�Don�t forget to clamp your butt-joint.� -Hank Hill

There are so many musician/music business terms that I find distasteful. Literally, like it makes me taste metal or something. Some of these words are: showcase, support band� I know there are more too. I also dislike �gig� but what are you going to do? I just reviewed a debut album by this band and I feel kind of bad but I couldn�t help but give them a so-so review because I felt the whole thing was a big moneymaker shake-a-rama showcase; this is a band that has stellar instrument playing, terribly talented singing complete with dramatic gasps and Jeff Buckleyan vibrato, production to die for, yet seems to have lost sight of the music. And he actually sang, about leaving a girl, when �things go down� that �a gig�s a gig/And a gig comes first.� Well, given my already present disdain for the word �gig,� I nearly threw the thing out the window because I knew this sentiment would set the tone for the rest of the album, the aforementioned moneymaker shake-a-rama. He may as well have been singing, �Gimme major label� please�� So, the thing was, they also sent press material, fully equipped with all decent quotes anyone has ever said about them and instead of a schedule that said, �shows ______ are playing:� it said something like, �currently playing showcase gigs in New York City.� This I find depressso. I mean, it�s not even about fans and music anymore. It�s about fat men with cigars and baseball hats milling about trying to figure out whether the song they�re hearing is hooky enough and whether these guys are going to shake their moneymakers enough to rake in some dough for the corporate rat race. Bleh. Bitter bitter, in the shitter. Whatever that means. Enough about that. I always go on about this.

Repruzzzent Motah City, Meat Mongah!

So here�s the Leo DiCapitated/Jack White thing: Jack�s really like this rock chameleon. Sometimes he looks like Leo, sometimes he looks fat, sometimes he looks like a guy I used to have a band with, sometimes he looks like Casey Affleck (who I think is positively adorable)* sometimes he looks like C., this boyfriend of a girl I know that always acts like he doesn�t know me when I say hi so I�ve decided to stop saying hi altogether and he never says hi so I just think he�s a dick even though Wil says he�s just nervous around girls but I don�t believe it. And if he is then I feel bad and someone should hand him a Xanax. And he should swallow it. Swallow it hard, buddy!

And Meg is just cute and someone should call her �Pooter� and affectionately stroke her soft hair.

My review is up on Diary Reviews. And I did done good, yo. Blizz-worthy, yo. David Blizz-worthy.

*As Shannon coined �Baldwin Paunch,� I�d like to coin, �Affleck Underbite.� For some reason, the underbite works much better on Casey than it does on Ben. But that�s just my taste. And the Affleck Eye Droop works better on Casey too. But this other picture I found of him he looks, with his wee arched eyebrows, like Frankie Muniz from Malcolm au Milieu as I like to call it� and also looks like he�s applying for a position in the Baldwin Paunch Club.

Word of the Day for Friday May 24, 2002:

zeitgeist TSYT-gyst; ZYT-gyst, noun: (I do LOVE this word!)

(Often capitalized) The spirit of the time; the general intellectual and moral state or temper characteristic of any period of time.

Like other figures who seem, in retrospect, to have been precociously representative of their times, [1]Kerouac was not simply responding to the Zeitgeist, but to the peculiarly twisted facts of his own upbringing.

--William Plummer, "Jack Kerouac: The Beat Goes On," [2]New York Times, December 30, 1979

The best writers of that predawn era were originals who had the zeitgeist by the tail.

--Gary Giddins, [3]Visions of Jazz: The First Century

The events of 1989 mark a decisive shift in the Zeitgeist: History has zigged or zagged. No simple lesson follows, but it is clear that radicalism and the utopian spirit that

sustains it have ceased to be major political or even intellectual forces.

--Russell Jacoby, [4]The End of Utopia

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Zeitgeist is from the German, from Zeit, "time" + Geist, "spirit" (related to English ghost).