Yesterday, Amanda and I went to New Orleans to go shopping. Yeah, fuck you, I like shopping, eat my dick. We went to Magazine St. to a place I haven't been for a while. We started on the end near that weird split, close to first street, and we started at that massive record store near there - not naming names - since we both have mental wish-lists hundreds of albums long and we knew we'd spend the most time there. Plus, I'm interested in buying a new turn-table, and they carry used ones.
The place is a haphazard wreck, and in the back room where lies the country and the rock, there are dead roaches all over the place. Not everything is priced, but everything is coded, right. I was in some kind of heaven. The record players were extremely overpriced, I mean, we're talking 10 year old units with wear and tear for 140 dollars, but, the selection is awesome, there are easily tens of thousands of records there, not counting singles. And we stayed for 2 hours.
Eventually, she had her selections and I had mine. I figured he'd have some sort of in-store chart at the front for the price, you know, R = 2.00 or whatever.
No.
The old fucker whips out a RECORD GUIDE and starts quoting prices from there.
So, I didn't buy anything. Fucking ridiculous. What I love about buying old records is that they're usually not treated like fucking baseball cards. Fuck that.
Later we went to Neotopia, which was deck; and about a dozen other shops that weren't so deck. At this one store, I saw this girl who looked familiar, but I didn't remember her name, I guess she saw me glancing at her, so we started that stupid thing where you glance at someone because she's glancing at you and vice versa, and you pretend to look at other stuff so that you'll stop looking at the other person. As I was leaving, I realized that I didn't know her at all, but that she was Dru's doppelganger.
We ate at a thai restaurant off of St. Charles, not the Basil Leaf, the cheap one. It was filthy, the bowls, the floors, the restaurant, and our waiter was super prissy - and a guy. However, the food was great.
On the way home, I tried to find stuff on my ipod that she hadn't heard. I had some Ted Leo, and found myself explaining "this isn't really his strongest song," chisel did this song and it sounded much better" "I don't really like this song" "This sounds so much better live"
After 5 songs I gave up, but not before she quipped to me as he blundered through "timorous me"
"You know, it's things like this that make black people hate us"
brandon [email] said at 4:36 PM 01-10-2005: Hey, I'm not knocking Ted Leo at all. Like Sting and his "just like that old man/in that book by nabokov" and the faust reference in "wrapped around your finger", Ted works in smart references into his power-pop ish stuff. Who else today can work in words like "incessantly" or rhyme Odysseus with Telemachus, while keeping the allusion and the metaphor intact. And making sense.
Well, it's not fucking Peaches. And, the Decembrists are too clever by half. Maybe Steve Malkmus, but he's done. So Ted Leo is the go-to guy, when you want to indulge your sweet-ear, without completely trading in the intellectual component. Right? probably not...
After all, I've paid money to see him at least 5 times. Tyranny of Distance is my favorite album of his so far in his solo work, and was in my top 3 for the year when it came out. Hearts of Oak just didn't do it for me. And Tell Balgeary Balgury is Dead, eh. I haven't bothered to pick up the last one.
But I can't figure out how to get other people to care about him. So, like I said, I chaulk him up as a guilty pleasure.
And a racially divisive icon who will one day unintentionally foment a racial war.
Last time I posted about Ted Leo on Killoggs, the response was about 50/50 love/hate. Apparently Erica was his wetnurse or something and talks to him on the phone every night and once took it up the butt while he sat in a rocking chair in the corner and jerked it. Randy hates him. See who's got a head now?
kiche [email] said at 4:53 PM 01-10-2005: the decemberists are terrible. i don't care how intelligent their lyrics are, i can't get past how much they blow as musicians. they should have named themselves audio rohypnol.
kevin [email] said at 4:57 PM 01-10-2005: TOD seems to have lots more energy than his latest stuff. i believe that is the last record where he played almost everything himself.
christian [email] said at 4:59 PM 01-10-2005: i think my perception of ted leo's appeal is skewed by the fact that the love/hate ratio for him in DC is more like 90/10. if you are here and like smart pop rock whatever-you-want-to-call-it, ted leo is your man, and people here love him unabashedly for it, as demonstrated by his 5+ sold out shows a year here.
tyranny of distance is my favorite as well, and if i couldn't get someone into him immediately with 'biomusicology', 'under the hedge' or 'timorous me' i'd probably give up on the person immediately. the new album is his best-sounding yet production-wise, but it's a little more streamlined and homogeneous. still, it really grew on me and for a good month or so i found myself listening to it every day. also, the better songs on it translate REALLY well live. i think i'm gonna listen to it now actually.
ericanm [email] said at 5:24 PM 01-10-2005: also, treble in trouble is his best record. and the lost on the way to load in 7". god i miss him playing with a reel to reel and sequencer. it was so good. not that i don't like the band but it's just not the same.
julie [email] said at 10:12 AM 01-11-2005: One of my customers at the bar last night was named Telemachus. His other 2 names (middle and last) were equally Greekian. I couldn't even help myself from exclaiming "What a NAME!" and smiling when I carded him. Then I felt like an idiot and I didn't have the heart to say what I really wanted to say, which was: What do your friends call you? (Telly!?!? Please say Telly!)
brandon [email] said at 10:48 AM 01-11-2005: Lem would be my preference if I were a TeLEMachus. (Telly = bald informercial guy or gay sesame street character; Joe, fucking boring, try adding a modicum of creativity to this site, Myriam, you'd think it wouldn't be hard with that big fat educated head of yours.
And my pick-up line:
Baby, you must be Shirley Maclaine...
Since you're about to go out on a Lem.
brandon [email] said at 8:51 PM 01-11-2005: Yeah, I meant that telly and the black telly. I wish I knew a Lem other than Stanislaw Lem, whom I don't really know, but man could he write.
If I weren't a southerner, I'd totally want to name my kids after classic characters, so that they could pick their own nicknames and keep their full, unwieldy names as secrets to tell lovers and best friends later in life.
brandon [email] said at 9:08 PM 01-11-2005: Because that's what we did in the wake of reconstruction, we named our children outrageously grandiose names like Creon Leblanc or Jefferson Davis Hutchinson or Cassandra Mamet or Napoleon Gaius Edwards or Horace Baidi Virgil Dagostino that kind of shit. It's similar to you know, living in a shotgun something and naming all your kids Prince and Princess because we had nothing NOTHING the North had taken everything, so we threw our dignity after it, slicing up our birth certificates to spite our faces.
brandon [email] said at 9:36 PM 01-11-2005: The really sad thing, Ed, is that I took all of those names except for Mamet and Dagostino from the our family tree. I think I've mentioned this before, but, we've got a Daniel Boone (first name, two parts) an America (first name) and an Augustus lurking in that vacuum just after the war, when they lost the plantation and couldn't own darkies anymore, and before jim crow began to settle accounts for us.
julie [email] said at 10:16 AM 01-11-2005: Sometime last year, Coldplay was on the cover of Spin Magazine. I know this because somehow that issue has taken up permanent residence in our upstairs bathroom. There's a bit where Chris Martin discusses playing 'Clocks' at the Grammys last year, and how he was backstage and he looked out and saw Eminem in the front row. And he had this sinking feeling in his gut as he realized, "Oh no. Eminem is going to HATE us."
Think what you will about Coldplay and Apple's daddy, but I thought that was a refreshing peek at self-avowed douche-baggery. I mean, at least on some level, he can admit that his music is really ....white. Haha.
myriam [email] said at 10:52 AM 01-11-2005: stacks of new yorkers, the weekly dig and the pheonix (free city papers), scientific american, discover magazine, and delia's catalogues.
obviously you live with your brother and i live with nerds.
ed [email] said at 10:56 AM 01-11-2005: Am I the only speedcrapper around? I don't have time to read, I just do the doo and leave. Five minutes would be an extraordinarily long time for me to be on the throne.
Besides, my cats wouldn't allow me to read. For some reason, they like to come and beg for attention while I'm pooping. They are strange.
meredith [email] said at 11:00 AM 01-11-2005: I don't read either, Ed. I am there for one thing and one thing only and do not feel the need to linger.
However for the longest time Jeremy had some Christmas edition of some electronics magazine in there. And if I would take it out, it would eventually appear in the bathroom again.
myriam [email] said at 11:02 AM 01-11-2005: it drove my cat crazy if we sat on the toilet and kept him out. he'd meow for awhile, then he'd stick his paw under the door like, "are you deaf?!", then he'd scratch at the door, then he'd meow louder and louder until finally you were forced to acrobatically leannnnnn over to the door and get it open, only for him to come in, take a look around, and ask to be let out again.
meredith [email] said at 11:08 AM 01-11-2005: I have one cat who is fascinated with... well, everything really, the world is his toy, but this is especially noticable in the bathroom area. I am waiting for him to fall in the bathtub trying to walk on the bubbles.
ed [email] said at 12:01 PM 01-11-2005: It's gotten bigger in the last couple years, but I was always a speedcrapper, even when I could eat a small horse in one sitting.
meredith [email] said at 11:15 AM 01-11-2005: I was so happy when our landlord finally fixed the door and we were able to shut the cats out of the bathroom. But for six months this was not possible.
art said at 11:29 AM 01-11-2005: I was visting friends in The OC last year and I closed the door to the bathroom to do my business and all of a sudden I hear their 6 year old pounding on the door and yelling 'let me in'. Luckily I had locked the door. When I came out they explained that they always leave the door open when the use the crapper because the kids didn't like being 'excluded'. WTF???
myriam [email] said at 11:31 AM 01-11-2005: my sister used to throw a fit if my mom closed the bathroom door! even if she was playing in another room, she would come running just to throw a fit. so my mom accomodated the same way your friends did... starting a long trend of giving in to my sister to her character's detriment. BAD SIGN.
meredith [email] said at 11:34 AM 01-11-2005: Dude, yeah, we were taught that the bathroom was a private place that not even parents had the right to disturb you in. Much less you disturb them. My childhood was the only time I ever brought reading material into the bathroom because that was an excuse to stay up past bedtime and read. I think my mom did the same thing but only because it was the only place she could be alone for ten minutes by herself when we were growing up.
art said at 11:39 AM 01-11-2005: ya. that nite, my friend and his wife excuse themselves at about 7:30 to say they'll see me in about an hour and to make myself at home. I asked what was up and they explained that the kids can't go to sleep in their own room or alone, so both kids and parents get into my friends bed every night and the stay there until both kids are asleep, then they put each kid in its own room and come back down.
I just don't understand this. They can either pay now and get it over with or pay for it over and over again when their kids end up spoiled, bratty and unable to adapt to situations.
meredith [email] said at 11:50 AM 01-11-2005: Oh my God, that is fucking insane. When will that stop? When the kids are freakin' 11 years old and have a sleepover and all their friends start being like, "Dude, you're a freak, you sleep with your parents?"
myriam [email] said at 11:54 AM 01-11-2005: They've actually done studies about how bad it is specifically to let your kid sleep with you. Practically every parenting book has like a chapter on how to not let your kid sleep with you, what age is appropriate to cut it off, etc etc etc.
meredith [email] said at 11:57 AM 01-11-2005: I have vague memories of climbing into my parents bed after nightmares, and one specific one where I came in and said I had had a nightmare and was told uncerimoniously that I was too old to be coming in after nightmares and to go back to bed. It was pretty effective I think.
brandon [email] said at 9:46 PM 01-11-2005: My cat does this too. But, as soon as she's in, she's not worried about Aesop's greedy brown dog dropping bones to his reflection in the stream, no, she wants me to fill up the damn sink - she drinks only from faucets or from filled basins, bathtubs, etc. This cat is bizarre, she only eats if you're there to pet her. I think it's a security thing. Then, she purrs while she eats, and if you stop petting her or wander off, she'll come and find you and lead you back to her food dish until she's fucking good and ready and full and ready to let you go. In a way, she's not unlike some of the worst sex partners I've had. Greedy bitches. And, like some of the worst sex partners I've had, she's totally into watching me when I perch upon the throne of hydros.
Which in a way is a blessing, beating or not beating the time between turning on the faucet and filling the sink, helps me gauge whether I'm going to have a 2003 plan-for-Iraq poop, or the more harrowing, unknown horizon 2004-2005 plan-for-Iraq poop. In general, I am a long-term, nation-building pooper. I've read considerable parts of the summa theologica on the can. Pooping was how I got through Augustine's Confessions. I hope somewhere, this confession pisses off some Lutherans.
art said at 12:18 PM 01-11-2005: but EVERYONE enjoys the sonorous emanations of their own scat. You should consider yourself blessed to be able to spend so much time alone with them.
angele [email] said at 11:29 AM 01-11-2005: Newsweek and the National Review. Neither of which I actually read (or subscribe to for that matter), but they are in the bathroom.
julie [email] said at 11:16 AM 01-11-2005: Brandon, I just noticed that The Eames Era was playing a show at MY BAR this past weekend, and I missed it. Aren't they friends of yours? Give a girl a heads up next time.
julie [email] said at 11:19 AM 01-11-2005: Josh, I'm appalled. You and I are in constant communication, practically 24/7. How is it that you managed to NOT tell me about this?
josh [email] said at 11:21 AM 01-11-2005: I had no idea you wanted to go see some no-name Baton Rouge band play... sorry. I didn't realize Brandon was friends with them. I think Zack is friends with them, though.
julie [email] said at 11:25 AM 01-11-2005: EVERY band starts out as a no-name band. The way they start making a reputation for themselves is by going on tour. The way they get people in other cities to come out to their shows is by word of mouth, and recommendations by friends. Then the next time they come to town, not only do you and Brandon spread the word, but I, the newly converted, tell ten of MY friends... and the next thing you know it, they're getting signed to Sub Pop and pretending they don't know who we are anymore.
It's a sad day when I have to school you on the checks and balances of the independent music scene, Josh.
josh [email] said at 12:23 PM 01-11-2005: Let me put it another way: I'm not going to give free promotion to any bands that I'm not making money off of.
julie [email] said at 1:08 PM 01-11-2005: Well, for bigger groups like Polyphonic Spree, or The Jets, I sometimes have to draw the line... But usually I try to be fair. Duos are the best, particularly ex-spouses who dress in red and white.
brandon [email] said at 8:59 PM 01-11-2005: Honestly, Julie, they're very, very cutesy. Smart, talented but cutesy. I was surprised to see they were playing that far out, figured the natives would spit-roast them or something. I mean, I've heard that if you're not somewhere between Mammoth and The Hidden Hand or the Locust, they kill you if you play in or around D.C.. Hell they killed Dimebag, and he wasn't even playing that close by. Anyway, if you're really interested, I've got a link to their site on fleksibelsau and one to the band profile on my profile in myspace, so, RTFM and DYFR.
ARRRR
