So this morning, I find out, while looking for some music to share, that I have missed the farewell tour for Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, a.k.a. Owen Ashworth. I didn't even know he was calling it quits! I'm quite bummed. But I don't blame him. He'll do something else, just under a different name.
So thank you, Owen, your first two albums are some of the very favorite albums in my music collection. You were music I found myself. Music I shared with people, music I still want to share with people. Thank you for taking an icon from growing up in the 80s like a casio keyboard, and adding more depth and feeling to it with your music than anyone probably ever realized was even possible. You did with it what John Darnielle couldn't ever quite do. And I love you for it.
(P.S. Had to add the first song I ever heard of his: "Jeane, If You're Ever In Portland.")
But honestly, I was more heartbroken when The Delgados split up and died.
Lemon Harangue
When did Family Guy start this stupid tradition of re-making movies shot for shot? It was bad enough when they did that extra-long two-episode star wars tribute. They must've thought they were hot shit for pulling that off, cause now they're doing it every other episode - why? Okay, so you can replicate Rocky III as a cartoon with Family Guy characters in it. How about putting some satire in there while you're at it, or even some jokes? Or would that get in the way of your respectful homage to classic cinema? Fuck it's boring.
I hate to say this, but they seem to be going the way of the Simpsons, around season seven. There's these moments, of utter dead weight that remind me eerily of how the feel changed on the Simpsons. It was subtle though. I knew the voices sounded different, there was some kind of "upgrade" done in visual and sound production, but it just made everything too clinically detailed, like CBC radio. And it was like the warm ambiance that pervaded past episodes had been thrown down the incinerator.
It was never the same after that. And the "dead weight" thing - it's filler, lines that are obvious from the subtext and add NOTHING. Was thinking of the boxing match on the latest episode, between Lois and Deirdre. She says: "You goin' DOWN tonight Griffin!", and Lois screams back, with pointless dramatics: "Nat TONITE I'm nat!" or something. Totally vacuous, no significant inflection, no joke, nothing. Filler is death for shows like these. When the Simpsons were at their best, they had no filler - same with Family Guy. Oh man, it's a Wonderful Day for Pie! But that hilarious Disney parody was just a couple years ago, wasn't it? Maybe it's a temporary backslide, but there aren't many of those in TV land.
I hate to say this, but they seem to be going the way of the Simpsons, around season seven. There's these moments, of utter dead weight that remind me eerily of how the feel changed on the Simpsons. It was subtle though. I knew the voices sounded different, there was some kind of "upgrade" done in visual and sound production, but it just made everything too clinically detailed, like CBC radio. And it was like the warm ambiance that pervaded past episodes had been thrown down the incinerator.
It was never the same after that. And the "dead weight" thing - it's filler, lines that are obvious from the subtext and add NOTHING. Was thinking of the boxing match on the latest episode, between Lois and Deirdre. She says: "You goin' DOWN tonight Griffin!", and Lois screams back, with pointless dramatics: "Nat TONITE I'm nat!" or something. Totally vacuous, no significant inflection, no joke, nothing. Filler is death for shows like these. When the Simpsons were at their best, they had no filler - same with Family Guy. Oh man, it's a Wonderful Day for Pie! But that hilarious Disney parody was just a couple years ago, wasn't it? Maybe it's a temporary backslide, but there aren't many of those in TV land.
Sorrow - Pink Floyd (live)
Ruh roh. She's busting out the Floyd. That must mean boy trouble. My only trouble with boys is that none of them are David Gilmour. Or John Keats. Or some miraculous twist of both.
Don't date men who aren't poets or musicians. They're not worth it.
Today, I will say that I hope he gets his leg blown off for joining the army and being a douchebag. Tomorrow I might regret it.
I guess that's not really a review, or a critique. But doesn't it say something about the music, or my connection to the music, that every time I'm feeling shitty about something, Pink Floyd is the only thing I can listen to that fits? Not the plateau, the plateau music (everything else I've shared here, pretty much) is for everyday. I think I'm a generally lull person, morose. A facade of moroseness. I'm bright red in the center and grey on the edges, and it comes across as mauve. The plateau music is mauve.
Pink Floyd is a deep red vein. Pink Floyd is the only music epic enough, that I have a personal relationship with enough to echo or express my heartache. When your world implodes, when your paradigm shatters, when you realize you've spent two years on nothing in the grand scheme of things, you need vast, echoey, deep, rich, classic, original music. For me, that is Floyd. It will always be Floyd.
I've got it repeating right now, this song. It's music to drown in, that's what it is. Marooned was for my first real attempt at, well, perhaps it's better not to say. Sorrow is for this, Sorrow is the long, smoky bar I can drink myself under and stop time in.
Or, well. Yeah.
i hate squash and other squash-type vegetables; i don't like to run, my empathy is usually more of a curse than a blessing, and sometimes i am better at rationalizing than i am at actualizing.
Matthew Dear, Gem
Song: Gem
Artist: Matthew Dear
Album: Black City
Year: 2010
Found this (heh) "Gem" last night, and downloaded the whole album. I have precious few electronica albums in my collection, but the ones that I have are really, really good. This album is on repeat for me for the rest of the day.
i hate squash and other squash-type vegetables; i don't like to run, my empathy is usually more of a curse than a blessing, and sometimes i am better at rationalizing than i am at actualizing.
Ferocious Oaks - Musical Dogs
My neighbors, Justin & Christel, and their band Ferocious Oaks... playing their song Musical Dogs (which you can hear a better recording of on their MySpace page) outside.
i hate squash and other squash-type vegetables; i don't like to run, my empathy is usually more of a curse than a blessing, and sometimes i am better at rationalizing than i am at actualizing.
"Apartment Story" by The National
This song doesn't need me to say anything for it.
i hate squash and other squash-type vegetables; i don't like to run, my empathy is usually more of a curse than a blessing, and sometimes i am better at rationalizing than i am at actualizing.
the 'Visit Canada' commericials on American TV-
I love them. Very, 'The Blair Witch' ish cuts & takes.
GREAT Bowie interview about Scary Monsters
A lot of interviews I read, especially with musicians, are disappointing, they tend to reveal their shallowness and stupidity. Bowie casually augments his own work with brilliant explication.
"I Was Only Going Out" by Loney, Dear
Listen to this one, it deserves it. It's got everything that, to me, makes a great song. Environment: Some songs, you know the kind, invade your space. This is one of... those songs that makes a space for itself to exist in; Emotion: Emil Svanängen, who IS Loney, Dear, always writes such great English lyrics - for being Scandinavian, which if you listen to Nikola Sarcovic, you know can be difficult sometimes - especially if you don't play metal. And I am such a fan of Emil's composition - in this song especially; Individualism: it's a song that doesn't sound like anything else I've heard lately. The feel of it is very plateau, I guess, but this one is wound different. True, the music video isn't too-too original, but the music itself is, I think. And, last but certainly not least - I can listen to it 10 times in a row and still want to hear it again. I admit I've had it on repeat all week.
i hate squash and other squash-type vegetables; i don't like to run, my empathy is usually more of a curse than a blessing, and sometimes i am better at rationalizing than i am at actualizing.
"Already Dead" by Denis Johnson
Well, it is beautiful, in a way that has me begging for something other than descriptions of a fleeing man tumbling through pacific coast creeks and forests - and then obliges me with an immersive portrait of a Halloween party and its intermingling of castes - in which I'm still lost. Like I'm not nearly worthy of this novel. Sure, I admit that. But I read the whole thing anyway, and I'm glad I did.
Navarro supposed he should stand aside, on the alert, but he let himself be drawn into sassy conversations and drank two beers quickly beside the kegs. Waved to Mo, a dancing girl. She lifted her hand and passed along the edges of his own irrelevance like a figure on a carousel.
What is it about this book, that literary types rave about, and that I can appreciate on a baser level? It's the style, or the eye, and the ear, and how they work together to synaesthetically sense an angular momentum in life, roiling currents, the latent energies of something more elemental, yet ethereal. I'm straining to try and have a meaningful take on it, but the story resists that. It's a frustrating read, but also rewarding every few pages or so. And of course, more than the sum of its parts, but seeming less than. Seeming, WTF? What's the point?
I like the character Yvonne. The fact that I like a character, really only her, says something about the author, I guess. I also like that in an afterward, on page 436, the author cops to having "distorted the intent" of the text "A Course in Miracles", on which Yvonne's notions are based, also referring the reader to the original. So, she's not just a straw lady. Although maybe that, as well. All things to all people, maybe? Yeah, make yourself easy.
get myself arrested - gomez
i hate squash and other squash-type vegetables; i don't like to run, my empathy is usually more of a curse than a blessing, and sometimes i am better at rationalizing than i am at actualizing.
Burnt Ivories & Dino Drama
"Piano Fire"
Sparklehorse
from It's a Wonderful Life
It's a Wonderful Life was Mark Linkous' (Linkous's, Linkou's, Linkoususes...) first substance-free album after being pronounced medically dead for three minutes after a bad reaction. It's sprinkled throughout with collaborations and is a bit more bare-boned than his other albums, not tinged in the sprawling psychedelic colors of its predecessor Good Morning Spider (and I have to be honest, I prefer It's a Wonderful Life, but mostly for sentimental reasons,) it offers, I think, a series of more sharply focused images, or at least, more sharply focused than we're used to seeing from Mark. You don't see this set of songs through the almost impenetrable static and metaphor of his previous works, but like reflections in a mirror. The emotions are, I think, closer to the surface, but they still have to be deciphered.
I love Piano Fire. It's propulsive. With PJ Harvey pulling guest vocals, and Linkous's lyrics and his own vocals pushing her...
how do you feel? / how do you feel? / I can't seem to see through solid marble eyes // fiery pianos wash up on a foggy coast / squeaky old organs have given up the ghost / fire them up and kill the pianos / there's creaky old organs burning on the coast
I like the static, I like the snares, the hush flush rush of the music feels like surf, like walking through the sandy swirls of low waves, leaving you wanting to drag your feet a bit, the way the vocals drag almost in opposition of each other, but in the same step, not so much riffing, but adding tension.... You still hear all the crashing and sift through it for the salt, the whole song washed in waves. The lyrical refrence to the ocean fits the music SO well. I love this song.
"Dinosaur Act"
by Low
from Things We Lost In The Fire
I wanted to find another song that gives the same sense of it being covered in a wash of something, or drowned in it... And it's got some good contrasting vocals in it as well, Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker are actually married. The bass beats are great, they feel like dinosaur stomps to me, big loomy echoes stomping all over it - which is why I like the title of the song. I love this album by Low, it's one I go back to over and over... someday I will do a decent review of it, but for now - there's the song.
You and your daughter / and your father / flew airplanes // You and your sister / can tell by the back of her hands // It was a dinosaur act / dinosaur act // After expenses / and pulling up fences / no more airplanes // And putting your foot down / a nail shot up like a bright red snowflake // Just like a dinosaur act / dinosaur act
i hate squash and other squash-type vegetables; i don't like to run, my empathy is usually more of a curse than a blessing, and sometimes i am better at rationalizing than i am at actualizing.
Haha Sound - Pendulum
Stereolab, dipped in lacquer, with the gain knob cranked - cool album, thanks chels.
woah
Thirty Rock really took a nosedive in quality, halfway through season 4, like they replaced their whole writing room with hacks who then resorted to crude formulas for emulating character behavior and plot lines. I think it hit its nadir with the dentist-anaesthesia episode. Wait, that wasn't even just one episode - it was an arc. An arc! I almost gave up. But I just watched the Floyd episode and it seems like it's starting to get back into form. Whew.
review of a movie with a pretty good title
the girl with a dragon tattoo
Incestuous Nazi serial killer rapist father son tag team. Plus: Swedish and English have many common words, e.g. daughter. Also, Swedish women don't stay Hot t t as they age either.
Incestuous Nazi serial killer rapist father son tag team. Plus: Swedish and English have many common words, e.g. daughter. Also, Swedish women don't stay Hot t t as they age either.
I have been watching these all day.
Arj and Poopy: Poetreet from Arj and Poopy on Vimeo.
i hate squash and other squash-type vegetables; i don't like to run, my empathy is usually more of a curse than a blessing, and sometimes i am better at rationalizing than i am at actualizing.
For Emma, Forever Ago
For Emma, Forever Ago
Bon Iver
2007 self-release / 2008 release by Jagjaguwar
I discovered this album in early 2008 when I was nannying in Stamford, Connecticut. It's not really a stretch to say it got me through that entire year.
Bon Iver - a play on the French "bon hiver" for "good winter" - is actually just Justin Vernon, formerly of DeYarmond Edison. When the band moved to North Carolina and broke up, Justin moved back to Wisconsin and holed himself up in a family cabin for four months, with recording the last of his intentions. He did what I think every artistic temperament would like to do after an exhausting creative "failure"... turn into a hermit and disappear. Recuperate in the snow, put the world on freeze until you're ready to resume.
Turns out when you're alone in a cabin and it's too cold to go outside, and you have rudimentary recording equipment just lying around, you can make a pretty incredible album, regardless of your original intentions.
One of the things I love about this, is that he recorded the music first, and then went back, listening to the melodies and inserting lyrics where he felt they fit best. To me, the words are just another instrument. There are parts where you can't really tell what he's saying, but you don't need to, the mood carries across regardless. It's got some brilliant lyrics, poetic, powerful images. Well, powerful in their loneliness, if that is power. They stick with you, especially once you figure out what he's saying...
"Sold my cold knot / A heavy stone / Sold my red horse for a venture home /To vanish on the bow -- / Settling slow // Fit it all, fit it in the doldrums / (Or so the story goes)"
It's all Vernon, all the instruments, everything. It wasn't re-recorded in studio when he reintegrated into society, (even though at times it does sound a bit too "produced" but that's just me nitpicking a folk element that's not acoustic, nor do I want it to be.) He had his brother haul up an old drum set for him, already equipped at the cabin with a Shure SM57 and an old Silvertone guitar. He says he made his own "instruments" out of stuff around the cabin for whatever else he needed. Here I picture the obligatory saw, washboard, sheet metal, moonshine jug, etc. But that's just me being romantic.
"I crouch like a crow / Contrasting the snow / For the agony, I'd rather know / 'Cause blinded I am blindsided // Peek in... into the peer in / I'm not really like this... I'm probably plightless // I cup the window / I'm crippled and slow / For the agony / I'd rather know / 'Cause blinded I am blindsided // Would you really rush out for me now? // Taught line... down to the shoreline / The end of a blood line... the moon is a cold light // There's a pull to the flow / My feet melt the snow / For the irony, i'd rather know / 'Cause blinded I was blindsided"
It's mood music, really. But it's good mood music. It's stuff I wish I'd written. I think it's gorgeous, but then, this kind of music is my thang. And I can be sucker for the soft stuff.
Besides, a lonely guy in a cabin? If you have to do it, you might as well do a Thoreau job of it.
"I was teased by your blouse / Spit out by your mouth / I was lulled by your low / Seminary song // Tear on tear on / Take all on the wind on / Soft bloody nose / Send another form // So many territories / Ready to reform / Don't let it form us / Don't let it form us / A creature fear"
i hate squash and other squash-type vegetables; i don't like to run, my empathy is usually more of a curse than a blessing, and sometimes i am better at rationalizing than i am at actualizing.
Ween
The best band you never gave a shit about till you heard more than three of their songs. This song makes me think of Malik.
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