10/13/2005

Listening to: Stone Temple Pilots - Core

Here is a collection of my thoughts as I ironed shirts and listened to STP:
  1. Ironing takes forever. Seriously. I blinked and it was 5 AM.
  2. You know how when you have a pattern of intersecting white lines over a dark background that illusory little dots appear where the lines intersect? Well, when I ironed that cool brown shirt with white lines that I ganked from Justin, it went bonkers and black dots jumped out every time I moved the iron. Bizzaro.
  3. STP is way more metal than I ever realized. And with a few exceptions, I only like the songs where they let their guard down and admit to having pop influences. But if STP is metal, then disfigure my face and call me Lars because I'm metal, too.
  4. Knowing Scott Weiland's predilection for all things smokable, it makes me wonder whether songs like "Sex Type Thing" are social commentary (cool) or autobiographical (scary).
  5. Irons suck a lot of power and generate a lot of heat. You really gotta keep the cold air circulating.
  6. All art is born of discontent, either real or imagined.
  7. The groove for "Sin" is a carbon copy of the one for "Wicked Garden". The same goes for "Crackerman" and "Sex Type Thing". What were they thinking?
  8. All art about love is based on a grossly exaggerated aspect of love, or an inaccurate, idealized aspect of it.
  9. I bought Purple for two reasons: "Interstate Love Song" and "Big Empty". It was worth every penny except for the booklet, which ostensibly contained Mr Weiland's handwritten lyrics to such songs as "Big Emty" and "Vasoline". The only thing that I learned from that booklet was that you can't hide crackheadedness.
  10. For the first time in my life, I have two weeks' worth of pressed shirts ready to go.

# posted by Brandon at 5:25 AM 3 comments Home

3 Comments:

Blogger Justin said...

Since when do you iron? You applying for jobs or something?

Over the years, I believe I've seen every STP, Pearl Jam, and Sugar Ray album for $3.99 at Vinyl Fever. Lot of Wallflowers, and a fair amount of REM as well.

Those still don't beat my perfectly-unscratched find of OK Computer for $3.99.

I have a heightened connection to grunge, due to your listening of it during the formative years of your and my musical development/awareness. Despite this, it doesn't feel like "mine," if that makes any sense.

I'd like to think the past couple of years have given me more of "me" in musical selections, although relying on underground critics and peers have led to disappointingly overrated forms (Clap your hands say yeah? The Go! Team??).

Those observations of art are most likely true.

I think you're talking about that Levi's shirt? The one with oranges (and greens?) too? Otherwise, I don't remember such a brown, white-striped shirt.

12:16 PM  
Blogger Rachel said...

Wow, ironing. I refuse to do that. I refuse to even buy clothes that will need to be ironed. (This may come back to haunt me when I officially embark on my professional career but I figure the next two years is plenty of time for fabric technology to develop such that ironing is never necessary ever again.) But I guess my ironing boycott must be making me missing out on some good chances for reflection on the meaning of art.

What I think about grunge is that it hit us (As in people relatively our age) at exactly the time when it's borderline silly drug-induced angstiness could speak to us strongest - in our adolesence. And therefore it will always have a special place in my heart.

1:00 PM  
Blogger Brandon said...

I iron since last night, when it occurred to me that there might be a better system than pulling the least wrinkled shirt out of the closet and hoping for the best. So now I'm thinking I'll iron all the shirts on laundry day and then have many more choices throughout the week.

On second thought, though, Judson used to do this. But that's all right. He was a cool guy, in some ways.

It's not Levi's, but it has oranges and greens in it.

Grunge, man. I don't like the word, but I think the music is great. All the recordings are so dark and muddy, you can't even separate the guitar from the bass half the time. I also got to thinking about how I taught myself guitar in the early 90's. I was never interested in chords; I always tried to play the riffs.

I liked grunge mostly because of the (gasp) clothing style. For some reason, I thought it was cool that they all dressed like they found their clothes in a dumpster and they couldn't afford to buy anything better. At the same time, the price of flannel skyrocketed for about 4-5 years. I bet it's back to normal now.

Also, "grunge" is a very misleading word. You know, Weezer was given that label. So were the Toadies, and the Gin Blossoms, and Toad the Wet Sprocket, and Radiohead. That's why I used to think those guys were all from Seattle (except Weezer, who were clearly from California).

1:13 PM  

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