So I finally beat Tennis for NES. At least, I beat the level 5
opponent, who is the hardest, so I guess that's tantamount to beating
the game.
Also, the High Fidelity soundtrack has introduced me to Love's "Always See Your Face" which definitely makes me want to get their album Forever Changes, even though that song isn't actually on the album.
Issue 11
Last night was, as they say, a character-building experience. It
seemed as if I was making up for all the times I didn't have to fill in
at the radio station this past term. But, hopefully tonight I will get
a lot of sleep in preparation for writing my paper about Queueing
Theory tomorrow. Perhaps when things quiet down next week I will
attempt to summarize it here.
The concert tonight was a good time. I think the Places might be a
good band, but since they had only a fraction of their normal group
there, and they played quiet music to a talkative crowd, it was for me
hard to come to any conclusion about them. The Long Winters played a
rousing set and reinvigorated my interest in them, which has been
intermittent. The Decemberists, who were attempting to sell their
latest EP for $10 (no sale for me), were as good as you might expect if
you've heard their albums. No, they didn't play all their good songs
(they have too many), not even "July, July!", which I think is my
favorite, but they did play their new EP in its entirety (The Tain EP),
a version of "The Chimbley Sweep" that featured duelling guitar and
accordion solos, and, as a closer, Echo & the Bunnymen's "Bring on
the Dancing Horses," which first appeared on their 1985 compilation, Songs to Learn & Sing, and also on the Pretty in Pink
soundtrack. All I could tell about it at the show was that the guitar
sounded like The Replacements, but the information superhighway helped
me figure out exactly what song it was. Thank you information
superhighway.
From The Onion A.V. Club:
For those who love John Mayer but find him too raw and
daring, there's Donavon Frankenreiter, an acolyte of the Jack Johnson
school of unbelievably boring, knockabout surf-pop. Possessing all the
flavor and personality of a stack of waterlogged newspapers, Donavon
Frankenreiter (Brushfire) is so inoffensive, it's strangely appalling.
A rabid cult following exists for ultra-lightweight '70s-pop throwbacks
like Frankenreiter, but their stuff is so flimsy, it's hard to prove
its existence, let alone justify it...
The band formerly known as The Microphones will be playing Monday night at the Triple Rock. Just thought you should know.
iTunes song #11,000: RJD2 "Iced Lightning"
Also, the iTunes for Windows Audioscrobbler plugin has stopped working for me, so that kind of sucks.
Total time elapsed from the beginning of the sociology exam to me finishing this entry: 22 minutes.
Tom Carson debunks the Reagan myth in the Village Voice
I have returned home. My room, I must say, is one exciting place. I
can watch television or movies (VHS, DVD, or DivX), listen to MP3s,
CDs, or vinyl LPs and use the internet all on my computer without
getting out of bed (remote control). I managed to move all of my stuff
to the side of the room so I can enter and exit and didn't actually
have to unpack it all at once. Tomorrow I will probably do more
unpacking, laundry, and maybe look through the classifieds for a job or
something. A job would be nice.
I will be listening to KUNI this
summer in the hopes that they can help me hear some new music even
though I will be poor (probably) and not on campus. I've heard it said
that Thursday night is the best night to listen. Last Thursday featured
Calexico, Mission of Burma, Guided by Voices, Jesse Sykes, Roxy Music,
The Cure, Iggy Pop, The Von Bondies, Secret Machines, The Replacements,
Bob Dylan, and Pavement.
Should I sign up for Netflix or be really hardcore (read: cheap) and
only get movies from the Iowa City Public Library, which has an
interesting collection? I can't decide.
Also, Ted Leo is coming to Iowa City on July 15. This is turning
into a pretty decent summer of rock shows in Iowa City, if I do say so
myself.
I watched a wretched Game 3 wherein the Pistons held the Lakers to
their lowest playoff score in 560 games. It looked more like a college
basketball game between conference rivals who were having a bad year. I
also watched the Cubs, who scored 10 runs in the fourth inning, which
made that game about as exciting.
Really, the most sports drama I've seen on TV in the past two days
is Larry Bird telling the world that the NBA needs more white American
superstars. (The best part was where he lamented the fact that
sometimes opposing coaches would put a white guy on the court to defend
him.) He seems to not have figured out that, for the most part, the
type of stars a sport generates is related to where the sport is most
popular for kids. There are tons of great Latin American baseball
players because there are tons of Latin American kids playing baseball.
The same goes for the Minnesotan, Canadian, and Russian hockey players
who dominate that sport. It's not hard to figure out why the PGA tour
is dominated by middle- and upper-class white guys: they're the ones
who spent their youth at the country club on the golf course. Larry
Bird should probably be spending more time supporting youth basketball
around the country and less time wondering aloud on national TV why
white Americans can't play basketball as well as other sorts of people.
I read Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian because the local library didn't have The Left Hand of Darkness; it was short and pleasant. I will now watch 21 Grams, which was another item acquired from the local library.
Yesterday I enjoyed a track from the new Magnetic Fields album as
well as Tiny Grimes' "Romance Without Finance" on the way to Iowa City.
I can't tell you more because the station failed to post the playlist,
which is weird. On the way home, KRUI
played a hilarious track in between Atmosphere and The Streets on one
of their hip hop shows, but they don't show playlists at all and I couldn't
call them because I didn't know their number.
My DVD player (Windows Media Player) stopped working, so I have to
find a new free DVD player for Windows XP and download it on a dialup
connection. I didn't get to watch 21 Grams because it was due before I could remedy the situation. I will update you as developments arise.
I went to the local library and, besides what you see to the right in the sidebar, picked up two movies. Top Hat,
with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, was fun to watch and funny, even
though the mistaken identity gag got a little stale after overuse. I
will watch The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly later this weekend.
I was, for a while, along with the rest of my family, disconnected
from the internet and the rest of the telephonicized world. It seems
that when my brother plugged in his modem, somehow the line to our
house went dead. This is confusing because I had no idea that modems
could do that and am still uncertain that they can, but the events
coincide almost perfectly, and it's difficult to say what else might
have caused the outage. Either way, I am once again interfacing with
the online universe at roughly 44.0 kbps.
I liked The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, but perhaps not as much as Quentin Tarantino likes it (I think I saw an ad in Sight and Sound or Film Comment claiming it is his favorite film). I was, however, unprepared for how impressive Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line
was. More than anything else in watching movies, I love to be
overwhelmed by something after either not having read enough about it
or having read the wrong critics. I think in this case it was that I
knew Terrence Malick was supposed to be a good director and that this
was that other war movie that came out the same year as Saving Private Ryan, which I remember seeing in the theater. Now I have to say that I think The Thin Red Line was unfairly overshadowed by the Spielberg blockbuster. Personally, I
preferred the philosophizing and rambling narrative of Malick's film; I
don't think it's necessarily better, but I am very glad I decided to
watch that other World War II movie from 1998.
Rather than attempting to write about it here, I'll link to a review with which I agree: Janet
Maslin captures the best parts in the New York Times, though I approved
of the meandering and plotlessness of the movie a lot more than she does
Well, I watched some of Game 5 tonight; I watched less because it
was such a blowout. I enjoyed watching the Pistons a lot more than I
ever enjoyed the star-studded Lakers because they play well together.
However, I don't really have that much to say about the game itself.
What I did note is that in the past 21 years, only six teams have won
NBA championships, and slightly more impressive statistically, only
seven teams have won championships in the past quarter-century. That
comes out to 3.57 championships per organization. (They've also only
had four commissioners in the past sixty years, but that's slightly
less glamorous.) Now, in baseball, over the period (plus one for the
strike), there were 17 world champions; in football, there were 14; and
12 different teams won the Stanley Cup since 1979.
Hockey is the only sport that even comes close in terms of
domination by, not even dynasties, but by organizations. The odd thing
about these statistics is that they don't measure "teams" in terms of a
specific group of players, or even in terms of management, but they
measure the protracted success of organizations. I haven't checked, but
I doubt many of the personnel from the Lakers' 1980 team were around
for the 2002 finals. In the NBA's 58 year history, the Lakers (both
Minnesota and LA) have won 14 championships, and the Celtics have 15.
That's exactly half the championships to only two teams. The recent
numbers, from 1980 to 2004, come after the ABA folded, so that makes no
difference.
The Boston Celtics won the NBA championship 8 times in a row; think
about that. That's more than any team ever in the four major team
sports here. The Los Angeles Lakers lost a staggering seven
championships in the 1960's; they've been in 28 of 58 championship
series.
The only reason I can come up with is that basketball has the
smallest roster of the sports, with only five players on the court, who
don't change from offense to defense. Hockey has the second fewest.
Baseball has pitchers who rotate in groups of four or five, not to
mention relievers, and football teams have as many as thirty different
players on the field in various starting positions. So, losing Bill
Russell or Michael Jordan means you've lost twenty percent of your
starting lineup, but losing Joe Montana, Terry Bradshaw, Sandy Koufax,
or Mariano Rivera, for example, just isn't the same. Even so, that
still doesn't explain why the same basketball teams would continue to
win year after year, decade after decade.
Also, researching this has led me to the discovery of possibly the
most mellifluous name ever for a sports team: the Ottawa Silver Seven.
Of course I used Wikipedia for most of the stats.
The people of Mongolia have to choose surnames by the end of the month, or else!
It became obvious within the first few moments that Cinema Paradiso
was going to be a sappy story: the music is so completely saccharine
that it would not be possible for this film to be anything but a
tearjerker. Thankfully, though, the music is not a defining
characteristic. Mainly, love for cinema is the focus of Cinema Paradiso,
manifested through the townspeople who have nothing else to do and by
the young boy, Toto, who takes over the projection booth of the local
cinema at age 10. The story is filled with vignettes from his memory
(the story is told in flashback), but there is a certain quality to
many of them that makes it clear that the director knows that the
audience knows that the scenes have some kind of extra-cinematic
quality that makes it obvious that the moments are images on screen and
not attempts at total realism. It's hard not to smile at the
cinemagoers or the amusing situations they get into. Also, everything
happens in the Cinema Paradiso: we see people who look like they're
having sex, a nursing baby, customers of all ages, newlyweds who
eventually bring their first child along, and even an old man who seems
to die of a heart attack after a particularly upsetting scene.
I might have liked this movie just a little bit more than I would
have otherwise because I just finished Italian Neorealism. Then again,
that also made it all the less believable that anybody, especially
schoolkids, would or could have sat through a double feature that
included La Terra Trema. But that's not the point; the
melodramatic scenes are many, but they work because it's so impossible
to dislike this movie. It made me sad that I was never around for the
golden age of the cinema, back before television.
His Girl Friday, on the other hand, was not very sentimental,
dealing as it did with a failed engagement, capital punishment, and
dirty politicians and newspapermen. I was constantly stunned at how
fast the actors continually delivered their dialogue, even with the
knowledge that this was a screwball comedy and that's what I should
expect. The journalists were all terrifically bitter and the
politicians wonderfully crooked, ready to exchange nearly anything for
a chance at re-election. I suppose it's a tribute to the frenetic
pacing of the film that a suicide attempt, an upcoming execution,
repeated criminal acts, and, dare I say it, a refreshingly
mean-spirited tone don't dampen the hilarity at all. I think I've only
seen three Howard Hawks movies, but I need to see a lot more.
I went golfing for the second time this summer and did slightly
worse, though the course was a tougher one. Hopefully I will have at
least one outstanding round to remember by the time September 10 rolls
around. (That's the end of the summer for me, I think.)
I'm still searching for a job. I will start it up again on Monday, at Syngenta Seeds.
I made another visit to the library, which you will note by the changes at left. I read Spin, which was as shamelessly unhelpful as always at critiquing actual new music (mabye slightly better than Rolling Stone),
but the issue was in a small way by the intriguing Jeff Tweedy
interview and in a big way by Dave Eggers' piece on grand-scale rock
albums and the Scottish band Big Country in particular. I think when a
non-music writer writes better about music than the actual staff of
your magazine, maybe that should tell you something about the quality
of your publication. That is, it's not very good.
I went to the Guided by Voices concert, and it was SOLD OUT! (Looks
like I'll be coming up with something else to review for Professor
Yeti.) I kind of figured that with Iowa City being a kind of small
town, and with many of the university students gone home for the
summer, and this being an indie rock show, that probably it wouldn't
sell out. Also, until today I knew of no way to pick up advance tickets
for the show, because they weren't selling on the internet and the
venue must have just announced where and how to get tickets in the past
few days. So I drove home with seventeen dollars burning a hole in my
pocket, cursing the fact that I probably won't ever get to see Guided
by Voices play since they're supposedly retiring in the near future.
Hopefully they'll come through MSP supporting their last album, because
that would be terrific. Sure, they tend to get too drunk to play and I
probably wouldn't get to hear "I Am a Scientist" anyway, but it would
still be a shame.
I contemplated trying to see a movie, but it was ten o'clock, so
everything had already started, so I just came home and made what
little money is available to me by preparing the bulletin for our
church. $22.50 per week is a lot better than $0.00 per week. However, I
believe the evening was somewhat salvaged by the fact that I got to
listen to Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska for the first and second
times. I'd never been excited enough by what I'd heard of the Boss on
the radio to actually purchase anything by him, or even seek MP3s out
on the internet, but I knew Nebraska was legendary as an album
based on demos rather than studio versions. Plus, it gets mentioned by
reviewers all the time (Mark Richardson from Pitchfork: "the indie rock
favorite in Springsteen's catalog") and Travis Morrison namechecks it
in "Ellen and Ben," so I decided that I had to check it out for free at
the library. It turned out to be everything I hoped it would be,
perhaps magnified by the fact that I was sitting depressed by myself at
night, but wow. Maybe you already know/own this album, but if you don't
you should go and get it right now. I think I like it a little better
than Lou Reed's Songs for Drella, which I mentioned a while
ago, and probably better than anything I've heard (all the way through
for the first time) since Mission of Burma's self-titled career
retrospective (which they're now making less-than-complete by reforming
and recording new music). It's kind of sad that this is supposed to be
such a curiosity in Springsteen's catalog since I'd love to hear five
more albums just like it.
Sad beats both angry and happy.
Popular etymologies are often wrong.
Agree or disagree, this is an interesting and potentially very useful idea.
Offshoring the [cinematic] Audience.
The above come from Arts & Letters Daily which I just happened to look at for the first time today.
No concert review this week, but I will be spreading the joy of
lo-fi indie rock as embodied by the Thermals in the next issue of Professor Yeti,
due out on June 30. Somehow, even though it's summertime and I'm
completely free of commitment, I was unable to start writing until
after 2 am this morning.
I've been enjoying Zookeeper, which was linked to in this faux-LiveJournal story on The Morning News.
Also, there is Dusted Magazine which I got from this guy's senior CS project at the University of Chicago, linked to by, once again, The Morning
News. I'm enjoying the focus on experimental and obscure music, but I
have no idea when I'll get my hands on it considering that I'll
probably be living the simple and cheap life for quite a while.
However, it's inane to complain about crap like that so I vow not to do
so again for, say, the next six months.
For the first time this summer I paid to see a movie, The Barbarian Invasions. In a small way it was like a far better alternative to Big Fish:
a dying man attempts to deal with mortality in part by reminiscing with
family and friends about the life he has lived. Except here they don't
lie the entire time. They discuss waning libidos, family, and then some
more about sex. They also spend a lot of time trying to decide whether
the current lack of intellectual curiosity they notice around them
signals the beginning of another dark age, hence the title. The father
believes his son, a financier, never reads books and survives on
technology alone. Many scenes and characters reinforce this, but it's
not really the focus of the movie. The focus is the relationship of the
old man with his son, his absent daughter, his wife, his friends, his
heroin provider, and the nurse who helps take care of him. It's not
sentimental or weepy, but it is really a terrific look at, as Kevin once put it, the poignancy of humanity.
I guess Clinic will be playing the Fine Line on October 29.
Issue 13 of Professor Yeti with a review by me!
---
The Village Voice tells me what I already assumed, from last time, about the upcoming Pedro the Lion show on Friday.
Legitimizing prison torture.
Hooray for the Patriot Act!
Except for the early transfer of power, Iraq is behind schedule.
"Note that none of the facts in Fahrenheit 9/11
are in dispute. What ABC and NBC called into question is Moore's
extrapolation and interpretation of information; in other words, his
slant. But by using loaded phrases like 'truth squad' and 'fact or
fiction,' and by omitting Moore's answers to key questions, these
networks did the very thing they accuse him of doing. I would argue
that this sort of distortion is far more dangerous in the context of a
news broadcast than in a clearly opinionated film."