Filed under: music
From the most recent round of Sweden’s Melodifestivalen. I can’t imagine anything being better than this. (Sorry, Lasse Lindh!)
Filed under: design of a decade, lists, mixtape, music | Tags: design of a decade, mixtapes, the year 2000
At the end of every top 10 recap I’ll be posting a mix with highlights from that year. Here’s the 2000 mix. In retrospect, I think I’m A Cucumber is probably a better song than I Like Hubcaps, but I’m not sure if I realized that at the time. (And how is that shit still funny after nine years?) Also, I switched one song out at the end so now it’s only 58.8 minutes, according to itunes. Sorry for being skimpy.
(Also, sorry that FileDen makes you click twice now. Sometimes. That’s an annoying new development, isn’t it?)
As always, I’d like to remind you that if you like the songs you ought to buy them. Preferably from a real store, because real music stores are on the decline and we should treasure them while we can.
Side A (zip)
1. Macy Gray, Why Didn’t You Call Me
2. Stereolab, Barock – Plastik
3. Yo La Tengo, Madeline
4. Stone Temple Pilots, Sour Girl
5. Aimee Mann, The Fall of the World’s Own Optimist
6. Fountains of Wayne, Baby One More Time
7. Hefner, The Hymn For The Things We Didn’t Do
8. Sleater-Kinney, All Hands On The Bad One
9. Cat Power, Sea Of Love
Side B (zip)
10. Clem Snide, I Love The Unknown
11. Catherine Wheel, Sparks Are Gonna Fly
12. Elastica, Mad Dog God Dam
13. Sinead O’Connor, No Man’s Woman
14. Catatonia, She’s A Millionaire
15. The Essex Green, Mrs. Bean
16. Dandy Warhols, Bohemian Like You
17. Babybird, The F-Word
18. Brak, I Like Hubcaps
[photo via the BBC]
1. Cat Power, Sea of Love
1. Cat Power, Sea Of Love
Louisiana musician Phil Batiste wrote and released the original version of Sea of Love under the name Phil Phillips in 1959. Like many great love songs, Sea Of Love is known just as much for a terrible schmaltzy cover (in this case, an early-eighties version by the Honeydrippers) as it is for the original. But the original is wonderful, because it’s so lyrically simple. One metaphor, and it’s in the title, and only a few words rhyme. When Cat Power recorded the song in 2000 she stripped it down even further, getting rid of the backing singers and the fifties arrangement and not replacing them with anything.
I bought The Covers Record when the InSound bus made a stop at Brown University, which was where I worked and not where I went; I didn’t know of Cat Power previously (though I remember pretending I had, once, to impress some girls in line at Store 24) but the indie-snob InSound dudes were really adamant that I get this, for some reason I don’t recall, in addition to the Lucksmiths 10” that I was purchasing.
Filed under: music
I don’t normally toss out birthday thanks, but since Erykah is pretty much the awesomest lady ever I thought I’d make an exception. Here’s my favorite video of hers, 1997′s Next Lifetime.
So now that the Grammys and Oscars are over–and boy were they both duller than dull this year–it’s time to prepare for two events that may be a little livelier (though sadly not so nationally televised.) The GayVN Awards are on March 28th and, like their hetero counterpart last month, there’s about 28567267462164826734 awards and about 724 nominees in each category.
Much more manageable, at least for purposes of internet browsing, are the Hookies, the third International Escort Awards put on by rentboy.com. Fifteen categories, six nominees in each category. Voting’s chosen by people that log in to the website, though, so chances are people will win based more on how hot their pictures are and not because any one person has actually spent thousands of dollars testing all the nominees in each category. (Though if anyone has, get in touch. I’d like to hear your opinions.)
After the jump, some of my picks, made after approximately two minutes of browsing in each category:
Filed under: design of a decade, lists, music | Tags: belle and sebastian, design of a decade, the year 2000
2. Belle And Sebastian, Family Tree
A lot of folks are down on Belle and Sebastian’s Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Peasant album, and not just because of its lengthy title. I’m not really sure why, though. It’s not as cohesive as Tigermilk or If You’re Feeling Sinister, but it’s a heck of a lot better than the awkward (and even more awkwardly-titled) The Boy With The Arab Strap. Even in 1998, possibly at the height of my B&S fandom, I traded that album after a few weeks for a European-only Suzanne Vega best-of.
FYHC,YWLAP isn’t a perfect album by any means; The Chalet Lines is ugly, and not in a good way, and it took me about eight years before grumpily resigning myself to the fact that I Fought In A War is sort of okay. But, despite that, there’s a lot of great tracks on the album. Songs like The Model, one of Stuart Murdoch’s better numbers about Christianity and somebody named Lisa.
But what makes FYHC,YWLAP better than its predecessor is the vastly improved songwriting on the songs Murdoch didn’t write. Stevie Jackson’s lovely Chickfactor was probably my favorite song on TBWTAS, but he outdid himself by following it up with The Wrong Girl. And Isobel Campbell went from writing one album’s most grating song (Is It Wicked Not To Care?) to writing possibly its best one.
Filed under: copouts
Sorry about that last post. I wrote about a third of a draft and then lost the internet, but I guess somehow I hit the publish button first. So, expect to hear more about the Hookie nominations tomorrow, when I’ve actually found pictures and whatnot.
I don’t think I’ll have my as-yet unwritten essay on Catholic porn done today, but I thought my headline was clever, so there’s that. And here’s some pictures from old Calendario Romanos.
Filed under: movies | Tags: clue, parts of my childhood you probably didn't know about
While I think it’s usually pretty lazy of Hollywood to do remakes, I don’t always mind when ideas are reconceived altogether; Tim Burton’s Batman is different enough from the technicolor sixties one that it makes sense, say.
But to have Clue re-envisioned by the man responsible for directing every awful entry in the the hateful Pirates of the Caribbean franchise?
Yicch.
I’ve seen the 1986 film version of Clue–I’m not exaggerating here–at least three hundred times. Mainly when I was in third grade or so, and watched it after school every day. EVERY DAY.
I also own lots of Clue board games, because I compulsively buy them at yard sales. I mean, I don’t have hundreds or anything, but probably somewhere around ten or so. (Though my much-beloved Clue: Master Detective, which took place in a different house with extra rooms and more weapons, has been lost to the ages.)
And I also own the Clue VCR game; both of them, actually. For those of you that might not remember, VCR games were games you played while watching movies. The Clue one was very complicated; you’d draw cards that said things like ‘The woman who set her drink down on the mantle in scene four either murdered or was murdered by the man holding the rope in the dining room.’ And then you’d have to figure out who killed who, and where, and with what. And also you take on the roles of the characters, but can’t tell anybody who you are, or something. Also there were more characters, but less rooms and fewer weapons. It didn’t actually make sense, but the videos were very campy and hilarious, and led to all sorts of in-jokey catchphrases back when I was younger:
“You are not my daughter–and I am not French.” “Gypsies! Gypsies came in the middle of the night and stole our baby!”
“I have never been to Sumatra.”
“But curare is better. Like my daddy says, give me a good neuromuscular poison any day!”
“White wine doesn’t need to breathe.”
“I will have the Professor’s formula by morning. I must cut off now!”
Etc. That last one is my favorite, mainly because after Miss Scarlet says it she uses the knife to cut the phone cord.
In the second volume, released a few years later, the cast travel from Paris to Tangiers to Rangoon. And, I think I can safely say, it’s much more of a “global thriller and transmedia event that uses deductive reasoning as its storytelling engine” than whatever the hell awful script fucking Gore Verbinski is going to get his stupid paws on.
[via what?]
Filed under: Uncategorized
There’s still almost a week left in February, but I’m getting kind of antsy for March to be here (mainly because I don’t have heat.) Here’s Tina B with her 1987 single January February, which may or may not be my favorite track on Freestyle’s Greatest Hits Vol. 3.
