Life Soundtracks via Facebook, pt 1 (updated)

So, over the weekend, another one of those pass-around lists happened on Facebook. I wrote a response, but posted it only there, which seems foolish in light of the follow-up I’ve also been asked to write, so here’s my 25-album list in response to these instructions:

List 15 albums that had such a profound effect on you that they changed your life, or the way you looked at it. They sucked you in and took you over for days, weeks, months, years. These are the albums that you can use to identify time, places, people, emotions. These are the albums that, no matter what they were thought of musically, shaped your world.

I snagged the idea from someone who’d expanded to 20, so I felt no compunctions about expanding to 25. This updated, edited version also includes mental snapshots for context.

  1. Lifes Rich Pageant, REM, 1985. A Columbia House cassette and the crappy deck in a ’78 Regal. Twenty-four years later, I meet Mike Mills in an airport, and what I think of is the first time “Begin the Begin” hit my ears in that car.
  2. The Joshua Tree, U2, 1987. See prior art; the beginning of the rest of my life, whether I knew it or not, since this thread leads eventually to Erin.
  3. Trace, Son Volt, 1995. A loaner pickup, theater in Texas, and weird scenes inside a corrugated metal barn.
  4. Sticky Fingers, The Rolling Stones, 1971. Chris Jolly’s room at Mallet, ca. 1990
  5. Mars Needs Guitars, Hoodoo Gurus, 1985. The back seat of the family car, an actual Walkman, and a drive home from the Coast
  6. Especially for You, The Smithereeens, 1986. One side of a well-worn cassette dubbed from Eric’s copy, played on constant repeat from 1986 to 1988.
  7. Uh-Huh, John Cougar Mellencamp, 1983. The other side of that same cassette.
  8. The Velvet Underground & Nico, The Velvet Underground, 1967. John Smith, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 1988.
  9. The Heart of Saturday Night, Tom Waits, 1974. A sort of romance, and an unrelated long nighttime drive through the North Carolina hills in the cold, cold winter.
  10. 1984, Van Halen, 1984. Church trips. Really.
  11. In Through the Out Door, Led Zeppelin, 1979. We dance madly in the hallway outside my room while Frank “shoots up,” Tuscaloosa, 1990 or thereabouts.
  12. Shelter, Lone Justice, 1986. Capstone Summer Honors Program, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 1987.
  13. Journeyman, Eric Clapton, 1989. A pitch black auditorium, a single floating cigarette, and the best opening chords ever.
  14. Couldn’t Stand the Weather, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble, 1984. Mike Adams’ Sentra, 1987.
  15. Little Earthquakes, Tori Amos, 1992. Cassie hated it. I loved it. 1992.
  16. Purple Rain, Prince and the Revolution, 1984. C’mon.
  17. Jane’s Addiction, Jane’s Addiction, 1987. In some weird grad students’ house south of Hardy near Elam, I get stoned for the first time, 1987.
  18. Cure for Pain, Morphine, 1993. Birmingham visit, 1995, and I discover Morphine via Mohney.
  19. Amnesiac, Radiohead, 2001. Eric and Chet summer as bachelors, 2001. Also REDACTED.
  20. The Soul Cages, Sting, 1991. Sting sings about my dad, 1991.
  21. One Fair Summer Evening, Nanci Griffith, 1988. The Tom Waits girl hipped me to this live Griffith set in 1993 or 1994. It was years before I realized I’d moved within blocks of the venue in question.
  22. Concrete Blonde, Concrete Blonde, 1986. On near infinite repeat from Patrick’s room, ca. 1990.
  23. Pretty Hate Machine, Nine Inch Nails, 1989. ANGRY. Also, HORNY.
  24. The Trinity Session, The Cowboy Junkies, 1987. I drive Frank and Eric P to the farm in 1988. We stop at a now-gone record store to pick this up on the way out of town.
  25. Doo Dad, Webb Wilder, 1991. Hattiesburg done good. “There’s a glimmer of morning / Just over the tree-line…”

The other “Groundhog day” film

I didn’t know this until just now, but Groundhog Day is almost certainly a stolen film; the plot first surfaced in a 1973 short story called 12:01 PM, wherein the loop is only an hour long, and the only one aware of it is a sad-sack businessman.

The story was then made into a 1990 Academy-Award winning short film far, far more disturbing than the Bill Murray classic. A subsequent TV movie expanded the idea to a full day.

The author and 1990 director brought suit, apparently, but were unable to compete legally with the essentially limitless resources of Columbia Pictures.

The good news is that the 1990 film is available on Youtube, split into 3 parts (total running time is 25 minutes). The protagonist is played by an actor you will find familiar.

In which I cop to watching terrible TV movies

I somehow ended up watching all four hours of the horrible TV adaptation of XIII last Sunday and last night, and boy am I sorry.

Here’s the main problem: XIII was a very well-received graphic novel first, over in Belgium of all places. It then made the leap into an interesting first-person shooter whose charm was enhanced by the fact that it was done not in a photorealistic style, but instead as though the player were playing the comic. Nice idea, and apparently well-executed.

Well, here comes the nearly inevitable film adaptation, clearly shot on the cheap with has-been (as in “has-been MUCH THINNER before now”) Val Kilmer in a bit part, and Stephen Dorff as the eponymous XIII.

And it’s bad. Really bad. Granted, there probably hasn’t been a decent plotline yet that actually works well in all three formats (game, comic, TV) because of the various demands and quirks of each medium, so they definitely get SOME slack for taking a swing at it. And there were parts that weren’t awful, but on the whole the entire affair ran on rails, telegraphing twists well before they happened. Plus, since it needed to anchor two evenings, it felt super-bloated at four hours (well, minus commercials). Add to this the fact that the plot of Shooter is basically the same thing, but in a much better movie, and you get some annoyance.

However, the single greatest area this steamer fails is in preventable problems clearly the result of a complete disregard for verifiable facts. To wit:

  1. One scene, said to be “the day before election day,” or early November, shows Arlington National Cemetery under a few inches of snow. Snow that early in or around the District would be freakish and weird, and while not unprecedented, is still out of place here.

  2. Compounding the error, though, is the very next shot of the film, which shows a lush and verdant White House lawn. Trees are full of leaves, the sky is blue, and there’s no hint of winter. Um, what? News flash to filmmakers: The White House is only about two miles from Arlington, dumbasses.

  3. In another shot displaying a willful ignorance of basic DC geography, a phone call placed from “a pay phone in Dupont Circle” shows the caller with a clear view of the Capitol down a wide boulevard. Leaving aside for a moment the basic problem — the Capitol isn’t visible from Dupont — the view provided OF the Capitol is from the east, and Dupont is northwest.

  4. A plotpoint of the film is a presidential race between a successor Vice President and the opposite-party candidate, who happens to be the assassinated President’s brother. That’s a little weird, but here’s the really fun part: a political ad we see in the film claims that the Vice President “as governor of Illinois voted to cut funding for the Marines.” Um, what?

  5. A late-film development is the deployment of a dirty bomb at a Bethesda polling station on election day, as a way to allow the government to impose martial law and disrupt the electoral process. This opens the door for a twofer of stupidity. First, we see elaborate, TSA-style security measures at the polling station, which have never been in place any time I’ve voted anywhere.

  6. The real screamer, though, is that (according to dialog in the film) DC suburb Bethesda, Maryland is “four hours from DC.” That’s some metro line, isn’t it?

Compare all this to the slavish attention to real-world geography shown by the Fallout 3 team on a video game.

Sigh. It’s what I get for watching a broadcast network, really. If NBC/CBS/ABC/Fox ever get something decent on the air, it’s got to be a complete accident.

In which we run some more

Mildly hungover on Saturday, I ran anyway: 4.46miles in 57:33, including my longest uninterrupted run yet (just over 2 miles, after which my heart was threatening to mutiny outright) and my lowest mile pace yet (11:55) — well, “yet” meaning “in this iteration of running.” Ten years ago, I could do a sub-30-minute 5K.

Perfectly fine today, I did a brisk 4.2 (or 4.12? Somehow, my Garmin desktop software and MapMyRun disagree) walk in just over an hour. Bit by bit… More running tomorrow, wherein I try to make it 2.5 uninterrupted miles running.

Fox, why you got to be so douchey?

The Sarah Connor Chronicles is back from an extended hiatus, and is the lead-in show to Joss Whedon’s new Dollhouse. However, collisions being what they are, we’re grabbing the Terminator stuff with the TV and getting DH online.

Except Fox has TSCC scheduled from 7:00 to 8:01, which makes it a PITA to tape TSCC and then grab something else on another channel at 8. It also means that even if you rig up a manual recording for TSCC, you miss the last minute or two of the show. This is clearly a ploy to drive viewers to Dollhouse, but it’s a cheesetastic dick move even if it is in service of a show creator we Heathen enjoy (Whedon).

Well, fuck you, Fox. And to think they wonder why people torrent TV; crap like this makes it objectively simpler to just download than it is to watch normally. (And, seriously, fuck Fox’s busy-as-shit halfass view-online site. It’s fallen down on me too many times to bother with anymore when I can get an HD torrent to watch without wrestling with browser plug-ins and net congestion.)

Friday Walkies

4.24mi, 1:07. Weird route this time that I don’t think I’ll repeat, given the traffic involved, but it was (sort of) worth trying.

This is a bad idea

Microsoft is getting into the retail store business, and has hired a Wal-Mart exec to lead the effort; the move is heralded as “taking a page out of Apple’s playbook,” and that’s almost certainly what they think they’re doing — after all, Apple has had a great deal of success with its stylish brand-enhancing shops.

This is baffling on a number of levels (timing for one), but the biggest head-scratcher is why they think anyone would go to a Redmond-owned store to buy any MS product. Apple stores work because Apple kit is perceived as stylish, hip, interesting, and desirable on levels unconnected with mundane IT concerns. There are plenty of legitimate technical reasons to prefer the Mac platform, both in terms of hardware and software, but those are secondary, I think, to the appeal of the stores.

Apple also offers a unity of design and function as well as a delightful marriage of hardware and software that Microsoft simply can’t match (this “we make both” angle is a nontrivial aspect to Mac reliability). Microsoft, on the other hand, has a broad and confusing suite of products, but doesn’t sell any computers at all unless you count the XBox.

Further, Apple enjoys tremendous channel control; it’s next to impossible to buy a new Mac for much less than retail, so a buyer doesn’t hurt themselves financially by doing their deal at an Apple store vs. ordering online. Microsoft’s gear and software, on the other hand, is traditionally deeply discounted by resellers, and MS won’t be able to compete with or undercut those prices without poisoning their own channel. End result: High prices at MS retail, lower prices at Amazon, and no crowds at the shops.

Sony, Dell, and Gateway all tried to do the retail thing, and unless I’m wholly incorrect none of them managed (or have managed) to make the shops interesting from a financial perspective. Nobody ever stood in line for anything these guys made, and the same is true for Microsoft. IT managers herald the next rev of Exchange Server, sure, and those stung by Vista await Windows 7 with cautious optimism, but none of those guys are going to stand in line for their upgrades.

Look for the Microsoft stores to be awkward, weird, and without obvious charm — which is more or less what happens every time MS apes something someone else did without understanding why the other party was successful.

Thank God there’s no REAL crime in South Carolina

Grandstanding douchebag Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott has arrested 8 in a quest to charge Michael Phelps in connection with candid party pictures appearing to show him smoking pot.

In a guns-drawn raid on college kids,

deputies seized four laptop computers, a desktop computer and a computer storage drive from his client’s home — supposedly to try to find evidence against Phelps, Harpootlian said, adding they refused his request Wednesday to return the items to his client.

This over a case that is, at best, simple possession, a misdemeanor in South Carolina (and nearly every other state as well).

Nice.

More running foolishness

Today I broke 5 miles; prior runs advertised as “about 5” were in the 4.7 to 4.8 range; this one was 5.04 according to Garmin, and I covered it in a little over an hour — average pace just over 13, including just three walking songs. Bit by bit…

Bill Gates does something hilarious and cool

At the uber-elite TED conference during his presentation on the eradication of malaria, he did something fantastic:

“Malaria is spread by mosquitoes,” Gates said while opening a jar onstage at the Technology, Entertainment, Design Conference — a gathering known to attract technology kings, politicians, and Hollywood stars.

“I brought some. Here I’ll let them roam around. There is no reason only poor people should be infected.”

Of course, the mosquitos released at TED weren’t malarial vectors, but the point was made, and I suspect he had everyone’s attention for the remainder of his talk.

FanTAStic.

(Note: I thought this was already posted back on the 5th, but here it is in the “drafts” box. Oops.)

Attn: Space Scientists

In an unprecedented space collision, a commercial Iridium communications satellite and a defunct Russian satellite ran into each other Tuesday above northern Siberia, creating a cloud of wreckage, officials said today.

Was this event (a) sort of inevitable or (b) bizarrely unlikely?

In which people are thanked, publically

If you, in the course of the holiday season, were to be gifted with some fine Imperial-pint sized beer glasses by certain Jackson-area attorneys, and were then to, after a post-holiday period of abstention, acquire some fine, fine beer to enjoy in said glasses, two things might come to mind:

  1. “Goodness me! This beer is actually much better in the pint glass, owing probably to the greater ability to smell the beer!”; and

  2. “Why, as God as my witness, it seems a crime against humanity and Christendom that modern beers are served in such paltry 12-oz bottles; my fine Imperial Pint glasses have room for much more beer than that!”

That is all.

Obama, Secrets, and the Lapdog Press

I’m still pissed off about the Obama position on the extraordinary rendition lawsuit — that, basically, the whole lawsuit must be quashed because it endangers state secrets, which is exactly the position of the Bush administration. I think Glenn Greenwald at Salon pretty much nails it, along with what’s wrong with the press supposedly covering Washington and presumably entrusted with holding them accountable.

I was going to excerpt, but you should really just go read the whole thing, including Greenwald’s excoriation of the twin douchebags over at the Atlantic, Andy Sullivan and Mark Armbinder, who are now behaving more like stenographers than reporters.

Running Redux

I’m doing it again. I said I hated it, but I’m doing it anyway.

I had a private moment in the Jos. A. Banks dressing room about six months ago (wherein I had to opt for the size above “38”), and consciously decided that, after the holidays, it was all going to change — and, shockingly, it has. I set my sights low to begin with, and just decided I’d do two things:

  1. Eat better by keeping healthy foods in the house. I have a tendency to take the path of least resistance, foodwise, so this is key. Keeping healthy choices around means I eat healthy things.

  2. Take an hour-long walk every day. I’ve run in the past, and can’t go daily, but walking I figure I can do. In an hour, I’d typically go something around 3.2-3.5 miles, depending on pace road choice and whatnot.

I kept to that for January, more or less — there were still pizzas and walk-less days, but precious few — and managed to lose ten pounds. Then we got to February, and my walks seemed to need a little something. Then I got to last Thursday and a similarly private yet completely opposite moment in my own closet: formerly tight pants fit again.

Well, there’s nothing like positive reinforcement, so on Friday my walk became about half walk, half run, and I ended up going 4.09 miles, according to Google. It’s not a great pace, but it’s my pace.

I thought the run was going to be a one-off, and returned to walking on Saturday (faster: 3.7 miles) . . . and then on Sunday I did the half-and-half again (just over 4).

And then I got tired of mapping these things manually after Gary told me about the Garmin running GPS devices, and in a moment of weakness I popped for one on Sunday. Today’s run was my first time out with it, and it’s really encouraging to see pace and distance in real time. It’s even more fun for a geek like me to have this data — and even period data, by miles! — available later. How fast was my first mile? My second? Am I keeping pace? It’s all right there, and that’s neat. (Today: 4.7mi in 1:05.)

Even better, the GPS will spit out mapping info that sites like MapMyRun.com (as well as Garmin’s own MotionBased.com) will map using GMaps, even creating embed-able maps like below. Delightful.

Well, sort of. MapMyRun is completely overrun with ads and geegaws, and if there were a better option I’d jump on it in a heartbeat. My friend Andrea suggests RunningAhead.com, but that site, while cool, doesn’t seem to do data import at all yet (at least not inside the browser, which Garmin publishes a plugin for — that’s how MMR works). It’s also essentially the work of one guy, which makes me nervous — I’d rather use a site with a business plan (though, in RA’s defense, it does appear to be endorsed by Runner’s World).

So, Heathen Nation, any suggestions on online running logs with GPS integration?

Dept. of Mysteries

Amazon’s launched a new Kindle with significant improvements today, about 15 months after the original device’s launch in November 2007. However, they’ve failed a key point: Apple, for example, tends to increase features over time while decreasing price, but the baffler here is that the new Kindle is still $360 — or about the price of a basic laptop.

It’s a neat toy, but I’m not sure I really want one at that price point. It’s too delicate-looking. At $199, it’s compelling. At nearly twice that, it’s something I think I’d only really want if I were on an airplane much more often than I am now.

Dept. of Duh

Turns out, replacing the eartips and filters on your Etymotic 6i headphones can result in a nontrivial increase in fidelity, especially if you use them a lot, and have had them for over four years and use them fairly frequently. So, you know, do that.

BTW, if you fly a lot — or, really, at all — you can’t beat these Etys (unless you go upmarket, and buy nicer Etys; the 6i set is designed for use with mp3 decks, and therefore don’t require an extra amp). The “in-ear” monitor style of headphone produces more sonic isolation than any of the big, bulky active noise-reduction phones from Sony or Bose, and are much easier to carry. They’re not cheap, but few genuinely high-quality things are. (Plus, about an hour into a long flight with a chatty seatmate, the the prospect of $150 headphones will seem like a bargain. Trust me. I know things.)

Why Seizure Is a Bad Idea for Law Enforcement

If you give empowered people the additional power of seizing goods without a burden of proof, eventually you get situations like this:

TENAHA — A two-decade-old state law that grants authorities the power to seize property used in a crime is wielded by some agencies against people who are never charged with, much less convicted, of a crime.

Law enforcement authorities in this East Texas town of 1,000 people seized property from at least 140 motorists between 2006 and 2008, and, to date, filed criminal charges against fewer than half, according to a San Antonio Express-News review of court documents.

Virtually anything of value was up for grabs: cash, cell phones, personal jewelry, a pair of sneakers, and often, the very car that was being driven through town. Some affidavits filed by officers relied on the presence of seemingly innocuous property as the only evidence that a crime had occurred.

Linda Dorman, a great-grandmother from Akron, Ohio, had $4,000 in cash taken from her by local authorities when she was stopped while driving through town after visiting Houston in April 2007. Court records make no mention that anything illegal was found in her van and show no criminal charges filed in the case. She is still waiting for the return of what she calls “her life savings.”

Dorman’s attorney, David Guillory, calls the roadside stops and seizures in Tenaha “highway piracy,” undertaken by a couple of law enforcement officers whose agencies get to keep most of what is seized.

This is robbery, plain and simple, and the officers involved should be charged as such, or at least held personally liable together with the state. Seizing property without a conviction is simply obscene, and will lead to abuses like these no matter what supposed “safeguards” lawmakers try to incorporate.

(HT: Cathy.)

Wow. Bank of America just got MORE evil

They’re trying to suggest to survivors that they may be liable for a dead parent’s debt — apparently as a matter of policy.

Paul Kelleher: Yes, I’m calling to inform you that my mom died on the 24th of January.

Bank of America Estates representative: I’m sorry. Oh, it looks like she never even missed a payment. That’s too bad. Well, how are you planning to take care of her balance?

PK: I’m not going to. She has no estate to speak of, but you should feel free to just go through the standard probate procedure. I’m certainly not legally obligated to pay for her.

BOA: You mean you’re not going to help her out?

PK: I wouldn’t be helping her out — she’s dead. I’d be helping you out.

BOA: Oh, that’s really not the way to look at it. I know that if it were my mother, I’d pay it. That’s why we’re in the banking crisis we’re in: banks having to write off defaulted loans.

The rep’s apparent intention, as Kelleher described it, was to mislead him into believing that he was obligated — at first legally, then, failing that, morally — to cover his mother’s debt (which, in any case, was not large: she had had a $1000 limit on her card). Of course, Kelleher was sophisticated enough to know that’s not true. But how many other less savvy callers in similar situations, he wondered, might respond to the rep’s breezy “how are you planning to take care of her balance?,” with a confused “I guess I’ll mail in a check”?

Wow. Classy move, BofA. Remind me to start using you oh, NEVER.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

In re: the previously reported dumbassery of the freshly-hired Tennessee coach: SEC To Kiffin: Shut up, dumbass.

University of Tennessee football coach Lane Kiffin was issued a public reprimand by Southeastern Conference Commissioner Mike Slive for accusing Florida’s Urban Meyer of a recruiting violation during his pursuit of Pahokee, Fla. wide receiver NuKeese Richardson.

During a recruiting celebration banquet Thursday morning, Kiffin alleged that Meyer repeatedly called Richardson while he was on his official visit to UT.

[…]

However, that’s not an NCAA violation, or against SEC rules, but Kiffin’s comments were.

“œCoach Kiffin has violated the Southeastern Conference Code of Ethics,” Slive said in a release. “œSEC Bylaw 10.5.1 clearly states that coaches and administrators shall refrain from directed public criticism of other member institutions, their staffs or players.

“The phone call to which Coach Kiffin referred to in his public comments is not a violation of SEC or NCAA rules. We expect our coaches to have an understanding and knowledge of conference and NCAA rules.”

Dumbass.

In which we are impressed

I finally got around to playing with iTunes’ “Genius” feature. Frankly, the hype and expectations were such that I figured it would suck, so it just wasn’t on my radar. I’m not even sure why I gave it a whirl today.

Holy Crap.

Feeding it “Neighborhood #1” from Arcade Fire’s first as a seed, it then spat out 24 tracks from my library that, as it turns out, I wanted to hear right now. The list:

genius-playlist.png

Yeah, this is gonna get used. If you haven’t played with Genius, do so. Today.

From the Quote of the Day mailing list

“I am seriously glad to be here tonight at the annual Alfalfa dinner. I know that many you are aware that this dinner began almost one hundred years ago as a way to celebrate the birthday of General Robert E. Lee. If he were here with us tonight, the General would be 202 years old. And very confused.”

Barack Obama, U.S. President.

I never get tired of this; Porsche Uber Alles

Thanks to their brilliant financial maneuver previously mentioned here, Porsche’s 2008 profits actually exceed their revenues.

Porsche’s profits before taxes of $11.6 billion in the fiscal year ended in July were actually larger than its total revenues from sales of $10.2 billion. Not even Google has profits exceeding 100%. Only 12% of Porsche’s profits came from making cars.

[…]

In 2005 the CEO started buying into VW, at a time when VW stock was below $50. Today it’s at almost $400, and in October it briefly hit more than twice that when Porsche revealed that it indirectly owned options to acquire 74% of VW. (Analysts are guessing that the company is paying an average price for VW stock of $100 to $150 per share.)

The announcement sparked such a panic by short-sellers that the company offered to boost liquidity by selling options on more than 3% of VW stock – making in the process another tidy profit that Goldman Sachs estimates to be about $8 billion.

By having options on so many of the shares, there really weren’t enough shares for those shorting the stock to make good on their promises, producing the drastic run-up in the VW price — and an absurdly huge windfall for Porsche.

LOL.

Obama, apparently a bit of a dick:

5yxcu0.jpg

(Stolen from Reddit, hosted here because the original is on some ephemeral photosharing site.)

Wow. All this time I thought it was Fulmer…

…but apparently just moving to Knoxville makes you a douche. Freshly hired Tennessee coach Lane Kiffin is accusing Florida coach Urban Meyer of recruiting violations before he’s even coached a down, and for no apparent reason.

Precis: Kiffin signed a sought-after Florida prospect (Nu’Keese Richardson) that Meyer was also pursuing. Kiffin is sore that Meyer called Richardson while he was on an official visit to Knoxville, but that’s no violation. Kiffin’s just wasting no time in making sure everyone in the SEC knows he’s a whiner even when he wins, so at least he’s got that going for him.

Florida AD Jeremy Foley:

“There was no rule violation and we have confirmed this with Southeastern Conference. It is obvious that Coach Kiffin doesn’t know that there is not a rule precluding phone contact with a prospect during an official visit on another campus during a contact period. His allegations are inappropriate, out of line and, most importantly, totally false. It is completely unfair to Urban Meyer, our coaching staff, our football program and our institution. The appropriate action at this time in my opinion is for Coach Kiffin to make a public apology.

Nice one, Rockytop. Can’t wait to whip your sorry butts again next year.

(via Edgar.)

No more Goo-Goo Muck. Dammit.

Lux Interior is dead. You don’t know who he was, maybe, but you know the sounds he made with The Cramps, and you know the CBGB crowd he ran with.

It’s been shocking to most of the people I’ve talked to about Interior that he was an astounding 62 years old, hardly an age associated with transgressive psychobilly music, but there it is. Interior was born in October of 1946 into a bland and banal postwar world, and founded the Cramps in 1973. Interior and his lifelong companion Poison Ivy were the among the first to blend punk or pre-punk ideas with rockabilly, and created a sound more or less all their own.

The horrible and sad thing is this: Arguably the most significant and important generation of American rock musicians came through CBGB in the early-to-mid 1970s, and they were mostly 20 to 25 years old at the time, and with some outliers were therefore mostly born between 1945 and 1955. These people were born into prosperous postwar America, with radio shows and Ed Sullivan and Elvis, and somehow managed to create something entirely new. It was these bands — the Cramps, Talking Heads, Blondie, Patti Smith, Misfits, Dead Boys, Television, the Ramones, New York Dolls, the Velvet Underground, and others — that shaped a good chunk of what’s interesting in modern rock music, and it’s these bands that are growing older at an alarming rate.

Losing Dee Dee, in 2002, and Johnny, in 2004 — both born in 1951 — was the first shock, but we’re in for some more. These guys weren’t choirboys, and the elder statesmen in the group are closer to 70 than 60 (John Cale and Lou Reed, both born in 1942; Sterling Morrison, born the same year, got cancer and died young at 53).

Go listen to something loud, weird, and incomprehensible to your parents, since God knows that’s what Lux would want you to do, and it’s probably what the rest of the CBGB crowd would like, too. (Even if many of them are older than your parents; Mrs Heathen’s mom is younger than Debbie Harry or Lou Reed.)

(Has the great CBGB musical documentary been made yet? It’s probably not punk rock to want one, but I sure as hell do.)

(Lots more Cramps goodness at The Daily Swarm.)

Meanwhile, in the bizarre intersection of hip-hop and evangelicalism…

The hip-hop-Christian “p4cm” folks have an amusing line of shirts available, and they seem especially keen on getting the word about about becoming an EX-masturbator. They suggest you also follow the link and read — sorry: “hit up” — their new article inventively titled “Masturbation,” which is so full of evangelical-speak that it’s almost indecipherable:

And God’s method of operation for sex is marriage. He created the fibers of sex to be so strong that it could only be contained in the confines of marriage. What is marriage, that only It can contain the orgasm? Because only a contractual covenant can contain something so strong…Anything outside that method would self destruct. Any other orgasm achieved outside of marriage couldn’t handle its intense, explosive, addictive, domineering, gripping force without repercussions. Yes, you could very well achieve and very much well, enjoy one, but not without suffering the impact of its climactic aftershocks. Yes, I just said it, Church! Yes, the tremors may feel good, but the aftermath, the consequences of an illegal orgasm is traumatic. You can reach the heights of sexual stimulation during masturbation, but can you handle its control over your life?

Isn’t it a little, I dunno, creepy to push this kind of scaremongering about Rosy Palms and her Five Sisters in 2009? Also, how ’bout that grammar? Our official Heathen advice is to stop worrying about solo diddling and put that energy into something actually constructive. Item one on their new to-do list should probably be a proper composition class.

Principles of the American Cargo Cult

Via Making Light, we find this nearly perfect encapsulation of modern American non-think. The author explains:

I wrote these principles after reflecting on the content of contemporary newspapers and broadcast media and why that content disquieted me. I saw that I was not disturbed so much by what was written or said as I was by what is not. The tacit assumptions underlying most popular content reflect a worldview that is orthogonal to reality in many ways. By reflecting this skewed weltanschauung, the media reinforces and propagates it.

I call this worldview the American Cargo Cult, after the real New Guinea cargo cults that arose after the second world war. There are four main points, each of which has several elaborating assumptions. I really do think that most Americans believe these things at a deep level, and that these misbeliefs constantly underlie bad arguments in public debate.

His outline is simple, clear, and almost completely right as far as I can tell. He begins with:

I. Ignorance is innocence

Complicated explanations are suspect

The world is simple, and there must be a simple explanation for everything.

Certainty is strength, doubt is weakness

Admitting alternatives is undermining one’s own belief.

Changing one’s mind means one has wasted the time spent holding the prior opinion.

Your opinion matters as much as anyone else’s

When a person has studied a topic, he has no more real knowledge than you do, just a hidden agenda.

Hey, I said it was probably true, not likely to cause you to think kindly on your fellow man.

What a REAL apology looks like

The Senate Sergeant-at-arms — i.e., the fellow ultimate responsible for the crowd problems on Inauguration Day — has joined Facebook to post an exhaustive and complete apology for the problems some encountered trying to enter their seating areas, including the “tunnel of doom” problem.

It doesn’t make it right for those who couldn’t see the event despite having tickets (fairly fancy, privileged tickets, even — it was Blues and Purples who had trouble, not lowly Silvers like Mrs Heathen and I), but it certainly IS refreshing to see a public figure issue such an honest mea culpa.

Nerdery of a different stripe

So, a question has burned in a certain community for some time about Senator, then President-elect, and now President Obama. It’s a terribly important one, at least in a certain group, and that question is of course: “What watch does Barack Obama wear?”

Well, wonder no more. Short answer: he wore a fairly uninteresting TAG-Heuer until August of 2007, when his Secret Service detail gave him a watch for his 46th birthday (purchased from the Secret Service employees’ store).

It’s this big black chronograph that’s been in most of the campaign pictures, his official portrait, and that was on his wrist when he took the oath. No, you can’t buy one, at least not like his; they’re not that expensive, but they are limited to Secret Service employees.

Aren’t you glad that’s settled?