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April 30, 2005

   So, I've been listening to Songs for Silverman pretty much nonstop since it arrived on Tuesday.  Is it good?  Oh yes.  Following is the review.

Ben Folds has built much of his career on piano-driven, pop-rock songs, most of which tell little slice-of-life stories in their lyrics.  It's a pretty narrow category, to be sure, but Folds is pretty unquestionable in his mastery of it.  His biggest hit to date, "Brick" (released with Ben Folds Five on 1997's Whatever and Ever Amen, the best of the group's four albums), was about taking a girlfriend to get an abortion - as Folds himself has said, there is no intent to make a political statement, despite the charged nature of the subject; it's just a song about two scared kids dealing with the most emotional and difficult moment of their lives up until that point.  And that's not even Folds' best song by a long shot.

2001's Rockin' the Suburbs, Folds' first solo album following the breakup of the Five, followed similar trends lyrically but had a bit of a different sound overall, leaning a bit more electronic than the Five ever really had (though Folds' interest in it could be seen in his 1998 solo album Fear of Pop, Volume One, which even die-hard fans tend to find fairly unlistenable).  While Suburbs produced a number of great songs, something about it was a little unsatisfying overall.  Seeming to recognize this, Folds spent nearly four years working on a followup, releasing three EPs - Speed Graphic, Sunny 16, and Super D in the interval.

It can probably be considered a good thing that the most disappointing aspect - and possibly the only disappointing aspect - of Songs for Silverman, which came out on Tuesday, is its number of tracks: despite the four years, there are only 11, and one is a reworked version of a track that appeared on Speed Graphic.  On the other hand, fans of Folds have gotten fifteen tracks out of his three EPs, and 11 of those were brand-new Folds-written songs (the remaining four were covers, though it bears noting that Folds covers tend to be uniquely enjoyable).  Factoring out the overlap, Folds has produced 21 new songs in four years, which is not to be sniffed at.  Also important is the average length of the songs - the album clocks in around 45 minutes, which is pretty much par for the course.

More importantly, Folds is in top form here.  The songs are appropriately piano-driven (there is no "Rockin' the Suburbs" on this album), with strings thrown in here and there to solid effect.  The stories (dealing in several cases with parts of relationships) are mostly strong with a couple that are even better and a couple that are a little more marginal.  Here, then, a song-by-song review of the album, ranked in order of how much I like them.

11. Prison Food (track 11)
There's nothing wrong with "Prison Food", as there's really nothing wrong with any track on the album.  But it's pretty unremarkable.  The tune is fine but unspectacular, and the lyrics are a bit more vague than much of Folds' work.  It's not that they're bad so much as that they don't really sound like him - they feel like they could have been written by pretty much anyone.  While in general that's not a criticism, I consider Folds a unique enough songwriter that I like to see a little more from him - and certainly we do see more, pretty much everywhere else on the album.

10. Give Judy My Notice (track 7)
In a straight comparison, this song is probably better than the next two, but I have to dock it points, as "Notice" is just a reworked version of a song from the first EP, Speed Graphic.  This in and of itself wouldn't be so bad except that the EP version is significantly better - while that track is pretty much just Folds and a piano, and doesn't actually feature the title until the end of the song (a much more effective use of it, to my mind), this song features drums, bass, and backing vocals, as well as repetitions of the title, which don't work as well considering the subject (Folds explains to a girlfriend that he's tired of having his love exploited when she doesn't really love him, then asks a faceless third party to "give Judy my notice").   It's still a fine song lyrically, but the other version is superior in every way.

9. Time (track 10)
One of two songs on the album whose chorus involves a somewhat hokey play with words (here it's "time takes time, you know").  It plays better in context, but it's not great.  Fortunately, the rest of the song is good - the opening piano riff is one of the album's best, and the lyrics, while still a tad vague, are relatively concrete in their meaning (Folds sardonically granting someone, presumably an ex-girlfriend, license to "think of me any way you want - I can be the problem if that's easier" after a breakup).  Folds has a way of making exceedingly bitter, sarcastic lyrics sound just as good as anything else, which we'll see a couple more times.  Interesting note on this song: Weird Al Yankovic contributes backing vocals, evidently returning the favor after Folds played the piano track on "Why Does This Always Happen To Me", a track on Yankovic's last album.  You'd never have known it was Al if the liner notes didn't tell you, though.

8. Sentimental Guy (track 9)
Though it too references lost love, there's a marked difference between "Sentimental Guy" and either of the previous two tracks - while both of those are rather acidic in their final analysis, "Sentimental Guy" offers a self-portrait of someone scarred by a loss (what the loss was due to is unclear, as is whether Folds is referencing a friend, lover, or family member) but sad rather than angry.  Folds describes how he "used to be a sentimental guy", but this changed with the loss of the person he's singing to, who "drifted far away".  Not angered by this, Fold's "Guy" is depressed in a sort of whimsical way, as he notes "Now I don't miss anyone, I don't miss anything - what a shame".  The tune itself has a kind of upbeat lilt to it that doesn't quite match the lyrical content, but it's not like Folds is necessarily known for always matching the two (Whatever and Ever Amen's "Song for the Dumped" being the classic example of this).

7. Gracie (track 5)
Though I don't want to fault Folds for writing songs about the current things in his life - his wife and children, particularly - instead of the endless parade of ex-girlfriends who creep in everywhere (to be fair, I have no idea how many of his songs in that vein are autobiographical or even semi-autobiographical, but I'm sure a good number derive at least partially from his own experiences), songs like this, while good, can be a bit grating.  The other noteworthy example is "The Luckiest", the last track on Suburbs and an unabashed declaration of love directly to his wife.  It's kind of cute, but it's also a bit sappy, and his earnestness overwhelms his usual songwriting sensibilities (which I'll explain more later).  "You will always have a part of me / Nobody else is ever gonna see" is sweet, but so few of Folds' songs actually sound like this that it's a little weird to hear it.  The tune, thankfully, is wonderful, and the closing piano notes and string flourishes are gorgeous.

6. Jesusland (track 3)
Since he spent much of his life in the South, it's interesting to hear Folds go after it as he does here.  Hiding behind a typically evasive melody are lyrics like "Out the gate you go and never stop, past dollar stores and wig shops"; though he's hardly explicit in the condemnation, it's hard to make much else out of the portrait he paints, and the moniker "Jesusland" certainly doesn't seem intended as flattery.  (Officially, there's nothing in the song that identifies the subject as the American South, but come on.)  Much of the song is just description, but the third verse's lyrics include the following: "They drop your name, but no one knows your face / Billboards quoting things you never said / You hang your head and pray for Jesusland".  The "you" there would appear to be God himself - which, if true, is a pretty big slam on the region and its politics.  Of course, I'm fine with it.

5. You to Thank (track 2)
The lyrics of "You to Thank" are truly fascinating - on the one hand, it's a humorous depiction of getting married in Vegas while drunk ("By the time the buzz was wearing off, we were standing out on the sidewalk / With our tattoos that looked like rings"), but on the other hand it's a strangely bittersweet tale of trying to fake one's way through a crumbling relationship ("For moms and dads, not a clue to be had / We put on a pretty good act / And they seemed to all need to believe it"), and possibly one that should never have existed in the first place.  (It's easy to picture the titular "You" as just a friend who had become more due to the accidental marriage, as opposed to a girlfriend he just shouldn't have married while drunk.)  Typically, the music is pretty upbeat, and the chorus sounds great.

4. Trusted (track 6)
The lyrics to "Trusted" read like words composed by someone who just realized that his relationship is not what he thought it was.  When Folds asks "Didn't you know we're as close as we can be?", he's asking it because the woman he's addressing has been reading his diary because she doesn't trust him.  The song's general thesis is that while everyone would like to know what their partner is thinking all the time, it's not really going to happen, which is why trust is important - and as Folds sings "It seems to me if you can't trust, you can't be trusted" (the other play on words I referenced back in the "Time" review), we can see the lack of trust souring the relationship from both ends.  Of course, the melody is still at best moderately reflective of this, though it's a great one.

3. Bastard (track 1)
It's an odd choice to open your album with a song that's five and a half minutes long, and for that matter one whose title is "Bastard", but this song grew on me faster than any on the album.  First, it's got a great melody.  But more than that, it has killer lyrics - it's simultaneously a story about an old man's passing and an attack on the arrogance of youth.  Folds notes that getting older involves gaining the ability to recognize that you don't know it all, singing "'The Whiz Man' will never fit you like 'The Whiz Kid' did" and "The more you know, you know you don't know shit".  Smart and acerbic without being too savage, the song actually finds more empathy for the titular bastard than for the "young man" of the second verse.

2. Late (track 8)
There may not be all that many songs that were written by one musician in tribute to the passing of another, but I'm sure this is one of the best.  Folds' elegy to Elliott Smith, it combines a melancholy but gorgeous melody with some of the best examples of what makes Folds' songs what they are lyrically.  The lyrics are not a fawning ode to Smith's songwriting genius or greatness as a human being - they're an honest look at what Smith meant to Folds.  "Elliott, man, you played a fine guitar - and some dirty basketball," Folds sings in the third verse.  He's not afraid to talk about human frailty either - "It's too late / Don't you know it's been too late for a long time", he sings in the chorus, a reference to Smith's personal struggles that apparently led to his suicide.  An honest tribute to a friend, the song is beautiful, bringing me to the verge of tears the last time I listened to it.

1. Landed (track 4)
As beautiful as "Late" is, I couldn't give up on "Landed", which I found immediately addicting right from the moment I heard the first chorus as a 30-second song sample.  It may be the best song Folds has released as a solo artist - melodically gorgeous, with perfect lyrics in which he sings to an ex-girlfriend that he's back in town after breaking up with the girl he'd started dating following the end of their relationship.  Considering the dodginess of that subject on basic principles, the song is far more poignant than it has any right to be, all of which is owed to the way Folds works the lyrics.  "I'm just now finding out what it was all about," he says of the older relationship, then describes how the other girl moved him to the west coast, "away from everyone," and "she never told me that you called / Back when I was still, I was still in love."  Despite the strangeness of its circumstances, "Landed" describes them perfectly, making the lyrics as affecting as anything on the album.  A non-album version, made available for download to people who bought the CD package through Folds' site, features strings at the beginning and throughout the song, and it's actually even better.

Final album grade: 95/100.  Its "worst" songs are exceedingly listenable, and its best songs are fabulous.  That's a great album.

April 24, 2005

   I know what I said last week about acting like you've been there before (I can read it right below this too), and we didn't even win.  But my stats went through the roof.  I'm trying not to make too big a deal out of it, but it's not often you go to a tournament and come back having set personal records for points in a round and team points in a round.  Well, now that it's actually happened, I can act like I've been there before next time.  Anyway, 2005 Duck Bowl results.

April 18, 2005

   So you already know we got fourth place.  Had this happened a couple years ago, I'd probably be bouncing off the walls, but really, act like you've been there before.  I'll save the bouncing for if I ever play on a team that wins.  Anyway, here's the TRASHionals recap.

April 17, 2005

   We got fourth place!   More detailed recap to come when I'm not ready to pass out.

April 13, 2005

   Well, I'm a little disappointed, if not entirely surprised, by the lack of comments so far.  On the movie message board I post at, the top ten list was probably actually the recipient of the most complaints, so let's see if that stirs anyone up.  But first:

Honorable Mentions

Each one of these films got a score of B+ (75/100) or better, but wasn't quite good enough to make the final Top Ten.

The Motorcycle Diaries

A little too rah-rah-communism for my liking, but it’s gorgeous to watch, it has a beautiful score, and Bernal is magnificent. If you can pretend it’s not about Che Guevara, it’s a near-perfect road movie.

Hero

Again, went a little too far with the up-with-communism ending, but before that it features sublime cinematography and a decent Rashomon-like plot.

Miracle

A little too prosaic to be a great sports film, but it’s still a pretty good one. Kurt Russell does a great job as Herb Brooks.

Collateral

In some ways it’s a bad action film dressed up to look like a good one, but I was sucked in by it. Cruise and Foxx are good, and the plot is just dense enough that it’s worth hanging on to the whole way.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Easily the best of the series so far. The time travel plot is neat and Cuaron’s lack of desire to show every single scene like Columbus did allows him to include a lot more wonder and imagination.

April 11, 2005

   With the worst movies of the year behind us, it's time for a shorter list: that of the most disappointing movies of the year.  Even though I saw 50, I couldn't have legitimately filled out a ten-spot list for this one, so you'll have to settle for half.

The Five Biggest Disappointments of 2004

5
Team America: World Police

Unlike the four that follow, this one isn’t on the list because I was expecting great things and was let down. Rather, what bothered me about Team America was how it was at times very funny, but undercut itself with a limp, cowardly political critique. Had the film just been a spoof of action movies, it probably would have worked on those merits. It would have been a little too juvenile in its humor at times, but that’s Parker and Stone for you. Instead, it attempted to jab at both liberals and conservatives without ever choosing a side, or even stating its own philosophy. Parker and Stone wanted the controversy of a political message, but not the burden of actually having to align themselves somehow, so they just called everyone stupid and decided that was an opinion. It isn’t really, and it hurts the film quite a bit.

4
I © Huckabees

When I saw the trailer, I knew that this would either be a very interesting film or one that was nothing but quirks. I hoped for the former; I got the latter. Essentially a parade of increasingly strange setpieces, Huckabees doesn't care whether its characters are real people or cardboard cutouts (they're mostly the latter) or whether its pop-philosophical machinations make any sense or not (they mostly don't). It's somewhat fun to watch in a detached sense, but after a while Russell's attempts to pass quirks off as existentialism just get frustrating. The film ends up seeming far less interested in the mysteries of life that it does in being a 21st century version of an Ionesco play that's playing a game of one-upmanship with its own weirdness at every turn. In the end, Huckabees is long on quirk and far too short on ideas.

3
The Terminal

Finding humor in the man-stuck-in-airport plot would have worked pretty well as satire, which is why The Terminal doomed itself by being so irritatingly earnest. There's certainly an interesting story behind the concept, but virtually none of it makes it onscreen - Spielberg is far more interested in telling a story featuring useless caricatures and a horrible love interest. The actors are game but the characters are almost uniformly awful, as not one of them seems to behave as a real person might, and while the direction and set design are skillful enough, they're put in service of relentless mediocrity. It's not an awful film, but it's not an especially good one either, and its faults end up outweighing its positives. The story of Viktor Navorski was worth telling, yes, but it was also worth telling better.

2
A Very Long Engagement

As a huge Amélie fan, I had high hopes for a re-teaming of Tautou and Jeunet, but Engagement lacks much of what made its predecessor so brilliant. The obsession to detail that made the 2001 film and its characters so vivid blows up in Jeunet’s face when he tries it again here; there are too many characters to describe and he refuses to prioritize. The upshot is that we end up learning more about a group of relatively insignificant soldiers than we do about Tautou’s Mathilde, which goes a long way towards dooming the film’s intentions. It’s half a rumination on the craziness of war and half a love story with an emphasis on the strength of hope, but the characters in the love story get woefully little attention as characters, making it difficult to care that much, and this hurts the war story as it is mostly a vehicle for the love story with a few ideas added in. It’s beautiful to look at, but Engagement never forges the personal connection that Amélie did, and it’s neither magical enough to match up to its predecessor nor sober enough to avoid the comparison.

1
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

Wes Anderson has made his name with films featuring quirky, sometimes unlikable characters whom the audience comes to care about anyway through his light, subtle humor and general tenderness. The Life Aquatic, however, plays like the film Anderson made to try and break that image, only to give up halfway through. Bitter and nasty where The Royal Tenenbams was sweet and sincere, The Life Aquatic presents another self-absorbed patriarchal figure along the lines of Gene Hackman’s Royal, but Bill Murray’s Steve Zissou has none of the do-right intentions that help mitigate Royal’s lack of social skills. Steve is bad with people not because he’s awkward but because he’s a total jerk. With maybe a half-hour left, Anderson realizes that the film he’s made so far is humorless and acrid, and tries to make amends with a final sequence that manages to be marginally touching in spite of the fact that it hasn’t earned that at all. Still, it would have been a lot better in a film that had characters worth caring about from the outset. Instead, it just feels like Anderson went back on his own desire to make a film that wasn’t as cute when he realized, only too late, how horrible an idea that was.

April 10, 2005

   With pretty much only Ray and the I-didn't-see-the-first-one-so-why-see-this Before Sunset standing out as major 2004 domestic-release movies I have yet to see, it's time to compile some year-end lists, which I'll do one at a time.  This first post will feature the ten worst films of the year (that I saw).  Feel free to discuss the lists in the forum; do remember before flaming me that I only claim this as my opinion, not some sort of fact, but I hope that the capsules explain why I picked the lists I did.

The Ten Worst Films of 2004

10
House of Flying Daggers

I don’t know that this film really deserves inclusion on a “worst of the year” list, but until I stumble across something truly awful, it’s probably going to hold the 10 spot. Though it starts in promising fashion with a visually dazzling, if entirely too long, setpiece, the film from there does about everything wrong it’s capable of doing. The plot contorts itself so many times that it ends up breaking its own back, and the love triangle that’s pretty much wholly invented for the final half hour never works. Worst of all is a Titanic-in-China ending that acts like characters about whom we knew very little and were given only marginal reason to care were the ultimate star-crossed lovers, and then plays a sappy ballad over the end credits. It’s so over-the-top it could only have worked as parody, but it’s not, so it’s just insulting.

9
Around the World in Eighty Days

Perhaps the only thing worse than a bad movie is a bad movie that gets there by ruining good source material. Such is the case here. Really, Around the World bears only a cursory resemblance to the Jules Verne novel on which it purports to be based; the Verne estate should probably file a defamation lawsuit. The film’s Fogg is not an enigmatic adventurer but a blundering, cowardly inventor. Passepartout is... well, the less said about how this film wastes Jackie Chan, the better. The film’s catering to broad, easy comedy assures almost none of the tension found in Verne’s breathless, almost cinematic prose. Far worse is the film’s feeling that it could do better than the novel in the villain department – Verne’s story pretty much lacks one – leading to its shoehorning in of a scenery-chewing Jim Broadbent and a group of Chinese assassins. Perhaps the thing that annoyed me most was the complete destruction of the Inspector Fix character, however – Verne’s Fix is wrong in his assumption of Fogg’s guilt but is noble in his pursuit, and Fogg’s enigmatic nature makes us suspect that Fix could be right for much of the book. The film’s Fix is a complete buffoon who is paid off to accuse Fogg of a crime we all know he didn’t commit. This alone should be worth five to seven years in the prison for cinematic bad ideas.

8
The Polar Express

So convinced of its status as a new holiday classic that it forgets to actually be good, The Polar Express has some of the creepiest animation ever seen, but that’s not the worst problem. Neither is the obvious catering to the IMAX audience by adding in roller coaster sequences that serve no purpose. No, what bothered me the most was the film’s attempt to bully children into believing in Santa Claus. It’s hard to believe that a film made by adults could take a fictional character in whom everyone has stopped believing by junior high school so seriously, but the pernicious thing about The Polar Express is its sincerity in suggesting that Santa Claus is not only real, but that true believers will ultimately be rewarded. It’s like a Jesus movie for the more secular set.

7
Kill Bill Volume Two

I was hardly a fan of Volume One’s homage-a-second style and endless violence, but there was a marginally enjoyable kinesis about it that I figured would be paid off by a deepening of the characters in the follow-up. Unfortunately, we got this instead. Humorless and sadistic where its predecessor was gleefully gonzo, Kill Bill’s second part dispatches the two other assassins standing in front of the title character in boring but nonetheless unpleasant fashion and then finally gets to the end of the story, at which point everything falls apart. Carradine is effortlessly cool but even he can’t make Tarantino’s garbage sound good; Bill’s superhero speech is the cherry on top of two movies that thought they were significantly cooler than they actually managed to be. By the time Bill gets his comeuppance in awkward fashion, we’ve already watched the very definition of “anticlimax” pass before our eyes.

6
Napoleon Dynamite

A supposed comedy that’s never even close to as funny as it thinks it is, Dynamite plays like the worst instincts of several other directors crammed into one film. It’s got the emotionless quirks of Wes Anderson’s still much better The Life Aquatic mixed with dialogue that thinks it’s funny but largely isn’t, which was true of far too many films this year. Not being funny is one thing – and it’s a dagger, to be sure – but Dynamite is also relentlessly smug, attempting to derive large chunks of its humor exclusively from the stupidity and embarrassing social awkwardness of its main character. Then it tries to have it both ways in an eye-rollingly cute final shot that may have less justification for its attempted cuteness than any other cute comedy ending ever. There are a few quotable lines here and there, but it’s obvious how hard the film is trying for them, and a film trying that hard to be loved and failing so miserably is pretty depressing.

5
The Forgotten

There’s something extremely frustrating about a movie that hints at an interesting plot and then takes the stupidest possible way out. Such is the case with The Forgotten, which could have been a mildly successful psychological story if it weren’t so interested in cheap scares, chase scenes, and a series of hilariously awful twists. Pretty much everyone sleepwalks through this one with the exception of Moore, but she’s wasting her time trying to save something that didn’t have a hope from the start. Perhaps the worst part is not the film’s stupid and pretty simple plot but its underestimation of its audience where that plot is concerned: at one point a character tells Moore, and by extension us, that the “truth won’t fit inside your brain.” I can’t speak for the stegosaurs in the audience, but my brain is bigger than a walnut.

4
Shark Tale

Dreamworks’ latest animated disappointment was most likely doomed from the start with its shockingly ugly character designs, but it really earned this spot by being about as bad as possible throughout the rest of the film. The Goofus to Finding Nemo’s Gallant, Shark Tale blunders through its story with every annoyance you might expect – scads of references to better movies, pointless dance numbers, and Will Smith managing to be almost more embarrassing at using urban slang than Martin Scorsese. (Almost, but not quite.) There are the requisite kid-friendly messages, but even they are comparatively dumbed down, and the cribbing of lines, shots, and entire characters from The Godfather makes one wonder at whom exactly this is aimed. There are kid-friendly movies that adults can sit through too; this isn’t one, and I don’t know why you’d want your kid watching a braindead reference-fest when Pixar movies are available.

3
Dogville

An apparent anti-American polemic that’s so rambling and unfocused it fails to get a solid shot off at anyone, Dogville is the sort of film that mistakes brutality for profundity. Lars von Trier seems to hate a lot of people – Americans, women, his actors, the audience – and they all get it in one way or another here, without anything so trivial as a well-made point to get in the way. His characters’ treatment of Grace is another notch in his heroine-torturing belt, but he fails to make the heroine likable and so ends up with three hours of stupid, annoying, evil people doing bad things to a gratingly stoic Kidman. The repetitive themes and stilted dialogue don’t help, nor does a final sequence that completely confuses the allegory. It’s difficult to tell what von Trier was trying to say with Dogville, and it’s so difficult to watch that when three hours have dragged past, it’s impossible to care.

2
Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!

A romantic comedy that has basically no idea how to be funny or romantic, Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! is pretty much the ultimate example of everything that can be wrong with the genre. Topher Grace has been somewhat typecast as a character I call the “nice jerk” lately; i.e. the guy we’re supposed to like even though he’s made to be something of a creep. It’s never more obvious than here, though, as Grace plays the male lead as a friend who really isn’t very friendly at all. I thought showing you like a girl by making fun of her as much as possible was confined to grade school, but Grace shows it’s alive and well in the minds of Hamilton’s writers. Josh Duhamel, as the titular Tad, is infinitely more likable, but Kate Bosworth’s one-dimensional naïf ends up picking Grace - probably just because somebody thought she should, not because it actually makes sense within the context of the movie. That Tad loses just seems like a dig at Hollywood’s phoniness, which is both richly ironic and simply thwarted by the film’s own plot.

1
Wicker Park

Just a mess from start to finish. The plot’s time-switching can be confusing, but the real problem is that the entire story effectively hinges around not only a tiny plot point, but one that could easily be resolved if any of these characters used the internet. Worse still is the stalking meet-cute that guarantees none of these characters will ever be likable. The “male stalkers are cute, but female stalkers are scary” message is insulting in a variety of ways, and the film’s direction tries embarrassingly hard to be edgy-looking without putting a priority on telling a decent story. There may have been worse movies this year, but I didn’t see any of them.

April 10, 2005

   With participation relatively minimal and only a few correct answers, here are the answers to the game of the April 2 update.

First, those that were right:

3) Blink 182 - All the Small Things (Alma gets this one)
5) Elton John - Your Song (this is definitely one for Alma)
12) The Beatles - For No One (the answer's on the site, of course, but Alma got in first!)
16) U2 - Bad (I am inclined to call this a lucky guess on the part of Greg, though it does match Craig's)
17) Van Halen - Jump (Dad, via e-mail, knows that the '84 Cubs were enough to put this one on top)
19) The Who - Baba O'Riley (Dad again, most likely remembering that this is one of my few favorite songs ever)

And now the ones no one got:

1) Ben Folds - Still Fighting It
2) Ben Folds Five - Underground.  Some good guesses, including One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces, but no one had the right one, off BFF's first album.
4) Fastball - Out of My Head
6) Fountains of Wayne - Stacy's Mom.  Frankly, I'm shocked no one got this one.
7) Guster - X-Ray Eyes.  Some good guesses, but this one was hard.
8) Led Zeppelin - Over the Hills and Far Away.  It would have been Stairway probably as recently as six months ago, but this one was tough.
9) Queen - Fat Bottomed Girls
10) Snow Patrol - Run
11) Steely Dan - My Old School
13) The New Pornographers - From Blown Speakers.  Good guesses from Greg and Dad, who both picked Neko Case songs (and I'm on record somewhere, though maybe not here, as loving her voice), but in the end I had to go with this one.
14) The Rolling Stones - 19th Nervous Breakdown.  Gimme Shelter, Dad's choice, is probably second.
15) Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers - Free Fallin'.  Another one of the few where my choice was actually fairly conventional, yet no one guessed it anyway.
18) Weezer - El Scorcho.  Had Leah shown up she might have known this one.
20) Jimi Hendrix - The Wind Cries Mary

April 3, 2005

   Now that a couple days have gone by and the likelihood of it being an awful April Fools joke has subsided, a melancholy Happy Trails to Mitch Hedberg.  Once referred to as the "next Seinfeld" because of his style of observational humor, Hedberg was probably closer to Steven Wright in terms of his dry delivery and frequent one-liners.  I had the good fortune to see him at Northwestern last year and while it wasn't his best show, it was certainly very funny.  He was apparently born with a heart defect that contributed to his death (he died in a hotel room in Livingston, New Jersey, not 20 minutes from my old house), though I suspect drugs and/or alcohol may have helped a little bit, even if they weren't the outright cause.  What surprised me most was that he was as old as 37, an age he certainly didn't project with his stoner demeanor.  Here's the Sun-Times listing of the obit; here are a few of my favorite jokes:

"I played golf... I did not get a hole in one, but I did hit a guy.  That's way more satisfying.  You're supposed to yell 'Fore!' but I was too busy mumbling, 'There ain't no way that's gonna hit him.'"

"When someone hands you a flyer, it's like they're saying 'Here... you throw this away.'"

"I like rice.  Rice is great if you're hungry and want 2,000 of something."

"An escalator can never break.  It can only become stairs.  You would never see an 'Escalator Temporarily Out of Order' sign, just 'Escalator Temporarily Stairs.  Sorry for the convenience.'"

"I was walking by a dry cleaners at 3 am and there was a sign that said 'Sorry, We're Closed'.  You don't have to be sorry.  It's 3 am, and you're a dry cleaner.  It would be ridiculous for me to expect you to be open.  I'm not gonna come by at 10 and say, 'Hey, I was here at 3 am and you guys were closed... somebody owes me an apology.'"

April 2, 2005

    For those who may have been keeping an eye on the Challenge but not reading the page, Craig won.  Drew fell short due to the outcome of a specific game for the third year in a row, much to his chagrin.
    Speaking of Craig, the following is ripped both from his blog and Leah's LJ.  Basically, I name 20 musical artists I like, and you guess which is my favorite song by each of them.  One of these is easy because it's on the site... but the rest, I'll be interested to see if people are right or even try.  I'll update correct answers here.

1) Ben Folds
2) Ben Folds Five
3) Blink 182 - All the Small Things (Alma gets this one)
4) Fastball
5) Elton John - Your Song (this is definitely one for Alma)
6) Fountains of Wayne
7) Guster
8) Led Zeppelin
9) Queen
10) Snow Patrol
11) Steely Dan
12) The Beatles - For No One (the answer's on the site, of course, but Alma got in first!)
13) The New Pornographers
14) The Rolling Stones
15) Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
16) U2 - Bad (I am inclined to call this a lucky guess on the part of Greg, though it does match Craig's)
17) Van Halen - Jump (Dad, via e-mail, knows that the '84 Cubs were enough to put this one on top)
18) Weezer
19) The Who - Baba O'Riley (Dad again, most likely remembering that this is one of my few favorite songs ever)
20) Jimi Hendrix

There's more! View last month's updates.

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This page last updated: Sunday, May 01, 2005 02:17:32 AM