Home again - back from the usual extravaganza of turkey, pie and other kinds of pie. I do think Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, these days - there's food, and family, and games to play, all with a fairly minimal amount of preparation - just the food shopping, really. It's only marred by the "Black Friday" nonsense the day after, but that's more of a Christmas thing than Thanksgiving, so it doesn't do any harm. There aren't many holidays left that allow you to just enjoy them at face value - no matter what you think of Christmas, it requires a month of shopping, or hearing about shopping - and these days, it's burdened with the Weight of the Continued Economic Survival of the Republic... not to mention Bill O'Reilly. Halloween has always been a rather dull holiday, more or less redeemed by watching Frankenstein or the Evil Dead films - but those days are gone, at least online. With every film blog on earth given over to a month of horror film posts, Halloween jumped the shark, married the costar, had a kid, brought in Ted McGinley and offered a Very Special Episode all at once. I may never watch another horror film as long as I live. It's bad enough devoting December and half of November to Christmas crap - at least Christmas has good music.
Leaving us with Thanksgiving, thank you very much. I don't have much more to offer, so I will leave you with 2 other things I am thankful for: trains, and my iPod - and the playlist of my trainride home, a kind of Random Ten on Steroids. Or bloated with apple pie, pumpkin pie, chocolate pie, banana cream pie...
Jonathan Richman & Modern Lovers - She Cracked
Stooges - Ann
MIA - Hombre
Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks - Elmo Delmo
Deerhoof - Sound the Alarm
MIA - Paper Planes [yes, the iPod was on shuffle... a reminder - Slumdog Millionaire makes the song its own...]
Butthole Surfers - Rocky["All of my friends, baby, they're going insane..."]
Big Star - Big Black Car
Radiohead - Hunting Bears
Melt Banana - One Drop, One Life
Nick Cave - Deanna (live)
George Harrison - Plug Me In [rockin' out!]
Isley Brothers - Fight the Power [time is truly wasting...]
Derek Bailey - This time [Bailey with Jamaaladeen Tacuma and Calvin Weston, rhythms section for Ornette Coleman, James Carter, James Blood Ullmer, etc. This record works amazingly well - I love this stuff. The rhythm section plays straight, straight free-funk - Bailey gets in the spirit of things - working the sounds, tones, pitch possibilities, the machinery of his electric guitar - placing it in context of the rest - they give him a tight groove and he lays sounds over it, without clashing - he accepts it as a fact and works around it, off it; he doesn’t ever settle into their groove, either time or their chords, but he keeps it in view - it all works beautifully.]
Big Star - Give me Another Chance [another repeated act.. this is a lovely song in full fake Beatles mode]
Charlie Parker - Don’t Blame Me
Velvet Underground - Black Angels Death Song [from the Quine tapes]
Van Halen - Jamie’s Crying [that first record doesn’t actually suck, oddly enough. Though already their sound is impossibly processed. They invented that sound, and no one else did it well, not really.]
REM - Supernatural superserious [the new record; not terrible but completely anonymous. Dull guitar lines, recycled harmonies from their old records etc.]
Rolling Stones - Coming Down Again [prefiguring Nick Cave’s latter day career - piano ballad with twists; Keef singing? Thoroughly gorgeous though.]
Black Mountain - No satisfaction
Echo and the Bunnymen - The Cutter
The Undertones - She’s a runaround [they really were a neat band]
That will do: something appropriate to finish it off - not quite M.I.A. but bearing some resemblance...:
1 comment:
"With every film blog on earth given over to a month of horror film posts, Halloween jumped the shark, married the costar, had a kid, brought in Ted McGinley and offered a Very Special Episode all at once."
Laughing until my hot chocolate comes out of my nose.
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