To look forward to

Kind of need to take stock of this so I don't forget about them, and I'll update as I learn/remember more:

Neko Case - Middle Cyclone (March 3)
A.C. Newman - Get Guilty (January 20)
Erykah Badu - New Amerykah Pt. 2: Return of the Ankh (February 17)
The Revelations ft. Tre Williams - Deep Soul EP vinyl release (January 27)

*Hoping for something/anything new from Joanna Newsom

Just about had it...

With rock and indie that's coming out now. I've been trying to give some attention to the Pitchfork end-of-the-year lists. Uninterested so far, at least in the list of songs. Can't say I'm not trying though. I did go and download each one and put them into a playlist I can listen to in the car, and I will give them all at least a chance while I'm driving around the next couple of weeks. So far I've only listened to a few random tracks. What strikes me most about the music Pitchfork responds to is the shtick involved in it. It seems like these bands go out of their way to think of a phrase, or a rhythm of words, or a "singing" voice, or an instrument, or a title, or some other sorry gimmickry to get their music noticed. A shortcut to making good music is what it strikes me as. Music made to be "interesting." Or music made to get notice to its makers rather than give the listener a real provocative and visceral reaction. Anyway, I guess I feel some torturous need to know what's going on in the genre so I am going to give all these songs a chance, though with each song, if it annoys me too much, it won't get much of a chance. And it's 95% a waste of time, this'll be the last time I feel the need to do so.

On the other hand, my people at Soulbounce put out one choice, not even a list, and I fall in love with them more than ever. Choosing Erykah Badu's "Honey" as their Video Of The Year and giving it a write up that is spot on. Definitely my favorite video of the year, more than likely my favorite song of the year, and one that was on neither of those lists from Pitchfork. Eat it Pitchfork!

Erykah Badu |MTV Music

TV Lull

Now that One Tree Hill has gone into hiatus until January, I'm lost for TV on Monday nights. Last night, while I was searching through Amazon, I watched I Want A Dog For Christmas, Charlie Brown followed by a harrowing episode of Intervention. Kind of an odd pair. So One Tree Hill, House, and Fringe are all away until January. The Ultimate Fighter, despite the horses-assery of this past season still a fave of mine, is over. Sons of Anarchy ended a while ago. My Thursday night NBC shows are more than likely about to go into hiatus if they haven't done it already without me knowing. Is Chocolate News going to stay on a while? Hopefully. Saving grace: TV Land runs between 2 and 4 episodes of The Cosby Show every night. Of course I've seen them all. Who the hell cares? Although now they're getting into the seasons where Elvin is a really central character. Soon enough Martin and Olivia will come along, and Rudy will be into her awkward stages. Then it will become The Cousin Pam Show for a while. These are not my favorites, but I can still watch them. But if TV Land all of a sudden decided to run Cosby every night followed by two episodes of Family Ties, I just don't know what I'd do with myself.

"You have a shit backstory and no conflicts!"

If you're not watching The Chocolate News, I would absolutely suggest a change of habit. At first I thought it was going to be a low-rent yet funny version of Chappelle's Show, but it turns out to be much better than that, hilarious on its own terms. Thought I'd just post my favorite segment from this week.



It's in better quality here but I couldn't get that to embed for some reason.

Completely Fed Up

I took a long time to write that last entry. Part of the reason is I've spent the last two hours being absolutely furious with The Redskins. I am not a fan of bandwagons, jumping on or jumping off. I try to make an effort to avoid such things. But goddammit, they were down 17 to 0 at one point in the first half. To Cincinnati. Cincinnati who has won once. Frankly I can deal with losses to the Ravens or the Steelers. Struggling against the horrid Lions didn't turn me off enough to stop watching, but this has been too much. And now they've had a touchdown called back, which turned into a touchback for the Bengals. GOD. DAMMIT. You really don't want to give up on your team! You don't want to be the person that turns your back when they get their face ground into the dirt. But I do think that at some point who have to tell the team that you won't put up with it, you won't reward them with your attention, and certainly not your money, if they'll give you nothing in return. That's the bottom line for Dan Snyder. If he has your money, he feels no need to change things. He'll still do stupid things in the draft, go out and get names to get attention (Jason Taylor? He's done nothing for us. Nothing. But he gets name recognition), and seemingly do whatever he can to avoid substantially improving the team. We had some success early in the season (and I'll admit, I let myself get crazy excited about it), but apparently that was only because we were doing something new. Apparently had nothing to do with hidden talents being brought to the fore like we wanted to believe. Because now, we did the new stuff for a while, other teams figured it out, got ready for it, and apparently we have NOTHING ELSE to fall back on. So, they've been fucking around for several years now, the last several weeks have been absolutely abysmal, and yet, via the Big O and Dukes show, I hear that they're still the highest valued franchise in sport. Amazing. I think the best thing for the team right now is some unbought seats at FedEx. Lord knows they're not being filled with Skins fans anyway. Make them feel it a little. This entry disgusts me a little bit too, because I don't like to consider myself one of those people who speaks of "we" when I speak of the team, but apparently I am. But I sure as hell have other ways I can spend my three hours every Sunday.

Ambition - Knowledge = I Have No Business Trying

Sometime between a month and twain ago it was announced on the 33 1/3 blog that they would be accepting submissions from any Joe SquirmyPencil for proposals to write books in the series. The 33 1/3 series puts out my favorite books. They're like my Harry Potter, they make me read when I normally would not. If you're unfamiliar, basically the author takes one album that he or she in enamored with (or in the case of Carl Wilson the opposite, or in the case of Eric Weisbard just wants to make fun of) and write a short, 150-or-so-page book around. The book might be a critique, might be fiction with the album at the center, might be a description of the album in the context of the time it was released. Could be anything. There is no better read than getting one of these with a take on an album that you yourself are in love with and intimately familiar with. You can scream at the author and tell them how wrong they are, or imagine you're best friends.

Inevitably, I had to wonder what book I would write for the series. Innocent enough. It's like the same reason I watch American Idol. I don't necessarily watch because I love the show or think the contestants are worth much. Some of them are, most are crap. But I watch because I love to take the themes and try to come up with what song would be the ultimate vote-getter or show-stopper. Then I go in my shower and I sing it and it's awful and I move on until next week. Back to the story at hand, I was trying to come up with my ultimate choice of album for the book series. This is when any tendency towards music snobbery you've ever had comes way to the forefront. Of course you want to pick an album that nobody else would choose to do, the easiest way to do that immediately seems to be to come up with an album, or even better an artist, that nobody has heard of. So I tried to get back into whatever indie mode I may have cultivated during my time at WCWM, but that never got very extensive. Plus it wouldn't be a pleasurable experience, because just about all the music I got into at that time I have not even a tiny fondness for now. Similarly the whole new folk thing I got into a few years ago. I mean, I like Blank Unstaring Heirs Of Doom well enough, but I don't think I could write a book about it. Tried looking at any number of other possibilities from the popular to the less so, and any genre I could come up with. Blacklisted, Ys, Too Bad Jim, Elmore James or Howlin' Wolf compilations (they'll allow compilations, but I'm not sure they'd allow blues. They specifically said "no jazz," so they might be looking for no other genres than rock/pop and things that crossover with that), Wild Gift, Boces, Astral Weeks (though somebody should definitely get on that), Curtis, Phases & Stages, Kick, Funkentelechy Vs. The Placebo Syndrome, The Hissing Of Summer Lawns, even a brand new one with New Amerykah: 4th World War. Although I'm crazy for all those albums, and there's certainly enough in some of them to write volumes around (for a better writer), none of them got me excited. It seemed like trying to pull a book out of them would be really hard. I can recognize the value of work, but to do something like labor over pages in support of a particular album, I think you need to love it in a way that borders on awe and certainly inspiration. Take Ys, for instance. One of my absolute favorite albums, I like to stack it up against the best. I've listened to it countless times and I'll listen to it countless more, but I still don't necessarily know what Joanna is getting at most of the time in her words. Actually, I could probably fill a book pretending I have some idea of what she's saying, or chasing it, but that would be a boring book. Every chapter would be completely separated from the previous, it'd be a jumbled mess.

But sometime last week, I came up with what would be the perfect album for me to explore. It ended up being nothing obscure, definitely not an obscure artist by any means, but an album that is unfairly lost amongst its artist's greatest accomplishments and not near as well-known as it ought to be. The album I came up with is Elvis Presley's Elvis Country: I'm 10,000 Years Old. When it finally popped into my head I thought it was just too perfect for a number of reasons. First of all, it's my favorite Elvis album. Elvis is basically my favorite artist, so that makes it a serious contender for my favorite album ever. But that is not even all that important as to why I think this would make a great book in the series. From the title, to the cover, to the song choice, the performances of course, the performances vs. the original performances, where it fits in Elvis's career, how it compares to other Elvis albums, its place as what I would say is Elvis's most (maybe only) cohesive album, and, maybe most intriguing to me, how it supports the mythology of Elvis. I'll probably end up going through a lot of those things in individual blog entries. Here, I just want to explain why I couldn't write the book.

The title Elvis Country can say a lot of things about what's contained therein. Most basically, it's an exhibition of several different kinds of country music, sort of a survey of the history of a very important facet of American culture, though I will say it's never a simple genre exercise. It's not like when Conor Oberst or Jack White decide they're going to be country for a while, it's all Elvis, it's never staid. It is occasionally predictable, but in a way that I think references tradition in country music, and in a way that simply puts a lump in your throat rather than making you go, "Hmm. Interesting." Basically it's not Elvis taking a stab at country, it's how Elvis did country. That's the most basic problem for me. I don't know enough about country music to put it into perspective, and I can't think of a way of getting around that. You need that sense of history, that's part of what this album's all about. I can maybe talk about how country music relates to rock and roll, but not about country music itself, and that's way more important here. There's also the history of Elvis himself. I think it would make for a really interesting part of the book. Where was Elvis at in his life? What was he going through when he put in these performances? Where did the song choice and concept come from? But with Elvis, it's never as simple as saying, "Here's what was happening at the time. That's why he does this, and that's why he did that." Elvis's career and life were a series of little steps, one thing leads to another. For instance, in the broadest terms, Sun leads to success at RCA, success at RCA leads to movies, movies lead to drought, drought leads to glorious comeback, glorious comeback carries for a little and then becomes sporadic. That's really broad, and there's a lot of nuance in there that would need to go into explaining this album. Especially this album, because an explanation of this album probably goes back through Elvis's life even before he had any inkling of being a performer. I feel like I would have to read a bunch of biographies about him, which are certainly available. Full biographies, not just of the late 60s and early 70s, but rather encompassing his entire life. I mean, I could just read Peter Guralnick's two books. They seem pretty comprehensive don't they? Definitely. But who knows? It seems like there's a million different histories of the man out there, mostly because a lot of people want to capitalize off him. They want to make it about them, put them into his story, so it's hard to say what's right and what's wrong. Anyway, I could definitely go with Guralnick's books and make a decent case, but I'd just about have to recount the whole thing to properly surmise Elvis's stake in these songs. I think, or I assume. I guess it could be the case that these are just songs he liked at the moment and he could sing anything at the time and make it great. That would make it easier. Have to doubt it though. Not when those songs are from some of his long-time favorite artists like Eddy Arnold, and artists he'd covered before like Bill Monroe.

So, there's a couple big reasons why I can't write the book. I could probably do some work and get it together, but not by December 31st. Maybe in a few years? I'll probably come up with more reasons not to write while I'm explaining what I would put in there. In the meantime, the good that's come out of it is I'm listening to that album a lot, and even found some session work from that period that I've never heard before. Fell in love with it all over again.

Something I've had to keep in mind the last few days

Just because I adopt an Australian accent does not mean that I am automatically sporting a chest made of kevlar. For Adam's birthday we went to see Australia. I actually enjoyed it. It's definitely a big, impressive spectacle. I'm not going to really review the movie, I will probably rarely review a movie. Rather I'll review The Drover's chest, which is easy to review because it seemed to be in view for most of the three hours. It may have even been covered most of the time, I'm honestly not sure because it makes such an impression you can't imagine it being a secondary focus of the movie. It is what this movie is all about. It's too powerful to be subdued by shirts, jackets, vests, scarves, silks, or leathers. If I made a wall out of his chest I could survive sandstorms, hurricanes, twisters, wildfires, planes, spears, dodge balls, or any other number of projectiles. If I coated the front-end of my truck with his chest, I could rear-end a school bus and turn it into flakes up to row 14. I could shave off the thinnest outer layer of skin and serve salsa in one pectoral and queso in the other. They were simply immovable, inflexible, impenetrable objects. Lex Luger had a big chest. You remember he used to get in the ring and flex and bounce his pectorals like they were marionettes? I don't think The Drover's chest could do that, and yet it's more impressive for it. It reminds me of moss. Initially it looks like a cushion, but you know that there's granite under there. (And you can bet there's wood somewhere.) All that, and I haven't even mentioned the woolly. That's all I'm going to say. It was so impressive to me that I had to keep myself from speaking in an Australian accent the next day. My chest is not designed to stop bullets, I think it's rather better designed to feed children, and no amount of saying "drove" or "walkabout" will make it otherwise.

Getting going

Okay, I've never made one of these before, so you'll have to bear with me. First correction: I'll have to bear with me. I'm going to give myself the benefit of the doubt and assume that I'll get on the ball and have this thing presentable eventually. Just a second ago I tried to alter the color scheme and got totally flustered, so that's not much of a start. In the meantime, who's reading? Exactly. So, no foul.