Tags: comix
HOLY CRAP! I almost forgot about this blog! The only thing that keeps me from ignoring it altogether is the fact that I get 50 or so pingbacks from spambots every week. Pretty annoying!
Well, if you haven’t already, check out my HILARIOUS new comic! Seriously, check it out! I spent a lot of time learning how to draw Charlie Watts. And it’s short, unlike my previous project!
Anyway, keep watching this space if you’re a fan of disappointment!
Welcome back to my HIGHLY CONTROVERSIAL blog series Seekrit History! I learned something after my previous installment: Never express opinions… Unless they’re positive!
Well, this time around, I’m going to blast a sugarcoated rainbow through the dark heart of this blog. And why not? I’m writing about magical Christmas music!
BACKSTORY: Last year at around this time a friend of mine introduced me to a true Seekrit Gem, an EP of Christmas songs by a bloke (that means dude!) named Simon Panrucker, evidently made as a Christmas gift for his friends. I’m not sure if that’s actually the case or I just assumed as much, but it does come across as a labour (that means labor!) of love.
MEGA-BACKSTORY: Actually, this was not the first time I’d heard Simon Panrucker’s stuff! way back around the turn of the century, the aforementioned friend turned me on to Panrucker’s early music/comedy project Grubnuts, which produced a handful of charmingly jeuvenile songs, including a supremely irritating kazoo-drenched cover of frat party staple “Zombie Nation” and “Emlyn’s Gay”, a gleefully immature inside joke that’s amusing as hell even if you’ve never met anyone named Emlyn in your life. Amazingly, the angelfire website where we found all of the grubnuts songs is still there! Check it out, it’s pretty classic stuff.
In the years since those Grubnuts songs were recorded, Panrucker has evidently learned a thing or two about songwriting and production, and every song on Happy Christmas, You Guys! is impressive in some way. The first song, “Snowflakes Falling Down”, is impressive in every way! With a memorable melodic hook and an extravaganza of instrumentation that includes piano, chromatic bells, and a goddamned sax solo, this song doesn’t need humor to get by, which is good because it’s not particularly funny in and of itself. But I suspect that to those who know the dude, it’s probably sorta amusing to hear Panrucker earnestly longing for a white ChrisTmas (gotta love that proper pronunciation!) and I myself am amused when I remember this is the same guy who did “The Annoying Song”!
Next up is “Everyone is Sleeping”, another ostensibly straight-faced ditty that certainly involves some serious songwriting. Unlike the kitchen-sink production of “Snowflakes Falling Down”, this one is intentionally minimalistical, successfully evoking the feeling of being the last one up.
Next up is the title track, and probably my favorite tune on the EP! “Happy Christmas, You Guys!” is one of the funniest Christmas songs ever, and it’s probably one of my all-time faves, up there with “Father Christmas” by the Kinks. Unlike certain other hilarious Christmas songs, you can actually bust it out at family gatherings or whatever… It’s pretty clean! The comedy here all stems from the insane level of enthusiasm, a sort of demented bliss reminiscent of Steve Martin in The Jerk that invokes possibly the greatest ever lead-in lyric for a breakdown in the history of Christmas songs that have breakdowns: “I’m so psyched, super pumped/I’ve been waiting for this one day for 12 months/I’ve had a run around and a skip and a jump/Now let me take a deep breath while I listen to my heart thump…”
“Leave My Nuts Alone” takes things back to those Grubnuts roots a bit for some good juvenile fun. The double-entendre might be more subtle than anything Grubnuts would have done, but it has a similar appeal to those Grubnuts hits of yore, and that singalong chorus is fookin’ infectious.
In short, these are the best Christmas songs since “Jingle Bells”, and they’re probably more fun than that Bob Dylan Christmas album. Go download the EP now. You can even name your own price, Radiohead-style!
He also has a brand-spanking new rap album that’s pretty hilarious, if for some reason you enjoy listening to music that isn’t about Christmas. Go check it out, if only for the cover art (but the music is good too!).
Tags: seekrit_history
Way back in middle school, I had to take a class called Language Arts. As prestigious as it may sound, it was actually a class designed for students who failed out of a foreign language in 6th grade. Needless to say, this was quite a collection of fuck-ups - You didn’t exactly have to be fluent to squeak by in 6th grade Spanish, after all!
We were dastardly little shits. When we had to read out loud (and sadly, reading aloud consumed a large portion of class time) we would pretend we were illiterate and mispronounce every other word. We’d yell out inappropriate things constantly. Our poor teacher even had to impose and strictly enforce a time-limit on bathroom visits, after we abused our privileges a few too many times. I came into that class a pretty good kid who didn’t give a shit about learning French, but before long I was fucking up with the best of ‘em. Kinda like Andy Dufresne, I became a criminal when they sent me away to be rehabilitated!
To be fair, Language Arts was a rather poorly thought-out class; in fact, it almost seemed as if it were designed to prove the theory that students act out when they’re not being challenged. The curriculum was essentially a mix of remedial middle school English and remedial elementary school English, and I think we all felt pretty ridiculous doing word-scrambles and acrostic poems. I guess maybe the logic behind this was that if you took a bunch of moderately-intelligent lazy kids and treated them like retards, they’d be motivated to work harder. Instead, we actually wound up enjoying it!
When the holidays rolled around, our teacher thought it would be a good idea to give us a creative writing assignment: write a Christmas story! A nice idea for a bullshit late-December assignment, if you were dealing with normal students. But she should have known how it was gonna go when she allowed us to write creatively; earlier in the year when she let all of us do an oral report on a topic of our choosing, nearly everyone chose to research a serial killer. Actually, I seem to recall that my fellow students really threw themselves into that one, so maybe our teacher came away from that thinking it was a good idea to give us some freedom. As it turns out, it was an educational miscalculation on par with that whole “letting the students choose who they sit next to” debacle.
I’ll never forget the day the principal visited our class. Our principal, the one who came up with the deliciously retarded school slogan “Don’t Make Fun” and then topped himself the following year with “Don’t Make FunnER” (an homage to the Die Hard series!) came to OUR class the week before Christmas break! He was sitting on the edge of the teacher’s desk with our Christmas stories in hand when we walked into Language Arts, and he didn’t look happy! Our stories, it seemed, were so shocking that our teacher thought it necessary to go over her own head and bring them to the principal’s attention. We had overshot our goal, really! We set out to horrify our teacher and here we had the principal of the entire school horrified! How far could we have been from getting the superintendent involved?
I vividly remember the surreal moment: our principal sitting on the teacher’s desk and reading aloud from a story that was, of course, a Silent Night, Deadly Night rip-off. As I recall, the tale in question ended with the world exploding on Christmas Eve as the woman who’d been raped by the homicidal Santa gave birth to the anti-Christ, and I’ll never forget the principal’s final comment on the story: “rape, murder, incest… It’s almost a good thing the world ended if things like this are happening at Christmastime in your world.” Let me tell you, there’s no greater yuletide gift you can receive than hearing your principe utter such words!
But, he said, there was one story - and only ONE - that wasn’t completely depraved, and he wanted to read it to provide us with a little contrast. I believe the story was about a kid stuck spending Christmas with some eccentric relatives or something - no genocide whatsoever. The girl who wrote this story normally seemed to fit in OK with the rest of the depraved rabble, but here the principal was, blowing her cover! By revealing her as the sort of person who didn’t write Christmas stories about rape and murder, he was making this poor girl seem quite the weirdo. Ironic, huh?
Actually, come to think of it, I’m sure she got by OK… After all, she was one of, what? Maybe three girls in the whole class? I doubt we gave her that much shit. But if a dude had written this sappy, rape-free story? BEATDOWN-CITY, you can be sure of that.
Hot damn, I wish I still had the story I wrote…
You know what’s wrong with the Children of Nuggets box set? It doesn’t have “Left in the Dark” by the Vertebrats on it! And you know what’s been shitty about all my Seekrit History posts so far? They haven’t had any links to the music I’m talkin’ about! I dunno if Rhino will change their ways, but I’m gonna change mine. This Seekrit History will include some samples!
In case you’ve never heard of it, Children of Nuggets was a compilation of catchy tunes from 1976-1995 (the Second Psychedelic era!), stuff that drew inspiration from the heyday of garage rock. It’s a pretty good sampler of stuff some might call “power-pop”, but I gotta give Rhino some shit for this glaring lack of Vertebrats. For truly, if Nuggets ever produced any children, the Vertebrats was them. Or were they the Sons of Rockin’ Bones?
At any rate, “Left in the Dark” is a tune that woulda been ripe for inclusion in that set. It’s a great song in and of itself (a nugget, if you will!); a break-up song filled with some authentic-sounding spite and bitterness (”how could you dare?”). It’s got a killer chorus, a great solo… AND I’ve got a sample for ya. This is the magic of blogging, folks… An experience Chuck Klosterman can’t manage with his fogey printed books:
SUCK ON THAT! While it’s not an especially well-known song, “Left in the Dark” has got some famous fans: it’s been covered by the Replacements (but only on the boozy live bootleg Shit Hits the Fans), Uncle Tupelo, and, uh, Courtney Love. Oh, and Jay Farrar called it “the quintessential garage rock anthem.” But you could read all of this on the Parasol Records homepage, and to give you an idea of how recently that page was updated, one of the quotes comes from an issue of Tower Records’ free rag, Pulse. There’s no mention, for example, of the Vertebrats reunion that apparently happened and apparently continues to happen.
Rather than copy and paste from an ancient internet text, I’ll tell you about my personal experiences with the Vertebrats! That’s what you came here for, right? Eh?
I found their CD A Thousand Day Dream in the dollar bin at some record store in the early 90’s and bought it, probably because it was the only thing in the bin that wasn’t a remix album or a maxi-single. Having never heard any music that wasn’t produced by Butch Vig, I had a hard time getting into it at first, but eventually I became New Jersey’s #1 Vertebrats fanboy! I even made a Vertebrats T-shirt in graphics class, brimming with pride at the prospect of advertising my knowledge of a band that other people didn’t know about! Needless to say, everyone thought I was the coolest with my Vertebrats shirt. Knowing about obscure bands was the key to social status in high school, which is why my friends and I would often sit around making up names of bands so that if any girl ever asked us what we listened to (as they often did!), we’d be armed with an arsenal of bands NO ONE knew about!
Artist's Conception of how awesome I looked
But here I had a real band nobody knew about, and they were a doozy! A Thousand Day Dream is like a Nuggets set onto itself! Besides “Left in the Dark”, You had the harmony-rich opener “Don’t Think About It”, and my personal favorite, the byrds-y anti-draft anthem “Diamonds in the Rough” with effective lyrics about how “Turning 19’s no… Fuuuuuuun anymore.” There’s also a pretty amazing solo in “Teen Seen”, and some rippin’ riffage in “Johnny Avante”, a funny song that’s probably about some pretentious hipster that plagued the Champaign, IL scene in the mid-80’s or something.
I got my dollar’s worth! There’s nary a dud in the bunch. Well, the chorus to “Big Yellow Bus” is sorta annoying, and some songs are a little forgettable (I forget which ones), but whaddya want? Even Children of Nuggets has some flaws, y’know. BAM! CALLBACK! BEST WRITING EVER!
Tags: seekrit_history
Paul Stanley is known to recycle stage banter in order to elicit the same reaction from different crowds, so it only seems fair that different crowds would use the same tactics to elicit a response from Paul Stanley, right? In Paul’s case, the desired response would be applause; in the audience’s case, the desired response might be Paul threatening to shove something up an audience member’s ass.
It would seem that busting out a laser pointer is a road-tested method for eliciting the latter response. It worked in NJ:
And it worked in Portland, OR:
While I’m sure that, being a guy in the audience at a KISS concert, the laser pointer guy is likely a fan of the “triple-X channels” and the Playboy magazines, I must say it’s rather unconscionable for Paul to steal Steve Martin’s standard heckler retort “I remember my first beer”. And anyway, I think the laser pointer guy has his heart in the right place - watching Paul Stanley stick a laser pointer up someone’s ass would probably be a lot more entertaining for the rest of the audience than watching his fat ass fly over the crowd on a zip line.
But you gotta hand it to Paul: as these 2 clips clearly illustrate, he’s a master of the smooth segue between lecturing an unruly audience member to trying to get the rest of the audience pumped up!
So this past weekend I was scouring the isle of Manhattan, trying to find some of the few remaining flu shots in existence. With me I had a team consisting of a Time Out New York writer, Food Network personality Alton Brown, and some guy named Kristoffer Tabori.
“Who the fuck are you?” I asked Kristoffer Tabori as we jumped into a taxi.
“Why, he read the audiobook version of Jeffrey Eugenides’ Pulitzer-winning novel Middlesex!” The Time Out New York Guy explained. “Well, technically he wasn’t reading it; he memorized the whole thing! Recite a passage for us, won’t you?
So Kristoffer went and recited something about a teenage girl with a “5-alpha-reductase deficiency” trying to steal a huge dictionary from the New York Public Library.
“Indeed,” Said the Time Out New York guy, “I know that dictionary well. The description of the chain that holds it to the table is quite accurate.”
As we got out and started walking, Alton launched into a story about some guy named Count Rumford who revolutionized ovens by repurposing tombstones from a Long Island graveyard to build an enclosed camp stove in which he produced bread crusts that bore the names of the deceased.
“All this talk about dead people is making me hungry. Where should we eat?” I asked the group at large, knowing who would answer.
The Time Out New York guy took a deep breath, then: “Well, Aamchi on 194 Bleecker St between MacDougal St and Sixth Ave has great potato and coconut chutney pao and Manchurian cauliflower like you’ve never had it before, or Ballaró Caffé Prosciutteria on Second Ave between 4th and 5th Mortadella with artichokes on spongy focaccia. But personally, I could go for the torta ahogada at La Superior on Berry St at South 2nd; it’s a pork confit and black beans bundled in a sourdough and swirled with tongue-scorching arbol sauce.”
“Ah, right. Arbol,” Alton interrupted, “Spanish for ’small tree.’ They can rate up to 30,000 Scoville heat units.”
At this point 2 men dressed as conquistadors appeared out of nowhere and stood on either side of Alton holding peppers. He went on: “When Columbus and his shipmates arrived on the island of Hispaniola (modern-day Haiti and Dominican Republic), they noticed the locals added these chiles to nearly every meal they ate, thus prompting one explorer to write, ‘the heathens eat that fruit like we eat apples.’”
At this point Alton produced a rubber glove and snapped it onto his hand, and suddenly he was holding a beach ball painted to look like an eyeball. “Now, when you’re preparing these you want to make sure you wear rubber gloves and don’t touch your eyes!”
“You know what? I don’t think I want to go out to eat.” I said, effectively ending the presentation. I pulled out a package of Dunkaroos that have been in my pocket since 1988. “I’m all set.”
Finally, we got to the vaccination dispensory, a nondescript building with a nondescript door in a nondescript neighborhood in a nondescript borough. The Time Out New York guy did a secret knock and singer/songwriter Matthew Sweet opened the door, holding a syringe in one hand. When he spoke, the words came out in perfect 16-part harmonies: “Whaaaaaaaat do you waaaaaaaant?”
“Uh, well, we were looking for some flu shots.” I said.
“There areeeeeeeeeeeen’t maaaaaaaaany left. Ooooooone of you will peeeeeeeeerish. Whaaaaaaat do you all dooooooooo?”
Alton spoke up first, talking about Good Eats and his gig hosting Iron Chef. He also brought up some charity bullshit, for good measure.
“Youuuuuuuuuuu may haaaaaaaaaave oooooooone.” Matthew Sweet said, and he stuck Alton.
The Time Out New York guy once again explained the significance of Kristoffer Tabori, and he got stuck.
“Whaaaaaaaat abooooooooout youuuuuuu?”
“Uh, I do a webcomic” I said. Noting a quizzical look on Sweet’s face I quickly added, “…and a blog.”
“Hooooooooow oooooooooften doooooooooo youuuuuuuu uuuuuuuuupdate?”
“Uh, once a week maybe? Sometimes less…”
Sweet’s brow furrowed. He turned his attention to the Time Out New York guy, who referred to himself as a “walking atlas of metropolitan culture.”
Sweet looked to me. I shrugged.
“Look. Look around! You see that unassuming store front over there? It’s a scientology center! If you go in there and sit through a video, they’ll give you these amazing chocolate chip cookies! And you see that alley over there? Jean-Michel Basquiat pissed there once!”
“Ummmmmmmmmm…” Sweet intoned.
“Look at that traffic light!” The guy went on, ” It was installed in 1988 by a guy named George Shell! It’s going to change in 3 seconds! There! And a pigeon is going to land on that stoop over there right… Now! You see? I know this city like the back of my hand!”
“Impressiiiiiiiiiiiive.” Sweet said.
I decided to go for broke. “You know, Matthew Sweet, I’ve always thought you were better than Elliott Smith!”
“Reaaaaaaaaaaally?”
“Oh, totally. I mean, you were doing the whole Brill Building revival thing like, 10 years earlier!”
“Oh, come on.” The Time Out New York writer interjected. “Elliott Smith was the new Burt Bacharach! At best, this guy was a Claus Ogerman.”
“WHAT?” Matthew Sweet bellowed.
“Oops. I’m sorry… I keep forgetting to not interject my own opinions into the…”
But it was too late. Matthew Sweet grabbed Time Out New York guy’s head and began screaming a 16-part dissonance into his ear. Then it grew to 24 parts, then 64 parts, then… Time Out New York guy’s head exploded!
And that’s how I got my flu shots.
Shit! I’ve really been SLACKING on this stupid blog lately! A lot has been going on since my last entry! Here are the updates:
UPDATE: THEE LONELY WIZARD NO LONGER LONELY!
UPDATE: I DELETE ARCHIVES! Remember how I used to have an “ARCHIVES” section on my site where I kept all my old-ass blogs from the pre-wordpress era? Well, I got rid of ‘em. But don’t kick that chair out from under you just yet! I’ll probably re-post the better ones here eventually; I’m not exactly brimming with new content these days!
UPDATE: PITCHFORK REDEEMED ITSELF! (a little!)
Yes, Pitchfork has somewhat made up for their shitty list of the decade’s top songs! No, I’m not referring to their list of the decade’s top albums here. That list, while not quite as horrible as their top tracks feature, is still kinda shitty. At the very least, it’s extremely predictable. For anyone with a vague familiarity with Pitchfork, the question was not IF a Radiohead album would be their number one album of the decade, but WHICH Radiohead album. And the answer, boring as it may be, is Kid A.
Pitchfork lists are always pretty dull. BUT didja read that Decade in News feature? It does contain an item on the Rapture’s brief moment of pseudo-fame, which the Pitchfork staff still inexplicably regards as an important cultural touchstone though it’s about as significant as Franz Ferdinand’s Seven Mary Three-esque moment in the sun, but other than that it’s a pretty interesting read! Fuck, 2001 was an eventful year! Napster got shut down in July and the ipod came out in October! Weird huh? And people died this decade! In 2001 there was Joey Ramone, then in 2003 we had Johnny Cash, Eliott Smith, and 3/4ths of the Exploding Hearts, And then ODB and Ray Charles in 2004, and Syd Barett, James Brown, and Tower records in 2006! And I fucking bought a Syd Barett CD at Tower once! FREAKY!
All of the music world’s big weirdos came outta the woodwork this decade. Brian Wilson finally released Smile, Axl Rose finally released Chinese Democracy, and Syd Barett finally died! To paraphrase Robyn Hitchcock, we never expected him to do anything ever again, so the fact that he even went and died was quite a shocker!
Since this list is brought to you by Pitchfork, you’ll have to wade through a lot of “news” items like “Ryan Adams Goes Solo With Heartbreaker!” “The Dismemberment Plan Break Up!” and “Conor Oberst Leaves Emo Behind!”, but sprinkled amongst the irrelevant crap they do throw in some news items that tell the tale of this depressing decade in music!
I will also admit that their section on the best music videos of the decade is pretty comprehensive! It definitely has every music single music video you’ve seen this decade on it! Obviously, since there was no universally agreed-upon venue for airing music videos this decade, we were all left with the improbable luxury of voluntarily watching random music videos on the youtube, and thus nobody saw any videos that didn’t benefit from a great deal of word of mouth hype circulating on the internet from peer to peer, almost like some kind of a… Virus! Someone smarter and more patient than I could probably spin this into an essay about how even though “monoculture” is dead and we no longer have any celebrities on the level of Madonna, the range of choices are more narrow than ever (at least when it comes to music videos). I don’t know about you, but I can probably remember at least 100 videos from the 90’s, most of them fucking horrible (actually, the only one that’s coming to mind is “Runaway Train”, but if I tried I could probably recall a few Everclear vids), and yet I can’t think of any music videos from this decade besides the OK Go! treadmill video and “Fell in Love With a Girl.”
Speaking of that treadmill video, though they place it pretty high on the list, the Pitchfork staff couldn’t resist taking a swipe in the write-up: “[the] Worst thing about it is you have to listen to OK Go.” ME-OW! Yes, sadly, not every listening experience can match the thrill of sitting through that 7-minute LCD Soundsystem song that doesn’t have a chorus.
Listening to 21st-century Weezer was not the worst part of the video for “Pork and Beans”, a forgettable attempt to jump on that OK Go bandwagon by trying to make a viral video… About viral videos! “Someone was going to do it, you could argue, but Weezer did and did it well, piecing together internet memes into a memory-jarring trip through 00s ephemera. Or should we say culture? I don’t even know anymore.” The correct description for the stuff in this video would be “tired jokes”, or, in some cases, “tired failed attempts at jokes”, but I do appreciate that note of defeat!
So why do I pay attention to Pitchfork? Because Pitchfork is the MTV of this decade, silly! Most of the stuff they hype is trendy garbage, but they do call attention to some quality shit now and then, and they do pump out some quality content now and then (when they’re not writing lists, that is). For example, their write-up on the new Beatles reissues is extremely informative! Lots of red meat for the audiophile in you.
Yeah, on those rare occasions when they avoid injecting their personal experiences into reviews or trying to be funny (not their strong suit, to put it mildly), Pitchfork craps out some good writing! Which is more than I can say for myself lately! Stay tuned for more crappy blogs, ’cause I’m sack in the baddle!
“What’s the story with Renaissance?” Many have wondered, after viewing the album’s nightmare-inducing cover art. Well, as far as I can tell, the story is that after the American public turned on disco, the Village People still needed money. Luckily, there was another fad on the horizon: New Wave!
…Just kidding! It’s not really a New Wave album. The first couple of songs sound like shitty leftovers from the band’s little-known disco phase with keyboardists standing in for the usual big-ass brass. Maybe the group was trying to make this transition into a “forward thinking” sound easier on their fans, but there could be something more subversive about this sequencing, like they were attempting to lull the listener with familiarity and mediocrity before amping up the weirdness for the album’s main attraction, a trio of songs about food.
Starting with “Big Mac,” the album’s second half delves into Weird Al territory with lyrics about a globetrotting weirdo who’s obsessed with the titular burger. It’s a pretty funny song, but not nearly as great as “Diet”, which features amazing lyrics about how you sleep with “Twinkies on your mind” and you’d better D-I-E-T “or you’re gonna roll away.”
But those tricky fuckers went and saved the best for last! “Food Fight” is the only song on the album that really sounds like New Wave to me, although it’s more Devo than The Knack. It seriously is a great little power-pop song, with some nice synth tones, a catchy hook, and an unnamed Village Person making a spirited attempt at what they must have thought punk rock vocals sounded like. Tucked away at the end of an album most people probably never made it halfway through, it is truly a Seekrit Gem!
Tags: seekrit history, the knack
When I saw that there was a Bollywood movie called Shart available on Netflix, I got curious. Not curious enough to put it anywhere near the top of my queue, but I let it hang out at the bottom alongside MacGuyver Season 1 in the no man’s land of stuff I’m vaguely interested in seeing one day, sort of. But my window of opportunity has apparently passed, as Netflix has decided it will no longer be able to ship me Shart. I suppose I’ll never know the joys of getting Shart in the mail! This whole thing just makes me wanna shart.
THE END