Our second guest is Doug Martsch, from the indie rock group Built to Spill. Since coming out of the Seattle rock scene in the early 1990s, Built to Spill have been one of the most important and influential bands in the indie/alternative rock movement. Martsch is considered by many to be the heir to J Mascis' alterna-rock guitar god throne. We talk with Doug about his nearly 20-year career in rock, and why he was never able to support himself with music until he signed to a major label. The band has a new album, "You in Reverse," and is currently on tour.
Why are Saturdays so crazy on my street? Last week, a big fat rapper is shooting a video. This week, a skinny 12-year-old black kid is riding around on a horse. What is this place?
Like this post? Click here to subscribe to the blog.
Some amazing tales this week. Jordan talks about getting put in Disneyland jail for using a bubble pipe. Gene talks about trying to convince an authority figure that he was holding something other than what was quite obviously a beer. Jesse talks about the time his mother got arrested for robbing a bank. Plus Vanessa sits in, and we hear from the Evil Computer Bent on World Destruction.
I'm shooting a video for my song METAL BY NUMBERS and need headbangers for the moshpit scene. We're shooting this Saturday, June 17 in LA. Darren Doane(Deftones, Shadows Fall) is directing, it's gonna be funny and metal and all you have to do is DRESS METAL(black, cammo, whatever metal means to you) and run around in an old school circle pit. Please come help me out. All types/ages of metalheads welcome. I want old school heshers next to the penny picking metalcore kids. Don't contact me, please contact Jeremy in production at myspace.com/clonesick or jeremyejackson@gmail.com
Here's another one for those of you who want more non-NY/LA comedy show announcements. Garage Comedy is a charming LA comedy show that features everything but traditional standup. Modest Proposal are the guys behind Modest Proposal Magazine, a great comedy fanzine. Lots of good people on the bill, should be worth every penny of the $5.
Like this post? Click here to subscribe to the blog.
(special note on that old post: I realized that's not Mike White, that's a guy who does a lot of improv at the UCBT in New York. Don't know his name, but he is HILARIOUS.)
Like this post? Click here to subscribe to the blog.
Devin the Dude is my favorite rapper. I've never heard someone who's more true to himself on record -- I feel about him the way some people feel about Tupac. He's got an easy charm, and almost all of his songs are about either girls or weed, and none of them are mean.
Listener X Amount sends us a link to a great interview with Devin in Mass Appeal. He talks about being with his wife for 14 years, and about his game:
What's your game like? How do you approach women? Uh�
Back in the day, of course. Back in the day, I was a smooth mo'fucka! [Hyena laughter.] I'd try to be kind hearted and honest without being a pushover.
Where did you get your game? Dolemite! My uncle Terry used to have me tag along with him, serenade his girlfriends and shit. They'd have me sing Shalamar songs, just smile and hug me, big kiss. I was like, I get more of this if I sing? Dang.
Even better, he speaks on his record collection:
What would most surprise people in your stacks? Paul Simon. All of Paul's shit is cool to me; his voice is just so smooth, just like James Taylor. My favorite music is probably '70s light rock.
Our friend Tom Scharpling of The Best Show on WFMU is interviewed today in Gothamist. He talks about The Best Show, about writing for TV and film, and about what keeps him going:
Now that I have shots at these things, I'm really excited about it. I'm not complaining, I'm just saying how it is. I can definitely be back selling sheet music. I'm one step away from that. I still pass the store where I used to sell sheet music everyday on my way to work. I didn't come from fancy schmancy upper middle class stuff. I come from a family of blue-collar people and it feels like I was meant to run a landscaping business and it's like the movie Final Destination. Instead of the grim reaper chasing me it's a guy with a push mower trying to get me back to where I'm meant to be. I just have to keep things moving now before reality and my inevitable fate catches up with me.
Also: on a related note, I'm still working out a pricing structure for the shirts. My inclination is to charge cost (which'll be something like $12) to folks who are financially subscribing to the show, and something like $22 (including shipping) to non-subscribers. They'll be nice shirts, by the way. That make seem out of whack?
Like this post? Click here to subscribe to the blog.
Our friend Chip Pope offers this insightful commentary on HBO's Entourage:
Dude, bro, dude, dude, bro, dude, bro,bro!
Dude!
HBO is so fuckin' awesome on Sunday night, Brah! Between the fuckin' hilarious misadventures of Vince and Co. on "Entourage" and the "Tourgasm" guys, I'd have to go to ESPN to find more useless, idiotic, misguided testosterone! I'm so glad I'm paying for this channel!
Fuck her hard for me, bro!
(Oh, unless "Entourage" is meant as satire. Then, I hate it. I only like it if its theme is that to truly be happy, you have to be famous and bang a lot of hot fucking chicks with fake titties while you star in stupid, big budget movies. If it has any other level to it, I fucking hate it, brahhhh!)
For those of you following the saga of my 10-year-old brother Eddy Demon's band, "Total Annihilation," there is a new chapter. Your attendance is expected.
From bassist Dorkmeister Harmoniak:
TOTAL ANNIHILATION is playing yet another show, this coming Saturday, 17 June at The LAB, on the corner of Capp and 16th Sts. (2498 16th St.) in San Francisco. We are playing as part of the KIDS ROCK festival, an all day event featuring numerous bands featuring numerous kids. If you're new to TOTAL ANNIHILATION, or just haven't been paying attention, it's the band featuring the songs and guitarings of whacked-out 10 yr old freakazoid Eddy Demon, for whom I, Damon (a/k/a Dorkmeister Harmoniak), play bass. Our drummer, Pietro d'Amato, 13, is the second coming of Keith Moon. Our sound can peel paint!!!
That's a good thing. Visit us at http://www.myspace.com/totalannihilationband to whet your appetite, then come to the show. I think it's free. It can't be pricey. There'll be uniquely hand-decorated CDs and t-shirts available, lots of new songs making their debuts, maybe even a new bandmember!
The music starts at 3pm with Hellakraptor, followed by Rock Ceremony, and then, at about 4:45, TOTAL ANNIHILATION!!! That's right: come to find we're headlining this shindig! And there's a reason: we're shit hot!(Don't tell the boys' moms I said that. Actually, you can. They already know) Like this post? Click here to subscribe to the blog.
Louie: Actually, the way that Conan ended up happening was that Saturday Night Live threw everybody off, all the people [in the cast], they had a big overhaul, and so they had a big audition at Catch in New York for every comedian.
At the time, every club in the city was closing. The Improv closed, and there was no work anymore, anywhere. It was ’92, and the ‘80s comedy surge was, I mean, it was gone. At the Comedy Cellar, there would literally be nobody in the audience, and they’d make you do the show, because if somebody happened to wander in there couldn’t be no show, so you’d literally be on stage in an empty room and you had to do the jokes. I mean, it was fuckin’ awful.
So it was like that for a few years, and I was going broke. And SNL was like the last chance, the last boat leaving, so Dave Attell, Laura Kightlinger, Sarah Silverman, Jay Mohr and me and a bunch of other people all auditioned. I remember that I was put first on the show, and the SNL people hadn’t shown up, and the guy that ran Catch, Louis Faranda, was trying to put me on anyway. He was like, “Go on.”
“But they’re not gonna see me.”
He said, “I don’t care.”
It was cruel as shit. And I think that Jon Stewart was there and he offered to go on and stall for me, which he did. But finally I had to go on, and as I went on stage they all filed in, and I remember that David Spade was with them, and he had seen me, so he made them sit down, Jim Downey and them, and said, “Watch this guy,” which I’m forever indebted to him for even though I didn’t get on SNL.
It made a difference, because I went on and I had a really solid, good set, and then over the following week Laura Kightlinger got cast, Dave Attell, Sarah, Jay, everybody but me [got cast], like everybody that was on that [showcase] but me.
I was just devastated, like it was just not gonna happen, and I had no more options. I wasn’t making a living. And the rent in New York is crushing. So, I remember calling Mark Maron, who was living in San Francisco -- he had kinda begged off New York to go to San Fracisco -- and I called him and I was asking him what it was like. I was up until dawn talking to him on the phone and deciding, “I’m gonna leave New York, go to San Francisco to do standup, but probably segue into another… I don’t know what.” I was so fucking depressed.
The next morning -- I think I slept for half an hour -- and then I got woken up by a phone call out of nowhere from Robert Smigel, who dug up my number.
He said, “Jim Downey from SNL told me that you’re really funny and that they weren’t sure if they were gonna use you or not, but I’d like to take a chance on you. I’m writing for Conan.”
I didn’t even know what that was.
So, I got some shit to him that I wrote, and my short films, and my standup tape, and it took me about a week to get the job. Thank fucking God. Thank God. I don’t know what would’ve happened to me if I hadn’t gotten hired there.
“I’m too tired to write new comedy,” the Monty Python star told The Times in a rare interview. “I can never do better than Fawlty Towers whatever I do. Now I very much want to teach young talent some rules of the game.”
Cleese, 66, will act as a “comedy professor”, holding masterclasses with students. Their set text will be insights gleaned from a lifetime in the business of making people laugh.
Cleese compliments Ricky Gervais and Eddie Izzard, and calls Bill Hicks a genius. He also mentions that he's not in "Casino Royale," (neither is his character, Q), and plugs the release of a World Cup meets Fawlty Towers single called "Don't Mention the World Cup."
Seriously folks, if you're not on the Killer Mike bandwagon by now, download The Killer Mixtape and hop on board. Came out last year, and it is wall-to-wall bananas. Sometimes I think he might be a better MC than Big Boi. Don't quote me on that, but know that Mike is serious.
by JAY WATTS III Not related to the Nation of Ulysses song of the same name, San Francisco’s The Sound of Young America (http://maximumfun.org, or check your iTunes podcast directory) began as a weekly public-radio show on a small station, and has since moved production to the comfortable digs of host Jesse Thorn. If your aversion to Internet comedy stems from workplace exposure to collegehumor.com or banal, animated GIFs with au-courant catchphrases, this podcast is a fine place for the medium to redeem itself.
Recent interviewees have included Montreal’s Jonathan Goldstein, host of CBC Radio 1’s hidden gem Wiretap and an executive producer at NPR’s This American Life. Quick-tempered comedian and Curb Your Enthusiasm player Shelley Berman (Larry David’s father on the show), who once chewed out “Crazy” Joey Cobden during a telephone sketch gone wrong, gave them a memorable interview, as have Fred Armisen (SNL cast member and former drummer for Trenchmouth) and—lest one think the focus is solely on funnymen—British music critic Simon Reynolds, author of Rip It Up & Start Again, the first respectable book to tackle the humourless world of British post-punk.
Like this post? Click here to subscribe to the blog.
Since this week's Sound of Young America is all about what's wrong with this country, and Pixar just released it's latest flick "Cars," I thought I'd reprint this remarkable piece of invective from the normally quite temperate Matt Belknap of aspecialthing.com and AST Radio. Is Matt on-target or off the rails? You decide.
--
There are so many problems that grow out of one central issue (that issue being: in a world without people, where cars are people, why would cars still look like cars, since cars were designed by and for people?).
1. Early in the movie, we see a field of crops, and throughout we see tractors in fields. WHAT CROPS ARE THEY HARVESTING, AND FOR WHOM ARE THEY HARVESTING THEM?! This would've made more sense if they had been oil fields (oil and gas are the soda and food of these car creatures), but of course oil has negative connotations, so they couldn't "go there."
2. If I'm not mistaken, we also see "flowers" being watered, but on closer inspection the flowers look like taillights or something -- in other words, they're mecha-organic, just like the cars themselves apparently are (I could be wrong about this, but if they're real flowers that creates other problems similar to the crop question). So if flowers are taillights, then WHY ARE THERE REAL TREES? WHY ARE THERE WATERFALLS? WHAT IS THIS WORLD THAT LOOKS LIKE OURS*, EXCEPT CAR-PEOPLE LIVE THERE?
*Even more infuriatingly, natural rock formations look like classic cars, radiators, engine blocks, etc. WHAT?!
3. There are a couple of references to Jimi Hendrix after we hear his National Anthem... WAS HENDRIX A CAR, AND IF SO WHAT KIND, AND HOW DID HE PLAY GUITAR WITH WHEELS INSTEAD OF HANDS?! HOW IS ANY MUSIC CREATED?
4. We see fans wearing colorful afro wigs in the stands at different races. WAIT, SO EVEN THOUGH THERE ARE NO PEOPLE, THERE IS STILL THE CONCEPT OF A HAIRDO CALLED THE AFRO?! IS THIS SOMEHOW CONNECTED TO THE EXISTENCE OF JIMI HENDRIX IN THIS WORLD?
5. Mack, the truck that drives Lightning around, communicates with Lightning over a video com-link that shows his face. But his "face" is the front of the truck, not inside the cab (the cab is his head), so where is the camera?
6. Romance is heavily suggested in the story, specifically between Lightning and the Porsche. But we're never told if cars procreate or if they're built somewhere, which to me is a pretty important question. If they don't procreate, why would the concept of love exist? If they do, how the FUCK does that work? Is it like the album cover for Aerosmith's "Pump?" Do baby cars come out of the mother car's tailpipe?
Every other Pixar movie has airtight internal logic. Usually, the anthropomorphized things are already living creatures (fish, bugs, monsters), so we have no trouble understanding that they could speak and have consciousness. in "Toy Story," the toys having a secret life grows logically out of the fact that children imbue their toys with personalities, and the toys are usually representations of living things anyway (cowboys, spacemen, pigs, dogs). But Toy Story takes place in our world, with a twist (the toys being alive). Cars never even begins to explain itself. Instead, it's built on the hope that people will go, "Ooh, cool! Shiny cars!" and not question anything (the same willful ignorance that allowed George Bush to get elected twice and go to war against a country without credible evidence). Given their past work, I hold Pixar to a higher standard in this regard, which is why I was so disappointed with this film. It's just lazy. It's bad, lazy storytelling, and up until now Pixar seemed to understand how important good storytelling is to a successful film. This makes me question that, because they seemed to just say, "We like cars, NASCAR is hugely popular, we can make a billion dollars very easily here by trading on our name and pairing it with a cultural phenomenon," and that all came before any concern for telling a good, solid story. The story elements -- not just the concept but the characters, the locations, the plot -- all feel like afterthought compared to the clear mission to make a shiny, flashy movie about race cars for kids and NASCAR fans.
Like this post? Click here to subscribe to the blog.
Animator Bill Plympton has always worked independently, creating both short and feature-length animated films. He draws every frame himself, and his absurd humor has netted him two Oscar nominations. He also recently created a music video for Kanye West, about which he talks in our bonus interview. His most recent release is "Plymptoons: The Complete Early Works of Bill Plympton," which includes his Oscar-nominated "Your Face."
Our second guest is Doug Martsch, from the indie rock group Built to Spill. Since coming out of the Seattle rock scene in the early 1990s, Built to Spill have been one of the most important and influential bands in the indie/alternative rock movement. Martsch is considered by many to be the heir to J Mascis' alterna-rock guitar god throne. We talk with Doug about his nearly 20-year career in rock, and why he was never able to support himself with music until he signed to a major label. The band has a new album, "You in Reverse," and is currently on tour.
