Off he goes, into the Wild Poo Yonder…

Shopsin’s is an incredible restaurant located at 54 Carmine St. in the West Village. I discovered the place through a coworker, and it’s become Amy’s and my favorite restaurant. It’s run by a couple of aging ex-hippies, Eve and Kenny, and their kids, and if it has one thing on the menu, it has 400. I am not kidding, folks. If they put their menu online it’d crash your browser, that’s how big it is. There are probably 100 soups alone. And everything is awesome, and in huge portions. It’s like home cooking if your parents were part of every ethnicity known to man: Italian, American, Middle Eastern, Mexican, Southern–it’s amazing. The best part about the place is its idiosyncracies. No parties more than four allowed; no cell phones allowed (and they mean business about that; Kenny Shopsin will get really pissed if you start talking on one); there are board games to play with; and when you leave, you can select a free piece of candy from the many boxes of candies they have available. Plus there’s great old-timey jazz and ragtime playing at all times.

I just found out that Eve Shopsin died this week. When Amy and I were in there on Friday, our usual time, she wasn’t there, and I overheard that she was in the hospital, but it didn’t seem like anything serious. Apparently whatever killed her came out of nowhere. This is really, really sad, as time and time again we told Amy’s folks that we’d take them next time we were in town so they could see what the place was like. I doubt that they’ll shut it down, though I’m not sure, but one thing’s clear–it won’t be the same.

Let’s get one thing perfectly clear: Thor Heyerdahl sailing across the Pacific on the Kon-Fricking-Tiki: That’s a “journey.” Getting booted off For Love or Money in the first round: That’s “pathetic.”

Looks like another Corky’s been left with nothin’. The question is, does he hate us? And does he hate our ass face?

My cri de coeur too much for you? Then please enjoy some mindless stupidity. I know I do!

You can’t really blame me if I didn’t have high hopes for the most recent Marilyn Manson disc. I’ve learned the hard way that my loyalty to bands I loved in high school can all too often reap a harvest of shattered expectations (and a lighter wallet–well, a lighter wallet on the part of the band in question’s publicity department) when a new album comes along. I got seriously, seriously burned by the most recent Massive Attack, Korn and Ministry records, though at least the latter two had one good song apiece (“Here to Stay” and “The Light Pours Out of Me” respectively). So when I picked up Manson’s The Golden Age of Grotesque I ripped it to my iPod, gave its first four tracks a perfunctory listen and gave up.

Silly rabbit. Inspired indirectly by my wife, whose encouraging words often prompt me to revisit albums I’ve written off (though she’d shudder to find out she’d in some way encouraged me to listen to more Marilyn Manson than I otherwise would), I decided to give the album another shot. Smart move. Grotesque is really quite a record.

The thing about Manson is that each album, for all their superficial (and sometimes not-so-superficial) similarities, function on their own terms. Portrait of an American Family was his tribute to scary kiddie movies, basically; Smells Like Children, mainly a remix EP, continued in the same vein but introduced covers for a shot at airplay; Antichrist Superstar was his real bid for industrialmetal fame; Mechanical Animals was his take on glam; Holy Wood was a synthesis of everything that had come before, particularly its two immediate predecessors. (It was supposed to be the third entry in his “triptych,” a description even I, a great fan of overly ambitious rock projects, found pretty freaking pretentious).

The Golden Age of Grotesque is actually one of Manson’s more original conceits. In the months preceding its release he gave a lot of interviews in which he claimed hip hop was going to be a big influence on the record; for example, he cited with admiration Ludacris’s self-appellation of the title “Ass Valedictorian.” But now that the record’s out we’re hearing and seeing a lot of references to Weimar Germany’s cabarets, a favorite muse of Roxy Music, late-glam Bowie, even the Doors.

What Manson did, as becomes apparent on the record, is draw a parallel between the two scenes so obvious that it’s difficult to see: Both these movements can be summed up in the words “party and bullshit.” The Germans who frittered the nights away while their country slouched toward Bethlehem and the hip hop artists who rap almost exclusively about the size of the rims on their luxury cars while war rages and their fans (and sometimes themselves) are shot in the streets are perhaps the two purest exponents of style-over-substance that popular art has seen in the last hundred years. This fact is, of course, cast into starker relief due to the dire circumstances surrounding these Neroesque figures.

So Manson and his compatriots (who, with the apparently forced departure of longtime bassist, co-writer and best-friend Twiggy Ramirez, are looking increasingly like a remake of Village of the Damned as costumed by Jean-Paul Gaultier) indulge in the slick production, spastic beats, murky bass, tossed-off ball-court insults and cunning wordplay of hip-pop, weave in the glamour, excess, martial overtones and polymorphous perversity of cabaret, and come up with a pretty riveting brand of frightening metal. Highlights include the opening “Thaeter,” which in the grand tradition of creepy Manson album-openers sounds precisely like the tuning-up of the house band in hell; the first real song “This Is the New Shit,” which, surprisingly, is actually true; the final real song, “Vodevil” (pronounced “vaudeville,” you see); and the wonderful title track, which sounds an awful lot like an outtake from the darkest days of Bowie‘s Aladdin Sane or Diamond Dogs period and features the boast “We’re the Low Art Gloominati and we aim to depress.” Believe me, I’d have been depressed if this record wasn’t as good as it was.

Interestingly, another mercurial artiste came out with an idiosyncratic take on hip-pop right around the same time as Manson. Prince Paul (he of De La Soul and the incomparable Handsome Boy Modeling School) made Politics of the Business as a test to see if, despite his using all the production techniques and cliches of his jiggier peers, he’d still get shunned by radio and video simply by virtue of being Prince Paul. Naturally he uses the cliches a billion times better than anyone else–“Original Chryme Pays” features a verse from one of the Beatnuts about how he’s trained his children to help him shoplift clothing from department stores; how’s that for an original gangsta?–so naturally no one’s playing the record. A cryin’ shame: the Neptunes-worthy hookiness of “Make Room,” the blistering verse from Guru on “Not Tryin’ to Hear That,” and the hysterical wishlist rattled off by Kardinal Offishall on “What I Need” all deserve heavy rotation. (Look for a cameo by Ralph Nader, of sorts… apparently a friend of Paul’s who was slated to DJ at Nader’s MSG rally was asked to bring his own turntables. “He can’t rent turntables and he’s gonna run the country?” Yet another reason for Gore voters to dislike the ol’ spoiler.)

Yesterday as I came home from work I saw two birds mating outside our apartment. I’ve actually seen birds mate a couple of times, and described these occurrences to my wife. “There’s a lot of down time,” I said. “Two seconds of the guy actually successfully on top of the girl, flapping his wings, and then he falls off and they just sorta stand around looking at each other.”

“So it’s pretty much like when humans mate,” she replied.

I don’t know Michele Catalano from a hole in the wall–I just know she helped found The Command Post and that some neat people around the blogosphere like her–but man, she’s dead wrong about voting down school budgets. The tipoff should have been that she agreed with creepy ur-conservative John Derbyshire–always a bad sign.

The long and the short of the budget situation is that regardless of whether or not the money could be better spent than it is in whatever budget you’re voting on, voting it down will do nothing to change that and everything to hurt the people who deserve it least, namely the children and the teachers. The time to change how the school board devises the budget is when it comes time to elect the school board, not vote on the budget.

If you live on Long Island, please vote yes on your district’s budget today!

And, um, hi, Michele!

I don’t like No Doubt. I want to, because Amy does, and because occasionally they’ll come out with a song that has some pretty good music (“Hella Good,” “Simple Life”). But I can’t get past Gwen Stefani’s Betty Boop voice. It just totally rubs me the wrong way. It’s only marginally better than Britney Spears’s, honestly. At least she doesn’t do all those guttural noises that Britney does, but the warbling she did when she’d hold notes on her early songs (“It’s just those little things that I feaeaeaeaeaeaeaear”) are just as bad. No matter what emotion she’s going for, I remain unconvinced. And I REALLY want to like “Hella Good,” did I mention that? That’s a badass synth riff they’ve got going there. Gary Numan’d be proud.

Another interesting thing about “Hella Good” is that you can take out her vocals and put in Madonna singing “Music” and it’d work perfectly. Has this been done on the Internet yet? Ken, are you listening?

Okay, so as recently as the introductory post on this blog I said I wasn’t going to be doing long reviews. Now all of a sudden I’m on Blogcritics. What gives?

Answer: One of the big reasons that I didn’t want to do long reviews anymore was that it was hard to justify writing stuff like that for free when I get paid for it elsewhere. But at Blogcritics, every time someone buys something from Amazon after clicking through to it from a link on your review page, you get 2.5% of the revenue! Hooray for money!

I’ve just joined Blogcritics, the delightful blogger collective dedicated to proving the axiom about opinions and assholes. The difference at Blogcritics, of course, is that they’re highly original and well-written assholes. Go take a look at my first post! (It’s basically the same thing as the post below this one, but hey, that’s the Internet for you!)

Today’s edition of Rich Johnston’s weekly comics gossipfest indicates that Marvel comics has forced new Wolverine artist Darick Robertson to make Wolverine attractive again.

FOR THE LOVE OF MIKE, IT’S ABOUT EFFING TIME!

In recent years, in a move spearheaded by writer/man-about-town Grant Morrison, Marvel has made a real effort to cash in on the innate sex appeal of Wolverine, or at least the innate sex appeal of Hugh “Curly” Jackman, by transmogrifying him from a hirsute, diminutive sack of ugly with an annoying habit of referring to himself in the third person and talking in what passes in supercomicsland as “dialect” to a leather-clad, good-looking guy with a halfway-decent haircut. In the process–which included taking his X-Men brethren out of some of the worst-designed costumes in the superhero business and putting them in outfits real people might conceivably wear–they gave one of the most prominent books in supercomics a much-needed makeover. You can say “comics are cool” as often as you want, but it’s unlikely to make any difference if your main character looks like a Brylcreemed, slightly more muscular version of the Simpsons comic shop guy. Seen in this light, making the X-Men look like a rock band and Wolverine like the lead singer was a fantastic idea.

You’d think this transformation–a sort of rough-hewn Young Brando-esque type instead of Bruno Sammartino with claws–would make sense to everybody. You’d think. But no, the fanboys are up in arms that this character, who was once the embodiment of what 11-year-olds think of when they think “tough guy,” is now a sexy beast, thereby forcing them to ask questions of their own sexuality they’d just as soon leave unanswered. So in the kind of misguided artistic move only made by mainstream comics people (or, perhaps, by whoever in Blur thought it would be a good idea to plow ahead without Graham Coxon), new Wolverine writer Greg Rucka and artist Darick Robertson decided to return Wolverine, a fictional character, to what he “really” looks like–namely, a human garbage truck with back hair.

Brilliant, no?

The result was a Wolverine solo book in which the main character bore not the slightest resemblance to the character called Wolverine in every other comic (he appears in virtually every X-Men related title on the shelves, and on the cover of each of them practically every month). Fortunately, it didn’t take long for Marvel to figure out that when Hugh Jackman is drawing in women and helping to rack up $85 million in opening-weekend box-office receipts, maybe it’s a bad idea to have a comic in which Wolverine looks like Robin Williams running around nude in The Fisher King.

Of course, they’re apparently planning to put all the X-Men back in their spandex pajamas. 8-year-olds, Dude.

New All Too Factual up today. Once a week, maybe twice? Sounds doable, right?

“I think the fuckers from Lord of the Rings should have fucking totally bowed down to Zeppelin. They should have put a Zeppelin song in Lord of the Rings! What the fuck, man? Come on! I’m actually physically angry at them that they didn’t put a Zeppelin song in fuckin’ Lord of the Rings. That’s my most important point I want to make today. They’re all hoity-toity, like, ‘We’re making the real Lord of the Rings.’ They consider Zeppelin not highbrow enough.”

–Evan “Didn’t Play ‘Mrs. Robinson,’ Then Gave Us the Finger at Yale Spring Fling 1997” Dando, in an interview by Jancee “Annoys the Crap Out of My Wife” Dunn in Rolling Stone

Permalinks! That’s what “plink!” means. Thank-props to Kennyb, programmer extraordinaire. Just from reading other people’s blogs I’ve gotten a sense of how hugely problematic the popular blogging thingamajiggers are, and meanwhile I’ve got my own personal Cornell Engineering Master’s Degree Holder figuring out how to make it so people can link directly to posts about my brother’s sex life. What a country!

Well, I’ll just say that I just watched Cybill Shepherd, as Martha Stewart, put on a conical hat and act like a quote little magic gnome unquote in an effort to seduce Tim Matheson. You tell me, folks. You tell me.

See the little fish up there near the top of the page? Hold your little mouse cursor thing over it. See? Isn’t that funny? Hat tip to Chris Onstad for letting us rip him off inspiration.

As my friends and family can readily attest, I am so far ahead of my time. But even though I’ve been drinkin’ PBR since well before the last millenium, I’ve still got to give credit to a) My father-in-law and b) Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet. (I feel much the same way about Heiniken as he does, too.)

Hey, I enjoy the San Diego Comic-Con as much as the next nerd, but this –well, it made me glad I read through an issue of Spin (where I first saw it mentioned), which is saying something. Too bad it conflicts with my regularly scheduled geek activities.

My wife is awesome for many reasons, one of which is her amazing ability to get me to like good music I should have liked in the first place. Back when I was in college she labored for literally months to get me to listen to Radiohead’s OK Computer, a thankless task until I finallly heard the first notes of “Airbag” and began a three-week jag of listening to that album and that album alone 24 hours a day. More recently, she got me into Interpol after I had written them off as trendy rip-off artists (they’re neither) and Queens of the Stone Age’s Songs for the Deaf after I’d written it off as spotty and dull (it achieves what Alvy Singer might call “maximum heaviosity”).

Her latest stroke of genius is reintroducing me to Tori Amos’s latest, Scarlet’s Walk. When I was in high school I got into Tori right around the same time I got into Pantera, and for the same reason: Trent Reznor liked them both. I loved Tori’s first three albums, and still do: they’re haunting, beautiful and brutal. But she started to lose me on the producery From the Choirgirl Hotel, and she shook me entirely with the double-disc To Venus and Back (the first disc of which seemed like a fairly spectacular failure to become Bjork and the second of which, a live performance, seemed unenjoyable unless you’re part of the hermetically-sealed world of Toriphiles, aka Ears with Feet (don’t ask)). At that point, I kinda preferred to make believe that she had lost weight and recorded two great records under the name “Fiona Apple.”

But Tori’s covers album, Strange Little Girls, was a return to form: the arrangements were sparse, tense and genuinely creative, with the usual riveting guitar work by King Crimson/Bowie/NIN axeman Adrian Belew and fascinating versions of songs from “Enjoy the Silence” to “I’m Not in Love” to “Heart of Gold.” Scarlet’s Walk follows in that project’s footsteps, with tons more attention to songcraft, allowing her vocals and piano to go unsmothered by electronic noodlings. It’s a long album without a weak track in which each song serves a different and vital purpose. My favorites, “Crazy” and “Your Cloud” (as well as the wonderful single “A Sorta Fairytale”) are as different from each other as they are from every other song on the album. Much has been made of the whole “It’s Tori’s take on post-9/11 America,” but it’s Tori’s take on her own voice, instrument and relationships that make it great.

So thanks, Ferg, for doing what you usually do: pointing out all the wonderful things I overlook.

Chorus: Awwwwww.