you know, i’m a normal girl. nothing too crazy, like having a cat farm as i’ll never have children. i have a boyfriend, he’s mad cute and likes me!!! i don’t talk to myself in public. often. ok, that’s a lie, but i’m pretty balanced. but i have a special relationship that i just can’t hide.
oooh yeah gurl, work that shit
her name is blackberry curve, and we’ve been together two years now. two special years. we’ve had our ups and downs, you know, like everyone else. but she keeps me connected, mostly. i look out for her too. i get her insurance and even clothe her in boring little gel covers. you know, in case i drop her all crunk like. but when she slips out of that cover….damn!
i wish that we could talk about it, but there, that's the problem
it’s a sleek phone! it is! i hear other peeps talking about their texting machines; iphone, androids, misc machines out there. yeah, that’s all great for you. it is. but i’ve gotten to know this thing, and change is hard. you get this shiny pretty thing, never bothering to read all the pamphlets and watch the tapes. this BB and i have gotten to know each other. she takes my photos, sends my facebook updates, tweets my nonsense, and deletes my shitty spam email. she’s been an important part of my life!!! there’s few humans i would trust with those tasks, but i trust her!
dare i? no...no, maybe she isn't good enough to have my last name.
so here we are, at contract renewal time. i put a lot of faith in you, but like all old models, you’re breaking down. not what you used to be. it’s like the relationship that just starts to fall apart. i don’t get texts because you won’t get off your fat ass and receive them. you put your needs ahead of mine, always needing charging and self absorbed things like that. i pay your bills! keep you looking good! hate to go all janet, but what have you done for me lately??? she can’t blame me for having that wandering eye….ooooOOOooooyeah!
sound of silver talk to me. makes you want to feel like a teenager.
it’s not to say i don’t believe that someone can find eternal and committed love. i do, it exists, i think? jonathan franzen wrote a little piece about something similar recently. it touched the unfeelingness that i and a lot of people had been feeling. ever since these little devices/angels from heaven had been introduced to our lives. the disconnect of connection. the like of ourselves when others *like* us. “we like the mirror and the mirror likes us.” this is a topic that’s been covered-ish. what did i mostly take from this article? franzen had a blackberry!! my literary idol shares my love, but is also a bird watcher…so there’s that.
so this isn’t a decision to take lightly, obviously. she’s meant a lot to me. sadly though, there’s a ton of the twist, but we’re fresh out of shout….to be continued….
So August Bravo tweets at me last night: “super 8 didn’t live up to my expectations but was still pretty good.”
It made me wonder, why do we go through life judging things based on our expectations? Obviously, there are a lot of low-level heuristic reasons for this in terms of everyday brain processing. But why do we do this for movies, books, events, personal experiences? It’s tempting to say this is a modern age phenomenon. That we didn’t do this before the internet. I mean, did people in Colonial America really walk around saying “man, that play didn’t live up to my expectations. The town cryer totally over-hyped it”? But I’m hesitant. Any time you start thinking that anything new is happening in society, you’re probably going to be wrong. Just ask the lorites. Still, the internet has a way of amplifying the echo chamber in ways that didn’t used to be possible.
The first time I can remember this sort of “didn’t live up to the hype” attitude permeating culture was when the Seinfeld finalé aired. Not that this didn’t happen beforehand, but this is when I started to notice. So Much Hype, they would all say, and the show had Failed To Live Up To It. Soon, this way of thinking seemed to spread to practically any form of entertainment or news event. Y2K? Overhyped! Star Wars Prequel? Didn’t meet my expectations. New Franzen book? HYPED! And so on.
But why does hype matter? Why do we go through life with the need to judge entertainment and events against our expectations? Why is it no longer sufficient to just say “I thought X was okay, but not great.”
The answer probably lies somewhere is the middle of modern internet shared culture, man’s fear of being made a fool, and the apparent need for everyone to have an opinion about everything. I guess it’s easier to talk about yourself and what you wanted from something rather than to articulate a critical viewpoint on it.
I would just posit this: it’s no way to live. Stop thinking about the hype. Ignore the hype. Don’t worry about whether your expectations are too high or too low, because in the end, nobody cares what you thought you would think, and you shouldn’t either. Just take it as it comes. (editor’s note: that’s what she said)
I really liked Super 8. Not a perfect movie by any means. Not a classic. And that’s okay. I can’t even remember the last time I saw a movie like this. Visual storytelling! Steady pacing! Kids who act like kids, not precocious one-liner machines or dead weight! People call this Spielbergian, but I feel like this is a disservice to both Spielberg and JJ Abrams. There was a time, lets call it “the 80s,” when this is what tons of movies looked like. They weren’t just a handful of CGI set pieces strung together by the weakest of scripts with lowest common denominator humor. Sure, maybe the idea wouldn’t be that groundbreaking or original, but at least they made some movies that weren’t remakes, reboots, sequels or adaptations back then. I miss this kind of movie. There should be more like it.
Also, Elle Fanning is ridiculously good in this. Worth seeing it just for her. Star-making.
This is what August Bravo thought. (editor’s note: no, we don’t know what he’s talking about either.)
August Bravo: Ok, I’ll get this off my chest first. The teaser for Super 8 had me really excited to see this movie. JJ Abrams could literally touch my bowel movement and make it into art, so I knew this would be an astonishing movie with some mediocre(ha) special effects.
The great thing about a teaser, especially like the one for Super 8 which I thought was just a working title, is that they say nothing. Ideas are populating your mind.
Naturally, I’m thinking Cthulhu.
Naturally, I’m wrong. How much is this guy going to fuck with us(me)? It’s cool, because it was still very awesome. Not as awesome as I’m thinking in my head because teasers let the mind wander. While most aren’t this broad, people can’t help but think of things beyond their imagination. Why else release a teaser trailer? Because they don’t have enough content to fill a whole trailer? Well yeah, probably. But they want to give the audience a ride. They want their expectations to be high.
And then with the full trailer, they want to smash all your Cthulhu-loving dreams and just show you it’s a movie about some kids with a camera. Albeit, still a very very good movie, with a very meaningful(aliens!!) plot. But audiences expect nothing and something. And I’m sorry that with Abrams I expect everything.
So what if it wasn’t Cthulhu, I still thought it would be something more. Yeah, it would have been cornier if it was more about (spoiler alert!) aliens, rather than having it very down to Earth. But I’m into bad movies. I think expectations are what get the movie going, the audience going. I’ll end it with this. Don’t put practically nothing in your teaser if you don’t want me to dream big.
As far as expectations go, I set mine at an all-time low and I’m generally never disappointed. Generally.
People whose arms were stroked by a robot nurse named Cody felt more comfortable if they believed Cody was cleaning them than if they believed Cody was attempting to comfort them. People who have low serotonin levels underestimate the intimacy shared by couples they do not know. The children of depressed fathers are four times as likely to be spanked, and the brains of depressed mothers are less responsive to the cries of the mothers’ children. Mental illness was going largely untreated among American babies. Test subjects experienced fear when they were given a third, prosthetic arm and researchers threatened that arm with a knife. A connection between violence and happy hour was noted in Wales, where officials planned to move ahead with a badger cull in Pembrokeshire and to rebeaver the countryside near Furnace. In England, Slimbridge scientists surveyed the fatness of swans’ behinds, and doctors treated a three year old for alcoholism. Welsh mountain sheep were deemed capable of following rules. “Sheep have great potential,” said Jenny Morton of Cambridge University. “They’re not as daft as they look.”
Chemists discovered why Van Gogh’s yellows were fading; a Dutch ornithologist remained unsure whether the yellow breasts of great tits change with age but found that the offspring of older females are likelier to die young. In Finland, tawny owls were evolving from gray to brown and sperm quality in humans was deteriorating. Religion was going in extinct in the Czech Republic. A sacred soft-shelled turtle in Hanoi, one of only four species left in the world, was gravely ill yet continued to evade capture. A female mite preserved in amber with her mate was observed to have been controlling the terms of their copulation. Florida could be up to 50 percent older than previously believed. Astrobiologists hypothesized that the first multi-cellular animal resembled cancer. Tonsillectomies make children gain weight. Weight-loss surgery makes children lose weight. Doctors touted the benefits of removing the gallbladder through the vagina. Texas scientists cut holes in the hearts of baby mice; the hearts then healed themselves.
The passages above are from the “Findings” section in the May 2011 issue of Harper’s and were written by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi.
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”
Well, I guess the Rapture didn’t happen, huh? Not today, I guess. I mean, I’m still here. You’re reading this, so I guess you’re still here too, huh? The sad thing about “The Rapture” is that, well, besides it being a fictional event in a set of fables in a funny book of short stories about wizards and demons and old world customs, is that… well, I just don’t know anyone who would be going up in this fantastical sounding Rapture thing. It’s just for the good, right? Well, all the people I know are bad, bad people… And I guess I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Oh well, a shame. But I suppose the Internet will quickly find something else for itself to get excited about, right? But there’s still us and there’s tomorrow and a little more juice to be squeezed out of whatever could be “the future” and there’s whatever could possibly come with that…
This trailer looks so so, but the movie will probably suck: Another Earth.
It’s Pilot Season! Trailers for (just a few of the) new TV shows that were just picked up:
Awake. Which… looks good, looks interesting, but I just don’t see a TV show that I would follow/watch for years and years there. Funny how both it and Another Earth‘s trailer use that song by the Cinematic Orchestra.
Alcatraz. The latest from the J.J. Abrams camp… The 4400 meets Prison Break, featuring Sam Neill and Hurley from Lost. This looks ridiculous, and I’ll watch it and just hope that it’s not another letdown like Fringe.
Person Of Interest. Another from J. J. Abrams, although it seems like it’s mostly just his name on it and the real creative juice is from Jonathan Nolan, writer of The Dark Knight and brother of Christopher. Looks interesting-ish, but Jim Caviezel? Was that really necessary?
“The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented.”
-Dennis Gabor
I had a dream a while back that the world was ending… It was an odd dream, but not a terrible one, I guess. It’s just not something you can prepare for, the end of the world. You can’t ever really be ready for it. You just gotta keep on living, don’t you? And loving and listening to music and dancing and pursuing impossible things and enjoying mundane moments and people and doing all kinds of stupid shit. Take things seriously but maybe enjoy the ridiculous things that surround you just a little bit more? I don’t want to tell you something terribly cliched, like… Live every moment like it’s your last!
No, don’t do that. You’ll probably hurt yourself trying to do that.
But maybe every once in a while, take a single moment and consider that it is your last moment on this beautiful, insane planet, and just really ponder that. And think about what you would do if it wasn’t. Beam yourself into the future and peek in on yourself and see what you’re up to. Take a vacation into the future and see who you are there. Interview yourself and find out what went right and wrong in your life in the moments/weeks/months/years between now and then, and take good notes. And when you come back to the present, remember that little trip. Remember that time you went to the future and appreciate that you’re back here, and now, and then go there again.
Oh well, hopefully this one was good practice for the next time the world (supposedly) ends. Still plenty of time to get your Rapture Playlist just fucking perfect. No sleep til 2012!
Marco Sparks: What an interesting video. That man stabbed himself in the chest! Multiple times! That is some serious follow through.
MD: Huh? Oh, I sent you the wrong one. But i do love that song. Look at this:
and…
Marco: Oh man, that song.
MD: This one is better:
Marco: I just remember hearing it one night, late at night when I was homeless and living with a friend, and I remember loving the song. It’s a tired complaint, I know, but this was back when VH1 and MTV still played… sigh… music videos.
MD: Which one, the Nine Days one? Or Vertical Horizon?
Marco: Oh, the Nine Days one, sorry. But I think a lot part of it had to do with really thinking that the girl in the video was super duper cute.
MD: Yeah, that was probably the real reason. Especially because that Vertical Horizon song is terrible.
Marco: Part of it was also because I was really trying to win over this girl who looked like the girl in the Nine Days video and… I don’t know, maybe I felt justified in my affections by the song/video?
MD: the song is kinda cute, I think.
Marco: She was dating this ginormous drug dealer at the time. Well, not “ginormous,” neither physically not, you know, stature in the suburban drug selling racket, but… well, either way, I just couldn’t compete with the guy. And yeah, the song is fine. Probably better than fine.
MD: Awww. Yeah, drug dealers are very attractive to women. All that money. And all those drugs.
Marco: That particular Vertical Horizon song… I liked it maybe the first time I heard it, but every time after… grating.
MD: It’s the reveal at the end of the song… that HE is the one the girl doesn’t want.
Marco: Of course she doesn’t want him. (He’s hideous.) This…
“Love can be so boring.”
MD: OMG this song.
Marco: There’s a very sad, very tragic playlist of recurring songs that I listened to a lot circa 1999 – 2002ish, and this song was on it intermittently.
MD: I bet we had many of the same songs. This was definitely on mine.
Marco: I feel like I was carrying around this very shallow sense of sadness or regret… like I had lost something that should be crucial but wasn’t, not really, though you at the time you couldn’t convince me of that… and my music reflected that.
MD: Exactly.
Marco: It’s strange that you got me thinking about that cause I was really thinking about a lot of music from back then lately the first summer I moved to this shithole state I live in… I did nothing. Absolutely nothing. Ate shitty food. “Ate shitty” as in “ate terribly.” Drank beer. Lots. Laid on the couch in my huge bedroom listening to music and reading. That was it. Oh, and thought up ridiculous plots of silly Clive Cussler-esque thrillers.
…but that one U2 album, All That You Can’t Leave Behind? I associate that album so strongly, oddly enough, with Bret Easton Ellis’ first book and with Hunter S. Thompson’s The Rum Diary because I listened to that album on repeat while reading those books for the first time that summer.
MD: The first Bret Easton Ellis, that’s Less Than Zero?
Marco: Yeah, Less Than Zero.
Okay, that invisible pain I mentioned… do you want to see a really bad example of a song from that period?
MD: Of course. Always.
Marco: okay, this artist I’m about to bring up is ridiculous and you kind of knew that when she first debuted, but just how ridiculous and plastic hadn’t quite hit yet…
Anyway, her first two singles were just silly radio pop fluff, but this was her third single, I believe, and I remember hearing this song for the first time on headphones while walking somewhere late at night… and it just seemed to resonate with that tragic void living inside me…
MD: hahaha YES! I felt similarly about this song…
Marco: (Holy shit, Lizzy Caplan is in that video.)
It’s probably been so long since i’ve bought an actual CD i’m sad to say because I still like CDs, I’m still a guy who likes CDs, but I have a lot of bad pop punk CDs from that circa Avril era. I mean, I probably have 700 cds and it’s just this incredibly awesome, sexy music collection, but just figure that 30 or so of those cds are from artists like…
and
MD: Nothing to be ashamed of.
Marco: Well, maybe a little, but it was a time and a place and everything changes and you make explorations and sometimes what’s bad is good and vice versa. And blah blah blah. And anyone who doesn’t get that is an idiot, right? Plus, these tiny revelations made here are hardly the worse musical sins I’ve committed as a listener…
Though, thankfully, this was the time period in which was i also really discovering, like, The Get Up Kids, so it wasn’t all bad. And that said, I gotta tell you, I’m sorry, but I can’t join you on the Jason Mraz journey.
MD: hahahahaha.
When I was flying back from Europe with an ex, we had a HORRIBLE fight. And this is like 10+ hours of flying BTW, and I just listened to this Jason Mraz song over and over again on the airplane radio system. It was really quite sad.
Marco: I can imagine. I think I’d like the song if it was a different artist, you know?
MD: Yeah. Jason Mraz is easy to hate.
Marco: And it’s something about Mraz himself that I just despise.
Okay, so I am about to hit you with two megahits from that time period. i don’t know if you’re ready for it.
MD: I’m so fucking ready.
Marco: That is exactly what I wanted to hear. But first, let me just say… Thinking about that Unwritten Law song… I was working where I am currently already when that song was unleashed on me and it’s so vivid in my memory the girl I had a crush on then that I associate that song with… I mean, nothing ever happened with that girl. She thought I was profoundly weird without ever realizing just how right she was and yet I still think of her when I hear it. Anyways… Prepare thyself!
MD: Getting ready…
Marco: You say that but can ever truly be ready to go back to… this:
…and also this:
BOOM!
MD: OH MAN, that Lifehouse guy. Do you think he made his voice sound like that?
Marco: Ha ha. Do you remember where you were when you first said out loud, “NO WAY, THAT BIG VOICE DOES NOT SOUND LIKE THAT LITTLE GUY FROM THE CALLING.”
MD: Wow. Seriously. I had no idea this band even had a name. It was just a song that was everywhere at the time.
Marco: Like back then, as they were signing their record contract they must’ve known they would not last.
It would be so much easier if we were talking about just the 90s here…
or late 90′s fin de siècle music, but this period we’re talking about, that early 00s, was just so fucking weird. Here’s a really, really sad fact: I also recall the first mp3 I ever downloaded and while this wasn’t the very first, I believe that lifehouse single was either #2 or #3.
MD: Hmm has this song been on a lot of commercials?
Marco: Probably so very many.
MD: Here’s one for the ages:
Marco: the first comment on that video’s youtube page is:
“I paused my porn for this. (:”
Editor’s note: This was a few months ago, mind.
MD: The ultimate compliment for any music video, really.
Marco: For serious. Yeah,back then I really liked the Bleed American and Futures album, which made me go back and look up Clarity. So emotastic.
MD: yeah, all the emo kids were soooo mad when they got popular for 5 seconds.
Editor’s note: I then told MD again about the 600ish page political novel that Benjamin Light and I started writing back during the time period being covered in this music discussion. (Separate editor’s note: Those 600 pages ended up only being probably 1/8the the novel’s probable length had it lived past its infancy. Jesus.) Anyway, about 75 pages of that book were written to Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity album. -Marco.
Marco: Wow, the neural pathways of memory and musical taste progression that this trip and fall down memory lane is opening up for me…
MD: That’s what it’s supposed to do!
Marco: I remember there was a period where I went to Burger King for lunch every day – ugh – and I’d order my food and sit myself in the corner, with my back to the TV and so I could see everyone there and I’d listen to music on headphones and eat and read articles from the internet I had printed out earlier in the day at work and just write. I was working on so many things back then and I had downloaded the Wicker Park soundtrack of all soundtracks because I had heard it was “hip.” And on it was this song:
MD: Very interesting that the video you found is a fandom vid for The Office.
Marco: …and that begat me downloading their album at the time and I would listen to that Snow Patrol album all the time during that period and write and, of course, it’s strongly associated with a girl at the time and all that blah blah blah. Words and music and women… funny how they’re all so strongly tied together in my head.
And yeah, I thought that was funny too, re: The Office video. I guess Pam/Roy was someone’s OTP at the time?
But anyway, that Snow Patrol thing… I think that was the start of me pushing into a new aeon on musical interests, as far as cruising on the surface of mainstream “alternative rock”ish type music for the masses, and enjoying something about the generic nothingness there.
And that strange sadness that belonged to nothing real in my life? I really think that perhaps it died when I first heard this song…
MD: Ah, such a lovely song…
Marco: I remember listening to this song on headphones on a lunchbreak at work and just breaking down into tears. I had to call in to my job from 100 yards away and tell them I’d be late and I just walked around, listening to this over and over again and feeling terrible, and wonderful, and terrible and sad and wounded, and it was like somewhere around then I stopped feeling sad about nothing and it was like the real regrets and misery entered my life.
MD: Like catharsis, like a breakthrough of sorts.
Marco: Yeah, exactly. I mean, like everyone, I have things that happened when I was younger that I carried the pain of those things with me, but I was always too shallow to really be affected by them properly, I think. I was suffering from a different kind of pain, I think, as my early 20s were crystallizing around me, and with that song… It was like the end of something more innocent and silly in my emotional dealings with the world, and the start of me experiencing real world sadness and hurt? Perhaps.
If all of this right now was a part of a documentary about my sad dealings with music at the dawn of my 20s, then the song that would be playing over the end credits sequence would be this:
MD: Ha ha, nice. And what does the hero learn at the end?
Marco: Nothing. Nothing is ever really learned.
And that end titles sequence, also, would just be sitting on the sidelines of a Quinceañera, watching young Spanish girls in pretty dresses dancing around with their family.
MD: You know, that sounds oddly hopeful.
Marco: Le Sigh. Remember when everything was just so simple and innocent and… BRITPOP?
MD: And it’s probably right there when i realized that this whole conversation would a blog post.
Marco: Yeah, sorry about that, but I think you’re right… Or maybe it’ll even be two!
That’s a short film entitled Ollie Klublershturf vs. the Nazis, written by Lost‘s Damon Lindelof and directed by Skot Bright. It features a few famous faces such Chris Hemsworth (who’s now Thor in Thor, and was Kirk’s dad in the Star Trek reboot), George Segal, Rachel Nichols, Norman Reedus, and Samm Levine. IO9 posted it the other day and I was excited because I hadn’t actually realized it had been produced. It’s about a little boy genius who invented a time machine and is trying to stop the Nazi scum who’ve infiltrated his family dinner in an attempt to steal his device. It’s silly but good fun.
Anyway, I had heard of it before because I remembered reading an interview with Lindelof about the origin of his being paired with J.J. Abrams to write the Lost pilot, which ABC gave them after it let go of Jeffrey Lieber (but kept his initial concept about a group of strangers crash landing on a mysterious island, hence his name appearing as one of the creator’s of the show). The gist of the story is essentially that Abrams was intrigued by the idea, and already had a deal in place with the network, but didn’t really want to do it on his own, so he needed to find another writer to work with and whom he could work with. Along came Lindelof, with the script for this short film being his audition piece, and history was made.
David Lynch to release an album
The anniversary of Bikini Atoll
and…
