>> Yeah, I'm still here. I went home to Florida for Christmas and just decided, halfway through the vacation, to not bother blogging for the duration. I'm back in NYC now but there's a lot on my mind at the moment, so no promises about what comes next. In any event, take the time you would've spent at my blog today and make a donation to the Red Cross for the victims of the tsunami in the Indian Ocean. Every seatback TV on the plane today was blaring disaster footage and the scale of it has really done my head in...

>> Scissor Sisters setlist, Hammerstein Ballroom, December 19th 2004:

• "Laura"
• "Better Luck"
• "Lovers In The Backseat"
• "Tits On The Radio"
• "The Skins"
• "Magnifique"
• "Rock My Spot (Crevice Canyon)"
• "Mary"
• "Comfortably Numb"
• "Filthy / Gorgeous"
• "Return To Oz"

Encore:

• "It Can't Come Quickly Enough"
• "Take Me Out" (!)
• "Take Your Mama"
• "Music Is The Victim"

And yeah, they did it -- despite the "rampant cuntiness" of the bit of the audience that we were in, this was probably my favorite show of 2004. More details later; I've got a flight back to Florida in three hours, and my car service shows up in one. Gleep.

>> WTF? PJ Harvey says she'll never play live again. Good thing I just saw her in October!

>> Kate Bush says her new album is "definitely" coming out in 2005. In other news, this morning I beheld a pale horse and a lamb with the marks of sacrifice walking down my street. I didn't think anything of it at the time, but in light of this news, it sort of makes sense.

Also, I finally got my Pixies show setlist if you want to scroll down.

>> Two musical links: Jake Shears summarizes the Scissor Sisters' 2004, via Kottke. Also: U2 will enter the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. For reasons unfathomable to me, The Pretenders are going in before Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five. I mean, I like the Pretenders, but come the fuck on, which of those two bands had a greater impact on the history of music? Oh well, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is just a parlor game anyway.

Oh, and for those of you who were wondering: I believe the Pixies went on stage Saturday night just after 9:00. In any event, I'd definitely be there by 9. I'm not absolutely positive that's what time it was, but I believe I looked at my watch at 8:45 when they were clearing the stage after the opening act.

>> Well, David Bowie and I both enjoyed the Pixies concert tonight (Dec. 11) at Hammerstein Ballroom, though unlike Mr. Bowie I didn't leave before the last song ("Gigantic!" What a fool he was!). In fact, I'd go so far as to say it was fuckin' rad. Badical, even. There's absolutely not a hope in hell of my remembering the setlist in full, but I can tell you that it encompassed virtually every song I wanted to hear them play (including "Head On!" I lost it!), with the sad exception of playing only one track from Bossanova ("Velouria." I would have loved to have heard "Dig For Fire" or "All Over The World" but I knew they hadn't been playing those, so oh well; still, no "Is She Weird?") and skipping "River Euphrates." But everything else = shit-hot. All their little bits of theatre -- Joey Santiago conducting a feedback squall with a drumstick during "Vamos," Frank Black and Kim Deal exchanging goodnights over and over at the end of the show -- were hilarious and awesome. Every song killed. Delightful. If an accurate setlist pops up while this post is hanging around the top of the page, I'll update with it.

In the words of Bono, all of this, all of this can be yours: My friend Cat (my fabulous concert-going partner this evening) has a pair of floor tickets to liquidate for the show on the 16th. She's selling them for $50 each, which is really a deal when compared against trying to buy them new from Ticketmaster, and they might've sold out by now anyway, I haven't checked. As usual, preference given to people willing to meet her in Soho to pick them up, since she's got finals this week and should be at home studying. If you're interested, pipe up in the comments and she'll be in touch...

Oh, and TV On The Radio were quite good as well, going a much heavier-rock route than I expected them to. I do remember their setlist, for what it's worth:

• "Young Liars"
• "Dreams"
• "The Wrong Way"
• "Staring At The Sun"
• "Poppy"
• "Satellite"
• "Ambulance"

And that's that. I've still got one more show to see (Scissor Sisters in the same venue, this coming Saturday) before I can declare it my favorite concert of 2004, but it's in the running.

UPDATE, DEC. 16th: Here's the Pixies set, courtesy of CDBaby:

• "In Heaven"
• "Wave Of Mutilation (UK Surf)"
• "Winterlong"
• "Ed Is Dead"
• "Bone Machine"
• "Subbacultcha"
• "Dead"
• "Cactus"
• "No. 13 Baby"
• "Head On"
• "Crackity Jones"
• "Debaser"
• "U-Mass"
• "I Bleed"
• "Gouge Away"
• "Broken Face"
• "Something Against You"
• "Isla De Encanta"
• "Hey"
• "Tame"
• "Monkey Gone To Heaven"
• "Caribou"
• "Velouria"
• "Mr. Grieves"
• "Nimrod's Son"
• "Here Comes Your Man"
• "Vamos"
• "Where Is My Mind?"

Encore:

• "Gigantic"

>> Dude, Sparky started a comics blog -- Trusty Sidekicks. I love it already.

I'm dogsitting for my sister on the UWS this weekend, so blog activities may be curtailed. Sadly I will once again be interrupting my Flickr streak. Grrrrr. But hey, Pixies tomorrow night yay!

Oh, and I did end up doing my Ocean's Twelve / The Life Aquatic double feature today. I dunno how much I really have to say about them in-depth, so I'll just say that O12 was every bit as enjoyable as I expected it to be, and Life Aquatic was sadly a fair bit less -- it dragged in a lot of parts and just wasn't as warm or funny as Wes Anderson's previous movies. If I end up formulating a more intense and well-reasoned opinion on it, I'll get back to you. Of course I didn't like The Royal Tenenbaums all that much the first time I saw it, but I do really dunno about this one...

>> Metafilter: It's Like America, Only With Freedom! Canada's Supreme Court has unanimously ruled in favor of the constitutionality of gay marriage.

Note to the United States: Canada is kicking our ass right now. Everything that I always believed this country stands for has suddenly been outsourced to them. And remember, it didn't have to be this way.

>> He lives! Now that we've spent a generous amount of time de-spamming and upgrading his site, Josh has begun blogging again -- Cultivated Stupidity is back.

>> On The Duality Of Privacy On The Internet: Or, Hasn't Anyone Figured Out How To Use Flickr To Hook Up Yet?

An excellent question. And hey, wait a second... that hot naked Asian woman (God, good thing I installed MTBlacklist) looks awfully familiar...

>> Just downloaded and installed: AdiumX, a Mac IM client that works with just about everything and does just about all of the things I want it to do (For example, it actually sends people your away message when they IM you -- I hate that iChat doesn't do that). I think I like it. It's very customizable too... I've already changed both its icon set and the way it renders my messages. Plus: tabbed IMs! Crazy talk!

I've become some kind of open-source superconsumer in the last couple of months -- I do all my e-mail with Thunderbird now, I do a significant percentage of my browsing in Firefox, and now I use Adium for IMs. Look at me, all geeky and l33t.

(Oh, and speaking of geeky things that I never followed up on: The RSS feed-reading trial fell apart after a few days. It's just not for me.)

>> Grammy nominations! Some are good, some are bad, etc. I honestly don't know who to root for in the Dance and Rock Group categories -- I like every single nominated song. And as usual, an excellent Alternative Album category. (Record Of The Year seems very, very off, however.)

>> How very convenient -- via Kottke, a New Yorker article on both of the movies I saw this weekend. It has a lot of accurate things to say about both, although I attribute his not being bored by House Of Flying Daggers to vestigial film-crit "If it's Asian it's got to be interesting" syndrome -- not to sound like a jerk, but c'mon, when American filmmakers do action films that are all visual panache with no emotional hooks, critics call them crap. When Asian filmmakers do it, they're "spellbinding" or "magical." (And you're still surprised and enraptured when people fly in these movies? Come on!) Get over it.

>> Installed tonight: MTBlacklist 2.0. We'll see how it works over the next few weeks, and maybe I'll even reopen commenting on old entries... in order to do that, however, I'd probably need to also implement Typekey. If I start thinking about doing that, I'll take a little poll on the subject here. But if you don't know what Typekey is, you should click that link and read up a bit.

I've spent a lot of time in the last few days cleaning up the 30,000+ comment spams that ended up in Josh's Movable Type installation. It's strangely satisfying work. ;-D And now that we've cured his blog's cancer, he's got no excuse but to post again all the time. Cough cough. Nudge.

Oh, and nice one to the spammer who hit my entry about Pepsi Holiday Spice with a clever comment designed to cast aspersions on BlogEthics.org. That was fuckin' clever. Enjoy being blocked, dickhead -- and if you work for BzzAgent, the way it seems painfully obvious that you do, then any moral gray area that I'd thought of your organization as functioning in is hereby eradicated. (More on this here.)

>> I saw Closer tonight, and it was OK -- certainly not something you need to rush out and see. It was a little overwritten, and Julia Roberts is tiresome to gaze upon and does very little except try her best to look sorrowful. Which fits the character, I guess, but man, I just really hate Julia Roberts. (So, uh, if you really like her, ignore me.) However, Jude Law, Natalie Portman, and Clive Owen were all fantastic (in ascending order of fantasticness, starting from Jude). Even in a just-OK, somewhat-depressing movie, it's very, very easy to just stare at Clive Owen for two hours. Oh. Oh so easy. Oh.

Yeah, OK, I don't do this very often, but a moment of silence:


GOD HE'S FUCKING HOT. Way hotter than Jude Law, who I often just want to punch (and whose character is just ever so punchable in this, though none of them are real human-of-the-year material). Ultimately, if you'd like to spend two hours thinking about just how painful romantic entanglements can be, then this is the movie for you! Otherwise, go see The Incredibles again.

I've actually seen a few movies in the last couple of weeks that I haven't written about here (I don't mention about 75% of the movies I see, come to think of it -- I just rarely have enough to say about a movie that would merit a whole blog post). I recommend Kinsey, which was pretty good if not great (Kevin was dead-on to call it "The Passion Of The Christ for liberal freethinkers"), and I don't recommend House Of Flying Daggers, which was pretty much just totally boring except for a couple of lovely visual bits. I'm really looking forward to December 10th, when both The Life Aquatic (which I'm 90% sure I'll either like or love) and Ocean's Twelve (If you didn't enjoy the first one, even a little bit, then I have to wonder about your fundamental humanity. What's not to love about fantastically beautiful people saying and doing fantastically clever things while wearing fantastic clothes?) are released. I may have to do a double-feature.

>> Further to last night's post about being marketed to, I just got done reading The Hidden (In Plain Sight) Persuaders, a really fantastic New York Times magazine piece about companies who create massive networks of unpaid citizen volunteers to hype products that they're given for free. It's an immensely fascinating article, and industry -- for one thing, there's this dogged determination on the part of both the agents and the companies to keep this practice "ethical" when at the end of the day it almost always involves a degree of dissimilation.

It's hard to say what I think about this; it's kind of amazing to read about how it's empowered the people who are taking part in it but at the same time I do have to wonder if (a.) it's safe to play around with the kind of psychological triggers that these campaigns revolve around (the need to be a part of something, the need to be seen as a tastemaker, the desire for respect from peers) and (b.) if it doesn't in some way render a lot of the basic social fabric of society quite suspect. When conjoined with PBS' The Persuaders special a few weeks back (I lean more towards this point of view about the reaction to that special than anything else), it makes for an important look at the shape consumer culture is taking today. If that doesn't sound too pretentious.

>> I was marketed to tonight. And I liked it.

I was poking about on Audioscrobbler, and I decided to click on one of their Google ads to help them out -- so I went over to Fox's The OC website. Now I don't watch that show, and never really have, and am more often than not bemused by the "rent-a-cred" music marketing machine they've managed to create around it. But I had a poke around their site, and I found it strangely attractive. And then I found that you could listen to the entirety of the OC "mix CDs" in a little Flash app, which also allowed you to skip to specific tracks.

And then suddenly I've bought two "as featured on The OC" tracks on iTunes -- The Raveonettes' "Christmas Song" and Interpol's "Specialist." Now, those were both songs I'd been planning to acquire for some time now. But I'll be damned if I didn't end up doing it because of that OC website. My "Consumer Whore" t-shirt should be arriving any day now.

In other Please Fill My Brain With Advertisements, I Like It news, I'm totally disappointed by the fact that I cannot seem to find an Inconsiderate Cell Phone Man fansite online. C'mon people! He's brilliant! My top five Inconsiderate Cell Phone Man quotes:

1. "Mauled by a tiger?!?" (This is brilliant because they continued to show it undaunted even after the Siegfried and Roy incident.)
2. "I told them I had a law degree, and they said SUH-WEET!"
3. "It's cool, I've got like a million minutes."
4. "I love you too, Nana."
5. "I've got a picture of it right here... unnnn-savory."

Honorable mention: the female voice that sings "So inappropriate!"

It's cool if you want to delete your bookmark to my blog now, by the way.

>> Wow, I'm already done. That was only moderately hair-raising. (Had some problems with my crappy FTP client setting permissions wrong -- fixed speedily by downloading a new FTP program).

That is, if this entry actually goes through when I click 'Publish.' And if the comments work. Etc. etc.

Whoops, forgot to skip updating the search-results template and now it's hilariously, ludicrously ugly. Better do something about that soon, I suppose.

>> I'm upgrading to Movable Type 3.12 this afternoon. So if this site vanishes and I never reappear, it's because something went wrong and I finally despaired of weblogging. (Also, if things don't work right around here for a few hours, that's why). Wish me luck.

>> Public service announcement: Go download the PDF of Popjustice's 20 Quid Music Prize magazine from last year. It's hilarious and it's only available today, so hurry!

>> By the way, if any of my readers truly love me, they can feel free to buy me any of the Diesel Sweeties t-shirts, especially the iPod, Buccaneer-American, and I'm A Rocker shirts. Alternatively, you could buy me the Popmart Lemon t-shirt from the newly redesigned and relaunched U2.com. (I also like the "unos, dos, tres, catorce" shirt.)

I'm a medium. Y'know, just FYI.

>> iTunes' shuffle mode throwing the Twilight Singers' live version of "Hey Ya!" at me reminded me of my dream last night, in which I went to see the Twilight Singers play somewhere. They did a bunch of Afghan Whigs songs, including "Retarded," and Greg Dulli climbed into the balcony where I was sitting and shook my hand, which was cool. But then it transitioned into this weird thing where I was right up in front of the stage and Dulli and I kept talking to each other and being very friendly and chatty. By the time they were covering White Zombie's "Thunder Kiss '65" in KISS makeup I realized that the dream was totally weird, and apparently that activated my subconscious "time to wake up" trigger.

Of course, that doesn't quite compare to the dream I had the other night in which I was playing a Wolverine videogame, and that quasi-logically transitioned into me and Ashley taking this kid who went to our summer camp this year (who, in the dream, we were raising) to a waterpark. Beeeezarrre.

>> This is an ad by the United Church of Christ. They wanted to run it on CBS and NBC.

This is the press release issued by the Church after being told the following by CBS:

The CBS and NBC television networks are refusing to run a 30-second television ad from the United Church of Christ because its all-inclusive welcome has been deemed "too controversial."

The ad, part of the denomination's new, broad identity campaign set to begin airing nationwide on Dec. 1, states that -- like Jesus -- the United Church of Christ (UCC) seeks to welcome all people, regardless of ability, age, race, economic circumstance or sexual orientation...

"Because this commercial touches on the exclusion of gay couples and other minority groups by other individuals and organizations," reads an explanation from CBS, "and the fact the Executive Branch has recently proposed a Constitutional Amendment to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, this spot is unacceptable for broadcast on the [CBS and UPN] networks." (emphasis mine)

"It's ironic that after a political season awash in commercials based on fear and deception by both parties seen on all the major networks, an ad with a message of welcome and inclusion would be deemed too controversial," says the Rev. John H. Thomas, the UCC's general minister and president. "What's going on here?"

I can't take in enough breath to scream WHAT THE FUCK?!? loudly enough.

Just checking -- does CBS always make a policy of checking everything it airs against the President's personal opinions? If he thought C.S.I. was boring and repetitive, would CBS still air it? I recall President Clinton asserting that he didn't have sex with Monica Lewinsky; since the Executive Branch had "recently proposed" that idea, it stands to reason that CBS would then not run any investigative journalism about it whatsoever, right? And yes, it's worth noting that this ad has nothing to do whatsoever with gay marriage -- it's solely about a church creating an atmosphere that welcomes gay men and women.

This is honestly despicable. The fact that gay people might possibly want to go to a church where they're not openly loathed and spat upon is apparently "controversial" now. It's a good thing I don't like anything on CBS or NBC, because I am honestly not going to watch their networks again until I've heard some kind of apology for this.