John Martyn 1948-2009

Fun with media manipulation, 1980s-style

#1: Culturcide - They Aren't the World
#2: Negativland - Helter Stupid (newscast)
The ax murder story was a hoax perpetrated by the band, and several news media outlets reported it as fact.

Music nerd stuff

I've spent part of my week playing around with the newish iTunes Genius feature, which, besides shilling product under the guise of "suggestions" (why do they think Guided By Voices fans might also be interested in Bachman Turner Overdrive?), also makes some creepily intuitive playlists based on a song of your choice. Unfortunately, the song must be licensed by iTunes, so a lot of stuff both obscure and super-famous doesn't work, including my Bollywood steel guitar compilation and Beatles albums. The playlists also sometimes get repetitive, with the same songs showing up over and over again. However, this creepy robotic ghost DJ also makes some very interesting connections that flow together like a well-sequenced album. In one instance, robo-Genius followed The Pretty Things' "S.F. Sorrow Is Born" with Pere Ubu's "Non-Alignment Pact," which worked ridiculously well, transitionally speaking, and might never have occurred to me otherwise if I were making a mix. Just now, it included T. Rex in a playlist based on Prince's "Cream." If you were somehow able to exhume dead rock stars, give them the gift of life, and force them to cover songs recorded after their demise, I think Marc Bolan could do great things with this early 1990s Prince hit. Given the Bolan treatment, "Cream" could very easily be a T. Rex song. The lyrics are very T. Rexy, and now I'm wondering if Prince had T. Rex in mind when he wrote it. I never would have considered this without the Genius putting the two together. I also wonder if I'm being tricked into forcing a connection because of the cold, clinical robotic programming of a robo-DJ. If the computer starts making the equivalent of mix tapes on its own, what else will it do? Is this the continuation of a subversive plan to ensure man's enslavement by robots? Is this the rise of the machines? Whoot! Zap! Kablammo!

You have been challenged!!!!!

I was perusing the odds and ends in the fridge and liquor cabinet while considering what mixed drink to make, and I invented a drink that I think may be one of the most horrible intoxicants ever considered by anyone on a desperate night. So far, this drink only exists in my mind and has never been poured into a glass or consumed. My challenge to the five readers I have left after posting so infrequently is this: Make this drink, drink it, then post about it on your own blog, or, if you have no blog (loser), post about it in comment form under this post. I expect no one to take me up on this offer, but goddamn it all to hell, it's time for a meme that's not about something nobody gives 1/8 of a shit about. Whoo!

Sally Jesse Raphael's Last Night in Town
2 oz. tequila, preferably shitty tequila with not much agave that comes in a plastic container
6 oz. of low-fat buttermilk, brand of your choice
1 oz. ketchup

Drink tenderly and slowly, savoring each precious moment!

Ron Asheton 1948-2009

Bummer. I was lucky enough to see him play live twice, once with J. Mascis and once with the reunited Stooges. One of my favorite guitarists.

You're a good-looking man, Tony

Journalism at its finest, Part 789

For the last half-decade, at least, most mainstream culture magazines have stopped publishing book reviews and have chopped their movie reviews down to Pizza Roll-sized nuggets of filler. That's hardly surprising, since we're a stupid country full of fat idiots. I have to admit, though, I'm a little surprised that someone is pulling down a salary to "write" movie reviews, like the following, for FHM Online. Granted, FHM is a terrible, terrible magazine, but I'm guessing they used to hire writers who could at least communicate semi-coherently, with a minimum of grunts, hoots, and bizarrely placed commas. A hydrocephalic emu placed in a room with flashing lights and an air-raid siren constantly going off while getting punched repeatedly in the rectum and being yelled at by Hardball's Chris Matthews could produce a more coherent review of the new Paul Rudd comedy, Role Models. For your enjoyment, here's the whole thing, unexcerpted, untouched by my hands (or an editor's, it would seem):

"When depressed energy drink salesman Danny (Paul Rudd) has meltdown and lands himself and his party animal coworker Wheeler (Seann William Scott) in jail, they are forced to spend 150 hours in the Sturdy Wings Big Brother program or face jail time.
Role Models feels like a dysfunctional family film. It’s got a lot of that warmness, but there is also cursing and boobies. It’s got a good moral in the end, that you would want to share with your kid, but might feel uncomfortable with the nudity, or not. It’s a little bit like a dirtier Meet the Parents.
A+ to the Casting Department for Role Models. Paul Rudd plays a sarcastic, asshole, a role he has played to much acclaim in Knocked Up. Seann William Scott plays a character that reminds us of a Stifler in his 20s. This may sound like a bad thing, they play their characters well, and work well together as a comedic duo. Besides, we always wondered what happened to Stifler.
By hearing the premise, you might have already guessed the movie's ending. Role Models falls into a lot of standard movie clichés. At the same time, it’s still entertaining throughout, and easy to follow.
Role Models was originally announced under the title Big Brothers. After Big Brothers was put on hiatus and Paul Rudd was commissioned to retool the script, the film was re-titled Little Big Men. "

If you don't believe me, here is the link. This was really published, and someone was really paid to write it. This did not come from a 7-year-old's MySpace page, or not. This may sound like a bad thing, an abused, retarded emu did not write it.

Shameless self-promotion

Hey, blog readers,
I'm not just a grumpy old crank who posts intermittently. I'm also a member of the world's first three-man barbershop quartet, The Spacenecks. Click here for songs about puppies, Old Glory, and the importance of prayer. I'm the blinking, indiscriminate blur behind the drum set.

Kindness is its own reward

On the bus home today, I sat next to heroes. Wonderful, selfless people who would do anything to help others. Class acts. Doers of good deeds. How did I know this? They said so. A woman. A man. She does her friends' dishes if she sees them in the sink. He gave her a ride home when her car died. She drives her friends home when they're too "fucked up." People ask her all the time, Why are you doing so much for other people? Why wouldn't she help if she could, she usually replies. He agreed. It's the little things that mean so much. He tries to do little nice things for people every day. It means so much, you know. She agreed. It makes her feel good to know that people come to her when they need help. Just like when he gave her a ride when she needed one. It feels good to help. He agreed. It felt good to give her a ride when she needed one. Her appreciation was reward enough. It's the little things. She agreed. The little things make such a difference. They add up. She is glad she can be counted on to consistently help others. He agreed. When he needs a ride home from the airport, he knows that some friends, even though they've been friends for years and really are good people deep down, can't be counted on to pick him up on time, if at all. He can always be counted on to pick his friends up at the airport, if needed, or anything else. He is here to help others. She agreed. Helping others is good, and it makes you feel good. He agreed. Then they got off the bus at their stop, continuing to tell each other about the good work they do for others. It's the little things they add up it's good to be needed warm fuzzy helping agree others help pick up at airport love hugs nice to be needed feels good to help helping good helping helpiness helpism helption helpy help help.
I believe this conversation continues still, and will continue until one of the kind, helpful platonic friends dies of natural causes in the other one's arms. One minute later, the survivor will smile, shed a few tears, look heavenward, ask "Who will pick up David from the airport now?," sigh contentedly, with only a tinge of melancholy, and cease to exist. I will found a church based on their teachings.

2008 vs. 2004

In Barack Obama's victory speech, he told those who didn't vote for him that he would be their president, too.
When Bush won in 2004 with 51% of the vote, Cheney said they had been given a mandate by the American people.
Class vs. Ass, "my friends."
I can't wait to see Bush and Cheney slither away in January.

Whoo!

The Nixon/Reagan/Atwater/Bush/Rove/Cheney/Murdoch/Hannity/O'Reilly/Coulter/Limbaugh/Bush II years are over. For now.
Obama has inherited what they refer to in the biz as a "fixer-upper." I hope he can do something with it, or at least knock it down and put a roller disco/pizza parlor in its place. In the meantime, I'll be learning Chinese.
Seriously, though, it feels like something great maybe happened.

Rope-a-dope

I'm listening to a radio interview with Mike Leigh, one of my favorite filmmakers, and the interviewer keeps hammering at him about what the symbols mean in his latest film. I love his answers. When asked about the symbolism of his main character's large circular earrings possibly meaning a deluded happiness that's locked in a cycle, and her taking the earrings off indicating a new way of looking at the world, Leigh politely but firmly tells him that most earrings are symmetrical by their very function, and she took them off because the next scene they filmed required a lot of tussling and struggle and the earrings made too much noise on the soundtrack. Then the interviewer asks him if the character's back pain symbolizes a reluctance to look at her past. Leigh: "You are plainly a fundamental unreconstituted top-rate intellectual, which I am not. I think it's fascinating, your analysis, but I think it's a load of old rope. I can't go along with it at all."
There is so much depth and mystery and substance lodged right on the surface of great work, and people are so afraid to deal with it directly and plainly, so they have to go symbol hunting. It's like all the music critics I used to read but now generally avoid who spend most of their word count analyzing the meanings of the lyrics, without once making an attempt to find a way of talking about the sound of these words, as sounds, as a part of the texture of sound created by the people performing the music.

Terrifying fact

I'm almost twice as old as I was when Bill Hicks died, yet every one of his non-New Kids on the Block-related jokes is topical. Holy shit.

Post Edited 2 Minutes Later: New Kids on the Block are currently in the midst of a reunion tour. I forgot. Please mentally delete the phrase "non-New Kids on the Block-related" and weep aggressively. Thank God McCain is running as inept a campaign as every non-Bill-Clinton/first-and-only-term-Carter Democrat since my birth. I also think it's astonishingly depressing that Biden is the second-poorest politician in our current Congress, yet he still makes about six times what my parents make, and no one is even remotely close to starving at either my mother's or father's home.

School

The bloom is off the rose. I want to be done. I want a real job. I want to be done. I'm too old to study for tests. To quote the eighth-graders I student-taught last spring, my classes this semester are "stupid and boring."
One of the fun parts of college, part 1 was staying up all night on weeknights. In college, part 2, all my classes are early in the morning. The metabolism of the Dr. Mystery of today is a jerk. I want the metabolism of the Robot X of yesterday. I'm tired of reading academic articles about education. The fads of today don't work. Also, the perpetuation of grotesque, monstrous, selfish, unequal, greedy, failed policies don't work. All public schools should have equal funding, you anti-Robin Hood motherfuckers. Keeping poor schools poor hurts everyone, and the kids who stop going to those schools because they have no books, computers, working bathrooms, good teachers, etc. are absolutely justified in carjacking and stabbing your ugly, handsome children. Constant group projects don't teach kids anything about individual responsibility. Standardized tests don't teach kids anything except how to take standardized tests. Letting politicians dictate curriculum standards is like letting politicians dictate medical procedure.
My biggest beef, however, is the bus. The bus is always massively overcrowded. Trying to find a seat on the bus this semester has been a cockfight of clusterfucks.
And for god's sake, when the bus is crowded, and more people get on, and you're already standing up in the middle of the bus, and there's space in the back, MOVE BACK! And if there's an empty seat, SIT IN IT! What the fuck is wrong with you? Fuck! All you selfish idiots who won't sit down in empty seats or move from your precious spots when the bus driver lets 38 more people on the bus are contributing to about 65% of the cockfight of clusterfucks! Why are you so stupid and boring and worthless? Why are you such narcissistic bags of shit? Why didn't your parents abort you? Or at least teach you some manners or public etiquette? Were they too busy calling the school every time you got less than an A- to harass your overworked teachers? Were they too busy letting their housekeepers raise you while they went to Belize for three weeks? Did they let you make important household decisions when you were three years old? Did you get whatever you wanted if you cried long enough? Does your geographic proximity to Russia give you foreign policy experience? Despite reading "all" of the newspapers, are you unable to name even one? Are you, like 50% of the people in my English classes, an English major who inexplicably has zero interest in literature or the written word of any kind and never reads any of the assigned work? Are you just a dick? Or an asshole? Or a "motherfuckin', titty-suckin', two-balled bitch" (a phrase chanted on the playground of my elementary school)?
I'm just a grumpy old crank. Like my Grandma used to say, "You can't walk across the pigpen without getting some mud on your shoes." Even better, to quote Orson Welles quoting Ferenc Molnar: "Never touch shit, even with gloves on. The gloves get shittier, but the shit never gets glovier."
No recess for the wicked!

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."