williebhines:

“No Reply” by The Beatles.

Here’s what’s weird about The Beatles, or maybe special —- biking home tonight this song came on my iPhone (yes I listen to music while I bike, but only once I start crossing the Williamsburg Bridge because from there until my home in Greenpoint there’s no traffic, really) and it struck me as the perfect song that could be. It’s a minor Beatles song but tonight it was the best song I could imagine — for these three minutes it was my favorite song!

Maybe because it’s cool windy night, and Brooklyn looked pretty as I biked through it? Maybe the song fit that environment. It’s a sparse song with a fair amount of reverberation, as if it were recorded in a basement. Still very crisp. Somehow old Beatles albums sound both crisp and full of echo. I guess George Martin knew what he was doing, or was this Geoff Emerick who would handle that? Anyway, it sounds very cool. 

John is so angry on this song — mad at this girl for sleeping with someone else. (I love “walking hand in hand in my place” as a euphemism for “fucking someone else” or at least I assume that’s what it means. Hand-holding = sex in pre Sgt. Pepper’s Beatles songs). What strikes me as strange about THAT is … when was John Lennon rejected by a girl? The Beatles were probably getting laid during most of their waking hours starting from when they were in Hamburg. By the time John wrote this song, he was a rich and internationally famous 23 year old — married and also thick with groupies at all times. He was wanting for nothing. Did he have an affair with a girl one night who snubbed him the next, and he parlayed that feeling into this song? Did someone make him wait 10 extra minutes for a blow job and he got so mad he wrote No Reply? Or was he still so crushed by his mother’s death 4 years earlier that could just tap into that whenever he wanted to sound like Buddy Holly but better, way better?

Paul’s harmonies are nice and angry. Someone real angry — like Afghan Whigs angry, like UNFAIRLY angry — should cover this song. Not big and loud — but SEETHING and QUIET and SO SO SO MAD.

The Beatles made a simple deal when they all sold their souls to the Devil: pack into our songs every feeling that everyone will ever have.

funnyordie:

God’s Craigslist Ad Looking for a New Candidate to Endorse

With Rick Santorum out of the running, God is searching everywhere for a new candidate to support.

scottgairdner:

Just spending my Monday night remembering a classic.

Not sure if Mr. Gairdner is being ironic here, but JUST FRIENDS, while no “classic,” is certainly a prime example of a shitty-looking movie that is far funnier than it needs to be. Ana Faris, Ryan Reynolds and even Chris Klein do nice work here - and Julie Hagerty plays Reynolds’ mom! Great for recommendations, because your friends probably haven’t seen it and will be pleasantly surprised. See also GRANDMA’S BOY. 

hanawaltvault:

“Cordmaker Rumpus Bumpus”

Looks like the dog from “Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron”

Have you ever seen her? The girl whose face you’d never in a million—no trillion—years describe as beautiful? The girl whose eyes are too wide, hair too wild, head too enormous to ever be noticed? Well, she’s been chosen for something girls only dream of … to be a part of Modelland … a place where dreams come true and life can change in the blink of a smoky eye… .

Inspired by Tyra’s real-life experiences and her creative imagination, the story centers on an awkward teen girl who gets selected to attend the exclusive Modelland academy, where magical Intoxibellas, the world’s best models, are trained. A spot at the academy is woefully out of reach for most girls, so why has quirky Tookie De La Crème, of all people, been selected?

Elmo

The Best of Elmo

[CTW; 1996]

6.4

Can we admit that the “best of” compilation still serves a purpose, even in this day and age of custom playlists and genre-dissolving mash-ups? After all, we’ve had 30 years to improve upon the transcendent sequencing of “Al Green’s Greatest Hits” and haven’t come close. Even the tired old “Hot Rocks” remains a perfectly convenient gateway to the riches of “Exile on Main Street.”

Still, the best argument for holding on to this hoary tradition may be to enjoy what happens when it is inevitably applied to those artists least suitable for it. Case in point: Elmo, who has arguably done more to thwart commercial and fan expectations than any pop figure since post-Blood on the Tracks Dylan. If “The Best of Elmo” fails to make artistic or historical sense of the Red One’s willfully enigmatic career trajectory, it nonetheless produces some the most jarring, pleasurable juxtapositions this side of a Girl Talk set.

As if sensing the impossibility of the task at hand, the producers seek to impose coherence via an overarching interstitial narrative: some claptrap about Elmo needing to decide which of his drawings to submit to the “Monster Art Show” (ironic indeed, given Elmo’s emphatic rejection of early attempts to align him with the then-burgeoning “Fur n’ Fang” scene). But this seemingly benign conceit can’t contain the paranoia that suffuses the Elmo oeuvre, and it soon warps into a metaphor for our muppet’s famously fraught relationship with his audience. Adoring friend after friend steps forward to claim the drawings for themselves, until their maker is left empty-handed, stripped of his gifts.

And what of those gifts? The one indisputable hit, “Elmo’s Song,” is here, of course. Placed as it is at the very end, it’s hard not to read its blunt declaration of creative autonomy (“I wrote the music / I wrote the words”) as an unapologetic disclaimer concerning the tracks preceding it. Certainly, bizarre song-and-dance nostalgia piece “Happy Tappin’ with Elmo” is nothing if not the declaration of someone willing to follow his muse where it leads him, entertainment-value (not to say dignity) be damned. A far more interesting failure is “Five,” a misguided foray into hip-hop that has miraculously become (slightly) less embarrassing with age. Is there not a touch of Gaga in his deft appropriation of those Hammer pants?

Oddly enough, the inclusion of these fiascos illuminates the more canonical work, attuning us to frequencies we may have missed the first time around: the melancholy corporeality of Ernie duet “One Fine Face,” the joyous savagery lurking beneath pastoral hymn “The Sound That’s in the Air,” the Rimbaudesque derangement powering psychedelic party jam “In Your Imagination.”

“It’s Elmo’s World,” goes the slogan — “and we just live with it,” one is tempted to add, the high-pitched cackle still lingering in the ears long after the most recalcitrant child has toddled off to bed. But even the most familiar neighborhood occasionally offers the opportunity to get lost. This collection, for all its flaws, may be just the hidden, junk-strewn alley we need.