Uninvited Modernity

Shackler's Revenge.

2008-12-01T17:50:00.000-08:00

This one goes out to the one of you that still checks this thing. Check out this picture of a building on fire:

Keep it up!

Meeting Some Wonderful Witches

2008-09-14T20:25:00.000-07:00

I met Thurston Moore today at a literary festival in Brooklyn. It was the kind of thing where we knew he'd be there, but nobody expected to actually see him. Turned out he was just hanging around like a regular dude, which I guess to most people he is. We saw him chatting up some guy in a flannel shirt and a baseball hat, and I told him I liked his music. He grabbed my arm and said "Thanks man!"

For those of you who don't know, Thurston Moore is the lead singer and guitarist of Sonic Youth. He looks like this:

Somehow he's 50 years old.

To a small subsection of the general population this is a huge deal, like meeting Jean-Luc Godard, or Eli Manning. His music is the president of the phylum that stems out toward everything we now call indie rock. Plus, it's awesome. He's not quite on the list of celebrities I would shamelessly scream praises at, but tonight I'll be spinning my noise rock tapes while I read the essays of Walter Benjamin. Walter Benjamin! To a small subsection of the general population that's like reading Heinrich Rickert! Or Gershom Scholem!

Convention Day II

2008-08-26T21:28:00.000-07:00

if I were a political pundit, I would be Pat Buchanan. Like him, I have a habit of disagreeing viscerally with the most basic uniting beliefs. Both Olbermann and Matthews were surprised, Outraged! that 74 percent people polled thought Hillary Clinton's passion might be coming from a place motivated by personal ambition rather than genuine support for the rival she's demanding recount every single delegate vote in case she did in fact somehow beat him. She was good though, perhaps too good, but I'm finding myself wondering if I even agree with this party anymore. Tonight we got Placing the many in front of the few, which is easier to swallow than last night's Health care for all, but do the many really deserve more than the few?

In the wake of this spectacle I'm having trouble shaking something my grandpa told me at the beginning of the summer. He said our country was posessed by a great national ethos that made public allowances at the expense of national progress. I'm lazy, but I'm not poor, so my own personal ethos has little to do with the nation at large. Thasts why its so easy for me to remain aloof, my own development has very little to do with what happens in Washington. But the consequences of my ethos speak louder to my grandpa's point than I was willing to concede to his face. I owe roughly 2 thousand dollars to the state, the bank, and the guy that stole my laptop respectively, and still I got off work early tonight because I sort of wanted to see The Rocker.

So now I'm hesitant to believe what I used to so passionately; that the wealthiest one percent is inherently evil and should be forced to give a percent of their earnings to the bottom 20 percent. I'm not saying we definitely shouldn't work towards universal health care, or making the many the priority, but now it seems more dubious to me. The government is like my father, and sometimes I wish that my father would kick my ass a little bit. Plus, it does look unfair to take away money from people that have earned it. AMC has convinced me more than ever that CEOs are in general cuntface soul-suckers, but that doesn't mean they don't deserve their cash. Now that I'm getting older, I'm learning to respect things like motivation and ambition, two values I don't have and wish I did.

I'm just saying I don't know anymore what my politics are. Political beliefs in general have deteriorated into meaninglessness, if they ever actually had meaning. Facts now have no relationship to reality. it's retarded that Republicans don't believe in Global Warming and Democrats do. I'm tired of hearing Republicans talk about lazy welfare hoppers and Democrats talk about hard-working immigrants who work three jobs and can't pay for medicine, like no other types of people exist. I have no interest in contributing to this debate on our country's values. But I have a voice, and I'm not representative of the average American, so I should take advantage of this elitist wine drinker we've got up. I've got to speak for my people. I'm going to vote for Barack Obama because I feel like he is most likely to watch the Bill Murray scene in Coffee and Cigarettes with me. From now on that is how I'm making my decisions about candidates. That and listening to Pat buchanan.

People like Joe Biden

2008-08-25T21:31:00.000-07:00

I fucking called it! Eli Manning has entered the public consciousness. Peyton continues to be America's favorite doofus.

Also, anyone notice that Ted kennedy has a Massachusetts accent like an actor doing a bad one? Like everything sounds normal and than he says "senatah".

No Country For Southern Men

2008-08-20T14:26:00.001-07:00

The speculation concerning Swing Vote’s failure at the box office overlooks the fact that it is far less political in span than its premise would indicate. Do not be disappointed, Good Ole Boys tend to preoccupy themselves with the present anyway, politics is a lofty ideal. I’ve read my Everette Maddox--he’s a poet from New Orleans you haven’t heard of. He died young, of cirrhosis or some shit, and read his stuff out loud in a downtown bar called the Maple Leaf. I’ve heard he slept there too. He had a thing about possums. But what does America know about Good Ole Boys? Their demographic leans toward Good Ole Bill, the ones that vote anyway. Now the Muslim is shooting three-pointers in Kuwait. This is better than nothing, but it doesn’t mean he’s a priority.

So who can blame Kevin Costner for getting drunk and playing foosball on Election Day? And who can blame a small town for disassociating itself with the nuances of a government that won’t solve their problems, not really, anyway? I’ve read my Ken Kesey, my understanding is that these things get talked about in bars, but they do get talked about. So when one good old Good Ole Boys gets a chance to speak with the government he's already acknowledged does not exist for him, what does he have to lose? Probably he feels shell-shocked at first--who wouldn’t?--but it passes. You get a few drinks in you, you sit down with that old man, and you tell him a thing or two about this mess we’re in. You’ve got boys back in town who’ll want to hear about it later.

Costner’s Bud Johnson doesn’t do any of that, besides the shell-shocked thing. At heart, he’s an Oprah American. He gets flustered when he meets important people. He revels in this new wave of media attention because, like you, he’s concerned about his lack of legacy. Like you, he’s in a Willie Nelson cover band. He drinks too much, but he has a precocious teenage daughter. None of this is nearly as appealing to Good Ole Boys as it is to people with no conception of, and limited interest in, what Good Ole Boys do find appealing. In fact, I imagine a Good Ole Boy would be somewhat perturbed that his representative Oscar winner was bumbling around politely for no, another hour. Probably slightly more perturbed than I was that I’d driven to the mall at 10:45 to watch this garbage.

Turns out the demographic of province is the Oprah demographic, the suburban patricians who luxuriate themselves with loftier notions of unproven American Platonic values. Or the poor folk who still trick themselves into believing that their own final act will come with symphonic crescendo. People who otherwise won’t mind that after two hours we still haven’t addressed the blatant transparency of two men who are, simply put, complete asses, because Bud Johnson has put aside his political apathy (and his drinking) for the good of the nation.

So ignore the fact that Dennis Hopper (who, by the way, is no longer on planet Earth, and God bless him for not letting a film prevent our understanding of that revelation) runs a nationwide ad contradicting everything he spent two years campaigning for when he could have just called Bud on the phone and lied to him, because he’s not asked to own up to it. The only man in need of adjustment is the Good Ole Boy himself, who, let’s not forget, will be unheeded, disheveled, and forgotten as soon as this is over, by everybody except the town he failed to represent. Of course, what bothered those fuckers the most was that his dumb ass didn’t know more about Roe vs. Wade. Inside every southern man lies a precocious teenage daughter. Go redeem yourself some more, Kev.

As to the matter of it not selling, my mom wanted to see it, but she wanted to see Brideshead Revisited more. My theater isn’t showing that, so we would have had to pay. And she had moving and stuff to do.

The Widower

2008-08-19T23:48:00.001-07:00

Settled on the cusp of his kitchen chair,
he noticed the pixelated face of a Chinese conscript
now staring at the overhead lamp from the confines of the newspaper.

From the milieu outside evacuated an echo of stranded dialogue,
that advanced the walls of the house
and fell onto the ground at its edges,
like the dust that follows in the silence after a gunshot.
A basketball lay in the grass by the driveway.

“Don’t tell anybody what you’re thinking” he smiled,
and his face was softened in the peaks of his lips.
“Don’t tell anybody else.”
He flipped the switch on the wall,
and floated into bed.

Spacehog, for the Nubes

2008-08-15T10:59:00.000-07:00

Also The Space Between, the radio made me feel nostalgic today.

A Chorus Line of Soap Stars and Homosexuals

2008-08-14T21:45:00.000-07:00

How many other people sit down to blog with no conception of what they're going to write about?

That's actually only half true. I usually keep in reserve a couple ideas that I'm not crazy about just in case I come up dry. When I was at the Beach last week I watched five movies I'd never seen before, and I don't think I'm going to have any format to talk about them, not as much as I'd like, so I'm going to write a paragraph about each of them now.

I came up with this idea in the car.

Lucky Number Slevin:
I think this movie lost all chance when the blurb on the back said it was a combination of the best parts of Pulp Fiction, The Usual Suspects, and the Professional. Critics need to learn that some things are sacred, and Josh Hartnett is not a Kevin Spacey. He isn't even a John Travolta. He's kind of a less exciting Robert Downey. Think Kiss Kiss Bang Bang but without Val Kilmer to clean up. And only Bruce Willis can sell lines like "now he ain't nosy, but he's got a nose" so thank Christ for Bruce Willis' prominent screen time. It's all kosher though til the end, which was the Seattle Chronicle's inspiration for the Usual Suspects nod. Twist endings are a lot like lesbian scenes (Mulholland Drive mother fucker!!!) In theory I'll sit through anything that can promise to confuse my perception of how a movie will end, but movies like Wanted are proving that they actually aren't automatic sells (and like Marshall postulated, is it actually possible to get off on the Mulholland Drive money shot?) I couldn't quite explain my problem with it to my brother, it's like two movies just got merged together--a charismatic action comedy and a cold-hearted revenge story--and there's nothing to rectify the split. I don't know how I feel about Hartnett. I do feel like he's trying.

Be Kind Rewind:
If nobody bothered to go see this movie then I will speak for the lot of us and say that it is good and it made my father feel better than he usually feels, so much so that he brought up in the car ride home how much of a bitch Sigourney Weaver is for willingly taking on it's one obligatory villainous role. Did I say villainous? I meant bureaucratic, which was his problem, and mine too, I mean with the movie, and not even problem really, it's just weird to see a blatant Michael Gondry film be so formulaic, and though I hate, I mean really hate to say it, I'm getting sick of Jack Black. I liked when his weirdness had druggy explanations, but now it seems he's cleaned himself up. Whatever, he tops everything he's ever done with this, and it's funny, and it's cute, and white people like it. This makes four comedies I've seen this year, and I can say with certainty it's better than Love Guru and Step Brothers.

Punch-Drunk Love:
I feel like you could walk out of this feeling really down or really high, and since I didn't really feel either I'll keep away from it's real heft. It is good though, even great, and it did occur to me, though I know a lot of people have already said this, that the idea of playing Sandler's recurring character against itself is dangerously close to brilliant. Definitively brilliant was Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who left me open-mouthed with his seven minutes of screen time. My analysis of acting is admittedly rudimentary, basically if an actor is capable of making one of those half second smiles while he looks at the ground and then looks serious again he's passed my test, but the Hoff Man here was more natural than I think I've ever seen someone be. I was floored, best performance of a career, and I already fucking loved the guy. It's right here. Adam Sandler's Freudian issues probably keep him up at night as often as mine do me, but it's nice to see that he does know what he's doing.

The Queen:
I originally felt the need to justify this choice in my head after I passed on the opportunity to pick up Casino, but that's stupid. God bless Tony Blair overacting like a motherfucker, God bless British ensemble theater acting, and God bless old British aristocrats sitting in a room talking about the way things used to be. How many of these people you think have ever had some dude talk to them about American tits in a Chinese restaurant? I was convinced for awhile that James Cromwell actually was from England. Poor dude is relegated to hunting with his traumatized grand kids and being indignant a lot. I guarantee he's never seen American tits, but he doesn't fall trap to the logical fallacy of copulation. Don't you know you're too old to have kids? It's good to be king.

And I caught Wonder Boys, but suffice to say I liked it so much that I bought it. Anything else, I'll addendum later on. I got some beers in the fridge, and I'd like to play Cornhole. Scratch, I like to play cornhole.

The Year 2000

2008-08-06T00:28:00.000-07:00

First of all, Brett Favre, what the fuck are you doing? Did you not read my tributes to you? You're embarassing me. There's no reason for you to become this guy. I'd actually prefer if you spent the rest of your career doing Old Spice commercials. Come over to my house and I'll run plays for you if you want, but stop being this guy.

Second, as promised I have something to say about Bruce. It was awesome, one of the best shows I've ever seen. I wrote some half-drunk, half-assed thing about his populism negating the role of critics earlier, but I feel it makes more sense to just say that when the 65 year old man sitting in the back tells Marshall and Casey to shut the fuck up and enjoy the music, it doesn't matter that Robert Christgau called you "an important minor artist or a rather flawed and inconsistent major one." I think that was the gist of it.

Probably more important were the Jersey Women near the front, who probably flashed him like 25 years ago, and would have again except they'd brought their kids. This was the biggest artist I've ever seen, and if it wasn't the best show ever, it's only because I'm older now and these things mean less to me. But his charisma knows no boundaries. I'm so tired of indie rock bands that are afraid to speak. It's like, it basically was Dewey Cox jokes, but at least Blink 182 had stage presence.

The best show I ever went to was Green Day, because it was my first, and because I was obsessed in that My First Band Ever kind of way, and because Billy Joe stuck his hand down his pants and shouted "SOMEBODY FUCK ME!!!" and then rocked for two hours.

Speaking of things that happened ages ago, how fucking awesome was Dark Knight? I will refrain from calling it Batman, I feel like I'm doing somebody a favor. I will also point out that I saw it before everybody else at a screening, so fuck y'all. The Joker is the best villian since Anton Chigurh. I'm so glad he was actually good so I didn't have to fake it. I like what Peter Travers said about Nolan bringing pop entertainment dangerously close to legitimate art. I liked even more when Travers said "the haunting and visionary Dark Knight soars on the wings of untamed imagination."

Oh and Pineapple Express was decent. Good night.

I'll get something about Bruce up in a few days

2008-07-31T00:45:00.000-07:00

I spilled wine on my father’s business card.
There’s a 703 number someone wrote in pen on it,
and an address.
My brother and I keep eating food in the basement
and at night sometimes I go to the 7-11,
what’s that thing they say,
I don’t need it but I like it.
I like football too, but whatever.

My father came home one night and he was tired.
We could tell because when somebody asked a question about dinner
he just mumbled something about swordfish.
I always wonder if the things in his life that seem like signifiers
actually do make him unhappy.
It’s like when you watch an actor give a bad interview on Conan,
and you wonder if it will bother them later.
I wonder how many things you get to rationalize before you just start ignoring,
and the rocks that glow off the surface of the ocean
forget your name, and you start moving in crazy directions under the water,
because nobody can grow after they’ve denied the presence of something real.

He told me he believed in God as a component of his universal perception.
Which means when he dies, he still won’t go to heaven or hell.
He told me there would always be someone smarter for me to find,
and that it was okay I kept spending all his money.
But I still felt bad about the business card.

This Is Not Art

2008-07-10T23:27:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about doing a real post, as in something that takes me a lot of time and thought, and would be, theoretically, a justification for why I talk bullshit all day. Because, at my best, I feel like the stuff I care about is the only thing that matters, and at my worst, I just want to cancel my HBO subscription and go to law school. I'm not ready to lay down a treatise about art, but one day I will be, so be ready for that.

I ate breakfast with my dad last week at Mclean Family Restaurant, which is a single restaurant owned by a family that serves breakfast cheap all day long, and primarily caters to old people. My entire adult life I've dug going to places like that more than any other kind of restaurant. The king of these places is the International House of Pancakes, which has spawned a national chain without succumbing to the Vaudeville deception that places like AMC take for granted. Places like IHOP and Mclean Family Restaurant do well because they understand that owing up to the majority isn't the only to survive in a business landscape. I've worked enough retail to see how companies fret about satisfying every customer. AMC especially has been born into some fantasy service land where people arrive straight from David Lynch movies to rely on the courtesy and respect of the staff, rather than the service the staff provides, to provide them with the positive experience that drew them from their bordellos in the first place. The truth is most people don't have the energy to notice if they're being treated well, or the self-confidence to do anything about it if they're not. But old people have the time to have both, and they will rule out establishments that don't supply them with the customer service that gives them their reason for leaving home. What I like about these places is that they don't bother trying to be all things to all people, they simply worry about providing an honesty to the people that will make it the main attraction.

The point is, much like old people themselves, Mclean Family Restaurant doesn't bother with being cool. I've finally reached a point in my life where I can see that any amount of time a person spends trying to be cool is automatically wasted. Count the hours you've spent on it, and go read 400 books. It is a devastatingly short-sighted goal, but one that has achieved enough merit to enrapture good, intelligent people that should know better. People spend their lives on it. And I don't mean for this to be an indictment of the human race, and I don't want to make a grand arching statement about where we are as people. I think we could do better, but I don't think we will. Here's what I know: 1) I am tired of trying. 2) I don't want people to think I'm a bad person anymore. 3) If I can be a role model for my brother and sister, I don't care what else I do. I am not like an IHOP. It is fucking hard to be like IHOP, and when you get there, you win, you win all the character in the world. I'll be there one day, you'll be there too, but not yet.

Shootin' straight, talkin' straight, enjoyin' good brews

2008-07-10T22:21:00.000-07:00

Texas, if you do not re-elect this man, you are a state of fags, and deserve for Fairytown Vermont to beat your ass back to Mexico.

Boys and Girls in America

2008-06-14T12:41:00.000-07:00

This post will not be about Tim Russert. To be honest I don't know much about him. I believe I found him amiable, with a self confidence that most TV men don't have. Usually when I watch news I don't pay attention to the stories, I just watch how the anchors react to one another. Mostly they make terribly low calorie jokes and fumble for connections between stories. Like today I heard this: "that's a great story, and here's another great story." And then "Look at this disaster, but here we have a disaster of another kind." It fills me with dread for my future. I'm already more polite and less honest than I used to be, but I'm sort of hoping that I've already gone through the worst of it. If I move even further in this direction I'm just going to live in New England and stop talking to people. Oh I also saw a guy and girl anchor get in a tiff, which was unusual, and kind of uncomfortable, like much good art.

I also appreciate the hot news reporters on Fox News, who prompted me to not make a Foxy News joke because, I mean, it isn't funny, but seriously, this is a very positive movement. Don't they have a naked news anchor in Russia? Or maybe she just wears bikinis, point is, I'm happy that the protectors of American Morality don't seem to mind some executive in Michigan (is that where they're based?) giving a presentation on how studies show most people don't like ugly women.

Speaking of Fox News, my friend Antonio told me that they referred to Michelle Obama as "Obama's Baby Mama." He said it like "Oh here's the latest Fox News racist Freudian slip," but I fail to see any problem with it at all. Frankly I think it's funny, and I'm not laughing at it, I think probably the guy that wrote it thought it was funny. And probably he was being pejorative, but probably he's the kind of stupid wingnut who thinks "that little Jon, he always tells the truth" is hilariously clever. So whatever, I don't mind laughing with him at this.

I'm continuously changing my mind about what I want this blog to do. This doesn't seem to be a problem because like three people read it (Marshall, Casey, Jessica, anyone else? Seriously leave a comment or something so I know) but right now it looks like Things I Came Up With Right Now, so enjoy it. Here are a few others I don't want to devote full paragraphs to:

I hate the lyrics in "Jungleland." The Arcade Fire dancing in the street is billion times more original and the imagery is so much better. Seriously the picture I have in my mind of all the neighbors in your cul de sac dancing to police lights in the snow is perpetually satisfying, and succeeds in creating a brand new archetypal picture for my brain. Bruce's Rat King reminds me of a Rebel Without A Cause character, and the saxophone solo is so anti-climactic it's like having sex when you're drunk and you're so numb you can't even feel it. Having said that, it's still a really cinematic song. How has no one made a movie out of any of the things he's written? He honestly could be a screenwriter and he wouldn't have to add that much. What do you know, this turned into a paragraph.

Also, I'm not pandering to you people anymore by giving you pictures. It's so boring to post them.

Also, Boys and Girls in America is really well written. I take back everything I said about it.

Tha Carter III

2008-06-10T21:02:00.000-07:00

Things I thought about the new Lil Wayne album:

1) A Milli has a beat where some Bayou black guy just says "A Milli" in a Stephen Hawking voice and it's sampled over and over again. I didn't like it at first but now I don't know why.
2) Also A Milli references Orville Redenbacher somehow.
3) Apparently Jay is ready to hand over the torch to Wayne. Now we really can call him the greatest rapper alive. If I were live blogging I would say "Oh even while fading away Jay manages to be a boastful douchebag." One day I will write an essay about Jay-Z.
4) Kanye West makes beats like a warm blanket. I hope he stays behind the scenes for the entire year. I need a break for awhile.
5) Dr. Carter is my favorite right now, because it reminds me of Dr. Octagon. Fuck I should go listen to Dr. Octagon.
6) How long will Wayne go before he gets tired? After awhile he's going to discover a new dimension.
7) Lollipop is the most reprehensible song I've ever heard. The vocoder reminds me of Keeping up with the Kardashians. I mean the vocoder as an instrument. It's trashy and makes me feel vaguely ill. I have difficulty listening to Aqua for the same reason. Having said that, I like Lollipop. Like I said to Marshall, this is like the ending of 1984.
8) 3 Peat is the best opening song since Intro on Da Drought. If he isn't the best rapper alive, he's definitely going to trick people by writing introductions.
9) How do you liveblog, I want to try it.
10) If I were liveblogging, I'd just shout for the next five minutes how happy I am that Wayne is directly addressing Al Sharpton.
11) I think from now on this blog will be me liveblogging about albums I'm hearing for the first time.
12) Fuck Al Sharpton, and everyone like him.
13) Remember on Da Drought when he was like "You don't even understand if you aren't from New Orleans, and if you aren't than fuck you."? That was a sad day for me.

It's interesting to see a real album from him after last year's insanity, though I'm not entirely sure where to place it. Da Drought was fun because you got to watch him actively become the best rapper alive by taking everyone elses' beats and destroying them. Now he's being an actual rapper, which means someone can beat him. Wayne raps like an opportunist, meaning he deals in the insipid crunk themes that fuel one hit wonders. The difference is he seems to be in for the long haul, and I believe him whenever he expresses his love for hip hop. For him I think the themes are even more meaningless; rather than using them because they sell he's using them as a surface platform on which to practice his linguistic acrobatics, which is what keeps him excitable. He doesn't have a distinct personality like Jay or Nas, but his mastery over the English language will suffice for now. He's definitely the best Mims or Flo Rida ever. I wonder how long he can keep it up.

Something Beautiful

2008-05-14T10:41:00.001-07:00

I guess I should acknowledge that my only real powers are for music criticism, and so I will stop wasting my time and everyone elses (oh yes dear reader, I have not forgotten you) and start focusing solely on my critical opinion of the songs I listen to. This will be good for 2 reasons. One, I really do enjoy writing about music, and I have no real other outlet for doing it, and two, if you ever wanted to know whether or not to like Wire, or Sonic Youth, or some other band no one else bothers to talk about anymore, now you will have an answer. Forget timeliness, forget relevance, and forget the fact that everyone in the world already likes Radiohead, this blog will finally take up a position as tragically dated as music analysis. I'll be timely too, but only when I feel like it. I think this is the start of a glorious new age.

When Everybody's Tryin' to Please Me

2008-04-16T17:52:00.000-07:00

This is probably the best thing I have ever seen on Youtube. Apparently Wicker Man is garbage, but no one will ever be able to convince me of that ever. This is already the perfect plotline; man has a gun, shouts a lot, does awesome but arguably reprehensible things to a bunch of women, then gets bees poured on his face. It's physics. The rest could be filler, it doesn't matter.

Jews vs. Jesus, or, the day Justin learned the difference between good and shocking

2008-04-16T10:12:00.000-07:00

Come back big or not at all.

Left Behind is a massive phenomenon. This is not news, the book was published over ten years ago, the movie made over five, but its size cannot be understated. These people are not fucking around, its the most polarizing subject possible; atheists despise it as blindly as Christians champion it, but by all means the Christians are winning. The book series has become a film series, a discarded television series, a collection of video games, and a song by Slipknot, which almost certainly is related. My friends have not read these books, the majority is silent, but its electing our presidents. Pay attention.

Having recently watched a majority of the movie now for the first time, I can attest to the fact that the devoted are very, very blind. By any objective standards Left Behind is complete bullshit. Kirk Cameron should not be allowed near children. While it is now clear that its too late for me to change my reprobate ways and I am most assuredly going to be here for the rapture, it is equally clear that there is not a single hip Christian in Hollywood. It is officially the equivalent of Ted Bundy hanging out in Vatican City. This is not an accident, a world guided by faith has different motivation than a world guided by profit. The devoted will watch with approval as the good people of Earth are shunned by the God that they seemingly live their lives for. It's all in the subtlety. Buck Williams, an aggresively positive television journalist, is the overtly saintly main character; a man who, in case it wasn't clear, has people around him who serve no purpose other than to remind him of his merits. He comforts old women, he's good to children, and in the middle of an air raid in Israel he goes outside to film the bombs dropping, not so that his station will make money, but because its what Jesus would do if he worked for CNN. He's sort of a more square, more smiley, more confused Jack Shephard, who coincidentally is the focus of an episode of Lost called Left Behind.

Buck's displacement after the calling is still a mystery to me (I've got about a half an hour left, so we'll see). But to the devoted, its an answer without a question. Clearly, this cigarette-free candyass reporter hasn't gone to church enough. Either his wife died and he lost faith, or his parents were heathens, or his car broke down one Sunday morning, but whatever the case, he doesn't make the cut. Neither do a significant amount of preachers, or any of the other overtly spiritually-sound people who are left trying to figure out where all their dorky religious friends have gone.

See the problem is, they're not making the case for the rest of us. When judgement day comes all the psychos will be gone, even the God Hates Fags guy seems pretty confident, so it will be the rest of us trying to decide what Buck and everyone else did wrong. The devoted claim to be trying to convert us, but they aren't. They're too caught up in all the nails in the wall that need stringing. This leaves no room for compromise; on judgement day there's no such thing as a lapse Catholic. Even Sufjan Stevens is cutting too many corners, because I believe he sleeps with girls. We aren't going to find enough common ground to start negotiating, so concepts like this are always going to remain polarizing, and lead to stagnant debate. This series is for the believers, so if you don't catch on than get the hell out. See you on the Sabbath.

And we are all alive, I believe

2008-04-01T10:20:00.000-07:00

I've decided not to write about Manchester or seeing the Fall or meeting the Fall or sleeping in bumper cars in an abandoned amusement park, because the trip ended a colossal failure and I'm not ready to justify it's existence by pointing out it's positives.
Nor am I going to write about how rappers are just like actors, the post I came up with on the bus on the way up, because I'm already bored by it. So instead I'm going to write down the things I come up with in my head right now, in short declarative statements. Don't ever say I don't put effort into my blog.

Virginia Woolf is a golden God. Clearly the secret to being a phenomenal writer is to be psychotic and unstable.

My self destructive tendencies have destroyed two perfectly good relationships. I should probably be forced to go live in a cave.

I have 21 pounds to last me the next 11 days. I have a bottle of apple syrup that I mix with water to make apple juice. I will be thriving on this for roughly one week.

Mark Smith has an inaudibly low voice, and not one of us had any idea what he was saying all night. He was nice though, and gave us beer and cigarettes. He also signed our ticket stubs, and tried to put us up for the night, although for whatever reason somebody insisted that he needn't bother. But he totally would have, for all his ranting, he's pretty easygoing.

My film itinerary for the next few days is 8 1/2, The Godfather, and Citizen Kane. These better rock my face more than anything that has ever been laid to film, or I'm posting an article officially declaring Bubba Ho-Tep the best movie ever made.

I don't care that today is April Fool's day. This holiday registers less with me than Easter.

It's quite possible this blog has run it's course. I'll let you know. Until then I will leave you with some food for thought, courtesy of a blogger from North Carolina who has recently come to my attention, one Professor Howdy.

A UNC prof. asked one of his students,
"Can you name our nation's capital?"
The reply was, "Washington DC."

When asked what "DC" stood for,
the student added, "Dot com!"

Bon Appetit.

Barack Obama ain't Nothin' to Fuck With

2008-03-25T07:23:00.000-07:00

"She spoke not far from the site where Obama last week delivered a rousing address on race -- and her campaign was pleased with the juxtaposition in the hope that blue-collar voters will be swayed more by pocketbook matters than the loftier subject of social harmony."

I will sidestep the temptation to use this sentence as an opening to talk about Hllary Clinton, and just appreciate that the Post has taken the time to have a sense of humor about how much better they like Obama.

Article here.

This is the Resurrection

2008-03-24T12:10:00.001-07:00

Happy Easter all, my father can tell you it was actually yesterday, but I forgot about it until about five o'clock this morning. Next year for sure.

And we're back

2008-03-23T15:47:00.000-07:00

It is fucking cold in London, warm in Madrid, what am I doing here, and why the fuck is my window open?

Anyway, these are the things I missed when I was away:

- Charlotte's monster vagina
- Reverend Wright's flammable oratory
- Barack's less flammable explanation of Reverend Wright's flammable oratory
- Bill Richardson's sexy Latin endorsement (actually I caught this on Euro-CNN)
- Hillary being a bitch
- A lot of shitty movies being released, including one Judd Appatow wank and this year's 300, which sources say has not the heart nor the power of the last one.

All I can say is, I picked a hell of a week to go to a country that suspiciously does not speak English, but I managed to catch myself up by first watching Obama's address and then watching a montage of Wrightisms provided courtesy of Fox News. It is my liberal college boy attitude that allows black people to God damn America and find it justified, but nobody believes that a potential president should be attached to this kind of rhetoric. So again, Obama did what he does, start with what we've come to expect anybody to say, then veer off into the territory we've so come to admire; apologizing for nothing and owning to more than the swiftest veterans would dare vouch for. Yes I am friends with Reverend Wright, yes I respect him, no I do not agree with him, and let's stop talking about this, because it's besides the point. I do not know if this will quell the opposition, I'm sure Sean Hannity is still talking, but to any legitimate mind this halted the inquisition more thoroughly than even us supporters thought possible. I don't know what the reaction was in the hotel when Hillary watched him with her staff, but I firmly believe that even if she held strong, a part of her felt the sting of watching her opponent jump the hurdles she so covertly placed in front of him, and realized that for all the show, and all the strength, she isn't as good as he is. And that is the one thing I can stand about her campaign.

As for the vagina, I'm glad the innocent Sex and the City character is actually into freak unsexy porn, it gives her a depth I felt she lacked in the show. And 10,000 into 300 and the second movie since the first attempted suicide; let's just call it a week.

PS. can anyone tell me who hit Sayed with the tree branch in episode 7 of season 1 of Lost. I don't care enough to keep watching, but I want to know who is sabotaging these people. I suspect the Cloverfield monster, but someone's going to tell me something retarded like there are actually Mole People on this island. Let's bring back the West Wing.

My 5 Favorite Things About London

2008-03-14T10:53:00.000-07:00

Spring Break starts tomorrow, and I'll be on hiatus for one week, and maybe two depending on how lazy I get. So I figured the best way to kiss off is to say something about my perspective so far on the city. I came up with half of this list walking back from the British Museum, the other half I will make up right now. Enjoy.

5. The Fact That There Are As Many Subways As There Are McDonald's
Actually, probably more. It's practically a Daniel Plainview competition between the two of them; there is not a McDonald's anywhere in London that is not in the near vicinity of Subway, and frankly, I think it's about time. McDonald's imperialism is like wire tapping; everybody has a problem with it, but nobody does anything about it, so it remains unchecked. They're becoming a bunch of greedy bitches too; there is no dollar menu here. That is the sign that you've gone too far, and I suspect that it was that development that prompted Subway to put up a stand. Plus, Subway is better, that steak and cheese is monster.

4. The General Reluctance to Give Away Cigarettes
This actually could be listed as a bad thing, I mean us smokers have an agreement; when we've run out, we can go to each other for help. It's not like you would ever ask some random person for one of their gummy worms, but cigarettes are the symbols of a universal pact we've agreed on, so at first I was perturbed when at 11 o'clock in the morning I realized I was out and nobody around me was willing to help. But now I respect the balls that it takes to tell someone to toss off; it's indicative of a harder culture that we could learn from. It's like, unless you're Jerry Seinfeld, you've spent a lot of time hanging out with people for no reason other than that it was rude not to. But here, I gaurantee that happens less.

3. Phone Booths
I know, whatever, this is such an obvious choice, but tell me you wouldn't be thrilled if not only did America have phone booths, but every single one was decorated in porn wall paper. And the idea behind it is so genius I kind of want to call just to congratulate them on it. "Well, people are near a phone, they see our pictures, they get in the mood, they can't do anything because they're in the public, then they realize they're near a phone." It's brilliant. I don't understand why Girls Gone Wild thinks they can make money when they have enough footage online to render their videos obsolete, but this old fashioned pay for play in the middle of the street is the height of innovative sex marketing. Plus, as my roommate pointed out, no one will ever have to pay for porn when all anyone has to do is go into a phone booth and grab a bunch of fliers. I live up the street from a 24 hour mart that frequently runs out of Jugs Magazine, so obviously that doesn't happen, but the idea is a solid one nonetheless.

2. The Wallace Stevens Poem on the Victoria Line
Yes, British people are cultured, so much so that on their way to work they sometimes like to ponder the metaphysical quanderies of life along with High American Wallace Stevens. Every time I'm on the tube I see this poem, it is always the same poem, and I think about it. Every time. And then after I do for awhile, I look at the company that's promoting it, which is called Art in the Subway. That's it. It serves no purpose other than to have me think about it. How cultured is that? And don't get me wrong, I miss the constant warnings against unprotected sex and giving birth to a retarded child that I'm rewarded with every day on the New York subway, but I feel that when I get home and some homeless guy is playing me the blues in Union Square, I will wonder a little bit about what Yeats would have to say about the whole thing.

1. British People who Have Been to New York
Everyone in England has been to America, and if it's late enough and you're anywhere near alcohol, everyone in England wants to tell you their America story. Conversations unequivocally start like this.
"'Ey! Where ya from?"
"Um, D.C."
"America!"
"Yeah we're Americans."
"Ai! I love America. I spent some time in...."
This is always ended with either New York, or some raggedy redneck place like Mississippi that prompts me to say "why?!" But regardless of the city they actually spent time in, they always have some outrageous story about it. In a Chinese restaurant one guy told me about some strip club in Manhattan where the tits were huge. The other night at a pub this loutish guy got philosophical about some gangsters who were walking towards him one night outside the KGB bar, and "I couldn't tell if they were friendly or not. That's what I love about America, you just don't know!" I find it sad that these people have better stories about their vacations than I do about my life, but America needs to get in the habit of accosting strangers and telling them appallingly revealing stories about their lives. We underestimate the charm of doing this by about 500 percent.

The 10 Best Songs of 2007

2008-03-12T12:38:00.000-07:00

I made this list in December, and again in January, and then I stopped listening, and then I made it again. Almost none of the songs from the first two lists stayed on the third time. I don't know what that says, but here is the definitive list, the ten best songs, in order, that were released in 2007. This is my final word, so after this, let's just not talk about it anymore. You guys hear about Vampire Weekend?

10.Wilco - Side With the Seeds
This song belongs firmly in the category of Songs I Play at My Fourth of July Barbecue. It's slow like Otis Redding and cool like Joe Cocker, and peevishly, perilously, white. This is called Wilco branching out. Some Americans love American flags, but all Americans love barbecues.

9. Feist - I Feel it All
I've complained about how Feist is like Joni Mitchell without the soul, because while both of them were intelligent women trying to write folk songs, Joni Mitchell got winded by summer of love crazy boho relationships and then wrote about how they made her feel fucked up and happy and young and sad, whereas Feist just wants to be ultra clever and sit in the park. On this song however, she eschews the idea that her lyrics are what make her talented, and buries them under a guitar lick that works like a good pop song. So it is, in fact, a good pop song. Turns out she's good at those.

8. The White Stripes - 300 MPH Torrential Outpour Blues
Unquestionably the filthiest song of the year, more Led Zeppelin than anything he's done since the early days, measured, refined, lazy, impossibly easy to dig, and the drum crashes even sound like educated decisions. Best delivered line: "But I can't help but wonder if after I'm gone will I still have these three hundred mile per hour, finger breaking, no answers makin', battered dirty hands, bee stung and busted up, empty cup torrential outpour blues" all in perfect deadpan.

7. Band of Horses - Marry Song
Here's to turning a verse about apologizing to a neighboring family for wrecking their wheelbarrow into a passive meditation on a comfortable marriage. This is a song about comfort, and is thus a comfortable song. Not comforting mind you, that's what everymen are for, but honest and talented; a gentle dirge that celebrates mediocrity rather than presenting it.

6. The New Pornographers - Challengers
Just ask Elliot Spitzer, extra-maritals don't get celebrated unless you're Rodney Dangerfield. Which is why songs like this need to exist. Right now I'm pushing 21, but one day I'll be pushing 40, and my list of obligations and responsibilities will destroy the sense of lazy entitlement I have now that allows me to do things like maintain this blog (or not.) Eventually you're going to need to break some rules, or they'll weigh you down, and hopefully you'll be able to use songs like this to retain your composure, but maybe you won't. Here are the facts: 1. it's beautiful. 2. It's honest, and 3. it doesn't shy away from the fact that sometimes it's necessary to to hurt someone else in the name of your own happiness. Just ask Elliot Spitzer. It's impressionistic enough to be about a number of things, but at it's heart it's about two people who find each other too late to grow up together, but who understand that their happiness isn't contingent on making the best on what they have. Always celebrate that freedom, even if you have to steal it.

5. Blitzen Trapper - Wild Mountain Nation
AGH! Country rock! Probably, for sheer enjoyment, this song could be number one. Pure relic and country myth, this is the kind of song that makes me wish I was a bear from Yosemite. Some talking points; it cruises like cruise control, and the imagery puts me at a camp out better than any one song has put me in any one place. But most importantly, the guitars noodle mercilessly, giving perfect breath to lyrics that could so easily become ironic and meaningless. This is the moment exactly before fun becomes funny.

4. Jay-Z - Pray
Imagine if American Gangster was this song, and then a list of this song's logical conclusions. It would be a film unto itself. The beat is shamelessly cinematic, and Beyonce speaks, earnestly, about praying. This is as massive as it gets, no cliche left unexplored, no instinctive draw unhandled. And God dammit it works. So much so that it wouldn't matter so much if Jay wasn't on, but he hits it every time. The first and third verse are everpresent boasting that Jay now does before business meetings to calm his nerves, but they flow so well that you don't notice. On the second verse, Jay grounds himself into a distinct time and place, you perk up, the music shuffles to the back, and you listen. It's intense, cinematic shit. I can't imagine what the movie would have been like if this had actually been the soundtrack.

3. M.I.A. - Paper Planes
My brother and I spent the entirety of freezing December with our windows down, shooting guns at passing traffic in sequence with the gunshots in the chorus of this song. We spent every single dinner telling my parents that all we wanted to do was take their money, until they wrote us checks and sent us to McDonald's. And guess what we did on the way to McDonald's. This was before we got to the "M.I.A. third world democracy" part, which became a mantra, and god damn, the murder was plenty when we found out that she didn't let them all survive. Then we realized she was kidding, and when our parents grounded us before the police could find out where we were, we played it in the basement, and we laughed, because it was funny.

2. LCD Soundsystem - All My Friends
It starts off with a minute of virtually static sound, and you realize that James Murphy has found that place where he knows he's onto something good. Then he starts talking; he's young and aggressive and not ready to admit that maybe this club circuit is kind of a chore. So he puts up a front, but immediately you see cracks in it, and as he gets older, the cracks get bigger and bigger, until he doesn't even bother trying to hide them anymore. I go back and forth about whether or not the friends are a real source of comfort for him, because they're certainly a defining personality trait, but this is not a comforting song. In fact, he goes out of his way to make sure we are not clinging to him for sympathy. This is his life, his friends, his better or worse, and most importantly, his artistic statement. That it's stuck in the middle of an unshakeably untouchable album makes it that much more callous. A song this true to life is going to garner some support from its fanbase, but James Murphy wants to be admired for his talent, because he needs to believe that he's better than the artists who couldn't write a song this good. It's what separates him from people like Ian Curtis, who put up no front and allowed people to relate to him as he tried to crawl away from his pain. In the end, James Murphy has his friends, and this is his song. So look, but don't touch.

1. Spoon - Eddie's Ragga
Clearly the music mags had something else at track six on their copies of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, because nobody gave this song the credit it deserved. But for Christ's sake, find me a song as bold, as tight, or as sleek as this one. One sharp power chord played in slow succession, switching off between reverb and not, over a slick bass line and unflinching drums. The movement is minimal, a fuck off power march, meanwhile Britt Daniel plays the part of jilted ex with such detachment that I don't even pay attention to the music. The delivery is so skewered that for the first six months I thought "Defective heart" was "defectivor", and some nonsense line about revolution was actually him using his broken heart to score chicks. This concept is liquid ice, there isn't anything he doesn't tell you about his life, but he tells you about in such a way that it becomes meaningless information; it's now just an excuse he can fall back on when he doesn't invite you to his birthday party. Britt Daniel belongs at home here where he can be an asshole, and nothing about this song invites you to look at it, making it the most singular piece of work of the calendar year. How the fuck did anybody miss that?

The Five Best Album Titles of all Time

2008-03-10T18:24:00.000-07:00

5. Public Enemy - How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul?
Things white people like: pretending they get rap. Things Public Enemy hate: white people.

4. Jefferson Airplane - After Bathing at Baxter's

we recorded this album. Practical and unwholesomely weird, like all the best acid trips.

3. Radiohead - The Bends

It's just as much the cover art as it is the title, which seems to me to be far more foreboding than OK Computer is and Kid A sounds.

2. Megadeth - Killing is My Business...And Business is Good!

Nevermind, this is the epitome of hopelessness. The apocalypse will be brought upon us in monster trucks, and we will all rock for a solid hour beforehand.

1. Devo - Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!

Q: Satisfied?

Film List Part 2

2008-03-08T21:27:00.000-08:00

Yes, it's true, I don't do anything besides watch movies and go to Jamaican clubs, so I'm making my film analysis my first ongoing feature.

The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford:
The cinematography! The cinematography! But what I liked more was the power; Brad Pitt is undeniably 9 feet tall in real life, and Casey Affleck is, as has been pointed out, Ben Affleck's little brother. I must stress that this is not a film about fame any more than Donnie Darko is a film about rabbits. It is a film about what is and what is not heroism. The only thing I feel bad about is that Casey does small much better than he does big, and he's just made a movie that made fun of him for it. Fortunately, not that many people saw.

Margot at the Wedding:
My only previous introduction to Noah Baumbach was his first film Kicking and Screaming, which taught me that my post-college malaise will be amusing and contain sex. But clearly things are going to get worse. I can't wait for his film about old people who just hide in the corner of their living rooms and order delivery from Schwanns. It's a good movie though, because he knows how to make good movies; I will begin preparation for toxic adult depression after the malaise kicks in. Full with witty banter.

City of God:
Jesus I got lucky this week. My mom bought Manchild in the Promised Land for me for Christmas one year, which is a book that made me think, "if I were black and poor, I would write a book." But it was a good story, if sloppily written. This is that book written by John Updike. The ending is either funny or horrifying depending on how you felt that day. It's a choose your own adventure story!

Gone Baby Gone:
This has to be one of the dumbest ideas for a plot twist ever conceived. It could not be stretching harder. It is the audio visual equivalent of 3 pages and a 5 page paper. I stopped caring after Amy Ryan left. and she wasn't even hot, I like, respected her for her mind.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead:
One day I will be fat and bearded and charming and I will move to Florence and hang out with Jude Law. Probably I will also make movies. Naw, I don't make films, but if I did they'd have Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

I Got Crunk At the University of Dub

2008-03-08T08:17:00.000-08:00

A bouncer told me to put out the cigarette I was holding. My reply: "but it's legal!" There was a flag with a pot leaf on it hanging next to the Jamaican flag on the ceiling. He could have pointed to it. I have never been as convinced that weed brings on good times better than alcohol and Rambo combined.

Three guys stood behind a table in the back center and traded off vocal duties. The music was consistently excellent, reggae for the technical age. Whoever thought that reggae made better dance music than techno was the smartest man alive. And he was black, and not Al Sharpton black, good black.

The word of the night though was beards. Fucking everywhere, and the good kinds that are matted and graying. It must be a fortunate side effect of being Jamaican that your facial hair goes gray before your real hair does. Or that old men still party and get crunk. The British kids were loving it, put on a show that isn't a show. My friend Ryan asked if you could transfer credits from the University of Dub to NYU. I told him I was transferring. Not one thing occurred that wasn't spontaneous and sincere. If something did, it got shuffled into the back and trampled on. I'm starting to think rap is climbing up the wrong tree. We've co-opted rap, we've yet to co-opt this. And yes, college kids are allowed to say that and still go.

Directed By Wes Anderson

2008-03-06T19:05:00.001-08:00

Yes. Here is the wave of the future, America. It will be like the Kinks, but with more cheek.

When Someone Great is Gone

2008-03-06T17:41:00.000-08:00

I've had absurd trouble trying to post Brett Favre's official retirement video, I guess it isn't ready for widespread viewing yet. Makes sense. But please take a minute and think about him. The hardest part is when he says he wishes he'd thrown less interceptions, as if that ever made him any less of a star. I need to make it clear that it is the spirit of human character that manifests itself through this game; that this game resides firmly in the realm of humanitarian consciousness. Right now it is presenting to us a man, one who lived his life as fully as the greatest in the pantheon of human achievement. He was a true American hero, and I will miss him.

I've got the video on msn.com. It is thoroughly worth taking a look at, no matter the lengths you go to find it.

You Can Dance, but Can You Dance Like That?

2008-03-06T15:17:00.001-08:00

I've made jokes before about going to live in a convent in Tibet, but this clinches it. It somehow makes perfect sense that a band of GIs stationed in Germany would shave the top of their heads and write pop music that would have made Lou Reed quit his day job if he'd been there to hear it. It's things like this that make me happy I can talk about "digging music," and mean "find transcendence," without a trace of irony. Serenity now. And this was before the acid craze. Someone tell Jonathan Richman he was ten years too late.

Q. Did Philip Seymour Hoffman Phone it in Last Year?

2008-03-06T10:19:00.000-08:00

Naw, how else do you play Aaron Sorkin? Finney though, that's another story.

So another year goes by, and he remains my favorite actor. So handsome, so portly.

All My Friends

2008-03-05T18:00:00.000-08:00

Interpol will go down as one of the most elusive bands in modern history. I have few reasons for liking them, and plenty for not, but I still do. I mean, can anyone tell me the appeal of this song?

Exactly, and I can't either, but still, I listen to it, like I'm waiting for it to become good. Like I'm giving it endless chances, and sometimes, somehow, it actually is.

Of course there is the lyrical obstacle; despite the amount of people who indescribably come to the conclusion that Paul Banks is actually a good poet, he isn't. Until now. I have found two reasons that document his subtle genius, that will silence the haters forever. You're welcome Josh Schwartz.

1) "My best friend's a butcher he has 16 knives."
This line actually is worthless by itself. My friend's a barber he has 12 different combs. My best friend's a hitman he has 72 guns. It's trivial. But, there is a but. For the longest time I thought he was saying "my best friend's a virgin he has 69s." Needless to say, I was dissapointed when I found out I was wrong, but it's close enough.

2) I don't actually have a second one. That first one counts as two. Nevertheless, the line stands alone. Bring on the guitar fill.

My Life is Not Like This

2008-03-04T16:45:00.000-08:00

Maybe it should be. Is there any denying this is one of the best songs ever written? Like I said, discrepancy, but this bitch carries it all the way. If he was just this guy, I'd accept it. Its the pathos I don't need.

Brett is Dead, Long Live Brett

2008-03-04T09:25:00.001-08:00

Eli Manning is right now the quarterback of choice for all freedom loving Americans, but in the sweep of football mania that was so prevalent last month, it's easy to forget how violently opposed I was to his succession into the Super Bowl. Just two weeks earlier I was screaming at him to fumble or throw an interception, because nobody touches Brett Favre. He is America's quarterback.

I'm glad he's going out on a good note. I'm happy that he will soon be a regular on Sportcenter where he can gloat about how the new hotness will never touch his old glory (shut up Dan Marino!) It was horrendously unlikely that he'd do as well next year as he did this year, but my reliance on the great cosmic justice will prick me for the next few nights when I think about how he couldn't pull the wins this year that we so badly wanted him to. An injury against the Cowboys that Aaron Rodgers cradled but couldn't carry, and the shocking loss to the Giants which taught us that Eli's sloppy conviction was good enough to earn the NFC championship, and that Brett was in fact 38 years old.

Can Peyton Manning fill Brett Favre's shoes? Maybe, but not until he stops trying to get people to like him. Maybe that will happen now, after his brother has become a national superstar. The great cosmic justice promises it will. And I hope it's right, I need a new favorite team.

My Name's Mark and I'm a Law Abider

2008-03-01T09:56:00.000-08:00

This is a a list of every former band member of the Fall.

Don't actually read it, I implore you. I did not count how many people there actually are, but it's a lot. How miserable a claim to fame would it be to have been the bass player in The Fall from 1979 to 1981? I'd rather be Jonny Drama.

I'm seeing them over Spring Break in Manchester. I feel like this is the closest I'll ever get to seeing Joy Division, also the closest I'll ever get to a fuck fest. 50,000 people in a tiny room watching a 50 year old guy stand on a stage and shout like it's Hyde Park. Sometimes I like to get paralytic and fight.

And I just picked up Fall Heads Roll, which came out in 2005. It's good, 50,000 people could hardly be wrong, but I'm pretty sure I've heard one of these songs in a Nissan commercial. That's some aggressively hip advertising. My name's Terry and I'm a....

Justin Makes More Lists

2008-02-29T08:11:00.000-08:00

Films I have seen recently that I can remember right now:

Grindhouse:
Does anyone else feel like Quentin Tarantino screwed Robert Rodriguez with this one? I imagine the brainstorming process went something like this: Tarantino: "Yo Robby, let's each make a slasher movie like the kind we watched when we were kids, and we'll make 'em shitty on purpose and we'll put 'em together and call it Grindhouse. Get it?" Rodriguez: "yeah sure." So Rodriguez goes out to find his brother Freddy and makes him into a superhero, and then rescues Josh Brolin from a horde of groping superfans in Texas and makes him his super villian, and uses them to make this super disgusting, purposely gratuitous, purposely B-status movie. Meanwhile Tarantino watches Women in Cages 50 times and then makes a regular Tarantino movie. Asshole.

Consensus says that Death Proof is better, and who am I to disagree, but Planet Terror made me more depressed, because I realized that there will never be someone as badass as Freddy Rodriguez in real life. And as far as Death Proof goes, it really is a step down for him. I hate when my heros start to get sloppy. It's almost as depressing as our lack of El Wrays. The first hour is perfect, and even the dopey Coen Brothers cops in the hospital is very Coen Brothers, but then Stunt Man Mike ends up in Tennessee and you see him staring at the exact same girls, and you say "oh god, we're doing this again?" And this time, with worse characters. The car chase scene at the end more than makes up for it, but it upset me that they actually ended his life. I actually felt kind of bad for him, like, why couldn't they just have accepted his apology? And now Rosario Dawson is going to have to spend the rest of her life knowing that she murdered someone. Isn't that like, hard?

Atonement:
Fuck this movie. The idea that a man would go to war and only get through it because of the promise he made to the girl he loves at home that he would return could not be more of a concept created only by girls. It makes Sex and the City look like frat boy porn. When I see a war movie, I want it to either be as badass as possible, like Rambo badass, or really horrible on its own merits, like Slaughterhouse-5. I liked the first hour though, the way I would if my mom rented it and asked me to watch it with her, and I didn't catch the last half hour, so my beef is really just the first part of the second half. We're having a film festival here next week and my options are some really awesome French crime movie, or this. And as much as I'd rather pick the good option I'm sure I'll pick the bad one just so I can have seen the whole thing. This obsession will undoubtedly eventually be the reason for my death.
Also, I have a supercrush on Kiera Knightley. I liked Domino.

Bubba Ho-Tep:
Unquestionably the most perfect movie I've seen in a long time. First, Bruce Campbell. His performance is stunning, in a way that makes me want to become an actor so I can fly in the face of anyone who says acting isn't about exerting your own personality. Ossie Davis sort of makes me want to fuck things too, especially with this line: "They dyed me this way!" in response to "Mr. Kennedy, you know you're black, right?" I've been asked if Bubba himself was real or just a tragic approximation of two men nearing the end of their lives. I prefer to think that mummies can and do exist, but it doesn't really matter either way, the whole movie bathes in the insider smirk that makes them both the same thing. I will demand that Bruce was in fact Elvis, even if he himself gets confused, but again, irrelevant. It's a movie about living, which is the subject of all the best films.

Cloverfield:
Saving Private Ryan with monsters. Also, giant spiders that defy all reason.

The Blair Witch Project:
Yeah I just saw it two weeks ago, on youtube. Also, Maid in Manhattan is on youtube. Maybe I'll watch that later.

The Oscars were last weekend too, and I didn't see them because England hates me and wants me to leave. Apparently they were good, but I'm too fucking bitter to talk about it. I'd rather play Triumph. I will say however, that this was a terrible year for endings. 3:10 to Yuma and Eastern Promises were almost deal breakers, and Michael Clayton finished strong, but on a much lower level than it began on. No Country and There Will Be Blood were the obvious exceptions to this, despite the polarizing debate that ocurred online, but I'm sure Marshall will have something up by the end of the week about how excellent they both were, so go read his blog. There you go Marshall, an endorsement. I'm gonna go build some military bases.

Also, for statistical purposes, here is my top ten films of 2007:

1. No Country For Old Men
2. I'm Not There
3. Things We Lost in the Fire
4. American Gangster
5. Zodiac
6. Eastern Promises
7. Michael Clayton
8. 3:10 to Yuma
9. There Will Be Blood
10. Superbad

I Will Spend The Rest Of My Life Using Juno Lines As Blog Posts

2008-02-27T15:55:00.001-08:00

I just wrote a paper about Global Communication, I'm in a towel and I want to go watch Atonement, so let's keep this quick.

Triumph is the gayest thing I have ever seen about Facebook. It's like Civilization if someone were describing it to you over the phone. And they actually have a spot where you can buy money using a credit card. How stupid have we become? I got in a bout with Casey today and officially drank his milkshake, which was properly thrilling, but then two random kids with unAmerican names (except Oli, I guess that's like a poor person name) came and embarassed me out of the running. Fucking imperialists. I am sure that I will be doing nothing else for the next week and a half before I quit and erase it from my existence, but this will be after I have another paper to do that I will not do, and if I do get around to it, I will probably type "I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE!" as often as possible in it. As in, "Ada told Richard to forget about the case and come with her, but he gave her an evil stare and said 'I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE!' and then took 50 kilometers of her land and destroyed all of her tanks." This did not happen in Bleak House. So I will fail. Fuck you Triumph, you've ruined everything.

On a related note, has anyone actually read Bleak House? I'm pretty sure even Dickens' scholars are like, "well I got through the first 700 pages, but then I threw it in a sewer." I mean don't get me wrong, it's good and all, but Jesus, even the Fountainhead gave me more room to stand on. What is with authors hating people? My first novel is going to be called Fuck You All, You Go To Bars And Drink But You Keep Checking Your Cell Phones For Texts, and it will sell a million copies, and be declared a post-modern masterpiece.

Also, I noticed as I was leaving Facebook that I have a Texas Hold 'em invite waiting for me. Dare me to join?

An American Band in London

2008-02-25T18:19:00.001-08:00

I feel comfortable saying that Britt Daniel has the best delivery in indie rock. What once struggled between Kurt Cobain and Elvis Costello impressions has flourished into an incredible ability to shout "AH-HH-HH!!!" and have it finish off a rhyming stanza. The show opened with "Japanese cigarette Case," no opening dialogue, which was classy, and if you think "Cigarette Case" wouldn't work live, you'd be wrong. Total powerhouse delivery. We went another five or six songs, three more from Ga, one from Girls Can Tell, and "My Mathematical Mind" from Gimme Fiction, with him still not saying a word. By this point I was starting to get pissed, witty banter is half of a good performance, but he kept doing these weird tic things that had to suffice. Like looking at his bass player and saying something in a really jovial way, or giving thumbs up to the production guys in the back. Then when he finally did say something, it was, "ha ha, you guys from England?" Britt Daniel is apparently really nice, and kind of awkward. When has he ever indicated that before? This is a guy who makes a living singing about how failed romances have made him emotionally untouchable. Where are the carpet stains, man?

Live however, Spoon is Britt Daniel. Even the lights knew this, so when they weren't directly on him, they were encasing him in a neon throne. His effects guy sits down and he stands directly in front of the drum kit, so if you're watching from far away it looks like it's just him and some guy standing behind him on his left. Spoon gets called a minimalist band, but they're more of an intricacies band, which doesn't carry over live so well. The ones that hit hardest were the ones that acted like pop songs, the two best being "Beast and Dragon, Adored" which is, unquestionably, the most underrated indie rock song of all time, and "The Way We Get By," which is by all means rated appropriately. They did not ever do "Monsieur Valentine" or "Sister Jack," and they didn't make up for it by doing "My Mathematical Mind," which actually does work on stage although is completely indistinguishable from the second half of Fiction on record. I'll forgive it though, if only because they played "Eddie's Ragga" directly after I shouted for it, so clearly it was my choice the whole time.

A good live show gives you an additional appreciation for the band performing. The best example I have ever seen of this is Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, which taught me that all their intellectual posturing is just to cover up that they want to make dance grooves. The word of the night tonight was power. I respect a lot of what Britt does in the studio, but Spoon has always been a band you have to pay a lot of attention to to really enjoy. Half the appeal is the voice and lyrics, and the other half is the confident structure. But tonight, even the studio experiments like "Japanese" and "The Ghost of you Lingers" were given rock star treatment, due in a very large part to drummer Jim Eno, who fucking pwned his bass and snare with conviction that rivaled Britt's stormside delivery. Like a more civilized Mitch Mitchell/Jimi Hendrix battle. Hit me like a tom. Which reminds me, "Turn My Camera On" is sexier than Mick Jagger and Prince combined, and "Beast and Dragon" is pure indie cool. The band's mission statement has always been a coarse dynamic of hipster detachment unconfessional honesty and real underhanded compassion for the poor souls who find themselves in the same boat. It seems impossible to reconcile those two, which is why there's this discrepancy about what kind of guy he actually is. But "Black Like Me" played after "Finer Feelings" worked pretty well, so until the universe implodes on itself, the answer will just be to pump up the volume. In any case, he needs to stop being such a fairy and rock my shit as much as his music does.

Never Told A Lie I Didn't Believe

2008-02-25T05:02:00.000-08:00

"New York City Serenade" is the last song off Bruce Springsteen's second album, The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. It isn't a song I would necessarily be interested in, in fact as far as casual listening goes, it's probably my least favorite song on the album; I have it on vinyl, but Jessica liked it a lot and wanted me to put it on a mix I made her, so I got it online and now, months later, I realize it's on my iPod. It's also the only Bruce song I have anywhere on me now that was written before 1984, so I'm treating it like water in the desert. Jessica's claim to it was that it was beautiful, but I don't really agree, it's got sort of a deep street vibe, and it has violins but they more progress the story than get weepy, so I didn't ever really listen to it until I realized the song was called "New York City Serenade," and might be better if I paid attention.

The write up on Bruce is that he's a storyteller, and he picks the right specifics to convey massive details with very few words. "New York City Serenade" is a short film, and yes, it is beautiful. It starts with two kids, a boy and a girl, named Billy and Jackie, the Springsteen Dick and Jane, hanging out in the backseat of a Cadillac, the Springsteen 50s Diner. They have some plan to drive down Broadway at midnight, and steal something, or somehow acquire something. With Bruce you never get the feeling that any of the bad things his kids are going to do are actually bad, so "make off with the loot" sounds incredibly noble, even if they're just robbing some old tenement woman (not that they are.) Then he veers off and mentions a train, one that Jackie will not take for fear that Billy will leave her behind. This is pure American myth, only in Springsteen's world could a Cadillac outrun the midnight diesel locomotive. Now we have a theme.

Cut to another scene; an old jazz man is blowing in an alley, same night, different street. Bruce says, and I quote, "Any deeper blue and you're playin' in your grave/Save your notes, don't spend 'em on the blues boy," but he doesn't mean it. A violin carries him out as he repeatedly tells him to "keep singin'." Fade to black and let the music take you home.

This is a Salvadore Dali film if he'd been into sentimentality rather than fucking people up emotionally. My only point of contention with Springsteen has always been that his stories don't seem like they could happen in real life, but what I realize now is that they weren't supposed to. They were his own ideas for what life could and should be, and at that point in his career, what he thought it would be. That's what the American myth really was to him, not a patriotic surge that permeated his music, but a glory and power that he hoped was real. Billy and Jackie aren't archetypes, they're friends he wishes he had. They aren't friends we all wish we had, they're too specific to a certain mindset; everyone knows Bruce wasn't ever hip, but that's only because he was too specific about what he wanted. It's harder to relate to him than it is to, say, Bob Dylan, but he's easier to love.

Now he knows how the world actually he is, and that he was always very wrong about it. That's why all his albums since at least 1984 have sounded jaded and bitter. Magic is one of the most depressing albums ever released, and people would notice that if they weren't just comparing the power chords to Born to Run. It's a record about a man who had everything that this life had to offer, when all he really wanted was some of the things his life had to offer. He's compensating for it--notice the smirk of cocky intelligence that just barely transcends the look of solemnity on the Magic cover--but he'll never be a social butterfly again. As they said to Vincent Van Gogh, this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you. I wish Bruce was a national icon, we tend to like people who tell us how hopeless we are more than people who believe that we actually aren't, but he's more deserving of our sympathy and respect than anyone except maybe Lou Reed. Let him go peacefully into the shadows with his friends and loved ones, and hopefully, hopefully, we'll catch the next one. Serenade me home, boys.

Jesus Says I'm Wrong, Where Do I Go From There?

2008-02-09T17:05:00.000-08:00

I feel I should weigh in on why I think Kanye West is as good as I do. The moral complex demonstrated by the Jay-Z remix should probably say it all, but, as much as I thought it impossible, the original song is even better.

First I'll talk about the more famous version. If Kanye just produced for a living, I'd call him a genius, he makes better songs than Timbaland, even without JT. Timbo makes club beats, Kanye makes beats to listen to. But Diamonds (remixed) is a brilliant song by all accounts. Morality as it is is overrated, I hope most of you know that, but to demonstrate it as a focal conclusion is unheard of. Regardless of how you feel about blood diamonds, none of you cheeky fuckers have discussed it like this. It's like an abortion clinic doctor who's convinced he's a murderer; it's the most comprehensive moralistic view I've ever heard.

But I got over intelligent political hip hop in ninth grade. The original song boasts more Kanye boasting than I've heard in many years. His persona is becoming ridiculous. He thinks he's the best. That's because he knows he is, but his reasons are different than mine.

Let's talk about Graduation. It's a boring album that assumed it would be loved. And it was, just look around and you'll find a critic year-end album list that praises it for being the only rapper who can't rap like he's aware of himself. Graduation was a cash-out album that did well because songs like "Good Life" and "Stronger" spoke more fervently to hip hop fans than "Drunk and Hot Girls," which spoke most fervently to people who still wanted to believe he was the smartest man in the game.

Kanye West is the smartest man in music. More then the litany of producers who've made their name over the past ten years, he understands how people devour music. If anything, he's the next Bowie. And my reasons for being mad at him are the same as my hypothetical reasons for being mad about Low: it predicts music I won't like in 5 years. He understood that an album about catch-phrases would eclipse an album about God or money, and he was right. He knows exactly what he's doing. But what he used to do, captivate people like me who assume music indicates intelligence, isn't what he's aiming for. He wants to sell records, and he's figured out how.

"Jesus Walks" may turn out to be his bid for intelligence; I have no idea how the rap game works. Jay-Z spent the latter half of his career convincing us he was smarter than he was; rappers think about images more often than politicians. But for awhile, Yeezee was the only man convincing us pop was alive. "Diamonds from Sierra Leone," the original, doesn't bother explaining how smart it is; it's a rap song that is invested in being a rap song. Kanye's brilliance is in his ability to look beyond himself. As long as we have pop stars who recognize they're pop stars, we'll be ok. But now we have a man who's obsessed with his own success. There's nothing I can say about that besides I hope to God he keeps it. If we reach limitations, I hope they're solved by R. Kelly. He's the only one who knows how to do it proper.

I Just Want You

2008-02-09T17:02:00.001-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmLt6kcZ72Q

I'd post this directly but it forbids such trivial things. This is an excellent song, if it weren't for the fact that it's about being pissed off about facebook, I'd expect it on Born To Run. God bless the Boss.

It All Started With A Movie Script...

2008-02-09T10:44:00.000-08:00

This is Diablo Cody's blog. I don't know how I feel about hipsters infiltrating the Academy Awards, maybe this spells the beginning of more interesting movies getting the bid, but I also feel like the Academy should remain a gentlemen's club run by George Clooney where they give nominations to Benicio Del Toro because they feel sad he's from Puerto Rico. This press domination Diablo's held onto for far too long sort of makes me afraid it's the precursor to a lot of iPhone girls at NYU being considered edgy and intelligent. Not that Diablo's not intelligent, I'm sure she probably is, but that's what I want to talk about. Because if hipsters are being embraced by the liberal whiteys who run this country, why are they starting with Juno?

In all honesty it probably isn't that bad a movie. My complaint about the dialogue is that Peter Travers thinks its cute. Maybe we need female responses to Knocked Up, I'm not the person to ask. Socially, I can see Juno being called on by default, especially by rich whiteys, but isn't that the problem with the Oscars to begin with?

When I left the theater, my initial reaction, besides being superpissed that Michael Cera got about ten minutes of screen time, was that if this movie had been better; funnier, smarter, more realistic, it would have been Ghost World. Juno is a movie about settling; it preaches a message that doesn't pan out in real life. She'll be writhing in contempt for his Moldy Peaches records before graduation. Whereas Buscemi's lonely weird guy is a real person in every sense of the word, and his "I've stayed in horrible relationships for years to avoid having to say this" is one the most accurate statements about lonely weirdness I've ever heard in a film. If movies are supposed to show us to ourselves, Ghost World took total awkwardness and demonstrated how essential it is to the human condition. It took an isolated weirdo and made him all of us. The closest Juno gets to that is "I try really hard actually." Plus, if Buscemi is no Michael Cera, at least he got good screen time.

The lineup this year for best picture is pretty weak. Michael Clayton is good but not transcendent, and Atonement is most likely gay. No Country and There Will Be Blood will and should sweep. I remember there not being that many good movies this year, but now I feel like I'm just missing them. Ghost World was nominated for, but did not win, best adapted screenplay in 2002, losing out to A Beautiful Mind. Russell Crowe deserves a seat at the table. Thora Birch does not.

Unless we decide she does, which we will if we give Ellen Page and Diablo Cody the nods we most likely will. Then we're going to have to start actually being upset about Being John Malkovich. It's a strange time in America, this is no country for old men. My disdain for a relatively decent movie comes from what it isn't, not what it is, but if you take away the stripper background and the indie to mainstream superhighway and the miles of press and the Real Geezers' glowing review, it's just a movie that examines deep emotion with an unlikeable protagonist. What am I still doing here?

David Tyree for Pope

2008-02-05T12:13:00.000-08:00

And because it bears repeating, and more repeating, and more repeating, and more repeating, I'm posting the Tyree catch. This is shit to watch when you feel sad, I do believe I'm calling Immaculate on this one. And yeah, consider this me gloating.

David Tyree for President

2008-02-05T04:45:00.000-08:00

It's 7:45 back home, I'm standing on the morning of Super Tuesday. My grandparents asked me if I've filled out my absentee ballot slip yet. The answer is no. I didn't plan on voting, absentee ballots are terrifying, but now it doesn't even matter, I don't have time to worry about things as trivial as who our next president is going to be, because the Giants won the Super Bowl. Bring on Mike Huckabee, we have Eli Manning.

Here's what matters: There is no more jealousy in the NFL. I have been told, more than a few times, that the only reason the rest of America hates the Patriots is because they wish they could be as good. That has never been the reason. The reason everyone hates the Patriots is because they have fans who tell us that the only reason we hate the Patriots is because we're jealous. Patriots fans, and the real ones, the deserved ones, who have been on the same side for years, gained an intolerable superiority this year, that made every fat guy standing in line at a Borders or Taco Bell with a New England sweatshirt on feel like he was an integral part of his team's victory. I don't know what they're all doing now, probably acting like any fan who's team lost the superbowl. You can't win if you can't lose, this complex is now extinguished, and we can all go back to being friends.

The Patriots were God's team this year. A mechanized infantry of superhuman muscle that threw and caught footballs like they were being coordinated by machines from above. If we put Tom Brady and Randy Moss in Iraq, they would hail mortar like smart bombs and destroy every faction in the area that they were told to. They would do this without sweating. Without smiling. As much as I hated them this year, I loved seeing them drive, because it was like watching an air craft carrier move slowly across the water; powerful, massive, and unflinching.

This wins football games, but it takes away from the myth. We're an era of few surprises, an obsession with toppling our betters has left us with none. My favorite part of the crowd panouts was not to Peyton dilligently watching his brother play, but to a shot of Pam Anderson intensly focused on the field. Our stars have to take something seriously.

Football is, besides the Oscars, I guess, the last realm of disputing talent that we can watch with genuine enthusiasm. Tom Brady, the MVP, is very possibly the best quarterback since Joe Montana, but that isn't what I'm saying. We didn't want Brady to win because he's good, we wanted him to lose because we want football to reinforce in us what sports have encouraged since their inception: any given Sunday, and glory is alive.

I've defended Eli Manning against everyone in my family, and plenty of people from other families, but the fact is that he's unreliable at best. His regular season started off promising, then got ugly, and picked up at the end only enough to make his team a wild card. He is not the best quarterback in the league, he isn't even in the top five, and if you aren't from New York, you probably knew him best as the asshole younger brother of Peyton who demanded to be on the Giants because he had that respectable last name. He became America's quarterback the same way John Kerry became the Blue states' nominee; anybody but Brady.

In the end, this means little. Everybody had two weeks to forget their differences and realize that Eli had had the playoff season of his fucking life. He was now an imperfect quarterback with very little chance of beating the juggernaut Patriots, but who we would still root for because this game meant so much more than, say, the game the two teams played last month to finish out the regular season. To say David and Goliath is far too obvious.

So it happened, and American football did what nothing else, save the Oscars, I guess, has done; kept the spirit and glory of America alive. Belichick and co. will be back next year, and they will still be a better team than the New York Giants, and Eli will have on games and off games, and his status as American everyman will wear off, but for a moment, and for much of this dreadful dead period we call the off season, he will be the embodiment of the force that keeps us alive; the man we can turn to as Heidi Montag and the rest of us continue to laugh ourselves out of existence, and say, "we were all there, we all saw you do it."

An Open Discourse on Paternal Devotion

2008-02-03T09:36:00.001-08:00

I don't go to the gym a lot. However, despite this, I don't have sex either, so maybe I'm missing something. But the concept of it to me just seems like hard work. The extent of my health plan has mainly been to replace meals with cigarettes, so to go do a lot of physical labor, especially in a weirdly empty room surrounded by mirrors, with absolutely no reward save a personal satisfaction (which, let's be honest, hasn't been an award since I was in Boy Scouts) seems counterintuitive. I'm not putting the gym down, and overtly it is a really good idea, "hey, let's go pump iron so we can fuck chicks," but it strikes me as odd that in reality, what that means is that there's a culture of frat boys who are saying to each other "let's go exert our bodies so that we can be good fathers."

AHA! checkmate.

And now I'm going to smoke outside. Go Giants.

Leave Chris Crocker Alone!

2008-01-30T11:59:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piw5oOQ_BnE&watch_response

I can't decide if I hate this or not. I can't decide if it's supposed to be ironic, or some kind of Freudian internal conflict, or an earnest Gimme More remix. But the part with the guy mooning in the background has to be some kind of artistic statement. Part of me wants this to be the biggest thing online since 2 Girls 1 Cup, but another part of me is glad it's only got four comments, and all of them are negative. What else is there to say about this...who still makes fun of Chris Crocker? Who is ready to pursue Chris Crocker using his own methods? Why is that guy showing his ass? This is the most bewildering video I have ever seen in my life.

Note: My favorite comment is the most recent one, that's upset that this video isn't actually about scientology. I hope that guy complains about that on every video he watches.

I have one more year to be a child actor

2008-01-27T20:23:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_J-lxK8uCY&NR=1

Why aren't I doing this right now? Girls, is there any situation in which this wouldn't work? I mean, would it actually end up being more like that scene in Dogma where Jay and Bob save Bethany's life and she just thanks them? And then of course there's the Graduate, which for some reason isn't on youtube. This is though: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSxihhBzCjk. which is potentially better.
This is a good movie scene:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWshPH_jsjQ
And so is this, obviously:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAVEXE6ADcs

January 22, A Day That Will Live in Infamy

2008-01-23T09:40:00.000-08:00

I'll keep this post short, frankly I don't know what to say, I feel like the reporter who had to cover the Hindenburg explosion, I'm all sputters and "for the love of Christ!" right now, and it's been a day.

1) Juno awarded a nomination for best film, and Diablo Cody nominated for best original screenplay.

I don't think Juno will take best picture, but I have a suspicion this is going to be like last year, when Little Miss Sunshine beat out Pan's Labyrinth for the screenplay award. If that's the case I really have no reason to come back home, American culture is dead.

2) Fred Thompson drops out of the presidential race.

Honestly? He's like the affable coke addict politician from Primary Colors, and by far the only person I liked for personal reasons rather than just political ones. Now I'm going to have to pray that Barack becomes 20 times more assertive, or Mitt Romney converts to Islam.

3) Heath Ledger dies.

As if this was necessary to make yesterday any worse. I've been steadily gay for Heath since 10 Things I hate About You, and Brokeback Mountain made me believe it was possible. Batman was going to convince me that he would one day become ugly and therefore attainable, but now I'm just going to wear a veil and pull myself off the market. Here's to hoping he becomes the next James Dean. Which he won't, if Diablo fucking Cody has anything to say about it.

Fuck this, I'll be back, maybe, it just feels like now, what's the point?

England owes me a living

2008-01-18T05:33:00.000-08:00

Let's be honest, there's no one who reads this blog that I don't know very personally, so me saying that I'm in London now is a rather wasted effort. But regardless, I'm in london, I arrived two nights ago, and I have since bought two packs of cigarettes, a small bottle of vodka, a cheeseburger from McDonalds (that's royale with cheese) and a train ticket. It's less cold here than it is in new York, and there are a lot of fat guys with skinny girlfriends. Also, people in general seem to be rather witty. My theory on why this is is that 1) the convenience store clerks are all British, and not unspecified nubes, and 2) England has been around for about 800 years longer than the United States, and doesn't have the same identity crisis we do.

And the cabs are disturbingly British, as are the phone booths (they have phone booths!)

And the BBC is the weirdest fucking thing I've ever watched. They have a show called Guilty where a woman in a blue button up shirt brings people into a mock court room and charges them with petty crimes. Really petty, as in, "you're too fat to wear that," which is not a speculative example. She then brings in the accuser (in this case, the girl's mother) and presides over the case like Joe Brown. At the end the audience deliberates and comes to a decision (are you actually too fat to wear that?)

So suck it apologists, the rest of the world is as bad as we are, they just hide it better.

It was the sex, not the scandal

2008-01-18T04:52:00.000-08:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/17/AR2008011703607.html?hpid=topnews

Remember when Bill Clinton went on the Arsenio Hall Show? I don't either, I was like 5 years old, but apparently he was good. He played saxophone and forever cemented his blackness. People are still saying that.

Obviously, Barack Obama is the most excellent man alive. Everyone agrees, he's like Don King, a mad pimp, a king, and black, blacker than Bill Clinton, who is in fact white.

But there was a time when Bill Clinton was charming. Remember that? I vaguely do. He gave a State of the Union once (at least once) that I watched because I am a jackass, and he made some faux pas about demanding that neighborhoods be more liberal when he meant to say liveable, and played it off like a champion. Even my thirteen year old self was impressed, and this was back when Titus was a primetime show.

Now he seems, at best, insane, at worst, an asshole, and in fact, probably both. I wonder if this is legacy protecting or just getting old, but gone are the days of affability and high self esteem (which ironically, is how he was getting laid in the first place.) He's become bitchy and self important, the outcome of a lifetime of confidence and self-righteousness. He's like one of those kids who gets mad at their parents when they get mad at him for breaking a window. His approval rating upon leaving the White House was staggeringly high, and now people hardly remember the scandal. It's become a footnote on top of a presidency that's marked by how good the economy was (not that he had anything to do with that.) Especially now. I remember when people talked about how they were embarassed for our country. Now we accept that as a given. So why is he such an asshole? He's like a new parent who stops being funny and starts being concerned. Which is the only excuse I'll accept. If it turns out Monica Lewinski is hiding babies I'll let all of this bullshit slide.

Hillary Clinton is not black, so even if her husband actually was, electing her would not be the same. She is however, a woman, so electing her would be equally progressive. And let's face it, she's a woman the same way Obama is a black man. She has to be stern the same way Obama has to be white. We're not going to elect Kanye West, and we're not going to elect Drew Barrymore. The problem people have with Clinton is that she's trying to be strong in a way that makes her unlikeable. And her husband has become insane. And he's campaigning for her.

I wonder if she puts out, with other people I mean, not with Bill, for whom she probably doesn't. Actually she probably does, she just doesn't enjoy it.

And don't vote for her, she probably doesn't even know who Arsenio Hall is.

Paper Planes - Not the Best Song Ever

2008-01-14T23:42:00.000-08:00

Paper Planes is not the song of the year, simply because one other person wrote a song that has been around for longer and is still better. But James Murphy is not M.I.A.; if they were rivals he would be Salieri to M.I.A.’s Mozart. Not that M.I.A. is a musical genius, in fact, Murphy is nearer to Mozart than she is, he can orchestrate; M.I.A. is a genius the way Winston Churchill was, and she’s created a piece of art that unlike The Constant Gardener, Blood Diamond, Hotel Rwanda, or the New York Times World section, has made the third world seem enriched and foreign rather than desperate and pitiable.

“Paper Planes” does this less than other songs, like “Hussel,” on which African emcee Afrikan Boy invites Jay-Z and his ghetto cronies to come to Africa and compare the hustle. “Hussel” is the quintessential Kala track, supposing that Kala has an agenda. “Paper Planes” is the song that proves it doesn’t. And ask Wilcannia Mob Keith if he signed onto the album so that some liberal mugger would send him a check. See what part of your body he beats with sticks.

The high profile Visa printing enterprise that steals the show with its four dropped cartridge shells is a political statement only in the sense that it’s Maya's anachronistic joke. Now keep in mind her intelligence, directed coyly this time at the non-believers. Think she cares if she makes them care? All I want to do is take your money. Break yo self fool!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sei-eEjy4g

Chuck Klosterman, or Chuck Norris?

2008-01-12T16:37:00.000-08:00

You decide:

The thing about reading Chuck Klosterman is that like half of his appeal is assuming he's some incredibly personable journalist who hangs out with Stephen Merritt on weekends. When you find out he actually looks like geeky Peyton Manning it's hard to take his bullshit as seriously. It makes what he has to say a lot more like bullshit, rather than pithy insight, which it would be if he looked more like geeky Tom Brady. This Chuck Norris photo is the best artistic decision he ever made; I assume by posting it I just made him 50 times more famous.

Note: For my anonymous fans, I look like geeky Tom Brady. HA HA HA!

Justin: 1, Internet: 0

2008-01-10T16:12:00.000-08:00

I wrote this review for Silent Uproar last April. Now that I've stopped writing for them, I'm taking my posts back for myself. This is my favorite of all the reviews I ever did for them. Most of my pieces were pretty bad, and this one isn't great either, I mostly just listened to each album one time and then found some petty reason to dislike them, not really being sure how to review albums and reading a lot of Pitchfork. But what I like about this review is that it's unfathomably pretentious. I think I'd discovered Robert Christgau like a week earlier and was impressed that he said things like "I availed myself of my freenet privileges...."

Anyway, in retrospect, Silent Uproar was a pretty sweet deal; as long as I kept my articles short I could pretty much do whatever I wanted, and because I reviewed bands like Grand Champeen and The Rails, the editing was relatively minimal. My main point of contention with the site was how unbelievably shitty it was, conceptually, artistically, intellectually, but otherwise we got along fine. And they let me post things like this:

The Hourly Radio – History Will Never Hold Me
Posted in Reviews by justin on April 4th, 2007

Rating:
2.9 / 5
Label:
n/a
Website:
http://www.thehourlyradio.com/
Musically, History Will Never Hold Me could ably command a positive fluidity in any club that encourages shagging in its bathroom stalls. It’s lead singer Aaron Closson’s pure emo vocals that deny The Hourly Radio their seductive fervor, as he continuously proves that his earnest pain is just about the unsexiest thing ever. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that this isn’t solely the result of a disjointing inability to focus the direction of his band’s sound, but even if he is genuinely hoping to introduce a marriage of catharsis and sleazy nonchalance into the spectrum of human consciousness, he mostly just squanders the sexualizing properties of his album. The band is thus relegated to a capricious purgatory, because if we can’t fuck to this pain, than why would we want it?

DC in a Body Bag

2008-01-09T20:12:00.000-08:00

The other night I went into DC with my friend Marshall to go dancing at the Black Cat. The Black Cat is a club that hosts events with names like "Metapop" and "Britpop, indiepop, soul" and "Soulpop" and "metasoulpop" and "Indiesoul MetaBrit" etc. Basically every night involves playing "Crazy" at least five times and a lot of kids talking about Morrissey; the point being that there's no place better to spend a Friday night. At least I assume; my analysis is pretty speculatory, because I haven't been inside the Black Cat for more than 20 minutes since 2005, when Marshall fronted a metaindiepop band called Sid Space and the Black Cat let them play in their back room.

Marshall and I attempted three times to get into the Black Cat over the summer. The first time was during a robotrip, which, to our happiness but to this post's chagrin, we were allowed in with no problems. They played "Crazy," and I think I heard some kids talking about Morrissey, and then it was 2 o'clock and the club closed and we had to go home. It was fun, and we decided to go back the next weekend. So we did, but this time we started at a Taco Bell in Falls Church and filled a large size soda cup with diet coke and some vodka, so we'd have something to drink on the Metro. By the time we showed up at the club I still had the cup in my hand. Apparently, Taco Bell cups aren't allowed in the Black Cat, because the bouncer wouldn't let us in. This bouncer was Asian, and somewhat overweight. Remember that, because it will be important in a minute. Marshall got in a fight with him, by which I mean an actual fight, where he headlocked him and knocked his glasses off his face. I don't remember what happened, but somehow the club got us to leave and we spent the rest of the night at Jumbo Slice making friends with a guy named Kyle.

We went back the next weekend to try again. This time we had no drinks in our hands, and we each showed our respective IDs to a different bouncer, with the full acknowledgement that we wouldn't be drinking there anyway. Marshall has a state ID, which has a brown coating on it that makes his picture look kind of like an old photograph of George Pickett. It doesn't look fake though, so when the bouncer refused to let us in we were, understandably, upset. But we'd learned from our mistakes, rather than getting in a fight with this guy we waited until he was releaved by someone else and then went back, told this new bouncer we didn't have IDs, got our Xs drawn on our hands and went in. We were almost in the club room when we were stopped by the original bouncer, who told us we had to leave. Marshall asked to see a manager, and when we did and he wouldn't let us in either, Marshall told him to suck his dick. Then they kicked us out.

As far as I can tell, all of this is standard club procedure, and happens all the time.

So here's where it gets ugly: The other night, let's say it was Friday, we went back and were stopped outside by the bouncer. I told him I'd never seen him before, which as far as I knew was true, and Marshall told him he'd never seen him before, which was less true. The bouncer recognized us as the guys who'd once called him a "fat chink." We contested this in earnest, but he wouldn't let us in. Marshall asked him to see someone higher up, so they brought us inside to the ticket stand and we waited until a manager arrived, and recognized us as the guys who'd told him to suck his dick back in August. Without hesitation he threw us out of the club, and for the fourth time we were back out in the sidewalk, drunk, trying to find some other place to go.

Washington DC is dead. There was a time when Dickie Valentine from the Electric Six could have pissed on the floor and then lit a match off of Teresa Heinz Kerry's bare vagina to smoke his unfiltered. There was a time when "Suck my dick" was a term of endearment, as in something Ronald Reagan would say to Jerry Falwell. They'd both laugh. I don't know who is ruining this country, but whether it's Hillary Clinton or Chad Kroeger, this shit needs to stop. I have been blacklisted by the Black Cat.

8:15 AM

2007-12-19T05:13:00.001-08:00

Dear readers,

I'm Not There is an excellent film. Go see it immediately. That is all.

Top 5 Dylan songs:

5. It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)
4. Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts
3. Like a Rolling Stone
2. Desolation Row
1. Visions of Johanna

You Think I Give a Damn About a Grammy?

2007-12-12T02:05:00.001-08:00

The sad thing is that I have even less to do than this Blog might imply, and while others are perusing Youtube when they can't sleep at 4 o'clock, I'm reading forums about Michael Vick and getting far too angry when I post replies.
So this morning I started listening to my iPod on shuffle, a decided course of action until it got light out and I could go get breakfast for free. By about the third track I got the idea to only listen to songs from this year, and then write quick blurbs about how I felt about them. By the fourth track I decided to post my output here. Some of my responses are more thought out than others, I mean, I could do a track by track of Modest Mouse without spinning the record at all, while Ted Leo I've played like twice all year. But I stand by all of these opinions, so if you disagree with something, take it up with your ears, and if you like, leave a comment. Beyond that, enjoy the show. I tried to be as all-encompassing as possible, but I did just leave it on shuffle, so not everyone got a voice, while a few got too many.
I suppose I should make my disclaimer here: I'm into abrasive noise, and I duck trends to the fullest extent that my tastes allow. Nobody else will say that Von Sudenfed put out the album of the year, but I will. Furthermore, I hate Feist, not because she necessarily put out a bad album, but because she ran famous with a mediocre album while my boys levelled out with a decent score on Metacritic.

Anyway, let's begin:

Bjork – The Dull Flame of Desire: On which Bjork and Antony express love for each other (aren’t they both gay?) The drum is appropriately minimal, but the horn doesn’t express much besides whales, and when the two of them get big together, it resembles moaning Tom Waits and Keith Richard, only far less beautiful.

Art Brut – Late Sunday Evening: On which Eddie Argos goes all Gary Snyder and is even more mundane than normal; something about going to bed too late. Am I the only one who thinks his backing band hits every time?

Bjork – Earth Intruders: She’s probably smarter than her lyrics make her out to be, but musically this is often exciting, thanks in equal parts to her and Timbo.

Modest Mouse – Education: On which Isaac struts like David Byrne in regular clothes, but still the band sounds like Modest Mouse, and at this point, no one else. One point of contention: if he keeps telling me how stupid he is, I’m going to start believing it.

The White Stripes – Little Cream Soda: On which Jack White does his best heavy metal riff, on which he takes himself more seriously than I do, but we both enjoy him immensely.

Modest Mouse – Little Hotel: On which Isaac repeats the sentimentality of “Blame it on the Tetons” but doesn’t get away with it because he doesn’t pretend he’s being deep.

Saul Williams – WTF!: I finally figured out who Saul sounds like: not Tunde from TV on the Radio, not Hootie, not Lenny, but his producer Trent Reznor. I feel like Saul is happier about that than Trent, who probably doesn’t listen to rap and probably doesn’t care about black music, but they do both seem to like slick beats. Reznor was on an El-P song this year too, and it was good.

Grand Champeen – Cities on the Plain: I got this album from Silent Uproar and didn’t even make it to this song. I got selfish and stopped listening after the second song sounded like Olivia Tremor Control. If I had made it all the way here, I would have essentially concurred with my initial opinion that this is harmless indie pop, but I probably would have felt warmer about it.

Britney Spears – Get Naked [I Got A Plan]: On which Britney does her best to be tiny and not sexy, in that obnoxious way that girls think is sexy, but on which Danja lays the hottest beat of the album, causing my friend Marshall to say “this is terrifying!” and me to say “but it’s so pretty.” Truth is it still sounds a lot like Timbaland.

Interpol – Wrecking Ball: On which Interpol shun the argument that they made a bad album, as well as shunning their Joy Division in favor of standard stadium rock.

Talib Kweli – Give ‘em Hell: On which Kweli offers many old arguments against American spirituality as if they were new, and one against King James that is new. What kind of asshole thinks he can just rewrite the Bible?

Bright Eyes – Classic Cars: On which Conor is thoughtful about the ending of a relationship that seemed healthy, much to my dismay.

The National – Apartment Story: During which I realize why my girlfriend likes them so much; they’re pained, sentimental, quiet, understated, and they write lyrics like “do whatever the TV tells us,” not to be ironic, but to make a personal statement. It would be unbearable if it weren’t so beautiful.

Radiohead – Videotape: On which Thom is beautiful but not satisfying, silencing the haters but teasing the fans. Don’t worry though, the album is good. Really, I like it.

Gorillaz – Highway (Under Construction): Damon Albarn assumes even more characters than Isaac Brock, which makes him…smarter? No, but probably more fun at parties. Not like this song is that fun, but it does have a kind of Spoon vibe in terms of its random sound effects, and a saloon piano at the end that is good in its superfluousness.

Siouxsie – Heaven and Alchemy: She could probably rally a few girls to feel good about themselves, but probably not the same ones that listen to Siouxsie and the Banshees.

Troublesome – Money Machine: Troublesome is an emcee from Brooklyn who comes into Manhattan sometimes to sell his CDs in front of Virgin Records. I bought this for three dollars after one of his entourage told me the beats were hotter than Kanye West. The sad part of that statement wasn’t that it’s true, but that the lyrics are far better as well. This is shockingly good hip hop, a hungry, intelligent kid who isn’t angry enough to say he’s better than everyone else, even though he is.

Sigur Ros – i gaer: On which Sigur Ros do not use capitalization, and fail to make up for it any way, save for a massive wall of sound before both verses that makes me pray they’re protecting something worthy and aren’t. Like a huge wall surrounding a trailer. It’s even worse because you know they thought it was great. Just like you know they think everything they do is great.

Jay-Z – Sweet: On which Jay offers filler on an album that is reasonably filler free. Does that make it more or less offensive?

The Hives – Return the Favor: On which The Hives give me everything I could ask for, but still leave me feeling odd, because I thought they were more idiosyncratic.

OneRepublic – Say (All I Need): During which I am inspired to write my own closing sequence of Scrubs. I like them better than I like the Fray, which is weird, because they sound exactly the same.

LCD Soundsystem – Get Innocuous: On which James Murphy lays his barest club track, and I am inspired to go watch Trainspotting some more.

Interpol – Who Do You Think: On which Interpol shun the argument that they made a bad album, and I am reminded of how they could have been a really good punk band.

The Twilight Sad – I’m Taking the Train Home: On which the band does more of what they did for the rest of the album; namely, ground their lofty musical cacophony with a steady drum beat. Although, unfortunately they are less successful than they are in other places.

The Twilight Sad – That Summer, At Home I Had Become the Invisible Boy: On which they do a far better job of grounding their lofty musical cacophony with a steady drum beat. As for the title, yes, it’s a perfect indication of what he’ talking about.

Mims – This is Why I’m Hot: http://www.villagevoice.com/music/0711,harvilla,76021,22.html

Kanye West – Big Brother: On which Kanye gets all gay for Jay-Z over a beat I fail to care about.

The Foxboro Hot Tubs – She’s a Saint Not a Celebrity: An appropriate song to close with because it has a back-story. I got it online on the Foxboro website, which is quite similar in reality to the Green Day website because they’re the same band. Green Day like to form new mysterious bands before they release albums. They did it in 2003 with a metallic band called the Network. Foxboro is more of a Buddy Holly pop sound, although this particular song sounds a lot like Green Day. All of this is very good news for me because I like Green Day a lot. And they do Buddy Holly pop well, meaning this album is much better than their last pretend album.

Animal Collective – Peacebone: This song came on while I was figuring out how best to sell that last song, and I want to write about it because there are several things I feel need to say about Animal Collective before they get called the best band since Radiohead ( which they already have). Like 1) I used to hate them, but this song changed my mind. 2) The screaming in the middle is great, one of the best ways I’ve ever seen a band utilize screaming. 3) This is a pop song, that’s all it is. 4) The video is terrifying, I still hate these fuckers.

The end. Good morning.

Why I Get Laid Often

2007-12-06T01:02:00.000-08:00

I've invented a dance. It involves thinking that you look as cool as possible when you actually look stupid. I call it the Microphone Dance, because you have to pretend that you're holding a microphone the entire time. You can only use it with songs that have guitars that you know all the words to. I have another dance for beats. It's called the Black Cat because I invented it at the Black Cat. It's also called the Robo. It involves shifting your weight from one leg to the other and pushing your hands out in front of you like you're propelling yourself backwards with your arms. Maybe I'll videotape me doing these and put them on Youtube. Then you can see what they look like.

It's almost Christmas already?

2007-11-26T22:56:00.000-08:00

At some point I'm going to make a best of '07 list for music, and if I see some more movies, for movies too. If God wills it and I brush up on my shit I could even talk about football for a minute, but suffice it to say for now that the '07 Patriots are the '72 Dolphins, and everyone wants to see them do it, no matter what they say.
But there are a bunch of things I discovered this year that I feel comfortable with documenting a month and five days prematurely, because unlike films, trivial discoveries don't Oscar-bait in December, and unlike music, they're easier to catalogue. So here is a list of things that I found out about for the first time in the year 2007, that made it a damn good time.

1) Arrested Development.
I once said to my roommate back in January or February after a bit of weed that "It's not even a show, it's just a collage of jokes!" I still mean it. Said roommate, Jeff Eckman, owned way too many TV shows on DVD, many of which I watched and some of which I liked, but none of them instilled in me a faith in television like Arrested Development. It's a travesty that Will Arnett isn't the most famous man in Hollywood. It's a travesty he's not fucking right now, and if he is, it's a travesty I don't know about it. I watched all three seasons over the course of about two weeks. Now, multiple viewings make me worry--it's far too clever and it's cute, but even the Simpsons made bad episodes when they were good. Now Michael Cera is getting paid to be awkward, but back then he did it because it was right. It still is, just buy the DVDs.

2) An unbridled love for shitty sports teams, in my case the Redskins, in others, the Mets.
I discovered this recently at a Mets game I went to because "I live in New York!" There was hope in this game, the Mets had spent the past two weeks sliding down the steep, muddy hill of failure in one of the most malleable fuck ups in sports history, made even worse because they'd been sitting on top of one of the most promising positions in Mets history. But if they won this game against the Marlins, they still had a shot at the playoffs.
Needless to say, they fucked it up, and not only that, but they played like assholes, making errors and pop-flying like Babe Ruth league 8th graders excited they got off a hit. Sports journalists would say it was one of the most poorly played games ever executed, casual baseball fans would say they were bored, but Mets fans? There are no casual Mets fans. And so even with their team out and their coach unaccountable and that hopeless bastard Reyes who got booed on and off the plate every single time he was up to bat, they left Shea Stadium as optimistic as when they arrived because next year there'd be another season. That's impressive.

3) Graduating from the pretention of shopping at indie record stores and spending food money at Virgin.
Indie kids are fags. They talk about bands like they went to school with them, but the truth is they only listen to any one particular record between 1 and 5 times. They also disdain Virgin because it's soulless and tacky. These are the same kids who were happy when Tower collapsed, like it's easy to find music, like independent record stores ever actually have anything, like they're not more expensive. There is no such thing as High Fidelity, that's another thing I learned this year, people work at record stores because they need jobs, they could care less if you're buying Sneaker Pimps or The Fall or John Mayer. Number of times Virgin has tried to devour my soul: less than three. Number of times I've had to sell my cock to afford a used Roxy Music album from some dickhead in a flannel shirt: guess.

4) Robert Christgau.
This guy is the Vince Lombardi of music journalism. In 1970 he wrote a piece about Altamont for the Village Voice that made the Rolling Stones look like demigods. I always looked at them more as blues whores with huge cocks. Christgau made me realize that there's no fucking difference. He's also said perfect things about Radiohead, Pink Floyd, The Velvet Underground, Sly Stone, Modest Mouse and Kanye West. Besides the fact that he thinks the Pixies are okay (which is still troubling), I am Christgau. The conversation we would have about bands that are overrated and bands that aren't would rival Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud's introductory conversation about the collective unconscious.

5) Hip Hop.
Everyone moralizes about this. Everyone tries to rationalize it. Even Jay-Z apologized for his cash-money-hoes obsession on VH1. But anyone who dismisses rap as superficial or misogynistic, or much worse, stupid, should be deported to Sweden. I admit a serious hard-on for Kanye West, but "It take more than a magazine to kill my Vibe does/he write his own rhymes, so sort of/I think 'em/That mean I forgot better shit than you ever thought up." Duh.

6) Youtube.
Maybe I was the last person ever to use this website, and I still haven't fully immersed myself in it, but it does beg the question, how did anybody know anything before it arrived? I can watch interviews of Jon Stewart on Letterman from 1996. I can watch Fred Thompson in a swivel chair berate Michael Moore for being a dirty communist. I can watch my old roommate's older brother and his friends make comedy sketches. I can watch said roommate's girlfriend looking at leaves on the ground in Prague. Once when I was bored, I watched full episodes of Scrubs all day, one ten minute clip at a time. One day I'm going to record myself yelling at some girlfriend over the phone, and join the ranks of immortality along with all them.

7) Jonah Hill.
Michael Cera's fat, amiable counterpart--this is the true high school everyman. That guy who's funny and says disgusting things because he doesn't bother to process them through his sex-obsessed brain and even if he did he'd find nothing wrong with them, but then freezes every time he's near a girl...Superbad won't win awards for genre-expanding, if it wins anything, it'll be because it got everything right. Even more than Will Arnett, Jonah's A-list status needs to happen immediately. I'm sure Matt Damon would concede the cover of People Magazine.

There were other good things I saw this year, but I had to use them to block out all the bad things that happened, like me seeing Hillary Clinton give a graduation speech, so they were already occupied. But at any rate, these were the things that mattered, the things that I'll get nostalgic about next year when I'm in London (Trivial discoveries 2008: Tony Blair is funny. I learn this when he and I have a yacht party and he makes a joke about "Big Pimpin'"). And if you had nothing going for you this year, you can use this list too. It's all pretty good stuff, especially Fred Thompson.

It's hard to be a saint in the city

2007-11-17T23:01:00.000-08:00

Turns out everyone's a fan of On The Road, so I hiked over to the New York Public Library with a girl we'll call my girlfriend, to take a look at the original unedited scroll, as in, the whole fucking 120 feet of typos and speed memory and long, long fucking sentences, straight off the typewriter.

Despite the fact that he sometimes wore ties and his family claimed French Canadian heritage, Jack Kerouac was the Kurt Cobain of bohemia. Too hip, too weird, too inspired to be understood by the slogan fans he generated upon publishing, he pulled off an idea we all wish we'd had first and did a thing we all wish we were doing now, wrote a book because he wanted to do it and then, when "Beatnik" became a barrette and a socialist key card, he got sick of it, started showing up drunk to public appearances, and went the same way Kurt would have gone if he'd been less into heroin and more into living. He became cranky and conservative in his last years, renounced his friends, "beat," and hipness, and became the ideal for another sort of American dream: the bitchy alcoholic (a personal aspiration for me).

Not that that's a bad thing, or even something we shouldn't herald him for. I mean, let's face it, by 1993, Ginsberg had become an irrelevant poet who got awards because people who didn't ever really get him wanted to make sure we would. Burroughs maintained his awesomeness with 1) his Drugstore Cowboy appearance, 2) the fact that he never got less insane, and 3) because he was always the coolest anyway. But for all Burroughs' brilliance, he was too depraved to be more than a character, albeit a respectable one, so they stuck him in a film and made him into the world's most appropriate cameo.

But Kerouac took himself far too seriously to relegate himself to the shadows of purported genius. I mean, the beat movement of the 50s, is one of the most selfish (read: perfect) movements ever to gain wind. They didn't want to change the world, they couldn't have cared less about social revolution, they were an incestuous group of fag friends who wanted to find spirituality in New York City. This is a movement that shouldn't have ever had the limelight to begin with, and that didn't know how to carry itself (despite claims to the contrary) when they did. Making Kerouac famous is like digging Radiohead when it's so obvious how much Thom hates, well, people who dig Radiohead. Art at it's most pure isn't looking for an audience, which I guess means it's also a lot like bringing the celebrity to Kurt Cobain.

The importance, the significance, the true greatness of the beat movement was how self-contained it was. Like the smuggest, loserest high school clique, there was a disdain for the general population, and a mission statement that, if carried off, would pry them away from it forever. They never achieved the transcendence they seeked, although there could have been a point where they had gotten close, but things so labor intensive, so spiritually exhausting have expiration dates. And when they get co-opted by lazy assholes who are bored at home--there's only so much escaping you can do when you're being sought out. Ginsberg read for bigger audience, Burroughs stayed Burroughs, but Kerouac, he got sick of it and hung up his pen.

Which brings me to the exhibit. The scroll was laid out on top of a 60 foot long white thrown, protected by a Plexiglas covering that looked sturdy but still forbade anyone touching it. The plaque at the end mentioned that this original version was scrapped for a less explicit, less longwinded version and, unfortunately, that's the cut that made it. Which is bullshit, On The Road is still longwinded and hard to read at places--I don't remember it being sexually explicit, although apparently there's a line that reads"Dean was fucking with Marylou" that was originally writen "Dean was balling Marylou," so clearly sometimes editors are just cunts. I once met a guy who told he hated On The Road because it was badly written, and he was right. On The Road is a great book because it awakened in everyone under a certain age who read it an idealism that they'd probably toyed with since adolescence, but had no vehicle through which they could articulate it. It changed people, a lot of people, and no book that can boast that accomplishment should be considered anything less than a success, but Kerouac wanted to be a writer, not a minister, so it wasn't his success. He's quoted as saying something about how shitty the experience actually was for him, and it probably was; it's interesting to go back and see how many times he says he's miserable throughout the book. So for all the fans and reverence and "Do Not Touch" protective covering, this isn't what he wanted.

Maybe he wanted to be famous on his own terms, maybe he wanted the good Karma and Nirvana (oh snap!) and enlightenment he figured his writing would give him. Maybe he just wanted to spend his life talking to good people like me and the girl we'll call my girlfriend, and thinking that life was beautiful. Maybe we all want that--maybe that's why his writing hits so many of us so hard. Go see the exhibit, it's good, but don't say I didn't warn you, Jack Kerouac is for the watchers, not the dreamers.

Why Bruce Springsteen Will Always Sound Better in New Jersey than in New York

2007-10-26T10:07:00.000-07:00

Two words: Jersey Turnpike.

Why are people talking about the production on Bruce's new album?
Apparently all the music is shuffled to the side to make room for Bruce, which I guess is true on like mega-fi speakers or crystal-clear Ultrasone headphones, but nobody uses those anyway, at least not when they're listening to Bruce. I mean let's face it, Bruce's appeal is his rock and roll. In my Lester Bangs journalism dreams, my comment box fills up instantly with critics and bloggers shouting "Fuck you! It's all about his lyrics!" One particularly vocal fan yells "HE'S A STORY TELLER! HIS DETAILS CONVEY VOLUMES!"
Maybe, but come on, "Born to Run" is about a car, "Thunder Road" is about leaving your scrub hometown and headin'...east I guess. Girls get namedropped, and the Rising was sort of (not actually) about 9/11. That's all I know about Springsteen lyrics. I can't even understand him half the time, how badly could he even want me to hear?
No, his talent is his rock songs. And Born to Run, check it, isn't even that big when you really get down to it. Piano, trumpet, guitar, the first time I heard the album on headphones I was shocked at how sparse it actually is. I use headphones because they show the things I miss when I listen to songs casually, but Bruce Springsteen is the one exception; he's all negative space. He sounds better when he's blowing your speakers.
So now, after days of wading through Radiohead hype bullshit with the rest of the indie kids in new York, I've got the new album, and I'm playing it every night before bed, and I'm thinking yeah it's good, I mean there's nothing wrong with it, the songs rock, the tunes are hot, but I'm not really digging it. First of all, if he ever was a great lyricist, he's not anymore, and second, the songs are formulaic, in like a how did he not get bored in the studio kind of way. Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, solo, verse, chorus. This are what late period albums are? Not like his early stuff deserves praise for it's high level of complication, but at least "Thunder Road" kept going in the same direction.
Point is, listening to Magic on headphones, even without the supposed production issues, is disappointing. If you haven't seen it, New York's got this thing where everyone walks around with their iPods so they can ignore bums easier. But they also listen to music I think. So imagine how many New Yorkers right now are walking around with this album on, and feeling underwhelmed by songs like "You're Own Worst Enemy," which, note: is the worst song ever recorded by anyone cool ever. But even if they were listening to "Born to Run," it's just not what you're supposed to do with the Boss. The man fixes cars for a living while banging hot models, headphones are like seat belts to him: way gay. That's why when he comes here he crams all his fans into Madison Square Garden, then speeds off back into every small American town in America (he lives in all of them simultaneously).
Opinion on Magic: inconclusive. My listening to it doesn't even count right now.

Intro

2007-10-02T15:36:00.000-07:00

I got a new blog, and I can type in Hindi if I want to! So mostly that's what this blog will be, writing things and seeing how they look in Hindi. Also other stuff. But they'll be in Hindi too.