Wow, I didn’t see this one coming. Oasis are reuniting for a tour after splitting up and throwing chainsaws at each other for fifteen years. I think I’ve always been Team Noel but I haven’t followed all of the drama that closely. This would be a great show to see live, I think; I just can’t rationalize $200 in Ticketmaster surcharges and battling for a 5% chance to actually be able to buy a ticket.
I got sucked down a rabbit hole a couple of days ago by a YouTube interview with the Smashing Pumpkins about recording Siamese Dream, and that led me to other songs he’d recorded for Gish, and now I have Tristessa on repeat in my head. Gish is a fantastic album, one of my desert island discs, and one I need to source the remastered version of to re-rip to MP3. My copy is tinny and treble-heavy, and I’d like a version with more of the bottom end restored. Anyway, this tune has a great groove and I’ve always loved it.
I was sad to read the Japandroids are both releasing an album and breaking up after the tour cycle is over. It’s pretty amazing what two people can do with a guitar and a drum kit, but that’s also got to be both limiting and exhausting after awhile. Near to the Wild Heart of Life got me up and out of the hospital after cancer surgery (well, that and NACHO FRIES!) and both their albums to this point have been awesome.
This one has been in my head for a couple of days, so there you go: Mexican Moon, by Concrete Blonde. This is one of those CDs I don’t ever remember buying but somehow wound up with; it’s not their best album (that’s Bloodletting, which had Joey and Caroline, which are both fantastic) but this song is absolutely beautiful. Johnette Napolitano had an incredible, individual voice.
Here’s the video update from the last month, with a big chunk of July chopped out of the middle for vacation.
In other video entertainment news I was happy to see that Roadkill, which used to be on the MotorTrend channel until MotorTrend blew themselves up, is now on Max, so I’m catching up with all the seasons I missed (something like 6 years’ worth). They’re also showing a couple of related shows like Roadkill Garage and Junkyard Gold, as well as Mythbusters. So there is a reason to keep Max around for a while.
Back in the 80s as a highschooler and aspiring comic book artist, I was at our local mall and picked up a copy of Heavy Metal magazine from the newstand rack. A story called Rebel was the feature in that month’s issue, and I was enthralled. It was a well-drawn post apocalyptic Road-Warrior-esque story set in New York City and I stood there for an hour absorbing as much as I could. I guess I didn’t have enough money to buy the issue, because I don’t have a copy. But I immediately went home and started drawing my own version of what I had seen, which went on for about 30 pages before I ran out of story ideas. Fast forward to yesterday, where two comic artists who run a channel reviewing comic books featured the trade paperback version of the strip I seen 30 years ago. I’m glad to see it holds up as well as it does in my memory; it’s an incredible work of art.
In a strange and bitter happenstance, one of the reviewers on this YouTube channel was accused of soliciting and grooming high school aged girls, and committed suicide a few days ago after she went public.
This is mostly for music nerds of a certain pre-Spotify age, but I found it fascinating: the oral history of Pitchfork from Slate magazine.
Greene: It was always, and only ever, a bunch of nerds writing essays about records. It was that before it became famous. And it was that after it became famous. It was only ever that, and those are the people who still come to Pitchfork, but I guess it wasn’t enough.
Hmm, this looks interesting. A self-described fan of The Three Body Problem novel series gives it a glowing review after seeing the screeners. It’s written and produced by the guys who fumbled the ball at the goal line with Game of Thrones, but hopefully (because the source material has all been written) this will be better. I’ll put this on the watch list, even though I rarely watch series TV these days.
Huh. A couple of years ago I paid for a MotorTrend+ subscription so I could watch Roadkill, the original “Will it Run?”-style TV show, and they also had Dirt Every Day and Top Gear US among other good shows. Most of the rest of the channel was cable-TV dreck—Reality TV-style customizing shows that were irritating when they were on cable 20 years ago. Nevertheless, I felt pretty good about my subscription, because I liked the three shows mentioned above. I let the subscription lapse after the first year and considered renewing it, but then they watered down Top Gear US and got rid of the hosts I tolerated. Then they axed Dirt Every Day. Now it turns out they’re bleeding cash and are shutting down the streaming service and moving everything to Discovery+, where I will not be subscribing. I feel like we subscribe to enough services as it is, and seriously, if we didn’t use Amazon Prime for online purchasing, I would cancel that subscription, because their streaming selection is straight garbage.
Friday evening we had the Morrises over to see the Cirque de Soleil production of Twas the Night Before Christmas, which was as amazing—and as French—as you might imagine.