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.

I want a hot rod. It'll go good with my glasses.

In a town lousy with Toyota's and BMW's and Jeep Cherokees, I wanna tool around in a hot rod. A '32 Ford. A Deuce.


Not some pampered trailer queen that gets hauled from show to show to protect its 32 coats of paint, but a working, road-worthy car I can actually go somewhere in. With air conditioning.

In my mind's eye — or is it the Driveway Of My Dreams? — it's black. A sedan — this is a family car, see? Cragar SS rims. Red line tires. Red leatherette interior. Mid-50s Chevrolet steering wheel. The top's not chopped, at least not much. The motor's pretty straight and possibly not exposed. The CD player's hidden in the glovebox. And did I mention it's got A/C?

Don't think I'll have exhaust pipes running along with sides lake-style. Burnt the Hell outta my leg as a kid getting out of my uncle's Corvette. That was one tactical error I actually learned something from.

I'd really like to think I was up to the task of building my own, either from a real metal made-in-Detroit donor Deuce or a quaity set of Tupperware (fiberglass body). But I'm man enough to admit that if I built me a hot rod, it'd be with a checkbook, not a socket set. I got no skills. What I do have is a pile of magazines (Hot Rod, Car Craft, Rodders Journal, etc.) and a ton of toy cars cobbled together over about 30-something years of seriously wanting a hot rod. Maybe it's research for when I do graduate to hot rod ownership. Or maybe it's just a buncha cool old hot rod junk. Either way's fine with me.

Guess all this plants me firmly in the Wannabe column. Let's hope that's a temporary thing.

"You'll hear the drums and the brush of steel"

Late Spring, 1983. North Carolina State University. There's only a day or two left in the semester, so I'm getting ready to head back to Doylestown, PA for the summer. I have no money.

This is a bad deal, because Wall Of Voodoo is playing The Pier in Raleigh's Cameron Village shopping center. I'd recently fallen in love with their "Call Of The West" album (it's still a favorite), all my friends had, and we were dying to see these guys.


So I'm packing crap in my dormroom, listening to the NC State radio station. The DJ comes on with this lame question and the promise of a pair of tickets to the first caller with the answer. He begins to play their cover of "Ring Of Fire" and asks who did the original version.

I won the tickets.

We got there early, I remember. At some point, I sat on the floor--actually on a skanked-out piece of carpet brimming with who-knows-how-old spilled beer--leaving my Levis and white Chuck Taylors with stains my mom never got out.

But what a show.

Wall Of Voodoo may be the perfect marriage of pop music and the avant garde. Sorry, Sonic Youth. With their cheesy drum machines, 80s synthesizers and reverbed guitar, they were like nothing I'd ever heard. Still aren't. All this is given some meat by Stan Ridgway's lyrics and delivery. They made two albums (the first was "Dark Continent), and Stan left. It made sense, they'd nailed it on "Call Of The West." What would you do for a followup?

Luckily, what they did next was they toured for it. A lot. Fuelled by the MTV-derived success of "Mexican Radio." And there I was with my free ticket, my best friend James and my beer-stained Chucks.

Okay, now it's 25 years later. Stan's made a string of excellent solo records. And now he's touring, and promising to do some stuff off "Call Of The West" as a 25-year tribute kinda thing. James is coming down from NYC for it.

The Pier is now boarded up, its underground entrance sealed up.

I'm in charge of the tickets again--paying this time. After all, I have a job and a degree and stuff now.

And in a time when not much musically excites me, I'm so stoked for this thing I could scream. It's the 31st. And I'll tell you all about it.

Not quite a hot dogger. But no gremmie, either.

This CD is a dream come true. But it coulda be a dream come truer.

The American International Beach Party movies are amongst my all-time favoritest things — of all time. Especially the mighty "Bikini Beach" from 1964. It's in my Top 5. Not just Top 5 Films. I'm talking Top 5 Things. Period. Ever.

I've found a few of the soundtrack LPs from these things. But they're not true soundtracks. There are a few albums of Annette singing some stuff from a particular movie. Another's got Frankie singing 'em. Or Donna Loren. And they're not bad. It's just they ain't what you hear in the movie.

So after all this time, along comes this CD. About 20 tracks, most from the AIP series. "Ride The Wild Surf" by Jan and Dean and some other stuff are on there, too. Some of the tunes have never been available on CD or LP before--coming direct from the actual soundtracks. Hooray!

So, while I'm rejoicing and thanking God (and the label, Varese Saraband) for this thing, I'm also thinking it coulda been better. With more than half a dozen movies to pull stuff from, it coulda been longer than 45 minutes. And it's a real crime against nature not to include one of the Potato Bug (Frankie as a British, Beatleque pop star) songs from "Bikini Beach." Or at least one tune from Von Zipper (Harvey Lembeck).

Anyway, it's great. Buy it. Also get the big fat boxed set of DVDs. Unless you're like some people (my wife included) who think these things were created by, and for, idiots.

Guess that makes me an idiot.

The Pinnacle Of Human Achievement #48: Wax Paper.

This might seem a bit outta left field, but stick with me here.

We were talking about hot dogs at the office—we talk about hot dogs a lot, come to think of it. And we got to talking about what makes a good hot dog really, really good.

Personally, I like boiled ones better than grilled ones, for starters. And I absolutely HATE ketchup on anything (is that un-American?).

I'm convinced that the key to the whole hot dog deal is wax paper. You go to the hot dog place, they drop your hot dog in a sheet of wax paper and wrap it up (an artful, truly amazing thing to watch through the window at Raleigh's Char Grill). The hot dog sits in there all snuggly and the bun gets steamed by the moisture coming off the hot dog and the chili and stuff. And it all just sorta sits there and comingles, for lack of a better word.

So, rather than a number of separate flavors--like bun, dog, chili and mustard--you get just ONE thing: chili dog. All the flavors are fused somehow through the wax paper's startling superpowers.

My wife was saying this morning that the same thing applies to hamburgers. And she's right. Get you a cheeseburger from the Burger Boy in Wilson and you'll see what I mean-—it all becomes one flavor unit. This is why the hamburgers in fancier restaurants aren't as good—-they bring 'em to you in pieces, so the flavors haven't had a chance to sneak around and get all comfortable with each other.

Some places try the same trick with tin foil. And while that works OK, there's something about the sneak peak you get through the wax paper-—the smeared/squashed chili, for instance-—that does it for me. The Billiard Academy in my hometown, Thomasville, GA, always gives you a visible chili stripe beneath the first layer of wax paper. (By the way, the Billiard Academy might have the best hot dogs in the world.)

The point of all this is that we should all stop for a minute and realize how much better our hot dogs, and therefore our very lives, are because of wax paper.

Four aluminum cylinders of raw power!

My Mom passed away in March after a long bout with cancer. Ever since, the smallest, goofiest of memories take on almost cosmic importance. Right now, they're all we've got.

The other day, we were at Walmart (my absolute all-time least favorite place to be) to get cat litter or sinus headache medicine or something. As usual, I cruised down the Hot Wheels/Johnny Lightning/Matchbox aisle. And I came across a pre-painted 1:24 scale model of an orange 1974 Chevy Vega. And the memories hit me like the Santa Fe Super Chief.

We had a pair of Vegas. Brand new '74s. Both orange. Dad had the GT with the rally stripe and the white interior—exactly like the one you see above. Mom's was the station wagon (no fake wood on the side, thank God). Black interior. Sorry, couldn't find a picture of it. I thought they looked so damn cool sitting together in our Cary, North Carolina, driveway.

It was in that Vega wagon that Mom drove me and my best friend James to see JAWS at the Village Theatre in the summer of '75. Not to mention hauling us all over Raleigh to buy monster models and monster magazines and monster whatever-the-hell-else. I was 10.

Eventually, my aunt ended up with the GT. Not sure where the wagon went.

Of course, Vegas are now known for their problems. All-aluminum engines crapping out. Rust. Interiors falling apart. But I don't remember us having any trouble with ours. (Sadly, when you see them now, either they're stacked three-high waiting for the crusher, or some gearhead has turned it into some sorta pro stock drag machine.) Chevy sold a bunch of them.

Anyway, standing in that damn Walmart looking at that toy car, all that stuff came crashing back. Mom. The cars. James. JAWS. The monsters. The Delco radio. The black vinyl seats being hotter than 40 hells in the summer. Good times. If my childhood was a baseball bat, those Vega years would certainly be the sweet spot.

So, for once, my trip to the dreaded land of Sam Walton ended on a positive note. And by the way, my daughter gave me the model for Father's Day.