Friday Music

This week’s installment:

Caught a recent episode of ICONOCLASTS, the Sundance Channel show where they film as two creatives from different fields hang out and talk (the first episode I saw was Quentin Tarantino and Fiona Apple, for example). This most recent episode featured Eddie Vedder (from Pearl Jam) and Laird Hamilton. They hung out at Hamilton’s family home in Hawaii, and talked art, music and surfing. During the show, Vedder played the following song for Hamilton, which was recorded as a tribute to the big wave rider: Pearl Jam – “Big Wave.”

Catching the internet trailer for Lost Boys 2, and hearing the emo cover of “Cry Little Sister” during it (by some group called Aiden, which will be featured on the soundtrack), reminded me of how much I liked Gerard McMann’s original. According to the wiki entry, McMann says that he’s recorded new material for the new film. Another chalk mark in the “maybe it won’t suck” column. Gerard McMann – “Cry Little Sister.”

For : The original single version, complete with Max Headroom: The Art of Noise (feat. Max Headroom): “Paranoimia.”

Some new Swedish pop, with a distinctly Winehousean vibe, from one of the contestants of their version of the ubiquitous Idol competitions. Pretty good stuff. Amanda Jenssen – “Do You Love Me.”

There was a turntable group in NYC that called themselves the X-Men. They got an album release in the early part of this decade, where, for legal reasons, they were called the X-Ecutioners. They had one single, a collaboration with Linkin Park, to cash in on the rap-rock sound, which was actually pretty good: The X-Ecutioners (feat. Linkin Park) – “It’s Going Down.”

I was listening to Donald Fagen’s “The Nightfly” earlier this week. It still blows me away — only 8 tracks, and every one of them perfect. Here’s one of my favorites — a cautionary tale of an interracial Romeo & Juliet: Donald Fagen – “Green Flower Street.”

Lastly, some remixed Miles Davis, from the Evolution of the Groove Remix album. Late in the song, they hand some MC duties over to Nas, and it’s not bad — but really, I think they should have kept it just the Miles stuff, which is far, far better. Miles Davis (feat. Nas) – “Freedom Jazz Dance (Evolution of the Groove).”

Pulp Primer

(From a comment made in an earlier post, which I think merits a post of its own)

If you’re looking to jump into reading Pulp, here are some suggestions:

First up, an excellent overview, which might give you an idea of what directions you’d like to look toward:

The Great Pulp Heroes by Don Hutchison. It’s probably the best overview I’ve read to date, organized by chapters devoted to the big name characters and magazines.

Nostalgia Ventures has been doing two-novels-per-issue reprints of the original Shadow and Doc Savage pulps, complete with original interior illustrations, and historical commentary by Will Murray. Well worth your time.

Here’s a list featuring some of The Shadow reprints on Amazon,

and

A similar list of Doc Savage reprints.

There have also been reprints of The Spider, by various publishers, easily found by searching on Amazon under “The Spider”, “Grant Stockbridge” or “Norvell Page”.

Baen recently produced The Spider – Robot Titans of Gotham, which reprints two complete Spider stories, and is a good introduction to the character.

From there, doing searches on characters — “Operator #5”, “Secret Agent X”, “Phantom Detective”, etc. — will lead you to various reprints that are available.

…and that’s not even getting into the new Pulp fiction (Moonstone’s collections of new short stories featuring The Spider or The Phantom …. or Adamant’s own Thrilling Tales Quarterly….

Passport Hell, Redux

After the joy (looong, friends-locked story) that we went through in trying to get The Minion’s passport last year, you can imagine my opinion of the following “solution” by the US Government:

A Washington Times investigation has discovered that the US has outsourced the manufacturing of American passports to overseas companies — including a Thai company that has had problems with Chinese espionage infiltration.

Not only that, but the GPO (government printing office) is charging the State Department more money for manufacturing the passports than it costs to make them, which apparently has allowed them to ring up more than $100 million in profits (although how one office can make a profit from another, when it’s all tax dollars anyway is beyond me).

Jesus Christ, that’s POWERFUL stupid.