Facebook Status Lyric Atrribution

I hate it when a person uses a song lyric in their Facebook status without attribution. I am trying to change the world one status at a time but I'm worried I look like a douchebag.

Just watched a Philadelphia Independent Film Festival submission called "My Kidnapper." Definitely the type of doc I'd read about and would immediately feel like I had to see it, it's that interesting. So read about it.

TV Producer Mark Henderson, one of the six "kidnapees" experiences a kind of Stockholm Syndrome when he starts receiving emails from his Colombian kidnapper. Henderson and some other tourists were taken during a camping trip in the Sierra Nevada mountains by a group of Colombian revolutionaries. They were let go after a few months and then, not quite a year later, Henderson and his fellows start getting emails from the group, asking pretty mundane things like "what've you been up to since?" Their kidnappers became Facebook friends and invited them to weddings. For Henderson, staying in touch with his kidnappers and making the documentary with the other people captured seemed to take on a weird, 21st century therapy... Pretty wild.

Here's the trailer:

Revessay: My off/on relationship with Spraynard's "Cut and Paste."

I loved Spraynard's first E.P.  I guess, like everyone else, I had a Latterman-sized hole in my eardrums that had to be filled? But you know those Latterman comparisons are just lazy so that's the last you'll hear of that.

I think I started listening to that demo during that January warm-spell last winter... or was it late fall? Don't really remember. I remember trekking out to Cedar House, Sartaj in tow, hoping to catch them at an overcrowded shit show. Mimi had given them two thumbs up after seeing them play Fennario a week earlier. I guess we missed Spray, but thankfully got to see Factors of Four rock the kitchen before dealing awkwardly with a crackhead in some Baltimore Avenue Chinese restaurant. So the first time I saw Spraynard was probably at our house that following spring break... their sets haven't gotten much longer. They played the demo + a Plow cover.

A lot of time passed, from a local music standpoint. The buzz about "Cut and Paste" started, in my ears, mid-fall, when Mimi played me "Jay's Cafe," a C+P track that had its debut on "West Chester Nuclear Winter." The song is an instant classic, but yeah dude, my interest in Spraynard had definitely waned by this point. I think I probably had some post-Pirouette fear of band commitment. Factors of Four had yet to fail me (well, actually, they were broken up by the summer's end,) but I just felt too tired to get attached to anyone else. And my ambivalence toward Spraynard continued, through downloading C + P, seeing them play my house one or two more times, and the laser tag show...


READ MORE ON MY BLOG THAT WILL STRICTLY BE ABOUT LOCAL MUSIC RELATED STUFF (IF I KEEP UP WITH IT.) INAUGURAL ESSAY Y'ALL.

Animal Sounds

I still stand by my hyperbolic claim that Teenage Cool Kids are the best band of the decade. Click to 2:50 into this video and see why.



Also, who didn't love an underdog this tenth of a century? Arrested Development? Conan-as-Tonight-Show-host? Yankee Hotel Foxtrot debacle? Y100-to-YRock-on-XPN? Stuff like that.

EDIT:

They have fucking EVERYTHING a young rock fan wants these days: running and Malkmusite/mathy guitar lines, drones, kiss off lyrics (Savage, sneering in Art School Anarchist: "[So,] is there a reason for your sentimental streak, or have you just gone soft man?"), hooks/bababa's til the Texas cattle come home...

EDIT:
Maybe the problem is there aren't enough young rock fans around to appreciate?

GOT ANY WHAT/May is coming.

May is coming, everyone.

I think this song, Liz Phair's "May Queen," the closer of her underfuckingrated sophomore effort Whip-Smart (and it IS whip-smart,) does a good job defining that end of year, up all night confusion that finals bring on. "Got any what?" Although Liz is probably talking about fucking rock and roll would-bes like Nash Kato, and, I don't know, finding relief that she's not their only booty call? That WOULD be a relief.

May Queen - Liz Phair

"Don't be fooled by him he's fine.
Rock and roll Ken doll,
He's a national end-all,
He's an on and off friend of mine ...

Where have I been?
Got any what?
Who have I seen?
I spy a May queen.
You were miles above me,
Girls in your arms.
The changing of her majesty's guard is truly amazing.

Got any what?
Disease, hashish, a mind,
Do I have any what?

Where have I been?
Got any what?
Who have I seen?
I spy a May queen.
You were miles above me,
Girls in your arms.
You could have planted a farm
With all of them hay-seeds...."

-Liz Phair (knows that May is coming.)

And here's a bonus. "Polyester Bride."

'Lost' is awk

Loving the last season of "Lost" but one thing is bothering me. Every time a character interacts with Smoky/Not-Locke/Man in Black, I just feel like they're dancing around a MAJOR issue. Not-Locke is always talking about how he wants to leave the island and the rest of the cast (Richard, aside) is just nervously going along with the plan. Not-Locke HAS to know something is up, right? Like, his followers are totally dragging their feet on this "we're going to take the Ajira plane off the island" thing.

All they have to tell him is "Dude. Leaving the island sounds great and all and we want to help you out, but everyone else says you're THE absolute evil that will destroy the world and if you get off the island it will be the end of everything, or whatever... So I guess what we're trying to say is, like, good luck or whatever, we can't help you out anymore. The whole cork/wine thing..." Is that so hard?!

Wolf Party

My "cousin," Kristin Gal, prompted me to revisit the Blood Brothers song I appropriated for my longtime internet handle. Definitely regretting the decision to use a song that might, today, be called "like Of Montreal re-imagined as a screamo band" for my net identity. C'est la vie!



Those wolf mechanics banging, indeed.

Class presentations

Insert easily drawn parallels between these two clips:


Ugh nevermind, clip is nowhere to be found. Jeff and Pierce's zany Spanish presentation on Community 102. Just watch this instead:

How do you fight it? We started our own radio station.

I will never forgive the teens and tweens of Noggin's target audience. They made a decision during the early double- zeroes: trashy composite sketches of a parent's worst nightmare or clever kids living the "making something out of abs. nothing in the suburbs"-dream. These, the teens weened on MTV's Laguna Screech and the post-90s Real World  ("A number of different people in a house doing abs. nothing productive. Let the drama begin!") wanted something like the new MTV but packaged for middle school.

And, actually, that was it: The Big D. Drama. (I'm going to start using we, because I am not excluded, being that I was a tween/teen in the early aughts.) We, for some reason, wanted to look into an awful sort-of mirror every Friday night. And, for awhile, it was fun... until this point of "I no longer know who the fuck I am supposed to have empathy for." Radio Free Roscoe was a respite from/foil to Degrassi: The Next Generation's batshit fucking insanity. Both did have golden nuggets of realism buried in some (brilliant) middle-aged writer's vision of teenagedom.

RFR's of course was much more generous: marginalized, "voiceless" high schoolers will, enterprisingly, find their voice. It entertains me to no end and comes as no surprise that it sprung from the same mind that spawned The Adventures of Pete and Pete. And watching it, I get this kind of embarrassing sense of physically being uplifted (see also: listening to an especially funny Earles and Jensen call, or Rasputin Secret Police's "The Sacred Cup.")

Fine line between precious and awesome. I dunno. That's all I have to say about that for now.

What is not to love about this video?

Well, considering it features Britt Daniel and Janet Weiss performing together on the same stage, there is abs. nothing to not love, only love love love forever. Let me marry this video.

Forget Who We IzZzZz

I guess I'm not that much better than them, but if a bunch of Johnny-come-lately's crash this ticket on-sale and ruin the week leading up to, day of, and week following July 24 for me, I'm going to be pissed. I mean, I was five when they broke up but I have had an understanding of this band's importance since eighth grade. Matt Pannell put, of all songs, "Hey Ma, Do I Hafta Choke on These?" on a mix for me (the mix also included everything from the Anniversary to Shai Hulud to Reggie and the Full Effect.) Judging by these kids' absolute hatred of Joan of Arc and anything Kinsella-related that may not have an obvious hook/total emoshunul resonance, I doubt many of them have sat through "Hey Ma."  But it turned me on, mostly because it, along with Joan of Arc's So Much for Staying Alive and Lovelessness made me feel sophisticated and was a nice break from the glass-shattering, notebook-scribbling intensity of Saetia. That summer, I woke up around noon every day to the aimless open-chord bashing of "Basil's Kite." Back then, there was lots of mystery and I couldn't watch Cap'n Jazz play the Daily Grind on YouTube or connect with fans of Midwestern emo. I didn't even really know there was a Midwest "sound," but now you and all your buds can replicate that scene every Friday night at Philly's newest warehouse parties/basement shows thanks to a bunch of undergrads who chose fascinating names like "Snowing," and "Bearings"to silkscreen onto the covers of their demo 7". So I don't even know why I should be worried, maybe Philly will have had enough mathy emo stuff by the time July rolls around and... well nevermind, that's just not going to happen at this rate.

EDIT: And if Jade Tree folds because they really had to take a chance on these kids buying the Analphabetapolothology reissue and folks remain satisfied with their Soulseek downloads or whatever... sorry for the haterade.

The New Patriotism

This might get me into some trouble.

Between The Hurt Locker and The Monitor I feel that there's probably a new, young patriotism coming around... maybe one that's sort of, maybe, more understanding (?) of where we are right now? And what it took to get here? And an appreciation of where we come from? New regionalism?

That is a Polaroid Zach took of his room.

Dispatches from John Crodian

Texts:

Me - These tweenage girls on the R5 just said West Chester was boring. Want me to fuckemup?
John - Tell them about Macaroni Castle. That's what I'm trying to call my apartment.

First of many blurbs I will be writing about NBC's "Community"

I like that the writers don't overdo it with Abed. I think Abed is two things: a TV character with Asperger's and great metacommentary on how everyone wishes their life was more like a TV show and will go to distant ends to make that a reality. (Actually, those two things are pretty much facts.) It would have been really easy to: have the entire character (and maybe even entire show) revolve around the fact of Abed's Asperger's... the entire show would devolve into jokes about his "social awkwardness" (in most college lecture halls and conversations, being "socially awkward" is considered a disease unto its own) and Abed's storylines would be centered around trying to get him to assimilate into, like, normal society or whatever, and the lessons it would teach would be "it's OK to be different!" (Which it is, and I don't have a problem with that being "a lesson that is often taught," but it would get tired.) Also it would be really easy to have each episode be some amalgam of sitcom tropes and Abed would sort of ground the whole thing by calling everyone out on it. This is something the show does do a lot but not to excess. Abed isn't a crutch the show leans on... he really is like some kind of commentator keeping each character in check. In that way he works to the show's total advantage. Just as the audience is catching on, saying to each other "Hey this is just a riff on _________," Abed steps in and calls everyone out on it.


[Paragraph about the new, hilarious weirdness the show has stumbled upon, using each actor's ability to do physical comedy and tempering it with their great dialogue/chemistry, creating some kind of "synergy" unseen in any other sitcom of late (or at least the ones on NBC Thursday nights.)]

WATCH COMMUNITY.

Amazing Adverb of the Day

This is a Ben Franklin-level adverb, re: getting drunk, via Community creator Dan Harmon:

"Childhood-revealingly."

This entry is me taking notes. Required something more permanent than a retweet.

Everyone should also know I'm probably going to look like him one day (soon):

Boy on the Verge

I borrowed Vendela Vida's Girls on the Verge from my cousin who gets an A+ for her (to my total delight) so-clearly-a-Gen-Xer bookshelf. Douglas Coupland's Generation X, Shiny Adidas Tracksuits and the Death of Camp, various McSweeney's, etc. The book is an excellent series of firsthand accounts of different rituals the modern day girl chooses to go through: marriage, rushing a Sorority, the debutante ball. But I look like an idiot carrying it around:

My cousin is also an OG Death Cab fan from back in the day. She saw them with the Dismemberment Plan during the amazingly named Death and Dismemberment tour. I had so quickly outgrown Transatlanticism that I couldn't take seriously claims that their old stuff is a lot better and a lot different. And actually when I hear a song like "Crooked Teeth," or even "I Will Posses Your Heart," I always feel like such an idiot for writing their new stuff off. But it's too late now. Or not. Because I ripped We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes and haven't stopped listening to it. It's fucking awesome.

It's mathy and has killer hooks and mopes only maybe a third of the time (Why do I think this is a bad thing for some bands and not others? I don't get me.) Some tracks remind me of American Football (this is always good if we're talking about a band that formed before the insane Philadelphia math rock boom of 2008.) I hate being wrong.

Note to Self

You should never appear literary. If it shows, then you've crossed the line and become a pretentious bore. And God save us from that.

-Larry Kirwan

Charter of Liberties

I get amazed by students have lived in this city almost two years and still they say things like Rittenhouse Square Park and have never ridden a bus.  It's easy people: William Penn laid out five SQUARES (just. squares.) in his original plan for Philadelphia, and all you have to do to catch the bus is find the sign and all you have to do to get off is pull the cord. Get it? Also find it annoying when students have never been further east than the train station, further north than Susquehanna Avenue, and further west than the fraternities.

One of many blurbs I will be penning about "The Monitor"

The Monitor, like Grievances, ends on an optimistic note (literally.) Both songs have the feel and the lyrical content of a person that's too tired to carry on. In Albert Camus, Stickles is sucked dry by Glenn Rock, toasting his "general indifference." After an emotion-shattering din, something -- an accordion, perhaps, or a melodica -- plays a melodic tune for the last 45 seconds of the record. A ray of light. All will be well... eventually.

"The Battle of Hampton Roads" goes from Stickles' minor-key pleas for his darling to not "ever leave," (repeated and reinforced by french horns and dramatic drumming,) to a seriously victorious-sounding bagpipe line (again supplemented by rolling drums,) inducing head nods and fist pumps. The rolls shift from the tom to the snares and crash cymbals. Guitars enter. The bagpipes drop out, replaced with an arpeggiating lead guitar riff, like the breakdown of "Fear and Loathing in Mahwah, NJ." This song is, thankfully, far from over. This lead slays. You have just succumbed to tears brought on by the bagpipe's beauty, and now this lead guitar is reminding you that everything will be OK. The band collapses into their trademark din and drone that shifts for another 90 seconds until it sounds like the tape machine is shut off.

In other news, I have been having an amazing time dogsitting my cousin's beast, Ella. She's a pit/cane corso mix and on most days that would a terrifying prospect but she's middle-aged and lazy. We play frisbee for a half hour (she's amazing,) go for a walk, and then she watches TV and eats pizza with me until bed... which she shares with me. 

And just like Halloween, I never want to not celebrate St. Patrick's Day. My Catholic grade school was St. Patrick's (and thus my Parish) so it was something I grew up with... it wasn't shoved down our throats, creating resentment. It created, like, a weird sense of pride. Fond memories there... Great friends followed me back to Whitemarsh Township where we enjoyed Franzone's, Guinness and Wawa. A total tri-force.

St. Patrick Was a Rocker

Just try and tell me listening to this song you still feel pangs of regret about all the money you spent at Hot Topic on Dropkick Murphys merch. Just try.

Irish Rose - The So So Glos

Waking Up Drunk - Spider Bags

Theme From “Cheers" - Titus An...

"So give me a Guinness, give me a Keystone Light, give me a kegger on a Friday night."




This song makes me think of a joyous St. Patty's day morning, pre-parade, everyone leaving their homes for the day.


"Brrrridie! Bridie, girl!" My parents took Mimi and I to see Black 47 at a college fair at, I think, the old Civic Center. I WAS GOING TO PUNK SHOWS IN WEST PHILLY 10 YEARS BEFORE YOU FUX.