Walking to work this morning, I was stunned to see the following front page peeking out at me from the newspaper boxes on my route:
Archive for February, 2008
Sun Times or The Onion?
Friday, February 29th, 2008Ralph Gamelli Fiction in Yankee Pot Roast
Saturday, February 16th, 2008FLYMF alum Ralph Gamelli has a short piece at Yankee Pot Roast poking fun at America’s best-rated sitcom: Two and a Half Men. Ralph, the show deserves all of the ridicule you can give it
South By Southwest Preview, Part 2
Saturday, February 16th, 2008SXSW 2008 Preview
To prep for the 2008 South By Southwest music festival in, I’m arming myself with an alphabetical list of the groups performing and an active Internet connection with the goal of listening to top tracks from as many bands as possible and offering my impressions here.
The reactions will be quick and dirty, reflecting my own musical taste and ignorance, but if they save me or anyone else from accidentally sitting through a performance of Hey, How’s Your News, then they will be worth it.
South By Southwest Preview, Part 1
Tuesday, February 12th, 2008SXSW 2008 Preview
To prep for the 2008 South By Southwest music festival in, I’m arming myself with an alphabetical list of the groups performing and an active Internet connection with the goal of listening to top tracks from as many bands as possible and offering my impressions here.
The reactions will be quick and dirty, reflecting my own musical taste and ignorance, but if they save me or anyone else from accidentally sitting through a performance of Hey, How’s Your News, then they will be worth it.
Maggie Flynn Shares Her Sparkle
Thursday, February 7th, 2008FLYMF friend Maggie Flynn has become a contributing writer for LACityZine.com, a Los Angeles blog compilation of local news, music, and all-around good times. Check it out—her pieces are the ones with the meticulous style and subtle, groovy wit. Her most recent offerings include Valentine’s comfort for the single and professional pointers on being a karaoke star.
Scaring Ourselves to Death
Thursday, February 7th, 2008The Spymaster, Lawrence Wright’s January 21 New Yorker article on Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, has received some coverage due to McConnell’s laughable attempt to evade stating that waterboarding is torture. For those who haven’t read it, the money quote is:
“I know one thing. I’m not a water-safety instructor, but I cannot swim without covering my nose. I don’t know if its’ some deviated septum or mucus membrane, but water just rushes in….If I had water draining into my nose, oh God, I just can’t imagine how painful! Whether it’s torture by anybody else’s definition, for me it would be torture.”
Which One’s Monty?
Wednesday, February 6th, 2008The Onion A.V. Club has an interview with John Cleese where he reminisces about his career, Monty Python, and the current state of comedy filmmaking. He comes off as warm, perceptive, and genuinely funny.
The Life of Brian inspires a detour into theology, which is where Cleese drops a nice quote:
Here’s what I think in a single sentence: I think that the real religion is about the understanding that if we can only still our egos for a few seconds, we might have a chance of experiencing something that is divine in nature. But in order to do that, we have to slice away at our egos and try to get them down to a manageable size, and then still work some practiced light meditation. So real religion is about reducing our egos, whereas all the churches are interested in is egotistical activities, like getting as many members and raising as much money and becoming as important and high-profile and influential as possible. All of which are egotistical attitudes. So how can you have an egotistical organization trying to teach a non-egotistical ideal? It makes no sense, unless you regard religion as crowd control. What I think most organized religion—simply crowd control.
That’s a bumper sticker waiting to be made. I can see the steeple graphic already.
Not Quite Invincible
Monday, February 4th, 2008Austin Grossman’s novel, “Soon I Will Be Invincible,” is a prose distillation of the world of superheroes, taking the heavy hitters, absurd plot twists, and insane plans of comic book lore and condensing them into a single narrative. Extradimensional energies and stray magic wands bestow powers and take them away; a supervillain endeavors to pull the planet out of orbit; and Batman, Wonder Woman, Doctor Strange and Superman all weigh in via slightly flawed homologues.
Grossman offers an internalization of the medium, one that’s hard to achieve on the illustrated page. Half of the proceedings—the better half—is dedicated to Lex Luthor stand-in Dr. Impossible rationalizing his motivations as he walks us through his latest evil scheme, assuring us, constantly, of his genius. “I often wonder what Einstein would have done in my position,” he ponders at one point. “Einstein was smart, maybe even as smart as Laserator, but he played it way too safe. Then again, nobody even threw a grappling hook at Einstein.”