We recently celebrated a holiday in America known as Black Friday. This is the most capitalist of holidays, where all of us grubby consumer whores wake up at times normally reserved for going to bed and stand outside in the cold and the wind and sometimes rain to display our unbelievable stupidity, and to show off exactly how much we value saving some money over our personal health and wellness.
So, in accordance with tradition, at 1:30am last Friday i was standing outside of Best Buy, hoping to score a $400 laptop and a $90 flatscreen monitor. Despite wearing two complete sets of clothing, a sweater, and my heavy green Army coat which may or may not have come from Siberia, the wind ripped through me and froze the marrow of my bones for three and a half hours until i, somewhere near the 100th person in line, was finally admitted to the store.
My next stop was Half Price Books, where everything was an additional 20% off in recognition of the holiday (so, 2/5ths Price Books). Amanda and Alyssa were already in line when i got there, so i just kind of sneaked in to join them. As i entered the line, the person standing immediately in front of my compatriots turned around and excitedly addressed me by name. At first i was shocked and confused, but then i recognized this short, balding fellow adorned with Green Lantern and Watchmen pins: it was Aaron, whom i'd worked with years earlier in the soul-sucking health insurance industry and one of the nerdier persons i'd kept company with!
Later on, when we were back home, Amanda asked who that person was that i'd been chatting with in line pretty much until the moment they opened the doors to the store. I responded with a story.
Aaron came in to work one day at our soulless insurance company and walked straight over to my cubicle. "Well, today's my last day," he said. I hadn't even realized that he was quitting. "I just came in to clear out my desk and say goodbye." We talked for maybe ten more minutes or so, and then he walked back across the room to make good on his assertion. Within another ten minutes, unceremoniously, he was gone.
A half an hour or so later, our boss, Jason (best boss ever), approached my cubicle. "Hey, Trevor, did i hear you talking to Aaron a little while ago?"
"Yeah," i replied.
"Um...where did he go?"
Confused, i replied, "...home?"
"Oh...why did he do that?"
"Didn't he tell you that he quit?"
"No..."
As it turned out, i was the only person that Aaron told that he quit.
2010/11/16
Don't Trust Dr. Mario, He Is Not A Real Doctor
It's my birthday!
This post has absolutely nothing to do with that!
I'mma keep it short because i want to go to bed!
Amanda recently bought Civilization Revolution for the Xbox 360, and she's been playing it obsessively for the last week or so. I can't pull her away from the damn thing. So, since we need to be cleaning the house for the party this weekend, this morning before she woke up i removed the memory card which contains her gamer profile from the system and hid it in my pocket. Fortunately, to my utter surprise, she did not fire up the Xbox the moment she set foot downstairs, but instead waited patiently for me to finish the pancakes and then got straight to work on the house. I was amazed. Just yesterday i saw her walk in the house with Alyssa after they'd been out shopping, plop down on the couch and start playing Civilization within one minute of entry.
So anyway, we got to talking about this while we were both working in the same room, and i said to her, "You know, we have the same problem that my parents did."
"Oh?" she inquired.
See, we have little, mostly playful spats now and then about how much higher her gamerscore is than mine. I just rolled over 8000; last night she hit 10000. For my parents, in the age before Xboxes and gamerscores and such things, there was Dr. Mario.
Mom was really, really good at Dr. Mario. Dad, not so much. She was constantly beating him. He was getting to the point where he didn't want to play with her anymore, because he didn't stand a chance of winning, ever. And, in the days before online play, this left Mom with nobody else to play with. So they struck a deal: Mom would play three levels higher than Dad. Eventually, this deal had to be modified to five levels higher.
Even that wasn't really enough; Dad was still just really good at getting his ass kicked. Sometimes at night, when i was supposedly asleep, i'd hear them arguing over the trivial details of their Dr. Mario games. But the real kicker was, one time Mom fell asleep while playing...and she still beat him.
This is a common occurrence for Amanda. Amanda will fall asleep during games all the time and still beat everybody else. Usually we're speaking of board/card games here, like Settlers of Catan or Phase 10, not video games. But the principle carries over.
But the whole memory card thing this morning is what really brought up the parallel between Mom's mid-90s video gaming habits and Amanda's current ones. One time, i'm going to go ahead and call this 1994 because i think it was about the time that Tetris 2 came out (i was going to go with the release date on Dr. Mario, which i looked up on Wikipedia, but 1990 seems waaay to early for this to have happened), Mom finally recognized her addiction to that damn pill-dropping game and asked me to stage an intervention. She asked me to hide the Dr. Mario game cartridge from her for a period of time, which i did.
Well, one night, probably just a couple days later, she went out of town for some reason and wasn't coming home until the wee hours. I didn't think much of this...until she woke me up in the middle of the frigging night.
"Where's Dr. Mario?" she asked.
I mumbled some unintelligible gibberish. "You told me not to give it to you."
"That's ok. You can give it to me now," she persisted.
"But it hasn't been long enough," i protested.
"It's fine. Just give me Dr. Mario, it's ok." This may have gone on for a little longer, but i don't imagine much; after all, i just wanted to go back to fucking sleep. The game was in a bucket under my bed. I fished it out for her and went back to sleep.
In conclusion, don't trust Dr. Mario. He'll get you hooked on his little pills, and pretty soon you're harassing your single-digit-aged children in the middle of the night to get your fix. What a fucking jerk.
This post has absolutely nothing to do with that!
I'mma keep it short because i want to go to bed!
Amanda recently bought Civilization Revolution for the Xbox 360, and she's been playing it obsessively for the last week or so. I can't pull her away from the damn thing. So, since we need to be cleaning the house for the party this weekend, this morning before she woke up i removed the memory card which contains her gamer profile from the system and hid it in my pocket. Fortunately, to my utter surprise, she did not fire up the Xbox the moment she set foot downstairs, but instead waited patiently for me to finish the pancakes and then got straight to work on the house. I was amazed. Just yesterday i saw her walk in the house with Alyssa after they'd been out shopping, plop down on the couch and start playing Civilization within one minute of entry.
So anyway, we got to talking about this while we were both working in the same room, and i said to her, "You know, we have the same problem that my parents did."
"Oh?" she inquired.
See, we have little, mostly playful spats now and then about how much higher her gamerscore is than mine. I just rolled over 8000; last night she hit 10000. For my parents, in the age before Xboxes and gamerscores and such things, there was Dr. Mario.
Mom was really, really good at Dr. Mario. Dad, not so much. She was constantly beating him. He was getting to the point where he didn't want to play with her anymore, because he didn't stand a chance of winning, ever. And, in the days before online play, this left Mom with nobody else to play with. So they struck a deal: Mom would play three levels higher than Dad. Eventually, this deal had to be modified to five levels higher.
Even that wasn't really enough; Dad was still just really good at getting his ass kicked. Sometimes at night, when i was supposedly asleep, i'd hear them arguing over the trivial details of their Dr. Mario games. But the real kicker was, one time Mom fell asleep while playing...and she still beat him.
This is a common occurrence for Amanda. Amanda will fall asleep during games all the time and still beat everybody else. Usually we're speaking of board/card games here, like Settlers of Catan or Phase 10, not video games. But the principle carries over.
But the whole memory card thing this morning is what really brought up the parallel between Mom's mid-90s video gaming habits and Amanda's current ones. One time, i'm going to go ahead and call this 1994 because i think it was about the time that Tetris 2 came out (i was going to go with the release date on Dr. Mario, which i looked up on Wikipedia, but 1990 seems waaay to early for this to have happened), Mom finally recognized her addiction to that damn pill-dropping game and asked me to stage an intervention. She asked me to hide the Dr. Mario game cartridge from her for a period of time, which i did.
Well, one night, probably just a couple days later, she went out of town for some reason and wasn't coming home until the wee hours. I didn't think much of this...until she woke me up in the middle of the frigging night.
"Where's Dr. Mario?" she asked.
I mumbled some unintelligible gibberish. "You told me not to give it to you."
"That's ok. You can give it to me now," she persisted.
"But it hasn't been long enough," i protested.
"It's fine. Just give me Dr. Mario, it's ok." This may have gone on for a little longer, but i don't imagine much; after all, i just wanted to go back to fucking sleep. The game was in a bucket under my bed. I fished it out for her and went back to sleep.
In conclusion, don't trust Dr. Mario. He'll get you hooked on his little pills, and pretty soon you're harassing your single-digit-aged children in the middle of the night to get your fix. What a fucking jerk.
2010/11/15
Liner Notes
This blog is inspired by an article i saw in The Onion once. The article is about a guy who makes a mix CD and then writes extensive liner notes for it. Being The Onion, they are of course making fun of this guy, but it made me think: if i knew this guy, i would totally read through all of this. That's a package that i'd eat up for sure.
So i've decided to compile some liner notes of my own for this year's PAC. I'm going to post another short blog immediately after this one, because i know that this isn't going to be everyone's proverbial cup of lard.
First, i'll explain the PAC itself. Trevor's Poor-Ass Christmas is a series of CDs that i've done every year since 2004. At first, it was just a collection of songs that i liked, but it's evolved to the point where i now spend the entire year compiling this damn thing. It's my way of taking all the music that i've been listening to incessantly over the year and exposing other people to it, hopefully so that they'll discover something that becomes as important to them as it is to me. Responses to the PAC have been mixed; most people like it, but not to any great extent. Then there are people like Jolly Green Giant, who has said that it's kind of a highlight to his year and he looks forward to the new compilation every Christmas.
This year, as i was working on the final mix, i realized that these CDs mean something more to me personally as a whole than the songs on their own do. Since i do them toward the end of the year (i try to have them available at my birthday party, mid-November), they're a pretty good snapshot of the kind of person that i was at that time of my life. Looking over previous collections, i've certainly changed a lot in the last seven years.
So here are my liner notes to Trevor's Poor-Ass Christmas 200X. My birthday party's this weekend, so nobody's actually seen the disc yet and few have glimpsed the track listing, so this will be your sneak peek. If you're into that sort of thing.
1. Them Crooked Vultures / Gunman
Them Crooked Vultures was pretty much the biggest news in rock music last year. Supergroups usually end up sucking, trading mostly on the names of the members and relying on that to sell records. This makes way for often lazy songwriting. Anyone remember Asia in the 80s? Their biggest hit took the guitar riff directly from their guitarist's other band's only hit. I am speaking of The Heat of the Moment, directly ripping off The Buggles' Video Killed the Radio Star. Listen close, you'll hear it. But i digress. Them Crooked Vultures, for those who don't know, is Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age/Kyuss, Dave Grohl of Nirvana/Foo Fighters, and John Paul Jones of fucking Led Zeppelin. There was no resting on the laurels here; Them Crooked Vultures debut album is one of the most amazing things i've heard in years. It delivered on, as Josh Homme promised, "riff like you've never heard before." It's truly something different and remarkable.
I remember their first show happening; it was an afterparty for last year's Lollapalooza, at Chicago's Metro, and the only way to get a ticket was to order it online, and already have a Lollapalooza ticket. But they didn't announce who was playing at the show; they just put up a web page that featured the logos of Queens of the Stone Age, Foo Fighters, and one of the runes from Led Zeppelin IV. Much of the rest had to be pieced together through rumors and other such things. Motherfucker already had his Lollapalooza ticket, and he thought he knew what was going on at the Metro, so he got his computer at work all set up on that web site at least an hour before those tickets went on sale. Unfortunately, due to the shitty internet connection we have at work, he was unable to get into the online order form, and the show sold out in minutes. Motherfucker was pissed.
The Them Crooked Vultures album came out on November 17, just a little too late to be featured on the 2009 PAC. Gunman was the first song added to this year's PAC, and i thought it to still be a fitting opener to the disc.
2. PJ Harvey / Meet Ze Monsta
The first of two PJ Harvey tracks represented this year. I originally had three songs on it, but Amanda thought that was excessive. "You don't understand," i said. "For the first six months of the year, i was listening to almost nothing but PJ Harvey." And this was true. I went through a big PJ Harvey phase in 2008, just before we left for New Zealand, and in fact spent much of the night before we departed scouring the internet for a couple PJ bootlegs to take with. At the time, i came up with only one. This phase didn't last long after we got back, for some reason, but it did land Rid of Me on that year's PAC. This year, i've come into an astonishing windfall of PJ Harvey boots, including some of her very first shows in 1992 when she performed without a band in seedy bars across the UK. But anyway. Lots of PJ this year.
3. Droids Attack / The Great Wall of 'Gina
One of the best bands in Madison. I strongly recommend checking these guys out live. Their riffs are heavy as fuck and the atmosphere they create while playing just takes you to another place. I was at the CD release show for this in...March? April? It was amazing. I was actually invited to man a camera for the music video for this song, but unfortunately the shoot was the same weekend that i was in Minneapolis seeing...
4. Biffy Clyro / That Golden Rule
...which was not worth the drive. Sure, Biffy put on a great show, but it was only 25 minutes long! We had figured, they came all the way here from Scotland, the least we can do is drive to Minneapolis to see them. But we had been under the impression that they were second from headlining a three-band show. As it turned out, they were second to play out of four. There's a very interesting story about our experience at this show, but i think i'll make a whole blog of that someday soon. (UPDATE: link)
Anyway, the album this comes from, 2009's Only Revolutions, was not available in the United States at the time of this show (March? April?) for less than $35 for an import copy. So, even though it's probably still not worth it because of gas, i was happy to score a copy of the album at the show for $10. We saw them again in Chicago two days later, which was an even shorter set and a somewhat less energetic performance. Fucking Biffy. Come back to the States and headline, dammit!
Fun Fact: the aforementioned Josh Homme also appears on Only Revolutions, on the track immediately after this one.
5. The Distillers / I Am A Revenant
The Distillers, like Biffy Clyro, are a band that i discovered in New Zealand, even though they're an American band. This song ended up on the PAC this year because i was listening to it extensively while editing the new version of Kiwiland, Ho!, and i really like it. At first, i had wondered if Courtney Love had been in a punk band aside from Hole, but it turns out that this band's frontwoman is Brody Dalle, who is married to...Josh Homme.
6. 10 Minutes With My Dad / Heavy Metal Parking Lot
This song is what compelled me to feature a gigantic Explicit Lyrics logo on the disc's packaging this year. Holy shit, where do i start with 10 Minutes With My Dad? I'm not entirely sure how i came about this band, it was through multiple links off of one of the many music blogs i read. They had one of the band's two 2004 EPs up for download in its entirety, and the blog entry described debauchery beyond anything i've ever heard of before. The band consists of these two blonde bombshells, who tend to perform wearing as little as possible (ie, thongs and belts across their tits), have dildo fights on stage, and sing songs about fucking their dads. I left that tab open in Firefox for months before i actually downloaded the EP, as if staving it off in apprehension, but when i finally listened to it i was blown away. These girls have as much talent as they have T&A. This song is about rednecks. Being from a certain small hick town in Wisconsin, where the high school had to start forcing students to enroll in racial sensitivity classes, this song reminded me of more than a few people i used to know.
7. The Avalanches / Frontier Psychiatrist
This is a weird one. I spent a long time being unsure how it would fit into a compilation, since the beginning and end of the song are built to be put exactly where it sits on The Avalanches' album, Since I Left You, but completely by chance i paired it with Heavy Metal Parking Lot, and the two feel like they were made for each other.
This song is such a bizarre combination of sampled audio, symphony, hip-hop beats, and record scratches, i don't even know what to say about it. It's best just experienced.
I first discovered this song through my Pandora shuffle, and ordered it from the library. The disc proved quite popular, so i had quite a wait before it came. In the interim, i was in the video suite at MMI late one night working on something or another, and i heard this song suddenly blasted loudly from another suite. It was Dick, watching the music video, which is also pretty fucked up. Check it out.
8. Shiny Toy Guns / Le Disko
Finding something to appropriately segue to from Frontier Psychiatrist was no easy task, and i'm not entirely sure that i accomplished it anyway.
This is an infectious dance/punk song that i was introduced to through another MMI student, Jesse. He used it in one of his projects, and got it lodged in my head. I ordered this from the library, and once it came, listened to the album on repeat for a week or so. Then i just listened to this song on repeat for a while.
9. Metric / Gold Guns Girls
I'm convinced that this is one of the greatest songs recorded in the last five years. I've had a handful of friends recommend Metric to me over the years, but for one reason or another i just never remembered to go looking for them. Amanda and i were at Jimmy John's earlier this year, and Gold Guns Girls came on the radio. I was awestruck after less than a minute, and asked an employee if he knew what was playing. Since they play satellite radio, he went in back and checked for me. I waited for this CD to come through the library almost all damn year. In the meantime, i downloaded some Metric bootlegs and listened to them constantly throughout the year. My only regret is that i couldn't just put this song on the PAC 20 times and call it done.
10. Broken Bells / The High Road
Another sort of supergroup, Broken Bells consists of James Mercer from The Shins and Danger Mouse, a producer/musician who first rose to prominence a couple years ago when he started some big legal fiasco over mixing Jay-Z's Black Album into The Beatles' White Album and releasing it for free to the internet as The Grey Album. I first heard this song on the actual radio, on 105.5 Triple M, the radio station i'd later do my internship with. I bought this CD almost as soon as it was released, taking it home that day and listening to it on repeat as i passed out, possibly from food poisoning from a restaurant which was shut down by the FDA weeks later.
11. Ringside / Struggle
I found this band, like many bands on the last two PACs, through Pandora. It was probably through a Spoon mix, they have that kind of vibe to them. I got their album from the library and then later found it on the dollar shelf at Half Price Books; it's worth a couple listens, but for the most part, this infectious lead-off track is as far as you need to go into it. This is another song that i ended up leaving on repeat all night long a couple times. Sometimes, when i'm alone, i'll randomly shout things like, "I just want to move ahead! MOVE AHEAD! I just want to stay in bed! STAY IN BED! BUT IT'S A STRUGGLE!!!"
12. The Sounds / Riot
Also from Pandora. These guys, especially frontwoman Maja Ivarsson, are completely full of themselves. They've been quoted as saying that they set out with the intent of being better than The Beatles, and Maja aspires to be "the best female vocalist around...at least of this century." I find their egotism quaint, and after the first couple listens of their debut album, Living In America, i more or less dismissed it. But this song, Riot, popped up in my shuffle a few months later, and i got hooked into it. I tried listening to their albums again, thinking i'd missed something before (this happened to me with CKY, a band i dismissed at first which has since become one of my all-time favorites after Frenetic Amnesic shuffled randomly through my iPod), but to no avail. It's just this song. It's so goddamn good. I couldn't stop listening to it.
13. Tegan & Sara / Hell
I may have jumped the gun a little by putting this on here, but i don't regret it at all. You'd think, since in 2007 i declared Sleater-Kinney to be my favorite band and haven't yet backed down from that, that i'd have discovered Tegan & Sara much, much sooner. Same goes for Metric, really. But this came about first when i saw a girl on my bus wearing a Tegan & Sara shirt, and i said to myself, "Oh yeah, i've heard of them. Always meant to check them out. Maybe i will." So i ordered a few of their albums from the library that day, although after copying them into iTunes, i didn't really listen to them. A friend posted a link on Facebook some time later to a video of Tegan singing Wake Up Exhausted with The Alkaline Trio live, and i was like, whoa. I read through some of the forum comments on that video and there was a guy raving about a couple other Tegan & Sara songs, one of which was Hell. So i pulled up those couple of songs on iTunes and listened through them, and Hell grabbed me in the best possible way. I'm sure i'll be listening to Tegan & Sara a lot more closely next year, but for this year, sticking with Hell seemed to be the way to go. I enjoy this song quite a lot, so i'm expecting to enjoy the rest of their catalog quite a lot, too.
14. Lady Gaga / Just Dance (f/Colby Odonis)
Last year i remembered hearing about Lady Gaga, but straight-up pop music stays pretty far off my radar these days, so i never even considered giving her a chance. But then one week, two of my friends whose musical opinions i put a lot of stock into posted links on Facebook to two of her music videos (Poker Face and Bad Romance), so i thought maybe i ought to poke my head in and say hi. The videos astonished me. This is some serious avant-garde art shit here, and it's popular in the mainstream! What the fuck?! I watched the videos a couple of times over. While i lose a little respect for Lady Gaga for taking her clothes off so much, i recognize that that's pretty much the only reason her shit got popular. But now that it's there, it's paving the way for more art to get the attention it finally deserves. And the music's damn good, too. This remains my favorite Gaga song, but really, with Lady Gaga, it's less about the music and more about the attitude. I expect to see great things from her in the future.
15. Against Me! / Stop!
This was not my first choice for an Against Me! song this year, but From Her Lips to God's Ears didn't really seem very relevant in 2010. After that i considered Miami, but it didn't jive well with the rest of the comp, plus it's over four minutes long, so it got cut. But since i did listen to a lot of Against Me! this year, i knew they had to be represented. This song popped up on my Pandora shuffle one day, and i knew i had a winner.
16. O Pioneers!!! / Dead City Sound
These guys sound an awful lot like Against Me!, don't they? I'd heard a lot about them from Mitch Clem's various comics, since he was kind of obsessed with them and even ended up playing bass for them at a couple shows, but hadn't had the chance to listen to them. When i found that online record label Quote Unquote Records, whom i also discovered through Mitch Clem, was hosting their newest release Neon Creeps for free download, i jumped at the opportunity to snag it. As a whole, the album seems a little...emo...for my tastes, but fortunately i think the music itself makes up for the lack of depth in the lyrics. Plus we need a sad song here and there. I probably listen to way too much happy music these days.
17. Butter 08 / Mono Lisa
When Jason introduced me to Cibo Matto in 2007, it was another near-instant obsession for me. Butter 08 is a side project that Miho Hattori and Yuka Honda of Cibo Matto worked on between their two albums, which also included Sean Lennon and Russell Simins of The John Spencer Blues Explosion (not to be confused with Russell Simmons of Run-DMC, a totally different guy), both of whom would appear on the second and final Cibo Matto album, as well as producer Mike Mills (not to be confused with REM's Mike Mills, a totally different guy). This is a hard to find album, i still haven't tracked down a physical copy of it, but not for lack of trying. I downloaded Butter 08 in 2008, but for some reason they didn't appear on that PAC. They should have. I used the song Mono Lisa in a re-edit of a scene from the movie Hero which i did as a class project, a video that i'm quite proud of, and therefore Butter 08 finally becomes represented on the PAC. I need to get a hold of Miho and Yuka's other side projects/post-Cibo Matto projects, i think i'm in love with these girls, musically.
18. Monster Magnet / Blow 'Em Off
The first copy of PAC 200X that i burned had a different Monster Magnet song, Cage Around the Sun, on it. But i hadn't listened to the lyrics too closely when i first selected that track, and it turns out that it's a narrative, and his dog dies in the end. I decided that it was too much of a downer for Trevor's Christmas CD, so i replaced it with this one, straight off of the Kiwiland, Ho! soundtrack. Monster Magnet has been one of my absolute favorite bands since 1998, when i first heard Space Lord. 1995's Dopes to Infinity, which features Blow 'Em Off, and 1998's Powertrip are two of the finest rock records you will ever hear. Anyway, this year i was given quite a large number of bootlegs from Monster Magnet's earlier years, 1992-1996ish, and i thought it appropriate to include something from them of that era, even though it was live stuff i've been listening to. This is probably my favorite Magnet song, anyway. This one or See You In Hell.
19. Wax Audio / Thunder Busters
This one was a last-minute addition. I was on YouTube looking at something or another, and you know how YouTube is, you see something interesting in the sidebar and you just keep getting linked to video after video. Well, eventually i was linked to Thunder Busters, a mashup of AC/DC's Thunderstruck and Ray Parker Jr.'s Ghost Busters theme. Normally, mashups are not my thing, but this one made me laugh and laugh and laugh. I probably watched it five times in a row when i first found it, and more times later. Wax Audio has entire albums of mashups available for free download from their web site, so i grabbed them all. They're very good at what they do. I just had to include this.
20. Amy Winehouse / You Know I'm No Good
I kept hearing this song on Triple M, but every time i did, the DJ wouldn't tell me what it was before or after hearing it! I loved this song, not knowing what it was, for months, until finally, i got out of the car just after it ended and went inside and looked online at Triple M's list of last played songs. And there it was, Amy Winehouse, another artist i'd heard of through friends but not bothered to check out. I mean, as an avid fan of the Cheezburger network, i'd seen plenty of stuff like this and this, i figured i'd never need to. Boy, was i wrong. What an amazing singer. Too bad she'll probably be dead by next Christmas.
21. PJ Harvey / Down By the Water
I hear that when this song was released, some angry groups formed mobs and attacked PJ because they thought she had actually given birth down by a river and drowned her daughter. I feel kind of weird including two songs from the same album, but i think what i'm really telling you is that you should probably go buy To Bring You My Love right now.
22. Matt "Chainsaw" Chaney / Donuts, Go Nuts!
I think that this year's PAC could have easily been a disc entirely made out of video game music. I've been pretty firmly attached to my Xbox for much of the year, and there have been a number of games i've played with great soundtracks. Fortunately, i refrained, especially since the song from I Maed A Game with Zombies is like fifteen minutes long. But the Splosion Man soundtrack...man, that is something amazing. And i didn't even include any of the symphony-with-heavy-metal-guitars tracks that make up the bulk of the soundtrack, or in other words, the entire soundtrack except for the one song i did include. This little ukulele ditty about doughnuts is pretty surreal when it pops up in the game, and i thought it would make a great closer to this year's PAC. You can download the entire Splosion Man soundtrack for free from Splosion Man.com, under the "free stuff" section. Try the game out, if you're into side-scrolling puzzle/action games. You'll like it.
Cripes, i think that was a little longer than i'd intended. Anyway there it is, a track-by-track breakdown of this year's Poor-Ass Christmas Collection, which nobody will read, but it felt good to write it anyway.
So i've decided to compile some liner notes of my own for this year's PAC. I'm going to post another short blog immediately after this one, because i know that this isn't going to be everyone's proverbial cup of lard.
First, i'll explain the PAC itself. Trevor's Poor-Ass Christmas is a series of CDs that i've done every year since 2004. At first, it was just a collection of songs that i liked, but it's evolved to the point where i now spend the entire year compiling this damn thing. It's my way of taking all the music that i've been listening to incessantly over the year and exposing other people to it, hopefully so that they'll discover something that becomes as important to them as it is to me. Responses to the PAC have been mixed; most people like it, but not to any great extent. Then there are people like Jolly Green Giant, who has said that it's kind of a highlight to his year and he looks forward to the new compilation every Christmas.
This year, as i was working on the final mix, i realized that these CDs mean something more to me personally as a whole than the songs on their own do. Since i do them toward the end of the year (i try to have them available at my birthday party, mid-November), they're a pretty good snapshot of the kind of person that i was at that time of my life. Looking over previous collections, i've certainly changed a lot in the last seven years.
So here are my liner notes to Trevor's Poor-Ass Christmas 200X. My birthday party's this weekend, so nobody's actually seen the disc yet and few have glimpsed the track listing, so this will be your sneak peek. If you're into that sort of thing.
1. Them Crooked Vultures / Gunman
Them Crooked Vultures was pretty much the biggest news in rock music last year. Supergroups usually end up sucking, trading mostly on the names of the members and relying on that to sell records. This makes way for often lazy songwriting. Anyone remember Asia in the 80s? Their biggest hit took the guitar riff directly from their guitarist's other band's only hit. I am speaking of The Heat of the Moment, directly ripping off The Buggles' Video Killed the Radio Star. Listen close, you'll hear it. But i digress. Them Crooked Vultures, for those who don't know, is Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age/Kyuss, Dave Grohl of Nirvana/Foo Fighters, and John Paul Jones of fucking Led Zeppelin. There was no resting on the laurels here; Them Crooked Vultures debut album is one of the most amazing things i've heard in years. It delivered on, as Josh Homme promised, "riff like you've never heard before." It's truly something different and remarkable.
I remember their first show happening; it was an afterparty for last year's Lollapalooza, at Chicago's Metro, and the only way to get a ticket was to order it online, and already have a Lollapalooza ticket. But they didn't announce who was playing at the show; they just put up a web page that featured the logos of Queens of the Stone Age, Foo Fighters, and one of the runes from Led Zeppelin IV. Much of the rest had to be pieced together through rumors and other such things. Motherfucker already had his Lollapalooza ticket, and he thought he knew what was going on at the Metro, so he got his computer at work all set up on that web site at least an hour before those tickets went on sale. Unfortunately, due to the shitty internet connection we have at work, he was unable to get into the online order form, and the show sold out in minutes. Motherfucker was pissed.
The Them Crooked Vultures album came out on November 17, just a little too late to be featured on the 2009 PAC. Gunman was the first song added to this year's PAC, and i thought it to still be a fitting opener to the disc.
2. PJ Harvey / Meet Ze Monsta
The first of two PJ Harvey tracks represented this year. I originally had three songs on it, but Amanda thought that was excessive. "You don't understand," i said. "For the first six months of the year, i was listening to almost nothing but PJ Harvey." And this was true. I went through a big PJ Harvey phase in 2008, just before we left for New Zealand, and in fact spent much of the night before we departed scouring the internet for a couple PJ bootlegs to take with. At the time, i came up with only one. This phase didn't last long after we got back, for some reason, but it did land Rid of Me on that year's PAC. This year, i've come into an astonishing windfall of PJ Harvey boots, including some of her very first shows in 1992 when she performed without a band in seedy bars across the UK. But anyway. Lots of PJ this year.
3. Droids Attack / The Great Wall of 'Gina
One of the best bands in Madison. I strongly recommend checking these guys out live. Their riffs are heavy as fuck and the atmosphere they create while playing just takes you to another place. I was at the CD release show for this in...March? April? It was amazing. I was actually invited to man a camera for the music video for this song, but unfortunately the shoot was the same weekend that i was in Minneapolis seeing...
4. Biffy Clyro / That Golden Rule
...which was not worth the drive. Sure, Biffy put on a great show, but it was only 25 minutes long! We had figured, they came all the way here from Scotland, the least we can do is drive to Minneapolis to see them. But we had been under the impression that they were second from headlining a three-band show. As it turned out, they were second to play out of four. There's a very interesting story about our experience at this show, but i think i'll make a whole blog of that someday soon. (UPDATE: link)
Anyway, the album this comes from, 2009's Only Revolutions, was not available in the United States at the time of this show (March? April?) for less than $35 for an import copy. So, even though it's probably still not worth it because of gas, i was happy to score a copy of the album at the show for $10. We saw them again in Chicago two days later, which was an even shorter set and a somewhat less energetic performance. Fucking Biffy. Come back to the States and headline, dammit!
Fun Fact: the aforementioned Josh Homme also appears on Only Revolutions, on the track immediately after this one.
5. The Distillers / I Am A Revenant
The Distillers, like Biffy Clyro, are a band that i discovered in New Zealand, even though they're an American band. This song ended up on the PAC this year because i was listening to it extensively while editing the new version of Kiwiland, Ho!, and i really like it. At first, i had wondered if Courtney Love had been in a punk band aside from Hole, but it turns out that this band's frontwoman is Brody Dalle, who is married to...Josh Homme.
6. 10 Minutes With My Dad / Heavy Metal Parking Lot
This song is what compelled me to feature a gigantic Explicit Lyrics logo on the disc's packaging this year. Holy shit, where do i start with 10 Minutes With My Dad? I'm not entirely sure how i came about this band, it was through multiple links off of one of the many music blogs i read. They had one of the band's two 2004 EPs up for download in its entirety, and the blog entry described debauchery beyond anything i've ever heard of before. The band consists of these two blonde bombshells, who tend to perform wearing as little as possible (ie, thongs and belts across their tits), have dildo fights on stage, and sing songs about fucking their dads. I left that tab open in Firefox for months before i actually downloaded the EP, as if staving it off in apprehension, but when i finally listened to it i was blown away. These girls have as much talent as they have T&A. This song is about rednecks. Being from a certain small hick town in Wisconsin, where the high school had to start forcing students to enroll in racial sensitivity classes, this song reminded me of more than a few people i used to know.
7. The Avalanches / Frontier Psychiatrist
This is a weird one. I spent a long time being unsure how it would fit into a compilation, since the beginning and end of the song are built to be put exactly where it sits on The Avalanches' album, Since I Left You, but completely by chance i paired it with Heavy Metal Parking Lot, and the two feel like they were made for each other.
This song is such a bizarre combination of sampled audio, symphony, hip-hop beats, and record scratches, i don't even know what to say about it. It's best just experienced.
I first discovered this song through my Pandora shuffle, and ordered it from the library. The disc proved quite popular, so i had quite a wait before it came. In the interim, i was in the video suite at MMI late one night working on something or another, and i heard this song suddenly blasted loudly from another suite. It was Dick, watching the music video, which is also pretty fucked up. Check it out.
8. Shiny Toy Guns / Le Disko
Finding something to appropriately segue to from Frontier Psychiatrist was no easy task, and i'm not entirely sure that i accomplished it anyway.
This is an infectious dance/punk song that i was introduced to through another MMI student, Jesse. He used it in one of his projects, and got it lodged in my head. I ordered this from the library, and once it came, listened to the album on repeat for a week or so. Then i just listened to this song on repeat for a while.
9. Metric / Gold Guns Girls
I'm convinced that this is one of the greatest songs recorded in the last five years. I've had a handful of friends recommend Metric to me over the years, but for one reason or another i just never remembered to go looking for them. Amanda and i were at Jimmy John's earlier this year, and Gold Guns Girls came on the radio. I was awestruck after less than a minute, and asked an employee if he knew what was playing. Since they play satellite radio, he went in back and checked for me. I waited for this CD to come through the library almost all damn year. In the meantime, i downloaded some Metric bootlegs and listened to them constantly throughout the year. My only regret is that i couldn't just put this song on the PAC 20 times and call it done.
10. Broken Bells / The High Road
Another sort of supergroup, Broken Bells consists of James Mercer from The Shins and Danger Mouse, a producer/musician who first rose to prominence a couple years ago when he started some big legal fiasco over mixing Jay-Z's Black Album into The Beatles' White Album and releasing it for free to the internet as The Grey Album. I first heard this song on the actual radio, on 105.5 Triple M, the radio station i'd later do my internship with. I bought this CD almost as soon as it was released, taking it home that day and listening to it on repeat as i passed out, possibly from food poisoning from a restaurant which was shut down by the FDA weeks later.
11. Ringside / Struggle
I found this band, like many bands on the last two PACs, through Pandora. It was probably through a Spoon mix, they have that kind of vibe to them. I got their album from the library and then later found it on the dollar shelf at Half Price Books; it's worth a couple listens, but for the most part, this infectious lead-off track is as far as you need to go into it. This is another song that i ended up leaving on repeat all night long a couple times. Sometimes, when i'm alone, i'll randomly shout things like, "I just want to move ahead! MOVE AHEAD! I just want to stay in bed! STAY IN BED! BUT IT'S A STRUGGLE!!!"
12. The Sounds / Riot
Also from Pandora. These guys, especially frontwoman Maja Ivarsson, are completely full of themselves. They've been quoted as saying that they set out with the intent of being better than The Beatles, and Maja aspires to be "the best female vocalist around...at least of this century." I find their egotism quaint, and after the first couple listens of their debut album, Living In America, i more or less dismissed it. But this song, Riot, popped up in my shuffle a few months later, and i got hooked into it. I tried listening to their albums again, thinking i'd missed something before (this happened to me with CKY, a band i dismissed at first which has since become one of my all-time favorites after Frenetic Amnesic shuffled randomly through my iPod), but to no avail. It's just this song. It's so goddamn good. I couldn't stop listening to it.
13. Tegan & Sara / Hell
I may have jumped the gun a little by putting this on here, but i don't regret it at all. You'd think, since in 2007 i declared Sleater-Kinney to be my favorite band and haven't yet backed down from that, that i'd have discovered Tegan & Sara much, much sooner. Same goes for Metric, really. But this came about first when i saw a girl on my bus wearing a Tegan & Sara shirt, and i said to myself, "Oh yeah, i've heard of them. Always meant to check them out. Maybe i will." So i ordered a few of their albums from the library that day, although after copying them into iTunes, i didn't really listen to them. A friend posted a link on Facebook some time later to a video of Tegan singing Wake Up Exhausted with The Alkaline Trio live, and i was like, whoa. I read through some of the forum comments on that video and there was a guy raving about a couple other Tegan & Sara songs, one of which was Hell. So i pulled up those couple of songs on iTunes and listened through them, and Hell grabbed me in the best possible way. I'm sure i'll be listening to Tegan & Sara a lot more closely next year, but for this year, sticking with Hell seemed to be the way to go. I enjoy this song quite a lot, so i'm expecting to enjoy the rest of their catalog quite a lot, too.
14. Lady Gaga / Just Dance (f/Colby Odonis)
Last year i remembered hearing about Lady Gaga, but straight-up pop music stays pretty far off my radar these days, so i never even considered giving her a chance. But then one week, two of my friends whose musical opinions i put a lot of stock into posted links on Facebook to two of her music videos (Poker Face and Bad Romance), so i thought maybe i ought to poke my head in and say hi. The videos astonished me. This is some serious avant-garde art shit here, and it's popular in the mainstream! What the fuck?! I watched the videos a couple of times over. While i lose a little respect for Lady Gaga for taking her clothes off so much, i recognize that that's pretty much the only reason her shit got popular. But now that it's there, it's paving the way for more art to get the attention it finally deserves. And the music's damn good, too. This remains my favorite Gaga song, but really, with Lady Gaga, it's less about the music and more about the attitude. I expect to see great things from her in the future.
15. Against Me! / Stop!
This was not my first choice for an Against Me! song this year, but From Her Lips to God's Ears didn't really seem very relevant in 2010. After that i considered Miami, but it didn't jive well with the rest of the comp, plus it's over four minutes long, so it got cut. But since i did listen to a lot of Against Me! this year, i knew they had to be represented. This song popped up on my Pandora shuffle one day, and i knew i had a winner.
16. O Pioneers!!! / Dead City Sound
These guys sound an awful lot like Against Me!, don't they? I'd heard a lot about them from Mitch Clem's various comics, since he was kind of obsessed with them and even ended up playing bass for them at a couple shows, but hadn't had the chance to listen to them. When i found that online record label Quote Unquote Records, whom i also discovered through Mitch Clem, was hosting their newest release Neon Creeps for free download, i jumped at the opportunity to snag it. As a whole, the album seems a little...emo...for my tastes, but fortunately i think the music itself makes up for the lack of depth in the lyrics. Plus we need a sad song here and there. I probably listen to way too much happy music these days.
17. Butter 08 / Mono Lisa
When Jason introduced me to Cibo Matto in 2007, it was another near-instant obsession for me. Butter 08 is a side project that Miho Hattori and Yuka Honda of Cibo Matto worked on between their two albums, which also included Sean Lennon and Russell Simins of The John Spencer Blues Explosion (not to be confused with Russell Simmons of Run-DMC, a totally different guy), both of whom would appear on the second and final Cibo Matto album, as well as producer Mike Mills (not to be confused with REM's Mike Mills, a totally different guy). This is a hard to find album, i still haven't tracked down a physical copy of it, but not for lack of trying. I downloaded Butter 08 in 2008, but for some reason they didn't appear on that PAC. They should have. I used the song Mono Lisa in a re-edit of a scene from the movie Hero which i did as a class project, a video that i'm quite proud of, and therefore Butter 08 finally becomes represented on the PAC. I need to get a hold of Miho and Yuka's other side projects/post-Cibo Matto projects, i think i'm in love with these girls, musically.
18. Monster Magnet / Blow 'Em Off
The first copy of PAC 200X that i burned had a different Monster Magnet song, Cage Around the Sun, on it. But i hadn't listened to the lyrics too closely when i first selected that track, and it turns out that it's a narrative, and his dog dies in the end. I decided that it was too much of a downer for Trevor's Christmas CD, so i replaced it with this one, straight off of the Kiwiland, Ho! soundtrack. Monster Magnet has been one of my absolute favorite bands since 1998, when i first heard Space Lord. 1995's Dopes to Infinity, which features Blow 'Em Off, and 1998's Powertrip are two of the finest rock records you will ever hear. Anyway, this year i was given quite a large number of bootlegs from Monster Magnet's earlier years, 1992-1996ish, and i thought it appropriate to include something from them of that era, even though it was live stuff i've been listening to. This is probably my favorite Magnet song, anyway. This one or See You In Hell.
19. Wax Audio / Thunder Busters
This one was a last-minute addition. I was on YouTube looking at something or another, and you know how YouTube is, you see something interesting in the sidebar and you just keep getting linked to video after video. Well, eventually i was linked to Thunder Busters, a mashup of AC/DC's Thunderstruck and Ray Parker Jr.'s Ghost Busters theme. Normally, mashups are not my thing, but this one made me laugh and laugh and laugh. I probably watched it five times in a row when i first found it, and more times later. Wax Audio has entire albums of mashups available for free download from their web site, so i grabbed them all. They're very good at what they do. I just had to include this.
20. Amy Winehouse / You Know I'm No Good
I kept hearing this song on Triple M, but every time i did, the DJ wouldn't tell me what it was before or after hearing it! I loved this song, not knowing what it was, for months, until finally, i got out of the car just after it ended and went inside and looked online at Triple M's list of last played songs. And there it was, Amy Winehouse, another artist i'd heard of through friends but not bothered to check out. I mean, as an avid fan of the Cheezburger network, i'd seen plenty of stuff like this and this, i figured i'd never need to. Boy, was i wrong. What an amazing singer. Too bad she'll probably be dead by next Christmas.
21. PJ Harvey / Down By the Water
I hear that when this song was released, some angry groups formed mobs and attacked PJ because they thought she had actually given birth down by a river and drowned her daughter. I feel kind of weird including two songs from the same album, but i think what i'm really telling you is that you should probably go buy To Bring You My Love right now.
22. Matt "Chainsaw" Chaney / Donuts, Go Nuts!
I think that this year's PAC could have easily been a disc entirely made out of video game music. I've been pretty firmly attached to my Xbox for much of the year, and there have been a number of games i've played with great soundtracks. Fortunately, i refrained, especially since the song from I Maed A Game with Zombies is like fifteen minutes long. But the Splosion Man soundtrack...man, that is something amazing. And i didn't even include any of the symphony-with-heavy-metal-guitars tracks that make up the bulk of the soundtrack, or in other words, the entire soundtrack except for the one song i did include. This little ukulele ditty about doughnuts is pretty surreal when it pops up in the game, and i thought it would make a great closer to this year's PAC. You can download the entire Splosion Man soundtrack for free from Splosion Man.com, under the "free stuff" section. Try the game out, if you're into side-scrolling puzzle/action games. You'll like it.
Cripes, i think that was a little longer than i'd intended. Anyway there it is, a track-by-track breakdown of this year's Poor-Ass Christmas Collection, which nobody will read, but it felt good to write it anyway.
2010/11/05
Arglesfarg.
I had a dream the night before last that we went back to New Zealand for another three weeks expressly for the purpose of shooting a sequel to Kiwiland, Ho!, my overly long and less than exciting documentary. When i woke up, things that had happened the night before seemed distant memories, as though i had actually been gone for those three weeks. Even in the two days since, i've been feeling as though i've actually lost that time. So i figured i'd pull another story from the most fertile story-telling ground i've got, those three weeks in March of 2008 that i spent abroad.
I've often said that there is one reason that i'd really like to go back to New Zealand, and it is related to video. As our trip progressed, i had been diligent in taking a quick video tour of every hostel, hotel room, cabin, and campground that we spent a night in. Out of twenty nights in the country, i only missed one of our accommodations, and it is perhaps the only one that really mattered. I am speaking of course of the anachronism that is Wilson's Hotel in Reefton.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008, the ninth day of the trip. I began my original blog entry for this day with the word "Arglesfarg," which i went on to explain that i had no idea why i did. For lack of better title for this post, i've chosen to use that.
We spent the day driving many kilometers out of our way to observe geological features with names like "pancake rocks," "blowholes," and "Crazy Paving Cave." On that day we saw the only flowing water in New Zealand which was not a beautiful blue color; it was still perfectly clear, but it was tinged a rusty red. We called it the River of Blood. I'm sure we're not the first to christen it that. I don't know what its real name is.
We stopped in Westport for dinner, which was probably one of the better meals of the trip. I've noted in my log that i ate Chicken Cordon Bleu, so you know it was a good day. But with night looming, we needed to pick an ending point for the day and get to it. After all, if i haven't underscored this enough in my previous New Zealand stories, the country shuts down pretty darn early. 6:00 is pushing it in most of the big cities, let alone the smaller towns (by "big cities," i mean "clusters of more than 100 houses." There aren't many.), and it was already going on eight.
Amanda selected Reefton as a good target, primarily because it was near to the hot springs we wanted to visit the following day. We consulted our hotel guide (our "second bible") and selected Wilson's Hotel. If i'm not mistaken, we made that choice because it was the only one in Reefton. We called ahead, and the lady on the other end of the phone gave us a 9:00 deadline to check in. It was 80 kilometers away.
Under normal circumstances, 80 km is a perfectly reasonable distance to travel in an hour. The speed limit on most roads in New Zealand is 100 kilometers per hour (roughly 60 miles per hour). This was true of all the roads between us and Reefton, even.
The natives, the Kiwis, would have even traveled at that speed along the roads between Westport and Reefton. That is because Kiwi drivers are certifiably insane. I never saw a native slow down for anything, including the random 200° turns on the sides of mountains with sheer cliffs to your right and no guard rails anywhere. New Zealand does not believe in guardrails; they seem to believe that if you are stupid enough to fall off the road, you probably deserved it. You'd better pray that you land on a sheep, because it's your only hope of cushioning that fall. There's actually a fair chance of that happening; at last census, sheep outnumbered people 20:1 in New Zealand. Cows 8:1.
As if the roads themselves weren't problematic enough, daylight was shrinking and fast. And we weren't only losing daylight because the sun was going down; no, the process was being expedited by the big, fluffy gray clouds rapidly moving into our area. When the rain started coming down and i was forced to slow down even further, we started to become worried about making our rendezvous. I'd look warily over the edge of the roads as i made yet another turn that left us facing farther around than the complete opposite direction, sometimes seeing trees below, more often seeing nothing but bare earth and boulders, trying to gauge how much faster i could actually go with an acceptable margin of safety. We probably should have just stayed in Westport.
Somehow we made it to the hotel with seven minutes to spare.
We were greeted at the door by an older lady who was completely out of place for this century. I'm talking serious vampire potential here. She could've just stepped through a portal from 17th century England. She probably did. She was overly accommodating; even at 9:00pm, which may as well be the witching hour, she offered to bring us tea and milk to our room. We politely declined, but thanked her for her hospitality. The whole thing just screamed "Twilight Zone." If i had the budget to film a ghost story anywhere in the whole damn world, this is where i would do it.
We ascended the rickety stairs with well-tread carpet and an elaborate wooden banister to our room. The room featured two beds with a communal reading light, an enormous closet, a mirror, and a sink. Yes, a sink, right in the middle of the room. I can't really come up with much of a logical explanation for it, other than maybe when the hotel was built, in the Victorian period, shaving was a more private matter than bathing and pooping, and could not be carried out in public facilities.
Speaking of public facilities, as soon as we had our luggage in the room, i made my way quietly down the empty hallway toward the bathroom on the complete opposite end of the building. I can't even begin to describe the creepy vibe i got on that journey; the low lighting, all the closed doors, the creaky floorboards, the blood red paint on the walls and the matching drapes drawn across all the windows. I was all alone and there was no ambiance ("silent as the grave," perhaps?).
The restroom was dark when i entered. I groped around fruitlessly for a light switch. Eventually i discovered it next to an entrance on the opposite end of the room. I never did find out where that door led, or why it would possibly be more important to have a light switch there than next to the main entrance.
Furthermore, each of the stalls had its own light switch. The stalls themselves were actually completely enclosed rooms in their own right, kind of like if somebody had installed a toilet in a walk-in closet.
Verbatim from my journal:
My return to the room was no less entrancing, but i made it at a considerably increased clip. When i opened the door to the room, it scared the shit out of Alyssa, who was lying on the bed with a horrified expression splattered on her face. Amanda stood near the door in a fighting stance.
Amanda woke up first in the morning (not unusual), and slipped off to take a shower. When she came back, rather than yelling at us to get out of bed (which would have been par for the course), she jumped eagerly back into bed with me, shouting about how there was no hot water and she'd just bathed with entirely cold water. Alyssa opted not to take a shower that day (Amanda and i calculated this as her fourth consecutive day of hippie living), but i, a smelly, smelly man, didn't think i could avoid it. I had no trouble with the water. It was lukewarm at first, but i had a good steam going in that bathroom by the time i was done. To this day Amanda curses my name for it. It's not my fault she was the first person in the entire hotel to try and bathe.
I don't think that we saw another tenant the entire time we were there. When we checked out, the hotel clerk was in another elaborate ancient-looking dress. She was just as engaging as the night before, offering us tea and to fire up the kitchen and make us breakfast. We again politely declined; we were already horribly behind schedule and wanted to get going. New Zealand is laid back like that; early to bed, late to rise. Reefton had no gas stations, and at 10:30am, the only convenience store was still closed. Not very convenient, now is it?
So that's the tale of Wilson's Hotel, by far the most interesting place we slept on our trip and probably the creepiest place i've ever let down my guard enough to go unconscious in. I'm not kidding; if you don't believe in ghosts, visit this place.
By the way, i know it's a little late, but happy Guy Fawkes day everybody.
I've often said that there is one reason that i'd really like to go back to New Zealand, and it is related to video. As our trip progressed, i had been diligent in taking a quick video tour of every hostel, hotel room, cabin, and campground that we spent a night in. Out of twenty nights in the country, i only missed one of our accommodations, and it is perhaps the only one that really mattered. I am speaking of course of the anachronism that is Wilson's Hotel in Reefton.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008, the ninth day of the trip. I began my original blog entry for this day with the word "Arglesfarg," which i went on to explain that i had no idea why i did. For lack of better title for this post, i've chosen to use that.
We spent the day driving many kilometers out of our way to observe geological features with names like "pancake rocks," "blowholes," and "Crazy Paving Cave." On that day we saw the only flowing water in New Zealand which was not a beautiful blue color; it was still perfectly clear, but it was tinged a rusty red. We called it the River of Blood. I'm sure we're not the first to christen it that. I don't know what its real name is.
We stopped in Westport for dinner, which was probably one of the better meals of the trip. I've noted in my log that i ate Chicken Cordon Bleu, so you know it was a good day. But with night looming, we needed to pick an ending point for the day and get to it. After all, if i haven't underscored this enough in my previous New Zealand stories, the country shuts down pretty darn early. 6:00 is pushing it in most of the big cities, let alone the smaller towns (by "big cities," i mean "clusters of more than 100 houses." There aren't many.), and it was already going on eight.
Amanda selected Reefton as a good target, primarily because it was near to the hot springs we wanted to visit the following day. We consulted our hotel guide (our "second bible") and selected Wilson's Hotel. If i'm not mistaken, we made that choice because it was the only one in Reefton. We called ahead, and the lady on the other end of the phone gave us a 9:00 deadline to check in. It was 80 kilometers away.
Under normal circumstances, 80 km is a perfectly reasonable distance to travel in an hour. The speed limit on most roads in New Zealand is 100 kilometers per hour (roughly 60 miles per hour). This was true of all the roads between us and Reefton, even.
The natives, the Kiwis, would have even traveled at that speed along the roads between Westport and Reefton. That is because Kiwi drivers are certifiably insane. I never saw a native slow down for anything, including the random 200° turns on the sides of mountains with sheer cliffs to your right and no guard rails anywhere. New Zealand does not believe in guardrails; they seem to believe that if you are stupid enough to fall off the road, you probably deserved it. You'd better pray that you land on a sheep, because it's your only hope of cushioning that fall. There's actually a fair chance of that happening; at last census, sheep outnumbered people 20:1 in New Zealand. Cows 8:1.
As if the roads themselves weren't problematic enough, daylight was shrinking and fast. And we weren't only losing daylight because the sun was going down; no, the process was being expedited by the big, fluffy gray clouds rapidly moving into our area. When the rain started coming down and i was forced to slow down even further, we started to become worried about making our rendezvous. I'd look warily over the edge of the roads as i made yet another turn that left us facing farther around than the complete opposite direction, sometimes seeing trees below, more often seeing nothing but bare earth and boulders, trying to gauge how much faster i could actually go with an acceptable margin of safety. We probably should have just stayed in Westport.
Somehow we made it to the hotel with seven minutes to spare.
We were greeted at the door by an older lady who was completely out of place for this century. I'm talking serious vampire potential here. She could've just stepped through a portal from 17th century England. She probably did. She was overly accommodating; even at 9:00pm, which may as well be the witching hour, she offered to bring us tea and milk to our room. We politely declined, but thanked her for her hospitality. The whole thing just screamed "Twilight Zone." If i had the budget to film a ghost story anywhere in the whole damn world, this is where i would do it.
We ascended the rickety stairs with well-tread carpet and an elaborate wooden banister to our room. The room featured two beds with a communal reading light, an enormous closet, a mirror, and a sink. Yes, a sink, right in the middle of the room. I can't really come up with much of a logical explanation for it, other than maybe when the hotel was built, in the Victorian period, shaving was a more private matter than bathing and pooping, and could not be carried out in public facilities.
Speaking of public facilities, as soon as we had our luggage in the room, i made my way quietly down the empty hallway toward the bathroom on the complete opposite end of the building. I can't even begin to describe the creepy vibe i got on that journey; the low lighting, all the closed doors, the creaky floorboards, the blood red paint on the walls and the matching drapes drawn across all the windows. I was all alone and there was no ambiance ("silent as the grave," perhaps?).
The restroom was dark when i entered. I groped around fruitlessly for a light switch. Eventually i discovered it next to an entrance on the opposite end of the room. I never did find out where that door led, or why it would possibly be more important to have a light switch there than next to the main entrance.
Furthermore, each of the stalls had its own light switch. The stalls themselves were actually completely enclosed rooms in their own right, kind of like if somebody had installed a toilet in a walk-in closet.
Verbatim from my journal:
As I sat on the toilet, a moth fluttered around, trapped in the room with me, and irritated me a bit. Then it landed on my back. I began talking to it, saying things like, "I don’t mind you in here, sharing the most intimate of moments that I won’t even let my girlfriend in on, but do stay off of me! And my clothes!" because it kept crawling into my drawers as they sat on the floor. Moths eat clothing, don’t they? In the end, after flying around crazily and whacking himself so hard into the walls that I thought he’d squash himself like, well, a bug, he flew himself into a spiderweb. By the time I was finished in there, he’d gotten himself out, and when I opened the door, he flew away.
My return to the room was no less entrancing, but i made it at a considerably increased clip. When i opened the door to the room, it scared the shit out of Alyssa, who was lying on the bed with a horrified expression splattered on her face. Amanda stood near the door in a fighting stance.
Amanda woke up first in the morning (not unusual), and slipped off to take a shower. When she came back, rather than yelling at us to get out of bed (which would have been par for the course), she jumped eagerly back into bed with me, shouting about how there was no hot water and she'd just bathed with entirely cold water. Alyssa opted not to take a shower that day (Amanda and i calculated this as her fourth consecutive day of hippie living), but i, a smelly, smelly man, didn't think i could avoid it. I had no trouble with the water. It was lukewarm at first, but i had a good steam going in that bathroom by the time i was done. To this day Amanda curses my name for it. It's not my fault she was the first person in the entire hotel to try and bathe.
I don't think that we saw another tenant the entire time we were there. When we checked out, the hotel clerk was in another elaborate ancient-looking dress. She was just as engaging as the night before, offering us tea and to fire up the kitchen and make us breakfast. We again politely declined; we were already horribly behind schedule and wanted to get going. New Zealand is laid back like that; early to bed, late to rise. Reefton had no gas stations, and at 10:30am, the only convenience store was still closed. Not very convenient, now is it?
So that's the tale of Wilson's Hotel, by far the most interesting place we slept on our trip and probably the creepiest place i've ever let down my guard enough to go unconscious in. I'm not kidding; if you don't believe in ghosts, visit this place.
By the way, i know it's a little late, but happy Guy Fawkes day everybody.
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