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Showing posts from April 22, 2007

Songs that make the AV Club Cry

Great 18 song mixlist on The AV Club--see title of this post. It's a list of a lot of music I've never heard/heard of, but then I'm not a music-writing professional, so what do I know? This list provoked 403 (!) comments, hipsters weighing in on sad pop music. Makes sense that there would be so many comments, since everyone knows that the best songs are the saddest songs. My two cents: Ani DiFranco's cover of Prince's When U Were Mine. She performed this as an encore when I saw her back in the summer of '99 at Red Rocks outside of Denver, unaccompanied save for Maceo Parker on Soprano Sax. Maybe it was the vodka watermelon, but I sobbed like a baby. We had great seats, the city of Denver was shining like diamonds behind the stage, I was in love... ah, college. At any rate, the song is doubly sad because it doesn't seem to exist anywhere but in my brain. No bootlegs, no album versions, no "Ani Live at Red Rocks" double albume, no YouTube, not

Howard Hallis, Driven...to Excellence!

I was searching for a brilliant piece of internet farcery, "Who Will Be Eaten First?" a Cthulhian parody of a Jack Chick tract.* Sadly, instead of the mindless horror of The Old Ones, I found something much more soul-chilling: a lawyerly cease-and-desist order. (http://www.howardhallis.com/bis/cthulhuchick/) (Again, sorry for the cut-and-paste--I am totally repeatedly flummoxed by blogger with the linking) On the happier side of things, checking out Hallis's site led me to [duh-duh-duh ominous music] The Picture of Everything. Hallis is illustrating all of popular culture: [http://www.thepictureofeverything.com/] Wow! I would love to snip some of it to show on this site, but that seems iffy, and the image is also really huge. Really huge. I mean, it's everything, right? *For those of you for whom this term is unfamiliar, Jack Chick is the producer of some theologically revolting cartoon ...strips? They're tiny little things, two panels per page, and they a