A Tale

Yesterday I twoerted that I like the Antlers album Hospice and that it sounds kind of like a Bon Iver/Secret Machines mashup. I was wrong. It's not a mashup. It is a much more complicated relationship than that.

It's more like Bon Iver and The Secret Machines were seat-mates on a trans-Atlantic flight in the early 80's from Munich to Chicago. After takeoff, they started chatting about this and that and found out that they both lived in the same upscale suburb north of Chicago, right on lake Michigan. In fact, they both knew some of the same people, went to the same dentist and had kids in the same school, though not in the same grades. Bon Iver had kids in 1st and 5th grades while the Secret Machines had twins in 3rd grade, a boy and a girl. They also discovered that they were both Vietnam veterans, Bon Iver an Army officer fresh out of West Point at the time and the Secret Machines an Air Force mechanic. The Secret Machines had been there for the fall of Saigon. As the plane landed, they exchanged phone numbers and made plans to see each other again soon.

Two weeks later, Bon Iver calls up the Secret Machines and invites them and their wife to dinner on Friday. In another strange coincidence, Bon Iver's wife and the Secret Machines know each other. In fact, they were once high school sweethearts so desperately in love they planned to marry at 17. The wedding was prevented by Angie's parents because the Secret Machines were worthless failures who would probably just end up having to enlist in the armed forces because there weren't any other options for no-accounts like them. She cried for days when the Secret Machines DID enlist. But she moved on. She went to college, got a job as a copy writer at a big downtown ad agency and the Secret Machines showed up in her thoughts less and less until she met Bon Iver at a happy hour on the Miracle Mile and all thoughts of the Secret Machines disappeared. He was a handsome, dashing Army officer just returned from Vietnam and Angie liked nothing better than an emotionally wounded man to care and fall for. So a year later they got married. He worked for a big defense contractor and worked his way quickly up the ladder to Vice President in charge of Munitions Operations. They had kids, bought a house on Lake Michigan and everything was beautiful and kind.

But all of that came crashing down as she saw the Secret Machines for the first time in nearly 20 years. They didn't turn out to be a no-account. In fact, they were now the owner of the biggest aircraft maintenance company in the tri-county area. Midway, O'Hare, even Milwaukee all used the Secret Machines for maintenance contracts. Their wife was lovely. No, not just lovely. Stunning. The kind of woman you see on magazine covers or billboards or trading cards if they made trading cards for beautiful people.

At first, the Secret Machines didn't even realize the connection. They were so far divorced from their past as the poor kids from the wrong side of the tracks that everything before 1974 seemed like a dream, or a copy of copy of a copy, or a television show that you forget about as you are watching it, flushed down the short term memory hole. But then, the Secret Machines were introduced (or re-introduced) to Angie and everything that would happen in the months ahead was written on their eyes in that instant.

At dinner, everyone laughed about the coincidence and the Secret Machines and Angie told stories about the old days. Everything was perfect. The Secret Machines felt young again. Angie made love with Bon Iver more fiercely than she had in years that night. He credited the 4 glasses of wine she'd had, but really it was the Secret Machines coursing through her head.

They began a torrid affair, the Secret Machines and Angie did. Lunchtime trysts, "out of town meetings," and soon they realized that the love they'd felt as teenagers was no passing fancy. Or was this just a mid-life crisis? A clinging to youth and power and soul and life that was doomed to burn out? No, it must be love, they told themselves over and over and over. Saying it did help to lessen the guilt a little.

And so the divorces started. Bon Iver, resigned to his fate, parted amicably with Angie, sharing custody of the children. He was hurt of course, and though resigned to it, did occasionally curse his fate. Of all the people in the world to end up next to on that flight, why did it have to be the Secret Machines? Why not John Ritter or even Jack Johnson? Why godammit? He had a good life! A good wife! And now he had his munitions. At least with Panama and Grenada, Libya and Afghanistan business was booming.

The Secret Machines, however, forced an unwanted and devastating divorce on their gorgeous and emotionally unstable wife, Emilia. Two weeks before the divorce was final, she took too many muscle relaxants. Her car was found wrapped around a bridge abutment and her body was crushed inside the Jaguar. Her face, the thing that had attracted them to her in the first place, was untouched however. She could almost have been closing her eyes to listen to a particularly good aria at the Chicago Opera House. It was a wonderful funeral, as far as such things can be wonderful. The kids were crushed to lose their mother and turned to the Secret Machines for more support than ever. They had always been a good father, the Secret Machines, and it broke their heart to think that it was their actions and an internal combustion engine that had pushed Caroline and Jeremy's mother into that abutment. They never told the kids why. The police wrote it off as an accident. So it goes.

And life went on. The Secret Machines and Angie married and moved to a different suburb on the lake. Bon Iver never did remarry. He had plenty of opportunities, but something just never felt right. Maybe she smelled to much like soup. Maybe she stole his cat. It was always something, and as his children grew up, they passed word of his excuses and reasons to Angie when they were at her house. Every time she heard about Bon Iver, she felt a pang of sadness, knowing that she was partly responsible for his emotional state, but the pangs always passed quickly.

The kids grew up, moved out, started families of their own. Grandkids came around every so often, in from New York or Dallas or wherever it was their parents had moved them to now.

Then one afternoon in September of 2008, Bon Iver's phone rang on his mahogany desk in his Chairman-of-the-board suite. He picked it up. The voice he heard on the other end was familiar, but so.....old.

"Angie died last night," said the voice, and Bon Iver knew at once that it was the Secret Machines. He couldn't bring himself to speak. So many emotions were being generated by his glands that he couldn't even breathe. Hate, fear, sadness, schadenfreude, and regret. Anger, panic, despair and the crushing sense of lost hope. For he'd never given up. Like the grown children of divorced parents, his own children, he always harbored a ridiculous and irrational hope, that maybe just maybe she would change her mind. That they would get back together. But now it was impossible. It felt like his life hadn't changed, but somehow the universe was different.

"It was colon cancer. The funeral's next Monday if you would like to come. It will be at Memorial Cemetery on Westminster Street. 1 PM."

And again, silence.

"Goodbye, Bon Iver."


And so he did go. He went and he saw his old friends that had sided with Angie. Everyone looked so ancient, so withered, half-dead and it hit him: that's how I look too. And he realized that it was too late. But yet not too late for some things.

At the wake, Bon Iver went up to the Secret Machines. "I'm sorry for our loss," he said. "Our loss," not "your loss." The point came across clearly. And they started talking. They drank scotch and talked and ate things off trays that the waiters brought around. The Secret Machines told stories, Bon Iver told stories. They shared as only two lonely people at a funeral can.

A week later, the Secret Machines received a call.

"It's time," crackled the voice of Bon Iver over a cellular connection that was interfered with as one of the largest solar flares ever recorded washed over the earth in a bath of plasma and voltage.

"It's time to record an album."

"Let's do this before we die. Let's do this before it all goes black," said the Secret Machines.

And so they did, and that album would sound kind of like The Antlers - Hospice.

Anyway, I give the Antlers 4.5 cuils out of 5.

You Say You Want a Revolution!?

Well, I don't have one for you.

What I do have is a brief story about how one time I went out to real Virginia (this would have been last week) and as I was just starting to drive, I realized that I didn't have any CDs with me in the car (and mind you, this car has a 6-CD cartridge changer in the trunk!) so I stopped at my favorite record store to buy some. Since it's kind of a long drive, I purchased 3 new CDs. I am doing my part to keep the record companies in business. I only pirate software. So here's what I think about those 3!

1) Shame, Shame - Dr. Dog: Honestly, I'm a little disappointed. Fate was totally good, so I expected the same. It was only regular, not totally, good, though. I think it earns 11 dog-eared DSM IVs out of 14 (They're not a real doctor, but we call them Dr. Dog)

2) Infinite Arms - Band of Horses: You know that one song, Funeral by Band of Horses? Yeah, that's about my depth of knowledge of them too, until I bought this album. Basically, I chose to buy it because The National was sold out and I'd heard of this band and the cover looked really cool. I know I'm not supposed to judge things by their covers, but a lot of time it works! And it did here. This album does for symphonic dirge-pop what Shame, Shame did for medical canine-pop. By that I mean it was a new album. Rating: a linear approximation of a Taylor series (the fourth Taylor series to be exact)

3) Congratulations - MGMT: I liked it. I don't care what anybody else says, I like it! (BTW, what do other people say? I really want to make sure I'm not going outside the group consensus on this. I don't want to lose my valuable CRED points.) There is a song about Brian Eno. Rating: On a scale of 1 to Clever! this one gets a "ConGradulations!" with a picture of a diploma.

Just This Thing

The Top 14 Albums of 2008 (That I happened to download, purchase or otherwise hear)

1. Dr. Dog – Fate
   In many respects, this album was a watershed moment for bands with the word “Dog” in their names. Not since Three Dog Night were in their heyday has a “Dog” banded sounded…well, so much like Three Dog Night. Not that that is a bad thing.
   
   Rating: A Sheepdog with a Brandy Barrel around its neck so you can make some eggnog when it comes to rescue from a vile mountainside retreat in the Andes.
   
   
2. Vampire Weekend – Vampire Weekend
   It sounds like these white-shoe yupsters got kicked in the face by Paul Simon and then accidentally the whole African musical colonialism. Not that that is a bad thing. Any band that calls Bottleneck a “shitshow” is alright in my book. I hate those Bottleneck bastards.
   
   Rating: A werewolf weekday
   
   
3. Okkervil River – The Stand Ins
   Even better than their 2007 masterpiece The Stage Names. Not that that is a bad thing. Probably my favorite of any of the albums in this list.
   
   Rating: Some outsider art by an artist who arguably kidnapped a kid
   
   
4. Coldplay – Viva La Vida
   SMASH HIT 2008!! NUMBER 1 SUMMER JAM!!! Under investigation by the FBI for allegedly stealing tunes from The Creaky Boards and/or J. Satriani. Not that that is a bad thing.
   
   Rating: Dude, I just listen for the articles. I mean the production values. I don’t actually LIKE it, you know.
   
   
5. Of Montreal – Skeletal Lamping
   I haven’t quite listened to the whole thing, but I can tell you without a doubt that it is the best concept album about a large, black, post-op transsexual in history. Also, Emusic? Yeah, about that claim that Of Montreal is similar to Neutral Milk Hotel? I think it only holds true if “similar” means that the guys in the bands know each other and they both have a word that starts with “M” in their band names.
   
   Rating: 185 bones out of a full skeleton
   
   
6. The Secret Machines – The Secret Machines
   It’s got a kick-drum that won’t quit. Also there’s a pretty good, albeit short, total freakout on track 6.
   
   Rating: A machine that’s not exactly secret, just not well understood by most people, like an internal compression ignition combustion engine or something.
   
   
7. Frightened Rabbit – The Midnight Organ Fight
   a. Pretty standard indie rock fare. I like when a song from this album comes up on random for whatever that’s worth.
   
   Rating: A+, if you like Scottish accents, Gefilte fish+ if you don’t.
   
   
8. Port O’Brien – All We Could Do Was Sing
   I’ll be perfectly honest here: it’s really not that good. The first song and Pigeonhold are the best songs, so I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.
   
   Rating: Two nautical themed songs too many.
   
   
9. The Rural Alberta Advantage – Hometowns
   Eh, it’s not bad. It’s nothing to write home to Alberta about, but I’ll still listen to it. However, the song Luciana totally needs to be remastered so that it’s listenable. Also, the Distillers song called Drain the Blood is better than TRAA’s song of the same name.
   
   Rating: Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia PUT TOGETHER!
   
   
10. Shearwater – Rook
    Slow, relatively dull with way too much vibrato in the vocals. What else can I say, you know? Hm....the occasional glockenspiel is both soothing and soporific, if you’re into that sort of thing.
    
    Rating: > pawn, < bishop
    
    
11. Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago
    I don’t know if the story behind the recording of this record makes it better or worse than it actually is (something about a Wisconsin cabin in the middle of winter and ice fishing). Regardless of the story, it’s a pretty good album, but if you get a chance to see him (I think his name is Justin something) live, it’s totally way better. Also, Bon Jovi fans: DO NOT get your hopes up. Even though the names are similar, the music is not.
    
    Rating: A Bucket of ice-fish tacos.
    
    
12. Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes
    I’m just listening to it right now, but I can tell from the cover and from the stuff other people have written about it that I’ll like it. I’m pretty predictable. I DO like the first five tracks at least.
    
    Rating: 8 out of 10 canine species.
    
    
13. She & Him – Volume 1
    I got it in the mail yesterday. I’ll let you know.
    
    Rating: ALBUM OF THE YEAR ACCORDING TO PASTE MAGAZINE!!!!!!
    
    
14. My Morning Jacket - Evil Urges
    Don't worry about the album name, it doesn't sound nearly that evil. What it does sound is AWESOME. I appreciate good musicianship. Especially when good musicians rock so hard and are not boring. This doesn't happen often.
    
    Rating: Evel Knievel Urges
    

Full Disclosure: There are exactly zero (0) albums released in 2008 that I own that do not also appear on the list above.


POST-POST BONUS ALBUM: CHINESE F'N DEMOCRACY - G 'N' F'N R!!!


UPDATE: I would like to deny all rumors that I voted in the NPR listeners' poll for best albums of the year. It just LOOKS like I did. Hell, I don't even listen to NPR.

I Can Hit A Target Through A Telescope

Being as I am, I was hopelessly unaware of this band called Flobots who have this song called Handlebars. You've probably all heard it, it's the one that's all "I can ride my bike with no handlebars," and "I can keep the rhythm with no metronome," and "I can end the planet in a holocaust," or something like that. I'd heard people singing the first line about the handlebars and I just sort of assumed it was a cheesy nostalgia-heavy song about "wasn't it fun when we were kids?" But it's not. Instead it's a post-modern investigation of the dialectic of innocence and experience, an almost freudian examination of how our hubris and self-centeredness doesn't change so much in form, only in degree. It's a self-reflexive dia/monologue on the state of politics and our own complicity in the actions of others and the effects of those actions. Where is the line, the song asks, between power and purity? Between strength and delusion? Between confidence and conquest? Between my life and your death, or a billion deaths?

All in all it's probably the most pointed and devastating critique of modern culture to come out of the rap-rock genre (did I mention it's a rap-rock song? No? Oops.) since 1996 when The Bloodhound Gang released their seminal gutter-rap jeremiad "I Wish I Was Queer So I Could Get Chicks."

Building a Foundation

So a friend of mine recommended some Isaac Asimov books to me and I went to a gigantic used book store (>1,000,000 books) and bought them: the original three Foundation "novels."

Let me say this: what they lack in grandiosity, they make up for with interesting characters. That is, there is absolutely nothing they lack in grandiosity and an absolute dearth of characters that you care about, or are really even interested in.

Maybe I should stop taking recommendations from a guy who doesn't read fiction. I'd tell him what I think about the books, but he's not here. He's in Peru tripping with some shamans. I'm not even making that up.

Seriously.

The Return of The Roving Machinations of the Watching Movies and Then Pretending to Write Reviews that People Pretend To Read

Here are some brief Reviews of the movies I've watched in the last dickety-two days.

Treasure Planet - Like Treasure Island but IN SPACE! The blend of computer and traditional animation is a little offputting, but extraordinary in a way, since it seems like such an obvious idea but nobody else does it.
5 Pieces-of-8 out of 9

Treasure Planet - Better the second time through, "By tunder."

Casino Royale - Definitely the best James Bond movie starring Daniel Dubbleishsomething. I really like how they made torture and murder look bad. You don't see that every day anymore.
A Straight Flush

Treasure Planet - Okay, this is getting old.

Treasure Planet - When exactly is this movie due back to the library?

12 Monkeys - This one makes way more sense if you don't fall asleep in the middle of it and wake up when Bruce Willis is naked in WWI. By the way, if you've always wanted to see Bruce Willis naked and getting scrubbed down and naked in a filthy trench, this is the movie for you. Also, when you watch this movie you officially get bonus points if you point out that it was based on the 1960's French move La Jetee.
9 out of 12 Monkeys

Treasure Planet - .....

Control Room - A documentary about media coverage (specifically Al Jazeera) during the lead up to and beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom: Persian Gulf First Blood Part II starring John Rambo? Snoozefest. Bombs, guns, dead journalists, bi-polar extremism, war is bad, the end. Interesting if only for the fact that it's fun to watch peoples' reactions to things they thought/believed/knew would never happen. But not that interesting.
11 gain knobs on a 32 channel sound board.

Treasure Planet - I give up. It's my new favorite! The centroid of the mechanism is important though, so at least I've got that going for me, which is nice.

You Are Not My Typewriter

Okay, here's a question for you. Why had I never listened to The Long Winters before? I mean, sheesh, somebody could have told me that I would like them. They are totally right up my insufferable white person, blogging, thinks-he's-too-cool-for-most-things alley! You can even tell all this just by looking at the cover of the album that I stole out of my sister-in-law's former basement bedroom last week. She obviously doesn't need it any more if she didn't take it to San Francisco for college. Probably because, in SF, you're required to act like you're not one of those insufferable people, that you're actually better than them, while actually being one. I can't wait to move there. I would fit right in.

Also, since I've got nothing better to do, here's another list of books that I've read in the last couple weeks.

1. The Road by Cormac McCarthy - Probably one of the most bleak books I've ever read. I think it might be allegorical or something. Even if it's not, it's still a very interesting book. It's one of those post-apocalyptic books that's not really a story about the post-apocalypse era. Nothing is ever explained other than that the Man and Boy have to keep walking and walking because everything has been destroyed. Also it rains a lot. Also, cannibalism.



2. The Devil's Larder by Jim Crace - You wouldn't think that a book of 64 short (some very, very short, as in 2 words short) stories all about food could be very interesting, but it is. To be fair, the stories aren't really about food, per se, but it does play heavily in all the stories. Also, pathos, love, irony, sex, death, poop, poison, comedy and drugs.



3. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley - Huh, turns out I'm probably a Beta, possibly a Beta-plus. If you haven't read the book, that means that I'm born to be a consumer who doesn't like to fix anything and would rather buy it new and who also dislikes the actual country but loves country sports. That way, I buy lots of sporting equipment to use in the country and thus consume more. Spending is better than mending. Also, it's a very funny book. Also herds of midgets and vomiting.



4. 1984 by Erich Blair aka George Orwell - You want a picture of the future? Picture a boot stomping on a human face forever. F'n Big Brother, man. He sucks. Also, I love Big Brother.



5. Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut - Nothing to say, really, but that this is a collection of short stories. Some are good (The Euphio Question), some are really good (Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow), and some are not so good (I don't remember what they were called). Also, the Handicapper General shoots people with shotguns.



One more thing, to save you time next time I write a list of books that I've read recently you can check the list below of books in my quick trick book stack to see if you're at all interested. Just so you know.

The Quick Trick Book Stack (to be read in no particular order)



• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath


• The Population Bomb by Paul Erlich


• A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn


• Raising Cain by Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson


• Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson


• The Final Solution by Michael Chabon


• The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro


• Narcissus and Goldmund by Herman Hesse


• The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Eco


• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad


Any more suggestions? Once winter starts next month, there is literally nothing to do but read.

Phone My Family. Tell Them I'm Lost.

Books I read in the Last Few Weeks: Brief Reviews and Arbitrary Ratings

1. Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick – Like a bad episode of the Twilight Zone complete with “Where are they now???” epilogue.
   9 Cans of Miller Lite



2. The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut – What I always thought a read-in-one-day book should be.
   9 out of 10 pieces of eight



3. Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut – I, for one, welcome our new machine overlords!
   9 buns out of a baker’s dozen



4. Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut – See the cat?? See the cradle????
   9 aces



5. Terrorist by John Updike – It’s as if Mr. Updike, the magnificent writer of the Rabbit Angstrom stories, of which I have read none, went to the store for hackneyed characters and bought a few. Here they are:
   
   All the Middle-eastern characters: 5 terrorists, one CIA informer
   
   The one black woman: Whore
   
   The one black man: Pimp
   
   The one Jewish guy: short, depressive
   
   The one artist: flighty, slutty, bad mom
   
   The one Older American Wife: overweight, addicted to soap operas, has a cat
   
   The one Older American Spinster: scarily devoted to her job and boss
   
   9 pieces of sand out of some Alaskan beach.



6. The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman – The book I would write if I had the time, imagination, keen wit and flair for the almost truthy that Mr. Hodgson does.
   9 facts in the whole book. Maybe less.



7. The Pesthouse by Jim Crace – Not about post-apocalyptic America, set in post-apocalyptic America.
   9 sentences written in iambic hexameter per page.



8. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling – Snape Kills Dumbledore!!!
   9 dead, 25 missing



9. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling – Deathly Hallows?? More like Deathly Harvests!
   9 chapters out of 10.

Then it Becomes a River

Well, since all I ever do around here anymore is give lists of things I've recently read, watched or listened do, I figured I might as well keep doing that! So here's some brief and superfluous notes on some albums I've recenly bought, borrowed, checked out from the library or otherwise listened to.

Sky Blue Sky by Wilco
If you like Wilco already, I'm sure you'll like this one too. It's very pretty and soulful. It is also a little bit of a downer, but so is life in general, so it's all good. The best songs are Impossible Germany, Side with the Seeds and Hate it Here. I would recommend that you listen to it while sitting in your office staring at your computer screen blankly and wondering how in the world you got yourself into this.


Nevermind by Nirvana<
Nobody needs me to say anything about this. For some reason, we didn't already own this. Well one thing I can say is that the album artwork for this album definitely aged better than the art for the next album in this list. The next one is almost comical.

Ten by Pearl Jam
Again, nothing I can say will add anything to the world. However, the fold out album art of the band members standing all together in a circle with their hands raised together is funny. It's like they are trying to be a football team or something.

Southernplayalisticadillacmuzic
This is Outkast's first album. I borrowed it from a friend of mine at work who basically only likes it because he thinks that teh Outkast guys are fellow conspiracy theorists, which, in all fairness, they might be. Other than their references to disease engineering and white plots to kill the black man, the album is very rap-of-the-mill.

Live at Stubb's by Matisyahu
An album full of mediocre (at best) reggae rap...BUT the rapper dude is a white Hasidic Jew! So it's cool in a Weird Al kind of novelty way, so I guess it has that going for it.

The Else by They Might Be Giants
They Might Be Giants' 12th album! It's okay! It comes with a full length bonus disc! THe bonus disc is at least as good as the actual album! It contains one of the best stalker songs I've ever heard! And a song about drunk driving! And a song about nuts that my son already knows! Are you convinced to go out and buy it? No?? Well, imagine my shock.

Some Loud Thunder by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!
Holy cow. I can't believe these guys were indie rock darlings! Not bad, but certainly nothing to right home about in ridiculous overwrought metaphors and forced significance. Plus, the song titles are borderline stupid. Mama, Won't You Keep Them Castles in the Air and Burning? , Upon Encountering the Crippled Elephant, Satan Said Dance? Seriously?

There’s Only One Thing That I Know How To Do Well

For awhile there in the last couple months I was all, like “I’m gonna try to stop being so lazy and actually do something with my 30 minutes to myself that I get every morning instead of just laying there in bed after the alarm goes off dreading the moment at when I really REALLY have to get up in order to make it in to work ‘on time.’” I’m sure you can guess what I decided to do. Yep, that time-honored tradition of pompous, self-important and repetitious people everywhere: read non-fiction books to widen my understanding of the world. Unfortunately for me, a previously dyed-in-the-cotton fiction reader, non-fiction books generally do not offer any world-view-broadening capacity. They do offer gimmicks, though, so at least I had that going for me.

Nickel and Dimed: On (not) Getting by in America by Barbarbarbara Ehrhenrheich

If you can get past the (not) incisive parenthetical “not” in the title and actually get into the book you’ll find, well, you’ll find a book about how hard it was for the author to live like the poor folk she feigns compassion for. I was hoping for an insightful look into the lives of the people out there that work minimum wage jobs and have to somehow string things together. Or not. Instead, this book provides a wonderful portrait of just how annoying it was for the author to have to live in rundown hotel for a few weeks and how much working a minimum wage job sucked for her and how all the poor people she worked with (ancillary characters at best and typically just Socratic foils for the author's self pity) just didn’t get it that if they would just demand better pay, unicorns and rainbows would start shooting out of their asses. Oh yeah, she also loved to take stereotypical pot shots at the people whose houses she cleaned when she worked as a maid because they thought they were better than the people who clean their lovely suburban houses, but really, HA HA, THE JOKES ON THEM because Ms. Ehrenrhehich is so totally their intellectual and moral superior!! Take that!

At first I was frustrated that the book took such a one-dimensional (not to mention demeaning) look at the minimum wage subculture and didn’t delve into what life is actually like for that class or how they got there or what obstacles they face. But then I realized, hell, that kind of stuff doesn’t move copies! Gimmicks move copies (well over a million so far) and that’s what being a “muckraking” writer is all about, isn’t it? Making your readers think you care (and vicariously they themselves (not a real word, but whatever) care) while simultaneously using your story about being a fake poor person and your superficial dealings with actual poor people to make yourself a good chunk of money! Oh Irony of Ironies. But then again, writers got to make a living, too, so I guess I have that going for me.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by The Most Awesomest and Brilliant Young Economist in the History of the World

I should have read this book before Nickel and Dimed because then the gimmickries of the first book wouldn’t have bothered me as much since I wouldn’t have expected anything deep or incredibly insightful. While well-written and interesting, Freakonomics explores the hidden side of things if your idea of “the hidden side” is “around the corner.” If you were thinking “buried under 50 ft of molten lava hundreds of miles off the coast of Madagascar,” sorry, but nothing is that hidden. For instance, did you know that drug-dealing organizations funnel almost all the money to the top and that the street soldiers, the ones that deal directly with the customers, hardly get paid anything? Shocking, I know. Dealing drugs is NOT the socialistic, money-sharing utopia we all thought it was! The other annoying thing about the book, for a statistically minded person such as myself, was that, as is typical of mass-marketed stuff in general, statistics were used extensively without any discussion of their significance or applicability. I trust the economists who wrote the book understand and are correctly using statistics, but man, I wish they would have used their position to encourage a more stringent statistical methodology in published materials. But still, it was a fun, gimmicky book to read so I guess I have that going for me.


Silent Spring by Rachael Carson

This book is so important that I learned about it in one or maybe two of the countless classes I had on American History in my formative public school years. Blah blah blah, pumping noxious, carcinogenic chemicals into our water and food isn’t good for us. The crazy thing about this is that 40 years ago, when the book was written, a lot of people DIDN’T know that all these amazing new chemicals could be dangerous. Now that this danger is common knowledge, the book loses some of its “I DON”T BELIEVE IT!!!!” punch. But hey, Al Gore like it, so I guess I’ve got that going for me.


The Future of Life by Edward O. Wilson

Gimmick: Mankind has systematically, throughout history destroyed all life on earth up to and including humankind and a huge die-off of 80% of the world’s population is needed to return the Earth to its natural condition. L

But since the US is such a rich and powerful country, you and I probably will be among the surviving 20%, so I guess I’ve got that going for me! J

P.S. the book doesn’t say that last bit.


The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century by Doomy McDoomerson Kunstler

If you live in the suburbs and drive to work every day and go shopping at Target at least once a week (read: me), this guy hates you. He thinks you are blithely driving the world off a cliff and if you don’t know how to brew your own beer, make your own shoes and grow your own vegetables (I am 1 for 3 on these so far, but that’s another post) you are probably going to die or have to fight tooth-and-nail for you life in the near future. Peak oil, blah blah blah, we’re all going to die, the world is going to hell in a hand basket. So what? I know how to ride my own bicycle (if I actually owned one that is), so I guess I’ve got that going for me.


Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond

Boy, what I wouldn’t give for a gimmick. For all my bloviating about how other lame non-fiction books don’t give you a deep enough view of things, I sure could have used a shallow view here. I’m not even half way through it yet. I can tell because I haven’t got to the pages with the pictures on them yet. If you ever wanted to learn about the medieval Norse society on Greenland, this book is for you. If not, well, it might still be for you but you might want to skip a few chapters. I’m pretty sure he’s going to start comparing these old collapsed societies with our modern globalized world pretty soon, but I’ll let you know when I get to that part. Check back in, say, October. He also writes about the expansion and inevitable collapse of the “Anasazi” in the Chaco Canyon area to which I have been, so I guess I’ve got that going for me.

List Tuesday: Prosthetic Foreheads on Their Heads

Motion Pictures That I Watched in the Last Week Reviewed and Rated on A Scale of 1 to Pants.

1. What the (Bleep) Do We Know: See Here.
   Rating: -Pants


2. Dune: As solipsistic, blowhardian and inelegant as the book but way worse. It does have the bonus that its star, Kyle Maclachlan is from my hometown or something. Also, he was in Showgirls, a marginally more bad movie.
   Rating: e-1.


3. Bonnie and Clyde: This one was really good. I’d seen it before, but it’s still fun to watch. It stars Warren Beatty (aka Dick Tracy) and Faye Dunaway as the titular characters. (Also named after the characters? A muffler shop in my hometown. The shop’s logo is a gun.) The best thing about this film is its schizophrenic jumps in mood from slapstick car chases set to “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” to the “heroes” contemplating the murder they just committed. Or, like at the end, when it’s all lovey-dovey and then they die in a “hail of gunfire*” (spoiler alert: Bonnie and Clyde die). Historically, this movie is notable for the introduction of squibs and realistic violence into modern cinema. Before this movie, all the violence was obviously non-realistic because LOOK! PAUSE IT! Now rewind. That guy is so totally still breathing! There are also two Genes in this movie, Gene Hackman and Gene Wilder (in his debut performance), so it has that going for it.
   Rating: Assless Chaps.


4. Chinatown: Depressing as a…..something or other that’s real depressing. Maybe like a raccoon caught in a bear trap and it’s still alive and struggling to reach the rifle that the hunter just dropped because he got mauled by a bear and now the bear is trying to maul the raccoon before he gets the rifle and you know that the raccoon is doomed but keeps on reaching for that gun. Sorta like that. I think the main point of it is that the harder you try to prevent something horrible from happening the more likely it is to happen. Especially if you end up in Chinatown because we all know what goes on there. Also, it has realistic violence (and incest)! Thank you Bonnie and Clyde director Sam Peckinpah! It stars Jack Nicholson and, huh, that’s weird, Faye Dunaway. It won Oscars for Art Direction, Car Direction, Water, and Bandages.
   Rating: More Fedoras then you can shake a stick at.


5. Network: The best movie ever made about a fourth-place network news broadcast and its descent into banality and journaltainment. Actually, I’m not kidding. This one is a recent addition to my top 10 movies ever list (again, I’d seen it before but that was when I didn’t understand that the entire universe was utterly meaningless and doomed and there’s no point to anything, so I didn’t get it as much.) Basically it’s all about how everyone has their price and it all doesn’t matter anyway because somebody else is controlling everything so they can make some more money. It’s also probably the funniest movie ever written by a guy named Paddy. And it was spoofed in UHF, so you just KNOW it has to be good. It stars William Holden and, WTF??? Faye Dunaway again??? I must look like some kind of Faye Dunaway obsessed uh….person. Great. Except, wait a minute, now I’ve got a good excuse when the FBI/NSA/CIA/DIA or whoever looks at my library records (oh don’t worry, they’re looking at yours too) and see that I checked out a movie that glorifies bank robbing and death I can just say, “well look at the other movies I checked out! They all have a young Faye Dunaway, so obviously I’m just in love with her. Thirty years ago!” Except Network also features a group of domestic terrorists, I forgot to mention that part. Crap. What have I gotten myself into?
   Rating: I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!


6. Duck Soup: Uh, I only watched about 15 minutes of it. Sorry
   Rating: A Painted-on moustache.


7. The Bicycle Thief: Just in case you don’t get it, in case you don’t quite grip the fact that everything falls apart and the center never holds and life sucks most of the time, you should watch this movie. It builds and builds (in a post-war Italian neo-realist way of course) up until the end when the main character humiliates himself in the eyes of his young son. The end. It’s arguably De Sica’s best film. It is currently in an argument on this topic with the next movie in this list.
   Rating: Threadbare, third-hand linen trousers


8. Umberto D.: This is arguably De Sica’s best film. Unlike the previous one, there is at least a small glimpse of hope at the end. Sure the eponymous character is broke, debased, homeless and alone at least he didn’t go through with the suicide because of his cute dog. (Spoiler Alert!!! He doesn’t go through with his suicide attempt at the end because of his cute dog!) Of course you’re left to imagine what happens after the film ends. Sooner or later, Mr. Ferrari is going to get malaria or something and die homeless in some back alley in Rome and his cute dog will probably have to eat his dead body for sustenance. So it f’n goes.
   
   But really, I like the movie. The cinematography is great and it’s primarily performed by non-professional actors. When it looks so good, who cares if it’s all about the banality of evil. Or not even evil, just the banality and hopelessness and inevitability of life?
   Rating: 10,000 Lire



9. The French Connection: Probably the best drug-running espionage detective movies I watched that day. There’s this one part where Gene Hackman is driving a commandeered car through the streets of New York (?) chasing an elevated train that pretty much is one of the top three movie car chases ever. It also has realistic violence! On the whole, I would watch it again if I didn’t have to return it to the library.
   Rating: Plaid suit pants with a .45 strapped to your ankle.



10. Red Dawn: WOLVERINES!!!!!
    Rating: Patrick Swayze 50 - Communist Pigs 1



11. Tokyo Monogatori (Tokyo Story): Quite possibly the 4th best movie ever made (behind Citizen Kane, M, and Howard the Duck). Basically, nothing happens in the whole movie. You really have to listen for what’s NOT said (don’t you want to slap me now? I always want to slap people after they spout some BS like that). The camera angles and views are phenomenally telling. It’s like you’re a voyeur sitting on a grass mat in almost every shot, just watchinfg things unfold. It’s an even better movie to watch if you’ve had a lot of dealing with Japanese people. Trust me. What is it about, you ask? Just Google it or something, they know more than I do. Essentially it all boils down to this…
    

    Kyoko: Isn’t life disappointing?
    Noriko: [smiling] Yes, it is.

    
    
    Rating: 6 beers and an old pair of fishing shorts.

*All reviews of Bonnie and Clyde are required to use the phrases “hail of gunfire” or “hail of bullets.”

There are 17 links in this post.

A Watch With A Minute Hand

Due to an unexpected day off from work, I've got some extra time. What's the best thing to do with extra time? Yep, go to the library, check out 6 movies and watch them. I was going to write a post reviewing each of the six movies, but I couldn't wait more than 3/4 of the way through the first one. It's called "What the (Bleep) Do We Know. Putting it into the same post as Network, Chinatown, Duck Soup and Bonnie and Clyde wouldn't be fair to anyone.


The Review
PLEASE DO NOT WATCH IT. It is the worst movie in the history of the world (even worse than Practical Magic if you can believe it). How it ever got more than 1 star on Amazon is as beyond me as any little grasp of science is beyond this movie. It's like watching the crazy chef character from Beakman's World explain the ideas from a Deepak Chopra book. If that doesn't put you off, how about this? The main message of the movie is that anything wrong in your life is your own damn fault because you are thinking wrong and are addicted to your negative emotions. The Holocaust? Yep, those European Jews brought it on themselves because they really were addicted to the persecution. (No, smartass, Godwin's rule doesn't apply here because I didn't specifically mention Hitler. Crap!) Same goes for those negative thinking idiots in Darfur etc. And to add to all these horribly mis-guided ideas, it's a crummy movie. I mean, it really just sucks. Note to the filmmakers: if you are going to have interviews in a movie implying that these people know what the hell they are talking about, you really, really, really have to put their names on the screen or else I'm just going to assume they are a bunch of phonies reading from a teleprompter. This is essentially the polar opposite of a real science movie. I've never agreed with censorship, but if all copies of this movie could be loaded onto a rocket and fired into the heart of the sun, the universe would become a better place. Maybe by positively thinking, I can make it happen. *closes eyes and meditates on breaking the laws of physics as taught to do by this movie* Damn. It's still playing. What a bunch of baloney.

WHATEVER YOU DO, DON'T WATCH THIS MOVIE.


A few choice quotations -

"I'm taking this time to create my day. I'm affecting the quantum field."

"You are a God in the Making"

"God is the superposition of all spirits."

"I can influence space itself. I am responsible for all those things."

"It is my belief that our purpose is to be [something idiotic that I couldn't hear because I have no category in my mind to understand such a nonsensical statement]"

"Everyone is God"

P.S. I'm going to start praying to You today.

P.P.S. I know what the (bleep) they know. They know how to make a God-awful synth-heavy soundtrack.

P.P.P.S. Oh, oh oh this is too good. One of the "experts" is a teacher at, I can hardly say this with a straight face, Ma....Maha.....Maharishi University. ROTFLMAO.

I Came Back as a Bag of Groceries

Well, it's that time again folks.

*everybody shouts "WHAT TIME IS IT?"*



It's time for more rambling reviews of some CDs I recently bought!

*everybody shouts "YAY!!!"*




Funeral – Arcade Fire: I'd downloaded this one a long time ago so it's not like I'd never heard it before or anything. But still, it sounds way better in full quality on my car stereo (I now drive 14 miles each way to work every day. Ugh.) than it did in 128kbps quality on my crummy, standard-issue iPod headphones. There are lots of pros to this album: sweeping soundscapes, poignant if melodramatic songwriting, grand instrumentation etc etc. However, there's a big con: poor, poor packaging. I want to listen to the CD, not spend all my time figuring out how to remove it from the stupid cardboard sleeve. Once you get it out, I would recommend not ever putting it back in.

P.S. Mike, you would like this, I'm pretty sure. They use a hurdy-gurdy.




The Greatest – Cat Power: This album is the sauce to Mama Cass's ham sandwich. I mean that it's so full of stuff you might choke on it. Wait, no, that's not what I mean at all. Crap. Um, it's an album full of songs by a chick singer with a large dollop of Al Green, a cherry of Van Morrison on top and Carole King noodles. Not really good driving music, but good for, you know, sitting around, eating goldfish crackers and drinking a limited release Phat Abbot Tripel Belgian Style Ale by Arbor Brewing Company.

P.S. It appears that Michigan has some pretty decent breweries.



Wincing the Night Away – The Shins: (At this point in the post it is okay to start thinking, "what is all this indie BS? Is this guy some sort of, like, wannabe cool person who just follows all the popular streams in 'indie rock'?" Well, pretty much yes) If you've heard of this album, and who hasn't, you've probably heard that it's good. I won't abuse your illusion because it's not an illusion. This is a good album. Well, if you like their first two it is. Maybe even if you didn't like them it still is. I wouldn't know because I did like them and I can't exactly go back in time and unlike them. Who do you think I am? Buck Freaking Rogers?

P.S. The addition of some electronic instruments and stuff pushes this album from good to great.

P.P.S. Isn't Zach Braff so dreamy?
< /obligatory_zach_braff_mention_required_in_all_reviews_of_the_shins>




A Weekend in the City – Bloc Party: With a name like Block Party you'd kinda expect a hip-hop group or sumpin', right? But did you see? It's not "block," it's "bloc." Like the communist bloc! Get it! It's a subtle (or semi-reasonable facsimile thereof) reference to politics! Ha! How'd they ever come up with that?! But anyway, this one is not as good as their first one. I mean, it's still good and all, I just wouldn't write home about it.

P.S. I would write here about it though. In fact, I just did!



Neon Bible – Arcade Fire: I picked this up yesterday for $7.98 at, get this, Target (if you call it "Tar-zhay" I will, well, I probably won't be able to do anything about it because I am way up here in northern south-east Michigan). $7.98? Man, that is less than I paid for toilet paper at Target and all I'm going to use the toilet paper for is, um, well, you know. So first I thought I could just save money by using this CD as toilet paper but then they only had one copy left and it's made out of plastic and cardboard and stuff which is really not that comfortable to use as toilet paper. So instead, I listened to it. And I'm glad I did because I really like it. It's even more melodramatic than Funeral (seriously, "mirror, mirror on the wall, show me where them bombs will fall?" Melo. Drama.) It's also a lot angrier and bitterer than Funeral. Which is good because I'm pretty angry and bitter most of the time. Musically, it is, if anything, an expansion on their earlier sound. It's got huge church organs droning sometimes even. Plus, it's got 11 songs. Spooky.

P.S. Mike, you would like this one too I think.

P.P.S. This is a bogus review because I've only had a chance to listen to it up through track 8.

This post has 10 links

Not Lost, But Gone Before

I don't know how to say this, but, well, this post is going to be brief reviews of stuffs. I can't rob you of that.

Paul Simon - Surprise: YAY! A new Paul Simon album! Boo. It kind of stinks. He's an old dude trying to sound "relevant." That's never going to end well. Plus, Paul Simon and electronica are != unsucky. However, there is one song called "How Can You Live in the Northeast?" Amen Paul. Two months and I am outta here.

The Who - The Endless Wire: Yay! A new Who album! They're old dudes NOT trying to be really relevant. It ends pretty well. I mean, this is no Who's Next, but come on, what is? Plus, there's a line in "The Mike Post Theme" that goes like this, it goes: "There comes a time in every little punks life when he has to write a song for his common law wife." Brilliant songwriting. Plus it comes with a bonus DVD that I'll never watch. Plus it has a tri-fold case which is cool. Plus it weighs less than a regular CD because it's printed on paper. Plus, when you play it backwards it synchronizes exactly with The Wizard of Oz played backwards starting from the point where Dorothy meets the Wizard. Neither one makes any sense whatsoever!

Little Miss Sunshine: I laughed. I cried. I hurled.

Oh wait, no, that was Wayne's World. This one there was no hurling. It was pretty good with funny parts and sad parts and maybe superfluous parts (the part with the cop) a some neo-neo-realistic parts. But that's just my opinion. Here is the opinion of this other dude (it's always a dude) on Amazon dot com ("It's dot net!") presented in its beautiful entirety. Best. Amazondotcomreview. Evearh. With. Added. Links.

The cognoscenti of today's cultural mafia would have us believe - once again, at the risk of our otherwise being branded as rank philistines - that this is a brilliant movie, one that cuts right through the muck and unmasks reality without restraint (we've now got to "keep it real" at all costs, and of course restraint is most unfashionable). Yet Little Miss Sunshine is actually no more than another tired exercise in postmodernist banality, and it couldn't be less authentic. Inauthenticity in the name of authenticity is the real order of day (e.g., the tattoo phenomenon; Oprahism). Really, hasn't this juvenile drivel become boring yet? Apparently not to most. We now live in a state of mass permanent adolescence where entertainment capacity is the supreme measure of value. Friends, the Brave New World is indeed upon us. Little Miss Sunshine is thus certain to win Oscar gold, or at least garner some nominations. Yes, it's come to this, it's that dreadful.

I suspect that many profess to like this movie for the sole reason that they feel obligated to like it. One must give our cognoscenti and their dictatorship of relativism credit: they've convinced the many that there is really no better and worse, but only difference. There is no truth, only opinion. Thus all becomes equally worthy of celebration, including dysfunction. Here we see some of this regime's diabolical mendacity, for sickness requires treatment, not applause.

Having been instructed that this is a wonderful movie, I rented the DVD and dutifully performed the familiar ritual of this Brave New World: I pressed Play. Less than two minutes passed before I divined exactly what this movie would be, what pseudo-philosophy drives it. This is how transparent today's deconstructionist dross has become for those with eyes to see.

As a grad student, I lived in a house where the owner rented out every room. Over several years, three film students lived there. Through them, I was exposed to many more film students of both the undergrad and grad student variety. Almost without exception, all of them were entirely vacuous (this extraordinary correlation between film students and vacuity must remain a subject for another time). Is it even necessary at this point to mention that virtually all of them subscribed to today's reigning orthodoxy - that is, almost all of them were faithful subjects of today's dictatorship of relativism and had absorbed (consciously or unconsciously, usually unconsciously) its adolescent pseudo-philosophy of postmodernism/deconstructionism with its cheapened pre-Socratic flux worldview? They were also very chic, in today's shameless vulgarian sort of way of course. For example, virtually all of them had at least one tattoo (a herd of "individuals"!), and all felt that they were eminently authentic (ah yes, "authenticity" - got to "keep it real"). In short, they were all very fashionably ironic, yet blissfully unaware of the depths - rather, the shallows - of their irony.

Why do I mention these film students? Because Little Miss Sunshine reeks not only of today's chic pseudo-philosophical adolescent barbarity, but also of amateurism (some cinematic antidotes: the films of Bresson, Bergman, Kurosawa, and Tarkovsky - here there are truly authentic depths).

The characters are completely typical of this slick amateurism's taste for decay:

-Son: a 15-year-old waifish (thus fashionably effeminate) caricature of a Nietzschean who's taken a vow of silence until he enters flight school as a means (obviously, though unstated in the movie) of exercising his frustrated will to power. (This caricature, incidentally, is yet another slap to Nietzsche's face born of a typically superficial (mis)understanding of his philosophy - Nietzsche would despise him and his creators).

-Uncle: A suicidal homosexual Proust scholar. Very likeable, of course, among the least repulsive of the characters.

-Grandfather: An unbridled vulgarian and heroin addict. The sum total of his life's wisdom? "F**k as many women as you can," he instructs his pseudo-Nietzschean grandson. I kid you not.

-Father: A failed motivational speaker. Of course, we're meant to note the tremendous - tremendous! - irony in the relationship between his Oprahist self-esteem program and his wreck of a life. (Incidentally, have you noticed how some form of Oprahism is now almost unavoidable in every field? In religion, syncretism and ecumenism; in education, self-esteem building, etc. etc. etc.)

-Mother: A somewhat rode-hard-and-put-up-wet shell of a woman who can barely contain her disdain for her husband. A rather defeated and ghostly figure, though with (ironically!) some semblance of her maternal instincts intact.

-Daughter: The one character whom the filmmakers would have us believe is unstained by the dysfunction in which she's immersed. She has a wonderful smile, likes ice cream, wears nerdy glasses, and is pudgy - thus in the abyssmal world of this film, on these bases alone she qualifies as Little Miss Sunshine (these flimsy bases subtly indicate this film's rank poverty, by the way). Yet - ironically! - even this seemingly angelic figure also reeks of the odor of corruption: She's attracted to the wildly twisted world of beauty pageants populated by prepubescent girls made-up and dressed as adolescent strumpets (the filmmakers obviously wished to evoke JonBenet Ramsey here - nothing is sacred). What's Little Miss Sunshine's dance routine music, inspired by her vulgarian grandfather? Superfreak by Rick James, the magnum opus that famously captures Mr. James at the height of his poetic artistry: "She's a very kinky girl / The kind you don't take home to mother." No need to describe the predictably salacious gyrations this artistry inspires in Little Miss Sunshine. But wait - most ironically! - her filthy routine ignites a scandal at the pageant, itself a model of sanctimonious filth!

Dysfunction, disorder all around. Yes, very fashionable. No, not at all cutting edge; to be on the cutting edge today actually requires a complete rejection of all of this nonsense.

Just what is all this? Is it simply meant to entertain us? I have no doubt that to get themselves off the hook, the filmmakers would say so. After all, in the Brave New World, this alone is a sufficient ground to serve up any kind of dreck at all. But is it really possible that a movie suffused with so much dysfunction, so much existential disorder and confusion, all presented as comedic, isn't meant to communicate something more than mere entertainment? Do you know anyone with such a grim view of life who is satisfied merely to entertain when presenting this view? Could it be that presenting such dark dysfunction in a comedic fashion is itself a philosophical statement? (We're not dealing here with the lighthearted - yet infinitely more profound - comedy of the Marx Brothers variety).

This is nihilism; more precisely, today's cavalier, chic nihilism where absurdity, meaninglessness, decay, disorder, and dysfunction of every variety are - ironically! - treated as norms and indeed prescribed as such. Unorthodoxy is the new orthodoxy (Sooooo ironic! Yay!).

This is a coarsened, vulgarized, film student version of pre-Socratic flux philosophy (unconsciously, of course). All is chaos, movement, and instability - yet not in a cosmic sense as for the pre-Socratics, but inwardly. And all of this is presented - here we return to today's debonair nihilism - cheerfully! The not so subtle message: There really is no order attainable in our lives. The most we can hope for is manageable dysfunction. We must accept it and indeed come to see dysfunction as our normal condition (the irony!). There is no real transcendence possible in this life, not at all.

The filmmakers would no doubt retort: "No no no! You've got it all wrong. It's an uplifting story, a story of hope...." No. Each character's life is a disaser, a model of disorder, and remains so through the end of the story. It seems otherwise, but to go into how this is so I'd have to continue much longer.... Suffice it to say that, in spite of appearances, there is no redemption possible in this bleak world. Defeatism is at the very core of this movie, and this defeatism is itself at the very core of nihilism, which is itself at the core of today's postmodernism/deconstructionism, which is itself at the root of today's consumerist dictatorship of relativism....

I'd give this movie zero stars if I could, but I suppose one star is okay since it does contain two healthy streams of dialogue (though the healthy counsel contained here is given by - ironically, of course! - models of decline).

In the end, the makers of Little Miss Sunshine (such an ironic title!) give us cause to once again quote Shakespeare's epitaph for this age:

"O shame, where is thy blush?"

Pirates of the Carrriibbeeaann Part 2: The Curse of the Black Pearl Part 2: The Curse of the Deadman's Chest Part 1: In Which Piglet Sees a Heffalump: What a disappointment. Basically the only good thing in this whole movie was when Winnie-the-Pooh got eaten by the Kraken (that's 'Kray-ken,' not Crack-hen.' You can ask my son. He will correct you). Well, that and the part where the natives were portrayed as cannibalistic savages.


This post has 184 links.

LIST TUESDAY! DETROIT ROCK CITY!!!

So, for certain reasons, I visited the lovely city of Detroit yesterday (City Motto: Now only the SECOND most dangerous city in the country!). Basically, the only time I listen to the radio is when I go to Detroit and rent a car and forget to bring any CDs or remember to bring CDs but the car is only equipped with a tape player. Seriously. This is what happened yesterday. It's like they built a time machine to bring a car from 1997 to the present just to rent it out and annoy me. Stupid Ford. Anyway, I was listening to 89X, "Detroit/Windsor's only New Rock Alternative!" By the way, Windsor is in Canada. I think maybe Detroit is too. I'm not sure. But that is beside the point. What is so close to the point that it can actually be proven to be the point through simple mathematical analysis is this: a list of songs I heard on the radio.

SONGS I HEARD ON 89X DETROIT'S ONLY NEW ROCK ALTERNATIVE

1. Some song by My Chemical Romance: It starts out with some almost springsteenian lyrics about going to see a marching band with your dad with a nice, insistent drum cadence and builds up to an almost epic sound. All in the first 30 seconds. Then it devolves into your basic emo, pop-goth crap completely indistinguishable from approximately 50% of the songs I heard yesterday. Well, not completely indistinguishable. There was this one part with some awesome squealing guitars that sound almost like Poison or something.


2. Candlebox - Does it really matter what song? Well, okay it was their one hit from I think 1993. Confession time: This is almost of Postsecret caliber - I once voluntarily attended a Candlebox concert in the Yakima SunDome. Wow, it feels good to have that off my chest.


3. Another song by My Chemical Romance. Or maybe Ashes of Soma. Or maybe the Used. Or maybe Chevelle. I know I heard songs by all of those guys because the DJ told me so. I just can't tell the difference. Really, I can't. I must be getting old.


4. That one Green Day song that rips off the rhythm and chord progression from Chicago's "25 or 6 to 4." Another song from 1994! I felt like I was back in middle school playing hackey sack! By the way, compared to the the pop-punk/goth/whatevs stuff this song is not bad. It's almost dirgey and not at all emo. If you don't know what "emo" means, it means whining about how sucky life is and how some girl betrayed you and maybe you should go cut her, or maybe yourself. Green Day on the other hand, whom I don't really like but appear to have real potential to be a three decade band, got big by writing about being bored and stoned and lazy without being all depressive like those grunge %*#$ers. That's a much better reflection of the zeitgeist of the younger generations because it will last. Being a whiny self-obsessed, mopey teenager only lasts a few years. Being lazy lasts forever.


5. Some song about a ghost. Maybe by Sleater-Kinney. It was actually really good. If you know what I'm talking about, please tell me what it is.


6. Nickelback. Hey, they're Canadian too! That qualifies as a rock "alternative," right?


7. Another song by My Chemical Romance


8. Audioslave? Oh yeah! The one's with the Soundgarden guy! Man, remember Soundgarden? They were all "black hole sun, don't you come" and then that chick's face was melting off! Sweet!"


9. The Toadies song about asking someone if they want to die or something. It still kicks butt. Just like 7Mary3. Chugging, slow guitar riffs are to a Nokia-brand cell phone what industrial staplers are to orange elm leaves. Yeah.


10. Three Days Grace? Is that a band?


11. Snow Patrol. Or should I call them......SLOW Patrol? HA HA HA HA HA! Because of their slow tempos? Get it? Get it? Thank you, I'll be here all week!


12. Another song by My Chemical Romance


13. An ad for a concert by My Chemical Romance

Oh yeah, I also read a book yesterday in airports and airplanes: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. I think this was the fourth time I have read it. It's only 139 pages long. But it is really good. It has now officially entered my top five books ever. The list now looks like this....

A TON OF BRICKS'S TOP FIVE BOOKS EVER

1. Catch-22


2. One Hundred Years of Solitude


3. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich


4. Lonesome Dove


5. Any book by Thomas Pynchon, none of which I have read, but if someone asks, will claim to have read and really really like.

Bad Photoetry Thursday + Misc!

Okay, here's the bad photoetry.....



Now, here are some other things I've been wondering. Please give me answers if you know.

1. Is it more effective to punch someone with a jab in the nose, or is it better to really go for a full extension swinging hook right to their temple? You get more arm speed (due to the rotation) with the swinging hook, but the nose is so much more sensitive!

2. Guess what has two thumbs and isn't voting on November 7th? THIS GUY! *points to self with thumbs*

3. How come, when a bird flies into a closed sliding glass door, it's kind of funny, but when a person does it, well, I guess that's pretty funny too. Never mind.


Now, here are some books that I've read in the last month. Do you want to know what I think about them? Of course you do.

1. Traveling Mercies - Anne Lamott
   A good, if typical memoir (hard childhood, divorced parents, drugs, alcohol, kid, redemption) that is a little heavy on the similes/analogies. Yes, when used sparsely and cleverly they can be incredibly effective tools. When used in nearly every sentence, the can be incredibly annoying affectations. Still, I would recommend it.



2. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas - John Boyne
   Apparently aimed at the "young adult" audience, this book is about a 9-year-old son of a Nazi Commandant at Auschwitz (Out-with in the book). It's supposed to be a fable of sorts but it's kind of boring. The end "twist" is telegraphed from about a million miles away (that's about 40 times around the earth at the equator or about 58.5 times around the earth at the latitude of Sapporo Japan) and the lesson, or moral of the story if you want to follow the "fable" tradition is basically "the Holocaust was bad." Duh. But even though you know what's coming, it's still a good book to read on a plane or something since it's pretty short.



3. War of the Worlds (NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING TOM CRUISE!) - H.G. Wells
   Uh, there's nothing to say about this except "why haven't I read this before?"



4. Choke - Chuck Palahniuk
   Romantic isn't the right word, but it's the first one that comes to mind. This book is like a police baton fight between nihilism, craziness, domestic terrorism, Jesus, NOT-Jesus, and sweetness in a used sex toy shop catering to alcoholic sex addicts. Some of it might be set in 1734, some might be set in 2556 and some might be set yesterday or the day before. There might be miracles, there might be heroes, there might be love, there might be something in it to save you. But probably not. Maybe the best of the Palahniuk books I've read.

Beating a Dead House

So we just finished this book. It was pretty good. We bought it in the Seattle airport on Tuesday morning. The airport is where we like to buy all our books about airplanes crashing. It just fits. Anyway, the book was called Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. Here is a review for you. It even has a bow on it and some expensive wrapping paper.

It is a good book.

Hm, that's too short...Shall we get all loquacious and/or pretentious? Okay.

First, let us say that there are some very disturbing parallels, well, maybe parallels is to generous a word, more like identicals between the protaganist in EL&IC and the narrator of Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum: both are named Oskar (Schell and Matzerath respectively). Both are relatively strange children who obsessively play percussion instruments among many other idiosyncracies. Maybe it's just a tribute to Grass, I don't know. Anyway, this review is boring. Long story short, the book uses all the classic modernist cliches, time jumps/mixed-up chronology, multiple narratory viewpoints, intentional misspelings, etc. Mr. Foer even throws in diagrams and pictures a la James Joyce in Finnegan's Wake (which, by the way is not a real book. It looks like a book but no one in recorded history has ever been able to finish it. Anyone that tells you that they read the whole thing is a liar, even your English professors. They are so just pretending). He uses these affectations to tell an interesting and well imagined story about a boy whose father was killed in 9/11. He also throws in a Vonnegutian (Vonnegut-esque? Vonnegutious? Vonnegut-like?) sequence about the bombing of Dresden in WWII. Blah blah blah we couldn't put it down, so now we're finished with it. Hm? Not enough literary references? Okay, well we suppose you could also compare it to the recent novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon in that both are written from the perspective of a precocious/disturbed child on a quest and are intentionally disorienting, probably as a reflection of the ennui/fear/overinformed/cynical/confused zeitgeist of our time. Whatever that means. We just made it up right now. Someone put us on the back of a book cover. We want to be blurbed.

Oh yeah, we also bought some CDs.

Wolfmother - Wolfmother: It sounds like Black Sabbath, the Doors, The Who, AC/DC, and the Clash went on a drunken bender and fell down six flights of stairs only to land one right on top of the other in a giant ice-cube tray and then got doused with 56 gallons of putrid, three-week old bath water. So yeah, it rules.

The French Kicks - One Time Bells: Sound like the Strokes. But the CD was only $1.99 in the used bin, so....

Van Morrison - Moondance: Into the Mystic is perhaps the best single-take song ever recorded. Perhaps.

Matador Records Thingy: Also from the used bin. It is a veritable cornucopia Jack-o-lantern (it's still October) of "popular" indie bands like Cat Power, the New Pornographers, Belle & Sebastian etc. It's not bad. We're listening to it right now infact. Our favorite is Brightblack Morning Light.


We are going to Chicago for three days next week. Look for pictures of birds. And snow.

Do (Not) Pass Go

I hereby issue a warning: the main portion of this post will discuss matters theological, religical, and possibly pseudo-philosophical. If you are not interested in this kind of stuff (or even if you are) I would recommend reading the following instead:

1. If you live in the District and you want to fear for your life: Read This


2. If you like football and profanity: Read This


3. If you like addictive and maddening Flash games: Play this

There, that should cover all but the most masochistic of readers (Hi!)

So, I recently borrowed/was handed unsolicited a book from my friend Mike. It looked like this...

And here is what Mike had to say about it. Wait, no, here is what he had to say about it.

Here is what I have to say about it so far. And by "so far" I mean, halfway through the second part (the part about practical application)

After reading the first part all the way through, I decided that it may (not) require a re-read. But anyway, I liked some things about it and disliked others. I liked the obligatory rundown of what some of the hallmarks of postmodern thought are. Every "postmodern" or "emergent" theology book is required by law to have some sort of introduction to the idea that all inputs can/will be interpreted differently by different people, and the chapter in this book on that subject was probably the best one I've read. Second, I liked that it was short, since my reading time is synonomous with "times when I find a seat on the train or bus" However, just because it is short does not mean that it is light. Mr. Rollins is, regardless of all judgment of his theological beliefs, a good writer. More importantly, he is a concise writer. If there's one thing that obfuscates the intent of any philosophical piece it's florid prose. I guess Mr. Rollins is not trying to obfuscate anything. Third, I liked his idea that the Bible is best read with a "prejudice of love." If we're going to read it with a prejudice (and if you would just read the freaking intro to this book, you would know that that is unavoidable) it might as well be with a "prejudice of love," right? And fourth (there are more than four things I liked about this book, but this post is already getting long), I loved the linearity of the presentation. Instead of introducing ideas all scatter-shot and letting the reader sort things out, Mr. Rollins has presented them in a logical fashion in which one thought leads directly to the next. This makes the reading easier, but is not very "emergent." It's almost like he has a specific thing he is trying to make us think!

Now, as a counterpoint, here are four things I didn't like about it. First, in my opinion (IMHO for those that only know IM-English) there is not enough discussion of what Jesus actually taught. Instead, we are treated to dozens of quotations from contemporary, or at least relatively contemporary, philsophers talking about what Jesus meant when he said what he said. To me this seems like scuba diving in Rimrock Lake and reading a sign on the bottom of the like that tells you what the Great Barrier Reef looks like. Actually, that might be the world's worst analogy, so never mind. But you get the idea, right? Second, Mr. Rollins seems to flirt dangerously with a faith of pure existentialism. He struggles and ultimately fails, again according to me, to define faith as anything other than some undefinable "experience" of God. Sort of a, "you'll know it when you see it" kind of thing. I can't cotton to this thinking. I just can't. Reason, science, evidence, these all have to play a part in it. Why would the original Christian documents spend so much time emphasizing the truth of what happened (death, resurrection etc) if "what really happened" is irrelevant in the face of a "God Experience?" I guess I would fall somewhere between Mr. Rollins and Francis Schaeffer on this topic. Third, and this one may (not) be fair, I don't like the services described in the latter half of the book. To me they sound like shows. Good shows probably, but shows nonetheless. I think this ties in to the existentialism of the book/emergent movement in general. You can easily use a good show (cool art, candles, digital projectors, constant music!) to produce a feeling of "experience!!!!" without any substance. Politicians know this, rock stars know this, it is common knowledge. I'm not saying that the services described have no substance, but the focus of them seems to be on having it look "cool." Even a dirty heathen could make a "church" "service" look cool and seem "authentic" if you taught them a few key words and ideas. They don't need to believe it, but they can sure make other people "feel" it. This worries me in general, and maybe I'll write a post later about what I think might be better. But maybe not. And finally, fourth, I wish "emergent" writers would stop using the same ol' people to endorse their books. I can look at the cover and know what Brian McLaren thinks about it, you don't need to tell me. Wait, that's a bad example because his blurb is on the cover. Well, imagine that it wasn't, I would still know what he would say about this book. Isn't there somebody out there who we don't know about that liked this book? Anyone? Or is it just that "unconventional" "emergent" people are just as easy to market to as any other group and that upon seeing a few key endorsements we go into a sort of unthinking trance and buy the book? Yeah, probably that one. I wish I was a religious book publisher because that's where the money is: selling books to upper-middle class, self-loathing yet strangely self-righteous urban white people. Wait, am I just talking about myself here? Crap!

I Give Up

Well, the death of this blog might be on the horizon. I couldn't be cynical today, and without that, my blog persona's got nothing. Nothing.

I wanted to say something cynical and funny about this house concert that I went to last night, but I can't. It was too good.

Dang it, Ryan and Holly!

Everyone else: I highly recommend The Cobalt Season's But I Tell You.