Karl HELLO THERE, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN…
Bun E. Carlos, Robin Zander, Rick Nielsen and Tom Peterssen. Live at the Gypsy Tea Room
ARE YOU READY TO ROCK? My law school friends in Dallas, Shahin and Terrie Khoshbin, recently attended a birthday bash thrown by another Dallas attorney who does well enough to book Cheap Trick for his personal entertainment. Terrie was kind enough to provide these exclusive photos to the site, which is fitting in light of the Trick influence on the Pate sound. BTW, the Khoshbins thought Trick rawked, natch.
FRIDAY BRAINTEASER: a version of the Sam Loyd classic.
JOHN LENNON: There were plenty of tributes yesterday, but the most interesting thing I ran across was the NYC Radio The Night John Lennon Died MP3 at the WFMU blog.
GRAMMY NOMINEES are announced, including Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Rick Moranis.
THE NEW PANTHEON MUSIC AWARD NOMINEES are announced. It's an award created to honor the best new music bubbling just under the mainstream's radar. Elton John, Elijah Wood, Beck, Margaret Cho, John Legend, Ben Gibbard (Death Cab For Cutie), Keith Urban, Ric Ocasek, Shirley Manson (Garbage), Chester Bennington and Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park, Suzanne Vega, Dave Matthews and other artists will choose the ten finalists, with the winner tol be announced on February 6, 2006.
BIRDMONSTER gets a rave and an interview in SF Weekly. You can stream a few at MySpace.
SEASON OF THE LIST: Stylus concludes its Top 50 Singles countdown. Filter adds Top Tens from Adam Olenius of Shout Out Louds, Swearing At Motorists, Leslie Feist and Blake Miller of Moving Units. The Tufts Daily also has a Top Ten. Robert Duffy has a 20 Favorites with downloads at Donewaiting.
THE POGUES are miffed that frontman Shane McGowan took an impromptu holiday to Morocco when he should have been rehearsing with them.
THE CASTANETS: Ray Raposa talks to the Miami New Times about moving to a tiny town in Baja California, Mexico, when he was thirteen and the development of his “eerie, autumnal, sorta-Appalachian Velvet Underground sound.” You can hear that sound in the free download of “First Light's Freeze” at Asthmatic Kitty.
CBGB gets a yearlong extension on its lease.
BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE: There's a profile and album track streaming from NPR.
OLIVIA TREMOR CONTROL multi-instrumentalist John Fernandez talks to You Ain't No Picasso about the band's reunion DVD, possible future gigs and his current band, Circulatory System. MP3s at the link.
PINK MOUNTAINTOPS, a band related to Black Mountain, has a free track up for their upcoming album, Axis of Evol. (Yes, I bet the band likes Sonic Youth.)
GARY GLITTER has confessed to his lawyer he has shared his bed with a 10-year-old girl.
PETE DOHERTY-KATE MOSS UPDATE: This time, the troubled singer was so happy he wasn't holding when the cops searched him that he strummed a tune for them. Meanwhile, Doherty's former bandmate Carl Barat has the video for “Bang Bang You're Dead” streaming from the site for his new band, Dirty Pretty Things.
COURTNEY LOVE is selling a quarter of Kurt Cobain's catalog to Martha Stewart?
KING KONG: Movies.com has a slew of clips posted, including production diaries and a VFX demo reel. ALSO: Director Peter Jackson has shed 70 pounds, ostensibly by going off the Morgan Spurlock diet.
CLARE DANES sees dead people. Or did when she was young.
MATT DAMON is going to be a dad. Is it that he can't stop aping buddy Ben Affleck, or a reaction to those stories about George Clooney constantly groping him on the set of Syriana?
THE SOPRANOS: The next season is going to start with a bang. Figuratively, at least.
NICK NOLTE: A lawsuit by parents of a teenager who says she was raped during a party at Nick Nolte's home can include evidence of previous drug and alcohol use by the actor and his son. So much for a speedy trial!
CHRISTOPHER ROBIN has been axed from the next installment of Disney's highly-successful Winnie the Pooh franchise. Robin's agent claims that the casting of a tomboyish girl for the new film reeks of political correctness, but I don't think you can ever rule out money issues in Hollywood… or the Hundred-Acre Wood.
SUPERMAN RETURNS: Radar wonders whether he's returning from the closet. NTTAWWT. But Defamer notes that the story has a couple of verifiable errors.
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, a.k.a. the gay cowboy movie (based on a short story by Anne Proulx), faces its toughest challenge yet — wooing mainstream America. This seems to extend to using ads that are distinctly familial and thoroughly heterosexual.
JACKO is on the verge of a 270-million-dollar meltdown that wold cost him the Neverland Ranch and Sony Beatles music catalog.
GWYNETH PALTROW likes the British stiff upper lip, yet somehow married Coldplay's Chris Martin. And forgotten the British reaction to the death of Princess Diana. But other than that, she’s spot on.
NBC is now making current shows (as well as old ones) available for download on iTunes. So what's the most popular new material? NBC chief Jeff Zucker says it's Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.
SPIKE JONZE remains a master of short-form video; his version of the new GAP ad is even better than the one for air. And it made me want to watch Walken tap his way through Fatboy Slim's “Weapon of Choice” all over again.
IRAQ: As the Dec. 15 election nears, candidates and political parties of all stripes are embracing politics, Iraqi style: “It is like night and day from 10 months ago in terms of level of participation and political awareness,” said a Canadian election specialist with the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, a group affiliated with the U.S. Democratic Party that is working to ease Iraq's transition to democracy. Iraqi blogger Mohammed takes an in-depth look at the prospects for the various parties. And pamphlets allegedly being distributed by Al-Qaida's Committee in Iraq reflect a surprising degree of hysteria on the part of Al-Qaida and growing bitterness towards moderate Sunnis. ALSO: The US military has delayed the deployment of one combat brigade and put another on standby in what could become the start of a drawdown.
IRAN: President Ahmadinejad expresses doubt that the Holocaust occurred and suggests Israel be moved to Europe. Just the sort of thing one wants to hear from a nation that UN nuke watchdog Mohammed ElBaredei says may be only two or three years from a nuclear weapon.
AFGHANISTAN: An ABC News poll in Afghanistan — the first national survey there sponsored by a news organization — shows both vast support for the changes that have shaken their country and remarkable optimism for the future, despite the deep challenges they face.
RADICAL ISLAMISTS IN EUROPE: As a Dutch court heard evidence of a radical group tied to murder of Theo van Gogh learning to behead people in a way to inflict maximum suffering, countries like France are recuitment spots for radicals, with one of the main Al Qaeda operatives in Europe urging “the mujahidins (…) to act quickly and take actions against Great Britain, Italy, Holland, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Australia, Russia and France..” Sweden is also worried about the trend, with several video clips on the Internet purporting to show experimental detonations of explosives in a wooded valley in Sweden.
CULT OF THE iPod: You can dress your iPod like Santa for the holidays, though I suspect Sylvia Hauser would rather dress her Shuffle as a cowboy for that country vibe. ALSO: Who else would be on William Shatner's playlist but… William… Shatner! The Shatner/Joe Jackson cover of Low's “Common People” is at the link, too.
“PODCAST” is the 2005 Word of the Year, according to the New Oxford American Dictionary. But industry analyst Nitin Gupta of the Yankee Group says the addition of the word to the dictionary is “overstating the pervasiveness of podcasting.”
MAC USERS (and some do visit us): Reportedly, a version of Google Earth for Mac OS X has begun showing up outside the US. But you will “probably never” be able to use SBC Global DSL service.
MORE SONY CD PROBLEMS: This time its PC securrty problems created by the SunnComm MediaMax copy protection software, which is different from the cursed XCD system noted here earlier. Sadly, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club's Howl and My Morning Jacket's Z are among the affected discs, so I would recommend not sticking 'em in your PC…
ONLINE DEALS: Comparison shopping Web sites have seen a surge in holiday visits this year.
MURDER FOR CHEESE? Just in case you missed Thursday's biggest story: “In an unusual case of mistaken identity, a woman who thought a block of white cheese was cocaine is charged with trying to hire a hit man to rob and kill four men…”
GOLDFISH gets cosmetic surgery. The story says it was to remove tumors, but clearly the fish got collagen in the lips.
HORSES cannot be forced to wear diapers on Malta.
PERFORMING MONKEYS in Indonesia carry several viruses that could infect humans during the close contact common to street shows.
BATS HAVE BIG BRAINS and small cojones, or vice versa, depending on the promiscuity of the females in their species.
