New records!

Went to the local used store, here's what I bought and what I paid (only listened to a couple so far):

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Damn The Torpedoes, $3. Listened. Always kinda curious about this album, worth the $3 for at least two pretty good songs on each side (singles, mostly).

Boulder, s/t, $3. Listened. I was high when I bought it and loved the synths on the opener, "Join me in LA." Realized too late that it was a Warren Zevon cover and the rest of the album was kinda trad '70s boogie bullshit; that they sound like they look (see photo). I feel vaguely ripped off, but the Zevon tune is pretty sweet.

Horslips, The Man who Built America, $2. Listened. Side one is this fantastic new wave pop fest, with plenty of hooks and dudes singing to chicks about missing them and stuff. Then, as I'm listening to it, I look 'em up on wikipedia and see that they were an Irish folk rock band that mostly did concept albums, and that The Man Who Built America was their "heavy" album that alienated fans. As I read this, side two starts feeling like they were in the studio and said "Oh, right, we need a concept," and they started plugging away at missing ol' Blarney or whatever the fuck the Irish call it. Still, OK, just markedly less good than the first side, which was awesome. Easily worth $8.

Thee Image, Inside the Triangle, $8. Listening. So, apparently, my four-or-so needle drops totally mistook the character of the band—I thought they were some weirdo disco band with a lot of trippy Hammond organ and space oscillators. Which they are, but they're also a buttrock band on "All Night Long," a decent funk-rock band on "I.O.U.s", a shitty sub-10cc ballad band on "Rapture of the Deep," and prone to prog pretensions through-out. Which makes it kind of funny to see the folks here (also the folks hosting the image) begging for the guy to re-up it. I dunno. Maybe if I had a rapidshare account, it would be worth downloading it, but I can't imagine I'd ever want to share it enough to upload it. Not worth $8, even though I may raid it for mixtapes.

Cheetah, Rock & Roll Women, $4. Not listened. From the needle drops, they sound like Suzi Quatro's rockin' tracks, which I like. Two sisters, like Heart, vaguely big-hair attractive, like Heart.

Grace Jones, Warm Leatherette, $3. Not listened. In-store preview? Well, I know the title track from a cover by The Normals, it's got Sly and Robbie producing and playing on it, and it has a cover of "Love is the Drug." It should be good, right? EDIT: Whups. From looking at All Music, it seems that the Normals did the original.

Eric Burdon and the Animals, The Twain Shall Meet, $2. Not listened. I like his voice, and most of the stuff I've heard on either side of this (Animals, War). Couple of drops sounded promising, even if the album's a bit beat and fuzzy.

Golden Earring, Moontan, $4. Not listened. To be honest, four bucks is about twice what I'd pay just to own "Radar Love," but the rest of the album sounded promising too.

Night Soil Man, Garden of Delights, $3. Not listened. A couple of drops gave a dark post-punk vibe, and a little googling shows that they turned into Drive Like Jehu and inspired some story. I'm really looking forward to the album, but haven't been in a scary evil vinyl mood, so am kind of hesitant.

Muxtape!

Muxtape

So, that's what book reviews are like, huh?

Jerry Fodor reviews Kripke: Names, Necessity and Identity by Christopher Hughes.

This is the sort of thing that I am only moderately qualified to read, and not at all qualified to write, though I do like the ever-present pull of questions against "truths" in philosophy. Via Metafilter.

Story ending prompted by O. Henry Prize winners anthology

A man jumps out and yells, "Gotcha!" Then everything is the opposite.

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Originally uploaded by joshsteich

Crystal antlers. On a hill.

BASEBALL!

After watching this movie from Thomas Jefferson (from this Metafilter thread), I got curious about the defunct league that was playing (the Atlantic League's Newark Colts, though I can't tell who they were playing against), and stumbled onto this explication of minor-league baseball in Danbury, Connecticut (the one state that I always have trouble spelling). Or "Hat-town" as it was apparently known, in that time before catchy nicknames.
There's also this neat chronology of the year that Edison filmed the game, which briefly mentions Lizzie (Arlington) Stroud, who was the first woman to play professional baseball, albeit only for one game (she pitched).

And if the focus isn't narrowed enough, there's the Minor League Baseball Researcher, which has a bunch of California League stats and some interesting descriptions. Too bad it's not regularly updated, but we're all in the long tail here.

AskMe?

Questions I have:

How best to stream radio from my computer to my office without it raising the suspicions of the IT department or costing me money.

What was the Arab world like immediately prior to Mohamed?

Party at Cohn's

And it was all Michigan folk. Tasty dip, good easter egg hunt. Stepped out to go to dinner at Sky's Tacos, was delicious. Had a vegetarian torta, Amy had burrito. Both failed qua generis (open-face burrito, sandwich needed fork) but were DEL-ICIO-US on their own merits.

50000

50000 songs on Last.fm.

Foursquare!

We're starting to bandy about some sort of scorekeeping, Amy and I, so we can finally know that I'm better.

Meetup!

Then we did this too. As Amber cals 'em, my internerd friends.

Then the parents came

And this is what we did:

My folks: Beach, Thai Boom, Tacos La Flama, Broad, Hammer (Kara Walker makes me racist), Gemini printers, pool, big breakfasts. Wrote up a review for LARECORD.com. Stressed out.

Her folks: Hiking in Temicula or something. Temescal? Some canyon and state park. I enjoyed the walk, but I kinda ran out of things to say. Long Beach Aquarium was OK. If I'd paid, I woulda been annoyed. They had a Prius and didn't get it at all. Couldn't get the doors to stay locked. Number one reason to not get a Prius? While at a stoplight, I somehow managed to screw around with the dash computer and it froze, then rebooted, leaving us stalled. Ate at some Italian Place (Maria's?) in Westwood, and it was the damned dullest Italian food possible. Too sweet, too much. We also ate at the Boston Pizza Company in Long Beach.

I note Boston is not known for their pizza.

Mariachis?

We went, a couple weekends ago, down to Mariachi Plaza, in the Boyle Park neighborhood, to see if we could find mariachis to photograph. It had been described, third-hand, as a place where mariachis gathered in huge flocks, like parrots. Instead, it was, like, three guys. I was hoping for more festive photos, but instead (especially with the construction for a new train line and station) it was kind of squalid and gray. Luckily, we met up with my then-coworker Justin (on to better things now, I hope) at La Serenada de Garibaldi (spelling?) for dinner.

I went with the potato tacos, which were light and pretty tasty, though kind of monotextural. Amy went with the gorditas with mixed vegetables, which were better. They were one of those restaurants that, guessing purely, seemed like they'd do seafood well. I mean, they seemed to do well with crisp, delicate textures and I'd bet that fish works well with that, at least the tacos. The gorditas seemed less incomplete.

I will say that the chili sauce there was really excellent, and some of the best I've ever had.

We also got to see a bit more of the neighborhood. There was a housing development htat really reminded me of Arrowwood. Too bad the commute would kill me.

SAFETY!

While reading this question on Ask Metafilter, in which the asker refers to some putative "Paul Reiser Effect," I remembered being in elementary school and how after you farted, you had to yell "Lou Rawls!" first, otherwise someone could hit you.

I have no fucking idea why.

I remember asking my dad "Why Lou Rawls?" when I was a kid, and while he hadn't heard of it, he speculated that Lou Rawls' rich baritone was some talisman.

Anyway, I think we just kind of misheard something or other and it caught on because elementary school boys are prone to adhering to arbitrary rules about farting enforced with violence.

I think the "Paul Reiser effect" is likely similar—something that sounded good at the moment, totally detached from any coherent meaning.

In happier news

I started emailing back and forth with Chris Bathgate's uncle randomly on Metafilter (he knows the GLMS guys too), and he sent me this article.

Money quote that simultaneously illuminates why I like Brandon Zwagerman and why I like to make fun of him: "'I think his power lies in the synthesis of his haunting, vaguely accented vocals and his talent for writing songs that more often than not hit that bulls-eye in your chest called your humanity,' Zwagerman said."

Dude, fucking move your fucking car!

"And you know this....how? Ugh. Your answer to the OP was judgemental, dismissive, and totally out of line and you really ought to just apologize for it and move on, instead of trying to justify it. Period." from Iconomy.

This morning, we woke to find that some jackass had parked us in. While we were wrangling with tow companies (our usual one was having some sort of weird phone problems), the guy finally rolled out (one of our neighbors managed to wake him up, when my girlfriend's door pounding hadn't had an effect). This chubby, pale white dude, looking like a boiled potato in a tracksuit. Instead of just apologizing and moving his goddamned car, the guy kept trying to argue that his cross-ways parking was a legitimate spot and, you know, whatever, man. I just kinda went off from my balcony, yelling at him in this stream of profanity "Move your fucking car! Don't fucking argue with me, just move your fucking car! What the fuck are you doing, standing there like a fucking retard? Why the fuck aren't you moving your fucking car? Move your fucking car!" We'd been trying to leave, to go grocery shopping, for over an hour and the guy just had this vacant, open-mouthed stare while he's standing there with his door open, unable to process what the hell was going on.

And it was the same car that we've had towed previously for parking in that same exact fucking spot, man. So I've been keyed up all fucking morning, and I heartily endorse the idea of drinking. I think I'm gonna get drunk and go to the movies.

I even had to apologize to the poor woman from the police that I was on the phone with when the guy came out. Sheesh, man.

Atlas Sound!

Atlas Sound—Let The Blind Lead Those who can see but Cannot Feel” (Kranky, 2008)

There is something to be said for being too nice to pull off ambition. For “Let the Blind Lead Those who can see but Cannot Feel,” that’s mostly a good thing—the title is a good glimpse of the type of silliness Deerhunter lead singer Bradford James Cox can veer into, especially with no band to hold back his whimsies. But that Cox has such a good head for arrangements and records such a pretty album that his straining doesn’t undo the core.

His album opener is built around a child telling “A Ghost Story” and the slight narrative becomes a warm, reverberating fable. In the hands of a band like The Books, the sample would have likely been a sparse and morose, but Cox ends up treating the kid with surprising tenderness.

Likewise, reading his interview with Pitchfork makes the songs less interesting, not more. The themes behind are usually moments of poetic suffering, but little of that comes through—“Winter Vacation” is easier to enjoy if you just accept it as a Sigur Ros rip-off; “Cold as Ice” is a jaunty David Byrne loop rolling along with Cox’s endlessly washed voice, and he could just as likely be singing about his favorite Foreigner songs as some adolescent romantic humiliation.

Still, all the songs are enveloping, all reward headphones or good speakers, and all follow the inexorable logic of dance music, succeeding through emotional tones rather than concept. That may be best shown on “Scraping Past,” where Cox works from the same aesthetic that Matthew Dear does, using the title as a looped wash over a plucky glitch backbeat and a simple two-note bassline. Instead of developing the melodies, he mixes them to develop the song, which gives the song a simple propulsiveness that might have otherwise spiraled into twee jetties.

If “Let the Blind Lead Those who can see but Cannot Feel” had achieved the depth that Cox seemed to want, the album would have been a slog. Thank God Cox realized the shallow pleasure of listening to music, and made a good album rather than a “great” one.

America's next what the fuck, TV?

New cycle of America's Next Top Mongol!

Kim's, like, considered totally dumb or something, but she's really just deaf.

And OMG, PUNK ROCK CHICK IS GIVIN' 'EM HER BACK! SHE'S A FUCKING NIHILIST, MAN, AND YOU'RE JUST GONNA DEAL WITH IT!

I love this show. It is the number one assault on reality in America, the sort of shit that Warren Ellis only fucking dreams about. There is nothing that isn't rendered in the most explosive, expressionistic way possible.

And I love the beats behind it, this unceasing emotional narrative that's propulsive like the score to a musical. That may be the best comparison—the reality show as '50s musical.

But oh shit, they're gettin' thirsty over breastmilk what the fuck?

THERE WILL BE BLOOD

The core of There Will Be Blood should be readily apparent to anyone who loves metal, especially the epic drone metal of bands like Sun 0)))), Sleep or Om. It is long, concerned primarily with evil, and heavy.

In There Will Be Blood, there is only one character—the rumbling bass note of Daniel Day Lewis's Daniel Plainview, an oil prospector who is more a force than a man. He is not particularly reflective, and the film only gives him two foils to communicate with, and both are removed abruptly.

He is black, oily and essentially simple. For all the praise that Daniel Day-Lewis has received, most of it has been deceiving, given over to the size of the character he portrays (the Onion AV Club note on "Big Acting" is particularly dead on) rather than noticing that he gets some surprisingly subtle moments out of a lumbering beast of a film. While generally, he's just acting the living fuck out of the movie, acting with great effort and attendant bombast and bellow, he's able to draw humor out of his humiliation at the hands of an Evangelical. Conversely, the intensity that he puts into "I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE!" makes it as "scary" as Venom's protestations that they are truly evil, in league with Satan.

Add that to Anderson's juggernaut direction, which emphasizes an unresolved and ever mounting tension, spurred on by Plainview's drinking and alienation, and it has the feeling of a particularly turgid metal opera. To strain the metaphor only slightly further for increased accuracy—set that metal opera in Deadwood and you have There Will Be Blood exactly.

Which isn't to say that it's bad, because it's not. It's just unabashedly portentous while being nihilistic about what it portends, and it's interesting to me that this is treated seriously when a lot of metal isn't. It has the same technical virtuosity, the same aesthetic power, the same mythological vocabulary, the same moral fixations (there is arguably nothing more moral than nihilistic art). And this movie is up for the picture of the year, while Pelican's City of Echoes is ignored at the Grammy's?

Where I have to abandon this point is that, like City of Echoes, I didn't enjoy There Will Be Blood all that much. I thought both were interesting, and I'm glad that they exist, and I can put each in its genre context, but they're things that I'd like to think about, rather than experience again. I would urge anyone reading this to see There Will Be Blood on the big screen—I would have abandoned it about ten minutes in on a small screen. But then, metal's better live, innit?

So fucking hip

In upping my hipster quotient, I went and saw a show at Shepard Fairey's print shop in a weird downtown warehouse district.

Playing were Crystal Antlers, Wooden Shjips and Darker My Love.

I've been on this mission to hear Crystal Antlers for, like, a couple months now. My coworker Phil is their erstwhile manager, and he gave me an EP of theirs that I really dug—they sound like Comets on Fire meet Funhouse-era Stooges. So, since then, he's put on a half-dozen shows, and through a combination of me being old, miscommunication and just bad luck, I've managed to miss them every time. Like, I either show up too late, or can't stay late enough, or end up at a different show on the same night… whatever. I missed Crystal Antlers AGAIN. I thought they were headlining, when Darker My Love was.

But Wooden Shjips were awesome—just that loose, casual, four-note groove behind all of their space rock, I really dig it. And Darker My Love was OK. They were more a Jesus and Mary Chain rip, which is cool, because Wooden Shjips are a Spaceman 3 rip, and I like JAMC.

I picked up two Crystal Antlers 7"s though, and both are pretty good. "Parting Song for Torn Sky" is the lead-off on the EP that I've got, and when I heard it I mentioned that it sounded like Blue Cheer done right (I've always been kinda disappointed by Blue Cheer's inability to balance their awesome riffs with their experimentation), and Phil had no idea who I was talking about, but the band thanks Blue Cheer on their cover of Mose Allison's Parchman Farm. **EDIT**—Phil knew who I was talking about, but I guess I didn't think he did or something. He just didn't want them compared to Blue Cheer—which I still kinda think is funny, because the band mentions 'em. But I didn't mean to make Phil come off as a dumbass!**

Plus, that one's on clear vinyl!