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has it been that long since i last posted... seeing how there's more action coming from spammer "commenting" on an old post of mine, i figured i'd get back into the blogging game... this will just be a random thoughts post, which i may elaborate on some of later, but for now... these are things i've either wanted to blog about, thought about either recently or for years, or just... wanted to type... so without further ado...

random thoughts:

- i don't really like the Grateful Dead. i actually think they have some okay songs, but i just never got into it. maybe it was because the Dead, to me, were a lot like Jimmy Buffett (at least at my high school where someone would inevitably want "What a Long Strange Trip It's Been" as the end of year senior class song) - not musically, which i think they definitely have a leg up on Buffet with, but in terms of the people they attract. that said, I have known some really passionate Grateful Dead fans, who followed the music not the "atmosphere." I will admit to thinking the video for "Touch of Grey" is completely awesome (and i don't really even mind the song...

- speaking of "the dead," I really enjoyed DC comics recent "Blackest Night" event. Really. A lot.

There were definitely some problems I had with it (the outcome, where certain heroes and villains

were brought back from the dead, was well played, I just wish they had brought back some more than

others...). I'm really interested how this is going to play (mostly i just want to see a new Aquaman ongoing),

but again: the ending was top notch. And really, I have to say that this is where DC comics, i think, really

beats Marvel in their crossovers.

With Marvel, the last few "Major Events" (since civil war) have been kind of ham handed, and really didn't

seem to be interested in "change" - yeah, it looks like some of this upcoming "heroic age" will be a big,

permanent deal... but i still half expect "Seige" to have a huge cop out ending where the key to defeating the

now batshit insane "Sentry" is something they've had all along. With DC, although it has felt like each crossover

has just been serving to lead to the next big event, they actually have impact. (of course, Marvel does a

significantly better job with timing, whereas with a DC book, you can never tell when in relation other books

are taking place to the big event, and sometimes you get events spoiled for you. Marvel definitely is a little more

disciplined, though I think Luke Cage taking over Thunderbolts would have been a better thing to find out

when Seige was all over...

- I still have no real interest in sitting down and seriously watching James Cameron's "The Smurfs" "Avatar."

Similar to my aversion to "Cloverfield" if someone convinces me... but otherwise. I think it's less to do with the movie

itself and more to do with my loathing for most of the work of James Cameron (and, bluntly, the man is a

ridiculous asshole, but i only object to how that seems to come across in his movies). I like the first Terminator

just fine, and Aliens (although it doesn't hold a candle to the first one), but i seriously cannot name another James

Cameron film i truly like (the Abyss might come close, although, hmm, no. not really.) Also, as much as i sort of

like 3D (i think for some movies, like Coraline, it has worked really well), i'm not too terribly into seeing a 3D

movie that, as has been largely pointed out elsewhere, is either stealing the plot from disney's "Pocahontas" or something

else (Dances With Wolves, Fern Gully, etc.) (or, as many critics from various ends of the political spectrum have stated, is

an extremely ham handed political analogy of anti-imperialism/racism/environmentalism/younameitsomepoliticalhackhasfounditsm).

nope. not for me.

(and really, it's the smurfs. sorry.)

- it's sort of awful how bad i want to see iron man 2. i never really liked iron man as a character. even now. even post

movie. even with all the, admitedly very cool, thing they have done to him in the comics (asshole iron man is better than

bland "rich guy uses money for superheroics" iron man any day. and now he's having to redeem himself. a lot.) i just

have little real interest in reading him.

- i don't understand tween pop stars, especially those churned out through the disney or nickelodeon machines. i'm also

a little disconcerted that there's a nickelodeon "tween" machine now. but seriously, all the tv shows are overacted, overly

broad comedy and the music just tries to hard to fit in some popular niche of music, that it all seems really trite and boring.

and i know this is how various elements of the entertainment industry has always worked (a manufactured pop star is a

manufactured pop star. period). but... ugh...

- "true" by spandau ballet is a terrible song. just terrible.

- if Marvel is bringing Jean Grey back, and i sort of hope they are, they had better not do it just to kill her in a few years.

it gets old. fast.

- even though they explain it in Darkest Night, i would have liked to see all of the unnecessary deaths from "Identity Crisis"

undone for brightest day (Firestorm's was a start, but i'm talking sue and ralph dibney). i also think they should have had - or do

as some sort of parody/one shot kind of thing, the dead black lantern versions of all the unnecessarily/ridiculously killed off

characters from the past couple of decades in DC history and have them attack the writers/editors responsible...

- all for now. more to come...

conspiracy proven

apparently, the moon landing WAS faked as an A.I.M. plot...

the proof?

well, neil armstrong is apparently, actually MODOK!

=

yep. i knew it.....

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:

___________
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!