John from Cincinnati

2007-08-13T21:18:00.000-04:00

Menomena

2007-03-28T11:54:00.000-04:00


		television
	John From Cincinnati HBO (WARNING: contains spoilers for the season that just ended, but since I don't really recommend seeing it, you might as well read my review.) Coasting on the goodwill he earned by creating three stunning seasons of Deadwood, David Milch could have televised a piece of poo, and I would have watched 13 episodes just to see what happened. Unfortunately, with John from Cincinnati, that's kinda what he did. I've read enough interviews with Milch to know that his writing process, at least now that he's not scripting police procedurals, is wildly idiosyncratic: he lies on the floor of a trailer with a pillow, surrounded by "writers" and a typist, barking out lines of dialogue and editing them on the fly as he watches them appear on a large screen on the wall. And he apparently does this without a plan. He just puts characters in a room and lets them interact, hoping something of interest transpires. Which, on Deadwood, something often did. Deadwood benefited from a loose timeline of historically dictated plot points, so it looked like there was a plan -- at least until the end of the last season, which built pressure relentlessly to an anticlimax that still somehow satisfied, mostly because it seemed realistic. John from Cincinnati, however, has no such moorings: no plot points, no tiresome "realism." It turns out Milch works better with some restrictions. The problem with most of this first (and, I have to imagine, last) season is that nothing really happens. A weird guy shows up to a surfing town, performing miracles or being nearby when they occur, but only about 16 characters seem to exist in this town, and they only interact with each other. Most of the time, when Milch let his characters interact with each other, they just discussed the other characters offscreen. People had emotions, fears, and motivations that were realistic enough, but dramatically it was like the opposite of 24. I don't mean the antidote to 24, or a soothing relief from 24. As we all know, most law enforcement officers go their entire careers without firing their weapons, but Jack Bauer draws, fires, and kills people with his gun multiple times an hour. It's retarded. But despite resurrections, levitations, and various teleportations, JfC is narratively so realistic that it's filled with exactly the kind of "drama" as a typical week at the office. I enjoyed some of almost every episode, but I can't recommend it with a clear conscience to those of you with HBO on Demand.
		: . . .4.1: . . . . :

Recent Movie Rental Roundup, Vol 1.

2006-05-13T04:49:00.000-04:00


		music
	Friend and Foe Menomena It's hard to describe the music of Menomena without trotting out the cliché that they don't sound like anybody else. It's weird enough that they appear to have three different lead singers, but it's the structures of their songs which are really puzzling. They're built through some sort of collaborative live-looping process, but whatever. What results is just fucking weird. I'm not always sure I like all of it, but I'm always a little confused, and I don't necessarily become less so if I listen more carefully. This is one of those albums that, every time I think of it, I stop listening to whatever else I'm listening to and put this on instead. One of my favorites of the last year.
		: . . . . : . . .9.3:

The Unicorns and Islands

2006-05-10T06:21:00.000-04:00


		movies
	Recent Movie Rental Roundup, Vol.1 Somehow I end up seeing a crapload of movies, and it's only fair that I tell you how they were. This capsule review format, assuming I can restrain myself, should allow me to convey the most pertinent information (is it worth watching, and if so, why?) with room for a little color. Here goes nothing. Jarhead dir. Sam Mendes This movie was a big sandy reminder of how much more I like Peter Sarsgaard than Jake Gyllenhaal. Jake really bulked up for the role, and his neck is wider than most of his head, which it turns out is not very attractive anyway. I know some of you think JG is hot, and I'm sorry to be the one to break it to you, but he's a straw hottie: you're heating up your Hanes over a smirk and an eye-twinkle -- there's no there there. Watching two hours of gyllenglower should cure you of any residual crush. As for the movie itself, it's decent enough, though it it doesn't look as hot when you stand it next to its most obvious cinematic progenitors, Full Metal Jacket (Marine training) and Three Kings (Gulf War). It's a war movie without the actual war, and it's about what happens when people are trained to kill, dropped into a war zone, and not allowed to kill. Jamie Foxx is good, Sarsgaard great. Watch for the scorpion fight. 2046 dir. Wong Kar Wai Megapraised quasisequel to Wong's In the Mood for Love, which I didn't see. It's slow, beautiful, and heartbreaking, a five-year snapshot of one man's life, with the time marked by the women who mattered even as he tried his damnedest to keep them from doing so. Tony Leung, who I still think of as the other guy in The Killer, plays a hack writer of dirty science fiction in late-sixties Hong Kong, and living in a decaying hotel brings him into contact with a series of dazzlingly portrayed women. He's blandly charming, an improbable ladies man, but by the end of the movie, I wanted to fuck him, too. Although I think it was a bit overrated, it is a pretty serious meditation on the stupid human trick of falling in love with the worst possible candidate for such attention. The sixties scenes are shot with loving attention to every detail, and the intermittent scenes set on a high-speed transglobal train in the year 2046 are drool-worthy confections, the exterior stuff CG but the interiors classic sixties-style future vision, rounded corners and womb chairs. Best if you're in a patient mood. The Brothers Grimm dir. Terry Gilliam I wondered how a TG movie got by me, so I rented it and had my answer. Poor TG got back on his horse after failing to make Don Quixote (see Lost in La Mancha for the tragic tale of the doomed production) and came up with this, which might have been a fine movie made by someone else, but had the bad luck of being the worst Terry Gilliam movie ever. Cast your eyes over his directing filmography, and you'll see that it's a pretty stellar list, and it's no shame being the worst of the bunch (yes, worse even than Munchausen), but still, it's a letdown. Heath Ledger, Peter Stormare, and Jonathan Pryce are all great, but in service of something that looks and feels a little too much like Time Burton's Sleepy Hollow. Oldboy dir. Chan-wook Park A brutal Korean revenge movie with an awesome setup: a man is imprisoned -- without knowing why -- for fifteen years, when he's freed just as capriciously, left to find his captors and give something back. The payoff doesn't quite live up to the setup (though that could be a cultural difference -- maybe it killed in Korea), but along the way there are some tasty setpieces. Stu told me to watch for the scene where our hero, armed only with a clawhammer, takes on a narrow hallway filled with 30-odd thugs -- and leaves them all moaning on the floor. The end takes too long, but all in all it's worth a rental, though when I put the DVD in, it defaulted to playing back with the audio track dubbed in English. Fiddle with your "Audio" and "Subtitle" buttons until you get Korean sound and English titles, as god intended. Flightplan dir. Robert Schwentke A capable thriller that takes place on a jet bigger than that monstrous Airbus deal. Jodie Foster is great, as always, at making you care about her, even when the plot is full of nonsensical action movie holes. Sarsgaard is in this one, too, and he's great, again. Sarsgaard! The director does a great job of conveying the sense of being on a plane, and pulls some Hitchcockian camera stunts, if you dig that kinda thing (the extra features are pretty cool on this one). It's also unclear whether Jodie's character is completely nuts or not, which is hard to pull off. I had fun with this, despite the aforementioned plot holes, because they just come with the territory nowadays. Domino dir. Tony Scott Quite unexpectedly, this one ended up being the pick of the litter. It's completely over the top, and the opening credits let you know that the movie doesn't take itself too seriously, feeling like a mix of Charlie's Angles, 70s exploitation flix, Saturday morning cartoons, and an Aerosmith video. I've always thought that Tony Scott was a crowd-pleasing hack compared to his serious older brother Ridley, but I'm starting to wonder. Ridley's cred is all based on two early works of unquestionable genius and vision: Alien and Bladerunner. But lately it's all been Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, and, god help us, Hannibal. Tony made Top Gun at the start of his career, so he was at least more honest about his intentions. But then he made True Romance, which this movie kinda reminds me of, though it owes more to Tarantino's other big pre-Pulp Fiction script, Natural Born Killers. The thing is, I think that Domino might be better than both of those movies (TR and NBK). It's unabashedly entertaining, and admits early on that it's fucking with the truth for the sake of fun. The supporting cast is uniformly fantastic, with your Rourke and Liu and Walken all up in that shit. The pace is, like, perfect, and I mean it. Oh yeah, and the story is that Laurence Harvey, of The Manchurian Candidate, had a daughter who gave up a career in modeling and a life in Beverly Hills to become a bounty hunter. The script is by the same guy who wrote Donnie Darko, and it's sharp and smart as it should be. I don't want to say anything else, except that you should see this flick.
	Jarhead : . . . . : .7.3. . : 2046 : . . . . : . .8.5. : The Brothers Grimm : . . . .5:9. . . . : Oldboy : . . . . : .7.0. . : Flightplan : . . . . :6.8. . . : Domino : . . . . : . .8.6. :

Nicotine patches

2006-05-08T19:02:00.000-04:00


		music
	Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? (2003) The Unicorns This was one of those albums that made me sit up and take notice the very first time I heard it; I got that tingly sensation that should sound familiar to any serious music lovers reading this. I entered a hyper-alert state that blocks out extraneous stimuli so that my brain can figure out if I'm actually hearing genius or just another goddamn let-down. (See, most of the time, when you buy a new CD and you listen to it, and you're more or less pleased with the result -- you usually don't end up buying absolute pieces of shit these days, because mp3s, lo-res audio samples on sites like Amazon, in-store listening stations, a billion online reviews, and the good old hipster grapevine should steer you towards the rare gems and away from the clunkers. But some artists out there must be geniuses, and the records they are making now are masterpieces, and they will be revered as such for many years. I take George Michael's advice, and I listen without prejudice to the recommendations of my friends, hoping for that special tingle that freezes me in my tracks and sends all the blood to my eardrums. I listen listen listen to the whole album, waiting with ever-increasing tension for the awful song that ruins everything, or the slow but steady decline in song quality characteristic of a "front-loaded" record, but sometimes the album is... just it, man, right? Jupiter aligns with Mars, the CD finishes, leaving my cheeks wet with tears of gratitude, and it's all I can do to stop shaking long enough to start the damn thing over again immediately. In years past, it's happened with Boards of Canada's Music Has the Right to Children, The Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin, Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Rufus Wainwright's eponymous debut album, and even Beck's Midnight Vultures. Each of those albums left me in stunned disbelief, but you'll notice that the albums I listed are all from like 1999, so it's been a while.) Friends, The Unicorns brought me the closest I've come to that shivery transcendence since y refused 2 k. If I describe the album in too much detail, it will only sound stupid and make you want to avoid it, and I want you to buy it, live it, and love it with me. But it's only fair to say something like: a bunch of Canadians, boys, who may as well be teenagers even if they're not, perform a song cycle, or maybe an opera -- I don't know -- about unicorns and ghosts and Noah's Ark and bizarre medical conditions and death. (Huh, when I say it like that it sounds like I could be talking about In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, but the albums couldn't sound more different.) The Unicorns are goofy, clowning around, ecstatic, energetic, and so A.D.D. that they can't write songs with choruses -- the idea of singing the same couplet or quatrain more than once would just bore them to sleep. I must have listened to this 100 times. I can't sing its praises more highly without sounding like a jackass. I love it. Return to the Sea (2006) Islands I don't know how to break this to you after reading the elegy above, but less than a year after releasing Who Will Cut Our Hair... The Unicorns broke up. I almost cried, but I consoled myself with the knowledge that I'd always have that album. Well! Imagine my excitement when someone showed me Noel Murray's review in The Onion of this album (by the singer and drummer of the Unicorns!) a week before it came out. I was jazzed out my skull, bwah. Shee-it. And the review was fairly positive, even though he led the piece with the following bit of heresy: The Unicorns' 2003 album Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? wasn't exactly overrated, since it was fairly obscure even by indie-rock standards, but a circle of hardcore indie aficionados did praise the slight, excessively whimsical piece of DIY pop way out of proportion. Who cares, y'feckin' arse'ole. I ran out to get it, and it deserves the highest praise I could give it: it sounds like a Unicorns album. I almost wept the first time I heard it. Again I'll refrain from description, except to say that it's more stylistically varied than the Unicorns, and that, so far, I love this one too, only just a little bit less.
	The Unicorns - Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?:	: . . . . : . . .9.6:
	Islands - Return to the Sea:	: . . . . : . .8.9. :

V for Vendetta

2006-04-27T13:41:00.000-04:00


		products
	Nicotine patches I smoked Camel Filters for thirteen years, and for most of them I smoked a pack a day. I'd never really tried to quit before, mostly because I didn't want to. For many years I'd cultivated a persona that was vociferously pro-smoking, and it seemed disingenuous to flip-flop on the issue. I smoked a lot. I smoked in places I wasn't supposed to smoke, and at inappropriate times. Which in retrospect seems rather churlish, but I get it now: smoking is a rebellious act not only because it's self-destructive, but because it amplifies your solipsism to really horrifying levels. Smokers are always about satisfying their immediate needs, and in polite society, the person who demands to be treated as an exception, as an individual, is despised and admired in varying proportions. Smokers are selfish and worse, they make other people's lives more unpleasant with their smoke, their odor, their breath, etc. But as a former smoker, I can say that we like it that way. Anyway, sometime in 2004 I realized that I wasn't enjoying smoking anymore, not at all. I believe that despite the huge role that the Nicoderm and Zyban played in getting me over the physical addiction, I would not have been able to quit for real if I still enjoyed smoking. My doctor prescribed Zyban at my request, because I had taken Wellbutrin (same drug, different brand name) in 1998 and I had noticed that even though I wasn't trying to quit smoking, I was smoking a lot less. I actually had to remind myself: "fuck! It's time for a smoke! What am I thinking?" but if something distracted me before I got a cigarette lit and into my mouth, I might forget again for another hour. So I knew it was effective at stopping my cravings. I got the Nicoderm patches, and started with the strongest, which was something like 20mg of nicotine a day. The nicotine or some other aspect of the transdermal delivery system was caustic, and I had to remove one of the patches from my chest because it just stung too much -- the welt it left was real ooky. So I devised a schedule of placement on various parts of my upper arms, and that was cool. I wrote this review on request, which is why it's not so punchy -- I'm not so jazzed and full of things to say about the patch. But I will offer this drastically important advice for free: If you want to quit smoking, do your best to stop enjoying it first. Chain-smoke unfiltereds for a month until you're coughing up bloody lungpies. Smoke in your bedroom with the windows closed. Go to a cigar club and just sit there, breathing rich men's exhalations. Buy your smokes full price in midtown Manhattan. Putt out butts on your tongue. Whatever it takes. Because if you quit while you like it, then all the events in your life that would normally trigger the desire for a smoke will still do it once you're off the patch. But if you hate smoking by the time you quit, it won't even occur to you as a possibility. As for rating these things, I guess they did what they were supposed to, which was deliver nicotine. But they ate my flesh a little, and they don't work for everybody.
		: . . . . : . .8.0. :

Wonder Showzen

2006-04-26T19:13:00.000-04:00


		movies
	V for Vendetta dir. James McTeigue I dug this movie, but the only other person I've talked to who admitted to liking it is my physician, which is a bad sign. Because she has terrible taste in movies. Ha ha! But seriously, folks,I did enjoy this movie. Like many people who ventured out to see this the night it opened, I enjoyed the comic on which it was based. Alan Moore demanded his name be removed from the credits and all promotional hoo-hah, so full credit for the movie's source material went to the artist, David Lloyd, which is weirdly dishonest, if unavoidable. You can't blame Moore for dissociating himself from a movie of his work. His excellent comic The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was turned into an absolutely fucking retarded action flick (whose posters hilariously showed the acronym LXG executed in a futuristically beveled (whatever) ingot of brushed steel, even though the story takes place in Victorian England) that ranks with the worst of the millennial spate of comic-based movies (Catwoman, Fantastic Four, and the so-bad-I-can't-look-away-must!-look!-away! stillbirth called Daredevil). The movie of his comic From Hell wasn't bad at all, but it took some rather drastic narrative and historical liberties for the sake of entertainment value, including a gripping final scene in which Prince Albert Victor corners Jack the Ripper in the bell tower of Big Ben, whereupon The Ripper reveals himself to be the tenth descendant of Oliver Cromwell, (raised, like the eight generations before him, in a fearful, self-imposed, and monastic exile) come to London to exact his family's revenge on the monarchy and restore himself to the Lord Protectorate; however, Jack (aka Oliver XI) and his plan were sidetracked when, confronted for the first time with the decadence and wickedness of contemporary urban life in London, he felt compelled to enforce a philosophy he calls Extreme Puritanism (E.P. for short) which involved pure thoughts, bland diet, and the disembowelment of whores. Jack is about to rip Prince Albert in a similar fashion when Queen Victoria appears out of nowhere just in time, lifts Jack over her head and growls: "We! Are! Not! Amused!" and flings him from the tower into the Thames. Whoops! See what happens to me? Back to the review at hand. The film was a reasonably faithful adaptation of a fairly cinematic original, though neither is what you'd call action-packed, both being less concerned with kicking ass than with making readers/viewers think about totalitarianism. I believe this is an important thing for art to do, and maybe it clouds my critical faculties. The dialogue is unquestionably silly at times, as are some of the plot points. But Hugo Weaving and Natalie Portman were both really fucking impressive, expecially because you forget that the former is wearing a mask almost immediately. I know this review is late, so it may only help you decide whether to see it on DVD or whatever, and I'm sorry about that. I thought it was definitely worth it, and many people who I talked to who didn't like it seemed to be overly grumpy, impossible-to-please fanwads. They can always suck it. See the movie with people who like movies.
		: . . . . : .7.8. . :

Hard Taco Project

2006-04-26T18:46:00.000-04:00


		television
	Wonder Showzen god knows when on MTV2 I don't really like this show. I hate the puppets in the studio, I really hate the puppet they use to assault people on the street (lacking as it does any of the wit or restraint of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog), and I super-duper hate when they use kids to be mean to old people on the street. The show is supposed to make the viewer cringe, and I know the creators are trying their damnedest to get something rejected, and so far only their ep with the "Little Hitler" bit has been removed from the air permanently. As a rule, I don't dig on the schadenfreude. What's the other show that makes people feel bad on purpose for viewer's entertainment? I had to call my sister to figure it out, and surprisingly it's The Daily Show: I hate the segments where they're interviewing somebody and making them look stupid. Whoop! She just called me back to say: The Andy Milonakis Show. Yup. She's on my wavelength. BUT! Some of their cartoons are just mind-blowing. I can't count the people I've shown "D.O.G.O.B.G.Y.N." -- which may be the most offensive, least redeemable cartoon with a cute dog in it ever. "WinoBot" is amazing for a) how close it comes to offending me without offending me, and b) how stupid it could have been but isn't. Or something. Still, not all the cartoons are winners; I saw one called "He-Bro", which was offensive and surreal without being funny enough. Again, one of the things that makes me uncomfortable about this show is that sometimes they hit me just right, and I don't want them to be able to do that.
		: . . .4.7: . . . . :

Pedialyte

2006-04-26T18:37:00.000-04:00


		websites
	Hard Taco Project This is the website of a guy named Zach London who writes a song every month and posts it to his site. I was referred to this site by a former roommate who knew this guy from his school (maybe?). I can't remember now whether the referral was positive (as in "check this out, I really dig it, man!") negative (as in "listen to how much my friend suxx!") or guardedly neutral (as in "I may have an opinion about this but I'm not saying what it is till you say what you think"). Neutral seems the most likely, as it encompasses the other two choices, too, huh? Fuck it. I admire and envy his dedication to his goal, and I think he's an M.D. too, which actually just pisses me off. A song a month didn't sound like much to me at first, because when I was making a lot of music I'd easily make 3 songs a week. But since I haven't recorded a song in, what, almost two years now, it drops my average a bit. If I count 1999, I may have made a song a month. Ugh. Maybe if I stop counting two years ago. Having never been a big fan of They Might Be Giants, I can't really tell the essential difference between this dude and those prolific fuckwads. His voice is nasal, he's overly clever (which you can tell from any list of his song titles), and he mimics various musical styles with ease. I don't know. Maybe that's more like Ween, but I've got a soft spot for Ween. This guy is like Ween, except not as good, and just one guy. I had so many things I was going to say, but I was gonna link to a couple of songs. Here: • Kinks/Belle & Sebastian: Truer Than a Teardrop • Take a guess: Surfin' Savant • Folky confessional: The Only Serious Thing • Beck? King Trucker • TMBG, right? Egg Came First Some people might think this stuff is genius. I don't particularly agree, but I don't have the heart to give this the rating I would give it if it were an actual album. For a doctor's hobby, it's really not too shabby, I guess. I think what gets me about this site, what made me want to review it is this: I egomaniacally, but completely, believe that if I made a song a month, the results would be better, but I DON'T DO IT. Why not? What else am I doing? Pbbththbh. This site makes me hate myself a little.
		: . . . . :6.0. . . :

Nostril Zits

2006-04-21T01:14:00.000-04:00


		products
	Pedialyte (Orange) electrolyte-filled rehydrating drink On their site, they call it an "oral electrolyte maintenance solution" which I guess you have to do if you're a bunch of assholes, or if you work for the pharmaceutical industry, which: [super-obvious joke omitted after "Popems are like crack" debacle -- Ed.] (neener). (Okay, indulge me briefly (ha!) in elucidating a pet peeve of mine: Stupid corporate websites. The Pedialyte site is stupid and practically content-free, but what gets me the most is how they spread their lack of content over four totally meaningless "sections," because I guess someone somewhere feels that sites with all their information on one page aren't taken seriously. And who knows? Maybe they've done research, and in fact, sites that don't make you click a bunch of hoo-hah to read their 6.5 paragraphs of information aren't taken as seriously. (Oh and those 6.5 don't count the FAQ, which contains all of this site's actual information.) But that idea just makes me mad. Fuck! I want to see that research! I bet it's true! Fuck! <old man voice>People want to go clickety-click, clickety-click! Well, phooey! I ain't codin' it!</old man voice> Glaargle. Somebody find me that study and I'll give you a free CD and a T-Shirt. The motherfuckers also tell you to throw it out after 48 hours, "...as beyond this period the bacteriological safety of the product may be compromised. The air we breathe contains many common contaminants (such as mold). As soon as the seal of the container is broken, the air contacts the product. Pedialyte should be used within 48 hours to ensure its quality." FAAAHCK YOOOUUUU. What was my real point? Oh yeah. This stuff tastes like shit, especially if you're all queasy from throwing up everything you've put in your stomach for the previous 24 hours. Sweeter than a Care Bear's nooners, and "Orange" apparently refers only to the color, because the flavor is twenty miles from citrus and hit every branch on the way down. Shut up, Pedialyte!
		: . . .4.5: . . . . :

Villa Incognito

2006-04-14T04:25:00.000-04:00


		concepts
	a zit or zits inside your nostril medical condition Every once in a while, usually when the rest of my face is breaking out, I'll feel a strange tenderness on the side of my nose without an obvious external blemish to explain it. Well, by now I've learned to recognize the telltale signs, so I just batten down the hatches and wait for the pus-filled storm to arrive. Sometimes it appears as a big old whitehead just inside the opening of the nostril -- this least painful example of a Nostril Zit can be easily popped, but it hurts like a titty-twister administered with barbed-wire gloves. The other kind never develops a head and HOLY COCK these things are painful. They just sort of expand from the geometric center of one of the fleshy wings of your nose, swelling and hurting. Try to squeeze out some of the pressure-causing liquid and the resulting shockwave will familiarize you with the sensation of being one of Mike Tyson's opponents back when he was a boxer. See, nostril zits always form within some kind of head-essential, nose-based nerve bundle, like symbiote crabs protecting themselves with shells (except what the fuck, because: they're zits, not crabs). Squeeze these at your peril, Kemosabe. Since nostril zits do no good in the world, and they bring only pain, they are rated even lower than Tom Robbins.
		0:4. . . . : . . . . :

Tom Robbins

2006-04-14T03:42:00.000-04:00


		books
	Villa Incognito by Tom Robbins In the sprit of open-mindedness I decided to give TR another chance when I found this book, written in 2003, at my friend's house (read the review of Tom Robbins below to understand the boundlessness of my magnanimity). Despite the fact that it starts by talking about a character's nutsack for a couple of pages [not kidding], I found myself enjoying it. Robbins seemed to have settled into the act of writing; it's less self-consciously show-offy than Still Life with Woodpecker, and he's learned to let the comedy come from the story instead of inserting slapsticky one-liners every other sentence. (I dunno, maybe he's been getting better for years, and maybe Woodpecker is uncharacteristically awful. But I don't think so; people love the fuck out of that book, call it his masterpiece. I think of it as another good example of how I don't need to read a book to know I'll hate it.) Villa Incognito is a light book whose characters think they're living in a heavy one. Despite painstaking physical description and copious detail, those characters come off as fuzzy and insubstantial, not people so much as jerry-rigged bundles of eccentricities, vocations, clothing, and identifying marks. The plot is shallow and abritrary, which might not have been a problem if the characters were interesting enough, but they're not. A pivotal character is supposed to come off as a Falstaffian version of Brando's Colonel Kurtz, but Robbins fails to demonstrate the character's charisma convincingly; it's like a movie whose main character is supposed to be a world-class artist, but when they show you the art on screen, it ruins it, because it was just made by the art department. In terms of the narrative style, I kept feeling like he kept a stitched sampler over his writing desk that said SHOW DON'T TELL instead of HOME SWEET HOME, like he internalized the cardinal rule of college creative writing classes and carried it with him into his professional career. He takes the doctrine to a chilly extreme, so the book contains an awful lot of what and not much why. I'm not saying that Robbins should explain every character's actions, but I'd prefer it if I believed that he could. As it was, the characters just did stuff, and might as well have done the exact opposite without a reader even batting an eyelash. So far this review may seem negative, but I did enjoy reading this book at the time, maybe because I kept expecting it to be horrible, and it was just mediocre. Faint praise, I know. But it means that there's hope for him -- having learned to quell the awful stylistic tendencies of his misspent (though lucrative) youth, all he has to do is learn to create characters that people care about, and he'll be on his way! Wa ha ha! Still, two things in the book reminded me of the older Robbins that I really hate. The first is the scrotal obsession of the first chapter, which I won't belabor. The second was a three-page reverie about mayonnaise. It starts as a description of a character's love for mayo (he's from North Carolina, and has been living for years in Laos without access to it), but when Robbins gets impatient, the omniscient narrator takes over and spins a wordy tribute to Hellmann's that's too clever by half, and feels totally out of place. It seems like just the kind of thing that you'd see mentioned in a review, like: "Look for the side-splitting elegy to America's favorite spreadable condiment, mayonnaise -- that section alone is worth the price of the book! Bravo, Mr. Robbins, you've done it again, with your keen observation of American culture and its obsessions!" Yarf. [by the way, imagine that made-up quote but stick DeLillo in it instead. Seems totally plausible, doesn't it? Double yarf.] All right, I've said enough. I can't really recommend it, because there are too many other important things to read in this life. But I honestly can't give it less than a 5. And that's pretty good!
		: . . . .5:2. . . . :

misuse of the word "schwag"

2006-04-11T02:26:00.000-04:00


		people
	Tom Robbins American author I have hated Tom Robbins since freshman year of college, when my roommate was like "Dude, have you ever read Still Life with Woodpecker? Oh my god, it's sooo good; Tom Robbins is a genius! Here, listen to this," and he proceeded to read aloud the the first of many lines he would share with me, each of which he thought was the absolute pinnacle of wit. Here's what he read to me: It might be noted here that Freudian analysts of fairy tales have suggested that kissing toads and frogs is symbolized fellatio. In that regard, Princess Leigh-Cheri was... not so naive as Queen Tilli, who thought fellatio was an obscure Italian opera and was annoyed that she couldn't find the score. Oy. I hate everything about that quote: the stilted, faux-formal "it might be noted here"; the "funny" character names (Princess Lechery? Pphbbt.); the uninteresting observation about frogs and the gutless way he attributes it to "Freudian analysts" so you understand that he would never make such a banal observation; finally, the fact that it's all in service to a truly awful joke. I really hate that joke. It's a stand-up comic joke, begging for a rimshot. Not only do I hate this kind of lazy, formulaic joke, but I really mistrust anybody who finds it funny, and especially anybody who thinks it's great comic writing. At best, Robbins achieves a cheap pastiche of Vonnegut, but quirk for quirk's sake leaves me cold. He's juvenile, scatological, and tries to titillate and shock with ideas like the aforementioned Princess "[using] a papal candlestick for the purpose of self-gratification." Gasp! So naughty! Oooh! that opera joke still makes me mad. I know I seem a little unreasonable about this, because after all it's just one paragraph, but (apologies to Neal Stephenson) Still Life with Woodpecker is fractally annoying to me: the whole is a disaster; each chapter is a nightmare; zoom in on a paragraph at random and I'll be just as annoyed by it as I was by the book as a whole, and the sentences, oh the sentences -- innocent words strung together against their will into necklaces of crappy prose. To extend the arbitrary metaphor from the last sentence, Tom Robbins's writing looks from a distance like fine piece from Tiffany's, but when you get up close, it reavels itself to be cheap, gaudy costume jewelry, traded by the handful for a peek at a 19-year-old's tits.
		: .2.7. . : . . . :

Lucky Number Slevin

2006-04-10T01:02:00.000-04:00


		concepts
	misuse of the word "schwag" Webster's Online says "swag" is "loot; spoils, profits." For obvious reasons, I prefer the synonym "booty." Everyone knows that "schwag" is slang for shitty marijuana (dry, full of seeds/sticks, or just low in THC), but more and more often (and especially on the West Coast) I've heard "schwag" used to mean "free crap from industry conventions" or "the stuff in gift bags from Hollywood award dinners." Drives me nuts. Google the word "schwag" and, as of April 2006, all but the first hit are pages about swag, including a typically long-ass story from Wired.com about the history of corporate-logo-stamped tchotchkes. That first hit is the page for a Grateful Dead tribute band called The Schwag, who may be a bunch of asshole hippies but who obviously take their name from the real, drug-related definition.* I'd like to be a more descriptive logophile, but my nature is prescriptive. Yeah, I know that usage changes the language, and that many things are acceptable now that were anathema to our ancestors. But some things in popular usage are just wrong wrong wrong, and I won't shut up while there's still a chance to stem the flow of wrongness. For only one example, "alumni" is still plural: say "an alumni" and I slap you with a knife. In fact, while we're on the topic, many words ending with an "i" are plural, especially if they arrived in English unchanged from Italian or Latin: Cacti, ravioli, gemini, etceteri. But hell! Back to the point of this review, which is that "schwag" refers to bad weed, so stop using it for "swag." I understand the desire to Yiddishize words when possible, because it just sounds funny. Cut it out. *(BTW, you should totally look at the pictures on The Schwag's site. It's a very upsetting collection of snapshots from gigs, featuring the universally hippie-hideous members of the band posing with an endless stream of relatively cute girls with big smiles and bad taste in music. I find it helpful to look at the photos when I forget why I hate hippies. Gets me back on track.)
	using "schwag" when you mean "swag":	: .2.6. . : . . . . :

Entenmann's Glazed Popems

2006-04-09T22:34:00.000-04:00


		movies
	Lucky Number Slevin dir. Paul McGuigan I watched the trailer for this on Apple because I thought it looked cool. I was thrilled to see that a friend of mine is in the fucking thing, because it gave me an excuse to go see it despite lukewarm reviews from sources I had no personal reason to doubt. Well, the movie was not great, but I enjoyed it. Josh Hartnett is cute, Lucy Liu is cute, and everybody else is ugly (but they have character!). The plot maintains a certain coherence, and although it was obviously written by a fan of Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie, the guy didn't have grandiose delusions about his skill. The narrative moves forward with only a couple of indulgences in flashback, and the plot twists, such as they are, do not strain the bounds of credulity. So that's nice. Also, the guy I know who was in it was very good (but I'm not gonna name-drop). Otherwise, I feel I must mention that wallpaper played a bigger role in this movie than many of the actors -- and that's not an insult to the actors. The production designer covered every inch of wall in this movie with garish, geometrically patterned wallpaper, the kind you see a lot on walls behind British people in film or video footage from Britain (like, in poor British people's flats, not like Buckingham Palace). It was meant to be noticed, and remarked upon, but the reviews I read didn't seem to want to give the filmmakers the satisfaction of acknowledgment. But I'm easy: yes, production designer, I saw the wallpaper. Wallpaper wallpaper wallpaper.
		: . . . . :6.3. . . :

bancomicsans.com

2006-04-09T04:04:00.000-04:00


		products
	Entenmann's Glazed PopEms sugar-coated baked goods Entenmann's website says of these donut-hole products: "These sweet treats are perfect for popping in your mouth," which is true, but is not the whole story (no fucking pun intended), not by a long shot. Specifically, it fails to convey the lack of choice you will have in the matter of whether or not to pop another one in your mouth. These objects obliterate any cherished notions you may have about "free will"; they audibly mock your notions of self control, sounding like a box full of Gremlins from the movie Gremlins (the bad kind, the eat-after-midnight green scaly kind). In fact, I think it's clear that Popems are a baked tribute to Gremlins. (That sounds stupid. I really wanted to say that the other way around, that Gremlins are a metaphorical tribute to Popems, the fevered catharsis of a Hollywood screenwriter after he couldn't get a hold of his OA sponsor and ate five boxes in half an hour. But temporal reality is a spoilsport, because unlike Gremlins, Popems didn't exist until the late 90s.) (Somewhere in this oblique-ass review I should point out that I think Popems taste really good. After all, you never know when an Entenmann's rep could be trolling the web for the perfect recipient of the golden Free Popems For Life coupon.) I guess Entenmann's is a local brand, limited maybe to the East Coast, or the Northeast, or NY and PA. Count your blessings, desperate housewives of Privet Drive! Remember that slogan "once you pop you can't stop?" It was for a potato chip or something, and though it's gross to eat a whole bag (or tennis can-full) of fried potato slivers, a box of Popems is as heavy as a dictionary, and is made of sugar, lard, and highly addictive drugs. I'm not sure exactly how their scientists came up with the perfect mixture of nicotine, heroin, and crack cocaine, and I'm not sure how they circumvented FDA labeling regulations that should have required them to list these ingredients on the box -- or, for that matter, various laws making two of those ingredients illegal. And are they even allowed to put nicotine in food? Somehow I doubt it. But it is the only explanation for the effect Popems have on certain humans. A chemical "perfect storm." A chemical "dream team." A chemical supergroup, the Damn Yankees or Traveling Wilburys of the bakery aisle! Fuck. I am so horny for Popems right now.
		: . . . . : . . .9.2:

Metrosexuality

2006-03-30T04:11:00.000-05:00


		websites
	bancomicsans.com A site dedicated, more or less seriously, to halting the public use of the font Comic Sans. I'm not so much reviewing the site itself as the concept of hating a font so much that you devote a website to its eventual destruction. The creators of this site are earnest as hell even as they joke; They have a manifesto, which as a form I always like because a it aspires to a rare directness, completeness, and (one hopes) honesty about its subject, even if the execution often falls short of the ideal; I'm just glad someone was game enough to give it a try. bancomicsans's manifesto is great: totally pompous and grandiose -- at one point literally calling for a revolution of the proletariat to aid in the cause -- because its writers know too much than to take themselves completely seriously. The ironic dance of "I'm kidding... no I'm not... just kidding... or am I?" may at first seem kinda childish or intellectually immature, but sometimes it's the only way for a serious intellectual to behave. (And to digress for a moment, the same thing happens in New York fashion all the time, this weird Schrödinger's Cat-dance of: "is that guy for real with that mustache, or is it ironic?") Who would take somebody seriously who really took this "Ban Comic Sans" crap seriously? Their ironic distance makes following their lead possible. (Hmm. I'm beginning to wonder how old this phenomenon really is. We tend to give our ancestors less credit for cleverness than they maybe deserve. Don't all movements start out as a bunch of drunken friends advancing a thought experiment, having fun, going along with the gag, daring each other into more blasphemous or extreme statements, until somebody whips out a pen, checks the spelling and grammar, and hammers it to the cathedral door, ruining the fun for everyone?) Anyway, read the site. Part of the case against Comic Sans is that it is fucking everywhere. If you walk two minutes in a densely populated commercial area of a major US city and you won't have to wait three minutes before spotting as many egregious applications of Comic Sans on handbills, posters, even professional signage. The fucking sugar packets in my local diner say "Sugar" in Comic Sans. This wouldn't be so bad if, like two of Microsoft's default fonts, Arial (a sloppy copy of Helvetica) and whatever they're calling their variation on Times Roman, it was fairly plain, and therefore almost invisible in most contexts (nobody says "nice use of Arial, dude"). Comic sans is a badly made comic book word balloon font -- in the wrong context (i.e. not a comic book word balloon) it stands out and stabs you in the eye with its inappropriateness. Anyway, I'm just recapitulating their arguments in less coherent and less complete form. Read the site. Live the message.
		: . . . . : . . .9.0:

St. Ives Apricot Facial Scrub

2006-03-30T03:31:00.000-05:00


		concepts
	Metrosexuality As should be obvious, Metrosexuality has nothing to do with sexuality. It's a vanity-based lifestyle choice wherein men fetishize clothing, cosmetic products, or other things traditionally the realm of women. Metrosexuals are usually men with too much disposable income who subscribe to the set of lies I'll call the Cosmetic Fallacies (just a few examples: that you are a troll without beauty products; that super-expensive beauty products differ significantly from their cheap counterparts; that people might not detect the defects of your personality if you smear enough crap on your head [see also the facial scrub review]), so they're willing to invest hundreds to thousands of dollars and countless mirror-hours on ridiculous nonsense. At least in certain major metro areas, metrosexuality is a socially acceptable way for a straight man to express his feminine side, and I certainly don't want to discourage that kind of expression in general. But the behaviors that comprise metrosexuality in specific are such a shallow, vain, and icky way of doing it that they ultimately amount to a caustic misogyny. And like most pre-fabricated, off-the-shelf forms of personality, I'm embarrassed by it on anybody over the age of eighteen.
		: .2.0. . : . . . :

Prince of Persia: Warrior Within

2006-03-30T03:21:00.000-05:00


		products
	St. Ives Apricot Facial Scrub WARNING! It is my experience that some ingredient of this product, when combined with some ingredient found in some shampoo(s) or conditioner(s) at my house, creates a poisonous gas. On two (but only two) separate occasions, as I was rinsing the scrub from my face in the shower, I felt a burning sensation in my nose and lungs, forcing me to fling open the window and hop out of the shower to open the bathroom door, creating a lifesaving crossbreeze. There is no mistaking what occurred: it happened as soon as the scrub hit the puddle of standing water at my feet; it only happened on days I washed and conditioned my hair (which is rare enough); it smelled like nothing so much as Hot Death, though the nearest analogue is home hair bleach. Unfortunately, I don't remember which hair product was the other half of the death gas equation (as none of the hair products in the bathroom is mine), and I'm loath to attempt to recreate the magical reaction. Putting aside momentarily the possibility of death by poison gas, let's talk about this stuff in terms of its effectiveness as a beauty aid. Once I started using this exfoliating scrub, my skin started looking fresher, cleaner, and much less covered with dead skin. The gritty particles suspended in goop -- which I guess are supposed to be ground-up apricot stones -- are abrasive enough to satisfy your average American male. See, when it comes to skin-care, hair-care, or other beauty products, most men find it hard to pretend that we don't know the entire industry is a sham, isolating, amplifying, and preying on women's insecurities, then charging them a mint for the favor. If we're forced to participate in this evil system by buying such a "product," it had better be cheap, effective, and short on beauty-industry bullshit (for exceptions, see "Metrosexuality" coming soon). Your average American woman will happily plunk down $60 for a miniscule pot of "invisible microabrasive spheres in pore-frightening gel," and even really intelligent women are programmed at a very early age to disengage their critical faculties in the beauty aisle -- it's the same process that makes possible the sale of makeup and razors. Certain gay women are the most likely to be able to resist this idiocy, but are by no means immune (hence "lipstick lesbian"). But men need something real, something with tangible effects. Something like St. Ives Apricot Facial Scrub. It feels like you're washing your face with wet cement, and that's exactly how we like it. There is no doubt that you have been scrubbed -- the contusions tell you it's working!
	rating as facial scrub:	: . .. : . .8.7. :
	rating as non-producer of poison gas:	: . .3.1. : . . . :

Battlestar Galactica

2006-03-30T02:57:00.000-05:00


		games
	Prince of Persia: Warrior Within Video Game (PlayStation 2) I played some early incarnation of Prince of Persia on my old Mac IIcx in college, and it was a decent diversion at the time. (my other favorite time-wasters at the time were Maelstrom (Asteroids on steroids, a truly great game), The Incredible Machine (an ingenious freeform problem-solving game in which you built Rube Goldberg devices to achieve set goals), Apeiron (a Centipede update that showed how much the enjoyment of Centipede depended on that rolly-ball); interest in Tetris was waning, and Crystal Quest was already old hat. God, it's a miracle I got any work done at all.) This game is the second "new generation" PoP title. The coolest innovation of the first (aside from all the stuff that came automatically with a contemporary PS2 game, like hi-res graphics and 3-d gameplay) was the ability to rewind the game ten seconds if you screwed up in some dangerous but fixable way. It was fucking genius, because 90% of the time in these video games, your character dies as a result of a stupid mistake. When you jumped into a pit of deadly metal spikes, you just held down a button until you moved back to the ledge you were on before you leapt blindly to your death. So satisfying not to have to start a section over from the last save point every time. Otherwise, the game involved complex (though not always difficult) puzzles involving a lot of jumping around and pulling switches and moving boxes and crap like that, interspersed with some sword-fighting. I thought the game was great. No task was too hard that I couldn't do it within at most 3 tries, except for bosses, who were appropriately tough. I would have given that game a 9.0, I think. This game is just as good, I think, and it improves on some things that I didn't even know bothered me about the first. But it's a sequel, so it doesn't seem quite as special.
		: . . . . : . .8.9. :

Gillette Fusion

2006-03-29T22:12:00.000-05:00


		television
	Battlestar Galactica If you've ever seen Stargate SG-1 or Stargate: Atlantis, you would think that the Sci-Fi channel's original shows are crap: badly acted, cheaply shot, written to strict and unimaginative formula. You'd be right. The shows are popular with Science Fiction Geek (SFGs) who don't use normal standards to judge stuff. The most important things to a SFG are (in no particular order): Internal consistency, the illusion of scientific rigor, exclusionary content that plays to SFG ego (e.g. unexplained military acronyms); cool-looking computer shit; a hero cool enough to identify with; western-style action sequences. In exchange for these elements, SFGs are totally willing to sacrifice quality in characterization, plot, emotion, etc. But as you may have heard, the "reimagined" Battlestar Galactica is really fucking good. Generally, what what's good about BG is its narrative complexity and depth, i.e. it actually considers what would happen if the remainder of the human race numbered 50,000, was floating through space in a random and accidental "fleet" of civilian spaceships and one Battlestar (a space version of an aircraft carrier), and was constantly on the run from a species of robots determined to kill every last human. (Of course the robots are indistinguishable from humans, a sci-fi trope essential since Philip K. Dick revolutionized the genre.) The show considers the political, legal, and economical ramifications of such a scenario (Who is in charge of the fleet? Should abortion still be legal when the survival of the species is in doubt? What is the basis for an economy in this context; does money still have value? Is the death penalty a valid punishment for any crime?) It deals with these subjects like the complicated adult issues they are, and the answers are never simple, and often unpleasant. Just as importantly, the characters and the relationships between them are treated with the same depth and attention to detail. Everybody is suffering from the effects of post-apocalyptic trauma and loss, and they are all running for their lives. Various characters have richly complicated histories with each other, but they never descend to the level of soap opera. People are realistically flawed, nobody is perfect and nobody is wholly evil either; even the genocidal Cylons are treated sympathetically -- you just need to hear their side of the story! As if that weren't enough, add the best Sci-Fi effects and space-fight sequences ever made for television. They are thrilling, clever, original, and horrifying. A lot of good guys die, many ignobly. The physics feel righter than ever; I'll often see something and think "yeah, that's how that should look," not even knowing how other shows' depictions of space flight have bothered me over the years. The space scenes have almost no sound, just the muted pulsing of Galactica's big guns. I could go on. But suffice it to say that if you hate science fiction, this suffers from none of the things you hate about science fiction. And if you like one-hour dramas, this is still one of the best-written shows on television. This isn't impossible, HBO's Deadwood proved that contemporary genre shows could be as serious as anything else on the screen. To understand Galactica's accomplishment, imagine Deadwood with a really well-executed, thrilling, horse-mounted gunfight every ohter episode, in addition to all its current charms. Yee-hah!
		: . . . . : . .8.5. :

Cloud Atlas

2006-03-29T21:53:00.000-05:00


		products
	Gillette Fusion "shaving system" In January 2004, Gillette put a battery in the handle of its Mach 3 razor blade and released it as the M3 Power. It sounded like a stupid idea to me, and I'm not the only one who thought so. I found this prediction on the site of an "advisory services firm specializing in ... new product... creation." This company clearly consists of a solitary asshole who makes stupid-looking charts and then guesses which new products will be successful. He took one look at the concept of the M3 Power, and thought: "this is the same fucking razor they've been selling for years, except now it vibrates and costs 70% more. This product is doomed." Of course, he was totally wrong. It became the best-selling razor within a year. Constant and unnecessary tinkering has been a hallmark of consumer industries since the first time somebody put the words "New & Improved" on a box and sales jumped by 20%. But even in this context, the "innovations" developed every two years by Gillette seem like practical jokes calculated to piss us off by insulting our intelligence on a massive scale. But instead of saying "fuck you" and vowing to grow beards, we buy the new razor. Why do we do this? My theory: Razors are so boring, and the task they perform such an unpleasant necessity, that any change that delivers a consumer thrill -- no matter how retarded and/or potentially disfiguring -- is rapturously embraced by the American male. The thrill is everything. If you can think of a way to make toilet paper thrilling, you could retire within the year. I know this is true. Because despite everything I've ever said on this subject, I bought the 6-bladed Fusion after watching the ads for it during the Superbowl. I'm an asshole. And the shave, of course, is not noticeably different from any shave I've gotten in the last ten years. It's a good shave, but it's not ten dollars good.
		: . .3.1. : . . . :


		books
	Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell I am love love loving this book. Sometimes a novel with a gimmick works (Time's Arrow) and sometimes it doesn't (Hopscotch). Initially, the too-too clever structure (which it's better if I don't reveal) seemed gimmicky and pleased with itself. But each successive section is so amazingly beautiful that the narrative oddities not only enhance they story, but make it possible.
		: . . . . : . . .9.2:

UD Reviews the World