August 31, 2007
ARCHIVAL
I did not know The Wire had decided to post older pieces online. (I am sure they did this ages ago, but I am not so quick.) This piece on Timbaland is about to turn nine. Here’s hoping they put up some more stuff. Thank you, Rob, Chris and/or Tony.
MOUTHS
Will you be in Seattle on November 8th? I will be and would love to see you there, if you are there. Or are going to be. There.
TOOL-HOP
It turns out that the tool described below is called a stampertje, but so is something else. I do not want to spoil the fun. Google up the word and see what you see.
JUKE BOX
Miles Raymer, actual Person From Chicago, writes:
“DJ Nate’s been blowing my mind in an extreme fashion. He’s like the juke Aphex Twin. Seventeen years old and breaking so many rules that I’m not even sure he realized they were there to break in the first place.”
August 30, 2007
THIS IS WHY SOMETHING ELSE IS HOT
Piera Gelardi pointed a camera at me and Philippe von Borries asked me a question. I stood still and answered.
LET US ALL HELP RHODRI OUT
The song is worth your bother. BUT NEVERMIND AND ANYWAY = SO LIFE = MAGICKAL GLASSES + FAKE STEELY DAN.
August 29, 2007
August 27, 2007
MASH UP
If you order sparkling water with lime (or lemon) in Amsterdam, your drink will arrive with the tool pictured above. This tool does not just stir—no! The flat and gently spiked end can mash up your lemon or lime, should you choose to put in the time. How multi-taskingly hot is that?
August 25, 2007
LOWER THE ROOFBEAMS, CARPENTER
So good, until the very last image. Leave a tender moment alone! To coin a phrase!
August 24, 2007
UP-TO-THE-MINUTE 50 CENT REPORT
Curtis has had an entire year to come up with a Lil Wayne diss. After months of mental marination, he’s given us “Part Time Lover.” The beatdown? The ether?
50 thinks it’s kinda gay that Wayne kissed Baby on the lips. Let that lyrical homicide sink in. Take a few days off work, if necessary.
CYCLOTRON SAYS: 50 is stinking up the joint like week-old herring because he is a hip-hop board commenter from 2006.
(Even Willie the Kid, a better rapper, had the same non-ammo for Wayne, with some Trina insults added. Interesting that nobody is trying to body Wanye’s lyrics. I wonder why.)
UP-TO-THE-MINUTE WAYNE REPORT
NO: Princess, "Throne" f/Lil Wayne
BIG YES: Lil Wayne, "Bandana On The Right Side" f/Nu Jerzey Devil
(Wayne just blamed his valet for the/a new "Carter III" delay. Which is odd, as he already apologized for this delay two months ago. Maybe he should drive his own car for a little while, or get an iPod.)
UPDATE
Reader Vanessa Lann writes:
“They’ve been rebuilding the Stedelijk Museum for two or three years now, and there’s a temporary Stedelijk Museum next to the Amsterdam Central Station. The former building was located next to the Van Gogh Museum on Paulus Potterstraat. I think they plan to bring that one back into being when all the renovations are completed. That’s probably why the Politie people were confused; it might not be on any maps at the moment.”
If you think politie should mostly be preventing college kids from getting run over by bicyclists when they come out of the Bob Marley coffee shop all mellow yellow, this ignorance is no big deal. But I examined the map with young po-po dude. I just looked up both Stedelijk addresses on the web—they were both visible on his little map. So, if you come to Amsterdam, make sure you have someone from The Hague (or perhaps Newark) show you around.
ALL DIALOGUE GUARANTEED
[American stops two young Politie officers on bicycles.]
“Pardon me. Thank you for stopping. Do you know where the Stedelijk Museum is?” [Incredibly famous museum.]
LADY POLITIE: “No.”
MAN POLITIE: [Takes out map and looks at it.] “It is not on my map. I am sorry, no. You will have to ask someone else.”
“I’ve asked five people. I thought the police might know.”
MAN POLITIE: [Laughing.] “No.”
August 22, 2007
WATCH MY FIETS
You have to ride a bike, no matter the destination, weather, or your state of mind. That is just how it is going down here.
August 21, 2007
AMSTERDAM IS NOT LARKING ABOUT
I am staying here in the apartment of my excellent friend, Jowi Schmitz. (She and her boyfriend are living on the houseboat: they got all types of housing here.) Jowi is a journalist, playwright, aikido yper-ninja, former bicycle mechanic, and novelist who will be holding a party for her new book tomorrow tonight. Her first novel (below, on left, with yellow jacket) is about a man named Leopold who carries eggs in his jacket. The new book (on right, in blue) is about two sisters with a very complicated relationship. I know this because Jowi told me. (The only Dutch I know is “coffee verkeerd,” which translates roughly as “mistaken coffee,” and will make the nice person bring you a latte if you say it out loud.) “Kus van je zus” is already in its second pressing, a fact which I found exciting. Jowi says Dutch press runs are quite small, so this is not quite as exciting as it sounds. I beg to differ.
August 20, 2007
DO NOT LOSE FOCUS
This is going to make for hot chart fisticuffs and a spike in Billboard’s newsstand numbers, but keep your eyes on the prize: September 11 is the release date for
August 19, 2007
August 17, 2007
August 13, 2007
THERE ARE SEVERAL THINGS TO SAY ABOUT THIS CORNBALL VIDEO
But I have only one question: did Justin get an iCar?
YOU THINK I’M GOING TO GET SICK OF THIS
and then I don’t. (This version seems to load a little slower than the old one: DO NOT PANIC.)
(Somebody put this video back up after Collie Buddz and his lawyers [or whoever] took it down.] Also: I don't give a shit if there's a white dancehall artist or two or twelve or none but isn’t it kinda, you know, textually wonky that dude is worried about the weed coming around? What happened to “soon come”? And who the hell runs out of weed? Can’t his manservant take the G5 to Mexico? Maybe this is about some famous herb drought that everybody knows about, if everybody is the everybody who smokes weeds.)
August 11, 2007
VAMPIRE WEEKEND, EAST RIVER MUSIC PROJECT, SATURDAY, AUGUST 11, 2007
People danced, tanners tanned, boats sped.
August 09, 2007
August 08, 2007
NOWHERE—I’M NAILED TO THE FLOOR
Zap Pow’s “Last War” + Tony Kelly + Lil Wayne + Promethazine = MY JAM.
August 06, 2007
August 05, 2007
August 03, 2007
BAT MAN
After the jump, you will find a brief piece on Meat Loaf. It was written last summer for Talk Of The Town. Meat Loaf and I met on a day in June or July of 2006. (I will look up the date and eliminate that vagueness.)
Meat Loaf has a problem with names, but being called Meat Loaf is not one of them. “I’ve been called Meat since I was nine months old,” the singer and actor said recently at a diner on Fifty-Fourth Street. “Teachers in school called me that. It’s not like a stage name. My original birth certificate said Marvin Lee Aday. There was a commercial when I was a kid that said ‘Poor, fat Marvin can’t wear Levi’s.’ It upset me to no end. If somebody called me up on the phone and asked for ‘Marvin,’ I would tell him them he wasn’t there. “
Mr. Loaf was in town to promote the Halloween 2006 release of his new album, “Bat Out of Hell III: The Beast Is Loose.” With a day off, Loaf decided to catch a showing of “Pirates of the Caribbean II” at the Ziegfeld. Partly due to the sun, and partly because he had scratched his cornea two nights before at a performance in New Jersey, Loaf wore rimless Rayban sunglasses, which he removed when he spoke. (“It might have been a bit of ash from the fireworks. The doctors couldn’t figure it out, but they’re sure the cornea is scratched.”)
Roughly as stocky as he was in 1978, Loaf wore a black Nat Nast vintage shirt with white stitching, white vents and an embroidered red image of a Velocette motorcycle spread across its back. Loaf walked into the coffee shop with a left-leaning limp, wearing black leather sneakers closed with Velcro straps. Even without the lack of ruffled tuxedo shirt, and sporting a line of grey stubble, Loaf looked much like the sweaty, operatic singer who released the first “Bat Out of Hell” in 1978, recently voted the number one guilty pleasure of all time in the British music magazine, Q.
After a sparsely attended Sunday morning showing of “Pirates,” Loaf settled into an outdoors table at Rue 57 restaurant on the corner of 57th Street and Sixth Avenue, where he did not eat. (“I had popcorn,” he explained.) He called Johnny Depp’s performance as Jack Sparrow “amazing” and imagined how he might fit into “Pirates III.”
“I would be just one of the new recruit pirates. I wouldn’t want to be one of the creepy barnacle guys. The hammerhead shark guy is pretty good, though, ‘cause they gave him a real identity. The others, they don’t really have an identity. They’re kind of all…barnacly.”
The first “Bat Out of Hell” has sold fourteen million copies in the U.S. alone, making it one of the biggest selling albums of all time. Many people remember “Bat” because of the song “Paradise By The Dashboard Lights,” in which Meat Loaf tries, for eight and a half minutes, to get to third base with singer Ellen Foley. Phil Rizzuto narrated the singer’s progress in the manner of his day job as the Yankees announcer—“Here’s the throw, here’s the play at the plate. Holy cow, I think he’s gonna make it!”—prompting Foley to sing the most famous “stop right there” in the history of pop.
“Casey Kasem used to write a little newsletter that went with his American Top 40 show. It said ‘Paradise by the Dashboard Lights’ has reached thirty-nine. Let’s get this kind of trash out of the top forty.’”
Other than Marvin, the name he’s had most trouble with is the title of his life’s major work. The songs for “Bat Out of Hell” and its easily found sequel—“Bat Out of Hell II,” released in 1992—were written entirely by Jim Steinman. Several years ago, Meat Loaf sued Steinman for trademarking the phrase “Bat Out of Hell.” Loaf has now dropped the suit, and the bats have been liberated. (Steinman wrote only seven of the songs on “III,” including “It’s All Coming Back To Me Now,” written originally for “Bat Out of Hell II.” The song remained unrecorded until Celine Dion chose to open her 1996 album “Falling Into You” with her own version.) Meat Loaf will perform songs from all three “Bats” in a one night performance on November 2 at New York’s Palace Theater.
Though history will remember Loaf largely for “Bat,” he has spent the bulk of his career working as an actor, often in musical theater. After his mother’s death in 1966, Meat Loaf left his home in Dallas and moved to Michigan and California with a rock band that went through several incarnations: Popcorn Blizzard, Meat Loaf Soul and Floating Circus. (“The organ player dressed like a swan, the bass player dressed like an Indian, the drummer dressed like a clown and I dressed like the ring master. You couldn’t really get a ringmaster costume, so I just went out in a tuxedo and bare-footed.”) In 1969, Meat Loaf moved to New York to join the cast of the Broadway musical “Hair.” After “Hair” he appeared in a production of “Rocky Horror” at the Roxy in Los Angeles, and then went to England to film the movie version.
“They paid me $17,000 to do the movie, and then I won twenty-three thousand pounds at the Playboy club. I decided I would sit there and play around in London. When I finally came back to L.A., I went to the Roxy, and someone said ‘Yeah, this director’s been trying to reach you. His name is Milos Forman and he’s doing this movie called ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.’ This is, like, 10:30 at night. At about midnight, I called him. He’s got that accent and he says, ‘Oh, I’m very sorry, oh, no.’ They had hired Brad Dourif at four o’clock that afternoon. It wasn’t meant to happen. If I had done ‘Cuckoo’s Nest,’ I would have never done ‘Bat Out of Hell.’”
Meat Loaf appeared in the independent movies “Focus” (2001) and “Crazy In Alabama” (1999), played Amiens in “As You Like It” at the Delacorte in Central Park (“I’d love to do Falstaff,” he says) but is probably best known for his performance in the 1999 film “Fight Club” as Robert “Bob” Paulson, a testicular cancer support group member. Already a hefty man, Meat Loaf wore a fat suit—referred to in some reviews as “man tits”—for the role.
“That weighed forty pounds—unbelievably heavy. It was made out of flax seeds. Fincher needed it for the movement to look real. They built a special seat for me to sit in, and a metal harness that the suit laid on. When we were into the movie about two and a half months, Fincher ordered them to put up a styrofoam suit when he didn’t need the movement. But we didn’t wear that that much.”
In November, he will appear in an installment of Showtime’s Masters of Horror series, in a film called “Pelts” directed by Italian schlock horror auteur Dario Argento.
“I didn’t know who Dario Argento was. I don’t watch horror movies. My youngest daughter Amanda heard about it and flipped. She said ‘Dad, you’ve gotta do this, you’ve gotta do this.’ I wasn’t gonna do it until she told me I had to do it.”
“My character is a dealer in low quality furs,” Meat Loaf continued. “I do, according to them, make horror history. I skin myself alive. It was disgusting just doing it. I can’t imagine watching it. We only did one take. I was in such a state when it was over, I couldn’t even talk.”
Whatever nightmares fur may now engender, poor, fat Marvin no longer haunts Meat Loaf. In 1986, well into his career, the actor purged himself.
“I went to a judge in Westport, Connecticut, to change my name. The judge asked me ‘Is it because you owe people credit? Do you have warrants?’ I said ‘No,’ and he said ‘Well, then, why are you doing this?’ So I told him the story of the Levi’s commercial. And he looked at me and he said ‘Are you joking?’ I said ‘No.’ He said ‘That’s the most horrifying thing I’ve ever heard. They would never get away with that today. That’s discriminatory.’ He took out the seal, stamped it, and said ‘See you later, Michael.’ I’m not that crazy over Michael, but it’s better than Marvin.”