Phil Spector GYK (Guilty You Know)

I hear his stylist could get life in prison. (I don't know if you can see it, but he's wearing a dragonfly pin the one photo. Is that what you're doing when you're getting ready for your murder trial...trying to figure out which insect broach goes best with crazy?)

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Reading an April Vanity Fair article on the crash of the Icelandic banking system and the country itself (wha? what do you masterbate to?). In it the writer explains everyone knows everyone there, so to ask people if they've met Bjork is stupid...of course they know Bjork. 

...a professor of finance at the University of Iceland says...in a weary tone, "She can't sing, and I know her mother from childhood, and they were both crazy. That she is so well known outside of Iceland tells me more about the world than it does about Bjork."

Black or White

You might have heard we were buried in snow in the days leading up to and during Christmas. It was fun at first. The roads were closed and kids were sledding everywhere.

On a shutdown Queen Anne Ave much bigger kids were snowboarding, skiing, chair-skiing, inflatable-bed sledding, and trashbag sliding their way down the steepest hill we have here.

I wandered out to the streets late that first heavy Saturday to see people congregating among 12-packs of light beer jutting out of the snow. It was a fun and friendly atmosphere. People were offering me beer as we watched, and sometimes pushed, people riding shovels, inner-tubes, and cookie sheets down the hill.

In the year that I've lived in Seattle this is the only the second time people here have been friendly enough to openly smile or say hi to one another. The other time? When Barack Obama was elected. That lasted just two days.

So electing the first black president, or a freak snow storm, is all you need to make a friend in Seattle!

The Cake is a Lie

Have you ever seen your PC in his undershirt?

Saw Jon Hodgman speak regarding his book a couple of weeks ago. As a demonstration of his "renaissance man" credentials he wore a tuxedo and traveled with, well, what can only be described as a bard.

The contributor to The Daily Show, and PC to Justin Long's Mac, showed up late and out of costume. So as Mr. Hodgman dressed into his GQ-supplied tuxedo Jonathan Coulton played a little ditty called Tom Cruise Crazy:

He knows someday he'll have to play
An old, retarded grandpa
While someone younger plays his sexy son

He then went on to sing the Jon Hodgman theme song (presumably written for Hodgman).

This bearded beast of a man is also the unlikely creator of another theme song for a PC; Coulton also wrote the endgame song for the antagonist in Portal...which if you haven't played... I must conclude means you do not have opposable thumbs.

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What The Fuck Was I Thinking (WTFWIT?)?:

I hope this will be a regular feature of this blog, where I take a couple of demazepam and a long needed look at my collection of music over the years and wonder....what the fuck was I thinking? This week:

Phil Collins
...But Seriously

The subtitle on this should be: ...ellipses, now more than ever. Are we to assume there was some hilarious english-accented joke told prior to the naming of this album. And the aftermath is, "...But seriously. $12 for this crap that I completely ripped off from Lionel Ritchie."

And what's the deal with the cover art? Giving precedence to Oprah's O magazine, every phucking Phil Collins album featured his miserable roast beef mug.

As for the music, there were some decent post-Genesis PC albums (okay, songs...okay, lyrics...okay, drum beats) out there, but ...But Seriously is ...Butt Awful. Lot's of '80's saxophone, Top Gun electric guitar, Phil Collins on drums, and the rest is synthesizer.

Let the song titles explain the rest:
Hang In Long Enough (The required motivation to get you through the album)
That's Just the Way It Is
Do You Remember (where's your punctuation now Phil?)
Heat On The Street (The "heat on the street" is emanating from this dog turd of a song)
Find A Way To My Heart (Really? Did you lose a bet on this one?)

I can only think that this was all done during his acting period when he was too busy not wearing socks or hair on Miami Vice to put together a decent record. Something tells me Phil Collins will be a frequent guest of this column.

In my defense, Drew Barrymore got me started on drugs at a young age.

WTFWIT?

He'll Be Coming Down The Chimney Down?

The snow on the ground and the lights in the tree are a painful reminder that Christmas is just around the corner...and I still can't get into it this year. Maybe it's the economy. Maybe it's that Bush is still "president." Maybe it's because the residents here in Seattle don't exactly exude that holiday warmth (I just learned a new term: Seattle Freeze).

But like the little girl in Poltergeist, one thing that is pulling my death grip from the wicker headboard of humbug and into the holiday black hole has got to be the Christmas music my girlfriend insists on playing on the iPod. Which, up to this point, has consisted of mostly Andy Williams songs. The only thing getting me through that has been dismantling the lyrics of these crazy songs until they seem interesting and/or dirty. For example, in Happy Holidays he sings "He'll be coming down the chimney down"? WTF does that mean? I'm convinced the song is really about drugs. In which case the lyric makes much more sense:

And Santa Claus is coming round
The Christmas snow is white on the ground
When ol' Santa gets into town
He'll be coming down the chimney down.

It's Dylon's Tamborine Man all over. Obviously Santa is code for drug dealer, and snow means coke, and then he comes down...which means, duh, coke with a heroin chaser.

And then there's the oddly sexual It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year: "Those gay happy meetings when friends come to call"; "There'll be much missle-toeing"? I can only assume the song is about orgies involving some weird thrusting foot fetish...something that I'm just now learning to enjoy.

Well, Amazon has saved my butt once again, this time by giving out free Christmas music for the 25 days of December. They are still cheesy of course, and in some cases even depressing (you're a downer Charlie Brown Christmas) but they're free and a respite from the typical Christmas music. They add a new song every day and you can download the previous days' songs too! Link to it here: Amazons 25 days of free

I'm telling you though. All of this Christmas music is really screwing with my scrobbling.

Boys Who Like Girls That Are Boys Who Like Blogs

Homemade Cardboard iPod Dock

As Christmas and Channukah and Chakwanza are coming up and the economy being what it is, here is a great present for those of you cheap, ahem, I mean creative types to make for that iPod person in your life. Geeky Gadgets has the layout here


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Blur is getting back together for two shows in London, and maybe more? More here

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I was recently back in Austin for Thanksgiving and met up with some friends at Gingerman to catch up. Cobo asked me what Seattle band he should be listening too. I was too drunk to answer, or remember what I did say, but I hope I said The Dutchess and the Duke.

There are many Seattle bands that I'm interested in: These Arms Are Snakes; Hazlewood Motel; Fleet Foxes. But these days I've been listening to The Dutchess and The Duke's cd She's the Duchess, He's the Duke. The first time I heard their song Mary on the interweb radio I thought it was the new release from the M Ward/Zooey Deschanel project now known to the world as the royally simplified band name She & Him. The reason? The tDntD guitar sound is a bit like Ward's, and the female voice sounds a lot like Deschanel's in the movie Elf. (And I've frequently secretly fantasized about Zooey ever since Almost Famous, so that's what I project when I hear any woman's voice...yes, even when listening to NPR).

What I like about tDntD in a word is...okay I can't do just one words so here you go: they have an old school whimsy about them. Or rather, like they dropped out of school and decided to see what Mexico was like during the winter; then they ended up playing sweet, sad, yet surefooted songs, for the passing travelers for gas money...in the 60's.

I've heard mixed reviews of The Dutchess and The Duke's shows, so I'm a little anxious to see them play tonight at Neumo's, along with Shearwater and Grand Archives.

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Is it me or does the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah singer sound exactly like David Byrne?

Maybe I'm Just Like My Mother

Is it me or does the brit band Elbow sound exactly like Genesis' and Say Anything's Peter Gabriel?


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Seattle's only paper, The Stranger, is having their annual auction for charity. By posting this I know I'm only encouraging competition in my bid for the Calvin Johnson Mix Tape, but some of these were too good to be left behind...only to be covered by a much wider read blog (hi mom!).

Among them:
So You Wanna Be a Rock Star - which starts with a complete STD screening...and somehow gets better from there!

So You're a Single Straight Man Who Likes to Hang Out in Pickup Bars: You and 15 of your friends get VIP treatment at Venom. The best part is you get a T-shirt that says "The Morrissey of you the less I like." FYI the shirt only comes in a medium (cuz I knew you wanted to know).

Chutes and Ladders Too Narrow: The board game Shoots and Ladders signed by The Shins, and oddly not by Briteny Spears, whose career the game was originally based on.

and

So You're Gayer Than Gaylord McGayerson: The That's Entertainment!: The Ultimate Anthology of MGM Musicals "for you and the highbrow homo in your life." Ahh...Gene Kelley. The original Maverick.


Bid now at: Strangercrombie '08

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Love to love you echo-7

Nirvana and Pink Coming Out

I'm reading this book called Music in Washington: Seattle and beyond, by the wonderfully named Peter Blecha. I say "read," but the book is a few pages of introduction and mostly pictures. This is good since those few pages of text invalidate this "culmination of 25 years of research" when it says "...leading bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam released groundbreaking albums around 2001."

Really?! This is a real feat considering Cobain died in 1994. Obviously Nirvana and Tupac had the same record deal.

I guess Bush is right when he says history will judge his presidency. Apparently he was responsible for the release of Nevermind...but not for 9/11.