Aisha

Good to Know That If I Ever Need Attention All I Have to Do Is Die-Brand New

Right now (it will be different next week) my favorite song is Biscuit by Portishead. It just kinda seems perfect for some things I've been feeling lately.

I've been listening to Deja Entendu a lot in the past two weeks. I love the lyrics. I've had the CD since last winter but just now 'discovered' it... so to speak.

My just gave me two Pixies albums and I like them so far. I didn't know there was a Post-Punk genre.

The guy I just started seeing listens to a lot of different music including heavy metal. I guess within the genre he loves death metal (which I'll admit sounds scary). He just saw Lamb of God. He says the angrier the better and he said he doesn't even need to understand the words. I can only take it in small doses though.

I am definately going to get it and read it soon.

When I read this some of it hit a little too close to home for me. I think I am unduly influenced by movies. The is a Postal Service lyric that says "That I've been waiting since birth to find a love that would look and sound like a movie" I am ashamed to admit it but I hear that admitting you have a problem is the first step. Anyway, I want to get the book. I heard all the chapters are stand alone commentaries like the above.

I'm sorry...it is good though.

I found this on another board. It was on a thread where Radiohead fans were dogging Coldplay (that really upsets me since I like both band, although Radiohead is lightyears better) Anyway, this guy posted this and no one even really mentioned it but I really thought is was interesting. Sorry it is so long but it is worth it. So without further ado here it is. Chuck Klosterman, opening chapter of his book Sex Drugs & Cocoa Puffs No woman will ever satisfy me. I know that now, and I would never try to deny it. But this is actually okay, because I will never satisfy a woman, either. Should I be writing such thoughts? Perhaps not. Perhaps it's a bad idea. I can definitely foresee a scenario where that first paragraph could come back to haunt me, especially if I somehow became marginally famous. If I become marginally famous, I will undoubtedly be interviewed by someone in the media, and the interviewer will inevitably ask, "Fifteen years ago, you wrote that no woman could ever satisfy you. Now that you've been married for almost five years, are those words still true?" And I will have to say, "Oh, God no. Those were the words of an entirely different person -- a person whom I can't even relate to anymore. Honestly, I can't image an existence without _____. She satisfies me in ways that I never even considered. She saved my life, really." Now, I will be lying. I won't really feel that way. But I'll certainly say those words, and I'll deliver them with the utmost sincerity, even though those sentiments will not be there. So then the interviewer will undoubtedly quote lines from this particular paragraph, thereby reminding me that I swore I would publicly deny my true feelings, and I'll chuckle and say, "Come on, Mr. Rose. That was a literary device. You know I never really believed that." But here's the thing: I do believe that. It's the truth now, and it will be in the future. And while I'm not exactly happy about that truth, it doesn't make me sad, either. I know it's not my fault. It's no one's fault, really. Or maybe it's everyone's fault. It should be everyone's fault, because it's everyone's problem. Well, okay...not everyone. Not boring people, and not the profoundly retarded. But whenever I meet dynamic, nonretarded Americans, I notice that they all seem to share a single unifying characteristic: the inability to experience the kind of mind-blowing, transcendent romantic relationship they perceive to be a normal part of living. And someone needs to take the fall for this. So instead of blaming no one for this (which is kind of cowardly) or blaming everyone (which is kind of meaningless), I'm going to blame John Cusack. I once loved a girl who almost loved me, but not as much as she loved John Cusack. Under certain circumstances, this would have been fine; Cusack is relatively good-looking, he seems like a pretty cool guy (he likes the Clash and the Who, at least), and he undoubtedly has millions of bones in the bank. If Cusack and I were competing for the same woman, I could easily accept losing. However, I don't really feel like John and I were "competing" for the girl I'm referring to, inasmuch as her relationship to Cusack was confined to watching him as a two-dimensional projection, pretending to be characters who don't actually exist. Now, there was a time when I would have thought that detachment would have given me a huge advantage over Johnny C., inasmuch as my relationship with this woman included things like "talking on the phone" and "nuzzling under umbrellas" and "eating pancakes." However, I have come to realize that I perceived this competition completely backward; it was definitely an unfair battle, but not in my favor. It was unfair in Cusack's favor. I never had a chance. It appears that countless women born between the years of 1965 and 1978 are in love with John Cusack. I cannot fathom how he isn't the number-one box-office star in America, because every straight girl I know would sell her soul to share a milkshake with that motherfucker. For upwardly mobile women in their twenties and thirties, John Cusack is the neo-Elvis. But here's what none of these upwardly mobile women seem to realize: They don't love John Cusack. They love Lloyd Dobler. When they see Mr. Cusack, they are still seeing the optimistic, charmingly loquacious teenager he played in Say Anything, a movie that came out more than a decade ago. That's the guy they think he is; when Cusack played Eddie Thomas in America's Sweethearts or the sensitive hit man in Grosse Pointe Blank, all his female fans knew he was only acting...but they assume when the camera stopped rolling, he went back to his genuine self...which was someone like Lloyd Dobler...which was, in fact, someone who is Lloyd Dobler, and someone who continues to have a storybook romance with Diane Court (or with Ione Skye, depending on how you look at it). And these upwardly mobile women are not alone. We all convince ourselves of things like this -- not necessarily about Say Anything, but about any fictionalized portrayals of romance that happen to hit us in the right place, at the right time. This is why I will never be completely satisfied by a woman, and this is why the kind of woman I tend to find attractive will never be satisfied by me. We will both measure our relationship against the prospect of fake love. Fake love is a very powerful thing. That girl who adored John Cusack once had the opportunity to spend a weekend with me in New York at the Waldorf-Astoria, but she elected to fly to Portland instead to see the first U.S. appearance by Coldplay, a British pop group whose success derives from their ability to write melodramatic alt-rock songs about fake love. It does not matter that Coldplay is absolutely the shittiest [bleep] band I've ever heard in my entire [bleep] life, or that they sound like a mediocre photocopy of Travis (who sound like a mediocre photocopy of Radiohead), or that their greatest [bleep] artistic achievement is a video where their blandly attractive frontman walks on a beach on a cloudy [bleep] afternoon. None of that matters. What matters is that Coldplay manufactures fake love as frenetically as the Ford [bleep] Motor Company manufactures Mustangs, and that's all this woman heard. "For you I bleed myself dry," sang their blockhead vocalist, brilliantly informing us that stars in the sky are, in fact, yellow. How am I going to compete with that [bleep]? That sleepy-eyed bozo isn't even making sense. He's just pouring fabricated emotions over four gloomy guitar chords, and it ends up sounding like love. And what does that mean? It means she flies to [bleep] Portland to hear two hours of amateurish U.K. hyper-slop, and I sleep alone in a $270 hotel in Manhattan, and I hope Coldplay gets [bleep] dropped by [bleep] EMI and ends up like the Stone [bleep] Roses, who were actually a better [bleep] band, all things considered. Not that I'm bitter about this. Oh, I concede that I may be taking this particular example somewhat personally -- but I do think it's a perfect illustration of why almost everyone I know is either overtly or covertly unhappy. Coldplay songs deliver an amorphous, irrefutable interpretation of how being in love is supposed to feel, and people find themselves wanting that feeling for real. They want men to adore them like Lloyd Dobler would, and they want women to think like Aimee Mann, and they expect all their arguments to sound like Sam Malone and Diane Chambers. They think everything will work out perfectly in the end (just like it did for Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones and Nick Hornby's Rob Fleming), and they don't stop believing, because Journey's Steve Perry insists we should never do that. In the nineteenth century, teenagers merely aspired to have a marriage that would be better than that of their parents; personally, I would never be satisfied unless my marriage was as good as Cliff and Clair Huxtable's (or at least as enigmatic as Jack and Meg White's). Pundits are always blaming TV for making people stupid, movies for desensitizing the world to violence, and rock music for making kids take drugs and kill themselves. These things should be the least of our worries. The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy. There is no "normal," because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously. You can't compare your relationship with the playful couple who lives next door, because they're probably modeling themselves after Chandler Bing and Monica Geller. Real people are actively trying to live like fake people, so real people are no less fake. Every comparison becomes impractical. This is why the impractical has become totally acceptable; impracticality almost seems cool. The best relationship I ever had was with a journalist who was as crazy as me, and some of our coworkers liked to compare us to Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. At the time, I used to think, "Yeah, that's completely valid: We fight all the time, our love is self-destructive, and -- if she was mysteriously killed -- I'm sure I'd be wrongly arrested for second-degree murder before dying from an overdose." We even watched Sid & Nancy in her parents' basement and giggled the whole time. "That's us," we said gleefully. And like I said -- this was the best relationship I ever had. And I suspect it was the best one she ever had, too. Of course, this media transference is not all bad. It has certainly worked to my advantage, just as it has for all modern men who look and talk and act like me. We all owe our lives to Woody Allen. If Woody Allen had never been born, I'm sure I would be doomed to a life of celibacy. Remember the aforementioned woman who loved Cusack and Coldplay? There is absolutely no way I could have dated this person if Woody Allen didn't exist. In tangible terms, she was light-years out of my league, along with most of the other women I've slept with. But Woody Allen changed everything. Woody Allen made it acceptable for beautiful women to sleep with nerdy, bespectacled goofballs; all we need to do is fabricate the illusion of intellectual humor, and we somehow have a chance. The irony is that many of the women most susceptible to this scam haven't even seen any of Woody's movies, nor would they want to touch the actual Woody Allen if they ever had the chance (especially since he's proven to be an über-pervy clarinet freak). If asked, most of these foxy ladies wouldn't classify Woody Allen as sexy, or handsome, or even likable. But this is how media devolution works: It creates an archetype that eventually dwarfs its origin. By now, the "Woody Allen Personality Type" has far greater cultural importance than the man himself. Now, the argument could be made that all this is good for the sexual bloodstream of Americana, and that all these Women Who Want Woody are being unconsciously conditioned to be less shallow than their sociobiology dictates. Self-deprecating cleverness has become a virtue. At least on the surface, movies and television actively promote dating the nonbeautiful: If we have learned anything from the mass media, it's that the only people who can make us happy are those who don't strike us as being particularly desirable. Whether it's Jerry Maguire or Sixteen Candles or Who's the Boss or Some Kind of Wonderful or Speed Racer, we are constantly reminded that the unattainable icons of perfection we lust after can never fulfill us like the platonic allies who have been there all along. If we all took media messages at their absolute face value, we'd all be sleeping with our best friends. And that does happen, sometimes. But herein lies the trap: We've also been trained to think this will always work out over the long term, which dooms us to disappointment. Because when push comes to shove, we really don't want to have sex with our friends...unless they're sexy. And sometimes we do want to have sex with our blackhearted, soul-sucking enemies...assuming they're sexy. Because that's all it ever comes down to in real life, regardless of what happened to Michael J. Fox in Teen Wolf. The mass media causes sexual misdirection: It prompts us to need something deeper than what we want. This is why Woody Allen has made nebbish guys cool; he makes people assume there is something profound about having a relationship based on witty conversation and intellectual discourse. There isn't. It's just another gimmick, and it's no different than wanting to be with someone because they're thin or rich or the former lead singer of Whiskeytown. And it actually might be worse, because an intellectual relationship isn't real at all. My witty banter and cerebral discourse is always completely contrived. Right now, I have three and a half dates worth of material, all of which I pretend to deliver spontaneously. This is my strategy: If I can just coerce women into the last half of that fourth date, it's anyone's ball game. I've beaten the system; I've broken the code; I've slain the Minotaur. If we part ways on that fourth evening without some kind of conversational disaster, she probably digs me. Or at least she thinks she digs me, because who she digs is not really me. Sadly, our relationship will not last ninety-three minutes (like Annie Hall) or ninety-six minutes (like Manhattan). It will go on for days or weeks or months or years, and I've already used everything in my vault. Very soon, I will have nothing more to say, and we will be sitting across from each other at breakfast, completely devoid of banter; she will feel betrayed and foolish, and I will suddenly find myself actively trying to avoid spending time with a woman I didn't deserve to be with in the first place. Perhaps this sounds depressing. That is not my intention. This is all normal. There's not a lot to say during breakfast. I mean, you just woke up, you know? Nothing has happened. If neither person had an especially weird dream and nobody burned the toast, breakfast is just the time for chewing Cocoa Puffs and/or wishing you were still asleep. But we've been convinced not to think like that. Silence is only supposed to happen as a manifestation of supreme actualization, where both parties are so at peace with their emotional connection that it cannot be expressed through the rudimentary tools of the lexicon; otherwise, silence is proof that the magic is gone and the relationship is over (hence the phrase "We just don't talk anymore"). For those of us who grew up in the media age, the only good silence is the kind described by the hair metal band Extreme. "More than words is all I ever needed you to show," explained Gary Cherone on the Pornograffiti album. "Then you wouldn't have to say that you love me, cause I'd already know." This is the difference between art and life: In art, not talking is never an extension of having nothing to say; not talking always means something. And now that art and life have become completely interchangeable, we're forced to live inside the acoustic power chords of Nuno Bettencourt, even if most of us don't necessarily know who the [bleep] Nuno Bettencourt is. When Harry Met Sally hit theaters in 1989. I didn't see it until 1997, but it turns out I could have skipped it entirely. The movie itself isn't bad (which is pretty amazing, since it stars Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal), and there are funny parts and sweet parts and smart dialogue, and -- all things considered -- it's a well-executed example of a certain kind of entertainment. Yet watching this film in 1997 was like watching the 1978 one-game playoff between the Yankees and the Red Sox on ESPN Classic: Though I've never sat through the pitch sequence that leads to Bucky Dent's three-run homer, I know exactly what happened. I feel like I remember it, even though I don't. And -- more important -- I know what it all means. Knowing about sports means knowing that Bucky Dent is the living, breathing, metaphorical incarnation of the Bo Sox's undying futility; I didn't have to see that game to understand the fabric of its existence. I didn't need to see When Harry Met Sally, either. Within three years of its initial release, classifying any intense friendship as "totally a Harry-Met-Sally situation" had a recognizable meaning to everyone, regardless of whether or not they'd actually seen the movie. And that meaning remains clear and remarkably consistent: It implies that two platonic acquaintances are refusing to admit that they're deeply in love with each other. When Harry Met Sally cemented the plausibility of that notion, and it gave a lot of desperate people hope. It made it realistic to suspect your best friend may be your soul mate, and it made wanting such a scenario comfortably conventional. The problem is that the Harry-Met-Sally situation is almost always tragically unbalanced. Most of the time, the two involved parties are not really "best friends." Inevitably, one of the people has been in love with the other from the first day they met, while the other person is either (a) wracked with guilt and pressure, or ( completely oblivious to the espoused attraction. Every relationship is fundamentally a power struggle, and the individual in power is whoever likes the other person less. But When Harry Met Sally gives the powerless, unrequited lover a reason to live. When this person gets drunk and tells his friends that he's in love with a woman who only sees him as a buddy, they will say, "You're wrong. You're perfect for each other. This is just like When Harry Met Sally! I'm sure she loves you -- she just doesn't realize it yet." Nora Ephron accidentally ruined a lot of lives. I remember taking a course in college called "Communication and Society," and my professor was obsessed by the belief that fairy tales like "Hansel and Gretel" and "Little Red Riding Hood" were evil. She said they were part of a latent social code that hoped to suppress women and minorities. At the time, I was mildly outraged that my tuition money was supporting this kind of crap; years later, I have come to recall those pseudo-savvy lectures as what I loved about college. But I still think they were probably wasteful, and here's why: Even if those theories are true, they're barely significant. "The Three Little Pigs" is not the story that is [bleep] people up. Stories like Say Anything are [bleep] people up. We don't need to worry about people unconsciously "absorbing" archaic secret messages when they're six years old; we need to worry about all the entertaining messages people are consciously accepting when they're twenty-six. They're the ones that get us, because they're the ones we try to turn into life. I mean, Christ: I wish I could believe that bozo in Coldplay when he tells me that stars are yellow. I miss that girl. I wish I was Lloyd Dobler. I don't want anybody to step on a piece of broken glass. I want fake love. But that's all I want, and that's why I can't have it. I really liked it. "Coldplay...they sound like a mediocre photocopy of Travis (who sound like a mediocre photocopy of Radiohead)" What?! I really disagree with that statement. But anyway, What do you guys think.

Silent Bob: Chasing Amy. (Shocked silence, more for the audience than anyone else) Holden: What? What did you say? Bob: You're chasing Amy. Jay: Why do you so shocked for, man? Fat bastard does this all the time. Think just because never says anything, it'll have some huge impact when he does open his [bleep] mouth... Bob: Jesus Christ, why don't you just shut the f*ck up. You're yap, yap, yapping all the time. Give me a f*cking headache. (to Holden) I went through something like what you're talking about, a couple years ago, this chick named Amy. Jay: When? Bob: A couple years ago? Jay: What, you live in Canada or something? Why don't I know about this? Bob: B*tch, what you don't know about me I could just about squeeze in the Grand [bleep] Canyon. Did you know I always wanted to be a dancer in Vegas? (does a gesture with his hands, a reference to a move by the exotic dancers in "Showgirls") Betcha ya didn't even know that sh*t, did ya? Jay: So tell your f*cking story so we can get outta here and smoke this. Bob (to Holden): So, there's me and Amy. And we're all inseparable, right? Big time in love. Then four months down the road, the idiot gear kicks in, and I ask about the ex-boyfriend. Which, as we all know, is a really dumb move. But you know how you don't wanna know, but just have to know--stupid guy bullsh*t. So, anyway, she starts telling me about him. How they fell in love, how they went out for a couple of yeas, how they lived together, her mother likes me better, blah blah blah blah blah. And I'm okay. Then she drops the bomb. And the bomb is this: it seems that a couple of times while they were going out, he brought some people to bed with him, "menage a troi," I believe it's called. And this just blows my mind, right? I mean, I am not used to this sorta thing; I was raised Catholic, for Gods sake. Jay: Saint sh*thead. Bob (to Jay): Do something. (to Holden) So I'm totally weirded out by this, right? So I start blasting her. I mean, I don't know how to deal with what I'm feeling, so I figure the best way is to call her 'sl*t,' tell her she was used. I'm out for blood, I really want to hurt this girl. I'm like, "What the f*ck is your problem," right? And she's just trying to calmly tell me it was that time, it was that place, and she doesn't feel like she should apologize because she doesn't feel that she's done anything wrong. And I say, "Oh, really?" That's when I look her straight in the eye, tell her it's over. I walk. Jay: F*cking-A. Bob: No, idiot, it was a mistake. I wasn't disgusted with her, I was afraid. In that moment, I felt small, like I lacked experience, like I'd never be enough for her or something like that, you know what I'm saying? But what I did not get: she didn't care. She wasn't looking for that guy any more. She was looking for me, for the Bob. But by the time I figured this all out, it was too late. She had moved on. And all I had to show for it was some foolish pride which gave way to regret. She was the girl. I know that now. But (lights a cigarette) I pushed her away. (pause) So I spend every day since then chasing Amy. (pause) So to speak. One of my favorite parts of Chasing Amy

We're no longer called Sonic Death Monkey. We're on the verge of becoming Kathleen Turner Overdrive, but just for tonight, we are Barry Jive and his Uptown Five.

I used a clip of that for my Gerantology project last semester. It was the part where is talks about needing people for everything now but goes on to say we always need help especially in the middle of life. It was a really moving scene and I got A.

Who draws the crowd? Who plays so loud? Baby it's the guitar man Who's gonna steal the show You know baby it's the guitar man :guitar:

I got so excited when I read this I just had to listen to this song. I love it. :guitar:

I love Whipping Post. I also love Statesboro Blues and One Way Out. I only have their greatest hits album though.

I really liked your song. It is right down my alley.

I think we might go see Some Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin at the Outland Ballroom this weekend. I haven't seen them before but I listened to a few of the clips and I think they sound really cool. Take a listen and tell me what you think. I really like House Fire!

I think sound really cool. I'm going to have to listen to the whole album.

I had a listen and they do sound a lot like Simon & Garfunkel. I might have to go to Borders so I can listen to the whole album.

I have had greenplasitc bookmarked ever since I got the internet. I love radiohead but I understand a lot of people don't like them. I know very few people here that do. I actually think that radiohead has some things in common with Pink Floyd. Its a really subjective feeling but I think that is one of the reasons that I really got into them. Both bands' albums are, to me, symphonic in scope. I know I am opening myself up to criticism but I really think there is a connection there.

I think the Shins sound older. There is a Beach Boys quality to some of their songs.

How to Disappear Completely-Radiohead

RADIOHEAD drummer PHIL SELWAY reacted in fury when he was kept awake by a loud party held by GREEN DAY - but was locked inside his hotel room by the BASKET CASE stars as a result. The dispute was sparked when Green Day partied into the night at Los Angeles' infamous Chateau Marmont hotel, forcing tired Selway - who was trying to sleep in a nearby room - to knock on the door and beg TRE COOL to turn down the noise. In response to the request, Cool turned off the music, but blasted out a different album moments later - Radiohead's OK COMPUTER. And in a further act of mischief, Cool tied a rope around Selway's door - keeping him trapped inside. Cool says, "(Selway said), 'You let me out you f**ker! I'm telling THOM (YORKE, Radiohead frontman).' "(I said), 'Dude, if you walk into a room of hot chicks and they're blasting out you're album, you're like, What up? Right?'"

We had so much fun the other night. There were a ton of people there and so much energy. We got our toes stomped in the mosh pit which was actually really fun. My legs and arms are still sore from all the dancing we did. The only thing I am not sure of is what the bands actually sounded like. It was so loud and everyone was screaming. We were drinking so who knows. It was such a high energy show. My friend did bring me the Alexisonfire and the Brazil CDs though and I plan on listening to them soon. It was such a crazy night. We of course went to Taco Bell afterward and called it a night.

I am so excited! My friend and I are going downtown to the Rockwell in just a couple of hours to see this show. I hear they are kinda punk and totally fun. I will have to get back to you afterwards to let you know if they are worth a listen. A lot of the bands that play there are up and comers. The Rockwell