I'll be back. Seriously.
This weblog will be on hiatus next week (and only next week) while the wife and I get some much-needed R&R in Hawaii. In fact, we'll be right here should any emergencies arise.
So, in lieu of regular posts next week, I offer you the bold predictions of:
Future News, for Next Week and Beyond
In sports, despite the Game 1 aberration, the Lakers pound the 76ers. The matchup draws XFL-size TV numbers. The world yawns and changes the channel. Tampa Bay still can't believe it has three professional sports franchises. Someone wins the Stanley Cup. Canadians and people from New Jersey and Colorado feign interest.
In technology news, following the leads of dack, glassdog, noah grey and others, thousands of webloggers stop posting. No one notices.
In business, everyone gets laid off. The fact that the Dow is over 11,000 doesn't seem to deter people from talking about an impending recession.
In entertainment news, Jerry Bruckheimer continues to be allowed to make movies. No one knows why. Radiohead's Amnesiac is hailed as the greatest thing since Pet Sounds or Revolver, even though it's not half as good as Kid A, which wasn't half as good as OK Computer.
In politics, the Middle East remains hopelessly fucked up. George W. Bush says something unintelligible. The defection of that Jeffords guy makes pundits salivate, but it doesn't make a whit of difference in any real person's life.
In health news, it turns out that everything is bad for you. Even those things formerly thought good for you turn out to be bad for you. We are all a day closer to dying today than we were yesterday.
Have a bitchin' week. ßßß
Commute, work. Commute, sleep. Commute, work. Commute, sleep. Commute.
Apparently Alllen Iverson and co. didn't get the memo: they were supposed to roll over. So who do you think is happier right now, David Stern or Pat Croce? It's a toss-up.
That X10-disabling URL I wrote about on Monday ain't workin' for me. Sorry for the bum steer. I'll fix those X10 camera fuckers yet.
Please observe a moment of silence tomorrow for the passing of another great website: Lawrence Lee is shuttering Tomalak's Realm. Tomalak's Realm was free and packed with tons of valuable and immediately applicable intelligence; in other words, it was destined to fail. Let this be a lesson to all of us: Everybody run on over to The Obscure Store and give Jim some money, quick!
Who says it doesn't pay to sit on your ass and watch TV? Between the NFL Sunday Ticket settlement and the Blockbuster lawsuit, I stand to earn a tidy sum. I'm thinkin' a whole 10 or 20 bucks. Fuck yeah.
Is anyone at all surprised about Gary Condit's admission that Chandra Levy, his former intern who's been missing for five weeks, spent the night at his crib? Thought not.
I bring you Bodyperks and Completely Bare with Flair. Ladies: You really don't have to go to all this trouble. We would still want you if you covered yourself in mud and leaves. Trust me on this. ßßß
Amnesiac
It starts off promisingly enough. The first track, "Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box" sounds a lot like "Idioteque" and the more interesting of Kid A's dance-damaged tracks. "Pyramid Song" certainly wouldn't have sounded out of place on "Kid A" either: a somber, moody orchestral piece, like Thom Yorke channeling Kurt Weill.
"Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors" is when it truly starts getting weird (but in a good way). Thom Yorke's (well, I assume it's Yorke; it's actually pretty hard to tell through all the effects) vocoded and modulated voice is laid over a hypnotic downtempo distorto-loop for about four minutes. "You and Whose Army" takes us back to the creepy Weill educational opera vibe, replete with otherworldly backing vocals. Yorke's voice is muffled, as if he's singing with his head in his hands. (If you've seen the Meeting People Is Easy, you realize that he very well may be.) It eventually swells to a groovy Blur-esque Merseybeat gospel feel before it all falls apart again.
"I Might Be Wrong" sounds like Yorke jamming with Muddy Waters and a Casio keyboard until they drop in some tasty LFO'd synth-bass notes and Colin Greenwood starts playing a line oddly reminescent of Blondie's "Rapture."
"Knives Out" is the record's first real misstep. Yorke's eerie vocal melodies keep it from sounding like generic modern rock, but this is clearly the weakest tune to this point. It lacks the harmonic, rhythmic or structural experimentation that marks the first half of the record. If you feel like you've heard "Amnesiac/Morning Bell" before, that's because you have: it references "Morning Bell" from "Kid A." That Radiohead, on album #5, is already recycling riffs from one album to the next is curious.
"Dollars & Cents" bears a rhythmic resemblance to the aforementioned "Morning Bell," but its drowsy, percolating rhythm never really gets going. All the string arrangements in the world can't make a non-song a song.
"Hunting Bears" brings us more noodling when we really just wanna rock. The intro sounds like it might be heralding a big rock 'n' roll rave up, but it degenerates into a George Harrison does Ravi Shankar guitar/sitar thing. All filler, no killer. "Like Spinning Plates" doesn't do much to get the album back on track. More weird loops, more strings, more falsetto vocals. Maybe I've reached a saturation point, or maybe the second half of this record is terribly self-indulgent. I'm not quite sure.
The final track, "Life in a Glass House," returns to the Brechtian opera feel. A disappointing finale to a disappointing album, this song sounds like a John Kander gospel death march. "Glass House" features what may be the only lucid lyrics on the record: "Well of course I'd like to sit around and chat/But there's someone listening in." I don't think this bodes well for Thom Yorke's already fragile mental health.
Even with my questionable math skills, it appears that 5 of the album's 11 songs are quite good, and that's probably a better average than most bands. And Radiohead's bad songs are probably a damn sight better than most bands' good material. But what troubles me is: A. that after four consistently great records, Radiohead seems to be devolving into a self-indulgent prog act; and 2. they're already going back to the well for material. I hope they're not running out of steam, but I fear they are.
But of course I didn't let that stop me from adding googlyminotaur to my Yahoo IM buddy list.
ßßß
Layin' It Down
My advice to you: Review the Rules of Rock to ensure that you are in compliance. Buddyhead is all fancy and redesigned now, but they haven't posted any new gossip, so what good are they?
Just what the Raiders need: another whiny, washed-up veteran receiver. Memo to Al Davis: If you can't win with the second-best receiver in the history of the game, do you really think old, slow, injured Jerry Rice is going to be the difference-maker? Didn't think so.
I have all manner of extra holes in my body, but these people are just stupid. Whatever happened to Hail Marys?
Hey, Dack: careful out there on the links. Golfing is way more dangerous than blogging, apparently.
Here, for a limited time, is a long and dry but still interesting account of the sort-of rise and kinda fall of Inside. Worth a read.
Jim Romenesko, of the Media News that bears his name, gave blawg a link on his other site, The Obscure Store. Much love, Jim.
If you must hate, do not hate the playa. Reserve your hate for the game. ßßß
Seriously, you guys. Seriously.
Poetic justice: Dubya signed the "zero-tolerance" bill that got his daughters busted, and even his mom is piling on, claiming "He is getting back some of his own." Damn, Babs, you harsh.
If you're even an occasional reader of MSNBC, you've probably noticed the incredibly irritating interstitial Flash ads on the News home page. Yes, they suck something awful, but at least MSNBC had the sense to put a "Go directly to MSNBC News" link at the top of the page. So unless you're interested in Qwest VPN, click the link at the top to skip the ad. But this truly is the future of New Media media, so get used to it.
Speaking of really awful Web ads, I'm eternally grateful to Q for discovering a way to disable those ubiquitous X10 camera pop-up ads for 30 days. And if his logic is correct, you should be able to change the "DAY=30" part of that query string in the URL to any ol' number to disable them for any length of time. For example, click here to disable them for 10 years. Now that's the best offer I've had all day.
The only other good news I know is that Blawg radio is back online. If you haven't had a chance to check out the indie-pop show or any of the myriad other shows (OK, four), simply click here. Rock on. ßßß
Don't miss last week's brilliant insight.
