Magic Jewball

It’s attack of the mid-90’s has-beens! Yes, I’m cleaning out my work CD collection which, you guessed it, began in the early 90’s and hasn’t been sorted through since. Along the way, I have found the following tracks that I quite literally forgot existed. What happened to these people? Does anyone know? All I know is that several of the CD’s I found have been “discontinued by the manufacturer” according to Amazon which could mean big bucks for me. Except I’ll never get my act together to sell them. Oh well!

In the meantime, enjoy these here, because half the CD’s I found aren’t available for download.

These first two are both from Interscope, which my first boss left to join. She offered to take me with her but I didn’t go. Months later I was out of a job. But I did get these CD’s.

Weird wild stuff from a friend of Trent Reznor’s.

“You’re as funny as a bank.” Why don’t I use this line more often?

Remember when all songs used to sound like this? Good times.

And later when they used to sound like this? That is, girls? Because it’s hard for a guy to get away with a song called Tiny Meat.

That was from Ruby. I’ll be your DJ because Yahoo doesn’t have BIG GIANT LABELS like YouTube. But this was a better version.

Well, I hope you liked those all enough to spend $14.95 on the copies I’ll be selling later.

Oh, I kid! Maybe.

Thanks for your patience, it’s been a painful week. I mean that literally, as the dentist was doing some work (yes, she has bought a new house on the basis of my teeth alone) and made a wee little error involving a slipped drill and a mouth full of blood. So I’m finding it a little hard to think straight just now.

But I did just want to share this one little tidbit. I kind of thought I’d remember all the fun events of my youth but it seems I do not because I had the following exchange with one of my high school exes on Facebook. Don’t worry, it wasn’t on anyone’s wall. Actually, it started with one of those memes they have where you post a note saying, “post one memory you shared with me – then you post this note and people will share memories they have with you.” I posted something innocuous on his.

He wrote me privately:
“I know you won’t post the memories note, [ed. note: ha! everyone knows how much I hate these things], and you probably don’t want this posted online [ed. note: eh, whatevs], but one memory I have of you is when I rented a porno movie and we watched it together.”

But the strange thing is, I don’t! I thought the first porn movie I ever saw was in college. What is wrong with me? I didn’t even take drugs in high school!

I was afraid to say I didn’t remember but what if he quizzed me? You know how much the plots vary! No, I kid, I’m just way too honest so I was forced to admit that I have utterly forgotten that.

Answer? “OMG you totally suck!!!”

So true, people. I may have to see one of those memory recovery specialists. But in case you think maybe he mis-remembered seeing it with someone else, he further wrote: “I remember renting it, watching it at your house and making fun of it after.”

Oh yeah, that sounds like me.

Actually, I think the video for this was the first porn I ever saw. Hey, I was twelve!
Duran Duran – Girls On Film

I can’t believe I wrote yet another rant against the concert ticket industry! Mostly because it kept this third Blogoversary post from being my 500th post. How awesome would that have been? I blew it. But whatevs! I’m happy to still be blogging because several of the bloggers I really loved and admired when I first started no longer are. Actually, a little bit of me wonders if they were on to something as I occasionally have nothing much to say and am afraid I’m saying the same shit over and over. Luckily, if you have as short an attention span as I do, the latter one doesn’t bother you as much.

Life has been very busy and weird lately and later on this year, I might be able to tell you why! It’s not the Jew & A book, which I’ve unfortunately not been able to work on (and I’m only working on the proposal here – there may be no actual book, except in our minds), it’s not my next charity project, although I hope to get started on that soon, and it’s not a super-secret cure for the economy, although I wish it were.

But in the meantime, there will almost certainly be more cookies, more New York, more baseball, more Judaism, more tennis, more music, and more exclamation points. Not there, though, that didn’t seem to merit any. Eventually, should the last one or two things get taken care of, there may even be kitchen pictures. Thanks for sticking with me, readers, RSS subscribers, commenters, and Googlers! You deserve all the exclamation points of my heart!

See? 500 posts, I kid you not. This will be 501, like the jeans…. and just as meaningless.

The last couple of years, I gave lots of stats, but this year I think I’ll just link to my two favorite posts of the year, one light-hearted and one not so much.

Onwards!

The Cure – Three

I’m just not really sure who “you” is/are.

Remember the name of the new Depeche Mode song, Wrong? You know what else is wrong? The way they dicked me over for tickets to their New York shows. I’m on both Ticketmaster and Live Nation’s alert lists plus signed up for the depeche mode dot com list, but I never received the presale password or any announcement of when the presale started. How did I find out? From my favorite Cure site, naturally. Ugh.

I didn’t find out there even was a presale until 45 minutes after it started and then had to waste a few precious minutes searching for the password. I finally found it and bought a ticket even though the location sucked. Then, the regular seats went on sale a week later and even though I logged on at 10am and two seconds, there were already no decent seats left. By about 10:20, after much fruitless searching, North of the City and I had decided to wait till they added another show (there were several free nights after the announced show so we were pretty sure they would). Little did we know, they’d decide to add it a few minutes later and announce it NOWHERE. I happened to discover it existed twelve hours after the fact from a comment on brooklynvegan (I either have to read brooklynvegan more often or less often).

What the FUCK? This is one of those moments where I can’t decide whether it would be more satisfying to sue someone or kill someone.

I’m writing this at 11:30pm and I’m going to let this post sit till morning. Let’s see if I’m still this angry!

Edited @11am to add: still livid today! On the plus side, there are several things I’m even angrier about so it’s been pushed down the list. Lucky I have the thought of future DM concerts to comfort me.

Title comes from:
Kelis – Caught Out There

Sometimes, when I have a spare moment to think, I like to try to sum up the whole of a musician’s output with one or two words. It’s a game for boring meetings and stuck subways. So, if I was going to come up with something for Nine Inch Nails, it would be, “control.” Or, if it was Martin Gore from Depeche Mode, it would be “sex & religion” or perhaps “religion & sex.” But what about me? In light of my blogoversary later this week, I now have nearly three years of writing to come up with some sort conclusive description and I would have to say, the thing my writing has been most obsessed with is change. I’m always wondering what about life is the same as it was and what is different and what about the things that are the same are somewhat different and why I care about these things or not. I’m not really good at moving on, so much so that when I do move on, I usually realize that I never really cared in the first place.

I think all this over-introspection and constant dialogue with the past has been exacerbated by the arrival in my life of Facebook, a site the New York Times this week described as an extended version of “This Is Your Life.” Which is probably too bad as I spend way too much time being the guest on an imaginary episode as it is. This weekend, I saw that a friend of my niece has posted pictures which tagged her (this is how I could see them) of some sort of event at her high school called “Cafe Day.” The pictures did not help me understand what that was except costumes and sports and mugging for the camera seemed to be involved. I can tell you that it’s a new within the last twenty years innovation because my niece attends the same high school that I did.

But it was fun nonetheless to see how little the school itself had changed (it is a tiny school and has two or three hallways and just one bathroom for each gender) and how it hasn’t. The lockers are still the same ugly alternating colors and the women’s bathroom the same drab beigey pink. If you’re wondering why there was a shot in the bathroom, what I surmised was that the ladies use the bathroom for the same things we did, that is, to hang out and gossip in semi-privacy while avoiding teachers or class or whatever.

In fact, I distinctly remember one of the women with whom I am now Facebook friends confiding in me in that very closet of a bathroom that a good male friend wanted more from her but she had said no. Later, they married. Now, she’s married to someone else so you see, people, always trust your first instinct. But I digress. I find it thrilling revisiting a moment from the past and seeing it’s the same for someone else, my own niece. Recently, she joined a Facebook group for the school newspaper, for which I also wrote at about the time Al Gore was inventing the Internet. There is something comforting about this, I have to say, as though periods of time move in parallel, rather than one blending into the next in the linear fashion we all know and accept. This is more like a Lost episode. Or, perhaps more like the new Race to Witch Mountain movie, which isn’t a remake of my favorite book and movie from childhood, the producers take pains to say, but a “reimagining” of it. I wasn’t sure whether this piece of marketing hype was intended to mollify people my age or to reassure the currently young audience that it wasn’t that sort of old-fashioned Disney movie where a Winnebago lifting off the ground merited oooohs and aaaahs. No matter. It’s a useful device to explain something that you parents out there probably already understand. The past doesn’t have to be figured out and wrestled with as often when you see your progeny experiencing the same things you did. Of course it’s different for them. They have Facebook now. But in the pictures on Facebook, your niece is in a picture with your HS BFF’s niece against the exact same backdrop.

Title comes from:
Depeche Mode – In Your Room