Maynard James Keenan is one of the best living voices in music. He's up there, way up there, right next to all the other voices I like, if not technically better than them (which I can't list now because I can't think of 'em) if only lacking due to the style of music he makes. My Tool and A Perfect Circle phase (which was also my A System of a Down phase) ended only a year or two out of high school---once I was no longer tapped into "the source" of popular music, I lost sight of it. Over time my attachment to APC, Tool, and SoaD diminished... but A Perfect Circle still gets plays in my car, mostly because it is ridiculously fun to try to sing along with Maynard and marvel at how he sings unlike anyone else in music today.
This is mostly because underlying every really heavy "in your face, bitch!" rock song there's something poetic, powerful, and melodic about it. The Outsider, a pretty clear rant against attention whores and people who say things like, "I am going to kill myself! Don't you care?" (which I've heard in various forms over the years, including one recent occurrence of "I'm still in love with you and I may or may not have swallowed a whole bottle of Xanax. Do you care?"), contains vast swooping swirls of guitar (this is my "technical jargon" in top form, but when Wikipedia can have "ambient doomscape" written on it, I think I can say whatever the hell I want) that somehow turn anger and rage into a beautiful thing.
That's really the primary strength of A Perfect Circle, all across the album they take things that are menacing and angry and craft these absolutely beautiful songs around them. With nearly 1,000 reviews on Amazon with a rating of 4.5 stars, I don't really think I need to say a lot as it's all already been said.
Now, if only Maynard James Keenan would make an folky indie album...
This song is dedicated to my friend Becca, who I told today I no longer wished to sustain our friendship after she lied to me about having cancer in an attempt to guilt me into hanging out with her more often.
The problem with assholes is that everyone has one. Or is one. Or something. I don't know.
Last night someone tried to force me to watch The Story of Stuff, which, if you're unfamiliar, is an environmentalist documentary by some dykey looking chick named Annie Leonard who bases her entire argument against consumerism and mass production on this one statement: "You cannot run a linear system on a finite planet indefinitely."
The first time she said this I immediately turned off my ears and stopped trying to pay attention. Since she says this early on, I hardly watched most of the thing, though I kept glancing at it to see how ridiculous it became. (The black and white drawings made me think it would be intelligent science, like how Imagining the 10th Dimension is smart so I was inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt.) For being someone who drives a Prius, my God do I hate this kind of bullshit.
1.) Humans are a linear system inherently. We're born. We kill things. We eat them. We shit them out and dump our shit in the ocean. Nothing we do can be circular or self-sustaining, unless you mean we fertilize our fields by dumping our shit into them instead of the ocean, but I have a feeling that human feces isn't the best fertilizer. (Turns out it isn't but if you compost it then it's OK.) Animals do this, too, it's called living.
Living is a linear system. The amount of whatever it is we shit out every day combined with the decomposing mass of our body when we die does not replenish the planet of what we took from it while alive. We are not batteries or generators. We are simply machines that consume until we die.
Even Native Americans used up shit. They didn't breed a buffalo for every buffalo they killed---they just made sure they didn't kill all the buffalo and they used mostly all of the buffalo because they didn't have anything else to use. (Though we can say, "Because they understood that waste was wrong..." if we really want to.)
2.) Finite planet? So wait a second... this planet we're standing on... we're going to use it up and it's gonna disappear? First up, Earth is not finite. It was here before we were here, living happily, even with dinosaurs on it (which is pretty fucking mind blowing when you really think about it, fucking DINOSAURS roamed the Earth) and after we use up WHAT WE NEED, the Earth will be here. And when we've all died off because we can't survive in the California heat that's spread to the whole globe, the Earth will recover, grow a bunch of trees, and eventually Man will take it over again and fuck it up unless the Sun goes all red giant on us sooner than 1 billion years from now (anywhere from 600,000 to 2 billions years are given figures for how long before the Sun wipes us out all by itself).
There was a time when life on this planet didn't revolve around nonrenewable resources. Oil's always existed but it wasn't until someone invented something that used it did we need it so much. When the oil is gone, it's not going to affect anything to do with the earth. The shit lies underground, doing nothing for no one.
Trees grow. They're a renewable resource, there's nothing finite about trees, and somewhat unarguably they're one of the primary backbones of society. Annie Leonard makes a big deal about how a lot of the original trees are cut down ("only 20% of our natural forests are left on the planet") without pointing out that, uh, trees grow from the ground almost entirely on their own accord. She goes as far to say this: "Where I live, in the United States, we have less than 4 percent of our original forests left."
The U.S. Forest Service says that 33% of our nation is forested and that number has been stable for about 100 years (and I hate to cite Fox News for this info, but whatever). So in 100 years we haven't lost any forests, but we've only got 4% of our original forests left?
What, exactly, qualifies as an original tree? I'm assuming a 2,200 year old sequoia is an original. That's probably where Leonard gets her 4% figure at: the only original trees in the United States are sequoias. I'm certain every other tree has probably been cut down or has died at some point in the history of the world, so I'll give Leonard the benefit of the doubt:
Fine, all our "original trees" are gone. All we've got now are those cruddy replacement trees that hardly process carbon monoxide nor generate any sort of useful wood---oh wait, those replacement trees are "original trees". (I am, obviously, ignoring the impact on local ecosystems by deforestation but only because over 80% of paper comes from tree farms and not 'natural' eco-system supporting wilderness.)
I could keep going (into how stuff naturally decomposes over time, even stuff that doesn't decompose in minutes before our eyes) (how fresh water is formed and replenished by natural processes) but most of this woman's points all hinge on the idea that the planet is going to be exhausted.
The planet is not going to be exhausted. What's going to be exhausted is all the things we think we need to survive. Oil can go get fucked, nothing needs that. (Coal, too, isn't necessary for the planet's survival.) Fresh water? There's plenty of it being made every day in parts of the world where we aren't. Trees? There's probably a tree outside wherever you are right now that is actively growing, plants that are photosynthesizing as we speak. Even if you live in the city, within a mile there's probably a couple hundred animals living without human intervention just fine.
We're going to miss electricity, though, when we run out of oil & coal and can't power our generators. We're going to miss our cars and all our plastic shit, too. That'll be really hard on modern society. We'll miss driving to the grocery store and buying meat right off the shelf. What we'll have to do, instead, is walk to our local farmer's market and buy meat off the farmer who knows how to handle cows. Not so tough.
3.) I wouldn't be so annoyed if the people who showed me this shit, if the people who made this shit weren't gigantic hypocrites. You're so righteous, with your big ideas for making society less wasteful, but what do you actually do?
A few minutes into watching The Story of Stuff I said, "Well, I think we should demolish everything, all the houses, and burn all our things, and then live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle," and immediately I was attacked. "How would you survive!" "I'd grow things?" "No, no, that's not the point, watch what she says in the video..."
Then what's the point? What is the point of this video? Isn't the whole environmentalist agenda (to say "agenda" not in a derogatory way) to decrease man's impact on the environment. Well, let me tell you, that house of yours, (that really nice house of yours) is impacting the environment. That is land that trees could be growing on, that animals could be living on. You could demolish your house down to the bare essentials (let's say kitchen, bathroom, big main room for sleeping) and still end up with a lot of land that you're just uselessly covering with concrete and wood.
Wood, by the way, that probably came from "original trees". Good job, you've officially contributed to destroying 97% of our "original forests", you big asshole. (That concrete, too, was made out of minerals that were displaced from their natural habitat, thus wreaking havoc on local ecosystems that depended on the geography of the land.)
And that car! Hooboy, how many years have you been driving those things around? Don't you have feet? You could ride a bicycle... but wait, that's manufactured, which impacted the environment. So, no bicycle, but you still have feet. Feet are 100% natural and totally free of environmental impact--UNLESS YOU STEP ON PLANTS WHILE WALKING. So, don't do that and you'll be fine.
That plastic cup you're drinking out of... at the least it could be handmade ceramics, that way when it broke you could just grind it up and put it back into the soil.
I'm sure you see my point. Or, maybe you don't.
When your comfort still comes first, you're not a goddamn environmentalist. You aren't a saint because you put a couple bricks in your toilet to conserve water---you still shit in a toilet and waste water just to get rid of your shit. You could stop using a toilet, but you won't, because it's easy and simple. You're not about to throw out your television or your iPod, because you're attached to these things---which are obviously completely unnatural and merely suck resources from the environment to give you pleasure.
As long as you're simply lessening the impact you're not making a change. This whole thing is the equivalent of saying, "We're punching nature in the face 18 times a day but if we do this thing we will only be punching Nature in the face 10 times a day."
So my advice, to you, environmentalists, put your money where your mouth is. Demolish your homes. Throw away all your stuff and never buy anything but exactly what you need and never throw anything away ever again unless you have to. Stop driving a car, stop using electricity (unless you generate it yourself via a natural hydro/solar/air/human powered generator), stop buying produce and goods that are mass manufactured or pasteurized and most of all... stop using the internet to peddle stupid bullshit like this to me.
Epilogue: I am obviously frustrated. I drive a Prius but I am not an eco-nut. I recognize that the result of our modern, comfortable, and utterly boring lives is that there is an environmental impact. Even when you build something out of wood, by hand, using primitive tools, you end up with a bunch of wood pieces left over. When you start building stuff out of things made out of synthetic and non-synthetic chemicals, you end up with a bunch of pieces left over. All these pieces have to go somewhere, and since they aren't useful for anything, they get discarded. That's just the way things are.
Human life is a constant cycle of using tools and disposing of them when they are no longer useful. Originally our tools were bones and rocks, animal pelts to clothe us. Now they're iPods, computers, televisions, cars, and pudding cups. The natural cycle of things, of the world, is that what once was useful or pertinent is no longer. This isn't a matter of planned obsolescence (courtesy of General Motors) slowly taking over our lives.
Environmentalist zealots want you to believe things are only this way because evil greedy (white, probably) men have influenced the world to be this way for their own means. This isn't so: people like you and me realized it would be easier to provide goods to a large number of people by producing things in this way. There's no secret agenda, aside from the clear agenda of profit, which people who work and provide goods are entitled to. You profit every day you go to work and leave with money. (Environmentalists also like to villainize corporations, as Annie Leonard does in Story of Stuff, because they're profit-based enterprises and obviously anyone motivated to make money is the devil.)
The problem isn't a matter of "a linear system on a finite planet" being unsustainable (and, as I stated, she should be saying "a linear system on a cyclical planet" but that wouldn't support her agenda), it's a matter of too many people for too little resources. All these horrible things we do the environment are a result of more people needing more goods. Developing countries pollute a lot because of this: supporting the lives of more people requires industrialization in order to inflate the amount of goods available, but unfortunately they don't yet have the vast coffers necessary to legislate and regulate burgeoning industries.
If anything it shouldn't be The Story of Stuff, it should be The Story of Unsustainable Prolonged Growth. When animals in the wild reproduce to excessive levels they end up eating everything around them, and then their numbers dwindle until their habitat is able to recover enough to support them again, and then, if they all haven't starved to death, the cycle continues until it balances itself out: sustainable ecosystem due to the "finite planet" resulting in the deaths of what can't survive.
Unfortunately humans developed reason and imagination beyond what animals are capable of and when it came time for nature to flex her muscles and say, "Hey, I don't have enough shit to support all you damn humans right now," man said back, "I don't think so, bitch," and we've been raping her ever since. If we don't have what we need where we are, we steal it from somewhere else. This is why we're killing the planet, and we've been doing it since the end of the Middle Ages. It's not even a modern phenomenon.
You're not an environmentalist until you accept this fact, the fact that your very presence on this planet goes against the natural order of things, and then realize the only real truth there is in any of this: if you want to save the planet, you should kill yourself. If it wasn't for all the things we do that are polluting it, harvesting it, and destroying it, you wouldn't be alive. You shouldn't be alive right now, period. Your existence is killing the planet.
Lessening our impact is only going to prolong the inevitable. Those who truly, deeply, and honestly care about the environment can't argue: to truly save/love the earth we have to end our exponential growth. We have to stop relying on industry to keep us alive. In short, we have to allow ourselves to starve to death when we can't feed ourselves any longer.
Until you're willing to go hungry, to grow bored, to get sick and die, you don't give two fucking shits about the environment, you goddamn poseur. Stop talking in my ear about how enlightened you are, I'm sick of it. You're just as delusional as the people you vehemently oppose.
P.S. (After 2,410 words I still need to say more:) In the beginning of the video Annie Leonard waves around an iPod as her example of "useless consumer garbage" and I take some offense to this. Can you even begin to imagine how digital music players like the iPod have lowered the economic footprint of the music industry?
Instead of driving to a store, buying a CD made out of multiple bits of plastic that had to be manufactured and all the pollution that comes along with that, that was shipped to the store via truck which polluted more, just to fill my house with more stuff I'll just eventually break, lose, or throw out, I can just jump onto a computer, click a button, and *poof*, just like that, I have a ton of new music.
How much closer to zero environmental impact can you get? Sure, the iPod is made out of stuff, but 202 albums (about 1/3rd what my iPod can hold) is a lot of unused plastic, and the iPod certainly doesn't have that much of anything in it.
Somehow when I posted other Mike Patton songs I didn't figure I could work in a Tomahawk song, so thankfully we've come back around to something hard-rock like after a good month of straight weird indie shit. You might remember Mike Patton from Day 98 and Day 99. If you don't, well, there you go.
So as per my usual routine I was looking at the SongMeanings page for this song to try to figure out if there was something I could write about it. On there someone makes some snide comment to the people discussing how it's obviously about killing off a relationship to the effect of, "Never watched the show Captain Midnight, have you?" to which no one responds.
I thought, fine, I'll take the bait. Turns out there's a few things related to the name Captain Midnight.
1.) There was a radio serial called Captain Midnight that ran from 1938 to 1949 involving a aviator who helped people out and fought crime. Apparently it was hugely popular with an audience in the millions. Arguably there's no way Mike Patton listened to this since he was born in 1968.
2.) In Robert A. Heinlein's book The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, one of the main character's aliases is Captain Midnight. Unfortunately the song and this book share nothing in common.
3.) A 1979 movie called On the Air with Captain Midnight about a teenager who uses a powerful CB radio to take over the airwaves as a renegade disc jockey probably doesn't have much to do with this song either.
4.) In 1986, John R. MacDougall temporarily blocked the HBO satellite signal (simply by sending a more powerful signal at it) in a protest against HBO scrambling their signal and forcing people to pay for de-scramblers or something. I don't know, but a lot of shit went down, and none of it has to do with this song.
And then I remembered what I've always known about Patton: none of his songs mean anything. This one has meaning just by coincidence, probably, he decided the emotionality of the music warranted really dramatic lyrics so he made his words go that way. From the Wikipedia entry on Mike Patton:
"I think that too many people think too much about my lyrics. I am more a person who works with the sound of a word than with its meaning. Often I just choose the words because of the rhythm not because of the meaning."
Ah, well, at least this all filled some space.
P.S. This album is off the hook and totally awesome.
This song goes out to my ex-girlfriend, who attempted to ruin my life (note the dramatic emphasis) by reading about my intention to go see The Builders and the Butchers last Friday night and decided that instead of just letting me to go the show by myself, she would show up with one of her dude friends unexpectedly and thus completely ruin my mood and make a reclusive slightly-awkward music lover like myself unable to enjoy the show in the least. So I left. Yes, my ex-girlfriend chased me out of a concert. How much of it is my fault for losing my cool and leaving? 60%, but damn if I can't blame the bitch stalking me for the other 40%.
So, if you were waiting for me to say something about how awesome it was to see The Builders and the Butchers, let me tell you: They were pretty cool when they opened for Amanda Palmer, but as to what their new material is like, I don't know, and what they're new album is like, I don't know yet either. All in all my ex-girlfriend managed to completely sour my stance on a lot of things by shoving strangers in my face in what was once a comfortable setting for me to listen to music.
If the song isn't enough: Fuck you. Stay out of my goddamn life, you crazy bitch.
Hugs and kisses!
Since I should say at least something about Queens of the Stone Age, I will say this: Josh Homme is obsessed with The Kinks. If you ever sit down and listen to a bunch of The Kinks in one go (just, like, "the greatest hits") and then sit down and listen to a bunch of Queens of the Stone Age, it will hit you like a ton of bricks. (Especially if you listen to all their Kinks covers, hah.) I stopped listening to Queens at Era Vulgaris (just couldn't get into it) and they don't factor much into my musical diet, but some of their songs are incredibly fine.
The debate over this song on Songmeanings is utterly exhausting and I don't even want to get into it. Here's a rundown of options: 1) The song is about feminism. 2) The song is about the black panther movement. 3) The song is an attempt to mock LL Cool J, who singer Kim Gordon attempted to interview for SPIN magazine around the his album "Walking With a Panther" which was greeted by the hip-hop community with disdain over how commercial it was.
I was going to spend this post to talk about some data I posted about you, my visitors, on my personal Twitter account the other day, but now I don't really feel like it.
Short version is this: I've got a small loyal audience. Thank you guys for sitting on my site, listening to music, maybe reading the bullshit I write. I appreciate the attention.
I really need to stop time traveling. On Friday when I rushed through writing four of these things it was stressful and unfun. It's like work, really... but work I want to do, just as much as I don't want to. Being behind is nice because it gives me time to sit down and plan out a multi-song sequence instead of just winging it each day. Then I can plan which song fits into what I want to write, if I have a specific topic in mind... Right now, I just want to talk about how I do this, you see?
When I listened to Sons & Daughters' This Gift, I believe I was unimpressed. As I've said before, if I listen to something and it doesn't grab me, I forget about it entirely. I don't even maintain an opinion other than "I listened to it and I don't listen to it now." Sons & Daughters, however, kept popping up in playlists I made using iTunes Genius, so eventually this song and Split Lips (which you can find on The Birthday Mix) wormed their way into my musical repertoire just based on blunt repetition. In this way I am glad I have an 80gb iPod when I only really need 15gb of music: iTunes Genius forces me to re-listen to all the undeleted music in my collection out of the context of the album, and some of it is quite good!
Unfortunately about four updates ago iTunes Genius stopped working for me. Thanks a lot, iTunes!
When I started this project a mere 223 days ago, I had visions of grandeur: I'd build a huge audience, everyone would love me, people would buy tons of music, and my opinion on music would come to be respected. Since I've been doing it "this long" (and I put it in quotes as to accentuate that it hasn't been "that long" at all) I've realized a few things.
1.) It's hard to talk about music the way I do, in a "tough/ugly love" kind of way. I don't post anything I don't like, but I always have something negative to say about the song I post. A lot of the times I worry that an artist will land on my site and instead of reading all the parts where I go, "I love this band!" they read the parts were I say, "But this part of the album blows," and mark me in their head as being on their "go get fucked" list. A lot of the time my internal censor is going off saying, "Would you say this to this band's face?" and most of the time the answer is no... if only because I don't like meeting the people who are in the bands I love.
2.) I'm not going to get famous writing about a song every day on the internet. If anything I'll achieve my original goal as stated in the sidebar: I want to expose people to the music I listen to. So far I've achieved this goal and, without doing anything different than I am now, I'll continue to achieve this goal every day that I post music. If you've liked at least some of music I've posted, then I've done my job. I'll take pride in this.
3.) I'm not going to get rich off this, by any measure. No one buys music, at least not through the links I put to Amazon MP3, and that's no big deal really. The Amazon links were a request early on by readers and I like the album art. I'll talk numbers in tomorrow's (yesterday's) post.
All in all, I am proud of what I have done here, and will keep going. It's work-like, at times, if I let myself fall behind, but overall, I like it.
It's an unfortunate fact about the American music business that when Be Your Own Pet's Get Awkward came out here in the states (their home states, mind you) the album was edited of three songs that the label considered too outlandishly violent for the fragile hearts and mind's of America's youth. Never mind that Be Your Own Pet themselves are a band composed of said fragile hearts and minds... In lieu of a proper release of Get Awkward, we get Get Damaged, which contains the three songs deemed unsuitable for American audiences.
Becky reminds me of the movie Brick in that it casts high school in a light slightly different than what it was. I might have only gone to high school for my freshman year, but I remember days where I felt like I was a detective, trying to protect some girl (or someone) from sinister influences. I remember girls (and guys) declaring war on other kids. The drama was real and palpable, even if it never went to such extremes (such as a whole brick of drugs resulting in a murder, or just a regular girl deciding to stab her former BFF to death) we can still remember high school as seeming to be a harsh black/white reality of Sin City-style proportions.
With all the attention I've been giving to all these (relatively new) Scottish indie rock bands, I figured I'd be good if I gave a little attention to an Irish indie rock band that has been around since forever and ever. It's unfortunate, with the 6 albums they've released (plus 2 live albums) I've never really found any of their work all that inspiring. Admittedly, these days it takes a real punch in the face to get my attention and The Frames don't seem like a punch in tha face kind of band, at least until you hit the last couple seconds of Dream Awake.
I first heard this song set to the end of the pilot episode of Life, where I remember that it was used during some specifically climatic scene that left me feeling like 1) I gotta watch this show!, and 2) I gotta find this song and listen to a lot! Imagine my disappointment when I discovered the rest of the band's music lacked this sort of power.
My memory on The Frames is hazy, as is my memory of most bands where I listened to them and went, "Feh," and then forgot about them entirely. Maybe I missed something. Maybe if I went back and listened through all their albums in order I would be wowed by their progression as artists and find all new songs I could enjoy. I don't know. Stranger things have happened.
As it is, this is a powerful song. I like it a lot. I don't care that it doesn't seem to be about anything (though someone on SongMeanings says it's about the Aztec's Book of the Dead, but it seems highly unlikely). Have a good weekend!
Personal Note: Tonight I'll be seeing The Builders and the Butchers at Club Spaceland in Silverlake. They're a great band who've got a new album coming out, and I posted them back on Day #18, which doesn't seem over 200 days ago. Expect to hear a song by them tomorrow, 'cause I'll probably buy their new album at the concert tonight.
So, I apparently missed the boat on this band back in 2007 entirely. I guess I was too distracted by Andrew Bird and Arcade Fire and they never made a mark on OiNK so I, just, you know, dropped the ball, as it were.
Where We Were Promised Jetpacks is like a Scottish The Airborne Toxic Event/The Cure/whatevs, and where Frightened Rabbit is powerful and emotional like a Scottish The National, The Twilight Sad is like a Scottish The Frames and... oh, Frames are Irish. I'm sure I probably just offended someone. Let's say Twilight Sad is like a Scottish Deadly Syndrome? Does that work? Have I thoroughly confused everyone?
This album, it plods, but it's fun to listen to. If you put it through lousy speakers all you're gonna hear is a bunch of mush. Apparently when you hear them live, they sound mostly like a bunch of mush, too. Take this album, though, and put it through a nice pair of cans or just a pretty nice stereo, and it's pretty cool. The mush clears up and you hear all the individual layers and everything sounds nicely balanced and, hey, these guys know what they're doing.
Good job, guys!
Tour Note: These guys are touring with Frightened Rabbit and We Were Promised Jetpacks, you can check for tour dates in your area over at the FatCat Records events page.
Rushmore was such an influential movie on me, I think.
I say I think because I'm not sure. When it came out in 1998, I made my parents take me to see it. They didn't understand it, but I felt I saw something of a hero in Max Fischer. I was 13. When I got it on DVD I would set it to repeat on my DVD player in my room and as I sat on the computer all day writing on The Electric Biscuit (and it's 400 readers a day, which was impressive in 1999 before anyone really knew what a 'blog' was) it would play. It turned into a security blanket.
When I eventually got laid, my need to watch it lessened, I identified less with Max's fairly sinister turn in pursuit of pussy. As I aged, my perception of the movie as a whole changed. A couple years ago I thought that Max Fischer was a big of a jerk, and sympathized more with Herman Blume. I used to think Rosemary Cross was the hottest women I'd ever seen... these days, she's cute, and I guess that's part of the film's charm, that the object of such turmoil isn't some super model, but just a regular girl, just like how it always is in reality. Two dumb boys, fighting over a girl who isn't worth it, but they can't stop fighting long enough to spend enough time with her to see that.
I watched it recently (I believe I showed it to a girl) and I had nearly no reaction to it at all. It's a cute movie, but all the potency I saw in it as a youth as evaporated. Maybe it's just that Wes Anderson's work has aged me at the same pace it has aged him. The Royal Tenenbaums is as affecting as ever, The Life Aquatic still makes me stop and marvel (mostly at how well Murray absolutely embodies all the characters Wes Andersons sets out for him), and The Darjeeling Limited played into all my little constantly occurring existential crises and made me yearn to have brothers of my own I could try to bond with, to look for meaning with...
While other geeky white kids picked up a game of Dungeons & Dragons and, in their early twenties, got addicted to World of Warcraft, I watched Wes Anderson movies. I idolized Max Fischer and hoped one day to get a standing ovation of my own. Tears surged in my eyes as Richie Tenenbuam slit his writs to Elliott Smith. I marveled at the beauty of the Jaguar Shark while Sigur Ros lured my head into a beautiful dreamy state. I felt Life On Mars? soar in my chest while Steve Zissou lit a cigarette on the bow of his ship. I got a little turned on when Jack Whitman licked his hand and shoved it between the Indian girl's legs before fucking her.
All these moments in Wes Anderson's films inspired me to live life a little fuller, to take more chances, and to go with the flow. Throughout my life I've never looked at film (or fiction in general) as way to escape from reality, or to enjoy something other than my own world, but as inspiration for the way I want to live my own. Anderson has given me examples of so many beautiful moments that it's hard to miss them when they come around. I've got a practical blue print for identifying them. Thanks you Wes Anderson.
I did some research on this one. I read up on that guy Gideon from the Bible. I even read Gideon's International (not because I thought it was pertinent to the song but because that is how Wikipedia can so often draw you in). I browsed people's comments on SongMeanings and read the lyrics and tried to come up with my own interpretation and I came to these conclusions...
1.) I guess I don't give a fuck, the song just sounds cool. I think this is the sort of thing that people say "sounds like U2" but being that I have never really listened to U2, I can't say for sure.
2.) It's pretty obvious the song is vague. It's about Iraq and the Bible while being about neither.
I was also going to type up a big philosophical rant today, directed partially at a lot of the people that I have been arguing with lately (somewhat specifically @leftsider) about how "the way they live their lives could be better", but I don't know now. It was going to start off like this...
Oh, fuck, I don't care about this either.
Oh well. This is a bad day to crank out four songs of the day in a row...
I'm getting lectured right now by my co-worker about how eventually "one day [I'll] know" what it's like to be a parent. I'm sitting here and trying to explain to her that despite her overwhelming fear that her 12 year old son is going to get raped by a pederast the second he steps outside and that's why she, and other parents like her, don't allow her children to go anywhere unsupervised, that the world is actually safer place now than it was back when she was a kid.
She actually sighed, reminiscing over her youth in the 1970's, saying, "It was just freer back then."
She doesn't even realize she's a walking case study of helicopter parenting. She's told me, "I prefer that my son stay inside and play World of Warcraft instead of go outside because it's dangerous."
She even defeats her own points, saying, "We're just more aware now. There didn't used to be a website that told you there was a child rapist living within three miles of you."
There's nothing to say really, but that we live in a society paralyzed by fear. This poor woman can't let her 12 year old son walk down the street for a mile without being terrified that he's going to get harmed in some way. Harmed by what? By who?
She says that her line of thinking is that "the internet has made the predators more ballsy, before they were isolated but now they can get on the internet and plot together and encourage each other to snatch away a child." I tried to say that that seems far fetched but, really, who can say.
Which is best? To err on the side of fear or to err on the side of hope? These are people who you could show statistics to, show them that crime in their area is less than it has been in years, and they'd still insist that the "outside world" is too dangerous for their children. What can you do? What can I say?
All you can really do is hope that when all these children grow up after being over-protected by their parents, that when they have children they don't buy into the same myth inspiring hysteria. They'll realize their parents were silly and kick their children outside and say, "Go play! Come back for dinner!" and don't worry about them incessantly. The parents addicted to their children will give rise to parents who know that it's another form of sickness to be avoided, that smothering your children in a protective cocoon motivated purely by fear is not the way you should raise a child who is meant to cope with reality.
What about the children... what about the children...
David Vandervelde guests on this track. It's ~16 minutes long and instead of listening here you can just download it for free if you want.
From the website:
Winter in Chicago is humbling. Subzero winds and impossible snowfalls lead even the best of us to booze, fish fries, and B movies on VHS. And when Dave Vandervelde started crashing on the couch at the Moon Tower there was plenty of all that. But there was also this: an epic Saturday jam, mics hot in the frigid garage, Dave joining up with the Moon boys for hours of meandering, experimenting, and mind-expanding. A year, 300 overdubs, and hours of editing later, that psychedelic Saturday was chiseled, bent and fired into this Psychedelic Saturday.
This is the kind of psychedelia I love: loud, noisy, with swaths of swirling guitars and keyboards, freak out sections and moments where you feel like you're struggling through the haze to hold onto a solid groove that just barely alludes you under the surface. Where British psychedelia in the 70's was either sunflower-infused tongue-in-cheek drug pop, or blues influenced darkness, American psychedelia was all about being a loud fuckin' acid trip. There's no bad vibes, but there's no pure sunshine here either. It's just introspective, you know... you know... man... it's just about the music, you know... the music, how it flows, man... and boy does it flow...
Jay Bennett is dead. This upsets me. It upsets me that I didn't learn about it until a month after he died.
Jay Bennett was a member of Wilco up until the release of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, which would have probably been a much different album had Bennett been as involved in the mixing process.
I heard this song on NPR and downloaded the album. Not much to say, though!
This song is noisy and slightly crazy but I love it.
It's unfortunate when a good artist begins their career, their first album, with a track that is both really good and almost entirely unlike everything else they'd ever produce. David Vandervelde does this on his first album, with Nothin' No, a song that feels like it has an awful lot in common with The War On Drugs (through a Glam tinted glass) (whose song Taking the Farm has been featured)... like, it could be a Kurt Vile song, which is totally unfair to Vandervelde to say because he got a CD out before Vile... well, whatever, in my lexicon, Vile comes before Vandervelde.
Did you see what I did there? O' Lordy.
This was recorded in Jay Bennett's studio, who I just recently learned had died back in May. I'm sad about this, and today I was supposed to post one of Bennett's songs, but instead I am posting this because I am excited about it.
This kid is only 22 on this recording. He was 19 when he wrote the song. This makes me feel a little like a loser, and I say this a lot, like about Peter Gabriel in his work with Genesis, you see, I'm pointing out my themes for you.
It's disappointment!
This song is about the best things ever: getting high & bitches who sleep with you behind their boyfriend's back and play with your head, too. I think the lyric "when your boyfriend drove to meet you, you covered the bruises on your neck" is the most romantic thing ever. I wonder what this means.
It's a shame, though, and I must cover this because I don't want you to suffer the same fate I did: don't dive into Vandervelde's work expecting a lot of music that rocks quite like this does. On this album only two have tempos anything close to rocking (Jacket and Wisdom from a Tree) and the rest feel kind of easy listening. His second album, Waiting For The Sunrise is almost entirely one slow tempo, the kind of music that drifts hazily over a AM truck radio while you lie in the back sleepily watching the sunset holding some pretty girl's hand. I don't have a truck, and I've never done that, but when you listen to it you'll know exactly what I mean.
That's not to say that I am disappointed in Vandervelde's latest album (it's quite good, really), it's just that it's... unfortunate. I would have liked a second album full of Nothin' No class rock songs... but I've got The War On Drugs' Wagonwheel Blues for that, I suppose. Vandervelde's next album will surely be great, no matter what tempo or influences it's indebted to, so no harm, no foul, we've just got a bunch of great music to listen to in the very end.
Thanks, man. You're totally inspirational.
Free Download Note: You can download this song (as well as Jacket and two songs from Waiting For The Sunrise, all worth grabbing) for free courtesy of Vandervelde's label Secretly Canadian.
There aren't any lyrics to this song on the internet, so in pursuit of enjoying this song further, I am going to attempt to transcribe the lyrics myself.
_hewh!
we're drivin' the voice out we're drivin' the voice out we're so tired we're makin' something for nothin'
and i can't relieve them ???? and seein' (???) what's joyless is joyless is joyless is joyless
ahhhhhhhhh
we're drivin' the voice out we're drivin' the ghosts out we're so tired of makin' somethin' for nothin'
you're kicking and streaming the feeling is breathin' we're so tired from beatin' (???) the captain is bleedin'
say it again i give and i give it's joyless, joyless the place we're at (???) it's joyless, joyless joyless, joyless (3x)
ba-ba-ba-da...
la-la-la-la...
say it again beginning to end it's joyless, joyless the place we're in
joyless, joyless the state we're in it's joyless, joyless (2x)
_
joyless, joyless (3x) the place we're at
Well that was a gigantic pain in the ass and a waste of time. Some of the shit I can't hear and I've marked that with (???) if I am unsure of it. If you care enough, chime in!
This is a cool song. This band has released a bunch of albums but I've only ever listened to this one. The album sounds low-fi, but it actually uses a lot of studio trickery and it's really apparent at 1:29 where the sound that was occurring cuts out without any reverb and they break back into a verse... really bad mixing/editing or something.
I became hooked on this album back before I'd even discovered I was a hipster with a taste for noisy psychedelia (this was even before I discovered Olivia Tremor Control) and certainly before I had built up any sort of tolerance to loud high-pitched indie vocalists, so over time this album started to annoy me.
I consider Minus Story part of a "high pitched vocalists from 2004-05" trifecta including Akron/Family's self-titled and The Earlies These Were The Earlies.
I need to give these guys more love, so they'll be going on my rapidly growing list of "albums and artists I used to listen to but need to revisit and rediscover". Apparently no one listens to them and that's unfortunate. Go forth, populace, and listen!
0.) I spent two and a half hours writing this up. I hope you read it. LOL? If it's full of typos, I don't care!
1.) This is marked "original version" because this version of this song is off of Iter Facere. They took this track and a few others from it and remixed them for Water Sphere---their 'official' debut album, I guess---but this version of Elephant Island is superior, I think, as is most of Iter Facere compared to Water Sphere.
2.) I had the pleasure of seeing Pilotdrift open for The Polyphonic Spree back in 2004 and they were fantastic. They switch instruments a lot and create massive waves of noise. I commented to someone in the crowd, "It's like Radiohead meets shoegaze," and they disagreed with me, saying something far more pretentious than I could ever have mustered all those years ago. The microphone wasn't really working during Dancing Bear and it almost made the song more interesting, struggling to hear the singer lament a disinterested lover.
3.) This song is about the Imperial Tans-Antarctic Expedition. Here's a brief history lesson if you don't want to read the Wikipedia article and just want to know the story as it applies to the song.
In 1913 Ernest Shackleton, who'd previously sailed to cold places, decided to raise the equivalent of 2.2 million dollars in order to finance himself an expedition to the Antarctic so that he and his 30 or so wiley men could traverse the continent all on their own.
Unfortunately in 1915 their ship, the Endurance became trapped in ice. After a near month of fighting to free the ship from the ice, they gave up and prepared to wait for the ship to eventually break free of the ice while setting up for living off the ice. This was February 23rd, 1915.
On October 24th, after spending 8 months living on the ice and sleeping in the ship, the hull was beginning to be crushed by the ice packs. The crew was able to salvage most of what was necessary during the initial collapse of the hull, but photographer Frank Hurley left behind his camera and all the photo plates he had taken. On the 27th Shackleton declared that they would abandon ship,
Over the next week weeks the wreckage stayed afloat and, among other gear saved from the wreck, Hurley salvaged 150 photographic plates out of 550 that he brought.
After attempts to travel to more stable locations proved impossible due to the nature of the ice floes they were on and the surrounding waters, November 1st became the first official day that they were camping on the ice. On the 21st of 1915, the ship finally sunk below the waters.
A month later, on 23 December, Shackleton decided it would be a good time to try to travel to solid land again, but after seven days of back-breaking continuous work the crew had only traversed 7 miles and dealt with it's first instance of upheaval when a carpenter refused to work. Shackleton had them set up camp, again.
By April 1916, they had killed and eaten the dogs they had brought with them (the first set were killed as a result of their excessive need for seal meat which was cutting into the men's allotment, the second set were killed for the same reason but their meat made a great alternative to seal). They begun a hard journey toward Elephant Island aboard the lifeboats they salvaged from the ship, and by April 15th they landed on a strip of land they christened Point Wild.
Unfortunately Point Wild was on a strip of land that was hardly ever frequented by people. They realized in order to be rescued someone would need to notify civilization, so Shackleton with a small crew took of northward to South Georgia on April 24th, 1916. After 16 days of an 800-mile journey in an open boat on rough seas and in horrible conditions, they landed in South Georgia.
After traversing the land for three days straight without rest they came to a whaling station---the first human contact they'd had with anyone outside of the expedition since December 1914.
On May 22, Shackleton attempted to rescue the rest of the crew back on Elephant Island, but an impenetrable barrier of ice had formed that the ship he brought was unable to break through. On June 10, he tried again with a different ship---upon word from London that a suitable ship for breaking through ice wouldn't be available until October---and failed for the same reasons. On July 12, the same thing happened yet again.
On August 25th, Shackleton convinced the Chilean government to lend him a small steam tugboat, and with favorable conditions on their side they arrived at Elephant Island on August 30th and rescued the crew.
In all this time there was only one loss among the 30-man crew of the Endurance, and that was the toes of stowaway Perce Blackborow's left foot, which had become gangrenous due to frostbite and had to be amputated. The crew had survived for three months on Elephant Island with only seal meat, penguin meat, and the hope that Shackleton would rescue them, to live on.
By the end, Shackleton's crew survived with no losses while trapped in the Antarctic for 22 months, over 640 days. (A crew that was sailing around the other side of Antarctica lying supply depots for Shackleton's on-foot journey across the Antarctic lost three men and was beset by a whole other set of issues despite accomplishing their mission, which was futile and useless due to Shackleton's crew never even setting foot on Antarctica itself.) Much of their survival as to do with Shackleton's own relentless optimism, living by the motto: "Never for me the lowered banner, never the last endeavor."
If you're interested in more info about this, there are a series of photos on the American Museum of Natural History website. If you wanna read a brief article that spins Shackleton's form of optimism into a little "self-help" type guide, I found this great article on optimism thanks to Google.
If you've ever read any good books about Shackleton, please recommend them in the comments! I've always been intrigued by this journey (and especially the image of it painted by this song) and should probably read up on it more often. Shackleton and his men should inspire us... so often we are 'trapped in the pack ice' of our lives and could use a little inspiration to keep us alive on it, etc.
Secret Machine's first album is almost entirely about loneliness and the things it inevitably leads to.
Blah blah blah.
I am getting really bad at this.
Getting older has been an interesting experience so far. I'm asking older guy friends of mine (I.E. the fathers of friends) whether or not it's normal for the mid-twenties to be a time period where you begin to fear commitment, lose all sight of what you thought love felt like, and then just go around relentlessly breaking hearts because you don't feel like you want to be with anyone for an extended period of time. It's not until I started to get tired of it (yesterday) that I started to realize I need to stop fighting my nature.
And my nature is that sex is stupid. I like it a lot, and I want to put my cock in everything, all the time, (not no matter what, though, because there are plenty of land monsters and swamp donkeys in the world that I have no interest in putting my penis inside) but at the very end of the day, it's not what's important. I almost feel like I spent the last 6 years of my life proving to myself that I could fuck women and that I'm not the dweeby skinny white kid who everyone called a faggot constantly in middle school. (It's hard being skinny white kid in a middle school full of Mexican junior vatos.) Now that I know I can chase tail better than anyone else I know, and now that I don't seem to fall in love every time I get my dick wet, I am just a little bit lost.
What now? Where do I go from here?
I'm assuming the answer is simple: ride out your mid-twenties, enjoy all the benefits that testosterone and excessive energy give you (like the desire and ability to ride a unicycle!), fuck only when it feels necessary, and stop breaking girl hearts. I'm sure that I'll eventually figure out what love is again, and how to feel desiring of someone's presence in my life, and how to not become annoyed every time a woman hangs around me for longer than 12 lucid hours.
Living without internet is tough: I'm about a month behind on the point where I'd go out looking for new music to devour. I need to go to someone's house and sit around for a couple hours downloading music. The Broken West came out with a new album a while back and I never got it. Sad sad sad, because this is a fun album and they've got an entertaining sound (kind of a mixture of of ya'llternative mixed with the general musical ambiance of Los Angeles bands, at least that's the vibe I get).
You can't find lyrics for these guys either, not that it really matters: once you pay attention you realize you don't need to, because the only part that is really important is when you're pulled into singing "sun down by the horizon, now it feels all right, no one fears the darkness down in the valley of night" because this song has a super catchy chorus and I love it.
If you're reading this and you're familiar with bands that sound along the lines of the last couple I posted (i.e. The Old 97's, The Broken West, Ha Ha Tonka) please drop me some band names in the comments or on Twitter that way when I finally get around to grabbing music I can expand my collection of ya'llternative. (I love that designation so much!)
Unfortunately you can't seem to buy this from Amazon, so there's no album art or link.
This is the song used in the awesome open scrawl of Damages, which was awesome for the first season and couldn't hold my interest in the second season.
This is one of those songs that is absolutely incredible to sing along with while you're cruising down the road. Definitely one of my all time favorite "male-empowerment" songs. "You know what, bitch?" this song says, "I ain't going to take any more of your shit, I'm out!"
Someone on SongMeanings says this song is ya'llternative and that made me laugh pretty hard.
Nothing introspective today. I've never really walked out on a woman. All the times I should have I ended up staying. Poor Brad...
In six months it will be 2010 and we'll officially be living in the future. It's going to be crazy.