Where I'm Calling From and Where I've Been

If I were a mixtape, it would sound something like this at the moment.

1. Nirvana- Aneurysm (Live version from a bootleg I have where the guys who printed up the liner notes thought that the title was "Come On Over") (key line: " Love you so much it makes me sick")

2. Aesop Rock- Commencement at the Obedience Academy "Must not sleep/must warn others")

3. Neutral Milk Hotel- Communist Daughter ("Bends toward herself the soothing")

4. Talking Heads- Take Me to The River ("Love is an ocean that I can't forget")

5.  Neil Young- Tonight's The Night ("As real as the day is long")

6.  Robert Johnson- Come On In My Kitchen ("Babe it going to be raining outdoors")

7. The Refreshments- Interstate ("I don't need a miracle but I could use a push in the right direction")

8. Soundgarden- Outshined ("I got up feeling so down")

9.  Mission of Burma- That's When I Reach For My Revolver ("But all of that is changed now")

10. Love- A House Is Not A Motel ("And if someone asks you/you can call my name")

11.  The Beach Boys- I Just Wasn't Made For These Times ("They say I got brains but they ain't do me no good")

12.  The Jam- That's Entertainment ("Waking up from bad dreams and smoking cigarettes")

13.  Graham Parker- I Discovered America ("Everyone said quit now and that's when I found hope")

14. The Flaming Lips- Waitin' For A Superman ("Well I thought it was already as heavy as can be")

15. Eliot Smith- Speed Trials ("But it's sure as fate and hard as your luck")

16. MF Grimm- Children Of Cain ("Children of Cain just nod to this")

17. Bruce Springsteen- Magic ("This is what will be")

18. Atmosphere- Tears For The Sheep ("The language was primitive, the listener complex")

19. The Replacements- Swingin' Party ("If bein' afraid is a crime we'll hang side by side")

20. Canibal Ox- The F-Word ("I'm more than just a shoulder to cry on")

Sometimes I'm pretty sure that most people don't go about things in the ways that I do. 

What I've been up to:

 

Reading: Dennis Lehane's Darkness Take My Hand and Sacred, The Corner by David Simon and Edward Burns (it's kind of a precursor to The Wire. Actually, I picked up the Lehane books in large part because he wrote for The Wire.)  Slam by Nick Hornby, which was good but not great, and intended more for teenage readers than his other books (although it might have enough cursing to irritate some high school librarians, which I consider to be a point in its favor), I just started Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses,  and we'll see if I finish it, as it looks like a fairly demanding read.  Also, there's a slight chance that Islamists might go after me for reading it.  

Listening:  Besides the stuff I mentioned, I've been getting prepared for the Rock The Bells festival later this month by listening to some of the acts on the bill that I'm less familiar with, like The Pharcyde and Immortal Technique.  Beyond that, a lot of the usual suspects.  Plus I'm still working on the music for my sister's wedding reception, which is alternately fun and maddening.  Guests who know me will be able to tell which songs I chose, and which songs the increasingly deranged bride chose.  Also, do you really think Elvis Costello's "Allison" is appropriate for a wedding reception?  I get that my sister's future husband's sister is named Allison, but I can't be the only person who actually understands what the song about, can I?  I mean, why don't we just play all of Dylan's Blood On The Tracks while we're at it.  (Except for "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts", which could potentially work.  And on some tv show, there was a wedding where the theme song was "Shelter From The Storm", but I think they only heard the parts about "I came in from the wilderness/a creature void of form/ 'Come in' she said I'll give you/shelter from the storm" and missed the entire rest of the song, which mostly consists of lost loved and Dylan comparing himself to Jesus, which is practically an entire sub-genre of Dylan songs.  But the show got it wrong by using the album version.  I would have used the live version from the Hard Rain album.  But that's just me)

Watching: Wall-E, which I liked, the second season of My Name Is Earl, which I started on Netflix after finishing the fourth season of The Wire.  I think Rome will be next.  I saw the new Narnia movie, which was okay but way too long, and The Happening,  (going to see it wasn't my decision, which I hope I don't even have to say.  As is often the case when I see a bad movie, there was a girl involved.  The only bad movie which I saw in the theaters by choice over the last few years was The Da Vinci Code, which I had to see after it got booed at Cannes.  I was hoping for a true train wreck, but Ron Howard could only produce a mediocre mess.)which isn't so much bad as inscrutable.  It's like a film made by aliens who had seen a few Earth movies, but really didn't understand them.  But it's also pretty bad.  I think I was the only person in the theater who wasn't so much pissed off as impressed by it's essential strangeness (strangeness in the bad way, not the awesome Night of the Hunter or David Lynch way).  I saw Indiana Jones, mostly out of a sense of cultural obligation.  It wasn't really bad, but it was staggeringly unnecessary, and the actors seemed to know this.  I finally caught up with Battlestar Galactica, which I had begun avoiding this season.  The final few episodes of the half-season were pretty decent, so I'll wind up finishing the ride when the show re-starts.  Oh, and The Venture Bros., which is still six kinds of awesome.  And my secret shame is watching Hell's Kitchen on Hulu.com.  I hate the reality show parts of the show (i.e. all of the contestants display sociopathic tendencies, pointlessly dramatic commercial breaks, inane contests) but I'm a sucker for Gordon Ramsay yelling at people.  I wonder if BBC America shows episodes of the British version of the show, which I'm positive is better than the Americanized version.  And if next season is b-list celebrities, then even Ramsay can't keep me there.

Playing: No one game in particular.  Some GTA: San Andreas, some re-playing of the original Half-Life on PS2, some Super Mario Galaxy, some Bully.  But there's no game that I'm obsessed with at the moment.  I picked up Lego Indiana Jones for the Wii, mostly because of how much I love the Lego Star Wars games.  It's pretty good, but by no means is it a must-buy, especially since it doesn't take very long to finish.   

The picture is Neil Young, but you already should have known that.  

Oh, and by the time I finished editing and rewriting this, I looked up and it was Thursday. I am apparently 26 now, which is slightly vexing.  I thought that 25 was a perfectly reasonable age to be.  

Don't Quote Me Boy, Cause I Ain't Said Shit

Sorry about the lack of activity lately. My computer has been acting up, and apparently needs a new hard drive to be content.

What I've been up to:
Reading- books about Shakespeare, specifically Stephen Greenblat's "Will In The World" and Peter Ackroyd's "Shakespeare: The Biography". I need to finish the book "Mansion on the Hill", which is about the corporate incursion into rock music. I got distracted by the Shakespeare books and need to pick this one back up.
Watching- The Wire on DVD, the season finales of 3o Rock, Lost (My bold prediction is that Locke is in the coffin. I'd almost be willing to bet on it) and The Office (fantastic season finale- so much to love about it, but I'd single out another sighting of the great Mose Schrute and Dwight convincing the new HR woman that Kevin is retarded), the movies "Iron Man" (good not great) and "Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian" (way too long, and there was no need to invent scenes that aren't in the books to pad out the running time past the 2 hour mark) and "Clueless" in chunks on TBS. That movie is so much better than it should be.
Listening- A lot of The Pogues and Shane McGowan, the Mobb Deep song "Shook Ones Part II", which is an old song that I've been captivated by lately, the new Gnarls Barkley and Atmosphere albums, Cool Calm Pete's album "Lost", and while I was doing some editing work I couldn't stop listening to Oasis collections (specifically the greatest hits compilation "Stop the Clocks" and the B-Sides collection "The Masterplan". I really can't explain why the brothers Gallagher seemed so conducive to fixing typos.
Playing- The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Bully, No More Heroes, which I picked up when I saw a used copy on sale for about 25 bucks and my curiosity about what a punk video game would really be like got the best of me, WWE: Smackdown vs. Raw 2006 (although I'm still waiting for a pro wrestling video game as good as the ones for the N64 were), the download game Lostwinds on the Wii, which is really fantastic, albeit way too short.

Hopefully my computer will be fine on Tuesday, so I can resume semi-regular entries.

Citation Needed

Hey yo.

So, I haven't been up to a lot in the last week or so. I've been re-reading James Elroy's novel American Tabloid, which is a lot easier to keep straight on the second run through. The book is one of those historical novels that mixes real people with fictional characters (like E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, Caleb Carr's The Alienist, or the Harry Potter books). The book is the first installment of a trilogy, and I read on the Wikipedia that the third book is supposed to come out this year.

I've watched a few movies- The Good Shepherd, which desperately wants to be The Godfather of spy movies, and eventually fails at that ambition. I watched Million Dollar Baby, which is very good, and I'm not sure why I didn't see back when it came out. And I watched The Age Of Innocence, which is a Scorsese film that is rated PG, which is weird at an existential level. Whenever I see a Scorsese film without excessive violence or vulgarity, I feel slightly confused, even when the movie is very good (i.e. After Hours or The Aviator or his Bob Dylan documentary). So now I have The Departed playing in the background, just to bring order back to the universe, violent-Scorsese-movie wise.

I've been listening to a lot of Leonard Cohen (still) and trying to decide if he's my second or third favorite Canadian songwriter of all time (He's behind Neil Young and maybe Joni Mitchell.) I have a list of favorite Canadians, and only one person on the list is fictional. That has to be considered a compliment to the Maple Leaf State, right.

I've been meaning to write more, but keep forgetting that I'm meaning to, and then I spend time regretting when I should be using it to try and write more. It's a vicious cycle, really.

I've been thinking about how weird the internet really is. Last week, on the Deadspin sports blog, there was a link to a website called Garfield minus Garfield. I found it to be really funny, and quite possibly brilliant, so I broke my own rule about forwarding internet memes to friends of mine. Then, a few days later, a completely different website I was reading had a link to the Garfield site. And then, in the issue of Entertainment Weekly that came today (I subscribed because I like the magazine, but I really like only paying ten bucks a year for the magazine. The looming death of the printed word is something of a bummer, but you can't beat the bargains that it entails.) there was another reference to the website. There are probably already websites and/or blogs mocking the Garfield minus Garfield, or doing the same thing with other comic strips that aren't funny. The internet is really weird.

If you don't hear from me in the next few months, it'll mean either a)my enemies have caught up with me and it us up to any poor souls who accidentally click on this blog to avenge my deaths (unlikely) or b) I'm picking up a copy of the Wii game Super Smash Bros. Brawl tomorrow, and I won't be able to extricate myself from its clutches for a while. I actually went to Circuit City to pre-order the game, which is something I hadn't done since Sonic the Hedgehog 2 about 15 years ago. I pre-ordered it mainly because Circuit City said they would give me a ten dollar gift card if I paid them in advance, which struck me as a reasonable offer, and because it's entirely possible that this game will be as hard to come across as Wiis for a week or two, and I've been waiting for this game for a long time, because I'm a nerd and I get enjoyment from beating up Pokemons with Link that I would rather not examine closely.

Quick Hits

I've said it before, but dammmit- Super Mario Galaxy is amazing. I love how open-ended the game is- not in a sandbox way, but if you don't like a level, there are at least three or four other levels you can go to instead to get the stars you need to advance to new levels. That by itself solves one of my biggest problems with platform games where I tend to get stuck on one level and have no choice but to keep bashing my head against the game. If you have a Wii, you should be playing this game.

I finally listened to the free Atmosphere album, Strictly Leakage. If you like Atmosphere at all, you should grab it. It's pretty good. I'm curious if any of these tracks are going to be on the album that's supposed to come out this year. Keith posted the like once, but here it is again- http://www.rhymesayers.com/atmosphere/

Living for giving the devil his due...

Hi kids (note that I say "kids" despite the fact that to the best of my knowledge, no one younger than me reads this with anything approaching regularity.)

I've been meaning to put more stuff up, but I've been busy watching baseball (You had to figure Cleveland would eventually remember that they were Cleveland EDIT: I wrote that when Boston had gone ahead early, but now in the fifth inning the Indians have closed in a little. The Indians might just ruin the plans of Fox executives who want a profitable World Series yet), pouring my hours into my PS2 (Beyond Good and Evil, Kingdom Hearts and College Hoops 2K5 mostly- it just occurred to me that I have no idea if one should italicize video game titles. I mean, if you think of video games as art, which I do, [The real question is whether or not video games are good art] shouldn't one italicize the titles? But I can't remember ever seeing someone do that.) re-reading Terry Pratchett novels (in an attempt to slightly brighten my worldview without sacrificing any of my trademark cynicism) and using the Netflix to catch up on movies I really should have seen by now (Walk the Line, Jacob's Ladder and 300 thus far, although I'm halfway through 300) all the while still trying to find a proper job.

James and I went to NC State's embarrassingly named "B-Ballin' at the Old Barn" on Friday night. It was basicly just an open practice for the men's basketball team, along with a few shooting competitions. The highlights were seeing J.J. Hickson for the first time (this kid is going to be really, really good. I just wish that there was a better chance we'd get him for three years) and seeing Chris Corchiani, who is my absolute favorite basketball player of all time. Between that and the ECU game, it's been a pretty good weekend for NCSU athletics, which is something of a rarity this time of year.

However, because life simply will not allow me to go through a single weekend without something that threatens to drive me to resorting to violence, I did read a rumor that Michael Bay is working on a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. Now, The Birds is my least favorite of Hitchcock's major films (hell, I like Spellbound more than The Birds) but still, Alfred doesn't deserve this. Even Tippi Hedren doesn't deserve this. It's bad enough that by the time I finish writing this Hollywood will have finished green-lighting remakes of all of my favorite 70s horror films, but now they're going to start working through Hitchcock? I always figured that the one good thing to come out of Gus Van Sant's attempt to remake Psycho in the late 90s was that it would cure the movie industry of any impulses to touch Hitchcock's back catalog. Of course, this made the key mistake of assuming that Hollywood has the capacity to learn from mistakes. I just can't wait to see how he explains why birds start exploding.

I don't want my brother coming out of there with just his joystick in his hand

So I just got The Godfather game for the Wii. I had a coupon from Amazon for pre-ordering Harry Potter, and I had to spend twenty bucks to get the rebate/discount/whatever, so the game wound up costing me about twenty-three dollars. Which seemed worth it. I'm still just begining to play around with it, but I do love using the wiimote to punch people. It's just cooler than simply pushing a button. I have no idea if I'll get tired of this (either mentally or physically) after a few hours, but thus far I dig it. At any rate, it looks like it is more respectful to the Godfather legacy than number 3. (Zing! GF3 jokes are the cutting edge of cinema humor)

Metroid Prime 3 also comes out today, which I want. And I needs to get me a classic controller so I can play some SNES games with a more appropriate controller.

Also, there's a new Aesop Rock album out. I need more money to keep up this lifestyle.

"And maybe Adil has point about the machinery of capitalism being oiled with the blood of the workers" (Sorry. I'm watching season one of The Simpsons while I'm typing this up)