Hey, That's Me!

I'm delighted to have been asked to contribute to this month's "snack away" series over on eat!drink!snack! My post is up today.

Cold?

Then keep yourself warm with some of these essays; jane dark's sugarhigh! has been particularly en fuego of late.

· On Britney

· On Hannah Montana and Taylor Swift

· On Gossip Girl

Great Writing by Other People

Adam Gopnik on Philip K. Dick in The New Yorker (via).

James Green Pea-ness on why the Nintendo DS game Elite Beat Agents is a stunning piece of interactive pop criticism.

And, though only an excerpt is available online, Nick Hornby's interview with David Simon in the August '07 issue of The Believer is so good it's just unreal. Luckily, the bit that is available on the web is absolutely one of the high points of the whole exchange ("Like many writers, I live every day with the vague nightmare that at some point, someone more knowledgeable than myself is going to sit up and pen a massive screed indicating exactly where my work is shallow and fraudulent and rooted in lame, half-assed assumptions"). Do yourself a favor and seek out the issue for the full thing.

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.

Ys

Oh yeah. Ys finally really clicked for me this morning. Crying on the train--not just for hangovers anymore!

Speaking of oh yeah: our girl LK recently won the Bellevue Literary Review 2007 Goldberg Prize for Fiction for her story "Presidents, Space, Medical Miracles." It's a wonderfully sweet and sad little gem of a story, and she deserves every bit of recognition she's received for it. (Recognition from Amy Hempel no less!) Please join me in advising her to continue rocking the fuck on.

Room for Rhombuses, Too

OK, I give up. There's no way I can even pretend that I'm not geeked about seeing this movie. Behold, Nacho Libre (via), starring Jack Black, directed by Jared Hess, and written by Mike White. I think my inner twelve year old boy just had an asthma attack of unadulterated giddiness. (Maybe these links will be of some interest to the good folks who occasionally stumble upon my blog while looking for actual wrestling information?)

As long as I'm admitting embarrassing things this week, I might as well admit that I have a real soft spot for John Mayer. (So does ?uestlove.) Um, does this Radiohead cover (via) earn him any cred at all? Or does it just make things worse? I think it's tits.

Go nominate a blogger you love for one of the Best Sentences of 2005 (via). The deadline to submit is tomorrow. Seriously, this isn't a boomerang-style hint to nominate me or anything; I would just love to see some deserving alterna-media folks get the credit they're due outside of something as relatively insular as the Bloggies. I know I've quoted it before, but this sentence about Franz Ferdinand from Matthew Perpetua's Fluxblog was the first thing to come to mind. It still makes me smile and is worthy of commendation (as is most of the rest of his blog, both the writing and the music he highlights).

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.

Lanky Brunettes with Wicked Jaws

The boys at Coke Machine Glow can bark and chase each other around the rec room all they want, nattering earnestly but ultimately pointlessly about whether music criticism should be objective or whether it's an inherently subjective pursuit. Meanwhile, Robert Christgau just gets shit done. Yes, I know it's not exactly fair to hold a couple of young turks up to the Dean's standards (and, hey, at least they're attempting to really wrestle with some big ideas, right?), but it's nice for everyone to be reminded occasionally of the thrilling places pop music criticism is capable of going. A stunning article for anyone who's ever had a passing interest in the Marshall Mathers / Eminem / Slim Shady phenomenon.

"I'm a Ukrainian-Russian-Lithuanian-Roma mix, and I can identify with any other spirit, but the Roma aspect is important because it brings you straight to the intersection of art and human rights, and all music and art that always interested me had that element of . . . reaching out through borders": Carl Wilson interviews Eugene Hutz.

Has anybody watched The Thin Man recently? This movie is 72 years old and it doesn't show its age at all. It's one of those classics that I'd somehow never caught up with, and after reading both the formidable Amy Sherman-Palladino and Mimi Smartypants make references to it as a favored and influential movie, I put it in my Kittenflix queue and watched it this weekend. I could give a shit about the mystery plot. It's all about the oft cited chemistry and sparkling dialogue between William Powell and Myrna Loy. Delightful company to spend a Sunday afternoon with.

My feelings about Natalie Portman usually fall somewhere between complete indifference and exasperated skepticism, but when I saw her on the cover of this week's issue of Entertainment Weekly I had about ten years' worth of awe and reverence instantly downloaded into my brain, Matrix-"whoa, I know kung-fu"-style. Holy hell, what a beautiful human.

People fucking delight me. I was in the grocery store yesterday, wandering around in the state of bewilderment that that chore always induces in me. Studying my hastily scribbled list and drifting to a stop in front of one of those wall-length coolers, I heard a gentleman standing nearby quietly mutter in my direction, "you buy some eggs, girl." Ha! When did my Saturday morning errands turn into an R. Kelly song?

Big thanks to JWard for burning me a copy of Neko Case's stunning Blacklisted. It was about time I started catching up with her non-Pornos work, and this was a perfect place to start.

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....

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.