MY FAMILY: If your parents came home from a week-long vacation to find that the son whom they had charged with painting the exterior trim in their absence had instead only painted half of said trim before entering a drug-addled haze, sticking a wet paintbrush in his back pocket, and lolling about all over the house in a Goldilocks-like quest for a comfy place to crash, thus covering most of the furniture with bright green paint, they would no doubt be aghast. My parents? This was their best-case scenario.
THE ROCK AND THE ROLL: I was slow to warm to that The National record that all the cool kids are trying to decide if they’re over yet. My hesitation was all about frontman Matt Berninger’s vocals, which on my initial listen put me in mind of any of a dozen terrible post-grunge fake-rock bands who have taken their lead singer’s baritone as a license to wallow in bathos and faux profundity. And I think all of us whose college careers paralleled the ascent of Crash Test Dummies are rightly a little gun-shy about such voices. And okay, yes, his voice also reminded me of Christian rockers Third Day. Are you happy now?
But I gave in to the album’s irresistible charms when I got to track 7, “Apartment Story,” and realized that Berninger wasn’t all belt and bluster. So help me, I’m pretty sure he’s crooning a little on that song. “Apartment Story” is exactly one superfluous horn arrangement away from being a Neil Diamond song. I say this as the highest form of praise. It’s the tune that chased away all my biases and made it possible for me to listen to the album with fresh ears, and I’m glad of it. I think it’ll sound even better this fall.
THE ROCK AND THE ROLL II: Friends! Would you like to be charmed and rocked at the same time? The hie ye over to Chicago Acoustic Underground and scroll down to Episode 32, where you can download a podcast interview + in-studio concert from Short Punks in Love. (Actually, here’s a hotlink for the podcast so you won’t have to click/scroll—lemme know if that’s a problem, CAU!) SPIL is husband-and-wife duo Brian Cremins and Pearl Ratunil, and they play the sorts of songs that you always hope to hear when you switch to the AM band on long lonely late-night drives with the city-glow forever over the horizon. If you’ve been waiting all your life about an anecdote about the science of amplifying a toy Smurfs guitar—then my friend, has the 20-minute Short Punks in Love podcast got a treat for you!
I hereby propose, when and if SPIL ever gets off its duff and makes that southern tour it’s been talking about, that we have a Short Punks in Love v. The Delicate Cycle battle of the married-people bands! Except instead of a battle they would just play on the same night and talk about how much they admire each other’s songs and how much they both like cats. (Those who enjoy cats should also listen to the podcast, which features more cat-talk than most rock bands are willing to indulge in.)
COMICS: Ben Towle offers an in-depth examination of the sudden vogue for all things MODOK (via The Comics Reporter).
RED STICK: I’d like to alert everyone to a new member of the Cruise-loathed blogroll on the right, Red Stick Modern. RSM is devoted to discovering, promoting, and preserving all the intensely cool Mid-Century Modern architecture here in Baton Rouge. Like a lot of mid-size Southern cities, Baton Rouge isn’t always good about preserving the parts of its history that don’t have a few dozen minie balls embedded in them, and that goes double for houses and buildings from the 50s and 60s, structures which barely count as “historical” in the minds of the unimaginative. Thanks, RSM, for raising Baton Rouge’s atomic-age profile!
RED STICK + COMICS: Those of you in the greater BR area who are not dead inside should make your way to LSU’s Hill Memorial Library, currently featuring the exhibit Super Stories: A Brief History of Comics. The exhibit, which runs through October 20th, is partly organized around Hill Memorial’s William Bowlus Collection, an archive which includes over 7,000 comics from the 50s through the 1980s, and includes features on superhero comics, alternative comics, comics as an artistic medium, and the various ways in which mainstream comics have grappled with issues of race, gender, and politics. Don’t miss it!
1. Bright Green Paint-Apart from the affect it will have on the neighbors when they look at the shutters—I say, nice color choice. SLD’s 1st apartment in Philadelphia was painted Go Green. I will always have fond feelings for bright green.
2. I’m wondering if you have an insider on some committee at that library who was stuffing the ballot box so that they decided to exhibit “Super Stories” rather than “Medieval Castelian Poetry” or something?
I want an exclusively Fury-family blog. All Furys, all the time.
I may be the only person in Jackson that has not heard the new The National yet. I think it’s because nobody loves me.
Thanks for the plug, Professor. At Red Stick Modern, we welcome any and all suggestions for buildings, both commercial and residential, that should be featured. K, bye!
Oh, man!! I really want to go to that exhibit! Is there an online archive of the covers? I can’t quite recognize that Magneto issue . . .
And Mavis dear, you can totally borry my copy!
You are such a dear.
It took us a while to discover this review of our podcat… I mean, podcast.
We like cats. They also happen to be the management team of SPiL. Ben handles security, Rosie does PR —she’s the one pictured on the my space page.
As far as shows in BR —book it, and we will come.