And my good friend Frankenstein is now Frankenreagan

On the way to work yesterday, I heard a commercial on the radio for CarSense, a website where you could order a car and they'd deliver it to you. So does that mean you can't look at it before you buy it? Doesn't sound like such a good idea to me. Maybe you're allowed to reject it after they bring it to you, but the commercial didn't address that.

Speaking of advertisements, there was a billboard on the Pennsylvania Turnpike for a store called "The Fish Factory." I remember when I was in college, I decided that "Fresh from the Fish Factory" would be a good album title. I forget exactly why. Hopefully, if it turns out I ever DO use this title, people won't associate it with the store. {g}

Last night, bethje and I watched In Search of Dracula, a documentary from the seventies narrated by Christopher Lee. Some of the information in it was interesting, but it suffered from bad visuals and reenactments. They'd occasionally show inaccurate images, starting with when they were talking about Bram Stoker's research at a museum, and, for some reason, there was a graveyard on the screen. Perhaps the most ridiculous image, however, was when they were talking about how Mary Shelley had a nightmare that partially inspired her to write Frankenstein. In the documentary, the dream involved a really crappy-looking robot. Then, towards the end of the film, they started showing way too much footage of silent movies. I mean, we get the point without their showing five minutes or more of these films. So it wasn't a particularly good documentary. I do think I should read both Dracula and Frankenstein at some point, though.

Along the lines of my thoughts about long albums in my last entry, I've been thinking about song lengths. There sometimes seems to be a certain amount of prejudice against short songs. I think it was on the Frank Black Forum that I saw it suggested that all (or at least almost all) short songs are "filler." Honestly, I think that's a term that would be more accurately applied to songs that are long for no reason. I specify "for no reason" because some songs NEED to be long. Indeed, that's sometimes the whole point. What I don't like is when a song is padded, usually through unnecessary repetition or uninteresting solos. I tend not to enjoy jamming. Instrumental solos are fine. Drawing them out to the point where they get incredibly tedious is not. There are exceptions, but I think the general rule is that a song shouldn't be any longer than it needs to be. If it's said what it's supposed to say, why drag it out? I think that good long songs tend to be ones with multiple parts, and a lot of musical changes. (I'm sure there are technical terms for this, but I don't know what they are.) This could be something epic like, say, Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" or pretty much anything by Meat Loaf, but it can also be something simpler, as long as it doesn't just repeat itself over and over again.

I'm not sure if I've mentioned it here, but I know I've said on other online forums that I tend not to like it when an album starts with something long. I can't totally explain why, but I think a good album should start with, well, not necessarily something short, but something that catches your attention, and lets you know that you're in for a collection of songs. A long beginning can draw attention away from the album as a whole, if that makes sense. I kind of think "S-E-X-X-Y" wasn't a good choice as an opener for They Might Be Giants' Factory Showroom, both because it's the longest song on there, and because it doesn't sound like much else on the album. It sort of seems disconnected from the rest. On the other hand, I think "Blast Off" works well as a beginning track for Frank Black's Dog in the Sand, and that's much longer than "S-E-X-X-Y." So I guess there are always exceptions.