The Cabin in The Woods

Went and saw this movie yesterday with my buddy Dan. It was a real riot. College students travel to a remote cabin in one of the most hackneyed set ups ever. The kids in the movie are the brainy chick, the slutty chick, the jock/horn dog type, the intellectual type and of course, the stoner/nerd. Everybody is good looking.
Some dudes in lab coats run the show from some underground bunker. Lots of blood is spilled. These guys are numbed out by their government robot jobs. They see a bigger picture they must adhere to while inflicting unending pain on their hapless subjects. It had a little bit of an Evil Dead vibe at first, but that gets out of the way pretty quick. There is some great dark humor and quite a bit of gore. Mermen are pretty fucking hideous.
A fun horror flick. I recommend. At least one hick has horrible skin. I suggest an oatmeal facial scrub.
Also contains a nice young lady making out with a mounted wolf's head as well as a pretty funny motorcycle stunt. A sexual encounter takes place in a rather moldy, mossy environment that could only result in chiggers.
Dust your nuggets people. It's summer.

Let Me Tell You About Shearwater

I picked up the new Shearwater album "Animal Joy" and damn if it isn't great, beautiful music.
It's downright fruity in the best way possible. To me this music is about dirt and nature. I have no other way
to describe it. First some background...
I got into these guys a little late around the time of their "Golden Archipelago" record and on first listen it failed to impress. I had read a lot of great reviews for their albums "Palo Santo" and "Rook" which I admittedly have still not heard. At the time I had purchased "Golden Archipelago" it was a little too complicated and refined for my moods, but then something strange and terrible happened. My dad became terminally ill and started going down hill very fast. I had my iPod on shuffle one day while trying to find a parking spot at the hospital and the first song "Meridian" came on and I just sat there for a while and really listened to it for the first time. I was kind of blown away by it. It took on a dramatic, soothing and cathartic vibe and I was moved.
The music of this band is a bit more refined than what i am normally into. I generally like raw, emotional records, but these guys give you that in a majestic way. I kind of got a Van Der Graaf Generator vibe from it.
It was theatrical and conceptual and little bit melodramatic. 
What happened not too long after the consummation of my love for this group was pretty bizarre. At my wife's behest, she suggested I go out one night to blow off some steam. As it happened, Shearwater was actually playing a gig in Tallahassee that night. So I went out to see them and Damien Jurado and proceeded to get supremely fucked up. I was due the next morning to visit an oncologist with my father and family to receive what we all feared would be his death sentence. In this heightened emotional state, I took it all in. I got to meet Thor Harris, Shearwater/Swans drummer who turned out to be a swell guy. Steve Dollar was kind enough to introduce me to him. I watched the whole show and also talked for a short bit with Jonathan Meiburg, the leader of the band and its lead vocalist. He has the kind of dramatic vocal style that generally goes missing in a lot of so called indie circles. He has a technically rich and powerful voice.
People don't generally sing in that kind of serious style anymore. It was refreshing. Anyway, he was nice enough to listen to what were probably incoherent meanderings. That band cleansed my soul and gave me a terrifying night. I pretty much had a monumental breakdown later on that night...my God.
"Animal Joy" is their new album and is a little more straightforward and dare I say "rocking" in parts. I quite like it. I recommend it. Great songs and musicality. Proggy even. So you know I'm down! I'm a sensitive man.

I Went and Saw "The Descendants"

Beautifully filmed in Hawaii with Beau Bridges looking like a charred husk.

George Clooney takes whiteness in this movie to a new level. Matthew Lillard's gums win best supporting actor nomination from me. Judy Greer is cute as always. It's hard to develop empathy for these characters. I guess no matter how rich and affluent you are, your heart is always going to get screwed at some point. The kid actors are pretty good in this film and Robert Forster punches one of them in the face. Deservedly so. It's hard to have resolution when the source of all your love and agony is in a coma. People are money grubbing snakes that will fuck around on you with Matthew Lillard. Proceed through life with caution. Bonus points to Rob Huebel (Children's Hospital) for placing his nuts in a jar next to the bed.

Blu-Ray review: Grand Prix

One of the greatest car racing films ever made stars James Garner. He's a real douche bag in this movie and treats everyone like shit. Even in the bonus features he's threatening to throw people/extras blocking the shot into a canal! What an animal. The Rockford Files was great. Jessica Walter (Arrested Development/Archer) is astonishingly beautiful in this movie although she's kind of a treacherous. She bones James Garner's character while her husband is healing up from a horrible crash injury. The racing scenes are amazing as are the location shots and it brings us back to an amazing time in auto racing history before it was destroyed by rednecks.

Beautifully photographed. The transfer is super clear and the colors really pop. Once again everybody has severe nicotine addictions and drink alcohol constantly. The 60's!!!

There is an amazing crash scene where a dummy flies into a tree. A lot of the racing scenes are incredibly realistic as they used real drivers and the actors themselves did a lot of their own driving. They say Garner could have actually gone on to competition he got so good. What a man!
The only film that competes with this is "Le Mans" which is also incredible, but a little more atmospheric. I heard McQueen was originally involved in this movie, but dropped out due to lack of creative control.
Both movies are worth watching.

While Stricken I Watched THE GUNS OF NAVARONE on Blu-Ray

Is there any movie in which Gregory Peck doesn't look like a smug prick in it?

I must apologize, I have been deathly ill for a week. This film was on price cut at the local Satanic Big Box

store so I picked it up. I needed something to feverishly go in and out of consciousness to. I barely made it out of there without passing out in the aisles. As of this moment of posting I am sweating and watching this hilarious classic. My favorite part so far is when they describe these guns of Navarone and in the background the huge fake canons fire. Peck looks like he's had a cigarette surgically attached to his lip. There's a guy that looks like Fred Grandy (Gopher ala Love Boat). Everything is "bloody" this and "bloody" that when any Englishmen are on the screen. This film is my second or third "impossible, suicidal" mission movie I've watched in the last month. Not sure what that's about.

This blu-ray print is beautiful and it is so lovely to see real landscape shots instead of CGI.

Whoahh, Anthony Quinn  keeps slapping a Ringo Starr/Freddie Mercury impersonator. Highly recommended. 

I remember watching this on late night cable tv a few years ago and thinking "those guys are having a real hard time getting to those cannons. This is taking forever."

Also, don't ever eat these. These are horrible. Flavorless mush.

Blu-Ray review: Days of Heaven

An incredible film from the late 70's by Terrence Malick with music from Ennio Morricone.

I'm not usually into tragic love stories, but this Criterion Collection issue of Malick's film from 1978 really moved me. Richard Gere stars as a murderous steel worker in the early 1900's. He confidently sends his boss to a dirt nap(although it was an accident) and escapes with his girlfriend to Texas where they take up working for a farmer. Apparently, the foreman thinks they suck and immediately becomes suspicious of them. Sam Shepherd stars as the good looking farm owner with the crooked teeth. He lives in the "obviously rich" house.

He falls in love with Gere's girlfriend. Gere and his girl are travelling under the guise that they're brother and sister. This enables Gere to cook up a scam when he realizes the farmer has some horrendous disease. The farmer is seduced by Gere's "sister" and they get married. See where this is going? Anyway, a whole bunch of horrible shit happens after that. On a bright note: No gerbils were harmed during filming.

The cinematography in this movie is amazing with lots of wide angled landscapes that are really beautiful. The movie has a sort of dream like quality that I enjoy. Dialogue is often minimal and a good portion of the film is narrated by a young girl. Life sure was hard back then, you betcha.

I haven't seen much of Malick's work. I did see the "Thin Red Line" about 10 years ago and really liked it. I did not make the connection until I read the bio in the booklet that came with the dvd. When I think about that movie now I see a lot of the same stylistic qualities at hand.

I watched "Blow Out" on Blu-Ray

I am big fan of "Blow Out" although I'm not a huge DePalma fan. How about "Snake Eyes"? John Travolta is great as a movie sound dude with a shotgun microphone that likes to record owls. Some of the camera work is amazing in that they used split screen techniques to keep the subject in the background in focus with subjects in the foreground. Nancy Allen is kind of terrible in her dipshit character's role, but I think that was the point.her character is both exploiter and the exploited. The film within a film stuff at the beginning that kind of takes the piss out of 'Friday the 13th/Halloween' teen sex horror films is pretty funny. John Lithgow appears as a total psycho. The type of role he reprises so brilliantly almost 30 years later on "Dexter". He really is a creep in this. Dennis Franz cannot possibly own a t-shirt that isn't stained.
The music score in this film is kind of insane. It careens from huge orchestral dramatic flourishes to low grade early 80's synth cheese with a LOT of sexy saxophone.
It is essentially a sound recordist industrial film, political murder mystery and slasher movie rolled into one.
The ending is both depressing, ridiculous and fantastic. I found a lot of the sound recording stuff fascinating. Travolta chain smokes in a fucking hospital for crying out loud. Almost none of the sound editing techniques or smoking scenes are relevant today. DePalma was brilliant in evoking the kind of weird, grainy film shots in the political assassination scene that reminds me of the Kennedy films by Zapruder.
The Criterion film transfer to Blu-Ray is amazing. I love seeing all of these older films with a lot of detail revealed, especially location shots.

ROCK DISCO, ANYONE?

When disco infiltrated  the mainstream in the mid-70's it seemed everybody was jumping on the bandwagon.
As a matter of argument, I am going to say just about everybody in popular music started in with the whole hi-hat swish-swish beat. I actually like some disco songs and think that history has been kinder to that fad than people thought it would be. I always find it interesting when people thoroughly believe something sucks ass and yet they continue to support it by buying records. As recent proof I offer up Creed. Does anybody actually admit to liking them? How 'bout that Limp Bizkit come back? Not so much. The fascination with the disco thing...it seems just about everybody made a disco album or at least a disco informed song. Kiss made "I Was Made For Loving You". It's kinda got a disco beat (ghost played by Anton Fig while the Catman recovered from psychic hemorrhoid surgery), but it's really just a hard rock/pop song disguised as disco. Ace Frehley just couldn't take it and he often referred to it as "rock disco" just to keep his street cred. For the real disco/rock abomination I look no further than another Lou Reed atrocity known as "The Bells". Anybody throw that piece of poo on lately? I dare you to sit through the prime choice cut of "Disco Mystic" or the tightest jam of the century to put some slide in your glide and some dip in your hip (thanks RRM), "Stupid Man". Sounds like Clint Eastwood walking into a gay bar in "The Eiger Sanction". That's a film that in my mind takes homophobia/homoeroticism to a weird level while Eastwood gets all sweaty with George Kennedy. Anybody that has listened to Lou's "LULU" album knows he's still got the touch.
 

I Watched Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol

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...

you guessed it: STRING BEANS.

Prancin' Paul says "Merry Christmas to all!!! AAAhhh...Yeaaaayy!!!"

This arrived in my mail yesterday. A real fine surprise (thanks SR). Just what the Hell is Paul prancin' about this time?

I WISH YOU A HAPPY HOLIDAY SEASON!

MAY ALL YOUR DREAMS COME TRUE IN THE NEW YEAR!

What If There Wasn't Any Beer?

ZIMA

   

 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.

 

Bacon Ray- The Swab

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.

The Swab.zip

I Didn't Care for This Guy.

What a douche.

Time to get Il.

Rock and Roll Rot Gut

This is the lamest...is this what killed Bon Scott? I don't understand this new trend. 

Pairs well with formaldehyde.
I recommend a penicillin chaser
Killed by death.

The lunatic is on the crapper. Don't give me that goody good bullshit.

Pairs well with Cheetos.

With bonus existential horror.

Hints of Tawny Kitaen, hair spray and bologna.

The Pete Townshend/Alex Van Halen String Bean Connection

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.

Review: Winnebago Man

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!

CAN and "What Happened to Your Sense of Adventure, Son?"

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.

God Bless Ozzy Osbourne.

 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.

Movie reviews. Who cares?

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.

Welcome!

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.