SomerVaudeville! SomerVaudeville!

(note: the following makes more sense if you say it in a hyper-active voice with, possibly, a Korean accent.)

Somervaudeville!

At Johnny D’s!  Davis Square!

The Pluto Tapes will be there playing “rock and roll” music!

The Can Can Revolution will be there! Happy Dancing!

Uncle Shoe will be there, playing his banjo!

Justin who tells stories and plays the saw will be there too!  You can say you saw him, and he can say he saw too!  If you know, you should come to Somervaudeville!

Hula girls!

Somervaudeville!

TONIGHT @ 8PM!!

(The Pluto Tapes are my band.  Can-can Revolution is my girlfriend’s can-can troupe.  Uncle Shoe is… Uncle Shoe.)

 

songs you don’t know: “Pork and Beans”, Weezer

Well, look, you’ve probably heard this song if you’ve had your radio on lately, but the video is what’s important here.

Remember when Weezer put The Muppets in their video for “Keep Fishin'”?  Well, this is sort of like that.  Except here, instead of Kermit and Miss Piggy, the band joins forces with the entire internet.  Yes, that’s right, the video features Kelly, the Numa Numa kid, the Star Wars kid, Miss South Carolina, Chris Crocker, the Banana from Peanut Butter Jelly Time… the list goes on and on.

It makes sense.  “Pork and Beans” is Weezer in their “hey, man, I’m gonna do my own thing and you can’t stop me” head space (also see: “The Good Life”, “In The Garage”, etc.).  Your more popular viral videos tend to feature someone “being themselves” for the camera, as awkward and silly as they really are.  The ones that aren’t sort of “cinema verite” for the digital age are generally just really clever, which is why it’s cool to see Liam Sullivan’s “Kelly” character here as well. 

Oh, and in lieu of pyrotechnics, Weezer is playing in front of a bunch of exploding soda-and-Mentos bottles. 

 

songs you don’t know: “Night Reconnaissance”, The Dresden Dolls

The Dresden Dolls, the official Punk Cabaret band of GeekUSA, have a new album of odds n’ sods out, called No, Virginia. (Well, their last one was called Yes, Virginia, so it stands to reason.) If you’ve seen the band live or listened to the copious bootlegs over at Automatic Joy, you probably know most of the tunes, but it’s nice to have official studio versions.

“Night Reconnaissance,” the first single, is pretty amazing. It’s one of the five new tracks, and it’s about sneaking out of your parents’ house to steal lawn ornaments with your best friend when you’re a kid in the suburbs. Seriously. It’s catchy and fun and there’s a video, filmed in Lexington, MA, where Amanda Palmer grew up.

Video and babbling below the cut.

 

the big move

Nothing to do with music or politics or, well, GeekUSAery here, but… I’m moving to Somerville on May 24 (that’s this Saturday, chumps) and am looking for people to help.  Will provide beer.  I want to get started kinda early, and will have my Dad’s van, though any other vehicular assistance would be awesome.

 

The Stone Ship

I can’t believe I forgot about this until now, but…

…last October, I appeared in a live-action radio drama called Tomes of Terror II.  Every year, around Halloween, the Post-Meridian Radio Players stage an event where we perform for a live audience, making live sound effects and doin’ some seriously awesome voice acting.

The story are all adaptations of old radio scripts.  The one I appeared in – The Stone Ship – was from an old episode of Nightfall, and involved a band of sailors discovering a Medusa-like creature in the wreckage of a ship.  Very intense and creepy, and I played the Captain.

If you missed all of this, you can hear our version of The Stone Ship starring me as Captain Jessup over at the PMRP website – located here.  Go listen: I’m really quite good.  🙂

And if you want to hear what my amazing and talented girlfriend sounds like as a doddery-old woman, you can go listen to her story from the same evening, Our Miss Brooks: The Halloween Party, where she plays Mrs. Davis.

 

Hillary Clinton raps

Word.  Let me introduce to you the Notorious H.R.C…. aka Hill C, aka Queen Chappaqua.  Dats right, er, boy-ee.

Here be the second single, trippin’ on Biggie Smalls:  “Taking Back The White House”

 

Worst Years In Music: 1991 (part one)

I haven’t done one of these for a while, so I figured it was time.   In case you’re new around here, “Worst Years In Music” is a feature I write every now and then where I take (most of) the Top 100 songs of any given year (according to Musicoutfitters.com) and give ’em a good shellackin’.  I’ve already done 1988, 1990, 1996, 1997, and 1998 (doing things in order is for lame-os), so I figured what the hey, it’s 1991’s turn.

In 1991, blah blah seventh grade blah blah girls blah blah I was a nerd blah.

“Blah” is a good word for this year on the Top 100, actually.  Mind you, this is just before Nirvana and just after The Eighties, so no one knew what they were bloody doing.  Popular music in 1991 sort of showed up, fell to the floor, flopped around, and then sort of died.  For the most part.  And, for every ray of hope – REM, the KLF, Seal – there were a million Gerardos.

Part one: songs 100-60, below the cut.

 

1988 Was The Worst Year In Music Ever

(Note from Andy in 2008: I wrote this three years ago. I haven’t tweaked it since, so it’s still got all sorts of fun errors and whatnot, and it’s definitely a product of 2005. Having said that, it’s still really funny. I’m posting it here because it was languishing on my Myspace site, ignored and unloved, and it told me that it wants to be where people can see it and access it easily. )

 

through being cool

Megan Hustad’s written an article for Salon that posits the theory that our “favorites” lists (on Facebook, etc.) have made snobs of us all.  Go read You Are Not Your Bookcase, and try not to identify.

The North American Hipster, Doucheicus Totalus.

 

on human cryopreservation and giant foam puppet heads.

You ever have one of those days where you go online to read about something, and before you know it, you’ve found yourself reading something completely different?  Today, to kill some time, I decided it would be pretty cool to learn about cryonics. 

(Wow.  That’s actually a pretty awesome pun. Cryonics?  Cool? Kill some time?  Get it?  No?  Aw, come on, man… why the cold sholder?  Haw haw…  no?  Okay.  Moving on. )