A message to the person who called into Rush Limbaugh’s show and claimed she was a democrat only to instantly switch her political allegiance after Rush ranted at her for 5 minutes which included him saying “Presidents cant fix the country” ultimately leading the person to say that they would vote for John McCain in November to which Rush responded, “thats how you get things done in America.”


Note - I have 770 AM on my radio for Imus. Occasionally i switch over during Mike and The Mad Dog commercial breaks to infuriate myself, which is my most favorite way to be. 

People should have to pass some kind of standardized reasoning test before we let them vote. This is the reason that America is suffering because people like Rush Limbaugh belittle you into thinking that he doesnt like you and the only way you can get him to like you is to agree with him. But why would anyone care if a fat drug pusher like Rush Limbaugh likes them? Because of all the things that are ruining America the most contagious and dangerous is the people of this country’s over powering need for people to like them. people cant think or speak freely because they are afraid that someone might not like what they think and say, So they float through existence trying to destroy any hint of an opinion or abstract thought before it infiltrates their brains thus making them agreeable to all people and useless to me, and the rest of society that finds this quality in people repulsive, at the exact same time. to all the people who worry about people not liking them, guess what? I dont like you. Please feel free to email and attempt to win back my affection. Im sure my disgust with you will keep you up nights. Maybe you can use that time to think about your station in life and how you can improve it. The first way i would suggest: read a book. The second?

STOP LISTENING TO RUSH LIMBAUGH!!!

Tags: , , , ,

Saturday


Saturday was a good day.

I got up early like i always do. I got dressed, put on some jeans and a tshirt and scooped up our laundry to bring it down to the basement where our ‘laundry facilities’ are located. I wasnt expecting it to be so perfectly nice out, if i didnt say it out loud as i sometimes do when im alone, i definitely said to myself in my head, “Holy smokes, it is a nice day out today.” Not only was it nice, it was much too nice to be wearing jeans, so for the first time this year i put on some shorts, dug my trusty pair of sandals out of the wasteland that is the back seat of my car, im not sure why they were there, and went about my saturday morning ritual of cleaning my house.

I dont go crazy when i clean, i have a cat so vacuuming is very important. Along with that i like to clean out the sink, run the dishwasher, wipe down the counter tops, this makes me feel like a i work in a diner which is nice. I sometimes clean the toilet because even if you cant see it, the toilet is a dirty place. We rarely clean the shower, i think this might be a character flaw or a genetic defect. It just never occurs to me that this is something that really needs to be done although i can see everyday that it does. If this makes me a bad person then so be it. I aint cleanin’ no shower.

It was so nice on Saturday I opened a bunch of windows and let fresh air and street noise circulate through the apartment. My cat, Buddy, the ultimate cat, descended from a long line of jungle kings, enjoyed a few hours pining for the freedom of the outdoors laying in the open window sill.

Now, i finish vacuuming, so its time to get to work on putting the kitchen back together and for something like this, you have got to have some music but, what music to play, whats the perfect record to relax and enlighten and to heighten the experience of scraping old lasagna from a Pyrex pan and scrubbing questionable stains and materials off my kitchen counter? Some people think the key to good weekend light manual labor background music is to find something nice and light, something you dont have to pay attention to too much. It literally sits in the background so at some point while youre doing whatever it is youre doing you will forget that the music is on. It will become part of the background noise and will take its place with the sound of the water running, the traffic outside and, if you live in an apartment, the sounds of your neighbors letting their red headed 6 year old systematically destroy their house one mysterious “just fell of the bunk beds” THUD at a time. I am of a different school of thought when choosing tunes for this very tricky time of the day. I prefer something really weird, something that i wouldnt normally listen to if i had to pay full attention to it. My normal selection for a nice day house cleaning session would be from my pals The Penguin Cafe Orchestra. they are by far my favorite psychedelic, new age, ambient island lounge folk band and their first three records are very charming indeed. However on this particular Saturday i was in the mood for something a little different so i sifted through my vinyl collection and finally decided on David Byrne’s ‘The Knee Plays.’ This fit the bill perfectly. Its weird, the whole record is full of marches comprised of synth horns and there’s is no singing just David Byrne spoken word. Awesome. It was laid back and just the perfect piece of music to keep me interested even when i was realy paying attention and it never once configured it’s sounds to the general cacophony of life.

Then…band practice. Oh glorious band practice. Our practice space is in West Haven. It is located inconveniently in the back of a warehouse in a cinder block room we rent from a guy that rents it from someone else. it was so nice out we propped the door open, had a few beers, and played music for 4 hours. Thats what i call relaxing friends.

Later that night Nicolette and I watched Frasier for a while, ate some food, flipped back and forth between baseball games and the Final Four. After, she studied and i continued reading The Iceman Cometh. I went to bed around 11 i think, early maybe but sometimes friends, its just time to go to bed.

Tags: , , , ,

OneVoice - April 4, 2007


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!

Tags:

One of Those Days


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.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

REM - Accelerate


rem.jpg 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.

Tags: , , , ,

She & Him - Volume One


she-and-him.jpg 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.

Tags:

Lyrics


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.

Tags: , , ,

OneVoice - March 28, 2008


  Tom’s recent blog entry about the Grateful Dead song Dark Star reminded me of my father. Was my dad a Deadhead? Not at all - in fact, I’m not sure he ever heard a Grateful Dead song. So, why does this mention remind me of my dad?My father would have been 73 this March 28th had he not passed away suddenly in 2004. It was almost 30 years before his death that he and my mom took my two brothers (Carl and Mike) and me to see our first concert. I don’t think we even asked to go, so it was a big surprise when they took us to the now defunct New Haven Coliseum to see Three Dog Night.

At that time, Three Dog Night were my second favorite band, second only to The Beatles. While I knew their music from Top 40 radio stations, I didn’t become a huge fan until Joy to the World became a smash. I got their album Naturally (the one that included Joy to the World) as a gift, and, after that, I couldn’t get enough Three Dog Night.

The band was touring behind their Hard Labor album, the one that featured The Show Must Go On. I have a few memories of the show. The warm-up act was the Souther, Hillman and Furay Band, which, as I found out in later years, was quite an all-star band. The crowd wanted no part of them. Three Dog Night, which had been a seven-piece group up to that point, added a second keyboardist Skip Konte, who dressed like a wizard, and played that great calliope opening to The Show Must Go On. I remember younger girls sitting next to me, and waving their arms in front of my face to the music (although I can’t think of what song they could have been doing that to). Oh, yes, and I also remember the pungent smell of marijuana, and not really knowing what it was.

All in all, I remember it as my first concert, the first of many I’ve attended, probably not the best, but definitely the first, and I have to thank my folks for that experience.

So, what does this have to do with the Grateful Dead? It was probably 25 years later when I was taking my sons to the New Haven Coliseum to see a World Wrestling event. We had invited my dad and my brother Mike to join us. As we walked into the venue, my dad looked at Mike and me, and said, “Do you remember when I took you guys here to see the Grateful Dead?”

We laughed and told him that it wasn’t the Dead, but rather Three Dog Night. I’m not sure we convinced him, and I don’t know, if that point, whether he would have recognized a Three Dog Night song or not. It didn’t really matter then, and it doesn’t matter now.

Happy Birthday, Dad, and say “Hi” to Jerry Garcia for us.

Tags:

Cutler’s and Why Some Aspects of Hell I Like and Why Some, well, Not So Much


Cutlers is a record store on Broadway in Downtown New Haven. It was founded in 1948, is a New Haven landmark and, although I don’t remember the circumstances which precluded this, there was once a small picture of it in an issue of Vogue Magazine. Maybe it was Esquire. Either way I have been going to Cutler’s since my Dad (OneVoice) brought me there a significant number of years ago. When I learned how to drive I drove myself and my friends there on a weekly or sometimes daily basis to rummage through their collection of  45’s and jazz cd’s. When I got older and started reading Magnet and Big Takeover I would go there to find the latest in super hip indie rock and to browse their used bins for copies of Elvis Costello albums, that was of course until they re-issued all of them but that’s a different story for a different day. When I was older still, about a year ago, I would go to the only place I knew that kept a complete-as-could-be collection of Criterion DVD’s, my drug, my passion, the ruiner of my credit. Dad if you were ever wondering where all my money went you can blame Cutlers and the Criterion Collection. And while the décor inside seemed to change on a regular yearly schedule, there was always Standard Cutlers on one side and to the right of it, the store next door, was Cutlers Classical.I don’t think I need to go into detail about what they sell.

That was until last Saturday. I went there to pick up the new Mission of Burma re-issues, which they didn’t have, a not quite new trend for Culter’s, not having something they absolutely should have, that people count on them having, and noticed that Cutlers Classical is gone. Not only that but Standard Cutlers shrank due to the fact that Standard Cutlers ate into half of Cutlers Classical for their used cd, vinyl and old school arcade games section. That’s 50% less Cutlers folks. Which means the already crowded store is now more crowded. It means a more limited DVD selection and it means, from what I could see, a lot less used product and significantly less used product. Pick an artist. Any artist. You could find that artist in the bins and even if they had only three or four albums Cutlers would have a collection of import singles some weirdo live bootleg and a dvd or two even if you were previously convinced that a dvd for that artist didn’t even exist. That was Cutlers. There was a point in their history where you could honestly say that they had Everything. Now not so much.

So I guess the next question would be why did they shrink their business? I suppose the easy answer would be because the music industry is in the toilet but that would really only be a third the answer. Even if the music business was tanking record stores could continue to thrive at some level if it weren’t for iTunes and other music download sites. I will admit that I am as guilty of this as the next person. If the record industry would like to file murder charges against all of those who frequently engage in the downloading of music rather than purchase that same music at a store well then I will plead guilty in court and will gladly do sometime behind bars. Do I feel guilty when I download an album that only a year ago I would have forced myself to trek to the record store at the end of the world before I would even consider taking the suckers way out and just downloading a hard to find record if it was available online? Absolutely. But while I am certainly not alone, I don’t believe that me and my co-conspirators are the real reason Cutlers cut itself in half and why the music industry is in such dire straits. The real reason is…

The music sucks. And if you don’t see that then you are lucky because you have yet to be exposed to the worst era in music in the history of humanity’s reign upon this Earth. Truly we have hit a low point culturally when the Billboard Top 40 is filled with people like Chris Brown, Rhianna, Flo Rida, OneRepublic, Miley Cyrus, Buck Cherry, Sean Kingston, The Jonas Brothers, Fergie, Three Days Grace, Linkin Park, Finger Eleven, Danity Kane, Madonna! Still with the Madonna people come on. Open your ears to something new but more importantly something good. If we all stopped listening to junk and paying for junk and stop enabling people that created the junk their would be less junk and Cutlers would have to cut it self in half and we could all go swimming in a pool of imports and bootlegs and we can live in a world where bad music can only be played at clubs where people wear white sweat suits with big fake diamond necklaces around their necks and wear their hats crooked, where men call women bitches and refer to themselves as pimps. Where people laugh at things that aren’t clever and who say that things they don’t like are “Gay.” Where people talk about movies like “Never Back Down’ and the newest Tyler Perry movie like they’re art films. If people like this want to listen to bad music they absolutely may. The rest of society doesn’t need them for anything anyway except maybe as examples of who not to act like and what a lifetime of listening to junk music gets you.

I like to think of music as Hell. It has seven layers. The surface or layer one is where you get the junk and have to portray the above attitude towards culture for all of eternity but the deeper you go the better the tunes get, the better the food gets, the better the films get. Its really hot and its tough to get there but if youre willing to put in the effort you will be handsomely rewarded.

I suppose its only like Hell in the layers sense. I suppose I could have used a dip analogy as well but I have never been a fan of layered dips. I’m not a Hell supporter either but I like it better than layered dips. Hell for me would be having to eat layered dips for all eternity.

(Tom cringing)

Tags: , ,

For Your Enjoyment


dinosaur.jpg

I just cannot stop lauging. Im printing this out and putting it in my cube.

Tags:

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »