there's bourbon on the breath of the singer you love so much

Last night was odd. We were slower than a motherfucker because of the weather. Rain, rain, rain. Time was creeping by, and I thought the night would never end. I thought it would never even make it to 11:00 so I could play Bring a Neglected Record to Work. It seemed especially so because this one kid wouldn't shut up. He's obsessed with all these conspiracy theories about September 11. When he was done ranting about that, he started ranting about Martha Stewart. Why he gives a shit about her, I don't know. He kept saying that she was innocent of wrongdoing blah blah blah. Okay, fine if that's what you want to believe, but he kept insisting that she had been accused in the Enron scandal. I tried to correct him "you mean that insider trading thing with the drug company". "Oh, no", he would say "Enron.". Okay, buddy.

I'm sure he's already got some conspiracy theories going about yesterday's awful events in London. I'll have to hear about them, too.

incidentally, we normally fly the flags of England, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, The UK, and of course The US outside our restaurant. There's a series of poles surrounding the upstairs patio, which is where they are. Northern Ireland does have its own flag, but we don't fly one of those. Because of the recent holiday, we had taken all the others down and we're flying 6 US flags. Not even the general manager of the restaurant knew about this, so I don't know what happened to the others. I'm sure the owner had something to do with it.

Okay... now to the good stuff.

Last night, I took several Neglected Records to work and used a complicated method to randomly pick one. The record I was supposed to do was Just for a Day by Slowdive. I started with it, but I got about three songs in, and I realized that although I still love that record, I couldn't possibly listen to it at work. You need to be laying in bed or sitting on the porch with a beer to listen to that record. So I had to abort that mission. I abandoned the complex method of random selection and picked Hearts of Oak by Ted Leo and the Pharmacists. Hell yeah! A damn fine record. Very punk at times, very emo at times. All rawk. There's a lot of death and suicide imagery, which kinda sucks, but it's so much fun to listen to "Where Have All the Rude Boys Gone". Check it out. I actually think that if it was marketed right, the kids would go nuts for the Ted Leo. I like it better that he's not all over the MTV and whatnot, but it's fun and up-tempo without being aggressive. Some of the hooks are awfully damn catchy too. I remember writing a review of this record for a now-defunct website run by a former friend. I gave it high praise when it was brand new, and I'll still praise it two years later. Although I enjoyed it immensely, and I'll give it 4 out of a possible 5 saute pans, I had another agenda. I realized that Sufjan Stevens was patiently waiting his turn. Instead of giving Ted a repeat listen for the sake of a better blog post, I just wanted to listen to Illinois again. I wasn't really able to give it a thorough listen. I haven't been able to do that yet. I'm looking forward to finding little things about that record that I love. In a big-picture kind of way, I'm enjoying it, though.

now playing:

Red House Painters Ocean Beach