A guest post from John McCain

You know what I hate? Pork barrel spending. I wasn't named Miss Congeniality in the Senate. Maverick. Maverick. Maverick. Pork barrel. Miss Congeniality. Obama said that Wall Street/Main Street thing, right? Let me say it fourteen times, then. Maverick. Pork barrel. Maverick. Where are my brain pills? Maverick.

My other grandmother, my dad's mother, died this morning. That makes the fourth death in the family this year. My aunt died in February, my maternal grandmother died three weeks later, and my great-uncle Fred died a few weeks after that. Now my paternal grandmother is gone, and I feel like I should be sadder. There are a handful of reasons why I'm taking this latest news so well. First, I simply have death fatigue. I'm tired of grieving. Second, my grandmother hadn't been herself for several years. Her death was sooner than expected, but still expected. She had Alzheimer's, diabetes, and renal and liver failure. She spent most of her time sleeping and repeating the same few lines of small talk over and over. I resigned myself to the fact that my grandmother was gone three or four years ago when she stopped bathing, combing her hair, clipping her fingernails and toenails, and managing her insulin and had to be placed in a nursing home. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer's shortly thereafter. My dad, while definitely sad, mostly sounded relieved today. I also feel that relief. I don't want to see my relatives linger and decay, and I don't want to linger and decay myself. Third, I had little in common with my dad's mother. While I had, and have, so much to say about my maternal grandmother, an attempt to capture some of my paternal grandmother's life in as unsatisfactory a medium as a blog post would look something like this: She loved her family, liked to watch Murder, She Wrote and gossiped about the neighbors. We didn't really have conversations, just exchanges of small talk and occasional news about family and friends. However, I do remember her with affection. The last time she was well, about five years ago, I was home for a visit. My brother, sister, father, and I were eating dinner and watching a nature documentary about blue whales on PBS or Discovery. Soon, the topic of blue whale sexual reproduction came up, and the whale's gigantic penis filled the screen, popping out and wiggling around, looking for blue whale love. It was nearly the size of a medium-sized tree trunk. The narrator discussed the difficulties of attracting a mate in the ocean. My grandmother looked up from her fried chicken and said, "He's bound to get something with that thing." I will fondly remember her making way too many frozen pizzas every Christmas Eve, overestimating the size of our family by at least six people. I'll also remember mowing her and my grandfather's lawn every week for six or seven years, coming inside after I was done to eat a ham and cheese sandwich, drink a strawberry pop, and collect my five dollars.
On campus today, I heard a girl in the library answer her cellphone and say, "Hi, Grandma." I immediately thought to myself, "I don't have any grandmothers anymore. I had two of them and now I have none." I have only one grandparent left, my mother's dad. Two weeks ago, my 92-year-old great-uncle Swede had to move into the nursing home. The old generation in my family is rapidly disappearing. My parents, aunts, and uncles are slowly, but not too slowly, becoming that old generation, while I can put "middle-aged man" on my business card in less than nine years. My mother visited the cemetery in my hometown last week to see her mother's headstone and looked around a bit afterward. She said, "I know so many people there," before waiting a beat and correcting herself -- "knew so many people there." Someday, I'll be old, if I'm (un)lucky.
I decided to just get on with my life today, and the rest of the week. I went to class today. Movie night is still on for Saturday, band practice for Sunday. I made myself scarce after my aunt's and maternal grandmother's deaths, but I'm in a different place now. I think getting on with the business of living is the best way to proceed this time. What a year.

Norman Whitfield 1940-2008

See Saw

Rick Wright, keyboardist/pianist/organist for Pink Floyd, died of cancer today. He didn't get as much attention as the other guys in the group, but he wrote my favorite non-Syd Barrett Pink Floyd song, "See Saw." I have a particular fondness for mellow, breezy, pretty psychedelia, if that description makes any sense, and this song brings home the mellow psychedelic bacon. By the way, Mellow Psychedelic Bacon is opening for Trey Anastasio at the Hepatitis Festival at some organic farm this weekend.

A great man

I came home from class today, turned on the television, and heard Maury Povich say these words:
"Cassandra tells us that she suspects her husband of stealing money from his own children to take another woman to the circus."

New rock urban legends

It's been too long since a ridiculous rock urban legend hit the streets. What happened to the days when tales of Rod Stewart's stomach full of semen, Marilyn Manson's child acting career on The Wonder Years, Paul McCartney's secret death, and Alice Cooper's on-stage ingestion of Frank Zappa's shit (or was it the other way around?) were blindly accepted as fact on the mean streets of Anytown, USA? It's time for some new ones. Feel free to unquestioningly accept the veracity of the following claims and freely spread them all over town, or add your own!

1. After leaving Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett played shortstop for the Atlanta Braves for three seasons. He mostly sat on the bench, but he did see game time in the bottom of the eighth inning against the Montreal Expos in the 1971 season.

2. After losing an all-night poker game, former member of 'N Sync Joey Fatone became Elton John's butler for one year.

3. Jim Morrison is Chuck Woolery's second cousin.

4. The Arcade Fire's Win Butler admitted to a French journalist that he was sexually attracted to Carol Channing. The journalist later disappeared.

5. Former Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi told Ronnie James Dio that he could eat the world's biggest hoagie in one sitting. Dio scoffed at Iommi's claim and arranged the delivery of the hoagie at Ritchie Blackmore's birthday party the following weekend. Iommi never showed up, and most of the hoagie had to be thrown away. Dio begged Blackmore to give the uneaten portions of the hoagie to Blackmore's 13 Rottweilers, but Blackmore angrily replied that his dogs only eat dog food, and if you give people food to dogs, you spoil them. The dogs will forever after never be satisfied with dog food, Blackmore continued. I mean, Jesus Christ, once they get a taste for hoagies, they'll expect hoagies every day. The two men argued long into the night until their wives begged them to give it a rest. They were tired and wanted to get some sleep. The two men agreed, but on his way out the door, Dio looked up at Blackmore with a fiercely determined glare and said, "This is not over, Blackmore."

6. Amy Winehouse has been dead for six months. A Las Vegas female impersonator, Herb Friedman, has been portraying Winehouse at her recent public appearances.

7. Bill Cosby briefly recorded with Godspeed, You Black Emperor! before realizing he had walked into the wrong studio door. He wanted Studio 114, not Studio 115. He was on his way to record a voice-over for his book-on-tape, Come On, You People! Get Off the Drugs, Dammit! and assumed the experimental rock group were providing sound effects and between-chapter segues.

8. If you say you hate jam bands and emo, people will think you're pretty cool. It's a position only the most maverick, daring, and complex thinkers take. Your brave stance will win many admirers. If you also say The Grateful Dead suck, particularly if you say this to indie-rock scenesters, you will be feared for "dangerously telling it like it is."

Coincidence is either hit or miss

I spent the summer reading every short story Flannery O'Connor wrote. I also took two classes. In an assignment for the first class, Overcoming Reading Difficulties, we were instructed to read whatever we wanted for an hour, as long as it hadn't been assigned by a teacher for a class. The next day, the professor asked each one of us what we read, wrote the titles and authors on the board, and used these titles for a discussion about reading. I liked her as a professor and as a person, and the strategies she taught us to help struggling and reluctant readers understand and engage with texts will come in handy when I start teaching. However, our aesthetics couldn't be more different. She sees reading as a social act that brings us together and shows us how, deep down, we're all the same. She believes literature is at its best when the reader can relate his/her life experiences and background with the text. She also believes the curriculum should assign books featuring characters with the same demographic background as the students. I see reading as a solitary act that benefits us most when it presents us with our differences, not our similarities. We all want to be loved, we all bleed when we get cut, we all need to sleep. So fucking what? It's our differences that matter. Over-reliance on relating our own life experiences to the words on the page creates too many opportunities for shallow, superficial readings and misreadings. We're imposing our own backstories on the text and making it all about us instead of about the work. The time to relate our own experiences to a piece of writing is after we've read it closely and understood it, not during the reading process itself. This touchy-feely, hippy-dippy, put-yourself-in-the-text approach in secondary school jarringly and abruptly morphs into pointless symbol-hunting and post-colonial canon-shredding in college. Sometimes you get lucky, but mostly you're told that literature is only as important as its analysis, criticism, and/or use as a launching pad for theory. But that's another story. When my professor called on me and asked what I read, I mentioned the O'Connor stories. She then asked suspiciously, "This wasn't for a class, was it?" I was the only one who was asked this question, and I was a little insulted. Then, another student asked what kind of things O'Connor wrote. My professor said, "Southern."

O'Connor lived in the South for most of her too-short 39 years, and most of her writing takes place there. She wrote incisively about the South, and her take on racism and black/white race relations in a specifically Southern context is one of her greatest achievements as a writer. But I felt this description of her entire body of work in one geographical word limited and marginalized her. My professor might have said other one-word descriptors: "Death." "Christianity." "Hypocrisy." "Ignorance." "Humor." "Terror." "Families." "Faith." They could apply, too, but they're equally limiting and ghettoizing. Flannery O'Connor writes Flannery O'Connor stories. To find out what that means, you have to read her, and read her closely. Like all good artists, she's too strange to fit the tidy niches where we try to shove every messy, slippery thing. And everything is messy and slippery. Except for the music of Conor Oberst. You can safely file that under "Shit," my friends.
While reading the O'Connor stories, I thought a lot about my grandmother, who died in March. See, I told you everything was messy. Here I am, doing what I tell everyone not to do. Imposing my personal life on the work. Both O'Connor and my grandmother were devout Catholics, while I'm as secular as can be. I only believe what's in front of me. However, both O'Connor and my grandmother were creative, intelligent people with wonderful senses of humor. Their strong, personal, admirable faith is something I don't have, but something I feel close to anyway. I was raised Catholic, and Catholicism will always play a part in my life. (Obviously, I'm talking about O'Connor's personality traits that come through in her writing and in reading about her personal history.) I'd like to think my grandmother read and enjoyed O'Connor, and I wish I could talk to her about it. I asked my mother last week if my grandmother read any O'Connor. She wasn't sure, but she thought so.
My grandmother's favorite movie was The Wizard of Oz, and one of her favorite songs was "Over the Rainbow." In the weeks immediately following her death, my iPod on shuffle played both Harry Nilsson's and Jerry Lee Lewis' versions of the song several times. My mother said she also heard "Over the Rainbow" on the radio several times in those three weeks. (I'm not sure which version.) She told my uncle this story on the phone. When he hung up, he turned on the radio. "Over the Rainbow" was playing. He immediately called my mother back and told her. That same uncle had recently started dating a woman, and it was going well. She had been in two abusive relationships, so when she was driving alone in her car, she asked for a sign that my uncle was a good person. "Over the Rainbow" started playing on the radio. Surely, this should instill a little faith in me, right? No. These are just coincidences. Lovely coincidences that make me think about a wonderful person I was lucky enough to have in my life for 30 years, but coincidences nevertheless. My uncle and the woman he'd been seeing have since broken up, eliminating that sign from God. Judging from the frequency of the song's appearance on limited playlist corporate radio stations in western Nebraska and Colorado, I'm guessing someone has recently covered it and had a hit with it, or the oldies stations are working it into the repertoire. And I put the Nilsson version on a playlist on my iPod. Songs in the playlist tend to come up more often on shuffle, though this could be a coincidence as well.
Last week, I watched the "Dark Side of the Rainbow" on YouTube, which syncs up Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" album with The Wizard of Oz. The supposedly staggering number of synchronicities leads many gullible, conspiracy-loving and/or stoned individuals to insist that the band specifically wrote the album to match the 1939 classic movie OR some kind of cosmic interference from some mystical realm created the synchronicities for reasons we can't understand. Ignoring for now the Herculean task of attempting such a folly with pre-DVD, pre-VHS 1973 technology and the fact that the movie is 1.5 times longer than the album, there are still many problems with these theories. I agree that there are a shitload of coincidences, which send chills of delight and spookiness up my spine, particularly the fact that each song ends right as a scene changes in the movie. But, and this is a big but, for everything that synchs up perfectly, there are at least, AT LEAST, ten things that do not. I'm happy that so many freaky coincidences happen when the album plays at the same time as the film because it's a lot of fun, but in order to believe some grand design, one must ignore everything that doesn't work. We're talking about a cognitive bias here called apophenia, which is seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. Once, I rented Fritz Lang's silent classic Metropolis, but I didn't care for the score, so, roughly ten minutes into the movie, I hit the mute button and played Aphex Twin's "Selected Ambient Works, Vol. II" instead. Many movements of people and machines matched the music perfectly. Many others did not.

This is similar to the tactics those incredible douchebags like John Edward use when they claim to speak to dead people to exploit the grief of the bereaved for money. These "cold readings" usually involve a barrage of guesses. Some of these guesses are going to be correct, and grieving people desperate to hear from a loved one on the other side tend to ignore the incorrect guesses and grab onto the correct ones. Another of my recent YouTube obsessions is watching magician/skeptic James Randi debunk psychics, cold readers, mediums, astrologers, faith healers, etc. Beautiful stuff, especially when that idiot Uri Geller squirms on "The Tonight Show."






If there is an afterlife, maybe I can get together with Syd Barrett, Flannery O'Connor, and my grandmother and watch "Dark Side of the Rainbow" on a puffy cloud while John Edward and Sylvia Browne burn in hell below. I'm open to being wrong about the whole secular/skepticism thing.

By the way, I have an uncle who does a perfect imitation of the Cowardly Lion.

This next post is entitled "Sucking the Bloodworms of Necrotic Destiny"! URRRRGGGGGHHHH!

A poem entitled Selected YouTube Comments for Pavement's Video of "Range Life", aka Better than Anything Floyd Did After '74, Motherfucker

malkmus is bad at lip singing, but then again he rules all that is man :)

Billy Corgan sucks Malkmus's dick at being depressed

Why did they beeped out FUCK ?!? it's just a stupid word, how can a word be that bad that it's not allowed to be heard ?

Siamese Dream is a good album. Plus, Billy Corgan fucked Courtney Love, and they probably did a lot of heroin together. So, I like Corgan. Though, Pavement is probably my favorite band from the nineties.

song ends with a Squier riff. unstoppable.

I think pavement sounds simmular to the beatles great so what a happening

He means to live on the range...Out in the countryside. Away from the bullshit.

yeah you guys fucking rule,,how cool is visiting a pavement post for range life and talkin politics and terrorism,,rock and fucking roll dudes- trendy fuckin cocksuckers suck my retard vomit pussy cunt

Amazing...beautiful song...this is kinda random people but it really reminds me of travelling in Nepal aged 18 before this BASTARD "king" wormed his way in....respect to the Malkmus...............

I love Pavement. But, god, 90's clothes. Just... xD
reply: what do you wear?? - catsuit motherfucker

this is pavement isn't it?

thing is though... Stephen Malkmus said that he never dissed smashing pumpkins music... He just dissed there statement

I'm Robertson. Do you guys wanna hang? I got some beers and pizza at my house. I'm lonely.

This is awesome Pavement Rules!!!

Reply #1: Really, the band can't be considered as a whole so say "Pavement rule", if you see my point. You're refering to a single thing but it's made of several parts, i.e. band members.

Reply #2: why cant it be considered as a whole? Figure that out revolt guy

Reply #3: So, Would you say that a car "rule"? It's also a single thing made of several parts. If you talk about the sum of all parts then you say "Rules".

Good enough to almost be it
Who like music can't hear it
Doomed
Pick your pockets full of sorrow
And run away with pavement tomorrow
PLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEASE
Now seriously, both bands are such amazing, stop being such a pusy and get over it.

Better than any thing floyd did after '74 mother-fucker!
Reply: That is your opinion which is fair enough,why the need for the insults and expletives?

i would usually skip over this song on the cd. however once i started hearing the whole song, i immediately fell in love. the song now brings me solace.

This I dont get .. Ive heard better music. He doesnt have a tune to it

Ch-Ch-Changes

I have decided to re-name my film blog. I called it "Film-Watching Robot" to match "Can-Smashing Robot," but that name has started to bother me. It implies that either the film audience in general, or me in particular, is a mindless automaton sucking up irrelevant content. That may be true, but I don't want to be the one to say it. The new title comes from a line in the movie Stroszek. Additionally, I have started posting an image of the day. I will do this every weekday unless I actually have something else to post. Toodle-oo, chummmmmmmmmmmmps.

Check out the new blog, same as the old blog. Get fooled again!

Don't ask David Bowie to pick up your dry cleaning because it may not get done in a timely fashion

An exchange of comments from David Bowie's "Space Oddity" video on YouTube:

Person #1: "Good song, but God damn, he creeps me out."
Person #2: "what do you think he's going to be a regular johnny dependable"

CD cover meme

I'm not the biggest meme fan, but this one is actually pretty fun and involves two of my favorite things-- fake album covers and randomness. Click here to play the game. Here's how mine turned out (I'm guessing this fake artist would probably end up on a bill with String Cheese Incident, Trey Anastasio, and/or Bob Weir):

The humid press of days

What does everybody do now instead of posting blog entries? Listen to Bright Eyes? Eat lemon meringue pie? Start a be-in for peace? Tell off-color jokes to aging priests with drinking problems on bingo night? I've got nothing, and I've had nothing for weeks and weeks and weeks. I can't think of any Can-Smashing content. I've written a few posts on the movie thing, and there's always a couple movies to write about per month on the horror movie thing, but I feel pretty devoid of inspiration lately. There's so much fucking content in the world! Look how many episodes of Family Matters there are! I mean, Jesus, it's fucking unbelievable.

Aw jeez! Gimme a break!

It was all worth it

Headline from Yahoo News, July 7, 2008
"Iraqis now free to pimp out sports cars after Saddam's rule"

The uplift junkie slap-bass date-rape party plan

If you want to get depressed, take a few minutes and look at the comments for any random YouTube clip. You won't have to read too far to find incredibly racist bullshit, no matter the subject. However, on rare occasions someone posts something great like the following (commenting on whether or not the Red Hot Chili Peppers suck):
"We know more about the mythical California than anyone ever wanted to know, and really, it's just a goddamned state, for chrissakes."

I just want to thank whoever posted that for making me laugh instead of making me despair at the seemingly endless supply of fascist creeps who think every YouTube clip needs a string of comments about ridding the world of blacks, Jews, and homosexuals.

The Great Blue-Eyed Soul Cocaine Malaise of '73

The CC DeVille/Rivers Cuomo equilibrium

These guys switched identities in the late 1980s. First up, a picture of CC DeVille from an early incarnation of Poison:






















Next, a photo of Rivers Cuomo's 1980s hair-metal band, Avant Garde. He's in the center in the top row:

Educational program flashback of regional interest

Hey kids!
In the 1970s and 1980s, daytime programming on my home state's PBS affiliate was devoted to locally produced children's shows. I wonder if this still happens. I'm guessing it doesn't. In Nebraska, the shows were written and produced in Omaha. They aired throughout the state, as well as in South Dakota and Ontario, Canada for some reason, and I watched a lot of them in my elementary school classes. Most of them seemed to be about people locked up against their will and forced to read children's books to their captors. Kind of creepy, in retrospect. Star Lore was about a group of space alien children who stared at a blank blue screen all day until they got bored. Then, an adult alien woman with a blue Afro would hit a button on a weird machine and a kid's book would pop out. In Once Upon a Time, Marion the Librarian is kidnapped by a witch and forced to read her children's books, which, once again, pop out of a weird machine. My favorite one, however, was Reverse the Curse. Two ex-librarians turned archaeologists discover the Egyptian tomb of King Hop-To-It, but the tomb is cursed. The King comes out to play, complete with gold facepaint, and informs the two women that they must stay in the tomb and decipher the hieroglyphics while passing on literary information to the King, or the curse will kill them. Thanks to the magic of YouTube, the very first episode of Reverse the Curse is now available. Come for the Egyptian curse, stay for the boogie-rock theme song, mannered overacting, and Carole King sing-along. I'm not joking.





I Googled the names of the three actors to see what they're doing now, and actually found all three. Marlin Rothe is a GLBT activist and heavily involved in theater in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Peggy Billo is involved in theater in Los Angeles and has done some bit parts on network television, and the hilariously named D. Chetley Kraft writes teacher's editions for elementary schools.

Here's the opening to Once Upon a Time. They decided that overly delicate hippy-folk was the best way to set the mood here.



Finally, I need to present the theme music to Tales in a Treehouse with Mrs. Kozeny. I wasn't a big fan of this show, which consisted of a woman in a treehouse reading a story, but the theme music sounds like a collaboration between Aphex Twin and Perrey & Kingsley.

Tales of small-town life: KISS edition

Listening to Paul Stanley's stage banter this week, I realized that many of my formative childhood and young adult memories are somehow related to Kiss. Which is funny, because I was never much of a Kiss fan. Gene Simmons was, and still is, a revolting pig who could give two shits about rock and roll, though I think the rest of the band honestly enjoyed playing music. He has stated that when he and Paul Stanley get too physically decrepit to play live, they will hold auditions for their own replacements and keep Kiss going like a professional sports team. He hit a new low for me with that comment. He's got so much contempt for his fans that he is deliberately planning to let them pay upwards of $225 to see a cover band. A Kiss website for fans of the original lineup features a message board where every single contributor refers to Simmons as Mean Gene the ATM Machine. They've done more "farewell" tours than Ozzy Osbourne. If Cliffs Notes existed for the dumbest song ever written, "Rock and Roll All Nite" would be those Cliffs Notes. However, I'll always have a special place in my heart for Kiss, particularly for how they keep showing up in my personal life. Here's the rundown:
1) I came out of the womb with a love of comic books, horror movies, and rock and roll permanently imprinted on my brain by Baby Jesus, so Kiss' image was right up my alley. Some of my earliest memories consist of a total fascination with how the band looked. I hadn't heard any Kiss songs yet, but I loved staring at pictures of them, their record covers, and their images on television. I remember being four or five and seeing the Kiss episode of "3-2-1 Contact." One of the hosts got to work backstage at a Kiss concert in Abilene, Texas and interviewed the backstage crew, the lighting guys, the sound guys, etc. The Kiss stage spectacle, in all its glory, presented for a children's science show. My mind was blown. I remember being almost beside myself with excitement, and I also remember actually praying to God each day before "3-2-1 Contact" aired and asking Him to re-run that particular episode. It finally worked one glorious summer day, and I couldn't believe my luck. Thanks to the magic of YouTube, here it is. (It's not quite as exciting as I remembered it.)



2) The Ogard brothers lived four blocks away when I was a wee little man. They were several years older than me and had most of the same interests. Three or four times a year, they sold a lot of their old stuff at their mother's yard sales, and I was always in heaven. I usually left their yard sales with a giant stack of horror comics, a couple of cool robot or monster toys, and the occasional Black Sabbath or AC/DC cassette. One year, they were selling a complete set of Kiss toys. I wanted them so badly, but they were a lot pricier than the usual yard sale stuff, and I had to go home empty-handed (except for the giant stack of horror comics, of course). I don't know where they are now, but I ran into them in the bar in my hometown at Christmas about ten years ago, and they said they were playing in a few punk bands in Seattle and Portland. They were too old for me to hang out with, but I always felt a little better knowing that someone else in town liked the same weird stuff as me. It made me feel less lonely and detached.

3) My babysitter Amber told me that her cousin was in the front row at a Kiss concert in Denver and got burns on his face from a pyrotechnic mishap. I remember feeling a little scared and a little excited by the story. "I want to go where rock and roll happens," I remember thinking. "However, there is a chance I could get physically injured, which simultaneously excites and terrifies me." I'm paraphrasing, obviously. I don't think I would have said it that way at age seven.

4) I remember being in a small house in the country as a very small child. My parents are still in their twenties and are drinking in the kitchen with a few of my uncles, their friends, and whoever lives in the house. I don't remember who it was. My parents hardly ever drank because they were upset by their fathers' drinking problems, so I think it was the afterparty following a friend's wedding. My memory is really fuzzy about this, though. Here's the part I remember clearly. I started to get antsy and irritable because the only other kids there who were my age fell asleep. I wanted to look through the record collection of the guy who lived in the house, but I was afraid to ask. My intentions must have been obvious, because a nice, pretty Hispanic woman who I think was a friend of my aunt and uncle asked me to pick out some music to play. I flipped through the records happily and came across a copy of Kiss' "Destroyer." "Play this! Play this!" I yelled. The woman told me that although Kiss looked cool, their music wasn't very good. I didn't believe her, though I hadn't heard much Kiss yet. She told me to pick something else. I believe I picked a John Mellencamp record, back when he was known as John Cougar (without the Mellencamp). I think it went over well. I wish I knew the details of this evening a little better. It was the only time I was ever in that house. I wonder who it was.

5) A tale of college-town life: While at school at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, I worked at a record store. (It's sad that that sentence will soon read as "I once worked for a blacksmith.") One night, a co-worker and I joined forces at my place for a Kiss double feature. His bootleg of "Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park" was followed by my rented copy of "Runaway," starring Gene Simmons, Tom Selleck, Kirstie Alley, and robot spiders. This is not a very interesting story, but it was a good night, and it gives me an excuse to present a scene from "Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park," a masterpiece of ineptitude.



6)One of my gifts on my eighth birthday was a compilation called "MTV's Rock 'N Roll To Go." The tracklisting is as follows:
Pat Benatar - Hell Is For Children
The Cars - Drive
The Fixx - Are We Ourselves?
Hall & Oates - Say It Isn't So
Billy Idol - Rebel Yell
Kiss - Lick It Up
Cyndi Lauper - She Bop
Madonna - Lucky Star
Steve Perry - Oh Sherrie
Ratt - Round and Round
The Police - King of Pain
Thompson Twins - Hold Me Now
Tina Turner - What's Love Got To Do With It
Wang Chung - Dance Hall Days

I think "Lick It Up" might be the worst song on the album, but you know what Paul Stanley has to say about that: "If (the people who think Kiss sucks) didn't really believe that the best band in the world was the Thompson Twins, they might be here tonight and you crazy motherfuckers would show them what rock and roll is really all about, uh huh."

7) My three favorite Kiss songs.
#1: "Black Diamond." The Replacements covered this on "Let It Be." I bought the Replacements album during my senior year in high school, the day after my first experience with LSD and the day before my first and only time snowboarding. I was in Laramie, Wyoming with a friend of mine visiting his older brother. I always thought "Black Diamond" was yet another great Replacements song, and I was shocked to find out it was a Kiss cover. "But Kiss sucks," I thought at the time. Not always. This performance of "Black Diamond" during Kiss' Madison Square Garden show from 1977 rocked my balls off, then rocked my right ball onto my left side and my left ball onto my right side, then rocked my balls back off, then rearranged my balls in the correct order, then rocked my balls back on. It's pretty kick-ass is what I'm trying to say. Gene Simmons, even back then, looks like he's thinking of marketing schemes instead of rock, but Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley, and Peter Criss keep the faith.



#2: "Hard Luck Woman." Paul Stanley originally wrote this one for Rod Stewart, who failed to record it. Peter Criss steps up to the plate again, proving that you can't go wrong with a singing drummer who's dressed up like a cat. I first heard this song when it was on a K-Tel compilation of random pop music from the 1970s that I bought from the Case brothers when I was in grade school. The Case brothers were a couple of long-haired ne'er-do-wells that hung out with my mom's youngest brother, who was still in high school at the time. They used to come over to my grandmother's house and play metal guitars with my uncle. They loved Randy Rhoads. The odd thing about the Case brothers was that they were still in high school, but they owned and lived in a little house by themselves. I don't know if they were emancipated minors or if their parents were dead or in jail, but I'm sure it was very easy for them to drink beer and smoke weed without parental consent or disapproval. My grandmother drove me over there once when my uncle was hanging out with them so I could ask him if I could buy his ZZ Top - "Tres Hombres" cassette. (She was a great lady.) When the Case brothers saw me and my grandmother at the door, they turned off their lights and ran toward the back door. I'm sure they were either drinking beer or smoking weed with my uncle. I was too dumb and young to expect that unsupervised teenagers were going to be doing something untoward and wouldn't take kindly to their friend's mother and cousin unexpectedly knocking on the door, so I was baffled by their behavior. I want to belatedly apologize now, but nobody knows what the hell happened to the Case brothers. I also want to point out that I was extremely surprised this was Kiss, because I expected insane, demonic heavy metal based on their appearance. It is also worth mentioning that the song preceding "Hard Luck Woman" on the K-Tel record was "Boogie Fever."



#3: "I Was Made For Loving You." No story about this one, I just love every single classic-rock-goes-disco song. (Dig that crazy falsetto at 2:30, Starchild!)

You like surprises, right?

I was checking my blog stats just now, and someone found one of my sites by Googling "double vaginal surprise." They were probably disappointed. All three of those words can be found on my blogs, just not adjacently. Maybe it was Paul Stanley.