Friday, July 12, 2002 -- 10:55 p.m.

When I don't write about music or movies or various other things I write about batshit insane Japanese wrestling. One of my churned-out-in-a-day epics of attempting to comprehend Toryumon has just been posted on a little website called Buster Time (the explanation for the name is a long and weird one). I recommend that you start not with my review but site honcho "Digable" James Cobo's sadistic, hateful and hilarious deconstruction of an ICP-centric wrestling video. I hope it's not too presumptuous for me to say that it will prove amusing even if you do not know what the hell "STF" or "Moonsault" are supposed to mean.

Recent CD purchases:
-The glorious wondermous fantastoid Rhino reissue of the perfect and awesome debut album by the Ramones (replete with a huge gob of alternate demo takes and b-sides and rare stuff). Got it cheap 'cos it was scuffed but I heard nary a skip on my bumpy bike ride home from Cheapo so hey that's cool.
-Kraftwerk's The Man-Machine. Holy hell this album is amazing. It makes me want to buy Germany's other great contribution to circa-1978 space-age future culture -- a Porsche 928 -- and cruise around town with "The Robots" bumpin' loud through the subwoofers, heavy enough to drown out all the yuppie pseudo-Sturgis bikers and the endless drone of classic rock oozing out of open Camaro windows. The Sex Pistols might've been tagged the "band that saved rock", but most of the bands that still take them as an influence tend to stink like death. The bands that draw from Kraftwerk are changing rap, dance and rock all at once, nearly a quarter-century after the band's (debatably) best album.

The White Stripes are in town tomorrow at First Avenue and tickets are sold out so I'm not going. MOPE MOPE MOPE.

Stolen-from-Popculturejunkmail.com* link of the week: A gallery of Peeing Calvins, which are to Being A Total Dipshit what Little Metal Fishies are to being a Christian.
(*which was itself stolen from here.)

I rented Akira from the skyway branch of the St. Paul Public Library of all places and I plan on watching it until the wee hours of the night. This will certainly give me pleasant and wonderful happy-happy dreams. Hooray!

-Nate

Wednesday, July 10, 2002 -- 09:07 a.m.

Scott Seward's got a lot of gall, talking shit about the lyrical skills of El-P and whining "I can do better than that" while flinging around some of the lamest attempts at rhyming prose I have ever seen ("his trepanning for old-school glory holes like a mole or a vole and dissing my Rolls cuz it's got fly rims, de-luxe trim, and a glove box filled with the British country-house novels of Barbara Pym." OH SHUT UP). Amy Phillips whines about Murray Street and addresses the entire review to Sonic Youth themselves -- I hope their response is "maybe the problem is we've been around almost as long as you've been alive so go buy a bloody Vines album then". And Christgau not only takes a dump on the awesome N*E*R*D album but doesn't even realize their name is an acronym: "No-one Ever Really Dies". Tell me again -- why the Village Voice is a rock-crit bible?

-Nate

Tuesday, July 9, 2002 -- 07:38 p.m.

Well, my new job is great -- air conditioning, helpful co-workers, a mid-morning starting time and close proximity that allows me to sleep in until 9:30 -- but it's nine hours less per day to think up and write about goofy stuff. I got southsidecallbox material to finish, too, so until I get my bearings and learn to save a couple hours every night for Detritus updates, expect this sort of sporadic non-content until sometime this weekend. In the meantime, I invite you to check out a custom paint job I made for Motor City Online, a game which is sort of like Everquest except instead of elves and gnomes there's Chevelles and Torinos, plus it's not as pathetically addicting. ("Neight" explained: I go by "N8P" on some message boards I frequent and eventually someone joked that "N8" could be spelled as "Neight" and... well, yeah.)

-Nate