Just think of me as the back of Entertainment Weekly
Movies: My full review of Meet the Robinsons is here, though I use the word "full" loosely -- it was cut down by a hundred or two words, mostly just for the sake of cutting it (because if you can convey a point in fewer sentences by merely oversimplifying what I'm saying and maybe taking out some examples, why not?). I'm not sure why this happens to my PopMatters reviews so often, given that other film reviews on the site run several hundred words longer than most of my drafts, and sometimes twice as long as "my" final versions. It also mis-lists the voice cast as an amalgam of people who voiced supporting characters and people who I'm not sure are in the movie at all, taking the IMDB listings at face value and ignoring the actually-researched cast list I provided. Bitch bitch bitch.
DVD: PopMatters is asking for nominations for a staff-wide "50 DVDs movie-lovers must own" list, but I don't know if I can really participate. I could say that the (largely out-of-print) two-disc versions of Fight Club, Moulin Rouge, Almost Famous, and Anchorman are the best ones around, but do I really think anyone besides, you know, fans of those movies MUST own them?
TV: I should just stop myself from knowing this kind of thing, but check it. Scary/crazy Veronica Mars fans started their own LiveJournal community (communities?) because they feel persecuted by people criticizing their endless criticisms in the main community. One facet of these new vengeful-fan communities: cancellation campaigns. Yes, some people are so mad at the show (which has had a shift of about, I don't know, eight percent, from the first season to the current third) that they are writing to The CW telling them they should cancel it, thus finding a creative solution to the dilemma of how to waste your life once you don't like a particular TV show anymore. For one such campaign, someone wrote a locked post with contact info for a CW higher-up. Another member of the community who wasn't vehemently anti-Veronica took this info and posted it in the regular community. A
200-comment melee ensued, with multiple people actually making a straight-faced claim that posting this "locked" information "publicly" was unethical. Whenever anyone pointed out that the kind of person who gets upset about someone's efforts to undermine a frankly malicious cancellation campaign, the crazy people responded saying that was NOT the point; the POINT was that information from a PRIVATE post was reposted publicly. Yes: private information. So private that it was posted on the internet. It's almost as if "locking" a livejournal post has absolutely no legal, ethical, or moral heft. The thread was pretty much over by the time I saw it, so I'm just mentioning it here to vent about what total fucking idiots these people are. Jerks, too: who starts a cancellation campaign as vengeance for the show not getting them off the way fanfiction does? EDIT: In more positive TV news, HELL YEAH we got some 30 Rock season-two action. Now do the worm!
Music: From reading SPIN and Wired and Rolling Stone and the various internets, I've read countless articles about new ways to experience music. Radio is dead, CD sales are dead, iTunes and MySpace are very much alive but overwhelmingly vast, so people turn to music blogs or internet radio or whatever the article is covering and/or promoting. One of these jillion articles got me thinking about how and why I like the bands I like -- not their qualities, which are pretty easy to pinpoint because I can be pretty fussy -- but how they were even brought to my attention in the first place. I find this especially confounding now that many of my traditional sources (friends' cars, time spent at college radio stations, acceptable commercial radio), too, have dried up. I don't do college radio, and I don't spend too much time in friends' cars anymore. The former gained me greater familiarity with the Mountain Goats and the Dismemberment Plan; the latter got me Radiohead and Blur and Pixies exposure. One of my longest-standing devotions, to They Might Be Giants, was started by Jeff talking them up during fourth-period lunch in tenth grade. Chris sent me "Me and the Major" and bam, Belle and Sebastian. Rob would be very pleased if I mentioned that I got into Sleater-Kinney because he heard "You're No Rock and Roll Fun," sent me the mp3 telling me I was clearly going to listen to it and buy their album, and then sat back and watched as I did exactly that within a couple of weeks. Rilo Kiley came from a couple of songs Marisa put on tapes for me, and the Hold Steady, though I heard some of the Pitchfork hype, pretty much came through Ben giving me a copy of his Best Music of the First Half of '05 CD (still don't really get LCD Soundsystem, though, the same way I don't really get !!!). Downloading is still usually the way to go, but it's hard to sort through all of the music out there that seems so specialized. I really liked a Mew MP3 I had so I got the whole album and realized that this is music for a particular mood or craving that I don't know if I'll ever actually have. I got an older Thrills album because they always sounded like something I would enjoy, and indeed, I did enjoy listening to So Much for the City but don't remember much of anything about it now. Queens College bookstore had that last !!! album (Louden Up Now, not the one that just came out) for 75% off, so I checked that out; I'm surprised by how little happens on it. I was semi-obsessed with "I Love the Valley OH!" (thanks Chris) but I'm wary of Xiu Xiu and that mini-crop of bands that all seem to take a vaguely Andy Dick-ish approach to sexuality. I downloaded a bunch of Pitchfork's 2006 singles and found out I might like Be Your Own Pet (maybe I would've been happier not knowing). I feel like I'm firing shots in the dark. Unrelated: does anyone want to go see Fountains of Wayne with me in a couple of weeks? I'm sort of on the fence about it because the new album isn't great and the concert is the night after I'm seeing Jarvis (and at the same mugly venue). But I haven't seen them since before Welcome Interstate Managers came out, and, I dunno, I could go either way.
Books: I am in the middle of way too many books. I still haven't finished Lost Girls, I'm a couple of stories away from finishing Animal Crackers, I didn't finish The Golden Compass for class and then never went back to it though I intend to before the movie comes out (mainly because it has a fucking awesome bear in it; the rest is pretty convoluted and I hear it only gets worse in the later books), and I've taken Winesburg, Ohio on at least three vacations in the past year, thinking I might start it during downtime. Plus, I have to read Zadie Smith's On Beauty by the end of the year under threat of punishment, not because it's just that good, but because I made Marisa move it to the new apartment. Also: Make Love!* *The Bruce Campbell Way. Once I get through this YA course, hopefully I can work on adjusting my grown-up-reading ratio. In the meantime, it's Boy Meets Boy for me. Plus: comics. I buy about six comic books regularly, and two of them come out about once a year. One of those, Optic Nerve, was taken off this week's comics shipping list at the last minute and isn't on next week's, so I guess it's off to Rocketship with me. But I did get Buffy "Season 8" #2. That, a screening of Hot Fuzz, and a new Lost are about ready to make my night.
DVD: PopMatters is asking for nominations for a staff-wide "50 DVDs movie-lovers must own" list, but I don't know if I can really participate. I could say that the (largely out-of-print) two-disc versions of Fight Club, Moulin Rouge, Almost Famous, and Anchorman are the best ones around, but do I really think anyone besides, you know, fans of those movies MUST own them?
TV: I should just stop myself from knowing this kind of thing, but check it. Scary/crazy Veronica Mars fans started their own LiveJournal community (communities?) because they feel persecuted by people criticizing their endless criticisms in the main community. One facet of these new vengeful-fan communities: cancellation campaigns. Yes, some people are so mad at the show (which has had a shift of about, I don't know, eight percent, from the first season to the current third) that they are writing to The CW telling them they should cancel it, thus finding a creative solution to the dilemma of how to waste your life once you don't like a particular TV show anymore. For one such campaign, someone wrote a locked post with contact info for a CW higher-up. Another member of the community who wasn't vehemently anti-Veronica took this info and posted it in the regular community. A
200-comment melee ensued, with multiple people actually making a straight-faced claim that posting this "locked" information "publicly" was unethical. Whenever anyone pointed out that the kind of person who gets upset about someone's efforts to undermine a frankly malicious cancellation campaign, the crazy people responded saying that was NOT the point; the POINT was that information from a PRIVATE post was reposted publicly. Yes: private information. So private that it was posted on the internet. It's almost as if "locking" a livejournal post has absolutely no legal, ethical, or moral heft. The thread was pretty much over by the time I saw it, so I'm just mentioning it here to vent about what total fucking idiots these people are. Jerks, too: who starts a cancellation campaign as vengeance for the show not getting them off the way fanfiction does? EDIT: In more positive TV news, HELL YEAH we got some 30 Rock season-two action. Now do the worm!
Music: From reading SPIN and Wired and Rolling Stone and the various internets, I've read countless articles about new ways to experience music. Radio is dead, CD sales are dead, iTunes and MySpace are very much alive but overwhelmingly vast, so people turn to music blogs or internet radio or whatever the article is covering and/or promoting. One of these jillion articles got me thinking about how and why I like the bands I like -- not their qualities, which are pretty easy to pinpoint because I can be pretty fussy -- but how they were even brought to my attention in the first place. I find this especially confounding now that many of my traditional sources (friends' cars, time spent at college radio stations, acceptable commercial radio), too, have dried up. I don't do college radio, and I don't spend too much time in friends' cars anymore. The former gained me greater familiarity with the Mountain Goats and the Dismemberment Plan; the latter got me Radiohead and Blur and Pixies exposure. One of my longest-standing devotions, to They Might Be Giants, was started by Jeff talking them up during fourth-period lunch in tenth grade. Chris sent me "Me and the Major" and bam, Belle and Sebastian. Rob would be very pleased if I mentioned that I got into Sleater-Kinney because he heard "You're No Rock and Roll Fun," sent me the mp3 telling me I was clearly going to listen to it and buy their album, and then sat back and watched as I did exactly that within a couple of weeks. Rilo Kiley came from a couple of songs Marisa put on tapes for me, and the Hold Steady, though I heard some of the Pitchfork hype, pretty much came through Ben giving me a copy of his Best Music of the First Half of '05 CD (still don't really get LCD Soundsystem, though, the same way I don't really get !!!). Downloading is still usually the way to go, but it's hard to sort through all of the music out there that seems so specialized. I really liked a Mew MP3 I had so I got the whole album and realized that this is music for a particular mood or craving that I don't know if I'll ever actually have. I got an older Thrills album because they always sounded like something I would enjoy, and indeed, I did enjoy listening to So Much for the City but don't remember much of anything about it now. Queens College bookstore had that last !!! album (Louden Up Now, not the one that just came out) for 75% off, so I checked that out; I'm surprised by how little happens on it. I was semi-obsessed with "I Love the Valley OH!" (thanks Chris) but I'm wary of Xiu Xiu and that mini-crop of bands that all seem to take a vaguely Andy Dick-ish approach to sexuality. I downloaded a bunch of Pitchfork's 2006 singles and found out I might like Be Your Own Pet (maybe I would've been happier not knowing). I feel like I'm firing shots in the dark. Unrelated: does anyone want to go see Fountains of Wayne with me in a couple of weeks? I'm sort of on the fence about it because the new album isn't great and the concert is the night after I'm seeing Jarvis (and at the same mugly venue). But I haven't seen them since before Welcome Interstate Managers came out, and, I dunno, I could go either way.
Books: I am in the middle of way too many books. I still haven't finished Lost Girls, I'm a couple of stories away from finishing Animal Crackers, I didn't finish The Golden Compass for class and then never went back to it though I intend to before the movie comes out (mainly because it has a fucking awesome bear in it; the rest is pretty convoluted and I hear it only gets worse in the later books), and I've taken Winesburg, Ohio on at least three vacations in the past year, thinking I might start it during downtime. Plus, I have to read Zadie Smith's On Beauty by the end of the year under threat of punishment, not because it's just that good, but because I made Marisa move it to the new apartment. Also: Make Love!* *The Bruce Campbell Way. Once I get through this YA course, hopefully I can work on adjusting my grown-up-reading ratio. In the meantime, it's Boy Meets Boy for me. Plus: comics. I buy about six comic books regularly, and two of them come out about once a year. One of those, Optic Nerve, was taken off this week's comics shipping list at the last minute and isn't on next week's, so I guess it's off to Rocketship with me. But I did get Buffy "Season 8" #2. That, a screening of Hot Fuzz, and a new Lost are about ready to make my night.