The Archives
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06.23.08The Urbane versus The ProfaneSerendipitously enough--well, serendipitous to me and me alone because over the past week (and owing the fact that I have only the most intermittant access to the internet these days) I have been re-watching various STELLA goodies and listening to Me Talk Pretty One Day on CD--Michael Ian Black is attempting a literary feud of sorts with David Sedaris, which means that my dreams tonight will be pleasantly replete with tandem bicycles and Intro French vocab.
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05.18.08JUST LIKE 10TH GRADE.Realizing with glee that there's a new Death Cab for Cutie album early on a Sunday morning makes me a little ashamed and a lot happy.
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05.13.08HATTED HIPSTERS!Why is it that I am the only person I know1 who is truly charmed by the obnoxious hipsterish cook Spike on the current season of Top Chef (example: he does not hesistate to declare himself as from "Williamsburg" instead of the apparently staid and boring "New York")--it disgusts me that I might find myself attracted to such an unremittant nincompoop; I never thought that I would be so weak as to find myself enamored with so cliche an affectation as perfectly-cocked hats or perfectly-pursed lips or a perfectly-clipped beard...I guess there's no accounting for poor taste in mildly-hirsute scenster ...
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05.10.08WRINKLES? DO WANT!All of the visual media I have consumed over the past two weeks--the uninspiring movie version of Ghost World, almost the entirety of the inaugural season of 30Rock, and the first half of The Big Lebowski--have featured the singularly peculiar personage of Steve Buscemi, a strange and delightful series of coincidences that leaves my interest piqued for May-December romance with a snaggletoothed curmudgeon.
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03.20.08CULTURAL CAPITAL: LOW, BUT RISING.I have not seen No Country for Old Men (and have little desire to), but I have noticed a tendency of those who [presumably] have to mention "No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh" as a paradigm of acute brutality, which is just to say that I try to keep tabs on how chunks of arcane collective knowledge make their way into my working cultural vocabulary; it is a phenomenon I have attempted to chart for some time--indeed, I can tell you precisely how I came to unequivocally know who Paris Hilton is1, and will soon be done with charting ...
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03.05.08AUF’ED!So you know how sometimes your midichlorian1 count feels abnormally low and anxiety is high and your nose is getting sore because you've used up all the Puff's with Lotion and Vick'sTM (third time today I've extolled the virtues of said product, by the by) and had to switch to crude pedestrian tissues AND THEN you realize that the finale of Project Runway is THAT VERY EVENING and even though you're pretty sure that the quaalude-ridden lady is going to win even though New York Magazine totally disagrees but that kind of makes you more excited because it adds ...
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02.11.08Sure we can, but we probably won’t.The first, last, and only person to whom I showed the treacly Will.i.am (do not phunk with his heart) Yes. We. Can.1 video had the most bizarre reaction: he felt neither unduly inspired nor unduly dismissive, he just kept asking me who the different celebrities were and twenty seconds before it ended shrugged, turned away, and declared, "I don't recognize any of these people," a sentiment at which I felt quite aghast2; I didn't even consider that its validity as a political statement/art/campaigning tool/wev would be based on the relative percentages of A-, B- and C-listness of the people ...
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02.06.08Dark-rimmed glasses. Messy [black] hair. Mmmmm.I enjoy (I was going to say "love" but let's keep things realistic here) Chuck Klosterman for the same reasons that I like Project Runway and True Life: it's still pop-culture soma, but I can quite readily convince myself that they have more substance than their more populist analogues (Project Runway:Top Model::Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs:I Love the 80's1); I still wouldn't publicly announce2 enjoyment of Klosterman's fat-free cultural criticism--I mean, the index of ...Cocoa Puffs is little more than an alphabetized summary of Gen X trends (not that I am disparaging of Gen X; at least they comprise some ...
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01.23.08No games, just sports. Meh.Goodness, I just realized that my owner of the coffee shop where I "work" (those quotation marks are meant to be invalidating; I would not dare call my lounging near an espresso machine and masking my scorn for suburban business-people with giggles "work") is a poor facsimile of Mel Gibson's character in What Women Want - and I realize that it is totally embarrassing to be familiar with the ins and outs of such a "film" (again, invalidating quotation marks), but it was on TBS or TNT or some shit television station one insomnia-ridden night and I gave in to ...
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01.16.08the night starts hereI am altogether ashamed by my musical tastes; not ashamed enough to change or hide them, mind you, but ashamed nonetheless - I like polished lovey-dovey pop in the vein of Stars and "[indie|freak|nu] folk" - shit like that; it's totally embarrassing, but it's what indubitably spreads a smile across my face, even in my moments of deepest disdain.