Been To Cincy

I've been to Florence,Kentucky numerous times visiting one of my company's customers, but never had time to go across the Ohio into Cincinnati until tonight. Reading Roadfood.com paid off for me as I went to the oldest bar in town, Arnold's Bar and Grill (please no Happy Days jokes) and had a great time. The food and drink were fine, the people there were friendly and the bartender was excellent - I should have gotten the young man's name, but you'll know he's there if you see a bicycle chained to the parking meter out front. I probably would have stayed all night if I had realized they were going to have live classical music later on. I drove around the Over The Rhine neighborhood too - you know I like to live dangerously. Then I later searched the immense Party Source store for obscure beer and ended up buying some Youngs Chocolate Stout to try when I get back home to Tennessee.

Blogging wi-fi (makes me feel like Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame being able to say that) from Holiday Inn.

It's All About Clicking With The Right Clique

Hillary Clinton continues to position herself as the conservative voice of the Democratic Party. This time she's dogging the video game industry. She's a shrewd one.

Mike Vallely Coming To Music City In May

I'm stoked to see that Mike Vallely will be stopping by Nashville on one of his frequent tours across the country. He may not know every razzle dazzle new trick, but he skates with passion and I'm sure he will showcase some incredible tricks that rarely get done today. I've been a big fan of his ever since I saw him in Public Domain and I've become a bigger fan of his based on the way he lives his life. Make sure to mark your calendars for May 14th. He'll be at the 6th Avenue Skatepark.

Good Reading

I've ran across a couple of nice blogs also from Tennessee. One is the remembrances of Gladys Crump at Times Long Ago. She talks about growing up in rural Tennessee back in the days when general stores were still the place to go to buy everything. She has a nice style and a love for the past I like.

I'm also digging Ramshackle Humanity from Nashville. He's got pictures of pretty girls too.

This isn't a blog site, but as a cartoon nut the Big Cartoon Database is a godsend. Go there and spend a few hours on me.

Chicken Little's or are you getting Chicken?

More news of the impending apocalypse. It appears we are running out of everything. I guess we'll know if the scientists are right soon enough about the impending apocalypse but in my defense: I drive a $650 1988 Chevy Corsica that only needs gas every three weeks since it only takes me about ten minutes to drive to work. I haven't bought a new pair of shoes in over a year because the one's I own haven't yet worn out. I also go through my home turning off lights that are left on. I'm trying for gosh sakes! Of course, I also had a teacher (5th grade to be precise) that swore that the world was running out of drinkable water so fast that by the time I grew up I would have to drink urine that had all of the waste processed out (is that even possible....wait I don't wanna know). This hasn't come to pass.

CD Review - The Complete Strategist: We Care

The Complete Strategist is the brainchild of Billy Kilgannon; a solo project that developed into a full fledged band. Kilgannon does vocals and plays guitar, Ryan O’Donnell plays guitar and also contributes vocals, Jeff Snyder plays the bass, and Brett Shenkman is on drums. They have an album coming out at the end of April titled We Care which should make lovers of indie-pop flavored fancies very happy.

It’s a Baskin-Robbins of influences on this gently melancholic disc. The lead off cut, “Pyrosis”, does indeed burn with a Shins like intensity as its suffused with trebly guitar interplay setting off Kilgannon’s just this side of almost annoying nasal vocals (think of They Might Be Giants and you’re getting warm). A warning – the song will burrow its way into your brain and you’ll find yourself singing snippets out of the blue. I created a bit of a stir this morning in a project meeting since singing is generally frowned upon. More low key mildly psychedelic musical notes are arranged for listening pleasure on the punny “Ilend” recalling Sixties rock at its breeziest. “Get Outta’ Town” chugs along like a lost Cars track running into Weezer and would be a big hit if radio wasn’t such a crap heap these days.

I don’t want to make the fellows in The Complete Strategist get down about the mainstream radio thing, there’s always hope of lightning striking like it did for one of the groups they sometimes resemble: Fountains Of Wayne who struck gold with “Stacy’s Mom”. This amorphous post modern style is practically a musical canon these days. The song “Ro Jo” even manages to put in a nod to The Police during the intro and outro. The lyrics are generally of the vague intellectual type though Kilgannon goes for the universal jugular on “Anyone Stupid Enough” which has this line, “anyone stupid enough, I can just humor them, they won’t understand” which is something we’ve all felt at some time or another. We Care is not a complete success. It’s probably just an old school rock and roll homage to the days when albums had ten songs at the most with at least four songs being filler, since there are four songs out of ten here that sound like clinkers to my ears.

The Complete Strategist reside in Eastern Pennsylvania and We Care will be released on Happy Home Records.

Not Surprising

To find that colleges are bastions of liberalism run amok. I attended M.T.S.U. long enough to get a degree in anthropology and even though I hit dead center whenever I take one of those political tests to show where you lean - left or right - my views were considered horribly conservative to my professors and fellow students. If I really wanted to hack people off, I'd say the reason why there are so few conservative professors out there is because most conservatives get real jobs, but I would never be caught being so mean now, would I? My actual feeling on this one is that like attracts like. Many of the radical students from the Sixties became professors and they generally taught cooler subjects and had bigger impressions on their students (it doesn't mean they are actually teaching anything per se) and these kids decided to go into the same business until an exponential growth of liberalism has swamped academia. Ivory towers make a great place to coast through life too, once you've gotten tenure and that probably appeals to the work ethic of most hard core liberals too. Of course, hard core conservatives will pitch a fit about such news - I told you so they'll scream - but other than producing more liberal professors to teach college I believe the left leaning is fairly harmless. College is about jumping through hoops to get a job, meeting people to socialize with, and partying.

Supreme Court to hear file sharing arguments

The Supreme Court will hear arguments on digital file sharing today. It should be very interesting to hear what they think. Some opinions have already been expressed so check out the story at Yahoo News. The usual musical hacks like Don Henley, Sheryl Crow, and the Dixie Chicks were there to support the recording industry corporate behemoth which has been settling most of their illegal file downloading cases for $2,000 a pop (I wonder how much of that money goes into the performers pockets the recording industry claims to be protecting? not much I bet) while Brian Eno, Heart, and Chuck D all stood on the side of file sharing. There's so much great and completely legal downloads out there so you shouldn't be downloading files illegally anyways, but I can't stand the RIAA with their witch hunt mentality, especially when profits are very healthy for the major labels even in light of losing market share to video games and other forms of entertainment.

Easter Aftermath

Chocolate bunnies in my sleep

Are hopping after me,

For cutting off their ears and eating their heads

The chocolate bunnies want me dead.

 

 

 

Citricritic And Race Relations

I tried to post a comment on this excellent post over at Citricritic about race relations, but the server kept flaking out on me. Go over and visit this exemplary site.

Black Lipstick On Sweet Jane's Face

Many years ago when the Austin, Texas rock and roll underground scene was making big waves with acts like Zeitgeist, Doctor’s Mob, The Wild Seeds, Glass Eye, True Believers and Daniel Johnston to name but a few SPIN magazine came down to do a feature story on the scene which was dubbed the "New Sincerity" in music. I was captivated for a number of reasons; Daniel Johnston worked at McDonalds then and I also worked for the golden arches, Austin came off in the story as a slacker paradise welcoming to artists like I fancied myself to be, and most importantly the story had a bit about a local night of music where each band took the stage to perform a cover of The Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane”, which may sound repetitious to some, but to my Velvet’s obsessed mind read like heaven. Were any of the members of Austin band Black Lipstick in the audience that witnessed the night of homage to Lou Reed back in 1985? It’s not likely since they would have been just children then, but the spirit of that club date must have seeped into their collective unconscious as the force of VU is strong with them.

Black Lipstick is Elizabeth Nottingham, Travis Higdon, Steve Garcia, and Phillip Niemeyer and as they proclaim on the lead off track from Sincerely, Black Lipstick, "B.O.B. F.OS.S.E.", “if the world’s a stage then the whole damn world should bow to us…” they are ready for our supplication. Its exuberant rock loaded with Velvets and Television/Tom Verlaine New York cool mixed with Texas heat and drawl and certainly not without antecedents – read the first paragraph again if you’ve already forgotten the apparent love affair Texas has with “Sweet Jane”. The surface of Black Lipstick’s music might suggest insouciance, but there’s much going on beneath it all. Guitars snarl and hum, drums thump, and the bass rides around each song picking up the melody line when it gets dropped. Prickly little pinpricks of delight await the really attentive listener. “Grandma Airplane” unwinds for seven plus minutes telling the tale of an airplane ride with such dreamlike assurance it feels like you’re the one in the air while “it’s your world sitting on the ground”. Black Lipstick manage to come off as both bohemian and working class and to honor such a melding of intellectualism and pragmatism the next paragraph of this review will be done using the cut up method. I have cut up old Black Lipstick press clippings and through random choices I will try to capture the essence of the band.

CUT UP section: Vinyl over human interaction – this is smart stuff. An atmosphere of erotic suspense – they combine the usual freshly derivative snarky, sexy boho punk. Somebody brilliant comes along to remind you to tackle the grubby themes. The Lipstick aesthetic is clearest nerdy neurotic tribal they’re clever like Lou Reed. Instilled Texas hipsters complete with boy/girl vocals memorable. End of CUT UP section.

“Throw Some Money At It” sounds a little like Pavement which is okay with me. I do prefer the mild psychedelia of “Viva Max” better. You could be the big spot the influence winner of that one if you happen to mention Joy Division. But spotting the influences is not the appeal of the band; yes “The Bad Catholic” might remind you of My Bloody Valentine but what matters is what Black Lipstick do with those influences. They take them, shake them, and remake them. I listen to Sincerely, Black Lipstick when I tumble out of bed each morning so I get the proper dose of rock and roll to get me through another day at the day job and then bookends the night when I’m needing to space out.

It’s one of the best albums of the year so far and your home and rock and roll heart would be empty without it. It’s available from Peek-A-Boo Industries.

Show Your Love To InstaPunk

No, no...put down that trenchcoat! I don't mean that kind of love. I mean the sidebar link clicking kind of love, because the content is always a few cuts above most of the blogs out there, plus they completely wowed me with this map link thingie a few weeks ago and I totally forgot to post about it then. So I'm posting about it now to make up for my laziness. It's total coolness over there all the time. Well, except for the photo of the toe.

Get Konked!

“'Cause we're The Konks, yeah yeah yeah yeah
Yeah, we're The Konks and we don't care"

The Konks are rock and roll primitives and you should care and be glad. They hang out with other rock and roll primitive bands like The Curses, The Tamp Offs, Triple Thick, the Coffin Lids, and the mesmerizing Mr. Airplane Man. They won the first Little Steven Battle Of The Bands in Boston throwing a personal beat down on Triple Thick and The DownBeat 5. Bob plays guitar and harmonica. Jon plays bass. Kurt plays two lousy drums and sings. Rest assured that the guitars are also cheap.

Their new self-titled release for Bomp contains 12 songs played with such abandon they’ll make your head spin or maybe it’s the contact carbon monoxide poisoning from The Konks hanging out in the garage for so long. It doesn’t take but a few seconds to see why Bomp would want to sign The Konks. “Outta My Mind” explodes out of the speakers with Kurt yelping all the way. We’re talking screaming tribal thump and super fuzz stammer done with just the right amount of destructo guitar solos and bass guitar beserker bottom. “King Kong” stomps through the reverb chamber with analog biplane smashing style. The song “Out Of My Mind” has a nifty bass line loping around the opening guitar riff which just calls for a rooftop concert – I can’t quite explain my reasoning here, but it was in my personal notes so it must be true. Other tasty treats: “Break My Back” is a blues infected raunchy mess with a bass and drums only bridge that shows why all one needs is a beat, there’s the minor chord “96 Tears” sweep of “What I Came Here For” which shows that The Konks can play nice when they want to, “Honey” has a cool guitar lick that sounds a Canned Heat on crystal meth, and their cover of fellow Boston band, Aerosmith’s “Toys In The Attic” which brings me to tears because it makes me remember when Aerosmith was actually good.

Some interesting tidbits about The Konks: They don’t get their name from The Kinks who of course have a studio named Konk. They are not related to the John Dunbar led Konks of power pop fame. The name comes from the hair straightening treatment congoline. This album was reviewed by bmarkey earlier for blogcritics and the review was so well written it made the Bomp website. This album will probably show up in my best of 2005 list. So go out and get konked.