Conventional Wisdom

Because earlier I commented on the casting of Edward Norton as the Incredible Hunk, I feel it's my duty to report also this bizarre bit of news: young Frodo Baggins will play Iggy Pop in an upcoming biopic. Now it's exciting that Iggy--like Andrew W.K., Bob Seger and Ken Burns--a native Ann Arborite should be memorialized in film, but Baggins strikes me as a little too fresh-faced and self-consciously hip, no? I'm curious to see how he keeps the nerd-charm of his characters in the The Faculty and Eternal Sunshine at bay in order to channel Pioneer High's finest, a former vagrant who once trolled the basement of the UGLi looking for inspiration (as Iggy told Terry Gross), a man who made it cool to stab yourself with broken bottles. Very curious indeed.

In other news, the CW--a network that I'm pretty sure is run by 14-year-old girls--has announced its fall line-up will include a series called Aliens in America: a comedy about a Pakistani foreign exchange student hosted by a tripped-out family in Wisconsin. (Is Wisco really some sort of hotbed for foreign exchange students?) Maybe it's the Pakistani-in-the-midwest in me, but I'm really excited to try to figure out what channel the CW is and watch this show when it airs. The preview scenes on the website are not at all promising and on the heels of Canada's supremely unfunny Little Mosque on the Prairie I hold little hope for this show, but the network went and cast an actual Pakistani (so far as I can tell) and that's like Rosa Parks kind of progress for my people. We used to just play terrorists--now we get to play characters who the other characters in the show think are terrorists. If that's not the American dream, I don't know what it is.