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For a bunch of aging art-rockers from Chicago, the Sea and Cake absolutely DESTROYED tonight. Then again, they always do. Surprisingly shredtastic.
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For a bunch of aging art-rockers from Chicago, the Sea and Cake absolutely DESTROYED tonight. Then again, they always do. Surprisingly shredtastic.
Took some digging but I found this over the weekend and made myself cry reading it out loud at lunch on Sunday.
Abdominal Migration
Abdominal Salad Shooters
ADHDEAD
An Inability to Breathe on Weekends
Ankle Bearding
Aortal Collapse
Arby’s Mouth
Argyle Pattern Baldness
Armpit Homunculus
Autonomous Nipple Syndrome
Bad Humors
Bearded Thalamus
Bone Sporking
Braintooth
Braintooth
Brainwhistle
Capillary Yogurt
Carcassing
Chinese Firebones
DIS, or Dissolving Intestine Syndrome
Dry Mouth
Dry Mouth
Eye Curdling
Eyearrhea
Eyesplosions
Facial Corkboarding
Fallopian Tapeworm
Flunamis
Genital Migration
Gopherism
Grover Nordquist Syndrome
Hair Swelling
Hairy Uvula
Honey Nut Areolas
Honus Wagner’s Disease
Hungry Hungry Hipbones
Increased Appetite
Increased Risk of Vampire Attack
Ingrown Testicle
Involuntary Blowhole
Involuntary Narnia Adventures
Jimmy Crack Corns
Knee Transference
Lactose Addiction
Late Onset Albinoism
Lou Ferrignose
Lungfire
Lungquake
Massive Weight Gain
Mild Hulkism
Mild Kidney Explosions
Mind of Mencia
Minor Heart Explosions
Monkeylung
Multibrow
Nostril Inversion
Outgrown Testicle
Permanent Blindness
Phantom Hand Syndrome
Pituitary Ferns
Precocious Kidney
Prolonged Erections – But Not Where You’d Hope
Puckerlung
Pulmonary Weevils
R.E.O. Speedlung
Rage
Rectal Buffalo Wings
Rectal Dyslexia
Rectal Frosting
Rectal Hallucinations
Re-Emergence of the Umbilical Cord
Restless Arm Syndrome
Restless Leg Syndrome
Restless Torso Syndrome
Rocky Mountain Oysterism
Runaway Gums
Scrappy Dooism
Scrotal Bassoon
Scruffula
Severe Weight Loss
Siamese Nipples
Skeletal Xylophoning
Spaghetti Ovaries
Speaking In Tongues
Spontaneous and Uncontrollable Gum Growth
Spontaneous Gypsy Scarf
Spontaneous Harper’s Subscription
Spontaneous Mertail
Spontaneous Pregnancy
Steven Tyler Lip
Subcutaneous Funyuns
Tennis Scrotum
Teriyaki Lung
Testicular Cranberrying
Testicular Myopia
Testicular Testicularization
Thoracic Geysers
Tracheal Meerkat Colonies
Transsexual Kidneys
Urethral Knotting
Vein Seizures
Ventricular Funk
Verizon Guy Syndrome
Vivid Dreams of Self-Cannibalization
Warlock Hump
Whatever Happens When You Drink Rocket Fuel
X-Ray Hearing
Yellowstone National Bladder
My friend just asked me what I would do if I had a billion dollars & what came out of my mouth without thinking was “make the Queens of the Stone Age live with me and teach me how to play every instrument and make an entire album about Honey Nut Cheerios.”
For a song that appears to be dominated by the sexual histrionics of Robert Plant and the equally filthy guitar pump-thrusts of Page, this track is absolutely owned by John Paul Jones. While Page and Plant are flailing about, making a graphic, overblown spectacle of their cock-rock prowess, JPJ is leaning against a wall, smoking, probably eating a sandwich, while pumping away at you so hard that you can feel it in the back of your throat. He hits you sideways, flips you over, jams it in again, swirls it around like he’s mixing a goddamn martini; he intersects with you at irrational angles, then smacks you with it unexpectedly, leaving you there on the floor. He flashes that jagged, mangled British smile then moves on to the next one, while the rest of the band wonders why no one is fussing about them.
The opening sound of Page’s guitar screams that it wants to fuck you, with that brackish, distorted sludge that sounds like he’s submerged in the bilge of a sinking freighter – it’s truly nasty, a coital haze, like a fog of sweat and fluids. But it’s also too obvious, like the douchebag at the bar with the best lines; he’s good, a pro maybe, but that quiet one over there, the one with a ridge down the front of one jean leg almost to his knee – he’s the one that will leave you spent, ruined and gasping for air. I can’t even listen to this song anymore without focusing on the bass. (Thanks, B.)
MINUTEMEN - “Dr. Wu” (Steely Dan cover, 1984)
From the halcyon days when the last thing you’d expect from one of the world’s greatest punk bands was a straight, affectionate, and utterly unironic Steely Dan cover.
One of 100 or so reasons MINUTEMEN were just the best.
I was really into Capricorn One when I was a kid, not because I gave even a second thought to moon landing conspiracy theories, but because, goddamnit people, Elliott Gould, James Brolin AND O.J. Simpson? James Brolin chewed up the screen the year before in that weird-ass The Car movie where he battled an automobile possessed by the devil. Spielberg’s Duel may be the canonical evil vehicle flick, but an (unidentified) human being manned the tractor-trailer in that one. And Christine? Well, it’s Carpenter and it’s over the top but it’s too much of a parable for me - The Car is not only weirder and more purely a thriller, it’s also got a much more badass, sinister-looking car, plus some maniacal explosions at the end. Capricorn One featured the red-hot Brolin, plus O.J., Brenda Vaccaro, Hal Holbrook, Karen Black and TELLY FUCKING SAVALAS. You couldn’t assemble a better cast than that over an entire Love Boat season.
So, when I saw the trailer for Transformers: Dark of the Moon, though I’d never seen the other Transformer movies, I thought, well, I have to see this, because it’s moon conspiracy shit, and damn it, I love me some goofy moon landing coverups. Plus, well, EXPLOSIONS, and it’s fucking hotter than hell here in Texas, so why not spend a few hours in an extended adolescent frisson. Also, a Michael Bay movie is like a satirized version of itself — it’s so balls-out, so in-your-face, so leaden with cheesy moments and mind-blowing pyrotechnics, that it’s got the same unintentionally humorous effect of one of those nutjob Mississippi congressional candidate commercials. You can’t even make fun of it, because it’s already as absurd and racist and tone-deaf as anyone could ever possibly be. The only satire of a Michael Bay movie is a Michael Bay movie.
This one starts with a juicy moon landing conspiracy in which all these Hasbro toys are engaged in a megawar on planet Jumbotron or something and then one of them gets away just as the bad toys are getting ready to take over and eventually lands on the moon. Turns out, then, that the moon shot program was all a coverup to see what kind of stuff actually landed on the other side of the moon, and Armstrong high-tailed it over to this crashed spaceship and took some shit out of it. In the meantime the bad toys on earth, which have apparently been beaten down in previous chapters of the series, are gathering themselves up in the African savannah (why Africa?) and preparing to bring some kind of ruckus, because there’s some other space detritus at Chernobyl, and all of this stuff ties together in ways that make absolutely no sense, but then this badass looking drain auger robot monster starts tearing up Chernobyl but some stupid semi truck robot defeats him, and then they take the stuff back to the U.S. and then that nun from Nanny McPhee, who looks damn hot here, although kinda brittle and still sexually repressed, takes the stuff from the moon and locks it up in a giant safe.
In the meantime, there is this dork with a smoking hot girlfriend who lives in Washington DC who’s saved the world a couple of times and is job hunting, and he gets a job with John Malkovich, who has a hilarious spray tan and will apparently do anything these days, but then dork gets homoerotically assaulted by the Asian guy who showed us his tiny penis in The Hangover. This guy hands over all his conspiracy theory stuff to dork and then gets killed, and everything goes haywire and then all of the sudden John Turturro is grinding through scenery like a fucking wood chipper and is on the O-Reilly factor and then HOLY SHIT BUZZ ALDRIN is in this movie.
So we get a lot of comic relief from that guy from Serenity, who plays Turturro’s bodyguard, and then there is a scene in a Russian bar that makes no sense, then a disappointing chase scene that does not have nearly enough destruction, but in fact it’s just a tease, because you know what you came here for, and you know that Mr. Bay is going deliver the goddamn goods, and then what do you know, the ENTIRE LAST HOUR of this movie is pretty much NOTHING BUT EXPLOSIONS AND MAD ROBOT FU.
The bad robots try to send the good robots into space, and some of these good robots have ethnic accents, (what the hell?) but then the good robots didn’t actually get on the space shuttle, and they come back to wage war on the Adult Megaplexxx, which has taken over Chicago and is going to beam the Jumbotron planet over here next to earth and make everyone on earth their slaves, even though, I mean, what the fuck, how stupid are these robots because putting a giant planet right next to earth is going to completely fuck up orbits and gravity and all that shit and the whole damn mess will probably spiral into the sun or something but MICHAEL BAY DOES NOT FUCKING CARE ABOUT YOUR STUPID GRAVITATIONAL FORCES, PEOPLE.
What Michael Bay cares about is blowing shit up in new and innovative ways, and I’m down with that, although the robot fu is frankly unimpressive, because robots can only break shit over each other’s heads and stuff so many times before it looks like you’re just watching a bad bar fight or some MMA crap. Thankfully, Michael Bay decides to pretty much destroy most of Chicago, and if you love your destruction porn, man, this shit is for you. We get entire buildings sliced in half, all Fruit Ninja-style, then landing on OTHER buildings, causing all sorts of absolutely mind-bending, sliding down and off building fu. There’s crazy batman-suit skydiving fu, cruise missiles blowing shit up everywhere, giant robot spaceships crashing into buildings, wanton destruction of landmarks and, finally Barton Fink making out with that chick from Nanny McPhee with some super cheeseball music to end it all.
Make no mistake: this is an unmitigated pile of narrative horseshit. Nothing makes any sense at all. Most of the humor is juvenile yet there are unexpectedly racy jokes and an ass shot at the beginning that probably gave every teenage boy in the theatre uncomfortable wood. All that said, you’ve got Buzz Aldrin (!) and a director who destroys shit better than a fat guy at an Asian buffet. You may walk out of here feeling like the first time you saw a particular kind of porn you thought you’d never like: guilty, dirty, horrified, shamed - yet strangely satisfied.
Transformers: Dark of the Moon - Synopsis, Part I
Transformers: Dark of the Moon - Synopsis, Part II
However you feel about bloated rock concept albums, it’s hard to argue that this isn’t the definitive one. The record produced a number of hits, a bizarre tour, and a few genuine moments of utterly incomprehensible bad-ass-ness, one of which occurs at the 4:30 mark here. Up until this point, The Wall has veered all over the fucked up map of Waters’ life, run through a gauntlet of abusive headmasters, doting mothers and vacuous girlfriends, some absurd, some poignant, all of them stewed in a pot of awkward ambivalence. Comfortably Numb, sweet and sad, begins to distill this mess into genuine pathos and beauty. At least that’s how it starts.
But then here, at 4:30 or so, just as Waters hammers a bass note so leaden and abused that he must have plucked the string with Australopithecus’ preserved femur, a note viciously kicked in the teeth and shoved into a storm drain, a note that floats for one wispy second like a severed head on a post, a stark warning of where you’re about to go – here, right here, this is where the record plunges over a cliff into a sea of dark madness. It’s a second or so of mood change so intense that when you hear it, you realize, FUCK, this is what this entire album has been leading up to. This is the killshot, the knockout, the epiphany. This is Alec Guinness staring at that goddamn bridge, mumbling “what have I done,” and collapsing.
Back when this record came out, it was, well, a record, and Comfortably Numb ended side three. You flipped it over after this to what was, in essence, a climax of destruction followed by a strange little denouement. But that moment, that change at 4:30, that’s the peak of this record for me. Gilmour follows it with possibly the most gorgeous, sinister solo of his career, and it fades into disaffection, alienation and insanity. Beautiful.