Travis

My wife and I completed our Dead Like Me re-watch with the movie last night. We remembered it being really terrible, and it's still not very good but still worth watching as a fan of the show. It's frustrating because it could have been a great deal better and they made some pretty bad decisions (the main plot seems like a reaction to "oh shit, Mandy Patinkin isn't in on this." and they recast one of the characters and did an extremely poor job of it), but it also kind of tied out what really needed to be tied out to make the show feel whole. Bad movie on the whole, but some good fan service sprinkled all around to make me glad that we went back for a second go all these years later.

Flukes said:

https://twitter.com/CNBCnow/status/1171827460712935424

BREAKING: Trump administration readies ban on flavored e-cigarettes amid outbreak of vaping-related deathshttps://t.co/tNLeRxFxI5

— CNBC Now (@CNBCnow) September 11, 2019

Imagine if instead of 6, vaping was killing 10 to 12 thousand Americans each year? Now imagine Juul is Ruger, Remmington, or Smith & Wesson.

This ban is so fucking stupid. It's my understanding that the deaths have been isolated to more off market varieties and if the deaths really are their concerns then why is it just the flavors that are being eliminated. People do realize that there is a fucking law on the books banning sale to people under 21, right? I understand that the whole vaping thing could use some better regulations, but this is so arbitrary and stupid. Grown ups like flavors too. What is their honest basis for depriving them? I use tobacco flavored stuff anyway, but I'm not a fan of the government saying I can't have something because of what flavor it is.

cdrive said:

Oh Roberta!  surfer blood covered Hey Sandy!  And Chad & Jeremy! And Box Elder!  

I've got that one in my queue but I haven't gotten to it yet. I'm really intrigued. I liked their first record... shit that was almost 10 years ago and they have 4 since. Crazy.

cdrive said:

The new Kim Gordon single....I like it a lot more than Murdered Out, which was still really good but a little bit of Gen X fan service sonically.  This new video is so cool too.  I see you Loretta Fahrenholz!


Should I get into Jeff Buckley?  Y/N

Thanks for the heads up on the Kim Gordon. I've seen her name pop up a bit lately, makes sense if she's got a new album. I've never tried anything from her solo before. I'll give it a shot. Knee deep in The Beta Band at the moment, but I'm flagging it, for sure. Thanks!

RE: Buckley. Personally, he's one of those artists where I gave him a couple of shots, I have an album (Grace) and it's definitely quality stuff but it just doesn't compel me to come back for more. I like it, but it doesn't cut through entirely. That said, I do hear the quality and he does fall in an area where I am known to have a blindspot. Not sure how much you've heard and I think this is one of the better known tracks, but my favorite tune of his is Grace.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxjBHKNSM38

A dude who I've always thought evokes Buckley for me even though they don't sound a ton alike is Imaad Wasif. This could be totally inaccurate, but he kind of feels to me like tossing Buckley in a blender with the good parts of '00s Sebadoh (mostly for production purposes with that weird super heavy, overdriven to all fuck out cut to certain guitars, and some of the riffs are a bit Lowenstein-y in that time) and a classic rock sensibility. I don't know if that paints even close to a real picture, but just a weird notion that I've always carried with me. Anyhoo, I dig the Wasif stuff that I've heard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akPbPC6hrbY
He also did this really nice acoustic tune that I love on his first record.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_rd1ViUIME

I stumbled onto the Jon Brion produced version of Extraordinary Machine by Fiona Apple today (the one that was shelved, I think by the record company, so she remade it with a different dude) and it's honestly better in many spots. There are times where I wish you could fuse the two versions, mostly coming down to one round of clean up on Brion's version to crisp it out a little, and I think the version of Tymps that's on the actual album is better, but on the whole I think Brion's version is easily better. It's particularly evident on ones like Red Red Red and Oh Well which have some additional orchestration that really adds a lot. Pretty cool since the "lesser" version was already my favorite record of hers. 

If this interests anyone just youtube searching Jon Brion Extraordinary Machine got me to a playlist as the top result. It's good stuff.