Dry Humour on the Wet Coast

Just don’t.

Now, I know a lot of people out there are, like your truly, dig the ink and get totally jazzed at the thought of some new work adorning your flesh. Hell, if I had the money and the inspiration, my whole back would probably be covered in some serious needle work. But I don’t, so it isn’t.

Anyway, I right this because I came across a fellow asking for change the other day on Granville. He was striking up conversation with passers-by, trying to get a few coins so that he could maybe procure some sustainance, or at least booze. Not harm, no foul. I’m a big fan of street people.

But this one suit goes up the the fellow and tell him to get a job. The begger, whom I’m going to call Slappy for no reason in particular, takes this as a huge affront against his lifestyle. He gets angry and says something to extent that he’s tried but can land work on account of the giant freaking tattoo across his face. Three bright red perdurable scratch marks grace his cheek, with the effect of making it seem as though Slappy got in a fight with Wolverine and lost.

So Slappy was at a loss. No jobs for the face tatted. That is, unless you work in a tattoo shop or at the circus biting the heads of pigeons for cotton candy money

Not matter how cool it seems, or how rad Mikey Tyson is, or how much you want to be like that dude from Kubus and Bang Bang…

don’t get a tattoo on your face.

So today is Cinco de Mayo, a Mexican holiday in celebration of the defeat of the invading French. Personally, I always thought it was the Mexican day of independence, but what do I know, I’m not, nor have I ever been Mexican.

It’s a fiesta that celebrates the Battle of Puebla where the Mexican forces repelled the French and staved off a full on occupation. Although the French would later on take over the country and install Maximilian as Emperor, it’s the though that counts.

The real Mexican day of independence is on September 16th, so there’s that to look forward to.

There’s something to be said about a man, who, through determination and the sheer force of will is able to overcome an obstacle. Oh and it helps when your determined sheer force of will comes in the form of a high-tech freakin’ battle suit-of-armor.

Like most super hero movies slated to be the first installation of a trilogy, they story of this summer’s action blockbuster, Iron Man, delves mainly into the origin of the man behind the Iron Mask. But unlike other origin stories, this one manages to hurdle all the other pitfalls that set the others back.

Taking the direction from the Marvel Ultimate run of the armored adventurer, Tony Stark finds himself taken hostage by militants in Afghanistan. With the help of a fellow captive / genius scientists, Stark tricks his captors and instead of creating a WMD for their own nefarious purposes, he uses the technology they supplied him with to create a walking tank capable of breaking he and his cell-mate out of their cave-side dungeon and to freedom.

After the ensuing boom-fest, Stark makes it back home with a new found look on like. Follwing his run in with the rebels, he realized what a blight his company’s weapons dealings have been on the world and vows to change the nature of his business, and with the help of his assistant Pepper Potts, his military contact Jim Rhodes and his newly refined super-suit, track down all of his wayward munitions that have fallen into the wrong hands.

But the road isn’t that easy to Stark. Obadiah Stane, his life-long mentor and second-in-command of Stark Industries has other ambitions for the company, and wants to send Iron Man to the scrap heap.

For one, never throughout the film to you feel like you see the main character abandoning his former self completely and coming out a completely different person. That’s one thing that’s always bugged me about the genre. Once the hero says “Welp, I better be a good guy,” he no longer acts like he used to. All of a sudden he’s a swaggering dudly do-right and the goofy twerp that he used to be can’t be found any where (I’m looking at you Spider Man). But Tony Stark, played masterfully by Robert Downey Jr., don’t suddenly loose his self-obsessed and braggart ways. In fact, instead of being humbled by the experience, he acts just the way you’d expect a billionaire, Richard Branson crossed with George Clooney-type, to behave. He has fun with his new toys and wants make sure that he gets all the attention that he can.

Although this film is dominated by the massive presence of RDJ / Stark, Gwyneth Paltrow and Terrence Howard to great jobs in their role. Jeff Bridges is great as Stane. His huge stature casts a long shadow over the comparatively tiny Stark, accentuating the final confrontation that much more dramatically. Oh and Paltrow does the impossible; she actually comes off as likeable.

If anyone but Marvel, John Favreau, and Robert Downey Jr. were involved with this production, it would have ended up coming off either patronizing or unlikable. In typical RDJ fashion, he takes a philandering spoiled rich-kid souse and turns him into a charming, endearing anti-hero, which is the core of the character to begin with. Had the creative reigns been taken from the bigs brains over at the House of Ideas, than we would have ended up with some pretty boy Patrick Demsy kind couche-tard blowing crap up while dropping stink-tastic one-liners, winking at the camera, because that’s what the audience wants, right?!

The cgi sequences were seamless and the action scenes were more than satisfying. Never did you feel like you were, ya know, watching a movie. But did feel like you were watching the best super hero film to date.

9 / 10

>SPOILERS<

Holy crap, and to have Nick freaking Fury, played by Samuel L. Jackson, after the credits with a fan-boys dream come true!

Well, not yet, but they will be and that’s a pain in the ass.

So I’ve been looking for a replacement pair of kicks for the last little while, and anyone who knows me knows a few things about my taste. One is that I like to wear mainly black and white shoes, that’s just my thing. I used to wear authentic chuck taylors, but since the company was bought out by nike, I can’t bring myself to purchase them. That brings us to my second shoe-point; I hate Nike and love Adidas. Why? I’m not too sure. It might be a combination of my latent punk past, what with my disdain for all things large coporate (namely nike), and my Hispanic heritage that embracess Adidas and all it stands for. To a latin, Adidas IS soccer, and Adidas IS sport.

The perfect pair of Adidas are hard to find. For the last year or so I’ve been rocking these white leather Campus Adidas that don’t look too unlike Creepers, so they’ve got a nice rockabilly flair to them. But they’ve been loved a little too much and the leather is starting to crack.

What I’ve always had my heart set on, since I’ve started buying shell-toes, is a pair that has the chuck taylor coloring. Black sides, white toes. Pretty simple right? Well, I thought so until I actually starting trying to find them in earnest. It turnes out finding a pair of Super Stars with those exact hues is hard to come across than procuring a piece of the true cross. They might as well be made of safron and dodo eggs, given how rare they are.

But the other day Doozy and I found them perched on the wall of out local sporting equipment outfitters, begging to be bought, and seeing as how my 25th was still a week away, she got them for me. The day is saved! Right? Well, not quite. You see, my size was out of stock (10) and they had to order it in (7-10 business days) so I’d have to wait of my shoe salvation to come in the mail.

I figured that it wouldn’t be to hard, considering how full my plate was at the time, the days would fly past.

Fast forward to yesterday. While checking the mail, I noticed a stange post card from UPS. It’s relayed that they tried to deliver a package to me a week ago but they didn’t know what to do, so they’d be  send my package back to the main depot in Ontario by the 28th unless I go down to Richmond to pick it up. Welp, yesterday was the 28 and there was no way in hell that I’d be able to make it to the next city over before the sent my dear kicks to London. So I called the toll-free and they told me that the shoes hadn’t left yet and that I could get them sent to a UPS store nearby. Only thing is that I’d have to find that store, call the manager there and get premission and then call back the toll-free to give them the details.

Fine, simple enough.

After tracking down a spot a block away from the building and pleading my case to three people on staff there (it’s going to cost 10 bucks just to pick it up) I called back the toll-free and gave them the info. Great, grand, wheels are in motion and I should have my shoes sometime on the 29th.

About 10 minutes later I get a call from London, Ontario. It’s the UPS people over there. Apparently my request for transfer has been ordered incorrectly and the shoes are still going to London, only now instead of my apartment being the intended destination, the address has been changed to that of the UPS store I wanted it sent to. So I had to call the toll-free number again to have them straighten this out, but by this point I was talking to maybe a third representative who seemed about as interested in my case as a vegetarian at a steakhouse. She said that the order was fine and that it should be at the UPS store on the 29th as intended, but if it were to be shipped to London, it’d have to call tomorrow to see where it had been sent.

So after 5 phone conversations, I still don’t know where my shoes are and I probably won’t know until the end of the day.

It turns out UPS stands for Unhelpful Personal Service.

Or maybe Ugly Pelvic Scenes.

Urban Parachute Snakes?

Right now the electro bleeps and bloops of Crystal Castle are dancing in my ears and my thoughts are wandering from the serious to the serene. I have a job interview this afternoon as an ad sales rep for a magazine chain, and I’m doing my homework before I grace the halls of my potential future employer.

I’ve finally downloaded (like anyone buys music anymore) the Crystal Castles self-titled and I’ve totally digging it. It’s upbeat enough to keep me interested, mellow enough to allow me to concentrate on some of the other tasks at hand. If I come across some sort of financial windfall in in the near future, intend to purchase some reliable equipment and start producing electronic music in hopes of achieving BMP beauty that these cats are jammin’.

Oh yeah, Doozy and I saw Forgetting Sarah Marshal on my birthday and it was a seriously funny movie. See it when you have the chance. Two big toes up. One of the trailers before the flick was for the upcoming Apatow pic, Pineapple Express. I’m going to go into detail about what it was about, because I’m fairly certain that you can google the info yourself, and if you’re an Judd Apatow fan, you’ve probably already caught wind of the flick by now anyway. What I want to get into was the fact that they used Paper Planes, the M.I.A. song, for the sound track of the preview. Man, I’ve never given that chick a chance before, namely because a friend of mine play her first album non-stop on a road trip down to Coachella a few years back and I’ve been a bit adverse to giving the new album a shot. But, DAMN, the track is HOT. I played it for the lady and she thought it was a bit jarring at first, but after one listen, we’re both hooked I’ve been scouring the interwebs to find an upload .rar or .zip file of Kala that I can sink my teeth into, but to no avail. So if anyone other there has a link the want to send me, post in the comments and I’ll send you a Pizza Trophy.

The weather on the coast has been mild as of late. The morning are cool and humid and the air is sweet with essence of budding plants. Green is starting to cover everything, and it’s starting to feel like the tropics again. Like home. I love living here. If only the work front was as forgiving as the climate. My temp contract with Shaw has abruptly ended and I’m now relegated to the task for finding gainful employment as a full-time vocation. Although the interview looks promising, I’ve an uphill battle ahead of me.

Send your prayers to your higher-power of choice and let them know I could use a hand up.

If Thor answers, tell him I want my hammer back.

I found a leaked copy of the new My Morning Jacket (mmj) album on a message board the other day and I was super stoked to give it a listen, so much so, that I didn’t even wait to go the coffee shop (where I am right now) to download the sucker. Instead, I logged onto an open network and used that saps licky-split wifi and grabbed the sucker as soon as I could. Now, I usually don’t like to jump onto strange networks, mainly because I kind fell like a jerk stealing band width or something, but this was an emergency. We’re talking about mmj, here. I’m sure they’d understand.

My first impression was something of a let down. Honestly, I was kinda pissed off. I was distugsted at the foreign nature of the music I was experiencing. It was like nothing mmj had released before. The songs, at first, seemed phoned in, the song writing rudementary and over-simplistic. Gone where the atmospheric tones and nuanced subletee that had made the band stick out in the first place. After only one listen, I was convince that this has to be some sort of joke by James and the boys. Like a big flip off to all the down-loaders ripping the album before the set release date (sometime in July, I think… June?) kinda like when Madonna dropped her single online before it was set to come out and it was only a 3 minute audio file of her swearing at the audience for trying to steal her shit. She sucks, but that’s neither here nor there.

ANYWAY, I decided to give the album a fair chance. I was in a crappy mood when I was listening to it and I went in with a whole heap load of preconcieved notions and lofty expectations. That and I had just celebrated my 25th and I was feeling a bit quater-lifey, and I was right in the middle of some sort of exetensial crisis.

Upon further listen, the album isn’t as bad as I had set it out the be. In fact, I’d say it’s something of a breath of fresh air in an otherwise stagnant room of stale music. With so many bads out there now aping the style that mmj made famous (Band of Horses, Fleet Foxes, and so on) they decided to take more of an extremist pathway with this venture. Before where they’d be kinda country, they’re now very twangy. Where they were once drifting into the high pitch, they’re now diving into the falsetto.

Touch Me I’m Going to Scream, stands out at the dominant track, encapsulating all the appealing features of Evil Urges, but the most catchy, and polarizing, song would have to be Highly Suspicious, a song that sounds like Prince backed up by Bear Force One. Although it may have one of the stupidest hook lines (peeeeEEEEanut butter puddin’), it’s destine to become the song you catch yourself singing in the elevator, to the delight of your subconscious and to the chagrin of your rational waking, tasteful, mind.

So if you’re hopping to find Z part two, or even an At Dawn sound-alike, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. But if you go in with an open mind, and a sense of humour, this might make it onto your top ten list at the end of the year.

So, I’ve been working 7 says a week for the better part of a month now while trying to freelance, find a better job, and be a steadfast cowboy for my prarie rose back at the homestead, so I’ve been a bit too busy to come up with any pithy writing for this hear blog in a little while. I’m amazed if anyone even reads this still. Save for Dan. Dan I know reads this. Hi Dan

Sorry ’bout the lapse, gang. I’m not going to promise that the is going to be the same amount of writing as I have been posting in the past, but I’ll see if I can’t get a couple of posts up a week.

Anyway, how about that band The Management MGMT? Not too shabby eh?

Seriously heady, wall of soundy, room filling shimmer pop. I’m only about 3 track into Oracular Spectacular and I’m sold.

Pick this up.

Or, if you’re poor and go to the local coffee shop to use the high speed internet because the Rogers Wireless Internet sucks emu butts, try going over to the google and type:

“MGMT” + site:Megaupload.com

you might find something you like.

But srsly try that with any band / album you’re looking for. It works like a charmsky. I found all of the Board of Canada back catalog that way.

Welp, back to the grind.

So there had been some buzz on the cool-kid blogs and hipster message boards as of late about the up-and-coming sub-pop rookies, Fleet Foxes. To tell you the truth, I usually don’t pay enough attention to the rumbles from these sources, I usually wait for some sage advice from a trusted individual. But this time, this time I took the time out to give the album a spin. Or rather, find a download link of the as-of-yet unreleased full-length, bluetooth the files to my Nokia 6300 and listen to it at the coffee shop while I try to work on some freelance work.

Initially while sellting into the first few chords, I thought it was going to be another sleepy alt-country, folkster offering. But after a little bit longer, you find that it’s rather instead another etheral, sweeping My Morning Jacket-inspired band. And as I’ve discussed before in the Band of Horses review, I have no problem with that. I’m a huge fan of that type of music, but it takes a lot to stand out if that’s the road you’re going to take as a group.

Something about the baroque atmosphere, coupled with rustic allusions peppered thought out the album, does just that. The Seattle-five piece does a great job establishing their own voice with a sound akin to an early morning campfire in a misty pacific northwest rain forest. Like flannel blanket, the sonic engulfs the listener, wrapping their ears with a shimming glow. Great, my imagery made we want to go camping.

After giving it a few more listens, the geist of the album really beings to flesh out and a more coporeal visions starts to come into focus. The doulbe-step drum pacing evokes steam-engines dashing across the plains, the choral vocals stir up shadows of chivalry and mossy grey fortresses, with an end result feeling like something that straddles difference between larping and a spagetti western.

Like My Morning Jacket dressed  like cowboys at the renaissance fair, Fleet Foxes hav definitely stumbled across something amazing here and it’s no wonder that this album has already earned top marks / best album of the year nods from critics and musical gourmands alike.

If you ask nice I might post a download link.

Alright, it’s time for another new section. I know Friday Fanboy is super popular with the kids, so I figured that I’ll let the webbernets know what kind of goodies I’d like to line my stockings. And I don’t mean Christmas, I mean regular socks. That’s were I keeps things I like. Such as: Toys, Money, and Feet.

So here’s the latest hot little number that’s caught my eye.

Boom! You’re a DJ.

Korg, the super happy fun company that makes various synths-and-such has been busy working on this entry into the casual gaming market. Or rather casual composing market.

Using nothing more than the standard hardware, this game lets you make totally original electronic music, phat beats and bomb-ass bootie-shakers. Like a pocket-sized synthsiser, you can create your own tracks, and if anyone out there has used garage band, or fruity loops, you can see that the touch-screen interface looks hella cinch.

I’ve tried my hand at making some tracks before using my M-Audio keyboard and my MacBook, but the lack of immediate results and feedback made layering and production a tedious experience. I might upload them later, but the best way to describe them would be “the soundtrack to a space-FPS.”

Releasing this july, the Japan-only program will run for about 4,800 yen, or 50 bucks for us baka gaijin.

You won’t be finding this in any store on this side of the Pacific pond, but DS games aren’t region specific, so you could probably buy one online.

gimme.

PRODUCT PAGE

>UPDATE!!!!<

Turns out it’s not just for the land of the rising sun anymore! according to the official blog, it’s going to be released world-wide! You should have seen me when I read this news, I actually squealed in excitement. Well, not really squeeled. It was more of a manly-grunt. I grunted in macho approval. Yeah, that’s the ticket.