Monthly Archives: December 2010

December 31, 2010 · 4:36 pm

The Recipe For A Perfect New Year’s Eve



The Holy Bee has never been a fan of New Year’s Eve parties. You usually end up at one where you don’t really know anyone (it’s your wife’s or girlfriend’s friends more often than not, and they’re sort of assholes), and everyone is being extra loud, and the music is almost always shitty.

Unencumbered by any of that, I will be consuming a Papa John’s Take-n-Bake, catching up on some sorely neglected movie-watching, and drinking three of those Blue Moons, plus an old-fashioned or two, and going to bed at 11:30, so I don’t have to watch the shriveled-up, stroked-out corpse of Dick Clark slur the countdown through his yellow teeth as Ryan Seacrest manipulates his emaciated limbs Muppet-style to create an illusion of life-like movement. Then I’ll be up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed on January 1st, ready for some bowl games and the remainder of the Blue Moons.

I’ve met my goal of 26 posts in 2010 for this blog, and expect more vital info, larfs, fiercely-held and poorly-defended opinions, and shameful self-revelations in 2011. This Used To Be My Playground rolls on (and on and on), the Top 20 Albums of 2010 will be revealed in January, Books of the Holy Bee for 2010 is coming soon, there are some new multi-part series in the works, and if you’re interested in the music/pop culture collective I’ve misspent hundreds of man hours on since 2002, the Institute of Idle Time has a new website. Check it out at:

http://instituteofidletime.wordpress.com/

Leave a comment, shake a (virutal) hand, even contribute if you like. My big contribution thus far has been re-running This Used To Be My Playground — now with minor (and I do mean minor) revisions and repaired You Tube links!

Happy New Year to all.

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Filed under Life & Other Distractions

December 20, 2010 · 11:51 am

Top Albums of 2010: Honorable Mentions

It’s that time of year. For the fourth time, the Holy Bee presents its Top 20 Albums of the Year. (2007, 2008, and 2009 lists can be found in the archives to the left.)

As predicted, 2010 produced a bumper crop of good music. I struggled last year to come up with twenty albums I liked well enough to put on my list. This year, I had a quota of twenty by springtime, and several worthy contenders had to get the chop. Here, then, are some albums that didn’t quite make the cut, but are certainly worth a listen.

Against Me! — White Crosses
With its 2007 album New Wave, Against Me! managed to alienate its hardcore, politically-agitated “true” punk fans by abandoning social outrage and political sloganeering and embracing a more approachable (and more mature) viewpoint. White Crosses continues that trend, and puts a pretty fine point on it by titling its best song “I Used To Be An Anarchist.” The point when a band pisses off its already angry, narrow-minded “core” audience is usually right when the Holy Bee jumps on board, because that’s when a band has actually gotten good as musicians/songwriters, and has outgrown being the musical equivalent of spray-painting an anarchy “A” on the side of a Rite Aid, thinking they’re changing the world.

Black Mountain — Wilderness Heart
This Canadian collective leaves behind the soaring, fantasy-Zeppelin jams of their previous record (#7 on my 2008 list) in favor of a quicker, more casual effort. These concise hard-rock nuggets sometimes sound a little too tossed-off, and don’t really stay in your head after hearing them. They certainly don’t have that “sweated over” intensity of their last album. Continue reading →

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Filed under Music -- 2000s

December 1, 2010 · 12:36 am

This Used To Be My Playground, Part 14: Bitten By Reality

#115. “Streets Of Philadelphia” — Bruce Springsteen
The Holy Bee used to love going to movies. In the early nineties, a typical evening-show ticket was between five and six dollars. Matinees dipped as low as $3.5o. I probably watched two movies per week in a theater (and that total increased in late 1995, when I began working at a theater and could watch films to my heart’s content free of charge. More on that later.) Whatever the “big” movie was in any particular week, I was most likely in attendance. December/January was especially busy, what with all the Oscar-bait. (The weeks just before and just after the “summer blockbuster” season are probably the worst movie months. I was one of the maybe two dozen unfortunate souls who saw Folks! in the theater, just because I wanted to “go the movies” that night, and had already seen the other seven films playing at the Cinemark Movies 8.)

Tombstone was the movie I was excited about around this time, and I made a point of seeing it on Christmas Day, but Philadelphia was the big, prestigious Oscar-bait movie of the December ’93/January ’94 season. Like many “important” movies of that era, I let it wash over me without forming any strong opinions one way or another. I was a “movie-goer,” not yet a true film fanatic. That’s one of many evolutions the Holy Bee would undergo through 1994-95. These changes also included moving from a detached admiration for the work of Bruce Springsteen to full-blown fandom. Bruce was going through a rough patch at this time. The E Street Band was on hiatus, and the reviews for his ’92 double album release were middling. The muted, synth-heavy ballad “Streets of Philadelphia” won the Oscar for Best Original Song and put Bruce on the road to revival. (I still like Tombstone better than Philadelphia, and you know you do too.) Continue reading →

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Filed under Music -- 1990s, This Used To Be My Playground