• Twitter

  • http://u.nu/3nf4f This has made my face smile at least twelve times. I can't move it out of my reader. Yes, mark as unread!
  • Happily devastated after finishing Atonement. The movie was wonderful, and the book was better.
  • Suddenly a heavy rain.
  • @stakethisclaim Our dinners were sisterwives. Mine also had a lot of mushrooms in the sauce. I believe in mushrooms wholeheartedly.
  • Oh, Top Chef. If I'm bored with your pre-finale episode, how can I hope to get jazzed for the finale? Stop being so boring this season.

• Categories

  Select Category books and reading    academia    articles    cannonball    Comics    copied poetry    links    major thinkers lists    miscellany personal    commentary    favorite things    food and recipes       vegan mofo    memories       definitions    que emocionante    vaguish    vignettes    works    writing pop culture    Current    internet    movies and television    music    radio    reviews Uncategorized

• Way back:

  Select Month September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003 July 2003

• Reading:

  • The Demise of “Cathy”
  • cooked my first not-from-a-box pad thai!and i quote the...
  • After-Dinner Turtle?
  • “Nobody ever eat 50 eggs.”
  • Mad Men, 4x03 The Good News
  • Bus Story: Not a Drop of Lemonade in Sight
  • Plus-Size Wars
  • Zeugma
  • sanctuary
  • Are Migraines Linked to a Heart Defect?

• Listening to:

  • Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit
  • The Shins – Caring Is Creepy
  • Jimi Hendrix – Fire
  • Led Zeppelin – Black Dog
  • Radiohead – Karma Police

• Comics

  • Comics Curmudgeon
  • Donation Derby
  • Dreamless
  • Garfield Minus Garfield
  • Overcompensating
  • Questionable Content
  • Red String
  • Secret Vespers
  • XKCD

• Food

  • Cake Maker to the Stars
  • Coco Cake Cupcakes
  • Elana's Pantry
  • Frugal Vegan
  • Get Sconed!
  • Vegan Appetite
  • Vegan Dad

• Friends

  • Alizarine
  • Marty
  • Still Going Native
  • Tychoish
  • Young Mountain

• General

  • Dear Prudence (Slate)
  • Free Range Kids
  • Ironic Sans
  • Love Letters Project
  • Nytpicker
  • Pajiba
  • Rands in Repose
  • Stanley Fish (NYT)

• Visual

  • A Suitable Wardrobe
  • Book Covers (Financial Times)
  • Book Covers Anonymous
  • Caustic Cover Critic
  • Creative Bits and Bobs
  • F*** Yeah Christina Hendricks
  • Henry Sene Yee
  • Nuena Photography
  • Sartorialist
  • Shelved Books
  • Strange Maps

Yesterday Pajiba ran a column on Elijah Wood by contributor Michael Murray. He tries to put a finger on what’s so fascinating about Wood, and describes what I agree is the most memorable scene in Deep Impact:

As a tsunami is about to wash over the world, Wood — mobile and courageous on a zippy dirt bike — dekes in and out of the doomed motorists jammed on the highway.

My dad hates Elijah Wood and has since Wood starred as the kid in the updated Flipper movie. But I loved that movie (and still do: the statute of limitations on childhood taste has not run out), and countless others he made in the ’90s starting with Radio Flyer.

Deep Impact continued a fundamental shift in my taste. 1997 had come and gone with Titanic, which my friends and I liked a lot . . . then some of those friends saw it twenty times, while others decided a month later that they hated it. The combination of schizo obsession and backlash seemed even more ridiculous after the release of Armageddon, one of the biggest waste-of-time pieces of tripe I’ve ever endured, but for some reason people LOVED it and hated Deep Impact. I began to think about how this quieter, box-office-failing movie was better regardless of its level of commercial success. That’s not to say I didn’t continue to see questionable things and often do now.* But I started to understand the relationship between good movies and entertaining movies and their overlap.

It’s hard to explain the place Wood holds in my pop-culture memory because you just had to be there. In a way, our whole generation grew up on the same trajectory, and I’d seen him in movies from childhood to adolescence and onward, playing various parts that felt really truthful even though they spanned different historical periods, different backgrounds. I flipped through the December/January issue of Teen People — a teen magazine so honestly good I asked to get a subscription — and saw this spread on Elijah Wood:

For some reason, this magazine spread is one of my strongest sense memories to this day: I remembered this exact photo (and spent a lot of mental energy finding it online), the colors of the title font, how the shirt he’s wearing is blue because you see it on the next page. I was listening to a CD I’d just received for my birthday — 1996′s Yourself or Someone Like You by Matchbox 20, one of my first favorite CDs and one I still love for its importance to me then — and one of those songs is embedded in the memory too. The CD rode a continuous wave of successful singles and sold millions and millions of copies. I can’t listen to this album without thinking of this story on Elijah Wood in this magazine, and I can’t think of Elijah Wood without thinking of this album.

There’s some mental coin flip where this particular moment on this particular day won the memory game: An actor I like but don’t love, in a fairly typical photo spread, for an embarrassing movie (The Faculty!), sitting in my room, looking out the window into town, listening to a fairly typical mid 90s pop rock group. I feel a connection to Elijah Wood because of it, and I still think he’s great even though I fell asleep during each installment of Lord of the Rings.

* Here’s a clause to strike fear in your heart: Journey to the Center of the Earth in 3D.

Oh, embarrassing. I am smitten with this singer-songwriter who’s 18 and from Joplin, Missouri, best known as a major pitstop for Bonnie and Clyde. (Did you know they were only 25 when they were killed by the police?)

Never Shout Never got my attention with a short clip of his song “Happy” featured in a TLC promo for their show Table for 12. It’s a sweet song, but the best part by far is the tune he sings on the line “I’m happy knowing that you are mine.” He’s got a Jason Mraz-y vibe in the best and worst ways alternating.

But I love this song and I love these words from it:

I am a man of six feet tall
Just looking for some answers
In a world that answers none of them at all
I’ll say, “Hi,” but not reply
To the letters that you write
Because I found some peace of mind

‘Cause I’m only as tall as my heart will let me be
And I’m only as small as the world will make me seem
When the going gets rough and I feel like I may fall
I’ll look on the brightside – I’m roughly six feet tall.

I have been in a good mood for a straight week or so and I’m digging it.

It also means this is the right time for me to watch lame movies because I’ll cut them a lot of slack! See also: The Proposal and 17 Again, both of which made me feel kinda squishy inside. Reluctantly.

Mew Mew’s been sick lately and the doctor guessed it was allergies, so she’s on kitty prednisone now and it’s working. She’s pepped up, is eating more, and has cute small sniffles instead of painful big ones. She’s sitting on some junk mail as we speak.

• The Caustic Cover Critic has a funny roundup of the obscenely irrelevant covers of a print on demand (POD) outfit dealing in public domain works.

• Today’s Garfield Minus Garfield mimics my life, and I am not ashamed.

• Another genuinely funny and clean Jerkcity.

• Andrew Sullivan’s blog has these three posts on shitty work: first and second lists of reader thoughts on menial jobs and some opinions on President Obama’s job history.

• No Caption Needed examines photos of the death of the Virgin Megastore in New York:

More importantly, we are privy to the mourning process; we see human grief for the loss of commerce, exchange, goods often enjoyed in common.

• This is poignant in a consumer climate where, the New York Times reported this week, consumers are still saving over spending, totaling in a .1% loss instead of the .7% gain expected:

Major clothing chains including Macy’s, Nordstrom, Liz Claiborne and Kohl’s posted earnings declines this week. Even Wal-Mart Stores, the nation’s largest retailer and one of the hardiest survivors of this recession, reported lower sales on Thursday.

Problem: You sign up for a karaoke song but realize you don’t actually know the tune for anything but the chorus.

Solution: Leave the bar just long enough to watch a video of the song on YouTube on someone’s cell phone.

• Billy Joel and his newest wife are divorcing. This aside on their ages made me chortle:

(she’s 27, he’s 60; if the age difference were a person, it would arguably still be too old for her)

• Sonia Zjawinski recently published one of the stupider ideas in recent memory: Trolling popular photo website Flickr, making and framing your own prints of photos you like for free. As the commenters (and the Nytpicker) point out, this is to photography what unauthorized downloads are to the music industry: Illegal.

People in the comments drew all kinds of analogies, but there’s no need: this is a crappy thing to do. You aren’t stealing from faceless millionaires or record label corporations, it doesn’t have any awkward nobility the way music downloading does, and many of these photographers would likely give you the permission if you’d only ask — they’d probably be delighted to know their work was in someone’s home. And if cheapness is the key here, hell, offer to PayPal each photographer ten bucks.

The real craw-sticker here seems to be that this blog post ran in the New York Times, which apparently has no common-sense regulation anymore.

• My new breakfast of choice: 1/2 cup Grape Nuts, 1 6-oz Dannon All Natural Nonfat Plain Yogurt, 4 packets of Truvia, and a few drops of pure vanilla extract. The yogurt and subsequent ingredients basically recreate the vanilla Dannon Light n Fit, with Truvia instead of a digestively caustic artificial sweetener, and straight yogurt instead of a long list of ingredients studded with chemicals. 280 calories, 1 gram of fat (0 saturated), 28% of daily fiber, 28% of daily protein.

In a timely, uncanny fashion, I had a draft saved called “I’ll Be There” with a link to this YouTube video: State Farm’s I’ll Be There commercial.

This commercial is wonderful and makes me kind of weepy every time I see it. Its soundtrack features a remixed version of the Jackson 5 classic beginning with Michael Jackson’s voice, isolated a capella, singing this line I’d never really heard the words to:

You and I must make a pact, we must bring salvation back.

It turns out the words I remembered were the more pop-tropey ones (“I’ll be there to comfort you,” “You know he’d better be good to you”), and not the well-crafted, interesting ones mixed in:

I’ll be there to comfort you,
Build my world of dreams around you, I’m so glad that I found you
I’ll be there with a love that’s strong
I’ll be your strength, I’ll keep holding on

Let me fill your heart with joy and laughter
Togetherness, well, that’s all I’m after
Whenever you need me, I’ll be there
I’ll be there to protect you, with an unselfish love that respects you
Just call my name and I’ll be there

I can’t think of anything more heartwarming than building your world of dreams around someone, of an unselfish love that respects that person! Jeez. No wonder the commercial chokes me up.

Now Michael Jackson has died, abruptly as far as the public is concerned. I am not a real Michael Jackson fan by any definition, although I do love the Jackson 5 and consider that his creative peak as far as music that appeals to me. (That said, at a dinner party last year, a friend’s fiance reenacted the entire “Thriller” dance in about sixteen square feet of apartment floor space while wearing a white wife beater and porkpie hat, and I loved the hell out of it.)

But really, what I will remember about Michael Jackson is that for whatever reason, what he saw and the world saw never lined up, and he destroyed his body and his life in pursuit of something no one else felt was rational. The man was clearly mentally ill and had personal problems that were never kept private enough nor made public enough to satisfy anyone’s curiosities, which made them last for decades. And since his choices didn’t make sense in any paradigm the public understood, this will prove to be his lasting legacy.

From the mediocre 2004 U2 single All Because of You:

I like the sound of my own voice
I didn’t give anyone else a choice

Don’t we know it, buddy.

Earlier this week I linked to Stanley Fish’s column on headlines. Later that day, a good example popped up on frog design:

Will the Real Brand Owner Please Stand Up?

This relates back to the classic game show To Tell the Truth, where three panelists would all claim to be a certain individual and answer questions. At the end, the celebrity judges guessed which they believed to be the real thing, and the announcer said, “Will the real ________ please stand up?”

Usually the best questions involved jargon or industry knowledge the panelists were supposed to have. The major entertainment value was in the really gifted fakers who managed to hoodwink all the judges. One of the more famous guests now is Frank Abagnale, who appeared in 1977 — then his 1977 appearance was recreated by Leonardo DiCaprio in the 2002 Steven Spielberg movie Catch Me If You Can.

Of course, the syntax was mimicked by Eminem in whatever that song is, “Will the real Slim Shady please stand up?” And, in turn, by Weird Al in his mocking medley “Angry White Boy Polka.”

Note: When I say “LOL” I really am.

tychoish: I ordered a 40 ounce tea pot
tychoish: and I’d really like to get a 50 ounce carafe or something, but sigh

Caroline: Hahaha
Caroline: Life is soooo hard
Caroline: My teapot isn’t big enough

tychoish: lol
tychoish: that sounds like the bookish nerd’s answer to the milkshake song
tychoish: my teapot brings all the boys to the parlor

Caroline: LOL
Caroline: If you do not post this interchange somewhere, I will.

This post is dedicated to my Fleetwood Mac-loving parents.

From a New York Times Fashion article on Stevie Nicks’ influence:

[Nicks'] reach extends to Hollywood as well. Lindsay Lohan hopes to buy the rights to her life story and to play her on film. Unmoved, Ms. Nicks responded: “Over my dead body. She needs to stop doing drugs and get a grip. Then maybe we’ll talk.”

Awesome.

keep looking »