Know what just stuck in my mind this evening? Now that I'm not moving, I'm going to get to meet Megan in March. What's French for "yippee!"?
Youpi, if you can believe it.
I was thinking about you too yesterday as I was confirming my plans with my friend in Houston. I am very excited for my trip (well, except for the writing the paper part). For Austin, I'm confirmed at Habitat Suites for the 12th-15th. I was also looking into SXSW--is there a way to buy individual tickets to things? I don't think I can swing a full film festival pass right now.
R.I.P. Sneaky Pete Kleinow, master of the pedal steel.
That's no good. Here's a clip of the man in action: [link]
Youpi, if you can believe it.
Youpi!
is there a way to buy individual tickets to things?
I'll check with my friend who is master of all things SXSW.
Great. Now I'm earwormed with "Lollipop".
As I was from Scrubs this week. Though also mightily entertained.
David Bowie is 60 years old today. Still hot? Discuss.
Yes.
I'm honestly not sure what else there is to discuss about that.
Any discussion there might have been was completely unneeded due to The Prestige.
Shrift and SA speak for me.
[link]
Paul Stanley needs no introduction. Every fucking song at a Kiss live show, however, seems to need one, a completely inane overly-rehearsed one at that, and some mad genius out there has finally made a CD-length compilation of some of the gems in the Paul Stanley Crowd Interaction canon. My good friend Dave Viola, who’s been obsessed with Stanley’s on-stage patter for countless years, tipped me off to this one — he’s the one who pointed out to me that Stanley, in-between songs on-stage, sounds less like the frontman for an internationally known rock megaband than a shrill Christopher Street queen stuck outside a club at three in the morning, frantically searching on the wet pavement for the last few poppers that accidentally flew out of his hand onto the ground. The ZIP file below of 70 tracks’ worth of Stanley shenanigans has already been posted elsewhere on the web, but it’s good to get this kind of stuff as much exposure as possible.
The blog from whence comes the text above has since taken the files down, but you can still get them here: [link]
I've been reading Simon Reynolds Rip It Up And Start Again - Postpunk 1978-1984 and it's pretty fucking great.
Highly recommended for anybody interested in that era (
SA!)
or just grew up on that music. It's really well written and beautifully researched, covering everything from Manchester when the Fall and Joy Division were recording, to the NY No Wave scene with James Chance and Lydia Lunch to The Residents, Pere Ubu & Devo, Throbbing Gristle, PiL, Gang of Four and the Mekons, the origins of the goth scene. Just tons of fascinating stories and insights.
It's making me imagine a tribute to JG Ballard from that era. He was so influential and so many groups reference him directly or obliquely. "Always Crashing in the Same Car," "Warm Leatherette," "At Home He's A Tourist," "The Passenger," "Hallogallo," Gary Numans "Cars," "Autobahn," so much of the early Fall, "Transmission" etc.
Relatedly, a song review in AMG for The Associates "White Car in Germany."
Like just about every other song recorded by Billy Mackenzie and Alan Rankine as Associates, “White Car in Germany” sounds little like anything else you’ve ever heard. Their songs might bring up fuzzy recollections or thoughts – the score from an obscure foreign film you can’t quite recall, Berlin-era Bowie at a war-ravaged cabaret, Scott Walker at his most fractured, a disturbing dream you once had. Their ambitious, experimental pop tapped into a type of genius that few other groups can lay claim to. “White Car in Germany” closed out a fantastic run of 1981 singles and wound up as the lead song on Fourth Drawer Down, the LP that collected those singles released for Situation 2. It’s a plodding march of a song, led by an overdriven machine beat, that features peculiarly cracked lines from Mackenzie. They seem to vacillate between a children’s playground chant (“If some brat annoys you/Do what’s felt impromptu/Kick them in their own”) and something scrawled by a hallucinating lunatic (“Slide your way through Zurich/Walk on eggs in Munich”). The cold, concrete-and-mortar atmosphere is offset by Mackenzie’s detached diva vocals, which add a darker color of gray. Like every other song recorded by Mackenzie and Rankine, “White Car in Germany” is likely to be seen as either a steaming pile of pretentious slop or a glorious slice of oddball pop. (It’s truly the latter, of course.)
