The Musings of a Very Important Lawyer.

Headlining Lollapalooza 2008 will be Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, and Rage Against the Machine.

I had to write the year “2008″ twice up there just so that everyday internet readers would not confuse it with fucking 1992.

Several big, expanded, remastered cash-grab album re-issues have come out in the last few months, all of which are screaming for my attention. In the interest of something to talk about, I’m going to go endlessly on and on about why they are so great. There’s nothing obscure about this list, but I’d like to discuss anyways, so here goes.

The most widely-heard of all these re-issues is Beck’s Odelay, which got the “deluxe edition” treatment. These deluxe editions are super, super nice – I have the Who ones for My Generation (absolutely incredible – “Leaving Here” has a Keith Moon drum pattern that sounds like proto-jungle, thirty-five years ahead of its time) and Tommy (better for the liner notes than the extras – what idiot wants to hear a demo of “Pinball Wizard” that doesn’t even have a drum track?) . There’s tons more I have my eye on, but none of them are quite as special as Odelay. Odelay doesn’t get put on even 1/4 as often as Midnite Vultures, which deserves a Pulitzer, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an unstoppable juggernaut of greatness. It’s got a whole second disc of bonuses, all B-sides and comp tracks and demos. It contains “Richard’s Hairpiece,” the Aphex Twin remix of “Devil’s Haircut,” which is notable because I purchased it on vinyl back when I was an Aphex completist. The album and the b-sides just reek of high school for me, and I’m aching to pick up a copy once I can find it for less than fucking thirty dollars.

Next up is another high school favorite, a CD that endlessly repeated in my car as I’d drive through the snow on my way to/from school – Air’s Moon Safari (10th Anniversary Deluxe Edition). Moon Safari came out at a time where my friends and I had an all-consuming obsession for all things synthesizer. I remember my friend Joe lending me his Polymoog around the time, and being frustrated that a piece of junk like that was unable to even pretend to replicate the beauty found on this CD. Moon Safari was the last truly solid album Air wrote; that’s really unfortunate, because it was also their first. Their use of vocoder – supposedly to keep the vocalists mostly gender-neutral – is ubiquitous without ever being annoying (this is quite the tightrope when it comes to the vocoder!). “Kelly Watch the Stars” will hit me with nostalgia for winter-time driving until the day I die. This album is really fucking stupendous. Again, there’s a second disc with B-sides, comp tracks, and so forth. Plus, this one comes with a DVD – it’s the tour video Air put out when this album got released the first time, except it’s off of that nasty VHS and onto a format that isn’t irretrievably broken.

Third – and I just read about this today, via Pitchfork – is Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville. Liz Phair was one of my absolute favorite musicians in the whole world when I was in high school. A smart, aggressive woman with an amazing knack for confessional lyrics that weren’t about fucking fairies or whatever (you can pretty much go and fuck yourself, Tori Amos [although Little Earthquakes will always be amazing]) and who wrote incredibly vicious, rocking tunes. I was just like oh my God. I’m sure I talked about marrying her at least five million times. Exile in Guyville is why. It’s totally perfect, it’s from Chicago, it has “Mesmerizing” and “Fuck and Run” on it. Fun fact: my sister walked in on me singing “Fuck and Run” on my guitar once in high school. You want to feel the pain of true, raw embarrassment? Have a little girl walk in on you when you’re singing a first-person song about a girl, you know, fucking and running “even when I was twelve.” I am secure in my masculinity, bro. I swear to god I am.

This is also a good time to mention Replicas Redux, a double-disc reissue of Gary Numan / Tubeway Army’s first true classic with a whole second disc of demo versions and stuff. If you heard any of the other Numan reissues, you know that there is tons of gold to be mined in the demos / Peel sessions / live tracks / etc. Plus, this is the one reissue on this list that is actually affordable – like fourteen bucks at Reckless – so it’s pretty easy to go and buy it and then listen to it all of the time.

Dream Journal has been a regularly occurring feature here at veryimportantlawyer.com for over thirty years. By divining the secrets and hidden meanings behind my dreams, I have made the world a better, more enlightened place. This feature also successfully predicted the outcome of several presidential elections as well as a great number of disasters, both natural and man-made.

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So in my most recent dream, I am at a fancy restaurant with my immediate family. The waiter brings out a plant, placing it between my sister and I. The plant has a great many beige tentacles, looking exactly like spaghetti. There is also something that appears to be a mouth; the mouth looks like what a condom looks like when it is rolled up.*

We’re sort of fascinated by the plant; it seems to be getting noticeably bigger. It’s sitting on sort of a large dish/bowl. My sister goes to poke at it with a spoon, and suddenly and silently the spoon is devoured. Now we’re just totally freaked out and our fascination has been replaced by apprehension.

Then, with no warning, the plant lunges out of the dish thing and bites my sister on the arm. She totally flips her shit, all yelling about how IT FUCKING BIT ME and I’m super grossed out, like how the fuck does some nasty squishy plant bite my sister?

This freak-out moment precipitates my waking up. I didn’t think too much about the dream, but then on my bike this morning I had a chance to reflect, and all I could think about was what a bunch of bullshit that dream was. Basically, my brain just took a bunch of things it had seen before (spaghetti, my sister) and grafted it onto Little Shop of Horrors. That’s sort of bullshit when you think about it, dude.

* I cannot speak from experience, but this is what it looks like in the movies

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We hope that you have been enlightened by this most recent entry in the Dream Journal series of veryimportantlawyer.com blog posts. Please look out for our next installment, which will almost certainly be about zombies.

As an introduction, Sen. Allard has just introduced sort of a fun little joke amendment to the budget bill, wherein he purports to implement every Obama campaign promise, to the tune of $1.4T.

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Dear Sen. Allard,

I am just writing you from Illinois to thank you for wasting my money as a Federal taxpayer so that you may pull fun, cheap stunts by introducing hilarious budget amendments that have no chance of passing and exist solely to mock a presidential candidate.

For all the rhetoric about how those who oppose the president and the war “hate America,” it is refreshing to see a United States Senator willing to truly hurt the country by throwing money that belongs to the American people in the garbage.

You are a spectacular failure as a Senator and as a human being. I recognize that you do not represent my home state, and thank God for that; however, you are still a government employee and therefore supported in part by money that comes from my pocket. I consider it a gift from above that you will not continue to be so for much longer.

Hopefully the next job you have will require you to actually work.

Sincerely,
A Very Important Lawyer

The newly rebranded CEDAR FAIR PRESENTS PARAMOUNT’S KINGS ISLAND this year added Firehawk, a flying coaster that basically dared my girlfriend to ride it and not get a headache. We actually emerged unscathed (although it sort of hurt my legs), but somewhat bored – Firehawk is absolutely not a very good ride.

Kings Island is known for two things: The Beast, and Son of Beast. The Beast is well known because it is the world’s longest wodden roller coaster, tearing ass through over five hundred thousand megayards of American countryside. In fact, during the original construction of The Beast, the ride’s architect personally went to the rainforest and cut down over four square miles of virgin-growth trees, stamping out dozens of endangered species simply to demonstrate man’s utter dominance of nature. Don’t worry, though – most of those species were huge, really ugly bugs, and those things are assholes and deserve nothing short of a painful extinction.

As should be obvious, The Beast is among the greatest roller coasters of all time. Kings Island owns a ton of amazing, gorgeous land, and the Beast travels over a lot of it – you are taken away from the park and hurtled blindly through acre after acre of terrifying, presumably haunted woods.

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Guys, I archived the above like months and months ago. I’m posting it now as part of the VIL CLEARINGHOUSE but here’s the Cliff’s Notes:

- Andrea and I managed to get in an argument at the water park about whether, once married, she’d take my last name (no)

- We rode the Beast in darkness at park closing time. Riding up in the front. Beautiful.

- Top Gun’s awesome, I spazzed out on Vortex and yelled about how Andrea “promised” me that it didn’t go upside-down, I love Flight of Fear like a child, Firehawk sucks, I made Andrea ride the Spongebob 3D virtual reality ride (when the 3D was broken!), the food at PKI is disgusting, the Avatar: the Last Airbender ride is the coolest looking kids’ ride I have ever seen, and the Scooby Doo Haunted Spacegun Thing is a waste compared to the old spookhouse but could totally be worse.

Sorry this is half a year late! I was busy playing beer pong!

A man in a room suffers

This is a compilation track that Warp Records has made available as a totally free MP3.

I love this band, so this gave me a big boner.

This is a no-vocals track with tons of drums and a drifty little keyboard melody. Sounds like it belongs on one of the Microtronics mini CDs they did.

Broadcast – “Green Peter”

Which came first – the furry or the Internet?

First, we had Panda Bear’s Person Pitch, which was basically like Pet Sounds, except sung by ghosts.

Now we’ve got Burial’s Untrue, which sounds like 2-step, except that all of the artists are ghosts, and they record their vocals in a secret underwater ghost studio.