So I just downloaded Zemanta, to use for the blog that actually pays me to write. It's a little weird; upon opening this to write I get a 3x3 grid of pictures on the side of the page to use as inspiration, and it SWEARS it's going to give me suggestions soon on what pictures and links and little tags I might want to use in this post, based on what I've already written in the post, or something meta like that. So far, it has not provided any wry and sardonic observations about sports or music or drinking.
Update 1. I have been given a picture of, I believe, Everclear, and some ideas for tags to use in this blog, one of which is "Second Life." Isn't that what the Paultards use to pretend they still have some sort of social relevance?
New pictures. Still of mutherfucking Everclear, and now they're thinking it should be a tag of mine. What, exactly, is about that band from my first paragraph? Did I say that I would buy you a new house, where your roses can bloom?
Next update. Apparently I'm interested in fighting Paragraph 175, which I just looked up and was a German law banning homosexuality between men. Because between women? WAY hot. I've seen videos. Also, the tag suggestions believe I'm into shopping.
So what have we learned with this Zemanta preview? I love Everclear and gay sex (those two, really, though - hand in hand). Also, my blogs pertain to shopping and Second Life. So, I guess, so much for the sports and politics and music. Except, of course, for Everclear. Goddamn I love Everclear.
It's in my brain!
Monday, May 19, 2008
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Barry Zito and the Velvet Underground
Yesterday, Barry Zito lost again. He is now oh and eight on the year, and the Giants have lost all nine games he has started. Now, to be fair, this game and (I believe) the last, he allowed only a couple runs, and the Giants scored only one in each. However, specifics such as those don't really matter when you're being paid $126 million over seven years to be this awfully awfully bad. And the bitch about baseball is, even if the Giants fired him, he works in one of the few professions in California where he is not an at-will employee. The Giants will have to pay him all that money.
And, as an A's fan, I'm absolutely delighted by that. Seeing the Giants be stuck with this monstrosity really does make me smile. As a friend put it, Zito's "a miserable player on a miserable team." Growing up actively rooting against the Giants, and seeing them build a stadium with a fucking 309 foot right field wall so Bonds could (literally) juice balls into the goddamn water, and then having Zito jump ship to the rival...to some of us, this was deserved punishment all around. Fuck the Giants.
I'm listening right now to the acetate versions of Velvet Underground's demos that became the Velvet Underground and Nico album. That album was originally released in 1967, and there are more than one song on that record specifically and obviously about heroin (you know, like the song "Heroin"). Listening to it now, I'm trying to imagine the jolt I'd get out of a band singing so bluntly about such a taboo subject. We're so inured to shit like that these days, we don't even get up in arms about a song where Eminem kills his ex-wife or whatever she is. I can only imagine the response a band would get in 1967 singing about putting a spike in. I mean, this is when Johnson was in the White House, we hadn't gone to the moon, we were still in Vietnam, so forth and so on.
I think what's so shocking about the music, however, is that it's not loud, it's not abrasive; it's simple music with a very candid Lou Reed describing drugs with a sort of monotony usually reserved for laundry lists. Sometimes we forgot that loud doesn't equal shocking. And maybe I'm listening to the wrong stuff - I haven't delved into G.G. Allen or anything - but I can't think of a way to be shocked by something a band actually sings about these days. Acts can be vile, but who since Velvet Underground has been so forthrightly jarring (Amy Winehouse doesn't count, because it's no different). I think it might be nice to be shocked now and again.
And, as an A's fan, I'm absolutely delighted by that. Seeing the Giants be stuck with this monstrosity really does make me smile. As a friend put it, Zito's "a miserable player on a miserable team." Growing up actively rooting against the Giants, and seeing them build a stadium with a fucking 309 foot right field wall so Bonds could (literally) juice balls into the goddamn water, and then having Zito jump ship to the rival...to some of us, this was deserved punishment all around. Fuck the Giants.
I'm listening right now to the acetate versions of Velvet Underground's demos that became the Velvet Underground and Nico album. That album was originally released in 1967, and there are more than one song on that record specifically and obviously about heroin (you know, like the song "Heroin"). Listening to it now, I'm trying to imagine the jolt I'd get out of a band singing so bluntly about such a taboo subject. We're so inured to shit like that these days, we don't even get up in arms about a song where Eminem kills his ex-wife or whatever she is. I can only imagine the response a band would get in 1967 singing about putting a spike in. I mean, this is when Johnson was in the White House, we hadn't gone to the moon, we were still in Vietnam, so forth and so on.
I think what's so shocking about the music, however, is that it's not loud, it's not abrasive; it's simple music with a very candid Lou Reed describing drugs with a sort of monotony usually reserved for laundry lists. Sometimes we forgot that loud doesn't equal shocking. And maybe I'm listening to the wrong stuff - I haven't delved into G.G. Allen or anything - but I can't think of a way to be shocked by something a band actually sings about these days. Acts can be vile, but who since Velvet Underground has been so forthrightly jarring (Amy Winehouse doesn't count, because it's no different). I think it might be nice to be shocked now and again.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
No one reads this anyway
Whaaa? No posts in a month? I know, I can't believe it either. However, YOU try going through the death throes of a relationship, work full-time, get paid to blog elsewhere, and do this. Give it time. It'll all come back.
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