Archive for February, 2008
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
Doesnt it sound like the title of some new Ashley Judd movie? In reality, from everything i have read this morning, the title of this blog refers to the situation Hillary Clintons presidential campaign finds itself in. One of the things i had recently begun to admire about her campaign is how it generally acknowledged the fact that it was in bad shape. I think its pretty classy when someone can admit that someone else is probably going to win but that you are going to buckle down, give it your best shot and hope that things turn around for the better. She said during the debate last thursday that if things didnt turn around and she didnt win the nomination that she “would be fine.” Thats nice i thought, now i dont have to feel bad when Obama wins denying America its first female President, which, i have to admit, i was sort of starting to feel bad about. Apparently however, Hillary was just really really wonderfully high on Thursday, woke up on Friday, still a little hazy but generally cognizant, watched the video of the debate and said, “What? What did I say? I’m not going to be fine! Im going to be pissed! Much like I am right now!” And so Team Clinton got desperate but unlike before she decided to garnish her desperate with a heaping spoonful of crazy and now instead of seeming determined she seems ruthless.
And people are starting to notice. Here are todays headlines from some of Americas major news soures:
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/us/politics/26clinton.html
The Daily News
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/columnists/lupica/index.html
New York Magazine
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2008/02/clintons_barbs_condoned_by_the.html
Im sure this list can be updated as the day goes on (we can also debate the term “major news source”). During a normal election, and issued by a standard candidate, Hillary’s attacks might be seen as just that, attacks politically motivated and not personal but, when they come from the mouth of a Clinton, they sound petty and jealous and rude and condescending. Some part of me would feel bad for the way she comes off during her speeches and press conferences if i didnt think she wanted to look this way. I think she wants to seem desperate. I think she wants people to think that she will do whatever it takes to be president. i think she is hoping that people connect this ruthless desire of hers with the thoughts that maybe, because she wants it so badly she is willing to risk her reputation and her sanity, that she really loves us, that she really cares for us and that she really would be the democrats best candidate for president. Unfortunately for Hillary the more people see her in this desperate and flailing state the more people see the underlying truth of her campaign: that it doesnt have anything to do with you, me or America, its all about Hillary and her Arthurian quest to be president. I do feel, if Barack had to drop out for whatever reason and she became the default nominee and managed to beat John McCain, that she would make a decent president while in office, i dont question her intelligence and her policies and vision seem to be grounded in a general willingness to be a good person and a good president. But in the same way that George Bush’s White House has been described as having a “mob mentality” so will the Clinton’s. It will cost our government and our country dearly if anyone stands in the way of her “causes.”
Am i being to hard on her? I dont know, maybe, maybe not. What i do know is that her plan is back firing on her. Every-time someone reads one of the stories listed above, of which a differenent but similar version will be printed in every newspaper and magazine from now until she decides to drop out, the American people wince and then run to embrace the candidate that doesnt make them feel like a bad person for supporting the candidate of their choice. Your not going to hear Barack tell the American voter that their delusional for not voting for him but you are hearing that from the Clinton’s everyday. When Bill Clinton, in Texas last week, told a crowd of people, “If we win in Texas and Ohio i think we an get the nomination, if we dont then we probably wont. Its in your hands,” he was basically saying My wife and I are holding you all personally responsible for not letting us be president. It has nothing to do with how they ran their campaign or how they spent their money or how the conducted themselves or how seriously they took Baracks initial bid for the nomination. Its our fault. Yours and mine. She wanted it and we took it from her. We should be ashamed. Well, Im not ashamed and neither is anyone else. we will be ashamed if Barack wins Texas on Tuesday and she doesnt drop out of the race. we will be ashamed if she continues to try to pry elected delegates away from Barack just because the DNC’s arcane election rules says she can. We will be ashamed when the Clinton campaign starts to circulate a picture Barack should be proud of, dressed in a traditional African outfit while visiting Africa, in an attempt to appeal to America’s “ignorance” hoping we will mistake his attire for something having to with being a Muslim. Oh wait, thats already happened. Well then you win Hillary Clinton. I am ashamed. Ashamed that our electoral process has come to this. Ashamed that someone cannot remark on your record and your positions without you running around and unfoundly calling them a liar and a cheat. Ashamed that everytime you say that this election has nothing to do with race and gender you try and drag it back through the mud of gender and racial divide.
I will close today by saying thank you to Hillary Clinton for confirming that i made the right choice on Super Tuesday. That i chose to support the candidate that himself chose to stay above all of this nonsense.
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Monday, February 25th, 2008
I sat through the entire ceremony last night, including the nauseating Enchanted songs, and i feel pretty good about how the whole thing went down. I liked most of the nominated films and performers so i was rooting for everyone unless you were associated with Juno. Good Work everyone!
Moving on…
One of the things i’ll be doing, when there is nothing else i really feel like writing about is commenting on my list of Top 15 Favorite albums of all-time. This is a pretty eclectic list but not frustratingly so. My taste tends to swing in a specific direction so there wont be any gangsta rap or bone head county music on here. I will unveil my list one record at a time and hopefully if you havent heard this particular record you will get yourself a taste. So, entry #1 (in no particular order, unranked, im just going to list them as they were when i originally jotted them down) belongs to:
Elvis Costello and the Attractions - Blood and Chocolate
The last album he did with the Attractions until All This Useless Beauty is also the best Attractions record since Armed Forcesand where that record may not have been made by a group of guys that loved or even liked each other they at least had momentum on their side and obviously cruised through that record like a rock and roll knife cutting melted butter. Not only that but the songs on Armed Forces could have been carry overs from This Years Model making that exact period Elvis’ most successful in marrying his two favorite things, hating people and writing the catchiest melodies since the Beatles were holding your hand and taxing the pennies on your eyes. Those records were easy. When the first song on Blood and Chocolate, the title track, kicks in with its bare E chord you can imagine him struggling somewhat to come-up with a decent guitar line before finally deciding to just bang on one chord for 4 minutes loathing the thoughts running through his head making it impossible to concentrate. the whole record stinks of this kind of anger and frustration. His band, the best backing band in the history of rock, this is arguable im sure but in that argument im taking the Attractions, was freaking breaking up, mainly because he hated his bass player and the cherry on top of the already too cherry laden sundae is he gets divorced. These songs specifically, Home is Anywhere you Hang your Head, I Want You, Battered Old Bird, and Crimes of Paris, sound like they were wrenched out of Elvis against there will, thrown on a recording console and stapled and nailed down with pneumatic air guns. Is there any other reason for Home is Anywhere you Hang Your Head to be so slow and his vocal performance so mannered and so off key on occasion? doesn’t it sound like the songs are fighting their own existence? In Battered Old Bird they use a reverse tape loop to lead into the bridge and kiss my grits if it doesnt sound like the record has finally decided it just cant take it anymore and come hell or high water its going back to the dark pool it had been swimming in inside Elvis’ head. Fortunately, it didnt and we have this amazing record to listen to. This is the first Elvis record I ever bought. at the time those Rhino reissues were a big deal (it has since be reissued again by Hipp-o but unless i finally wear out my copy I will be avoiding spending another couple hundred of dollars replacing records that need not be replaced) and i made sure i bought each one the day it came out. I poured over Elvis’ newly composed liner notes watched him get fat and bearded, weird and then back to normal, ive heard him be great and not so great all within the space of track 1,2, and 3 on the same record, but this record front to back is fantastic, fantastic, fantastic. I think in away, it ruined my life. Anyone that knows me knows that i have a slightly cynical side to myself. Am I totally blaming Elvis? No but did he and this record play a major part, i have to believe that they did. Its the record where you can hear Elvis loose his faith in marriage, his band and himself, and when something like thats going down, even the jauntiest acoustic coffee shop pop tune, like Crimes of Paris, is going to sound like you are singing through a smirk while poking people in the eyes with the head of your guitar. Fantastic!
Posted in Movies, music | 1 Comment »
Saturday, February 23rd, 2008
Today i will be picking my winners for the Oscars. A lot of people try to pick who will win, I’m going to pick who i believe should win. so, without further delay lets pick some freaking Oscars!
Best Picture
There Will Be Blood
Best Actor
Daniel Day Lewis - There Will Be Blood
Best Actress
Laura Linney - The Savages
Best Supporting Actor
Hal Holbrook - Into the Wild
Best Supporting Actress
Cate Blanchett - I’m Not There
Best Director
Joel and Ethan Coen - No Country for Old Men
Now for the films that are inexplicably under represented or not represented at all:
Zodiac
Into the Wild
Christian Bale and Steve Zahn in Rescue Dawn
Frank Langella in Starting Out in the Evening
Eddie Vedder’s soundtrack for the Into the Wild
Johnny Greenwood’s score for There will Be Blood
There Will Be Blood is by far the years best movie and Daniel-Day Lewis gives probably the best performance by any actor in over a decade. he is even better in this than he was in Gangs of New York. I have always been a big Laura Linney fan so if shes nominated for an Oscar I’m going to support her. I’m giving my supporting actor to Hal Holbrook because he was incredible in Into the Wild and Into the Wild got totally screwed this year. Maybe it was because it came out to early and no one remembers it, maybe people are put off by its earnestness. either way it got royally snubbed. I hate the word snub. Cate Blanchett is the only thing worth seeing in I’m Not There, which was by far the years most disappointing movie. I am a huge Dylan fan and i kept waiting for it to let me love it but only when Cate Blanchett’s Dylan was on the screen could you really see the potential within. Finally, The Coen Bros get my vote for directing No Country for Old Men because it would not have worked if it had been directed by any other director much like There Will be Blood wouldn’t have worked if Plainview was played by anyone else but Daniel Day Lewis.
I’m actually pretty pumped for tomorrow. Keep on chooglin’.
Posted in Movies | 2 Comments »
Thursday, February 21st, 2008
I made a decision last night that this would be my last post about American Idol unless something really unbelievable occurs. There are probably 100,000,000 people that blog about their every thought regarding American Idol and that is not why i got this blog. So, my final thoughts on this years American Idol are as follows: a girl is going to win. They were pretty good last night, not great, i could do without most of them but a few showed that they had some vocal chops and some personality and thats all im looking for when i watch this show. I counted 4 out of 24 contestants who fit this bill and they are all girls. The rest of them cannot sing and are socially awkward. Those are two things that i dont want in my pop stars.
The name of this blog is “A Combination of Things” and while it fits my blog it is actually the name of a song that I wrote a couple of years ago but finally recorded with the Joiner Inners last year. Its a pretty good song I think. I have always thought that it had a kind of Replacements feel to it. I think its kind of shambley and rough, not rough like tough but rough like not clean, a little sloppy, all good things. I’ve got a red notebook next to me as a write this and its first 3 pages are filled, front and back, with things i want to write about in this blog. Ive broken them down into some simple categories that you can see over to the right there, yeup right over there. If you allow me to ramble some more ill get to my point. I bring up the song because, i never at any point sat down and wrote out a set of new lyrics for the tune, i never felt inspired to do so. I had already given it the name and one night, i think i may have been watching a baseball game, I’m a Mets fan by the way but we’ll get to that at another date, I started sifting through this manila folder I have that is filled with yellow legal sheets and scraps of receipt paper and envelopes and Chinese food take out menus, all of them containing ideas for stories and books and movies and lyrics written in my very distinctive chicken scratch. I have accomplished very little in the time i have already put in on this planet but these manila folders with all of my many years of accumulated notes and thoughts i think shows me that i have the potential do something pretty great, I’m talking about great creatively. I’m not going to be president, although I’m not sure how great being president is, and I’m not going to cure cancer and I’m not going to climb a mountain because I’m afraid of heights and people that climb mountains are crazy not great. The end of this story is this, I was watching a Mets game and i was looking through this folder and pulling out anything that i thought might make a good lyric. i was remembering where i was and what i was doing when i was making these notes. I had my guitar next to me and a fresh legal pad with “A Combination of things” written across the top of it. when i thought i had enough lyric ideas i started writing them down and after a little trimming and a little editing and a little revising and a little more of all of them, i had myself a tune. a pretty good tune. Not a great tune, because i think I’ve only written one great song in my life and i only think that because everyone tells me it is but Combination of Things is a pretty good song and I’m proud of it i guess. Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is this, This blog is going to be just like that song. I’m going to take little pieces of myself that i have accumulated throughout my existence and I’m going to write about them and by the end of what I’m writing my views on them may have changed. By the end of reviewing a movie i might find that i didnt like it that much when at the beginning of the review i said it was the greatest movie i have ever seen. Maybe ill review a record after one listen and hate it but maybe ill listen to it while I’m reviewing it and the guitars on the fourth track will do something i didnt notice before and i wont be able stop listening to it for a week. maybe the drums start to shake out a beat that is impossible for one man to play but you dont hear the second man or that second set of hands and the record finds its way into the open slot in my top 15 records of all time. Little things that dont mean anything all of the sudden coming together to mean something. It may not mean anything to you and i absolutely respect that but i think blogs are kind of personal. The fact that people read them is almost secondary. You write for yourself and if you do it well enough and interesting enough maybe someone starts to pay attention but you do it, I do it, first, to put the pieces of myself into some kind of order, to archive them by date and category and if you’re honest with yourself as you go when you’re done you can show it to someone and say this is me. whether you agree with me or not, this is all that Ive got.
(click on the link “Combination of Things” in the Blogroll to hear the tune at my old bands myspace which i have renamed. i dont think i need to tell anyone what the new name is)
Posted in music, whatever | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008
Big win by Barack Obama last night. That’s 10 in a row folks. Keep on chooglin’.
Alright. I told anyone who would listen that i wasn’t watching American Idol this year because of the bull crap that they pulled with Josiah (although, after watching last nights proceedings, i am actually sort of glad he didn’t get put through. I forgot that the goal of these early elimination rounds is to pick a song and turn it into adult contemporary trash. Im not sure how well he would have accomplished this and im glad he was spared the embarrassment). Anyway, i DVRed and I watched and half way through some random crumb bum’s rendition of Moon River i was wishing i had stuck to my guns and not compromised my principals due to an absence of acceptable time killing activities while waiting for the polls in Wisconsin to close so that i might bathe gloriously in election night analysis and punditry. Every male performer this year is terrible. TERRIBLE. Even the Australian guy with the record deal, Michael “Two First Names” Johns, was sub par and he sang one of the same songs he sang last week in LA. I can only hope that the girls tonight are better because now, since i have already forfeited my integrity, i have to watch and root for all the men to get kicked off before all the women the same way i rooted for Ace to spontaneously combust mid-George Michael song during season 5.
Also, it’s lunch time here in corporate hell and I just ate a Quizno’s. its close to the office and never crowded. I was nursing a substantial hunger and had forgotten to bring myself a microwavable soup or even a small plastic sack of pretzels. Let me tell you something faithful blog reader, don’t be fooled by advertising or praise from a colleague or friend, eating Quiznos is never a good idea. Ever. I did however just find a piece of Orbit gum, flavor spearmint. Which is always nice
Posted in Politics, music, whatever | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
As always blogs are lame unless you speak your mind and comment about what the blogger has written. Please, no mercy.
Also, the ‘C’ button on the computer I will do most of my writing on does not work consistently. I also dont always remember to capitalize things.
Enjoy!
Posted in whatever | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
This is my first official post but I need to back track and comment on a few events before I start dealing with current issues.
- Barack Obama – There is a primary in Wisconsin today and Barack absolutely needs to win it. He can not afford to let Hilary gain even a shred of momentum going into March 4th. I am not politically intelligent as you will see going forward, but if I know anything its that Barack needs to put his foot on the gas here and keep on rolling. I wouldn’t say that im a fervent supporter of Senator Obamas. I haven’t been to any of his rallies and I haven’t donated any real money. I have a bumper sticker on the back of my car and a cardboard sign in the living room window of my house that’s hard to see from the street if the sun hits it just right which it usually does but I am excited about the prospect of this man being our next president. I think issues in Presidential elections are almost secondary. I know that probably sounds crazy but I just feel like once you are in office your reality changes and your issues and beliefs have to adapt accordingly. However I will say that he has been the most realistic candidate this year. He is aware of the divide between Republicans and Democrats and has structured his plans, programs and ideas in a way that will appeal to members of both parties in an effort to do some real work for the good of the country. I haven’t heard him say once, regarding his use of the House and the Senate, that it is, effectively, his way or the highway. I think he believes that when all is said and done we will be able to find OUR way and that’s why Im supporting him for president. If he doesn’t win the nomination I will admit that I will be a little sad about it, but I definitely think that Hilary Clinton will make a fine president. I just think Barack Obama would make a better one.
- The Grammys – Dear God in heaven what a freaking sham this whole event is. If I thought that swearing on my blog would be a good idea I would be swearing all over the place right now. I am just so disgusted with the state of the music industry. I know that no one except the previously mentioned music industry puts very much stock into these things but I personally, as a musician and a card carrying member of the “Not an Idiot Club,” find it just so insulting they someone somewhere actually believes that Amy Winehouse should win any kind of award. I dont feel this way because shes a drug addict, I feel this way because shes terrible. At the end of this post I will list 10 records that came out this year that are better than almost every record that got nominated for any award at this years Grammys. And do I think that Herbie Hancock won Album of the year because the Grammy voters actually thought that it was the best record of the year. No I do not. I think they gave it to him because hes nice and he makes nice music and because he plays the piano nicely and because he has Norah Jones on that record and shes nice. The fools that hand out the Grammys love to reward music that you don’t have to think about, that has a good beat or that you can listen to if youre having trouble falling asleep. Im glad my parents had the foresight to teach me the word Travesty. Try falling asleep to these records(in no particular order):
Against Me – New Wave
Espers – II
Wilco – Sky Blue Bky
PJ Harvey – White Chalk
Dinosaur Jr – Beyond
Miles Davis – The Complete on the Corner Sessions
Grinderman – Grinderman
Neil Young – Chrome Dreams II
Okkervil River – Stage Names
Ted Leo – Living with the Living
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