Coachella '09 [The Oh-I-Forgot-One-More-Thing Edition]

As an inside joke, Brian and I refer to our annual Coachella trek as Operation: Mindcrime. [Can't even remember how that one got started.] But each O:M has its own special landmarks, and this year there were two in particular:

Coachella 2009 Official Soundtrack: Day & Age by The Killers. [A close second: It's Blitz! by Yeah Yeah Yeahs.] We listened to that Killers record over and over, especially the first few songs. Nothing like blaring "Spaceman" at max volume in a rented Toyota Camry Hybrid after midnight. In fact, it made me go into my Killers catalog and listen to some of the older stuff once I got back home.

Coachella 2009 Official Soundbite: "Gentlemen, I want my scalps!" [It's a repositioning of the words from the trailer to the upcoming Tarantino film Inglourious Basterds, seen below; keep in mind it's a lot funnier to say the shit in the trailer late at night after prolonged sun exposure and Miler Lite consumption:]

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"The Silver Gun" by Robert Palmer (1983)

I mean...Urdu? Seriously, Urdu . On an already eclectic and worldly album -- Pride , from 1983 -- "The Silver Gun" closes a chapter in Robert Palmer's career by singing a song about a horse in a language spoken daily by over 100 million people. The liquid bass line and propulsive electronics set out a bedrock for Palmer to ping phrasings rather out of place in Western music, askew astride even the peripatetic minimalism of the rest of the record. Somehow, in the middle of Michigan's Appalachia, I had this on vinyl a few years before the CD era officially commenced. It was an album of effort -- even the cover, a pointillism-and-bronze work, had Palmer's head barely above the water -- but the stitches didn't show to my pre-adolescent eyes and ears. In a career marked by zigs and zags, Pride and "The Silver Gun" were most certainly Other, and for a kid that felt like he didn't belong much of anywhere, it was nice to have those discrete feeling...

Some 2024 Listening Pleasures

It started with a gift of two JBL Control 25 speakers, and by "gift" I mean "borrowed" -- a.k.a. "will never return" -- from an obsolete tech detritus pile at work. I may have snagged more than two gifts, of course, but the raw footage proving such a claim remains elusive. And after installing the JBL speakers into the upper corners of the music room, and after installing speaker stands for the rear speakers I already had, and after making the hard choice between a big-ass bean bag and a comfy leather recliner to properly center myself in the audio field (R.I.P., big-ass bean bag), there was only one missing piece: the Apple TV 4K unit. So for me, 2024 was the year I streamed a lot of music in Atmos through Apple Music, surrounded by new tunes and old bops in thrilling new dimensions. Some might say you don't need surround sound, 'cos the two ears + two speakers modality has been dandy for a while now, but that's like saying you don't need ...

Triple Feature

For the first time since its inception, I was unable to see even one film at the Traverse City Film Festival this year. It wasn't for lack of desire, of course, but rather a scheduling conflict between the TCFF and Lollapalooza, which I attended for the second straight year. (Two quick takeaways from Lolla '18 -- rock music attendance is in the minority, and the young kids enjoy wearing basketball jerseys of varying vintages. And I'm old as fuck.) So to make up for my absence at the TCFF, I decided that yesterday would be my own TCFF in miniature, so I went to three movies back to back to back. I walked into a darkened theater at 3:30pm, and essentially didn't leave until just before 11pm. And thankfully, I was able to see three pretty wonderful movies, each wonderful for different reasons. You should see them if you haven't already. The troika of cinematic joy is as follows, with trailers to click on should you so desire: Mission Impossible: Fallout Rare is the...

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