Early Predictions for This Year’s Oscar Nominees

We’re halfway through the year, so I figured I’d throw in my suggestions for some early Best Picture contenders at the Oscars.

- Sean

JULY 08

(Your beloved Master of the Moon can now be found at Twitter.)

The Best Album Covers in My iTunes Library (Hey, why not…)

Taken from my Last.fm page because as Johnny Rotten would put it, “I’m a lazy bastard”. I selected the ten best album covers out of my pitiful iTunes Library and ordered them accordingly. Perhaps, we may be able to determine what makes a great album cover great, or perhaps I will totally waste your time. The latter certainly seem to be more likely . . .

10. Transformer, Lou Reed
A very iconic image. Reed in full glam regalia, guitar in hand and in stark black and white. What’s great about it is that it makes a bold visual statement and communicates the notion to the buyer that Reed’s music is going to have a sense of theatricality to it. Plus, it’s just a damn striking picture.

9. “Heroes”, David Bowie
Bowie was always avant garde but the “Heroes” cover is just something else. In grainy black and white, Bowie strikes a completely bizarre pose. I still have no idea exactly what he’s supposed to be doing but it freaks me out. So y’know, job well done. (The cover for his next album, Lodger, almost made it on this list instead. It shows Bowie lying on the floor with a broken nose. It’s so totally uncharacteristic for the fashionable Mr. Bowie that you have to love it.)

8. Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, Arctic Monkeys
I’m actually not a huge fan of the band, but I’ll be damned if that’s not a great album cover. The guy is apparently a friend of the band’s, I’m assuming after a long night of doing things primarily involving drugs, booze and exposed breasts.

7. Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd
The cover of Wish You Were Here is a perfectly surreal accompaniment to Pink Floyd’s brand of dreamy, epic rock. Gotta love the way the edge of the picture is burning into the white. Fun Fact: the guy on the cover is actually on fire. Ah, the dangerous days before they invented Photoshop . . .

6. Teenager of the Year, Frank Black
I think the cover speaks for itself.

5. Sticky Fingers, The Rolling Stones
Another very effective shocker and an image that sums up what rock and roll is really all about. The original vinyl featured a real zipper that actually unzips, which is totally awesome, even though it apparently dented the record and ruined it. Fun Fact 2: They wouldn’t let them sell the album with that cover in Spain, so they replaced with an image of a woman’s severed fingers in a can of beans, which is obviously far more tasteful.

4. London Calling, The Clash
This is punk. Based off of the cover of an Elvis album, The Clash replaces The King with Paul Simonon smashing his bass on stage. The “fuck you” message is just so potent and so perfect. Just a defining image, for The Clash and for punk music.

3. Things Fall Apart, The Roots
There are five different covers for Things Fall Apart, all of which are designed to make white listeners feel guilty. The photos used are from the Civil Rights struggle of the 60s and show the Roots’ connection to politics and history, giving you a clear idea of what kind of rap album this is. The only album covers I can think of that create such an impression and force us to question ourselves and society.

2. The Velvet Underground and Nico, The Velvet Underground
A very famous cover for The Velvet Underground’s first album, by Andy Warhol, who was their manager at the time. It’s just a great piece of pop art and The VU should’ve counted themselves lucky to have such an artistic genius provide them with a cover. The banana is in fact a sticker that can be peeled off to reveal the pink banana underneath. (You can’t see it but it says “Peel here and see” at the top.) Unpeeled copies of this album are big collector’s items.

1. Abbey Road, The Beatles
Simple and sweet. This is my idea of album cover perfection. People love Sgt. Pepper’s and it’s certainly a classic but you just can’t beat Abbey Road. The cover was apparently shot quite spontaneously. It’s been parodied a thousand times and it’s also been the source of many “Paul is dead” rumors, mainly claiming significance in the fact that he isn’t wearing shoes, and that Lennon was dressed in all white, representing the undertaker or death or heaven or something. (Lennon was just really into minimalist design at the time.) It’s inspired every idiot who visits Abbey Road to stroll across that zebra crosswalk and yes, I’d totally do it if I went there too. My favorite album and my favorite album cover.

- Sean
JULY 08

The Danger Mouse Seal of Approval, Don’t Listen Without It!

This is Danger Mouse.

No, not the British cartoon hero, the enigmatic music producer.

It occurred to me recently that Danger Mouse’s name is practically a golden seal of approval. He’s been behind some of the best music of this first decade of the 21st Century and I’ve enjoyed just about every album he’s produced.

Danger Mouse, real name Brian Burton, comes from White Plains, New York and spent the late nineties making demo tapes of his instrumental, trip-hop inspired music. He did an album with rapper Jemini in 2003, but found sudden fame when The Grey Album dropped on the Internet like a bomb in 2004.

The Grey Album was a brilliant concept: Danger Mouse took the commercially released a capella version of Jay-Z’s seminal Black Album and mixed it with The Beatles’ seminal White Album. Every time I tell people about this for the first time, they’re utterly bewildered. They roll their eyes and assume that the album is just Jay-Z played over a bunch of Beatles songs. It’s much more than that. Danger Mouse set out to prove that oft-criticized practice of “sampling” was not stealing music, but cutting it apart and pasting it into wonderful new pieces of art, like the musical equivalent of a collage. The Grey Album chops and transforms Beatles songs into strange new configurations, while still preserving their original tone and matching them quite perceptively with Jay-Z’s vocals.

Copyright issues kept The Grey Album from every being officially released, but a group called Downhill Battle staged “Grey Tuesday” on February 24, 2004, hosting the full album on hundreds of sites across the internet. Sites were of course forced to take the album down by Beatles label EMI, but the damage had been done and it’s currently pretty easy to get your ears on a copy. The Grey Album launched the admirable “mashup” craze, as well as Danger Mouse’s career.

Former Blur frontman Damon Albarn contacted Danger Mouse and got him to produce the second Gorillaz album, Demon Days, and DM delivered another modern pop masterpiece. His efforts on the album got him a well-deserved Grammy. Up next he did The Mask and the Mouse with MF DOOM and teamed up with Cee-Lo to form Gnarls Barkley. Their first album, St. Elsewhere spawned the popular but ultimately overexposed hit “Crazy”, and a plethora of excellent tunes. The recent follow-up to St. Elsewhere, The Odd Couple, came after he produced The Good, The Bad, and The Queen for Damon Albarn’s unnamed British super-group, which I reviewed in detail a few months back.

This year Danger Mouse has produced albums for The Black Keys and Martina Topley-Bird and is working on Beck’s soon-to-be-released next album.

Rather than going into much greater detail about the golden touch of this be-afroed prodigy, I’ll let the music speak for itself. (Brought to you by YouTube, because I can’t figure out how to fucking upload mp3s here.)

“Encore”, from The Grey Album. A mash-up of the Jay-Z track of the same name and the Beatles songs “Glass Onion” and “Savoy Truffle”. This video, a fan creation dubbed “The Grey Video”, is pretty excellent.

“Kids with Guns”, by Gorillaz, from Demon Days.

“Smiley Faces”, by Gnarls Barkley, from St. Elsewhere.

“Nature Springs”, from The Good, The Bad, and the Queen.

- Sean, somehow DJ DangerFerret doesn’t sound as appealing.

MAY 2008

“What if we wrap the pancake AROUND the sausage!?”: The Fine Art of Food Convergence

con·ver·gence When media devices with multiple functions are combined in order to form one device with all functions.

You know, like the iPhone.

But convergence is no longer confined to the realm of hip gadget geekery! No, it’s coming to a supermarket near you, as I learned today while on a trip for groceries.

I give you, sausage inside of a pancake:

And look, they put it on a stick for added convenience!

Kidding aside, this is one of the more disgusting items that the junk food business has managed to invent. I mean, who the hell would eat this?

“I want to enjoy a tasty breakfast before leaving home for my place of work and/or enrolled education, however, I have neither the time nor patience to sit down and consume the traditional morning time meal or pancakes and sausage links. I know! I’ll break out my Jimmy Dean Pancake & Sausage on a Stick™! Not only does its handy presentation fit my on-the-go lifestyle, but I’m able to push more food into my mouth at once! If only they could find some way to eliminate the problem of having to breath between bites!”

And this isn’t the only example of food convergence.

The KFC Famous Bowl, the target of much ridicule and scorn from my cousin and I since it was introduced:

The Famous Bowl is described by KFC in the following manner:

We start with a generous serving of our creamy mashed potatoes, layered with sweet corn and loaded with bite-sized pieces of crispy chicken. Then we drizzle it all with our signature home-style gravy and top it off with a shredded three-cheese blend. It’s all your favorite flavors coming together.

The inherent horribleness of the actual concept is only underscored by The Famous Bowl’s quite infamous reality. Here’s what they actually look like (WARNING: THE FOLLOWING PHOTOGRAPHS MAY BE CONSIDERED DISTURBING BY ANY READERS WHO INTEND TO EAT ANYTHING EVER AGAIN.):

Yeah.

If I’d not been told that these were “KFC Famous Bowls”, I would’ve merely assumed that a morbidly obese man had eaten a full KFC meal, vomited it back into a bowl, and posted it on the internet for others’ entertainment.

Which is about how I imagine it to taste. I refuse to allow The Famous Bowl to come within twenty yards of my mouth and have considered filing a restraining order against it just to be sure, but others are braver than I. Like Patton Oswalt.

The hilarious comedian has been doing a bit about it for a while:

There is no more apt description of a Famous Bowl than “a failure pile in a sadness bowl”, but it turns out that he’d never actually tried one. The A.V. Club convinced poor Patton to try one and the results were what one would expect:

The Famous Bowl hit my mouth like warm soda, slouched down my throat, and splayed itself across my stomach like a sun-stroked wino. It was that precise combination of things, and so many other sensations that did not go together. At all.

The gravy, which I remembered as being tangy and delicious in my youth, tasted like the idea of blandness, but burned and then salted to cover the horrid taste. The mashed potatoes defiantly stood their ground against the gravy, as if they’d read The Artist’s Way and said, “I’m going to be boring and forgetful in my own potato-y way!” The corn tasted like it had been dunked in fake-corn-flavored ointment, and the popcorn chicken, breaded to the point of parody, was like chewing a cotton sleeve that someone had used to wipe chicken grease off their chin.

The cheese had congealed. Even in the heat and steam of the covered Famous Bowl, it had congealed. I stabbed it with the tines of my spork and it all came up in one piece. I nibbled an edge, had a vision of a crying Dutch farmer, and put it down.

What has America come to? There is no greater sign of the decline of Western Civilization than the indefensibly stupid notion that piling multiple food items into a bowl and shoveling them into your mouth is a good idea.

It’s great to know that we can count on the food industry to create new and inventive ways to make Americans look like disgusting idiots.

God bless America!

- Sean, almost as Famous as The Famous Bowl, but covered in far less gravy.

May 08

The Sad and Inevitable Death of the Album

I just ordered me a sweet Radiohead t-shirt featuring the lovely, disturbing artwork of Stanley Donwood. Mr. Donwood has been producing art for Radiohead’s albums since The Bends in ‘95 and he’s built the band a great visual aesthetic to match their music. Album art is one of the oft-forgotten benefits of the physical album, something that is sadly on its way out. Now, I’m no enemy of the mp3. In fact, most music I enjoy comes to me by some means through the internet. What I’m far more worried about than the death of the cd is just the death of the actual concept of an album itself.

See, thanks to the mp3 format, my generation is growing up with nothing but singles. I’m sure a lot of people my age never even bother buying cds. Singles are sometimes the best song on the album, but that’s besides the point. Artists (Well, some artists.) put a lot of thought into what goes into an album, how it’s all ordered, and what the general effect of it is. The entire album is an experience to be enjoyed, not just one catchy tune. And it’s very easy to discover that some of the least known and least popular songs by a band are actually your favorite, hidden away in the album waiting for you to give them a listen.

I’m not going to pretend that you have to do elaborate concept albums in order to be considered a great artist, and a singles only format could certainly work for some people. Like Arctic Monkeys. The band talked last year about releasing songs as they finish them rather than putting out albums, giving them a more frequent creative output. See, I endorse that. I’ve listened to Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, and I’m not impressed with it as an album, but I like parts of it, and most of those parts just happen to be its singles. Besides Sgt. Pepper’s, I’d argue that The Beatles were a lot bigger on songs than they were on albums. (Though the fact that most of their songs are instant classics might render that a moot point.)

So basically, it’s up to the artist, and perhaps the album won’t die, as long as there are artists and fans who still believe in it, like Radiohead and like myself. Now excuse me while I go listen to In Rainbows.

- Sean, just an animal trapped in your hot car.

May 08