Idiot Box 2010

I suppose that title is a misnomer. Yes there are thousands of dumb shows on television, but why watch swill when there is also quality, textured progamming? This post isn't about the swill either, so chalk the title and this opening bit to my goats-mandated compulsion for obfuscated attempts at meta-comment.

Yes, well, recently-aired television in the form of a list of the shows that are programed to record on my digital video recording machine. I will mourn that machine briefly when I soon do not have it. That's what I was getting at. It's straightforward.

The Walking Dead
Why I watch: The first episode is pretty much amazing. Zombies are cool. Post-apocalyptic imagery a la top photo.
Quibble: Only 6 episodes of this exist, still gets mad slow toward the end.

Boardwalk Empire
Why I watch: It's the Sopranos in prohibition-era Atlantic City. Offers perception of 1920s American life and politics. Good to great acting performances from the four major characters. Omar from the Wire plays a character named Chalky White. Paz de la Huerta could be the Joe DiMaggio of televised nudity.
Quibble: Can get a bit heavy-handed with the metaphors.

30 for 30
Why I watch: Documentaries about different subjects by different filmmakers hit and miss, with the best transcending sports and exploring modern humanity. The Iverson one (No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson), the OJ chase one (June 17, 1994) and the Colombian soccer one (The Two Escobars) spring to mind. June 17, 1994 is one of my favorite pieces of media that I have consumed, like visualizing part of a Don Delillo novel.
Quibble: Some of them aren't as good, like the one about the origins of fantasy baseball.

Sons of Anarchy
Why I watch: Motorcycle gang members do their thing, run guns, fight the enemy of the week (Aryans, IRA, Feds, etc.) but with hearts of occasional gold. Not unbelievable characters confronting each other and their legacy. Peggy Bundy and Ron Perlman (HellBoy) as the motorcycle mama and daddy respectively.
Quibbles: Muddled at times. One of the main character's name is "Jax".

Louie
Why I watch: Louis CK is funny as hell. Provides a good mix of stand-up and horrible situations. Sometimes both, like this confrontation with a heckler.
Quibble: Darkly hard to describe.

Doctor Who
Why I watch:This mostly.

Quibbles: British. Nerdy.

Mad Men
Why I watch: Don Draper et al doing Don Draper et al things. The dialogue. Pete Campbell's wide variety of blue suits. Hipster cred.
Quibble: Can devolve into idealized, if imperfect, vision of history.

South Park
Why I watch: Al Quaida crashing jet-liners into people from New Jersey, and in the process stopping the advancing horde of New Jerseyites.
Quibble: Kind of shitty these days, you know?

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Why I watch: Philadelphia is in the name. It's grotesquely funny and quotable.
Quibble: Not enjoyable while stoned.

Community
Why I watch: Along with Louie, a half-hour comic show with smarts that is hard to define. Chevy Chase in a wheelchair. Probably all the characters.
Quibble: Could be described as dramedy.

Top Chef
Why I watch: Bunch of crazy good food. Host Padma Laksmi. Fulfills weekly recommended intake of reality show drama.
Quibble: Hyper-kinetic cuts in editing.

The Venture Brothers
Why I watch: Cartoon satire of heroes and villains. Brock Sampson. Horribly inventive.
Quibble: Half the time I don't know what's going on, plotwise.

Other shows in the DVR that I don't feel like writing about right now because they are off-season or cancelled or whatever, but still I would watch them maybe: Treme, Parks and Recreation, 30 Rock, Futurama, Terriers, Archer, Better off Ted.

So there you have it. If I were to put a gun to your head and tell you to watch one of these, it would be June 17, 1994 or Louie or Community depending on my perception of your sensibilities.

Bagger 288

Here's the AV Club's of the best films of 2010, which I endorse, having seen only number 4. Next is Exit Through the Gift Shop because it is on Neflix streaming. Score! Although I would like to make in-the-know jokes about something called "Winter's Bone".

"Half of its users use Twitter as like a sort of digital closet that they go into once in a while to mutter to themselves, with no one else listening."

This essay on a video game is notable if only for the introduction of the term BFCockPOOT (Brett Favre's Cock Principle of Ontological Transference).

Great moment in sour grapes journalism? Or greatest? Cliff Lee=1893 World's Fair=9/11 Health Bill blockage=All My Children.

That's it. Merry Christmas from Lamar Odom and family.

RIP idealism

A few notes on giving peace a chance:

There is a scene in the possibly underseen "In Bruges" where Colin Ferrell beats the hell out of a American tourist, telling him "That's for John Lennon, you Yankee fuckin' cunt!" Later Farrell is dismayed to learn that his beating victim was actually Canadian. Humor!

Some reporter here just told me that the "real infamy" is there is more media coverage Lennon's death today than there was of the bombing of Pearl Harbor yesterday. This is the same guy who didn't understand why a "White Student Union" at the local university is a terrible idea. A king of merit-less arguments.

For some reason this reminds me of a Hunter S. Thompson quote about Richard Nixon representing the "dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise." On instinct I find this to be true and think that anyone who disagrees is either lying to themselves or has willed themselves into ignorance, if those are two separate things.

How can one compare a musician who wrote songs about peace and love with the bombing of a Naval base? It's completely infuriating, these two things could not be any more different. Maybe there is some fundamental comparison as reflections of opposing forces that make up human nature, the urge to both create and destroy. Later we could discuss the relative merits of David Bowie and the Battle of Antietam.

A better comparison would between Lennon and Nixon, or better yet Lennon and J. Edgar Hoover. At least then it would be between two people, and not a person and historic event. Also possibly acceptable: Some connection between Lennon's murder and the bombing. Two sides of the same coin, yin yang, etc.

I'm not sure if I'm making much of a point here and I'm already tired of trying to explain myself. The plan was simply to commemorate the 30 anniversary of a guy's death that affected many millions of people. Best intentions turn foul and bitter, again. So I'll just end this with a recommendation to go listen to Happy Xmas (War is Over).

Strong men also cry

Burning someone with hot tea out of nowhere to early 90s synth-riffs. It just works for me, I don't know why. Later the viewer and Daniel Craig are filled in on why this happens; it is something about napping on the job and a prison term. "It wasn't until Capitol leaked "Ordinary World" to a radio station in Florida in the autumn of 1992 that it looked like Duran Duran mania might yet hit again." A welcome diversion, in any case.

The other day I was driving and thinking about what stylized violence could go along with The XX's Intro, or perhaps Neon Trees' Animal. The latter was playing on either the top 40 or "alternative" local radio station at the time, in between sultry-voiced commercials for a Linkin Park-brand iPad. But all I could think of was a terribly violent fight between a terminal cancer patient and her elderly mother, with cricket bats. They could easily be tricked into fighting, because of the mutually severe brain rot. Still, that may be too weird, personally. But I do like the idea of cricket bats. Talk to you later!

Get rich quick

Things I read today

Fans of the Original 10 (RIP Tampa Bay Mutiny) know there's something else at stake Sunday. The rest of the band has its origins in the Philadelphia space rock scene of the early 90s. Knowledge is power ... France is Bacon. This is just the kind of thing that the British sporting press eats up like free bags of crisps, but there may be one avenue of escape for Bale: he’s Welsh. Robert Kraft once, controversially and perhaps not intentionally, gave one of his three Super Bowl rings to buff, Modigliani-headed Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin.

-various sources

edit: Too highbrow? Here (balls towel)

Economic codependence explained by dancing pandas

I have nothing of substance to add to that video, the mildly racist caricatures really put it well, in their rap battle.

New Girl Talk album dropped today, you may or may not be aware. Download it for the the novelty/partying if nothing else, if you have internet skills to do so. I mean ... ELO and GZA ... Radiohead and ODB ... and the rest.

I enjoyed this, about people in Olive Garden ads sharing their existential pain. The buzz generated by a story at work about an Olive Garden's pending existence made me as disgusted as I've ever been with my hometown/the human race. That day.

Beard eating

No one once said that it would impossible to write a newspaper column combining the McRib and moustaches. They were wrong.

If anyone has the Daft Punk Alive 2007 album on cassette tape or can make that somehow I will buy it off them for three dollars, maybe more.

It's nice that Conan O'Brien is back on the air, even if the show isn't called "One Night Closer to Death" as he joked during the show on Wednesday. That name is better.

True phrases that seemed unlikely 5 years ago: Pat Burrell two-time World Series champion.

And lastly, I thoroughly enjoyed this collection of writings from 2013, about the 2011 NFL lockout. Suddenly: Bedlam.

Cleaning out the queue: Dead songwriter edition

As always these are movies seen after they were sent to me through the mail. Looking at the rental history, I realize that I have been "slacking" on watching the Netflix, so much so that I am beginning to suspect that it is a waste of money. There are so many other ways to spend my time! Like watching movies on television, for example "Get Him to the Greek" on demand with my roommate and his awful girlfriend and noticing how Russell Brand basically rips off the whole choose life speech from Trainspotting. Or Avatar for the first time and then thinking for hours about the perfect joke to post on Facebook or Twitter or somewhere else and then not ever posting it. The joke was something like "Just watched Avatar for the first time, how did this cute little film slip below my radar?" I am so fucking clever or whatever.

Townes Van Zandt: Be Here to Love Me
"I'd like to write songs so good nobody understands them, including me."
-Townes Van Zandt
This is a documentary about a songwriter I'd never heard of until I saw the indie music video that was included in the World Series post from last month. That video was directed by the same person (Margaret Brown) as this movie, and there was link to it in the YouTube description. Which is a good example of the arbitrary methodology I use to find movies for the queue. Sometimes there is great success. Like this one -- a bit impressionistic maybe -- but a tender, unflinching look at a guy who had a messed up life what with the shock treatments and drugs and whatnot, when he wasn't writing great songs. As far as music documentaries go, you can't do much better than Steve Earle talking about Russian roulette.

Lawrence of Arabia
Here's me taking another step in a slow, agonizing attempt to see every film in the AFI top 100. Kind of like the crossing of the Nefud Desert in this film. I like to imagine some kid in 1962 getting his mind blown by seeing this for the first time. The most iconic score on this list, along with The Good The Bad and The Ugly.


A History of Violence
Stab him in the brain with his nosebone, Viggo! Later you can have rough sex with/rape Maria Bello on the stairs! The movie lives up to its title. Yet but, there is more subtlety than you might expect.

World's Greatest Dad
I still haven't watched this, indicative of my hatred of Robin Williams and what I was typing about earlier today before I had a gin fizz. Williams writes a fake suicide note for his son after said son dies in a terrible auto-erotic asphyxiation accident, is what I gather from the summary on the Netflix envelope.

Everything Is Illuminated
Ukrainians and Jews, together at last? The grandfather thinks he's blind and has a seeing-eye dog, yet he drives the car. You can't make this stuff up! (editors note: based on a true story)

The Searchers
John Wayne in the role he was born to play: Racist cowboy.

Bronson
Ehhhhhhhnnnn, no. The trailer looked cool, but this is no Chopper. This movie kind of tries to be a combo of that and A Clockwork Orange, and fails terribly. Cash no. Robbo? No cash.

Run Lola Run
German techno. I probably would have liked this more if I'd seen it closer to when it came out, in 1998. Disjointed narratives and timelines were so much fresher then, you know? Still, she does run a lot.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Oh, here we go, this is one of the best films I've ever seen. It is based on a memoir of a stroke victim that he dictated entirely by blinking his left eye. This guy. At first I wanted to see it just because I was curious to how the hell he wrote a book. But also I've been thinking a lot about the mind-body problem, and this fits right in with that. A glimpse of what it would be like to exist as a brain trapped inside a body, a prisoner in one's own skin, learning to interact with world that is completely beyond your control. Note to self, an essay on this somehow? No.

Fantastic Mr. Fox
Foxes love them some whatever they do in this movie. Steal things?

Hot Tub Time Machine
Hilarious? Increasingly it seems the answer may be yes. I enjoy the comic stylings of Rob Corddry. He's in your face. And the black guy from the Office is also funny. And the rest of course.

For a Few Dollars More
I have little to no recollection of what happens in this movie. But rest assured Clint Eastwood kills a bunch of people. I think I liked it more than Fistful of Dollars. I don't know, blame the booze.

The Believer
Jewish Nazis: A recipe for disaster? If this movie is to be "believed" that could well be the case. Sorry. What's his name, Ryan Gosling, is a good actor, between this and Lars and Real Girl and the other one where he's the crackhead teacher.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Speaking of Nazis! It's amazing how these things come together sometimes. Maybe you heard of these books? The movie is good, if Swedish.

A Fistful of Dollars
I will be sad when Clint Eastwood dies. YOU CAN NEVER DIE, CLINT! Until you inevitably do of course.

The Kid Stays in the Picture
Self-narrated autobiography of Robert Evans, Hollywood producer behind Rosemary's Baby, The Godfather and Chinatown. Later he did a bunch of coke and was disgraced somehow. Surprisingly, in this film he focuses more on his successes than his disgrace. Patton Oswalt says it's the greatest Hollywood memoir ever, because Evans is the devil.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Yeah. I was really into the spaghetti Westerns for a while, and not without cause. I blame that Arcade Fire-Once Upon A Time in the West mash-up. And of course this. Spoilers.
Is that the music from Kill Bill 2?

Hard Target
See here.

The Descent
Quality horror flick, with the all-female cast going crazy with the claustrophobia and killing cave mutants with pick-axes and the nihilism. Best horror movie ever I want to say. I don't like horror movies though.

North by Northwest
A cool thing about watching some classic film for the first time is the rush of recognition where every pop culture reference barely understood previously comes into sudden, sharp focus. This has two such moments, the finale on Mt. Rushmore and Cary Grant getting chased by a crop duster.

Morvern Callar
I don't remember this at all ... something about a vacationing in Spain? Covering up a suicide? Whatever.

That's all for now, I am going to spend the next several weeks summoning the internal fortitude and willpower to go see 127 Hours in the theater when it finally comes to Philadelphia.

Twenty minutes later they walked along the street, umbrellas up, it was raining lightly, a few panhandlers, a woman in a mohawk and white makeup punching a doomsday leaflet into the belt buckle of Marvin's raincoat. PEACE IS COMING--BE PREPARED. Most the shops were open despite the hour or because of the hour and they were almost all below street level so you peered over a guardrail to see what they are selling, Role-Reveral Rubber Goods, or Endangered Fashions--jackets made from the skin of disappearing species.
They went into a hole in the wall place, a lot of cracked plaster and roachy baseboards and a stock of rare recordings. But you're not talking about old jazz 45s. These were phone taps you could buy, recordings of organized crime figures discussing their girlfriends or their lawyers, he's a hard-on with a briefcase--you're talking about men on the eleven o'clock news in cashmere overcoats with enough material you could clothe a Little League team from Taiwan. And phone taps of ordinary anonymous men and women, even more repellent-addictive, your next-door neighbor maybe, and Marvin understood how such a purchase could lead to stupefied hours of listening, could take take over a person's life, all the more so for the utter sucked-dry boredom of the recordings and how they provided the lure of every addiction, which is losing yourself to time.

I almost excerpted the part about Marvin having progessively worse-smelling BMs while traveling across Soviet Eastern Europe, but you know. This is more foretelling, considering it was copyrighted in 1997.

For all the anti-DC talk you hear from politicos, most of them can't get enough of the place. The diagonally slicing arterial avenues are just larded with dudes in khaki pants and gold-buttoned blue blazers who, pre-Pelosi ethics rules, couldn't cram down enough lobbyist-purchased steaks at the charmlessly wood-panelled wine n' dine joints for which the district is so famous. You know how, yesterday, Politico's honchos bemoaned the state of distraction-driven political culture? Yeah, it's like that with politicians who campaign against Washington. Most of these people are having fun there.

-RIP Russ Feingold

Tangentially about the World Series

The reason why that video is there is extremely esoteric, even for this blog. It has something to with the mild resemblance that the singer has with San Francisco Giants closer Brian Wilson, what with the eyes being too close together. It was either this or something about Spoon and Mike Fontenot. So that's one "storyline" to watch, somehow. But what else?

The Josh Hamilton situation. I am deeply ambivalent toward Josh Hamilton. His success can represent victory over terrible addiction that can occur when the crutches a person has relied on for life are yoinked out unexpectedly (ie, he descended into drugs after he moved away from his parents and lost the ability to play baseball because he got hurt). There are parallels to be drawn between him and giant-headed recovering addict Don Gately, my favorite character in Infinite Jest. Maybe later. But on the other hand Hamilton's story of redemption through not trusting oneself with bills larger than a 20 also reflects the deep financial inequalities that exist in America. Like, if this guy couldn't hit a baseball 450 feet, he'd be dead and/or homeless I suspect. He's a meathead. Not to mention the whole God thing he's got going.

-0-

The Giants haven't won in a long time. It is an interesting fact that the Giants have not won a World Series since leaving New York. They are kind of even cursed, I read the other day on ESPN.com, what with the WS earthquake and the terrible 2002 loss to the Angels and Barry Bonds. I should be more hostile toward them, considering they knocked "my" team out in a series of bitterly contested games that could have gone either way. And said defeat prevented me from seeing any playoff games live this year. I didn't even care if the Phils made the World Series, I just wanted to see Game 7! FUCK* Anyway, yeah, go Giants. National League woo! Witnessing a friend's pure joy at seeing the Giants in the World Series makes me realize how jaded the Phillies recent string of success has made this town. "How quickly does the world owe you something that you only knew existed 10 seconds ago?"

In closing, this sentence I read on Deadspin earlier today: "I've heard from pretty reliable sources that Pat Burrell dresses up as The Machine, in full gimp decorum before games." You're goddamn right he does.

*That ticket is so getting burned in some sort of ritual sacrifice at some point.

Check out this dog

I like to think the owner of this dog is like the Ukrainian guy from Everything is Illuminated. "Many women want to be carnal with me, because of my premium dog." You know who trains their dog to do parkour, or "freestyle walking" as I derisively call it? Ukrainian hipsters, that's who. You see what happens when you remove the oppressive Soviet boot from these people's metaphorical necks? YOU SEE WHAT HAPPENS?!?

Gorillas were observed to play tag. Biologists said that gorilla taggers acquire some form of “advantage” by hitting competitors, and then preserve that advantage by running away, but it was not clear whether gorillas could be deemed conscious of the rules. Chimpanzees conducting border patrols kill the infants and seize the territory of other chimpanzee groups. Zoologists described two new species of pancake batfish living in the Gulf of Mexico. Cetologists found that female humpback whales seek out their girlfriends summer after summer. The death of as many as 500 million trees in the Amazon in 2005 was blamed on a single storm, and the recent death of as many as 500 penguins who washed ashore in Brazil remained unexplained. “What worries us,” said one Brazilian scientist, “is the absurdly high number of penguins.”

-guh?

It makes me appreciate the Phillies more somehow

Somehow because of the immense appreciation that already exists for the Phillies in my brain. With any luck they will be the most dominant hometown team a Philadelphia homer will ever see. Filled with great baseball, irrepressible and clutch and dirty and other adjectives. The Reds were called the Little Red Machine* this year but not any more. Also the Phillies color could also also be considered red, with the hats and all. Perhaps 'Little Red Machine' is a play on the actual team name and baseball history, but people who say that have never read The Giver.



The subject of the title of this post though is the prologue of Don Delillo's novel Underworld, and the raw enjoyment I derived in reading it. Delillo's prose is certainly more fun than 900 pages 15th Century Spanish in translation, i.e. Don Quixote. Anecdotally: I ripped through the 60 page Underworld prologue in one sitting the first time. And there is likely another reading coming before the end of the baseball playoffs. And then another some day in December when I really miss baseball. Televised baseball is everyday and then not at all, cold turkey.

Basic summary: Jackie Gleason vomits on Frank Sinatra's shoes while Bobby Thompson hits 'The Shot Heard Round The World' among other things. The other things include a kid who jumps the turnstiles and paper falling from the upper decks and J. Edgar Hoover. And now I've done more research, via a google image search, and the prologue was actually a separate thing, at one point, called "Pafko at the wall" until it became the Underworld prologue, at which point it became "The Triumph of Death" which is the name of the painting that J. Edgar Hoover is looking at because it fell on him while Gleason was vomiting.



Whatever, Delillo loves him his crazy style. And the ideas are funny/poignant. I'm no literary scholar, but I've certainly read enough to post about him on the internet. Airborne Toxic Event ain't just a LA indie band. So as jarring as it may be to jump from 1951 baseball to some broad painting 230 bombers in a post-cold war USA desert, you know its going somewhere. Like, I trust this author. There are going to be sudden changes in setting, and tangents about waste and sex and death and crowds and whatever else, but at the end, the audience is going to know what happens. Which really is kind of important when trying to tell a story.



*It's possible I'm remembering this wrong and the nickname was something less demeaning.

Recently learned there is something called "shoegaze" and the thing I don't like about it is that I like it. What I don't like though is the blatant unfinished nature of this video. What the fuck, have some professionalism YouTube user "ezekieldas" if that is your real name.

This guy

I've seen this before, it's internet old for sure. But now seems like the correct time to put it here. Most recently via something called internet k-hole.

From the archives 2

I was checking the tracker for the first time in a while and May 2007 is wildly* popular. So I clicked on it and it's a fair representation of this blog, like it is before I was aware of post-modernism.

But May 2007 was some halcyon days, I can admit drunk, what with the "deathmatch listoff" and the thing about Starship Troopers being underrated, with this lead:

The 1997 film tells the tale of Johnny Rico, Dizzy Ibanez, Doogie Howser, Denise Richards and Gary Busey's son -- among others -- as they travel across space to train for and fight the inevitable giant insect war of the 23rd century.

*4 hits

edit: Pistol whip foreshadowing!.