Archive for the ‘Awesomeness’ Category
Taylor Becomes a Wolf: New Moon Clip
Eeeee! It’s, like, SO hot when Jacob totally saves Bella.
In all seriousness, though, Kristen Stewart has a nice right hook. But I’m not sure I’m impressed with the wolf transformations. Benicio Del Toro is much scarier.
Get ready to squeal in 3…2…1:
Thao Nguyen Wants to Write You a Song
Remember singing telegrams? Yeah, me neither. At least in my lifetime, their existence seems to have been purely pop-cultural.
But no longer(!), provided you like your missives flavored with saccharine, and occasionally anarchic, indie pop.
Thao with the Get Down Stay Down—formerly of Virginia, lately of San Francisco—will write and record a singing telegram for the winner of a raffle; the (kinda steep) $20 ticket price benefits CASH Music. The nonprofit creates open-source software and code to ease the distribution of music.
Shudder to Tweet
Sampling the thought streams of D.C. musicians past and present.
-Our brand new album, “in ‘Love’”, is out on October 27! Keep your eyes peeled for ordering info and tour dates!: http://bit.ly/CeTKL
-Surprisingly underwhelmed by the new Revolver remaster. :( -E
-Vintage episodes of American Gladiator just aren’t doing it for me right now.
-New Sockets column FORGOTTEN VINYL. First download is a posi disco raga by Charanjit Singh! http://bit.ly/2MKvoQ
Edie Sedgwick:
-Speedy Gonzales on the phone…trying to get me a licensing deal. Gonna need a big advance if I’m gonna sign with a stereotype…
-Hanging with Rodney Dangerfield and Trotsky tonight. Trotsky really pissed that Dangerfield called Marx’s dialectical materialism “a farce.”
-http://bit.ly/oj8Tr AND http://bit.ly/ZFB1v. Weird day for a Washingtonian.
-my bus driver hit a squirrel today and mumbled at it for the rest of the ride. You can’t just jump out in the road like that.
Tonight in Fall Arts: The Deen Bros.
Good gosh, y’all, Paula Deen’s boys are in town plugging their gourmet cookbook, Transfats Don’t Mean Shit To Me The Deen Bros. Take It Easy: Quick and Affordable Meals the Whole Family Will Love, at the Barnes & Noble in Tysons Corner.
And it’s not just them—there’s more stuff going on all over the DMV.
I Should Have Sent My Surrogate to See Surrogates
Not even a CGI-treated Bruce Willis sporting a toupee can redeem Surrogates, the dystopian robot movie that forsakes a promising plot in favor of blowing shit up at random.
“But I love blowing shit up/blowing robots,” you’re probably thinking. “And I love watching Die Hard on USA. Oh, heh, I just remembered that time he yelled, ‘YIPPIE-KAY-YAY, MOTHERFUCKER’.”
I submitted my fragile, Bruce-obsessed psyche to Surrogates despite (well-founded) reservations after a friend told me, “Dude, it’s only like 45 minutes long.”
And after the closing credits finished, sans perfunctory gag reel, my first thought was: That loving, sweet, melodious sack of shit lied and now 88 minutes of my life is gone.
My second thought was: I think I taste blood. I should not have eaten that entire box of sour skittles.
I did not think again after that until today.
After the jump is my case for Surrogates’ potential and the reasons it failed. So long as you don’t do anything weird, this post will not make your mouth bleed.
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Bluebrain—And You—To Perform “Cakeblood” In Dupont Circle
If you’re going to make strange music in Washington, D.C., this is the week to do it.
“Cakeblood,“ a composition-on-cassettes for 50 boomboxes, isn’t officially part of this year’s Sonic Circuits festival, but the participatory work by local electro-indie-pop duo Bluebrain is certainly of a piece with the experimental music festival’s try-anything mission.
The skinny: Bring a boombox or some kind of tape-playing device to Dupont Circle tomorrow night at 7:30 p.m. (rain or shine, as of right now). There, Bluebrain—which is brothers Ryan and Hays Holladay, formerly of the Brooklyn band The Epochs—will distribute as many as 50 cassette tapes containing about 30 distinct musical parts, and lead a procession of ad-hoc musicians around the city. There’s no way to ensure precise synchronization, which is hardly the point, anyway: The more chaotic, apparently, the better.
“It’ll sound like we’re in this weird, electronic jungle,” says Hays Holladay, 26, of the 30- to 35-minute work. “Sometimes it’s very eerie, and sometimes very pleasant. It has this sort of chirping kind of feeling.”
Read More “Bluebrain—And You—To Perform “Cakeblood” In Dupont Circle” »
There Is Too Such A Thing As A Free (Onstage) Lunch
OK, an actual, edible lunch you’re on your own for. But starting Thursday, you can feed your head — and your appetite for theater — for nothing.
Actually that’s not an uncommon thing here in D.C. , and I’ll be pointing these things out from time to time. (My mantra about theater: Nobody should ever pay full price.)
But the deal this week is maybe a little bigger than the usual: Thursday marks the kickoff for the Inkubator Festival, an annual new-plays shindig put together by the nice folk at a D.C. play-development outfit called the Inkwell.
Of “Inkreadings” and “Inkubator Productions,” after the jump…
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Sharks Like Soul Music
I recently reported that monkeys like Metallica. In continuing animal-music news, it turns out that Barry White puts sharks in the mood for love.
Workers at a London aquarium played Barry White for a reluctant zebra shark named Zorro, and it was so effective, Zorro’s violent and amorous overtures to other sharks apparently disturbed some visitors.
The Anti-Formalist: A Q&A With Todd Rundgren
Todd Rundgren, you may be surprised to learn, doesn’t own a cell phone.
This fact might be unremarkable, except that an embrace of new technologies is the only unifier of this pop eccentric’s winding, four-decade career. As a prolific recording artist and producer, Rundgren was an early adapter of the synthesizer, and one of the first to realize its pop-music possibilities. On his mid-’70s solo albums and with his prog outfit Utopia, he pushed the limits of how much music an LP could hold. His Dali-loving 1981 video for “Time Heals” was the first to employ computer graphics; several of his mid-’90s albums were CD-ROMs; and he was an innovator of the internet as a music-distribution tool.
“I’m kind of selective about the technology I adapt for my lifestyle,” Rundgren said in a phone interview last week (he borrowed a friend’s). He was in Cleveland, rehearsing for his current tour, on which he’s reproducing in full his 1973 magnum opus A Wizard, A True Star. Rundgren and his band will perform the album at the Music Center at Strathmore on Thursday night.
Posse On Clownway: ICP Reviewed
Whining about invisible haters has become an empty cliche but when Insane Clown Posse calls themselves “the most hated band” it’s hard to argue. On a critical level ICP might genuinely be the most loathed musical act of our generation. I don’t even think Tom Breihan likes them. Which is odd because they’ve always struck me as simply inoffensive and serviceable rock-rappers who found an incredibly loyal audience and catered directly to them. There’s no fault in that, really. But self proclaimed smart people hate them in the purest sense of the world. This is mostly because they and their very loyal fans are guilty of being poor and wearing face paint and building a community and all those other anti-intellectual and unironic fun things that bands used to do with/for their fans BPF*. Basically they are the Kiss of today, it’s just that the demographic that is willing to buy into that type of world has narrowed dramatically. I blame the internet.
ICP’s tenth studio album, Bang! Pow! Boom!** dropped on Tuesday and it warranted further investigation for a couple reasons. One, their recent festival turned internet meme The Gathering of the Juggalos seemed like the greatest place on earth, despite ill informed derision from certain poverty demonizing stuff white people like type elitists. (If drinking cheap soda and listening to is Scarface is wrong then I don’t want to be right.) But, perhaps more interesting than that was the wikipedia claim that Violent J “listened to music by the psychedelic rock band Gong for inspiration” while making this album. Which means he has better taste in music than Jay-Z.
Hit the jump for some quick thoughts on my first ICP full length. Woop woop! Read More “Posse On Clownway: ICP Reviewed” »
