Hungover at 8 'o' clock and BEASTIE BOYS VIDEO ANTHOLOGY (100)

I'm writing this post at 8:45 on a Tuesday night, and I'll be quite honest, I'm pretty hungover. My head is pounding (in the way that only booze can make it), my mouth is dry (and no amount of water seems to satiate its need) and my stomach is frolicking on the edge of hunger and nausea.

I was drunk at noon today - this is not a regular part of my weekly routine. Three of my loutish friends and I (Whiskey Pete, Freytiger and Jonathan-Marc) attended the Anchor Steam brewing tour.

What's Anchor Steam? It's beer, delicious delicious beer made only in this fair city I now call home. What's an Anchor Steam brewing tour? A tour through there beautiful brew house that ends with a hefty sampling of their delicious beers. I believe I drank seven beers ... in forty minutes.

Things I liked about the Anchor Steam brewing tour: beer drinking, the bottling machine (look how it spins!), the way our tour guide sounded out every single syllable, our tour guides seeming dislike of his job (it's just refreshing to see job-discontent in action), beer drinking, Summer Beer straight from the tap.

Things I didn't like about the Anchor Steam tour: realizing that old people are the reason for all things bad in the world, the way our tour guide eyed us when we first came in as if he knew we were drunken trouble, the fact that I couldn't stand on the railing to get a better look at my beloved bottling machine, the man with the accent, the man with the blue backpack, the man in the orange shirt, questions, questions, questions.

I am still a little drunk. My post might make no sense.

I'm a little disappointed, for the first time ever, that The Criterion Collection picked The Beastie Boys Video Anthology (100) as their hundredth film. Of all the amazing, absolutely wonderful films they could have thrown a few dollars at to celebrate their cresting of the big 1-0-0, they decided to piece together, an admittedly thorough, collection of, sigh, Beastie Boy videos?

I sat through them though, and here's my thoughts:

1. I love robots doing the robot.

These fuckers are creative. Undoubtedly. And it is certainly nice to see, in this age of music videos disappearing in to the hobbit holes of the interwebs, the work of a group who put pride and effort in to their visual representations. And hell, it's always funny to see a giant cardboard robot doing the robot. I laughed, loudly.

2. There is a timeless quality to these fellows.

At any given point in this collection of videos these gentlemen could've been anywhere from 20 to 50. Maybe Mick Jagger let them borrow his needle set and Vitamin B injections, because it's at least a little weird.

3. Or maybe it's a dated quality...

I couldn't figure out, while watching video thirty million, if the timeless quality was because they're aging exceptionally well, or if it's because no matter what time period it is (though I notice they subtly excised the whole "No Sleep 'Til Brooklyn" era) everyone of their songs sound exactly the same. Every rap consists of them name-checking, talking about dancing, and perhaps rhyming something with the word "flop". Perhaps if you never change, you become immortal. Like the Highlander.

4. Or maybe it's a timeless dated quality. Yeah that's it.

Strange to say this with Adam Yauch battling cancer, but these guys seems literally unphased by the progression of music or the ravages of age. They're pushing 50 and nothing seems to have changed, except the thread count of their sheets and how many dollar dollar bills they're sleeping on.

5. Why?

I don't have a lot to say about this collection of videos. I still love "Sabotage" and "Roots Down" but that's all I really got. I haven't looked at what 200 is, but it better not be a Weezer Video Anthology, or I'm throwing down.

Thursday: 100 Fucking Films!