Patti Smith

There is a scene in the movie Chasing Amy where in one short burst of dialog the three Kevin Smith New Jersey trilogy movies (Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy) are tied together into one cohesive whole. This article on Allmusic.com does that to a certain extent for my jumble of musical interests. I never connected the Ramones and early 60s pop before (although I should have ... I mean, really, they worked with Phil Spector ...) I stumbled across the article surfing around trying to answer one simple question:

How did I get to be 37 and not own any Patti Smith records?

I was aware of Smith. Just didn't feel compelled to buy any of her stuff.

Until now.

When I was growing up I would sit in front of the radio and wait for a specific song to be played. This was the early 80s, so that often meant sitting through a lot of junk justifiably forgotten today. (Yes, a lot of my faves come from that era. But let us not forget it was also the era of REO, LRB and other bands with more letters but even less interest for me).

Recently I've found myself listening to XM44 waiting for a Patti Smith song to be played. ANY Patti Smith. It's been quite a while since I've done that sort of thing.

One cool thing about this current obsession is that I can see at least 2-3 blog posts coming from it. All of them about Patti Smith. Or none of them.

Depends on how you look at it.

Do ya wanna dance?

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0.
1.
0.

Do ya, do ya, do ya, wanna dance?

Probably not. Unless binary inspires you to put on your boogie shoes.

But wait.

Imagine those digits are the representation of a song on a CD. (I pick Prince's "Controversy" from the album of the same name, but pick whatever ...) In that context (as read by a CD player), ones and zeros definately will help you get your groove on.

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The above is a much smaller version of what was supposed to be the main part of 3 posts ago.

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This is funny looking at it today:

I've heard guys with 10-megabyte hard disks complain of feeling cramped.

Thinking in Forth - Leo Brodie - 1984

Considering how cramped my 80-gig drive is ...

I don't know what this means

Blogger has a neat new feature where profiles with similar interests are linked. Just for fun, I clicked on the link for one of my favorite books, The Passion.

249 other profiles list that as a fave book.

A little under 90% of those profiles are from female bloggers.

Huh.

The real surprise, though, was the number that listed interests that could be called 'tree-hugging hippy crap'. (I can say things like that for the same reason I can find humor in having MS. Self-awareness and all ...) The Passion is not a book I would associate particularly with folks showing a particular enthusiasm for things like ... uh ... nature and stuff.

Oops

Hey, I screwed up again! I wrote this entry in two parts at work and emailed them to my home account. At least that is what I intended. I'm not sure if I forgot to email part one or accidentally deleted it, but here is the second half... Crud, the first half led directly from my previous entry. Oh well. So it goes.

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Speaking of dance [which I was in the missing first half], if you go pogo (that's a play on a slogan for the Pogo comic strip), you could do worse than check out www.somethingilearned.com. I stumbled across this blog looking for info on Dead Silence, a Colorado hardcore outfit that I liked quite a bit but that has always seemed to be unknown on the web. (You can find anything on the 'net HAH!) I've spent much time there the past few days. Every band covered in the 80s hardcore section either 1) I listened to 2) I intended to check out but never got around to or 3) would have intended to check out had I known they existed.

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Also check out the e-book Free Culture. More on that later ...

Sooner or Later

You're probably thinking I'm referencing Hank Williams with the "see the light" jazz in the previous post. Bzzzzzt wrong answer. "I Saw the Light" is a great song, and would be on a top 100 list of them if I ever made such a thing. But what I was thinking of, what was going through my head, was the Jeff Healey band's "See the Light".

Remember that. It's important.

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Sunday I got a chance to listen to Oi!sters on XM radio 53. I've meant to tune in to that show as long as I've had my receiver but just never actually did. Wish I had before, because I enjoyed it quite a bit. You may remember how dissapointed I was with the Slam-A-Lot show on XM 53. It is touted as the hardcore show but was mostly metal, or at best "metalcore". Hey, I enjoy that style, but if you order a strawberry shake you want strawberry, not chocolate.

Oi!sters was truer to its advertising. Plenty of good old-fashioned working-class themed punk rawk. Exactly what I wanted to hear.

As pretty much everything does, this inspired many an hour of surfing the 'net. I was curious: was the Wikipedia definition of Oi! worthwhile (unlike the Wikipedia definition of girl group)?

I was pleasently surprised to find it was. As a bonus, I also discovered a great way to waste a few hours (or, if you're like me, a few days): Bandtoband.com. I've only played around with it a bit, first connecting 7 Seconds to other bands, then Funkadelic. I was a bit surprised by the longest path I found - Madonna->Funkadelic. Expected that one to be shorter.

After playing around on that site for a while I returned to Wikipedia, looking up straightedge bands. Apparently there have been 3 'waves' of straightedge. I fit in best with (guess it) 'old school straight edge', even though I was listening primarily during the 'youth crew' era. (Confused? You won't be after checking this link out. Or, at least not by this anymore).
One of the articles mentioned the pro wrestler CM Punk. Straightedge posturing is part of his in-ring gimmick. Interesting. I really dig this kind of connection between disparate interests.

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Remember Jeff Healey? I told you he would be important. He played the leader of the bar band in the movie Roadhouse. Also in that movie was Terry Funk. A professional wrestler.

See? Sooner or later everything comes down to pro wrestling. Somehow.

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A little housekeeping here: this post is again way off task, but the next few should be more on-topic so to speak. Not that I'm abandoning the idea of not talking about what I'm talking about. Even though I'm talking about it.

Oy vey. I'm giving myself a headache. If only things were as simple as left and right, black and white, 0 and 1.

0.
1.

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road/See The Light

Well, Shinders folded.

Chances are this means nothing to you. Shinders was a Minneapoliis area newstand/collectables store. It was founded in 1916 and from 1992-2004 was my employer. 4 years of the current (prior to the recent shutdown) ownership managed what the Great Depression, WWII, Vietnam, and Iraq failed to do: shut 'er down.

I have fond childhood memories of Shinders. It was always a part of what "big city" to me. A place I could pick up the latest issue of "Maximum Rock n Roll" or whatever. Where I could feel a part of whatever pop culture clique I was aspiring to. Where the folks picking up "Better Homes and Gardens" were the odd ones out, and folks like me looking for obscure imported titles were the norm.

As an employer Shinders was a mixed bag. I was probably lucky to move on when I did. However, it was during my time at Shinders I moved from casual comics reader to die hard collector. It is a hobby that greatly enhanced my life, and working at Shinders had more than a little to do with my becoming passionate about it.

The downtown location used to be open 24 hours. I remember the lights, shopping in that store at 3 am.

Those lights are gone, now. There are other places with similar product, but Shinders is gone.

One commentator after the shutdown said he couldn't understand why folks were so loyal to that store.

Guess he never saw the lights.

My Tshirt Disturbs Me

Yesterday I was wearing a t-shirt from '92, around the time of the "Death of Superman" storyline in the (guess where) Superman titles. That is relevant because the shirt depicts (guess it again) Superman's funeral. (Don't worry. He died but he got better ...)

The shirt depicts a funeral procession with many of the DC heroes following behind the pall bearers carrying the casket. For fun I will sometimes try to name them all. Since many of them are at best minor characters, this is quite a task even for an alpha geek like me. Yesterday, looking at it, a few things bugged me a little.

1) No Lori Lemaris.

Come to think of it, I don't even know if she was in continuity (or real in the fake Superman universe) at that time. Goofy as DC comics may sometimes be, they have stayed away from things like mermaid girlfriends in modern continuity.

2) Beast Boy is a pall bearer.

The pall bearers include many of the heavy hitters hero-wise ... and Beast Boy. Why? I can't fathom it really.

3) No Batman.

Granted, Bats had his own problems around that time (broken back and all), and was in a "crabby pants" phase and probably didn't want to hang out any way. Still seems like a pretty major omission.