The Greatest Generation

Had the honor to meet a member of the 101st Airborne who landed inland from Omaha beach on June 6, 1944. Just like Private Ryan. Softspoken, wheelchair bound and proud, I didn't expect to get choked up after I shook his hand and thanked him for what he did.

It was the first time I'd thanked a veteran. Amrbose's Band of Brothers taught me brotherhood was what won the war.

I think I know what Patriotism means. Maybe at least one member of the greatest generation thinks this gen-exer isn't so terribly uncool.

Hang Tough, SoCal

Our thoughts and prayers are with you.

R.E.M.Live: Ich Bin Ein Dubliner?

Last week, R.E.M.LIVE went live to a [insert favorite corporate retail outlet here] near you.

Now, I love this band. Love their music
more than any other four guys playing great rock and roll. Love their longevity. Love the songwriting. In fact, I love this band so damn much I can get past their politics.

But do we really need to hear Mr. Stipe, pictured doing a mediocre Boy Wonder impersonation above, tell the Dublin audience that they "come from a strange, far away and often-confusing place called the United States of America?" I would hope that R.E.M. esteems their country higher than that. I can understand that you don't like G.W. Bush or the war--or conservatism--for that matter. After all, Mr. Stipe did go on Anderson Cooper recently. But maybe love for country during a 2005 concert in Dublin isn't the best place to profess love of country. Mr. Stipe, I welcome your comments.

At any rate, I do appreciate the two songs Mr. Stipe calls "our state of the union address." Great stuff, especially a rare R.E.M. fight song called "Final Straw." A great thing about R.E.M.'s music is a conscious choice on part of the songwriters to allow for personal meaning plug-ins. Their songs might be a musical flipping of the bird to them but to me they mean something else. So that's great, thanks for playing. I'll still buy the next record in April on day one. Like I have with each since New Adventures in Hi-Fi.

Anyhow, the setlist is mostly good, but I wish to all that's sacred and holy that they permanately retire "The Great Beyond" and "Imitation of Life" from all setlists. The R.E.M. catalog is replete with oustanding songs and these two aren't holding water over time. Maybe one day we can hear "Bittersweet Me," "Texarkana" or "Try Not To Breathe."

But speaking of songs that hold water, "Boy In The Well" sounds fantastic and I absolutely was floored by the show opener, from 1994's Monster, "I Took Your Name." "So Fast, So Numb" sounds equally fantastic and not just because it's from Hi-Fi.

I recommend viewing the DVD with a shot of Dramamine and sunglasses. I get the high energy style and trick pony photography, but only on Orange Crush is it well executed. Definitely postpone watching if you've got a headache.

Perfect Square, on the other hand, is an absolute gem and if you've got a hankering for R.E.M. live, give that DVD a whirl. I'm afraid it has the aforementioned waterlogged songs, but still well worth your time.

Guys, thanks for the live release and I hope when the Democrats take back the White House nothing changes. Would that be so terribly uncool?

Reckoner\In Rainbows Ra d iohe_ad

If you haven't had the good fortune to give In Rainbows a spin, do yourself a favor post haste. Radiohead have made a new record, we're told at inrainbows.com. A spectacular set of ten songs I've been waiting to hear since 2003's disappointing Hail To The Thief.

(And you should know that I tried my damndest to like that record. I just couldn't get into it.)

Reckoner is a spectacular song. Radiohead, thank you for making a new record. You deserve all the publicity your distribution experiment got.

What a breath of fresh air. The folks down at Hollywood and Vine are no doubt cursing the terribly uncool factor of it all.

Nobody Knows My Na-- Er, Reads My Blog

Spread the word to your excellent friends - nobody reads my blog.

So behold my resolve: I'm going to post daily in what is sure to be glorious brevity in an attempt to capture my own everyman narrative. Literary and dramatic critics be forewarned: MD is unleashing his power on the ever-perpetuating filth of the blogosphere.

And you'll find I'm good with quotes, lousy with sources. A media mogul was purported to have said, "The information age has given new credence and credibility to uniformed opinion."

Who I am to hold back if that's the world we live in? No, holding back would be terribly uncool.

I Am Breathing Water

Music enthusiast or not, I would suggest that nearly everyone esteems one album in their collection as favorite. I try to stay away from the word favorite, simply because I believe its futile-to-impossible to objectively identify just one favorite album above all others from the vast cornucopia that none of us could truly traverse in one lifetime.

Rather, I have one album I would call my most personal. It's not something I recommend to friends, because, albeit selfishly, I believe this album was conceived, written and recorded just for me. Difficult, I find it, to describe what's so great about this record but suffice it to say it resonates with me. In fact, that's probably the best way to define good music. If there's no resonance, it's just fluff.

Suppose its fitting that it's by one of those no-fence-sitters bands, R.E.M. In other words, you either love 'em or you don't. But they're not polarizing, there is a difference. Polarizing is a pompous buzzword anyway.

New Adventures In Hi-Fi, released in September 1996 is my album. The critics loathed it, and I'm glad they did. It's not their album anyway.

So to Berry, Buck, Mills and Stipe: I just want to say thank you. My world would be emptier without this.

And that woud be terribly uncool.

Stadium Arcane-ium

After a six month hiatus, I mustered the gumption to play the now-Grammy lauded Stadium Arcadium by the immortal Red Hot Chili Peppers. My hope was to uncover a great rock and roll effort that I must have surely not given much of a chance when playing it back in May.

Nope. I discovered that 50 percent of the album is crap spread across a half-baked packaging concept and on two CDs. No wonder Sir Elton John regards the Grammys with about as much squalor as he would a Girls Gone Wild DVD: there's just no substance there.

While spacing out at work, I decided to be playlist geek and find within Stadium Arcadium the album they should have made. Surprisingly, there's gold in there, you just have to look. The record I think they should have made is called We Believe and arranged thusly:

Snow (Hey Oh)

Desecration Smile

Hey

We Believe

Slow Cheetah

Dani California

Strip My Mind

Make You Feel Better

If

Especially In Michigan

Hard To Concentrate

She Looks To Me

Torture Me

Animal Bar

Arrange these tracks in your mp3 player and let it roll. I'm confident you'll hear a gem that they somehow convoluted with 14 other poorly executed, tired tracks.

If you don't agree with me, come back with your own 14-track combo, name it, but stick with recent RHCP tradition and have a title track.

The Grammys would tell you that's terribly uncool.

Go ahead, you can laugh all you want...

...but I've got my philosophy. So postulates the venerable Ben Folds. Unless you're living in a cavern atop the Afghanistan peaks, chances are you're an active consumer of popular culture. I find it unfortunate that the widespread literature out there about popular culture, especially that of music, is pompous, condescending and belitting.

Every time I pick up music, pop culture or entertainment magazine, the pretentious borderline-nonsensical tone of any written piece is enough to make me gag. Does making me feel incurably lame sell subscriptions? Are they that arrogant as to try to tear down their readership as terribly uncool and never build them up? Do they intentionally inflate the tone and voice of the publication at the behest of some bizarre agenda to make everyone a freaking music snob? Or am I the only one who acutally reads the writ of periodic literature?

Probably a combination all of that. Nevertheless, a great many of us place an importance on popular culture that carries serious religious undertones. I am no exception. Whether or not this is killing society or all of us is an interesting discussion albeit a depressing one.

Readers, it's about enjoying the immense pop culture cornucopia literally at our fingertips. I don’t love the company of miserable music snobs. And, really, who does? Not even they enjoy the spat of their rhetoric, though they will tell you they do. How can you enjoy inflaming your own callousness under the pretense of "I know what’s cool and you don’t."

So I add this to the ever-crowding blogosphere of this revolutionary inner sanctum known as cyberspace: A commentary for the rest of us who shouldn’t settle for the hostile, arrogant and self-perpetuating garbage in the literature of mainstream popular culture. Stick it to the snobs.

But that’s terribly uncool.