David Lynch is so awesome

I doubt the iPhone music and tag at the end was his idea (smacks of smartass internet geekery to me) – nonetheless, this is so great:

It feels like 1990 all over again

What’s this?  Megadeth wrote a thrash song again? Holy crap.

This “Headcrusher” could be a head fake – but if it’s not, and the rest of the album sounds basically like this, I’m gonna be one happy listener this September 15th.  (Which is when the album comes out.  I guess I could have said that before.)

The reviews section

New music, movies, and books this week:

Music gets a B.  Certain new albums by old fogeys are transparently overrated with an A, but in two years we will forget this and say the new new album is the best one in two decades.  One obvious piece of crap gets a C-.

Movies get 3.5 stars out of 5.  Johnny Depp’s awesome face is worth an extra half a star.  Michael Bay’s explosions are worth -1.5 stars.

Books – who cares, nobody is reading this section.  Just like nobody reads books.  Several made-up-looking titles get raves, why not.

For you folks that still have your emusic subscriptions

The site has just added some huge chunks of music from the RCA Records and Sony back catalogues.  I just downloaded Gil Scott-Heron’s classic album “Pieces of a Man,” which is one of those “love to own it but not sure I want to pay new-CD-prices for it” things for me.  I plan to plunder this collection as mercilessly as my current subscription will allow.  I know this is part of the change that is jacking up subscription prices – hopefully you, like me, just renewed recently and have months ahead to enjoy this stuff at the usual rate, before they start yanking your wallet out through your nose.

I will also point out that while emusic’s new pricing plan screws over nearly everybody in most ways, here’s one way that it doesn’t: yours truly has four albums up on emusic that are stuffed with tracks (19, 19, 23 and 29 songs each).  And thanks to emusic’s new frustrating pricing policy, you can now download any one of these for 12 “credits” instead of the 19, 23, or 29 downloads it used to cost you.  So… there’s that.

The face maker

Diane,

They call it “Face of the Future” but I prefer the Face Maker, or perhaps El Faceinator.  Whatever you wanna call it, it’s pretty awesome.  I present (for the gratification of those who know me) four of my best faces: these are top from left to right, me as a child (with facial hair!) and me as an old man; then bottom from left to right, me as an East Asian and me as a Botticelli painting.

El Faceinator is quite easy to use, so waste your afternoon playing with it.  And I must say, that child simulation of me is scarily accurate.  Which makes me think that old me isn’t going to be getting a lot of chicks.

One of my best songs, part 6

Diane,

Bet you thought I forgot about this.  Didn’t ya?  (Didn’tcha?  Dincha?  Dinya?  Dimsum?  What the fuck is happening?)

Well, I didn’t.  Whether or not you cared, whether or not you even remembered about whether or not I was going to forget, I did NOT forget, and here I am to rub.  It.  In.  Your.  FACE.

Today’s entry is a sub-two-minute slice of New Age, Windham Hill treacle called (with appropriate hippiefied, leftist solemnity) “Pacific.”  It’s Yanni and John Tesh banging out a soundtrack for a National Geographic special on whales.  It lacks irony or hipster quotient; just listening to this will turn you into a sexless old person.

Having completed the undersell, I will move on to the story.  I had a wife at one time, and she was a sweetheart, but it was not meant to be.  We had our good times though, and she left me with a lot of pleasant memories.  One of the frontrunners in that pack is this one: her brother-in-law, the amiable goofball who loved to eat pizza with me, drink MGD near me (I stuck to IBC), and help me record music on my 4-track tape recorder.  Ed was a stand-up guy who I talked to for some years after my marriage fell to bits, and one of the things we always talked about was our stint as Social Animals.

Social Animals – precious, right?  SOCIAL ANIMALS IS PEOPLE!  This project was a way for me to exercise the calmer parts of my creativity.  It was also a way to meet Ed halfway, or maybe two-thirds of the way; y’see, Ed was really into Pink Floyd.  When a guy’s primary influence is David Gilmore’s glacial, somewhat bluesy solos, you have to tamp down on those punk and grindcore urges.  There was no way I was going to get Ed to blast out 150 BPM riffs on songs with titles like “Our Mothers Tried to Abort Us.”  So instead we fired up a lava lamp (really), busted out the keyboard and congos (really), and acted like we were too high to care about things like vocals or song structures – even though neither of us was exactly Snoop Dogg or Matthew McConaughey.  In the few years Julie & I were together, and a few years after that, Social Animals cranked out five tapes full of aural wallpaper – to borrow a Brian Eno-ism.  It would be hipping it up too much to say we approached the ambient excursions of Aphex Twin, though that was in fact an influence on me; closer to the truth is that we put Aphex, Floyd, and various New Age “sound of the rainforest” CDs in a blender and came up with a palatable, if often bland, fruit smoothie of music.

But it’s still far and away the most relaxing shit I’ve ever put my imprimatur on.

This “Pacific” is from the very last Social Animals tape, so it follows my split with Julie and stands in the middle of the fading end of my relationship with Ed.  (Nothing bad went down there; I think things simply went their natural course and we eventually just stopped talking.  I imagine if I ran into him today though, we’d still share a hearty handshake and a lot of fond reminiscing, and might end up recording another one of these things.)  The song concept was simple and pretentious, which marks it as prime Social Animals crap: I recorded a very stripped down keyboard track of a synth pad playing two New Age-y chords over & over; then Ed and I each took a run at a guitar solo for it.  His version became “Atlantic” and mine, “Pacific.”  And it’s going to sound egotistical of me, but I think mine won.  This is one of the best bits of guitar playing I ever did.  Technical proficiency is absent – as it basically always is, when I play – but I tapped into my inner Mark Knopfler and found some deep well of lyricism (or something) that made two boring chords sound kind of lovely.  It’s strange to say this about a piece of music that I played and wrote entirely on my own, but this reminds me of Ed more than anything he was actually involved in.  It reminds me of a whole time in my life that he was a huge part of.  It makes me a little sad and wistful.  It makes me hungry for deep dish from Giordano’s and a frosty bottle of root beer.

Here it is.

Postscript: “Pacific” was used by some local filmmakers for the closing scene of a short movie they made about a hitman (or something).  It was not a great movie, but it was neat to see someone just trying to do something like that, and it was nice that they saw something in this song and decided to use it.  I never did get a copy of that movie, but I’m satisfied with my memory of it, I think.

Here there be downloads

Various albums of mine have finally made it online in digital download format.  You can find them at the links below.  Brazen plea for your assistance: if you contribute any user reviews or include these albums in content lists on any of these sites, I’ll be forever in your debt.*  That kind of thing is what may push this endeavor from pure loss to only marginal loss for me.

* Actual time I will be in your debt: seventy minutes.

1.99 Millers: Drink Your Way Out of This One (vol. 1)

Download from

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1.99 Millers: Drink Your Way Out of This One (vol. 2)

Download from

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The Insaniacs: 29 Goddamn Phat Tracks

Download from

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Breakfast Jones: Consolidation

Download from

John Locke: bold tragedy or show-destroying misstep? Or neither?

That’s the controversy raging around the internet (or the “Lost”-centric parts of it, anyway) since last week’s fifth season finale, “The Incident.”  And I don’t know if we’ll have an answer until NEXT May… if ever.

A little background.  John Locke was practically the face of “Lost.”  He was an all-day sucker – a guy conned out of his kidney by a father who popped in and out of his life only for the organ harvest; a guy who would listen to almost anyone who told him he was special; a guy who basically worshipped an island, mainly because it restored his ability to walk after an attempt on his life left him with a crushed spine.  On the other hand, Locke was a mystic shaman and all-around badass – a knife-collector and -thrower; a hunter and tracker; someone who seemed uniquely in tune with the island and its secrets.  From the beginning there was this split in Locke, and we “Lost” fans were all waiting for him to step up and be handed the key to the kingdom.  He seemed destined for greatness.

And then his corpse tumbled out of a metal box, unceremoniously plopped on to the sand.

The beauty of that reveal – in a purely mechanical sense – was that Locke was killed a long time ago.  Locke was strangled in a brutal and ugly fashion midway through season 5, right in front of our eyes.  And well before that, the big reveal at the end of season 4 was Locke’s placid, embalmed mug lying in a coffin.  As shocking as those moments were, I don’t think many of us really thought he was gone.  When he was resurrected by the island, it seemed like destiny welcoming him with open arms.  THIS character can’t die.  THIS character must have redemption.  Yes, they titled a recent episode “Dead is Dead.”  But that was just a fakeout… wasn’t it..?  Knowledgeable characters like Ben Linus and Richard Alpert expressed degrees of doubt about the new Locke.  Ben all but said “I don’t think this is the same guy.”  There were heavy-handed hints like the fact that during “Dead is Dead,” Locke and the mysterious shape-shifting smoke monster never occupied the screen at the same time.  But no, we all said.  That’s a red herring.  They WANT us to think Locke isn’t Locke.

As it turns out, the writers let us fool ourselves.  It was – again, just mechanically – a masterstroke.  They let us talk ourselves out of the possibility that Locke wasn’t himself any more.  They fed us scenes like the new Locke eating fruit on the beach, staring at the ocean – just like the old Locke.  They showed us Locke extending a sympathetic hand to Sun over her separation from her husband, and Terry O’Quinn even laid on the old heartwarming crinkle-eyes.

Ooh, that’s playing dirty.

They fooled us good, yes they did.  But what does this mean for “Lost”?  Is dead REALLY dead?  Is Locke really gone, and in his place just an amorphous immortal being with a prediliction for tormenting and judging the lesser humans drawn to the island by his nemesis, Jacob?  We still have O’Quinn but we don’t have Locke, and the more I dwell on that fact, the more it stings.  The implications are crushing.  Locke may have just been a sucker all along.  He may have just been a sap who was being fed messages by the island’s dark half, who was eagerly setting himself up for his own downfall.  He may have died without redemption in a dirty hotel room – his suicide attempt interrupted, only for the man who “saved” him to murder him anyway.

I can’t judge the ultimate meaning or value of this plot thread yet because frankly, it’s just too huge.  It dwarfs everything the show has ever done before.  If this is it for Locke – if dead is REALLY dead – then the writers have huge, brass balls, and they have definitely earned the Glengarry leads.  These guys are surely closers.  But the thing about closers is: sometimes they play dirty.  Sometimes they promise you a beautiful piece of land, and you show up and find it’s a worthless patch of hardscrabble dirt in the middle of nowhere.  Sometimes what they sell you is a tragedy disguised as a redemption story.

John: hope to see you – the real you – again next season.

Universal plans to remake “Videodrome”

The story is here on Ain’t It Cool News.  All I can say to this is… give me a fucking break.  Some movies are so distinctive and bizarre that there is no reason to ever remake them – they stand outside of time; they can’t be dated, exactly, because they were utterly anomalous to begin with.  “Carnival of Souls,” for example (can’t you see that Michael Bay-ed up with Scarlett Johannson as the buxom young dead lass, and modern rock hits of 2002 replacing the original lame-o organ score?  oh yes!); or “Blue Velvet” (what “Blue Velvet” needs is less Dennis Hopper acting like a freak and more Jessica Biel in her underpants, am I right, people?  …no, I am not.)  “Videodrome” is another such a movie, as are most by Cronenberg.  Universal: do the right thing and leave this in development hell.

1.99 Millers remix

It’s done.  Live drums have replaced stale samples, somewhat good sound has replaced somewhat bad sound, but otherwise this is basically the same slab of alt country/Americana/rock as it ever was.  Oh, except the cover art, which is a little shinier:

Click here for volume 1, and here for volume 2.

There are no bonus tracks as previously suggested, because it now looks like the Millers will be releasing a follow-up EP/short album instead.  That should be done in June, if I had to guess.

Also of note: both volumes of “Drink Your Way Out Of This One” will be appearing on emusic.com, iTunes, Amazon.com, Napster, and other legal music download services in the near future (2-6 weeks depending on the site).  The Insaniacs album “29 Goddamn Phat Tracks” and the Breakfast Jones compilation “Consolidation” will also be appearing.  Tell your friends.  Download revenues enable me to afford more stuff, and don’t you think my next project should feature a $3000 Gibson?  Or a mound of cocaine with a hooker half-buried in it?  I can’t rock right without money, people.