ipodshuffle

It's all coming together now...

For some reason, Tom Verlaine's "Breaking in My Heart" - the Side 2 Tour De Force from his first solo album - has been running through my mind the past few days.  In fact, I know the reason: "Torn Curtain" from Marquee Moon came up on the shuffle sometime last week, and I started wondering whether that solo album will ever make it back into print, at least on the digital side; "Breaking in My Heart" is the standout on the album, so thinking about the album put that song in my head.

But anyway, doing something completely unrelated the other day - raking leaves in fact - I realized that not only was that song running through my head, but that there were two others banging around in there, competing for literal "share of mind": the Stranglers' "Walk on By" and Nils Lofgren's "Valentine."  And when I thought about it today, I realized that it wasn’t a coincidence that thinking of the one song also suggested the other two.  As “Breakin In My Heart” plays on my mental jukebox, the guitar intro riff suggests the similar intro of the Stranglers' song, and the first piercing lead notes are sonic reminders of the lead in "Valentine," a very different song by a very different artist.

Meanwhile, The Lad has taken to watching “Kim Possible,” a show on Toon Disney, with a theme song about how “I’m just a normal high school girl, but sometimes I have to save the world” done in a faux Destiny’s Child style.  The song’s chorus features the line “call me beep me if you wanna reach me” sung mostly on the same note, going down one step for the last word - and that little pattern always calls up the similar melody line of the RHCP’s “Aeroplane” (“I like pleasure spiked with pain and music is my aeroplane.”) 

After a few decades of active listening, the several thousand songs in my head are coming together like some musical Pangaea, where an R&B flavored Disney theme song and a 10-year-old Chili Peppers line aren’t that far apart at all.  Far from being on separate continents, they’re just a quick stroll across the Bering Strait from each other…

The Kreative Kontroversy

"Picture book, pictures of your mama, taken by..." Wait a minute ... this is something else?  Doh!

Seriously, the HP campaign had already started winning awards by the time this Head and Shoulders one broke.  Wasn't there one junior brand manager in the whole company who could raise their hand and say, "um... excuse me Mr. Bigsby... I really love this ad you put together and all, but it is just a little like the current Hewlett Packard tv ad that's been running the past year..."?

Am I buggin you? I don't mean to bug you...

The news earlier this week that Bono and Geldof could be up for Nobel Peace Prize left me feeling vaguely unsettled and perturbed about the world.  Live 8 / Aid etc notwithstanding, somehow the idea that someone I mainly remember for my own college radio faves "Rat Trap" and "I Never Loved Eva Braun" (and of course, that big ol' honkin hit that everyone else knows) being elevated to the Mandela / MLK level was not a good feeling.

Then I saw the headline on the the SXSW news digest for the day: "Indie Rockers Mock Geldof" and all felt right with the world again, or at least that little corner of it...