The Bicameral Mind

Bloggers condemned to one hundred years of solitude have no second reader on earth.

2008-02-21T10:35:00.000-08:00

Hi folks,
As you probably already surmised, my interest in facetious, impersonal blogging has pretty much run its course for the time being. If I ever devise a plan to attract even fewer readers, I will trumpet my return. Until then, I'm going to go lay down in Nickajack Cave and wait for a spiritual epiphany (if it's not too cold there).

'07 films (more or less) that I saw in '07

2007-12-30T10:39:00.000-08:00

in approximate order of preference

The top tier:

and the rest:

GRINDHOUSE finished dead last (behind the lowly MR. BROOKS) and thus doesn't get a still :p

This list is as half-hearted as the guy from LCD Soundsystem's vocals

2007-12-26T07:24:00.000-08:00

Here they are, my favorite Hott Traxx and Jammz(z) -- accompanied by YOUR least-favorite weak quips -- of '07:

1. Amy Winehouse - "Rehab;" even though this song was a lot more fun before she turned into Shane McGowan with a beehive.

2. Ted Leo & The Pharmacists – "Rappaport's Testament: I Never Gave Up;" In a typical example of my denseness, I still don't know the story behind this song. Also, I normally don't place cover songs at the top of my best-of lists, unless the tune in question was originally done by Roxette. Nevertheless, TL really stomps some ass on this Chumbawumba cover. He also made the only (non-comedy) album I was really crazy about this year, which is why there's no albums list yet. I know, where else can you possibly get your fix of year-end listmaking?!?

3. Jay Reatard – "I Know a Place;" I typed out a little ironic routine about this song title answering the previous sentence, but after a bit of reflection I think the prudent course is to acknowledge the coincidence and move on.

4. Feist – "1234;" I already accepted a couple of years ago that commercials are the new radio. I'm sure there's no shortage of people hating on this cathcy song with simple lyrics as they trip over themselves trying to find the next forgettable indie-prog sensation ("They have the pretension of Yes, but none of the competence!")

5. Von Sudenfed – "The Rhinohead;" Mark E. Smith's trademark mutterings seem weirdly suited to dance music. I bet his presence would've even improved that Fatboy Slim concert film (!) I caught a portion of on Starz the other day. At the very least, he'd look better in a Hawaiian shirt than Norman Cook.

6. Radiohead – "All I Need;" Since this was my favorite song on In Rainbows, and my least favorite moment was the sputtering percussion that opens the album, I'm sure I've lost whatever sliver of acerbic credibility I had somewhere.

7. The Black Lips – "O Katrina;" Unless I've completely misinterpreted this song's meaning, I believe it's also about the guy from "Rappaport's Testament," except told from a female perspective. Imagine that subject turning up twice in one year!

8. Heavy Trash - "They Were Kings;" Jon Spencer dispenses with tired rock canon reverence and pays tribute to unsung bands like the Cheater Slicks and Destination Lonely for a change. Can a Doo Rag biopic be far behind?

9. Robert Wyatt – "Just as You Are;" A great duet between Wyatt and his wife Alfreda Benge. Almost as touching as Serge and Charlotte Gainsbourg's "Lemon Incest."

10. Iron & Wine – "Boy With a Coin," Loved his homemade debut a few years ago, but that wispy voice doesn't always grab me in a more produced setting. This song did.

Reads 2007

2007-12-26T06:54:00.000-08:00

I made some progress this year in turning around my unprecedentedly lazy (for me) reading habits of 2006. I resolved to push dvds (tough), internet (ok) and social events (piece of cake) aside long enough to finish at least one book per month. Some of these were finished as quickly as one day and the longest took three months. This coming year I’m upping the ante to an average of two per month (please, temper your incredulity). That’s right, Tree of Smoke and Brothers Karamazov, prepare to be consumed by a reader of above-average voraciousness. These are in rough order of preference:

The Violent Bear It Away – Flannery O’Connor
Gilead – Marilynne Robinson
Immortality - Milan Kundera
The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
In Persuasion Nation – George Saunders
Herzog on Herzog - Paul Cronin and Werner Herzog
The Optimist’s Daughter – Eudora Welty
Into the Wild – Jon Krakauer
*about ½ of the Studs Terkel Reader
The Zanzibar Chest – Aidan Hartley
No Country for Old Men – Cormac McCarthy
The Areas of My Expertise – John Hodgman
The Code of the Woosters – P.G. Wodehouse
A Man Without a Country - Kurt Vonnegut
The Moviegoer – Walker Percy
Slapstick – Kurt Vonnegut
Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock n Roll – Nick Tosches
33 1/3: Loveless – Mike McGonical

Also read a couple of chapters of William Vollman’s Rising Up, Rising Down. I should finish a couple more by the time I retire. Currently reading: The God Delusion – Richard Dawkins

Please see "Mr. Brooks" for a real-life version of this game

2007-12-10T09:50:00.000-08:00

A few months ago I went through a couple rounds of the "Build-a-Movie Game" on the Friends of Tom board, which as usual only a couple of people participated in (what, does everyone have jobs or something? Pheh). This is where you're given three names and you have to devise a plot for a movie starring all three. Here's what I came up with for my suggestions:

Jim Brown, James Dean, Charo:

Jim Brown and James Dean star in this landmark drama as two men who overcome their racial differences and become closer than brothers, only to have their bond shattered by a pair of ferociously gyrating hips. While researching his family tree, Brown discovers that he and rival construction worker Dean are both direct descendents of the brutal King Leopold II of Belgium, who raped and/or artificially inseminated Congolese slaves and Belgian peasants alike. Stunned by a blood relation they didn't think possible, the two of them steal Dean's father's convertible and embark on a spiritual quest to Mexico, all the while brawling with rednecks and flouting society's corrupt rules. Once they arrive, however, both are tempted by vivacious nightclub singer Charo, who's also married to a famous bandleader/powerful, ruthless gangster (Xavier Cugat as himself). Soon Dean and Brown are rivals again and engage in a knockdown, drag out fight, after which Brown is gunned down in the street by Cugat's henchmen. Dean, overcome with guilt, swears revenge and trails the tuneful thug to his sprawling mansion. There he enacts deadly revenge upon Cugat, only to be coldbloodedly shot and killed by Charo while fleeing the premises (and possibly the premise). The only film ever made by director Brendan Fraser Sr. broke racial barriers across the nation upon its initial release and still has the power to shock today. Don't miss Black Heart, White Pout.

Jay-Z, Betty White, Martin Short:

Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter makes his surprising acting debut in this quirky, sensitive comedy drama from the people who brought you Otters Holding Hands (2009). Jigga plays Norman Westphal, a lonely Tae Bo instructor who spends all his free time collecting 78 RPM records and playing virtual world games like Third Life and Cyber Topeka. The course of his life irrevocably changes when he befriends two fellow eccentrics: Mabel Balducci (Betty White), a crotchety yet lovable ex-Broadway hoofer with Tourette's whose private press records Norman discovers at a friend's garage sale; and neighbor Zazz Gunnerson (Martin Short), a jittery, anxious, facially scarred bus driver who never got over his wife's death in a freak spelunking accident and is also obsessed with 60's French pop. The three of them decide to break out of their shells and embark on an epic cross country trip to New York, where Mabel hopes to nail one last Broadway audition. Due to a series of quirky circumstances, however, they must use a beat-up old jet pack that belonged to Zazz's uncle as their mode of transportation. Watch them hold on for emotional and physical life as they jet pack their way through a hilariously melancholy emotional journey that culminates in Norman's Mabel-inspired decision to cut a rap demo, which he performs in French as a tribute to Zazz. The film will inexplicably be named Boys and Girls in America after the Hold Steady album, and Craig Finn will have a cameo as a Davy Crockett hat-wearing street poet.

Eminem, James Garner, Dabney Coleman:

Marshall Mathers had reitred from the rap game and was enjoying a life of luxury, going so far as to sell his massive white t-shirt collection on eBay and remodel his home studio into a doggie day care center. But his peaceful existence is shattered by the return of a dangerous foe he thought was gone forever: his obsessed “biggest fan,” Stan. Turns out the rapper’s hit single was more autobiographical than he let on, and that the real Stan wasn’t actually in the car that went off the bridge at the end of the song. Instead, it was Stan’s brother Matthew, who was “an even bigger fan” of the rapper and thus had to be eliminated via the old brick-on-the-accelerator trick (NOTE: the authorities were never able to properly identify the bodies of Matthew or Stan’s girlfriend because gaseous pollution from a nearby power plant caused their bones to melt). Now Eminem once again finds himself on the receiving end of threatening letters like this one:

Dear Slim,
Writing a song about my story was in questionable taste
So I’m going to turn you into a form of edible paste.
I saw you last weekend at the Zach Galifianakis show
Now I’ll have to stab your atlantoaxialis lateralis slow

And so on.

Slim Shady becomes even more alarmed after hearing about the grisly murder of Sir Elton John (James Garner, in a taut-yet-flamboyant cameo), with whom he performed “Stan” on the Grammy awards a few years ago. One night, in an elaborate set-piece, Elton is lured to a dinosaur museum where he believes he’ll be performing a benefit show for the Duke of Gloucester. Instead, he finds a hooded Stan waiting for him with a variety of crude but effective weapons fashioned from pterodactyl bones. An elaborate game of cat and mouse follows, culminating in Stan cornering Elton on the roof of the museum. Stan, whose face we never clearly see, pulls a gun and gravely intones “It’s only fitting that one dinosaur should kill another,” before shooting the skylight glass out from under Elton’s feet. The former Rocket Man plunges to the floor, where he’s impaled on a triceratops horn just before impact. Stan looks down at his well-predicted handiwork and spits out a terse “Goodbye English chode” before swiftly fleeing the scene.

Determined not to end up like Elton in any way, Eminem seeks out the one man he believes can help: Phil Collins (played by Dabney Coleman), whose song “In the Air Tonight” Eminem briefly referenced in “Stan” and who he becomes convinced is the disturbed fan’s next target. Having murdered a stalker in self-defense in the early 80’s (an incident which formed the basis of Genesis’ hit “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight,”) Collins is widely considered to be a grizzled, deadly expert in such matters. He reluctantly agrees to go along with Eminem’s plan to lure Stan to Collins’ mansion, knock him unconscious, pose him funny, and then call the authorities. While laying in wait in his office for Stan one fateful, stormy night, and with Eminem waiting in the next room, Collins absentmindedly fiddles with some unopened mail, until a certain suspicious envelope catches his eye. He slowly opens it and reads the letter inside, which is printed on Dr. Dre “Chronic 2001” stationary and reveals the movie’s shocking plot twist…

SPOILER

SPOILER

SPOILER

…that Eminem is actually Stan and always has been!!! The letter from Eminem unfurls the whole sick plot: that the stalker Phil murdered was Eminem’s real biological father (who Em repeatedly claimed he never knew); that the rapper’s entire career, the “In the Air Tonight” reference in “Stan,” and the Elton John murder were all just elaborate ploys to gain him access to the scene of his father’s murder (i.e. Phil’s house); that Matthew was actually Eminem’s brother and that Stan’s girlfriend who died was actually Eminem’s ex-wife Kim Mathers, who was later replaced in public appearances by a Russian-born look-a-like paid to go along with the ruse. A sheet-white Collins looks up to see Eminem standing behind him holding the instrument that killed his father: a self-defense drumstick with a retractable blade protruding from the thick end. Eminem maces Collins and rushes at him with the drumstick, but the English rocker instinctually dodges him and the blade becomes lodged in Collins’ desk. While Eminem struggles to free the drumstick from its temporary mahogany jail, a blinded Collins runs through the halls of his sprawling mansion in a desperate attempt to escape. As Eminem stalks him through the house, Collins must also endure the rapper’s newfound love of sinister quips, such as: “Hey Phil, since you can’t see anything does that mean you have an… invisible touch, lol?” (and yes, he pronounces “el-oh-el” out loud to enhance his evilness)

Thankfully, a diversion is provided during the melee by the sudden arrival of R&B singer Phillip Bailey, who dueted with Collins on the #1 hit “Easy Lover” in 1984. Bailey senses that Collins is in danger via some unspecified psychic ability, but almost immediately upon entering the house he’s stabbed with an axe that Eminem finds laying around in the pantry. Collins, having regained sufficient eyesight, seizes this opportunity to sneak up behind Eminem, grab the drumstick, and stab him in the neck in the exact same spot where his father died. As Phil thrusts the blade deeper, he turns the tables on Eminem pun-wise and growls “I’m sending you to ‘another green world,’ which is also a Brian Eno album I played drums on,” just before dropping the rap superstar to the floor in a lifeless heap.

An exhausted Collins then collapses on the floor as we fade to black. When we fade back in, three months have passed and we see Phil sitting in his garden, soaking up sunshine as his maid brings him the mail. A particularly ominous envelope causes him to freeze, and as he slowly opens it we see the letter inside is printed on Dr. Dre “Chronic 2012” stationary. He drops the envelope to the ground in terror and the camera pans in on the return address, which belongs to Eminem’s daughter, Hailie (NOTE: it’ll just say “Hailie,” and in the final cut we realized we didn’t explain that’s his daughter’s name, so I’m telling you now so you’ll know).

A Blog with 50 pounds of headlines stapled to its chest

2007-11-25T21:27:00.000-08:00

Two of my all-time heroes be rackin' up Frequent Blogger miles lately and are cleared for takeoff to your Fascination Zone (I think it's time to go to bed):

Carrie Brownstein likes q-tips, hates precious music (mirroring my tastes exactly)
Tom Scharpling reviews every James Bond movie ever; mocks Bill Parcells lookalikes.

Also, I thought either No Country For Old Guys or There Won't Not Be Blood would have Movie of the Year honours locked up, but it turns out I'm Not There is a contender too. More on that later. Don't read any other blogs til I get back... not even the ones I linked. If you do, I'll be able to smell it.

Beowulf

2007-11-16T15:07:00.000-08:00

I don't know if I've ever known anyone - including me (not to be confused with the villainous, wraithlike Not Me) - who actually enjoyed this dumb poem. I suppose it's only fitting that they've adapted it into a supremely goofy-looking entry in the "I'M-YELLING-LIKE-BRAVEHEART" genre of film. One thing's for sure, I highly doubt Crispin Glover's performance as Beowulf's monstrous, large-tailed foe Grendel tops my own portrayl of the creature from my Old English literature class in college. Like most of the class exercises from this period, I don't recall what the point was, but everyone had to form groups and act out scenes from the material we had read that semester. I was assigned to portray the scaly villain Grendel, perhaps because my icy paleness fostered rumours of reptillian blood that hounded me throughout my scholastic life. This in-class performance entailed (ho ho) fashioning an elaborate costume that consisted of a fierce nametag pointedly identifying myself as the waste-laying monster, and a prop tail sewn together by a cowed classmate from old pillows or something.

While Sir Dwight Sheckman, the author of Beowulf, portrays Grendel as a fierce killing machine in the early stanzas, I called upon my Methodd* training to unlock the diffident nature at the character's core; disposing of my enemies with appropriately wry nonchalance rather than unseemly vigor. When I was called upon to convey Grendel's panicked terror during his losing battle to Beowulf, I let forth the thundering, soul-shattering utterance, "Ow, my tail;" a moment that so rocked my classmates they had no recourse but to laugh to ease the unbearable dramatic tension in the room. Finally, once I, GrendelChris (the line where my character ended and I began had become distressingly blurred), was dispatched to the icy depths, I compounded my character's misery by intentionally getting my tail caught in the door following my dramatic exit from the classroom. Needless to say, word of my world-beating performance reverberated across select portions of the campus for a good hour or so after class.

But if I may quote one of Sir Sheckman's own lines to reflect the aftermath of this event, "We mayest be thru with Grendel, but Grendel sureth ain't thru with us." I found, dear reader, that one cannot disappear so deeply into the mind of a monster without sacrificing a part of oneself. But what black inner morass spawned in place of my old self? To this day I cannot say, except that it may be nestled in the liver. All I know is, the urge to don The Tail and swat at passerby remains strong, and on some languid nights it's all I can do to summon the strength to supress it. Will I manage to keep the monster at bay? Will Crispin Glover finally pay me some much-deserved royalties? And how will Auntie Anne's pretzels figure into future events? Stay tuned...

*a style of acting that utilizes a concentrated lack of effort to uncover a powerfully incompetent form of dramatic truth; not to be confused with the the "Method" taught by Lee Strasberg, which mainly involves excessive twitching and biting the heads off rodents.

You can't help but compare yourself against the old bloggers.

2007-11-11T16:57:00.000-08:00

Cormac McCarthy's recent chat with the Coen Brothers in TIME revealed that over the years, whenever he wasn't building shelter or memorizing antique dictionaries, he had time to see at least a few movies (appropriately enough, he's a Malick fan). Maybe he had at least a flickering thought of a film adaptation in the back of his mind when he was writing his atypically brisk thriller No Country For Old Men, the only one of the six McCarthy books I've read so far that seemed tailor-made for the screen; what with its cattle gun-and-air tank-wielding supervillain, its outrageous but not-undigestible violence, and its ambiguously gay wizards and witches. Thankfully, the Coen Brothers were of course smart enough to realize the potential for cinematic greatness there on the page, provided there was no excessive tinkering. Of course, I read plenty of fretful comments on the intertubes about how the Coens would supposedly ruin the material with their "wink-wink approach," as if that's all they ever bring to the table, and as if McCarthy's work were 100% humorless. I would think both author and filmmakers are at least somewhat bemused, for instance, at the sheriff in No Country who laments the presence of "kids with green hair and bones in their noses" on the streets of small Texas towns, even if the concern for our decaying world is real. So if it looked to you from the previews and trailers of this movie that the Coens nailed it, they did. Well, you could argue the ending is somewhat deflating, but it worked for me, and reminded me how No Country can be seen as a pre-apocalyptic prelude to The Road.

Now bring on the other film of 2007 that looks like some fantasy movie draft pick, There Will Be Blood. Kudos to Paul Thomas Anderson for turning one of the two phrases that guarantee box office success into an actual film title (the other one being There Won't Be Balls).

Just in time for Halloween!

2007-11-01T15:11:00.000-07:00

The Shining recently topped some British poll of the scariest horror movies (just take my word for it - don't stifle me with your link orthodoxy, man). This despite the fact that only the beginning of the movie is all that creepy. The rest of it is mostly about Kubrick making a hotel look cool and Jack not having to worry about being too high to act that day. Not that I'm complaining. I could have picked a much scarier #1 than that though; In fact, I think any of these classics would do in a pinch:

Mr. Blandings Builds Your Grave (1950)
The Betamax Throttler (1982)
Friend of Blacula (1978)
The Hag I Saw in Saginaw (1925)
Alien vs. Pitchfork (2005)
It Smudged My Boat Shoes (1998; available for sale on latenightshots.com)
The Baconator (2007; released for a limited time only)
Weekend at Cthulhu’s (1989)
Kraftwerk Treffen Sie den Wolfmann (German, 1977)
Adult Kickball Slaughterhouse (2010; actually a script of mine)
www.yourbrainsbeenslashed/slash/thefilm.gov (1999)
The Cripple That Went Out During the Day (1935)
We Are Zombie Marshall (2007)
Jerry Lewis Meets the West Memphis Three (1994; never released; believed to be destroyed)
MAC and Me (???)

As a side note, you should avoid these at all costs:
Brunch of the Dead (1990 remake)
Don’t Pick Up the Phone Unless It’s Me 2: What Did I Tell You?!? (1974)
The Critic-Murdering Spectre (working title; M. Night Shyamalan, 2008)

I'm

2007-10-31T12:21:00.000-07:00

...going to see the latest final cut of Blade Runner tonight. Please God, please don't let there be people there dressed as Rutger Hauer and/or Daryl Hannah for Halloween. I can handle Edward James Olmos, but not that. Update to follow later.

Also, complete this sentence:

"Where you're going..." e.g. "Where you're going, they serve fry grease instead of coffee and the jukebox only plays bass solos." OR: "Where you're going, the crowds are so ugly even Paul Stanley doesn't love them." OR, in honour of tonight's movie, "Where you're going, the electric sheep dream of androids for chrissakes! Ooo!" I know you could do better.

UPDATE: OF COURSE no one was in costume. Plus, Edward James Olmos (or "EdJOlm" as the gossip rags call him) was way creepier than I remember. This is now the third version of the movie I've seen, on what is probably the biggest screen in DC. Funny thing is, it's still not THAT good. The Ford/Sean Young relationship is a bore, and a lot of it just kind of drags and feels weirdly inert. The whole appeal of Blade Runner remains about 6% Rutger Hauer and 94% the overwhemlingly amazing visuals. Just think, without that landmark cityscape Billy Idol's Cyberpunk album and all that anime I ignored might never have happened!

By the way, the military ads that seem to run before every AMC theater showing I've been to in the last few years are getting more and more ridiculously overblown. This time we were treated to an interminable, propaganda-laden music video by 3 Doors Down (who I hear just left their label and signed with In the Red) that actually drew jeers afterward. Plus, the total avoidance of Iraq in these ads is bitterly amusing, in a "Screw You, Taxpayer" kind of way.

Misselanius things I like (Did I spell "things" right?)

2007-10-29T18:51:00.000-07:00

For starters, I like this comp:
If you intuitively trust two soul/funk/hip hop djs to put together a more interesting rockabilly/jump blues comp than, say, some lumpy wannabe greaser, your trust will be rewarded. As Keb Darge queries in the liner notes, "Why do so many people listen to so much shit today when they haven't heard this stuff yet?"

Whether you dig the new Radiohead album or have already kinda had your 160 kbps fill of it, you may be interested in another commercially viable band that took their sound even further out into abstratct territory. Try downloading this jazz-like (which in my head does not equal "jazzy," or even "jazzgasmic"), occasionally woozy-sounding gem for $6 next.
I like this funny show, which I didn't realize before I bought the dvd is only 9 minutes long and thus all over YouTube:

I really, really like this hardass movie, which is the Ultimate Paul Schrader Film. Taxi Driver was already the Ultimate Paul Schrader Script; I'm sorry the 70's never brought us the Ultimate Paul Schrader Game Show ("How much do you bid for this cache of small arms?"). This film is still not on dvd in the States, so of course I'm obligated to mention it here.

And above all else, I like - nay, love - the "Shreds" videos. StSanders, you are so aptly monikered. You can't not laugh at this:

This whole premise is sweaty.

2007-10-28T20:31:00.000-07:00

Hi folks, still dealing with a bunch of shit that I've tried twice to address here, unsuccessfully. One very, very minor issue right now: I really do not want to get back to the usual shallow subject matter of this blog, yet eventually I probably will. So if you're currently not getting enough shallowness from other sources, be patient.

OK, I will mention I recently watched what will hopefully be the only 7 minutes of Californication I'll ever see. I know, it's hard to believe that a show named after a Red Hot Chilli Peppers album could be lame, but hear me out. Within the first 30 seconds it looked pretty clear that this show would be Duchovny's slurpy b l0wj0b to himself, and sure enough what happens onscreen two minutes later? He gets a b l0wj0b! Actually, two of them: once in a dream (in a church! EDGY!), then another immediately upon waking up. I didn't want to stick around for the trifecta. HBO may be looking a little hapless lately, but despite its newfound hype everything on Showtime still looks like half-assed* sensationalism to me. Except for Penn & Teller's libertarian "truthbusting" show, which annoys me in other ways and may have been designed for people who find Bill Maher too cuddly.

One more completely random thing I'll mention, aprops of nothing: Lately I've been craving a neck massage. No, not some creepy variant of a massage either. It's for actual tension. Well, I guess it's kinda creepy in that I don't want one from a professional, but it's still not the premium cable kind, is what I'm saying. Wait, what am I saying?

*in this case, I don't know if I'd necessarily prefer the whole ass.**
** EDIT: It only occured to me this morning that this is the second of three posts this month to use "half-assed" as an adjective. Is "quarter-assed" a phrase? I may have to file it away out of necessity.

"It's all a big nothin'" - Livia Soprano*

2007-10-16T11:45:00.000-07:00

*not the healthiest fictional character to channel, I know.

Hi, folks - all 4-5 of you - no more posts until November or so. Things are really rough right now. In the meantime, I'll leave you with this gratuitious zinger from the Washington Post review of Drew Carey's Price is Right debut:

Carey was as much spectator as performer. He lacks, at least so far, the ability to control the contestants and keep them from wandering out of camera range during their euphoric conniptions, leaving what might be considered the host's sphere of influence. Carey is something of a sphere himself; when he first came out from the wings at the start of the show, he brought to mind the giant mechanical peacekeeper that went haywire in the first minutes of the movie "RoboCop."

This of course coming from Tom "Pizza the Hut" Shales (as long as we're referencing 80's movies).

Best director ever to inspire an awful Le Tigre song

2007-10-06T14:21:00.000-07:00

Every time I read some reference to "mumblecore" (is that still around?) or catch five insufferable minutes of The Puffy Chair on Sundance, I'm tempted to think "What hath John Cassavetes wrought?" Long considered the "patron saint of independent film," not even the best of his microbudget progeny seem to have inherited the kind of odd originality and heavily spiked life juice that pulsates through his finest work -- namely, the entire run from Faces ('68) to Opening Night ('77), along with his "farewell" '84 film, Love Streams (still haven't seen Shadows). A Cassavetes film can be thrilling, albeit exhausting, for viewers who adapt to the extreme emotional shifts and individualistic, drunken language, or just half-assed and irritating for those that don't. But I don't envy anyone that would reject so many wild, priceless moments: Gena Rowlands waiting for the school bus in A Woman Under the Influence; Ben Gazzara taking time out from a forced mob hit to check in on the status of his awful nightclub act in Killing of a Chinese Bookie; Gena suffering through a horrific blind date in Minne and Moskowitz, only to eventually find true love w/ Seymour Cassel and his facial hair; Gena again "shaking things up" for Cassavetes by bringing him a stable of barnyard animals in Love Streams, to name but a few. If you're tuned to Cassavetes' wavelength, the creative rush of his films is still palpable, and certainly very few American filmmakers past or present were ever so liberated in their work, or reached so high for a new mode of self-expression.

But wait, I've just discovered there's more! Cassavetes apparently sought to make great strides not just in filmmaking, but in the realm of wacky talk show appearances as well. Cassavetes, Gazzara and Peter Falk appeared on a full episode of the Dick Cavett Show in 1970, ostensibly to promote Husbands, which as you can tell from the Life cover above was anticipated with much critical fanfare at the time. However, they must have decided the best way to do so would be to try to recreate the film's mad bender vibe on Cavett's show. Dick was a professed Faces fan and remains a great, witty sport throughout his guests' Three Method Stooges act, whereas Letterman would have probably gritted his teeth for five minutes before moving on to the next barely engaged interview. The full episode is uploaded complete with vintage commercials in part one below, as well as parts two, three and four.

Also, here's a bonus slice of Dick Cavett awesomeness (as always, bear in mind my criteria for awesomeness may differ wildly from yours): a great clip from the Orson Welles interview that Gazzara briefly refers to in one of the above clips

Maborosi

2007-09-27T14:57:00.001-07:00

I rented this 1995 Japanese film from the director of After Life and Nobody Knows (both unseen by me), on the strength of this youtube clip, which would be gorgeous if youtube were capable of such a thing. The overhead shot with the snowfall beginning -- fantastic. Unfortunately, the US dvd from New Yorker is wretched, much like my attitude in this post. Looks transferred straight from vhs, exactly the opposite of what this carefully composed film demands. Nevertheless, judge this 6 1/2 minutes for yourself.

Another unnecessary sequel!

2007-09-24T02:12:00.000-07:00

Fuggedabout Schmidt (2009) - Jack Nicholson returns as discontented retiree Warren Schmidt, and this time he's teaming up with mob boss Frank Vincent to steal -- aaaah, fugeddaboutit! Directed by Linc Cassavetes (yup, there's another one).

Well, they say that Santa Fe is less than ninety miles away...

2007-09-23T18:51:00.000-07:00

The term “media circus” didn’t emerge until the mid-70’s, but by 1951, Billy Wilder had already literalized the concept onscreen in his caustic satire Ace in the Hole, recently rescued from oblivion by a much-celebrated Criterion dvd release. When a miner is trapped in a cave-in while scavenging for “Indian artifacts” in New Mexico, opportunistic reporter Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas) spins the predicament into an epic human interest story that attracts hordes of gawkers, reporters, entertainers, and yes, even a full-fledged carnival (not-so-subtly titled “the Great S&M Amusement Corp.” in a sneaky move past the censors) to the site. While the disgraced, ex-big time reporter seeks to prolong the rescue mission until he can leverage his way back to his old job with a New York paper, the miner’s discontented wife (Jan Sterling) plans to skip town once the story blows over; lining her coffers in the meantime by charging admission to the site.

Ace has a reputation as Wilder’s most cynical study of human nature, and indeed Douglas’ Tatum is one of the meanest bastards ever to appear outside of a gangster picture in a Hayes Code-era Hollywood film. Stridently unethical and verbally, as well as physically, abusive, Tatum seemingly embodies every negative trope of the 50’s-era news business that Wilder and co-writers Walter Newman and Lesser Samuels could throw in; and the film’s contempt for the broadly drawn “Mr. and Mrs. America” types who lap up every tragic detail of the story (and ostensibly resemble a large segment of Hollywood’s usual target audience) is almost equally pronounced. Not surprisingly, the film was such a box office bomb that Paramount never even released it on VHS, and in fact recouped some of its losses from Wilder’s salary on his next hit, Stalag 17.

Unfortunately, Wilder’s cynicism isn’t as perfectly realized here as in masterpieces like Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard; occasionally coming off not only as one-note but insultingly obvious. Tatum’s canny deflection of suspicion from the obviously unwieldy drilling plan also seems like a stretch, until you recall the mainstream media recently took their own sweet-ass time before raising hard questions about the deadly Utah mine disaster. Nevertheless, the film is a must-see not just for its uncompromising tone but because its audacity is complemented to outstanding effect by Wilder’s typically pimped out dialogue and some of the sharpest cinematography of his career.

Ace in the Hole would also make a great double-bill with the even-more prescient A Face in the Crowd (1957). While most Americans today can probably at least acknowledge the distasteful overkill of most media circuses, even as they devote their unhealthy interest to them, plenty are still wholly, gullibly snookered by the sort of sinister, phony folksy charm Andy Griffith lays on in Elia Kazan’s cautionary tale, as evidenced by George W. Bush and that doofy red pickup truck that future washout presidential candidate Fred Thompson uses exclusively for campaign appearances.

"Where am I going to get a pair of beautiful women's legs on such short notice?"

2007-09-14T19:47:00.000-07:00

(Above: a possible still from Napolean Dynamite 2: Awkward Boogaloo)

Roger Ebert has been covering the Toronto Film Festival and gives a typically generous heads up (Yes, I said "heads up." I dare not infringe his copyright) about the latest Quirky Indie Comedy that will be driving me nuts in a couple of months... probably without me ever actually seeing it. Juno stars Ellen Page as a 16-year-old pregnant with Michael Cera's mumbleseed, and everything Ebert writes about it gives me an uneasy feeling: The film received a warm, loud, standing ovation (So did Clerks II at Cannes. Means nothing. Plus, the audience was probably packed with these shills); The characters in this situation are unlike any others he's seen before (i.e. they're all driven by precocious child logic that has no bearing on reality); and he predicts the film will be "quickly beloved when it opens at Christmas time" -- most likely by an audience suddenly demanding their comic heroes stride across the screen decked out in a demeaning mish-mash of 70's/80's/90's retrogeek fashion. Michael Cera doesn't need a goofy costume to be funny, but such sloppy visual cues are apparently the new definition of crowd-pleasing for nostalgia-addled... whipper snappers (there, I said it!) who watch too danged much VH1. Why doesn't that channel ever play Amy Grant videos anymore, anyway?

But, we'll see. I could be very wrong, as I was in my little-read 1997 essay on The Sweet Hereafter, "Tragically Hilarious: Atom Egoyan's Bus-Crashing Laff Hoedown." First-time screenwriter Diablo Cody previously adapted her blog Pussy Ranch - which chronicled her time as an "unlikely" stripper - into a book that landed her this Letterman appearance. Wikipeida not-inaccurately notes that Dave was "imbued with fascination with the sex industry and her observational prowess" during the interview. Hey, it beats listening to Paul Schaeffer's constant cackling. I just found out about Cody 20 minutes ago, but my cold assessment is that her friendly demeanor, calculated wit and anime-ready moniker clearly mark her as a savvy purveyor of Fleshbot-friendly geek chic (I demand that appear as a blurb somewhere). Ultimately, that means she would probably charm me out of my nothin-happenin' schlubdom with ease if we ever met, before she returned to her multitude of fulfilling projects and I to my pretentious Netflix rentals, respectively.

Boy, this post really went in an unintended direction. It's almost like I got my just desserts for complaining about a movie I haven't seen yet; But how could that be?

Update (non-all caps version): I waited until after I posted this to read Michael Hirschon's notes on the proliferation of quirk in The Atlantic, which gets off to an immediately shaky start with its use of the term "Gen-X" but mostly recovers. Looks like I avoided too much overlap, except for a shared disdain of Napolean Dynamite, as Hirschon's big target is Ira Glass. Between this and the Onion's recent smackdown, isn't it odd how there's apparently a This American Life backlash suddenly brewing? For what it's worth, I agree that the one episode of the tv version I saw didn't work at all, with Glass' "And now for something completely different" transitions serving as the nadir. As for a couple of Hirschon's other examples, if anything Arrested Development is more zany than quirky, and Flight of the Conchords ended up charming me to the point where it was my favorite show of the summer. Granted, the only other competition was John From Cincinnati, but still.

Yet more about TheWirethewirethewire

2007-09-03T12:15:00.001-07:00

A good read from the Washington Post about the last day of filming. They report the s5 premiere date as Jan 6 - sooner than I thought. So you know what that means: S4 arrives on dvd Dec 4.

As Philly Boy Roy would say:

2007-09-02T20:31:00.000-07:00

"Who does he think he is, Omelet Ertegun?"

Sunday's New York Times Magazine had a feature article on former wanna-be wrestling manager/current Columbia Records co-chairman Rick Rubin, detailing his efforts to save the music industry without having to get up from the comfort of his zabuton. First, I should mention the article is amusingly bookended by Rubin's discovery of a "new" band called the Gossip, who I first saw when they opened for Sleater-Kinney in 2000 and are so popular in England that Beth Ditto bared her corpulent flesh on the cover of the NME. Second, this is more like Rubin-as-Guru PR stuff, rather than an astute appraisal of his credentials as a producer. I'd like to read more about just how "hands-off" his role is during the recording process; surely Slipknot can't be the only band with grievances? That said, one need only type the words "Def Jam" to shore up Rubin's cultural cache, and he was unquestionably a godsend for Johnny Cash's career. There may not have been a Walk the Line and probably a lot fewer reissues if the Rubin-helmed American albums hadn't made Cash marketable to Gens X, Y, XY, YX, MXPX, and so forth. He also deserves credit/blame for extending the Red Hot Chili Peppers' career by at least 15 years, thereby establishing Chad Smith as a national treasure (and ensuring that I will now get tons of google hits for "Chad Smith" + "national treasure").

The article also details some of Rubin's ideas for saving the major music labels, who at one time could weather storms like home taping and the Rock 'N' Wrestling Connection but are now in genuine danger of collapse. I have doubts about Rubin's proposed $19.95 subscription model, but at least he seems to be bringing something to the table other than flailing gestures and the usual contempt for consumers and artists alike. Take Steve Barnett of Columbia's suggestion in the article to start gobbling up artists' touring and merchandise revenue; Not exactly the kind of idea that'll prompt Steve Albini to shutter his recording studio and start a supergroup with Ashlee Simpson, Taylor Hicks and Gibby Haynes.

As for me, I don't pretend to know what could solve the major labels' woes, but I did think of a couple of possibilities while writing this post:

1) Have prominent Dead Boys fan Jim Cramer go on CNBC and beg the Federal Reserve to bail out the music industry like he did in response to the mortage crisis.

2) Expand upon a curious new phenomenon I witnessed firsthand at a club the other night: band elections! Normally, you couldn't drag me out to H St in DC on a Wednesday night to see Rogue Helicoptor Pilot open for These Cupcakes Are Delish, but this was more like a riveting microcosm of our political process than a standard indie rock show. The guitarist, bassist, drummer and glockenspielist of TCAD were all campaigning onstage for the title of Band President, to be chosen by the audience at the end of the show. The lead singer told the crowd he was ineligible to run "under the Van Halen Fairness Doctrine," but that he was promised some sort of honorary title and a specially designed, gold sequined robe from American Apparel as compensation. The singer also introduced scattered "campaign ads" projected on the wall throughout the night - I was struck most by the glockenspielist's heartwrenching tale of having to pay 4% of his art school tuition - and moderated a heated debate during the encore break in which the guitarist called the drummer a "leaden-footed flip flopper," holding up a gasp-inducing cameraphone pic of his rival drumming while wearing flip flops to bolster his claims. The band then handed out golf pencils and paper scraps to the audience and waited until the results were tabulated before playing the last three songs of the night. Unfortunately the voting ended in a tie, necessitating a run-off gig later in the month, but I'm sure Sony or whatever would have the wherewithal to rig it so that doesn't happen very often. At least I hope so, as some of the miffed indie rockers in the crowd started poking each other with the golf pencils, spilling their cheap beer and hurling subtle sarcasm at the visibly cowed band until the club owner politely asked everyone to file out in an orderly fashion, which they did. Maybe next time these kids will learn to run on the only political platform I care about: The Uplift Mofo Party Plan.

That's it! I'm buying a video camera.

2007-09-01T06:44:00.000-07:00

There's literally no reason why you and I should not be making movies and cashing in on awkwardness when a film can be released with this title:

My pitch is for a real-time movie called BRB, about a bunch of hip, underemployed college grads who've recently moved to Brooklyn (i.e. the most fascinating, culturally relevant people on earth), waiting on line to buy the latest iGadget. It'll delve into their very mild disaffection; their slightly inarticulate confusion; their somewhat dwindling trust funds; their struggles to recall the perfect Family Guy scene for every social situation. I don't think "mumblecore" adequately describes what I'm going for. I've been kicking around "shirt-edge" as a genre title. What do you think?

People like lists, right? Please tell me people like lists.

2007-08-22T19:10:00.000-07:00

Robert Christgau, the Dean of American Windbags, has every Village Voice "Pazz & Jop" critics' poll going back to '71 archived on his website. For no discernable reason, I went through each list and picked my own personal winner for each year from their album and singles lists. In many (i.e. most) cases, my own personal favorite didn't make the list so I had to make due with their choices.

For my own sanity's sake I didn't try to document every snub and absurdity, but I did notice:
- At no point during their 31-year career do The Fall appear to have made either the albums or singles list, yet the Mekons pop up regularly.
- The Go-Betweens were shut out, amazingly, until The Friends of Rachel Worth in 2000.
- Critics reeeeaally hate metal.
- They hated Pink Floyd almost as much.
- I think I've pinpointed 1994 as the year when mainstream pop singles crap out entirely and never recover. There seem to have been surprising numbers of choices in years previous.

Albums:

1971: The Rolling Stones: Sticky Fingers
(Led Zeppelin IV finished last on their list @ #30, right below Delaney & Bonnie. Haterz.)
1972-73: No poll. Projected winners: Hot Tuna
1974: Big Star: Radio City
1975: Bob Dylan: Blood on the Tracks
1976: Ramones: Ramones
1977: Television: Marquee Moon
(Overrated, according to the spritely lad from Franz Ferdinand, who while explaining his reasons why here clearly illustrates why his band isn't built to last)
1978: Elvis Costello: This Year's Model
1979: Buzzcocks: Singles Going Steady
1980: The Clash: London Calling
(a controversial pick, I know. When are the tastemakers finally going to rediscover this obscure gem?!?)
1981: Mission of Burma: Signals, Calls & Marches EP
(winner should either be Black Flag - Damaged, or Minor Threat's first EP. Or Juice by Juice Newton)
1982: Flipper: Album/Generic Flipper
1983: REM: Murmur
1984: Minutemen: Double Nickels on the Dime
1985: Hüsker Dü: New Day Rising and Flip Your Wig
(oh yeah, ties are allowed, apparently)
1986: Beastie Boys: Licensed to Ill
(they manage to bounce a few Budweiser cans off the Smiths' heads)
1987: Prince: Sign "O" the Times
1988: Sonic Youth: Daydream Nation
(I know, God forbid someone shouldn’t pick “It Takes a Nation of Millions…” Also, the Pixies’ “Surfer Rosa” didn’t even make their list)
1989: Beastie Boys: Paul's Boutique
1990: Public Enemy: Fear of a Black Planet
(happy now?)
1991: U2: Achtung Baby
(Yes, I unreservedly love it. Bite me).
1992: Pavement: Slanted and Enchanted
(not even my favorite Pavement album - that would be CR, CR, while acknowledging Wowee Zowee might be the "best" - but my favorite of this list)
1993: PJ Harvey: Rid of Me
(winner should be Wu-Tang Clan - Enter the Wu-Tang)
1994: Guided by Voices: Bee Thousand
1995: PJ Harvey: To Bring You My Love
1996: DJ Shadow: Endtroducing…
1997: Radiohead: OK Computer
(Yet another bold, divisive pick. Look, I'm not afraid of a little controversy! The point of this is to set tongues wagging).
1998: Neutral Milk Hotel: In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
1999: The Magnetic Fields: 69 Love Songs
A few of the following picks are not-so-emphatic:
2000: OutKast: Stankonia
2001: New Pornographers: Mass Romantic
2002: Neko Case: Blacklisted
2003: Cat Power: You Are Free
2004: Elliott Smith: From a Basement on the Hill
(winner should be Reigning Sound - Too Much Guitar)
2005: Sleater-Kinney: The Woods
2006: Scott Walker: The Drift

Singles:

1979 - The Records: "Starry Eyes"
(I hate "My Sharona")
1980 - Joy Division: "Love Will Tear Us Apart"
1981 - Gang of Four: "To Hell With Poverty"
1982 - New Order: "Temptation"
1983 - Prince: "Little Red Corvette"
1984 - Prince: "Let's Go Crazy"/"Erotic City"
(mostly for the B-side)
1985 – Kate Bush: "Running Up That Hill"
(I'm sure Alan Partridge would agree w/ me)
1986 - Pet Shop Boys: "West End Girls"
(... and its 2007 descendant)
1987 - Public Enemy: "Bring the Noise"
1988 - Rob Base & D.J. E-Z Rock: "It Takes Two"
(provides the soundtrack to a summer of mayhem in David Simon's Homicide)
1989 - Public Enemy: "Fight the Power"
1990 - Deee-Lite: "Groove Is in the Heart"/"What Is Love"
1991 - Geto Boys: "Mind Playing Tricks on Me"
1992 - Cypress Hill: "How I Could Just Kill a Man"/"The Phuncky Feel One"
(the Suicidal Tendencies reference @ the end of HICJKM helps seal the deal)
1993 - Dr. Dre: "Nuthin' but a ‘G’ Thang"
aaand here's where the rot sets in:
1994 - Nine Inch Nails: "Closer"
(you can toss everything else they did in the garbage if you must, but this was like the goth/industrial/safely freaky/Skinemax "Nuthin' But a G Thang")
1995 - Elastica: "Three Girl Rhumba '95" (aka "Connection")
1996 - Blackstreet: "No Diggity"
("Common People" would've won if we were talking about William Shatner's version)
1997 – Yo La Tengo: "Autumn Sweater" (a really shitty list. Sleater-Kinney's "One More Hour" was my favorite song of this year)
1998 - Aaliyah: "Are You That Somebody"
1999 – N/A; an even worse list. I can't even pick a winner unless I go up my nose [sorry]! No hope; no hope....
2000 - OutKast: "B.O.B."
2001 - Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott: "Get Ur Freak On"
2002 – fucking Missy Elliott again: "Work It"
2003 - OutKast: "Hey Ya!"
(People were practically in shock that an awesome song could still become a ginormous hit by this point. I still maintain that they ripped me off though, as I was using the expression "Hey ya" years before this was released. Plus, I was sued by Rosa Parks before they were. No originality these days!)
2004 - Jay-Z: "99 Problems"
(might've been the 3rd best song on LL Cool J's Radio, but in 2004 it's single of the year)
2005 - Kelly Clarkson: "Since U Been Gone"
(on the level of an okay Pat Benatar song, but by 2005 standards it's practically runnin' s-hit)
2006 - Gnarls Barkley: "Crazy" (winner should be late-period Crazy Frog)

My ancestry's brush with fame... and infamy!

2007-08-19T18:52:00.000-07:00

While he's all but unknown to even the most knowledgable historians today, my great-great-grandpa Venison Plowe (our family dropped the silent "P" shortly after his death, although the "l" remained lowercase) was at one time arguably the third or fourth most famous lip reader in western Maryland. I hardly need to remind my readers that entertainment options were scarce around the turn of the century, centered as they were mostly on bible reading, deer tickling and poisoning one's spouse. Therefore, an accomplished lip reader could dazzle crowds far and wide with his "feats of verbal verification," as the posters used to say. Yes sir, folks would travel from as far as Johnstown, PA to see ol' Venison practice his craft. One time he even performed in front of 1,500 people at the county fair, although it's possible that most of the crowd was there to see the follow-up act: a pig blowing into a jug.

Still, it was pretty impressive whenever great great grandpa Venison strapped beaver tails to his ears for soundproofing and attempted to repeat back whatever people said to him from a distance as great as 1.9 yards. I say "attempt" because despite the relatively close proximity and the faultiness of the beaver tail earphones, his guesses were almost always wildly off the mark. An audience member might remark "the fire engine is red" and Venison would interpret it as "The Duchess is swathed in jump rope and blubber." But ol' Venison's piss-poor lip reading skills didn't matter because he had a secret trick: he was also a trained hypnotist! No matter what someone would actually say, he'd hypnotize them and the entire audience into thinking the correct phrase was something like "Zeus has crashed through my skylight wearing a mu'umu'u." Whenever I heard stories as a kid about great great grandpa Venison I'd usually ask why he didn't just bill himself as a hypnotist, since they made a lot more money than lip readers anyway. This usually resulted in me getting a belt to the face from the nearest relative for "asking too many gay-ass questions." Later I discovered that Venison was kicked out of the Western Maryland Hypnotists Guild early in his career and blackballed for "theft of ceremonial robes, improper clucking instructions, and suspicion of buggering somnolent bystanders." All in all, I can't say I blame them.

After the demand for lip readers dried up - along with his hypnotizing ability - Venison "fharted around for a whyle," as he later wrote in his "jhournal." He eked out a living writing trashy stories under a pseudonym ("The Stupendous Gus") for hypnosis magazines like Mesmerised Lasses and Wacky Trance, wallowing in profanity by day and moonshine at night, until he accidentally swallowed a toenail clipper and died in 1917. Not a pretty story, I know, but hey I'd like to see some of the sleazeballs and slave traders in your family tree... jerk!

Teddy Rockstar: Powered by (a) Starbucks (van)

2007-08-13T19:59:00.000-07:00

Coincidentally, this went down four years ago tomorrow (it's also on the Dirty Old Town dvd):

In other news, the (most likely series) finale of John From Cincinnati was packed w/ gibberish and malarkey, even by their obtuse standards. The parade at the end was like the goofiest movie Robert Altman never made, although Ed O'Neill had me cracking up. This after the episode kicked off with maybe the greatest non-Al Bundy moment of the series: an aerial shot and montage set to Bob Dylan's "Series of Dreams," culminating in Shaun and the titular Cincinnatite surfing back down to Earth. It would have been even better with a "Lawrence of Arabia"-style POV shot of Butchie and Kai watching them emerge as a speck on the horizon. The tragedy of all this is that future generations will never understand the unique grip that John From Cincinnati held on our collective psyche, and we'll have to settle with telling our grandkids exactly where we were when Palaka's tattoo got infected.

Oh, and you want some unexpected synergy between Ted Leo and JFC? Here ya go.

Patton blows my mind again

2007-08-07T22:59:00.001-07:00

I'd give THREE kudos if I could!

New Derrière Rising

2007-08-03T19:19:00.000-07:00

Jon Swift picks apart the "Derrièrists," thankfully only a few of whom are publicly enjoying another touchdown dance following the deaths of Bergman and Antonioni. For my part, I love, love Bergman, obviously, and liked L'avventura when I saw it a few years ago, but I couldn't get into The Passenger at all (I'll give it another chance at some point) and really don't care for Blow-Up, aside from this wicked scene and maybe one or two others. Check out this great letter to Ebert from the actor who played the corpse in Blow-Up. He was originally supposed to have a bigger role, but the film was shut down and pieced together in editing due to Antonioni going over-budget. The producer was a tad peeved that Antonioni was spending money on painting grass a different shade of green and sprucing up houses and the like.

Also came across this quote on Bergman's passing: "I am proud to say he treated me exactly like his other children - with no interest whatsoever." - Lars Von Trier

Ingmar Bergman RIP

2007-07-30T08:47:00.000-07:00

(Taken mostly from Nostalgia Party No. 2 and DVD Beaver)

Guess what I found at a yard sale for $2

2007-07-24T05:25:00.000-07:00

A 1967 acetate of the Velvet Underground covering Christmas tunes, including "Here Comes Santa Claus" with an unusually festive Nico on vocals, a 37-minute "Twelve Days of Christmas," and a version of "European Son" with sleigh bells. It also includes an untitled Thanksgiving song about a guy who stuffs his head in a turkey to impress a transsexual and then falls off a construction beam to his death. You can even hear Lou Reed yelp at the end after John Cale drops a viola on his foot. Look out, eBay!

Will success spoil... uhm, this guy?

2007-07-22T21:14:00.000-07:00

(Above: Steve Carell, the beefy version)

If watching a dozen or so characters on John From Cincinnati enact their own personal "Waiting For Godot" each week isn't doing it for you, and if you're like me and have come to the cold, hard realization that once The Wire is done, HBO's golden age of dramas is offically kaput (have you heard about their softcore, utterly tedious-looking , relationships-are-hard show?), you might find something watchable on AMC, of all channels. The first episode of Mad Men (check out that blatant HBO ripoff website design), Matthew Weiner's new show about advertising executives in 1960, shows promise of developing into something good. Weiner was a writer and executive producer of The Sopranos, and if you're guessing a Sopranos writer's take on early 60's ad men might be a bit jaded, well then perhaps you can tell me whether or not magic plays a role in the new Harry Potter book. Even for the time period, the first episode overdoes it a bit with the "hey toots" office sexism, and revels too easily in the irony of a prominent tobacco campaign (see this disappointed Slate review for more gripes), but compellingly square-jawed protagonist Don Draper shows enough flashes of Tony Soprano-like duality and shading - mainly during scenes with a female client - that you'll probably want to know where Weiner is taking his character within the context of the boozy, socially uneasy time period. By the final scene, the glimpse of the seemingly unattached Draper's home life even constitutes something of a surprise. The show's production values are also easy enough on the eyes to make us think we're in capable hands. Strong, burly, capable hands. What? You said something? No? Huh. Man, that redheaded secretary is stacked.

The next encore of the premiere is this Wednesday @ 10. As you can tell by the opening paragraph, The House Next Door is pretty enthusiastic about it and has promised the next few episodes turn it up a notch. And hey, what's that in the preview for episode two, a therapist's couch? Oooh, they really are trying to ease my Sopranos withdrawl.

"When do this shit change?" - Bunny Colvin

2007-07-22T14:10:00.000-07:00

Alan Sepinwall succinctly summarizes just a few of the reasons why the Emmys are a joke here, and it's a bitter joke indeed that The Wire has been so pointedly ignored every year aside from a writing nomination for season three. Amazingly, it didn't even crack the list of top 10 Best Drama finalists that leaked a month or so ago. Of course, the Emmys are just continuing their tradition of shunning anything that comes out of Bawlmer, beginning with their repeated Homicide snubs in the early 90's (I checked and The Corner did get some nominations in the miniseries category). At this point, I even picture the voters sending David Simon anonymous, taunting e-mails: Hey Baldy, hope you're enjoying your lake trout subs in "Charm City." I was playing squash w/ Kelsey G. when I got a text about your latest goose egg. Maybe some day you'll make a grown-up show in a real city with an actual star like Billy Baldwin or Billy Pullman... or even Billy Connolly (news flash, Mr. Reporter: he's versatile). Until then, go choke on a crabcake, loser. Yerrrp! Sincerely, "Olympia Bukakis"

Of course, Deadwood hardly fared any better, aside from some production nods (nice to see that backbreaking budget pay off!), but that's no surprise as you can only throw out the word "cocksucker" so many times before you start to turn off voters (just ask Bill Moyers). 30 Rock did get a comedy series nom, but a win probably wouldn't do them any more good than it did Arrested Development. And where, oh where, was the love for Daddy's Hoes on the CW, starring Michael Rappoport's brother, Ahmnott? This was their year, cocksuckers!

I've pulled out all the stops for your Friday afternoon frolicking

2007-07-20T12:00:00.000-07:00

Back in my "nomad years" (as Bush once referred to a significant chunk of his adult life), I would occasionally kill a few minutes by filling out sarcastic answers to mind-numbingly pointless surveys on MySpace. Some people said they found these amusing, which I could tell meant they actually considered them to be "incandescent bursts of epoch-defining hilarity" (their thoughtwords, not mine). I don't know whether or not the following survey ascends similarly glorious heights, but since I've got a whole blog to sustain with my regurgitated nonsense I thought I'd spit one up and let you be the judge.

Things you may or may not know about me - in particular order

A) Four jobs I have had in my life
1. Pudding impresario
2. Voice actor on “Lil’ Allman Brothers” cartoon
3. Dick Gregory impersonator
4. Manager of legally permissible “Chuck F. Cheese” restaurant

B) Four movies I watch over and over:
1. Lilya-4-Ever
2. Lilya-4-Ever
3. Lilya-4-Ever
4. Is that weird?

C) Four places I have lived:
1. Funny answer
2. Hilarious answer
3. Sidesplitting answer
4. Existential answer peering into the bottomless depths of the human soul

D) Four TV Shows I watch:
1. 30 Rock
2. QI: Quite Interesting
3. John Gibson From Cincinnati
4. Dateline NBC Will Decide Who Lives and Who Dies

E) I have been to:
1. the mountaintop
2. heaven and back
3. paradise, but I’ve never been to me
4. Crackerjack Cal’s Peanut Butter-and-Rape Whistle Emporium in Gaithersburg

F) People who e-mail me (regularly):
1. Jimmy Two Arms
2. Jimmy Four Legs
3. Jimmy Seven Nipples
4. Jimmy Thirty Helens Agree

G) Four of my favorite foods:
1. Veal Smoothie
2. Kiwi Burger
3. G. Gordon Liddy’s Cinnamon Bologna Treats
4. Spice Must Flow… wait, no, that’s my favorite Spice Girl

H) Four places I would rather be right now:
1. Australia (“Lotta flies there.”) What about New Zealand? (“Uhhh…”) Sold.
2. Japan (“What? No you wouldn’t”). Yeah, you’re right. I just wanted to seem worldly.
3. Norwegian cuddle party. Norwegians are renowned for their excellent, highly refined cuddles (“That’s it. I know I’ve said this before, but I’m done with you.”) What do you mean? (“The lame, smart-alecky tone; the stunted frame of reference; the desolate, lonely existence") Hey! ("Look at you, wasting time on this adolescent bullshit at your age because you know that after twenty-eight years treading this planet you've still got nothing original or interesting to say. Well, I can’t take it anymore. You. Are. Pathetic. Goodbye.”) Ah, you’ll be back. You're totally at my mercy. Hey! What time are we going to Chipotle later? (“….”) Hello?
4. The world from Tron. The denizens of Tron reportedly have access to better health care than the United States. (“….”) No? Nothin’? (“….”) Huh. He’s really gone, I guess. (“Oh thank God, you’ve gotta help me!”) Huh? (“Right after I left you I ran over an old lady with my Lexus. I killed her!”) You drive a Lexus? (“What? Didn’t you hear me?? I’m in serious shit here, man!”) … (“Hell-ooo!”) Heh… oh, look a daffodil… heh. (“….”) Certainly are a lot of them this time a year (“You fucker. You fucking… pigfucking… fucker.”) Hey, come on! (“You’re not going to help me are you?”) Well, you were the one who said you were done with me and put on a big production about it. (“You were being stupid! C’mon, remember when I saved you from those drunken frat guys who were going to kick your ass?”) That’s not how I remember it. (“WHAT?”) I was about to put that one guy in the Crippler Crossface. (“Come on, man, don’t do this now, I hear sirens!”) Of course, I would never use that move now, for obvious reasons. (“Oh God, I gotta get outta here. I’ll see you in hell!”) Hey, can I have your Playstation?

I ) Four friends I think will repost:
1. Friends. Hmph. Some friend I am.
2. When my friend needed me, because he murdered an old lady, where was I? Well, I was standing in front of him, but my point is, what was I doing? Nothing except nursing my all-too-easily bruised ego over some petty slight, that’s what.
3. I mean, the way I am, I let my nuts hang everywhere I go. That’s just a fact of life. But where’s it gotten me? Why do I run away from everything and leave the earth scorched behind me? Is it because of some innate flaw in my genetic code or do I have the capacity for change?
4. Oh, I know who will repost this: my dumbass cousin, Leslie. She’ll probably answer with a bunch of stupid shit though LOL.

J) Things I am looking forward to this year:
1. New Coen Bros and PTA movies
2. Exciting new internet memes.
3. Anything that will continue to distract me from the black, tangled morass that is my life
4. Disrupting a hot dog eating contest for no reason. I wonder if bagpipes will suffice or if I should go the IED route.

Edward Yang: a belated RIP.

2007-07-15T20:14:00.001-07:00

I didn't want to say anything about the terrible, untimely passing of Edward Yang on June 29 - after a seven-year battle with colon cancer - until I had a chance to rewatch his outstanding, international breakthrough film Yi Yi (A One and a Two), regarded by many as a masterpiece and sure to go down as one of the best films of this decade. It seems like I'm always saying I don't have time to review anything on this blog beyond a couple of paragraphs, and although that's lately been true, I would like to say something more in depth about this film at some point, since a simple description can't convey the deeply cinematic impact of this thoughtful, ambitious study of urban family life in Taiwan (full disclosure: I'm never actually going to get around to it). Unfortunately, this is the only Yang film available on dvd here, or indeed in much of the world, apparently, although maybe distributors will finally get a move on now that the Unintended Spotlight is shining. Criterion released a typically handsome and much-needed edition last year with an absolutely perfect cover (once you've seen the film, you'll know why) that I highly recommend.

And really, how can you not trust me after I proclaimed the Jodorowsky box set to be the release of the year back in January, despite the fact that I can really only recommend the symbolism overload of Holy Mountain? Yes, I'm backing off that claim now that I've come down from my pineal gland high, although I did finally get around to watching HM with Jodorowsky's predictably entertaining commentary and will soon do the same for El Topo. I lost count of the number of times Jodorowsky took credit for inventing or presaging some later trend or event in the film, everything from the internet to the Shining Path to rock stars wearing black nail polish. Just think if Cameron Crowe or somebody had ever filmed their own scene where an androgynous old man breastfeeds someone from two baby leapord heads on his chest. There'd be no end to his crowing (no pun intended).

Does anyone remember that Jane's Addiction album, "Rich Hall Will Hit You All?"*

2007-07-15T18:20:00.001-07:00

I just discovered this popular and not-dumbed-down in the slightest (Trebek!) UK quiz show, QI: Quite Interesting, hosted by Stephen Fry, where the panel of comedians are asked seemingly odd questions as an excuse to reaveal and riff on obscure facts. Points are awarded not for boring or obvious guesses but for the most creative. There's lots and lots of episodes on YouTube that I can tell are going to be cheering me up regularly for the forseeable future... once I've exhausted all the Tay Zonday clips, that is. Here's one random excerpt:

*Still one of my favorite Jon Wurster-isms

Yes, Stop Making Sense could have been even better.

2007-07-09T23:07:00.000-07:00

Embedding has been disabled, but check out these shit hot Talking Heads live clips filmed for Italian tv in 1980, starting with Psycho Killer. The only thing hotter than Tina Weymouth here is Adrian Belew's ridiculously great guitar work. I'm saying this for free!!!

Oh, and speaking of SMS, I attended an outdoor screening of it a month or so ago in Silver Spring as part of this year's Silverdocs festival, where Jonathan Demme got the lifetime achievement award thingie. It's virtually impossible to tire of the film, and I was surprised by the number of indie-looking kids who joined the thirty-and-forty-somethings in the impromptou dance section. There was even a bit of audience participation during "Life During Wartime" when a group of kids and possibly their parents mimicked Byrne's jogging* by running circles around the screen. Unfortunately, my attempt to dance with a lamp was met with outright mockery and hostility, as it was a table lamp I made in woodshop in eighth grade, and I kept beaming people in the head with it and anachronistically yelling "Y'all ready for this?" until I was chased away by festival organizers. I consoled myself by pondering what the early Rocky Horror pioneers must have endured.

*also pronounced Will Ferrell-style as "yogging," just as I similarly refer to "blogging" as "bjogging," much to my family's shame.

The Bicameral Book Club: Prepare to be smited, Oprah.

2007-07-08T15:27:00.001-07:00

How many novels leave you not only captivated within the first paragraph, but also moved? Gilead, Marilynne Robinson's 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning second novel - published some 24 years after her renowned debut Housekeeping - accomplished that for me. Gilead is constructed as a series of first-person letters from 1956 written by John Ames, a 76-year old Iowa minister suffering from heart disease, for his young son who will grow up having never really known him. Neither the setting nor choice of narrator are the stuff of which edgy cult followings are made, and the premise may sound a little mawkish, but while Ames has no pretense of being a brilliant theologian, he is nonetheless a wise, mature individual whose thoughtful musings offer readers more than stock platitudes. There are careful considerations of faith prompted by encounters with Ames' scholarly, atheist brother Edward and the works of the philosopher Feuerbach that will likely prove to be crucial selling points for some non-Christian readers. Elsewhere, Ames vividly recounts family history and anecdotes for his son, such as a grueling childhood trek with his father to Kansas in search of a relative's grave, that show off Robinson's period research.

I took my time with this book and will likely read it again at some point, as its meditative pace almost reflexively demands, and certainly rewards, careful consideration. Robinson's characterization of Ames is mostly flawless, only rarely lapsing into uncharacteristically "authorly" sentence structure throughout the letters. Conflict does arise when Ames' unrelated namesake John Ames Boughton, the n'er-do-well son of a dear friend and fellow minister, returns to town after a mysterious absence, stirring feelings of bitterness and anxiety for Ames that thankfully play out in non-melodramatic fashion. Above all, the book transcends bland "life is beautiful" sentiment with its uncommon serenity and, yes, grace. It's one of those works that can almost subtly affect a person's outlook, and may come as a great relief in these relatively vulgar times (yes, this is the second post in a row that derisively references our "times." I'll be further exploring this topic in my new screenplay, "It's Codgerin' Time," which I'm hoping will be picked up for development by Richard Branson's new family channel, Virgin Kids)

The Unexamined Hype

2007-07-04T10:17:00.000-07:00

(Above: Needs more clutter)

Even in these generally mediocre times, I find the idea of unconditional fanboy excitement for the Transformers movie a little weird (unless you just find the idea of someone wearing a Strokes t-shirt in 2007 delightfully absurd). Market researchers would likely consider me among the target audience for this thing: I grew up with the toys and cartoon series, pestering my poor mother to buy me the latest Dinobot playset... although it wasn't until years later that I found the nerve to get the 2Pac-esque "Collect 'Em All" gothic-lettered tattoo that now adorns my rippled stomach. Yet I can't say I look back on something that was so nakedly about selling merchandise with any sense of fondness or nostalgia. Is there anyone alive who can say their imaginations or development were enhanced in any way by this stuff? Weren't these toys and cartoons nothing more than a placeholder for bored latchkey kids? If anything they might have helped prepare kids to shamelessly covet inessential, clunky, status symbol gadgets like iPhones as annoying adults. I will admit that the Transformers universe wasn't totally devoid of personality: my hazy memory ranks the comic book series as above average, and the original 1987 animated movie was kind of a weird head trip for kids in that it elaborately killed off several of the most popular characters (i.e. the ones that had the best voice actors). It also gave birth to the sub-Journey power ballad "You Got the Touch," which was later hilariously recycled in Boogie Nights. Plus, there were a couple of evil robots that turned into a tape deck and cassette (most likely an R. Stevie Moore mixtape). That's pretty cool.

Send in your school lunch PSA's now

2007-06-26T20:00:00.000-07:00

If anyone's interested, I'll be spinning some tunes on WFMU's Listener Hour this Saturday @ 9 am. It'll also be archived here forevah shortly thereafter. I was surprised when Brian Turner agreed to let me host a one-hour salute to Better Than Ezra, but there you have it!

UPDATE: Well, I think it went well, even though an angry legal missive from Better Than Ezra's manager (who curiously uses Hello Kitty stationary) forced me to nix the tribute idea a scant few hours before airtime. Here's the playlist I came up with on short notice:

Abbey Lincoln – Lonely House
Lull – Moments (excerpt)
John Cage & Kenneth Patchen – The City Wears a Slouch Hat (excerpt)
Stan Kenton – Thermopylae

Kathy McCarty – Hey Joe
David Darling & the Wulu Bunin – Ku-Isa Tama Laug
Hugh Masekela – A Long Ways From Home
The Triffids – Wide Open Road
The Flatmates – Shimmer

Compulsive Gamblers – Sour and Vicious Man
Chosen Gospel Singers – It’s Getting Late in the Evening
Cheater Slicks – Train of Dreams
The Caretaker – We Cannot Escape the Past
Weekend – Nostalgia (demo)

Roky Erickson & 27 Devils Joking – You Don’t Love Me Yet
Harley Hatcher – Satan (Theme)
Scientist – Blood on His Lips

Hey, whatever happened to that Lyman guy, anyway?

2007-06-21T16:39:00.000-07:00

I just realized I completely forgot to celebrate the one-year anniversary of this blog a few weeks ago. If I had my druthers (and by the way, who doesn't love the word "druthers?" It sounds like an antiquated type of cowboy paraphernalia, but nope, it's just a word that denotes a personal preference), I would have marked the occasion not by looking back at all the laughs we've shared ("Uhhhm...") and the hundreds of comments I've received ("Errr... hmmmm...."), but by offering a sneak peak at some of the amazing, imaginary posts I have lined up for the next year; Including:

- A hilarious account of my ill-fated attempt to buy a used English Beat cd on half.com; a transaction that took me across several state lines and into the belly of North Dakota's vicious underground llama-fighting ring. Get ready for some intense jpegs.

- The highlights of my predictably controversial interview with female "shock comic" Dawn Mexico, conducted at the Old Pancake House during a tour stop here in Bethesda. According to the Cleveland Examiner, Dawn's pig-filthy, misogynistic, blatantly racist jokes about illegal immigrants, Cindy Sheehan and the Dalai Lama's twisted sex life "make Lisa Lampanelli look like Maya Angelou." During our talk, Dawn did a routine involving a well-known brand of syrup that was so upsetting I had to walk outside to gather my thoughts, whereupon another patron tried to jam their fork into her hefty thigh. Don't miss it!

- Also, get ready for a sampling of the dozens of unpublished letters I've written to Veranda magazine over the years, lambasting them for their paltry gazebo coverage and frequently digressing into lyrical accounts of my lifelong love of carrots. I call this series A Bustler in the Hedgerow: 2000.

And more! This year's gonna be big, folks. I think this will finally be the year the blog gets a google hit! Just think, someday you'll be able to say you "knew me when!"

"I tell ya, sometimes I don't know whether I'm on foot or horseback."

2007-06-16T23:25:00.000-07:00

I saw Knocked Up today. Apatow still has that smidgen of mushiness that won't let him keep Rogen and Heigel apart despite all plausibility, but otherwise his work keeps getting stronger and funnier. Harold Ramis' cameo here is fitting, since Apatow is pretty much the new king of smart slob comedy and also taking it into relatively uncharted territory. I wouldn't be surprised if Leslie Mann gets a supporting actress Oscar nomination. Also, hooray for so many Freaks & Geeks cast members popping up in this and for Rogen beoming a star, especially after the film's early casting problems. I should probably check out Undeclared already.

I also watched the second episode of John From Cincinnati OnDemand today. I'm leaning more toward the "whoo boy, that's terrible" camp. Usually I like to get an insightful narrative glimpse at a world like surfing that I never gave a second thought about. Unfortunately, in this case it entails putting up with a poor man's Chauncey Gardner in the title role; a bunch of ersatz supernaturalism; and a couple of terrible key performances, among other problems. On the plus side, I like Ed O'Neill a lot in this, plus Bruce Greenwood is nothing to sneeze at, so I'm not quite ready to pack it in yet as Milch might still surprise me. Oh by the way, diehard Bicameral Mind fans - like the one who writes the fan fiction where me and Daily Kos team up to fight Hamas dressed as Lucha Libre wrestlers - may remember my crack about this show's promos being so terrible that they're what's killing all the bees. Well, turns out the show's theme song by Joe Strummer features a refrain about "killing all the bees!" Gadzooks! Maybe I've got some sort of tv theme song sixth sense. I'm gonna try to keep the streak going and predict that King Uszniewicz does the next version of "Way Down in the Hole" in The Wire season five.

Ah but it wasn't all Surfin' Jesus and pregnancy jokes today. I forgot to get Beastie Boys NYC tickets right at noon and missed out by a good 20 minutes. There goes that vacation, since I don't feel like paying the scumbag scalping pros on eBay. Also, I was going to go to a documentary concert film about the Ex at the Silverdocs festival tonight but fell asleep on the couch for a good hour and a half instead. Two bush league errors for sure. Maybe it's time for me to start practicing that Robert Downey Jr. "get it together" scene from Two Girls and a Guy, which unfortunately for me, since I'm probably the only one who saw that movie (with good reason), doesn't appear to be on YouTube.

I'll leave you for now with trailers for two movies I'm anticipating more than any others in recent memory. The first is for the Coen Brothers' adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men, which won almost uniform raves at Cannes and certainly looks like a return to form for them, to put it mildly. The Coens had an excellent starting point as this was the only McCarthy book I've read that practically read like a movie script, although I'll be curious to see how they handle the elegiac ending.

Then there's Paul Thomas Anderson's suddenly very promising There Will Be Blood, based on Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil! and starring Daniel Day Lewis as a Texas oil tycoon. The cinematography looks stunning, almost like a Terrence Malick film.

New lolcat: IM IN UR STRIP CLUB! STARIN AT CRISTOPHUH!

2007-06-11T17:03:00.000-07:00

(The following could've used an editor, but who can afford one? Tony Soprano hasn't paid me in months for all that landscaping work I've been doing.)

At 10:01 last night you could practically hear bars and parties deflating across America as millions watching The Sopranos were hit with one of the most abrupt, ambiguous TV endings ever. My initial reaction wasn't so much anger or disappointment as shock; that David Chase, a proponent of anticlimaxes if ever there was one, pretty much went in the direction that some fans probably joked about heading into the finale: just abruptly pulling the plug without tying up any loose ends. Then I scolded myself for being shocked, as the last two episodes pretty much followed the pattern of every season ending since the show's second, albeit on an exaggerated scale: A flurry of action in the penultimate episode, then a cooling down in the finale (this M.O. sometimes seems to be contagious among HBO dramas). And there was a sense of closure throughout the episode that was somewhat obscured by the final scene: Tony will certainly be indited at some point, with one of his crew testifying about God knows what (although the rat in question, Carlo, knows nothing about the show's most memorable murders: Chrissy, Adrianna, Big Pussy, Ralph Cifaretto, etc); Uncle Junior, Paulie and Janice all got appropriate send-offs; The war with New York fizzled out when lazy-eyed creep Butchie got scared that Phil was mad at him and cut a deal w/ Tony; There were callbacks to the first season, w/ Meadow's friend Hunter popping up and AJ reminding Tony during the final scene that he once told him to "remember the times that were good." Hear that, Television Without Pity posters?

But that ending: in terms of disappointment it has nothing on the complete obliviousness to impending cancellation that Twin Peaks displayed, nor the bitterness surrounding the Deadwood debacle that just keeps growing. Actually, the more I thought about the Sopranos ending, the more I liked it (looks like I'm not the only one). Most of the predicitons that have been flying around for years revolved around the sort of Mafia films that Tony's crew regard with deep reverence: Would Tony go out in a hail of bullets; Would he flip to the FBI and "get to live the rest of (his) life like a schnook," a la Henry Hill in Goodfellas (but who would Tony have informed on anyway? He's the boss of the family); Would they go the horrendous Godfather III route and have something happen to his real family; Would Phil finally admit that he did more than just jerk off on a tissue in prison and convince Tony to get an apartment with him? Some astute viewers predicted a "life goes on" ending that would be keeping with the series' overall tone, but ultimately Chase seemed to pick "none of the above" and crafted something new: a tense scene fraught with almost abstract peril that leaves Tony and the audience forever suspended in dread. That memorable choice will surely become an integral and mostly respected component of the series' legacy. In a way it recalled 2001: A Space Odyssey, with Tony freezing upon entering the restaraunt and appearing to look at a version of himself, similar to Dave the astronaut when he finds himself stranded in that mysterious room. We'll never know what Meadow's parking and entering, the doorbell ring and then the blackout represent (and do Member's Only jackets = death, just like in real life?), but in a way the fact that these questions will linger is a testament to the scene's taut execution. If, say, Entourage were to end with a a freezframe of Turtle about to bite into a chicken sandwich, it probably wouldn't have quite the same effect -- although truth be told, I would probably get a little choked up. Personally, as far as endings go, I always wanted the maddeningly deluded Carmella to finally face up to at least one of Tony's horrific, secret misdeeds, as well as the monstrous nature of their staid suburban lifestyle that the psychiatrist tried to impress upon her in season three. I say that not only because I find Carmella uniquely despicable, but because I relished the thought of Edie Falco tearing into that kind of material. Again though, any hope of redemption or insight the characters might have initially displayed has calcified over eight years into increased bitterness, self-absorption, materialism and paranoia. So assuming he wasn't killed, we end with Tony wallowing not only in the mob life but in a form of banal, domestic evil: His shallow, humorless wife; his possibly even more deluded daughter, who envisions herself crusading for the rights of downtrodden Italian-Americans in her future career as a mob lawyer; and his astoundingly useless, comically pathetic son, who has inherited all of Tony's most negative traits but has been spoiled right out of even the mob life. All of them a parasitic blight on the world, all of them helping to rob modern life of any sense of meaning, but still rockin' out wistfully to "Don't Stop Believin." The characters' pursuit of laziness was exemplified perfectly in the funny scene where AJ's parents talk him out of joining the army and potentially (but not likely) making something of himself to go work on a Daniel Baldwin movie instead. Chase must have been thinking of the series' themes when he named the episode "Made in America," although he might also have been referring to Christopher's apparent reincarnation as a cat that freaks Paulie out right here in the good ol' US of A. Or maybe it was the reincarnation of Adrianna's dog. I guess we'll never know for sure.

So there was a lot to like about the show's finale, Chasehaterz, but my beef is: Why couldn't they have saved us A LOT of filler and just ended it abruptly three or four years ago? Starting with season 4, the show sometimes found itself spinning its wheels over several episodes with repetitive plotlines and psychological character studies that weren't always so dramatically interesting. Product placement, HBO cash cow status, and "labored malapropisms" (as one of my fellow FOTs put it), also seemed to unduly intrude upon this fictional world now and again, and Nancy Marchand's death no doubt irrevocably changed the direction of the show. But the deliberate pacing, everyday rhythms, big statements about America, dark comedy and occasionally thrilling suspense were not only worth savoring but unique to any medium, not just television. So if it meant putting up with episodes devoted to peripheral characters like Vito and Artie Bucco in order to experience scenes like this, so be it:

"You don't need a gynecologist to know which way the wind blows."

2007-06-08T05:29:00.000-07:00

My only Sopranos prediction: Since Tony fell asleep at the end, this week opens with a dream sequence. I hope he gets slapped by a monk again.

I had some more I was going to post about the show, but I'm just too preoccupied this week. As usual though, there's analysis of even the most minute symbolism all over the web ("Does AJ watching Metalocalypse in the psych ward foreshadow a classic rock apocalypse for Tony?"), with the best coming from The House Next Door and Alan Sepinwall (and a belated thanks to the latter for linking to my "Russian theory" a couple of months ago). It's also worth reading the TV Club at Slate just to discover that Brian Williams from NBC News is an obsessive Sopranos fan who even singled out the stuntwoman who fell down the steps last week by name. Unfortunately though, he's also extremely fond of Meadow. If that's not reason enough to switch to Katie Couric I don't know what is.

Oh, and by far my favorite use of music in the series' run: The Stones' Voodoo Lounge-era "Thru and Thru," w/ Keef singing, during the season 2 closing montage. "Evidently Chickentown" by John Cooper Clarke was a late contender this year, and hearing "When the Music's Over" at the Bing last week prompted me to drag that song out for the first time since high school.

“Godard is counterfeit money. Rouch is rock solid.”

2007-05-17T12:05:00.000-07:00

Dictated by staunch opinions and unpredictable whimsy, Herzog’s unique taste in media is uncanny for its specificity. He boasts of a longstanding affinity for “The Anna Nicole Show” and its late star. “Years ago, when everybody dismissed it as vulgar and cheap, I kept saying, ‘Watch it closely. This is big. This is important,’” he says. “It depicted something in our civilization that is very important. Now that she has died, all of a sudden it dawns on everyone how important this phenomenon has been. I wish I could’ve made a film with Anna Nicole Smith.” - from this article on the Werner Herzog documentary retrospective at the Film Forum in NY

Don't worry, Deuce Bigalow is well-repped too.

2007-05-05T18:19:00.000-07:00

I just discovered Nostalgia Party No. 2, a livejournal community that posts film stills. Lots of 'em. These may serve as highly effective rental suggestions, or maybe just reminders of what you liked about a particular film. Or in some cases, maybe the only thing you liked. Here's a bunch I selected that should give you the idea... you'll just have to be a slave to my taste and click on them:

01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16

Speaking of movies, I was recently flabbergasted (as opposed to merely flummoxed) after reading this quote from Universal exec Cathy Schulman that ran in Variety a couple of weeks ago:

A highlight of the Mandalay Pictures’ slate at Universal is the remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” scheduled to be in production by early fall.

“We think we have a very contemporary take,” Schulman said. “In the original, the birds just showed up, and it was kind of like, why are the birds here? This time, there’s a reason why they’re here and (people) have had something to do with it. There’s an environmental slant to what could create nature fighting back.”

I've gotta say, I can't fault their logic here. I can't tell you how long that lack of explanation bothered me... and the reason why I can't tell you is because it never did. Because I can actually, y'know, grasp the point of things. Wait 'til their next remake when they reveal the REAL reason James Stewart had Vertigo: he was stressed out about Colony Collapse Disorder.

Oh, and just who's directing the Birds remake? None other than Michael "I want Armageddon in the Criterion Collection" Bay. Forget explaining the birds' motivation, I'm still waiting for him to explain why he had Ben Affleck incorporate animal crackers into a love scene.

Someone's been tampering with Hank's Memories...

2007-04-30T17:11:00.000-07:00

Before The Office, before Curb Your Enthusiasm, before Alan Partridge, before, uh... the upcoming Geico caveman sitcom (?), there was The Larry Sanders Show, Garry Shandling's acidic, impeccably acted talk show satire that revitalized HBO's original programming and set a new standard for edgy tv comedy. Or at least that's what I remember reading and hearing secondhand during my HBO-less teenage years, when I could only dream of one day being a big shot w/ premium cable, just like Biggie Smalls in "Juicy," (and if you don't know, now ya know... fella). I've caught up with the show in bits and pieces since then, mostly through edited, syndicated reruns; I recall a long stretch a few years ago where I was staying up til 2:30 to watch it, nurturing a Wallace Langham-like bitterness while my clueless fellow collegians were out drinking and having fun. Poor clods.

Unfortunately, the show hasn't thrived on dvd either. The first season - released before either the tv-on-dvd market or popularity of the name "Larry" took off - didn't sell well, precluding the release of subsequent volumes until now. The new (Not Just the) Best of the Larry Sanders Show collects 23 uniformly great episodes in peculiar fashion. It's packaged with a plethora of special features that delve deep into Shandling's weird headspace, as he seeks to catch up and/or make up with many of the show's big name guest stars (emphasis on big name -- maybe Garry isn't as interested in reconnecting with, say, Robert Hays). The result is a series of what Garry calls "intimate, personal conversations" w/ the likes of Alec Baldwin, Sharon Stone, Jerry Seinfeld, Tom Petty, Ellen DeGeneres, David Duchovny, Carol Burnett and Larry's fictional late night rival Jon Stewart (what, no Elvis Costello?). Some of these segments, especially Garry's oddly competitive boxing match with Baldwin and a Botox breakfast with apparent ex-flame Sharon Stone, are awkward and weird enough to make this set recommendable even if you're pissed about the whole seasons remaining in limbo (although the first season has been rereleased and Shandling says the rest are coming eventually).

Among the other highlights:

- Seeing again just how many rising actors and comedians passed through the cast: Stewart, Janeane Garofalo, Bob Odenkirk, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Scott Thompson, Sarah Silverman, Jeremy Piven. Dave Chappelle and Norm MacDonald also make memorable guest appearances.

- The Seinfeld interview demonstrates how shrewd he is, particularly when he and Garry discuss ending their respective shows on top (at least critically, in Garry's case). It also somewhat unflatteringly shows him using a Bluetooth or something to track the progress of a lost jacket.

- Bruno Kirby's final bit of acting, putting in a funny cameo at the end of the "Making of Larry Sanders" doc

- Garofalo admitting her "naturalistic" acting was the result of putting in minimal effort, as she was more focused on stand-up and drinking at the time.

- A completely nerdy argument between Shandling and Judd Apatow (later of Freaks and Geeks and The 40-Year-Old Virgin) over a scrapped joke involving a child on a leash.

But what distinguishes Larry Sanders from its imitators most of all is the high level of acting. The performances by Rip Torn as bulldog producer Artie and Jeffrey Tambor as Larry's talentless, tacky sidekick Hank Kingsley are unparalled. Torn steals plenty of scenes, but Hank is my pick for THE GREATEST TV CHARACTER OF ALL TIME; an angry, self-loathing imbecile trapped in the nightmare of being a poor man's Ed McMahon. Just look at the character's range in the episode "Hank's Night in the Sun," where he fills in for Larry as host and morphs from endearingly nervous schlub to raging asshole literally overnight. Someone on the dvd comments that Tambor basically played the character as Greek tragedy, and by the time of his scary meltdown in the series' amazing final episode Hank has become an epic portrayl of showbiz despair. As far as I'm concerned, you can throw Archie Bunker and his chair out of the Smithsonian and onto the street to make way for Hank Kingsley sitting uncomfortably on the couch.

Ricky Gervais in particular has acknowledged how much his career owes to Larry Sanders. If you haven't seen his faux-awkward interview with Shandling from a couple of years ago, these highlghts were carefully chosen by the YouTube poster to make Gervais look hopelessly outmatched and omit the barbs he gets off in the full version (or at least the portions I actually watched).

Consarn it, get me Avon Barksdale on the horn.

2007-04-27T11:16:00.000-07:00

Television Without Pity has recently started recapping The Wire beginning with season one. Considering how badly BET is supposedly chopping up season two in reruns, that site might be your best bet if you don't have HBO and have been too busy watching all your old Airwolf tapes to make the leap to dvd in the last ten years. As you'll immediately notice upon first visit, TWOP uses little cartoon icons next to the title of each show. Some of them are more closely related to the show's actual contents than others. The one they're using for The Wire, however, leaves me a tad mystified:

I get that this humorous, crotchety caricature is "listening in" on someone or something, in keeping with the crack investigative skills of some of (damn you, Herc) the Major Crimes unit, yet I'm struck by how completely he fails to embody anyone on the show. I guess he might vaguely resemble the Greek, but then again I don't recall the Greek hoisting any unwieldy ear horn thingies while conducting his nefarious dealings (that's what flunkies are for). Granted, this antique hearing device does resemble some of the Baltimore PD's moldering surveillance equipment, but even Valchek makes a more sightly specimen than TWOP's cartoon codger. Personally, I might have doodled McNulty and Bunk puking outside an Irish bar, or maybe Stringer Bell scribbling away in a community college business class; or perhaps even Bubbles visiting Space Camp and spilling crack vials while floating in the zero gravity chamber (now that was a Very Special Episode). Now that the damage is done though, I hope David Simon still has time to incorporate this mysterious character into season five; perhaps as Lovable Lou, a quick-tempered, cantankerous ex-colonel who speaks to Prez's math class about the dangers of both improper ear horn insertion and B-more's latest street drugs. Which reminds me, in keeping w/ past topical drug names such as "WMD's", I predict next season's corner kids will be slinging "Global Warnings"* and "Of Montreal Sex Tapes" (that last one's just a hunch).

*with apologies to Philly Boy Roy

UPDATE: I can't believe I actually wrote about this today. Could the topics of this blog be any more pointless? What happened?!?

"Roy Orbison sits impassively like a monochrome Buddha."

2007-04-19T15:04:00.000-07:00

WFMU's Bronwyn C alerts the world that some of the greatest stories I've ever read on the internet, Ulli Haarbürste's tales of wrapping Roy Orbison in clingfilm (or plastic wrap, in U.S. parlance), have been compiled and expanded in novel form. You can still read the original stories here, and at the risk of hyperbolizing, if you don't enjoy them at least a little then I don't want to know you. Or if you don't enjoy them and I already know you, then it's too bad I can't undo the circumstances that led to our acquaintance :(

My Big Fat Greek WHAT?!? (cue "surprise" take; cue "BoOoOIiing" sound effect; cue eternal shame)

2007-04-14T08:57:00.000-07:00

Last night I forwent my usual, lascivous, Dov Charney-like Friday night plans ("Who are you kidding, hermit boy, you were probably building a model monorail and posting L.A. Law clips on YouTube, as usual." "Shut up. A lot of Larry Drake fans watch those clips.") to attend a gala cinematic event in DC. Earlier that afternoon, whilst browsing the "Weekend Picks" on DCist - as I often do, in case a hot new indie band like Milk Was a Bad Choice or The Willie Aimes Dysphoria are in town - I saw a listing for a free, ultra-obscure, "Greek exploitation" film called Death Kiss playing that evening at the Library of Congress. The description on the theater's website included the following passage:

Gigolo Jim Preston, disenchanted during the anniversary of his marriage to his wealthy, older, alcoholic, shrill of a wife, Ellen, concocts a plan to rid the planet of her presence and enjoy the breadth of her fortune with many a young plaything. In his plight, Jim calls upon his seemingly normal friend Mike to drop the axe. Unbeknownst to Jim, Mike is a heroin-addicted psychopath with hobbies that include kidnaping, rape, addicting others to heroin, storing live people in coffins, etc. and is considering taking up necrophilia.

As I mentioned earlier in my Grindhouse post, it's easy to get burned with these movies that promise almost-surreal levels of outrageousness but either don't deliver or quickly get boring - or are otherwise just plain unwatchable. Maybe Quentin Tarantino has been a worse influence on me than I thought though, as the description sounded so wacky I wondered if the Greeks had anything new to offer the world of sordid, grade-z movies... besides maybe foustanellas. So I decided to hoof it over there after work ("'Hoof it over there?' What are you, a Montana survivalist or something?" "Haven't you done enough damage already, parenthesis?").

There were a couple dozen others in the audience as our gregarious host gave a brief introduction. He confirmed the screening was more or less a fluke, as they happened to have a rare Greek exploitation film (a micro-genre I'm going to offensively and not-so-catchily dub "Unilowbrow") and decided to schedule it for an open date. They had also promised trailers beforehand with titles like Black Samurai and The People Who Owned the Dark, but instead the first thing that appeared on screen was... a 70's porn flick. After what felt like a looong few minutes of graphic on-screen fucking, the host ran into the projectionist booth to shut the thing off, then came back and apologized, saying the wrong film was in the canister. "That was supposed to be a Pasolini trailer," he pleaded. Yeah, right.

So anyway, then it was on to the main course; the souvlaki, if you will. Hey, remember how the description of the movie sounded potentially fun? Well, would you believe it turned out to be... misleading *gasp*? First, this print of the film was actually called The Rape Killer, not Death Kiss. Second, the psychopath wasn't nearly as outrageous as he was made out to be. He was just a sweaty little Polanski lookalike who liked to rape women, slap them in the face OVER and OVER and then strangle them. Whoops! Oh, and the wife wasn't "shrill" or "alcoholic," she was just the usual brainless female victim. The heroin vacuum who played the mistress was a non-entity as well. The audience sporadically laughed at the usual inane dialogue, horrific clothes and implausible plot points (not to mention an undending succession of compact cars), but the rape stuff stopped everybody cold.

So overall it was a disappointing couple of hours, but at least it was free, aside from the metro fare. Plus, now I'll be able to say I watched some hardcore porn at the Library of Congress. I feel just like a Congressional page! For a much classier cinematic antidote, here's a link to a wild, 8-minute car chase from the French* action movie Blazing Magnum.

*EDIT: At first thought it was an Italian movie, I think because some music from this was on that Beretta 70 soundtrack comp. So at first I wrote - get this -"Italian? Now, uh... that's-a spicy meatball." Ha ha ha! Get it? 'Cuz... that old commercial... ("Do you comprehend how much you deserve to die for that?" "...Yes. Yes I do.")

Regret #57,432

2007-04-13T04:48:00.000-07:00

I should've read more Vonnegut.

Now I feel like an

The Grindhouse Report (in which I'm too lazy to italicize anything)

2007-04-07T18:21:00.000-07:00

I couldn't care less about many of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's obsessions (e.g. the careers of B-movie veterans like Michael Biehn, Jeff Fahey and Danny Trejo), and until now I've flat-out hated every Rodriguez movie I've seen, with the exception of certain aspects of Sin City (and a case can be made that major credit for that lies elsewhere). However, I found the bulk of Grindhouse to be entertaining anyway, and Planet Terror's (Rodriguez's section) over-the-top, over-the-moon onslaught can probably be appreciated either as genre parody or tribute. Not so with Tarantino's film, Death Proof; I think they released this at Easter because Tarantino inflicts Christ-like suffering on bored audiences waiting for the payoff.

Give Rodriguez credit for making a film that turns his weaknesses (storytelling, trashiness, allegedly breaking up his marriage to bang Rose McGowan) into strengths. There probably wasn't any need for ANOTHER zombie movie, but the combination of McGowan eye candy, "missing reels," ridiculous violence/explosions and Texas freakiness made me laugh out loud probably more than I did at Shaun of the Dead. So if that's what you're looking for, it delivers.

But I wouldn't have bothered w/ Planet Terror at all if it weren't for the Tarantino double feature. I don't know if there's anyone whose movies I have enjoyed, or at least found interesting, against greater odds. About 70% of Death Proof is SO! FUCKING! BORING though! Dear GOD! If you thought listening to David Carradine in Kill Bill was tedious, get ready! Most of this film consists of a bunch of "tough chicks" sitting around bullshitting while we wait for Kurt Russell (good here, especially at the end) to do something. Now I for one would be a happy moviegoer if more films ditched their usual routine plot machinations to focus on fascinating conversations and odd tangents; Plus, making a second film as over the top as Planet Terror would've been just as tedious. But Tarantino seems to be locked in a contest with Kevin Smith to see who can write the most interminable, artificial dialogue imaginable. I found Uma Thurman and Maria de Medeiros engaging to listen to in Pulp Fiction, and I liked Pam Grier in Jackie Brown, but the women in this film don't resemble anyone you or I know (women, I'm... uh, looking at you here). They reek of the seedy confines of Tarantino's head and come solely adorned with his obsessions. Yuck. Plus, there's more of his awkward, allegedly good-natured racial banter on display. In a way Death Proof IS an interesting oddity; it could never stand on its own as a feature release but it contains one well-executed middle sequence; a crazy, extended car chase ending; and one of the best "The End" title cards I've ever seen. None of that redeems the preceeding tedium though.

Finally, the fake trailers at the beginning and "intermission" are easily the highlight of this thing; similar to how the amusing trailers to those old exploitation films are usually more entertaining than the features themselves. Maybe 2-3 minutes is the ideal length for these kinds of films.

Perhaps the creepiest scene in all of "Twin Peaks"

2007-04-03T19:09:00.000-07:00

And no, it's not the quaint, charming BOB appearance that immediately follows it. It's this song (or as the YouTube user labeled it: "song"). Watching the new season 2 dvds reminded me of it. I don't know whose voice that's supposed to be, where the other instrumentation is coming from, or what Lara Flynn Boyle is actually thinking when her character has to gaze longingly at über-doofus James Hurley. You know how Boogie Nights permanently recontexualized "You Got the Touch" from the Transformers movie? If someone ever gives me a motion picture green light I'm gonna find a way to re-imagine this.

Song of the Year 2007. It's ovah, Seance!

2007-03-28T07:11:00.000-07:00

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists' (great) new album Living With the Living has apparently already locked up album of the year in some quarters and has been on heavy rotation at my palatial estate for the last week or so; but their ridiculously stomping cover of Chumbawumba's "Rappaport's Testament: I Never Gave Up" from the accompanying Mo'Living EP (actually a brief song cycle about some of the lesser known Wayanses*) is what's really rockin' my... uhm... palatial world right now. It's the only song I've listened to obsessively in gods know how long as well as the first one to fill me with some "Eye of the Tiger"-style get-up-and-go since... well, Ted's recent cover of "Rock n Roll Dreams'll Come Through." In fact, I think the only way I'll give up now is if they don't play this song when I see them tomorrow night in DC. For now you can listen to it at the very end of Omar's latest Best Show on WFMU recap.

*Yes, I went for a bad Wayans pun instead of a bad Rappaport pun. I daren't attempt both. I simply daren't.

"See you at the Oscars!"

2007-03-25T19:58:00.000-07:00

This post serves as something of a public service (as opposed to the rest, which are more like saintly missives kissed by seraphim), as I think - think - at least a couple of my readers have never read anything by George Saunders, who I'm almost certain they would go unabashedly batty for in no time. Many of Saunders' recent stories initially resemble an expanded, satirical McSweeeny's feature or some other internet-era feat of whimsy, but are eventually fraught with uncommon humanism and Vonnegut-like pathos that distinguishes him above so many other contemporary writers. I just finished his latest short story collection, In Persuasion Nation, and it really clicked with me beyond anything of his I'd previously read, which includes the fantastic Pastoralia and the earlier CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (which I felt at the time suffered from seemingly forced miserableness). In short, Saunders is the funniest writer I know of working today, certainly one of the most clever and original, and if it catches you right his work is also genuinely affecting.

Wait, did I say George Saunders? I meant Tom DeLay w/ Stephen Mansfield. That's a mia-gulpa for yours truly.

One of those all-link posts that I hope ultimately doesn't count

2007-03-21T21:53:00.000-07:00

- SOYA has a preview of Showtime's version of This American Life - which I'll check out in whatever decade Comcrap gets around to fixing my cable - with an animated segment by Chris Ware.

- Things every comedy-loving person saw before me part 437: On Fiona's right shoulder, a good angel. On her left, a bad one.

- Said the Gramophone's posted a gorgeous Medicine Head song that I flipped over last winter, which evidently was one of John Peel's faves. I originally heard about it as part of a news story on the suitcase full of singles he carried with him most of the time. I then found it as part of a subsequent flurry of mp3 postings that, like an Andy Goldsworthy piece, was too fragile and beautiful to last.

- Here's another mp3 blog w/an oft-great selection. It's worth checking out just to see how many films you can identify from the still frames.

- "The President should be allowed to fire everyone..."

- "...and senators should be allowed to take all the cheap shots they want without anyone being able to respond."

Oh, and I'm diggin' this hard (and no, I haven't picked up the rest of the stuff in the box set yet):

I'm told that after the early 70's, the Bee Gees briefly emerged from obscurity to appear in some reggaeton-themed, coming-of-age drama with Daddy Yankee, the girl from Puce Moment, and Tom Noonan from Manhunter. Oh, and they apparently rode Rick Dees' coattails by releasing a disco record. However, anyone who likes the Beatles, Beach Boys, Zombies, etc. even a little would do well to check out their remastered, reissued (with bonus tracks that stack up just fine against the non-bonus kind) debut album from '67, which is utterly in the same vein as those groups. Take the weirdly brilliant flourishes of "Every Christian Lion-Hearted Man Will Show You," which proceeds from mock-Gregorian chant into ye olde 60's pop majesty. You know what a Gregorian chant intro would portend these days? Some depressing, 22-minute post-rock instrumental w/ a title that looks like a page from Absalom, Absalom! that's what! To quote Brian Wilson by way of Tom Scharpling, "I just wasn't made for these times."

Which is not to say depressing music doesn't have its proper place. Take El-P's new one, for instance. I've only listened to a couple of tracks so far, but any hip hop album that opens with a Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me sample automatically earns five mics and a couple of "garmonbozias" for good measure.

Please God, let there be three more Artie Bucco episodes.

2007-03-18T00:25:00.000-07:00

While a Simpsons movie is finally hitting theaters this summer, in perhaps the most flagrant-ever defiance of the "strike while the iron is hot" rule, another dragged-out series is coming to an end as the final episodes of The Sopranos air beginning in April. Recently there was a news story about a shooting permit dust-up between the producers and Bloomfield, NJ. Series creator David Chase wanted to film the alleged final scene in the final episode at Holsten's Ice Cream Parlour but ran into some resistance from stereotype-scarred locals, who were eventually forced to relent and let the filming take place.

The ice cream thing is a fascinating tidbit. If we assume that the final scene of the series really does take place in an ice cream parlour, then I present the following theory on how the ending will play out:

FINAL SCENE:

TONY and AJ enter an ice cream shop. Robert Patrick's compulsive gambler character from season two is manning the counter, but Tony fails to notice. AJ glances up at the menu.

AJ: I want an ice cream cone... and a hamburger... and french fries.... and some fucking ziti (wink to the camera)... and...
TONY (shaking him furiously): YOU'LL GET NOTHING AND LIKE IT!*

Just then, the INDESTRUCTIBLE RUSSIAN MOBSTER who eluded Paulie and Christopher in the "Pine Barrens" episode from season 3, storms into the shop and stares down Tony. We see he is still badly injured but holding clumps of wingtipped hair in his tightly clenched fists, indicating he has already enacted revenge against Paulie off-screen.

TONY: No! It can't be you! We all thought you were dead!

The IRM says something in Russian, but some jackhammer noise outside drowns out his voice, so even if you speak Russian you don't know what he's saying, and it's supposed to always remain ambiguous.

Suddenly, the IRM attacks Tony, first attempting a bear hug w/ no success, then slamming him through a table in a feat of mom-rescuing-trapped-child-like strength. A horrified AJ stands there watching because he is useless. Robert Patrick has fled the scene. The IRM then drags a stunned Tony over to the soft serve machine, where he slowly empties its contents down Tony's throat, choking him to death.

The camera then pans from Tonly's lifeless body over to a tub of ice cream marked BEN & JERRY'S DUCK DUCK GOOSE. We hold this shot and superimpose it over a flashback of Tony frolicking with the ducks in his pool at the beginning of season one.

CUT TO:

A blank, bright white screen, in front of which stands the creepy, silhouetted old woman Tony has previously seen in his dreams. The figure steps slowly forward and is revealed to be... DAVID CHASE in drag. Chase then smiles knowingly at the camera as we fade out. The Rolling Stones' "Rough Justice" plays over the credits.

*It's never too late in the series for a Caddyshack homage.

The Ides of March

2007-03-15T11:57:00.000-07:00

I remember always hearing something about this day but I can’t remember what it is. You’re supposed to remain generally oblivious, run with/toward sharp objects and wear a leafy headband, right?

This doubles as my submission to the 33 1/3 series, by the way

2007-03-10T19:49:00.000-08:00

Recently while listening to Prince's greatest album, Sign O' The Times, on the way to work, I began to have new, serious reservations about the lyrical content of a song I've always dug, "The Ballad of Dorothy Parker." While I haven't always exactly shared the same value judgments as His Purple Badness, let alone the characters in his many salacious songs (hmmm, now I smell a potential blog miniseries), something about this particular title character seemed especially off-putting on this occasion. Let's break down the song's lyrics and see if we can pinpoint the sources of my consternation:

Dorothy was a waitress on the promenade
She worked the night shift
Dishwater blonde, tall and fine
She got a lot of tips
Well, earlier I'd been talkin' stuff
In a violent room
Fighting with lovers past
I needed someone with a quicker wit than mine
Dorothy was fast

OK, so far I think most of us would have a favorable impression of Ms. Parker. Plenty of charming, alluring young women have held down food service jobs at some point in their lives. My ideal personifcation of this type might more closely resemble, say, Salma Hayek than a "dishwater blonde," but whatever. Plus, Dorothy of course shares her name with a revered writer, so any moment now I think we can expect her to serve up a platter of bon mots with a side of sly come-ons (or onion rings), right?

Well, I ordered - "Yeah, let me get a fruit cocktail, I ain't 2 hungry"
Dorothy laughed
She said "Sounds like a real man 2 me"
Kinda cute, U wanna take a bath?
(do you wanna, do you wanna, bath)

Uh oh, right away discriminating listeners probably are getting the feeling they've been sold a bill of goods concerning Ms. Parker's alleged "wit." I can just picture the kind of woman who'd say "sounds like a real man (to) me." She'd probably fit squarely in either the white trash or Francesca Fiore camp, neither of which I particularly want to visit. Plus: "U wanna take a bath?" That just about tops the list of most UN-clever things a person can say upon first meeting . "Hi, my name's Chri - WILL YOU TAKE A BATH WITH ME?!?" Although today that sentence might look more forgivable in the low-stakes era of text messaging, where Prince proved 2 B ahead of his time, spellingwise.

I said "Cool, but I'm leaving my pants on" (she say)
"Cuz I'm kind of going with someone"
She said "Sounds like a real man 2 me"

We'll address the pants issue in a minute, but you'll recall how that last sentence set off alarm bells the first time she used it. Now she's just repeating the same stock phrases like a mentally challenged person approximating flirtatiousness. A part of me wonders if this song should've been called "Riding the Bus with Dorothy Parker" instead.

"Mind if I turn on the radio?"
"Oh, my favorite song" she said
And it was Joni singing "Help me I think I'm falling"

Oh good, I'd have to listen to Joni Mitchell with her as well. Normally I don't think music taste is that important but by now I'm less and less inclined to cut her any slack.

(Ring)
The phone rang and she said
"Whoever's calling can't be as cute as U"

Ugh. Keep going...

Right then I knew I was through
(Dorothy Parker was cool)

My pants were wet, they came off
But she didn't see the movie
Cuz she hadn't read the book first

Dorothy not having read a book? As one bonafide comic genius was fond of saying, "get out of the city!"

Instead she pretended she was blind
An affliction brought on by a witch's curse
Dorothy made me laugh (ha ha)

Great, now we can apparently add bad improv acting to the list of "cons." The fact that this guy is laughing at it doesn't exactly cast him in a good light either. Maybe Prince is channeling Drew Carey here?

I felt much better so I went back
2 the violent room (tell us what U did)
Let me tell U what I did...

I took another bubble bath with my pants on
All the fighting stopped
Next time I'll do it sooner
This is the ballad of Dorothy Parker

At this point I think I'm most concerned about Prince's wardrobe, as I'd wager the kind of pants he wears wouldn't lend themselves to frequent bubble bath immersion . I don't know if his leaving his pants on (at first, anyway) nullifies the whole "cheating" aspect either. Worst case scenario, that resembles Francis Wolcott from Deadwood's logic, and I'm sure we all remember how that turned out.

Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker
Well
Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker
Well

Yes, yes, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker. Maybe someday Prince will write a follow-up song called "The Ballad of Virginia Woolf," about a schizophrenic lunch lady who ends up running around in an gorilla suit like at the end of Wise Blood. Save that for your next comeback, Your Paisley Majesty!

I've been shamefully negligent

2007-03-02T07:33:00.000-08:00

...in declaring my love for 30 Rock on, of all things, this very blog of admiration and/or scorn for the works of others. Count me as the 3,000,000th unoriginal person who saw last week's episode to say I love it so much I want to "take it behind a middle school and get it pregnant." You can always watch the last 5 or so episodes for free on nbc.com and I strongly advise everyone to take advantage. It's become my favorite show while Real Time w/ Marlo Stanfield is away. I always thought Tina Fey was just ok, but if I'd known she would eventually create something so brilliant that also just happens to feature recurring Ghostface Killah appearances, I would've subjected you all to beguiling/creepy .gifs like this more often:

Kelly Clarkson Survived a Broken TV Home.

2007-03-01T19:54:00.000-08:00

Despite having already written the self-described "definitive treatise on American Idol" (still the second most popular blog post in MySpace history, following Joe Rogan's legendary 2005 flame war with a Thai restaurant waiter). I made another couple of mild attempts to get into it this year (well, the auditions anyway) without success. You want just one reason why I'm not furiously texting each week on behalf of, say, a moisturizer-loving white guy warbling "A Change is Gonna Come?" Here's just one:

Forget for a moment that the other two "judges" on this show are a crackpot choreographer who got lucky and a guy primarily known for using the word "dawg" more awkwardly than Sean Connery. I think I'd have more musical taste in common with just about anyone - even Ryan Seacrest, a guy who makes Carson Daly look as gonzo as Hunter S. Thompson - than Simon Cowell.

All this time I've had absolutely no idea what this guy had done in the music industry that even qualified him to critique the handwriting on a setlist, much less anyone's singing ability, so I looked up his entry on the perpetually super-accurate Wikipedia (and by the way, the NY Times running an article about someone else's inaccuracies is a bitter laugh indeed). Turns out in addition to signing a bunch of UK pop drones I'd mostly never heard of (note: as bad as you think American pop music might be, just rememeber the British scene is always substantially worse), Cowell's also got the following credits under his belt:

"He also released several novelty recordings featuring the likes of wrestlers of the World Wrestling Federation, Zig and Zag and the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, that were huge successes."

Wrestlers? Power Rangers? Zig? Zag? Before looking at his resume, I always thought Cowell's idea of a perfect pop star would be a trilly-voiced, mall-ready sexpot who finds herself irresistibly attracted to a flat-topped sleazoid seemingly oblivious to his own prissiness. Turns out it would be Jet Jaguar.

Meanwhile, from elsewhere on the interwebs, here's your first, tantalizing tease as to the contents of The Wire season 5 (Thanks to Recidivism for the link). With all due respect to UBM, I kinda consider Maniac Cop to be the "Dr. Strangelove of police procedurals." I'm gonna go waaaay out on a limb w/ a prediction for the final season: McNulty will die, while Omar and Bubbles will both survive. Oh, and Clay Davis will resign as state senator and join the Comedians of Comedy tour. I think they've been building up to that one for some time.

Live Oscar blogging beats the Apollo moon landing any day.

2007-02-25T17:39:00.000-08:00

7:55 PM - I've been wearing an unwashed grey suit for over a month to support Borat's screenplay nomination. Tonight's where it pays off!

8:35 PM - Surprisingly, Errol Morris' opening interview montage did not include a Fred Leuchter appearance.

8:40 PM - Ellen's suit is the visual equivalent of "Oprah, Uma."

8:47 PM - Woo hoo, first award... What the FUCK! The Good Shepherd lost Best Art Direction?!? Fuck! This! Evening ruined. Kiss my ass, Hollywood. Is basketball on? Pacers vs. Kings... uh...

8:53 - Man, this Kings game is weird. Ron Artest just started singing about fighting Peter O'Toole. Wait, which show am I watching? Fuck, this is actually kinda hard.

9:07 PM - GUYS!!! IM sO DRUNK!!!1!

9:23 PM - OK IM BACK. SOMEone told me Tim and Eric r presenting later.

9:30 PM - guys yu think Jon Heder will evr win an oscar? ppl never tjought eddie murphey wld win one either and look what just happened.

9:32 PM - OH SHIT JAMES TAYLOR GUYS I LOV THIS SONG!!!

9:34 - Aand now its that convenient truths song. look yall i know its easy to be cynical abouit the oscars but ten billion people watch every year. ITS STILL REAL 2 ME DAMMIT!

9:37 PM - HEY ITS SORE LOSERMAN HA HA HA

9:40 - gUys Im sorry abt that sore loserman joke. this aint the half hour comedy hour on fox news, you dont come here for that sorta thing. Also, I just saw on yahoo eddie murphy didn't actully win. sorry.

9:56 - Shit, sorry again I was lookin for that gif of the cat jumpin out of the hedge and attacking the little kid bt i cant find it. I just thought it wouild be funny. i dont even know whats goin on on the oscars. I'm sorry... this blog sucks. im not fukin funny eitehr which is why i only have 2 readers.

10:01 - you know what the worst part of tonigt is, i got stuff i should be workin on for work but i keep puttin it off. WTF is wrong w/ me why am i so unmotivated. Plus im fukin drunk and i only had 1 beer.

10:03 FUUUUUUuuuuuuuuuck.

10:06 god i fuckin suck. i suck i suck i suck. Can you at least make friends on match.com or is it only for dating? Im lonely and i suck. i need to take this fukcin suit off, it stinks.

10 ? im going to bed early. i'll catch tim + erics bit on youtube tomorrow. sorry for sucking.

Plus, I'm Pretty Sure This Blog has Been Read as Many as 23 Times Since June!

2007-02-23T12:30:00.000-08:00

Above: I didn't know Biohazard were still together, much less that they had an opening for a saxophonist

This weekend sees the release of The Number 23, which I believe stars Jim Carrey as an accident-prone fire marshall with bladder control issues who becomes obsessed with the alphabet or something. As hard as it is to believe that I could pass on the new Joel Schumacher movie, I think I'll be spending my $9.50 elsewhere this weekend. Nevertheless, this film has gotten me thinking about the significance the number 23 has played in my own life. For example:

-On my 23rd birthday I ate 23 pounds of macaroni and cheese over a period of 23 hours and subsequently shat 23 times, all while having 23 seperate crying fits.
-When I was a kid, I was a big fan of Michael Jordan (No. 23), but now I know there are at least 23 reasons to find him loathsome.
-There are at least 23 states in the US that I have no desire to ever visit, although I've heard the western part of the 23rd state, Maine, is pretty happening.
-I abide by the little-known comedy "rule of 23," in which the setup is established 22 times and then the 23rd time is the punchline. Unfortunately, the audience is usually hurling too much abuse by that point to hear the punchline, but that's what makes it edgy.
-It’s a little known fact that Spike Lee bought the rights to my 23rd novella, The 23rd Hour (which followed my previous efforts 22 Cigarettes and The 21st Jump Street) for $23,000 and adapted it into The 25th Hour. I just wish he hadn’t changed the original ending, in which Edward Norton’s character is mauled by 23 mutated lemurs.
-One day in high school – Dec 23, to be exact - I received 23 swirlies in the bathroom after I wore a pink t-shirt depicting 23 members of Menudo.
-I’m pretty sure I've masturbated to at least 23 different Sherilyn Fenn movies in my life. This eventually cost me 23 friends when a few of us got together to watch Of Mice and Men.
-In the early 70’s my uncle Tyrone “Donkey” Duncanhurst (23 letters!) was in a funk band called the Two Threes. They recorded a song called “The Funky 23 Corners" that was banned from 23 different radio stations due to the second and third verse, in which my uncle threatened to shoot Spiro Agnew 23 times in the face.

I could go on and on, but if you'll excuse me I have to go buy a cobb salad at Whole Foods for about... $23 bucks!

And it seems to me you awarded custody of the body like a candle in the wind

2007-02-23T09:01:00.000-08:00

I really, really, REALLY didn't think I would care about any aspect of the Anna Nicole Smith debacle, but this crying judge is just off-the-charts bizarre. The video is easy to find elsewhere, of course. Sure, the world appears to be "melting like an ice cream cone," and the Bush administration is using its same old tricks to provoke conflict w/ Iran, but still, a crying judge! The only thing funnier would be if this character changed careers and handled the case. Enjoy the apeshittedness of 2007 before it just turns to regular shit.

A Yellow-Trousered, Spritely Elf Playing a Musical Bottle of Ale

2007-02-22T20:22:00.000-08:00

I can't help but recycle Andrew Earles' recent linkage to this Michael Anthony-led bass excursion/Sun Ra Arkestra audition from Van Hagar's 5150 tour. This follows news that the recently-announced Van Halen reunion tour is likely already kaput. It's just as well: Wolfgang VH may be a prodigy for all I know but let's see him run around after downing as much Jack as Anthony had in this clip -- all while pretending to tolerate the Red Rocker's onstage presence (did this tour have its own sweatpant coordinator or something?)

I take it back...

2007-02-19T20:49:00.000-08:00

Jodorowsky is clearly a lightweight compared to this.

Meanwhile, Criterion finally releases Army of Shadows in May. And from elsewhere in their catalog, if you enjoyed Pan's Labyrinth, or maybe especially if you were turned off by certain aspects of it, this enigmatic film should be your next stop.

Did a gay guy besmirch the crossover dribble or something?

2007-02-15T19:15:00.000-08:00

Former NBA star Tim Hardaway made some comments about gay people last night that seem to have gone COMPLETELY under the radar (or "on the down low" if you will). Actually, you've probably heard about it by now but this was what he saideth on a Miami radio station:

“You know, I hate gay people, so I let it be known. I don’t like gay people and I don’t like to be around gay people. I am homophobic. I don’t like it. It shouldn’t be in the world or in the United States…First of all, I wouldn’t want (a gay player) on my team. And second of all, if he was on my team, I would really distance myself from him because, uh, I don’t think that is right. I don’t think he should be in the locker room while we are in the locker room. But stuff like that is going on and there’s a lot of other people I hear that are like that and still in the closet and don’t want to come out of the closet, but you know I just leave that alone.'’

Eyewitnesses have just come forward w/ details about further remarks in the same vein that Hardaway made off the air:

"Gays are gayin' it up. So mad. So mad at teh gays.* It shouldn't happen in the universe or even in towns. When I am in one building, I want them to be in another building from me and also to, uh, not be gay there. I hereby declare it. When I go to teh movies with women and share a bag of popcorn with women I do not want gays driving cars near the building. I mean, the theater. Hate. Hate them. Hate them so much that... it... it... flam - flames. Flames, on the side of my face, heathing... breathle - , heating breaths. Heathing breath... "**

The blunt, simple-minded vehemence of Timmy's remarks - spurred of course by former NBA player John Amaechi recently coming out in a new book - reminded me of this classic, still-shocking Brass Eye exposé from 1997:

*According to one source, Hardaway was indeed so mad he was pronouncing words like "the" as typos, out loud.
** The same source did confirm that Hardaway regularly expresses himself by quoting the movie Clue, although he allegedly mutes all of Mr. Green's dialogue when watching the film at home.***

***Two "Clue" references already this year and we're not even through February yet. I kind of can't believe it myself.

The Best Super Bowl Commercials

2007-02-04T19:45:00.000-08:00

- MetLife's Glengarry Glen Ross parody w/ Tony Dungy in the Alec Baldwin role. Even with the bleeps, this was rough stuff.
- The one where the two mechanics eat the candy bar and accidentally kiss, then Peyton Manning attaches Christmas ornaments to their balls in follow-up spots throughout the night (that guy'll shill for anything).
- Bjork and Matthew Barney as married samurai taunted by a yodeling seal while stranded on a sinking iceberg for Bud Light.

Also, I didn't realize until today that the glorious Puppy Bowl takes place a couple of miles from me at the big Discovery Channel building in Silver Spring. I'm surprised College Park didn't take advantage of this close proximity to riot over the outcome.

Children of Men and Prog Rock's Ultimate Victory

2007-02-04T07:41:00.000-08:00

This year's Oscar nominees for Best Picture look like such boring consensus picks that I may try to convince ABC to drop their coverage of the ceremony and instead run a live feed of me sitting in my apartment playing Bubble Shooter and sulking about my impending, sure-to-be-desolate birthday (which I'm hoping will be Sizemore-ically depressing enough to spin off into a VH1 series). I've only seen one of the nominees, The Departed, but while that's a well-executed genre flick its presence on the list must mean that Scorsese could release a gag reel of outtakes from that Kodak commercial he appeared in and get 9 nominations, just so voters could finally give him a useless gold statuette and restore balance to the universe's trivia lists.

A particularly egregious shutout in comparison would be Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men, which is also easily the best non-documentary film of 2006 I've seen so far (followed by United 93, a film which is nevertheless akin to mental torture at times), and I suspect it will probably stay that way. CoM is set in England in the year 2027, where the UK is the last industrial nation left standing after a series of calamities have thrown the rest of the world into chaos - information that the film subtly discloses through unobtrusive newspaper clippings and background advertisements rather than clumsy exposition. Worst of all, a wisely unexplained infertility plague has stricken humanity for 18 years, effectively crushing all hope for civilization's future until ex-activist-turned-burned-out-bureaucrat Clive Owen ends up having to escort a "miraculously" pregnant immigrant - who at one point jokingly tries to convince Owen she's a virgin, in a nod to the film's allegorical aspect - across the country. All the while the two of them are pursued by terrorists, as well as the occasional cute dog or cat, which tend to cling to Owen.

Regrettably, the quality of widely released films has degenerated to the point where opening the fucking Departed nationwide its first weekend is considered something of a bold move, which helps explain why Universal dumped this film into select theaters at Christmas. Clearly they had no idea what they had on their hands, since in addition to having a brain, Children of Men is a gripping sci-fi thriller that's almost Spielbergian in its hold on the audience; albeit also in its tendency to nearly undo a few scenes with heavy-handedness or ill-timed wisecracks. Cuarón stages two key, much-talked-about action sequences in long, amazingly choreographed, Steadicam shots, the second of which lasts roughly six minutes and finds Owen running through a warzone on a bad foot and dodging bullets... while also cat juggling (well, they might restore that part in the dvd anyway, as I suspect a more cynical populace will finally embrace the sport by 2027).

One of my favorite details in the film is that despite being set in the future, the music everyone frequently listens to is still dated pre-2006, implying that once young people stopped being born popular music crapped out entirely and the filmmakers didn't have to hire anyone to predict future trends ("How about... Haunted Electrohouse"). In one scene, a radio dj is overheard introducing a "classic" from 2003, a time, he says, when people still didn't comprehend the bleak future they were facing (the Shins evidentally fooled everyone). Meanwhile, Michael Caine's wealthy, hippie cartoonist lives with his near-comatose wife in an isolated cabin and gets down to such golden oldies as Roots Manuva and Aphex Twin in between the Beatles and Stones. Best of all, Owen at one point visits an obscenely rich art collector friend, played by Danny Huston, to ask for a crucial favor. Huston's character has bunkered down at a now progged-out Battersea Power Station along with his hopelessly game-obsessed, medicated son, with such works as Michelangelo's David (now sporting a prosthetic leg) and Picasso's Guernica providing the backdrop for their meals. He also blasts King Crimson throughout the building and has taken advantage of his locale by recreating the cover of Pink Floyd's Animals, complete with inflatable pig, in a permanent tableau outside his window, as seen below.

The Floyd reference is ironic and especially apt, not only because animals seem to pop up in every other scene but because Roger Waters' misanthropic worldview will be well-suited to any of the grimdystopian (hello, Cormac McCarthy, you're not the only hotshot who can randomly combine words) possible futures ahead of us. I guess it could be worse; just imagine if New York were the last city left standing: some zillionaire would no doubt try to recreate Supertramp's Breakfast in America album cover. I don't think any of us wants to imagine that.

Regurgitated movie quiz

2007-01-29T09:04:00.000-08:00

In recent years, before New Times Media lately began gutting them, the Village Voice would run the aptly named "World's Hardest Film Quiz" in its pages. I doubt anyone will get upset if I repost one section of the 2004 quiz here for my readers, who I'm guessing haven't seen - or won't remember - this portion, and who I'm putting on the honor system (no googling). Name the film in which these final lines of dialogue are spoken:

1. "She wouldn't even harm a fly."
2. "The day I left, it was written in the almanac: 'The Fire forces the Goldto move. Extremely favorable for going west.' "
3. "Don't shoot—they're in Switzerland." "Good for them."
4. "Its origin, and purpose, still a total mystery."
5. "If not today, then tomorrow, I will have told someone. I can think about escaping after that."
6. "He was a credit to the fight game, to the very end."
7. "Yeah, maybe our fucking orders will come through."
8. " . . . Cannibal."
9. "Won't you leave me a souvenir. Only a small souvenir."
SPECIAL BONUS QUESTION provided by ME:
10. "Alright, Chief, take'em away. I'm gonna go home and sleep with my wife."

Please note that I changed #8 from what originally appeared in print ("...Animal") as I'm certain they were incorrect. Truthfully, I only got #s 3 and 4 right at the time but felt afterward like I definitely should have known 1 & 7. I'll post the answers in the comment section later this week, if anyone actually tries to answer any of these.

Here it is.

2007-01-26T07:37:00.000-08:00

The greatest thing that has ever happened to me. And until it hits the marketplace, here is my message for this invention.

The DVD Box Set of the Year

2007-01-24T11:45:00.000-08:00

...will be released May 1. I don't think Criterion could top this if they put out a Magnificent Ambersons box with the original ending and free Orson Welles capes and hats.

From The Digital Bits:

Boy have we got some great DVD news for you film geeks today! ABKCO Films and Anchor Bay Entertainment have just announced a pair of titles that we've been waiting for on DVD since Day One of this format... El Topo and The Holy Mountain! No kidding! Anchor Bay will release a special limited edition collector's box set, The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, on DVD on 5/1 (SRP $49.98). The set will contain El Topo, The Holy Mountain and Fando Y Lis on DVD, fully restored and remastered from new HD transfers in anamorphic widescreen video, with Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0 audio. The box set will also include 2 music CDs containing the soundtracks for El Topo and The Holy Mountain, as well as a DVD of Jodorowsky's never-before-released first film, La Cravate. El Topo and The Holy Mountain will also be available separately (SRP $24.98 each). The El Topo DVD will contain audio commentary by the director, the original theatrical trailer (with English voice-over), a 2006 on-camera interview with the director as well as an exclusive new interview, a photo gallery and original script excerpts. The Holy Mountain DVD will include audio commentary with the director, deleted scenes with commentary, the original theatrical trailer (with English voice-over), the Tarot short with commentary, a restoration process short, restoration credits, a photo gallery and original script excerpts. Fando Y Lis will include audio commentary with the director and the La Constellation Jodorowsky documentary. Subtitles on the discs will be available in English, French, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. Awesome news indeed!

Soundtrack cds! Commentaries! And more! All for under $50! I'm going to put on a loincloth, paint my genitalia and run around the desert in honor of Jodorowsky... AGAIN!

If you've always wanted to see Rip Torn attack Norman Mailer with a hammer...

2007-01-24T04:35:00.000-08:00

today's your lucky day. More info here.

Inland Empire

2007-01-15T12:42:00.000-08:00

Saw it, don't know what to make of it yet. Mulholland Drive and Eraserhead make intuitive sense if not coherent sense, but I would need another viewing or two (no small commitment) to see if any of the three hours worth of loose threads here coalesce into anything at all. I will say that Lynch would seem to be seriously running out of gas with some of these themes - shifting identities, Hollywood - if he still didn't mine them so vividly. I attended the sold-out screening at the AFI Theater in Silver Spring last night w/ Lynch in attendence. Nothing particularly new came out of the audience Q & A (except for the story of Georgia the cow), although someone asked Lynch what music he was listening to and he mentioned Au Revoir Simone, which led to him describing the scene from Pee-Wee's Big Adventure from which the band got their name. That was surreal.

Bees. I Hate Those Guys.

2007-01-12T07:27:00.000-08:00

The "best" scenes from the Wicker Man remake. Swiped from here and here.

I promise copying and pasting will not replace my usual brand of mediocrity

2007-01-08T10:40:00.000-08:00

Huh. Robert Downey Jr. is going to play Iron Man. No, not that one. This one. I'm completely over superhero movies but this casting tells me A) they probably won't shy away from the alcoholsim angle and B) there may be some company crossover potential:

The police, who had been prepared to go in with a SWAT team, chose a more relaxed approach. "We decided to just do a 'knock and talk,' " says Anderson, who had learned from the hotel's security director that Downey spent the day in his room with a female companion, who has not been identified, but who, according to police, left behind a Wonder Woman costume.

Elsewhere, from this past Sunday's Washington Post, comedian Jonathan Carlos says that being Stephen Colbert's Black Friend doesn't come w/ many perks:

How did I get to be Colbert's on-air compadre of color? Simple. One day a friend of mine who happened to be a producer for the show called and asked me to come and have my picture taken with Colbert. He explained that it was for a segment they'd be airing that night in which I would play Colbert's black friend. With zero prospects and a gnawing fear that they'd find a replacement, I streaked over to the studios on New York City's West Side, where I was quickly introduced to the man himself, Stephen Colbert. We took the picture and my producer friend showed me out. The joke has since become a running gag. I had hoped to parlay it into a job; instead I got a lot of MySpace "friends." These experiences didn't leave me feeling good, but they did make me think more about being black. Better late than never, I guess.

That's unfortunate, although not quite as painful-sounding as watching Stephen suck up to Henry Kissinger a couple weeks ago, but I wouldn't be too quick to slag off MySpace friend status. I'm hoping that when Gilbert Arenas approves my friend request I'll get invited to his next Diddy-hosted B-day bash in DC, a terrifying/fascinating account of which was recently posted over at the amazing Wizznutzz.

Speaking of terrifying (but not fascinating), I hope you're ready for Bush's big Iraq strategy announcement this Wednesday. He thought it over really, really hard in Crawford over the holidays, and I'm sure he's been mostly consulting the same neo-cons who've been so on the money about everything that's happened so far, so things should start turning right around any day now. Hell, Iraqis already have reason to be cheerful, as they won't have to worry about controling their oil fields for the next 30 years! The build-up to this announcement (which will apparently be a troop increase) in the media reminds me of the hoopla surrounding the mysterious "It" a few years back. Remember? There were stories and rumours circulating about a mysterious invention referred to as "It" which would likely change all of our lives once "It" was revealed. A few months later, there was a 60 Minutes segment in which "It" was unveiled and "It" turned out to be the fucking Segway scooter, which to this point has been chiefly notable in my mind as a badge of assholism and as the main mode of transportation of GOB on Arrested Development. I'm betting the best thing we'll soon be able to say about Bush's new Iraq plan is that it'll be "sub-Segway," a very lowly ranking indeed.

Someone confiscate Michael Mann's Audioslave cd.

2006-12-30T19:53:00.000-08:00

(Above: Wasn't "Outacted by Clouds" a Pink Floyd album title?)

Last night I watched Michael Mann's new, dour-ized adaptation of Miami Vice on dvd. I've still never seen much of the tv show, other than stray scenes like this one that I try to recreate on a nightly basis, complete w/ angst-ridden pay phone calls to family and friends (much to their consternation). Nevertheless, it's a safe bet over the course of five seasons there was at least a minimum of character development and comprehensibility, which is more than you'll get in Mann's new, typically stylized Foxx/Farrell version.

The cops in the new Vice aren't characters so much as they are constructs of fetishistic, high-tech law enforcement. I wonder if Mann ever catches himself calling his fellow man "civilians" in real life. I know that on the show Don Johnson's Sonny Crockett had a son, an ex-wife and a pet crocodile. The character Colin Farrell plays, however, seems to be more emotionally unattached than Ralph Nader before hooking up with Gong Li later in the film. There's no wife, no kid, and if he ever had a crocodile, judging by his glum demeanor he probably ate it. In fact, the only piece of backstory I could pick out was a factoid about Nu-Crockett's dad playing Allman Brothers covers or something (say, was he later a roadie for Metallica?). Jamie Foxx's Ricardo Tubbs is at least shacked up w/ a hot special lady, but she just so happens to be one of his fellow vice squad officers. Even for a Mann film, where professionalism is placed above all else in life, the cops here exist in a thoroughly insular world that seemingly allows no outsider entrance, except maybe for sexy showering purposes.

Overall the film is terrible in terms of character and story. The plot finds Crockett and Tubbs infiltrating a wacky contingent of Colombians, Russians and white supremacists that the Bush administration has nicknamed the Axis of Casting. To add to the multicultural frenzy, Gong Li's character - some kind of money manager for the group - is Chinese-Cuban and possibly proficient in zero languages. I did have a better time understanding Gong than some viewers seem to have, but Farrell's accent is odd and he delivers his lines more tersely than Burt Reynolds on Celebrity Jeaprody. He also looks instantly dated and ridiculous - like Fred Armisen with pro wrestler hair and facial styling - yet he's portrayed as some sort of ladykiller (possibly literally? Hey, maybe). Foxx is neither effective nor well-suited to his role either. In the end it doesn't matter what the characters are saying anyway, as much of the dialogue is either meaningless jargon (this film will clean up at the Op-Sac Awards) or absurd tough guy talk that's nearly awfulsome but mostly awful, some ("This is the hand we've been dealt on a Saturday night at 11:37 PM" - Crockett). Don't count on action sequences to break up the verbal tedium either as there are only two such set pieces, both arriving toward the end of the film.

Despite all that, there are still plenty of visual reasons to recommend Vice, as Mann ups the ante with the striking hi-def video look that also distinguished Collateral. Many shots of swaying palm trees and ominous thunderclouds are lush enough to make Terrence Mallick go out and shoot more footage of bugs to stay on his toes. Occasionally the picture quality is noticeably gritty but not unappealingly so. Beyond that there's so much vividly shot nightclubbing and boating and traipsing around islands that it even makes the generic hard rock on the soundtrack sound good. Now I'm sorry Mann never directed a Jay-Z video (hell, I'd settle for a Fatlip video). Here's a reprinted L.A. Times article about what Mann feels are the pros and cons of shooting in high definition, and why it was actually harder to shoot that way than it would have been with film.

Unfortunately mood and atmosphere aren't enough to counter the film's deficiencies, in my opinion. I'm sure many critics would be happy if Mann's films kept getting more and more aesthetically stylized and oblique so that they can write about the auteur theory and "action movies for art film lovers," but while I usually admire his films, Mann's not David Lynch. Hopefully next time he or his collaborators bring some actual characters and better story ideas to the table. Or at least a crocodile.

Officially the Worst Christmas Ever - James Brown RIP

2006-12-25T06:37:00.000-08:00

Clearly Santa Claus did not go straight to the ghetto this year, as JB once instructed. You have been or will be reading a lot about the World's Greatest Entertainer's importance to the 20th century, but here's a clip of probably the best incarnation of the JB's - from 1971, when Bootsy Collins and his brother Catfish (along with his wicked guitar solos) were in the band. If you want proof of how inhumanly tight they were, look no further than the change around the 3:43 mark. This is also on possibly my favorite JB recording - the Love Power Peace live cd.

Also, from the WFMU archives, here's a 6-hour JB Xmas day extravaganza put together by former dj Douglas Wolk (a critic w/ great taste) from 2001. Real Audio required.

From happier times, before I got sick of Jack Black

2006-12-24T16:46:00.000-08:00

Look for the amusing shot of Brian Posehn moshing toward the end:

Somehow "Date Movie" was shockingly omitted

2006-12-22T07:28:00.000-08:00

Due to firings and corporate restructuring the annual Village Voice film poll has been moved to indieWIRE this year. OK, I'll do my homework and check out Death of Mr. Lazarescu but I've been burned before - as have we all; thanks a lot, subjectivity! - by films the elitest of the elite have raved about (I still think A History of Violence is kinda lousy, for one). Anyway, just for my own self-indulgent cataloguing purposes, here are highly unscientific letter grades for every film on the list that I've seen thus far (or so I think. My eyes were glazing over by the end), with a few scant comments.

The Departed: B+. Alec Baldwin: more hilarious here than on "30 Rock?"
Army of Shadows: A+. Ahem.
Old Joy: B-
Borat: B+
Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story: B-
The Proposition: C
Brick: B- "Where are you eating lunch these days?"
Neil Young: Heart of Gold: B
Dave Chappelle's Block Party: B+. Dave gets more and more likable. There's a sequence with an odd, elderly couple who own an "Angel" house that feels straight out of an Errol Morris movie.
Lady Vengeance: B
An Inconvenient Truth: B
The Devil and Daniel Johnston: A. One of the best rock docs I've seen. Regardless of what you think of his music it's a fascinating look at how mental illness impacts creativity, and how audiences, friends and family respond.
Talladega Nights: C+
Jackass Number Two: A-. Funnier and probably more subversive than Borat. John Waters beams like a proud papa in his cameo.
Why We Fight: C+
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada: B-. Initially overrated by me, as I was happy to see anything vaguely Peckinpah-ish in theaters at the time.
Street Fight: A-. Makes the election on The Wire look as soft as one of Namond's punches.

Since I mentioned it, I should mention that except for Army of Shadows, The Wire and Deadwood were several universes above everything on this list in terms of quality this year, illustrating again how difficult it is for movies to reach the novelistic depths of the very best television. And no, I still can't work up the desire to see Little Miss Sunshine.

D'OH!

2006-12-18T13:44:00.000-08:00

YOU may have heard by now that YOU were just named Time Magazine's Person of the Year.

Don't know what YOU did to deserve this honor? They elaborate further: "You were named TIME magazine's "Person of the Year" on Saturday for the explosive growth and influence of user-generated Internet sites such as YouTube, Facebook and MySpace. You were chosen over Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, North Korea's Kim Jong Il and Donald Rumsfeld. Congratulations."

Since Ahmadinejad is always going on about how good looking he is whenever I see him, I thought I'd finally gotten the upper hand for once in my life. Imagine how my heart sank though, when I finally opened the issue and saw this sidebar:

NO, NOT YOU.
We forgot to mention: For your questionable work ethic, perpetual lack of direction and most of all for this recent photo, you were not included among the roughly six billion winners of our Person of the Year results. Your fellow runners-up include Terrell Owens, the producers of Bumfights, and Steve the Drunk from Deadwood. Better luck next year.

Filling the Christgau Void with Low-Rent Absurdity and "Wire" References: Fave Music of '06

2006-12-12T18:48:00.000-08:00

It’s that time of year when every critic and music geek with an iPod full of Cambodian Gary Numan covers foists their pointless top 10 lists upon an indifferent interwebosphere. But why read blogs with names like PickledBeetRhapsody and My Old-Thyme Aorta when you can stay here and find out what a guy who works at a medical journal, has seven readers and has never played an instrument thinks about the ok-but-nothing-great year in music?

HOTT ALBUMMZZ:

1. Scott Walker – The Drift. Oh the bitter irony. Just a few posts ago I was bemoaning the rise of annoying, mogwai-voiced, Legend of Zelda reject Joanna Newsom, now I go and award warbly wonder Walker wecord-of-the-year. Uhm... I sorta contain multitudes, I guess. I won’t pretend this was the album I listened to most this year, but it was genuinely unique (an almost impossibly rare distinction at this point), darkly compelling and frequently brilliant in its Penderecki-meets-Zachary Brimstead clatter. Plus, how many other singers have the balls to use an evil Donald Duck voice on one track? There’s gotta be more of a sense of humor at work here than is readily acknowledged, in addition to the creepiness. The big question is, will anyone else ever follow in Walker’s footsteps and go from former teen pop idol to reclusive, avant garde, operatic artiste? Usher, get one cacophonous orchestra and slab of percussive frozen meat, please.

2. V/A – International Sad Hits vol. 1. A compilation of tracks from four artists - Kazuki Tomokawa and Kan Mikami from Japan, Kim Doo Soo from Korea and Fikret Kizilok from Turkey. I think it’s a no-brainer that I would buy a well-compiled comp simply called “Sad Hits." Add “International” to the title though and we’re really cooking, since you don't necessarily know if the lyrics are insipid in their native tongue. It’s all mournful folk music onto which you can project your own epic tales of woe. In mine I’m an exiled balloonist traversing the clouds with my superintelligent panda friend Sho-Bing. We come across a city in the clouds that has lots of cool lamps and is ruled by a young Mimi Rogers. Then I get into lots of crossbow battles with the Lemur People* who are running roughshod and breaking all the lamps. Plus, I’ve got a pornstache. Oops, wait, most of that was meant to go in the blurb for the “Non-Threateningly Bizarre Hits” comp. Pretend you just read something else.

3. Sonic Youth – Rather Ripped. The numbering in this list is sort of arbitrary, but for me this ended up being probably the most-listened-to rock album released this year. It’s also their best since ________. At the risk of my harsh words devastating him and causing him to dress sloppily, I won't miss Jim O'Rourke.

4. Mission of Burma – The Obliterati. So were they saving up that crack about Nancy Reagan’s head for 20+ years or what?

5. The Gossip – Standing in the Way of Control. The songwriting continues to improve and the riffs and singing are more righteous than ever.

6. Jay Reatard – Blood Visions. Great, moody, noir-edged punk somewhat reminiscent of the Wipers.

7. Neko Case – Fox Confessor Brings the Flood. Have you heard? She’s kinda hot. But now everybody’s all about Jenny Lewis. Sorry, but I picture Jenny Lewis having a bunch of Muppeteers and nimrods in Christmas sweaters as her frustrated platonic friends, all of them drinking strawberry shakes and singing along to Bryan Adams' Greatest Hits (what the hell am I talking about?). Give me Neko any day. I don’t like this as much as Blacklisted but it’s still great and more ambitious.

8. Bob Dylan – Modern Times. For people who thought “One Froggy Evening” wasn’t actually froggy enough.

9. Yo La Tengo – I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Make You Go Out to the Backyard, Pick a Switch, Then Come Back Here So I Can Beat Your Ass With It. James McNew talks tough in these album titles but let’s hear him try to cut a convincing promo on The Magnificent Muraco. Yeah, I thought so.

10. Ghostface Killah – Fish Scale. Did you catch his 30 Rock cameo a few weeks ago? Can The Ghostface Variety Hour be far behind (and if so, has U-God been practicing his plate-spinning skillz)?

HOTT JAMMZZ (as seen on Club MTV®)

(Gnarls Barkley's most ingenious costumes yet)

1. Gnarls Barkley – "The Crazy Song" (aka "Captain Crazy"). Did a Kidz Bop version ever come out? Listing this here reminded me of this maddening, idiotic, Chuck Klosterman-penned NY Times article from June. Seriously, this article’s crimes are legion and it would take a whole seperate post to get into it. Why didn’t I do that six months ago, anyway? Is it too late? No, it’s never too late (“What about the fact that no one cares?”) “No one cares” is the new “people care,” wise guy.

2. Robert Pollard – "Love is Stronger Than Witchcraft." Easily one of his best non-GBV tracks, ranking with the likes of “Alone, Stinking and Unafraid,” “Supernatural Car Lover” and “Gifford’s Enchanted Sweatshirt"... whoops, I think I just made that last one up. I can't really tell anymore.

3. Junior Boys – "In the Morning." Low-key electro(-ish) pop, pulsating yet melancholic (“Oh yeah, that’s the stuff”). Huh? (“C’mon, be more obtuse. Just a little more, c’mon.”) Uhm, okay… uh… the supple groove is like a shimmering chimera, subtly shifting in dynamics while churning dancefloors like a worldweary buttersmith (“Oooooh yeah, that’s it! Blog me hard, baby!!”). OK, this is too creepy. Next track… (“No wait, talk to me about Destroyer! C’mon, Rubies, baby, RUBIES!! C’MON!!”).

4. Gnarls Barkley – "Smiley Faces." I may actually like this even better than “Crazy” but I don’t want to piss off any Hilton family members or troubled, schizophrenic Kidz Boppers who have access to loaded weapons by admitting it.

5. Clipse – "Wamp Wamp (What it Do)." I don’t completely get the hype around the album yet but this song is awesome (“awesome” being a popular slang term among contemporary urban youths). It would no doubt match up perfectly with the next freaky “Little Superstar” Bollywood footage that'll be dug up and turned into an online “sensation.”

6. DC Snipers – "All Humans are Garbage." I wouldn’t go so far as to call Missle Sunset album of the year, but at least it blew up and knocked Panic at THE! disco off the charts… oh, wait…

7. Cat Power – "The Greatest." Whatever happened to that possible SNL audition Chan alluded to a while back? Maybe she should apply herself instead to finally wrting a song half as depressing as the average Seth Meyers sketch.

8. Justin Timberlake – "Sexy Back." The first time I heard this, I didn’t know what it was and thought that Peaches had hooked up with some hot shit producer or something. Then I found out it was by this Henry-lookin’ motherfucker (wait, you don’t think "Henry" will catch on as a derogatory term for guys with overgrown infant heads? You’re wrong. Just dead wrong.) Do you suppose New Kids on the Block are bitter because they didn’t have Timbaland taking an inexplicable interest in them back in the day? This song is also entertaining because it presumes that sexy was somehow undervalued as a commodity for a time, like it was off somewhere taking a bethonged power nap.

9. Portastatic – "Sour Shores." Poor Mac doesn’t get the attention he deserves. Even now, I can’t think of anything to say about this song. Except it’s good and all. Damn.

10. Hank IV – "Got Got." This song is ok, it’s pretty rockin,’ but the sole reason it’s top ten is because it was inspired by Omar from The Wire. Note to all musicians: I will grant any music about or inspired by The Wire a slot on next year’s prestigious top ten list. I don’t care about your previous crimes against music. James Blunt can croon to a velvet painting of Snoop in his next video; Phil Collins can rewrite “Another Day in Paradise” so that it’s about Dukie; Joanna Newsom can record an 18-minute track for kazoo orchestra about Herc stealing the Triforce of Power from Ganon. I don’t care, it’ll all go on the list. Bet that.

(Still trying to forget Michael K. Williams' role in "Trapped in the Closet")

*Originally it was the "Manatee People" but I've since learned that manatees are off limits. That'll teach me to stray from lemur country.

The Langley Schools Music Project circa 2048?

2006-12-09T21:14:00.000-08:00

Brian Turner recently posted a link on WFMU's Beware of the Blog to a fairly jaw-dropping YouTube clip of The Young at Heart Chorus covering Sonic Youth's "Schizophrenia." This was the first I'd heard of this group of senior citizens who have been staging theater and musical productions since 1983 (with an obviously high turnover rate in the line-up). Recently, there was a British documentary about the group that yielded the Sonic Youth clip, as well as the one below - a guy hooked to an oxygen machine, covering Coldplay's "Fix You." Music lesson of the day: renditions by ailing senior citizens seem to immediately lend gravitas to any Bed Head-drenched eunuch's schlocky, soccer mom-friendly, musical weepfest. If Rick Rubin is ever granted the power to re-animate the dead, look out; there won't be a dry eye in the house.

You can check out Channel 4's page for another clip from the documentary. Their own site also has links to other articles and coverage. There are items about the group's repertoire of poignant tunes, the occasional "Hey Ya" or Hendrix cover, as well as past collaborations w/ Latino breakdancers, punks, Cambodian folk artists and a production w/ a gay men's chorus called "Flaming Saddles" (I'm sure people were camping in line to see that one. Ha ha, get it? Camp? It's... ha ha... ha... uuuugh, help me, Rip Taylor). I have no idea if any of those last few projects were, y'know, watchable (yes, forgive me for having serious doubts about "Flaming Saddles"), but at least they sound like AARP meetings from Bill O'Reily's worst nightmares, which is fine by me.

Meanwhile, are you itching to hear tracks from the absurdly rare, alternate Velvet Underground & Nico acetate that was bought at a NY street fair for 75 cents and ended up going for $155,401 on eBay, probably to some douchebag emo-trepreneur? For a short time you can get mp3s of the alternate recordings over at Moistworks. The post's author is coy about his source - the party that was auctioning the acetate made a digital backup but I'm not sure if these mp3s originated from them or the poor-quality Japanese bootleg that surfaced a few years ago. In any case, I regret that I couldn't bid on this one past the $130,000 mark. I've currently got my eye on an ultra-rare 12" version of "Rapper's Delight" that replaces the third verse with a clip of Dick Cavett telling an anecdote about Groucho. They say only 5 people ever heard it but everyone who did went out and bought brown turtlenecks.

Tell Me About the Rabbits + Jodorowsky Mania in '07

2006-12-04T07:43:00.000-08:00

The Inland Empire trailer is up on YouTube. Evidently that's Lynch singing. I know he did all the music; no Angelo Badalamenti this time around. Opening night in DC is Jan 13 at the AFI theater.

On another weird movie note, I watched a bootleg of Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain for the first time this weekend. It's hard to still think of Lynch as being all that weird when you've got, say, a guy being violently breastfed by an old man with two baby leopard heads on his chest. ABKCO has confirmed this film and Jodorowsky's El Topo (not sure about Santa Sangre) will almost certainly be released on deluxe dvds (w/ commentary and bonus features) in 2007, although no word yet whether they'll be from Criterion as rumoured. The commentary should be both entertaining and informative, as the extensive religious symbolism in Holy Mountain mostly goes over my head. Here's a promo interview w/ Jodorowsky concerning the films' re-release, and a WFMU blog post from '05 with a bunch of fascinating links concerning Jodorowsky's sadly never-made, visionary-sounding adaptation of Dune, which at various points was to have involved Salvador Dali, H.R. Giger, Moebius, Orson Welles and Pink Floyd. More info on that and the disaster it eventually became for Lynch here, of course.

IN OTHER NEWS (and by "news" I mean "random stuff on the internet about people I like" - the subject of my every post, it seems): Hey, another WFMU blog link! Today they offer an online primer on Chris Morris.

Next We Teach Sufjan Some Suffjering

2006-11-29T21:52:00.000-08:00

People, after several failed attempts to come around to her vocal stylings on "The Milk-Eyed Mender," and having now been confronted with a new album full of extremely long songs, I've come to the conclusion that Joanna Newsom simply must be destroyed (Not literally of course. I mean "destroyed" in the "kindly asked to stop" sense, not in the "Get ready to have your Keebler house blown up" sense").

Dead Elf by Joe Cassen

Martian: “What’s soft, and round, and you put it on a stick, and you roast it in the fire?”
Tom Servo: An elf?
Martian: “Oh! And it’s green!”
Tom Servo: Oh! A dead elf!
- from "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians," Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode 321.

Unfortunately I fear we've already allowed this problem to fester for too long and now it's nearly beyond our power to stop it. How many more hipsters and pointy ear fetishists are we going to lose to this whimsical scourge? I mean take a look at what we're up against:

I'm not sure how that last one got in there, but you get the point. I think Mario Savio summed up our current situation best:

"There's a time when the operation of Pitchfork becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the computers and upon the iPods, upon the harps, upon all the harpsichords, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who go to her shows, to the people who download her songs, that unless you're free, that affected little woodland creature voice will be prevented from warbling at all!"

HOW CAN YOU HELP?!?

I haven't quite figured that out yet but I have come up with a few preliminary ideas:

- Distribute flyers at your next local Renaissance Faire and/or Tolkien convention warning patrons about the dangers posed by burgeoning "freak folk" scenes; Hope some sort of weird turf war breaks out.
- Blare the new Jay Reatard album loudly and as often as possible.
- Hmmm, I don't know, I guess the harp isn't so bad. Maybe I should just keep listening. I'm also not opposed to long song suites in gener-AAAAAAH! GAH! NO! MUST KEEP FIGHTING!!! SAVE YOURSELVES BEFORE IT'S TOOOO LAAAATTE!!

Robert Altman RIP

2006-11-21T08:59:00.000-08:00

Wow, awful news. Inexplicably, the headline on Yahoo's homepage reads "'The Player' director Robert Altman dies at 81" (was it that big a hit?), although apparently someone on CNN has already erroneously ID'd him as "the creator of the series M*A*S*H." C'mon, cable news, hire some film geeks for the anchor chairs already. I also see someone has uploaded his apparently quite odd film w/ Bud Cort, Brewster McCloud , on YouTube, so guess what I'll be squinting at on my computer tonight before it's taken down?

Among his huge filmography (of which I've seen only a portion - about a dozen or so) there'll inevitably be disagreements as to which are the classics, which are just ok and which are disasters, but McCabe & Mrs. Miller, the Long Goodbye, 3 Women, California Split, Short Cuts, Nashville, Gosford Park and Secret Honor are all great and worth anyone's time, to say the very least. And I'm sure Paul Thomas Anderson will continue to completely bite his stylee for years to come.

And if you're looking for another image to remember him by from his later years, here he is pawing at Lindsay Lohan on the set of Prairie Home Companion:

UPDATE: Well, I watched Brewster. Yeah, it's basically dopey and they don't even try for coherence but it's free-spirited in a way you just don't see much in film anymore. It's definitely Altman in full-on eccentric (and high) mode and has plenty of enjoyable scenes. Maybe the timing has a lot to do with it but I can't help but like it.

Lousy Celebrity Makes Record

2006-11-20T21:39:00.000-08:00

Hearing exceprts of formerly "underground" rock music in commercials doesn't phase me much anymore, but I'm still trying to wrap my head around this Mitsubishi ad that uses "Blindness" by the Fall. I can see how they thought the song's vicious riff would make a cool soundtrack, but the fact that they kept Mark E. Smith's typically garbled "I was walking down the street..." vocal at the end must mean there's an ad writer at Mitsubishi with one sly, snarky sense of humour.

Anyway, here's the Fall performing a shortened version of that song on Later w/ Jools Holland late last year. I'm guessing they were booked, in part at least, to maintain the band's media visibility for a while longer in honour of John Peel, rather than because of Mark's sparkling stage presence and personal demeanor. Don't be alarmed by the 15 seconds of Robert Plant at the beginning of the clip, he has nothing to do with what follows. Plus you'll get to check out Mark's disproprionately hot current wife on keyboards.

Also, here's their other performance from that episode: a medley of "Pacifying Joint" and the Move's "I Can Hear the Grass Grow." And just for the hell of it, check out their national tv debut - booked and introduced by Peel - from 1983, doing "Smile" and "2X4," complete with dutiful professional dancers (unfortunately the video cuts out early).

Ubsolutely Fuscinating

2006-11-18T20:29:00.000-08:00

Lately I've been catching up with some of the Sci-Fi Channel episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 that I've never seen before, both on dvd and on YouTube, where you can find lots of episodes broken up into ten parts (my willingness to spend all my free time watching lengthy, low-res clips on computer screens knows no bounds). I didn't have Sci-Fi on cable when they aired and I was never in a hurry to catch up with this era, I think mainly because I'm intrinsically opposed to the Pearl character that replaced Forrester and TV's Frank. However, the last few seasons did contain some of the series' most entertainingly ghastly movies and they were often on fire with the quips in the theater as well, so I can just skip the host segments and I'm happy. I ran across this deleted footage from the series' final episode, where the producers surprised Mike & co. with a montage of clips from past films while they were shooting comments for that week's movie, Diabolik. It's a treat for any fan of the show.

Then a Hellbeast ate them.

2006-11-15T18:11:00.000-08:00

Reason #4,057 to get a region-free dvd player: Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, Matthew Holness and Richard Aoyade's inspired sci-fi/horror parody which aired on Channel 4 in the UK in 2004 and was just released on dvd there last month. Holness stars as Marenghi, a Stephen King-like horror writer who's just as prolific but considerably shittier (from one love scene: "He whisked off her shoes and panties in one move. Wild - like an enraged shark, his bulky totem beating a seductive rhythm"). Darkplace was Marenghi's sci-fi vanity series - shot in the mid-80's but never before broadcast - starring himself as an allegedly heroic doctor investigating paranormal disturbances at a hospital. The writers throw in all the cheesiest elements of low budget, genre tv: absurd dialogue, awkward dubbing, aggressively ugly film stock, cheap special effects and stilted acting, particularly by Marenghi's sleazy publisher, Dean Learner (Ayoade), who plays the hospital administrator ("He couldn't actually interact with other actors. I've never seen that before... or since"). The show mostly avoids the perils of creating something "intentionally bad" simply by making everything as straight-faced silly as possible, such as this scene from episode one:

Apparently the show recently aired on the Sci-Fi Channel. I don't know if a US dvd release is forthcoming, but predictably it looks like you can find most of it on YouTube. Also, the Dean Learner character recently returned in a new talk show parody called Knowing Me Knowing You with Alan Partridge... er, I mean Man to Man with Dean Lerner, which I haven't seen yet.

Bjork & Steve Coogan - Together at Last

2006-11-10T12:29:00.000-08:00

Well... in 1997, anyway.

1000 Stage Dives Per Song

2006-11-08T20:09:00.000-08:00

Activate!

I For One Salute Our New Gay Overlords

2006-11-08T09:31:00.000-08:00

(Above: The Santorums brace for a new era of dog-fucking)

The Jiggle You Save May Be Your Own

2006-11-07T10:28:00.000-08:00

Idolator offers the life-saving tip of the week. For my part, I once saw an out-of-towner get capped in the alley behind Tombstone Cafe in Frostburg, MD for never having heard of Jon Felton & His Snowmobile.

A Quick Round of "Yea or Nay" (while he's away)

2006-10-26T08:01:00.000-07:00

(Above: Bureaucracy at work in Playtime).

I was thinking of writing about each of these topics, but figured I'd clear them all out of the way now, as I'm clearly bursting with other ideas for this blog (*cue nervous laughter again*):

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road – YEA. Maybe the best post-apocalyptic scenario I've ever encountered; Bleak but riveting. Also an unusually quick read for a McCarthy book. I finished it in two nights.

Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried – YEA; This book is a rare case where it’s hard to imagine anyone being disappointed.

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas – NAY; He had me, then he lost me with all the sci-fi genre dabbling. He just comes across as a dilettante, in my opinion.

Playtime, directed by Jacques Tati – YEA. Amazing-looking film and utterly singular in tone, although it definitely won’t appeal to everyone. Imagine if Kubrick, at his iciest, had directed a Buster Keaton movie and you’d be on the right track.

Street Fight – YEA; Tough doc about the 2002 mayor’s race in Newark, NJ. A great glimpse at how dirty politics can get on the local level. The incumbent’s staff pretty much openly harasses the challenger, his people and the filmmaker in plain sight. Makes the election on The Wire look like a pillow fight.

I’m Alan Partridge series 1 – YEA, and it’s finally on dvd here in America. Steve Coogan as one of the funniest characters in recent times – an obnoxious, tacky, talentless ex-chat show host, now living in a Travelodge in Norwich and working as a very-early morning dj on a show primarily heard by farmers. Alan’s alienating behavior was clearly a big influence on The Office. Even better if you’ve seen the previous Partridge series, Knowing Me Knowing You. Need convincing? Here's a clip of Alan locked in a heady debate about intensive farming with Chris Morris.

Anti-stem cell research ad in response to Michael J. Fox – Clearly NAY, and while everyone in it is a complete sphincter, I have to single out the Passion of the Christ guy, Jim Caveziel (sic), who not only bookends this ad sitting in front of a statue of Jesus but spouts some Latin or something at the beginning just to be really irritating. Did anyone not see this guy’s apparent delusion coming? News flash, Caziel (sic): John Turturro played Jesus too, and you don't see him acting like an idiot. Maybe you should talk to, say, Andrew “Dice” Clay about the perils of confusing your character with reality. I bet Dice knows more Latin too; and since I’m linking to a YouTube clip:

All YouTube comments ever, especially for popular clips – NAY; Truly the dregs of humanity on display.

I know something is happening but I don't know what it is

2006-10-25T21:25:00.000-07:00

If you're a Bob Dylan fan but thought the only remotely gay thing about him was that eye makeup he wore during the Rolling Thunder tour, here's an interpretation of one of his most ubiquitious songs that may change your mind:

Looks like that line about "the jugglers and the clowns" put some very twisted ideas in someone's head. Sadly, their even peppier performance of Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat” during the commercial break apparently wasn't recorded.

Hannity's foolproof plan to secure Congress

2006-10-23T07:36:00.000-07:00

He forgot to say "the election has been moved to Wednesday" in Spanish.

Sick's a sort of metaphor for the way these people lead their lives.

2006-10-22T20:01:00.000-07:00

Posted for no real reason, other than that Brass Eye should be seen by everyone on the planet but still has never been released in America. Pity how little has changed in Cowsick since '97:

Disappointed OLDBOY fan wanders into wrong film, fights off gang of ushers with a hammer.

2006-10-22T10:15:00.000-07:00

(Above: Guess which of these three characters is the most entertaining in Old Joy).

In a recent post on the Onion A.V. Club blog, Scott Tobias wrote, concerning Andrew Bujalski’s Mutual Appreciation and Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy: “If you care at all about American independent films, you’re required to see these movies.” Well, here’s a slightly less hyperbolic rejoinder: if you’re reading this post you’re required to treat that statement with extreme skepticism. I haven’t seen Mutual Appreciation, as both the praise and derision I’ve read concerning Bujalski’s two films make them sound like something I’d prefer not to endure, but I did see Old Joy and while it mostly accomplishes its very modest goals, they amount to so little that asking you to spend $9.50 watching Portland hippies on an uneventful camping trip is a tough proposition, even if your right to call yourself an independent film fan is apparently at stake(?).

First, I must admit that despite living in the DC area for nearly two years this was the first film I’ve seen at the swank-ish AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring. I was one of six people in the theater for a 5:15 showing, which made for a slightly awkward introduction by the guy who encouraged us to spread word-of-mouth for the film (yeah, sorry). The movie observes two longtime friends, Mark (Daniel London) and Kurt (Will Oldham), who reunite at Kurt’s suggestion after some time apart to check out a hot spring in the Oregon woods. While Kurt is an unemployed, perpetual flake who’s taken to wandering the streets at night, Mark and his very pregnant wife – who’s understandably wary of Kurt -both have unspecified careers which apparently monopolize most of their time. I should note the movie is acutely observed. Oldham is convincing and not overbearingly quirky as the sort of annoying, faux-esoteric bullshitter seemingly stuck in an unending post-grad phase - but hey, says he’s “in a really good place right now” - whom one should take great pains to avoid in life. Reichardt portrays the trip exactly as it would likely occur, meaning there’s no showy confrontations over long-buried tension; no whiny, vapid “soul-searching” and no torturous, allegedly witty patter of the sort that plagues films about professionally aimless 20/30-somthings. For the most part, they simply drive up, listen to Air America (thank God not Randi Rhodes) in the car, get lost, find the place, hang out in the woods, in the meantime there are a couple of telling, subtle moments (literally, there’s maybe a couple), and when it’s over they’ll likely resume their prospective courses.

Old Joy uncannily has the feel of a glacially paced contemporary Asian art film where you basically have to fill in story and meaning in your head based on the largely subtextual info on screen. Can we stop pretending this is some kind of inherently intellectual style of filmmaking? Often in my experience these films end up as an emptily pretentious dawdle whose main worth is as a cudgel for smug would-be cineastes to use against the rubes who surely “should stick to Adam Sandler movies” if they “don’t get it,” as if detractors can only be entrenched in one possible camp. But I digress. Admittedly the Pacific Northwest is one of the most fitting spots in the country to transplant this meditative style, but the constant nature shots aren’t exactly of Terrence Mallick-like grandeur (the film apparently wasn’t shot on video but manages to look like it). As for the characters themselves, Mark seems vaguely worried about Kurt’s deteriorating mental and professional state, but otherwise we know too little about him to get a read on him and he makes disappointingly little impression other than as a guy killing time on a meandering weekend. Manohla Dargis of the New York Times writes that during the centerpiece scene at the hot spring where Kurt describes an anxious dream that contains the film’s summative line – “sorrow’s just a worn-out joy,” Reichardt “finds perfect cinematic expression in a stunningly moving close-up of Mark’s open, surprised and now-joyful face.” I found the whole thing a bit more inscrutable; if he’s supposed to be experiencing some sort of genuinely euphoric moment (has this ever happened to you when you’ve heard people ramble about their stupid dreams?) rather than relaxing in a toasted haze it doesn’t come across and feels a bit unlikely and unearned, even if that line does cut to the quick of the characters’ current relationship. I do like the film more in retrospect, but its thin, 76-minute story simply doesn’t add up to much, and as one commenter on the AV Club blog noted, to call it “one of the finest American films of the year,” as the Times review does, is to raise expectations that likely won’t be rewarded - although then again, this has seemed like a fairly unremarkable year so maybe they will.

So yeah, this post has been a long, rambling way of advising, “wait for the dvd.” But if you need an immediate Oldham fix you can always check out this cameo appearance from "Wonder Showzen," where he indulges in some down-home hijinx with Zach Galifinakis and David Cross... and no, Cross' familiar attire in this segment is surely no accident.

UPDATE: Remember how I said I liked the film better in retrospect? Well, I find myself liking it even more now. I still think the muddy characterization is a huge flaw and the overall hippieness of it a tad irksome but I appreciate more the way the film eschews on-screen obnoxiousness that you can find in a zillion other sources for a calmer, more assured approach. Hey, I'm entitled to modify my opinion right? That's one of the perks of being an amateur nobody - that and not being deluged with pesky praise, professional respect and scads of promo materials. Who needs all that anyway?!? *cue desperate laughter*

Hey NBC, how about a complementary Jason Lee moustache comb for the trouble?

2006-10-16T10:54:00.000-07:00

Last week's premiere of 30 Rock, Tina Fey's new sitcom apparently based on the backstage goings-on at Mad TV, was funny enough that I'll be watching again this week. Unlike that Aaron Sorkin thing with the same basic premise that I haven't seen, this show does not appear to treat sketch comedy with the same we're-walking-here gravitas of national politics. No, thankfully here you've got my hero (even though he really seems like a jerk) Alec Baldwin effortlessly busting Tina's balls, and Tracy Morgan giving bizarre line readings about the government putting AIDS in chicken nuggets. Try it (Wed @ 8), you'll like it.

I was a little hesitant to post a positive note about this show as I don't want to look like I'm doing viral marketing for NBC or am trying to land one of those "reputable influencer" gigs that my fellow blogger litelysalted was offered. Not because I'm against it, but because I'm already doing viral marketing for The CW, that new WB/UPN merger channel. Take a look at this awesome mid-season replacement show I'll be promoting across the interweb in a few months:

- Llama; Capitalizing on the House and Shark trend of shows about unorthodox, charismatic, high-powered professionals with pithy names, Bob Hoskins stars as the latest incarnation of His Holiness, the Dalai Llama (spelling changed to the animal name for "fierceness"), and he's shaking things up along the path to enlightenment. A firm believer that "the character-building of suffering" should be a Fifth Noble Truth, Llama isn't afraid to crush some toes to bring Buddhism into the 21st century and save Tibet from shadowy Chinese agents. Viewers will be riveted by Llama's unusual methods, as he opens a high-tech Buddhist hospital with some seriously dramatic karma in Los Angeles; berates visibly shaken guest star Richard Gere; and dropkicks a depressed monk square in the chest to awaken him from a "nap of ignorance" (production of the series was suspended for several months while Hoskins recovered from this stunt).

This show will also be available via video podcast or sent to anyone who follows the Noble Eightfold Path on their cellphone.

(Above: Dharma and Bob - Hoskins running shit as Llama).

Extra! Extra! Mittens the Cat Stumbles Onto Bizarre, Symbol-laden, Psychological Netherworld!

2006-10-11T09:47:00.000-07:00

In a way, blogs are kind of like those toy presses that let kids print out a "family newspaper" about the latest goings on in their overly precious households. So basically instead of writing cutesy headlines like "Mayer Family Adopts New Puppy" for the amusement of 4 people, adults like me are writing little, made-up, Onion-like news stories best described as "Man Enjoys 'The Wire' Immensely" or "Loud Target Customers Disrupt Sock Purchase," or "Self-diddling Ends in Tears Again" (wait, pretend you didn't read that last one), for the amusement of... 4 people. Same principle.

So with that in mind, here's a link to a news story that will affect Daddy's future movie-going plans: David Lynch will be distributing his new movie INLAND EMPIRE himself in the US (an unusual move for a name director, to say the least), and it should be in theaters by the end of 2006 in its full, three-hour version.

(Above: Dancing prostitutes + digital video x confusing narrative = Oscar)

Also, for those interested in such things, here's a YouTube link to a trailer for the upcoming Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez "double feature," Grind House, featuring a cast straight off of the USA network @ 3 A.M.

I'll continue to keep you updated on further developing stories, such as the nuclear situation in North Korea and dangerously rising hermitude levels in my apartment. Courage!

Best use of Dropkick Murphys songs in a police thriller?

2006-10-08T14:42:00.000-07:00

(Above: "Woah, so did Faye Dunaway really throw a cup

of piss in Polanski's face?")

With his new, really-good-but-not-quite-great movie The Departed, Martin Scorsese – you may remember him as the director of Michael Jackson’s “Bad” video - is “back”… sort of. While I liked The Aviator (although not so much that I’ve felt the need to sit through it again), it was an oddball epic about OCD that struggled to fashion a clear cinematic narrative out of Howard Hughes’ life. Gangs of New York was a mess that seemed to have escaped from Scorsese’s grasp at some point, or perhaps it was simply afflicted with Harvey Weinstein’s bad mojo. As for Bringing Out the Dead, the less said the better (ok, one positive – the title always reminds me of one of the early scenes in Monty Python & The Holy Grail). None of these films lacked Scorsese’s typical kinetic energy – at 64 his grittiest films are still vividly hyperactive, although he’s proven he can adapt to other styles as well (to quote Christopher Moltisanti: “Kundun – I liked it!”). Now however, comes a leaner, stripped-down, more impersonal tale that benefits from finding Marty (I call him Marty. We hang out on weekends watching old Howard Hawks movies) fully in his comfort zone – even if the film is knowingly a tad on the illogical side.

First, if you’re like me and thought the trailer made this film look like a disappointingly rote police thriller, you may also agree with me and find that Marty (“Hey buddy, it’s Chris. Have they flown in that rare Ball of Fire print from France yet?”) and screenwriter William Monahan utilize a full bag of tricks – including clever use of cell phones as a plot device – to revitalize the genre, although bear in mind I haven’t seen Infernal Affairs (a stupid title for a movie, but then again so is My Bloody Valentine for a band), the Asian film on which this one is based. The plot, in brief: undercover cop (Leo) infiltrates mob, while mob boss (Jack) grooms a rat (Matt) in the police dept. Both rats spend much of the film trying to find out each other’s identity, and by fantastic (to put it mildly) coincidence they both become involved with the same police shrink, who has the same role most women have in cop movies: a shitty one (unless they’re made to be improbably ass-kicking). I don’t quite know what it is Scorsese sees in Leonard(o) DiCaprio that he keeps casting him in such unlikely lead roles, but get ready for their next apparent collab, with Leo playing – I shit you not – Teddy Roosevelt (I'd sooner believe him as Teddy Pendergrass)! I give Leonard credit though for challenging himself with each film and possibly causing permanent damage to his brow with all that furrowing. He’s working hard again here; playing a character with lots of unconvincing and underdeveloped emotional baggage that doesn’t quite come across. I thought a scene where he unloads during his first visit to the shrink fell particularly flat. We’re never quite as invested in young Leonard coming out alright so much as we are in seeing Matt Damon’s slimy character get his. Damon is put to his most effective use I’ve seen to date (other than having him wander around the desert for 90 minutes, of course), and he should consider playing more weasely roles, as he's talented but too capable of being terminally vanilla elsewhere.

As for Jack, he gives a restrained, almost dour performance as an introverted nebbish… in The King of Marvin Gardens, 34 years ago. Here, he’s practically in full-on Joker mode. Initially, he balances the charisma level just about right, as he has to project a suitable aura of power in his role as boss/father figure to Damon. Plus, it'll always be entertaining watching him make lewd remarks to waitresses. By the film’s later stages, however, his performance is practically in another universe. We see him MAKING RAT FACES while ruminating over the rat in his gang and licking his hand after squashing a bug. Another scene finds him cavorting with two hot bimbos while wearing a leopard-print robe (guess whose idea that was) and throwing coke around like a ninja tossing a smoke bomb, which would be okay if the film took place in Newbridge, but it just seems silly here. No, the real scene-stealing actor in The Departed is Alec Baldwin, who, along with Mark Wahlberg as a belligerent fellow cop, dishes out all of the film’s best, shamelessly entertaining insult humor. In fact, Baldwin is such a great presence now as a doughy supporting actor that if William Hurt can be nominated for an Oscar for his slim but entertaining turn in A History of Violence then a similar nod for Baldwin wouldn't be undeserved.

Which brings us to the Oscar speculation that inevitably accompanies any Scorsese release. While his last two films overtly felt like Miramax-driven campaigns for a gold statue, this smaller, less ambitious but more entertaining and effective film might ironically represent Scorsese’s best shot at the award yet, particularly since competition this year is so paltry. After all, they can’t give it to Eastwood again… can they? Then again, maybe Brett Ratner is the new Golden Child. Whatever the case, every filmmaker knows that one’s career is not complete without a Best Director Oscar… which is why the films of Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick are now hopelessly lost to obscurity while this year’s trophy is being replaced with a bust of Ron Howard that shoots fireworks. Now... tell me who’s Bad.

Scaaaaary Music

2006-09-30T17:35:00.000-07:00

For decades there's been no shortage of metal meatheads, gothic chumps, gangsta wannabes and disgruntled boy bands tripping over themselves to appear as dark and twisted as possible, but genuinely unsettling music of the jump-out-of your-seat, look-over-your-shoulder, or at least refrain-from-giggling variety is often hard to come by. Just being a quality musician that deals with "dark" themes isn't enough to qualify. Slayer, for instance, may kick ass and utilize plenty of disturbing imagery but I don't find them "scary," and ookie-spookie types like Nick Cave and Tom Waits are too theatrically removed from their material (call me when you've actually moved into one of those decrepit barns you're always going on about, Waits). So here's a list of stuff that I find/have found personally unnerving to varying degrees, and that may get you blacklisted by the rest of the neighborhood should you choose to play them at this year's Halloween party. Obviously, this is far from definitive, as vaguely defined lists on some random dude's blog are wont to be, so any other recommendations are welcome (hint hint):

Suicide, "Frankie Teardrop" - This is still the only piece of music I've heard that I never listen to alone late at night; a completely bent 10-minute masterpiece about a disturbed factory worker who earns eternal damnation by blowing away his infant son, wife and himself. Alan Vega unleashes some of the most horrifying primal screams ever recorded over the ominously chugging synth bass and drum machine. A direct inspiration for admitted fan Bruce Springsteen's menacing "State Trooper" from the Nebraska album.

Kronos Quartet, Black Angels - The shrieking violins that kick off George Crumb's Vietnam-inspired title piece set the visceral tone for this anti-war lament of an album, but do not encompass its entire style. There’s also a performance of Shostakovich’s bleak "String Quartet No. 8," a crying Romanian woman (man?) throughout Istvan Marta’s "Doom. A Sigh," and an ironically placed recording of an old Charles Ives war tune reminiscent of Kubrick’s use of "Midnight, the Stars and You" at the end of The Shining. "Black Angels" is the most effective piece on the record though; its dissonant bursts of sound conjuring striking images of violence.

Before I go further, I should state the obvious and mention that I’m a classical music layman, and did indeed become aware of most of the composers below through Stanley Kubrick movies.

Krzysztof Penderecki, Matrix 5 – Before Crumb’s “Black Angels” there was Penderecki’s harrowing “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima,” searingly performed here by the Polish Radio Nationaly Symphony Orchestra (of which my uncle was… not a member). Despite it’s clearly defined structure, “Threnody” is like the classical equivalent of Peter Brotzmann’s free-jazz onslaught “Machine Gun.” The entire album is amazing though, and in its way pure horrorshow.

György Ligeti, The Ligeti Project II – Second part of a five disc series on the composer’s works, recorded between 2001-2004. Kubrick used a few Ligeti pieces for the soundtrack of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Two of them here, the shimmering “Lontano” and the static, eerie “Atmospheres,” remain the perfect music for interstellar traumas that leave you an ashen-faced old man inexplicably living out your days in a room full of antiques.

Bartók, “Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta” – More Kubrick madness; this was also used in The Shining, although it was nearly replaced after “Reunited” by Peaches and Herb tested better with audiences.

Scott Walker, “The Cockfighter” – Assuming your inner Beavis can resist snickering at the titular “sport,” and that you have a taste for Walker’s outrageous, faux-operatic voice, this tune from his 1995 album Tilt can serve as prime car-crashing material. After a minute or so of low murmuring, buried instruments and weird digging sounds that prompt you to turn up the volume, the track explodes into a techno/industrial dirge with Walker warbling about God knows what on top. This all had to have come as a surprise to any Walker fan at the time, and leads the listener to assume he was probably listening to a lot of Nine Inch Nails at that point (he was).

Finally we come to what surely must be the most terrifying album on the list, however the cover is so intense I still can’t work up the nerve to listen to it.

Clearly this nubile young woman has been traumatized by some kind of protracted mental and physical abuse, perhaps, judging by the location and the song title “Dirty White Boy,” incorporating scatological elements. I’m not familiar with the works of this “Foreigner,” but I would guess they resemble a cross between a harsher Diamanda Galas and John Cale circa the “Sabotage” tour, when he was ripping chickens’ heads off onstage.

Pleasant dreams!

"Freelove Autobahn" just isn't as funny.

2006-09-25T09:18:00.000-07:00

Surely all of you are aware of the great BBC sitcom The Office, and even more of you are probably aware of the American remake (still largely unseen by me) on NBC. But did you know there are French and German versions of the show now as well? This Slate article has the details. I can't wait for the Islamic fundamentalist version where the boss makes inappropriate jokes about suicide bombers and Tim stones Dawn to death for her "shameful flirtatious glances."

(Above: One of David Brent's pranks goes horribly awry)