison alone proves inadequate. clearly, david bowie would be apropos, too. jt explores the many facets of a doe-eyed fish-out-of-water in a dangerously sexy adult word. cute]. But here, Timbaland takes that voice and traps it in a hall of mirror-balls, surrounding it with glistening strings, dizzy sci-fi synths, and itchy funk guitars [STOP THE PRESSES!!! you mean this album contains the same kind of ear candy featured on every dance record released in the past 30 some-odd years? oh, do tell!]. The result is a disco album both dazzling in its technical trickery [how? as a result of those innovative synths and entirely unexpected funk guitars?] and enormously satisfying in its emotional sweep [ah, yes, the whole fish-out-of-water thing is undeniably compelling stuff. gotcha]. If an album this ambitiously weird [again, from where does this observation follow?] can be one of the year's biggest sellers [because it's 'weird'? or is it perhaps actually in spite of whether it's weird or not, as the artist happens to already be insanely popular with the buying public, and the album would've sold just as well if jt had sung the whole thing with an organ grinder backing him up?], we're in good shape [read: not just a transparent concession to music that people have actually heard of, which we'll make every now and then as a token gesture to prove that at heart, we're unbiased purists in our love of all music. it may be popular, but it's also WEIRD, so, as you can see, we haven't actually cashed in our indie cred. you can go ahead and sleep peacefully, dear reader]. --Tom Breihan

so proud

2006-12-19T11:33:00.000-08:00

just found out that the staff over at salon.com made honorable mention of "delancey", one of my brother's band's songs, in this feature (click refesh a couple of times to bypass any advertising/log-in snags).

it might not mean so much to people that don't know justin when i say this, but i'm completely overwhelmed sometimes when i hear what he's capable of when he opens himself up sonically, particularly when it comes to how purely powerful his vocal cadences are, and how smart, focused and effective the arrangements he writes prove to be, as becomes especially clear with amy and ellen throwing down the rhythm muscle.

to have such a well-trafficked site as salon recognize them is a great achievement. stop by the jumping bomb girls myspace site to give more of their music a listen, especially if you happen to have a taste for good power pop.

jinx

2006-12-15T09:07:00.000-08:00

someone removed the red splotches from the ubercrombie billboard not 24 hours after i posted about them. shame on you.

first, a little more credit where it is due

2006-12-14T08:53:00.000-08:00

major, major props to whoever shot the big ubercrombie and bitch advertisement above the porter square t station with paintballs, covering the offensive monument to soulless, fascist fashion (faschion?) with red blotches. i can now smile as i return that vacant-eyed model's gaze on my way to work.

flu fighter

2006-12-13T08:40:00.000-08:00

so the flu's had me on the ropes for the past couple of weeks, which up until today has effectively derailed any aspirations i've had for writing, and really most any activity that would require my assuming an upright position for more than a couple of minutes.

but time marches on, and i'm as tenacious as a raging bull, and i've got a simmering fever for blogging and a stockpile of new material to have it at with.

credit where it is due, first: thanks to my beautiful girlfriend, briana, for caring for me in ways that even my worry wart mom would've approved of, had i been posessed with the RECKLESS impulse to inform her of my sickness in the first place, and a vigorous, phlegm-free shout-out to my housemates, who admirably did NOT insist that i wear a containment suit for the times i ventured out from my fortress of sickitude.

the opposite of irony/more fun with wikipedia

2006-11-30T14:14:00.000-08:00

while repeatedly clicking the 'random article' link option on wikipedia in an idle moment at work, i came upon the entry for IAD (internet addiction disorder).

"I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy."

2006-11-29T12:49:00.000-08:00

inspired by this here post, i went and wikipedia-ed up charlie brown.

beauty in this here excerpt from the wiki article, particularly in the last line:

"Charlie Brown soon evolved into the sad sack character he's best known as: feeling enslaved to the care of Snoopy, beset by comments from everyone around him. Common approaches to the strip's storylines included Charlie Brown stubbornly refusing to give in even when all is lost from the outset (e.g., standing on the pitcher's mound alone on the ballfield, refusing to let a torrential downpour interrupt his beloved game), or suddenly displaying a skill and rising within a field, only to suffer a humiliating loss just when he's about to win it all (most famously, Charlie Brown's efforts to win the statewide spelling bee in the feature-length film "A Boy Named Charlie Brown". Charlie Brown never receives Valentines or Christmas cards and only gets rocks when he goes trick or treating on Halloween but never loses hope that he will. His misfortunes garnered so much sympathy from the audience that many young viewers in North America of the "Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown" and "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" TV specials have sent Valentine cards and halloween candy respectively to the broadcasting television network in an effort to show Charlie Brown they cared for him."

and yet ...

2006-11-21T08:32:00.000-08:00

sometimes, pitchfork will publish a glowing review in which praise DOESN'T come off as cheap or too easy, as seen in this write-up of sufjan stevens' new christmas album.

it's appropriately circumspect, offering a liner note summation of indie ethos as context for the apparently problematic -- stevens' spiritual orientation -- before observing that

" ... for all the squirming induced by Stevens' brazen faith, the talents that elevate him above your run-of-the-mill coffee-shop folkie are crucially linked to the characteristics that inform his faith: empathy, optimism, and a love of ceremonial pomp,"

which goes a long way in explaining (and perhaps, in context, reconciling) the anomaly that stevens and his underground success represent, a mature and even-handed appreciation that mitchum then deftly brings to bear on the release at hand, which comprises a whopping five cd's worth of christmas music.

all told, this review is very good writing on music. it makes me feel like i absolutely owe it to myself to check out a musician whose stuff i've never listened to before, playing songs i've only heard a zillion times.

what do people think of sufjan? sounds like he could be a divisive character ...

(the g.g. allin analogy, incidentally, is pretty f-ing funny, given sufjan's huggy bear persona).

jaded rock critic

2006-11-16T20:06:00.000-08:00

me? not so much.

but i do think sometimes that rock critics are too jaded for their own good.

it sounds like i'm setting up to dig into some recently-read review that i take issue with, but i'm thinking a little more broadly, about the type of synopsis i might read in pitchfork or another like-minded web source, where so, so much energy is channeled into the endeavor of the artful dis, but where positive appraisals evoke about as much revelatory power as a fortune cookie at a bad chinese restaurant.

i generally like pitchfork, and am almost always impressed with the creativity that informs the composition of their reviews and their explications of albums, but i often approach the site in the same way i found out last week in florida that my dad does right wing talk radio: with my senses strictly attuned to bullshit, ready to feverishly cry foul to an imagined official at the drop of a hat (strictly commercial: look for some jibber-jabber on my sunshine state vacation here soon).

look, i think it's as simple as this: music is stories. i mean, lyrics can TELL a story, but instrumental accompaniment tends to BE the story, and it seems as though a lot of modern writers on music selfishly (and oftentimes laughably) place such a great premium on the white noise of their own epiphanies in the nuances of aural space and time that they tend to forget that at the end of the day, music is only as good as the story that it conveys, and so they will laud the esoteric (and oftentimes lamely impenetrable) while spitting on the accessible (and oftentimes profound). a music can be laden with brilliant hooks and great grooves -- the things that communicate so directly to your gut and your heart -- and yet if the lyrics are literal, if the progression is linear, if the sound is slickly-produced -- if it's too 'commercial', in other words -- you can safely bet that the song or album will be panned.

i love, love, love indie music, but sometimes, music that happens to be good also happens (for that very reason) to be popular, the posited intelligence of the listening public notwithstanding. what a shame that some very talented people are so intent on sharpening their reviews on the wry and the negative that they ignore this cornerstone.

hey, thanks, sid vicious

2006-11-03T10:54:00.000-08:00

stranger without candy

2006-10-31T08:27:00.000-08:00

as i walked down my street on the way to my guitar lesson last night, i encountered a rather harried-looking woman smoking a cigarette out on the sidewalk.

"hi, excuse me," she chirped, turning to meet me as i approached. then, noticing that i had a cigarette, she murmurred in a rumble "ok, at least you're smoking," almost as an aside to herself.

first thought: "huh, that's a weird thing to say. maybe she feels we share a smoker's kinship or something."

then: "she kind of looks like amy sedaris. and seeing as how she's out in front of the house where jesse has told me the eccentric sister of amy and david sedaris resides ... "

she confirmed my suspiscion immediately, introducing herself, in neighbor-to-neighbor fashion, as tiffany sedaris.

i hesitated a bit, feeling a bubble of mild nausea rise up in me.

when i was a college freshman, i regularly got baked with friends and cracked up watching tiffany's sister portray a cheerful dementia on the program 'strangers with candy'. a couple of years later, i read affectionately bittersweet anecdotes about her family in a david sedaris book i had received as a christmas gift.

i felt like an unintentional voyeur. it didn't help that i remembered jesse telling me of a boston globe article about tiffany in which she bemoaned that the popularity of her brother's works had framed the way in which people received her -- especially when meeting her for the first time -- and inspired them to make snap assumptions about her life and her personality.

it was a weird feeling, but i decided that i could mitigate that by just reacting to her as she had received me: as a neighbor.

getting a hold of myself, i said, "oh, hi, i'm jon. i live a few houses down."

we talked mostly about her missing cat, which was what she had stopped me to inquire about in the first place. she seemed to be puzzling things out on the fly, kicking herself for letting the cat outside, wondering if she should put a big missing poster up somewhere on her house, worrying over her pet being lost outside on halloween because "thirteen-year-olds can be real assholes." i did my best to make light of things, offering that we have three cats at home, and that such things are bound to happen.

seeing that i had a guitar, she asked me about the kind of music i played, and made a tangential but funny crack about clog dancing.

on parting, she interrupted pleasantries almost urgently to inform me that she does glass work, and that some of her pieces are displayed in the front window of her home.

i didn't think it was a desperate stab at drumming up business, but rather got the impression that she felt that letting me in on her craft was an essential means to an end; hey, i'm your neighbor, and this is what i do.

i think i might drop by some hungover saturday afternoon to check out her work. she's cool, and maybe she has something within the meager price range i've set for original art that would help me finish off the one blank wall i have left in my room.

Game Review: Ultimate Ghosts 'n Goblins

2006-10-25T08:27:00.000-07:00

The funny thing is, as I fired up Ultimate Ghosts n' Goblins for the first time, I wasn't speculating so much on what kinds of graphical enhancements, beefed-up sounds and gameplay tweaks Capcom would bring to its portable update of the console classic.

I was thinking more about the weight, durability and aerodynamics of the PSP system, and about how far it would travel if I whipped it across the room, and whether it could survive a crash landing, and wondering if I had the funds to reimburse my friend Mouse if I ended up smashing the one he let me borrow to review the game.

The original Ghosts n' Goblins on Nintendo set a standard in console gaming's early days for the kind of insanely steep difficulty that inspires gamers to defenestrate their controllers. The hero, Arthur, could hurl projectiles in just two directions and absorb only two hits by bullet or enemy contact before dying, bosses from the opening stages would appear together to tag team the player later on, and if you ever did manage to run the hellish gauntlet and topple Lucifer, the final boss, the game cheekily informed you that you had to complete a second, more difficult go-around in order to finally save the princess and earn the true ending.

Still, solid gameplay mechanics, colorful presentation and a memorable cast of characters proved that Ghosts 'n Goblins was more than a mere exercise in masochism. The same can be said of subsequent series releases on the Genesis and SNES, which improved players' odds a bit by granting Arthur the ability to fire in multiple directions, adding new weapons to his arsenal and giving him screen-clearing magic spells, even as Hell's minions remained as resilient as ever, and the environments they inhabited just as perilous.

Now, having effectively skipped two console generations, Ghosts 'n Goblins returns to remind older players of how a videogame can simultaneously set your teeth on grind and encourage you to come back hastily for seconds and thirds after shaming you, and to punish a host of new gamers who've generally had it too easy in life, what with their multiple save points, generous life bars and powder puff enemies.

This is not to say that Ultimate Ghosts 'n Goblins poses an impenetrable challenge to newbies. Aware of the vast scope of modern gaming community, the game proffers three difficulty settings: "Ultimate" doffs its helmet to the original game, imposing two-hit deaths on players and sending them all the way back to the beginning of the level with every demise, while the tamer 'Standard' and 'Novice' modes pamper them with more hit points and extra lives, and by respawning Arthur at the exact points where he kicks the bucket.

It's not exactly a kinder, gentler Ghosts 'n Goblins, though, as regardless of which setting you choose, the game does not artificially alter its core challenge by removing enemies or obstacles.

And believe me, UG 'n G wastes no time bringing the pain.

While Arthur enjoys some new weapons (including a nifty boomerang scythe and a Simon Belmont-approved whip capable of taking down the bigger foes in one or two hits), bolstered magic attacks, pick-ups galore and some fresh platforming tricks, all of which render him more well-rounded and user-friendly than before, Capcom has made sure to stack the deck on the other side to more than compensate for such additions. From the get-go, you are forced to essentially multitask in order to survive, mounting a full-court-press offense to keep the hordes of monsters attacking you from all directions at bay, all the while dodging shots and negotiating the expected pitfalls and traps that populate each level. As you'll notice almost immediately, this latter endeavor becomes complicated by the fact that you recoil when hit, a convention of traditional platforming that can instantly send you plummeting into bottomless chasms; purists will likely accept this as an indelible, familiar element of the form, while others will bemoan that the one-hit deaths that result are cheap. Meanwhile, you have to strive for some degree of accuracy with your shots, lest you nail a gravestone with an errant projectile and summon the wizard, a series staple who can transform Arthur into such comparitively impotent forms as a chicken, grasshopper and a skeleton (though resourceful players will find that they can actually take advantage of the 'fat lady' form's ability to float to pepper stubborn airborne enemies with fire).

Along the way, you'll encounter a host of mid- and end level bosses that will impose extreme tests of your reflexes and, more importantly, your ability to be patient and read patterns. Some of the battles, such as the one with the rattlesnake mini-boss pictured above, are decidely uninspired, and lean a little too heavily on the need for sound hand-eye coordination. Others hearken back to showdowns with the awe-inspiring, screen-filling bosses of the 16-Bit entries in the series, and encourage a wonderful marriage of strategy, reaction time and fundamental platforming savvy. One of the most memorable is your second fight with the recurring gate keeper monster, which circles the screen around Arthur, firing off bullets and periodically taking out the ledges from underneath him, which forces you to scramble furiously as you nic away at its health with pot shots.

Whether bland or bursting with innovation, these boss battles are abusive. Make no mistake: you will die. And you will die often.

If all of this sounds a little overwhelming, it's because it's supposed to be. But then, Capcom's aim is not to frustrate you with impossible difficulty, but rather to facilitate the kind of adrenaline rush moments that occur when you're operating on sheer gut-level, trigger-fingering instinct. Such moments have unfortunately become rare as interface and game worlds have become more complex and abstract, and to experience them again here transcends mere nostalgia: they're pretty damn fun, too.

One such sequence came for me on the third board. Finding that a pillar I had just mounted was teetering over, I waited until it had leaned forward enough for me to successfully double-jump the gorge it towered over. Upon nailing the landing, though, I found that my new perch was quickly crumbling. I rushed forward to make use of Arthur's new ledge grab move as it fell away, and pulled myself up onto solid ground. Almost immediately, an enemy set in motion a huge boulder that threatened to knock me back into the chasm. A quick double-jump later, and the rock rolled harmlessly into the pit. All of this happened within a matter of seconds, and the resultant visceral excitement was awesome.

Almost equally satisfying, too, is negotiating the clever ways in which the environments are structured, particularly when it comes to how each one dangles temptations like extra lives and power-ups just out of your reach, forcing you to think creatively and act with precision in order to claim your prize without losing a life. Because the levels are oftentimes on the short side, exploration is generally limited to minor detours off the linear path, and with few stages to begin with, there doesn't feel like there's quite enough extraneous meat to dig into. However, the new warp key pick-ups encourage you to do some backtracking, enabling you to retrieve previously inaccessible treasures and items, some of which bestow permanent abilities.

The graphics and sound evoke a light-hearted, nostalgic theme and feel. Character models are brightly-illuminated and frequently pastel, sporting a vaguely cartoonish look that juxtaposes well with the richly-detailed and oftentimes grim environments. Though two-dimensional in gameplay and essential appearance, UG 'n G employs three-dimensional flourishes liberally, adding a polish of realism. Though parallax is an old trick we've all seen before, I'll have to admit that I was impressed with how the effect translated via the PSP's muscle. Meanwhile, the game's audio aims to tap fond old school memories, from an enhanced take on the original's spooky first level theme to the xylophone clatter of Arthur's skeleton when you perish.

It's obvious that Capcom did not merely dig up Ghosts 'n Goblins's bones, dust them off and call it day. Ultimate Ghosts 'n Goblins is lovingly-crafted, rebuilt from the ground up and tailored to be an accessible, enjoyable experience for seasoned knights and apprentices alike.

For the record, by the way, Mouse's PSP is still intact.

prediction

2006-10-24T11:19:00.000-07:00

hipsters will soon turn their wonderfully subversive (collective) eye towards bob seger, and will trip over each other in a mad dash to see who can be the first to pretend to hold him in puffed-chested reverence, as with michael mcdonald before him, and steve perry/journey before him. this, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the fact that seger wrote some decent songs.

and a saturday rundown

2006-10-24T09:29:00.000-07:00

-generous piece of beth's lemony-chocolate birthday cake with nutter butter sweet peanut butter cracker cookies embedded into the frosting (the nutter butters being a personal adaptation)

-handful upon handful of sour cream and onion cheez-its

-sweet and sour chicken with white rice, spring roll, crab rangoon and fortune cookie

-one cow tail candy

-one small pkg. junior mints

-one small york peppermint pattie

-one no-name chocolate peanut nougat bar

underwhelming so far, but later, making a dinner feast with someone immensely special to me:

-fresh squeezed oj

-big ol' ham with homemade jack daniels/brown sugar glaze

-sausage, apple and pecan cornbread stuffing

-broccoli

-homemade creme brulee with jp licks cake batter ice cream on the side

joy.

jon sells out?

2006-10-23T09:39:00.000-07:00

well, not really.

a month ago or so, i got an email from a contact person working for this marketing group. her company promotes music, movies and videogames online on a grassroots, word-of-mouth level. read somewhere that this approach is called "viral marketing", and i guess the contact chanced upon an old post i wrote on videogames and saw fit to tap me as a carrier on behalf of capcom and one of their latest offerings, 'ultimate ghosts n' goblins' for the psp.

so, the deal is that i write up a short, OBJECTIVE review of the game (based on what i've heard about it, i wouldn't be surprised if i end up complaining that it's hard as balls) and submit the link to the post to the contact. in exchange, i get to keep the copy of the game i use for my review and enjoy whatever resultant blog promotion will come from getting a link through m80.

once i get a chance to actually play the game -- i'm waiting on a friend who works security at my office to loan me a psp, which i was unfortunately unable to get this marketing person to throw in to sweeten our deal -- i'll be posting my brief review of it here.

fin

2006-10-20T07:55:00.000-07:00

brian and myself square off in a battle of the insult tees on our last day in denver. if we had switched places, he might've won. might've.

traveling at the speed of kyle at the espn zone in downtown denv.

trying my best to tame a mighty burger at the venerable carl's jr. as you'll see, though ...

... i had some stiff competition in the competitive eating department.

that's a wrap, folks!

up next: jon sells out?

and then, on the way back to the hotel, we were attacked by scoundrels fishing off of their balcony with a blow-up doll.

2006-10-18T12:53:00.000-07:00

and even more partying

2006-10-17T12:39:00.000-07:00

create-your-own-caption. go ahead.

post-reception festivities at an uptown denver bar ("the living room"?), strangely regarding a cigarette / conferring with bridesmaid maggie on what exactly it is one does with those things. i like how the camera can freeze and preserve a nanosecond moment (even that's too large a quantity of time, of course, but lacking a wieldier concept ... ) and thereby suggest a story, mood or zany idea that never had any place in reality. with that in mind ...

... take a look at this picture, and tell me who you think i would eventually have a major problem with.

if you said fucking despicable oprah on the left (and not the guy in apparent indignant shock on the right), then DING! DING! DING! DING!

the story here is that the bar was clearing everyone out for closing, save for the group of untouchables pictured above. thinking that they might have some pull with the staff (and that there might even be a good story behind it, or something), i nonchalantly (and peaceably) invited myself to join them.

now, i don't know whether it was the fact that i flirted a little with the girl to my immediate right, or that oprah had some pent-up anger with the world in general over being oprah, but there came a point where oprah decided it would be a good idea to be abrasively condascending to the drunk guy who had had the nerve to so rudely infiltrate their exclusive little mala vista social club.

if there's one thing i can't stand, it's jerks who talk down to friendly drunks.

so, when it became clear what the hell was up, i let loose with a torrent of sarcasm.

me: "you must be SUCH a wonderful and unique person! ... "

her: "as a matter of fact i am ... "

me [interrupting]: "yeah, uh-huh ... OPRAH!"

the next move in defeating oprah was to go grab alex's sister, christine, and return to the scene to point out oprah to her and talk loudly (and sarcastically) about how "glamorous" and "special" and truly great oprah was. hearing about this trick the next day made me proud. maybe even defiantly so.

and more ...

2006-10-17T08:05:00.000-07:00

absolutely one of my favorite pics. alex's mom is brimming with so much joy, and is boogieing with such vigor that she's created a distortion of the space/time continuum in the air above her. alex's brother, ed, is a mild-mannered soul who in his spare time also happens to be a kung fu master who could fucking cleave you right in two (i'm not even fucking kidding), and yet even he is overwhelmed by mrs. chu's whirling dervish moves.

a great pic of the groom and best man (and, if you look closely, a good one of dave doing a little lurk).

getting an early start on the next great american novel, hemmingway-style (plastered).

instead of the staid old guestbook, alex and leigh provided a typewriter for friends and family to convey their sentiments. a classy touch.

... and with that, bride and groom recede from the fading present, walking hand-in-hand through the years and into the future of their own making.

next up: i fucking hate oprah

party (i better hurry the hell up here)!!!!!!!!!

2006-10-16T09:12:00.000-07:00

hanging with the gang. nothing too special here, save for being one of the two shots in which darcy appears (he's on the left, taking a rare break from behind the camera). told you i'd get to him!

intermission

2006-10-12T11:14:00.000-07:00

i heard sheryl crow's "soak up the sun" at the gym this morning.

i do not think sheryl crow needs to soak up any more sun. she looks like a lovingly-basted thanksgiving turkey.

with the closing of that last entry in mind,

2006-10-11T09:39:00.000-07:00

i'd like to say that i think that treating the exchange of sacred vows as though it carries doomsday implications is a tired and lazy comic convention, not to mention an unfair one in that it almost invariably avails itself to a stupid, canned macho pretense (e.g., "he just signed his life [and his defining freedom to chase tail] away!"), and so i'll be dispensing with that approach now.

besides, why pussyfoot around saying the obvious: that i love my friend alex -- in his toast, best man elliott described him as 'the craziest asian guy i've ever met', and i would have to agree, and add here that a large part of what makes him special to me is that he always strives to make sure that anyone along for the ride with him is having just as much fun living it up -- and that i'm absolutely overjoyed that he's making a life with a person as kind, supportive and all-around wonderful as leigh.

i remember we talked with leigh's brother mike about how the gut reaction to being involved in serious occasions in which you're expected to keep a straight face, such as being in a wedding party, is to either laugh out loud or start sobbing.

no need for either ... we were all smiles as alex and leigh affirmed their vows and began married life together.

more tomorrow!

opening salvo

2006-10-10T11:04:00.000-07:00

i originally thought i'd put together a chronological travelogue and retrospective, but it turns out that would take some time, and seeing how the denver story's already over a week old ... well, i'm gonna hit you with a volley of pictures in installments and do my best to make a little sense of them for ya. no promises, though.

here we go:

lunch on friday with elliott, robin and darcy along 16th street, the main strip that runs through downtown denver. much of what there is to do in denver is situated on it or somewhere close by, which gives the distinct impression (at least to a bostonian like myself) that the general infrastructure has some intelligence to it.

as you can probably tell, the sun was blinding that cloudless day (and for the rest of the weekend). elliott benefitted from shades and some shade, while robin and i (i'm sitting across from him) baked in the relentless rays. i can't account for the scorching status of darcy, the man responsible for this and all the shots that will follow, as he's off-camera. i'll get to him soon enough, though.

kyle and a little 'what, me worry?' pose at the hotel room on friday. it should be noted that as this was an all guys room, every one of us lounged around in wife beaters belching heartily, passing beer gas and trading dirty jokes in between generous handfuls of pork rinds.

in all seriousness though, kyle came through with an extra wife beater for me when i realized with horror that i hadn't thought to pack an undershirt to wear under my tux. a BIG 11th hour save there -- thanks kyle.

dave, steve and michelle caught in a reservoir dogs moment en route to the denver athletic club, where the wedding was to be held. coincidence that we also got a reservoir dogs style shot as part of the professional wedding party photos (the photographer: "walk towards me ... like in reservoir dogs"), or a harbinger of the bloody chaos that we were all in store for? we shall see ...

... and here's the happy couple:

2006-10-09T18:56:00.000-07:00

alex, my friend of many years, and his lovely wife, leigh, in one of their first moments of married life.

hope you're ready for a heapin' helping of pictures from the wedding and assorted shots from my denver trip, as well as the alternately goofy/heartfelt exposition that will accompany them, because that's exactly what you'll be getting over the coming days.

we'll begin at the end

2006-10-05T11:33:00.000-07:00

because of darcy's able and ample shutterbugging, the only time i felt i needed to snap a shot in denver came when i noticed the above sign as he, kyle, dave and i were squaring things away at the hertz rent-a-car in preparation for heading home.

i doubted that the sign's purpose was to direct people's attention to the water fountain it was stationed above, as the bubbler was very much out in the open to begin with.

the only conclusion i was left with, then, was that the sign is intended to instruct, as in, 'this is what people folks do with a water fountain'.

asinine. *

* pointing out the self-evident stupidity of something in explicit terms is a self-evident act and, well, stupid in the same way in and of itself. **

** this could go on ad infinitum ***

***