I Feel Good!

I think everyone needs to take a moment to enjoy this wonderful piece of Post-It art I found at work today. Happy Friday, my kittens!

The Men Don't Know, but the Little Girls Understand

If rock and roll doesn't make you feel like this on a fairly regular basis, you're doing it wrong.



(Via Pitchfork. Incidentally, I'm pretty sure it's the same kid from this picture.)

Tiny Bits of Funny

I bow at the feet of the genius who wrote this tutorial on LOL Kitteh as a Second Language. This is an absolutely virtuosic display of utter ridiculousness. I could have used the help when I was making this sign. That "have" is just crying out to be a "has."

I fully support Mimi Smartypants's suggestion that we all start using "SCIENTIFIC!" as happy-exclamation slang.

LOL, "Radiohead (my generation’s Arcade Fire)".

Also, it was just announced that the Long Blondes will be touring through the Subterranean in early June. Sooo much good live music coming up this spring and summer. I can't believe Someone to Drive You Home still hasn't been released in the U.S. yet.

Q: Are We Not Snowmen?

Q: Are We Not Snowmen?
Originally uploaded by wrestlingentropy.

A: We Are Devo!

(Seen on Leland between Rockwell and Western.)

Handlebar, Handlebar, You Are My Handlebar!

I just got the most recent issue of Rolling Stone in the mail the other day and haven't really had a chance to read anything yet (except the piece on Matt Dillon, which seems oddly spiteful, though perhaps it's just not as gushingly reverent as most glossy magazine profiles I'm used to these days), but this exchange from the Q&A with Andre Benjamin that Stereogum excerpted yesterday cracked me the hell up:

RS: Are you with me on this: "Hey Ya!" is the best song of the twenty-first century? ANDRE BENJAMIN: Jesus. I don't know, man. That could be argued by a lot of people. RS: Can you think of anything better? ANDRE BENJAMIN: No.

Love it. Bitches, seriously, if you are not reading Green Pea-ness on some kind of regular basis, you are missing out on the best kind of celebratory exasperation the MP3 blogs have to offer. He talks a lot of shit about a lot of stuff, but always in service of wildly flipping out about something he loves. He reminds me of the Doc from Deadwood in that way; sphincter perpetually clenched and just barely resisting the everpresent urge to grab some motherfuckers by the throat who don't SEE! DON'T YOU SEE! the beauty and decency that's so readily apparent to his own eyes and ears. James celebrated the blog's first birthday last week with a five-day reappraisal of ten songs that have continued to stand the test of time for him, and, this week, gave us an inspired vision of how our musically inclined grandparents might have reacted to the shit-hot new singles of their era. Go visit now. "Kick-push, kick-push, kick-push, kick-push, coast...!" is all that's been in my head for the past three or four days. Sing it with me! "Kick-push, kick-push, kick-push, kick-push, coast...!" I can watch segments of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report on Comedy Central's website or YouTube, I can rent TV on DVD from Netflix, and I can read wonderfully funny blow-by-blow wrap-ups of the VMAs from S/FJ and Fluxblog. Why would I ever pay good money for cable? It is revealed that Chicagoist loves Great Expectations every bit as much as I do. Yay! We've all seen Sufjan's facial hair by now, yes? I love how something as completely insignificant as a newly grown handlebar mustache has become this major issue being discussed all around the series of tubes. On quite the other hand, here's something actually worthy of being discussed all around the series of tubes: Robert Christgau got fired from the Village Voice. And now for our weekly requirement of cute-but-also-funny animal related items: bunnies yawning (via the Birdchick Blog) and Chicago's own cat circus (thanks, LK).

Puppet Bike!!!

Chicagoans, all your base are belong to Puppet Bike (don't forget to check out the blog, too [via]). I'm obsessed. This, in fact, may be a more potent mood-lifter than even the sublime genius that is Whiplash the Cowboy Monkey. Spread the love, kittens; I know we could all use a little bit extra today.

You Left Me Behind to Remind Me of You

Michelle Collins has been on fizz-ire this week. LK and I accidentally caught a portion of Deal or No Deal the other night, and, as we'd never seen it before, we were alternately stunned and baffled by its insipidity. The You Can't Make It Up episode summary posted the next day, complete with Celine Dion screen-captures, was like so much manna from the comedy heavens, reconfirming my perception of the show as being a vile waste of time and money. But, for all that post's hilarity, her riff on Cute Overload's alpaca footballing star was just crazy-brilliant. Didn't know it was possible to improve on something that was already wiping-away-tears funny. The Guillemots cover the Streets' "Never Went to Church." I've been digging on the Guillemots for a little while, and I'm big-time into The Streets right now, so what could go wrong, right? But, arrrrrrg, I just can't go 100 percent of the way with this cover. As far as the music itself goes, the Guillemots' take is more interesting than it could have been, but I have a real problem with the fade-out repetition of that line at the end. Mike Skinner's slightly treacly version is definitely not one of the sonic stand-outs on his latest album, but it's nevertheless become one of my favorites simply because of that line. The reason it works so well is that it's kind of tossed off in the middle of the song. It totally caught me off guard the first time I heard it, and my heart would have 'sploded right out of my chest from the truth and brilliance of it, that is, if my heart hadn't stopped beating entirely for a few moments. But, Skinner doesn't give you any time to dwell on it. The song just matter of factly chugs along back into the sub-Kanye's "Roses" chorus (which Pitchfork brilliantly referred to at the end of last year as his "please-don't-die-grandma" song), and then on through to the end. And, well, isn't that what it's like to have an epiphany about some irreducible aspect of the human condition? Those realizations come out of nowhere, hit you hard, then drift on by, their force a mere echo, leaving it incumbent upon you to hold the memory of them and adjust your perspective accordingly or just let them disappear into the rushing, receding current of your life. I mean, this is really emotionally sophisticated stuff. But Fyfe Dangerfield totally dilutes it both through repetition and by saving it until the end of the song, like it's some kind of summary or punchline or something. No one's ever had an epiphany gift-wrapped for them at an opportune moment and then gently repeated until they catch it and really have time to process it. Here, it just plays like the most banal pop music or processed romantic comedy cheese. Unforch.

The Proposition and Lady Vengeance

Went in for a bloody revenge/ties-that-bind double feature on Sunday: The Proposition at the Music Box, then Lady Vengeance at the Landmark. I'm glad I saw them in that order because the second served as a much needed corrective to the first.

I very much wanted to like the Nick Cave Australian Western (it's basically useless to call it anything but, on account of it probably wouldn't have received nearly as much notice without that pedigree), but it was just a bit too ramshackle to really win me over. Playing with archetypes is a tricky business; when it's done well, it can be completely thrilling, but when, as here, you just get a handful of very basic, very familiar character outlines that are supposed to be Meaningful simply by virtue of being Suggestive of something Universal (count the number of Biblicals in the reviews gathered on Metacritic!), it all starts to feel very emperor-has-no-clothes. The characters look exactly like they should look, talk exactly the way they should talk, act out exactly the plot points they should act out, but to what end? I felt like I only had about one dimension to swim around in while I was watching the movie. I could appreciate the craft on the surface, but there wasn't a whole hell of a lot of meaning left to ponder beyond that point.

It's thick with atmosphere and portent, and, where it succeeds, it does so largely on the strength of the visual storytelling. A filmmaker doesn't have to do much work to make the Australian outback look stunning, but John Hillcoat framed it nicely with some interesting editing that simultaneously kept the obviousness of the plot at bay while respecting its functionality, and, evidently, created a safe space for some grand, swinging-for-the-fences acting to boot. I qualify the success of the visuals with "largely" because the other place where the film really soars and comes into its own is through the too-spare use of black humor. Par example, after mentally and emotionally unstable youngest brother Mike is sentenced to 100 lashes, the brutal flogging scene weeps its way, like Passion of the Christ with cowboy hats, through shots of the townsfolk watching dispassionately, the blood being wrung out of the cat-o'-nine-tails, the slo-mo wailing horror in his face, all soundtracked to a mournful, a cappella Irish folk tune. A beat or two for the audience to catch its breath, then one of the attending officers counts, "thirty-eight." More of this (and Ray Winstone's running-into-a-closed-door pratfall and a soldier's limping that calls back, about an hour later, his accidentally shooting his toes off and the "we're not misanthropes, we're a family" one-liner), please! But the bulk of the script was unfortunately bogged down with a lot of stilted, highfalutin diction that might have been gorgeously, gothically poetic in a Bad Seeds song, but just ended up sounding like something Drusilla would have written if given enough time and creative resources. (Seriously? That scene of Emily Watson in the bathtub describing her dream about the dead baby gripping her finger? That kind of shit drives me nuts.)

I just started in on the first season of Deadwood (thanks, Lisa Ro!), and even after only a few episodes, I could feel the fresh memory of the meatiness of its dialogue and labyrinthine sociopolitical machinations spoiling my experience of The Proposition. Though, like many of the most successful Westerns (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly being foremost in my mind at the moment), The Proposition picked up some steam toward the end in its inevitable, tragic conclusion, it still left just a little too much hanging in the breeze without a satisfying context or connection.

Danny Huston is, for me, def the standout in the cast, a monster worthy of all the veneration and fear the other characters build up around him, worthy not because he does so much more scenery-chewing, but because he does so much less. He's repeatedly described as being dog-like, but I kept seeing the calm insanity of a beautiful, magnificent cat in his perpetually crouched, coiled performance. (Anthony Lane goes for ursine; fair enough.)

Unlike The Proposition's limited rewards, Lady Vengeance is positively stuffed with treasures as you keep digging deeper and deeper. Atonement for past sins! The different functions played in a person's life by individual and collective grieving! A human being's fundamental ability to choose to be a devil or an angel in any given situation! The unimaginable hurts visited upon us by an unblinking universe! The balm of religion and its occasional situational uselessness! The formative importance of both the family of our birth and the family of our circumstance! I could go on.

The pacing of the film is nothing short of remarkable. Before I realized what it was doing, I thought to myself while watching it, "gosh, this is the longest resolution to a film I've seen in some time." It just kept ending, and ending, and ending. But then I realized, of course it's the longest resolution to a film I've seen in some time--the film is all about resolution: finishing chapters, tying up loose ends, mourning what's passed/past, repairing what we can, apologizing for what we can't, selfishly chasing after that which we imagine will allow our individual selves to heal, dimly realizing we are redeemed by our friends' and family's love for us sometimes in spite of but more often because of our inability to fully achieve the closure we crave. Instead of the brief, explosive money shot we're used to getting in most revenge flicks, temporarily satisfying but not necessarily complex, inevitable but weightless, the substance of Lady Vengeance is in its ending and constitutes a good half of the running time.

Having not seen the preceding two films (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy) in director Chan-wook Park's so-called vengeance trilogy, I can't pretend to speak to what he's doing in relation to his own oeuvre and that of what J.R. Jones calls the "extreme Asian" genre, but, based on what I saw here, I am in nothing but awe of his skills. He liberally uses all the elements that I loved most about The Proposition--and some that I didn't love there but was completely swept up in here--with profligate abandon. More music, more black comedy, more single-minded-hero-on-a-mission plot points, more innocents in gut-wrenchingly disturbing peril, more ridiculous coincidences that bring long-separated family members back together, more hyper-stylized framing that looks cool for the sake of looking cool, more operatic emotions snuck in under the radar of genre conventions, more keen understanding of the conflicting impulses in human nature that lead us to make difficult decisions--not to mention a far less enigmatic and far less charming villain and a protagonist with far more mixed motives, far more at stake, emotionally, and far more (interesting) complicity in the villain's actions and eventual downfall.

It's also bloody as hell, gorgeous to look at (the opening credit sequence is especially noteworthy, doing more for the colors red and white than Jack and Meg have in recent memory), and doesn't take itself seriously at all, except when it does and, even then, it takes great pains to earn it. Sure, there's a touch of sappiness here and there that you're going to be hard pressed not to find in all but the most unrepentantly gruesome Asian exploitation flicks, but they're generally easily glossed over if that's the kind of thing that's likely to stick in your craw. Lee Yeong-ae carries the thing on her back effortlessly. She caroms from murderous rage that manages to remain profoundly human to adorable cheekiness (the scene where she simply holds up a bar of soap by way of explanation for a minor villain's well-deserved comeuppance is particularly delightful) to a mother's heartbroken willingness to accept the consequences of the way she's failed her child to angelic self-sacrifice, all without smudging her most excellent, and oft-remarked upon, red eyeshadow. The movie itself is outstanding, and, as I say above, pairs wonderfully with The Proposition, for the ways they speak to and inform each other.

On the movie tip, I finally saw an actual preview for Olivier Assayas's Clean before Lady Vengeance this weekend. The good handful of reviews I read when it was released on the coasts here in the U.S. about a month ago definitely got me excited about it, but the trailer pretty much had me salivating in anticipation. Do any of you filmies know if it's going to open in Chicago at any point in the near future? The "release dates" page on the IMDB is no help; it only goes as far as the April 28 limited release date. Boo! The Windy City needs some Maggie Cheung too!

"[T]here are those who sympathise with my predicament--as if becoming 30 were a terrible accident that could have been avoided if only I had not been quite so silly": Various British celebrities and Alice Cooper share their two pence on what they're proud to have done and what they wish they would have done before they turned 30 (via).

"At a certain point, you have to wonder which is the outside culture. I mean, I think it's a lot more normal to grow up Evangelical than to grow up in New York!": Matthew Perpetua in conversation with the author of Body Piercing Saved My Life: Inside the Phenomenon of Christian Rock on Fluxblog.

"[T]he human brain has a specific centre that does nothing more, and nothing less, than recognize faces. This centre is what enables us to recognize each other with such certainty. Prosopagnosia, or face-blindness, is what you get when that centre is damaged or otherwise unable to perform its functions": a lucid, good-humored description of what it's like to live as a social being with face-blindness (via).

And, for fans of both Cute Overload and my own "Wild Animal Edition" post below, I bring you: Vicious Dog Pack Kills Gator in Florida.

Wild Animal Edition

Bears killed and ate a monkey in a zoo on Sunday in the Netherlands, jest in time for visitors to witness the carnage and be traumatized forever.
(Link)

The first wild grizzly bear/polar bear hybrid is found in Canada. Any word yet on the gorilla-shark mutant of the Discovery Channel's dreams?
(Link)

Alligators killed three women in Florida this week; previously, there had only been seventeen confirmed deadly gator attacks in the state since 1948.
(Link)
A British website's report on the same story features the headline "Florida rocked by alligator attacks." This could also work as a perfect lead-in for a review of a really kick-ass Cajun music festival. In this article, an exasperated trapper laments, "We can't just keep developing wetlands for homes and shopping centres and then wonder why we are up to our ears in alligators." I don't know about you, but, every time an alligator is closing in tight for a nibble on the old earlobes, I inevitably find myself wondering, "why am I up to my ears in alligators?"

And, only lethal to my sense of cynicism: hamster tongues.

I Want to Feed You Butter Rum Candy

An embarrassment of musical riches this summer: first we hear that The Divine Comedy is about to deliver a new album, and now comes word that The Long Winters' third full length, Putting the Days to Bed, will be released on July 25. Can't wait.

All right, my little Satanists, are you ready for the National Day of Slayer? (via)

I think I finally may have found a podcast worth committing myself to: Stylus magazine's Stycast (via--and, while you're there, heed his advice to visit the ridiculously great Green Pea-ness blog). I listened to #248 on my commute this morning, and I have to say it was worth it for the Coldcut feat. Roots Manuva track alone.

Just when Mimi Smartypants was starting to give me a resounding case of the mehs, she dashes off a paragraph about her small daughter's newfound reverence for skateboarding. She writes, "My kid will not be some lame-o Betty standing on the sidelines while the boys practice their bean plants and fakie tail grabs. So we each held her hands while she rolled along, and all the way home she would not shut up about it." Skate or die...from the cuteness! Loves it!

Puppies Puppies Puppies Puppies Puppies!

CRP authors in the blogosphere this week: Dirk Jamison writes for Largehearted Boy and Doug Crandell gets written up for Post Road Magazine. These are two of my favorite new voices we've published recently, and both of the write-ups just make me love them even more.

Scroll down here to last week's episode, fast forward to approximately minute seven, and revel in the glory that is a This American Life piece on--wait for it--The Puppy Channel. I know, I could hardly believe it either. (Thanks for this and the Post Road link, LK.)

Has anyone anywhere ever had a relatively good/positive experience buying tickets for an event? Because I honestly don't think I have. I'm not talking about the sweet old lady who took your money at the front door of your little sister's choir concert. I'm talking about buying tickets to see a rock show or whatever. When I use Ticketmonster, I feel screwed, which makes me angry. When I make the effort to go to a box office, people are usually bitchy, which pisses me off. I hustled as fast as I could after work last night to get to the box office at the Metro before it closed at 6 to buy tickets for this weekend's Gogol Bordello show (Nora Rocket and JZ and I will be MAKING MERRY OUT OF NOTHING, LIKE IN REFUGEE CAMP! OH YEAH, WHOA NO!). My dilemma: will I make it to the box office in time if I try to hunt down one of my bank's very few cash machines in the distance between my office and the venue? But, what's this? Joy of joys: the website says they accept Visa, Mastercard, and American Express! Perfection. What an epoch of convenience I'm lucky to be living in!

Still, I'm cutting it close (thank you, rush hour brown line delays!), and I blow in to the Metro store windswept and out of breath at about 5:55. There are maybe four or five people standing behind various counters, some setting up merch for that night's show, others tapping on laptops and flipping through magazines. No eye contact whatsoever is made with the frantic, disheveled Polish tornado that has just tumbled through the door. I stagger around the room, trying to deduce if any of these clearly superior specimens of humanity have any interest in helping a sister out. I finally point-blank ask a petite blond woman, "can I buy tickets for a show on Saturday?" "Oh, you'll have to talk to her," she says, pointing to a woman standing about eight feet to her right. For fuck's sake. "Hi, can I buy three tickets for the Gogol Bordello show on Saturday?" I ask the woman standing eight feet to my left. She barely says a word to me, makes minimal eye contact, and starts processing the order. I reach into my bag for my wallet, and, just to be sure, I ask, "I can use a card to pay, right?" This query is met with eyeballs of steel. "There's a 4% surcharge on the total ticket price if you want to use a card." I temporarily die for a moment, standing right there on my own two little feet as I hear this, because OMG, WTF, not being surcharged was the whole reason I elected to make the journey to the box office in the first place and being able to use my card was the whole reason I didn't stop for cash on the way! (Bitch.) But, as politely as I can muster (read: not very politely at this point), I ask if there are any cash machines in the vicinity. "There's one on the front of the building, there's one across the street, there's one on the corner, but I'm closin' in five minutes." This is the point at which, in all exchanges like this, I am always tempted to begin weeping and rending my garmets as I deliver a soliloquy on the theme of Am I Not Pure of Heart? Am I not pure of heart? Did I not try as hard as I could to get here as quickly as I could? Was I not met with transportation challenges on the way? Did I not initially consider withdrawing cash from my checking account to make this transaction easier on you, the customer service representative? Is it not spring in Chicago and was I not struggling to walk against the wind off the lake with my very short skirt threatening to become my very short belt every step of the way? Regardless, I would like to believe that that exceptionally moving performance was subtextually obvious when I, instead, said, "um, OK, then here ya go," and handed over my debit card.

I mean, whatevs. I got the tickets, I'm going to the show, I'm looking forward to it, all is well in the kingdom of Entropy. But, is it just me, or are these hoops that must inevitably be jumped through just not very rock 'n' roll? I mean, how do the corduroy-clad hipsterati deal with these sorts of indignities when they're making plans to go see Art Brut or whoeverthefuck? Or is it just me? Do these box office workers smell the square on me when I walk in the door and then proceed to treat me like the guy from High Fidelity who was looking for a copy of "I Just Called to Say I Love You"? But, I mean, I usually walk among them fairly well disguised--hello, little camouflage skirt, bright red lipstick, black plastic frame glasses, black messenger bag festooned with band pins? What else do they want from me? People, people, people--there has got to be a better way!