Topher has created a monster. He's gotten me and mines addicted to interested in vinyl toys, what with his Bastardino icon and his Tirehead-dog-thing-humping-his-360. After buying some for the missus, signing up for the Tomopop newsletter (what is Tomopop?), and playing with Castle Crashers, I'm pretty sure I'm hooked.
Thankfully, web 2.0 is a vast labyrinth of deep links upon deep links, leading me to various and sondry (that's the Middle English spelling. I'm taking a Chaucer class, but more on that later) factoids, pichurrs, blog entries, and this video.
Colette's c-blog --> Colourlovers --> Digg --> Video.
So -- I've never filmed myself before. Let me clarify -- I've never filmed myself before and put it on YouTube. That shit is for crack-addled teenage girls and pretentious boobs. Seriously, nobody gives a shit.
But.
What if someone did give a shit? What if half a dozen someones gave a shit? What if making videos of yourself is an incredibly effective procrastination tool?
One of the good things about the whole Destructoid thing is that, once you're a part of it, you can relate, at least on a few (perhaps perfunctory) levels, to everyone else there. We might not all like robots, or toys, or flannel shirts, but we all like Destructoid enough to have signed up for it and to check out where the mascot came from.
For the record, I didn't plan for the fucking robot to stall out at weird times and interrupt me when I was talking. I also don't know what compelled me to a.) use this take or b.) do this at all, except for the fact that it was more fun than studying.
I like to think that when you break your YouTube cherry, it's acceptable to compulsively watch yourself over and over. But, that might be my raging egocentrism talking.
Poking around Ectomo instead of tackling a huge and sexy to-do list, I stumbled across this Flaming Lips video. Thank you, Ross Rosenberg, for reminding me of this delightfully quirky and endearing tune.
But, seriously, he's right. It would be bad if the robots won.
And since I'm here, check out this sweet tattoo:
M.I.A's "20 Dollar" is what we in the know call a "grower"
which is to say that, the first time I heard it, I was mildly
disinterested and aggressively unimpressed. I mean, I guess that
referencing the Pixies is cool, but choose a more obscure song for
maximum street cred. Much to my chagrin, I couldn't seem to escape the
damned thing until I realized that it was growing on me.
In an equally hip, yet vastly more subtle, move, M.I.A also managed to lift
Seriously,
give it a listen. The Orgy version might actually make this phenomenon
easier to hear. Either way, it explains this song's peculiar ability to
get stuck in my head even though I don't know any of the goddamned
words. Actually, that might ruin it.
For now, I'll just enjoy what amounts to an elaborate New Order/Pixies mash-up.
Not that that's a bad thing.
Remember a week ago when I was gushing over how good the yet-unreleased Beirut album, The Flying Club Cup, was? Well, I haven't really moved past that yet, so here's another video, this time of Owen Pallett singing "Cliquot," courtesy of La Blogotheque.
The thing about Owen Pallett is that the name of his Toronto-based outfit happens to be that of my favorite video game franchise of all time. Convenient, that. In any case, a little digging shows that Final Fantasy actually sings on the album:
Indie backscratching is always cute, and Pallett's old hat -- he's also worked with Arcade Fire, Bloc Party, and Stars."It's not a cover it's a co-write. Zach [Condon] wrote an instrumental and gave it to me and I wrote the melody and lyrics. I haven't heard the finished version and didn't even know it was called Cliquot."
On the decidedly low-fi end of the spectrum, here's a cover of Peter Bjorn and John's "Young Folks", as performed by Dawn Landes.
While I prefer the original, I can appreciate the metaphysical workings of a folk cover of "Young Folks" performed by old folks. Either way, this video comes courtesy of Simon Gooch, who, while he may secretly hate me, has the best last name ever.
Continuing on, I stumbled across some more of those nifty Take Away Shows, this time featuring one of my favorite singer-songwriters of, like, ever: John Vanderslice. Why should you care about John Vanderslice?
Any way, now that Vanderslice's cock is out of my mouth, here's one of three videos, again via La Blogotheque: To make a long story short, I'm a big fan, and I'm definitely picking up his newest album. And so should you.
1. He founded the Tiny Telephone recording studio which has been used by the likes of Spoon, Beulah, Okkervil River, and Death Cab for Cutie.2. He writes really fucking good music.
3. His old band, mk Ultra, is named after a CIA mind-control experiment from the '50s primarily focused on the ingestion of LSD.
4. His first album Mass Suicide Occult Figurines is all of these things: named after a line in Neutral Milk Hotel's "Song Against Sex", available for free download, and amazing.
5. Most importantly, he was involved in an elaborate hoax with Microsoft that included numerous trademark licensing lawsuits, child pornography, and Bill Gates death threats.
Editor's note: All of this video hunting is a direct result of my need to procrastinate while working on an essay about Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Morte d'Arthur." That's in no way relevant, and serves only to justify an otherwise banal post about year-old pop songs.