XII

RIP





Drive-By Truckers - A Blessing and a Curse"

XI

I walked into Mexicali Brewz late last night, and was immediately accosted by two really faded dudes as I tried to find even the slightest hole to get a beer. They kept telling me my fedora was awesome and then started yelling, "BOUNCING SOULS? BOUNCING SOULS?" I responded "Yeah man, How I Spent My Summer Vacation" is a great record, to which they reacted by yelling "Yea bro" over and over. A couple minutes later the long-hair was walking around and the bartender kicked him out, presumably for being an excited lil' boy. He walked out, dejected, only to come back a few minutes later. As he opened the door though, the bartender stood in wait, and began throwing coasters at him until he left. One of the better bouncings I've seen for sure.

Stay tuned for my new book, "Adventures of a Fancy Gentleman", dropping in the fall.



The Bouncing Souls - How I Spent My Summer Vacation

X

I'm in the middle of about a three week bender and I hope everyone is having as much as I am, though it would be nice to go to sleep before the sun wakes up.

I love horror movies. Can't get enough. I wouldn't even really say they scare me for the most part, but that's not even the reason I watch them. I watch because I'm obsessed with the different devices and methods that a filmmaker will use to get scares. A perfect example is the climax in Halloween, when Laurie Strode, played by that tranny Jamie Lee Curtis, kneels at the frame of the door which opens into the room where she's just killed her masked assailant, Michael Myers. Before she can catch her breath, he sits straight back up. If you try and tell me that isn't one of the scariest scenes in movie history, you're a dope.
Again though, it's not actually frightening, it's more of a "cool" scary. I have a smile on my face the whole time. I like scenes that make me yell "Fuck, that ruled." Unfortunately the american horror movie has become an endless string of bad remakes, in which they take movies from Japan and Korea and strip them of all beauty and artistic sense, the very things that make them scary, and replace it with cheap thrills, jump scenes, and happy endings.
I went to see "The Strangers" the other night, and all I can say is fuuuck, that ruled. The movie was exactly how it should have been. It's been getting terrible reviews, and the people I went with hated it, but I will not be swayed. If you saw "Funny Games", you'd probably recognize The Strangers as a less lyrical, worse acted version of that, and I mean that in the best way possible. I'm not gonna give it away, but the ending is perfect.

All the music in the movie is played through the turntable in the house, one of those aforementioned cool devices I hold so dear. The soundtrack has a couple great songs: Richard Bruckner's "Ariel Ramirez", the Woody Guthrie written, Billy Bragg and Wilco performed "At My Window Sad and Lonely", and "The Sprout and the Bean", from the Joanna Newsom album "The Milk-Eyed Mender".



Joanna Newsom - "The Milk-Eyed Mender" (2004)

IX

A few summers ago, my friend Ryan and I drove the 40 mins down to Westfield, where I had lived and worked for a little while before an epic crash in which I was fired for drinking at work, and then spent the next few months unemployed and a recluse, only leaving my room to go to the liquor store. We were going to visit my friend with whom I had worked and kept in contact with. I think we met her at some awful cafe where a lot of kids probably pumping Norma Jean through their ill-fitting, terrible sound quality earbuds hung out. A forgettable experience to say the least. Afterwards we grabbed a couple six packs with my fake ID which I still had at the time, and went up to a golf course to put em down. It was perfect drinking weather. I hadn't started smoking yet, but it was the kind of weather when cigarettes taste the best. That summer I had three albums in heavy rotation: the first two Hold Steady records and "Grace". The warm tone and almost distant sound fits in well with the summer. One of my favorite things about music is the way it just naturally becomes a soundtrack for certain times or activities, though I'm not sure if it's due to the sound or to the listener.



Jeff Buckley - "Grace" (1994)

VIII

I've been making a lot of mixtapes for myself lately because it's a good way to kill 15 minutes, and I have a hard time figuring out what I want to listen to in the car. Usually it's either O and A replays, or my iPod on shuffle. Mixes save me a step and require one or two less synapses to fire. They have no real theme, aside from being songs I'm into lately, which is a departure from the things I would do as the annoying, whiny, sappy pile of yuck that I was as a teenager, when every one seemed to have some sort of "love song" theme in one way or another. Thankfully as I've grown older I've devoted my energy to better, more mature things, like being devoid of almost all emotion, and staring through most people at the wall behind them when they talk to me as I think about how much better it would be if I was petting large jungle animals in Thailand. One glaring omission though, from the love song mixtapes of yore, was the lead off track to Sabbath's "Master of Reality".

"Sweet Leaf": Great love song, or greatest love song?




Black Sabbath - "Master of Reality" (1971)