Question

For some reason I'm hesitant to drink water I left sitting on my counter in a water bottle for a week. Is this any worse than drinking water that was sitting in my pipes for a week?

Some Notes about San Francisco

1) Many of the famous skate spots, including Embarcadero (EMB) and Pier 13 (I think) now have heinous contraptions screwed into the concrete that prevent anyone from doing grinds. In a bitter stroke of irony, the city has even elected to chip chunks out of the stairs surrounding a statue at Embarco to prevent anyone from skating it. Apparently Frisco's willing to destroy a piece of architecture simply to prevent people from wearing slowly away at it, especially if they wear away at it with aluminum trucks.

2) The most scenic day spent in SF netted zero photos because I'd neglected to bring my camera out to Scott's house in the East Bay for a night of drinking and chatting about InfoSys, India, and journalism (of all things).

This turned particularly problematic when I took the BART commuter rail back into downtown and decided to walk the 10 miles along the bay/coast back to my friend's apartment in Ocean Beach. Sure, I saw everything, but no one on Facebook is going to know.

3) There was much talk of the distinction between Pwnage and "getting served." Theories included that Pwnage has to involve the Internet, and "getting served" has to involve breakdancing. We did more than watch that video of the four-year-old getting served/pwned by a Times Square breakdancer though. At one point we walked into a bar that served such drinks as "Tequila Mockingbird." DJ Takes Self Too Seriously (not really his name but nevertheless his name) was spinning and there was a projector showing people breakdancing behind him. The bar included mostly people in tight jeans who probably wouldn't have quit smoking if San Francisco hadn't outlawed it in the bars. My party and I pretty much agreed that we had gotten served, and not just Speakeasy Pale Ales.

4) While in attendance at the Gay Pride Parade on Sunday, we noticed numerous things.

a) A Pride parade does not consist entirely of rollerblading conga lines wearing only tight white rayon pants. Sometimes there are also balloon-clad transsexuals.

b) You will see exposed boobs at a Pride parade, but not really any more than you'd see on any other day when you go to a strip club.

c) House music!

d) If you are me you will get kicked in the butt by a gay man, right in the crack. More than surprising, the act was confounding. Was it a sexual overture? Did he want to start a fight on arguably the most loving of all days? I shot a questioning look back at the perpetrator, and his face seemed to imply that both of my guesses were true. For better or worse, I have since resolved that, gay or no, any man who kicks another man in the butt crack is asking for a fight. Luckily for the gay community, no one else tried it.

e) Yahoo! sponsored the festivities, or at least helped by passing out purple stickers pronouncing the pride of the stickee. I wonder if those guys handing out stickers were interns or what. Whoever got assigned to that, they were probably "Just glad to get out of the office."

5) If you are in a bicycle messenger bar, it is best not to say how lame biking is. According to Alan, it is like "being in the lion's den and hating on gold fur."

6) Barry Bonds can hit a home run most of the time.

7) Knocked Up was okay but not as good as Rotten Tomatoes said. Certainly, though, not as controversial/sexist as some haters have said. It's odd to argue that a movie isn't feminist or whatever based on assumptions about the guys women will/won't fall in love with. Beautiful up and comers sometimes date and love total slobs and douchebags (believe me I know this to be absolutely true) - even guys far worse that Seth Rogen's character, who actually got his shit completely together together (including tearing through three baby books) in like five weeks I think. Sod off, wymyn, sometimes a hot chick likes a guy you don't like, even if you are, unlike her, not pretty enough to play a doctor on Gray's Anatomy.

8) If you have vaguely reddish hair, telling people to order a Red Headed Slut at the bar is almost always an okay idea.

I Am on Vacation but I Couldn't Resist

From a scathing review - if a poorly written and line-edited review can really be scathing - of Knocked Up:

The writing doesn't feel real or natural. It's just a bunch of guys sitting around the table being lewd, vulgar and riffing on each other.

If you could still be serious about using the word "riff" before now you are definitely in troubs when a lady who uses sentences such as

My happy feet really wanted to get the heck out of there

is copping the steez.

Jeezy Responds

To a pretty antagonistic and moral-panicky Q&A in the June 2007 SPIN:

I'm not a plumber, I can't rap about pipes. I'm not a roofer, I can't rap about houses.

I'm not a rapper, I can't rap about raps. :'(

A Few Facts and Opinions About the Tacoma Public Library

1) They have a lot of DVDs that are not Masterpiece Theater or documentaries, including such as The Marine starring John Cena, The Devil's Rejects, and Transformers: The Movie. I wonder if they think public libraries should carry these films for the same reasons that I do.

2) Many of these unconventional DVDs, including Back to the Future, in addition to being uneducational in the traditional sense, are bootlegs! Do Phyllis and Janet (two of the librarians or at least two librarian-sounding names) go to those guys who spread out blankets on the streets to stock the shelves? The intellectual commons meets copyright law at the library in more ways than just letting you at books for free! I kinda imagine DVD bootleggers have a deal worked out where they can slang product as long as they donate some merch to the public well-being. We should do the same for drugs and prostitutes maybe.

3) You can't look at pornography using the wireless, unless it's through Bloglines. I don't think that they respect Bloglines users more, they just have outdated software.

4) A child was molested by a man here in October 2006. Security is very tight at the library. They only let one person in the bathroom at a time, and search it after each use (I'm thinking drug deals). Four security guards prowl around, making patrons feel even more uncomfortable than they already are just being in a public library. The guards are not afraid to tell you not to tip back in your chair.

5) Just down Tacoma Ave sits the Pierce County Courthouse. Right next to it, the jail, which houses an above-average percentage of the population, if you catch my drift. It might say something about a town that the nearest building to its library is its jail. Are they hoping spillover from one to the other? Or maybe fearfully anticipating the opposite.

That man [in the jail] and the man in the [library] / Don't realize how close they really are
--Nobodys

6) Every once in a while, someone will enter the library talking at a very high volume. Maybe the frequency of this occurrence is accentuated by the fact that I'm spending a lot more time in the library than ever before, but I seem to remember places like Milwaukee Public and Georgetown University enjoying a greater degree of quiet.

6) [Opinion only] Good library.

Bagenius ("Je me souviens du confondement entre le B et le V en espagnol, [putain]")

The Filename of This Photo Is "headshotr.jpeg," Which Gives You a Good Idea Just What Kind of L.A. Band We're Dealing With Here

It was senior year of college, graduation rapidly approaching. It was maybe February, and I'd started hanging with a couple girls who came by Tuesday nights to take stale bagels from me as my shift at the coffee shop ended.

When I got off we'd hang in the food court at the student union and I'd mostly listen to them talk to one another about their days: papers turned in late, boys affronted, their love-hate relationship with my friend Scott.

After a fashionable time, one of the girls, named Pheebs, called me up.

"Hey Mike my friend's band is playing at the 9:30 Club. I have tickets. Want to go?"

"Sure."

"I don't want you to think this is a date or anything."

"Of course not."

The show was Kings of Leon (yo Leon! These guys are the Kings of you!), and the Kings of Leon are alright I guess but Pheebs knew the openers, a little supercool L.A. band called Vagenius. They reminded me of a band that played at my high school called Loserface, who called me and another geeky white dude onstage to freestyle rap (I can hardly believe it either, but rapping was once part of my life).

Vagenius reminded me of Loserface because the lead singer of Vagenius had dyed-black hair, was a girl, and played the keytar, kind of like the lead singer of Loserface had real-black hair, was a girl, and played the keyboards. Both girls were hot in a Joan Jett kinda way, but the comparison isn't as obvi as you might think by the photo. They had moves and could belt it out pretty, not like Joan who bless her heart is a yeller (and a good one). They guys who backed them up just looked like guys I went to high school with.

So Vagenius played some gay-wave (you knew that, though, keytars and all), but good gay-wave, better even than The Killers or Interpol, because it wasn't synth-y and they played the keyboard like a keyboard and guitar like guitar and didn't play either like the other one (maybe my main objection to the Aughties-Eighties vein of music).

The tunes were crisp by definition and the singer had a whispy voice.

When the Kings came on we got to go upstairs to the VIP section and meet Vagenius. I didn't say a lot but I remember the singer telling a story about how Kings of Leon heard their tape and asked them to tour with them, and Vagenius'd never heard of Kings of Leon so they had to listen to "Trani" pretty avidly so they could pretend they really loved the Kings. (Why not have a band just called The Kings? That's a great name, right? Also why not have a band called the Beetles? I've wondered about that a lot.)

This was pre-Youtube post-Napster so it was probably pretty hard for this woman to make time to like the Kings of Leon, but Pitchfork was doing the damn thing so it couldn't have been that bad.

I guess it worked out okay because about two months after the show when I got over myself and the "What am I doing with myself now that college is over," I came back to their Web site and started banging Vagenius tunes on the regular, actually more like on the constant. The delivery is nostalgic, and whereas the timbre is different, they kinda remind me of Jane's Addiction (see post below).

Well as songs are wont to do after 10,000 plays, the early Vagenius wore out, and I ditched it for some "Don't Like the Way" and some joints by this group Guided by Voices.

The reason I'm remembering all this is because I'm going to San Francisco to visit Scott tonight and he mentioned via Gchat that Pheebs might be around. Some memory triggers got pulled and before I knew it I was back at Totallyvagenius.com and they have this new album called "Hello Stranger," the lady singer is still there, she speaks Spanish, and not much has changed in the way of this music still being moving.

So check out some Vagenius. The embed is a little short and weird but that's okay.

Today Is National Go Skateboarding Day

Tomorrow Is the Friendlier National Come Skateboarding Day

And people are losing their conceptions of the borders of possibility in the process! And not just regarding whether you can backflip to manual. From the Skateboarding Day .org:

On June 21 skateboarders around the globe will celebrate the pure exhilaration, creativity, and spirit of one of the most influential activities in the world by blowing off all other obligations to go skateboarding! (emph added)

Never mind whether skateboarding, relative to other activities, is "influential" (it is near-superlative in all respects). The real question is whether a habitual activity can be influential. Like you can build a fire and it won't be influential. You can play guitar and it won't be influential.

Maybe if everyone went out and did a 1080 that would be influential. Or started doing cannonballs out of pole jams.

So, in honor of National Come Skateboarding day, a vid of the Ghost of Skateboard Future doing a pole jam to cannonball. You can only do this trick on Tony Hawk Pro Skater or if your name is Chris Haslam (the comments say it isn't but screw that Haslam can do this trick so it is him):

You Can Stand Under My Umbéla!!!

In a post from April about Bacon Skateboards, a Pac-NW company I'd never heard of, I remarked briefly on their selection of a Modest Mouse song called "Polar Opposites" for their Cuntry as Fuck video.

The Cuntry as Fuck version contains a banjo and a quicker tempo, and generally I like it better, except that I have to listen to that weird vomiting noise at the beginning of the Bacon video to get to the actual song.

As a sort of compromise, I've been going to Youtube to watch matthiasheuermann's remix of "Polar Opposites" with footage from Béla Tarr movies:



Two things:

1) The use of Modest Mouse's music over Béla Tarr's work is controversial for several YouTube commenters, but not controversial enough to engender "flaming":

Muzakconcrete: Man. I just can't believe you're doing this to parts of bela's movies. Conside the lack of music in his films. What does that tell you?

matthiasheuermann: funny you should mention this, as the other day we watched Werkmeisters Harmonies and someone pointed out that the use of music (especially in the scene where the ransack the hospital) is the weakness of this film, as it is not very subtle.

Muzakconcrete: It's not the use of the music which is weak. It's the music itself, it's not great in Werckmeister. But anyway, I was referring to the use of ambience as a device, the very absence of music in most scenes. It just seems a bit reckless to throw modest mouse songs over his film. Surely part of his genius is that he uses sound in the way he does?

[By the way, does it ever bother anyone else when someone who comments online or blogs relentlessly follows rules of punctuation and caps but then falls off on the "that/which" rules? No half steppin', doggies. Grab an MLA and get in the game.]

matthiasheuermann: You're absolutely right. It's a bit reckless, but hey, that's the kind of chap that I am. And frankly, I hardly do Tarr's genius justice by exploiting his visual imagery for todays pop music, but if I get merely one viewer interested in watching the films of Tarr, I consider myself redeemed.

Muzakconcrete: What can I say? It's cool.

Arguments on both sides are oddly formulated, but rather than get into that, I'll leave you with this prelude to the above dialog:

karelsidorjak: You had no idea what you are watching,sorry!!!!

According to my prejudices and lack of knowledge about Hungarians, I'm assuming that Karel Sidorjak is a Hungarian friend of Béla Tarr (whom many commenters on this video know on a first-name basis, apparently).

Zooming out a bit, karelsidorjak's admonishment is, almost quaintly in its Hungarian way, true in any situation and also tempered with a condescending false intimacy contained in the ",sorry!!!!."

Maybe I will learn more about "Béla Béla eh eh" at a different time, and at that point we can discuss Hungarian film. But unless he did skate vids, we're probably going to leave him where he is: on wikipedia.

2) As I said, I've been listening to this song upwards of twenty times daily for several weeks. Starting Wednesday of last week, I began internalizing the message, thinking "Drinking away the part of the day that I cannot sleep away" would be an interesting approach to life.

I started to drink at work, about five beers early on in the shift, and ramped up my PBR consumption back home. At work, I gave slow service. At home, I was simply drunk. By Sunday, I'd reached a level of toxicity that made hiking up Tiger Mountain less than an entirely pleasant experience. I've since decided to take a break from the Isaac Brock approach, and have even quit smoking (kind of).

It's a bit crazy to me that I am outwardly so critical of the "debauche" approach to literature and art. I claim to myself at least that I find drugs and sex uninteresting at their fundamental levels. Yet, I still internalize the message that drinking and drugs are awesome and there is some kind of authenticity achieved by means of their consumption.

Or maybe I just like to drink and need to stop making a thing of it (with myself).

I Ain't Never Been No Place

Sorry about the delay I was over here climbing Tiger Mountain for a sec. That coupled with a bangover leaves me incapacitated, blog-wise.

Not to mention Rihanna is still number one with "Umbrella."

Here's what I got in meantimes:

I love Ani Difranco as much as the next guy (okay probably a lot more), but her music videos are crazy boring. "Pick Yer Nose," ordinarily one of my favorites, blasted apart by assuming people will simply be riveted by watching Ani walk around trying (not trying?) to talk to people.

Also, live versions uniformly beat out studio tracks when it comes to this woman.

Still oddly attracted to her.

:P

Justification of Ignoble Profession i.e. Writing

Chuck Palahniuk, in an A.V. Club Q and A:

If I can imagine it, that's already happening.

An Archeological Adventure

A friend and sometimes reader of Ideelz (unless a rando from Toronto somehow found me) is on aforementioned adventure in Amman, Jordan. In support of the proliferation of blogumentarianism (of which I have no part of which to speak [!!! -- Chik chick chik]), I'm a-linking to her.

I'm hoping for photos but I'd even settle for reading the first post. She sounds a little tired.

Archeological Adventure

Go West, Young Man

From Richard Rorty, "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids," Athenaeum Library of Philosophy, 1992.

There is, in short, not much reason to hope for the sort of single vision that I went to college hoping to get.

Rorty's talking about the impossibility of all-encompassing philosophy that transcends postulates (he calls them "hypotheses" but I'm feeling saucy), but that sentence capturesss a larger disillusionment I felt when I left school.

College consists mainly in being buffeted (and sometimes, scarily, buffet-ed) by a bunch of older people who certainly are smart but whose main interest at best is to impress upon young minds a specific world view, one at which they've arrived through a series of missteps and scholarly omissions, be they glaring or obscured by the the prejudices of the era. Helpful as they might intend to be, their main purpose is to shut down intellectual avenues in hopes of producing more people who think like them, or at least more people who approach thought in a similar way.

For some people who aim to inhabit an extant intellectual structure (aspiring doctors, lawyers, (ghasp) journalists) this is fine. But for those who thought they would be attacking thought from new and exciting angles, college disappoints. Grad school, I imagine, only makes things worse.

Maybe this is just a resurgent "Fuck You Heroes" now that I'm largely outside the tower, but darned if I don't wonder that worse than Good Will Hunting-style "We don't love them schools," I'm reaching a point of "I hate them schools. They are a racket."

Just my thoughts.

Just what I'm feelin at the time.

My Lip Gloss Is Poppin'

We Have To Do This

As promised everyone, here we go on another fanchapstic voyage through the nether regions -- the bowels -- of traitorous radio to give you a lil' insight into lil' mamas and lil' papas everywhere who just can't get enough petroleum gel on their oral orifice.

Lil' Mama, an apparent cross between a thirteen-year-old girl and a forty-year-old woman, is lately jammin everyone's radio frequencies with a lil' raspberry called "Lip Gloss":



You are hearing correctly:

Lil' Mama's Mama: Mama, what's wrong?
Lil' Mama: I just want to be part of the cool crowd. I just feel like I don't have what it takes.

Lil' Mama's mama calls Lil' Mama "Mama."

Moving on.

. . .

The radio version of "Lip Gloss" is a ballad of love dedicated to that shit ladies smear on their lips. Direct and straightforward, the song articulates a clear thesis ("My lip gloss is poppin'") then illustrates this idea with numerous specific examples (the principal verse).

Things get a bit crazy when Mama ties her lip gloss to her identity: "What you know bout me?" All you need to know is that Mama's lip gloss is poppin'.

This reminds me of the early high-school days when girls were 14, not a girl, not yet a woman, starting to wear short shorts to school and meaning it, some even had A- or B-cups, they started heaving on the makeup in the morning, getting ready sexually for whatever was coming -- they didn't really know, but they knew that they'd better get at it. At the same time, though, these chickadees are still going home and cutting out photos of Cam'ron or Justin Timberlake and taping them to their walls. They're still hiding their Lisa Frank stuff in the closet when their friends come over to hang out. They still talk to their teddy bears.

They wear lip gloss by the gallon.

Their parents can't carry enough crates to their room. They practically bathe in the shit. They smell like cherries and cough syrup wherever they go.

People start to take notice.

Only one consumer product known to man is so comfortably nestled between the excitement of emergent sexuality and pre-pubescent "Pretty Pretty Princess": Lip gloss.

It goes on your mouth, that part of your body that's gonna be getting a lot of attention soon. It serves a medical purpose. Mama can't deny daughter a lil' lip gloss, you need protection from the sun and chapped lips. It's like fifteen cents for one lil' tube.

What Lil' Mama has hit on more effectively and subtly than any teeny-bop sensation of the New Era age (ballcaps) is just how fine a line girls tread now that hetero dudes don't have to pass around Playboys.

Think Spice Girls, shouting "Girl Power" but wearing bondage gear. Then think Britney, wearing schoolgirl outfits and yelling "Hit Me Baby One More Time," making a thing of her virginity.

Then look at Lil' Mama. Whereas the former ladies practiced a kind of doublespeak to help girls negotiate the parameters of womanhood, Lil' Mama simply occupies the space. This is evinced even in her contradictory name, her video-mother's hermeneutic confusion, and the ultimate message conveyed in the video.

Mama's mama says basically "It was inside you the whole time." Lip gloss is just a magic feather. In one sense, this is an unconvincing case of the video "going Dumbo." Who really believes the magical lip gloss that made the lockers autonomously pound to the beat of Mama's music had nothing to do with her popularity? In another sense, though, the message is more nuanced: This lip gloss that you wear is a signifier for the thing inside you that's about to blossom into some serious sexual power. In a couple weeks, you aren't going to need that stuff, because you will have a butt.

A bigger butt.

A poppin' butt.

Onesies

One-off objections to the Rihanna Billboard situation have included:

She looks like a premature baby;
There is no melody;
Jay's verse is awful.

Amazingly, even though I'm the only one in my circle of friends willing to defend this song, it is still #1. Yeah Rihanna looks like a baby, but a sexy one. She's lost weight. Yeah the verses aren't great but it's the chorus, people! Jay's verse is awful but it's growing pains for a new life off the streets. Stay tuned there may be more coming. Meantime peep this.

Shaun White Now On TV During Summer, Daggers Fly

According to ESPN, the International Olympic Committee is trying its hardest to get skateboarding on the docket for 2012 London.

Now we can watch NBC Olympic montages about Corey Duffel's Olympic dream:

Not cutting the corners of his mouth while he skates.

Vegas Baloney etc.

As usual, I'm in the cafe, but not as usual, I've left my headphones back at the apartment, so the jig is up, Lil' Mama-wise, so we're going to have to take a bit of a detour into some other parts of the internet, not involving audio.

In the spirit of crippled media, here's a sneaky peek at the Vegas chronicles, rapidly spiraling out of control, word count-wise. I'm feeling like Grady Tripp over here.

Somehow it came out that I speak French, so Qi asked me how to say "I want to eat you up," and I told her. I found out their ages (thirty-six), and there were some jokes about the mile high club, but joining that club is harder than you might think. That particular conversation went like this:

Qi asked, "Have you ever joined the mile-high club?"
I answered, "No."

Apparently this is not the way to join. Looking back, it seems obvious that the proper answer is, "Yes. As a matter of fact our organization has an opening. Meet me in the bathroom for an application." In my defense, I'm a little shy, and I kind of have a deadpan humor thing going, so I'll console myself that my response just flew over the ladies' heads.

The blogpost I'd written jokingly about Airport to Bedroom had included the tip "Share a cab to your house. This always works." Just then Danielle asks:

"Do you want to maybe split a cab or something?"
"Sure."

So we de-planed and I awkwardly tailed two Portland strippers/real-estate agents past the slot machines and through the security checkpoint-of-no-return. While we waited for their luggage I watched some Japanese tourists photograph the airport and saw limo drivers hold signs with people's names on them. I had arrived in Vegas, with a small amount of style and a limited number of strippers. Things were going alright, but just alright.

Just a draft but whatever, mostly to prove I wasn't lying.

Songs about Lip Gloss Have Been Brought to My Attention

For people who listen to the radio it is not surprising that there is a Lil' Mama named Lil' Mama who raps about lip gloss and makes aforementioned adored #1 Rihanna hit into a remix that is better than the original song (a feat that is no longer a feat, given early-stages "What Means the World to You," more-recent albeit maligned "Back Then," and practically contemporary "Rehab," but perhaps noteworthy only in that it's becoming a thing, rather than an aberration). At any rate, there is much exegesis to be parlayed about over the "My Lip Gloss is Poppin'" phenom. Not to mention ideas about whether this Lil' Mama is Lil' in the sense of being short or being young (I think it's the former because she looks 40-ish), and whether or not she's an actual Mama who begs her daughter to make her into Lil' Grandma.

But I've been writing cover letters all day so that whole shimmy and a shake will have to wait till tomorrow after I send some more cover letters and my brain is actually working (see above sentences).

Why Is This Insulting?

Maybe it's just the same racism that had people hating on my friend Leon for posting to Gawker about this guy who blogs in the voice of Chauncey Billups and also does blogs in the form of fake emails to Jay-Z.

Is it always misguided to dislike a cover of an awesome R&B (I think I'm gonna spell R&B "R$B" from now on) by a sub-awesome not-punk band or any other group of twentysomething white boys? I remember there was a folky acoustic cover of Boyz N Tha Hood a while ago and I felt the same nauseation going, you know, just thinking something like "What gives them the right to do this."

It's very hard in these sarcasm-soaked times to draw a line between doing a cover of an R$B or rap song just to be cute and doing one because you love the music and want to participate. Sometimes the gig rings true and it's just happy times, but mostly when something like this shits itself out I just cringe.

I'd like to attribute my distaste for these covers to the fact that they rob songs of their original vibrancy and attitude, that they take a passionate and legitimately felt sentiment and turn it into crass pomo cuteness. But again the problem is one of intent, and who can really properly attribute that from the outside? I guess the most logical critical perspective is that these covers just don't add anything to the existing song, don't appear to have a reason to exist, the original song is infinitely superior, bladie bladie bla.

Whatever it is, I will continue to disfavor this effort, as much as it might align me with socially conscious rappers and others with whom I generally disagree aesthetically. Sometimes you just gotta bite the bullet.

New P-Land Band Sounds Pretty Good

When I was in high school, I lived in the attic. The attic had the dual advantage of sound-dampening insulation and a bathroom. Every day I would wake up before school and put No Code or In Utero or Siamese Dream on full blast so I could hear the rock over the percussive dripping of the showerhead.

Today, when I wake up on the futon, I reach over to my laptop and throw on some PIL or maybe "The Passenger" by Iggy Pop if I'm feeling kinda Detroit. Then it's off to the douche but those thin little speakers aren't projecting the same way my AIWA boombox did it.

But I am now listening to some tunes that might make me reverse my whole laptop-only listening experience. That is, I'm listening to music that is growing on me very quickly, reminds me of a nice-guy Gray Matter or Fugazi or other undergrad type music. I'll try to remember the name of this band by the end of this post and if I do I will link it (form matches content yeah yeah yeah).

The album starts with an organ blast which is subsequently completely abandoned. Picture "Like a Rolling Stone" only once-again listenable because instead of that pseudo-trademark organ-eighth-note-off bullshit there are just speedy distorted guitars and the tagline is "So here's your future."

The band in question (literally in question, still can't remember the name) has a Pavement-style nasal but well-enunciated vocal delivery, poetical in a way, post-Pitchfork rock for people who don't like quiet shit and think The Hold Steady sounds too contrived.

Here we go:

The Thermals.

It's not like Lifter Puller where I'm instantly playing Tracks Two and Nine over and over again, usually putting on Track Two as I'm getting ready to shower, hearing Nine as I'm drying myself off. The Thermals are not a shower-type band, not yet. But it probably took me four or five years to do the AIWA dance with Nirvana, so they shouldn't feel bad. I've always been a bit behind the times. And at least they have the potential. Right now the Thermals are a forties-and-tallboys band, good for the afternoon on a day off, hanging with the guys. I would probably not listen to them much if I were back East, but if life in Tacoma has had any effect, it is that I will give the Therms another shot. Tomorrow. Before the shower.

Rihanna Saves Us All, Saves Herself for All Of Us (I HOPE)

This better get embedded it's too huge to go other ways:



Well even though Ted Nugent is only killing chickens on cable TV and not cutting records that rock as hard as State of Shock, it is nevertheless a tumultuous Monday for the 'biz; Maroon 5 once again blasted off the Number One spot, this time jammed down by two new tunes: one by Rihanna ft. Jay-Z (this is the real comeback forget Kingdom Come-backs), the other by WHO CARES IT BUMPED MAROON 5 DOWN ANOTHER NOTCH.

So with all this nonsense tossing up the received order of divine rule by the likes of such monarchal bastards as Maroon 5, we've got a regular reformation going on. If my stolen internet doesn't step up its game in short order, I'm gonna have to roll to the coffee shop around the corner to properly blogument this sonic shift, nail some theses to the door, do what I have to do, because this shit is exciting.

Rihanna is back! Last year I went to New York City for my birthday and we stumbled through a hangover and some story pitches while listening to "S.O.S.," Soft-Cell "Tainted Love," and Gloria Jones "Tainted Love," and the sun shone and it was hot. We made the whole situation start to matter in that Park Slope swelter.

Is it a fact that summer is here?

Looks like it. This "Umbrella" Number One jam does what "Crazy in Love" did several years ago; place Jay-Z as a flowing counterpoint to a crazy-sexy R&B sensation making convincingly genuine, cohesive sensual paeans to fidelity, old-school romanticism, and more.

I'm liking Jay-Z flowing at the beginning. Although "Crazy"'s loco flows were way hotter and worked better as a climax that gave emphasis to the blasting horns that really made the song, I like the Jay-as-chorus-line/ringmaster idea, where he spits a couple lines introducing a song's overarching themes (rain, Rihanna), then lets the lady elaborate. From this standpoint, Hov can't lose; he still has a controlling position; structural primacy and the cred to let you know what's new with Rihanna or whoever and why this song is hot. He keeps it brief, we keep listening, and in the back of our minds we might even thank Jay for bringing this little number to our attention.

The controlling metaphor/image - "You can stand under my Umbrella" resembles the fidelity stylized in country songs - I'm thinking "I Will Always Love You," and if you need water metaphors to make a full connection, "Islands in the Stream."

Listen to these lines from the chorus:

When the sun shines
We’ll shine together
Told you I'll be here forever
That I'll always be your friend
Took an oath Imma stick it out 'till the end
Now that it's raining more than ever
Know that we still have each other
You can stand under my Umbrella
You can stand under my Umbrella
(Ella ella eh eh eh)

The rhythm is perfect poetry-wise (maybe singing-wise for you Jack Spicer fans out there, but I think even you can fuck with this shit), and note the sound-poem punctuation at the end, reminiscent only lyrically of Eminem's "Square Dance" (eeeh eeh ahh eeeh ah) among other songs. A singer/rapper can only do this when they've mastered the sounds in question to such a great degree that they'll give listeners a peek behind the curtain and say "Listen to these syllables. These are the syllables I used to make this thing that you enjoy."

Let's not forget the degree of fidelity expressed in this song. It's the degree of fidelity that only occurs when you're first falling in love with someone, when you really think there is no one else, when that spell falls over you the first time you wake up and her arm's around you and the sun shines outside and makes that white rectangle on your bed. Rihanna feels that way, too, sometimes, judging by the way she delivers this song; it's about sex but it's about sex the way sex is a gateway to a truly great friendship.

May through July have typically been good months in the romance department, starting when I was twelve and kissed a girl at French camp, came home semi-cured from depression, and carrying through the college years when the sun would bring the tank tops out and sexual discoveries just started to make more sense for the ladies. As such, any tune that comes around at this crucial moment, showing a woman devoted sincerely and totally to some idea of heterosex life (although there's not explicit mention of dude parts in "Umbrella," I don't know I just will keep considering Rihanna as straight just so my hopes remain alive - I don't think I mentioned she caresses herself naked AND dodges CGI water in this video) totally rules my summer, provided the beat is somewhat sweltering and somelady gives me her phone number within a couple weeks of the song's debut on the charts.

Step one is complete. Now we'll have to see about step two. This is the first number one song I've blogged that I've liked just as much as I've thought about. Fucking two Ideelz way way up. RIHANNA THX SO MUCH I <3 U.

Lebron James Raps?! I Hope So!!

Last night, LeBron James helped the Cleveland Cavaliers destroy the Pistons to win the Eastern Conference Finals and earn a chance at the 2007 title ring. That is not news.

[. . .]

What is news is that the night before last night LeBron James released a theme song called "Main Attraction," which appears for the moment on allhiphop.com. According to an Asian Fanatics (not what it sounds like) forum post, LeBron, in addition to ballin', "also raps," and teamed up with Sprite to sponsor a theme-song competition. The result was Paul Wall not really rapping about Sprite and this guy Al Fatz (predictably, given the sugar content), really singing about Sprite.

So for now LeBron James hasn't rapped, but is oddly still listed as "ft." on the Allhiphop mp3. Are people "featured" in songs as long as they are somehow involved in the project? Probably LeBron and Paul Wall hang out; Paul Wall can't be a Spurs fan, he's froum Houston.

Paul Wall had something to say about this cross-promotional adventure; awesomely, he manages to make his comments about his song on LeBron pretty much focus on himself. From the presumably Asian journalism major's forum post:

"Lebron is truth on the basketball court [true], and we had a lot of fun making the song for him [maybe true]," Paul Wall told AllHipHop.com. "He's handling up right now in the playoffs [true], kinda like how I'm handling up on the mic and demolishing the tracks [true]."

I am willing to draw two conclusions from this: 1) that a vandalized Wikipedia entry (since edited) that claimed Chauncey Billups was "bisexual, having admitted to romantic relations with men," was probably posted by LeBron, and 2) that LeBron knew he was going to dust the 'Stons in Game Six. I imagine the meeting with his agent went something like this.

Agent: So, LeBron, we have this song by Paul Wall and Al Fatz that is about you and how great you are.

LeBron: Yes I know.

Agent: We're in a tight spot. A lot of haters think you can't bring it to the finals and you are not Jordan.

LeBron: How did you just say a hyperlink? Should I click on it or what?

Agent: That's not important now. What's important is you have a decision to make. Are you going to win game six or cry like a little bitch? Because if you are going to cry like a little bitch it probably isn't wise to release a song about how much Sprite you drink. It won't be good for Sprite, and it won't be good for you.

LeBron: Don't sweat it, Doc. I just read on Wikipedia that Chauncey Billups is bisexual [snickers].

Agent: Alright that's good enough for me. I'll have Illseed start some rumors that you "also rap."

LeBron: Okay cool, later dude. I gotta go film a commercial where my head turns into a lemon, then a lime! I'm still young enough to think that kind of thing is cool.

As silly as it sounds, it worked. The only remaining steps for LeBron are: 1) win the NBA finals; and 2) release a rap album that tops Shaq's in sales and flow. Both are possible, maybe even probable.

Ideelz out.

Never Thought I'd Rememory in a Headline But It's Saturday

It's an old idea that there are many songs we love merely because they are glommed on to some seriously pleasurable nice nice very nice moments from smaller times. They're like the soundtracks in romantic-comedy montages, both the ones where the dude and the chick are improbably finding ways to love each other and the ones where the dude is remembering the improbable things he loves about her in the post-jilt moments. The songs are often 80s classics, partially because romantic comedies started in the 80s and partly because that kind of cheese is exactly what gets 30-something infantile single women all jazzed up and ready to cruise in their Saturns to the nearest singles bar or slot casino.

At risk of seeming like a mid-30s woman, I've been having maddening bouts of romantic nostalgia lately, wanting to just get all Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan on some chick who doesn't exist except as an abstract conception. But trust me she is hot and funny and far from possessed of wack music taste. She even likes to drive me to the skate park in her Passat and watch me, secretly having a crush on a couple other skaters but never going to do anything about it.

Unforgivable, right? But we've all been there.

Aaaand I'm jamming a song on repeat the way I used to do with Blind Melon in college (even though I didn't really ever share Blind Melon with anyone because no one else really seems to care about them any more).

I'm not really critically engaging the thing. It's a sunny Saturday morning and I'm not smoking cigarettes - I'm drinking coffee. I realized the other day that sometimes you just need to have some olfactory memories, be they activated by putting on some suntan lotion, sitting next to your cafe au lait, or walking till you find some fresh-cut grass (or even dog shit). I am infrequently overly sentimental, but when we fall, we fall hard - I'll go on facebook and check out the profiles and photo albums of previous ladies of my life just to see if I can bring back the smell of their hair or whatever (pervy right?).

During the teen years, I used to get back from a 7-9 a.m. swim practice on Saturday mornings and turn on the radio to some Everclear or Refreshments, sometimes Smash Mouth or that band Mark McGrath was in would even be on. But I wouldn't hate, I'd just enjoy these boneheads' company as I paged through the comics or thought about some high-school sweethearts and heard my mom vacuuming in the T.V. room. The sun would shine especially bright through the windows, painting these whitish squares on the breakfast table. Remembered moments like holding hands and secretly liking it or even the first time you see the bra come off have got those same rectangles all over them. In the spirit of that, here's some New Order.

Nineties Rock Lost Its Cock (In a Good Way)

I'd been meaning to do a post about early-nineties scratchy voices with catchy, gay (awesome Foucault gay - not mere Will and Grace gay) hippie-ish instrumentation, but I'd forgotten about it until I saw the A.V. Club do an interview with Perry Farrell. Excerpt:

The A.V. Club: How would you describe Ultra Payloaded?

Perry Farrell: The term I use is "sedimentary rock," because it was built in layers.

Let's bracket for a moment comments on Farrell's well-documented pretension and focus on the fact that this is a hilarious, even self-deprecating joke. Then let's move on to the part where we watch some Youtube together.



Typically what we remember about the early nineties (if we're 23 like I am) is Nirvana and Pearl Jam, maybe Soundgarden occasionally. These bands were great, but Jane's Addiction and Blind Melon (dummy anagram for Blind Lemon) were spearheading a revolution mainly focused on barretted hair and scratched voices. Look at Shannon Hoon in this clip from Woodstock '94:



Sad that this music didn't really engender a lasting following. Picture this perfect picture: The 80s look like they're actually dying away, sort of. People are playing guitars again. People are looking back at that time and kind of saying "Hey we looked ridic back then, but maybe there is something to looking ridic, if it isn't all self-serious and we actually put a little actual humor on top of the whole thing (and I'm not talking about hipster irony or sarcasm)." Is it just me or did Perry Farrell actually look cool with a bird's nest of scrunchies in his hair? I went to private school during this era, so maybe I missed out on the legions of teenies who copped his steez, but the bigger hunch I have is that it never even really happened, and that's why when we dig into collective memories of the 80s-90s transition we only remember that everyone parted their hair down the middle Kobain-style. Which brings me to another point about our current state of affairs.

I was at the bar last night sipping on some Manny's Pale ale and having a few smokes (I know I know I'll kick soon but it's hard when you work in the resto biz. . .) and actually got hated on because I do drugs relatively infrequently and recently have not been an uncommon drunkard. There lies in the Pacific NW and maybe in all aspiring-hip parts of the country a druggy variation on the frat-boy "drunk as hell is cool and masculine" head-trip. That is, if you aren't doing heroin or basing on the baselines, or at least trying to score some serious shit, you just aren't cool. The same applies to tattoos and body mods. Which has me going all, "Wait a minute guys these things are cool but are they fun?!" And of course the answer is difficult to tease out but from an authenticity perspective it seems like the superficial trappings of being a rad kid often overtake the beneath-the-surface coolness of people actually just having a barrell of laughs over something lame. Self-destruction is often a part of cool people's lives, but we ought to be careful to think whether it is the coolness or just sort of a correlated phenomenon. I.E: Druggies use slang and slang is cool so you gotta use drugs to say cool slang. I.E: People saying things like "I'm a writer" to you while you're at work and then you look over their shoulder when they're on break and their notepad says something like:

I get so angry sometimes.
I just want to punch something.
I am so mad at you it burns like a fire.

But they're sipping a whiskey and seven while they write this so there must be a Buke type thing going on. At least that's what I picture them thinking. There are more examples but I think you're getting the picture.

All of this inauthentic derisive awktown garbage is cased to some degree in the weird Male-Female dialectic we've had since Baudelaire. Writing is totally gay and for sissies, so you have compensation for this with drugs or sex or whatever, people trying to look mysterious and down for the cause at the same time. "I miss the comfort in being sad." We all know where the whole thing ends, too, junked-out in the corner with sore nipples that you've shown everyone because you got the cute bars through them this past weekend and maybe next time when you get your clit done something will really happen and you will be legit but in the meantime you've got some percocet so you're making it, baby, it's just around the corner and you can see it wagging its tail and when you catch it you will be a lion and no one will fuck around with you anymore.

On the other hand, the above videos are the opposite. Perry looks lame, but he's confident enough that one is even glad he looks lame and it gives one hope that maybe some utopian day we too can look totally lame but it'll be cool because we're doing it to have a good time and not to impress other people with our dark side and the steep slope of degeneracy.

It looks to the trained eye like this, Blind Mellon and Jane's Addiction, as opposed to The Killers or Interpol is the kind of 80s gay-wave we really need nowadays. Farrell and Hoon both did the dirty dance with the China but if you look at them in those videos they were rapturously in love with the music that they made. Tonally and melodically, they both sang in major keys more often than minor and they had the damned courage to actually get gay (poverty-of-relations gay not Queer Eye gay) onstage, wear some serious female hair products and put in parentheses the extent of their degeneracy so it wouldn't get in the way of the one thing that mattered: the joyous (gay) message of their sad sad songs.

Gluing fur to your neck doesn't make you a lion. In a different world Shannon Hoon would've kicked and would be alive today. There would be more scratchy voices on the radio singing longing songs of joy. But they didn't quite make it, and we've unfortunately forgotten some of the near-hippie wavecrest that came around when we were really quite young.