Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: adrienne truscott, enrique iglesias, our hit parade, usher
More soon.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Hello,
Just a quick note to apologize for the complete lack of posting lately. I’ve been a little busy releasing the new Headmaster and also starting work on the third issue (already!) but also I’ve been frankly a little dumb lately. My Drafts folder is more full than it’s ever been–thoughts about my personal life, about news events of the past month, about music that I’ve been listening to lately, about professional wrestlers that may have made me gay, about movies I’ve been and books I’ve been reading, and about the not-new-but-still-fascinating-to-me phenomenon of Ben Cohen (see above). But nothing is very good. I am going to be kind to myself and blame the disgusting humidity of a Rhode Island summer rather than blaming my personal woes or mental
To make up for these things I’ve been diving pretty deep into entertainment, reading two books at once and watching movies every day and pulling out old albums to listen to. In general this makes me more critical and makes me think more and will eventually (hopefully) snap me back to my old self.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: ashley macisaac, bran van 3000, canada day, canadians, dragonette, finger eleven, france joli, hot hot heat, janet jackson, snow
Happy Canada Day!
In honor of our neighbors to the north, here’s an impulsively-made top-ten list of my top 25 favorite pop songs by Canadians. Loreena McKennitt’s “The Mummer’s Dance” isn’t one of them, but I thought that deserved special mention because remember when that song was popular? Aiiieeee.
For the sake of your browser loading time I’m splitting this into three posts:
25. France Joli, “The Heart To Break The Heart” (1980)
“Come To Me” is her classic, of course, but I’ve always been a little more partial to the lead single from the Quebecois disco singer’s follow-up album.
24. Dragonette, “Take It Like A Man” (2007)
Dragonette, who are on the radio now, were a big part of my summer of ’07. At the time I was more into “I Get Around,” but multiple viewings of this video have made me think that this is possibly their classic.
23. Snow, “Informer” (1993)
Yes, yes, I know. But it’s so catchy!
22. Ashley MacIsaac, “Sleepy Maggie” (1995)
The nineties were so weird. Like when the modern rock/alternative radio stations used to play Enya, and Natalie Imbruglia, and Pavarotti duets with Bono, and weird bekilted Nova Scotian fiddlers with lady friends who sang traditional songs in a folk-rock style. This song is probably horrible, I have no doubt, but when I was fifteen I liked it so much that I can sort of still only hear it with those ears.
21. Bran Van 3000, “Drinking In LA” (1997)
My boyfriend has this album and still plays it. It was another odd, odd hit on modern rock in the nineties, a sort of “Scooby Snacks” for boozebags instead of stoners. The part where the DJ asks people to call in with the Bran Van guy’s favorite cheese is a highlight.
20. Finger Eleven, “Paralyzer” (2007)
Oh be quiet this is good.
19. Jane Siberry, “One More Colour” (1985)
Jane Siberry, who apparently goes by Issa now, is not what you might call a “singles artist.” However, her 1985 album The Speckless Sky is one of my favorites for zoning out to arty eighties pretension. The video is also something.
18. Hot Hot Heat, “Get In Or Get Out” (2004)
I thought Hot Hot Heat stayed good for longer than people gave them credit for (I like Elevator!) but this early song, which I first heard on some kind of British music magazine CD sampler, is still probably my favorite.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: canada, post-gay bullshit, pride, the grid, the internet
[This is another one of those internet things that you're either tired of by now or haven't heard of at all yet. I didn't mean to spend half my morning writing about it, but here you go.]
Earlier this week The Grid, a six-month old Toronto weekly owned by Canada’s largest newspaper, published an article called Dawn of a New Gay, and boy did it upset certain quarters of the internet. A lot. Paul Aguirre-Livingston, the 24-year old writer pictured above, approached the magazine a while back with the idea of profiling the “post-mo,” the current generation of gays who are less into activism than their elders. What are they into, then? Mostly their own wealth, it turns out:
We’re tattooed and pierced and at the helm of billion-dollar industries like fashion and television. We vacation with our boyfriends in fabulously rustic country homes that belong to our parents, who don’t mind us coming to stay as a couple.
Now, let’s not forget that rich people are people too, and that they have feelings like anyone else. (Sure, they get cover stories for personal essays disguised as journalism, but they that does not make them inherently evil individuals.) And the writer is not 100% wrong. Lots of people have accepting parents and some of them even have parents with country homes that they are allowed to describe as fabulous, in print, without any editorial distance whatsoever. It Has Gotten Better, as they say.
But I was very bored and mildly annoyed by the time I was about a third of the way through Aguirre-Livingston’s 3,000 words. What a narrow worldview he has, I thought! He is writing a trend piece about himself and only himself with no irony or distance whatsoever! And there are so many bow ties! And seriously, does the world fucking need the word “post-mo”? (A: No.)
After a very, very jam-packed week I am looking forward to a few days of nothing and then this. Rumor has it that I may even show up in drag, something I’ve only ever done once before.
I may even have to play Zoli Adok:
The Deal sisters, Kim and Kelley, turn the big five-oh today, so I thought I’d remind you of the existence of “Off You,” my favorite Breeders song and one of my favorite songs ever written, basically. I’ve mentioned it here before, but it is worth repeating, particularly since the band’s 2002 Title TK album didn’t do particularly well commercially.
Many years ago, back in the era of flickering torch gifs, there was a website called RockInBoston.com, which was run by a guy named Joe Harvard. He had lengthy and (I thought) fascinating stories about pretty much every rock musician to pass through Boston during the eighties and nineties, and he had this whole story about Kim Deal and about how you should never, ever give her pot because she just wasn’t very good with it. When Title TK came out and there was that song “Sinister Foxx” about the iguana, and how in interviews she explained that the song was about how pot dealers always had pet iguanas that always seemed to be escaping from their tanks, I was genuinely confused. For years.
Two more Breeders favorites plus a Kim-led Pixies classic after the jump:
The dominatrix reads tonight! As do the escort, the stripper, the rentboy and the porn store clerk.*
Sorry I’ve been such a Negligent Nevil with this blog lately. But I just wanted to remind you that tonight–tonight!–I’ll be reading in Providence with the fabulous Audacia Ray, the fabulous Melissa Gira Grant, the fabulous Maria Diaz, the fabulous Lola D. Sorrow, and the fabulous Will Vail. It will all be very fabulous, and we will [tentatively] tell you all the things you need to know about fisting firefighters, Madonna, what to do when someone else’s erection interrupts your workday. As this is only my second-ever reading in Providence, I am not sure which story I’m going to actually tell, and may sort of let the composition of the audience dictate whether it will be a gross story about bad sex or a very gross story about bad sex.
We’re Here To Help
65 Eddy Street
Providence RI
9pm
free!
[*Well, former escort, former stripper, former rentboy...]
3am, still awake. Annoyed, annoyed, annoyed. This video is helping, though. I have no idea who The Twins are, I just stumbled across this after falling down a deep K-hole of Eurodisco videos.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: born this way, downloads, lady gaga, me me me me me, slowness
And by special I mean tedious.
Lady Gaga’s new album came out today, and Amazon is selling it for $0.99, and I am downloading it! This is remarkable, because I’ve never actually bought an entire mp3 album before. Ever. Because I live in the past, mostly, and because I’ve never really felt the need to, but also because I’ve switched computers enough times over the years that I know how easily things get lost.
I’ve had some troubles, though, as you can see above. At first I (somehow) downloaded the single instead of the whole album, and now that I’m downloading the whole album (via Amazon’s downloader thing, which it forces you to install) there’s been a number of errors. Plus I’ve been doing this for like half an hour now and I only have five songs downloaded. Probably I could have walked to the mall and bought the thing and listened to half of it already, plus had a physical copy of the kind-of-awful-kind-of-fabulous cover art.
In the meantime, I’m trying to install 100Mb of updates to Word, to open a .docx file that I swear was not a .docx file the last time I saw it. But that process is also being very slow, so I’m just sort of killing time here while I wait for that part of my life to be over.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Missing the final tomorrow because I am getting on a plane in, um, five hours, but here’s what I’d like to see (assuming the production of the Big 5 numbers reflect their overall song quality…):
1. Serbia
2. Germany
3. Slovenia
4. Bosnia
5. Moldova
6. Italy
7. Austria
8. France
9. Iceland
10. Azerbaijan
And ideally Denmark, Finland, Switzerland and Ireland would all go home with 0 points.
