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Tuesday, January 31

Berry to play with R.E.M.?

http://www.murmurs.com/

Berry to play with R.E.M. for Georgia music commemoration?

R.E.M. may be set to team up for a live show with Bill Berry again, according to Peter Buck.

Playing with the Minus 3 and Robyn Hitchcock in the UK, Buck has twiced suggested another reunion is on the cards.

Murmursian gponter79, returning from the band's Manchester gig last night, was amongst the fans to meet Buck and Scott McCaughey after the show.

gponter79 quoted Buck as saying: "We are supposed to be getting inducted into the Georgia (Music?) Hall of Fame in October I think, and we will be hopefully playing with Bill, but we'll see."

Peter first revealed the possibility at an earlier gig last week. It would be the third time R.E.M. have played live together as a four-piece since Berry's departure in 1997.

The four teamed up in Athens last year for the wedding party of R.E.M. guitar tech DeWitt Burton.

KABOTD: Anti-Flag

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-flag

El Mozote's Band of the Day

Anti-Flag is a punk rock/hardcore punk band formed by Justin Sane, Pat Thetic, and Andy Flag in Pittsburgh in 1993. New Red Archives released their first album, Die for the Government, in 1996. In the subsequent years they released albums on Go Kart Records and Fat Wreck Chords, as well as their own label, A-F Records. Of these, Underground Network (recorded by legendary punk producer Mass Giorgini), could be considered their "breakthrough" album, successfully connecting the band with its largest audience to that point.

Anti-Flag's lyrics espouse a variety of left wing political ideals, and take a strong stand against fascism and nationalism, as well as dealing with lighter topics like the punk scene and romance. Politically, Anti-Flag is comparable to LA's leftist Rage Against the Machine. They have consistently contended that the American system of militarism and capitalism is destructive to the world as a whole.

In 2005 Anti-Flag signed a two-album record contract with major label RCA, though their label A-F Records remains independent. Their new album, For Blood and Empire, will be released in the Spring of 2006. The band said that they want their music to be heard. RCA is owned by Sony BMG, one of the largest corporations in the world. Many fans find this decision hypocritical due to Anti-Flag's previously overt anti-capitalist lyrics. Furthermore, critics have highlighted the contradiction between releasing an album entitled 'Underground Network' and espousing the benefits of independent media, and signing to a major label. This perceived lack of ideological rigor has contributed to the suggestion that Anti-Flag's lyrics are excessively slogan-oriented, and do not encourage independent thinking or action.

KASOTD: Suspect Device

http://www.plyrics.com/lyrics/stifflittlefingers/suspectdevice.html

El Mozote's Song of the Day

"Suspect Device" by Stiff Little Fingers

Inflammable material is planted in my head
It's a suspect device that's left 2000 dead
Their solutions are our problems
They put up the wall
On each side time and prime us
And make sure we get fuck all
They play their games of power
They mark and cut the pack
They deal us to the bottom
But what do they put back?

[Chorus:]
Don't believe them
Don't believe them
Don't be bitten twice
You gotta suss, suss, suss, suss, suss out
Suss suspect device

They take away our freedom
In the name of liberty
Why don't they all just clear off
Why won't they let us be
They make us feel indebted
For saving us from hell
And then they put us through it
It's time the bastards fell

[Chorus]

Don't believe them
Don't believe them
Question everything you're told
Just take a look around you
At the bitterness and spite
Why can't we take over and try to put it right

[Chorus]

We're a suspect device if we do what we're told
But a suspect device can score an own goal
I'm a suspect device the Army can't defuse
You're a suspect device they know they can't refuse
We're gonna blow up in their face

GSOTD: Jumping Someone Else's Train

http://www.sing365.com/music/

Jumping Someone Else's Train by The Cure

don't say what you mean
you might spoil your face
if you walk in the crowd
you won't leave any trace
it's always the same
you're jumping someone else's train

it won't take you long
to learn the new smile
you have to adapt
or you'll be out of style
it's always the same
you're jumping someone else's train

if you pick up on it quick
you can say you were there
again and again and again
you're jumping someone else's train

it's the latest wave
that you've been craving for
the old ideal was getting such a bore
now you're back in line
going not quite quite as far
but in half the time
everyone's happy
they're finally all the same
because everyone's jumping
everybody else's train

jumping someone else's train
jumping someone else's train
jumping someone else's train

Monday, January 30

First Comes First

http://ichuddersfield.icnetwork.co.uk/

The Paddingtons: First Comes First

By The Huddersfield Daily Examiner

The Paddingtons live performances are well known up and down the country.

They were signed straight after one of their live shows.

Recently The Paddingtons have brought this to Huddersfield, playing in the Cornerhouse with half-cut promotions.

I was lucky enough to be able to go and see them and I have to say they were amazing.

Now they have released their debut album on mercury records and what everyone wants to know is can they translate their fun live shows onto a studio recorded cd?

The answer is yes they can.

Opening track Some old girl immediately makes you want to get up and dance regardless of where you are.

Lead singer Tom Atkin screams the vocals out with the same intensity of when he performs live.

Title track First Comes First shows off The Paddingtons unique punk/indie style in a great catchy tune.

Previous single Panic attack is a brutally truthful punk track with lyrics like "do you wanna die? Go on, commit suicide".

The album is rounded off with Sorry a fun tune that makes you want to scream out the lyrics with Atkins.

So The Paddingtons have succeeded in turning there awesome live performances into a 30-minute record. Regardless of where you are, this album will make you want to get up, dance and scream along to the lyrics.

El Mozote Presents: Steven Wright

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Wright

Steven Wright (born December 6, 1955) is an American actor, writer, and stand-up comedian from Burlington, Massachusetts. He is known for his slow, deadpan, monotone delivery of ironic, witty, and sometimes confusing jokes and one-liners.

Wright released a comedy album in 1985 entitled I Have a Pony. In 1992, Wright had a recurring role on the television sitcom Mad About You. He later won an Academy Award for his short film, The Appointments of Dennis Jennings. He has also appeared as the voice of the radio DJ in the film Reservoir Dogs.

There are numerous lists of jokes attributed to Wright circulating on the Internet, sometimes of dubious provenance. Wright has stated that "someone showed me a site, and half of it that said I wrote it, I didn't write. Recently, I saw one, and I didn't write any of it. What's disturbing is that with a few of these jokes, I wish I had thought of them. A giant amount of them, I'm embarrassed that people think I thought of them, because some are really bad." [1]

In a 2005 poll to find The Comedian's Comedian, he was voted amongst the top 50 comedy acts ever by fellow comedians and comedy insiders. He was recently named in the Top 25 of the Comedy Central 100 Greatest Standups of All Time.

Steven Wright One-Liners

"You can't have everything. Where would you put it?"

"I'd kill for a Nobel Peace Prize."

"I used to work in a fire hydrant factory. You couldn't park anywhere near the place."

"It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to paint it."

"Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time."

"I bought some batteries, but they weren't included."

"One day I put instant coffee in a microwave and almost went back in time."

"I got a packet of powdered water but I don't know what to put in it."

"I had some eyeglasses. I was walking down the street when suddenly the prescription ran out."

"When the guy who made the first drawing board got it wrong, what did he go back to?"

"What's another word for thesaurus?"

"I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography. When it's finished I'm going to sue myself."

"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."

"I hate it when my foot falls asleep during the day because that means it's going to be up all night."

"I stayed up all night playing poker with Tarot cards. I got a full house and four people died."

"If you can't hear me, it's because I'm in parentheses."

"I spilled spot remover on my dog and now he's gone."

"A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory."

"Why is it, 'A penny for your thoughts,' but, you have to 'put your two cents in?' Somebody's making a penny."

"I bought a house, on a one-way dead-end road. I don't know how I got there."

"I wrote a song, but I can't read music. Every time I hear a new song on the radio I think, 'Hey, maybe I wrote that.'"

"I once locked my keys out of my car. I had to break out of my car with a coat hanger."

"There's a fine line between fishing and standing on the shore like an idiot."

"We had a quicksand box in our backyard. I was an only child. Eventually."

"Why's the alphabet in that order? Is it 'cause of that song? The guy who wrote that song wrote everything."

"I tried sniffing Coke once, but ice cubes went up my nose."

"I was out walking my dog yesterday. On the ledge. Some people are afraid of heights. I'm afraid of widths".

"My friend is a radio announcer. When he walks under a bridge, you can't hear him talk."

"I came home to my apartment and found that everything had been replaced with an exact replica. I called my friend over and said 'Can you believe this? Everything's been replaced with an exact replica!' He said, 'Do I know you?'"

"I was being interviewed for a job. During the interview, I started to read a magazine. The interviewer asked, 'What are you doing???' I said, 'Let me ask you a question. If I was driving at the speed of light, and turned the headlights on, would anything happen?' He said, 'I don't know.' I said to him, 'I don't think I want to work for your company.'"

"I went to a convenience store the other night. It had a sign reading, 'Open 24 Hours'. The manager was locking the place up. I said, 'Hey, the sign says you're open 24 hours!' He said, 'Yeah, but not in a row."

"I finally got around to reading the dictionary. Turns out the zebra did it."

"I was arrested for lip-syncing karaoke."

"I got home after a night of drinking and pulled out my car keys to get in my building, so I started it up and took it for a drive."

"I busted a mirror and got seven years bad luck. But my lawyer thinks he can get me five."

"Be nice to your children. After all, they are going to choose your nursing home."

"A friend of mine once sent me a postcard with a picture of the entire planet Earth taken from space. On the back it said 'Wish you were here."

"Do you think that when they asked George Washington for ID that he just whipped out a quarter?"

"I was reading the dictionary the other day. I thought it was a poem about everything."

"If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something."

"I tried to hang myself with bungee cord. I kept almost dying."

"It doesn't matter what temperature a room is; it's always room temperature."

"A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking."

"If you think nobody cares about you, try missing a couple of payments."

"Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it."

"I recently moved into a new apartment, and there was this switch on the wall that didn't do anything...so anytime I had nothing to do, I'd just flick that switch up and down...up and down...up and down....Then one day I got a letter from a woman in Germany...it just said, "Cut it out."

"One day, when I came home from work, I accidentally put my car key in the door of my apartment building... I turned it... and the whole building started up.... So I drove it around.... A policeman stopped me for going too fast... He said, 'Where do you live?'... I said, 'Right here'... Then I drove my building onto the middle of a highway, and I ran outside, and told all of the cars to get the hell out of my driveway."

"Power outage at a department store yesterday, Twenty people were trapped on the escalators."

"I can remember the first time I had to go to sleep. Mom said, "Steven, time to go to sleep" I said "But I don't know how." She said, "It's real easy. Just go down to the end of tired and hang a left." So I went down to the end of tired, and just out of curiosity I hung a right. My mother was there, and she said "I thought I told you to go to sleep."

"I was once walking through the forest alone. A tree fell right in front of me -- and I didn't hear it."

"Today I... No, that wasn't me."

Selected filmography

Desperately Seeking Susan, (1985) Larry Stillman D.D.S.
Loser, (2000) Man in Bar
Reservoir Dogs, (1992) (voice only) as "K-Billy DJ"
So I Married an Axe Murderer, (1993) as "Pilot"
Natural Born Killers, (1994) as "Dr. Emil Reingold"
Canadian Bacon, (1995) as Canadian Mounted Police Officer
Half Baked, (1998) as "The Guy on the Couch" (uncredited)
Coffee and Cigarettes, (2003) as "Steven"
The Aristocrats, (2005) as himself

Bush: Clearing Up Uncertainty

A couple of days ago, in New York, I was having a Diet Coke with my friend, Prime Minister Koizumi. He's the Prime Minister of Japan." - W
09-23-04 - Bangor, Maine

"Listen, the other day I was asked about the National Intelligence Estimate, which is a nation intelligence estimate." - W
09-23-04 - Washington, DC

Brokeback Bush

Click on the title bar to view.

SYV: In Between Days

Click on the title bar to see a concert recording of "In Between Days".

GSOTD: In Between Days

http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/

In Between Days by The Cure

yesterday i got so old
i felt like i could die
yesterday i got so old
it made me want to cry
go on go on
just walk away
go on go on
your choice is made
go on go on
and disappear
go on go on
away from here

and i know i was wrong
when i said it was true
that it couldn't be me and be her
inbetween without you
without you

yesterday i got so scared
i shivered like a child
yesterday away from you
it froze me deep inside
come back come back
don't walk away
come back come back
come back today
come back come back
why can't you see?
come back come back
come back to me

and i know i was wrong
when i said it was true
that it couldn't be me and be her
inbetween without you
without you

Sunday, January 29

Tips on turning tapes into MP3s

http://www.syracuse.com/

Sunday, January 29, 2006

MP3s are much easier to play than cassette tapes. You can listen to them on your computer or on your iPod. Your DVD player, if it's a fairly new one, can probably play them, too, if you copy the files on a CD.

But the best thing about MP3s is that they'll never jam or wear out - something you could never say about the cassettes you left on the rear-window shelf of your car.

So after realizing last year that some of my priceless home-recorded cassettes had become unplayable after years of storage, I started a long-term project to convert the music on my tapes to MP3 files.

MP3s can be stored, copied and played easily - after all, they're just computer files - and I knew that if I did the conversions carefully, I'd end up with MP3s that sounded just as good as my original tapes.

The conversions, as I reported last week, have been easy. (You'll find that column in my archives, which store all my newspaper articles, at www.technofileonline.com/texts/tec012206.html.) But the hard part came when I realized many of my new music files had to be tweaked.

Imperfection realized

In a perfect world, you would be able to click something on your computer and press a button on your tape deck and watch as an analog audio gets converted to digital sound.

In real life, however, I had three problems:

Problem No. 1: If I wanted the recording from my tape deck to my computer to stop at exactly the right moment, I'd have to sit at the computer during each transfer and click "Stop" at the exact time.

Fat chance of that happening.

Problem No. 2: Many tapes were louder than normal, and many others were quieter. A lot of others sounded as if they'd lost all their highs and lows. Their audio response needed to be boosted.

Problem No. 3: I had some really long recordings that were split onto two tapes. It would be silly to keep them split up, so I had to combine the resulting MP3s.

And now, the solutions

Solution to No. 1: I wasn't able to get my MP3 recordings to end when the tapes ended, so I used the timed recording function in Audio Hijack Pro to turn the computer's MP3 recordings off after a reasonable amount of time.

In other words, if I was making MP3 transfers of a C90 cassette tape, I'd set the timer to stop recording after 47 minutes. (C-90s are supposed to play for 45 minutes a side, but most of them have a little extra tape and play longer.)

Audio Hijack Pro is an extraordinary audio recording program for OS X. Timed recording is only one of its amazing functions. If you use Windows, you could do this sort of thing manually by setting a kitchen timer for 47 minutes (or for any other tape-side length), so it would alert you to attend to the transfer.

All the MP3s I made using this method had a few minutes of silence at the end, so I trimmed the silent passages using MP3 Trimmer on OS X and, to make sure there was a Windows program that would do the same thing, using MP3DirectCut under Windows 2000. Both are able to do something that's quite unusual: They can edit MP3 files without re-encoding them and therefore without causing any loss of quality.

Get MP3 Trimmer ($11) from deepniner.net/mp3trimmer or MP3DirectCut (no cost) from www.mpesch3.de.

Solution to No. 2: Tapes that were louder than normal needed to be auditioned carefully before I could transfer them to MP3. The problem? Digital audio has an absolute limit on the loudest sounds that can be recorded, and any sounds that are louder than that limit cause horrible breakups in the audio. So I simply had to listen to the loudest passages and set my volume levels accordingly. This often took a lot of time.

I was able to cheat for tapes that were quieter than usual. I simply "normalized" the digital file in my sound editor. Normalizing brings the overall sound volume up to a higher level.

Solution to No. 3: I combined most of my multi-part MP3 files using MP3 Trimmer. MP3DirectCut worked fine, too. Standard audio editors can't combine MP3s without decoding them into WAVs or AIFFs, joining them and then re-encoding the audio. This reduces the sound quality and takes longer.

Al Fasoldt's technology column appears here weekly and is available online at www.technofileonline.com. Write to him at features@syracuse.com.

Red Eye

We rented this last night since "The Aristocrats" was all out. This was a pretty dull thriller but it passed the time until Dane Cook's SNL re-run last night. The story was decent enough although I would have liked more background on the terrorist's (amazlingly not arab) motives. Also, the political target is touted as this great guy yet he needs a box of stogies and champaign in his room. Sounds like a pretentious asshead to me. My recommendation is to wait for this thing to play on TNT.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/

BY ROGER EBERT / August 19, 2005

Cast & Credits
Lisa: Rachel McAdams
Rippner: Cillian Murphy
Dad: Brian Cox
Cynthia: Jayma Mays
Charles Keefe: Jack Scalia
Linda Keefe: Beth Toussaint Coleman

DreamWorks presents a film directed by Wes Craven and produced by Chris Bender and Marianne Maddalena. Screenplay by Carl Ellsworth, based on a sotry by Ellsworth and Dan Foos. Photographed by Robert Yeoman. Edited by Patrick Lussier and Stuart Levy. Music by Marco Beltrami. Running time: 85 minutes. Classified PG-13.

Wes Craven’s “Red Eye” is movie that wants to be a good thriller, and moves competently, even relentlessly, toward that goal. It’s helped enormously by Rachel McAdams, whose performance is convincing because she keeps it at ground level; thrillers are invitations to overact, but she remains plausible even when the action ratchets up around her. When she’s stalking a terrorist with a hockey stick, she seems like a real woman stalking a real terrorist with a real hockey stick. It’s not as easy as it sounds.

The terrorist is played by Cillian Murphy, who was the sinister Scarecrow in "Batman Begins" and here plays a young man who seems pleasant and attractive to the heroine, until she asks him what his business is, and all the warmth goes out of his eyes as he says, “As fate would have it, my business is all about you.”

They meet in the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport. She’s Lisa, a hotel desk manager, on her way home to Miami. He’s the cute guy who helps her put down a jerk, buys her a drink, and ends up with the seat next to hers on the overnight flight. Murphy is handsome, but, like James Spader, the good looks come with a warning: There are ominous undertones here. Speaking softly, he explains that her father is being held hostage, that her help will be needed in a plot to blow up the deputy secretary of homeland security, and that her job is to call the hotel and have the security guy put in a suite where he can be more easily assassinated. The encouraging angle is that the deputy secretary is taken that seriously.

What makes this goal worthy of a thriller is that the terrorist plan is of course nine times more complicated than it needs to be, and is constructed entirely out of things that could go wrong. It’s remarkable that terrorists like these still possess feet they have not shot off. About the plot I will say no more, except in a general way: The scenes on board the airplane are about as convincing and plausible as they can be, given the situation. And the scenes after the plane lands bring a cool excellence to the standard scenario in which the killer and the victim stalk one another.

Maybe what I like best about the movie is its reticence. After a summer of crashes, bangs, endless chase scenes and special effects that belittle the actors standing in front of them, what a pleasure to see characters in a thriller doing what people like themselves possibly could do. There are no supernatural or superhuman feats in the film, unless you count the piddling detail that a character isn’t slowed down by an unexpected tracheotomy. The movie, bless its heart, even tries to make this development plausible, by providing a doctor who eyeballs the victim and says (I quote from memory) “It’s not too bad -- only the larynx.”

The rise of Rachel McAdams has been spectacular, if only because it has been so steep; in 2002, she had eighth billing in “The Hot Chick.” The only thing better would have been ninth billing. But then in 2004 she starred in “Mean Girls,” as the bitchiest girl in Lindsay Lohan’s high school. It was a surprisingly good movie, and then came a straight romantic lead in “The Notebook” and a comic romantic lead in “Wedding Crashers,” where Owen Wilson fell in love with her and caught a heart-warming case of sincerity. Now this.

The previous three movies positioned McAdams as a rising star. “Red Eye” will be more important, because casting directors, who know what to look for, will see that she brings more presence and credibility to her role than is really expected; she acts without betraying the slightest awareness that she’s inside a genre. I wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that she’s Canadian and thus culturally trained to avoid calling unnecessary attention to herself. Too many young Hollywood actors, especially in thrillers, think it’s all about them. Her performance qualifies her for heavy-duty roles. Cillian Murphy is already established and does not need discovering, but here he shows an ability to modulate his character instead of gnashing the scenery. They’re very effective together.

Wes Craven, the director, has been making thrillers for a long time, and knows how to do it. From "Last House on the Left" (1972) through “Swamp Thing” (1982), “The Serpent and the Rainbow” (1988) “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare” (1994) and the “Scream” movies, he has put stories and characters ahead of Gotcha! moments. Watching “Red Eye” function so smoothly, doing exactly what it was intended to do, I was reminded of Howard Hawks’ definition of a good movie: “Three great scenes. No bad scenes.” Craven scores two and one. Not bad.

SYV: Killing an Arab

Click on the title bar to see the Cure's Video for "Killing an Arab".

GSOTD: Killing an Arab

http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Killing

Killing an Arab by The Cure

Standing on the beach
With a gun in my hand
Staring at the sky
Staring at the sand
Staring down the barrel
At the arab on the ground
See his open mouth
But I hear no sound

I'm alive
I'm dead
I'm a stranger
Killing an arab

I can turn
And walk away
Or I can fire the gun
Staring at the sky
Staring at the sun
Whichever I choose
It amounts to the same
Absolutely nothing

I'm alive
I'm dead
I'm a stranger
Killing an arab

I feel the silver jump
Smooth in my hand
Staring at the sea
Staring at the sand
Staring at myself
Reflected in the eyes
Of the dead man on the beach
The dead man on the beach

I'm alive
I'm dead
I'm the stranger
Killing an arab

Cure Posters





GAOTW: The Cure

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_cure

The Cure is a British band widely seen as one of the leading pioneers of the British alternative rock and post-punk scenes of the 1980s. A combination of lead singer Robert Smith's iconic wild hair, pale complexion, smudged lipstick, and the frequently gloomy and introspective lyrics have led to the band being considered part of the gothic rock genre. Smith rejects this and other attempts to confine the band to a single genre.

1970s

In 1976 Robert Smith, a 17-year-old student, formed The Easy Cure with classmates Michael Dempsey (bass), Laurence "Lol" Tolhurst (drums) and Porl Thompson (guitar) from St. Wilfrid's Catholic Comprehensive School in Crawley, Sussex. They began writing their own songs almost immediately, and quickly amassed a repertoire of original material and a growing following.

In 1977, The Easy Cure auditioned for Hansa Records and received a recording contract worth £1000. A year later, following disagreements about the direction the group should take, the band, newly named The Cure, were signed as a trio (minus Porl Thompson) on former Polydor records scout Chris Parry's new Fiction label (distributed by Polydor). The B-Side to the single "Boys Don't Cry", "Do the Hansa" has been seen as a humourous slap in the face of Hansa Records by The Cure for not signing them.

The Cure released their first single "Killing an Arab" to both acclaim and controversy: while the single's provocative title led to accusations of racism, the song is actually based on French existentialist Albert Camus' story The Stranger. The single was packaged with a sticker label that denied the racist connotations.

In 1979, The Cure released the album Three Imaginary Boys and embarked on an extensive period of touring, during which they performed with various other iconic bands such as Joy Division and Siouxsie & the Banshees, leading eventually to a side-project collaboration between Smith and Banshees member Steven Severin, released under the name The Glove. One particular tour The Cure and The Banshees embarked upon together saw Smith pulling double duty each night by performing with The Cure and The Banshees (as their guitarist).

The next single "Boys Don't Cry" was a minor hit in the US, and Three Imaginary Boys was repackaged for sale there as Boys Don't Cry. Robert Smith wanted to move in a darker direction, while Michael Dempsey wanted to do more of the same. Dempsey left the band, and Simon Gallup (bass) and Matthieu Hartley (keyboards) joined. Smith was growing a friendship with Gallup and was likely going to replace Dempsey with him anyway.

1980s

In 1980 the four-piece Cure released Seventeen Seconds, produced by Michael Hedges, which reached #20 on the UK charts. A thoroughly unique album that is minimalist and rather acoustic, it was written and recorded with "clarity" by Smith who says it was inspired by romantic difficulty. He said it was also influenced by fatigue from touring and artistically by Bowie's Low. It was a shocking departure from all of the Cure's previous output. One critic dismissed it as a "soundtrack" and critic Adrian Thrills disliked it so much he said he was ashamed that he had been the first critic to write about the band. Other critics were enamored with the Cure and a dashing Smith was featured in very flattering articles, although there was some controversy concerning the Cure's image, or possible "anti-image". As with the early mixed reviews, the record is regarded very highly by some fans and musicians today and overlooked by others. "A Forest" also became the band's first UK hit single. The Cure set out on their first world tour, at the end of which Matthieu Hartley, the synth player, left the band.

In 1981 came the album Faith, which hit #14 on the UK charts, as well as an instrumental soundtrack for the film Carnage Visors (these were packaged together as a long-play cassette called Faith/Carnage Visors). Carnage Visors was used as a "tour support" film for their "Picture Tour". The music from Carnage Visors had a very limited print run and has subsequently become very rare. Faith, unlike Seventeen Seconds, was a very difficult album to produce. Lyrics were written in the studio and his fellow band members became detached from the process, often drinking instead of working. More than one critic said the single "Primary" and the song "Doubt" sounded like the rest of the album, only sped-up. The most commonly cited song from Faith today is the cryptic and lovely "All Cats Are Grey", although the song received little attention when the record was released. The problems in production didn't injure the finished record, and the Cure sounded so good when performing the album at many tour stops that, if not for the difference in sound quality, a listener would have difficulty distinguishing the live performance from the studio record.

Beginning at twenty-one, Smith "didn't see that there was much point in continuing with life. In the next two years, I genuinely felt that I wasn't going to be alive for much longer, and I tried pretty hard to make this feeling come true" (1). The band members' lives began to be marked by increasing drug use and Smith adopted a theatrical make-up enhanced look, reminiscent of Siouxsie. In 1982 The Cure recorded Pornography, a bleak, nihilistic offering that led to more rumours that Smith was suicidal. In spite, or perhaps because of the rumours, Pornography became the band's first UK Top 10 album, hitting the charts at #8. The release was followed by the "Fourteen Explicit Moments" tour, and by increasing problems among the members. Some members of the music press didn't take Faith and Pornography seriously because of Joy Division's Closer, a record that gained notoriety due to the suicide of the band's singer, Ian Curtis. Pornography received stinging reviews from nearly every critic, a fact that is ironic considering Pornography is, today, possibly the band's most respected record among fans, and has been promoted a great deal by Smith. One contemporary critic, S. Sauer, feels the song "Cold" is the Cure's most brilliant track, lyrically and musically. However, the song that appears to have the most appeal for fans is the aggressive opener, "One Hundred Years". Phil Thornally was chosen by Smith to produce. After an altercation in a club between Smith and Simon Gallup, Gallup left the group and started another one called Fools Dance. Smith says that he "doesn't even remember making a lot of Pornography" (2).

In late 1982, with the Cure disbanded, Smith sought a totally new musical direction. The Cure, now a "band" that consisted of Smith by himself (Tolhurst would join later after attending art school to play keyboards), released the pop single "Let's Go to Bed". Smith suggests the single was a parody of pop conventions designed to alienate fans, shock critics, and perhaps kill the Cure. It was, perhaps unintentionally, successful. Shortly after, in 1983, two more singles in a similar vein followed, "The Walk" (UK #12), a song critics charged was a New Order plagiarization, and the playful "The Lovecats," which became the band's first UK top 10 single at #7. The Walk has the distinction of being, up to that point, the only Cure song Smith's mother liked. The same year, Smith also recorded and toured with Siouxsie & the Banshees, contributing his writing and playing skills on their Hyaena and Nocturne albums, as well as recording the Blue Sunshine album with Steven Severin as The Glove. The Cure released four studio singles and their B-sides as the album Japanese Whispers, designed by Smith for the Japanese market only. Smith has said MTV refused to air the single for the Lovecats because the network thought the band members were gay because they wore make-up. The singles from this period were uncharacteristically upbeat and accessible, although the B-sides "Lament" and "Just One Kiss", probably written before "Let's Go to Bed", were a diluted echo of Pornography and Faith. Smith would soon return to writing harder-edged material.

In 1984 The Cure released The Top, a tonally diverse yet generally psychedelic album. Unlike most of the band's prior output, the album has, at times, an expansive worldly viewpoint, with the anti-war track "The Empty World" with a female protagonist, and the "Wailing Wall", set in Jerusalem. However, the track "Give Me It" exists in a very small and frenetic space. Others, such as the serene "Dressing Up" and the sardonic "Piggy in the Mirror", are introverted. A large number of tracks involve women, including the single "The Caterpillar", a delicate love poem, and the sharp pop "Birdmad Girl". There is even the suggestion of jazz influence with the abstract "Bananafishbones". On some tracks Smith played all the instruments except the drums (played by Andy Anderson) and the saxophone (played by returnee Porl Thompson). He also asserted in Ten Imaginary Years that he purposefully tried to make his singing sound worse. It is definitely unique in the Cure's output, but works well with the material. The Cure then embarked on their "Top Tour" with Thompson, Anderson, and bassist Phil Thornalley on board. The Cure's first live album, Concert consisted of performances from this tour. At the end of the tour, Anderson was fired for destroying a hotel room and replaced by Boris Williams. Thornalley left and was replaced by returnee Simon Gallup. Robert Smith later expressed his satisfaction with the reunited Cure, saying "we're a band again."

In 1985 the new lineup released The Head on the Door which reached #7 in the UK and #59 on the American charts. The record features a pop single, In Between Days, that contrasts a buoyant positive sound with what are, at first, bluntly negative lyrics. The record also features the first Cure song that is predominantly a guitar solo, "Push". That format would be further streamlined two years later with "The Kiss". The songs "A Night Like This" and "Sinking" are fan favorites. Overall, the album is quite a departure from the psychedelia of The Top and is a more straightforward pop record that uses traditional instruments rather than the electronics of the Japanese Whispers era. Following this release and another world tour, the band released Standing on a Beach, a collection featuring all of The Cure's singles and B-sides. The album's title was taken from the first line of the band's first single, "Killing an Arab." This release was accompanied by a video version called Staring at the Sea and by another tour, as well as a live concert film called The Cure In Orange. Standing on a Beach became the record those new to the Cure usually purchased first and contained enough pop to make it accessible for a wide audience. Throughout 1986 Lol Tolhurst's alcohol consumption was interfering with his ability to perform, and Psychedelic Furs keyboardist Roger O'Donnell was frequently called upon to stand in for him.

In 1987, The Cure released the double album Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, along with their most critically-acclaimed single in America up to that point, Just Like Heaven. The song's video was later chosen as the best alternative video of all time by MTV's 120 Minutes. The intoxicating guitar solo from the opening track, "The Kiss", was used in a Miami Vice episode. The band embarked on the "Kissing Tour."

In 1988 the band history Ten Imaginary Years was released, and Lol Tolhurst, though he had not yet officially left the band, was replaced by O'Donnell. In 1989 The Cure released the album Disintegration, which became their highest-charting album to date at #3 and featured four Top 20 singles ("Lullaby", "Fascination Street", "Pictures of You", and "Love Song"). Disintegration remains the most influential Cure record in America, although Pornography has gained considerable attention in recent years. The opening track, "Plainsong" is often cited as being one of the most beautiful tracks in the Cure's output. Shortly before the release, Tolhurst left permanently, leaving Smith as the only remaining founding member of The Cure. The Cure embarked on the "Prayer" tour. This tour featured some of the band's longest ever shows; their final gig at Wembley Arena (announced by Robert as "probably our last show") lasted over three and a half hours. Because Tolhurst was still on the payroll during the recording of Disintegration, he was credited on that album's liner notes as playing "other instruments," even though he didn't contribute at all to its recording or engineering.

1990s

In 1990 The Cure released a collection of remixes called "Mixed Up". It was panned by critics. Smith has said that he expected this, but decided to release the collection anyway. In May of that year, O'Donnell left the band and Thompson suggested long time guitar tech Perry Bamonte as his replacement. "Mixed Up" was followed in 1992 by the album Wish, which went straight to #1 in the UK and to #2 in the US. The Cure also embarked on the "Wish Tour" with Portsmouth's Cranes (one of Smith's favourite bands) and released the live albums Show (September 1993) and Paris (October 1993). As a promotional exercise with the Our Price music chain in the UK, a limited edition EP was released consisting of instrumental outtakes from the Wish sessions. Entitled Lost Wishes, the proceeds from the four track cassette tape went to charity. The EP has since become an extremely sought after item, copies exchanging hands for approaching £100. Porl Thompson (guitar) left the band once more during 1993 to play with Robert Plant and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin and Bamonte took over as lead guitar.

During 1994, Lol Tolhurst sued Robert Smith and Fiction Records over royalties payments, also claiming joint ownership of the name "The Cure" with Smith; after a long legal battle Tolhurst eventually lost. Boris Williams (drums) left the band, and was replaced by Jason Cooper (formerly with My Life Story), and Roger O'Donnell rejoined. The band also contributed a new song, "Burn", to the soundtrack of "The Crow".

In 1996 The Cure released the album Wild Mood Swings, a bright record somewhat closer to conventional rock that received little attention despite, or because of, its diverse melodies and unusually rich orchestrations.

1997 saw the release of "Galore," the follow-up to The Cure's multi-platinum singles collection, "Staring at the Sea/Standing on a Beach." "Galore" contained all of the Cure's singles released between 1987 and 1997, as well as the new single "Wrong Number," which featured longtime David Bowie guitarist Reeves Gabrels. Gabrels also accompanied the Cure on a brief American radio festival tour as an onstage guest guitarist for "Wrong Number."

In 1998 Smith appeared as himself on the animated TV show South Park (Episode 112, Mecha-Streisand). The Cure also contributed to the soundtrack album for The X-Files: Fight the Future as well as the Depeche Mode tribute album For the Masses, with their cover of "World in My Eyes."

2000s

The Grammy-nominated album Bloodflowers was released in 2000. This album was widely seen as the third in a trilogy including Pornography and Disintegration. The band also embarked on the nine-month Dream Tour, attended by over one million people worldwide. In 2001 The Cure left Fiction and released their Greatest Hits album and DVD, which featured the music videos for a number of classic Cure songs. The song "Just Like Heaven" featured briefly in the motion picture "Donnie Darko" of the same year.

By 2001 The Cure had been around for a quarter of a century and had had probably the most pervasive influence of any band in the history of the alt-rock scene. Their dark, layered textures, ad-hoc harmonies, and careful employment of cycles and repetition were picked up by subsequent bands such as Lush, Mogwai, Modest Mouse, and Sigur Ros.

In 2002 they continued recording, and also headlined twelve major music festivals, in addition to playing several three-hour concerts during which they performed the albums Pornography, Disintegration and Bloodflowers in their entireties on back-to-back nights at the Tempodrome in Berlin. These performances were released as the Trilogy DVD in 2003.

In the spring of 2003, The Cure signed to iam Records. In 2004 The Cure released a new four-disc boxed set on Fiction Records titled Join the Dots: B-Sides and Rarities, 1978-2001 (The Fiction Years). The set includes seventy Cure songs, some previously unreleased, and a 76-page full-colour book of photographs, history and quotes, packaged in a hard cover. This album peaked at #106 on the Billboard 200 album charts.

The Cure released their first eponymous album on iam records on June 28, 2004. To promote this album, the band headlined the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival on May 2. They also appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. The album The Cure made a top ten debut on both sides of the Atlantic in July 2004 and debuted in the top 30 in Australia. The album also received a generally positive reaction with some critics rating it as the group's best since Disintegration.

The group were awarded MTV Icon for 2004. The ceremony included performances of Cure songs by the groups AFI (Just Like Heaven), Blink 182 (A Letter to Elise), Razorlight (Boys Don't Cry) and the Deftones (If Only Tonight We Could Sleep), and was hosted by Marilyn Manson. Smith subsequently included songs by AFI, Blink 182 and the Deftones in his setlist whilst presenting a special John Peel evening session on BBC Radio 1.

Inspired by Rhino Records' series of Elvis Costello reissues, 2004-2005 has seen the reissue of Three Imaginary Boys (December 2, 2004), Faith, Seventeen Seconds and Pornography (April 26, 2005). Each comes with a second bonus disc of previously unreleased material, including home and studio demos, live performances and out-takes. All the studio albums up to Bloodflowers were supposed to be re-released in 2004, but the record label did not want to release albums at the same time as The Cure, and the first batch was delayed till late 2004/early 2005. Many have still not been released, but The Top, The Head on the Door, Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me and The Glove's Blue Sunshine are meant to be released in Spring 2006.

Together with Join the Dots, the four-disc set of B-sides, the amount of non-album material the band possesses appears to be rather high.

In May 2005, Smith fired O'Donnell and Bamonte, along with Bamonte's brother Daryl, who had been the band's tour manager for many years. They reportedly were informed of such by a Cure fansite. The band made a few festival and television appearances as a three-piece before, in June 2005, it was announced that Porl Thompson would be returning for the band's 2005 summer shows. The quartet played the Live 8 show in Paris on July 2, 2005.

The Cure is in the studio as of January 2006 and plan to release their thirteenth studio album this summer. Original reports stated that the album would be released on Smith's birthday, April 21st.

Albums

Year Album UK US Additional information
1979 Three Imaginary Boys 44 - debut album
1980 Seventeen Seconds 20 - -
1981 Faith 14 - -
1982 Pornography 8 - -
1984 The Top 10 180 -
1985 The Head on the Door 7 59 -
1987 Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me 6 35 double album
1989 Disintegration 3 12 -
1992 Wish 1 2 -
1996 Wild Mood Swings 9 12 -
2000 Bloodflowers 14 16 -
2004 The Cure 8 7 First album on Geffen Records

Compilations


Year Album UK US Additional information
1981 Happily Ever After - - US only compilation of Seventeen Seconds and Faith on CD,LP and cassette
1983 Japanese Whispers 26 181 singles and b-sides compilation album
1986 Standing on a Beach/Staring at the Sea - The Singles 4 48 singles and b-sides compilation album, cassette version ("Beach") contained full b-side tracklist, CD version ("Sea") contained only four
1990 Mixed Up 8 14 remix album
1990 Integration - - US only box set collecting the US maxi-CD single releases of Fascination Street, Love Song, Lullaby and Pictures Of You from the Disintegration album as well as a fold-out color poster of the group-packaged in a 10" x 5" picture box
1997 Galore 37 32 singles compilation album, songs from 1987-1997
2001 Greatest Hits 33 58 compilation of singles 1978-2001 with two new tracks
2001 Greatest Hits - 106 "limited edition" 3CD with acoustic versions of Greatest Hits and DVD with music video versions.
2004 Join the Dots: B-sides and Rarities, 1978-2001 - - 4 CD box set compiling remastered versions of all B-sides and selected rarities

Live albums

Year Album UK US Additional information
1984 Concert 26 - live album
1984 Concert and Curiosity 26 - Concert live album with unreleased tracks on the b-side. available only on cassette.
1991 Entreat 10 - live album highlighting Disintegration tracks
1993 Show 29 42 live album
1993 Paris - 118 live album

Re-releases

Year Album UK US Additional information
1980 Boys Don't Cry - - a renamed version of Three Imaginary Boys with a slightly different tracklist
1981 Faith/Carnage Visors - - special long-play cassette
2004 Three Imaginary Boys - - 2CD "deluxe edition"
2005 Seventeen seconds - - 2CD "deluxe edition"
2005 Faith - - 2CD "deluxe edition" including Carnage Visors, previously available only on the 1981 long-play cassette
2005 Pornography - - 2CD "deluxe edition"

Singles and EPs

Year Song UK singles US Hot 100 US Modern Rock Single B-side
** denotes 12" or CD maxi-single only
1978 "Killing an Arab" - - - "10:15 Saturday Night"
1979 "Boys Don't Cry" - - - "Plastic Passion"
1979 "Jumping Someone Else's Train" - - - "I'm Cold"
1980 "A Forest" 31 - - "Another Journey by Train"
1981 "Primary" 43 - - "Descent" / "Primary (extended)" **
1981 "Charlotte Sometimes" 44 - - "Splintered in Her Head" / "Faith (live)" **
1982 "The Hanging Garden" 34 - - "100 Years (live)" / "A Forest (live)" / "Killing an Arab (live)"
1982 "Let's Go to Bed" 34 - - "Just One Kiss"
1983 "The Walk" 12 - - "The Dream"
1983 "The Lovecats" 7 - - "Speak My Language" / "Mr. Pink Eye" **
1984 "The Caterpillar" 14 - - "Happy the Man" / "Throw Your Foot" **
1985 "In-Between Days (Without You)" 15 99 - "The Exploding Boy" / "A Few Hours After This" ** / "Inbetween Days (extended)" **
1985 "Close to Me" 24 - - "Close to Me (extended)" ** / "A Man Inside My Mouth" ** / "Stop Dead" **
1985 "Half an Octopuss" E.P. - - - UK 4-track 10-inch including Close To Me, A Man Inside My Mouth, Stop Dead and New Day.
1986 "Quadpus" E.P. - - - US 4-track 12-inch including A Night Like This, New Day, Close To Me and A Man Inside My Mouth.
1986 "Boys Don't Cry" (New Voice-New Mix) 22 - - "Pillbox Tales" / "Do the Hansa" **
1987 "Why Can't I Be You?" 21 54 - "A Japanese Dream" / "Why Can't I Be You? (extended)" ** / "A Japanese Dream (extended)" **
1987 "Catch" 27 - - "Breathe" / "A Chain of Flowers" **
1987 "Just Like Heaven" 29 40 - "Snow in Summer" / "Sugar Girl" **
1988 "Hot Hot Hot!!!" - 65 - "Hey You!!!" / "Hot Hot Hot!!! (extended)" ** / "Hey You!!! (extended)" **
1989 "Fascination Street" - 46 1 "Babble" / "Out Of Mind" ** / "Fascination Street (extended)" ** US ONLY
1989 "Lullaby" 5 74 23 "Babble" (U.K.) / "Out of Mind" ** (U.K.), "Homesick (live)" (U.S.) / "Untitled (live)" ** (U.S.) / "Lullaby (extended)" ** (U.K. & U.S.)
1989 "Love Song" 18 2 2 "2Late" / "Fear of Ghosts" ** / "Lovesong (extended)" **
1990 "Pictures of You" 24 71 19 "Last Dance (live)" (U.K.) (U.S.) ** / "Prayers for Rain (live)" (U.S.) / "Fascination Street (live)" (U.S.) ** / "Disintegration (live)" (U.S.) ** / "Pictures of You (extended)" **
1990 "Never Enough" 13 72 1 "Harold and Joe" / "Let's Go to Bed (milk mix)" **
1990 "Close to Me" (Closest Mix) 13 97 - "Just Like Heaven (dizzy mix)" / "Primary (red mix)" **
1990 "Hello, I Love You" - - - Promo only release
1992 "High" 8 42 1 "This Twilight Garden" (U.K.) / "Open (fix mix)" (U.S.) / "Play" ** / "High (higher mix)" **
1992 "Friday I'm in Love" 6 18 1 "Halo" / "Scared As You" ** / "Friday I'm in Love (strangelove mix)" **
1992 "A Letter to Elise" 28 - 2 "The Big Hand" / "A Foolish Arrangement" ** / "A Letter to Elise (blue mix)" **
1993 "Lost Wishes" E.P. - - - "Uyea Sound" / "Cloudberry" / "Off to Sleep" / "The Three Sisters"
1993 "Purple Haze" - - - -Promo only release
1996 "The 13th" 15 44 15 "Ocean" / "Adonais" ** / "It Used to Be Me" **
1996 "Mint Car" 31 58 14 "Home" / "Waiting" ** / "A Pink Dream" **
1996 "Gone!" 60 - - "The 13th (feels good mix) / "This Is a Lie (ambient mix)" ** / "Strange Attraction (strange mix)" ** / "Gone! (critter mix)" ** / "Gone! (ultra living mix)" ** / "Gone! (spacer mix)" **
1997 "Five Swing Live" E.P. - - - "Want" / "Club America" / "Mint Car" / "Trap" / "Treasure"
1997 "Wrong Number" - - 8 "Wrong Number (digital exchange mix)" / "(analogue exchange mix)" / "(dub analogue exchange mix)" / "(p2p mix)" / "(crossed line mix)" / "(isdn mix)" / "(engaged mix)"
2000 "Out of This World" - - - -Promo only release
2000 "Maybe Someday" - - 10 -"Maybe Someday (hybrid mix radio edit)" / "(dance mix)" / "(acoustic mix)" -Promo only release
2001 "Cut Here" - - - "Signal to Noise" / "Cut Here (missing remix)"
2001 "Just Say Yes" - - - "Just Say Yes (acoustic)" -Promo only release
2004 "The End of the World" 25 - 19 "This Morning" / "Fake"
2004 "Alt.End" - - - "Why Can't I Be Me?" / "Your God Is Fear" -U.S. only release
2004 "Taking Off" 39 - - "Why Can't I Be Me?" / "Your God Is Fear" -U.K. only release

Early Cure song list

"See the Children" - demo from '77/'78
"Meathook" - demo from '77/'78
"Pillbox Tales" - demo from '77/'78
"I Just Need Myself" - demo from '77/'78
"I Want to Be Old" - demo from '77/'78
"Heroin Face" (live)
"I'm Cold" (demo)
"Foxy Lady" (Jimi Hendrix cover)
"Rebel Rebel" (David Bowie cover)
"Plastic Passion" (demo)

Videos

Staring at the Sea - The Images (VHS)(Japanese LD)
The Cure in Orange (VHS) (LD) (VCD)
Picture Show (VHS)(LD) (DVD) DVD only available as a Brazilian only Region 0 import-reissue
The Cure Play Out (VHS)(LD)
Show (VHS)(LD)
Galore (VHS)(VCD)
Greatest Hits (DVD) (To see the three secret videos ("The Caterpillar"; "Close To Me (Closer Mix)" and "Pictures of You"): In the song selection highlight "The Walk" and press down, right, right. Highlight "Close to me" and press up, up, up. Highlight "Friday I am in love" and press down, down, down)
Greatest Hits: Deluxe edition (CD 1 of "Greatest hits"; CD2 of "Acoustic hits" and DVD)
Trilogy (DVD)

Band members

Current members
Robert Smith (vocals, guitar, six-string bass, keyboards, bass guitar, violin, drum machine; member 1976-present)
Porl Thompson (guitars, saxophone, keyboards, artwork; member 1976-1978, 1983-1993 & 2005-present)
Simon Gallup (bass guitar, keyboards; member 1979-1982 & 1985-present)
Jason Cooper (drums; member 1995-present)

Past members
Lol Tolhurst (drums, keyboards, other instruments; member 1976-1989)
Michael Dempsey (bass guitar, backing vocals; member 1976-1979)
Matthieu Hartley (keyboards; member 1979-1980)
Phil Thornalley (bass guitar, production; member 1983-1984)
Andy Anderson (drums; member 1983-1984)
Boris Williams (drums; member 1984-1994, one-off acoustic session in 2001)
Roger O'Donnell (keyboards; member 1987-1990 & 1995-2005)
Perry Bamonte (keyboards, guitars, six-string bass; member 1990-2005)

Check out this Blog!!!

http://mymoustache.blogspot.com/

First Impressions of Earth

http://www.varsity.co.nz/music/articles.asp?id=5148

The Strokes, First Impressions of Earth

written by Matt Kelly on 29 Jan 2006

First Impressions Of Earth
by The Strokes
14 tracks, 52 mins

www.thestrokes.com


It seems people are giving Julian Casablancas a hard time over his lyrics. There are some pearlers here though:

"All my pets they were there and they smiled/ take a shit - it was fine."

"I was a squirrel/ you chopped down my tree to get my fur."

"My mind is as blind as branch on a tree."
And my personal favorite, "Don't be a coconut, god is trying to talk to you."

Yet if we stop snickering for a moment, some songs here have fine lyrics, such as "Ize Of The World". It's customary to try to give it to The Strokes with both barrels as revenge for arriving amidst some of the most ridiculous over-hyping the music industry ever saw, though it wasn't necessarily the band's doing at all. After being put on such a glorious throne by critics, the significant number of people who felt The Strokes weren't even much good to begin with eagerly waited for them to implode and go down in flames.

Sorry to disappoint those hoping for blood in the water but regardless of how this sells, or whether or not it brings expectations of The Strokes down to levels they can match, it's an enjoyable collection of pop rock with an edge. The last two songs suck ("Evening Sun" and "Redlight" have uninteresting vocals and none of the toe-tapping guitar work featured elsewhere) but before that we've got a dozen decent songs to sit through.

Many of them just do the job - "You Only Live Once", "Razorblade" and "Heart In A Cage" for instance, stroll comfortably onto your speakers, swagger around confidently and leave, the job of delivering proper rock done. There are more notable moments though, such as lead single Juicebox's seamless marriage of distinct sections into a driving unpretentious whole ("Fear Of Sleep" does something similar) and the organ only "Ask Me Anything" where Casablancas drones drolly for an affect that is mildly sarcastic yet sounds surprisingly good.

There's a transformation into U2 (but in a good way) for the sensitive yet frenetic rock of "Electricityscape" and Casabalancas sounds like Matt Bellamy of Muse on the impressive and intense "Vision Of Division". Then they're almost lullaby like on "Killing Lies". "Fifteen Minutes" on the other hand begins like a Pogues impression but moves up-tempo and "rock" towards the end, a move that may have been uncalled for because it robs the song of its quaint slow charm, but it still sounds good. "Ize Of The World" is a great track, building relentlessly and creating a real sense of desperation and mania. It almost shows real vision yet immediately undermines it by ending pointlessly mid-lyric suggesting The Strokes didn't know what to do with such an epic sounding song. A pity.

At least they can play them guitars. The opening of "Razorblade", the solo on "Juicebox", the instrumental break on "Vision Of Divison" and other moments demonstrate that guitarists Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond and bassist Nikolai Fraiture know the score. Casablancas does well on the vocals, shaking off his "barely awake" reputation with his impassioned cry of "You're no fun" on "Fear of Sleep" and working on making his disinteretedly cool style work for him rather than making him seem a poser as it has in the past. Not a bad way for 2006 to kick off for rock. Leave your bias at the door and you should have fun.

mq432000@yahoo.co.nz

Saturday, January 28

We Are Scientists' With Love and Squalor

http://rockymountainbullhorn.com/

Dance rock fans must be the most restless and demanding fans on the planet. From The Killers to Franz Ferdinand to Kaiser Chiefs to Bloc Party to Maxïmo Park to any number of others, acts capitalizing on bouncy, keening, hooky rock about girls and partying seem to be as immediately forgettable as they are immediately likable. And now we have We Are Scientists, the next band on a conveyor belt of strong, if increasingly anonymous, releases.

Though from the name, you might think We Are Scientists includes at least two keyboardists and various sprinkled synth embellishments, the band is really only three Brooklyn dweebs upholding the trinity of guitar/bass/drums. Limited by both forebears and instrument selection, it’s a wonder With Love and Squalor is as good as it is.

Almost every song on Squalor tries to be the first single, kicking out of the gate with urgent riffs, battering drums and yelped verses. This is most noticeable on “Inaction,” which builds from playground-level chants to upward of four separate choruses. “Callbacks” and “The Great Escape” both work wonders in their choppy repetitiveness as spoken-sung punk ditties, and “This Scene Is Dead,” with its disco-stomp drums and pulsar guitars, narrates the club scene even as it rocks it. The band seldom slows things down, as on the near-ballads “Textbook” and “Lousy Reputation,” which are welcome anomalies.

After a while, the Scientists’ formula becomes more than apparent, but usually not before the rush is over. And in a genre such as this, where urgency is the highest virtue, that should earn this band their fifteen seconds before the next scraggly-haired, shit-grinning upstarts appear.

GSOTD: To Have & To Have Not

http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/To

To Have And To Have Not by Billy Bragg

Up in the morning and out to school
Mother says there'll be no work next year
Qualifications once the Golden Rule
Are now just pieces of paper

Just because you're better than me
Doesn't mean I'm lazy
Just because you're going forwards
Doesn't mean I'm going backwards

If you look the part you'll get the job
In last year's trousers and your old school shoes
The truth is son, it's a buyer's market
They can afford to pick and choose

Just because you're better than me
Doesn't mean I'm lazy
Just because I dress like this
Doesn't mean I'm a communist

The factories are closing and the army's full -
I don't know what I'm going to do
But I've come to see in the Land of the Free
There's only a future for the Chosen Few

Just because you're better than me
Doesn't mean I'm lazy
Just because you're going forwards
Doesn't mean I'm going backwards

At twenty one you're on top of the scrapheap
At sixteen you were top of the class
All they taught you at school
Was how to be a good worker
The system has failed you, don't fail yourself

Just because you're better than me
Doesn't mean I'm lazy
Just because you're going forwards
Doesn't mean I'm going backwards

Friday, January 27

50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2005

50. Geraldo Rivera

Charges: A mustache only slightly less loathsome than Tom Friedman’s-if only because fewer people take Rivera seriously. Began his career as a seemingly skilled and passionate muckraker, but having been exposed countless times as a shameless, megalomaniacal fraud, he absolutely refuses to get out of our living rooms. Most recently, Geraldo was accused of making a frail, elderly victim of Hurricane Katrina whom he "rescued" do multiple takes of the rescue scene with Rivera for Fox News cameras. Geraldo heroically carried the woman’s dog.

Exhibit A: Claims he defected from CNBC to Fox News for patriotic reasons.

Sentence: Sealed inside Al Capone’s vault with a phalanx of Neo-nazis armed with folding chairs.


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49. Michelle Malkin

Charges: A curious case of racial Stockholm syndrome with a palpable lust for violent ideological oppression and displays of imperial power. Rose to prominence in conservative circles by congratulating white America for its most shameful chapter since slavery, and encouraging a return to form in her book, In Defense of Internment: The Case for "Racial Profiling" in World War II and the War on Terror. Malkin thinks it’s hunky-dory to detain an entire demographic indefinitely if it makes the rest of us feel more comfortable. Her newest, Frenzy, argues that liberals have lost their minds, because they are upset with the direction their country is taking. Her evidence is a carefully collected selection of the dumbest things liberals have ever said, as if she couldn’t have just as easily filled an entire library with the insane ravings of right-wingers. Her accusations of blind hatred and vitriol mimic soul sister Ann Coulter’s classic tactic of psychological projection: whatever Malkin is, she sees in her opponents.

Exhibit A: Internment was so irresponsible that it prompted 40 history professors to sign a letter condemning it.

Sentence: Detained indefinitely without charge and waterboarded hourly for looking at a cop "all slanty-like."


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48. Larry the Cable Guy

Charges: The absolute nadir of the American South’s baffling cultural hegemony. A middle-class Nebraskan, raised in Palm Beach, whose parents sent him to private school, masquerading as an Appalachian mutant and making millions off the nine-toed cyclopes in his audience by calling his material "blue collar," when it’s really just a celebration of proud ignorance. The latest in a long line of "entertainers" propagating the lie that real talent is elitist. The South has risen again—just long enough to grab the rest of the nation by the legs and pull it back down to its Lovecraftian depths. Isn’t even "bad funny." Makes Jeff Foxworthy look like Chris Rock.

Exhibit A: Ostensibly humorous catchphrase translates into "complete the task."

Sentence: Sent back in time for the sole purpose of having Mark Twain’s cigars extinguished on his face.


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47. Martha Stewart

Charges: Only in America could a plutocrat charged with insider trading find sympathy among her social inferiors—people she would have either sterilized or mustard gassed, if the law permitted her. Stewart, a woman so frigid she makes Gila monsters look cuddly, rode this wave of infamy to a resurgence in popularity and a second television show. To the nation’s delight, she then used this public forum to demean the aborigines in her charge with robotic mordancy. Is in obvious discomfort when laughing. Would have drowned the survivors on the Titanic and used their corpses as a human pontoon to walk to dry land.

Exhibit A: Seemed to genuinely enjoy prison.

Sentence: Forced to use own K-Mart products.


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46. Bruce Chapman

Charges: Founder of the misnamed "Discovery Institute." Despite its pioneering title, Chapman’s organization seeks to make one of the world’s oldest, dumbest ideas the prevailing ideology, to "undiscover" evolution and set us back more than a century. Seems to believe a petition signed by 400 PhDs and professors is convincing proof of Intelligent Design’s widespread acceptance, when more scientists named "Steve" endorse Darwin. A lazy dissembler, he blames the lack of actual research and peer-reviewed articles on ID on academic "blackballing." Right, ‘cause Galileo had it easy. Chapman’s sole trailblazing achievement in the field of academic inquiry has been in proving scientists can be even smugger--when driven by theology.

Exhibit A: Held high-level positions under Reagan and Bush, Sr. Is not a scientist.

Sentence: Infested and colonized by scabies mites: eyeless, brainless parasites unique to humans—perfectly evolved to afflict us. Succumbing to the maddening itch, Chapman skins himself alive.


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45. Robert Novak

Charges: The absence of charges, for one. While the Valerie Plame leak scandal has taken down one prominent reporter and tarnished the reputation of several others, Novak—the one who actually printed the leak—remains inexplicably unscathed, unless you count the profane bout of crankiness that got his satanic ass bounced to Fox News, where, after all, he really belongs. Either Novak has secretly revealed his sources, damaging his already dubious journalistic credibility, or he is simply so well ensconced in the Washington power structure that he can’t be removed, like a metastasized tumor.

Exhibit A: The sheer, dreadful, angler-fish ugliness of the man, which can only be explained by the gradual accumulation of several lifetime’s worth of misanthropy, or possibly possession by demonic entity.

Sentence: Finds himself chained to a desk with James Carville; figures out he’s in hell only after several weeks pass without winning a single argument.


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44. George Lucas

Charges: It needs to be said: George Lucas is an awful writer and a shitty, shitty director. His second Star Wars trilogy absolutely sucked from beginning to end, and was in fact the least brave creative endeavor he could possibly have chosen, a guaranteed grand slam. Lucas has grown so accustomed to massive commercial success that he has no idea he’s putting out the worst work of his career, and no one dares to tell him. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, because an army of sexless, sedentary thirty-something dweebs with an unhealthy fixation on Princess Leia will insist that his schlock is brilliant as if their lives depend on it, and an absurdly disproportionate media blitz always brings the kids in. But everything that was great about the first trilogy—reasonably decent acting, an engaging storyline and cool model-based special effects—is gone, replaced by detestably unsympathetic characters reciting torturously bad dialogue in a manner so wooden that coaching from Keanu Reeves would have helped, and CGI effects that, while painstakingly crafted down to the nanopixel, somehow looked less real than plastic spaceships and Muppets.

Exhibit A: Already revising the new trilogy for DVD releases.

Sentence: Cast into the gaping maw of Tatooine’s all-powerful Sarlacc and digested alive for a thousand years, along with a talkative Jar Jar Binks.


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43. Rush Limbaugh

Charges: Rather than engage in the admittedly difficult task of justifying GOP policies rationally, the key to Limbaugh’s success is attracting an audience that actually yearns to be lied to. It doesn’t matter how many righteous fact-checkers assail him in print and on the web, because dittoheads don’t care that he’s lying, as long as the lies justify their prejudices. Limbaugh’s program is not just hypocritical; it is a celebration of hypocrisy for ignorant crackers, angry at smart people and strung out on the dwindling sensation that they are better than everyone else by virtue of their race, sex, nationality or level of bluster, because their character and accomplishments don’t warrant such feelings. If political discussion were sex, the Limbaugh audience would be a horde of virgins beating off to deranged rape fantasies.

Exhibit A: Started out in sports radio; hasn’t changed his approach one bit.

Sentence: Starved to death in full view of glazed ham; ACLU mistakenly bestowed entire estate due to barbecue sauce stain on last will and testament.


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42. Nancy Grace

Charges: Revenges herself nightly for the murder of her fiancée on every criminal suspect and defendant; facts be damned. Despite her viscous, Gump-like hyper-drawl, her brain can barely keep pace. Looks like a camel in drag. Her crude vindictiveness is to the myth of the southern belle what Roots was to the myth of the genteel South.

Exhibit A: Repeatedly utters a snarling "You know what?" at guests who question her-not as a rhetorical device, but as a declarative sentence.

Sentence: Wrongly convicted and summarily executed by intrauterine electrocution on national television, so horrifying the nation that capital punishment is thenceforth outlawed.


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41. Charles Krauthammer

Charges: Considered an intellectual authority among neocons, Krauthammer, like his colleagues George Will and Tony Blankley, really only presents a passable facsimile of gravitas, substituting vocabulary for intelligence, mischaracterization for argument, and intolerable haughtiness for authority. The fact that this wanton fascist’s opinions are not only considered fit for mainstream consumption, but among the cream of the conservative crop, is a maddening indictment of both the media and conservative movement.

Exhibit A: Posed a hypothetical scenario involving 9/11 "architect" Kalid Sheikh Mohammed to advocate legalizing torture, when the actual Kalid Sheikh Mohammed was actually tortured without any such legislation.

Sentence: Lockheed-designed bionic exoskeleton he receives from Dick Cheney in exchange for opposing stem cell research goes berserk, ignoring Krauthammer’s excited protestations as it uses its powerful titanium arms to pulverize his loved ones and donate his life savings to Hamas.


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40. Tom Cruise

Charges: Criminal narcissism. After mega-lawyer Bert Fields threatened to sue The BEAST over Cruise’s inclusion in last year’s Loathsome List, we responded by giving him the editorial finger, and bracing ourselves for the legal spanking of our lives. Instead, the episode seemed to trigger a cascading ego crisis, culminating in a rapid and irrecoverable image downgrade from exalted idol to ridiculous buffoon. From his laughable claim of psychological expertise to his worst acting performance ever—as a man in love—Cruise simply cracked up on camera in 2005, and a public hitherto willing to overlook his obsessively inauthentic personality and comical religious affiliation had finally had enough. Cruise is a perfect example of a person who is simultaneously in love with and completely unfamiliar with himself, living in perpetual fear of self-actualization, and asserting a legal right to live free of criticism. A guy who can do whatever the hell he wants, yet chooses to devote his life to maintaining the public perception that he is somebody else.

Exhibit A: "I care man, I care. I care about you. I care about your children. I care about these people here in this room. Every one of you. And I...I mean it. That is not just some words to me. That is a promise." Seriously, can’t even act like a human being.

Sentence: A lifetime of forced, joyless sex with famously beautiful women, only to have his colossal gay porn library posthumously bequeathed to the Smithsonian by bitter, unloved offspring.


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39. Dr. David Hager

Charges: A Bush appointee to the FDA who was the key figure in its rejection of emergency oral contraceptive Plan B as an over the counter drug, which Hager bragged was the second time in fifty years the FDA has ruled against the overwhelming approval of its own advisory committee. The author of books like Stress and the Woman’s Body and As Jesus Cared for Women, Hager repeatedly sodomized his ex-wife for years against her will, alternately apologizing for or denying it when confronted by her, offering excuses like "You asked me to do that" and "Oh, I didn’t mean to have anal sex with you; I can’t feel the difference," she told The Nation. Seems a bit fishy, a supposed authority on women’s health who can’t detect such a significant distinction with his most sensitive instrument.

Exhibit A: "My official comment is that I decline to comment."

Sentence: A three-day group ramming by the multi-dildoed Oregon chapter of NOW, after which Hager will walk with a pronounced limp, never to regain control of his sphincter, and discover himself to be inexplicably pregnant.


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38. Mr. Blackwell

Charges: Has made a career of releasing an annual list judging the most superficial members of society based solely on their most superficial aspects. Richard’s "Worst Dressed" celebrity lists have all the redeeming qualities of syphilis. Is clearly motivated by jealousy towards young, beautiful women, because he knows he can never be one.

Exhibit A: Routinely cited by E!, Entertainment tonight and People Magazine; we’ve got to settle for the Celebrity Justice.

Sentence: Teeth extracted with pliers and used to bedazzle Britney Spears’s jean jacket.


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37. Donovan McNabb

Charges: Played so poorly that his demoralized and alienated teammates yearned for the return of ego-vampire Terrell Owens. A chocolate commodity so inoffensive he makes Hershey bars look militant. Responded indignantly to loopy criticism from the head of the Philly NAACP, but laughed off Rush Limbaugh’s racist broadsides. Choked in the fourth quarter of Super Bowl; this year he enjoyed the worst fourth quarter passer rating in the league. Made over $11,000,000 in 2004.

Exhibit A: Logged only significant playing time this season with his mom in soup commercials.

Sentence: Peon at a Campbell’s Soup cannery in China. Flogged routinely for underperformance.


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36. John Rendon

Charges: The man behind the man behind the curtain. His PR firm created the Iraqi National Congress in 1991 and dubbed Ahmed Chalabi its brave leader. Has been on the CIA’s list of organizations to funnel money to since the key role it played ousting Noriega from Panama for papa Bush. Three weeks after 9/11 the Rendon Group began collecting a $326,000 a month paycheck for disseminating Iraq war propaganda by organizing and funding the INC, amongst other activities such as bribing and coercing foreign journalists to beat the drum for war. The Rendon Group played matchmaker between Ahmed Chalabi, Judith Miller and a well-trained Iraqi defector with wild, polygraph-disproved claims of vast WMD stockpiles. A former McGovern supporter and lifelong Democrat who enjoys his life as the Goebbels of outsourcing.

Exhibit A: This self described "information warrior" produced the now infamous tight shot short film of the falling Saddam Hussein statue with a small, yet enthused cast of INC players he had shipped into town with CIA money and planes.

Sentence: Paid handsomely to saturate the global media with fabricated reports that the cure for cancer is "punching John Rendon in the throat."


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35. Michael Brown

Charges: Second fiddle to Bush’s Nero—except that while New Orleans sank, Michael Brown just fiddled with himself. A man of geological indolence, Brown makes lichens seem dynamic. Despite being woefully unqualified for his job as FEMA director, it was Brown’s lethal callousness that really astounded (and killed) so many Americans. When one of only two FEMA employees Brown had vouchsafed New Orleans wrote two days after Katrina that "the situation is past critical," Brown responded, "Thanks for the update. Anything specific I need to do or tweak?" When he finally arrived in Louisiana, Brown was preoccupied with demanding more time to eat dinner at a Baton Rouge restaurant, instead of sucking down an MRE and getting to work doing his incredibly important job, like a fucking man. Brown reacted to the most important moment in his life like an immature college student who realizes he’s fucking up the semester and stops going to class without telling anyone. No human being can possibly be this ineffective unless he simply doesn’t give a shit if people die.

Exhibit A: In subsequent communications, Brown asked, "Can I quit now? Can I come home?" and complained about trouble finding a dog sitter. With almost comical indifference to those actually suffering, he wrote: "I’m trapped now, please rescue me."

Sentence: What else? Dehydrated, starved, and slowly baked to death on a Ninth Ward rooftop while repeatedly buzzed by news helicopters. Body secretly recovered and incinerated by Blackwater operatives as part of a Cheney-initiated campaign to keep casualty figures artificially low.


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34. Scooter Libby

Charges: Known as "germ boy" within the administration for his obsession with creating panic over biological warfare in order to facilitate huge government vaccine purchases and alter markets to the benefit of big pharmaceutical industry stock holders like Rumsfeld, George Shultz and himself. Sound familiar? A high-level fall guy, responsible for leaking what was in the interest of profit, not leaking what wasn’t, and barking on cue to produce the noise of governance without the drawbacks of actual governance.

Exhibit A: "The Aspens turn in clusters," or something.

Sentence: Raped by bear.


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33. Johnny Damon

Charges: Any baseball player with highlights in his hair should be faced with the same penalty system applied to those using performance-enhancing steroids. It’s ruining the game. And if a ball player is going to grow a beard, it should be a Charlie Manson/Thurman Munson scraggle of bushy whiskers, not a neatly manicured and softly conditioned frame for your pretty face. The only thing that got Damon to step into line and quit hair-farming was a 52 million dollar check from the New York Yankees. Boston prayed for the multi-bladed Gillette that officially made him a Yankee to slip while gliding over his Adam’s apple and spill his lifeblood into the bathroom sink.

Exhibit A: Going from the Red Sox to the Yankees is like fucking the guy that murdered your husband.

Sentence: Killed by barrage of hurled D cell batteries when he takes the field at Fenway next season.


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32. Kenneth Tomlinson

Charges: Hired to infiltrate the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, making way for a GOP takeover of the final outlet for objective, fact-based TV reporting left largely unsullied by corporate manipulation. Why is it that whenever conservatives complain about the "liberal bias" of investigative journalism programs, they seek to “balance” them out with shows that feature wealthy Republicans sitting in chairs and talking? And why is that those who rail against "racial quotas" have no problem with affirmative action when it’s applied to newsroom ideology? Tomlinson’s heavy-handed invasion was so objectionable that he was forced to resign, but he left behind some real gems: new CPB president and CEO Patricia Harrison was co-chair of the RNC, Assistant Secretary of State and oversaw the production of now-notorious fake news segments for the White House; and the new Chairwoman and Vice Chairwoman are both major donors to the RNC. Look forward to a new, more "balanced" era in public broadcasting.

Exhibit A: Next year’s children’s special, "Elmo and Milton Friedman’s Supply Side Christmas Adventure."

Sentence: Life as Bill Moyers’ butler, including sponge baths and diaper service.


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31. Rita Cosby

Charges: Unholy pastiche of fearmongering and celebrity ringworm with the brain of a moth, the integrity of a tapeworm, and the appearance and larynx of a sugar-addicted, glass-eating drag queen.

Exhibit A: Her banter with Joe Scarborough kills children.

Sentence: Kicked in the nuts.


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30. Hillary Clinton

Charges: Let’s face it: one reason the Republicans have done so well in recent elections (aside from touch screen voting machines) is that they are consistent in their views, however nuts they are, while "new Democrats" like Clinton are willing to hump every fence they come across. Hillary’s recent triangulation on issues like flag-burning and naughty video games has no right-wing equivalent in reality, but it would be something like Alaska Senator Ted Stevens launching a campaign against logging. Claims to pray all the time, which even her supporters know is bullshit.

Exhibit A: Will probably cause yet another tragic Republican presidency.

Sentence: Designated cookie-baker for Feminists for Life.


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29. Terri Schiavo

Charges: Sacrificed her grey matter to vanity, only to become the focus of a manufactured media blitz involving the character assassination of her husband, the selective coverage of fifty protestors by 200 reporters, and a disgusting demonstration of congressional overreaching, all in deference to a frightening fringe culture’s farcical take on ethics. If you can’t tell a brain-dead oxygen-waster from a fetus, you’ve got no place debating policy or exploiting a devastated family to further your idiotic agenda or political career.

Exhibit A: As confirmed by a conspicuously underreported autopsy, Schiavo feels the same about her current situation as she did a year ago.

Sentence: To have the circumstances of her death become a bizarre political freakshow; to be worshipped as a religious idol by weak-minded weirdoes who never knew her, stripping her and her family of all dignity as she lies, powerless to stop it, in a hospital bed. Oh, right. Never mind.


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28. Joe Lieberman

Charges: Technically there are 55 Republicans in the Senate, but that’s not counting their favorite shill Joe Lieberman. He’s a Democrat because…well…he’s from Connecticut. And he’s Jewish. But Lieberman has spent his time since "losing" to Bush/Cheney in 2000 spooning the White House and attempting to inoculate their increasingly insane policies from legitimate criticism. Resembles Tex Avery cartoon character Droopy Dog in voice, demeanor, and spinelessness.

Exhibit A: "Freedom of religion doesn’t mean freedom from religion." Apparently, it also doesn’t mean freedom from asinine revisionism.

Sentence: Made into Oval Office footstool.


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27. Ann Coulter

Charges: The fact that Coulter is considered desirable by Republicans betrays their sick and masochistic nature. We saw Coulter in person this year, and she is a revolting skeleton with a boob job and a grotesquely oversized head, who feeds only on the hatred of her target audience, liberals. Sole redeeming quality is that she is impossible to take seriously--she's really more of a shock comic than a political commentator, whether she knows it or not.

Exhibit A: "I’m getting a little fed up with hearing about, oh, civilian casualties."

Sentence: Confined to Mississippi; forever banned from interacting with the lefty intellectuals she lives to antagonize.


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26. Spammers

Charges: Wasting billions of minutes of time and millions of dollars in bandwidth on the thin hope that a few poor saps will be stupid enough to believe that a Nigerian banker actually wants to give them millions of dollars, or that responding to an unsolicited e-mail is the smart way to refinance their mortgage or enlarge their penis. Every day, we must perform the tedious task of combing through our e-mail and deleting the nine tenths of it which consist of the most retarded marketing in history, along with mean-spirited swindles and ads for the vilest pornography imaginable. All because these jack-offs can think of no better way to support themselves than by pestering the entire fucking planet.

Exhibit A: Your inbox.

Sentence: Faces repeatedly smashed into keyboards until dead; bodies made into actual Spam; greedily devoured by Nigerian bankers.


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25. Paris Hilton

Charges: Won’t go away. A head so empty, the rails of coke that sustain her must dissipate in clouds around her ears; this residual high the only explanation anyone would come within five feet of her. Brainless, her spinal cord defies physics, like an Indian rope trick. Her Carl’s Jr. commercial, while an uninspired approximation of eroticism, was still hotter than her actual "sex" tape, in which she only made noise when she wasn’t screwing—that’s not hot. Squints inexplicably for photo ops, suggesting even minimal focus is beyond her. Her continued success as a celebrity famous for nothing, despite the eerie resemblance she bears to the inbred banjoist from Deliverance and a lack of talent so profound that others become duller as they approach her, indicates that something is fundamentally wrong with humanity.

Exhibit A: Somehow, everybody in America knew that this completely pointless person had lost her dog, and we are all diminished by the experience.

Sentence: Locked in a room with a high steel ceiling which lowers a centimeter per hour, until she either solves a Rubik’s cube or is crushed; whichever comes first.


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24. Jim Guckert

Charges: The most hilariously twisted figure of 2005, including Michael Jackson. Guckert, better known as Jeff Gannon, truly lived a life in need of two names: the upright, macho, McCarthyite Clark Kent and the buff, military-fetish prostitute Superfag. Gannon symbolized so many things: the exponential erosion of journalistic standards, the fundamental hypocrisy in the heart of each Republican (further evidenced by their charges of "gay-bashing" when liberals could not conceal their amusement at his outing), unseemly conflicts of interest between the press and the GOP, etc. But what was lost in the sauce was that Gannon was a straight-up plagiarist, actually copying and pasting sections of White House press releases into his articles, and we don’t mean quotations. Now that’s a lazy propagandist. Nobody seemed to find that part of the story particularly interesting, but hey, what’s violating the first rule of journalism next to hotmilitarystuds.com?

Exhibit A: Despite having been publicly exposed to be a clownish impostor and an embarrassment to his party, Gannon refuses to go away, clinging ever more tenaciously to the same self-denying dogma that made him a laughingstock in the first place.

Sentence: Reunited with reality, in the form of ass cancer.


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23. Jennifer Wilbanks

Charges: Wasting the entire nation’s time and attention without actually being abducted and killed. The "Runaway Bride" fiasco marks a new low point in modern news, an episode in which the media devoted more attention to a single fruitcake than the rest of the damned world, discovered her to be simply an inconsiderate flake, and continued their shameless round-the-clock coverage of her unabated for many days afterward, compulsively playing 10 seconds of towel-headed perp walk footage over and over and over again, as world events were left to take care of themselves. This bug-eyed bitch and her doormat fiancée, after all, were important—right?

Exhibit A: Even if she were actually abducted and killed, it wouldn’t have merited 1/1000th the coverage she got in the first day of this speculation orgy.

Sentence: Actually abducted and killed.


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22. Jesse Jackson

Charges: Having parlayed a brief association with and willingness to mimic Martin Luther King Jr. into a lifelong career, Jackson finally cast aside all vestiges of integrity in 2005, diving headlong into rhetorical prostitution appearances in support of three extremely dubious "heroes": transparent pedophile Michael Jackson, all-star wide receiver and raging asshole Terrell Owens, and convicted quadruple-murderer Stanley "Tookie" Williams, who Jackson compared to Nelson Mandela. Providing the post-black pop star with racial cover for what must have been an exorbitant amount of money, and arguing that Tookie’s writing a children’s book makes up for mocking the death-rattles of his victims, Jackson managed to make Al Sharpton look good last year. It’s a long, soul-destroying trek from "I have a dream" to "I have to get a receipt for my expense account."

Exhibit A: Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH coalition organized a five-bus caravan, ostensibly to bring New Orleans residents wiped out by hurricane Katrina back to the Big Easy for guaranteed jobs and housing. Only fourteen of the two hundred passengers were actually from New Orleans. Three quarters of the passengers went right back home. Forty-eight were hired, three of which were from New Orleans.

Sentence: Jackson awakes to discover that he really has 'had a dream,' and that he is actually white, dirt poor, unemployed, and a terrible dresser.


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21. Bill Frist

Charges: A physician whose senatorial career has been a protracted renunciation of the Hippocractic oath. First and foremost, Frist does harm. Drew the scrutiny of the SEC and Department of Justice for directing the sale of $6 million worth of stock in his brother’s company, while claiming not to know he even owned it. Diagnosed Terri Schiavo from the senate floor, proclaiming "that is not somebody in a persistent vegetative state," and then denied ever having made such a judgment. His Harvard Medical School classmates reproached him in a letter for having exploited his medical training. Made protecting drug maker Eli Lilly from litigation for putting mercury in vaccines a provision of the Homeland Security bill. Honed his surgical skills on cats he adopted from pet shelters—really.

Exhibit A: Opposed Patients’ Bill of Rights.

Sentence: Brain damage due to botched botox treatment.


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20. Oprah Winfrey

Charges: Winfrey’s entire life is an exercise in self-aggrandizement, from the TV show which tells us what to read and how to live to her eponymous magazine, every issue of which features her smug countenance on its cover. More than just another insufferable Hollywood egotist, Oprah is something more akin to a housewife messiah, providing false hope and faux spirituality for experience-deprived worshippers. Everything she does is strategically designed to draw more praise, more devotees, and of course more money. Recently had celebrated poet Maya Angelou on her program to promote her new poem, which Oprah read for the audience as if she wrote it herself, as she seems to actually believe.

Exhibit A: Dr. Phil.

Sentence: Crushed by self-commissioned 40-story platinum Oprah statue.


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19. James Sensenbrenner

Charges: Hates free speech. Sensenbrenner is every truculent moron who ever shouted you down for informing him or called you a traitor for disagreeing with him. Sensenbrenner wants to apply criminal penalties for broadcast indecency—jail for swearing. Sensenbrenner and his supporters don’t know a damn thing about freedom or democracy; they may not even understand that they are clearly against these concepts. They are terrible, mindless, trained by decades of churchgoing into an unquestioning loyalty and a bitter resentment of dissent. That’s why they didn’t mind when this turgid cock abruptly ended a hearing on the Patriot Act after a single round of questioning because the witnesses were talking about Guantanamo. Sensenbrenner gaveled the hearing to a close over the objections of many, and when it became clear that the Democrats weren’t leaving, this old, worthless bag of shit turned off the microphones and ordered CSPAN to turn its cameras off, clearly enraged by the idea of liberals getting a turn to talk. Specializes in legislative attacks on civil liberties and the separation of powers, such as the Patriot Act and 2005’s REAL ID Act, which made it’s way into law as a rider attached to a military spending bill, and allows the Homeland Security Department to bypass any law or court to erect physical barriers at our borders.

Exhibit A: If Sensenbrenner ran the country, we’d go to jail for writing this.

Sentence: Spine-mounted electrode racks Sensenbrenner’s body with searing pain every time he utters an article, pronoun, or any form of the verbs "to have" and "to be."


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18. Tommy Hilfiger

Charges: Egomaniacal designer of drab, ironically patriot-hued clothing, manufactured by Chinese migrants who overcrowd the equally drab Pacific Rim factories of the United States Commonwealth of Saipan, favorite illegal vacation spot of Jack Abramoff and Tom Delay. Workers slave for pennies, are administered forced abortions, and still can slap a "Made in the USA" sticker on their products.

Exhibit A: Publicly raising a spoiled cunt on MTV’s post-apocalyptic "Rich Girls," and hosting a primetime CBS reality infomercial while peddling overpriced trash made by slaves.

Sentence: Receives gift from Ralph Lauren—a Sicilian necktie.


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17. William A. Donohue

Charges: If Jesus Christ were alive today, Catholic League president Bill Donohue would regularly call him a faggot in casual conversation. Purports to somehow defend Christianity by attacking nearly everybody on the planet in a perpetual frenzy of hateful, red-faced rage. As far as Donohue is concerned, the main focus of Catholicism is to stamp out homosexuality and Hollywood Jews who "like anal sex."

Exhibit A: When a liberal blogger posted an "O’Reilly Factor" parody transcript wherein Donohue launches a campaign against responding to sneezes by saying "gesundheit" instead of "God bless you," many failed to get the joke, because, well, it’s just plain realistic.

Sentence: Actually judged by true Christian god.


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16. R Kelly

Charges: As if videotaping himself urinating on an underage girl wasn’t bad enough, Kelly decided to follow up by inflicting the worst piece of music in American history upon the public consciousness. Kelly claims he is a genius for squeezing out what are so far 12 installments of his “hip hopera,” “Trapped in the Closet” like so many virtually identical turds, with no variation in musical content and a story line so patently terrible that it soon became the subject of a parody-frenzy involving Saturday Night Live, South Park, Mad TV, Jimmy Kimmel, and the Upright Citizens brigade, among many others. Even his good songs all seem to be about fucking underage girls.

Exhibit A: Seriously—pissing on an underage girl.

Sentence: Trapped in a closet. Eventually dies of thirst.


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15. Karl Rove

Charges: A greasy pig whose only distinction in life is his total lack of decency. Rove is decidedly not a genius; he is simply missing the part of his soul that prevents the rest of us from kicking elderly women in the face. His admirers have elevated fanatical, amoral ambition to the status of a virtue, along with lying, cheating, and negligent homicide, all in the name of "values." Quite possibly the worst person in the worst White House in American history.

Exhibit A: "As people do better, they start voting like Republicans - unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing."

Sentence: Lowered head first into oil refinery smokestack.


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14. Elisabeth Bumiller

Charges: The ultimate Bush hagiographer, Bumiller is responsible for unearthing such essential information as Bush’s iPod playlist and how he always makes his bed time. Bumiller’s weekly presidential throat job in the rapidly declining New York Times, the "White House Letter," reads like transparent ad copy for the president. Her unabashedly moist, worshipful tone would seem a little over-the-top at an RNC convention. Bumiller revealed the secret of her success to her alumni magazine at Northwestern: doing the very least that her job description requires. "At every press conference I stand up every time and ask a question," Bumiller said. "No matter what." Wow.

Exhibit A: "You can’t say George Bush is wrong here. There’s no way you can say that in the New York Times…You can’t just say the president is lying. You don’t just say that in the… You can’t say the president is lying—that’s a judgment call… What is wrong with that? What is your problem with that? What? Why do you all object to that?"

Sentence: The Times' reign as the "paper of record" is finally brought to an end when the paper’s headquarters are demolished by readers upon publication of Bumiller’s final dispatch, "Bush’s Taint: Sweet Like Honey."


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13. God

Charges: If your answer to the age-old question of God’s existence is "yes," your next question should be, "Why is he such a dick?" After three major natural disasters, not to mention the eternal constants of famine, war and disease, to believe in God is to believe either that He enjoys fucking with us, or at best has totally lost interest in the whole "people" thing. Never calls anymore.

Exhibit A: Mosquitoes, Ralph Reed.

Sentence: Forever listening to an unending stream of idiotic, mundane prayers uttered by the dumbest, most inarticulate people in His creation.


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12. Barbara Bush

Charges: Her polluted womb nurtured the seed of American decadence. The root of America’s decay; the poison tree from whence the fruit loop George W. Bush sprang. This unfeeling, unthinking patrician hag spawned America’s most notorious welfare child, whose every glaring deficiency has been excused or underwritten by undeserved wealth. Chuckling, she remarked of poor people displaced by Hurricane Katrina, "And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them." Of their plans for permanent relocation, she speculated: "What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas." A true aristocrat, she sees poor people as another species.

Exhibit A: George H.W., George W., Jeb, Neil, Jenna, Barbara, Noelle, succeeding generations.

Sentence: Hysterectomy on principle. Bound and thrown into Lake Pontchartrain. If she floats, burned at the stake. If she drowns, even better.


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11. Samuel Alito

Charges: The US Supreme Court’s fait accompli. President Bush’s closet case follow-up to the "most qualified" Harriet Miers' disastrous nomination, Alito was defended vociferously as a victim of racism by conservatives for being labeled "Scalito," a nickname clearly signifying his kinship of judicial philosophy with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and nothing else. Writes autistic opinions, in which language itself is rendered meaningless. For example, he wrote in a decision that the government should not protect plaintiffs from "employers who, although they have not acted with the intent to discriminate, may have treated their employees unfairly." When Alito puts on his Supreme Court robe, America can say "Arrivederci" to a woman’s right to choose.

Exhibit A: In a landmark case, Alito distinguished himself by advocating the most extreme interpretation of law on the conservative Third Circuit; the decision prompted one observer to note, "[F]or the first time since 1973, a Federal court of appeals has directly said that Roe v. Wade is no longer the law of the land."

Sentence: Paper cut while handling the Constitution, left untreated, becomes infected, eventually killing him. Wife cries.


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10. Bill O’Reilly

Charges: Even Limbaugh must bow before O’Reilly’s unparalleled bullying skills and ability to deliver undiluted bullshit with an air of brusque authority. O’Reilly is so comfortable with his astounding hypocrisy that he didn’t skip a beat when he was publicly revealed to be a comically perverse sexual harasser, continuing to sanctimoniously moralize about the corrosive effects of rap music and intellectualism on American society. Main tactic against his critics, whose jobs rank among the easiest in the world, is to accuse them of his own methods: arbitrary smears, selective quotation, partisan motivation, and intellectual cowardice. Infuriatingly claims to be a political "independent" who just happens to parrot virtually every Republican talking point and equate mainstream liberals with Nazis and Stalinists. Claimed his call for abandoning San Francisco to al Qaeda bombing was "satirical," which is itself the funniest thing he’s ever said. An honest to goodness list-making Joe McCarthy wannabe, with the ACLU standing in for the Communist Party.

Exhibit A: O’Reilly’s novel, Those Who Trespass, which reads like an eighth grade writing assignment, is about a blustery news correspondent, demoted from foreign correspondence to less prestigious work (as O’Reilly was when he moved from ABC News to Inside Edition), who murders a string of colleagues he feels have hindered his career. "I kill you on page six," he told Charlie Gibson on Good Morning America.

Sentence: After O'Reilly's influence fundamentally changes the nature of jurisprudence, he is tortured and jailed for life when it is discovered that he once leafed through a copy of the Communist Manifesto as a teen.


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9. BTK Killer

Charges: It’s not so much the depraved sexual murder or sociopathic lack of remorse—if we started including every homicidal freak in this list, there'd be no room to display our prodigious political bias. It’s the fact that Dennis Rader turned out to be, in the end, a sad, needy wuss. His jaw-dropping statement at his sentencing, coming after a series of tearful, enraged victims’ statements, revealed the extent of Rader’s detachment from reality—doling out thank-yous to his lawyers, the cops, his prison guards and the gang back at lock-up, like he just won an Oscar, cracking inside jokes and pretending to be 'close' with people who doubtless wished they could beat him dead with his own severed arms.

Exhibit A: "I feel like a star right now."

Sentence: Bound. Tortured. Killed.


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8. Judith Miller

Charges: The human warhead Ahmed Chalabi fired into America's collective ass on behalf of the federal government. A dutiful stenographer, Miller regurgitated all of Chalabi’s erroneous assertions about Iraq’s weapon’s capabilities without skepticism and threw in a few of her own. Essentially started a war with bad reporting, and remained indefatigably self-satisfied throughout the ensuing imbroglio, her mantis-like face fixed in a smile behind oddly insectival sunglasses. Managed to cast herself as a martyr for journalistic principles, despite her role as a conduit for a successful White House propaganda campaign, which is exactly why they’d try to use her to leak a CIA agent’s identity—to break the law again.

Exhibit A: Told a Salon interviewer in May, 2004, while US troops were already dying, "You know what, I was proved fucking right. That’s what happened. People who disagreed with me were saying, 'There she goes again.' But I was proved fucking right," which shows that not only doesn’t Miller really report for the Times, but she also doesn’t read it.

Sentence: After a brief but horrible stint as a chemical weapons test subject for Monsanto, Miller is vivisected without anesthesia and her organs are harvested alive to be preserved as spares for Seymour Hersh.


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7. Thomas Friedman

Charges: The worst of all creatures in the political opinion jungle: a cretin who thinks he’s a genius. Friedman’s intolerable knack for converting irreducibly complex geopolitical/socioeconomic situations into simplistic, tin-eared insta-clichés makes him one of the most dangerous people on the planet, arming people even stupider than him with the illusion of knowledge in the form of a crude vocabulary of badly mixed metaphors and ill-conceived flashcard images, thereby having a negative net effect on the nation’s intellect. India and China are "like a bottle of champagne" which someone has been "shaking for 40 years;" the modern economy dictates that "you need to be at a certain level to be able to claim your share of a global pie that is both expanding and becoming more complex;" and the threat of terrorism is a "bubble" that threatens to "undermine" open society. Friedman’s disorienting literary ineptitude is nearly enough to distract us from the indisputable fact that he has no fucking idea what he’s talking about. For this dolt-friendly parlor trick and a slavish devotion to globalization and technology as abstract, almost mystical tenets, Friedman has achieved iconic status. Exhibits the easy smile and benevolent smugness of an unjustly celebrated man who has never thought very deeply or rigorously about anything at all.

Exhibit A: Despite his constant exaltation of the internet as some kind of global cure-all, Friedman had to actually fly to London to discover that European newspapers were having misgivings about Guantanamo Bay.

Sentence: Column outsourced to Bangalore, where there is some difficulty in finding a peasant ignorant and ineloquent enough to please his audience. Compelled at gunpoint to write a 500-page retraction of his recent best-seller, called No, Actually the World is Round.


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6. Michael Jackson

Charges: Jackson’s second escape from accountability for a well-known lust for little boys was disappointing, but at least his image is forever ruined, causing him to flee the country. Unfortunately, his own imperiled children have not been taken from him. First plan upon acquittal was to build another amusement park, this time in Africa, where apparently it must be easier to buy off parents and/or potential prosecutors. Currently in Bahrain, where he is negotiating a consultant job with a company to help set up—yup—theme parks. Like a spider whose web has been destroyed, Jackson simply relocates and spins a new one. On top of all of this, he hasn’t recorded a decent track since Thriller’s success drove him off the deep end, and has retroactively ruined such now-creepy titles as "PYT (Pretty Young Thing)" and "The Way You Make Me Feel."

Exhibit A: Truly living in a fantasy world of his own creation, Jackson insists with a (figuratively) straight face that he has only had a nose job. Remember when Prince was weird?

Sentence: Forced to actually relive his childhood, including all of the beatings and molestation which transformed him into the inhuman freak he is today.


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5. Tom Delay

Charges: A politician so horrible, his prior career as an exterminator constitutes fratricide. Smiled for his mug shot like it was a campaign poster. Asked three young Katrina evacuees, “Now tell me the truth, boys, is this kind of fun?” One of an elite handful of white Americans still engaged in the time-honored tradition of screwing over Indians. Responding to a request he extinguish his cigar in a restaurant in accordance with federal regulations, Delay replied, “I AM the federal government.” Claimed that there was “no fat left to cut” from the federal budget to offset New Orleans reconstruction costs. So arrogant in abuse of power that he doesn’t even take time to construct plausible lies.

Exhibit A: Explaining his failure to enlist during Vietnam: "So many minority youths had volunteered…that there was literally no room for patriotic folks like myself."

Sentence: Bashed to death with hammer.


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4. You

Charges: Silently enabling and contributing to the irreversible destruction of your planet. Absolving yourself of your responsibility to do anything about it that your immediate neighbors don’t. Assuming that it’s normal behavior to spend several hours each day totally inert and staring into a cathode ray tube. Substituting antidepressants for physical motion. Caring more about the personal relationships of people you will never meet than your own. Shrugging your shoulders at the knowledge that your government is populated by criminal liars intent on fooling you into impoverished, helpless submission. Cheering this process on.

Exhibit A: You don’t even know who your congressman is.

Sentence: Deathbed realization that your entire life was an unending series of stupid mistakes and wasted opportunities, a priceless gift of potential extravagantly squandered, for which you deserve nothing but scorn or, at best, indifference, and a cold, meaningless demise.


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3. George W. Bush

Charges: Simply put, the stupidest man ever to lead this country. Bush’s lobotomized Will Rogers routine is a satirist’s dream, a European intellectual’s caricature of the dipshit cowboy American, all balls and no brains. Often responds to questions by attempting to define the word he finds the most challenging in them. Thinks press reports of his various crimes are responsible for his waning popularity, rather than the deeds themselves. Interprets the constitution like a Unitarian interprets the bible; for maximum convenience and with no regard to the actual text. Foreign policy vision is less serious and more simplistic than an issue of Captain America.

Exhibit A: "I want to thank the President and the CEO of Constellation Energy, Mayo Shattuck. That’s a pretty cool first name, isn’t it? Mayo. Pass the Mayo."

Sentence: Trapped for eternity under shoddily manufactured Diebold voting machine, unable to reach nearby refrigerator full of hot dogs and bourbon.


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2. Dick Cheney

Charges: At the forefront of nearly every administration effort to anihillate the constitution. A true psychopath with only one motivating force; insatiable greed. Insists that we can only remain "free" through torture, spying and secrecy. Bears the crooked ugliness of a man whose entire life has been devoted to a senseless pursuit of power, and whose most effective weapon is a total lack of ethics, or even decorum. So cartoonishly evil he defies parody.

Exhibit A: "I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency."

Sentence: Strapped to chair; eyes removed with melon baller. Nursed back to health. Lips sewn to a rubber hose connecting him to a 500 gallon nutrition shake. Nursed back to health. Fingers, hands, toes, feet, nose and genitals devoured by hungry pigs. Nursed back to health. Legs and arms ground to stubs with belt sander. Nursed back to health. Fitted with earphones that play only Christina Aguilera songs, and left alone to think about what he has done.


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1. Pat Robertson

Charges: If Pat Robertson’s local Starbucks caught fire, he would claim that God was punishing them for giving him a caramel latte when he ordered vanilla. Robertson has always been a demonic charlatan with the credibility of Miss Cleo and a lust for Armageddon in his vile, rat-toad heart, but this was really his year to shine. In 2005, Robertson called on God to vacate seats in the Supreme Court (the almighty obliged, killing Rehnquist), advocated assassinating Hugo Chavez, said ‘judicial activists’ were a more serious threat to America than terrorists, called criticism of the war treason, said John Roberts should be thankful for Hurricane Katrina, which he implied was “connected” to Roe v. Wade, attributed Ariel Sharon’s stroke to divine retribution for the Gaza pullout, said “the Antichrist is probably a Jew alive in Israel today,” and implied that God would wipe the residents of Dover, PA off the map for rejecting Creationism. Not to mention raising huge sums of cash from his zombie army, much of which is diverted from his charity operations to his business interests, including African diamond mines. Has long advocated that America simply ignore the Supreme Court. Robertson’s God is an insecure, misogynistic, homicidal fanatic—just like Pat.

Exhibit A: Vehemently opposed to voluntary abortion in America, but okay with forced abortion in China, where his cable investments depend on the good graces of the government.

Sentence: Repeatedly struck by lightning.