the only guarantee in life is a life worth dying for

A short, sharp and shocked media blow this week:

The Best of Fritz Leiber: “America the Beautiful” and “Poor Superman” can be read as prophetically savage satires of the American right and left, respectively, at the dawn of the 21st Century. Or they’re just good sci-fi, as the rest of this collection is.

When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold: Cherchez la DJ, the poet tells us, and when I couldn’t put my finger on what fell short on Lemons I looked to Ant. Atmosphere’s DJ, normally reliable, picked a succession of synth-heavy, bass-laden tracks for Slug to rap over, instead of the usual funk / soul / rock blends. Given Slug’s Midwest baritone and aging voice, the results don’t move quite as well as they ought. Still, subpar Atmosphere still beats the best that the Yin-Yang Twins have to offer any day, so add it to the collection.

(If you want an Atmosphere album of nothing but upbeat, tubthumping, house party jams, check out Strictly Leakage - a free download on Rhymesayers)

Virtual Unrealities: The Short Fiction of Alfred Bester: As I’ve remarked before, if Philip K. Dick is the glue-sniffing kid from the back of the glass with Elvis Costello glasses and conspiracy theories, Alfred Bester is the clove-smoking kid in the mod jacket who’s read Chomsky and Paglia. Where Dick runs manic and weird, Bester reads cool and peppery. But the subject matter resounds through both: questioning reality, our place in it and our relation to it.

To Play the King: “Remember that frightfully nice man who talked a lot about ‘the classless society’? He had to go, of course, in the end.”

Ian Richardson returns as Francis Urquhart, the brutally Machiavellian Tory who secured his role as Prime Minister in House of Cards. To Play the King depicts a remarkably daring caricature of English government in the early 90s. While no one calls the King whose coronation kicks off the series “Charles,” or his ex-wife “Diana,” or his estranged sister-in-law “Fergie,” you can’t mistake who they mean.

Urquhart’s schemes don’t stack quite as deeply or as intricately in this series as in the last one - but you don’t watch these shows for the labyrinthine plot. You watch them for the utter depravity: Urquhart’s unmitigated lust for power and his cold, Shakespearean rage at anyone who stands in his way. He talks a lot about being the only person fit to run the country, but that’s clearly a rationalization. The object of power is power, like the book says.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: I’ve long maintained that Last Crusade holds the title of Best Action Film of the 80s. Watching it again on Saturday night, however, I wondered: could it be the Best Action Film of all time? Your thoughts, people.

when the crowd gets loud it can burn up the roof or make the walls all fall down

This media blow stacks the tracks and cuts the wax that split the facts and rock the racks.

Atmosphere: If you haven’t already checked out the hippest cat on the underground scene, I can sum up the best parts of Slug and Ant’s live act with the following. Ten minutes before the end of his sadly shortened set (all-ages show, early curfew), Slug grabbed the mic and said, “All right, instead of doing that fake ass pretentious encore shit, I’m just gonna sing two more songs, then I’m out.” I HAVE FOUND THE LAST REAL MC.

Even if you don’t know every track he raps on, you can’t help but bob along with Slug’s delivery - lyrical but not too clever for his own good, rhythmic but not predictable. As big a fan as I am, I probably only knew about half the songs they played - When Life Gives You Lemons You Paint That Shit Gold had only dropped on Tuesday, and apparently more people liked God Loves Ugly than I did. Still, I’d change nothing but the curfew.

Johnny Cash - “Hurt”: I saw the first 30 seconds of this video on YouTube, back when it made the rounds, and thought, “Oh, it’s just like the original song, only slower” and shut it off. For whatever reason I came back to it the other day and listened the whole way through.

Wow. I was so wrong it’s fucking embarrassing. I could not have been any more wrong and still been speaking in the English language.

If you have never seen it before, watch it alone or with a trusted friend:

The Editors: Pretty good. Indie without being slowcore or atonal. They have the same symphonic bombast as Arcade Fire and the same lead singer who can sing but has clearly never had voice lessons as Interpol. I listened to An End Has A Start and liked it; you could probably talk me into listening to others.

David Gray: On a whim I picked up his Greatest Hits the other day. Maybe my musical tastes have mellowed with age - I don’t know if this guy would have made the same impression on me contemporaneously as he does now. Though I remember liking “Babylon” at the time. Good, chill pop music. “Shine” has been wrecking my face pretty continuously for about a week or so now.

Gnarls Barkley: Give it up for Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse, who completely flipped the mainstream hip-hop concept by rapping about fear, self-consciousness, hubris and isolation. The Odd Couple, their sophomore effort, covers a lot of the same ground as their debut. Cee-Lo spits simple-sounding tracks that come from a complicated place, emotionally. Not as many toe-tappers as on St. Elsewhere (no “Crazy,” no “Smiling”, no “Gone Daddy Gone,” no “Last Time”), so it might not stand the test of time.

The GZA: To break up the monotony of top 40 pop and emo heartbreak for a minute, here’s the Genius’s hardcore track “Knock Knock.” Chappelle’s Show fans will recognize the song, though not the video, from Season 2.

Dave Matthews Band: I stopped listening to these guys after Crash came out; I’ll argue I made no mistake. I picked Crash back up again after maybe a decade of not having listened to it and I still loved it. Aside from “Cry Freedom” and “Proudest Monkey” you can’t find a sleeper on there.

Trent Reznor: I’ve had “The Hand That Feeds” stuck in my head for about a week now. I listen to that one, plus something off of Wu-Tang’s Enter The Thirty-Six Chambers, plus at least one Soundgarden song, at least once a week at work. I’ve turned 27 and suddenly I just want to hit 17 again.

I’m surrounded by more babies than Ashanti songs

• I’m not going to talk much about work on here, as a rule, but: were I still in the semiotics game, I might have a lot to say about the degree of weeding I need to do when sorting a list of common search results related to babies. I mean actual babies, not ooh baby, so I have to manually pick out anything inappropriate. No, I don’t want baby got back lyrics. Or hey baby. Or mtv cribs. Or baby got boobs. Or america’s next top wet nurse. There’s enough infancy imagery in pop culture to make at least two masters’ theses, if not a grant proposal.

• Tuesday night I put just shy of 16 gallons in the tank and paid a few dimes shy of $50. That number’s going to sit with me for a while. I can buy an XBox 360 for 7 tanks of gas. I can get a decent suit for 5 tanks of gas. I can take a girl out for a quality dinner or I can fill up my car. You try it - it’s fun!

• Work and jiu-jitsu have taken over my life recently, meaning I haven’t had as much time to devote to the simple pleasures like paying bills. I still haven’t touched my W-2s. I know that I have more than a month to do them and the actual process will take me maybe 2 hours, but I still feel the obligation sorely. My all-time record for earliest filing remains Valentine’s Day. One year I hope to beat that record.

• While woeing is me the other day, I forgot one awesome development that blew the rest of the weekend’s bad news out of the water: I landed tickets to Atmosphere’s next show in Boston! April 26th. I’ve branded this date on the surface of my brain. I will have no schedule conflicts on April 26th. Nothing will stand between me, the Theatre District and the twin sons of Mini-Hopelessness. I understand that the birth / death of your loved one may be important, sir / ma’am, but I’ve got GA seats to Atmosphere, so you’ll excuse my rudeness.

• Speaking of memory, and of work: I have yet to forget where I parked or which locker I’m using in the gym. Given my tendencies toward occasional absentmindedness I consider this a pretty serious accomplishment. Apparently, all it takes is a conscious effort to remember a number - even if that number changes every day (”P3″, “44″, etc) - and I’m good. Or maybe I’m growing sharper in my old age.

• I transition from “mid twenties” to “late twenties” in about three weeks. I’ll make sure to update my viewpoints accordingly.