I never sleep, ’cause sleep is the cousin of death

You can find this media blow in a numbered Zurich account.

The Final Cut: the third installment of the House of Cards trilogy and an excellent farewell to the series. You never really watch the show for amazing sophistication, so much as to marvel at the utter depravity of everyone involved. Ian Richardson as a gloating, Shakespearean villain trumps most actors’ attempts at being subtle. A couple observations:

• Not one, but two Indiana Jones villains! If M. Witty can ID them without resorting to IMDb I’ll reward him in the (costless) manner of his choosing. Or anyone else, but I think he’s my only reader who’s seen all three.

• Did somebody send a memo to the writers and say, “Nice work, but Season 3 definitely needs more tits and gunplay. Like, a lot”? Because I don’t see how else this happened. And you know those slicksters at WGBH just can’t get enough tits and gunplay.

Illmatic: This one, I think, will end up overtaking me like The Wire. At first I couldn’t see anything special about The Wire, until I realized that each show was technically perfect and exceptionally real. Similarly, I don’t know yet if Illmatic merits five mics, but I Can’t. Stop. Listening.

The Ministry of Fear: The last of Graham Greene’s three “entertainments” that I bought a few months back. I liked it just as much as I liked the others so I have nothing more to add except: buy these books and read them! And: Greene writes an awful lot in this novel about “rumpled bachelors” living in “furnished flats,” which made me feel a bit self-conscious at first. Then I decided to own up to the title. I am a rumpled bachelor! And yes, I do live in a furnished flat! What of it?

The Searchers: Being a stranger to the distant year of 1956, I can’t tell how much of John Wayne’s virulent hatred of the Comanche Indians stems from his character’s racism, and how much from the movie’s racism. Yes, the movie establishes that Ethan Edwards, unrepentant Confederate veteran and wanted coach robber, might have some internal issues. Consider his tendency to shoot out the eyes of dead Indians - not because he thinks it’ll prevent them from navigating the spirit world, but because he knows they think it will. At the same time, it’s John Wayne. He’s the big-shouldered hero. No one can make Wayne so despicable that an audience of men won’t want to emulate him, except perhaps Howard Hughes.

Interpreting the movie with some charity - the Comanche, though not savage subhumans, certainly did raid and rob lone settlers, and any film set in the West between 1830 and 1910 needs some villains - I find The Searchers pretty exceptional. Any student of film or aspiring director needs to memorize John Ford’s cinematography in this project, for one thing. The door silhouette onto Monument Valley? Yeah, that’s Ford right there. And the movie’s not just about the epic quest of two men to recover a kidnapped girl - it’s about, to quote Ebert, how it’s about it. Don’t know if I’d call it the best Western of all time, but it’ll do until the ruckus come along.

Finally, as several sources have noted, author Thomas Disch committed suicide this past 4th of July. I reread his savage satire Camp Concentration this week (funny how novels set in prison camps seem to speak to the modern audience!) and loved it. Dissidents and prisoners in an alternate future get dosed with a derivative of the syphilis spirochete, which dramatically expands their intelligence at the cost of killing them in nine months. Between the mad genius of the infected prisoners and the bland, Kafkaesque bureaucracy of their captors, the story weaves a poetic nightmare of a mind, and a society, slipping into oblivion.

back of my neck gettin’ dirty and gritty

I take for granted that I will never have everything I need out of the apartment - or even packed - by the day of the move. Years of experience taught me this. So I had relatively little stress on Saturday morning when I realized that I had yet to pack:

• An entire bookshelf’s contents;
  
• An entire media center worth of electronics;
  
• The entire top shelf of my closet;
  
• Any kitchen utensils

I stuffed things into boxes until Rachel, Lisa, Jason and Kate showed up. Through a mix of delegation and brute force, we muscled the UHaul van full to bursting and rolled over to Davis Square just as the sun reached its peak. I’d thought ahead, of course, and had a fridge full of water in the new place.

Once all the boxes and furniture migrated up three flights of stairs, the five of us settled in to unpack in air-conditioned comfort. The five of us quickly assembled the queen-sized bed frame, stocked the bookshelves and unpacked the kitchen mess. “You are going to get so much ass here,” Lisa observed with child-like wonder. I can’t verify that prediction in the first 48 hours of residency, but I think the place has potential.

I treated the four of them to Redbones barbecue right down the block. A conversation about music soon led to a poll about the most recognized guitar riff, then to the most recognized bass riff, then the sexiest guitar riff. Despite some pretty intense debate, we all agreed that the Dead are terrible.

I spent the rest of the weekend in air-conditioned comfort, except when I didn’t.

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.

they know my name ’cause I told it to them

I gave The Neon Bible another try (the Arcade Fire album, not the posthumous John Kennedy Toole novel) - and it’s not as bad as I first thought! I don’t know if I’d feel a pressing need to see them live if I’d already seen Interpol play within the last 12 months, but I can stand their music better now. I even found myself rocking out, just a little, on the drive in this morning.

Similar feelings about Dismemberment Plan (I owe Jason for bringing these both to my attention, though Elizabeth N. turned me on to D-Plan way, way back in high school). Don’t expect me to revisit Kanye, though.

I fed Pandora a smorgasboard of entries yesterday - I held the cutting board up to its gaping maw and scraped Atmosphere, Interpol, controller.controller, Massive Attack, Chemical Brothers and Otis Redding into it. It spit out a couple interesting recos: Arctic Monkeys, Blue Scholars and The Editors, among others. New fodder, new fodder!

I watched a repeat of America’s Best Dance Crew in the break room at work over lunch on Tuesday. I have the following observations, possibly heretical:

• Sure, Breaksk8, the roller-skating dance crew, is talented, but doesn’t half the novelty lie in the fact that they’re not falling down? It’s like wearing ten pound wristbands while you pop ‘n lock. Lil’ Mama would say, “Your moves weren’t the freshest, but DAMN - how’d you do that with those weights on?” If they were doing the same caliber of moves without skates they wouldn’t have even made the cut. And you don’t get extra points for handicapping yourself … on the street.

• The repeat we saw had a Michael Jackson theme to it, in honor of the 25th anniversary of Thriller (and god damn, that album stands the test of time). One group actually drew “Thriller” as their song to dance to. “Isn’t that cheating?” I asked. “Can’t they just do the Thriller dance? And then J.C. Chasez will say, ‘You guys did the dance from “Thriller.” You win.’” Because that shit is hard. I speak from experience here.

• Status Quo - represent!