If there’s a theme this time around, it’s the idea that you can draw lines between all kinds of things, and despite the existence categories like “rock”, “country”, “r&b” or whatever, a lot of interesting stuff happening in the brackish areas where the borders bump up against each other. Each of these records, quite accidentally by the draw, features a bit of genre clashing.

For those keeping score, we’re up to 96. The next edition should take us up to an even 100 records reviewed and commented on.

♦ Various Artists – Kiss My Ass – Classic KISS Regrooved: Several of these tribute records cropped up in the nineties, mostly featuring young up-and-comers covering tunes from iconic classic rock bands. This one largely follows that formula, albeit with a few swerves, such as a classical piano version of “Black Diamond” from Yoshiki of XJapan, a droll acoustic version of “Rock and Roll All Nite” by Toad the Wet Sprocket, and most notably, a surprisingly excellent cover of “Hard Luck Woman” by Garth Brooks (backed by KISS themselves), whose rougher “rock” vocal style is a dead-ringer for Peter Criss, adding credence to the possibly apocryphal story that Brooks really wanted to be a rock guy, but “settled” for country because he didn’t have the right look. The record also has a great track by Extreme, and an interesting cover of “Detroit Rock City” by The Mighty, Mighty Bosstones, which probably comes as close as I’m ever going to get to hearing the guitar breakdown from that song performed by mariachi horns, which I’ve always though it absolutely begged for.

♦ Emmylou Harris – Spyboy: I picked this one up from a thrift shop rack a couple of weeks back, and have enjoyed the hell out of it over several listens. It’s a live record named for Harris’s 90s back-up band, and serves as an almost career retrospective, though it comes right at the beginning of Harris’s 90s career resurgence, shifting away from traditional country and toward a folk rock/americana sound. A lot of the record comes from Harris’s early career, including her cover of “Love Hurts” (which she originally did with Gram Parsons), as well as a great version of “My Songbird” from Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town. The highlights, though, are tunes from Wrecking Ball, the record the recorded tour supported, including the amazing “Deeper Well”. More than anything else, though, this record is a showcase for the band, who hang together tightly and support Harris’s lilting vocals well. In my experience, a lot of “live” country tends to rock harder than polished Nashville studio versions, though Spyboy tends to play more like a rock power trio than any country band you’re likely to find, replete with agressive bass lines, guitar feedback tricks, and extended solo breaks. It’s a nice, unexpected combination and definitely an enjoyable listening experience.

♦ John Mellencamp – Dance Naked: Mellencamp had already largely fallen from the prominence of his mid-eighties heyday by the time this record came out in 1994, but that doesn’t mean that this isn’t a decent little rock record. It’s sparse, both in content (nine tracks coming in at less than 30 minutes total play time) and instrumentation (the title track features just a couple of acoustic guitars and drums, with no bass), but it sounds, lacking any other effective descriptor, “like Mellencamp”. The story behind the album is that the record company wasn’t happy with his previous, more experimental record, Human Wheels, so he purposely recorded this radio-friendly, stripped down record over a couple of days in response, just to prove how little effort the kind of thing the record company wanted required. Despite being considered a simple knock-off, it still charted well, and included “Wild Night”, a Van Morrison cover/duet with funk/R&B bassist Me’shell Ndegeocello. In any case, it’s a solid little record that’s an enjoyable listen, but honestly, it feels like it’s over before it really gets started, and little of it, save “Wild Night”, really sticks with you afterward.

♦ Bad Lee White – What Goes Around: This record is a little piece of history, the first EP from the band that would eventually become The Badlees, the band I spent much of the 90s following and listening to in various Central Pennsylvania watering holes and beer gardens. It features future Badlees Jeff Feltenberger (on lead vocals here), Ron Simasek on Drums, and Brett Alexander contributing some guitar. it’s an interesting oddity, not sounding entirely like the band they’d become, but showing hints of the future. “So Long” features a prominent mandolin line and a “roots rock” vibe which would inform the band’s sound later, and “Boomerang” sounds almost R.E.M.-like, with jangly electric guitars and general Athens-eque feel. I’d been searching for a copy of this record for many years, never having been able to get my hands on an original pressing when it was on sale in the late 80s (back when couple of the guys were substitute teachers in my school), and had many fruitless years searching the internet and the tape-trading community trying to track it down. A couple of years back, the band’s manager managed to locate a couple of CD copies somewhere, and put them up for sale on ebay. Of course, I immediately snapped it up. I don’t think this is the original pressing (I think it was originally only available on cassette), as it includes the original four track EP, plus a couple of remixed tracks. However, it’s likely the only chance I’ll have at owning a copy of this collector’s item, so I’ll take it.

The preponderance of little but cat videos for the last week should tell you all something. I took a little break from the grind. Over the course of my career thus far, I’ve traditionally worked with the kind of person who hosted their family’s Thanksgiving feast, so I’ve usually been the guy who stayed around the office in the days surrounding the holiday to make sure the place didn’t burn down. This year, however, was different, as the project I’m working on seemed to take a little bit of a break, the make-up of the team is different, and, I decided…it was my turn.

So, I took last week off.

I didn’t really even do all that much. I mostly hung around the house, other than getting out to spend an afternoon with a friend who needed some company. I tackled a few small projects, like consolidating my two fish tanks down to one, and upgrading the OS on my desktop computer, but mostly I just hung out and relaxed.

The latter part of the week was unfortunately marred by a random illness being passed around through much of the household, starting Wednesday night (I was sidelined most of the weekend), but I still managed to make a mostly traditional Thanksgiving feast (which actually breaks tradition for me), which was well-enjoyed by all present, given the current level of leftovers (there aren’t many).

I did take a subset of the kids out to the movies on Thanksgiving afternoon (the sick folks needed some peace and quiet), where we greatly enjoyed “The Muppets”, a film that was a lot of fun, and made just as much for new fans (the youngest child was captivated the entire time) and for old (lots of fun little continuity jokes for old fans like me).

That’s where we stand right now; as things go, I’ve got a few things to wrap up the work year, which ends for me in about three weeks. I’m already counting down.

I actually passed 50k on November 16, which says something. There might be a decent novella in the mess. I’ll get back to you after I play with editing.

Yes, because I’m on vacation.

Catvertizing.

Courtesy of Fred Clark at Slacktivist, The Ten Commandments – Binary Edition:

This is pretty much all the world’s major religions distilled to their purest essence. It really is that simple. If more people simply looked at it this way, and practiced their chosen faith (or lack of faith) this way, there’d be a lot less conflict and unpleasantness in the world.

Also, the best thing about this construct is that if you’re not specifically Judeo-Christian, or don’t do religion at all, you can feel free to substitute your own favored diety/higher power/idea/aspect/concept/philosophy/whatever in for the direct object in number one, and it still works!

It just goes to show that no particular philosophy has a monopoly on human decency.

I’m not a fan of the Twilight series. It’s not written for me, and I understand that. I’m not opposed to the series on any militant level, though I still find a lot of the ideas presented terribly troubling, and have always suspected that these troublesome ideas could potentially really mess up a young, impresionable fan’s view of the world and cause, at best, some seriously warped expectations, and at worst, things I don’t even want to contemplate.

This week I read a two-part series over at the slacktiverse by guest poster Amarie, which describes how the portrayal of certain things in the Twilight series really did mess with her way of looking at the world, how she recognized that fact, and moved beyond that way of looking at those things.

She also comes at this issue from a perspective I hadn’t before. Being a person of color, she also came to notice some interesting racial elements in the story that I, being a middle-aged white guy, likely wouldn’t have picked up on. There are some troubling implications in that interpretation, though she also finds some ideas that are, from a certain perspective, inspiring, although I suspect Meyer didn’t really intend it to be that way.

In any case, this is one of the better pieces of serious, personal writing I’ve seen regarding these popular works, and I encourage you to take a look at “Love at First White: Twilight and Self-Hatred from the Viewpoint of an African American Fan”, parts one and two, as well as the comments on both threads (the slacktiverse is one of the most eclectic, thoughtful, and well-spoken communities on the internet). I made me think, and I hope it’ll engage your brain as well.

Now, if only I could have come up with a more clever title for this post, and a way to work in this particularly disturbing, tangentially related internet “thing”.

As you may be aware, dear reader, I’m a big fan of the kind of pop culture meta piece like this one from (surprise) Amanda Marcotte about what she perceives as the ascendance of mass-market mediocrity in modern American popular culture as being inherently more “worthy” than properties with more limited, niche appeal.

I include below an execerpt which demonstrates her thesis:

But in recent years, I’ve felt a shift in the zeitgeist. It’s just a hunch, but it feels like the belief that mediocrity, by dint of being “populist”, is somehow more pure and honorable for it. Terms like “elitist”, “snob”, and the dreaded “hipster” are flug around with zeal. I suppose that was always true, but now people who do that aren’t just implying that you’re a weirdo for having certain tastes, but that you’re somehow morally inferior because you aren’t one with the people or some crap like that. It seems that mediocrity is literally beginning to rule.

I’m pretty sure Amanda’s on the right track with this idea, and that it ties nicely into the whole “Real Americans hate science and thinking” attitude so many of us perceive around us. I’m also pretty sure that it’s not as new a thing as Amanda posits.

Damn, this makes me feel old.

It’s no secret that for most of my life, I’ve found myself drawn to entertainments with limited appeal and was ostracized for it as a kid, to the point where I spent quite a bit of time denying my interest in these things and trying (more often than not in vain) to replace them with more “socially acceptable” interests.

Eventually, lots of us outsiders found each other and we all realized collectively that it’s cool to like what we like, and despite what “the masses” are out there saying, there’s nothing wrong with being the way we are. Life got much better* once I figured that out, and I suspect that it works that way for most people with similar origin stories.

That doesn’t mean that we weirdos aren’t always on the side of Angels – we do our fair share of scorning the mundanes for their love of things like “Two and A Half Men” and “American Idol”, though often that’s part of a cycle of resentment going back decades that we should really get over. For the most part, though, we’re content to be left alone with our indie music, sci-fi, and wooden german board games, and are perfectly willing to let everyone else do their own, mainstream thing**.

While the idea is not new, I think there may be some substance to the fact that this sort of thing si becoming more heated in recent years. I suspect I have a theory as to why:

In the last decade or so, there’s been a steady creep of geeky-nerdy things seeping into the world of mainstream entertainment, with the internet and video games and stuff like “Big Bang Theory”, enough of a creep that the people who traditionally hated on the outsiders are feeling some pressure on their worldview because they find themselves adopting some of it. Of coure, the bully-oppressor type hates nothing more than having the social order challenged, largely because they’re so invested in it. This elevation of mediocrity holding some sort of moral superiority over fringe things is that group’s way of trying to re-assert their feelings of control.

This whole thesis goes to prove that John Hodgman is perhaps our greatest modern day philosopher, because he was really on to something with his geek culture vs jock culture theory, because this idea is just that one, through a set of vintage black-rimmed hipster glasses.

________________________

* – Mostly… it seems that in my case, there were a few hiccups regarding long-standing relationships with people who preferred the kid who denied his nature, and resent him for disappearing.

** – I failed here recently, I think. Last week I saw Jack and Jill (for free, I feel compelled to add), and while I giggled at Pacino chewing scenery left and right, I felt like I needed a shower after all those fart jokes and incidences of product placement.

I finished several things yesterday. It feels like I accomplished something.

• writing my NaNoWriMo project. A solid 50k + word first draft. Might be a good 35k word novella in there with some judicious editing.
• a first read-through on a huge pile of documentation. Useful and necessary for an ongoing extracurricular project.
• reading a book. Fark – how the mass media tries to pass crap off as news, with bonus reference to the “ballsack conundrum”
• Jekyll. Steven Moffat’s pre-Who programme that I’ve been watching on and off for ages. It got really good there in the last two episodes, and not just because of Gina Bellman (though she helps!)
• Arrested Development. Another show that I came to late, and have been doling out to myself in small doses over the last year. One of the best television comdedies ever, and ended just about the way it should have.
• My dinner. That burrito was really good.

It’s been a little while since I did one of these. Of course, it’s november, so there’s very little blogging going on at all, thanks to the whole novel-writing experiments and general life stuff. Of course, I’m still doing the up and back to DC thing for work, and last week, coming home took me like five hours. I had some time to listen to a lot of music which I shall now talk about. For those keeping score, with this entry, we’re up to 92 records riffed on. I’m really rather chuffed that I’m nearing one hundred records, and am still having fun, even if no one else bothers to read these.

♦- Queensryche – Empire: This one, for whatever reason, reminds me of Sunday afternoons in high school. I spent a lot of weekends at my dad’s place through those years, and Sunday afternoons usually meant getting immersed in some sort of activity – a board game, attempting to repair something, or cooking a meal. For some reason, in these memories, MTV is on in the background going through the top 20 video countdown, and there’s usually a Queensryche video on. I forgot how many of these songs became “singles” (though not necessarily singles that ended up on the radio). More than half of these songs – the title track, “Jet City Woman,” “Best I Can,” “Anybody Listening?” and of course, “Silent Lucidity,” which broke all over radio and one of the better Pink Floyd pastiches out there – had videos made, and they all charted. This one’s not quite as much of a “concept” record as “Operation: Mindcrime,” but it’s one of those that hangs together well as a big, fancy progressive metal song cycle rather than a collection of unrelated tracks.

♦- The Clarks – Love Gone Sour, Suspicion and Bad Debt: I’ve talked the Clarks before – this is one of those early records that my friends who did college (the band formed at IUP out in Western PA) in Iron City country talk about as being so much better than the later major/semi-major label records. They make a good case, because there’s some great stuff on here, including “Now and Then,” “I’m The Only,” “Madeline” (pre-saging the other two “girl songs” on Someday Maybe), and live show sing-along-staple “Cigarette,” all featuring Scott Blasey’s distinctive vocal inflection, and Rob James’ ringing overdriven guitar tone. It’s all great bar-band rock stuff, equally good for dancing, singing along, or just hanging back with a beverage and letting it wash over you. I first encountered the Clarks supporting the previously mentioned SM, the record that comes after this one, but the live set included a bunch of these tunes. If you’ve never encountered these guys before, they’re worth looking into – it’s great stuff.

♦- Sarah Jarosz – Song Up In Her Head: I first heard Sarah Jarosz on A Prairie Home Companion a few years ago, where she played a bunch of great folk-bluegrass tunes and managed to survive several awkwardly flirtatious chat sessions with Garrison Keillor. I eventually downloaded this record, and enjoyed the heck out of it. This record was put together while she as still in high school, but is really amazingly polished for someone so young, in part due to appearances by heavy acoustic bluegrass hitters like Chris Thile. She’s got a great a great, smoky sort of singing voice, well displayed on tracks like Tom Waits’ “Come on Up To The House” and the title track. She also totally shreds on the mandolin and banjo, as demonstrated on some of the instrumental tracks like the Grammy nominated “Mansinneedof.” I’m kind of in love, even if I have occasionally confused her with another teenage folk americana prodigy, Laura Cortese, who I saw play a mean fiddle at the Birchmere a while back, once or twice.

♦- Molly Lewis- I Made You A CD, but I Eated It: That last comment about being “kind of in love” really applies here more than the last review, I’m only a little ashamed to admit. I’ve been following Molly’s career for years now, enjoying her adorable and self-deprecating YouTube performance and feeling a bit like a dirty old man. She is, however, probably one of the better examples of “internet stardom” out there, from humble beginnings in ukulele covers of Britney Spears, System of a Down, and Jonathan Coulton tunes shot on video from a bedroom closet to getting noticed by Coulton and playing regularly with him on the west coast and in international waters, to winning songwriting contests with excellently crafted songs like “Our American Cousin”, a humourous and touching three movement piece about the Lincoln assassination (in 3 minutes forty-one seconds), and releasing this disc, which includes most of her original output to date, including “MyHope,” a paean to a certain withering social networking service, and the excellent “Road Trip” inspired by the Lisa Nowak astronaut love triangle episode a few years back. She also, more than anyone else, inspired me to go buy a ukulele and pretend I know how to play it.

♦- Aimee Mann – Live at St. Ann’s Warehouse: I think I’ve always wanted to be an Aimee Mann fan more than I’ve actually been one, though I’ve always enjoyed her distinctive breathy voice since she sang lead in ‘Til Tuesday way back when. Her solo stuff has always been interesting and sort of mellow, which I quite like. Equal parts folk and rock, not afraid to take risks and drop the occasional F bomb if the song warrants it. This live disc came packaged with a concert film DVD, which is really quite excellent. I can’t remember where I got it, but I do remember not realizing there was a DVD in there as well – it was a pretty good cutout rack deal. Most of the bigger hits are here – including much of the soundtrack to Magnolia, including “Wise Up” and “Save Me,” though I’m pretty sure my favorite track is “Pavlov’s Bell” which was featured when she did a guest shot on Buffy the Vampire Slayer in season seven, before making a crack about how she hates “playing vampire towns.”

♦- The Refreshments – Fizzy, Fuzzy, Big & Buzzy: A high school friend who moved west turned me on to these guys when the were still playing bars in Arizona. They later came to prominence as, among other things, the band that played the theme song for King of the Hill. This is the band’s first major label record, and only one of any consequence, as they fell victim to the great record label purges of the late 90s like so many other promising bands. This one did feature the relatively big hit “Banditos” about a very strange bank robbery. Besides that one, though, there are lots of solid tracks here, including “Down Together” (which wikipedia tells me was single #2), “Suckerpunch” and “Mexico” a last-call sing-a-long that I inadvisably did at a couple of open mic sets sometime in 1997-98.