Race to the Finish Line

OK, I've been playing media catch-up over the past week or so, consuming (mainly) music and movies as fast as I possibly can before the end of the year, while still attempting to give them their due.

I'm finally taking time to digest Extraordinary Machine, which grows on me, almost despite myself, with every listen (does anyone have a download of the Jon Brion version I can borrow or copy? I'd be curious to hear it and compare). I just got around to picking up Late Registration, which, at this early stage in my appreciation of it, I think might actually be better than The College Dropout (can it possibly be true?). And, I recently bought The National's album Alligator, which, if you squint, is about one flugelhorn away from being Cousteau, except for the fact that it's totally not cheesy at all, doesn't flaunt its sterilizing-your-bullet-hole-with-bourbon lyrics like "Karen, put me in a chair / Fuck me and make me a drink," and has way more than mood going for it. Plus, I loves me some world-weary baritone.

Went out to see Good Night, and Good Luck on Tuesday night, at long last. Yeah, it's kind of a glorified PBS special, and the plot, such as it is, is really just a vehicle for the archival footage and the commentary on the state of journalistic integrity in this country, but it's gripping as all get-out and rabble-rousing in just the right way. The evocative black and white visuals, though perhaps a predictable stylistic choice (really, though, what the hell else are you going to do with it?), are absolutely gorgeous. Clooney's turning into quite the little director, isn't he? I've heard folks make comparisons to Clint Eastwood, but I think between Clooney's leading man persona and his occasionally smarmy self-satisfied, self-righteous attitude, the more apt comparison might be to—wait for it—the Golden Boy, Robert Redford. There's a very Quiz Show vibe in the 1950s / loss of innocence / TV-insiderness of Good Night.

King Kong is nothing short of spectacular, in both the connotational and denotational sense of the word. As CTLA has often been known to say, I laughed, I cried, I took notes. Peter Jackson can do no wrong. He's one of the rare directors I can think of who possesses the ability not only to ratchet up the thrills way beyond anything you've ever seen on screen before, but also to then use and build on that visceral response he's just elicited from you in service of deepening your emotional reaction to the story. In one of the most brilliant edits I've ever seen, the movie cuts from the heart-pounding dinosaur stampede on the island to a shot of Ann Darrow getting dropped from Kong's palm when he returns safely to his lair. Far from being just an ADD-induced switch to the next scene, Jackson and his editor knew it was imperative to harness our exhausted, breathless, terrified, ecstatic excitement and transfer those feelings, seamlessly, over to Ann. When you literally feel like you've spent a couple hours in her shoes on this grand, confusing adventure, the heartbreak at the end is all the more potent. Highly recommended. Bonus points for catching the Sumatran Rat Monkey inside joke when they're taking a tour of the boat.

And then, of course, there's Brokeback Mountain. Ah, disappointment is such a loaded word, isn't it? Now, I know I'm going to sound like a pretentious wanker for saying this, and I'm totally, 100% willing to be proven wrong, but I just can't shake my suspicion that the medium of film itself is fundamentally unsuited to tell the story this story is telling. "Brokeback Mountain," the story, is a masterpiece. Don't get me wrong, I'm no Annie Proulx devotee, and I only just read it two or three weeks ago, but I was so immediately taken with its power that I knew it was going to be (no pun intended) an uphill battle for a movie to do it justice. The translation from page to screen is admirable; it gets everything from plot points and main characters to, in a general sense, the spare, stoic tone pretty much right. But, not to get all film schooly here, I don't think Fang Lee (yeah, I know it's Ang Lee, but I heard Hugh Grant once call him "Fang Lee" and I thought it was the funniest thing ever) sufficiently accounted for the way the sexualizing gaze of the camera would transform it from a love story that happens to get tangled up in homosexuality into a homosexual story that happens to get tangled up in love.

Maybe I'm just being immature, but considering how rife the tropes of the traditional movie Western are with homosexual undertones (as Stephen Holden aptly points out), it took everything in me not to want to snicker like a madman each time, pre-consummation, the two characters so much as glanced at one other, not to mention anytime anyone said anything about "fishing," "hunting," or "horseback riding." There's even a latent giggle in my tendency to, however affectionately, refer to the movie as The Gay Cowboys. I shouldn't have wanted to do that. I would never even be tempted to give the short story that nickname. I could stick a pen in my eye for temporarily reinforcing the unbelievably still-lingering, century-old fallacy that cinema can't summon the psychological richness that literature can, but, goddamn it, the visuals kind of trivialize what Proulx was trying to do here. Even without nudity or explicit sex scenes, film invites us as viewers to voyeuristically consider bodies in motion and when those bodies belong to two beautiful men kissing rapturously on the mountainside, then, by golly, you've got yourself a gay cowboy pitcha, no matter how much dialogue and how much Method is expended in service of the idea of it being about greater social issues or, yes, even capital-L Love.

The way I see it, this story is not about sex. It's not about homosexuality. It's about love. I know it's a slippery slope to talk about love in the context of gay rights, or, hell, even just general societal acceptance, but that's exactly what's so fascinating, to me, about Proulx's story. She posits this situation where two people who are the loves of each other's lives, and use their sexuality as a means of expressing it, don't know what to with themselves or the intensity of their feelings because they live in a culture that hasn't built room for the possibility of romantic/erotic same-sex relationships. In a variation on the drum that Dan Savage has been beating in this repressive, reactionary Bush era, our collective ability to deal with the reality that men will want to have sex with other men and women will want to have sex with other women should have fuck-all to do with notions of love or fidelity precisely so that when love does enter the equation, as it so clearly does in the case of these two characters, it doesn't result in the large-scale destruction of a person's family, other relationships, and sense of self. Of course, what better way to dramatize this conflict than in the context of stereotypically rigid gender roles carved out of the myth of the West. (Paging Dr. Higgins, ABD.) This place where public pressures collide with private certainties is the crossroads of heartbreak and tragedy. The last line of the story says it all: "There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can't fix it you've got to stand it."

My point being, did I get any of that out of the movie? I don't think so. (Please, by all means, let me know if you did.) I got a sense of heartbreak, a sense of "that sucks," and even a sense of poignancy in that final shot, but the fact of its being filmed added nothing to what was already present in the story. It just shifted it to another medium that leans a little more heavily on our heartstrings and robs some of the interesting tension that comes from what Nick Hornby described in this April's Believer as literary fiction's "ability to be smart about people who aren't themselves smart, or at least don't necessarily have the resources to describe their own emotional states."

Are all you other filmies keeping up with Slate's annual Movie Club? (Thanks to Mike O'D for reminding me the exchange had begun.) It's an awful lot to take in one go, but fun to rub your own opinions against. One of my favorite turns of phrase this season, courtesy of A.O. Scott: "I of course am pro-evil, anti-Christmas, and in favor of Brokeback Mountain being taught alongside Darwin (and, for that matter, Darwin's Nightmare) to schoolchildren." Also, Rosenbaum gives a very cool shout-out to his "friend and favorite film academic" Jim Naremore, whom I would probably describe with those two terms as well.

Happy fourth anniversary to the O'Ds today! And happy new year to the rest of all y'all, as I doubt I'll be posting again until we flip to '06. Cheers.

Viva Harvestime!

Attention denizens of Lincoln Square: the Harvestime grocery store has been remodeled! And not just remodeled, but expanded! I hadn't been shopping in a week or two, so imagine my surprise when I stopped in last night and saw that the wall behind the former produce section had been completely knocked out so that the store could take over the entire adjacent building. My sister didn't quite understand why I was reeling for the first five minutes or so as we explored the newly spacious floor plan, but I assured her that, to those of us who live in the 'hood and shop there regularly, this is a very big deal. Check it out.

I'm glad to see that so many other bloggers on Ye Olde Internette have been providing links to this weekend's "Lazy Sunday" Narnia rap from Saturday Night Live, because it's incredibly funny, but my sister and I have been in continual hysterics about a different sketch that appeared later in the show, "Two A-Holes Buying a Christmas Tree." For the past two days, during pregnant pauses in conversation, we've taken to saying to each other, "you look like a rabbit."

Pitchfork lists their Top Fifty Albums for 2005 today. As suspected, Sufjan's Illinois is tops.

And, speaking of best-of 2005 lists, big, big love goes out to the Real Slim Chaney for his gorgeous work on the packaging and liner notes for my CD compilation. That's right, kids, pin.monkey.press will make all your craft dreams come true! Out of towners, I'm going to try to put the packages in the mail today. In towners, if I haven't called you personally yet, be sure to get in touch with me before you leave for the holiday if you want yours for the road. There's only a limited number of schmancy packages available, so if you snooze you lose. (Though, I'll of course be happy to burn you a copy of the disk itself.)

Best of 2005
Originally uploaded by wrestlingentropy.

Track list:

1. Swimmers—Broken Social Scene (Broken Social Scene)
2. The Bleeding Heart Show—The New Pornographers (Twin Cinema)
3. Fire Snakes—Laura Veirs (Year of Meteors)
4. Ultimatum—The Long Winters (Ultimatum EP)
5. Fake Palindromes—Andrew Bird (The Mysterious Production of Eggs)
6. This Year—The Mountain Goats (The Sunset Tree)
7. Is This Love?—Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (Clap Your Hands Say Yeah)
8. When I Turn Ninety-Nine—Devin Davis (Lonely People of the World, Unite!)
9. Dogs Were Barking—Gogol Bordello (Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike)
10. Scripts—Stratageme (Mis Amis)
11. Tippin Toxic—Mike Jones vs. Britney Spears (Hollertronix—Vol. 2, EP)
12. No More Shoes—Stephen Malkmus (Face the Truth)
13. Missing—Beck (Guero)
14. My Mathematical Mind—Spoon (Gimme Fiction)
15. Chicago—Sufjan Stevens (Illinois)
16. Brothers on a Hotel Bed—Death Cab for Cutie (Plans)
17. The Engine Driver—The Decemberists (Picaresque)
18. Sadie—Joanna Newsom (The Milk-Eyed Mender)

Up Jumps Da Button

Who knew I was such a freakish anomaly? I've recently discovered that, apparently, I am the only person I know who buttons her shirts from the bottom up, instead of from the top down. The vigorous indignation that this admission has aroused in the past three days when I have questioned a series of friends and loved ones about it seems even more heated than the ire provoked by other perennial favorite us-versus-them chestnuts like "pop or soda" and "toilet paper unrolling over the top or from underneath." I try to reason with these sartorial Stalins by likening my directional preference to the zipping up of a zipper, but that logic has been roundly met with dismissive snorts and/or eye rolls preceding the supposedly irrefutable proof, "it's called a button-down shirt, Allison." For the love of God, are there any other button-uppers out there? Should we start a support group? I just want to be loved for who I am! Dare to proudly come out of the closet* with me!

*You know you were waiting for me to say it

I've Got Music to Keep Me Warm

Hilarious: "Now That's What I Call Blogging!" (via Stereogum). Downloadable Christmas mixes at The Test Pilot (also via Stereogum) as well as Gorilla vs. Bear and Good Weather for Air Strikes (the latter two via the Test Pilot post). If you're looking to snag the lot, be forewarned that they do overlap on a number of tunes. Matthew Perpetua outdoes himself on Fluxblog today, writing about the GENIUS that is Mike Jones. (Mike Jones's "Tippin' Toxic" will appear on my year-end best-of mix and I can thank Fluxblog for introducing me to it.) Giddy sent me a link to this Pandora web site yesterday, and though I haven't had a chance to play with it as extensively as I'd like, it looks like it might be useful for learning about new music in the future. Dig the weird, overly specific yet somehow still vague descriptions of the musical style you choose to explore.

She Used to Have a Carefree Mind of Her Own

Oh my God, my heart almost seized up this morning in a contraction of pure delight when I read this: Britt Daniel will cover Elvis Costello's "Veronica" on an upcoming episode of Veronica Mars. It's a real Christmas miracle! (I love saying that anytime something even mildly pleasant happens during December. The cuffs of my pants didn't get soaked in the snow and slush? It's a real Christmas miracle! My tom yum soup came to the table spiced just right? It's a real Christmas miracle!) Somebody better rip an MP3 off their TiVo and make it available online after it airs.

I guess this is as good a time as any to announce that Gimme Fiction is the number one album on my personal top ten list this year. How'd it sneak past Sufjan and Laura Veirs and the Decemberists? Hell if I know. But, as much as I've tried to look at it from every possible angle, there's no denying it at this point. It's just the right length, it's creepy and cryptic and somehow optimistic (the Addams fam-i-ly ::snap, snap::), it's an incredibly earnest meditation on the role of artiface artifice in our lives, and, of course, it's a magnificent vehicle for Daniel's voice. I would probably love any band that featured a vocalist as charismatic and precisely balanced on the edge of chaos and razor-sharp control as he is, so it's just a massive, massive bonus that Spoon is also so interesting musically. Gimme Fiction, ladies and germs, Gimme Fiction. Me and Steven King, man, we're riding this one into the sunset. (Ed. note: ::gag::)

Speaking of top ten lists, the Onion A.V. Club covers the year in music in this week's issue. Essential reading, as always.

Has anybody else been watching House on Tuesday nights? It doesn't really have any of the traits that are usually prerequisites for me to get into a television show (cumulative emotional attachment to richly drawn characters, intricately layered storylines that build on each other over weeks and months and years, supernatural events and/or sports writers), but I nonetheless have come to genuinely look forward to flipping over to Fox after Gilmore Girls is over. Oh, how I do love Hugh Laurie, and it's always good to see the once and future Bobbi Bernstein getting steady work. A killer Cynthia Nixon guest spot last night, too.

You Can Read My Dorky Summaries or Just Click on the Links

Though I have a fairly healthy appreciation for the surge in esteem comics and comic artists are garnering in mainstream culture (what with my natural affinity for geekiness of all stripes), I've yet to take the time to actually educate myself about any of the major players and their work (recommendations, DS, or anyone?). However, I do know the hotness when I see it: Chris Ware illustrates the cover for a new edition of Candide, as the first in a new series of classic works from Penguin Books featuring fresh, sexy covers by contemporary comic artists. Drool-worthy stuff indeed.

The Decemberists sign to Capitol. I officially have no opinion about this. Colin Meloy's lady Carson Ellis is also expecting a baby, which is cool. I just hope that the inevitable song for the baby that will no doubt appear on a future album isn't annoying and/or lame. However, I am thrilled beyond belief that Tucker Martine is helping Chris Walla with producing duties when the Decemberists go back into the studio. I think he has the potential to be huge on the indie scene, based on the lusciousness of his work with both the Long Winters and Laura Veirs this year.

Richard Pryor

It's not exactly like no one saw this coming, but it's still a bit of a punch in the gut to hear that Richard Pryor passed away today. I will be forever thankful to CTLA for loaning me his rented DVD of Richard Pryor: Live in Concert (which appears on Jonathan Rosenbaum's list of his 1,000 favorite films in Essential Cinema). It's an astonishing bit of stand-up comedy, one that is based in extraordinarily sophisticated storytelling way more than it is in cheap joke-telling. Anyone who wants to talk about the "honesty" of a performer, be it musician, actor, or comedian, needs to calibrate her yardstick to the naked, raw personal exposure offered up by Pryor here. My other treasured cinematic memory of him is, of course, his appearance as the eponymous fraud in The Wiz. The film hasn't exactly aged well or anything, but the final, maybe, twenty minutes are still absolutely emotionally scorching. The fear of being found out that you see in his eyes when Dorothy finally confronts him in the cold, echoing hangar where he sleeps on a ratty old cot, hiding away from the eyes of everyone who expects him to be the grandest of the grand when he's really just a quivering mess of insecurity and failure himself, is so private and so potent, it's almost difficult to watch, and even more difficult not to interpret as an utterly truthful representation of the clammy fear his own fame and success forced him into. He will be missed.

I'm One Step Away from Glow Sticks and Pop Rocks

My lovely houseguest (the third, for those of you keeping score at home) was in town this past weekend to complete the second four-day portion of her Thai yoga massage workshop at the River West branch of the Moksha Yoga Center. She invited me to come along with her to a holiday potluck/talent show gathering at the studio on Saturday night. I went mostly as a gesture of good faith, since she'd come with me to a party with my friends the night before. (Which was all kinds of fun, by the way, C&LLA. Thanks for hosting.) But, what with leaving my cozy, recently Christmas-ized apartment in the sleety snow and anticipating feeling awkward standing around in a room full of sexy yoga practitioners, I'd pretty much already made up my mind that I wasn't going to have a good time. (That doesn't sound like me at all, does it?) Let me tell you, though, all the awkwardness was TOTALLY WORTH IT when the final act of the night took the stage. They were two guys from Chicago's Spunn dance company (yeah, I'd never heard of them either), and all the pent-up anxiety I was feeling about being there came out in a cathartic rush of sudden, unexpected tears because of the pure beauty of what they were doing. I know it sounds kind of ravey and lame to describe; they were basically just spinning around with some fluorescent tie-dyed flags under a black light. But, in that moment, it was the most wondrous thing I'd ever seen. (Shut it, haters—I was totally sober and un-chemically altered.) I was electric with thankfulness to be alive and there to see it. I felt like Dana Whitaker after going to The Lion King on Broadway: "It was really quite something. It was exactly where I was meant to be at that moment. It was like church. I didn't know we could do that; did you know we could do that?" (Why does everything in my life have to come back to Sports Night?)

(Speaking of my being electric: I shocked myself in the ears last night. No joke. I was wearing my headphones, which were plugged in to my portable CD player, which was zippered in to the front flap pocket of my messenger bag, which was sitting on my lap as I was on my way home on the El. I wanted to transfer my plastic H&M shopping bag from my right hand to my left, but as I passed it across the front of my body, the static electricity leapt off the bag and traveled through the zipper, up the wire, and straight into my skull. It was one of the most ridiculous and ingenious ways I've ever mildly injured myself.)

I don't think there's ever been a contest I'd be more capable of winning: Said the Gramophone is asking folks to make their top ten album list for 2005, then write a haiku about it.

If the time ever comes when the whole husband and baby thing becomes a viable option for me, I want my marriage to look like this. BAK recently turned me on to Dooce, which is my new favorite blog. She's the mimi smartypants of Utah.

A Perfect Day for Banana Phones, and Other Stories

Banana phone,
originally uploaded by wrestlingentropy.

OK, so this is just the most recent in a long line of photos I've taken of my sister in ridiculous situations (e.g. posing with the fuzzy purple tire monster in the kids' corner at the auto parts store [?], sitting on the edge of the fountain in front of the garbage dump in Northwest Indiana, etc.). I was trying to kill the roll of film and insisted she needed a funny prop. (Bananas in your ears? Always funny; am I right?) She's stopped protesting as much when I tell her to do these things; I suspect she's actually beginning to enjoy it. (More random new, semi-recent photos here.)

Wow. Somebody found some old, undiscovered Jeff Mangum demos in a house in Louisiana. It's been a resoundingly good year for NMH fans between the release of Kim Cooper's 33.33 book on In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Mangum's surprise guest appearances onstage with Olivia Tremor Control and Elf Power in New York, and Pitchfork enshrining In the Aeroplane as a classic 10.0 album.

Monkeys with accents, also always funny.

I'll Talk About Drinking Later, I Promise

Caught up with Rent and Capote this weekend. I tend to want to agree with the good folks at the A.V. Club about the former, which I think is actually more telling as a generational stance than a critical one. I shouldn't have been surprised that several older, more established/establishment critics, such as A.O. Scott, Owen Gleiberman, and even J.R. Jones, took the "yeah, it's cheesy, yeah, it's Disneyfied and reductive, but it still put a lump in my throat and won me over in spite of myself" cop-out instead of excoriating it for the completely uninteresting waste of time and talent it so clearly is. I was thankful, then, to find Nathan Rabin had as little patience for the soured milk in this time capsule as I did, which I'm going to chalk up, in a flailing belly flop of probably faulty logic, to the fact that we're younger and closer in age to the characters and have a more visceral memory of both the era in which the show is set and the heyday of the musical itself. Somehow that proximity seems to allow for a clearer perspective on where it went oh so wrong and a willingness to call it like we see it.

I guess I just have a hard time letting this movie slide by with a shrug, despite the fact that I was never really a Renthead back in the day. I just love musicals so much, and they're such a huge part of me and will probably always inform a great deal of my musical and artistic tastes, and I want, and expect, so much from them that I feel personally let down when they don't live up to my expectations, or, even worse, do live up to the cliched expectations of what a musical is "supposed" to be (cheesy, overwrought, culturally irrelevant, etc.). Not to mention that, in a world where the very nearly perfect stage-to-screen translation exists in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, there's just no fucking excuse for a movie musical—especially a moderately rock 'n' roll movie musical—not to have a healthy dose of self-awareness, formally. I think part of what subconsciously galled me most about the whole thing was its increasingly nested levels of abstraction: a movie based on a musical based on an opera using most of the original Broadway cast members playing characters a good decade younger than they are, filmed in the mid '00s but written in the mid '90s and set in the late '80s, on a San Francisco soundstage version of a New York milieu that doesn't really exist anymore. In another, more capable director's hands, this project could have gone to some thrillingly Brechtian places with a few meta gestures here (without resorting to the goofy "we're putting on a show in the desert" thing that Jesus Christ Superstar does), but Columbus, big shocker, simply wasn't up to the task.

(Amusing sidenote: on the brown line platform at Randolph and Wabash around 7:30 on Thanksgiving evening, a bunch of young DePaul students were keeping us all warm with how much they were flagrantly flaming in their discussion of appropriate lip gloss for the cold air and whether they should see Rent or the new Harry Potter movie later that night. The train eventually pulled up and an upper middle class, upper middle aged white lady who had been quietly sitting by herself on a nearby bench the whole time meekly offered to one of the boys as we were all stepping into the same car together, "oh, I saw Rent on stage when it was here in Chicago." Ha! Classic. That exchange totally made my night.)

On the complete other side of the tonal spectrum, I admired Capote for its restraint. I liked that there were no big, obvious Oscar moments, that the score was both fairly spare and used minimally—and never overly ham-fisted when it was—and that the acting was nicely nuanced and not necessarily splashy in the usual biopic way. However, having never read In Cold Blood, I don't feel like I have much more to say about it.

Finally saw Andrew Bird perform live for the first time this weekend and was every bit as wowed as I expected to be. BAK said she was disappointed that it was a relatively low-energy show, but, having nothing to compare it to, I was just blown away. Any performer who can captivate an audience so intensely and so thoroughly is clearly something special. Each song he played from Mysterious Production instantly became my favorite song from the album, at least until he played the next one, and I don't think I've ever yelled louder at a relatively demure show than I did at the end of "Fake Palindromes," which was just impossibly awesome. Bird somehow seems to burn a little more cleanly as a human; I get the sense that he's probably a vegan and most likely has come close to levitating a couple of times during what I imagine to be his early morning yoga and meditation regimen. All this is to say: the focus, my God, the focus. He actually walked by me at the end of the show as I was on my way to the bathroom, and I was so breathless with excitement I could barely force enough air out of my lungs to croak "brilliant show" at him. Which, right after I said it, immediately felt as pointless and irreducible as telling the Eiffel Tower that it is certainly is a pretty structure.

Oh, the tragicomic Romeo and Julietness of it all! The headline says everything you need to know: Teen with Peanut Allergy Dies After Kiss. (Note also that the URL defines it as "canada_deadly_kiss".) Kinda awesome in its own sweetly sad way. That poor kid is going to need so much therapy.

Get ready to have some strong opinions about this, one way or another: Dating Without Kundera—Milan, that is (via mimi smartypants).

Now for the Liz Armstrong portion of the post: and then I got really drunk last night and fell down. Big love to the Pimp Ninja, who once again was responsible for getting me out for a fair bit of alcohol-related mischief on a school night.

Happy Bowieday

Two David Bowie-related links in one day? He really is omnipresent:

David Bowie's Area (thanks, Nora Rocket—you've excelled with the phallic links this week).

Bowie joins the cast of Christopher Nolan's new movie, playing Nikola Tesla (via Pink Is the New Blog)! Sounds like it has the potential for much awesomeness.


"Well, let’s just say I usually take a break from my pro-life policies on Thanksgiving day...." (Thanks for the picture, Lisa Ro.)

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

It's Also Björk's Bjïrthday

Music for Robots freaks out about the goddamn fucking awesomeness of The Long Winters' "Ultimatum" today. My breath actually caught in my throat a little bit when I was scrolling through my live bookmarks this morning and saw the words "my arms miss you, my hands miss you" pop out at me. Good to see that someone else is with me on this.

Let's welcome pin.monkey.press to the sidebar, shall we?

You've gotta be kidding me. (Thanks, Nora Rocket.) What, no "ribbed for her pleasure" option?

Local photographer Johnny Knight has a cute series of photographs called Her Special Day, showing brides doing unbridelike things. My favorite, as many of you will probably guess, is the graffiti bride, though the oven bride and the pickup bride are pretty awesome, too. (Thanks, Lisa Ro.)

Ladies and germs, I've found my blog-brother. I was googling something or other a few days ago and stumbled upon—wait for it—"You're Tacky and I Hate You: Where the Streets Are Paved with Cock." Are we talking best ever or best ever?!

I swear to God, if you go see Walk the Line, you will preface every sentence that comes out of your mouth for at least the next 24 hours with "Hi...I'm Johnny Cash" in a nice basso profundo rumble. You will also likely want to have nothing but cigarettes and beer for your next meal.

Big, big love goes out to my best girl on her birthday today.

Dandelions Induce Smooches

Leave it to The Believer to make me give a damn about popular countercultural artists I generally have no interest in. September's interview with Sarah Silverman and this month's interview with Devendra Banhart lured them both out of their respective brands of skewed preciousness that usually bug the crap out of me, helping me understand a little more readily what so many people find so appealing about them. There was a delicacy in Sarah's discussion of the mechanics behind her humor that pleasantly undercut the thick coating of ironic narcissism and self-satisfaction that I just can't get beyond in her naughty girl persona (her calling Rushmore "a perfect movie" certainly elevated my opinion of her as well), and Devendra temporarily dropped the stream of consciousness crazy-talk (he didn't mention yams once!) to quote Miles Davis and lucidly shed some light on his perspective of the different phases he's already gone through as a songwriter. (Side note: did everybody else but me know that he was born in 1981? I'm usually not the kind of person to get all bent out of shape about feeling old, but this knowledge stresses me out. Brutha is the unofficial representative of a whole musical movement, and has been for the past two years or so, and he's only 24? ::sigh::)

I find that once or twice a year I'll get really fired up about some ad campaign either because I love it ("Tito: Enjoy the empanadas and Coke. Love, Mom") or because it annoys me so severely that looking at it everyday in magazines and on El platforms becomes like the pleasureable pain of pressing on a bruise. This season's irritation comes from those Starbucks "it only happens once a year" ads that have started popping up everywhere. Arrrrrrg. It's a clever concept that just went horribly, horribly wrong. It's not bad enough that the corporate appropriation of the indie-annointed style of willfully cutesy-poo monochromatic drawings with delicately elogated limbs (sort of Marcel Dzama meets Edward Gorey) is like the most cloying burnt sugar topping on an otherwise tasty little bit of pastry—no, no, the text has to fuck with your brain's ability to parse the grammar at a glance. I can't tell you how long it took me to resolve the phrase "plants prompt kisses" the first time I saw it on a billboard. It was the first example of those ads I'd seen, so I didn't know what the gimmick was yet, and it was too far away for me to clearly make out the mistletoe the man in the drawing is holding above his head, so I thought that, based on the way the woman is kissing him on the cheek, it meant "drinking a peppermint mocha will make people give you immediate kisses"—plants (Web 11: verb, 'to place firmly or forcibly') prompt (Web 11: adj., 'performed readily or immediately') kisses. In the name of Steven Pinker, I can't believe no one in the Starbucks marketing department would have considered the possibility for misinterpretation here! Sure, it's not like there's an offensive double entendre hidden in the homophone or anything egregious like that, but still, ads live or die in their ability to cut to the chase without too much mental labor. So now, even though I've seen that ad a million times, I still can't help but read both meanings simultaneously, which gives me the kind of dull headache you get from staring too hard at one of those "is it a vase or two people looking at each other?!" optical illusions. And, of course, that headachy association can't help but rub off on all the other sweater/dancing/decorating variations as well. Fleh.

Save Me from Myself!

You know how diabetics and people who are allergic to penicillin have those bracelets with their special medical information on it in case they have health trouble when they're out alone somewhere? Well, I think I need one that says "Do Not Let This Woman Talk to Rock Stars, Ever." I was out at the Devin Davis show last night, having a great time, catching up with newly engaged SC and CP whom I randomly happened to run into, and, just before I ducked out the door to head home, I swung by the merch table to tell Devin how much I love the album. Well, any modicum of coolness or self-possession I may have had earlier in the night flew right out the side of my brain and into the chilly November air. This is not the first time this has happened, kittens. I get all spazzed out and tongue-tied in that moment when I'm finally face to face with some talent I'm digging on, trying to convey my admiration while striving to also be concise, witty, nonchalant, genuine, and unaffected. Granted, standing around the merch table at the end of the night isn't really the time or place to say much more than "good show" or "I like your work," and, what can he possibly be expected to say in response other than "thanks a lot" or "glad you liked it," but still. I'd rather not have to ride the El back home with my Miss Dork Patrol USA sash on display for all to see.

Despite the fact that, by all accounts, it was a relatively creaky show (the sound was pretty ass-tastic), I still had a hell of a good time. I've previously extolled the virtues of the Monday night rock show and this one even improved on the formula by getting me home by 10:15. (It helps when the person you're going to see is the opener for the main act.) Devin is adorable; he looks like a Bottle Rocket–era Luke Wilson, which is to say, kind of lanky and awkward and long-haired and adorable. His band is everything you'd (that is, I'd) want out of a group of musicians assembled to play songs from an album called Lonely People of the World, Unite!—they all looked like the dorky kids with genuine chops I knew in high school band, played the hell out of the material, and weren't afraid to look like they were really having fun doing so. I guess it's hard to be pretentious when the onstage instrumentation includes a maraca with a monkey head, a keytar, and a theremin. They played everything from Lonely People... except "Transcendental Sports Anthem," "Sandie," and "Paratrooper with Amnesia," but included one new song that rocked out in a jaunty 6/8. Their penultimate song was "Giant Spiders," which they started off with—get this—a short percussion jam using shakers and agogo bells and whatnot. How totally dorky is that! And how much did I love it! I had the biggest, stupidest smile on my face during the whole song, and not just because I think it's one of the strongest tunes on the album. Anyway, Devin and his boys put on a great show, and Chicagoans will have another chance to check him out when he plays The Empty Bottle, opening for Rogue Wave, on the 25th.

The Harry Potter Legal Age Countdown Clock: sick, sick, sick. I love it!

There's some really interesting discussion going on in the comments section of this Stereogum post about the continuing popularity of classic rock versus the anticipated long-term musical/cultural viability of today's big indie rock bands.

Fell in Love with a Michel

Boo! Hiss! The bastards finally did it: Arrested Development got canceled. I haven't exactly been keeping up with the new episodes, but I still would count it as one of my favorite shows, based on my love for the first season alone. Let's hope it can survive a Buffy-esque shift to another network, cable or otherwise.

Those of you who know me well know of my obsession with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. (Giddy would often come home late at night and see the DVD case open on the floor near the television, every bit as incriminating as an addict's dirty needle. The next morning, I usually got a mock-accusing, "Did you watch it again?" to which I, sheepishly, had to reply, "...yes. It's just the only thing I ever want to watch anymore!") Anyway, I only bring that up to contextualize the mind-bending excitement I felt watching Michel Gondry's Director's Series DVD over the past two evenings. What a flipping genius. I'm absolutely enamored of the way he combines dark childhood whimsy, French self-deprecation, a magician's sleight of hand, a technician's precision, and his own obsessive-compulsive repetition of certain themes/images (skeletons and skeleton costumes; trains; multiple, disparate realities impinging on each other until they result in either messy, chaotic havoc or a kind of infinite regression) to create these eminently charming and sweetly melancholy visual poetry bombs. (All this being said, I suppose I should link to the new Stripes video [via Stereogum], which doesn't disappoint.)

When You Believe They Call It Rock 'n' Roll

Matthew Perpetua of Fluxblog is only the most recent example of passionate Spoon defenders/apologists/(fuck it) FANS I've been tracking online since my own heart and ears were won over by Britt & Co. earlier this year. Here he talks about seeing them live in NYC last weekend. I've never paid much attention to the lyrics of "The Beast and Dragon, Adored," as it's not really one of my favorite songs on the album, but the way he tied them in to the "recurring theme in the Spoon catalog - 'Believing Is Art'...(Or more simply: 'You Gotta Feel It')" gave me chills. Props.

Personifying sloth with the name "Chad McBro" in the fourth line of the first paragraph here nearly made me choke on my own tongue with the kind of laughter that's half being amused by the turn of phrase itself and half wordlessly acknowledging the right-on truth underneath it.

I wiped out on the sidewalk spectacularly last night. I must have hit a wet leaf or something, I don't know quite what happened, but it's another Fleet-Footed Felus tumble for the record books. I started off walking at a good pace on the right edge of the sidewalk, felt my right heel slip out in front of me, started lurching sideways into the splits, realized I wasn't going to successfully regain my balance, so decided the best thing to do would be to hurl myself toward the berm on the left edge of the sidewalk, where I landed on my back. There was no one around to witness this (I was on a quiet neighborhood street in Evanston after dark), but when I was finally able to compose myself and start walking again, replaying the whole sequence of events made me start laughing uncontrollably for the next four or five minutes. Which made me look even more drunk and insane. Something about seeing my little bundled-up self in my own mind's eye slipping and sliding and stumbling in this ridiculously wide trajectory through space in such a condensed period of time struck me as really, really funny. (No scars to remember it by this time, though.)

Not a Post About John Cusack

Jason Schwartzman is the new John Cusack, just in case you were wondering. I finally had a chance to catch up with Shopgirl this weekend, and in the process of fleshing out a character that was a tad underwritten in the novella, he proceeds to both steal the whole damn movie and create his own updated version of the sensitive, intelligent, and slightly spazzed-out girl-porn archetype that can be traced through Lloyd Dobler all the way back to Jimmy Stewart in The Philadelphia Story ("hearth-fires and holocausts!"), and probably even further. Schwartzman comes fully loaded with far more funny little bits of stage business and under-the-radar, hilarious line readings than he needed to. He's endearing as fuck.

Today on Pitchfork: in praise of rock operas. Whereas I'm always glad to see high-concept albums with sustained through-narratives given their due, it's funny to me that the tone of this article is all, "hear ye, hear ye, this is the second coming of the rock opera—you should be thankful we're pointing this out for your benefit." Um, thanks Rob. I'll be sure to get right on my thank-you note after I've stopped listening to DC's Fin de Siecle, and, uh, pretty much everything else I own.

Has anybody else ever been on the brown line with the guy who does the card tricks? I know I've seen him at least once before, but he sat next to me the whole way north to Western during rush hour on Friday, shuffling and bridging and fanning the entire time. I had my earplugs in, so I was fairly successfully able to ignore him, but he eventually got the pretty girl sitting to the other side of him to pick a card, any card. Dude, didn't you get the memo that the only time card tricks are cool are when you're not making a big deal out of them? The more attention you draw to the fact that you're doing one, the lamer it is. Just like impressions. Other humorous things I saw on the El this weekend: a guy reading Rob Gordon's all-time favorite book, Johnny Cash's autobiography Cash by Johnny Cash, and one of those iPod Nano ads vandalized so that the screen says "Fatboy Slimey" instead of "Fatboy Slim." (You totally can't bust me for referencing Cusack twice in one post. I used the character name for just that reason. Hahaha—catch me if you can, suckas! Quick like lightning!)

¿Que Onda?

This just in from the Department of Where Have I Been for the Past Ten Years:

I've finally discovered Beck.

Since I was a complete musical theater dork in high school who wasn't listening to anything remotely cool or of the era at that point in my life, I missed Odelay when it happened and have consequently spent the greater portion of my late teens and early twenties relatively Beckless. (Except for "Tropicalia," which I fell hard for when Mutations came out. I played it nearly every week on my radio show at WIUS. Good Christ, how I love that song.) I've always known, intellectually, that I would like Beck if I ever took the time to get into his stuff, so I've been happy to accept burned copies of his albums from friends of mine who want to convince me of his greatness. I just stockpiled them in my CD case, waiting for the day when I would feel like making the commitment to him.

Kittens, that day occured last weekend. I don't know what clicked, but all I want to do right now is listen to Beck. I downloaded Guero a day or two ago and it is sooo good. "Missing" will be an easy addition to my end of year CD comp. It's such a joy to listen to an album that's so confidently produced and performed and sequenced. There's no nervousness that there's going to be a clunker hiding somewhere, and there's no stress that I'm going to have to digest something new and undiscovered. It's been discovered, dammit, oh how it has been discovered, and now I just have to sit back and reap the rewards. Hell yes.

Not the Brosnan/Moore Movie; The Van Der Beek/Sossaman One

Hmm. Whereas I'm instinctively appalled when I read about these "Kill Whitey" dance parties (via Brainwashed, which itself is via Tiny Mix Tapes), I can't help but feel a bit concerned that CocoRosie is all of sudden being cast as the representatives of this new breed of so-called post-ironic racism, all based on Bianca Casady's quote in the Washington Post. I mean, yeah, that was a slightly stupid thing to say to a reporter, and, yeah, white trust-fund hipsters in Williamsburg can be just as sexually aggressive as any of the "hard-core" guys at hip-hop clubs (in part because they're protected by the equally biased assumption that white trust-fund hipsters must be safe to get freaky with because, y'know, they're white trust-fund hipsters [hello, did no one see The Rules of Attraction {kidding}]), but it's not like the Casady sisters are the ones organizing those truly abhorrent sounding gatherings. On quite the other hand, however, I find it a whole lot easier to swallow the comment that their new album is just "a collection of willful, calculated eccentricities clumsily juxtaposed with each other," even though I've heard nary a track from it. I suppose I find it easier to sleep at night with my knee-jerk judgment calls about the music as long as I'm giving the humans the benefit of the doubt. Until they give me definite reason to think otherwise. (Related: Gapers Block's post about all the campus trouble caused by U Chicago's "Straight-Thuggin' Ghetto Party." Fleh.)

Saw a hell of a trio of movies this past weekend, and wouldn't you know, they all started talking to each other (I love it when that happens): A History of Violence is a brilliant companion piece to Caché (which of course I saw the week before), and the epically weird The Night of the Hunter (showing, gorgeously restored, at the Music Box) seems like a significant touchstone for History of, a connection I haven't really seen acknowledged anywhere (except for, maybe, this review in German, which my language skillz aren't polished enough to translate at the moment; schade). The wildcard movie was Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, whose flabby pomo smugness probably wouldn't have annoyed me as much if I'd not just walked out of that horrifyingly creepy dinner table scene at the end of History of and straight into what felt like a crystal punch bowl full of Robert Downey Jr.'s recently detoxed neurotransmitters. I tend to spend a lot of time thinking about contemporary notions of masculinity in crisis, and I'm still trying to wrap my head around all the ways that Caché and History of are using deeply traditional family structures to deal with this idea of men as the keepers of secrets, men as the catalysts for the fulfillment and perpetuation of tragic destiny. The various implications for the wounds that are transferred onto and modified by the next generation break my heart when I stop to project a governmental metaphor onto them.

After all that heavy shit, I feel like I need some bouncy balls. (Which makes me suddenly remember that I've had two dreams in the past month and a half—the second one last night—about getting an uncontrollable case of the giggles in inappropriate settings. Hmm. Odd. Well, at least it usually puts me in a slightly better mood when I wake up in the morning.)

Three Thumbs Up

This is, like, already a week old at this point, but I'm still laughing about Heather Havrilesky's take on the inner lives of pop culture critics. From where I'm standing, it seems to have gone all the way around the circle of irony and met back up again with sincerity. Hits close to home in an uncomfortably good way. (A good uncomfortable way? A good way of uncomfortableness? An uncomfortable way of goodness? I'm feeling very Stoppardian right now....)

Surely this must be some kind of reality TV stunt. "Celibate indie rock frontman goes back to Harvard—wackiness ensues!" (Ed. note: Can you still call Weezer "indie"? I guess I'm referring more to the general sound and aesthetic of their music and less to the fact that they're on Geffen.)

Cookie Monster shills for Selmer. Well, at least it's not for Nabisco.

The Pimp Ninja and I were having a discussion about the hilariously terrible, awful dates we've both been on in our day (though his stories definitely take the cake for sheer weirdness), and I declared that we need to make trading cards to commemorate these whacked-out characters and situations we've encountered. The newest addition to his deck? The One with the Bear Mace. And people say romance is dead....

Jonathan Richman and Other Things That Make Me Happy to Be Alive

Kittens, can you believe it? Jonathan Richman played "Pablo Picasso" during his show at the Abbey on Saturday night! I nearly stopped breathing. It was a total 1,000 Places to See Before You Die moment for me. He was kind of making fun of it, too, while he sang, which actually made it even better. He kept mangling the pronunciation of "asshole" every time the verse came around; it was all vowelly and Italian-sounding by the end, more like AHz-ohl. Priceless. Though I can't say that the show itself was incredible (the audience didn't really seem totally, 100% there with him; he was still getting over a monthlong bout with laryngitis; he only played for about an hour and didn't come back out for an encore), I can say without reservation that he was incredible. I can only think of a few rare people I've ever seen who are that completely at home in their own skin and so genuinely in love with the world around them. I know that sounds unspeakably cheesy, but it's really true. He kept a cowbell and a sleigh bell stick off to the side of the drumset, and he would periodically set down his guitar, even in the middle of a song, just to dance around and make noise with them. It seemed like he was having just as much fun doing that as anything else. (And, for the record, he's a much better guitar player than I ever realized or gave him credit for.)

From Fluxblog, re: Franz Ferdinand's song "The Fallen": "Though twitchy funk is their bread and butter, I definitely prefer them with their Franz-o-meter set to Ultra-Jaunt, which makes them sound vaguely like late period Grant Lee Buffalo decked out in Dior." Sentences like that make me so proud to be a blogger.

Flip Flop Flying skewers bird flu fears.

Hours, or at least minutes, of entertainment: Who's the Boss (via Said the Gramophone). Internet-type death matches between random crap. I thought my favorite was David Grohl (Foo Fighters Frontman) Vs. Kitt (The Knight Rider Car)...until I scrolled down and saw Halle Berry (The Monster's Ball) [sic] Vs. Black Forest Cake (Delicious Treat)...until I continued to scroll down and saw Keanu Reeves (Speed) Vs. The Plot of the Movie Speed (Speed). Brilliant.

A Subatomic-Size Flashlight

In the mood for a good, quick snark?

I was totally loving this article on nanotechnology as I read it over lunch today. There's something utterly charming about the weird, overly bubbly tone that eventually gives way to some of the most terrifying quantum mindfucks I could never come close to dreaming up on my own. I also love the way the author's little bio paragraph at the end of the article says, curiously defensively, "The ideas stated here reflect the personal views of the author. They are in no way related to his professional affiliation with [the university he works for]." Way to ratchet up our confidence that you're in any position to be giving us the down-n-dirty facts about fourth-generation recombinant DNA bioweapons, dude.

Miss Garland, My Darlin'

Oh kittens, we had a thrilling movie moment last night at the CIFF screening of Michael Haneke's Caché, the kind that can really only happen communally, in the dark of a theater, in the assured hands of a director who has complete control of your attention with his skilled plotting and camera work. Though I generally make no bones about giving spoilers aplenty in my blog posts, I'm not inclined to talk about this major plot point, except to say that it was one of the most genuinely shocking things I've ever seen in a movie, and this is coming from someone who actually paid to sit through the entirety of Irreversible. Now that I've read a handful of short reviews this morning, I have to laugh at all the admonitions to be sure look at the bottom left corner of the screen during the final shot, because my companions received the exact same hint last night from a ticket taker before the movie started, which made us so attuned to the potential enormity of the detail that, when we actually saw what it was, it almost felt anticlimactic. It explains nothing, but certainly adds an additional layer of complexity and mystery to an already complex and mysterious film. (Also, speaking of short reviews, I don't know what movie Jonathan Rosenbaum saw before he wrote his capsule for the Reader, but it certainly wasn't the one I saw. I'm usually the first person to be on guard against a director's punitive attitude toward the audience or characters, but that charge feels nothing short of wildly inaccurate here.) This was my first viewing of a Haneke film, but I will definitely be adding more of his stuff to my Kittenflix queue. Thanks to DS and KP for convincing me to join them for the night out.

My love for John Darnielle just continues to grow. Here's his guide to whom indie boys should be crushing on now that Scarlett Johansson has gone all mainstream.

Though it's not rocking my world quite as much as I'd hoped it would based on all the superlative blogging about it, I'm still enjoying the hell out of Devin Davis's Lonely People of the World, Unite! "When I Turn Ninety-Nine" has a corking good brass line, and I woke up in the middle of the night a few days ago to a noise it took me a little while to identify as the sound of "Iron Woman" playing on repeat inside my own head.

Oliver Twist

Polanski's take on Oliver Twist was, as anticipated, a worthy addition to his body of work. His almost scientifically detached eye for recording the cumulative effects of an overwhelming menace on a powerless but tenacious individual lent itself perfectly to restoring the integrity to this, by now, overly familiar story. Barney Clark (who bears a striking and almost hilarious resemblance to Mia Farrow) has a few wonderful moments (especially the interval between downing a mug of hot gin and water and then completely passing right out of his chair), but he mostly walks around like a living embodiment of the Kuleshov effect, allowing, yes, of course, Polanski to edit around his beautiful little visage, but also allowing the other characters within the world of the story to project their own assumptions about the quality of his soul onto him without much intervention on his part. Oliver is repeatedly judged by his melancholy expression and the fineness of his features and often reaps unexpected benefits. This pleases us as spectators because, yes, he is a lovely little boy, and he's our protagonist, and we wish to see him succeed. But while we accept and even emotionally endorse, for example, Mr. Brownlow's confidence that the boy is pure of heart and deserves to be elevated from the squalor he lives in, what are we to do with this mode of operation when taken in conjunction with the problems of anti-Semitism that come up around Fagin? It's been widely discussed that he's often refered to in the novel (which, admittedly, I've never read) as "the Jew," and there's a wonderfully filigreed little tap dance of ambiguity here in Ben Kingsley's performance. He spends much of his time on screen teetering at the edge of the precipice of stereotype, never quite tumbling off, but inviting us, daring us, to blow him over with our own baggage and preconceived notions. Which is why the final scene where Oliver voluntarily goes to visit Fagin in his prison cell to pray with him, and for him, and forgive him is so, so crucial. Even more important than providing a satisfactory resolution for the narrative, this moment gives us, as an audience, a final opportunity, an unflinching challenge, a hurled gauntlet, to transmute our easy, natural sympathy for a charming little boy who will finally have a chance to live surrounded by love and comfort into a genuine, hard-won sense of compassion for a horrifying, mad old man who probably has never known and, except for this gesture, will never know again before his execution, much kindness in the world save for what he stole, grasping and greedy. Behold the power of cinema, ladies and germs. Using editing and image to comment on the art itself and to jar our perceptions just enough to lead us, changed, out of the theater at the end of the night, our sense of social justice provoked.

(A cross-country happy birthday shout-out to Giddy and her twin today.)

Strunk v. White: The Danger Mouse Remix

OK, a few last-minute tidbits before the end of the day.

A musical adaptation of The Elements of Style performed at the New York Public Library?!?! (Via Alex Ross.) Had I but world enough, and time....

In honor of Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize, I would like to share my favorite Pinter quote that does not come from a Pinter play. From--wait for it--Scream 3: "They've got Usher doing Pinter off-Broadway!" (That one was for you, Benji.)

You know you want it: TomKitten conspiracy theories on Slate. Dude, there's even a link to a time line. Dude.

Crooks and Liars has the Smurfs UNICEF ad. It's a tinny recording in French, but you'll get the general idea.

Happy Anniversary!

What it is, bitches! I was too busy yesterday to post that it was my one-year anniversary of going live on Blogger. Thanks to all y'all for fanning the flames of my egotism enough to keep me tapping away at the ol' keyboard. Here's to the coming year.

Perhaps the best band name ever? Arctic Monkeys. The 'Fork showed them some love earlier this week, and Aurgasm has the MP3s you crave. It's the heavily accented vocal delivery that does it for me. For what it's worth, people who claim to know such things say they're going to be the biggest band out of Great Britain since Oasis.

Said the Gramophone introduces you to Agent Simple, who comes across as the love child that Stephin Merritt and Jonathan Richman would have had if they'd enjoyed a passionate summertime fling in Sweden some twenty years ago. Guaranteed to bring a smile.

(Am I or am I not the absolute height of web-savvy circa 2003? I'm all, "dude, does everybody know about MP3 blogs?! They're hella tight!")

For what it's worth, all the people I work with at the CBCM say (I'm paraphrasing here) everyone needs to chill the fuck out about the avian flu. Unless, of course, you're flying to Hong Kong anytime soon with the intention of having unprotected sex with infected migratory water fowl, in which case, I think you have some other issues to worry about.

A Farewell to Smurfs?

I'm trying to do something with a Papa Smurf/Papa Hemingway pun here, but unfortunately coming up short. This sounds disarmingly intense, which, I guess, is the point. (Thanks again, JP.)

The Little Boy in Me? I Call Him Doug.

Shit like this totally brings out the little boy in me. I'm absolutely delighted by the food chain gross-out drama right now. Python vs. Gator Death Match '05!!!!!!! (Thanks, JP.)

On much the same note, I've been on a real science kick these days, especially after proofreading our forthcoming kids activity book Exploring the Solar System, so I also quite enjoyed Michael Brown's geeky/goofy insouciance here regarding the discovery that our unofficial tenth planet, 2003UB313 or "Xena," has its own moon.

Mnah Mnah

Yes! Yes, yesyesyesyesyesyesyes! This is an excellently written, smartly argued close reading/review of Gimme Fiction and an eloquently conceived, passionately convincing case for Spoon as one of the premier rock bands working today (via Said the Gramophone). I narcissisticly love having my own opinions corroborated by other denizens of the blogosphere.

Will someone please explain to me why I absolutely agree with Michelle Collins's indifference toward Ricky Gervais and The Orifice? Although I haven't yet seen the Christmas special, I finally got around to watching seasons one and two within the past two weeks, and I have to say I'm also resoundingly underwhelmed. The first season beats the shit out of the second, that's fer damn sure, but I was nevertheless nowhere near as wowed as I expected to be. Maybe my expectations were too high, based on all the "BEST EVER!" chatter surrounding it, and it does certainly possess that British je ne sais quoi where the comedy can't fully blossom until you've not only watched it but also talked about it and quoted the funny bits with someone else, but I still can't help feeling that it's not actually as sociologically trenchant as popular opinion claims it is. I dunno. The second season started to go wrong for me when it actively began painting David Brent as a bigot, rather than just making him a clueless dipshit who happens to accidentally say bigoted things. It's a subtle distinction but one that, I think, the uncomfortable humor really hinges on. And, as for the uncomfortable humor, there is a tremendously fine line between what is uncomfortable because it's something that actually happens in life versus stuff that's uncomfortable because it makes you say "gosh, wouldn't that be uncomfortable if that happened?" Watching the first season, I actually felt sick to my stomach because of the devastating accuracy of some of David Brent's character tics, especially all the cross talk in situations where his power is threatened (with Jennifer, with the facilitator during training day, etc.). Whereas in the second season, especially during the unfortunately unfunny comic relief episode, you get the cruel de-pantsing of one of the anonymous drones and the whole interpretive dance sequence. Those moments are just begging to be declared "ooh, awkward!", but, both of them seem a little too over-the-top to really feel intrinsic to the office setting, and, isn't that the whole shtick this series is riding on? That, here we're shining a light on all the fleeting moments of discomfort that arise in this specific setting that most everyone has experienced yet no one really talks about? De-pantsing is cruel and awkward anywhere (and, let's face it, do people really get de-pantsed anywhere other than in a middle school locker room?), and calculatedly "wacky" and oblivious interpretive dancing...well, does that actually happen anywhere outside film and TV sets where comic actors and writers are just getting off on the idea of their comic actor and writer friends doing outrageous things to make each other laugh with the tacit assumption that the audience will automatically find anything they shit out of their gifted little comic sensibilities howlingly funny as well?

Are these pointless arguments? Are these the kind of arguments that I scoff at when other people launch "but that would never happen in real life!" critiques at me about movies I love? I don't think so...the "that would never happen in real life" defense absolutely does hold water when the piece in question is rolling mockumentary style. If you're going for veracity, you can't be selective about it. You can't decide it only applies to some of the characters, but not the ones being played by the writer/director/creator/mastermind/mouthpiece.

OK. Enough with eviscerating Gervais. There are plenty of things I did adore about the show. The Tim/Dawn arc was incredibly satisfying (not to mention that I might have a little crush on Martin Freeman) and I think Gareth might actually be the most funny, interesting, and accurate caricature/character in the whole series. And I have to say that the two line outro at the end of the third episode in season two--"My knees hurt."/"No they don't."--made me laugh way harder and way longer than I thought it would.

Has everybody already seen this faux-preview that makes The Shining look like it was directed by Cameron Crowe? A friend forwarded it to me this weekend, and Nerve highlighted it as their favorite pic of the week. As I've stated in this forum before, I totally love previews, and I think this is a brilliant way of exposing how you can manipulate anything to look like anything given the right editing and music.

Sasha Knows

Yes, the blogosphere is still echoing with rumbles of rumination about Kanye's live-TV outburst. But when it's S/FJ, you perk up your ears, goddamn it:

Tying the tin cans of Bush's racism to the getaway Caddy of Bush's corporate wedding? Shows you that...dipshits who wanna dismiss hip-hop as bloviation simply can't see the fire, or the water.

I eat my small-minded words. The Long Winters' song "Ultimatum" is all kinds of crazy-gorgeous. For such beauty, I ask forgiveness for my whinging impatience.

Liz Janes was fine and all, but now I'm sad we missed Laura Veirs when she opened for Sufjan the day before we went to the show. Stereogum was right to declare her the new hotness, if the lovely "Fire Snakes" (MP3 available on Aurgasm) is any indication.

P to the Oh-Lanski

Serenity isn't the only movie opening this weekend that I'm geeked about; Roman Polanski's take on Oliver Twist is high on my list of priorities as well. He gave a rare interview in the fall music issue of Entertainment Weekly and speaks, perhaps unsurprisingly, eloquently about himself, his notorious troubles, and his take on contemporary cinema. While the videogaming of American movies is not necessarily an original or even wholly accurate complaint, I nonetheless found myself deeply moved by this quote last night:

I think that most films now, you forget over dinner. Because your head does not want to go back to them. In other cases, you do go back mentally to it, and run it again. That's what I would like to be the case with my films.... Most of this stuff on the screen is not cinema anymore. It's a videogame. Any geography to a scene, it doesn't exist. You're in limbo. By showing a constant deluge of special effects and crashing sound, people are getting too used to it. One of the reasons of doing Oliver Twist for my children and for children in general is I want to teach them again what cinema is.

How Come You Dance So Good?

I've long found the actual "we'll always be your sugar" tagline to be quite funny, but this certainly does improve on it in a whole wonderfully awful new way.

From today's New York Times: NYC is getting into the act and showing some love for the migratory birds, too.

Craig Robinson, the mastermind behind Minipops and other pixel-based goodness at Flip Flop Flyin', commemorated his birthday yesterday with a list of other noteworthy events and celebrity births from the same date that he found listed on Wikipedia. Has everybody else already done this for their birthdays? I just did a search on February 18, and, while I did know most of the amusing celebrity birthdays (Adolphe Menjou, John Travolta, Vanna White, Yoko Ono, Toni Morrison, and Matt Dillon, anyone?) and that Pluto was discovered on my birthdate in 1930, I did not know that on the same day

* Martin Luther died in 1546, Michaelangelo died in 1564, and Oppenheimer died in 1967
* Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of the confederacy in 1861
* Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was first published in 1885
* the first full-length 3D movie Bwana Devil premiered in 1953, and
* KISS released their debut album in 1974.

Rock!

Grinnellians: one of you should so post a comment to this discussion of indie wedding songs. "Idioteque" and "Love the One You're With," def! On much the same note, I'm still laughing at Shawn's story about how he attended a wedding this summer where the best man, who disapproved of the union, contributed motherfucking "Stars and Stripes Forever" to the mix CD that was compiled by the wedding party and given out as favors to all the attendees. That just kills me. The idea of some sorority sister of the bride listening to that disk in her car to remind her of the special occasion and being all "what the shit is this shit?" when the goddamn brass kicks in. Love it.

The Ocean

Finally! Someone (other than Benji Kelnardo) is with me on the whole the-ocean-scares-the-shit-out-of-me thing. To paraphrase more dialogue from Sports Night that I can't find accurately quoted anywhere online, we don't know what the hell's going on down there—it's down there. It's their home. It's where they live.

Ready? OK!

My father is fond of telling a story about the time he went to a Don Ellis concert at some point in the mid-'70s and was nearly brought to tears when the crowd spontaneously began to clap in 7/8. Ellis was renowned for his play with odd time signatures (one of his songs is titled "33 222 1 222" because that's the subdivision of one measure of that tune in 19/8), but he swung them so hard and so smooth that they felt completely funky and completely natural. I had my own version of that experience on Saturday night at the Sufjan Stevens show at the Metro when the crowd spontaneously began to clap in the 11/8 of "The Tallest Man, The Broadest Shoulders: Part I—The Great Frontier." Feeling those "one-two-three-four CLAP, six-seven-eight-nine CLAP CLAPs" rising up from the ground floor was like feeling the perfect distillation of that place in his music where the complex becomes simple and the simple becomes complex (or the universal becomes personal and the personal becomes universal or however you want to say it). It was love and it was joy and it was respect and it was understanding and it was intimacy and it was participation and it was appreciation. I feel like that's what being a fan of Sufjan is all about. Plus, as anticipated, there were Illinois-themed cheers and a human pyramid, not to mention both "All the Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands" and "Chicago" played as encores. I was a very happy kitty. (I also picked up another concert poster; check it out here. I didn't take the picture, but that's what it looks like . . . except for the fact that, unbeknownst to me, some chucklenuts stepped on it before it got rolled up and rubber-banded and handed to me, so there's a big fucking footprint in the middle of it that I discovered yesterday when I opened it up to flatten it out. Grr.)

A longish interview with Carl Newman on Pitchfork today.

Yes, childrens, today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Don't disappoint me. Or Colin Meloy. Or the good folks at 826 Valencia. Of course, the only pirate-speak that comes to my mind at the moment is Gilbert and Sullivan's, which, depending on where you're standing, is either totally weak or totally fitting. MLBO'D and CTLA, say it with me now, in the best Beard-bellow you can muster: "A keener hand at scuttling a cunarder or cutting out a P. & O. never shipped a handspike!" (Thanks, Berianne.)

I Shoulda Snagged Siskel's Chair While I Had the Chance

I have given the thumbs-up, unironically, as a genuine sign of approval, at least twice in the past 24 hours. What the hell is wrong with me?

Internet Lit Watch

On reading Faulkner; on reading Nabokov.

I am a sucker for snarky essay collections about pop culture (professional envy much, Allison?), and I've been reading about Jill Soloway's new one, Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants (ack! great title, but what a horrible front cover design!), all over the place, most recently in Bookslut. I'll be eager to check it out soon.

Somewhat related: a beautiful picture of an outdoor "bookstore" in Norway (from Jonny Mo).

All You Have to Do Is Meow, Meow, Meow

How geeky is it that I want to register for this? (Link via Gapers Block.)

Let the Decemberists backlash begin.

OMG! What will Luke's answer be?! Gilmore Girls rules! (Thanks, LK.)

Despite my earlier pleas for ideas and suggestions on where to donate for hurricane relief, I've actually held out giving anything until today. But, based on a short piece I heard on NPR this morning about the disproportionate amount of Katrina donation money that has come through the Red Cross in part because of their online affiliations with Google, Amazon, iTunes, et al, I just decided to give to Oxfam America. Not because I hate the Red Cross or have any kind of compelling connection to Oxfam or feel the need to be stupidly indie as fuck when it comes to trying to do the right thing during a crisis of this magnitude, but because the underrepresented entities nobly doing the best they can in the shadow of the mainstream monoliths need a little lovin' too.

CBCM in the News

For those of you who are curious as to why I've been waking up at 5 AM on Friday mornings so that I can be downtown between 6 and 6:30, check out this article about the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors from today's Sun-Times. You can also look for the link to the main CBCM website in the sidebar at left.

The bird-related synchronicity in my life has increased to an almost comical degree this year, but, perhaps more than anything else, as I'm riding the brown line toward the Loop, watching the sun rise over the lake, I always think, with great fondness, of this quote from Salinger's Seymour: An Introduction:

I found out a good many years back practically all I need to know about my general reader; that is to say, you, I'm afraid. You'll deny it up and down, I fear, but I'm really in no position to take your word for it. You're a great bird-lover. Much like a man in a short story called "Skule Skerry" by John Buchan, which Arnold L. Sugarman, Jr., once pressed me to read during a very poorly supervised study-hall period, you're someone who took up birds in the first place because they fired your imagination; they fascinated you because "they seemed of all created beings the nearest to pure spirit--those little creatures with a normal temperature of 125°." Probably just like this John Buchan man, you thought many thrilling related thoughts; you reminded yourself, I don't doubt, that: "The goldcrest, with a stomach no bigger than a bean, flies across the North Sea! The curlew sandpiper, which breeds so far north that only about three people have ever seen its nest, goes to Tasmania for its holidays!" It would be too much of a good thing to hope, of course, that my very own general reader should turn out to be one of the three people who have actually seen the curlew sandpiper's nest, but I feel, at least, that I know him--you--quite well enough to guess what kind of well-meant gesture might be welcomed from me right now.

The Other Side of Bliss

Rufus Wainwright on opera in the New York Times (via both Stereogum and Alex Ross). Thanks to Indiana University's estimable School of Music, I've been to a handful of operas in my life, and would like to fancy that I appreciated them as much as I was capable, given my lack of point of reference. But, hearing one of my favorite musicians rhapsodize about the art form makes me really want to dive in and self-educate. Seems you could devise a pretty kick-ass beginners' course just by going through the selections he cites in the article.

I read Jonathan Ames's most recent novel Wake Up, Sir! in the course of about two days this week. It is borderline embarrassing how much I love him. I will save you the self-indulgent quoting of my favorite passages here, but, sweet Jesus, is it funny as all get-out. It's a bit slow at the beginning, but once he finally gets to the artists' colony in New York, you will be treated to the funniest description of a seersucker suit you will undoubtedly ever read, the pure genius of the phrase "corn on the macabre," and the most accurate, if just this side of hyperbolic, representation of what happens when a bunch of neurotic, self-important artists live together in extremely close, isolated quarters. I could swear I recognize veiled references to at least three faculty members from IU's English department (Ames was artist-in-residence or somesuch there during the second semester of my senior year, which is how I was first introduced to his work), but I'm sure that anyone who's ever known a socially maladjusted painter or poet or photographer probably sees more than a passing resemblance to them in these characters, too. Just for snicks, here's an interview with Ames from Powells.com.