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Thursday, April 24, 2003
yeah what the hell. DC sucks for the first 20 years of his career then gets traded to the sixers and decides its time to play. Who is this thomas dude? Young or what? Never heard of him before last night.
hdouble 3:36 PM
ted is pissed
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=127&e=6&u=/ucru/bush_comes_clean__it_was_about_oil
hdouble 9:06 AM
man, no cable is killing me. Rob, no comments about your boy!??? Alley??? I took Philly +4 last night at home, depending on that tough bastard Alley, and he came through (by one). And Mr. Softie (aka Keith) actually had a decent game. I think Philly is going to the finals, the east is horrible.
Dirk is awful on defense but he's unbelievable on offense. 23? years old averaging like 25 pts and 10 boards. Tonight I went with Minn. + 9.5! and took the Money line on the nets at Milwaukee. I'm 3-5 (2-2 spread, 1-3 with the damn unders) for the playoffs, should get back even tonight.
hdouble 8:56 AM
Wednesday, April 23, 2003
"you can get anything you want
at davey's bookstore (excepting Ayn Rand)"
hdouble 4:56 PM
cool gourds article:
> NO ALTERNATIVE
>
> Are the Gourds the last of Austin's Next Big Things?
>
> BY KATY VINE
> [of Austin; writer for Texas Monthly]
>
> People who moved to Austin in the early '90s stepped into a
> strange arena. Theaters had just been hit with Slacker, and the
> whole town was like a pretty kid who'd just been shown an
> image of himself in a mirror, prompting simultaneous feelings of
> vanity and debilitating self-consciousness. How could one go
> into a grocery store in a bathrobe anymore without being labeled
> affected? And when dotcommerce crept into Austin and other
> college towns across the country, a narrowly defined laid-back
> lifestyle was drawn into sharp relief, creating expectations that
> were increasingly difficult to live up to. Inevitably, a round of
votes
> identified 1991 as the end of an era.
>
> Around this same time, the guys who eventually became the
> Gourds moved to Austin and started practicing in a beat-up little
> house held secure with a casing of creeping vines. It looked like
> the earth was trying to reclaim it (you could barely make out the
> shack from the street). The Gourds called it the Steamy Bowl.
> Inside, weird art and graffiti decked the walls, and the Gourds
> and their friends played and drank and wrote country-zydeco-folk
> songs often accompanied by absurd non sequiturs:
>
> A little song, a little dance
> a little seltzer down yer pants
> lump o gold the size of yer head
> a little bramble in yer bed
> happy day in a boat
> trade a heifer for a goat
> Caledonia, where the hell you been?
>
> Kevin Russell, the big lead singer, played guitar and mandolin
> and howled through his nose, harmonizing against the hoarse
> tenor of Jimmy Smith -- a shaggy kid from Plano (a suburb of
> Dallas) who grew up listening to classic rock. A Welsh drummer
> named Charlie Llewellin was matching Jimmy's bass with the
> booma-chucka beat of a train, and a skinny, red-headed Star
> Wars fanatic from Louisiana named Claude Bernard picked up
> the accordion.
>
> They weren't nostalgic purists -- didn't know or didn't care about
> definitions of eras. They were creating their own hybrid: carefree
> road-trip music, sitting-on-the-porch-drinking-beer music that
> pulled rhythms and instrumentation combinations from
> honky-tonk country, raved-up zydeco, harmony-driven folk, and
> romantic strolls. The lyrics, for the most part, were an
> afterthought -- vivid images assembled haphazardly. Russell
> says, "The thing about being in Austin and writing all those
> Gourds songs -- the way the Gourds sounded and felt -- it had a
> lot to do with the way we lived, the way we thought. Real
> idealistic. We were just sorta lost in ourselves. Real naive, in a
> way. Innocent." Who knew innocence would inspire a rally cry?
>
> In short, what happened is that the Gourds recorded one live
> radio show in early 1995, and sold copies of the cassette at
> gigs. Coffeehouses all over town played this tape, and within a
> couple of months the shows exploded from twenty to four
> hundred people. That same year, Munich Records signed the
> band and booked them on a European tour. They continued to
> tour two hundred days out of the year. Bootleg tapes circulated.
>
> Then fast forward: This guy Keith Langford -- Kevin's
> brother-in-law -- replaced Llewellin on drums, jump-starting the
> rhythm section like a cardiovascular shock, and then this
> hard-wired bluegrass fiddler Max Johnston, who'd played with
> Uncle Tupelo, joined the Gourds and the Gourds started to
> sound like a real goddamn great band, so much so that Doug
> Sahm passed the torch to them, saying, "You guys are it. Take it
> and go with it."
>
> Then the bomb went off. I walked into a friend's house one night
> a few years ago, and she was dancing to a Gourds song on her
> dining room table, kicking over Bud Lite cans and lit candles,
> making "Ozzy" hand signs and screaming, "I love this band!" I'm
> convinced that had her house caught fire she would have
> continued shaking her hips to the beat while spraying the
> extinguisher.
>
> The song was "Gin and Juice," the Gourds' 1998 rootsy folk
> cover of the Snoop Dogg rap. The band tackled the song as a
> musical challenge (what other group playing to
> patchouli-doused crowds was singing about "bitches in the livin'
> room getting it on"?). They never thought it would receive major
> play as a party song. But it takes a danceable beat and gives it
> even more energy as it goes along. "It's like 'Louie, Louie' or
> something," Kevin says. "But 'Louie, Louie' has more chords
> than 'Gin and Juice."' In any case, at live shows, girls started
> stripping and doing Lambada moves to it.
>
> The band is a little disturbed by this. They are not alone in their
> discomfort: When a member of the audience shouts out a
> request for "Gin and Juice" dunng a show, half the crowd nods in
> agreement; the other half cringes. "You know," Kevin says,
> "there's those cool shows when everybody's all aggressive and
> yelling and screaming and are way into what's going on -- it's a
> little weird though, 'cause we're not rock stars." It's true. Even
> though "Gin and Juice" tripled the Gourds' audience, and has
> given the band rock-star status complete with bootlegged shows
> and thorough Web sites where fans can download MP3s (some
> die-hard followers have even been inspired to tape the band's
> weekly practices), the act itself hasn't changed.
>
> Not too long ago, the Gourds returned to the spot where they
> recorded their breakthrough live set on Austin's public radio
> station. They had all been growing beards because they had just
> provided the soundtrack to a documentary film, Growin' a Beard.
> After explaining his mismatched socks to the announcer
> ("They're similar -- I mean, they're clean"), Jimmy introduced a
> newer song. "This one's called 'The Bridge,"' he said. "I just blew
> the bridge out of proportion so it's as fat-headed as the verse
> and the chorus." The announcer suggested to the at-home
> audience, "Listen for the bridge." Jimmy replied, somewhat
> puzzled, "You can't miss it." It sounded like a mellow stroll, with
> Jimmy singing, "only the Godfather of Soul can take you to the
> bridge." The song ended with one band member making a pirate
> sound "arrr" and another guy mumbling "da bridge" the way
> some folks might say "da Bears." The band finished the set with
> one of Kevin's new songs that he'd written with his son,
> "Somebody Give Me a Flower, I'm a Robot." I think it's safe to
> suggest that capital-F fame feels a thousand miles away.
>
> But scenes change and bands change with them. Everyone I
> know is nervous that Stepford wives are moving in around the
> corner from them; what style of music would they crave? "About
> five years into the Gourds," Russell says, "we thought, 'Okay, this
> will probably be over soon. We've had our moment.' And still,
> every show I think, Wlll anybody show up? One club last week
> didn't put us in their ad and we were like, 'Wlll anybody come?'
> and then there's four hundred people there."
>
> I keep hearing about the doom-and-gloom makeovers being
> given to Seattle, Athens -- your town. In Austin, developers are
> mowing over funky dives and replacing them with big new
> structures -- even the Steamy Bowl has succumbed -- inspiring
> some people to reflect upon and assess the past decade.
> Maybe this is the end of an era. I don't know.
>
> What I know is this: At seven this morning I woke up to a bantam
> rooster crowing. The girl who cuts my hair went on a
> twenty-minute monologue about whether she liked Evil Dead II
> more than Dead Alive. And last night, at the Gourds' show, a
> Tex-Mex food-parlor-cum-dance-hall filled up,
> shoulder-to-shoulder, all the way to the doors.
>
> So maybe the question isn't when the next bell will be tolling, but
> who will heed its call.
>
hdouble 1:31 PM
KG is always nasty. Lakers will blow them away, probably win in 5 or 6. How often will Troy Hudson drop 30?
hdouble 8:50 AM
Monday, April 21, 2003
bucks suck. I had the under on the spurs, so BOTH buzzer beating bank threes killed me. That was the toughest loss ever, betting wise.
I don't know if you guys are getting this in Philly or Sweden, but this Laci Pedersen case is gonna be the biggest thing since OJ... good looking husband kills 8 month hot pregnant wife (how many folk songs are there about this?) and thinks about running to Mexico (grows goatee and found with 10K cash). The media are eating this story up, and it's got all the drama in the world, and even fits the old archetypal folk song-- guy kills pregnant wife and runs to Mexico!!! Anyway, today I saw a picture of Scott Pedersen (the accused murder) getting interrogated, with his goatee and long hair, and he looked like an incarnation of DMITRI KARAMAZOV. Should be interesting to see how this one plays out... although it looks like the guy is guilty, it would be cool if he's not.
hdouble 11:41 AM
Sunday, April 20, 2003
WHAT? Andrew??? I didn't get that at all... maybe if you gave her a receding hairline. Gotta watch it again. Favorite scenes? I think the few that hit me the hardest (without ruining it for others), in order:
1. The conversation at the train station
2. The "kiss", juxtaposed with V Woolf's kiss scene
3. Young Ed Harris running into the street
4. Just about all the Ed Harris scenes
Thinking back, there are 10 more that resonate, but I saw it about a month ago so it's still pretty fresh. Depressing, will be tough to watch again.
hdouble 7:27 PM
saw the hours. what agreat movie. got to wait a while. write more about it later. the first thing though, a little banality: the lady who is going to the hospital (1951) looks exactly like Andrew (Cali andrew). i'll write something of substance after some sleep. like the story idea H.
david 4:19 PM
2-3 on the weekend, back even after winning 50 on the LAKERS today. Yes I have gone to the dark side. Took them -2 at Minnesota, and they killed em...
Monday: took Utah +9.5 at Sacramento, may take Celts +7 at Indy...
hdouble 3:28 PM
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