Saturday, April 21, 2007

Saturday Music Special: Chris Cornell Live



This past Thursday I had the good fortune of seeing one of my favorite singers live. Chris Cornell, who you either remember from Soundgarden or know from Audioslave, played at Avalon (a 1,000 person venue on Landsdowne Street in Boston), and he rocked the damn house.

Cornell came out swinging with "Spoonman", and continued to run through a veritable "best of" from Soundgarden's heyday. He mixed in an Audioslave track here and there, most people cheered like crazy. Even more did so when the unexpected Temple of The Dog guitar lines began to ring.

Cornell's voice, probably the best in recent rock history, is deceptive. He mis-stepped on "Hunger Strike", going flat on the raucous chorus' high note. His folly was redeemed when we all realized that he just hadn't warmed up before the show - and all of a sudden the clouds parted, the waves crashed in, and Cornell called out to "Say Hello To Heaven". On pitch. On his game. He still has it, folks.

About midway through the show, the band (whose talents, while great, can't compare to Kim Thayil's guitar, or even Tom Morello's) left the stage. Cornell, bathed by a single spotlight, picked up an acoustic guitar and told us that "this is where the trouble usually starts". He played through a number of songs off his first solo record, "Euphoria Morning" - all the while reminding us that his first show as just "Chris Cornell" was here in Boston, and that he loved these small shows, because these were for the "real fuckin' fans". The crowd cheered.

As Cornell broke into another Audioslave number, the band filed back in and proceeded to rock. I think Cornell told us that one of the guitar players (the one on his right) was named "Ducky". Ducky channeled the aforementioned Kim Thayil as best he could on "Pretty Noose", and drew praise from us in the crowd.

As he closed out his second and final encore, Cornell roused us with "Slaves & Bulldozers", a track that enticed my companion and I to high-five and exclaim that this track was for the true fans - a statement that drew scowls from the Meat Loaf lookalike that had wedged his rotund self between us. He didn't know the words. As Cornell left the stage, fist pumped straight up at the sky, he cried out, "See you next time!".

"He played it all." The guy behind me exclaimed as we filed out at the end of the night. And right he was.

Sunday, April 15, 2007

The Sunday Music Special

Last week, I heard the song "Tamacun", by Rodrigo y Gabriela & have since downloaded every album and video of theirs that I could find on my favorite torrent indexes.

Embedded below is a video of them playing the song live. Enjoy.




Here's a link to their official site.

Saturday, April 14, 2007

The Saturday Video Special

Peyton Manning's "United Way" Parody Commercial (from his recent SNL appearance):

Enjoy!


Wednesday, April 04, 2007

A Breath Of Fresh Air

Since I've been waxing a bit preachy for the last couple of days, I felt now would be an appropriate time to share my favorite banned (and consequently NSFW) television commercial.

Enjoy, and see you in the funny pages...


Monday, April 02, 2007

"I Haven't Seen Evil Dead 2, yet..."

Saying that you "get bored easily" is like code for "I grew up in the nineties."

Now I could certainly articulate the restlessness that characterizes us nineties kids more glamorously, but I feel like that would be a betrayal of sorts. I can't very well reveal the secrets quietly kept by my generation without sacrificing my place among the restless.

The best I can do is to tell you that it's not the lack of stimulation, it's the lack of stimulation's constant flow - Ludovico style - that seems to be the root cause of our collective anxieties.

Think about it like this: remember that first commercial that came on years ago about kids with ADD? It talked about how an afflicted child's brain was like a TV that kept changing channels. It had that nasty white noise and static violently tearing through infomercials, cartoons, sitcoms, films, and National Geographic specials alike. Well if ever a decade was akin to an ADD afflicted child's brain, the nineties was totally fucking it.

So why this sudden desire to enumerate that which sets apart the nineties and the decade that preceded it...besides hair and music, that is? I'm not entirely sure. It's just something that's been on my mind as of late because, well, lately I've been really bored. I'm bored with just about everything and just about everyone around me. I'm bored with being able to predict my whereabouts on a given weeknight, three weeks hence. I'm a little horrified at the fact that I spend most mornings blog crawling and watching the news. The news has been showing reruns for like three years, and I hate reruns.

Then at the same time, I absolutely love the fact that every morning I rise, make coffee, and hear about what's going on in the world that day. I love knowing that some crazy bitch drove across half the country with a duffel bag full of goodies on some crazy mission to kidnap the "other woman" (word up, NASA). I actually am quite keen on the idea that every Tuesday night, I go and visit my favorite watering hole, talk to my favorite bartenders, and drink a glass of my favorite scotch.

That's the other thing about us nineties kids. We're terrible hypocrites. We love and hate just about everything at the same time. Like, I HATE Justin Timberlake...but I'm kind of digging on him to. Not his soulless attempts at music, but rather stuff like his SNL appearance. I HATED 300 for the same reasons I thought Sin City wasn't all that grand, but I still went to see in IMAX...'cause it looked sooooo fucking cool in IMAX. I HATE Boston because the weather is so often best described as, well, shitty. But I love Boston because it's home and it's full of the people, places, and things that I'm most fond of spending my time with.

So maybe it's not so much a nineties kid thing as it is an east-coast thing? Nah. If I was from out west, or worse mid-west, and all things were still equal (education, cable service, high speed internet), I have a feeling that I'd feel much the same way about most things as I do now. But like Tom Wilkinson said in that movie, "what you feel only matters to you". (Tom, by the way, should get an Oscar just for getting out of bed in the morning.) So why burden others with your thoughts? Well, that's another thing about us nineties kids...we're likely to tell you exactly what we think is what at just about any point in time. So there it is.