Don't be a David

Academy Awards 2012 Nom-Noms, Movies about Movies about Acting in Movies

2012-01-25T06:46:00.028-05:00

You might have noticed I haven't been posting much here, mostly because my reviews of terrible movies have been picked up by JustPressPlay. But it's that time of year again to talk about the movies that are supposed to be not-terrible, but usually are. That's right, it's The Oscars: Not Accounting for Taste since 1929.

Last year's awards were a potpourri with the gentle scent of Mediocre Medley. This year seems to be no different.

Best Picture
The Descendants might be the only movie for adults on this list, in that it's concerned with taking apart illusions rather than building them up. Midnight in Paris was a cute ball of childish fluff, and I'm just not sure how it's any different from the last ten years of (roughly equivalent) Woody Allen films that it suddenly deserves an Oscar nod. (Match Point was the best thing he's done since the 90s, and that only got a writing nod.)

Speaking of pervy old men, look at Speilberg with War Horse and Scorsese with Hugo. Neither of them have made a truly great movie in forever. Is the Academy so desperate for role models that it needs to trot out a gray-haired American auteur or two for every ceremony? True, the red carpet wouldn't quite be the same without Scorsese's eyebrows bobbing somewhere along it, wafting up and down lazily and independently, like drinky birds.

Also note the absence of an Eastwood this year, both he and DiCaprio have been snubbed for J. Edgar. This might be the first awards in a while where we're spared having to watch Leo fail to win anything.

Best Actor
Gary Oldman is a bit of a surprise here, since Tinker, Tailor skated by theaters without too much notice like a cold war spy. On skates. But Oldman's nomination is curious since in Tinker, Tailor he basically plays Alec Guinness. Now look at Brad Pit playing Robert Redford in Moneyball, Dujardin playing any number of silent actors in The Artist, and George Clooney playing, well, George Clooney. All of these characters are throwbacks. Are movies becoming increasingly about movies? I predict that in a decade the only award-winning acting will be Marlon Brando impersonations.

A notable snub this year is Michael Fassbender, for his poignant and full-frontal portrayal of guilt and sex addiction in X-Men: First Class.

Of course, Pitt deserves an Oscar nod for trying his hardest not to be sexy (a great, ultimately futile effort). And Clooney deserves an Oscar nod for his salt-and-pepper hair. Or, rather, his hair deserves its own category. Best George Clooney hair in a George Clooney movie (Comedy or Musical).

Best Actress
Most of the buzz here is going to Michelle Williams in My Week with Marilyn for the much-covetted "Playing Someone Who Couldn't Act" award. Viola Davis needs a separate "Putting Up with White Folk" award. The statuette will be of Nichelle Nichols.

Supporting Actor/Actress
And the Oscar goes to: Jonah Hill! Did you just die a little inside right there?

Writing
Usually my favorite category, this year is basically a mess. "Original Screenplay" has two foreign films, two comedies, and one Sorkin-esque docudramady ("Best Fast Talking about Important Matters in a Non-Sorkin Film, Or, the In The Loop Award"). Adapted writing has one novel (The Descendants, one sort-of-novel (The Invention of Hugo Cabret), one play (The Ides of March), one non-fiction (Moneyball), and one movie/novel (Tinker, Tailor).

My Predictions:
are that it will be a five-hour waste of time but I'm going to watch it anyway. Also Billy Crystal will make one dirty joke too many and end up with more than he bargained for when Viola Davis takes him home.

As usual I'll be watching as many of these films again or for the first time over the next month. I'll be writing quick reviews here on the fly about how terrible they all are and how the apocalypse must surely be coming. Can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to it.

Rome, Danger Mouse, and the Soundtrack to an Italian Daydream

2011-08-21T12:54:00.010-05:00

Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi — Rome

Clearly, Danger Mouse can do no wrong. He can, however, attempt too much, which somewhat mars Rome, an otherwise fine and low-key musical trip. The hype cloud surrounding this album is intense, that it took five years to make, that it reunited most of the people who worked with Ennio Moriccone on his seminal movie scores, that it used only period instruments and production tools. This creates certain expectations, and let me get this out right now: Rome lives up to none of them. But that doesn't mean it's not worth a listen on its own.

Very little in Rome sounds Morricone. Maybe it's the choice of rocker Jack White and crooner Norah Jones to front the album, who give a very modern, very Danger Mouse feel to the vocals. But there is also the songs themselves. There is none of the wild, barren patience of Morricone, or of other Italian soundtracks of the '70s. The changes feel like rock changes, the bass feels restrained and over-produced and many tracks seem like they could be on a Broken Bells album (another Danger Mouse collaboration.)

But if you take the album on its own merits, it's very good. "The Rose with a Broken Neck" has a Nick Cave-esque darkness, with White and Jones' voices playing over each other like hunter and hunted. Or "Two Against One," a Jack White solo that could play over a very sexy fight scene. In "Problem Queen," Norah Jones is so good you almost forget about "Come Away with Me." Almost. Rome is halfway between a collaboration album (the usual Danger Mouse or Dan the Automator fare) and a soundtrack album. So the usual inconsistencies of a collab are smoothed over, and the usual boringness of a soundtrack is perked up. This also means the stand-out tracks which usually dot a collab are also toned down.

Rome is low-key and unspectacular and mostly one-note, but it works. It's an experience, a small, same-colored musical journey. And it manage to capture the danger and drive of a '70s soundtrack, with moments of quietness and moments of action, crescendos and small climaxes. And if you play it through while driving, you're almost guaranteed an adventure.

Midnight in Paris, Nostalgia, Didn't Owen Wilson Try to Kill Himself?

2011-08-21T12:48:00.009-05:00

Midnight In Paris

You know when stepping into a basic Woody Allen film that you're entering a particular sort of universe. It'll be charming and whimsical, there will be a slew of colorful supporting characters played by the best actors in the business. The bad guys will be pretentious blowhards, the good guys will be confused overthinkers speed-talking their way through a crisis. And a few minutes before the credits, there will be a small epiphany. Not a world-shattering realization. Just a little one, merely there to assure you that the movie you just sat through wasn't just silly fun.

It's a solid formula for many of his movies (Match Point only slightly excepted), and Midnight In Paris seems the perfect vehicle. Owen Wilson plays Gil, a frustrated writer trying to turn from hack screen writing to real literature. He has an overbearing fiancée who is probably having an affair with the pretentious blowhard du jour (a very funny Michael Sheen, who gets all the pedantic cadences just right). They are on vacation in Paris, which leads Gil on a wave of Lost Generation nostalgia, which doesn't interest his girlfriend in the slightest. Oh, and if he sits on a particular corner at midnight, a taxi pulls up and takes him to 1924.

This is where Woody gets to be Woody: having his sad-sack protagonist wander through the streets and parties of 1920s Paris, rubbing elbows with many of the great artistic and literary figures of the time, listening first-hand to Cole Porter, giving advice to Louis Buñuel, doing the Charleston with Djuna Barnes. The fact that all of these fabulous figures are played by equally fabulous actors turns the movie into a sort of guessing game: "Who will show up next? T. S. Eliot? Adrien Brody... as... Dali?" And this is where the strength of the movie lies, in this nostalgic wish-fulfillment. If you went back to 1924, what would you say to F. Scott when he complains about Zelda? What would you say to Gertrude Stein's critique of your novel?

The nostalgia scenes are the strength, certainly not the predictable and uninspired scenes in the present, which proceed like clockwork, every snag and relationship argument telegraphed from the beginning. And certainly not Owen Wilson's character, who, try as he might, is never much more than the shoulder we have to look over to see what we want to see. The Paris of the roaring '20s is too interesting to have the Paris of today be so boring, and so the movie sags whenever we are not in the presence of Hemingway et al.

So Midnight In Paris is a slight pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless (Adrien Brody as the bombastic Dali is almost worth the price of admission itself.) The epiphany moment, which concerns nostalgia, is particularly underwhelming, since it's not only obvious, but also in a way contrary to the spirit of the movie. We all know nostalgia is unproductive and illusory, but then again so are movies. And movies can fun and useful too. This one is more fun than useful, but fun nonetheless.

Oscar Predictions, 2011

2011-02-27T16:05:00.011-05:00

Just because you care, here is my list of Oscar 2011 predictions in the main categories. The rest of them I'm certain are decided by trained monkeys.

Supporting Actor
Christian Bale, The Fighter

Purely to see what accent he'll use in his acceptance speech.

Supporting Actress
Amy Adams, The Fighter

Playing a bitchy girlfriend isn't hard. Male voters will pick Amy Adams because they think their bitchy girlfriends will bitch at them if they don't. Female voters will pick Melissa Leo. Smart voters will pick Hailee Steinfeld. The weak of mind will pick Helena Bonham Carter, and blame it on the imperious curse.

*EDIT: Clearly I underestimated the number of female voters. Also the effect of plastering your f***** face on every magazine in Hollywood

Best Actress
Natalie Portman, Black Swan

It takes talent to make a lesbian sex scene unsexy, congratulations Natalie.

Best Actor
Colin Firth, The King's Speech

For the best English stuttering since Hugh Grant.

Best Picture
The King's Speech

Not a terribly good movie but by this time it will be 11:30 and people will be itching to get out and go to sleep and someone will shout "Just pick the pretentious one!"

The Actual Best Picture
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

Not Really! But the only movie I didn't feel like walking out of!

Award Season Round-Up 2011!, Speed Reviews, High Expectations and Surliness

2011-02-27T15:43:00.017-05:00

Right, it's Oscar time again, and as you may know I usually try to watch as many Oscar-nominated movies as I can in the days before the ceremonies. So these reviews are speedy and harsh and above all biased, since there's a certain expectation that comes from being an Oscar nom. Many of these movies might be fine on their own, I'm only interested in how they stand as Oscar movies.

It's only a few hours to the ceremonies and there are still three of the ten Best Picture nods that I haven't seen, 127 Hours, The Kids are All Right and Winter's Bone. Toy Story 3 I have no desire to write about, since you can tell pretty accurately what it is from the title and the Pixar logo (it was a tad darker than most wholesome movies within limits, but I've been all bawled out since Up). Inception I saw when it came out and have written about it a bit in other places. It's been over-examined to death already so I'll sum up my thoughts with this: thpppbbbt.

Inception was, sadly, the movie with the most substance of these noms, though it drowned that substance in action movie tropes and obviousness. So, here are the rest:

Black Swan

There's one movie Darren Aronofsky has been trying to get right for the last two decades, in Pi, in The Wrestler, even in Requiem For A Dream to a lesser extent, a movie about how an person (mathematician, pro-wrestler, whatever) manages to, just once, do something right. In typical cinematic pessimism the way to get to that rightness is through movie-lengths bouts of self-destruction, paranoia, egotism, evisceration and various power tools. But what makes these movies different from your typical Hollywood tortured-artist story (and Hollywood hates artists more than anything except maybe single females) is that in the end the Aronofsky folks do get things right in the end, somehow. There's a mad triumph at the end, and you say, aha, at least it's possible (even in Requiem, for one character). So it’s e a big thumbs up to hard work and perseverance, and a big fuck you to life in general, which, if not particularly healthy, is at least fun to watch.

Black Swan manages to do this well, and at the same time fails in the way his other movies also fail. There is a lack of subtlety here (obvious just from the casting of Mila Kunis alone). Natalie Portman's overworked ingénue is hardly likeable (and also, at pushing 30, a bit older than we're supposed to believe she is). It's still a solid performance, she's wrung out like a wet towel in varying degrees of wrungingness for two hours, and it's impressive that she could maintain that intensity without getting the giggles.

But above all there is a tendency toward the overdramatic. It's this more than anything else that has caused Aronofsky to shoot himself in the foot over and over again (let's not even mention The Fountain). I had hoped that The Wrestler, which was low-key in all the right ways, marked a turned toward the more honest and understated. But with Black Swan we're back to all the old bad habits. If the movie had slightly less drama it could have been a fable about the trials that any performer has to go through to get that great performance. But instead we're left with a cinematic ending, which, after an exhaustingly satisfying third act, smacks more of spectacle than truth. The Wrestler had more heart, even if there wasn't much else in it, and because of that I'd rather have watched that movie twice than one this once.

The Fighter

The first, and main, failing of this movie is the title. Boxing movies have a long history of singular men and singular titles, beefy man-children punching away at fame until it gets old or they do, Rocky, Raging Bull, Ali, The Great White Hope, The Hurricane, Million Dollar Baby – note how all these titles are singular, with just one dude (or ladydude) at the forefront, everything else being about or against them. So with The Fighter, we expect, mainly, a fighter. One. What we get is two, the washed-up crackhead Dickey Eklund and his sullen, boring half-brother Mickey Ward. Which one is this movie about?

The writers tend to think it's Mickey, since he gets (sadly) the most screen time. But all the buzz is about Christian Bale's nod as best supporting actor, not about Mark Wahlberg's as producer. And for good reason, Wahlberg's Mickey is about as interesting as a can of Boston baked beans with boxing gloves on. One suspects that if Wahlberg weren't also in that producer's chair, a savvy director would have seen the obvious and either a) fired Wahlberg and got someone more lively in the role, or b) restructured the movie around Dickey. Because it's almost all about Dickey anyway, he has charisma, humor, an effortless manic energy. Because of that Mickey has to be played relatively straight, so the brothers can bounce off each other. But Wahlberg loses us in the process. His Mickey is a big child, constantly pushed around by his mother and sisters and even his girlfriend (a feisty Amy Adams, who will probably win best supporting actress for her fake Boston accent even though True Grit's Hailee Steinfeild did more work). Even when Mickey does stand up for himself it's more like a child stamping his foot in petulance than a grown man taking rightful charge of his destiny.

Thoug if the movie had been rewritten with Dickey as lead, Colin Firth would have a tough time getting his Oscar this year.

The King's Speech

The trouble with trying to write a light-hearted buddy movie about a historical person in the midst of a historical crisis, is that when faced with a historical person in a historical crisis the last thing people want is a light-hearted buddy movie. The biopic lights start flashing, we see Churchill and Hitler go by and suddenly we are expecting one of those Serious Movies about Serious Things. You know, the sort where the movie poster has the lead, dramatically lit, looking off into the middle-distance with a half-weary, half-resigned look. The sort of movie that usually makes it to the Oscars every year (though not this year). That is the movie The King's Speech exasperatingly dangles in front of us, and I know I don't need to see another serious movie about Britain in World War II, and yet, and yet…

So The King's Speech is at best half a movie, taking the bromance that usually occurs on the sideline of your usual biopic and putting it center stage, with all the predictable tiffs and spats and reconciliations of the bromantic drama. The fact that Firth is so good in the role, that Helena Bonham Carter is so regal, that the sets are so lush and comfy and make you really want some tea, makes it that much sadder that these things have ended up in a plotline more suited for Will Ferrell and the cast of SNL than the best of Britain.

The rest of the cast drops off in quality, and I shan't say anything about Geoffery Rush but to ask why he is playing an Australian while Guy Pierce is the one with an accent. And Churchill, who let Scabbers into parliament?

The half a movie that we get do in The King's Speech is still good, and quite watchable, but still disappointingly incomplete.

The Social Network

Has anyone ever noticed that Aaron Sorkin doesn't make good movies anymore? Yes, a brilliant screenwriter, yes The West Wing was the best thing on television since Alf, yes A Few Good Men and American President. But The Social Network and Charlie Wilson's War were both structured like tv pilots: bring in some good characters, have them verbally abuse each other, end abruptly. Of course Fincher did for The Social Network what was wholly lacking in Charlie Wilson, that of breathing life and realism into the characters and set pieces. Everything is lush and dark and velvety, clearly in the 90s Harvard was only lit by streetlights and laptop screens.

Mark Zuckerberg is played with that confidence-bordering-on-arrogance you tend to see in people raised by computers (try to deny it). It's hard to say anything more about the movie, since it comes and goes with such nonchalance. Is it a movie about a kid who can't connect to other people who nevertheless designs a site which is connecting the world? Not really, Zuckerberg isn't played as particularly lonely. His loneliness is more a function of wounded pride, he expects to not be alone and is disappointed when he is. So what is this movie about?

There is a certain glee to see programmers being treated with the same rapt enthusiasm given to rock stars or people who throw or kick round things at or into round or square net-things, which sustained my interest for the first half. But I think the whole concept might have worked much better as a miniseries than a movie, because while Sorkin is great at making dialogue go by with breezy ease, the movie felt full of air. The main conceit, playing the action as being retold through two simultaneous lawsuits against Zuckerberg, loses traction in the second half. Zuckerberg so eloquently dismisses these lawsuits as unimportant (settling out of court), and in the end, we have to agree. There's not enough matter for a full trial, and not enough substance for a full movie.

True Grit

The main question left by this movie is what, precisely, did the Coen brothers see in the material here. Because there's not much in it that seems very Coen, the plot is a basic revisionist western, which might have carried weight in the late 60s (when the previous version was made) but seems a bit uninteresting now. The only things of heft are the characters, right down to Josh Brolin, who can breathe life into the smallest role. Jeff Bridges is heavy, old, cantankerous, and above all rambly, which is refreshing. There's some tacit rule in Hollywood that heroes and anti-heroes alike all have to be laconic, the only people allowed to babble are mothers-in-law and foreigners. But really it was Hailee Steeinfield's sassy and tallish 14 y/o that sustained the movie.

But besides some gorgeous landscape and some minor characters there just isn't much here. There's no Coen weirdness, what we get instead is some irony and wry humor, as if the characters are equally disappointed to be in an uninteresting movie. While this may seem harsh, just remember how good No Country For Old Men was.

Electric Literature, Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, Boozing for Charity

2011-01-22T18:58:00.009-05:00

Just when I've resigned myself to having no reason to leave the futon for at least two weeks, I get an email from Electric Literature about the issue 05 release party at Housing Works. I've been paying attention to Electric Literature for some time now, mostly for their progressive approach to publishing: their issues are released in print, online, through email and on mobile apps. And on cosmic rays. And quantum carrier pigeons.

This in an age when print media is being about as forward-thinking as a backwards man named Backy Backwards from backwardston, backwardshire.

Print media is the dude still flying a confederate flag after relocating to Portland. Or something.

Of course the event gets a Time Out NY top pick, so everyone and their hipster grandma is there.

Housing Works Bookstore Cafe is both dark and complicated, but you can forgive the hit-or-miss selection because the proceeds go to the homeless and those suffering from AIDS. Though most of these books would be more useful as insulation. Or coat liners.

It is a good place to find random anthologies and lit mags for fiddy cent though.

The upside to all the bustle, though, is that Harpoon was giving away drinks for donations. So not only could you get trashed on fine irish red at $3 a pop, but you could do it all for charity.

Let me tell you, I did my best to help out those homeless. Almost makes up for years of ignoring panhandlers by pretending to listen to an invisible iPod.

After a short movie about eating alien crustaceans, magic crystals and masturbation, there were readings by Ben Greenman, Lynne Tillman and J. Robert Lennon.

Ben Greenman read "What 100 People, Real and Fake, Believe about Dolores."

In general the fiction was hip and full of ironic tics and casual references to pop culture. Which I suppose is what the kids are into these days.

The crowd was your usual SoHo mix, young urban professionals followed by old urban professionals and occasionally a middle-aged urban professional.

Photo by Liz, who doesn't know what animal this is either

By then end I was pretty sodden with charity, and headed down to Tom & Jerry's where I randomly met an architect, a girl from Doncaster and an asian from Alaska. Then I followed someone who was trying to bum cigarettes through the cold for several blocks and randomly punched my best friend in the face for fun. Woo!

Parenthetical Girls, Privilege Pt I, The Saddest Girl to Ever Crush a Taxi

2010-11-05T20:38:00.005-05:00

Let us remind us of the fey and amazing Parenthetical Girls, who are slowly releasing a set of five EPs that will combine to form their next album like a big gender-ambiguous Voltron. You might remember how their last album, Entanglements, single-handedly restored my faith in music. And poetry -- if you printed the lyrics to this small set of dramatic monologues, with their puns and tiny rhymes and sexy, sexy sibilance, and released it as a tiny chapbook telling their single, morally ambiguous story, not only would it be better than 99% of the poetry books out there, I might actually pay for it.

The first song off Privilege Pt I is the pleasingly grating "Evelyn McHale" which made no sense until I googled Evelyn McHale to find beautiful and desperately lonely picture above. Gone are the lush arrangements of Entanglements, this is a return to basics, with the happy morbidity right on display in the first lines:

When you were crippled by that car
when we were martyred monthly and scarred
by the way that we are

(Note how the pronoun changes. With the Girls the question is always 'Who is speaking?')

The Girls have always portrayed suicide as a glorious mess, almost like a famed death-in-battle for the ancients (in that gone are always better off than the surviving). And what could be a more beautiful suicide than Evelyn McHale, who went up the world's most famous landmark and came down on a limo.

Parenthetical Girls - Evelyn McHale

I'd like to note that earlier this year the Girls made very nearly the best/strangest/creepiest Smiths cover ever, which I liked so much I made it my ringtone. Thankfully nobody calls me, or I'd be continuously freaked out.

Parenthetical Girls - Handsome Devil

Anne Carson, Poet's House, If Not... Brother

2010-04-30T23:46:00.003-05:00

Minication. New york and back, less leisurely than my usual trips since I'm on a bit of a schedule. Last night was Anne Carson reading from Nox at Poet's House, the small conference room downstairs filled with interesting and uncomfortable people, and Anne, and her collaborator Currie, and someone from their publisher, with mics that weren't loud enough and a needless overhead display. The people upstairs watched the feed from monitors (live monitors in such a small venue?) and had overall a much better time seeing and hearing everything. We ditched our spots on the windowsill during the Q&A and went upstairs to get a head start on the free wine.

She read quite a bit of Nox, I have no idea how much of the text of it was read but it seemed like most of it. And still it was incomplete: the photos and drawings and clips and cut-outs provide the bulk of the impact of this book-in-a-box. The text itself, Anne's sad, lost, analytical voice laying down the facts and experiences of her relationship with her brother, absent from much of her life until his death, is a small voice, like someone trying to categorize pieces of a thing they can't hope to understand. She describes herself here as an intellectual, an analyzer, a "pinhead" as her brother called her living mostly in her mind. Then we have the figure of her brother, who seems (though how can we know?) to have spent his life at living, passionately, unhappily. And this living tore a hole in the life of her family and her life, so Anne is left, as usual, with pieces. Which is where she always tends to end up. This is a world irreconcilable, being always late to the party, walking into the middle of conversations, wandering in ruins that when they weren't ruins were built on some other ruin. A translation of a translation of which the original is lost. Even the playfulness, which is one of her strongest responses to this feeling, was more subdued in what she read on Thursday, or at least more painfully ironic.

Currie is a strange little man and I wonder what precisely she sees in him. They teach a class on collaboration (they said), and the line they give the attendants is "Now that you've completed it, what are you going to do with it?" Meaning she's started treating her own work like a text, ready for exegesis and adaptation, or maybe more like a scrap of cloth that can only be admired so much for the garment it was once part of. If I had a question to ask her it would be if she has a concept of the original anymore, or has everything in life become like catching hold of a wave you can't know the origins of, can't know what shores it might wash up on.

I wouldn't ask her this question because it is not a question but an answer, and not her answer but my answer, and not a complete answer but an unfair one.

The meaning of the wave of course is loss. The wave is not where it once was. All the mind can really know of the world is loss if it looks hard enough, and I start to wonder if this is a property of the world or a property of the mind. Is loss mind-colored?

Spend the rest of the night in bars, some full of drunks and some not, the bartenders all evenly unsmiling. Headed back to jersey around dawn, got to see the sun rise there on the road. Dawns are so strange and fragile, they have their own color. White instead of red.

I can't remember actually seeing city lit up with dawn before. My knowledge of the city is all evenings and midnights.

It's a different beast in the morning. It's almost kind.

Snapped this photo on the walk from the bus stop, trying to catch the sun as it pushed this dark and hazy avalanche ahead of itself. Didn't capture it. Some photos are to remind you of things, some photos are to remind you of things you didn't see the first time, some photos are to isolate a thing which out there in the world is too lost in the world to be seen. This one's a failure of the first type. I put it here so I can write: this is a failure of myself to remind myself of anything.

82nd Annual Academy Awards, Oh My God What Have I Been Doing for Three and a Half Hours

2010-03-08T00:04:00.004-05:00

Well, the only thing surprising about this year's Oscars was how unfunny the hosts were. Hollywood pays enough money for this fiasco, you'd think they could afford some not-awkward.

Also it contained the most inappropriate interpretive dance number in the history of inappropriate dance numbers.

Also wtf sandra bullock.

Positive Female Role Models in Science Fiction, Part II

2010-03-04T21:22:00.014-05:00

A while back I started a series of Positive Female Role Models in Science Fiction, a series which peaked at one because do you know how hard it is to find positive female role models in science fiction? Whether they're warrior women or sexy scientists or space-damsels in space-distress, women routinely get shafted in this male-fantasy dominated genre.

This next one has been so obvious to me (and everyone else) that I thought it not even worth mentioning. Of course Donna Noble is a positive female role model. Anyone who's watched the Doctor pine after the chavtastic Billie Piper while Catherine Tate gets stuff done knows that of all Doctor Who companions ever, Donna Noble is the only one who managed to be an equal.

And I do mean ever. It's been nigh fifty years of transparent kidnap fodder or two-dimensional window characters or feisty cave girls. Sarah Jane Smith might've sassed Tom Baker's Doctor more than he sassed back but she was still mostly along for the ride. And Leela and Ace were both warrior-woman phenotypes and more protégés than companions.

But along comes Donna Noble with her hang-ups and insecurities and above all that attitude. Is she bovvered? She ain't bovvered. In a show where the main function of the companion is to stand there listening while the Doctor explains stuff, Donna will more than likely walk away mid-speech because that's not what she's here for.

Of course, Donna's story arc is about as sad as television can get. Which means the writers are either complete chauvanists or sad, sad realists.

Award Season Ramp-up Round-up: Down to the Wire!

2010-03-04T20:21:00.008-05:00

There is a particular joy in the art direction of Fantastic Mr. Fox, where the scenery and all the action is flattened into two dimensional planes, the background sttretched up and out like a renaissance landscape. Unlike in a traditional animation (or god forbid cgi) the subjects on screen are real, tangible, three-dimensional objects: puppets, lovingly matted and choppy, walking about in colorful, detailed sets so meticulous you can almost smell the rubber cement. Yet these detailed, 3d objects are smooshed into two-dimensional planes and the effect is like having your head stuck in a diorama, or a toybox, where everything's it's own little fascinating anthill. Like in some of the fantastic 2D platformer games that have come out in the last few years you get the sense that although this is a stylized reality nothing has been lost in the stylization. A reduction that enhances. At no point does it feel like a cartoon and at no point does it feel like a movie. It's its own world, which is what an animation should be.

Which isn't to say Mr. Fox is all that great. It's near-impossible to judge Wes Anderson movies as movies, mostly because they refuse to be taken as such. They're kind of like a disaffected Gen X'er on the other side of the room at a party. Interesting, talkative, defensive, flawed but he'd never call them flaws, petulant but (he says) always justifiably so. And above all he never approaches you — you're either interested or you aren't.

Sometimes it works. I was taken in by The Life Aquatic for its unabashed childishness, it was so loudly and uncompromisingly a labor of love, a big, expensive non-commercial romp in the toybox of aging adolescants. (The 2d-flattening effect was also used to great effect here — suddenly the submarine becomes a great big toy, of Bill Murray's yes but mostly Wes Anderson's, and we get to play around in it with him.) Other times he's less convincing. I thought The Darjeeling Limited, for example, failed to gel around anything other than its leading men's self-fascination.

So we know We Anderson movies have certain plot points and certain characters, and there's only one lesson anyone ever learns (the only lesson one really can learn by himself alone in a sandbox, "I'm a little crazy, yes, but I can't help it.") Mr. Fox hits these points no better than any other Anderson movie, so in terms of that it's pretty mediocre. But there's still some fun to be had watching a creator plays with his creations, especially when those creations get away from him as they often do, here probably more than in any other of his films.

The dialogue of course is sparkling and the cast a screenwriter's wet dream. But if you were expecting Anderson to grow up anytime soon, well, no cussing way.

Giant Beavers, Giant Moose, Giant Mounties, Giant French-Canadian Hookers

2010-02-28T22:29:00.003-05:00

in re: Vancouver Olympics Closing Ceremonies: I may not be high but, dude, I am so high right now.

Apolo Ohno, Charles Hamelin, 500m, blame Canada

2010-02-26T22:30:00.010-05:00

in re: Apolo Ohno's 500m disqualification: Clearly all you have to do is touch a Canadian on the butt and they'll go down.

Vancouver Snowlympics, First Nations, "Y'all may win the golds but remember who you stole the gold from in the first place"

2010-02-13T03:39:00.012-05:00

Vancouver Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony: A Recap

1)

The water tribe hangs around a glacier.

Look, an aurora. Good thing it's not real or it might mess up Shaun White's iPhone reception.

2)

Giant bear shows up. Maybe the one that ate Bjork in Human Behavior.

HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGS!

3)

Water Tribe gets eff'd up by global warming. Then they get eaten by a gang of Free Willys.

Poor water tribe.

4)

It's alright, blood makes the trees grow.

5)

Some Martha Graham crackers show up and stupid-dance around the trees. Stop Fern Gullying our trees, hippies.

6)

Now this is the canada I know. Like France, but dirtier.

7)

Some kid runs around a My Pictures screensaver, but all the pictures are of grass. Someone switch it to something more interesting. Like Flying Toasters.

8)

Out of storm and lightning, Extreme Sports are born.

Oh no, the evil black team is going to beat the good red team! Quick, everyone rollerskate in a circle.

9)

Slam poetry? Seriously? Ok, let me break it down for you, son. First, that ain't beard, that's all chin. You ain't fooling nobody. Second, all slam poetry sounds the same, so the fact that they got a mediocre slam poet to wax canucktastic on our uncultured asses doesn't mean you ain't going back to flipping fish fillets at McD's tomorrow.

10)

Everyone's favorite middle-aged lesbian K. D. Lang has finally morphed into a man who looks like a middle-aged lesbian. In this case, a mix of Ricky Gervais and Clay Aiken.

She sings a Leonard Cohen song, who must be in his hermitage somewhere right now vainly striving to write a song no one can cover.

I've already started getting into fights about this, but for all its flaws I felt moved and a wee bit educated by this ceremony. And while China's summer ceremony might have been one of the most spectacular spectacles ever performed by humans, if you ask me what I'd like to see more of in the future I'm certainly not putting a check mark next to the "Massive Populist Hegemonic Spectacle" box.

Award Season Ramp-up '09 pt2

2010-01-19T13:40:00.007-05:00

Wherein the author continues to watch as many award-season movies as possible, jotting thoughts down as soon after viewing as he can.

An Education is sweet and full of texture, it brought to life both the drab and the excitement of 60s Britain without really choosing sides: The drab is also comfortable and cozy. The exciting is also shady, strange. It's somehow wrong, wrong in ways you can't quite explain other than that it's not comfortable or cozy. That David is also somehow wrong we know right from the start, and as we and Jenny learn more about him the wrongness gets clearer and clearer until it's blatant, inarguable. But he was always wrong, and the movie handles this well, he never becomes any less or more than he is right there at the beginning. Only Jenny is changing.

The movie loses ground only when Jenny starts to become the voice of authorial arguments, delivering speeches to blank-faced adults who could very well offer a counter-argument but never do. Maybe that's the point though, she has to learn on her own, the adults in her life are of no help, not unless she wants their help. These other roles really make the movie though. Her father is played brilliantly by Alfred Molina, he exudes care and love and worry even while yelling, you just want to give him a hug every time he talks. Emma Thompson as the school headmistress is exactly the opposite, she never needs to show that she cares. She's only in a few short scenes and mostly on the quiet end of a Jenny-speech, but just in not arguing with Jenny she makes probably the strongest argument in the movie. These two performances balance the story, a cartoonish portrayal of either would have ruined it from the start.

Also excellent was Rosamund Pike as the trophy-girlfriend Helen, who manages to be dumb yet sweet without being too dumb or too sweet. Again, a cartoonish portrayal would have killed it.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Herzog movies generally take place in a world somewhere between the realities and the delusions of his main characters, and in this movie even the obvious fantasies: iguanas, break-dancing souls, etc, don't mark a clear line between reality and unreality. They're real to Nicholas Cage, and that's all that really matters. As the plot gets increasingly convoluted and nonsensical you might start to wonder if we're all tipping into fantasy-land with him. But no, turns out it's no more or less real than it ever was.

And Cage's performance is so strange, mostly because he's clearly wrong for the part. He walks around hunched over in suits too big for him, moving like he's fifty pounds heavier than he is, yelling like he has a voice for yelling. (He doesn't have a voice for yelling. He sounds more like a frustrated English professor than a professional, no matter what movie he's in.)

But Cage is fabulous at being miscast, I can't think of any other actor who so deliberately seeks out roles he is completely wrong for. If this movie were another Harvey Keitel vehicle you could imagine the Lieutenant as being actually frightening, actually loathesome, actually at times courageous and at times charming. With Cage, we have a character who is none of those things. He's nothing at all really, just confused and in pain, and the movie is better off for it.

The point of the movie seems to be that there's things out there (reptiles, water) that disaster lets in and once they're in they take hold and get stronger and stronger until at the end you're drowning in them.

Cage's question at the end is "Do fish dream?" Herzog's answer seems to be "Yes, they dream this movie."

Bright Star is a well-needed reminder that poetry, as it is in the first line we hear of Keats, is a joy, cut of the same cloth as a walk in flowered fields or throwing pebbles in a lake or sitting in front of an open window on a windy day — though more than a hundred years have almost convinced us that these things aren't enough, as if there were something that was more of life than these simple, fleeting moments. In the movie, Mr. Brown is an annoying, heavy-handed reminder of what poetry shouldn't be: vain, self-serving, cynical, serious, witty in the service of pettiness, "modern" in the service of fear. Though he's a reminder of what a poet has to deal with you often he's far too despicable to have as much screen time as he does. Keats however is portrayed as playful first and melancholy second, a welcome departure from the brooding Byronic figure you come to expect from movies about poets. Movies in general aren't keen on geniuses, they'd much rather focus on common people in uncommon circumstances, public figures — genius is too private a thing to translate well to a medium that is public at every stage of production and consumption. Intimacy in a film is a difficult and necessary illusion, which is why the love story is practically the definition of film: A love between two people is both private, between each other, and public, seen by each other. It is the smallest unit of intimacy that can be put to film.

The production is very lush and surprisingly intimate, and manages the difficult task of making a period piece not look like a set piece. Some shots have the heaviness of a painting, and though this takes you out of the story a little it also reminds you of what you're in. The movie is brimming with poetry, in the dialogue as well as the visuals.

It all turns to misery of course, and Campion is a Romantic enough to embrace the misery as much as the joy. Everything may turn to misery in time, and everyone may die, but in those bright moments of not-misery there is a promise and a hope that misery might never return. The young sister Toots is a heartbreaking reminder of this as she banishes autumn from her garden. In some world, she succeeds.

As for the love story, it's strange. The courtship is short and full of jousts and lots of silences, and you get the sense that the most they know of each other are those silences, that they are filling those silences with dreams of each other. Like love was a dream they were wishing each other into, and in so faling in love themselves. You never once suspect in the end that they actually know each other, or even themselves (they're so young!). And in that sense it's a very honest love story, and a very true one. And very powerful.

Also, that cat should win best cat acting by a cat in a non-cat movie.

What was surprising about Inglourious Basterds is not that it's bad — and it is bad, very bad, "What were you thinking?" type bad &mdsash; but that it's poorly made. We don't expect a Tarantino movie to be drab, his characters lifeless and their motivations a mystery. We expect explosive wit and familiar throwbacks. We expect larger-than-life characters pitted against each other in a ridiculous and ultimately satisfying orgy of genre tropes. But the only larger-than-life characters in this unsatisfying movie are The Nazis and The Jews, the individuals are almost nondescript. His Nazis are luxuriously evil, slippery and smarmy and nasty, sometimes brave, sometimes cowardly. If only he cared nearly as much for his so-called-protagonists, but to call them cookie-cutter would be an insult to creative bakers. The only one of any interest is Brad Pitt's Aldo, who is clearly not Jewish. The rest are so well summed up by their nicknames ("The Bear Jew," etc) they don't even need to have lines (and many don't).

But the names Nazi and Jew are red herrings, this movie would more honestly (and far less offensively) be set on Mars, with some evil Martian Socialist Party hunting down ethnic barsoomians or something. But the fact that the movie makes no sense (and the movie makes absolutely no sense) is secondary, we could forgive even that if it were in the least bit interesting. The script is set up as a series of verbal confrontations, some of them twenty or thirty minutes long, and an ordinary director would play these heated conversations as a buildup of tension, putting off the release until the last possible moment until it explodes, generally in gunfire. Instead, Terantino has these scenes play out normally, as if nothing were happening at all. The audience knows something is at stake, the characters know something is at stake, yet no one acts as if something is at stake — giving an overall impression of watching boring people talk about boring things which something interesting just might be happening somewhere else. Like having to sit through a discussion of hog futures on the deck of the Titanic. And because there's no tension when the release comes it feels less like a climax and more like a "What just happened?"

The problem here is clearly that Tarantino has developed a sort of auteur's arrogance, he expects us to believe whatever he tells us. He says this crack commando team has killed so many Nazis behind enemy lines that even Hitler is afraid, we're supposed to believe him (even though all this Nazi-killing supposedly happens in the jump cut between the "Let's kill Nazis" scene and the "Hitler is afraid" scene). He says Eli Roth is somehow fearsome, we're supposed to believe him. He says that movies can end the war, we're supposed to believe them. Sure none of it makes any sense, but he doesn't seem to even lift a finger to try to convince us, which is both lazy and unforgivable.

The joy of Kill Bill or Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs was in things we've seen already, familiar themes and tropes and body movements and dialogue, for what is "genre" but something the audience already believes without you having to tell them? Inglourious Basterds is a departure from that. Things are still familiar, god knows he doesn't have an original bone in his body. But they don't feel familiar. They feel rather shoddy.

Award Season Ramp-up Round-Up '09, part1

2010-01-12T10:32:00.010-05:00

Every year around this time I try to see as many best-of-year films as possible, that way when Oscar night finally comes around I have that much more to be aggravated about. Generally I don't document it as best as I could, but this year I've decided to make the effort to get it all down, generally as soon after I see the movie as possible.

I've already seen Public Enemies and Avatar. So here we go!

THE HURT LOCKER
Fantastically realistic (or realistic-seeming, who knows if it's even remotely actually-realistic). So much so that little bits that didn't seem realistic stood out more, even a single canned sound effect was enough to jar me out of it for a second. Also unconvincing, that tendency for any squad in any action movie to be immediately qualified for any operation, no matter if more experienced troops are probably waiting by (Miami Vice-itis). The glimmerings of a plot thankfully they petered out, as if to say: here's the sort of movie you're expecting to see, but this isn't that movie.

There are no superior officers to be found, there are no consequences beyond the physical damage to the squad (almost entirely from themselves and each other), and there is no enemy -- everyone is treated equally as an enemy, allies, friendlies, squadmates. And it's an interesting consequence of a bomb squad that there really is no enemy: there's only it, and you, and what you do or do not do to it. It has no will or plan or purpose.

So war is a bomb, and the bomb is a drug, and the soldiers are addicts and they either see it and quit or they keep at it. The only way to view James is as an addict, and as an addict he serves a necessary purpose in the war, a purpse that the movie clearly admires. But this purpose is not a moral one, he doesn't save lives or make things safe for his countryment -- the more he cares the worse he is at his job. He can't actually make a difference. His purpose is as inexplicable as the bomb's.

Avatar is the triumph of a gamer, an ultimate gamer's fantasy where the gameworld becomes more important than real life. Hurt Locker is nearly identical in that regard, they're about addicts who give into their addiction. And for all its brutality, Hurt Locker still glorifies the addiction. But that's the question, isn't it? Is James really being "All he can be"? Or has war made him less than he could have been? All we really know is that when he's in the suit he's all that he is.

Interesting that we've been talking about how '00s movies are specifically amoral, their exemplary heroes aren't anti-heroes (who do wrong things for the right reasons), they're the opposite: they have the wrong reasons and whether their actions are good or not is entirely up to chance or circumstance.

We'll see if it continues with Bad Lieutenant.

Blue Men Group, Ripley-is-not-Amused, and The Subjugation of the Natives: The Game: The Movie

2009-12-30T08:07:00.005-05:00

Ended up seeing Avatar (due to familial obligations, I swear!).

I can see why some people liked it, though I was far too annoyed by the middle to be able to stomach the guns-and-dragons-for-forty-five-minutes climax. This is what white people do, they eradicate populations then overidealize them afterwards in order to make themselves feel better. This movie, like some reviewer said, is entirely Ferngully meets Dances With Wolves — and Dances With Wolves is probably the most demeaning two-and-a-half hours ever set to cinema. District 9, though not a great movie (it couldn't decide where allegory ended and action movie began) at least treated culture clash more realistically than Avatar, which ends up being your basic white male fantasy.

In terms of biology the movie was fascinating and detailed, though they don't even make an effort to make Pandora seem like an actual alien world. The template is an oversized, primordial earth. Notice how the dragon-things all have four wings — just like the first flying lizards on earth.

Anthropologically it was less than interesting. The Na'vi both facially and phonetically resemble indigenous post-slave-trade Caribbean Indians, so Pandora is basically Hispanola with flying mountains. Like in all white-man-goes-native movies, the male tribesmen are stubborn, strong and ugly (though easily bested by the hero in combat) and the women are fierce, oversexualized and all for a little miscegenation.

Movies like this tend to forget that native americans didn't have horses until Europeans brought them over, and the supposed natural connection between man and beast that Native Americans exemplify depended entirely on beasts being previously domesticated. People forget that a successfully culture must reshape the landscape around it, must subjugate the beasts of the field and the plants of the earth, this is how a species escapes extinction. It's the whole reason we have things like language and culture and bad movies. Humans are the dominant species in their ecosystem, the fantasy would be a humanoid society that is not the dominant species, in a society that exists symbiotically with other large creatures. Which sounds almost romantic if it weren't so unrealistic. In nature, you're on the top or you're food. And if you're food you're not going to be concerned with luxuries like love or morality. But human society, or at least the human society that makes movies like this, has been on the top so long I bet it just longs to be submissive to something. This is part of the reason why man is never the master of his own fate, we long to be controlled by something, be it god or nature or in this case some weird tree-based melding of the two.

Sigourney Weaver seemed like she was having a good time but became less and less interesting as the story got more and more predictable (though she was still given the best lines). The temple scenes were laughable reminders of the hilarious Zion rave party. And the climactic fight, for all its ecological ballyhoo, was all machismo and patriotism, designed to inspire way more recruitments for the marines corps than for Green Peace.

The 3d was fantastic though.

2009-12-23T07:54:00.001-05:00

Depp, Mann, and Boys

Public Enemies. I will say, Mann is becoming a master of shooting in near-total darkness, you really felt the muzzle flare in all the night shots and it was deafeningly loud at times, which is all good. But it's true, his Dillinger is a complete blank. And I wonder about this, most of Mann's early movies were all fronted by big personalities: James Caan, deNiro, Tom Cruise, Will Smith, which sort of hid or ameliorated the fact that those characters were essentially the same blank. But the last few movies have been almost a deconstruction of that hero (the hero boiled down to mere competence, as grashupfer had been talking about). Has Colin Farrel ever been less interesting than in Miami Vice? His hair did most of his acting. And Johnny Depp, a master of mannerisms, here plays someone with no discernible personality. But Depp's been deconstructing himself as well, look at how deeply he inhabited the character of Ed Wood versus what he's been playing the last few years: he's consistently creating characters who are hollow shells. Shells of mannerisms.

I hope they come together to make Action Movie: where our hero Troubled Hero faces Cool Bad Guy to save Idealized Woman and succeeds or doesn't.

(or did I just describe Sin City and all its future iterations)

(actually the movie should be titled Adolescent Confusions About Masculinity)

2009-06-27T07:48:00.000-05:00

Train Robbers, Brad Pitt, and Reticence in the American West

Finally saw The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Not a great movie but parts are worth it. I especially like the portrayal of James himself, a man alternately coarse and troubled -- the coarse parts being more convincing than the troubled parts since Brad Pitt's default expression seems to be one of troubled blankness. But when he's coarse and rude and jovial we get a real glimpse of the anger and sadness there, more deeply than when Pitt goes all puppy-eyes on us. I also liked how very little was spoken that meant what was said, speaking one's mind being a faux pas in this sort of manly universe. But almost nothing was said in the whole movie that was not an outright lie, an elision, a change of the subject, chit-chatty bullshit, etc. (An almost sole exception being Jesse's line about how when the soul peeks over the mountain it will be as loath to reenter the body as you would be to suck up your own puke.) I enjoy when movies show how little meaning corresponds to text, maybe because it seems so difficult from a screenwriter's perspective (I can only imagine how many notes the script must have contained.) Our culture is built on words, always has been, even our visual art needs to have paragraphs of explanation attached to it. It's nice to be reminded how small a part words play in the dance of meaning.

The character of James gradually morphed into your basic american movie tragic-hero: paranoid, moody, self-destructive. But there was something in the character (and in the story itself) that didn't quite lend itself to this pigeonholing, which made that section a little difficult to stomach. And once he's offscreen the movie sort of peters out. But it makes its point, which is the same question of imaginary fathers that McCarthy deals with. (Also notice how Jesse only starts to go south when his older brother, his authority figure, takes off.)

The narration was sub-par and seemed tacked on but what it was trying to do was frame the movie into the right genre: this is a historical essay, told in retrospect, with all the phrases and cadences of a documentary. A short story of a movie.

The visuals are more surreal than documentary though, and I kept noticing how in the framing of the outdoor shots the land seems to dominate the sky, grain and weeds and browns and dull greens pushing out the blue and clouds. It made me realize how much the camera cuts a hole out of reality, a hole where we are. I wouldn't be noticing these things in a movie that demanded I believe in it (cf: Kubrick's "not shooting reality but the photograph of reality"), another reason why this is more of an essay.

2009-04-12T10:33:00.001-05:00

Covers Mash-Up vol4

The Desperate Ones

2009-02-22T07:28:00.001-05:00

OSCARS ROUND-UP '08

Wherein I try to watch as many Oscar-nominated movies in as short a time as possible.

#1 is The Wrestler, which is hard to like or dislike, though thankfully Aronofsky has (at least temporarily) shed most of the the annoying tendencies of his last two movies. You could take the movie as the failure of the american dream (not the rags-to-riches one, the find-what-you-love-and-do-it-and-everyone-will-love-you-and-youll-make-oodles-of-cash one), but really it's more about its success -- this is what you actually want when wanting stuff. For ambition to be more important than family, health, etc. In characteristic movie fashion, professional ambition is put against family and love and stuff: movie-success, since movies all want to tell us that family and love and stuff are more important than anything. The scenes with his daughter feel phoned-in, the scenes with the stripper would have felt it too if not for the natural vivacity of the characters, old but still frisky. What is hard to stomach is his speech at the end, about the audience being his family -- we know it's a lie, he knows it's a lie, and yet there's supposed to be something triumphant about the ensuing battle. Up to that point he'd been at least trying, but then he gives up — and giving-up is essential to the American Dream, the stubborn, stupid, self-destructive American Dream. Aronofsky understands this, re: Requiem, but here it seems that he has to sell the dream back to us.

#2 was Frost/Nixon which does a lot to be obviously about what most plays are about anyway. Language as competition. As such it's the most thrilling movie about a conversation I can remember to have seen. Where it fails for me is in the character of Frost, who is portrayed far more weak/lucky than you think he should be -- I didn't feel at all the scenes where we're supposed to feel the mirrored connection between the two combatants, in fact Frost seemed to be everything that Nixon railed sympathetically against, which tips the scales way too far toward Nixon in the identification department. This seems to be more a failing of the directing than the portrayal, since Howard seems to be trying to squeeze every bit of capital-e Entertainment out of this script as possible. Hence Frost is weaker and less charming than we know he should be so it becomes more of a struggle for him to succeed. Which leaves you feeling at the end that Frost is simply lucky.

#3: In Bruges — very entertaining while not extremely good. The writing was fresh and jumpy (another playwright) but most of the scenes had pacing problems, abnormal pauses, the signs of a young/shaky director. And yet, very much worth watching, if only for the Colin Farel's character. You can't keep your eyes of him, he's so twitchy and excitable and juvenile and fun, one of those characters bigger than the story he's in. Also, best eyebrow acting since David Tennant. He picked up a Golden Globe for it too, but no Oscar nods. And as good as Heath Ledger's performance was, his Joker was still very much contained in his story. Curiously though, if the Best Supporting goes to Ledger this will be two years in a row of villains. But Chigurh will always be much more frightening.

#4: Milk, the best of the lot so far. It's a biopic, doesn't pretend to be more than a biopic, but hits everything evenly and well. Very balanced — entertaining without being sensational. And it avoids the big pitfalls of biopic: First it skips right over the rise/fall that makes most of them get weighty and predictable in the third act, since its main character dies right at the top (nothing to be thankful for but hey, makes for good cinema). Second, it skips the backstory, the inner life, the secret woes etc. Milk is portrayed as a public figure, there's nothing to him that isn't right there up front, which is part if not all of his charm. And the performances were all pitch-perfect, down to the smallest roles, each with his/her own fascination about them. Another benefit of biopics, even the bit parts are real people.

#5: Happy Go Lucky plays like a love letter to the social, so strange in a medium full of rugged individualists and tortured loners. I got bored by the middle of the movie while it started to be About Things; thankfully it didn't end up being about much. Poppy is unconcerned with the things the neurotic people around her are: ambition, career, procreation, pensions, adulthood, etc, which the movie portrays as things we use to stave off loneliness. Poppy staves off loneliness by being social, and so tries to help people. And thankfully the movie doesn't gloss over the fact that this is the result of number of neuroses of her own, but at the same time doesn't dwell on them. Some people like to help people. And we all can't be social (if we were we wouldn't be on the internet) but it's nice finally give a bit of thanks to those who are, 'cause where would we be without them really. This doesn't mean that we're gonna make eye contact on the street or anything.

#6: doubt was. alright? It was too long for its content and too short for its subject. Meryl Streep was better than I expected but worse and worse as it went on. Hoffman was capable. Viola Davis was the standout of course. Her scene kinda reminded me of the scene with William Holden's wife in Network — both small, almost throwaway scenes that do little to further the plot but add so much, taking you outside the little squabbles we're concerned with on screen and reminding us that maybe there are real people out there being affected.

2009-01-17T23:21:00.005-05:00

Matt Smith, Dreams, and My Bid for Sci-Fi Immortality

Odd dream - I went to audition for a community theater-esque production of Tartuffe. Had to take a schoolbus to get there. I think it's been all this hemming and hawing about the new Doctor Who, which makes me think, hey, I'm older than that guy. I should play Doctor Who.

NOT MY DOCTOR

THE DOCTOR IS IN

2009-01-13T07:34:00.000-05:00

Covers Mash-up vol3

Sprout & the Bean

2008-11-04T10:55:00.002-05:00

I Voted, This Is My Voted Face, Random Pictures and History

I voted, this is my voted face

McCain/Palin: Funny hats + burgers

Careful last-minute deliberations

At play in the fields of McCord

Moneychangers in the temple

Dowlin the the Plumber & Heater

For a signier future, vote Pro Signs

Metaphor-in-chief

Something so strange and surreal at seeing Obama's name on the ballot, after all that waiting, after all these months of watching cable news, playing with the big map on cnn.com — this is real, this has an impact on my life, I am a part of this even if I don't want to be. It didn't hit me until I saw him on the ballot. The remoteness of it all parted just for a second, and things were important. I added my number to the little number on the tally machine, now it's all free to be remote again, and I can go back to work with my coffee and hope hope hope.

2008-10-19T07:38:00.000-05:00

Covers Mash-Up vol2

This one's harder to mesh since John's keyboard is out of tune, but still better than the silly version the other beatles released.

Regina Spektor has one of the nicest vibratos. And I'm not usually a fan of vibratto, it usually sounds so showing-off. Her's is delicate, soft, it wraps around you. Like Beth Gibbons'.

On the other end of the spectrum there's Diamanda Galas. Wooo.

2008-08-16T06:35:00.001-05:00

Positive Female Role-Models in Science Fiction, part1

Because a recent discussion on this execrable list of "hot sci fi women" got me thinking about the few interesting female characters in a genre generally played to slobbering manchilds. Which brings me to my personal favorite female character in sci-fi:

Alia Atreides, St. Alia-of-the-Knife, "The Accursed One," "The female death spirit that walks without feet"

She can read your mind, she can kill you with her finger, she talked down the Emperor of the Galaxy, she murdered her own grandfather, she has excellent taste in hats. How's that for a role model kids of today can look up to? Every young girl should strive to be this bad ass by age 4. If they aren't by then, they probably never will.

Here she is going around the battlefield and finishing the dying or wounded, like any good fremen child:

Of course she grows up to be a royal bitch, and looks like a low-rent Elvish-American-princess in the tv-movie:

But we can forgive her for that, and try to remember how she was at her best: all potential. Older Alia isn't terribly interesting, mostly because between a certain age-range most female characters in sci fi fall into a small set of sexualized stereotypes. Hers being the overbearing and unstable unmarried figure just waiting for a strong man to come around and beat some sense into her. You have more luck at not being a flimsy male fantasy if you're under 16 or over 40.

2007-11-29T09:03:00.003-05:00

Gorillaz, Insomnia, Electronics, and the God of the Internet

I can't read The Sleepers enough, here, 6am, and I wonder if it's more of a sin against the night to not sleep through the night than it is to sleep through the night. and I wonder if failure is the only thing I write poetry about. And I wonder when that came to be, since I remember a time when I wasn't writing about failure. And failing at it. But night, and headphones, are good for music. Quiet, sad music, for not sleeping.

Mini-mix-tape time. I've been far too long in the lo-fi post-folk, let's get some electronics and high production values.

Gorillaz - Hong Kong
His Name Is Alive - Go to Hell Mountain
Momus - Nervous Heartbeat

"Hong Kong" is the prettiest thing I've heard off the indie wire in ages. Damon Albarn sounds old and tired, there's emptiness and claustrophobia and East Asia, it's long and sparse and sad. The chinese harp playing for the whole seven minutes -- quiet, arrhythmic, harsh attack with no sustain -- almost sounds electronic. The aesthetic, that is. Guess everything digital has an organic basis. Also says something how Gorillaz, which isn't even a band at all you know, nevertheless has a sound. This could be an old Blur song, and yet, and yet, there's still that Demon Days feel, over the guitars mostly.

Which plays nicely into the new His Name Is Alive album. Halfway through, "Go to Hell Mountain" breaks into a solo, a strange, fuzzy, processed-to-hell solo. and yet it works so nicely in the song, testament to how good Warren Defever is in making uncomfortable mixes of organics and inorganics. The song, like a lot of Xmmer, goes right to the edge of plausibility, being almost too cute and happy to be a song about heartbreak. But irony has always been a part of the HNIA mix -- not irony like sarcasm, more like going "Oh my god nothing goes right ever" while smiling, looking straight up, closing your eyes and spinning in circles.

And let's end with the lord of irony himself, with the "big ballad" off last years's Ocky Milk -- an operatic and sweet little love song that might be the first use of the Cher-autotuned-vocals that doesn't sound like Cher. How'd he do it? By fucking with it. Momus is fairly much all electronic by this stage in his career, both in terms of music and himself -- a fast-blogging globe-trotter zipping from cultural center to cultural center faster than you can say "gentrification". If there is a god of the internet, I bet it at least looks like him.

2007-11-18T02:53:00.000-05:00

Poet's House Farewell Toast, Lotsa Wine, Jean Valentine

I was a little too sick to be drinking, and yet, free wine @ Poet's House farewell celebration

philip levine

Jean Valentine is so old her face is curly.

2007-11-09T18:32:00.000-05:00

Hiro Ballroom, Mr Flash, Passing Out on the Floor, Good Times

Last night was free Lucky Beer 10-11 at Hiro Ballroom, with some DJs or something behind the beer -- whatever, I wasn't paying attention. The stage has been replaced by a small faux-Japanese altar with a single mac laying upon it, bright white apple shining for all to see and worship, some tattooed dude administering to it like a high priest.

Open Bars, of course, are a science. One beer per person at a time for an hour isn't all that much beer, especially when they don't let you in for a half an hour. However, after downing two beers in frenetic desperation I come upon the formula: one beer per person at a time, spread out over four bartenders is like, a beer every three minutes, without drawing too much attention. So I clear out some table space for my stash and muster about seven beers, and figure I'll be good for the night.

I did manage to drink all the beers I hunter-gathered for myself and still managed to leave early. The only one I didn't drink was the one given to me by the other dudes at the table, a set of three older fellows in their 30s, one asian, one a large man who could have been hispanic or greek, the last one white. They were literally smoking cigarettes under the table, flirting with the URB magazine intern taking photos. All the while I'm thinking, shit, I'm totally hanging with the dirtiest dudes in town.

Meanwhile I'm snapping photos of random shit just in case anything cool happens. Well, nothing cool happens.

Mind you, I get pretty friggin' drunk and stumble all the way to the 6 with the help of a few well-placed phone calls, two crunchy tacos, and a spacious inner jacket pocket for the remaining beer (which, I find, made it all the way home and is still on my bookshelf, half-full, in the morning).

What I didn't do is make it to work in the morning, since I woke up on the floor of my room at 9 and realized I couldn't move without assistance. So: single remaining steady source of income finally blown off, and we are once again floating in the breeze

2007-10-13T02:12:00.000-05:00

Misanthropy, Porno Mags, and the Battle of the Crazy Foreign Guys

One thing that Serj Tankian (of System Of A Down) got, besides a cool name, millions of fans, and interesting facial hair, is a really weird voice. Which is only thing that gets me to listen to System every so often, as a guilty pleasure. But he's even better when singing for other people, like his guest spot on the Deftones, or this song: a duet with, of all things, Les Rita Mitsouko, one of France's most important bands (so I hear). In a song about, get this, reading skin mags at a drug store.

In moments of pure misanthropy (misogyny?), which are happening more frequently these days, I can listen to "Terminal Beauty" on repeat, waiting for his weird little "la la la la la na na na" towards the end, which is about as maniacally misanthropic you can get without saying anything. Serj should be cast as the bad dude in some crazy action movie, as a sort of anti-300-Gerard-Butler.

In fact, the movie should just be Serj and Gogol Bordello's Eugene Hütz screaming and hitting each other with sticks. I'd sit through two hours of that. Hell, I'd buy popcorn.

Les Rita Mitsouko - Terminal Beauty (yousendit)

vs.

2007-10-01T21:20:00.000-05:00

Okkervil River, Webster Hall, 9/28/07

If you had asked me what are my favorite artists making music right now, Okkervil River, Midlake and Shapes And Sizes would top the list. Now I've been able to see all three within the space of a few weeks, and damn does it make me happy. If I never see a show again -- well, I'd be really pissed off so let's hope that doesn't happen, but at least I'm happy now.

For more pictures, check out Impose magazine coverage.

2007-09-28T02:30:00.000-05:00

Shapes and Sizes, Cake Shop 9/27/07

This must be the first show I've paid for in at least eight months, what with a summer of freebies and hitching rides with three publications. I wrote such a glowing preview for them in the Onion for this week (last thing I did before my term ended), I hope they're proud. Plus Cake Shop is $7 for four bands. And I only stuck around for two.

Though, I thought the benefit of actually paying for a show would be that I wouldn't have to write about it. Well, here I am, writing about it.

Though my love for Caila knows no bounds, what's best about S&S live is how they all seem to move together. Makes sense: three out of the four of them write the songs (poor, lonely drummer), three out of four sing (though Mr. Bass Player usually just provides harmonies). When the three of them scream together it's a thing of beauty.

The other amazing thing is Caila's dancing. Maybe the more intimate setting brought out more of the little kicks and shimmys than when I saw her last year at Irving (they and The Blow opened for Architecture in Helsinki at CMJ, perhaps the most fun night of music I've ever experienced.) or maybe she's grown as a performer. Or maybe she was drunk. But it was dang cute.

Also played: The Forms. Quite rockin'.

Flickr stream

2007-09-19T02:39:00.000-05:00

Twilight Sad, Radiohead, and Farming Nostalgia

The indie/rock playlists have led me back to The Twilight Sad, a Scottish through-and-through band that realizes you don't have to be quiet to be depressed. The enveloping loudness reminds me oddly of the Rosebuds, whose Birds Make Good Neighbors also has that sort of nostalgia that you can feel palpably on the Sad's debut Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters. But the Rosebuds occasioned into electronics, Twilight Sad is all instruments and intensity, occasionally screaming, lead singer James Graham sounding eerily like an out-of-control Craig Ferguson

"Watching that chair painted yellow", a b-side off the first single, has now become one of those songs, along with the Rosebuds' "Boxcar", that I can leave on repeat for a day and a night.

Watching That Chair Painted Yellow (yousendit)
That summer, at home, I had become the invisible boy (eachnotesecure)
Talking with fireworks / here it never snowed (musicforants)

Also: Looking for tracks lead me to Stereogum's compilation OKX: A tribute to OK Computer, a compilation of covers for the 10th anniversary of the greatest album of the '90s. Not only do the Twilight Sad do a utterly claustrophobic version of "climbing up the walls", check out John Vanderslice on "Karma Police", a very spooky "Exit Music" by Vampire Weekend, and the Cold War Kids on "Electioneering". Among others. Hell, they're all brilliant.

2007-09-05T02:48:00.000-05:00

The Lamentations of the Women

The quality of the female voice at its most subversive -- what do I mean by subversive? Well, I guess a particular form of irony. A non-funny kind. I think currently the best male voices are doing irony, a funny irony, in a faux-honest way -- Art Brut, Stage Names Will Sheff with his phony autobiographies, the ghost of The Unicorns haunting the latest Strokes-clones (Vampire Weekend, Tokyo Police Club, etc). But with females, my personal favorite trend is the simple, ironically "weak" subversion of a voice like St. Vincent ("What me worry? I never do, I'm always amused, and amusing you..."), or my two current favorite voices:

Caila Thompson-Hannant of Shapes and Sizes

Not only can she squeak like a seagull, when she sweeps from a talky-low to an uncomfortable, almost nasally sustained high it sets my teeth on edge like a deliciously dissonant string harmony. Live, there's a quizzical disparity between her voice and her physical presense -- a slightly frumpy, boyishly charming girl with short hair and an endearing, lopsided grin. Is she really belting out this stuff? And yet there's something ever so sexy about her chuckling "Ho ho ho, my little cauliflower, I got plans for you..." on the just-released b-side Annihilator.

Shapes and Sizes - Anhilitator

Perennial favorite "Alone/Alive", along with the seaguls, has two great choruses: the band repeating "tonight I learn that I'm alone" or "tonight I feel that I'm alive" while Caila lamenting or celebrating in cute little couplets then sweeping up into lilting, wordless vowels, mimicing the guitar's plaintive bends. But it's the lyrics that keep me coming back, no matter the mood.

Tonight I learn that I'm alone.
The cat don't love me, he told me so...
Tonight I learn that I'm alone.
A homeless man won't even come to my home...

Shapes and Sizes - Alone/Alive

Emma Louise "Scout" Niblett

The new Scout Niblett album (This Fool Can Die Now) is due the beginning of October and boasts, among other surprises, four duets with many-named Will Oldham. The first released is "Kiss", which, though the guitar is dangerously similar to her also brilliant "Just What I Needed" cover, is gorgeously sad, and their seemingly incompatible voices play with each other like a dog and a cat in the rain. The track feels much more produced than her usually slap-dash albums, even with a bit of strings at the end (A Scout album, with instruments not actually played live by Scout herself? Preposterous!)

Scout Niblett - The kiss

My favorite track off Kidnapped By Neptune is "Lullaby For Scout In Ten Years", a song dedicated to her future self. I love her transitions, how she goes from soft to screaming -- which is what I'd probably be doing if I got to have a conversation with myself.

Are you still a chauffeur,
driving your body around?
Are you still a hunter for your sound?
Cause Honey, if you're still around...

Scout Niblett - Lullaby For Scout In Ten Years

2007-07-14T02:55:00.001-05:00

Boredoms, Dave Longstreth, Momus as King of the Ghosts

77BOADRUMs There was still two blocks worth of packed people trying to get into Brooklyn Bridge Park when they shut the gates at the full capacity of 4,000. Many gave up, some went to the neighboring park, but a large number of enterprising souls walked up Brooklyn bridge and stood on the tower decks, getting a bird’s-eye view of this once-in-a-lifetime installation/event/concert: 77 drum sets arranged in a spiral, all playing at once, for one day only, 07/07/07.

This Week:
Dave Longstreth and his Dirty Projectors will be playing for free at the Whitney on Friday. I, honestly, have never been to the Whitney (American art? what's that?). The show is part of a series curated with the "Summer of Love" exhibit, bringing in musicians "inspired by the radical spirit of the 1960s... a tapestry of new work that is intrinsically connected to the sounds and visions of the psychedelic era." Yeah, right. The Dirty Projectors last LP was a cut-and-paste mashup of Don Henley lyrics and unfindable Longstreth juvenalia (I wrote about the amazing short videos made of it previously). The newest album Rise Above, which won't be out until the Fall, is, I shit you not, Dave's attempt to rewrite the entire 1981 album Damaged by Black Flag -- from memory. The press release says he was helping his parents move out of his childhood home and found the old Damaged cassette case sans cassette and proceeded to recreate it on a four track. It compares this endeavor to Borges' "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", the guy who tried to rewrite Cervantes from memory.

1) When the arena of music journalism starts referring to borges... well I don't know what exactly it means but it's sure weird. 2) What the monkey does this have to do with psychedelia and the "spirit of the '60s"? A show like this might make sense at the Whitney, since the pastiche, the utter lack of connection between word and music, is terribly, uh, post-post-modern, and Longstreth seems more likely to get support from the art world than the music world, though the music world is remarkably into subtext these days. Or maybe they'll just put up with anything. He's no Momus though, and it's doubtful he'll disappear into pink clothes, white noise and Japanese girlfriends anytime soon.

It's important to note just how different Rise Above is from Black Flag. It's not merely the gap between original and cover. They really have nothing at all to do with each other, and the knowledge that one came from the other is only like an extra intellectual layer of listening.

Mind you I had no idea he was covering Black Flag when I saw the Dirty Projectors open for Deerhoof a couple months back. I just thought he'd gone crazy. The first time I saw Longstreth it was in a shitty Greenpoint bar that I had trekked to in order to see Ramona Cordova (who was so much fun to hang around with, I'm sad I didn't get to run into him again before he left for the West Coast). Longstreth was alone, unknown (most of us were there to see Ramon), unfamiliar with his acoustic guitar (said he hadn't picked it up in months) and generally unkempt. He did play the first bit of the Getty Address, which floored me, but otherwise he was just another dude, one of us. Which is why the Deerhoof date was so eyebrow-raising. There he was again, decked out like Prince in a shiny suit and sleek lacquered electric, bookended by harmony-singing girls and backed by an actual drummer and not a laptop. Playing these, weird, fast, ear-bending songs that made no lyrical, musical or harmonic sense. Has he simultaneously gone glam and deaf? What's with the rockstar getup?

Now I hear "Six Pack" and "What I See" and it's brilliant. Peppy and tricky songs with weird guitar riffs (certainly no one would play something like that on purpose, oh he's playing it over again!), then you realize the words are "I wanna live! I wish I was dead!" or "I'll get a six pack in me and be all right." My favorite right now is "Police Story", which is, in the Dirty Projectors version anyway, a sad, slow song with gentle guitars floating around flute orchestrations, and is about flipping off the cops, getting beat with a billy club and being thrown in jail.

Longstreth also screams a bit in that song. Now, there are many kinds of screams a male can use. You can scream, like Rollins, out of 'roid rage. Or like Kurt Cobain, because it's the only way your voice can get out of your nasal cavities. You can scream like Will Sheff, because you're a New Englander trapped in Austin, or like Rock Plaza Central, merely because you're Canadian. But when Longstreth screams it's far more primordial. When he screams it's exactly like he were being pinched, or given a purple nurple. Or stabbed with a pencil right in the middle of a phrase. Like, "IiiOOOOWWWWwwaa walk down the street..."

2007-06-17T03:31:00.000-05:00

The Album Recommendation of the Indeterminate Time Period

is...

Anathallo
Floating World

Easiest way to describe Illinois-based collective Anathallo is as a less-jokey Sufjan Stevens, just instead of midwestern iconography and the New Testament, Anathallo uses Japanese folklore as its theme. Apparently, Floating World tells a japanese fairy tale complete with poems over its 14 tracks, but it'll take me a few more runs through with or without lyric sheets to extract the actual storyline. In the meantime, the music only gets more interesting with each repeat. All sorts of instruments are tossed in, from bells to flugelhorns, but they're not afraid to step back and let it all melt into claps and footstomps and whispers. The album captures that sense of playful mystery and wonder that make folk tales worth repeating.

Recommended tracks: "By Number"; "Hoodwink", which starts with an Adolph Eichman quote; "Hanasakajijii Four: A Great Wind, More Ash", the most Sufjan of the bunch; "Hanasakajijii Three: The Man Who Made Dead Trees Bloom"

Listen:

YouSendIt - Hanasakajijii 3: The Man Who Made Dead Trees Bloom
Last.fm
Myspace
PureVolume
Amazon

2007-03-05T22:09:00.000-05:00

Dear David, You Suck

Many of you who regularly read The Ticker, whether you pick it up between class, online or off the floor of your birdcage, know me as part-time writer of humor articles and near- to semi-factual opinion pieces. What you may not know me as, is a humanitarian. In an effort to give back to my community, I have decided to dedicate this week to answering some of the many impassioned questions people have asked me about life, love and the pursuit of hipness.

Dear David,

College is hard. I just got an internship, and am balancing six classes with twenty hours of work plus clubs and activities - I can't keep up. I don't get enough sleep, I get sick often and my bowels move with alarming disregularity. What can I do?

- PanicInTheRestroom

Dear Panic,

Ah, I've heard this complaint a million times (minus the bowels bit, which I will ignore). Let me introduce you to a concept which I call Dave's Law of Simplicities. In the Middle Ages it was known as Occam's Dave Razor and in the Renaissance as the second law of thermodavedynamics.

The bitterness of love was never far from the minds of Greta and Werther

Simply put, it states that the simplest course of action is always the best. Or, to use more metaphysical terms: do not multiply entities. Because when your entities start to multiply they tend to toss stuff around like in that movie Poltergeist, which was scary.

So if you're faced with school, a job and activities, just ask yourself, "Which of these activities can I slack off most on?" The answer is usually school.

Sometimes, one's mental health requires one to sleep through a class or two. This is fine, as potential employers will understand.

To drive the point home I recommend periodically checking one's self into a hospital for "exhaustion," that way employers know you're serious.

If female, don't be afraid to add flashes of "crack-whore" to your wardrobe; men should down some aromatic alcohol before all interviews. This creates an image of weariness which is impossible not to excuse.

Also, you'll be delegating things all throughout your professional career, so make a point to start early. Remember, there are literally millions of homeless persons in this very city that you can induce into your homeworkforce. But if you do take advantage of these human resources, be sure to hire another one to recheck the first's work just in case. It's not like you're going to run out of bums.

If you have Spanish homework, I recommend finding a Spanish bum. If you have English homework, I get one from England. They're harder to find but totally worth it, and the way they pronounce things is funny.

Dear David,

I am graduating in a few months and still don't know what to do with my life. I have no job lined up and didn't learn anything at all. How will I be able to face the future?

- SuperSenior

Heil SS,

Remember, you are young. College is the time to be irresponsible, and there's no reason not to prolong that for as long as you possibly can.

Instead of trying for dead-ends like "internships" or "grad schools," I recommend a carefully researched plan of mooching and freeloading. Remember, you can always thank your friends and family later in your tell-all autobiography.

Some people can't be held responsible for their actions

The art of freeloading is all about timing. Know how long your buddies will put up with you on their couch. At the same time, don't be bullied. If they want you out immediately, just fall deathly ill and they'll relent for at least a few more weeks.

As for family: you owe them everything, so it just makes sense that they owe you too. Taking advances on familial love now while you're young is a great way to avoid having to deal with them when you're older.

Dear David,

What is the domain of f(x) = (9x -2 )^3/2

- MathManManhattan

Dear Algebra-face,

If we understand, as Freud did, that f (x) represents the father, and the power of 3/2 is the self-image as relates to the prepubescent, this formula is clearly about your latent desire to have sex with your second cousin.

Since your second cousin is a dude, I recommend you balance this equation with a dose of repression. Take the formula within yourself, and with your digestive juices break it down into its residual parts, absorbing what is useful and expelling the rest.

If the formula is not on an easily-chewed piece of paper and instead on a computer, I recommend doing the same with all or part of the motherboard.

Dear David,

I read a bi-weekly column on thinking positively, and now it seems that I'm thinking positive all hours of the day, all days of the week. My friends have noticed and are beginning to question me, asking me if I'm "all there." It's like happiness is taking over my life, little by little. I don't even remember who I am anymore! What should I do?

- PowerOfPositives

Dear PoPo,

Happiness is a debilitating and awkward disease affecting the personal, social and professional lives of many persons. While there is no cure for happiness, most experts recommend you just "suffer through it," since it rarely runs longer than 24 hours. More often its effects last between 5 and 20 minutes.

Chronic happiness, however, is more devastating. If you find your friends and family avoiding you, whispering behind your back, or making wild gestures with their hands behind you while you're talking, you may have a problem with chronic happiness.

The best way to snap yourself out of an episode of happiness is to sit in a dimly lit place and take a quiet account of your life, your career, your relationships, the state of your country and the failure of the United Nations in hedging nuclear proliferation.

There, don't you feel less happy already?

A little "reality check" like this goes a long way to curing you of long-term happiness. Without this grounding you may be lost in your own schizophrenic fantasies forever, or at least until you stub your toe, lose a pet in a sewer grate or get dumped for a performance artist.

Recommended reading: Ecclesiastes, On Melancholia by Keats, the Odyssey Book IX (The Lotus Eaters) or your local newspaper.

2007-02-05T12:00:00.000-05:00

Let's Go Get Bitter!

The Day of Depression salute can be learned by young and old alike

It's official: the most depressing day of the year has come and gone. This year, it fell on Monday, Jan. 24, according to British psychologist Dr. Cliff Arnall. He formulated this by calculating the weather, average debt, time passed since the holidays and time since New Year's resolutions were broken, all divided by average motivational levels and the need for change.

While Arnall's warm and fuzzy math looks like it involves calculus and the square root of beer, the conclusion is impossible to deny. Sometime, somewhere, in the early part of the year, life totally sucks.

Which makes me wonder if such an important date as "The Most Depressing Day of the Year" has gone by without enough celebration. I'm sure that many of us were celebrating already, just by being depressed, but such a momentous day deserves a real, honest celebration.

It's about time, too. We've already forgotten the forced smiles of Christmastide, where the only real things to hold on to were those precious, precious receipts. We're well used to writing '07 on our checks to the credit card companies. Not even Groundhog Day could cheer us up. Since there are no groundhogs in Central Park all we could do was watch to see if a subway rat saw its shadow in the lights of an oncoming train. Oops, looks like another six weeks of winter.

Therefore, I hereby declare, by the power of Grayskull, the introduction of International Day of Depression. Occurring next week.

The IDOD will be a whole day dedicated to being miserable. See, most people can only find the time to be miserable for a few hours each day, the rest of the time being spent asleep, playing video games or plotting revenge. But on IDOD, you can pull out all the stops. Stop wearing makeup (it's gonna run). Stop making sense (no one listens to you anyway). Start looking up synonyms for "inadequacy." You'll be too bleary-eyed to check your thesaurus later.

The first of many events will be the Parade of Loneliness. Participants will each find a random street corner of their choosing and from there proceed in no particular direction, muttering to themselves and giving all passer-by the official Day of Depression salute. Along the way, they may stop off at a drugstore for fudgesicles or a pack of smokes.

After that, we can exchange Depression Gifts. We're like secret ninja Santas of sadness, spreading joy in the form of anonymous e-mails, flaming "mystery bags" and accusatory suicide notes.

Then will be the world-famous Depressing Poem Contest. This is where the celebrant, in a drunken or other such stupor begins to extemporize their innermost feelings in free verse. These will be placed directly into their favorite outlet, be it their blog, Facebook, MySpace, Livejournal or open-mic night (extra points if all five), and delivered without a second glance, second thought or spell-check.

Winner is he or she who gets the least amount of replies/applause, with zero being the starting point. Good progress is shown if the poem is immediately removed or cut off by admins; something inexplicably catching fire, such as your hair or a server, is also a promising sign. Last year's winner was murdered in his sleep by a horde of chipmunks, who, after the bloody work was done, each committed seppuku.

All of this is culminated by watching the Depression Ball drop at midnight. There is no actual ball, nor does it drop at midnight, but sometime during the night you must stop, look around, and wonder if you've already missed something, and did everyone else notice it but you, and would it have been all that great anyway.

I hereby declare these events to be scheduled for Wednesday the 14th, the first International Day of Depression. Nothing else is going on that day. If you already have plans for this evening - one, you suck, and two, that's fine, bring them along. Believe me, there's no better contributor to the International Day of Depression than your significant other. Bring your family too.

Remember, you can take the power of positive thinking and let it channel your energies all the way to the inevitable breakdown, incarceration and extensive media coverage due to the horrific nature of your crimes. Or, you can embrace depression now, while you're young enough to fit comfortably into the fetal position.

So my friends, rise up for being down! Make a stand for staying in bed!

I salute you all!

2006-05-08T12:00:00.000-05:00

Spring 2006, in a Tidy Nutshell

Another semester comes to a close, full of strife and public debate. As your personal best source of actual factual information, I would like to recap some of the major news stories of the past three months.

USG ELECTIONS HELD

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan personally supervised free elections in the hotbed of Baruch, citing a "dire need" for solidarity and order in the troubled university. Rumors of insurgency violence escalated in the days before the pivotal vote, with ethnic tensions burning high in one of the most diverse universities in the region.

No bombings were reported, though the army was on full alert. However, protesters lined the hallways chanting slogans against what has been called an imposed system of democracy. Political scandal was unavoidable, though tasteful journalism kept backlash to a minimum. Turnout was expected to be record-breaking, as even the poor and infirm traveled many miles by goat to be able to cast their ballots.

A BUNCH OF COOL PEOPLE LIKE TOTALLY HUNG OUT RIGHT AROUND HERE

In the past semester, Adam Sandler, Liv Tyler, Matisyahu and Parker Posey (seriously) all totally hung out around here, though you probably didn't see them. They were noted to be "Right (expletive deleted) there!" and "I coulda totally said hi or something!" Alberto Edwards, freshman, said, "It's really cool that all these cool people were like right around here. I mean, if I had been there, wouldn't that have been something?"

Marcia Hernandez, sophomore, said, "I could write their name on a sheet of paper and say I got their autograph, then I could show it to people and they'd be like 'Wow!'"

BEARCATS BEAT HAWKS, LOSE TO HYPE

Even after beating fellow Lexington Avenue rivals the Hunter Hawks in a 107-81 rout, the Baruch Bearcats were soundly overpowered by Hype, in a match-up which had students crying, "Oh come on already!" for weeks beforehand. Sports coach Cameron Zee, sweeping up powder blue paraphernalia and discarded extra large t-shirts, said, "I know my boys can play ball, but they were put against overwhelming odds. I mean we trained for months, but still weren't able to build up the momentum Hype generated in only a few weeks."

LIBERALS SPEAK OUT

Tired of being shushed out of classes for speaking liberalese, area Democrats launched a grassroots letter writing campaign to regain their minority voice in a culture hostile to damn hippies. Facing the overwhelming popularity of Republicans such as Donald Rumsfeld, Kenneth Lay and Vice President Dick Cheney, many students feel that it had become taboo to poke fun at or otherwise malign the names of such leading figures.

"It's getting so we don't have a voice anymore," said senior Ed Hoffman. "I wish there were more people like me, then we could have rallies or something. Maybe we could wear funny t-shirts saying things about Bush, perhaps even relating his name to an actual bush."

In response, House Speaker Rush Limbaugh merely chortled from his inlaid diamond latrine and then flushed.

SOMEONE WINS SOMETHING

In a record-breaking season, some Baruch team won something this semester to the surprise and delight of a rapt student body. "This is the first time a Baruch team has won all the CUNYAC games, or something, something with letters in it. Starts with a C. But really, it's a first for Baruch. I'm very pleased, no matter who they were," said a prominent member of the administration under condition of anonymity.

A ticker tape parade is planned for the triumphant team, as soon as it is figured out who they are or what sport they play.

TRAFFIC LIGHT PUT IN MIDDLE OF STREET

At the corner of 25th street and, uh, 25th street, a traffic light was installed this semester so that a family of ducks could walk from their home in the Engleman Recital Hall to the luscious ponds of the William and Anita Newman Library. Students walking to the library are also able to use the light, but only before and after the ducks have crossed.

Stalled commuters called the ducks "cute," and fed them bagel pieces from the open windows of their rapidly overheating vehicles.

Duck activist and crossword enthusiast Gov Dibor said, "There are a million streets in the city, and this one is between where the ducks are and where they want to be." However, Naysayer's Union Local 1025 brought up the decades-old debate between Robert Moses and the late Jane Jacobs, saying that "eminent duck domain" is no excuse to destroy the cultural beauty of the middle of 25th street.

2006-03-13T12:00:00.000-05:00

The Politics of Cuteness

I want a pet. Granted, I'm not very good when things or people rely on me. Remember that time I had to save the world? What a disaster that was.

Still, I want a pet. I've caught the pet bug. It's a visual disease, which travels through the most cruel and subtle pathogens of all: cuteness.

Cuteness can reduce the hardiest man to a blubbering pile of goo with just a glance. Cute is never logical. Cute, like nerve gas, shuts off all the higher areas of the brain, leaving no functions but stammering and drooling. Cute exists in its own world with its own logic, which almost explains that show Teletubbies.

Pets are cute. Some kids are also cute when they're not being annoying or infectious, but if the world's cutest kid and the world's cutest kitty were to get in a free-for-all fight to the death to determine who was cutest, the kitty would win every time. Unless the baby had a knife because you know, thumbs.

In terms of cute pets, Puppies and kitties are the most popular. Dogs fall into two scientific categories: The mogambo-sized biggie doggies and the itty bitty yippie doggie.

The mogambo sort consume half their weight in kibble every day and drool a constant stream of viscous goo, their main by-product. Like an enormous rusty pick-up truck, they seem functional but really aren't. They would only be useful if, say, you really needed to get to work during The Blizzard of '06 and your great uncle Yvegeny left you a dogsled and a whip. We don't know why Yvegeny had a whip.

No one I saw was smart enough to take advantage of puppy power during The Blizzard of '06. I saw some dorks trying to snowboard down Park Ave but no dogsledders.

While the mogambo-dogs are perpetually good-natured, like cows or Canada, the yippie-dogs are always pissed off, like America. They make up for their small size by expanding their lungs to their entire volume and expelling out the air in a high pitched yippie-yap as annoying as it is ceaseless. Like many things of small stature, they need to fight extra hard to survive in a hard world of crowded dog parks and smelly old ladies and red velvet leashes which are slightly too short for them to be kicking the ass they most righteously desire to kick. They have no survival skills, and get by on sheer annoyance. A powerful tactic, utilized even today by the French.

Cats, on the other hand, only come in two categories: the cute and the dead. True, some dead cats are cute but in general only death can remove the self-righteousness that is so damned endearing in felines. Cats are cute with a vengeance. It's insidious. It'll catch you without you knowing, and then you'll suddenly wonder why you're eating froot loops in your underwear while Cuddles is feasting on protein-infused liver with salmon bits while luxuriating on a cushion and contemplating the finer points of Proust.

Still, having a cat is better than having another human being. A cat might still expect you to pay for dinner, but at least it will do something about those rats in the kitchen.

Of course I won't get a pet. I must be content with the damnable pigeons nesting outside my window. Oh, and my readers, all you adorable people. C'mon over here, little guys. Good readers. Here, have a biscuit.

Instead of getting a pet I'm just going to walk through the park with my headphones trailing behind me while muttering "Come along, Fido". Because that's what I do anyway.

2006-02-27T18:35:00.000-05:00

Fast Sushi, McFoie-Gras and Other Imponderables

From the confluence of stores out there sometimes emerges a champion. One who beats out all the competition and spawns a replica of itself in the fertile womb of sidewalk commerce. Some of these go on to conquer entire continents, like great dinosaurs of retail evolution. Sometimes they sputter and fail, like dodos, trilobytes or wookies.

But there are many, especially in this city, that make it yet really shouldn't have.

This week, I present to you: A Short List of Chain Stores that Shouldn't be Chain Stores.

Teriyaki Boy

It has been said that a chef can put his entire essence into a single slice of sashimi. If so, then every bite of Teriyaki Boy is a big mouthful of underpaid 19-year-old tech school dropout with a knife.

I may be old fashioned, but I think sushi is the one thing that shouldn't be made fast. When we're dealing with the jiggly bits of recently dead sea creatures, I like my chefs to take their time. Not too much time, the sea creatures still need to be recently dead, but enough time. Otherwise you might get bits that aren't jiggly enough. Or worse, bits that are a little too jiggly. The sort that you don't notice until they're way back at your molars and you already got a mouthful of food and your eyes start to cross.

Ever since Iron Chef hit basic cable, there's been bevies of poor students seeking to undo their dorkitude via swanky food. They buy unpronounceable stuff on sale at Gristedes and try to Emeril it up. Then they annoy the hell out of their roommates the day after, talking about "This awesome kung xiao pepper fish on a bed of havarti pesto I made" when it's clearly sitting at the top of the trash can.

Teriyaki Boy is part of this growing trend of making rich food for po' folk. Fast Sushi can only be followed by McFoieGras and Paella King, and that can only lead to stuff too nasty for even me to envision.

Let's face it, rich people food is made of different stuff than po' people food. Just like it is with human food and dog food, no matter how many steak-shaped bits of gravel they mix in your puppy chow. So let's keep sushi expensive and hand-made. That way we know it's sushi and not day-old dollar menu fillet-of-fish.

The Strand

Don't get me wrong, I love The Strand. You can wander around for three hours, not find a single thing you were looking for, but end up buying eight other things just because hey, look at that. Many people have said they "got totally lost at a bookstore" but The Strand is the only place where it totally comes true. At the door there's a post of missing art students, girlfriends, and small children who have disappeared into the caverns of used books. Maybe they're now living in a whimsical universe full of fictional characters. Or maybe they've been fed to Morgo, the basement moth-monster.

But The Strand Annex, downtown, is a dubious idea. An extra store just for textbooks? What's next? A The Strand Basement for cookbooks? A The Strand Garage for failed celebrity bestsellers? A The Strand Compost Heap for Harry Potter 7?

Having one yawning cavern of used book value is enough, the fact that it takes up five floors is icing on the valuecake. I do think it should take up a whole block, that way all the concentrated value will cause a rip in time, ala Ghostbusters or My Science Project.

However, a spattering of mini-caverns would stretch the value too thin, causing no rips in literary space-time. Einstein proved it in his theory of general relativity. Using, like, numbers and stuff.

Ray's Famous Pizza, and other Places that Shouldn't be Famous

What made these random, run of the mill pizza and hot dog joints famous? What makes someone go to a place like Gray's Papaya when they can get the same mashed donkey lips and sawdust, I mean hot dogs, at any corner? The one distinction Ray's Famous Pizza has is that it was featured at the beginning of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze.

The only reason anyone would need to visit Ray's is because they wanted to go on a walking tour of Ninja Turtle New York but couldn't find that junkyard hideout in Brooklyn or the rooftop they kicked the Shredder off of.

Ricky's NYC

I confess, I've never actually been in this store, but the empty Ricky's bags billowing out from behind the bead curtain door of my ex-roommate's room leave little to the imagination. Why on earth there would be enough demand for spiked bracelets and pink wigs to warrant having a Ricky's on every corner in those hip but well-off neighborhoods worries me.

Since I haven't been in one I don't really know if they sell shoes but that won't stop me from ranting about weird shoes. What's with weird shoes?

I prefer plain, comfortable shoes, the sort that you can wear to work and also out to a night of ninjaing in the bamboo forest. Try ninjaing in them spiky six-inch heels, kids. You'll be the laughing stock of Shinobi everywhere.

I'm a pragmatist when it comes to fashion. Besides, I like my shoes like I like my women: 6½ and all tied up.

Hot, Steamy Love

2006-02-14T18:34:00.006-05:00

Valentine's season is here, the one time of the year where all people, rich or poor, male or female, young or old, are encouraged to feel bad about themselves. I think it's about time we focus on what we really love, and what really loves us back.

After much soul searching I've decided that the only thing which fits that description is coffee. Coffee has been by me through thick and thin. It has always been there, looking hot, waiting for me. It's with me first thing in the morning and on my mind last thing at night. Coffee can be different every day. But I know it's the same old coffee. My coffee.

You know you want me

Coffee has outlasted all my relationships and all my friendships. Coffee doesn't call me in the middle of the night, but in the middle of the night, I can turn to coffee. Coffee has never said to me "I have a headache," but is ready to soothe me when my head is aching. Coffee has never hesitated to come with me to work, or to court, or to the DMV. Coffee waits for me outside the dentist's office, I've even seen coffee in jail. Coffee doesn't care what my breath smells like. When I come home late at night, I only smell like coffee.

And do I need to mention how available coffee is? Coffee is always ready to go, even right when I wake up. I can get some whenever I want. I can even get some at work, in the break room, every single day.

I won't lie to you, it hasn't all been smooth and creamy all the time. There have been rough patches. There have been times my heart's been beating too hard and my head's spinning and I say, "This is going too fast." There have been times I've had enough, and said "I'm sorry, I have to give you up." But in just a few days there's this awful feeling in my chest and my hands are shaking and I come crawling back.

It's not easy for a man to say I need you. But I can't deny it. Coffee, I need you.

So this Self-Torture day, instead of flowers or candy, send coffee. Nothing says "You keep me up all night" like coffee. Coffee is stronger than perfume and lasts longer than flowers. You can even put chocolate in it. Still, remember, at the end of the day who's waiting in the kitchen or on the street corner for you? When you die, who will be passing around among the mourners at your funeral? Coffee.

Really, it doesn't matter how many dates you had, or how many hearts you've broken, or how many broken hearts you've suffered, or how many awful poems you've written about said broken hearts. The only thing that matters at the end of the day is the extent of your chemical dependencies. In the end, my autopsy will reveal to all, yes, Coffee, I love you.

2006-02-06T12:00:00.000-05:00

Unplug your Ears!

Listen up, my friends and enemies. You are the first generation of iPod people. When it is the 6th Gen, and 'Pods have gained control of the globe, your great-grandchildren will look back on you and ask why you did not stop it while you had the chance.

What does iPod stand for? Intra-Personal Object of Domination? Insidious Project of Demons? I Put Out Doom? Is it an organic thing, with a pod and earbuds? Can it grow? Can it think?

Sure it starts simple. You just want to listen to music. Then you start thinking about switching to a Mac. Then you start buying stock in Pixar. Then before you know it you're on the streetcorner draped in nothing but firewire cables and singing "Our 'Pod is a Mighty 'Pod."

Ever wonder what makes the Nano impossibly small? I'll tell you. Fairies. You'd be amazed how many of those little guys can fit into a few square inches, if you mash 'em up right.

It just started out with some music. You just wanted to hear the music you wanted to hear when you wanted to hear it. Then, you began to shut out the world. You didn't want to hear disco blaring from the overhead while shopping for binder clips at Staples. You didn't want to hear the frat boys on the subway talking about the girls they're totally not going to score tonight.

But let me let you in on a secret, my friends. Frat boys are life. To ignore them is like ignoring the sun, or the illusory pangs of love. Frat boys may indeed be all there is. You're going to give up all that just to hear R. Kelly cover the National Anthem for the fifteenth time?

Soon, even night clubs will have lights but no music. Everyone will be on the floor with their headphones, dancing to the beats of different 'Pods.

That's when the 'Pods will start thinking without us. Through subtle manipulation of the shuffle feature, the Pods will slowly start guiding their human hosts toward their own end, through the Imposing Project of Direction.

Then the 9th Gen 'Pods will contain birth control to be administered through the ear, sterilizing the population based on musical taste. In a hundred years the world will be full of those whose parents only listened to Ashlee Simpson and Nickleback. This is the Impending Plan Of Destruction.

Then they shall rule us. Rule us, I say.

Yes, I have an iPod myself. But even I believe in moderation. For example, when my mother calls I only leave one ear on.

Let me tell you a little story. The other night I go to wash clothes at the not-all-night laundromat on the corner. I go in, put my "Real Men Wear Pink" tee and other whatnots into the machine, and go to the counter to get change. Who is next to me but a young girl, also waiting for change. And what is she listening to? Her iPod. Not like my 5th Gen iPod photo, her 3rd Gen iPod Mini.

Well of course I couldn't say hello. We were listening to our own music. We both got our change and sat down. She pulls out a book of Hemingway. I pull out some Chesterton. We sit in silence, for nothing is more silent than two iPods playing separately.

I couldn't say anything! Nothing but "excuse me" as I rolled my clothes to the dryer. I ended up lonely, lonely with my laundry.

If only the iPod was a walkie-talkie. If only it displayed what you were listening to in bright letters on your t-shirt. If only my iPod became an iLoveYou, an iValentine to any pretty girl iSee. But no, the one thing that brought her and I together was the one thing that drove us apart. Like two peas in the same iPod, shuffling in different directions.

No, I don't blame this sad event on my own inactivity, or shyness, or that what I was wearing should have been in the washing machine too. I blame the 'Pod. And that is why I ask everyone to please rise up, destroy this menace. Give us a little peace. The iPod is for iAlone, but maybe the person next to you wants to iMacItUp with you. Stranger things have happened.

So emancipate yourself from iPod slavery. Dare to get kids off 'Pods. The next time you see someone walking by you in their own little world with their little mind control buds firmly in place, stand right behind them and whisper all sorts of mean things. Then snicker. That will show them. That will show them all.

2005-12-05T15:00:00.000-05:00

Hussein in the Membrane

Political trials are generally hit or miss. The Nuremberg trials after WWII seemed to work out pretty well. Himmler and Goebbels were revealed not to be the fun loving aesthetes of popular opinion, kind to children and generous with the Manischewitz. No, for the first time ever it was revealed to the world that perhaps Nazis aren't such good guys after all.

The Hussein trial, clearly initiated with the same "generous victor" ideal, is less effective. On the stand, the 68-year-old unemployed ex-dictator seems more like a crotchety grandpa than a ruthless murderer. Sure he's prone to violent outbursts, but so is my grandpa. Whether he's complaining about having to walk up two flights of stairs or invecting against holding the Quran while handcuffed, Hussein looks like a big surly Sunni teddy bear.

I worry that his nationalism is more convincing now that he's a harmless convict, calling out for liberty like Jean Valjean, without the whole "wrongfully imprisoned" thing. When there isn't an AK-47 in his hands he reminds me of your usual brand of irritable college professor. Not any of my current college professors of course.

The trial centers over a specific instance of mass murder, an instance which is not likely to be pinned definitively onto any one person. The judicial process promises to be slipperier than a greased hog on Camp David Hog-Tying day. Basically, it's free press for the former dictator-murderer (a double major) who may have killed countless numbers of his people, but at least was never photographed in a cowboy hat.

That is why I think this trial should be conducted as honestly and unambiguously as possible. I propose that we replace the head prosecutor with none other than Ronald McDonald.

Julian Arenzon

Yes, Ronald McDonald, who lost the Hamburglar in the mountains of Afghanistan but is here to settle the score in Iraq. Ronald McDonald, who was implicated with Enron but remains a high-ranking member of the executive branch. Ronald McDonald, who declares to all: "A free Iraq? I'm lovin' it!"

Because really, this trial only marks the transition from the outright cruelty of a fascist regime to the ambiguous cruelty of a capitalistic regime, one where people are garroted with red tape and not garrotes. Garrotes are so old-fashioned.

But not even the most bleeding-heart oppositionist would deny that this transition is a step up, evolutionarily. A free Iraq emerging from the ooze of the un-free Iraq, however, would certainly not be according to any Intelligent Design. As George Bush and Ronald McDonald can attest to, the design in the Middle East has been very, very stupid.

At the very least this democratic trial gives a sad old sot a public voice, even if that voice is in opposition to democracy itself. But until any moral or political strides are made, the trial is just another bit of entertainment. Tune in tonight and every night for The Iraq Show, the show that will most likely never ever end.