"Dick Laurent is dead..."

One of the earlier CDs I ever bought with my own money was the soundtrack to the movie Lost Highway. At the time, I didn't have a clue who David Lynch was, I just wanted it because it had a great non-album Smashing Pumpkins song on it, and I kind of liked Nine Inch Nails' "The Perfect Drug" too. It also had Lou Reed, David Bowie, Marilyn Manson, Rammstein (pre-"Du Hast"), and all that crazy Angelo Badalamenti noir-jazz that's in every David Lynch movie. It took me another few years to really care about Lou Reed and David Bowie too, although I at least knew who they were when I was 14.

So tonight, I finally watched the movie, after it was finally released on DVD last month and after I read a couple "wait, maybe we got this wrong" articles about the DVD release by critics, who generally hated it in 1997.

It's an all right movie, I guess. It's unmistakably a David Lynch movie, like everything he does. It's got quite a few "what the hell is this person doing in this movie?" moments; Robert Blake, Henry Rollins, Richard Pryor, Robert Loggia, Marilyn Manson, and Gary freakin' Busey all turn in supporting roles. I found it to be a lot more low-key than the rest of his stuff. First viewings of a David Lynch film are always a little confusing, but they're usually not difficult to stay interested in, like this one was. I would say Lynch fans should watch it, and if you're not a Lynch fan, you're not going to watch it anyway.

Anyway, I really just wanted to show you all this clip, because it's a good example of why we should probably all be terrified of Robert Blake. This thing rivals Daniel Plainview drinkin' up milkshakes in terms of the whole "what the fuck this is insane/awesome" thing.



Supposedly Blake is completely responsible for the way that character looks and acts, which, just... yeesh. Check the huge 1997 cell phone too.

I kinda like how Phillies-Mets is a legitimate rivalry now. For a while it seems like we've really hated the Mets, but the Mets had bigger things to worry about, which fueled the inferiority complex that we Philly fans have, which generally manifests itself as loathing New Yorkers for being such fatheaded smug assholes. So there was no small amount of pleasure in the Phillies not only winning the division last year, but doing it over the New York Mets, who set a new standard for incompetence with the worst season-ending skid ever (finally getting, who else, the '64 Phillies off the hook). Even after the Phillies got swept by the Rockies in the playoffs, it wasn't heartbreaking, because the Phillies were division champs, and the Mets fans had to wallow in disgust all winter long, and we have bragging rights for a whole year. And now Phillies-Mets is a big-ticket rivalry, and Fox's game of the week.

I think that's pretty cool. As long as the Phillies start winning some damn games here.

sunshine 'n' water 'n' trees 'n' such

A couple months ago, I was sent down to Maryland to work with a pipe crew for a week when my other job was shut down to dry out (February is no good for construction). We were putting in a sewer line in a sort of village that's pretty typical of the area, a collection of houses bunched near the shore of the Chesapeake, a village in the sense that it's a group of homes that are all in the same area, but not in the sense that the homes sprung up around a central location for any reason other than that there's a large body of water nearby.

I knew the water was close by, but I didn't know how close (I figured within half a mile or so), and the first morning I was there it was extremely foggy, so I was lucky to be able to see the machine at the other end of the pipe I was standing next to. Then around noon, the fog cleared, and the sun came out, and holy shit, there was the beach 50 feet away from us, along with possibly the most beatiful waterfront landscape I've ever seen.

Anyway, I was just thinking about that, because one of the guys who was at that job got sent to mine today, and I was realizing that part of the reason I don't completely hate my job is because while a lot of people I know are staring at a computer screen in a cubicle, I'm outside enjoying the nice weather, and sometimes, nice scenery too. It was nice to not have to stare at nothing but dirt all day.

I was also thinking about the fact that the bay down there is one of the most tranquil and gorgeous places I've ever been, and I've lived most of my life 25 miles away from it, and I've been there something like three times in my entire life. I've been to Disney World that many times, and that's 1,000 miles away and also horrible. Christ.

Other random thought for today: I kind of think I'm going to listen to I Often Dream of Trains by Robyn Hitchcock every day for the next three months. It is a wonderful album and I have no idea how I lived for 24 years without it. Well... 23, it came out after I was born.

soapbox time!

You know, in Barack Obama I finally had a presidential candidate that I actually admired. If I wasn't necessarily ga-ga about the idea of him being president, that's basically because I don't think that it's actually possible for me to go ga-ga for a politician, no matter who it is.

Then he had to go and put his foot in his damn mouth. I'm not about to switch who I'm voting for next week, but I'm not going to gloss it over and pretend it's not an issue either. It's not an issue of him being "out of touch," it's about him acting like a condescending ass. He not only said that religious people and gun owners have turned to those things because of economic issues, he also put them on the same level as racism, nationalism, and bigotry. That's not exactly small potatoes when you're trying to convince those people to put you in charge of them. It's condescending at best, insulting at worst.

Being from a somewhat depressed, small Pennsylvania town myself (not coal-country depressed, but not exactly thriving either), I would like to point out that what he said is actually true for a small minority of people, but is still horseshit. I'd also like to say that for about as long as I've had a political sensibility, I've always bristled at the myth that liberals are out of touch elitists. That's horseshit, too, but the reason that Republicans are able to convince so many people that that's true is because people keep giving them perfect ammo to do it, like Obama just did, and if he keeps it up, he's going to end up just like John Kerry. Fortunately he's probably got people to remind him every day never to say something like that again.

Again, barring unforeseen circumstances, I'm still voting for Obama next week (and in November too, John McCain scares the hell out of me), but it's naive to pretend that this isn't a concern, if not about his personal views toward small town people, than at least from an electability standpoint. If you compare his comments with Hillary Clinton's deluded fantasy about sniper fire in Bosnia, I would say Obama's is the bigger faux pas, and more likely to bite him in the ass later on.

when I grow up to be a man...

When I grow up, I want to be the sad loser who watches R-rated movies with a clicker in hand to post the exact number of usages of the word "fuck" (and its variations, of course) to imdb.com trivia pages.

With some hard work and a little luck, I could be the guy who edits this Wikipedia article.


Crap, I just ruined my snarkiness by actually browsing the article and finding something I consider amusing: Apparently Good Will Hunting dropped more F-bombs than Trainspotting. Damn you, Wikipedia! Your utter banality has once again proven surprisingly alluring!

I have nothing of importance to say.

The nice thing about a wireless network is being able to waste time on your computer and sit outside enjoying the nice weather at the same time.

Suck my dick, WIRES!

I don't understand the rage directed toward Uwe Boll. If I could banish one filmmaker to Siberia, and I had Uwe Boll, Michael Bay, the guys who keep making these "Scary Movie" and "Meet the Spartans" things, and Brett Ratner in front of me, Boll would be the last guy I'd get rid of.

I can see people not liking him actually boxing his harshest critics, but I think that's a pretty funny publicity stunt. Nobody made anybody get into the ring with him, and for fuck's sake, nobody is making anybody pay attention to him, or constantly shoving his crap down our throats, which is more than can be said for whichever 80s cartoon, 70s movie, or 60s sitcom is being made into a shitty movie this week.

SFA OK

Try as I may, I can't really get into the Super Furry Animals' latest album, Hey Venus! I lauded their last album, Love Kraft, thusly: "the slowed pace has enabled the Super Furry Animals to make the most coherent and focused album of their career, and even if their whirlwind compositions no longer make your head spin, there are still many gorgeous subtleties to be found in their characteristically lush orchestrations and brilliant pop melodies." (Take a trip in the wayback machine here.)

Hey Venus! doesn't quite have the stately strut of Love Kraft, but the mood and the sound are similar enough. So why can't I get into it? I've never heard an album by these guys that I didn't like until this one.

The answer I keep coming up with is that this one feels kind of half-assed. For an album that clocks in at under 40 minutes, it sags a lot. A handful of the songs, at three minutes, still feel too long by a minute. A couple of them sound like song titles that were stretched into songs as fast as they could be written ("Baby Ate My Eightball," "The Gift That Keeps Giving"). Then there's "Run-Away," which is either a very lazily written song, or some kind of experiment in how many elements of other songs can be borrowed without giving any credit. Songs checked on that list include "Be My Baby" (drums), "What Becomes of the Brokenhearted" (melody) "Every Time We Say Goodbye" (lyrics) and, uh, "Runaway" (title), but I'm sure Led Zeppelin still has them beat somehow or another. It's also the best and most interesting song on the album.

Listening to Hey Venus! makes me feel the same way that I do when I listen to Steely Dan. It's eminently listenable, immaculately recorded and produced (as usual for the Super Furry Animals), and there's a part of me that feels like I'm being had for even trying to take this so seriously (never more so than during the baffling "Suckers!").

Maybe I can break it out in two or three years when they put another album out and it'll sound a lot better.

I'm pretty sure Ben-Hur and Spartacus are the same movie, anyway

There are plenty of examples of how political involvement can sully the reputation of an artist, actor, or performer in the minds of roughly half the population, and there are examples on both sides of the spectrum. Jane Fonda is one example. Barbra Streisand is one. Ted Nugent is one. And hey, here's where I'm going with this, Charlton Heston is another.

I first encountered Charlton Heston as the star of every hilariously overblown epic ever made in the 50s and 60s (and every time Ben-Hur or The Ten Commandments came on TV, my dad would proclaim the movie's untouchable greatness, and get nostalgic for the days when ham-fisted history buffs like David Lean and Cecil B. DeMille ruled Hollywood). In the late 90s, Heston became more familiar as the face of angry gun-toting conservatives across the country, and that's about when I started developing an irrational hatred of Heston, a feeling that only grew when I saw him in Bowling for Columbine actin' a fool.

Here we are years later, and Heston died, and I can scarcely remember why I hate him so much. The "cold dead hands" moment sticks in my brain, but I had to do some research to realize that he was a conservative nutjob well before he became president of the NRA. Check out this quote: "Somewhere in the pipeline of public funding is sure to be a demand from a disabled lesbian on welfare that the Metropolitan Opera stage her rap version of Carmen as translated to Ebonics."

Ouch! Take that, lesbians, disabled people, publicly funded arts, opera in general, rap, and, uh, black people!
I was working on the best "cold dead hands" joke to make about his passing (rough draft: "Are Charlton Heston's dead hands cold enough to pry his gun away from them yet?"), but The A.V. Club came up with a better one, found here, along with the moment that will almost certainly be better remembered than "damn dirty ape" or "let my people go" or "I am Spartacus" or whatever. Ok, that last one was Kirk Douglas. Anyway, reproduced caption: "Has anyone checked to make sure nobody has stolen Charlton Heston's musket in the last couple of days?"

I guess you could say I wasn't terribly sad at the news of his death. The other quip I came up with had something to do with him and Ronald Reagan and Alzheimer's and delusions of grandeur. It was pretty mean.

Unrelated: I just saw Meat Loaf in a commercial for AT&T or something, and it was kind of awesome. Another ad was for a movie from "the guys who brought you Knocked Up." I'm quoting it because those are the exact words that appeared on the screen. How pointlessly vague is that shit? It's weird that the only time you ever see that type of thing is in ads for shitty-looking comedy movies that I hope I never see. Like the above example, or anything with Rob Schneider or the Wayans. We need to adapt this sales tactic to other mediums. "Shine a Light, from the guys who brought you Taxi Driver and 'Start Me Up.'" I think that record labels should start advertising any Brian Eno-produced album as being from "the dude who brought you The Joshua Tree." Hell, why even limit it to albums he produced? Which record label was Robert Wyatt's Comicopera out on? Print this in Rolling Stone ASAP: "Robert Wyatt's Comicopera: there was a dude who was involved in making The Joshua Tree who was also tangentially involved in this project." Platinum by May, guaranteed.

Wait, what was this about? Oh right, Charlton Heston... nah, I'm done with that dude.