I've never felt so proud to be a graduate of NCSU.

From the video game blog Kotaku comes this... charming?...story about Frat life at NCSU. I thought that the NCAA honoring 712 different teams' academics without mentioning NCSU would be the week's highlight. I was wrong. (I had a conversation with my stepfather about the NCAA list. I pointed out that half the reason one supports a swimming team was to guarantee at least one team with solid academics. He suggested that the gymnastics team as a similar institution designed for academic performance, but I saw the problem with that right away. Anyone that hungry all the time can't focus on their studies. When all you've eaten that day is ice and carrot shavings, you can't focus on math. That's just science.)

A Question

Which convention of bystanders in musicals is stranger? When they walk by some bloke singing a song to himself and act as if they aren't seeing something unusual, or when a dozen or so of them stop what they're doing and join in, often with surprisingly elaborate choreography? Obviously, the knee-jerk reaction is to say it's the latter. But if you think about it, there's a certain "When in Rome" mindset there that one might find almost admirable. In a way, it's the ones who don't notice that there is the possibly dangerous individual caterwauling on a street corner who seem more wrong.

Also, John Smoltz got strikeout number 3000 tonight. Which is awesome.

This Month in eMusic

I downloaded:
-an RJD2 "cover" of Radiohead's "Airbag"
-Beat Happening's Black Candy album
-Black Francis' Svn Fingers EP
-Pavement's cover of "No More Kings"
-A shitload of Rolling Stones stuff, including Their Satanic Majesty's Request, Metamorphosis, Got Live if You Want It, the tracks from the British versions of Aftermath and Between The Buttons I was missing and Rock n Roll Circus.

So, a lot of Stones to listen to.

Buddy Holly, Thom Yorke and P.T. Anderson: The Axis of...Something

Easing back into things with a question. Do you know the Radiohead song "True Love Waits"? It's an acoustic track at the end of the "I Might Be Wrong" live album. It's a fantastic song, stunning in it's simplicity when compared to the songs from "Kid A" and "Amnesiac" on the rest of the album. But what I've always wondered is this: Is the title a deliberate echo of the Buddy Holly song "True Love Ways"? This is the band that gave us a B-side titled "Paperbag Writer". So, maybe, right?

Now, on the Radiohead EP/single entitled "My Iron Lung', there is a song called "Punchdrunk Lovesick Singalong". A few years after the release of the EP/single, Paul Thomas Anderson wrote and directed a film called "Punch Drunk Love", which wasn't as good as the two movies that preceded it. Did P.T. Anderson lift his title from the Radiohead song? Remember, for the soundtrack of his next film, There Will Be Blood, Anderson employed one Jonny Greenwood, lead guitarist of Radiohead, to score the film.

Ricky Gervais' favorite song by Radiohead is "Bones", or at least that's what he told the BBC. My favorite Radiohead song is either "Lucky" or "Black Star" or "Knives Out" or, occasionally, "Idioteque".

I have seen more movies since the last time we spoke. One was titled "Walk Hard", and was funny and flawed and had some really good music and a great cameo by Eddie Vedder, and I would recommend to some people, but with the warning not to expect too much. The next movie was called "Into The Wild", and Eddie Vedder was also part of that movie (he did the soundtrack). "Into The Wild" is a good movie, but not a great movie, in part because Sean Penn is a better actor than he is a director, and he tries to get too cute with editing and flashing text on the screen, but if you've seen all of the really great movies from last year and want to see a good movie from last year, you should maybe see "Into The Wild". The third movie was "Before The Devil Knows You're Dead', which was directed by Sidney Lumet five decades after his first movie, "12 Angry Men" and for that fact alone is rather astonishing. It's a movie about two brothers who decide to rob their parents jewelry store. It doesn't go well for them from there. It has Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke and Marissa Tomei and Albert Finney in it, and it got ignored by the Oscars, but I liked the movie a lot. It's not as great as "There Will Be Blood' or "No Country For Old Men" or even "Juno", but it's good.

My sister is getting married, and I'm in charge of the music. Today, I got a list of songs that they want played at the reception. I saw that "The Twist" was on the list, which surprised me. I asked my sister's fiancee about it, and he referred to it as the song from "Wedding Crashers". I watched "Wedding Crashers" once, but outside of it reminding me an awful lot of "Meet the Parents" with Vince Vaughn as Ben Stiller and Christopher Walken as Robert DeNiro, and being disappointingly mediocre, the movie didn't make much of an impression on me. So I went to imdb, to check what songs were used in "Wedding Crashers" and there I discovered that they didn't want Chubby Checkers' "The Twist" at all. No, they want "Shout" by the Isley Brothers. My best guess is that because of the song "Twist and Shout", they got the two songs mixed up. This is what I'm working with.

Does This Strike Anyone Else as Weird?

I understand the Roy/Kansas connections. But If I was an UNC fan , I can't imagine being happy seeing my coach wearing the logo of the team that just sent us home. Of course, UNC fans might try and spin this as an example of how classy Roy is.

But the larger point is that both UNC and Calipari fell. Which makes me happy. Because I'm a State fan and take little joys wherever I can find them.

My Influence Is Not To Be Questioned.

Recently, I pointed out how desperately Tom Waits needs a Pulitzer. Today, the awards came close, giving an honorary award to Bob Dylan, who deserved it even more than Tom. I feel like I can take credit for this, despite what "logic" or "reason" might suggest.

I'm a little worried about tonight's basketball game. I really, really don't want Calipari to win a championship, but I'm concerned that Memphis' athleticism and guard play might be able to overwhelm Kansas. We'll see. But gods, does anyone else hate the 9:00 PM tip-off as much I do?

You Can Be My Partner In Crime

Okay. I get it. I talk about how much I love Ratatouille for months, but Stacey doesn't believe me. But then, Keith makes one post about how perfect Pixar is as a studio, and then she listens. I see how it is.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about.

The Rolling Stones are probably my favorite band that I don't like all that much. No, I don't know exactly what that means either. But most of my favorite bands I feel some connection to- The Beatles, The Who, The Replacements, The Band, Radiohead, Pearl Jam- all of them I feel a (probably misplaced) connection with. But not the Stones. I don't know if it is because I don't give a damn about any of the music they've put out in my lifetime, or if it's because I've always found Mick Jagger to be more annoying than anything else. But while the Stones put out two of my absolute favorite rock albums (Let It Bleed and Exile on Main Street), I've never really considered myself a Rolling Stones fan in the same way that I consider myself a fan of, say, Bob Dylan or Buck 65 or Bruce Springsteen. (Two other bands who've put out music I really like but never felt a connection to are The Clash and U2. Especially U2. I can't quite explain why I own as many U2 albums as I do. I have a theory that if you leave a copy of Achtung Baby lying around long enough, copies of The Unforgettable Fire and War just sort of spontaneously generate in your music collection. I can't prove it yet, but it seems the most obvious explanation.)

I've been thinking about the Stones lately because of the new Scorsese concert film about the band, Shine A Light (named for a song on Exile on Main Street). I haven't seen the movie yet, but I do plan on seeing it, hopefully in the theater. I don't imagine I can talk any of my friends into going to see a bunch of guys in their sixties playing rock music, but I'm willing to go this one alone. I want to see the movie in part because I adore Scorsese, and in part to see if the band can still bring it, despite the fact that it's been about twenty-five years since their last decent album (Some Girls) and even longer since their last real masterpiece (Exile, the end of a streak of albums as good as anyone else's streak of great albums).

On Friday, I got an email from eMusic about the Stones. The music store, which mostly consists of indy stuff (Epitaph wound up pulling their catalog from the site over a conflict about money, which should give you some idea about how indy the stuff on the site really is. Def Jux and Matador are among the most prominent labels carried by eMusic) acquired the rights to the Stones' music from 1964-1970, which means that most of the important stuff the band did is now for sale cheap, and that I know what I'm using my downloads for over the next few months. I might not like the guys, but the obsessive-compulsive in me can't turn down this deal to complete my collection of the important Stones stuff.

(As I'm writing this, I have the UNC/Kansas game on in the background. Right now the score is 40-12, Jayhawks. I really don't want to jinx this, but HOLY SHIT! If Kansas can beat UNC and a John Calipari led Memphis team in back-to-back games, I take back every snarky thing I might have said about the Jayhawks over the years.)

I guess my point is that if you were on the fence about eMusic, and care about rock music, then your choice might just have been made for you.

Also, this is what Keith Richards said about French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard in the new Entertainment Weekly:

"Godard...I really liked his dark, French-gangster movies. I think the guy went mad. He's a Frenchman. We can't help them."

Oh, and I tried the Trader Joe's cheap, plain label beer. It turns out that it's just a mediocre lager. Better than Budweiser, but not by much. So don't bother with it.

And There Ain't No One Gonna Turn Me Round

I had this idea today. Did any of you poor souls who are (or aren't) reading these missives of the damned read Greil Marcus' book about "Like A Rolling Stone"? No. Well, you probably can guess what the book is about from my telling you what the book is about. It's an entire 286 page (including the index) book about (arguably) the greatest rock song ever written. And so I was thinking about Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah", and how if a genius rock writer like Marcus can milk the greatest rock song for an entire book, there is certainly an extended essay that can be wrung out of the different versions of Cohen's masterpiece. Of course, you might wind up talking about the ways that tv and movies have used the song, then you have to talk about Shrek. Which no one wants.

Other songs that I would want to read about include:
"Heard It Through The Grapevine"
"My Mind Playin Tricks On Me"
"Sea Of Love" (If only to try and reconcile the original with Cat Powers and Tom Waits versions of the song)
"A Day In The Life"
"Smells Like Teen Spirit"
and
"Sympathy For The Devil"

The title is from a Big Star song called "The Ballad of El Goodo". I once again mention that Big Star should be everyone's third favorite band of all-time.

I watched Cronenberg's film "Eastern Promises" last night. It stars Viggo Morgentsen, who was Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings movies, and whose name I probably misspelled just now. It's all right though, because the key board has been drinking. The movie is damn good. I'm not sure when Cronenberg switched from mind-fucks like Videodrome and began doing stories that could actually happen in the world we live in, but it's fascinating. The movie is very good. If you need something to see, you could do worse, although it doesn't crack my top five movies from last year. (At last count, the top five are: 1. No Country For Old Men
2. Juno
3. There Will Be Blood
4. Michael Clayton
5. King of Kong, narrowly beating out Ratatouille)

I still haven't seen "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Outlaw Robert Ford" or "The Savages" or "Before The Devil Knows Your Dead" or "Charlie Wilson's War" or "Sweeney Todd" but all of them are on my Netflix que.

I did finally see "Be Kind Rewind" last weekend. It's good, but nowhere near as good as Eternal Sunshine or Science of Sleep. The middle part, in which Mos Def and Jack Black remake Hollywood movies like Ghostbusters and Driving Miss Daisy and 2001 is by far the best part, although the cynic could consider it merely another example of Michel Gondry's obsession with practical special effects. The movie winds up being bogged down in a fairly traditional Hollywood plot, which is unfortunate, given both Gondry's track record and the potential of the cast and filmmaker.

I'm reading the new Rob Neyer book right now. Rob Neyer is a baseball writer, and he's better at writing about baseball than anyone else is at the moment, including Bill James. Which means nothing to most of you who are, for reasons that largely escape me, still reading this.

Right now I'm listening to Tom Waits. Specifically, to the "Brawlers" disc of the "Orphans" collection. I've been listening to a lot of Tom Waits, recently. There are times when I very sincerely believe that all we need to know about life we can learn from Tom's "Rain Dogs" album, along with "Pet Sounds" and "The Office" and "The Great Gatsby" and "Silent Hill 2". But most times, I don't.