The Top 100, June 2005 edition

June 11th, 2005

In an effort to keep my Top 100 Albums list going and to make use of the “The Top 100″ category, I’ll periodically be adding new albums that I think would make my Top 100 (at the expense of some other albums) if I redid them today. For the most part it will be used to allow for reviewing of new CD’s that I think are really good, but I’ll just keep the guise of the Top 100 until I redo it again five years down the line.

With that said, I was pleased to discover two incredibly good albums in the past few weeks — the new Alkaline Trio, which has become my favorite one in just a short amount of time, and the new Coldplay, a very brilliant album with a final song that was written for Johnny Cash (he died before he could record it.)

It’s been a long time since two great CD’s have burst thier way into my collection at the same time, so you’ll get a single post – double review.

Alkaline Trio – Crimson

I was tired of the darkness that Alkaline Trio had dealt me by the time I had reached the end of Good Mourning, their last album. I thought it was a silly little ploy to change their sound without alienating their fans, and while it had some great songs and was a decent album, it was nothing like the Alkaline Trio I had grown to love over the past four years. I listened to it a bit, but I never really accepted it as a good album. Crimson is more of the same, but for some reason – maybe I’m older, or wiser, or maybe I’m just more open for change – I’m really into this album. In fact, in the past few weeks it has become without a doubt my favorite Alkaline Trio album – beating out Maybe I’ll Catch Fire. This doesn’t seem like an act anymore. Good Mourning was really a true change in their sound, and Crimson completes the transformation, pushing the pop-punk elements to the back burner and turning up the darkness. I appreciate the macabre way the lyrics are spelled out more, and I appreciate the fact that their sound is so clean and crisp. I especially appreciate “Back to Hell,” where Dan and Matt trade lines in one of my favorite choruses yet. Crimson has re-awoken my interest in Alkaline Trio the same way Caution did for Hot Water Music.

Coldplay – X&Y

I’m not quite sure if this album is destined to be Coldplay’s greatest – it is, after all, tough for many of us to let go of the quiet wonder that is Parachute – but the media and reviewers are lumping Coldplay and U2 together, either by comparing the two as contenders for the biggest band in the world or by slagging on Coldplay for not being enough like U2. First of all, they’re not U2 at all. There’s no ego in their music – they’re not playing as if they are the best thing since the Beatles. They’re playing like they are, well, just a really good British rock band. Their songs are about nothing, and simply put, there’s a reason that Coldplay’s big sound is all about nothing – it’s the “emo” of the top 40: quiet, brooding, self-centered and masochistic, and ultimately personal. X&Y takes over where …Rush of Blood to the Head left off, though I’ve found that in the past five days since it’s come out I like it much better. In fact, it’s approaching Parachutes status on my “best brit-rock albums” list, with the first eight songs being next to perfect. The end of the album drags, but anything would drag after the first 35 minutes.


Leave A Comment

Issues Considered: Music, The Top...

Olympics 2008, NBA style

June 10th, 2005

The next men’s Olympic basketball team has become an extreme obsession with me in the past few weeks, ever since the announcement of the committee that will oversee the player selection. According to ESPN.com, the 2008 men’s Olympic team will be chosen by a group of former players and coaches, all of which are either Hall of Famers or will be within the next five years.

The committee? Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, David Robinson, Charles Barkley, Bill Russell, Oscar Robertson, Dean Smith, Bob Knight, John Thompson, Chuck Daly, Larry Brown, Jerry West, and a handful of NBA team presidents and general managers.

Phoenix Suns chairman Jerry Colangelo is managing director for the team. The same GM who put together a Suns team that was a pure delight to watch during every game they played this year.

Listen – this is the best thing that’s happened to men’s Olympic basketball since the original Dream Team. I’ll admit, though, I’m a little wary of what they can do. Even if they choose the best players, what’s the guarantee that they’ll get those players to commit to being part of an Olympic team for all of their summer – the plan is for them to practice together, play together, to have an Olympic only coach. To be like the international teams.

It will be hard to get that team together.

Of course, I’ve already put one together for them. This is based on today’s players… this may or may not be even possible in three years, in 2008.

In the front court, I’m putting Ben Wallace and Brad Miller at center. In the international game, you don’t need to worry too much about an inside presence; it’s a drive, kick, and shoot type of system. Ben Wallace is a defensive master, so if anyone gets inside, they’re going to get stopped. Miller is the same way, and has always been one of the most underrated players in the league. Shaq is too old, and not willing to make the sacrifice, I think, so he’s not included. You could also make an argument for Emeka Okafor, and he may very well make the 2008 team if he improves over the next two years.

Helping Wallace out in the starting lineup is Tim Duncan, the perennial “most fundamental” player and a star who is willing to make the sacrifice to play internationally. He’s been in three world tournaments already, so he’s going to be a very knowledgeable leader on the court. Amare Stoudemire can take Shaq’s place as “big dominant American;” he’ll be simply unguardable except by other big men like Yao Ming or Dirk Nowitzki. Shawn Marion makes it for his intensity and ability to play both small forward and power forward. He’s great defensively, and he’s able to both drive and pull up a jump shot.

Kevin Garnett and Jermaine O’Neal would make the team in a heartbeat if they were willing to play. It’s been shown, however, that both of them are not incredibly excited about having to work all summer, so I left them off for this reason.

My starting swingman would be either Marion or LeBron James, who is amazing to watch and can play the point if need be. He can drive and he can shoot, so he’s well suited for international play. We’d have seen a lot more of him last Olympics if Larry Brown wouldn’t have been coaching, so there will be a lot of anticipation as to how he plays, much like there was a lot of theorizing on how Michael Jordan would do against the international teams in 1992 – would he simply be Jordan, or would he explode and become something even greater.

I’d want to put Rasheed Wallace on the team too, but I don’t like him, so I’m picking his teammate Rip Hamilton, the new Reggie Miller, because I do like him. He’ll drive any opposing guard crazy running off of picks and hitting the mid range jumper.

At shooting guard, it’s going to be all shooters. One of the biggest complaints about the 2004 Olympic team is that they had too many of the same type of player – too many drive and flip players as opposed to the rest of the world’s dead-eye sharp shooters. Bring in either Ray Allen or Michael Redd, and Joe Johnson. All three are consistently deadly three point shooters, and Joe Johnson will not object to coming off the bench behind either Ray or Redd, whichever is healthy and willing – I’ll just say Redd for the sake of choosing someone who hasn’t been on the team yet. There will be a little bit of harmony, as both could potentially score 20 a game in the international system.

I’d love to throw Gilbert Arenas on the team too, but there’s not enough room. The big stars, like Kobe and McGrady, can stay at home and learn to play as a team.

My point guards were difficult to pick because my favorite point guards are all claimed by their country – France has Tony Parker, Canada has Steve Nash. I took the easy route, instead, and picked Allen Iverson, who really impressed me both this last year and at the 2004 Olympics, and Dwayne Wade, who can be the slash and drive player for the team.

My team:
Brad Miller
Tim Duncan
Ben Wallace
Amare Stoudemire
Shawn Marion
LeBron James
Rip Hamilton
Michael Redd
Joe Johnson
Allen Iverson
Dwayne Wade

I need one more.

Fred Hoiberg.

“The Mayor” led the league in three point percentage this year, and he’s the best possible 12th man you could find for a team like this. You need an all long shooting team on the floor? Hoiberg’s going to give you the energy, run the floor, and launch up threes all night because no one will think to guard him. If you’ve got Michael Redd, Allen Iverson, LeBron James and Amare Stoudemire on the floor, would you bother with Hoiberg at all? He’s the ultimate bench player, and he’s the perfect player to fill that last spot.

You can’t tell me that if we brought that team to face the world we wouldn’t win.


Comments: 8

Issues Considered: Basketball, Sports

Substitute writing

June 8th, 2005

I was just thumbing through the ol’ Moleskin notebook and found this. I thought I’d throw it on here – substitute teaching always sucked, and this is something I wrote at school one day. It’s very “woe is me,” but when has that been anything different from anything else I’ve posted.

I’ll do this more and more frequently as I find decent stuff I have written in the past. It’s under a new category and everything.

———————————-

Why should they bother to even begin to listen?

They already know by this time that I, their substitute, is here to watch them, to make sure nobody dies, catches on fire, or eats in the room. All they need is a babysitter. So I sit, trapped behind a desk, holding on for my own sanity – rushed by the noise of 25 teenagers vying for the top spot of the person who breaks the visitor. Given an assignment that could no way fill a 50 minute period, the students slowly raise and turn into a mob of chattering pigeons, bubbling in their seats and gradually filling the room with an uneasy chaos.

Still, I can’t do much of anything, too fearful of that line between tyrant and teacher. Too spineless to stop what, in all actuality, is non-harmful talking, realizing that they would otherwise be sitting quietly — but would be just as unproductive — if I was to lay the law down, breaking out a ruler and smashing knuckles.

The question raises itself: how do I build respect? Why bother? They already stare at me with contempt when I stand in front of the room. They have already placed themselves into a free-for-all mode when they saw me at the desk. I find myself too thin-skinned, struggling to hold control, knowing there is no sense in trying to get any teaching across when all resources have been used getting them in their seats, opening their books, and shutting their mouths.

It has been this way since my first solitary teaching experience. With no one else to back me up, I have floundered, left to exact discipline on students who won’t listen in the first place. I give up to easily, counting the minutes until the next period, or until lunch, or until I can go home.


Comments: 3

Issues Considered: Career, From the Moleskin, Writing

Big kid stuff

June 7th, 2005

Kerrie and I may be taking a major life step in the upcoming months that has caused me a little bit of anxiety lately: purchasing our first home. It’s not that we can’t afford it, it’s just that, no matter how well off someone may be, it’s a huge purchase. I thought buying a car was hard – imaging dropping thousands of dollars on a wooden frame with walls.

No one should feel sorry for us, by any means. Kerrie’s mother owns the house, purchased for both business and investment reasons, so we get along with our landlord. We’ve managed to live here with relative ease, paying minimal rent while Don, Kerrie’s stepfather and La-Z-Boy salesman, occupies our basement.

At the same time, it’s hard going from a modest rent payment in a house that we’ve had complete control over for quite a while to paying over double for the same place, except this time without the luxury of sending our sprinkler maintenance bills to the landlord. It’s trading the easy road of renting from relatives for the more expensive, but better rewarding road of actually owning a house and getting some sort of a return on the money put into it.

We’d never think of moving at this point in our lives at all anyway – we’ve put too much into making this specific building our home and we wouldn’t want to have to start all over again with some new building; new landscaping, more painting, new furniture. Thanks, we’ll keep what we have.

Still, I can’t help but feel strong-armed into this by the laws governing the South Dakota First Time Homeowners incentive – we’ve got to move quickly while we’re still eligible, and to me it feels too quick. I’ll have to give up some superfluous things in my life; we won’t be able to save as much, we’ll be harder pressed to have the money to go on vacations, I’ll have to cut back on what in a few months may seem like an excessive 50 dollar a month book budget.

In short, I’ll have to actually stop whining and realize what I have, how fortunate I am to have this opportunity to enjoy the amenities that are presented to me before things get really crazy with kids and career changes and all of those other life-changing happenings. I’ll have to — * gasp * — grow up.

But really, what would I have to write about if I did that?


Leave A Comment

Issues Considered: Vilhauer

The grass is always greener

June 7th, 2005

I thought I was bad.

I’ve mentioned before how I’m a little anal about the condition of our lawn. In all actuality most of it was an act – I do care about our lawn very much, as in I care if there are unsightly yellow spots or if it’s too long. But I’d never go so far as to have it chemically fertilized once a month or get the lawn scissors out to get the exact corners every week. I like the lawn to look nice, but no matter what, it’s still just lawn.

In fact, what happens almost every year is this:

1. Initial reaction. After the snow clears, I begin to take notice of our lawn. I notice the yellow spots that Becket has made by repeated urination. I see matted down areas where we consistently walked over packed snow. I begin to worry that this is the year that our lawn will be taken over by dandelions and clover, leaving nothing but an unwieldy patch of random foliage, none of which is actually “grass.”

2. Panic. As the days get warmer, the grass continues to be a dead mass. Sure, it’s too cold for the grass to grow at any normal rate, but that doesn’t stop me from full “lawn panic,” which includes at least, if not all, of the following things: natural organic fertilization; lawn thatching; planting grass seed in any small bare area; constant reminders to myself that everyone else will have a pristine lawn while mine continues to turn eight shades of brown.

3. Realization. The dandelions show up, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I begin to mow once a week, and come to the conclusion that it’s green, it’s growing, and it’s just fine. I trim every time I mow in an effort to keep it as immaculate as possible, but I’m not worried about the state of the lawn itself.

4. Boredom. I mow only when the lawn is long. I trim only once every other time I mow. My lawn is only at its best when people are stopping by. It still looks good, but it’s not even a small concern to me anymore. It has filled out fine, all of my worrying was for naught, and so I concede that the lawn has won over my anxiety for another year. I begin to worry about more useful things, like ticks, or Miami Dolphins’ running backs.

I am currently on stage four.

My neighbor, however, is always at stage one.

It’s funny, actually. He makes my lawn neuroses look almost normal. He has mowed four times in the past two weeks, trimming and sweeping every single time. I have seen the lawn care van in his front yard at least twice a month since the summer started. He sprays his lawn with some kind of grub mixture – the kind in the green bottle that has eighteen different warnings about improper ingestion. Once, we caught him sprinkling his lawn at midnight on a Saturday. We’ve been without rain for roughly one day in the past month and a half, and he’s out there throwing more water on the lawn. He’s only in his early thirties, I’d bet, which makes it even more weird.

Kerrie says they had a dog for one day, but had to take him back. I suspect that the dog, presented with the perfect lawn, deposited a small prize, and our neighbor killed him.

The real story, though, is that today I found myself with a better-looking lawn than him. I had just freshly mowed, and his lawn was still a little long. It was wonderful. I made a note to myself to take a picture and post it tonight along with this.

But, alas, when I came home, he had mowed everything up, stealing an opportunity by me to one-up the neighbors who’s primary objective is to consistently one-up our lawn. I’ll be damned if he’s going to do it all summer, though.

Well, if I ever get up from this computer long enough to trim the yard, that is.


Comments: 3

Issues Considered: Outdoors

Batchin’ it up

June 5th, 2005

I’ve learned something through these past couple days: nobody, aside from friends of the bachelor, really cares what happens at a bachelor party. Have you ever known that guy who talks endlessly about the great party he went to the night before and how everything was the coolest thing he’s ever seen? Do you remember thinking that every story he has is exactly the same, with a different house as background?

Well, I don’t want to do that to you.

I was planning to launch into a long-winded description of my friend Ryan’s bachelor party, a party that another friend, Russel, and I had planned hastily under duress of the impending deadline.

Well, actually, that’s not quite the truth. The truth is that I, in some sort of drunken state a few months before, had admitted that I would be able to plan the party and that I would call Ryan’s brother, Eric, and get things figured out. I then forgot everything completely, and was only reminded about three weeks ago. Russel and I had to act quickly.

We planned a party at Russel’s house. We’re not the stripper and barhopping group that would partake in the stereotypical bachelor party, so I resurrected the best party idea I’ve ever been a part of: the bathtub full of cheap beer party. Yard beer. The idea is that everyone brings one twelve pack of cheap beer, like Old Style, Pabst, Grain Belt, etc. and dumps it into the bathtub. We made a chart in the interest of tracking each beer.

It was very fun. We didn’t do anything special, aside from watching the Twins beat the Yankees and playing a quick two-table game of poker, but I’d hope to say that Ryan had fun, and he didn’t have to buy any of his own cigarettes. My only regret is that I assumed that no one from Minneapolis would come down, so I didn’t bother calling.

Still, fun ensued. If it wasn’t for Ryan’s car getting broken into at the end of the night, everything would have been perfect. If it wasn’t for bad luck…


Leave A Comment

Issues Considered: Friends

Modest Mouse, redux

June 3rd, 2005

Modest Mouse. In Sioux Falls.

What the fuck?

Last night, at the cozy Ramkota Ballroom (an area that Kerrie and I actually visited for a wedding expo, of all things,) Modest Mouse, my favorite band in the known world, came and rocked my face off. I’m serious – I looked down and my face was on the floor, singing along with The Mouse on its own.

How this came about I’ll never know. I looked at my e-mail one day and the Modest Mouse mailing list had sent me an e-mail hyping their next tour stops – and Sioux Falls was right there. I spent five days wondering if it was true, and then the Argus Leader confirmed it later. I was ecstatic.

The last time Modest Mouse came to town, in 1996, only 10 people showed up. This time over 1500 showed up. It was pretty intense – a great show. It was pretty similar to the First Ave show I went to in February, so I’ll just link that review.

Here’s what bothered me. People. That’s it.

Modest Mouse has gained a wider fan base than they would have had in 2001, as evidenced by the 150-fold increase in attendance, and I would say that the majority of the fan base is, at most, slightly familiar with anything other than their newest album, Good News for People Who Love Bad News. While this is okay – I’m not going to look down my nose at people who are not the “biggest fan ever” – it leads to an interesting mix of people.

At First Ave we stood by the bar, on a balcony, and had a clear view of the stage throughout the show. I never had to jostle for position or crane my body around someone taller than me in order to see the show. In Sioux Falls, however, there is no balcony. It was all-ages all in one area, and this led to an overcrowded “bar” area (where they had between two and three “tenders” servicing about 50 people at a time and they ran out of beer before Modest Mouse even started playing,) and a percentage of the crowd that became disinterested in any non Good News song – all of which seemed to be standing in front of me.

“Cowboy Dan” is one of Modest Mouse’s epic songs, one of my favorites and it was a pleasant surprise to hear them play it. While I watched the band rock out an extended jam session, though, I was annoyed to find the girls in front of me taking each others pictures. One would turn so that the band was in their background and smile — *click* — and then would pass the camera and continue with another person. I ignored them the best I could, but Kerrie was understandably upset. It was pretty annoying.

We also had a herd of pre-graduation college “dudes” trying to start a mosh pit (a mosh pit at Modest Mouse?) and a proliferation of smutty looking teenagers pushing their way to the front, watching for five minutes, and walking back out – repeating this about ten more times.

It was a great show. I loved it. But I was able to see the stark difference between having a show in an exhibition hall and having it at a bar designed for music shows. It was, however, a good test of how accessible our mini-city can be for the kind of shows that usually pass us by.

To top it off, I was able to go home after the show instead of a hotel or a friends house to crash on a couch. Also, we saved about $40.00 in gas by not driving to the Cities.

That alone was worth the 25 bucks.


Leave A Comment

Issues Considered: Concerts, Music, Sioux Falls

« Older Entries

Newer Entries »