Beth Hart//"L.A. Song"

Minks//"Margot"

Dungeons & Dragons

Mayer Hawthorne//"Dreaming"

The Rolling Stones//"Time Is On My Side"

Once every so often one must revisit vintage Stones footage to remind oneself that there was a time when they really were the dirtier, more "dangerous" version of The Beatles, rather than the strange and aged nostalgia act that they are today...and have been since the early 80s pretty much. Mick really was beautiful back in the day, wasn't he?

BOY//"Oh Boy"

I love this song, but I hate this video. Not that I require every video to be a literal representation of the song, but I would like for it to have SOME connection to it.

The one literal-literal moment I could find in the video is the bit where Valeska spits up the gold necklace. I hate it.

This song is frequently on my mind because I seem to have a larger than average number of heartsick friends who are forever falling in love boys and girls who are waaay out of their league, if not in looks or status then just in the general "speed" at which they live their lives. I am the same way, but at least I keep it to myself.

Have you ever seen the movie "My Sassy Girl"? It was a huge hit in the early 2000s, not least of all because it was so funny and cute and charming and had a pretty girl in the lead, but I think movies of this sort specifically appeal to the heartsick among us because it is only in movies where you have the quirky, "fast" girl eventually falling for (and staying with) the awkward and quiet nerdy boy. This has never, ever, ever, ever, ever happened in real life.

Carpenters//"I Need To Be In Love"

This time of year always makes me feel lonely. The cooler days, the longer nights, the sweaters and scarves, the falling leaves and outdoor cafes, the constant reminders of the coming long winter months...everything about this time of year makes me want to hold someone close...to have someone to hold close. Saying that I "need" to be in love would probably be a gross overstatement (I have, after all, gone all these years without and am doing pretty fine), but autumn in New York is pretty much the closest I ever come to saying so.

I love Karen Carpenter and never really understood her being the poster child for fake '70s smiley-faced sentimental easily listening love pop. Even at her most supposedly-saccharine ("Close to You", "We've Only Just Begun"), the songs for me have always been more about the sadness and longing and loss than they were about that faintest glimmer of hope that arises from it. It's sad that it was only after she died, after we found out more about her life, that even her harshest detractors have recognized this, when the clues were right there in your face all along. Did nobody ever really sit down and listen to even a single verse of "Superstar", or "Goodbye to Love", or "Rainy Days and Mondays", or "I Need to Be In Love", or "Hurting Each Other", back in the day?

Of course, as in most things in life, I blame Richard.

The Scaffold//"2 Days Monday"

 

 

This is actually Paul McCartney's brother. I will make no comment further than that.

Ron & Marty
 

Ron and/or Marty (whichever one is not the puppet) was arrested in 2012 on charges of possession of child pornography and conspiracy to kidnap a child. I won't even go into the chat transcripts.

The Hardy Boys//"One Time In a Million"

Happy birthday, Bruce.

We miss you.

This Mortal Coil//"Kangaroo"

Yo La Tengo//"Ohm"

I sort of stopped liking Yo La Tengo back in the late '90s. "I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One" was the transition record for me, when they started leaning too much on the abstract noodling while I just wanted some punchy, catchy pop songs! MAN, "Electr-O-Pura" was like a perfect album.

They've gotten back to writing pop songs in their last couple of records and I started liking them again, even to the point of going back and buying all of the stuff that I had skipped post-"And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out", and yes, even learning to appreciate it. All of it.

You'd think with an album title like "Fade" and the song title like "Ohm" that they were going back to the abstract noodly stuff, but this record, as you can see and hear from the video and song, is really the brightest and poppiest they've been in years.

The Beth Edges//"Colours Collide"

I love everything about this. The classic verse-chorus-verse-chorus-solo-bridge-chorus structure, the crispy guitars, the snappy drums, the bouncy pop-rock "oh-oh-oh-oh"s, and the gorgeous and colorful video, comprised of hundreds of lomographs that were submitted to the band as part of a contest I believe.

I've always been a big fan of film photography (it's how I learned), and actually rediscovered my love of it a couple years back through lomography. Though the term has come to be used interchangeably with all "analogue" film photography lately, the technical definition is "analogue" photographs taken with cheap plastic toy cameras and/or with expired film with the expressly stated purpose of taking photographs with intentionally surprising, occasionally wonky results.

But whatever. To try to label it defeats the purpose. I love it all and really do think it will make a comeback, not just with the hipsters and the "weird" kids but with everybody. I think it won't happen in this generation, but in the next one, when people look back on today and wonder, seriously wonder, why there are seemingly so few truly iconic moments or personalities to define this generation, and also wonder why they're recollection of these times are so...small. And square. And orange. And washed out and fuzzy - not in any real, organic, warm sense but in a computer algorithmically everything-looks-exactly-the-same sense. And why all we can remember is food. And feet. And bathroom mirrors.

And though it's all related, I think the mere fact that a photograph "exists" gives it an automatic step-up in importance, regardless of subject matter. There was a time when taking a picture was a little more involved than simply pointing your phone at a mirror. You had to acquire a camera. You had to get film. You had to know how to open and load your camera, how to wind and rewind. God help you if you needed a flash (especially in earlier times when you needed to worry about bulbs or cubes). You had to wait until you finished a whole roll before you could look at any of them, and then only after sending them into a shop and having to wait an hour, or a week, or weeks to get them back. Or, if you dared, develop them yourself, if you had access to the right space, lights, projectors, paper, chemicals. And with each roll, you knew you only had a limited number of chances to get a good shot, before you had to start the process all over again. Not even mentioning the expense involved in all this. Things were once not so instant, not so...disposable.

So what does it mean? It means that every time you pick up a photograph, you're picking up an image that somebody probably put a lot of thought into. No matter what the subject matter, no matter where you find it, whether it's from your grandmother's wedding or if it's just a stranger's loose vacation snapshot found at the bottom of a thrift store cabinet, every time you pick up or look at a photograph you can't help but wonder, who took this, and why? What does it say, what were they trying to say, and how closely do the two match up?

Unless, you know, they were just fiddling with it and the shutter went off.

Still, you never know.

Ariana Grande//"Baby I"

Eddi Reader//"Joke (I'm Laughing)"

Maureen McGovern//"I Want to Learn to Fly"

Battle of the Planets

This week's Saturday morning cartoon...although growing up this wasn't on on Saturday mornings but rather Monday through Friday mornings at maybe 6:30, 7:00. Waking up to cartoons was never bad. I need to bring that back into my life. Waking up to NY1 or the stupid Today Show just doesn't cut it.

Francoise Hardy//"Tous Les Garcons..."

London Grammar//"Wasting My Young Years"

How to Succeed with Brunettes

Tycho//"A Walk"

Roy Orbison//"It's Over"

The Seekers//"The Carnival is Over"

The Flo

Jokebook

They're Playing With Fire

Meeks//"Let It Be"

Wendy's training video - "Hot Drinks"

Small Black//"Photojournalist"

And we're back! You may have noticed that NTMO was slightly...not in existence...for the last few weeks. That was because I had gotten an email quite suddenly in the middle of the night telling me that the Blogger robots had noticed an unusual number of links to other sites on this blog, had decided it was a spam blog, and that the blog had been deleted.

That's it.

No "If you think this is a mistake, please contact us", no "If you would like an actual human review of your site, please contact us", nothing. Just "Our system automatically decided this, so THE END." I knew logically that there had to be some sort of recourse or review process, but god damned if Blogger was going to give me the first hint as to a page to visit or a person/address to contact.

There was nothing on the Blogger FAQ about this (other than stating that this is something that is occasionally done - basically exactly what was said in the email they sent me), and sending a message to Blogger's "contact us" link on the site did not get me any response. I thought it was the end, but there was so much else taking my attention at the time that I was willing to just shrug it off, thinking this was fun while it lasted, maybe I should do other things now.

It wasn't until just the other night when I was on my dashboard, saw the link to NTMO under "deleted links" or some such heading, and noticed for the first time a button next to it marked "Restore". I swear, that wasn't there before. I clicked on the button and, lo and behold, got a message saying that an actual human being would now review my blog, and that I would receive a response within a day or two. Sure enough, over the weekend I got the message saying that yes, they had made a mistake, and the blog was back online.

OF COURSE this blog as a number of links to "other sites". 98% of those "other sites" are YouTube. Because THIS IS A VIDEO BLOG. Yeesh.

Anyway, that's how life-support on satellite NTMO was switched back on. And just in the nick of time, as air doesn't really circulate up here in space. You think being on a plane for 13 hours is bad...

But there's nothing like a good near-death experience to force one to take stock. Maybe I can/should do other things with this blog. The videos are not going to stop (unless Blogger tells me again that I need to), but maybe I can no longer assume that the images, beats and melodies tell the whole story, the one that I want to tell. I don't know, still figuring it out in my head. In the meantime, if you don't care, just ignore all the distraction below the band name//"song title" information and keep click-scrolling. Until I find a voice, until I figure it out, just keep enjoying the videos.

Departing Earth From Messenger