Warbling strings swell as someone looks down at a dust-covered binder and delivers a curt and cryptic one-liner. The television screen goes black and giant white letters stare back at you, floating slow and ominous. And then you say, “What! What is that supposed to mean?” and when you say it, you say it in one of two ways.
The first way is the same way you would say it if you had just been told that you had won an all expense paid trip to Scarlett Johansson’s Sexy Adventure & Ice Cream Palace (Unfortunately, there is no such thing …yet. MTV, are you reading this?).
This first response is, of course, the appropriate response.
The other way is the kind of reaction you would have if you were an astronaut, and while you were recovering from a traumatizing space accident, your doctor came into your hospital room in a hazmat suit and told you that they have discovered a small growth of something that they will only refer to as “foreign tissue.” Read more »
This letter is long overdue, and will most likely fall on deaf ears, but I feel that it is necessary if only for my own piece of mind. I hated you for a long time, and maybe it was well-deserved, but it’s time to bury this shit and let the hate out of my heart. I look on you now with the knowledge of Low and Aladdin Sane, which takes most of the sting off, but what you did was still fucked up, and I was just a kid. I’ve loved a handful of women in my life, but she was the first. By that point you could have had anyone you wanted. Actresses, models, Mick Jagger. Why try and mack on my girl? And what’s worse, you’re gonna go and wear a cod piece and throw on some skin tight leggings. I was six years old, barely packin’ anything more substantial than a Vienna sausage. Read more »
In honor of the the 81st Academy Awards, I wanted to give my pick for which film will win Best Picture. I haven’t seen any of them, but I don’t see how that makes me any less qualified to choose.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
When a middle-class family moves from San Francisco to a small town in Iowa, Anne-Louise, a precocious 9-year old, realizes that her favorite stuffed animal, Benjamin Button, has been lost in the move. When Patrick, the patriarch of the clan, recommends to Anne-Louise that perhaps it is time for her to set aside childish things like stuffed animals and begin her pre-pubescent tweenie years, she throws a fit and reveals to Holly, the mother, that Patrick had been carrying on a torrid affair with the family babysitter, and this was the reason the family was forced to move to Iowa (when Patrick tried to break it off with the babysitter, she threatened to go public, and so he was forced to take a position in Iowa with his company to avoid destroying his family. Read more »
I’ve always figured that Crispin Glover was an authentic wacko, but in the past few days I’ve been curious to discover exactly just how warped he truly is. For those of you who don’t know, Glover is the actor/writer/musician most commonly associated with his role as George McFly in Back to the Future. What some fans of the series might not realize is that Crispin, due to a contract dispute, declined to appear in the sequels, and so when George McFly appears in parts II & III, it is either previously filmed footage or a different actor wearing prosthetics, but I digress.
Crispin, whose middle name is Hellion, began acting at the age of 13, but his most notable (to me, at least) acting gig pre-Back to the Future also came in 1985 when he starred as “Groovin’ Larry” in the third installment of Trent Harris’ the Beaver Trilogy, entitled The Orkly Kid. Read more »
Look at us now; busted up and everyone talking about hard rain. It seems to me in times like these, we should be looking for entertainment in the old fashioned places. Not that I don’t enjoy a night on the town as much as the next debaucherous youth, but wouldn’t it do us all a bit of good this year to crack open a book, dust off a board game or head down to the local movie house rather than getting pissed and licking the ear of your best friend’s girl just before you wrongfully accuse her of making a cuckold of him.
Sure, the Dow was down another 300 today and ticket prices aren’t getting any lower, but there are definitely some movies scheduled (or rumored) for release this year that might remind us all of the better times. Here are the 2009 sequels/remakes/franchise reboots that could turn America’s frown upside down: Read more »
Franklin Pierce. Fourteenth President of the United States, man about town and inveterate drunk.
In 1852 the Democratic Party was splintered. Everybody was at each other’s necks and bickering over their differing opinions. Franklin Pierce, a New Hampshire lawyer, didn’t have very many opinions (if he did, he didn’t express them very clearly) and, even better, he was a pretty likeable guy. The Democrats nominated him and pit him against the Whigs and he won by a landslide. The Whig platform wasn’t even that much different from the platform Pierce had been running on, people just liked him better than his opponent, Gen. Winfield Scott.
March 4th, 1853, Franklin “Baby” Pierce was inaugurated into the office of the President of the United States of America. It’s kind of a messed up name if you think about it, considering none of his three children survived to adulthood. Read more »
I learned something yesterday. The only thing worse than spending Valentine’s Day hungover, having lost your phone, is having this song stuck in your head the whole time:
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to purchase a bathmat and toilet seat cover that aren’t stained with vomit.
I was lucky enough to score an interview with Alex Lilly, and it went something like this…
Most of my current musical tastes stem from a tangled, incestuous tree with roots as deep as Robert Johnson to stalwart, vibrant branches like Elvis Costello and Aimee Mann. A few years back, during a period of obsession with the aforementioned Mann, and other chanteuses like her, I stumbled onto the dulcet sounds of Inara George. Read more »
