On the other hand, who likes a man in a tie? A man in a tie is always dumb. Look at that dumb idiot, working for the man! TV shows like Mad Men might try to trick you into thinking ties are cool, but you're supposed to hate every tool on that show (right?), so you just got tricked. By the year 2020 we will have reached Peak Tie and won't have any more ties, too bad.
Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? is a ten part essay series by Steven Hyden featured on the A.V. Club. The essays look back at the 1990s in a historical and semi-autobiographical fashion, focusing primarily on the musical trends of the era. Moving from grunge's clash with hair metal to the rise of Brit-pop and rap rock and culminating with the emergence of Napster and the shameful debacle that was Woodstock 99. Reading the essays is like taking a plaid colored time machine back to the days of depression and dial-up internet. Well, not exactly, but the essays do make for a good read. And since I'm convinced that a 1990s revival will likely be the next big thing in popular youth culture, reading these essays has prepared me for the horrible, horrible times ahead.
I just think it's so precious that every band is way into EPs now. Too bad nobody buys physical albums anymore - the sizing of the packages used to be part of the charm. And this EP? Well, it's got a couple good songs on it I guess, but it sounds, I dunno, like a band I'm totally going to forget about in a year or so? But I'll probably forget about two beers I bought for $5 once, too, so the price makes it nice.
There's a great book out there called Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History Of Punk which chronicles the beginning of the punk scene on the east coast. We Got The Neutron Bomb makes for an excellent companion piece to Please Kill Me, as it chronicles, in a similar style, the rise of west coast punk. From the death days of glam rock to The Decline of Western Civilization, the book covers countless bands, zines, venues, trends, triumphs and tragedies. It's a good, quick read that gives you a greater picture of what the west coast punk scene was like in the late seventies and early eighties. And like any good book about music, it made me want to listen to more music, not just the classics in my collection but the stuff I'd never even heard of before.
Voluspa is an album by The Golden Filter, a band that falls into the genre known as "indie dance music that could probably be played in the background on Gossip Girl." I've been into this sort of music lately because, I don't know, mid life crisis? Anyway, it's got great beats and electronic production, but it's a little too dramatic to be called just a dance album. "Always Right" media outlet Pitchfork criticized the album because its songs lack traditional structure, but I thought that was pretty endearing. Anyway, if you like guitars don't buy it, but if you like a depressed modern version of ABBA then go right ahead.
This particular Jaws rip-off comes to us from the Land Down Under, having been made during Australia's insanely prolific (emphasis on the insane) era of ozploitation films. Razorback focuses on a gigantic wild boar with a penchant for eating people, be they toddlers or investigative journalists. What makes Razorback, and by extension most ozploitation movies, so entertaining is the sheer oddity of it all. Not just the oddity in the movie's premise, but the oddity in a world populated by unsettling characters, stark landscapes, bizarre animal species, technology that seems to straddle the divide between industrialization and steampunk, brutal violence, nudity, and popular music that all seems to sound like Men at Work. Australian cinema from the ozploitation era is truly a genre and an experience unto itself.
Though it can be said for many genres, horror is notorious for creating great posters and home video box art to compensate for and mask shitty movies. While the poster art for Cheerleader Camp smacks of a teen comedy sex romp mixed with horror elements, the movie itself is a uninspired, by-the-numbers slasher. It's Meatballs meets Sleepaway Camp meets boredom and a nearly thirty year old Leif Garrett playing a high school student. Despite attempts to use dream imagery and countless red herrings to hide the identity of the killer, it's not hard to figure out who's behind all the bloodshed. Gimme a "Meh."
For a long time I considered this to be my favorite Sonic Youth album, although in retrospect I think I was saying that just to avoid the obvious choice of Daydream Nation. Anyway, it's still a pretty great album, although if I had to characterize it, I'd call it... docile? Well, at least Macaulay Culkin was in one of their videos. Um.
You know what's an awesome movie? Groundhog Day. Aw, who am I kidding? You probably already knew that. Seriously though, Groundhog Day is pretty frickin' sweet. Definitely one of the all-time greatest Bill Murray movies. If you haven't seen it before or if it's been a while since you last saw it, do yourself a favor and go watch it ASAP.
Once upon a time (aka the 1980s), Zellers was a major player in the discount department store game in Canada. They were the Wal-Mart of their day, until, that is, Wal-Mart expanded into Canada. Nowadays, Zellers stores are like ghost towns, virtually devoid of customers and staff. You can still occasionally find some decent deals at Zellers, but good luck finding a cashier to sell you anything. You know the old service industry joke, "this job would be great if it weren't for the customers"? Well, if you happen to work at a Zellers store, then you're living the dream.
I forgot to mention that each of these albums is written in a different language. This one's Esperanto, everybody's favorite fake language! This one has the tracks that are the least song-like in the first three SYR albums. The first and last tracks are about 30 minutes each of noise noodling, with no melodies ever really entering into the equation. I'm just being a completionist, in case you couldn't tell, because I'm not really expecting anybody to rush out and grab these side projects. Here's the title track!
Darren Aronofsky's newest film, Black Swan, is a bit of a head trip. I'm not sure if I can even explain it all that well without venturing into spoiler territory. The film centers around Natalie Portman's character, Nina, who has been cast as the lead in a production of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. The production requires Nina to master the roles of both the White Swan and the Black Swan. Her struggle with the dual roles begins to seep into her off-stage life, with sexy (but mostly freaky) results. While that doesn't really tell you all that much about the film, it should be noted that the performances from the cast (especially Natalie Portman) are all excellent and Aronofsky's visuals are striking. 
For years, VH1 produced a television series called Behind the Music which chronicled the stories of various bands and popular artists. If you ask me, the single greatest episode produced for the series was the episode featuring Megadeth. As laid out in the episode, the story of Megadeth is an epic tale of envy and excess. A veritable roller coaster ride of personal triumphs and self-destructive drug binges. There's also plenty of life lessons that can be taken from the special. "If you're gonna snort three hundred to five hundred dollars worth of cocaine and heroine a day, every day, then you're gonna have money problems." Truer words were never spoken.
This is the second in Sonic Youth's SYR series, in case you couldn't use context clues to figure that out. This one seems like it is comprised more of songs that couldn't be released on a regular album, since two songs are 20 minutes long, not that that ever stopped Sonic Youth before. Of course, both of those songs ended up being shortened and turned into songs with vocals on A Thousand Leaves, so what do I know?
This is the first album in Sonic Youth's pretentious/arty SYR series, in which they attempt to do musical experiments too weird for their albums. I guess that means, in this album's case, the same sort of songs with no words? Everything is 7 minutes or shorter, and there's only four tracks, which means it's about 22 minutes long total? It's fun, but I'm sure glad we have iPods/mp3 players now, because they all came in little cardboard sleeves that basically guaranteed you the disc would be scratched to infinity before you got done with it.
This Sonic Youth album is pretty good, but I never really count it in my top whatever. Since it came out in high school, I listened to it about a trillion times, because when you're a kid you can basically just sit and listen to an album without doing anything else and feel like you accomplished something. I bought it on a school trip the day the OJ Simpson verdict came out, and I remember being the only non black person on the bus who was happy about it, not because I didn't think he was guilty or some racial thing, but just because I wanted him to play Nordberg again in the next Naked Gun movie, which never even happened. Check out the songs and remember what a magical time the mid 90s were!
A lot of people my age don't go out to the movies very often, at least that's been my experience based on where I live and the people I know. Myself, I go a lot. In 2010, I went to the movies 22 times. 20 of the movies I saw were from 2010, one was 2009's Sherlock Holmes and one was a repertory screening of a William Shatner movie from the 70s that I saw at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas. Now the average person might think that 22 trips to the movies is a lot (and it probably is for someone who's not a professional critic), but I didn't even manage to catch everything I wanted to see this year. I didn't get to watch The Social Network, I didn't get a chance to watch Scott Pilgrim vs. the World until it came out on DVD, and Black Swan hasn't even gotten a wide release yet. The movies I saw this year came from a wide variety of genres: comedies, action flicks, horror movies, comic book movies, Oscar bait, and even two movies in 3D. So while a lot of critics are saying that 2010 wasn't a particularly strong year for movies, I can't complain too much, at least no one nuked the fridge this year. 
A Muppet Family Christmas is my absolute favorite Christmas special, it just isn't Christmas for me unless I watch it at least once. There's been maybe one or two years in the last twenty three that I wasn't able to watch A Muppet Family Christmas and those were horrible times which need not be mentioned again. In the special, the Muppet gang decides to head down to Fozzy's mother's farmhouse for Christmas. The Muppets are eventually joined by the Sesame Street gang and the Fraggles. There's lots of singing and laughing and holiday cheer, it's god-damned beautiful. Merry Christmas y'all. 
This one might be a little obscure. I can remember watching A Claymation Christmas Celebration back in the day, but I don't think it's been shown too many times since then. In the special, two dinosaurs host a program explaining the origins of popular and traditional Christmas songs. A running joke in the special has characters mixing up the lyrics to "Here We Come A-wassailing," replacing wassailing with waffling, waddling, etc. The special was produced and directed by Will Vinton, the man behind the California Raisins, the short-lived Eddie Murphy series The PJs, and the truly bizarre Adventures of Mark Twain. Basically, if you've never seen the special and you've read this far anyway, just remember it was the 80s, it was stop motion animation and it kinda made sense at the time. 
Wow, watching A Garfield Christmas Special last night totally made up for sitting through Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol earlier in the week. It had been quite a few years since I last watched the Garfield special and I'd honestly forgotten just how good it was. It's short, it's sweet, the songs don't suck, the animation is classic, and the nostalgia factor is very high. I was a big time Garfield fan when I was a kid and the television specials were always something to look forward to. Out of all the Christmas specials that I've covered so far, this is one of the only ones that I actually own on DVD. I bought it at the time more so for Garfield's Halloween Adventure, but now I have another reason to dust it off every year. Thinking about it now though, I bought it online and probably got it in an order with a bunch of horror movies, so there's a good chance my name's on a list somewhere now.
Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol has been adapted for films, television and the stage about a gazillion times. I could have easily done reviews for a dozen different versions of A Christmas Carol, but instead I chose to review the one with Mr. Magoo. In case you don't know/remember, Mr. Magoo was a delightfully senile and essentially blind cartoon character who appeared in a number of theatrical shorts and television specials from 1949 until political correctness came into fashion. At 53 minutes, Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol is a lot longer than it needs to be. The special is padded out with way too many crappy songs and references to razzleberry dressing, whatever the hell that is.
Before watching it again last night, I probably hadn't seen A Very Brady Christmas in almost twenty years. And even though I have no real connection to or affection for the Brady Bunch franchise, this particular Christmas special has been occupying real estate in my head since I first saw it back in the day. This is probably why I was never really good at calculus or why I can never remember people's birthdays. Important chunks of my brain are clogged with memories of Bobby Brady driving a race car and Marcia's cool phone that looked like a panda. Ah, such is life.
I know a lot of children's entertainment is supposed to be kinda dumb, but Frosty the Snowman is seriously retarded. It's a shame too, Frosty was made by Rankin/Bass, the same folks who made the Rudolph special. Only this time around, the special was made with traditional cel animation instead of stop motion animation. It's not even particularly good cel animation either. The voice dubbing is terrible as well, I've seen Godzilla movies with better dubbing. And why the hell does Frosty say "Happy Birthday!" whenever someone puts the magic hat on his head? 
My God, the late 1980s was a bizarre friggin' time to be alive. Go back in your mind to the time when Pee-wee Herman was one of the biggest names in children's entertainment. Remember all the neon and the puppets and screaming real loud? I bet you'd think that the guest list for his Christmas special would've featured some really big names. Sure, there were a few: Magic Johnson, Oprah, Cher, and Whoopi Goldberg. But Zsa Zsa Gabor? Frankie and Annette? Little Richard? And musical performances from Grace Jones, k.d. lang, Charo, and the Del Rubio Triplets? Say what?
A Charlie Brown Christmas is a bit of an odd duck as far as these Christmas specials go. It's probably one of the only specials to feature both the Biblical story of Christmas as well as an anti-commercialization message. And the protagonist, Charlie Brown, is one hell of a sad sack. It's also kinda funny that this special along with Rudolph and the Grinch, which have been annual staples of the Christmas season, were made over forty freakin' years ago. There's only a handful of specials that have had that kind of durability over the years, which is to say, don't count on watching Shrek the Halls with your grand kids. 
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