Reaper: Pretty Darn Good!

Hey, here's a new TV show that's actually worth checking out: Reaper. It's from Kevin Smith and stars Leland Palmer from "Twin Peaks" as the Devil. The show is about a slacker who finds out that his parents sold his soul to the Devil before he was born. Such an obvious premise; amazing no one has done this show before.

On the radio, Smith called it "derivative in all the right ways," which is true. There was DNA from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Ghostbusters, plus a Seth-Rogin-type character and a "Forty-Year-Old Virgin" workplace milieu. Plus, it's on the C-Dub!

Visit cwtv.com/shows/reaper

Skull Made from 1980s Metal Tapes

I can see that the teeth of the matter is Mötley Crüe's Shout at the Devil, while Judas Priest's Screaming for Vengeance forms the temple.

By the way, this is Skull #11 ('80s Metal), 2006. by Brian Dettmer.
Currently on display at the International Museum of Surgical Science, Chicago.

Photo by Flickr user Andrew Huff used under a Creative Commons license.

Via BoingBoing Gadgets.

LA Celebrity Sighting #17

I spotted Sonic Youth guitarist/singer Thurston Moore at Canter's just a few days after seeing SY perform at the Greek Theater in Griffith Park. I did go up to him and thanked him for doing a great show; I felt kinda dorky about it, but I've been such a huge fan of his band for so long, not saying something was simply unthinkable. Plus, Thurston is under the mistaken impression that Kim Gordon is his wife and mother of his daughter Coco. I need to break the news to the man at some point about Kim being with me. I'll be gentle about it...

LA Celebrity Sighting #16 (French Edition)

My Niece Mathilde spotted French entertainer Johnny Hallyday having dinner at the French bistro Morels at the Grove in Hollywood. Hallyday became famous in the sixties as a sort of French Tom Jones, mostly for his French-language covers of American and English rock hits. He is adored by his French fans to this day, and still performs frequently. He is also known for not being the sharpest knife in the drawer.

LA Celebrity Sighting #15.50

It's been awhile since my last sighting blog entry. Lots to catch up on! Let's start with David Marciano, not exactly an A-list star, but well-known to fans of the TV series The Shield as Detective Steve Billings. The Ex and I spotted David with a female companion while we were at Lucha Va Voom!, enjoying the Mexican wrestling and burlesque striptease! Us bald men love them boobies!

Down El Paso way...

...things get a little spread out.



This YouTube link is posted mostly for the benefit of Pain. Pain will likely know why. As a bonus, it also happens to be one of my favorite songs.

In addition to Tina, I guess Mr. Belew also knows his way around a guitar.

There are 10 other totally awesome clips from this 1980 Talking Heads concert in Rome, available via the above YouTube link.

Into The Cauldron - Part 3

(Kim Gordon, of Sonic Youth; she's my girlfriend, she just doesn't know it yet.)


What the hell is going on at music concerts these days?!?! When I started going to shows back in the early eighties, people would show their excitement by dancing or maybe playing some air drums/guitar, sometimes smoking a little weed, or sipping a beer while nodding their heads. Today, it seems like a lot of concert goers think that they're simply socializing at a club or bar, and that the band working their ass off upfront is just background music to their super-exciting life. I went to see Sonic Youth at the Greek Theater in Griffith Park in LA last week, and I was astonished by the total lack of attention or interest people seemed to have for the stuff that was actually happening onstage! Most people appeared to show up late, and I mean like 20 minutes late, and then proceed to get up every five minutes to go buy a $7 beer, or go to the bathroom to piss out said $7 beer, or check messages on their blackberry or iPhone, or in general, just have extremely loud, asinine conversations with the person sitting next to them, or on the phone. I calculated that the three middle-aged Silver Lake hipsters sitting in front of us actually saw maybe half the show, and that the drunken Irish women behind us probably witnessed a cozy 20 minutes of music. The rest was spent doing other shit that would NEVER come to mind to a person like me who paid $35 to come see one of his favorite bands play one of their best album in a fantastic setting by the hills of Griffith Park! Let me make myself clear: I do not care about anything you have to say, so shut the hell up! The only thing you should be doing is looking at the stage and enjoy the show. Forget the bad beer, and if you must have one, keep it at ONE, not five! Oh, and a music show is not the right place to catch up with your friend over the phone. If that's what you want to do, buy a six-pack, go home, put the fucking record on, and call your dumbass friend, but please don't ruin my evening! Into the cauldron, the lot of ya!!

Note To Self: Next Time, Use Throw-Away, Prepaid Cell Phone

What's more damaging to the sanctity of Senator David Vitter's (R-LA) marriage, and his relationship with god?:

A. Having to live in a world where gay people can legally get married and enjoy their love for each other like the rest of us?

B. Cheating on your wife by using the services of high-class DC prostitutes?

The answer, of course, is A.

Sexo y Violencia!

There is this great show here in LA called Lucha Vavoom, which is a mix of Mexican wrestling, comedy, and burlesque striptease. It happens several times a year at the great Mayan Theater in downtown LA. Rosemary and I went to see it the other night, and it was a a lot of fun! It was clearly a standard gathering spot for the hip 50's retro/psychobilly crowd, and other scenesters; there were several comedians acting as MCs and commentators during the matches, some fun striptease acts using female, male, and transgender dancers, and above all, 5 great wrestling matches with people with names like Dirty Sanchez, Mini-Chicken, and the Poubelle Twins. It was all there - the good guys, the bad guys, the all-girl battle royale, the crazy tag teams, the blatant cheating, the incompetent referees with slow counts, the audience taunting the wrestlers, wrestlers getting thrown in the audience, and much, much more! Nothing like a good dose of theatrical sex and violence to relax one after a week of hard work! Lucha vavoom!!

No Jazz!

On Saturday June 23rd, my ex-girlfriend and I went to see The Police at Dodger Stadium. We paid $50 a pop to sit in the nose-bleed section, but we didn't care. The Police were the first contemporary band that I got into when I was growing up. I will always remember hearing Message in a Bottle for the first time on Top Ten radio in the winter of 1979. They were cool, and wrote great, catchy rock songs. I loved them, and I was more than happy to sit in one of the upper decks of this huge baseball stadium from what looked liked a mile away form the stage, just to catch a glimpse and hear them do all the classic tunes the people came to see them play! My Russian navy binoculars did help a little bit, though...

Anyway, the Foo Fighters opened up. I never was very impressed by them, but they were quite enjoyable live. Frankly, I've always been quite surprised that someone like Dave Grohl, with his talent, background and pedigree, and his impressive musical influences, couldn't come up with better material for his own band. Anyway, an entertaining set, which seemed to please the plastic, OC-type middle-aged wives and girlfriends who were dancing around us, their fake tits bouncing in their $90 tank tops. We briefly reminisced how we saw the Foo Fighters play in Boston back in '95 opening up for Mike Watt on his first solo tour. Dave played drums in Watt's backup band then, and I think Eddie Vedder was on guitar. Mike Watt is still touring the country in his Econoline, and the Foo Fighters, well....they are almost like classic rock at this point...funny.

The Police came out and did their thing, and they were great! Stewart was The Man, wearing a black headband and white gloves, and playing like the old days. Andy Summers' riffs were clean and angular, and faithfull to the original recordings. And Sting was....well....Sting, I guess! They played all the songs I wanted to hear, including my favorites (Walking on the Moon, Invisible Sun, Spirits in a Material World), and it was a great show. The only criticism I had was about this annoying habit that Sting has about changing the arrangements on some of the songs, or sing them in a different key, or do these improv meddleys that sometimes dragged on for way too long! I was reminded of a story that the aforementioned Mike Watt told about playing bass for the Stooges: he said that Iggy Pop was very keen on him playing the original, simple Dave Alexander bass lines, and not get all fancy, and that if he got carried away playing live, Iggy would turn to him and scream "no jazz!". Let's just say that I felt like Stewart or Andy should have turned to their singer a few times during the show, and yelled "Yo! NO JAZZ!"

Weird Sh*t I See While Riding My Bike - Part 1 (Why Don't We Do It In The Road?)

Another segment I'd like to christen here to document all the interesting (and sometimes bizarre) stuff I see and ride by - or over - while on my bike. I'll start with a bang: yesterday, on Waring and La Brea, while riding back from the Bicycle Film Festival in Hollywood, I passed a bright red silicon vibrator sitting in the middle of the road. For the rest of my ride home, I kept thinking: how did this vibrator end up on the street? Did its user throw it out his or her apartment window in a fit of orgasmic joy? Or was it thrown out of a car window as it was getting pulled over by the cops because of its excessive swerving? Or maybe it simply fell out of someone's bag while they were crossing the street? Or was it dug out of the trash by a stray dog looking for food? Ah, if sex toys could talk!....but then again, forget that thought - this is probably best left unsolved, as Nigel Tuffnel would say!

Through Furnace Creek on a Fixie

I went to the 7th Annual Bicycle Film Festival here in LA this weekend, and saw a wonderful short documentary about 4 Los Angeles vegan cyclists who decide to compete in the famous Furnace Creek 508 bike race...on their fixed-gear bikes!! This is a relay-style, 48-hour, 508-mile race that goes through Death Valley, with total elevation gain of 35,000 feet! The documentary is called "Eat! Sleep? Bike!", directed by Sasha Edge Perry, and I highly recommend it to anyone who gets a chance to see it. Them LA fixie riders are tough!

Into the Cauldron: Don Orsillo

Meet Don Orsillo, play-by-play announcer for the Boston Red Sox on New England Sports Network. Has an annoying habit of giggling like a nine-year-old girl at analyst Jerry Remy's in-game "jokes." Nickname: The Thumb.

Despite the fact that he's a well-paid professional broadcaster with a dream job, Orsillo loves joking about how some of the opposing players' names are difficult to pronounce. This first happened a couple of weeks ago during a game against the Atlanta Braves. He basically refused to make any effort to correctly pronounce the name of the Braves catcher, Jerrod Saltalamacchia. Usually he would just say "Saltamacchia" and then titter with Jerry about how hard that name was to pronounce. At one point he said "It has like five or six words in there." Presumably he meant syllables.

But is it really that hard? Sal-ta-la-mac-chi-a. It's Italian, just like "Orsillo." Come on, Thumb! A paisan!

Then, this past week, the Colorado Rockies come to town. The Rockies catcher: Yorvit Torrealba. At shortstop: Troy Tulowitzki. And in center field: Ryan Spilborghs. You would have thought Orsillo had never operated his larynx before, to hear him stumble over and complain about these names. Are they really that hard, Don? Sound it out. Torrealba = Torre-alba = Joe Torre + Jessica Alba. Easy peasy! Plus, the media guide provides a handy pronunciation guide for each name. Use it.

The half-assed effort to pronounce these names, coupled with the incessant jokey complaining about it, had me mentally dunking Orsillo in a cauldron of molten lead. Is it too much to ask that a broadcaster do his job, practice the tougher names beforehand, and just say the name without any extraneous comment? It's your effing job, Orsillo, to call the game accurately and informatively, period. Leave your effervescent "personality" and "quirky goofiness" and "crypto-xenophobic mispronunciations" out of it.

Into the cauldron with you!

In the Cauldron

This is a new segment that I'd like to do on a regular basis. As some of you know, I get easily aggravated by small, often inconsequential things, and usually vent my frustration in unhealthy or annoying manners. This will be a way for me to do this without driving the people around me completely crazy. The degree of my discontent will be measured on a semantics scale, from "headbutt" to "up against the wall", with other ratings in between to be announced later, as I make them up.

My target today (no pun intended) is...the Beatles! Their catlaog is co-owned by Michael Jackson and Sony/ATV Music Publishing, but my understanding is that the surviving Beatles, along with the Lennon and Harrison widows still have full creative control of the music. So, I will blame them for letting Target use the McCartney tune "Hello Goodbye" in its most recent ad campaign, and I will blame Paul in particular for allowing this to happen since he wrote the song.

So, Paul, step on up and come get your headbutt! You deserve it, lad!

LA Celebrity Sighting #16

Keith Morris (seen here on the right) was the original singer for Black Flag until 1979 when he left and formed the hardcore skate/surf-punk outfit the Circle Jerks out of Hermosa Beach. Any self-respecting SoCal punk fan should have the Circle Jerks' debut album Group Sex on their shelf. I ran into Keith at Amoeba Records in Hollywood, buying a shitload of vinyl, and anxiously examining them at the counter for scratches. Sure, he looks like a goofball these days - a mix between Leon Trotsky and a Jah dance-hall DJ - but if you doubt the significance of this man's recording career, go home and download Black Flag's Nervous Breakdown EP. Don't argue - just do it.

LA Celebrity Sighting #15

I ran into Mary-Louise Parker at Whole Foods in West Hollywood, in aisle 2, by the chips, salsa and cookies section; she was there with some nondescript guy and a toddler, and all I really remember is that she looked right at me and smiled, and I thought she was the most attractive dope dealer I've ever seen! Snoop was right: she is quite the MILF!

HELP!

For the longest time, I treated the Beatles' collection of recordings as a two-tier catalog: there was Revolver in 1966, with everything that came after it, and then there was the stuff before that, the Beatlemania stuff. When I discovered the Beatles, I immediately gravitated to the later-period recordings, and I pretty much ignored the pre-Revolver releases. Years later, I got into the other albums, like Rubber Soul and Help!, and while listening to the title track of Help! tonight, I was reminded how absolutely brilliant these guys had gotten by early 1965! In particular, I think that Paul and George's background singing on the verses for that track is proof that the Lennon/McCartney song-writing team was pure genius. For that little bit alone, they are forever gods in my mind.

LA Celebrity Sightings #12-14

It's been a while since I've posted my last entry, but I certainly made up for the wait with a nice cluster-sighting at the Arclight Theater in Hollywood. R and I were there to see Zodiac, when we ran into these three folks in the lobby, talking in a group. For those of you who are fans of the show The Shield, you will recognize them as "Danny", "Corrine" and "Dutch", aka Catherine Dent, Cathy Cahlin and Jay Karnes, repectively. This multiple sighting was exciting for me because I am a fan of the show, and it was a bit like running into 3/5 of a band you like, so I kept looking around to see if the others were there....where are you Michael Chiklis?

Cinema Update

Circle June 1 on the calendar: a new Judd Apatow movie starring Seth Rogen: Knocked Up. Plot looks a bit lame totally awesome* but and the presence of Rogen demands that Attention Must be Paid.

* The local commissar demanded this edit.

LA Celebrity Sighting #11 - Santa Monica Edition

We spotted Robert picking food up at the Santa Monica vegan restaurant Real Food Daily while we were eating there last weekend. For those of you who may not know, Robert Trujillo is the current thud staff man in Metallica. I highly recommend the movie Some Kind of Monster which documented the recording of the album St. Anger and the coming of Robert into the band; it's a great rockumentary, even if you are not a fan of the band's music. Robert is an amazing player who favors using his fingers rather than a pick, but who is nevertheless one of the fastest guys around, in the vain of Geezer Butler, Steve Harris, or Geddy Lee. Gotta respect the bassman!

LA Celebrity Sighting #10

I went down to this place called the Farmers Market down on Fairfax and 3rd a few weekends ago; it's not really a farmers market, but more like a tourist attraction, with dozens of souvenir shops and restaurants, very much like Faneuil Hall in Boston. It's adjacent to The Grove, a fancy-schmancy pedestrian outdoor mall, complete with a trolley and all the upscale stores and restaurants one would expect. Anyway, here I am, reading Rolling Stone magazine at this newsstand, silently lamenting the terrible state of the American rock scene (the heinous poseur band Fall Out Boy was on the cover!), when I looked up and found myself right next to Kanye West! I of course pretended to not recognize him (you gotta stay cool!) and proceeded to grab all sorts of different mags to look at as a transparent excuse to stay close to him. He was there with a woman and a kid, and spent some time talking to someone on his cell phone about some photo shoot. I have to say, he looked quite classy and handsome, and I probably would have said something to him if he had been alone.

LA Celebrity Sighting #9

R. and I went to see a show at UCLA called Flesh and Blood. I sat down next to this woman who told me she was holding the seat for her friend. I moved to another seat, and a few minutes later found out that the friend was actress Maura Tierney when she walked in late and quickly sat down behind me.

I was never a big fan of her work on ER, but I quite enjoyed her acting when she was on Newsradio, a great comedy sitcom that aired in the second half of the nineties, which was canceled after the tragic murder of one of its main actors, Phil Hartman.

Mood Enhancer

What is it about the Swedes that improves my mood so reliably? This new song by I'm from Barcelona has been playing recently at my local coffee shop and the video just makes me want to move to Malmo or Huskvarna on the double.

America Before the Estate Tax

Back in early 2001, at my last job, I had kind of a loopy advertising concept to defend the estate tax against abolition: images of sooty, child-labor-y America around the turn of the 20th century arrayed beneath the headline "What Was America Like Before the Estate Tax?" (The estate tax was first enacted in 1916). It was too over-the-top for the people in charge of the pro-estate-tax campaign, and became kind of a running joke at my expense, but now there is a website full of these images.

It's easy to imagine that life would be just ducky if we just got rid of taxes and regulations and ran a laissez-faire economy, but we tried that already, and I don't think most of us would really like to go back to those days.

(Via BoingBoing)

Me and Daniel Johnston

I finally got around to watching "The Devil and Daniel Johnston" last night, the documentary about singer/songwriter Daniel Johnston, who has been a darling of the underground music scene for the last 20 years. Johnston, a gifted songwriter plagued with chronic mental illness, has often been compared to other troubled geniuses like Brian Wilson and Syd Barrett. While I was not familiar with all the details of Johnston's personal story and his music, I had been exposed to some of his songs over the years, mostly through covers by other artists (Boston's own Mary Lou Lord's cover of "Speeding Motorcycle" and fIREHOSE's rendition of "Walking the Cow"). The documentary does a decent job of presenting Johnston's art (mostly music, with some drawings and paintings), but it mostly seemed to focus on the larger issue of Johnston's struggle with mental illness over the years, and the tragic effect it had on him, his family, friends, and artistic peers. It's a depressing movie, but I appreciated its honest portrayal of the debilitating and often terrifying effects of severe manic depression. There seems to be a certain coolness associated with being a mentally ill artist, at least from some fans' point of view, and I've always been annoyed by that attitude. By the end of the movie, I was left with a deep sense of sorrow for Johnston's tragic story, as much as I was intrigued and curious to find out more about his body of work. His music, at its best, is truly brilliant, but it came at such a high personal price! I found myself wishing that he had grown up healthy, even if that would have meant being less successful artistically.