Things I Learned On The Toilet, Volume I

I do a fair amount of reading, and like most patriotic Americans, I do most of that reading on the toilet. A few years ago, a friend turned me on to Uncle John's Bathroom Reader, an annual publication specifically designed to be read while pooping. I currently own about 15 of them, and I've read them all at least twice. As such, I've picked up more than a few useless facts. Here are some.

1. There is, in fact, a heirarchy of clowns. Top of the pile is the whiteface clown, characterized by a mostly white face, often with bright red triangles around their eyes. He's the one dishing out the pies and seltzer. Next comes the grotesque whiteface clown, a notable example being Bozo the Clown, featuring a multi-colored wig, sometimes with a bald cap. This clown is often the butt of jokes. Third is the auguste clown, with Clarabell from "The Howdy Doody Show" being the best known. And finally, the tramp, bottom of the pecking order, best portrayed by Charlie Chaplin in his "Little Tramp" movies.
2. James Buchanan was our only bachelor president, and it has been speculated for decades whether or not he was gay.
3. Famed hairdresser Vidal Sassoon was a member of The 43 Group in post-WWII England. He and his comrades fought in the streets against the remaining Nazis and fascists who were still sermonizing to the public.
4. General George S. Patton came in fifth in the 1912 Olympics in the "modern pentathlon", which was designed to showcase the skills required of the military. He placed high in horseback riding, fencing, swimming, and running. However, he missed the target twice during the shooting event, and lost to four Swedes.
5. Thomas Adams, the inventor of Chiclets, was actually trying to create a cheap rubber substitute. He received the chicle (sap of the Mexican sapodilla tree) from none other than General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, the man responsible for the massacre at the Alamo. He hit upon the idea to manufacture gum after noticing how much Santa Anna liked chewing the chicle.
   
6. President Zachary Taylor's remains were exhumed in 1991 to test a theory that he had been assassinated by arsenic poisoning, posited by one Clara Rising. The relatively low levels of arsenic found could be explained by the medications and folk remedies of the day (which often contained things like lead, arsenic, and mercury). The results destroyed Rising's budding literary career.

Isn't history cool? If you too would like to be a washroom wizard, check out any of Uncle John's Bathroom Readers, available at fine bookstores everywhere.

- Josh

This Is A Long Drive For Someone With A Lot To Listen To... A Sunday Sermon

Dan here. Been a while for me as well with the blogging and the keeping people informed. As James has already pointed out, we've been busy with prepping the record, the tour dates, and also rehabbing a new practice space with state of the art (read: whatever I can find extremely discounted on the Internet) gear. My standards for the new gear have been "Will not course electricity through my body when turned on." So far, so good.

I recently went on one of my long jaunts up through New York State (where James and I both hail from). Being unemployed until the start of July, I've had some time to kill and have been spending it seeing family and friends who have otherwise gone neglected for the last couple of years. With that said, my preferred method of transport is almost always a car, and preferably be one that I'm driving. I have at times a raging type-A thing going on, and being in control of a vehicle helps.

So during my last trip, I loaded up the fauxPod with a ton of records that I've downloaded and haven't gotten around to listening to yet. Here are a few that I finally got a chance to check out over the last week:

The Wooden Birds' "Magnolia"
- This is Andrew Kenny's new band. Kenny was the frontman for an absolutely superb band called The American Analog Set, one of my personal faves from college. It's a very muted, quiet record, with very sparse arrangement and a ton of close mic-ing on everything. I really love the tight, up-close-and-personal sound on this record, it's hardly treated at all (ie. no walls of reverb, overproduced drums and vocals, ten-layer guitar tracks, etc.). Kenny's voice is hushed and soothing, and the girl he has singing with his is excellent. Fans of AAS, Songs:Ohia and the like would definitely enjoy this.

Heaven and Hell's "The Devil You Know"

- Old rock stars should just sit at home, collect their royalties, and stop embarrassing themselves by creating reality shows that show what dysfunctional lives they lead. Unless you're Ronnie James Dio, Tommy Iommi, Geezer Butler and Vinny Appice and you want to pretty much pick up where "Mob Rules" era Sabbath left off. Heaven and Hell is the post-Ozzy lineup of Black Sabbath, often overlooked by most fans, but glorified by the die-hards. The new record is by no means an earth-shattering reinterpretation of anything. It is a solid album of old metal dudes proving to the rest of the genre that they must never forget the face of their father. Iommi's lead playing has really progressed, and there is not as much of his classic "pentatonic noodling" (that's a Josh term, and I thank him for it). This record came on at a point where I was starting to get a bit car-groggy, and it did the trick better than a 5-Hour Energy Shot.

Grizzly Bear's "Veckatimest"

- I am not very familiar with Grizzly Bear, but this got some insane rating in Pitchfork (who could snark at anything, I swear). What a fresh sounding record! Only gave it a once-through listen, but I was really impressed with the overall tone of this record. I could produce a laundry-list of influences on this , but rather than playing the spot-influence-then-cross-reference game I often play in my head, I just let it happen. That doesn't happen often to me, so it's welcome when it does.

Sonic Youth's "The Eternal"

- SY is one of those bands that has influenced me so hugely, but which you can hear almost no evidence of when I play. Like The Velvet Underground, I think everyone who bought SY albums in their musically formative years went out and formed bands, whether those bands sounded like "Goo" and "Daydream Nation" or not. Mine certainly didn't. My fave from them still continues to be "Murray Street", and "The Eternal" works on me in the same way, which means I enjoy it as a record from a very talented crew of players who have been consistently making records for around 25 years, and I get to accept it as part of a very large body of work, an autobiographical progression of songwriting, if you will. I love a band that just goes out and does what they want, how they want and has a fan base that is (for the most part) willing to give it all a shot and not bitch and moan about artistic vision, major label betrayal and the like. "The Eternal" is incredibly accessible, very melodic in a lot of places and genuinely a great rock record.

Phish's Summer '09 Tour Tapes

- Like James said previously, they're playing better than they've played since coming back from hiatus. I was lucky enough to see them in Camden a couple of weeks ago, and it was like coming home. Proclaiming anything about Phish stirs up a lot of sentiment from both sides of the coin, but they've been one of my favorite bands since high school and will never apologize for that, ever. The Northeast tour tapes have been truly great to listen to because I get to hear four of my musical heroes refind what they love about playing music while they're finding it.

Okay, enough of my gushing. I tend to only post about music that I love, so you'll rarely hear me snark about much of anything musical here. If I don't like it, I tend to just not mention it, as it isn't worth my time to listen to, much less write about.

In Sobriquets news: We've got a date coming up July 1st in Philly at Lickety Split on 4th and South Streets. This place has been hosting a great roster of bands from Philly and beyond, and we hope to see you there. Check out thesobriquets.com as usual for more dates, particularly the CD release shows on July 17th and 18th. The show on the 17th is with a band we recently played with in Baltimore and we just love them. I'll gush about them later in the week, I'm sure.

-Dan

Sad Bastard Sunday Roundup: Tuesday Edition

Hey all... James here.

Haven't blogged in awhile (save for my occasional texted rants to my other blog, though I haven't really sent any of those in awhile either).

Been pretty hard at work prepping the new record (details of which to be released soon), and booking our summer tour dates to promote said record (details of which to ALSO be released soon). For those of you thinking we haven't been playing nearly enough shows of late, believe you me, we feel the same way. One gig or so a month just ain't cutting it for this big-haired geek, to say the least. I need to make an ass out of myself in public at least thrice fortnightly or I start to get weird (how would we know, you ask snarkily... you'd know).

Been also watching a lot of Phillies... well, actually, not WATCHING the Phillies, per se. I don't have cable, and most of the games are on Satan's Sports Net (and for once, I use "Satan" not to refer to the Fox Network). I spend many an evening (too many, one might suggest) staring at MLB.com's Gameday, providing me an almost visually interesting display of pitch by pitch. It's kind of like video game graphics from the mid 80s when the game froze, and all you could do was watch the CPU throw strikes past you whilst your NES began to shake, then to smoke, and lastly to weep, ever so gently, in the corner.

Aaaaanyway... the boys are doing, generally, quite well of late (admittedly, not so much today), though I had an odd weekend last weekend: I don't think I've ever rooted against the Red Sox and FOR the Yankees in the same, well, ever. I know it's trendy to shit on the Sox because of Red Sox Nation (which, in fairness to Bostonians, we here in Philly would be probably just as bad, if we could win more than one championship per generation), but having grown up reading (and re-reading, and re-re-reading) a lot of Stephen King, I can't hate the Red Sox. I can't. Except when they play (and especially beat) the Phils. But AT THE SAME TIME, the Yankees (who I, like all thinking people, despise) were playing the Mets (who I wouldn't have really any too many negative feelings about, except they and the Phillies have this rivalry, see, and therefore must lose at all cost). Up was down, black was white, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.

Watching the Wire... halfway through Season 5... wherein everyone loses their damn minds...

Getting ready to go to Warshington and pelt Congress with small stones until they stop being stupid.

That's about all for today. Perhaps I'll get back to blogging more regularly... or maybe not.

Listened to a couple sets of Phish from last week... for those of you who may profit from this information, allow me to say they're playing better than at really any time in the past decade.

That is all.

Loves,

J

I Got Nothin' (Sorta)

For real. I have very little going on that I haven't already talked about.

I'm still in the middle of that show about women, and it's absolutely become a job. I don't want to go, but I need the money. And on rare occasions, it's fun. Recently we started dicking around and trying to add classic movie themes into the middle of songs, whenever possible. Day 1 involved the theme from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". The guitar player managed to sneak it in just about everywhere. As the bassist, it's a lot harder for me to include these things. Day 2 was a particular challenge. We were trying to work in any music from Star Wars. Have you every tried playing the Imperial March in the middle of "I Will Survive"? Not entirely possible. However, playing the riff from Peter Gunn during "Girls Just Want To Have Fun" actually works pretty well. If anyone can think of movie themes that are easy to insert (a la Close Encounters), please let me know.

Also, I've been reading an exhaustive history of heavy metal music called Metal: A Definitive Guide by Garry Sharpe-Young. He spent 20 years culling all the information and interviews, and has organized the bands (about 75 of them) by type. It starts with Heavy Metal, such as Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, and Budgie, and goes on from there. It includes some of my favorite bands in there, such as 3 Inches Of Blood, Testament, Nevermore, Lamb of God, you name it. It's about 8" by 9", with size 6 font, and 500 freakin' pages, man. It took me 4 days to read about Black Sabbath alone. (On a very smooth side note, Paul Donato, one of the many, many replacements for vocalists Ozzy Osbourne and Ronnie James Dio [inset], fronted the band Keep under the pseudonym Michael McDonald following his Sabbath career. The band also featured Mark St. John of Deep Purple and KISS drummer Peter Criss.)

And finally, even though it's in the Twitter, Dan took the new EP over to DiscMakers in Camden to get pressed. Should be back very shortly, at which point you will buy it. Not may buy it, WILL buy it. You can't see it, but I'm glowering and shaking my fist at you through the computer.

In summary, apparently I did have some stuff to talk about.

- Josh

Optimistic Monday

Does anyone else religiously follow box office returns for Hollywood films? I've been doing it since I was a kid (when we looked at the news on something called "paper"). As many of you know, I've been particularly interested in the performance of the new Star Trek movie, being a fan of the franchise and of JJ Abrams.

Star Trek has been faring well, posting the lowest declines from week to week of any film this year. While I would imagine the quality of the story, production values, and marketing probably influence a film's box office performance the most, some reviews have attributed Star Trek's success to another factor: optimism.

Star Trek as a franchise has always reflected a rosy view of the future, honoring the wishes of its creator, Gene Roddenberry. This did not change for the latest installment. However, the most successful "reboots" of franchises in the last few years were Casino Royale and Batman Begins, both dark and brooding films. So when I saw Terminator Salvation last week, I wondered why it was performing much worse than anticipated.

Both Terminator and Star Trek have questionable stories, well-known characters, lots of explosions, slick special effects, and young, talented casts. There are many differences, for sure. But the most obvious difference is the setting. Why do more people in 2009 prefer the utopian sheen of Star Trek over the post-apocalyptic gloom of Terminator? Where would you want to spend your two hours?

And hey, The Sobriquets are doing things again! We're playing shows, finalizing EP artwork, and practicing in our new space. We're all very happy about that.

- Nick