Here’s a quiet, gripping song called Nothing to See by a woman named Miya Folick:
This is a fantastic melody paired with some devastating lyrics, and it’s on repeat in my brain. She’s got some other really good tracks available on Spotify—Bad Thing is another standout.
So my MotorTrend Online subscription lapsed about a year ago, and I’ve held off on renewing it for reasons I can’t really explain. Dirt Every Day was always one of my favored shows on that channel: two guys cutting and welding and building crazy vehicles to take on crazy adventures. Turns out they’ve ended the show—no idea if they’ve cancelled it or if the hosts have hung up the towel. There are some other shows on the channel I like—it’s the best place to see the old episodes of Top Gear, but I’ll have to reassess whether or not I’ll renew it now.
I read a retrospective review of an an odd album called Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots on Friday that got the song Fight Test stuck in my head. It was a strange album 20 years ago and it still sounds like nothing else out there today, but the melody here is catchy and the lyrics are really quite perfect.
My good friend Matt sent me a text asking if I’d been to a Soul Coughing show at Bohagers with him back in ’97, and I said, Yes! I was there! They were throwing board games out into the audience! Turns out there’s a recording of the show on the Internet Archive. It’s not recorded through the board, but the sound is good enough. Bohager’s is long gone now; it got razed and developed into a parking garage about five years after that show. And, here’s the inspiration for the name of this website.
Jen and I took some well-deserved time together to watch the new season of Stranger Things and Obi-Wan Kenobi, and while we had some problems with each of them, I enjoyed them both very much.
Spoilers ahead!
Stranger Things took a long time to get things going over the first bunch of episodes, and there were several plotlines I could easily have done without. Everytime the action moved to Russia I looked at my watch and reached for my beer. My irrational dislike of Matthew Modine continues—how did that guy get cast by Kubrick? Oh, right, he’s a blank piece of wallpaper. They sidelined Maya Hawke into a caricature of anxieties, when she was the deepest character from last season. But the last two episodes paid off handsomely, and just to have a character play Master of Puppets on a trailer roof in the middle of Hell was worth the wait. When the other characters were bumbling around in the dark, Max took center stage and carried most of the show—and it worked. P.S. I’ve had enough Kate Bush, thank you.
Obi Wan Kenobi was also a fun ride, if you’re willing to look past the obvious plot holes (and as a superfan of the original Star Wars, I knew they would be Death Star-sized.) Yeah, it’s another “save the kid” setup—this, after the Mandalorian spent two seasons showing us how it’s done properly—but it was great to see these characters in a different, non-Lucas situation where a director understands how to engage with people. Ewan McGregor killed it. There’s a scene where he’s got to bust out the lightsaber and take out some Stormtroopers in a hallway, and after he’s dropped the last one, he does the badass twirl-lightsaber-and-return-to-ready-position thing from the Phantom Menace, and that’s when we know Shit Just Got Real. I about fell off the couch. The duel he has with Vader is probably one of the best swordfights in the whole series—Rey and Kylo going through the Red Guards might be the top of that list—but it had me on the edge of my seat, even though I know how the whole thing is going to end. My guess is that Ewan McGregor was thrilled to return to this simply for the opportunity to revisit the character and show what could have been possible twenty years ago. It’s not often in life we are offered a do-over; I’d say he made the best of it.
God, I hope this series is good; the graphic novel series this is based on was amazing. July 29 is on the calendar.
I’ve been looking for the collected Venture Brothers seasons on DVD for years with no luck, and suddenly they appeared on Netflix’s DVD service (yes, we still pay to have DVDs sent by mail). I just filled up the queue with comedy goodness and bumped everything else to the bottom. By the way, there’s a movie coming! I sure hope it’s better than the Deadwood movie.
File this under Awesome Shit I Did Not Know Until Today: Blood and Thunder, one of my all-time favorite metal songs, features guest vocals from Neil Fallon of local heroes Clutch. One of my favorite podcasts breaks down the song and some of the things that make it so good.
Working on the bus this summer I binged about thirty episodes of Strong Songs; even if you’re not a musician there’s a ton of great stuff to learn about great music.
Hank Hill, everlasting.
I’ve long been a fan of the Onion A/V Club, a website dedicated to pop culture and home to a ton of excellent writers from the early days of the web. Some time ago they got merged into Gawker and when that family of sites imploded they were able to hang on, most likely because of the quality of their work. G/O Media, the new corporate owners of the old Gawker sites, are now basically pushing the longest tenured writers at the A/V Club out in a pretty blatant move to bust up their union and hire cheaper workers in a race to become yet another middling entertainment site. I can only hope they follow the lead of the writers at Defector and build their own thing together.