From: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org (fegmaniax-digest) To: fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Subject: fegmaniax-digest V12 #191 Reply-To: fegmaniax@smoe.org Sender: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk fegmaniax-digest Monday, May 26 2003 Volume 12 : Number 191 Today's Subjects: ----------------- re: robyn stings, stewart remains slow ["Marc Holden" ] Re: How was Neil Young? [Miles Goosens ] Re: Chris Langham [Michael R Godwin ] Re: biographies [Michael R Godwin ] Re: Liz Phair divorce tunes [HSatterfld@aol.com] good article on the Matrix [bayard ] Liz Phair and her lactiferous ducts ["Natalie Jane" ] Re: Liz Phair divorce tunes [Aaron Mandel ] Re: Liz Phair divorce tunes [Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 25 May 2003 19:00:21 -0700 From: "Marc Holden" Subject: re: robyn stings, stewart remains slow >* the Stripes and Dots patterns on the CDs are pictures of Robyn -- or >more accurately, his shirts. Stripes are trousers--note the zipper. Marc If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason. Jack Handy ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 25 May 2003 20:25:43 -0700 From: Barbara Soutar Subject: How was Neil Young? Miles announced: >Oh, if I hadn't seen them before, I'd be all over this tour, just like I'm going to trek out of town to cross another big "never seen" band off my list, Neil Young & Crazy Horse. > How was that show? she asked eagerly. I just downloaded a bunch of songs today and am loving Ohio, Long May You Run, Cinnamon Girl, and one he did with Pearl Jam called Downtown. This last one is pretty funny. For some reason I've never had the chance to see him play... I envy you. Barbara Soutar Victoria, British Columbia ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 01:31:06 -0500 (CDT) From: Miles Goosens Subject: Re: How was Neil Young? [Miles enters from stage left, typing at the top because he's accessing his mail via Earthlink's Webmail rather than downloading to Eudora as he does normally.] Oh, I haven't seen Neil Young with Crazy Horse *yet* -- we're making the trek to St. Louis in August to see him. He'll be a bit closer in a couple of weeks, at Chastain Park in Atlanta, but it's midweek, and Chastain Park's posh factor is a major turn-off. Plus we were threatened with death last time we saw a show at Chastain Park (Roxy Music, July 2001). We've seen Neil once before, solo/acoustic at the current Opry House, in... '99? '00? Only time Neil's been here in the 15 years we've been here, if you don't count that CSNY reunion tour (our love of Y is great, but wasn't enough to subject ourselves to over two hours of C, S, and N). Anyway, it was good 'cept for the people who kept shouting out requests (even mid-song!) despite the announcements before the show and at intermission, and even after Neil was finally moved to say something about it himself. [Someone yells "but is Neil funny?" and Miles exits stage right, pursued by B'rer Rabbit.] - -------Original Message------- From: Barbara Soutar Sent: 05/25/03 10:25 PM To: FEGMANIAX DIGEST Subject: How was Neil Young? > > Miles announced: >Oh, if I hadn't seen them before, I'd be all over this tour, just like I'm going to trek out of town to cross another big "never seen" band off my list, Neil Young & Crazy Horse. > How was that show? she asked eagerly. I just downloaded a bunch of songs today and am loving Ohio, Long May You Run, Cinnamon Girl, and one he did with Pearl Jam called Downtown. This last one is pretty funny. For some reason I've never had the chance to see him play... I envy you. Barbara Soutar Victoria, British Columbia ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 15:03:51 +0100 (BST) From: Michael R Godwin Subject: Re: Chris Langham On Sat, 24 May 2003, James Dignan wrote: > not sure quite why it reminded me (possibly the "pointless interviews" > comment) but do any of you Britfegs know what Chris Langham's doing these > days? He's done some seriously funny 'pointless interview'-type stuff. Apparently he was 60 recently. See the NOTBBC correspondence at: which mentions many forgotten moments from his career. But no-one refers to his excellent owl impersonation... The most recent show I saw him in was a counselling sitcom with the tubby woman who gets everywhere nowadays - Caroline Quentin from 'Men behaving badly'. Apparently it was called 'Kiss Me Kate'. Not v good, anyway. > I'm hoping and praying that some of "Do not adjust your set" got saved in > the great BBC tape-culls of the 60s. Possibly the first TV show I can > remember any of. I bet they've disappeared. Still, at least that means we no longer have to fear Mrs Black and her evil Blit Men! - - Mike Godwin n.p. Here comes the equestrian statue PS In pursuit of my 1953 campaign, I've just seen "20,000 leagues under the sea" on TV. Best fight between a giant squid and Kirk Douglas ever caught on film... ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 15:14:32 +0100 (BST) From: Michael R Godwin Subject: Re: biographies On Fri, 23 May 2003, Barbara Soutar wrote: > Other than this, I'm reading The Best of Hugh Kingsmill, an obscure but > fascinating critic from the early 20th century. Ordered it from abe.com > which I find to be a great source of second-hand books. Got into this > Kingsmill guy because the book is edited by Michael Holroyd - ever since > I read the biography of George Bernard Shaw he wrote, I've been a big > fan and read anything associated with his name. This leads me into > territory I normally wouldn't explore. I suspect that you would like the Lyttelton - Hart-Davis Letters. See Haven't read them myself, but they are near the top of my list. Recently read Martin Seymour-Smith's bio of Kipling, and while it was impressive, I got slightly bored with the incessant "and this _too_ may be explained by Kipling's repressed homosexuality" every four or five pages. I will definitely try Holroyd. I'm getting up the energy to read "White teeth" this week, but I doubt if it will be my kind of thing. - - Mike Godwin ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 11:38:34 EDT From: HSatterfld@aol.com Subject: Re: Liz Phair divorce tunes <> I have listened to this song on Liz's website...it is very much in the mode of "I just got a divorce and am looking for my self-esteem" sort of song, but it is very self-aware about being that sort of song. IMHO her lyrics are pretty much the same as they've always been, like them or hate them. It's the production that has upset some people, she has borrowed The Matrix from Avril to produce her new singles. Pop over-production has never bothered me much, but then again I have been witness to a scary divorce here lately myself, so maybe I'm just a little too in-tune with the new material. Hollie ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 10:34:37 -0700 (PDT) From: bayard Subject: good article on the Matrix i was disappointed in the second film, but this hints at what they're going for with the conclusion. contains insights that could be considered spoilers, if you're exceptionally clever. http://www.killingthebuddha.com/critical_devotion/gnosis.htm - -- No monster me / Sadly no saint either..... NFADs http://web.utanet.at/nkehrer/JOmegaRace.html ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 11:04:17 -0700 From: "Natalie Jane" Subject: Liz Phair and her lactiferous ducts >What is a "het-boy"? Or was that a typo? Heterosexual boy. (I am presuming that 10% of the boys in the audience were not interested in Liz Phair's boobs. Though 10% of the girls might have been.) > > As for the background films, the most distracting was during "Yoshimi > > Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 1," which was accompanied by a really > > bizarre film of Japanese schoolgirls vomiting blood and shooting each > > other, intercut with scenes of a woman apparently selling bottled > > water. > >The first part sounds like it might be from Battle Royale, if they were >in a kitchen. Someone else told me that, too, but they were in a classroom - this girl suddenly starts vomiting blood, and then everyone whips out huge guns from nowhere and starts shooting each other. The last scene is of all the girls lying dead on the floor. I forgot to mention also that "A Spoonful Weighs a Ton" was accompanied by a film of the Teletubbies. I wonder how they got the rights to that. n. _________________________________________________________________ The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 12:23:32 -0700 From: Eb Subject: Re: Liz Phair and her lactiferous ducts >(I am presuming that 10% of the boys in the audience >were not interested in Liz Phair's boobs.) Is anyone really that fixated on her *body*? I figure it's mostly a case of a gal with pretty hair/face and a turn-on personality. She's not exactly "curvy".... Eb ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 16:17:13 -0400 (EDT) From: Aaron Mandel Subject: Re: Liz Phair divorce tunes On Mon, 26 May 2003 HSatterfld@aol.com wrote: > IMHO her lyrics are pretty much the same as they've always been, like > them or hate them. It's the production that has upset some people, she > has borrowed The Matrix from Avril to produce her new singles. I just listened to the "full album tease" (i.e. clips from every song strung together, not actually a full album) on her website and... I don't know which songs The Matrix produced but some of them had really stupid production touches on them that don't sound much like Liz Phair to me. Some of the other tracks were glossy in a nice way. I don't know. Are these guys actually any good? I thought the big Avril single sounded kinda weak. Lyrics: There were some wince-inducing moments in the preview, but I don't think that'll ruin it for me -- never been into her lyrics particularly. > Pop over-production has never bothered me much, but then again I have > been witness to a scary divorce here lately myself, so maybe I'm just a > little too in-tune with the new material. Phair did an interview with Entertainment Weekly recently that had me rolling my eyes... it was about how all her old fans would hate her now but that was their problem because she was going to make it big, and she'd always hated "the indie scene", blah blah blah. The problem I suspected with all that, which was borne out on my first listen to the teaser clips, is that it doesn't sound like she's broken free of her hipster background to make a brilliant pop record; it sounds like she's making a hipster's idea of a sellout record! It's like a lot of the kids I went to high school with who were raised Christian and then decided they were Satanists -- they still asserted the truth of a lot of the bible stories they grew up with, except that they'd changed their minds about who the good guy was. I'm sure that Phair's cohorts in Chicago used to talk about what makes a record a hit, and how each thing that makes a record popular sucks for a different reason. But are those really the people whose ideas about making a pop record you should follow, even if you invert their rules about what sucks and what rocks? On the third hand, the teaser didn't sound THAT much different from Whitechocolatespaceegg to me; obviously the rebellion against indie snobbery is the big PR angle for the new record and so EW played it up... whatever. I'm looking forward to hearing the album anyway. And, okay, FOURTH thing, can you really cross over to harmless pop superstardom when your record has a song whose chorus goes "gimme your hot white cum"? Even if you record it with Pete Yorn? a P.S. Speaking of indie darlings, the scenester chip in my head must have finally kicked in, because I've gone from finding the new New Pornographers record disappointing to loving it. Nice to see that Dan Bejar (whose last two Destroyer records I haven't liked at all) is still contributing, if not touring with the band. His "Ballad Of A Comeback Kid" is the high point of a great second half to the album. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 22:28:33 -0500 From: Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey Subject: Re: Liz Phair divorce tunes Quoting Aaron Mandel : > And, okay, FOURTH thing, can you really cross over to harmless pop > superstardom when your record has a song whose chorus goes "gimme your > hot white cum"? Even if you record it with Pete Yorn? Along similar lines, I just noticed at AMG that there apparently exist "clean" versions of (at least) the first two Liz Phair albums. That version of _Exile in Guyville_ must be, what, three minutes long? Or did she do an Alex Cox/"clean" _Repo Man_ absurd rewrite ("you melon farmer!")...: "I can feel it in my bones / I'm gonna spend another night alone / with _Chicken Run_... / _Chicken Run_ / Nick Park's such a clever guy..." Also...maybe anyone who's ever worked at a college radio station can help me out on this: every once in a while, they'll play a track with a "dirty" word in it and bleep it out, using an annoying "beep" sound which, I suppose, is generated by some button someone has to push. I've always thought it'd be far more interesting to, say, cue up _Metal Machine Music_ on the other player and, at the appropriate moment, switch over to that machine, so it'd be more like "That way we can [towering squall of multiple-tracked feedback] and watch TV..." Or one of those obnoxious, especially-chosen-to-be-pleasant sounds, like newer cars make when you've left their doors open? Or perhaps a snippet of Pat Robertson saying "Satan!"? ..Jeff J e f f r e y N o r m a n The Architectural Dance Society www.uwm.edu/~jenor/ADS.html :: When the only tool you have is an interociter, you tend to treat :: everything as if it were a fourth-order nanodimensional sub-quantum :: temporo-spatial anomaly. :: --Crow T. Maslow ------------------------------ End of fegmaniax-digest V12 #191 ********************************