the ape gears

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Obsessive playing and re-playing of the Fiery Furnaces' "Chris Michaels," more biking, a nice long talk with Julianne (who's leaving town, sadly, but with whom I'll finally get to work at her new gig in NYC) in the course of which I left my bike helmet at the restaurant where we met, and Margaret Cho's Notorious C.H.O. in the evening. (Verdict on the latter: she's very, very funny--I mean, I had tears of laughter rolling down my face a couple of times--and she can do more with her face than any other comedian I know, but the hagiographical interviews with her fans at the beginning and end of the movie have GOT to go. As does the feel-good pep speech at the end of her main set. No difference between that and the "heartwarming" chapter that Erma Bombeck used to put at the end of her books.) Any lacunae readers going to be at Comic-Con that I don't already know about? Email me. Or else I'll just have to spend five days singing "how bad does she seee-ee-ee-eem, she makes me wanna scream" to myself.

Today's song is Andrew Beaujon's "Packaging Deduction" (removed), a very bitter song about the music business by a guy who's seen plenty of its gruesome inner workings--and a song that sounds like it's an extended metaphor for a collapsing romance, but is not actually all that metaphorical. (For those who haven't encountered the term before: a "packaging deduction" is the 25% or so that gets taken out of the nominal royalty rate for most big-label artists' CDs on the grounds that, um, they come in packages.) Andrew (thanks to whom for permission to post this!) was, through the early '90s, the main songwriter in Eggs, a band very near and dear to my heart (their singles comp How Do You Like Your Lobster?, in particular, will someday be more widely recognized for its wonderful strangeness and range). This song came out, if I'm remembering correctly, a year or so after Eggs folded, on a compilation single handed out to attendees of the second Indie-Rock Flea Market. (I have relatively few memories of that day, besides meeting one of the few other people I'd ever encountered at that point who knew about Family Fodder--who was also named Douglas!--and seeing Trans Am play a 20-minute version of ESG's "UFO." I have relatively few memories of anything before 2001 or so, actually. This is not Eggs' problem.)

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This page contains a single entry by Douglas published on July 20, 2004 1:18 AM.

lines (multiple colors thereof) was the previous entry in this blog.

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