Split Infinitives

This is the person I have been obsessed with lately. So tough,...

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:18:06 -0500

This is the person I have been obsessed with lately. So tough, so tender. RELATED: Underrated.

"Ben Stiller deserves full acknowledgment as Greenberg’s co-creator. His performance is some..."

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:07:53 -0500

“Ben Stiller deserves full acknowledgment as Greenberg’s co-creator. His performance is some kind of career peak, a beautifully modulated piece of craft and one of the best bits of physical acting you’re likely to see in a film for a while.”

- From Glenn Kenny’s Greenberg rave. He also called it “a picture of moments, and a lot of them are still coalescing in me.”

Mark Lanegan: “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” From...

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 12:45:30 -0500

Mark Lanegan: “Where Did You Sleep Last Night”

From The Winding Sheet

Relevant to this, considering Kurt played guitar and sang on Sheet, Lanegan’s first solo album. Someone needs to sit down and talk with Lanegan, then write a long, heartbreaking feature.

Jason Segel and Ed Helms Join Duplass Brothers’ Stoner Comedy...

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:56:50 -0500

Jason Segel and Ed Helms Join Duplass Brothers’ Stoner Comedy Jeff Who Lives at Home | /Film

Getting fairly obsessed with the Duplass brothers, so this is exciting.

Psyched on this! Enthusiasm!

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:52:10 -0500

Psyched on this! Enthusiasm!

I wrote almost exclusively about Michael Lynche’s...

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:36:42 -0500

I wrote almost exclusively about Michael Lynche’s performance, for obvious reasons.

Three Things About Last Night’s American Idol: Watching Michael Lynche, If Only For A Moment, Change Everything

Big moment. More tomorrow.

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:39:52 -0500

Big moment. More tomorrow.

FADER FORT SXSW 2010 REPORT, YOU GUYS

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:11:00 -0500

Just got a top secret email from a deep-sourced source person source. He/she said this is what Thursday is looking like.

Fader Fort Lineup, Thursday, 3/18

1 – 1:30 Gilbert Gottfried

1:30 – 2 That girl from the Progressive Insurance commercials

2 – 3 Cap’n Jazz

3 – 4 Kosha Dillz

4 – 5 The little kid from Two and a Half Men

5 – 6 Seinfeld

White Hinterland: “Begin Again” Biggest surprise of...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:21:55 -0500

White Hinterland: “Begin Again”

Biggest surprise of the year for me. Verses are soft, muddy, hooks are massive, affirming. Like Aaliyah recording in an igloo. From here.

Elia Kazan’s Wild River is not available on DVD in the...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:57:23 -0500

Elia Kazan’s Wild River is not available on DVD in the United States. Inexplicable.

This week’s ‘That’s Montgomery Clift!’ at BAM.

GQ: Three Things About Last Night’s American Idol: All...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 10:33:11 -0500

GQ: Three Things About Last Night’s American Idol: All Right, We Get It, Everyone Loves Crystal Bowersox

Titus Andronicus: “Theme From...

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:14:00 -0500

Titus Andronicus: “Theme From ‘Cheers’”

I know we’re at a saturation point here. Hang with me, the album is out today.

"Ezra Factory was his rap name in college, we would eventually learn, meaning: “a factory that..."

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:28:00 -0500

“Ezra Factory was his rap name in college, we would eventually learn, meaning: “a factory that produces Ezra, because I’m so hot, but also that I’m a factory of cool rhymes.” Ever the diplomat, he added: “I also liked the reference to Factory Records.””

- Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig, in Conversation with John Wray at the NYPL, or, the Burden of Pretending That Your Mom Was a Stripper - Sound of the City

Titus Andronicus: March 6, 2010 Bowery Ballroom

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:20:00 -0500

Titus Andronicus: March 6, 2010 Bowery Ballroom:

Download the entire, sweaty, messy, imperfect, ultimately satisfying show there. Lots of Replacements correlations to be made. Here’s the review of The Monitor I wrote for eMusic. It’s about 10,000 words too short.

Leaving home can be hard. Titus Andronicus frontman and primary songwriter Patrick Stickles left his native Glen Rock, New Jersey, to follow a girl to Massachusetts. It didn’t work out. His mistake, our gain. From that broken affair and an obsession with Ken Burns’ epic documentary, The Civil War, comes this, one of the year’s finest and most enthralling albums, equal parts punk and Americana, classic rock and roots; it’s a composition so complex and riotous it demands a lyric sheet and a glass of whiskey at every turn.

Named after the historically revolutionary — and eventually, sunken — battleship developed in the 1850s, The Monitor was a vessel bustling with bravery, paranoia, desperation, sorrow, and lots of booze and excrement. These are Stickles’ themes, too, and while his parallels between the war within our country and his own pissed existence are awfully muddied once the first song — the throat-clenching “A More Perfect Union” — is over, he and his bandmates have dragged us deep down into the muck. We sit passenger-side, watching the landmarks of his native New Jersey fly by like road signs on the Jersey Turnpike. “Tramps like us, baby we were born to die,” Stickles yarls on the opener, simultaneously defaming and paying homage to his state’s musical godfather, before the band tumbles into the album’s oft-repeated refrain: “The enemy is everywhere.” Throughout, friends and collaborators like Craig Finn and Cassie Ramone chip in interstitial snatches of speeches from relevant Civil War-era figures: Abe Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Walt Whitman, etc. The speeches create a disquieting terror between these rip-roaring songs; they are the meditative calm before and after every storm.

And things do get stormy. Musically, the band is fuller than before: shambolic saloon piano, desert-quiet harmonica solos, dueling ripchord guitar, knee-knocking fiddles. They have grand ambitions here, working out a long, twisted song cycle. There’s also drama in every word Stickles utters. He is verbose but precise; literate but low-hanging. There are literally dozens of quotable lines, little bon mots twisted from other sources (The Dark Knight, Billy Bragg, local haunt The Glen Rock Inn), or wholly original lamentations (“You will always be a loser!”, “I’m sorry mama, but I’ve been drinkin’ again,” “It’s still us against them,” “Give me anything but another year in exile!”). Stickles is also an increasingly intuitive vocalist, able to avoid the Conor Oberst-lite tag that dogged him after the release of the band’s 2009 debut, The Airing of Grievances. His wail is louder and leaner than before, his whisper tremulous and haunting.

Perhaps a warning is required here: Eight of the 10 songs on The Monitor exceed five minutes. Closer “The Battle of Hampton Roads,” is a whopping 14 minutes. Be not afraid. This is a striving young band, but also an enormously accomplished one. Full of feeling and fury, The Monitor deserves the time.

3 more scoreless innings for Mejia today.

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:01:57 -0500

hotfoot:

2 hits 0 walks 1 K.

His spring line so far: 5 1/3 IP, 5 K, 2 hits, 0.00 ERA

Get on the level. Jenrry Mejia, Ike Davis, Josh Thole. No more drama in my life.

That's crazy how you can just change the address of your Tumblr without losing followers, etc. Technology!

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:30:30 -0500

That's crazy how you can just change the address of your Tumblr without losing followers, etc. Technology!

"I’m just contrary. I want to take an open-minded point of view on someone that is normally..."

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:42:00 -0500

““I’m just contrary. I want to take an open-minded point of view on someone that is normally vilified. If you want an easy job, go work for the Red Cross. If you want a real job, go work for Big Tobacco. I have always kind of seen something in that, like making ‘The Insider’ is easy, right? It’s like Big Tobacco is evil. Wow, what a statement.”

- Jason Reitman. Just dredging up a little post-Up In The Air failure quote schadenfreude from November. Cuz, you know, The Insider was only about how bad Big Tobacco is and it was easy to make. Idiot.

Jason Reitman firmly at the controls in ‘Up in the Air’ - Los Angeles Times

MS Paint?

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 01:23:41 -0500

MS Paint?

(via fuckyeahsubs)

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 18:35:34 -0500

(via fuckyeahsubs)

Photo

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 14:19:07 -0500