Ollie’s Majoring In Neo-Fascism At Columbia

I strongly recommend the film Igby Goes Down . I wish I had something more interesting to say about it right now other than that I really liked it a lot, it’s very witty, and it can’t come out on DVD soon enough so that I can go back and enjoy all of its clever one-liners again. It’s a fine dark comedy, and probably the best new film I’ve seen since The Royal Tenenbaums came out last year. It shares a lot of that film’s Sallinger-derived aesthetic, but unlike The Royal Tenenbaums, its characters are entirely unsympathetic bastards through and through, and this film’s NYC is very contemporary as opposed to the romantic storybook New York of the Tenenbaums. The cast is excellent, especially Kieran Culkin as the title character, Ryan Phillipe as his drole older brother Oliver, and Jeff Goldblum as Igby’s godfather D.H. I’m looking foward to seeing this film again.

I’m Tired And Distracted

There are a lot of things that I’d like to mention on this blog, but thanks to a pretty bad case of blogger’s block, I really can’t think of any good way to write about them. Trust me, Igby Goes Down deserves a far better write up than the one I gave it. I tried. I’m not feeling well. Anyway, here’s some things I’d want to talk about, and hopefully will elaborate on later in the week:

I very much enjoyed reading The Bush Dyslexicon by Mark Crispin Miller. I recommend it for anyone with a strong interest in the Bush administration, spin, propaganda, and in sussing out just who George W. Bush really is.

Scarface’s The Fix, Shakedown’s “At Night”, GusGus’s “Unnecessary”, Slum Village’s “Tainted” and especially Cam’Ron’s “Hey Ma” are all albums/songs which have been making me very happy the past few days.

Grant Morrison’s New X-Men #132 was a let down, but #131 was definitely one of the best issues so far. The Frank Quitely-drawn cover to December’s #135 has brought me a lot of child-like joy. It’s probably the single best cover I’ve ever seen on an X-comic, and it has a wonderful Abbey Road quality to it, in that it seems to invite speculation about what’s happening between the characters and what every little gesture and detail might mean. In design terms, it’s great. In terms of draftsmanship, it’s tight. In giving fans something to talk about before the issue hits the stands, it is ahead of its time in embracing the current message board-speculation-on-early-solitations status quo. I’m very excited about this issue, and the four subsequent issues – five straight months of Morrison/Quitely. It’s going to be sweet.

I haven’t enjoyed Morrison’s The Filth nearly as much, but I continue to read it mostly out of a combination of loyalty and curiosity. It’s such a stark contrast with NXM – the characters in the Filth are so dull, drab, lifeless whereas he’s done a wonderful job of making his NXM characters vibrant and complex. The Filth is just so lacking in charisma – four issues in, it still has yet to capture my interest, even with a foul-mouthed Communist commando chimp. I’m hoping there might be a payoff later on, since it is still early on in a 13 issue series.

I recommend reading Russell’s Flaming Lips interview, and the ongoing studio diary of Mixerman, who is an audio engineer working on recording the debut album of an anonymous band with an unnamed major producer. Jody, who introduced me to the Mixerman saga, thinks that it’s probably Rick Rubin, and I’m inclined to agree with her.

I found this to be rather amusing. I found it thanks to The Minor Fall, The Major Lift, which I think is one of the best blogs currently going these days. I’m with the Minor Fall guy, the Guardian article about Morrissey with the baffling assertion that there were “beef-fed cowboys” at a Colorado Morrissey concert ready to storm the stage while he sang “Meat Is Murder” is just ridiculous. It’s also pretty typical of Brit pop journalism, which isn’t to say US journalists are any great shakes either.