3 Songs for the Season
While trusty Whisky has been kickin' out the jams with several album recomendations lately, I've only got three single songs for ya.
But, they're pretty damned awesome, imho.
First of all is Cee-Lo Green's "Fuck You." Cee-Lo is one half of Gnarls Barkley.
Catchy and profane as hell, it makes me grin every time I hear it (alone in the car or privately on the MP3 player, this ain't one for the kids).
Shoo the kids out of the room and give it a listen. Now listen again, and near the end of the song listen to the whiny part where his mom says "This is one for your dad." I laugh hardest then.
As a companion disc to the other K-tel compilation I dreamed up, Love Songs for One, I've got start at a set of expurgated obscene songs, to be entitled later:
- "FU" by Cee Lo Green
- "F**k You" by Lily Allen
- "Crazy B*tch" by Buckcherry
- "I Bet You They Won't Play This Song On The Radio" by Monty Python
My favorite song of the moment is John Mellencamp's "Save Some Time to Dream."
The song itself is just a good tune, as evidenced here by one of the many live performances you can find on the web, but this particular version from the album No Better Than This is a haunting rendition that must be heard.
The concept of the album was to record in mono on the original equipment with a live band in the various places that Elvis, Robert Johnson, and other great artists recorded some of their seminal tracks. While it's worth one good listen, I don't imagine this is one I'm going to slap into the player that often.
However, I've already played the hell out of "Save Some Time to Dream." I'm still not tired of it, and I think it's one of those I'll always come back to.
I continue to be amazed at the great songs Mellencamp is capable of writing. I look forward to everything he does now.
Finally, we have one of those songs I should be deeply deeply ashamed of for even liking (but I've never cowered from proudly declaring I like what I like, even to the extent that I "won" one of Micheal Blowhard's (aka Ray Sawhill) "I'm So Gay" competitions).
If you have daughters around the house, there is no escaping the cultural impact of the TV show "Glee." While I can't watch more than 10 minutes without feeling like I have to guzzle a beer, scratch my ass, and belch loudly enough to alarm the dogs (we have two now - a story for another day), when my daughter queued up their cover of Van Halen's "Jump," I have to admit I was charmed. (Second link here in case the first one is yoinked; however the producers of the show seem to realize the value of viral video on Youtube.)
Having the chorus sing the rhythm guitar part is inspired, but having the voices spread out in harmonization in the latter part of the "bah bah dah dum," so it sounds like the harmonicis of Eddie's guitar, is beyond brilliant.
I'm gonna have to remember when I have the windows rolled down when that one cycles up on the player in the car.
Happy Halloween everyone!
Friday, October 29, 2010
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Entertainments while facing the void
Hey there, few readers I have left after not posting for a month!
[Three paragraphs of bitching and moaning excised. No one needs to read that shite.]
So, amongst all this, one still attempts to stave off the demons and the boredom with entertainments.
Stumbled through Lucy by Laurence Gonzales, which was festooned with some of the clumsiest writing I've come across since I've re-read some of my less-inspired posts. It also made the mistake of filling (filler) pages of description of verdant forests and vistas of unimaginable beauty, etc. Since Gonzales is such a clumsy writer, it was easy to skip most of that crap.
Which was too bad, really. The premise - a misguided scientist of the Jane Goodall stripe manages to create a human/bonobo chimp hybrid that looks mostly human - is a promising one. Alas, it pretty much apes (heh heh) the plot of Escape from the Planet of the Apes, makes the chimp-girl noble via sheer dint of her birth (why would she be better than a human just because she has bonobo genes?), and even stoops to the now-obligatory swipes at Christianity (though it was fundie Christianity being swiped at; the author had the grace to include a "good" Christian in the plot).
I wish someone would try again with this idea, and do a better job.
Tried to read Room by Emma Donoghue, and was immediately charmed by the dead-on first person narration by a five-year-old, with the funky word constructions and primitive, though logical, grammar.
Mysteriously they spend all of their time in a small room. However, SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER it turns out that they are being held captive by a kidnapper who is the (unwanted, rapist) father of the child, and in order to escape the child has to play dead in a rolled-up carpet and then jump from a moving truck. I have a child that age, and the thought of my little sweetie having to dive out of a moving car and bounce along the pavement is just too much to bear, even in print.END SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER
NOT REALLY A SPOILER (as it's indicated on the cover summary): What's worse, once they escape the room, the mother's character immediately changes in a way that isn't consistent with what went before, and it's heart-rending. The child still pines for the close environment of the room and his mother's undivided attention, but once she's free, she appears to not care about the child's adjustment to the new world, and that struck me as wrong.
At that point, I skipped to the end to see how it turned out, and was glad I abandoned it when I did. I'll leave it at that.
If child-in-peril plots don't bother you, you might like the uniqueness of Room and the artistic chance Donoghue takes, but I think anyone with small kids will be put off.
On the heels of that unhappy fictional experience, I watched Shutter Island, which also eventually turned out to be another child-in-peril story. A very gruesome one at that. (Remember the moms who drowned their children? This is that on steroids.)
Even The Runaways, the bio flick about Joan Jett's first band (plus Lita Ford who I don't recall being mentioned by name in the flick which was weird, as she's the only other one who "made it") was mostly about how these young teen girls were exploited. I'd read the bio it was based on and thankfully they didn't use some of the more prurient stuff. Though I gotta admit the opening scene is audacious: menstrual blood landing on the gravel between one of the character's feet, the first line being something about what a time to get her period.
After all of this, oddly, I really liked Machete, Robert Rodriguez's latest. It's about as hyper-violent as it comes, full of everything that makes a move a hard "R", but it was damn good adult escapist entertainment. There's a scene where a nude woman removes a blackberry from the only place she could store it, replete with the sound effect of retrieving the same. I had a big chuckle with the boys afterwards about the sound tech who was instructed to come up with that sound.
So, here I sit, admitting I enjoyed a movie where the hero swings through a window a floor down - Die Hard-style - using a man's intestines more than these "serious" entertainments.
I guess I prefer bad guys getting hurt rather than babies.
And I guess I like that about myself.
Hey there, few readers I have left after not posting for a month!
[Three paragraphs of bitching and moaning excised. No one needs to read that shite.]
So, amongst all this, one still attempts to stave off the demons and the boredom with entertainments.
Stumbled through Lucy by Laurence Gonzales, which was festooned with some of the clumsiest writing I've come across since I've re-read some of my less-inspired posts. It also made the mistake of filling (filler) pages of description of verdant forests and vistas of unimaginable beauty, etc. Since Gonzales is such a clumsy writer, it was easy to skip most of that crap.
Which was too bad, really. The premise - a misguided scientist of the Jane Goodall stripe manages to create a human/bonobo chimp hybrid that looks mostly human - is a promising one. Alas, it pretty much apes (heh heh) the plot of Escape from the Planet of the Apes, makes the chimp-girl noble via sheer dint of her birth (why would she be better than a human just because she has bonobo genes?), and even stoops to the now-obligatory swipes at Christianity (though it was fundie Christianity being swiped at; the author had the grace to include a "good" Christian in the plot).
I wish someone would try again with this idea, and do a better job.
Tried to read Room by Emma Donoghue, and was immediately charmed by the dead-on first person narration by a five-year-old, with the funky word constructions and primitive, though logical, grammar.
Mysteriously they spend all of their time in a small room. However, SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER it turns out that they are being held captive by a kidnapper who is the (unwanted, rapist) father of the child, and in order to escape the child has to play dead in a rolled-up carpet and then jump from a moving truck. I have a child that age, and the thought of my little sweetie having to dive out of a moving car and bounce along the pavement is just too much to bear, even in print.END SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER
NOT REALLY A SPOILER (as it's indicated on the cover summary): What's worse, once they escape the room, the mother's character immediately changes in a way that isn't consistent with what went before, and it's heart-rending. The child still pines for the close environment of the room and his mother's undivided attention, but once she's free, she appears to not care about the child's adjustment to the new world, and that struck me as wrong.
At that point, I skipped to the end to see how it turned out, and was glad I abandoned it when I did. I'll leave it at that.
If child-in-peril plots don't bother you, you might like the uniqueness of Room and the artistic chance Donoghue takes, but I think anyone with small kids will be put off.
TLD: This goes against Ebert's dictum that you should review the thing you saw (or read) not what you wanted to see (or read), but since a few folks in the Amazon reviews mentioned it, I thought I would too, because I had the very same thought while reading Room: this would have been excellent as a short-form fiction - a novelette or short story. (Especially if the "escape" portion of the story would've been less harrowing.)
Works that have a strong, highly-stylized first person narrative that conveys specific character or mental traits are usually better in short form. For example both Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes and Born of Man and Woman are wonderful short stories with a great sucker-punch. (Those are links to the actual stories, and if you haven't read either, you've got a treat or two in store for you.) Flowers for Algernon is unique in that the author expanded the short story into novel form later. I've read both, and while I consider the novel a success, I prefer the short story as it delivers most of the same material in a tighter package, which makes the ending more visceral, in my opinion.
Thus, it'd be interesting to see Donoghue pare Room down to a short story. If you read this, Ms. Donoghue, and aren't too pissed at me for not completely enjoying your book, consider giving it a try.
On the heels of that unhappy fictional experience, I watched Shutter Island, which also eventually turned out to be another child-in-peril story. A very gruesome one at that. (Remember the moms who drowned their children? This is that on steroids.)
Even The Runaways, the bio flick about Joan Jett's first band (plus Lita Ford who I don't recall being mentioned by name in the flick which was weird, as she's the only other one who "made it") was mostly about how these young teen girls were exploited. I'd read the bio it was based on and thankfully they didn't use some of the more prurient stuff. Though I gotta admit the opening scene is audacious: menstrual blood landing on the gravel between one of the character's feet, the first line being something about what a time to get her period.
After all of this, oddly, I really liked Machete, Robert Rodriguez's latest. It's about as hyper-violent as it comes, full of everything that makes a move a hard "R", but it was damn good adult escapist entertainment. There's a scene where a nude woman removes a blackberry from the only place she could store it, replete with the sound effect of retrieving the same. I had a big chuckle with the boys afterwards about the sound tech who was instructed to come up with that sound.
So, here I sit, admitting I enjoyed a movie where the hero swings through a window a floor down - Die Hard-style - using a man's intestines more than these "serious" entertainments.
I guess I prefer bad guys getting hurt rather than babies.
And I guess I like that about myself.
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