godthedog

i kinda doubt it will be. there's more than enough great stuff from the year to justifiably snub it. even among those of us who loved it (myself included) at the time, 'fahrenheit' seems like this weird aberration now.

natty light was brewed in a dead syphilitic homeless man's asshole. poor college kids and winos buy natty light because it's cheap and it's got alcohol.

there's a good chance 'before sunset' will sneak in a screenplay nod. it's gotten a surprising amount of end-of-the-year buzz. this was a god damn great year for screenplays. if somebody put 'before sunset', 'sideways' and 'eternal sunshine of the spotless mind' in front of me and forced me to choose, i think my head would explode.

are there difficulties the site has with using the article manager that i don't know about? i never had any problems with it.

fuck yeah, you could pull that off. as long as it was something that could stand on its own and didn't read as "music folder people fucking around with each other on the content site."

you write better articles than i. i can just edit someone else's work a lot better than i can write my own. if i were you i'd use a plan of attack that's more piecemeal; go for the anthology approach rather than the linear history approach, so to speak. answer smaller questions, like how good ric flair really is, or the mid-90s wwf style v. the mid-90s ecw style, etc., before you barrel into THE HISTORY OF PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING AS WE KNOW IT. you can hone and revise the big plan as you go, but think of it in small pieces that can stand on their own, stuff you can crank out in a couple days for posting. just so that you can have something to point to that's substantial and out there while're you're working, and so that it doesn't feel like such a big impossible undertaking. like how dickens and joyce published chapters of their novels in serials as they went. or something.

i get insomnia sporadically, but since the move it's really started to bug me when i get it, cause whenever i get it, like 7 other people know about it. my roommate, cause he's such a light sleeper, the doorman for my building, the people who work the graveyard shift at the diner on the corner, and the security guard at the library. insomnia is a very personal thing for me, i don't want everybody looking at me and going, "oh, that's the guy who can't sleep at night and gets restless all the time." i see their probing eyes and their stolen glances, i know they're sitting there judging me. i KNOW it.

i was going to get an ipod for christmas, but my mom couldn't find any in stock. she's supposed to send one as soon as best buy gets them back in stock. until then, i have to lug this big clunky cd player and cd booklet all the fuck over new york. i don't know how much more of this i can take.

exactly. you get hit this loooong string of powerful, near-flawless shit from "da mystery of chessboxin" all the way down, then THAT song comes up and it's like "...huh? this is IT?" if i still can't sleep after this sam phillips album i'm gonna see how it works if i just stop after "tearz."

it's like taking a date to 'schindler's list', only with more shots of people crying. but yeah, great stuff. i spent the first twenty minutes or so thinking it was going to BE a less subtle version of 'schindler's list', and it kind of is, but there's an added dimension of fresh wounds and national guilt (since it's still fairly recent and everyone agrees that we should've done a lot more than we did) that made it feel REALLY immediate and harrowing. i like how bald it was about its goals & its tactics, with cheadle literally STATING, "we have to shame them into helping us." if i ever teach a film class on representations of history and ideology, i'll show this movie. it's definitely worth a full-length review, cause there's a lot going on, i'll see if it's still fresh in my mind after i finish up 'sideways'.

i think i'll be different and do a "disappointing closers to really good albums" edition: massive attack - mezzanine, "(release)" rolling stones - let it bleed, "you can't always get what you want" talking heads - remain in light, "the overload" wu-tang clan - 36 chambers, "7th chamber part II"

incidentally, i originated that saying in an NYT review of 'birth of a nation', talking about how it had all these grand ambitions of making film a respectable art form, but turned out to be a hokey and racist piece of shit. i guess it just clicked with people, and everybody just started ripping it off left and right. chris's departure wasn't that big of a blow, as his stuff wasn't a TSM exclusive anyway, and he didn't contribute often enough to make it a really big feature. i think loss's contribution would've done much more and been the little south american kid of the captain planet team, so to speak. i don't know what made him leave it incomplete, but it probably had to do with a lack of free time, as my burnout did. don't think it's his fault or anything, since he's such a stand-up guy who goes out of his way to not let people down, but god damn if that article didn't get people talking. will's good people. i think he'd be a better choice for newbie submissions. tom seems constantly pressed for time, and will kept telling me about how easy his job is, and it's not like he wouldn't be qualified. i feel like the ball got dropped on the edwin situation. the site hasn't had a music critic in forever, and all the music folder regulars like him, so that would be another easy 20+ readers easy. speaking of pop culture, what the hell ever happened to castleman? i liked him a lot, in a "respectfully irritated" way.

occasionally i'll read some of al's stuff (which is really weird considering i have no interest in the topics), i used to read the shoot interviews and coey's stuff when they were semiregular items, and i'm still waiting for the next part of loss's revised history of the wwf (which is probably the most perceptive and wellwritten piece this site's ever posted). it's really a shame that there isn't more interest than there is, cause we've got some very fine writers and a lot of potential, but motivation and free time are very sporadic. the stuff that mostly got people talking was the really thick, in-depth, dense stuff that takes a lot of time to put together, and the fire kind of burned out. (i know i myself had about a half-dozen half-finished reviews to my credit after starting grad school, but just didn't have the "oomph" to follow through.) i think a lot of that has to do with the lack of substantial feedback we get, but at the same time i think we'd GET more feedback if we just put stuff out there with more regularity & did more pimping. sass got a good buzz going with the summer changes that were made, but we just didn't keep the momentum going. i lobbied to get edwin on to beef up the pop culture section, but to no avail. i've started doing reviews again, but only because i've found myself with massive amounts of free time to where i can spend an afternoon or 2 just kicking back and cranking out fifteen hundred words. i doubt i'll be able to keep it up when classes start again.

I Come In Peace? see, i went back in time and changed the course of agent's posting history to make it funnier. crono, the only advice i really have to give is that you need to finish it before you ask for advice. otherwise it'll probably never get finished. just worry about getting it all down first, and worry about making it good later. there's very little good that can come of asking a dozen different people for editorial help when so little of it is even there, the problems will multiply and the process will become a lot harder than it has to be. finishing a large project is hard, and revising it to make it not suck is even harder. there's no reason to take on both at once.

the roots - phrenology nina simone- some 'best of' compilation sam phillips - martinis and bikinis listened to the latter this afternoon. damn good stuff, i don't know why the hell i waited ten years before i picked it up.

just because it's "distinctive" doesn't mean it's "good." a director's strength is in how compelling he makes his material, not how he can fit in his trademark pop culture references or tracking shots or whatever. i would take the "nondistinctive" approach eastwood uses in 'million dollar baby' over tarantino's overkill wanky approach in volume 1 of 'kill bill' any day. Clint Eastwood - Million Dollar Baby --yeah. he'll probably win, and i won't complain if he does. Marc Forster - Finding Neverland --this had a far better script than 'million dollar baby', but 'baby' ended up being the better movie because of some bad choices forster made. namely he turned up the melodramatic elements way too much when it wasn't necessary: BIG DRAMATIC moments stretched on too long, intrusive music, the slow-motion was dumb, etc. the quieter moments were a lot more powerful. i'm surprised he was nominated. Taylor Hackford - Ray --meh. i'm totally indifferent to this one. not that hackford had a gold mine of material to work from, but he did his job competently and nothing more. the hallucination sequence near the end was really over-the-top and out of place. Alexader Payne - Sideways --stellar. absolutely fucking stellar. never misstepped, never wavered, and he's got a fucking pitch-perfect sense of timing, knowing just when to hit the emotional notes and how long to hold them, and knowing just when to get the laughs. i cannot gush enough about how nearly perfect this movie is. Martin Scorsese - The Aviator --haven't seen it yet, but i'm skeptical. scorsese seems to have dwindled from cinematic demigod to typically competent director, and i don't know if he has any fire left. this seems to be getting the same kind of critical hype that 'gangs of new york' got, and 'gangs' does not hold up well. he cuts through the bullshit really well. that's his style, more or less. but it's not like you can watch ten minutes of his work and be able to tell who it is. he isn't terribly different from the effective studio directors of the 40s/50s like michael curtiz or howard hawks or carol reed ('the third man' is an influence that eastwood says he goes back to repeatedly, especially for lighting). like them, he finds what's absolutely necessary for the story and throws everything else away. he shoots very quickly (he's known to hand out $100 dollar bills to everyone on the set if they get it right on the first take). but nobody else i know of really works like that today, so that in itself makes him distinctive.

ha. like i care about literature or philosophy or religion. HA, dammit.

it's cool to like the literature, like i enjoy a lot of nihilistic art, but as an ethos or a philosophy of life it's pretty shitty and contentless. i assumed IDRM was referring to it as such, since he was placing it in context with atheism and religion and other major life choices.

in order: no. no, no. and yes.

saw this two days ago. this has nothing to do with anything, but while i was walking home from my favorite diner this afternoon, on a street i've walked down approximately 3,250 times before, i passed by quentin tarantino. i did a double take, and kept walking. immediately after our encounter, it started snowing. truly a magic moment.

not in the personality department. jolie is a fucking basket case.

bob dylan - "subterranean homesick blues" john lennon - "mother" tori amos - "horses"

Why are you underwhelmed? I'm underwhelmed in the sense that on paper I don't see how this improves or is even equal to the "Smallville" cast. For example I think that Erica Durance is just perfect as Lois Lane and I see it hard for someone to do as good a job as she has. so in other words, it would be impossible for you not to be underwhelmed by any choice they made.

i've always wanted to say this: you are not the coolest straight guy below 14th. you may be the coolest straight guy from houston on down, but from bleecker to 14th it's me.

the ontological argument has been disproven. what are the aquinas & kierkegaard ones that you're talking about?