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Well, that's more like it!

So, despite continual reference to Kortnie's joker tendencies, she leaves before we can see her tell, like, a joke. Perhaps her joke was signing up to maybe one day be a frustrated model carrying the stigma of reality TV. In that case: hilarious. But that's neither here nor there because there are bigger, fishier fish to fry:

 

Paris Hilton loves things and stuff

I watched an entire season of Paris Hilton's British Best Friend, and all I got was this crappy supercut of the things that she likes and doesn't:

Actually, I got a lot of joy out of it, too. She's getting quite endearing in her irrelevance, I must say. Four years ago, I would have rather cut my fingers off than blog about her. Now, thanks to two reality shows, I kinda can't get enough. Kool-Aid, consider yourself drank!

(Big up to Paris Hilton Online for supplying my crack!)

Blow it out your War Zone

If you have an inkling that you might enjoy a movie in which a man literally gets his face punched in with a single blow (as in: fist meets face, makes hole), and you haven't yet seen Punisher: War Zone, what are you doing with your life? Actually, I'll make it easy and answer that for you: YOU ARE WASTING IT. This film is magnificent. I never really read The Punisher comics, but I know they went for relative realism (which is always a funny thing for a cartoon to do). War Zone seems to adapt that appropriately as a candy-colored symphony of brutality (nutshell imagery: the streams of blood that flow from people's mouths look like Twizzlers). It's an approximation of what would happen if Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher got together to have 90 minutes of rough-yet-quip-filled sex. I don't know if I've seen garbage own itself as steadfastly since, I don't know, Pink Flamingos, and tonally, this is Robocop's fuck-up little brother. Win-win-winwinwinwinwinwin!

This film already has its fans, and I'm happy to join the cult. It's such a visceral experience that I'm not going to go too deep into it. This is not rocket science. It isn't even when the scientists find out things about space. Instead of a full on review, I'm just gonna fuck you up with some truth:

All my heroes

This is merely administrative: for a while, it's been striking me as wasteful that I don't have a record of the heroes that revolve in and out of the left column of this blog. So I decided to make one. From now on, when whatever's up there ends its run, it's going directly to this post (most recent at the top). I never figured out where broken hearts go, so maybe this is my way of making sense of the world.

Everything that's been up (to the best of my recollection) is below. I'm sure there's stuff I'm missing, but whatever. That's life. I added a few that should have been my heroes, just 'cause, you know. Whatever.

A-Nijah-lated

When Tyra barks, "Push! Tension! Strong!" as a girl is leaving her chambers and it still isn't enough to elicit a single tear or declaration of regret, it's obvious that said girl hasn't been beaten down. You know what that means, right? Nijah wins, guys. She gets to ride the Great Glass Elevator and she gets to run the chocolate factory.

(Also, yeah, I said it: Tyra Barks.)

We let the weirdness in

These days, I am going through a major Kate Bush kick, inspired by the amazing new Bat for Lashes album, Two Suns. I downloaded that shit on a whim and before I completed my first listen, Natasha Khan had me hypnotized. She really is a siren, and but she is not the first of her kind. Kate Bush's influence on Two Suns is unmistakable, though not to a disrespectful degree (frankly, Two Suns is the album I wish 2005's grown-and-unsexy Aerial turned out to be). Kahn embodies the same arms-length intimacy as Kate by using a singer-songwriter aesthetic to create characters rather than confess. Instead of just a girl with a piano, we're hearing a girl with a piano along with all the voices her head can conjure. And that's not even mentioning the production similarities (a few Two Suns tracks use the same sort of post-new wave primitive drum programming that inhabits the first half of Hounds of Love).

Khan's more tempered than the fearlessly shrill Kate, though, and, to my untrained ear, her songwriting isn't as sophisticated. But that's for the best as I'm not sure if we could handle two Kate Bushes -- the world's head might explode. While Khan comes off cool even when wailing about her wickedness inside, it's never taken more than a literary reference or the image of a stringed instrument to have Kate wailing, balls-out. And if she didn't have balls that day, she'd probably hire men to dress as them so that she could incorporate them in an interpretive dance of the testes.

 

And dance!

I've spent the past few weeks of listening to Kate's music and howling at her videos via YouTube (you haven't lived till you've watched her talk about her vegetarianism or explain her positively batty "Sat in Your Lap" video to a roomful of bored pre-pubescent children). During this time, I finally realized something about Kate, whom I've loved since high school: she was made for me. No other entertainer I've invested myself in has ever struck the balance between awe-inspiring technical proficiency and utter nonsense so well. She has the paradoxical effect of a retarded genius. I've repeatedly written about my obsession with ambiguous intent in pop culture. There's nothing more satisfying to me than something that doesn't announce itself as intentionally or accidentally hilarious, something that slips through that crack of decidedness and tickles my brain as it dissipates into multiple receptors. Take Kate's dancing, alone, which while clearly thought-out and rooted in technique, nonetheless feels absurdly unhinged...

(Warning! Warning! So many more gifs follow. We're talking hours worth of madness. Be prepared to be seduced or, at least, derisively amused!)

Embrace the Ides of March

I can't let too much time pass without noting that on Sunday, I completed my fourth nicotine-free year. Before March 15, 2005, I was a boozer, a user and a loser. But more than that: a chain-smoker. Now, at least I can say that I've shed the last title. Really, this is the accomplishment of my life and one of the few things in which I allow myself to proudly revel. Looking over the ledge, before I quit smoking cigarettes, I worried that I was condemning myself to a life sentence of pining for nicotine. I'm glad to report that it's not the case at all: it only gets easier and more harrowing that I ever smoked in the first place.

Also on Sunday, Rudy turned 6. I notice more and more that people worry that he doesn't get the attention that Winston does. That couldn't be further from the truth IRL -- if anything, Rudy gets more affection because he's more into that sort of thing. Winston is something of my muse because he's so fucking weird. Despite appearances, I would not share so much about him if he didn't genuinely interest me on an almost scientific level. The, "Awww, cute cat" thing is there, of course, but there's a lot more to it than that, as far as my inspiration goes. Rudy, being more conventional in appearance and behavior, therefore, takes up less space on the Internet, but not in my heart. He's the one who sleeps on my chest every night, not Winnie.

How's that for irony?

Release some tension

Regarding Jessica, I foresee a future full of forget. I seriously had to look up her name more than once while I was taking notes on this episode. That said, she's definitely the prettiest girl in the exit line of my short-term memory.

Demons and angels

I laughed at this post-case Judge Judy interview set that aired earlier this week way too hard. Seriously, I was bellowing and days later, I haven't stopped:

I love how matter-of-fact the second woman is, like, yeah, the woman who gave us defective football jerseys is a walking crime against God and pure evil. It happens. [Shrug.]

And speaking of God, there's a follow-up to the Finally Tonight, Jesus video by Everything is Terrible that made the rounds this week (it has rightfully amassed over 120,000 views since it was posted Monday). The hosts of AM Northwest have discovered the video and they are both dumbfounded by it (the guy refers to it as "a website that somebody sent us") and giddy to have been included. If you want a snapshot of old media's clueless fascination with new media, it doesn't get any more wholesome than this. "I wonder how they got video of us," this woman TV-show host says. Everything is Terrible responds, "I can't give away all my secrets but I'll reveal a hint as to how I got video of them: AM Northwest is a televised program." Bwah ha ha! I've seen the Internet and it looks like compressed .flv rendering of Jesus!

When I showed this to Tracie, she pointed out that by broadcasting this, they're showing TV on the Internet on TV. Mixed-media fun at it's most Jesusy, this is!

Let the right one in the remake

I just watched last year's much-hyped Swedish vampire pre-teen drama, Let the Right One In. The biggest impression it left on me is that Mariah Carey better fucking be cast as Eli in the forthcoming English language version. For you see...

 

 

...Mariah, too, is eternally 12.

I thought the movie was cool, but truly overrated. It wasn't all that, and at the same time, too much. The pacing is so deliberate, it feels like the movie is constantly taking a step back to admire itself. It unfolds so slowly that watching it, I felt like it would have taken just as much time to fly to L.A., and observe the action at Les Deux to learn the film's ultimate point: it's all about who you know.

Oh, but the scene below is completely classic. I mean, it's poorly placed in a movie that's so bleak and serious, but in the end, I'd welcome a live action Crazy Cat Lady (hurling felines and all!) even at a funeral.

It's so weird that something so campy could make it into a film that is otherwise so unsmiling, but shit, I'll take camp where I can get it.