The Dark Side of Album Art

As a child of the '70s and '80s, I long nostalgically for the "lost art" of album art.

You kids today with your iShuffles and MPod3 players listening to your dubby steps and emoticon music... Y'all don't know nothin' 'bout going up to the Record Bar or Sounds Familiar ('sup, Darius!) and plunking down 7 or 8 of your hard-earned grass-cuttin' dollar$ for the latest album by your favorite band. That album you waited a whole damn *year* for them to drop (or eight -- thanks, Boston).

Y'all don't know nothin' 'bout digging through crates upon crates of albums at Papa Jazz, or pouring through stacks and stacks of indie 7" singles & EP's at Manifest back when it was on Main St. (yo, Carl!) -- so tiny and cluttered, but it *defined* the word "cool".

And then going home and devouring the album art and the liner notes while listening to the whole thing sequentially, like the band intended it to be heard. Musing at the sometimes-wacky, sometimes-thought-provoking album art. Reading along with the lyric sheets (if they were included), all the while picturing in your own mind what the songs were really about.

For you see, in this age of digital consumption, when a band releases a new album, most of us download the 2 or 3 tracks we like, and we ignore the rest. Forget those deep album cuts we'd catch ourselves singing in the shower 30 years later. No, those other tracks are lost to the ethereal bit bucket and forgotten. And as we move on, we could often care less...

But what is really lost is even more intangible, and bigger than we realize: We are robbed of that all-encompassing full-album experience.

And what made that experience so big and so all-encompassing was the fact that it wasn't intangible at all. It was the very *tangibility* of holding that album cover and dust jacket in your hand *while you listened* to the whole B-side that made "listening to my LP's" an actual event -- an experience.

</rant>

And so, lads and lassies, I wish to present to you something quite wacky and cool that I ran across; something that fellow aficionados of old-school album art will appreciate and find most amusing:

The Dark Side of Album Art

Enjoy... :-D

-=B

Coincidence?

It's been a while since I've posted anything, but here's a quickie:

Something hit me this morning as I was driving in and listening to the radio. I heard an ad during Kim Komando's morning update, and a couple of things fell into place:

FACT: A while back, we heard that Apple had a no-cash policy for sales of the new iPad -- you'd need a credit card to buy one.

FACT: At the WWDC, Steve Jobs said that a new iPad is sold every three seconds.

Now this morning, I hear:

FACT: Every three seconds, an identity is stolen.

Coincidence?

-=B


PS- Yes, I know that Apple has now reversed it's no-cash policy, but it's still funny, so shut up.
;-)

Don't Cry For Me, South Carolina

The Mark Sanford saga gets weirder by the hour...

Holy crap. This past weekend, I thought this was the most un-newsworthy story I'd heard this year, but today it's rapidly devolved into an enigmatic quagmire. Giggity.

Apparently, the Gov wasn't actually off getting raped by naked mountain people like we all thought he was on Monday. As one poster commented, "In all fairness to his aides, 'I'm getting some Argentinian tail' sounds a lot like 'I'm hiking the Appalachian trail' when you're on a fuzzy satelite[sic] phone connection. Who hasn't had that kind of innocent misunderstanding?"

Affairs are nothing new, and they happen all the time. Sure, it's easy for us to throw stones -- and this is a BIG target. But if you're the Governor of the buckle on the Bible Belt AND the president of the Republican Governor's Association... well, I guess he did relegate his sinful ways to a foreign country at the far end of a foreign continent... but c'mon, did we learn nothing from the lessons of Bill C.? "Excuse me while I whip this out" will not get you to the White House in 2012. Thank you, drive through.

I like the fact that he did stand up when called to the carpet, and in front of God and everybody proclaimed the shameful truth. He could have done the ol' Democrat Shuffle, but he just laid it all out there. That took a certain measure of testicular fortitude. ::golf clap::

However, the future is now immeasurably bleak for the Gov. One of a mere handful of Republican contenders for DC: 2012, he has surely shot himself in the ass. Hate to say, but I'll bet you before the week is out we'll hear the "I" word emanating from the Senate Chamber.

And it is unfortunate because, while we consistently denigrate politicians as lying, smarmy lowlifes who are not to be believed or trusted, we simultaneously hold them to some ridiculous moral standard and rip 'em to shreds when they fail to live up. We do this regardless of the fact that personal frailties and private foibles have precious little to do with the job. I'll bet Gary Hart is somewhere laughing his ass off right now.

(Which brings up a tangential point: You think a cripple in a wheelchair who doesn't look so good on TV could ever be elected President of the United States again? I mean, it's front-page news when a presidential candidate has an appointment with the cardiologist, for chrissakes. F.D.R. wouldn't stand a snowball's chance in hell today, yet we elected him to FOUR effin' terms just sixty-odd years ago because a majority of folks weighed the issues and decided he was the best candidate for the job. My, how our priorities changed.)

OK, so the Gov's no Brad Pitt, but if I'm going all the way to Argentina for some piece and quiet, it had better be jumping out of a cake, landing on my randy johnson, and spinning around with sparklers and a horn section. I can't wait to see this gal. She better be like eleven times hotter than that Angelina chick.

He should have just taken a page from Laura Bush and kept it all to himself. Giggity goo.

-=B

Friday, August 15, 2003

Matrix limericks

There once was an Agent named Smith
Who thought the One's powers were myth.
But Neo defied him
By diving inside him
And blew him to pieces forthwith.


If Morpheus offers to you
a choice between red pill or blue --
then what's your conclusion:
to stick with illusion,
or wake in a pod full of goo?


A beautiful hacker named Trinity
had fighting skills and femininity.
But when the rave started
she suddenly farted
and everyone fled the vicinity.


A dude said to Morpheus, "Whoa!
How deep does this rabbit hole go?
If one little pill
provides such a thrill
I'll buy the whole bottle, to go!"

(Stolen without permission from the Matrix Essays blog.)