Last Wednesday I went to go see MI:4. I found it to be an alright action packed ham sandwich of a film.
Apparently, Tom Cruise is the kind of guy who likes to drink one beer and then leave the room.
Russians appear to be lacking in curiosity and will do whatever it takes to not follow up on weird sounds emanating from a hallway that is normally very quiet.
One of the co-stars, Paula Patton, is very beautiful, but looks like she could break you in half. She may be Lyle Alzado reincarnated as a black supermodel. That or Rashida Jones on mega-steroids. Mr. Cruise may have been wearing 5 inch lifts in his loafers.
Simon Pegg appears as a "nerd" and one that will not shut his pie chute. Jeremy Renner almost gets baked by a microchip.
Some of the stunts are great and the CGI is generally very good. The situations these people find themselves in though are beyond improbable and they never could arrive in time to do any of the things they do without the use of a time travel machine or a Jetta that travels at the speed of light.
A lingering question: If Tom Cruise is so ripped and ready to kick ass, why can't he kick the ass of a dude that looks like he is in his late 50's, early 60's? I think there may be several nuclear briefcase to the face and nuts fight sequences in this. I cannot be sure. The stunt on the Dubai tower though is pretty amazing. Also, parking is completely fucked up in that country.
In other news, I am a proponent of these things. Can't live without them. Good for clearing out remnants of...
The answer to this question would have been "Zima"? Really, this is what would have been created? Where's the goddamned foam?
I tried this stuff once and it tasted like lemonade. I would suggest that it doesn't taste too different from those Smirnoff ICE or Bacardi
things. The problem is that you've had 4 of these by the time you've realized it. And then there was this alternative...
Anybody remember Pina Colada Malt Liquor? Gurgle.
Ice Cube escapes in his car to visit the loneliest fridge in the world.
Taking a break from recording "The Swab" 1998-Georgia Street Studios
Left to Right: Bruce, Merlin, Brent, Mike
Center: Taco Maker
The link to the Zip file is after my long winded history lesson at the bottom of the post.
An interesting story...about 6 months ago I spoke with Merlin Mann about trying to post our catalog for Bacon Ray and possibly remixing "The Swab". I have been in the process of going through master tapes to try to find and salvage some of them as they've all been subject to less than ideal storage conditions including several flooding incidents. The mold is a-growin'. Merlin was game so I went about trying to find the tapes. I have not located them as of yet and in my busy schedule I kind of gave up for the time being. Oh, I am sure they're down there in one of the 8 huge bins of ADAT master tapes (cringe!!!). I'm just not so sure they will be playable.
Out of nowhere and in a stroke of luck/coincidence I saw a post by Dave Murphy on Facebook about how he was remastering this cd. A more accurate depiction would be "Mastering". Thanks also to Pete Butler for caring enough to get this to Dave.
Recorded mainly in '97-'98, "The Swab" was an album released alongside the implosion of Bacon Ray. We worked really hard on this record, but it was recorded in a rather arduous process as Georgia Street Studios was in the midst of falling apart, band members were going through troubling times and the end was nigh for the band. So we were unable to give a proper mix and mastering job to this album as opposed to "The Golden Master" which was a mammoth project that we spent a lot of time and effort putting together. We did this one mostly ourselves with some tracking and mixdown assistance from Tommy Hamilton and some guest spots on keys and sax from Afshin Beheshti. Because of these situations, some indifference to the end and my inexperience and tin ears for monitor mixes, it turned out kind of thin sounding and the levels from song to song were really all over the place. We ended up pressing maybe a few hundred cds on the cheap and doing a black and white cover.
Dave Murphy...we owe you big time. You have really done a great job remastering this.
Honestly, I have not listened to this record much past it's original date. I had to go back and relearn some stuff from it when Bacon Ray did a great reunion gig at the Down Under about 6 or 7 years ago (it's been that long!?) and at that time I was less than happy with how it sounded, but I thought the material was good.
What struck me was that this record was pretty dark in spots and I think the people that were into us thought of us as kind of a goofy bunch of dudes writing songs about Metal Magicians and Pantsmen. Stuff like that was still part of our overall approach, but something darker was brewing in this batch.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy it. Hard to believe this album is 12 years old! The link is below.
Growing up and dreaming of being a musician/rock God enabled me to read a lot of shitty music magazines. I was fascinated by some of the hair metal mags such as Circus and Hit Parader. They weren't always promoting RATT and bands of their ilk when they started, but that's about all they had in their pages in the early to mid-80's. Pasty coked out morons with pointy guitars singing about dealin' with the Devil and shoveling as much of the aforementioned Dark Lord's dandruff up their hoovers adorned the pages of these magazines. Everybody looked like they were packing a Vlasic in their spandex. Spinal Tap in the extreme.
The antithesis to these magazines in my small universe were OPTION and MUSICIAN. I found out about both The Replacements and Husker DU through Musician and they usually had some pretty good interviews. OPTION gave me Sonic Youth around their "Bad Moon Rising" period. After all Musician gave us the immortal review of GTR's first album which read simply "SHT". Whatever happened to Max Bacon?
I hear he's toiling in a GTR tribute band as Max Bacos. Get it?
To put a meandering story to bed....
I was reading in Musician a SERIOUS story about Van Halen where Alex Van Halen was asked about hearing loss.
He said he never wanted to get as bad as Pete Townshend. He said you could walk up to Townshend and say "Hey Pete, I'm fucking your wife" to which Townshend would respond "I like string beans".
The end.
Maybe this never happened, but that article has haunted me for over 25 years so please wear your earplugs.
Winnebago Man. In which a former spokesman for Winnebago's video outtakes go viral. The guy acts like total freak in those clips. Hilarious stuff, but he is humiliated by their popularity. The film makers track him down and he is a total curmudgeon giving Kazynski a run for his money. The most intriguing guy in this film is his buddy who seems like a serial killer with a fake moustache. The hipsters in San Fran love his cranky ass. He hates Dick Cheney. I give him an extra star for his Cheney fixation.Bonus review!: In full disclosure I also watched part of "Love and other Drugs" today just to check out Anne Hathaway's boobs. Obviously the best part about that contrived dump of a film. Gyllenhall is a scum bag hunk in it. His abs are to rock hard as mine are to soft serve. Nobody got boned in a tent. Have I ever mentioned how much I hate Oliver Platt? I guess I don't need to now.
Boooooo!
Original Cover Art to Can's Tago Mago. Featured on the 40th anniversary edition.
I got into CAN around the time I had just started playing in Ultraboy. This is probably around early 1992 about 6 months after the Singing Spoons had broken up. Kelly Shane and I were both working at Vinyl Fever around that time and he was ordering in all kinds of awesome import stuff. I had read some stuff about these guys and liked what I heard about their approach before I had listened to a single note.I had him order me a bunch of their albums. It was expensive and I think only a comp was available in the US at the time. Well, I got WAY into them. We even did a total freak out cover of "You Doo Right" in Ultraboy. I have no idea what it must have sounded like. We only played it once and that was at a show at the Down Under.
A little background on how I decide to jump in on a band...
I am often drawn into music through an interesting album cover or just an interview/buzz about a band. That doesn't happen much anymore because 1) I am older and have more listening experience which tends to dull the excitement and 2) I just don't have as much time for discovery between raising a kid and working a soul destroying 9 to 5 job.3) With the internet it easy for me to get into overload mode and just give up.
Could this be the answer to my long standing question of "What happened to you?" For example, how does someone go from digging on Zappa and the Mothers to listening to Bonnie Raitt in their BMW (I think they included a copy of "Nick of Time" with every E-Series circa 1990-1992)? Is there a natural law that determines Neil Diamond in your middle aged life? But this is all a digression and I kind of dig 'ol Neil.
There are all kinds of things in life that can rob you of listening ambition...not all of them bad, by the way.
Anyway, back to CAN. I was always way into "prog rock", but I was also into all that 80's shit on SST. I had pretty much exhausted all of my options for both those things that were worthwhile by the early 90's or at least I thought I had. Enter CAN. It had never dawned on my dumb ass to check out late 60's/early 70's bands from Germany, Italy, etc. As a matter of fact a lot of these band's work was languishing in obscurity except for hard core freaks. Later in the 90's, this stuff kind of came way back into fashion with US reissue campaigns and readily available imports on the french Spalax label.
I found CAN's brew of jamming and heavy, rhythmic work-outs pretty intoxicating and a balm to my psychotic turmoil at the time. I was more into the early Malcom Mooney period when I first got into them. He was the vocalist on "Monster Movie", "Soundtracks" and "Delay 1968". Mooney could best be described as "ranty". After he flipped they got Damo Suzuki who is totally hippy dippy and makes pretty terrible fashion choices. They really started extending outwards and it got harder to tell what instruments were playing. The bassist Holger Czukay started in with some awesome deep grooves and went to work with the razor blade on the tapes. Sounds like they smoked the tapes and then spilled bong water all over the mixing board.
The drummer Jaki Liebezeit is just fantastic and plays in these super hypnotic grooves and repetitive patterns.
I cannot recommend this reissue enough and hope they do more like it for their catalog. They have reissued the catalog a few times over the last 20 years, but I am hoping for definitive versions in 2012.
If you're enthused by Can or want to give them a try, avoid their late 70's stuff. It is a little more commercial sounding and Czukay is more in the role of producer than bassist on some of it.
Not the doc we've been waiting for, but still worth seeing. Be forewarned, it's kinda not good, but there are some clips where he's just zonked. In a nutshell, the guy is a lovable clown, but at the height of his popularity, thanks to MTV, he was a drooling tool. He and his family drooled all the way to the bank. Oddly, he sounds like dog shit on most of the solo clips. I do not have high hopes for him in the Sabbath reunion as he's pretty much shot. I will still go if opportunity knocks just to be able to pay tribute to that legendary influence. emphasis on the word "pay". You'd think that they would be able to get a few other stories out of some of these goobers that haven't been all over VH1 Behind the Music. God bless me for being able to finish this. 2 stars.Wow, what a trailer.
I like to go see movies every Wednesday if possible. Here in Tallahassee, Fl at the AMC in the constantly deteriorating Tallahassee Mall, the first shows are usually cheap and there is almost no one there. The budget theatre across the street smells like piss and is no longer offering movies at enough of a cut rate to put up with the migraine inducing color scheme, sticky floors and shitty prints/pants of the other patrons. I will be bringing over a bunch of reviews of films and/or tv shows that I used to post to Facebook. Enjoy.
Someone is making me do this. You can expect absurd,pretentious and/or cranky postings about popular culture. Short movie reviews that will really take your breath away as you ask yourself "Why do I feel like my IQ just dropped 100 points while reading this?". Also, you will think longingly of string beans.
