Give It Up For KG... Give It Up For ME!!!

Oh yes. In any other year, this would be the motion picture event of that year. Alas, it isn't that year. It's THIS year.

OMFG, My Finger!!!

This demonstration of a finger-safe table saw is jaw-dropping.  Totally legit.  The blade detects the electrical currents in your finger, and drops from the table near-instantaneously, thus saving you from a life of misery.  Coolest thing I've seen in a while.

Of course, if you read the article you'll see that the tool industry really lived up to its name: they refused to adopt the technology until the government got involved.  What a bunch of dickbags.  As if people wouldn't pay more for a saw that removes the #1 source of danger involved.  I wonder how many fingers have been detached from hands since the product's initial demonstration in 2000.  (Probably enough to feed all the Sox fans at Fenway this weekend!)

Decision 2006

This week I have decided a few things.  Because I'm the decider.  Not you.  Me.

* If we give James Blunt to Hezbollah, and allow them to do whatever they want to him, will that end the war?  Is he what all this fighting's about?

* Cinderella Man was almost a great movie.  I enjoyed it immensely, way more than I thought I would.  I came out of it giving Ron Howard, one of my least favorite directors, a great deal of credit for the incredible job he did.  But then I read up on the "bad guy" of the movie, Max Baer.  He was portrayed as little more than a womanizing, arrogant (unbelievably so), and proudly murderous fiend.  Very little of that is true; in fact, Baer was more of a clown than anything.  Howard made a big deal out of the fact that Baer killed two men (one indirectly) in the ring, and conveniently made Baer's character a guy who relished that power.

* Cansei de Ser Sexy is being hyped up an awful lot, but rightfully so.  They tap into the broken-English-girl-band-run-by-men territory that The Go! Team recently made successful.  I'm sold, albeit w/ reservations about the "obsession with sex" that their female vocalists have.  I feel like I'm 13 again, being scandalized by "Sir Psycho Sexy" and tittering in a corner.  But good God are they fun.  Who wouldn't want to listen to Brazilian women boasting about how sexually active they are?  The music's pretty fun too.

(As an aside, CSS just played the Pitchfork Festival.  You may remember Pitchfork from such declarations as "most of !!!'s audience has come to accept Nic Offer's generally asinine lyrics as an inherent part of the group's unique dynamic." [Nick Sylvester, 6/8/04]  That's right, because Pitchfork would never champion or promote an artist whose lyrics are asinine.  !!! sure stands in sharp relief next to CSS' Proustian tribute to the restoration of the life spirit and the delicacy of human existence, as found in their song "Artbitch":

Lick my art-tit
Lick my art-tit
Suck my art-hole
Suck my art-hole

Bra-fucking-vo!  Leaves of Grass, my ass!  So, putting that big jug o' drivel into a song is okay because... why?  Because it's sung by sexy Brazilian ladies flaunting themselves?  Well, never mind then!  Who needs standards?  Actually, on second thought, sexy Brazilian ladies... hmmm... maybe Pitchfork's onto something...)

* Also found in my car stereo recently is lo-fi-bande-de-l'année Tapes n' Tapes.  Pretty good.  Not great, but good enough to grow on a guy.  And good enough to justify their "your blog made my band overrated" fame.  The Loon is pretty creative, given the low-budget constraints.  I see them kicking some ass in the future... unlike certain other lo-fi bands.  (Hype Your Band Say Yeah!)

* Big, big props to Robert Randolph and the Family Band for cheering me up all week.  Check out Live At The Wetlands if you want the inside of your brain to burn down with joy.  Or check out their Austin City Limits appearance on PBS.  I now believe that Congress should pass a law banning all religious ceremonies held in the absence of the Sacred Steel.  (Separation of church and what now?)

* I wonder if anyone's made a t-shirt yet with Mel Gibson's unkempt, bearded face, above his now-infamous complaint: "What Do You Think YOU'RE Looking At, Sugar Tits???"  You know, cause it's the next big thing now.  (In fact, that picture of him on TMZ might go nicely with a Photoshopped set of earlocks and a yarmulke.  Shalom!)

Skill Testing Questions

I'm back from Canada, bitches!  (Don't all get up at once to welcome me back.)  Good time, great food, great weather... it got up to a balmy 85 degrees at one point!  But it's nice to go to America Jr. every once in a while, if only to underline the differences between American and Canadian cultures.  Parallel populations, developing in only-somewhat-parallel manners.  More on the trip at a later date (read: once I've forgotten about it).

Of the many differences I encountered last week, here's one I didn't come across.  Apparently it's against the law in Canada to award contest prizes to someone who has won said contest without having performed some kind of "skill."  Deadspin brought up a story of free golf clubs from Sports Illustrated not being distributed due to the requirement of a "skill testing question."  Will assumed it was a gag, but it's not... it's the law.  It has something to do with casinos and gambling, where you cannot win a prize without having   The formality of a skill testing question is required on any sweepstakes or contest in which Canadian citizens participate.

What kills me is that the Canadian courts actually determined what constitutes sufficiently-tested "skill."  Typically the question is a simple math problem, so the courts decided that the math problem has to have, at minimum, three operations in order to justify a prize.  I guess figuring out "1263527653 mod 237647" or the square root of 12374612347861293874628374 isn't skillful, but "2 + (2 x 2) - 2" is.

Slow News Month For Minutiae

I've been real busy, and I'm going to be even busier over the next month or so.  You're probably not going to hear much from me until late July, on account of a series of small vacations.  I'll do my best.  Anyway, here's what I think about movies and music of late

NachOOOOOOOOOOOO
What a weird movie.  You can tell it comes from the Napoleon Dynamite people; Jared Hess has an unmistakable style, love it or hate it.  In this case, I knew what I was in for (unlike ND, which took some getting used to) and ate it up right away.  They had me from the moment Jack Black snarfed his beans.  What's weirdest about it is that there's absolutely no story, and no real development of said non-story... yet the conclusion moved me.  You're gonna see the movie and be like "are you fucking kidding?  You got emotional while watching THAT?!?"  But I was.  Hey, I'm as stumped as you are.  I ate some dirt... I ate some grass... I used some leaves... to wipe my tears...

X-Men III
Passable, but devoid of heart and charm.  Everyone's going through the motions.  Definitely the least essential of the series, despite having so much potential with Angel, Beast, Juggernaut and company.  When the "surprise" twists are the highlight of the movie, you have problems.  Not much more to say than that.

Spoon - Kill the Moonlight
Excellent stuff.  I'm glad I get to go back through their older albums, slowly but surely, and appreciate their attention to detail even more.  Makes me all the more disappointing that they're not famous, because they're so good at what they do.  It's not even that challenging, really... no more than, say, Cracker.  And Cracker was famous.

Sufjan Stevens - The Avalanche
I like it, but like any "collection" (as opposed to "album") it suffers from a lack of flow and inconsistency, and hasn't got anything to offer people who haven't chugged the Sufjan Kool-Aid yet.  It's a lot more hit-and-miss than Sufjan's proper albums; I'm glad the majority of this stuff wasn't released on Come On Feel The Illinoise.  But even Bad Sufjan is worth a listen at this point.  It's stunning to think that he can have such depth of composition on the toss-aside crap he never releases.

Snow Patrol - Eyes Open (redux)
OK, fine.  I still believe it's not an essential album, not in the same universe as Final Straw (obviously), and not complex or deep by any stretch of the imagination.  I still maintain that any number of bands could have made this exact same album and it would have been just fine.  But it's not as bad as I made it out to be.  I'm kind of partial to the next-to-last track, as it builds momentum and finally lets it loose.  I like it.  It's fine.  It just doesn't have that special thing that makes it important in and of itself... you still have to reach back and be like "well I liked Final Straw and I like the band, so I'll like this."  No thanks.  If I lay here... if I just lay here... will you lay with me and... listen to Final Straw instead?

What Tha Heck Is A "RIM JOAB"?!?

Remember the struggle between the MPAA and South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone over the rating of South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut?  How they argued over how many half-seconds of Saddam Hussein's fake animated penis could be shown in an R-rated movie, and other such issues?  This memo summarizes the ridiculousness pretty nicely.  Parker and Stone are already American heroes for making those people analyze their stupid dick-and-fart movie frame-by-frame, but Stone gets a lifetime pass to the Doucette Executive Washroom for his postscript.

Take Off, Eh!

The good news: Americans haven't cornered the market on assholes.  The bad news: America Jr. is the inspiration for the previous statement.  I dare you to witness this shameful act and not get pissed off.  I really hope General Motors is using the Hummer line to spy on the North American asshole community, and that a big, big bust, complete with capital punishment, is coming.  Oh, pleeeeease...

The Da Vinci Choad

Based on the early returns from critics, my plan to see the movie of The Da Vinci Code instead of reading the novel has backfired.  So I broke down and read the book.  Diagnosis: sufficient.  The book I'm currently reading (Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson) does a better job of weaving a fictitious interpretation of religious history, but DVC stands out as compared to other commuter-rail novels in its ambitions and its intellectual subject matter.  So, despite my reservations, I give it its due.

Anyway, I'll break my opinion up to this point into the good (Pork) and the bad (Beef).  Bad news first, because my feelings on the book are best summarized by this sentence: "it sucked, but it was still pretty OK."

BEEF
1) I really hate the potboiler genre's ridiculous emphasis on one- and two-page chapters.  "Mommy, I wrote a chapter today!"  It's like when I'd pump my high school history essays up to the 14-point font, so I could fill a page faster than 12-point type would have.  Just as I artificially created a full two pages, Brown artificially creates suspense in the reading process without actually having as much suspense in the story.*

2) Brown's flashes of "Style!" really piss me off.  Boy, was I surprised to find out that Sophie has a mysterious past.  No kidding!  For someone who came up with some really convoluted codes and conspiracy theories, his character development is awfully transparent.

3) Also, those revelations are just unendingly self-congratulatory.  Does every chapter have to end with a cliffhanger?  Someone has a mysterious revelation, but he/she doesn't feel like sharing until after a chapter break?  Gee, you made me wade through a whole two-paragraph chapter before revealing your secrets.  Dan Brown, you are a magnificent bastard!

4) Okay, you know what?  If you want to write short chapters, so you can things keep moving along, artificially manufacture some suspense, and juggle the interweaving storylines, knock yourself out.  I give you permission to write two chapters per page.  I'll deal.  But don't number them.  Sweet phenomenal Christ, that drives me apeshit.  You're basically admitting that your readers have too short an attention span to read three actual chapters... but you want them to feel good about having read three chapters anyway.  "Hey, it's Chapter 112!  Dan Brown sure packs a lot of chapters into eighty pages."

5) Do people still say "what the devil?" in conversation?  How can a novel that takes place in the era of cell phones actually have that expression as serious dialogue?  What's next?  Is Robert Langdon gonna say "oh, fiddlesticks!" in the next book?  There's only two groups of people who should be licensed to say "what the devil?" without it being tongue-in-cheek: barbershop quartet singers and Civil War reenactors.  Langdon's not on either list.

6) Robert Langdon is as boring a franchise hero as you could ever imagine.  Aren't characters supposed to have traits?  I cannot describe Langdon beyond his vocation ("symbology" professor).  Langdon is the literary equivalent of Textured Vegetable Protein... he contains all the nutritional requirements to be a hero-like substance, but he has absolutely no taste.  Water is flavorful and zesty compared to Robert Langdon.  Although, in his defense, he does say "what the devil?" a lot.  That's kinda like character development, right?

PORK
Despite all that beef, I did enjoy reading the book.  In a sea of diarrheal thrillers, it at least has some fiber.

1) It helps when the author actually has a message to send, and has done his research.  I know nothing about art history, but his narrator does speak from a position of authority.  He may not have been entirely accurate, as Wikipedia tells us, but he was certainly convincing.  In a book where the subject matter is so much more interesting than the goings on, it's easy to get sucked in.

2) You have to respect the heaping helping of subversive, anti-establishment, intellectual discourse that has been dumped on the doorstep of the common potboiler reader.  Anything that pisses off the Catholic church so much has got to be good... there's no greater endorsement than the Catholics denouncing you as a heretic.

* - I suspect this will come up when I see the film.  But to speculate is unfair to everyone, so forget I said that.  But not really... cause I didn't remove that sentence!  Wink wink!

Two Ways To Get Me To Turn Off Your Radio Station

1) Play a Violent Femmes song.  In fact, why don't you go ahead and play one that begins with an irritating a capella wail ("Add It Up")?  Cause I just love starting my morning with whiny singing voices.  When I can't get the sound of babies getting crushed in the teeth of engine gears, I like having Violent Femmes songs as my Plan B.  Is there any way I can put his voice into my alarm clock?

2) Five simple words... Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.

But this is more than an excuse to bitch about Pinch Your Cheeks Say Nnnnnnngh.  See, the actual occurrence of #1 this morning made me realize why I hate Shithead's voice so much.  It isn't just because he sings like a retarded version of David Byrne... it's because he ruins the Byrne affectation by mixing in the Femmes' Gordon Gano and his deeply unpalatable affectation.  Eureka!  I've reverse-engineered the biggest music-critic sucker's-bet of the new century!

See, I like David Byrne.  He makes his singing voice work, because it comes in so many flavors and has such dexterity.  He works hard to sell it to you.  That hard work is a big reason for the acceptance of Talking Heads' visionary overall sound.  Thus, to compare Fuckface's incompetent, lazy affectation to Byrne's highly-skilled one is inappropriate.  It necessarily reflects Byrne's genius upon someone with no such genius.  Furthermore, the Byrne connection always made me wonder whether my objection to Asshole was just a matter of assimilation, of becoming accustomed to his grating sound.  I no longer have to worry about that; I hate the Violent Femmes, so acknowledging Taintbag's equally-viable similarity to Gano saves me from all that self-doubt.

Nice to know that even though the day started on a downer, it gave birth to a big relief.  Yippee!!!

Fearless Freaks

Today is a Flaming Lips day.  This morning, I listened to five Lips albums in a row.  It was quite the hoot, I tell you what.  I got the idea last night, while watching the documentary The Flaming Lips: Fearless Freaks (filmed by Wayne Coyne's neighbor).  Pretty great stuff.

As a non-rabid Lips fan, I was unaware of the band's backstory, so it was interesting to learn about the earlier Lips incarnations.  But unlike many "writing the history books" documentaries, the filmmakers did not construct a narrative.  There's no discussion of histrionics, no discussion of "why do you think The Soft Bulletin resonated so much, and so forth... they left that side of things alone.  Events and landmarks are observed and discussed, without much expository BS from anyone.  The insights provided by the band are strictly about their process, philosophy, and personality.  There's no back-patting, no self-congratulation, no "let's be honest, we're a big deal"-type pragmatism.  They pretty much just stay on-topic... "how do you guys do what you do?"

It's also neat to see that Coyne pretty much just does whatever he's interested in at the time, without regard for whether anything useful comes from it.  If it means organizing an experiment with 20-something car stereos in a parking lot, all of which are playing different tapes simultaneously, that's what he does.  If it means making a self-financed absurdist sci-fi film (Christmas on Mars), that's what he does.  Sure, the "parking lot" test eventually spawned the four-disc Zaireeka album, but nobody would even conceive of anything like that, or its related "boombox" experiment, with any commercial aspirations in mind.  You can tell Coyne just thought it would be interesting to do.  That helps the movie bang home the image of Wayne Coyne not as a musical visionary, but as a visionary, period.

Related to that notion is the film's emphasis on Steven Drozd's contributions to the band.  Coyne is portrayed as a tireless worker who has a lot of ideas about things, but not music necessarily; Drozd, on the other hand, is shown as a musical savant from a family of musical savants.  When Gabby Hayes of the Butthole Surfers was asked what Coyne's biggest asset is, he laughingly exclaimed, "Steven!!!"  I can't speak to whether that's real or not, but the filmmakers have certainly framed it that way.

Anyway, good movie.  It was worth it just to see Wayne Coyne floating around the crowd in an inflatable bubble.