Watched the documentary The Heart Is A Drum Machine last night. It was fairly entertaining and occasionally thought-provoking, but let’s just put it out there: this is a movie that asks people like Juliette Lewis, Fairuza Balk, and Victoria Jackson to speak on camera about their thoughts on music. Uh, Brian Eno too busy? The taste of opportunity lost hangs heavy over much of the film; one finds one’s mind wandering frequently, pondering the personalities whose hard-won life wisdom might have been cinematically documented and preserved in place of, say, Bijou Phillips’s blathering. Also, both Jason Schwartzman and Laraine Newman’s names were misspelled in the credits, which certainly isn’t a catastrophic issue but evinces a definite lack of attention to detail and quality control.
In the end summation, it’s impossible not to conclude the film is basically emphemeral flash pretending toward ground of substance (like a 90-minute MTV public service announcement delivering the message “Hey kids, music can be all deep and spiritual in addition to being something you dance to, so hey! Go Music!”) but it’s well-intentioned, and enjoyable for what it is: Children’s Television Workshop programming for music stoners–and, uh, their friends who need to see people they recognize from being in that one movie they watched once.
My version of this Joseph Arthur song has the guitar capoed at the first fret; the original version, which can be found on the album Come To Where I’m From, is capoed at the second. Double-click the video to watch in720p HD on youtube.
This 4:34 clip from the Making of Sacrament feature on the Lamb of God Walk With Me In Hell 2xDVD is one of the most real representations of the creative process in an actual rock band–and the ridiculous tensions and passive-aggressive manipulations often present within–that I have ever seen.
Without exaggeration or hyperbole, Liam Lynch’s homemade show Lynchland is one of my favorite things on the internet. Great fun, catchy songs, homebrew greenscreen, and self-rendered effects make for far more entertaining viewing than virtually any corporate-produced network show.
The downside to Lynch doing it all himself, of course, is that new episodes can be few and far between, especially when the show has to take a backseat to paying work. It’s been a long dry spell lately, but finally Lynchland Episode 23 is up at http://liamlynch.net–haven’t watched it yet, but with guest appearances by Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz (both of Look Around You) you can bet it’ll be first in the queue tonight. And hey, if you haven’t seen Lynchland before, it’s all new to you: scroll down to the bottom of the podcasts page and start at the top (maybe skip the Viewer Mail episodes).
I spent last weekend catching up on a bunch of music-related video stuff that I’d been meaning to get around to for one reason or another. Your results may vary.
I don’t really know how I avoided seeing 1991: The Year Punk Broke until now, as I recall liking the music Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Dinosaur Jr., the Ramones, et al made around that time and all. I’d think someone in my peer group would have insisted at one time or another. After viewing, however, I understand why word-of-mouth never recommended this for consumption: the movie is basically the worst piece of crap possible. It’s redeemed not even slightly by its inclusion of decent performance footage of the bands playing, due to shitty sound. Also, every time Thurston Moore talks on camera any decent person would want to punch him and not stop until he stops talking, he’s so goddamn annoying. This is a waste of even a fan’s time. I made it through to the end though, yay me.
Conversely, The Devil and Daniel Johnston was thoroughly enjoyable and recommended viewing for pretty much anyone. It’s a great story of which I only knew about half, as it turns out, and previous familiarity with the work of Daniel isn’t necessary — frankly the less familiar with him you are, the more surprising the film would probably be. Well-done on every level, not just as a music-related artifact: I’d recommend this wholeheartedly to anyone who enjoyed American Splendor, for example.
Thurston Moore also appears onscreen in Pavement’s Slow Century, afairly standard here’s-the-story-and-some-performance-footage recap of the band’s history. Pavement wasn’t the kind of band that lent itself to wacky tour antics or legendary rumors, so there isn’t much here in the way of big shocker moments — I imagine this would be pretty hard to get through if you didn’t already have an interest in the music of Pavement, so non-fans should probably skip this one. I pretty much enjoyed it throughout, though I can’t imagine I’ll be going back to rewatch it anytime soon.
The Sex Pistols’ There’ll Always Be An England is their first legitimate live performance video, which seems pretty surprising considering the amount of live Pistols performance footage I’ve seen over the years. Shot in London, basically There’ll Always Be An England and the bonus documentary The Knowledge both feature middle-aged men revisiting the sights, sounds, and locations of their childhoods. Not bad, but not great — if you didn’t like the live reunion album Filthy Lucre you won’t like this either, and I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone who’s not a Pistols aficionado. Way too many random shots of people in the crowd mouthing the words to the tunes, too, cut that shit out, director Julien Temple. I also watched a bootleg of the Pistols’ “last” show in San Fransisco, 1978, and the comparison was illuminating: young guys playing songs badly vs. older men plodding through the same songs nearly 30 years on. One thing is constant throughout though, and that’s that John Lydon/Johnny Rotten is always pretty entertaining no matter what else happens to be going on. Temple’s The Filth and The Fury remainsthe definitive Pistols video, though.
Pistols guitarist Steve Jones also pops up in Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, a mostly loving tribute to the deceased Clash leader (also by Temple — though sporting a somewhat contradictory title to the Pistols release) that does us the service of not glossing over Strummer’s willingness to discard friends in order to conform with punk orthodoxy, his long post-Clash fallow period, or his ongoing anxiety over coming from less-than-impoverished roots. The contrived “campfire setting for all the interviews” gimmick is a little over-the-top corny and pretentious all at the same time, and whenever a famous face pops up onscreen (Johnny Depp, John Cusack, Martin Scorsese) you know they’re just going to yammer some intolerable bullshit with no bearing on reality whatsoever, but there’s a surprising amount of documentation of even the earliest days of the Clash here and it’s mostly told in Joe’s own words thanks to extensive use of interview recordings and his radio show broadcasts. Falls short of wide Devil and Daniel Johnston-type appeal, but nice for anyone who ever even kinda liked the Clash.
The Ultimate Revenge, featuring vintage early 80′s performances by Venom, Slayer, and Exodus, is basically just intertwined excerpts of Venom, Slayer, and Exodus playing at Studio 54 (the titular ‘revenge’ is on disco, to show you just how much this thing is a product of its time) along with some execrable interview footage. Slayer is pretty awesome, Exodus is pretty bad but with surprisingly good guitar leads, Venom is kinda corny but enjoyably so in that over-the-top classic metal way. Let’s face it though, there’s no need for caveats here — unless you’re already way into classic mid-80s metal you’re not even gonna think about trying to track this one down.
In these doldrums of summer, one really notices how slim and shallow the network’s offerings are; in the blush of publicity they’re great at making it appear something’s happening when nothing really is, but eventually one realizes it’s just new iterations of the same old tired soaps, game shows, overwrought “dramas”, and hacky sitcoms. Howard TV is something perhaps only Stern (or Oprah, his counterpart for the non-Y-chromosome segment of the population) could pull off, in that it’s essentially an entire channel devoted to the universe of Stern, his radio show, and the various characters that orbit within its gravity. Between the four-day-a-week Howard Stern morning radio show itself, the followup Wrap-Up Show, the behind-the-scenes activities of the Stern staffers, the ongoing circus that follows the show’s Wack Pack of hangers-on, and material drawn from the vault of videotapes originally shot during the time Stern was on the E! channel, there’s a near-constant flow of new, high-quality programming on Howard TV — I’d estimate there’s at least an average of around five hours of new content added per week.
The real downfall of Howard TV lies in its limited distribution. Thus far the material produced for On Demand remains solely available there, which is all well and good if you happen to be on one of the cable systems that carries In Demand Networks, but if not, well, you’re pretty much SOL. Especially now that Howard TV is branching out into producing more original programming (such as its two bowling shows and the Miss Howard Stern reality show), the service is perfect for Itunes video sales: it’s easy to imagine Stern fans loading up their ipods with the latest Howard TV content each morning for the subway ride into work, and the fact that this or another similar revenue stream isn’t being capitalized upon is ludicrous. It’s the problem Howard has (so far more-or-less successfully) been combating since leaving terrestrial radio for satellite: sure, the show is great, but do people know? If a person has neither satellite radio nor In Demand-enabled cable television (nor the proclivity towards filesharing), then chances are they don’t. But if they could get a taste of what’s going on at Sirius and Howard TV on Itunes, it could lead them into purchasing more, perhaps regularly, and maybe even signing up for a satellite radio subscription — you know, once all the Sirius/XM merger issues are settled. Without this additional avenue for revenue or exposure, the Stern circus will likely stay out sight and out of mind of most who don’t already number themselves among the converted.
Internet advertising can be a confusing labyrinth to navigate at the best of times, but here at aaronpoehler.com I like to keep things simple. Basically, you’ll notice that on nearly all posts and pages at aaronpoehler.com there is a single banner ad. That banner ad is managed through Project Wonderful, which allows advertisers to bid what they think the ad space is worth and what they’re willing to pay per day. The highest bidder at any given time has their ad displayed sitewide here, across both blog pages and static website pages such as the vault of music reviews, so if your ad is the winning one at any given time, your ad will be seen by visitors to virtually all pages on this site (the number of which is in the hundreds right now). Advertisers are charged only for the amount of time their ads are displayed and there are no per-click charges, so it generally ends up being a good deal for all concerned — unlike many internet ad schemes which are easily defrauded through false clicks, which is why I’ve stuck with Project Wonderful above AdBrite or Google Adsense. Plus, it’s nice for me that I generally find the ads placed through Project Wonderful are interesting links to cool stuff I haven’t heard of, rather than the untargeted spammy links I seemed to get with the other services.
So if you’ve got a website, product or service you’d like to advertise here, go to http://www.projectwonderful.com/advertisehere.php?id=15866&type=1 and sign up today. There are a bunch of interesting demographic data and site statistics there for your perusal as well, and of course, right below these words should be an ad banner by the current highest bidder. I wonder who it is right now?
Watched the documentary The Heart Is A Drum Machine last night. It was fairly entertaining and occasionally thought-provoking, but let’s just put it out there: this is a movie that asks people like Juliette Lewis, Fairuza Balk, and Victoria Jackson to speak on camera about their thoughts on music. Uh, Brian Eno too busy? The taste of opportunity lost hangs heavy over much of the film; one finds one’s mind wandering frequently, pondering the personalities whose hard-won life wisdom might have been cinematically documented and preserved in place of, say, Bijou Phillips’s blathering. Also, both Jason Schwartzman and Laraine Newman’s names were misspelled in the credits, which certainly isn’t a catastrophic issue but evinces a definite lack of attention to detail and quality control.
Second selection 
Without exaggeration or hyperbole, Liam Lynch’s homemade show Lynchland is one of my favorite things on the internet. Great fun, catchy songs, homebrew greenscreen, and self-rendered effects make for far more entertaining viewing than virtually any corporate-produced network show.
I spent last weekend catching up on a bunch of music-related video stuff that I’d been meaning to get around to for one reason or another. Your results may vary.
In these doldrums of summer, one really notices how slim and shallow the network’s offerings are; in the blush of publicity they’re great at making it appear something’s happening when nothing really is, but eventually one realizes it’s just new iterations of the same old tired soaps, game shows, overwrought “dramas”, and hacky sitcoms. 
Internet advertising can be a confusing labyrinth to navigate at the best of times, but here at aaronpoehler.com I like to keep things simple. Basically, you’ll notice that on nearly all posts and pages at aaronpoehler.com there is a single banner ad. That banner ad is managed through 