We Are the Illusion

We watched Network (1976) over the weekend; first time I’ve seen it. If you haven’t seen it in a while, or have it somewhere at the bottom of your queue, I recommend moving it up. Things have changed so much in the last thirty years that they’re pretty much exactly the same. The clip below [...]

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This Present Dark Knight

[I'm going to talk about this as if you are among the six bazillion people who have already paid to see it, i.e., "spoilers ahead"] The Dark Knight is a great movie, and there is plenty of print to tell you so, so I’ll skip over that point. Christopher Nolan has crafted something which, as [...]

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A Nation of Mans

Within a few experiences of each other, I saw Mike Judge’s Idiocracy and Pixar’s Wall-E. I don’t know if this will happen to a lot of people, but it makes for an interesting vision of the future. Wall-E assumes we will be commodified and technopolied into boneless blobs of passive, isolated-in-a-crowd, roaming media eaters. Idiocracy [...]

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FoL

I got around to Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man in the last week or so. I’ve got a book of Cohen’s lyrics and poems I enjoyed, and I get why this guy is so brilliant and all, but my taste-o-meter has just never swung towards much more than a few listens to Songs of Love [...]

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On the brink of the edge of everything

David Karsten Daniels’ Fear of Flying is a beautiful, biting and bright set of meditations on death and dying, and the self and its source somewhere in that process. It’s no goth infatuation with the abyss; it’s full of the wonder and fear of the way of all things, growing old, facing the realities of [...]

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First Quarter Report

So, I started the year eager for some harder fare, but after a several weeks of grinding and droning on with the Whigs, Ladyhawk, the Foals, the Dodos, and pop punchsters Vampire Weekend, I found myself under a self-induced avalanche of Van Morrison and Elvis Costello, and then back at blues guitar, digging out Buddy [...]

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Surprise?

The wife and I are big Kristen Wiig fans. We got to see her with the Groundlings the summer before she started with SNL. She did a Target cashier character in her first season that gave me hope for post-Fey SNL. She commits to these nutcase personalities in a way that reminds of John Belushi, [...]

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More warm. Less fuzzy.

All you folkies and other softies can come out. It’s safe now. CJ turned me on to Andy Gullahorn a few weeks ago, and I picked up his new record, Reinventing the Wheel. Andy wasn’t making as much noise as I was looking for at the time, but I could tell I was coming back. [...]

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Juuuust right.

So, among my 40 songs for 10 bucks this month, I added Ladyhawk to the anticipated Liam Finn and The Whigs picks. And, I have to say, The Whigs hit the spot. Finn, the “gentle rocker,” has some great melodies and harmonies, but is sometimes looping everything back into itself, and gets a bit droney. [...]

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Remember 2007?

Before I begin, let me just say, you won’t earn my love by reading the whole thing. It’s just nice to know you. I’ve been so busy putting together a list of the Greatest Recordings Known to Humankind, 2007, that I didn’t have time to get around to this list of Albums I Really Liked [...]

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