Music

Caught red-handed showing feelings

I’d forgotten how much I love Pink Floyd’s film “The Wall.” We saw it at the Inwood last night at midnight with Brittney and Chris. We weren’t the oldest people in the audience but we definitely fell in the high end of the range. Near the beginning of the film, someone’s cell phone rang. The girl sitting in front of me turned to her boyfriend and asked, quite seriously, “Was that in the movie?” Sigh. Doc’s cluster headache cycle is just not going away. No screaming bad ones, but he has a headache almost constantly since about February. Saturday we went to three different health food stores looking for this capsaicin nasal spray which is said to help with migraines and anecdotally with some peoples’ clusters too. The first one was just a distribution center in an office park (closed), the second one was Roy’s Natural Market (closed on Saturdays… seriously, WTF?), and Whole Foods did not carry it. We may have to order it online. Our Whole Foods trip wasn’t a complete wash though; we spent a long time staring at the fabulously gorgeous desserts in the dessert cases. They are too pretty to eat. I just want to look at them all day! I purchased a new bottle of Dr. Bronner’s Peppermint Castile Soap. I love this stuff. The label, if you aren’t familiar with it (and if you’re not I suggest you read it!), will lead you to the conclusion that dear old Dr. Bronner was nearly all his pancakes short of a stack, but by God (pun intended) he can make some damn fine environmentally friendly non-sodium-lauryl-or-laureth-sulfate-containing liquid soap. It’s expensive but a little goes a long long way.

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First Born Unicorn

On Friday night, Doc and my Mom and I watched a nifty old movie, “The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao.” Tony Randall plays Dr. Lao, Medusa, the Abominable Snowman, a serpent, Pan, Merlin, and Apollonius of Tyana (the blind seer). It also stars Barbara Eden, pre-Jeannie. I love the classic special effects – cheesy and obvious to our 21st century eyes, but undoubtedly stunning for the time. Also, we discovered that the line in the chorus of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Californication” is, indeed, “FIRST BORN UNICORN.” Seriously. “First born unicorn, hard core soft porn.” I just… I have no words. How can I possibly have words to describe that?

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Whatcha gonna do with all that junk?

OK, so I don’t know if you’ve heard the Black Eyed Peas’ song entitled “My Humps,” (the one that goes “whatcha gonna do with all that junk, all that junk inside your trunk?”) but I just recently heard it all the way through for the first time and saw the video. I’ll go on the record and say that oh my god this has got to be one of the most insanely stupid songs I’ve ever heard. “My lovely lady lumps?” Did she just sing the words “Tryin’ a feel my hump, hump. Lookin’ at my lump, lump.”?!?! And NOT crack up??! It’s not like there is any shortage in this world of vacuous songs that encourage women’s use of tits and ass to further their own materialistic desires and/or boost their rock-bottom self esteem (“my milkshake brings all the boys to the yard,” anyone?)… but SERIOUSLY PEOPLE. Is “lady lumps” not the most asinine phrase you have ever heard? I don’t know whether to laugh or feel horribly embarrassed. Anyhoo, the point of all this is, my brother alerted me to a BRILLIANT cover of this song by Alanis Morrissette. She managed to make it sad and haunting in tone, which is incredibly amusing when she sings something like “I’ma get, get, get, get, you drunk, get you love drunk off my hump,” and the video is a fantastic parody. Check it out…

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Every Tape Tells A Story

When I was in middle and high school, during the dark ages of the 1980s, it was a common occurrence to see a long string of cassette tape fluttering on the side of the road, trailing away from a broken and discarded mix tape. Mix tapes, for teenagers in love, were not given lightly. A tape full of songs with pointed and poignant lyrics was a gift to be analyzed for hours; what did the selection of THOSE particular songs mean? Why were they in THAT order? And creating a mix tape for your objet d’amour was an hours-long exercise in subtleties. So to spot one of these fragile magnetic love-poem-collages in a ruined state, littering the roadside, tossed out of a car window in a fit of pique, always made me a little sad: this was concrete evidence of love gone wrong.

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