P.S., Tell Owen to Bring His Bongos

"Sparrow Aviation Administration Blames Collision On Failure To Detect Pane Of Glass." I can't think of any better way to bring out the undercurrent of redonkulousness inherent to the months I spent getting up before dawn last fall to monitor with the CBCM than with this article from The Onion (via). Classic. The graphics are outstanding.

That's Dyer pride, bitches. Get shot at, shrug it off, continue on your drive to Michigan. Hometown, represent!

Steely Dan's "Peg" has to be one of the most perfect songs I can think of, so I was pleased as punch when Stereogum pointed me in the direction of this short making-of video. Minute after minute of brilliance, from Rick Marotta discussing how he got that spine-tinglingly perfect cymbal sound to Becker and Fagen openly sneering at guitar solo outtakes. Also, be sure to head over to Steely's web headquarters and read their bloody brilliantly funny open letter (also via the 'Gum) to Luke Wilson, asking him to convince Owen to publicly apologize at one of their concerts for stealing the plot idea for You, Me, and Dupree (serial comma, bitches) from their song "Cousin Dupree." If you don't immediately start giggling at the opening (all caps) salvo, "OPEN LETTER TO THE GREAT COMIC ACTOR, LUKE WILSON," you might be a little bit dead inside.

I'm Getting Tired Of...The Banjo

"When you are listening to a rock & roll song the way you listen to 'Jumping Jack Flash,' or something similar, that's the way you should really spend your whole life. That's how you should be all the time: just grooving to something simple, something basically good, something effective and something not too big. That's what life is. Rock & roll is one of the keys of the many, many keys to a very complex life. Don't get fucked up with all the many keys. Groove to rock & roll and then you'll probably find one of the best keys of all." --Pete Townshend

I grew up reading Rolling Stone thanks to my father's general addiction to periodicals and inability to throw anything away, and, though its cultural relevance is only a cold, pale shadow of what it once was, I recently opted to receive a few free issues through a special deal that came with my subscription to Salon. Lucky me, I was just in time to receive the big 1000th issue, which you may or may not have seen screaming at you on newsstands in lurid, holographic 3D. I feared that its bulk and overly glossy packaging would make me want to puke with its self-importance and self-referentiality, but it's actually really stellar. I spent a good portion of the weekend devouring it. There are the predictable contributions from Jann Wenner, Cameron Crowe, and Greil Marcus (who cites the above Pete Townshend quote from the eighteenth issue of the magazine in 1968 in his longish piece on RS's early years), but there's also some extremely enjoyable guest essays, perhaps my favorite of which is Bret Easton Ellis's meditation on Tom Cruise's appearance on the cover in 1990 (Days of Thunder era). Referencing the scene in American Psycho when Patrick Bateman shares an elevator ride with Cruise, Ellis writes, hilariously, "I keep thinking about that scene in the elevator in American Psycho and how different it would be played today. Would Bateman, the man also obsessed with appearances, either see a kindred soul or--after witnessing the couch-jumping, the hectoring on the Today show, Scientology, the thing called Vanilla Sky--quietly back away and hope to go unnoticed?"

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's a beautiful essay about the famous photograph of John and Yoko taken on the day of his death (writer Scott Spencer ruminates, "Remembering Lennon's boyish boast about the Beatles' being more popular than Jesus, and seeing again the profound artistic sympathy with which Leibovitz composed this last portrait of him, we realize: Here is our Pietà") and many in-their-prime photos of some of the sexiest motherfuckers ever to have worked in popular music. I'm thinking here specifically of this shot of Mick & Keith and this shot of Bowie paying intentional homage to James Dean. Yes, yes. As Giddy once famously said of me, in jest (somewhat), on her Friendster page, I like magazines.

In Eddie Izzard voice: We've got suits of babies! We've got babies on suits!

Did everybody read the Fork's looong interview with Sufjan today? I nearly fell out of my chair when I read that part about his "small obsession with birds" ("I think I might have gone a little overboard, because I have three field guides, I'm saving up for a pair of binoculars, and I want to buy the elephant folio book of Audubon prints of birds of North America. So I've probably invested a little too much time in this"). Sure, sure, on the surface it looks like it can just be chalked up to all the research he did to write the "Lord God Bird" song for NPR, but the Wrestling Entropy family knows better--there must have been some weird voodoo going on with the avian-themed packaging Chris conceived for my 2005 year-end mix and the inclusion of "Chicago" thereon. (Just like when Ben Folds and Neil Hannon went on tour together a few years ago, and CTLA claimed I magically made it happen by rubbing their albums together in my big CD binder.)

And a big ol' happy birthday to BAK today!!

Viva Harvestime!

Attention denizens of Lincoln Square: the Harvestime grocery store has been remodeled! And not just remodeled, but expanded! I hadn't been shopping in a week or two, so imagine my surprise when I stopped in last night and saw that the wall behind the former produce section had been completely knocked out so that the store could take over the entire adjacent building. My sister didn't quite understand why I was reeling for the first five minutes or so as we explored the newly spacious floor plan, but I assured her that, to those of us who live in the 'hood and shop there regularly, this is a very big deal. Check it out.

I'm glad to see that so many other bloggers on Ye Olde Internette have been providing links to this weekend's "Lazy Sunday" Narnia rap from Saturday Night Live, because it's incredibly funny, but my sister and I have been in continual hysterics about a different sketch that appeared later in the show, "Two A-Holes Buying a Christmas Tree." For the past two days, during pregnant pauses in conversation, we've taken to saying to each other, "you look like a rabbit."

Pitchfork lists their Top Fifty Albums for 2005 today. As suspected, Sufjan's Illinois is tops.

And, speaking of best-of 2005 lists, big, big love goes out to the Real Slim Chaney for his gorgeous work on the packaging and liner notes for my CD compilation. That's right, kids, pin.monkey.press will make all your craft dreams come true! Out of towners, I'm going to try to put the packages in the mail today. In towners, if I haven't called you personally yet, be sure to get in touch with me before you leave for the holiday if you want yours for the road. There's only a limited number of schmancy packages available, so if you snooze you lose. (Though, I'll of course be happy to burn you a copy of the disk itself.)

Best of 2005
Originally uploaded by wrestlingentropy.

Track list:

1. Swimmers—Broken Social Scene (Broken Social Scene)
2. The Bleeding Heart Show—The New Pornographers (Twin Cinema)
3. Fire Snakes—Laura Veirs (Year of Meteors)
4. Ultimatum—The Long Winters (Ultimatum EP)
5. Fake Palindromes—Andrew Bird (The Mysterious Production of Eggs)
6. This Year—The Mountain Goats (The Sunset Tree)
7. Is This Love?—Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (Clap Your Hands Say Yeah)
8. When I Turn Ninety-Nine—Devin Davis (Lonely People of the World, Unite!)
9. Dogs Were Barking—Gogol Bordello (Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike)
10. Scripts—Stratageme (Mis Amis)
11. Tippin Toxic—Mike Jones vs. Britney Spears (Hollertronix—Vol. 2, EP)
12. No More Shoes—Stephen Malkmus (Face the Truth)
13. Missing—Beck (Guero)
14. My Mathematical Mind—Spoon (Gimme Fiction)
15. Chicago—Sufjan Stevens (Illinois)
16. Brothers on a Hotel Bed—Death Cab for Cutie (Plans)
17. The Engine Driver—The Decemberists (Picaresque)
18. Sadie—Joanna Newsom (The Milk-Eyed Mender)

Jonathan Richman and Other Things That Make Me Happy to Be Alive

Kittens, can you believe it? Jonathan Richman played "Pablo Picasso" during his show at the Abbey on Saturday night! I nearly stopped breathing. It was a total 1,000 Places to See Before You Die moment for me. He was kind of making fun of it, too, while he sang, which actually made it even better. He kept mangling the pronunciation of "asshole" every time the verse came around; it was all vowelly and Italian-sounding by the end, more like AHz-ohl. Priceless. Though I can't say that the show itself was incredible (the audience didn't really seem totally, 100% there with him; he was still getting over a monthlong bout with laryngitis; he only played for about an hour and didn't come back out for an encore), I can say without reservation that he was incredible. I can only think of a few rare people I've ever seen who are that completely at home in their own skin and so genuinely in love with the world around them. I know that sounds unspeakably cheesy, but it's really true. He kept a cowbell and a sleigh bell stick off to the side of the drumset, and he would periodically set down his guitar, even in the middle of a song, just to dance around and make noise with them. It seemed like he was having just as much fun doing that as anything else. (And, for the record, he's a much better guitar player than I ever realized or gave him credit for.)

From Fluxblog, re: Franz Ferdinand's song "The Fallen": "Though twitchy funk is their bread and butter, I definitely prefer them with their Franz-o-meter set to Ultra-Jaunt, which makes them sound vaguely like late period Grant Lee Buffalo decked out in Dior." Sentences like that make me so proud to be a blogger.

Flip Flop Flying skewers bird flu fears.

Hours, or at least minutes, of entertainment: Who's the Boss (via Said the Gramophone). Internet-type death matches between random crap. I thought my favorite was David Grohl (Foo Fighters Frontman) Vs. Kitt (The Knight Rider Car)...until I scrolled down and saw Halle Berry (The Monster's Ball) [sic] Vs. Black Forest Cake (Delicious Treat)...until I continued to scroll down and saw Keanu Reeves (Speed) Vs. The Plot of the Movie Speed (Speed). Brilliant.

Happy Anniversary!

What it is, bitches! I was too busy yesterday to post that it was my one-year anniversary of going live on Blogger. Thanks to all y'all for fanning the flames of my egotism enough to keep me tapping away at the ol' keyboard. Here's to the coming year.

Perhaps the best band name ever? Arctic Monkeys. The 'Fork showed them some love earlier this week, and Aurgasm has the MP3s you crave. It's the heavily accented vocal delivery that does it for me. For what it's worth, people who claim to know such things say they're going to be the biggest band out of Great Britain since Oasis.

Said the Gramophone introduces you to Agent Simple, who comes across as the love child that Stephin Merritt and Jonathan Richman would have had if they'd enjoyed a passionate summertime fling in Sweden some twenty years ago. Guaranteed to bring a smile.

(Am I or am I not the absolute height of web-savvy circa 2003? I'm all, "dude, does everybody know about MP3 blogs?! They're hella tight!")

For what it's worth, all the people I work with at the CBCM say (I'm paraphrasing here) everyone needs to chill the fuck out about the avian flu. Unless, of course, you're flying to Hong Kong anytime soon with the intention of having unprotected sex with infected migratory water fowl, in which case, I think you have some other issues to worry about.

How Come You Dance So Good?

I've long found the actual "we'll always be your sugar" tagline to be quite funny, but this certainly does improve on it in a whole wonderfully awful new way.

From today's New York Times: NYC is getting into the act and showing some love for the migratory birds, too.

Craig Robinson, the mastermind behind Minipops and other pixel-based goodness at Flip Flop Flyin', commemorated his birthday yesterday with a list of other noteworthy events and celebrity births from the same date that he found listed on Wikipedia. Has everybody else already done this for their birthdays? I just did a search on February 18, and, while I did know most of the amusing celebrity birthdays (Adolphe Menjou, John Travolta, Vanna White, Yoko Ono, Toni Morrison, and Matt Dillon, anyone?) and that Pluto was discovered on my birthdate in 1930, I did not know that on the same day

* Martin Luther died in 1546, Michaelangelo died in 1564, and Oppenheimer died in 1967
* Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of the confederacy in 1861
* Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was first published in 1885
* the first full-length 3D movie Bwana Devil premiered in 1953, and
* KISS released their debut album in 1974.

Rock!

Grinnellians: one of you should so post a comment to this discussion of indie wedding songs. "Idioteque" and "Love the One You're With," def! On much the same note, I'm still laughing at Shawn's story about how he attended a wedding this summer where the best man, who disapproved of the union, contributed motherfucking "Stars and Stripes Forever" to the mix CD that was compiled by the wedding party and given out as favors to all the attendees. That just kills me. The idea of some sorority sister of the bride listening to that disk in her car to remind her of the special occasion and being all "what the shit is this shit?" when the goddamn brass kicks in. Love it.

CBCM in the News

For those of you who are curious as to why I've been waking up at 5 AM on Friday mornings so that I can be downtown between 6 and 6:30, check out this article about the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors from today's Sun-Times. You can also look for the link to the main CBCM website in the sidebar at left.

The bird-related synchronicity in my life has increased to an almost comical degree this year, but, perhaps more than anything else, as I'm riding the brown line toward the Loop, watching the sun rise over the lake, I always think, with great fondness, of this quote from Salinger's Seymour: An Introduction:

I found out a good many years back practically all I need to know about my general reader; that is to say, you, I'm afraid. You'll deny it up and down, I fear, but I'm really in no position to take your word for it. You're a great bird-lover. Much like a man in a short story called "Skule Skerry" by John Buchan, which Arnold L. Sugarman, Jr., once pressed me to read during a very poorly supervised study-hall period, you're someone who took up birds in the first place because they fired your imagination; they fascinated you because "they seemed of all created beings the nearest to pure spirit--those little creatures with a normal temperature of 125°." Probably just like this John Buchan man, you thought many thrilling related thoughts; you reminded yourself, I don't doubt, that: "The goldcrest, with a stomach no bigger than a bean, flies across the North Sea! The curlew sandpiper, which breeds so far north that only about three people have ever seen its nest, goes to Tasmania for its holidays!" It would be too much of a good thing to hope, of course, that my very own general reader should turn out to be one of the three people who have actually seen the curlew sandpiper's nest, but I feel, at least, that I know him--you--quite well enough to guess what kind of well-meant gesture might be welcomed from me right now.

Insert Four-Letter Word for Emphasis

Eve Corbel's Lesser-Known Editing and Proofreading Marks (thanks, GH).

Mimi Smartypants takes on The Lorax (FYI, Nora is her toddler-age daughter):

READING ROUND-UP

Recently finished:

[...]

The Lorax. Oh, shut up you fucking Lorax. I read this book to Nora every single day and she still wants more. She cluck-clucks over the glop in the Humming-Fish pond, she sighs with despair over the smoggy sky, she scolds, "No! You do not do that!" at the sight of axes felling Truffula Trees. Should I just order her Greenpeace sweatshirt now? I'm down with the environment and all, but repeated readings of The Lorax have made me want to go shoot a panda, load it in my Navigator and drive it to a national park, and then set fire to its corpse with gasoline.

Hot boys in women's clothing on Pink today (scroll down, and have a chuckle at the picture of Beyonce while you're on your way).

I'm sure you've all read Ray Nagin's interview transcript on Wonkette by now, but if you haven't, it's imperative you check it out. (Thanks, Nora Rocket.)

After the slightly demoralized tone of yesterday's post, I feel compelled to save for posterity the thoughts that were running through my mind as I walked into the office this morning: people are good! Chicago is good! seeing the sunrise is good! rescuing migrating birds is good! I hope y'all can find your own little bit of light this holiday weekend in the midst of our current national shitstorm. Cheers.