A defense of Roberto Benigni

This is not a typical "Johnny Stechanno" was an amazing movie post(I can't even spell the title) type of post. All I am trying to say is, back in the 80s, when Jarmusch made Down By Law, Mr. Roberto was brilliant. His creative input was nil, and all he was required to do was be crazy and silly while John Lurie and Tom Waits bad-assed it in the background in the bayou. I feel bad for the man, after getting destroyed in the Times for his Iraq movie, but in the end, I can't feel too bad for the man who made the foreign language Oscar winning dreck Life is Beautiful. He does suck, but let'sSave as Draft let him suck for what he deserves to suck for. He wasn't always awful.

i suck

no posts till NYC

Sorry, that's how it will be

The rhyming is bad

Lack of blog is sad

MPLS won't do it for me.

Hello New Friend

I am currently looking at the "Do not disconnect" circle on the beautiful screen of my black, beautiful, brand new 80 GB iPod. Christmas came a little early in my house. I just wish it would finish charging so I could start playing with it.

?

The Scissor Sisters are going to guest star on Passions? I hope they play "I can't decide."

While we're on the subject...

You can watcht the entire Rainbow Brite movie on YouTube as well.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9

Is it even possible to rent this anymore?

Koala-wala Land

In anticipation of next week's Ask the AV Club, I want to talk about the only series that ever dealt with interplanetary koalas, the Noozles. Shown on Nickelodeon in the late 80s and early 90s, The Noozles, Blinky and Pinky, helped their friend Sandy find her missing father. They could help because they came to life when she nuzzled their noses(they spent part of their time as koala teddy bears) and were residents of the very parallel dimension in which Sandy's father was trapped. This saga so enraptured my sister and I that we tried to make our mom change our swimming lessons to later in the afternoon.

It was on at 12:30, and was preceded by another totally inappropriate "children's" animated series, Grimm Masterpiece Theater. Watching three princesses run for their lives from evil alien bug monsters who dropped their disguises just before the princesses gave up their will to return to the real world and submit as slaves to the bugs was...interesting. Very Sailor Moon, but more fairy tale and less obviously messed up. I think that program is why I wasn't surprised or shocked by hentai. Even at 6 I wondered when the tentacle porn was going to start.

God bless You Tube. And Nickelodeon for not having enough American kids programming to show poor children during the day. Although David the Gnome was totally lame.

John Carpenter Extravaganza

Is it ever possible to explain why you suddenly crave something? Popcorn, chocolate, a hamburger, or in my case, one of the early 80s John Carpenter-Kurt Russell flicks. Last weekend it was Escape from New York, this weekend, The Thing. I should have reversed the two since tonight is the night I'm spending by myself, but I solved the problem by renting an even scarier movie-Shattered Glass. That's pretty much the ultimate horror show for a non-fiction writer.

Back to sci-fi for a minute. The specific sci-fi/horror genre of The Thing, Alien, and the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers always have a handy computer or tool that projects humanity's doom. It's always a lot of fun to watch the evolution of technology in scary movies, especially when they're not the main show.

Sad.

Me: Don't worry, there's plenty of orange juice left.

Ethan: I would hate to run out of orange juice while you're on your climb to the plateau of hopelessness.

Gloating

My brain has finally recovered from the haze of victory and way too much to drink. And we're still winners! My analysis? The Republicans have inferior potassium.

A Modest Proposal for Medicaid

It fits with their "life begins at conception" beliefs, so I don't know why I was surprised to see that the Republicans have managed to weasel their way out of guaranteeing babies - BABIES - born in the U.S. to illegal immigrant parents free care under Medicaid. After all, if they were simply pre-born when they were smuggled across the border with their parents, they're not really citizens and we shouldn't feel bad.

Babies - BABIES - those pink little lumps of flesh that gurgle and cry and can't do anything for themselves, babies born in the United States, citizens of this country, don't have the right to care that can save them a lifetime of illness, or worse, shorten their lifetimes dramatically, don't have the right to vaccines and preventive care that eradicated horrible diseases in the developed world.

But then again, if they die, we don't have to worry about our beloved America becoming Mexicanized. Or maybe their parents, wherever in the world they come from, will stop trying to immigrate when they realize they can get more complete, better care from their local witch doctor than from hospitals in the United States.

Really classy Leslie Norwalk, really classy. Deficit Reduction Act my eye.

Babies! Why be mean to them? What did they ever do to you?

PUT ON SOME G*DD#^M PANTS!!!!!!!!!!

You are not, in fact, "playing with proportion," living on the cutting edge, winterizing your summer look, or finding a different "way of showing your shape in winter." You are WITHOUT PANTS. You LACK TROUSERS. There is a DEARTH OF FABRIC in the region of your private parts.

Sorry, it was a moment, and the Times was right, I did have it. A truer column title has never been written.

That time of Year

The leaves a practically all gone, the days start cloudy and end with flurries, and the prospect of 6 long months of winter chills the soul and makes everything a bit more wrought, edging towards the "over." Which means it's either time to start reading that dusty copy of the Unnameable or to restart my subscription to Netflix. Can you guess which one I'll do? A free copy of Beckett's Collected Shorter Plays to the first correct answer(seriously, we have an extra copy)!

Also, as a way to inject levity into the next five days' political conversations, I am going to punctuate all serious ideological statements with "sha na na na," like at the end of the "Family Ties" theme song(that was at the end of Family Ties, right? I suppose I could go back to Jake and find out) to emphasize the importance of voting for candidates who support stem cell research. I haven't found appropriate theme songs for the SD abortion ban or the WI gay marriage/civil union ban yet.

Boo!

Happy Birthday to Whitman, the world's most badass three year old. May you rule Madison as well as your father one day.

Halloween

As I listened to Ethan talk to his brother about their Halloween memories, and about their shared dislike of pumpkin carving, I thought of a year that takes on a whole new meaning now that I'm an adult.

My sister and I each got pumpkins to carve every year. There are tons of pictures of us at the pumpkin patches. One year we carved Bert and Ernie pumpkins, and each of us picked our pumpkins based on our favorite of those two characters. My pumpkin was short and round and was Ernie, and Dana's was tall and oval and was Bert. It only hit me now that our personalities match those choices as well.

The pumpkins looked really cool, too.

My Sister is the Greatest Volume III:

Wherein obscure 90's C-list celebs who later married 80s C-list celebs are referenced while mocking the genetic lot of a newly omnipresent celebutot,

Corngirl521: you know what is hilarious? apparently after singing a few songs at a concert, he totally started ripping on jessica simpsonm
meredithlynnec: nick?
Corngirl521: yeah
meredithlynnec: man that's good stuff
meredithlynnec: did you see how she said that she knew it was over when he didn't go to africa with her for her stupid charity?
meredithlynnec: also, WTF with Rumer Willis' chin?
Corngirl521: yeah. what a bitch-ass charity to be associated with
Corngirl521: what about her chin? did she get it done?
meredithlynnec: no, it's just so damn huge
Corngirl521: oh yeah
Corngirl521: she and casper van dien would have horribly freakish children

PS: The Oxenbergs were a great gravy train to hitch to. How Grace Kelly of you.

Ills and their cure

So I'm laid out with a terrible cold/flu/plague thing, with Arrested Development Season 1 and my knitting as my only entertainment. Also, the therapeutic benefits of a hot shower are being denied me because the hot water has not worked since Maintenance turned on our heat yesterday.

On the plus side, my dear friend Eric is in the Twin Cities and I will get to see him and catch up after a long period of radio silence. I can't wait to go get boozed up with him.

Wanted

A friend in Minneapolis who has cable and will let me watch Battlestar Galactica at their house on Friday nights.

California Bitches

(Directed in particular to a woman in Davis whose name I don't know): You are not on The Real World. In the non-MTV "real world," people do not sit their roommates down for a talk about cleaning styles and then spring on them a well thought out manifesto on why you can't stand them. That, in case you are confused, is what normal adults tend to call "cunt-ass bitch" behavior. There is no excuse for cruelty one month into any relationship, romantic, cohabitational, academic, or work-related. If I hear any more about it I am coming out there to kick your butt across the International Date Line. The swim in the Pacific should give my dear tormented friend some much needed peace.

Update: I really am a quitter

I did end up dropping the class, and the only thing I learned from the experience is that "learning experiences" cost more the more you try to learn from them. What a waste of hundreds of dollars.

Emeritus Punk

I sat down to my regular Sunday ritual of diving into the New York Times arts-section-first and discovered yet another Minneapolis-centric article written by Kelefa Sanneh. Like any good current Minneapolis resident who lived in Brooklyn during 2005, I love the Hold Steady(I credit Ms. Lauren with first showing me their awesomeness). Aside from a little confusion about why the author so desperately loves Minneapolis(confidential to Mr. Sanneh-I'll trade places with you if you like it here so much. No, no, it's no trouble. I understand how completely inferior New York is to MPLS in every way), I enjoyed reading it.

After I'd finished, I thought for a while about the bars I've loved in Madison and Minneapolis over the years. The list includes some dank holes in the wall, although none of them could accurately be called dive bars. They weren't faux-dive either; at one time many years ago they had been genuinely rough places frequented by bikers and tattooed characters who weren't afraid to meet you out back with a metal pipe and a chain. The days when the C. C. Club, the Paradise, the Caribou, and the Wisco hosted pissed of punks and derelicts are long gone; now former cheerleaders with artfully applied streaks of Manic Panic pull their Marlboro Lights out of Coach bags on their way outside to get their nicotine fix. Even with the smoking bans and the addition of digital jukeboxes that list the latest Xzibit track next to "Johnny Hit and Run Pauline," these places still feel invitingly gruff.

These places are immune to sanitization as long as they can afford to keep their doors open. You can't get the smoke smell and grime out after 30 years, and there is always at least one man(or woman) who looks like they haven't left their bar stool since 1970. My friends and I don't go to today's "dive bars" because they don't have any other place they feel comfortable; we drink beer and drink in the history of violence and working class frustration to forget for a while that the United States is more prosperous than perhaps any other society in the history of civilization and that we, with out college and graduate degrees and our white collar jobs, live absurdly close to the top of the heap. We pay homage to the old masters, the Emeritus Punk that is home to IFC tv shows, WCW screenwriting credits, and tips on how to make your brand new band t-shirt look like you bought it in 1981(even if you don't look old enough to have been a fetus that year). Hell, even in the old days these places weren't their legends. My father played pinball at the Paradise during his lunch all through the mid-70s, clad in a suit and chatting with his State Government bureaucrat friends.

Don't think for a moment that I would trade my dive bar nostalgia for something "more authentic." I'm way too white and bourgeois for hip hop, which, as the New York Times tells me, is the new punk rock(an assertion I'm loathe to entertain). I'll order my PBR because I want it, not because I'm skeptical of the microbrews on tap next to it, and I'll play my favorite Cheap Trick song because I like the band, and I'll prove to anyone, Frat Boy or Harley head, that I am a force to be reckoned with at pool. I like feeling like a part of a continuum more than feeling on the cutting edge, and it's nice to someplace where the pretense is brought in by the customers and not built into the booths. At least then you can drown your disdain in your rail whiskey in your own corner, and maybe you can befriend another paton who isn't cool enough for the current scene.