Stay inside our rosy-minded fuzz

This is a great song by a great band. Perfect cadence for running, but also just really nice to listen too. One of my favorite pieces of music all summer and still now.

Tunes For the Road Experience, Vol. 12

SNFU, Painful Reminder.

Drunk on a Bike, is also brilliant, of course, but I can’t find a decent version on Youtube. This’ll have to do.

The young boy had fallen in love
With his homeroom teacher
He has fallen in love

It happens everyday
In schools throughout the city
Throughout the city

She was married, he did learn
And inside he did burn
Deep inside he did burned

He vowed that never again
Would he open his heart
Open up his hear

And to serve as a reminder
He painted her a picture
This painful reminder
And he keeps it in his binder
This painful reminder

The next day in his art class
He drew a picture of her
With an axe in her head

A picture’s worth a thousand words
Even those left unsaid
Those best left unsaid

Now he walks the halls alone
But it is for the better
Alone…alone…alone

He vowed that never again
Would he open his heart
Oh no! never again!

Christopher Walken is an alien.

Seriously. Remember this video? Who knew?

Graff.

 

Bernie Hinault shows us his Badger face

“If I can breathe, I attack.”

C’mon, that’s pretty fucking cool.

Tunes For the Road Experience, Vol. 11

Four Walls and Adobe Slabs.

Animal Collective’s song ‘My Girls’ gets it pretty right, if you ask me, even if the video is pretty damn trippy.

There isn’t much that I feel I need
A solid soul and the blood I bleed
With a little girl, and by my spouse,
I only want a proper house

I don’t care for fancy things
Or to take part in the vicious race
But to provide, for one who asks,
I will, with heart, on my father’s grave

I don’t mean
To seem like I care about material things
Like our social status
I just want
Four walls and adobe slabs
For my girls

Ten Foot Pole and the Summer of ‘96

Nothing reminds me more of mountain biking than this song. Well, this song and the smell of citrus degreaser. Oh, and that taste of blood you can get in the back of your throat when you’re totally anaerobic for longer than you’re supposed to be able to be.

I worked for a few years at this great shop called Spokes n’ Attire, in Kensington, Calgary. The owner was (and still is, I’m sure) a great guy, and the crew I worked with were all pretty rad as well. This was the dawn of the new skate-surf-snowboard punk scene in California and those were the tunes we would blast all day long. Lagwagon, Strung Out, Face to Face, Good Riddance, Bad Religion, Fugazi (ok, East Coast), Pennywise, NoFx. Basically anything that came out on Epitaph.

One of my all time fav bands from that era is these guys, Ten Foot Pole. A band that featured a lead singer that played professional baseball for the White Sox and the Dodgers. Scott Radinksy juggled pro ball and punk rock for a number of the eleven years he played in MLB – pretty cool if you ask me. And he was a pitcher, no less. And a good one – one of the best Jewish pitchers the league’s ever seen. Oh, and he had Hodgkin’s Disease and kicked that to keep playing. He retired and opened a skate park and museum, called Skatelab, in California.

I saw TFP play a number of gigs in those years, before Radinsky parted ways with them to join another punk group called Pulley. They’d play small community halls, or the campus spots, and there’d be anywhere from 75 to a couple hundred people in there moshing and losing their shit. Radinsky was very approachable and would hang out with the crowd, just sitting on the stage, having a beer, after the show. Talking to anyone that wanted to talk.

This song is probably one of the most motivating tunes I’d listened to, back in that day. Headphones on, knee warmers on, clipped in and ripping it up around Fish Creek Park, Nose Hill, or out in K-Country or the Benchlands near Canmore. Gold. Check it out and read the lyrics below.

Doesn’t Scott Radinsky seem like a pretty rad mo fo?

We’ve been hiding out forever
Waiting to release all our energy
That’s still inside
It’s time to get it out
Get it out of me

Something new
I want to make this time special
Something for you
Playing as hard as we can
Grind out the energy

I want to scream again
So you can hear me singing through my hands
Release it
Let it go
Let it go

We’ve found a way to make up for the lost time
Turn it up and play it loud
Grind out the energy

From J.M Coetzee

“Although he devotes hours of each day to his new discipline, he finds its first premise, as enunciated in the Communications 101 handbook, preposterous: ”Human society has created language in order that we may communicate our thoughts, feelings and intentions to each other.” His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.”

“You try out for nothing then you drop dead”

This is a great band. I got to play third wheel with an old pal and his GF on a week long trip to New York that culminated in seeing Phoenix play in Central Park, under this well timed warm autumn rain. We’d both been fans since around 2000, when there was a big French House remix of the song ‘If I Ever Feel Better’. They’re blowing up these days.

It was a great gig and an even more memorable experience due to the fact that we found $100 and a Mastercard after the show. We cut the card up and spent the $100 at Salon de Ning on the top of the Pennisula Hotel, like the high rollers we were pretending to be

Here’s a great live performance of ‘Girlfriend’ from the Craig Ferguson show. The whole track is great, but I especially like the last minute or so, when the band drops out to just the rhythym and Thomas Mar’s voice, carrying the song surprisingly well on just those two elements.

They’re playing in Toronto on Dec 5 and I couldn’t resist getting tickets.

20 min watts? Not too bad.

Considering I have done about zero riding this year the numbers that came out of my 3 min and 20 min watts test tonight weren’t too bad. Pretty happy with them, all things considered. Last year my best numbers were 360 for the 3 min and 308 for the 20 – that’s about my best. If I could produce those numbers at, or even a bit lighter than the body weight I’m at now, I’d be in good shape, I’m a-thinkin’. Tonight I did 330 for 3 min and 252 for 20. Those will go up about 15% in 3 to 4 weeks, once some intensity starts to happen.