fine whine

August is New Music Month, at least for me. Over the last few weeks I've amassed what I hope will prove to be a fairly decent collection of new music. Now I just need to listen to it.

First of all, I joined eMusic.com with a 100-song free trial (email me and I'll give you the details - the regular one is only 25 songs). I was very methodical in my picks, making sure to have as close to that 100-song limit chosen before downloading a single track. eMusic gets a bad rap for not having many mainstream artists, but I was more than able to find albums I wanted and some that sounded intriguing*.

Before I mention the new artists I found, I was exceptionally pleased to see new releases from two groups I really like:

• Comments of the inner chorus by Tunng. I was turned onto Tunng by an offhanded Warren Ellis blog mention, and have been hooked ever since, going as far as to track down their album as an English import. I didn't pay very much for it on eBay, but now I see that eMusic has it, as well as this new album I'd not known they'd released. Their music isn't for everybody, but I enjoy it thoroughly.
• Last train to Mashville by A3. Well before gaining widespread popularity (and one-hit-wonderness) for the theme song to The Sopranos, A3 found their way into my collection from a discount bin. On their debut album they called their music "country acid house" and even that isn't broad enough a definition. Over the years they've put out a number of decent albums (including second-most-recent Power in the blood, available on the site though it is somewhat disappointing) but this one is a stripped-down, acoustic version of many of their hits, including a cover of John Prine's "Speed of the sound of loneliness" that sounds like a fair-to-middling country song they way they do it, but the fun's in knowing how they'd done it before. At least, for me.
• Buildings and grounds by Papas fritas. Back in the days when I lived within broadcast distance of WLUW I listened to a lot of what most people would call "college radio" or perhaps "indie" while I drove to work and back. I'd hear something I'd like and write it down, hoping to look it up and hunt it down later. Many songs and groups I was able to find (for example, Belle and Sebastian) but many eluded me, including the song The way you walk by Papas fritas, which they would play at least once a week, seemingly to taunt me. I never saw the album on the shelves at the libraries, or used or new music stores, and I wasn't willing to shell out the cash to buy the rest of the disc, tracks-unheard. But now I have it, and access to their entire discography, thanks to eMusic. Now I only need to figure out if I still like their songs, I suppose.
• Just like the fambly cat by Grandaddy. Grandaddy's another indie radio darling, though one that the libraries seem to buy. Here again is a new release I hadn't know about, and I doubt the library will pick it up anytime soon, my requests notwithstanding.

I didn't just pick up music from groups I recognized, but I'll write about the other tracks I downloaded once I've given them a few more spins.

* Pun intended.

Permit me to again point you toward All Consuming. While it allows members to designate books, albums, and movies as "worth consuming" or "not worth consuming" (or, neither, though that's not the way it's supposed to work), but that two -state system (well, three) isn't enough for my tastes. Some stuff is not not worth consuming, in my opinion, but I'm not so fond of it to actually claim it to be actually worth consuming.

I'm not willing to commit, I guess.

But some stuff I watch and read and hear is, in fact, well worth watching or reading or hearing, and I'm not afraid to say so. So that's when I use the easy-to-use tagging capabilities of the site, and have tagged such master works "fantastic". That link leads to a list of some twenty or so of them, and I'm working on a way to find all of the others. I've added Batman begins to the list (so bowled over by it as I was by it), and it's just one among a good many other movies and books that I've enjoyed consuming recently.

So I'm still not playing favorites, but I'm willing to show some favor and shower the superlatives. I may yet develop a heirarchy, from "crap"* to "adequate" and so on, up to "excellent" and with "fantastic" or perhaps something superior at the top. But not today. I'm willing to pick just the topmost for now.

* And you can find a list of the ones I deem to be "crap" in a similar, easy fashion. Like clicking "crap" in the previous sentence, or this one.

Based on an offhand recommendation from somebody at work, tonight as I washed the dishes I watched Harold and Kumar go to White Castle. I hadn't heard much about the movie before, and frankly never added it to my list because it sounded mindless, and was written and directed by the 'auteur' behind Dude, where's my car, which I have not yet seen. That movie has been described to me as equally hilarious and stupid, and, well, I just haven't gotten around to checking it out yet.

On the Harold and Kumar DVD is included the trailer for Festival express, the 33 years overdue documentary about the 1970 Canada train that shuttled Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, Buddy Guy, The Band, the Flying burrito brothers, and others between three massive concerts and the jam sessions and parties and liquor store raids in between. I mention this because part of the trailer is scored with the Dead's "Casey Jones" (a song obviously inspired by the trip), which I had inexplicably running through my head for a number of hours two days prior. Ooooh, spooky.

While we're on the topic of music, however, I must give credit to Harold and Kumar for finally letting me hear the lyrics of "Let's get retarded" by the Black-eyed peas*. You could well recognize this song, as it is largely the title phrase repeated over some catchy beats over and over again. I'd heard it every week at work during our weekly lobby meetings to announce how well the business was doing, and I'd taken the lyrics to say "Let's get things started" or something similar. Never once had I thought that our company's co-presidents would use a song about getting wasted as a lead-in for a meeting.

Speaking then of bureaucracy (well, I guess I was), I also watched The Terminal, starring Tom Hanks and Stanley Tucci. Stanley's one of those actors whose name is immediately recognizable even if his face or his films are not. At least, he was to me. For many a year I've had Joe Gould's secret on my list of films to watch, and I think it was probably because Ian Holm was in it. Oddly enough I happened to see it at the library today, as I often have, since it doesn't seem to get checked out very much. Every time I see it I consider watching it, but the few times I glance at the covers I put it back, not wanting to see a period piece or a sappy drama. Well it turns out that Stanley stars in it and directs it. Go figure. I'll probably watch it soon, as Stanley does a pretty good job in Terminal. Also on my list is 1996's Big night, his directorial debut, and I'm pretty sure I'd added that because Tony Shaloub is in it.

That's what I like about having such a long list (over four hundred films long), the fact that I often forget why a certain one is on it and get the thrill of figuring it out while watching. Of course not every movie I watch is on my list before I see it; such was the case with The last shot, in which, coincidentally, Tony Shaloub appears.

His scenes aren't the high point of that film, but they aren't its lowest either. It's an adequate Hollywood farce, more or less, but doesn't seem to make much of its potential. The story is about a fake film production to cover a mob crackdown, and it turns into a fable about compromising one's vision and selling out and cashing in and filming a movie called "Arizona" in New England.

Matthew Broderick actually looks like a grownup, for once, but that might just be the beard talking. Alec Baldwin doesn't impress as much as he could as a starry-eyed FBI agent finally seeing his chance to do something big. The rest of the cast fails to make much of an impression as well (except in small bits, such as Toni Collette providing a drug test urine sample while chatting in a restaurant). Prominent for the lack of prominence is Calista Flockhart as a foul-mouthed struggling actress who takes small animals hostage to get her way at least twice. I think that her doing this is the old hackened phenomenon of the tv actor trying to escape typecasting as a popular, wholesome character, but she comes off as more annoying than startling or eye-opening.

On the other side of the cliché is Neil Patrick Harris's appearance in Harold and Kumar, as himself. Not only is he a former wholesome character trying to expand his reperitoire, his character is expected to be as nice as Doogie Howser and this allows him even more of a free hand to mess with the protagonists and the audience. He reappears later in the film and neatly ties up his little plot tangent, and satisfyingly so (for us and for the guys onscreen) and overall it works. Yes, it's a stunt, and one as blatant as Dustin Diamond's uncredited cameo in Made (as himself, the guy who played Screech on Saved by the bell) and just as well incorporated into the plot.

So did I like any of these movies? I'm not sure. Harold and Kumar go to White Castle made me laugh a number of times and brightened up what would otherwise been dull dish-washing. It has funny moments, but they don't gel into something of significance, unlike, oh, Office space, for example. The boys aren't Cheech and Chong reincarnated, and fail to overcome the limitations of the road movie, drug movie, and mismatched buddy films all in one shot.

The Terminal also made me laugh, and at more sophisticated jokes. It too falters, relying on too many neat little touches or strays too far from plausibility, but everybody involved puts so much into it to make it nevertheless watchable and enjoyable. Knowing Andrew Niccol had a hand in writing it helped me understand the inclusion of some of the film's scenes that were too quirky to be believable, but Spielberg and Hanks handle them more masterfully than Al Pacino and Niccol himself did with the clunky, dull and totally unbelievable S1m0ne from a couple years back. Niccol's an interesting writer, but in smaller doses and concepts not quite so high. Still, I think I liked it, and I'll probably watch it again someday, if for nothing else but the rich performances and the impressive set construction that doesn't distract from them at all.

I've probably seen The last shot the only time I'll watch it. My track record with Hollywood farces and insider jokes is spotty at best. Of the ones I can list off the top of my head:The Player, Get Shorty, Swimming with Sharks and The Big Picture, I wasn't particularly enamored with any of them. There are better movies about making movies, but that would be a whole different topic to address. Perhaps another time.

* The Peas are at the forefront of the so-called 'crunk' genre of music, revolving around partying (i.e. smoking marijuana), getting drunk, and having fun. While I am certianly fond of that last one, and occasionally have partaken of the previous item, I haven't ever smoked up or smoked out or partied or whatever the kids call smoking pot these days. While I seem to be able to enjoy drug-reference movies on some level (Half baked was funnier than Harold and Kumar), what little bit of crunk I've heard has no appeal to me at all**.

** Moreover the popular crunk appropriation of the term 'retarded' to mean 'drunk and/or high' is at the same time offensive and disappointing. In addition it brings to mind the reprehensible Saturday night live sketches starring Jimmy Fallon and Rachel Dratch as idiot teenagers with a camcorder and a crush on each other. In every sketch, many times more than once, they play-insult each other with "You're retarded" in a stupid accent before making out. I do not like to be reminded of these sketches.

So today I was bouncing between so-called radio.blogs and I stumbled across a catchy track called "Perfect bore" by a band called Extra Extra. Oddly enough, the band doesn't seem to exist outside of a website and this one track that I streamed. As for Allmusic, Django's, Amazon and so forth: nobody's heard of the group. Apparently I have imagined them, or they are just really, really independent. Which is unfortunate, since their music is kinda catchy (though I know it's dangerous to judge based on a single song) and I'd like to find more.

Searching for them reminded me of my quest for more information about the britpop group Space. Talk about a common name. I have two of their albums, Spiders and Tin planet but neither is very recent and I am pretty sure they'd done something lately. As was the case with EE, the usual suspects turned up very little in the way of new music from them. However as I was traipsing around Times Square two weeks ago I bumbled into the massive (well, at least multi-story) Virgin Megastore, in which I discovered Space's Suburban rock 'n' roll in the imports bin. That's odd, I thought, I've never heard of this album, and apparently so had nobody else save for the store. Go figure.

So anybody with any better information about Extra Extra, please feel free to drop me a line. Anybody wanting to listen to them can drop by here and hear it with radio.blog's nifty little flash player, but I can't be sure how long it will stay in the playlist.

I've got something of an entertainment buzz going. Now that Nano's over and my vacation hold at the library is off (despite only writing four or five days last month I never turned my hold off) the good stuff is just rolling in.

I've been cracking up flipping through Interior desecrations by the very funny Jim Lileks. It's possible that I'm just tired but some of that stuff is side-splitting. Check out this book if you have any sense at all of taste or humour.

Last night I watched Suddenly, a thriller from 1955 that is more known for having Frank Sinatra as a villain than for being a pretty good movie that gives far more screen time to Sterling Hayden than it does to ol' blue eyes. This is not to say that Frankie doesn't turn in a good performance. He turns out to be a pretty decent psycho killer out to make a cool half mil to off the president, but pretty much everybody is good. I haven't seen the other film on the DVD, ostensibly with Frank again as a heroin addict or something like that, but Suddenly is well worth watching. Then again, I like to watch Sterling Hayden. If you have no idea who he is, go out now and track down The killing (one of Stanley Kubrick's forgotten early films about which I have written previously). It's a darn good movie and you shouldn't regret watching it. I don't.

I'm also happy to have finally stumbled across the excellent drama The Wire that HBO's been showing for a couple seasons now. Though it treads on the same turf as Homicide: life on the streets it's a different beast altogether. It's dense, clever, well-written, dark, gritty, and even funny at times, and I'm enjoying it immensely. Altogether I've done well to have waited and had all of these hit me at once.

Harshing the buzz considerably though is the continued stupidity of HBO's DVD people who cannot seem to consistently stick a chapter stop at the end of the opening credits. Why is this so difficult? I cannot be the only person in the world who does not want to sit through the entire theme song every fifty minutes when I'm devouring these shows. I am enjoying this show so much but when I watch five episodes in one night that means I need to fast forward four times (I did want to hear it all the way through, once) and tomorrow night I'll likely need to do it eight more times too if I know the way that I watch these things.

Then again I didn't pay for this (thank you Columbus Metropolitan Library) but I was thinking that I would probably be willing to pay an extra dollar or two (not more than two though) when I do buy discs of a show if it had chapter stops after the opening credits. At least until everybody figures out what the producers of M*A*S*H seem to already know. DVD makers, just put a chapter stop after the opening credits, please, damnit. This just gets to me for some reason.

On the upside, though, now I have a challenge. 'Roundabout the end of episode three ("The buys") I heard a familiar tune, albeit in an unfamiliar fashion. The song was one that I first encountered on the highly underrated soundtrack album for Batman forever called "The hunter gets captured by the game" and as far as I had known until today the song was done first by Tracy Thorn backed up by Massive Attack.

How wrong I was. Though that album is no stranger to cover tunes (Lou Reed's "Passenger" done by INXS's Michael Hutchence comes to mind) I'd never considered this song, one of my favorites of all time, to be one. Well, the one in the show sure didn't sound like Massive Attack and I immediately (and correctly) inferred that the version I knew and loved was likely a cover, but this one could well be also.

So I went out on the web, and I'm still not sure what I heard. Unfortunately "The Wire" is too common to help out on a search, and the HBO forums don't have a good enough search either. I'm pretty sure nobody else has asked about the song on there, and I moved my search over to the good old allmusic guide instead. There I discovered that the song was written by none other than Smokey Robinson and it was probably first performed by the Marvelettes. Unfortunately it's also been done by another five or six artists, too. So now the hunt begins.

I enjoy the hunt.

I'm not generally one to pick favorites. You can look at it as a sign of great integrity or great insecurity, but either way I just can't consistently a shortlist of the entertainment greats (or colors or foods or anything else for that matter). That said, to claim to be "not generally one to pick favorites" often leads to explanations longer than this one and after that, bewildered expressions. To save people the trouble, I often pluck titles out of the air as "favorites" just to grease the wheels of polite conversation and discourse.

Movies-wise I generally champion 1997's science-fiction/anti-fascism epic/spoof/actioner Starship troopers, more for the reactions it gets than for any actual affinity I have for the misunderstood gem.

That said, I do love the film.

I've never settled on a token favorite music group or album, however. Mostly when I'm pressed I just mention the ones I'm borrowing from the library, at long as they're moderately well known. Other times I just think back upon my collection and name names that pop up more than a couple times. In doing either I often omit the discs that I really do enjoy, oftentimes much more than the recent ones or the multiples.

After all, the Crash test dummies have been trying out a lot of new things on their more recent albums, but they're leaving out the stuff that makes it worth hearing.

But I digress. Today when I was walking around I was happy to be listening to Visual Audio Sensory Theater by VAST, which you've discovered if you're lucky and which you like if your tastes run parallel to mine.

Well, Lars Ulrich likes VAST too, but don't hold that against either of us.

I really like this album, and all the more so for having discovered it all on my own. Way back when I worked a pair of jobs for a summer, one of which saw me clocking in at midnight and out just around dawn. My commute, as it were, was about a twenty five minute drive, several miles of which was through Sand Run Park, a two-lane blacktop path through some of the most scenic bits of the Cuyahoga River valley.

At one point the road dipped through a river. I usually slowed down for that bit.

I knew those roads very, very well. By the end (and once I knew the way traffic and the deer worked) I was able to drive through the park with only my parking lights lit, and occasionally did so without incident. Being a foolish teenager I sometimes would do the same whilst steering with my knees, employing equal amounts of leverage and stupidity. But none of this matters. It was when I put aforementioned album into my player today that I recalled the first time I played it, moving stealthily through the park.

The disc, for those who don't know it, starts slowly and quietly with some strings that build up a sweet theme until abruptly switching over to a crunchy electric guitar riff. Then it starts to rock, and with great samples and instrumentation thrown in for the ride it makes for a good album all the way through. It hit me hard the first time I heard it and it sounds no worse these so many years later.

That isn't the part that matter so much either. The greatest part is the fact that it was a complete surprise to me. Back in my hometown there was this little shop called The Record Exchange that had two great bins of discs priced twenty five cents to two fifty, and I looted it often in those days. By now I have probably fifty or sixty such CDs littering my collection, and to be sure many of them are trash.

The occasional one does stand out, and such was the case with VAST's debut disc, which found its way into my hands as a four-for-a-dollar promo disc in a barely-labeled envelope.

Sometime since I've given that one away and replaced it with the genuine issue, and that was the one to which I was listening today. Today when all of this came back to me and I decided to write it down.

So, well, thanks, Record Exchange.