How to ring in the New Year.

Step 1. Select the snack of your choice. (In my case, Cheetos -- the crunchy ones.)

Step 2. Choose the adult beverage of your choice. (I'm having a White Russian.)

Step 3. Insert THE NIGHT STALKER DVD into your DVD player. (An episode you haven't seen ever/in a long time/last night, but it was really good. You could also go for one of the two TV movies.)

Step 3. Enjoy.

A Wonderful Life It Ain't.

It's late Christmas Eve. Presley's in bed. Jennifer and I are getting everything ready for Santa Claus' arrival. I decide to turn on the TV to give us something to watch as we wrap presents that will be unwrapped in just a few hours.

Maybe there's some kinda holiday thing on. A CHRISTMAS STORY. The Grinch. Charlie Brown. One of those Jesus documentaries on A&E.

What do I come across? THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE.

Now, I think this is a great film. A landmark. But I question the widsom in scheduling this one on December 24th.

Did that keep me from watching a bit of it? Not at all.

"You're ruining Christmas!"

It's an absolute fact that A JOLLY CHRISTMAS FROM FRANK SINATRA from 1957 is the greatest Christmas album ever made. Hell, even Santa Claus would agree with that.

I'll nominate THE VENTURES' CHRISTMAS ALBUM as #2. One of the Elvis ones (take your pick) holds down the #3 spot.

And the list goes on. Sorry, Phil Spector. Please don't shoot me.

Every year, Frank, the Ralph Brewer Singers and conductor Gordon Jenkins provide the soundtrack to my holiday -- and it's pretty much impossible to have a blue Christmas when this thing's on.

Up top is the original LP's cover art. Pretty, ain't it? That was the way it looked when Capitol sent it to stores back in '57. It had a "high fidelity" thing in the upper right corner.

Then, in 1963, after Frank had split Capitol for his own Reprise label, the album was re-released as THE SINATRA CHRISTMAS ALBUM. That's it to the right. Kinda lame cover, but that same great music. Now at a slightly discounted price.

Then things start getting confusing. Along comes this thing called the compact disc. Capitol puts out A JOLLY CHRISTMAS FROM FRANK SINATRA, giving us a couple extra tunes -- and they return to the original cover art! In the meantime, another Sinatra holiday CD is put together, this one on Reprise, called THE SINATRA CHRISTMAS ALBUM, pulling together various holiday tunes recorded for various things -- he never recorded a full Christmas album for the label. No relation to the retitled JOLLY CHRISMAS that Capitol had once released. (You may have seen this CD. It's got an artsy shot of a red Christmas ornament on it.)

Then we get to 2007. A JOLLY CHRISTMAS FROM FRANK SINATRA is now 50 years old! So an anniversary version of the CD is prepared, which turns out to be just the regular thing with a new cover. No new tunes. No alternate takes. Not even some kinda different-numbered-bit remastering. Just a bastardization of that cool old cover art and some shiny slipcase thing. Sorry, not impressed. (It's always bothered me that the artist is never credited, and his signature on the LP cover is illegible.)

So the music is as great and timeless as ever. But are future generations gonna be stuck with these tacky new graphics? Let's hope not. I'd like to think that my grandkids' Sinatra Christmas music (who knows what format they'll hear it on) will look like the one I had -- and my parents had. Tradition is such a huge part of the Christmas season. This is one I sure hope we don't screw up.

By the way, Frank followed A JOLLY CHRISTMAS FROM FRANK SINATRA with the fabulous COME FLY WITH ME. He was on a roll that would last damn near a decade.

Ring a ding ding!

And a jolly Christmas from me, too!

[The title of this entry thing is bellowed by one of Ned Beatty's bratty kids in Spielberg's 1941 (1979).]

"You can never go fast enough."

And you can never own this movie too many times.

My Dad's laserdisc company, The Roan Group, put TWO LANE BLACKTOP (1971) out. It was the last laserdisc he released before making the switch to DVD. It's also one of my all-time favorite movies (Warren Oates gives one of the greatest film performanes ever), and having anything to do with it (and I did VERY little as far as the laserdisc was concerned) was indeed an honor.

At the same time Dad did the laserdisc, Anchor Bay released the same transfer on DVD. It's long out of print, but Criterion has just put it back out in a more deluxer deluxe edition. Came out last week -- just in time for the gearhead movie freak on your Christmas list. Man, I can't wait to get one.

I've recommended this film to countless people. And reaction to it has been split right down the middle: people either love it or hate it. There's no "it was OK" with TWO LANE BLACKTOP.

Once I get my copy, I'll give the three people who read this a full report on its splendid-ness.

Freddie Francis: 1919 - 2007

Every December, Turner Classic Movies does this montage-y thing where they give you a runthrough of all the film people who've passed away over the last year. I always dread it, because each year I find that someone I really respect and admire has made the list -- and I had no idea they were gone.

This year was no exception. It was Freddie Francis, the British ace cinematographer and horror director. His specialty was black-and-white widescreen stuff, and THE INNOCENTS (we lost Deborah Kerr this year, too) and THE ELEPHANT MAN show what a master he was. Francis claimed to approach everything as if it was black-and-white, thinking in shade and texture rather than color. His color work in stuff like GLORY, Scorcese's CAPE FEAR and THE STRAIGHT STORY demonstrate that.

But he also directed. Typecast pretty quickly as a horror director, he made several films for Hammer (EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN in 1964 and 1968's DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE, for example)and the bulk of the anthology films like TALES FROM THE CRYPT that Amicus cranked out in the Seventies.

He quickly learned that even a good director has a hard time rising above a bad script, and this plagues a lot of his directorial work. But they always LOOK great, with a lot of the story told visually. THE SKULL and CREEPING FLESH are good examples of his visual flair making the most of a lackluster screenplay.

Over the course of my film-geek adulthood, I've searched out almost anything he ever touched -- from great pictures like SONS AND LOVERS to trash like VAMPIRE HAPPENING -- and I've always been fascinated by his use of shadow and the incredible places he decides to place his camera. These days, Freddie Francis is well-served by DVD, and something like THE INNOCENTS would make an ideal way to discover what a great artist he was -- and show off the spiffy widescreen HD TV you got for Christmas. And, of course, THE SKULL has that cool device where the camera looks out, POV-style, through the eye sockets! Good stuff.

I can feel a real Hammer Horror binge coming on.

Happy Birthday, Pally!

Francis Albert Sinatra
December 12, 1915 - May 14, 1998

Do the right thing. Light up a Chesterfield and pour yourself good stiff drink. And by all means, through something Nice N Easy on the hi-fi.

"Here by the sea and sand"

The Who, Virginia Beach, 1968. A former co-worker of mine was at this show. And I will forever hate him for it.

R.I.P.

Robert Craig Knievel
1938-2007

"... there's magic in my eyes."

Been listening to a lot of THE WHO SELL OUT lately. It's my favorite Who album, for one thing, which automatically makes it one of my favorite albums, period. And I finally tracked down the rare mono mix, which some people prefer. It's certainly different, but I haven't quite made up my mind yet.

You get a lot of different guitar solos, for one thing — especially in "Our Love Was." And a completely different version of "Mary Anne With The Shaky Hands." And it's a little punchier on the whole with a more pronounced high end, which I like.

One thing's for sure. I prefer it to the remastered CD, which has extra stuff stuck in the middle of the original album's sequence. Bad move. If I were President, that would be an offense that carried automatic jail time. But if you wanna stick some demos and stuff on the end of the original album, knock yourself out. Just don't mess with what I grew up listening to over and over and over till the neighbors could probably recite the lyrics to "I Can See For Miles." That's like painting a pack of Toastchee crackers and can of Copenhagen on the table in "The Last Supper."

However you hear it -- mono or stereo, vinyl or 8-track, CD or boosted off the Internet -- THE WHO SELL OUT is a masterpiece, taking the whole Pop Art thing The Who flirted with during that period and really running with it. From the tacky ads on the cover to the commecials between songs to songs that turn into commercials ("Odorono"), this thing is completely cuckoo. It's got Pete's Art School thing all over it. I can't imagine what it musta been like to hear this record brand new in 1967. (And as an Advertising practitioner, it's an weird justification of the kind of swill we crank out. See? It IS art!)

It's a shame they abandon the pirate radio theme toward the end of Side Two, but them's the breaks. It's also a shame that with all the Tommy Lifehouse Who's Next Quadrophenia rock opera concept album discussion, this one rarely gets mentioned — when it's maybe the time where Pete's concept really really works.

And Keith Moon goes completely nuts throughout with all sorts of engineer-y knob-twiddling giving his cymbols a real abrasive edge.

This LP has a soft spot in my heart because it was one of the first "rare" records I paid a "collector's" price for — $12 of my high school summer job hardearned (at Memory Lane Records outside Philly) for an original stereo Decca copy with the shrinkwrap still on it. It was a purchase I debated for days -- you'd think I was buying a Cadillac or something.

Have you heard the Petra Haden thing? It's great, a tribute this album certainly deserves.

Welcome to the new conference room.

I work in one of those glass-and-steel office buildings that Raleigh is so full of. These buildings all look the same -- and it doesn't seem like any are more than 15 years old.

The agency I work for occupies the entire second floor. But it's also where the lobby is (the first floor you enter through the parking deck), so we get quite a few strangers in our men's room. I went there today, and there were four guys already in there. Businessmen, each about 35. Khaki pants, blue oxford shirts, sportcoats, loafers. Hair full of product, standing up in a brush-looking kinda thing. (Come to think of it, they all looked a lot like sociopath/murderer/freak Scott Peterson.) Those briefcase-suitcase-airport-terminal-wheely things, all parked side-by-side outside the restroom door.

Two of these guys are at the urinals. The other two are waiting their turn behind them. I walk in, see all this humanity packed into the restroom and pause for a second. Do I want to wait? Should I come back later? Should I see if the stalls are occupied?

I step into the bathroom. Then it hits me. These four guys are all on their Blackberry/Treo/iPhones -- using their thumbs to frantically maneuver through emails or phone messages or child porn or whatever.

EVEN THE TWO GUYS WHO ARE PEEING!

I decided to come back later.

So, are some people arrogant enough to THINK their time is so valuable they can't even urinate without sharing their wisdom with the rest of the world? Do they think we're gonna be impressed? "Look at that, Austin. That's what I call multi-tasking!" 'Fraid not. It's more like "Oooooh! That guy's peeing and messing around with his cell phone!"

One thing's for sure. I ain't touching nobody's cell phone ever again. Who knows where it's been -- like, God forbid, a men's room in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Frame 352

From the Patterson-Gimlin film.

In Hell, everything is in Metrocolor.

When I was a kid, my Dad collected movies. He still does, but now they're on DVD, not 16 or 35mm film.

Came across this image the other day (on the wonderful, excessive, tech-y, geeky widescreenmuseum.com), and it really sent me back to those film days.

It's a 35mm frame from Stanley Kubrick's 2001. (That chilling scene right before the intermission where you realize HAL is reading their lips.) Squeezed for anamorphic projection. With a round reel changeover cue. With both the stereo magnetic and optical mono soundtracks. And printed on whatever crappy film stock Metrocolor stuff was dumped on. Seemed like no matter how well you cared for the stuff, it faded to this sickly pink over time. I've heard that some films from the period were this faded while still in their theatrical release!

The weird thing is, your brain will eventually correct the color for you — if the movie's any good. For instance, James and I watched THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM about 14 thousand times (including back-to-back showings from time to time), in a 'Scope 16mm faded-brown "Color by Pathe" print. And we never complained. You can now get it in a beautiful widescreen DVD, by the way.

Same with 2001. The redone transfer in that new Stanley box is supposed to be truly amazing. Haven't seen it yet (it's on my Christmas list).

But as for the film itself, I've seen that thing about 50 times. And movies just don't get no better.

This might be the best record of 2007.

Or maybe it's the best record of 1927, which is what it kinda sounds like.

Whatever, it's really good. And, of course, Levon Helm is a National Treasure and should be on the nickel instead of some stupid buffalo.

So do yourself a favor. Go get this here thing.

Herbie Rides Again Part 2

Halloween was a success. Jennifer got the costume done. Candy was accumulated. And Presley realized her dream to be Herbie The Love Bug.

In case you were wondering, yes, it is an extreme butt-ache to escort a six-year-old that's wearing a four-foot-long foam Volkswagen, as seen below. (Some of you may recognize the house.)


She's already making plans. Next year, it's the Pink Panther.

Herbie Rides Again.

For Halloween, my daughter Presley wanted to be Herbie. The Love Bug. Number 53. The Volkswagen from the Disney movie.

I'm happy to say that her love for Herbie was inspired by my own love for Herbie. I've been nuts about those movies since I saw them as a kid, and as a result, there's a 74 Beetle sitting in our driveway.

I'm also happy to report that my wife created a really incredible Herbie costume for Presley -- an masterpiece of foam and cloth and other stuff -- and I'll be sticking pictures of Presley and her outfit on here as soon as I can.

We'll be trick or treating in Cary, North Carolina's Scottish Hills, a neighborhood I lived in as a kid -- when I was first wigging out about those Herbie movies. God, that was a long time ago.

Thanks For Brian Wilson

Since my Mom passed away (back in March), there have been days that weren't so hot. Guess that just comes with the territory.

Somewhere in there, I heard of a thing that has really helped me out. Every day, I think of a person that has been a positive influence in my life, or has had a positive impact on my life, and I think about how grateful I am for that person. Some of these I've written down; others I organize in my head and leave it at that. (For some reason, I've gotten in the habit of doing this in the shower every morning.)

Don't remember what the specific outcome of this was supposed to be (I was pretty damn skeptical about it, to be honest). But so what? It's been a great exercise, and along the way I've figured out that I'm either truly blessed or lucky as hell -- because I've bumped into some outstanding people in my 43 years on this mudball.

Sprinkled among all the family members, mentors and friends have been artists, writers, musicians, Randolph Scott and even a hot rod builder or two. Today, I am truly thankful for Mr. Brian Wilson.

Why? Well, I could just say, "Go listen to 'Surf's Up' on the Beach Boys bootleg of your choice." Or I could tell you that one of my goals as a parent is to take my daughter to see Brian perform. Or I could point to the beautiful painting of Brian my good friend Tomas Gardner painted for me.

But, really, it's this. Brian went way, way out there -- to the very farrest-away edge -- to create some incredible music for us all. Sometimes it was really, really hard for him to come back for that edge.

We should all learn something from his story.

But maybe most important, we should all just dig his music.

Behold The Power Of Film!

Came across this image recently at moviewallpapers.net. It's of the HAL 9000 computer from Stanley Kubrick's mighty 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. I thought it was cool and did indeed make it the desktop on my computer. No big deal, right?

Well, it hadn't been on there a day before the comments started. It was creeping people out! That picture, not a whole lot more than a red circle, was giving my co-workers the willies.

Stanley, you sure knew how to make movies. But I sure wish you'd made more of 'em.

Can't get it off my mind.

I'm thinking about some Char Grill. And that means I ain't thinking about much of anything else.

I'd opt for the real one, on Hillsborough Street. Let's see, uh, cheeseburger — mustard and pickle, fries and a large Dr. Pepper. (I don't do no Pepsi.) Then, if it turned out that that wasn't enough, I'd go back for a plain hot dog.

In recent years, The Char Grill and Watkins Grill have become two of the main reasons we don't pack up and split the Raleigh scene.

There used to be a big fat brown cat that used to hang out at The Char, bumming fries and stuff offa people. I've probably plugged a dozen orders of fries into that cat. Haven't seen him in a long while, so I bet he's dead. All those fries probably did him in. That, or some loser whipping his Camry around the back of The Char too fast. You know, now that the Char Cat is gone, you see a lot more Char Birds. A big afternoon for my little girl is to sit in the back of our Chevy pickup, tossing french fries to the Char Birds. If one happens to actually catch it in flight, man, that's living! Ah, the simple things.

This Car Knocks Me Out!

Snagged this image offa Jalopy Journal (again). It's the 1920 T-Bucket Ford that graced the cover of (THE) VENTURES IN SPACE, one of my all-time favorite albums.

It was built by Mr. Fred Steele from Maynard, Massachusetts — who they say drove it all the way to California for the photo shoot! His car was chosen because it was white and would show up in the night shot they wanted for the cover.

While this LP has been listed by many, many musicians as a huge influence on their playing (and Keith Moon supposedly played it to death), I'm sure this T was a big influence on a lot of hotrodders in the mid-60s. This car stands, to me at least, as THE quintessential Bucket T. I'm really glad to know it's still around and still in such good shape. Now, if I could just figure out how to get a ride in the thing!

Good News That Makes Me Kinda Sick.

Just saw on The Jalopy Journal that Ed Roth's Orbitron showcar has been found. And while I'm overjoyed to know that one of the icons of my youth and a real Work Of Art actually still exists (unlike a growing list of other cool stuff), it's evidently been through hell.

According to the Journal's blog: "Turns out the car spent some time at a Mexican carnival and finally ended up being used as a trash receptacle in front of an adult book store."

Ed and his work deserve so much better than that. The owner says he's gonna restore it. Let's hope.

My Kid (And Somebody Else's Hot Rod)

There's this hamburger place down the street from our house called Grill 57. On the third Saturday of the month, they have a thing they call a cruise-in. It's pretty much a car show kinda deal where the locals polish up their Camaro's and Mustangs and stuff, eat hamburgers and just generally hang out and rap about cars.

We stopped by today and snapped this picture of Presley and a primered Ford sedan (with a sloppily-chopped top and some ugly rust spots). Looks cool here, though. I like a bit of a homegrown look. But that radiator cap's gotta go.

Presley was also hip to a beater Volkswagen Type III Squareback. No wonder I love her so much.

Damn Yankees.

I hope Joe Torre goes somewhere else and wins The World Series next year. And I hope a buncha guys split the scene over the next couple months.

That's the least the Yankees deserve for treating Torre like dirt.

Just exactly what I need: a reason to live.

http://www.myspace.com/spinetinglermovie

Great Bands I Miss #74: The Backsliders

Raleigh's music scene has never turned out to be the rocket to stardom people keep thinking it's gonna be. Not for a lack of great musicians, like Vanilla Trainwreck or my sickeningly-talented friend Jeff Hart. Not for a lack of folks that have gone out there and done something, like say COC, Ryan Adams and, uhhhh... Clay Aiken. And not for some bands that made some great records that about 12 people ever got to hear.

Case in point. We used to have a band around here called The Backsliders. And, man, they were something else.
Around '96, they were playing out constantly, and I was a music geek, single, bored out of my mind and all too willing to spend another night at The Brewery. What first attracted me to The Backsliders was that they'd evidently had their lives changed by the same Buck Owens records I'd found at a yard sale about two years earlier. Their songwriting impressed me, too. As did the way Steve Howell played that beautiful F-hole Telecaster. Don Rich or Clarence White woulda been proud.

On the strength of their incredible live shows, they developed a big local following, and their Brewery gigs were always packed. And hot. And very, very great. So it made sense when they signed to Mammoth that they'd put out a live EP recorded there. It's a great introduction to the band, and for those of us who were there, a great reminder of how those misspent nights weren't so damn misspent after all.

They followed it with THROWIN' ROCKS AT THE MOON, produced by Pete Anderson. It's a really good record, but after all those live shows, it seemed a bit, well, mannered. They toured for it, and when they returned to The Brewery, they were still great. But somewhere in there, the rot set it. And before long -- in fact, halfway through recording the next record -- they were pretty much done.

Nowdays, when I think of what a show at a club is like, those Backsliders shows come to mind. And you know, a PBR just ain't been as good since.

Hot Rod Update: Still don't have one.

I'm sorry to say that my driveway is still hot rodless. And the way things are lookin', it's gonna be for quite some time. Crap.

However, my wife picked up another copy of this paperback at a thrift store the other day. HOT ROD by Henry Gregor Felsen. Written in the 50s and in print for ages. I read it one summer in Texas back in the mid-70s, during a period when my cousin Koby and I were all about hot rods and street rods and show cars and all that stuff. We built the models. Read the magazines (and all the Felsen books). Collected the cards, from Odd Rods to the Don Russ Hot Rod cards. And just generally daydreamed about these things. The fact that Strawn, Texas, is littered with raggedy old Fords and stuff probably inspired a lot of it.

Back to this paperback. HOT ROD is the story of Bud Crayne, a Midwestern highschool kid who works at a garage and has a cool set of wheels and is always wrenching on it to make it go faster, drive better and be safer. His girl's La Verne Shuler.

Over the years, I've gotten several editions of HOT ROD, with all sorts of really cool cover art. But this one, from an early 60s printing, I believe, just kills me. That has to be one of the all-time most bitchin' paintings ever. The sweet cars. The cool-looking guy in his t-shirt and rolled-up Levis. The kicked-up dust. And that girl! You can have your Picassos and your Monets and all that stuff. I want this thing hanging over my couch.

Wonder who painted it? I couldn't find a credit on the book. Whoever did it, I've probably stared at that art longer than it took 'em to paint it. A masterpiece. The ones for some of Felsen's other books -- STREET ROD or CRASH CLUB, for instance -- have great covers, too, that seem to be painted by the same artist. They're all great, but HOT ROD really does it for me.

Always thought it'd be boss to build a rod to match the one in this painting. That burgandy color. The fenders. The chrome firewall. Yeah.

Fly on the wall time, big time.

Came across this photo on Alex Cox's web site. Left to right, that's Sam Peckinpah (THE WILD BUNCH), cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno (AMARCORD), Sergio Leone (THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY) and Monte Hellman (TWO-LANE BLACKTOP).

How'd you like to have been there, soaking up some of that?

If you haven't been to alexcox.com, go. It's one of the best movie-related sites I've been to. Not just because it's got tons of stuff about his own films, but because he's such a nut about great Westerns. There's even his never-published book on Spaghetti Westerns, which you can download as a big fat PDF.

Boy, did I miss the boat on this one.

I'm pretty good about stuff like this, but here's one that I screwed up royally back in 1988. God, that's almost 20 years ago.

Back then, I was a big Sonic Youth fan. SISTER ("Catholic Block" is a great great song) and EVOL were never too damn far from my CD player, and I remember driving home from work at Dillon Supply Company many times with those two records blaring at far beyond any sort of comfort level.

But somehow in '88, when they released the mighty DAYDREAM NATION (which I bought on vinyl on its first day of release) I wasn't impressed. My friends were all over it, proclaiming it a masterpiece from Day One. But it was still SISTER and EVOL for me. Fade out.

Fade in: 20 years later.

Sonic Youth has celebrated DAYDREAM NATION's 20th anniversary with a tour, playing the album in its entirity. (That's a photo from one of those shows up there.) That's an honor usually reserved for stuff like PET SOUNDS. And there's a bitchin' re-issue CD thing with extra stuff. A friend raved about one of the live shows, and that got me thinking about the record again.

So I pulled it back out. And, damn, it's good. Real good. Which, of course, doesn't say much for where my head was at 20 years ago. And it's a little weird to place DAYDREAM NATION on my Best Of 2007 list. But that's where it sits, waiting for CHROME DREAMS II to shake up the order of things.

Their name pretty much says it all.

Me at the Whatabuger in Lewisvile, Texas.

Cheeseburger with mustard, lettuce and pickle. Fries. Large Coke.

Bitchin'.

"You can never go fast enough."

I'm gonna write a thing on here one day about TWO LANE BLACKTOP.

But not right now.

If you ain't seen it, I pity you. If you have, you oughta be writing a blog about it yourself.

To sorta paraphrase my best friend's girl, I love me some movies where nothing happens.

If I won the lottery...

DALLAS, Texas (AP) -- Actor Peter Fonda is auctioning off some of his memorabilia from "Easy Rider," including the American flag taken from the back of the jacket he wore throughout the film.

Fonda, who was producer, co-writer and co-star of the groundbreaking 1969 movie, "just decided it was time to share some of his treasures with collectors and fans," said Doug Norwine, director of music and entertainment memorabilia at Heritage Auction Galleries in Dallas.

The flag has an estimated value of $50,000.

Other items up for auction October 6 will include a Department of Defense pin that adorned the jacket, Fonda's gold record for the film's soundtrack album and his collection of six movie posters, including those for "Easy Rider" and "Ulee's Gold."

In one scene from 1969's "Easy Rider," Fonda's character throws his wristwatch away. But it wasn't the Rolex that Fonda wore in the movie's earliest scenes, which is part of the auction.

"There was no way Peter was going to risk damaging the watch, naturally, so a different one was used for the scene where his character tosses it away," the catalog listing explains.

{If I suddenly fell into some dough, that damn flag patch would be mine. Came across this story on CNN. Something tells me I'll be watching EASY RIDER before too long.}

Making sure my do gets done — it's takin' some doin'.

Greetings from Lewisville, Texas, right outside of Dallas. I'm sitting in a Holiday Inn Express, killing time before going to bed. In the morning, I got a pretty major Damage Control client meeting.

I flew outta Raleigh early this afternoon, and Homeland Security snagged my hair gel and toothpaste at the airport. The tubes were too damn big, they said, which meant Paul Mitchell and Close-Up both hit the RDU trash can.

So, when I got to Texas, my agenda not only included check-in and dinner with the client, but a run to some-damn-place for some kinda stuff to make sure I could glue my pompadour into some kinda shape come morning. And, of course, some sort of dentifrice to beat the crud off my teeth with.

Lucky for me, there was a wonderful girl in charge of the shuttle bus/van thing here at the Lewisville Holiday Inn Express, and just a few minutes shy of their 10pm cutoff, she ran me down to the local Super Walmart for handful of those travel-size toiletry things. Hair crap. Tooth stuff. And what the Hell, a chocolate PayDay. (We passed the time by talking about Whataburger, and I'm now sitting here in my room wishing to God I had one.)

All this pointed out a pretty important thing about life in the Present Day. And it's this: you go to a Super Walmart in Lewisville, Texas, or the one down the street from my house in Garner, North Carolina, and they're exactly the damn same. The travel-size hair crap is in the exact same place in both stores. The stores smell the same. The odd color created by the flourescent lights is the same. The people stocking the shelves or manning the registers and the freaky-looking customers all look the same. Even the selection of hot rod magazines is the same. And as we all know, this is a trend that's creeping across our once-great nation all too damn fast.

So, while I give Raleigh a lotta grief about its evolution into Nowheresville, USA, I guess I gotta cut it a little slack. It's not alone in its vanilla-ness. Look at Lewisville. Hell, look at Anywhere. And ask yourself: can we turn this Big Mess around? Or is this what we're stuck with? What we're gonna hand off to our kids one of these days? "Gee, thanks a million, Pops."

Masterpiece?

The other day, a buddy of mine mentioned IMPERIAL BEDROOM (1982) by Elvis Costello & The Attractions. I hadn't listened to it in years. So I dug it out. Wow.

I always remembered it being kinda overproduced, a sharp contrast from the Nick Lowe-produced stuff that came before it. (GET HAPPY! would probably make my desert island collection.) And, yep, it's right much produced, a bit showy, though I'll leave off the "over" part. Maybe "baroque" is the word I'm looking for. You can tell Elvis and the gang were having a good time hanging out with Geoff Emerick, who'd engineered a lot of the great Beatles stuff -- and who was simultaneously engineering McCartney's TUG OF WAR across the hall while IMPERIAL BEDROOM was being recorded. I can imagine all the "tell us about 'Paperback Writer,'" that was probably going on. (Costello's a card-carrying Beatle geek, another reason I like him.)

But it's the songs that matter with EC. And this one's no slouch. As a schlubb that earns a living bumping words into each other, I listen to something like "Beyond Belief" with awe, admiration and a big fat pile of jealousy.

"I might make it California's fault
Be locked in Geneva's deepest vault
Just like the canals of Mars and the great barrier reef
I come to you beyond belief"

How does the bastard do it? And do it so OFTEN? It never ceases to amaze me. Plus, there are SO MANY words on this album! I bet only Pete Townshend's ALL THE BEST COWBOYS HAVE CHINESE EYES boasts a word count even close.

I came to this LP a few years after its release. Actually, I was a fairly late convert to the whole Costello scene. The first one I bought new was GOODBYE CRUEL WORLD, often listed as his worst album -- even by EC himself. The title of this blog was plastered across the top of the poster for the album, a copy of the thing I have stuck somewhere. Whether it's a masterpiece is open to debate and endless geekdom, but if you have a copy, you oughta play it.

Word of the day: Blamestorm

Heard this one today. It was a new one on me.

The Urban Dictionary defines BLAMESTORM as: "A meeting, usually corporate or governmental, to decide who should be blamed for the incompetence of the organization itself."

I'm currently involved in a project where it appears just such a meeting took place. However, that would indicate a level of organization that I don't believe this company is capable of. So, probably what we had around here was what the late, great Hunter S. Thompson referred to as a SHIT MIST.

Yeah, that's what it was. And unfortunately, some of it got on me.

It's so stupid. I can't wait!

My best friend and I cooked up this really stupid idea. And the more I think about it, the more stoked about it I get.

Okay, so we're really big JAWS geeks. I'm talking really, really big. Like maybe seen it more times than that guy down the street in his mom's basement has seen STAR WARS. That kinda big.

We used to watch it all the time, in a wonderful 16mm Panavision print my Dad had. But now we're adults, and everybody's got DVD players and widescreen TVs and we live a long way from each other and all that kinda grown-up crap.

But we got us this idea. Pick a night. We each get out the DVD and fire it up, at as close to the exact same second as possible. We get on the phone (him in NYC and me in NC) and then we watch it "together." Of course, we could always wait till the next time he's down here or something, but that wouldn't be as stupid, would it? And that's the point of the whole thing.

Maybe we've stumbled upon the Next Big Thing: The Conference Call Film Festival. (Guess we should watch DIAL M FOR MURDER next, huh?)

The Cure For A Terrible Day.

When you're having a totally terrible awful "Where's-the-galvanized-tub-full-of-Koolade?" kinda day, nothing works quite like a favorite movie.


For me, today is just such a day. And I'm sitting at my desk thinking it'd be great to sit down on the couch with maybe an adult beverage and watch RIO BRAVO.

Being that I can't do it right now, a cool picture from it of John Wayne helps a bit.

Or maybe this is an ABBOTT & COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN kinda day.

"That's a spirit breaker."

Mr. Krabs said that on SpongeBob.

And I know exactly what he means.

Just got some comments back from a client on a radio spot I wrote. Pretty cool spot, I might add.

Well, it WAS a pretty cool spot. The client completely rewrote the script instead of just giving me comments on what I'd written. Looking it over, I see maybe three or four words that I wrote. It's a really huge, really frustrating, really stupid, really a damn mess.

And it now has a disclaimer at least 20 seconds long, which means the whole thing is at least 15 seconds too long. On the bright side, that gives me a helluva excuse to remove a decent chunk of the crap they wrote.

So, as I get to work on this thing, trying to pull it back from the brink of Suckdom, I'm a little concerned. What if my turd polisher can't handle it?

Another day saved by Warren Zevon (who should still be here).

Today, I was suffering through yet another client meeting. And some Warren Zevon lyrics found there way into my head. (Not hard, I wasn't really using it at the time.)

"You're supposed to sit on your ass and nod at stupid things
Man, that's hard to do
But if you don't they'll screw you
And if you do they'll screw you, too"

That's from "Bill Lee" offa BAD LUCK STREAK IN DANCING SCHOOL. Don't own it? You should.

Aren't familiar with Zevon's music? Then, dammit, you're a sap -- and I feel sorry for ya.

How'd I end up with a kid like this?

Yesterday my daughter Presley, who's six, went and got all her hair cut off to make a wig for a cancer patient. And I could not possibly be more proud.

The whole thing was inspired by my mom losing her hair during her chemotherapy days and getting a wig (she prefered hats). And I'm sure my mom's proud of her, too.

She's a good kid.

Still no hot rod.

But my best friend's cousin Monty's got one. Go Monty!

"He got the high sign so he jumped the bus..."

Tuesday night, I saw Stan Ridgway play a show in "celebration" of CALL OF THE WEST, a fine album he made back in '82 — when he was front man for Wall Of Voodoo.

My best friend James rode the AmTrak down from NYC for the show — he and I saw Wall Of Voodoo together back in '83. (I wrote a blog thing about that show a week or so ago.) If Stan was gonna pay homage to his truly great album, we thought we'd pay homage to our truly great evening from back in June of '83.

To be honest, we were both a little scared. Would this taint our fond memories of the old show? Would it live up to the materpiece that is CALL OF THE WEST? (In one of those arguments people tend to have at parties when adult beverages are present, I once loudly proclaimed CALL OF THE WEST the absolute Best Album Of The Eighties. And in the clarity of the next morning, I realized I was probably right.) Would Stan be another one of those Rock N Roll guys who'd got all old and dumpy and crummy?

We shouldn't have worried about that crap. Stan and his crack band played with some of the arrangements a bit, especially on a deconstructed "Factory," while others got a more reverant treatment. In between the CALL OF THE WEST tunes and a few other Wall Of Voodoo things were songs from Stan's solo work — and a really creepy cover of Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit." A good show.

With CALL OF THE WEST, Wall Of Voodoo got it right. It sounds as crazy, creepy and fresh today as it did then. I bet I've heard that album hundreds of times — and I marvel at it every time. It's certainly something worthy of a celebration. (Now that I think of it, their DARK CONTINENT is a masterpiece, too.)

NOTE: In a blog somewhere, someone recently wrote about Wall Of Voodoo and CALL OF THE WEST. Stan chimed in, saying "Sadly, two WOV members are gone to Heaven. Sometimes the price is high for things like this." That would be Marc Moreland and Joe Nanini. RIP, fellas.