Wild Beasts-Thankless Thing

There's a small movie theatre near my apartment that makes a bold claim on its marquee. In huge block letters it says, "WORLD'S BEST POPCORN." I'm sure I've had their popcorn at some point in time, but I don't even know if I'd recognize the world's best popcorn if I tasted it. Popcorn is popcorn. Amirite?

But that is not what is important about this marquee. The first time I noticed this pronouncement was when the movie Shame was playing there. So the marquee read, "WORLD'S BEST POPCORN" in huge letters, and centered underneath it, in equally bold type, it said "SHAME." For some reason I cracked up every time I saw it. I think I might be easily amused.

So last night I'm driving by the theatre, and for the first time in a while there's a different movie playing! This time, under "WORLD'S BEST POPCORN" it reads "CARNAGE." At this point I'm feeling like whoever books the movies at this place does so simply to play off the popcorn proclamation on the marquee. It's just too perfect. Below I will detail the scenarios these two movie marquees conjure up in my mind.

WORLD'S BEST POPCORN: SHAME

Oh man, I can't believe I actually came to this film alone. I never do this. Maybe if I slouch down in the seat nobody will notice. Or if I constantly look around expectantly until they dim the lights, people will just assume that I'm waiting for someone... Damn, that popcorn looks good. Do I get the large? No, I can't get the large. That's just weird. Walking to my seat alone with this gigantic tub of popcorn. And I know I'll get the butter topping. I always get the butter topping...

-in seat- Sh*t. Here I am. Just me, this potentially inappropriate NC-17 indie flick, and a fat*ss tub of popcorn. I have officially passed the point of no return. When are they gonna dim these g***amn lights?!

WORLD'S BEST POPCORN: CARNAGE

Ooooh, this movie looks good. A good old-fashioned drama. I'm ready to watch some people suffer. Not suffer suffer, you know. First-world problems suffer. Sprinkle in some passive aggressive, throw in a dash of long-held grudges and petty jealousies, and pretty soon you have a room of white people freaking out on each other! Good times. Hmmmm... I need something to snack on while I watch this prize fight. Sno Caps? A vastly underrated candy, but I'm just not in the mood. Haagen Dazs bar? I feel like that's kind of a loser snack at the movies. It'll probably fall off the stick halfway through, and it'll serve me right for extending my menu past the classic film fare. I'll just go with the old reliable: popcorn.

I love indie movie trailers. I get to get excited about films that will probably only be shown in New York and Los Angeles for the next six months. Mmmm... this one looks good. I can soooo handle subtitles. Wow, this popcorn is good. Even the unpopped kernels are tasty! Does Sony Pictures Classics make every one of these movies? Do they make any money? Do they just hit up the Playstation guys for loans all the time? Mmmmm... tasty. This popcorn rules. The butter sludge is so evenly distributed throughout the tub. Yuuuuummmm. Ooooh! It's a new Audrey Tatou film! Is she ever gonna age? Is she just gonna morph into Juliette Binoche in the middle of one of her movies? Damn! No more popcorn. The movie hasn't even started yet. Fail.


(This Wild Beasts song is beautiful. I haven't heard much of their stuff, but this is a gem. Wow.)

Games-Strawberry Skies/ Oneohtrix Point Never-Sleep Dealer

Here's a partial glimpse of my ever-expanding list of people that suck:

-The guy at the bar for the big game that is so incessantly loud that he makes me want to stop cheering. I'm into it, but when he starts a "DEE-FENSE!" chant during halftime I want to turn around and smack him. He's the one that you just know will start a fight with anyone wearing the opposing team's jersey. I would imagine that his life outside of the bar amounts to approximately sixty hours a week loading sacks of beef jerky onto an eighteen-wheeler. This is as good as it gets.

-The really slow driver that is completely unaware of anything that is going on around him. I'm driving behind him on a city street, and he brakes in front of seven consecutive driveways because he's just not sure where he's going. If you're not capable of counting by two and figuring out the approximate location of your destination, you are not allowed on my roads.

-This one is pretty standard, but the guy on the cell phone in a public place is a big one for me. Especially if it's a sit-down restaurant. The other night this middle-aged man was talking on his phone for twenty-five minutes while we were sitting approximately one foot away from him. Of course this conversation entailed lurid family details about Bethany finally getting up the nerve to leave Frank due to his performance issues in the bedroom. Now I've pretty much accepted that some of the "younger generation" doesn't consider privacy or tact to be a huge priority, but this guy was fifty. I actually said something. I never do that.

-The person who works in any sort of service job and is a total **** to people. For the record, I got a job waiting tables once. I quit after one day. Why, you ask? Because I realized that it wasn't the job for me. I realized that the first person to talk down to me was going to get a platter of beef stroganoff in their grill. It just wasn't my thing. Now if you choose to work in customer service, you make a conscious decision to put up with annoying people. Goes with the territory. If you don't like it, go get a job with the beef jerky loader.

I've already posted about Ford & Lopatin. I still love that album. Well, before these two fellows were called Ford & Lopatin they were called Games. I really love the song "Strawberry Skies." Great vocals and production. 2:17 is bliss. Now this Lopatin fellow also has another project called Oneohtrix Point Never. It's much darker sounding, but also very good. Tweaked video. The Games one is great, too.

Kurt Vile-Jesus Fever

So what do you do for a living?

I'm a high school English teacher.

Oooooh. Sorry. That must be rough. I could NEVER do that.

Ummmm... well... it's actually-

I REALLY respect you guys. I mean I could never do it, but God bless you guys!

Uhh... thanks? But it's actually a really fu-

I mean I would NEVER have the patience to deal with all those annoying teenagers. Ugh. I mean, just spending an hour with my niece is enough. Don't you ever get tired of dealing with them?

Well, actually they're a lot of-

And the pay?! How do you even live out here?

Well, surprisingly, the pay's actually pretty-

Do they have some sort of special teacher housing in the outskirts of South San Francisco or something? Wow, I really respect you guys. WOW.

Yeah, uh thanks! So what do you do?

I do IT for a bank.

HOT BAR: Eddie Money-Shakin'; Billy Squier-The Stroke; Michael Jackson-Dirty Diana; Tina Turner-Private Dancer (live, with multiple awkward solos)

I walk into Whole Foods thinking to myself, "Why am I in Whole Foods? I'm no California granola willing to pay exorbitant prices for grass-fed free-range left-leaning Stanford-educated goat cheese." But I know why I'm here. Because it's a block from my apartment. Because while I hate shopping, I also know that the three quarter-full half gallons of milk in my fridge resemble water samples from the Dagobah System. So I venture in, knowing I'm going to be assaulted by North Face jackets and people in better shape than I am. But I soldier on.

I'm really hungry. And I'm feeling especially edgy today. I don't know if I can brave a full twelve minute shop. F*CK IT, I'LL JUST GET HOT BAR. That's another problem with Whole Foods. As soon as I muster up the courage to do a food shop, I walk in and hot bar stares me in the face. The steam seems to coo at me, "Shaaaaane. You don't reeeeeeally want to boil that water for another meal of tortellini, do you? That's so boring! And frankly, we both know that that's the best case scenario. You'll probably end up throwing an over-priced frozen dinner into your sad little microwave oven, won't you? Wouldn't you rather have meeeee? There's a turkey leg the size of Turkey with your name on it over here. And a greasy pile of macaroni & cheese with that crusty topping you love so much. And look over there! Some vegetables you can throw in to convince yourself that your diet isn't the nutritional equivalent of a heroin addiction. Cooooooome to meeeeeeeeee."

I try to avert my gaze, knowing that one torrid night spent with hot bar is just that: one night. Nobody ever does hot bar leftovers. It just doesn't work. I got this far, I might as well set myself up for the week, right? RIGHT? WROOOOOOONG. There is no escaping hot bar. With a mixture of excitement and despair, I put back my cart and head over to hot bar.

Hot bar always costs at least five dollars more than I anticipate. I put what I think are normal portions into my recyclable container, and somehow my hot bar purchase still adds up to eighteen dollars. That's where the shame starts creeping in. Then I go home and eat, and I realize where that eighteen dollars came from. It's too much food. But I can't stop. It tastes good, and hot bar leftovers are a no no. By the time I'm done with hot bar I have no food for the rest of the week, and I feel so fat and disgusting that I have to take a cold shower to try to wash away the shame.

Every once in a while a song will come on that makes me feel hot bar. It's just slimy. If hot bar was a person, it'd be a smug, middle-aged, slightly rotund man named Fred that makes a good living selling insurance, and wants everyone to know about it. Fred drives a Thunderbird, and likes to fancy himself a ladies man. People kinda hate Fred. The following YouTubes are the songs Fred listens to in his Thunderbird.

Eddie Money is so hot bar. Kinda good hot bar, but still hot bar. He's probably in a dive bar in the Keys right now, hitting on some fifty-seven-year-old lady with leathery skin and a bad boob job.



Classic hot bar. This guy will still be wearing male-camel-toe pants when he's in a nursing home. So uncomfortable. He probably gets really drunk and obnoxious at Squier family reunions. "UH OH. UNCLE BILLY GOT INTO THE TEQUILLA AGAIN."



I was seriously traumatized when this video came out. Uh, Mike? Who's this "Dirty Diana" you speak of? Who have you been hanging out with lately? Come home, Mike. Please.



Tina has always been a trailblazer, and with "Private Dancer," she once again broke new ground for women. That new ground was hot bar. This song came out when I was seven, and I just didn't get it. Is Tina saying she's gonna be a stripper? Why would she write a song about it? Whaaaaa? Add to it a live performance featuring a steamy sax scene with our hero Tim Capello, and this song's got hot bar written all over it. I think the concert promoters gave out gift baskets with Viagra samples at this show.

Pink Floyd-Sheep/Led Zeppelin-Traveling Riverside Blues; How Many More Times/The Doors-Strange Days

I finished the last section of Let's Talk About Love: A Journey To The End of Taste, and I took some interesting points from it. One main one is this: musical discourse might be more open and "democratic" if we have conversations that are less about whether or not our musical taste is better or worse than other people's. If the conversation is framed more in terms of, "Wow, we have completely opposite musical taste. I wonder what in our backgrounds lead to that?" it might result in more engaging, and less dismissive and misguidedly pretentious dialogue. After all, one man's Meat(loaf) is another man's Poison. (groan?)

This all sounds so lovey-dovey, group therapy-ish that I could almost puke (say that last line in a Holden voice), and I don't expect to turn into some kind of weirdo music socialist ( ;) ), but it made me reflect back on the origins and shaping of my musical taste. A somewhat recent influence arose around the year 2000, when I started going (borderline living) on the internet and researching music through various methods, such as discussion boards, reading about bands or albums, and downloading all sorts of music. But if I really go back to the beginning, I'll probably find myself in a cluttered basement in Westhampton, New York.

Before the age of eight or so, my experiences with music were limited to Kasey Kasem's top 40 on the radio, and Solid Gold, the weekly top 40 program, on the television. My Dad gets about seventy-five gold stars for liking Prince, but other than that our music-related conversations were something along the lines of, "Dad, why is Crystal Gayle's hair so long? Does she trip on it? Is it used for Rapunzel purposes?" We watched whoever happened to be on that week, be it Kool & the Gang, Laura Branigan, or Hall & Oates.

My step-brothers were the ones that introduced me to the concept of obsessing about bands and listening to more than just the songs that happened to be playing on the radio at the time. When I would come over to their house, I would inevitably end up in the basement, a young boy's wonderland that consisted of a pool table, a dart board, and a foosball table. They were about eight years older than me, so of course I thought they were way cool. When Robert Plant started braying over the stereo about squeezing lemons (a pretty bizarre metaphor in retrospect), and Roger Waters started moaning about "one of [his] turns coming on," I was immediately hooked. Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and The Doors were of course fm staples, but my brothers fostered in me a maniacal love in these bands that has since filtered over into other groups like Radiohead, The Beatles, and Brian Eno. The latter artists have more "music nerd" cache to them, but most people don't even know who the hell Brian Eno is, much less get to hear his music (which is kind of a bummer, cause it's not all as out there as some people assume).

I'll start with Pink Floyd. It's much "cooler" to be into Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd. It's more artsy sounding, less bloated, and seems to take itself less seriously. And Barrett totally lost his sh*t on acid and went crazy, which is mega cool!!!! Don't get me wrong, I definitely enjoy Piper At the Gates of Dawn and some other Syd Barrett stuff, but i definitely have much more of a connection to Roger Waters-era Pink Floyd. Sure, some of the lyrics are insufferable, and some of David Gilmour's guitar solos are about as emotive as aluminum siding, but there are still a bunch of great songs. And the memories each of these songs conjure up are endless. Take the song "Sheep" from the album Animals (my favorite PF album). I love the plaintive intro, then the way Water's vocals are eaten alive at the end of each line by the synths and the raging guitars. The surprisingly unrestrained guitar solo at the end is also perfectly in line with the lyrics.

My step-brothers and I knew ever Zeppelin song by heart. Well, almost. I butchered some lines, and never heard the end of it. "IIIIIIIIII'm not trying to find it" from "Misty Mountain Hop" somehow turned into "llllllllaaaaaaaaaatrafayeeeeeeeeeh." Phonetically it almost worked. Needless to say, we loved Zeppelin, and when we heard that there were going to be two non-album tracks on the then-new box set, it was almost too exciting to handle. When those two songs turned out to be "Traveling Riverside Blues" and "Hey Hey What Can I Do," our seemingly unrealistic expectations were exceeded. Two great songs, one a rollicking blues rocker (I had to say that corny phrase once in my life), and the other a sad acoustic number about a guy that's... uh, dating a prostitute? The naivety of youth made me think they were just arguing over cereal preference or something. To this day I don't really look too deeply into Plant's lyrics (good thing-cause most of them, "TRB" for one, aren't even his.) I left out the "HHWCID" YouTube and threw in "How Many More Times," because it's my favorite Zeppelin song. It's just monstrous. I don't care if the section from 6:38 to the end of the song is the most c*ck-rock, over-the-top thing ever, it still rules. And John Paul Jones, ever the underrated Led Zeppelin member, anchors the whole song with his rolling bass line.

"Strange Days" is probably my favorite Doors song. I can't really escape the fact that Morrison's lyrics are really corny, but the bass playing in this song is awesome. At 2:04 it sounds like there's psychotic rubber bands flying all over the place. Not quite sure what's up with this video, though. MIDGETS AND JUGGLERS ARE STRANGE! And then there's Ray Manzarek walking behind them, who's about as strange as a public accountant shopping at Best Buy. Anyway, the imagery in this video is as bang-you-over-the-head as many of Morrison's lyrics. Oh, wait. Am I lapsing back into music snob mode? NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Jim Morrison is a talented musician with many things to offer a diversified modern audience. Gosh darn it, I like him!