Someone to Take Care Tonight

Here's the trailer for Wes Anderson's new one, The Darjeeling Limited (via Kottke). Squee! Aside from the easy/obvious nose jokes, I think it's brilliant that he's working with Adrien Brody. Polanski doesn't get acknowledged often enough as an influence on Anderson's style, and Brody hasn't really done much work worthy of his talent since The Pianist (I know I've kind of come around in my estimation of The Village and loved King Kong when I first saw it, but it's not like either of those are the best showcases for what he's capable of). I'm really eager to see what they're going to pull out of each other. (Or, more likely, how they're going to be kind of melancholicly stoic together.) Plus, I didn't realize the movie was coming out so early in the fall. Even if the limited release schedule doesn't bring it to Chicago until October, that's still, basically, right around the corner. Get excited.

It's a deceptively simple gag, but it slays: in response to the whole Boing Boing-ified Famous Poems Rewritten as Limericks thing, Carl Wilson shares a pal's take on William Carlos Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow" as it perhaps would have been written by Jonathan Richman. It's, of course, called "Hey! Little Red Wheelbarrow!" and it's brill.

Foodies and Chicagoans (and Chicago foodies), have you heard the sad news about Grant Achatz? Not to make light or anything, but, goddamn, it's like something straight out of fucking O. Henry. How awful.

I read the first sentence of this review, rolled my eyes, and clicked away to a new page. Fuck that shit.

In continuing to think and talk about Spoon's new one, I love how we can all agree they're one of the best bands out there, but not on what that means and why. There are the old school Telephono and Series of Sneaks devotees, the ones who view Girls Can Tell and Kill the Moonlight as the dead-center of the current indie rock canon, and those (incl. myself) who think they're doing their most vital and exciting work now with Gimme Fiction and Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. How can that not be a sure indication of their surpassing brilliance?!

Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga continues to stun, and album-closer "Black Like Me" is so good it just makes me want to puke all over the place. I'd been so blinded by the beauty of that broken fourth wall at the end of the song ("all the weird kids up front / tell me what you know you want") that I'd kind of mentally glossed over the actual final line, "someone to take care tonight" (which I've been somewhat willfully mishearing as "someone should take care tonight"). It feels to me like one of the Streets' personal accountability songs collapsed into one line. Linking his own desire to be taken care of by an absent someone with a more universal longing to be taken care of that we all feel, he's also, I think, stepping up to the plate in that moment to become someone who will take care. (Assuming, that is, that the weird kids up front are clamoring for a piece of him, their beloved rock idol.) Masterful. I quite like Matos's review of Gax5 (via Largehearted Boy), especially for his reading of Gimme Fiction, but I'd call that last line of "Black Like Me" anything but an obscure angle.