Please tell me how this is a good idea

Oh My God. Vile, so vile that my initial thought was a bit on the inappropriate side. I sort of wondered if using more nukes in WW II would have stopped this travesty.

Now, I am of the mind that it was the nukes that created this, as if any non-radiated country, hell individual could have created this.

These are true snacks for the apocalypse.

Top 50 Movies

Here are my top 50 movies. Again, with these lists they are likely to change at any time. But as of right now I am quite happy with this list. Though it would have been easier if I had gone to 100, as quite a few favorites were left out of this.

What does this list say about me?

1. 8 1/2
2. Bamboozled
3. 400 Blows
4. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
5. North by Northwest
6. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
7. Julien Donkey-Boy
8. Thesis
9. PI
10. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
11. Breaking the Waves
12. Shallow Grave
13. Fight Club
14. Mean Streets
15. Repo Man
16. The Squid and the Whale
17. Crumb
18. Naked
19. I Heart Huckabees
20. Magnolia
21. Primer
22. In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger
23. Wonderland
24. Brother from Another Planet
25. George Washingtom
26. 3 Women
27. L'Avventura
28. How to Get Ahead in Advertising
29. Ratcatcher
30. Network
31. Midnight Cowboy
32. Butcher Boy
33. Blade Runner
34. Masculine-Feminine
35. Bonnie and Clyde
36. Dancer in the Dark
37. Jules and Jim
38. Barry Lyndon
39. Children of Men
40. The War Zone
41. Don't Let me Die on a Sunday
42. Orlando
43. To Catch a Thief
44. Mildred Pierce
45. Charade
46. Badlands
47. Heavenly Creatures
48. The Apartment
49. City of God
50. eXistenZ

Red Bean and Walnut Soup

Of course I find this recipe during the time i am doing a fast/cleanse.

But seriously, how good does that look? I would of course nix the chicken broth for a nice roasted veggie one. But that flavor combo with some nice bread and some wilted greens or broccoli rabe.... Man that would be a great dinner for sure.

And it is weird, as walnuts are one of my least favorite nuts, but only the texture of them, as I like their flavor and just love walnut oil. So I have a good idea that I will enjoy this one when I finally have a chance to try it next month.

Cocktail Madness

I really have to wonder what gets one to think that alcohol induced breakfast cereal is a good idea. I mean I strive for originality in the kitchen and never like to see creativity limited in any way, but this just seems a bit too out there for me.

I mean if people are enjoying it then good for Mr. Freeman and his cocktail pedigree, I am just not going to partake. I would however like to Go to Tailor and imbibe on his more normal cocktails though. Normal in that you actually drink them, what with his pumpernickel raisin infused scotch, lemon verbena rum, and whatnot, they seem like they would be far from normal.

Free the Music

I love Last.fm. I have been a user for years. In a time that I felt so many musical options were being closed off to me, it has opened me up to some of my favorite artists. I sort of fell back in love with music through Last.fm, after slipping into a rut of not noticing new artists or pretty much caring.

So to say that today's announcement made me ecstatic would be a slight misnomer. I am pleased in ways I am having a hard time even conveying. No more 30 second clips to figure out if I want to invest in an artist. This pleases me soooooo much.

The music industry might not die as quick a death if they continue down this path and let the people hear the music they want. Now if only more artists would upload their tracks to Last.fm.

Here are some artists that I discovered though Last.fm:

Nouvelle Vague
France Gall
Keren Ann
Emilie Simon
Lee Hazlewood
Mareva Galanter
Brisa Roche
Sibylle Baier
Lady & Bird
The
Televangelist & The Architect
Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan
Carla Bruni

And those are only the ones in my top 50 artists list. So go over there and check them out if you have not used the site before. Be careful, the use of that site will cause you to buy more albums/songs than you planned, but it will so be worth it, I promise.

And some people say i am never happy........

Top 50 Works of Fiction

Since this blog mainly exists to discuss media products, ones that I am often quite critical of, I am going to periodically leave lists of things that i really enjoy, to give as wide a spectrum of my tastes as possible to the reader. Today I start with works of fiction.

This is in no specific order and I am sure 3 weeks from now it would be quite different as well....

1. Random Acts of Senseless Violence
2. His Dark Materials
3. Play It As It Lays
4. The Great Gatsby
5. Cathedral
6. Post Office
7. Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday
8. Watchmen
9. The Portrait of a Lady
10. Snow Crash
11. The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles
12. The Grapes of Wrath
13. Underworld
14. The Fortress of Solitude
15. A Home at the End of the World
16. The Sandman
17. VALIS
18. Traplines
19. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
20. Invisible Man
21. The Lord of the Rings
22. The Middle Kingdom
23. Moby-Dick
24. To Kill a Mockingbird
25. The Invisibles
26. Invisible Monsters
27. The Perks of Being a Wallflower
28. Youth in Revolt: The Journals of Nick Twisp
29. Give Me Liberty
30. Skin
31. Native Son
32. Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!
33. The Dark Phoenix Saga
34. Jinx
35. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
36. V for Vendetta
37. The Beach
38. The Black Cauldron
39. The House on Mango Street
40. The Velveteen Rabbit or How Toys Become Real
41. Maus: A Survivor's Tale
42. Amnesiascope
43. Moonshadow
44. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns
45. Calvin and Hobbes
46. Skinny Legs and All
47. The Castle
48. Neuromancer
49. The Stranger
50. Blankets

Annihilating Melancholia

It would not be a lie to say that most people would classify me as negative or even pessimistic. Even if they chose to refrain from those descriptors, not many would say that I ever exuded happiness. And they are right I am not one who craves being happy, and one might say that I would have a hard time even describing happiness or even what happy is. In fact a group of my friends have compiled a list of things that I hate, including: cookies, or cake without the ake as I like to say, why bother (that i dislike cake as well is of no relevance); grass, far too much of the land is covered with this mostly useless greenery, we need plants and flowers that can attract bees and sustain life for more than cows; swimming, get tossed into a pool as a toddler and forced to be on swim team as a kid and you would hate it too; along with many other things that mostly would cause mass indifference or joy in other peoples' lives. I bring this up because one of my friends tried to tie my hatred of things to happiness with the most illogical syllogism I have ever come across: "you hate happiness, but hating makes you happy. It is a vicious circle." It makes for good humor and whatnot, but it is quite untrue. I do not hate happiness, I just find it fleeting.

But even this causes unease in many people. They want me to be happy, as my often sour disposition moves in direct opposition to the way they want to view the world. I can not tell you how many times people have suggested to me that maybe I could benefit from anti depressants. But I am far from depressed. I am not about to take my own life, as I assume some feel my world view suggests. And as much as it troubles me, Shia LeBeouf, an pretty bad actor, has summed up my feelings best when stating why acting was the most important thing in his life: "Happiness isn't worth anything. It's momentary. This is forever."

When I first read that I felt like someone took me out of me for a moment. Then when I used this exact quote to defend myself others would say things like "Nice defeatist attitude. Suicide should cheer you up." Statements like this make my head nearly implode. There should be emotional change in every sane rational individual all the time depending on the situation. Yet to the majority of people my admitting it and embracing it should be cause for suicide? Color me seriously confused. It seems completely insane to me to cling to one emotion against all others. I go through life and take it how it comes. I do not strive to be happy nor pissed off, but during the course of a day i usually get both and everything in between.

And while I have thought of this since then it never really made it to the top of my investigation list until I read an amazing article called In Praise of Melancholy by Eric G. Wilson. The heart of his argument provides a nice bookend to my earlier thoughts on the matter. He claims that in a recent Pew Research study "that almost 85 percent of Americans believe that they are very happy or at least pretty happy." And like him I find this to be shockingly awful. That there are just 15% of people that exist outside the obviously accoutrement filled zone of happiness seems absurd. He takes this further and suggests that as a culture we strive to annihilate melancholia. And rather than embrace this with a marketers fervor (what with self help books and psycho active drugs galore), he sees some deep drastic problems with this. What would challenge us to strive to get better if every one was happy all the time? He focuses on melancholia and its dramatic impact of the artistic spirit and drive. And while I completely agree with him on that, I also wonder where any innovation would come from in a world where everyone smelled roses and bathed in champagne. The shop keeper or office worker who resides unhappily in his/her job creates new products to shift the dullness of repetitive efforts to some new product. Do you think the self correcting type writer was developed in a vacuum or in direct consultation of the steno pool and their frustration and unhappiness with their mistakes?

Yet our culture is bowling towards a world where happiness is essential to exist. How long have we been a Prozac Nation? I have heard countless times of someone behaving like an ostrich by doing their all to avoid bad news. Comments like "oh, I do not even watch the news, it makes me far too sad" are too prevalent through out our entire culture. To this I often sit wanting to bang my head into a wall. How can one convince someone that it is okay to embrace moments of contemplation about events that directly effect others that share our planet. Wilson suggests it is the creation of art (writing, painting, music) that helps lead people to places where they can become aware of their own potential. Potential to not be happy and the potential to leap over it with the realization that there is more to life than a dreary force fed happiness. He suggests when happiness "is no longer viable. We want something more: joy. Melancholia galvanizes us, shocks us to life." While he does not come out and directly say it, he is associating perpetual happiness as a sort of emotional prison. I could not agree more.

While science has forever looked for that device that offers perpetual motion, they have yet to find one. There is a reason for this, anything that starts with out the threat of stopping defies the entire nature of our finite universe. We are but small specks in regards towards things in the magnitude of the universe, and it would do us wonders to remember that and in doing so see that everything is fleeting. To try and dictate a single desirable emotional way of being goes not only against the nature of man, but of the universe. Yet the fact remains, our culture is pressuring the last 15% to acquiesce and join Bobby McFerrin and Clinique on unabashed happiness trips. Yet as Wilson says, "to foster a society of total happiness is to concoct a culture of fear." Which on its face seems contradictory, but is a spot on critique. Happiness is emotional safeness. It is growing up in a nest, letting your wings grow large and plump, but never using them to soar, so you stay in the nest, as you are too happy to want to experience the other. Persistent happiness weighs one down like an anchor and causes fear of that which might shift that happiness even for a second. In a recent email with a friend she told me one of the scariest things she had ever heard:

"At a wedding about 12 years ago in Florida, right before I moved to California. I was talking to a girl I went to high school with that I wasn't close to and she said she couldn't ever imagine leaving Florida because it was "so safe" there. Um, wtf? and she meant emotionally safe, not physically safe. Sigh. I don't want to associate with people who have that mentality."

And thus we have happiness as a trap, the fear of new experience forcing one to stay insulated with the known. And to this all I can say is Gah!!!! In the drive to get everyone happy, we are helping remove discovery from the table. And if we are not inquisitive people, how can we justify our existence? Is just being a consumer enough? In the coming emotional Gattaca like state, that will be exactly it. How and even why will we produce new things when we are happy with what is available? As if our cultural forms are not recycled and reproduced enough as it is, what will happen when melancholy is no more?

Wilson's uses Keats to show how if one is able to embrace and utilize the low portions of ones life, of which Keats had many, the troubles the heart suffers is the stuff that drives our culture forward. Keats saw death first hand, first by his family and then ultimately through his untimely death due to consumption. Yet he found that "to deny death and calamity would be to live only a partial life, one devoid of creativity and beauty. Keats welcomed his death so that he could live." Yet this is exactly what prescribed happiness is all about: denial. That America seems to want to embrace this denial is one of the most troubling things that is facing us in the beginning years of the 21st century.

This feels far from complete, so I am going to try and figure out why Americans are scared to be sad in future posts. For now I will just campaign for others to embrace their melancholia. Note the ticks that make you sad and try and use them to propel your desires and endeavors forward. Remember that "most hide behind a smile because they are afraid of facing the world's complexity, its vagueness, its terrible beauties." A prison of grinning teeth is just as real as cold steal bars. And in the meantime you can find out more of Eric Wilson's fight against traveling down the road to eternal happiness in Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, his new book that has quickly made it on to my must read list.

Is Disco Trek Dead?

So they released the new Star Trek preview today.

All I have to say is this movie looks more and more like a bad idea all the time. JFK and Spock talking over the creation of The Enterprise. Wow, how original. Someone using JFK's magnificent oratory on space exploration to give us goosebumps... And really, how far into the future is Star Trek, in their world, no other president or leader has much to say about space travel, even though the cost to fund building Starfleet must have instilled much more rhetoric. But no, just like this franchise fans are constantly looking backwards so are its creators.

And just why does the ship building yard look so much like the set of blade runner, are the new de-aged Enterprise crew replicants?

How hard is it to let things die and remain so? I guess not nearly as hard to create new stories and mythologies. They might as well market this film in the same vein they used to market Oldsmobiles, "This is not your father's Star Trek." It worked so well for Oldmobiles....

So here is to hoping this film floppity flop flops, and the door to nostalgic space travel will close and new ideas can burst forth from elsewhere.

The well is dry, time to drill for water elsewhere.

My Juno rant

Everything about me wanted to like Juno. And I left the theater a bit uplifted, and rather happy that I spent an hour and forty-five minutes at the movies, but I was not sure if I liked the overall tone movie. The acting was great and it showcased a side of humanity not normally seen on screen, the forgiving, quick witted non-smarmy kind. While Juno obviously held disdain for much life had to offer, she was not a single serving of angst plated over easy. While her despondent movie brethren often look down upon everything with equal sense of near entitlement, Juno seems to accept that which comes to her, not necessarily liking it, but accepting it. There is little fight in her towards the things she can not control. In this, she is not apathetic like the kids in River's Edge, but just has a better understanding of the world than most 16 year olds. And while the film seems to be about her unplanned pregnancy, it seems far more about the way she is able to plug in with that which surrounds her.

From the very start of the film we see her charting the territory that that surrounds her from "the most magnificent discarded living room set" she has ever seen to the animated environs that show her suburban town. At first it is a bit off putting to watch Juno step onto the 4 color palate of a comic book, but this is the first hint that while the following story seems real, it is as fake as any global disaster than only Superman can deflect. Yet at the same time it shows how Juno traverses the world on her own terms. The realms and facts of everyday life need not concern her, which we can see as she pops back into the real world and tries to deny the facts of two previous pregnancy tests. When asked why she needs a third test she replies: "I think the last one was defective. The plus sign looked more like a division sign. I remain unconvinced." So rather than accept the harsh reality of being another statistical teenage pregnancy, she tries to deflect away the facts with her wits and opens herself to a third possibility on her true/false baby exam. This is who Juno is, and she is presented in the most admirable way. And at this point I just knew I was going to love this film.

Yet, I sit here, after much thought, pretty much with only condemnation about it going though my head. Why? What about this film makes me so uneasy? Well for one thing, the whole film seems to be summed up in a montage of what Juno thinks a jock wants. It shows what the credits call 'Pretty-to-Goth Girl' morphing from preppy cheerleader to hot topic model extraordinaire. That is the whole movie, a pretty cheerleader film (read typical Hollywood popcorn movie) as "gothed out" (indie). The airs of the film all point to it being outside the mainstream, but it is just more of the norm masquerading in amazingly witty dialogue and longing for a more wholesome time of idealized family life, or "the way we never were."

This is nothing new, the co-opting of a genre to present the idealized status quo, but the marketing angle of this film makes this feel dirty beyond belief. The movie poster, with all its mismatched vertical stripes, is extremely bold and even uses a quote that calls the film "fresh". But again, this film is about as fresh as 3 day old popcorn at the modern multiplex. The marketing seems to try and recall the quirkiness of movies like Napoleon Dynamite. This points exactly to my first major issue with the film: its use of quirkiness as a substitute for real character or plot development. Yet the quirky, goofy look of the two main characters helps make them different enough to float out of the strata of a normative movie. And it is directly from the use of quirk as a point of reference rather than from direct character development that makes what was a promising premise fall to the depths Juno does.

And thus the my real loathing of this film begins. It dresses itself up in quirky colors and asserts its relevance to pre-packaged divergent culture with a classically indie rock soundtrack and Juno's acid tongued quips, but it exists really to embrace the idealized post WW II nuclear family structures. The script only pays lip service to family life outside the suburban norm. As Juno and her friend search through the penny saver to find adoptive parents, Juno longs to have her baby in a loving non-conventional home: "I was thinking I could give the baby to somebody who likes that kind of thing. You know, like a woman with a bum ovary or something. Or some nice lesbos." In fact this is the only time the movie even presents the idea of an alternative family. Everything else seems post war Eisenhowerian bliss in Juno's idealized suburban realm. In fact, the couple she decided to adopt out to lives an hour away, so not to distract with the lovely portraiture of the complacent suburbs Juno presents. And granted Juno still decides to give her child to the newly single Vanessa at the end of the movie, which I assume would have made Dan Quayle have an aneurysm if she was played by Candace Bergan, but this is the only time a family is allowed to be so ill defined in the film. And Vanessa is already damaged goods what with not being able to have a baby and all, though will likely be a loving mother.

How different is Juno from Cher from Clueless? Sure Cher is searching for clothes while Juno is seeking parents for her unborn child, but those are just plot conventions, they are both determining how to plug into their distinctive worlds. And while Juno does not demonstrate the obvious conspicuous consumptive power of Clueless, it does seem to be working towards a set of underground cool notes through Juno's cultural cache. From her arguments of 1977 being the best year for rock and roll to her off centered wardrobe, how many young women will begin to model themselves after her? In other words, Juno presents Juno as someone to emulate, and provides clues of what to buy to be more like her.

Juno is obviously a character to look up to, far better than the empty soulless teenagers portrayed on what was once the WB. But I have a major problem that not once throughout the entire film is she presented with a healthy response or option for birth control. While all characters seem to agree it would have been best for her to avoid the pregnancy from the start, the only time a condom is even mentioned is when Juno explores her options at the planned parenthood center clone. The abrasive desk clerk offers her a condom in a most uncouth manner:

Desk clerk: Would you like some free condoms? They're boysenberry.
Juno: No thank you. I'm off sex.
Desk clerk: My partner uses them every time we have intercourse. They make his balls smell like pie.

That is it. Condoms are treated as the entryway of a punch line. And while this could be interpreted as an astute commentary on abstinence only sex ed, there is far more at play here than just that. As aforementioned, Juno is an easy character to idolize. She is written in a way that many people wish they were, and I say the lack of any other mention of contraception is damn near criminal. The 16 year old girls that will look to her for inspiration should not have to look to her for sex ed, but that is the way of the world, and the creators behind this movie needed to address this issue. That they do not is as irresponsible as showing only angst driven complications Juno suffers from the pregnancy. They almost make pregnancy seem cool.

This brings me to another major theme that percolates under the surface throughout the movie, the issue of family structure. Juno's voice over at the beginning of the film really highlights this as she talks about how her mother left her and her father for New Mexico and had "three replacement children" and how she lives in a blended family with her father and step mom and their toddler, who says nothing the entire film. And this is a huge source of contention for me. From the film i know about four things about Juno's sister, she takes toddler ice skating lessons, over uses Ba-cos, is a scapegoat for Juno, and most importantly never speaks. She is much more a plot device than a person. Her presence is almost like a salve to prop up the fact that only families with children are real, that two married people, have to have at least a single child together to have any meaning. Just the thought of this convention drives me mad. That this hip script and film would seem to advocate for such a ill conceived notion of marriage boggles my mind. I expected far better of you Juno, far, far better.

Juno's main foil in this film is her Mother, who gave her up after knowing her, rather than right after she was born, never holding her in her arms. That we, the audience, never even see the mother, really shows how little actual drama is in the script. Sure there is the fact that Juno is pregnant and her navigating what that means to a 16 year old, but again this movie is far less about the pregnancy than about how quick Juno can spit out witty ephemera to polish the rusty rudder of her life. As the Pretty-to-Goth girl sequence really sums up the core essence of how this film presents it's self to the audience, Juno begins her decent back to a normal 16 year old, well non pregnant at least, by asking her father "I guess I wonder sometimes if people stay together for good... I just need to know that it is possible for two people to stay together happy forever. Or at least a few years." And so this takes us back to the moment of conception, as Juno figures out she loves Bleeker (and as much as I have harsh feelings towards much of this film, what a great name for this character), the father of her child. That even though a pregnancy has come between them, this is the real thing. And so we get the happy Hollywood ending to such an edgy film.

Wait, what? Every character seems to have what they crave at the end of the film, Juno and Bleeker are together, making music, Juno's step mother is loving on her dog, which up to this point was impossible due to Juno being allergic to dog saliva (did her pregnancy cure this allergy as well???), Vanessa has her child that she holds lovingly (it is a wonder that she was not shown walking off into the sunset pushing a stroller), her useless husband (soon to be ex) has his last chance at rock and roll fame and a loft downtown, Juno's dad is happy building model ships and that his daughter no longer resembles "a planet", as Juno once refers to herself. The only character that seem worse for the wear of the film is Bleeker's mom, who does not approve of Juno. How did a film with such a premise, that relied on such witty, tongue piercing dialogue reformat itself to a photo spread in Better Homes and Gardens or a Rockwell cover of the Saturday Evening Post? With the birth, even Juno's wit now seems to be absent. Love even conquers that? Color me unimpressed.

But I guess the major reason that I have major problems with this film is that even knowing all the above, I still quite liked parts of it. In other words, I took the bait and was hooked in like that first time someone puffs on a cigarette all the while reading the surgeon general's warning. Maybe it was not meant to be so vitriolic towards the culture it critiques behind veils. But the core of my emotional response to this film remains that I would like to think that my 16 year old self would be friends with Juno, or a reasonable facsimile of her. So rather than battle with my emotions (a never ending battle to be sure), I can say that I really enjoyed the notion of the film and felt a sort of kinship with Juno, but have a deep dislike for the puppet mastery behind the curtain trying to instill pre-packaged, pro-consumptive, normative values through a mural of self discovery. But I guess it is my fault to think that any romantic comedy could hold any sort of meaningful critique on society at large.