Daily Archives: February 28, 2011

14 posts

Doing the Right Thing by Quitting Sheen Cold Turkey

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Charlie Sheen. The holy detestable scourge of humanity that is Charlie Sheen makes me want to punch him in his throat-box and then shake him until the crazy man living inside slides out onto the floor of the insane condom-wrapper filled hotel room he parties in.

Why?


Well because he’s taken all the goodwill sent his way by a gracious, but health-hobbled Michael J. Fox, and literally shot it up his nose and used it to slap the asses of various hookers just because he can, and mostly because CBS has paid him to do so. Nice. Sheen would be just another out of work, has-been actor, holed up under a bridge in Dogtown if Fox hadn’t had to leave Spin City. And now, yes now, that the network has finally realized this — what will they do about Charlie Sheen?

Don’t Pay Him Another Single Dime

Yeah, have you heard? He wants a raise. Yes, currently stuffing his pockets full of $1.8 million an episode is not sufficient. He now says that in order to return to his beloved-by-idiots show he wants $3 million an episode. $3 million?! That’s like an entire boat full of coke! A small island off the coast of the Maldives of low-class prostitutes! The entire salary brought home by his brother Emilio since The Breakfast Club!

I’d like to go on record by saying that no person, who on his television show spins a yarn of tired misogynistic tropes and sits on a couch in a bowling shirt while wearing loafers, should make anywhere near $3 million for anything. This is acting? Or is this what your loser uncle Irwin-the-Pharmacist does in his sad life living down by the docks? CBS should be laughing so hard the entire building should levitate 50 feet off the ground, spin, and then shoot into space and crash on the moon so they can attach a picture of Charlie Sheen to a flagpole as evidence of an alien life form, and then, and only then, return to ask if the coke-monster from Platoon is serious. There’s no way anyone should pay him one more dime to continue making this horrible show about a horrible person who basically holds the rest of the cast hostage every time he goes on a binge.

Don’t Feel Sorry For Him


You know how this country has a weak spot for beleaguered celebrities? How we decide that it’s not their fault that their parents/lives/celebrity/famousness made them the way they are and that they should get another chance? Yeah, this stupid thing we do. After all, look what’s happened to Robert Downey Jr. and Drew Barrymore — they’re fine now, and successful, and a testament to good old fashioned faith, talent, and an enviable stick-to-it attitude. Yes, well, that is nice. Well, no, it’s not! These people are all addicts. Yes. Okay, some have been able to overcome a large portion of their demons, mostly those who actually want to get better, and realized that they have a career to salvage. But others…well, they just don’t. (LiLo, I’m also looking at you, and Busey, well, I’m terrified of this season’s Celebrity Apprentice.) They just want to remain crazed, coke-addicted maniacs, because well, they enjoy it. They love, love, love it! It is all they have, and they don’t give a damn who knows it…because it’s really not about you.

This is what Sheen thinks about his drug use:

The Associated Press reports that during his various, “Fuck the world, I’m fabulous!” television tour this morning, he said that he “exposed people to magic” when they partied with him and that he loved doing drugs.

“What’s not to love?” he said on ABC. “Especially when you see how I party. It was epic. The run I was on made Sinatra, Flynn, Jagger, Richards just look like droopy-eyed armless children.”

Does he want to change? Nah. Will he change? Nope. Reportedly, he’s been clean for 72 hours because he finds coke boring. Yes, boring. I’m thinking if he could find a way to snort the skin-flakes of various porn stars for a high…he would do it until he finds that boring. Nonetheless, these are not the sentiments of a reformed drug abuser.

Realize That He Doesn’t Care About You Or The People Who Watch His Show

He isn’t an actor. He isn’t about the craft of acting. He doesn’t have aspirations of being the best artist or performer he can possibly be. He wants your money. And he’d rather get it with the satisfaction of having every person in authority prostrate themselves in front of him, because he’s a narcissistic drug addict. He believes that CBS owes him an apology, “publicly, while licking my feet” he says, for not recognizing his awesomeness, and because he’s “tired of pretending I’m not a total, bitchin’ rock star from Mars.” Absolutely. Yup, the more you keep sweeping his crap under the rug, and backing him and all his lunacy, is one more step you take into the darkside, CBS. The darkside that is letting the lunatics run the asylum and dictate to you how much their crazy is worth, because it’s easier to have a megalomaniac, shriveled wizard dictate how much money you will pay him to continue to keep your network afloat, instead of shipping this loon off into obscurity and replacing him with any number of talented actors.

“I am on a drug,” Sheen said. “It’s called Charlie Sheen. It’s not available because if you try it you will die. Your face will melt off and your children will weep over your exploded body.”

Exactly. He is Charlie Sheen, and he is a drug. CBS, think you can stop chasing this dragon?

Update: Apparently someone gets it. This afternoon Sheen’s longtime publicist, Stan Rosenfield, quit after an interview with TMZ where Sheen made a remark implying that Rosenfield lied on his behalf about that Plaza Hotel incident in October.

“I have worked with Charlie Sheen for a long time and I care about him very much. However, at this time, I’m unable to work effectively as his publicist and have respectfully resigned,” states Rosenfeld.

I was kinda hoping he resigned because Sheen is a huge self-destructive prick who’s destined to take anyone down with him that attempts to latch themselves to his burning, sinking ship. But a bailout is a bailout, I suppose.

The Crasstalk Buzz Maintenance Program

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Thursday was interesting wasn’t it? I think we all realize how much this place means to us and that we want to keep the Crasstalk buzz going. Frankly, maintaining this place is going to take money. The question is this: how should Crasstalk generate this money?

The site that shall not be named, who also helped create Thursday’s pickle (with some help from Arken), apparently thinks that orange finger-staining Frito-lay snacks is the ideal way to feed Nibbles. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want a Cheeto War here — and I don’t think Honey Badger will stand for it either.

Booze seems to be a unifying force here and that is why I created The Crasstalk Buzz Maintenance Program. Purchase fabulous wine through www.winedreamer.com using coupon code: FEEDTHEBADGER and Crasstalkers will get 10% off their wine purchases and 10% will go to our Crasstalk Overlords to offset the costs of upgrading and maintaining this site.  Turn your vice into something nice, for a change.

But wait there is more!

During the evening of Thursday, March 24th, I will host live-blog winetasting and walk Crasstalker’s through six wines from www.winedreamer.com. So invite some friends over, unless you plan to plow through six bottles of wine yourself!

The wines that we will be tasting are as follows — pricing includes 10% discount:

Whites:

  • Secret 2007 White Wine ($12.59)
  • Piro Piro Piccolo 2009 Pinot Grigio ($15.29)
  • Martellotto Chardonnay 2009 Santa Barbara ($17.99)

Reds:

  • Martellotto 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve Paso Robles ($17.99)
  • M by Martellotto 2008 Pinot Noir Willamette Valley ($21.59)
  • Either Conservative Red or Progressive Red — same Meritage wine, different labels to reflect your political persuasion ($22.49)

You do not have to purchase all of these wines to participate, obviously. If you end up purchasing some of the other wines from www.winedreamer.com, let us know how they taste during our live-blog. I will probably bring out Pura Vida as that is a favorite.  Any wine you purchase at www.winedreamer.com that uses code FEEDTHEBADGER will get the 10% discount and will get the 10% to support the site.

FYI….1. Shipping is not included in these prices and the cost to ship 1 bottle or 6 is about the same; 2. Discount will not show up until the FEEDTHEBADGER code is entered and until the final screen at checkout.

Remember no code = no money for Crasstalk and no discount for you. Any questions, feel free to email me at [email protected]

Cheers!

Are You Smarter Than a Football Player?

I have spent much of the past two days in front of the television watching sturdy and well-formed young men run around an empty stadium in Indianapolis dressed in nothing but skin-tight biker shorts and muscle shirts. I haven”t seen so many bulges since that morning at the Provincetown Pride Parade. But that’s a story for another day. No, I’m not watching Spring Break on the Logo Channel, it’s the NFL Network. That can only mean one thing, America. It’s Combine Week in the NFL.

The NFL Combine is basically an audition for hundreds of prospective NFL football players. These are incoming players, eligible for the draft for the first time. They run, throw, block, hop, skip, jump and do everything but sing show tunes in front of scouts and coaches from all 32 NFL teams and a national television audience. Off the field, players are examined by doctors, interviewed by general managers and taken apart mentally by staff psychologists. Last year in a notorious Combine moment, wide receiver Dez Bryant of Oklahoma State was asked by Miami Dolphins General Manager Jeff Ireland if it was, in fact, true that his mother was a prostitute. Ireland, who later apologized, was either looking for a quick lay after the session ended or just wanted to see how Bryant reacted to sudden stress.

For the average football fan who is not actually going to make any selections in the upcoming draft , the Combine is at once as dull as watching articial turf grow and as fascinating as brain surgery. Hour after hour, day after day, 300-lb linemen defy several laws of physics and run 40 in 5 seconds, 200-lb running backs lift twice their weight 18 consecutive times and quarterbacks throw perfect spirals all the way to Chicago.

But the most intriguing part of the Combine is, sadly, not on television. The good stuff takes place behind the scenes in closely guarded classrooms, where players are given a raw intelligence test called the Wonderlic Cognitive Ability Test, written, scored and evaluated by the Wonderlic Corporation of Vernon Hills, IL.

In today’s ultra-competitive business environment, thousands of employees in a variety of professions have at some point taken a Wonderlic-type test as a condition of employment. It makes sense if the applicant is a CPA or a HVAC repair-person. A business wants to know it’s not hiring Paris Hilton. But what does an IQ-style test have to do with the physical ability and the commensurate willingness to remove a quarterback’s head from his shoulders in the hopes of gaining a Wild Card berth or gain one extra yard only to have James Harrison drive his rocket-fuel-propelled body into your chest, sending you hurtling into the club seats. The heart and motivation to sacrifice self for team cannot be measured on a 50 item multiple-choice test.

Indeed, a major academic study completed at the University of North Carolina in 2007 concluded there was no correlation between high Wonderlic scores and success in the NFL. So why take this test at all? Who knows–why take the SAT? Perhaps the problem is that football is just asking the wrong types of intelligence questions. The Wonderlic’s questions are fairly straightforward, by-the-book IQ type questions, such as:

  • A train travels 20 feet in 1/5 second. At this same speed, how many feet will it travel in three seconds?
  • When rope is selling at $.10 a foot, how many feet can you buy for sixty cents?
  • The ninth month of the year is…

You can take an entire sample test here.

Despite its reputation as a Neanderthal ThugFest, football at its highest levels is by far our brainiest and most intellectual game. It’s true that baseball players are frequently required to both scratch their balls and spit tobacco at the same time. And then guess curveball. But that’s pure hand-eye coordination–as is having the innate ability to consistently miss your shoe with your spit.

Basketball and hockey are mostly athleticism, grit and instinct. And yes, the very best players see the game as it will be three seconds from now not as it is in our reality. That is more than raw intelligence for a sport–it is a gift of timing, intuition and physical creativity. Kinisthetic and athletic geniuses like Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky and Kobe Bryant literally play a different game than we do.

But football is on a whole other level when it comes to complexity.  A typical play call on offfense might be:

  • “Scatter-Two Bunch Right-Zip-Fire Right-273-Pivot-F Flat.”
  • “Duece Right 19 Slot on 1 and Dice Right Ice Cream Alert 654 Jose”
  • “Trips Right 255 X Block Slant H Disco Alert 12 Trap”

If you are a quarterback, a position which only a kind of football savant can play, not only do you have to know your play and know where all your backs, linemen and wideouts will be and when they will be there, but you also must determine what the defense is doing. And this despite the defense doing everything it can to disguise its intentions.

And the incoming and data must be processed and communicated to ten co-workers in less than 30 seconds, again and again, under extreme physical and mental pressure in a setting where the decibel level is often as high as at a Clash concert. All this and it suddenly seems a 50 question IQ test is not enough. If you’re going to be my quarterback, I’m going to want transcripts, letters of recommendation from your sophomore English professor and that research paper you did on the Civil War. Oh, and I’ll need your Calc final.

Most of all, I’m gonna want to see how you react when I ask if it’s true you’re sister’s a whore while we’re both standing on train tracks at high noon with the Acela bearing down from the east, Ray Lewis coming from the west, and Larry Fitzgerald open down the road for six easy points. And right now you’re down to four seconds to figure out how long ago the Acela left Detroit. Do all that correctly and a hundred million dollar, seven-year deal is yours. And I’ll tell you I was just kidding about your sister.

Photo here.

In Praise Of Older Men

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While human and cinematic history is filled with May-December romances, in contemporary society they are relatively rare. In movies, there is rarely any mention of a large age gap between romantic leads, but I can say from experience that it can, in fact, be a significant issue on many levels. In a relationship involving an older man and a much younger woman, there is often an assumed implication: that she is bartering her youth and fertility for his wealth and security. That may be the case in some unions involving a difference in age of several decades, but in my case, it was love at first sight from the start.

 

Since I was a child, I’ve always sought out older people of both genders to befriend and advise me. My first real crush – aside from my passion for Underdog when I was 5 – was on my sixth grade social studies/PE teacher, who was 47 at the time. We shared a phenomenal intellectual connection and an effortless affinity. He inspired me to achieve my personal best in my studies and in my athletic pursuits, and we developed a mutually appreciative, very close yet utterly innocent extra-curricular relationship that would be impossible to maintain in today’s Law & Order: SVU-influenced society.

 

At age 14, I met a 29-year-old Christopher Atkins lookalike at a family wedding, and I came thisclose to dating him in secret. When I was 17, my I was smitten by a hunky, hip, obscure rock musician my parents’ age, who lived in our apartment building. He confessed to me once that if not for my mother’s watchful eye, he would have invited me up to his apartment eagerly.

 

At a spiritual retreat near Woodstock, I met my first lover, a tantric adept, when I was 19 and he was 40. (We are still close friends, 24 years later.) Between the ages of 19 and 26, I had lovers ranging in age from 18  to 60.  I met my boyfriend and companion for the last 17 years when I was 26 and he was 57. Like other much older men I’ve been attracted to, one of the things which intrigued me most about him was that he was uncomfortable with our large age difference. It’s proven much easier for me to bridge the gap in life experiences with someone who is not seeking a token or trophy to reminisce his own lost youth.

 

My present relationship calls to mind the enduring marriage of (early 20th century film icon) Charlie Chaplin and Oona O’Neill, pictured above. They met when she was 17 and he was 54, and their union lasted until his death, more than three decades later. Chaplin caught a lot of flak for the woman he chose to be his wife. But if he had ever listened to any of the prurient gossip and made a different choice based on it, he would have missed out on sharing the truest love of his life.

 

When love finds you, age, sexual orientation, racial/ethnic, or religious backgrounds really don’t matter. As the world becomes more diverse, there is more acceptance of individual choices which seem to be outside the norms of society. In being true to yourself, you are never alone.

Test.

The Straight Man’s Guide To The Oscars

Lots of people like the Oscars. They REALLY like the Oscars. If you’re the typical American woman and/or gay man, this is basically your Super Bowl, minus the cool commercials and John Madden. You go to the store the day before, stock up on drinks and food (chocolate) and turn on the TV at 3 p.m. to watch all the red carpet special. Because it really fucking matters what who everybody is wearing! Continue reading →

Oscar Fashion: The Good, The Bad and the WTF

Good morning to you! What a night! Dancing Queen and Missing Peace are passed out in the corner and confetti is floating in their champagne glasses. Let’s let them sleep it off – they deserve it! Although the ceremony was bad, you made it great by joining us for an epic live blog of the red carpet and the awards. We knew Francaway (the terrible monster cobbled together from the lifeless corpse of James Franco and the manic horse-muppet, Anne Hathaway) would be awful and there were few surprises for the winners this year – all the excitement was on the red carpet.

I’m peeling off the false lashes to take a closer look at last night’s fashion in the semi-sober light of day. Below are some of the most notable looks of the night. Who did you love? Who did you hate (we don’t say “hate” – how about “detest” or “want to stuff into the trunk of a car heading into Missouri meth country”)?  Click on the images, below, to get a closer look – all the better to snark with, my dears.

The WTF Award goes to…..Melissa Leo! The Best Supporting Actress winner is my pick for the absolute worst dressed. Everything was wrong with her look – the cut, the fabric, this slit up the center, the appropriateness for the event. You don’t want to go down in Oscars fashion history for wearing a giant homage to what’s left on the table after a country fair bake sale. She was heavily favored to win and should have ramped it up about ten notches. She also could have been less annoying while accepting her award (like she didn’t know she’d win – pssssshhaawww).

WTF, Leo. W.T.F.

The Bad Award goes to…Scarlett Johannson. It was not the worst – see directly above. (Are you still drunk?) It was just bad. Bad color, bad back, bad hair and no boobs. ScarJo, your big tickets are the reason we tune in and we want to see them. You might think Helena Bonham Carter would win this award, but I actually give her a pass because she’s delightfully nutty and my expectations for her are very low. She rarely disappoints because she’s set the bar mere inches off the ground. Also notable horribleness goes to Kathryn Bigelow and her sweater dress.

Dolce and Gabbana done wrong.
My girl crush.

 

The Good Award goes to…like five people. Reese Witherspoon and Camila Alves are my favorites of the night, but then I like the classics, the looks that will stand up over the test of time. If Reese is a little tame for you, how about Mila Kunis? At first, I was torn over the purple and the lace and the little boob-cup detail, but the more I looked at it, the more I liked it. Now I love it. The shape of the dress looks fantastic on her, though it would be hard to go wrong on that girl.  My other favorite of the night is Jennifer Hudson.  Wow.  She looked fan-freaking-tastic. Plus, Mila and JHud were on point with the color trends of the night – red (Bullock, Anne Horseface, Penelope Cruz, Jennifer Lawrence) and purple (Portman and the aforementioned ScarJo). Abandoned was the “green with envy” look that we saw at the Golden Globes.

J Hud looking fab.

 

 

 

Simple dress, perfect cut, great hair.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As we noted last night, there was a serious lack of bling. Is it because of the economy? Are the stars not even allowed to borrow jewelry anymore?  LiLo ruins everything.

Finally, a word with all the hairstylists in Hollywood. With limited exception, the hair on the ladies looked like it had been through a hurricane. That is NOT CUTE. When wearing a formal gown before millions of people, looking like you just woke up after a rough night is not acceptable and yet, so many women were sporting that look. If they didn’t do the undone Bardot look, then the tight bun was the other option, a look which is very severe on most women.  Were they influenced by the ballerina chic in Black Swan? The boring hair and lack of baubles left us feeling more like the morning after than the main event.

 

"May I show you to your seat?"
Portman wearing port wine.
This hot bitch can do no wrong
This drew mixed reactions.
Speaking of hot bitches...
Love the dress, but Mandy Moore?
Camila Alves, best dressed and tressed.
Living well is the best revenge.
One word: Baywatch.
You cannot wear that bridesmaid's dress again.
Bellatrix is a character, not a lifestyle choice.
Patrick Bateman is less scary.
Okay, scarier than Patrick Bateman.
So over this look. Moving on...
When your stylist hates you (wedding dress #68).
Older Goop with Sleeves
Matching boob and hair parts? No.
No.
No.
Yes.

Stray Tracks of the Week (2/17-2/25/11)

*This post is also posted on The Pop Stalinist, my personal blog. There were a few reviews that didn’t make it over here this week.*

I listen to music constantly, and I’m constantly acquiring new things. So much, in fact, that serious evaluation on an album-by-album basis is impossible. To ensure my musical hoarding doesn’t amount to too much waste, I’ve elected to begin picking out choice tracks from my catch and reviewing them, here. I’m hoping to make this a weekly thing, every Thursday or Friday night, mods willin’.

This week was actually pretty light, with a lot of my listening time devoted to older Swans records and newer Angels of Light recordings, which I have dug up in light of an incredible show put on by the former that I attended in Denver this past week. These are musical supplements I’ve been taking. I put in entirely too much work last week resizing Youtube (and apparently it slows WordPress down) so I’m just linking to songs this time.

Antena – Camino del Sol (from Camino Del Sol on Le Disques du Crepsecule / Numero)

This is actually an old song, from a band I wasn’t even aware of until Numero re-released their 1982 Camino Del Solcompilation / mini-album on vinyl not too long ago. Antena was a French band originally signed to Le Disques du Crepsecule, a small Belgian indie that became notable for its close relationship with the Benelux subsidiary of Factory Records, who in large part birthed the “Madchester” scene from which Joy Division / New Order and many other notable post-punk bands emerged. Unfortunately for Antena, Manchester’s heat didn’t rub off on them (though Factory Benelux artists, such as A Certain Ratio, did meet with some success) and they and they became the sort of act that obscurity collectors raved about but few really remembered.

It’s somewhat sad to contemplate, given a track like “Camino Del Sol”. This is certainly a sort of pop music, albeit the sort of pop that goes ignored all too often. Antena’s stock-in-trade is tropicalia (or as Neil Tennant called it, “electro-samba”), which, as you might expect, translates into typically sunny moods, but Antena’s song (and most of the album from which it is culled) contains a remarkable melancholy largely attributable to Isabelle Powaga’s whisper-sung vocals and the (synth harpsichord?) chords that make up the melody, giving it an extra depth. In terms of production, it near-perfect, so good as to feel contemporary, with the electronic elements blending seamlessly in with the percussion and the vox. It feels like a lost classic, perfect for a warm Summer, or a Roger Moore Bond film. One wonders what more Antena would have produced had they received the attention they deserved.

“Camino Del Sol” on Youtube.

(Camino Del Sol is currently being sold in vinyl format on Boomkat, but if digital music is your thing I’ve only been able to find it on iTunes, which is weird!)

Hype Williams – Business Line (from One Nation, forthcoming on Hippos In Tanks)

I admit that I reacted poorly when “Witch House” became a thing. Beyond being unimpressed with Salem‘s inexplicably acclaimed minstrel act and wary of blog-defined microgenres (as opposed to, say, regionally defined ones), beyond the universally irritating use of wingdings in band names and cheaply acquired occult signifiers, as an industrial music fan I had a chip on my shoulder over Witch House’s debt to that venerable scene. Every booster of Witch House (some bloggers briefly tried to rebrand it as “Drag Music” when it was clear the “House” designation was an albatross) seemed to go on about how a given act (usually Salem) was creating totally unprecedented music – dark electronic music with a debt to hip hop. I felt this was clearly bullshit, and I was ready to write the whole thing off.

But as the bloom came off Witch House in the mainline indie press and the paremeters of the sound, which were always nebulous, started to expand beyond acts that had hit my shitlist almost immediately (Salem, Tri Angle records, and Creep, who will always and forever be that band who called their music “rapegaze”), it started to sound better. All it really needed was a de-emphasis of the Screw Musicinfluences and the tacky triangles-and-hoods bullshit. Hype Williams was more than willing to offer those things. It’s not entirely clear what their story is – it’s possible that they’re an anonymous collective, but the public face of the group, such as it is, is a duo, Inga Copeland and Dean Blunt, hailing from Russia and London respectively. Perhaps their distance from the States (and the general lack of hype from the usual blogroll suspects) made them better candidates to push Witch House forward, but whatever the case, their sound palette has proved quite diverse in the project’s short history.

“Businessline” is from their forthcoming LP debut on Hippos In Tanks, and what’s striking about it is how out-of-time it seems – It could certainly have come from the same 80?s VHS haze as “chillwave” did, but the winding synthline brings it forward to the 90?s as well, when Richard D. James was intermittently putting out demo-quality tracks that  brought a certain rough-hewn pop sensibility to IDM. It’s a short track, but its unmannered lightness stands in sharp contrast to the sort of contrived gloom that defined Witch House when it was born. If I had to wager I’d put money on Hype Williams being one of the few bands that survives and moves on when that house of cards collapses, assuming they’re anywhere near the premises when it happens.

“Businessline” on Youtube

(“One Nation” will be available from various retailers in just about a week’s time. In the meantime, you can download “Businessline” from XLR8R, for free.)

Solar Bears – Cub (Keep Shelly in Athens Remix) (Unreleased)

Solar Bears’ She Was Coloured In was one of my favorite LPs from last year (I think it ended up on #2 or #3 on my list) but “Cub” was probably the weakest track on the album. At first listen it sort of fits into the Geogaddi-era Boards of Canada sound that Solar Bears appeared to be tapping into when their music first hit the blogs. But on She Was Coloured In they showed a range of influences and capabilities beyond mere imitation of BoC (and there are far worse acts to hound). As it stood, “Cub” was an anemic sketch, really little more than a tasteful hippy guitar jam that goes nowhere over 2 minutes and 45 seconds. Worse than pastiche, it was bad pastiche.

Luckily for us, Keep Shelly In Athens (who I had never heard of before this) took to remixing duties on “Cub” and pushed the BoC era a bit forward, to The Campfire Headphase day, doubling the song’s length and adding all the dramatic bombast and sonic texture that the original lacked. I’d be remiss to say there wasn’t something a little bit off about the track – probably the fact that all the song’s emotion is front and center, on its sleeve, so to speak, and the meticulous production is sort of wasted on that bluntness. But it’s still head and shoulders above the original in terms of efficacy and quality.

“Cub (Keep Shelly In Athens Remix)” on Youtube.

(This remix isn’t on any official releases. XLR8R has it for free download, however, along with a surprising number of other Solar Bears tracks.)