Emma and I have this habit with our Netflix account that’s become a real problem. It usually goes like this: Emma spots a review of some amazing foreign indie political documentary or whatever in The New Yorker, and we decide to add it to our queue. But when the movie arrives, it sits on the counter for a week or so before we send it back, unwatched.

The thing is, it’ll be a Tuesday night, and we’re both dead tired and feeling like watching something mindless. And so we do this again and again, with all these movies that we’re supposed to watch. I wish I could blame it on the baby, but it’s been going on long before that. Years, maybe.

One of the movies this happened with recently was Once. It arrived from Netflix, and we sent it back ten sheepish days later without having seen it. It was about musicians, for god’s sake. How could I not love it? But for whatever reason we passed it up and continued our Netflix charade.

After the Oscar for Best Original Song went to “Falling Slowly” from Once, Emma went to our local video store the other night and rented the movie again. We sat with her parents, who were visiting from the UK, and popped it in. Within about 30 seconds, everyone but Emma was fast asleep. This was nothing to do with the film, I should add, but jet lag on her parents’ part, and a congenital couch+movie=sleep disorder on mine. I woke up about an hour into the film, with the most incredible song playing. I asked Emma what I’d missed, and she rolled her eyes at me. “You have to see this movie,” she told me. “It’s amazing.”

And so I watched the rest, which was brilliant, and then watched it from start to finish again the next day. The lead characters and story are so charming, the songs are fantastic, and it’s just a great little movie.

Here are the opening credits, featuring one of several live performances in the film by Glen Hansard (lead singer/guitarist of the Irish band The Frames and also the guitarist from the 1991 movie The Commitments). Hansard plays one of the two leads, a Dublin street busker.

Evie’s very first visitor was my sister, her Aunt Niki. Niki brought up a great little onesie that she’d had custom printed from a website. The front of the onesie says “I am the champion”

… and the back says “of nothing in particular.”

“Get it?” Niki said. “Like the Smiths song.”

The back sounded incredibly familiar, but the front had me confused.

“I love it,” I said, “but you know what? I think I’ve had that lyric wrong for about twenty years. I thought it was ‘I am the son and heir of nothing in particular.’”

Niki looked a little panicked. “I’m pretty sure it’s champion,” she said. “Almost positive.”

We did a quick Google search. It was “son and heir.”

“Oh no!” she said. “But ’son and heir’ doesn’t work for Evie, anyway, and ‘I am the champion of nothing in particular’ is a much better lyric, right?”

Whether it makes a better lyric or not, I don’t know, but I like it about 1000x better on the onesie. It cracks me up every time I see it.

As a side note, I once spent a good hour or so on KissThisGuy.com, the archive of misheard lyrics (named after the mishearing of “kiss the sky” in Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.”) By far my favorite entry, which I’ve remembered for years, was from someone who once thought “I’ll never be your beast of burden” was “I’ll never be obese, Roberta.”

We just received the fantastic news that my sixteen-year-old cousin, Kieran, won the Australian National Championships in Sydney with his barbershop quartet, The Fishbowl Boys.

Kieran’s third from the left in this band photo.

The boys worked incredibly hard to raise the funds to fly from Adelaide to Sydney for the competition, from busking in Rundle Mall (Adelaide’s main shopping district) to holding fundraiser barbecues at their school. (Note: I’ve heard rumors of groupies known as “Fishlings.”)

Here’s a clip from the local radio coverage of the Fishbowl Boys coming off of the plane at Adelaide airport, wherein they sing a 1925 song by Ray Henderson, “Sitting on Top of the World.”

Excellent stuff, Kieran! Big congrats from NY.

HBO has another home run in Flight of the Conchords. It’s a brilliant little comedy featuring two New Zealanders as struggling musicians living in NYC. The show is pitch-perfect, and the occasional little digs at the NZ/Oz one-sided rivalry are particularly great.

I found this clip of the Conchords doing “The Humans Are Dead” from one of their earlier live shows. It’s hilarious, and I’m stunned at the perfection of Jermaine’s Mac computer voice impersonation, which kicks in about halfway through.

(via schneider)

Thanks to my friend Ron, we got tickets to the VIP section for Elvis Costello’s show at the Nokia Theatre in NYC last Wednesday night. The show was absolutely brilliant, with tons of stuff from the old days, including fantastic versions of “Uncomplicated,” “Radio Radio” and “Lipstick Vogue.” He played for well over two hours, and his voice has never sounded better. His band, The Imposters, is pretty much the Attractions with the guy from Cracker on bass. Awesome stuff.

To represent one of the best live shows I’ve ever seen, here’s one of the worst pics I’ve ever taken, thanks to my crappy cellphone camera and a few beers:

The tour and the VIP lounge were sponsored by Visa, which was strange enough, seeing Elvis matched up with a corporate sponsor. The most surreal part, however, was the “Visa Meet & Greet” afterwards, which Ron was able to sneak us into.

Ron took us down to a backstage lounge with potted palms and massive couches. There was a masking tape “X” on the floor in one corner, and when Elvis came in, a blonde girl dressed in black with a clipboard and a headset called out our names to step onto the “X” and have our photo taken with Elvis.

Names were called, small groups of people stepped forward and shook Elvis’s hand, put their arm around him for a quick picture, then wandered off. As we neared the front of the line, my friend Steve leaned in and said, “You know, it’s like having your picture taken with a parrot at a resort.”

There was a very Madame Tussaud’s-like quality to our photo op with Elvis. I mean, technically we met him, but the word “met” connotes something far more involved than the reality. We stumbled up, I said something completely retarded and incomprehensible about it having been an incredible show, two quick flashes fired, and we were off.

It has to be said, though: If you had a cardboard cutout of the quintissential Elvis (the 2007 Elvis, anyway), this is pretty much what you’d want him to look like—full gangsta lean and cocked bluesman’s hat.

(Total number of cool people in the following photo: 1)

It’s like the story my friend Todd told me about the time his brother was standing in a bar and Mick Jagger passed by. He shouted, “Hey Mick!” at Jagger’s back, but the singer gave no reaction whatsoever. Todd’s brother still refers to the moment as “that time I met Mick Jagger.”

Thanks to Ron, this will forever be “that time we hung out with Elvis.” I’m sure Elvis recalls it as fondly as we do.

Viacom launched a $1 billion lawsuit against Google/YouTube yesterday for “massive intentional copyright infringement.” They’re not the first to file suit, but it’s the biggest action taken by the biggest player to date, and it’s unlikely the last of its kind. Here’s the full story.

Add to that last week’s demand by ASCAP for much higher performance royalties on “all Internet transmissions of musical works to the public,” and you’re looking at big changes ahead in 2007 in the video sharing space.

Mark Cuban, who has been predicting this for some time, weighs in:

Google may not know it, but they have already lost. They will lose this case if it’s fought to the end, and whatever moral victories they may be able to gain in a legal battle or settlement will be ripped from them when the DMCA is changed. Then they will still have to negotiate with copyright owners to get their content. The entertainment industry may not be great at many things, but getting copyright law changed to meet their expectations is one thing they are better [at] than anyone. (link to full article)

Early 80’s hip hop icon Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel from the Furious Five will be the first Hip Hop artists inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame later this month. Here’s a great 1992 interview with Melle Mel and Grandmaster Flash rebroadcast this week as a web audio stream on NPR’s Fresh Air.

On the origin of his name, Melle Mel says, “Flash gave me that name, because my name was just Melvin, so I didn’t think that would be too cool a name, you know: MC Melvin.”

British comic Adam Buxton does a live vocal edit of an NWA song for his young son. Fantastic.

Searchin’ my car, lookin’ for the biscuits, thinking every chap is selling bits of chocolate.

(via chris)

Lots going on right now at Pump Audio. This week we put our Soundtrack service online, which will launch officially in the next couple of weeks. It’s the first online search and license tool for Pump’s independent music catalog. Take a look.