godthedog

so if saunders is fired, nobody will want to coach the pistons, and with good reason. but if one of the starting 5 gets traded (especially wallace), morale will more likely than not go down the shitter. the "greater than the sum of their parts" mentality that MAKES them the pistons will be gone; guys who felt safe and at home in the system might now feel like if they'll have to win a championship next year just to not get traded away.

they should if they want to win 3 more games where the circumstances won't be the same.

detroit should obviously be worried, but so should miami. detroit played horribly and they still only lost by 5 points.

dude, phoenix is one big 5-headed scoring threat. if dallas doesn't play hard defense to throw phoenix out of rhythm, they're not going to outscore them. it just isn't going to happen. they move the ball too well & they don't hesitate to make any quick open shot they can, especially from the 3 point line. nash, diaw, marion, barbosa, bell, thomas...dallas doesn't have the firepower to counter all that point-for-point. it won't matter if dallas's strategy is to have an offensive field day and get 120 points, cause in that kind of game phoenix can get 127 points. i think dallas will win because they're better at doing things they're not good at than phoenix is, but it'll be interesting to see how they take themselves out of their own comfort zone and play ugly basketball just to keep phoenix off. great test to see if dallas really IS a championship-caliber team.

phoenix will have the edge on energy for the first couple games. they got 3 days of rest before a game 7 they barely broke a sweat on. dallas had the tougher, more physical series; while they can certainly keep up with phoenix, they may not be able to make the necessary defensive stops to slow them down, and if it turns into a shooting contest, phoenix will win. i don't think they'll have a defensive answer to stop nash from running the floor, and they'll just have to let him wear himself out. phoenix will steal one of the first 2 games. after that though, fatigue will catch up and it's anybody's guess. i don't think phoenix will have the firepower or the energy to finish dallas off, but they've shown to be pretty damn tough and might just push it to 6 or 7 games on willpower.

my new job doing data entry for 8 hours a day lets me listen to music while i work. while nice, this has meant i've had to expand my music collection a lot in the last couple of weeks to keep from getting bored. van morrison - 'astral weeks' van morrison - 'tupelo honey' cowboy junkies - 'early 21st century blues' neil young - 'rust never sleeps' neil young - 'everybody knows this is nowhere' otis redding - greatest hits echo and the bunnymen - 'ocean rain' mazzy star - 'she hangs brightly' i also took my girlfriend's kelly clarkson cd and listened to it twice today. i'm never doing that again, songs whose titles i can't even remember were stuck in my head for the rest of the night.

i remember seeing kobe bust out some really nice suits for press conferences in the 2003 playoffs. he needs to bring those back.

you hate them, we get it already. this game, by the way, is why the clippers won't win the series. little playoff mistakes like getting in the penalty early and fouling the shit out of them when you're in control late in the game.

strange how if BOTH teams play shitty enough it still makes for a suspenseful game.

bingo. this is where d'antoni and the suns' style of basketball starts to hurt them. i don't think anyone could possibly execute the 'soft defense run-and-gun' style better than the suns, but the weaknesses of that style are pretty glaring and easy to exploit if you have a smart coach and a versatile squad. d'antoni has picked and disciplined this team specifically for this style, so what kind of adjustments could they make? moreover, would d'anotini be WILLING to make any adjustments? he seems pretty set in his ways and insisting that his team just needs to play harder.

i believe by "he," you mean phil jackson, since he drew up the plan for the game and started screaming "TAKE IT INSIDE!!!" when they started moving the ball around the perimeter sometime in the 4th quarter.

i found a used copy of my bloody valentine's 'isn't anything', and i've been listening to it on & off for a few weeks. i think i like it more than 'loveless'. it sounds more dangerous & more varied. though i was never really nuts about 'loveless' in the first place.

how is this? i've loved everything i've heard by them, but i haven't had the gumption to pick up anything outside of 'open' and 'the trinity session'.

i think it works best with the last 3 tracks, but i think i just love "obviously 5 believers" way more than i have any right to. i seem to have a thing for those penultimate throwaway tracks ("tourette's," "silver," "black angel's death song").

i know that the point of the song is to be sarcastic, but it doesn't work. you need at least a little bit of irony, some sort of difference between a literal meaning and an implied meaning. almost everything in the lyrics is completely literal, and the "ironic" lines are so easy and cliche that they might as well be literal ("it's no fun till someone dies"). if you want to tell me that i am addicted to violence on tv and you want to be ironic about it, bring it out between the lines somehow. don't just tell me "stare like a junkie into the TV, stare like a zombie," cause then you sound like my mother.

liam gallagher. ha ha ha. i kid, i kid.

i like every tool album i've heard, but i heard "vicarious" on the radio today and holy shit is it awful. the arrangements & feel of the song sound EXACTLY like "schism." i dare somebody to defend the lyrics, trying to make watching death on tv sound all cool and shit ("i like to watch things DIEEEEEEEEE") while acting heady & above it at the same time, like some horror movie that tries to teach you to be kind to women. the title is horrible too, cause you can instantly tell why they picked it. it's a word that seems sort of sharp and dangerous cause it sounds like "vociferous," but it's this high concept word that deals with identity and feelings and shit. the song honestly sounds like a group of really talented musicians decided to get together and do a song that makes fun of tool.

no possible way that kobe can control the tempo of a suns game. kobe is absolutely ripe for getting sucked into the suns' kind of game, and you can't do it with only one scoring threat. other teams don't take over suns' games by scoring over their defense. they don't care, they just score more than you. if they shut down the suns' 3-point threats they MIGHT have a chance, but how would they do that?

i was about to say "'time out of mind' was good, dammit," but then i realized it came out nine years ago, which would still mean that dylan hasn't done anything good in nine years. all said & done, young is probably rock's coolest elder statesman at the moment. definitely the only one with the fire to pull off a concert film without embarrassing himself. misguided probably, but not desperate. young doesn't exactly have a track record of wanting a lot of attention or sales.

^bingo. just because young made it work before doesn't mean it isn't still hard as fuck to pull off a GOOD political song; and 'prairie wind' certainly didn't indicate that he's still capable of pulling off something he pulled off a few decades ago. in order to not make a political song sound preachy and self-indulgent, you have to be REALLY on point with the lyrics, so it sounds like you're making a solid point and not just emoting. none of the lyrics in 'prairie wind' are very on point or literate, especially the lyrics where he was trying to be political. so i'm not holding my breath, especially if he did the whole thing in 3 days in a fit of rage.

saw about 10 minutes of it the other night. it looked pretty terrible.

eh...i think 'heart of gold' was subpar material getting the godlike film treatment. there was nothing wrong with the filming, the Nashville atmosphere was captured perfectly (bringing back some memories), and Young still has an unbelievable amount of energy...but the songs were just kinda boring. if you're gonna do a new-album-as-concert-film, THAT is not the album to make a concert film on. this just sounds like a bad idea. directly political hip-hop music=pointed and good. directly political rock music=self-indulgent and preachy.

Tony Montana should never ever ever be compared to Hamlet. i used to feel bile rise up in my throat at the mention of 'apocalypse now' until i caught about half of it on bravo a year or two ago. narratively it's still overblown and terrible, but it looks really good. i can at least sit back and look at the pretty pictures. i loathe 'breaking the waves'. i think critical opinion has turned around on this movie a little, now that everybody knows the trick to lars von trier's movies (i.e., make the woman as pathetic as possible then torture her), but holy shit did this movie get a lot of love back in the day. i saw it on all sorts of 'best films of the 90s' lists, and it's a manipulative, sadistic piece of shit parading as "sincere" and "cathartic." i will never understand how von trier gets such talented women to subject themselves to such horrible things. they sure as fuck can't be attracted to the script, cause he writes terrible female characters. the only redeeming thing about this movie is emily watson.

what a coincidence, i just bought 'hunky dory' today. the only other bowie album i've ever owned is 'low', which is fantastic. took some getting used to, but the first side especially is surpisingly infectious. first thoughts on listening to 'hunky dory': maybe my standards from 'low' were set too high, but the tracks seemed a little samey and saccharine. i've never liked "changes." i also don't like the high nasal register he uses on this album.

their solos get about as much attention as they should. they're tight, melodic, and simple, and they're pretty obviously there to serve the song as a whole. they were never a great band of technical musicians, and they never set out to blow anybody away with flourishes. they pretty much treated every solo with the exact same approach, but if you're as good with being tight and catchy as the beatles were, why even try to wow them with something else? they found a great formula and they stuck with it.