Music Notes 5.11

Kylesa - Spiral Shadow


Heck yes Kylesa! Though this band has been on my radar for quite some time, I had never heard any of their stuff until I bought this album on somewhat of a whim earlier this month. I’m glad I did. This is exactly the type of music that sums up my current taste in music: stoner sensibilities, cosmic groovyness and some great ass-kicking roll-the-windows down songs. This album was practically on repeat the entire month, and in that month’s time, I can unabashedly put these guys right alongside Clutch, Fu Manchu and Kyuss as titans of the stoner rock genre. I’m sure I’ll be *spinning* this album all summer long, but not without checking out this band’s other efforts.

Cheeseburger Haiku - Big Nick's

Big Josh and Big Nick

Is there such a thing as the best burger in the world? Let's ponder on this for a moment. The art of burger is a fairly rigid one; for a cheeseburger to be a cheeseburger it must take on the following attributes: a bun, a ground patty of meat (no veggies please, I'm a purist) and cheese. That's it, that's a cheeseburger. With those three ingredients one can conquer nations or poison the masses, or anything in between those two extremes. Through combinatorial calculations it can be estimated that with all of the breads to bake, cheeses to melt and animals to grind, that there are approximately five trillion possible different cheeseburger configurations, and this isn't even taking into account levels of cooked-ness. All those possible burgers and I haven't even mentioned ketchup, mustard, bacon, double bacon or mushrooms or any of a thousand things that can top a burger. There are a lot of possible burgers, many of which have never been eaten. For instance, I'm thinking of a ground flamingo burger with American cheese on challah bread. Has anyone had that? Oh yeah smart guy, well then I'll just top it off with a splash of Tobasco and ham and pastrami.

Fun fact: if I were to eat a burger once a second for the known age of the universe then I would be as fat as the universe.

Movie Time 5.11

Stripes - This early 1980’s screwball comedy has all the benchmarks of the great comedies of that era: a stellar cast that includes one or more of the following: Bill Murray, Chevy Chase, Dan Akyroid, Steve Martin, Harold Ramis, or John Candy (Stripes has three of them!); gratuitous booby scenes (yes! boobies!); racial jokes that you’re unsure whether whether to laugh at or not (protip: laugh, and then comment on how you’re not laughing at the joke, but rather you’re laughing at the fact that thirty years ago those types of jokes were okay for mainstream comedy movies); and a villainous presence depicted as either angry/ whiny aristocrats or commies. Honestly, Stripes has a lot going for it and the movie is great up to a point. That point: the end of the second act. This movie, like many other comedies from that era, as well as most comedies in general, lacks a third act that is actually funny. Once Bill Murray and co. graduate from their training the movie devolves into an unfunny action flick. Total bummer. I’ve been noticing this unfunny third act thing for a while now, and it’s something that generally bothers me about comedies. Now that I’m fully aware of this phenomenon, I’ll try to analyze it more in depth.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Remember when Johnny Depp didn’t play just a pirate, or some zany character in a shitty Tim Burton remake, or just flat out Johnny Depp? There’s a reason he is regarded as a great actor, and I think very little of that has to do with his body of work in the last ten years or so. This drug-fueled flick about drug-fueled journalists in the desert is a prime example of Depp’s acting prowess. While the movie wasn’t quite up my alley, I thought Depp was brilliant. He was the thing that kept my interest for the whole two hour drug trip, especially when things got ka-rayzee. I understand that this movie has achieved cult status in the years since its release, so I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. I’m won’t say I liked or disliked it, but rather I future-liked the movie, since I feel as though it requires multiple viewings to totally grasp. Next time I watch it though, I’m going to need one of the following three things: someone who loves the movie to watch it with me, me to have just finished reading the novel, or tons (Nay: tons and tons) o’ drugs.

Books is Good, Mostly - Volume 4

Cat’s Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut

Throughout my teen years Chuck Palahniuk was my favorite author. I read all of his books and most of them several times over and I became pretty familiar with his style of writing and his darkly satirical wit. My love of his works reached a peak after I read Rant: An Oral History of Buster Casey. For me that book was the pinnacle of his writings and since then I haven’t found his new works to be as exciting or funny anymore. I’ve since been rummaging around for a new author on whom to hang my literary hat, a new Chuck Palahniuk, if you will.

This brings me to Kurt Vonnegut. I first read Slaughterhouse Five about three years ago and again at the end of 2010. Vonnegut was a name that was familiar to me, I had seen it over and over again in the quotes praising Palahniuk’s books, always something along the lines of ‘Palahniuk is like a modern day Kurt Vonnegut.’ It was only a matter of time before my search for a new Chuck Palahnuik led me to Kurt Vonnegut. As I read Cat’s Cradle I couldn’t help but make the same connection.

Vonnegut’s style is something that I can get behind. I like his deadpan delivery and no-frills prose, the way he’s able to make the absurd seem mundane while mocking the absurdity of the mundane. Ideas come left and right, some so brilliant they require you to stop and think, others so true that you’re convinced that you’ve had the very same thought a thousand times, though have never put it into words. He certainly has a way with those things.

Cheeseburger Haiku - Island Burger part 2

Greetings Burger Brethren! Welcome back to Cheeseburger Haiku, the poem about, and shaped like, the delicious tasty meat-bread-cheese trinity. In this edition, our resident burgermeister heads back to Island Burger for another go-round at the 60+ offerings on the menu. This time, the burger was called Pepe's. We're not sure who Pepe is, or what he did to earn his own burger, but he must have been something special. Following is a short history of the legend of Pepe, as relayed to the editors of Cheeseburger Haiku in the language of deliciousness:

Pepe was a hard man living in a hard time. His poncho was very big. On the rough plains of Tuscaloosa, Pepe was a donkey herder whose donkey farm was beset by the terrible donkey plague. All of his donkeys were dead or dying or dying to be dead. Pepe's rigid, tan features were  animated by tears for his poor donkeys far too often. One Thursday he saw an ill-portent: a hamster stuck in a hamster ball stuck in a giant tumbleweed tumbling east under a cloudless sky. Pepe was far too familiar with the omen: it had devastated his life once as a youngster already and he'd be darned if he was going to let it happen again, so he loaded up his least dead Donkey and rode out after the hamster stuck in a hamster ball stuck in a tumbleweed. Always just out of reach of his bounty, Pepe followed it all the way to the shores of the Carnie River. There at the banks of the river, he scooped up the ball and was about to give it a good punt into the blue sky, when a haggard witch approached him. After a tense stand off, with tons and tons of squinting, Pepe handed over the ball in exchange for immortality. That day, that very day, Island Burger devised a new burger and called it Pepe's. Then all of Pepe's donkeys got better and everyone was happy.

Music Notes 4.11

No ado. Here’s this month’s selections.

Wishbone Ash - Argus

It only makes sense that an album this awesome would fall through every crack imaginable so that I only find out about it accidentally while tracking down information for a different band. A month ago I had never even heard of Wishbone Ash, now they stand as a symbol of hope that there is a butt-ton of awesome 70’s rock just waiting to be discovered. I consider myself pretty knowledgeable when it comes to classic rock--at least for someone born well after the decade was up--but some bands you still really have to dig for. Wishbone Ash play a brand of rock and roll that falls somewhere in between progressive rock and proto-metal, making it a fine listen on a brisk Spring day. I can fully recommend this album to anyone who considers themselves a classic rock aficionado. It will not disappoint.