SPEAKER | A Greta Garbo and an Alfred Hitchcock

In honor of the holiday, here's a depressing song:

MP3: "Halloween Parade" by Lou Reed

From 1989's New York. In the liner notes, "Halloween Parade" has "(AIDS)" where other songs have songwriting info, in case it wasn't quite clear from the lyrics, which are vintage Reed, painting clear-eyed portraits of marginalized characters in precise "Walk on the Wild Side"-style strokes and confronting the sub-titular disease through those characters instead of proclamations or sentimentality. The music is the same timeless, no-frills rock 'n roll present on the entire album, gussied up with doo-wop harmonies on the outro, and the combination of resolutely old-fashioned music and ultra-topical subject matter turns the song into a combination elegy and celebration, Reed hoping to be true but not quite believing it when he sings "See you next year at the Halloween parade."

Visit the NYC Halloween Parade yourself.

For more spooky music, check out these sites:

Rusty Spell's Online Mixtape

Radio CRMW

Thanks to my dad for the links. Happy Halloween!

RANDOM THURSDAY LINKS

Philip Pullman profile from the Sunday Times (Thanks, Hillary)

What Bush really thinks of you (via The Day Jobs)

Nick Cave covers Pulp at Clap Clap

Am I going to do this? Let's see how I feel Sunday night. (The more musically inclined might be interested in this, also via Clap Clap.)

If you're planning on dressing as Walter Sobchak for Halloween, you could do worse than to start here.

DriveSHAFT ROOLZ! Oil Change: best album ever.

SPEAKER | He basted you with butter, darling, and made you crawl inside



Today is the release date for the new double album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus. Together, the two discs mark an improvement over last year's disappointing Nocturama, but it's not quite a return to the form of Cave's 1997 masterpiece The Boatman's Call. The albums could probably be edited down to one much stronger disc, but together they provide a compelling portrait of where Cave has been, where he is now and where he's going.

MP3: "Hiding All Away" by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Abattoir Blues is the louder, rockier, gothier of the pair--in short, it's the one that's more like the Bad Seeds of the 80s and first half of the 90s. In fact, the lurching "Hiding All Away," which threatens to go completely off the rails for most of its 6-minute running time, sounds like it could have been on From Her to Eternity or even a Birthday Party album, except for the fuller production and backing vocalists. Those backup singers, by the way, are omnipresent throughout Abattoir Blues, and are pretty representative of the 21st-century model Nick Cave, whose persona is more that of a slightly kooky uncle who occasionally croons down at the local hotel lounge than the legitimately scary Iggy Pop-meets-Dracula wild man he used to be. The Boatman's Call is the dividing line between those two Caves, and represents the best of both: the music is gentler and more melodic than on previous Bad Seeds efforts, but it retains those albums' spare atmosphere and the menace in Cave's voice. It's becoming more and more clear that guitarist Blixa Bargeld's departure was a huge blow to the band, but all is forgiven when "Hiding All Away" erupts into chaos at 5:11 and Cave starts bellowing "There is a war coming!" You can't help but believe him.

MP3: "Breathless" by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

That menace has all but disappeared on The Lyre of Orpheus. Though songs from Orpheus could go on Abattoir, and vice versa, in general this second disc is home to Cave's more upbeat material. "Breathless" is maybe the happiest song Cave has ever recorded, so much so that I almost want to think it's a parody. Listen to that flute, just for example: this ain't exactly the Polyphonic Spree, but it's more the kind of thing you'd expect to hear from David Byrne than the guy whose idea of a love song used to be this:

MP3: "Just You and Me" by The Birthday Party

From Prayers on Fire.
Read some barely comprehensible ruminations on The Birthday Party.
Everything you'd ever want to know about Nick Cave, at least up until 2001.

EVERYTHING IDOL | Qualifying Round, Heat 30

Office Space won the last heat to move on to Round 2 in the ongoing competition to determine the Best Thing Ever.

The next four contestants, please:




1. Speaking in Tongues by Talking Heads |
Home is where I want to be
But I guess I'm already there
I come home - she lifted up her wings
Guess that this must be the place
I can't tell one from another
Did I find you, or you find me?
There was a time before we were born
If someone asks, this where I'll be




2. Underworld by Don DeLillo | And you can glance out the window for a moment, distracted by the sound of small kids playing a made-up game in a neighbor's yard, some kind of kickball maybe, and they speak in your voice, or piggyback races on the weedy lawn, and it's your voice you hear, essentially, under the glimmerglass sky, and you look at the things in the room, offscreen, unwebbed, the tissued grain of the deskwood alive in light, the thick lived tenor of things, the argument of things to be seen and eaten, the apple core going sepia in the lunch tray, and the dense measures of experience in a random glance, the monk's candle reflected in the slope of the phone, hours marked in Roman numerals, and the glaze of the wax, and the curl of the braided wick, and the chipped rim of the mug that holds your yellow pencils, skewed all crazy, and the plied lives of the simplest surface, the slabbed butter melting on the crumbled bun, and the yellow of the yellow of the pencils, and you try to imagine the word on the screen becoming a thing in the world, taking all its meanings, its sense of serenities and contentments out into the streets somehow, its whisper of reconciliation, a word extending itself ever outward, the tone of agreement or treaty, the tone of repose, the sense of mollifying silence, the tone of hail and farewell, a word that carries the sunlit ardor of an object deep in drenching noon, the argument of binding touch, but it's only a sequence of pulses on a dullish screen and all it can do is make you pensive--a word that spreads a longing through the raw sprawl of the city and out across the dreaming bourns and orchards to the solitary hills.




3. The Indiana Jones trilogy, directed by Steven Spielberg | "No ticket." - Indiana Jones




4. Couches | More comfortable than the floor.

Polls close Monday, November 1 at midnight.
_____________________________

The Round 2 contenders so far:

Kitties
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Air conditioning
Bob Dylan, 1965-66
Star Wars: the original trilogy
The Simpsons
The stories of Raymond Carver
Home cooking
The lightbulb
Homicide: Life on the Street
Ping-Pong
Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
Scissors
Google.com
Sex
US Postal Service
Chocolate-chip cookies
The Lord of the Rings (the movies)
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
Email
Rushmore
In the Aeroplane over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel
Fight Club
Beef
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Books
The Big Lebowski
Batman
The Far Side by Gary Larson
Seinfeld
The Office
Preacher by Garth Ennis & Steve Dillon
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
In Utero by Nirvana
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Office Space

And the losers' brackets are shaping up thusly:

FILM: Boogie Nights, Edward Scissorhands, Lawrence of Arabia, Pulp Fiction, This Is Spinal Tap, Young Frankenstein, Some Like It Hot
MUSIC: Surfer Rosa by the Pixies, Otis Redding's oeuvre, Automatic for the People by R.E.M., "Georgia on My Mind" by Ray Charles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles, The Velvet Underground's four studio albums, iPod/iTunes, London Calling by The Clash, Led Zeppelin IV by Led Zeppelin, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars by David Bowie, The Boatman's Call by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Ritual de lo Habitual by Jane's Addiction, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain by Pavement, Superunknown by Soundgarden, Vs. by Pearl Jam, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness by The Smashing Pumpkins
TV: Monty Python's Flying Circus, The Sopranos, Freaks and Geeks, Mr. Show with Bob and David, Futurama, Fawlty Towers, The Larry Sanders Show, The Cosby Show, South Park, NewsRadio, Alias, Gilmore Girls, Oz
LITERATURE: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, Inferno by Dante Alighieri, Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson, Peanuts by Charles Schulz, Krazy Kat by George Herriman, The Invisibles by Grant Morrison, The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller, Ghost World by Daniel Clowes, 1984 by George Orwell, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
FOOD & DRINK: apple pie a la mode, Guinness Stout, pizza delivery, Coca-Cola, NyQuil, bourbon, chicken, seafood, pork, macaroni & cheese, In-N-Out Burger
OTHER: shoes, eBay.com, Mapquest.com, Weather.com, money, power, fame, that picture of Johnny Cash flipping the bird, righteous indignation, correct spelling, carpet, dinosaurs, nemeses, film, grooved vinyl, magnetic tape, optical discs, future magic hard drives, Superman, Spider-Man, X-Men

EVERYTHING IDOL | Qualifying Round, Heat 29

Preacher, Huck Finn, Buffy and In Utero defeated their peers to move on to Round 2 of the ongoing competition to determine The Best Thing Ever. Here are the Round 2 contenders so far:

Kitties
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Air conditioning
Bob Dylan, 1965-66
Star Wars: the original trilogy
The Simpsons
The stories of Raymond Carver
Home cooking
The lightbulb
Homicide: Life on the Street
Ping-Pong
Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
Scissors
Google.com
Sex
US Postal Service
Chocolate-chip cookies
The Lord of the Rings (the movies)
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
Email
Rushmore
In the Aeroplane over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel
Fight Club
Beef
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Books
The Big Lebowski
Batman
The Far Side by Gary Larson
Seinfeld
The Office
Preacher by Garth Ennis & Steve Dillon
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
In Utero by Nirvana
Buffy the Vampire Slayer

And the losers' brackets are shaping up thusly:

FILM: Boogie Nights, Edward Scissorhands, Lawrence of Arabia, Pulp Fiction
MUSIC: Surfer Rosa by the Pixies, Otis Redding's oeuvre, Automatic for the People by R.E.M., "Georgia on My Mind" by Ray Charles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles, The Velvet Underground's four studio albums, iPod/iTunes, London Calling by The Clash, Led Zeppelin IV by Led Zeppelin, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars by David Bowie, The Boatman's Call by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Ritual de lo Habitual by Jane's Addiction, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain by Pavement, Superunknown by Soundgarden, Vs. by Pearl Jam, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness by The Smashing Pumpkins
TV: Monty Python's Flying Circus, The Sopranos, Freaks and Geeks, Mr. Show with Bob and David, Futurama, Fawlty Towers, The Larry Sanders Show, The Cosby Show, South Park, NewsRadio, Alias, Gilmore Girls, Oz
LITERATURE: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, Inferno by Dante Alighieri, Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson, Peanuts by Charles Schulz, Krazy Kat by George Herriman, The Invisibles by Grant Morrison, The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller, Ghost World by Daniel Clowes, 1984 by George Orwell, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
FOOD & DRINK: apple pie a la mode, Guinness Stout, pizza delivery, Coca-Cola, NyQuil, bourbon, chicken, seafood, pork, macaroni & cheese, In-N-Out Burger
OTHER: shoes, eBay.com, Mapquest.com, Weather.com, money, power, fame, that picture of Johnny Cash flipping the bird, righteous indignation, correct spelling, carpet, dinosaurs, nemeses, film, grooved vinyl, magnetic tape, optical discs, future magic hard drives, Superman, Spider-Man, X-Men

The next four contestants, please:




1. Office Space, directed by Mike Judge | "So I was sitting in my cubicle today, and I realized, ever since I started working, every single day of my life has been worse than the day before it. So that means that every single day that you see me, that's on the worst day of my life." - Peter Gibbons




2. Young Frankenstein, directed by Mel Brooks |
IGOR: You know, I'll never forget my old dad. When these things would happen to him...the things he'd say to me.
FRANKENSTEIN: What did he say?
IGOR: "What the hell are you doing in the bathroom day and night? Why don't you get out of there and give someone else a chance?"




3. This is Spinal Tap, directed by Rob Reiner | "I do not, for one, think that the problem was that the band was down. I think that the problem may have been that there was a Stonehenge monument on the stage that was in danger of being crushed by a dwarf. All right? That tended to understate the hugeness of the object." - David St. Hubbins




4. Some Like It Hot, directed by Billy Wilder |
SUGAR: Water polo--isn't that dangerous?
JOE: It sure is. I had two ponies drowned under me.

EVERYTHING IDOL | Qualifying Round, Heat 28

And now, a heat for the illiterates in the audience. Remember to vote in Tuesday's, Wednesday's and yesterday's polls too.




1. The Invisibles by Grant Morrison and various artists | "My mate Elfayed told me something when I was little and wanking about twenty times a day: 'We made gods and jailers because we felt small and ashamed and alone,' he said. 'We let them try us and judge us and, like sheep to the slaughter, we allowed ourselves to be...sentenced. See! Now! Our sentence is up.'" - Jack Frost




2. Preacher by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon | "No more quittin'. I'm gonna go get Gran'ma an' Jody an' the rest've that motherfuckin' vermin, an' I'm gonna stamp 'em into the shit they came from. An' then I'm goin' back to lookin' for God, and when I find him--he better have a fuckin' good excuse." - Jesse Custer




3. The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller with Klaus Janson and Lynn Varley | "The time has come. You know it in your soul. For I am your soul...You cannot escape me...You are puny, you are small--you are nothing--a hollow shell, a rusty trap that cannot hold me--smoldering, I burn you--burning you, I flare, hot and bright and fierce and beautiful--you cannot stop me--not with wine or vows or the weight of age--you cannot stop me, but still you try--still you run--you try to drown me out...but your voice is weak..." - The Batman




4. Ghost World by Daniel Clowes | "It's not like I was 'going punk' or something...I'm not fucking thirteen...Anybody with half a fucking brain could see that I wasn't dressed like some modern hardcore asshole...It was like an old 1977 punk look...I'm sure Johnny Shithead is way too much of an idiot to figure that out! I wish I could just come up with one perfect look and stick with it...Like what if I bought some entire matching 1930's wardrobe and wore that every day...The trouble with that is you look really stupid and pretentious if you go to a mall or a Taco Bell or something...And you have to act a certain way and drive an old car and everything and it's a real pain in the ass!

"God, don't you just love it when you see two really ugly people in love like that?" - Enid Coleslaw

Polls close Monday, October 18 at midnight.

You're entering a world of pain

While googling for the necessary ingredients for my planned Walter Sobchak Halloween costume*, I stumbled across perhaps the dumbest, most ill-informed review of The Big Lebowski imaginable. I want to say "This guy went to Yale?" but then I remembered our president did too. What gets me the most is the total college-sophomore aren't-I-smart idiocy of the final paragraph. I'm pretty sure I used to still write movie reviews like this.

*Anybody know where I can get a flattop toupee to make me look like this:



I unfortunately can't even grow that much hair. Also the glasses? Anybody?**

**UPDATE: If this is the best available, I think I'm better off sticking with my usual bald.

EVERYTHING IDOL | Qualifying Round, Heat 27

A special heat just for the literate folks in the audience:




1. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain | One of my teachers in high school transposed the initial letters when writing this title on the board, so that it became "Fuckleberry Hinn." True story.




2. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens | This was my favorite book in fifth grade; I haven't read it since, but let's just assume it still holds up.




3. 1984 by George Orwell | Off by twenty years! Ho ho ho!


4. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham | I read this because it was referenced in Seven (and Morgan Freeman's character William Somerset was named after Maugham), and it took nearly my entire senior year of high school. I think I wrote at least two essays about it in different essay competitions.


Polls close Monday, October 18 at midnight.

EVERYTHING IDOL | Qualifying Round, Heat 26

That's right, a new E.I. poll every day this week (except for Monday). Be sure to vote in yesterday's too.




1. Superunknown by Soundgarden |
Pale in the flare light
The scared light cracks and disappears
And leads the scorched ones here
And everywhere no one cares
The fire is spreading
And no one wants to speak about it
Down in the hole
Jesus tries to crack a smile
Beneath another shovel load




2. In Utero by Nirvana |
If you ever need anything please don't hesitate
To ask someone else first
I'm too busy acting like I'm not naive
I've seen it all I was here first




3. Vs. by Pearl Jam |
Troubled souls unite, we got ourselves tonight
I am fuel, you are friends, we got the means to make amends
I am lost, I'm no guide, but I'm by your side
I am right by your side




4. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness by The Smashing Pumpkins |
And I knew the meaning of it all
And I knew the distance to the sun
And I knew the echo that is love
And I knew the secrets in your spires
And I knew the emptiness of youth
And I knew the solitude of heart
And I knew the murmurs of the soul
And the world is drawn into your hands
And the world is etched upon your heart
And the world so hard to understand
Is the world you can't live without
And I knew the silence of the world

Polls close Monday, October 18 at midnight.

EVERYTHING IDOL | Qualifying Round, Heat 25

Seinfeld and The Office defeated their peers to move on to Round 2 of the ongoing competition to determine The Best Thing Ever. Here are the Round 2 contenders so far:

Kitties
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Air conditioning
Bob Dylan, 1965-66
Star Wars: the original trilogy
The Simpsons
The stories of Raymond Carver
Home cooking
The lightbulb
Homicide: Life on the Street
Ping-Pong
Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
Scissors
Google.com
Sex
US Postal Service
Chocolate-chip cookies
The Lord of the Rings (the movies)
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
Email
Rushmore
In the Aeroplane over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel
Fight Club
Beef
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Books
The Big Lebowski
Batman
The Far Side by Gary Larson
Seinfeld
The Office

And the losers' brackets are shaping up thusly:

FILM: Boogie Nights, Edward Scissorhands, Lawrence of Arabia, Pulp Fiction
MUSIC: Surfer Rosa by the Pixies, Otis Redding's oeuvre, Automatic for the People by R.E.M., "Georgia on My Mind" by Ray Charles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles, The Velvet Underground's four studio albums, iPod/iTunes, London Calling by The Clash, Led Zeppelin IV by Led Zeppelin, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars by David Bowie, The Boatman's Call by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Ritual de lo Habitual by Jane's Addiction, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain by Pavement
TV: Monty Python's Flying Circus, The Sopranos, Freaks and Geeks, Mr. Show with Bob and David, Futurama, Fawlty Towers, The Larry Sanders Show, The Cosby Show, South Park, NewsRadio
LITERATURE: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, Inferno by Dante Alighieri, Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson, Peanuts by Charles Schulz, Krazy Kat by George Herriman
FOOD & DRINK: apple pie a la mode, Guinness Stout, pizza delivery, Coca-Cola, NyQuil, bourbon, chicken, seafood, pork, macaroni & cheese, In-N-Out Burger
OTHER: shoes, eBay.com, Mapquest.com, Weather.com, money, power, fame, that picture of Johnny Cash flipping the bird, righteous indignation, correct spelling, carpet, dinosaurs, nemeses, film, grooved vinyl, magnetic tape, optical discs, future magic hard drives, Superman, Spider-Man, X-Men

Today, TV dramas get their turn:




1. Oz | "You get into a fight, you fuck up your parole. And I hear for the next three months, you're gonna be a good little boy, so you can get outta Oz, see your two sons. You know, I think that's great. But, you know what I'm wondering? What if Vern doesn't get out? What if, as he comes up for parole, he gets into a brawl, a knock-down, drag-out with his old roomie? What if every time he comes up for parole, Vern gets into some ugly incident and has to serve his entire sentence? And his two sons, they become monsters. That's what I'm wondering about. Prag." - Tobias Beecher




2. Alias | "One night - oh, this was years ago, maybe two years before you and I met - I had just finished my first Far East briefing in the White House. I was new to the CIA. After that meeting, everyone got into a limousine to head back to Langley, but I didn't. I told them I was gonna walk for a while. They all looked at me sort of funny--I mean, it was a cold night. So I said 'I need to get some air,' but the truth is...I was overcome. It did occur to me, as I was walking down the White House steps, that I was living in a perfect moment. Everything was filled with promise: my role in the CIA, my relationship with a wife that I had not yet met. Still, I could feel the darkness coming. So I wandered around for a while, ended up at the Jefferson Memorial. It was always my favorite one. Looked out across the basin. Lincoln, right there. I didn't know how it would finally materialize, the darkness. I had nothing to base it on. It wasn't as if the CIA had just betrayed me, or my wife had just been diagnosed with lymphoma. None of that had happened yet. So whenever life takes an unfortunate turn, as it has this week, I just remind myself that I could see it coming all along." - Arvin Sloane




3. Buffy the Vampire Slayer | "I hate this. I hate being here. I hate that you have to be here. I hate that there's evil and I've been chosen to fight it. I wish a whole lot of the time that I hadn't been. I know a lot of you wish I hadn't been either. This isn't about wishes. It's about choices. I believe we can beat this evil. Not when it comes. Now when its army is ready. Now. Tomorrow morning I'm opening the seal. I'm going down into the Hellmouth and I'm finishing this once and for all. Right now you're asking yourself what makes this different. What makes us more than a bunch of girls being picked off one by one? It's true. None of you have the power that Faith and I do. So here's the part where you make a choice." - Buffy Summers




4. Gilmore Girls |
LUKE: I'm different. I'm a loner.
LORELAI: Oh no. No no. I don't want to hear about the romance of being a loner.
LUKE: Some guys are just naturally loners.
LORELAI: Yes, lonely guys.
LUKE: Independent guys.
LORELAI: Sad guys.
LUKE: Maverick guys.
LORELAI: Lee Harvey Oswald.
LUKE: John Muir.
LORELAI: The Unabomber.
LUKE: Henry David Thoreau.
LORELAI: Every one of these sad and lonely guys.

Polls close Monday, October 18 at midnight.

EVERYTHING IDOL | Qualifying Round, Heat 24

Yet more TV-comedy goodness:




1. Futurama | "It's just like the story of the grasshopper and the octopus. All year long, the grasshopper kept burying acorns for the winter, while the octopus mooched off his girlfriend and watched TV. But then the winter came, and the grasshopper died, and the octopus ate all his acorns. And also he got a racecar. Is any of this getting through to you? " - Philip J. Fry




2. Fawlty Towers | "Arse I have to put up with from you people! You ponce in here expecting to be waited on hand and foot, while I'm trying to run a hotel here! Have you any idea of how much there is to do? Do you ever think of that? Of course not, you're all too busy sticking your noses into every corner, poking around for things to complain about, aren't you? Well let me tell you something - this is exactly how Nazi Germany started. A lot of layabouts with nothing better to do than to cause trouble. Well I've had fifteen years of pandering to the likes of you, and I've had enough! I've had it! Come on, pack your bags and get out!" - Basil Fawlty


3. The Larry Sanders Show |
HANK: What about the time I chipped my tooth on the bathroom urinal? What the fuck is so comical about that?
LARRY: It was a back tooth, Hank. I don't know how you did it.




4. Seinfeld | "I don't even want to talk about it anymore. What were you thinking? What was going on in your mind? Artistic integrity? Where--where did you come up with that? You're not artistic and you have no integrity. You know, you really need some help. A regular psychiatrist couldn't even help you. You need to go to like Vienna or something. You know what I mean? You need to get involved at the university level. Like where Freud studied. And have all those people looking at you and checking up on you. That's the kind of help you need. Not the once a week for eighty bucks. No. You need a team. A team of psychiatrists working round the clock thinking about you, having conferences, observing you, like the way they did with the Elephant Man. That's what I'm talking about, because that's the only way you're going to get better." - Jerry Seinfeld

Polls close Monday, October 11 at midnight.

SPEAKER | Tom waits for no man



Tom Waits's new album, Real Gone, comes out today; it's his first since the 2002 opera-soundtrack double-whammy of Alice and Blood Money, and it marks his deepest excursion into noise-as-music since he started working this angle on Swordfishtrombones. On first listen, Real Gone is nearly impenetrable--a murky stew of Waits's trademark whiskey-throated barking and percussion that sounds like a bunch of guys pounding on a car with a sledgehammer, with an industrial-graveyard atmosphere hanging over everything. It's unmistakably Waits, but it all runs together (there's no piano, for one thing, which marks a significant departure from his previous work), and it's not until a closer second listen that the songs and their individual textures (like the human beatboxing, by Waits himself, on "Top of the Hill," and the turntable rhythms of "Metropolitan Glide") reveal themselves. That's much the same reaction I had to Rain Dogs, which I thought was the most unmusical thing I'd ever heard when my dad first played it for me when I was ten or eleven, but which has since become one of my favorite albums. Real Gone doesn't have that one perfect rock song that Waits is still capable of tossing off whenever he feels like it--no "Downtown Train" or "I Don't Wanna Grow Up" for more famous bands to cover--but it doesn't really matter that much. This is the sound of Waits both digging deeper and stretching his boundaries, and on those terms it's a success.

MP3: "Hoist That Rag" by Tom Waits
Waits sounds like he's having a hell of a time here, bellowing some vaguely political beat poetry over and around Marc Ribot's snaky, fuzzed-out Cuban guitar lines--the whole effect is sort of what I imagine the Buena Vista Social Club guys might have come up with had they started playing in a post-revolution state prison. It's like monsters or robots playing second-hand Havana blues in an underground club, their reptile claws and metal pincers too indelicate to hold the instruments but making a go of it anyway, while the Party faithful sip kerosene mojitos and watch the jineteras dance.

MP3: "The Day after Tomorrow" by Tom Waits
This one is political, and not vaguely at all. Musically a cousin of two of my favorite Waits songs, "Time" and "Whistle Down the Wind," this takes the form of a letter home from a soldier in an unspecified war. But I think we can all guess which one, right? Coming from a lesser artist, lyrics like these would sound hamfisted and overly earnest at best:

I'm not fighting for justice
I'm not fighting for freedom
I'm fighting for my life
And another day in the world here

I just do what I've been told
We're just the gravel on the road
And only the lucky ones come home
On the day after tomorrow

But with Waits growling them directly into your ear, they take on a hard-won veracity that reveals the platitudes about "hard work" and "staying the course" for the cheap ploys they really are. (This song also appears on Future Soundtrack for America.)

(MP3 disclaimer: All MP3s offered on this site are for evaluation purposes only--i.e. download them, listen to them, decide whether you would like to purchase the music from a friendly retailer, and then delete them. All MP3s will be available for one week after they are posted. If you are an artist or represent an artist or label whose music appears here, and you would like your music removed, just let me know.)

EVERYTHING IDOL | Qualifying Round, Heat 23

The Far Side inexplicably defeated its competitors to become the best comic strip of all time and move on to Round 2 of the ongoing competition to determine The Best Thing Ever. Here are the Round 2 contenders so far:

Kitties
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Air conditioning
Bob Dylan, 1965-66
Star Wars: the original trilogy
The Simpsons
The stories of Raymond Carver
Home cooking
The lightbulb
Homicide: Life on the Street
Ping-Pong
Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
Scissors
Google.com
Sex
US Postal Service
Chocolate-chip cookies
The Lord of the Rings (the movies)
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
Email
Rushmore
In the Aeroplane over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel
Fight Club
Beef
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Books
The Big Lebowski
Batman
The Far Side by Gary Larson

And the losers' brackets are shaping up thusly:

FILM: Boogie Nights, Edward Scissorhands, Lawrence of Arabia, Pulp Fiction
MUSIC: Surfer Rosa by the Pixies, Otis Redding's oeuvre, Automatic for the People by R.E.M., "Georgia on My Mind" by Ray Charles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles, The Velvet Underground's four studio albums, iPod/iTunes, London Calling by The Clash, Led Zeppelin IV by Led Zeppelin, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars by David Bowie, The Boatman's Call by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Ritual de lo Habitual by Jane's Addiction, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain by Pavement
TV: Monty Python's Flying Circus, The Sopranos, Freaks and Geeks, Mr. Show with Bob and David
LITERATURE: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, Inferno by Dante Alighieri, Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson, Peanuts by Charles Schulz, Krazy Kat by George Herriman
FOOD & DRINK: apple pie a la mode, Guinness Stout, pizza delivery, Coca-Cola, NyQuil, bourbon, chicken, seafood, pork, macaroni & cheese, In-N-Out Burger
OTHER: shoes, eBay.com, Mapquest.com, Weather.com, money, power, fame, that picture of Johnny Cash flipping the bird, righteous indignation, correct spelling, carpet, dinosaurs, nemeses, film, grooved vinyl, magnetic tape, optical discs, future magic hard drives, Superman, Spider-Man, X-Men

The next four contestants, please:




1. NewsRadio | "I had a small house of brokerage on Wall Street. Many days no business comes to my hut. Jimmy has fear? A thousand times no. I never doubted myself for a minute, for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo...dung." - Jimmy James reads from his book, Jimmy James: Macho Business Donkey Wrestler, translated from Japanese back into English




2. South Park | "I've learned something too: Selling out is sweet because when you sell out, you get to make a lot of money, and when you have money, you don't have to hang out with a bunch of poor asses like you guys. Screw you guys, I'm going home. " - Eric Cartman




3. The Office | "What is the single most important thing for a company? Is it the building? Is it the stock? Is it the turnover? It's the people--investment in people. My proudest moment here wasn't when I increased profits by 17%, or cut expenditure without losing a single member of staff. No. It was a young Greek guy, first job in the country, hardly spoke a word of English, but he came to me and he went 'Mr. Brent, will you be the godfather to my child?' Didn't happen in the end. We had to let him go--he was rubbish. He was rubbish." - David Brent




4. The Cosby Show | "A long, long time ago, three to four generations ago, parents didn't talk much to their children. At four A.M, the father would come home, look at his son sleeping, wake him up and say 'Boy, go out and plow the field now.' And the boy would rub his eyes and say 'Yes, pa.' And occasionally, the son would ask the father how much he'd get paid. And the father grabbed the plow, and ran over his son. Those days are over, because we have become more civilized, more sophisticated, but it's still inside of me no matter how sophisticated I get. And it grows over time. Boy, when I say to one of my children to do something and they say 'How much does it pay,' I think I'm going to buy a plow." - Heathcliff Huxtable

Polls close Monday, October 11 at midnight.