Edwin MacPhisto

"Yeah" won't be at the top of the charts much longer. Usher's probably going to knock himself off - he already has the #5 song in the country now too, "Burn." My guess is that'll take us into the summer pretty nicely. With this huge tour and the fact that the new album is poppier (and better) than anything he's done since the mid-90's, I think Prince actually stands a chance of getting some heavy airplay too, which'll be weird. For the number one summer jam, though, I'm putting my money on some new material from Hall & Oates. Fuck 'em up, Darryl.

I don't really think there's anything too guilty about "Toxic." It's a fun pop song with a really great hook. "Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman" would be more along the lines of a Britney Spears guilty pleasure, except that it sucks.

Hey, my editing will lead me to a very...good...job...at McDonald's...editing burgers. Groan.

Revoke your damning faint praise. I've been outclassed by EPMD.

As if anything else in here is relevant. I think it summed up the thread quite well.

Not really. "Pro-choice" has been around since the early 80's. Pro-choice and pro-life picked up more popularity as time went on, developing out of the journalistic standards of "pro-abortion rights" and "anti-abortion." Everybody eventually got a "pro" that didn't include the nasty word "abortion" in the label. Gore definitely got a lot of mileage out of it, though.

Fun House is dirty, scabby gold. I especially love the porno-madness saxophones that pop all over the second half of the album and send it spiraling into "L.A. Blues." Blessed cacophony. And while I sorta dumped on the first album in the For Knowledgeable People thread, it's still really good. But I'm not sure if it's Fun House good.

Finish the match and then edit edit edit! Slice paragraphs! Dice paragraphs! Fuck a transition! Editing is the tool of the mightiest! Sure, I'm just an old vet who barely has time to keep up anymore, but a few people have been talking to me lately about their matches going over or having a hard time staying focused. The solution is to just be ruthfuckingless with your own stuff, and be willing to slash and burn anything that's slightly superfluous. Cute commentary, filler brawling, even a false finish or two - everything must go! We're rolling back prices. So, if you're in a jam, "save-as" and go bonkers. ::edits Thoth::

I like the few tracks I've heard off of Talkie Walkie better. More atmospheric, less cheeseball synth ("Kelly Watch The Stars" was cute, but the chorus always made me want to punch someone in the cock). MC5 - you'll be wanting Kick Out The Jams, their first album (a live one), for starters. It's pretty neat. They're one of the earliest punk bands (i.e. New York Dolls/Stooges era), and you might like their raw nuttiness. Personally, I'd go for the Stooges first, because I think they did what the MC5 did better in most fashions. I'd start with Fun House if you go Stooges, just because the self-titled first album is good, but not great. Fun House and Raw Power are about as energetic, menacing, and drunkenly compelling as proto-punk stuff gets. And, ah, Sleater-Kinney. Well, you really can't go wrong with them. If you avoid their first album (self-titled and just okay), you're good as gold. Call the Doctor and Dig Me Out are earlier, rougher, and have some of their most gorgeous songs on there ("Good Things," "One More Hour," and "Buy Her Candy" foremost among them). Those two albums are about as good as they can be and I'd recommend either to you without reservations. Next up are The Hot Rock and All Hands On The Bad One. I like them both, and the latter is probably the most flat-out fun album they've recorded. Totally kick-ass, but I think the earlier albums might be a better place to start. And then you've got One Beat, which is fucking stellar, but sort of fades out over its second half. It gets a little monotonous - listen to any of the songs individually and you're great, but you might get a bit tired of the dour crunch as the album progresses. The first four tracks on this album are jaw-dropping, and it's worth getting just for the joy of hearing them the first time. Sleater-Kinney are so good that you can approach their catalog pretty much anyway you want, despite my biases towards the earlier albums. It might be fun to go chronologically, but you can also just buy whatever you see cheapest at the time. Oh, and download their cover of "More Than A Feeling" if you can. It's gut-wrenching.

Dali is incredibly accessible. He's weird and skilled; his stuff is fascinating to look at, often has the appeal of a brain-teaser, and looks pretty on a wall. You can get away with Dali being counterculture or just something cool to have on your wall, depending on the piece you're considering. He's bizarre, but not too bizarre to be offensive to most sensibilities. Out of the surrealist artists, he probably made the most conventionally pretty art - he's cool to look at without being too aesthetically confrontational. That's the hook. I think he's all right. Decent for all the reasons mentioned above.

On Full House: I saw Bob Saget do stand-up comedy last week. It was awful, and not in any of the good-awful ways I was expecting. He basically made a few jokes about being on Full House, talked about Dave Coulier shaving his balls, trash-talked audience members, and slung profanity in every direction. Which is charming, in a way, but he never really seemed to be fully into it. Also, the stunning finale of the act was him pulling out a guitar and playing a song about farts.

My bichon neither sheds nor craps in the house. I so win.

I hope Maskarade wins, because the inevitable "That's what he Said!" joke is going to get old so, so fast. Plus, he's got a k in the name, which is hardkore. I also like the blend of veterans and new dudes. Hoo diddly.

Pfft, silly general argument. I'd say that doesn't matter either. Cobain's but glorified, but almost every artist that dies sees a big sales spike in the short run. If it keeps up, something bigger is happening than morbid fascination or name recognition.

I don't think that's true. Selling 15 million albums over a long period of time is, to me, more impressive than selling 15 million in a couple of years. It indicates that the music has lasting appeal and is for some reason (whether you want to call it the Cobain legend or just the fact that it's damn fine music) still being picked up by new listeners. Sell 15 million albums in a couple of years, and you might be a fad that won't sell a million more once your heyday is passed. Keep selling in smaller numbers, and you start to prove that you were more than just a child of one particular trend.

You do what you can with MTV Music Generator, you know? I decided that I probably shouldn't have listed a Wu-Tang track for the same reason converge couldn't pick Jay-Z. I could take almost any track off of Enter the Wu-Tang. Maybe "Protect Ya Neck" right now.

If you're talking Americans, I don't really think it was the barbarism of the US troops that motivated most of the people who wanted to pull out of Vietnam. It had something more to do with the 58,000 dead Americans.

I'm not too concerned by this, because out of all the dropped groups I've heard on this list, I can't honestly say that I think one of them made particularly good music. For the most part, I vote "good call, music business." Of course, the major labels still form a cannibalistic enterprise that chews up most young talent and spits them out when they don't cross over. Which is unfortunate, but far less unfortunate when it's Dope and Eve 6 getting shitcanned.

Shit, I'll have a go at it. Okay, so you've got a weird meter here. Uh...I guess I'd call it septameter, since you've got 14 beats in every line but the last, ending in 13. So, good on that, I'll say, even though it's a weird-ass form. The most characteristic formal problem of the whole piece comes in the first two lines. You have a string of alliteration and lots of long, languid assonance and consonance (you probably know those, but that's 'like internal vowel sounds' and 'like internal consonant sounds,' respectively). So the rhythm is really aborted. I'm flowing through the first line, and then I get into a weird, rapid-fire string of almost exclusively monosyllabic words in the second line. There's no consistent mood. The mood you do get is one of deep cliche. Something you may want to read (NO ENGLISH DEPARTMENT AHHH) is Philip Sydney's Astrophil and Stella cycle. The self-reflection and self-doubt is something he basically owned, even if it did get tired as shit after 144 sonnets. You might get some ideas about how to better preserve a mood or lyric flow within stanzas. And you know, I'd actually suggest you try the sonnet form, or some typical poetic form. It's easier to get better in one of those templates than in the somewhat odd 5-line stanza system you've devised. I dunno. It feels soulless. It's wrapped in a very odd idiom, as if you're attempting a cursory play on a Victorian or early Augustan style (i.e. Alexander Pope, maybe?), but the images are all uber-cliche. Tears that wash away self-doubt? I think that's why you're getting a lot of the eye-rolling - the images are something that a lot of people have seen a million times before. At a certain point they stop being archetypal and start being trite. More on the cleansing tear. A weird sentence on first read - "My therapy" as your subject, considering the discussion of needing tears, seems to suggest actual therapy - i.e. on the couch, with a shrink - as your real subject. Read it over and see what I mean. Since I don't think that's what you're trying to say, invert: "The cleansing tear is my therapy, the water of life." Your subject is going to be your literal element; your object is going to be the figurative one. And the rhythm of your words is off again - your clauses are very awkward when placed next to each other. Sometimes you're doing one in a line: And sometimes two to a line: I think it comes off as sloppy rather than varied. Overall, I think the biggest problem with the actual content is that it reads like one of those posters with a kitten holding onto a branch and a Proverb printed in brush script. Your imagery is really conventional, and your form is awkward in many ways. Generally, if you've got one locked, you can get away with the deficiencies of the other aspect. When both are stumbling, the poem is doomed. So, I basically said what IDRM said, except with about 30 times the length. Whoops. I think the point stands - brief dismissal or semi-detailed analysis, the poem still needs a lot of work.

i guess i've already become the official carrier of joyce's jock here, so i'll have a crack... ::adds suitable jock support:: I'm just finishing up my first reading of it, and as godthedog knows I really sorta love it a lot too. The giving up on the third page thing is odd to me. The book is divided into 17 episodes, and the first two ('Telemachus' and 'Nestor') are two of the most standard. The prose is a bit embryonic, but the technique is mostly straight narrative. The real killers are 'Proteus' and 'Oxen of the Sun.' The book is always a challenge in the best ways, and I like it for that. Fun Ulysses revelation of the day for nerds: the opening page of Eumeus echoes the first page of Telemachus perfectly. On the second page of the book, Joyce refers to a character shaving. In Eumeus, 600 pages later, in a narrative form designed to echo Telemachus, Stephen Dedalus is covered with wood shavings. Joyce even uses the verb "bucking" in the Eumeus opening to give us the glib reference back to Buck Mulligan. And a million other subtle things that pretty perfectly exemplify the evolution of hero Bloom throughout the day and his developing relationship with Stephen. Clever, very. It's the most playful book of language I've ever read. I loves it.

I don't really have an interest in watching all of Fatal Attraction over the next day or two, but I need to get a clip from it for a history project about AIDS. It's pretty common knowledge that a lot of people saw the affair in Fatal Attraction as a sort of allegory for the spread of AIDS in America at the time. So, take a stab in the dark - are there any particular scenes in the film representative of/readable as this that I could easily spot without sitting through the whole thing? No one else in my group knows how to import clips into digital files, so I kinda got stuck with the burden. Alas. Help a brother out.

The new Modest Mouse album, Good News For People Who Love Bad News. I'm a big fan of the band, liked the pre-release single ("Float On"), and it was only $7.99 at Best Buy. More thoughts after a few listens, but right now it's settling into a warmer version of the dreamy Moon and Antarctica, but with much fuller instrumentation and some of the more interesting rhythms and distortions of their earlier stuff.

Yeah, I did. I really fucking loved that match so, so much. I haven't kept too close tabs on the fed over the last year, but in the two and a half years I did, that one makes it into the Top 5 Finishes. Wish I had time to read more stuff these days. Alas.

Wrong Astro, Tyler. This guy's just Astro. The former SWF guy is Astro101. Being 'astro' must be the new in thing.

Pretty sure it's % of voters eligible to vote in the Democratic primaries. I'm not sure how that accounts for any open primaries where anyone registered to vote under any party can come make their choice. It'd have to be a really silly study to make it a percentage of the total registered population. Some hard numbers would be nice, too.