MIX CD for a person who was lukewarm towards me

                Internet romance is a fleeting thing. At first, you’re so excited to finally connect with someone in the virtual sea. You think of them, of all the fish in the sea, I wanted her, she wanted me. Even though I met them on a site their parents paid for, in a weak attempt to get them a boyfriend, our bond felt strong. It felt great, we were connecting. Adding her various networking sites felt good, it felt right. We were happy sending random messages through vast distances. 

                Sometimes, you know, it doesn’t work out with people. The two of you might seem to have a lot in common. At an undefined moment in time, things change. Everything changes. Such a thing happened with this person. Without meeting, we had grown bored of each other. Other people appeared to me more interesting than little old me. Rapidly our AIM conversations dwindled to nearly nothing.

                But one day, out of the blue, I got invited to her birthday party at a beer garden of high repute. Perhaps I’d be given another chance. Working throughout the week, I not only came up with my usual stellar mix, but I did something more. Look below to see. This is the unedited selection of descriptions for each song, sent as text to her Myspace account. 

                When I arrived at the party, we became friends, nothing more than that. Feeling rejected, I spent the rest of the night talking to her brother about some creative stuff he did for work. She made up a story about how we met at some concert. At the night of the night, we left as friends. We’re still friends on Facebook, but I never spoke to her again. My MIX had failed.

                That doesn’t mean it’ll fail on you. All of the descriptions are perfect for the songs. I hope this helps you more than it helped me. Consider this the prehistoric ancestor of my current MIX CDs, like a fossil trapped in amber, waiting to be resurrected again.  

        

1. Red Krayola - Hurricane Fighter Plane.

Once upon a time, Mayo Thompson had something in his pants. And with his snotty voice, he announced it to the world with the strangest backing band ever, complete with the most thoroughly incompetent bass player he could find in the great state of Texas. In a perfect world, this would’ve been a hit single. Most people lacked his clear vision of a world without logic, sense, or musical talent. 

2. No Age - Cappo

These guys go surfing on the Southern California coast. Or at least it sounds that way. They also sound like they might exist in reality, unlike our previous guest. 

3. Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention - Who needs the Peace Corps?

Frank Zappa sings scathingly about the false political awareness many of the “boomer generation” possessed. Singing about one young lad, who decides to wear non-traditional Western garb for the purpose of looking cool, he then enjoys marijuana and gets some police officers to kick the shit out of him on Hate Street. This intrepid cut summarized Zappa’s perfect satire with musical talent.

4. Duke Ellington and His Orchestra - Washington Wabble

A young bird goes and gets a bum’s rush from the local bull. Now he doesn’t care for this sort of thing, and calls the bull a wet blanket. Well, ha, you can see here why he’s a bird, can’t you? So off he goes, in a real huff, and sees a tomato. The real McCoy, but he can’t stop and make whoopee with her, get a few sinkers. No, he’s out on the lam, on account of that insult. Good thing he didn’t stay and chat with the cat’s meow either, she was a moll anyway.

5. British Sea Power - The Lonely             

I listened to this constantly as I went back and forth on the train, from civilization and out of it. As this played, I’d see backyards of people both rich and poor. This is a truly enlightening experience of listening to a lonely former naval power sing about playing on a Casio, electric piano. 

6. Crème Soda - Deep in a Dream

A bunch of hippies got together about 5 years too late and decided to make some hippie-ish jams. They were of high quality, as were the performers. Then they realized it was 1975 and got cynical, then employed. 

7. Slint - Breadcrumb Trail

Slint existed in a certain moment of time, when a bunch of paranoid people moved to Louisville, Kentucky, to make uncomfortable, tense rock. Some called it Post-Rock, since it lacked any of the sort of things that made things rock, like happiness and girls. The members of Slint most likely did not have adoring women flocking towards them; they most likely had those record-store types with the beards and thick glasses, nodding their heads in approval. Despite their overwhelming ability to give almost anyone nightmares with their delusional, uneasy songs sung in uncertain voices, they broke up. Then, as paranoia and unease gained currency towards the latter half of the Bush administration, they gave it another go. Our song here discusses the joys and terror of being in a carnival. 

8. Sun City Girls - Radar 1941

Sun City Girls knew the Norwegians could no longer defend them, so they made one last stand in Hammerfest, Norway. Using the only items nearby, booze and guitars, they coined this little ditty, a drunken surf song that loses interest in itself every now and then. 

9. Flying Saucer Attack - Standing Stone

One fine afternoon, the singer realized his voice was shit. So he brought up a ton of distortion and feedback, and sang like someone on an acid trip. Then he got a three-year old to play the drums.

10. Gong - Witch’s Song/I am your Pussy

They dedicated this song to their mother, and some fleas. The 1970s were a strange time.

11. Optiganally Yours - Stop Touching Me

Originally written after a harrowing experience with a toaster oven, this song exudes positive feelings, also sexual harassment. 

12. Sergio Mendes Trio - Vivo Sonhando

Back in the 1960s, Brazilians provided the world with perfect music to drink cocktails to. This particular band did it especially well. To improve the ease, they replaced the singer with a saxophone, just to be so cool and casual.

13. Stereolab - Tone Burst

It’s like a giant burst of distorted guitars, and then we get those socialist lyrics sung in French. Why French? So that way, it’ll sound sexy.

14. Deerhoof - Polly Bee

Originally starting off as a pop group, they didn’t realize how weird their singing was, or how inane the lyrics were. Here we listen to the singer ask such probing questions as “Why am I so happy all the time?”

15. Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg - Jane B

A couple of French people, singing about French shit. They were so explicit that even France put its foot down on having their songs on the radio.  Possibly perfect music for some kind of bad ass spy flick in the near future, which would involve a former KGB agent trying to kill the President of some total shit-hole Eastern European nation no one’s heard of, and the one CIA agent down on his luck trying to bring him to justice. Also hamsters would be involved.

16. Low - Caroline

Most rock bands start out playing fast and slowing down. When Low decides to slow down some more, their songs will last half an hour each, with eight notes played in total. Their beauty is to play those eight notes perfectly right, and at the right times. Too many bands figure if they play fast, perhaps they’d occasionally get the sound right. Low know better.

17. Nick Drake - From the Morning

Apparently his life revolved around sleeping late, smoking pot, not getting laid and playing the guitar. He spent his entire life on a college campus as a philosophy major.

18. June of 44 - Sink is Busted

Here is one of those greats from Louisville, the Post Rockers. Here they display their inability to cope with even the simplest of problems, a broken sink. Instead of doing anything about it, they wrote this meandering song that feels like it’s always moving away from you.

19. Penguin Café Orchestra - Hugebaby

As a couple of penguins sat drinking their coffees and reading the New York Times Magazine section, they noticed a baby flying out of a car. The car’s passengers had dissolved away, as had the car, and the baby slowly floated about, looking at the penguins below with dreamy amusement. 

20. Beirut - Untitled

Apparently this musician lacks basic naming song skills. Perhaps he should’ve stayed in school, instead of hanging around the Balkans in seedy clubs, listening to their degenerate hobo music.

How should I celebrate Valentine’s Day?

                 People have strong opinions on this holiday. Some revel in the opportunities for “Valentine Sex” with their girlfriends, also known as “Birthday sex” for when their love was born, well rarely is it born on that day, but it’s a good excuse. They celebrate by watching a relatively well-regarded film or television program at home in bed. Or maybe they play “Apples to Apples” in bed; really whatever they do must be in bed.  

                Most of the ‘passion’ towards Valentine’s Day is of a different sort. Perhaps Joel Barish (from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind) said it best how it was “a holiday invented by greeting card companies to make people feel like crap”. That is the other extreme: people upset, hurt even, by the reminder that they haven’t met anyone. Meeting the right one isn’t easy, countless dating sites make money off of this little problem, off trying to help you court or woo a special someone. Creating an online dating site is pretty much a sure fire way to constantly get advertising dollars, especially from porn site ads on the side for those a little disheartened from their search. 

                Each year the two forces line up, ready to confront each other. Truth be told, they are extremely diverse groups. Good and bad exist amongst them; I’m certain you’ve meet wonderful, lovely couples. Sometimes I meet ones so perfect I hope they marry, and I secretly hope I’m a close enough friend to get invited to their wedding (I love weddings and the possibility of free, catered food). Single people just might be searching for a certain someone to complete them. They are otherwise fine but maybe haven’t had as much success in meeting people as they’d like. For those types of people, you try to invite them to parties, Karaoke outings, in the hopes of matching them up. Being a matchmaker is a grand thing. 

                Wherever there is good, evil lurks. I’ve met totally messed up couples. One poor soul got beaten up since his “Sims Family” character died in a computer game after ineffectively trying to put out a fire. They had great, almost unbelievably amazing sex as you could see various heavy hand imprints on the shallow walls. Honestly, I wish I could get those imprints out of my head, but they mixed passion with crazy so well. I saw the two berate each other constantly, almost a comedic amount. Or it would’ve been comedic if I didn’t care about them. Personally, I thought they were horrible for each other but 8 years later, they married. Those not in relationships may not be any better.

                I can think of one such individual from whom relationships eluded him for good reason. He never cut his hair. From the back, he looked like a girl and got a few people very confused. Each day he’d pay for things in ‘shoe money’ since he failed to purchase a wallet, which is generally used for those sorts of transactions. Personally, I saw him feebly explain to the cashier “Sorry, it was, uh, in my shoe.” Never at any point did it occur to him that perhaps he might want to take it out of his shoe before he met the cashier’s steely gaze. Or he could have bought a wallet. For him, it is somewhat obvious to see why he remained single. Plus, as icing on the cake, he failed to use a refrigerator over the winter, preferring to store food items under snow. When we returned back from a hard day of doing nothing, he dug out a gallon of milk fully frozen. There are many reasons he remained single, despite the charming way he named his Myspace page “Casual Sex” and joined the “Casual Sex” group on Myspace. 

                This year, I want some help from both camps. How can one get through this holiday without succumbing to either extreme? I want to get through Valentines’ Day without giving up what makes me so special. What I’ve tended to do is walk around Chinatown alone, looking at all those cute live creatures.  Sometimes I see the courage of these creatures, trying to escape an inevitable fate of ending up on someone’s plate. A crab once escaped from its bucket of fellow crabs, yearning to break free from the oppressive tyranny, a society which wanted to eat him (or her). Looking on, I watched as the store owner eventually caught it. Rather than being upset at the crab, the store owner stood smiling, amused at this feeble attempt of escape. For that crab, I created a blog. If a creature which can’t even walk straight has faith, then you should too this Valentine’s Day.

                Find that special someone. If you already have the one, or “a person” what do you do to celebrate this cliché-ridden holiday? What is a creative way of celebrating it? Do you buy chocolates, go ice-skating, or do you use it as an excuse to fool around at home as you watch something you’ve probably already seen a couple of times. I’m curious; I never know how people approach this day, besides from the single point of view. Coming from one of those losers at the game of love; I want to know what leads to those wonderful, lasting relationships. Love is an emotion I’m not very familiar with, how do you let this great things build up, how does it grow?

                Opposites attract according to various sitcoms, parental advice, dating sites, advertisements, etc. If opposites attract, does that mean people keep their original personalities, or do they change over time? Having been around old couples, I guess they end up looking like one another after a period of time, their faces and bodies melting into one particular mold. They have the same interests in Rachmaninov and growing tomatoes in the garden. Maybe over time the two reconcile their differences and slowly meet each other’s expectations, becoming better people in the process.

                Let me know what you’d do to avoid the Valentines’ Day problems, those trials and tribulations it entails. Can Valentines’ Day even be indie, or it is too mainstream: any attempts to be hip will fail miserably. Any suggestions or any way of shedding light on this elusive subject would be greatly appreciated. I’m in the dark on love, and I want to be brought into the light.

Person of the Year: Julian Assange

If this guy does not get that person of the year thing in Dentist Office Magazine Time, I’ll be shocked. Glenn Beck has nothing on this Australian-born, white-mopped Albino. Single-handedly he created an absolutely new way (for better or worse) of dealing with corporate and governmental interests. Say what you will about the validity/danger of what he does, it ought to be obvious the guy is the first internet folk hero, existing primarily in cyberspace.

                He looks pretty good too considering he’s almost 40. With his accent and white hair, he could be a cosmopolitan evil doer. Perhaps the James Bond franchise should use him as a template for their next villain, pairing him with a white cat to stroke as he wreaks havoc on international security. My hope, they put him in the Fallingwater house outside Pittsburgh. Something about Frank Lloyd Wright’s design works well with Julian’s supposed temperament: urbane yet fragile, like the house ought to just collapse, yet it fails due to its inner power.

                Cast as a villain in a Bond movie would still portray him in a more flattering light than what the media has given him. Among some of the grosser accusations are of rape (and he’s being questioned, not being sentenced. You’d think otherwise though according to the spin), causing the death of innocents (when his work actually gives concrete numbers of how many people have been killed in endeavors), and coming across rather haughty (the last one is his own damn fault). His treatment, though poor, pales in comparison to what Bradley Manning (alleged source of the leaks) has faced. Reading the New York Times article on him, he got dismissed as someone desperately seeking acceptance rather than focusing on why the leak was important. Mr. Assange got this as well, being asked about his son and divorce, but nowhere as extreme (Manning doesn’t have the option of letting an organization speak on his behalf). 

                Basically, the focus on Julian appears to be a ruse to focus away from the leaks. The leaks themselves range in terms of how much they shock, and much of it isn’t very surprising, excluding the juicy parts about Tunisia and Saudi Arabia. Had the US Government simply ignored or laughed off the leaks, perhaps there might not be the outpouring of support for this guy on the internet, along with the various DOS (Denial-Of-Service attacks) that such support entails. In short, the response to his work was bungled. Having  Newt Gingrich and others calling for his assassination proved stupid as well, along with those calling him a terrorist saying how he should be hunted down like Osama (Julian’s response that since he’ll be treated like Osama, he has about ten years of freedom yet, was a particularly effective barb). 

                Travelling across the world like a digital nomad, lacking any real home, makes his odyssey that much more interesting. Continually attacking Julian is so incredibly stupid, it is like when people engage somebody trolling: by giving them attention, you only encourage this kind of behavior. How our government fails to understand how free speech (and treason) works is beyond stupid. It is actually embarrassing to have a government that so poorly comprehends the internet besides knowing it’s a series of tubes. 

                Person of the Year usually needs some controversy to make it stick. I’ve yet to encounter two people with the same reaction of the guy. Going between the extremes of Ron Paul (who adores him) and Sarah Palin (who unsurprisingly misses his point completely), he’s garnered a huge amount of attention.  Rather than focus on his leaks and ask how we can stop him, maybe a better question is to ask how are we doing? I mean, this material is leaked to him by those within the system itself and are dissatisfied enough to bring this information to his organization we should be trying harder. People are always going to be unhappy, but not normally to Bradley’s level.  If we’re hiding this much anyway, maybe we should ask ourselves why? As Ron Paul eloquently put it:

““In a free society we're supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, then we're in big trouble. And now, people who are revealing the truth are getting into trouble for it.”

                I may not always agree with Mr. Paul on most issues but he sort of hit the nail on the head with this. His nine questions are here as well, as further ruminations on what Wikileaks means:

9 Questions, kind of like Skidoo 23's 7 songs

                While Julian continues to have this information released, maybe the US can re-evaluate where we’re heading. Is the creation of a paranoid semi-police state really a good idea? Right now it feels like this whole year has been about questioning ourselves and which way our country is going, either with the Tea Party, the Left’s dissatisfaction with Obama, or the abysmal economic growth we’ve been experiencing. Julian basically tore all that away to ask the absolutely fundamental question:

“Are we happy with ourselves?”

                I wonder what will be next for him and his Wikileaks organization. There are a few things left he can do in order to raise money for his cause:

1.       Leak Nude Pictures of Julian Assange.

2.       Get together with Ron Paul and start a buzzband.

3.       Find out where Panda Bear’s album is, leak that onto the internet.

4.       Host “The Soup”

5.       Move to Brazil (via the Brazilian President’s love for him. Plus, extradition rules from there are a bitch).

6.       Arrange to leak the documents on Myspace, finally get people to visit Myspace again. I feel that getting corporate sponsorship might help.

Justice – Planisphere 7.6

Yeah, I’m late to the party on this one. My apologies to this great French duo, but when are we getting another album? I mean, it has been literally years. Are you commissioning some sort of dance orchestra for this, like Jean-Claude Vannier? If you are that’s understandable. If not, I’m a little disappointed.

The music presented here was used for a Dior Homme fashion show, so I can imagine how much fun the show must have been. All those hallmarks of great Justice Tracks are here, the buildups and the breakdowns, the filtering, etc. What’s interesting is basically the duo takes the approach of Gez Varley in his “Bayou Paradis” album and uses only one chord progression for the entire 17 minutes.

Not that this ruins the music at all. Justice is great musicians, and creates a real killer mix on here. This feels like the next logical step for them, as they get their barring together for when to go and write another song. Download free off their myspace, or find it floating around cyberspace. Both the 4 track edition and the continuous 17 minute long mix are available; I’d suggest the breakdown of the tracks though.

Is the movie “The Social Network” just copping a feel off of Generation Y?

I’m sure you’ve seen the advertisements proclaiming this cinematic “manna from heaven” bestowed on us ignorant fools. The movie of a generation, one screams. Not to be missed, another one says. Citizen Kane remade for narcissistic types, raves another. 

According to my friends’ status updates, they are all going to see it. Some even “like” it, confirming this is an acceptable thing to post on Facebook, and that Mark Zuckerberg won’t get you for watching it. Instead he’ll just pour all of your personal information into various advertising algorithms, so the ads you see on the will be specifically targeted to your tastes. Man, I hope that you are able to avoid that cruel fate, of being a willing participant in a giant advertising scheme. Who knows, next you may be asked to water someone’s virtual crops. Shutter at the thought, maybe the movie isn’t worth it. 

The movie stars Jesse Eisenberg, who is basically Michael Cera if Michael Cera experienced human emotions. Perhaps I can’t exactly find fault with the cast; they’re just looking for work, but the whole premise of making a movie off of such a showy social website that’s been established for only a few years sounds a bit off. I mean, I don’t exactly see movies on OKCupid or Last.fm. A movie about Myspace would probably just focus on Tom crying in a small room surrounded by white erase boards filled with nonsensical gibberish. But Myspace did offer some easy ways to protect your privacy. Just try navigating Facebook's privacy settings and see if you don't go utterly mad.

Facebook works like most social networking sites do. What’s different about it is how much information it has and how many people use it. Recently it was discovered that people use Facebook even more than Google, which struck me as a wee bit upsetting. I mean, what happens when people are more willing to learn about their social networks than actually search out knowledge, whether or not it is particularly relevant. Sure, you can try to search out new things on Facebook, but they are only self-serving. There’s hardly anything new to be discovered on there, and lately it has been trying to cop even more information from Wikipedia, in the hopes that by merging that information into their format, you’ll never have a reason to leave.

Having a movie come out about this is probably the most blatant attempt of ripping off Generation Y for its nostalgia. I’m a little surprised that only a few years need to pass before things count as nostalgia, so that’s  disappointing. Aren’t we the generation who had an entire show dedicated to ripping off our childhood for cheap laughs (Robot Chicken, see that Transformers reference), or hell even Transformers. Think of it, there are Transformers 1, Transformers 2, all those Harry Potter movies, countless Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchises, Mortal Kombat, Spiderman 1, Spiderman 2, Spiderman 3, and countless others even more forgettable. Now we have a movie about a site we all frequent on a fairly regular hourly basis. Despite our best efforts, you’re in or you’re out.

Not being on Facebook gets you dirty looks. Each time somebody hears “I’m not on Facebook” a few thoughts pop into their head:

1.       Potential Luddite (impossible, Luddites are made up to scare web designers)

2.       Has “sketchy” past (like, horribly evil past)

3.       Wants privacy (completely foreign concept)

4.       Is Amish (depends on size of the beard)

5.       Doesn’t like you enough (most likely scenario)

So this movie just lets you watch your favorite website come to life, in all of its petty cruelty. It started out as a way for people to see who was single and who wasn’t. Mark apparently made enough enemies for someone to write a screenplay and get it successfully produced. Perhaps Mark might spend another hundred million (after that kind gift to Newark) to create another movie, a response to this one, where he singles out people he dislikes and dumps on them for roughly an hour and a half.

It annoys me to no end that this movie feels like a giant data-mining exercise. Yes, I know it was based on the book by Ben Mezrich, but the movie reeks of angst.  It feels like it is reliving the history of something that might have been a social movement, but then unreasonably adds a bunch of drama to keep you interested. Does there need to be that much angst for a website? This isn’t 4chan or something.

To give you some idea of the level of dramatic put-on and emotional unease, the soundtrack was done by Trent Reznor. If that doesn’t give you an idea of the level of angst at play here, perhaps the commercials might. Each one I see gives the feel that these people are off to destroy the world we love and hold dear.

By putting my thoughts into words, I’m certain I will be dragged against my will by my group of well-intentioned friends hoping to get me more “movie-savvy”. I just don’t dig the cruel humor so prevalent in movies; that’s the main reason I didn’t enjoy “Borat”. Maybe I should just learn to accept that nostalgia happens quickly, and that it can quickly be capitalized upon. But nonetheless, The Social Network shall find me somehow, someday whether in a theater or on a lazy, channel-surfing day.