Just a kewl instrumental shoegaze / post-rock voyage, with one of the sickest basslines ever (starting right after the 4-minute mark). The bass also has that nice round, "fat," undistorted sound that I prefer. Other examples of bands with this bass sound include Bark Psychosis, Hovercraft, Unwound, Bleach, and Poem Rocket, which coincidentally happen to be some of my all-time favorites; as in: bands to whom I'd donate a kidney with no questions asked if they ever needed one.
I bought this CD, I Fall To Pieces, used in the $2 or $4 clearance rack at the Mushroom in the early '00s, partly due to it being on Bedazzled. The packaging is very artsy, with translucent, vellum-esque paper and a definite Factory / 4AD aesthetic, which is not surprising, since Bedazzled always wanted to be the U.S. 4AD or Factory.
While doing some research for this post, not expecting to find much, I found out about a 5-song demo tape UlVi released in 1992, which someone is currently selling on eBay. Cool find. But I was more amazed to find out about the long, strange tale of their drummer, Danny Ingram. Read all about it here. Summary: He met the Clash at a '79 concert in Ontario and was urged by Joe Strummer to form his own band; was in some D.C. harDCore bands in the '80s, most notably Youth Brigade; co-founded gothy post-punkers Strange Boutique (and Bedazzled Records); briefly joined Swervedriver on drums after their drummer fled at the Canadian Border on their '91 tour; appears in their "Never Lose That Feeling" video (as I've mentioned before, it's my #2 favorite song ever, and my #1 favorite shoegaze song ever); co-founded Ultracherry Violet; played in some other bands.
I'm printing everything he says about UltraVio here for posterity, just in case that A Pessimist Is Never Disappointed blog ever goes kaput without warning, like so many music blogs do: "I started playing in Ultracherry Violet with my friends Dan Marx and Dugan Broadhurst shortly after the demise of Emma Peel. I loved this band. It was very much an extension of the sort of shoegaze thing that I'd been doing in Swervedriver and it was very much in my musical wheelhouse. I really thought that we had some great, original songs. But I quickly became really frustrated that the band was gaining no traction. It was either late '93 or early '94 and we were playing a show at The Black Cat. I think there were maybe 30 or so people in attendance. My frustration reached critical mass and I pulled a Keith Moon on stage. Throwing my drums at Nick P., the sound man, and threatening bodily harm to anyone who came near me. I'd had it with drumming. I made up my mind that night that I was done with it. And to make sure I would have no second thoughts, I did my best to demolish my poor, beautiful Gretsch drum kit. I was convinced that was it. I was in a new relationship, my life was starting to turn around in different ways, and I wanted to make a break with the past. That lasted about a year. I didn't touch my drums from that night until about 11 months later. Steve Willet called -– he had taken over Bedazzled records (the label that Monica and I started to release Strange Boutique music). He decided he wanted to release a CD of Ultracherry Violet. I'd mellowed out quite a bit in the intervening time, thanks to my new partner and future wife, Sally. Dan, Dugan, and I talked it over and decided to do it. We lugged our gear up to a dilapidated warehouse in a run-down part of Baltimore to record our CD. It had been so long since I'd played that my hands quickly blistered and started bleeding. I polished off nearly 3/4ths a bottle of Jack Daniels to try and steady my nerves and dull the pain of holding the sticks. We recorded all the songs in one day, but by the time we got to the last two -- "Mexico Song" in particular -- I could barely grip the sticks. My blisters kept bleeding and they kept slipping out of my hands. Still, we did all the songs in one take. There are 3 or 4 songs on that CD of which I'm really, really proud. The production is all over the place, but you can really tell that Dugan wrote some great songs... and Dan was really imaginative on the bass."
Indeed, the bass grooves and radioactive guitar tones on this album could be called seminal in the history of U.S. shoegaze... if anyone had actually bought the CD, that is. I believe Bedazzled Records went out of business a few years after the album came out, and the Violets never made any music videos to my knowledge. Note that Ingram doesn't even mention the demo tape in the interview. The one song I've heard from it, "Wayve", is pretty gothy and primordial.
UnFun Fact: According to UlCherVio's guitarist, tracks 3 and 6 are the same song ("Losing My Friends") because of an error by someone or an error at the CD pressing plant. So apparently, the only place to hear "Remember" is here, where said guitarist left his comment.
Pic taken from the website mentioned above; photographer, venue & date unknown
I always feel the need to explain my post titles for instrumental tracks. This one is a line from Faith No More's classic "Falling To Pieces", which I thought of when rolling around the album title I Fall To Pieces inside my head for a few million nanoseconds. (That video is very important to me, since it's one of a handful of songs/vids that got me into rock / "alternative" rock music in '91/'92, when I was strictly a rap head.)
Thurs.: Saw The Hunger Games in Houma, despite having only read about a third of the book. Felt the campy overtones of most of the adult male characters detracted from the film's impact. Played for a while at a basketball court I found, in 90º heat, in my Reggie Miller jersey which I recently dug out, yet dudes still called me "Larry Bird." I think one called me "Reggie Bird," which I found quite creative. The Pacers blew out the favored Heat that night.
Since that guy in the Beastie Boys died, I decided the only thing to do is to post the most Beastie Boys-esque song I can think of. Unfortunately for the Beasties, these 140 seconds eclipse pretty much anything they ever did... Awkward. I really hope their moms are not reading this...
Note: It should go without saying that the tagline on this site's header ("Providing roughly the same amount of hits as Sadaharu Oh since 2011") is an appropriation of a line in the Beastie Boys' "Hey Ladies."
I got this album, Emerge, on LP in Dec. 1998, after reading about the band in Alternative Press and/or Magnet (both of which I subscribed to) in the previous year. They were essentially always described as some variation of "Pavement meets the Beastie Boys," or "Archers Of Loaf meets the Beastie Boys," etc. The hilarious cover art, a soft-focus shot of a group of flowers, is a classic. It'd be ideal for an album by Starland Vocal Band or some hirsute new age flautist from a Balkan nation. As for the curious band name, it's simply the name of their high school football team; for what it's worth, mine was the Country Day Cajuns and our mascot was a crawfish. I was a starter at wide receiver and cornerback, and wanted to play WR in the NFL. AllMusic Guide gives this LP an accurate 3-star review and accurately says "Emerge seeks out the common ground between the Beastie Boys and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, slicing and dicing meaty hip-hop beats, crazed garage-rock riffs and vintage keyboard squawking; what could have amounted to little more than primordial pomo sludge is actually quite impressive when it catches fire (see "Go for a Ride," "Add It Up" and "Get Off Your Feet"), although the band's willful lack of focus is a weakness as often as it's a strength."
The drumming is incredible... Like, it should be in the hall of fame of drumming. Listen to how the drummer leads the way in speeding up and slowing down the tempo within each bar. Polvo would be proud at the sheer math-rockness of it. The distorted organ (Hammond B3, I'm guessing) sound is just too cool. The song has an overall badass quality that is infectious. I planned to recommend this song to Apple for use in an iPod commercial about 10 years ago, but for some reason I never did. The "Do the math / Multiply, divide, subtract" line would be perfect to play next to a graphic showing how many songs could fit into a certain size (GB) iPod.
"Add It Up" is a huge leap forward from their early self-released novelty single "Yos To Go," which begat what was apparently their only music video:
Pic taken by my sister, at my behest, in December on the edge of the French Qtr. while we were going to various Prospect.2 art exhibits around town:
She also took this one of me with some sort of robot vending machine outside the Contemporary Arts Center:
Pretty uneventful week... Went in for Mother's Day barbecue with the fam, and drove around with my dad frantically looking for flowers at 7PM on a Sunday night. Luckily Rouse's saved the day. Planted a Juniperus chinensis 'Blue Point' (Blue Point juniper), a Chamaerops humilis (Mediterranean Fan Palm) (normal green version), and a Leucophyllum frutescens 'Compactum' (Compact Texas Sage). Had to buy a new $300 tire due to a tiny nail in the sidewall. Found out holes in this location cannot be patched, so the whole tire has to be replaced. Was sort of creeped out by how enthusiastically the mechanic told me "If someone gets mad at you, all they have to do is stick nails in your sidewalls!" Vaguely considering seeing a band called As Cities Burn on Friday.
Appreciation of BOOTED NEWS WOMEN Blog - I just found this, the worst site in the history of America, narrowly edging out Facebook. It brews up anywhere from 1 to 30 boot-tastic posts per day. Reading the user comments is by far the best part.
Planets with similar climates: Bailter Space - "Pass It Up" (1997), Six Finger Satellite - "Parlour Games" (1995), James Chance & The Contortions - "Contort Yourself" (1979), Bleach - "Shotgun" (1991), The Delta 72 - "...Ever Since You Told Me" (1997).
(Dome Records, 1980 / The Grey Area / Mute / Elektra Records, 1991 / The Grey Area / Mute, 1992)
I'm not much of a Wire fan at all, but this minimalistic side project of theirs was pretty intriguing, based on the few songs I've heard by it. For a song that's barely even there, it makes a pretty big impression. Too bad Wire couldn't capture this chilly, cinematic vibe in more of their own stuff.
I got this song 2 years ago on an interesting Mute Records compilation from 1991 called Tyranny Of The Beat. The CD booklet aptly describes this song as "elegant blocks of sweet noise free-floating through space." I have to wonder if this album was a big influence on A.R. Kane, Hugo Largo, Bark Psychosis, and other quiet, abstract groups that came along later in the decade.
Side A of Dome's 1980 self-titled debut LP. Note: The stripey block design is a grayscale version of the album cover itself.
Angela Conway also recorded under the alias A.C. Marias, and released an album under that name on Mute in 1989 titled One Of Our Girls (Has Gone Missing). She is now "a successful music video director."
In 1991, Mute released a VHS home video concurrently with the Tyranny Of The Beat CD. It featured this Dome video, which could be described as the most hilariously botched soundcheck in recorded history, or as brilliant deconstructionist pop art:
Yikes... Hopefully Conway didn't "direct" that one...
Sunday, May 6: Made a last-minute decision to go to Jazz Fest, with Em & Damion. Had my dad watch the video for "Best Of You" right before he dropped us off. Delivered some cigars from him to Jeff in his patrol car outside the front gate of the fest right before going in. Saw the Foo Fighters' whole 2-hour set, which started off great, then sucked for a while, then ruled at the end with "Best Of You" & "Everlong." Moshing like crazy to the latter in the mud at End Fest '97 was one of the top highlights of my concertgoing life, so this time couldn't really hold a candle to that, but it was still good. I spent about an hour staring at this girl in the crowd who looked exactly like this sex blogger named Pocket, trying to determine if it was her. Speaking of candles, the Foos presented their guitarist with a birthday cake near the end, which marks the second time I've seen that happen in the last two weeks. Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings then stole the show in the Blues Tent. Also saw a bit of Maze, the Preservation Hall 50th anniv. celebration (with vox on a song called "Freight Train" by Ani Difranco), and the Neville Brothers (with a guest appearance by Trombone Shorty).
Went to the Mushroom that night on a hunch that Sam might be there, and she was. I had only seen her once in the prev. 6 months, and was worried that she no longer worked there. I brought some satsumas that I swiped from my parents' kitchen. She immediately strode up grilled me on why I was not at the free Roky Erickson / Thurston Moore show the previous night at One Eyed Jacks, and excitedly told me all about it. She got one of Thurston's lyrics sheets from the stage. I saw The Orb's first album (the abridged 1-CD version, unfortunately) in the used CD racks and recommended it, so she put it on, and all of its weird samples sounded amazing on their incredible surround-sound stereo system, with speakers in all the various nooks and crannies of the store. Got Hüsker Dü's Zen Arcade (double LP), a stunning Joy Division poster, and Pet Shop Boys' "It's A Sin" (7"). I rec'd Drive Like Jehu's Yank Crime to her, so hopefully she dug it. I think she and I must've been brother and sister in a past life.
They also had an amazing "Love Will Tear Us Apart" poster, which I was going to buy until I found the "Atmosphere' one.
Yesterday, May 8: My neighbor helped me take out this ugly 8x10 foot concrete slab in the backyard with just a 10-lb. sledgehammer, with a trick he taught me a trick in which you slightly raise part of the slab with a pry bar and then jam a rock under the slab. This forms an air layer underneath the slab, so it makes spiderweb cracks very readily when struck. So in a few minutes I singlehandedly turned that bitch into rubble with a few dozen hits, after procrastinating over it for a multitude of years. Sure wish I had video of that. A few hours prior to that yesterday, I took this snapshot in my car door's window before heading to a dollar store:
Today: He, my neighbor, gave(!) me a ~300-400 gallon pond liner that he had laying around. He had been using it as a satellite pond next to one of his other ones for about a year before removing it for some reason. I think May 2012 has probably been the best month of my life so far in terms of people doing considerate things for me and having illuminating conversations with me. I should mention this neighbor is often referred to as "the bird man" due to his extensive collection of birds in aviaries in his backyard. He's as big of a plant nut as I am, if not bigger, so we always talk about plants and landscaping philosophies, e.g. tree trimming, shade creation, propagation. Some of his big Live Oaks, which he planted 30 years ago, can be seen in the pic above. I'm not sure if I could ever move back to New Orleans after being spoiled by living out in the country since Katrina. But if I did, I would need a big fucking yard. The ones out here are about 5-20 times bigger than ones of houses of equivalent value in NOLA, which can be either a blessing or a curse, depending on one's enthusiasm for yard work and tree upkeep.
Jermaine Paul just won season 2 of a show called The Voice, which I don't watch. I had seen him singing backup vocals (& occasional lead vox during the numerous time when she was offstage changing outfits) at an Alicia Keys concert on St. Patrick's Day '04. You could practically hear the panties dropping around the New Orleans Arena every time the dude took the mic. (The crowd was probably 80%+ female.) My only qualm is that I'm not sure why a seasoned pro was allowed to be on an amateur singing competition. Check him out stealing the show in AK's song "Diary".
Millions Against Monsanto: The food fight of our lives - "Finally, public opinion around the biotech industry's contamination of our food supply and destruction of our environment has reached the tipping point. We're fighting back."
Love him or hate him, Bryce is here - "And let’s face it, his name is Bryce. BRYCE. That could only be more irritating if his parents had gone with EdHardyNickelbackCrocs." ... "Harper is self-aware enough to know he’s antagonizing you. He’s baseball’s version of the guy who sits at a stoplight blasting 'Sexy & I Know It' at unholy decibel levels, staring directly at you through the window of your involuntarily rattling Subaru."
Planets with similar climates: A.R. Kane - "The Madonna Is With Child" (1988), The Comsat Angels - "Restless" (1981), Mazzy Star - "Mary Of Silence" (1993), Low - "Shame" (1995), Slowdive - "Albatross" (1991), Sonic Youth - "Satan Is Boring" (~1984), Plexi - "Ordinary Things" (1996), Insides - "Yes" (1993), Chairlift - "Cool As A Fire" (2011), Bark Psychosis - "All Different Things" (1989).
(Thrill Jockey Records [U.S.] / City Slang Records [Germany], 1998)
Note: I wrote most of this last September, but couldn't post it because that was California Month, so here it is. One of the reasons I'm doing it now is that I recently stumbled upon & bought a 1976 movie called FutureWorld at a thrift store. Another reason is that I realized the bassline starting at the 4:30 mark was probably inspired by / stolen from the opening guitar chug in This Heat's "Horizontal Hold." (See previous post.)
After a few unassuming retro post-rock / deconstructed-metal LPs with sarcastic synth splatters, Trans Am reprogrammed their algorithms to finally allow for vocals and true song structure. Their recipe came to terrific fruition on their 1999 album Futureworld, whose title was, I assumed, a reference to CAN's album Future Days. But like I said above, I'm now pretty certain it referred to that movie. This one goes out to Joey Buttons & Kathi. I bought lots of cool CDs from their booth at the Record Raid in March, and it turned out they were also at the '99 Trans Am concert I will be talking about below. [Update: Oops; only Joey was at it.] This album came out in early '99, so I dated the song 1998, the year it was recorded. This is the most effort I've ever put into a post, so I hope somebody gets something out of it...
The song's greatness is pretty self-explanatory, so there's not much to say here, other than to point out that it's a song about the isolation that people will feel as we become more bogged down by gadgetry that supposedly allows us to stay more interconnected. Sound like 1999? 2012? Well, imagine how it'll be in 2050, 3000, or 5000. (5000? Yeah right... I'll give you a million dollars if humans even make it past 2200.) Sebastian "Seb" Thomson is simply one of the best drummers in history. You can tell he's heavily influenced by Jaki from CAN, yielding that style that is uniquely choppy & funky, yet sleek & robotic. He probably wears a shirt less frequently than Dave Navarro or Matthew McConaughey. When the song slows down at about the 4:20 mark and shifts into a sinister, "prowling" mode, it's just the coolest thing ever. I think Nathan sings "the falling snow" during the second half, but the vocoder is much more heavily used in that half, so your guess is as good as mine. The music video was edited down by 2.5 minutes, omitting most of the ending, and sucked in many other innovative ways too:
Fun Fact: Yes, that's Ed Helms, later of The Daily Show, The Office, and The Hangover, in a cameo appearance on banjo.
As far as other tracks on this album are concerned, "Television Eyes" (whose title is a reference to the Stooges' "TV Eye") and "Cocaine Computer" (please, folks, no jokes about Whitney Houston's Facebook account) are unquestionably the best. In fact, I struggled for a long time deciding whether to post "Futureworld" or "Television Eyes," and had to look to my orb for guidance.
The early '99 Thrill Jockey mailorder catalog has this very succinct sales pitch for the album: "Can you say vocoder? Sure you can – VO CODE R. Lawful evil beats, nature documentaries, car chases and rock and roll anthems."
Jonathan Bunce of Eye Weekly gave the album a 5-star rating, and said"The world's most forward-looking rock band has created the definitive millennial document. Forget the false hopes and fears surrounding the three big zeros -- this is the sound of technocracy collapsing into banality. 'Sitting alone in my future home / Fax machine, telephone / Phonograph, gramophone,' sings Nathan Means on Futureworld's drone-rockin' title track, with a gentle melancholy that would sound alienated even if it wasn't processed by a vocoder. Yes, the fourth Trans Am disc is the first to feature vocal stylings and embrace pop melodies -- which enhances, rather than dilutes, their conceptual electro-rock assault. On first glance, the trio seems to have turned into Kraftwerk, with Teutonic titles such as 'Am Rhein' and the motorik melodics of 'Runners Standing Still' -- one imagines them waiting out Y2K in a Berlin bunker with only Six Finger Satellite for company. But there's accessibility, depth, humor and chaos colliding here, from the more-bounce-to-the-ounce bleepery of 'Cocaine Computer' to the aggressive fuzz-bass destruction of 'City in Flames' to the lighter-in-the-air finale of 'Sad and Young.' Just as last year's The Surveillance had the final word on urban paranoia, Futureworld says more about the sci-fi dystopia we live in than any Hollywood blockbuster ever could."
My Trans Am timeline:
First read about them in Nov. 1996 in a Thrill Jockey mailorder catalog
Got their debut album Trans Am on vinyl in March '98
Missed them live a month or so later at the Mermaid Lounge in New Orleans due to having to cram for a test that night; swore I'd catch them the next time out
Read a glowing review of Futureworld in Mar. '99 in Spin*
Finally got to see them in May '99 (with lame openers Pan Sonic and The Fucking Champs) at the Mermaid
Got Futureworld on vinyl in 2005
*I also bought Moonshake's Dirty & Divine that day at that store
Note: Local instrumental prog / post-metal band Weedeater (not the stoner metal Weedeater from North Carolina) were for some reason replaced on the bill by The Fucking Champs.
I never got to see "our" Weedeater; check out this clip (probably from '94 or '95, based on the Dead Eye Dick video teaser at the end) of them. Trans Am's first album sounded a lot like this.
At the concert, they played a couple of vocoder-ed songs, hence they played "Futureworld" and "Television Eyes," the two best songs on the album. And I remember someone in the audience shouting out "Illegal Ass!," which I later learned was a song from one of their obscure EPs. Here are pics from that show, taken by me and Andrew Mister on my Kodak disposable camera; sorry for the small file sizes:
A Loyola student was filming Trans Am and projecting the images in real-time onto a screen behind them while they played. This must have been a digital camcorder, because the images were being altered in various ways to make the band look like computer-animated drawings and/or robots. Unfortunately this did not show up in the pics because the flash drowned it out. As you can imagine, I would give anything for a video of this gig! Nate was sporting an all-gold basketball uniform for some reason... Coincidentally, the Washington Bullets/Wizards briefly changed their main jersey color to gold several years later. For good measure, here's a pic of Finnish minimalist techno "band" Pan Sonic (f.k.a. Panasonic) playing their "music" while standing behind lots of expensive equipment:
I never saw Trans Am again, even though they came through here a few more times. They toured arenas(!) opening for Tool in late 2007, and I actually almost went to see one of those dates, but I had not paid any attention to either band for about five years, so I skipped it. Futureworld was reissued on LP with remastered sound and free digital download (containing two rare tracks) in late 2011.
Monday, Apr. 30: Saw Dayna Kurtz at the Hi-Ho Lounge; got there late and only saw the last 30 or so minutes. There were only about 20 people there. Like most folk singers with an affinity for New Orleans (Ani Difranco comes to mind), she has allowed NOLA's music to influence her recent music for the worse.
Tuesday, May 1: My dad had knee arthroscopy, so we helped him with icing it, etc. Dropped off a few trees at Parkway and had an impromptu conversation with Haley (sp.) for around 2 hours. She works for that organization and I just volunteer there; she recently put in all the native trees around the "Big Lake" in City Park by the art museum. I showed her a separate farming plot a block away that she had never been to, which kind of blew her mind. She signed me up to do a long-term project with her that will involve us designing and planting a fruit orchard for some new school in New Orleans East. It's kind of a thrill when an attractive, much younger lady follows one around and writes down one's botanical musings on her notepad for a few hours, but I didn't let it go to my head. Okay, I did, but who wouldn't? It was one of those "I've got the brawn, you've got the brains" kind of things.
Afterwards, went to Home Depot a few blocks away and saw a very rude older white lady verbally accosting a black male H.D. employee (and a white male one, who soon walked away and left the other guy to fend for himself) for a long time about something he had no control over. Specifically, light bulbs. Sample gripe: "You people who work at Home Depot are almost as bad as the ones who work at Lowe's nowadays." Reported her b.s. to a store manager, and mentioned that if it were my store, I'd kick her out. Shot hoops at the Annunciation St. court, and then, for the first time ever, at the NOPD station's court on Magazine. The latter was a bit difficult because the rims are a little too high (some courts do this to discourage dunking, which damages rims) and were double-thickness (which makes the ball bounce wildly on even a slightly-errant shot). Got dad some chocolate with bacon in it at La Dulce Vita. Had New Girl Night with Em, mom, dad, Vanessa.
Wed., May 2: Despite a sudden rainstorm, I stopped off at a small nursery on the Westbank that I almost never go to. Ended up talking to the employee for about an hour about tons of stuff after she asked me "Want a free tomato plant?" in the greenhouse. Let's see, we talked about cacti, tomatoes, mushrooms, music (she used to have punk bands play at her apartment), tattoos, asparagus ferns, atheism, Russian sage, etc. I showed her that the white petals of the Pineapple Guava tree look, feel, and taste like marshmallows, which she was pretty impressed by. Definitely my dream girl, and I think she spoiled me for all other females in the future... (And of course, the rain magically stopped right after I walked in.) And to top it all off, the last song I heard on the radio (WTUL) right before turning my car off and going in was a song that I later found out was "Endless Summer" by this Aussie band called The Jezabels. Kind of a mash-up of Kate Bush, U2, and Sunny Day Real Estate. My point is that it's a really dramatic song that seems tailor-made to lead into something great, kind of like the boombox scene in Say Anything. So overall, it was like a scene out of a movie: I hear that song in my car while it's raining; something impels me to go into a plant store; the rain stops to make way for the "endless summer"; I meet The One and we hit it off. And knowing my luck, I probably never see her again... But for me, a great convo is better than sex, and probably less grueling than a marriage. She's a big fan of mushrooms and '70s psych music, so I made a mental note to give her a CD-R of Amanita by Bardo Pond.
Later that day, I planted my Mayhaw tree in Vacherie during another bout of rain as the sun went down. Watched a bunch of videos by EatTheWeeds, which are always fascinating, until the wee hours.
Over the past few days, I've planted a Viburnum dentatum (Arrowwood) and Lyonia lucida (Fetterbush), as well as those free tomato plants. Deciding if I want to accept some free tickets to Jazz Fest today from my sister; the only good act is the Foo Fighters, but they're playing for 2 full hours, and I recently became obsessed with their song "Best Of You." Saw them in '97, and that gap of years would usually preclude me from seeing the same band nowadays; but they've had a ton of good singles since then. Dave Grohl's semi-ironic "metal warrior" posturing really sticks in my craw, though, and it's gonna be 95º heat index today with possible rain. Decisions, decisions...
In honor of heat, humidity, my dad's knees, and film cameras, here's me, Em & dad on a pier on the Mississippi coast in mid-1990. The fam was tagging along with him en route to one of his many triathlons that he did ca. 1990-92. He's 38 in that pic. I was wearing my LSU Basketball Camp t-shirt which I had just gotten weeks earlier. Shaquille O'Neal signed the back of it at the camp right after a breathtaking LSU intrasquad scrimmage. That's the only athlete autograph I've ever requested or received; unfortunately I never took a pic of it before throwing the shirt away a few years ago.
Yes, we threw them back
Planets with similar climates: Simple Minds - "70 Cities As Love Brings The Fall" (1981), Add N To X - "Metal Fingers In My Body" (1999), Satisfact - "First Incision" (1996) & "Triple Deck" (1998), The Horrors - "New Ice Age" (2009), Mocket - "Un-Man" (1998), The Sound - "World As It Is" (1984), probably some stuff by Tubeway Army.
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