I love everything this man has ever done.
How did this become the official “ON” button of the 21st century?
Why wasn’t I consulted?
I finished Run River last night, and have now officially exhausted Joan Didion’s fiction. A sad day is upon us, friends!
Where else can I turn for snappy, dispassionate appraisals of broken California rich folk? Please write me some more novels, Joan. No one does it like you.
Also, she was kind of a fox back in the day, in the Ice Queen mold.
Which I have no problem with.
I am only slightly ashamed to say that I’ve become obsessed with the TV show “Friday Night Lights.” It’s a TV show, which is based on a 2004 movie, which is based on a 1990 book about the high school football obsessed town of Odessa, Texas.
I haven’t seen the film or read the book, but the show is super emotional and intense. Every episode, there are at least two or three moments when a character is about to cry, and the music swells up, and Dillon, TX becomes the most heartbreak-iest, emo-ist little town in the world.
Speaking of the music, the Austin, TX band Explosions In The Sky scored the film, and their music was used in the show’s pilot. We actually played a random show with them years ago. It’s interesting how well their music works on the show, since their grand, guitar-y post-rock is pretty far off from Linkin Park or DJ Screw or whatever might actually get played in a typical Texas high school football locker room. Though who knows, maybe they listen to this now instead of “Let The Bodies Hit The Floor.”
The funny thing is that the show’s theme song - which sounds a lot like Explosions In The Sky - was actually written by W.G. “Snuffy” Walden (great name), the same guy who scored My So Called Life, thirtysomething, Roseanne, The West Wing, and all kinds of other big TV shows. You can hear it here (though it is inexplicably “mashed up” with the intro to some show called “Coach,” which I don’t remember.) It’s actually a well done homage, though one way you can tell that the theme song is NOT by a “real post-rock band” is that there’s a wooow-wooow-ing fretless bass playing, which is near the top of the list of indie-rock stylistic no-no’s.
But what this means is that the lineage of post-rock bands, from Explosions In The Sky to Mogwai to Godspeed and all the way back to Slint, is somehow represented now in a major network TV drama, usually the final outpost of outdated aesthetics. Kind of strange.
That said, the show can’t seem to find an audience and might get canceled after this season anyway. (At which point I will shrivel up and die.) So maybe their theme should sound more like this.
Download it HERE.
Happy Valentines Day!
We had a great time making LOVE WILL REIGN SUPREME (2008’s Valentines Day covers EP) at Noam’s house last year. So we had a lot of ideas of how to do another one for 2009. Do the whole thing over the internet? Record everything in one day? Only Tom Petty?
Eventually we decided to make use of a momentarily empty house (except for three rugs and a leftover piano) in North Bennington, Vermont. We brought in everything ourselves, like we were camping: food, pots and pans, toilet paper, blankets, forks, sleeping bags… and a few tons of gear. It was zero degrees outside most of the time and felt more or less like camping on hardwood floors.
Tracklist:
1 Say You Will (Kanye West)
2 Love Hurts (Everly Brothers)
3 Lullaby (Dixie Chicks)
4 Satellite (TV on the Radio)
5 At My Window (Townes Van Zandt)
6 You Don’t Know How it Feels (Tom Petty)
Sometimes a magic genius dreams up something so absurd and so perfect - something that fits into your life like a phantom limb you never knew you should be missing - that it’s a wonder you’ve been living without it for the last million years.
Friends, that being said - let me introduce you to the Wake N’ Bacon Alarm Clock.
What is the Wake N’ Bacon, you ask? Well, thanks for asking. The WN’B cooks a strip of bacon in its tiny oven when your alarm goes off, thus affording you the pleasing aroma of fatty pork product at the start of every day, regardless of whether you still live at home with mom or employ a live-in chef.
Also, if you didn’t notice, it is being cooked inside a tiny wooden pig.
It’s odd timing that I read my first Updike novel two months ago (Couples). I really loved it, and read another right after. He made stringing together beautiful sentence after beautiful sentence in the service of a compelling story look so easy. Considering that he published a new book almost every year for 50 years, I suppose it must’ve been to some extent. Anyway, a true American icon and artist has passed. See you later, John.
US Air jet makes an emergency landing in the Hudson this afternoon after it struck a FLOCK OF GEESE, messing up two of its engine.
All 155 people are safe.
Mad Men - Before this show, I can’t say I was very curious about the atmosphere at Madison Avenue advertising firms circa 1960 and the drunken lives of its worker bees. But now it seems like a completely acceptable obsession to have.
Chic - I fell completely in love with Chic this fall. Especially their amazing string arrangements, apparently done by one of the Daft Punk-ers fathers (weird). I’m serious, their strings sound like the best cotton candy you’ll never have.