Year in Review

There are many ways I could celebrate and summarize this magnificent year gone-by, but you and I both know this kind of thing has to be done High-Fidelity style (see above), with a top-five list. Top five instances of someone mixing up "Obama" with "Osama" maybe? Top five viral videos featuring cats? Top five Blogger E lines, related or unrelated to her deep primal lust for David Brooks? Unfortunately, these things take time, and while I have that in deep oil reserves, they also take patience, of which I have none. So, in the end, you lose. Instead, I give you the top three songs our upstairs neighbor, a single woman in her late thirties, loved to blast weekday mid-mornings during my time on the dole. Happy new year.

3) The Indiana Jones theme song



2) Beyonce -- If I Were a Boy



1) Afroman -- Because I Got High

Summer Movie Preview

So, have you visited my house lately?

You very well might have because March and April were really the high season for house guests at our place in old South (of) Temescal/sort-of-Korea-Town/maybe Mosswood. Plus, I had a birthday party recently, and many of the 11 people I know in the Bay Area showed up. Anyway, if you've visited my house lately you might have found me preemptively explaining the copies of Entertainment Weekly on the coffee table (by which, of course, I mean "in the bathroom" because I'm classy like that). I don't know how I got signed up for the magazine, and I don't know who's footing the bill--maybe I have a secret Magwitch in Hollywood--but one day a couple of months ago, it just started showing up at my house.

Part of me was mortified--everyone knows the Postal Service is quietly judging you based on your subscriptions (which is why, I make sure to keep my subscription to Cement Americas current)--and that part always wants to explain to people that I'm not, you know, the kind of person who actually goes out and signs up for Entertainment Weekly. But then another part of me waits for the magazine with bated breath, reads it cover to cover, only skipping over mentions of American Idol, Britney Spears, Gossip Girl, The Hills, and other pop culture phenomena that make no sense to me. So, "cover-to-cover" maybe isn't right--I read a good 19% of each issue. But those pages I read I read with great attention, and let me say this: Magazines for people with short attention spans?! What a country! Even though I slave through the maximalist New Yorker profiles in multiple sittings, I read the whole Tina Fey profile in EW last week while toasting and cream cheesing a bagel. I didn't even contract Tina Feytigue!

Ironic unself-awareness of maximalism references aside, I do have a point. The current issue of Entertainment Weekly taught me two things: 1) George Lucas' original concept for the fourth Indiana Jones centered around space aliens invading the earth, and he is obviously the dumbest person in America, and is lucky to have Steven Spielberg to save him from the rancid porridge residing in place of his brain matter; and 2) Adam Sandler is going to play an Israeli commando-turned-New-York-City-hair-stylist who falls in love with the Palestinian owner of the salon he takes a job with. Hijinks and Hezbollah! Merriment and Mossad! (See trailer above). Joke premised on Adam Sandler's foot? Check. Rob Schneider in brown/black/yellow face? Check. Sure-fire box-office gold? Umm, fuck yeah check.

A Misspent Youth

Here's the first photo from the Indiana Jones 4 set. This is the moment where my level of excitement begins its Kilimanjaro-high trek to fever pitch. Yeah, I use mixed metaphors--jealous? Obviously, the movie will be a spectacular turd, but unjustified, unreasonable hope springs eternal, or at least until the Transformers movie comes out, and said hope starts flatlining. And then I'll watch the the live action Thundercats movie and that'll suck, and I'll accept finally and forever that I am but a consumer and Hollywood will stop at nothing to make the joys of my youth fodder for its shit-mills--granted, the mixed metaphor there doesn't make much sense, but you know what I'm saying.