Hear hear on Converge. I've seen them multiple times and I have literally never seen them without a large-scale fight breaking out. I saw them once when, halfway through "The Saddest Day", the band noticed a female friend getting into in the pit and first the singer, then the bass player and guitarist, leaped into…

Oh Good Lord, I have tears in my eyes. Those combined to be one of the funniest fucking things I've seen in a long time.

Stephen King's The Mist should be on here too. It's a really interesting new horror film. The crazy Christian woman is infuriating and scary. And the gigantic monster is sweet. Total bummer ending too.

Envy
No love for the new Envy "Recitations"?

Vinyl's not outdated. I work in a record store that sells a lot of vinyl. New and used. Most indie, punk and metal bands and quite a few mainstream acts release vinyl nowadays in addition to cds.

The Replacements could have been on here multiple times. "Answering Machine", "Seen Your Video", and "Left of the Dial" all are antiquated. It's a testament to the Replacements and Paul Westerberg though that those songs are still so powerful (well, maybe not Seen Your Video since that was always just sort of a…

Isn't Kill Bill (both volumes) SUPPOSED to be a more or less empty, fun genre exercise. I've always seen it (and Grindhouse) as more or less love letters to Quentin Tarantino's favorite movies and directors. If you're not down with that, fine, but I think it's stupid to accuse Kill Bill of being empty and silly. I…

the battle sequence at the end is pretty sweet (though it's no Helm's Deep…then again, what is?), but I agree that the film runs back into melodramatic hippie crap after that. i went into Avatar with very low expectations and was pleasantly surprised. it's probably about as good as you're going to get from big-time…

Unforgiven does indeed have a badass ending. "Deserves got nothing to do with it." OHHHH SHIT. Unforgiven's one of the most badass movies I've ever seen. I love it.

man I'd go no matter what. I've never seen him but I'd love to. his solo record is great and so are the Lemonheads (at least, for a while they are).

as an American soccer fan, it is indeed an interesting experience to have to root for an underdog. if the US doesn't win gold in baseball or basketball or medal in hockey, it's pretty much a disaster, but if we get out of the group stage in soccer, it's amazing! it's kind of a neat, fun experience to be on this side…

I had been up for 36 hours straight by the time Fugazi closed the festival I was at. Ian McKaye bitched that the doors to the gym they were playing in were open and he wouldn't start until the doors were closed because it was "cold" (it was like 50-something). I was so tired that I barely remember them. It was one…

I went to that show in Pittsburgh and it was amazing. You missed out. No one here knew who Baroness was so I felt silly dancing and singing by myself, but oh well. Mastodon played Crack the Skye from start to finish and then did an encore of songs from their other albums.

I've always imagined every single Black Flag show to have been like this…especially when Rollins was in the band. Reading Rollins' tour book kinda confirms this imagining of mine.

Sometimes you hear people say they should have been alive in the 60's or they wish they'd been a teenager in 1977 or something, but for me, I'm pretty convinced I should have been about 18 in 1991, instead of the 8 that I was. I've gotten so into alternative music from that era the past few years. Dinosaur Jr.,…

A couple summers ago there was a festival put on by American Eagle here in Pittsburgh (for some reason, AE moved their corporate headquarters to Pittsburgh's South Side a few years ago) which was pretty much the best thing you could ever ask for from an outdoor festival. It was a two-day show curated by Anthony…

Elliott Smith is one that I never had any specific opportunity to see, but I wish I could have seen him. In the same vein musically, I don't know what Mark Kozelek is up to these days, but I've never seen him perform under any name. Ghosts of the Great Highway is one of my favorite records and I really want to see…

I mention it above, but I saw Mastodon open for Dillinger Escape Plan at a nightclub in Pittsburgh right around the time Remission came out and then i saw them a couple years later at a festival in Louisville around the time of Leviathan. I hadn't seen them since until April when they played here with Baroness,…

I saw New Found Glory open for Snapcase and Taking Back Sunday open for Grade (on their final tour or Grade would have been one of my big regrets). I went to see Dillinger Escape Plan in about 2002 or 2003 and the opening act was Mastodon. They're not actually "opening acts" per se, but I got to see 7 Seconds,…

man, you enjoyed Bob Dylan live in the past couple of years? I saw Dylan two summers ago and he was dreadful. he couldn't sing (not in the "oh he can't sing" way that he's had since 1961, but an "oh my God, he's dying onstage" way)…he'd croak out a word or two per line. the whole band played every song in a weird…