Hammer & Tickle

I've got a piece in NRO today on Hammer & Tickle, a documentary about Communist jokes. Also, I promise to begin regular blogging again soon. Maybe.

double feature doozy

This is a good portent: the first film I'll be seeing for review in New York (and my first NYC press screening) will be Grindhouse.

Kicking all kinds of...

Sheer brilliance:

This one was directed by Quentin Tarantino, who’s been an actor in stuff like RESERVOIR DOGS and PULP FICTION (he’s also in PLANET OF TERROR and DEATH PROOF). This is his first directing job and the dude KICKS ALL SPECTRUM OF ASS. He kicks ass that isn’t even in the ass area. Like, his director skills are so stripper-with-chainsaw good they make you grow asses on other parts of your body that he then kicks.

I don't know when it happened

But the New Yorker's web redesign is just awesome.

The Host

I didn’t mention this, but I saw The Host. It’s not as good as a lot of critics are claiming, but it’s kind of fun at times, and takes a sort of stab at being a politically-relevant B movie in the style of old Carpenter/Cronenberg/Corman flicks. It’s not terribly well paced, and the mish mash of competing tones—melodrama, slapstick, tragedy, big-effects monster movie—don’t mix together all that well, but it’s usually at least amusing. The thing plays kind of like cinematic Engrish, as if the filmmakers had some sort of idea of what an American monster movie should be like, but couldn’t quite approximate it and got some goofy results in translation.

Big Apple

(Approximation)

Me: Why do the subways here always smell like vomit?
C (not a New Yorker): Cause you don't piss in them enough.

So, I'm sure I'm the ten millionth person to mention this, but the subways, lovely as they are for someone like me who hates driving, kind of reek. I've yet to actually see any human excretions puddled up anywhere, but my nose is pretty certain they're around somewhere.

I am less impressed with New York fashion than I thought I would be. Yes, it's about 10 million steps above D.C., but that's because D.C. is the most fashion-conservative city anywhere. It makes, I dunno, rural Alabama, look positively hip. Anyway, here in NY, there's definitely more variety, and there's a lot more casual approach to things--it really frees you up if you don't have to wear a suit or something like it everyday--but the only things I've really noticed are that guys sport a more scraggly hipster look compared to D.C.'s typical junior prof/journo-geek thing, girls tend to better color coordinate their coats (the day after it snowed they all wore big white coats), and girls seem to do a much better job with boots here--especially the brown boots/black top thing.

This is not to say I haven't seen some very spiff looking members of both sexes, but they're a lot more rare than I was led to believe. People just kind of look and dress like people, you know?

Addendum: The Politico disagrees with me about D.C. And yeah, D.C.'s glamour elite are slowly becoming more noticed, and may even be growing. But the rank and file, even amongst the semi-hip younger people, are still a lot less fashion-forward than in other cities (which is kind of par for the course for a city built on government policy intellect and wonkery).

Deadlines Kill

I know I've been lax about updating this thing, but it'll just have to wait a little while longer. I'm under hellish deadline pressure, and adding even some no-pressure content creation right now would probably cause a tear in my brain, if not an outright implosion. For now, though my latest NRO piece, "Jacked In," on the how the Presidental candidates are using social networking websites, is up. Now if only I can get some work done, I might have time to be social myself. Here's a teaser for the piece:

The art of campaign politics is, in many ways, the art of networking. It’s a practice that’s hard coded into Washington’s DNA. Washington, or at least political Washington, lives and breathes by endless, obsessive networking — coffee meet-ups, happy hours, cocktail parties, and business cards power-blasted at anyone with a pulse and a Blackberry. To live and work in D.C. is to be caught in the perpetual rush to know and befriend — or at least make genial contact with — everyone. During election season, the town’s network culture expands as candidates take their campaigns — which are really just massive networking drives — on the road. But even the most relentless parade of stump speeches and town halls can only touch the few souls who are physically present. Consequently, candidates are increasingly using the Internet, with its limitless geographic scope, to connect with voters, substituting human interaction for web-based interactivity. And what better way to press the digital flesh than via the new wave of social-networking sites?

If you're in NY

MOMA is showing a bunch of Fassbinder films in April. I haven't seen any of his work, and I don't claim to know much about him (I know, I know), but I'm hoping to get to a couple.

Me on Geeky Tech Stuff at NRO

I've got a piece on Tim Wu's wireless Carterphone paper up at NRO today.

Not surprisingly, Wu, a leader in the fight to regulate the Internet (he coined the phrase “net neutrality”), thinks the wireless industry could benefit from greater regulation too. He makes several major recommendations, including applying neutrality rules to wireless networks, and enacting a “wireless Carterphone” policy that would prohibit wireless operators from approving the devices attached to their networks. The paper offers some useful coverage of the complexities and weaknesses of the wireless industry, but his major recommendations — all predicated on the notion that the wireless industry is essentially uncompetitive — don’t seem warranted. At best, Wu offers solid suggestions to the wireless industry about how it might improve its service offerings, but too often his report reads like a list of consumer gripes designed to prod telecom bureaucrats into various regulatory moves.

The World is Not Enough

Megan McArdle wonders "how much music is enough?"

There are a couple of ways to answer this. First, and most obvious, is "all of them." Having every album at your finger tips ought to be enough, right? Seems self-evident. Maybe it is. More in a moment.

Second, I think you could say that enough is having every album you know you want. It would be a complete collection of all the songs you are conscious of being interested.

To expand that a little, you could also say it's every album you could possibly want. So, I know that I don't like country or dirty South rap, but within the general spheres of music that sometimes have an interest in (all sorts of rock, independent hip hop, jazz, some orchestral music, experimental and electronic music), having every possible album, updated on a rolling basis, might be enough.

Finally, I think you could make the case that it's not possible to have enough, that enough is only achieved when you're completely satisfied with your musical options at any given point--which, at least for a picky, anxious listener like me, is borderline impossible. I have more than 10,000 songs on my harddrive, and I more or less meet the second criteria--having every album I know I want--but I'm still often dissatisfied with my choices. And that's why I'm a restless devourer of new music and music reviews, why it's not abnormal for me to go through more than a dozen new albums in a month, and why I'm pretty much constantly searching for great new music. There's no such thing as enough; there's only temporary satisfaction.

Most of what I wrote here, I should note, holds true with any number of things: movies, books, TV shows, blog posts, magazine and newspaper articles. In the internet age, when content seems to bubble up from the pores of every surface around us, it's easy to become addicted to everything new, to feed on the slough of new content being piped into your cable modem. The cheapness and abundance of it all encourages us to devour more of it more quickly, to be satisfied for shorter and shorter periods, for enough to get, not closer, but further away as we have more.

If it's blood you've come for, you're welcome to join us

As if to make up for the loss of an hour’s worth of sleep last night, Brooklyn residents today were blessed with a gorgeous, sunny mid 50s afternoon.

Naturally, I spent it inside a dark, windowless movie theater.

The movie of the afternoon? 300, Zach Snyder’s sword-n-sandals comic book adaptation. The movie is basically Gladiator’s brain-damaged, steroidal, coked-up younger sibling--and not in a good way either. Yes, the digitally painted sets and heavily processed photography look fantastic, but that doesn’t save the movie from ending up as little more than a blunt, witless exercise in dumb-as-rocks juvenile wish-fulfillment. This might have been fun, at least, except for the fact that its biggest sin is that it’s boring. Honestly, how could such glorious depravity be so utterly yawn inducing?

300 blends heavy metal weapons with a heavy metal soundtrack. In fact, the movie is probably best understood in the same terms we understand bad heavy metal music: It’s guttural, brutal, monotonous, vulgar, comically self-serious, populated by purposefully outrageous characters in silly costumes, often painful to experience*, and just generally absurd and overwrought.

One problem with the movie is that it’s so concerned with being this grand, brutal, epic that it spends pretty much the whole movie extolling itself as a grand, brutal epic and never actually gets around to being one. In acting, the term “indicating” describes when a performer uses motions and expressions that aren’t realistic, but are intended to explicitly tell the audience what a character is feeling. 300 basically spends its entire running time indicating.

Well, that and showing off the super ripped bods of its Spartan warriors.

As others have noted, the whole thing has a pretty serious homoerotic S&M undertone to it. If you love chiseled beefcake, you’ll have a ball with the legions of CGI-assisted six packs on display here. All of the Spartan warriors run around in lace-up sandals, brown leather underwear and big red capes (a fashion trend that’s apparently already catching on in certain parts of L.A.). There is one chick in the movie, but mostly she’s just there to, um… wait, I have no idea why she was in it. It’s as if the filmmakers were involved in some secret competition to make a movie that was both the most hyper-masculine and the most stereotypically gay thing they could possibly make. In that, they succeeded.

Something else to note: The movie is based on a comic book that’s based on a real historical event. So naturally, 300 is a great history lesson. Some of the things you’ll learn:

• That Greeks liked to yell. And punctuate their speech with big. Dramatic. Pauses. So much in fact that they did it PRETTY MUCH. ALL. THE. TIIIIIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• Persians liked body piercing so much that they pretty much stuck piercings everywhere. In their lips, tongues, eyebrows, middle of their cheeks—you ever heard of knee rings? Persians invented em.
• Spartans have a daily quota they have to fulfill on usage of the word "honor," otherwise they’re sentenced to 20 lashes and a self-important speech. (The system is lenient, though: You can substitute a beheading for your daily quota.)
  
• Back in the Greek day, the sky was always brown and gold, which I’m sure is Snyder’s way of saying “Look how our skies appeared before global warming!” If he wanted to reduce emissions, he could’ve started by not making 300.

Still, if you’ve ever wanted to learn what an armored battle-rhinoceros trying to take down some gay porn models in knee-high metal boots and red capes looks like, this is the movie for you.

Addendum: Dave’s list of political allegorical matches to the movie is pretty awesome, made extra awesome by including Dilios as Marty Peretz. One quibble, though: I think Officer McNulty was not France, but Congressional Democrats.

*Admittedly, I actually a lot of kind of awful heavy metal. Like, for instance, The Locust. Just one of those things.

The City that Never Sleeps

Where am I? Still blogging regularly at The Corner and Planet Gore. This (among many other things) is my job now, people. My post on Zodiac today is probably of interest to a few of you.

What else? New York is still a towering mystery to me. Washington felt big when I got there, but by the time I left, it felt small. The city felt busy at times, but rarely crowded (Adams Morgan on a Saturday night is the exception, not the rule). There are only a handful of areas to go on a Friday night, only a half dozen movie theaters you need to worry about going to, only a few malls and shopping areas of note. Things seemed clean. The buildings never reach past about 15 stories. I felt like, given a couple of years and a budget, I could probably manage to eat at every decent restaurant in town. I could see all the museums and take all the tours. Given enough time, it would be possible to more or less finish the city--and then keep up with the new stuff as it opened.

New York, on the other hand, with its endless sprawling corridors of restaurants and delis and laundromats and shops, feels infinitely more vast--if D.C. is a hulking solar system (orbiting the sun of the federal government), New York is a giant swirling galaxy, lit by a million suns, with many more million planets in orbit. Stopping at every one is impossible; even finding ones of note sometimes seems daunting.

Of course, there are things to love: I'm just a few minutes walk from the lovely Prospect Park; because of the subways, travel, in some ways, is easier than in Washington; there are always people out and about, walking, talking, going about their business. The city has more energy than any place I've ever been.

I have no doubt that the place will become more familiar, feel smaller, become more predictable. I'll settle in and find a routine. But somehow, I suspect that it will never entirely feel old and familiar to me, that it will always seem at least a little bigger than I can imagine, that there will always be something fresh, new, exciting, and uncertain, waiting just down the block.

Seriously, I've Got the Jitters

After much hassle and uncertainty, Dismemberment Plan tickets have been obtained! Thanks to the Post's Going Out Gurus and Catherine at Washingtonian for doing helpful internet update-type stuff and keeping this out-of-towner in the know. Extra thanks to Ja$on Bureaucrash for picking up the tickets at the Cat.

For the record, I saw the Plan 11 times between 1999 and their break up. And I'm still completely psyched beyond anything about this.

Music

I know that this makes me look like a completely generic tussle-haired fifteen year old emo-goth, but the new Bright Eyes EP is really, really good. And let me tell you what's even better: the leaked tracks from the new Nine Inch Nails record. Say what you will about Conor Oberst, but the fact remains: He's an incredibly talented songwriter, and his brand of ultra sincere, urban smart-kid folk rock is one of the best things happening in guitar-based rock today. As for Nine Inch Nails, well, Trent Reznor is one of those guys who you don't have to like--no doubt he's abrasive and difficult and off-putting--but he's also pretty much a genius. Quite simply, no one else sounds anything like him. Sure, there are ripoffs aplenty, but not one can summon the utterly enveloping, intricate layers of noise and sound that Reznor puts together, and more importantly -- no one can do it in a way that's also so surprisingly accessible.

And, while we're on the topic of electronic geniuses, I managed to hear an early release of the new El-P album, I'll Sleep When You're Dead. It's higher order geek-thug android hip-hop--as meticulous and insane as his much-hailed Fantastic Damage, which, if you haven't heard... well, just listen to "Fantastic Damage" on MySpace and prepare to have your brain scrambled. As an added electro-genius super bonus, the album has a track with Trent Reznor called "Flyentology." You can hear it, and watch a certifiably nutso Adult Swim-produced video for the track, here.

Movie Mania -- on TV

I’m still getting used to this whole bazillion channels of cable thing. I’ve had it before, but not for several years, and at that time, it was kind of spotty and didn’t offer HD. Plus, it just bears reiterating: DVRs are awesome. Most people love them because they allow you to watch your favorite shows whenever you feel like, skip the commercials, and generally allow you all the fun parts of closely following a show without any of the hassle of scheduling your life around it. And, no doubt, that’s awesome. However, that’s not really anything you can’t get from poking around the internet’s P2P grey markets (although it does offer it legally and somewhat more conveniently).

However, with all the movie channels (I get about twenty between HBO, Showtime, and others like TMC), it offers a movie nut like me the opportunity to flip the listings and record movies that I otherwise wouldn’t watch. Yes, I know the movie channels tend to repeat movies, only showing a few a week. But with 20-odd channels, that still means there are at least 50 movies being shown each week—and odds are there are at least a few I haven’t seen. Combine this with my NetFlix subscription (which I use almost exclusively to watch older movies that aren’t likely to be shown on TV), and it’s pretty easy to rack up 5-7 new movies a week.

Of course, that may not be a goal everyone shares. Hmm.

Line of the day

Matt Yglesias:

And, I suppose, in some sense invading another country for no reason at all is sort of the most punk rock thing ever.

Besides a leather jacket with pyramid spikes, of course.

New York Livin' (But Not Bloggin')

Sorry for the lack of updates. Still settling in to the new job, new life, new place, New York. More later, but for now, let me recommend John Singleton's Mark Wahlberg-starring Four Brothers. Is it actually good? Nah, not really. But it's a surprisingly effective and entertaining multi-ethnic exploitation flick that offers up all requisite violence, course joking, and stereotypes you want from an exploitation flick--and, more importantly, it never lets anything so boring as tender moments, plot, or logic get in the way of the good stuff.

Arcade Fire

... hits Newsweek.

You know, it becomes tougher and tougher to claim a band is some small-time, marginalized indie band -- even, as the article calls them, a "big" little band -- the more often they appear in places like the New York Times and Newsweek.

Zodiac

...comes very close to being a masterpiece, but ends up just being very, very good.

I am a time bomb...

The best band in the history of the universe is reuniting for a single show in my old hood. due to some extremely unfortunate, unforseeable circumstances, I missed their farewell show back in 01. I won't miss this.

Movie Film for Theaters

Your day just got way, way better.