March 31, 2004
Dook and the College Dropout
I hesitate to say anything too nice about Dook with the Final Four coming up this weekend, but someone over there did a really nice job booking their annual Last Day of Classes concert. Yep, that's right - Kanye West and Dilated Peoples, Wednesday April 21 on the main West campus quad! I just hope this show won't fall victim to the typical hip-hop concert delays and cause me to miss any of Four Tet at Go! later that night.
On a related note....UNC almost never gets to blow massive wads of student fee cash on campus hip-hop shows, but this year they've actually booked a Nas show at the Dean Dome - and on the day after Kanye, no less. Student fees partially subsidize the Nas show so that student tickets are only $10. But still, it's not quite the same as a free outdoor Kanye West show....and I just learned that Hell's long-awaited Super-Trivia-With-Cash-Prizes is scheduled for that same night (4/22). OK, enough with the planning for late April...
Currently listening to: the debut of Air America. In general, this sort of babble-heavy caller-centric talk radio is not exactly my cup of tea, but this new network is clearly an important and exciting development.
Posted by Tim at 03:07 PM | Comments (0)
March 29, 2004
Bears See Things Pretty Much The Way They Are
Don Caballero played Go! Room 4 tonight but I intentionally passed on the show. Don Cab are one of my favorite bands ever but the current incarnation is a bit of a sham, somewhat of a False Caballero. The lineup now consists of longtime drummer/octopus Damon Che and some guys from Creta Bourzia who (impressively) figured out all of the Ian Williams/Mike Banfield guitar parts to old Caballero songs. False Caballero rolled through town last October and I eagerly went to the show without knowing anything about the lineup change. After a lot of the emo kids cleared out after this band I'd never heard of called The Constantines, False Caballero took the stage and played copious portions of What Burns Never Returns and For Respect in addition to some other DonCab oldies and even a few new songs. All of the "old" songs were technically dead-on & very accurate...and I must admit that I enjoyed hearing them. But I got this weird icky feeling that I was being sold something under the guise of nostalgia...and that maybe I had finally passed some age threshold where the bands I liked in college were already doing "reunion" tours for cash a la The Who. Five years ago I saw a Steve Perry-less Journey at Walnut Creek Ampitheatre and enjoyed the hell out of it...but my ticket was free and I was drunk on a grassy lawn on a warm summer evening and I had absolutely no delusions of (or vested interest in) "Journey authenticity". Funny, the one thing that I will probably remember the most about last fall's False Caballero show was that Damon was totally drunk and pissed off about the band's performance and who knows what else...he kept making negative comments and I thought he might even start re-enacting elements of the Don Cab show at Local 506 ten years earlier when he got frustrated with soundman Todd Goss and proceeded to pitch a huge fit....as well as a snare drum and most of his drum sticks onto the Local 506 floor. Now those are good memories....
Back in the present: I was lucky enough to witness Ian Williams' awesome new band Battles a couple weeks back...more on that show sometime soon.
Posted by Tim at 01:48 AM | Comments (4)
March 25, 2004
Bad American Presidents
While the week's most exciting political story is clearly the bombshell revelations from the book and testimony of former anti-terrorism chief Richard Clarke, I continue to be really fascinated by the continuing evolution of Howard Stern's political awakening and its potential impact on the 2004 election. Check out the latest bit of hilarity from Stern's show, an absolutely hysterical "Bad American Presidents" parody of those Budweiser Too-Much-Cologne-Wearing-Man ads:
Updated linK: http://www.howardstern.com/sounds/Bad_Amer_Pres_GWB.mp3
What's interesting about Stern is that he supported both Bush and the Iraq War until just about a month ago, when he came back from a weeklong vacation saying that he had read Al Franken's Lies... and that he was now an Anybody-But-Bush guy. Ever since, he's been mercilessly mocking and ridiculing Bush every morning on his radio show in front of millions of listeners (mp3 sample here). Sure, part of this is totally self-serving, as Stern directly blames Bush for the fact that Clear Channel suddenly dumped Stern's show from 6 of its radio stations (reportedly because of its offensive/lewd content but only a few days after Stern's anti-Bush statements started, hmmm...). And by ranting against the president himself, Stern brilliantly backs up against the ropes and puts himself in a position to become a political martyr and a free-speech-censorship victim should the FCC decide to actually go after him with heavy fines. I really hope they let him stay for at least a few more months so that he can keep railing on W and win over the minds of thousands of impressionable "Howard Stern listeners", who may or may not overlap with the much-hyped "Nascar Dads" demographic.
Posted by Tim at 01:41 PM | Comments (0)
Don't Blame Canada
So tonight I went to Kings to see Broken Social Scene. I'd totally missed the boat on this Canadian band for all of last year, despite the fact that a friend had been playing and hyping their You Forgot It In People CD for my housemate once last summer. WXYC never put the album in rotation as far as I know, and it wasn't until January of this year that I finally got a chance to fully digest the CD while riding around snowy Wisconsin in a friend's car. I must admit, my overall tolerance for new-ish "indie-rock" is not always so high these days, but damn if this CD didn't grab my ear, throw in some curveballs, and retroactively earn a would've-been spot in my top 10 of 2003...or did it come out in late 2002?!? Anyway, the live show was pretty satisfying, the 8+ people in the band played most all of the songs on the first (and best) half of the album. Several of those songs really do a great job of capturing the spirit and sound of late 80s Dinosaur Jr....which is an awesome thing when you get it right. Which these Canucks have somehow figured out how to do. Hmmm, it seems that one of these guys was actually in Do Make Say Think, who put out an awesome CD on Constellation many many years ago...
Posted by Tim at 01:48 AM | Comments (0)
March 23, 2004
LOAN DENIED!
Here's a fun and simple anti-Bush petition/fundraiser/action that doesn't require donating any of your own money or writing a letter to someone like Elizabeth Dole in the futile hope that she might actually consider being less than 100% loyal to the Republican Party.
http://www.clickbackamerica.org/petition1.php?id=17
You click on the link, sign the petition, and the good folks at MoveOn.org get $1.00 for their anti-Bush ad fund (so that they can run ads like "Polygraph" in key battleground states). The best part is that since this is being pushed to college students (though anyone can participate), there's a competition to see which college can amass the most clicks/donations. At the time of this writing, UC-Berkeley is way out in front, but UNC-CH is only slightly out of the Top 10. Duke is way down in the lower 40s, naturally. C'mon, Heels!!
Posted by Tim at 05:36 PM | Comments (0)
March 22, 2004
Allow me to reintroduce myself...
So here I am with a blog. My instincts tell me that the first real entry into a blog tends to be some kind of combination of personal introduction, statement of purpose, rough projections about what is likely to be posted in the future, and maybe even a little bit of self-effacing modesty in the form of rationalizations and justifications for the blog's mere existence. It's tempting to go that route...but I'm going to skip most of that. Lately I've actually been wondering why in the hell it took me until 2004 to even halfheartedly embrace this whole electronic self-publishing thing. For many years during the 90s I seemed to have very little problem broadcasting all sorts of opinions and thoughts and reviews and other pointless ramblings and whatnot via a self-published print zine. Of course I eventually got burned out on that....for all sorts of reasons that I may soon rediscover. So I'll just have to see how this goes...
Posted by Tim at 12:10 AM | Comments (0)
March 21, 2004
System.out.println("Hello World");
Sibilance, sibilance.....I think this thing is on!
Posted by Tim at 01:55 PM | Comments (0)