Archive for April, 2008
Friday, April 4th, 2008
For those of you who will be watching the NCAA men’s basketball Final Four this coming weekend, as I will be, allow me to help enhance your viewing enjoyment - everytime Seth Davis is about to offer some inane comment (which is virtually all of the time), mute your TV and offer the following as discussion topics for those watching the games with you:Personally, the only team I can’t see winning the whole thing is Kansas. I can make a case for the other three teams, but the Jayhawks do absolutely nothing for me.
Are you surprised that, given all of his years in the NBA, Dell Curry has yet to introduce his talented son to a weight room?
Am I courting disaster to suggest that Tyler Hansbrough is the 2008 equivalent of Christian Laettner? He might be a great college player, but I don’t see him as a standout pro.
I don’t think any underclassman should declare for the NBA draft unless his team has at least reached the Final Four, and preferably only when his team has won the national championship. Basketball is still a team game, and, unless you have achieved a certain level of success with that team, you shouldn’t be going anywhere.
I know we have our own target here in Connecticut with Hasheem Thabeet, but is there a softer big man in the country than Georgetown’s Roy Hibbert? I can’t believe he was a second-team All-American.
When you get a chance, google Brad Listorti and see where he ranks on a couple of different NFL draft sites. OK, I know Brad didn’t play basketball at Rutgers or UMass, but I knew him when he played youth basketball with my son Eric, and I am rooting for him to get drafted. He participated at the Matt Ryan workout a couple of weeks back, and teams are showing interest in him as a tight end and as an H-back.
You’ve got to love (no pun intended) how Kevin Love plays. I don’t even mind when Seth Davis says he is always in the right place, making the right play at the right time. Love had me as soon as I saw him throw his first outlet pass. Why can’t we get all of these young players to be so fundamentally sound?
Who do you dislike more calling college basketball games - Gus Johnson or Brent Musberger? Me? I can do without both of them.
Does the fact that all four number one seeds reached the Final Four really mean anything? Each of the teams had a scare or two along the way, so this particular result was in doubt a couple of times. I think we should accept it as the coincidence it was, and, if anyone on the selection committee suggests otherwise, slap them!
OK you can unmute Seth now - may the teams you have in your bracket win, and may you spend your winnings wisely … supporting our troubled economy, of course!
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Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
Oh Lord, yesterday was just one of those days my friends. My Wednesday ended up being saved by a wicked band practice and copious amounts of Regular Coors (the Banquet Beer and by copious I mean 3 or 4) but it was close man, it was real close. I almost lost it there for a while. The work just kept piling up and my boss told me that Friday we have to dress business casual because his boss is coming in ( as an example of why this is such a problem for me today i am wearing a Mets tshirt, jeans and my red torn up converse. I usually wear something similar everyday). The morons that inhabit the cubes around me would not stop talking about their kids and their diseases and their vacations and what they had for breakfast and what they were going to have for dinner and i didnt get to eat any lunch because i had to pick up a bag that i thought would fit my bands keyboard on my lunch break and the key board ended up not fitting in the bag and i was late getting back from lunch because people dont know how to drive any more and i got stuck behind a school bus and car drives funny, it makes funny noises and it feels like it is being ripped apart in a nuclear explosion when i hit pot holes, etc. etc. insert your own daily horror stories here…
I needed an outlet as i do four out of five business days. I needed a friend and a confidant and someone that would not only understand what i was going through but would stand up for my rights as some one who wants to jump out the window because the bottom rung of society will not stop laughing its hideous maniacal laugh in regards to something that isnt funny. Let me ask you a question, how long should a debate about how much you would be willing to pay for a double disc edition of Aeon Flux staring Charlize Theron last? The answer is not an hour which is how long that exact conversation lasted over my head between the person that sits opposite me and their boy friend.
I needed to commune with a person or rather a being who could commiserate with my misery. So i reached into my pocket pulled out my ipod and found the person who is always there for me…Bill Hicks. I loaded up Rant in E-Minor and set my soul to relax.
I was really mad though people and i needed something else besides Mr. Hicks. I needed an extra jolt of fury in my putrid office kitchen coffee-ish sludge. So, went through the entire Bill Hicks catalog made a mix of favorites and then made of mix of some appropriatly chaotic and angry and sometimes but not always loud music. I finished my mix around 5pm. My shift ended at 6 so i spent the rest of the afternoon floating down the soothing river and mutual angst and cultural indigestion.
The music mix looks like this:
The Fox - Sleater Kinney
New Wave - Against Me!
If White America Told the Truth for One Day Its World Would Fall Apart - Manic Street Preachers
Careening With Conviction - Mission of Burma
World Wide Suicide - Pearl Jam
Waiting Room - Fugazi
Working Class Hero - John Lennon
Voodoo Chile (Slight Return) - Jimi Hendrix
I think everyone probably has a ‘One of those days’ mix.
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Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
Several weeks ago i said some pretty mean things about REM. In a discussion with friends I declared that REM was totally irrelevant. While not horrible, Up and Reveal were unfocused and messy and their production out shone the songs which is something that should never ever happen unless you’re Bjork. Around the Sun was legitimately terrible. I dont care what anyone says, specifically huge REM fans, there wasnt one good song on that record and Michael Stipe sounded like he was asleep through the whole thing.
Now 4 years later they give us Accelerate and while i refuse to take back any of the mean things i said about them a couple weeks ago Im not going to beat around the bush: this record is a monster, even more so than Monster which wasnt fantastic either but did rock. On the first track, Living Well is the best Revenge, they sound like their ’80s indie mates the Replacements (when are they getting in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by the way), which is really saying something when youre talking about REM. Michael Stipe sounds super engaged, Mike Mills is singing his super high back up vocals and Peter Buck sounds like hes playing on a Minus 5 record which are all pretty good. The only thing missing is Bill Berry. this is the perfect Bill Berry record. Bill Rieflin is a hell of a drummer but sometimes his fills are just too much when all the song really needs is a little 1-2 tom and snare hit. Nice and simple and clean.
Accelerate is loud, its passionate and it has brought REM all the way back from total irrelevancy to being a band that you have to listen to. Awesome, way to make me look like a jerk REM.
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Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
Becasue it cant be put any better than Allmusic.com’s Tim Sendra put it, “She is actress Zooey Deschanel (Almost Famous, Elf, her sister is on Bones), Him is alt-singer/songwriter M. Ward.” Thats the only thing im going to quote from another review. Let me start by saying that it would be unfair to judge this record as an album by simply an Actress. the record is too good for her not to have earned her stripes as a musician and a singer. Also this record was released on Merge and the last time i checked the label home of Bob Pollard, Neutral Milk Hotel, the Arcade Fire and Spoon wasnt in the business of releasing vanity projects for actresses who think they can sing. Zooey can sing and she writes a mean ’70s sunshine pop and country tune.
People have been comparing her voice to everyone from Dusty Springfield to Linda Thompson but her voice doesnt sound like a lot of other voices you may have heard. she frequently fails to hit notes and the tone and timbre of her voice switches sometimes so drastically in the same song you might be fooled into thinking, as I was, that someone else is singing. You would be wrong. As i was. her voice is slightly alien but honestly this album would not work in anyway if she was a better singer. 90% of this records appeal is in her voice. The other 10% is the songs which the album credits entirely to her except for two covers and one collaboration with Jason Schwartzmann (Rushmore and Phantom Planet), which leads me to believe that M Ward’s participation was limited to backing vocals on two songs and production. There is a haunting echo to almost every tune which is also how M Ward records sound. Weird.
The covers, You Really Got a Hold on Me and the Beatles’ I Should Have Known Better, are not great, the album would have been better off without them but, while this may not be the greatest record ever or even one of the best of the year, it is a surprisingly solid affair by an artist whose opportunities to make another record hopefully rest in her abilities as a singer and a song-writer and not on her name.
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Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
Ugh.
I have spent the last two days writing lyrics. Of writing lyrics i am not a fan although i have done a lot of it over the last two years or so. They just always seem really goofy to me and i can only get used to singing my own words after the song is a few years old, that way it doesnt seem like my song, hopefully it has been played so much that it feels like we’re playing a cover and not something that I slaved over. Which is how i approach my lyric writing.
There is no rhyme or reason to how i write lyrics. i come up with a melody first and there are usually a few lyrics naturally embedded in the melody. if they make sense i use them in the song and write around them, if they dont i try to come up with something that sounds very similar. My lyrics seem to always be about myself although in a more surreal context. Another way i write lyrics is to sift through these manila folders i have that are filled with scraps of paper with novel, short story and lyric fragments on them and try to adapt something that was previously written to the structure of the song. I was sorry to learn yesterday that i have almost exhausted this lyric writing ‘crutch’ i have and any songs i write from now on are going to have to have totally fresh shiny new lyrics.
Which really sucks.
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