dusting off some old stuff

Let's see, more music. Bought some cassettes recently. I'm willing to risk 30 cents per at the thrift store when I see tapes that might be interesting.

The KLF - The White Room

All I'd ever heard from these guys was "Doctorin' The TARDIS" so I was expecting something completely different from this release than what it wound up being. Not horrible, but not anything I think I'll want to re-listen to. I am a pale fat guy with no rhythm so while I can appreciate a catchy song with a good beat, I'm not gonna dance to it (and wouldn't be able to to save my life, though I might attempt to if I were really drunk)... Thinking of that older song does make me want to try to find the very first season of Doctor Who so J. and I can watch the series from the beginning.

L.L. Cool J - Mama Said Knock You Out

I'd heard the title track before and dug it so of course I wasn't gonna pass up a chance to hear the rest of the album. Some good tracks like "Boomin' System" but the more R&B style stuff really doesn't do anything for me.

Fun Lovin' Criminals - Come Find Yourself

I loved that "Scooby Snacks" single so why I didn't buy this when it came out is a mystery. Oh wait, I was too busy getting into Coil and Neubauten and pretty much everything else Jim Thirlwell ever had anything to do with. There's not a bad song on this tape. It would've been great to see these guys (FLC) play a show with the Beastie Boys, especially if there was any chance of a freestyle battle!

More on a future date, really.

(...)

...looking around the spare room I've shoehorned most of my "stuff" into it's become clear to me that I have a Problem. I cna't exactly blame my parents for this completely but... It's my own fault, taking the habits I've learned from them and branching out, they go to garage sales and rummage sales and buy things eextremely cheaply, whereas most of the stuff I wind up w/ I get for free, either from scavenging it or it gets passed along to me from my parents. If it's something I think I might have a use for, I'll keep it, find a spot to put it in, and there ti stays until I uncoverit while looking for something else entirely. While I'm not as bad as my great-aunt was (I don't save every empty container or box and I try to recycle all the paper and cardboard I can no longer use) I believe that my girlfriend is pretty much the only thing keeping a damper on my pack-rattery. Whether she intends to or not, she's the reason I have everything mostly in this room, and part of my closet. If I lived by myself, I would probably have accumulated enough crap to be able to build entire smaller rooms out of it. I really don't have much of a social life, so it's not as if I'd have much of an excuse to worry about how it looked to anyone else. I would probably not make much of an effort in dating if I weren't in a relationship (that sounds wrong, it's not as if I'm making an effort in dating while in this relationship, either)

There is a clear path from the doorway to my chair here, and I only have to move a few lightweight things to get to the closet in this room, which I keep telling myself if I organized it properly, it could hold much more stuff. THat right there, is my problem. Teh last thing I need is "more stuff" ... what I need to do is figure out how to fit the stuff I already have, in there, to free up more floor and table space in here. If I can keep it contained, keep it under control, things will at least appear 'normal'. That's what counts, right? It doesn't matter what's going on below the surface as long as everything looks right.

quick music reviews, continued.

Smashing Pumpkins - Adore

This was in the $5 grab bag o' CDs that I talked about last post. Disc and booklet were in great shape. My girlfriend came in while I was listening to it the other night and said, "Adore? I used to have that, that CD sucked." When I replied that so far, there was one good song on it, she asked: "Ava Adore?" Right in one.

Stone Temple Pilots - Purple

I still have my copy of "Core" from junior high but never heard this one all the way through until now. Had the soundtrack from The Crow so I could listen to "Big Empty" whenever I wanted, and that and "Vasoline" were always playing on the radio anyway, along with "Interstate Love Song" (whose title I could never remember)... Was "Vasoline" intentionally spelled that way to avoid copyright infringement?

Faith No More - The Real Thing

I knew I liked this one, since I still had the cassette of it. Nice to have it on CD for free, though.


Soundgarden - Down On The Upside

Another one for the list of "bought it used on CD, traded it back, found the cassette for next to nothing, wound up with another CD of it anyway."

and another from the used binge,

OhGr - SunnyPsyOp

OK, but I liked Welt better. Maybe it'll grow on me later, so I'll listen again...


I can't bitch about getting free CDs, though it is a pain listening to all of them once through just to make sure they don't skip before I try to sell any of the ones I don't want.

Tax day.

Did mine a while ago, so I wasn't freaking out. If I actually owed, I'd put that off, but usually I get some sort of refund so I mail mine in early. I always misremember the mailing deadline as March 15 because of the "Beware the Ides of March" quote.

My parents gave me a shopping bag full of used CDs they got at a rummage sale for $5. Some good ones in there, a few bands I'd never heard of or bothered to listen to though I'd see their CDs in every used rack in every store. Some were scratched, some not good for anything but donation fodder, some I'm actually gonna keep. Looking through these reminded me of how much fun I used to have browsing at the local used shops, so I went today. Confined myself to the budget section, found a few good ones.

Primitive Radio Gods - Rocket

Finally found a copy of this one, as I'd been wanting to hear the rest of the album ever since the single came out. Still has the sticker on the front of the case advertising the single, which gets bonus points from me, since I'm OCD about that sort of thing and always try to carefully reattach anything like that if it comes on the outer wrapper of a new disc. Overall, I liked this one. I thought the other tracks would be more sample-heavy like "Standing Outside..." is, but that's not to say that more/different samples would improve them. Again, not something I'll listen to every day, but a keeper.

MC 900 Ft. Jesus - One Step Ahead Of The Spider

First heard of this group back in junior high when I was looking up info on Al Jourgenson's 1000 Homo DJs side project, since both groups showed up on some old Geocities page with a list of funny band names. At some later date, I picked up a cassette of Welcome To My Dream at a library discard sale, complete with all the stamps and stickers. Yeah, this was the later album that had the Spike Jonze video for "If I Only Had A Brain" that you might've seen on Beavis and Butthead back in the day. Keeping this one, gonna try to find a copy of the first release (Hell With The Lid Off)

More later.

Nostalgia.

Can you still call it that when it's not something you originally lived through? Ever since I was young, I always thought everything seemed cooler 'back in the day'... spent hours looking through my grandparents' stacks of '50s-'70s Popular Science and Mechanix Illustrated magazines, reading the reviews and ads for cars and tools that looked way cooler than anything modern. Even the typefaces used in these old mags looked awesome to me. And of course, to go along with this, I got to grow up during the last gasp of proper Saturday Morning cartoons! Looney Tunes, Merrie Melodies, the old MGM shorts, Tom and Jerry, the older half-colorized 'toons where everything was badly tinted red/green, "(Blank) On Parade"-style singing, 'things coming to life' shorts, caricatures of 'old timey' celebrities, and from what I could tell, all the jokes that would later be considered sexist/racist were left intact. I grew up with all this, and still enjoy it. It really bothers me that many of these old 'toons are only shown in censored versions nowadays, if you can find them at all. For instance, I caught a replay on Boomerang of the classic Tex Avery short "The Car of Tomorrow" that was missing the "Indian convertible" and "rickshaw car" gags. What the hell, man? Watch this for yourself and see how "offensive" these jokes really are!



I would have thought that "the suits" running Boomerang/Cartoon Network would have more issues with the woman driver/mother-in-law jokes than the throwaway gags involving a teepee and a rickshaw. The "Thrifty Scotsman Model" was left in there for broadcast, too. I don't see anything that's sooo offensive that kids these days shouldn't see it, and especially when you're gonna show this 'toon on a special cable channel that you've gotta pay extra for whose intended audience seems to be baby boomers and older folk who remember these cartoons from their youth??? Makes no damned sense to me. Oh yeah, here's my Wikipedia-style disclaimer: I believe my posting of this short falls within fair use guidelines because I am using it to illustrate a point and its low resolution is in no way a replacement for any shiny uncensored DVDs that the Time Warner empire wants to sell me and you. Offer a DVD version of the Compleat Tex Avery laserdisc with all the same content and I will buy that puppy in a heartbeat! It sucks when the only place we can see many of these older 'toons is in low quality on YouTube or similar sites. I was inspired to post this after stumbling upon John Kricfalusi's blog.

lawl.

Funny coincidence: Eminem's "Cleaning Out My Closet" came up on the computer while I was actually cleaning out my own closet! That's right up there with hearing The Clash's "Lost In The Supermarket" over the local grocery store's Muzak system, and the times I've heard "Closing Time" by Semisonic (or better yet, "Tired of Waiting For You" by the Kinks) very close to the store's actual closing time. Stuff like that makes my day, especially when it's actually random (and not just some smart-assed music dork (like me) trying to be clever with the "now playing" post tags)...

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Not much going on, which is fine by me. Taking a break from everything to finally go through several crates worth of crap from high school/college. When I moved I just stuffed it all in there and took it with me, figuring I'd organize it later. It's later enough, years later, and with my girlfriend planning to go to school - she'll actually be able to use some of the stuff I've been holding on to. My parents raised me to be thrifty so I hoarded pens, pencils, notebooks and office supplies like a guy that survived the Great Depression. Found some other useful stuff mixed in, like the rest of the mailers I'd kept from the music I'd bought back in the day. Apparently I was OCD enough to make a list of all the albums I got in the awesome $40 score, which turned up in one of the notebooks, so I'll write about that whole story on here. Not until I finish with these crates though...