Darling

You ever see one of those movies that it's totally obvious that the people making it thought it was brilliant? This is one of those. A woman babysits a haunted house but it's very scary according to the loud violin score and literally nothing else that happens in the movie.

RATING: 8%

A Thousand Leaves by Sonic Youth

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.

RATING: 89%

SYR1: Anagrama by Sonic Youth

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.

RATING: 57%

The New Yorker

Because The New Yorker is a pretentious rag filled with pseudo-erudite 5,000-word ramblings on The Hills, I will compose my review of the magazine in crude bullet points:

GOOD

• Good writers


• Sometimes good stories
  
• Sometimes good poems


• Sometimes moderately amusing cartoons
  
  NOT GOOD
• Overblown high-brow reviews of fucking everything, from Forgetting Sarah Marshall to local bars that everyone local already knows about, but will now be filled with ever and ever more yupsters from Manhattan.


• Self-congratulatory advertising for lifestyle items that no one cares about


• Snore-inducing "ethnic" pieces, usually involving a writer who, if not non-white, has lived abroad, and is talking about something involving cooking. These "cooking" pieces are often written by women. We women sure do like us some cookin'!


• Weak-ass, unfunny weekly caption contest


• The same content every single week wrapped in a different cover (sometimes, if you're really lucky, three covers at once!). I really cannot tell one issue apart from the one before or after it.


• Total lack of interest in "debut" authors and poets in favor of crusty old "established," or in some cases dead, writers.

Yeah, I subscribe to keep myself "apprised" of current writing, but the staff of this magazine needs to quit fooling itself that it's discovering or uncovering anything that hasn't been covered to death elsewhere. I don't ever actually end up reading any of the issues. They collect on my floor, in dusty stacks, which is pretty much where they belong.

RATING: 27%