Pop Culture Blog: Music, Movie and Humor

Leveraging low-hanging synergies outside the vertical fruit box since 1999.

Fumigating Neverland.


in Reminiscent

When I moved in to my current apartment, it was September 2000 and I was 26 years old. I had a sweet job, a building which was always full of young girls, a fraternity-esque social life and the interior decorating to match. It was cheesy, but it was OK to be cheesy. It was expected – and I was in good, cheesy company. But as Seamus left in September for new horizons in Hartford, I am now the very last of the old guard.

The years have flown past, and I’ve never updated my decor. Sitting in my room now, I see the signed flag of St. George I received when I left the Hinds Head in 1998. An original operational 1977 Han Solo blaster. A remote controlled R2D2 which is even older. A map of Northern Ireland printed on Irish linen I got in Belfast in 2001. Goldfinger, Casino, Die Hard 3 and A Bronx Tale (way to go Lillo by the way,) posters. My skydiving certificate. Multiple DeNiro, Sinatra and Frank Black 8x10s. Unframed photographs that are taped to the walls including my football team group shots that are all curled up at the edges and need to be preserved as they may still impress girls. A creative writing award I won in 1991 that definitely never will. A boomerrang I got in Australia and a wooden machete I got in South Africa. And there’s a few shitloads more.

Let me just say what you’re all thinking – My bedroom looks like the Chinese curio shop in Gremlins, if it were managed by a 12-year-old homosexual.

My Canadian houseguests have been delayed, and I’ve spent the evening boxing up the majority of this juvenile crap and moving it into the basement. I won’t part with it – some of it is actually pretty cool, but it’s time to move my epicenter, my bedroom, into 2006. I’m not a pack-ratting hermit by nature, and it’s just been a matter of getting to a tipping point to send me over the edge towards serious redecoration. And, dare I say it, adulthood. Thankfully, it just happened.

Yesterday Kyle and I went to a lovely annual Christmas party up in Marblehead that I have not attended in 4 years. Several of the guests were induviduals from the aforementioned job with their little children, and subsequent lives, in tow. Towards the end we met a 63-year-old mortgage broker who proceeded to tell me how nice I was and that she wanted to set me up with a young girl she knows in Beacon Hill. She asked for my business card. On the way home, Kyle told me that the woman was just going to try and sell me property. I realized he was right – because if you didn’t know me, all gussied up and being extremely polite at a posh Christmas party, you’d think I really fucking had it together.

The scene switches, and my latest hypothetical lady love is staring up at a magazine cutout of Al Pacino in Serpico as I whisper sweet nothings in her ear. And… scene. I’m framing the autographed Trailer Park Boys glossy and leaving it where it is, and the football photos are also getting framed and can stay, but look out world – Peter Pan is growing up and redecorating.

Incidentally, the Bob and Doug Mackenzie action figures are also staying. And here you thought I’d completely lost my shit.

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Friday’s Fairytale: Essential Christmas Croonings.


in Monday's Quotelet

The usual source of the quizzlets is once again sucking hind tit, self-admittedly using “leftover” questions this week – all of which I’ve answered before here on PITF. So I’m thinking up my own. It’s relevant, it’s hep, it’s seasonal and it’s interactive. Although it is late in the day, and many have you have already mentally checked out for the weekend, play along if you please. And if not, go pork a wreath.

Top Five Holiday Songs EVAH.

5. The Chipmunk Song – The Chipmunks: Human counterpart “Dave” encourages Alvin and the rest of his little rodent gang to wish for more peace and love, and less hula hoops, during the holiday season. It’s catchy, and ever so frigging creepy at the same time. Here’s a Flash parody that will immediately make you want to bathe.

4. Little Drummer Boy – David Bowie and Bing Crosby: On his yearly Christmas special in 1977, Bing asked Bowie, whom he’d never heard of but had been advised was big with ‘the kids’, to join him for this classic duet. Crosby died a month later, and nobody saw this until after his death which added to the already oozing sentimentality. Personally, I’m glad that Bing got one last chance to prove that he could entertain children just as well as he could beat them. I kid Bing. He was awesome.

3. Christmas in Hollis – Run DMC: During their 80s heyday, the guys put together this yuletide hip-hop single that was the first and last of its kind. Here’s the thing – it’s surprisingly a very, very good tune. I loved it as a kid, and it holds up well over time. I buy into the fact that Santa visits the hood as regularly as he does any other neighborhood. I don’t buy into the fact that collard greens should be served with Christmas dinner or that the pre-religious Run would have returned Santa’s wallet.

2. Baby, It’s Cold Outside – Dean Martin: If you know me, you know of my eternal love of Dino. That having been prefaced, this song could have easily been called I Know you Don’t Want to Fuck me, but it’s Really Frigging Cold Outside. Listen to Dean coax his ladyfriend into staying for “one cigarette more” due to the raging elements that await her outside. The raging erection is most definitely inside, and Dean’s going to be dammed if he lets his folly leave before there’s egg nog all over her green sweater. In all seriousness, this is a cute classic that I always pull out this time of year.

1. Fairytale of New York – The Pogues: I’ll say it – This is hands down the best Christmas song that has ever been written. Shane MacGowan and the late Kirsty MacColl trade sentiments and then jabs in a booze-soaked yuletide slugfest. Any song that can bring me to tears every year, which also rhymes ‘maggot’ with ‘faggot‘, has something just a little special going on. This year marks the 5th anniversary of Kirsty’s tragic death, and the single is being re-released with all proceeds going to her charity. There is also a documentary about the strange story behind the song airing on the BBC next week. The best of the best, this song will be featured on Radio Pye next week for the uninitiated.

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It’s High Time I Found My Building On Google Earth.


in

Open the bomb bay doors, Mr. Oppenheimer. We’ve finally found him.

Without a couple of famous North End landmarks in the vicinity, this satellite photo of my neighborhood would be little more than a messy mess and the get mess crew. on the right you can clearly see the Old North Church. “One if by land…” and all that revolutionary jazz. On the top left, the old Brinks Building, now a hotly contested yuppie parking garage, is in effect.

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Wednesday Wadio: Edo G’s ‘I Got To Have It’.


in Wednesday Wadio

“I’m from Roxbury the ‘Bury but not the fruit y’all – Don’t make me act like where I come from cause it’s bru-tal.” – Ed OG.

In honor of this senseless scene of local studio slaughter, I was inspired to feature a legendary Boston rap artist on Radio Pye today. As an aside, how many rappers have been shot or otherwise died in their recording studios at this point? 2Pac, Jam Master Jay, ODB… You hit the studio with the intention of laying down a few bizzangin’ tracks – and just end up laying down. Update: Here is an MP3 by the now permanently defunct, murdered Boston rap group, Graveside.

Ed OG and da Bulldogs’ seminal 1991 release “The Life of a Kid in the Ghetto” is beloved by any hip hop fan who attended high school in the Boston area that year. There’s your “Bugaboo”, your “I’m Different”, but the track everyone remembers, and which made it onto Yo! MTV Raps for a couple of weeks in March of that year, is the classic “I Got to Have it“.

Edo’s work was a great combination of social commentary, sexual adventure and bootie-shakin ‘ party jams. There isn’t a weak song on “Ghetto”, and the rough beats and heavy sampling are a time capsule of early 90s rap – or ‘the golden age’ as I like to call it. “There were no drug raids and driveby’s on “Life of a Kid in the Ghetto,” just episodes in the life of a young man who knew his calling.”

Edo is still kickin’, having recently and quietly released a great album with Pete Rock, and I recently read in a Boston music magazine that he’s hard at work recording with another Boston crew. He plays regularly at the Middle East and is even thinking about getting into politics in the future. Perhaps as a member of the Skinny Dip party. Time will tell – but this is a great song that I remember fondly and wanted to reintroduce to my small world.

“These days you have to look long and hard for such a charismatic and original freshman. In 1991, “Life of a Kid in the Ghetto” proved that between NY and LA, there were many places who had their own story to tell. In that regard, Ed repped the ‘Bury and Boston to the fullest.”

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