So many things conspiring to make life difficult today…no point in going into details, I just wanted to let out a little virtual scream of frustration at the whole unfortunate business.

So, gah!

Done.

To update: today’s complaint has largely to do with the circuitous paths one is required to take to navigate and eventually comply with the secuity measures put in place by a large, quasi-corporate organization’s information technology infrastructure.

I spent about eight hours today largely sitting on my hands waiting for the IT folks to try and solve a problem that ended up being the result of administrator error that no one will own up to. Somebody somewhere “”terminated*”” the electronic existence of my newly renewed smart card, which is required for access to any computer system associated with the larger network. The card is also necessary for physical access to the facility, though that only requires being examined by human eyeballs. I would have been much more screwed if there were locks keyed to the card as well.

Pisses me off, really. Not so much the draconian security measures , but the fact that somebody short circuited my legitimate access and no one will own up to the mistake.

Also pissing me off is the esoteric corporate password policy, which didn’t get in the way of anything today, but constantly does otherwise. And, based on reading I’ve done on security theory, it’s not particularly effective.

It seems xkcd reads the same white papers I do, which led to this particularly interesting comic.

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* – I actually went and logged into the electronic HR file system to make sure there wasn’t a personnel action ending my employment; I was almost afraid someone accidentally Miltoned me.

There are several Greatest Hits packages in this edition; quickie releases designed to quickly get new fans up to speed or replace aging cassette tapes, or just to make money to pay off a divorce settlement or wring the last bit of blood from the stone after the band calls it quits. They have their place, and in at least a couple of instances, I was in that place. Or I needed to buy one more disc to get one free or something. It depends. Anyway, I managed to collect quite a few of these over the years:

♦The Bangles – September Gurls: This is one of those cheapie compilations that record companies put out hoping to sell a few copies at a low price point without expending a whole lot of effort. It came out sometime in the mid-nineties, during the Bangles’ break-up/hiatus. I own it largely because I still don’t have anything else in the Bangles’ catalog on CD, despite being a fan and having most of it on cassette or (at one point) vinyl. Track-wise, it veers pretty far from the “”Greatest Hits”” ideal (no “”Manic Monday”” or “”Walk Like and Egyptian””)…most of those are left off in favor of catalog pieces with Michael Steele on vocals (including the title track), which, frankly, is okay with me; she’s always been the most under-appreciated of the non-Hoffs Bangles. It does have “”Set You Free”” and “”Crash and Burn,”” both of which are favorites of mine. in fact, it would have been just about perfect if they’d included the band’s cover of “”Hazy Shade of Winter.””

♦Craig Kelley Band – Still Searchin’: I must have purchased this one during a summer catering gig; I’m pretty sure I saw these guys at least half-a-dozen times in those days. If I remember, the band’s live show was pretty energetic, though re-listening to this disc, I was kind of let down; it’s got that odd production quality where the guitar is tinny and buried in the mix; and the guitar wizardry was kind of Kelley’s “”thing””, as evidenced by the hidden guitar wankery track at the end (buried behind a wall of twenty-some tracks of five seconds of silence each! Ah, the 90s). I think the radio single that got Central PA airplay was “”Lorraine,”” which has a nice hook (and less of the weird mix); the rest of it didn’t leave much of an impression beyond the overt and sort of surprising praise music vibe on a couple of the later tracks.

♦Sammy Hagar – Unboxed: As evidenced by the BMG music service barcode, I got this one through mail order at some point in the mid-90s; it seems like the kind of thing I would have gotten to fill out the classic rock collection. This is a greatest hits package covering the period in Sammy’s career between Montrose and Van Halen. As such, it’s a little uneven sound-wise. Some of the older stuff comes off a little thin; “”Two Sides of Love”” almost has a Rick Springfield “”Working Class Dog”” vibe to it, whereas “”High Hopes”” and “”Buying My Way into Heaven”” are much, much heavier. It’s still kind of a stupid fun record, what with “”Heavy Metal,”” “”Three Lock Box”” and “”I Can’ Drive 55″” on it, as well as the total utter pretention of “”Eagles Fly”” which sounds like it’s trying to be inspirational and earnest, but pretty much makes no sense at all lyrically.

♦The Cars – Greatest Hits: Somewhere along the line, my eldest daughter latched onto this band, and requests this CD in the car all the time. I suppose I can understand why; it’s full of great pop hooks and is just weird enough to catch her attention (and this is before she saw what the band looked like in videos). I’ve never been a totally dedicated Cars fan, though I remember loving “”You Might Think”” and “”Magic”” on MTV when I was young, and this collection of those and all the rest of those 80s staple singles often hits just the right nostalgia spot, even if I didn’t see that scene in “”Fast Times at Ridgemont High”” featuring Pheobe Cates and “”Moving in Stereo”” in time for it to leave the impression it leaves on so many other young men who are slightly older than me, though that section of the rental tape was a bit more worn than the rest of the film. Go figure.

I was recently introduced to the concept of “”blogging as a spiritual practice.”” Not “”spiritual”” in the sense of either my youthful experience (angels, not thinking too hard about god, veiled right-wing propaganda) or “”celebrity”” spirituality as effectively satirized in the form of David St. Hubbins or Terry & Laurie Bohner on film, but “”spiritual”” in the sense of the act of writing as a tool to organize the mind and assist in making sense of all the seemingly conflicting thoughts always floating around in there. In short, writing as a sort of meditation.

At least that’s what blogging was for the people introducing the topic, who spent a bit of time talking about why they started blogging, and what their goals were for starting blogs. it got me thinking about exactly why I’ve done it for nigh on a decade now, since before “”blog”” was a word. I agree that the meditative and thought-organizing benefits are a big part of why I keep doing it, but it certainly wasn’t always that way. The “”whys”” behind the practice/hobby/habit have changed over the years.

Early on, blogging (or whatever we called it at the time) was, for me, the most subtle and polite way of screaming “”LOOK AT ME!”” I could manage. Very little style or substance. It was pretty much what you’d expect from a bright but insecure young adult with free time and access to the appropriate tools. I’m not saying that many worthy things haven’t come into existence out of exactly that combination of factors, but it’s probably a good thing most of my output from this period is lost to the ages.

Later, I conceived a “”blog”” as a way to share the mundanity of life with others geographically distant (to see examples, refer to the early years of ancient history, linked above). Lots of alarmingly specific* posts consisting largely of “”I did this, then I did this.”” this got boring to me, though, as evidenced by the sometimes weeks-long spans between posts. The folks who I was trying to share with didn’t do much sharing back, and the dreams of conversation (witness the aborted attempt to set up a message board in summer ’06) kind of died.

By that point, though, it was a habit, so I kept doing it. Eventually, I started branching out into more idea-based writing (this largely coincided with the end of graduate school – I guess I had some free headspace), particularly once I got deeply (for me, anyway) involved in the 2004 Presidential campaign. I started writing less about my activity schedule and more about my thoughts on things happening in the world. Slowly but surely, I think I started finding a voice; or probably more accurately, I stopped being ashamed of my voice, and no longer worried that the things my voice wanted to say would put certain people off. As a result, I think the writing got better, and I became a bit more comfortable in my own skin.

What I write about today varies a bit. there’s still some description of “”I did this,”” but I try to limit it to interesting and novel things. This has the benefit of generating a motivation to overcome my hermit reflex and seek out interesting things to do, and thus write about.** A lot of what I write today, though, is reflective; a lot of prose dedicated to discovering who I am as a person, most often through the lens of how my past experience has shaped me. Some of this manifests as nostalgia, some as regret, some as vague references to intensely personal dirty laundry, some is just music, pop culture and cat pictures, but almost all of it simply trying to draw a line between who I was in my teens and my twenties and the person I find myself today.

What I’ve found interesting and surprisingly helpful as this blogging experiment goes on is that I actually have a representative example of my thoughts and feelings over the course of a decade or so; a decade that I’ll almost certainly look back on as one of the most transformative times of my life. This has helped me to chart my evolution a little more effectively, to see more clearly the trends and causes of why I ended up as I am at this point in my journey.

Because, as science tells us, memory is fallible, making us all unreliable narrators of our own personal stories. By the nature of how our brains work, we build faulty data into memories as time goes on; our perspective is inherently compromised. It’s just how the human brain works – memories are fluid, and changeable through time and experience. What this means is that your memories of a given event in the past are different today than they would have been earlier. Having a marker back there (in the form, of say, a blog post) is often useful in getting to a consensus perspective between the two perceptions.

And sometimes, it’s just useful to have a record that can tell me definitively when exactly I went somewhere or did something. You’d be surprised how often I use that.

In any case, having arrived at this point by examining the chronology of my blog experience, I suppose I owe the reader the promised mission statement (I’ve already covered the “”meandering”” part):

I guess I continue to write in this space, because the act of writing through my thoughts, feelings, and ideas helps to make sense of and find truth and meaning in them. In that sense, I guess it is mediation, which a quick google search defines as “”a spiritual practice…to explore the very nature of what we are.”” It’s self-reflection, an attempt to understand why I hold a thought or belief. Sometimes the best tool to facilitate that understanding is to open up a text editor and start writing.

But that’s not the whole story. The writing is one thing, the other part of the blog ethos is publishing. For me, the act of putting it all out there sets up a sense of obligation and motivation. Mentioning something on the blog can push you to follow through on it. If I talk about biking in this space, I’m more likely to do it. I keep a little mileage counter over on the left sidebar; the pressure to keep that ticking up regularly is a motivation tool. That motivation helped me lose 30 pounds over the last year. A couple of years ago, I started keeping a running list of the books I’ve read as part of the blog. As a result, I read a lot more. The act of publishing one’s intentions helps one to follow through; it’s really that simple.

So that’s that…perhaps the most meta blog post about blogging that was ever blogged. I hope it was worth it.

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* – So alarmingly specific that a couple of years ago, I went back and scrubbed many of the specific proper nouns out of the archives (to protect both the innocent and guilty). That’s the only editing I’ve done, though. the rest is as it was at the time, misspellings and dead links and all.

** – As a result, I’ve managed to do some pretty interesting things over the years, including the crashing of election night victory parties, meeting and talking with several people whose work I truly admire, and seeing some really talented artists and performers at work. I probably wouldn’t have done any of these things had I not had the pressure to come up with something interesting to blog about.

Being the devoted music fan that she is, Amanda Marcotte put this piece up about the 20th anniversary of the release of Nevermind coming up next month. That record, nor any of Nirvana’s output ever really resonated with me the way it did with a lot of my peers, especially those a few years younger than me (like Amanda), for a number of reasons, but I must say that I really appreciate pieces of writing like this about music. Music really does tap into our brains at a visceral level; when a song means something to us, it connects inextricably with all sorts of memory threads such that hearing that piece of music even decades later can bring to the surface all sorts of memories, emotions, sounds, and even smells that we associate with the time in our lives when that music was special to us.

Once upon a time, I wrote a short essay that’s apparently been lost to the ages* about how when I was a having a really overwhelming, crappy sort of day at the office back when I was a worker drone instead of a computer guy, I managed to save my sanity that afternoon by popping River Songs into the CD player and being momentarily transported back in time to college in the spring of ’96, sunlight and a cool breeze streaming through my open dorm window as the semester wound down, surrounded by friends, freedom, and possibilities. It was a glorious revelation, and I really wish I could find those couple of paragraphs again (though I suspect they’re not as well-written as my hazy memories paint them).

Heck, just the act of recalling the memory of remembering the original thing is starting to conjure up phantom sensory input of the scent of the flowers in the yard near my dorm window and feeling of the sunlight streaming in, hitting my skin as I’m sitting at that desk watching people walking by on the path as they get ready for their weekend…

That’s why I love this kind of writing; even though I don’t know the writer (other than through reading her stuff and chatting with her for a few minutes at a book signing once), by reading her description of her experiences with a piece of music and the memories and experiences the music causes her to recall, makes me feel connected to her experience, and starts firing up related memory processes in my head; of my experiences with similar music; where I was when I heard of Cobain’s death and what was going on around me.**

And that’s why I love hearing people’s personal musical experiences; it’s a feeling of connection, a shared experience, even if the sharing parties aren’t in the same place (sometimes, given my particular nature, the geographic displacement is actually a feature!). I guess, in retrospect, it’s the kind of thing I’m trying tap into with all those record reviews I’ve been doing lately; tapping into those musical memories that I haven’t necessarily thought about in a long time, bringing them to the surface, and sharing with with the world (at least theoretically), and maybe getting to see what sort of memories they dredge up in others.

Of course, I could just have shitty musical taste and the theoretical world at large is collectively looking at me like I have three heads or something.

That’s probably it.

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* –Sometime between ’98 and ’01, before I had reliable archives for this site. I’m pretty sure it’s floating around in the archives of the Badlees yahoo group from that period. There may be a link to it in the archives of this site that I missed – in any case, actually having the piece isn’t as important as the idea of the piece.

** – Same college, different dorm room. For the record, I wasn’t particularly surprised he’d killed himself (I don’t think anyone was), but I wasn’t particularly devastated, as the music never had a huge effect on me (I was wrapping up my hair metal infatuation and moving into my awkward country phase. And as far as grunge was concerned, I liked Pearl Jam better anyway), but I had friends that were heartbroken at the time, and in the intervening years, life experience has brought me to develop more empathy for what the man must have been going through.

Underneath all the Smurfs and Cowboys & Aliens brouhaha, there was a another film that came out last weekend that got a lot of attention in certain corners, despite opening on only eight screens in the US. That movie? Attack The Block, a small British sci-fi/adventure film about a group of inner-city kids defending their South London council estate apartment block against an alien invasion.

The reviews over the weekend were quite good, and the film’s per-screen average was amazing (for example, the little blue guys did $10k per screen on a little over 3000 screens, Attack did better than $16k on eight). Some of this was due to word of mouth from Comicon and festival screenings, as well as the presence of co-star Nick Frost and producer Edgar Wright, who, as I shouldn’t have to mention, have given us great things like Shaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim.

None of those eight screens were anywhere near Richmond or DC, but a little googling yesterday trying to figure out when it would open someplace I could see it managed to also find a press screening at an undisclosed location in the District last night, and a means to get myself into the lottery for free passes to said screening. Obviously, my name came up in the lottery, or there wouldn’t be a point to composing this post.

It turns out the screening was in Chinatown, right next to the Verizon Center, one of the busiest neighborhoods in the city on the best of days, made all the more busy due to several hundred pre-teens in cowboy boots: it seems that the Gelfling Taylor Swift was playing the arena last night. I finally made it through the morass of pop country fans to the theater, where I was ushered behind the ropes, handed an 11×17 poster for the film, and pointed at an unmarked screening room.

I’d been to pre-release screenings before, usually on radio station passes, but never a press screening. It really wasn’t any different than any other movie screening, other than having the back half of the theater reserved for press, the absence of previews, and a couple of studio PR flacks randomly asking questions to some of the folks milling around.

But what about the movie? It was a lot of fun, in that low-budget action movie sort of way – you can tell that the people involved had a lot of fun making it, and that enthusiasm for the project pulls you in. The cast was put together well, especially when you consider that they’re a bunch of unknowns kids and first-time actors; lots of good funny lines delivered well. Being low budget, it’s shot mostly in one building, but it works well for the subject matter; lots of dingy, claustrophobic hallways for the aliens to chase people through. And, of course, the aliens themselves were very well done. Nothing fancy, but they’re still pretty iconic, all matte black with those flourescing teeth.

The only thing that I see putting certain American audiences off are the sometimes thick accents and potentially unfamiliar slang – it’s VERY British. That said, it didn’t seem to bother the crowd I saw it with, which was amazingly diverse, running the gamut from harried young professionals to trendy urban teenagers to elderly latino women (I suspect they didn’t have enough pre-distributed passes, and were handing out free tickets to folks milling around the mall outside), who all seemed to really enjoy it and not be bothered by any of this – of course, this is a big city; it might not play as well in the sticks, which is, frankly, a shame.

Anyway, to sum up, last night’s adventure was an interesting and novel experience; and now I have a few connections to find further opportunities in the future. And the movie was just as fun as promised by all those internet film geeks – I highly recommend checking it out when it makes it to your town.

I vaguely remember hearing a few rumblings in my preferred corners of the internet regarding this essay by comedian-actor-geek Patton Oswalt about the simultaneous mainstreaming and death of nerd culture when it was published last December, though never managed to get around to it until very recently.

Most of the reaction to the essay was negative, asserting that Oswalt was doing little more than complaining that now that his favored club was no longer particularly exclusive, he was thinking about taking his ball and going home. I think there’s some of that there, to be sure, mostly because I come from roughly the same generational and cultural space as Oswalt, and have been known to engage in a little of that sort of complaining myself from time to time, but there’s also more to it than that.

A lot of what Oswalt was lamenting was the fact that while the explosion of the internet over the last decade and a half has made almost everything immediately accessable, which is, objectively, a good thing, it’s also made us less willing to put the kind of effort into our cultural obesssions that we once had to that made those obsessions truly special to us. To those of us who have spent our lives sifting through longboxes at swap meets and trading bootleg tapes through the mail in order to track down that “”lost”” issue of a comic or a rare live perfomance of an otherwise unreleased song, the shortcut to otaku-ness feels a bit like cheating.

But not just cheating in the sense of being able to collect and digest every episode of The Prisoner and internalize decades’ worth of theories of meaning over a weekend.* It’s of cheating oneself out of the gradual experience of discovery, of stumbling upon others working their way along the same path to geekery, and coming upon the knowledge and speculation through interaction with other kindred spirits. Somebody who just torrents everything is missing out on not just the collective experience**, but the feeling of euphoria one gets when finding the next nugget of breadcrumb along the path.***

In any case, I’m not necessarily bemoaning this development and praying for the hasty arrival of the pop-culture Singularity to the extent that Oswalt seems to be (not that I think he really is, either – the man’s a comedian known for his sarcasm, after all), but I do tend to believe that some of these newly-minted geeks, by virtue of having unfettered, easy access to all this formerly underground subcultural stuff, are missing out on some of the experience that those that came before them had, and in a sense, I feel for them a little bit.

But not enough that I’m not totally ready to tell them to get the hell off my lawn as I wave my cane around, because I totally recognize that these are the ruminations of an old man about how things were better when I was that age.

And that just makes me feel bad for me. I probably ought to start taking advantage of this overabundance of information to catch up on all those Animes and emo bands the kids are listening to, though that’ll probably just make me look desperate.

Life, it seems, is just a Kobiyashi Maru.

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* – This is almost a bad example, as I just “”discovered”” The Prisoner this year, devouring the whole series over a couple of weeks thanks to Neflix and some internet essays. I’m sure there are probably a bunch of old grognards out there who would look at me with disdain, since they found the show through a combination of late night PBS airings and basement screenings of scratched 16mm prints projected onto bedsheets over a couple of years. Perhaps a better, more personal example for me would be my years of scouring magazine articles, liner notes, and catalogs in order to track down rare Bon Jovi B-sides, non-US releases, and songwriting credits during my teens. Today, anybody with access to the internet and a couple of URLs can find everything on mp3 in one big archive file and download it in less than an hour.

** – The best and probably widest ranging example of this oral tradition? Every kid in 1980s America, it seems, even those without a subscription to Nintendo Power, eventually learned the secret of blowing on the contacts of NES cartridges through the low-tech network of out-of-state cousins and regional summer camp bunkmates.

** – You can still get that feeling, though. I had a bit of a spring in my step for weeks after finally finding a badly-dubbed VHS copy of the Corman Fantastic Four film at a flea market several years ago, or just the other weekend when I found a 2nd edition D&D monster manual at a yard sale.

Tonight, we pour a flagon of mead out in honor of Plinq, the elven hunter, who died valiantly under the maul of the bewitched dwarven king he was trying to save. His arrows were true, and his wilderness tracking skills peerless, and his heart trusting. Sometimes too trusting, but that was just part of his charm (and largely due to his crappy “”sense motive”” modifier).

And, it was probably just as well that he fell in battle when he did, as I’m likely going to have to be absent from this particular gaming table for at least a few weeks. It’ll let the rest of the party have some adventures while I’m gone, and I shall rejoin the party as a new companion when I return.

I’m thinking a cleric/healer this time, because the lack of one in this party is why I’m writing this post to begin with.

This week, we talk about a handful of other records pulled out of my big box. I guess if there’s something approaching a theme to be drawn from this batch, it’s the presence of hidden lore behind a record that makes it what it is. I almost threw in a review of the newish Wailin’ Jennys record I picked up last week while I was scavenging a Borders location, though as REALLY GOOD as that record is, I need to digest it a little more, and since I’ve only had it a week, I’m not sure if it applies, even if I did get it at a discount (which fits the cutout aesthetic).

♦ Saraya – When The Blackbird Sings: In the waning days of the hair/glam metal era, 1989, PolyGram records began setting up a band to become the next Bon Jovi; with the same heavy New Jersey working class attitude, only this band would have a pretty girl out front rather than a pretty guy. Saraya was that band. Fronted by Sandi Saraya (the band used to be called Alsace Lorraine before the record company got hold of them), had a modest MTV hit with “Love Has Taken It’s Toll” off of their self-titled debut, and toured as support for bigger acts. Then they put this record out, and promptly broke up, saving themselves the disappointment of Grunge’s ascendence and PolyGram’s buyout where more than 50% of the artist roster was slashed. At least that’s the story from wikipedia, anyway, and it’s sounds about right. Anyway, it’s kind of a shame, because it’s a pretty good, if not particularly unique (other than being one of the handful of female fronted rock bands at the time), hard rock record. I’m not sure what the singles were; if there were any (this record landed in the cutouts pretty quickly after release), but I could see “Bring Back The Light” hitting moderately big a few years earlier. It kind of has that definitive late 80s glam sound, some of it has a definite “Pat Benetar fronting High and Dry era Def Leppard” vibe, which works for me. The rest of it sounds like one of those bands who plays in the background of the ubiquitous club scene in many a lower-teir 80s movie whose tune fades into the background after a minute or so, but helpfully shows up on the soundtrack album, largely because the studio’s music division was looking for cross promotion.* There’s nothing at all wrong with that band. That song often set just the right mood in the film. However, no one’s going to argue that that band ever made it big.** Also, significant only because of the title of this series, I bought this record from a cutout rack, with a notch in the spine so deep it actually clipped the edge of the disc, making it unplayable in my car CD player; luckily, it did play in my computer so I could rip and burn a replacement copy.

♦Stairway to Heaven, Highway to Hell: This record, a benefit project for the Make A Difference Foundation, features most of the bands that took part in the Moscow Music Peace Festival, a huge rock show in Moscow (one of the first high profile western performances there) in 1989, benefiting anti-drug efforts in both the US and the Soviet Union. It wa A lot of people credit the show for helping to bring down communism and westernize the Soviet Union. Those people are probably giving the festival too much credit, but it was a high point in the history of “”hard rock.”” Really, the whole project and subsequent record were part of a settlement for übermanager Doc McGhee to avoid jail time on drug charges. He took his entire stable of artists to moscow for the show, and had them record cover tunes from bands touched by drug or alcohol abuse as part of his community service. Most of the stuff on the record really isn’t the artists’ best work, frankly, but it’s interesting. Motley Crüe’s cover of Tommy Bolin’s “Teaser” is probably the highlight. I bought it, not surprisingly, for the Bon Jovi track, a pedestrian cover of Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys are Back in Town.” What’s most interesting (besides Klaus Meine’s broken english on the Elvis medley) is that Neither Stairway to Heaven nor Highway to Hell appear on the album (though Bonham’s kid drums on one track).

♦The Cranberries – Everyone Else Is Doing It, SO Why Can’t We?: Sure, everybody remembers the omipresent singles, “Dreams” and “Linger” from this record, with their bright shiny hooks and lilting vocals. They were everywhere for a year or two, and probably still get routine airplay on Hot Adult Contemporary/doctors office radio stations to this day. And rightfully so, because they’re damned good pop songs. However, I always kind of dug the Cranberries not for the bright, shiny stuff, but rather the darker textures that populate much of the rest of their catalog. All the best Irish folk songs are dark and a little sad, after all, why should Irish pop music be any different? “How” serves as a pretty good example of this sound, and also demonstrates how putting the bass out in the front of the mix on these kind of pop songs ought to be done more often. I’m also surprised that “Sunday” didn’t chart higher (I didn’t even know i was a single), as it’s one of my favorites on the record, largely because it sounds so much like IRS-era R.E.M. Their best tune, though, by far, is the dark and political “Zombie”, which doesn’t come around until the next record. Finally, I kind of hate the obvious record company influence that forced the band to do away with it’s original name, The Cranberry Saw Us.

♦Rusted Root: –When I Woke: This is one of those records that seeped slowly into my consciousness through repeated exposure. In 1994, you couldn’t walk past an open dorm window on campus without hearing a track from this band; either this record, or one of the several copies of their previous indie release that crossed the state from their hometown of Pittsburgh. And this was before “Send Me On My Way” became the next go-to piece of music to set your movie trailer to. This band really was kind of crafted specifically to appeal to northeastern college students in the mid-nineties; the neo-hippie vibe, the infectious world-music percussion influence (drum circles on college campuses never quite go out of style), it all appealed to all of us who were young, on our own, and looking to change the world by co-opting a cartoon version of 60s youth culture. That said, beyond the image, the rhythms across this record really are engaging and get people moving, even unconsciously. I dare you to listen to “Drum Trip/Ecstacy” and not start shaking something. However, my favorite piece on the record are the interplaying of vocal harmonies on “”Beautiful People.”” Interesting, but of no particular note, are the number of songs about meteorological phenomena.

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* –That actually happened with this band post-breakup; ending up on the surprisingly good soundtrack to the electric-redneck Mitch Pileggi vehicle Shocker

** –The only bands I can think of off hand that got sucessful after a high-profile motion picture soundtrack appearance would be Extreme and Nelson, both of whom appeared on the Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure soundtrack. However, Extreme hit it big with “”More Than Words”” which is about as opposite as you can get from “”Play With Me”” (the guitar solo bit was used during the Beethoven at the mall montage), and Nelson’s contribution, “”Two Heads Are Better Than One”” was attributed to Powertool, and wasn’t “”Nelson”” so much as the twins knocking off a track with Dweezil Zappa.

Turning Writers into Motherf*cking Rock Stars by Chuck Wendig at terribleminds dot com

Face it, right now, the reading of books in this country is not exactly looked at as a valuable use of time by a significant portion of the population. Book stores are going under. I picked the bones of two different Borders locations this week, and have one more visit on the agenda.

Perhaps what we need is a little less politeness and quiet dignity from our modern crop of authors in order to drum up interest in reading and draw attention away from relentless reality show trash. We need our writers to take on the aspect of rock stars in order to save the literary art form.

to wit:

Epic rock star personalities make way for epic rock star beefs. David Lee Roth versus Van Halen. Jay-Z versus Nas. Foo Fighters versus the entire TV show “Glee.”

The authorial world demands this. And we’re not talking about some little Twitter snit, some online battle oozing across a handful of Livejournal comments. It’s not enough for Stephen King to talk to Entertainment Weekly and be all like, “Well, Stephenie Meyer is no J.K. Rowling, pfft.” I’m talking, Terry Pratchett needs to go and take a shit in Dan Brown’s mailbox.

Seriously, just go and read this thing. Now. You shall laugh and laugh.

This weekend brings a new box of CDs to the car, and thus, a new edition of this particular series, in which I examine my somewhat questionable musical taste, as expressed via the great variety of compact discs I’ve accumulated over the course of my life. If anything, this little project of mine shows that I really shouldn’t judge anyone else’s musical taste…even if that taste involves front row seats to the Train-Maroon 5 tour (aka “lowestcommondenominatorpalooza”) currently circling the nation, luring in the nation’s supposedly hip soccer moms and pukka shell wearing frat boys to central locations for possibly nefarious purposes:

I’ve even included an extra review this time…bonus!

♦- Heart – Brigade: To repeat a common refrain from this series, I don’t necessarily remember buying this record; I suspect this one came into the collection via my lovely wife. In any case, this record is arguably the peak of the band’s 80s resurgence. For those who didn’t see the relevant “Behind the Music,” Heart started out in the 70s, and logged several big classic rock hits, but despite how badass “Barracuda” was, they were always sort of pigeonholed as a “girl act.” After floundering through the early 1980s, they hit big with a slicker, commercial rock sound and a stack of power ballads. This record includes a bunch of surprisingly good hard rock-ish tunes (“I Didn’t Want to Need You” and “Wild Child” are highlights), and features the huge hit “All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You,” which always felt kind of skeevy to me, even as a teenager. Listening to it now, however, it comes off as more sinister, since it leaves open the interpretation that the song’s narrator was “in love…with another man!” before the song started, and the whole anonymous hotel tryst with the vagabond hitchhiker was totally premeditated by woman and her partner as a low-cost means to conceive via a 3rd party sperm donor because the spouse was shooting blanks. I have fun imagining another verse involving lawsuits, movie rights negotiations with Lifetime Television, and 24 hour coverage by Nancy Grace.

♦- Avril Lavigne – Live Acoustic: I picked this EP up off of the clearance rack at my local Target for a buck and change. That said, it’s really very good. Six tracks off of her early records, recorded live, apparently in a mall, just Avril and a guy playing acoustic guitar and doing some harmony vocals. Despite being recorded in a mall, and Avril’s popular reputation at being a totally disposable studio-crafted pop star, I have to say I’m impressed with the fact that this record got released; it’s pretty raw – no processing on the vocals beyond a little reverb on the PA. Putting it out there shows definite confidence. There are a couple of bum notes, but the little imperfections are what make the songs work; often better than their studio album counterparts. It doesn’t quite save “Sk8er Boi” from still being trite despite it’s catchiness, but “He Wasn’t” and “Take Me Away” both work better here than in their original versions.

♦- Barenaked Ladies – Rock Spectacle: This live record, recorded during the “Born on a Pirate Ship” tour, covers a lot of the highlights of the band’s first three studio records, but the real treasure here is that it manages to capture some of the feel of the band’s live shows, which are/were at least as much about comedic improvisation as much as really tight musicianship and performance. The record will never replace the experience of a live show, featuring long impromptu rap performances about whatever happened on the way to the venue that day and the flying mac and cheese (“don’t open the cheese pouch!”), but the record does include some of that (sadly, at the end as bonus tracks, which are often clipped off on modern CD players which can choke on the “enhanced CD” bonus videos wedged in as a ROM segment on the disc), as well as some great live versions of “Straw Hat and Dirty Old Hank,” “Jane,” “Brian Wilson,” and “What A Good Boy,” a mostly forgotten deep cut from Gordon that I’ve occasionally dusted off for open mic sets.

♦- Billy Thorpe – Children of the Sun…Revisisted: During my college summers, I spent way too much time in the back of a mobile kitchen cooking and slinging french fries to patrons at many of central Pennsylvania’s finest fireman’s carnivals and scholastic athletic competitions. One of the common threads across those summers was the constant presence of the local classic rock station playing in the background behind the drone of roiling fryers and wobbling exhaust fans. Amidst the soup of BTO, Aerosmith and Molly Hatchet, I’d occasionally hear the title track from this record, with it’s percussive guitar riff and soaring vocals about spaceships. It intrigued me enough to track it down. The whole package is a 1979 space opera concept record about benevolent aliens coming to rescue humanity from a dying earth in the early 1990s. Really. It’s weird, but in that strange 70s concept album way that you can’t help but appreciate. The title track, which is really the focus here, is seven minutes of impressive studio wizardry, with lots of great stereo panning effects, over-the-top guitar work, and plenty of Beatle-esque harmony. The rest of the record is padded out with some of Thorpe’s (who more or less quit pop music in the early 80s to start toy companies and score television shows, including ST:TNG) other work from the period, through 82’s East of Eden’s Gate, which is interesting, and still fits with the space opera concept the original record had going for it.

♦ – Tori Amos – Tales of a Librarian: This is essentially a greatest hits package put out by Atlantic after Tori left the label. It’s a pretty comprehensive collection, allegedy organized according to the Dewey Decimal System, and includes a nice cross-section of Tori’s output. I’ve always been a fan of her sound (I love the piano and ethereal, unearthly vocals) but I’ve never waded fully into Tori fandom, which can be voluminous,obsessive and a little intimidating. As such, never really heard the songs in their original contexts with any regularity – it’s been songs in isolation, and in the live setting (though we had to leave that show early, because an in utero @fairiedaughter was being particularly difficult to her mother that night). I really need to go back and start listening to the albums one of these days. Still, most of the significant tunes from the period are here: “Cornflake Girl,” “Crucify,” and “Silent All These Years,” which is probably my personal favorite, as well as the excellent but really depressing and uncomfortable composition, “Me and A Gun.” Come to think of it, “excellent but depressing and uncomfortable” kind of describes most of the Tori Amos catalog, but that’s part of why we love it so.