1,000 is a nice even number
This is post number one thousand. This is also the last post ever on this blog. I’ve posted here one thousand times and that was pretty easy, but doing another thousand seems daunting. One thousand, easy. Two thousand, difficult. Plus, it’s as good a time as any to start something new.
And I still have another blog.
Happy holidays!
Click on it.
Really good at naming things
The band Dear & the Headlights has a song called “I’m Not Crying, You’re Not Crying, Are You?” on their album, Drunk Like Bible Times.
“Axl Rose pleads plot for global domination”
Yes, that is real.
Return of the corn-rowed poet
I wrote of a review of the new Guns n’ Rose album Chinese Democracy for the Press this week. For the amount of times I used Axl Rose and/or Chinese Democracy as a cheap punchline (a sample of which are mentioned within), I thought it was an appropriate thing to do. And it’s a fun way to say hi to all those peeps.
Hey, peeps.
::
It took Leo Tolstoy four years to write War and Peace, and it took Marcel Proust 14 years to write In Search of Lost Time – both of which are tomes of an artistic statement so grand in scope and so loaded with meaning that the stories and metaphors within these stories, it could be said, describe the universality of human experience. Since Use Your Illusion I and II were releaed in 1991, it’s been 17 years since the last proper Guns n’ Roses album. In those 17 years, Axl Rose took 15 of them to write and record Chinese Democracy, and if you listen to the first minute of the album and then skip to the last minute of the album, you should identify that Axl tried to do something as equal in scope and magnitude.
The Germans have a word for this kind of thing, Gesamtkunstwerk, and by this they mean a “complete artwork” or a “total art” that encapsulates everything there is to have in an artwork. Though he and I may probably don’t share the same vocabulary, it’s safe to assume Axl Rose is trying to achieving this – hence, 15 years and endless turmoil. As Chuck Klosterman writes in his definitive review of the same album, “The explanation as to why Chinese Democracy took so long to complete is not simply because Axl Rose is an insecure perfectionist; it’s because Axl Rose self-identifies as a serious, unnatural artist. He can’t stop himself from anticipating every possible reaction and interpretation of his work.”
The beauty of the absurdity of this situation is that is album exists without context – in an artistic vacuum. Comparable to nothing, it is perhaps the only album released this year without care or mention of anything else released in the past two decades. The result: what rock n’ roll is all about. Fuck yeah, what rock n’ roll is all about. Axl hasn’t lost a step: his bravado is spewing out if his skinny frame and in his voice has that characteristic hint of Satan. Like they’ve always been, the lyrics are full of obvious metaphor and self-righteously insane language about abstract love situations – “So now I wander through my days / Trying to find my ways / To the feelings that I felt / I saved for you and no one else” – or just cheesy – “Broken glass and cigarettes/ Writings on the wall/ It was a bargain or the summer/ And I thought I had it all.”
With every yelp, yack and lustful howl, it’s true that the only thing has changed about him is his wardrobe. This is a man talking exactly what is going on at the bottom of the depraved soul of a rockstar (the roses), filling the empty space with fast, hard rock n’ roll (the guns, if you will) Buckethead, in all of the glory that is the literal interpretation of his name, fills Slash’s Willy Wonka top hat with a killer solo on practically every song. Yes, there is a Spanish guitar and I think I hear a sample somewhere at the beginning of ”I.R.S.”, but the sheer brilliance that I am listening to a new GnR album (that sounds like a GnR album fresh from the early 90s) is pretty fucking awesome.
Axl Rose is, in my opinion, the single most under appreciated vocalist in the history of rock n’ roll. He’s also a walking punchline (see: The Brock Press, 11/04/07, “How to be Stevie Wonder”) writing an album that is another punchline within itself (The Brock Press, 10/30/07, “101 reasons your band is never going to be any good”, #68). To put onself in the frame of mind to take it as seriously (and non-ironically) as Axl would want me to (I think Axl wants this to be compared to Tolstoy , not Nickelback), this album fucking rocks. As long as you completely give yourself over (perhaps unwillingly) to Axl and his minions, and if you accept this new corn-rowed prince in a football jersey as your fallen God, “There Was a Time” might be your new “Stairway”. But, y’know, probably not.
No one likes chitchat about the weather…
…but I am about to leave the house wearing a T-shirt, and it’s December.
T-shirts!
Ones that I want. This is a shameless post of things that i want. I will be updating this on a constant basis, I have decided. Here goes:
Yes please.
Enfield Tennis Academy. On Heather, orange or blue.
This Crow is all swatchy.
…
November 29: Let’s add more!
A star made out of goobly things
Vacationistic would make a good travelling tee
Holy shit! The British are coming again!
Mr. Zogs Sex Wax, because she wears it in Smiley Face
More coming. I realize this is shameless.
Ho, Canada
One nod to Luc Robataille, another nod to my favourite Dutch design outfit. Good ole’ Canadian masculiniity blahbitty blah, and I’m just adding mine to the pile.
I made this with CS4. It’s fun having a computer that can actually do something.
Be daft
UPDATE: If you want to make an instant mashup with any song, just plan the in iTunes (or Winamp, if you’re upset that “Caroline in the City” is off the air) and then go back into this and — wham! — instant mashup! I had some interesting results with that Devendra Banhart song.