No Country for Old Men

We watched No Country For Old Men tonight. I had never seen it. I know, I know. It's really, really good. Great, even. It's pretty well-regarded, so I don't know what I have to add to the mix. I will say that although Oscars are dumb and whatever, There Will Be Blood is the better movie. At least, it felt more like an event, something more than just a movie. But I won't argue it. No point. It's funny, I guess it's because they were two really intense, highly acclaimed movies that came out around the same time, but the two are always linked in my brain.

My one dissapointment is that there is a startling lack of No Country For Old Men fanfic on the Webs. I've only found a few. Two involve the Chigurh/ Carla Jean scene at the end. Only one is erotic! Get to it, moderately talented writers with plenty of time on your hands!

Anyway, since we're on the subject, here is some other somewhat obscure fanfic I've come across:

Mythbusters
Law and Order: SVU
Rachel Ray (I love this line: "Even though Rachael had to wake up early in the morning and start on her new show, Tasty Travels, she decided it wouldn’t hurt to spend the night with Alton and do some tasty traveling of her own…")
Matlock/ A-Team crossover
Peanuts
Hannah Montana
Two and a Half Men (with over 2 stories!)
Seinfeld ("What if George Costanza had a sister?")
Muppet Babies (Hey worrywart, it's G-Rated!)

Also, Dave Segedy knows the secret to killing a leprechaun. All you have to do is "throw its pot of gold on its head."

Have a Totally Devolved Christmas!

So, a few days ago I committed a total blog foul by neglecting to provide even a tiny scrap of aural evidence of why Joyeux Mutato is my favorite Christmas album of all time. This was brought to my attention and I am now going to attempt to make amends. It's a shame that it's out of print. Guess there's only one thing to do.

Have a splendid yuletide, space cadets! Joyeux Mutato. Right click, save as, you know.

Blue Joy
Midnight Wind-Up Toy
Bell Boy
Tannenbong
Happy Woodchopper
Only 12 Shopping Days Left
Peace and Goodwill
Enough Xmas For All
Rudolph the Space Deer
You Better Watch Out
Let There Be Snow
I Don't Have a Christmas Tree (Soylent Night) [High Tolerance Edit]

Keep in mind that this is the Rhino Handmade Limited edition version of the album, which is a bit different from the regular release.

Here's an extra special stocking stuffer, just because anyone interested in this would probably not mind seeing the head spud's pug wig out a little:

Bloomington Gets Some Love

The AV Club threw some love B-Town's way in their list of 2008's worst band names:
Cutesy bullshit! Zing!

Joyeux Mutato, Spuds

This is my favorite Christmas album, Joyeux Mutato by Mark Mothersbaugh (this image is of the cover for the velvet-covered limited edition from Rhino Handmade). It's currently out of print, but used versions of the commercial release are available. For those not in the know, Mothersbaugh is one of the founding members of DEVO, as well as being the composer of really spiffy movie scores. He's Wes Anderson's dude of choice for the job, and also created the music for Pee-Wee's Playhouse.

Though Joyeux Mutato is a seasonal album, I'd listen to it any time of the year. It's divided pretty evenly between mutated versions of old classics and brand new standards. My favorite is definitely "Happy Woodchopper," which makes me feel really enthusastic and ready to make stuff happen. It kind of reminds me of the music from one of the best Nintendo 64 games, "Banjo and Kazooie," and though it's almost ten minutes long, I'd be just fine with ten more.

Joyeux Mutato is a really happy album, and more than any other I've heard, it goes head to head with the baser commercial aspect of the season. Kind of like Bad Santa, but less vulgar. Among thumping techno beats and layers and layers of synthesizers and samples, you can hear the voices of hyperactive children screaming for more toys as a vapid Santa Claus bellows with glee. For folks who tend to get down about the capitalistic orgy that happens this time every year, it's a chance to get down to it, instead. That's the sort of thing Mothersbaugh's excelled at for over thirty years, holding up a funhouse mirror to the candy-colored, perfumey world we live in and making it into great art.

Blago, You're Pissin' Me Off.

I notice it. I do. I may not let on, but when I'm out in public, I feel the disapproving glances and I know that people whisper to each other. When I was a little one, my mom warned me that people would judge me. There was no "might" about it. "You will be shunned by some people, but hold your head up high and know that there is still some dignity in being a Serb."

Well, I'm half Serbian, to be honest, but it doesn't matter. I bear the Serbian stain in my blood. It seems to be the way the rest of the world sees it, at least. Serbs don't have the greatest reputation. I think in America, people who didn't grow up in a multi-ethnic area are kind of unclear as to who they are. Just another bunch of stooges from the Balkans. Where are the Balkans, anyway?

Northwest Indiana is a true melting pot, having drawn immigrants from all over Europe, who sought work in the booming steel mills in the early 20th Century. This included the various peoples of the former Yugoslavia: Macedonians, Croats, Serbs. None of them liked each other, for various reasons buried deep in their individual histories which have little bearing on their modern situations. When attending functions with Serbian relations and friends of the family, it was virtually guaranteed that complaints about one of the various opposing groups would be loudly aired, and not always in English. Of course, it's not just infighting. When my dad met my mom, and informed his parents of their intention to marry, they were pretty put off that he was bringing a dirty Serb into the family. This was what I grew up knowing, and when I tell people I'm half Serbian, it's like divulging that I'm part of a petty, obsolete group of people.

In all honesty, I don't have such a dim view of Serbs or any other slavs, for that matter. They've had some bad breaks. Add an "e" to slav and you've got the origin of the name. They were also situated perfectly to be eaten up by the Ottoman empire. The strife in the nineties was, in part, the legacy of their quelled uprising at Kosovo (which means "blackbird," poetic, huh?). Old hurts die hard, or not at all, and part of the stereotypical image of Serbs is that they're really, really stubborn, to the point of hurting themselves rather than submit.

I'd like to take this chance, as an admitted Serb, to extend my congratulations to Rod Blagojevich for being the second-most reviled of my countrymen. I think Slobodan Milosevic appreciates the company. Slobo and Blago, BFFs for-ev.

The Secret Ingredient No More!

From our friends at Lulu comes Natural Harvest - A Collection of Semen-Based Recipes. Pun strenuously intended.

Semen is not only nutritious, but it also has a wonderful texture and amazing cooking properties. Like fine wine and cheeses, the taste of semen is complex and dynamic. Semen is inexpensive to produce and is commonly available in many, if not most, homes and restaurants. Despite all of these positive qualities, semen remains neglected as a food. This book hopes to change that. Once you overcome any initial hesitation, you will be surprised to learn how wonderful semen is in the kitchen. Semen is an exciting ingredient that can give every dish you make an interesting twist. If you are a passionate cook and are not afraid to experiment with new ingredients - you will love this cook book!

Surprisingly enough (I think), this book seems to be a few cuts above your typical DIY self-published affair. The pictures look like they're professional, and the interior is laid out like a real danged cookbook.

My big question is this: seeing as how the semen is coming from a human source, and more than likely voluntarily produced, this is cool with vegans, right? I don't see why not. That's the interesting application here: how can we improve vegan food with semen? The author describes its application in cooking to that of egg whites. So there's some promise.

The author also recommends splooging onto a hot griddle and making a sort of semen omelette, as an introductory recipe to new cooks. Semen omelettes: the gateway drug to a world of ejaculate cuisine.

A Book I Wrote

I have written a short book called Modern Expressions in Quality Management: A Customary Approach. It is a collection of 60 poems and tiny stories I wrote over a two year period and posted as MySpace blogs, when I was a member of that particular social network. I am not now, because it is aggressively annoying. My newish blog Cosmik Wolfpack is intended to continue the proud tradition begun with these writings. They are for the most part stream-of-conscious and sometimes they get pretty silly or horribly depressing. Less of the latter, I'd reckon. I realy dig letting the words fly off the top of my noggin and not censoring them and letting them be what they are, without regard to meaning. Sometimes what seems to be nonsense is actually just the lack of intention, and it's a sort of generosity to the reader to give them the words and let them do with them as they wish. I think that's sort of what Stephen Malkmus has been up to all along, for all of the jawing back and forth about what the heck he means. He means to be playing rock music and making sounds with his mouth.

Okey dokey, the book retails for $9.42 before shipping and is available here. I intend on having copies to sell myself for cheaper, but at the moment I don't have any.

Camera Obscura: Let's Get Out of This Country

Quick note: I'm simul-blogging this, and all future music writings, at Human Trampoline, a blog wholly dedicated to writing about music. I hope to get more people involved over there, which is the whole point, you know. Otherwise, simul-blogging would be just this weird exercise in needless internet swellage.

I recently was introduced to Camera Obscura's Let's Get Out of This Country, and I've been listening to it a whole lot lately. When you listen to this band, it's expected that you'll note the similarities to Belle and Sebastian. If you review them, you're absolutely required by the Professional Association of Pop and Rock Critics (PAPRoC) to do the same, with a tidy monetary bonus if it's within the first few sentences. It is times like this that I sorely wish they would not have rejected my application. Though thinking back to a particularly disastrous interview I did with Trans Am about ten years ago, I do not blame them.

So, there are some similarities to that other Scottish indie-pop band. Luscious instrumentation, biting and sharp lyrics that could be overlooked for surface "twee-ness," album covers prominently featuring young, fashionable people. The Pitchfork review of this album likens the band to a mirror, female-led B&S, which I think is pretty valid (as much as they're the establishment, and deserving of criticism, Pitchfork does have a few insightful writers). If someone is a fan of B&S, Camera Obscura is a very safe recommendation.

But these are definitely not the only two bands in pop music who are really similar, and for whom this similarity is constantly mentioned. For some bands, it feels like you could swap vocalists and either could nearly pass as the other. This isn't quite the case with CO and B&S. There are so many subtle little differences that I'm having a hard time picking them out. The music comes from a similar place but takes a different road, parallel, but with different scenery.

Right now, I'm listening to this album as much as I listened to Tigermilk back in the day, or any other newly acquired B&S record (save Catastrophe Waitress... ugh). And as much as the similarities are fresh on the mind at first, I think that what separates a lot of bands in these situations is personality. It's a huge part of pop music's appeal, definitely bigger than originality. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Originality is rare and hard to pin down; there are many times that I've thought that someone was wholly original and without precedent, only to find a potent precursor - finding Howlin' Wolf after Tom Waits for example (though Waits has plenty of stylistic variation beyond raucous, primal blues hollering). Though Waits has some stylistic similarities to Wolf, no one would confuse their personalities. All things being equal, it's personality that makes a particular performer stand out while another slips from the mind almost instantly.

Camera Obscura and Belle and Sebastian are led by strong personalities, which is probably a huge reason that each band makes such exceptional music in the first place. It's like when you meet someone who reminds you strongly of a friend. Though they might be linked in your mind for all of the uncanny similarities they share, they each nonetheless have their own distinct personalities, informed and created by a multitude of hidden factors: past experiences, upbringing, desires, secrets, worries, subconscious inclinations. They may dress alike, speak with similar diction, and share elements of body language, but they're each their own person. If they are generally cool people who are pretty generous and not too self-absorbed and jerky, you just let it ride and accept them as they are, and do right by them.

Photoshopping the Hell Out Of Dudes

This chavvie represents.

NetfFlixing

When Jennie and I moved into our new place, we decided to say "no" to TV. That was it. We'd had enough. Enough evenings lost in flurries of "What Not To Wear," "Law and Order" and its plentiful offspring, and the vehicles of the Food Network All Stars. We crunched the numbers and it just wasn't worth the $80 a month. I won't try to make it out to be some high-minded moral stand. We were just like, "eh... not all that necessary."

Since Jennie got her laptop, though, we've started checking out the instant viewing selection on Netflix. Now, instead of relaxing evenings of being entertained by whatever Comcast felt like putting in front of us, we get to choose from s smorgasboard of half-forgotten sitcoms, dramas, and a nice selection of BBC favorites.

We recently watched the entire run of a show called "Swingtown," which apparently was aired on CBS over the summer to much hype. There are only thirteen episodes, and it looks like it hasn't been picked up for more (apparently it was the recipient of a brisk conservative boycott). I can't say it's a tragedy. This isn't "Firefly" or "Freaks and Geeks." It was a serviceable hour-long drama with plenty of flaws. For one, I'm a little tired of the "suburban couples discovering their marriages are prisons" story. And the "unknowingly oppressed housewife learns to express her true self" story. And the theme song, performed by Liz Phair, was predictable faux-disco whose lyrics consisted entirely of "Givin' it up, givin' it up. Givin' it up for love. Give it up for love." Though if Liz had the opening's visuals for inspiration, a rote montage of nostalgic seventies images like glittering disco shirts, 8-tracks, and roller skating, I can't blame her for not doing better.

The predictability of the strained marriages grated on me more. It's funny, but I'm realizing how heavy the weight of pop culture's treatment of marriage is in my day to day life. Basically, our accepted concept of marriage is that it's this thing you get stuck in while you watch all of your dreams and idealistic fantasies blow away like ash and feathers. I feel like there's an assumption that a marriage is, by default, not really that happy. So when you tell someone you're married, there's this baggage attached to it. I definitely feel it when I tell people how long we've been married - it's almost seven years. And that's a loaded number. I have to fight the urge to explain that I'm happy in my marriage, when I shouldn't be obligated to. "Happily married" as the saying goes. It's my life, so it doesn't feel like an anomaly. If TV and movies are to be trusted on this, my perspective is pretty skewed. But that's the thing. Society is basically millions of skewed perspectives skewing off each other, some perpendicular, some parallel, most crisscrossing at various funky angles.

But every show can't be a masterpiece, and this one had its high points. Number one, Grant Show's moustache. He played one of the main characters, an airline pilot. He and his wife are the "swinger" couple on the block. They've got an orgy pit and a pool, which turns out to be a convenient place for the cameramen to grab overhead swimming shots of the principals. Show's character is a bit creepy (a lot of the dudes are), but he's so... charming, it's easy to get past. And the moustache never quits. I think his name is Captain Decker, but Jennie and I just call him Moustache Ride. It's a cool name, and well earned.

A close number two: The swinger couple has, by far, the healthiest marriage. It isn't perfect; there are jealousies and misunderstandings and lies. But they are so committed to honesty that these incidents never derail their relationship. They're depicted getting busy with dozens of other people, but they're totally committed to each other. And when the wife ends up pregnant at the end of the show, it's genuinely touching when, instead of being all bummed and sulky over the eminent end of swinging as they know it, Moustache Ride is like, "baby, I've never loved you more than I do at this moment." It's pretty remarkable that these two were main characters on a CBS show. You know, the network of Touched by an Angel and Dr. Quinn.

We also watched some episodes of Coupling, which I was kind of surprised to like. After the first episode's by-the-numbers introduction of the characters and their relationships, the writers have some air and write some really snappy scenes. And I liked the first episode of Friday Night Lights pretty well. I know the whole thing is "it's not really about football," but I actually like football so the amount of time the game took up didn't bother me too much. The teenagers are written refreshingly natural dialogue, as good as I've heard since "Freaks and Geeks," really. It's just not about freaks and geeks. It fuzzes up the clique lines a bit, which is nice. High school cliques are such a crutch for lousy writers. It's nice to see teenagers in west Texas written with a bit of complexity.

Finally, I watched an episode of the Super Mario Brothers Super Show, a pretty blatant twenty minute Nintendo commercial. This is stupid to say, because the show is stupid to watch, but I'll say it. I wish they wouldn't have mucked around with the Mario universe so much. The episode I watched involved a riverboat race and a character named "Mark Twang." Like, for real? There aren't riverboats in the Mushroom Kingdom! Come on. And I wish they would have made Captain Lou Albano speak in the squeaky Italian accent of the modern Mario. It wouldn't have been any more humiliating than having to "do the Mario" over the closing credits. Nope, I reckon not.

Black Friday

Two years ago, I had my seventh and final Black Friday working in the retail sector. I woke up before dawn to meet the rush of consumers who had been waiting in line for hours in hopes of obtaining deeply discounted digital cameras, memory cards, laptops, and digital photo frames.

This year, I woke up before dawn with the Atlantic Ocean's air to breathe, put on the shoes I had sitting outside the tent, and made Jennie and myself some oatmeal on the camp stove. We packed up a lunch and headed out for a day of exploring Cumberland Island, and we contributed a big fat dollop of nothing to the $41 billion orgy happening over on the mainland.

We began by hiking the Parallel Trail down to Sea Camp.



My my, what a lordly tree we've found amidst the palmettos!



At the crossroads, we headed for the camp.



And found this large insect. Then it was back to the beach, where I went nuts taking pictures of shorebirds.


American Oystercatcher.


Royal Terns and Laughing Gulls.



Willet.

Hoping to check out the ruins of Dungeness mansion, we left the beach and were treated to a really cool area where the dunes gave way to the salt marshes that the island shelters.







I think we heard some herons out in the marshes but they laid low. We followed some twisting trails past a small cemetery until we found the grounds of Dungeness, a mansion built by the Carnegies and now in ruins.











The Carnegies' horses went feral after they abandoned the mansion during the depression. We saw a couple of them grazing on the grounds of the mansion. Then, as we headed north along the main road we heard a sudden clamor of hooves and turned just in time to see a whole mess of horses running across the field. With a crash, they plunged into the forest all at once and we could hear them fussing in there, hidden by the palmettos, as we walked along. We met a ranger who kindly gave us some fossil shark's teeth she spotted in the gravel of the road.



We also saw this little deer on the road, and managed to snap this photo before she got any deeper into the trees.

We took a much needed break for our lunch of rice and beans near the Sea Camp dock and watched a group of day trippers disembark the ferry. Then it was time to pack up and finish the rest of our hike. We headed up the main road again, but decided we hadn't had enough of the Atlantic's company yet, and took one of the paths to the beach. For a while we slowly strolled along, picking through the ocean's refuse again. Eventually we figured it would be best to head for camp to get a fire going before dark. Unfortunately, we missed our trail, mistaking our entrance for another one on the map. We overshot it by almost a mile before we figured out our mistake. We'd even passed another couple of backpackers who were clearly heading to set up a new camp for the night, judging by the size of their burdens. We scoffed at them, believing that they were from our camp at Stafford - there was no way they'd make Sea Camp by nightfall. By the time we figured out our mistake, and finally got to our camp just before the sun set, we discovered that they were our new neighbors.

On the bright side, this little mistake gave us the chance to stumble across three or four horses grazing in the dunes.



Seeing horses by the mansion was fine, but it seemed pretty familiar, something we could see any day back home. Finding horses atop dunes and down in the brush below the path was nice and unfamiliar. A surreal last image from the island.

Thanksgiving with Armadillos

This Thanksgiving, Jennie and I were like "darn it, we ain't been campin' in a tootin' long time." So we went camping. Our last trip, to South Manitou Island at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in August of '07 was a real blast and got us sort of hooked on the idea of backpacking on an island. So we decided to try the magic out again, this time at Georgia's Cumberland Island National Seashore. The traffic was a little bit insane. I found that Georgia drivers don't really adhere to the "pass on the left" rule we generally stick to here in Indiana. But it wasn't too steep a price to pay to spend a couple of days on the Atlantic Ocean, completely divorced from the madness of the holiday season. I'm going to break up the trip into a couple of posts. Today's will cover Thanksgiving itself.

Since we sort of overslept and missed the early morning ferry from St. Mary's, GA to the island, we had to take the 11:45, which was mostly carrying daytrippers. Our campsite was about an hour and a half hike from the dock, at the Stafford campground. It is the only one of the island's back country campgrounds with firepits, which we were glad of. Of course, the bougies down at Sea Camp, near the dock, had all the amenities, including wagons to haul their gear.

By the time we got to our site and set up the tent and hung our gear and food from the trees, we didn't have much daylight left to do any major exploring, so we went out to the beach, which was really close, and poked around in the sand for shells and examined all the dead jelly fish and horseshoe crab hulls and human trash the sea had tossed up. Then we headed back to camp and had a modest feast of dried tortellinis. We got a fire going as the sun sunk to the horizon. It was a real Thanksgiving; I felt thankful for the fact that places like this haven't all been bulldozed yet, the health that allowed me to experience it, and a companion and friend and wife like Jennie to experience it with.

Visual stimuli:



Jennie on the ferry. Note the dude behind her, "digging for treasure" as she likes to describe it.



Spanish Moss. Copious amounts everywhere.



The main road.



Our first encounter of many with an armadillo. Little snuffling dudes reminded us of our pup Gregory. Not nearly as smart, of course. The Germans call them panzerschwein (awesome industrial band name BTW). They give birth to litters of four identical pups. Our American species doesn't actually roll into a ball.



Some intrepid soul had salvaged this roap from the beach (judging by the barnacles) and tied it in a tree near our campsite.



This was my favorite environment of the island, the interstitial are between the beach and the forest, where shorebirds nested and sea oats collect the sand into dunes.



Horseshoe Crab graveyard.



Don't worry, I didn't let it get her.



Sea oats in the waning sunlight.