So boot, if at all.

I had the best weekend ever pretty much, and I’m still riding high on Cloud 30 today....

Tue, 29 May 2012 11:01:15 -0400

I had the best weekend ever pretty much, and I’m still riding high on Cloud 30 today. I’m at work, and work sucks, and I almost had a horrible debacle this morning involving a smashed jar of pasta sauce but broken glass and marinara all over my kitchen were deftly avoided by my sort of quick hands and good engineering on part of Newman’s Own.

Anyway, I was going to write another birthday post this weekend but time was not exactly of the essence for such a thing (no complaints from me, I was quite busy partaking in all manner of awesome things).

Perhaps I’ll write one today, time allowing. Miles Davis’ birthday was Saturday and, like Bob Dylan and Paul Weller, the man’s music has had quite an effect on me.

Happy birthday, Paul. It’s kind of funny. When my good...

Sat, 26 May 2012 17:00:40 -0400

Happy birthday, Paul.

It’s kind of funny. When my good friend Ben first gave me In the City to listen to our freshman year of college, I was only a little more than mildly impressed. I remember really liking “I’ve Changed My Address” and their take of “Slow Down,” and the rest of the album I was probably only a little better than “okay” on. Even after Ben gave me All Mod Cons to listen to, I still wasn’t completely sold on the Jam. I read up on them several times over, but I just wasn’t all that into it at that time. I’m not really sure why.

The first time I actually heard the Jam was one night on Vh1 Classic, probably a summer or two before college. It was the video for “Start!” I believe. Maybe it was “Town Called Malice,” I’m not entirely sure. Both videos are similar, and I remember thinking, “Huh, that was pretty cool. Who are these guys?” I did a little bit of research but it was nothing that really stuck. I didn’t hear any more music by the Jam until Ben gave me a better introduction. They stayed out of my mind completely until then.

I still can’t figure out exactly why Paul’s music didn’t click with me right away. I really don’t know what happened. I was a big fan of the Who, and I loved the Kinks. I wasn’t as well versed in the Kinks as I would become in college, but still. I got where they were coming from. But why didn’t the music strike me then? Maybe I was just up to my neck in New York bands at the time: the Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth, Television, Interpol. I had also recently discovered Mission of Burma my senior year of high school. But, the summer before college, I think the most pivotal record I got was Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs. I guess none of that really quite prepares a person for the Jam. I wasn’t at all a stranger to punk rock or well-crafted songs, but maybe my head just wasn’t totally ready for it. But I have to wonder though, because when I listened to All Mod Cons later on, I still wasn’t all there. Hmmm…

It wasn’t until the summer of 2008 that I really got into the Jam, when I listened to Setting Sons. Maybe then it was because I had reconnected with Ben after a falling out and not speaking to each other for a year, and also having declared the first “Britpop Awareness Week” as the last week in April. It was probably that week that helped a bit, but I don’t know. By that time I was definitely into the Kinks, and after luckily snagging some Britpop albums from my college radio station’s giant giveaway of their old library (I picked both Pulp’s His ‘n’ Hers and Different Class that day, along with the better part of Ride’s discography, and just about every Charlatans album).

Britpop Awareness Week was intended mostly for myself and my music nerd friends as a way to look into all this great music that America wasn’t into back in the 90s, and up to now. Since I’d just gotten all this music for free from WSKB, I figured I’d embark on an adventure to listen to nothing but Britpop for one full week. I devoured the Stone Roses, Oasis (finally got to listen to their full albums), Blur (them too), Pulp. I was so excited for all this music. All this great stuff I missed out on suddenly became intensely important to me. I was dreaming of England. I was dreaming of music.

That summer, I met Stephen Bailey. Things would never be quite the same. We were playing in a band with our buddy Matt at the time, and we instantly hit it off with all kinds of music we’d been discovering in our lives. It was around that time that I listened to Setting Sons. After having reconnected with Ben, he shared the record with me since he knew I was definitely okay with the Jam. But getting into Setting Sons, I became totally enamored with that music. It just meant so much to me, and suddenly it made all the sense in the world. I wondered what the hell had been wrong with me when I first heard the Jam and it didn’t completely click. I became obsessed. It wouldn’t stop. I just needed that music and it needed me.

Steve and I became totally and completely insane with all this English stuff. I helped get him into Britpop, and it was all a whirlwind in a few months. Eventually, the band we’d been playing in started to splinter and we ended up forming Beat Surrender. We had an appetite that needed to be satiated. Paul’s music was a big, big part of that—in case you couldn’t tell by our name. It was the attitude, the dedication to the craft of songwriting, even the clothes, and we just couldn’t help but dream of England.

Over time since then, I’ve explored Paul’s other musical outlets—being the Style Council and his solo career. He’s refused to be pigeonholed, and I can’t help but admire him for that. But, on the other side of him having a richly varied career, he’s also been prolific and consistent. He’s so fascinating to me; he’s a man who could probably dump an album a year like McCartney with half-assed material and still get hits, but he doesn’t. Instead, he seems to put quite a lot of care into his albums, and for someone so prolific it’s amazing that he’s never really been messy artistically. What a guy…

Anyway I could go on saying how great I think he is, but I’ll let the music speak for itself. That’s really what’s important. And you know what else is great about him? He’s showing no signs of slowing down.

Happy birthday, Paul. Cheers, mate.

(Author’s note: I began writing this yesterday, the 25th, when it actually was Paul’s birthday, but after returning home from work I was taken away into an intense game of Risk and other worthy events… but I digress. Might be a day late, but let it be.)

Dammit, why can’t I be in LA now so I can be enjoying this...

Fri, 25 May 2012 16:01:19 -0400

Dammit, why can’t I be in LA now so I can be enjoying this wonderful madness?

welcometotwinpeaks:

How SUBLIME is this poster for the David Lynch retrospective at New Beverly Cinemas? By Todd Spence.

Okay, I know it’s Paul Weller’s birthday today, and...

Fri, 25 May 2012 11:34:09 -0400

Okay, I know it’s Paul Weller’s birthday today, and I’ll get to a nice post about him and how great I think he is in a bit. But for now…

JUST LOOK AT THAT SHIRT! I love throwback stuff like this, especially for a bygone team like the Hartford Whalers. I may need to buy this in the future. I’m not even a big hockey fan (yet), but I remember the Whalers from when I was a kid and stuff. This shirt is AWESOME.

And also, let’s not forget the Hartford Whalers theme song, Brass Bonanza.

Happy birthday, Bob. Though I’ve spent most of today...

Thu, 24 May 2012 23:59:50 -0400

Happy birthday, Bob.

Though I’ve spent most of today listening to Funkadelic, it’s Bob’s birthday. It’s true I might not listen to him as much as I did when I was at the beginning of my life’s musical journey, I continually return to his music looking for a sense of “home.” It’s ironic that while Dylan was a restless musician and traveler, and of course noted for the lyric “no direction home,” I still find his music to be ultimately comforting no matter my mood.

With a career so vast and varied, yeah it makes sense that I can find anything of his to fit any mood, but still. It’s that sense of relief I get when I listen to him. He had such a palpable effect on me when I was younger; when I was a student of music and complete novice. I’m always a student of music, but I’m not so much a novice anymore. Dylan gave me confidence and attitude, and that restless feeling looking for continual growth both musically and personally. His influence on me extends beyond music and to other parts of my life. I tend to see Dylan as somewhat of a father figure—a role model of sorts. If you want to get Freudian, maybe that’s because I first gleaned Dylan from my own father. My dad named my older sister after the song “Sara,” and I’ll never forget one day when he was cleaning his house and listening to Blood on the Tracks. Weirdly enough, I actually mistook Dylan for Tom Petty at the time. But anyway, that’s where I really remember first hearing Bob.

There was something so intriguing about it to me, and it wasn’t the way he sang. I remember hearing “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts” going through the stereo and it mystified me. It was epic, it was a story. I think in that moment I knew that there was more to this man than just a couple chords, a melody, and a turn of phrase. It wasn’t for a few years that I’d truly begin studying his music, but I’ll never forget hearing that sound, looking to the living room past the stairs where the music was coming from, and just listening for a moment and thinking of nothing else but, “What is this, it’s important…”

It became very important for me later once I began forays into his vast discography on my own. When I was in eighth grade, I remember buying Blonde on Blonde with some allowance money. Thanks to Vh1’s more legitimate programming in the late 90s, I was able to learn about some very important music that would come to mean a lot to me in later years. Eighth grade was when I discovered that I wasn’t like other kids, who were too busy listening to New Found Glory and calling it “punk” while I was absorbing London Calling and Never Mind the Bollocks. Blonde on Blonde became so important to me after I bought it. It was something to study. It was literature to me, but some kind of textbook for life and thinking and existing. It really meant something, bigger than guitars, concerts, records, and rock music in general.

There was something about it, and I think there still is. It speaks its own language, in a way. I think, apart from casual Dylan fans, that there’s something to be said of those who follow Dylan and those who quite dislike his music. The music is usually simple and the lyrics are usually complex, but it doesn’t matter. Springsteen has more complex music with equally complex lyrics and probably has a larger fanbase than Dylan these days. So what makes Dylan so dislikable? The voice? Nah, not for more studied music fans. Maybe it’s because his music has its own language, as I was saying. It’s something to be unlocked because it’s about more than just chords, melody, performance, and even lyrics. It’s on an aesthetic level, but Dylan is also on a mythological level now too, and his mythos might even surpass that of the Beatles. Well, that’s debatable. Nevertheless, the amount of storied wonders throughout his career is still amazing to behold today. Just look at the amount of critical text still published about the man and his work.

Dylan’s more than just music, he’s great art. There’s no doubt in my mind that his body of work will become as studied, discussed, and debated as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Picasso, Rembrandt, Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare… His cultural impact has been as monumental as the Beatles, truly. What separates Dylan’s impact from the Beatles though, is that he has affected high culture probably more than pop culture—hence all the big-wig literature over the years. Anyway, I digress.

What I’m saying is that Dylan has had a major impact on my life, and he’s still important to me today. He still has the ability to surprise me as I get older. Every time I come back around to his music after exploring any and all manner of things, I drift away into a world he helped me create in my mind, filled with characters and places and stories that are so familiar and comforting to me. It’s like picking up your favorite novel and never growing tired of it—no matter how many times you’ve pored over its pages.

Happy 71st, Bob. Here’s to good health and good song.

it8bit: Sci-FI NES Games from a Parallel...

Thu, 24 May 2012 23:15:01 -0400

it8bit:

Sci-FI NES Games from a Parallel Dimension

ianbrooks: We were unfortunate enough to live through such horrible movie-licensed games like Robocop, Total Recall, and E.T. (or as we usually refer to it: That Game Which Shall Not Be Named), but perhaps somewhere in an alternate timeline where good things happened and people knew how to make good movie-based vidya gaemz, we could have had such instant classics like “They Live!” (with real 3D glasses action? Give me that) and MST3K (do you play the movie they’re watching, or just Press A to quip?)

(vgjunk/io9)

newsweek: nwkarchivist: 50 Years Ago, Newsweek Was...

Thu, 24 May 2012 15:59:37 -0400

newsweek:

nwkarchivist:

50 Years Ago, Newsweek Was Astronaut/Moon Crazy

Awesome style, us.

Bad dream.

Thu, 24 May 2012 10:50:00 -0400

I had a terrible dream this morning. Here’s what I explained to my best friend in an e-mail:

I was in a dark room, sitting in a nice chair across from this chick Olivia I haven’t seen since high school. She was also in a nice chair. It seemed like there might have been two other people there with us, sitting in similar chairs next to us on either side, making them sitting across from each other likewise. Then Olivia started singing. She was in chorus and the Clef group in high school, so that sort of made sense in the dream. I got thirsty and headed out of the room downstairs.

Heading downstairs was like it was at my house in Cumberland, and it was all dark. So I get to the fridge (same place it was at in the actual house), and when I opened it I was suddenly struck by my body going totally limp and I collapsed to the floor, seemingly in slow motion. It began to feel in that moment that someone or something was holding my down, and I began to struggle. What happened next was even more intense.

Suddenly, the dark room of what was the kitchen of my old house faded away to black. I was still being held back by something and I couldn’t move, despite my struggling. It didn’t quite feel like someone was holding my arms but more like a blanket was holding me. In the darkness ahead of me were dark, dark clouds. There was a flicker of lightning, and emerging from the clouds was this giant mechanical face with wings extending from the sides. However, the wings were also metallic and not moving. More lightning and I could see the whole structure. It looked like a giant insignia of some kind, and the face was mechanical looking with beady red-orange eyes that glowed slightly.

While being faced with this giant floating insignia in the clouds, I couldn’t move because I was being held back. I even realized I was dreaming and STILL couldn’t move. That really freaked me out. Then after a moment, the image faded away and I woke up.

I don’t think I need to explain how awesome this...

Tue, 22 May 2012 12:41:43 -0400

I don’t think I need to explain how awesome this is.

sesamestreet:

Larry Bird vs. Big Bird 1-on-1: Who you got?

Just had a pretty awesome weekend in New York City. Highlights include: hanging out in some sweet...

Sun, 20 May 2012 20:37:04 -0400

Just had a pretty awesome weekend in New York City. Highlights include: hanging out in some sweet guitar shops, playing a limited edition Roger McGuinn Rickenbacker (i.e.: holding heaven in my hands), seeing Paul Weller live, and hanging out and talking with successful people my age who understand that I need to get out of New England.

Definitely a very life-fulfilling weekend.

life: May 19, 1925: Malcolm X is born. In 1960, LIFE magazine...

Sun, 20 May 2012 20:27:52 -0400

life:

May 19, 1925: Malcolm X is born.

In 1960, LIFE magazine assigned Arnold, who died in January 2012 at the age of 99, to document the days and nights of Malcolm X, the controversial and intensely charismatic public face of the Nation of Islam. For nearly a year, she followed the thug-turned-devout Muslim and activist from Washington to New York to Chicago. (Eve Arnold—Magnum)

See Eve Arnold’s photographs of Malcolm X here.

Okay, first watch this dope trailer for D.A....

Fri, 18 May 2012 14:42:17 -0400

Okay, first watch this dope trailer for D.A. Pennebaker’s Monterey Pop.

Now, I finally got around to watching the film just the other night. I’ve had the Criterion Collection for quite a while but never made the time to watch it. In a word, it’s incredible. The film cuts the bands and stuff out of order (see Wikipedia for how it all went down), but Pennebaker, being the Man, made some wise choices to make it a totally compelling movie experience. Having the Criterion edition though is marvelous, since it includes the entire Hendrix set and the entire Otis Redding set on a separate DVD, plus another DVD of about two hours of other unused performances.

I still need to watch the other performances, but looking at what’s on that DVD, I’m kinda bummed they didn’t get more Byrds—they only captured three covers they did.

Despite them being shown in the trailer here, the Grateful Dead’s set isn’t included on the DVD either. Maybe it had audio issues/turned out to be boring/had incomplete video. Oh well.

Another bummer is Moby Grape’s fate at the festival. They had the opportunity to be filmed, but their dickheaded manager wouldn’t allow them to be in the film. Turns out they were in fact filmed, but due the legal stuff the footage is still in the vaults. At least the majority of their set can be listened to on YouTube.

Anyway, see Monterey Pop if you can. It’s amazing stuff. Seeing it the other night finally got me around to giving Jefferson Airplane a fair listen, as well as reminding me to check out the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.

I can’t stop listening to this song. I thought I...

Thu, 17 May 2012 23:30:00 -0400

I can’t stop listening to this song. I thought I didn’t like Jefferson Airplane very much, but I apparently like them a lot. This album’s great. This great little guitar piece is followed by the mercurial “White Rabbit.” I always liked that song, for sure. Awesome stuff.

I was watching the game last night and this happened. I was...

Thu, 17 May 2012 13:16:00 -0400

I was watching the game last night and this happened. I was totally dying laughing about it too. The screams! Paul Pierce was NOT fuckin’ around.

For non-basketball fans: It’s barely a 40-second clip. Just watch it and hear how incredible the screams are.

I’m going through the argument of why NOT to have advertising on sports jerseys in America...

Wed, 16 May 2012 12:52:00 -0400

I’m going through the argument of why NOT to have advertising on sports jerseys in America right now. I know this will probably sound lame to most people, but whatever. Even if I wasn’t into basketball and you asked me five years ago what I thought about putting sponsor’s logos on sports teams’ jerseys, I still would have said, “Dude that’ll look like shit, are you kidding?”

Does anyone even really pay attention to commercials and advertisements anymore? I mean really. Go through all the Freudian shit you want, but how many ads have really affected me lately other than, “Hey that was kinda clever”? Really. Even if it’s a funny beer commercial, I’m still not buying fucking Bud Light or Corona unless it’s the last god damned thing available. Or I’m drinking with my old drummer—then I’ll gladly have a Bud Light with him.

Anyway, I don’t care what the rest of the world does with their sports jerseys. Aren’t the American leagues rich enough already? Who cares if that advertising will bring in more money for the leagues and teams? IT’LL LOOK LIKE SHIT! Those uniforms mean a lot of things other than a fucking rag to wear when you’re running around sweating your balls off. It’s an identity, history, legacy. There’s enough advertising and sponsorship in sports already.

So if you want to read the article that got me all riled up, here it is. “Forward thinking” doesn’t have to mean “money-grubbing,” asshole.

Photo

Wed, 16 May 2012 10:24:43 -0400

I had the most bizarre dream last night. I don’t remember much of it, but man it was some...

Mon, 14 May 2012 11:31:51 -0400

I had the most bizarre dream last night. I don’t remember much of it, but man it was some seriously fucked up shit.

I was hanging with my sister in our dad’s old house back in Rhode Island, getting ready to watch a movie. I wasn’t feeling good for some reason, so my dad hands me a lighted joint. It was the most poorly rolled joint ever; the paper was all fucked up, and some greenery was like hanging out of the end.

So I smoked this joint, watching this movie, whatever it was.

Then later as my sister and I are watching this movie, I’m just laughing my ass off like a mad man. Now, despite the fact that my sister was sitting next to me on the couch, she didn’t know I was smoking. Later in the dream, she’s super pissed at me for smoking. My dad was nowhere to be found, and I felt intensely guilty.

Why was this dream so messed up?

My dad is seriously, absolutely, 100% against drugs. He’s never done anything.
I’ve never smoked pot.
We were in the old house we haven’t been to since we were kids.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

Who knows. It was so strange waking up with all that in my head. “Whoa…”

This my friends is a blue-footed booby. It’s a cool bird....

Fri, 11 May 2012 12:28:57 -0400

This my friends is a blue-footed booby. It’s a cool bird. It also has the best name for a bird, ever.

So the Paul Simon Facebook page had a status update saying that...

Thu, 10 May 2012 13:08:35 -0400

So the Paul Simon Facebook page had a status update saying that Paul said “Kodachrome” was about “the distortion of reality,” and asked fans what they thought about this. I replied:

As the narrator is looking “back on all the crap [he] learned in high school,” he’s romanticizing his past experiences through the entire song. If you listen to how Paul sings it, and notice the perhaps overzealous pride in the lyrics, it’s easy to imagine that the narrator is some loser sitting at a bar talking to some younger guy about his glory days. Thing is, his glory days probably weren’t as awesome as he thinks they were, and he is probably just “some guy” now.

The chorus and the coda at the song’s end enhance this idea, like the narrator has this obsession of looking through his old photographs, probably rewriting some of his own history in his mind. And when he discusses the girls he “knew when he was single,” it points to the “mama” in the coda as not being his mother, but instead his wife, who’s probably annoyed that his husband occasionally pores over old black and white photos of girls from his past.

The distorted reality, at least to me, isn’t about anything dreamlike or surreal or whatever, but mostly about how we look at our past through the eyes of old photographs, and how sometimes as we get older begin to want to rewrite our histories with exaggerations and other inaccuracies because, quite simply, we want to be remembered. We don’t want to be remembered as nobodies, and we don’t want to remember our past as being boring, lame, and ordinary.

The cliche goes that every picture has a thousand words, and with that, it’s easy to misinterpret a photograph or just as easily rewrite the past in your mind. That’s what I think Paul was getting at.

todaysdocument: 11:00 A.M. Newsies at Skeeter’s Branch. They...

Wed, 09 May 2012 12:53:23 -0400

todaysdocument:

11:00 A.M. Newsies at Skeeter’s Branch. They were all smoking. St. Louis, Mo., 05/09/1910

From the series: National Child Labor Committee Photographs taken by Lewis Hine