Neil Kash'n'Karry's mic etiquette

MEMO TO ASST. TREASURY SECRETARY NEIL KASHKARI (aka the guy "managing" the bailout $$$): Dude, if you are going to be on the national stage, learn to use a microphone. Back off your P's, man:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCAhclr3ql4

(via gawker, which just isn't as funny in these trying times, is it?)

An open letter to the President-Elect

Dear. Mr Obama:

I understand you're busy and am grateful you are taking time to read this. I am flattered you like my blog. If you like the music I talk about, then maybe when you and the girls are installed in the White House, I can come visit with my 80g external hard drive full of tunes and we can swap. Just don't tell the Justice Dept how I came by so many songs (ha ha)!

I want to say how I appreciate your taking on the onerous task of the Presidency in this seemingly dark and painful stretch for our country's history. However one voted, both you and Senator Biden, and Senator McCain and Governor Palin, deserve to be patted on the back for such willingness to attempt to lead us now.

I understand that you are going to have a heaping plate full of tasks to attend to, what with the bailouts and the wars and the 28-days-later bug probably escaping the CDC even as I type, but I wonder, since we are cyber-chums, if you could see fit to slip an executive order under the doorjamb for your old pal Nick.

I'll just say it:
Do you think it would be possible to get someone to remix and remaster the 1994 Suede album Dog Man Star?

This is the one where Bernard Butler left, yes, before the whole thing was recorded and Brett Anderson supposedly played some of the guitar to finish it and it is sort of thought of among rock congonscenti as a flawed masterpiece, dark like The Empire Strikes Back?

But, you see, Senator, even when I first bought this (on cassette!) it sounded way too sloppily bottom-heavy, and the vocals are flanged in some dumb Ed Buller way and it just sounds lousy. "Mastered lousy," like Todd Rundgren would say. The end result is, when I occasionally try to listen to it, going in thinking surely it was me who was wrong the other 100 times over the years I have stuck it in the player, I still end up going, "Oh, man, this record would be so much better if you could hear it!"

Even in the Lost in TV Suede video comp, when the commentary track is on, the band members say of "New Generation," "Why does this sound so bad?" as if they had never even believed it themselves! And "It's that way on the record!"

Surely one person's government issued healthcare benefits could be spent instead to right this wrong? You can choose the person, even.

Remember: History is the sum total of the things that could have been avoided.

The The

Does Matt Johnson have enough money? I always wonder/worry about people who were sort of mid-level successes music career-wise when they are off the public radar, perhaps because I always hated the story about how Colin Moulding and Dave Gregory were driving rental cars back to their original stalls for money to live on during XTC's "strike" from 1992-1999...so depressing. Do the guys from A House have to work in a Marks and Spencer? Does Michael Quercio (sp, prolly) from the Three O'Clock manage a coffee shop? I want all faded pop stars to have enough money to read all day.

Herewith, though, is a video I never knew about, for a song I've always loved from The The's 1993 LP Dusk:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2RtUv_PgGA

Ahem

Nikki Eddy and her girlfriend Dawn Miller comfort each other during a Proposition 8 opposition rally at the San Diego Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Community Center November 5, 2008 in San Diego, California. Proposition 8, which bans same sex marriage, passed in yesterday's California election. By Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images.

(note to dude second from right - the Andrew Sullivan lookalike contest starts at 10pm sharp!)

Brakes Forever!

A local brake repair place I pass nearly every day has a sign with specials listed, ie "BRAKEPAD SERVICE 29.99" and the like. Then, at the bottom, it says:

BRAKES FOREVER!

Which was, I thought, a very nice way for the business to convey just how excited they were about their article and the implementation thereof..."We love brakes! They help you stop, they keep you from hitting kids on skateboards...running into walls...they're FANTASTIC!"

After a day or so of thinking exclusively on this, I realized it was probably just a lifetime brake service deal being offered, as in "buy a complete brake service now and it's guaranteed for life of your car." Indeed, it wasn't actually a burst of overexuberance at the concept of brakes and braking at all.

OH, WELL!

Free Me

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3c9KPM2J-o

Click, if you dare.

Thanksgiving

The other Sunday I was driving down a leafy street and saw a squirrel in the road dragging an entire ear of decorative corn! Just as fancy as you please, pulling his trophy by the decorative tassel doodad...


Here was a squirrel who had had enough!


Enough scrounging for acorns! ENOUGH patiently waiting for the trees to drop their bounty, all manna-like!

He saw an opportunity on a neighborhood porch and he took it.


Later that day I saw a crow dragging a bale of hay across a highway ramp...


I also wonder if the squirrel went back into the underbrush and through some hedges into a subterranean cavern where he was met by some smiling, beneficent harvest deity, someone like this:





















(semi-relatedly, I also hope, on a trip we hope to make soon to Chicago, to find a inexpensive but great-quality large no-stick frying pan at a neighborhood kitchen supply shop, and to dither with myself about whether to buy a microplane or a mandoline, then, that night to decide, yes, I should have bought both; but on returning the next day to purchase these items, to find a vacant lot, just nothing, where the shop had stood. The shop had never been there [eerie wind noise]..!)