After being fearful about America’s future in space, I thought “why not relax and watch a funny movie?” My sister crashed in my apartment the other night and brought knowledge of a great video with her. It’s pretty dumb and funny, sort of like a cross between Right Said Fred and RuPaul.
Enjoy!
Via Amy
Like many people, I am in love with many classic Muppet songs. Tunes like “Letter B” (sung to the tune of “Let it Be”) and the entire Sesame Street “Signs” album pull at my heart strings. Some of these songs are such catchy little ditties you just can never forget them.
One such song that cannot be forgotten is “Manamana.” I used to only think of this song when I heard about my family that lives in or my friend who grew up in Manallapan (do doooo doo doo doo), New Jersey. Now though I’m humming it every day as my company is working on a project for a medication named Rimonabant which, when mentioned in any meeting, makes everyone hum that damn Muppet song. Its pretty funny to listen to someone say that they have a client call about Rimonabant and before she can say what time, she is drowned out by massive amounts of humming. In honor of this daily dose of childish fun that I’m having at my employer, I thought I would post the song so it can get stuck in your head too. Enjoy!
Via Lee
I love the long tail and how nothing is every truly gone with the advent of the Internet. In case you didn’t know, N.E.R.D. stands for “no one ever really dies” and the ‘Net makes it so. Here is one application:
Online music fans have downloaded more than 250,000 tracks of previously out-of-print recordings by European artists since the launch of Universal Music’s pioneering digital catalogue reissue programme earlier this year. It was launched as the first step in a multi-year drive to reinstate more than 100,000 European deleted recordings. The initial offering comprised more than 3,000 out-of-print tracks from the company’s vaults in the U.K., France and Germany. They were made available through online music services in 20 countries, mostly in Europe.
Below are listed the top artists, albums and tracks. I didn’t know most of these names and am still finding out info and/or listening to all of them. Cool to say the least, check it out:
MOST POPULAR ARTISTS BY TRACK
1. Noir Desir
2. Chris de Burgh
3. Gun
4. Eddie & the Hot Rods
5. Del Amitri
MOST POPULAR TRACKS
1. Gun, Word Up
2. Eddie & the Hot Rods, Do Anything You Wanna Do
3. Brigitte Bardot, Je T’Aime Moi Non Plus
4. Freak Power, Turn On Tune In Cop Out
5. Cast, Guiding Star
MOST POPULAR ALBUMS
1. Big Country, Steeltown
2. Fairport Convention, Meet On The Ledge
3. Jacques Brel, Ballades et Mots D’Amour
4. Freak Power, Drive-Thru Booty
5. Nana Mouskouri, Les Plus Beaux Noels du Monde
Weird! Lots of new music to listen to now…
Enough doom and gloom for the week. I have been meaning to post this awesome clip of the group OK Go performing its song “Here It Goes Again” using synchronized treadmills. They did it in one take and its ridiculous – I especially like when they “swim” or “skate” from the back to the front – plus its a jazzy song too. Happy Friday!
Via Chris
“Modern Times,” the first studio album by Bob Dylan in 5 years, is being streamed this week by AOL Music so feel free to “try before you buy.” Thus far, I’ve listened to the first 3 tracks. He sounds, for want of a better term, strong. The first track is robustly bluesy, not stripped down like his Grammy winning “Time Out of Mind” album. The second track sounds like it could have been played at the “Enchantment Under The Sea” dance. The third track is bit bluesy and a bit rockabilly. Enjoy!
I wish I always could be so lucky: this past week I started and ended it at a concert. On Monday, I saw the Foo Fighters play an acoustic show at the Beacon Theatre (Frank Black – Pixies – opened). Last night, I saw Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (CSNY) perform at the Theatre at MSG after two different people in my life, separated age-wise by over 20 years, both raved about their performance on this tour. While I immensely enjoyed both shows, I was struck by the amazing emotional gulf between the two, mostly in terms of relevancy and importance. One was simply music – the other was music and so much more.
The Foo show was great and left me all smiles. Dave Grohl was engaging, a regular chatty Kathy actually, and their expanded roster of musicians (Pat Smear was back w/ them – gotta love a punk rock dude who was in a band called the Germs whose name rhymes with pap smear) played a lot of the new tracks off of the acoustic side of their new record along with a good number of older songs – “Its all about the catalog dude!” Dave yelled at one point. The songs were all really well done but one song sticks out in particular after last night’s show: “In Your Honor,” the title track from their latest album. Dave wrote that in honor of John Kerry while he was out on the campaign trail with him. He sung it well and the band rocked it out but he never mentioned the campaign, the current world we live in, Bush or anything political at all. He simply played the tune and moved on to other tunes, like “Everlong.” Looking back, it was like listening to rock & roll cotton candy – all fluff and no substance.
Comparabily, the CSNY show didn’t feed you at all: it threw a bucket of cold water in your face and let you know that shits all sorts of fucked up and then worked up your appetite to do something about it. I thought that CSNY would stick to a “safe” show of their classic hits but instead they grabbed the show by the balls. In a surprise, the group played a ton of songs off of Neil Young’s new album Living With War which completely slams the Imperial Bush Presidency and the GWOT (global war on terror for those not up on the lingo). I urged you months ago to listen to the Neil’s new disc and I urge you again now. The group displayed on a huge video screen US deaths broken out by month and lambasted the president for not attending a single soldier’s funeral. They showed a picture of every single dead soldier thus far – 2,607 of them (a fact I know because of last night’s show) – while they played a song dedicated to the troops. They put the words to the new Neil Young song “Let’s Impeach the President” on screen and urged the crowd to sing along. They played “Teach Your Children” and Crosby said “Every teacher’s salary should be tripled!” before launching into it. They played “Ohio” and as everyone was singing “4 dead in Ohio” it felt in a way like Kent State could have just happened.
My friend and I over and over again just couldn’t believe that it was 2006, almost 40 years after these gents made their debut, and that we were watching these 4 strong, clear voices belt out songs with such meaning, harmony and clarity, that we were watcing their fingers run wild and pluck out tunes that scarily matter more than ever. Their stamina too must be commended – they played for a total of 3 hours (with only a 20 min break in the middle so the show was almost 3.5 hrs long). Their message of peace is still a sound one. The peace symbol on the stage wasn’t a dated relic of the 60’s. It was a stark reminder that the more things change, the more they stay the same. There is a battle for peace too and that battle needs to be fought and not ignored.
Sitting around reflecting this morning, I wish every concert now packed the same emotional punch that the CSNY show did. Art for art’s sake in a world gone crazy sometimes is not enough. Someone has to be out there making art with a purpose, art with a message. It was like watching Lou Reed’s perfomance at the Hurricane Katrina Summerstage benefit for 3 hours. I feel blessed, energized and motivated. Maybe if every show packed this type of punch I would feel battered but a good slap in the face once in a while to me is a good thing.
It is so hot outside that I’m trapped in my apartment, sipping Pina Coladas and going through old stuff, trying to clean tha place up. Here is a sample of what I found:
* A Letter from the City of New York’s Finance Department which read (bold my emphasis): The respondent has been charged with violating Traffic Rule 4-08(k)(2) by standing or parking a vehicle where a posted sign reads “No Standing Except Trucks Loading and Unloading.” The time first observed is stated as 12 AM. Respondent persuasively states that this is an error. Defective summons dismissed on the merits.
Sweet! I love re-reading traffic tickets that I’ve been able to get thrown out, especially when I got the ticket Thanksgiving 2004 and it was eventually dismissed in January, 2006. Who says you can’t fight City Hall?
* An axe on my wall:
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I bought this axe online for my friend Tree’s Medieval wedding a few years back. Yes, I was able to buy a weapon and have it shipped to me. Yes, it was after 9/11. I’ve been trying to find the right hook in order to hang it because even my wife, joy of joys, thinks its cool and I finally found what I was looking for in a store called The Container Store (I know, The Hook Store would have made more sense) which really actually kind of rocks. As my friend Mr. Neu stated, my day yesterday was sort of summed up by Will Ferrel in Old School: “Well, um, actually a pretty nice little Saturday, we’re going to go to Home Depot. Yeah, buy some wallpaper, maybe get some flooring, stuff like that. Maybe Bed, Bath, and Beyond, I don’t know, I don’t know if we’ll have enough time.” That being said, I was also able to buy 5×7 plastic sleeves there for the next item I’m listing…. |
* A book for my postcards. I have been collecting postcards from museums I’ve visited, places I’ve been and people who’ve sent them to me (regardless of where they are from) for a long time now. In fact, the only tangible items I have from my Bubbe (she was my great grandmother even though “bubbe” means grandmother in Yiddish) are postcards. They’ve all been in a bundle in my bookcase for years – at best a few were displayed on my wall in college to try and show a bit of my personality to the world – but now I’ve finally put them in sleeves, courtesy of the aforementioned Le Magasin de Container, and then in a book so they are more accessible. I’ve been buying representations of these fantastic works of art to use as inspiration and to jog my memory that such art exists in the world and instead of being inspired by them, they been hidden away from view. Now, I hope that maybe by looking at Van Gogh’s “Skull with a Cigarette”, the intensely huge sky of Ullapool, Scotland, the words that two Icelandic girls who I knew for all of 24 hours wrote me after they left London, “Le Baiser (the kiss)” by Rodin and many, many, many other ‘cards on a more regular basis, my creative fire will spark from its smoldering state more often.
* A phat new rap mix, titled “Rap Mix #2.” I bought 2 tickets to sunny Florida online the other day and in doing so, I got 20 free iTunes songs to which I said, “Sweet!” I’ve used 3 of them on tracks from Ghostface Killah’s new album “Fishscale” which is just flat out ridiculously good. After reading a really positive review of Ghostface’s new album in the NY Times of all places, I was on iTunes and wound up buying these songs after to reading reviews and listening to snipits. I just love the Wu-Tang clan. Out of all the rap groups that are out there, I seriously think that the Wu are the best. I just love the imagry, the mythos, da mystery of chess-boxing and everything that is associated with them. So, “Rap Mix #2” is devouted to them and their disciples. My head is grooving back and forth listening to “9 Milli Bros.”
Someone had a lot of time on their hands and spliced together this terrific video of George Bush singing U2’s hit song “Sunday, Bloody Sunday. Its pretty damn funny and weirdly catchy. Enjoy!
Via Chris
The Gnarls Barkley’s performance at the MTV Movie Awards has to be seen to be believed. The song is pretty good but the performance is out of this world, literally.
Via Jordan
This is what it is like to be and feel old. It is to wake up each day and to feel that everything good has passed, at least in terms of an apex, at least in terms of appreciation of said apex. Nothing produced today, no art, no music, no films, etc can equal the impact of what was produced in the past. That which was produced in the past was produced at a time when I lived – that means to say that what I am appreciating occurred in the recent past, or at least the past that constitutes my life time, with compensation duly added for the time when I was alive yet had no comprehension of events occuring, mostly limited and focused to my childhood pre-five years old, although certain fugue like states later in life caused on purpose or by accident also qualify. I am listening to Metallica’s Master of Puppets right now and wish, oh so badly wished that I saw them in concert when they were in their prime.
But wait, I think I did. I think that during Woodstock one could consider them in their prime. If that is the case, then I saw them and crowd suffered to them, for when Master of Puppets came on I went up. I wound up kicking a dude from Texas in the face on my way down which would not have been so bad if he wasn’t the same person I had not only been hanging with for the past few hours but the same individual who was plying me with alcohol during the entire time. He was hooking me up and I kicked him in the face. He didn’t mind though – we both laughed and drank more. So I lived through it but didn’t live through itl, because that was one isolated instance, that was one show and an abnormal show at that, a show which helped shape the course of my life, something that opened me up though still limited me, something where I learned what I could control and what I could not, a show that set me up for all the rest that has transpired.
And the guitar soars as I type, the sound rising like the lines on my face, so beautifully hard, climbing towards the top of a cliff that will only make you dive, as a huge stone stab falls crushingly onto you, as if in slow motion the walls of a room closing menacingly without a human cyborg relations bot to rescue you. Chris Campenelli sang this to me with a crazy look in his eyes. I am realizing that every person is so deep, that the wells of the thoughts, even empty thoughts are deep, are perverse, are layered, are ready to multiply at a moment’s notice and only need the spark to cause it to flow. And the music dances onward, upward, swirling around in the melody maelstrom, cue the drums, smash smash smash smash smash