Is Traffic Heavier Now?

(top screencap via, other screencaps via)

IFC has been cycling Crash - not Paul Haggis' questionable 2004 Oscar-winner, David Cronenberg's 1996 carfuckers saga - which I haven't seen (despite owning the DVD) since its theatrical release.  Back then I watched with the source material fresh in mind, thought it an interesting failure that adhered too closely to the Ballard; now I think it's perhaps the last great movie the man might ever leave behind.  [Spoilers throughout.  Also, this might get yucky.  Sorry.]

Cronenberg made his name as a thinking person's horror director, and when you're a teenage mondo freak you're flattered when anyone working the genre with even half a brain splatters across your windshield (nevermind someone who introduces sex as something other than either undead fantasy or a punishable act).  In the ‘80s fright flicks became obsessed with growing practical f/x technology, were indulgences of elaborate executions or goopy phantasmagoria.  Cronenberg's work could include both, but he was obviously working his own level.  It wasn't simply the matter of employing f/x as means to an end; it was both a matter of context - the Canadian's cool, often stilted staging worked in contrast to the genre's usual histrionics to generate more shock - and attitude, considering the f/x not as criminal or supernatural elements, but as serious representations of body horror.  (Never underestimate the love that can be generated by elevating fanboy elements to serious consideration.  See: The overbearing worship for The Dark Knight.)

The script for 1983's messy, brilliant Videodrome inadvertently (?) provided its director a label - "The New Flesh" - and an explanation of his appeal ("It has something that you don't have... It has a philosophy. And that is what makes it dangerous."), but the film was less a defining feature than another cell in the organism of the director's work.  Consistent subjects and approaches helped gain him a critical following; anyone exhibiting auteur tendencies can be more easily evaluated (and the auteur theory indulges fanboy needs, positing interconnections between isolated fantasy constructs).  His reputation would grow as his obsession with mind/body conflict shifted toward mental disconnect, as the f/x he utilized emphasized the fantastic.  The high point of his career, still, is the Fly-Dead Ringers-Naked Lunch triptych over which the filmmaker evolved from exhibiting the effects of an extreme degenerative disease to exploring drug-induced sexuality-questioning dissociation.  Not that he was mellowing to court mainstream eyes; "gynecological tools for mutant women" and talking typewriter-bug asses do not box office gold make.  But while The Brood ('79) unforgettably showed Samantha Eggar biting into her external tumor/womb to give birth to her rage babies, Cronenberg excised a dream sequence from Dead Ringers ('88) wherein his Mantle twins, reimagined as conjoined, are bloodily separated by Geneviève Bujold's teeth.  Presumably the artist was maturing; as someone who'd long ago lost his taste for latex-and-Karo stew but still had his sick sense of humor, I flattered myself with parallel progress.

(Cronenberg's other 1983 film, a restrained and solid version of Stephen King's The Dead Zone, might fit best as a sidebar into auteurist career retros, but the flick - the director's first high-profile literary adaptation - presaged his current just-ok hired-hand phase.  More practically, its box office success helped his career.  He had already gotten offers to direct such stuff as Flashdance and Beverly Hills Cop.  I long to see the alternative universe versions of those; his would-be Total Recall, not so much.)

So boom here's Crash, and James Spader shoving his dick in Rosanna Arquette's leg wound.

Something is missing from the marriage of James Ballard (Spader, whose character is named, as in the novel, after the author) and Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger).  They take other sexual partners - joylessly, the introductory couplings we're shown are refused orgasm - then meet and mate while describing and reenacting their extracurriculars.  Ballard gets into a car accident - he jumps a median, speeds the wrong way on a ramp - with Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter) which kills her husband.  The Ballards and Remington are drawn to a cult lead by a man named Vaughan (Elias Koteas) where auto collisions are considered a sexual activity.

After first seeing the movie I churned out words, probably better than these, who knows where they are.  Maybe in some warehouse where all things CompuServe are kept.  Cronenberg makes serious, considered films, inspires serious, considered analyses - and Crash begs for interpretation away from the literal because the literal is unnatural and outrageous and disgusting.  The structure of the film makes it a contemplation of the Ballards' marriage:  It opens with a trio of sex scenes - Catherine + other, James + other, Catherine + James; during the last one, after she distantly mentions that her outside experience didn't make her come, he consoles her with the phrase "maybe the next one."  At the end of the film, after James has given Catherine her first auto accident, he meets her body under the wreckage on a grassy median (other than a nighttime chase through the woods, the grass is the only natural surface in the film, could signal an exit from this type of manufactured dalliance).  After she sadly says that she thinks she's alright, he starts to have sex with her, consoling, "Maybe the next one, darling, maybe the next one."

So you can see the whole flick as a gross elaboration of its early swinging scenes.  Desensitization, as a subject, is an obvious and suitable topic, aided as much by the filmmaker's consistent cold tone as the plot.  You can talk about how technology's role in our lives or ponder how desperate craving for human contact leads the characters to bang bumpers.  The breakdown in traditional interpersonal contact mirrors a breakdown in society, the cult as a bunch anarchists.  The cult stages passion plays in which celebrity crashes (James Dean, Jane Mansfield) are re-staged.  Why can't these folks just drive between the lines and enjoy the vanilla sex God gave them?

Then there's the Cronenbergian bent, because the director is always frankly amoral:  As we abandon nature and find new ways of living, our bodies must change.  Vaughan could be a philosopher/prophet, but he is also another in Cronenberg's long line of mad artist/scientists (Shivers' Emil Hobbes, The Brood's Hal Raglan, Videodrome's Brian O'Blivion, The Fly's Seth Brundle, Dead Ringers' Mantle brothers, Naked Lunch's Benway).  He seems to provide Ballard and the film with a specific mission statement.  His study is "the reshaping of the body by modern technology, something we are all intimately involved in."

Vaughan is quite aware that he's full of shit.

Watching Crash this time, without a head readied to make comparative mixed-media and intra-oeuvre studies, I appreciated it as a fetish film.  Not a film about fetishists, though it's ostensibly that too.  Crash could be seen as Cronenberg's idea of material to which his theoretical band of outsiders might harmlessly spank it.

At the time of its release there was both predictable conservative uproar over the film's content and predictable critical defensiveness about the form.

Concerns that the ideas presented within the movie might inspire adoption of its erotic technique certainly seem ludicrous.  (But might be unmeasurable, considering how many car accidents happen each day, considering the circumstances of some go unexamined, considering that privately staged crashes would never be reported.)  It was a low-budget art-house movie with no huge stars and a subject with very limited appeal.  Though it went on to become eighth highest-grossing NC-17 film in the U.S., it did so by taking in little more than two million dollars.

The notion that Cronenberg had created a film-virus is amusing, given most of his early movies concern outbreaks of some sort, outbreaks often seen as destructive to civilization but are otherwise not judged morally (The director has been widely quoted as saying that "a virus is just doing its job"); his scientists are portrayed with varying degrees of positivity and dementia.  But of all the director's major films up to that point, Crash is one of his most dead-ended.  There's something asexually procreative about a lot of his work - the parasites in Shivers, the virus in Rabid, the sexless rage babies of The Brood, Videodrome's New Flesh and life-as-video signal, Brundle's telepods (The Fly's smartly deleted coda featured a butterfly baby).  The more mind-focused his work became, the less epidemic the change:  A woman with an impossible womb gives birth to an identity by introducing a rift into the Mantle twins' self-contained world in Dead Ringers.  You could argue that Naked Lunch, via drugs and tragedy, births a Writer.  Crash concerns a married couple, has loads of sex - all of it strategically unsafe, and though Vaughan asserts that a car crash is a "fertilizing" and though accidents affect physical changes (and you could argue Arquette's Gabrielle as a "new creature" if you'd like), the central couple is left at the end much as we found them at the beginning.

James' desire to indoctrinate Catherine into the cult recalls Brundle's attempt to "purify" his mates via teleportation (Ballard uses both Vaughan's actual and automotive penises as agents).  Catherine's disappointment when she escapes her accident without transformation might signal an end to this particular cycle of experimentation or might portend even more extreme efforts behind the wheel.  But whatever the "next time" holds, it doesn't seems as enticing as, say, Shivers' climactic swimming pool orgy.

(What I remember (accurately or not) most about the source novel are endless descriptions of comingling vehicular and bodily fluids - petrol and plasma, antifreeze and splooge - which I suppose could be meant as a high-viscosity primordial ooze.  There are post-wreckage and post-orgasm fluids on display in the film, but I don't think they're shown to co-mingle in a way that suggests creation, or even baptism, just the parallel recognition that both the mechanical and biological bodies go dripdripdrip.)

["cum, blood and gold splattered on tom ripley, patrick bateman, tony soprano, humbert humbert, the devil, dexter morgan, beatrix kiddo, angel, vic mackey, malcolm reynolds, raoul duke, god, and all my beloved fictional anti-heroes" by Libby Lynn, from her Flickr] 

There are always going to be cars and people, and now there's the film to transfer the idea of modified people/car interaction (as there was a book more than twenty years before it); but there are no car/people babies.  After Ballard and Remington, we're never shown additions to Vaughan's cult, only subtractions; though Ballard claims Vaughan's car after that man's death, there's no indication he plans to spread the word to a new generation of bangers.  Though Vaughan's death might be Christ-like to his own cult, putting the catalyst for the film's subversion to death is as in line with the Hays code as throwing Paul Muni in the gutter.  As aided by Cronenberg's natural low-key monotone, the film wouldn't seem to portray its activities as rewarding.

Which is one of the standard critical defenses against Crash's eroticism:  The subject matter is too artificial and too coolly staged to mean to turn anyone on.  Motive used to be important not just to establish cred but legality; there was a time when intent to titillate was something akin to a punishable offense and people had to meet and blahblahblah until the proper authorities were convinced that, okay, the object d'smut was indeed boring enough to be allowed out in public.  Today, when erotica is embraced by academia and self-satisfaction now supersedes purposefulness on just about every level, the need for such arguments seems quaint.  But even in 1996 both critics and Cronenberg downplayed the nature of the film's content and focused on its form and delivery in order to have the work taken seriously.

One of the common refutations of a potential epidemic was that, though its elements are less fantastic than most of Cronenberg's films, its depictions are pure fantasy.  "Crash," Ebert wrote, "is about characters entranced by a sexual fetish that, in fact, no one has."  A very pre-Internet assertion.  Now we can Google up the most ridiculous turn-ons.  The domain for crashfetish.com is no longer held, but there's a description (along with the lapsed link) at the necro-oriented site "Death and Dementia" (seriously, ew):  "Nudity-free site contains hundreds of car wrecks, victims photos, and related car crash fantasy material."  More mainstream, BoingBoing reported a foray into plane crash fetishes directly inspired by J.G. Ballard's book.  Feel free to look for more, I'm off to flush my cookies.  (I'm also not going to, beyond Siskel/Ebert and personal recollections of the reaction at the time of release, do a survey of critical opinion.)

Instead, Ebert praised the movie for being "a dissection of the mechanics of pornography," for using porno "form" without achieving its "result."  Plenty of sex on screen, nothing downstairs offscreen, all the blood stays in the right head.  The film - awarded a special Jury Prize at Cannes not for quality but for "daring, audacity, and originality" - consists almost entirely of either sex scenes or driving scenes (which in this context should also be considered sex scenes).  Again, the first three scenes in the movie are sex scenes.  But they are abbreviated, without climax, and used to establish their main characters' relationship.  That might make Crash an incompetent porno film, or an ultra-competent one.  Depends on what floats your boat.

I'm neither familiar with the ways of "real" car crash fetishists nor want to be - I suppose the sex act for them could be the crash itself, and all the interhuman or human-car relationships before and after the event are just appreciative foreplay/post-coital cuddling?  In the movie, no one is actually having human-to-human sex during a crash and there are no slo-mo injury shots that relish the disfiguration of the body during an accident.  (Thank goodness.)  There is nothing so crude as someone mounting a stick shift or plugging up an exhaust pipe.

There's an argument to be made that Crash could not work as a fetish film simply because it's fake.  The crashes are staged, the sex isn't hardcore, the wounds aren't real.  I'd like to think that anyone with an actual car crash fetish has learned to comfort themselves with a rich fantasy life and can suspend disbelief enough to "enjoy" this stuff at least as much as folks enjoy the fake orgasms and transparent set-ups in "normal" pornography.  But it's amusing that Cronenberg includes a scene where the cult watches what he assumes they would consider stroke-stuff:  Underground crash test dummy footage.

(Because of his tone, it's easy to think of Cronenberg as humorless; he isn't.  In a scene where Vaughan and Ballard get car parts tattooed on their bodies, Ballard holds up the pattern for a sphincter-like Lincoln hood ornament and says, "Where do you think that one should go?")

Cronenberg himself doesn't want you to think of his film as porn because porn only has a single use:  "The standard definition of pornography is something that is created solely for the purposes of sexual arousal, and by that standard the movie is not pornographic -- it asks to be taken on a metaphorical level. The way the dialogue is delivered or the characters react -- none of that is meant to be torn from reality." His film is a complex, challenging work of art that begs interpretation not masturbation, okay.

But Cronenberg, like Vaughan, can be full of shit.  His comments about his own work are almost always interesting (it's a shame there isn't a commentary track on the DVD; the last ten minutes from an old Criterion LaserDisc edition are on YouTube, and some kind soul has upped the mp3 as a torrent online), but sometimes the ideas don't translate.  (I recall him describing how his lousy adaptation of David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly was about its characters creating "a new kind of sex" - which, buzzer, no, lovely parting gifts.  But that is one of the things Crash is about!  When Ballard and Vaughan eventually pair up, it's less a specific homosexual curiosity than another reconfiguration of flesh and automobile.)  Cronenberg allows Vaughan to reappreciate his own work within the film; several scenes after explaining the whole "reshaping of the human body by human technology" thing - the most typically Cronenbergian bent - Vaughan dismisses that as "a crude sci-fi concept" that "kind of floats on the surface and doesn't threaten anybody."  Vaughan is creating excuses to enjoy his fetish.  Could Cronenberg be doing the same?

The whole argument that Crash's tone establishes it as non-erotic is also wrong.  It's unrealistic, sure.  But the PTSD "trance" Ebert claims is also Cronenberg's SOP.  The director has a very narrow emotional comfort zone.  It's rare he allows an actor to break away - although two performances that have, James Woods' in Videodrome and Jeff Goldblum's in The Fly, work exceptionally well.  (Goldblum, though it's his standard operating procedure, has to act Human-Plus because (a) The Fly is basically a melodramatic romantic tragedy and (b) he's not just acting for himself, but for all that make-up.)  Holly Hunter is a generally an expressive presence on film, and here - compared with naturally cool actors like Spader and Unger - she seems smothered.  There are no howling, enthusiastic orgasms in Crash, but there's rarely any howling or enthusiasm in any David Cronenberg film.  (The red-walled snuff arena in Videodrome would seem to be an exception, but it's framed at a distance and - despite the screaming - is more disturbing for its lack of enthusiasm.)

Once you get past how sick and silly Crash's subject matter is, once you get used to its tone, it feels like it's meant to be as erotic as Cronenberg is capable of making it.  Wounds and wreckage aren't inherently sexy, naked bodies and cars are.  How long cars have had a sexual role in American society, I don't know - from their inception they've at least been a status symbol, they've long been a symbol of personal freedom, we get driver's licenses at the same time our bodies start to sexually realize themselves, and pragmatically, cars provide a place to fuck - but they do, even when they're not described as compensatory phallic symbols.

(The specific cars are not chosen for inherent ergonomic sexiness, and models may or not represent their owners - I'm not a car guy, you go do that.  But Vaughan's banged-up Lincoln convertible is supposed to both evoke the Kennedy assassination ("a special kind of car crash") and Vaughan's cock.  Long before Catherine and James discuss the member ("scarred from a motorcycle accident") in private, you have a pretty good idea what it looks like.  You've seen it roaring down streets, bending into fenders.  After Vaughan's death, Remington and Gabrielle meet and make out in the car's wreckage - it's not a lesbian scene, it's a three-way.  At the end, Ballard claims the Lincoln (from director Cronenberg, in an aural cameo) and uses it to love-tap Catherine into her first (the film's final) accident.)

Crash is erotic not because it shows attractive people writhing around in various states of undress, but because it shows them treating each other with respect and even some tenderness, and because the film often treats its subjects with respect and some tenderness.  The Ballards are a committed, loving couple who clearly understand each other; there's something powerfully intimate and intuitive about Catherine's descriptions and inquisitions (just after his initial accident, before he has discovered any sex/crash connection, she gives James a handjob while describing to damage to his vehicle).  Though much is made of how much of the sex in the film is front-to-back, hands and eyes appreciate flesh with a sense of discovery.  And they appreciate metal and leather the same way.  Ballard first drives the Lincoln while Vaughan and a prostitute negotiate its back seat; it's a double date, and Spader's eyes and hands are amazing while he grabs the steering wheel and takes control.  The movie looks at its cars and characters this way, too, with odd-angle rigs and non-standard sex set-ups; Peter Suschitzky's camerawork isn't elaborate, doesn't bring attention to itself, it pays new attention to very old subjects, bodies and buggies.

The movie's most obvious fetish object is Arquette's reconfigured Gabrielle, whose black-rod surgical supports and ridiculous rubber titty brace make her look at least half-Borg.  And the most transgressive thing that happens concerning her isn't the wound-sex (which - again, thankfully - is not explicitly shown) or her turn with Remington; it's how, after presenting herself as an ogled object in an auto showroom, she catches her leg brace on the leather interior of a Mercedes and makes a salesman tear the seat to get her out.  Naughty!

It's easy to overthink this stuff, easy to want to escape into overthinking this stuff.  When Ebert took his confronting the formal structure of pornography and "mechanism of human compulsion" blah to his TV show, Siskel - who hated the movie - called bullshit.  And though he's blunt and dismissive, I think his reaction is more honest than Ebert's or even Cronenberg's.  He asserts that the film can indeed be erotic, and he hates that.  Inspiring that sort of involvement with this type of material is more dangerous than any empty intellectual exercise.

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Anyway, that's not what I wanted to talk about. 

Howard Shore - Crash (mp3)(buy)

Though I'd originally set aside the film without a second glance, I've revisited its soundtrack many, many times.  Howard Shore has collaborated with Cronenberg on a dozen films going back to 1979; his best score before this one was probably the one for The Fly, an oversized orchestral thing that acknowledged both the film's monster movie roots and its sweet romantic center.  The composer's probably best known for his Academy Award-winning product for the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which he repackaged as a six-movement symphony and took on an international tour.  Big!  Huge!

Crash's low budget forced Shore to scale his operation back, to great effect.  According to the CD liner notes, "the score was primarily orchestrated for six electric guitars, three orchestral harps, three woodwinds, and two percussionists" and was subjected to a great deal of post-recording manipulation.

Like the film, it can be sexy, dangerous stuff.  There are dark mood tracks with obligatory metal-on-metal screeching, but this theme undulates both methodically and naturally, the strings as sinews that'll slice your calluses clean off.

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Thurston Moore & Nels Cline - Finish Yr Self (excerpt from the Rhino In-Store Metasweet)(mp3)(buy)

Clumsily extracted by yours truly from a 45-minute performance the guitar greats gave in Westwood's Rhino Records store on December 30th, 1996, I've no idea if I'm applying the right title.  The CD claims four sections to the seamless one-track "Metasweet," but there are five tracks on Pillow Wand - which firmed up (stiffened up, perhaps) similar material in a studio that same day.  This excerpt most closely corresponds to Wand's "We Love Our Blood" in its cleanliness and placement, but it's not the same tune.

"Blood" also starts clean, and one of the things I love about this bit is how it emerges from the choppy echoes of the previous section ("Tommy Hall Dragnet" on Wand, "Where the Hell is Tommy Hall" here).  In-Store isolates each guitarist - Sonic Youth dude's in the left channel, the then-Fibbers guy is in the right - and while Cline is ultimately responsible for laying the foundation with that tight, repetitive run, Moore takes point in snatching notes from the noise.  Though those notes are less tuneful, more expressive, like a child running ahead of his parents' patient steps.

Love how the tantrumish wails Moore starts injecting around the 3:29 mark settle down into a tempered, almost Hendrixy run, how after that he keeps punching away from the path.

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Orchestre de la Radio-Télévision de Cracovie (Jürg Wyttenbach, con., Carmen Fournier, violin) - Giacinto Scelsi's Anahit (mp3)(buy/buy alternate performance)

Things that make you go Ommmmmmm:  Giacinto Scelsi was a mid-20th century Italian composer, a "playboy count," a wanderer of the East, a sufferer of psychological breakdown, a circle hovering over a horizontal line, a dedicated patron of a single piano key.

He contemplated, challenged the note, watched it hold.

Representative was his Quattro Pezzi Su Una Nota Sola (Four pieces each on a single note), which is what it says it is, which isn't remotely as dull as that might seem.  The compositions - none reaches the five minute mark, all feel like they could go longer - keep their chosen tone as the center but vary instrumentation, attack, accuracy.  They bend away from the tone, introduce second tones, create reverberative dissonances, but what each leaves you with, as they very gradually approach and recede, is A Note.

"Anahit" is a longer piece - [SPOILER ALERT] more than one note!  It emphasizes/shocks its sometimes disconcerting minimalism just after the midway point with a rich "golden section."  Gorgeous stuff, and a good reminder that it's been too long since I've pulled out that Stars of the Lid disc I liked so much.

Heard this track streaming on Classical Discoveries on WPRB a few weeks back.  The disc this specific performance comes from appears to be out of print in the U.S.; it's also on this 3-disc import.  There's also an alternate performance available.

You can read more about Scelsi over at Alex Ross' Haus.

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First photo = Five stars

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Happy Seventh, Largehearted Boy.

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Go ask Sasha Frere-Jones some ?s.  Maybe something about Beyoncé, maybe something about why he's being so hard on Lost.
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"I've got dignity ON MY DIGNITY!"

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"Are you the double-sided dildo?"

I like screaming at cookware and redecorating the front of my home with rocks.  So:  Now it's time for The New Sincerity.  Please enlighten us.  It's not like there's much to disagree with in that post, except perhaps some unnecessary insiderish status wagging - that record might have leaked, but some of us got to hear it three weeks earlier in our p4k Mystery Machine (FIRST!!!), except perhaps that boiling all human motivation down to a single "basic biological truth" is foolish, except perhaps the very author of the piece.

Sylvester's own dabblings in "Ironic Creative Fiction" branded him a useless distraction long ago.  He even confronts this, good for him, having to devote the entire first paragraph to confusion over whether or not the object of his scorn is his goddamned secret identity; later he comes close to apologizing for past wrongs - he's "not exactly proud" - but fails to criticize himself on any specifics.  Perhaps Sylvester feels that's best left to others.  But others have better things to do.

Ironic Creative Fiction is about as dangerous and useful and fun as a headless Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robot.

The killer bullet point in the whole deal is the most direct one:  "Hipster Runoff is really fucking boring."  Kumbaya.  I'm not concerned, as Sylvester is, with HRO's inherent insecurities.  I've sniped before that both its character and quantity get in the way of content, but the main problem is that it's the same tired in-quotes question repeated over and over in degenerative LOLspeak.  I've told people they should read HRO once, only once, as art it's worth a single glance.  Frankly, it's been the only notable new content development in the "music blogosphere" in the past couple years.  But it's an idea for a post, not a body of work, even Giacinto Scelsi would have criticized it as too one-note.  It contains an odd chuckle here and there; "When I fuck my girlfriend, I pretend I'm fucking Wes Anderson" is almost funny enough to be on a Hot Topic t-shirt.  But the American Apparel-sponsored blog is both the insufferable Kristen Wiig character and Lorne Michaels' determination to shove that character down our throats.  If seeing the same three prefixes Ctrl+V'd again and again in supersized Helvetica makes you feel you're expanding your worldview, HRO is yr altbro.  Indie culture has long displayed a preference for the confines of its own ass.

Or instead you could buy and breeze through this and enjoy the question of why-listen-to-what from more than a single tired angle.

Lord knows there's nothing worthwhile going on at this place, either.  Perpetual opinionating is just treading water in a toilet.  But I'm happy enough making empty promises and insignificant splashy outside either camp's circle of synchronized back-patters.

I was hoping that we'd wake up the day after Obama had been sworn in and Perez Hilton and Hipster Runoff and Stephen Colbert (who can be funny, fine, but his relentless sarcasm (or pseudo-sarcasm or double-dog pseudo-sarcasm) is soul-withering) would have all closed shop and joined the Peace Corps.  Childish things, put ‘em away, make ‘em gone.  But progress doesn't just happen, America, it takes work.

And I thought we were already free of Nick Sylvester, but people say that Patrick Swayze's real good in that new show.  Maybe this will be a worthwhile venture, or maybe it'll just be a YouTube video of a monkey peeing in its own mouth, let's hope for the best, why not.

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Maybe I'm just jealous of people who can actually finish a post.

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One thing's for sure:  The Internet needs. a. fucking. editor.

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"One thing about racism that people don't talk about his how BORING it is. I don't mean that in a dismissive or reductive way. I understand that racism does actual damage to real people all the time, and in that sense it is horrible (understatement) and unignorable. But in the sense that this movie is racist, it's boring when people are just so bull-headedly wrong about EVERYTHING."

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Someone pretending to be Kanye West has been sending me e-mail, then sending me more e-mail apologizing for sending me e-mail, then sending me more e-mail.  There is no reason I should be in Fake Kanye West's address book.

But if Fake Emily Mortimer is out there, hit me up.

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MzlTv:  Erykah Badu's new baby's name will be <140 characters long.

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R.I.P. Joe Ades.  "He cleaned up really well," she said, "but still there were these little shreds of carrots that said, ‘I was here.'"  Marnie Stern ain't got nothin' on you.

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Wouldn't winter be the perfect time for The Hot Toddies to play New York?  Not June.  Winter.

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Hold on:  Of all the people who've lost their jobs in Detroit over the last year, Matt Millen is once again collecting a paycheck?  NBC Sports, shame on you.  Though this is the network of Jeff Zucker.  The network's slogan must be We Reward Failure.

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And: Good on you Kurt, Cards.  I fully expected Arizona to get pulverized, as I have every step of the way through this postseason.  Just the size disadvantage up on the line should have set them back permanently.  The interception was a bad pass, the undisciplined penalties were nuts, and there were so many stops that should have been made.  But they didn't just make it a game, they made it a good one.  And while I hate citing any stat other than the score, lookee these:

"[Warner] threw for 377 against the Steelers. Three hundred seventy-seven yards! That's 141 percent more than the Steelers averaged giving up this year (156.9 yards per game, best in the league)... In 12 quarters [3 appearances in the Super Bowl], Warner has passed for 1,156 yards, the most in Super Bowl history. In 16 quarters, Montana threw for 1,142. In 20 quarters, Elway threw for 1,128."

tags: movie reviews  david cronenberg  nick sylvester  hipster runoff  

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