(no subject)
Hey, remember that quiz from last week that determined if you were a true friend of mine or not that 8% of you decided to take and then it turned out that on average none of you are true friends of mine? Well, let's give you the answers - that way, you may never truly be a true friend of mine, but at least I'll let you cheat in order for you to bluff it - helping you out at test-time, its like I'm in high school again!
Question #1
I severely freaked out in 1996, believing I might have fatally poisoned which celebrity?
Lou Barlow, leader of sensitive indie band Sebadoh
Adrian Tomine, author of sensitive indie comic Optic Nerve
Chris Elliott, star of sensitive indie TV show Get A Life
Chan Marshall, chanteuse of hyper-sensitive indie band Cat Power
(B) came to town along with Seth on a tour promoting their comics on the Drawn & Quarterly label, and I brought gifts for them. I gave Seth (Palookaville author) a Peanuts-ish thing I found at a thrift, and I didn't know Adrian's interests very well so I gave him some chocolate pretzels made by my mom. I also bought his book 32 Stories at the instore, got home & read it, and then discovered he had a fatal peanut allergy, and of course the pretzels had peanuts in them too but they were all coated over by the chocolate. Thankfully I knew they were staying with the guy who owns Criminal Records and he assured me that they discovered it and all was well...as for the other answers, the closest I've ever gotten to (A) was saying hello to him once, I've never had the pleasure of being in the same room with (C), and I did meet (D) backstage at Smith's Olde Bar due to another Criminal Records connection but if anyone would have been poisoned that night it would have been me from overswooning...
Question #2
I myself was non-fatally poisoned in which metropolitan city?
Paris, eating sketchy fish in a brasserie
Tokyo, eating sketchy blowfish in an izakaya
Madrid, eating sketchy mushrooms in a tapas place
London, eating sketchy shepherd in a shepherd's pie shop
It was actually sketchy cream sauce that did it, but (A) is the answer. (B) put the fear of the ancients in me but it tasted great, everything we ate in (C) was nothing but addictive, particularly the mushrooms at a place called Puerto De Atocha, and I didn't ever eat (D) while in the Big Smoke because eating shepherd just ain't my thing...
Question #3
Which foreign language did I study for a year in my college?
French
German
Japanese
Spanish
I spent a year learning (A) for the purpose of sounding sophisticated and/or interpreting Stereolab songs, neither of which came close to happening and 99% of the language has now left my head as evidenced by our trip to Paris a few years ago. I've never attempted to learn (B), I've been working on (C) for 4 years now (round 3 of Japanese class started this past week), and I spent 2 years in high school on (D) which I've retained probably about as well as anything else I learned in high school - damning that with faint praise...
Question #4
Which band once spent the night at my place while on tour?
Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
Sunburned Hand Of The Man
Acid Mothers Temple
Yo La Tengo
Of course it was (C) which I wrote a big journal entry about a long time ago although some of you may not have known that. I only met Russell Simins from (A) briefly after a show in Athens in 1996 and discovered he was a huge asshole, or at least he was to me that night. (B) was going to spend the night at our place in 2004 until the last minute when they found a relative who lived near the club. And sharing an elevator with James McNew of (D) in a Japanese toystore is as close as I've come to my all-time favorite band.
Question #5
I cried in WREK's studio while DJing one night when a caller said what to me?
They couldn't believe that I thought myself to have hip tastes
The Nick Drake song I was playing was played at his dad's funeral
I had screwed her out of a concert by forgetting to fax in the guestlist
By not devoting my set to Beatle George when he died, I was like Bin Laden
I thought it'd be obvious (D) was the answer from how absurd it sounded. I was the trusty guest-host of WREK's "Stonehenge" (the obscure classic rock show) in 2001, and I always got a thrill from doing the show due to all of the friendly listeners and the fun of playing all sorts of obscure songs over the air for 3 hours on a Friday night. As it turned out, George Harrison died the day of the show, and I was torn with what to do. I'd been looking so much forward to my planned set, but I knew I needed to do something for him. Assuming that the right-of-the-dial station were probably focusing on him, I decided to do my planned set but throw in some songs from him through the show (including an inspired "I Need You" set, since The Who, The Kinks, and The Beatles all wrote great songs with that title). This was a big mistake. I received a deluge of hate calls from people seriously distraught over my decision. The last call was the guy who said the above, and to be truthful I was paraphrasing but he literally did say that the whole thing was like 9/11 for him (I never knew if he meant George's death or my playlist). I buckled, never feeling this way on the radio before, and spent the rest of the night playing solid George album sides. Which I probably should've done from the start in retrospect, but I was just being a little selfish. I lost all desires to ever host the show again after that. Boo hoo. As for the other answers, I'd never get upset over (A). I'm surprised most people guessed (B), something that wouldn't make me cry in all likelihood unless it had a really sad story - then again, back when I DJed it was before the WB network, even before trendy Volkswagen commercials, so needless to say there was no Nick Drake funerals in those days. And I'm sure the circumstances of (C) happened more than once during my college tenure, but I never broke down because of it.
Question #6
From my memory, how many girls conversed with me during my time at Georgia Tech from 1994 to 1998?
1
2
3
4
I can't guarantee this is the correct answer, but the only ones I recall are enchant, xantha (and I was fairly drunk that time but I'm still counting it), and a girl in one of my graduating senior classes who first started speaking to me after my haircut incident (more on that later), perhaps out of trainwreck curiosity...hey, at least a boy flirted with me during that time (yet another Criminal Records connection) or else I'd have given up all hope...
Question #7
Which trashy celebrity was I compared to the night I dressed up in drag?
Anna Nicole Smith
Courtney Love
Naomi Campbell
Conrad Bain
I really loved that a couple of you guessed (D). Of course it had to be (B) - we were too drunk to carry off the makeover inherent in choice (A), let alone choice (C). So you know, it was Halloween 1998 and we were off to the Clermont Lounge (my first time) to see DQE and the last time I'd ever see Smoke live.
Question #8
Drunkenness has caused all of the following to happen to me except what?
Vomit from drinking too much after winning 1st place at rock trivia night
Nearly get kicked out of a Borders for shouting profanities
Get my hair butchered nearly to the skin by equally drunk friends
Get pulled over by GT cops but they were too inept to tell and let me go
I've had someone in my party commit (A) before, but it wasn't me. (B) occurred at the Borders on Cobb Parkway, as we wandered over there after drinking hurricanes at the Copeland's next door and I kept yelling "Goddammit" to geebs in the music section when some guy had enough of it. (C) most certainly happened one late summer night in 1998 just before I graduated college - phatjoe, I can't believe you don't remember that! And (D) occurred after visiting geebs at his workplace, when I went the wrong way on a one-way around midnight. I may not have been drunk at that point but I had definitely been drinking and had in fact just come there from a bar in Little 5 Points. The cop pulled me over and I made a faux-pas while talking to him when I said "I forgot this was a one-way, its been a long time since I've worked here" when I meant to say "Since I went to school here" - the cop asked me for clarification on it and I thought "oh shit, I'm busted." That and the fact that I didn't turn the radio off while I was pulled over and WREK's "Atmospherics" was playing at a decent volume so here was all this weird ambient stuff going on. But he eventually just said "Be more careful" and let me go on my way. Crisis averted.
Question #9
When do I not wear glasses?
When I drive
When I read
When I see movies
When I travel
I can see decent at short distances, terribly at anything far. A-chan constantly points out things that I can't see - the other night, she inadvertently made her "turtle" sound (really really cute, I have to say, and unfortunately I can't explain it to you in the written form) and I eventually discovered that she was looking at a book about 15 feet away from us that had a turtle on the cover. I'll probably end up wearing glasses full-time by the end of the year though.
Question #10
Which mad collecting phase have I not gone through?
High school yearbooks of unknown strangers
State quarters (notating both the D & P minted coins)
Autographed glossies of C-list celebrities
Monopoly board games of various vintages and all derivations/parodies
S collects (B) but I don't, so that's kind of a trick question. Anytime I run across (A) in a thrift, I pick one up especially if they have lots of signatures in them. I'm surprised geebs forgot (C) - for a time I planned to decorate our Collier Ridge apartment with glossies that I'd win on ebay provided they cost less than $10 - I wanted it to look like a restaurant of the absurd. I started the collection off with Bob Barker and "Macho Man" Randy Savage but it never progressed after that - it was pretty difficult to get one of Eddie Albert & Eva Gabor of "Green Acres" so I gave up. And there are still remnants of (D) around here, although I ended up donating most of those board games to the Howell Mill location of Jake's Ice Cream, which went belly-up a matter of months later - sigh...
Enough of that. Here's this week's review, again from the last issue of Frank's APA. Ones from the new issue will start next week.
International Sad Hits Volume 1 (20/20/20 Records 2006) I'm not really a fan of Damon & Naomi, but I do share the same interests as them apparently and the maiden voyage of their new imprint label sounded good to me. 4 singers are documented on this album: Fikret Kizilok(Turkey), Kim Doo Soo(South Korea), Kan Mikami, and Kazuki Tomokawa (both Japanese). The motif is indeed that these are guys who sing melancholy melodies with anguished performances, with recordings taken from the last 25 years or so. Everything is quite sparse, usually not much more than a guitar and an impassioned vocal, and even without a word in English you can tell that its bummer material, even melodramatic in spots. It strikes me as a bit curious that they couldn't have just reisued some albums by these people in full rather than as a compilation, especially seing as how the South Korean's 4 songs are all taken from the same album, but I gues this handy comp might move more product. Hey, we all know sad people aren't the richest people in the world. But wait, aren't the richest people in the world usually sad? And if Damon & Naomi are always so bland, why are their musical tastes so rich? You won't find the answers to these questions here, but at least you can cry along with them - sadness is a universal language, I'm happy to say.
And mummed lips until later, but this Boredoms reissue really does live up to the hype - who'da thought?
Question #1
I severely freaked out in 1996, believing I might have fatally poisoned which celebrity?
Lou Barlow, leader of sensitive indie band Sebadoh
Adrian Tomine, author of sensitive indie comic Optic Nerve
Chris Elliott, star of sensitive indie TV show Get A Life
Chan Marshall, chanteuse of hyper-sensitive indie band Cat Power
(B) came to town along with Seth on a tour promoting their comics on the Drawn & Quarterly label, and I brought gifts for them. I gave Seth (Palookaville author) a Peanuts-ish thing I found at a thrift, and I didn't know Adrian's interests very well so I gave him some chocolate pretzels made by my mom. I also bought his book 32 Stories at the instore, got home & read it, and then discovered he had a fatal peanut allergy, and of course the pretzels had peanuts in them too but they were all coated over by the chocolate. Thankfully I knew they were staying with the guy who owns Criminal Records and he assured me that they discovered it and all was well...as for the other answers, the closest I've ever gotten to (A) was saying hello to him once, I've never had the pleasure of being in the same room with (C), and I did meet (D) backstage at Smith's Olde Bar due to another Criminal Records connection but if anyone would have been poisoned that night it would have been me from overswooning...
Question #2
I myself was non-fatally poisoned in which metropolitan city?
Paris, eating sketchy fish in a brasserie
Tokyo, eating sketchy blowfish in an izakaya
Madrid, eating sketchy mushrooms in a tapas place
London, eating sketchy shepherd in a shepherd's pie shop
It was actually sketchy cream sauce that did it, but (A) is the answer. (B) put the fear of the ancients in me but it tasted great, everything we ate in (C) was nothing but addictive, particularly the mushrooms at a place called Puerto De Atocha, and I didn't ever eat (D) while in the Big Smoke because eating shepherd just ain't my thing...
Question #3
Which foreign language did I study for a year in my college?
French
German
Japanese
Spanish
I spent a year learning (A) for the purpose of sounding sophisticated and/or interpreting Stereolab songs, neither of which came close to happening and 99% of the language has now left my head as evidenced by our trip to Paris a few years ago. I've never attempted to learn (B), I've been working on (C) for 4 years now (round 3 of Japanese class started this past week), and I spent 2 years in high school on (D) which I've retained probably about as well as anything else I learned in high school - damning that with faint praise...
Question #4
Which band once spent the night at my place while on tour?
Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
Sunburned Hand Of The Man
Acid Mothers Temple
Yo La Tengo
Of course it was (C) which I wrote a big journal entry about a long time ago although some of you may not have known that. I only met Russell Simins from (A) briefly after a show in Athens in 1996 and discovered he was a huge asshole, or at least he was to me that night. (B) was going to spend the night at our place in 2004 until the last minute when they found a relative who lived near the club. And sharing an elevator with James McNew of (D) in a Japanese toystore is as close as I've come to my all-time favorite band.
Question #5
I cried in WREK's studio while DJing one night when a caller said what to me?
They couldn't believe that I thought myself to have hip tastes
The Nick Drake song I was playing was played at his dad's funeral
I had screwed her out of a concert by forgetting to fax in the guestlist
By not devoting my set to Beatle George when he died, I was like Bin Laden
I thought it'd be obvious (D) was the answer from how absurd it sounded. I was the trusty guest-host of WREK's "Stonehenge" (the obscure classic rock show) in 2001, and I always got a thrill from doing the show due to all of the friendly listeners and the fun of playing all sorts of obscure songs over the air for 3 hours on a Friday night. As it turned out, George Harrison died the day of the show, and I was torn with what to do. I'd been looking so much forward to my planned set, but I knew I needed to do something for him. Assuming that the right-of-the-dial station were probably focusing on him, I decided to do my planned set but throw in some songs from him through the show (including an inspired "I Need You" set, since The Who, The Kinks, and The Beatles all wrote great songs with that title). This was a big mistake. I received a deluge of hate calls from people seriously distraught over my decision. The last call was the guy who said the above, and to be truthful I was paraphrasing but he literally did say that the whole thing was like 9/11 for him (I never knew if he meant George's death or my playlist). I buckled, never feeling this way on the radio before, and spent the rest of the night playing solid George album sides. Which I probably should've done from the start in retrospect, but I was just being a little selfish. I lost all desires to ever host the show again after that. Boo hoo. As for the other answers, I'd never get upset over (A). I'm surprised most people guessed (B), something that wouldn't make me cry in all likelihood unless it had a really sad story - then again, back when I DJed it was before the WB network, even before trendy Volkswagen commercials, so needless to say there was no Nick Drake funerals in those days. And I'm sure the circumstances of (C) happened more than once during my college tenure, but I never broke down because of it.
Question #6
From my memory, how many girls conversed with me during my time at Georgia Tech from 1994 to 1998?
1
2
3
4
I can't guarantee this is the correct answer, but the only ones I recall are enchant, xantha (and I was fairly drunk that time but I'm still counting it), and a girl in one of my graduating senior classes who first started speaking to me after my haircut incident (more on that later), perhaps out of trainwreck curiosity...hey, at least a boy flirted with me during that time (yet another Criminal Records connection) or else I'd have given up all hope...
Question #7
Which trashy celebrity was I compared to the night I dressed up in drag?
Anna Nicole Smith
Courtney Love
Naomi Campbell
Conrad Bain
I really loved that a couple of you guessed (D). Of course it had to be (B) - we were too drunk to carry off the makeover inherent in choice (A), let alone choice (C). So you know, it was Halloween 1998 and we were off to the Clermont Lounge (my first time) to see DQE and the last time I'd ever see Smoke live.
Question #8
Drunkenness has caused all of the following to happen to me except what?
Vomit from drinking too much after winning 1st place at rock trivia night
Nearly get kicked out of a Borders for shouting profanities
Get my hair butchered nearly to the skin by equally drunk friends
Get pulled over by GT cops but they were too inept to tell and let me go
I've had someone in my party commit (A) before, but it wasn't me. (B) occurred at the Borders on Cobb Parkway, as we wandered over there after drinking hurricanes at the Copeland's next door and I kept yelling "Goddammit" to geebs in the music section when some guy had enough of it. (C) most certainly happened one late summer night in 1998 just before I graduated college - phatjoe, I can't believe you don't remember that! And (D) occurred after visiting geebs at his workplace, when I went the wrong way on a one-way around midnight. I may not have been drunk at that point but I had definitely been drinking and had in fact just come there from a bar in Little 5 Points. The cop pulled me over and I made a faux-pas while talking to him when I said "I forgot this was a one-way, its been a long time since I've worked here" when I meant to say "Since I went to school here" - the cop asked me for clarification on it and I thought "oh shit, I'm busted." That and the fact that I didn't turn the radio off while I was pulled over and WREK's "Atmospherics" was playing at a decent volume so here was all this weird ambient stuff going on. But he eventually just said "Be more careful" and let me go on my way. Crisis averted.
Question #9
When do I not wear glasses?
When I drive
When I read
When I see movies
When I travel
I can see decent at short distances, terribly at anything far. A-chan constantly points out things that I can't see - the other night, she inadvertently made her "turtle" sound (really really cute, I have to say, and unfortunately I can't explain it to you in the written form) and I eventually discovered that she was looking at a book about 15 feet away from us that had a turtle on the cover. I'll probably end up wearing glasses full-time by the end of the year though.
Question #10
Which mad collecting phase have I not gone through?
High school yearbooks of unknown strangers
State quarters (notating both the D & P minted coins)
Autographed glossies of C-list celebrities
Monopoly board games of various vintages and all derivations/parodies
S collects (B) but I don't, so that's kind of a trick question. Anytime I run across (A) in a thrift, I pick one up especially if they have lots of signatures in them. I'm surprised geebs forgot (C) - for a time I planned to decorate our Collier Ridge apartment with glossies that I'd win on ebay provided they cost less than $10 - I wanted it to look like a restaurant of the absurd. I started the collection off with Bob Barker and "Macho Man" Randy Savage but it never progressed after that - it was pretty difficult to get one of Eddie Albert & Eva Gabor of "Green Acres" so I gave up. And there are still remnants of (D) around here, although I ended up donating most of those board games to the Howell Mill location of Jake's Ice Cream, which went belly-up a matter of months later - sigh...
Enough of that. Here's this week's review, again from the last issue of Frank's APA. Ones from the new issue will start next week.
International Sad Hits Volume 1 (20/20/20 Records 2006) I'm not really a fan of Damon & Naomi, but I do share the same interests as them apparently and the maiden voyage of their new imprint label sounded good to me. 4 singers are documented on this album: Fikret Kizilok(Turkey), Kim Doo Soo(South Korea), Kan Mikami, and Kazuki Tomokawa (both Japanese). The motif is indeed that these are guys who sing melancholy melodies with anguished performances, with recordings taken from the last 25 years or so. Everything is quite sparse, usually not much more than a guitar and an impassioned vocal, and even without a word in English you can tell that its bummer material, even melodramatic in spots. It strikes me as a bit curious that they couldn't have just reisued some albums by these people in full rather than as a compilation, especially seing as how the South Korean's 4 songs are all taken from the same album, but I gues this handy comp might move more product. Hey, we all know sad people aren't the richest people in the world. But wait, aren't the richest people in the world usually sad? And if Damon & Naomi are always so bland, why are their musical tastes so rich? You won't find the answers to these questions here, but at least you can cry along with them - sadness is a universal language, I'm happy to say.
And mummed lips until later, but this Boredoms reissue really does live up to the hype - who'da thought?