The Caesars

The last couple of months an increasing number of YouTube videos have faulted, giving me the error message "This video is no longer available." I've assumed that YouTube was being more diligent about copyright concerns. And then, I found myself telling some students a video that they had all been able to access was unavailabe. It took me a couple of hours, but I finally pinned it down. Updated my Flash plugin, which is the engine underlying YouTube video, and the problem is solved. It's somewhat irritating. I've updated my browsers multiple times. Shouldn't Flash be included in these updates?

Anyhoo, here's some power pop from The Caesars.

Bluetech - Alchemie Dub

Electro + ambient = psybient.

Placebo - Without You I'm Nothing

Performing live with David Bowie. So glam.

Opal - Supernova

Opal was a precursor to Mazzy Star, and a better band, perhaps.

Elevator

A Sub Pop band in the late nineties. Lo-fi psychedelia (according to Wikipedia). This is a great clip from '99.

Big screen professors

Watched "Smart People" and "The Savages" this week, which feature an English professor (19th-c British) and Theatre professor (Brecht), respectively. A minor plot line in "The Savages" finds the professor ultimately subject to the "naturalistic" emotion (bad childhood) he eschews in his work; the "Smart People," predictably, don't turn out to be so smart. I enjoyed both. The best part of "Smart People" is the girl who played Juno, except for this time her precocity is grating and arrogant. "The Savages" is on another level. It stars two great actors, Laura Dern Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman, as a brother and sister who must deal with a dying father after not seeing him for many years. It's a grubby, bleak movie that throws into relief the meager sustenance their intellectual pretensions give them. The many free-floating issues are encapsulated in a last scene in which Linney's play about her childhood is being rehearsed. A father figure repeatedly hits a young boy, who then floats upward on wires. When we realize that this young boy is Seymour Hoffman, his emotionally challenged character suddenly comes into sharper focus. It's nicely done.

Neko Case

With The Sadies.

Beta Band - Dry the Rain

Requiem for a Maverick

Matt Taibbi writing today in Rolling Stone.

McCain was a war hero who married an heiress to a beer distributorship and had been in the Senate since the Mesozoic Era. His greatest strength as a politician had up until this year been his ability to "reach across the aisle," a quality that in the modern Republican Party was normally about as popular as open bisexuality. His presence atop the ticket this year was evidence of profound anxiety within the party about its chances in the general election. After eight disastrous years of Bush, they thought they had lost the middle — so they picked a middling guy to get it back.

Which made sense, right up until the moment when they stuck him with Pinochet in heels for a running mate. Sarah Palin would have been a brilliant choice as a presidential nominee — and she will be, in 2012, when she leads the inevitable Republican counter-revolution against Obama's presidency. She's a classic divide-and-conquer politician, an unapologetic Witch Hunter and True Believer with a gift for whipping up the mob against the infidel. In a way that even George W. Bush never was, she is Karl Rove's wet dream, the Osama bin Laden of soccer moms, crusading against germs, communism, atheism and other such unclean elements strictly banned by American law.

Jon Spencer Blues Explosion

Short clip of Spencer's version of trash punk blues. Whatever it is, he's kind of channeling Mick Jagger (who was channeling Skip James) here. But I think he briefly plays a Theremin at the end, which puts a geek spin on the Jagger strut.