Category Archives: Pop Culture

Don’t Spam the Messenger

iChatI’ve had to remove my iChat/AOL Instant Messenger screen name from my already fairly outdated About page because in the past month or two, I’ve become the victim of some pretty frequent IM spamming. There’s nothing interesting or clever about this junk advertising, aside from the fact that it gets delivered over a previously spam-free communications channel; in fact, it’s probably among the more banal and least innovative ways of capitalizing on a new medium that I’ve seen.

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Long Haul in Middle Earth

Return of the KingFor fans who don’t want the J.R.R. Tolkien “Lord of the Rings” trilogy to ever come to an end, director Peter Jackson has apparently done his very best to fulfill that wish with his interminable, ass-numbing, bladder-busting “Return of the King.” It clocks in somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred hours and goes to great pains to bring satisfying resolutions to nearly every one of the bakers’s dozen of protagonists and almost all eight billion of the supporting characters in this epic tale of short people and cloak-lovers.

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I Found Summer

Donna SummerAs a know-nothing, seventeen year old snob with an ill-informed set of rules for the way art and music should be made, I wouldn’t have given a second thought to completely passing by and paying no attention to a Donna Summer album. But after reading a recent interview with her, my thirtysomething curiosity was provoked, and I bought myself a copy of her disco-era classic “Love to Love You Baby” today. First of all, this cover is remarkable, a gloriously posed expression of emerging sexuality. And second, this music is beautiful, a lush and lilting dance-floor reverie. I regret how long it took me to open up to it.

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Devolution Number Three

The Matrix RevolutionsWhat I was thinking last night while watching “The Matrix Revolutions” at the local megaplex was, “What the fuck is this movie?!” At times I was sure it was a version of “Battlefield Earth” made for people who refused to watch “Battlefield Earth;”a bloated, brutal mess of a film obsessed only with shallow spectacle. This movie sucks. It’s fraught with the kind of decadent, rampant tedium that only multimillion dollar Hollywood budgets can buy — the kind that the original “Matrix” put to shame — and weighed down even further by miserable dialogue delivered by miserably directed actors.

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Media Savvy

On the MediaNPR’s “On the Media” has got to be my favorite of the many excellent radio programs on that radio network; it’s by far the most enlightening and entertaining weekly exercise in parsing the complex motives behind media reporting available anywhere. While cooped up in the office lately, I’ve been glad to be able to access the past month of its archives on the Web site, and gladder still to see that they’ve begun offering these shows in MP3 format, and no longer solely in RealAudio. In fact, I’ve always felt that all public radio programming should be available in the open MP3 standard, rather than in proprietary formats like RealAudio or Windows Media; there’s a nice symmetry there. I hope that Marketplace follows suit.

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Pulp Faction

Relaxed MuscleJarvis Cocker, ex-front man of the destined to be legendary Britpop combo Pulp, is about to release the first full-length CD from his new project, the provocatively named Relaxed Muscle. I had my first sampling today of the song “Be Real,” which is rather shadily offered for download today at Fluxblog. This song is great! It’s like some weird collision of Pulp, “Heroes”-era Bowie and the Fall. It has me totally enthusiastic for an impending album for the first time in a long time. Cocker has always struck me as an oddball genius on the verge of charicaturizing himself into obscurity, so I’m thankful that, in this song at least, he has kept his wits about him and written a truly superb track. You can also catch a video for another of his new tunes at NME.com.

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Onion on an Elf

Everyone thinks The Onion is gut-bustingly hilarious and so do I, but if it came down to choosing between the faux newspaper’s satiric content — The Onion proper — and its supplemental entertainment section — The Onion A.V. Club — I’m almost certain I would choose the latter. This section, composed primarily of movie, music, video and book reviews, is highly underrated or at least under-noticed.

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The Kill Bill Tour of Japan

Kill Bill“Kill Bill” is like a kind of delicious cinematic dessert commingled with a helping of tongue-piercing thumbtacks; it is at once sweetly delirious and deeply offensive. This mix is about the right combination for Quentin Tarantino, a writer-director who seems to go out of his way to make incredibly disgusting movies, all of which will be remembered as pioneering artistic statements but never without inciting a terrible queasiness in some subsection of his audience.

After having steeled my stomach through the sheer viciousness of “Reservoir Dogs,” the shock-for-shock’s sake of the overrated but still compelling “Pulp Fiction” and the dodgy blaxploitation-philia of “Jackie Brown,” I can say that I had not counted myself among those who took issue with the director’s wanton desire to piss off just as many people as he delights.

So, I figure, it makes sense that I find “Kill Bill” to be just about the worst piece of Orientalism to make it before discerning movie audiences in quite some time. It’s my turn to be indignant.

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Pain in Vain

YankeesYou can call me a fair weather fan, but when the home team is behind, I don’t think I’m constitutionally suited to watching baseball. This is the situation I find myself in this evening, watching the Yankees struggle against the Red Sox in the seventh and deciding game of the American League Championship Series.

The winner moves on to the World Series, and the loser spends the winter in ignominy — this kind of drama is the definition of good ball, but I find it’s a sort of drama both too excruciating and too superfluous for me to watch. That is, I am endlessly fascinated by the game but I find these moments of extreme competitive consequence to be too much, too engrossing and too demanding of my emotional energy. What’s more, I find something subliminally complicit in watching, as if I’m somehow partaking in my team’s progressive defeat. This is all completely irrational, I know… but with everything else going on in my life, I’d just as soon not watch these pivotal matches and thereby save myself the exhaustion. Anyway, go Yankees!

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