The thing about listening to Funeral was the fact that it's a deeply emotional album.  While they recorded it, several of the bandmembers' family members died, hence the album's name, as well as one of the most memorable lines on the album, "My family tree's losing all its leaves."  But like the Flaming Lips and U2, Arcade Fire might address death, but only make that a better case to embrace life and love while you can.  And when listening to Funeral you can't help but do so, as the songs are written and performed with such masterful skill that you wonder how this can be their full-length debut. 

A lot of people have compared Arcade Fire to Polyphonic Spree, which I think is incredibly unfair, especially because you can only get that impression from two points: (A) The band has more than five members, making them "wicked friggin' huge" to most people, and (B) there's a big chorus background to the song "Wake Up," which is probably the one most people recognize.  I say that upon listening to "Wake Up," I was immediately reminded of Bowie, which is probably why he wanted to play that song with them a couple of weeks ago.  But let me say a couple of things about Polyphonic Spree while I'm at it... they're the group that's trying too much to duplicate the Flaming Lips.  If you've seen the Spree live, you can't help but be reminded of a Lips show, with all the balloons and confetti and cymbal crashing and the super-happy crazy front man.  Also, the "chaos chorus" was started by the Lips, too, on "The Gash." 

So please, pick up the Arcade Fire's Funeral if you get a chance.  It's quite possible that you'll be floored. 

Meanwhile, in the world of golf... Greg and I spent the last two days playing.  Wednesday afternoon we got together and played nine.  I beat him for the first time, 51 to 52, which was exciting, but even more gratifying was the fact that I had two pars and came this close to my first-ever birdie.  Yesterday, Dad and I met with Greg and Mr. G for another nine.  It was the first time I had been out with Dad this year, which I had been dying to do, especially after what a summer it had been for him.  We all had a great time, but I managed to lose my scorecard somewhere on the sixth.  I said that it "felt like a 56."  But I'm getting a lot better now.  If I can play on a more consistent basis, I think I'll do alright.

And finally, a blurb on movies.  Last week Greg and I saw Lord of War, with Nic Cage.  If you've seen the ads, you've seen the best parts of this one.  The thing that bugged me about this movie was the fact that reviews were saying it was a "Dr. Strangelove-style black comedy."  I guess that all you need to do to score that kind of label is to make an anti-war movie that shows lots of guns until you realize that guns are bad, and pepper in a couple of jokes here and there.  Guns + Jokes = Black Comedy!  Not quite, I say... first of all, Dr. Strangelove is 100000000% better than this film, and Stanley Kubrick's memory is insulted by such a half-assed comparison.  Also, Strangelove is designated a comedy/satire, as are other fine dark pieces like American Psycho.  Reviews also said it got preachy near the end, but I think that it was preachy all the way through, just moreso in the last twenty minutes.  Or was it a half-hour?  At the pace the film moves along, it felt more like 50 minutes.  Cage didn't even have a freak-out, which Greg and I were looking forward to.  Instead, he had a slight breakdown and Ethan Hawke took the freak-out for him (Hawke is a capable freak-out actor, and I don't think he works nearly enough these days).  Avoid Lord of War and save your cash for something else.  We're going to take a gamble on Cronenberg's History of Violence next week, I think.

One thing that I was pumped about this week was the fact that the radio has changed at the store.  Our old satellite channel has been reworked to play music that is supposedly demographically accurate.  That being said, on Tuesdays you can expect oldies and whatnot, and on a Saturday evening you'll get a mix of R&B and more contemporary rock.  I have to admit that I am enjoying a lot of the selection.  Some of the artists that have been playing since the radio changes:

• Prince
• Huey Lewis and the News
• Coldplay
• Old Matchbox 20 (when they were good)
• Credence Clearwater Revival
• The Rolling Stones

Also, there have been songs played that I haven't heard in a long time, like "When You're Gone" by Cranberries, "Cars" by Gary Numan, "Burning Down the House" by Talking Heads, and that Toad the Wet Sprocket song of which the name escapes me.  Not the one everyone remembers, but the one about going to the ocean and not taking pictures of it.  I fully expect to hear Third Eye Blind and that "How Bizarre" song that was all over the radio in summer of '97 or '98.  Brings back memories of playing NHL 94 on Genesis in the mid '90's.  Coincidentally, I can play NHL 94 on my PS2 version of NHL 06. 

And finally, while on one of my breaks last night, I happened to come across an old note that I found in my car that I had written I don't know how long ago.  I believe that I was trying to remember two funny ideas that I got out of dreams the night before.  The first was an idea for a movie about two factions of spies that work out of the same hotel, fighting against each other on different floors.  I called it "Spy Hotel."  But the second was much better, and 10 times funnier.  I give it to you here, unedited:

Reality Show
They fly you out to some beautiful island somewhere on a charter jet.  When you get off, girls hand out a bunch of grapes to each contestant.  Then the host (Tim Curry) comes out and announces that the game has already begun, because the twist to the game is that you can't put the grapes down, and like, five people have already put down the grapes.

I laughed so hard that if anyone had heard me, they'd have thought I had gone insane. 

Not much has been going on lately, though.  The most interesting piece of news that I can forward right now is the fact that it's only a few more days until our grand opening at the store.  Everything has been made to be 100% Hannaford.  Victory is now a thing of the past.  It's sad in one way, but it's really pretty cool at the same time.  Sure, a big part of North Brookfield has been erased, but it's been replaced by something even better.  The pharmacy is going to be ready for Sunday, the remodeling has been a big success, etc.  I'm happy with things and customers are coming around, too.  It was only a couple of weeks ago that we still had customers coming through lines and telling us that "this store sucks" and "everything has gone downhill fast."  Never mind the fact that we sell a ton of new items or that we've lowered thousands of prices.  People in a town like this don't handle change very well, but I think that Hannaford has done a great job in transitioning between the companies. 

I was also thinking today about the fact that I have terrible luck trying to get to concerts.  Tickets for some shows are so expensive that I wonder how some of my friends are constantly going to shows and still manage to afford their booze and gas at the same time.  I keep my eye out for my favorite bands, and whenever I see that someone's coming to town, it never works out well.  Case in point, Interpol will be in Portland next week, and I had voiced a desire to go up and see them play.  This ended up becoming a planned family trip up there for the weekend, since we hadn't been in a while anyway.  However, when it came down to it, there really was no way we'd all be able to get up there for a Friday evening.   I figured it was silly anyway, to head up with my family just so I could see a show without any of my friends, so I figured I'd wait until they added more dates.  As it turned out, they would add only two more: Saturday and Sunday back home in New York City.  This will conclude their tour for Antics.  So I guess I'll have to wait until their next album is done to see them come around again, hopefully in Worcester or Boston this time.  Maybe I could con someone into coming with me.

That's the way it is for me, though.  Ever since the Barenaked Ladies New Year's Incident, I've been shut down at every opportunity for any show I'd think of seeing.  Any time R.E.M. goes on tour, I try to make a note of their Great Woods (Tweeter Center) date and then promptly forget about it.  Since no one talks about R.E.M. anymore, I only manage to find out about the show two weeks after it happened, usually when I run into my friend Shaun and he begins to gush over how great a show it was.  The last time Radiohead came through (which seems like about 20 years ago), I was in New York for the week.  I even had a situation similar to the Interpol thing a couple of years ago with the Flaming Lips: sandwiched between a vacation from work and a family visit to the very town, the Lips were in Portland.  (Okay, so the only similarity was the fact that it was in Portland.)  Bad timing on the work vacation, but I think I ended up spending a day in Boston during that stretch, so it was okay.

On a final note, the Tornadoes won the Can-Am League championship last week, which was pretty damn cool.  Only a few months ago I was pumped at the thought of simply having a baseball team.  Now we've got champs in our backyard.  Now like I said last month... Maybe they can expand the ballpark to take in a couple thousand more fans?

Don't mess with Mess.

I watched The Incredibles again today.  What a great movie.  It manages to be completely original, even though pretty much everything was borrowed from other sources.  The characters are so well developed, too.  But some of the dialogue is really what gets me... my favorite quotes in there include (but are not limited to)... "Dash isn't graduating, he's moving from the fourth grade to the fifth grade.  All they do is invent new ways to celebrate mediocrity!" ...and... "You know what your father says... everyone is special," followed up with, "Which means no one is."  Pretty heavy for a flick that was pretty much geared towards the 5-13 set. 

I need to go golfing.  Badly.

For one thing, the amount of blame that's being thrown around over the relief situation has been atrocious.  I'm sick and tired of people immediately blaming the president for every damn thing that happens in this country.  Before blaming him, why don't people blame the following first, and then see what else is left to blame George Bush for:  The mayor of New Orleans for not warning the populace sooner and spending the rest of the time complaining... Telling people to beat it as late as he did was not a good call.  The rest of the Louisiana government is also on the hook in my book... for instance, there's only three highways out of New Orleans.  That's all well and good, except when you take into account that there's the potential for this kind of thing to happen.  They could have also tried coming up with better ways to augment their levee system.  Those levees were 100 years old.  Finally, I hate to say it, but the populace of New Orleans themselves seemed to take these sort of things too easily.  A lot of interviews I've seen have come across to me that a lot of folks from the city didn't think that the hurricane would be too much of a big deal. 

I have to wonder if a city that holds a party like Mardi Gras has something like this coming for them, in a biblical sense. 

But that was then, this is now.  These people need help, that's for sure.  So if you get a chance, please donate to the Red Cross and help the relief fund.  I pitched in today at work.  I hate to get sidetracked again, but I've only seen one person give to our fund at the store, and that was this morning.  Then, five minutes later, some bitch comes through my line and says, "How dare you put that sign up, I wouldn't give to the Red Cross if you gave me a million dollars."  I have but one thing to say to that: Go to hell.  I know people who work for the Red Cross and they're some of the greatest people I've been privelaged to know.

I also hate to harp on the media, as plenty of people like to do at times like this, but it really makes me sick to watch some of the coverage.  I hate watching the news and seeing someone call black people carrying food and supplies that they got from an abandoned store "looters" and white people not branded as such.  Okay, you've heard that a million times, I'm sure.  I also notice that a lot of these news crews can just go in and out of the city as they please, taking pictures of a sea of unfortunate people, and then pack it up and head out of there at the end of the day.  Why not taking a van load or two of people out with you?  At least Geraldo Rivera is still enough of a cool guy to go down there and help people on the spot.  As long as he doesn't expose any top secret troop movements.

One more media-related point... I'm so sick of CNN, Fox News, etc. citing people's blogs as a news source.  Blogs are not a credible source of serious news in my view.  To me, it's the same thing as trying to pass off Wikipedia as a reference in a term paper's bibliography.  I saw them (no joke) consult Rosie O'Donnel's blog the other day about the hurricane relief.  I wanted to throw up.  I say that if they keep looking at some blogger's posts as real news, than I think they should also go over to LiveJournal and see what XxUnderDarkenedWingsxX has to say about the subject as well. 

Ugh.  What a crappy week.  As fate would have it, Something Awful's servers are based in New Orleans and Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka is trying to get them moved home to Kansas City, where the only disaster is NASCAR, as he put it.  (More like the Chiefs, am I right??)  So without SA, there isn't any offbeat humor to take the edge off.  At least I got things off my chest... 

Hopefully I'll have enough time to complete my summer movie reviews this week.  Stay tuned, America (blog blog blog).