Michele and Chris announced their engagement last night via text message as we were all enjoying the Mandy Moore show. Needless to say, it made the night even more exciting than it already was. I only hope that it happened while they were getting drunk at Senator McCarthy's grave in Wisconsin. We're all excited to have Chris' love of PBR, The Brewers and beards come to Los Angeles. Anyone whose myspace name is (or, at least, was) "Scrabble Chris" is a fantastic individual.
Below is the ensuing text message conversation between Chunk and myself, as I was told to inform him because Michele is the only girl on earth that doesn't have Chunk's number.
Kevin (9:22:46 pm): michele's gettin h1tch3d Chunk (9:23:40 pm): serial? Kevin (9:24:02 pm): frlz Chunk (9:24:47 pm): OMFGZ Kevin (9:26:26 pm): roffelz Chunk (9:27:34 pm): u r 2 ez 2 luv Kevin (9:30:04 pm): im in teh rcksy watchin mandi mor Chunk (9:42:47 pm): iz see kute!?@ Kevin (9:44:45 pm): teh h0tz
At some point this will stop being a poor joke and I'll just end up talking this way.
I just saw the Mandy Moore show at the Roxy tonight. Beyond the fact their her new album, Wild Hope, is not doing that well, Mandy wanted to make it clear to all those in attendance that she couldn't care less about the singles from her early teen-princess career. When someone from the crowd requested "Walk Me Home," she responded with "I hate that song." She's a genuine talent with unmatched vocal skills, but as long as her songs don't achieve the same notoriety as "Candy" no one will give a (proverbial) shit. A bunch of irrelevnat celebs were in attendance, including Heidi from The Hills and the ever-popular Perez Hilton (he posted a review of the show as well).
I'd just like to point out that, as a 25 year-old elitist who primarily listens to metal and hardcore, that this is one of the best shows I've ever seen. Mandy has a sensational voice, and she tastefully acknowledges the fact that she used to be a pop-princess without rubbing our faces in it; she really can belt with the best of them now.
I'm pretty much ready to marry her, but in the mean time, I think all of you would benefit from going to see her perform songs from her Wild Hope record live. You won't be sorry.
By the way, she's also fantastic in just about every movie she stars in - particularly Saved.
Apple's iPhone comes out on Friday, June 29th at 6pm and, not surprisingly, there's been an ocean of hype surrounding it because that's what Steve Jobs does... again and again. People are, across the board, convinced this is God's gift to the wireless industry, even though this is Apple's first venture into the field, and Apple's products are notorious for being faulty upon first distribution. The Onion has a good snapshot of the absurdity to which this phone's hype has reached. Some guy is even camping out and detailing his spellbinding, umm, sitting around on pavement adventures here.
Gizmodo today reminded us that with all the great things Apple puts into their gadgets (and believe me: I own most of them, so I'm not writing from the perspective of a skeptic), if you're going to shell out $600 for this thing, you might want to remember that Apple tends to leave out a lot of features as well.
Sure you can watch youtube videos, but with no number pad, what are you supposed to do when the touchscreen breaks? By the way, does anyone remember the Nokia N-Gage?
Kevin's Interpretation: Jay-Z was done dropping cash on names like Andy Wallace, Steve Osborne and David Eggers to be involved with a band that can't sell records.
Thrice belongs back on Hopeless anyway where people seek smart music and not the new Rihanna jam. Louis, make that happen.
Word on the street is that Bon Jovi's new record Lost Highway is slaughtering the White Stripes' new album Icky Thump in first-week sales, proving, once and for all, that music from the 80's is still slightly less one-dimensional than pretentious garage rock from the 00's.
In the less-relevant department, Mandy Moore's new record Wild Hope is going to be lucky to slip into the top 30 this week, further hammering home just how long ago "Candy" was a top-40 hit. I commend Mandy Moore for giving up the bubble-gum pop princess thing just about as swiftly as she embraced it, but I wish she'd be in more movies like Saved. Either way, I'll be at her show on Wednedsay at the Roxy yelling "I crashed my van into Jesus!" a lot.
I knew there was a reason I made an unannounced comeback to my old message board Mods Under Protest (one one lasting remnant of punkrocks.net). I was greeted today with an absolutely fantastic thread provided by Mr. Jon Ledford.
Comedy is hard. Creativity is even harder—and a waste of time, we say. Anything worth learning can be learned via simple formulas and the memorization of data. Thus, we are proud to present Comedy by the Numbers, a vital new manual by Eric Hoffman and Gary Rudoren. This biblette makes the secrets of comedy accessible to those who might not have the ability or talent to be funny. Hey, maybe that's you! [McSweeney's]
Everything from the classics such as animals doing human activities, ventriloquism and jokes about short people to more modern forms of humor such as self-deprecation, conducting an orchestra and anti-authoritarianism, visit here for your 169-step guide for the comically challenged.
If you aren't familiar with John Hodgman beyond the "I'm a PC" Apple ads, you're missing out on a great writer and "comedian" (he'd never call himself such) through his book, The Areas of My Expertise, as well as his contributions to McSweeney's and NPR's This American Life. I had the chance to meet him and hear him speak on his book tour last fall (I rambled about it here), and his charming lack of charimsa is something to behold.
The above auction is for the benefit of the internet's best creative writing sanctuary, McSweeney's, who lost well in excess of $100,000 from the distributor of their print magazine. Help keep them afloat, so they don't suffer the same fate as Punk Planet did last week; the legendary magazine of the counter-culture collapsed under a more-than-somewhat similar scenario.
Just because HBO lost their last blockbuster show last week when the Sopranos went dark (and Entourage has been phoning it in for the last year) doesn't mean you should abandon all hope. Beyond the fact that On Demand usually has a bountiful selection of Amanda Bynes and Tom Cruise movies, their new show Flight of the Conchords is fantastic. Think of a British-style comedy about a less raunchy version of Tenacious D. The show has a simple plot, but frequently segues into music videos. These guys have been performing as Flight of the Conchords for several years now (there are videos of them all over youtube), so they aren't a band created for the sole purpose of sketch comedy, and their current US tour has actually been selling out in most cities.
It's on right after Entourage on Sundays (10:30pm). I recommend it, unless your sole idea of funny is a Farrelly Brothers movie or a dude taking a fastball to the groin.
WEB OF SILENCE: Webcasters, including L.A. radio station KCRW and its website KCRW.com, will join together for a Day of Silence next Tuesday (6/26). Stations and Internet radio sites will shut down regular programming as a protest against the new high music royalties for Internet radio, established by the Copyright Royalty Board in March. KCRW will produce a one-hour program—D-Day for Webcasters— featuring Pandora, Live365, Yahoo, AccuRadio, SomaFM, indie webcaster Bagel Radio and public radio station WAMU/Washington, DC, among others. KCRW GM Ruth Seymour will moderate, as participants describe the effects that the new rates will have on their ability to stream and to serve audiences online. Webcasters are supporting the Internet Radio Equality Act, which has garnered bipartisan support in the House as well as the Senate. In addition, they have filed appeals and a request for a stay with the US District Court in Washington, DC. However, if none of these tactics succeed, webcasters will be required to send checks to Sound Exchange, the collection agency for the record companies and the artists, on July 15, with rates retroactive to last year.
You can view KCRW's info on the cause here. The page includes info on initiatives in Congress on how to support webcasters getting reamed by music publishers, and how to contact the proper representatives.
By the way, if you're an avid internet radio listener and your favorite show is off the air on Tuesday, you can always tune into everyone's favorite conscientious objectors from Canada PunkRadioCast.
I'm surprised this isn't a bigger story, although on any given day I can't really tell how many people actually like Sufjan Stevens. A lot of people just do it for a false sense of credibility.
Anyway.
He's been known to act like an enigmatic weirdo in the past, so in many cases it'd be hard to tell if he's behind it, or his Purevolume page just got hacked, or if Purevolume got their hands on a track and jumped the gun on posting it (does anyone ever post new songs exclusively on Purevolume anymore?), but Gorilla vs. Bear got the scoop (along with a screenshot) on a new track showing up on his page for about 72 hours. It was called "Portland, or, Whistling Underwater" from an upcoming album possibly titled Oregon, With The Wind. The album title's overly cheeky, and picking the soon-to-be-passé hipster hangout of Portland for the first track is way overly obvious for a guy like this.
Thankfully, Pitchfork cleared it up with the proper amount of sass, as always.
It all seemed pretty legit... until we actually listened to "Portland, or, Whistling Underwater". It sounded like really, really bad Animal Collective. Hopefully not the work of our Sufjan.
Turns out, it's not. The whole thing-- the song, the album, the entire PureVolume page-- is a complete fake. According to Sufjan's label Asthmatic Kitty, Mr. Stevens had nothing to do with any of it.
I really don't understand how these internet trends start, or why on earth the LOL cats have become so popular, but people now seem to be circulating these LOL metal images, which are pretty great.
There's been lots of great trends, from the O RLY owls (which were big enough to earn a Wikipedia article), all the various pwn3d graphics, to the amazing stuff on ytmnd (my favorite of which being the one featuring Snoop Dogg in Kirby's Dreamland here).
It's really fascinating that this is the sort of postmodern world we currently live in, and that when the robots and computers destroy the earth, not one bit of this will be left for future generations (of robots, I guess) to see. Tangible art certainly still exists and can be breathtaking, but all these various outlets for expression online have somehow achieved much greater mass appeal.
When's the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art going to have an exhibit of this stuff? If old Atari computers can be museum exhibits now, so can this:
Apparently Jessica Cutler, famous for the Washingtonienne blog and accompanying sex scandal has gone bankrupt! She seemed to be sitting pretty only year ago after the success of her book (which was technically only "based" on the blog, but some of the changes were suspect, such as changing the popular DC blog Wonkette in reality to "Blogette" in the novel).
Go over to Gawker to view not only the story on her bleak financial situation and the related defamation suits she's involved in, but also a list of her assets, which includes a $50 fur coat and a dog valued at... priceless?
Now she just needs to start whoring herself out in a new scene. I'm thinking all those rich bankers in Omaha might be about her speed. She's already run through DC ("Hollywood for the ugly," as she calls it in her book), so her options at this point are regrettably limited.
By the way, yes. I was one of the few that read her book. She uses such high-brow vocabulary as "WTF" in the book, to give you an idea of the quality.
Gawker is selling these lovely sociopolitical statements for a mere $19.99. I'm thinking about having my whole softball team wear them as our uniform.
Buy it here.
I came across this story on goodmagazine.com about Danica McKellar (Winnie Cooper from The Wonder Years) this morning.
“Math doesn’t have good PR. I’m going to do my best to do great PR for math,” she says. As a spokesman for the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, she testified to a Congressional subcommittee in 2000 about the country’s need to better prepare math teachers and draw more young girls toward math, especially at the age when they tend to start avoiding the subject. “Not only is middle school a time in life when girls are dealing with so much emotionally, it’s also when math gets harder.”
She's a math nerd now! This is really fantastic news. We read all the time about girls who have "nerd" tendencies including playing Halo and World of Warcraft, etc., but to be a traditional, hardcore nerd means to not only embrace math, but convince other people to do the same. Jessica Alba telling the world she likes playing MarioKart really doesn't do the world any good.
When I was studying electrical engineering at Virginia Tech (a university that has almost exactly 50% females), most of my upper-level classes had in the neighborhood of two girls for every 30 guys, but those two girls were always, without fail, sharper than the guys. The stereotype that guys are better or more interested in math really ought to be imploded, because the world's being deprived of some significant contributions. Math is only hard to people who believe that it's hard. If people (and I'm talking guys and girls here) put half as much time into learning calculus in high school as they do on social networking websites, they'll be grasping Faraday's Law in no time.
And if you aren't doing math because you think it isn't edgy or hip enough for you, how about just getting a tattoo or something?
When members of Texas Is The Reason, The Promise Ring, The Gloria Record and The Love Scene get together, you can only expect good things. Check out House and Parish, who are just now starting to play shows in the New York area.
By the way, if I hadn't been in Laughlin, NV seeing Air Supply on Thanksgiving, I'd be really pissed that I missed the Texas Is The Reason reunion in New York.
I spoke on the phone today with Chris Wrenn, owner of Bridge 9 Records - I'm working on a story about them for an upcoming Alternative Press issue. I won't really divulge details of the interview because you can go read that yourself, but one small point came out that really surprised me. Bridge 9 is about to release their first music video in the label's history for the Death Before Dishonor record. Sparing you any lengthy commentary regarding this fact, I'd just like to point out some of the incredible hardcore videos that were all released (and probably even saw MTV airplay before 120 Minutes was taken off the air) over six years ago. With music like this, it's hard not to make a pretty engaging video (the Sick Of It All video for "Step Down" is, regardless of genre, one of the coolest music videos ever made).
Alternative Press is finally starting to build up their online archive, which means some of my articles have finally found their way online. This is especially helpful for me, as I don't actually read the magazine because I never seem to manage to get on the subscriber list.
JOURNEY SINGER WHACKED: Just one day after Journey launched its comeback with a strategically placed soundtrack appearance on The Sopranos finale, the band’s remaining founding members stopped believin’ in frontman Jeff Scott Soto after just 10 months on the job. Said guitarist Neal Schon: “We’ve just decided to go our separate ways, no pun intended. We’re plotting our next move now." Added keyboardist Jonathan Cain: added that he hoped Soto would remain “a friend of the band in the future. We just felt it was time to go in a different direction.”
No one gives a good god damn who sings for Journey as long as it's not Steve Perry, anyway. You'd think Journey would capitalize on this wave of popularity (if you can call 25 years a "wave") with younger audiences and hit the road with Jimmy Eat World or Fall Out Boy, rather than continuing to tour with Def Leppard, who won't be growing any additional arms anytime soon.
In other irrelevant news, Kelly Clarkson fired her manager. If her manager's taking the fall for her new single tanking, she should have thought harder about firing herself as songwriter. Does she think "Since U Been Gone" just... happened?
It seems like pretty much everyone on earth is outraged by the Sopranos finale, myself temporarily included in that. Wikipedia even locked their Sopranos article for the time being, presumably to prevent enraged commentary on the show's blank screen conclusion. From the viewer's perspective, we invested over eight years, witnessing innovative writing, captivating performances, and the unexpected deaths of just about everyone's favorite characters, which makes this very Grapes of Wrath ending equal parts frustrating and deviously clever.
Gawker posted a cool commentary of the final episode that echoes my sentiments fairly well, plus they link to a video of the final conversation between Tony Soprano and the now senile Corrado Soprano, which is one of the most powerful scenes of the final season and a fitting way to remember the show.
Regardless of the lack of closure, the show's final scene (shown below) and the morbid tension that accompanies it is certainly bound to go down in history as one of the more peculiar and memorable scenes in television history.
The grammar on the previous post is flat out terrible. I'm leaving it as-is as a harsh reminder to myself while I go back to following the Grammar Girl podcast.
I saw the Hold Steady last Thursday, but honestly, was too drunk to remember most of it. I hadn't played the elegantly wasted "that guy" in quite some time, particularly at a show, so I figured it was about time, and the Hold Steady is the ideal complement to that mission.
Enough for the aside. I'd review the show thoroughly, but HITS has done a nice job of it for me:
The Hold Steady at El Rey Theatre, L.A.: Guess if you’re jonesing for vintage Bruce, you could do a lot worse than this glorified Brooklyn-by-way-of-Minneapolis bar band extraordinaire. Picture Paul Giamatti as Harvey Pekar playing a rabbinical scholar fronting the band at the time of The Wild, the Innocent and the E-Street Shuffle and you get an idea of rock’s most unlikely lead singer. Craig Finn, who looks Jewish, but is actually Irish, apparently takes drugs like the former, drinks like the latter and pines to find a girlfriend not repulsed by him like members of both tribes. Live, the bespectacled Finn is the center of attention, even with his nondescript man-tailored shirt—think a bearded Sigmund Freud channeling Elvis Costello—flapping his arms and wildly urging the audience on, then stepping from the microphone and exaggeratedly repeating the same lyrics... [full story]
The band's last two records, Boys and Girls in America and Separation Sunday are beyond played out in my stereo, but, good lord, what an entertaining band to see live.
If you've just been dying to know which movie reviewer is most suited to your tastes, this site is entertaining. They only pick between, as best I can tell, 4 critics, but it'll at least reaffirm for most that rotten tomatoes is generally pretty spot-on.
I can't think of a better word to describe my feelings for the return of MTV's Unplugged than "lukewarm."
MTV PLUGS INTO UNPLUGGED: MTV’s storied Unplugged franchise is returning with planned shows by The Police, Bon Jovi, Kenny Chesney, Mary J. Blige and John Mayer, among others. The acoustic performances will be shown on MTV, VH1 and CMT, as well as online and mobile phones. Bon Jovi, whose 1989 acoustic performance on the 1989 MTV Video Music Awards, according to legend, originally inspired the concept, will kick off the newest Unplugged with three consecutive nights starting June 22 on MTV, VH1 and CMT, to launch the June 19 release of their new album, Lost Highway. Each of the shows will then be available respectively on MTV.com, VH1.com and CMT.com after the on-air premiere. [HITS]
I'm pumped on Bon Jovi, but I'm not pumped on the fact that it's highly unlikely that he'll bust out "Blaze of Glory." We'll have to deal with a bunch of new stuff. I'm not a doctor yet, but I'm pretty sure there's some kind of quantum mechanics law that proves, outright, how much his new songdoesn't rock.
The album's shredding penultimate track "Mission Statement" says it all:
We are the change that we've been screaming for.
Any long-term Strung Out fan won't argue that the band had, in every sense of the term, "lost it" on their last two records, American Paradox and Exile In Oblivion (read my old review). Strung Out's first few albums, particularly Suburban Teenage Wasteland Blues and Twisted By Design, got me through my formative years despite rampant bouts of depression, and it's a shame that the only thing in the ensuing years that brought about a similar state was the release of really disappointing Strung Out records.
It's beyond my pleasure to say that Strung Out has officially "returned." I won't blame it all on the Alternative Press feature of Suburban in a recent issue, but it's really incredible to see the band return to their roots (going old school to return to new school?) to give us a record that could slot in between Twisted and The Element Of Sonic Defiance quite nicely. Blackhawks Over Los Angeles is the ideal balance of blazing pop punk and metal that made this band so incredible in the late 90's, and while they'll never quite match the absurd urgency of Suburban or Twisted ever again, this record represents a step in the right direction for a band that many felt should have thrown in the towel seven years ago.
Saying Strung Out is "improving" is like calling a 4000-year-old nation like China a "developing nation," but it's admittedly true. Strung Out completely lost their identity, and they've fnally taken steps to rediscover it. They don't try to be metal, and they don't try to be pop punk - they finally do what was so amazing about Twisted and just play like Strung Out. It's a shame this band has struggled so much in recent years. This was the band that got kids through high school in the late 90's. Now kids are stuck with bands like Fall Out Boy and New Found Glory, who I'm quite sure don't even write their own songs much of the time. Guys, make it a point to get this record. While you're at it, seek out all of Strung Out's new-school brethren, such as Lagwagon, Pulley, Good Riddance and Propagandhi; learn how a kid should really rock the fuck out in high school.
Apple's iPhone comes out on Friday, June 29th at 6pm and, not surprisingly, there's been an ocean of hype surrounding it because that's what Steve Jobs does... again and again. People are, across the board, convinced this is God's gift to the wireless industry, even though this is Apple's first venture into the field, and Apple's products are notorious for being faulty upon first distribution. The Onion has a good snapshot of the absurdity to which this phone's hype has reached. Some guy is even camping out and detailing his spellbinding, umm, sitting around on pavement adventures here.
I'm surprised this isn't a bigger story, although on any given day I can't really tell how many people actually like Sufjan Stevens. A lot of people just do it for a false sense of credibility.
