The Royal Tenenbaums

#21 on Glenn's Top 100 Movie List

My pledge to you, R3 reader(s?), is that in this election year, 2012, I will finish my Top 100 Movie List and my Beer For Every State Countdown! And this movie is pretty good, right? I haven't seen it in like six years. I remember watching it on 50 cent Tuesday at the discount theater in Tallahassee, and I got like three dollar hot dogs. Must be listworthy I guess.

RATING: 94%

Cassette Tape Memories: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

Probably my least favorite kind of music is the kind of music found on this soundtrack - late 80s/early 90s R&B/new jack swing garbage. But still I have a soft spot for all the ridiculous songs on this album, probably because I remember walking around my backyard with a Fischer Price tape player blasting it like crazy when I was 9. At the time I mainly listened to soundtracks, classical music, and jazz, so pop music wasn't really in my vocabulary until a year or two after I owned this album when a friend picked up a Louis Armstrong tape I had in disgust and told me "Glenn, cool people don't listen to Louis Armstrong. Cool people listen to C&C Music Factory." Well, he was half right I guess, but for now just check out some TURTLE Power if you've got a few minutes and I think you do.

RATING: 51%

This Shirt I Bought At The Renaissance Festival

Worn this year in Texas? Dork alert! Worn fifteen years from now in any state out of driving distance? Instant hipster cred. I'm not sure which is worse (just kidding).

RATING: 82%

Hipster Douchebags

It's hard to know what to talk about with hipster douchebags. On one hand, one has to contend with their affected distaste for things lowbrow and commonplace (a friend of mine this weekend warned me: "It's considered uncool in Austin to talk about T.V. shows"), and, on the other, their disdain for sincerity, which they find corny and embarrassing. The best thing to do, I suppose, is nod and smile knowingly while listening to their stories about this or that exclusive friend who is socially deviant in a humorous way and/or hooked on heroin.

Hipster douchebags are always accusing other people of being hipster douchebags, because the hipster believes that only s/he is a truly free spirit, while everyone else is merely trendy. This is probably rooted in the mistaken notion that trends are chiefly driven by conformity (the "hipster's kryptonite") rather than the desire for distinction and genuine originality--a desire that the average hipster is incapable of attributing to anyone other than him or herself (Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter's book The Rebel Sell is about this, among other things).

The worst thing about hipster douchebags is that sometimes they'll invite you to a goat barbeque in Austin, and then when you get there, they won't talk to you or introduce you to anyone, and you'll stand around trying to make small talk with 30 apathetically hostile hipster strangers like a fucking knob. At times like this, it's important to remember that hipsters are dismissive of everything you say because they realize it would only take 5 minutes of earnest conversation for you to figure out how boring and shallow they actually are.

RATING: 5%

(Image from www.theokomyanefamily.us.)