February 2012
1 post
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December 2011
1 post
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November 2011
1 post
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Prescott Pharmaceuticals Side Effects - Full List
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
...
October 2011
1 post
robdelaney:
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.”
September 2011
1 post
10 tags
August 2011
1 post
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July 2011
4 posts
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Transformers: Dark of the Moon - Synopsis, Part...
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...
7 tags
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June 2011
2 posts
4 tags
11 tags
The Green Lantern: A Synopsis
Green Lanterns are intergalactic security guards hired by a council of animatronic Estelle Gettys to patrol the universe, which has been evenly divided into 3,600 sectors, for which each Green Lantern is responsible. The animatronic Golden Girls sit perched atop mile-high barstools and render their decisions on universal security policy to some dude that looks like a cross between Erroll Flynn and...
May 2011
2 posts
6 tags
Thor: A Synopsis
Opening: Natalie Portman and that hot chick that Robert Rodriguez was boning for a while and Stellan Skarsgård (who is both sufficiently Nordic and sufficiently professorial to fulfill two purposes here) are out in the desert in New Mexico doing the astronomy equivalent of storm chasing and some big professional wrestler that looks kind like a skinny Nick Mangold lands in the dirt and they run...
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Today's Vinyl: Uncle Tupelo
Long before the mandolins took over and they were crowned the founding fathers of a new genre of music, Uncle Tupelo were three kids from Illinois who performed a jazz-ectomy on the Minutemen and grafted on folk and country to create a novel hybrid. Punk and country had been melded before, but almost always to humorous effect - this was serious, thoughtful, often sad music. The original trio...
March 2011
5 posts
“Aside from kitten memes and porn, schadenfreude is the dirty coal that keeps the...”
– Luke O’Neil’s Remembrance of Things Assed: How My Childhood Friend Became an Internet Laughingstock (via curator-of-curiosities)
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February 2011
1 post
4 tags
Today's Vinyl: Plain Wrap
The record nerd’s cocoon of willful obscurity was ruined years ago by the internet; whatever it is you’ve got secreted away in the closet, at least two of the three other people who also possess it have already created a site with hi-res images, FAQs and an extended, annotated review. Or, in this case, you discover that the short-lived southern California trio that released a...
November 2010
1 post
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October 2010
2 posts
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September 2010
1 post
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Today's Vinyl: The Who
Pete Townsend’s difficulty in penning a followup to Tommy forced The Who to release their first live record, the generically labeled (in a nod to bootlegers) Live at Leeds. After the Tommy tour and a performance at Woodstock, the band declined to sort through nearly a hundred hours of live recordings (and reportedly burned the tapes to prevent piracy), instead scheduling concerts at Leeds...
April 2010
1 post
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Today's Vinyl: Repo Man
Alex Cox’s Repo Man is one of those movies – like Blazing Saddles or Dr. Strangelove – that you probably wouldn’t enjoy watching with me. Whatever I don’t recite directly, I laugh at prematurely in anticipation, ruining any sense of surprise or wonder that you could otherwise experience. Maybe the off-key, dystopian take on white punk ennui appealed to a confused late-teen...
March 2010
3 posts
4 tags
Today's Vinyl: Led Zeppelin
Back when I was in middle school in southern California, the lost, lamented KMET would play “Led Zeppelin A-Z” once a year, which is exactly what it sounds like – all the band’s songs played in alphabetical order. One summer I sat down with a cassette deck and recorded the whole thing in preparation for an arduous family road trip to the Sierra Nevada mountains, where I was to...
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Today's Vinyl: Brian Eno-David Byrne
This platter provided many a freaked-out evening in a certain college dorm room near the UT campus. Combining obscure religious chants and sermons with a charging, percussion-heavy, loop-oriented sound, you could reasonably point to this record as a progenitor of electronica, IDM and other sample-based genres, as well as nearly everything Al Jourgensen ever recorded. I recall Peter Gabriel...
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Today's Vinyl: Roy Eldridge & Dizzy Gillespie
Beautiful day here and a fine morning for digging into the jazz archives. I was fortunate back in college to date a girl who worked with a professor whose vinyl jazz collection was damaged when his home flooded. He decided to unload anything that had visible water damage, so I picked up a stack of records that had a few stains on the sleeves but were otherwise in good shape (you can see the...
February 2010
9 posts
5 tags
Today's Vinyl: Pretenders
Go listen to this one again, all the way through, and tell me how many debut albums have been this good. Recorded in 1979 after the Nick Lowe-produced single for Stop your Sobbing, this record dropped in January of 1980 with a sound so fully-formed that it leaves you wondering how good the drugs really were around then. Mixing reggae, rock, punk, classic pop balladry and a freaking metric ton of...
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Today's Vinyl: Glass Eye
Austin’s Glass Eye got tagged with the “avant pop” label by local writers, but the group always felt like two separate bands to me: Kathy McCarty’s folk-inflected singer-songwriter tunes and Brian Beattie’s impossibly bottom-heavy nerdcore rock. I was as guilty as any other nerd of heading to the bar or the bathroom when one of McCarty’s plaintive paeans to...
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Today's Vinyl: Jane's Addiction (bootleg)
If, like me, you nearly crapped your pants when you saw Perry Farrell collaborating with 50 Cent and Kelly Rowland for an ESPN NCAA football intro a few years ago, you’ve either ignored the commercialization of everything fringe or you’ve clung to the nostalgic memory of Jane’s Addiction as a genre-bashing LA band who sung primarily about prostitutes, heroin, or prostitutes on...
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Today's Vinyl: Fripp & Eno
The great thing about ambient music is its broad application - it’s equally appealing to the massively stoned college student looking for a 3am freakout-stopper as it is to an aging, stressed-out technology guy trying to keep from physically threatening the next customer who calls him talking about how they really want a more “Web 2.0-ish” design for their next web store. At...
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Today's Vinyl: Sixteen Deluxe
If you were in Austin in the mid-90s, Sixteen Deluxe were the absolute shit, the band that was going to make it huge, Austin’s psychedelic retort to the Jesus and Mary Chain – heavier, fuzzier, louder, and more ass-kickingly in-your-face. The band did eventually make it big, so to speak; they signed with Warner Brothers and released Emits Showers of Sparks (now out of print), but the...
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Today's Vinyl: Genesis
After a week of extreme pain and nausea (kidney stones - they’re like childbirth for men!), let’s continue the sickness and unease with an ignominious lowlight in my collection: a limited-edition, foldout-sleeve, clear vinyl seven inch of quite possibly the worst song Genesis ever recorded (if not one of the worst songs of the Eighties) – the excruciating Invisible Touch...
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Today's Vinyl: Butthole Surfers
Forget about death metal, Norwegian black metal or any of the faux-horror-movie acts that entertain the Juggalo nation; the only band that ever really scared me – that made me fear not only for my physical safety but also my mental stability and grip on reality – were the Butthole Surfers. For a while during the late Eighties in Austin, a Butthole Surfers live show was an ugly, surreal trip into...
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Today's Vinyl: Robert Plant
Before we dive into the vintage Zeppelin archives, it’s worth visiting some of the cheesier ephemera that I collected during my decades-long obsession with everything Zep. In this case, that obsession encompassed the solo career of vocalist Robert Plant and the odd supergroup he assembled after Zeppelin’s demise, which included Phil Collins on drums. This Japanese 7-inch was probably...
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Today's Vinyl: Unicorn Magic
Austin has a rich tradition of indie bands with public substance abuse problems, and I’d put these gentlemen near the top of any list of severely inebriated performers. In their brief existence, the Jimmy Bradshaw-led Unicorn Magic regularly graced the inside stage at Emo’s with tales of magic, wonder and childhood joy, at least when they managed to finish the songs all the way...
January 2010
8 posts
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Today's Vinyl: Queen
When Queen released Jazz, I asked my mom for the album as a Christmas present. She went down to the mall – probably to Hastings or some other now-defunct mall record store – and, as she was paying for the record, the clerk asked her if it was a gift for her kid (I guess this implies that my mom didn’t look like your typical Queen fan in 1978, which is true; I think she was actually going...
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Today's Vinyl: Pete Townshend (picture disc!)
Pete Townshend’s All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes almost single-handedly got me through the latter years of high school. Why a record by an aging rock star largely concerned with the tribulations of aging rock stars would have enormous emotional resonance for a geeky high-school student is still beyond me to this day. Might have just been that the minor-key sadness of Slit Skirts...
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Today's Vinyl: Spoon
Caught Spoon last night at the ACL studios for a KUT taping, and this is a really a band at the top of their form. The show was fun, loose and dynamic; Daniel broke a string on Written in Reverse so we got to hear that one twice (I liked the broken string version better). I’m starting to think these boys might go somewhere.
The first time I saw Spoon was in an office building on Congress...
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Today's Vinyl: Aztec Camera
Backwards and Forwards is one of those weird 10-inch EPs that my Denon turntable doesn’t understand and tries to drop the needle in the middle of the second track. Aztec Camera were a Scottish, proto/thinking man’s Crowded House fronted by the dashing Roddy Frame, who went so far on this record to list height, eye color and other salient details for all the band members. This is...
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Today's Vinyl: MC 900 Ft Jesus
Long before the Spike Jonze-directed video for If I Only Had a Brain made him an MTV hit, Mark Griffin was an obscure Dallas MC purveying sample-heavy, mostly instrumental hip hop. I heard Born with Monkey Asses on George Gimarc’s wonderful Rock & Roll Alternative radio show and picked up this self-released EP, which preceded MC 900 Ft Jesus’ full-length debut, Hell with the Lid...
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Today's Vinyl: Scratch Acid
If nothing else, the Jesus Lizard reunion last year provided a clinic on stage diving, with the nearly 50-year old David Yow showing as little regard for his own health and safety as he did back in the eighties, when Austin’s Rabid Cat released this rude bit of noise. While the Washam/Sims sound isn’t quite the tight, mean power drill to the temple that it would become with the...
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Today's Vinyl: 9353
I spent a summer in a study abroad program in the former Yugoslavia back when I made the somewhat misguided decision to minor in Serbo-Croation at Texas. There I met a hardcore nut from D.C. named Bill who wore big black ass-kicking boots and brought a box of tapes of some of the most random shit I’d ever heard. I played him Camper Van Beethoven’s Black Flag cover (Wasted) and he...
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Chub Rock
Why isn’t there a well-defined genre of music called “Fat Guy Rock”? I’ve got it in my head. Obvious candidates include Tad, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Meatloaf and Screaming Trees. You could throw in the Minutemen and Hüsker Dü since D. Boone and Bob Mould were both big boys during their heyday.
Current fat guy-fronted acts include Fucked Up and Les Savy Fav, both of...