Having vanquished both the Kurgan and General Katana, Harrison Ford has absorbed the energy from the Quickening to finally become the Last Immortal. Thankfully he’s taking his many wives and daughters and returning to Zeist where he’ll never ever (fingers crossed) bother us again.
Baby, can you hear me now? The chains are locked and tied across the door. Baby, sing with me somehow. Blue, blue windows behind the stars. Yellow moon on the rise. Big birds flying across the sky, throwing shadows on our eyes. Leave us hapless, hapless, hapless.
Okay, so that’s a bastardization of a great Neil Young song, but I can’t help feeling that Robin Allen’s Hapland is located in north Ontario. In an area with dream comfort memory to spare.
I love games like this. You just keep clicking until you find the right combination that allows you to keep exploring. It’s like a visualization of all the interactive fiction computer games I used to play when I was younger, like Zork and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
There are a bunch of great ones out there, like Jakub Dvorsky’s Samorost and The Polyphonic Spree’s Quest for the Rest, and also the stuff on Vector Park. But today I’m wasting my time on Hapland 3.
Feeling hapless, hapless, hapless.
A few years after college, when I was young and stupid, I used to wait tables at Blueberry Hill in the U-City Loop near Wash U’s campus in Saint Louis. In those days, we drank for free while we were on the clock and drank for half price when we weren’t, so I’d entertain myself during long shifts by drinking as much as I could and playing the same songs over and over again on the jukebox.
The jukebox was filled with hundreds of great tracks, but I had a few standbys that always managed to get me going and annoy the living hell out of the rest of the staff. They were, in no particular order, Someday by Creedence Clearwater Revival, Sundown by Gordon Lightfoot, Running Bear by Billy Preston, and I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail by Buck Owens. The last two were particularly successful in driving my co-workers up a wall because within moments of the opening beats, everyone knew what song was playing.
I’ve…..got….a…. tiger by the tail, it’s plain to see.
I won’t be much when you get through with me.
By the end of my tenure there, they had instituted a kill switch for the jukebox and eighty-sixed the free drinks policy altogether.
Buck Owens died Saturday at the age of 76.
While I can’t forget his turn hosting Hee-Haw, and I’ll remember him for the sound he pioneered, I’ll remember him most for the joy that he gave while I worked at Blueberry Hill.
Thanks, Buck. I’ll miss you.
- Listen to I’ve Got A Tiger By The Tail
- Listen to Big in Vegas
How does Jack Bauer do it? How does he stay so alert yet so calm in the face of danger? Shots of Kopi Luwak? Cold showers? Foxy? Volcanic bong hits?!!
Nah, man. It’s the Kleptones. That earpiece he’s always got in? That’s not for talking to Chloe back at CTU. Those are earbuds and they’re for jamming out to 24 Hours.
The masters of the mash-up [A Night At The Hip-Hopera, Yoshimi Battles The Hip-Hop Robots] have returned with a 2-disc narrative spanning roughly the same amount of time it will take Jack to return from the dead, stop the Russian terrorists and repair his relationship with his estranged daughter. Initial Highlights Disc 1: 1150 Closer to the Boxer, 1800 War of Confusion.
Tracks and torrents are available the Kleptones site, and there’s also a video for the nine o’clock hour, 0900 Daft Purple.
Since Daft Purple samples Thomas Bangalter and Roy Davis, Jr.’s Rock Shock, here’s withoutsound (((friend))) Joel Lava’s video for the original track.
Last week’s discussion of religion and its place in art (On a Mission from God) and the resulting conversation about Jeff Mangum has had me listening to a lot of Neutral Milk Hotel the past few days. While trying to uncover exactly what Mangum is up to these days (still searching), I stumbled across a tribute album to NMH, Each Song A Little More Than We Could Dare To Try.
I must admit that I have a love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with tribute albums because more often than not they are sprawling, discordant catastrophes, that barely serve the original material.
Why does this happen? Well, the other day I was talking with a friend of mine who plays in a number of bands and he told me about a tribute album to The Birthday Party he worked on. He and the band were already recording in the studio when they were asked to record a track for Release the Bats (due out April 4th on Three One G). They listened to the original once, parsed out the different parts of the song, and then recorded it in one take. I’m not implying that everyone takes this approach when recording for a tribute album, but it wouldn’t surprise me based on the usual results.
But Tribute albums can, on the very rarest of occasions, not only serve the source material, but also offer new insight into the songs. Such is the case , I believe, with Each Song A Little More Than We Could Dare To Try.
Recorded in 2003 by a group of Neutral Milk Hotel fans from the message board on the Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang, the album is an affectionate song-by-song reconstruction of Mangum’s acclaimed In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. The original album is like a drive up the coast of Northern California on a beautiful, clear day when you feel like you can see all the way across the Pacific to Japan. But then the fog rolls 
in and you have absolutely no idea where you’re headed, much less whether you are about to drive off a cliff into the ocean. Each Song is far from being a polished portrait, but it does expand these moments of lucidity and ambiguity. The end result feels like the end of Wim Wenders’ rambling, cyberpunk epic Until the End of the World, a waking dream.
You can download the individual tracks from San Diego Serenade, or download a zip file of the album from RapidShare.