[LEMONS] 12.30.2005
An Iconic Image Is All That Stands Between A Lifetime in Topeka and a Fistfull of Squid Shoved Into A Legendary Orifice
I was riding the 7 Haight the other day, sitting in the row of seats up in the front of the bus that face sideways. The cranky-old-Chinese-lady-with-a-sack-full-of-pistachio-nuts seats. Five or so people can sit side by side in these seats, and as we got to the intersection of Divis, a teenage girl and her mom got the bus on and sat down next to me.The girl was wearing big-ass, old-school headphones, straight out of 1983, with a Rolling Stones sticker on the earpiece. My first thought, which naturally was God, the Stones suck now, was immediately followed by two others: Oh, right, irony and then man, that is one iconic logo.
And after a brief and depressing digression in which I pondered how hip kids in San Francisco are, and whether that's a good or bad thing, I began to think about band logos.
Remember when any band worth its drug habit had a logo? The Stones, Kiss, AC/DC, Black Flag, The Dead Kennedys, Public Image Limited (the PiL), Ozzy, The Ramones, D.R.I., Van Halen, Maiden, Public Enemy, The Doors, The Beatles, Priest, Zeppelin, Metallica--logos were mandatory if you wanted to rock the fuck out. Back in the day, you couldn't even call yourself a band until you had your own font. Even Prince had a logo. Kind of.
But I can't readily recall any band's logo I've seen in the past, oh, fifteen years or so. Aside from maybe Weezer, which is such an ironic, Halen-esque kind of logo that it doesn't even count. I don't like condescending W's.
Sure, a lot of metal bands still have logos these days. But when was the last time you heard a new good metal band. I mean, yeah, yeah, I read John Darnielle's blog, too. And okay, Leviathan is the new Kind of Blue, or whatever, if you say so. I wouldn't be the one to ask.
But I don't remember seeing any of their logos on the back window of the Camero parked next to me at the 7-11 lately. And besides, they all look like bastard children of Spinal Tap. Fuck you and your latter-day umlauts. I remember when a simple schwa e stenciled on a drum kit was enough to get you banned from Young Life.
Where have all the band logos gone? You'd think, with as many bootleg copies of Photoshop as there are out there, that we'd be living in a golden era of rock band logos. What happened? Don't these people know Goopy?
Dio!
What about fucking Dio!?! Now that was a goddamned logo.
Show me an American male between the ages of 30 and 45 who grew up in the suburbs and I'll show you somebody who spent hours at the mall staring at a Dio album upside down. Unless he was afraid to rock, that is.
Obviously, another part of the problem is that it's pretty fucking hard for a band to be evil these days. Remember how evil everyone used to think Ozzy was? In the 70s and 80s he was the stuff of urban legends. But then we all grew up, and now you can see him in re-runs on MTV shuffling around the house in his jammies. And Rob Halford's gay, now, for crying out loud. Or, I guess maybe he always has been, but now he's going around telling everybody. And, okay, sure, I guess it's technically possible to be both evil and gay, but come on. Years of stereotypes involving floral arrangements, hair salons and house music don't exactly translate into Hell Bent for Leather. Or, well, maybe they do.
Oh, and on another note, the Strokes are gay. And all you idiots who like them are gay too. Not good gay, like Rob Halford gay, but gay in a bad way. Gay in the pejorative sense.
But back to what I was saying. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that virtually every evil band that rocked a sweet logo eventually turned into congregations of elderly, balding, pompous jackasses who charge $90 for a lawn ticket. Or maybe logos just fell out of fashion. I don't pretend to know.
But I do know that what I'm hoping for in 2006--aside from an end to war and poverty and seeing George Bush dragged off to federal prison in handcuffs--is more band logos.
Happy New Year. Rock out with your Wok out.
Üpdätë: For more scholarly, better thought-out takes on the same subject see these excellent posts by MacDara Conroy and Tom Vanderbilt. The latter posits
The disappearing logo might just be the canary in the coal mine signifying the dematerialization of music. Sure, there are little JPEGs on iTunes that depict album covers, but the proliferation of digitally acquired music and the rise of “playlist culture” is a threat not only to the idea of an album as a coherent body of work, but the album (in CD or whatever form) as a package. The shift from album to CD represented meant the artist’s canvas was reducing in size to less than a quarter of its original, and now, to essentially nothing.
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12.27.2005
Merry, Merry, Pom and Berries
This year, I went all out on decorations. I wanted the apartment to look really nice for Harper--who is more or less trapped here--and her family. I think it did. I hope it did. And I think that it was largely due to the wreath I got from the Oak Hill Farm store at the Ferry Plaza.
It was the second wreath I bought from them this year. When I got the first, a smaller Eucalyptus wreath, I absolutely fell in love with the one pictured here, with its dramatic pomegranates, magnolia leaves, and red and blue berries.
But I didn't think we could afford it, and I spent two weeks or so mulling it over.
But then I found out that I wouldn't have to throw it away come December 26, that it should in fact last a few years, and I decided to go for it. And I'm glad I did. It completely transformed our apartment, and gave it an old-world Christmas feel. And now, in addition to our wall, it also adorns my workspace as I use it as my desktop background image now.
Ho ho ho
I hope you had a Merry Christmas, or are having a happy Chanuka, or whatever it is that you choose to celebrate.
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12.22.2005
2005 Reading List
Because I like to Keep Track.Finished:
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
The Good Earth - Pearl S. Buck
The Coma - Alex Garland
Jimmy Corrigan Smartest Kid on Earth - Chris Ware
The Wind Up Bird Chronicles - Haruki Murakami
Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood
I am Charlotte Simmons - Tom Wolfe
Persepolis - Marjorie Satrapi
In the Shadow of No Towers - Art Spiegelman
Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
The Historian - Elizabeth Kostova
The Things The Carried - Tim O' Brien
The Testament - John Grisham
Harry Potter 5 - J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter 6 - J.K. Rowling
The Big Year - Mark Obmascik
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
Unfinished:
Chronicles - Bob Dylan
The Ground Beneath Her Feet - Salmon Rushdie
A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
Currently Reading:
California, a History - Kevin Starr
Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami
I am amazed at how few books I read this year. Even moreso; of the books I finished, how few new authors I explored. Only Satrapi, Hosseini, Buck, Kostova, and Ware were new to me (and even Ware might not count as I have read numerous shorter pieces of his before). Kostova and Hosseini were the only new novelists I explored.
Also, the ones I didn't finish were all quite good, I just put them down for one reason or another and never picked them up again.
I'd say the best book I read this year, my favorite at least, was The Grapes of Wrath. In terms of contemporary fiction, I was floored by The Kite Runner, and I'm really into Kafka on the Shore. California is quite good, and is exactly the survey history I was looking for. However, I really wish it focused more on the period from European discovery to the 1906 quake (after which I quite frankly begin to lose interest because I'm relatively familiar with 20th century history).
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12.20.2005
But, I thought you said we won
You know, it would be much easier for me to believe that we are winning the war in Iraq if, you hadn't already told me that we won.- l i n k -
12.18.2005
Feed Me
Hello,How are you? Oh, good. Me too. Although I stuffed myself on cookies last night. Mmmmmmm.... cookies. Oh! That reminds me. I have a new address for my site feed. I'm using Feedburner now, which I've had on Warm Planet (my global warming blog) for quite some time.
The old one will, shortly, no longer update. Instead, you'll need to point your reader here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/honan/kCvG. the little XML button up top should work too.
I have to say, I'm a little sorry to say goodbye to the old feed. We had been friends and compadres for a long time. Goodbye, old feed. I hope you go gently into oblivion.
Is all of this mystifying to you? If so, don't worry about it. Just have some tea and go back to bed. Maybe have a cookie. There now. That was nice, wan't it?
Love,
Mat
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12.07.2005
Long Knives, Long Memories
I used to live in a run-down old house on Hancock Street in Athens, Georgia. It was a big old wooden thing, that I would guess was built sometime in the early part of the 20th century. I've never seen a place that better epitomized the word "ramshackle." When I moved in, my landlord told me not to walk on the porch (which was between the top of the steps and the front door) as it was falling in. There were holes in the hardwood floor--which, like many old houses, was built a few feet off the ground instead of on a foundation--that I had to cram plastic grocery bags in to keep the mice and rats out. It was completely infested with fleas. Outside my window, hookers strutted up and down the street at all hours1. Another guy who lived there was robbed at gunpoint inside the house by a guy with a pillowcase stuffed full of Sega. I loved it.Since it was such a dump, it catered to a bohemian crowd. All four apartments housed fairly interesting people, who, by virtue of living in a vermin-infested house in a crime-ridden neighborhood, tended not to be too uptight. This was great for me, as I used to be able to play music as loud as I wanted with my friends Rob and Michael. Rob had his drum kit set up in my living room/bedroom, and Michael kept his ginormous Mesa Boogie stack there as well. I played through a Blues Classic, and we always turned the volume turned up to 11, bitches.
One time, as we were playing, I looked up and saw a woman standing in the middle of my room. I'd never seen her before and was, quite naturally, a little perplexed as to, you know, what the hell she was doing standing next to my television2. But, we didn't stop playing immediately, even, because it was sort of like, well, naturally there's some strange person standing in my room. It was that kind of place.
My housemates/neighbors were similarly inclined. The other three guys who shared the first floor were all in bands. One of them, Ben, had a bedroom that shared a vent with my bathroom. And throughout the time I lived there, I would hear the sound of his guitar coming from my toilet. It was nice.
Ben was in a band that was involved with the nascent Elephant 6 scene--you know, The Olivia Tremor Control, Neutral Milk Hotel, of Montreal3, The Apples in Stereo, and Beulah, among others. Although a couple of these bands were in Colorado and California, this was primarily an Athens scene. Yet these bands were just getting off the ground at the time. The only one that was truly a working band at that point (in Athens at least) was Olivia.
At the end of the summer, I moved out. I would have stayed, but I had let a skater-cum-squatter with too many piercings for his own good move in for a week, and then couldn't get him out again. Really. But Ben and I kept in touch, largely through Rob, who took a class with Ben at some point at Georgia State in Atlanta. I went to see one of his bands play at MJQ, shortly after that place went legit, moving out of a hotel room and into a permanent (I guess) space below ground at the old site of Lou's Blues Review. It was great. He was great.
Today, I just discovered that Ben's new band, Long Knives, is featured on NPR today. They are quite excellent. You should buy their album. Or at least download their MP3s.
UPDATE: I just noticed another friend of mine, Thad, from the same era is also in Long Kives. Good fucking work, guys.
1. It never failed to amaze me how often I'd see Johns picking up prostitutes from 8 - 10 AM. I guess some people really need to get their breakfast swerve on.
2. It turned out she was from the Neilsons rating company. She wanted me to become a Neilson family, but for one reason or another I wasn't eligible. So, she wound up hooking up my next-door neighbors/housemates instead. The same one who was robbed and is, if you continue reading this story, the focus of this epistle. Later, she and Rob would have a torrid affair. I'm relatively sure that, years later, she would ultimately be responsible for the cancellation of the Lance Krall Show, due largely to Rob's starring role. It is, I admit, just a theory.
3. Speaking of which, Derek Almstead, the original bass player for of Montreal who now plays in Circulatory System also lived in that house, although he was only there for a month or so while I was. I went to go see Frank Black with him, and I've seen him out here too. He never remembers me.
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