Lemon Ice Forever!

New York, NY

Mon, 14 May 2012 22:16:00 -0400

A place so crowded that even if you merely almost slip on an actual banana peel in the middle of 6th Avenue at 14th Street during rush hour, but do not actually fall, the number of people who point and laugh will still extend into the double digits.

(PS: Shouts out to the comedy genius who put a banana peel in the middle of 6th Ave during rush hour. There are a lot of really well-dressed high school kids who hang around that corner cracking cool high school kid jokes. I bet it was one of those guys.)

City Living

Wed, 09 May 2012 14:33:28 -0400

Walking towards the park where I eat lunch, I tried to grab a free thing of Mentos from the people who give you Mentos and then evangelize Mentos to you. I was wearing headphones and listening to The Glands (been pretty into The Glands, lately), who left just enough open space in their song “Livin’ Was Easy” for me to hear one of the Mentos evangelists refer to me as “flippant.”

I think she saw my headphones as a lack of desire to hear her Mentos evangelism, where I saw them as a hopefully-mutual understanding that we both know just how good Mentos are (pretty good, not great), so let’s just cut to the chase. For how often I act pretty flippantly, I don’t think I’d ever been called “flippant” before.

South By Southwest

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 12:43:00 -0400

I didn’t drive 30+ hours to stand in line, so I mostly only saw one kind of music, and everyone already knows The Puffy Areolas, Apache Dropout, and Thee Oh Sees are good bands. More important things abounded. For example:

On the way to Austin, I got carsick outside of a convenience store near Allentown, Pennsylvania (it happens ~~when I am hungover~~ sometimes and is probably a silent epidemic so back off). A nice man in a truck pulled up next to me and asked me if I was all right. For some reason I felt guilty, so I shouted the first reason that came to mind that a perfectly civilized man might be throwing up in a place like that, in the middle of the afternoon. Unfortunately, that reason was “I have post-traumatic stress disorder!”

I do not actually have post-traumatic stress disorder. I’m not totally sure that throwing up is a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. I’m not going to look it up, because I’d rather not be proven wrong. The man drove away without saying a word.

I Wrote a Review Of the Game Ziggurat for Paste Magazine

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 13:58:00 -0500

I Wrote a Review Of the Game Ziggurat for Paste Magazine:

This is a really good example of a thing that I stared at and analyzed until I completely lost any sense of its quality. It is possible this review is incoherent. It is equally possible that if you remove every third letter from this review, you will extract a tighter, more observant review, and the remaining letters will form a nice recipe for a cool drink on this unseasonably warm New York day.

So: I’ve been effectively unemployed for awhile now. The...

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 00:49:00 -0500

So: I’ve been effectively unemployed for awhile now. The living has been okay, though, and the end is near.

More Importantly: The discovery that I (apparently) came up with this has more than replaced any sense of accomplishment I might have gotten from working some dumb job for a few months.

It’s a good day for YouTube comments. (Related)

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 16:06:27 -0500

It’s a good day for YouTube comments. (Related)

"[Rasheed Wallace] gave just enough to become one of the most beloved players of the past 20 years...."

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 17:30:00 -0500

“[Rasheed Wallace] gave just enough to become one of the most beloved players of the past 20 years. His in-your-face humanity takes most of the credit for that feat, but the fact that all it took was a couple jokes, one championship, and a whole lot of technical fouls shows the wariness and outright contempt the NBA’s younger fans felt toward the traditional sports-talky model of the athlete as role model and ambassador for all bland, generic virtues of sportsmanship and dignity.”

- Jay Caspian King’s out-of-nowhere thing about Rasheed Wallace is pretty spectacular; the above sums up a lot of why I find myself drawn to the NBA. (And, I think, pretty closely approximates why a lot of my like-minded friends like hockey so much, but one of these days I’ll figure that out for sure. I swear.)

Also, this bit: “In the early aughts, Rasheed tried to reach out to the Blazer fan base by hosting a radio show on Jammin’ 95.5, Portland’s only hip-hop station. Wallace and a friend mostly played underground Philly hip-hop and spat freestyles over instrumental tracks.” How did I not know about this? Are there recordings?

I Wrote About the New Wounded Lion Album For Dusted

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 18:27:00 -0500

I Wrote About the New Wounded Lion Album For Dusted:

Actually, I did so awhile ago. And the album’s not that new. Such is life.

The review came out pretty good, though: Wounded Lion’s not writing earth-shattering pop songs anymore, but considering post-Reatard In the Red pretty much only releases records by (not-necessarily-bad) bands on artistic autopilot (and TV Ghost), at least there’s something there.

I realize that almost nobody who reads this cares about Tumblr...

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 13:28:00 -0500

I realize that almost nobody who reads this cares about Tumblr theming at all, and my exceedingly unclear style of writing will probably make this useless for anybody googling for it, but I believe I have found an undocumented bug in Tumblr’s theming system.

When you are referring to a user-defined variable in a theme (like, for example, a download link to the movie Phat Beach), it’s done this way:

{text:Phat Beach Download URL}

If, however, you put a space in there, like so:

{text: Phat Beach Download URL}

The variable will appear correctly in the theme customizer’s preview pane, but will not appear at all on the blog itself, making you look the fool to, say, fans of Phat Beach, which isn’t anywhere near as good as you’d think it is.

I'm wondering what ever came of these blobs that fell from the sky, and what were the bacteriums found? The other question that causes doubts, not only in my mind, but many, is - how could the blobs have hit the ground without smashing into tiny pieces? The page showing this blob s practically the size of the persons hands, and even a rock falling from the sky would hit the ground and shatter, so please explain this if you can. Thank you.

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 13:44:00 -0500

Thank you for your curiosity. More information about the blobs can be found by researching the following:

John Birch Society
Reverse vampires
Blobfish
The unreleased Mario game where you control Mario by drinking a gigantic jug of water
The terrible unreleased Void LP
Government denies knowledge
Government denies knowledge of the terrible unreleased Void LP
Are Newport cigarettes illegal in Newport, Rhode Island; if so, why

Players' Clubs In Our Midst

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 20:02:48 -0500

It is a fact of modern life: There are places in our world where only players may tread. Whether only players may enter these areas or if player status is temporarily bestowed upon those who enter is unknown, and it probably doesn’t matter. Inhabiting a players’ club provides the player with confidence and a sense of well-being that normal areas do not.

Players’ Clubs I have known:

The front seat of the upper deck of a double-decker bus.
The one walled-in booth at Picante, a Mexican restaurant on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
One of those big rooms in a zoo or science museum where there are tons of butterflies all over the place, just flying around.
The strange free-standing structure off to the side of my friend Carl’s house, which is effectively a garage with a normal door instead of a garage door.
A glass-bottomed boat.
The “Free Parking” space in Monopoly, provided the game is being played the civilized way, without using Free Parking as a money dump.

Breaking radio silence to post “The Crunch” by Toy...

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:57:00 -0500

Breaking radio silence to post “The Crunch” by Toy Love, primarily because it doesn’t appear to be online in any easy-to-digest format, and I want my bandmate Mark to hear it.

Although: I have covered Toy Love frontman Chris Knox in these pages before. I called him the best songwriter alive, primarily due to his incredible sense of pop economy crossed with what I guess you’d call sincerity or emotional heft. It’s still pretty probable that he is my favorite, but after watching this incredible video of a newly-comebacked D’Angelo literally burning the entire arena to the ground and making everyone on earth start crying with a song that consists of little more than four notes, four words, and and a bunch of awesome wailing, I think I have some thinking to do about economy v. emotional heft.

I Wrote About the Skoal Kodiak Album For Dusted

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 01:46:00 -0500

I Wrote About the Skoal Kodiak Album For Dusted:

This was only put online a couple of days ago, but I wrote it about a month and a half ago; it’s grown on me a bunch since. Especially with the recent revelation that the vocals sound like a strange, modulated version of Jon Spencer. This review is not very good, because there are a lot of pretty irritating surface-level breakbeat-type things about the record that I hadn’t let myself get past before tossing off a pretty b-minus review.

Confidential to those who can read my thoughts: The 90’s Japanese group whose poppier material sounds exactly like Skoal Kodiak, the one whose name I couldn’t remember for hours while writing that review—and in the days that followed, for that matter—was Violent Onsen Geisha.

The Internet

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 12:17:45 -0500

Where you’ll come up with an idea to play Kind of Blue and Bitches Brew on top of one another, calling it Kind of Brew, and it’ll have already been done. I had come up with a hilarious half-joke about how all jazz sounds exactly the same and everything.

I can’t sleep after that Warriors/Clippers game that I...

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 02:55:00 -0500

I can’t sleep ~~after that Warriors/Clippers game that I can’t believe I watched from beginning to end~~. So, I created a thing. It might be better described as a series of songs that flow into one another, effectively making one long song, or “medley”, except all of the songs-within-the-song are performed by different people. A “mixture” of musical styles and personnel, basically.

It is called Dog Wearing a Stegosaurus Costume, which also describes the art (above), because the notion of digital-only collections of music having “art” is ridiculous, and so is a dog wearing a stegosaurus costume¹. It can be downloaded here. I started in on it to have something to listen to on the train ride back to New York City tomorrow, so the emphasis is on driving kinds of songs that might sound all right while looking out the window of a train, or while trying to read a book² on a train.

The first piece in the thing is “It Was Up In the Mountains,” which is a short John Giorno thing about celebrating holidays. From there, it does this:

Peter Gordon & The Love of Life Orchestra - Beginning Of the Heartbreak
Lumerians - XuluX
Cave - Machines and Muscles
The Pastels - Baby Honey
The Meat Puppets - Look At the Rain
Reports - Dinamo Cambridge

Actually, it ends with “Love Performance” by Total Control, which doesn’t exactly fit with the rest of the things, but is my favorite song of 2011, so it seemed nice to include in a skippable place. Also, its refrain (“These are not the last days”) seems like a good 2011 thing for pretty much every conceivable reason³.

(I had meant to include “Those Pockets Are People” by Electrelane between the Pastels and the Meat Puppets, but accidentally forgot it when compiling them into one big thing. It’s a little intense for this thing, anyway, though it would have been kind of neat if I separated both “Beginning Of the Heartbreak” from “Don’t, Don’t” and “Those Pockets Are People” from “The Partisan” on the same thing.)

¹ That is also the name of the compilation because thematic continuity is important in a mix something something Rob Sheffield?

²The Right Stuff, currently, which is pretty good but I bet there’s a graduate thesis somewhere that supposes Tom Wolfe has Asperger’s because of how much he likes repeating himself.

³ I had a big thing written out about that song, actually, but it devolved into thoughts on “still having to get out of bed” or whatever, which was so stupid that I threw my computer out a window and killed myself and now I’m dead, which is why I’ve been using footnotes so much lately. Because I can’t do that twice.

I Reviewed the New Batman Video Game For Paste Magazine

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 18:53:00 -0500

I Reviewed the New Batman Video Game For Paste Magazine:

I recently got into a messageboard argument about Skyrim¹ when I should have been working. It led, more or less directly, to an opportunity to do this. Let that be a lesson to you.

¹Skyrim isn’t a good game, per se. It’s just really, really good at having and displaying all the big obvious signposts people have for a “good game,” much the same way that strong Oscar contenders can always be seen from a mile away. That said, if you need me I’m going to stay in tonight and forge a million iron daggers in order to get my Smithing skill up to 100.

Pink Reason - Sixteen Years Continuing on the subject of songs...

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 18:08:00 -0500

Pink Reason - Sixteen Years

Continuing on the subject of songs I listened to a lot during two thousand and eleven: Dang. It’s about time this record came out. I had leadoff track “Holding On” featured in the little sidebar playlist on my Myspace page circa 2008, back when that was a thing you did when you liked a song¹.

Thinking back to the strange self-obsession that caused everyone to create Myspace pages and usher in the era of social networking sets it in pretty clear relief: Nobody shoots the moon in the self-analysis department like Kevin Failure. For all the talk of “misremembered nostalgia” in music this year, Shitting in the Garden (and “Sixteen Years” in particular) seems like the sound of perfectly remembered nostalgia.

Being able to think backwards with that kind of accuracy can probably drive you crazy, which explains the near-constant comparisons Failure gets to the certifiably crazy (and great) self-analytics of Skip Spence and Jim Shepard. A lot of guys bandy about the term “confessional singer-songwriter” to get laid or work with Kanye or whatever, and that’s fine, but Pink Reason doesn’t appear to be going for either of those, and he does a pretty good job.

¹ For the record: Other songs in the playlist included “Boo Hoo Hoo” by the Strapping Fieldhands, “My Bartender” by Earthmen and Strangers, “Places West of Shawnapee” by Skygreen Leopards, and “I Can’t Wait” by the Sneaky Pinks, a song so perfect that when Nobunny was still semi-anonymous he more or less betrayed his identity by continuing to play it live.

I haven’t been working too much and I’ve hit a...

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 17:33:00 -0500

I haven’t been working too much and I’ve hit a boring part in Skyrim, so I’ve ended up doing an extra little bit of thinking about my favorite songs of 2011. Diagnosis: Same delicate balance of 60’s pop and repetitive bummer-rock as ever. This brings me one step closer to creating a “songs I like” algorithm, though it’s becoming increasingly difficult to predict how into phasers I’ll be in a given year. (2011 was a good phaser year, primarily because of the excellent Sex Church LP and because hardcore bands are getting better at using them.)

(Above: “Dull Light” by Sex Church)

I bet some crazy percentage of blog posts mention something...

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 13:52:00 -0500

I bet some crazy percentage of blog posts mention something along the lines of “Hey, haven’t written here in awhile, ha ha! Been busy with the kids and shit, so.” Let’s say 5% of them. Apologizing, thinking out loud it’s time to start taking their blog more seriously, and so on.

Anyway, “Raincheck Vibrations” by Wounded Lion (above), that’s where I’ve been at, during that whole thing, even though I heard it for the first time about two hours ago.

(Unrelated: If any of you are internet hoarders who somehow have copies of any of my more recent posts, I accidentally deleted the ten or so most recent ones while running a Ruby script for something more or less unrelated. A couple of them caused me to receive compliments from people I liked receiving compliments from, and I’m [at least] as narcissistic as the next Tumblr user.)

Well, it certainly seems that developing a “beleaguered,...

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 16:45:43 -0400

Well, it certainly seems that developing a “beleaguered, defensive divorced man” artificial intelligence has become my day job. So be it.