Keith Phipps Also Has A Blog

2009-07-07T22:08:00.004-05:00

JUST TESTING IMEEM: DAYTON FUNK ASIDE

I think I'd post to this blog more if embedding MP3s weren't virtually a thing of the past. Maybe iMeem could change that. For instance, if I wanted to share the results of a playlist I created from Dayton funk bands and needed to share, say, the awesome Lakeside track "Fantastic Voyage," which later provided the foundation for a Coolio hit, would that work? Let's see:

Fantastic Voyage (2006 Digital Remaster) - Lakeside

Hmm... Apparently yes.

2009-01-27T21:33:00.002-06:00

UNFORTUNATE JUXTAPOSITION FOUND AT USWEEKLY.COM TODAY

2009-01-03T09:35:00.012-06:00

TWO CORNERS
Erich Von Stroheim's 1922 films Greed can make many claims to greatness. Among them: it's the first great butchered movie masterpiece and the first great movie about dentistry. It's also a great city movie. Adapting Frank Norris' novel McTeague, Von Stroheim lets the commonplace moral themes of folk tales and murder ballads play out in a San Francisco that's still coming into full flower as a metropolis.

Von Stroheim insisted on shooting on location, one of the many reasons his movie became a money-sucking monster taken out of his control. But it was the right decision capturing, however accidentally, an American city still shedding the 19th century as it covered itself in the 20th. Some of my favorite shots, well, ever come when Gibson Gowland's sort-of dentist works on patients from his Polk Street office.

The novel places this at 309 Polk Street above a post office. Later it would serve as a real dentist office, which must have confused readers of the novel. Now it's overshadowed by city hall. I'm not sure Von Stroheim used that exact address. Maybe someone in San Francisco could tell me.

Here's the shot that I love (and, as above, pardon the poor image quality. I'm working from YouTube since the film is, confoundingly, not on DVD.

Imagine for a moment being in that chair. If you could get past the anxiety of having dental work done by a man without a license (though you wouldn't know that) who looks a bit like a half-wit (which you undoubtedly would know), would you see a city in transition? If you were older, would you take a moment to note the Model Ts and cable cars that have nudged the carriages off the street? Could you imagine for a moment the San Franciscos to come from the neurotic, obsessive streets of Vertigo through the Vietnam-era anxieties of Dirty Harry and beyond? Could you see the present for what it was and imagine the future?

I think about that corner every time I pass by a bank here in my Chicago neighborhood. It was my first bank when I moved here, chosen as much for aesthetic qualities as any other reason. It has a classic look, complete with an old-fashioned giant vault in the back. (What it didn't have at the time was online banking, thus necessitating an eventual switch.)

A few years ago it added a tacky-looking LCD screen as a concession to modernity, which disappointed me, although I'm guessing others were just as bothered when they added the classic-looking stainless steel clock however many decades past. Around the same time they added something else: A neon sign in the second floor office. Squint and you can just make it out in the photo below.

It says "Dentist." Now I find myself wondering what the patients getting work done up there see looking out on our corner of the world. And what they can't possibly know to look for.

2008-12-23T16:24:00.002-06:00

THE FACEBOOK AD-BOT KNOWS ME SO WELL
Yes! So very tired of waxing. That's me.

2008-12-16T17:26:00.002-06:00

NOT ON DVD, NOT IN THEATERS, NOT ON TELEVISION
Assembling next week's Inventory feature made wish, once again, I could see Thom Andersen's documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself, especially when I found an excerpt from this reputedly excellent, three-hour look at depictions of L.A. as created by L.A.'s most famous industry on YouTube.

2008-10-30T17:31:00.001-05:00

I KNOW THIS ISN'T NEW BUT IT'S NEW TO ME AND I LOVE IT

2008-08-28T22:58:00.003-05:00

IF YOU NEED TO KILL TIME AT WORK TOMORROW
Hulu now has episodes of Elvira's Move Macabre in their entirety. I did this movie, Monstroid for Films That Time Forgot a while back. It's wretched. But kind of entertainingly wretched.

2008-08-25T14:43:00.003-05:00

RARE SEAN CONNERY APPEARANCE INSPIRES HISTORY'S VAGUEST HEADLINE

The story over at Reuters is about a promotional appearance for Connery's new book at which he restates his commitment to stay retired from film but adds, "I've a feeling there is something cooking. I don't know what it is yet."

Alternately: CONNERY PROMISES NOT TO DO NOTHING.

2008-08-21T20:13:00.003-05:00

WHAT I'VE BEEN LISTENING TO: THE RAIL BAND

With pieces by A.V. Club contributor Michaelangelo Matos as my guide, I've been using a portion of my eMusic downloads for the last couple of months to pick up some knowledge of African music. It's such a huge field, fitting for a huge continent, and there's a lot to here. Basically I've just been cherry-picking a few acknowledged classics here and there and I've yet to find something I didn't like. (Which tends to happen when you just cherry-pick classics.)

But, anyway, Le Rail Band: Where has this music been all my life? They're a Mali act formed in 1970, sponsored by the National Railway Company, and given a home at the Buffet Bar at Bamako's Sation Hotel. (I'm using this as my source.) Their formation was apparently part of a government initiative to preserve traditional Manding music.

I know how to find Mali on the map but know little of Manding culture. I know this singer's name—it's founding singer Salif Keita, who would later pass the baton to Mory Kante—but I have no idea what he's singing about. All I know: These guitars kill me and I've been listening to Le Rail Band (a.k.a. Super Rail Band, a.k.a. Bamako Rail Band, a.k.a. Super Rail Band of the Buffet Hotel de la Gare, Bamako) almost every day lately.

Here's why:

Boomp3.com

2008-08-18T20:35:00.004-05:00

HULK SLEEP!

I've been reading Marvel's massive Hulk Omnibus, which reprints all the Hulk stories published between 1962 and 1968. (It's pretty big.) During most this period Hulk was popular enough to keep publishing but not popular enough to justify his own book during a period when Marvel could only publish a limited number titles in any given month thanks to a fairly crappy distribution deal. Thus, once his own title bit the first after six issues, Hulk ended up sharing space in Tales To Astonish first with Giant Man then with Sub-Mariner.

The stories are entertaining and filled with the Jack Kirby/Stan Lee spirit—and for a few strange issues, the Steve Ditko/Jack Kirby spirit—even if the plotting seems a little seat-of-their pants than over in, say, Fantastic Four. After a while it just becomes a question of who's kidnapping Hulk in any given month. Late in the run, Kirby starts sharing art duties with Bill Everett that includes one of the weirdest two-panel stretches I've ever read in a comic book:

"Even his sleep is too powerful to shatter!" Are we to be impressed by Hulk's superhuman sleeping abilities or is this an example of Lee's spirited prose overcompensating for a lull in the action? And could this particular gamma bomb side effect be marketed as a sleep aid? As far as I know, Hulk's super-sleep remained unexplored in subsequent issues.

2008-08-17T20:48:00.001-05:00

SOMETHING THAT MADE ME LAUGH
E!'s The Soup is always good. Sometimes, however, it's transcendent.

2008-08-17T20:40:00.004-05:00

RECENT STUFF I WROTE

Music review: The Final Solution: Brotherman

This is the soundtrack to a blaxploitation movie that never got made (and may not have even been scripted.) Good stuff.

Box Of Paperbacks: Ed McBain, Vanishing Ladies

Early McBain, writing under yet another pen name. Not bad but problematic and protracted.

2008-08-13T08:22:00.003-05:00

NEWS FROM HOME

I like to check in on my hometown paper The Dayton Daily News from time to time. But I rarely find anything as amusing/disgusting as this headline:

"Bath In Sink Costs Xenia Burger King Employee His Job"

But wait, how did they know? Was their proof? Oh yes. He posted this video to his MySpace page:

"It's my birthday, and I'm taking a bath," he says. But the best line comes from the videographer, trying to coax an older, less easily amused co-worker to come look: "You can't see his penis or nothin'."

Or maybe the best quote belongs to the health commissioner who spoke to the paper. "They had already discarded about $10,000 worth of equipment and completely sterilized the sink twice," he said. "We just hope no one else follows through with (a behavior) similarly bizarre."

2008-08-12T11:23:00.002-05:00

ROAD-TESTING A DIFFERENT MP3 EMBED SITE

Hey, the new Damien Jurado song is pretty good

Boomp3.com

2008-08-10T22:12:00.003-05:00

PRESENTED WITHOUT COMMENT

Isaac Hayes (1942 - 2008)

2008-08-09T16:00:00.002-05:00

CENSORED GRAPES

This year's reading has been all about The Box Of Paperbacks Book Club over at The A.V. Club and my subscription to the Library Of America, which sends me hardbound omnibus editions of major American authors. I love the books and I like the randomness of the subscription service. One day I don't own any Willa Cather novels. The next I own five of them in one meticulously presented volume, complete with slipcover for that added touch of class/pretension.

Because I got a lot of Steinbeck when I first signed up I've consequently been reading a lot of Steinbeck, including The Grapes Of Wrath for the first time since high school. It held up well, but read a little saltier than I remembered. That's because it was a little saltier than I remembered. My edition restored some cuts made by Viking upon its original publication. A note at the back details the changes and provides some awkward comedy when read on its own.

Most puzzling entry? I vote for, "Joan Crawford."

2008-08-08T19:26:00.001-05:00

WHAT? NO JETPACKS?
I'm watching the opening ceremonies of The Olympics now, as directed by Zhang Yimou. So far, so good. But why don't they have this?:

2008-08-07T19:41:00.004-05:00

THE LATEST KUENN/PHIPPS ONLINE OBSESSION

Move over LasagnaCat. It's time for Cake Wrecks.

Cake wrecks?

Cake wrecks!

Cake wrecks.

2008-08-06T15:45:00.004-05:00

RECENT STUFF I WROTE: NEWMAN PANTS

- New Randy Newman album, Harps And Angels
Worth it for Newman's delivery of these lines alone in the title track:
[speaking as the voice of God]
"You ain't been a good man
You ain't been a bad man
But you've been [half-beat] pretty bad"

- Sisterhood Of The Traveling Pants 2

Pretty Greek scenery + appealing actresses ≠ something worth seeing.

2008-08-06T12:42:00.004-05:00

SECOND WAVE VIBRATIONS

If you're of a certain age and grew up with parents with no interest in rock and roll you probably first encountered The Beach Boys song "Good Vibrations" in an ad for Sunkist soda. Specifically, this ad:

The lyric is changed, the arrangement pretty lazy, and the harmonies aren't exactly soaring. Hearing "Good Vibrations" this way is a bit like seeing Hamlet on Betamax in a production in which Hamlet wears a Burger King t-shirt the entire time. Maybe that's why it took me a while to understand the song's genius.

So where did the commercial come from? I have a partial answer for that. I just wrote a review of the album Brotherman, a long lost soundtrack to a never-produced Chicago-set, '70s blaxploitation film with music performed by the unfortunately named Chicago soul act The Final Solution. It's due out in a bit on the great Chicago boutique label Numero Group which specializes in such oddities. Numero sends out updates every once in a while, and the most recent one linked to that YouTube clip above. Turns out it was The Final Solution, or at least members therof, providing the vocals.

I doubt they regarded it as their finest moment, either. In fact, the Brotherman album makes a pretty convincing case for their best moment never seeing the light of day until now. Here's a taste:

Love that guitar line, which was apparently going to be swapped out for a more polished guitar sound, strings, and horns. Maybe it's best it never got completed after all.

2008-08-05T21:13:00.004-05:00

LATE TO THE MOVIES: SHE'S HAVING A BABY

I've spent a little time lately catching up with some John Hughes movies I haven't seen or haven't seen in years. I'm not quite sure why. I don't think, when you get down to it, John Hughes makes (or, made, really) very good movies. And catching up with and revisiting Hughes is surely less rewarding than, say, watching all those Robert Bresson movies I've never seen. (Then again, Au Hasard Balthazar kind of did a number on me.) But sometimes you just want to do something and you're not sure why. Hence, I just watched She's Having A Baby.

Filmed at roughly the same time as Planes, Trains, And Automobiles and released a year after Planes in 1988, She's Having A Baby was supposed to continue Hughes' move away from teen movies. It didn't. In fact, it was kind of a critical and commercial failure. Was it that Hughes' built-in teen audience weren't ready to follow him into adult stories?

Maybe. I was, at least in theory, one of those teens. I can't speak for anyone else, but Hughes movies like 16 Candles and The Breakfast Club were less an active influence on my teen years than part of the ambient noise. I watched Candles, Club, and Weird Science on video months after they played theatrically. I saw Ferris Bueller the summer it came out but skipped Pretty In Pink and Some Kind Of Wonderful until college and grad school respectively. But it didn't really matter. The movies were quoted constantly (sometimes hurtfully), the fashions trickled down to my junior high (half the girls in my 8th grade class showed up wearing vests in August of '86), and the soundtracks were everywhere. How did mid-'80s British synth pop come to define the sound of teen yearning for my generation? The careful combination of gauzy cinematography, quirkily beautiful actors, and inspired editing.

But back to the movie at hand. Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth McGovern play young marrieds who seem to hate each other. That's not really an exaggeration. There's a montage toward the end (more on that in a minute) filled with scenes of their happy life together, most of which we never saw watching the movie preceding it. Bacon's a whiny, creative type who ends up in advertising. McGovern is disapproving. They fight, occasionally about the expectations of their terrible in-laws and sometimes because they just fight. It threatens at any second to become a movie about getting divorced.

It's a weird mix of adult problems and juvenile gags that reveals how poorly the concerns of characters past the drinking age ft into Hughes' formulas. He'll latch onto a real problem--money woes, extramarital temptation, etc.--and then brush it aside with broad humor or a jokey fantasy sequence that reveal Hughes as a director either extremely comfortable with ambiguity or unsure about what he wants to say. Bacon and McGovern's neighbors (including, as was required at the time, Edie McClurg) are nightmares treated with affection. At one point, a suburban block party devolves into a cacophony of under-the-breath backbiting and shrill recrimination but there's an unmistakable fondness to the way it's presented as the score makes clear. Later, Bacon fantasizes a dance number involving those same neighbors and their lawnmowers. Is he going mad from his surrounding or falling for the place?

Either Hughes is playing it both ways or he doesn't know what he wants to say.

Elsewhere he's perfectly comfortable manipulating the audience to feel exactly what he wants it to feel. Cue the Kate Bush:

Yes, that montage alternated happy memories with surgical instruments. And what kind of wife plays "Gotcha!" with the possible death of a child? I don't see this marriage lasting. But Hughes never made me believe it was meant to last anyway.

A final note: Young Alec Baldwin is in this playing an '80s sleazeball and it's tough to underestimate how well that works.

2008-08-04T22:39:00.002-05:00

WHAT I HAVEN'T BEEN BLOGGING ABOUT WHILE I HAVEN'T BEEN BLOGGING

- Dental Surgery: One night, while flossing me teeth, I felt the floss hook on a tooth where I'd previously gotten a crown. I tugged until I felt somethign give. Then I pulled out half my tooth. Thinking I'd just pulled out the crown, I scheduled an appointment at my dentist, who informed me that I'd pulled out half my tooth and would need surgery to finish the job. Two weeks of dread led up to a quick procedure mostly memorable for the Vicodin-addled couch time that followed.

- The Pitchfork Music Festival: The only downside to the dental surgery was that I missed the opening night of this year's Pitchfork, which included Public Enemy performing It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back in its entirety. The next day, opinions were divided as to whether it was awesome or lame. Most said awesome. I'm going to coninue to think it was lame just to feel better. The rest of the weekend felt anti-climactic, though Jarvis Cocker was cool and I'd neve seen Dinosaur Jr. before. Now I have. They were good.

- Comic-Con: Actually, I did blog about this.

- Lollapalooza: Went to see Radiohead. Skipped the rest.

- Nature's fury: Actually, this was just tonight. Stevie, Bryce, and I had tickets to the Cubs game which started fine and ended in a tornado siren. It briefly looked like we'd be stuck at Wrigley for hours. (Never one to miss an opportunity, beer vendors weaved through the crowd as we waited for a chance to leave. Hey, it wasn't the eight inning when the rain delay started.) In time, the tornado warning gave way to a severe thunderstorm warning which gave way to a mere downpour. We headed for the El and made it home with relative ease and in relative comfort. Sometimes the CTA gets it right.

- AT&T's online text-to-speech-demo site. (I call this "Morrissey 2.0")

2008-06-13T14:24:00.002-05:00

TODAY IN UNFORTUNATE HEADLINE PLACEMENT

Currently at The Chicago Tribunes site:

Also: Do you believe you can touch the sky?

2008-06-10T21:22:00.004-05:00

ROCKING FOR GOD

My review of a Larry Norman best-of collection Rebel Poet, Jukebox Balladeer ran today. It's the kind of longer music history piece I love writing and don't get to do as often as I like. (I've got another one, a review of Dennis Wilson's Pacific Ocean Blue running next week, too.) I'd never heard of Norman until he died at 60 earlier this year. He was billed as the "Father of Christian rock," which didn't much entice me. But his stuff is pretty incredible. He was a forceful, eccentric voice perfectly in tune with the confusing time of the early-'70s. I can't recommend the collection highly enough, or the material I've heard apart from that album. Here's one of many cuts warning of a loom apocalypse that he seemed to feel was close at hand:

2008-06-10T21:07:00.003-05:00

IN DEFENSE OF HACKERY

In the past couple of days I saw a pair of soon-to-open major movies. I officially shouldn't talk about either of them so let's just call them Film X and Film Y. You can pretty easily figure out the rest. Film X is an action film, a sequel to a box office disappointment that promises to distance itself from its predecessor. It was the subject of a very public feud between the company that made it and a key player on the creative side. It is the essence of corporate product, filled with moments of what's generally known as fan service.

Film Y is the work of a visionary filmmaker who came seemingly out of nowhere earlier this decade and has pursued a singular vision to diminishing commercial and critical returns. This latest is no exception. It could only be made by one director.

Film X works. It gets the job done. It's not great. In fact, it's pretty far from great, but it's a solid piece of fast-moving entertainment in the mold of, and related to, another film made by the same company earlier this year. It's not as good. But it's not bad.

Film Y fails. Sometimes dully and sometimes spectacularly. The vision's still there in some breathtaking sequences filled with the director's signature touches. But the novelty's gone even from these and the stuff that surrounds them... Oh the stuff that surrounds them. There's one moment involving an iPhone, you'll know it when you get to it, that would do Ed Wood proud. A lot of people will blame the failings on the premise, which isn't yet general knowledge, but it's really no sillier than the premise behind The Mist, and that movie's scary as hell, not a reliable source for unintended laughs.

Great films are generally the products of powerful visions but the evidence isn't always on the side of the visionaries. There's something to be said for the churn-them-out Hollywood factory when it works, if only because it provides the visionaries something to rebel against. Even if that rebellion sometimes does them in.

2008-05-21T12:39:00.004-05:00

ONE SENTENCE THAT PARTLY EXPLAINS WHY I CAN'T STOP READING MARK HARRIS' PICTURES AT A REVOLUTION: FIVE MOVIES AND THE BIRTH OF THE NEW HOLLYWOOD

Describing a scene during pre-production for Dr. Dolittle in which director Richard Fleischer met with Rex Harrison and his actress wife Rachel Roberts:
"Fleischer, Harrison, and Roberts then went out to a local restaurant called the White Elephant for an evening that ended in utter chaos when Roberts, who had been indulging her penchant for barking like a dog as soon as they entered the establishment, brandished a knife at her husband, and Fleischer hurried them out and poured them both into a cab."

2008-05-20T20:29:00.003-05:00

OH, THE RAGE
This is a comment from an A.V. Club reader signed in as "A Tennessean" in response to this stupid video overplaying that Michelle Obama "proud of my country" comment:

"I can say that for the first time in my adult life (well maybe not the first), I've seriously wanted to fuck up some ignorant Tennesseans. Especially that smug prick from Vanderbilt. And the white woman talking about diversity and shit. Fuck her. I walk by a county republican headquarters everday and want so bad to smash their windows. They have this hideous oil painting in there with G.W. in the middle with his head bowed and Lincoln on one side and Washington on the other with their hands on his shoulders also bowed in prayer. Uhg! 245 days left!"

Hideous oil painting? I'm intrigued. Could he/she be talking about this?:

I'm guessing yes.

2008-04-15T21:04:00.004-05:00

WHEN HARRY MET GIGER

I was on Deborah Harry's Wikipedia page today for some work-related reason that I've already forgotten and got a bit sidetracked looking at her discography. Where I thought she released a bunch of solo albums, she's only put out seven over the last 27 years. The one that came out last year was her first since 1993's Debravation, an album I listened to all the way through back in my college radio days. It was, like Billy Idol's Cyberbunk, at least partly an attempt to fuse William Gibson's fiction with rock music. It didn't work, though Sonic Youth had better luck with at least one Gibson-inspired song years later.

I've always been curious about Harry's first solo album, Koo-Koo from 1981, which I know mainly because of the famous controversial cover by H.R. Giger:

Giger is the Swiss artist whose disturbing and/or erotic depictions of "biomechanics" found their most famous expression in his designs for Alien. What I didn't know was that Giger directed a pair of videos for the album filmed at his studio. The pairing is much more intriguing than it sounds. Here's Harry performing "Now I Know You Know":

And here she is performing "Backfired":

What's weirdest about this to my eyes, apart from the Gigerian body stocking, is how poorly it all fits together. Blondie was expert at taking trends in fashion and music and making them their own. Alone Harry doesn't do nearly as well. Both songs were written and produced by Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic, the go-to guys for late-disco pop sounds and Giger was both edgy and trendy at the time. It's all the right elements at exactly the right moment and it should have worked briliantly. And yet... Well, the evidence is above.

I'm less curious about Koo-Koo now.

2008-04-15T09:06:00.003-05:00

WITHOUT GOING OVER...

I've got a piece on The Price Is Right up on Slate today. It's a show that brings back fond memories of childhood and of misspent dorm hours. Here's an amusing clip I didn't find a way to include. It pretty much speaks for itself:

So close!

2008-04-12T13:20:00.003-05:00

I MADE YOU A MUXTAPE?

Boing Boing had an item this week on a site called Muxtape.com that allows users to upload virtual mixtapes to the Internet to share with others. And that's it. It's remarkably simple and fairly unslick, which is in its own way pretty refreshing, even if users would currently seem to be limited to one muxtape at a time. Or at least it's that way now. A related blog keeps announcing new features. It seems like a site worth keeping an eye on.

Oh, and I totally made one just for you. Here it is. The title comes from the fact that this cold I've been dealing with all week took a bizarre turn yesterday that found a headache settling behind my left eye. I admire its specificity.

2008-04-10T10:12:00.003-05:00

THE MYSTERIES OF CHICAGO: DON'T MESS WITH STRANZ
A crimefighter gets specific.

In case you can't read it, here's the added text:

"Stranz is the man who has the machine that sends electric shocks. He lives at..."

Here the text has been crossed out and someone else has pointed out that this is a "whorehouse." Somehow I can't imagine that this is what CAPS had in mind.

2008-04-05T09:22:00.003-05:00

DO I KNOW YOU?
From Facebook's new "People You May Know" feature:

Can I bring the person to bring Stipe and Kasell together at last?

2008-03-20T17:18:00.003-05:00

ANOTHER REASON WHY I'M THIS CLOSE TO SWITCHING TO MSNBC.COM FOR MY HEADLINE NEEDS

Two of today's headlines from CNN.com:

This was also a day where a women dying after a freak collision with a sea ray got a lot of play.

2008-03-19T22:13:00.014-05:00

The New York governor without fear?

Who is new New York governor David Patterson? I mean really. When nobody is looking, who is he? Here's a theory:

Patterson was left blind by a childhood ear infection.

Daredevil was blinded by a childhood accident with radioactive waste.

Patterson's father served as Secretary Of State of New York, setting an example that his son would have to struggle to live up to.

Daredevil remains haunted by the death of his father, killed by gangster's after refusing to throw a fight.

Patterson has a law degree.

So does Daredevil.

Patterson: Tortured romantic history.

Daredevil: See above.

I guess what I'm getting at is that while I'm not sure there are tights and a fighting stick in Patterson's closet, I'm not sure there's not.

2008-03-19T07:16:00.003-05:00

CNN.com-watch: The more Obama asks for change...

Barack Obama delivered a speech yesterday that a) excellently defused the Rev. Wright controversy b) demanded that this political season be played on higher ground and c) revealed the soul beneath the politician. I thought I might have overestimated its effectiveness until I read an editorial than went even further than I was thinking.

Not everyone got it, however. Here's how it appeared in the headline feed at CNN.com

2008-03-13T19:04:00.008-05:00

The Box Of Paperbacks Book Club: Supplemental

In the Box Of Paperbacks post that went up today I wrote about Wolfshead, a 1968 collection of miscellaneous Robert E. Howard stories. It was packaged, like the paperback collections of his Conan stories, with a cover featuring Frank Frazetta art, in this case a slightly censored version of the painting below (as always, click to enlarge):

One of my readers commented that "The Howard and E.R. Burroughs boom [of the 1960s and '70s] was the result of the Frazetta covers as much as the stories." I don't think he/she is right but they certainly played their part. Frazetta is the definitive adult fantasy artist. And one whose work fills me with profoundly mixed feelings. As I wrote back, "Every bit of good taste and refinement in me wants to resist all those image of musclemen, dripping swords, heavy-breasted women, and scowling animals but I can't. His stuff is amazing." It's all that's leering, and sexist, and simpleminded in fantasy and science fiction but it also accesses the parts of those genres that reach directly to the id. I shouldn't overthink it. If I can like Brahms and The Cramps and I can like Mondrian and Frazetta.

That's not even the point of this post. The point was to spotlight a few weird Frazetta corners I found in researching that Wolfshead post. Namely, a couple of paintings done for L. Ron Hubbard Novels.

This is The Lieutenant from Final Blackout, a Box Of Paperbacks subject I covered (pretty unfavorably) here:

And this is a puny Man-Animal doing battle with an alien in Battlefield Earth. (If the movie looked like this, it would have been much better):

Finally, here's a piece of art from From Dusk Til Dawn I'd never seen before, with Salma Hayek in full Vampirella mode and Frazetta renderings of Tarantino, George Clooney, and Juliette Lewis:

Again, that's much better than the movie I remember. Maybe, if they'd used that as the poster, it would have drawn a bigger audience. Maybe that guy who wanted to credit Burroughs' and Howard's latter-day success to Frazetta was on to something.

2008-03-13T09:47:00.003-05:00

The Awesome Pulp/Archie Mash-Up You Didn't Know You Were Waiting For

From Chris's Invincible Super Blog

2008-03-12T18:51:00.004-05:00

Enter The Hulu

Hulu, NBC and Fox's joint online video venture debuted today and it's pretty neat. Scott Tobias and I both signed up to be early users. He got accepted; I did not. But via his login I've been playing around with it for a little while. Now that it's a fully operational Death Star of a site it's even more impressive. You can embed whole movies in your blog, if you choose, in addition to TV shows from The Office to Galactica 1980. Users can also watch them on the Hulu site and the quality is impressive.

But one of the neatest features has to be the ability to trim clips. Like, say, you just wanted to share the part of Boat Trip when Cuba Gooding Jr. and Horatio Sanz realize they've accidentally signed up for a gay cruise, gay Roger Moore and all:

Oh, Boat Trip. As if seeing you once for professional reasons wasn't bad enough, you came back to me like a bad meal last fall when my dad was in the hospital. One of his succession of bad roommates was a grotesquely overweight man prone to make room-clearing use of his bedpan in ways that were pleasing to none of the senses. He also liked to play his TV at maximum volume. Consequently we once spent a Sunday morning in a fetid hospital room while a TBS showing of Boat Trip blared in the background. I can laugh about it now. Kind of.

2008-03-12T18:35:00.002-05:00

"This is only the beginning!!!"
I don't usually promote Onion (as opposed to A.V. Club) stuff here because a) I figure everyone in their right mind is already checking out The Onion and b) It's always good, so what is there to say? But every once in a while something really sticks withe me, like this disgusting/hilarious Onion News Network piece:

Anonymous Philanthropist Donates 200 Human Kidneys To Hospital

It is nice to have a positive story once in a while, isn't it?

2008-03-08T21:23:00.004-06:00

LATE TO THE MOVIES: The Mist
I'd heard good things about The Mist for a while now, from general buzz, from my pal Josh Rothkopf and our own Tasha Robinson's review. This week Scott Tobias became a convert. I was still skeptical. I've never had any great affection for writer/director Frank Darabont. The Shawshank Redemption is solid enough, and I like the way it balances roughness with sentiment. But after sitting through The Green Mile and The Majestic I'd lost the faith. But after watching The Mist tonight I can confirm the rumors are true.
Adapted from a 1980 novella by Stephen King, it combines the best of King—the class-conscious realism and the ability to make horror emerge from the fabric of everyday life—with the best of H.P. Lovecraft—hungry, tentacled beasties. (Side note: Do this and Cloverfield suggest a trend of stealth Lovecraft adaptations?) It's tense and minimal, extremely well-crafted, and able to deliver on the promise of shocks. Is there any cheesier horror movie device than one character looking over the shoulder of another and gasping, "Oh god!" Probably not. But every time it happens here the imagery that follows is truly Oh God!-worthy, even if there's not an element lacking an easily identifiable source of inspiration.
It's also political as hell, thanks to Marcia Gay Harden's fire-and-brimstone crazy lady character, who uses fear to make herself a demagogue. There's no shortage of monsters here, but the bulk of the action concerns the meltdown of trust amongst characters trapped in a supermarket. It's like the Twilight Zone episode "Monsters Are Due On Maple Street" only with, you know, actual monsters. And unlike a lot of King story's, it has an ending that works, courtesy of Darabont. A horrific, horrific ending.
I think a cult following awaits The Mist, which did little at the box office but has already had a couple of midnight showings At The Music Box here in Chicago. It's certainly one of the best mainstream horror movies of recent years even if, after that final scene, I'm now thinking Darabont's kind of a bastard.

2008-03-08T17:14:00.008-06:00

MOORE FOOTNOTE
Noel Murray and I put together an Alan Moore Primer for The A.V. Club last week. I think it turned out pretty well. We spent quite a lot of time on Moore as the cause and solution to the grim and gritty trend in superhero comics. I didn't have room to talk about it in the piece but over the course of putting this together I came across, "Grit," a funny little four-page parody of Frank Miller's Daredevil from the early-'80s that I came across in researching its piece. It's interesting for two reasons: 1) It's a reminder that all those funny (and occasionally "funny") short stories in Tomorrow Stories didn't come out of nowhere. And 2) It's a send-up of the grim and the gritty from a the perspective of a then-outsider to the world of American superhero comics. He was about to get his hands dirty with the very material he's parodying here. Click on the images to enlarge:

2008-03-08T17:03:00.003-06:00

GRATUITOUS CUTENESS
Well, once you factor me out. This is Scott and Ali's daughter Isabel meeting our dog Sophie.

2008-03-07T08:37:00.003-06:00

MY FAVORITE BAND THIS WEEK: Los Campesinos

I've been laying off music reviewing a little this year, if not quite as thoroughly or publicly as Noel Murray. But I still have opinions and my opinion is that Cardiff's Los Campesinos are awesome. They're young. They're Welsh. They have a violin player. And they sound like they're having a lot of fun while making some unpredictable-but-not-fussy and rhythmically charged music. Noel turned me on to the band's debut EP last year. The forthcoming full-length Hold On Now Youngsters does not disappoint. Here's a great track, that's not even the best on the album:

Los Campesinos: "We Are All Accelerated Readers"

2008-03-07T07:46:00.004-06:00

RANDOM INFORMATION

• I'm in Ohio visiting the parents now and it's destined to snow. That's been the case the past few time I've been here. I foresee a lot of sitting around. Also, it's the second time I've shown up here after the state has gone what I believe to be the wrong way in an election. But looking around at least I'm not filled with rage that the people I see might have voted for Clinton. When it went to Bush in 2004 I felt like I was in Invasion Of The Body Snaachers. Clinton supporters seem essentially human.

• From here by way of io9: LOLTHULU!:

• Why does Brett Favre, the only football player I've ever cared about, seem more pissed than sad announcing his retirement?:

2008-02-09T09:00:00.001-06:00

The Mysteries Of Chicago: The Gas Station With The Slippery Adjectives
Not far from my office, there's a gas station I frequent for its proximity, its steady supply of diet soda, and its brusque-but-efficient service. This gas station has a car wash I've never used for no particular reason. But I'm not sure I'd be more inclined to use it now that its services descriptive phrases have gotten an upgrade.

2008-01-29T19:52:00.000-06:00

Exit The Critic: Terry Lawson
Reading Defamer earlier today I came across a post about the Detroit Free Press' decision not to replace film critic Terry Lawson, who took a buyout offer late last year. I could go on about the death of film criticism, but I want. For the record, I think there are plenty of fine critics out there and plenty of people reading them. But there is a problem with newspapers and the fact that a paper like the Free Press can't keep Lawson around says everything about that problem.

I grew up reading Lawson when he wrote for Dayton's Journal-Herald and later the Dayton Daily News. (A merger brought him from the city's morning paper to its only paper.) He was a tough, fair critic with a personable prose style who wasn't afraid to criticize a sure-to-be popular movie if he didn't like it or champion one he liked even if it didn't look to be a popular favorite. (I remember his four-star review of Robocop making me feel like I had permission to think of a really great genre film as just a really great film. Period.) He was also a local. I remember attending a Sunday-afternoon art film series in 8th grade where he would show up for Q&A sessions after the film.

Other reviews that mattered to me: His declaration of Hannah And Her Sisters as a masterpiece meant a lot. I saw the film in junior high and loved it. I'm sure I didn't get all the nuances—-Why would Allen need to buy white bread and mayo to convert to Christianity?--but I'm with A.O. Scott in thinking that it's okay for kids to stretch out of their comfort zone. His review of Jean De Florette brought me downtown to my first foreign film.

I don't want to write about the guy like he's dead. Hopefully he'll keep writing for someone else. But I also hope the Freep and all the other papers trimming back their local arts coverage realizes what they're losing by getting rid of their local arts sections and replacing their critics with, say, the semi-ubiquitous, widely syndicated Orlando critic Roger Moore. There's no sense of connection there. As a budding film buff, it felt important to have a guy who was just as passionate and a lot more knowledgeable about the things I loved in town. It felt like these things were important to where I was and not just something that happened somewhere else.

And, yeah, I recognize the irony of me saying this as someone who's mostly read online and published in a newspaper distributed in 10 cities. Why should someone in our Denver edition feel like I'm writing for them? I don't know. But I only hope that someone reading me develops a passion for what I'm writing about of the sort Lawson prompted in me. Even if I did like Cloverfield.

2008-01-28T20:19:00.000-06:00

The Mysteries Of Chicago: The identity crisis bookstore
On Belmont St. over by the old Onion office there's a fine little bookstore that, for as long as I can remember, has done business under a sign saying "Town Cleaners."

I can't even remember the real name most of the time since it's pretty dull. It's The Gallery Bookstore I've always thought of it as the Town Cleaners Bookstore. It reminds me of a character from Grant Morrison's run on Doom Patrol named Danny The Street. Danny was a transvestite street. On the outside he featured Guns and Ammo stores and other macho fixtures. But on the inside he was all nice boutiques.

I'm pretty sure the Town Cleaners Bookstore was just too cheap to have the original sign removed, however.

2008-01-26T20:00:00.001-06:00

The Mysteries Of Chicago: Cafe Muppet
What is it? How can it exist in a copyright-intense business culture? Why does it barely show up on Google? (All I could find was a Yelp entry from someone who had never eaten there.) Some questions may never be answered. (Click to enlarge and you'll see that, yes, that's a little Kermit on the sign, or you would if it weren't so blurry.)

2008-01-24T19:43:00.000-06:00

PERMANENT RECORDS REMOTE: The Feelies' The Good Earth (1986)

We put our Permanent Records feature on hiatus over at The A.V. Club so of course I find an album I have to write about. The feature will probably be back in some form later on, but I need to say some words about The Feelies' The Good Earth, the New Jersey band's second album. Released in 1986, it followed their debut Crazy Rhythms by six years. Crazy Rhythms is often, and rightly, cited as an influential albums. It jittery, post-punk jangle can be heard in countless subsequent bands from '80s college rock on. But it's The Good Earth that I love. I parted it with it in a cash-strapped CD purge somewhere between high school and gainful employment. I don't know how I could ever have let it go. It's fallen out of print in subsequent years but thanks to eBay and a part-time wholesaler in Thailand I now own a copy again.

R.E.M. was among the bands wearing out their copies of Crazy Rhythms and Peter Buck repaid the favor by producing The Good Earth. The band had a slightly different line-up by then and a slightly different sound. R.E.M. had listened to them and clearly they'd listened back. The Good Earth mixes the jangle and countryside spirituality of early R.E.M. with a Velvet Underground drone but the sound is all its own. Here's a favorite track:

Always a cult favorite, never a popular success, The Feelies signed to Warner Brothers, put out two more albums, then called it a day. I don't have those but I suspect eBay does. But I might wait. The Good Earth is pretty much all I want to listen to right now anyway.

2008-01-23T20:34:00.000-06:00

REMAINING BOX OF PAPERBACKS BOOKS

Hunter Adams, The Man From Planet X: The She-Beast

Brian Aldiss, Starswarm

James Blish, A Life For The Stars

James Blish and Robert Lowndes, The Duplicated Man

John Boyd, The Last Starship From Planet Earth

Ray Bradbury, Chad Olivr, and Theordore Sturgeon, Three To The Highest Power

Edgar Rice Burroughs, The People That Time Forgot

Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Mad King

John Coleman Burroughs, Treasure Of The Black Falcon

A. Bertram Chandler, The Alternate Martians

Gordon R. Dickson, Naked To The Stars

Gordon R. Dickson, None But Man

Philip Jose Farmer, Down In The Black Gang And Other Stories

Philip Jose Farmer, A Private Cosmos

Philip Jose Farmer, The Green Odyssey

Philip Jose Farmer, Flesh

John M, Faucette, Crown Of Infinity

Ian Fleming: Thunderball, The Man With The Golden Gun, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Goldfinger, From Russia With Love, Doctor No., Thrilling Cities

H. Rider Haggard, Cleopatra

Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint, The Blind Spot ("The most famous, fantastic novel of all time," according to the cover.)

Robert Heinlein, The Puppet Masters

Nat Hiken, Sergeant Bilko

Robert E. Howard, Wolfshead

Otis Adelbert Kline, The Outlaws Of Mars

C.M. Kornbluth, Not This August

A. Merritt, The Metal Monster

Ed McBain, Vanishing Ladies

Larry Niven, Neutron Star

Larry Niven, World Of Ptavvs

Andre Norton, Lord Of Thunder

Andre Norton, The X Factor

Philip Francis Nowlan, Armageddon 2419 A.D. (The original Buck Rogers Novel)

E.E. Doc Smith, Grey Lensman (2 copies), First Lensman, Children Of The Lens, Second Stage Lensmen

Cordwainer Smith, Space Lords

O.F. Snelling, James Bond: A Report

George R. Stewart, Earth Abides

Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human

William F. Temple, Battle On Venus

Jack Vance, The Five Gold Bands / The Dragon Masters (Ace Double)

Jack Vance, Space Opera

Various Authors, The Avengers: The Passing Of Gloria Munday, The Avengers: The Afrit Affair

Various Authors, The Alien Condition

Jules Verne, The Demon Of Cawnpore

A.E. Van Vogt, Slan

H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man

Leonard Wibberley, The Mouse That Roared

Leonard Wibberley, The Mouse On Wall Street

2008-01-09T22:07:00.000-06:00

DIVIDED BY A COMMON LANGUAGE
I interviewed Michel Gondry yesterday in advance of the terrific new film Be Kind Rewind and it was a terrific experience. He was an engaged, thoughtful interview subject and I found the whole experience quite pleasant. He's French and has a pretty good command of the English language, even though he sometimes needs to take the roundabout way to get to his point. He also has a distinct French accent, which, of course, only makes sense. When I'm talking to someone who's not a native English speaker, I find, as I'm sure everyone does, that the mind naturally adjusts to meet them halfway. It just kind of happens.
If you're not there, however, it can be baffling. I passed the audio file on to one of our new interns who started work on the 38-minute conversation at 10am. I got busy and didn't check on him until around 2:30 and I asked him how he was doing. He said, "It's tough." I said, "How far into it are you?" (Because, you see, it kind of has to be done soon to make the deadline for our Sundance issue.) He said, "Twelve minutes." And here's a sample of what he had done:

AVC: It’s seems to me, maybe I’m making the wrong connection here, but was this in any way influenced by Dave Chappelle’s Block Party?

Gondry: Yeah, completely. And in that, she’s(?) the ground basically. I had this concept for years, the fact that this kid remakes these movies. Uh, it’s as if(?) someone fears if he got a concept that had, for years, if he couldn’t keep it up he put it down for 10 months(?) and then he doesn’t do it itself, because there are needs. And the film would not have to be typically achieved, because it’s like watching a home movie. You don’t watch it for the technique or aspect, you watch because it’s reminiscent of the good men known to these parts(?) as your friend, or it reflects who it belongs to.

It's beautiful, in its way. And completely unrunnable. I ended up doing the transcript myself.
And I don't blame the intern at all. I probably would have transcribed it the same way if I weren't a participant in the conversation. Funny how that works.
Also funny: Gondry's parody of the popular "Will It Blend?" clips that float around the Internet that doubles as a commercial for his film The Science Of Sleep.

2007-12-28T06:57:00.000-06:00

OLD NOW. OFFICIALLY
I'm 35 today. Yay? At least, as usual, Frank Sinatra has prepared me for the coming year, which will surely be a year of blueblooded girls and riding in limousines. (Their chauffeurs will drive.) Well, maybe not. But with any luck it will be a better year than this last one.

2007-12-24T11:14:00.000-06:00

THE MOST CHRISTMASSY PLACE ON EARTH
When you spend the holidays in Florida, it's occasionally easy to forget that it's Christmastime, especially if you grew up in the often snowy, always cold Midwest. Fortunately, there are people down here who work to will Christmas into the tropics. And nobody works harder than the folks at The Oakdale Christmas House in St. Petersburg. Operating since 1977, it's a massive, front yard display of shiny Christmas doo-dads. Very little of it is original work. Mostly it's toys and lawn decorations from the past few decades set up in a series of brightly lighted, almost shrine-like displays. The front yard, for instance, features a Teddy Ruxpin, helpfully labeled "Talking Teddy Bear":

The house combines items pretty randomly. One display features a pair of angels spinning in the air as they book end Minnie Mouse:

There are some original characters however. Meet Mr. Slush and his family. And their disco ball:

But it's not all cartoon characters and inflatable snow globes. Peppered throughout are reminders that Christmas is a celebration of Jesus' birth. Often in the most unexpected places:

Honestly, the whole thing can't be properly experienced unless you're there. So I'll try for the next best thing. Here's a video. Note the clip of a televangelist playing in the background. I didn't realize until I finished taking the video that the display had a TV at the top but it's in frame at one point. Merry Christmas!

Update: Stevie also blogs about this.

2007-12-19T11:16:00.001-06:00

WELCOME TO THE 21ST CENTURY: THE FUTURE OF DRY HANDS
Last night I went to a screening of The Great Debaters, a Denzel Washington-directed film about a groundbreaking '30s debate team from a Black college in Texas. The movie was earnest/well-acted/forgettable but I'll always remember the night as my first encounter with the Dyson Airblade, a new-ish mechanical hand drying system that emphasizes air speed over air temperature. It's like sticking your hands in a cool jet stream. It truly is a wondrous age.

Below, someone (not me, obviously) enjoys the Airblade.

2007-12-18T16:35:00.001-06:00

INCHING OUT OF BLOG LIMBO
Some clips must be shared. I saw this on the generally terrific (if too infrequently updated) hip-hop site Oh Word. It has nothing to do with hip-hop and everything to do with two old guys going at it on live TV. Oh, word!

2007-10-03T20:39:00.000-05:00

THE KIND OF PHONE CALL I DON'T GET ENOUGH
It's by design that my work number isn't the easiest thing to track down. After years of working in the Madison office where anyone could walk in off the street and tell us about his hippie jam band playing at some coffee house, I've tried to limit unwelcome access as much as possible. When I do get a call it's usually from someone I want to talk to or someone tenacious enough to figure out my extension. I rarely get calls from famous puppeteers out of the blue.
But that changed yesterday when Bob Baker of the Bob Baker Marionettes called to talk about the Disney Inventory Noel and I wrote last week. We had a nice talk about his time with Disney, where he worked in the special effects department after WWII. It was great to talk to someone who was there, especially after being immersed in Disney stuff after reading Neal Gabler's bio. Baker's well known in his own right, though. He was head animator for George Pal's Puppetoons and worked on everything from Star Trek to Close Encounters to George Ulmer's Bluebeard. And his marionette company has entertained L.A. kids for years. Like the title of this post says, I wish I got out-of-nowhere calls like this more often.

2007-09-30T17:30:00.000-05:00

CD SHELVES FOR SALE

If you've ever been to my current place, or any place I've ever lived, you've probably noticed that it's overrun with media. It's the best fringe benefit of my job that a lot of books, CDs, and DVDs float my way for free. But the cumulative effect of doing this for a few years is that the room disappears fast. Factor in that I spent years prior to turning pro squandering my paycheck on media and a personality that gets sentimentally attached to objects and you're left with, well, a mess. And given that our place, while spacious, is still very much a big city condo something had to give. For the last couple of weeks, it's been giving. Stevie and I did a large book and DVD purge last weekend that left us with a little more pocket money and still way too many books and DVDs. For the past few days I've been packing up my CDs.

I know people, people who are wildly enthusiastic about music, who have taken advantage of the glorious age of digital music we're now living to sell their CDs. I can't do that. I just can't. I've been building my collection since I was 16 and can still tell you the first four CDs I bought and when I bought them. (First: Green by R.E.M., purchased during a marching band trip on the first week of its release in 1988 before I owned a CD player.)

I get attached. I can remember poring over liner notes for albums and staring at covers. I once saw an interview Bryan Ferry where he complained that CD listeners lacked the "tactile" relationship with their music that vinyl fans enjoyed. If he only knew what was coming. I'm pretty sure I'm from the last generation to grow up touching music. But I don't really touch it anymore. I rip, peruse the liner notes, and go. I still look at the covers, but it's usually when they appear in the corner of my screen.

I don't really miss playing CDs, to tell the truth. I love the digital age. I listen to music just as deeply and more broadly than ever. I take my iPod with me everywhere. My laptop (and an external hard drive) allow me to keep a considerable library at my fingertips and a large hard drive at home houses a collection in excess of 200GB. That said, I still love my CDs. And packing them up hasn't been easy. I kept hitting little sentimental trapdoors. I mean, I can remember a couple of weeks in December of 1998 when the Townes Van Zandt album High And Low And In Between felt like the closest friend I had.

Nonetheless, they have to make room. So, apart from a few we listen to in the car on a regular basis, down to the basement they go, secure in the finest plastic tubs Target stocks. I guess I could get rid of them, but I keep thinking about the dream house I'll maybe own down the line, one with a wall of shelves for all my CDs that my as-yet-still-imaginary kids, who will never rebel against their dad's great taste in music, will be able to look at, and listen to, and touch.

2007-09-25T22:02:00.000-05:00

THE FRUSTRATIONS OF FLYING WHILE WIRELESS

I've been flying more than usual lately (see previous post) and as anyone who's spent anytime at O'Hare already knows, nothing is free. To use the wireless you have to sign up for a service called Boingo. Which, whatever, as a captive audience who compulsively checks his e-mail, I'll pay for the privilege. But Boingo was apparently set up around 1994 and signing up for it requires finding a username that
a) Isn't taken and
b Is between 5 and 10 characters

That's not as easy as it sounds and around attempt 12 I came up with a username that I thought was perfect. Of course, it didn't work.

2007-09-25T19:26:00.002-05:00

WHAT I HAVEN'T BEEN BLOGGING ABOUT WHILE I HAVEN'T BEEN BLOGGING

So, hi. It's been six weeks since I've posted here and for once I have a good excuse. On Monday, August 20th, my father was in a car accident near his home in Englewood, Ohio while taking some vegetables to his sister-in-law. His car collided with a dump truck. The driver of the dump truck going full speed and died at the scene. My father was able to make a call to my mother using his cell phone while others waited for him at the scene. Accounts vary as to whether or not he exited the car himself or was pulled because of a small fire. As to who was to blame, I'd rather not get into that issue apart from saying that my dad had a lifetime of frustratingly overly cautious driving. This seems to have been the day he made a split-second mistake at a backwoods intersection known for poor visibility, a history of accidents, and neighbors who have raised the issue with the town council more than once.

My father suffered broken ribs, a punctured lung, a fractured knee, and fractured upper vertebrae, all serious injuries for a 29-year-old, much less a 79-year-old. He was taken first to one hospital then to another, the latter being known for its trauma center. He was declared to be in serious but stable condition.

He was still in much the same condition when I arrived the next day, there being no good, short-notice flights the day of the accident. We also decided that I simply couldn't do that much to help on the day of the accident, anyway. It was a feeling I'd come to know all too well.

When I first saw my father, he was in bad shape. When I left, two weeks later, he had improved only slightly. When I returned the weekend after that he was still not well enough to be released from the hospital and into a nursing home. This was deemed necessary as the next stage of his recovery since he would need almost constant care upon release.

Complicating matters: he's kind of a danger to himself at the moment. That's the thing I haven't touched on yet. The accident left my dad with a broken, slowly recovering body. It seems to have left his mind in similar shape. For the first ten days or so he was virtually incomprehensible, a trend that bottomed out during a terrifying trip to the ICU. He would hallucinate, grab at imaginary car keys in the air, and talk about things that the dog was doing. Since then he's been better, but it's a deeply qualified better. He can talk about the accident in horrifying detail but has to constantly be reminded where he is. Asked what year it is and dad will always respond, "Now wait a minute..." before replying with something that's not even close.

And that's more or less where we are now. I've yet to go back since my dad was moved to a nursing home last week. I get daily reports from mom. She's wildly encouraged by the slightest signs of improvement and crushed by any setback. I'm due to go back again next weekend. I don't expect any major improvement. The way I see it we're on a journey of many miles that my dad can only travel in inches.

I really appreciate everyone who's been asking about him. I'll start posting updates in this space. I'll try to be better about keeping in touch but it's kind of been hard to get back to everyone. If you'd like to send cards or anything, my dad can be reached at:

Friendship Village
5790 Denlinger Rd.
Trotwood, OH 45426

Stay safe and well.

2007-08-15T19:51:00.000-05:00

SILENCE: BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY
As anyone still reading this all to infrequently updated blog probably knows I did a piece for Slate a couple of weeks back about Popeye. I'm not sure I have that much more to say on the subject, but I'm using it as an excuse to test out some software that rips, converts, and uploads clips from DVDs. Here's a moment of early Fleischer brothers insanity in which Popeye will stop at nothing to create a quiet environment for a baby. (Not Swee'Pea, by the way. This is pre-Swee'Pea.) Enjoy.

2007-08-15T09:22:00.000-05:00

ALL THE FUN OF MYSPACE, NONE OF THE CAM-WHORES
Just as everyone else soon will, I now have a Facebook page.

2007-08-14T23:04:00.000-05:00

HOW WILL THEY REMEMBER YOU?
Keith: Merv Griffin died, did you hear that?
Stevie: Yeah. [Pause.] He was the one with the big penis, right?
Keith: [Confused.] I think you're thinking of Milton Berle.

2007-08-14T22:52:00.000-05:00

"ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS NOTHING"

I once considered writing an article on why I thought there has never been a bad version of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. I'm glad I didn't. This new one isn't so much bad as half-hearted. There are plenty of current events (well, current as of when it was shot for an intended 2006 release) floating around in the background to acknowledge that there could be some political subtext to it, but it never commits. There is at least [minor spoiler] one truly daring idea that it plays with, the notion that maybe the invaders have the right idea, that humanity is a self-destructive species that might be better off if someone else would take a firm hand to it. And it backs it up by not making that strong of a case for humanity. There's also much that could have been done draw parallels with an outside force invading the U.S. for our own good. Unfortunately, all that stuff just sort of lays there and the action doesn't compensate for it. And, man, can you tell that this thing is patched together by different hands months apart. It's been edited to the bone and the style changes virtually with each scene. Avoid. (I do like the line I've used for the title, however. Pretty chilling coming from Jeremy Northam, even if I did spend the whole movie thinking he was Todd Field.)

2007-06-20T08:02:00.000-05:00

DELIGHTFUL AMAZON WEIRDNESS
I could tell you how Amazon decided I wanted to purchase some kind of American flag and Robert Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land but I think that would spoil the fun.

2007-06-11T20:20:00.001-05:00

WHAT I'M READING NOW: HOW THE WORLD ENDS

Here's what I don't need to read next: Anything suggestive of the apocalypse. In the past two weeks I've read Don Delilllo's latest, Falling Man and, like the rest of the Oprah-instructed nation, The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. (Hey, I was going to read it anyway. And now she's chosen one of my favorite books of the last decade or so, Middlesex as her next project. Please stop reading my mind, Oprah Winfrey.)

Both were excellent / terrifying. I just finished the McCarthy today and it's a vision of the world after some sort of apocalypse as pitiless as it is plausible. He never gets around to detailing what's made the sky turned grey and the buildings melt just enough to lose their bearings but it doesn't matter. It's a picture of the world gone off the cliff, the kind we always fear leaving to our kids. By McCarthy's relucant admission it was inspired by his relationship with his young son (McCarthy's 75 with an 8-year-old kid) and it's filled with a desparate need to preserve what's good and human in the face of times that's misplaced the value of such qualities. It's relentless until an ending that's a tiny bit of a cop-out. Thank heavens.

My review of the Delillo book posts Thursday so I won't repeat myself. But I'll add a couple of filmic references by saying that nothing's captured the tone of what it felt like in the days, and now years, after 9/11 so well since The 25th Hour. I wouldn't put Lee in charge of the film version, though. I think only Kubrick could have really caught the sense of unease stirring beneath cool surfaces that he does so well.

Now I need to read something about resource girls who raise money for animal shelters or something.

2007-06-11T19:40:00.000-05:00

SOMETHING I SAW TODAY

Today while walking Sophie I saw a boy of about eight wearing a Scarface t-shirt. I don't have a picture of the kid but I think I can simulate just how wrong that is with other pictures.

+ PLUS +

I'm pretty sure it was a kids' size, too.

2007-05-09T22:15:00.000-05:00

WHEN VICTORIAN MORALS AND BESTIALITY JOKES COLLIDE

In searching for an image of a giant man for that last post I hit a site called Postmark Press, which is run by a woman who works with images from old postcards. Hey, she's been on Martha Stewart Living, so it's more than just a hobby. There's lots of cool stuff there, including a postcard of a man who's very proud to live in Akron. And then there's this:

I'm still trying to get my mind wrapped around it.

Oddly enough it bears a striking resemblance to the DVD cover for Sleeping Dogs Lie, a Bobcat Goldthwait-directed movie that played Sundance under the name Stay and is apparently the as intelligent and insightful as any film about a youthful indiscretion involving an animal can be.

It's a terrible cover. But not, as it turns out, without precedent.

2007-05-09T20:45:00.001-05:00

BABY, YOU'RE SAFE WITH ME:
OR, IT'S NOT EASY BEING BIG

I am, as anyone who has ever met me can attest, a big guy. I'm tall and not slender in the least. I'm pretty sure I give the impression that I could physically harm somebody although I've never thrown a punch in my life. Most of the time this works to my advantage. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've never had to throw a punch in my life is because I'm big. I think imposing might be the word I'm looking for here.

But being big has its costs. I like VW Beetles and Mini Coopers but I can never buy one. I like to sit on the aisle seat at movies so I can stretch my legs a bit. These are not tragedies. People assume I'm kind of dumb, even if only one persone, my roommate freshman year, has come out and said he thought I was dumb based on my appearance. That's also no tragedy. That's something I tend to use to my advantage.

But here's the other thing: I can scare people. Specifically women. Walking around, I'm always careful to keep my distance and act as unthreatening as possible. Most of the time it works. Sometimes it doesn't. Today, for instance, I was walking to my car behind a woman doing the same. It was broad daylight and there were other people around. Admittedly, the neighborhood our office is in can be a little sketchy. Maybe she'd had bad experiences before, I don't know. I was late, as usual, for picking Stevie up and for some reason this woman kept turning around to look at me as I drew closer. She looked slightly more panicked each time and even started to clutch her purse. Meanwhile, I figure the best way to deal with the situation is simply not to acknowledge it, make no eye contact, and just keep moving. I mean, what's the alternative? Say, "Hey, nice lady, I'm not going to hurt you." That's even creepier.

Why did the whole experience make me feel like I'd done something wrong? And would this have happened if I'd been, say seven inches closer to the ground?

2007-04-07T15:36:00.000-05:00

THE WICKER MAN: A TRIBUTE IN SONG
Because Appple's GarageBand makes making crappy ambient music way too easy and because it's cold outside and I had nothing better to do, I present to you my musical tribute to Neil LaBute's The Wicker Man. My apologies in advance especially since, with the help of Apple's pre-made loops, the beat's all mine this time.

2007-04-04T18:46:00.000-05:00

A TV SHOW I ENDORSE
I curate the Videocracy section over at A.V. Club central, which means wading through a lot of not-so-great clips, many of which seem like they're trying to be funny. Whenever anything from VH1's Acceptable TV shows up it's a cause for celebration. The show's clips can be watched on VH1 (for traditionalists) or on the website (for Gen Z) types. Or you can sample one right here, just because I said so.

2007-04-03T17:20:00.000-05:00

ANALOG TO DIGITAL: THE OTHER PARTON

I spent some time this weekend browsing a record store I'd previously underrated--Lincoln Square's Laurie's Planet Of Sound--while hanging out with some old college friends. Browsing the country section I came across two albums by Stella Parton, the younger sister I never knew Dolly Parton had. Turns out she had a low-key country career in the late-'70s, scoring a couple of country hits but never quite emerging from her sister's shadow despite an appearance on The Dukes Of Hazzard. Today she enjoys a gospel career, which you can read all about at her website.

I Want To Hold You In My Dreams is her first non-gospel album and it's not bad, either. Released on her own Country Soul label, it features a number of original compositions sung in a pleasant voice that sounds more than a little like her sisters. And that's probably why I never heard of Stella Parton. There's plenty here to like but nothing that her sister doesn't do better. (And am I wrong or is that Dolly in the background on some of these songs?)

But, putting Dolly aside, this is worth a listen. The title track--the hit--is achingly sincere (I'm a sucker for a good spoken-word passage) and there's an odd little song about Olivia Newton John called "Ode To Olivia," defending her against country purists who didn't like the Australian's inroads into "their" music. And you have to have respect for anyone who cuts a song called "Long Legged Truck Drivers," a raucous declaration of tha narrator's inability not to give it up for any trucker that passes her way.

2007-04-02T22:36:00.000-05:00

WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT? (AMBIENT MIX)
This might be the stupidest way I've ever spent half an hour. I'm teaching myself to use GarageBand while putting together a draft of a possible podcast. This, of course, yielded a remix of Aphex Twin's ambient classic "Cliffs" with soundclips from The Reaping, a movie I want to see for all the wrong reasons. Enjoy?

2007-03-30T12:17:00.000-05:00

A MUST TO AVOID: 360S

My friend and colleague Noel Murray's recent blog post dislodged a traumatic food experience worth sharing, if only so no one else out there makes the same mistake I did this Tuesday. Hungry for a snack, I hit our vending machine and picked up a bag of something called 360s after a cursory glance at packaging promising cheese and pretzels. Thinking it was a rip-off of Combos, a snack favorite since their introduction in the '80s, I opened the package to be greeted by orange pellets that practically glowed. These weren't pieces of cheese surrounded by pretzels; these were pretzels surrounded by cheese. The packaging promised "real cheese" but the "cheddar" looked instead like pieces of clay covered in glaze.

They tasted much the same. I downed three pellets and shared one with a co-worker before trashing them. I'm no stranger to junk food, but this looked like some human equivalent of dry dog food.

The weird thing is you shouldn't have any trouble avoiding them. When I Googled them I found only sites that sold food in bulk to fundraising groups. One contained this note: "Due to the nature of this item, we do not accept returns for this product." I can only imagine some poor Boy Scout in Duluth who has to live with a closet of these once word-of-mouth got out. So how did they end up in an office in Chicago? The mystery deepens.

2007-03-23T16:57:00.000-05:00

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MY WIFE
The ever-delightful Stevie turns 29 today. She will be accepting message of good will both at her own blog and here. Hooray for my lovely wife!

2007-03-22T17:14:00.000-05:00

WORST VACATION EVER

(Okay, just go ahead and say it like the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons: Worst. Vacation. Ever.)

Today is my first day back at the office after the waterborn toxic even that left us all office-less for six week. And it feels good. I had mixed feelings about going back. I'd kind of settled into a nice groove rolling out of bed and into the office. But I think if I'd stayed much longer I would have settled into a nice funk as well. I always already starting to feel it this week when, until I came up with a "to do" list and made myself work through it, felt a bit directionless. It didn't help that the pile of crap I kept bringing home from the temporary office the business staff was using was piling up around my feet. I never realized just how weak the signal-to-noise ratio in all the promo CDs and DVDs we get in until my home became a depository for it all.

It's weird: I could probably swing being a full-time freelancer (emotionally, at least... I'm not sure I could make it work financially.) And I don't mind an office routine, especially since my company is pretty understanding about letting us work at home when we need to. (Which for me is about three times a month when I can't stand the distractions of human company in any form any more.) But this working at home while working for a company business is not an enviable life. There were times I would have loved to have taken my laptop to a library or a coffee shop but couldn't because I felt I needed to be near a phone. And I did. There were fires that had to get put out daily. And there were plenty of days I would have loved to have said "screw it" and just gone shopping for records and comics all day. But I couldn't do that either.

It was getting old and I kept having this urge to cut my hair off that didn't pass until today. (Not in a Britney-sort-of-way. Just much shorter after intentionally growing it out into a moppy thing for a while. Why? I don't know. Blame it on the quasi-shut-in lifestyle. I also realized that, apart from Stevie, I wasn't really talking to anyone else and kind of losing the touch for it. A few more weeks and I'm pretty sure I would have turned into Max Von Sydow in Hannah And Her Sisters. ("Can you imagine the level of a mind that watches wrestling?")

So I welcome the return to office life, even though our office is still problematic. I'm going to try set up a little isolated office within the office so I can have some privacy for once. We'll see how that goes. Also, it's orange. Really orange. How orange? This orange:

Yeah. That orange.

2007-03-21T21:16:00.000-05:00

PIMPING ONION PRODUCT
I can't let this pass without a post:

But to apologize for the indirect self-promotion, here's some piano-playing cats:

2007-03-21T21:05:00.000-05:00

THE QUOTABLE SCREAMIN' JAY HAWKINS

I'm currently reading Gerri Hirshey's Nowhere To Run: The Story Of Soul Music. It's good, too, and kind of sad so far. Published in the early-'80s, it draws heavily on conversations with soul giants who were, by and large, not doing so well in the post-disco era. But I digress. Here's a great quote about soul music from Screamin' Jay Hawkins, interviewed by Hirshey shortly after Hawkins opened for the Rolling Stones:

"Now I never sung that stuff, but I like it, what they call soul. That stuff got heaven and hell in it." He laughs. "Me I guess you have to say I spent most o my time on the dark end of the street."

2007-03-15T19:02:00.000-05:00

ANALOG TO DIGITAL: DUETS, WHAT ARE THEY GOOD FOR?

Edwin Starr and Blinky, Just We Two (1969)

I'd never heard of this album before spotting it at Reckless Records in Chicago but who could resist that cover? This was an album Edwin Starr recorded after "Agent Double-O-Soul" but before "War," working with another new Motown signing, an L.A. preacher's daughter named Blinky. It's a pretty inspired pairing, too. Starr's a belter, and like The Four Tops' Levi Stubbs he pushes the Funk Brothers outside the assembly-line comfort zone. (James Jamerson's bass work is worth the price alone.) Blinky's clearly someone's who grew up listening to gospel and pop and decided she didn't have to choose between them.

Starr would go one to release "War" the next year, one of the few hit songs from the classic Motown era that wears thin over time, especially since he displays a much greater range here than that song's one-note grunting. You won't hear it on too much after "War" either, certainly not on the dreadful disco hit "H.A.P.P.Y. Radio." And Blinky? She apparently kept recording material that never saw the light of day then went on to open for Sammy Davis Jr. before disappearing from the scene. Listening to this it's hard to understand why.

When I started this I decided only to post from albums that aren't available on CD, not realizing that this had come out, in a limited edition, on Hip-O's online-only arm Hip-O select (a.k.a. The site that could eat up the Phipps family fortune if I bought everything from it I liked, like those big Motown singles collections and the James Brown singles series). So, in the interest of fairness, here's a link, and two of the album's best tracks. Dig the way Starr calls Blinky out by name on "I'll Understand." He almost makes the ridiculous name sound sexy.

2007-03-15T14:23:00.000-05:00

REJECTED!

Recently I answered an open call for submissions from Contiuum Press' 33 1/3 series, a run of monograph-like books dedicated to classic albums. Out of 450 submissions they chose 20. Mine wasn't one of them, which is fine, although I was hoping it would be. Meanwhile, my big piece of Memphis music movies was pushed from the issue it was slated to run in with the possibility it might run in a future issue. Might.

So my freelance writing sideline is at an impasse at the moment. Which is okay, I guess. I've got plenty to do for The A.V. Club, which always publishes my writing to an audience that seems to like it. But I would have liked to have written this book and I would have liked to see my Memphis work pay off. Which it might still. Might.

Anyway, below is my rejected proposal in the interest of just getting it out there. I'm not rereading it, especially since I've thought of ways to improve it ever since I sent it. If it's riddled with typos or misspellings, please don't let me know. That would just depresss me. Also, you should hear the album. It's amazing.

* * * * * *

First let me say that I was thrilled to see you had opened the door for submissions for 33 1/3. I’m a big fan of the series and would love to contribute. With that out of the way, let me get right down to it and propose doing a book on an amazing album I can’t believe you haven’t covered yet: Jerry Lee Lewis Live At The Star Club, Hamburg.

It’s an album recorded at a crossroads, both for Lewis and for rock and roll, and I would approach it as such. Having seen scandal diminish his commercial fortunes, Lewis has left Sun Records and Sam Phillips for Smash and an unsure future that, in 1964, has yet to pay off. Yet while the hits have dried up domestically, Lewis’ stock has risen abroad. A return to England, the country that unmade him, has been a great success. He has no shortage of fans in Germany either, wildly enthusiastic fans who chant his name when he plays The Star Club in the heart of Hamburg’s nightclub-and-red-light-district, the Reeperbahn. It’s the district that helped birth The Beatles and other British Invasion bands, a wave of rock and roll musicians who grew up worshipping Lewis and his peers, a generation they’re already eclipsing.

One of the bands chasing The Beatles will back Lewis at the Star Club set, The Nashville Teens, who, despite their name, hail from throughout the U.K. They’re soon to have a hit with “Tobacco Road” then begin a slow fade back to obscurity. On this album, they almost seem to be doing battle with Lewis, his inimitable singing and playing outpacing their secondhand competence. They play the British Invasion sound well, but there’s no mistaking it for anything but a copy of a copy made irrelevant here by the presence of an original. As Lewis races through his own hits, and the hits of others from his generation, they’ll lose the battle even if others will win the war for them.

Lewis remains, as ever, a tortured man, believing that the music at which he excels has already spelled his eternal damnation. He’s still haunted by the loss of his toddler son, Steve Allen Lewis, who died in the family swimming pool. His marriage with Myra Lewis, the cousin he married when she was 13, remains volatile. There’s joy in his playing in front of that chanting crowd, but something else as well. Performing high on amphetamines, the state in which he would continue to perform well into the 1990s, he adds his own flourishes to the lyrics. When he sings, “Jerry Lee’s going to rock away all his blues,” while playing “High School Confidential,” there’s exuberance to it but also some wishful thinking. He’s a few years away from a comeback with the country hit “Another Time, Another Place,” but a performance of Hank Williams’ “Your Cheating Heart” gives a hint of the guilt-soaked records that will send him up the country charts.

Recorded in a time of great change for Lewis and the music he helped popularize, Live At The Star Club, Hamburg provides a jumping off point for further discussion—of both Lewis and the environment surrounding the creation of the album—with virtually every song. I would structure this book around the album’s set list, discussing the origins of each song, its particular relevance to Lewis as a recording artist, and it relation to a larger discussion. The autobiographical “Lewis Boogie,” for instance, would lead into a discussion of Lewis’ origins. With “Great Balls Of Fire,” a song built around the twisting of Pentecostal imagery into a sexual sacrilege, I would talk about Lewis’ religious beliefs. Other points of discussion would include ‘60s Hamburg (a scene as wild and open in its way as ‘50s Memphis), Lewis’ relationship with the artists and rivals whose hits he’s covering (including Carl Perkins, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, and, with “Money,” Motown), and the unhappy decades awaiting him as he sank successfully into the sounds of country remorse.

As for the biographical information, I’m the editor of The A.V. Club, the entertainment section of The Onion. I began at The A.V. Club as a freelancer, then worked as assistant editor before becoming editor and I’ve written thousands (no, really) of music and film reviews for it, in addition to interviewing everyone from Sam Phillips to Robert Altman. During my tenure there I’ve helped build a section that was once an afterthought to the satirical news into a respected publication in its own right. I would be the best possible person to write this book both because of my deep love of the music and because of my willingness to throw myself into a project until I’m second-to-none in expertise. What I don’t know about Lewis and this album already I intend to research thoroughly both through secondary sources and by consulting as many primary sources as I can track down. I zeroed in on this album as the result of writing a piece for an upcoming issue of REDACTED on portrayals of Memphis music in film. I’ve long been drawn to the place and period that created the early sounds of rock and soul music, but it was Lewis that I couldn’t let go of when I finished the piece. I would like to write a book with the unmistakable intensity of a Jerry Lee Lewis performance and the scholarly discipline I’ve admired in other volumes in this series. My favorite so far: Douglas Wolk’s Live At The Apollo, which captured the personality of the performance itself, provided illuminating facts about its context, and breathed with a personality all its own.

I sincerely hope you’ll give me the opportunity to write an entry that can live up to the high standards you’ve set so far.

2007-03-08T22:47:00.001-06:00

MOVIES ON MY MIND: 300

UPDATE:This ended up being a draft for a more polished piece I published on The A.V. Club blog. You can read it here. It's much better than this version.]

Another Tuesday means another Tuesday-night screening, this time for 300, an adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novel about the 300 Spartans who held off an army of Persians at Thermopylae in 480 B.C. I went with my friend and colleague Nathan Rabin and I'm honestly not sure how to respond to the film. On the way back we couldn't decide if what we'd just seen was thrillingly repulsive of repulsively thrilling.

One thing's for sure, it's a fairly faithful adaptation of Miller's book. Like Sin City it tries its best to mimic the look of Miller's art, shooting on soundstages, filling in the backgrounds with CGI effects, and opting for stylization over realism. There are a few notable additions: On their way to Thermopylae the Spartans, led by Gerard Butler's Leonidas, stumble upon a village that's been destroyed by the Persian army, leaving only one small child to tell the tale. Before dying. And there's a lot of business with Leonidas' wife, who's left behind to try to persuade the Spartan council that maybe standing up to the Persians wouldn't be such a bad idea. Both bits feel a lot like padding even if they play into the most disturbing aspect of the Zack Snyder-directed film: Somehow in the translation from page to screen it's become a screaming endorsement of fascism.

That's not a word I want to throw around lightly and I know I'm not quite literally dead-on, since Sparta wasn't a fascist state. But the film doesn't dwell on the finer points of Spartan statecraft. What it offers is vision of society in which value comes only from one's devotion to the preservation of the state. The Sparatans worked toward one purpose, strengthening their city state through raw might. They practiced a brutal version kind of eugenics, discarding any babies found to be flawed. Miller's book portrays all of this with an unabashed admiration for its barbaric integrity. But admiring aspects of ancient principles isn't the same as endorsing them and that's something that gets lost on the way to the screen.

I'm not suggesting that the filmmakers are looking for a Spartan revival, but in moving from one medium to another, 300 has gained a layer of glamour with some disturbing implications. The fight scenes are brutal but, as our own Tasha Robinson points out in her review, so completely divorced from realism that they become oddly bloodless no matter how much blood fills the screen. Snyder shoots the battle scenes with a dynamic intensity, slowing it down to dwell on the good bits. It's thrilling. And it's only thrilling. There's no sense of danger. Death comes with no feeling of loss. Part of what bugged me so much about Troy a few years back was that, even while telling the original war story, it shirked its responsibilities as a war movie, boiling down a devastating, decade-long conflict to what looked like a bloody spring break. Here it's like a weekend with the boys gone slightly awry.

Nathan said he couldn't remember a movie so unabashedly pro-war. I can't remember one so unabashedly pro-nationalism. The Spartans here constantly define themselves by what they are not. When an envoy from Xerxes mentions Athens, Leonidas dismisses them as "boy lovers." (There's an inconvenient truth about that distinction.) When Xerxes meets Leonidas, the film plays up his ambiguous sexuality and not-so-ambiguous body language. And it's not just behavior that's un-Spartan. The Persian army consists of Middle Easterners, East Asians, and Africans. If the film never quite treats the other races as repulsive, it doesn't hesitate to emphasize their exoticism and danger, elements that clearly have no place in an ordered, Spartan society.

Any resemblance to our own is not entirely coincidental. Miller's book was released in 1998, years before our current conflict in the gulf. But a film's a product of its time and it would be hard not to draw parallels even if the screenplay didn't throw in touches to make the connection even clearer. There's a lot of bellowing about "freedom" (nevermind all that compulsory military service), a feckless, corrupt anti-war legislative body to deal with and the film ends with Sparta leading all of Greece in a battle against mystic force from the East. A shameless recruiter would spend this weekend trolling the multiplexes.

300 plays like Starship Troopers without the irony and it closes on a note of triumph that shuts out the great irony of history. The repulsion of the Persion army paved the way for a golden age, one that allowed for Sophocles, Plato, Euripides, Heordotus... you name it. And it lasted about 80 years until a fairly pointless civil war between Sparta and Athens ended it. But that would have to be the subject of a very different sort of movie. Don't expect a sequel.

2007-03-08T08:49:00.000-06:00

ANALOG TO DIGITAL: PICKING THE HITS

Anyone who's spent any time in used record stores—and I'm speaking here as someone who's logged plenty of hours in them—knows that a few things are always true:

1) They all smell the same
2) They're always poorly lit
3) There's always plenty of Herb Alpert and Chet Atkins albums laying around for cheap.

I once decorated a small niche of an especially crappy apartment with copies of Alpert's Whipped Cream And Other Delights, but I'd never spent much time with Atkins until recently. Atkins ran RCA's Nashville division for years, pioneering the crossover "Nashville sound" that would help define country music in the '60s. Atkins also cut a lot of albums on his own, usually two or three a year. He'd typically lay down rhythm tracks at RCA's famed Studio B, a facility he'd put on the map, and record the leads at his home studio.

Atkins recorded many instrumental versions of contemporary hits, but even the renditions that border on easy-listening kitsch are usually redeemed by his distinctive playing. I picked up Solid Gold '69 in part because I simply couldn't imagine Atkins' versions of "Son Of A Preacher Man" or "Aquarius" and in part because I never pass up any rendition of "Hey Jude." But the standout tracks are the sensitive readings of "Both Sides Now" and "Blackbird" I've posted below.

One more thing: For some reason Donovan does the liner notes. There aren't any Donovan songs on it and if he appears on it somewhere, it eluded me. But the note is worth reproducing verbatim:

chet paul's tunes sensitive love for love young brownskin harp ear good for nice sounds but of fuzz great face beautiful guitar fondling country smooth like strings and cream joni's tune lovely classical box rewind once upon a time irish music went west and fiddles and jest country music came from the marriage of men's cultures under new suns and now c & w is very popular in ireland... and chet is very popular in america and i thank him for playing "our" new tune so beautifully. -- Donovan

Well said.

2007-03-07T21:17:00.000-06:00

ALTERNATIVE LIFESTYLES: MIAMI VALLEY STYLE
"Maybe even a sandwich platter"

This is primarily going to be of interest to my fellow Daytonians. It's a tour of the Dayton Swim Club, a North Dixie Dr. institution that I've driven past many times without realizing that, well, it wasn't a swim club. Let's take a tour!

I think I'd love this clip anyway. The host is just so dang jovial as he shows off all the low-budget benefits of joining the Swim Club. Soda machines! A video game! A mechanical horse with a vibrator glued onto it! Amazing.

2007-03-05T20:41:00.000-06:00

MOVIES ON MY MIND

RECENT FILMS I HAVE SEEN: Zodiac, Summer Rental, and a secret surprise movie even I didn't expect to see

Putting aside the Neil LaBute remake of The Wicker Man, David Fincher's Zodiac, which I caught last Tuesday, was one of the most disturbing films I've seen in a while, and not necessarily for the reasons you might suspect. In recreating the investigation into the late-'60s/early-'70s Zodiac murders, Fincher doesn't spare any of the grisly details—there's a murder by a lake that's all the more disturbing for its unflinching matter-of-factness—but what he gets really right is the psychic toll of obsession and the cancerous effect of an unanswered wrong. In a blind taste test I couldn't have told you that this was from the same director as Seven, Fight Club, and Panic Room. They're all films I admire, but the the nihilism of the first two has been transformed here into a muted dread. It settles like a haze on a San Francisco that's left the Summer Of Love far behind and the technical flash, so much in evidence in Panic never calls attention to itself here. It's technically brilliant, but in a chilly, Kubrickian kind of way. Even when blood gets spilled it looks cold.

Here's how our own Scott Tobias put it (and put it well):

Zodiac follows the events in strict chronology, without imposing an artificial structure. This daring conceit risks shapelessness, but makes the passage of time more devastating, as datelines separated by days or weeks extend to full years while the case lies fallow.

Devastating's exactly right. Watch as Robert Downey Jr.'s character devolves from funny drunk to a pathetic, almost inhuman lump of a man. Maybe he would have gotten there without the Zodiac killer. Maybe not. The film never veers from this strategy. Labels like "Six months later..." pop up between scenes as the leads grow cold. It's comic until it becomes tragic.

There are moments here that need discussing that can't quite be talked about without spoilig the plot. But I need to talk about one, so I'll vague it up as best I can. After a long stretch of scenes that's little more than characters discussing leads and finding out that everybody knows something about the case but nobody knows everything—there are lots of passages like this—one of the characters follows a lead into a moment straight out of The Silence Of The Lambs. He's in the wrong place at the wrong time and it's clearly going to cost him. Except it doesn't. It's a dead end followed by trusting someone else's wrong instincts, something we don't find out until many scenes later, maybe years for him (I can't remember). But the film doesn't make a big deal acknowledging this. The character's moment of mortal fear becomes irrelevant to him since it turned out not to contribute to solving the murders. It's exhausting to share that kind of paranoia and monomania for two and a half hours and Fincher makes it clear it's just a sample of what it would be to live it and there's no small reward in that.

*******

I don't have a lot to say about the 1985 comedy Summer Rental, which I watched, kind of, while doing some file sorting at the end of the day last week. (Ah, the joys of working at home.) It was one of those films I alway wanted to see as a kid and never got around to seeing. And now I've seen it. With Summer School another film on my Netflix queue, it comes from a brief period in the mid-'80s when Carl Reiner was synonymous with summer comedies. It also came from that period when John Candy was in seemingly everything. Here the gags are cheap and belabored and the plots straight from the snobs v. slobs playbook. Watching it was purely an exercise in reflexive nostalgia and the most rewarding part came from being reminded of what old cereal boxes used to look like. I used to think there was some value to watching just about any movie I hadn't seen before. As I get older I'm not so sure. (Which doesn't mean I'm not going to watch Summer School too.)

*****

So the big secret movie: When we saw Zodiac there was a marketing type there offering us passes to one of two movies. The first was The Brave One, a Neil Jordan film starring Jodie Foster and Terrence Howard. All that sounds promising. The second was a mystery movie. The marketing woman said that all she could tell us was that it would be rated PG and that it came from, "this genre of film," at which point she waved her hand across a sheet of paper listing everything from Cars to Pirates Of The Caribbean. Hmmm.... Something sure to be interesting or a mystery movie? The choice was clear: We went with the mystery movie.

There was much fuss and bother in getting to the screening and a lot of line-waiting as well. By the time we got inside we'd convinced ourselves we would be seeing Fred Claus since the passes, upon closer inspection, further specified it was a "holiday" movie and we knew it was in post-production in Chicago since the media was all over star Vince Vaughn for complaining about our city's post-production services. We were wrong. Long story short (and maybe these magic words will send my traffic through the roof): I've seen Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix.

How was it? I'm not even sure I should say. Ethically, I'm not even sure I should have been there since I don't think critics are even supposed to go to test screenings. But I'm not reviewing it professionally so screw it. I liked it, anyway, so I'm not poisoning any wells.

When the film series started, I didn't have much invested in it and, frankly, the films didn't really reward investment. I had only read the first book, which I liked just fine, but the first two films were kind of a bore. I remembered little beyond Kenneth Branagh's sly turn in the second one and Rupert Grint's ability to look either mortified or terrified (but never both at the same time and never any other emotion .)

The third film, Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban changed that in a big way. The story deepened considerably (just as it did in the books), the stars grew into their roles, and director Alfonso Cuaron got beneath the special effects to find the human element. At the same time, I caught up with the series (thanks in no small part to Stevie's enthusiasm; she screamed like an eight-year-old when they announced what we were seeing) and the quality of the films started to matter to me.

Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire fell short of its predecessor but it wasn't bad, either. It just got a little too caught up in the big setpieces and lost sight of the characters. That's not a problem here. The massive plot's been streamlined considerably, but it's been streamlined smartly. There are a few scenes that will mean a lot more to readers of the book but having read the book isn't essential. But director David Yates (who's previously worked mostly in British television) strikes a pretty great balance between the kind of drama that comes from big scary monsters and the kind that comes from realizing how easy it is to feel absolutely isolated from eveyone around you. The first shot's a killer and the only effect is a piece of abandoned playground equipment. Yates is sticking around for the next entry, too, and that's not bad news at all.

Everybody's good in it, too, but I have to single out Imelda Staunton's turn as Dolores Umbridge, a teacher with the most memorable talent for passive aggression since Uriah Heep. Some of J.K. Rowling's political subtext might have been lost if Staunton hadn't played her as Thatcher with fixation on cute kitten collector plates. She might be slightly less fist-tighteningly hateful than she was in the book, but only slightly.

I can't really say I enjoyed the test-screening process. It's a vile practice that's crept evolved from a marketing tool into an intrinsic part of the creative process. That's wrong. And, furthermore, this wasn't quite ready to screen. Many of the effects weren't done, and they got less complete as the film went along. I'd like to see it again with a climax that doensn't involve Ralph Fiennes with CGI-assist dots on his face battling Michael Gambon on a soundstage. But it was interesting to be on the other side of it, tiny pencils at all. We were asked for our favorite and least favorite scenes, asked to rate various elements on a scale of one to five, and questioned about our favorite characters. If we'd all hated one scene, would it be gone? If we'd ganged up on Daniel Radcliffe, could he have lost his job? Who knows? I'm sure they'll ignore my comments anyway. I'm out of the demo. Who cares what I think?

2007-03-01T08:59:00.000-06:00

ANALOG TO DIGITAL: THE GREAT TWIN CITIES FUNK POP BAND THAT WASN'T

(First: Sorry so long between posts. The next couple of days should be better. In the meantime, here's some more from my continuing efforts to transfer some vinyl music to MP3s.)

When Sinead O'Connor had a hit with "Nothing Compares 2 U," articles about her always touched on a few points:
1) She's bald
2) She's odd
3) U2 helped her get her start
4) She's Irish
5) Prince wrote it

But Prince didn't write it for O'Connor. He wrote it for The Family, might've-been-huge-but-wasn't Paisley Park act consisting of three refugees from the recently disbanded Time (St. Paul Peterson, Jellybean Johnson, and percussionist/hype man Jerome Benton), saxophonist/vocalist Eric Leeds, and Susannah Melvoin, twin sister of The Revolution's Wendy Melvoin.

They released one album in 1985, but even by the time I got curious about hearing the original version of "Nothing Compares 2 U" and was already buying up every Prince b-side I could get my hands on, it was hard to find. Was it some lost treasure of Minneapolis funk? I finally had my question answered recently when I found a vinyl copy for $5.99. Answer: No.

But it's not bad either, as these two tracks suggest. "Screams Of Passion" was the single and while I'm not going to say that this version of "Nothing" surpasses O'Connor's or the version Prince threw on his greatest hits collection. But it's worth hearing anyway.

P.S. The new embedded file-sharing system comes via a free site called Divshare, which I recommend.

2007-02-19T17:52:00.000-06:00

HAPPY PRESIDENT'S DAY

In honor of today's holiday, here's the legendary Joe Garden:

2007-02-19T17:28:00.000-06:00

JERRY LEE LEWIS: LIVE AT THE FRENCH LICK RESORT AND CASINO, FRENCH LICK, INDIANA

I've regretted going to my share of concerts over the years, and sometimes not even because they're bad. There's a Tortoise show that stands out as something that would be a truly memorable experience if the band was playing in your living room as you drifted off to enjoy a nice nap. But I've never once regretted turning out for one of the old guys. One of my favorite concert memories ever is seeing Johnny Cash at the Glastonbury Festival in 1994. This was around the same time the first American Recordings album came out. He was that year's token old-timer and I don't think he expected the reception he got. It's not like he ever stopped touring, but I don't think he'd ever played to a sea of black-clad, pierced English youth who could sing along to every song. And I mean every song. Not just "Ring Of Fire" but "Ghost Riders In The Sky," too.

On Saturday night Stevie and I saw Jerry Lee Lewis, like Cash another member of the Million Dollar Quartet. The last one, actually. He even named his last album Last Man Standing and put a picture of himself with Cash, Elvis, and Carl Perkins inside. I've been on a big Jerry Lee kick ever since writing the (apparently still in the editing process) article on Memphis music movies and picking up the aforementioned Last Man Standing. (A side note: It's actually quite good, unlike most of the oldsters-duet-with-younger-stars albums. Of particular note: A duet with Keith Richards called "That Kind Of Fool" on which they lament they were never the kind of fools who could just have one drink and go home to their wives.)

I'll spare you the harrowing ordeal of getting there via Google Maps directions that took us through the back roads of a national forest where no house is apparently complete unless there's half an automobile or a broken stove on the lawn and mention only in passing that southern Indiana is (otherwise) really pretty to get to the show. Once again: No regrets. Lewis' long-serving band warmed up the show with a handful of oldies which the drunken louts behind us dimissed is "bullshit" that quickly got downgraded to "third rate bullshit." It wasn't, but it wasn't star time either. That came when Lewis ambled out, explained that his plane had been rerouted and that he hadn't had time to change then launched into "Roll Over Beethoven." His voice was problematic on some songs, in fine form on others but the playng remained, as always, an inimitable force of nature. And, despite the environment--which offered excellent acoustics but little else in the way of atmosphere--it felt like a Jerry Lee Lewis show. The drunken louts wandered up to the front of the stage to do some dancing, prompting security to escort them to one side, but not before one of them engaged in some spirited finger-pointing in Lewis' direction and Lewis returned the favor. Later Lewis complained about how it wasn't a rock and roll show if people could tell you how to dance and when to dance. This was shortly before a fight broke out (also involving one of the louts.) For a good 90 seconds or so it was more Memphis roadhouse than sterile casino.

One particular highlight was Charlie Rich's "Don't Put No Headstone On My Grave," which Lewis played as a country lament that turned into rockabilly then back again. These are the official words:
"Don't put no headstone on my grave,
All my life I've been a slave,
Want the whole wide world to know,
That I'm the man that loved you so"
For some reason I heard "loved you so" as "loved his soul." I could be wrong. But I do know he finished the song by slamming the cover of the piano keys against the piano and then looking out at the audience in defiance of something. It might have been death or maybe just the woman he took to task for putting her fingers in her ears with the words, "And people say I'm crazy."

As I was hoping, he also did his rendition of "Over The Rainbow," which just kills me. And he closed, of course, "With Great Balls Of Fire" and "Whole Lotta Shaking Going On." For the final passages of "Shaking" he rose, kicked over the piano bench, and played standing up. There was great effort involved in every part of that action and to close the show he simply wandered off and let the band play the final notes. But the spirit behind the gesture was unmistakable. One more rock and roll show down and The Killer was off to join the night, even if now it was at a slower pace.

Below's the setlist. Both it and the photo above come via the thorough European fansite The Jerry Lee Lewis Start Page.

1) Roll Over Beethoven
2) Over The Rainbow
3) Sweet Little Sixteen
4) Memphis, Tennessee
5) Before The Night Is Over
6) She Even Woke Me Up To Say Goodbye
7) Why You Been Gone So Long
8) Don't Put No Headstone On My Grave
9) I Dont Want To Be Lonely Tonight
10) You Win Again
11) Hadacol Boogie
12) Great Balls Of Fire
13) Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On

2007-02-19T16:02:00.000-06:00

ANALOG TO DIGITAL: DANCE, GREEDO, DANCE

I've had this album, Patrick Gleeson's Star Wars laying around for years without really recognizing what it was all about. I picked it up mainly because it looked like a hilariously kitsch Star Wars cash-in and featured this impossible to pass up subtitle: "Selections From The Film Performed On The World's Most Advanced Synthesizer." This, of course, must be heard. It is, pretty much as I suspected, an awesome relic, setting John Williams' score to a disco beat and throwing in every flourish that the world's most advanced synthesizer circa 1977 has to offer. (For the record, that's, per Gleeson's liner notes, "an E-mu (pronounced ee-mew) systems synthesizer. It is polyphonic--that is it plays 16 notes simultaneously when instructed to do so--and it is computer driven. The computer, which stores up to 8000 notes in from one to nine memory banks, is based on the Z-80 central processing unite, a popular chip among 'homebrew' computer folks.")

What I didn't realize was the Gleeson was the electronic music guru who put a heavy stamp on Herbie Hancock's early-'70s albums like the awesome Sextant. He's still active, too. There's a short article about him on endlessgroove.com and he's got a MySpace page.

So now I feel a bit bad about being disrespectful to this album for all these years since the man behind it is a legitimate talent whose work I've enjoyed immensely elsewhere. But that doesn't really make the album itself any better. Gleeson provides some detailed liner notes about wanthing to take "another approach" to Williams' score "one that did involve synthesizers and which was more surreeal than the scoring of the original." He also talks about embedding "semi-hidden references back to the film." For instance: "On the main theme track, which is Luke's theme, if you listen carefully to the bassline you'll hear that it is divided into two sections, one of them a hip funk line which is very 1977, and the other one a kind of remembrance of the way basslines were in the late '50s. This is because to me Luke is both a contemporary hero, and also a kind of throwback to the science fiction hero of the fifties--he hardly even kisses the girl."

Well, the reasons for that would come out later. Meanwhile, all I hear is disco John Williams.

Listen: Patrick Gleeson, "Star Wars Theme (Luke's Theme)"

Listen: Patrick Gleeson, "Cantina Music"

2007-02-10T23:24:00.000-06:00

ANALOG TO DIGITAL: WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

Okay, I know I'm way, way behind everyone else with this, but I'm still thrilled I've learned how to do this. And by this I mean convert records into MP3s. I got my turntable back from my pal Bryce and had it figured out pretty quickly. And I will share with you the first fruits of my labor: A Moog version of the theme from Alfie as performed by someone named Christopher Scott. It's from the 1969 album Switched-On Bacharach. More to come, I'm sure.

Listen: Christopher Scott, "Alfie"

2007-02-08T22:12:00.000-06:00

THEY'RE TRYING TO WASH US AWAY

So, this is why my week has been a little hectic: Exploding pipes. Namely, one exploding pipe at our office that flooded us out. Kyle came back from the bathroom saying it had "exploded" and that water was headed our way. I thought he had to be joking or exaggerating. He wasn't. This is what it looked like (all photos courtesy of Kyle Ryan):

My first thought was, "Oh, this sucks. I should just go work at home." It didn't really occur to me until I saw firemen on the stairs evacuating the building that I had to go home. Here's my on the stairs (please note the water cascading down):

And here's what the hardest hit part of our office looks like:

As of now, we're all housebound, which is okay by me. I'm pretty productive when working at home. But who knows when we can go back? Apparently there's no guarantee against bacterial infections and other troubling possibilities. (It was sewer water after all.) I'm planning on stopping by tomorrow to pick up some mail and some recording equipment. This week has taken a strange turn, to be sure.

2007-02-08T22:10:00.000-06:00

A PICTURE INSTEAD OF WORDS

Hey. Sorry me no post for a while. Here's a picture of some Battlestar Galactica Mini-mates to make up for it. Note the Starbuck figure comes with a cigar.

2007-01-29T10:41:00.000-06:00

HEY MAN, I'M ON A PODCAST
The inimitable Jesse Thorn, creator of the beloved podcast/public radio show The Sound Of Young America was kind enough to feature me on the latest episdoe of his other podcast, Jordan, Jesse GO!. I dole out TV advice and am outed as a fan of Dr. Who. You can get it on iTunes or here.

Updated: Jesse sent in a better link. It's in the comments.

2007-01-28T19:22:00.000-06:00

NEW A.V. CLUB FEATURE / THE BEES

On Thursday we unveiled Videocracy, a new A.V. Club feature charting the most popular video clips on the web. I'm happy with it. But I'm not sure why this hasn't made the charts yet:

...especially since we've been quoting around the house endlessly since finding it. "The bees! The bees! MY EYES!"

2007-01-28T18:54:00.000-06:00

OPERA NIGHT: TURANDOT

Stevie and I took a trip to the Lyric Opera on Friday to see Turandot. It was part of my Christmas gift to her but, of course, kind of a present for myself as well. I wish we got there more often. I'm a fully committed fan of the opera whenever I'm there even if I rarely listen to it outside of an actual performance. Maybe it's a situational fandom--I think I can name most of the Ring Cycle but I don't remember what order they fall in--but I'm as happy at the Lyric as I am at the Music Box (our revival theater) or the Vic (our favorite concert venue). In another century it might have been more central to my cultural life. As is, I'm glad for every chance I get to experience it. We had season tickets one year in the second or third-worst seats in the house. It was a nice education but since then we've been paying for good tickets once or twice a year instead of terrible seats all year round.

Friday we saw Turandot, Puccini's final opera. He left it unfinished shortly before smoking himself to death. Conductin it for the first time, his friend Arturo Toscanini famously stopped the production at the last note Puccini wrote. This was my first time seeing it and I can't say I loved it the way I love Tosca or Madama Butterfuly. The ending obviously suffers--I can't help but think that Turandot herself would have more than one big moment--but beyond that I found myself not liking the lead characters in the least. It's a fairy tale piece inspired by a story from the 1001 Nights and it doesn't allow for the psychological complexity I like so much in his other works. There's one great Puccini heroine, but she's off in the margins. Still, the music is, of course, beyond inspired, so why quibble?

It might also have been the production we saw, which sported wonderful, almost Disney-like sets by David Hockney but variable performances. I liked the singer who played Turandot and loved the singer who played Liu and while I appreciated the voice of the South African tenor who played Cafalo, his acting was comically awful. The crowd felt it, too. I hadn't seen such a lukewarm response since we saw Regina a not-so-smooth adaptation of Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes by Marc Blitzstein (a.k.a. that guy from Cradle Will Rock. I don't have the critical terminology to explain why it fell short, but you can feel opera when it gets to that place. This mostly didn't.

2007-01-23T20:20:00.000-06:00

MY DAY: JANUARY 23, 2007

Because when there's nothing else to write about, there's always today.

• Went to the gym and finally gave the new Arcade Fire album a good lisen. Oh. Yes.
• Went to work and figured out some assignments between calls. Also reviewed the new Clap Your Hands Say Yeah album and learned that I actually didn't have crummy MP3 files. It really sounds like that.
• Talked to a publicist who informed us that the publicist of a famous actor had turned us down for an interview with no explanation. It was a real WTF moment. If I had to pick an actor that I knew everyone on staff considered one of their favorite actors it would be this guy. Again, WTF?
• Pulled the trigger on some iTunes tracks that had been piling up in my shopping cart, mostly Nas songs from those in-between-years recommended by Nathan and some Neptunes-produced songs I don't have already.
• I'm now watching the State Of The Union address. Is Obama sleeping? And if he is, will that kill his presidential run?

2007-01-18T19:40:00.000-06:00

MY ADVENTURES IN MYSPACE: DAY OF THE CAM-WHORES

I have a MySpace page, just like everyone else. I usually check it every couple of days. Today I checked it twice. This morning I had no new messages or friend requests. This afternoon I had 12. Now I have 17. Why? One word.... Or is it two?: Cam-whores.

You've probably met them as well, especially if you set your profile to "male" and "straight." They set up profiles with provocative pictures that fig-leaf links for X-rated web cam services, or even other, non-X-rated sites. Take Grace:

She's just your average 20-year-old California girl who wants to be my friend. And if I want to see more pictures of her, there's a link for that too... A link to a laser-hair-removal service.

Ordinarily I ignore them but the deluge today is extraordinary. And then there's this. I'd like you to meet two of my new friends. First there's Gisele:

Then there's Mandoline:

Now, I suppose there's a chance that they're twins. The certainly make the same spelling errors. One links to another site (the ubiquitously advertised dating site true.com) with the come on "Want to see my in my birthday suite?" The other asks "Tell me if you like my birthday suite." Sadly, she'll never learn the answer. (Neither will Ashlyn, eMiLy, Miranda, Mandy, Shania, Larissa, Serenity, Ellen, Rianna Gloria, Ally, Kenna, Jasmin, or Leila.)

2007-01-17T19:46:00.000-06:00

MY DAY: JANUARY 17, 2007

Because when there's nothing else to write about, there's always today.

• Some unavoidable delays around the house meant I got to catch the beginning of Regis And Kelly. Regis was blown away by Tony Danza's turn in The Producers. Kelly thought the American Idol judges were way too hard on the poor kid who sang and juggled.
• Wrote a review of The Good, The Bad & The Queen, Damon Albarn's new quasi-supegroup with Paul Simonon of The Clash, Tony Allen from Fela Kuti's band, and Simon Tong of The Verve. Yawn.
• Wrote my contributions to a piece I'm co-writing with Noel that's, in part, about great bands destined never to make the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. I'm now listening to Hüsker Dü. These are related.
• Came home to see how the tortilla soup I made in the slow cooker turned out. Spicy.
• Made the unfortunate discovery that doing an image search for Tony Danza with "safe search" turned off yields some unfortunate results. Try it!

2007-01-17T19:29:00.000-06:00

WHY SHOULDN'T THIS MAN BE PRESIDENT?

I mean, Obama puts this:

on his official website. (I ganked it from The Beat, however.)

I've got a pretty big politician crush on Obama already, and this just makes it more pronounced. Of course, if 24 taught me anything the other night it's that even nice presidents have to make impossible decisions. So maybe he's better off not running.

2007-01-17T13:28:00.000-06:00

TESTING AUDIO HOSTING

Can I host audio files? I'm trying to find out. If it works, here's Booker T. And The MGs playing "Mrs. Robinson." It's from The Complete Stax/Volt Singles (1968-1971), available via eMusic or at a store near you. You should buy it! (I'm covering my ass here.)

Booker T. And The MGs, "Mrs. Robinson"

2007-01-15T21:02:00.000-06:00

MY DAY: JANUARY 15, 2006
Because when there's nothing else to write about, there's always today.

• Realized I hadn't posted anything here for a while and decided I should.
• Realized that I was so wiped out by finishing my big freelance piece (yay) that I'm officially out of things to say.
• So here's a post anyway. Whatever.
• Went to the gym very early despite not getting enough sleep.
• Stevie had the day off so I rode the bus into work today. On the bus I was wearing my cold-weather hat, one of those ridiculous-looking but very warm hunting caps with the flaps and the (fake) fur lining. I had the flaps down over my earphones. I was carrying my shoulder bag and a plastic bag with my lunch in it, which required some juggling. Once in my seat, I took out a notebook to work on a review longhand that I needed to finish today when I noticed that the draft from the door was blowing my hair. So I moved across the aisle, a process that involved securing my iPod and notebook and moving both bags then settling in and repositioning all of my stuff and getting comfortable with my notebook again so I could start scrawling away in my indecipherable handwriting. It was at this point I realized that, to all appearances, the line separating me from a crazy homeless person had never been thinner.
• Wrote. Edited. Went home. Made homemade French fries. Am currently watching the Golden Globes with Stevie. Jamie Foxx loves himself.

2007-01-08T20:38:00.000-06:00

"SOME OF YOU ARE GONNA END UP PUKING": (OR I WANT TO BE A "SLASHER MOVIE CRITIC")

Here's an amazing clip in which TV's Morton Downey Jr. puts horror movies on trial. Anyone heard of John Anastasio outside of this clip?