Staff dodgeball. I'm Batman

Comic Con!!

I went to Comic Con this year with about 140,000 sweaty, smelly, overdressed (and underdressed) losers. It was a painful experience, but a few cool things happened:

I ran into Claudio Sanchez from Coheed & Cambria and gave him a copy of Geek's September issue, for which I interviewed him about his five favorite graphic novels.














I also saw Mick Foley:













James Duval (This one's for that Gregg Araki lovin' Nick Dean):






Tori Amos:













Lou Ferrigno:















Joanna Angel:


















And, of course, Method Man, who I interviewed for Geek.

Blanco Mice

I'm interviewing White Mice for Rock A Rolla. Since they're one of those bands who exude a ridiculous persona, I sent them an email asking if they'd answer in character, or seriously.

Here was the the band's response:

"sorry for delay, hard to keep up with everything at once last week. We would answer the questions in character, no one cares who we really are, and no matter what, the answers are bound to be irreverent, stupid and inventive. We will fill in the facts as best we can but we always speak in our own language which we call "boobonics". The standard fact sheets and band bio mental midget bullet points I can send to you, but our answers and ideas are usually beyond/below reasonable interview territory. Every band projects some image, even the most holier than thou "no gimmicks" artists, ripped sweater faux folkies/ indy kids, metal dudes, etc, much of the big business of music comes to us a preconfigured package, a commodity, and complete with a very professional cover story, biography and glossy photo. etc. An image refined. We find it all totally hideous and funny and we reflect that in our project. We unrefine music, where others would spoof we would spoor. It is all about the anthropomorphic bad joke against humanity like zombie movies are made in bad taste. You can ask the questions, but you might not actually want to know what we think, its usually very wrong. Lettuce know.

cheese!"

Breakfast

This is my latest obsession: buying vanilla yogurt topping it with various fruits I've purchased. It's so much better than store-bought yogurt. I've tried strawberries, bananas, blueberries, kiwi, raspberries and blueberries.

Today is raspberries, which I purchased despite being $4.99.

In other news: I've been loading a ton of CDs onto the computer to put onto our new 80GB Ipod and I'm going crazy because I'm only at the F's (Fiery Furnaces, to be exact) and our computer's memory is about big enough to fit 20GB.

Rapper to look out for: Kail. He's an ultra-vulgar Los Angeles culture critic whose debut (True Hollywood Squares) will be out on April 22 (Alpha Pup).

In the past couple of days I've seen Dan in Real Life twice, No Country for Old Men and American Gangster. I'd seen Dan in the theater, and still really like its weird, oddly happy, white family vibe like The Family Stone and, to a lesser extent, The Squid and the Whale.

I'm convinced that the main reason No Country for Old Men was so successful was because there was no music throughout the whole movie. The lack of outside influence makes just the characters matter, and adds an extremely potent amount of tension. Loved it. They also omitted the proper elements of the book to make the story stand strong.

American Gangster wasn't too bad. I always have difficulty following mob movies the first time I see them because of all the character names and then trying to figure out who's bad, who's good and who's good/bad. Because I'm concentrating so much on this, I miss a lot of key dialogue, further confusing me.

Anyway, after we watched the movie, Jen looked up to see what was true and not true about the movie. Most was pretty accurate, but Frank Lucas only served five years in jail for his initial crimes, not 15. (Completely inexplicable!!) We also learned that he's friends with Sean "Puffy" Combs' dad, who was/is an actual gangster.

Furthermore, Jen also saw an L.A. Times article that ran yesterday that alleges P. Diddy ordered 2Pac's death.

hmm....

upcoming releases

I've had trouble getting my hands on a few a few releases I've been looking forward to for a while. Not surprisingly, two are clients of the same publicity firm. Oddly, they come out on the same day. The other two are major label artists, and although I consistently get emails from one of their publicity firms, they will not answer the ones I send back.

3/18 She & Him Volume 1
The Kills Midnight Boom
4/1 R.E.M. Accelerate
4/29 Portishead Third

In addition I'm getting more and more advances lately, and they arrive personally watermarked, but without any sort of album artwork. So I tend to buy them on vinyl, since I can just rip the CD-Rs they send and pop them on the Ipod. Here's that wishlist:

3/4 Cadence Weapon Afterparty Babies
3/25 The B-52s Funplex
Singer Unhistories
4/8 The Breeders Mountain Battles
Tapes N Tapes Walk It Off
Man Man Rabbit Habits
4/15 Does It Offend You, Yeah? You Have no Idea What You're Getting Into
Power Douglas Pentecostal Fangbread
5/20 Islands Arm's Way

When I most recently went to Amoeba in L.A., I returned a bunch of shit and somehow got $146 in credit. I was expecting maybe $50. Here was my haul:

Vinyl:
Radiohead's OK Computer
Q and Not U's No Kill No Beep Beep
The Locust's New Erections
The Shins' Chutes Too Narrow
Vampire Weekend's Vampire Weekend

New CDs:
Grayskul's Bloody Radio
Grayskul's Deadlivers
Bat For Lashes' Fur and Gold

Used CDs:
Pearl Jam's Vs. (used to own on cassette, had a burned copy)
Menomena's Friend and Foe

For Jen's parents:
Goo Goo Dolls greatest hits (Jen's dad)
Amoeba T-shirt (Jen's mom)

I'm currently listening to this album by Extra Life called Secular Works. Apparently the mastermind behind this band used to be in that freak free jazz outfit ZS. Instrumentally it's kind of gloomy post-rock, but the vocals are killing me because the dude sounds almost exactly like that dude I went to college with, Joe Mulhollen (who now does that awesome unsigned band Needle Up!), except this guy has difficulty staying on tune. It's still tripping me out though.

More Jabba

My other cat looks like Jabba the Hut

My cat keeps trying to eat my classroom keys.

AIDS Wolf and HEALTH photos, as promised long, long ago