20. All I Want For Christmas (is an Afghan Whigs reunion) - ok, not the best song, but expresses a sentiment that I stand behind, especially since my “Gentlemen” tape has recently been getting a lot of play out in the garage.. Came out this year on a compilation called “A Very Ohio Christmas”.

Writing and song comes from my friend Paul’s annual Christmas Mix. You can download it here, if you like Christmas songs from Space Ghost and Bruce Springsteen. I needed to listen to it since I’ve had that awful date-rape “Christmas” track “Baby It’s Cold Outside” in my head for eons.

Things learned during Thanksgiving



Post Grad asks the audience to believe that Alexis Bledel is the spawn of Jane Lynch + Michael Keaton.

There are a lot of movies playing on cable all day, every day. You really don’t want to watch any of them. More reliable art can be found in a book.

Happy hour at P.F. Chang’s can’t turn Burlesque into the bad movie you want to love. It’s just bad, and not fun bad.


Today’s vibes: Smashing Pumpkins, “1979.” Is there a better video about slacker teens and their wild freedom? Does Billy Corgan look like a Giant Baby in a turtleneck in the backseat?

Other videos with this vibe: Sonic Youth, “100%,” The Arcade Fire, “The Suburbs.” What do those videos have in common? They’re both directed by Spike Jonze. Katy Perry’s video for “Teenage Dream” and Kesha’s video for “Take It Off” are both going for that vibe, but they are ultimately about selling Katy Perry and Kesha as well as teenage kicks, so it’s just not grungy enough. Perhaps that’s the difference between videos when you are “alternative” and “authentic” as opposed to “pretty pop star” - or, maybe it’s because Perry and Kesha are ostensibly participating in their shenanigans…

(I’ve noted this before, but really: there is a redhead fountain of youth and Thurston Moore has found it. Where is it? I will go to there.)

Are there other videos that fit in this (generally, not so multicultural, huh? very “rocker”) category?

“The thing about The Departed, the x-factor that people can’t quite put their finger on, is that it deals clearly with class and accent all these things that are fundamental to Boston, but previously anomalous or even prohibited in demotic American films. Without English art, I never would have understood myself, my own family, or the New England world I lived in, as it was at that time. The Departed is the first time Boston was ever put accurately on screen, and I’m intentionally excluding the Friends of Eddie Coyle, which incidentally had an English director, because Higgins did a sort of Amos and Andy dialect comedy about his own people to entertain an audience of wannabe WASPS.”
— Epic, fascinating (at least to me) interview with William Monahan, screenwriter of The Departed. He also was a former editor for Spy Magazine, too. He has a lot to say about Boston, class, and the English and I think he’s onto something. Despite Monahan’s criticisms, I think The Friends of Eddie Coyle might be my favorite movie about the Boston area, but that’s for a variety of reasons, least of all Robert Mitchum’s perfect performance.

“Fuck paradise! Fuck that damn paradise! Olimpico was an oasis. In the heart of hipster Mile End, a café without wi-fi, a room without facebook, a place where people sat with allongés and talked. Warm, convivial, filled with the sounds of clinking spoons, new friends, maybe sometimes a Madonna song. You think I am exaggerating? I am not exaggerating! You know I am not exaggerating!”
— Sean Michaels writing about what happened when the wonderful Cafe Olympico (truly a community center; whenever I’ve gone to Montreal I’ve been so impressed at the way people gather and chat here, petting dogs and kissing babies, on this truly lovely street) got… or at least was in close proximity to, free wi-fi.

“Shteyngart says the first thing that happened when he bought an iPhone “was that New York fell away … It disappeared. Poof.” That’s the first thing I noticed too: the city disappeared, along with any will to experience. New York, so densely populated and supposedly sleepless, must be the most efficient place to hone observational powers. But those powers are now dulled in me. I find myself preferring the blogs of remote strangers to my own observations of present ones. Gone are the tacit alliances with fellow subway riders, the brief evolution of sympathy with pedestrians. That predictable progress of unspoken affinity is now interrupted by an impulse to either refresh a page or to take a website-worthy photo. I have the nervous hand-tics of a junkie. For someone whose interest in other people’s private lives was once endless, I sure do ignore them a lot now.”
— N + 1, “Sad as Hell,” by Alice Gregory. I really liked this piece. Goes well, I guess, with general modes of politeness in a smartphone age ambivalence that I talked about yesterday. I also enjoyed how straightforwardly written the piece was; often, N + 1 essays can just sound like efforts to bloviate in a way that shows how smart you are (academic as opposed to newspaper-y, I prefer the latter) - this was direct and more affecting because of it.

Mildly frustrated thoughts

Consider these “blind” items:

1) It is frustrating to receive missives from people who don’t take the two seconds required to get your name right. I say this as an “Elisabeth-with-an-s” but also someone who has a name, and is not Generic Title, either. It requires a minimal amount of time.

2) Particularly after a round of having to think “everything here is the best thing ever!” for about two years, it is interesting to see how my critical facilities translate from location to location. I think, naturally (and timing-wise) I am hard on what I write, I am hard on what others produce as well; but since taste is both a unifier, signifier, and also something different when you may have run-ins with someone, my taste on record has shifted. But to be honest, right now I am raw, sensitive, and easily, quite jealous. I don’t trust my opinions these days.

Which is partially to say, I miss well-crafted critical takedowns. Nobody who is in the position of critic has the job security to really, truly have an opinion these days, and there are few critics who really write from a perspective of being a wonderful human being with a soul (In film - Roger Ebert a notable exception, and online, writers like Kim Morgan tend to kill it on the regular).

3) Again, location really makes this behavior more accepted/regular, but to those of you out there who don’t have smartphones - aren’t iPhone people… sort of the worst, sometimes? (To friends with iPhones, particularly in New York, this does not mean you. I love you.) It can be rather annoying to be at a dinner with someone where they’re whipping out their phone - it’s not as if they’re being outwardly, openly rude, per se, and often it’s with the best of intentions - but I get frustrated, sometimes, by the way it seeps into human contact and communication. It’s jarring, and even if you’re… looking up a puppy photo, for example, it’s just time where the iphone person is poking on something and you, the person without a smartphone, are just standing there. Feeling kind of unlistened to. Company towns, where they give out iPhones at the gates, I let it slide like water off my duckish back, but I have to admit, overall - I don’t like it so much, and I wish that people would be more discreet with their phones and use of them in public arenas. And smartphones have made lines much less fun. Instead of potentially making friends in front of you or behind, people are just nattering on into the air. Movie screenings are similarly boring. Nobody talks to each other, everyone just stares at their phones with varying degrees of self-importance. It really is quite strange if you think about it.

As an apologia for my carping, you could read this film piece on great moments in movie musicals. I made Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench director Damien Chazelle write it, and it’s pretty much a shot of joy into your day.

“The problem is that the transition might have been smoother if the people running the industry didn’t have so much contempt for their own product. Now the institutional gravitas of these news organizations has leeched away. The Baltimore Sun used to have 500 reporters, morning and evening editions, and now they have 120. And the product reflects that, and these cuts were made before the Internet. They were made because some Wall Street analyst decided that you could make much more money putting out mediocre newspapers with less coverage and less reporters. And they were right in the short term. But in the long term, they were showing contempt for their readership and contempt for their own roles in society. Rather than papers of record, they became half-hearted attempts to provide a surface level of coverage.”
— David Simon, The Wall Street Journal.

(Other than that, I got nothing.)