I spent a good part of this morning unsuccessfully looking for an old black & white Halo Benders promotional photo from the mid 1990s.  I’ve been working the same type of hustle that I am now for half of my life and, when I was in high school, I spent the majority of my focus on getting companies to send me free shit for my marketing program’s “trade show” projects.  The Calvin Johnson founded, K Records was one of the most helpful and provided me with tons of merchandise and materials, including that Halo Benders photo, which was intended to hype the group’s sophomore effort, Don’t Tell Me Now (1996).  Two years prior, when Johnson (Beat Happening) first started the side project with Doug Martsch (Built to Spill), I had begun hearing the song “Don’t Touch My Bikini” on the local community college radio station.  Both keeping with and ending their pattern of dropping a new album every other year, Halo Benders released their final album, The Rebels Not In, in 1998.  That release contained “Virginia Reel Around the Fountain“, a song that is still a regular feature on Built To Spill set-lists to this day.  Calvin hopped on stage with BTS for a few random cameos throughout the following decade and the group reunited with a slightly altered lineup for a pair of shows in Boise, Idaho.  There have even been some random non-confirmed rumors of a possible new album and/or comeback but, for all intents and purposes, The Halo Benders were a Nineties band.  At one point or another during that initial run, the side-project even made an infamous, yet rarely seen, appearance on a quintessential 90‘s television program.  Thanks to today’s technology, the footage from that fiasco is just one more thing that has managed to resurface in our current times. (more…)

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Back in October, comedians, Nick Kroll and Jon Daly introduced their characters of “Bobby Bottleservice” and “Peter Papparazzo” (aka: “The Ed Hardy Boyz”) to the world via a video short on FunnyorDie.com.  Taking jabs at gaudy, tanning bed glamor boys and playing off the name of the classic, fictional teenage detectives, the video featured the duo trying to solve the case of a stolen belt buckle.  We liked that video and posted it.  Apparently, Funny or Die became aware that we had, because I just received an email from the site asking if we’d be interested in posting the follow up as well.  We were. (more…)

Popularity: 1% [?]

The title of this post pretty much explains it all.  Of course, if the recent Phish reunion shows were held on the West Coast, I would have titled it “Hella fools get arrested…”  Thousands of excited concert goers arrive in Hampton, VA to see their favorite 4-piece throw down the crazy funk jams that they’ve been dreaming of for the last 5 years, only to be fucked with imercifully by the local Po-Po.  You may have heard about this on various websites or even on your local TV news, but I’m calling bullshit on many of these reports and the operation as a whole. I’m also going to tell you exactly why. (more…)

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Hotlanta is the jam. Since I live here, I am probably a little biased yet the fact remains that if you come and visit this city, there is plenty of trouble to get into in a heartbeat. Most of the time when someone says something like that it’s taken in jest. “Oh sure, I know what you mean, man!” That type of thing. “You can get real drunk there, go to strip clubs, do drugs, blah, blah, blah”. Fuck that bullshit. I’m talking about REAL trouble. The fuckin run for your life, here come the cops type of shit. Please let me elaborate.

The other night the ol’ ball and chain wanted to go out (She loves it when I call her that). She used the kind of non-descript, “take me somewhere honey, I wanna drink” type of whine that girls are prone to do sometimes. It was a Wednesday night and I couldn’t think of an excuse not to go so, of course, I obliged. In any event, I was as hungry as a carnivorous platypus and, since there was nothing goin’ on, I thought a drink and some delicious eats would do me good. Well, we didn’t end up going to “Eats” (which is a cheap ATL staple, since forever, for food and it is delicious), but I did remember this one other delicious place called O’Terrils which is near Central Park where my friend used to live. Of course it’s an Irish pub, and they have good food like cranberry and turkey sandwiches, and all sorts of shit on rye bread. It is usually a pretty safe place to eat. As “safe” as anywhere near a Central Park (see MLK Dr.) and a methadone clinic, that is.

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