libraries

"It was my habit to go very slowly up the low, broad steps to the palace entrance, pleasing my eyes with the majestic lines of the building, and lingering to read again the carved inscriptions: Public Library—Built by the People—Free to All. Did I not say it was my palace? Mine, because I was a citizen; mine, though I was born an alien ... My palace—mine! ... All these eager children, all these fine browed women, all these scholars going home to write learned books—I and they had this glorious thing in common, this noble treasure house of learning. It was wonderful to say, This is mine; it was thrilling to say, This is ours."

—Mary Antin, from her autobiography The Promised Land (1913), describing her visits to the Boston Public Library as a child, after her family emigrated from Russia

belated World Cup fever courtesy of the Commodores

Lionel Richie has been more popular abroad than in the United States for years now. He's got a huge Iraqi fan base, and my first hint of his fame in other countries came in 1996, after some friends returned from a summer trip to Europe and reported that they'd heard his 1983 hit "All Night Long" wherever they went.

Soccer's also more popular abroad than it is in the U.S., so how come this 1981 video for "Lady (You Bring Me Up)" by the Commodores, Richie's old band, wasn't resuscitated during all that endless World Cup coverage? It's my favorite of all the Commodores' songs—in fact it's one of the Songs That Will Still Blow Me Away Years From Now™—and it ended up being Richie's next-to-last hit with the group before he embarked on his smash solo career. But as Popblerd's Mike Heyliger said earlier today in an e-mail about the music video, "I bet the surviving Commodores wish they could burn it."

More televised vapidity?

"Can't get no music on my MTV / Can't tell my emotions from reality ..." —The Silver Seas, "The Best Things in Life," 2010

People my age have long complained that MTV doesn't show music videos like it used to, concentrating on reality programming like The Real World and Jersey Shore instead. I used to complain right back at them that it does, just not during prime-time hours or anytime when they happened to be watching. But at some point I stopped paying attention, and this year the network finally dropped "Music Television" from its logo, which implies that they really have given up on videos.

Does this mean the network will stop airing its ultrahyped Video Music Awards telecast each year? Of course not! As long as videos are still shown between 3 and 9 AM each day, MTV can justify throwing a party to honor the best of the year.

It will, however, begin producing more scripted programs, according to the June 14 Wall Street Journal, in an attempt to move away from its recent glut of disposable reality shows. (It'd be fun to compile a list of how many MTV has churned out in the past decade—I'd guess most didn't make it past ten episodes.) Naturally, it's taking baby steps to begin with: the Wall Street Journal reports that "in 'Warren the Ape,' the title character is a poorly behaved celebrity who hopes an MTV reality show will revive his career."

Like AMC, formerly known as American Movie Classics, and TLC, which was once the Learning Channel, MTV is now just an acronym that means nothing. Some would say that makes it FUBAR, but any channel that can survive for almost 30 years in a rapidly expanding cable universe deserves the benefit of the doubt.

stirring the pot

In January of last year I read that DVD sales of Monty Python's Flying Circus spiked 23,000 percent (!) once Python-approved clips of the show started appearing legally on YouTube. DVDs of the influential 1976-'84 sketch-comedy series SCTV, which are packaged and distributed by Shout! Factory, have reportedly never sold well, but if potential buyers could see sample sketches on YouTube, especially clips from 1981 to '83, when SCTV was firing on all cylinders as part of NBC's late-night lineup, I bet they'd consider spending $50 on a five-disc set.

I e-mailed Second City executive vice president Kelly Leonard, who spoke with CEO Andrew Alexander, one of SCTV's original executive producers, but his reply seemed to indicate that several different companies have rights to the show's footage, thereby creating a lot of red tape to sift through. However, a few months later I noticed that SCTV clips were appearing on YouTube that weren't immediately being taken down through cease-and-desist orders.

The clips that are up on YouTube aren't coming from Second City or Shout! Factory, but it's possible the companies decided to relax their policy on the unauthorized posting of their copyrighted material.

Am I to thank for that? Yes. Yes, I am. But there was a price to pay.

One of the few SCTV-related clips I could find on YouTube in January of '09 was made by a 13-year-old boy doing impressions of his favorite characters from the show, including station owner Guy Caballero (played by Joe Flaherty) and station manager Edith Prickley (Andrea Martin), in costume. I first saw SCTV when I was around that age, so I loved watching this middle schooler's take on the characters. It reminded me how much I adored the show when it aired on Nick at Nite in the summer of '89. And if this teenager gets the humor, which didn't rely that much on topical references aside from popular TV shows and celebrities of the late '70s and early '80s, it seems obvious to me that others would, too.

Sadly, when I went back to YouTube this morning to watch his video again, I found the following message instead: "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by The Second City." Well, what about all those clips from SCTV that are now available on YouTube (remember—all because of me, and you're welcome)? There isn't any copyright claim on those? The 13-year-old fan got screwed because his video wasn't helping to sell DVDs?

In that case, I'm sorry I got involved. You can still thank me, of course, and send me money through PayPal as a sign of gratitude, but my mission was never to hurt the little guy. I feel like a morally indignant Bill Needle right now, but what I see in the mirror is a greedy Johnny LaRue.

I read books!

Correction: I own lots of books, but I'm a slow reader. My books sit on my shelves and silently mock me for being a word turtle. If they don't cut it out, I'll have to read Fahrenheit 451 to them—slowly, of course, but my point will have been made.

I am, however, going to be starting classes next month in the University of Illinois's Graduate School of Library and Information Science as part of its "distance learning" program, meaning I'll be taking all but one of the classes online from Chicago. Graduate school requires a lot of reading, yes? It might be time to retrain my brain.

Meanwhile, here are some recently completed posts with lots of pictures and little text (whew!):

2/28: Coming up with awesome book titles takes practice.
4/18: tiny weirdness on Facebook
5/4: celebrity smiles

Help us, Roger Ebert. You're our only hope.

On June 9 a reader who identifies himself as "kLO" left the following comment on the Hollywood Reporter's website under Kirk Honeycutt's negative review of The A-Team:

Dear Kirk Honeybutt. Why do film critics, ahem… sorry, I mean hacks, such as yourself always piss and moan about movies like these? I'm really convinced that the bulk of your Ebert aping colleagues (who are largely failed screenwriters themselves) time and time again, overlook or purposely gloss over what a film this is MEANT to be: Entertainment. They're not trying to say 'something' or change the world. It’s not meant to be deep and meaningful. It's meant to entertain people. It's a **** action movie for crying out loud. That’s it. Nothing more. Nothing less. Maybe you need to go back to film school and learn film. If you don't get the A-Team (because clearly you don't) then why someone is paying you to have an opinion when it's clear to me, you have no **** clue about what an action movie is designed to do, is really astounding. Don’t quit your day job, Kirk. Actually, scrap that – yes, do quit your day job, because you’re no good at it. You’re no more a film critic than my left nut sack.

I thought the male human anatomy came with just one sack, but maybe mine is special. Regardless, what does Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, the one critic kLO seems to respect, have to say about Liam Neeson and Bradley Cooper's newest film?

"The A-Team” is an incomprehensible mess with the 1980s TV show embedded inside. The characters have the same names, they play the same types, they have the same traits, and they're easily as shallow. That was OK for a TV sitcom, which is what the show really was, but at over two hours of Queasy-Cam anarchy, it's punishment.

Well, ain't that a kick in the sacks.

It's not the stars that are falling, it's the skies that hold them in place.

Maybe I'll be proven wrong, but after seeing another TV ad for Jonah Hex last night, I feel like it faces an uphill battle:

1. It's a western. It's also an action movie with big guns and explosions, and it's got supernatural horror-movie elements, but mostly it's a western, and that genre hasn't produced many successful films in the past 40 years (or, if you'd like a less sweeping generalization, since Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven in 1992).

2. It stars Josh Brolin, who's a handsome guy, but as Jonah Hex the right side of his face is disfigured after he's cattle-branded by bad guy John Malkovich, who probably took this role to pay for some renovations on his Tuscan villa.

3. It's based on a comic book. Normally that'd be a good thing, at least as far as Hollywood bean counters are concerned, but Jonah Hex is a DC title that already seemed old and unhip when I was reading comic books in the '80s.

Jonah Hex opens June 18, the same day as Toy Story 3. That sequel should do very well with family audiences, but it's also being targeted at college students who were toddlers when the first Toy Story opened in 1995. Disney and Pixar even screened the first two-thirds of the film for college kids earlier this year, whetting their appetites for the final third in theaters this summer. 

This Friday sees the debut of The Karate Kid, a remake of the hit film from the '80s, and The A-Team, an adaptation of the hit TV show from the '80s. Neither one looks promising to me, though I'd guess the former will fare better than the latter because it'll appeal to family audiences before they jump ship for Toy Story 3 the following weekend.

Richard Corliss has a good article on Time magazine's website about the fact that most of Hollywood's big films so far this summer haven't been as big as predicted. He chalks it up partly to the predictors raising box office expectations too high, but he also points out that ticket prices have increased once again. I paid for my girlfriend and I to see Splice on her birthday last Sunday afternoon—not our first choice, but it'd gotten good reviews (which I now disagree with)—and it cost $19. What happened to matinee prices?

One of the most interesting points of Corliss's article is about the number of movie tickets that are actually sold these days:

The five years from 2005 to 2009 showed remarkably consistent ticket sales, all in the range of 1.39 billion to 1.42 billion, according to movie-stats blog the Numbers. Indeed, in 2009 moviegoers bought no more tickets (1.42 billion) than they did in 1997; the 62% increase in box office revenue, from $6.51 billion to $10.65 billion, was entirely due to the gradual hike in prices. But the bust could be real: if current trends hold, the number of admissions this year will be 1.27 billion, the lowest since 1996. Historical note: None of the recent years comes anywhere near the 4 billion tickets sold in 1946, back before TV gave Americans a free, at-home option for watching entertainment. That's three times the tickets, when the U.S. population was half what it is today.

Seeing those figures reminded me of an Associated Press clipping I'd saved from the fall of 2007, when the Farrelly brothers' remake of Elaine May's The Heartbreak Kid was released. Reporter David Germain wrote:

“The Heartbreak Kid” [opened in] 3,229 theaters, about 1,000 more than “There’s Something About Mary,” which still managed to pack in far more viewers [in 1998]. Based on today’s higher ticket prices, “There’s Something About Mary” pulled in nearly 3 million people over opening weekend, compared to just over 2 million for “The Heartbreak Kid.”

Two million ticket buyers translated to $14 million over the weekend of October 5, 2007. By comparison, the number-one show on TV, American Idol, averaged 24.7 million viewers per episode this season.

Just as movie attendance ain't what it used to be before TV came along, network TV ratings have taken a hit over the past quarter-century thanks to cable TV, VCRs, home video-game systems, DVD players, the Internet, and DVRs. Dallas averaged 34.5 million viewers in its 1980-'81 season, which began with the episode that answered the question "Who shot J.R.?"; that alone attracted 83 million viewers, the highest rating for any non-finale episode in history.

Eighteen years later, the top-rated show was ER, with 17.8 million viewers on average. As many media watchers have reported (over and over and over) this year, American Idol's ratings have dropped every year since 2006, but 24.7 million viewers a week is still better than 17.8 million a decade ago.

When ER finished its 1998-'99 season with that number, George Clooney had recently departed the show after five seasons. He'd honored the contract he signed in 1994, but he was also interested in pursuing movie roles, and today he's one of the most popular and respected movie stars around (the Ocean's Eleven franchise, Michael Clayton, Up in the Air).

It can easily be argued that when Clooney was on ER he was much more visible and popular than he'll ever be on a movie screen, yet movie stars are still held in higher esteem than TV stars, and whenever a TV star generates a lot of buzz, like Katherine Heigl on Grey's Anatomy or Steve Carell on The Office five years ago, the question becomes "When are they going to make the leap to movies?," as if big-screen work legitimizes small-screen actors.

Screen size does have something to do with it, of course. I believe it was Clooney who once said in an interview that when he was on ER people would casually approach him on the street and say hello, but once he'd left the show and was doing movies, fans would keep their distance. His reasoning was that when you're a TV star you're invited into viewers' homes each week, and because TV is "the small screen," you're thought of as a regular person. But when a star is on "the big screen," he or she stands 20 feet tall and is gazed upon by an entire room of people, much like congregants in a church.

TV stars are friends, but movie stars are gods. (Speaking of which, Friends's Matthew "Chandler" Perry is one of many TV stars who will forever be known by the name of the character they played on the hit series that made them famous.) And that's how the stars will continue to be aligned, no matter how few people are buying movie tickets or turning on their televisions.

As the Blagojevich corruption trial begins ...

When Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich was arrested and charged with corruption on December 9, 2008, clearing the way for his impeachment and removal from office the following month, I still had the November 28 edition of the Chicago Sun-Times in a stack of newspapers at home. Inside was the headline "Let Ryan Go, Gov Says." The story starts with these two paragraphs:

Gov. Blagojevich, who for years has blasted corruption under his predecessor, George Ryan, said Thursday "it would be a good decision" for President Bush to let the 74-year-old Ryan out of prison early.

"I always err on the side of compassion," Blagojevich said during a Thanksgiving visit to the Chicago Christian Industrial League on the West Side.

The soon-to-be former governor added, "I think people make mistakes," and reporter Maudlyne Ihejirika noted that "Blagojevich was elected governor in 2002, promising to end the corruption that happened under Ryan." Were his comments a signal that he hoped the court would go easy on him?

The story printed next to that one, also by Ihejirika, speculated about who Blagojevich would choose to take president-elect Barack Obama's empty seat in the U.S. senate. (Blagojevich's alleged plans to auction the seat to the highest bidder are what got him arrested on December 9, after all.) At the Christian Industrial League event, the governor said of U.S. Rep. Danny Davis (D-Ill.), who was believed to be in the running for the seat, "I know that he is a good, decent man, and you don't find a lot of that in politics." Because people make mistakes, of course.

Then, on December 9, shortly before the governor was arrested, the Sun-Times published a short article with the headline "Blagojevich: 'It smells like Nixon.'" The governor, responding to a Chicago Tribune report that he was being secretly recorded by the federal government, said, "It kind of smells like Nixon and Watergate. But I don't care whether you tape me privately or publicly, I can tell you that whatever I saw is always lawful."

He continued, "The good news is, if they're going to those lengths and extents—if in fact that's true—that would suggest that all the past has been pretty good." At the very least, the past would turn out to be much better than the governor's immediate future.

Speaking of Richard Nixon, David Greenberg wrote in his 2003 book Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image that Watergate "validated fears of secret government activity. A cycle took hold: popular distrust of authority spawned inquiries into government misdeeds; and the wave of exposés, in turn, amplified the distrust."

The author then mentions a column that former Nixon speechwriter—and future actor and game-show host—Ben Stein wrote in 1984 (sorry, I don't have the source) that argued Watergate wasn't "such a big deal" in hindsight—all politicians and presidents lie—and that the outrage over it made the American public numb to future political scandals. "But the column's logical conclusion," wrote Greenberg, "was the reverse: that while the press might be running wild over third-rate Watergates, the public—inured by Nixonism and subsequent scandals—no longer expected consistency or even integrity from its leaders." Except when it comes to making mistakes.

It's no secret that Rod Blagojevich has idolized Elvis Presley from a young age. So did John Lennon. In the April 11, 2004, edition of the New York Observer, Anna Jane Grossman wrote about Leon Wildes, the immigration lawyer who defended Lennon in the 1970s after President Nixon, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, and Senator Strom Thurmond spearheaded an effort to deport him for a drug conviction—possession of cannabis resin, or hashish, to be exact—from his years in England.

"In 1972, President Nixon was a little paranoid," Grossman wrote. "It was the first year that 18-year-olds could vote, and because it seemed that American 18-year-olds liked rocker/activist John Lennon, and Lennon's politics were left of Nixon's, 18-year-olds might therefore not vote for Nixon. Thus, to prevent such a crisis, Lennon should be kindly removed from America, thank you very much."

The tipping point, according to film critic J.R. Jones in his 2006 Chicago Reader review of the documentary The U.S. Vs. John Lennon, was when "Lennon and radical activists Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin began planning a concert to coincide with the Republican convention in Miami ... the prospect of a concert to mobilize the youth vote was apparently more than Nixon could tolerate."

In his various interviews since his arrest, Blagojevich has come across as a guy whose grip on reality might not be as firm as his lawyers would like. Perhaps Rod thinks he's being persecuted because he's a rock and roller like Presley and Lennon.

Or because he's black. In January of this year Esquire published an interview in which the former governor, chatting about his former profession, said, "It’s such a cynical business, and most of the people in the business are full of shit and phonies, but I was real, man—and am real."

As for President Obama, he complained, "This guy, he was catapulted in on hope and change, what we hope the guy is. What the fuck? Everything he’s saying’s on the teleprompter. I’m blacker than Barack Obama. I shined shoes. I grew up in a five-room apartment. My father had a little laundromat in a black community not far from where we lived. I saw it all growing up.”

Is that why, when the Illinois House of Representatives voted whether or not to impeach Blagojevich on January 9, 2009, state representative Milton Patterson—who's black—was the only member of the House to say no? "I went by my own gut feeling, simple as that," he told the Sun-Times, explaining that his vote didn't mean he supported Blagojevich.

However, as Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell, who's also black, wrote in the paper two days later, "African Americans are a fiercely loyal group when it comes to supporting those in political leadership. I know that is a sweeping generalization ... but it is rare for the black community to turn its back on a politician who is viewed as 'inclusive.'" She added, "Too many black families have been nearly bankrupted trying to defend loved ones against false charges."

In other words, Blagojevich is innocent until proven guilty, even if he has made lots and lots and lots of mistakes.

Please keep your opinion of the Baldwin brothers semi-private when you're in public.

Yesterday I passed a man on the street who was standing in a doorway and talking on his phone. He was facing the door, as if waiting to be let in, as he complained that actor/born-again Christian/conservative talk-radio host Stephen Baldwin is an idiot, "but that whole family is a bunch of idiots."

my a-ha moment

Two weeks ago, as part of a freelance assignment I thoroughly enjoyed, I wrote a short biography of the Norwegian band a-ha (the 1985 hit "Take On Me") for Rhino Records' website. Yesterday I was alerted by my contact at the label that the bio had received praise from a completely unbiased source! 

I'm lying, of course, but it's nice to see that my purple prose has an a-ha fan's approval. Give me a mountain metaphor and I shall climb it.

However, the band's success outside of the United States in the past 25 years, much like fellow European acts Simply Red and Jamiroquai, is impressive. For one thing, a-ha played to 198,000 paying customers in Rio de Janeiro in 1991, and no, you can't just dismiss that huge number by saying Brazilians have lots of free time and money to burn.

celebrity smiles

USA Weekend, the Sunday-supplement rival of Parade, has a thing for toothy celebrity grins. But in the process of showing them off, the publication's printer often manages to make the owners of those smiles look cartoonish due to heavy color saturation and a few other factors I can't quite put my finger on.

Here are four from last year. First up, Dennis Quaid (click on each picture for a closer look), who's apparently made of rubber and plastic, which probably came in handy when he filmed the 2009 G.I. Joe movie.

Leslie Mann is one of the stars of Funny People. And she is a funny person, but here she just looks funny.

Samuel L. Jackson has appeared in approximately 5,861 movies in the past two decades. That kind of schedule would stress out anyone, which is probably why Jackson looks like he's about to eat the football he's holding in the photo below. Take a half-decade vacation, Shaft 2000—you've earned it.

Hilary Swank is known for her big grin, a la Julia Roberts, but on the cover of USA Weekend hers looks smaller than the other three celebrities'. She doesn't deserve another Oscar for this particular feat, but it's impressive nonetheless.

Finally, this picture of action director Michael Bay (Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, and the two Transformers movies, with a third on the way) wasn't taken for USA Weekend—it merely appeared inside the June 19-21, 2009, issue as part of an ad for M&M's. It doesn't require Bay to show a big, toothy grin either, but since it actually does portray him as a cartoon, it's worth mentioning, especially since his cinematic crimes against humanity make me fantasize about seeing him crushed under a shoe on the floor of a movie theater.

big-screen superhero scorecard

Ryan Reynolds's new movie, Paper Man, in which he plays Jeff Daniels's imaginary friend, a superhero named Captain Excellent, opens today. Last year Reynolds played the comic-book superhero Deadpool in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and in 2011 he'll star as Green Lantern in a big-budget adaptation of the comic book of the same name. (Six years ago he costarred with Wesley Snipes and Jessica Biel in Blade: Trinity, his first foray into movies adapted from comic books.) Reynolds may also reprise his role as Deadpool in a spin-off of Wolverine, which itself is a spin-off of the first three X-Men movies.

Chris Evans's new movie, The Losers, also opens today. It's based on a comic book, albeit one in which the good guys don't possess superpowers, but Evans did play a man with telekinetic powers in last year's Push, which, at first glance, looked like another X-Men spin-off. He also starred as the Human Torch in Fantastic Four (2005) and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007), and now he's set to play Captain America in a big-budget adaptation of the comic book of the same name. He'll also be playing Captain America in a big-budget adaptation of the "supergroup" comic book The Avengers.

Ryan Reynolds is married to Scarlett Johansson. She plays Black Widow, who's something of a superhero, in Iron Man 2, opening May 7, and she'll be in The Avengers with Evans and Robert Downey Jr., a.k.a. Iron Man.

With great power comes great responsibility, or so the Spider-Man movies reminded us again and again. And with great paychecks come great anxiety, I presume, about being a talented actor faced with the prospect of playing comic-book superheroes again and again for the rest of your career.

tiny weirdness on Facebook

Occasionally the advertisements on the right-hand side of Facebook pages will catch my eye because of the small pictures that are used:

The caricature of Paul McCartney on the right is a thousand times more flattering than the photograph on the left. The paparazzo who's responsible must be a John fan. (Typical.)

"He's got the whole hospital nursery in His hands ..." (I just hope God realizes those aren't peanuts.)

This image was attached to an ad about new fathers earning money from home, I believe. Never tell a man what he can't do, even if the activity in question is breast feeding.

soul of the son

I first heard D.J. Rogers Jr.'s "Lonely Girl" in June 2002 while waiting for The Sum of All Fears to begin at a movie theater in Hendersonville, North Carolina. It was part of the piped-in music provided by United Artists Cinemas, and Rogers was identified as the "hot new artist" behind the song after it played. I was immediately struck by "Lonely Girl's" smooth hooks, and I still think it's one of the best songs of the past decade.

Unfortunately, the album that housed the song, Emosoul, the title of which seemed to piggyback off the "emo" subgenre of pop-rock that was popular at the time via groups like Dashboard Confessional and Jimmy Eat World, was barely released at the end of '02. In fact I'm not sure if anything more than promotional copies were pressed by Rogers's label, Motown.

"Lonely Girl" should've been a hit. And because I liked it so much I ended up asking for a greatest-hits compilation by Rogers's dad, an R&B-gospel singer who was popular in the late '70s and early '80s, for Christmas in 2005. I wasn't disappointed: Golden Classics is well worth a listen.

the Alex Chilton-Michael Jackson connection

Last week as I read obituaries for singer Alex Chilton, who died on March 17 at the age of 59, reportedly from a heart attack, I realized he had a few things in common with Michael Jackson.

Chilton didn't end up becoming the biggest star in the world—he was a fairly obscure artist compared to Jackson—but he did have a #1 hit on the Billboard Top 40 at the age of 16 as the lead singer of the Box Tops. "The Letter," which hit the top of the charts in 1967, was the Box Tops' first single, just as "I Want You Back" was the Jackson 5's first single two years later, when frontman Michael Jackson was only 11 years old.

Listeners couldn't believe "The Letter" was sung by a tenth grader when they first heard it; Chilton's gruff vocals sounded like they were coming from a much older (and some would say blacker) set of pipes. Similarly, Jackson was noted for sounding mature beyond his years when he sang hits like "ABC" and "The Love You Save," and when he died last June many writers observed that he spent his childhood being the breadwinner of the family only to spend his adult years acting like a child.

One of the tributes to Chilton that I read on the Internet mentioned that he had covered Jackson's "Rock With You" in concert in recent years. In a video shot in Haiden, Austria, in August 2008, the month Jackson turned 50, Chilton introduces the 1979 smash hit by saying, "I honestly love this tune. Nobody else even realizes it's good yet, but I swear to God this is a great song. He didn't write it, but ... that's probably why it's great."

Okay, so Chilton wasn't a fan of Jackson's songwriting, but Rod Temperton, the Englishman who penned "Rock With You," deserves all the praise he gets. "Rock With You," like Chilton and Jackson, is an enduring classic.

a movie poster that could've spent less time explaining itself

Welcome back to my infrequent series (some would call it "abandoned" or "not substantial enough to even qualify as a series," but let's not nitpick) in which I play Monday-morning quarterback for movie-studio marketing departments and therefore justify my existence in this universe.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid, adapted from the book series of the same name, opens today, and recently I've seen posters on the sides of buses that feature this tag line:

"IT'S NOT A DIARY, IT'S A MOVIE."

Of course it's not a diary! How stupid do you think I am, Hollywood? Nobody advertises their diaries in public. Duh!

But even if they do, they're called blogs. Or Facebook status updates. Or tweets. And they help justify our existence by letting everyone else in the universe know what we think of, you know, stuff, or how bored we are or how fat we think we are (which is the cue for the rest of the universe to say "OMG, you are so not fat!").

You could learn a lot from people like me, Hollywood. In fact, yesterday when I was trying on some new jeans that felt a little tight and I decided Levi's has really taken a nosedive in popularity, I thought, "This would so make a great movie!"

Trash can be just as inspiring as art.

Thomas Mars and Laurent Brancowitz of the French band Phoenix were asked about their influences by Melena Ryzik for the March 7 installment of The New York Times's Playlist feature. Here are two excerpts:

Ryzik: On your list you also put a painting, "Guacamole Airlines" by Ed Ruscha.

Mars: He's just the coolest artist alive. Whenever you hear him talk about art, his approach to it is very contemporary, it's very pop, and that's something we've always wanted to do. That's why I put Us Weekly in there [too]. Why you want to create music can be because you hear something beautiful, and you're thinking, I could be inspired by this. But sometimes you see something disgusting, and you think, O.K., I have to make something better than this.

Ryzik: How do you hold on to ["teenage abandon," as Brancowitz calls the recurring theme in Phoenix's music] as adults?

Brancowitz: It's not hard. I mean, it's not related to age—I say teenage because it's something you experience with the most force when you are young. You know this emotion you have when you see a movie that's so beautiful or you hear a piece of music that sounds perfect? It's this kind of anxiety and joy. So it's very easy, actually. You just have to see the right piece of art.

Everyone needs a theme song.

Plenty of songs are named after women, but men have needs too.



Thanks for finding this one, Sini!

Coming up with awesome book titles takes practice.

Sometime last year I saw this book cover on a friend's Facebook page:

In Hendersonville, North Carolina, two months ago, while visiting my parents for Christmas, I saw the book's title again, this time on a postcard at a local grocery store called the Fresh Market (possibly the best-smelling place on earth).

Luckily, it's not the only memorable title Lorraine Peterson, an author of books for young (Christian) adults, has come up with over the years:

Answer: He's paranoid about getting mugged, so He never carries cash, but He can light up your life with a lightning strike if you'd prefer.

Answer: Your hair is proof enough that you can't be trusted to do the right thing.

Answer (in the form of bitter, sarcastic rhetorical questions that reveal a little too much about the person writing them): Who ever said God loves forgetful teenagers? Who said God loves teenagers, period? I mean, look at your face—if God loved mankind, why would He create pimples?! And why would He let grown men go bald in their early 20s but still give them pimples in their mid-30s? That's just cruel!

Most accidents occur in the home.

Last night I opened one of my kitchen cabinets to put away some dishes, but I forgot to close the door.

I have a short attention span, but I've only found it to be a problem since I graduated from college 12 years ago. Still, that's a dozen years, and the rise of the Internet as a part of everyday life probably hasn't helped.

In case you're just tuning in, I'm blaming the Internet for my short attention span, and I'm blaming my short attention span for my decision to interrupt the activity in progress—putting away dishes—in order to dust my breakfast table.

At the time I was thinking, "I'd better do that before I forget." But in the process of not forgetting, I forgot to close the kitchen cabinet door. That's why, when a spine from the little cactus on my breakfast table (my only table, and it doubles as a desk) pricked my finger, I walked over to the sink to rinse it off.

That's when I ran right into the kitchen cabinet door.

I didn't turn around and bang my head into it. No, I walked directly into it. How did I not see it?

It reminded me of when I was six and was jumping into a pile of leaves with a friend at his dad's house after kindergarten one day. On my second or third jump I was running toward the pile of leaves when suddenly I fell backward onto the ground—I'd hit a metal bar that was right above my line of sight. That accident left me with some stitches and a scar above my left temple. And now that I'm bald, the scar is in plain sight on my forehead.

I don't think last night's accident will leave a scar, and the cleanup didn't require more than a Band-Aid or four, but I was left with a gash* on my right temple, and over the next few days I'm sure I'll get lots of reactions like "What did you do to your head?"

Well, clearly I got in a fight with one of my kitchen cabinets. Unfortunately, it won.

* The gash above John McClane's (Bruce Willis) right eyebrow in the featured promotional still from 2007's Live Free or Die Hard doesn't resemble mine at all in terms of point of impact. His postaccident facial expression, however, is a perfect match.