Exile on Manning Street

"When I'm driving I found I'm dreaming": A Winter Mix

2012-01-07T02:30:00.001-06:00

We have not had any significant snowfall to speak of here in the state of Not Chicago, leaving the cleared corn and soy bean fields looking even sadder and more barren than they would with white stuff covering them. In that sense, the "cover" to this mix I have created is not exactly accurate. But it is a piece by Grant Wood called "January" (which, as of this writing, is only four days gone), so it is a little early to be making predictions.

That said, the scenery is a little bleaker than usual — overcast skies, trees with nothing covering the branches, chilly but not chilly enough to create ice when it rains. It's really an extended fall without the pretty colors to look at.

Hence why this mix has two modes: Loud guitars with fuzz pedals or loud guitar that sound weird. (And also some offputting rap music thrown in there for good measure.) It's not sad bastard music like my last two mixes. It's just abrasive — much like my Midwestern winter.

Download it right here, if you wish.

"When I'm driving I found I'm dreaming": A Winter Mix
1. "Get Away" - Yuck
2. "Hack The Sides Away" - Chavez
3. "An Echo From The Hosts That Profess Infinitum" - Shabazz Palaces
4. "Nosferatu Man" - Slint
5. "Sleeper Hold" - No Age
6. "Bones" - Male Bonding
7. "Unforgettable Season" - Cut Copy
8. "Sour Times" - Portishead
9. "Strange Ways" - Madvillain
10. "Seagull" - Ride
11. "Now You Know" - Afghan Wigs
12. "4th Chamber" - GZA
13. "Futura" - Battles
14. "Future Crimes" - Wild Flag
15. "Black and Brown" - Danny Brown and Black Milk
16. "Ghost Town" - Kurt Vile

Power Rankings — Wu-Tang Solo Albums

2011-12-31T01:06:00.006-06:00

I have recently taken up the (so difficult, I know) task of re-listening to every single Wu-Tang Clan solo debut album at least once.

Unsurprisingly, Liquid Swords is still ranked No. 1, mostly due to an all-star starting lineup (of well-known hits) as well as an extremely deep bench. Every single track, even a relativity unknown deep cut like "Hell's Wind Staff/Killa Hills 10304, sounds ominous yet inviting — the sonic equivalent of a kick in the teeth from Shogun Assassin while under some heavy drug-induced coma.

Only Built 4 Cuban Linx is No. 2 because I don't like Raekwon's flow quite as much as I like GZA's, and I also prefer weird pseudo-sci-fi underworld aspects of Liquid Swords to the whole "Let's rip off Scarface!" concept behind Cuban Linx. Really, though, the top two are a matter of preference.

What is non-negotiable, however, is Tical. The beats sound like RZA created them underwater, then dumped beer on his mixing board juuuuust in case. Also, Meth's flow is horrible (slow and sluggish) and he sounds high the whole time. This is not always a drawback in rap music (or even on Meth's Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) verses), but in this case it just makes the entire record feel sloppy and incomplete.

Here's the whole list. Judge for yourself.

Also, this is the solo debuts albums only... If you were to take the entire Wu-Tang solo oeuvre Ghostface wins by a landslide, no questions asked. But competitively, Iroman sucks.

And, technically, Liquid Swords isn't GZA's debut but it's his first put out after the Wu-Tang got big and entirely produced by RZA, so it counts.)

1. GZA - Liquid Swords
2. Raekwon - Only Built 4 Cuban Linx
3. Ol' Dirty Bastard - Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version
4. Ghostface Killah - Ironman
5. RZA - Bobby Digital in Stereo
6. Inspectah Deck - Uncontrolled Substance
7. Masta Killa - No Said Date
8. U-God - Golden Arms Redemption
9. Method Man - Tical

Unreal Is Here: Fall Mix 2011

2011-10-23T23:00:00.000-05:00

Those of my readers that live in the more Southerly states (i.e., the ones that have no seasons) may be laughing at me when it is December and I am essentially scraping glass off my car's windshield after an ice storm, but there's really no better season than the fall in a flyover state.

Recently I had to drive to a teeny town in west-central Illinois to cover, of all things, a soccer game. This meant meandering on state highways through cornfields and small towns with brick European style downtowns, and also wide places in the road with wood and stone Old-Western style "downtowns".*

*Never go to Van Brandenburg, Ill. If you blink, you'd miss it, and also be slapped with a $100 speeding ticket for blinking.

I don't say this so that you might pity me (although, I did hurt my back while carrying around a camera on the sidelines). I say it because it might be the most enjoyable drive I have made this year.

It rained the entire way. I never once got on the interstate, instead opting to look at the colors of the country. Well, the colors that were left. It had been so windy that many of the leaves skipped the transformation stage altogether and just flew off branches in waves.

I was listening to this fall mix I just made. (Mark always has good ideas about these things and made me want to make one of my own.) It's sad bastard music, maybe, but it's autumnal. Autumn is a sad bastard time of year. It makes you think — mostly about how cold it's going to be in a short amount of time and why didn't you spend more time outside and what the hell happened in the ALCS and what am I still doing here with myself?

Hopefully that's a good thing and not a bad thing. If you'd like to see for yourself, you can download said mix here. I don't think it's as good as Mark's (which you should go find here) but it works for my current Midwestern mood.

1. "Tractor Rape Chain" - Guided By Voices
2. "Route" - Son Volt
3. "Trans Canada" - The Constantines
4. "In The Morning" - Junior Boys
5. "Should Have Taken Acid With You" - Neon Indian
6. "Cause = Time" - Broken Social Scene
7. "Age Of Consent" - New Order
8. "Vapour Trail" - Ride
9. "The Boy In The Bubble" - Paul Simon
10. "Everyday Is Like Sunday" - Morrissey
11. "Going To Acapulco" - Bob Dylan & The Band
12. "Unreal Is Here" - Chavez
13. "Ice Hockey Hair" - Super Furry Animals
14. "These Days" - R.E.M.
15. "Feel The Pain" - Dinosaur Jr.

Pitching Pioneers

2011-10-15T03:37:00.006-05:00

Here's the story I wrote for the Effingham Daily News on a couple of local prospects that were selected in the most recent MLB draft and pitched in the Pioneer League this season. You can find a link to the full story here, but if you want to see the front page of Thursday's sports section (for which I designed the main centerpiece graphic), I'm including it here. Click on the photo for a bigger view.

Late-Night Summer Mix (For the Workin' Man)

2011-06-23T02:46:00.006-05:00

Hello.

Spurned on by Dan Nick Sean Mark Sam Tom (a blog, yes, but also a bunch of dudes that I know... complicated), I decided to take up their idea (challenge?) of making a summer mix.

I was inspired by the kinds of music I listen to as I drive home from my second shift job at night, with the windows down and the cool, humid Midwestern air blowing through.* Sometimes, I am smoking a cigarette.

*Strangely, the title and idea for this mix was inspired by one song that did not make the final cut, "Factory," by Bruce Springsteen. ("And you just better believe, boy, somebody's gonna get hurt tonight/ It's the working, the working, just the working life".) But there are two other Bruce songs from the same album on here, so hopefully that makes up for it. Also, a very similar song ("Factory Belt" by Uncle Tupelo) did make the cut. What kind of Midwesterner would I be if I didn't include a Tupelo song on a mix about working?

So without further ado, here is the aforementioned summertime mix, "Late-Night Summer Mix (For the Workin' Man)". Don't worry, it's got fun songs on it too. Enjoy. (Download here: http://www.mediafire.com/?7xcgp7a7hjg084p )

1. "Two Angels" - Jayhwaks
2. "Factory Belt" - Uncle Tupelo
3. "Tonight's The Night, Part II" - Neil Young
4. "Chest Fever" - The Band
5. "The Promised Land" - Bruce Springsteen
6. "People Got A Lotta Nerve" - Neko Case
7. "Before They Make Me Run" - The Rolling Stones
8. "Stay Positive" - The Hold Steady
9. "Dig A Little Deeper" - Peter Bjorn and John
10. "The Corner" - Common
11. "No Future Shock" - TV On The Radio
12. "Valley Hump Crash" - No Age
13. "Linus Spacehead" - Wavves
14. "Still New" - Smith Westerns
15. "Melody Day" - Caribou
16. "Battery Kinzie" - Fleet Foxes
17. "ELT" - Wilco
18. "One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong" - Leonard Cohen
19. "Streets Of Fire" - Bruce Springsteen

'Bout to make some bodies turn cold

2011-03-27T02:36:00.003-05:00

I might have something more meaningful here in coming days (I'm working on it), but until then, a song that I've been playing contless times since his death last week:

I never should have given up animation rights....

2011-02-14T01:31:00.001-06:00

"I mean, I guess it would just be a guy who, you know, grabs bananas and runs. Or, um, a banana that grabs things. I don’t know. Why would a banana grab another banana? I mean, those are the kind of questions I don’t want to answer."

Stones

2011-01-29T02:33:00.003-06:00

Not much to post, except I figured I should give a little update at least.

I'm in the middle of reading this book about the history of delta blues. Also, finished reading that Greil Marcus book I put on the side (it's like a "Studies in Classic American Literature," only for music). As a result, Robert Johnson's been in heavy rotation.

I guess I'd also ask: Anyone have any favorite blues guys for me to check out? Both books have opened up some new listening for me, but there's so much out there to process. I'd like to find out if any other readers have any favorite bluesmen.

2010 Jamz

2010-12-21T01:30:00.000-06:00

The SadBear albums extravaganza is (hopefully) on its way.

In the meantime, (because of boredom and the want to write about some musical things), I present to you my 15 favorite (notice I say "my favorite" and not the best) tracks of 2010. You'll probabaly note that (when you see my albums list), a lot of these songs come from said albums. That's because I am, at heart, more of an "albums" guy than a single songs guy. (Not that there's anything wrong with listening to a lot of singles. It's just a different way of digesting and enjoying music.)

Again: These are just my jams that I played on repeat this year. I don't know if they're better or worse than any other songs that came out this year. I just couldn't stop listening.

Let's do this, countdown-style.

15. The Roots (feat. Joanna Newsom) - "Right On"
I did not listen to the album that Joanna actually released this year, but who knew that anyone could make her sound this funky? Leave it to Questlove.

14. Caribou - "Jamiela"
The kettle drum/synth climax halfway through this song makes me cream my jeans a little bit every time.

13. Black Keys - "Every Lasting Light"
Note to Dan and Patrick: More falsetto-stomp, please.

12. Titus Andronicous - "A More Perfect Union"
One of my favorite moments in song comes in at around 1:45, when Patrick Stickles yells "Baby we were born to die!" Then comes a messy solo that probabaly isn't that hard to play but just makes me want to pump my fist along the whole time. Also, the outro with "Rally round the flag" is very cathartic. I think it's about a relationship and not about war, but I have no real idea.

11. Thermals - "I Don't Believe You"
Always count on the Thermals to write a hook.

10. She & Him - "In The Sun"
Zooey sounds great (as Econ says, "her voice is actually pretty hot in this song") and M Ward mostly lays low until that solo at the very end, which is very tasteful yet kind of trippy with all the reverb layers. Also, the video: M. Ward is just fucking cool the entire time, and she's adorable.

9. Beach House - "Silver Soul"
It was really a matter of "which Beach House song on the album is best?", since I love all of them but have limited myself to one song per artist. I went this route because I think it's the most representative of the album and what I like about it.

8. Wavves - "Green Eyes"
Real stoner love.

7. Kanye West ft. Pusha T - "Runaway"
Pusha T's verse on this song has been lingering in my head ever since the first time I heard it. "Power" might be the more epic song, and most representative of the album thematically, but I think this one takes the cake musically and production-wise.

6. Broken Social Scene - "Forced to Love"/"Meet Me In The Basement"
These both count as one in my mind, mostly because it's hard to seperate "Basement" from the album since it's only an instrumental. But, boy, what an exhilarating instrumental. When the horns come in near the end, you're almost sad to hear it end, and wish it could go on for another four minutes. But it does. So you have to listen again.

The other song here, "Forced to Love", is perhaps the exact opposite. It announces its intentions quickly, with a fluid keyboard-and-flute main riff and pretty easily-digestible (probabaly disposable) lyrics about love. It's nothing new, but it all comes together so nicely. I thought I would get sick of these songs/this album after seven months, but I still haven't.

5. Hot Chip - "Take It In"
Hot Chip at their most vulnerable.

4. Cee-Lo - "Fuck You"
If this song doesn't stick in your head after just one listen, you have no soul.

3. Janelle Monáe ft. Big Boi - "Tightrope"
I came into Janelle late in the game (try three weeks ago) so maybe this should be No. 1. Time will tell. Regardless, she sounds so exuberant in this song — it just drips with excitement.

2. Big Boi - "General Patton"
The rap world needs more opera samples. This one is downright triumphant.

1. LCD Soundsystem — "Dance Yrself Clean"
Any doubt as to why this song is No. 1 on my list? 3:07. Just hang tight til 3:07 and all your questions will be answered.

East Boogie

2010-11-22T23:51:00.008-06:00

Call it a morbid curiosity.

On the way back from St. Louis this weekend — my dad visited me since I'm not going back for Thanksgiving — I had some strange and sudden desire to get a glimpse of what local residents call "East Boogie."

That's right. For reasons unknown even to myself, I decided to venture inside and get my own firsthand glimpse of East Saint Louis, Illinois.

I've already been interested by the rise and fall of East Side's ridiculously good football team. But I wanted to see it first hand.

And now I have.

I didn't take any photos — I didn't have a camera, but even if I did I think I would have been too dumbfounded to actually stop and photograph things.

There is, however, a website where you can gaze upon the horrors of East Side. Built Saint Louis is this great website that documents cool old buildings and architecture — still standing and not — around Saint Louis and vicinity. It devotes an entire section to ESL, which you can find here.

Do I have some sick sense of intrigue? Well, maybe. But I am somewhat fascinated with post-industrial America. Maybe this is a byproduct of growing up in Detroit and being born in Joliet.

At any rate, I wasn't really prepared for what I saw today.

Don't get me wrong. I EXPECTED lots of urban blight and I expected to see a sad-sack city down on it's luck. I guess I just didn't expect it to be THAT bad. Maybe like Detroit on a smaller scale.

But the reality is much worse. Imagine Gary, Indiana (I'd say Detroit, but Gary is a similarly-maligned satellite community of a major city). Then, take away 70,000 people, remove every single worthwhile industry (factories) and leave only a Casino and about 15 strip clubs. Then, detonate a bomb that levels half of all the buildings that are left.

Yeah. THAT'S East Saint Louis.

I saw rows and rows of houses that had plywood walls instead of brick. I saw two project buildings, probabaly built in the 1970s, that were maybe seven stories high and easily the tallest buildings on my route. The only businesses to speak of were: a single convenience store, a single funeral home and a church. There was also a massive junkyard that took up what seemed like an entire city block. It was mostly full of trash.

I only drove down one street — Illinois 15. Basically, I was in Belleville and was on the road anyway and the sign said "East Saint Louis - 4" so I thought, what the hell? Why not at least drive in and say I've set foot in there? You can see my route here — I got as far as the project on 14th St. until I'd decided I'd seen enough. An old man watched me turn around, probabaly bemused that I had no idea what I was doing.

I should note that, unlike Gary, it's not easy just to "pass through" East Saint Louis. Gary is situated right on 80/90, and if one wants to, they could easily stop to get gas or whatever on their way to Chicago.

Such is not the case with East Saint Louis. By diverting the three interstates around the city, East Saint Louis is boxed in on the north, south and east. To the west, of course, is the River. One basically has to go out of his way to get anywhere other than the casino, which sits right on the River anyway. All of the exits have two options: towards East Saint Louis, or towards somewhere else (not that Brooklyn or Sauget, its direct neighbors to the north and south, are better options... Belleville, Collinsville, Edwardsville, Fairview Heights, and the other towns that don't directly border the river are actually livables places, but most of the Metro East suburbs are more rural than their Missouri-side suburban-sprawl neighbors to begin with).

What's the moral of this story? (Well, other than to share my weird fascination with this stuff and urban exploration.) I guess I'm just horrified that this is America. This is a city where 2/3 of the population is on federal assistance, 50 percent live below the poverty line and has one of the worst crime rates in the United States.

We have allowed this to happen to so many places in America. And at least in Detroit and Baltimore and Cleveland and regular Saint Louis there are redeeming qualities to the cities in question. Actual business. And some form of tax base that pays the bills.

The point is, there's something worth saving.

East Saint Louis almost seems like the type of place where no one would miss it if we started completely from scratch. And they might as well have — at its height in the 1950s, there were 80,000 people in the city, lots of factories and a bastion of blue-collar prosperity (at least, according to some articles I read today). Then everyone left, took all the jobs with them and allowed the people who couldn't leave to wallow in their poverty.

It's a sad state of affairs when an American city gets so bad it has to sell its municipal buildings and the residential neighborhoods start looking like a shantytown in the third world. That's East Saint Louis. If any city is a stand-in for American poverty, it is this place.

Fall = Time

2010-09-25T21:51:00.005-05:00

Why hello, fall weather. So nice of you to show up. I know, I know, I ran into you in Chicago last weekend and it was awkward. Really, I wasn't ready to see you again. But now that I'm back Downstate I can say, for certain, that I'm glad you're back. I don't like watching high school football games in 90-degree weather. Without you, it just feels wrong.

But now, with you back, I will pledge to wear a sweatshirt and jeans every day. That's a promise. Really. Maybe flannel every once in a while.

One thing, though: Could we not move so fast, so soon? I like you and all, but I think we just need to ease into this. I don't want to get sick. Please.

Things I read

2010-07-30T00:48:00.003-05:00

Magically, moving has found me more time to read that I ever did in Missouri. This probabaly has much to do with the fact that I no longer have cable and watch stupid Adult Swim shows during the wee hours of the night. Anyhow, here's a few things I've been reading as of late:

•Baseball biographies, including this great one on Satchel Paige and another on pre-1940's ballplayers (just re-released after being out of print for years, apparently).

•Harvey Pekar. I tried in vein to find some American Splendor comics at bookstores but everyone was sold out (or did not carry them). Instead, I bought his graphic history of the Beats. A re-reading of On the Road follows.

•My recent (a few months ago, that is) discovery of Longform.org has fueled my interest in long journalism (obviously). Some recent highlights have included the story of Paris' most secret society, TV's Crowning Moment of Awesome and The Mark of a Masterpiece.

•Most significantly, though, is the David Foster Wallace piece "Consider the Lobster". This because, I had somehow forgotten about DFW. The man wrote possibly one of my favorite sports pieces ever, on Roger Federer. (I'd also read the piece "Host", which appeared in the Ira Glass edited New Kings of Nonfiction.)

After reading the lobster piece, and because I had a $25 gift card to Barnes and Noble for my birthday, I decided to give his collection of essays (also called Consider the Lobster) a go. Recommended, for two main reasons: the piece on the national porn convention and the piece on the McCain2000 campaign. Unfortunately, the Federer piece is not in there but I think that might be one of the very last things he published. Thank god for the NYTimes archives (and, again, R.I.P. Play magazine). The point here is, DFW seems like the kind of guy I should have known about forever, yet I know painfully little about him.

My next question is figuring out if I want to attempt his fiction, and if I will like it. Lots of footnotes work for certain pieces of nonfiction, but I'm wary about authors who like incorporating them into 1,000+ page works of fiction. Any insights?

•There happens to be another short piece in Consider the Lobster on Dostoevsky, which convinced me I need to start re-reading Crime and Punishment (a book I never actually got around to finishing). Wish me luck. (Edit: This would probabaly be easier if I could find my goddamn copy of the book.)

Thoughts on today's World Cup matches

2010-06-11T16:23:00.002-05:00

No further commentary needed.

Plagerism

2010-04-17T03:32:00.005-05:00

Reebok's new sneaker commercial sounds awfully familiar, no?

Unfortunately, this is not the first time a sneaker company has ripped off aspects of rock and roll culture to sell its wares.

Reflections on my job

2010-04-10T20:24:00.005-05:00

Gary Cartwright, 1969 in Harper's:

Still, ethics is a nebulous question to a profession that has never really defined its purpose. To report? To expose? To speculate? To entertain? To criticize? To subsist and endure? A good sportswriter does it all. I do not know a sportswriter who would accept, say, one hundred dollars to print something he did not believe.

Also:

Many times I put out the paper alone. All the sportswriters did. We staggered in, tore the night’s run of copy from the United Press machine, selected the stories according to the page dummies supplied by the advertising department, assigned headlines and wrote them, clipped box scores and other trivia from the morning Star Telegram, selected pictures and sent them to the engravers, made up the cutlines, then hurried to the composing room where a printer named Max would be waiting to change everything. Like Charley, Max was a professional. All he ever said was, “Who the hell do you think you are?”

We survived on the assumption that no one read our paper anyhow. It is the same feeling you get on a college newspaper or on mind-expanding drugs. There are no shackles on the imagination; there is no retreat, only attack. One of my jobs was to make up little “brights” or boxes:

John Doughs made a hole-in-one yesterday at Glen Lakes Country Club when a snake swallowed his tee shot, a dog swallowed the snake, and an eagle carried off the dog, dropping him in the cup after colliding head on with a private plane flown by Doughs’s maternal twin.

We went heavy on the irony. Under these circumstances you might think we. got a lot of letters to the editor, but I don’t remember any.

-from "Confessions of a Washed-Up Sportswriter" by Gary Cartwright. Required reading for all sportswriters (and journalists, for that matter). In this book, which is well worth getting.

No Love Lost

2010-03-24T22:59:00.004-05:00

The description to this video says simply "smoking is cool." And, really, I must agree. Only Don Draper makes smoking look cooler.

Composure

2010-02-20T02:12:00.009-06:00

More photos here.

Dear Yo La Tengo...

2010-02-10T19:47:00.004-06:00

Dear Yo La Tengo,

Please record an album filled with nothing but wordless instrumental noise jams like this one. I will listen to it every day.

Love,

Jack

Say You Miss Me?

2010-01-31T21:52:00.006-06:00

Quickly, relating a dream I had last night:

First, in Hillsdale. Sunny. I think I was in art class. Not sure why. So this is going on normally enough.

Then, cyborgs. And lasers. No idea where they come from, or why, but good old Hillsdale College melts away to reveal a dystopian nightmare of steel, machinery and holograms. Some sort of combination of Blade Runner and TRON.

At one point, I shoot a double-barreled laser gun at some ominous television screen, nicking a Big Brother robot through both its eyes and somehow frying its circuits through the screen.

I woke up at some point after this.

Playing on continuous repeat through this whole ordeal— through Hillsdale, during the great cyborg/ android rebellion, and right up to the point where I killed the Big Brother stand-in robot— was "Say You Miss Me" by Wilco.

I would try and deconstruct this but I really have no answers. Mostly just a question: Does Wilco support or reject the pending android rebellion?

Zen?

2010-01-22T15:50:00.003-06:00

If we holler loud and make our way...

2010-01-06T01:57:00.006-06:00

(...We'd all live one big holiday)

Back from all my holiday travel, and ready for the grind. And it's a new year. Meaning, a new commitment to updating this thing a bit more often. Let's see if it takes, eh?

Playlist for January 6th, 2010:

My Morning Jacket - "One Big Holiday"
Bonnie "Prince" Billy and Matt Sweeny - "My Home is the Sea"
Ha Ha Tonka - "Walking On The Devil's Backbone"
Jay-Z feat. Alicia Keys - "Empire State of Mind"
Neil Young - "Don't Let It Bring You Down"
Nick Cave - "Get Ready For Love"

Also, a few links to savor (like Chase + Silliman):

The Stylus Decade
Beer drinking flowchart
Gangs on Indian Reservations
RATM tops the UK music charts (really!)
9,000 words about the KC Royals (proceed at own peril!)
The best sports feature I have read in a long time (Gary Smith in SI)
Boston Globe Big Picture: Best 100 Sports Photos of 2009
Cormac McCarthy does not think highly of Joplin, Mo.
Nick Southall

The sweater must have unraveled

2009-11-08T21:10:00.006-06:00

"Blankets are OK, but they can slip and slide. AND, when you need to reach for something, your hands are trapped inside!"

Here's the thing about Snuggies: At first glance it seems like a truly novel idea. "A blanket! With sleeves! Oh my! I never thought of doing that before!"

But wait. Are these people really saying they've never owned or even seen something known as a "sweatshirt"?

Dixon volleyball "Digs Pink"

2009-10-24T04:14:00.002-05:00

Got some good photos, I think, but as always my photos always look better before I put them online. The whole gallery is on the Daily Guide website here, there's a partial game story here.

A feature

2009-10-16T00:58:00.003-05:00

A new update, since I haven't for a while. I wrote a feature the other day. The photo kind of sucked, but I liked the story. This is it.

Cyclists invade Elbow biker bar

By Jack Hittinger

DEVILS ELBOW— On Wednesday night the Elbow Inn in Devil’s Elbow was a real biker bar. It was invaded by cyclists.

The Hostel International-Gateway Council, based in St. Louis, is sponsoring a “Cycle Route 66” bicycle ride, taking cyclists on Route 66 from Miami, Okla., to Eureka. And the Devil’s Elbow restaurant was one of their main stops.

“I’ve been involved with the Route 66 Association for four years,” Elbow Inn owner Terry Roberson said. “I’ve supported every event thats been down here including motorcycle rides and classic car runs.”

But this is the first bike tour that he’s seen in conjunction with Route 66. And on Wednesday night, the bar was hopping with cyclists eating bar-b-que, drinking beer and playing trivia games.

“This is a real biker bar now,” Roberson said, “‘cause we’ve got both bikers here.”

Read the whole thing here, if you please.

I caught the flu and away I flew.

2009-08-10T01:10:00.004-05:00

Bought Wilco (The Album) used for 9 bucks this weekend. Of course, it never reaches the heights of any of the classics, but I listened to it twice in the car on the way back. It's thoroughly enjoyable. I even like "Wilco (The Song)" (click for Colbert show) more than maybe I should. The whole album does smack of complacency, but there are some gems. Nice harmonies all 'round, some Nels Cline shredding, and references to older albums (church bells! They return!) for the hardcore fans disappointed with later output.

I wouldn't buy it new, but used I think it's a pleasant steal.

Nervous Breakdown

2009-06-26T15:55:00.003-05:00

The Missouri Department of Motor Vehicles is seriously going to drive me insane. Ahhh...bureaucracy...

I went ahead and hacked the sides away/ Without respect to age

2009-06-11T15:43:00.004-05:00

Playlist for June 11, 2009:

Chavez - "Hack the Sides Away"
Afghan Whigs - "Be Sweet"
Sonic Youth - "Leaky Lifeboat (For Gregory Corso)"
Wilco - "Dreamer in My Dreams"
Bob Dylan - "Simple Twist of Fate"
Sleater-Kinney - "One Beat"
Flaming Lips - "Mountain Side"
Uncle Tupelo - "Train"

Trickster

2009-06-09T16:11:00.003-05:00

I like the new Sonic Youth album, but why do they always have to start their albums with somewhat annoying Kim Gordon songs?

(PS, They're on Letterman tomorrow...competing with Conan, who has...wait for it...RANCID! What to watch, what to watch...)

Things I like right now

2009-06-04T16:18:00.003-05:00

A broadened version of my "feel good hits." Because right now I am mainly interested in listening to three types of things:
•Classical music on NPR - Am I getting old? I don't even know most of these pieces but there's something enjoyable (refined?) about driving around in the summer with classical strings cranked to 11 (well, more like cranked to 3...my care stereo is loud)
•Alt country — I'm officially a sucker for all things that involve twangy guitars. Uncle Tupelo began me on this righteous path, and I have been smiting everything in its wake. Recent purchase Whiskeytown is perfect highway/ backwoods driving music (can you tell that's when I listen to a lot of my music?), and the Jayhawks are, well, what would happen if the Byrds were from the Midwest and rocked out a little more with Graham Parsons. A.k.a. awesome. There's a YouTube playlist of them doing a live set in Germany, I suggest you check it out. It has a lot of material from Blue Earth, the album I've been spinning.
•Power pop — Power pop, indie pop, call it what you will. I currently have a taste for lots of power chords and big hooks. Matthew Sweet satisfies this need nicely— that solo on "Girlfriend" kills. Also found an affection for the Fountains of Wayne (I never thought they were that good...but they actually kind of are) and another band I randomly found called the American Princes. Also, the New Pornographers and A.C. Newman...how did I ever get out of the habit of listening to them? (If Elliott Smith were happier, I might include him here too...he shows some hooky brilliance when he's got a full band...but that self-titled solo album, the only one of his I actually have and have been listening too, can be really fucking depressing).
•Then there's XTC, which doesn't really fit into the power-pop category but they're still notable as a weirdass post-pop (kind of a combination between power-pop and post-punk, I guess?) band I've also re-discovered. I always knew a song or two but never delved deeper. Good thing I did. I always heard lots of Kinks comparisons, which might be true if only the caveat: Kinks songs as covered drastically by the Talking Heads. Maybe a bit much. Thematically, though, English Settlement and Skylarking remind me a lot of Village Green Preservation Society.

(S)Iberian Divide

2009-05-23T01:34:00.003-05:00

This does it for my baseball coverage this year...most of my damn games were rained out. I got stuck with soccer.

Now I must live with endless pointless summer activities that no one cares about until I finally get some Friday Night Football in August.

Here's the baseball:

IBERIA—By his own admission, Eugene junior pitcher Damon Adrian is not the ace of the Eagle staff. His performance in Wednesday night’s Class 2 District 8 championship game against Iberia could have fooled anyone.

“It’s a pretty good feeling,” he said after his 6-1 complete game victory at Hooper Field in Iberia.

But he’s not the ace.

“No, our ace is going to pitch on Monday,” he said when asked if he’d go again in the Class 1 sectional. “Not me.”

Really? Adrian’s not the ace?

“Well, I guess we’re pretty even,” Adrian said. “But he’s number one.”

Adrian fanned eight in a complete seven innings of work, holding the top-seeded Iberia Rangers to two hits.

Rest of the story is here: Daily Guide

Feel good hits of May 13

2009-05-13T15:55:00.003-05:00

Feeling very lo-fi today. Also, thanks to Tony, I've gone somewhat YouTube-playlist happy, like right now with similar songs. Find that here.

Wavves - "To The Dregs"
No Age - "Eraser"
Times New Viking - "Times New Viking vs. Yo La Tengo"
Pavement - "The Hexx"
Wilco - "I'm Always in Love"
Guided by Voices - "Game of Pricks"
!!! - "Me and Giuliani Down by the Schoolyard"
Grinderman - "No Pussy Blues"

Summertime

2009-05-08T15:21:00.001-05:00

Oh, hell yes:

Feel good hits

2009-05-06T01:57:00.004-05:00

A shamelessly appropriated idea which I will use as my own from now on. From former Stylus writer Ian Mathers. My feel good hits of May 5th/ the early morning of May 6th, 2009:

Los Campesinos! - "You! Me! Dancing!"
Animal Collective - "Brother Sport"
Tokyo Police Club - "Your English is Good"
Thermals - "Liquid In, Liquid Out"
Belle and Sebastian - "I'm A Cuckoo"
Jens Lekman - "The Opposite of Hallelujah"
!!! - "Take Ecstasy With Me"
Beta Band - "Inner Meet Me (live)"
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - "Tupelo"
Jayhawks - "Sioux City"

We can be heroes?

2009-05-01T14:53:00.004-05:00

The Kansas City Star posted this on their crime blog, calling it "the dumbest thing you will see today." I might agree:

Thanks, KC Star. Here's part two.

David Bowie approves.

Meet me in the dollar bin

2009-04-26T03:35:00.004-05:00

Went to St. Louis today, mostly to go to the Greater St. Louis Book Fair. It's not technically a "book fair," it's more of a "giant used book sale in the bottom of a mall parking garage."

Either way, I raked: Five books. Eleven dollars. Including:

-Roddy Doyle, A Star Called Henry
-Joseph Mitchell, Up In The Old Hotel (read the back of the book and it looks like a pretty badass collection of nonfiction journalism)
-Jonothan Franzen, The Corrections (hardback)
-David Halberstam, The Best American Sportswriting of the Century

The real gem, though, is this book called Oh, How They Played the Game!: The Early Days of Football and the Heroes Who Made it Great (hardcover, three dollars). I looked for a link on Amazon and it's out of print. I think it's from the 70s, or thereabouts, and basically consists of a bunch of old-time newspaper and magazine articles about football from the 1870s to the 1930s, all compiled by this crotchety old former New York Times sportswriter.

As you'd expect, it's nothing short of awesome. Among accounts of the first Princeton-Rutgers game and the whole Grantland Rice "Four Horsemen" article (neat, but obvious and everywhere), it has a bunch of random, interesting pieces on all sorts of things, from the first Army-Navy game to a bunch of old pieces on the U of M football team from the Michigan Daily.

The best of these, so far, is an article from Colliers from 1931, written by Pop Warner about his days coaching for the Carlisle Indian School, which closed in something like 1918 but had sweet teams in the late 1890s. The star player on this team was Jim fuckin' Thorpe.

It has some interesting views on race, seeing as how all of the players were Native Americans. I guess Carlisle was one of those evil Indian boarding schools which attempted to "de-savege" Native Americans...which sucks. But Warner has some insight:

Like [the University of] Chicago, Carlisle had no traditions, but what the Indians did have was a real race pride and a fierce determination to show the palefaces what they could do when the odds were even. It was not that they felt any definite bitterment against the conquering white or against the government for unfair treatment, but contests between red men and white men had never been waged on even terms.

'You outnumbered us, and you also had press agents,' a young Sioux once said to me. 'When the white men won it was always a battle. When we won, it was a massacre.'

And so on. I somehow never realized that Jim Thorpe went to an Indian school like that, nor that they were a powerhouse for about four years in college football. Warner's entire article (about 10 and a half pages in the book) is a pretty in-depth retelling of his time there. At the end he says that the white players he coached were whiny bitches a lot of the time (I'm paraphrasing there, if you couldn't tell), but the players at Carlisle were some of the best men he had ever coached on or off the field.

Basically, this book is an essential for anyone interested in college football. And sports. And sports writing. Too bad the damn thing's out of print.

*Also, three albums bought tonight: new Super Furry Animals, new Thermals and old Les Savy Fav. Quickly, on each:

-SFA was vinyl only with a free HQ mp3 download. Why every record label doesn't just do this for every album is beyond me. It really is more of a rock record than Hey Venus. On first listen, I'm not sure it's technically "better," but Venus was way too short. It had 11 songs, but they were all under five minutes. This one has 12, but the songs are a bit longer and more meandering so it doesn't feel like they short-changed you on content. For that reason alone, I think it gets enough points to boost it above Venus.

-Les Savy Fav has weird songs and awesome track names. If you can find their performance on Conan you'll wonder who booked them, because they are NOT made for TV (not necessarily filthy, but bizarre as hell, on record and onstage).

-Thermals production values are high. So much so that it doesn't even sound like them. Compare this (from their first album) to this (from Now We Can See). I used to think that their lo-fi nature was the main reason why I liked them, but....damn, do they write some catchy guitar hooks. And choruses. (Although nothing on this album touches the hook on Pillar of Salt. Nothing.)

Misc.

2009-04-23T14:31:00.004-05:00

I've already waxed about my obsession with the band Phoenix on other internet locales (we need to have some word to distinguish the regular "blogosphere" from the Sad Bear blogosphere...any suggestions?), so I won't do so again here. I just seriously can't get enough.

Some other new releases I'm interested in getting from bands I've never really heard: Art Brut, Doves and Junior Boys.

*Just wanted to give you a heads up: KC Star sportswriter Joe Posnanski's blog is one of the best around. One of the funniest things I've read in weeks was the post in which he detailed his three worst sports screw-ups. It hit close to home, especially that first one about Magic, since I imagine that to be me.

In general, he seems to "get" blogging. A lot of older sports guys don't. His tone is very conversational, and sometimes he'll write something serious and then offset something funny immediately after it in italics. Not novel, certainly, but it sort of reminds me of how a Jim Gaffigan routine might look if written down.

Just read his dissection of an ultra-dumb quote from Reds' second baseman Brandon Phillips.

He also hates Kyle Farnsworth, as does this guy.

The Boys (of summer) Are Back

2009-03-31T23:18:00.008-05:00

No embedding (can't figure that out yet), but listen: The Boys are Back in Town (Belle and Sebastian Cover)

No story, but I went up to Iberia (aka Siberia due to its northerly and somewhat out-of-the-way location) to snap some baseball photos. (Click on that photo to see a few more spring sports photos I've taken thusfar.)

They've got a great team this year (ranked 10th in Class 2) and some great history. In fact, all the small schools in the area have a good passion for baseball: they're too small to have football teams, so they play fall baseball instead.

More baseball is always a great thing.

I'm excited for the season to begin. At all levels. Look here: The Tigers dumped Sheffield today. Hallelujah, now Thames can start and hit his 40 home runs!

Schoolhouse

2009-03-15T20:49:00.003-05:00

I recently bought the Schoolhouse Rocks! Rocks compilation (and by "recently" I mean a few months ago). Mostly, the cover songs on the album are pretty faithful to the spirit of the original songs. For example, Pavement's version of "No More Kings" is straightforward (except maybe for some stuff at the end). As is Folk Implosion's of "I'm Just a Bill," despite being a bit more uptempo.

There's one song, though, that was weird even without a cover: "Little Twelvetoes".

First off, I'm not quite sure why they even included this song on the album. Does anyone remember this song? If you were to look back at your days of watching Saturday morning cartoons (when they resurrected the Cartoons on ABC in the mid-late 90s), which ones stand out? For me, the top three are probabaly the aforementioned "I'm Just a Bill," "Conjunction Junction," and maybe "Electricity," among others.

But it sure as shit isn't "Little Twelvetoes." I mean, I forgot all about the song until I started listening to Chavez and their cover of it.

Maybe it's because I'm still not quite sure what this song is about. I'm still not convinced it's an educational song. I think technically the purpose it to teach multiplication tables, especially (duh!) 12.

Except it doesn't do that. All it really does, in fact, is set up some imaginary system where some hillbilly finds an alien (I think) and says, "Well, if someone DID have 12 fingers, it WOULD be easier to multiply by 12, because they PROBABLY MIGHT have invented two other digits besides the ones we have already to stand for the other two numbers."

Confused already? Me too. I guess that might make for some freaky kind of science fiction scenario on an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. But how are kids supposed to learn anything from that?

The song doesn't really do anything beyond that. It's telling kids that they might as well stick to 10s instead of 12s because it will never get any easier, they will never have 12 toes.

Looking at the lyrics, the only time the song actually attempts to teach anything is at the very end, when it goes through the 12s:

One times 12 is twelve, two times 12 is 24.
Three times 12 is 36, four times 12 is 48, five times 12 is 60.
Six times 12 is 72, seven times 12 is 84.
Eight times 12 is 96, nine times 12 is 108, ten times 12 is 120.
Eleven times 12 is 132, and 12 times 12 is 144. WOW!

The problem is, it only goes through the numbers once. And there's a pinball machine in space. And the guy singing in the original song doesn't have a melody attached to this part, he just kinda says it.

If any one part of the song should have a better hook, it's this one. It's not really catchy, which it should be is to get kids to memorize it.

Which brings me to my point: Chavez and their outstanding version of the song, which is anything but.

I'm not sure if they picked the song or if whoever was organizing the comp told them to do "Little Twelvetoes," but either way it's an appropriate song for them, simply because they, like the song, were much forgotten about as a band.

And the more I listen to this song compared to the original version, I'm amazed at how they can get it to sound so different while keeping essentially the same structure. For example, the chorus is almost exactly the same.

It's the subtle differences, though, that make the song stand out from all the others in the compilation: The creepy backing vocals in said chorus. The main guitar riff. The part right after the chorus where they sing "Please come back again" and return from a piano riff to guitars.

Most important is the breakdown interlude in the middle where they go over the multiples of 12. It sounds like the alien being is actually transmitting the times tables down from his spacecraft, whereas in the original version it is all too obvious that its actually the voice of the narrator (mild-mannered jazz/folk musician Bob Dorough).

Like I said earlier, the other cover songs on the album don't sound too much different in tone from the originals (meaning, they're all pretty happy-sounding). This Chavez song, though, just obliterates any good-natured feel that I might get from watching the little hillbilly boy romp around in the original.

Instead, I get the same feeling I get when I'm listening to Coast-to-Coast A.M.-a little mysterious, a little wonderment and a little bit of incredulity.

Not that that's a bad thing-in fact, it's the very reason why its the best cover on the album. Few other things (on the covers album or off) do such things to your state of mind.

Problems?

2009-03-08T20:45:00.004-05:00

This morning I saw this strange message on a church marquee that I passed on my way to get coffee:

"Don't tell God about your problems. Tell your problems about God!"

I've tossed this around all day and I don't think it makes a lick of sense. If this "First Christian Church (of God, in Christ, or Whatever)" is trying to mess with the heads of passers-by with stupid logic and senseless wordplay, then they've succeeded.

Ten Second News

2009-03-04T01:09:00.005-06:00

Maybe this will take longer than 10 seconds to read, but I got some front page treatment last week:

That's my photo, too. You can read that full story here.

There's more:

-Some recaps of district basketball action from last week can be found here, here, here and here.
-Posted some of my highlights from basketball season on the Collegian Writers' Blog.
-An entertaining (if I do say so myself) preview of the Dutch baseball team for our World Baseball Classic coverage over at Bugs and Cranks.
-Finally, been helping out a bit on the news side. One kinda shitty story about the census, and another fairly okay story about the digital TV transition.

Fight for your right (to play basketball?)

2009-02-18T15:56:00.003-06:00

I seriously hope that someday, somewhere, I will be covering a high school basketball playoff game where something like this happens:

More info on the game/ brawl from the Montgomery Advertiser.

15 albums - how much has changed...

2009-02-17T02:16:00.000-06:00

So, there's this facebook thing. "25 Random Things," where a person writes 25 random things about themselves, and then tags 25 people to write 25 things about themselves and tag 25 more people, who do the same ad infinitum.

I hate that thing. It's annoying and I don't have time to sit there for two hours and think of 25 interesting thing about myself. Probably because there aren't 25 interesting things about myself that people don't already know that are even worth reading. Sill. (Popmatters has a nice little essay about the phenomenon that you should read).

So I think that's stupid. On the other hand, one of my former professors tagged me in another sort of note that I found more intriguing: 15 albums in 15 minutes. The premise:

"Think of 15 albums that had such a profound effect on you they changed your life or the way you looked at it. They sucked you in and took you over for days, weeks, months, years. These are the albums that you can use to identify time, places, people, emotions. These are the albums that no matter what they were thought of musically shaped your world. When you finish, tag 15 others, including me. Make sure you copy and paste this part so they know the drill. Get the idea now? Good. Tag, you're it!"

I did this one, because music actually means something, unlike "random facts" about a person.

The interesting this is, I did this kinda thing once before, freshman year. On my old (more embarrassing, and defunct) blog. Thing is, my tastes have changed so much since then that this new list bears little resemblance to that old one. So for fun I decided to post them on here side-by-side. The old list is first, then the new. No particular order on any of them.

2004 list
Bob Dylan - John Wesley Harding
The Brian Jonestown Massacre - Take it from the Man!
The Clash - The Clash [UK]
Fugazi - The Argument
Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures
Minutemen - Double Nickels On The DIme
Modest Mouse - Lonesome Crowded West
Pavement - Slanted & Enchanted
Pavement - Brighten The Corners
Pixies - Doolittle
Sonic Youth - Dirty
Spoon - Gimme Fiction
The Strokes - Room On Fire
Talking Heads - Remain In Light
Violent Femmes - Violent Femmes

2009 list
Pavement - "Brighten The Corners" - My first Pavement record. Not my favorite now (it comes in second behind "Wowee Zowee") but still important to me falling down the slipperly slope of music-nerddom (of the indie variety).

Sonic Youth - "Dirty" - Like "Brighten the Corners:" not my favorite album of theirs, but the first I heard. My introduction to noise music (sorta).

Spoon - "Kill the Moonlight" - Finally! My introduction to a favorite band that, to this day, holds up as a favorite. I ordered this online freshman year having never heard them before. Glad I did.

The Strokes - "Room On Fire - I remember looking at my iTunes play count at the end of freshman year and "Reptilia" had like 70 plays, with the rest of the album somewhere around 50. And that's just on the computer.

Joy Division - "Unknown Pleasures" - My introduction to post-punk. Vital in my music development.

Talking Heads - "Remain In Light" - Gleaned from my early days of reading Pitchfork; specifically, their "best of the 70s" list.

Rolling Stones - "Let It Bleed" - Hooked me on the Stones, and got me to realize they've come a long way (to sucking) since their glory days.

Uncle Tupelo - "89/93: An Anthology" - I listened to this for about three years straight before I finally bought an album proper ("No Depression"). Now I own all their albums and consider them a favorite band.

Beastie Boys - "Paul's Boutique" - First found at the West Bloomfield Public Library circa 2002. Seven years and about a thousand spins later, I'll never get tired of this record. Psychedelic rap glory.

A Tribe Called Quest - "The Low End Theory" - Wherein I finally realized that not all non-Beastie Boys rap is gangsta rap.

Wu-Tang Clan - "Enter the 36 Chambers" - Wherein I finally realized that not all gangsta rap was mindless and about killing people.

Daft Punk - "Homework" - Wherein I finally realized that not all dance music was about idiots dancing at raves with glowsticks and Dr. Seuss hats.

Fugazi - "13 Songs" - I realize that most of these are significant as introductions to genres. Well, this one's my introduction to hardcore and post-hardcore.

R.E.M. - "Murmur" - I grew up seeing R.E.M. as 'the band that did What's the Frequency Kenneth' and 'Losing My Religion.' Great songs, obviously, but when I came of age their new material was confined to adult alternative stations. I found this used at FYE or something for 5 dollars. Oh, I'm so glad I bought this on impulse.

My Bloody Valentine - "Loveless" - Shoegaze is a stupid term.

Neil Young - "On The Beach" - Doing 16, cause I couldn't decide. This album got me into...ah, screw it.

Who are these guys?

2009-02-09T12:00:00.000-06:00

Glory days, of which wish I was a part:

Note to self

2009-02-08T10:00:00.000-06:00

Note to (future) self: despite how good they look on the box, do not ever again buy the "budget" 90-calorie blueberry cereal bars at Price Cutter. They taste like baking soda. Thanks, future self.

My back pages

2009-02-06T20:56:00.008-06:00

The inch-thick sheet of ice that caked the entire sidewalk block of my apartment melted today, thanks to the 66-degree weather this afternoon. That's right, 66. It will go from 66 to below zero in a matter of days. I used to think that Michigan had messed-up weather, but now I know Missouri takes the cake.

I guess it doesn't matter how cold it is, though, since it's winter sports season and I'm inside all the damn time. This week, I went to three different sporting events at Waynesville High School. I have pep-band renditions of popular music permanently stuck in my head. Mostly classic rock fare - the band's rendition of "Carry On, Wayward Son" is the main offender here, along with the team's fight song, which I'm pretty sure really is "Eye of the Tiger," seeing as how they play it every timeout. The third-most-played song, though? Green Day. "Holiday." Damn if it isn't really catchy when played by a pep band...now that I think about it, brass makes it a better song.

Anyway, enough horseplay: tomorrow marks my very first sports "section." I got one-and-a-half pages instead of one because there's never anything for the "outdoors" page and no one actually wants to write anything. So I was able to write two long features. Both are about wrestling. Go to the SadBear blog for more info on the Minnesota wrestler, it's a weird story...) No electronic link yet, but you can see the layout. Here you are:

Ballin' it up

2009-02-02T21:21:00.007-06:00

There's something I really like about this photo, and I'm not sure what it is (it goes with this story, which isn't that good...I should have written better). Maybe it's that their poses are so creepy-looking and seem unnatural - almost like something you'd find in a wax museum or on a mannequin. Especially Mariah Wilder's (21) face and where she has her hands in relation to the ball. But it's real game action. I like the color, too. I got lucky, I think.

(I also like this photo of the boys team, just for the action of the guy in front.)

Ed. Note: A slight tweaking. Content has not changed. I wanted two sidebars. There you have them. Carry on.

Snowblind

2009-01-26T21:10:00.008-06:00

Down here, where we're at
The weather changes, that's the way it goes
Sometimes it snows, when everything's wrong
Sometimes it snows, but when it does, it doesn't last long
-Uncle Tupelo, "Screen Door"

Lots of Uncle Tupelo for me lately, and this song feels especially poignant with this massive storm we're having, coming after weeks of unseasonably warm weather (two weeks ago it was about 65). Except this snow seems like it will last forever - it began at about 4 p.m. and shows no signs of letting up. It's thick, mixed with ice and sleet. Good snowball fight snow, if I had anyone to exchange volleys with.

***

Lots of Tupelo, to be sure (they're St. Louis' greatest musical export after Chuck Berry, and even though they're from the Illinois side of the river I can now identify the places they mention in their songs), but also lots of Animal Collective. The new album has songs titled "In The Flowers" and "Summertime Clothes," but to my ears there's no better wintertime album.

It's positively ethereal, haunting and comforting at the same time. I listened to it as I spent 15 minutes attempting to drive out of the parking lot of the newspaper office. See, everything in these Ozark towns is built on hills. Either that, or the roads are on the hills and the homes and businesses are sort of sunken in around them. Makes for scenic driving in peak conditions, but that also means that its nigh impossible to go anywhere when it snows. I had a bear of a time getting up one of those steep inclines, as our office in St. Robert is thusly sunken in. I got out, but it took me forever because I could only really turn left.

***

I gave a woman a ride home. She was walking, as she usually does, but she said "It's kind of stupid to do it in the winter, I guess."

Ya think?

When I saw her she was in the middle of Old Route 66 in St. Robert, bundled up in sweats, a hoodie and a parka. I almost hesitated but she looked harmless enough. She was. We talked about how people don't know how to drive in the snow around here because all the soldiers come from Texas and Georgia. Then some guy in front of us, with Florida plates (naturally), fishtailed as he was going around the giant hill that divides Waynesville and St. Bob (the same one where the frog resides). We chuckled.

She told me that before I got her the police stopped her once and told her to get off the road and walk on the sidewalk to be safe.

"I told them that I thought I was still on the sidewalk. You couldn't tell what was what."

While they were talking, a snowplow whizzed passed them. She got blasted. The officer, still in the car, did not. They didn't offer her a ride.

SportsTime

2009-01-24T09:00:00.004-06:00

Despite the terrible header (which we're getting rid of, thank God), I like today's sports page. Maybe that has something to do with the fact that I wrote 80 inches of copy tonight. What can I say? I'm proud of the fruits of my labor. And my game story (on the Waynesville-Lebanon game) is probably the best I've done since I got here. Check it (full story online here):

Here's a bit of that game story - the beginning, anyway:

Jack Hittinger, Daily Guide
WAYNESVILLE--Going into Friday night’s tussle with Ozark Conference and district foe Lebanon, Waynesville head basketball coach Tim Bildner knew his team would have to be ready to defend the three. His team prepared accordingly.
He didn’t, however, prepare for this: a 68-66 “barn burner” that saw the Waynesville Tigers (13-3, 2-0 Ozark Conference) come back from an eight-point deficit, lead by nine, and then win by two. All of this, mind you, took place in a span of eight minutes in the third and fourth quarters.
“I’m glad to survive that one,” Bildner said while sitting on the bleachers after the game.
He needed the rest. The visiting Yellowjackets (8-7, 0-3) made 13 three-pointers out of 26 attempts–a 50 percent clip.
“We can’t even get that on two-pointers,” Bildner said, shaking his head.

The rest of the story, as I said, will be online Monday. So you'll have to wait. But here are some pictures, if you are so inclined: BJ Ray dunking; Kendall Lewis (this one would be sweet if he wasn't blurry); Donald Perry (need to figure out how to edit so the flash from another camera doesn't look so obvious); Brandyn Preston; Preston dunking.

Sure Shot

2009-01-22T13:53:00.004-06:00

Don't know how long this will be up, so watch it now (and never mnd the fact that the video is too large for my damn blog): Marshall's Markel Humphrey drains a 75-foot three to beat SMU.

Watch more ESPN videos on AOL Video

Mostly I like the interview; he seems like a nice kid and he's honest about it:

Interviewer: If we give you 100 tries to make that shot in that same situation, how many times do you make that shot?
Humphrey: Out of a hundred, I'd probably have to say...zero. That's just a lucky shot, man, I just threw it up there.

I love my job because I can watch this video, at full volume on full screen if I so desired, and nobody would bat an eye. Yes, that's right. Just one of the many perks of being a sportswriter (which also include working from 11 a.m. to about 12 p.m. every night and driving to obscure little high school gymnasiums in small towns to watch a wrestling meet. Awesome).

Best albums in 2008

2009-01-09T13:30:00.006-06:00

Not of, mind you. IN. Because I didn't exactly listen to every new album this year. Or even all of the ones I was "supposed" to listen to. So it's a mix: new albums from this year that I liked, but also albums that are actually old but are new to me. No particular order on any of these, except Portishead and the Walkmen are probabaly 1 and 2. Album name links to review, song name to YouTube sample.

Superlatives:
Portishead, Third ("The Rip")
Walkmen, You & Me ("In The New Year")
Q-Tip, The Renaissance ("Move" / "Renaissance Rap", this is one track on the album but I think they work better as separate songs)
Cut Copy, In Ghost Colours ("Feel The Love")
Times New Viking, Rip It Off ("The End of All Things")
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Dig, Lazarus, Dig! (listen to MP3 in review)
Spiritualized, Songs in A&E ("You Lie You Cheat")
Black Mountain, In the Future ("Angels", "Tyrants")
Vampire Weekend, Vampire Weekend (scroll down for Christgau's take)
Wale, The Mixtape About Nothing (listen to MP3)

Darn good:
Silver Jews, Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea ("Aloyisius, Bluegrass Drummer")
R.E.M., Accelerate ("Man Sized Wreath")
Los Campesinos!, Hold On Now, Youngster ("Death to Los Campesinos!", but their Pavement cover is the best thing they've ever recorded, unfortunately it's only on the EP)
Tokyo Police Club, Elephant Shell ("Tessellate")
Dungen, 4
Black Milk, Tronic ("Give the Drummer Sum")
Flight of the Conchords, Flight of the Conchords ("Ladies of the World"...the only reason why this album isn't great is because they fucked up some of the songs from their stand up and overproduced them...except this one...seriously, I want a whole album of nothing but songs like this and I'd enjoy it...even if they weren't being ironic, I think I'd love it...that fadeout thing at the end is brilliant, I could chill out for hours to stuff like this)
Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, Real Emotional Trash
Drive-By Truckers, Brighter Than Creation's Dark ("The Man I Shot")
Black Keys, Attack and Release ("Psychotic Girl")

Older albums I got into/ back into (only a smattering, these are the notable ones):
Chavez, Better Days Will Haunt You
A Tribe Called Quest, Midnight Maradurs
Uncle Tupelo, Anodyne, Still Feel Gone, No Depression
Wilco, Summerteeth, Being There
Son Volt, Trace
At The Drive-In, The Relationship of Command
Drive-By Truckers, Southern Rock Opera
Nas, Illmatic
Galaxie 500, The Peel Sessions
Superchunk, Here's Where the Strings Come In
Guided By Voices, Do the Collapse

I didn't listen to:
Wolf Parade, At Mount Zoomer
The Dirtbombs, We Have You Surrounded
The Kills, Midnight Boom
Presidents of the USA, These are the Good Times, People
Local H, Twelve Angry Months
Tapes 'n Tapes, Walk It Off
Fleet Foxes, Fleet Foxes (and not sure I want to in this case)

Anything else I forgot about. Which means that I didn't care enough to listen to it or didn't remember enough about it to remember it came out this year. Or I'm just retarded and forgot something good. Damnit.

Things I Read: 2008

2008-12-31T23:59:00.000-06:00

Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kaviler and Clay
Michael Chabon - The Yiddish Policeman's Union
T.S. Eliot - Four Quartets
Louise Erdrich - Tracks
Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex
Jonathan Safran Foer - Everything is Illuminated
John Gardner - Grendel
Graham Greene - The End of the Affair
C.S. Lewis - Till We Have Faces
Carson McCullers - The Member of the Wedding
Alan Moore/ Dave Gibbons - The Watchmen
Tim O'Brien - The Things They Carried
Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Stefan Szymanski - National Pastime: How Americans Play Baseball and the Rest of the World Plays Soccer
William Carlos Williams - Selected Poems

Seven songs

2008-12-29T12:00:00.003-06:00

I got this from the blog of former Stylus writer/ current PopMatters writer Ian Mathers. It actually looked like a good idea. Here are the "rules:"

"List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're not any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they're listening to."

I kinda want to see what others are into, but I'm not sure how many people would actually write it up. So I won't "tag" anyone. But I am interested in the frequent listening habits of others these days. So hit it up.

Anyway, here are mine. I tried to make these actually sound, you know, thoughtful and thought-provoking. I may have failed. Here goes either way:

"Electric Relaxation" - A Tribe Called Quest
There's this bit in the first verse of the song, Phife's very first rhyme, I like 'em brown, yellow, Puerto Rican or Haitian / Name is Phife Dawg from the Zulu Nation / Told you in the jam that We Can Get Down / Now let's knock the boots like the group H-Town. Right as he starts that rhyme, the upright bassline in the back goes "BOOM-BUM-BOOM-BOOM-BUM-BUM-BOOM-BHUUM-BHUUM-BOOM-BOOM-BUM..." I can't get that damn bass out of my head.
At that point the lyrics of the song (about how smooth the members of the Tribe are, sexually) are pointless. Uncharacteristically of the Tribe, the lyrics take a big backseat. The bass and rhyme structure are so smooth on their own that Phife and Q could very well be rapping through Anton LaVey's "Book of Satan," or "How-to" book on kitchen sink repair, and it wouldn't even matter. Although, Phife's verse near the very end is kind of hilarious, in a twisted sort of way: If my mom donױt approve, then I'll just elope / Let me sink the little man from inside the boat / Let me hit it from the back, girl I won't catch a hernia / Bust off on your couch, now you got semen's furniture.

"Break Up Your Band" - Chavez
Somehow, Matador let both Chavez albums go out-of-print. Maybe they never got big because they're not really any genre. They're one of those bands where for which it's impossible to create a Pandora station, because it thinks that they're like 5 different (wrong) things. They could be indie, but they're too earnest. They could be emo, but if they sing about relationships, they're opaque about it. They could be math rock, but they actually care for pop song structure. They could be punk, but they're too complicated. They could be metal, but they don't scream enough and they're only good musicians (no Kerry Kings here). See where this can go?
Anyhow, they re-released their entire discography on a 2-disc set. Which equals about 28 songs. It's a pretty excellent comp top-to-bottom, but this is the one song that stands out.
Everything about it encompasses what a three-minute rock song should encompass. Slowly-building intro? Check. Solid drumming? Check. Appropriate hooks (that little power-chord-and-bass thing in the verse that goes "DUH-DUH-DUH-DUNDUNDUNDUN")? Check. Anthemic chorus? Check. Engaging vocal melody? Check. Strange, almost disconcerting video? Check AND check. The only thing it's missing is a solo, which only becomes apparent when you really think about it too hard. Thing is, it would be superfluous. Man, I wish they recorded more music...

"Seven" - Sunny Day Real Estate
An emo band you can actually get behind. One that doesn't even look like an emo band, really (although their lyrics painfully betray their case...but it's sort of another instance of where he could be singing about anything because his voice is so powerful and perfect for the music).
Really, only three things I want to note about this song:
(1) The hook in the verse where the full band comes in and plays those six or seven quick chords.
(2) The fact that the lyrics repeat over twice. Good thing you'd have to look them up to really figure out what he's saying, because it's pretty shitty faux-poetry. Although I do like the line The mirrors lie, those aren't my eyes, even if it means nothing.
(3) The harmonies in the chorus. Geez. I don't even understand what it is about them. But they're just sorta thrown in there and they work.

"Factory Belt" (the second song, halfway in) and "Gun" - Uncle Tupelo
Not just an obligatory nod to both of the main songwriters (Farrar and Tweedy), I'm genuinely convinced that they're both geniuses. Sure, Tweedy's got Wilco and everyone fawns over him, but Farrar got jipped. Tweedy took the band and made another, more successful band, but Fararr basically did the same thing Tupelo was doing (with the old Tupelo drummer, at least) and stayed in obscurity.
Regardless, I like both of these songs for a variety of reasons. The former is Farrar's paean to working life combining Neil Young, the Minutemen and old-school country. The latter is a straight-up love song (well, maybe not "straight-up" like "Love Me Do" but a love song nonetheless). The reason why I'm so into these songs, though, is because both have this one lyric that keeps sticking out in my mind that makes me have to listen to it over and over. In "Factory Belt" it's the chorus line of It's tiiiime to lay this burden down/ Stop messin' arrouuund/ Don't wanna gotothegrave...without a sound.... Especially the harmony on the first "lay this burden down." They do that all the time on their songs (especially Tweedy when Farrar is singing lead), but for some reason this one sticks out.
"Gun" also has a similar sort of musical feel (all the heavy strumming in the chorus, kinda like "Factory Belt"), but its vocal vibe is totally different.
Tweedy sounds more jubilant than somber or gruff, as is Fararr's usual case. And there are no harmonies on this one. Just Tweedy singing 'Cause my heart, it waaaas a gun/ But it's unloaded now/ So don't bother me. The part that really sticks me is after the guitar solo, when everything drops out and he sings I sold my guitar to the girl next door.... It's just so vulnerable. I'm obsessed with it.

"Motor Away" - Guided By Voices
Don't ask me why, but any song that begins with the words "Post-punk X-Men" has my attention. And then the guy gets in the car and it gets serious and Bob starts wailing about how you can be anything that they told you to/ You can belittle every little voice that told you so, it makes you want to ram your car at full speed into whoever happens to be pissing you off at the time. And then when he continues and goes into the part about speeding going down icy streets and finally implores you to speed away...I swear, I start going 20 over on my mountain highway home street.

Nylon Smile - Portishead
Some of the songs on Third blend together, so it's hard to pick one. That's certainly not a knock on the album - I picked it up again the other day after a few-month-long hiatus (I listened to the shit out of it the week or two after I bought it, which ended up being about a month after it came out). It's just that all the songs have a certain minimalist vibe going on in them. It's hard to explain fully, and this live version doesn't have the exact feeling as the album.
Maybe it's the production: on the album it sounds like Beth Gibbons is simply alone in a room. The "instruments" are incidental. They're background noise; the guitar and sequencer could be the rhythm of the city at night while the percussion could be the sounds of the machinery in the boiler room that one can hear through the vents. Either way, they're back there making noise and they're the perfect compliments to her haunting (she sort of howls between actual singing) lament: Cause I don't know what I've done to deserve you / And I don't know what I'll do without you [...] I can't see nothing good / And nothing is so bad / I never had a chance / To explain exactly what I meant. And it ends right there. Literally a split second after the last "t." Is it a song? Or is it emotion?

Chest bump

2008-12-24T12:24:00.005-06:00

Say what you will about Dubya (I think we all have, so I won't again), but at least he's good for incidental humor. And something about this picture just makes me smile and think, 'Hey, maybe he's not so bad.' For like five seconds. But still.

(Found this on the Freep's Year in pictures 2008. It's not nearly as good as this one from the Boston Globe via the Sadbear, but it has this picture too, which I love.)

Supernatural Superserious

2008-12-20T22:08:00.004-06:00

Accelerate, R.E.M.'s "new" album, (and by "new" I mean "most recent," as in this spring; I'm just now getting around to listening to it) reminds me (1) why I love R.E.M., (2) why every R.E.M. album since Bill Berry left (Up and onwards) has sucked, and (3) why I wish I had grown up in the 80s when they were actually more relevant to the general populace.

Seriously...it actually kinda...rawks. Woah.

More retooling

2008-12-17T00:58:00.003-06:00

I am in the process of doing away with my other blog, which was set up solely for the purposes of having an online clippings archive. But I decided to consolidate. I wanted more people to see the stuff I was doing there (all journalistic) as well as the stuff I am doing here (mostly for the purposes of more literary endeavors and music criticism). Hopefully I can make the transition smoothly. Either way, I'll be posting more of my newspaper work on this site and hopefully, more of the other (non-work related) stuff here.

Tigers eek out 'W' vs. Prates

2008-12-14T08:00:00.003-06:00

By Jack Hittinger, Daily Guide

From the beginning of Thursday night’s meet, it certainly looked as if the Waynesville High School wrestling team would have a big upper hand against Branson. But the Tigers didn’t wrestle their best, and only beat the Pirates 44-27—a score that, according to WHS coaches, should have been higher.

The rest here.

Guitar Man Upstairs

2008-12-08T20:10:00.004-06:00

This guy makes me happier than words. Also, his bandmate kind of looks like Dr. Reist.

Looks like Christmas has come to Waynesville.

Fight to the finish

2008-12-07T08:00:00.002-06:00

By Jack Hittinger, Daily Guide

LEBANON - The raw numbers of the final score wouldn’t indicate it, but the Waynesville Tigers were lucky to get out of Lebanon High School’s Boswell Auditorium with a 64-53 win in Thursday night’s Central Bank Invitational Basketball Tournament.

Jefferson City Helias hung with the Tigers the entire game thanks to some shoddy defense and costly turnovers on the Waynesville side.

Tiger head coach Tom Bildner certainly didn’t like what he saw on defense.
“We weren’t following our own defensive rules tonight,” he said. “We did not apply the proper defensive help or pressure.

“I know that they understand what to do because they execute it in practice, but for some reason live games are different.”

Read the rest of the story here.

Basketball season tips off

2008-12-02T07:00:00.003-06:00

By Jack Hittinger, Daily Guide

LAQUEY - The Frisco League’s annual conference basketball tournament kicked off Saturday afternoon at Laquey High School. Saturday were both boys’ and girls’ play-in games as well as both boys’ and girls’ 4 vs. 5 first-round matchups.

More here.

The business

2008-11-30T00:22:00.003-06:00

Do you wanna be in the business? (The business)
The ups and downs with the hoes (The business)
Always gettin' fronted on at shows (The business)
People gotta stick their nose (In the business)
-A Tribe Called Quest

How succinctly A Tribe Called Quest describes my line of work. Well, maybe the hoes are a bit of a stretch. And I haven't been fronted on yet. But yes, thank you, I do want to be in "the business." The journalism business, that is.

The first two weeks are easy. Nothing's going on, I cram my page with filler and AP wire stories about the St. Louis Blues and the Missouri Tigers.

I work late (until 8 or 9). But I don't have to come in until 10. Or 11. Or 12. Whatever. I wear jeans to work 3 out of 5 days. I listen to co-workers, mostly women, talk about men and shopping for toys for their children. Then they poke fun at me for being the only guy around. I laugh along with them. Yes, the business is easy, so far.

***

Except now that basketball season starts. I cover 10 high schools to varying degrees. The big high school gets an automatic bid and onto my "SportsTime" page. They play in a large league with eight other big high schools. Four of them are from the metropolis of Springfield. Then there's Joplin (a good two hours, basically the Oklahoma border), Lebanon (pronounced "LEH-banin"), Rolla (RAWL-a), Camdenton, West Plains.

The Springfield media turns its nose up at those other hillbilly teams from the rest of the Ozarks. Which is ironic, because the St. Louis and Kansas City media does the same to the Springfield teams. I only have to cover them when my team plays one of them. Which give me an excuse to go to "Stick It In Your Ear" record store/ head shop every once and a while.

***

The other schools I cover are small. Really small. Like 100-300 students. They're all at least 10 miles from homebase, in small communities nestled in the Ozarks. They don't have football teams, so they like their basketball. And baseball. Fall baseball, in fact, is a Missouri-sanctioned sport.

But how do I get there? Because I still have trouble driving on Ozark highways at night. They're all two lanes back here, save I-44, and the prospect of going 55 on a winding two-lane highway with no light of any kind from Waynesville to, say, Crocker (11 miles away) sort of frightens me.

Who knows what kind of turn is going to come out of nowhere and trip me up? Sometimes there will be four "s" turns in a span of 5 miles. One wrong flick of the steering wheel and I'm colliding with sedimentary rock.

Even the interstate winds much more than normal interstates should. On the way to Rolla there's this community called Devil's Elbow, which is little more than a service station and a shack. Named such because of its place on a particular harrowing turn on the Big Piney River, the engineers who constructed the highway apparently didn't realize that it's a bit more dangerous for automobiles to go 75 miles an hour on the same type of turn.

Huck and Jim might have been able to do it on a raft, but a lumbering semi-truck? Not so much.

"Looking for the right kind of live free or die..."

2008-10-27T01:20:00.004-05:00

"Switching it over to AM
Searching for a truer sound
Can't recall the call letters
Steel guitar and settle down
Catching an all-night station somewhere in Louisiana
It sounds like 1963, but for now it sounds like heaven"
-Son Volt

I listened to the Son Volt album Trace about 5 times during my Missouri sojourn. They're from Saint Louis, so I thought it appropriate. Saturday was the best travel day, through Southern Oklahoma (which kindly reminds travelers about once every twenty miles, "DO NOT DRIVE INTO SMOKE") and the entire north-south length of Texas. By "best" I mean I was able to find the best radio stations, since the scenery itself is kind of drab.

Seriously. When I left Tulsa, there were three Big Twelve football games going on. Somehow Tulsa is placed just so perfectly that I was able to get the radio feed for all six teams that happened to be playing at that time (Kansas, Nebraska, Baylor, Oklahoma, Texas Tech, Kansas State). I liked the Kansas station the best, because a) they didn't have Southern accents and b) it wasn't the flagship station I was hearing but rather an obscure country station from Pittsburg, Kansas and advertised many things from the Pittsburg area that would normally have little interest to me. Like furniture and jewelry, Pittsburg style. Somehow, though, I was fascinated by all of it.

But this happened at noon. Selecting a radio station at noon is a straightforward affair: you hit seek and you have a very strong signal for a decent amount of stations, especially in a city.

At night, though, it becomes mysterious. One can pick up strange radio stations playing strange things from literally any part of the Western Hemisphere. Most of the stations you want to listen to don't come in very strongly so you'll hear two or three voices talking at the same time, unintelligibly, over music. You'll hear Spanish and French or sometimes, at least in Houston, nebulous Asian languages. You'll hear Coast to Coast AM. Coming from millions of different cities.

The light lingers for a bit longer in Texas. It's a pale blue in October, and it stays lit for a pretty long time until at some point everything clicks and it's pitch black. Sometimes there will be an Exxon on the side of the road giving some light, but usually it's just you, the road, and the lights from other cars behind you, which can be deceiving in the mirror.

I found myself radio-hopping from Dallas to Houston. The Longhorns game, to which I had been intently listening (did I mention how I think college football is second only to baseball in "best sport to listen to on the radio"? No? Well, I did now...) had ended and the sky was that pale blue and I tried listening to music but nothing seemed appropriate. So I attempted to find various sporting events, maybe a Rockets game or a Houton Cougers game. No cigar. No Houston stations to be found, actually. All were garbled with static and faint hints of music.

Somehow, though, I managed to hear this: "...and you're listening to the voice of the Chicago Blackhawks, WGN Radio 720!" Fuckin' hell, that's far. They were playing the Red Wings. I listened until it faded, and then found some Cajun guy talking about LSU football, a Colorado Buffs game, Notre Dame, Grande Ole Opry radio, a Spanish soccer game, and what I think was a Canadiens game in French. And a long infomercial for this hot tea made from cocoa that's supposed to be the best drink ever.

It almost makes me want to never listen to music in the car again.

(PS, I got and took the Missouri job, I'll be moving in about three weeks...)

First Impressions of Mizzou-Rah

2008-10-23T23:16:00.004-05:00

Missouri is a nice Midwestern state. Er, fuck, no, it's a Great Plains state. Huh? It's Southern? Goddamn!

*****

I stayed with my aunt and uncle in Tulsa last night. He'd been through Waynesville before. Used to live in St. Louis.

"It's a nice drive," he told me. "Scenic. Not too hard...although, the only thing they seem to have there are fireworks, liquor stores, and porno shops."

And oddly-placed signs. Like:

"Vasectomy removal, the best in Mizzou!"

or, to signify the Mickey D's for truckers:

"MCSTOP!"

Don't forget the millions of seemingly endless signs for Branson tucked behind that patch of Ozark plateau. Branson even has its own 24-hour radio station with paid programming and only paid programming.

****

This Waynesville place is a bit strange, too. All the roads wind like mountain roads should, only the Ozarks, according to Wikipedia, aren't actually mountains. I drove around for a while to get a feel for the town. It's smaller than Hillsdale, but feels like part of civilization because it's right off the Interstate.

Except when you turn the wrong way the "mountain" roads wind around for 15 minutes and you end up at the entrance to a military base.

But I dig. At least I do now. Hopefully they'll show me around more tomorrow.

****

But I still haven't determined if Missouri is a Midwestern state. I want to say yes. Springfield, only about 90 miles away, is as wonderfully small and-post industrial as any Midwestern city should be, graffiti-ed buildings and abandoned factories downtown and all. It could be Gary except there are about 21,000 normal, not scared (or scary looking) college kids walking around. They have a Cardinals' farm team and a record shop named "Stick It In Your Ear!" Rolla is much the same, but about 3/4ths the size and 60 miles the other way.

This should be the Midwest, I think to myself, but then I look out the window and see the fuckin' Ozarks, rocks jutting out of hills and weird red plants growing on them. I also hear townsfolk speaking in slight accents...an Arkansas drawl with a bit of nasal action. Real bizarre.

****

Interview tomorrow...not exactly sure what to expect. Or where the place is. So no pressure or anything, huh?

Overheard at the Oasis...

2008-09-18T20:52:00.003-05:00

The internet oasis where I am currently mooching off internet, aka my Mediterranean Cafe:

"You mean, you haven't seen the Sarah Palin baby name generator?"

"I think Ann Coulter is hot."
"If you're into men."

Can I not get away from these fucking kinds of discussions, even 1,320 miles from Hillsdale, MI?

I Hate Ike

2008-09-13T00:23:00.003-05:00

Shits and giggles, before I lose power:

It's better on record. But it's still the best song about hurricanes ever. Yeah, fuck you, Scorpions! The Black Lips come in a close second.

The Cafe

2008-09-08T16:17:00.002-05:00

"On some nights, New York is as hot as Bangkok. The whole continent seems to have moved from its place and slid near the equator..."

-Saul Bellow, The Victim

I'm not in New York, I'm in Houston, so it isn't as much of a stretch to imagine Houston as some foreign oasis like Bangkok or Tangier or Algiers. You know, somewhere foreign but not too foreign. The types of places where it wouldn't be uncommon to see people in turbans and fesses sipping coffee with French or American businessmen.

There's this cafe in Houston that I can go to where I feel like I'm in a foreign country. A place where (thankfully) they don't actually know my name, but they know my face. Even if they did know my name, they speak more naturally in foreign languages (Spanish...Mediterranean at the very least).

It's in this old building that, from the outside, looks like a Mediterranean villa covered with ivy. High bushes surround it, so it's hard to see the people sitting on the other side. You enter the ivy maze, sit down on the side of the building, kind of like a little enclave in an alleyway, and can't see the street outside.

The cars might as well not be there, and I might as well be sitting elsewhere, in some other country somewhere (as if Texas isn't almost one already).

Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-DUH...

2008-08-10T13:39:00.004-05:00

I woke up early today to watch the Team USA (the "Redeem Team") play against China (I need to say right now that love Yao Ming for some reason...he looks so goofy and cool at the same time that I can't help but love him).

Much to my pleasant surprise, I found that, for their basketball coverage, NBC has revived the greatest theme song in sports broadcasting history.

I mean, seriously. How can you listen to that theme song and not get excited about basketball? Maybe that's why the NBA sucks so much these days: no NBA on NBC, no theme song, and thus no excitement.

A list of other sweet sports theme songs to follow, when I get the time.

Bloggin'

2008-08-05T23:33:00.004-05:00

I've already posted this on the SadBear blog, but for the benefit of those who don't (which begs the question of why to begin with), I'm writing about the Astros for the baseball website Bugs and Cranks. My first post is up right now. So check it out. And the website, too, they have some funny writers.

Showing my age

2008-07-31T15:13:00.002-05:00

A distressing incident from this afternoon:

Me (walking into the room): So, the White Sox got Griffey today. Kind of scary...
12-year-old brother: Who?
Me (figuring he didn't hear me the first time): Ken Griffey, Junior.
Him: Who the hell is that?

Has it really come to this? Children not knowing who Ken Griffey, Jr. is until they see a picture of him and maybe recognize him as that one good player on the Reds? I don't know, but to me it's eerie: it was just about ten years ago (when I was his age...) that Griffey was the kind of guy that every kid had a poster of. Or at least a video game of. He was pretty much the guy, along with Sosa and McGwire. But now? Now kids under 15 have no idea who he is.

Maybe I'm naive. Ten years doesn't seem like that long ago, does it? I like to think of myself as a young person. But really, that's false. Young people have Ken Griffey Junior posters on their walls, ones that they took from Sports Illustrated for Kids.

Top Ten Songs About You

2008-07-23T18:33:00.012-05:00

(Or, Top Ten Songs in Which the Addressee is Mentioned in the Title)

I love songs like these. For no real reason in particular. I mean, it's very true that many (if not most) songs are about someone specific, about some sort of "you." I just like titles that specifically saw it. Most of the time they are only "Baby" or "Darlin" or "Girl" or even just "You," but they're always directed towards said person. Here's a list:

(Apologies to: "You're My Best Friend," "All I Want is You," "It's All Over, Baby Blue," "A Message To You Rudy," "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?", "I Want You" (She's So Heavy AND Dylan), "I Put A Spell On You," "Hang On To Yourself," "I Got You, Babe," "I Believe In You," and the entire Matchbox 20 album "Yourself Or Someone Like You," among many others.)

10. Morrissey - "You're the One for Me, Fatty"
The first Morrissey song here. A more personal twist on "Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others."
9. Caleb - "Baby Your Phrasing is Bad"
~~If I could find a sample of this I would post it. It's from Nuggets, so if you can imagine that then you probably get the gist of it. Great title, though, isn't it?~~ Someone anonymous put this song on Rapidshare. I'm not sure who you are but let me know so I can give you props. Everyone should listen to this song now. Supposedly, this guy was Elton John's guitarist later, and Sir Elton is actually rumored to play on the song. I love the phasing (with the "phrasing"...ha!) and the lyrics, while hard to discern, I think go something like this: "Please try to make yourself clear / So that when you talk to me it doesn't strain my ear." Good stuff or what, eh?
8. Tokyo Police Club - "Your English Is Good"
No direct address, per say, like the previous one, but the spirit is still there. This is sort of the opposite twist on it, I guess.
7. Black Flag - "You Bet We've Got Something Against You"
There's a 30 second sound clip that only has the chorus but luckily, the chorus is the best part of the song. It goes, no joke: "You bet that I've got something personal against you!" He doesn't even really sing it, he just kinda says it. I imagine this would be good fighting music.
6. The Magnetic Fields - "Fido, Your Leash Is Too Long"
Maybe the ultimate diss track about an unnamed person.
5. The Smiths - "William, It Was Really Nothing"
The other Morrissey song on the list. Supposedly about a guy named Billy Mackenzie from another British band called The Associates. They, in turn, recorded a response song called "Stephen, You're Really Something." Kinda lame, really.
4. Led Zeppelin - "Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You"
Probably the most famous of all the "Baby, I'm Going To Do Whatever With You" type songs. Also, most assuredly the most cliche title out of all of them. Still iconic, though.
3. The White Stripes - "You're Pretty Good Looking (For A Girl)
You can tell he wants her.
2. The Thirteenth Floor Elevators - "You're Gonna Miss Me"
I love how angry this song is, and I often wonder if the person he was singing about knows who she is. Actually, this would have been number one, if not for the fact that the next one exists...
1. Don Caballero - "Let's Face it Pal, You Didn't Need That Eye Surgery"
It doesn't have any lyrics so it's basically just an awesome title, but still, isn't this the greatest title ever?

Mr. C Montgomory Burns; net worth $8.4 million

2008-07-12T15:04:00.004-05:00

I have no idea how they calculate this, but somehow Forbes Magazine has come up with the top 15 richest fictional characters ever. My question: why is Mario even on this list (at least, he has been before) and not someone like Lex Luther is beyond me. And who the fuck is Ming the Merciless?

"...missile launchers hover in glowing light"

2008-06-23T13:55:00.002-05:00

...ask yourself a few straightforward questions: Do you want to go outside and steal a car? Do you feel the need to obtain a missile launcher? Do you feel like having sex with a stripper? Or, to more accurately represent the sort of reasoning involved in media-effects claims, do you feel that having sex with a stripper is now a real possibility for you?

You need to be honest with yourself. Go outside and find a locked car — or go to the back alley where missile launchers hover in a glowing light waiting for you to pick them up, or go drive down that street in your town where all the strippers hang out waiting for you to pick them up — and see if you're tempted.

The Chronicle has a great article today on Grand Theft Auto and the effects of other "explicit media" on our society.

The Side of the Barn, at Midnight

2008-05-26T20:43:00.010-05:00

"None of them knew the color of the sky."

-S. Crane, 'The Open Boat' (1894)

It's funny, living with light. You don't notice it when you're in them, but cities take a toll on the sky. Hillsdale might be a "hick town" but at least you can see the lights, however faintly, on the horizon. Jackson, Michigan. Hoo, boy. Sure, it's no Detroit or even Ann Arbor but it's comforting, those lights on the horizon. The only problem is, they taint the color of the sky.

Up North, you can actually see the color of the sky, and all the constellations. But suburban kids usually can't tell Orion's Belt from the Gemini Twins or the Sundlandic Twins or the Odd Couple, so it doesn't quite matter.

But hey, still. Stars. Natural light. No streetlights even. Can't see much of anything (but nothing to see anyway). You can hear dogs barking aimlessly and wonder why they bark. The only movement is the sound of your footsteps walking out the front door. The dogs are out back.

Country dogs have better noses, do they?, you mindlessly think to yourself, for some reason wanting to prove to them that they don't.

Getting around back proves more of a chore than you'd think. The grass is separated from the dirt driveway by about 3 inches so you lose your footing but don't quite fall, the dirt (more like sand, really) just engulfs the insides of your ripped sneakers and dirties your socks a little. You've been wearing them for two days already so they stick to your feet as you impossibly attempt to sneak into the backyard.

The dogs are caged in a short chain-link pen, and they seem to notice nothing as you crouch and watch from behind the car. They pant and sniff each other, you can barely make out their figures silhouetted in front of the barn. It casts a long shadow. In the daylight it's a dark crimson, but now it blends to the trees as everything does in total darkness.

You lean on the car, back to the pen, and look up again, vainly trying to find the Big Dipper. It's approaching midnight, you guess. No sense in rushing. There's nothing to do tomorrow. Nothing to do from now on - it's all like the side of that barn at night, blank and black.

Anything, you think, anything could happen. I can do ANYTHING I want tomorrow.

This has been true for weeks, but this "wilderness" makes it more apparent.

You hop up, light the cigarette that you originally came out for, and again try and beat those dogs at their own game. A dumb idea since the beginning, you realize, but invigorating nonetheless. You're doing something, yet doing nothing at the same time. Kind of like seeing something with nothing to see. (Or was it nothing and nothing? - you forget in the heat of the adrenaline rush.)

The dogs have quieted now, and you see your chance. You nimbly run on the tips of your toes to the barn, just around the corner from the pen. They're both sitting, licking at themselves. You take a long last drag and throw the butt into the void, then veer into a crouching run.

No signs of movement from the dogs, they still lie on their back paws, you decide to complete the run with a leap over the fence. An almost perfect execution, except the rip in your jeans snags at the last minute and you fall flat on your face.

By this point the dogs are already over you. They knew what was coming. A few licks and your face dampens.

A humiliating idea, you think. Who would do something this juvenile?

The dogs lick some more, your leg hurts, and there's no place for your pride in the pen.

Why were you allowed even to think about doing that? Why did you think you could win? This is their domain, you think, and I am trespassing. Why was I even allowed to see sand and trees and dogs?

There was no real chance of your success.

After a time - probably seconds, but a dog's tongue is known to distort reality - you dust yourself off and walk back to the house. The kitchen light's still on, and she's reading in the living room.

'Long cigarette?'

'Yeah.'

'You're filthy.'

'Yeah, those dogs are really dumb. They must've thought I was someone else.'

She goes back to her book. You stare into the single reading light, then back outside. You hear the sound of her parents rustling upstairs, music from her brother's room, and then the horns of a semi as it passes the small farmhouse.

Soon, the lights go out and the only thing you can see is Orion's Belt. There's nothing else to see.

There can be only one

2008-05-13T17:22:00.003-05:00

I enjoy the fact that these commercials for the NBA Playoffs are so good and so popular (according to this article, they're directed by the same guys who directed Little Miss Sunshine) that now Time
has taken to ripping them off.

T-Mac/ Rip:

B-Rock/ H-Rod:

My only problem is, I have yet to see one with a Pistons player on the television. I mean, today I saw one that featured Peja freakin' Stojakavic! The man's first language isn't even English! I wanna see one that shows a split screen of 'Sheed with, say...Ben Wallace. That'd be pretty fucking sweet. It will never happen, seeing as how 'Sheed hates everyone (and the media doesn't like talking about the Pistons...the other day Sportscenter had 15 mins of Lakers/ Jazz coverage and maybe 5 of Pistons/ Magic).

I plan on posting on here more often. More literary things, perhaps. I just keep getting lazy. Sorry.

Black Flag's Hair

2008-04-10T14:53:00.002-05:00

Econ sent me this:

"Hoes in area codes"

2008-04-07T12:04:00.002-05:00

Ludacris has many hoes in many area codes, apparently. Someone took the liberty of mapping them.

I'dve booed them, too

2008-04-06T22:33:00.002-05:00

Say you're a Major League Baseball team. Just say, for the sake of argument, that you were pretty shitty 5 years ago, got better, went to the World Series two years ago and are now a pretty hot team. Say that you make a major trade in the offseason, snagging two world series champions, one of whom happens to be one of the premiere players in the league. Your fans, anticipating a great season with offensive firepower and a dominant rotation, snatch up all the tickets to be had for the first week of the season. Say that one of the teams played this week is one of the worst teams in the league. What would you say you'd do? Would you LOSE EVERY SINGLE GAME IN THAT FIRST WEEK AND MAKE THE ENTIRE TEAM LOOK LIKE LITTLE LEAGUERS?

If that were to happen, hypothetically, how would you expect fans to react to that? Just take it mildly and shrug it off, despite the fact that in only one of these games did the team really look like the team with the second-highest payroll in the league?

No? Good. The Tigers deserved to be booed. The Tigers are making fools not only of themselves but of their fans - everyone who even marginally follows baseball and kind of likes the Tigers. Do you have any idea what I endured tonight? Do you? Tigers fans have been waiting for a team like this since 1984. We've been excited about this season ever since November's trade. This might be the most highly anticipated season in Detroit Tigers history, and what do you do? You catch us all with our pants down, rosy cheeked and blue balls as fans of other teams begin to rail in to us. It's not a good position to be in.

If you have a starting lineup with these kinds of names in it you better score some motherfucking runs. There's absolutely no excuse. What could you say? They keep losing the ball in the sun? The lights? It's colder here than in Florida? I'm not getting paid enough to hit something other than a weak line drive or fly ball? Seriously, I want to know.

The only excuse I can think of is that they aren't trying hard enough, which really isn't an excuse. There is no reason why they should be this bad right now. I think they'll come around, but these past six games aren't exactly confidence builders. If I could right now, I'd punch every single one of them in the face.

Top Ten Songs I Use If My Life Was A Series Of Movie-style Montages

2008-03-06T18:14:00.004-06:00

I love a good movie montage. In fact, few things about movies make me happier than a well-edited montage with good music in the background (one favorite that comes to mind is the Margot montage in The Royal Tenenbaums. Maybe montages are cliche or kind of lame, but I love them. And if my life were a movie (or, at the very least, a series of montages), then it would have a pretty kickass soundtrack.

Usually montages are a good way at speeding along the time and setting of a movie and telling the story in a quick and (usually) painless way. So most of the so-called montages that I have created on the spot do this. This isn't a collection of background music during an extended and important scene (I might do that one sometime soon).

And I should note that once I get past the college portion of this it's all made up. I mean, most of it didn't happen as I would chronicle it in the movie. My life would be kind of boring if I did a memory-for-memory movie. And really fucking long.

In some sort of chronological order:

The event: Me growing up.
The song: The Kinks - "Do You Remember Walter?"
Why: It'd be like the intro credits of the movie, because I have a hard time thinking this far back. My childhood was really boring. So it will be mostly scenes of me doing kid things and playing with Ninja Turtles and playing basketball on my kiddie hoop. That sort of thing. There's not much else you can do with that than "whimsical." I had to pick an oldie because that's the only real music I was conscious of at that point. The Kinks it is then.

My actual life (the movie) would probably start here, in high school:

The event: Me discovering indie music (for better or for worse). Lots of shots of me at record stores, leafing through vinyl and CDs, with shots of those bands and album covers interspersed on the screen. Maybe a few of me sitting in my room with headphones.
The song: Pavement - "Stereo"
Why: I still remember the instance. I was hanging out with my friend Geoff and we were looking at the internet and we stumbled across Pitchfork. We were both already kind of starting to get into better music, him more than I (at the time I believe my favorite bands were Nirvana, the Foo Fighters, the Beatles, and Bad Religion or something. Not bad, but could be better). He had seen Pitchfork before, and apparently he had already heard about Pavement. He played me some and then gave me his burned copy of Brighten the Corners. And that was that. So if anyone ever wants to know why I'm such an ass about some of these things, I blame Geoff.

The event: Going downtown for the first time and taking it all in.
The song: The Beatles - "Got To Get You Into My Life"
Why: I'm not sure this actually happened, per-say. I mean, there was never one instance of me going on a subway by myself for the first time and exploring the city. That's probably mostly because Detroit doesn't have subways. Either way, I always think that "GTGYIML" is the perfect "going and exploring on a summer day" type song. I I mean, I've done that in Detroit before. So fuck you guys.

The event: The sports montage. I never actually was on my high school baseball team, but this is a hypothetical "what-if-I-was-and-what-if-we-won-state?" sort of thing. (If you couldn't tell, this movie has no real plot).
The song: The Count Five - "Psychotic Reaction"
Why: I like sports montages. I have no idea why. One of my favorites is in "Little Big League" where it shows the Twins (as managed by a 12 year old kid) suddenly clicking together and making a bunch of sweet plays to the tune of "Move to Japan" by the Band. There's another equally good one in there to the tune of "Runaround Sue." I wanted a montage that felt like that. So this could be good.

The event: College. Lots of scenes of fun college things. Minus a lot of the partying, which will be the next scene.
The song: The Strokes - "Reptilia"
Why: I made a list freshman year that was "Top Ten Songs I Listened to Freshman Year of College." I can't find it anymore but I'm pretty sure this was number one. Even if it wasn't, any Strokes song would do. I listened to a lot of them freshman year. I don't as much any more, but when I do it's always enjoyable.

The event: Getting really drunk for the first time. I could incorporate all the vices in there: first cigarette, first drugs. And then chronicling a lot of (probably ill-advised) scenes of partying. And then just me taking swigs of Old Crow while I write papers alone in my room. (This scene could concievably be before the previous Strokes scene.)
The song: It would begin with Uncle Tupelo - "I Got Drunk" and then fade into Modest Mouse - "Polar Opposites."
Why: The first song might seem like the title is too obvious, but damn, is it appropriate: "I got druuunk / And I fell down!" It just highlights the "don't give a fuck" attitude you sometimes get when you drink a lot. The Modest Mouse is there for when it becomes a problem ("I'm tryin' / To drink away the part of the day that I cannot sleep away"). I think we all feel like this sometimes.

The event: The relationship.
The song: Wilco - "Kamera"
Why: A perfect "everything is awesome" song. It's just so damn happy. Lots of cliche relationship scenes. But then...

The event: The breakup / girl getting back together with the old boyfriend / girl breaking up with him again / girl trying to keep flirting with you but still saying she doesn't want a relationship
The song: Local H - "No Problem"
Why: "I've always been an easy in / And easy out the door again / I know it's only because you're down / That you'd ever want to come around / Just a little secret in a little town / You had me but it's over now / You'll get my attention again somehow / It's no problem." That's why.

The event: Roadtrippin'
The song: Bob Dylan - "Nashville Skyline Rag / "To Be Along With You"
Why: Well, not depressed anymore (the movie works that out in the actual dialog - girl and I are cool now), single again, and once again carefree. So I take a roadtrip with friends (not necessarily any one road trip that happened...but incorporating parts of roadtrips that I've had). This is a good roadtrip song. Or at least I usually pop in Nashville Skyline when I'm roadtripping.

The event: The movie's final scene. I'm not sure where it will be yet. Probably somewhere where we finish our roadtrip.
The song: The Replacements - "I Will Dare"
Why: This is the one that isn't actually a real event (yet). But the idea is we finish the roadtrip and we're somewhere neat, some random place, and we go somewhere where I meet a beautiful, cool woman. Maybe going from a record store to getting coffee to being at a minor league baseball stadium with said woman and friends. Roll credits. As the song starts.

(Fuck you. It's my life and my movie.)

The Question

2008-02-12T13:54:00.000-06:00

Today on Intensities in Ten Suburbs, Andrew Unterburger tries to respond to the question that serious music listeners hate most: "What kind of music do you listen to?"

This topic got me thinking. I replied to the post, saying that it's almost exactly the same question as "What's your favorite band?" - only the latter question, I might argue, is even more difficult. When someone asks you the simple genre questions, they're probably not expecting something more in-depth than "I listen to rock/ indie/ folk/ trip-hop/ etc." There's a certain amount of ambiguity implied right from the beginning.

While I agree wholeheartedly with what Unterburger says (and I'd suggest you read the post, it's very accurate), I always find the "favorite band" question even more difficult. The main essence of this question is: "I would like you to pick one musical artist that you admire over all other musical artists, always and forever." There's no flexibility or ambiguity there. It's a "gun to the head" type question. Other than the fact that most "serious music listeners" favorite bands change frequently depending on time of day, time of year, weather outside, mood, books currently reading/ just read, and state of intoxication, there's no simple way to answer this question even if you COULD pick one absolute favorite.

Example: "I like the Rolling Stones."

Now, this poses a multitude of problems. If you're talking to a music geek like yourself, there's a chance that he'll assume that you really don't like music that much; that you're one of those people that is actually dumb enough to pay 70 bucks for lower-bowl Stones tickets at Ford Field, the kind who truly believe that the Stones are still the greatest rock and roll band in the world.

On the other hand, if you're talking to someone who isn't a geek, they'll assume the same thing - except they'll be one of them and start trying to talk to you about that time they saw the Stones in '99. You'll then attempt to explain that they really aren't very good after Exile and utterly unlistenable after Some Girls, and then that your favorite album is actually Between the Buttons and then they'll look at you funny and say that they don't have that one. Of course they don't, because people like that use Hot Rocks as their record of the Stones from 1962-1968.

You can see the sort of problem this poses. I really do love the Stones, but it's a pain in the ass to specify that you only love them until 1975, and really hate them after 1979.

It's the opposite problem with artists that aren't household names. I won't go into detail here, but try answering the "favorite band" question with someone like Bad Brains or Guided by Voices or Sonic Youth. I don't know if it's harder to hear the awkward "Oh...cool" dismissal or to answer the equally difficult "Oh, I've never heard of them, what do they sound like?" question.

I'll spare you more bitching about this, though. After reading Unterburger's post, I really thought about it and came up with an answer that I could probably get away with as being somewhat definitive. People that ask me this question won't like this, but fuck 'em. They've started enough trouble as it is:

(conversation, turns to music)
"Yeah man, I saw your picture in the Collegian. You, like, write about music and stuff?"
(note: I have made this conversation as stereotypically "worst case scenario" as possible...most people that ask me this are fairly nice, smart, and normal people...not stupid frat boys. But this is my blog, so that's how I'm writing this example.)
"Yeah, a little bit."
"Aw, cool. So, like, what's your favorite band?"
"Uh, well, I donno, I have a lot."
"Ah, c'mon bro, Tell me at least one. EVERYBODY has to have a favorite."
(I scowl)
"Fine. But I don't have one favorite. I have five musical artists that, if I HAD to choose, I would probably name my favorite. But let me warn you, I listen to various types and kinds of music, and various bands. At any given hour I might change my mind. You might not have heard of these bands. So don't say I didn't warn you. I really like the Rolling Stones -"
"Oh, cool man I - "
"I'm not done. I told you I had five. The Rolling Stones, Joy Division, Elvis Costello, Sonic Youth, and R.E.M."
(silence. I realize that these bands aren't really, in the scheme of things, all that obscure. He does too. He opens his mouth to say something but I remember something else.)
"Oh, yeah, and almost anything by present or former members of the Wu-Tang Clan."

"Cool..."
(he walks away)

I realize that I'm a bigger asshole than I give myself credit for.

Remind me never to talk about music with anyone else ever again.

Clash (Of London Calling fame, as opposed to the "Of Cultures" fame)

2008-01-11T00:31:00.000-06:00

Nick sent me this video the other day:

Aside from the fact that (1) dancing animals always make a normally boring video 100% watchable and (2) the main guy in the video looks like Kevin Barnes if he decided to pose as the Counting Crow(e?)s lead singer for a day, this video was interesting in that it led me to this video:

Which reminded me of this M.I.A. song:

Which ultimatley begs the question: are The Clash a "hip" band again? I mean, granted, they've always been universally recognized by critics and other bands, but by "hip" I mean acceptable enough to appear in rap videos. What's next, Mick Jones laying down a guitar track for the new Wu-Tang album? (Which, come to think of it, would be AWESOME). I guess I'm just curious as to why rappers are sampling them now (this is two in the past maybe 5 months).

I can understand sampling "Straight to Hell," which is ultimatley the best ever slow jam about the Vietnam War. M.I.A. rocks it pretty well.

But whoever the hell this "Lethal Bizzle" fellow is, I'd like to ask him a few things. First, why the hell would you choose "Police on My Back" to rap over? It's gotta be the least rap-able track on Sandanista!. It's really the only straightforward "rock" song on the album. I might have chosen "The Magnificent Seven" "Look Here" or "The Washington Bullets" or any of the numerous dub songs (a particular favorite of mine is "The Equaliser"). But, even more importantly, WHY IS THERE ANOTHER BAND PLAYING THE SONG BEHIND YOU?! the song is obviously a sample. People who know the song will not be fooled into thinking they are actually playing the song with you. And third, aside from the stupid looking token white band playing behind you, could you edit this video any worse than you already have? The dogs in there seem random.

Christ, I think we need to get the RZA and Mick Jones together and drop a new joint post-haste. Prehaps Ghostface can spin a sick verse about his friend who used to cut coke and then got shot over an inspired replaying of "Koka Kola." I'm waiting, Rizz. I'm waiting.

Monkeys

2008-01-09T15:56:00.000-06:00

I've forgotten how good this video is:

Maybe the clowns have something to do with it. I don't know. But I've recently rediscovered the virtues of the Arctic Monkeys, frontman Alex Turner specifically. Yes, I realize I'm about a year-and-a-half late on this, but I don't care.

I bought Favourite Worst Nightmare when it came out last April and thought it was a decent yet ultimatley forgettable album. I think I was way wrong.

On a whim last night I played it all the way through driving back from the airport and was astounded how...astute it is. If I didn't know any better (I don't) I'd compare songwriter Alex Turner to something of a modern day, college-aged (but not educated) Ray Davies.

Heresy, some might say. Maybe. But bear with me here. Most of his songwriting on the band's first album, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not delt with little slice-of-life moments in the lives of middle-class British kids who like to party a lot. Not necessarily anything groundbreaking, and most of the songs deal with dancing or getting beat up by bouncers or getting ready to go and party for the night. This prevails for the first half of the album, until track 9 kicks in - the few songs after this show some impressive lyrical insights.

"Mardy Bum" (which, I believe, is British slang for something or other...I'd look it up but I'm on a typing roll right now) is a somewhat simple (as far as music goes, all of their songs are straightforward punk-influenced rock) love song about some working stiff who fights a lot with his girlfriend. Don't ask me why, but I think some of these lyrics are gems:

Now then Mardy Bum
I see your frown
And it's like looking down the barrel of a gun
And it goes off
And out come all these words
Oh there's a very pleasant side to you
A side I much prefer
It's one that laughs and jokes around

And then, the bridge:

And yeah I'm sorry I was late
Well I missed the train
And then the traffic was a state
And I can't be arsed to carry on in this debate
That reoccurs, oh when you say I don't care
Well of course I do, yeah I clearly do!

This rings true to me for some reason, especially when the above lines are followed by a somewhat sloppy guitar solo which brings to mind images of a fight, or sloppy makeup sex, or both.

The next song is "Prehaps Vampires is a Bit Strong But..." which is a raucus condemnation of the music press (think: NME or Rolling Stone) that seems to hound artists around every turn. Think "Rape Me" or "In Bloom" (that are about similar topics) with a sweet noisy breakdown in the middle.

Ray (and Dave) Davies, in their heyday, both wrote songs where they invented characters - maybe based on people that they knew or knew of around their hometown (think "Tin Soldier Man" or "Session Man" or "Do You Remember Walter" or "David Watts") .

Turner does the same thing. Two of the last three songs on "Whatever People Say I Am..." contain some character that Turner tells us about - albeit with less sunshine and more depression. It makes sense, though, seeing as how the Monkeys hail from Sheffield and the Kinks were from London. That's like the difference between being from Pittsburgh or Detroit and being from New York, from what I understand.

So their songs have a gritty take on life in the city. "When the Sun Goes Down" tells of a pimp who, by all accounts, "Is a scumbag, don't ya know?"

The last song on the album, though, is the kicker: "A Certain Romance". It's something of a cautionary tale: love, art, and decency are dead, and we know who killed it: jerks who think they're cool and just want pleasure. Or something like that. I don't know. I'm just stricken by the lines: "And over there there's broken bones / There's only music, so that there's new ringtones / And it don't take no Sherlock Holmes / To see it's a little different around here." It climaxes nicely with the guitars at full throttle.

So the point here is that "Favourite Worst Nighmare" is full of Kinks-y character tales. Most of it works pretty well and Turner has stepped up his lyrical game a bit - no songs about partying or dancing and he keeps the angsty relationship stories to a minimum. I like "Fluorescent Adolescent"s tale of the older housewife in heat, and how "Brainstorm" makes fun of player guys who try too hard to woo women ("Brian, top marks for not trying...We just can't take our eyes of his t-shirt and ties combination").

Maybe it's still a little rigid, and maybe the simple music doesn't make up for the lyrics, but I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. I mean, Christ, the oldest member of the band is only a year older than me! They released the first album before any of them were even 21!

I think they deserve time. And listening. And maybe a new band name, but it'll have to do for now.

Recovery

2007-12-29T16:24:00.000-06:00

I just "recovered" this blog after a year-and-a-half of inactivity. I won't delete anything, for hilarity's sake. But I'll try and get better quality control from now on. Expect more in-depth music and literary stuff than on the sad bear blog.

Peace.

Rock

2006-07-31T20:54:00.000-05:00

3:30 AM. Somewhere near Bronson, MI. Or was it Sturgis? They all run together anyway.

Are those birds singing already, or are my ears chirping?

There were two main causes for this confusion:

As I lay myself down on the couch at the Beat in the sweltering nighttime heat I felt like my hearing was gone for good. It was still loud, invading my thoughts, felt like metal cockroaches or ants or some sort of insect had crawled into my ears and walked around on the drums with spikes instead of insect legs and punctured tiny holes in them.

It didn't hurt per se, it was just distracting.

I was actually sort of enjoying it. It isn't every day that something blasts you so hard that you have to spend the entire 24 hours processing it just to appreciate what you just heard or saw.

***********

Two extensive reviews on the Pitchfork Festival: Day One; Day Two. I would write my own, but these guys seem to have seen more than I did.

I will, however, give you a list of what I liked and did not like as much from the bands that I did see (no order other than the broad classifications they are under):

awesome:
-Mission of Burma (pictured at top)
-The Futureheads
-Ted Leo (pictured at bottom)
-Yo La Tengo
-Jens Lekman

good:
-Os Muntantes
-Tapes n Tapes

alright:
-Destroyer
-Mountain Goats
-The Walkmen
-Silver Jews
-Art Brut

not that great (or just really fucking bad, I can't decide):
-Devandra Bandhart
-Liars

comix

2006-07-27T23:32:00.000-05:00

Why I love (1) comic books and (2) Wikipedia:

The Marvel Comics Civil War (as seen on The Colbert Report).

An American Tragedy

2006-07-03T17:51:00.000-05:00

Cure

2006-06-22T23:24:00.000-05:00

I love my professors: Dr. Birzer and I once had a concersation about how The Cure were a sweet band. He remembered this, and today he burned me a copy of some live bootleg of a Cure concert he had lying somewhere around his house.

"It's in my car," he explained to me. "I was listening to it on the way over here to make sure it was the right one but then I just turned it up and forgot I was going to give it to you."

Jack mk. 3

2006-06-21T14:46:00.000-05:00

Setting up a new blogger blog, because LiveJournal sort of pisses me off. More later.

Archives: News/ Features

2006-03-18T00:17:00.001-06:00

Great Lakes, Great Brews
Holy Trinity church celebrates Mozart mass
Holy Trinity celebration Sunday
Census taker visits Olds
Language learners seek ways to speak
Buying vowels with Pat Sajak
Mich. highway has history
Freedom rings for honorary
New lineup for Derby Days week
Animals galore make for a wild time
Beat the heat with a cool summer internship
Professors at home: Justin Jackson
Mascot coming for spirit
Students march in D.C.
CCA draws crowd
Towards a tighter campus
Democrats on campus form club
Strange encounters
Yearbooks will be distributed soon
Hillsdale Book Exchange a success
Florida students affected by hurricane slamming the state

Archives: Sports

2006-03-17T00:40:00.000-06:00

Goal of 20-win season in limbo after mixed week
Baseball destroyed by Tiffin Dragons
Krebs is Renaissance Man as Chargers earn split with Northwood
Giarmo blast halts 8-game skid; ball team seeks momentum
Ball team scufflin' amidst 6-game skid; homestand continues
Nationally ranked Grand Valley fall to Chargers
Chargers swept by Wayne; Grand Valley Wednesday
Chargers win a game, lose 4 to Findlay and Central
Baseball games canceled, Chargers leave for Florida today
Baseball starts 4-2 on first Florida trip
Ballclub banks on speed, pitching, depth, leadership
A voice from above
Olympian remembered: Homer native reflects on accomplishments
They were Chargers
Lacrosse club slowly gaining steam
IM volleyball a hit with students
Former Hillsdale baller succeeds as coach
Alumnus creates Charger football site
Baseball fever grips campus
Small club on thin ice

Archives: Arts

2006-03-17T00:38:00.000-06:00

Sights of the union
Worth the drive: Detroit Insititute of Arts
Band profile: The Fur Coat and All of its Children
Life of the party
A record collection

Archives: Music reviews

2006-03-17T00:28:00.001-06:00

2008 album grab bag
Super Furry Animals - Hey, Venus!
Ted Leo & the Pharmacists - Living with the Living
LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver
Deerhoof - Friend Opportunity
Pavement - Wowee Zowee: Sordid Sentinels Edition
Yo La Tengo - I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Show Your Bones
Belle and Sebastian - The Life Pursuit
The Strokes - First Impressions of Earth
The Constantines - Tournament of Hearts
Summer albums 2005
The Hives - Tyrannosaurus Hives

Archives: Opinions/ Editorials

2006-03-17T00:20:00.000-06:00

Editorial: The fat lineman legacy
Opinion: Studying in the Grewcock Student Union for pansies
Sports column: Hillsdale, meet your alter-ego: Davidson College
Sports column: NCAA recruiting violations minor in the grand scheme
Arts column: Lessons learned from BUZZ 102.5
Sports column: Detroit sports get the short shaft
Reporter battles the pink chatbots
Opinion: Mossey library; unnatural selection?
Column: Super Bowl Halftime observations
Sports Column: Hey Tigers: What the Hell?
Opinion: Music downloading, pt. 1
Opinion: Music downloading, pt. 2