Bah

Four number one seeds in the Final Four. I always thought that when this finally happened, it would be kind of cool. But it isn't. Unless Kansas knocks UNC out. Then it's great.

It doesn't matter which you heard the holy or the broken hallellujah.

There's a Leonard Cohen line, in "First We Take Manhattan", that goes something like, "You loved me as a loser, but now you're worried that I just might win.". I really like that line. I've had a few things I meant to write about this past week, but my mind has mostly been consumed by one big thing that has yet to fully resolve itself. More on that maybe. Or not. There are probably more Leonard Cohen lines that apply here.

What I downloaded from eMusic this month:
-Alex Chilton- "In The Street" (Live version)
-CunninLynguists (It's possible that I didn't misspell that in the correct incorrect way)- Dirty Acres
-Del The Funky Homosapien- Eleventh Hour
-Dinosaur Jr.- Beyond
-Fugazi - 13 Songs
-Mike Ladd- Nostalgialator
-Minor Threat- Out Of Step
-Mission of Burma- Signals, Calls & Marches
-RJD2- "Rollerskating Jam"
-Two tracks of Ursus Minor w/ Brother Ali
-Wilco- "I Must Be High" (Live)
-Matthew Sweet's cover of Big Star's "The Ballad of El Goodo"
-Paul Westerberg- "As Far As I Know"

Keith- I'm listening to "Suzanne" right now. The bit about tea and oranges that come all the way from China is in the first verse.

The post-punk 80s rock I downloaded mainly because I've started reading the book Our Band Could Be Your Life which covers those bands. The Mike Ladd thing I've never really heard of, but I'll grab anything that Def Jux releases. Alex Chilton, of course, was in Big Star, and there should be statues of him in at least three major American cities. One is Memphis, and I don't care where the other two are.

The picture is of Pushkin, because I like Pushkin.

I finally watched The Darjeeling Limited today, in between basketball games. The DVD sat in the Netflix sleeve on my desk for nearly a week before I got around to it. The movie was fine, I guess. I liked it more than the Life Aquatic, but it kind of felt like Anderson was returning to fields he already plowed with Tanenbaums, which I liked a lot more than Darjeeling. Kids, this is why it might be a mistake to begin your career with three films, two of which are nearly perfect and the other a legitimate masterpiece- you'll have a hard time staying on that plateau.

Monday night is the Brother Ali show at the Cradle. I've seen Ali twice before, and both times were special. I expect nothing less for this show. I'll probably scribble down a bunch of words about it, in no small part because at times I think Ali just might be one of the two or three best rappers of the decade.

NCAA Tournament stuff: Thursday was boring, Friday was awesome. The Tampa pod, where two twelve seeds and two thirteen seeds won in the first round is my favorite thing in sports since State beat UNC in football last year. Duke losing to Bob Huggins and West Virginia was just pure gravy. The only way this could get better would have been if Texas A&M could have held on against UCLA, or if Arkansas can somehow knock off UNC tomorrow. Which I can't envision happening. I'm really glad that I didn't fill out a bracket for a serious pool this year- I had Pitt in the Final Four. The only upsets I had were Davidson over Gonzaga and Siena over Vandy. I also might have predicted Duke to go to the Final Four, which in retrospect was a silly thing to believe.

Do you know the part of "Downtown Train" where Tom Waits rasps "I'm shining like a new dime"? He should have won a Pulitzer Prize for that moment. Doesn't matter what category. Hell, he should have won all of them. The Pulitzers are usually wasted, anyway.

Is This Really News?

I saw a headline that said "Obama Gets Scant Support From White Voters in Mississippi". I hate to fall back on stereotypes (this might be a lie), but come on- did anyone expect that white voters in Mississippi would be voting for the black guy? Really?

Really?

Other news:
-Tucker Carlson lost his TV show on MSNBC. Which shows that Chipper Jones does smile upon his creations.
-Super Smash Bros. Brawl is awesome.
-Finished re-reading American Tabloid, began re-reading the sequel, The Cold Six Thousand. Part of why I like these books is that sometimes, they are very funny. Sometimes reading them makes you want to take a shower to escape the grime. Sometimes, these two things happen at once.
-Schoolkids Records is closing in Chapel Hill, and I read online that the Raleigh store's lease is up in December or so, and they might move (again) or worse. This sucks.
-I've never watched American Idol. The closest I've come is having the last few minutes on, muted, while checking my email and waiting for House to come on. But I listen to Tony Kornheiser's podcast, and he is obsessed with American Idol, so I know a little about what goes on. Tonight, while I was looking for a song in iTunes for my mother, I noticed that the number one song in iTunes is Jeff Buckley's version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah". Now, this is one of my all time favorite songs, and Jeff Buckley's version is one of the more captivating things in music, but that doesn't explain why a song from a guy who drowned nearly 11 years ago, and was never all that famous, suddenly surged to the top of iTunes, which is usually dominated by the worst of the top 40. How did the late Mr. Buckley (I mean the late Jeff Buckley, not his father, Tim, who is also dead) make it to the top of the charts? I'm fairly certain it is because recently on the American Idol, someone sang the song "Hallelujah", and that led people en masse to start downloading Buckley's cover. Which is all really weird. But my deeper question is this: why didn't Cohen's (slightly inferior version, because of the different sets of lyrics he used in different versions) version make the charts? And now, do people think that Buckley wrote "hallelujah" the way that some people think that Lennon and McCartney wrote "Twist and Shout" and Hendrix wrote "All Along The Watchtower"? Also, it is incredibly fucking weird that Jeff Buckley is on the top of the iTunes chart in the year of our Jones 2008. That can't be overstated.
-I'm halfway through a book about My Bloody Valentine's Loveless album (which I put down a few days ago and need to pick back up) and I'm no closer to understanding why I like the album so much, given how many things about it seem like they would annoy me.

Citation Needed

Hey yo.

So, I haven't been up to a lot in the last week or so. I've been re-reading James Elroy's novel American Tabloid, which is a lot easier to keep straight on the second run through. The book is one of those historical novels that mixes real people with fictional characters (like E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, Caleb Carr's The Alienist, or the Harry Potter books). The book is the first installment of a trilogy, and I read on the Wikipedia that the third book is supposed to come out this year.

I've watched a few movies- The Good Shepherd, which desperately wants to be The Godfather of spy movies, and eventually fails at that ambition. I watched Million Dollar Baby, which is very good, and I'm not sure why I didn't see back when it came out. And I watched The Age Of Innocence, which is a Scorsese film that is rated PG, which is weird at an existential level. Whenever I see a Scorsese film without excessive violence or vulgarity, I feel slightly confused, even when the movie is very good (i.e. After Hours or The Aviator or his Bob Dylan documentary). So now I have The Departed playing in the background, just to bring order back to the universe, violent-Scorsese-movie wise.

I've been listening to a lot of Leonard Cohen (still) and trying to decide if he's my second or third favorite Canadian songwriter of all time (He's behind Neil Young and maybe Joni Mitchell.) I have a list of favorite Canadians, and only one person on the list is fictional. That has to be considered a compliment to the Maple Leaf State, right.

I've been meaning to write more, but keep forgetting that I'm meaning to, and then I spend time regretting when I should be using it to try and write more. It's a vicious cycle, really.

I've been thinking about how weird the internet really is. Last week, on the Deadspin sports blog, there was a link to a website called Garfield minus Garfield. I found it to be really funny, and quite possibly brilliant, so I broke my own rule about forwarding internet memes to friends of mine. Then, a few days later, a completely different website I was reading had a link to the Garfield site. And then, in the issue of Entertainment Weekly that came today (I subscribed because I like the magazine, but I really like only paying ten bucks a year for the magazine. The looming death of the printed word is something of a bummer, but you can't beat the bargains that it entails.) there was another reference to the website. There are probably already websites and/or blogs mocking the Garfield minus Garfield, or doing the same thing with other comic strips that aren't funny. The internet is really weird.

If you don't hear from me in the next few months, it'll mean either a)my enemies have caught up with me and it us up to any poor souls who accidentally click on this blog to avenge my deaths (unlikely) or b) I'm picking up a copy of the Wii game Super Smash Bros. Brawl tomorrow, and I won't be able to extricate myself from its clutches for a while. I actually went to Circuit City to pre-order the game, which is something I hadn't done since Sonic the Hedgehog 2 about 15 years ago. I pre-ordered it mainly because Circuit City said they would give me a ten dollar gift card if I paid them in advance, which struck me as a reasonable offer, and because it's entirely possible that this game will be as hard to come across as Wiis for a week or two, and I've been waiting for this game for a long time, because I'm a nerd and I get enjoyment from beating up Pokemons with Link that I would rather not examine closely.

Okay, this is obscure

But there's a new ad for one of those bullshit body sprays that are aggressively marketed towards "guys". The kind of "guys" who read Maxim and think that Anchorman is the best film that Will Ferrell was ever involved with. The kind of guys who think that Family Guy is the funniest show on television and think that Cee-Lo Green's name is Gnarls Barkley. The kind of guys who see the ads and assume that spaying this shit all over their bodies will instantly result in more anonymous threeways. This line of advertising is inherently offensive, I suppose, but I've lost a lot of my ability to be offended by implied misogyny. No, what's irritating me is the song being used in the commercial. "Can't Seem to Make You Mine" by the seminal sixties garage band, The Seeds. The Seeds are one of those bands who were almost big in the sixties, but are now only remembered by music history nerds and compilers of overpriced nostalgia cd box sets that buy infomercial time at two in the morning, but dammit- that doesn't mean that they deserve this treatment. (I suppose that it's possible that the band approved the use of the song in exchange for their first payday in about thirty-five years, but I like to believe that they were screwed out of the publishing rights for their music by an corrupt record label or sleazy agent. Call me a romantic, if you must.) I'm beginning to resign myself to the day when I hear the Replacements or Husker Du in a Diet Dr. Pepper commercial.

While we're on the subject of the desecration of rock history, does anyone here care about the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame?

No? Oh. Well, that won't stop me. New inductions in a few days, and here are my thoughts:


Madonna- Not actually rock and roll. But she did put out some good stuff early in her career (Borderline and Live To Tell come to mind) and is second only to Dylan and maybe Kiss in her ability to manipulate the media and control her own image. And since only about two-thirds of the inductees are really rock and roll (I like Billy Joel fine enough, but only a couple of his songs could honestly be said to rock) it's hard to complain too much.
John Cougar Mellencamp- Really? I mean, Springsteen is already in the hall, so do we need the inferior version of him? Shouldn't be in.
Leonard Cohen- Yes, yes, a million times yes.
The Ventures- Sure. We need someone in to represent surf rock (although Dick Dale isn't in, which is kind of weird.)
The Dave Clark Five- Really? I'll go tell the Zombies and the Troggs to expect their invitations next year. Seriously, Dave Clark Five shouldn't be in before the Stooges. Last year, they apparently got more votes than Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, but the rules were jiggered with to put Flash in and keep Dave out. I guess this is a sort of make-up call.
Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff- Key to Philly Soul, so that's fine.
Little Walter- Played harmonica for Muddy Waters and a bunch of other Chess artists. So that's good enough for me.

Wiggum and Scorsese

So, tonight's Simpsons was alright. Not great, but not terrible. In other words, like most of the recent episodes (except for the 90s episode, which was terrible). But the last line was tremendous. The episode was a send-up of The Departed, and at the end they did the shot of the actual rat. Then, Ralph Wiggum popped up and said "the rat symbolizes obvious-ness." It's funny because it's true.

Quick reviews of DVDs I've watched recently:
Michael Clayton- Really good movie. George Clooney is, like, the third or fourth best actor around, and the only real movie star we have these days. This movie should have been more popular, but I think a lot of people wanted it to be a kind of John Grisham legal thriller instead of a character study.

For Your Consideration- By the same people who did Best In Show and Waiting For Guffman and A Mighty Wind. All of those movies are better than this one. Missing from For Your Consideration: the mockumentary format and characters anyone cares about at all. the latter was more important to the other Christopher Guest films than the former. Fred Willard tries to save the film, but even he can't.

The Extras Holiday Special- Ricky Gervais is also in For Your Consideration, but he's better when he's back in the role of Andy. The (presumably) last episode of Extras is funny (although the celebrity cameos aren't as funny as Patrick Stewart or Ian McKellan's roles were) but is intentionally pretty dark. When Ricky Gervais was David Brent on the Office, he regularly said things that made the audience uncomfortable, but when he does it as Andy, it is harder to know how to feel because he spent a dozen episodes making us like Andy. I wonder if the message about celebrities would be more resonant with the masses if Ricky Gervais was a bigger celebrity in the US? Which would be weird. Or I'm thinking about this poorly, maybe. On the commentary track of For Your Consideration (I listened to it hoping that Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy would explain why they made so many bad decisions. They did not explain.) Guest and Levy said that Gervais was nervous about appearing in the movie. Not because he could sense it was a train wreck, but because he didn't do improv or ad-libbing on The Office or Extras. And this blew my fucking mind. The notion that Merchant and Gervais wrote out every line of their shows is really stunning.

My goal had been to see Be Kind Rewind this weekend, but it's not playing in Apex or Cary. This is annoying. I don't really want to drive to the Raleigh Grand or Southpoint in Durham to see this movie. What's really vexing is that it's not playing at the art house theaters or the mulitplexes. It's as if Gondry's film is too big for the little guys but not big enough to wrest a screen away from the Bucket List or the latest terrible film about step-dancing that uses numbers instead of words in the title (I guess Prince also follows this unfortunate habit, but he's a genius, so I let it slide with him). The bigger problem for me is this: I don't really trust critics when it comes to Gondry. I just looked up what The Science of Sleep got on metacritic. You know what that beautiful little masterpiece's aggregate is? Fuckin' 7o! So while the reviews for Be Kind, Rewind have been mostly mediocre-to-good, as far as I can tell, I'm not sure if I should take this as meaning not to drive out of my way to see it or not. If you can see my meaning through poorly chosen words.

Fuck it. I'm going to bed.