Guided by Voices, They are rock scientists.

The history of rock music is eponymous with the consumption of epic quantities of booze. Most famous rock bands in history have also consisted of famous drinkers. I am not old enough to have personally been able to see some of the legendary rock and roll alcoholic preform personally. I am sure Keith Moon and John Bonham were true epic drinkers not to be quarrelled with- they are both dead now. Keith Richards has lived his life notoriously wasted, but has released nothing but shit for a very long time. Sure, Motley Crue claims to have mainlined Jack Daniels, but they sucked. I am going to postulate the Guided By Voices are the drunkest bastards to play true ass kicking rock music. They are rock stars.

While it might be true that GBV have never been huge, it is a testiment to their music that after 20 years they can still sell out clubs on weekdays in small towns. Although they fall into the catagory of "indie" there music supercedes genre. It falls into the greater catagory of "rock." They are fabled to have written somewhere between 1200 and 1500 songs. I personally have about 800 of them in mp3 format, so I don't doubt it. However, the fact that most of their recordings are true examples of low-fi art, where this band really shines is while on stage.

They typically play for about 3 hours. When they go on stage they are visibly intoxicated. It is then all the more impressive that while playing 3 minute songs the band members are able to drink a beer per song, mixing it up with whole bottles of tequila and whiskey. What is even more amazing is that they have been doing it (Robert Pollard at least) for 21 years, and the fact that Robert Pollard is 46 years old.

Toward the end of their show they are clearly wasted in a way that would even make Local H's Scott Lucas's jaw drop. Robert Pollard is filling the time between songs glorifying himself and his band members while making fun of other bands on his label (specifically made fun of at the show I saw last night: Yo La Tengo and Cat Power). Despite the fact that most of the band can barely speak between songs, somehow they channel superior rock genetics and play perfectly.

To punctuate this, here are two examples. New years eve two years ago GBV opened for The Strokes. Numerous reviews of the show indicated that Robert Pollard gave The Strokes a lesson in being rock stars. This of course means that he got them so wasted they could barely play, then went on stage with them and showed them how it was done.

More down to home, after their show last night I saw their bass player in the Steak and Shake buying food for the band at 3am... it is clear that they did not stop drinking when they got off stage.

Guided By Voices is playing their final tour as a band. I am sure Robert Pollard will be touring as a solo artist, and that there will be a GBV reunion in two years, but the moral is that theoretically this is their last tour. They are playing Chicago new years eve, their last show ever. You would have to be insane to not try and go.

Reminders

1) Method and Red, a new TV show debuts on fox tonight, Wednesday, at 8:30pm. Thematically, it will pick up where "How High", in which Wu-Tang rappers Method Man and Redman smoke magic weed that makes them smart enough to get into Harvard, left off. Here they move into an upscale suburban gated community. They manage to upset the locals somehow. Do a shot every time a rich person falls into a pool.

I really hope Ol' Dirty shows up in a future episode. Wu-Tang! Wu-Tang!

2) Adrian Tomine signing, Thursday, at Borders. Tomine is everywhere the past couple of years - his comic Optic Nerve has really taken off, both in quality and popularity. He does art for the New Yorker now, and even did that Weezer poster everyone loves. Regardless of a few complaints, I like Optic Nerve moving to longer stories, as opposed to short anthologies of stories in each issue. He's at a point where he needs to be doing more ambitious comics - his talent is growing quicker than his output suggests.

I'm really pissed he's doing a signing at a Border's instead of Quimby's or Chicago Comics, stores that worked their asses off promoting his stuff to the faithful, but I can only imagine that he's involved in some sort of exclusivity contract with the giant bookseller. Hope that works out for him. See ya there!

Top 10 New Yorker Moments, 03-04

In case you are extremely bored today, I'm listing off my favorite New Yorker articles from the past year - I had to renew today and, while determining whether or not it was worth it I realized I had read a lot of great stuff from them. Here is some of it.

10 Holden at Fifty. Ok much older than a year, but it's so good it deserves to get included. After thinking about it, I was surprised by how much I read Catcher in the Rye the same way these days as I did when I was 15 (like, forgetting that Holden is in mourning and such). This is definitely a different way to approach a lot of the Salinger catalogue.

9 Lunch with the Chairman. It's all about Richard Perle meeting with investors from Saudia Arabia and the possibility of him being linked to a company that is making a lot of money off the war. Just to give you an idea about how intense it was, Perle immediately went on CNN and accused the author Hersh of being a terrorist.

8 The Thin Envelope. Louis Menand covers why college admissions have been such a horrid process over the past decade, and blows some strong holes in the theory of meritocracy.

7 Review of An End to Evil. The first couple of paragraphs puts a nice view on the days leading into the Iraq war in the U.N. and how we couldn't even get Guinea and Angola to back us on a resolution. The reviewer also does a great job handling Perle's book (which was read as the main source material for neocon bingo).

6 Torture at Abu Ghraib, The Grey Zone, Chain of Command The stories that helped break the Abu Ghraib scandal.

5 Faith, Hope and Clarity Again older than a year, but it blows everything else out of the water. Menand covers books concerning September 11th, and points out what should be obvious - the attack has been used by everyone to argue for what they already believed. He gives critical (for a magazine anyway) reviews of Chomsky, Baudrillard, Zizek, D'Souza and Bennett, among others.

4 Big and Bad (link not from newyorker.com). A history of the rise of the SUV. Getting to hear some of the things people say in auto focus groups is amazing. Here's my favorite thing one person said about why they bought an SUV: "If the vehicle is up high, it's easier to see if something is hiding underneath or lurking behind it." Is this a problem for most people? People lurking under their cars?

3 Kingdom of Silence. A seasoned US newspaper editor takes over at a newspaper in Saudi Arabia for several months. The culture shock he writes about is stunning. Women who weren't allowed to leave a burning building because their burqa's had fallen off while they were running (they were told to go back and get them) - sullen, out of work, young men (one of them notably a graduate-level library science student) wanting to become suicide bombers, and the country becoming even more extreme and closed off. A father from the country puts it best: " 'My kid is in the fifth grade...Out of twelve subjects, seven are pure religion.'...The religious establishment, however, wants education to become even more Islamic."

2 Jumpers. A story about the large number of suicides that occur at the Golden Gate Bridge every year. It's quite harrowing to hear from the few survivors that were interviewed for the article, and it's mind-numbing to watch the debate between those who want to install nets to save lives and those who don't want to impact the aesthetic of the bridge itself.

1 What Comes Naturally. I've never felt sorry for a book after getting a negative review, but I almost feel pity after Menand tears this book, about genetics and "the way people really are", a new one. He dismantles current personality theories, and shreds the book's take on everything from Darwin to modern literature. I hope the book was at least bought dinner beforehand.

I can't find a link to the Jonathan Franzen profile of Dennis Hastert, which I wanted to give a special award to as the worst thing I've read in the New Yorker last year. It's possibly the worst thing I've read in any magazine, and I read a lot of trashy magazines. Just to imagine Franzen getting in a fight with the oldest son of Hastert over who is a bigger Mekons fan is surreal. I really like Frazen, but as his recent collection of essays show, when he isn't all that interested in writing about something man is it horrible.

This list was obviously biased in favor of Louis Menand, who is a hero to ginandtacos.com, and someday soon we'll have a mini-page up about him where we will catalogue his stuff and encourage him to come to Chicago and eat tacos and drink gin and sleep on our couch.

Damn, its gotta suck to be gay

Few things other than terrorists seem to offend republicans more than the concept of two homosexuals getting married to each other. For the, seeming, vast majority of us out there, we can't really understand the issue. Even if you do not approve of homosexuality, it appears to me that the only value opposing gay marriage has is the age old "If I can't see it, it doesn't exist." arguement.

If we accept that people are gay and like most people agree that there is really nothing wrong with that, then all you are doing by not allowing their marriage is denying a substantial portion of the population rights everyone else has. In fairness there are a substantial number of reasons why allowing gay marriage is just the right thing to do. There is really no point in talking about this here.

The opposition seems to generally make the case that either, by allowing gays to marry they are somehow less married or that homosexuals are all clearly going to hell and don't deserve any rights period. It is this "reasoning" that has led to the discussion of an amendment to the constitution forbidding same sex marriage.

For the moment I am going to assume that everone thought the same thing I did when George Bush alluded to this during his last state of the union address- that talk of an amendment is simply political maneuvering and no one really expects it to actually occur. Yes, sure enough that seems to be the case. The Drudge Report indicated this morning that there is talk in Washington about a July vote on the amendment. Don't worry, there aren't nearly enough votes for it to pass. So what good does it do? Well, it forces democrats up for election to publically take a stand on the issue. Isn't that swell? The Republicans would like to have on record for campaigning who is for or against gay marriage.

Aint politics fun?

Spider-Man 2

Wow. I can't think of a time that a sequel has blown me away like this. It's even more impressive as I thought that the first movie was such a so-so experience. There were things I liked and things I didn't, but I did not care to see it again. This is not the case here.

Everything that I didn't like about the first Spiderman has been accounted for. Where the special effects and fight scenes in the first Spiderman looked about as real as a claymation episode of Davey and Goliath, here they have really gotten it together. We've all already seen two people punch and kick each other in a movie; I don't know if it's ever going to be done better than The Matrix or Fist of Legends. Instead Spiderman 2 gives us something far more playful: Doc Ock's mechanical arms fly around ripping around the scenery as Spidey jumps wall to wall avoiding him. They climb up a building, just to fall back down. It has a timing that you can't get anywhere else these days.

And Doctor Octopus is so much fun here. Speaking as a comic book geek, I have to say that the good Doctor is still my favorite member of spidey's old rogue gallery (let's discount Venom for the purposes of this discussion). I'll always prefer Hobgoblin to the either of the tired Green Goblins and anyway, I thought Willem Dafoe was way too hammy as the Goblin; he played up for laughs like Evil Ash of Army of Darkness than someone who was an actual villian. Alfred Molina does it just right, as some guy who really isn't in control of any of the things he's doing: science or superpowers.

And since I just recently saw Frida, I kept thinking it was Diego Rivera throwing bank vaults and taxi cabs at Spiderman ("You knew I was supervillian with mechanical arms when you married me Frida!"), which I could totally see happening for some reason.

Where the first movie felt very rushed and formulaic, as if it had to get from point A to point B without making any stop, this movie takes its time filling in the corners and throwing you unexpected, sometimes hilarious, suprises. A lot of the deeper character development and humor may be due to Michael Chabon presence as a screenwriter, whose "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" is a 700 page Pulitizer award winning ode to the love and power of comic books.

And the actors actually get to act for a change. Toby McGuire and Kristin Dunst are the cutest couple on screen, taking the eternal drama of the romantic relationship of Parker and MJ in all kinds of new directions. James Franco helps flush out the cast with a sharp performance of the unstable Harry Osborn. Sam Raimi keeps it all in check with the right balance of action, pathos and humor (the scene of Peter having a great day for a change is priceless). And he even gets to throw his old fans a bone: watch for a cameo by Bruce Campbell and a scene in an operation room that has all the quick cuts, tilted angles, violence and chainsaws of any of the two Evil Dead movies.

I sometimes felt as if the first Spiderman movie, while very long, was far too short. They had to cover the lengthy origin of Spiderman and the Goblin and their inevitable showdown. There was no time left over to actually create something that had much beyond the simple story. I simply misjudged - this was the actual movie I was waiting for, and it was definitely worth the wait.

TONY BLAIR, YOU GOT SERVED

It's not as though one needed an oracle to predict the future political prospects of Tony Blair. His Labour Party stands approximately the same chance of retaining a majority in Parliament as the British chapter of NAMBLA.

But, almost as if God felt like underscoring the point, local and EU elections in Britain this past weekend relegated Blair's party to an unprecedented third-place. This is roughly equivalent to the Republican Party pulling up third behind the Reform Party.

Whether or not this trend will carry over to the U.S. (where we seem, for some reason, to be proud of our lying moron of a leader instead of angry) remains to be seen. Suffice it to say, however, that if Bush wins in November it will be nothing short of a referendum on just how stupid the American public is, given that voters in Spain and Britain have already proven they are smart enough to make those accountable pay for the mess they created.