godthedog

what do you think are the standout tracks on this album? i think it works really great as a whole, but aside from "rosa parks" i have trouble pointing to enough knock-you-on-your-ass songs to qualify it as the best.

because it's offensive? the line about the chinese chick who "kept bootleggin' my shit" is far worse.

still gotta go with ween's 'the pod'.

90s favorite albums 1. sarah mclachlan - 'fumbling towards ecstasy' 2. ween - 'the pod' 3. jeff buckley - 'grace' 4. massive attack - 'mezzanine' 5. bjork - 'post' wu-tang and outkast almost made it, but i'm still too eurocentric to make that leap.

good times. i still visit the board and surf around most every day, but i find that i've just got very little to say now.

i haven't watched raw in a very long time, and haven't followed the boarding around it, so this may be a really stupid observation, but: john cena has evolved into COMPLETELY ripping off the rock. his entrance is like EXACTLY the same. he does the same little things to get the crowd into it (not just the 5-knuckle shuffle). strangely, it kinda works, even though he doesn't have the rock's sense of timing. i only caught the last 2 hours, but sweet jesus was this a boring ass show. soooooooooo muuuuuuuuuch wasted time, especially on intros and shit. the austin/mcmahons segment is one of the most painful things i've ever seen from beginning to end. there was no drama, no suspense, no surprise, nothing funny. at all. the flair/trips thing was fine. the beatdown went on a little too long, but it was a good idea. ladder match was rushed, but good enough. hardy & edge really aren't capable of conveying any depth to a match, but they tried their damnedest, and it was entertaining. the smackdown segment was a complete waste. you just DO NOT go through all the intros like that and cut the match off completely without giving us some kind of satisfying payoff (and the finale was not a payoff). legends/conway segment was fucking useless. did nothing, was terribly written, terribly executed. bischoff was on the show way too much. angle could've been included by the end in some way that DIDN'T involve a stupid "eric wants a no-DQ stip" story. bra & panties match was fine. did what it was supposed to do, and at least it wasn't boring. what really hurt the show, above and beyond any individual segment, was that they just didn't mete out the time properly. dragged in all the places that it shouldn't have, felt rushed in all the wrong places. just a piss poor, very unprofessional management of time that made the whole presentation feel very bush league and like they didn't know what they were doing. it astonishes me that this company can have such fantastic advertising and video departments, and still be so inept on basic presentation. if you're gonna put fucking posters all over new york next to posters of "the 4400" and "flightplan" and shit, you'd better make sure that your product looks as professional as those do. this did not.

bingo. the GOP is not looking for crossover appeal, and party loyalties are so fierce right now that he would scarcely sway any dems anyway. part of what makes him so popular in NY is his views on gays and abortion (so they can accept him as a republican without classifying him as "evil"), and the whole core of the republican party platform would need a major overhaul if he was their frontrunner. he makes a good paper tiger, but if he starts making major policy decisions, he becomes a liability to the party.

anybody else get the feeling that helwig is horribly insecure about his body, and has some kind of deep-seated fear of disfigurement as a threat to his manhood? he goes out of his way to call people out on their physical ailments just because they have physical ailments. "hey droz, you're a CRIPPLE!!!~! hey bobby heenan, you're DYING!!!!~!" there's the implication somewhere in there that each of them is less of a person for having that. it goes beyond bullying into something just weirdly self-directed. we need to stop spreading rumors on the net that warrior is just batshit, and start talking about how insecure and fragile his sense of self is. this is not only a better explanation, but it's more likely to prompt an obsessively long, inflated and insecure response on his website.

i'm reading the allmusic.com review of the new stones album, and this is what i'm seeing: "The tight, sleek, muscular band showcased there was a surprise - they played with a strength and a swagger that they hadn't had in years - but a bigger surprise is that 'A Bigger Bang' finds that reinvigorated band carrying its latter-day renaissance into the studio, turning in a sinewy, confident, satisfying album that's the band's best in years." "Far from sounding like a lazy affair, the album rocks really hard, tearing out of the gate with 'Rough Justice', the toughest, sleaziest, and flat-out best song Jagger and Richards have come up with in years." "And, make no mistake about it, the Stones sound better as a band than they have in years..." "...Mick is having a grand old time, making dirty jokes, baiting neo-cons, and sounding more committed to the Stones than he has in years." "...t's the Stones back in fighting form for the first time in years, and they have both the strength and the stamina to make the excellent latter-day effort everybody's been waiting for all these years." that stephen thomas earlewine, he sure knows how to pick those hyperboles with aplomb and freshness.

"wax ecstatic" is a great song. it's got that drive and texture that just screams mid-90s the way that "connection" by elastica does. i'm listening to the jackson 5's greatest hits, and "maybe tomorrow" has a SITAR on it. whoever made the decision to put that there needs to be shot. it's too bizarre-sounding to even be thought of as bad.

the theme from 'halloween' is probably the best ringtone out there. it translates to the R2D2 sound vocabulary of the cell phone very well. some people just have the original recorded versions of songs as rings, but those are stupid.

i know exactly 2 people in this city who keep cars here, and that's only for when they go on out-of-state trips to connecticut and shit. there ARE a lot of cars in manhattan, but keep in mind that at any given time during the day there's something like 3 or 4 million people in a pretty damn small area. also keep in mind how many cabs there are (one taxi for every 2 cars i think), and that ONE cab transports far more people in a day than 3 or 4 cars. people obviously do commute here from NJ, CT, etc., but they generally don't use cars to get around IN manhattan. they come to work, leave the car there, come back in the evening. if they have to run errands around manhattan, they don't drive. it's generally accepted knowledge that to get around manhattan in a car is difficult, cumbersome and insane. exceptions are far and few between, and you can only say there's a lot of car-drivers here because there's so many god damn people here.

1. blonde on blonde 2. blood on the tracks 3. another side of bob dylan 4. highway 61 revisited 5. time out of mind dylan's overall roughness seems to be the thing that turns people off the most initially (not JUST his voice, but that his albums tend to sound thrown-together without any regard for polish or anything), but that's what i love most about him. by nature the approach is going to be pretty hit-or-miss, but there's a cool mercurial energy to it that you can't capture if you do it another way. all through the 60s dylan was just a fountain of pure unregulated talent and sheer energy who didn't really seem to care about anything other than just creating something. didn't matter what: just keep writing, record it as quickly as you can, move on without thinking about it. 'another side of bob dylan' and 'blonde on blonde' both sound like they were recorded in like 3 days. something really rare to find in a studio record, especially with the rise of phil spector, the beatles, etc. dylan cared about that rawness; it's just as important an element of his songwriting as his recording (especially once he gets to his period of spewing out imagery indiscriminantly like "desolation row" and "stuck inside of mobile"), and i don't think it gets enough attention.

^first thing that came into my head when i read the thread title. marvin gaye and tom waits also have excellent songs with this title. if you want to flub a little bit, you could also count U2's "all i want is you."

i'd go with the train. going by car brings in a host of x-factors that i just wouldn't want to deal with (finding and paying for parking, traffic, perpetual one-way streets, hordes of pedestrians, almost no gas stations). plus it's nice to just walk around the city.

this could prove to be the least satisfying auteur/lead combination in the history of movies. scorsese's still a very skilled director, but he seems to have lost all perception of what makes a good script. it feels like he's been performing this function for the last 8 years or so of really great dressing for half-baked ideas. the last really really good movie he made was 'a personal journey through american movies'. there is nothing electrifying about the di caprio/scorsese combination. nothing. his assistant needs to get him a stellar WRITER, stat. fun fact: at the NYU tisch school of film and television, where scorsese attended (and later taught) film school, they like to have framed posters up in the halls for movies of the school's alumni--spike lee, brett ratner, et cetera. of all the movies scorsese has made, which poster did they choose to put up on the wall? 'gangs of new york'. not 'taxi driver'. not 'raging bull'. not even 'the last waltz'. 'gangs of new york'.

other than his 93 and 94 seasons with the suns, i'm totally ignorant on charles barkley's career and am always baffled at how he can consistently be ranked so highly. and nobody ever argues about it, so there must be multitudes of shit about him that i don't know. somebody make his case for me, preferably ripper.

in the last week or so: sonic youth - goodbye 20th century i know i'll need to be in exactly the right mood to listen to this one, and i haven't found myself in that place yet. common - be i could stand for a little more variation in the overall sound, and the last track sinks into hokiness (all the little kids' soundbytes had me half-expecting common to chime in with "nobody ever says i want to be a junkie when i grow up" at the end), but it's quite tight and good. very listenable and short. weezer - pinkerton yeah, i've waited this long to pick it up. listened to it once so far. seems kind of eh, but sounds like the sort of thing that takes a while to grow on you. david bowie - low afghan whigs - gentlemen tom waits - rain dogs listened to all 3 for the first time today, all very good.

Apparently that's a record review. That tells me nothing of why it got a 6.8. So Cornell has creepy lyrics. BIG DEAL. that's a great BEGINNING to a review. best mix of snideness and real discussion i've read by pitchfork was 'the fragile'. this stuff reminds me of an 'ET' review that roger ebert did in the form of a letter to his grandson. he was a little better at it, but it was still a stupid idea.

why's it doubtful? they just lack the mental toughness that comes with experience. same thing happened with the spurs when they kept getting eliminated by the lakers in the playoffs. nash can't run rampant like a chicken with its head cut off forever, and it's doubtful that he'll have another year of being THIS good, but i don't see him significantly slowing down anytime soon. and in the meantime, the rest of them will get better (esp. amare).

i think reggie miller wishes he was steve nash right now as well. i thought the suns were going to get dismantled, and they've really impressed me by at least being able to keep up so well with the spurs. they're far more evenly matched than i thought they were, and in any one game they still have a fighting chance. but san antonio has proven that they have that extra little bit of edge that makes them, frankly, a better team. in the fourth quarter of game 1, there was a pretty clear point at which the suns collectively already thought they'd lost, and they started getting sloppy & falling asleep at the wheel, making some stupid mistakes that san antonio was able to handily capitalize on. horry's 3-pointer in game 2 turned the tide, phoenix got discouraged and san antonio didn't let them get back into their rhythm. i see phoenix stealing away one game, possibly two, before the series ends.

i listened to 'straight outta compton' today, for maybe the 3rd or 4th time ever. eazy makes me want to stab myself in both ears with a swiss army knife corkscrew. that fucker has a voice more annoyingly nasal than liam gallagher, his flow is fucking TERRIBLE and has all the fluidity of a jagged sheet of sandpaper, stretching his syllables out in all the wrong places and having no sense of meter at all, and his rhymes betray the language skills of a retarded 11-year-old: "shinin' a light in my face, and for what? maybe it's because i kick so much BUTT" what the fucking FUCK? you're in a group called NIGGAS WITH ATTITUDES singing a song called "FUCK THA POLICE." YOU DON'T USE THE WORD "BUTT" IN A SENTENCE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES WHATSOEVER. are you afraid of offending somebody, did you not think of anything else to rhyme that? what the hell is wrong with you? "do i look like a motherfuckin' role model? to a kid lookin' up to me-- life ain't nothin' but bitches and money" THAT'S how you do a line in a song. if only ice cube did all the rapping in NWA. i saw a 2-pack of his first 2 records at tower the other day, i may have to pick them up. i think i'm going delirious from all the writing of final papers i have do this week.

probably the most famous american example. if i remember correctly, it's about seven hours long total, and a complete steal at $15. easily the most famous german example. it's boring as shit, but absolutely key in understanding the aesthetic principles of fascism: subsuming individual identity into parts of a mass ornament (LOTS of gorgeously geometric shots of crowds) and such. it is not a steal at $26--should be available at a really good local video store, if you have one around. i've heard a lot of things about this one as well, but i've never seen it, and it's almost impossible to find.

not his best work. it isn't really melodic or really wild, i'm kind of indifferent to it.

i just wanted to point that out.