Even She Can't Completely Ruin Writing This Good

Entertainment Weekly reports in its July 30 issue that Heather Graham will be joining the cast of Scrubs this fall, playing a psychiatrist at the hospital. A line of dialogue from her debut episode: "Show me a well-adjusted, successful man who wants to settle down and have kids and I'm not interested, but find me an alcoholic in his mid-30s that still thinks his band might make it, and just tell me where I can show up and buy him dinner."

I Know How He Feels

From Already Dead by Denis Johnson

"My life is strange," I told him.
"I don't like it when you cry."
"I'm not making it out there, Bill."
"No. Nobody is."
"What do I do now? What do I do?"
This got him going. "Hey! I've taken stock, I've made an assessment, I've done the thing sitting out here counting my fingers and toes and actions. And I got the truth on one side and my lies on the other, the nutty stuff and the stuff that's real, and we've convened, me and the trees and the spirits, and I got it calculated that the only thing I ever did right was buy that oak flooring for the cabin when they tore up the bowling alley in Point Arena. That's it, the oak flooring."
"It's very nice."
"I can't advise, is what I'm saying."
"I understood you."
"I mean everything else is on the failure and insanity side."
"But what a floor! Something to envy."

Two Quotes and a Definition

"A movie, I think, is really only four or five moments between two people; the rest of it exists to give those moments their impact and resonance."
--Robert Towne, screenwriter, Chinatown

"A man's got to believe in something. I believe I'll have another drink."
--W. C. Fields

Main Entry: spam
Function: noun
Etymology: from a skit on the British television series Monty Python's Flying Circus in which chanting of the word Spam overrides the other dialogue
Date: 1994

unsolicited usually commercial e-mail sent to a large number of addresses

Ad Hominem

Ouch. The rage didn't have to be that violent, or that squarely aimed at the man instead of his writing, but I definitely understand the impulse to really lay into Chuck Klosterman. I only made it halfway through Sex, Death, and Cocoa Puffs before discarding it with a sneer and a snort. Why this guy has been lauded as much as he has really makes my head hurt, and I no longer just think it's professional jealousy. Cintra Wilson is often just as wrong-headed as he is, but at least she's consistently funny and interestingly wrong-headed.

Fahrenheit . . . Fe(26)?

From Publishers Lunch:

Why Is Reading Really at Risk?

Because of things like this, dateline Cedar Rapids: "A church's plan for an old-fashioned book-burning has been thwarted by city and county fire codes."

Under the you-can't-make-this-up header, district fire chief Brad Brenneman objected because, "We don't want a situation where people are burning rubbish as a recreational fire."

One ever-helpful fire inspector "suggested shredding the offending material," but the minister behind the idea, "Said that wouldn't seem biblical."

Because, in Essence, That's Really Just a Knick-Knack

Giddy and I were both 100 percent sober, I swear, and having a discussion about broken bones.

A: But why didn't we evolve so our bones are no longer breakable? Wouldn't that make more sense?

G: Well, yeah, but then that would mean our bones would have to be made out of something different. The elements don't change. It's not like you're going to find a lizard made out of gold.

Truer Words, Part II

"Will find nice sensible boyfriend and stop forming romantic attachments to any of the following: alcoholics, workoholics, sexaholics, commitment-phobics, peeping toms, megalomaniacs, emotional fuckwits, or perverts. Will especially stop fantasizing about a particular person who embodies all these things." --Bridget Jones's Diary

Truer Words . . .

"You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn't want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named 'Bush,' 'Dick,' and 'Colon.' Need I say more?" --Chris Rock

Music News, Part II

Check out the new design on All Music Dot Com. I use the site for everything from settling bets among my roommates at home to fact checking manuscripts at work, so I'll be curious to see how much this redesign throws me. . . .

Music News

So much good music news to greet the morning (and the week) with!

McSweeney's and Barsuk, like peanut butter and chocolate, two great tastes that taste great together.

A fair and balanced review of Divine Comedy's Absent Friends (on Pitchfork, of all places!!!), made all the more noteworthy by the admission in the final sentence that someone other than me also regards Fin de Siecle as Hannon & co's finest hour.

Bjork being all freaky and gorgeous, talking about her forthcoming vocals-only disk, Medulla.

Colin Meloy and his Decemberists are heading into the studio soon to begin work on a new album, with a little help from Chris Walla, no less!

Inspired By (No Guarantee of Actually Being Inspired, Though)

OK then. So, inspired by the list of summer albums on Nerve I linked here yesterday, here's my own Top Five summer albums list.* Forgive the nostalgia factor. It's a list-making inevitability.

Sophie B. Hawkins, Tongues and Tails—-This album is all sexy, late-night humidity. When the sound of the train on the tracks rumbles through your ears at the very beginning of "Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover," then oozes into that fat, synthy groove, it’s 3 A.M. on dark back roads with the car windows down, no matter where you are or what time it is.

Rufus Wainwright, Poses—-Rufus made this album at the height of his own self-destructive decadence, and, as such, it has a hazy, lush vibe tinged with a melancholy awareness of one’s own mortality. It’s the ideal soundtrack for throwing caution to the warm, summer wind in that moment right after you ask yourself, "but what does it all MEAN?"

Barenaked Ladies, Maybe You Should Drive—-Yeah, yeah, yeah, how tragically unhip are BNL? Whatever. Listen to this album while driving through a cornfield with your best friend in the dead heat of late July in Indiana sometime, then get back to me.

Duncan Sheik, Duncan Sheik—-Depending on the night, this album is either a chilled glass of white wine that will get you just high enough to fall deeply in love with everyone around you, or it’s an air conditioned room where you can hide away from all the inflamed passions that have scorched everything you thought was beautiful in your life while you weep one salty, art-directed tear.

Mos Def, Black on Both Sides—-"Well, from my understanding people get better when they start to understand that they are valuable. And they not valuable because they got a whole lot of money or ’cause somebody think they sexy; but they valuable ’cause they been created by God. God makes you valuable. And whether or not you recognize that value is one thing." A declaration of independence for a glorious summer in the city, sorely needed after making it through yet another Midwestern winter.

* For a continuation of this topic and to see several other examples of Top Five Summer Albums lists, please go here.

Beer and Skittles

beer and skittles n pl but sing or pl in constr (1857): a situation of agreeable ease ("won't be all beer and skittles")

Has anybody ever heard or used this phrase before? Is it a colloquialism? I just stumbled across it in Webster's 11 and think it's fantastic.

Long Winters Alert!

Check out this tiny piece about summer albums posted on Nerve, notable mostly for the inclusion of John Roderick's own top five list.

Fuck Off

This is no, no, nowhere near as insightful or driving or beautiful an essay as Dave Eggers's "Never Fucked Anyone," but Christopher Hitchens has a go at the spate of linguistic indiscretions our nation's politicos have been prone to of late.

Quantify This, Suckas

As I walked into the 9:10 showing of Before Sunset at the Landmark with Nick last night, there was a coterie of attractive young marketing folks handing out surveys on light green colored paper with small golf pencils taped to the right margin. "Since this is the opening weekend, we'd like you to fill this out and give it back to us after the movie," they cheerfully informed us. Between standing in line in the bathroom with all the irate women who'd just gotten out of Fahrenheit 9/11 and sending a vaguely hysterical text message to BAK, I didn't have time to look at the sheet of paper before the lights went down and the previews started to roll.

80 glorious minutes later, I squinted at the sea of little black boxes they expected me to fill with checkmarks and cried indignantly, "I can't quantify my experience for them like this right now!" The only information they got out of me last night was that I'm a female, between the ages of 25-29, living in the 60622 area code.

Rufus's "Go or Go Ahead" was quietly playing on the sound system as we were walking out. "Are they trying to kill me tonight?" I asked Nick, wiping the smudged eye makeup away from the corners of my eyes.

Go. Go. Go see this movie.

Worth the Wait

iTunes came through for me! Rufus's Waiting for a Want EP is online, available for download, and luscious! (As Ferris Bueller said, "if you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.") "The Art Teacher" will bring you to tears, and it's about damn time that the fans have access to a nicely recorded version of in-concert favorite "Gay Messiah."

Also, had the opportunity last night to use some comp tickets to see Bleacher Bums at the Royal George. While the updated version of the script is quite enjoyable, and it's an incredibly special experience to be able to see that show in Chicago, it was very much a Thursday night performance. The actors felt like they were racing to the finish line, and some of the staging felt needlessly awkward. But, as always, there were isolated pleasures throughout. Original Bum Joe Mantegna showed up to sing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" during the seventh inning stretch, and Kevin Stark as the Cheerleader had just the right amount of annoying energy. But the show absolutely would have folded without Thomas Gebbia as Greg. He had all the cool, wisecracking intelligence that the character needs to stay appealing, without needing to bludgeon us with his essential "Chi-caaaaago" good-guy-ness that anyone playing Decker automatically gets saddled with.