Mmm, Tasty! 7: WWJE?

Gotta look your best for the Rapture! (Get password for article from Bugmenot. Pointed by Gawker.)

Mmm, Tasty! 6

Triple bacon ranch cheezeburgers == health food. It says so right here!

Mark and Barb Go to the Movies

Sahara (dir. Breck Eisner) This is another of those movies I wish they'd waited until summer to release. Exotic locations, cute stars, multiple cliffhangers, camels and colorful furriners--'til Spielberg finally gets around to another Indy Jones (by which time Harrison Ford's glower will have hardened into permanent rictus), this one'll do just fine. I mean, any movie where Matthew McConaughey just barely annoys me has to be doing something right. Mark's review (stupid points): ???

We love Great Leader! 8

Well, a few of us do.

Energy Prices--Surprise Surprise!

Poor, stupid Ford and GM. Amazing that Excursions and Yukons aren't selling--who'd ever have guessed?

On a side note, Barb and I were discussing how nice it is that we've lived through this oil patch at least once before--so it they actually make us buy gas only on odd/even days, we'll know just what to do!

Markie Listening Notes 6: Duke Ellington

Carnegie Hall 1948 (Vintage Jazz Classics) As I'm sure my pal Mike Brockman would attest, you could listen to Duke Ellington's music the rest of your life and never get bored. On this set, with the orchestra supposedly past its prime, it still manages to rock the bejesus out of a 12-bar blues named "Hi'ya Sue." Jimmy Hamilton plays the most amazing tenor solo I heard on a song of Duke's between Ben Webster's solo on "Cottontail" and Paul Gonsalves' on the Newport "Crescendo and Diminuendo in Blue."

Models for Christ. This is not a joke.

With the goal of guiding Christians through the sometimes unscrupulous fashion industry, Models for Christ was founded by husband and wife Jeff Calenberg and Laura Krauss, who met while modeling for Elite in New York in the early 1980s.

Pointed by Gawker.

Mad Clubbin' 1: Queens of the Stone Age, Premier, 4/14/05

I joked with Eric as we waited in line that the two of us probably raised the median age at the show by five years. But a surprising number of folks of our demographic actually represented (though many of them looked like they were bikers). Openers Throw Rag were pretty generic thrash, distinguished by a lead singer who looks like Scott Weiland in a captain's cap, a lead guitarist who used a Gretsch White Falcon for more sonic abuse than I'd heard since Neil Young subjected his to comparable abuse in the 1960s, and a heavily tattooed fellow who doubled on amplified washboard and (sez their Website) "man-tits." They were good sports about being sacrificial lambs for the Gods of Thunder who go under the moniker Queens of the Stone Age. I definitely think Josh Homme is a little too cocky a jock for me to really love his music, but I gotta hand it to him--he knows how to put Gods of Thunder riffs together better than Tom Morello and Omar Rodriguez put together. and he uses guitar leads functionally--they help drive the song, don't show off how many scales he practices. And Josh, being the Coolest Motherfucker On the Planet (go home George Clooney), barely breaks a sweat! Wish I'd seen an incarnation with Mark Lanegan singing and Nick Nutso Oliveri playing bass (and going insane), but this version of the band was, if anything, heavier than the records. And the contrast between how sweet Josh sings and the racket he and his band kick up does hold up nicely over an hour and a half.

Markie Listening Notes 5: Lida Husik

This singer reminds me how many amazingly great "alternative" women singer/songwriters and woman-headed bands have flown under the radar since the 80s. For every Liz Phair or Tori Amos or, God help us, Alanis Morissette that's relatively well known (at least to music geeks--and teenage girls who like the commercials that use songs from Liz's last album), there's a Barbara Manning, a Penelope Houston, Kristin Hersh, Mary Timony, here in Seattle Capping Day, Juned, the Visible Targets, Amy Denio, the Fastbacks, Visqueen. Lida is another who drifted from lo-fi guitar/psych-based songs to downtempo electro, plying her nicely expressive alto and pretty good hooks. So far the one I'm feeling is the second she made at Shimmy-Disc, The Return of Red Emma. It's much better produced than her first, and with songs that would sound right at home on Surrealistic Pillow. About the electro songs, I'll have to hear.

Update: Okay, first two songs on Your Bag are beautiful, as well. I could see listening to this along with the Magnetic Fields.

Mark Goes to the Movies

Schizo (dir. Guka Amarova) The central character in this film is a 15-year-old so silent and seemingly out of it that he's acquired the film's title as his nickname. But of course you know he's sharper than that, which he proves when his mom's thug boyfriend gets him a job with the Kazakh mafia family the boyfriend arranges bare-knuckle fights for. Along the way, Schizo shows that he's a survivor, but a big-hearted one, and his bond with a beautiful widow (whose husband died during one of the fights) and her just-barely-not-too-adorable son is the sweetest teenage romance I've seen this year. The backdrop, Mad Max-like steppe with the ruins of industry, ghost towns, machinery strewn everywhere, only adds to the displacement--as does the strange beauty of the Kazakh people (who look closer to Tibetans and Mongols--probably since they're the great-great...grandchildren of the Khan Himself--than they do to Russians). Mark's review: ***

A true man of God

Senator Santorum, we salute you. (Pointed by Teagan Goddard. Get password from Bugmenot.com.)

Guns and Safety

I love how how this article frames the argument in exactly the NRA's terms:

Violence hasn't subsided this year, from courthouse shootings in Atlanta and Tyler, Texas, to the school killings at Red Lake, Minn., the most deadly since Columbine. But the reaction has spurred something far different, drawing on the idea that if the victims had weapons they might not be victims.

Right--we'll all be safer if everyone's blazing away, not just the bad guys. Because we know that bullets fired by good guys in "self defense" only hit bad guys--innocent bystanders are protected by an invisible NRA Good Guy shield, just like in the movies.

But I'll meet 'em halfway. If people want to keep as many guns as they want in their homes for personal defense, more power to them. (I recomomend the use of trigger locks, locked gun cabinets, etc., but hey--it's their families, not mine.) But the minute some psychopath or some stupid kid trying to make points with the gangstas or get back at the jocks at school or some paranoid nutcase in traffic wants to carry his/her "right to self defense" into a school, office, highway, or other public place he/she shares with me--that's where I draw the line.

[Notes to Second Amendment absolutists: if the Founding Fathers had really intended an unrestricted right to bear arms, why put a qualifying clause about "a well-regulated militia" at the beginning of the amendment (the only amendment to carry such a qualification)? And if guns are really no more deadly or dangerous to the public at large than knives, clubs, etc., why do all these millions of firearm fans want to carry guns instead of knives, clubs, etc.?]

Mark's Film Classics 1

Who'll Stop the Rain (dir. Karl Reisz) Anytime I get depressed about living during the reign of Bush Jong-Il, I think back and remember we've been here before. Energy prices skyrocketing and pissing everyone off: check. Ass-deep in a war that polarized the country and also pissed everyone off: check. Corrupt would-be dictator/President siccing the Justice Department on thoughtcriminals and political opponents: check. Humongous quantities of drugs coming in from the war zone (what, you think those Afghan warlords aren't selling the processed stuff right back to us?), blowing out the lives of half the people you see, and creating dirty enforcers up and down the supply chain: check. Robert Stone's wonderful novel Dog Soldiers is a perfect memento. The movie adaptation is a great 70s movie, a great noir, a great heroin movie, a great Vietnam movie, and a great paranoia movie all at once. The whole cast is amazing, starting with Nick Nolte, who's just a baby in this movie and who looks just as dangerously crazy as he is today. Ditto the editing (another cinematic art that reached a kind of perfection in the 70s--cf. Taxi Driver, The French Connection) and the direction, which makes the Arizona desert as claustrophobic as a San Francisco apartment. Mark's review: ****

Restoring Dignity to the White House

You can always count on the kids to be on their best behavior. (Pointed by Teagan Goddard.)

Ve Luff der Obergropenfuehrer!

Ach du lieber!

We love Great Leader! 7

Well, kind of.

Now that JPII is no longer with us

I'm wondering how long the rapprochement between Evangelicals and Catholics can hold up--when the Real Christers start in with their Red Whore of Babylon schtick again (often put a lot nicer in respectable, intellectual theological discourse, of course)--especially now that St. John Paul has, probably for the rest of the news cycle, pushed St. Terri clean off the cable news.

Mark Goes to the Movies

Sin City (dir. Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller) It may just be coincidence, but it takes some cojones to open a movie, one day after St. Terry's passing and (maybe) one before St. John Paul II's, in which one of the antiheroes kills two priests (one through the grate in a confessional). Also, to release a movie guaranteed to be the coolest fucking movie the 14-year-old males in the audience who are attending with their big brothers will have seen all year at least until the new Batman comes out this summer. For the rest of us, it has the odd effect of being very faithful to the look and shot framing of the original stories but, given Rodriguez' gleefully cheap aesthetic, looking more like Ed Wood than Ed Dmytryk. And, of course, two hours of unremitting beatings, dismemberments, disembowelments, empalements, and other tortures, played for laughs, interspersed with babes out of a Maxim or Grand Theft Auto whose #1 and #2 virtues (in order) are willingness to have sex and being major hardasses. So the question to ask is: are you a 14-year-old male or not? Mark's review (stupid points): ??

Happy May Day One Month Early

A site for working stiffs everywhere--and the place I first heard the infamous Psycho O.C. Mom call to 911 over her cheeseburger.