retroBlog

Motoring, what’s your price for flight? You’ve got him in your sights,
And driving thru the night!
Motoring, What’s your price for flight? In finding mister right?
You’ll be alright tonight!!
Don would scream along with this song at the top of his lungs into his hair brush in the middle of our dorm room in only his boxer briefs…. and usually while i’m over at my desk trying desperately to figure out what the hell i’m going to do about my chemistry exam i had scheduled at 8 the next morning. ah, just your typical night in the dorms. oh, the memories. it’s funny how things that truly aggravated you back then can somehow evolved into a fond faded memory. take Don, one of my ol’ college roommates for example. Man, we were definitely polar opposites. THE odd couple on campus. the guy was six foot seven (but couldn’t play basketball to save his life..heh) and i… wasn’t six foot seven. he grew up in a military town listening to Ratt, Poison, Dokken and Winger. me, i was born in germany and grew up listening to the beatles! you should have heard us go at each other with our respective boom boxes. i’d blast The White Album while he was trying to go to sleep and at other times, he’d sing along to “round and round” by Ratt an atonal piece of crap song that should forever be banned from being played on anyone’s stereo system ever again! not only did we have different tastes, i swear the dude had Cameo tourette’s. whenever we happened upon some ‘dead-air’, some moment of silence or a lull in conversation, Don took it as a cue to fill it with some goofball impression of Larry Blackmon from the R&B group Cameo. “OOOWWW! looks so nice! Wrapped up tight!” Don would cry out all of a sudden with his right hand over his crotch sounding strangely like a cross between a constipated Barry White and Groucho Marx. as for life outside the dorm room, ummm, our meals together were arduous, for lack of a better term. in typical Don fashion, he’d bark at me “hey, hey, hey, lookit her!” several times during a meal. it had become sort of our cafeteria routine. he’d call attention to some passer-by and i involuntarily look up from my plate knowing full well it’d be a waste of effort. the fool had a running commentary on all the girls that passed our way as we ate. i wouldn’t have minded so much if he took note of the many fine lookin’ girlies that were around but nooooo, i ended up with a guy that enjoyed going out of his way to point out the flaws in people. “The girl’s got big-bird’s beak for a nose!”, “dag, wide-load comin’ through”, “man, where are the ankles on that one?” were what would typically came out of his mouth. and as you might have guessed, he basically talked non-stop. i don’t know. maybe he was just compensating for the lack of info coming from my general direction. with all that talking, he’d end up giving a little TMFI. too much freakin’ information. you know, i really didn’t need to know about : which condom he preferred to use, it had to be extra thick so it wouldn’t break, used geoffrey downes’ The Light Program and mike oldfield’s Islands as their let’s get it on music (what, no dokken?), he had an ex-girlfriend that he still saw from time to time, they both had an understanding, he was almost caught during a time of ‘understanding’ and had to climb out of her bedroom window with only his socks and boxers on… TMFI. OK, i admit that i didn’t REFUSE to listen to his tales but hey, he didn’t HAVE to tell me these things.
but it wasn’t all fun and games. living with someone never really is. we did have our blow-outs. especially early on. but like all guys, we’d just let it blow over and things got forgotten. surprisingly, we ended up getting along pretty well in the latter half of our time together. i even got used to his Cameo tourette’s. hell, i did my own interpretation of it from time to time. although i could have done without being tormented by Ratt songs, i’m still glad i kinda got to know the dude. interesting how memory colours the past.

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i’ve been looking forward to the release of the new live album by the original members of 80’s supergroup Asia for a while now. i mean, just look at the caliber and the musical history of the members of this group: John Wetton (King Crimson, UK), Steve Howe (Yes, GTR), Geoff Downes (Yes, Buggles) and Carl Palmer (ELP). to have these four men back together is truly a momentous occasion. the group started the reunion tour in 2006 and continues to tour around the globe for most of 2007. to commemorate the mammoth tour, they captured their March 2007 performance in front of a sold out crowd in tokyo. the CD is called Fantasia - Live In Tokyo: 2007 (2CD) and is the first official live recording of the original lineup. it has been a long time coming and after listening to the new double CD set, they might have waited a bit too long unfortunately. instead of a well-oiled, cohesive group of musicians that have gelled from a year of touring, what is presented here on CD is a fragmented group of rock legends that aren’t listening to each other and seem to be just going through the motions and are just there to add to their retirement fund. part of the blame has to go to the muddy and highly compressed audio mix. i’m not sure what equipment was used to record the concert but i’ve heard bootlegs that sound better than this. Carl Palmer’s drums sound so squashed by compression that at times it sounds like he’s beating cardboard boxes! but once you get past the underwhelming sound quality, one can definitely hear sloppy performances that land a bit high on the cringe-meter. i do have to give props to John Wetton who for the most part is singing these songs in their original key. i think the biggest problem here in terms of musicianship has to do with Carl Palmer’s drumming. there’s no denying that Palmer can do some flashy drumming on his extra large double bass drum set but he fails at one of the key fundamentals of drumming which is keeping solid time (tempo). Palmer’s tempo is all over the place and because of this, John Wetton and his bass can’t lay down a solid foundation. without a solid foundation (created by bass and drums), layering intricate keyboards and guitarwork on top of this can be difficult which is evident in this recording where the group sound disjointed and sometimes just plain unsure of themselves. don’t take my word for it, just listen to “Time Again”, “One Step Closer” and “Sole Survivor” where you can obviously hear the tempo shifts between the drum/guitar runs transitioning into the main parts of the song. probably the most embarrassing part (at least for Carl Palmer) is at the end of Palmer’s drum solo when they have to come back into “the Heat Goes On”- Palmer counts off the song too fast and John Wetton realizes this and manages to bring down the tempo with his bass and his vocals. the transition just sounds awkward and unprofessional. Come on! I expect more from these legends of prog rock!!

it’s sad to say but Fantasia - Live In Tokyo: 2007 (2CD) is a big letdown. i’m sure seeing these guys live and in person is a totally different experience but for an official CD release, the performances leave a lot to be desired.

Fantasia Tracklist:
Disc 1
1. Time Again
2. Wildest Dreams
3. One Step Closer
4. Roundabout
5. Without You
6. Cutting It Fine
7. Steve Howe Guitar Solo
8. Fanfare For The Common Man
9. The Smile Has Left Your Eyes
Disc 2
1. Don’t Cry
2. Court Of The Crimson King
3. Here Comes The Feeling
4. Video Killed The Radio Star
5. The Heat Goes On / Carl Palmer Drum Solo
6. Only Time Will Tell
7. Sole Survivor
8. Ride Easy
9. Heat Of The Moment

check out the new Asia in Asia 2007 japanese promo up on youtube.

for the official Asia website- click here

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i regret selling off the She’s Have a Baby CD soundtrack. i should have held onto it. especially now that i realize that the out of print CD is worth a whole lot more than what i sold it for way back when. here’s the XTC song off the soundtrack.

Have you got Miss Fortune, she’s the daughter of rich parents,
all she does is cry. One four-letter word is all she wants
but you can’t buy love so there’s no supply.

Will you take young Master Charge,
the boy who’s living well beyond his father’s means.
See his mother kill herself with work
to keep her dandy in the latest jeans.

Happy families is a kid’s game. Happy families is your main aim.
It starts out with a dealing in the middle of the night,
and ends up with a full house if you play your cards out right.
Mum says Dad is cheating, you should see the grown-ups fight
for happy families, the game that’s sure to please.

Have you got young Master Race the bigot son who,
like his dad, is fooled with fear.
Not so much a sun, more of a stormtrooper,
to burn the books when Dad’s not here.

Happy families is a kid’s game. Happy families is your main aim.
You start out with your first cub and you think that life’s a song.
You’ll end up with a wolfpack if you lay your cards out wrong.
Dad says Mom is cheating, you can see the children long
for happy families, the game that’s sure to please.

Have you got Miss Carriage, she’s the girl who wants a baby
that she cannot find.
Strange, the ones who want to win the race
are usually the ones who fall behind.

- Happy Families by XTC

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as some of you may already know, i’m a big Office fan. and like most fans of the show, I had Jenna Fischer’s Lollilove on queue at netflix. it wasn’t placed that high on my queue so it had been lingering there on the list for months. over the weekend i finally got around to seeing it and i have to say that it was better than i expected. the movie had mixed reviews and i knew going in that it was a low budget affair so i wasn’t really expecting all that much. but since Jenna Fischer directed and co wrote the script, I knew i had to at least watch the thing. the movie was pretty short and was structured as a mock-documentary a la Spinal Tap. Jenna’s husband James Gunn also starred in it and the premise is about James and Jenna setting up a charity for the homeless. it’s pretty much a satire on the rich and their point of view on charities. it was interesting that James and Jenna used their real names and incorporated a lot of their own photos and even their wedding video into the film even though they were obviously not portraying themselves. it was also an interesting dynamic to watch between the two leads where James played it over the top and Jenna tried to at least be a bit more grounded in reality with her character.

*spoiler alert*. don’t go beyond this point if you’re planning on seeing the DVD in the near future..[also NSFW. sorry]

(more…)

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