green apron monkey

the dreaded

Translation of absurdly popular Chinese song. I like the bit about the mouse and the rice. I think it has a certain affinity for the 50 cent line, "I love you like a fat kid loves cake."

Come to think of it, in mandarin I think that would go:
"wo ai ni jiu xiang xiao panze ai dan gao"

Dying Monolingual: Pin Yin Lyrics Archives

wo ai ni ai zhe ni
jiu xiang lao shu ai da mi
bu guan you duo shao feng yu wo dou hui yiran pei zhe ni
wo xiang ni xiang zhe ni
buguan you duo me de ku
zhi yao neng rang ni kai xin wo shen me dou yuan yi
zhe yang ai ni

I love you, loving you, as a mouse loves rice
Every day has a storm, I'm always by your side
I miss you, missing you
I don't care how hard it is
I just want you to be happy
Everything, I do it for you

homesick and wistful mix

Old 97's Curtain Calls
Lucinda Williams - Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
Tom Waits - Gun Street Girl
Nuetral Milk Hotel - In an Aeroplane Over the Sea
Billy Bragg and Wilco - California Stars
Los Lobos - Good Morning Aztlan
Josh Ritter - Golden Age of Radio
Gillian Welch - Revelator
THe Mountain Goats - See America Right
Sleater Kinney - Call the Doctor
Modest Mouse- Never Ending Math Equation
The Velvet Underground - Sweet Jane
The Shins - Gone for Good
Tom Waits - Cold, Cold Ground
Jesus & the Mary Chain - Just Like Honey
John Hiatt - All The Lilacs in Ohio
Nick Drake - Day is Done
Gillian Welch - Barroom Girls
Blur - Coffee and TV
Wilco - Via Chicago

back around

songs that are playing nicely in my head right now:
wiley - pies
wilco - I'm a wheel
!!! -intensify
grandaddy - AM 180
electralene - on parade

the shat is the shit

Shatner releases cover of Pulp's Common People

elex and I listened to it this morning. It's wonderful. Slackbastard, does not enjoy the shat and expressed his delight at not being present while the house was being shat upon.

Of course it isn't the Shat's most glorius contribution to music. That would be his acrid, funny collaboration withFear of Pop (aka Ben Folds), In Love.

According to pitchfork, it's part of a whole new album of covers. Aren't you glad I'm not going to be around to make you listen to it?

"Something Against You" nearly killed me

My ears are still a little ringy. The inside of lip got punctured. I have a bruise on my arm. I am hungover, and I may have significantly worsened a cold.

Tom tells me he has a friction burn on his back. He is missing a t-shirt. He looked dog-tired and right now he's at work because they couldn't afford to give him a Friday AND a Thursday off.

I think both of us are about as happy as two young miscreants can get.

The Pixies were awesome.

If you don't know about the Pixies, don't worry. You aren't the uncoolest person in the world. Just check them out at some point. They rock in a pleasant sort of way. You should let yourself be wooed by them. I fyou don't like the Pixies, that's cool too. I just don't particularly want to hear about it.

For us fans, this was something. The Pixies broke up just as I was becoming musically sentient. When I first bought Doolittle they were something amusing I had heard at a party. I continued buying Pixies CDs until I had almost all of them. They have a large catalogue and very few bad songs.

So that sort of anticipation had built up into my head, and no doubt the rest of Freeborn Hall yesterday.

So, knowing that, would you like to be the opening act?

The poor bastards to whom this job fell (I think their name was "Quiver") had a sense of doom. Even a good band would cause the audience to shift about uncomfortably, "come on, come on, Pixies." Quimmer or Quitter went up there, performed half-heartedly, sucked, then left. They sounded alot like Rush but without the talent or the benefit of me giving a crap. In between every song, Tom yelled "Next!"

Again, worst job in the world, but Quilter still did it badly.

After thirty minutes of sound checks and watching roadies arrange bottles of beer for convenient on stage consumption, the band finally came on.

They did all that rock and roll stuff: smoke and lights. They started off with the first song off their best album: Bone Machine. The audience got moist.

Then Kim Deal forgot how to play "Wave of Mutilation." They had to start over. Frank Black chewed her out a bit. Things were not tense though. The show went on and smoothly too.

The mosh pit got started and we leapt in. At first, there were a few people annoyed at that. Those people were silly. The Pixies are a punk band, no matter how idiosyncratic. People are going to mosh to "Debaser." But these things quickly sort themselves out as the people don't mosh get away from those that do.

I'm a pretty meek guy, but jostling about with a bunch of other twentysomething idiots is pure fun. And when a tiny Asian girl with horribly sharp elbows who got in there and tussles with the rest, it is one of the most glorius sights in human nature.

I put my licks in the pit, but neither I nor anyone else could outdo Tom. The man was everywhere: being the most obnoxious guy in the pit, being accosted by security for crowd surfing and taking off his shirt and throwing it to Kim Deal.

We unwound with over Sophia's with filtered water, whisky and the company of old friends.

That was a great birthday.

a lovely dilemma

It's no secret, I am a dorky fanboy.

It is also no secret that I am a dorky fanboy of The Pixies. Most of my friends own Pixies albums, and it is mostly due to my incessant playing of that band, my chattering about them and my dragging them to see Frank Black whenever he happened to drop by Santa Rosa or Sacramento.

It is indeed one of the great disappointments of my life that one of the bands that I love the most, broke just as I was reaching musical awareness. Indeed, it was probably the year I bought my first CD (Aerosmith, Permanent Vacation).

So, when The Pixies reunited and announced their tour I percieved that a great injustice had been righted. No more sludging through Frank Black's mediocre solo material. But only if I take action.

So I checked the tour dates. One date is at Freeborn Hall in my old alma mater, Davis. And it's on my birthday. Fuck. Yeah.

But then there's the other date, May 1st and that's the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, it's two days and the lineup, just on the first day, includes a number of bands I've always wanted to see (Wilco, Hieroglyphics, Stereolab) some bands that I'm curious about (The Rapture, Phantom Planet, International Noise Conspiracy) and some that I would go see so long as I was there (Death Cab for Cutie).

The problem is that this might be total overload for my little fanboy senses. Seeing the Pixies obviously will be a very special time in a young boy's life, and it would probably detract from my enjoyment of Wilco and The Rapture. Then there's the whole music festival thing and the whole Southern California thing. Seriously though, $75 for one day and I would catch up on a whole year's worth of not really going to that many concerts.

I'm definetly leaning toward Coachella.

sensitive

Things have been sucking around here with surprising amount of force. I won't get into the details, but the car dying was just part of it.

So most of the house has been pretty depressed, and for good reason. But we did come up with a novel treatment.

We wrote some (very) amatuer rock and roll. The only one of us who knows anything about music is Kylee. Yet we put Richard in charge of keyboards, Thalisha and Tom on vocals, while I whacked two bibles together.

Tom and I wrote the lyrics. Here they are:

Sensitive Boy by either Lambshaft or Johnny Skullkicker and The Broke Ass Losers

Everybody knows
sensitivity blows

yessssss

Bands I Didn't Want to

Bands I Didn't Want to Like But Do Anyway

Le Tigre
Cat Power
The Mountain Goats
Ryan Adams
Andrew WK

There is something persistent and infectious about each one, and also something thoroughly grating in the personality of each.

Two of them are snotty and arrogant performers (Cat Power, The Mountain Goats). One had an irritating song be latched on to by some irritating commercial and then had the Daily Show stick their foot straight up his ass (Andrew WK). Le Tigre's music is shot through with irksome and boring identity politics. Ryan Adams quite obviously doesn't have the attention span to finish most of his songs.

And yet, the heart loves what the heart loves, for its own reasons. With prolonged exposure I warmed right up to all of them. I can't really say why. Some I like on a primal Led Zeppelin level. Others write clever lyrics and do neat-o covers of Hank Williams Sr. songs (I am such a sucker for that). Others have the good taste to get David Rawlings to play guitar for them. That usually helps. If you are an asshole and you get David Rawlings to play guitar for you or (say) Bootsy Collins to play bass, chances are that I'll give you a listen.

Dead Rock Stars at Old

Dead Rock Stars at Old Ironsides: A Summary

Most Common Costume (male): Ozzy

Most Common Costume(female): Anything vaguely feline.

Costume Most Likely To Provoke An "Oh . . . yeah . . . That's clever.": "I'm not a Carebear, I'm a Scarebear. I have a bat on my belly"

Most Likely to Have Dragged the Rest of The Band Along: The drummer doing a wicked Keith Moon impression.

Lame (band): Reading the lyrics off cue cards for the band covering The Who.

Lame (audience): Heckling the guy who did bad stand up in between sets.

Lame (costume): Going as a goth or raver

Huh? (costume): Nomar Garciaperra

Trouble (prize): Girls with leopard print cowboy hats

Trouble (show): Tank Girl

Couple You Least Wanted to Piss Off: He-Man and She-Ra

Couple Josh Managed to Piss Off: He-Man and She-Ra

Guy Most Surprised to Have Anyone Get His Costume: Easy E

Surprsingly Good: Smells Like Teen Spirit by Kurt Cobain guy and Easy E guy

Thought We Were All Thinking: Dude, the bassist is dressed like Popeye.

I Am Too Black and

I Am Too Black and Blue
A lot of people don't like Lucinda Williams. She has an odd, nasal and undisciplined voice. Sometimes her singng has a flatness too it that can be difficult (I'm pretty sure this is an artistic affect, it certainly is in the song 'Sylvia' ). She sounds too country for some people. There are many otherwise adventurous people who can't hear a southern accent or a fiddle without their entire brain snapping shut. (what are you afraid of, hepcat? Slippery slope to chewing tobacco and voting republican?)

Oh and, yeah. On every album she's got at least one song that is really, really boring.

But, occasionally she just sings songs that smash my cold bastard heart into a million pieces. And this is glorius. Ripping me open and damaging my internal organs with sentiment, that is glorius. I think "I Asked for Water (He Gave Me Gasoline)" does this to me. So does "Metal Firecracker," "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road," "Side of the Road" and "Drunken Angel."

Way to go. Way to kick my ass.