The Explosive Generation

And this makes me cry because I will be on the east coast just 2 weeks later.

“Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness.”
Anatole France

I just got back from the most amazing 90 minute deep tissue massage/steam bath. I feel like I’m on drugs (or something like a happy bowl of jello). I’m gonna sleep really amazing tonight. It was a gift from Mandy. Yeah!

It was her birthday this weekend, so I treated her to an old-school dinner Friday at The Pantry (with the stated intention of then driving up the coast). However, given the fact that we first met right next door at the Hotel Figueroa bar…I whimsically suggested that we revisit it since we hadn’t been since.

**I guess I should also state here that this was all an elaborate ruse as I had booked a room there earlier in the day (during my lunch hour) and filled it up full of flowers, wine, birthday banners and much more.***

So we did enter the bar and had a drink. Upon our departure (which I had urged, as we still had to drive up the coast!)…I initiated an “impromptu scavenger hunt” within the hotel lobby (where I had hid prizes earlier in the day)…one prize led to another until we were in front of the hotel room door. Amanda, completely baffled (as I said I planted these items during a trip to the restroom…was still searching for the last prize when I pushed her into a room, it all suddenly became clear. [the lighting, the flowers, etc…]

I scored A LOT of points with that one I’ve been told!

About the hotel…Foder’s says: “On the outside, it’s Spanish Revival; on the inside, this 1926, 12-story hotel is a mix of Southwestern, Mexican, and Mediterranean styles, with earth tones, hand-painted furniture, and wrought-iron beds. You can lounge around the pool and bubbling hot tub surrounded by tropical greenery”.You can visit their website. And be sure to check out the Moroccan suites too. It’s pretty sweet!

Allegedly haunted: “though there doesn’t appear to be a specifically identified spirit, a number of strange things allegedly occur here. Eerie sounds are said to emanate throughout the hallways and the rooms, televisions turn on by themselves at night and will not shut off, and the elevator seemingly moves of its own accord, stopping on certain floors, then opening to display no one there”.

We didn’t encounter any of that. The next day…spent time in the Fashion District and Little Tokyo. I guess we were kind of kicking around there due to the fact that we had watched this incredibly racist bootleg dvd of a “pro-internment camp” jingoist Fox ditty called “Little Tokyo USA”. The Nisei in California were rounded up after Pearl Harbor c/o “liberal” hero Franklin Delano Roosevelt and shameful “idiocy” c/o the American people. The streets we leisurely walked were devoid of Japanese by 1942. The people in the movie kept talking about getting “sukiyaki”. I realized that I had never had it. (The other dish one always encounters people talking about in Hollywood movies of the 30’s and 40’s is “Chop Suey”). So we got saki, sushi and sukiyaki. Afterwards, I decided that I don’t like sukiyaki.

Click the picture below for some photos.

“Nouns is so cacophonous, so fertile, and so ripe with sound that parsing out the samples and effects and various layers of guitar is nearly impossible; besides, it’s way more satisfying to just close your eyes and just enjoy it.”

(from Pitchfork’s review-9.2)

At least, for once…I have no problem at all with the hyper-ventilating surrounding Los Angeles’ No Age , as their brand of unpolished pop is a great mix of enthusiasm and aural assault. However, I hope that the attention doesn’t kill The Smell scene in the process. [The new record is a little like Times New Viking meets My Bloody Valentine].

Really messy.

Hopefully, it will shift more of a national spotlight on our music scene and all the other fledgling bands like Abe Vigoda here. LA’s scene is nothing if not DIVERSE. A testimony to the city itself. But what about the art-damaged music on the hiphop side of things? Busdriver has a new single out. I love Busdriver. Why ain’t he famous yet?

I was gonna make the whole post just local bands, but why exclude other new releases?

no age sleeper hold (from Nouns-on Sub Pop!)
busdriver ellen disingenuous

As I wait patiently for the new Jay Reatard single at the end of this month
here’s a track from his last album as well as more music!

jay reatard turning blue (from Blood Visions)

People who know me know how much I loved Hot Snakes. So considering that John Reis has a new band called The Night Marchers which has 3 of the 4 snakes…I’m excited!

the night marchers i wanna deadbeat u (from See You In Magic)
brendan canning hit the wall (from Something For Us All)
sun kil moon tonight in bilbao (from April)
nick cave & the bad seeds more news from nowhere (from Dig Lazarus Dig)
animal collective water curses (from Water Curses )
stereolab three women (from Chemical Chords)
grizzly bear while you wait for the others
monotonix no metal (from Body Language)

And as I much as I’d like to…I cant post anything from the new Melvins “Nude With Boots” yet. It’s similar to the last record in some ways, different in others . One thing is for sure. The first song kicks ass! Speaking of ass-kickin’ rock. Dale is “guest dj” at the Cha Cha Lounge tonite (as well as it being Mandingo’s birthday tonite). So we are gonna meet there soon. I better wrap this up.

Oh, my good friend Chris just left for two months in Bali and Thailand. He’s promised to bring me back some cool Indonesian puppets for my collection. I have big plans tomorrow. But for now, adieu.

QUESTION: What’s your advice to the average American who is hurting now — facing the prospect of $4 a gallon gasoline, a lot of people facing…

BUSH: Wait a minute. What did you just say? You’re predicting $4 a gallon gas?

QUESTION: A number of analysts are predicting $4 a gallon gasoline this spring when they reformulate.

BUSH: That’s interesting. I hadn’t heard that.

(from CNN, May 1 2008)

Poll: More disapprove of Bush than any other president.

A new poll suggests that President Bush is the most unpopular president in modern American history. A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Thursday indicates that 71 percent of the American public disapprove of how Bush is handling his job as president. “No president has ever had a higher disapproval rating in any CNN or Gallup Poll; in fact, this is the first time that any president’s disapproval rating has cracked the 70 percent mark,” said Keating Holland, CNN’s polling director.

“Bush’s approval rating, which stands at 28 percent in our new poll, remains better than the all-time lows set by Harry Truman and Richard Nixon [22 percent and 24 percent, respectively], but even those two presidents never got a disapproval rating in the 70s,” Holland said.

“The previous all-time record in CNN or Gallup polling was set by Truman, 67 percent disapproval in January 1952.” While Gallup polling goes back to the 1930s, it wasn’t until the Truman years that they began surveying monthly approval ratings. CNN Senior Political Analyst Bill Schneider adds, “He is more unpopular than Richard Nixon was just before he resigned from the presidency in August 1974.” President Nixon’s disapproval rating in August 1974 stood at 66 percent

The poll also indicates that support for the war in Iraq has never been lower. Thirty percent of those questioned favored the war, while 68 percent opposed it. “Americans are growing more pessimistic about the war,” Holland said. “In January, nearly half believed that things were going well for the U.S. in Iraq; now that figure has dropped to 39 percent.”

The numbers on the Iraq war come on the five-year anniversary of Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” moment on board the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, when he proclaimed that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended.”

The record-low support for the war in a CNN poll could be one reason behind the president’s unpopularity, but it probably is not the only one. “Support for the war, the assessment of the economy and approval of Mr. Bush are all about the same — bad,” Schneider said.

“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.”
George Bernard Shaw

“And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.”
Abraham Lincoln

Believe it or not, this blog turns FOUR today.

It is also my birthday today, however…I am not turning four.

So join me in an appropriate song (Losing My Edge from LCD Soundsystem.)
I also stopped in to pick up some wine and sparkling water from Trader Joe’s and got freekin’ carded. Today of all days! So join me in another chanson apropos
(23 Years Too Late from Wire.)

I have a buncha stuff to post…but I need to get a chance to do so.
As I alluded to in a previous entry, the next month or so is pretty busy and I just need to back off blogging a bit…but I’ll try to do some.

Thanks to all my well-wishers!

“What I remember myself from films, and what I love about films, is specific scenes and characters.”
Harmony Korine

I got to see Mister Lonely on Saturday (the LA premiere, I think) at what is for my money the best movie theatre in Los Angeles by a long shot-The Silent Movie Theater. They mix everything up there from slasher films to noir, cult flicks to Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Silent Ozu to Stalinist-era “tractor musicals”. It’s for real movie lovers. I don’t know how they make any money but it certainly is (along with the American Cinematheque) some of the best programming I’ve seen since I’ve been here.

I’ve always been on the fence about Korine (who was there). Mandy loves him (or maybe is IN love with him, I still can’t tell). But it was definitely a different thing for him. The quote I put atop this post is really all it is. Memorable scenes and perfomances in a wacky story that hardly holds together. What is lacks in narrative cohesion and plotting it makes up for with the odd characters: James Fox as the pope, Anita Pallenberg as the queen, Werner Herzog a mad priest, an Abraham Lincoln with tourette’s, flying nuns…jeez it just goes on and on.

I am still thinking about it…so I guess I sorta liked it. Though it did have periods of horrible sentimentality which left a bad taste in my mouth. When we were trying to get seats up front, we were stopped by Miranda July (who directed “Me And You And Everyone We Know” ) who was saving seats for her boyfriend, who I believe is Mike Mills (who directed “Thumbsucker“). I was cranky about it, my girlfriend hates people who hog seats like that, but we complied. I fear, given how much she hates those films, if I told her who it was, she would have wanted to go back and sit in her seats. Yet, when I pointed out that the sentimental parts of “Mister Lonely” resembled the wincing moments of those other two flicks…there was only silence. “But Harmony is different”.

Yeah yeah. All I know, is that this is the last time she gives me shit about Guy Maddin.

If it weren’t for our mutual love for Werner Herzog and Buster Keaton…I don’t know where we’d be.

Alright. That’s enough film geekdom for about 6 months.

I apologize to you all.

“Time spent with cats is never wasted.”
Sigmund Freud

At times, my cat amazes me. She is capable of showing such a seemingly wide range of subtle expressions.

Unrelatedly….I was on Netflix this week, reading reviews of some Greenaway films. And I came upon this viewer-submitted “review” of one of his films that seems to have more plotting and action than any Greenaway flick I can think of!

“I am a huge fan of Peter Greenaway. When I was 38 I took a woman to see The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover at a movie theatre in Studio City. It was an old theatre and the woman was a friend of my wife. Her name was Karen and she was 23. My wife was 36 at the time. I don’t know why I chose this movie, but it seemed like the last place I would see my wife. Karen really enjoyed the movie and she invited me back to her house. We made love with the windows open. It was a warm spring day. When I left Karen’s house the sky was all purple and pink. My wife was waiting for me in the kitchen. She was crying. I asked what was wrong and she told me that her mother was dead. Her mother was a drinker. My wife said she tried to get a hold of me but I wasn’t answering my phone. I told her where I was. I said I was out with Karen. She asked me if we made love. I said yes. She asked me why I wanted to make love with Karen. I said it was because of Peter Greenaway. I said his movie really turned me on.”

Whatever.

In other trivia…I was reading a blog reviewing some of the bands playing around Austin during SXSW and was surprised to see “a band” (but really one guy) from the late 80’s was still around and making music.

My Dad Is Dead was from Cleveland (who’s classic early records on Homestead are all out of print but he is still making music and (more or less) doing the same highly personal songwriting (which, while more pop now…combined with the fact that the 80’s post-punk sound is more or less back) makes him still sounds pretty contemporary.

Here’s are two songs I found of recent vintage. While, by no means up to the quality of his early stuff is e-x-a-c-t-l-y the same formula, totally unpretentious and still sound pretty good.

my dad is dead my safe place
my dad is dead dark age revival

April was a busy month so I have been slow on the blog front. It will probably continue like this for the next month or so until I’ve fully relocated. I can’t recall if I mentioned that my ipod and my hard drives both died within days of each other. All music lost (yet again), the most painful part of it all is that I had a backup harddrive waiting to be copied onto…but I kept putting it off (”I’ll do it next weekend”, etc…).

Don’t put that stuff off. Seriously. After about a week+ of triage work, I’ve managed to regain about 20,000 songs so it’s not like I’m sitting in utter silence.

I should start a new series here I’d Like To Be In Your Shoes where I would talk about being at famous peoples houses. I really can’t, but I’ll only say that two weeks ago I was at the house of this couple, one of whom is a mega-rock star, who bought this amazing house from a famous actress I’m sure you’d be familiar with and out on the deck…there’s this private view of the ocean…like it’s “your ocean” to admire. Damn, that’s what money brought her. Though, to be fair, it also brought her “stalkers”. It made her paranoid enough to have a “panic room” installed.

Ain’t celebrity grand?

“You should look straight at a film; that’s the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.”
Werner Herzog

A list of movies we have seen (and re-seen) recently…
…some loved, some hated:

Mister Lonely (Korine, 2007)
The Big Parade (Vidor, 1925)
The Abominable Dr. Phibes (Fuest, 1971)
Dr. Phibes Rises Again (Fuest, 1972)
The Bandwagon (Minnelli, 1953)
My Summer Of Love (Pawlikowski, 2004)
Bamako (Sissako, 2006)
Liberty (McCarey, 1929)
Wire On The Box–1979 footage of Wire on German tv
Charlie Bowers short films (Bowers, late-20’s/mid-30’s)
Funny Games (Haneke, 1997)
The Seventh Continent (Haneke, 1989)
Be Kind Rewind (Gondry, 2007)
No End In Sight (Ferguson, 2007)
The Baron Of Arizona (Fuller, 1952)
Alucarda (Moctezuma, 1978)
Morvern Callar (Ramsey, 2002)
Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls (Meyer, 1970)
3 Women (Altman, 1977)
Divine Intervention (Suleiman, 2002)
Hard Luck (Keaton, 1921)
A Moment Of Innocence (Mahkmalbaf, 1996)
Through The Olive Trees (Kiarostami, 1994)
The Sound Of Fury (Endfield, 1950)
Head On (Akin, 2006)
Beauty And The Boss (Del Ruth, 1932)
Mildred Pierce (Curtiz, 1945)
2 Days In Paris (Delpy, 2006)
The Ex: Building A Broken Mousetrap (Cohen, 2006)
Bruce Connor short films (1960’s…)
Venom And Eternity (Isou, 1951)
Made In Britain (Clarke, 1982)
Sex And Lucia (Medem, 2001)
Anatomy Of Hell (Breillat, 2004 )
Secret Things (Brisseau, 2002)
Black Legion (Mayo, 1937)
The Ground Truth (Foulkrod, 2006)
Danielson: A Famile Movie (Aronson, 2006)
Shine A Light (Scorcese, 2007)
The House Of Mirth (Davies, 2000)
Daydreams (Keaton, 1922)
Convict 13 (Keaton, 1920)
The Threat (Feist, 1949)
The Night The World Exploded (Sears, 1957)
A King In New York (Chaplin, 1957)
Juno (Reitman, 2007)
From Hand To Mouth (Roach, 1919)
The Death Kiss (Marin, 1932)

Some new songs (and some re-postings).
There’s more stuff coming soon…so bear with me.

The Kills last day of magic (from Midnight Boom)
Jay Reatard see/saw (from a new vinyl 7″ on Matador!)
Graham Coxon + Paul Weller this old town (single)
White Denim mess your hair up (from Let’s Talk About It)
Land Of Talk young bridge
School Of Language disappointment 99 (from Sea From Shore)
Nada Surf weightless (from Lucky)
Be Your Own Pet bummer time (from Get Awkward)
The Black Keys strange times (from Attack & Release)
These New Puritans colours (from Beat Pyramid)
The Drift uncanny valley (from Memory Drawings)
Indian Jewelry swans (from Free Gold)
Holy Fuck lovely allen (from Holy Fuck)
M83 we own the sky (from Saturday=Youth)
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds lie down here and be my girl (from Dig Lazarus Dig)
Gnarls Barkley who’s gonna save my soul? (from The Odd Couple)