A New Beginning

In stark contrast to the morning after last time, the sun is out today, the sky is bright blue, the air is unseasonably warm, the trees are still full of glowing, fiery foliage, and, as I wrote here, TV on the Radio's "Golden Age" was the first thing that popped into my head when I woke up and opened my eyes. Let's not get ahead of ourselves or anything, but damn. This feels good. Proud of Chicago, proud of us all.

Avoiding the Inevitable Pun

I am approximately as sick of hearing about Bush's colon as I am of hearing about Harry Potter.

That is all.

"Enough With This Cicada Bullshit"

From the brilliant and twisted mind of Dr. Benji Kelnardo, a few thoughts on cicadas:

This has to stop. Every single fucking day I turn on the news and some jackass from Schaumburg is fryin' up a pan of the little fuckers or covering them in chocolate and arranging them on a silver platter. People keep sending in pictures of cicadas doing all sorts of gross things. They are making cakes in the form of cicadas and finding dead ones and dressing them up like a rock band and then freezing them (seen on channel 5, worth checking the website). They have made their appearance in Crown Point and buzz and hum all day long (this is actually kinda neat, it echoes through the whole neighborhood). However, they are so fucking hideous I don't even know where to begin. This is some biblical shit. They are big, ugly, stupid creatures that fly haphazardly into windows, screens, cars, etc. And they shed their exoskeletons. Um, just in case you didn't get that the first time--"they shed their exoskeletons." And they leave them wherever they feel like, driveways, bushes, porches. Yuck. And, matters got much worse today and yesterday as the filthy fucking sea-chickens discovered them. It looks like our neighborhood is a beach or the Southlake Mall parking lot, covered in the flying rats as they peck at the ground and fight each other for the creatures. It is Mother Nature at her ugliest. This sea-chicken phenomenon is apparently happening all over the area according to the
news. That's some sick shit. Fuck them. All of them.

Cintra on Anna

I love Cintra Wilson for her sublime snark, but when she occasionally tamps it down just enough to reveal sympathy for the most maligned objects of pop culture obsession, she can take my breath away. Some of the best writing I've ever read on Michael Jackson is in the essay "Jacko, the No-Nosed Man from Motown (A Morality Fable)" in her collection A Massive Swelling, and she does it again today in Salon with her brief piece on Anna Nicole Smith's death.

Bristling at the numerous obits that refer to Smith as "famous for being famous," she chides them [snip]:

What needs saying -- what it seems nobody has yet said -- is that when she was able to suppress her demons enough to pull herself together and look her best, she was fabulously gorgeous. Numerous red-carpet moments, the footage of which we now run over and over again like a televised rosary in order to understand her death, reveal this. Anna Nicole was a star because she possessed an unusually large amount of beauty.

Seriously, it's a really great piece with some really great writing. Please do check it out if all the other unavoidable, sour-tasting memorializing floating around in the ether today has left you feeling scummy.

The Coup

Chris C. turned me on to the awesome sounds of The Coup earlier this year (their "Laugh/Love/Fuck" from Pick a Bigger Weapon will appear on my year-end best-of mix), and, as many of you may have read on the 'Fork last week, they got into a huge bus crash with touring partner Mr. Lif earlier this month and pretty much lost everything. The rest of their tour, which would have stopped through Chicago last night, has been canceled, and, as professional musicians, that means they will have no way of making a living for the time being. Via S/FJ, I discovered they have a PayPal account now set up to help them defray some of the costs of getting back on their feet. Check their MySpace page for the donation link and for a note from front man Boots Riley about the situation. The proprietress of the House That Entropy Built considers the amount of money she sent a mere pittance in comparison to the great quantity of joy they have brought her this year and wishes these revolutionaries all the best during this challenging time.

RIP Spymaster Wolf

When the time comes, I can only hope my own obit will feature the word "spymaster" as prominently and frequently as it is used here. Somewhere, Colin Meloy is writing a song about this guy right now.

Band...or Panda?

< Strong Bad voice > Oh holy craaaaaaaap!< /Strong Bad voice > Best ever: from the Academy Awards wrap-up issue of Entertainment Weekly, behold the "Band...or Panda?" quiz! I nearly peed on myself when I saw this. So funny.

Seriously, what gives (or doesn't give, for that matter), Tennessee? (Via)

OMG, MySpace is sooo dunzo! Sign me up for Isolatr. (Via) Definitely the new hotness. (That was for you, Mac, the only person who appreciates my busted four-year-old slang!)

It's Raining Today

Scott Walker announces details of his first album in over a decade. I don't know too much about his work, but what I do know, I adore. But even for a casual fan like myself, this is a very big deal.

Seriously, Pope jokes are never not funny. Stereogum has the lowdown on Benedict XVI's iPod Nano. The line about The Joshua Tree cracked me up. Is it too much to hope for a hacked Sidekick scandal from the Vatican, too? ::shudder::

Do all you people know about the current political situation in Turkmenistan? This is news to me because I live in a cave and roar at people when they attempt to approach with fire, but apparently, the country is ruled over by a crazy dictator who has erected a massive gold statue of himself on a rotating base so that it always faces the sun, schoolchildren are forced to read the two books that he has written, all the clock faces in the country have to have his profile on them, and he has renamed the days of the week after himself and members of his family (among other offenses). This is awful, an egregious abuse of power, etc., of course, but--ha! Fuck me, this is the funniest thing I've read about all day. I feel so horrible being amused by this, but, Christ, what a wacko. Love it.

Scattered Thoughts

Here's a fun game to play the next time you're hanging out in the Borders cafe in Evanston: homeless guy or Northwestern professor?

I'd forgotten how much I like David Foster Wallace's essays. Sometimes thinking too much about David Foster Wallace's David Foster Wallaceness obscures the really appealing reasons why David Foster Wallace is David Foster Wallace. Reading the first few pages of "Big Red Son" in Consider the Lobster last night brought me back into the fold. (Mimi Smartypants agrees, or, I should say, I agree with her.)

I can't decide if I should make a snarky comment dismissing this survey or print out a hard copy of it and use the sheet to slowly papercut myself to death. (Via the Rabbit Blog.)

Oh the digital, futuristic isolation of it all! Listening to OK Computer on my iPod yesterday made me actually feel my thoughts start turning into 1s and 0s.

Best band name ever (revised and updated edition): The Kevins! BAK thinks the website is creepy; I say it's like a panda bear made out of marshmallows: twee, self-conscious, and fucking adorable. (Via Said the Gramophone.)

The more I think about Freygate, the more it genuinely upsets me. Not so much his role in any of this, but Oprah's appalling behavior. I suppose it's her prerogative to whip the whole thing into a frenzy in the service of "good television," but it completely invalidates any of the earth mother lovey-doveyness she fancies herself to be the living embodiment of. Her spectacular failure to treat this man, who is clearly in need of some genuine forgiveness for his admittedly shady behavior, with any semblance of grace is, in its own way, just as damning an example of misplaced American indignation as any of Dubya's fucked-up revenge politics. When will our collective national "me, me, me" temper tantrum finally die down?

I was all set to write a big post praising Soderbergh's Bubble the other day, but I kept getting tangled up in my own thoughts about it. I hope to gain some clarity soon, even if it's just some clarity about my own mutated ambivalence.

DS has a new show opening this weekend. It's called A Child's History of Bombing and will be playing at the Neo-Futurarium weekends through March 11. I plan on checking it out soon.

A big happy birthday shout-out to my beany brother today. Too bad he never reads this blog.

Obligatory Frey Post

Fuck the whole James Frey controversy. I wanna see Oprah stage an "oh no you di'int!" smack-down with Elmo and his potty pals (potty pals=best euphemism for incompetent, money-grubbing editors ever). "You betrayed millions of potty-training toddlers, Elmo! This isn't sad for me, this is embarrassing."

(Elmo link via the newly redesigned You Can't Make It Up.)

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....

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.

Giving New Meaning to the Term "Wish List"

Amazon quietly cashes in on sex toy market (via Nerve's Scanner). I love that the article was originally published in MSNBC's financial section.

17x5

It was a big weekend for movies for me, and there's no way I'm going to be able to comprehensively cover all of them. So I'm going to have to roll Kittenpants style today and set you up with some haikus (hai-reviews? [sorry]).

The 40-Year-Old Virgin

Cheap ending copped out:
song-and-dance sequence went from
sweet to snarky fast.

The Life Aquatic (on DVD)

This is Anderson's
Chinese Bookie—where Owen
is Esteban, dead.

Red Eye

Well-done genre flick.
Craven gives us shocks and laughs.
Girl power ending!

2046

Memories bring pain.
Pay for sex, then disconnect.
Whisper your secret.

The Constant Gardener

No full frontal scenes
for Ralph this time—what a shame.
Rachel still bugs me.

Notable previews include Philip Seymour Hoffman's Capote project and Brokeback Mountain. (Woo! Who doesn't love gay cowboys?)

Chicagoans, be sure you make time check out the Daily Meaning audio/photo exhibit at the Peace Museum in Garfield Park. Though I didn't have any run-ins with NPR luminaries at the opening on Friday night, I was still thrilled to be there to support the Pitchman. Look for his excellent pieces on the chicken slaughterer and the lineman when you go.

Check out Bushman's blog for a host of ideas on how you can help donate your time and money in the aftermath of Katrina.

Bloggers, get your free graphic at Last Plane to Jakarta, so you too can say thanks to Kanye for speaking the truth live on NBC this weekend. (You can read an editorialized transcript of what went down here.)




Overheard in a coffee shop in Evanston on Sunday: a twentysomethingish man to a twentysomethingish woman, clearly flirting, "You are a violent person. Look at you—you're full of hate. [beat] I like that in a girl." Kittens, that was the sexiest motherfucking thing I have ever heard. I've been waiting my whole adult life for someone to say that to me.

Insert Four-Letter Word for Emphasis

Eve Corbel's Lesser-Known Editing and Proofreading Marks (thanks, GH).

Mimi Smartypants takes on The Lorax (FYI, Nora is her toddler-age daughter):

READING ROUND-UP

Recently finished:

[...]

The Lorax. Oh, shut up you fucking Lorax. I read this book to Nora every single day and she still wants more. She cluck-clucks over the glop in the Humming-Fish pond, she sighs with despair over the smoggy sky, she scolds, "No! You do not do that!" at the sight of axes felling Truffula Trees. Should I just order her Greenpeace sweatshirt now? I'm down with the environment and all, but repeated readings of The Lorax have made me want to go shoot a panda, load it in my Navigator and drive it to a national park, and then set fire to its corpse with gasoline.

Hot boys in women's clothing on Pink today (scroll down, and have a chuckle at the picture of Beyonce while you're on your way).

I'm sure you've all read Ray Nagin's interview transcript on Wonkette by now, but if you haven't, it's imperative you check it out. (Thanks, Nora Rocket.)

After the slightly demoralized tone of yesterday's post, I feel compelled to save for posterity the thoughts that were running through my mind as I walked into the office this morning: people are good! Chicago is good! seeing the sunrise is good! rescuing migrating birds is good! I hope y'all can find your own little bit of light this holiday weekend in the midst of our current national shitstorm. Cheers.

Current Events Give Me Gas

I've always liked the Handlebar, but this makes me like the place even more: behold the Inverse Petrol-O-Matic Beer Pricing Scheme (via Gapers Block).

Does this really, really, actually, for-real-this-time mark the end of the road for CBGB's? If so, I suggest you dry your eyes with a copy of From the Velvets to the Voidoids.

What the fuck is going on over at Tiny Mix Tapes?

I have absolutely nothing insightful or profound to say about the whole ridiculously horrible Katrina thing. I'm having a difficult time simply processing the magnitude of what's going on down there, much less being able to talk about it in a way that doesn't just sound cribbed from Heart of Darkness. Has anyone made any donations or gotten involved with any relief schemes of note? If you have, please share your experience with the rest of the class. I'd like to figure out how I can deal productively with my sadness and support the community in a meaningful and appropriate way.