The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

I remember first hearing Smashing Pumpkins’ album Gish at the old Star Sound near the corner of Yonge and College back in 1991 when it first came out. Someone at the store decided to just let the album play; I was intrigued with the first track, I am One, captivated with the second track, Siva, and by the end of Rhinoceros (one of my all-time favourite numbers by the Pumpkins), I had bought the CD.

Their 1993 follow-up album, Siamese Dream, is considerably more accessible than Gish, but that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable. It became the album that alt-rock and Aerosmith fans could agree on. It opens with the arena-friendly Cherub Rock, slides into a wall of guitars with decidedly un-quiet Quiet, the perfect setup for track three, Today, one of the best mope-rock anthems ever recorded. From there, it just goes on and on with the gems: Rocket, Disarm, Spaceboy, Soma (here’s an interesting alternate version)…this is simply one of the finest albums of the nineties.

A good number of people I know were university students when this album came out. It got heavy rotation during my DJ shifts at Crazy Go Nuts University’s Clark Hall Pub, and a good number of those students who packed the floor when I played it are moms now. In honour of Mother’s Day and all those moms who hit the dance floor back in 1993, here’s the entire Siamese Dream album to brighten your Sunday afternoon. Enjoy!

Let’s face it: places like Adult World sell lots of films depicting — more or less — how your mom became your mom in the first place.

Found via Cherylynn Bewell.

Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.

— originally William Makepeace Thackeray; later by Eric Draven in The Crow

I thought I’d go with a slightly different Mother’s Day greeting: a scene from the 1994 film The Crow in which Eric Draven — the hero known as The Crow — cures a woman of her drug addiction and reminds her that she needs to be a mother to her daughter. It’s a little darker than your typical Mother’s Day greeting, but I think my points across.

To all you moms out there, and especially mine: Happy Mother’s Day!

This graphic made me chuckle:

It also gave me an excuse to throw together the graphic below. I think that a completely-in-charge-of-everything George Lucas (as opposed to an only-in-charge-of-some-stuff George Lucas) is the equivalent of meth for the Star Wars films:

If you want to see some actual ads meant to scare you away from even considering trying crystal meth, check out my post from 2008 on Montana’s anti-meth billboards.

I’d like to contribute this data point to the study.
It’s still the best accordion picture ever.

The abstract for a study conducted by three French researchers and published in the journal Psychology of Music has a rather dry way of putting it:

Men’s music ability and attractiveness to women in a real-life courtship context

This experiment tested the assumption that music plays a role in sexual selection. Three hundred young women were solicited in the street for their phone number by a young male confederate who held either a guitar case or a sports bag in his hands or had no bag at all. Results showed that holding a guitar case was associated with greater compliance to the request, thus suggesting that musical practice is associated with sexual selection.

Simply put: Ladies love musicians! I could’ve told you that, and the Globe and Mail explains the study in more detail.

Everyone also seems disillusioned with the latest movie version as well.