sometimes i'm such a tease and sometimes i'm a liar

yep.

no halloween posts. not even one. one in progress that i'll just say is a regular post. i'll do better for christmas, i swear.

so i'll just leave you with this, because i think it's pretty f-ing amazing...

i'm captain lou and i'm talkin to you!

RIP captain lou. many childhood memories involve you somehow...






wow. does anyone even remember that "Rock N Wrestling" existed?? i think it came on right before (or maybe after) pee wee's playhouse... man, THAT brings back memories...



(okay, i can't embed the girls just wanna have fun video... weird... but that's likely what most people remember him from....)

blank... now with filler

i have had bloggers block for weeks.

i have some halloween-ish ideas. but... hmm...

consider this filler:

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From High Fidelity
"The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up is hard to do – it takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick it off with a killer, to grab attention. Then you gotta take it up a notch -but you don’t wanna blow you wad, so then you gotta to cool it off a notch. There are a lot of rules…"

so one of the things i spend an awful lot of time doing - or have spent at least, over the past... oh... 15 years or so - is making mix tapes. and cd's. mostly cd's, but it started with tapes...

here's a decent sampling of some of what i have done over the years. not all of them, but quite a few.

now, most of them have been for girls. yes yes, i know... it's almost a cliche, boy making mix tape for girl (granted, many of these were for friends and/or girlfriends, not merely girls i had crushes on, but i certainly made my share of those too). and, for the most part, though certainly not entirely consciously, i have followed Rob Gordon's rules, and certainly agree that it takes ages longer than it might seem (i have really only successfully "thrown together" 1 mix in my entire life. 1. and even it took 3 days instead of the usual 2 or 3 or... well... more weeks).

some other basic rules i follow:

1. don't put their favorite song on it.
they have their "favorite song." they don't need to hear it again. i once made a tape for someone who requested all sorts of stuff be on it. it was awful (and was the one thrown together in a few days). you can definitely sidestep it by putting on a song they might not know by the same artist, or something similar, but if you out their favorite song on, while you might score some points, you might as well be buying them the record. (okay, that assumes you know their favorite song. there's a lot to be said for not knowing what their favorite song is and putting it on inadvertently. that, actually, is awesome).

2. always throw in something fun
unless it's a very serious mix, this shows you're not taking things TOO seriously. also, it's good to make people laugh. this can be anything from outright comedy songs to funny covers ("music of the beatles goes disco," etc.). if nothing else, you make them laugh or create a conversation starter (which, if that was sort of your point...)

3. covers are your best friend
see rule 2 and rule 1 and combine them. covers can be fun or funny. covers can sidestep the favorite song issue by giving them a new version of the song to enjoy. covers have always been a big part of the mixes i have made. i also used to do this thing where i sort of spliced 2 versions of a song together (all very technical. involved creative use of the pause button...)

4. close it off with a bang
some songs are meant to end mixes. you know them when you hear them. yeah, they aren't EXCLUSIVELY end songs, but they just work perfectly. maybe they sum up the purpose of the tape. maybe they just add a fun endpoint (this is sometimes where the fun or funny song comes in well). the closer is definitely just as important as the opening track, so definitely not a place for filler...

5. filler is okay.
with tapes, it was a necessity. you had to fill 45 minutes of side A of a c-90 and you had about 3 minutes left... 3 minutes of dead space just wouldn't do, so this is where you can throw in pretty much anything, as long as it doesn't go against the spirit of the tape (this also is a good place for the fun or funny song...). with cd's it's less of a problem, but really, if you're not filling the 80 minute capacity of the cd-r you just put into your drive, what's the point?

for me, it's a whole process. yeah, you have to grab them with the songs, but it has to be a nice package too. and this can take as long as the mix to make if you really work at it... yeah, you can just write the song titles on a j-card (if you're making a cassette) or cd-booklet, but to me, taking the time to make the artwork, shows as much passion behind the project as the songs you choose...

example, here is the artwork for a mix cd i made for my girlfriend recently:




yes, it's designed to look like a Penguin Classic. Took forever. but this is the kind of detail i'm talking about. it's really an art... i'm certainly not saying everyone should make highly detailed artwork for mixes, but really, why not? even if it's just a weird/funny picture (tons of those online)/ something from a movie... it just shows that you actually put that extra effort into it.

__________
in 2005, thurston moore edited a book all about mix tapes called, appropriately "Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture," where people from different walks of life - DJ's, musicians, artists, actors, etc. talked about mix tapes they've made ranging from love tapes, break up tapes, and "indoctrination" tapes (i once made a friend a series of 3 tapes of musical history/music they should know since at the time the only music they knew was savage garden (eew) and they might be giants. so i suppose it's something like that.) it's a good, fun book. definitely worth the 2o something it costs.

_____________

so, the mix tape. as the website says, it is certainly an art. As thurston moore says (or at least the publisher's product description of his book says), it is a "new way of re-sequencing music to make sense of our most stubbornly inexpressible feelings-a way of explaining ourselves to someone else, or to ourselves".

i make mix tapes.

the end.



(and, included for your reference, a couple of links, one if which i find the existence of hilarious. guess which one!)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixtape
http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Perfect-Mix-Tape-or-CD

i forgot to turn on my grunge pedal pt 2 (wow, really, this long after the first one?)

(full disclosure, i am not particularly a big pearl jam fan. i own a couple of their albums, and got the ten reissue for free, but at best you could say they are a band who has done some interesting things that i kind of like, and might even be a "casual" fan, but only barely).


so, honestly, pearl jam's place as "grunge" was always questionable to me. yes, they were from seattle, wore flannel, and members of the band were in proto-grunge bands like green river. but they were also in mother love bone, who were decidedly not grunge (very glam. very very glam).

pearl jam certainly did "grow" from their first album, "10", which recently was reissued, with a bonus "alternate mix" disc and some other junk (really, for a band that really played the anti-corporate rock game for a long time, despite being in some ways the poster boys for it in the beginning, this was an extremely commercial move). they really ended up hitting a more "classic rock" vibe than anything else, fitting very nicely in with their work with neil young. really, they could have fit really easily in the 70's AOR era, along with the eagles, fleetwood mac, etc.

but "10" (or "ten"... whatever)....
'

(the original cover was called the worst album cover of the 90's here, which is pretty much a good assessment - the new version, a wider shot, which I think you could get if you took out the cd booklet and unfolded it, isn't much better. or "grungier" despite the sepia toning...)

really, the re-release of "ten" now - not even for an anniversary, which at least would make more sense, as that's still a couple of years off now - is at best, a masturbatory effort of nostalgia that used to be filled by "classic rock" stations and now we get on games like "rock band" and "guitar hero." and I know, we get this sort of thing a lot these days - everyone's reissuing things, regardless of the point, so I can't completely hold it against them. but, again, the band that took on ticketmaster playing what has become a typical corporate rock game....

just weird (and not as weird as what we'll see in a bit).

my biggest problem with "ten" (and hell, I can even admit to having liked the album back in the day...) now is how poorly it holds up. unlike other albums from the same era, it just feels like an early 90's record. even the remastered disc, which was supposedly meant to make it less of the corporate rock-sounding album than it was then, doesn't really do anything different. it's like watching the first season of friends, where everything looked sort of artificial and plastic-y. this was grunge? the wanky guitar work (something they never truly got rid of), the whole "hell is for children" vibe of most of the songs... yeah, there are some definite "sing along" moments - who can resist the chorus to "alive"? but... ech.

and did anyone ever notice that every song, except for "black" pretty much has the exact same drum pattern? anyone? it's ridiculous.

pearl jam did ultimately redeem themselves a little musically (as I said before). they did help spawn the post grunge revolution (bands from live to creed owe "ten" millions in royalties for how they took vedder's growl and took it platinum heights) - which may be the most unforgivable thing about this album, as once pearl jam move on from their work on "ten" (which really took until "vitalogy" to really happen - "vs." was a decent start, but still... no...) hundreds of other bands jumped in with their deep voiced baritone singers and hard rock riffs, launching a hundred "big man voice" bands (even the singer for the verve pipe developed a vedder like growl for their boring hit "the freshmen" or whatever it was called, which in a lot of ways feels like a bad pearl jam outtake).

__________

the reissue of "ten" seems to be the tip of the iceberg.

pearl jam, after "ten" really became in a lot of ways, paragons of virtue. a little like fugazi (which may be the only time I ever compare fugazi and pearl jam), they really stuck up for their fans (trying to keep ticket prices low, their whole "official bootleg" scheme, which while certainly done with financial interests involved, but also certainly kind of brilliant for fans). yeah, they were with a major label. yeah they were still, in a lot of ways, just another big corporate rock band. but they distanced themselves from everyone else who had come in their wake, and really became a respectable unit.

now...

okay, so they have their reasons. and if the recent spin interview is any indication, their reasons aren't 100% awful. like they say, it's not like they're celine dion or AC/DC. but making Target the exclusive carrier of your new album kind of goes against the entire image you cultivated over the last decade and a half or so.

granted, I do love shopping at Target, but not as a music store (mostly have ever bought food, cleaning stuff, and housewares there). is that what Pearl Jam want to be associated with?

__________

vote for me!

yeah. so vote for me!

the House of M(ouse)

yay blog!

so i really am going to blog more.

for real.

just sort of trying to really focus on what this blog should be...

suggestions?

i know with halloween coming, i will likely do something throughout october for that. i'm not sure what, as i know trying to keep up with 31 days of posting was nearly impossible... once a week maybe? (suggestions for topics always welcome - email dave@sleepyrecords.com, subject "halloween blog ideas"

__________

as for other things....

so disney bought marvel (or something like that. is "bought" really the right word?)

truthfully, i don't see a lot of changes, and see a lot of positives (better distribution, especially with the slow death of the direct market; some properties coming to movie screens in bigger and better ways; disney variant covers - okay, maybe not the last one, though i can definitely see it happening). the movie and tv rights issues might get muddled, but overall i think it's a positive for both consumers and both companies. marvel will now have a better output for their younger reader oriented books, especially for girls (think what DC tried to do several years back with their failed Minx line, only with a better media arm).

what i doubt we'll see is like, when in the mid 90's, disney bought ABC, leading to EVERY ABC sitcom (especially the TGIF shows) going to walt disney world for some reason or another... (interestingly, and there may have been a reason such as an anniversary celebration or something which i truly don't recall). some of them made sense (really, shows like full house and family matters almost HAD to go to disney parks, although i think the plots they cooked up were ridiculous).

but Roseanne?

(here is part one of the multi-episode arc...)

okay, so roseanne was in it's downward spiral years, where the show quality was completely falling apart, and the show was jumping the shark left and right... but a multi-part episode where they go to the magic kingdom???? really? and all for the sake of marketing and "synergy." sad...

so no, I don't see a multi part arc of fantastic four where they take Franklin and Valeria to Disney, and Dr. Doom tries to take over the Matterhorn. Nor do I see man-thing (who, after all is based in the swamps of Florida, similar to where Disney World was built originally) popping up on Splash Mountain (though maybe something where the "nexus of all realities" somehow ends up on the Space Mountain ride... hmm...). but there are a lot of great, realistic possibilities, which could really be good if well played...

keep on with the force don't stop

so.

Michael Jackson is dead.

sort of weird typing it. not that i thought that he was immortal (throw in joke about being made up of lot of nonliving material, then throw it away for being a little too crass), but it definitely was unexpected.


(i won't make a "plastic" joke if you won't!)

my earliest Michael Jackson memories are as follows:

1. his hair catching on fire. this was big big playground news.
2. the Wiz.
3. thriller. more specifically, playing thriller on the playground in kindergarten. somehow assuming - this was also around the time of the Jackson's victory tour -that the other Jackson brothers (and, for some reason, their father Joe). yes, if there's anything to prove that i was a weird little kid, it was that. i knew the whole Vincent Price "rap" by heart. mostly because it was sort of cool to pretend i was a zombie crawling out of the ground. I'm pretty sure i didn't do the "dance" (i tried to learn it a couple of years ago... hard!)

yeah, he was always a bit odd. bubbles? his friendship with Emmanuel Lewis? a love song to a rat?


(oops, that's not Michael Jackson... ::shudders::)


(much better!)

but he was cool. the songs were good. the videos were maybe a little self indulgent, but to some degree that was the only way MTV was going to play a black artist in the early 80's. and really, i always wanted a sidewalk that lit up when i stepped on it...

even when he did the Simpsons - right at the start of the going "off the wall" (hey, nice play on his album title) he was cool (and very self effacing, which you didn't really see much from him afterwards). yeah, the Bartman was actually a pretty awful song. "Bad" wasn't anywhere near as good a record as "Thriller" but certainly tops "Dangerous." (this was also the start of his odd obsession with filling his videos with odd celebrity cameos - the Liberian Girl video had everyone from Paula Abdul to George freaking Jefferson and Theo Huxtable).

and then the downward spiral began... the plastic surgery (sorry, barring some horrible wasting disease, nobody's nose shrinks like that), the "allegations" (which, unfortunately, probably rang a little true...). the absolutely crappy videos from Dangerous (I'm not even going to post remember the time.... ugh... really?? the man who did Thriller and Beat It made that atrocity???)

favorite weirdness after his fall from grace?

1. wanting to play peter pan in Spielberg's "Hook" (the movie which sort of began the hallmark-ization of Robin Williams, but that's another post)
2. the giant statues
3. "Jesus juice"
4. claiming that "Invincible" didn't do as well as he thought it should have, not because it was a really sub par record full of tired, dated production values, but because the head of
Sony (who at the time had darker skin than him) was a racist... yes somehow Michael Jackson was suddenly a spokesman for African American equality...

all this said, it feels a little like my generation has lost it's Elvis. though MJ's fall from grace is a lot different from the latter years of Elvis' life (as far as we know, Jackson wasn't a drug addled mess at the end, but Presley was far less of a punchline at his death). in terms of impact... this is pretty huge. while certainly there is more going on in the world than this - should the death of a man who has become all but washed up really overshadow the crisis in Iran? - this will dominate the news cycle for a few days, with tributes, pictures of people mourning, tabloid magazines talking to "friends close to Jackson," and the inevitable quickie biography or two. which is what we do when celebrities die.

was Jackson still culturally relevant? ask Timberlake. ask the black eyed peas. ask anyone who has mined his style of R&B or aped his dance moves. had he gotten a chance to do his comeback tour, it could have been like Elvis's comeback special, reinvigorating his career. but now we'll never know...

an open letter to Tom Hanks

Dear Mr Hanks,

first of all, congratulations on your new-sh movie. i hope it is a success (though it seems it's fallen quite short). (say hi to opie for me).

but mr hanks, i am concerned that this movie is just another in a long line of "serious" roles that further distance you from your goofy/nice guy past.

i still remember your first attempt at serious, with bonfire of the vanities. i would have thought that the terrible reception it got, that you got in it, would have shied you away from any attempt to become a "real" actor again.

this is not to dismiss "Philadelphia" which was... well... amazing, honestly. and it's not to say that your oscar winning performances haven't been... well... oscar worthy. and it's not like you became the walking hallmark card that is robin william's carreer (though he did make attempts at recovery, those have largely been incredibly awkward).

but now a new generation of loveable schlubs have stolen your thunder. seth rogen, jason lee, steve carrell... yeah, the humor is cruder (though i remember bachelor party, sir) but in a lot of ways, they play the nice goofball that you used to do so well...

do i have a point here? i don't know. i'm not saying remake the burbs, or the man with one red show (though, wow, please do!) just bring back the tom hanks we all know and love!

(ps. no more stupid haircuts!)

random thursday morning thought...

what? a blog post??

it's been a while, though the number of half done entries sitting in my drafts folder might suggest i had ideas, just never finished them out.

so i'm flipping through channels and i come across the sci fi network, where i see amber tamblyn. now, i know she's been in a few sci fi type movies, so i think little of it, until i see her talking to mary steenburgen.... then the wheels turn and it clicks....

joan of arcadia? on the same network that brought us mansquito??

≠

yes, the show has "fantasy" elements, which probably earns it placement on scifi. and this was the channel which kept showing reruns of quantum leap, another "fantasy" show which really wasn't. but... i guess it just bothers me....


and that's my thought of the morning...

why on earth would you remake bonnie and clyde...

with hilary duff, no less?

sigh.

fuck you hollywood. fuck.you.

Amazing Obamaman

so today was the release of the much touted Amazing Spider-Man featuring Obama.

now, for one, the "Obama cover" was just an incentive cover - a 1 in 100, meaning retailers had to order 100 copies to get this:

otherwise, they got what i got:


now, this obviously will be a problem for some "collectors" and by that i mean obamabilia collectors, rather than comic book collectors. 1, because since it's not a special issue so much as a B story tacked onto the end of a "swinging peter parker - yes, this is what brand new day means" story. and 2, because explaining things like "variant cover" to non comic book people is like expianing string theory to a cow... Marvel kind of bungled it apparently, deciding rather late in the game that this was a) happening at all and b) to tell the the retailers, meaning many had already placed their orders when this happened (way to create demand... seriously, stunts like this are what cause the comic book bubble and collapse in the 90's)...

so tons of confused people, wanting an obama comic (where were they when this
came out? yeah, it didn't have the buzz, and was a straight biography, similar to the awesome Pope comic Marvel did in the early 80's,
but it was an Obama comic book) ended up with a pretty standard Spiderman comic, something i'm sure Obama - who apparently collects Spiderman comic books - would appreciate, but the typical memorabilia hunter wouldn't.


now, the story:

well, the main story is bit of a throwaway. Betty Brant recounting how much a good friend Peter is even though he finds a way to always disappoint her. he's supposed to be planning a birthday party for her, she's trying to hook him up with a girlfriend (gee, had they only kept him married this wouldn't be a problem, would it?). the birthday comes, and no party. betty gets mad and peter, the good friend he is, explains to her that everyone he was trying to invite was mad at her, so he did what he did - rented a movie - to protect her. so... yeah.

the obama story is equally short and sweet. peter parker's at the inauguration taking photos, sees an obama double, and steps in to thwart him (spoiler: it turns out it's the chameleon, wanting to be president... when's the last time we saw HIM?). there's some nice interraction between spidey and obama:

the Biden joke is a nice, cute touch. as is Obama's line "Honestly, I'm more upset by the Chameleon's shockinglu deficient understaning of the electoral process." so all in all, a good story. and a good spiderman comic. just.... not something the obamaphiles are going to really want to spend the soon the be inflated prices for (though they will) - my retailer had it going for $10, as it was a 1 in 100 incentive, and they base their prices for them that way i guess- but a good spiderman story nonetheless.

a better approach might have been having it more like "The Kid who Collects Spiderman" though without the terminal illness part of it. i think Obama telling spiderman he's a huge fan, and then Spiderman revealing his identity (i mean, Obama is the president) would have actually been brilliant...

new year, new geek (wtf! new post?!)

so it's the new year and while i'm not a fan of new years resolutions per se (i never keep them for more than a few weeks, often falling completely flat by february), i have resolved to blog more...

of course, not this entry. this is just to say, yes, the blog is still alive. and once i think of some good topics... so... yeah...