Entries from June 2004
June 30, 2004
1) Caroline Avenue – I Guess I Was Hoping For Something More – Tarkio
I finally found some more from Tarkio, Colin Meloy’s original band. This one’s got some little banjo work that runs underneath the main melodies. There aren’t any particularly brilliant couplets in this track, and The Decemberists seem far far away.
2) The Town Halo – The Slow Wonder – A.C. Newman
The cello hook riffs like Jaws, and the verse flips from menace to joy and back again.
3) I Summon You – 2004 Demo – Spoon
This little Spoon demo is essentially just Britt Daniel chopping away with his guitar, a sickeningly subtle piece of work where the verse and chorus barely shift into one another and four minutes of your life disappear before you can sing “mmbahmmbahmmbah.”
4) Naked As We Came – Our Endless Numbered Days – Iron and Wine
Sam Beam is Iron and Wine, the dude version of Cat Power or a more grounded Sufjan Stevens, if you prefer. Straight forward folk fingerpicking leads me to wonder how Beam falls into indie rock circles at all.
5) The Weakest Shade of Blue – Yours, Mine and Ours – The Pernice Brothers
This popped up on my Ipod and I had no idea which lush, layered Beach Boys influenced pop band it was. My Ipod lives in the shadow of Brian Wilson, now and forever.
6) Don’t Get Your Hopes Up – Me First – The Elected
I’m not a big fan of the rest of the album, but I get a huge kick of this song intro, which is almost identical to New York, New York.
7) Brand New Colony – Give Up – The Postal Service
The Postal Service is old news, but I felt the need for some love songs that sounded like they came from the Nintendo. “We’ll cut our bodies free / from the tethers of the sea / start a brand new colony” is such a beautiful hippie dream.
8) I’ve Got The Password To Your Shell Account – Zero One Infinity – Barcelona
This is the catchiest song about hacking password accounts ever. I stumbled across it a year or so ago and I still listen to it about once a month.
9) If We Can Land A Man On The Moon, Surely I Can Win Your Heart – When Your Heartstrings Break – Beulah
With Beulah on the verge of ending, I figured it’d be nice to put my favorite Beulah song from my favorite Beulah album with my absolute favoritest Beulah title on the list for this month.
10) Beyond Belief – Imperial Bedroom – Elvis Costello
This song doesn’t really have a chorus… you can just see Costello working overtime to sing the melodies just a bit differently with each line as well as pushing the lyrics far and wide.
11) The Letter – Uh Huh Her – PJ Harvey
Sadly, this is the only song on the new PJ Harvey album that I can even stomach.
12) Cinnamon – When I Pretend to Fall – The Long Winters
When I saw the Long Winters, I really wished they were better. I feel the same way about this song, which has a great pop hook but doesn’t have enough ideas to sustain the full four minutes of fun.
13) Bastards of Young – Tim – The Replacements
I could quote this song until the end of time. For the sake of space, just one bit “The ones who love us best / are the ones we’ll lay to rest / And visit their graves on holidays at best / The ones who love us least / are the ones we’ll die to please” I’m surprised their aren’t 20 punk bands named Bastards of Young.
14) Jolene – B-Sides – The White Stripes
This Dolly Parton cover is still one of the Stripes’ best performances. Couple this with White’s Loretta Lynn thing, and it’s pretty clear he’s got a creepy thing for old country broads. Barbara Mandrell, watch out.
15) We Both Go Down Together – Live in Toronto – The Decemberists
Oooooh new song. There are actually about four new Decemberists songs now, but this tale of starcrossed lovers opposing worlds that throw themselves off the Cliffs of Dover is high drama. “I come from wealth and beauty, untouched by work or duty” is something I wish I could sing about myself over and over again.
Posted in Mixtape 
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June 30, 2004
GRAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH
I think I’m going to slam my head against the wall until I fall unconscious. I have this feeling that if homie Axel were here he’d tell me to exercise until I passed out. Phil would load me up with some fruity mixed drinks til I fell asleep. Charity would knock me upside the head and then wake me up ten minutes later to tell me to stop snoring.
These are the things that go through your head when you should be dreaming instead.
EDIT
–
Two seconds after I typed that I yawned. New strategy: Read my own writing and bore myself to sleep. Score!
Posted in Endless Whining 2 Comments »
June 30, 2004
Linus put up pics from the BBQ up. I think I’m only in like two photos, but none of y’all want to see my ugly mug anyway.
Big fun, as usual. I gotta say that after spending an entire day in the sun and fire and then going to the supaawesomeifyoumissedityoumissedout Decemberists show later that night, I was sleeping the sleep of the just.
Posted in Eratta No Comments »
June 30, 2004
Why Black People Tend to Shout
by Ralph Wiley
When Ralph Wiley died a couple of weeks ago, he died as the only sportswriter I actually looked forward to reading. The thing about sportswriting is that most of it is terrible, a semi-regular crawl of column inches put out as filler, occasionally being controversal enough to piss some people off. Wiley always read differently to me. He was a guy who clearly loved writing, sports and writing about sports. Even with a weekly column on espn.com, he put out consistent work with a distinct voice.
So when he died that was a real bummer, and for consolation I got one of his non-sports books. Why Black People Tend to Shout is (like a lot of my recent non-fiction) a compilation of essays. As the title may suggest, Wiley takes on various aspects of Black culture and goes through it bit by bit while being simultaneously entertaining and educational. It’s not a huge eye opener in a lot of respects. It was written in 1991 and similar material’s been mined since then (most of Chris Rock’s career-breaking standup covers a lot of the same ground).
That said, it’s still sharp and relevant as ever. You can’t knock a guy willing to title a chapter “Why Black People Have No Culture” and has the first line of that chapter be “because it’s been on loan to White people with no interest.” Another nice bit, on why White people shouldn’t expect Wiley to trust them:
So why should any white person be somehow offended because he or she isn’t trusted by me? Why should that make me suspect? Why?
Because everybody wants to be respected enough to be trusted. Only white people assume they deserve this respect just because they are white and want it. The truth is simple. Black people have to love you before they trust you – and then it’s iffy. This has nothing to do with color or preference. It all depends on you.
Hard experience has taught black people this: Only those you know and trust can truly hurt you to the quick in this life. You expect to be hurt by everybody else.
Thanks for all the words, Wiley.
Posted in Dogeared No Comments »
June 27, 2004
When I first heard about Lost, I was both intrigued and confused. Any JJ Abrams (Alias, Felicity) is welcome by me but the idea of a show about 48 crash survivors stranded on a tropical island seemed … dumb. After watching the pilot though, it’s pretty clear that Abrams is not dumb, and is many degrees smarter than I am.
The show is still about the crash survivors, but the first episode is focused on a manageable cast of ten, and their introductions are handled deftly. You get to know a little about each one but not enough to feel like you’ve nailed them down to any sort of stereotype, and Abrams gets in enough little swerves to keep everyone dancing a bit. There’s even a Korean couple that speaks no English whatsoever. The big mystery character’s actually the island itself, carrying deeper secrets than any of the survivors.
It’s kind of hard to talk about without really spoiling it, but the show’s a lot more Land of the Lost than Gilligan’s Island, and will probably be the most interesting action hour of the new fall season.
Posted in Idiot Box 1 Comment »
June 23, 2004
Our Band Could Be Your Life
Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991 by Michael Azerrad
I was jacked to read this book, a set of thirteen rock biographies on some of the most influential bands of the American underground in the 1980s. Michael Azerrad did a great job picking out the bands, starting with Black Flag’s relentless assault and running all the way to Beat Happening’s quirky-fey indie approach. In between are chapters on the Minutemen, Mission of Burma, Husker Du, The Replacements, Minor Threat, Fugazi, Sonic Youth, Big Black, Dinosaur Jr, Butthole Surfers and Mudhoney.
I plowed through it in a few days, but I’m not sure there’s a lot of meat here. There are some great stories mixed in, but most of the bios are straight timeline recollections that bounce around from fact to fact without any particularly strong narrative. The strength of the book are the band personalities that happen to shine through, from Mike Watt’s awkward exuberance to Ian MacKaye’s grim determination. All the band stories seem eerily familiar, as almost all of them follow the same career trajectory of bored kids -> big ideas -> modest success -> implosion. The details are enough to keep it together though, and hearing MacKaye describe the straight-edge ethic or just hearing any good Mats’ drinking story will keep you flipping the pages.
One problem I had, and this is the case for many music books, is that if you’re not fairly familiar with the material then it’s a lost cause. Azerrad walks himself into no man’s land here, as most of the prose isn’t interesting enough to convert non-fans and fans are probably well versed enough that they don’t need the long explanations about every single band release. With that in mind, I’d recommend it to anyone with a passing interest but nix it for those who just don’t give a fuck.
Posted in Dogeared 3 Comments »
June 23, 2004
In a bizarre moment last week, my boss told me that I was going to be recognized for my length of service… I’ve apparently been working in the same place for ten straight years.
One decade. what. the. fuck.
The span includes my five undergraduate years of toiling part-time, so it wasn’t nearly as soul crushing as it first seemed. It is a little odd that ten years ago I was a freshman in college though.
What did I get for my indentured servitude? A paperweight. To be fair, it’s a nice black monolith with the UC seal on it that I could totally use to bash someone’s skull in.
Posted in Endless Whining 3 Comments »
June 22, 2004
All-Baseball.com did a thing this past weekend where a bunch of their columnists did their own take on the Dodgers-Yankees Sunday night game, which was nationally broadcast on ESPN. Obviously, the Dodgers columnist had the most articulate and well written piece, and the Yanks columnist thought Gagne’s strikeout pitch to Hideki Matsui was high and outside (which it probably was). The Oakland columnist spent his column envious of the Dodgers’ bullpen.
If you didn’t catch the game, there was an at-bat where Gagne locked horns with Alex Rodriguez, which looked strangely like this:
Imagine A-Rod in Yankee greys and swinging through a 98mph fastball though.
Posted in Eratta No Comments »
June 19, 2004
I just knocked off another music book for the hell of it. This is Pop! is a compilation of essays done for the Experience Music Project in Seattle. Like most compilations, it’s a little hit or miss, and I think the overall tone of the book is a bit too academic to be really considered entertaining. That said, there’s still quite a bit of insight to be had in these pages, and the better pieces gave me tons to think about.
Some of the better topics covered in the book included:
June 19, 2004
my ipod is broken. i think i’m going to cry.
Posted in Endless Whining 4 Comments »
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