PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Space Oddity vs White and Nerdy

 

That's the opening picture to Crimso Giger's Space Oddity MOC for the MocOlympics. I really like the yellow truck for some reason and that blue building is pretty cool too. Crimso and Chad have blasted up the ladder to round 5. The boys are working  in the Play It Again, Sam catagory. It's illustrating a song. Crimso picked a classic by David Bowie and I think he really knocked it out of the park. He's got some tough competition in Chas, who picked White and Nerdy by Weird Al. 

 

That shot of the rocket and the tin can Major Tom is floating in are just a couple of the great pictures Crimso has created in his MOC. Hope you enjoy the rest of the song if you stop over at MOCpages.

 

Chas has even more pictures than Crimso for his illustrated version of Weird Al's White and Nerdy and some of them are fun to look at. I always like those little dragons and that red and blue wall just buzzes. Or maybe that's the residual cold that I still have. I might need to go to bed soon. 

 

I like that orange chair and the Segway. Both of the guys are at the top of their game and the judges are going to have a tough time picking a winner.

The Band - SNL 10/30/76

I might have mentioned in the past that I hardly listen to bands anymore. It's been an on going thing. Sometime years ago I switched to soundtracks because I didn't want to buy anymore albums that had one good song and some other stuff I didn't like. If I listen to some band nowadays it's usually something from the 70's. It has a time weighted familiarity that I find comforting. As one event often leads to another, my purchasing the Saturday Night Live dvd's lead me to watching them, and that action lead me to The Band. I used to listen to them, ages ago, but I never kept their albums. As I moved around stuff fell by the wayside, lost but not always forgotten. My record collection grew by the hundreds to over 2500 at it's peak. Now I have an arm load of records that I never managed to shake off, and a record player in a box somewhere in the basement. There are some hundreds of records down there. They aren't mine and that's another whole long story, maybe for another day. Hopefully they are going away soon.

I watched the first season of SNL about a month ago. I have mixed feelings about the show. It's not as funny as it was when I saw it for the first time. It's probably me, but really, some jokes aren't funny, and some don't need repeated telling. I laughed at some of the things that were funny, and skipped through the odd thing that went on too long. Still in all I wasn't sad to spend 20 bucks on 20 odd hours of mostly good tv. I skipped through many of the musical acts. James Taylor wasn't a guy I listened to back them. Too mellow. That's all I'll say.

I started the second season over the weekend and tonight I listened to the episode with The Band. Buck Henry introduced them and mentioned they would be performing their last show on Thanksgiving. It was a month later that they shot the ledgendary Martin Scorsese documentary The Last Waltz at the Winterland Ballroom. The show was November 25, 1976 and the movie came out in early 1978. It's a great movie and a great concert. Certainly one of the best you can find. The Talking Heads would later push it's way to the top of the heap of great concert films with Stop Making Sense. My best friend at the time picked up tickets to see David Bryne and Jonathan Demme host a screening of the movie just before it was released. That was a cool evening. I did see The Last Waltz in the theater and I bought the three record set of the music. The records are long gone and I never bought the DVD though I did record the movie off TCM a while back.

The Band did three songs on SNL that night on October 30, Life is a Carnival, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, and Stage Fright. It was a really great set, short at 10 minutes, but long for even late night tv. They did a nice version of Georgia near the end of the show. Stage Fright is my favorite song of the bunch but Dixie always makes me whistle and sing along. It's so joyous for such a sad song. I linked to some others for fun. Cripple Creek, The Shape I'm In, The Weight. It was Cripple Creek that sold me on the band and made me seek out what ever record it was on. I bought all their albums eventally, then sold them when I moved to the US. Occasionally some blast from the past pops up, like The Band on Saturday Night Live, that reminds me how much I used to enjoy it. Luckily, some of the best of it still holds that old magic.

The Clash on Tomorrow with Tom Snyder - 1981

I was checking out the link to Tommy Gun by The Clash, just to hear it again, and if you know YouTube, you know there's always some other links lyin' around the page, waiting to lure you. I notice one for what turned out to be a pretty good version of Magnificent Seven. It's a 1981 appearance on Tomorrow with Tom Snyder. The sound is okay enough but I really dug the band's preformance. I might have seen that episode of the show. I watched Tom then, but not everyday.  I certainly would have watched it if I knew The Clash were going to be on. I heard The Clash everywhere I went back in the late 70's and early 80's. Everyone I knew played them, along with so much other new wave and punk stuff. That was the crowd I hung about with. I was also equally interested in seeing Tom interview The Clash. I liked the interview, but I liked Tom much of the time. The Clash aren't the best guests, not too chatty, but it's a pretty good bit. They follow that with Radio Clash. Nice that someone kept that and stuck it out on YouTube.

Paths to Glory

I was home for the afternoon, taking a half day of vacation, eatin' my Subway sandwich and reading MSNBC for some news and yakkin'. There was a link on the MSNBC front page that lead me to a Newsweek article asking if we are in a narcissism epidemic. Turns out a new books thinks we are.  Let's hope that turns out better in the future. On that page I noticed this head line over at Slate. "Meghan McCain on Karl Rove: Creepy" Who wouldn't like that headline. McCain is John McCain's daughter. He's the guy who ran for President, maybe you remember him. That same writer on Slate had a bit on Susan Boyle and her appearance on Britians Got Talent. It was pretty amazing. I had tears in my eyes for too many reasons to count.

There was a headline on this guy on MSNBC. It said the CIA waterboarded this guy 183 times. You'd think he'd be cleaner looking. I like the way the hair is creeping up over his shoulder. It's like it wants to take a look at what's going on at the front. Not much, someone's puttin' your ass in jail.

Shape of Things to Come

 

For some reason that touch of The Yardbirds made me dig about YouTube looking for some old songs I liked in the 70's. I don't have them on cd for the most part and don't hardly listen to cd's anyway. Occasionally some of these songs turn up in my web browser. YouTube has been a great place to hear some amazing blasts from the past. There is software that lets you convert the streaming video into files you can keep and store for replay but I haven't explored that yet. I have enough crap to do as it is. Today I didn't feel like doing much after I got home from work. I'm still running at slow speed because of the cold that I have had. Most of the symptoms are gone but I'm sleepin' more than usual. I was hopin' as I got older that what they say about old people needing less sleep were going to be true. It doesn't seem the case so far. I guess I have to get older to live my dream and have more waking hours.

I started diggin' around on YouTube because I wanted to hear Train Kept a Rollin' again. I just dig that song. Some versions have Jimmy Page on guitar. He went on to Led Zepplin after The Yardbirds. LZ is not a band I listen to anymore. Heard it enough when I was young. I played Houses of the Holy hundereds of times, but haven't listened to it in over 20 years.

Maybe it's nostalgia but I did enjoy hearing The Yardbirds and that lead me to Max Frost and the Troopers. Every hear of them? No? Not surprizing, they didn't exist, except in a movie. The band and the song came from the movie Wild In The Streets. It's not a great movie but it's certainly of it's time. 1968. I heard Julian Bond on MPR today talking about the 1968 Election season in the United States. That was some fucked up shit that year.

Max's song Shape of Thing to Come has been a favorite since I had the single. That was about 1970 or '71. The guitar is great and the drumming makes me want to pound on something. I had a friend years ago who had to air drum when he heard certain songs. That's this song for me. Train Kept a Rollin' is the same way. Early blues rock was pretty primal and certainly all new and exciting. There's a version from the movie here, and a fancy video here.

I Had To Much To Dream Last Night by The Electric Prunes comes in two length's. 3 minute and 7 minute. That some how led me to the Strawberry Alarm Clock and their classic Incense and Peppermints. There was a link to Donovan's Wear Your Love Like Heaven. I haven't heard that in decades I bet. Then there was a link to The Classics IV - Stormy and Spooky. Dusty Springfield did a cover of Spooky. Sopwith Camel - Hello Hello. The Seeds - Pushin' Too Hard. The Music Machine - Talk Talk. Arthur Brown - Fire. Johnny Cash - Ring Of Fire. Now I'm gettin' off the beam.

Tales of the Rat Fink

Greg lent me a copy of Tales of the Rat Fink. It's a documentary about Ed "Big Daddy" Roth. If you were me, you'd know who that is, and you would have had a flirtation with the car scene as a teen and young adult. Then you would have moved on to something new. Something always falls by the wayside as you move forward into the future. It does for me. Every now and again you get to revisit some aspect of the past in a nicely packaged media presentation. Here's one of those times. This 2006 documentary by Canadian Ron Mann is very Ken Burns like, being told mostly through old photographs and film clips. In between are bits of wildly colored animation and shots of the cars as they are today. John Goodman provides the voice of "Big Daddy" and several others, like Dick and Tommy Smothers, "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, Tom Wolfe, Robert Williams, Matt Groening, Paul LeMat, Jay Leno, Ann-Margaret, Billy Gibbons of ZZTop, and Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys all provide voices for the cars that Roth designed and built. It was those cars that I was interested in. As a model builder in the 60's I built those Ed "Big Daddy" Roth kits with the crazy cars. I read CarToons magazine. It's that outlaw design that shaped my impressionable young mind. That Rat Fink was one crazy monster. The movie credits Roth's design influence that still lingers today. He's also credited as being the first guy to put images on t-shirts. That sure lingers on today. It's debatable, in my mind, if that was a good thing, you know, when all is said and done. Roth is done, he died in 2001, but his work lives on. Here are a couple of his kits.

 

 

I built those, and then probably blew them up in the alley. Or chopped them up and made other cars out of them. At some point I stopped model kit building, but it would resurface later on when I went through my robot phase in the 80's. LEGO is model building, just no glue. Roth built the cars from fiberglass, shaped by hand and mind. No one had seen anything like it. Hit of the car shows. Money made from modeling built more cars. Then it was over, kids weren't into cars anymore, at least not in the numbers they were then. Sound familiar, tend of the decade, movin' on. It's a nice documentary about an interesting guy who added a nice touch to the color of the world. Who doesn't like Candy Apple Red. 

Simpsounds

Ummmm! Donuts! Is there anything they can't do? I miss those happy little rings of fat. I don't eat many anymore. The Mell-o-Glaze Bakery changed something in their donut mix a few years ago and I quit going. They aren't so good no more, and they doubled the price. They were cheap at 25 cents, that's for sure, and they would have been good at 50 cents if they hadn't changed the recipe. There aren't any good cake donuts around that I know about anymore. I don't go searching them out anyway. That's what I need, more fattening food. I can enjoy that donut vicariously when Homer eats one. Eat the hell out of that donut! That's what I'd yell at Homer. So, really, he's bringing me a double shot of goodness by making me laugh and saving me from eating that nasty donut. Good thing I don't care for Krispy Kreme. They are closing three of the four shops here in the Twin Cities and marketing their donuts through some gas stations and convience stores. Those donuts don't keep very well and eating six of them would make me sick. Versatile, that common donut.

   

Well, I don't know what got me going on about donuts, I was going to tell you about the three CD's I picked up last Sunday. I had that Target gift card burning a hole in my pocket. As you can guess I got these two CDs of music from The Simpsons. One from the TV show and one from the movie. See, another double shot of goodness. I didn't get the Donut version. I didn't see it, or I might have. I am a sucker for a gimmick. Sad for me, huh.

The Testify CD contains songs from the show. There's a bit of dialog bracketing the musical number. Most of the songs are by Alf Clausen. He done a lot of astounding music for the series and he's simply the greatest. He also did music for some tv shows, like ALF and Moonlighting, and the odd movie or ten. Occasionally the series has a guest star like Jackson Brown or Weird Al Yankovic come in and do a number. If you're a regular watcher and fan of the series, and I know I am, you might recognize some of these numbers. I barely did, not having seen some of the later seasons more than once. Can't wait to get them on DVD and see them. Even without pictures the songs are mostly fun and you can imagine what's going on. There's a wide variety of music types too. Rock, pop, some jazzy stuff, sentimental, parody or gag bits. A ton of variety with lots of nice art on the package.

The Simpsons Movie claims to be baked by Hans Zimmer. Like he could bake a cd. I've heard other Hans Zimmer scores. I couldn't tell you what they are off the top of my head. I enjoyed this score. It was fun and movie like. I still haven't seen the movie. I'm waitin' for the dvd to come out, and maybe get cheap. We'll see.

   

The Simpsons show has 4 other cds. Songs in the Key of Springfield came out in 1997 and Go Simpsonic with the Simpsons came out in 1999. Both have lots of short musical numbers from the show. Like Testify does. I love 'em to death, they have an uplifting quality that comes from good humor and satire. Sharing a joke is one of the basic necessities of life. That and donuts.

   

The other two are actual albums of regular songs. The Simpsons Sing the Blues really has the family doing blues numbers, old and new. I don't know if all the songs aired on or near the show. I remember seeing the Do The Bartman Video after a show one night. I've grown accostomed to these songs over the years. These 4 cds were favorites to play at the comic shop on a long sunday. People would always laugh and smile when these albums were playing. Just like I have been tonight. That's always a good thing. That and a donut.

Oh, yeah, that third CD was the score to the latest Harry Potter movie. This one is by Nicholas Hooper. I like it. It's much different from the scores that John Williams did. Fits the darker mood of the movie better. I can't imagine who's doing the music for the last film. It might almost be a horror thriller. I don't think there were any donuts in the movie. I have to watch the dvd very carefully and see. I won't wait for that to get cheaper.

Nice

Randy, this guy from Edmonton, had a post about complaint choirs on his blog. I never heard of them. So I looked at them. I would recommend checking them out. For many different reasons. Can you name some? I really enjoyed the one by some Helsinki school kids. They wrote their own complaint song. There's a Helsinki adults complaint choir video, and ones from Hamburg, Birmingham, and St Petersberg. If you like watching people singing, this is for you, lots of good faces to see. There are subtitles.

I thought the videos were cool and funny. I liked that the complaints were about things that were common to me here in Minneapolis. I think that complaining is something that people all over the world have in common. I think it's a good thing for people to get some idea as to what is going on somewhere else, other than, say, Iraq, so they can complain about more things. I feel a well informed public could complain their way to a better world. Just a pipe dream I have. Some of the compaints have the kind of cultural differences that you would expect from foreigners with ways different from our own, but I just found those fascinating.  I think YouTube is just great for that, bringing the world closer through video you can watch while you're home alone. Lets harness that power for good, not evil, huh.

Down below all the singing you can see Randy's band in a video they posted to YouTube. See if you like them.

American Jedi - A Teen Comedy

Outhouse Rag has a really fun 9 minute parody of American Pie and Star Wars. Obi Wan goes back to highschool. It made me laugh several times.

Hillbilly ruccus

The Cry-Baby dvd came out today. It's a director's cut with about 7 minutes more material. There's a commentary by John Waters, 7 minutes of deleted scenes, and a 47 minute making of featurette.  So, you know I'm in heaven. And all, without bein' dead...can't beat that. I watched the movie with the commentary on first. I have enjoyed the audio commentaries John Waters has done and this one was no exception. He's got a nice conversational monologue and he's filled with great stories. One of my favorites was when some police came to the set to arrest Traci Lords, the first reaction was "where can we hide her" and then everyone told her their stories about being arrested, and arrested for some pretty amazing things. They even have a club, one you only join after you've been arrested. I couldn't join, but that's a-ok with me, visiting jail to see Uncle G was enough. When the movie came to courtroom scene Waters said he had been in that court room before, but at the request of the city. Waters also talked about this movie being like an Elvis Presley movie and there is that bright 50's kind of look to it but it's the darker side of the king. Cigarette smokin' , french kissin', lascivious dancin', all mixed up with anger and rockabilly. Who don't like that. The featurette was nice, lots of fun comments and clips. Everybody always sounds like they had a lot of fun making the picture, and they all have so many nice things to say. The deleted scenes were the few things that didn't go into the movie for the director's cut and they were ok, nice to see them but I don't see rewatching them a whole bunch. What I did rewatch were several of the songs over and over. Not enough of them are marked as chapter stops. I like the rockabilly music, especially the last two numbers, Please, Mr. Jailer and High School Hellcats. Nice to see this.

Yesterday I got some more great twangy guitar music in the form of the score to Bubba Ho-tep. It sure is good, all moody and atmospheric. I listened to it three times yesterday and again tonight before I got to the Daily Show, which is now in their new studio. You can get a copy of the Bubba Ho-tep cd at the Bubba Ho-tep site, and it will be signed by Don Coscarelli and composer Brian Tyler. In a simular vein I'd recommend the scores to The Stand and John Carpenter's Vampires. I ordered the Cry-Baby soundtrack off of Amazon, it's still available, for a sawbuck. The soundtrack to Hairspray was only 7 bucks. I also have coming the Angel: Live Fast, Never Die - music from the series. Not any twangy guitar, I'm bettin', but I sure liked the music to the opening credits on that show. That was one sweet saxaphone. There is a new Angel comic out this last week and it starts off a five part series with a story that takes place after the last show of the last season. It dosn't explain what happened after the credits of the final show, it's a big fightfest as Angel battles an army of vampires in Romania on his quest to find the Kalderash Clan that put the curse on him. He wants them to remove it and he has a plan to get that. We'll see. The arts average, nothing too exciting. The writer Jeff Mariotte wrote a couple or three good Buffy and Angel novels.

The John Waters collection Very Crudely Yours also came out recently. There are 7 films and a bonus disc called the John Waters DVD Scrapbook. The films are A Dirty Shame (NC-17 Version), Desperate Living, Female Trouble, Hairspray, Pecker, Pink Flamingos, and Polyester.  The last six had been out in three two-disc sets three or four years ago. They were around for a bit then disappeared. If you bought all three and sent in a coupon you got the John Waters DVD Scrapbook. I am betting this is the same disc. It's a good collection.