Theme Park Experience

Good news for Jawbox fans: their third album, For Your Own Special Sweetheart , will be finally be reissued on Dischord later this year with three bonus tracks. Remembering when this reissue was announced back in 2004, this is pretty fantastic and all that good stuff. But the bad news for Jawbox completists: the band's cover of the Avengers' "Thin White Line" will not be on this reissue. Nor is "Falk" or "Chump II." Essentially, this Sweetheart reissue contains the original album, along with the B-sides from the Savory+3 EP. These three B-sides ("68," "Lil' Shaver," and "Sound On Sound") are fantastic non-LP gems. A Peel Session version of "68" originally appeared on the My Scrapbook of Fatal Accidents compilation, but not the original studio version. "Sound On Sound" gets the double-dip reissue, but "Lil' Shaver" has never been reissued anywhere else before. While I've ne...

If there's one thing that's incredibly frustrating in life, it's when you don't think you're being heard when you want to be heard. In hopes of steering this away from a vanilla vague philosophical matter, I say that because of a recent run-in with online ID theft. I love the bank I work with. They are very reliable and helpful, and I was surprised how quickly they responded to an apparent fraud on my account. Somehow somebody got a hold of an old credit card number of mine and tried to set up an account on a dating web site. My bank's fraud department immediately called me because the card number expired well over a year ago. While all that's well and good, the deal is, this was a card I never wanted, and when I was offered it, I flatly said "No." But they still sent me one. Compounding this, while depositing some money earlier this year, my very friendly teller started to give me the pitch for another one of these cards. When I kinda-politely cu...

Some encouraging news about me getting off the fence and actually making a decision. I decided after much debate that I should go ahead and sign up for cable television. Yes, this is proof I can make decisions beyond the ones I make every single day. Basically, since the digital switch, I have had very little success receiving any channels on my rabbit ears. With each channel scan I received less channels than the previous one. So, with the Dallas Cowboys season starting up and a desire to check out some of the upcoming new TV shows, (and with a housemate willing to split the cost) I decided to get digital cable from the same provider I get my Internet service from. Why this seems so big is that I went without cable for almost my entire eight years. For a while at my previous place, I was able to pick up MTV and AMC on my rabbit ears. To show how long ago this was, I remember how Joel and Benji from Good Charlotte hosted a show on MTV and AMC played movies like Halloween 4 on Friday ...

While I continue to sit on the fence about getting cable, I've made more definite plans to watch (or rewatch) an entire TV show from the beginning on DVD. I'm in the middle of the third season of Cheers , and have just begun to watch LOST again from the beginning. Just watching the pilot episode of LOST again has had immense impact, and I look forward to watch the rest of the series so far up to the season premiere of the sixth and final season next year. As this goes on, I still want to do a BSG Rewatch (as Julie describes it in her household). The thing is, there is a new, stand-alone TV movie called The Plan that is about to debut on TV (and soon, DVD). Like the other stand-alone Battlestar Galactica TV movie, Razor , this covers events that were only mentioned in passing in the regular series. So, what's the hold-up? Well, I'm considering my rewatch to be in chronological order instead of when the episodes originally aired. Geekitude is totally confirmed by th...

As I frown over the news about another redundant remake in the works, I am curious if there are more remakes in the works from a certain beloved horror author. Yes, me, Mr. Anti-Remakes is curious if more remakes of Stephen King's works are in the development phase. Why so? Because many previous adaptations look incredibly cheesy today. I don't know if the remake of Ocean's Eleven is what got Hollywood into thinking that remaking/modernizing films was a good idea. (It definitely wasn't with Gus Van Sant's nearly-shot-for-shot remake of Psycho .) But as I've seen time and time again with many horror movie remakes, they just seem forgettable and rather pointless other than a quick cash-grab. While there are exceptions (I still think Rob Zombie's take on Halloween is worth exploring), I just scowl. This is mainly because the originals have held up so well over time. But in the case of films like Children of the Corn and IT , there could be so much more done...

Over the weekend, while hearing apologies from a band member in the band I watched (and enjoyed the hell out of), something hit me. Not physically, but mentally. When there's a show, there are actually two shows going on. Meaning, there's the perspective from the audience, and then there's the perspective from the band. Too often, those perspectives don't seem to cross. I've played many shows where something went wrong. That something might have been a missed musical cue or equipment issues, but rarely have I talked to an audience member that noticed the problem or thought it was a big deal. Yet when you get the band's perspective, those gaffes seemed to make the show one of the worst shows of all eternity. In the case of what I saw over the weekend, I could tell there were some issues with a guitar, the amp, and the PA. Based on the looks between members and the soundman, things seemed to be frustrating all around. But for me as a fan, that didn't hamper th...

My first B-sides feature for the Observer is now online. This one is for the instrumental rock of This Will Destroy You. This Will Destroy You Sets Out To Make A Name For Itself In One Way Or Another Comparisons to post-rock bands like Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky are easy to make when listening to This Will Destroy You's music, but don't let those comparisons fool you into thinking that this band is anything like, say, Ozma aping Weezer, for example. Read the rest here .