Monthly Archives: June 2009

Someone Is Lying

msnbc.com:

A Belgian teenager has told police how she emerged from a tattoo parlor with 56 stars over one side of her face, rather than the three she had asked for, prosecutors said on Tuesday.

"I said this part, the top, is ok, but not the rest," Kimberley Vlaeminck from the city of Kortrijk, 56 miles northwest of Brussels, told Belgian broadcaster VRT.

The 18-year-old said she fell asleep during the procedure, and woke up in pain when her nose was being tattooed.

Nobody with a functioning nervous system could possibly fall asleep while their face is being tattooed. Even when it hurts the least, and not on sensitive skin like the side of your nose or near the corner of your eye, it feels like being stuck with a hypodermic needle, over and over (because that's pretty much what it is); and at worst, it feels like being carved with a red-hot handsaw. And it's loud even when the gun isn't right next to your ear, pressing against the side of your head.

"She agreed, but when her father saw it, the trouble started," Belgian newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws quoted the man as saying.

Ding! Ding! Ding!

Listening To...

  • Sonic Youth - The Eternal. I haven't really dug a new SY album since 1994. And even that one (Experimental Jet Set, Trash & No Star) was exciting mostly because the four albums before it were so good - on its own, Jet Set isn't great, but after two albums that were great, but were also clearly attempts at commercial success, it felt like an interesting experiment, so I could understand and accept it. After a couple of listens, though, and contrary to all the reviews I've read, this new album doesn't even feel like an experiment to me; I hear nothing new; it sounds exactly like I thought it would. Not even adding Pavement's bassist makes it stand out. I don't think I could have said that about any SY album pre-94.

    "White Kross" from SY's Sister (1987) just popped up on the iPod. It kills. Even though it's slathered in reverb and muddy production, the song just bristles with energy. The band's on fire. There's nothing like that on the new SY record.

  • Green Day - whatever the new album is called. It's too long. Too much of it sounds like things they've already written. I know Green Day's not really known for their experimentation, but come on - listening to a new album shouldn't feel like a game of Name That Tune.
  • The Decembrists - The Hazards Of Love. Oy... another fucking Decembrists record. Why do I buy these things? I don't have the attention span, nor the time, to sit through another album-length story told by that guy and his fucking voice.
  • Nod - Tree Stuff And Lightning. Now Nod can do a change-up. Sometimes they sound like a stone-drunk jazz fusion band, or a demented Vaselines-style indie-pop band, or a blues band playing left-handed in the dark, on a boat in the middle of a nor'easter. Sure, everything they do is irreverent and crazed, sometimes unlistenably so. And a Nod album always sounds unmistakably like a Nod album, but they don't sound alike; each new album sounds freshly unhinged. They're not recycling the same cliches, unlike some other bands I could name. Nod wins.

Craigslist!

I've never been teh world's biggest Weird Al fan, but this is just fantastic:

And that's real-life Door, Ray Manzarek, playing keyboards, too.