The Budos Band

FUUUUCK, I'm back. Here's "Origin of Man."

Vacation

We're off to France for ten days, meeting up with AO's dad whose been living there this past year.

We'll be in Paris for the last day of the Tour, so the plan is to get over to the Champ Elysees to soak in some French sports mania.

I'll be out of range, so posting should resume at the end of the month.

Tom Russell

Lili Drop

80's French Pop, with some ingenious video projection.

Fashion update

"The Croc looks like a plastic hoof." --Tim Gunn

I'm another wannabe metrosexual who watches Project Runway, but Tim Gunn makes the show worthwhile and suitably nerdy.

Cantelope Island

Herbie Hancock, Freddie Hubbard, Joe Henderson, Ron Carter, Tony Williams

Tool - Sober

The Melvins - A History of Bad Men

Back in the eighties, The Melvins' sludgy Seattle (well, Aberdeen, WA) sound predated Nirvana and Soundgarden. Here they are last year.

Surfwise and Wall-E

Surfwise is a documentary about a sixties/seventies-era family that lives in a camper and spends its time mainly surfing, and about the father's vision of living cleanly and simply. I'd heard an interview with one of the grown kids recently. It was both compelling and creepy, but what struck me the most was how much it was a vanity project. Although the family leaved in poverty and none of the kids went to school, they weren't exactly averse to publicity. And they are all sort of this way now. The adult children are so "LA" now, giving it the flavor of California dystopia.

My copy of Wall-E was pretty grainy, but it's a great movie. Great animation, good story, wonderfully imagined. It kind of ends like Battlestar Galactica, with robots and humans going forward together to rebuild a ruined earth. All in all, though, it's pretty disheartening that this is the best we can imagine at this point. Earth goes to shit, and in hundreds of years we can return with the machines to restore it. There's a millenarian theme buried in such plots as well.

Lucinda Williams - Joy

See it through to the end for the treat of watching a guitar nerd channel the spirit of rock greatness.

Rude Pundit says it best

Jessie Helms ends up in heaven (a surprise even to himself) and beholds [quote]:

fucking couples, as far as the eye can see, begin to reach out to each other, weaving together into a huge crazy patchwork quilt of an orgy, all races and sexualities merging together, sucking and plunging and coming and going back for more, never tiring, never losing erections or wetness, never getting sore, never needing to stop unless they want to, for, after all, it is heaven.

After witnessing heaven, the old racist rascal chooses hell, where:

he finds himself on a stool in a stark white room. In front of him is a glass of water that refills whenever he drinks it. After a while, what might be days, what might be centuries, he realizes that this is it: complete and utter isolation, bathed in whiteness, for all eternity, no one to touch but himself, no one to see but his own reflection in the glass.

Link

Summer breeze

Finding goth inspiration on this bright summer day. It's Type O' Negative.

Happy the 4th

Dedicated to the men who made this country great.

Netflix fraud

Netflix is charging me for a full month without sending even one movie to me.

Years ago I was a long time Netflix user, until they started using pop-up under-ads everywhere I surfed on the net. Back then it was also clear that they were throttling us, holding our returns for days at a time so our monthly totals were only about four or five movies. We gave up.

But there is one hard-to-find, old CBC series called The Newsroom, which is supposed to be a cross between The Wire and The Office. I couldn't find it anywhere and decided to give Netflix another try. They showed the series as available. Once I signed up they told me that they'd be sending my first discs the next day. The next day comes, and the queue says instead that they won't be doing a first shipment for FIVE more days. Meanwhile, I was able to find another source for The Newsroom.

Given the circumstances I decided to cancel the whole thing, since waiting a week for the first shipment seems like really bad service. And what does Netflix assure me? They'll still be charging for a month's worth of service, even though they didn't send me even ONE disc.

Elton John - Madman across the Water

Early seventies jamband version of Elton.

Sinéad O'Connor - Troy

Uttterly kick-ass.

Fugazi

Everybody . . . pogo!