Add this one to the growing list of stellar early ‘07 releases. Animal Collective member Panda Bear (aka Noah Lennox) offers a follow-up to his 2004 cult-favorite, Young Prayer, a quiet meditation on his father’s death, with a much less stark album of drony and hypnotic but undeniably catchy Beach Boys-inspired psych pop.
Choice cuts:
“Comfy in Nautica”
“Bros (Edit)”
In this absurd world, it can be beneficial to one’s sanity to maintain a certain degree of objective distance from the more inane aspects of culture. One way I do this is though a refusal to use stupid item names at restaurants.
I went to T-REX tonight with my family. Pretty impressive place, really. Definitely a lot cooler than Rainforest Café, mostly due to liberal use of REAL FIRE! But, of course, basically every menu item has asinine tie-ins to dinosaurs, or anything vaguely prehistoric (bones, volcanoes, meteors, whatever). So the sandwich I want is called “Herbivore’s Delight.” I really am firmly opposed to using ridiculous names such as this. I typically try to find the way to order my entrée that offers the least amount of dignification to the clever bastard who thought up its name. The very few times I have been conned into purchasing something from Starbucks, I have never uttered any of that “tall” or “venti” garbage. So when it came time to order, my first instinct was to say I want the “veggie sandwich.” I was in a giving mood, however, and conceded the herbivore bit. So:
Me: I will have the herbivore sandwich.
Her: …what?
[long beat]
Her (cont’d): Ohhhh! The Herbivore’s Delight®!
Conclusion: concept restaurants with stupid names for food are annoying.
Found this cool documentary following super-cool songwriter Robert Schneider as he works on the upcoming Apples in Stereo album, New Magnetic Wonder, which is, by the way, awesome.
Parts 4 and 5 are forthcoming.
Menomena – Friend and Foe
My favorite release of ‘06 so far. At the moment. It’s seriously amazing. On my first listen I concluded that it paled in comparison to their debut I Am The Fun Blame Monster, which is one of my favorite albums ever. But this thing has grown on me exponentially. These are surprisingly mature, unconventional songs that will work their way into your subconscious. Stream that shit.
“Wet And Rusting”
“Muscle ‘n’ Flo”
Animal Collective – People
Animal Collective’s Australian tour EP is finally being released. The title song is good, if a little boring. It’s basically Avey shouting “yeah” over a drony backdrop of very Feelsish instrumentation. The highlight for me is “Tikwid.” Listen, courtesy of Merry Swankster.
“People”
“Tikwid”
The collective will be playing the Granada on May 20. Get excited.
I wish I had an explanation for not writing much this week, but, uh, Warioware: Smooth Moves is fucking stellar.
Japanese artist Ken Kagami, best known for his art for Deerhoof’s Milkman (new album drops tomorrow, y’all!), creates simple, child-like drawings and sculptures with a certain preoccupation with blood, feces and male genitalia. I enjoy them.
I am an avid collector of dollar store DVD’s (I hope to highlight my collection in a future post.). One film, entitled Border Cop, brought a truly beautiful man to my attention: a man named Telly Savalas.
Throughout his career, which spanned from 1989 to 1995, although his life ended in 1994 (he starred post-humously in A. Dean Bell’s Backfire! as Most Evil Man), he took part in more than a hundred television and feature roles, the most well-known of which is detective Theo Kojak from the eponymous 70’s TV series. He also starred in Escape to Athena (“The patriot, the professor, the comic and the stripper, were fighting for what they believed in. Getting rich! “), Pretty Maids All in a Row (“In a California high school, a married teacher is the athletic coach and faculty advisor. He starts to have sex flings with his female students and eventually has to kill several of the girls to keep them quiet.”), and Birdman of Alcatraz (“A surly convicted murderer held in permanent isolation redeems himself when he becomes a renowned bird expert.”), to name a few. He was well-recognized for his signature bald head.
A few tidbits from IMDb :
I learned something today: when it is icy out, it is usually to one’s advantage to take a moment to consider which driveway he turns his car around in.
That’s right, it’s story time! Tonight, my significant other and I were cruising around her neighborhood (which I am morally opposed to due to the useless waste of petroleum), killing some time before I had to take her home. Well, the time came to, you know, turn around and head back in the opposite direction (This is on Eastside Dr. in Parkville, by the way.), and I pulled into the first driveway I came across. As I pulled in and my headlights illuminated the path ahead of us, I uttered the following:
“This was not a good decision.”
The driveway was narrow, long, winding, pretty damn steep, and horribly iced over. Really, everything you wouldn’t want it to be. I knew it wouldn’t be easy. I slid forward a bit, then tried to reverse. I floored it, of course, to no avail. My vehicle has four-wheel drive, my I couldn’t even get enough momentum to kick it into gear — the couple attempts I made yielded that nasty, grinding “you are killing your transmission” sound. After trying hopelessly for a minute or so, and just sliding further and further down the slope toward the house, we made a democratic condition to plow through these poor people’s yard. Of course, they had lights on in their window, but we would be gone in a second anyway, right? It’s not like they’re going to chase us.
Well, in doing so, it would have been a good idea on my part to, you know, not get stuck in the yard. The back of the car was still on the driveway, and I guess I have rear-wheel drive. So I backed up to the other side of the driveway to get the back tires in the grass, and I guess it would have been a good idea to look behind me or something. Oh hindsight. So we pretty much level this bush, and uhh, somehow manage to get stuck in the grass on the other side, and tear up the yard pretty good trying to get out.
This is the part where the door to the house opens and I see a man’s silhouette approaching. I guess at this point I placed my chances of getting out of this thing alive at about thirty-five percent.
As he got closer, he looked like a pretty typical rural good ol’ boy, toting a cigarette and a blue-collar shirt. Not a good sign. A million film scenes of gun-toting rednecks harassing dumb teenagers flashed through my mind as he approached. God, I’m an asshole. I rolled down my window and, always quick on my feet, addressed the man when he got close.
“Uh, hey, I was trying to turn around in your driveway and, ahhh, I kind of got stuck.”
Remember, I’m sitting on top of this guy’s bush right now.
“Yeah, I can see that.” This wasn’t in a joking manner. At all. This was in a “you just tore up my fucking yard, kid” sort of tone.
Ugh. I am an idiot.
Anyway, the guy ends up being horribly polite but obviously irked by the whole thing and lets me back up through his yard to the end of the driveway and get a run at the driveway, allowing me to kick it into 4WD and get on my way. Before I left though, I tried to atone for the situation the only way I knew how: by offering monetary compensation for any damage I had done. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. Brings a tear to the eye.
On my drive to school every day, I listen to Morning Edition on NPR. It offers a solid, entertaining overview of the day’s stories. One man, however, ruins everything; a man by the name of Carl Kasell.
One of NPR’s veteran newscasters, Kasell possesses, put simply, the most infuriating and distracting manner of speaking I have ever heard. The combination of him gargling excess saliva in his throat, loose skin flapping around in his mouth, and incessant lip-smacking makes paying any attention to his stories a virtual impossibility. His voice has literally sent me into fits of enraged shouting at 7 in the morning. This is no mere annoyance. He truly maddens me.
I wonder if anybody over at NPR has had the awkward conversation with him yet. “You know, Carl, don’t take this the wrong way, but…your voice.” If he were ever to get fired, I would probably feel bad. He’s a damn fine journalist and I’m sure he can’t help it. But ugh. It just needs to stop.
EDIT: Haha, apparently I’m not the only one who feels this way.
I watched two pirated movies over the weekend, during which I was stuck at home due to inclement road conditions.
Pan’s Labyrinth: Better than I expected. This movie is obviously getting a lot of critical love, but I didn’t see myself enjoying it too much, mostly because I cannot stand historical dramas, nor did I enjoy Hellboy. Or Blade 2. Or Mimic. This is great, heart-wrenching stuff, though. It takes the same themes you find in basically every fantasy film ever made (namely that of making sense of a harsh reality through an invented alternate reality) and filters them through a dark, intelligent script. The parallels between the reality of the grisly post-Spanish Revolution conflict and the fantasy sequences, which alternate between fascinating and horrific, creates an intriguing, multi-layered story that is worthy of all the attention.
Little Children: Watching this directly after Pan’s Labyrinth reminded me why I prefer real films to over-the-top flights of fancy. An ensemble piece, Todd Field’s film explores the lives of young parents in an upper-middle-class neighborhood. The plot loosely hinges around a sex offender who recently moved into the subdivision and an affair between two young people disillusioned from their respective relationships. Field looks at marital infidelity and suburban disillusionment without ever venturing too close to melodrama. Jackie Earl Haley delivers an affecting performance as the demonized sex offender; it is sure to draw more than a few tears. This film arouses all the emotion that Crash wishes it could have. It’s at the Tivoli right now, definitely try to check it out.
|
Recent Comments