Movies That I Want To See: Sundance 2005

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Mix CD reviews: Train of Thought

This Christmas, I asked all of my friends to give me mix CDs. I ended up with two; one from Mike called Train of Thought and one from Heather called Pink Thong mix. The latter had a sketch of a women in a pink thong on the cover. Clearly, Heather knows what I like.

Like the title, Train of Thought has the feeling of a long trip, a tour of Mike's musical brain. It starts with some punk ska, descends into a valley of politico-pop, flirts with indie darlings, mixes it up with lo-fi genius, visits the country and ends with some really weird avant-garde stuff.

Here's the breakdown for Train of Thought

Orange Alert - The Briefs
I gotta be honest, I'm not a huge fan of punk or ska, genres that Mike has a huge hard-on for. It's a pretty bombastic opening, and, after a couple of re-listens, it's a pretty decent song.

Vibrator-the Electric
Listen to the beginning closely. What's that? This song is done with dildonics? Yes, it's true, sex toys are making their way back into mainstream music. Not only does the vibrator serve as the beat that powers this fantastic machine of a song, it serves as subject matter. A double whammey. I dig this song, but I'm biased, I recommended it to Mike.

Oh Canada! - Five Iron Frenzy
A ska salute to Canada. Wouldn't it be great if someone used this song to promote to Canada in the USA. Imagine this song set to the imagry of lesbians getting it on. Our women are hot and they can marry. Take take, America!

Star-Spangled Banner - Rivers Cuomo
I never got onto the Weezer train, so honestly, Rivers Cuomo means very little to me. I'm a Canadian too, so I'm not big on the American anthem. Oddly enough, when I listen to the song, I focus on the chords in the background. Sounds like a mix of a mosquito plate and an organ put together. Music that kills insects.

America, Fuck Yeah (Bummer Remix) - Team America
America, Fuck Yeah as a cotemplative ballad. I'll be very disapointed if Trey Parker and Matt Stone don't get one of their songs from Team America for this year's Oscars. There's too much venom and wit in their lyrics to be ignored. But ignored, they will be, as Mick Jager will win for Alfie. Just wait, you'll see.

Kiss Me, Son of God - OKGo
Another odd pick for Mike. Not sure what I think about it.

Kissing the Lipless - The Shins
One of my favourite songs on the CD. The song has a frantic energy, reminding me of makeouts and drive-thrus. I think that it's the sharp chords after the corus. Or maybe it's the sheer simplicity of the music. Highly recommended.

Camaro - Frankie and the BJs
Another fave from mine on the CD. Mike's buddies made it, so don't go looking for it on Kazaa. A nice pastiache of hipster irony and gleeful earnestness. Clever and funny.

Wild Packs of Family Dogs (2004 remaster) - Modest Mouse
A nice little ditty from last year's critical darlings and Calgary fan favourites, Modest Mouse. Not nearly as good as Float On, decent none the less.

Breakfast at Denny's - Combusitble Edison
Martin Denny inspired lounge music. If the title is anything to go by, Breakfast at Denny's should feel like a trip through a jungle on Mars. Retro-futurism and pancakes. An interesting mix.

Bring the Rhino Across - Chris Lawson
My favourite discovery of Mike's next to the Arcade Fire. There's plenty to love in Bring The Rhino Across. There's the over the top use of the synth, the female/male duet near the end, and aself aware examination of the material, to name a few. An incredibly quotable song, one that can be used in casual conversation, if you're bold.

Monkey on Your Back - Clinic
Is it right for me to be reminded of Damon Alburn's involvement with Blur when I listen to this song? Because that's what it does for me.

Hockey Monkey - James Kochalka Superstar
James Kochalka reminds me of Victoria. I remember listening to Monkey versus Robot while high on mushrooms while looking at a pile of oh too bright froot loops that I had thrown across the room. Is Hockey Money as good Monkey Versus Robot? That would be like comparing Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes with the original. One's a satiral examination of man (or monkey) versus machine and the other is the musical version of MVP: Most Valuable Primate. A version of MVP that doesn't suck. No feces throwing or strange monkey backflips in this one.

Hit Me! - The Sounds
Mike says that it's a riot grrl version of 80's girl rock. Who am I to argue? Great garage rock with a twist of funk. You know that it's there. Another gem on the CD.

I've Got It All(Most) - Modest Mouse
Much better than the other Modest Mouse song on the CD due to it's polish and great lyrics. "How can someone so inconsistant mess up so consistantly?" Great quotable stuff.

Hand Springs - The White Stripes
Hard rocking plus the spoken word. It's like rap, but done by whites. Oddly, it reminds me of a car commercial.

GT400 - Thee Michelle Gun Elephant
Another recommendation by myself.

Huun Huur Tu - Tuvan Internationale
Aboriginal throat singning from Australia, I think. Haunting, yet strangely beautiful. It stands out like a sore thumb, but a great song none the less.

Loop de Loop - Ween
Ween's version of a Fred Penner song. It's okay. Surreal.

Pickin' The Chicken - Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant
And then, out of nowhere, Mike throws in some guitar strumming. What the fuck? I guess that it's there so that we're easied into the country stuff. Technically sophiticated.

The Rodeo Song - David Alan Coe
Redneck roadrage, with *gasp* profanity.

Rodeohead - Hard n' Phirm
Remember when some country musicians from Canada redid Pink Floyd's the Wall as a country concept album? Looks like it was more influential than we hoped... and feared. Rodeohead re-imagines Radiohead as hoe-down music. Good country music, but better if you're aware of Radiohead's body of work. Admittedly, I didn't get it at first, but once I noticed the source, I enjoyed it much more.

Wayfaring Stranger - Jack White
Writen by Jack White once he started to fuck Renee Zelwiggerajigger. Jack White, why do you have the blues when you're fornicated with an Academy Award winner? My mind boggles!

Liquor and Whores - Bubbles
A song taken from Canada's answer to the Kids in the Hall, the Trailer Park Boys.

Whisky in the Morning-Buck Cherry
I thought that Check Berry did soul music. This sounds like hardcore rock. Is this song from a strange alternate universe, or am I missing something?

Garage Dayz Night-Beatallica
Everyone loves to mashup the Beatles. Danger Mouse mixed them with Jay Z to make the Grey Album. Some other smuck mixed them with the Beastie Boys to make the vastly inferior Beastles. What do we have here? The Beatles mutated into head banging music? I shouldn't like it, but I do... I do...

Tonight is the Night I Fell Asleep at the Wheel - Barenaked Ladies
A couple of years ago, I worked the night shift in the boonies. My job was to chaufer a professional to a gas plant in the middle of nowhere. Our job was to watch water pumps and make sure that they wouldn't freeze. It was tedious, and I killed time having phone sex with Pearl. They played the song on CBC in the morning after a long day's worth of work. Morbid, and clever. One of my favourite Bare Naked Ladies songs.

Diary of an Unborn Child - Li'l Markie
Spooky pro-life song from the POV of an aborted featus. Imagine Alvin from the chipmunks warble "Why did you kill me mommy?" and you get the picture.

RoBlog 3.0

Lets try this again.

Thanks to a delibilitating bout of creativity, I've decided to revamp RoBlog. Think of it as a Tim Burton-esque re-imagining of the originial. Will there a wooden Marky Mark acting in front of ape people? That's still up for the jury to decide.

What's going to be different? For starters, I've decided to move all webjunk to Moon Karma Zero. Mike and Stephen have been pretty much keeping it alive for the last year and a half without my input, much to my eternal gratitude. I'm going to help them pick up the slack by (attempting to) post daily. If anything, it'll force me to go to MKZ daily instead of once a week.

I've also begun a writing blog, Broken Pornography, which I'll try to update every weekend. I'm using it as an online archive of whatever weird thought enters my head. Everything there is a first draft, so that's why the writing is so shitty. I'll probably end up harvesting everything there once my comic career starts.

Where does that leave RoBlog? I'm still figuring it out. It'll probably end up as a dumping ground for personal thoughts, movie reviews and other odd things. Think of it as an audio commentary for my life. An audio commentary where the director doesn't end up praising Chris Klein for his brilliant performance in American Pie 2. If I get lazy, it'll end up turning into a haven for my bookmarks on my computer.

And that's that. Enjoy the newest mutation of RoBlog.

Furries needs God's love too, you know

This site is dedicated to spreading the Gospel in the werewolf and furry communities. It is my hope that many trans-species people will accept Jesus as their Savior through this ministry. I will explain the etymology of this website's name. I got the idea from Werewolf Tobias' tradition of calling a werewolf stronghold a House. Well, I'm a dragon, so my ideal stronghold would be a Castle. And since this is MY website where I am MASTER, I call this my Castle.

Please do not take offense at what I have to say on my website. I know I can be quite bold and frank at times, but I need to tell you what God thinks about you. God loves you so much that He let His only Son, Jesus, die on the cross to pay the penalty for your sinful nature and create a new sincere heart in you so that you can be close to Him. If you are searching for God, you need to listen to God's messengers because that is how God is speaking to you right now. God will not speak to you through your senses. He speaks to you through His Word - the Bible.

More in link.

Wanna listen to all of Shatner's "Has-Been"? Well, don't say I never did anything for you, buddy.

Hunter S. Thompson: "Richard Nixon would be my man if he ran today.

Richard Nixon looks like a flaming liberal today, compared to a golem like George Bush. Indeed. Where is Richard Nixon now that we finally need him?

If Nixon were running for president today, he would be seen as a "liberal" candidate, and he would probably win. He was a crook and a bungler, but what the hell? Nixon was a barrel of laughs compared to this gang of thugs from the Halliburton petroleum organization who are running the White House today -- and who will be running it this time next year, if we (the once-proud, once-loved and widely respected "American people") don't rise up like wounded warriors and whack those lying petroleum pimps out of the White House on November 2nd.

More in link.

It's_official!__Burger_King_has_officially_turned_crazy!

In Honour of Bill O'Reily's new Scandal, check out the Electric Six's Vibrator!

More Puppet Fucking!
In the wake of Team America: World Police, many viewers have come out of the theater with urges that they didn't have before the film. We're talking about the urge to see puppets fuck. Thankfully, Broadway has proved on outlit for your perverse, perverse desires. Avenue Q is the Tony award winning Broadway musical that features an all puppet cast that sings about love, drinking and internet porn. If you want to check out the lyrics of their songs (totally in the vein of South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut), check out the link.

Lynne Cheney's Sisters

"Let us go away together, away from the anger and imperatives of men. There will be only the two of us, and we shall linger through long afternoons of sweet retirement. In the evenings I shall read to you while you work your cross-stitch in the firelight. And then we shall go to bed, our bed, my dearest girl."

It seems that in the wake of the last American Presidential debate, everyone has been talking about Kerry's shout out Lynne Cheney. Today, I'd like to give mad props to Cheney. Not only is the homosexual offspring of Dick Cheney, but she's also of the Western lesbian epic, Sisters. Check out more body tingling excerpts in the link.

Bizzare!Bill O'Reily's Sexual Harassment Suit
Stolen from the Smoking Gun, prepare to be literally shocked and amazed.

During the course of his perverted ravings, Defendant Bill O'Reily told Plantiff that if that they would then engage in sexual intercourse. When Plantiff Anrea Makiss again reminded Defedant O'Reily that she did not want to participate, reminding him that he was her boss, O'Reilly said "you just have to suspend that".

During the course of Defendant Bill O'Reily's sexual rant, it became clear that he was using a vibrator on himself. Plantiff was repulsed.

More in link.

Movies I Want To See: the Calamari Wrestler
The Calamari Wrestler mixes my two favourite genres of film together into a splendid sea-food dish of cinematic greatness: Japanese wrestling movies and movies about calamaris that manage to triumph over adverse conditions. Directed by Japan's self proclaimed "Ed Wood Jr. with talent", the Calamari Wrestler aims to please with romance, over the top wrestling moves, bizzare comedy and a squid with a heart of gold.

Is anyone interested in a gmail account? I can hook you up, if you're interested.

A Night At The Hip Hopera
In the wake of Dj Danger Mouse's megaton attack of copywrite law the Grey Album, it seems that everyone has been trying to create the Big New Mashup. Enter the Kleptones. Taking off where Danger Mouse left off, the Kleptones mashup mixes Queen's arena rock styles to a melange of hiphop from the last two decades. It's better than Batboy the Musical. This, I promise you.

Mixture, an new mix CD
1)Flock of Seagulls-I Ran
2)Radio Birdman-Descent Into The Maelstrom
3)the Replacements-Alex Chilton
4)Veronica Tangent-Clean Shaven Pussy
5) Eels-My Beloved Monster and Me
6)United Future Organization-Upa Neguinho
7)The Smiths-This Charming Man
8)Badly Drawn Boy-The Shining (Avalanches remix)
9) Buffalo Daugther-Great Five Lakes
10)American Analog Set-Weather Report
11)Lampchop-What Else Could It Be
12)Lovage-Sex (I'm a Man)
13)Zero7-In The Waiting Line
14)the Polyphonic Spree-Section 9
15)Gary Jules-Mad World

About two years ago, around the time when I broke up with Pearl, I developed a mad facination with late 80's rock and New Wave. What can I say? I was crazy back then. That said, one of my projects during that period was to create a mix CD featuring what I considered to be some of the best rock from that decade of excess that those of us that grew up during the 90s tried to forget. The CD was going to be called "Rock Rock". Clever, né? Sadly, like most of my creative ventures, I never completed it, but a partial playlist stayed on my old computer. Flashforward to 2004, and I've dug up my old computer, complete with my 400 plus library of music. Filled with ambition, I decide to pull a Lazurus and finally burn "Rock Rock". Pulling out my files, I rediscover a lot of music that I've loved in the past, and scrap my idea of making a CD of pure rock music, and decide to make a CD of music that I won't grow sick of. Mixture is the end result. The first couple of tracks, from I Ran to Alex Chilton are pretty much all the remains of my rock CD. Tossed at the wayside was Thee Michelle Gun Elephant's Black Tambourine and the Hot Snakes' Automatic Midnight. I decided to add Veronica Tangent's Clean Shaven Pussy because I like to represent my old home of Victoria's music scene. United Future Organization and Buffalo Daughter filled my quota of Japanese music, bonus points were added since an Englishman could appreciate the music since they lacked Japanese lyrics. I put Zero7's In The Waiting Line, the Polyphonic Spree's Section 9 and Gary Jules' Mad World because they've bookended a bunch of great films that I've seen the last couple of months. Kudos to anyone that can catch the cinematic references.

Anal sex as comedy

This was going to be my first time foraging in the ass forest, and I wanted to have a reminder of my trip, a memento I could carry with me the rest of my life…so I decided to film us.

I planned this beforehand, but I was afraid she would decline, so instead of being mature and discussing this with Jaime, I just made the executive decision to get it on camera…without telling her.

That alone is pretty bad. But instead of just setting up a hidden camera…I got my friend to hide in my closet and film it.

No really--I know that I will burn in hell. At this point, I’m just hoping that my life can serve as a warning to others.

More in link.

From Batboy: the Musical: Hold me, Batboy

Wong Kar Wai's 2046 trailer is up

Ain't It Cool Talkbackers provide biting political commentary

You guys thought Road Warrior was cool, right? Well, let's make it a reality! A Kerry presidency would just be politics as usual, but four more years of Bush would get us that post-apocalyptic dystopia that we all know and love. Think about it... four more years of Ashcroft could make Equilibrium a reality, which means lots of guys with biker helmets and black leather trenchcoats to rebel against, and that's ALWAYS cool! No industrial regulation means pollution which means climate change which brings about all sorts of natural disasters, so there's a possibility of some Godzilla shit going down, or at least some Perfect Storm type shit. In fact that's my real criticism of Bush, he's not evil enough. C'mon, George, drop that facade of legitimacy and start pressing red buttons; If we're gonna die (and we are gonna die,) then "let us make such an end as will be worth remembering!"

It's a weird age when the funniest political commentary comes from the infamous Ain't It Cool talk back.

Haruki Murakami's On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning

One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo's fashionable Harujuku neighborhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl.

Tell you the truth, she's not that good-looking. She doesn't stand out in any way. Her clothes are nothing special. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep. She isn't young, either - must be near thirty, not even close to a "girl," properly speaking. But still, I know from fifty yards away: She's the 100% perfect girl for me. The moment I see her, there's a rumbling in my chest, and my mouth is as dry as a desert.

Maybe you have your own particular favorite type of girl - one with slim ankles, say, or big eyes, or graceful fingers, or you're drawn for no good reason to girls who take their time with every meal. I have my own preferences, of course. Sometimes in a restaurant I'll catch myself staring at the girl at the next table to mine because I like the shape of her nose.

But no one can insist that his 100% perfect girl correspond to some preconceived type. Much as I like noses, I can't recall the shape of hers - or even if she had one. All I can remember for sure is that she was no great beauty. It's weird.

More in link.
I've been reading Murakami's work on and off for the last six months. If you haven't had a chance to pick up any of his work, I suggest that you do so. No other author can mix the mundane and the sureal and make it wonderfully compelling.