how does he not run out of genius? i never can get enough of this stuff.

hello, i’m on the internet and i’m listening to music. add me if you use this thing. i feel better now that van halen is no longer my #1

i agreed to help my sister out and house sit and take care of her beagles and bunnies while she and her fam take a vacation. she lives out in the country outskirts of sebastopol in sonoma county. i couldn’t say no, she deserves a break even though i am using some of my vacation time for this. i won’t have any human contact for a week or really have anywhere to go which i have some anxiety about.

her neighbors have a pond and last nite it rained, so the sound of hundreds of frogs kept me up all night. it was so loud. when i took her beagles out for a walk today a bunch of wild turkeys ran at me like they were going to attack and the dogs kept barking so they were getting even more crazy. maybe they felt threatened because their young were in close proximity. it scared the shit of me, i was so stunned i didn’t know what to do. they blocked the dirt road that lead back home. i thought to myself, “am i going to have to be the asshole that throws rocks at animals?” i am conditioned to seeing junkies and belligerent drunks in my neck of the woods but not a pack of angry wild fucking turkeys looking to make me pay. anyway, i forgot to bring books and only brought enough movies for two nights. i have a feeling that i will be drunk a lot this week.

it’s been a while since i listened to the 80′s/90s touch and go stuff and i can’t remember what exactly triggered this recent surge of anti-social dude rock in my daily rotation. it’s absurd how much shellac, jesus lizard and big black i’ve listened to the past two days. honestly a lot of times these songs are as funny to me even though they come off as violently aggro and macho. when i saw shellac last year, the audience was 80% sausage as i had expected. steve albini and bob weston cracked amusing dry jokes about hamburgers and bad haircuts between assaultive songs with scraping metallic guitar sounds and bonham-like thunderous drums. it was so loud and painful that i came back the next night. i loved it. i know it’s bad for me in the tinnitus department, but i can’t help it.

anyway i heard recently that shellac is going to release a new album in june and I’m excited because it’s been 7 years since the last record. i can leave this stuff alone for awhile and indulge in the airy and melodic but when i come back to it it always sticks in the rotation for awhile bordering on obsession. the content may come off really depraved and offensive, but i think a lot of people who hate albini’s discography don’t pick up on his sense of humor. to me he is like this hedonistic & volatile rick moranis with misanthropic urges to boot. him growling about thousands of “real” squirrels in a manner that suggests the armageddon is imminent is just hysterical imagery to me. it makes sense to me if/why people don’t feel it, but i don’t take his fearless trash talking in interviews or his lyrics seriously to a point I’m offended. what i love is the threatening intensity in his voice, even when he sings about woodland creatures or ballerinas. that intensity is always there even when he is completely tongue-in-cheek and i appreciate it. to me people who can crack tongue-in-cheek jokes & sarcasm and never let up are deserving of appreciation. it is kind of an artform.

biked to the ballpark last night with young for giants opening night, mostly for the fireworks. i always feel that as an A’s fan i have to explain myself when I go to that park, but it is too scenic for me to get all lame sportsjerk about it. met up with my old roommates dave and brice, sat in the upper upper deck and section 333 people were folding up their free “go giants” signs into paper airplanes and throwing them from up on high to the diamond. the ones that didn’t make it to the field ended up hitting people in the head rows below. ours got confiscated by the usher before it even took flight. we rode around after the game and fireworks downtown along the embarcadero and i snapped things i saw.

i’ve been tripping over this since yesterday:

i don’t know christian paine, but i guess he likes the photos and retarded sense of humor on this site. he took this old photobooth snap of me with BFF/#1 enemy Young dorking out bigtime and made it into an awesome poster that i will cherish eternally.

here is his site christianpaine.com. if you want to skip the Ben Gazzara clip (um, 1000 style points for that) and go straight to his art, click to enter and there are all his illustrations, paintings, and films. i hope i didn’t blow up his spot by posting about this, but it is so random & weirdly uplifting that i can’t not post about it. so yeah christian paine dude, i like his style.

I got excited when I heard that the producer of my favorite nature series evar The Blue Planet had produced another series called Planet Earth which is airing on the Discovery Channel now. Then I find out that they yanked Sir David Attenborough’s narration and put Sigourney Weaver’s in for the US version, which is so very lame. I couldn’t hang so I started watching the BBC version that i had to download and everything felt right with the world again.

The Planet Earth series is really damn amazing and comprehensive as per usual with Alastair Fothergill and his crew. There are many majestic sweeping shots of animals and the time lapse stuff is intense and impressive. The quality of direction, narration and the stunning photography is unmatched by any other nature documentaries I’ve seen.

There are 11 episodes in all with themes ranging from mountains to fresh water to caves to ice worlds. I can’t really sum up all the episodes I’ve seen because they are all very unique and disparate with their environments and regional animal life. I did noticed that The Planet Earth series is a lot more gory compared to The Blue Planet but I guess a shark tearing apart it’s fish prey isn’t as unsettling as seeing the exposed bone and gristle of a land animal as it’s being eaten alive by its predator.

yo i’m gonna buy these fancy joy division kicks so i can look awesome while mired in turmoil…. what the hell? this is just weird. ian curtis hung himself and this shit is hella tacky.

i love neil young so much that i can look the other way when there is questionable shit like that 9/11 “let’s roll” and he and crazy horse are way obnoxious in that one jim jamusch doc. “barstool blues” and “stupid girl” were the first songs i learned how to play on guitar. i will ride for Zuma forever. There are very few records that dear to me. I love that he can have songs that rock my face off with that dirty guitar sound and at the same time have these mellow soulful songs that gently tug on thee old heart strings.

there is this new cd/dvd release from the Neil archives called Live at Massey ’71. It’s a a quiet live acoustic album for playing when you don’t aren’t afraid to get into some good downer vibes. This is mellow go to sleep music, like Harvest Moon mellow which really isn’t bad, except this one is during “the golden era”. I have been replaying these versions of Old Man and Ohio alot. Excellent stuff.