The Disposable Heroes took New York City by storm on July 19th, playing an epic 2.5 hour set at Trash Bar.   Our first two clips of the show are ready for prime time (ie, youtube).   The first clip features the Chicago Bulls intro, 99 Cent Store and Not So Proud I’d Do It Again.   The second clip features Into the Wild Blueberry and Fat Man Walking Down The Street.   The belligerent heckling between those last two songs (about 15 minutes into the set) was the harbinger of the madness to come.   More clips will be posted later this week.  First of many thank yous to Sarah Berman for filming and downloading.

Running the show at Susty Party.

New York City these days is teeming with smart, young entrepreneurs.  One of my favorite enterprises is Susty Party, which produces sustainable party supplies.  Like the Disposable Heroes of dishes and tupperware.  Today, this fine product hits the market in every Whole Foods store in the Northeast.    Check out their site for how to order their stuff online.

This is the particular brand of floppies I found.

I’m stirring and cleansing through a massive apartment overhaul.   In sorting through an old box I found nearly a dozen floppy disks.  At first I estimated them to be from the mid-college era, but some may have far earlier origins.  One has a label affixed identifying lab reports, short stories and history papers from as early as 8th grade.  While the mid-90s were not a golden era in Martonian essay writing, to say nothing of the truly awful fiction I was churning out, these documents can either bolster or undermine my theory that we turn into real people around the age of 15 (though puberty/life experiences/ circle of friends obviously alter this equation to varying degrees).  Does anyone have a computer that still takes these disks? Would a library?   Will we eventually erect library/museum hybrids designed specifically to let people come in and access documents, photos and music from old electronic devices?  Or will those memories be trapped in a technological vacuum forever?   I hear the Library of Congress is cataloguing every tweet ever tweeted.  On what?  Hopefully not floppy disks.

Lou’s masterpiece.

Tonight I unwound to the newest record in the collection, Lou Reed’s Transformer.  You can read the story, covered here at LTD, of how David Bowie brought Lou Reed out of his musical exile, serving as an accountant in Long Island, to make this album.

In a moment of exaltation, I declared Transformer one of the 20 best rock albums of all time.   But upon reflection, it’s not THAT crazy.  Picking best albums is subjective, of course, but less so than picking favorite songs, since you have a 45-minute body of work to argue over.  As far as I could gather, these are the only rock albums that are indisputably better than Transformer:

Beatles, Abbey Road and at least one other album; Beach Boys, Pet Sounds; Bob Dylan, Blonde on Blonde; The Doors, self-titled; Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon; Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin IV; Velvet Underground and Nico; The Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street; Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run; Fleetwood Mac, Rumours; The Clash, London Calling; Michael Jackson, Thriller; Paul Simon, Graceland; U2, The Joshua Tree; The Pixies, Doolittle; Nirvana, Nevermind; Weezer, Blue Album; Radiohead, OK Computer.  You could probably make an objective case for Who’s Next, Appetite for Destruction and Arcade Fire’s Funeral, which still only brings you to 22 albums.   You could also make a subjective case for any number of albums not on this list as being better than Transformer, but is this list the baseline?  Is this a fair assessment of the rock and roll pantheon?  One day down the road we’ll have to do an album-based music tournament in the vein of the Davis Cup.    For now, keep sending me your nominations for the Peoples Choice Tournament.