Happy Thing with the Earth and the Sun

This is how Santa do on New Years

Sordid Puppy and I were anxious midwives to a bouncing baby blog back in the summer and since our beloved Foodmantooth has undergone the trials of internet infancy: irrelevance, growing pains, almost the shit, and finally at the half-year mark, officially the motherfucking donkey poop.

So the life of FMT has been basically mirrored the career of Lily Allen, even if she kinda sucks and FMT does the totality of actions that constitute the negation of sucking. Many things have gone down in the last half year, and some of them were good. I’m not indulging in the old top ten this or that of the year, because those are usually bad or wrong. I’m just gonna throw up five good things, five bad things, and one beautiful thing, which is Slothra himself. That shall be the year in Slothra’s eyes.

THE GOOD:

ONE: OG indie rock from the early 80s bringin it back home.
Sonic Youth’s Rather Ripped and Mission of Burma’s The Obliterati were two of the best albums of the year. Dinosaur Jr. played the best show Slothra saw this year. J. Mascis wore a powder blue t shit with feathers on it. And he destroyed Slothra’a brain with his Jazzmaster. Old dudes who think guitars make art actually do make art. Young kids should take lessons. This is some late style shit. These bands couldn’t care less about conceit, they just do the same shit they’ve been doing, without the burden of proof that comes from bands who are trying to get blog hype and “bands to watch” pieces in Spin after touring for 5 years and releasing 7 albums (“have you heard of this new rapper E-40?” I shouldn’t talk actually, I though E-40 was Too Short’s hypeman until that ghostriding the whip thing on the TV).

TWO: The Wire
Slothra doesn’t understand why all the talk about The Wire always refers to its “intricate plots”? Since when is this show hard to follow or off kilter in any way. Slothra is a retarded, larded sea mammal and he can can solve Poincare’s Conjecture, whip up a soufflé that’ll clean behind your ears, and cast his next rap opera all while following the goings on in Simon’s Bmore. The appeal for Slothra is the engrossing, streamlined plots. Nothin new in it really, (still no Homicide), but the sheer breadth is unparalleled. There are basically 7 shows in one. The first scene, where Snoop buys the nail gun, was utterly, transcendentally, almost sublime. The season was made in the first five minutes.

THREE: Brick
Now, this movie is something that’s hard to follow. Slothra’s fav of year. Wait, was Cache this year? Slothra’s not looking that up. Those movies are good, either way.

FOUR: Ornette Coleman
Hey, remember Jazz? You know, the one with the instruments and the heroin. Old dude named Ornette hooked up with his son and two bass players and recorded a concert that is probably the best album of the year. You don’t like Jazz? Oh you do, you own a Miles Davis album AND a Coltrane album. Wow, you cultured fuck. Ornette’s about 384 years old and you’ve been sleeping under his bed eating ice cream the whole time. Turn off that music with people singing on it and wake the fuck up to the master. Holy shit I’m fucking pissed.

FIVE: The Hills
Laguna Beach was good enough. Stupendously seminal even. But LC and Heidi brought it to a another (whole nother) level. Or maybe they were just hot and relatively charming and it is the geniuses at MTV that put it together. Either way, so far this is the best reality show I’ve ever seen (except Man vs. Beast, but that wasn’t a series). The episode when Heidi’s boyfriend comes over and balls his face off, then Heidi just brushes him off and we never see him again—probably the best moment of the year on regular cable. And the reentry of Beard Kid into my consciousness. The episode when he was wasted, wearing a top hat for some reason, and saying things to LC like “hey, yo, like you always act like this, and I don’t know how I act to make you act like this!” And he’s obviously too retarded to be acting! But LC broke my heart when she took Beard Kid over the internship in Paris. We all know she’s shooting for the pseudo celebritydom that her LB couterpart Kristen parlayed, and you don’t exactly need an ill CV and a properly phrased cover letter for that sort of employ, but come on, girl, what in God’s name were you thinking?

THE BAD

ONE: Tom Breihan
The internet hate all over the rap internet about TB almost made me become a Mennonite. None of it really had to do with anything, although it really spun things up and got people slingin ones and zeros like I’ve never seen. But pointless as all that was, Breihan himself ended up pissing me off more than any of the messageboard fools when he didn’t even address any of the issues brought up, which are ultimately much more important than his own aloof standing. That shit when on for a week straight and he’s writing about fucking Ian Makaye and carefully crafting his Pitchfork best of 2006 list, like there’s nothing to say.

TWO: Rap albums released in Dec.
More Fish has a few tracks that are up with Ghostface’s best work (“Block Rock”, “Alex [Stolen Script]) but I have less interest in the Theodore Unit that I do with Jay-Z’s supposed unimpeachable status. Hip Hop is Dead is not bad at all, maybe his best since Illmatic, but there are a couple points on there that ruin it. Why the fuck is Will I am allowed anywhere near a self-respecting hip hop album. I don’t understand this. Clipse came up with the best of the bunch, for sure, and anyone who paid mind to the “hey indie rock blogsters like this, so it makes the album worse” thinking is a straight gumptruck. Pharrell redeemed himself with some of those beats, and the overall coherence that rap albums have been so allergic to of late. A truly punishing album. Not sure Pusha and Mal philosophize too much about glocks and keys, more about the cold delivery than anything, but I appreciate the balls not to have a real single or any frivolous blubber.

THREE: Kneejerk praise for TV on the Radio and The Hold Steady.
The indie rock world swallowed these two underwhelming albums whole, took their surface characteristics and convinced themselves that these equal some kind of elusive cool genius. Not so. Both of those albums are average, but the indie infrastructure, which at this point has entrenched itself beyond repair, latches on to consensus for its own good. There’s no criticism involved here.

FOUR: Slothra’s broken CD player
I had my 5 disc changer in my trunk and our twinky train, of which I was the caboose, got bogged down in some seaweed, nahmsayin. Needless to say, there was some turbulence, and by the time I got home and threw in NOW 2354 with all the Nelly Furtado songs on it, I was getting no love. The tray wouldn’t even come out. FUCK. Slothra hasn’t been able to play CDs ever since. His computer has a sound card that makes everything sound like early Guided By Voices, so he’s gotta re-up the iPod everytime he cops the latest hit LP at the local record shoppe. Since his computer is a Commodore 64, it takes a fortnight to go from unwrapping a CD to juice out the pod, so now Slothra is weeks behind all the other bloggers who get enough traffic and google ad clicks on their sites to pay for CDs made out of Golden Manatee toenails (yes we have them), if they didn’t get all that shit for free anyway. Slothra wishes his blubbery fins could hold a Phillips head so he could break his Sony open like your auntie’s dome during that scuffle in ’83.

FIVE: Blogs
Blogs don’t have editors. Slothra can refer to himself in the third person and write things that are stupid and no one tells him he has to go to grammar school. But other blogs don’t write things. They post pictures of concerts and the 23485th remix of “My Love” but not many words. Slothra doesn’t understand why anyone would bother remixing “My Love” or any such banger. Why take the bang out of a banger, and change it into a lounger. Actually “My Love” might be a Barcalounger outfitted with cartoon mallets. Slothra understands less why anyone would post mp3s of my love remixes and then many people care about this. Anyway, FMT is getting calls from Palo Alto VCs left, right, and center, so SP and I aren’t gonna hafta worry about all this pretty soon.

THE BEAUTIFUL: