Hideous Penguin Boy vs. Really Big Head

Say hi.

2008-10-14T14:03:00.002-04:00

After the death of Patches, Mom waited about a week. Then she went and got a new kitten. That's him shortly thereafter. He's cute and frisky. Forgot his name, though, because I am dumb sometimes. I'll ask Mom.

Sorry, kids. Better luck next time.

2008-09-10T23:32:00.002-04:00

There's a fairly large college campus down the street from my workplace. Thus, you can always tell when classes have started up again because you start seeing newer, younger faces... and the occasional fake ID from some kid who hasn't heard from his buddies that hey, that stores will keep your shit so don't bother. I've confiscated two in the last four days alone, which is pretty unusual considering we can go a couple of months without seeing one. One of them was flawed but very good as far as these things go and would probably pass muster in 98 of 100 tries. The other... well, not so good. One of the shitty cheap-looking "Non-Government ID Card" dealies you can pick up on the streets of NYC for fifty to a hundred bucks. I always feel sorry for kids who carry those around -- it's like they didn't realize they were buying a big sticker for their forehead that reads SUCKER in big red print.

Nostalgia

2008-09-07T12:32:00.002-04:00

I purchased Slayer's Reign in Blood on CD the other day. Hadn't heard it since my days as a metal-shirt-wearing pimple-faced teenager, so I was impressed to realize it's even better than I remember it being -- an exemplary example of music as blunt-force trauma. Nice to know the things you liked as a kid don't always end up sucking. (Counterpoint: "Lightning Crashes" is playing on XM radio right now. I used to like this song. What an idiot I was.)

Ups and downs

2008-09-05T00:27:00.003-04:00

Replace "car" with "guy" and you'll have what I did over the Labor Day Weekend. Five hours up, four hours down. Pretty good for someone who hadn't hiked anywhere in about ten years.

This is an old picture of my cat Patches. I got home from New Hampshire to find a message on my cell phone from my mother saying that she (the cat, not Mom) had gone into renal failure. She died on Tuesday at the age of 11.

It's not "DRINK COKE," but...

2008-07-15T16:07:00.003-04:00

Shmaltz Brewing, the guys behind HeBrew beer (kosher and delicious!), have started a new venture called Coney Island Lager. I'm sure the beer is great, and I admire their reasons for doing it -- some of the proceeds are going to a charitable organization dedicated to supporting, as they put it, "lost forms of American popular arts and culture." But... well, take a look at the labels. When I look at the one in the middle and the one on the right, I'm suddenly not thinking about beer anymore.

Holiday snaps

2008-05-06T12:03:00.001-04:00

During my two weeks in California recently, I...

* Toured Santa Barbara wine country, hit five wineries in two days and spent way more money than I really should have spent.

* Finished two books.

* Went to Disneyland for the first time in ten years and was reminded of how much fun that place is.

* Performed best-man duties at a wedding, including a well-received toast that mentioned coffee shops, missing cufflinks and largemouth bass juggling.

* Ate more burgers in two weeks than I have in the last five years. (I'm so glad that there are no In-N-Out Burger locations in New York, otherwise I'd weigh 400 pounds.)

* Turned one year older and celebrated by catching up with family while consuming my grandmother's spectacularly tasty key lime pie.

* Encountered the elusive Screaming Eagle Cabernet Sauvignon in public. Twice.

* Got my wife hooked on cheese plates.

* Walked around Ventura in a half-drunk stupor at 2 AM looking for something to eat before realizing that nothing in Ventura is open past midnight.

* Helped arrange/attended a bachelor party in which I witnessed a man vomiting on a stripper. Which was kind of the most amazing thing ever, even more so because she shrugged it off and hung out to dance some more.

All in all, a decent time was had.

That'll stick.

2008-05-03T19:22:00.003-04:00

I just realized that the woman who cuts my hair has a daughter who works with her. Her daughter looks like Sativa Rose. Thinking about this while her mother has scissors to your head is just a cornucopia of mixed emotions.

FAWESOME.

2008-03-21T08:11:00.002-04:00

According to the latest Criterion newsletter, they're getting into the Guy Maddin business. A little spotted mousie told me so. Odds are that it's Careful, but I can't help but think it'd be super if it turned out to be Brand Upon the Brain!.

Even a blind squirrel...

2008-03-16T14:50:00.001-04:00

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you quite possibly the only funny LOLcat in existence.

Unforeseen expenses

2008-03-14T11:17:00.002-04:00

So I recently spent $114 on a bottle of beer. No, really.

Here's what happened: My father-in-law was helping remodel the bathroom in the apartment where my wife and I currently reside. During the work, he apparently developed a powerful thirst that could only be slaked by beer. He goes into the fridge and pulls out a beer. Later, I show up to get a couple of things from the apartment. He tells me, "Hey, this beer was pretty good," and hands me an empty bottle.

An empty bottle of Stone Vertical Epic Ale 2003.

See, we weren't staying in the apartment during the remodeling, and because of that, I wasn't keeping any cold beer handy. The only thing in the fridge, buried way in the back, was my Vertical Epic collection. Furthermore, while I have backup bottles on the '06 and '07, I had no such moment of foresight for the older vintages. So that's how a bottle that cost me seven bucks when I bought it five years ago set me back three figures when I replaced it via the magic of eBay.

I can't complain too much, though. I did get a free bathroom out of it.

And I wonder why I'm goofy for her.

2008-02-13T23:52:00.002-05:00

Instead of traditional hearts-and-flowers stuff, my wife decided for Valentine's Day to buy me something that:

A) I would really, really love

B) We would both enjoy.

So she gets me the "All My Stuff" George Carlin DVD stand-up boxed set. Best. Gift. Ever.

More music here: Another Stennie mix

2008-02-03T22:09:00.000-05:00

For the second time, I've sent off a CD to be used in Stennie's CD Mix Challenge. As the stellar mixes I've received thus far can attest, my disc is still something of the black sheep of the participants in terms of taste. But there's nothing wrong with that. (People seem to be liking it, at any rate.) Here's what was on that mystery disc. (NOTE: Commentary on thought process to come later when I'm not sleepy.)

1. Sellout (a song that is used or has been used in a TV commercial): The Butthole Surfers, "Who Was in My Room Last Night"

2. A song that’s in a foreign language: Einstuzende Neubauten, "Musentango"

3. A song about cheating: The North Atlantic, "Scientist Girl"

4. Song that makes you cry: Dead Can Dance, "The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove"

5. B-side: Drive Like Jehu, "Bullet Train to Vegas"

6. Kick-ass cover song: Revolting Cocks, "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?"

7. Earworm: Straylight Run, "It Never Gets Easier"

8. A favorite live track: Frank Zappa, "Approximate"

9. Title out of nowhere (a song in which the title does not appear in the lyrics at all): Sincebyman, "Who Would I Be Without My Middle Finger"

10. A favorite song you have discovered since our last CD Mix: El-P featuring Cage, "Habeas Corpses (Draconian Love)"

11. Favorite artist duo collaboration: Diamanda Galas & John Paul Jones, "Do You Take This Man"

12. Geographical location song (any song that mentions a geographical place): Modest Mouse, "Teeth Like God's Shoeshine"

13. Musical question...: Filter, "Where Do We Go From Here?"

14. And answer!: Therapy?, "Nowhere"

15. Four-letter word (a song whose title consists solely of a four-letter word): Tad, "Jack"

16. Seven Deadly Sins (a song about any one of the Seven Deadly Sins): Cursive, "Bad Sects"

17. A song you wouldn’t play in front of your Mom: Grinderman, "No Pussy Blues"

18. Song about violence and/or death: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, "Jangling Jack"

19. Guilty pleasure song: The Left Rights, "Take a Shit"

20. Amnesty Song - with a twist! A song that fits any two of the categories above. Rilo Kiley, "Does He Love You?"

Audio/visual violence, hooray!

2008-02-02T10:27:00.000-05:00

So let's try to put some life back into this hospital ward.

The third annual Onion AV Club Reader's Poll was posted yesterday. Got one quote in this year, which is less than previous years, but the competition appears to have been much stiffer. So I'm not complaining. If you're interested, though, here's my full ballot.

(BONUS: Of these five capsules, I despise one of them. See if you can guess which one!)

1) Considering how many fine films were released in 2007, it seems unusual that the most emotionally and aesthetically fulfilling movie of the year should be a cartoon about a hungry rat. But it seems appropriate for the delightful Ratatouille, considering its claim that genius can come from anywhere. Leave it to Brad Bird and the Pixar team, the latter setting themselves right after the noisy debacle of Cars, to take an unappetizing premise (rat! in the kitchen! ew!) and invest it with enough heart, soul, energy and visual beauty to make it a richly satisfying experience -- a souffle with substance. The defense of careful, quality work in a world overrun and cheapened by cash-grab mediocrity is stirring, as it's obviously a subject close to the hearts of its makers (one can imagine Skinner as a surrogate for Jeffery Katzenberg, trading on the cache of experience in the house of a master to kickstart a career peddling bland, empty-calorie crud); what impresses most, though, is the way that Bird uses the American perception of animation as kid stuff to his thematic advantage. With food as his metaphor and Anton Ego as his vessel, Bird puts forth a consideration of the simple loves that start many of us on the road to cinephilia.

2) "Directed by Ben Affleck." The phrase on first blush sounds like a ready-made punchline, a Hollywood version of "Take my wife... please!" You mean somebody gave money to Ben Affleck, the guy who smirked his way through Jersey Girl, Armageddon and a host of other embarrassments, and let him stand behind a camera telling other people how to act? It is to laugh. But on the evidence of the terrific, devastating Gone Baby Gone, the last laugh belongs to Ben. He's no Kubrick, but his direction is confident and unobtrusive, with his main asset being a willingness to stay out of the way of the material. And what material! The screenplay, from the novel by Dennis Lehane, starts as a blue-collar noir gloss but deepens and evolves into something much thornier. In the lead, Ben's brother Casey uses his natural boyish vulnerability to suggest a man used to being underestimated and used to surprising people with his spine of steel. Amy Ryan, as the world's worst mother, deserves all the accolades she's been getting, but Affleck the Younger has the toughest role -- a model of moral certitude in a world where certitude is useless and the right answer can still be the wrong answer -- and he's just as stellar. So Ben Affleck directed a film. And that's a good thing.

3) Presumably, Amir Bar-Lev had no idea what he was getting into when he started filming the Olmstead family. He just wanted a solid, likeable film about a child prodigy that maybe got people thinking about the function and meaning of abstract art. Instead, he ended up with My Kid Could Paint That, a fascinating, troubling portrait of media frenzy and the desire for narrative in everyday life. When it comes out that 4-year-old sensation Marla Olmstead may not be the sole author of her work, the film explodes in a dozen different directions. What was a feel-good fluff story becomes a war between embattled parents desperate to prove themselves and a hungry media beast that is perfectly willing to send these people up the river if it means a story. Bar-Lev gets caught in the middle as both a friend and a filmmaker (journalistic distance goes out the window), and there comes a point when it's made clear that he's contributing to the misery just as much as everyone else. In the thicket of denials and accusations rings out the question: Why do we poke and prod at seemingly innocent things, why do we invade? What's to be gained from tearing apart a kid? The answer: We need to have our stories, and the guys who feed them to us need to find ways to keep us interested. It's a hellish vicious cycle, and Bar-Lev is there to capture a textbook example.

4) It's such a perfect marriage that I wonder why it was never conjured up before: the gore film and the musical, together at last! Both genres revel in their own artificiality, and they're both similarly hyperbolic in regards to big production setpieces. What I mean to say is that it was only a matter of time before we got a film like Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. I know nothing of Sondheim's original stage play, but I do know that Tim Burton's adaptation of said stage play is a rip-roaring exercise in bombastic Grand Guignol. The cast doesn't have the most adept singing voices (especially you, Alan Rickman... sorry), but they sell the emotions with ease. Johnnie Depp in particular gives a strange and compelling performance that engenders bits of sympathy for the psychotic Todd even as I recognize there's not much sympathetic about him. (Revenge is fine and dandy, but taking it bit far, aren't we?) Meanwhile, Burton's tendencies towards extravagance and atmosphere at the expense of narrative are used all for good this time around -- he's got existing material to work with, and instead of tinkering with the source, he merely built a world around it. The threatening vertical compositions of the sets and the grimy color scheme, all grays and blacks occasionally ripped asunder by fonts of crimson, make the London of Todd feel less like a city and more like a stopover on the way to Hell. Most important, though, is that unlike some other stage-to-screen transpositions, Todd feels like a goddamned movie. A mad, bloody, dank, funny and ferociously entertaining movie, no less. The wait? So worth it.

5) What does it mean to sacrifice everything for a cause? Julia Loktev's disturbingly intimate drama Day Night Day Night traces the path of a nameless young woman, played by Luisa Williams in the year's best performance, as she prepares to become a suicide bomber in Times Square. Loktev builds tension and discomfort through creative use of sound and screen space; her framing is tight (some early tracking shots feel like the camera is trying to climb over the back of Williams's head), yet she leaves enough screen space to emphasize the isolation of her subject relative to those around her and the world at large. The situation she's conjured is horrifying, yet Loktev utilizes stillness as a way into a character who is ready to do something most of us would never consider. It's a striking feat of direction, but it wouldn't be half as effective without Williams, whose performance is like a master class in minimalism. She accomplishes more with an unwavering stare than most actors can do with reams of dialogue. In preparation for the mission, her character sheds personal attachments, possessions and her own identity (it's no coincidence that her handlers are all hooded, rendering them literally faceless), yet Williams lets us catch glimpses of the tremulous doubt beneath the placid, accepting exterior. (Key line: "Would you please eat with me? I don't want to eat alone.") The ending, as hard a kick in the gut as any film packed this year, asks us to consider if giving up everything might also entail losing things that were never meant to be lost. Solitude's a motherfucker.

Maybe that's why her smile is so wide.

2007-12-13T00:10:00.000-05:00

I can't be the only one who looks at Rachael Ray and thinks that, beneath the benign exterior and the carefully-cultivated chipper-cheerful homemaker persona, there's the roiling fire of a ravenous sex demon. It's something in the eyes, I think.

Think about the future!

2007-10-06T15:59:00.000-04:00

We're all in agreement that the zombies are coming, right? I'm rational enough to accept that I'll probably be bitten and turned at some point. And when I do turn, I hope that I'll have enough free will left in me to, as my first zombie action, eat Adam Levine's brains. Assuming he has any brains, that is.

Manners and the lack thereof

2007-10-06T12:25:00.000-04:00

A thought inspired by a conversation had recently with a clerk at Trader Joe's with whom I'm friendly:

Seriously, can somebody please explain to me what the fucking fascination is with touching the bellies of pregnant women? You people wouldn't want a stranger walking up and slapping you on the ass. Yet otherwise rational, polite people will think nothing of walking up to expectant mothers and giving their swollen stomachs a rub. Is that your stomach? Your baby? If it isn't, don't fucking touch it. You're making the woman very uncomfortable and making yourself look like a thoughtless jackass.

I also did this.

2007-09-04T11:19:00.000-04:00

7/29/07, bitches! Hell of a day, it was. More fun pictures when I return from Toronto, 'kay?

Michael Haneke: Not George Sluizer

2007-08-30T13:20:00.000-04:00

I've been on the fence about the upcoming American remake of Michael Haneke's infamous post-modern home invasion film Funny Games. On one hand, if anyone is going to remake it, Haneke should be the guy to do it, and it struck me as a good sign that he was indeed at the helm. On the other hand, there would certainly have to be compromises made to Haneke's uncompromisingly nasty scenario. Surely, at least, the video scene would have been altered.

So much for that. According to someone who's seen it, Haneke's attitude was along the lines of, "I'm changing nothing and go fuck yourself if you don't like it." Funny Games a la America is, by this report, the same vicious, thorny audience-baiting treatise on media violence that its Austrian counterpart was.

Of course, that brings up a new question: Does that make the remake more valid or completely superfluous?

Hunger

2007-08-26T21:19:00.000-04:00

I have found in recent years that there's few things more satisfying to me than a good sandwich. Spurred by hunger and a burst of creativity, I just crafted an epic sandwich. I started with rye bread, upon which I spread a small amount of a garlic-balsamic mustard I picked up when visiting a local brewery recently. Instead of lettuce (which I don't have in house anyway), I then added two leaves of fresh basil. Upon that, I added a couple small slices of jalapeno pepper. For the meat, I used a honey-glazed turkey, and for the cheese I used a good pepper Jack. At the last second, I also added a dash of fresh parsley.

Result? Jesus, this thing is tasty. So I'm eating that while heading into the final hour of Yi Yi, which is as great as everyone keeps saying it is. Life is pretty fuckin' keen right now.

Dude, I need money with a quickness

2007-08-15T23:01:00.000-04:00

Why? So I can hop on the next plane to Edinburgh and see the play that has this catchy little ditty. This HAS to come to New York. I will sell slaving rights to my firstborn if that's what it will take to get this to come to New York.

The HELL?

2007-08-15T12:05:00.000-04:00

Would anyone have any idea why there were so many people doing a search on the term "ageless dwarf" yesterday? The OCE got 100 hits from 100 different IP addresses and three different search engines on the term "ageless dwarf," thanks to my review of I Will Walk Like a Crazy Horse. Is there some sort of 'Net scavenger hunt going on? Is this possibly related to Cloverfield? Seriously, if somebody knows something, please enlighten me. It's fuckin' weird, maaaaan...

I don't know why I'm so excited over this...

2007-08-06T09:02:00.000-04:00

Considering the man's done nothing but disappoint me for the last twenty years, but...

OMIGOD ARGENTO'S "MOTHER OF TEARS" IS SCREENING AT TORONTO OMIGOD OMIGOD EEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

How did your weekend go mine had its moments kthxbye

2007-08-02T21:11:00.000-04:00

O cursed spite! (plus Music Time!)

2007-07-26T23:00:00.000-04:00

So apparently, I'm one of maybe two people on the whole Internets that realizes that El-P, in his song "T.O.J." off his extraordinary album Fantastic Damage, isn't rapping that "the time is out of joy." Bone up on your fucking Hamlet, people, before you look even stupider. (Seriously, if you're familiar -- at all -- with El-P, the bastardizations of his lyrics on various lyric sites, all of which seem to be working from the same crib sheets, are bloody embarrassing. He's difficult to understand at times, but not by THIS much.)

Speaking of... here's a song I've been meaning to post up for a while: "Poisonville Kids No Wins/Reprise" by El-P. It's the closing track off his new album I'll Sleep When You're Dead (best album of the year so far, for what it's worth), and like much of his work, it alternates cryptic, intelligent wordplay with beats and music that manages to be both dense and catchy. The main reason I want y'all to hear this, though, is just so you can understand why I think we should all lobby to get El-P to write the theme song to the next Bond film. And no, I'm not joking. Take a listen, even if you think you don't like hip-hop.

Laugh? I thought I'd die...

2007-07-13T11:07:00.000-04:00

Upon listening to the new Patton Oswalt CD Werewolves and Lollipops, I was surprised to find that Oswalt has discovered maybe the three funniest words in the English language: "Jon Voight's ballsack."

Seriously -- when listening to the routine that used that particular punchline, I damn near had to pull over to keep from wrecking my car, I was laughing so hard. Right now, I'm shamefully giggling just thinking about it.