For my money, "Smooth Criminal" was the greatest thing MJ ever did.

Last weekend, a dude was moving out of our neighborhood and having a yard sale. Erin and I made off with a ton of cool things. Most important of these, I scored a Pioneer 260 watt stereo system with 150 watt speakers for *drum roll* 20 bucks. The stereo is pretty busted up and I haven't even bothered hooking up to see what works on it or how it sounds. That's not why I bought it, because I already have a fairly decent, if aging, Technics component stereo I pieced together as a younger man. What I was missing was speakers. I let my speakers get a way form me over the past few years and now I have no idea where they are.

These yard sale speakers are Pioneer 150 watt 3-way cabinets, about 4 feet high. The removable black cloth screens were disgusting and the entire cabinet smelled slightly of cat piss. I removed the screens and hosed them off outside and wiped down the cabinets with some water and vinegar to neutralize the odors. I put them in the Guyroom and hooked up everything. They sound great. I can finally play records again!

There are some things I have on vinyl and cassette that will likely never see a digital release. It's my intention, in the coming months, to transfer some of these recordings myself to a digital format for preservation. Some of these things are really fabulous and out-of-print stuff so I'll likely share them here.

There are two things I have on cassette that I intend to transfer that some of you might find amusing. I have some recordings from the brief time I was in a punk band. One of these cassettes was recorded on a boombox during practice and sounds even more awful than we did. There's some other tapes from a live show we did that someone recorded for us that doens't sound half bad though. The other thing I have is some old recordings I made back when I used to DJ college radio. Written on the sleeve it says "4/23/92 - 2 Year Anniversary". There's a second one marked "4/30/92". There are a total of 4, 90 minute tapes in all, or 6 hours. I listened to a bit of one last weekend and the fidelity is so great on it. I recorded them on the pro-grade Tascam decks right there in the studio as I was doing my show.

The rest of the stuff I have on cassette are recordings I made of various albums and 7" records I really liked back then. Some of this stuff I have since acquired in other formats, but there are a few really quirky, fun things that I'd never be able to find.

Welf's gone for the weekend on a trip with her mother. Tomorrow I head for Washington County to help my grandmother move. Tonight though, I'm just hanging-out in the Guyroom with Fubu listening to my Les McCann records.

I didn't know they were remaking The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. I saw it on the marquee of the local theatre when I was home last weekend. If you don't know, the original was done in 1974 and starred Walter Matthau. The new movie has Denzel Washington in that role along with John Travolta, James Gandolfini, John Turturro, and Luis Guzman. Tony Scott is the director, who in the early 90s did a couple of my favorite action/crime movies, namely The Last Boyscout and True Romance. So this is promising, however, Scott hasn't made a watchable movie since '98's Enemy Of The State. So it'll probably suck.

Be sure to see the original, you won't be disappointed.


The other day I updated my master movie list with a bunch of new additions. I took those new additions and added some thoughts about some of them and have listed them below. If you feel like discussing any of them, fire away.

( Read more... )

I went back and added the names of the bands to my list of top 50 last.fm artists from the weekend, if you're interested.

Here's my last.fm top 50 in pictures. I'm not sure why I did this. I like band photos. There's something mesmerizing about them. Feel free to make guesses in the comments. I'd advise that you make your guesses before looking at the comments. I suspect some won't be guessed. I probably wouldn't get half of them if someone had posted them in their journal. If you're curious, the file names of the photos in most cases will give it away. Even if you're not interested in trying to guess, it's still a fun collection of photos.

1. Ramones


2. Dripping, Sopping: A Saturation Celebration (aka lossfound)


3.Modest Mouse


( +47 more )

This week I have a guest onboard, livejournal.friend wendy_sue. She's from the Bay Area, but has recently been living in Santa Rosa while learning to become a casino dealer. How cool is that? For several years now she has flirted with the idea of becoming a truck driver, and now that she's in the midst of a career change, it's at the forefront of her consideration. She flew out here on Monday and she's riding with me this week to see what the life is like. Unfortunately, given the nature of my current type of truck driving work, we've travelled all of 250 miles, haven't left Ohio, and have been sitting all morning waiting on load info.

---

In the never-ending saga of how I am woefully ill-informed of current events: I didn't know Cramps frontman Lux Interior passed away. For that matter, I didn't realize he was two years older than my dad. Everyone has random memories they associate with music. For the Cramps, mine is a simple one from just a few years ago. I had gone to San Diego to visit an internet friend and fellow Beastie Boys afficionado, to see the Beastie Boys in concert. The next day, we got up and went for coffee, then she took me on a car-tour of her town. It was a typical brilliant and beautiful SoCal day and we rode around with the windows down listening to Songs The Lord Taught Us on the CD player. R.I.P. Lux. Thanks for the rock.

Word is Bond

I've decided that, once I've finished watching all of Hitchcock's movies, I'm going to tackle the James Bond franchise and watch them chronologically, in order of release. As a kid, I saw many of them because my dad was such a fan, but I'm sure there's many I've missed along the way, and I haven't seen ANY of the new Bond movies with Pierce Brosnan or that other dude. The last Bond film I saw was The Living Daylights with Timothy Dalton.

In preparation for this task I was surfing through various Bond-related websites and have come to the conclusion that, despite having arguably the best character name in any Bond film, if not all of cinema, that Honor Blackman was down-right mannish looking and not terribly attractive as Pussy Galore. By contrast, now in her early 80s, she has an elegance and beauty few women her age can muster.

---

Fun Windows App #1: Circle Dock

Ever since Mac introduced the Dock interface, numerous incarnations have made their way to the Windows platform. Vista even comes packaged with its own inferior knock-off, Windows Sidebar. I think docks are pretty but I've never found them terribly useful. The real problem with docks is that they either a) take up screen real estate if they are set to be on top of everything else or b) they're not useful because they're under your open windows. The classic tag-team of the Windows Start button and the Quick Launch bar always avoided these two things and Docks simply didn't improve upon this setup, for me. That is, until I recently discovered CircleDock.



The major advancement CircleDock has, is a combination of its functionality and its shape. Since it's circular, it offers an equidistant travel, from dead center, to the icon of your choice. Why is this important? Because you can set it to remain hidden and brought into view, over everything you have open, centered under your mouse with a pre-defined keystroke or, as I prefer it, with a click of the third mouse button. When you click the icon/shortcut/folder you want, it is executed and CircleDock goes back into hiding. It's like being able to bring the quick launch bar to your mouse, anywhere on the screen with a single click. Since this elimintates the need for the quick launch bar, it frees-up real estate on your task bar for those zillion windows you have open. Of course, I'm hoping that a future release will allow Window minimizations to go to CircleDock like it does in RocketDock. Imagine being able to bring the entire task bar to your mouse!

There are lots of other cool features, some cosmetic, others practical. Probably the most powerful feature is the Dock Folder. Basically, it allows you to nest other CircleDocks inside the main one, sort of like subfolders on the Start menu. For instance, I could create a dock folder and name it "Music". When I click it, it takes me to a new CircleDock which I can populate with shortcuts to all of my music applications Winamp, TagandRename, Audacity, EAC, Reaper, etc. Also, while I have that Dock Folder chosen, it becomes the default CircleDock when I click the third mouse button, until I back out to the main dock (or navigate to another Dock Folder).

Best of all, it's open source and totally free.

---

Fun Windows App #1a: Screensaver as Desktop

Some of you may have noticed that my Windows desktop looked suspiciously like a screensaver. That's because it is. It's a trick that can be achieved by manually changing some settings in Vista, but why do that when someone wrote a small app that'll do it for you and that you can configure to run at startup? Theoretically, you can render any screensaver onto your desktop as the background in Vista. In practice, it works better with some more than others. The only downside, and it's a fairly big one, is that you lose all functionality of your desktop: the animated background covers your "true" desktop, and therefore the icons. But since I use CircleDock, pffft... fuck desktop icons. With the Aero glass on the window frames and the transparent sidebar, the animated desktop looks cool as hell and the performance hit to system resources is negligible. I mean if you're running Aero and Sidebar, you're not suffering in the resources department anyway are you?

Some of you expressed interest in seeing the Zia McCabe Suicide Girls photo shoot if I managed to get hold of them. I managed. She's nekkid and preggers. Don't be opening this shit at work if it's going to get you in trouble.

---

Microsoft has finally allowed POP access to thier Hotmail users, that is, those who didn't abandon them for Gmail 5 years ago. If, like me, you're still clinging to an old Hotmail address because you could've signed up for some porn website 12 years ago that you might need to retrieve your password to, you could be interested to know the details of how to set it up.

incoming: pop3.live.com (port 995, Security: SSL)
outgoing: smtp.live.com (require authentication, use TLS/SSL)

---

Have you by chance seen the ThruYou project done by Kutiman? He took YouTube videos of amateur musicians and mixed/mashed them into new, original songs. For presentation, who also chopped-up and cut the video to approximate what he did sonically. It's a mesmerizing music/video album from start to finish. It's probably the single coolest and most ambitious thing I've seen done on the internet in a long, long time. Here's the first in the series of 7 songs he did.



You can find all of the videos individually on YouTube, just run a search for Kutiman. In the description of each, he provides links to the source material for each song. You can also check out all the songs on the ThruYou website linked above.

When I didn't get reloaded yesterday, I had a lot of time on my hands. I probably should've been more productive and accomplish some things, but instead favored the path of least resistance and goofed-off online all day. Here's the details of my surfing, submitted for your amusement, interest, and knowledge.

---

A New 8tracks - May The Four Be With You
I thought I'd kick this entry off with my newest set of 8tracks, which you can check out here. Feel free to open it up in a new tab or window and listen to it while you peruse the rest of the entry.

---

Rock Star Eye Candy
Based on repeated recommendations from lossfound, I finally got around to seeing the documentary DiG! a couple of days ago. I'll save you looking it up: it's about the friendship/rivalry between two mediocre late 90s bands, The Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Despite the subject matter, I have to agree with my compadre that it is a fascinating doco for rock music lovers, even if you don't care much for either band. I've had plenty of exposure to the Dandys but not so much BJM, so I spent a little time reading about them and locating some of their music. The film also reminded me how much I used to think Dandys keyboardist Zia McCabe was a complete and total babe. There's a snippet of performance footage in the film where she's on stage topless, which surprised me a little. I surfed around looking at photos of her and discovered that she did a SuicideGirls photo shoot a few years ago when she was pregnant. Unfortunately, I don't have an SG account nor am I willing to shell out the bucks for one. But if someone out there IS, please lend me access to your account for a few minutes.

As if watching footage of Zia McCabe wasn't enough, the film introduced me to the delicious and charming Joel Gion. Joel refers to himself as "a tombourine man" in the Brian Jonestown Massacre, which essentially is all he does. And maracas. He's sort of the band's Sid Vicious with lambchop sideburns: he doesn't contribute a great deal to the music but looks great on stage. In the band photo shown here, he's the guy in the foreground with the glasses pushed back on top of his head. Turns out that, in addition to continuing to tour with BJM, he's started his own band, The Dilettantes who released an album in 2007 called - are you ready? - 101 Tombourines. I have no idea what the album is like and I'm sure it will be probably be awful, but I've already taken steps to acquire it and will be giving it a listen in the near future. With a look like that and the ability to charm the pants off of anyone, he deserves a shot at being a bona fide front man.

---

Geeky Security Tip #1
If you do any torrenting, I highly recommend you surf over to Bluetack Internet Security Systems and check out their downloads area. There you will find a paintstakingly maintained "block list" of IP addresses. These addresses are a mixture of known government agencies, RIAA/MPAA, P2P anti-piracy activists, etc. Plug this list into the IP filtering component of your BitTorrent client and you wll be invisible to anyone who operates from these IP addresses. The list is updated regularly so be sure to refresh it every month or two. B.I.S.S. even has a Blocklist manager program you can install to automate the update for you.

---

Surveying For Amazon Bucks
I cashed in some survey rewards for $35 in Amazon gift certificates and went shopping. I managed to effectively halve my wish list buying used copies of various CDs I've been wanting. I took a couple of surveys as well. One survey in particular was about the exciting world of paper towels. They ask for responses to things like, "Brand X paper towel is the only paper towel my family can feel confident about" and then request you answer on a scale with how much you agree with this. I just can't imagine there are people that would agree with it at all, ever, for any brand of paper towel, much less have varying degrees of it. Are there really people out there who care as much about paper towels as this survey would have me to believe? What's worse are the open-response questions. Like, "What comes to mind when you think of Brawny?" and you're given a box to type in your response. I think I put "A lumberjack." That's the one with the lumberjack on the front right? "What comes to mind when you think of Mardi Gras?" New Orleans, ya twit. At any rate, I answer these inane questions and rack up their reward points. I scored 6 or 7 CDs that will hopefully be waiting for me when I return home again.

---

Geeky Security Tip #2
Tweak Guides has long been a great place for learning about the inner machinations of Windows and what you can do to achieve varying levels of performance and stability vs. your computing habits and needs. I stumbled upon a forum entry there from last year, which gives a detailed tweaking suggestion for AVG 8.0. In particular, it tells you how to completely disable/dismantle the annoying LinkScanner feature during installation, in addition to disabling email scanning and Resident Shield. Obviously, disabling these last two aren't for everyone - it provides a level of protection for people who don't want to think about these things. But for the computer savvy who are cautious and vigilant about email and the software they download ANYWAY, these features are bothersome and tax system resources unnecessarily.

---

Old News That Was News To Me
Did anyone else know that Mia Zapata's rapist/murderer was caught, tried and convicted four years ago? How did I miss that? I never cared for the Gits, but I was doing college radio back then when it all went down and it was a Big Deal. This CBS story about it does a great job of covering the high points of the saga.

---

Few Things In Life Get Any Cooler Than This
I consider myself fairly well-versed in 70s underground rock/punk. From the Ramones to the Electric Eels, from the Sex Pistosl to Crime: I've made it a point to consume anything I could get my hands on. Imagine my surprise to discover the band Death. No, not the Florida death-metal group from the 90s. This was a power trio of teenage kids from Detroit who recorded a handful of demos in 1974, releasing two of the songs as a 45 single. They had a sound that for all intents and purposes WAS punk rock, even though there wasn't a name for it yet. The first Ramones album wasn't released for another full two years. The best part about it? They were black kids who got turned-on to hard rock after going to an Alice Cooper show. Drag City Records got hold of the old demos and has given these tracks their first offical release. You kind find a couple of the songs floating around on YouTube if you're interested. A few days ago, The New York Times did a great article about the whole story.

You may recall that in my wreck last year, that my trusty Durabook was smashed to bits and that I bought a gargantuan, behemoth known as the ASUS A7S. What you may not know is that it was a thorn in my side for a very long time. I was having some serious performance issues when playing video and audio media. I couldn't watch/listen to anything because the sound kept skipping and was jittery.

At first I thought that maybe all of the naysayers about Vista were right: that it was more than an OS, it was a POS. I decided at that point to wipe it clean and install XP. This proved daunting since this machine was not supported with any XP drivers by ASUS. Finally though, I managed to get all of the hardware working properly. And yet, I still had the same issues with audio/video. Even worse, I was getting some really weird problems with the system clock losing time, on the order of HOURS over the course of a day while running.

What you may not know is that, this past fall I bought a couple of cheapo, light-weight Dell laptops: one to replace Welf's aging HP and one to serve as a more portable alternative for me. While I love the 17-inch screen that the ASUS provides me while on the road, it's rather cumbersome as a true laptop. Taking it into a truckstop to sit in the diner was an ordeal and lounging about the house with it wasn't exactly convenient or comfortable. But I also had in mnid that, once I had the Dell in my hands, I would wipe the ASUS, reinstall the Vista Premium OEM and get with ASUS about checking out the hardware, as it still had over a year left on its two year warranty.

All the job changing and holidays got in the way of me doing anything with that until a week or so ago. In the meantime, I had been rather impressed by Vista's performance on the little Dell I was using. It came shipped with Service Pack 1, though. So, when I reinstalled Vista on the ASUS last week, I decided to take another run at trying to sort-out its woes with SP1 in place. My experience with ASUS hardware has always been good, and I was having a hard-time believing this was a hardware issue.

To cut to the chase, after updating Vista with SP1 AND after updating both the video and audio drivers I was still having the issues with playing media. I finally decided to look in the "Sound" category under Control Panel and immediately noticed that it was showing my speakers TWICE. I right clicked the first of these and chose "Test". It played its little tones with the annoying skipping and jittery-ness. When I tested the second one though, it was clear as can be. I removed the offensive set of speakers and rebooted and it's been fine so far.

Along the way in my little odyssey to get this laptop running properly, I spent a lot of time reading about Vista, especially about tweaking Vista. Despite the wee Dell's favorable performance in my eyes, there was something about Vista that irked the shit out of me: my hard drive seemed like it was constantly thrashing, especially after a bootup. This was also true on the ASUS. I know how to fix that now, so keep reading.

The biggest complaint that a lot of people have had about Vista is it doesn't feel as snappy and responsive as XP. I felt the same way, too with my first Vista epxerience. I even disabled the Sidebar and Aero hoping for performance boosts and was left feeling disgusted by the whole thing. Sure those are just pretty things, but right now I'm typing this on my ASUS with Aero & Sidebar running with a 2% CPU and under 40% 1 GB RAM being used. Maybe you already know these tips and tricks, maybe you haven't had to make the move to Vista yet. I do know that this quick and dirty tweaking job will make Vista scream if you have adequate hardware in the chassis. I've actually begun to prefer Vista over XP.

1. First of all, go to Control Panel & turn off Windows Defender. It's a useless piece of shit that does far more harm to the performance of your machine than any beneifts you may get from it. This is the number one reason why your hard disk thrashes in Vista (or XP for that matter).

2. But let's take it a step further. Either from the super-cool search bar in the Vista start menu, or using the "Run" option if you've reverted to a more classic look, type in "msconfig" and hit return. Alternately, it's located at C:\Windows\msconfig.exe (or whatever drive your Windows folder is on). A window which says System Configuration should open.



Click on the tab that says "Startup". Look through it, find Windows Defender and uncheck it. While you're here, look through and see if there are any other annoying programs listed here that are loading when you startup that you've never figured out how to keep from doing that. Now you know where to find them.

3. Next click the tab "Services". We're going to disable the following services. I'll also give a brief reason of why it's safe to do so and what you gain from it.

Computer Browser: This is a backward compatible service for pre-XP machines on a network. Unless you are operating some ancient box with Win98 on it on your home network, there's absolutely no reason to have this running and it's just wasting resources. Turn it off.

Superfetch: This is the main cuplrit on causing your HD to thash after bootup. What Superfetch essentially does is learns all of the programs and files that you open most often and pre-loads them into RAM after bootup. Depending on the amount of memory you have or how much 15-20 minutes of disk thrashing bothers you, you may consider turning this off. Once Superfetch has finished loading the programs into memory, your disk will stop thrashing and it won't be an issue anymore, however, you do have all those programs just sitting in memory all the time. You will get a performance boost from the programs you open most, but you might also see a performance gain in memory intensive applications if you have some extra memory to play with. For me personally, the jury still out. After having Superfetch off for a couple of days I've turned it back on to see if I notice a difference.

Windows Defender: Yes it's a service, too. Kill that shit.

Windows Search: No, this won't disable your ability to search the internet or your computer. All this does is disable the Windows Indexing Service. The Indexing service combs through all of the files on your computer and indexes their file names. Additionally it indexes all or portions of their contents (text, metadata, etc) and caches all of this information into a single place in memory. This way, when you search for something, it can first look to see if it is in the index in the memory cache, rather than searching your entire hard drive(s) for it. Only if it doesn't locate it in the cache, does it begin an actual search of your disk. Sounds like a neat idea right? It is to an extent, but it means that the indexing service is constantly making additonal reads from your hard disks everytime an indexed file name, or content, is changed, which means more thrashing. I recommend minimally changing the settings of WHAT is indexed if you're going to keep it. You can find Indexing Options in the Control panel. You certainly should not be indexing things like, oh I don't know, your Temporary Internet files directory. But what I really recommend is consider how often you realistically use the search function to find a file on your computer, and how important in those instances it is to you to have to have it instantaneously found. One final note: if you use Saved Searches or Virtual Folders in Vista, they both depend on this service to operate. Personally, I don't like the idea of depending on a "folder" which is generated from a cache. When I look in a folder, I want to see what's physically residing there. But that's for you to decide.

If you're a little wary of completely disabling these services, you can go to the Services Managment program and switch them all to "Manual" rather than "Automatic".

5. If you opted to disable Windows Search, let's take it one more step further. Open up Windows Explorer or My Computer and right-click on a hard disk. Choose properties. On the main properties window, all the way at the bottom, you'll see a checkbox for "Index this drive for faster searching". We've already disabled the service so it shouldn't matter, but, just to be safe... make sure it's unchecked and have it apply to all subfolders/files/etc. on the resulting screen. Do this for all the disk in your PC.

Now reboot and enjoy a much more tolerable life with Vista. While there are many, amny other way sot tweak Windows Vista, doing just those few things will make a world of difference in the performance, and may even change your opinon of it. I know it did me.

Some of you may have heard of the Weird N.J. book that was a best-seller a couple of years ago. This was followed by Weird U.S. and some sequels. They began a series of websites and officially licensed books written by other folks in other states.

This morning, my pal aloneinky was telling me about Weird Kentucky which she purchased recently. I decided to check it out online and found a book website that contained information about it. It contains forewards by the original authors of Weird N.J., but the book itself was written by Jeffrey Scott Holland. This is interseting to me because I knew him. He was a DJ at WRFL back in the day and is a professional artist of some reknown today. Heck, there's even an "international association of owners of Jeffrey Scott Holland artwork" headquartered in Frankfort.

JSH used to do a rockabilly show at RFL. Through his show and record reviews, he had a profound impact on a my exposure to that entire sub-genre of rock and roll. The Reverend Horton Heat, Flat Duo Jets, The Cramps, and probably most significantly, my love for Billy Childish, are all inextricably linked in my mind to him.

In the past year, I imagine as a result of working on the book, he began keeping a Blogspot called Unusual Kentucky. If you're interested in this sort of thing, there are lots of entries in the archives to dig through. It's also a very active blog at the moment with near-daily updates of stories and information, though some of it is just regurgitated from other sources. It makes a nice, central location for Kentucky-centric stories and oddities. I took the liberty of creating a LiveJournal syndication for it: unusualkentucky. Go head and add it if you'd like to see his blog entries on your friends page.

---

How come I am just now learning about the band Hermano? Granted, I know that in the past few years I have became increasingly more lazy about searching-out and finding new music/bands. This is the sort of band that someone should've grabbed me by the head, looked directly into my eyes, and spoke clearly using small words and plain enunciation. John Garcia (ex-Kyuss) along with Lexington, KY native Dave Angstrom (Supafuzz/Black Cat Bone anyone?) making heavy/fuzzy/deafening stoner rock is something I can get behind.

With my somewhat recent foray into social networking sites, I've decided after much deliberation to make my Livejournal a more private affair. That's not to say that there still won't be any public content here, but my journal has become increasingly more private over the past year. There was a time when I got a kick out of having a large public audience here, but that novelty has worn-off. I wish to return my journal to a simpler time, a journal where I feel like I know the people I am interacting with. That can only happen if a) I know you in RL or b) I have the time and energy to keep-up at least marginally with your journal. The reality is, I don't and I'm sure that' no surprise to a great deal of you.

For this purpose, I have and will be conducting a massive cleaning-out of my f-list. I absolutely despise "cut posts" but at the same time, when I'm unexpectedly cut from an f-list, I know the first thing *I* do is go to the person's journal and see if they gave some sort of reason. If you find that you have been cut in this process, please know that it's nothing personal. You're welcome to keep me on your f-list if you enjoy reading my public content here. As big of a cut as this was, it's entirely possible I made a some mistakes due to a name change I didn't notice or a mis-click of the mouse. If for some reason you think I may have inadvertently removed you, don't hesitate to drop me a note. I did sift through 315+ names and whittle it down to 120, so making a mistake is entirely possible.

Also, you're more than welcome and cordially invited to add me over at Facebook if you'd like to keep in touch.

ETA: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1007765711&ref=profile

On lossfound's lead, I've hastily thrown together an 8 song mix at 8tracks.com. It's a lot of noisy and heavy stuff, but there's a couple of fun things in it, too. Feel free to comment here or there about it. Also, if you decide to join in the fun and make a mix, be sure to link me.

YouTube is good for many things, but the thing I enjoy most is finding music vidoes from by-gone eras, especially stuff that I never saw or haven't seen in a very long time. Last week, I gave you an old Rose Tattoo video. This week, I have some more fun stuff for you. Three novelty songs from the late 80s/early 90s that may have flown under your radar, or as is most likely the case, was WAY before your time. Whatever the case, take 15 minutes and enjoy the awesome.

Scatterbrain - "Don't Call Me Dude"

The most ambitious of the three videos. It actually got a good deal of rotation on Headbanger's Ball back in the day. Wikipedia says it was a top 20 hit in Australia, which speaks volumes about the musical tastes of our brothers and sisters in Oz.

The Pursuit Of Happiness - "I'm An Adult Now"

Filled with great lines like the one I used in the subject, the lyrics are wry and dryly delivered. I thought it was an amusing song when I was 19. Now it's fucking hysterical. Really.

The Look People - "Five"

The previous two videos, I will grant that you may have seen/heard it before. Chances are though, you've never witnessed this next one. The song is completely wacky and its performers even more so. This is one of those low-budget videos where they used every green-screen trick, every angle, and what seems like a gajillion snap-zoom shots. How many minutes does Brubeck take?

While digging around on YouTube for various music related things, I stumbled across some old promotional music videos for the band Rose Tattoo from the late 70s. I had never seen any of these, and wasted a good 30 minutes watching them all. For the uninitiated, Rose Tattoo is a hard rock band that, despite having widespread influence on later bands (particularly the LA sleaze-metal of Motley Crue, Guns N Roses, et al.), has operated in virtual obscurity for over 30 years. This is due in large part to living in the constant shadow of their fellow Australians, ACDC, to whom they are constantly compared and often dismissed as being a poor man's version of. Rose Tattoo's sound is in the same ballpark as ACDC, but they have their own style and flair which is inimitable, particularly in the slide-guitar sound of Peter Wells and the freakish charisma of their diminutive front man Angry Anderson. As proof, check out this video for "Rock and Roll Outlaw" - it's both hilarious and awesome:



And if you've never heard "Nice Boys", there's a studio version of it on YouTube, too, but without an accompanying video.

Mike Nichols
There are few film makers in Hollywood with careers as depressing to watch unravel as Mike Nichols. His career as a director began with such promise with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1966, followed by The Graduate in '67 and a few years later, the wonderful Catch-22 in '70. After that, he seemed to become the go-to guy for big budget films chomping at the bit for an Oscar nod. He struck gold with Silkwood in '83, but after that it was all downhill. The cute but problematic Working Girl, the cloying Regarding Henry, and the embarrassing Postcards From The Edge. The Birdcage was funny but uneven and more recently, Closer was just plain awful.

Robert Altman
I won't pretend that I've made it all the way through Altman's long list of film achievement, but I do have my bases covered on a lot the high points. It's safe to say I have a love/hate relationship with Altman films. On the one hand, his peculiar style, especially with respect to dialog was groundbreaking. Between the improvisation and the intentional use of overlapping conversation, the really good Altman film welcomes second and third viewings. On the other hand, it's this very style which makes his films difficult for a lot of moviegoers to tolerate, especially since the plot and character development is moved almost entirely through dialog and not action. Most all Altman films examine institutions: MASH (war, western medicine), Short Cuts (Los Angeles culture), The Player (Hollywood), Gosford Park (the Victorian British class system and Victorian murder mysteries), and Nashville (country music industry) are all good examples of the Altman style. Oddly though, my favorite is 1973's The Long Goodbye which breaks from these usual trappings and tells a good old-fashioned private eye story with a wise-cracking Elliot Gould in the lead role.

Jim Jarmusch
I don't get what people find so appealing about Jarmusch movies. Coffee and Cigarettes had its moments but as a whole was pretty boring. Broken Flowers was tedious to watch and I couldn't even make it all the way through Down By Law before turning it off in frustration. A big part of it is the snail's pacing of his movies, but also just that he's not very adept at moving the story without dialog, something which he attempts to do with frequency and fails miserably at it. There are often long periods without dialog where the viewer is expected to rely solely on the unspoken acting of his actors under his direction or the scenery/set under his direction, neither of which he seems able to do very well. I've gotten to a point that Jarmusch is dead to me. It will take a LOT of good things said by people I respect for me to watch any more of his garbage.

Billy Wilder
Whether as the screenplay writer, the director, or both, few could argue Wilder's impact on film-making. If I was pressed to list my top five film makers, he'd be there. He won Best Picture/Best Director Oscars for The Apartment in 1960 and won several other Oscars for screenplay and director in his career. He's responsible for giving us pop culture touchstones like Marilyn Monroe on the subway grate in The Seven Year Itch and the line "All right Mr. DeMille. I'm ready for my closeup" from Sunset Blvd.. The list of classic films he was behind just goes on and on: Some Like It Hot, Sabrina, Stalag 17, Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, and A Foreign Affair. He even lent uncredited writing help to films such as Casino Royale and the original Ocean's Eleven. If your experience with older films is limited and you've never seen a Wilder film, you're really missing out on one of the greats of the industry.

David Fincher
Catch me in the right mood, and I'll argue that Fincher is the single most influential director of the last quarter century, and he did it with a single movie. He cut is teeth in the burgeoning CG effects side of the industry in the early 90s and used his powers to change not only the way CG is used, but the way people direct movies. At the time of its inception, CG was used for big budget effects as in, for instance, Twister. Fincher saw a different way it could be used, as a tool to achieve impossible compositions and camera movements, blended seamlessly with live action. A great example is early in Fight Club, when the "camera" moves through the window of the skyscraper, plunges dozens of stories, down through the pavement and ground, into the basement garage below the skyscraper and into the van to show the explosives - all in a single "shot". That sort of shot is so common place today that we think nothing of it, but it was a revolutionary bit of film making at the time. Another good example is in Panic Room. There's a really long tracking shot that begins outdoors, moves through a window, through the handle of a coffee pot, up the stairs of the house then through the banister rails and into a bedroom, stopping finally to show a pebble of plaster bouncing on a baseboard. Camera trickery aside, you also cannot understate the far reaching influence of The Game, Se7en, and Fight Club on the thriller genre as a whole: gritty yet stylish with the obligatory surprise revelation near the end.