Things Being What They Are

Your Amusing Image From Matthew Phelan For The Day

2010-03-26T07:32:00.000-07:00

Looking for used painting/portrait frames on craigslist, and came across this dumpy little hero. Has any man ever more looked the part of the WWI-era "doughboy"? Sedentary trench warfare will pork you out.

In Which I Get Excited About Seeing The New Wallace and Gromit Short

2010-03-24T07:57:00.000-07:00

The last legitimate Wallace and Gromit installment, A Close Shave, is over a decade old and my hope is that A Matter of Loaf and Death will cleanse my palate of the middling, feature-length W&G --- which Dreamworks evidently mucked with, and mucked up, much more than I'd thought. According to this Telegraph piece on creator Nick Park:

[T]he experience of working for a big, pushy American studio left a sour taste in Park's mouth. He found the experience stressful. It didn't suit his nature. This, after all, is a man who is happiest when out bird-watching with his binoculars in the English countryside. 'I would get these notes saying, "Shouldn't Wallace have a cooler, more modern car?" and I would say, "No, you're missing the point. The irony doesn't translate. It's cool because it's not." Having made three half-hour films already, I was in a position where I could say, "No, Wallace wouldn't do it." There is a false assumption that if things look old-fashioned children won't relate to it. Well, my favourite programme as a child was Dad's Army.'

Work Music.

2010-03-23T07:55:00.000-07:00

Thinking of a way to celebrate the mediocre passage of our half-assed health care bill, one of the things I've decided on is listening to the 2008 Election day live set that Killdozer did on WFMU. And thanks to the internet, you can too. Home grown left-wing radicalism and proto-grunge to express our collectively ambivalent feelings.

Way to go, Newt.

2010-03-22T07:14:00.000-07:00

Not to be outdone by the new radical fringe of the GOP, Newt Gingrich decided to suggest that the HCR bill will lead to the same kind of political fallout for the Democrats that Civil Rights legislation had in the 1960's:

But former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich said Obama and the Democrats will regret their decision to push for comprehensive reform. Calling the bill "the most radical social experiment . . . in modern times," Gingrich said: "They will have destroyed their party much as Lyndon Johnson shattered the Democratic Party for 40 years" with the enactment of civil rights legislation in the 1960s.

Am I reading this right? He's basically gloating about the fact that Democrats suffer for taking on unpopular, but morally righteous, legislative tasks, right?

I like to imagine he was skinning a possum as he said this.

[via Washington Post]

I Did an Event Review for You, teh Internetz

2010-03-17T18:26:00.001-07:00

It was for Anthem and about a special viewing of the MoMA's Tim Burton Exhibit. [One of the tags below is included in the taxonomy because Tim Burton draws a lot of things with huge boobs: sexy sunflower womanoids, sexy lady zombies, sexy female aliens, etc.]

Wes Anderson's Spiderman

2010-02-06T21:47:00.000-08:00

Overall pretty mediocre, but check out the Owen Wilson impersonation on that one guy. Geez. It is amazing. And: it starts at 0:23. [Link]

Emily Gould On Some Show Called "Digital Age"

2010-01-03T11:27:00.000-08:00

My favorite part of this is when she says "divulgey."

2010-01-02T18:55:00.000-08:00

Hoo Boy.

I haven't used this post tag/label/whatever in a while.

2010-01-01T10:56:00.001-08:00

The Mature Thing To Do [Simpsons Clip With Celebrity Cartoonists]

2010-01-01T10:45:00.000-08:00

via videosift.com

NYT: Jet Plot Shows Growing Ability of Qaeda Affiliates

2009-12-31T08:13:00.000-08:00

When I think about what the Birther movement and the Teabaggers would do with news of a successful terror attack committed on the U.S. by a skinny, African, Al Qaeda operative from Yemen, I get the sads real bad. [Link]

Happy New Year!!
2010!!

Unicorn chaser: The plane was bound for Detroit, so let's all enjoy some very political proto-punk from Death via the Evan "Funk" Davies Show [song | whole playlist ]

Hotel La Rut [Kids In The Hall]

2009-12-30T19:44:00.000-08:00

Not all comedy is this timeless.

Autobahn & Kraftwerk: Side By Side

2009-12-27T18:01:00.000-08:00

[For all you achievers.]

3 Minutes And 4 Seconds Of Elmo And Celebrity Ricky Gervais

2009-12-23T16:42:00.000-08:00

"Patriarchal Omniscience" Or Something

2009-12-13T08:59:00.000-08:00

I think if you want (me) to identify a single thread in Tina Fey's work—from creating the long-running SNL parody of the View to writing Mean Girls to helming 30 Rock—it's that she seems to have marshaled her amazing personal disdain for other women into comedy. If you think for a moment about other depictions of misogyny (e.g. In the Company of Men), and compare them to this montage of Jack Donaghy, it's hard to ignore that what makes his statements unique are the fraction of the time that they more resemble the mean things women think about themselves and other women.

It adds to this authoritative, "patriarchal omniscience" aspect to his character—an aspect I recognize as interesting, but shouldn't waste any more time on today.

"9th Annual Year In Ideas," with the Matthew Phelan Taxonomy

2009-12-13T07:26:00.000-08:00

The moment all of you opened this year's installment of the New York Times Sunday Magazine's Ideas issue, many of you were curious about why it had not already been organized by the degree to which I found each idea either depressing or uplifting. Get excited; I did* it:

Most Depressing

Infant Sleep Is Destiny :: If your baby's sleep habits are like every stereotype of a baby's sleeping habits you've ever heard, your baby is doomed to lead an unproductive loser-y life.
Predictive Smiles :: Because I don't try to make nice or smile often, all my marriages will end in divorce.
Counterfeit Self, The :: Basically just about any minor deceptive practice you engage in (from lying on your resume to buying knock-off clothes) will snowball until you are basically Tom Ripley.

Most Life Affirming

Treating P.T.S.D. With Tetris :: From a very diluted (but analogous) bit of personal experience, I can tell you that this is true. It's also true of Laplace transforms.
Good Enough is the New Great :: The tech merchandise arms race is coming to a close! Men's magazine gadget ad revenue will need to be replaced.
Drunken Ultimatums :: The revanchist impulse is hard wired into us and I can stop feeling guilty about it.
Myth of the Deficient Older Employee, The :: Creed on the Office is an offensive stereotype—and this new research will keep some of us from getting canned just before retirement, unlike old people today.

* I didn't do them all; I have work I should be doing. Get off me!

A Refreshing Bit Of Sarcasm

2009-12-11T06:41:00.000-08:00

Via Defamer:

There is no more personal act in the contemporary society than compiling a Best Of List. Since Congress decreed that people could no longer have personalities and substituted cultural pastiche for humanity, the choices we make in terms of what we put on our year end best lists has said everything about who we are and more importantly, whom we'd like people to think we are.

Wow Just Wow [ONN Edition]

2009-11-30T19:13:00.000-08:00

By any criteria—Melding Of Found And Filmed Footage, Make-up, Concept, Jokemedy, Audio Mixing, Pacing—this sucker is brilliant.

Zombie Reagan Raised From Grave To Lead GOP

A Very Good Piece Of Economic Analysis

2009-11-28T15:19:00.000-08:00

I don't really have it in me, today, to write more than that about this.

Read Tom Scocca On Jonathan Safran Foer's New Nonfiction Book [If You Like To LOL]

2009-11-10T20:26:00.000-08:00

Tom Scocca: My advice to young would-be reporters is to write a novel, because once you've written a book-length made-up story, you're qualified to write about any sort of factual business you please. [via the Awl, honestly just read the Awl every single day]

In Your Face, Unwarranted Influence, Whether Sought or Unsought, From The Military-Industrial Complex!

2009-11-04T15:31:00.000-08:00

I was incensed a while back by a particularly lame SNL cold open where Fred Armisen's Obama rattles off the lack of accomplishments so far. (It hasn't even been a year.) GITMO may still be open, but less flashy positive developments are under way:

White House officials say Mr. Obama took advantage of a rare political moment to break through one of Washington’s most powerful lobbies and trim more weapons systems than any president had in decades.

Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said Wednesday that the plan was to threaten a veto over a prominent program — in this case, the F-22 fighter jet — “to show we were willing to expend political capital and could win on something that people thought we could not.”

Once the Senate voted in July to stop buying F-22s, Mr. Emanuel said in an interview, that success “reverberated down” to help sustain billions of dollars of cuts in Army modernization, missile defense and other programs.

[Via the NYFT,B's!]

PSA: "Mafia Wars" and "Farmville" Are Probably Going To Scam You

2009-11-02T09:57:00.001-08:00

This Goes Out To All My Friends Who Routinely Invite Me To "Zombie Gangster Vampire Bite Them" or Sign Up For Some Other Mind-Numbing App On Facebook: Your credulousness is going to lose you money and is, in fact, a large part of Facebook's lazy, dishonest revenue stream. Just listen to Gawker's Ryan Tate:

[S]ocial network games like Mafia Wars and Farmville disguise old-school scams, Mike Arrington has been demonstrating over at TechCrunch this weekend. High-revenue don of social networking games Zynga, which makes the aforementioned Mafia Wars and Farmville, gets one-third of its revenue from various shady "commercial offers" and lead-generation systems, Arrington reports. Here's how HotOrNot founder James Hong described the social networking cash scene in a TechCrunch comment:

The offers that monetize the best are the ones that scam/trick users.... i'm pretty sure most of the money ended up getting our users hooked into auto-recurring SMS subscriptions for horoscopes and stuff.

Examples, via TechCrunch:

"Users are offered in-game currency in exchange for filling out an IQ survey... They are told their results will be text messaged to them... and are texted a pin code to enter on the quiz. Once they've done that, they've just subscribed to a $9.99/month subscription."
"Users are offered in game currency if they sign up to receive a free learning CD... The user is told they pay nothing except a $10 shipping charge. But the fine print, on a different page from checkout, tells them they are really getting a whole set of CDs and will be billed $189.95 unless they return them."

[Via Valleywag]

When Googling Soda Jerk, I Found This

2009-10-31T13:10:00.000-07:00

Important Blog Reading Message [Not Spam]

2009-10-29T18:49:00.000-07:00

My friend Adrian Chen is in a gladiatorial blogging competition with other members of the chattering class for an open editorial position at Gawker.

SO: Click on all his posts! Read them! Comment upon them! Go Biz-0nk3rzzzz!

It totes won't be a waste, because someone there already posted about him being funny, like a whole year ago!

This Exists: Nazi Hoodie

2009-10-08T08:11:00.000-07:00

Nothing says master race like beefing around Walmart in a hoodie. What I really want is a velour Nazi tracksuit, with the swastika on the butt.

ACORN Videomaker James O'Keefe's Funder: Facebook Investor Peter Thiel

2009-09-22T10:16:00.000-07:00

I'm really glad this aspect of the story is out now.

Leftovers from the reported volume of money "Paypal don" Peter Thiel gave O'Keefe for his previous stunt in February could have easily been used to fund the ACORN videos filmed this summer.

There's just no way that the February "Taxpayers Clearing House" thing cost $30,000. [via The Village Voice; another fun story about Thiel's politics here at Valleywag]

Crash Into Me, Former Presidential Hopeful and Ongoing Trainwreck John Edwards

2009-09-20T11:39:00.000-07:00

There's a piece in the Times today about recent developments in the John Edwards secret affair and paternity scandal. I don't think you have to be a music snob to find this part amusing:

The notion that Mr. Edwards is the father has been reinforced by the account of Andrew Young, once a close aide to Mr. Edwards, who had signed an affidavit asserting that he was the father of Ms. Hunter’s child.
Mr. Young, who has since renounced that statement, has told publishers in a book proposal that Mr. Edwards knew all along that he was the child’s father. He said Mr. Edwards pleaded with him to accept responsibility falsely, saying that would reduce the story to one of an aide’s infidelity.
In the proposal, which The New York Times examined, Mr. Young says that he assisted the affair by setting up private meetings between Mr. Edwards and Ms. Hunter. He wrote that Mr. Edwards once calmed an anxious Ms. Hunter by promising her that after his wife died, he would marry her in a rooftop ceremony in New York with an appearance by the Dave Matthews Band.

[Via NYT]

Jones/Winfrey/Hamm

2009-09-17T10:51:00.000-07:00

[via slocker]

Aw.

2009-09-17T08:24:00.000-07:00

Wasting My Time: 9/11 Edition

2009-09-11T13:55:00.000-07:00

Question: Why did I take the time to weigh in (again) on this unsatisfying film adaptation of Jon Ronson's book The Men Who Stare At Goats?

Answer: I'm probably avoiding real life issues a bit.

[Gawker Repost] "Adorable Literary Hoax Goes Entirely Unnoticed"

2009-09-09T20:44:00.000-07:00

In a 2004 issue of academic journal Modernism/Modernity, David Foster Wallace's short story collection Oblivion was reviewed by Jay Murray Siskind, a professor at Blacksmith College, and a fictional Don DeLillo character. And no one noticed!

[Full Gawker Post Here]

Great Moments In Manufactured Youth Culture

2009-08-31T17:11:00.000-07:00

Also: I strongly consider looking at my friend's piece on the last Polaroid film in existence being sold at Urban Outfitters.

Invitation To Derisive Laughter

2009-08-30T20:44:00.001-07:00

The backstory: This guy used to teach one of my brother's math in high school. According to my brother, this "toolbag [...] was a turd bucket."

Looks Like The Internet Came Through With The Mad Men Animated GIF I Wanted.

2009-08-29T21:07:00.000-07:00

"Huh, Collateral Damage"

2009-08-29T20:39:00.000-07:00

George Clooney has made a defecation out of one of my all-time-favorite nonfiction books. (Thanks, jerk. Really: Thanks. Thanks especially for the ham-fisted, Big Lebowski stunt casting.)

Beep Boop* seems enthusiastic about this turkey; though Videogum is more in my camp—but: Why trust us? Why not view the trailer and a clip or two from the actual Jon Ronson documentary and decide for yourself?

[Note: This last clip is of Jim Channon, the man Jeff Bridges is playing in the Clooney adaptation. Do you not notice how much more amazing and wildly implausible and frankly more compelling the real guy is?! Ahhhhhhhhrrrrrrrggggggghhhhh!!!1!!]

*My 2003-era blog idols are in their twilight.

Wow Just Wow

2009-08-28T15:22:00.000-07:00

2009-08-24T18:14:00.000-07:00

In this video: By re-showing a clip The Daily Show took out of context, Bill O'Reilly proves that The Daily Show had judiciously re-packaged the clip in a pretty accurate and funny new context. Then some CNN pundits ignore that fact and say inane things.

Limit Your Exposure [To Mad Men Season 3 Spoilers]

2009-08-16T22:53:00.000-07:00

Here, Alan Sepinwall is unsuccessful at getting show creator Matthew Weiner to admit why he set the new season in 1963: to stage an elaborate Dallas homage around the Kennedy assassination. [Draper's Season 3 Episode 1 lie about being an accountant investigating Jimmy Hoffa spins off the rails! He's kept secrets before, but can he keep state secrets?]

Did you know Baby Boomers are stupid, spoiled and narcissistic? Here, Frank Rich argues why the zeitgeist chooses the Mad Men season premiere over the Woodstock anniversary. [Hint: Black Camelot]

Here we learn "Pete’s big issue is that all the metrics for his manhood are fucked."

Is Sky Mall Embracing The Humiliation Of Its Brand?

2009-08-16T17:52:00.000-07:00

Given the popularity of Sky Mall and Sky Mall-esque products as an object for derisive laughter [Exhibit A; Exhibit B; and Exhibit C From the Onion itself], this banner ad purchase is a genius move. People looking for a sardonic laugh at Sky Mall's expense—literally on a money-per-click basis—will not be able to help themselves!!!

"That'll Be The Day"

2009-08-15T21:18:00.000-07:00

Implausible as it may seem, I didn't know anything about this book or the upcoming movie until two days ago. [via bEEDLEY bEEP bOOP sLIDE wHISTLE]

ALSO: In another alternate history, Buddy Holly's death is attributed to him being played by Kevin Macdonald and acting like a huge asshole.

Someone Had To Say It.

2009-08-15T19:41:00.000-07:00

But because this is a Washington Post editorial by a "reasonable" Republican no criticism of the conservative movement may be proffered without a "pox on both houses" attack on Democrats for doing the exact same thing, all the time, but worse.

Because Nancy Pelosi (D-Boogeyman) accused town hall disrupters of "carrying swastikas" (they were). And because unnamed "liberal antiwar protests" were chock-full of Hitler mustaches. Because Michael Moore said something dumb about the Patriot Act. And because Representative Brian Baird decried "Brownshirt tactics."

Here's the thing about that last one: the people intentionally disrupting town hall events and trying to turn them into anarchic carnivals of rage and possible violence are literally, actually guilty of "Brownshirt tactics."

Both the Nazis and Mussolini had Brownshirts and Blackshirts, their violent followers (many of whom were angry, disenfranchised-feeling war vets resentful of elites), attack socialists and union leaders, often on behalf of capitalists unhappy with leftist governments. Brownshirts marched through socialist strongholds in order to provoke attacks, and then they ginned up more support by holding up those who were attacked as martyrs. Does that sound familiar?

Thanks for this, Pareene. [via Gawker]

Kids In The Hall Season 1 Notes

2009-08-14T19:46:00.000-07:00

By now, I think most everyone is aware of how good the troupe is at playing rich female characters. Something I don't hear enough people say, though, is how good Scott Thompson is at making fun of heterosexual machismo. This bit is admittedly broad, but he sells it well. I mean, hey, I LOL'd:

An Old Fake New Yorker Joke

2009-06-25T18:37:00.000-07:00

Conan Father's Day Bit

2009-06-21T09:15:00.000-07:00

Perfectly executed.

[UPDATE] Horror Stories From SNL in 1995

2009-06-10T18:53:00.001-07:00

A choice excerpt, because I don't feel like I have sold this piece well yet. Skip to the end, if you don't like Roseanne, but do like stories about Norm MacDonald punching people:

Lately, the extracurricular action in the writers’ room has been more colorful than a lot of the writing.
The show hosted by Sarah Jessica Parker, in November, included a song contrasting love’s higher and lower impulses. Michael McKean sang chastely to Parker, plunking an acoustic guitar; then Sandler cranked up his electric guitar to underscore sophomoric lines like “I’m gonna give ya the wood!”

During rewrites of the piece, Kightlinger jokingly suggested to the group that the song be made even more explicit—and found herself the target of a crude barrage. “A couple of them turned on her,” says a close friend of Kightlinger’s, “with these really vicious, mean sexual things. . . . She’s one of the strongest people I know. Very tough to faze. And it made her cry.”

Kightlinger, who wrote for Roseanne last year, has been reciprocally shocked by the thin skin of her new colleagues. “I’ve had to pare down my sarcasm big-time,” she says, adding that she now feels “really positive” about SNL. “In the writers’ room at Roseanne, you could shit on each other and everybody would laugh. But here, it’s like, ‘Wait a second—that’s a piece I’ve worked on, dah, dah, dah.’ It gets personal in a hurry.”

In December, Ian Maxtone-Graham, a self-described anti-smoking zealot, complained about Norm MacDonald’s lighting up in the writers’ room. MacDonald shrugged it off. So Maxtone-Graham extinguished the cigarette by squirting MacDonald in the face with a water pistol. MacDonald punched Maxtone-Graham in the head, knocking him to the floor.

Horror Stories From SNL in 1995

2009-06-10T10:53:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of great bleak vignettes in this article—from Chris Farley's sycophantic display at a memorial for deceased SNL-writer Michael O’Donoghue, to Julia Sweeney's personal annoyance with Lorne Michaels' phalanx of high-strung young blonde assistants (widely mocked as "the Lornettes").

I left the article with a sense of the heroic awesomeness that is Jim Downey; pitty for the "too hip for the room" new hires like Laura Kightlinger, Chris Elliot and Janeane Garofalo; a reaffirmation of my love for Bill Murray; and a potentially productive chunk of my day gone.

[Link via a 1995 New York magazine]

Bruce Sterling's "Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature"

2009-06-08T19:16:00.000-07:00

SUMMARY: Easily, not the dumbest thing Bruce Sterling has ever written.

Naturally, everything he says applies just as urgently to cartooning and ought to have been on the agenda for MOCCA's Making Good Comics in a New Era panel.

Below are a few of the challenges* that I have comments about:

2. Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks, streaming video — are moving into areas where printed text cannot follow.

Also true for printed text paired sequentially with images. It's also conceptually indistinguishable from Sterling's #14, which is more a corollary than its own independent "challenge." (Who is editing this blog? Was s/he laid off?)

Something to keep in mind with this point is that: until you become a famous graphic novelist (whose very name is a Brand unto itself), film, TV and animation are your mortal enemies in the attention economy marketplace. Like the other losers (e.g. literature, nonfiction writing and the static visual arts) your twin hopes used to be that your production cost was still relatively lower and that the flexible pacing of your medium's consumption afforded audiences the breathing room to digest smarter, and thus more significant and lasting, idears.

Needless to say, the (relative) democratization of the means of video production, as well as the cheapness of digital distribution, have undercut those hopes significantly. Film, TV and animation will always be more expensive, but by much less than they used to be. And further, the public's ability to parse, edit, repost and generally scrutinize moving images has radically improved thanks to these technologies. The "Cool Guys Don't Look At Explosions" musical sketch from the 2009 MTV Movie Awards, should tell us something about the ascendancy of cinema studies in academia and its convergence with homemade YouTube montages. Namely: the shelf life of every genre convention in the moving picture medium has been dramatically reduced. If that's not a recipe for exponential sophistication, than I don't know what is. (However, I would be willing to debate the amount of drag force that a glut of "lowest common denominator" Reality TV, YouTube response videos and the like are effecting on this exponential up tic.)

8. Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and fragments literary reputation.

This is probably the only leg up we have on our rivals in moving images, whose work can "follow the vernacular" as it hightails it (heh) into the universe of cellphones and streaming video. Comics will always be cheaper and can pour themselves into all kinds of niches faster and deeper. Provided, of course, that they can stop trying to appeal to their own limited niche audiences. You know what they are!

18. The Gothic fate of poor slain Poetry is the specter at this dwindling feast.

Okay. So, clearly, this is not a challenge, but an artfully elucidated statement of fact. Can I attribute this to laziness on Sterling's part? A bit of creative license that forces the critical reader to re-evaluate his entire blog post as capital "P" Poetry? And, if the latter, why not use the cooler British spelling, "spectre"?

There's more (#'s 3-7 obviously), but I'm reticent to spend more time on it.

[Link via Wired]

* ("Challenges" sounds like self-help to me—but I realize that it can also sound like some "NASA-grade inspiring," Camelot-era bullshit.)

LOL [Context-Free Image]

2009-05-30T09:41:00.001-07:00

I Did An Interview With Peep Show Co-creator Jesse Armstrong

2009-05-29T19:51:00.000-07:00

It's up at the website for the PRI-syndicated radio show, The Sound Of Young America. Here's the opening blurb:

Jesse Armstrong is one of the co-creators and writers of the BAFTA-winning BBC sitcom Peep Show. (A BAFTA is like a British Emmy.) Now entering its sixth series, with a US version in development at Spike TV, Peep Show is a funny, but cringe-inducing, depiction of the lives of two twenty-something flat mates, played by past "The Sound of Young America" guest David Mitchell and comedy partner Robert Webb. No less an authority on UK comedy than Ricky Gervais called it "The only British thing that I was really blown away by in the last few years."

Armstrong has also written for other acclaimed television series, including the sketch series That Mitchell & Web Look and the political satire The Thick of It.

[Hey, TSOYA visitors: Wh's'happening?]

Paul Krugman: Inflation Unlikely

2009-05-29T13:06:00.000-07:00

According to his Op-Ed today, which I found comforting:

[...] don’t such actions [i.e. buying lots of debt both from the government and from the private sector] have to be inflationary sooner or later? No. The Bank of Japan, faced with economic difficulties not too different from those we face today, purchased debt on a huge scale between 1997 and 2003. What happened to consumer prices? They fell.

[...] it’s hard to escape the sense that the current inflation fear-mongering is partly political, coming largely from economists who had no problem with deficits caused by tax cuts but suddenly became fiscal scolds when the government started spending money to rescue the economy. And their goal seems to be to bully the Obama administration into abandoning those rescue efforts.
Needless to say, the president should not let himself be bullied. The economy is still in deep trouble and needs continuing help.

Boom! Rebutted!

The Babysitters' Club Theme Song

2009-05-25T18:27:00.000-07:00

Summary: Giggling holiday consumerism. Headbands in vibrant colors. A reaffirmation of the reliability of friends, specifically girlfriends who share membership in a childcare guild.

Sherlock Holmes Trailer [Pallet Cleanser]

2009-05-25T08:06:00.000-07:00

Having read most of the Conan Doyle Holmes books, I am happy to see this.

It's actually no more inaccurate an adaptation than the staid, refined Basil Rathbone version of Sherlock Holmes that's ingrained in our collective pop culture consciousness. And, frankly, I am delighted to see the pendulum swing this far in the other direction.

Finally, Holmes' drug habbit and Watson's athletic build will get some (over)representation.

Thanks for getting divorced from Guy Ritchie, Madonna.

"The Road" Trailer [Do Not Want]

2009-05-25T07:43:00.000-07:00

Nothing about this filled me with more dread than the "Dimension Films" logo. Did I really want to think of this adaptation in the same line-up with Scream 3, Halloween H20, Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return and Hellraisers 3-8?

Allegedly a "Fan Vid" for the Strokes Song "Razorblade"

2009-05-22T09:19:00.000-07:00

I still don't understand why no one liked their 3rd album.

"Look At Me Like A Human Boy"

2009-05-19T16:49:00.000-07:00

A Note On John Edwards

2009-05-19T08:49:00.000-07:00

"Ethicist" Randy Cohen has a post/piece/whatever on the NYT's site about Elizabeth Edwards new book—however, mostly, I want to direct your attention to this wedding photo and what is perhaps the most textbook "shit-eating grin" I have ever seen on a man's face:

Mary Gaitskill Interview: The Believer Issue 02.09

2009-05-17T15:56:00.000-07:00

I sometimes feel like I come off like Ed Wood talking about Orson Welles (as depicted in the film Ed Wood) whenever I'm talking about writers and how they've conducting their lives: that is to say, earnest and more than a little embarrassing.

In any event, this Mary Gaitskill interview was good—and I don't have much more time tonight to devote to this subject than to say that. Personal highlights included (but were not limited to):

Sentiment as false-feeling.
Her notion of what a wife is, and more importantly the, frankly, heartwarming post-print-publication addenda.
The bit about repetition in Dickens and the proceeding tangent on (essentially) everyone's natural tendency towards apophenia.
The differences between guilt and shame.

Some Music Videos

2009-05-15T15:02:00.000-07:00

Someone I know compared this Swedish-based group Liechtenstein to the Vivian Girls in the limited sense that both of these all-girl trios seem capable of coasting on their looks in lieu of having anything particularly amazing to offer sonically. As this blog post's label indicates, I am in no position to weigh in on whether this is true for either band. I bring it up because I am fascinated with this concept as a corollary to the glass ceiling specifically for attractive and ambitious career women: the more perversely degrading glass floor. That being said, I liked their set (sonically!) on Friday at Don Hills and recommend seeing them and Cats on Fire when both bands play at Bruar Falls in Brooklyn on Tuesday.

I was supposed to get a song from these guys on a mix CD from someone, but in the interim, I've broken down and just started listening to them on my own. So (obviously) the song is called "I'm In Fighting Mode" and the band is British trio Let's Wrestle.

Pollution In My Neighborhood Explained By WNYC

2009-05-10T22:28:00.000-07:00

The Irony Of This "McCafe" Hulu Ad Is Sad

2009-05-07T14:12:00.000-07:00

What is Adbusters Magazine going to do now that companies are "sponsoring" ad-free (virtual) environments?

When Haruki Murakami Chose To Be Poor

2009-05-04T10:25:00.000-07:00

Part something-or-other in an ongoing series wherein I read things about great authors whose early-30's were not exactly financially successful — largely to comfort myself with delusions of being in good company.

From a truncated version of Murakami's "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running" that appeared in (as with the first installment of this series) the New Yorker:

For three years I ran my jazz club-keeping the accounts, checking the inventory, scheduling my staff, standing behind the counter mixing cocktails and cooking, closing up in the wee hours of the morning, and only then being able to write, at home, at the kitchen table, until I got sleepy. I felt as if I were living two people's lives. And, gradually, I found myself wanting to write a more substantial kind of novel. I had enjoyed the process of writing my first two books, but there were parts of both that I wasn't pleased with. I was able to write only in spurts, snatching bits of time-a half hour here, an hour there-and, because I was always tired and felt as if I were competing against the clock, I was never able to concentrate very well. With this scattered kind of approach I was able to write a few interesting, fresh things, but the result was far from complex or profound. I felt as if I'd been given this wonderful opportunity to be a novelist, and I had a natural desire to take that opportunity as far as I possibly could. So, after giving it a lot of thought, I decided to close the business and focus solely on writing. At this point, my income from the jazz club was significantly more than my income as a novelist, a reality to which I resigned myself.

Preliminary Minutiae: Mini-Comic (Very) Roughs

2009-05-03T12:31:00.000-07:00

[Click to enlarge]

Haim Saban: Ay Yi-Yi-Yi Yi !!!

2009-04-29T08:31:00.000-07:00

I have been waiting over three years for a scandal involving the Israeli-American neoconservative billionaire Haim Saban, the man who made a fortune single-handedly bringing Japan's Super Sentai craze to the U.S. (re-dubbed Power Rangers). I am also thankful this scandal is funny.

My Pandora Radio Keeps Confusing Talking Heads And Faith Hill

2009-04-26T22:40:00.000-07:00

On The Boston Globe's Big Picture Blog

2009-04-24T08:47:00.000-07:00

[Via the Awl]

Each year, the New York Times presents in-house awards, called the Punch Awards, to recognize great contributions from the staff. This year they quite rightly recognize the inventor of The Big Picture, the genius Boston Globe-hosted photography weblog. Unfortunately, the owners of the Times are forced to note that staffer Alan Taylor (a software engineer) “developed and promoted the blog largely on his own time.” Perhaps in the future the newspaper company will encourage the development of their most successful products on, say, staff time.

Why Orwell Chose To Be Poor

2009-04-23T11:15:00.000-07:00

Part something-or-other in an ongoing series wherein I read things about great authors whose late-20's were not exactly financially successful — largely to comfort myself with delusions of being in good company.

From a recent New Yorker review of Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London" by some guy:

That’s a long time to be poor and living as hard as Orwell did. It suggests more seriousness of purpose and staying power than some comments would grant him. It’s true that he came from some rung of the English middle class (“lower upper middle” he once called it, subcategory military), but it wasn’t a social world that leant itself to sponging off your parents. His decision to become poor was just that, but it wasn’t a joyride that he could easily have gotten off once under way, and it carried psychological as well as financial dangers. So why did he do it?

Orwell’s explanation, given a few years later in “The Road to Wigan Pier” (which is a far more sociological and political book, about the unemployed poor in northern England), connects the experience to his years as an imperial cop in Burma:

I was conscious of an immense weight of guilt that I had got to expiate. I suppose that sounds exaggerated; but if you do for five years a job that you thoroughly disapprove of, you will probably feel the same…I felt that I had got to escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of man’s dominion over man. I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed; to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants. And, chiefly because I had had to think everything out in solitude, I had carried my hatred of oppression to extraordinary lengths. At that time failure seemed to me to be the only virtue. Every suspicion of self-advancement, even to “succeed” in life to the extent of making a few hundreds a year, seemed to me spiritually ugly, a species of bullying.

[Via The New Yorker]

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

2009-04-22T14:57:00.001-07:00

On The Plastic Jesus Scene From Cool Hand Luke

2009-04-22T08:03:00.000-07:00

There was a period when the two middle brothers in my family would sing this around the house a lot. Then my dad would sing it to himself while doing dishes. The Newman performance that inspired this fad in my immediate family is pretty cathartic and suitably ambiguous.

I, for one, can't tell if Newman's weepy banjo playing is actually meant to transform the Jesus statue's glow-in-the-dark plasticity and the Madonna's rhinestones from the mild parody songwriters Ed Rush and George Cromarty had intended into a poignant contemporary analog for the cheap poverty and humility Christianity is notorious for.

Ultimately, I know I'll have to rewatch the whole movie (which I haven't done maybe since high school) to know for sure. However, what I want to think is that this is just a perfect encapsulation of how useful even empty rituals and religious trinkets can be when you are down in the dumps.

Joke Dissection 1.03 [Web Exclusive for Sit Down, Shut Up]

2009-04-21T09:05:00.000-07:00

A lot of the humor in this piece comes from the obvious gulf between the emotion that's intended to be conveyed and the one that's plainly visible through body language (something the animation department for Sit Down, Shut Up is going to have to figure out how to simulate for these two voice actors post-haste).

By now, everyone who is a Will Arnett fan is aware of what he's doing here: contrasting his gravelly, leading-man voice and general belligerence against his blatantly insecure physical presence and general stupidity. It is the man's bread and butter.

So, instead, I want to focus on Jason Bateman's performance and some of his contributions to the straight man archetype. Namely: focused, measured and self-serving rage under a gossamer onion-cloth of feigned politeness; the ridiculous extremes of his insincerity, like his repeated suggestion that, maybe, the embarrassing details he's disclosing about Arnett should be run by him and possibly cut; the conspiratorial half wink when he says, "You have to keep your eye on" Arnett's various hair pieces ...

I'm sure there are previous examples of this unreliable straight man routine (Oliver Hardy's blame-skirting moments comes to mind). However, what's interesting about Jason Bateman's anal retentive, unhappy and vindictive straight man is that he always comes across as superficially well-adjusted and successful. He's like a life-long eagle scout going through a bitter mid-life realization that working hard and following the rules hasn't gotten him where he wants to be.

(Actually, thinking about the long fallow period in the middle of his career arch, I wonder to what extent this is the comic archetype he was born to play.)

Tote Bag Of My Self-Deprecating Dreams

2009-04-18T20:55:00.001-07:00

[Via Very Small Array]

Getting Sold By Academic Criticism

2009-04-18T20:42:00.000-07:00

I am a sucker for long-winded (but precise!) scholarship.

So, I've decided to write down a recent example I happened to have thoroughly enjoyed from Tony Sharpe's biography of poet Wallace Stevens:

This poem ["The Comedian as the Letter C"] was indeed the accomplishment of an extremist in the exercise, an act almost of aesthetic terrorism in a society whose post-puritan recrudescence had recently (1919) introduced Prohibition. It was also, as I have tried to suggest, a repudiation of several of the precious tenants of literary Modernism, in its unorthodoxy with regard to location and locution — no wonder Stevens and Hemingway came to blows! Although the heightened consciousness of the materiality of his linguistic medium might link Steven's poem to radical experimenters such as [Gertrude] Stein, the willed anachronism of its lexicon, and the old-fashionedness of its blank verse and the basic narrative shape, suggest a more traditionalist poetics. It is almost as if the poem had been expressly designed to appeal to nobody at all[...]

Post-puritan recrudescence! The willed anachronism of its lexicon! Complex ideas wrought more complex through the wit of formal linguistic expression! God, I miss the ivory tower

Joke Dissection 1.02 [The Simpsons]

2009-04-14T22:13:00.000-07:00

As someone for whom The Simpsons was expressly forbidden during the show's heyday, I am pretty agnostic on the whole issue of the later seasons' lack of quality.

This 19th season clip is a case in point, because I think it's a great example of how to steal a joke:

Now, this magnet gag is at least as old as the 1957 Bugs Bunny cartoon Bugsy and Mugsy, but the fact that it has a Looney Tunes precursor actually makes it more plausible, and kind of endearing, for a 10-year-old like Bart to actually attempt it.

More importantly, it affords some great character-based one liners. "It's not funny; these movements are involuntary."

Can I Has This Michael Jackson Portrait?

2009-04-14T19:07:00.000-07:00

[Via NYT]

Wow, This Really Hit The Spot Today

2009-04-14T12:30:00.000-07:00

[via Cat and Girl]

Joke Dissection 1.00 [30 Rock]

2009-04-13T06:06:00.000-07:00

When Liz Lemon's bridge-and-tunnel ex-boyfriend, Dennis Duffy, calls her dummy, it's funny—but it's also brilliant.

It provides a radically concise exposition of how a comedy writer could ever have loved him in the first place. (I think they also liked eating food in bed.)

Also, like her other more recent ex—Jon Hamm as Dr. Drew Baird—Dennis has clearly been living it up in the bubble.

Ellis vs. Predator

2009-04-12T05:56:00.000-07:00

Confrontational Dorkiness

2009-04-10T14:51:00.000-07:00

Never has "white guy dancing" been done with such a defiant, "Fuck you!"

"Being bored is the only time you are creative."

2009-03-29T12:59:00.000-07:00

Dyson Freeman is probably the only climate change denier I genuinely admire. [Via The New York Time Sunday Magazine]

This Exists: Rainbow Raider

2009-03-26T18:42:00.001-07:00

"Wow." Just, "Wow."

Thing I Never Knew

2009-03-19T20:39:00.000-07:00

This may be old news to some of you, but: Wow, Gordon Lish is like the Malcolm McLaren to Raymond Carver's Sex Pistols. [via NYT]

You Know, Begrudgingly ...

2009-03-13T13:09:00.000-07:00

I am impressed by how much this stupid "If You Seek Amy" Video operates simultaneously as a vicious celebration of, and a mea culpa for, Britney Spear's career of acting innocent while selling sex to minors. Congratulations America for the schizophrenic culture that could produce these three juvenile minutes of David Lynch by way of Madonna and Robert Mapplethorpe.

[This week's South Park about the Jonas Brothers couldn't have happened at a better time.]

Well, That Jim Cramer / Jon Stewart Thing Happened

2009-03-12T22:38:00.000-07:00

For anyone looking for the take-away message from the Jon Stewart / Jim Cramer interview this is it:

It was uncomfortable and somewhat breathtaking to watch. What I hope people get from this interview, though, is not just that CNBC is a really shitty journalistic institution. This is how ALL cable news works (and most websites, and some newspapers). Access is so difficult to find that journalists end up being mouthpieces for different points of view rather than arriving at some kind of truth. I have no idea how this problem gets solved, but until it does it seems to me that cable news does more harm than good.

[Via Some Gawker Commenter]

Ok, I'm Going To This ...

2009-03-12T09:27:00.000-07:00

... whether or not I am still coughing up new characters for "The Mucinex Expanded Universe."

I have no idea which one of my friends would also want to go, and I'm frankly enthusiastic about doing something by myself, but I'm just gonna throw this out here anyway:

SUN, MAR 15: Lizzie “Elizabeth” Skurnick reads from Check-in — which [Lauren Cerand] once bought a dozen copies of, and then resold them in ten minutes, it’s that good — on Sunday evening at KGB, along with John Reed and Amy Koppelman. 7PM, FREE.

[Event via Maud Newton. Video below via Caketrain.]

Cramer On Cramer: I Say My Show Works Basically Because I Pull Stock Picks Out Of My Ass

2009-03-11T11:20:00.000-07:00

From the May 28, 2007 issue of New York Magazine, Jim Cramer on his show in comparison to his recent sparring partners:

Look at Mad Money in contrast to The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, two programs that ought to be able to sue for libel after being included in the same sentence with Mad Money. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are both very smart, they’re both entertaining, and they both appeal to the kids. But at the end of the day, even they are heavily produced. On Mad Money, we cannot be produced because we are pretty much at the whim of whoever decides to phone in and ask me a question. And even the parts of the show I control are a lot more off the cuff than you would expect or even believe.

[This next part is technically earlier in the article.]

Forget Real World or Survivor—all these reality-TV shows go only part of the way because they’re so heavily produced. I have an hour-and-a-half tape delay. I say whatever pops into my head, and we keep it in the show even if it makes me look like an unsophisticated moron, a way too sophisticated know-it-all, or the worst: when I come off as a Marxist-Leninist, even though I’m a Trotskyite at heart (an easy mistake to make given my close resemblance to Lenin). On some level, the show is dedicated to the proposition that 98 percent of my education, or at least the parts my parents paid for, was not irrelevant, or at least the Western-civ stuff, along with that Shakespeare course, because it lets me confuse the bard with C.R. Bard, the medical-supplies company.

Mercurial? Counter-intuitive? Unapologetically unreliable?

On an unrelated note, the Lenin portrait on his set was one of the things I liked about Jim Cramer years ago:

I Want This To Get Ugly

2009-03-11T10:03:00.000-07:00

If you've been following the recent Jim Cramer / Jon Stewart feud, you're probably already aware that Cramer will be appearing on The Daily Show Thursday for the title bout.

Now, up until this point, Stewart has mostly hit three honest and unassailable points:

By a luxurious margin, neither CNBC nor Jim Cramer live up to their marketing slogans.
Their failure to do so makes them at least as dumb as Rick Santelli's "losers" who took on mortgages they couldn't afford.
Like Stewart's last famous cable news target, Crossfire, many of CNBC's shows have titles (Squawk Box, Mad Money, Fast Money) that betray a serious contempt for the viewers' intelligence, while actually attempting to convey a smirking, insouciant camaraderie with the audience.

There's a good chance Cramer's appearance will be a gentle ribbing on par with Bill O'Reilly's appearance. However, it would be really great if Stewart and the team ambushed Cramer on the long circulating accusations of his illegal activity and market manipulation.

Here's one example of what I'd like to hear come up, taken from former Columbia Journalism Review editor Mark Mitchell's long expose on a still developing short-selling scandal:

Not long before [Jim] Cramer announced his SEC subpoenas, Rocker sold all of his shares in TheStreet.com. Cramer sold around $2 million of his own shares. If Cramer knew about the SEC investigation before he sold his shares, which was almost certainly the case, he was trading on insider information - another jailable offense.

But Cramer don’t know nothin’ about nothin’. And Herb thinks the SEC investigation is an outrage. So Herb and Cramer have commandeered CNBC. They are live on CNBC. Herb has jabbered something about a conspiracy - a conspiracy to get Herb.

And now Cramer is going to show us something.

He’s pulled out a big, red magic marker. Veins are popping, rope-like, from his bald cranium. And he’s snarling. Cramer is actually snarling while he uses the big red magic marker to scribble something on a piece of paper.

He holds the paper up to the camera.

It’s...it’s his government subpoena...Cramer has vandalized his government subpoena! On live TV... in big red letters...

It says, "BULL!"

[This and more via Daily Kos diarist TocqueDeville]

“A world of pseudo-satisfactions that is superficially exciting but hollow at its core.”

2009-03-09T21:21:00.000-07:00

Stanley Fish, whose new book Save the World On Your Own Time is meant as a salvo against political activism in academia, took to the New York Times recently to better define his stance in lieu of accusatory contrasts to the typical neoliberal agenda for college institutions.

He didn't mean to, but his cursory definition reinvigorated my disdain for neoliberalism and left me interested in what the hell he thinks universities are for:

The objection (which I am reporting, not making) is that in the passage from a state in which actions are guided by an overarching notion of the public good to a state in which individual entrepreneurs “freely” pursue their private goods, values like morality, justice, fairness, empathy, nobility and love are either abandoned or redefined in market terms.

Short-term transactions-for-profit replace long-term planning designed to produce a more just and equitable society. Everyone is always running around doing and acquiring things, but the things done and acquired provide only momentary and empty pleasures (shopping, trophy houses, designer clothing and jewelry), which in the end amount to nothing. Neoliberalism, David Harvey explains, delivers a “world of pseudo-satisfactions that is superficially exciting but hollow at its core.” (”A Brief History of Neoliberalism.”)

Harvey and the other critics of neoliberalism explain that once neoliberal goals and priorities become embedded in a culture’s way of thinking, institutions that don’t regard themselves as neoliberal will nevertheless engage in practices that mime and extend neoliberal principles — privatization, untrammeled competition, the retreat from social engineering, the proliferation of markets.

Not interested enough to read his book though.

I am about to start doing my taxes.

2009-03-06T11:33:00.000-08:00

“We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed.”—Frank Bidart, "Borges and I"

The Roger Rabbit Of Super Bowl Commercials

2009-02-22T09:34:00.000-08:00

A popular story behind Who Framed Roger Rabbit says that it would have been impossible to get characters like Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse onscreen together were it not for the insistence and industry weight of Steven Spielberg.

Part of me wonders if the same was true of this Super Bowl Commercial for MasterCard. (The rest of me thinks these companies were actually grateful.)

Ewwwww!

2009-02-17T21:37:00.001-08:00

This Is True

2009-02-17T20:55:00.000-08:00

GOTHAMIST: You grew up in New Jersey. Are you surprised that people assume that New Jersey is just an unpleasant place?

TOM SCHARPLING: Yes I am. New York is fine. I like New York. Maybe I even love New York, but I grew up with New York half an hour away my whole life. Unlike all the people who live there now who grew up in Delaware, South Carolina, or wherever and then they act like, "I'm a New Yorker because I lived here for five months." They're going to tell what's going on. I went into New York every week with my parents to help them with their business my whole life. I had a pretty good handle on New York. I have a driveway, a back yard, a car, a dog that isn't all cooped up, and I go a half hour through the tunnel and I'm in the city. I use New York, I leave New York, and then I go back to my house. People think that New Jersey is some monologue joke with toxic dumps. Take a look at New York. You might want to take a closer look at where you're actually living. Ultimately, if people don't want to come to New Jersey, fine. It's more room for the people who get it.

[via Gothamist, obvs]

Times Are Tough, Orko

2009-02-17T15:58:00.000-08:00

[From here]

Out For Blood (or at least anwsers)

2009-02-12T11:33:00.000-08:00

A new Gallup Poll claims that the majority of American want—at the very least—some kind of investigation into potential criminal activities by the Bush Administration.

While I agree with them, I also understand that navigating this current economic crisis means all hands on deck and that alienating the whiny babies in the GOP is a luxury we can't afford yet. [via TPM DC]

Newsweek's "The Hills"/"The City" Parody "The District" Is Way, Way Better Than It Has Any Right To Be

2009-02-11T19:58:00.000-08:00

It's also (as my high school aged brother pointed out) a surprisingly comprehensive recap if you haven't been following presbo's first 100 days.

Episode 1:

Episode 2:

Lousy Trend Pieces on the Facebook "25 Random Things" Explosion!!!

2009-02-05T10:29:00.000-08:00

What have we done, ppl!? In the future, be careful about doing things that can lead to lousy trend pieces. [via Gawker]

Cash4Gold Attempts to Clean Its Search Results Of Criticism

2009-02-04T19:49:00.001-08:00

No Superbowl ad can hide the fact that Cash4Gold pays you a 3rd of your gold's value and is trying to hide that fact by bribing journalists who write about it. [via bEEPbOOP]

Keep It Up, Andrew Lin

2009-02-04T08:57:00.000-08:00

[via The Mountain Of Sadness]

No to "Yes Pecan" Ice Cream?

2009-02-02T09:24:00.000-08:00

This reminds me of an Onion headline I pitched earlier this month (that didn't make it past the Monday 700), "Obama's Economic Recovery Plan To Emphasize Campaign Mug, Tote Sectors."

Dude's image is like a recovery plan unto itself; and this fact seems to be developing into a serious "brand equity" issue for the administration:

White House lawyers are examining ways to control the use of the president’s image, while recognizing the worldwide fascination about Obama’s election, First Amendment free-speech rights and easy access to videos and photos on the Web.

“Our lawyers are working on developing a policy that will protect the presidential image while being careful not to squelch the overwhelming enthusiasm that the public has for the president,” White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said.

Obama’s calls for change and his “Yes We Can” campaign mantra are being evoked to sell assembly-required furniture in Ikea’s “Embrace Change” marketing campaign, bargain airfares during Southwest Airlines Inc.’s “Yes You Can” sale and “Yes Pecan” ice cream at Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc. shops.

[via Bloomberg]

The Term Boycott Came From "Captain Charles Boycott"

2009-01-30T20:34:00.000-08:00

I love this kind of thing.

There must be a draft of Mason & Dixon where this guy shows up. [Image via Wikipedia]

"I work to support my wife's Christian Louboutin addiction."

2009-01-29T10:16:00.000-08:00

Best Abramoff Crony Quote Ever!

Governor Rod Blagojevich

2009-01-27T14:12:00.000-08:00

WTF is this unbelievably ballsy blanketing of the court of public opinion?