Oh Shit

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor Will Retire From U.S. High Court

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said she will retire, letting President George W. Bush nominate a replacement and setting up a high-stakes political clash over the future of the Supreme Court.

O'Connor, appointed in 1981 as the first woman on the court, is the swing vote on some of the country's most divisive social issues. Her replacement may determine the court's direction on abortion, affirmative action and school prayer. Not since another swing vote, Justice Lewis Powell, retired in 1987 has a vacancy offered so much potential for determining the outcome of cases.

President Bush is going to get to appoint one, probably two, S.C. Justices. That's just what we need is two ultra-conservative, racist, sexist Judges sitting on the High Court. Whoopee

the Thruway, the Get up Kids and the fucking Turnpike

The Fucking Thruway

There are very few things that I hate more than the thruway, one of them being the jersey turnpike, but I’ll get back to that later.

Sometime back in March, I read somewhere that the Get up Kids were calling it quits. Fair enough, ten years, six eps, years of touring, I guess their time had come. Shortly after hearing this, there was rumor of a farewell tour. So I bought tickets, on the morning they went on sale. I guess I overestimated their popularity; the show only sold out the day of.

Now I live in Kingston, and the show was in Philadelphia. Not too bad, a nice 200 mile drive, I’ve done it dozens of times and I know it takes about 3 hours. So I left Kingston at 2 in the afternoon, planning on arriving in NJ around 5 to spend some time with the family before the show. Little did I know that same dumb shit 15 miles ahead of me tried to make an illegal U-turn and caused a three car pile-up. With casualties. With a crime scene investigation. With the southbound lanes of the thruway closed. Yes. Closed. So on a hot as shit Thursday afternoon, I got to sit in my car for 3 hours and ponder life’s greater meaning. Fuck that.

When things finally cleared up around 5.30 I still had about 2 and a half hours of driving ahead of me. I contemplated not going, but instead hauled ass straight to the Electric Factory in time to miss half of one of the shitty opening acts. Once there I met up with Becky and some of her Hot Topic crew. I didn’t know any of them, but they were all cool.

Matt Pryor of the Get up Kids

All things considered, it was a great show. It was my ninth and final time seeing one of my favorite bands. The Electric Factory, as always was kick ass. One of the fringe benefits of getting older is the option to go to the upstairs bar and leave all of the kiddies down in the mess. Not that I did that for the whole show, but for the openers and the dead time in-between it was fun to sit up three drinking beer in plastic cups and look down on the mess that is general admission. They played for about 2 hours, with a five song encore, and while I knew all of the songs, I can’t for the life of me remember any sort of setlist – which is fine because it seems that no one else has ever heard of the Get up Kids. Suckers.

Good times.

Oh. I hate the turnpike. I fucking hate it. I hate it so much. I hate every mile of it, from exit 2 to exit 18w. Fuck the turnpike.

The Pumpkins smash again

In what could be either extremely good news, or just another marketing ploy, according to Pitchfork Media Billy Corgan has announced plans to reunite the Smashing Pumpkins.

Placing a full-page ad in today's Chicago Tribune, Corgan has announced that he wants to kiss and make up with the other three former members of alt-rock juggernaut the Smashing Pumpkins. He says, "For a year now I have walked around with a secret, a secret I chose to keep. But now I want you to be among the first to know that I have made plans to renew and revive the Smashing Pumpkins. I want my band back, and my songs, and my dreams."

Now whether this would be reunion type of thing, or a continuation of where the Pumpkins left off is yet to be known. Also left unclear is whether or not Corgan plans to play with the other founding member, or if he has even spoken to them.

Barbeque and Batman

Friday night, Bridget and I went out to Max’s Memphis BBQ in Red Hook. Now I love BBQ, and apparently so does Max. The food there is unbelievable. As far as BBQ restaurants go, on a scale of 1-10, 10 being Dinosaur BBQ , Max’s pulls in a respectable 9.5. The food is definitely as good as Dinosaur, but its missing something in the ambiance. Whereas Dino is a dark and moody hangout for bikers and college kids, Max’s caters more to families and weekenders venturing up from the city. Ambiance aside, it is a terrific BBQ joint. They even have their own beer on tap, Max’s Blue Suede Brew that goes very well with the textures and flavors of the food.
After one quick obligatory glance at the menu, I knew I was going to get the pulled pork and beef briquette combo. Needless to say, I wasn’t disappointed. With sides of sweet corn, garlic mashed and of course cornbread the meal was complete.

After stuffing ourselves with delicious bbq we went to the Lyceum theater to see Batman Begins. As I mentioned in a previous post we don’t get out to the movies much. And now I remember why. There’s nothing like being crammed into a room full of people you don’t know, and soon don’t like, to watch a movie. It seemed like everyone in front of us had huge hair and everyone behind us was kickboxing with the back of our seats. Once the movie started, everything was fine, but that 20 minutes or so leading up to the film was infuriating.

Batman — the grittiest and most intriguing of all classic comic book heroes — has found new and improved life in the latest film version, Batman Begins, with Christian Bale as the best Dark Knight yet.

Christopher Nolan's film follows in a 66-year line that includes the original DC Comics, a campy TV series, a more solemn animated series and the highly theatrical, downright operatic feature versions by Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher.

We're introduced to Bruce Wayne as a boy, the scion of a benevolent billionaire. We learn why the lad has a pathological fear of bats, how that fear inadvertently triggers the murder of the boy's much-loved parents, and how that fear and that guilt combine to form Wayne's unsettled psychological underpinnings.

The story jumps to Wayne as a young man, his passion to fight crime and his training in philosophy, martial arts and other skills from an acknowledged master, Henri Ducard. Such talents ultimately become tools of his nocturnal crime-fighting missions. Director and co-writer Nolan, who cut his teeth on moody independent thrillers Memento and Insomnia, steps up several levels in budget and production values for Batman Begins. His only flaw seems a penchant for in-close, handheld camera shots and overly tight editing, which sometimes blurs action scenes so they're hard to follow.

But Nolan displays a sure talent for lean storytelling, shadowy imagery and powerful psychological shadings. Such attributes create a winning formula for a new millennium Batman. As Bruce Wayne says in the film, "A guy who dresses up like a bat clearly has issues."

Bale is a potent Batman, from his bulked-up frame to his ability to suggest emotional complexity. The great Michael Caine is a perfect Alfred, the paternal butler, and Morgan Freeman adds his typical resonance as Lucius Fox, who provides Batman with most of his costume and tools. Only Katie Holmes fails to generate a strong impression in part because her role as Rachel Dawes, a crime-fighting district attorney and Wayne's first girlfriend, is under-written.

In a summer jammed with remakes, Batman Begins demonstrates that once in a while, a renewed take isn't a bad idea.

iTunes Artwork Importer

I have something like 35 gigs of music on my handy little external drive, and although it’s a huge pain in the ass I do try to keep it all organized within iTunes (in the off chance that I ever buy an iPod). With versions 4.0 and on, along with the standard track information, there is also an option to display album artwork. iTunes does have a drag-and-drop feature for adding the artwork, but even this can be time consuming.

I recently came across a piece of software appropriately called iTunes Artwork Importer that automates the process of finding and applying the album artwork for any selected song.

I can tell you, this software is fantastic. I used it this afternoon to finish applying the album artwork to the tracks I haven’t gotten to yet. It worked well with no glitches and only a few instances of albums it was unable to locate. Using Amazon.com image server as a reference, the album has to be available on Amazon.com in order for the artwork to be retrieved.

Check out this screen shot!



And if you want to download it, check out the site YVG Software Services :: iTunes Art Importer 0.9.2

Bridget, the movie theater and a dvd burner

Ah the movie theater, the bastion of Hollywood escapism. I haven’t been to the movies in a very long time. I can’t remember if that last movie I saw in a theater was Meet the Fockers or I Heart Huckabees, but either way, they’re both on DVD now, and I saw them both last year.

This is due to a lot of reasons. Time, money, etc. Much of it has to do with Bridget not liking any of the movies that I want to see, and vice versa. And if she doesn’t want to go, well I’m not going to be that guy who goes to the movies by himself. Even when we can agree on a movie to go see, it seems that we never quite make it to the theater. In the past, more often that not, we would miss it in the theater all together and just rent it when it comes out on DVD.

Now this break from theater going began quite some time ago when I was working for Cunard. I never went to the movies because I was a) out of the country and b) confined to the ship every night, but I still saw all of the latest releases in the comfort of my own cabin. Almost anywhere in the world we went, there would be merchants (I use the term loosely) selling bootlegged copies of movies I didn’t even know were out. I saw most of the 2004 blockbusters in this fashion. It’s not a perfect science, and every now and then you think to yourself “sit down you asshole, you’re blocking the screen” to some asshole on the dvd standing up in front of the screen. Other times there can be numbers along the top and bottom (a workprint) and just outright terrible quality altogether. But with no other options for seeing the movies, this was the way to go.

Fast forward a year to the summer of 2005. We both work. We both work strange long hours. It would seem impossible to get to the movies, besides, if we were to go its $19 just to get through the door. And we still can’t agree on a movie.

So what is a boy to do? I’ll tell you what I did. I bought a dvd burner. Now this may seem like an odd decision. If I were to rent a dvd only to copy it, why not just watch it when I rent it? But it’s not quite that simple. In the same way that I was able to buy bootlegged dvds overseas, its even easier to obtain them stateside. Most movies, as soon as they are released, appear online. You only need to know where to look. Now i know this isn’t exactly legal, but to anyone who started using Napster in 1998 and followed the course of file sharing through KaZaa to Limewire to BitTorrent and so on, it’s easy to forget that aspect of things. Apparently I am not alone in this. According to BigChampagne, a consulting firm that tracks file-sharing trends, an estimated 8.6 million people were trading copyrighted songs at any give time in May 2005. While statistics aren’t available for movie downloads, you get the point.

I’ve seen a few movies since buying the burner, some of them in the theater still, some on dvd, some in limbo between the two. Again this is not a perfect science and it can be time consuming. The average movie download is anywhere from 600mb to 4gb and it takes forever to download them. Once downloaded, you have to verify that they are intact and not missing; say the last 20 minutes or something. Then you need to convert the Dvix files to video objects (.vob) in order to finally burn them to a dvd and hope that even then they play in your dvd player. I’ve found that more than often, for the quality of the movies, it’s not worth it to go through all the trouble. But then again I paid good money for the burner so I’m going to use it, you know?

This morning, Bridget says to me, lets go to the movies tonight. And I’m thinking, who is this woman asking me to go to the movies. We decided that we would either go see Mr & Mrs Smith or Batman Begins. Now I’ve heard good and bad about both, so I decided to consult a well known movie critic for his opinion, Roger Ebert. I head over to rogerebert.com and while there was no review for Mr & Mrs Smith, there was a review for Batman Begins. And right there, at the bottom of the review I saw this:

And sure enough, I did a little looking around and found this:

So it would seem that if we don’t make it to the movies tonight, we could always wait for the dvd to come out, or I could just make my own.

A Shitstorm of New Music

There has been a shitstorm of new music lately. I’ve been trying to keep up with it all, but sometimes it’s hard when there’s so much to listen to. Of what I’ve actually listened to, a few cds stand out.

Beck : Guero

If anything, this is a return to the swagger of Midnite Vultures and Odelay, but it's not a copy. Almost ten years on from Odelay, Guero has more assurance than its swaggering predecessors. The opener and current single, "E-Pro", sets out Beck's store pretty effectively: swagger, funk, breaks, and the first signs of the Latin flavor which colors the whole album. 'Que Onda, Guero?' (Where you going, White Boy?) is a good question; the answer, it seems, is wherever he wants. Guero is quite a ride.

The White Stripes: Get Behind Me Satan

Get Behind Me Satan is a brave but weird fifth album recorded in just two weeks and containing just three electric tracks. Jack's familiar guzzling guitar stomp has for the most part been traded in for a more melodic acoustic sound that relies heavily on piano and percussion effects. This is quite a departure from the stripped down atmosphere of their previous outings.

Get Behind Me Satan may fail to reach Elephant's stomping great heights but then Jack and Meg White are the most unconventional duo in rock 'n' roll. The album explores their musical capabilities to the full and in so doing proves they have more than a few tricks up their sleeve.

Coldplay: X&Y

You've heard the single, read the reviews and listened to the interviews; everything suggests Colyplay’s new album is going to be great. But it's not until you hear the first few bars of the opening track that you know that the band are going to achieve everything they hoped and dreamed of.

This album is superb. It'll silence their critics, amaze their fans and win them a whole new legion of admirers. It might even bring about world peace! I'm sure that was one of Chris Martin's objectives for this album.

Gorillaz: Demon Days

Gorillaz return with a blisteringly good album that happily skips from genre to genre and looks set to be one of the most rewarding albums you'll hear this year.

When Gorillaz's debut album came out in 2002, buoyed by the huge success of the "Clint Eastwood" single, no one really knew what Albarn and co. were up to. We knew the band was supposedly made up of ten year old musical genius Noodle, Satan worshipping green toothed bassist Murdoc, cuddly brick shithouse drummer Russel and the blue-haired singer 2D "for the ladies", but it essentially sounded like an Albarn solo album produced by then-collaborator Dan The Automator. Singles aside, the debut album sounded somewhat unfinished, with most tracks being no more than vague sketches.

Demon Days is a different, more widescreen a altogether. Hooking up this time with Dangermouse, who produced the online bootleg Grey Album which spliced Jay-Z’s Black and The Beatles’ White albums together to create merry copyright hell, Albarn has accumulated a stellar supporting cast of star guests to broaden Gorillaz's musical horizon.

A concise and enjoyable 50 minutes, Demon Days is so much more than just a rock star's novelty side project or thinly veiled solo album. It's a triumph for all concerned and should rightfully end the year as being one of its finest and most celebrated releases.

Sleater Kinney: The Woods

The Woods is more aggressive than anything Sleater-Kinney has previously released, but the musical recipe that works so well for Janet Weiss, Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein—Hendrix-style guitar solos, experimental interplay and flat-out noise—remains intact. Album opener “The Fox” uses overdriven, pounding guitars and panoramic drums in what turns out to be a simple children’s parable. In “What’s Mine Is Yours,” two call-and-response chords move into a sped-up blues number—until suddenly the band cuts out and Brownstein begins a ’70s-rock-inspired guitar solo, replete with feedback and fuzz. While the sarcastic ballad “Modern Girl” might break the album’s cohesive rock vibe, the six-minute jam bridging “Let’s Call It Love” and “Night Light” more than makes up for it. The trio delights in creating songs just to tear them down and rebuild them again in a different way, giving the album a dissonant, experimental edge.

The Alkaline Trio: Crimson

It was a long time coming, and we weren't sure if the Alkaline trio would make it there, but Crimson, the group's fifth full-length, skillfully separates the band from the pop-punk confines that have marked the previous eight years of their existence. Ignoring the group's 2003 transitional album, Good Mourning for just a moment, Crimson's leap in style from 2001's From Here to Infirmary is fairly akin to the kind of progression that Greenday made between their 1998 album Nimrod and 2004's mega-selling opus, American Idiot. The old shell has been left intact, but has been infused by the release of fresh blood. Stronger, bolder, and sequenced immaculately, Crimson is a beautiful score of music.

And there you have it. I still have a ton of music to get through, but I’ve got the means, and its only a matter of time before I listen to it all. That is provided that nothing else new comes out that catches my ear….

Fucking Weather...

Music Review : Ben Folds - Songs for Silverman

Ben Folds has grown up, and his latest solo release Songs for Silverman reflects that. Gone are songs about t-shirt stealing girlfriends and angry dwarves; in their place are songs about growing old, getting married, raising children, losing a friend and questioning religion. Many of the songs are reminiscent of his former band’s breakthrough album in style if not in substance. This album, however, is not an attempt to return to the heyday of Whatever and Ever, Amen, but a progression of musical style inline with Rockin’ the Suburbs and the three EP releases in between the two. Building on the momentum of the three EPs, Songs for Silverman shows us a mature return to the indie-rock/pop-influenced piano bass & drums trio of the early days while furthering the growth in musicianship that comes with age. Despite all the maturity, Folds never loses track of his pop hooks, even when he's deploying tricky time signatures and Steely Dan-worthy chord progressions.

Songs for Silverman was a album a long time in the coming, and finally hearing the album has left me wondering if it was worth it. The three EPs released prior to Songs for Silverman gave promise of an outstanding cd. What I heard wasn’t quite what I expected, but was still above par. This is not a bad album; from anyone else, this would have been impressive. Every song has slow, beautiful melodies. But even slow, beautiful melodies seem rather boring when you put 11 of them back to back. Yes, some of Folds' biggest hits fall into this category, like Brick and The Luckiest. The best new examples of where this sound works are Landed, Trusted, and Late. But again, there's only so much of the same thing one can take. Landed is the single, and has Bitches Ain't Shit, an off the wall Dr Dre cover as a B-side that should've been included on this record, as it is the kick that it so desperately needs.

Ben Folds is still brilliant, and still unparalleled. But Songs for Silverman just isn't as interesting as his other works. I still love him, I look forward to his next release, and whenever he ventures near Kingston we will try to go see him. Despite this lackluster outing, this piano man is still master of his domain.