fuck Tower Records, i'm going to Tower Records

let me begin with shouts out this time
other people that i know blog these days and i like to keep up with this and so if you are not already reading this shit (unlikely) peep it out
http://joshsimpson.livejournal.com/
http://questionableveracity.blogspot.com/
aschenkel.blogspot.com
http://bmmullen.com/
yay

i went to the soon to be defunct tower records today and got 6 cds for $40
yay
outkast - idlewild
ice cube - death certificate
the delfonics - golden soul hits (an old joke and its got that excellent song didnt i blow your mind this time)
battles - B ep
elvis costello - my flame burns blue
matthew friedberger - winter women/holy ghost language school

so natch i feel like a good consumer and momentarily really happy
intial reactions:
outkast is probably the coolest thing in popular music even if they have been kind of coasting post-Stankonia. i'd rather listen to the coasting of outkast than a lot of stuff. ice cube is fuckin core. i dont think there's a white person alive who doesn't feel a little uneasy under the pistol-whip flow of cube. but the anti-semitism! the misogyny! the glorified violence! the homophobia! i'm going to sound callous but is there anyone who gives a fuck about this in hip-hop anymore? cube sounds harsh and relevant and the beats on enough stuff are still funky and it leads off with the wrong n**** to f*** wit which kind of says it all. the EC album is pretty solid though i find the reworking of clubland a little too whack but thats just cause i love the orig, i know i'll warm to this. episode of blonde gets what i feel is a improving reworking with greater orchestration. its got extensive EC liner notes too and i really like that. i recently read an article EC wrote for a magazine about his best music for every hour of the day. it was awesome, what a hero, the world needs as much elvis costello output as it can get...or i do. no feelings of uneasiness in the presence of costello's strident croon. battles is some of the coolest/whack new shit i been digging and though i'd have to say the tras ep is better i just wanted to rep with the removeable media. and it had a sticker on it. now there's a sticker on my amp. its there and its gone with rapid fire precision and it can fade into the background or rock your domepiece. in a word, sick. and matthew friedberger, holy balls. this 2 cd set is the BALLS. just pick it up, i'm totally diggin on this sound. i think its funny that he kind of designated seperate "pop" and "noise" cds because the pop is whack and and the noise is accessible. so sweet anyway.

i peeped an ill show. dead child. its a metal band with guitarists from slint. check em out on myspace or www.deadchild.net
i'm expanding my uses, and thus the capabilities of this blog in a move i call "using the internet" so anyone can get a little closer to the vw experience minus the harmful side effects.
so as for the child a big part of my enjoyment/excitement is all live based and maybe they're just kinda silly to most but sometimes things of that nature just hit right in the right environment. and the logo looks METAL in my living room. and the lead singer rocked a CARS t shirt and after rocking ran back to the merch table to sell some t-shirts. damn but if i didn't almost buy one just to give the dude props (and it featured aforementioned METAL logo) at first i was bumming on the middle east full of about 10 folks to see the show but as dead child proceeded to melt the faithful faces we got pretty into it and let the band know that the shredding and the thrashing did not go unappreciated. plus i can say i saw em way back when, you know before they were popular...heh
i think i'm almost ready to get into metal. i almost bought an iron maiden cd today...is that lame? its just i can really groove on the shredding of a guit-piece and who doesn't like some directly feuled-by-satan rock? if rock be the devil's music let us give credit once in a piece is what i guess i'm saying. also i feel it is inevitable and now i've come to relish the thought of getting to a point where there is nothing (music-wise) which i cannot find some common ground with. do i like it because it is inevitable? is it rather inevitable because of my changing attitude? whoa. heavy.
anyhow! propagandhi/the mars volta/black sabbath/dead child have/will make this transition into darker and heavier territory possible and cool
i'm realizing what i've expressed here and how fucking lame my relationship to popular music is. i enjoy a rock concert but far from leaving it at that i use it as a starting point for an expandingly meticulous route into genre appreciation. maybe i should administer pabst beer when listening to these albums too as that no doubt heightened my enjoyment of the show. i am a tool.

frankly i am disappointed with the feature length BORAT. this was a very humorous film but, and to be fair to a lesser extent, i think it suffered from the awkward positioning of the narrative ali g feature/abortion. and i'm worried about baron-cohen's planned Bruno feature. its a problem that i think can also be seen in monty python films; inspired and unique comic ideas clumsily bloated into a standard narrative structure. naturally it must be getting hard to find good dopes who dont know whats up when filming this kind of thing (more potential trouble for Bruno) but i have to be straight up you know and i couldn't shake the feeling that even in the film's best moments (bartering for treasures from a gypsy) the show had been far better (Borat's solo audition for acting classes) and in a lot of the narrative segments i was just getting kind of bored and not laughing, which is really something considering its a pretty short movie. i did like BORAT but i had heard so many raves that i was underwhelmed. sadly i am this way about a lot of things that others/peers are very excited about. the departed for instance, which i guess i'm just foolishly disappointed by because its NOT goodfellas.

the tenacious D movie is nothing special but i think i had psyched myself down and/or out for this one and thoroughly enjoyed it. let me be clear, tenacious D is not better than Borat i just expected it to be worse and its probably about as funny. and the opening sequence is a bit of the ultimate.

and, goddamn it, the best movie-going experience i've had in a piece is Casino Royale. again expectations gaming is very involved here with a couple of recent kinda dopey bond films this one's BAD-ASS. daniel craig is real dec as bond and the film's high intensity without straying TOO far into the ridiculous. after the last couple charicature, franchise cash-ins there are some very refreshing moments of bond being good at what he does and not merely a kitschy, pop-culture relic. of course he is that and i have a tolerance for it so maybe my opinion is not so reliable. i just thought the movie kicked ass is all.

i got my diploma. i graduated college and never had to pay my 50+ dollars in overdue fines to the bird library! PEACE

there were clouds in my coffee
clouds in my coffee

oh no slits, you've changed...older, slower, sloppy on a guit-piece. typical girls sounded boss as did newtown but oh the overall downer you sloshed about for monday night, a fact you would not let us forget. there were a lot of things you wouldn't let us forget, ari. things that between most EVERY song you took time to explain. y'all were punks, y'all rocked a reggae influence (evidently the first ever to combine the 2...i aint arguing lets just hear more examples and less explanations) y'all haven't been rehearsing a lot for your comeback tour. this kept feeling like seeing a friend's new band where you keep trying to get into it and feel every new song but the band has to struggle into each jam and only hits moments of grace. and the new songs well, they sound kinda dumb. lyrics were always a little silly and such is the punk rock wont but older stuff had passion and fire and immediacy to elevate it...right? i sound like such a silly cliche bio of ANY band in the new york or london scene of glorious 77. at least all you slits seemed to be having a good time...well almost all of you. but encoring by RE-playing shoplifting seems hella-weak, no?
all this bitchy moaning aside there was a cool thing! a band called lifepartners (i think, i lost track of openers cause usually i'm not paying much attn to this part of the show) rocked out with reckless abandon. pretty much everything they played pummeled about at breakneck paces through screeching and screaming noise only to unleash choruses of wailing melodicism. this type of shit can get you worked up with a quickness. they allowed moments of metallic shreddery give way to bursts of unhinged cacophony while the singer bashed his keyboard and screamed his face off. good stuff guys, bravo.
a talk radio douche here in boston got fired for calling a candidate for governor a "fat lesbian." naturally my inclination is to call this douche a douche but now i gotta hold on. all of a sudden i'm thinking that as unproductive as THIS type of political discourse is to me at first blush is it any reason to fire someone? how offensive must you be to be removed from talking to people? this is familiar territory for sure but it does not seem to elucidate itself any further case by case. more and more i feel like you just have to allow for idiots to speak (and walk, but the hives already made that case). there are times i am pretty downright offended by a lot of press releases from the white house but i'm not about to call for regulation or resignation (except maybe for donald rumsfeld but that has to do with MORE than his smug-asshole tv-personality. though they are inextricably entwined i.e. "you go to war with the army you have") joan baez once said she was indeed politically naive but obviously politicians were as well and so she had the right to weigh in OR start a school of non-violence as she pleased. word up joan but i gotta take the good with the bad there i think. so word up joan and word up rush limbaugh? rush got in trouble, but was not fired...[what does that fat fuck need to do to get FIRED?], for intimating that michael j fox exaggerates parkinsons symptoms when on tv. ok, that's a shitty and pretty idiotic thing to say but even in that i'm hearing the small voice in the back of my head saying "but someone should be ABLE to level such ridiculous accusations" as a society we should not attempt progress through silence i think. we need to hope that most people will be reasonable and see bullshit for what it is. but i know this is a tall order. how many idiots still think saddam houssein had a hand in the 9/11 attacks despite NOTHING for evidence? damn. what to do? i just cant think its a good direction to start limiting what folks can SAY in our country. i know its often unpopular but in a free society you must take the good with the bad. for any worthwhile and engaging blog there will neccessarily be a thousand This Year's Vlads to clutter up the information superhighway with a dirth of worthwhile information. who CARES if the slits have lost their fervor but steely dan seem to maintain (whoa, i feel like the oppenheimer of rock n roll right now) so basically lets not set scary precedents for slippery orwellian slopes. i know this gets said a lot and a lot of times i feel like people dont beileve it or think it through because its tough. no one said it was gonna be easy. this is to me like abortion wherein i will never formulate an opinion impervious to specific argument. but thats as it should be. there are questions of ethics which maybe cannot be legislated because of their inherent complexities. what are we gonna do? legislate broadly, with room for individual exceptions? what type of precedent does that set? what type of regulation is that? i had a dream where i made a case for abortion issues being like ethical dilemmas of saving one or many humans and how that is done, in as much as people have a gut feeling about these things but are unable to artiulate reasoning most of the time. i thought it was funny to have such a specific and logical dream even if the logic is a little faulty to the conscious mind.
i had a bunchy of strange dream sequences last night where i was aware of dreaming but dreaming within a dream. i was DREAMING that i was trying to not wake from a dream which i was controlling and enjoying. this must be what tom verlaine meant about the dream's dream. in the dream i kept waking up and talking to people about dreaming and dreams and control and then i had an outstanding visual hallucinatory dream where i was blown away by my unconscious mind's uncanny ability to combine and rapidly cycle through imagery. i was aware of dreaming the whole time and even then sad about the fact that i could never relate this to anyone and could never recreate it. so naturally i try both this afternoon. i'm pretty much an idiot. please, give me a talk radio spot. how come i keep coming back to this?
dont silence my ramblings
dont fence me in
dont think twice
its alright