winter oranges 12|04

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Okay. We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog, already in progress.

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Five Years – David Bowie, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars

Talking over THUG with Kieron on the phone. He tosses out this, like, gem of an idea. To him it’s throwaway, it’s a punchline, but you can’t stop thinking about it. A couple days go by and you realize you gotta talk to him, see if you can do something with it. A couple days pass with “TALK TO KD!!!” written on your to-do list before you finally manage the guts to do it. So this could maybe be something, who knows.

Ziggy Stardust takes up a bunch of playspace this month; a truer phrenology would have pretty much the whole record except for Star and Sweet Head.

Sweet Sixteen - Bob Peck, Incredibly Strange Music, Vol. 1
Keeping up with last month’s excavations: rewinding a lot of Chicago music. This one a lost gem from some mixtape crush of Vinnie’s. Songs that for whatever reason are forever associated with the flophouse-- The Kid’s All Right by Bettie Seveert, Have a Lucky Day by Morphine, Edwin Collins’ I Can Still See You, Pitiful by Therapy?, um.. shit, there’s more. You should make a playlist. Come On Back to the War, by Leonard Coen, the Stones song that Bowls played obsessively, We Love You. Was that the one? Think so. The Liz Phair song, ‘naked, half-awake, about to shave and go to work,’ whatever it was called. Punk Rock City. That fucking Oasis song that was everywhere that winter. The Love song with the do-dit-dit do-dit-dit do bridge bit.

The last thing Bowls said before you walked out: I just wanna get high and listen to the Who.

We know, Bowls. We know.

Let’s Lynch the Landlord - Faith No More, Easy
Between the boogie-woogie of Sweet Sixteen and word of Mr. Bungle splitting up sets it spinning. That walking bass line and “We can/You know we can/We can/You know we can” sticks hard.

Get Off - The Dandy Warhols, Thirteen Tales of Bohemian Pretense or whatever it’s called, and, That Girl Suicide - The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Methodrone.

You and X. hit Ondi Timoner’s excellent DIG!, the documentary about the Dandys and the Brian Jonestown Massacre.

To any rational mind, you’d think Boys Better would stick first and hardest but, maybe, you knew that was what everyone else would get stuck in their heads, and, too, Anton Newcombe spitting “Hot diggitty dog?!?” is what really sticks.

Fuck it, though, this is a killer track.

The BJM have their entire catalog on line, available for download and for free—so I took it. It took the better part of a week’s listening, but I culled like, 30 tracks together. Enormously disrespectful? Probably.

That Girl Suicide is there because it’s the first BJM track you hear in the movie. Could’ve just as easily been The Ballad of Jim Jones or Vacuum Boots or Nevertheless.

Listening to BJM, then, pretty much takes you up to leaving for Florida a couple days before the holidays. You listen to the boildown on repeat. When you get sick of it, you rotate Ziggy Stardust back in, and then out again.

Stuart - The Dead Milkmen, Beelzebubba
Don’t worry, Ghost of Girlfriends Past, your secret’s safe with me.

Cold Blooded Old Times - Smog, Knock Knock
Packing the night before and the morning of the flight, and there it is. Singing it in the office, singing it and folding laundry. Cold? Is that it? Just the word “cold”?

No, that’s not it.

The older you get the weirder you get this time of year. Time, not place, act as landmarks. Obsessed with anniversaries and where-were-you-five-years-ago-todays and all that. Moving around a lot screws keeping track of the geographic narrative; the timeline is easier to follow and more accessible. And there you are and it’s the end of the year, evaluate it, all kind of shit. Still not done with 2000 in a lot of ways, and 2000 still ain’t done with you, either. Rest up, recharge, re-evaluate. Another chance to get it right.

If nothing else you can always walk around that weird lagoon with Kel forever, tying ribbons around her mom’s dog.

Little Sister - Queens of the Stone Age, Lullabies to Paralyze
We didn’t have to sign an NDA or anything, so, uh, fuckit. We pitched on the new Queens of the Stone Age video. The night of the 21st, they asked for proposals by the morning of the 23rd. You still haven’t heard back, so go ahead and guess no.

There’s a lot of cowbell and a crazy guitar riff.

That’s Okay - Craig Moorhead, Craig Moorhead’s Bold Experiment

I’m just gonna rock n’ roll. And let rock n’ roll… take me away.

Craig channels Hit to Death…-era Flaming Lips and the bedroom triumphalism remixed by Andrew W.K. to create this perfectly awesome fist-pumper of a summer jam just perfect for a drizzly Christmas night.

Queen Bitch - David Bowie, Hunky Dory

The end of The Life Aquatic is the end of Buckaroo Bonzai writ large in hipster holiday Futura.

Later, Kel’s eyes water up in the Apple store. It’s playing in your head and you need to sit down.

Everyone’s Going to the Movies (demo version), Steely Dan, Citizen Steely Dan

You got Citizen Steely Dan in X-Mas, 1994.

You kept a log of every movie you saw in 2004. Year-end feeding frenzy to catch them all before they starts vanishing. Stagger out of A Very Long Engagement on New Year’s Eve feeling drunk, overdosed, brainbaked and dry-eyed. Start to put it together again.

New Year’s Eve, Kel falls asleep on your lap at 11:15 while you and X. giggle and shiver through the eighties version of The Twilight Zone. He splits and you watch old episodes of Star Trek.

Happy new year, you fucking dork.