hey kids

guess what! the hold steady still sucks.

the lord giveth

man so i take a break from caring about music for a while and then i look at pitchfork and it's all WHAMFUCK all over the place:

"...at 11 or 12 it seemed weird to me to buy a record where you didn't know you'd like everything on it-- and I only really started to think about them because I realized that's how the other kids at school were relating to music, and I wanted to fit in."

i mean what i'd really like to say is "..."

bamboo kid

whatever the fuck song it is sampling "straight to hell" needs to stop immediately OK COOL.

it's okay, i know i remain #1 in your heart

i saw the preview for "iron man" and i got pretty excited, honest to god. i mean robert downey jr. is no nic cage, but who is? keanu reeves. have there been any negative reviews of the movie? i haven't come across any, and, well,

the movie theatrer in my town has one screen, or it had one screen, because it doesn't exist anymore, sort of. in the late 80s it'd get movies what seemed like two years after they had come out, but they only cost a dollar. AMAZING. there were huge murals on the walls and a balcony that was open maybe 5% of the time. eventually they upped the price to $4, but included all-you-can-consume popcorn and soda. it still didn't make any money, and it closed down for a few years, to open again as a full-on, new-movie, $9-ticket theatrer in 1999. the first movie they had was "runaway bride" and i made a cty friend visiting 1) go with me, 2) sit in the front row, 3) record the movie with a camcorder i had smuggled in.

i pretty vividly remember seeing the first x-men movie there. this is remarkable in its being long enough ago that the theatrer operated for a few more years, closed down, was supposed to reopen, burned down in a shady arson/insurance-fraud kind of thing, transferred hands a few times, was entirely renovated and turned into some kind of faggy step-up-from-community-theatrer thing where they bus in (not kidding) actors from soap operas (not kidding) to put on all these plays while charging $18 for a glass of wine on long island (not kidding). my parents have season tickets, what the fuck.

the x-men movie was good -- really good, actually, and it was the tip of the whole comic book movie adaptation thing of the past few years. BUT, really, the turning point was x-men 2, which was, shockingly, an actually great movie in its own right. x-men 3 completely sucked. i mean. but "X2: too fast in the habit" really surprised me. character development? a not-retarded storyline? absence of reliance on special effects? whoa hey wait a minute.

i expected something similar from "iron man" and that, like ever expecting anything other than the worst out of another person, was a gigantic mistake. robert downey jr. bones all these chicks and it's a cool time until this hummer he's in blows up and he gets locked in this cave with some other dude and these terrorists want him to make a missile but robert downey jr.'s like "fuck that shit i'm making this suit and i'm not talking about a tuxedo." WHOOPS SPOILER ALERT.

in escaping from the cave, he sort of blows up this terrorist dude, right? i say "sort of" because the terrorist is shown all groggy and with a bloodied head. this is important because weeks-or-months later he's shown again and his head's still all covered in blood. ??? "take a shower," except blood crusts over and falls off, get some fucking continuity thanks.

the real problem is the "transformation" that rdj goes through, from "i'm this dude who bones these chicks and doesn't give a fuck, i'mma blow all this shit up," to i've-got-this-conscience. why? because he saw that his company's weapons were in the hands of terrorists OMG.

everything to this point (except for the bloody terrorist thing) is irrelevant. this is what i don't like and is retarded: BEFORE rdj boozes all the time, AFTER rdj is like "i'm going to drink all this wheatgrass." he grows a conscience, i get it -- but it was a pretty dumb reason suddenly to develop a conscience, and the look-at-me-i'm-healthy aspect, what? generally speaking, i don't buy that people change at all -- if you're a shit now, you're likely going to remain a shit forever. i don't award demerits for violating that principle, but like maybe try to show one or two in-between steps? like maybe when he's in the cave he can say "well FUCK my favorite color used to be blue but now it's purple." small changes. incremental?

as it is, it falls on exactly the wrong side of show v. tell (the artistic plessey v. ferguson) and so i guess there are these explosions and they're pretty cool, right? it was boring and stupid and if my $10.50 had gone to any theatrer other than the pavilion, i'd've been (more) pissed.

and in a twist of the knife, the sabbath song, played over the credits, was chopped up and looped and more or less completely fucked with a chainsaw, THANK YOU.

p.s. i've been updating this one more frequently maybe.

why my family left?

a serbian introduced me to eurosong, and it is good to live in america.

one part

the thing about fascination or fixation or whatever is that it ends, usually suddenly. two of my friends are getting married in a couple of weeks and they asked for song requests to give to the DJ at the reception -- i suggested "go your own way" and off of that wound up free associating on youtube over to some live videos of jeff mangum (via wilson phillips, what?)

for a few years i was obsessed with neutral milk hotel, right. i found out everything i could about them and bought uk-only picture disks and on and on. in retrospect it was kind of stupid. they had just finished playing shows (forever) by the time i started listening and i lamented this -- what's even worse is that, looking through a list of all of their shows, i noticed that they played olde club on march 5, 1998. the seniors when i was a freshman had been freshmen in spring '98. three years, three years.

the youtube videos i saw were pretty great, and i'm guessing they were from the "live at jittery joe's" enhanced/CD thing that orange twin put out in 2001. i wouldn't know, because for whatever reason i've never seen it. it's exactly the kind of thing i should've bought the day it came out, and something i had planned to buy for months, but as soon as it was available i had no interest in actually getting it. (this relates to lots of things.)

which, also, okay. in 2001 i read all these websites and message boards and it seemed like neutral milk hotel hadn't played a show in half a lifetime, even if it was just since 1998. circulatory system put out a record (their first and, my prediction: only) and went on tour that november with jeff mangum as one of their two (2) drummers. my friends and i drove up to hoboken (maxwell's) and aside from being maybe the best show i've ever seen, it had, well: after they finished with an extended "now," it was encore time but there's no backstage. william cullen hart remains on stage and the rest of the band comes into the audience; i'm standing next to my roommate who's standing next to jeff mangum. w.c. hart starts playing a song and fucks it up, says "no, that's all, i can't play it." he starts over but it keeps happening and everyone keeps cheering and wants him to play the song. the fourth time or so he stops, jeff mangum yells "PLAY THE DAMN SONG, THE PEOPLE WANT TO HEAR IT," then turns to my roommate, says "like i'm one to talk," and laughs.

time symmetry: that was almost seven years ago, and almost seven years before that was 1995, hello 7th grade. time stretches and i don't know what to think about it. three years seemed like a preposterously long time, but now? not quite so much. maybe this is what getting old means.

i asked a friend about that olde club show. someone told him that the cops broke it up after elf power played, and neutral milk hotel never even went on. not that it was a good reason at all, but i started to feel better about everything after that.

we can do better

energy policy =
begging? that's a little sad. i might re-read this in two years and think i was a retard for saying it, but one nice thing about the '08 election is that even if hillary clinton kamikazes obama's chances of winning the general election, we'll still be infinitely better off with john mccain instead of bush. it's amazing, actually, how exactly wrong he's been about everything. it's way more impressive than governing blindfolded -- bush has some deep intuitive sense about what is good for america, and he always does the opposite. it is awesome in the, like, "hebrew god" sense of the word.

airports

it's funny because last night i listened to "pablo honey" for the first time in a long time and felt like shit.

something's going on

i simply remember my favorite things: