Great Leader Tells It Like It Is

"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."

- Bush W. Jong-Il

Aww....Kitties! 2

Masquerading as small automobiles.

We love Great Leader! 9

Um...hold on...he believes what????

Corin Tucker

I'm the world's worst starstruck fan, especially around musicians as powerful as Sleater-Kinney's amazing singer/guitarist. So it's reassuring to learn that, behind that shredding voice, Corin's just a normal person.

Oh, and while we're on the subject of S-K: which of this gifted, volatile, and complex threesome are you? I'd be Carrie!!!

Paris Hilton is Michaelangelo

I don't know what media aestheticians have to say about this. But reading about Phil Ochs and his association with the Yippies reminded me that they were pioneers of a media art form that had nothing to do with using media like broadcasting and video to simulate their real-world incarnations and everything to do with using the media themselves, unmediated except by their big-money gatekeepers, to make political or artistic statements (never mutually exclusive categories). So let's give it up for Angelina Jolie and Johnny Cochran and Madonna and Paris Hilton. The short-term artistic goal is get noticed at all costs. The extent to which you can rivet the attention of thousands of otherwise disengaged, alienated people with your antics over an extended period of time is the real art form of the past twenty years. And the best part of it is that it's both so perfectly capitalist (let the market set the rewards!) and so perfectly punk rock (monkeywrench the oppressor!), so perfectly modern (impossible without broadcast technology from satellites to the Internet) and so perfectly ancient (creating meaning associationally, largely visually/preverbally).

Mark Goes To The Movies

Palindromes (dir. Tod Solondz) I suppose if you're interested in this film, you know what you're getting into. Tod Solondz is as reliable an independent-film brand as Hal Hartley, Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson. All of whom are directors whose work I like, and I suspect I like it because I think they're all writers first and directors second. So though Solondz does have his own visual sense (the colors of suburban-mall America amped up just a little), what's most impressive about his movies is how the scripts set up one really uncomfortable joke after another and then detonate them. So if you find his bleakness blackly hilarious instead of skin-crawlingly nihilistic, this film will be right up your alley. Mark's review: ***½

Listening

Sleater-Kinney, The Woods (Sub Pop) I know it's all too PC and all, but this has been one of my two favorite bands (along with Yo La Tengo, for completely different reasons) for a long time now. Speaking as a fan of catchy Sleater like Rid of Me or All Hands on the Bad One even more than anxious/intense Sleater like Call the Doctor and The Hot Rock and this one, I wish it was a little sweeter. But one thing I love about this band is that it's always evolving. And this one reminds me a little of the transition Polly Harvey made between Rid of Me and To Bring You My Love: from really raw open mix to using a creative producer and trying out a lot of different new sounds, the extra money spent on the production was well spent. So they still inspire me, and their guitars still remind me of people I've admired from Captain Beefheart to the Clash and the three-way conversation these three women have keeps it real at all times. And they still turn me into a nervous wreck sometimes. And did I mention that Janet Weiss is one of the greatest rock drummers, like, ever? Man, if she and Dave Grohl had a baby...yeah, and if they released "Rollercoaster" as a single with a kick-ass video...

Hardest I've laughed all week....

Was at Anthony Lane's delightful poioson-pen letter to George Lucas in this week's New Yorker.

Anakin, too, is a divided figure, wrenched between his Jedi devotion to selfless duty and a lurking hunch that, if he bides his time and trashes his best friends, he may eventually get to wear a funky black mask and start breathing like a horse.

Mark and Barb and Robin Go to the Movies

Kingdom of Heaven (dir. Ridley Scott)
I've read at least one review of this movie about that Crusades that accused it of being too PC, but I'll take this flavor of correctness over James Dobson's (or Osama bin Laden's). Orlando Bloom models wonderfully, Jeremy Irons and Liam Neeson chew scenery gracefully, and I stayed awake through all two and a half hours.
Mark's review: ***

Listening

Booker Ervin, The Freedom Book (Original Jazz Classics) Interesting that Booker Ervin was in one of Charles Mingus' bands with Eric Dolphy. Though they sound completely different, Ervin is harmonically free, melodically voice-like, and rhythmically a thowback to Coleman Hawkins and Don Byas in much the same way Dolphy was. That's the secret to stretching the music: make sure at least some part of it ties into the tradition and extends it.

R.I.P.

A terrible couple of months for losing great jazz bassists: Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, Percy Heath.

Cry me a river, Detroit!

Someday these tanks will be museum pieces like those spaceshipmobiles from the late 50s or those aircraft carriers on wheels from '69-'73. Only, jeezis, they are so ugly!!! (Get password from Bugmenot.)

We're with Stupid...I mean, Great Leader!

And how fucking stupid does he think the American people are???? At least as stupid as he is...

President Bush's meticulously stage-managed presentations on Social Security have slowly shifted into a new phase, in which White House aides find misinformed young people to share the stage with the president and assert that Social Security won't be there at all when they retire.

And rather than correcting them on their misconception -- government estimates, after all, say that after 2041 Social Security will still be able to pay at least three-quarters of currently promised benefits without any changes -- Bush congratulates them on their perspicacity.

Bush isn't saying much new at these events, and attention in Washington is currently focused elsewhere.

But as he steadily pivots the focal point of his events from older people to younger, he is increasingly using hand-picked people under 30 as props in a scare campaign.

He's still telling seniors not to listen to all those unspecified people trying to frighten them by saying their benefits are about to be cut.

But he himself is forcefully asserting to young people that for them, when it comes to Social Security, the sky is falling.

Mark Goes To The Movies

Crash (dir. Paul Guigan) Initially I was really annoyed by this movie. It seemed like the characters were stereotypes from your typical liberal critique of soulless, economically-segregated Los Angeles: the soulless Westside yuppies, the hard-working Mexican ex-gangster, the racist honky cop, the self-loathing African-American sellout, the enterprising Iranian immigrant family, yadda, yadda. And the plot (another of those twisted multicharacter multistory tapestries like Short Cuts or Pulp Fiction, to name two L.A.-specific antecedents) does pile on the coincidences. But I'll watch anything Don Cheadle stars in (except, shamefully, Hotel Rwanda, which Barb warned me was a little rough for my sensitive sensibilities), and a couple of sequences (one where the policeman saves the life of a woman he molested during a traffic stop the night before, another where the ex-gangbanger calms his beautiful five-year-old daughter's fear of random bullets coming in her bedroom window) are just breathtaking. It might seem corny that the characters all come to more-or-less happy conclusions after the 24 hours the movie covers, but as intense as the preceding two and a quarter hours were I was relieved and grateful. Mark's review: ****

Heroine of the Week

You go, girl!!!!

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (dir. Garth Jennings) I know I'm going to have Homeboy Adams' peeps....ah, never mind. This book is firmly lodged in the Nerd Canon as well as the Americans Who Love British Humor canon, and though I've never made it more than 20 pages past any of Doug Adams' books, I did hear him speak twice in the space of a couple of months and definitely heard the same whimsy and kindness I got from his writing. So I'm not the most reliable reviewer for this movie. But I'll tell you, I laughed my ass off. Jim Henson's people do amazing work, Mos Def is a deft straight man (or straght alien), and Zooey Deschanel's all-around adorable funniness is terrifically right for the love-interest character. So if you have no expectations based on the book, go. Mark's review: ****

Mark Goes to the Movies

XXX: State of the Union (dir. Lee Tamahori) I know I'm going to have homeboy Diesel's peeps all up in my business, but I actually like Ice Cube better as the badass hero in this. There's something endearing about watching this tubby little guy who always looks pissed off jump off of buildings and kung fu bad guys (not to mention demonstrate his skills as a mack daddy!). And while I'm kind of distressed a director who once made so raw and harrowing a film as Once Were Warriors is another in the long line of art house heroes turned high-priced Hollywood whores, at least he knows the #1 and #2 rules of Movies for Testosterone-Poisoned 12-Year Olds: (1) Make sure every woman in the movie (including, God bless her game little heart, the beautiful Nona Gaye, Marvin's daughter) is dressed like a Penthouse Pet of the Month and (2) Make sure something big blows up every ten minutes tops. And hell, he edits videogame footage as well as all those ex-MTV-video guys. Mark's review (stupid points): ????

Speaking of Big Star,

this is a band that sounds like a cross between Big Star and Cheap Trick--but what's amazing is that the guitar player's using the same real reverby Fender guitar parts Alex Chilton plays on Radio City. Hmm...wonder how many other really fine Memphis-Brit hybrids were around then. (I actually kind of dig the South's take on guitar pop--REM, Mitch Easter, Chris Stamey & crew, Superchunk, Continental Drifters...)

While playing songs tonight

I just happened to look up the tab for "I'll Be Back" ("You know, if you break my heart I'll go...") and after marveling at what fluent, imaginative, and addictive songwriters John and Paul (and George) became after, what, less than five years together? And they went on for at least another three years only getting more amazingly good. It's my boomer chauvinism showing through, but I'll say that the Beatles are, to me, the gold standard for pop music after rock became its dominant form. A metric I originally developed for Big Star applies equally to their Liverpool inspirations: count the number of hooks in their song: the verse, the refrain, the bridge, the guitar parts, the bass part. You wind up humming every single one of them.

And hanging out with Tom and Keely and Alan and Vida and Eden remind me of another thing: kids adore Beatles songs, and you and they singing those songs together is more fun than grownups should be allowed to have.

That's one way to put it

Sad story behind girl's decapitation - Crime & Punishment - MSNBC.com

George Will??? Making Sense???

So what the hell is up with this? Cracks in the indomitable G.O.P. coalition???

Repeat after me: "PC is for right-wingers too!!!"

Death and Laughter by Photoshop

My God, where has this Website been all my life??????????

Mmm, Tasty! 8

Ten? Try two teenagers, dude!

He Oughta Know!

Kim Jong Il, meet your American doppelganger!