Author: jbenton

A music video for Grandaddy’s “Jed’s Other Poem,” made entirely on an Apple II with 48k of RAM.

Does any one in the Dallas area have a digital camcorder I could borrow? Would be much appreciative!

Best school bus crash ever. (Don’t worry, no one seriously hurt.)
Did you know: When some punk stole some of Sonic Youth’s equipment in 1999, it meant that the band could never play the song “Eric’s Trip” again, since live performance required a special old Drifter guitar that was part of the heist. In related “Daydream Nation” trivia (and man, what a good album that is): The final part of the final track, “Eliminator Jr.,” is meant as a tribute (or something) to ZZ Top’s guitar sound.
A 1989 prediction of what computers would be like in the year 2001. Some pretty good calls, actually, although it’s funny to think back to a time when people thought the fax machine would the center of our distributed lives. Notice no use of the word “Internet,” although “ISDN” is essentially a placeholder for the term.

My column ran in today’s paper.
For some reason, though, my name was nowhere attached. It ran under the name, email address and mugshot of my colleague Holly Hacker, temporarily rendering me significantly more attractive. (And less bearded.) Hmm…perhaps the paper is trying to tell me something?
(The name thing has been corrected online. The column’s about sleep. Zzzzzzzzzz.)

This is awesome: MP3s of Janet Greene, the right-wing answer to Joan Baez and Bob Dylan in the 1960s. She was hired by the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade to, you know, get the kids excited about fighting Big Red.
The songs are terrific in their awfulness. Take Poor Left Winger (lyrics here): “I’m just a poor left-winger / Befuddled, bewildered, forlorn / Duped by a bearded singer / Peddling his Communist corn / In the Café Expresso / Sounds of guitars could be heard / Twanging a plaintive folk song / Spreading the Communist word / Hair hung around his shoulders / And sandals were on his feet / His shirttail was ragged and dirty/ Making the picture complete.”
Plus other golden hits like “Comrade’s Lament” and “Commie Lies”!
The best part is the guys paying Greene thought she was playing ’60s folk — this is mainline ’60s Nashville country.

The new Miles Davis box set, The Cellar Door Sessions 1970, is very good. It’s a six-CD set of the live sessions from which were drawn Live/Evil, in my mind easily the best electric Miles album.
As the Amazon review (written by Dallas’ own Robert Wilonsky) puts it: “This is where Miles Davis turned funk into jazz, rock into soul, and chaos into Beauty…He rocked harder than Sly, got funkier than J.B., and turned jazz inside out, slicing the music open till blood spilled on to the floor.”
I got turned onto that album around 1994, when I was roommates with L. — probably the smartest guy I’ve ever met, despite his copious appetite for illegal substances. He’s now a big-time physicist who studies things like “injection and transport of interstellar pickup ions in the solar wind” and “space plasma particle instrumentation including time-of-flight spectrometers and ion optics.” He’s the mac-daddy.

How to install The Complete New Yorker on a hard drive. (Instead of forever swapping DVDs.)

You know who’s due for a critical revival? Caravan, the obscurist early ’70s wuss-prog band from the U.K. They mixed up elements of jazz and folk, but really, they ended up sounding like early Yes performed by a team of earnest hobbits.
(I make a strong mental connection between Caravan and little people. And not just because their songs feature lyrics like “As wandering minstrels play tunes of yesterday / When dragons roamed the land, knights in armour gold / Charged on horseback bold / The maids were saved, the dragons slayed.” I mean, come on! Does late-period psychedelic music get any cuter than that?)
I found their album In The Land Of Grey And Pink online somewhere, and it’s just plain charming. It’s like Jethro Tull without the fatal self-importance. I’m not sure I’d want to invite the band members to dinner — they’d probably stink of incense and slip some psilocybin in my iced tea — but their music is smile-inducing. (An MP3 of the title track is available in the Flash widget here.)
Some song and album titles: “Nine Feet Underground / Nigel Blows a Tune / Love’s a Friend / Make It 76 / Dan” (a 22-minute epic), “For Girls Who Grow Plump in the Night,” “Dabsong Conshirto (Part 1: The Mad Dabsong; Part 2: Ben Karratt Rides Again),” and “The Fear and Loathing in Tollington Park.”
I nominate them for the soundtrack of the next Wes Anderson movie, assuming it features meadows, sun-dappled maidens, and little people.

What are you doing on Friday, February 10?
You won’t be watching the stupid Olympics opening ceremony from stupid Torino in stupid Italy. (Speaking of which: Since when did good ol’ Turin become Torino? If the games were a few hundred miles southeast, would we say it was taking place in Roma, not Rome? Were the last games in Athina instead of Athens? Who do these foreigners think they are, determining their own names for their cities? And do we have to rename the Shroud now?)
You will be sitting in front of a TV, tuned in to your local Fox affiliate, watching the final four episodes of Arrested Development, the best show on television.
When the two glorious hours are complete, you will go to your computer, fire up your email program of choice, and email me: “Dear Josh, Thank you very much for allowing me to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Arrested Development. All the best, [your name here].”

Having spent much of the last weekend in various states of intestinal distress, I feel confident about making the following proclamation:
Cherry-flavored Pepto-Bismol tastes like ass.
I mean, ewwww. Regular Pepto may not be something you’d want for breakfast every morning, but at least that chalky taste is associated with relief in our collective subconscious. But add some chemical-tasting alleged cherryness and man, that taste never leaves your mouth. Yecccch.