SKM ... is thankful that his music library all fits in his VW Jetta.

I will have photos soon, but those who know me (and have helped move this collection in the past) can begin to form the mental pictures.  Here's a clue, though: I'm a former college radio DJ who once harbored the irrational (but far too common) desire to own a personal version of the station's library.  The pace of acquisition slowed considerably once I found other ways to occupy my time (see, e.g., the Malt & Barley Chronicles), but the weeding and winnowing has been a slow and arduous process.

And now that I'm moving for the first time in four years, from DC to NYC, with professional assistance that I don't trust, moving the records on my own has become an obsession of painful proportions.  On the plus side, I think I've got some reinforcements handy for ye olde Anti-Static podcast in the near future.

This extremely scary poster is being displayed on many bus shelters in my neighborhood recently ... yet another movie that screams out "what ever happened to the fine arts of animation and illustration?" or something along those lines.  More importantly, am I crazy or is there some unholy crossover leading to the leering visage above?

	+		=   WTF?
Horton Hears a Who		Joe Camel

Add Jim Carrey as the voice of our proud protagonist, and now I have all these uncomfortable thoughts about how purveyors of "adult entertainment" might parodize / satirize this one.  While an interest in both sides of that fence is not completely out of character for the dear departed Mr. Geisel, Dr. Seuss managed to maintain a firewall between the prurient and child-oriented that we would do well to respect today.  Ick.

My personal cognitive dissonance has been amplified, however, by going back 15+ years in the memory banks for a real screamer of a tune.  I had filed this one away under the title "Horton Hearts A Who" ... can't really explain it but for the Dr. Seuss sideways reference. My memory was wrong, but there's just as much confusion sown between the liner notes (putative lyrics never recorded) vs. the live performance (inspired in part by Pussy Galore's "HC Rebellion," a/k/a "the one where Julia Cafritz reads letters out of Maximum Rock'n'Roll" [Last.FM sample, review of the Groovy Hate F*ck EP]). Bottom line -- this one remains one of my favorite riot grrl-related songs.

Bikini Kill -- "Thurston Hearts The Who" (Self-titled EP, Kill Rock Stars, 1991 [eMusic])

Marking the passing of yet another crazed session of clock adjustment, the empirical research is starting to stack up against the institution of daylight saving time.  The New York Times has a nice resource page on the institution (frankly preferable to the Wikipedia version), while the naysayers started last spring in analyzing the 2007 extension  of DST in the United States (Ars Technica) and have picked up steam in the days leading up to today's "spring forward" (TreeHugger, Gizmodo).

Here's a more radical approach, born of my once-upon-a-time engineer's heart: why not abolish time zones entirely and switch to a single world clock?  The British established Greenwich Mean Time as a de facto world standard back when the sun never set on the British Empire, while today we've got UTC (Universal Time, Coordinated) which conveniently bolts atomic standards onto the Greenwich system.  The time zone I've inhabited most of my life, in the eastern United States, is variously UTC-5 (during standard time) or UTC-4 (during daylight savings).  As the world becomes flatter and more interconnected, it seems far easier to schedule and plan in UTC, rather than playing the whole "how many hours ahead/behind are you" game. 

Maybe I'm just reacting to the pain of scheduling cross-country conference calls in my day job, but I'm not all that attached to the "9 to 5" work-a-day convention.  Would it really be that difficult to switch gears to just designate all scheduled actions in UTC?  Or am I imagining some Star Trek dreamworld where time is even more arbitrary than it seems today?

Here's a brief musical interlude while I contemplate "ticking away the moments that make up a dull day" ...

Scrawl -- "Clock Song" (from Bloodsucker, Feel Good All Over, 1991 / Simple Machines, 1993)

This post is not really about music, except for the background riff rattling through my skull.  Fans of intense, moody, propulsive rock music from the late 70s and early 80s ought to get their tails over to Zeno Records and pick up the box set of the first three Wipers albums -- if only for the outtakes and bonus tracks. (If you already have this set, then take a few minutes to visit and learn about Greg Sage's tangential role in Portland's professional wrestling scene -- but do turn down your speakers first thanks to the embedded auto-play musical selections.)

Anyway, most everyone has ranted about "those darn kids today" at some point. It goes back a few thousand years, at least, with those witty Romans sighing "O tempora, o mores" as they sashayed to the Colosseum to watch people maul each other for entertainment. Today, though, it's as much about their parents as it is about those darn kids.

One of the best interpretations I've seen appeared in a recent thread on Jezebel (part of the GawkerMedia family) about the nightmare that is recutting old Sesame Street episodes (i.e. the era I grew up watching) to remove the negative influences -- like "Alistair Cookie" taking a bite out of his pipe. Commenter Cycles does the honors:

Sunny day (so be sure to put on sunblock so you don't get cancer)
Sweepin' the clouds away (but bring a raincoat and umbrella in case they come back)
On my way to where the air is sweet (but don't breathe in too hard, what with all the exhaust fumes and pollution)

Can you tell me how to get (kids, if you're lost, go to a police station. do not get directions from strangers)
How to get to Sesame Street (get an adult to help you cross the street, you could get run over)

The rewrite goes on for the second verse, as well.

This latest incident gives me the chance to pull out some material I'd been meaning to mention for some time. 

(E! Online photo)	(press kit photo)	(MySpace photo)

 

Two Australian MCs, both women, both making me scratch my head about their physical resemblences to Minnie Driver. (Incidentally, who knew that Driver had recorded an album in the past year?)

One of the very first videos that showed up on my Last.FM dashboard was this sock-puppet screwball throwdown from Macromantics.  I was initially excited about this record and then forgot about it for a while ... so the video recommendation is quite a welcome reminder of one of the more unique releases of 2007.

 

And hot on her heels is CatCall. The current work is a far cry from Catherine Kelleher's days shouting and shrieking in no-wave noise merchants Kiosk (as documented in July 2006 by these Punkcast videos). It's unclear whether Kiosk's work on this planet is truly done -- the MySpace page is maintained regularly, but the "official" LiveJournal site hasn't been updated in over a year -- but CatCall is definitely headed front and center.

Listen to August:

I've managed to track down four CatCall songs, and my favorite so far is "August," a downbeat sung number with fantastic organ phrasing. The raps are also solid -- a little choppier and rougher than Macromantics' flow, but equally slamming.  Aussie music blogs Off The Record and Who The Bloody Hell Are They? naturally have the head start on (and my gratitude for) bringing CatCall to the world-at-large ... with any luck, she'll be wrecking all our sound systems with an official release in 2008.