Train Off the Tracks

There's a review of Train's new disc in the current issue of San Fran Magazine. It, well, it suggests that the band has "made the perfect disc for middle-aged divorcées to blast out the windows of their Chevy Minivans."


Apparently some middle-aged divorcées didn't take too kindly to such chitter chatter (even though, at the end of the review, it says the band is "underestimating that audience's intelligence").

Here's a quote:
"I won't bother to go into an amateur analysis of what kind of trauma would induce a (I am guessing) young man to have such negative feelings toward older women, but his review manages to insult our clothing and bodies ("many pairs of Mom jeans a-wriggling"), our purported emotional neediness, susceptibility to trite lyrics, clichés, and superficial cultural references (Sonny and Cher, the Doobie Brothers), and general bad taste in music. And cars (Chevy minivans). So we have a little class prejudice as well as sexism, pretty ambitious for a tiny review."

She thinks the review was pretty ambitious! And written by a young man!

If only I weren't already taken…

Tweet You

You know what's killing blogging? Tweets. And Facebook. Seriously, I tweet once a day, and I write and work on the pooter all day, so I never really feel like blogging anymore. It takes too much time, it hurts my wrists, I get way less feedback.

You know what you can't do on F-Book? You can't put Grumpy Guy up on there.


Also, if you're like Brent and you live in the 2007s, you're not on those sites. Or maybe you boycott them like April. So this post is for you guys, because I still love you. This is what you're missing:

Breathless excitement over the upcoming Vampire Weekend album.

Even more breathless excitement over the upcoming Pavement tour, especially the shows in England.

Links to frightening pics of 40something TV stars, now staring in occasionally funny, often strange shows about cougars.

Links to the fun music blog of Carrie Brownstein (Sleater-Kinney), wherein she discusses whether it's okay to like the music of artists you don't, specifically the Black Lips guy, who just got in trouble for using the (other) f-word about the guy in Wavves.

A list of the top 20 books of the past 9 years, only 4 of which I've read (they've got ** after them):

#20: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
#19: American Genius, A Comedy by Lynne Tillman
#18: Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link
#17: The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem **
#16: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides **
#15: Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis
#14: Atonement by Ian McEwan
#13: Mortals by Norman Rush
#12: Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg
#11: The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz **yuck**
#10: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
#9: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro
#8: Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
#7: Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
#6: The Road by Cormac McCarthy
#5: Pastoralia by George Saunders
#4: 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
#3: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
#2: The Known World by Edward P. Jones
#1: The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen **

Kind of awesome Soul Train footage of the original "Shack Up," later covered by A Certain Ratio.

Funny pictures from bachelor parties.


Links to weird Japanese themed bath houses.

My undying affection.