The Most Handsomest Boy in School.

Car Car on his big first day! He learned so much!

the weather.

Sure has been hot, lately!

and the meek shall inherit the earth

Few pseudo-people in the modern world are acquainted with Internet Deprivation Disorder (from here on referred to as its more colloquial moniker: IDD (not to be confused with Freud's infant sex cokefiend brain demon)).  In a locality as technologically and culturally advanced as Seaside Heights, the high levels of IDD come as a surprise to most, and, much to the bemoaning of his humble and sometimes outspoken and most of the times non-existent readership, CP contracted one of the afflictions most deadly strains: blogger IDD (from here on referred to as its more colloquial moniker: BIDD (not to be confused with what your tech-savvy great aunt does on eBay).  BIDD's ill effects are twofold, first denying the blogger his/her ability to blog, then afterwards leading the infected to reflect on his/her status as a blogger, which in turn results in some pretty awful reflectionitis concerning the caverns of depravity one must reach to be morphed into a blogger in the first place/the existence of nearly every reality show/bro culture/guido culture/pretty much every culture excluding that of said reflecting blogger, which is blogger culture.  Wrap your head around that.   Things just go downhill from there, as you can imagine.

Symptoms of IDD/BIDD

1. Alcoholism

2. Sadomasochistic Watching of ESPN

3. Doing Laundry

4. Organizing of sufferer's iTunes Library

5. Acute Racism

6. Constant Consumption of Quizno's

7. Visual/Auditory Hallucinations

8. Irritability in regards to characters talking to themselves in TV shows/movies

9. Taking Nappys

Carmen has taken to living a colonial lifestyle, more or less.  Lots of thinking about the Articles of Confederation, the Stamp Act, harvest, stuff like that.  Here are some movie micro-reviews:

UP: 5 Strawberries

Terminator Salvation: 2 Strawberries

Drag Me to Hell: 4 1/2 Strawberries

The Hangover: 4 Strawberries

Away We Go: 4 1/2 Strawberries

The Limits of Control: 1/2 Strawberry

Adventureland: 4 Strawberries

If BIDD persists, the world may never know if Carmen preferred UP to WALL-E, or how many strawberries Veckatimest received, or how the entire NBA Finals depends on Orlando's outside shooting, or how bad Zadie Smith is at writing dialogue, or which Goslin kid is cutest, or so many more ors.  Things could be worse, though. Toodle loo.

NEVERMIND

the ghost of christmas past from the future

Since weathering the calamitous effects of reverse-culture shock, CP has been blessed with a lot of time to reflect on requisite mind junk that gets all muddled between the ears and screams for sorting; including and not limited to his once sour relationship with the Radiohead song "House of Cards."  Upon the release of In Rainbows, Carmen cited HOC as a low-point, a mired, superfluous track that disrupted the album's overarching flow and demanded almost a .8 drop on his infamous rating system: "The Strawberry Criterion."  If prompted this CP would have most likely described the track as, "a total suckfest that sullies all its bordering tracks with its suck and pretty much fistfraks itself for the entirety of its five minute twenty-eight second run time."  Shockingly, he was wrong.  When examining HOC as a stand-alone track, it becomes easier to admire its ambiance, the hypnotic guitarring and swirling woo's.  Lyrically HOC holds its own against cerebral-detonators like "Videotape" and "Bodysnatchers," while in no way surpassing the aforementioned, it still manages to convey that sometimes we build mountains of worry on foundations of hot air.  What the listener is left with is a song that's nowhere near as superfluous as "Faust A.R.P." or as drab as the first three minutes of "All I Need," but at the same time never aspires for the sonic brilliance of "Reckoner" or "Jigsaws Falling Into Place." So you can see how one can mistake the thing.  

This will never turn into a video blog.  

Youtube gives Carmen's computer panic attacks.

CP'S TOP TEN ALBUMS: #1

Perfect.

CP'S TOP TEN ALBUMS: #'s 2-4

#2 The Bends by Radiohead

After recording the vocals for "Fake Plastic Trees," Thom Yorke stumbled out into the London night, sobbing, and proceeded to drink himself into a drunken stupor.  This occurred because the album, that moment, wasn't only a culmination for Yorke after a long recording process, but it was a culmination for all rock music up until that point in history.   The song is about knowing, either consciously or sub-consciously, that the person you love isn't able to reciprocate that telltale emotion, knowing this and still being unable to wretch yourself from that person.  When the song crescendos with Johnny Greenwood's white-noise sound wall it is physically painful.  It's the sound of the limitations of rock music crumbling like an empire.  "Just" is about a really annoying person.  After The Bends, Radiohead chose to augment their sound both to evolve sonically and because they simply had no where else to go.  This is as good as rock will get.  And on "Street Spirit," the album's, and most likely any album's, most implausibly beautiful track, lush arpeggios carry Thom Yorke's pained musings on insignificance into an icy atmosphere populated by phantasms and half-speed remembrances, and he coos as the album eases to a regretful halt, the most simply perfect lyric that anyone could have wrote it and only Radiohead could have wrote it.

Immerse your soul in love.

#3 Frances the Mute by The Mars Volta

Covering over seventy-five furious minutes in five songs, Frances the Mute blends so many genres it forges a genre unto itself.  Songs traverse prog, jazz, metal, shoegaze, marimba within single movements, the lyrical pendulum swings from verbose English to blazing Spanish to dead as dead Latin without missing a beat, decibels oscillate like a bungee jumper.  This isn't mind-bending music.  This is music that wiggles into your axons and dendrites and sets C4 explosives at the base of the axon terminals and run for medula because of all the shrapnel.  Seeing the Mars Volta live is akin to watching a fireworks store on top of a skyscraper catch on fire.  Omar Rodriguez-Lopez composes songs with meticulous care and Jam-rock experimentation, all while shredding and power-chording like Carlos Santana's bad acid nightmare.   Cedric Bixler-Zavala's banshee falsetto lasers lyrics that are so esoteric and abstract they come off as the mad ravings of an Inquisition-era priest receiving plague revelation on a night drenched in moonlight.  It is incomprehensible and enlightening.  "Cassandra Gemini" is the epic to end all epics, over 32 minutes in length with 12 distinct movements and an ancient scroll of lyrics that are just so good Carmen can barely stand it.  LOOK.

Behind this snail secretion, leaves a dry heave that absorbs.

A limbless procreation, let the infant crawl deformed.

A bag replaced the breath of these suffocating sheets.

And now when the craving calls, I'll scratch my itchy teeth.

Come on and sing it now.

Sink your teeth into the flesh of midnight.

 

#4 Blonde on Blonde by Bob Dylan 

The greatest double album of all time.  No other artist, ever, has ever dragged language past its inherent limitations to the lofty doorstep of universality that all music strives for.  Dylan's lyrics aren't good because of their guile or delivery or topicality or emotionality; they are good because they fill the listener with the hot goo of recognizing that they are playing audience to something that is entirely, undeniably true.  From a certain  standpoint, esthetics aside, art seeks only to give rise to notions and musing that are already present in its audience, yanking the veracity out like teeth and holding the bloody kernel up for everyone to see and saying, "You see, this was part of you all along, and you're not not alone, not by a long shot."   Four decades later, Blonde on Blonde's most extraordinary feat is that it says this with such lucidity, simplicity, woefulness, bombast and assuredness that time melts away around the sound and you're left with nothing but yourself and the music because you know, without a shadow of a doubt, that you know exactly what this maniac is talking about.