Too Young To Move On

When H and I first started dating, like most guys, I had a phase of trying to make myself seem more interesting than I actually am. (HA! It worked!) And looking for something different to do on a date one night, because "You wanna go grab a couple of pints" doesn't seem all that alluring, I noticed that a club downtown was holding a Jeff Buckley tribute night. When I suggested it, H balked a little, and we wound up... going to the pub to grab a couple of pints instead. Turned out that her co-worker (and my friend who had introduced us) had said "Jeff Buckley's who guys use to get women in bed." I guess she thought I might have been showing my cards a little soon. My friend was right, though; Buckley's music was a bit of a panty-remover. Such a talented singer, writer, guitarist. It's too easy to say the usual bits about tragedy and such-a-waste and gone-too-soon... I mean, really, you think so?

Like everyone else I head heard Last Goodbye on the radio - CFNY (now: "The Edge") had it in medium rotation, I think. And when I heard that he'd died, and in such an odd way, it really struck me, somehow, and I wound up heading to Sam's and picked up Grace the same day. It quickly became one of my favorite albums of all time - if I don't play it as often these days, it's not because I don't love it anymore. I think now I just bring it out more for somewhat special occasions, when I can really give it a good listen.

There's a must-read great post on I AM FUEL, YOU ARE FRIENDS. She's assembled a great series of rarities, as well as a wonderful list of tribute songs to Buckley by other artists. I especially loved the Aimee Mann story. Read it here.

My favorite song of his, after all this time, remains Lover, You Should've Come Over. I have a few different versions of it, as it showed up on a couple of EPs. This, version, however, would be my favorite, Live @ WNEW-FM in 1995. It's a song that can still break your heart into a million little pieces, and you don't mind at all.

Jeff Buckley Lover, You Should've Come Over (Live)

Or, if you prefer, here's a You Tube video of a different performance:




This will be a good week to give it a good listen.

And if you still don't have a copy of Grace, what the hell is wrong with you? Go buy it right now.

You do know how to whistle, don't ya?

Well, to my continual amazement and glee, H has followed through on her intention to get involved with roller derby. The skates she got don't look as I has hoped (see here) but they're pretty rockin' all the same. Toronto Roller Derby kicks off the summer 2007 season this coming weekend, and H has joined up as a referee for this season - I'm told that the referees pages will get put up eventually. It seems like this has come together pretty quickly, and given that it appears there was tremendous interest in the first place, I'm surprised it wasn't established sooner. By an odd coincidence, the rink the league secured is in my parents' neighborhood. Pretty much any kid I knew growing up who played minor hockey played out of George Bell Arena, not to be confused with this other George Bell:


One of the best outfielders The Toronto Blue Jays had in the 80's, George Bell is perhaps best remembered as:

a) the first (and so far only) Jay to be AL MVP

b) telling reporters that Jays fans could kiss his big, purple ass.

I can't say that I recall why he said this, but we do have a tradition of athletes in this city telling people to kiss their asses. Todd Stottlemyre - another Blue Jay, natch - once told the mayor of Philadelphia to kiss his ass in front of 50,000 people, at a victory rally after the 1993 World Series. I have no doubt whatsoever that the advent of roller derby will lead to additional requests for ass-kissing, although I suspect that the press coverage will be less significant. And I really have no idea about the George Bell for whom the arena is named, nor do I know anything about the color of his ass, purple or no.

But back to the matter at hand...

H has adopted the derby handle of "Penny Whistler". ('cause referees have whistles, don't cha know.) Seeing as all of my suggestions featured the words Boobs, Knockers, Hoo-Hah, or some combination thereof, it's probably just as well that she went her own way on this one. If next time around she joins a team, maybe I'll run a contest for the naming rights.

Here's a couple of tracks which for different reasons seemed appropriate to mark today's theme. See if you can guess why.

Detroit Cobras Hey Sailor

Bright Eyes Pull My Hair

Listen. (part 1)

A happy byproduct of having been home sick this week - I believe today will be the last day off, but we'll see if the fever returns - is that I've had plenty of time to spend online and listen to music. I thought today I would share a few of the things I'm finding I cannot stop listening to. Maybe you'll like them too.

I first stumbled upon Maia Hirasawa a while ago, and she's got to be the best thing to come out of Sweden since IKEA. Well, maybe that's a cheap reference. She's got this wonderful breathy thing going on. Well, here, you decide how you want to categorize it. It's fantastic:




I think all videos from now on should be filmed in dingy bathrooms. Dig the giant drumming rat, too.

This is my other favorite track by her right now:

Maia Hirasawa You and Me and Everyone We Know

Maia Hirasawa is also part of Hello Saferide, who I suppose would be the other best thing to come out of Sweden since IKEA. (I should really stop that.) Slightly different sound. There's a drum in this song that I keep hearing even when it's not playing:

Hello Saferide The Quiz

You can learn more about both acts, and buy their music, at their label, Razzia Records.

Going in another direction, you can't seem to go anywhere without coming across a reference to The National. (SIXEYES has posted a lot of stuff lately.) Right now, I can't seem to get enough, either. Here's what YouTube has to offer:



Check out "Fake Empire" on their Myspace page. This one's an older track, but killer (forgive the heinous pun):

The National Murder Me Rachel

The National's new album Boxer (the one that everyone is raving about) is available at Insound. Get it.

Finally, if you were at all like me a few years ago and couldn't stop listening to the Elephant 6 stuff (Olivia Tremor Control, Neutral Milk, etc.) you might find a fix with The Decemberists. It may just be that voice, as I don't recall Jeff Mangum ever using a saloon piano:

The Decemberists Bandit Queen

You can buy The Decemberists at krs records. You should.

Where have you gone, Jason Chayka?

When I was a kid I lived on Long Island, in a town called Bethpage. It was pretty much the place between the two malls, or at least that's how I remember it. We lived at the halfway point on a county bus route that literally went from the mall in Hicksville (no, really, that's what it was called. yeah, I know.) and the one in Massapequa (got no smart-ass comment for that one, do you?). I don't really have much of a specific point in raising that tidbit of info, but let's see if I can link it in somehow.

I'm sick today. Leave it to me to get sick on what is normally my day off anyway, and on top of that, it's a holiday too. (Happy May 2-4 everyone.) Well, I'll show them - I'm gonna take tomorrow off. Hang out on the couch watching old Family Guy episodes and maybe some old movies. Daytime TV sucks. Anyway, feeling this cold? infection? syndrome? develop over the weekend I tried to ward it off with meat fest - next time I'll take pictures and post it, H had gone away to Milwaukee for the weekend and took the camera - but that didn't work out so well. I did however decide to watch Star Wars for the first time in years. (One of the many assets that H came with was an extensive collection of Star Wars paraphernalia, including an R2D2 collection.) After not seeing this film for like 20 years or more I'm surprised at how ell it stood up, considering how crap the "prequels" were.

Man, these decongestants and antihistamines are wiping me out. And the tylenols.

Oh, right. The link - and this will all become clear in a moment - is that watching the movie made me think of my childhood. I was old enough to see it in the theater when it came out (I'll bet Grandma took me to RKO Keith's in Flushing, which is no longer there, alas.) Man, when that movie came out, it was, I imagine, bigger than Harry Potter today. Every kid at school had to see that movie as soon, and as many times as possible. I would have been in the first grade, I guess. And I was friends with this kid named Jason. Jason could do (for a six-year-old) a pretty decent imitation of R2D2. He'd walk around the school yard at lunch time whistling and chirping in the company of this other kid, Tim, who would do the best attempt at an English accent a kid from Long Island could do while walking around in a stiff-armed posture as C3PO. I suppose I'm painting these kids as total dorks, but come on, we were all of 6 years old. Or so. Hell, the amount of drugs I've taken today it could have been last week for all I know.

Anyway, Jason and I became friends, and when I moved to Canada at 9, he was one of a couple of kids I stayed in touch with. Every couple of years when I would go down to visit family I would go out o the Island and see him. We shared an affinity for cats and cartoons, The Monkees and Dr Who (although I wasn't the one who made his own Tardis out of a box a refrigerator came in. Again, I guess that was pretty dorky. Somewhere I have the picture he sent me of it. If I get it scanned, I'll let you judge for yourselves.) Anyway, this long distance friendship carried into our twenties, and the dawn of emailing, and somewhere around that time we lost touch. And watching Star Wars the other night all smashed on Neo Citran made me think about Jason again and wonder what became of him. I'm pretty sure that at some point I tried mailing something to his old address and never heard back, but that may be another hallucination. I do know that online searching has turned up exactly nothing about him or, as near as I can tell, his folks. He had a sister named Rachel, and I don't recall his parents' names. I think his father had worked for Grumman. So, if you know Jason, or are Jason, by all means drop me a line.

For anyone else who waded through this, as a little reward, here's a piece of All Time Quarterback, one of Ben Gbbard's many side projects from Death Cab. I first heard this song online a few years ago, and I liked it so much I bought the album, and you should too. You can get the album here. I see they also have another song linked there too.

All Time Quarterback! Plans Get Complex

Palms & Runes, Tarot & Tea

Just a quickie to say how thrilled I am with the Michael Penn compilation that's just come out (thanks sweetie!). Palms & Runes, Tarot & Tea (the line is taken from a voice over in I Can Tell, from Resigned) is a collection that Michael Penn was given the opportunity to choose, and now finds him back on a label. From everything I've read about him over the years, I know he's not had the best experience with them, and as such released his last album (Mr Hollywood Jr. 1947) on his own label, Mimeograph Records, part of United Musicians, the label he and Aimee Mann founded with their manager to fulfill what United Artists was for film actors back in the day. The liner notes are pretty interesting - he notes that the alternative cut of Try presented here was actually the idea of some "wing ding" at the label, but it turned out alright in the end. Material from all 5 albums is covered, and as he himself says, the goal was to create an album anew, as opposed to a boring chronological a to z thing. Long Way Down, I may have preferred the album version; the singing was a little more visceral, but the sound has improved. This may be simply because until recently I only had Free For All on cassette - found it at Sam the Record Man last month for $5! - but Coal shines out. Lucky One and Don't Let Me Go come from MP4, an album I somehow missed all together, and they form a wonderful entry. I'll be ordering that one soon.


Here is Michael's video for Walter Reed, the first track off Mr Hollywood Jr, which also makes an appearance on Palms & Runes...




You can find Palms & Runes, Tarot & Tea at Amazon here.

Shop smart. Shop S-Mart.

Well, H and I had the best freaking time you can possibly have out at the theatre the other night, at Evil Dead: The Musical. We don't go to see regular productions. You're not going to find us at Les Miserables or Mamma Mia or even the ultimate Andrew Lloyd Weber craptacular Phantom of the Opera (easily the most hackneyed romance ever perpetuated on stage) but wait, I'm not talking about that crap. Start over.

So, as I was saying, we're into the weird stuff. Let's do a quick recap of the previous two shows we went to:

Lord of the Rings: The Musical. This was, unfortunately, not especially good. There was a reason Peter Jackson spread it over 3 movies, and even then could not cover everything from the books. So, cut the running time by 75%, add singing and dancing, and then cast this alleged actor as Gandalf (the man's delivery of lines makes William Shatner into Olivier). What do you get? A right mess. On the plus side, the effects were fantastic. Hobbits they got right. The Balrog, well, that was a lot of flashing lights and smoke effects. The spider was cool. The music? All instantly forgettable. I really wanted to like it, I really did. I see that the London edition is about to open, perhaps they have improved it. I know that they've cut some characters, and they also very wisely did not bring Brent Carver along. They did bring Michael Therriault, Toronto's Gollum, which is also wise, as he was hands down the strongest performer in it. Best of luck to them.

Edward Scissorhands. This turned out not be so much a musical as interpretive dance. No, really. But it was not all that bad, either. The story was tricky to follow, a) if you had not seen the film, as there is no dialogue at all, nor are there lyrics to any of the pieces of music, and b) even if you had, elements of the film are in some cases changed or skipped, and other events and details are added. Again, some of the techniques used for scene staging and props are cleverly done, and the music is largely taken from Danny Elfman's contributions to the original film, so you get what you expect. This only played in Toronto for a few days on a tour, so who knows where it is now.

I'm still glad that I saw those two productions, though. While the former did not live up to my expectations, and while my expectations for the latter were simply wrong, I got exactly what I wanted, and then some, with Evil Dead. We had seen it before, in the summer of 2003, when it was still in its early ghetto version with cardboard props at the Tranzac Club in the Annex. Even then, lineups went down the street. But even then the basis was there, the crazy campy songs, the purposely cliched dialogue, in some parts from the movies, in others new. We've been looking forward ever since for the eventual return of the show, after its Montreal and New York runs, with the promised better and bigger production, and Friday night we went to see it.

Well, they've put the money in exactly the right places. They've now got lighting and better sound than before, they may have spent some of it on better actors on the female side, but the originals weren't that bad to begin with. I only mention the women, because Ash is still, as he has since the beginning, being played by Ryan Ward, who does a fantastic job. His best bud in the first act, Scott, is still played by Matt Olmstead, who is drop dead (sorry) funny. They also seem to have increased the budget for blood - a highlight now is that the first 2 or 3 rows are designated as a "splatter zone". Most people seated there wore white t-shirts to better show off the carnage. The worst we got was the woman next to H lost track of her beer in the dark and dumped it into H's lap - didn't apologize either, just handed her a napkin. (What a stupid bitch, as Scott would say.) The show is deliberately campy and messy, and as such, succeeds where those other shows failed. It knows exactly what to deliver and how best to do so, and it even gives you songs to take away in your head - "Cabin in the Woods", is certainly a toe-tapper, although I think we are both partial to the tango stylings of "What the Fuck was That?", and you haven't lived until you've seen Ash sing "Die" while cutting off his girlfriend's head with a chainsaw and trying to sing through a mouthful of blood. You really haven't. See it. See it now.