Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: abba world, book reviews, books, cars, cash music, cold wave, condescending punctuation, help?, karaoke, mac and cheese, photography, record sleeves, suzanne vega, tata, the eighties, the noughties, throwing muses
“Miranda’s former life as an “escort,” a euphemistic attempt to soften that she sometimes was a prostitute, is only part of the back story of this very complex character with a dark past.“ –Thanks, condescending mystery reviewer (and editor) at the Macon Star.
Throwing Muses might be reuniting again! But they need your $$$$$ to do that.
The Dummy Guide To Cold Wave. I’m excited about this compilation coming out, because I don’t really know any of these songs.
This entire decade was just one big long eighties revival.
I’m pretty sure that heaven is where you go to sing karaoke with ABBA holograms. And now, to quote my childhood girlfriend Belinda Carlisle, Heaven Is A Place On Earth. (Although I can’t tell you how distraught I am that it’s not happening on this continent.)
Speaking of karaoke, I’ve been doing a lot of it this week. Already Gone might be my new karaoke secret weapon; I was really good at it despite having to lower the song like three octaves. My Let The Music Play is also excellent, if I do say so myself. My voice wavered a lot on Most Girls, but I was at a place where I didn’t know anybody and they all ate up the fact that the bearded man in the X t-shirt was singing a Pink song. My Freedom ’90 was better than the last time. And I’d rather not talk about how I butchered Oh Carolina.
Did I ever tell you that I used to kind of be the world’s biggest Suzanne Vega fan? It’s true, crazy though that seems in retrospect. So I was excited for this Time Out New York thing.
Despite the fact that I come from a family of processed food people, and despite the fact that I like cheese in basically every form it comes in, I had never until this week heard of Campbell’s Cheddar Cheese Soup until I suddenly found myself reading Paula Deen’s recipe for Mac & Cheese. (Which oddly I was indirectly led to by looking for Giada DeLaurentiis’ cleavage.) And then the 723 comments on her recipe, many of which are people explaining why hers isn’t good and putting their own recipes instead. My favorite is the one near the top that admonishes her for the canned soup but then calls Velveeta a “good cheese product.”
Nice Tatas! It’s a $2,500 car from India that was unveiled recently at the Detroit Auto Show. Although by the time it met US impact standards it would be more expensive. Plus marketing and shit. So who knows if it’ll even happen here.
50 Must-Read Photography Books. I will probably check one of these out of the library and then give up twenty pages in and then forget to return it to the library for six months. But it’s the thought that counts?
Finally, this is seriously my favorite naked man photo ever, maybe. (I’ve even posted it here before.) But I still don’t know who the model or the photographer is, or when it’s from, or anything. Help?
I’ll be posting the Top 40 on the blog at some point, but I think I’m just too tired to deal with that this weekend; my grandfather passed away yesterday and, while there’s nothing I can actually do about it, I’m sort of emotionally drained by it, anyway.
Sorry for the inconvenience, but stay tuned in upcoming weeks for livelier, fresher Pop Charts. (Hopefully.)
In the meantime, I leave you with Wolf Gang’s single The King And All Of His Men, which was #39 last week and which moves up with a bullet on tomorrow’s countdown. It’s very eighties in that slick and usually kind of annoying way that Dogs Die In Hot Cars were very eighties, but I love it. Long live Campari Rock!
I briefly mention them all in this interview, that’s what.
Filed under: Italians, music, tv | Tags: ballerinos, everything but the girl, the gayest thing i've ever seen, tracey thorn
Tracey Thorn just posted this on her Twitter; from what I can tell, it appears to be some sort of reality show about male ballet dancers, with a large, pointy-nosed drag queen judging and some sort of athletic theme that doesn’t even slightly fit in with Everything But The Girl’s wonderfully mopey standard.
But, you know, there are worse things in the world than athletic men in singlets dancing around to Todd Terry remixes.
For the most part, I’m really into iTunes Genius, mainly because it always pulls out songs that I didn’t even know that I possessed. But once in a while it lets me down. Like right now, for instance. Christina Amphlette is one of my all-time favorite female vocalists; when I hear her I want to hear other raspy, sexy females. Not every single person to have ever come from Australia. Jessica Mauboy? I mean really, iTunes…
Today:
tatas
kiss me put your cigarette out and kiss me
comma comma comma comma chameleon
mary j blige silver platter
ive slept with a hooker
Yesterday:
anki bagger
giant tatas
semen on pillow
nation with biggest penises
rebecca michael naked
I have good news and I have bad news, both of which might lead to a lack in posting over the next week or so.
The good news is that one of the Super Secret Projects I’m working on is progressing along nicely, and hopefully within the next few days I’ll be able to announce what it is. But here are some keywords to tantalize you: penises, fancy, boys, asses, Providence. You’re excited now, right?
In other good news I might start writing a column somewhere else soon; that’s not set in stone yet, but if it happens I’ll also be announcing it here in the next couple of days. (more…)
Filed under: Uncategorized
[And it slogs on...]
#9. The Killers, Somebody Told Me
February 2004–
I’m driving my friend, my friend’s friend, and my friend’s friend’s friend to an Anti-Valentine’s Day Party in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. It’s about half an hour away, which–by Rhode Island terms–is a long drive, especially when you’re in the car with one work friend and two people you don’t actually know.
We’re listening to The Left End, this hipstery dance-punk show on WERS, the Emerson College radio station. If you lived in the Providence area, it was the only place you could go to hear that vein of Interpol-Rapture-Fischerspooner dance-punk that was all the rage at the time. (FNX, the Boston Phoenix, had a Providence affiliate back then, but while the Boston network played lots of cool stuff the Providence outlet mysteriously focused on crappy nu-metal. But I digress.)
I distinctly remember hearing two songs in the night of that strange, fateful party: one was Gianni V, the song about Andrew Cunanan by an almost totally-forgotten group called The Fitness. It resonated with us–”I wish that you were stalking me” is a good chorus when you’re on your way to an Anti-Valentine’s Day Party–and we didn’t notice actually notice that it was about Versace’s murderer until the DJ said the title.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bad old days, bloggies, body hair, donny drake, elements of style, eurovision, george tiller, joe jervis, kansas, model wolves, national geographic, publishing, san francisco, sustainability, travis mathews, wildlife photography
Travis Mathews, who made the Good Vibrations award-winning In Their Room, wants to make porn and he’s casting bottoms. Once again, all the fun shit is happening in San Francisco…
Oh, hey, the former Attorney General of Kansas was basically stalking slain abortion doctor George Tiller.
Superhot porn star of the week: Donny Drake. The comments on this post are irritating, mostly because they’re either of the asinine “trim the bush to make the tree look bigger” school, or because they think his young-looking face doesn’t match his body, as though body hair isn’t something that happens until you hit a certain age. People on the internet are really fucking closed-minded sometimes. I mean, maybe whoever styled this shoot should have tamed the inner thigh curls a little, but that’s a very minor complaint about a very hot dude.
Sustainable book publishing: can it happen? (I heard about this via a Friday afternoon Twitter discussion thing, #FollowReader, which this week focused on the environmental impact of publishing. Twitter roundtables are always hard to follow and not necessarily worth the effort, but I’m glad I found this.)
The Wildlife Photographer of the Year was stripped of his title and banned from the competition for life after it was revealed that the wolf in his photo was actually a model.
Voting in the Bloggies is open. Joe from Joe.My.God is up for a lifetime achievement award, but I’ve never heard of a great many of the nominees, including most of those in the music and LGBT categories. (Apparently I’m not doing my research?)
I’ve decided I really like the National Geographic style manual. For what it’s worth.
[video: In my search for the Swiss and Albanian Eurovision songs, I came across this UK entry from 1978. It's kind of the missing link between ABBA and Fleetwood Mac, though I have no idea how many of these people slept with one another.]
