DSO Records: Trivia & Music

 Just want to wish everyone a Happy Chaka Khannukah and a merry X-Mas.

This space is not fully filled in for the year or anything, even if trivia is (we’re back at Dempsey’s on Wednesday, January 7), but things have happened. I’m looking to improve trivia in New York, and I think I can do it, and soon. Details to come. Until then, find someone you love and tell them you love them.

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It’s true, it really is, every last friggin’ word of it:

Ten Top Trivia Tips about Drunken Smartass!

1. Drunken Smartass can run sixty-five kilometres an hour - that’s really fast.
2. Humans have 46 chromosomes, peas have 14, and Drunken Smartass has 7.
3. If a snake is born with two heads, the heads will fight over who gets Drunken Smartass.
4. The ace of spades in a playing card deck symbolizes Drunken Smartass!
5. California is the biggest exporter of Drunken Smartass in the world.
6. While performing her duties as queen, Cleopatra sometimes dressed up as Drunken Smartass.
7. Drunken Smartass is actually a fruit, not a vegetable.
8. In Chinese, the sound ‘Drunken Smartass’ means ‘bite the wax tadpole’.
9. Drunken Smartass was banned from Finland because of not wearing pants!
10. Lightning strikes Drunken Smartass over seven times every hour.

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Look, I am as aware of the vagaries and importances of music history as anyone I know, and I know a lot of music nerds. In fact, I’d go so far as to say the people I know are as aware of both where things are right now in music and of where the stuff of today came from as anyone alive. (I may even have measurable proof of this, but that’s another digression for another time.)

In that light, I could not possibly give less of a shit about the release of Guns & Roses’ Chinese Democracy this week.

I understand it’s been 14 years in the making, and represents the culmination of everything the greatest of the great late-era hair-farmer bands had in them (or at least what Axl Rose had in mind), and the parallels to Smile, the lost Brian Wilson/Beach Boys decades-in-coming apotheosis, are easy and an adequate form of explanation as to what the hell happened.

And okay, let’s start there. The Beach Boys were the greatest chart-topping capital-A American Band of the pre-Woodstock 60’s. (Sure, Buffalo Springfield’s stuff was great, but they weren’t topping the charts with every song they released. Hell, not even Dylan had the Beach Boys’ track record, and the Velvets famously only sold records to other bands. If there’s someone I’m missing, let me know.) You could maybe make the case that Guns & Roses were the best band in their scene, but they didn’t have the consistent chart success of an REM or even Motley Crue, and just because Axl was an erratic space cadet who fought with his bandmates doesn’t make him Brian Wilson.* And I don’t know if anyone really noticed, but when Smile finally came out, it wasn’t exactly the second coming of Pet Sounds. The music was lush and pretty as you’d expect from a master arranger like Wilson, but as a lyricist, Van Dyke Parks was little more than a kiddie version of Bernie Taupin.

I heard a couple of the leaked tracks of Chinese Democracy through the usual nefarious means, and it sounds like the muddled mess I kind of expected. But honestly, if he’d managed to finish it in 1987, I don’t suspect it would have been a whole lot better. And while the world could always — always use more Beach Boys music, now that we have Soundgarden and all their descendants, and Queens Of The Stone Age and all of theirs, there are a hundred bands out there right now who can do what Axl did, and better.

Besides, we need to save Tommy Stinson. I know Tommy needs to get paid, and even a full-blown Replacements reunion wouldn’t make anyone rich, but goddamn, he’d have more integrity playing on a cruise ship.

So in the interest of the glorious future, I move we just let Guns and Fucking Roses** fade into history, like Oliver North, painter’s pants and the AMC Gremlin, quaint totems of an earlier era that frankly are better off staying there.

*And Brian wasn’t a danger to anyone other than himself. What Axl did (allegedly; thank you, out-of-court settlements and sealed court records!) to the women in his life was really fucked up. To paraphrase Robert Christgau, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll doesn’t mean fucking her in the ass after she passes out from the drugs you put in her drink.

** “G’n'F’n'R”? Really? Oh, Axl, how rebellious you are! At least spell your shit out, fergodsake.

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The great Goopy made this short comic about the economy that’s as cute as you’d expect from his other work, and yet still comes off as a short film.

Hmm. Maybe he should be making movies.

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I wrote a piece for BoingBoing Gadgets on a new kind of motion capture software, into which I manage to shoehorn a digression about pasting ping-pong balls to Tiger Woods’ face that frankly sounded pretty genius as I was typing it.

Yes, there’s also video footage of me looking like I’m eight miles high in an Amsterdam brothel, listening to “I Can’t Help Myself” and trying to act out the story.

Look, the point of the article is this: the fireballs are fake. The technological advance is real.

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You know, I’m totally going to miss Total Request Live. For real.

It was the cultural touchstone for a generation, the reason I was late for work when I lived near Times Square for a couple of years and I had to wade through the throngs of screaming preteens begging & clamoring for a glimpse through the second-floor window of whassisface from 98 Degrees or whatsername from that Disney show, not that one but the other one, no no no, you know who I’m talking about. Man, times none of us will ever forget, things those people will go home to their places where people are sensible and rational and grow old, and tell their grandkids about. God’s children, every one of us.

Over the entire run of TRL, I watched, cumulatively, a grand total of about 40 seconds of it. That includes clicking past it to get to something else, all the time I spent loitering in TV showrooms (handy hint: talk about a great place to meet people!), the occasional DVR leftover from when I was wanting to watch — oh, okay, I have never DVR’d anything on MTV. I’m just trying to be nice. But yeah, if I’ve watched an entire minute of TRL over the course of my (and its) life, that would be more than I thought.

But I will miss it. Because now, Carson Daly now has no fallback position, and when his show gets cancelled*, he’ll be up for the same temp jobs I’m going for, and that would be bad.

I will miss it because now all those teenpop would-bes are going to spill into other shows I actually watch, like Jeopardy! or Washington Week In Review or Antiques Roadshow or Billy Mays commercials. And really, that’s no good for anyone concerned, especially me. And Billy Mays.

I will miss it because it kept a significant group of obnoxious truants, hoodlums, ne’er-do-wells and — and other people I have been in my life — in a clear and easily-avoidable place in the city for a couple of hours every day, and now they’re gong to be infesting every corner of town, including and especially the places I go to in my daily travels. Again, nobody really wants that.

I understand the vagaries of ratings and market demand and corporate branding and the economy and all the other reasons shows like this bubble up and then fade back into the flotsam of the television world. But today, the world of popular culture is a little less spangled, and for that, as a species, we are poorer.

* Is that even still on? That’s another show I’ve never seen, wouldn’t know where to find, and have no real desire to find out about. I don’t hate Carson like some people I know do. It’s just that this world actually is big enough for the two of us. Does my apathy make me a bad person?

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New post up at Cocktailians:

The Final Presidential Debate Drinking Game Thread (Probably)

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I am providing these as a public service. It’s important to note that this is a comprehensive list; if you don’t find a costume that is appropriate for your needs on this list, consider it a sign that maybe you should stay in on October 31 with the lights out and catch up on your Bartlett’s.

Which is what I’ll be doing.

• sexy chicken
• sexy refrigerator
• sexy BLT
• sexy Buick LeSabre
• sexy racist John McCain supporter
• sexy wheelbarrow
• sexy parked car
• sexy bag of Cheez Doodles
• sexy Grimace (from McDonaldland)
• sexy topographic map of the floor of New York Harbor
• sexy Tom Brokaw
• sexy bowling alley
• sexy Metamucil container
• sexy steroid syringe
• sexy blueprint of an I.M. Pei building
• sexy votive candle
• sexy Trivial Pursuit game piece
• sexy gas pump
• sexy Zamboni (with or without driver)
• sexy Juan Valdez
• sexy bowl of Lipton onion soup
• sexy copy of the 9/11 Commission Final Report
• sexy bath mat
• sexy Season four DVD collection of “House”
• sexy drunk person in street clothes wrapped head to toe in toilet paper
• sexy despondent bond trader
• sexy Billy Mays
• sexy boil-in-the-bag mashed potatoes
• sexy pair of clown pants
• sexy George Washington wig
• Nicole Richie

That’s it. You’re welcome.

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I’m assuming “palining” will replace “fronting” in the dictionary soon, right?

I mean, that’s the fascination at this point, right? There’s nothing else. There really is no there there. She’s talking as much shit as possible and praying no one checks her work. She’s a Ponzi scheme of ideas, with Bill Kristol in a cameo as The Wizard Behind The Curtain.

I’m not saying Sarah Palin is stupid. I’m saying she’s trying to be sneaky. She reminds me of a four-year-old who’s learned that manipulating people is an easy way to get stuff he wants. She’s smart enough to talk her way into trouble, but not smart enough to talk her way back out. (I know this person. I may be this person.) She could get away with it in Alaska, where she could scream Jesus and fagbashing and flirt with every registered voter in the state to their face and squeeze one out on Election Day. But to do that in a national election, on a (way more than) 50x scale, is beyond her ken, and it’s started to catch up with her. I think she’s becoming aware of it now, but she can’t go backwards.

She’s successfully going to cleave the neoconservatives in the Republican Party from the conservatives. The neocons, the children of Rove, Atwater, Gingrich and all the other feckless dorks who went Gay for Reagan and think of politics as a game you win, not as, y’know, an actual process by which a nation functions in the world, are being exposed as the tools, stooges and soulless fucks they are, and the uneasy marriage that held for a generation between them and the true conservative thinkers, who actually believe in governs-best-who-governs-least and have found the nepotism and looting-the-treasury bullshit of these upstart morons detestable, is being ripped apart by this twinkly little uncurious no-talent heather, the Yoko Ono of the Grand Old Party.

Also, I know Alaskans and Yukon residents, and even the ones who talk like her don’t talk anything like her. It’s like they beat her accent out of her, and then told her to put it back in when they found it played better. Now she sounds like an Arctic Minnie Pearl, without the comic timing or the material.

She’s not stupid. She’s just shallow. She belongs in an Anchorage public television version of The Hills, not Anna-Nicoleing her way into the Oval Office with Rick Davis’ hand in her back.

Alright, I’m done.

(Note: No insult to Yoko Ono was intended. Maybe I should have said Courtney Love.)

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