TOP MODEL FEVER--CATCH IT!

Don't forget, my episode of America's Next Top Model airs tonight at 8:00 on your local UPN station. Don't watch Lost--watch Top Model! I'm taping Lost, so you can come over to my house and watch it on Friday.

His Dark Materials update

Read this interview with HDM director Chris Weitz to allay any fears you may have that the co-creator of American Pie won't do justice to Pullman's books. Weitz comes off as extremely thoughtful, passionate about the books, and even more-than-slightly British, which all bodes well for his adaptation. Also, he's been in contact with Pullman, which is a very good sign, and all his thoughts on adapting the books tend to match up with how I would approach it, which at least makes me happy. Still plenty of time for the whole thing to fall to pieces, but at least he's saying the right things. (Another good sign--Peter Jackson did a number of fan-fear-allaying interviews like this for Ain't It Cool News when he was gearing up for Lord of the Rings, and that seemed to turn out pretty well.)

EVERYTHING IDOL | Qualifying Round, Heat 22

The Big Lebowski destroyed its Los Angeles rivals, and Batman proved his superiority to all other superheroes, to move on to Round 2 of the ongoing competition to determine The Best Thing Ever. Here are the Round 2 contenders so far:

Kitties
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Air conditioning
Bob Dylan, 1965-66
Star Wars: the original trilogy
The Simpsons
The stories of Raymond Carver
Home cooking
The lightbulb
Homicide: Life on the Street
Ping-Pong
Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
Scissors
Google.com
Sex
US Postal Service
Chocolate-chip cookies
The Lord of the Rings (the movies)
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
Email
Rushmore
In the Aeroplane over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel
Fight Club
Beef
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Books
The Big Lebowski
Batman

And the losers' brackets are shaping up thusly:

FILM: Boogie Nights, Edward Scissorhands, Lawrence of Arabia, Pulp Fiction
MUSIC: Surfer Rosa by the Pixies, Otis Redding's oeuvre, Automatic for the People by R.E.M., "Georgia on My Mind" by Ray Charles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles, The Velvet Underground's four studio albums, iPod/iTunes, London Calling by The Clash, Led Zeppelin IV by Led Zeppelin, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars by David Bowie, The Boatman's Call by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Ritual de lo Habitual by Jane's Addiction, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain by Pavement
TV: Monty Python's Flying Circus, The Sopranos, Freaks and Geeks, Mr. Show with Bob and David
LITERATURE: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, Inferno by Dante Alighieri
FOOD & DRINK: apple pie a la mode, Guinness Stout, pizza delivery, Coca-Cola, NyQuil, bourbon, chicken, seafood, pork, macaroni & cheese, In-N-Out Burger
OTHER: shoes, eBay.com, Mapquest.com, Weather.com, money, power, fame, that picture of Johnny Cash flipping the bird, righteous indignation, correct spelling, carpet, dinosaurs, nemeses, film, grooved vinyl, magnetic tape, optical discs, future magic hard drives, Superman, Spider-Man, X-Men

The next four contestants, please:



1. Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson




2. Peanuts by Charles Schulz




3. The Far Side by Gary Larson




4. Krazy Kat by George Herriman

Polls close Monday, October 4 at midnight.

ALABAMA SPEAKER | Groundhawg Day

Work kicked my ass yesterday, and I was determined to gym it up last night, so you're spared any more rambling editorials on The Dukes of Hazzard today. Instead, I'll end Alabama Week with a piece of advice: Go check out my friends The Groundhawgs and download their song "Planet Alabamie Rag." I should have a copy of their brand-new album in my grubby mitts very soon, at which time you'll be hearing more from me about them.

Go already!

ALABAMA SPEAKER | I have boundless enthusiasm and zest to greet each day



It's probable that 99% of us would never have heard of Emmett Miller were it not for Nick Tosches, who happened upon Miller's music while writing his fantastic 1977 book Country. The idea of Miller, a largely unknown Georgia blackface minstrel who recorded with some of jazz's greatest legends in the first decades of the twentieth century and became one of the progenitors of country music, fascinated Tosches so much that over the next two decades he continued to dig deeper into the musician's past, eventually devoting an entire book to Miller (2001's Where Dead Voices Gather). You can't say it much better than Tosches does:

The alchemy of Emmett Miller's music is as startling today as it was when he wrought it. Definable neither as country nor as blues, as jazz nor as pop, as black nor as white, but as both culmination and transcendence of these bloodlines and more, that alchemy, that music, stands as one of the most wondrous emanations, a birth–cry really, of the many–faced and one–souled chimera of all that has come to be called American music. The very concept of him —a white man in blackface, a hillbilly singer and a jazz singer both, a son of the deep South and a roué of Broadway —is at once unique, mythic, and a perfect representation of the schizophrenic heart of what this country, with a straight face, calls its culture.

Here are two Alabama-referencing tracks from the one available recording of Miller's work, Emmett Miller: Minstrel Man from Georgia:

MP3: "Lovin' Sam (The Sheik of Alabam')" by Emmett Miller

Recorded September 5, 1929 in New York, with Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Eddie Lang, Leo McConville, Stan King, Arthur Schutt and Joe Tarto. The music is a particular kind of vaudeville jazz, obviously not country, but in Miller's strange, wonderful voice you can hear all those he influenced: Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers and every yodeling, hiccuping, nasal-voiced weirdo genius from Dylan on down. As a bonus, it's also a very funny song about an Alabama lothario.

MP3: "The Blues Singer (from Alabam')" by Emmett Miller

Recorded September 12, 1929 with almost the same crew (Gene Krupa replaced Stan King on drums). The dialogue at the beginning is one of Miller's blackface "Sam" routines, probably assisted by one Dan Fitch. The minstrelstry was out of fashion even then, but the music is still fascinating; I love the way Miller sings "Alabam'" in both of these songs, pushing his voice into falsetto and stretching out the final syllable into a yodel.

A good introductory article to Emmett Miller

Emmett Miller discography, with RealAudio samples

Excerpt from Where Dead Voices Gather, which contains pretty much everything there is to know about Miller

Really, go read Country--required reading if you have any interest at all in American popular music.

(MP3 disclaimer: All MP3s offered on this site are for evaluation purposes only--i.e. download them, listen to them, decide whether you would like to purchase the music from a friendly retailer, and then delete them. All MP3s will be available for one week after they are posted. If you are an artist or represent an artist or label whose music appears here, and you would like your music removed, just let me know.)

SHAMELESS PLUG



Don't forget, America's Next Top Model Season 3 premieres tonight at 8:00 on your local UPN affiliate. I won't be watching it, because Lost premieres at the same time, but you should definitely watch it. Otherwise, you won't know all the crucial background info for the Gardneriffic second episode next Wednesday.

ALABAMA SPEAKER | Who's gonna lay there passing blame?


My roommate's gun got nine bullets in it

(N.B.: I'm pretty sure most of you are already intimately familiar with the Drive-By Truckers, but just play along and imagine that I have vast legions of readers I don't actually know.)

Today's Alabama ass-whuppers are actually from Alabama, via Athens, GA: The Drive-By Truckers. The DBTs have been steadily building up a following over the last few years, thanks to relentless touring and an album-a-year release schedule, and they're starting to get serious national recognition (they appeared on Late Night with Conan O'Brien for the first time last week). Their obvious musical touchstone is Lynyrd Skynyrd, but the Truckers have thirty more years of Southern history to contend with and write about, and while they love the South, they don't gloss over its problems; their songs are mythology without mythologizing, like stories written by a Faulkner who's seen Walking Tall. (Their 2002 album title Southern Rock Opera pretty much sums up their sound.) The Truckers have three singer/songwriter/guitarists, who are all about equal when it comes to providing great songs--de facto leader Patterson Hood gets the most credit in the press, but Jason Isbell wrote my favorite DBT song ("Outfit"), and Mike Cooley's no slouch either. They put on a hell of a live show too, but be prepared to stay a while. They love to play, and it shows.



MP3: "Lookout Mountain" by Drive-By Truckers

From the new album, The Dirty South. Lookout Mountain starts in Alabama and continues through northwest Georgia to Chattanooga, Tennessee, and was a constant presence in my childhood, as it's visible pretty much anytime you venture north or west of my hometown. It's also the home of awesome tourist attractions Ruby Falls and Rock City, which is worth visiting exactly once, preferably at Christmas. The mountain was also home to battles in both the Civil War and Revolutionary War, including a disputed "final battle" in the latter. In this song, Hood gives Lookout the legendary stature it deserves in a rumination on responsibility after death, while the Truckers give their three-guitar attack a good workout.

MP3: "Hey Ya! (live)" by Drive-By Truckers

The highlight of my journalistic career so far was when Patterson Hood wrote in to the Flagpole to complain about my review of Outkast's Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. Dude, I like the album!


Greatest show ever

I was talking to Larry the other day about the casting for the upcoming Dukes of Hazzard movie, which does not inspire much confidence in those of us with fond memories of the General Lee. Johnny Knoxville sounds all right as Luke, but Seann William Scott shouldn't be playing any human being, much less Bo Duke. And if they wanted to cast a robot drag queen as Daisy Duke, then, well, mission accomplished. The movie's being written and directed by the Broken Lizard comedy troupe, which could be either good or bad: I loved Super Troopers, but Club Dread was mostly awful except for Bill Paxton's Jimmy Buffett impression and the always-welcome presence of Brittany Daniel, still the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in person. Check out the otherwise execrable Joe Dirt to see why she should be playing Daisy Duke:



All signs point to the Hazzard movie being a cheap irony-laden smorgasbord of mullet jokes, and while usually I'm in favor of these kinds of movies making fun of the source material (because honestly, who cares about Starsky & Hutch?), I think this is the first time a TV show I actually watched and enjoyed is getting the big-screen ha-ha treatment. Though I suppose it could be worse.

MP3: "Dazzey Duks" by Duice
Self-explanatory. This was pretty much the soundtrack to my eighth-grade year, however unwilling I was to accept it. Also a pretty good example of what Dre and Big Boi are talking about in "Ghettomusick."

WAV: "Good Ol' Boys (Dukes of Hazzard theme song)" by Waylon Jennings

Anyway, Larry and I were thinking aloud about the classic Waylon Jennings theme song, "Good Ol' Boys," and whether or not it could be successfully covered/updated for use in the film. Larry was of the opinion that any modern rock band that tried to cover "Good Ol' Boys" would sound like "douchebags," and I agreed, though now I'm thinking that the Drive-By Truckers might do a good job. Then it struck me that the best artist to update the theme song would be a Southern rapper, like Bubba Sparxxx or the Nappy Roots. Hip-hop has become for the South what country used to be: a way for the region's marginalized citizens to express themselves and in the process become less economically marginalized. Hip-hop has always had strong connections to its places of origin, whether it's New York or the West Coast, and Southern hip-hop is no different. Bubba Sparxxx's music is all about the South, both in his rhymes about growing up in South Georgia, and in the distinct "hick-hop" sound he and Timbaland put together. The same holds true for pretty much every other hip-hop artist from the South, though it's hard to find a successful rock band with a similarly distinct identity, the Drive-By Truckers being a notable exception. And mainstream country has left the "dirty South" behind in favor of a slick cornpone fantasyland, a marketer's idea of the South. If you're looking for the new Johnny Cash or Hank Williams, you're more likely to find him on BET than CMT.


Legends are made out of vulnerable men

MP3: "She Tried" by Bubba Sparxxx

Sparxxx is from Georgia, but Birmingham gets name-checked in this lament, which melds Sparxxx's confessional rhymes and Timbaland's stutter-step beats with mournful fiddle (by Austin Clark of the Clark Family Experience) and a high-lonesome chorus sung by Ryan Tedder. From last year's Deliverance.


They really should've cast Boss Hogg as Luthor's dad.

(MP3 disclaimer: All MP3s offered on this site are for evaluation purposes only--i.e. download them, listen to them, decide whether you would like to purchase the music from a friendly retailer, and then delete them. All MP3s will be available for one week after they are posted. If you are an artist or represent an artist or label whose music appears here, and you would like your music removed, just let me know.)

ALABAMA SPEAKER | Cause some trouble if I can



While we're on the subject of The Big Lebowski, we might as well talk a little about Townes Van Zandt. Van Zandt came up in the music scene in and around Austin, Texas in the sixties, along with such other similar singer/songwriters as Joe Ely and Jimmie Dale Gilmore (who played Walter's nemesis Smokey in Lebowski), who combined country, folk, rock and blues into a whole new beast that eventually spawned the No Depression movement. While he was never very well-known to the public at large, Van Zandt was a legend among other musicians and amassed a devoted cult following. Some of his songs were made hits by other artists, most notably "Pancho and Lefty" by Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard. Van Zandt was a brilliant songwriter with a Leonard Cohen-esque gift for plainspoken poetry and a fiction writer's ear for surgically precise storytelling, but his idiosyncratic voice (kind of like Bob Dylan imitating Johnny Cash) and rambling lifestyle kept him from achieving the kind of mainstream success he deserved. He died in 1997, just as he was starting to be recognized for his massive influence on a younger generation of artists. If you've never heard Van Zandt, you owe it to yourself to check him out.

MP3: "Blazes Blue" by Townes Van Zandt
From 1994's No Deeper Blue. This is today's Alabama connection: "Headed down to Alabam' / Cause some trouble if I can / Aw buddy would you like to come along." The song is a tribute to Van Zandt's friend Blaze Foley, another local legend in Austin who died in 1989. (Foley was also the subject of Lucinda Williams's "Drunken Angel.") "Blazes Blue" is a little rowdier than Van Zandt's usual work, thanks to hot slide guitar courtesy of Irish guitarist Philip Donnelly.

MP3: "Dead Flowers" by Townes Van Zandt
The Lebowski connection: this cover of the Rolling Stones classic plays over the movie's final scene. From Van Zandt's covers album, Roadsongs.

(MP3 disclaimer: All MP3s offered on this site are for evaluation purposes only--i.e. download them, listen to them, decide whether you would like to purchase the music from a friendly retailer, and then delete them. All MP3s will be available for one week after they are posted. If you are an artist or represent an artist or label whose music appears here, and you would like your music removed, just let me know.)

EVERYTHING IDOL | Qualifying Round, Heat 21

Books handily beat out all other information storage media to move on to Round 2 of the ongoing competition to determine The Best Thing Ever. Here are the Round 2 contenders so far:

Kitties
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Air conditioning
Bob Dylan, 1965-66
Star Wars: the original trilogy
The Simpsons
The stories of Raymond Carver
Home cooking
The lightbulb
Homicide: Life on the Street
Ping-Pong
Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
Scissors
Google.com
Sex
US Postal Service
Chocolate-chip cookies
The Lord of the Rings (the movies)
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
Email
Rushmore
In the Aeroplane over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel
Fight Club
Beef
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Books

And the losers' brackets are shaping up thusly:

FILM: Boogie Nights, Edward Scissorhands, Lawrence of Arabia, Pulp Fiction
MUSIC: Surfer Rosa by the Pixies, Otis Redding's oeuvre, Automatic for the People by R.E.M., "Georgia on My Mind" by Ray Charles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles, The Velvet Underground's four studio albums, iPod/iTunes, London Calling by The Clash, Led Zeppelin IV by Led Zeppelin, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars by David Bowie, The Boatman's Call by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
TV: Monty Python's Flying Circus, The Sopranos, Freaks and Geeks, Mr. Show with Bob and David
LITERATURE: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, Inferno by Dante Alighieri
FOOD & DRINK: apple pie a la mode, Guinness Stout, pizza delivery, Coca-Cola, NyQuil, bourbon, chicken, seafood, pork, macaroni & cheese
OTHER: shoes, eBay.com, Mapquest.com, Weather.com, money, power, fame, that picture of Johnny Cash flipping the bird, righteous indignation, correct spelling, carpet, dinosaurs, nemeses, film, grooved vinyl, magnetic tape, optical discs, future magic hard drives

The next four Los Angeles-centric contestants, please:




1. The Big Lebowski, directed by Joel Coen | "Way out west there was this fella I wanna tell you about. Goes by the name of Jeff Lebowski. At least that was the handle his loving parents gave him, but he never had much use for himself. See, this Lebowski, he called himself "The Dude". Now, Dude, there's a name no man would self-apply where I come from. But then there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense. And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place so darned interestin'. See, they call Los Angeles the "City Of Angels", but I didn't find it to be that, exactly. But I'll allow it as there are some nice folks there. 'Course I ain't never been to London, and I ain't never seen France. And I ain't never seen no queen in her damned undies, so the fella says. But I'll tell you what, after seeing Los Angeles, and this here story I'm about to unfold, well, I guess I seen somethin' every bit as stupefyin' as you'd see in any of them other places. And in English, too. So I can go with a smile on my face without feelin' like the good lord gipped me. Now this here story I'm about to unfold took place in the early nineties - just about the time of our conflict with Saddamm and the Iraqis. I only mention it because sometimes there's a man, I won't say a hero, cause, what's a hero? Sometimes, there's a man. And I'm talkin' about the Dude here - the Dude from Los Angeles. Sometimes, there's a man, well, he's the man for his time and place. He fits right in there. And that's the Dude. The Dude, from Los Angeles. And even if he's a lazy man, and the Dude was most certainly that - quite possibly the laziest in all of Los Angeles County, which would place him high in the runnin' for laziest worldwide - sometimes there's a man. Sometimes, there's a man. Well, I lost my train of thought here. But...aw, hell. I've done introduced it enough." - The Stranger




2. Ritual de lo Habitual by Jane's Addiction |
True hunting is over
No herds to follow
Without game, men prey on each other
The family weakens by the bite we swallow

True leaders gone
Of land and people
We choose no kin but adopted strangers
The family weakens by the length we travel




3. Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain by Pavement |
Down in Santa Rosa over the bay
Across the grapevine to L.A.
We've got desert, we've got trees
We've got the hills of Beverly
Let's burn the hills of Beverly




4. In-N-Out Burger |
WALTER SOBCHAK: He lives in North Hollywood on Radford, near the In-N-Out Burger...
THE DUDE: The In-N-Out Burger is on Camrose.
WALTER SOBCHAK: Near the In-N-Out Burger...
DONNY: Those are good burgers, Walter.
WALTER SOBCHAK: Shut the fuck up, Donny.

Polls close Monday, September 27 at midnight. Remember, you can still vote for the best superhero in Heat 20 until Thursday at midnight.

SPEAKER | Oh show us the way


The Mahagonny gang.

Every day this week the GLFC is bringing you Songs about Alabama. And I can't think of a more appropriate Alabama song to start off the week than the "Alabama-Song."

Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (The Rise and Fall of the City of Maghagonny) premiered in Leipzieg in 1930 and was banned by the Nazis in 1933. Its allegorical plot focuses on two lovers, Jim and Jenny, who fall into trouble in the anarchic American town of Mahagonny. Mahagonny is located in an Old Westernized frontier version of the South--at the time, neither Brecht nor Weill had visited America, and their conception of the country came from newspapers, popular culture and their own imaginations. (I imagine that the Brecht/Weill America was similar to the one Lars von Trier, another America-obsessed European who has never visited the country, presents in Dogville, though Brecht and Weill probably weren't so relentlessly bleak in their vision.) A hurricane also figures into the plot, in the wake of which the citizens of Mahagonny are allowed to do whatever they please. Take note, New Orleans.


David Johansen dreams of Mahagonny.

MP3: "Alabama-Song" by David Johansen

"Alabama-Song" is probably the most well-known song from Mahagonny, thanks to The Doors' sinister circus-organ cover. On the Weill tribute album September Songs, former New York Dolls frontman (and erstwhile Buster Poindexter) David Johansen covers the song and manages to sound even more drunkenly unhinged than Jim Morrison. (The industrial clang of the music helps in that regard.) In the opera, the song is sung by a group of prostitutes as they arrive in the newly founded city of Mahagonny.



He seems fit enough.

MP3: "Medley from Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny" by Lotte Lenya with ensemble and orchestra of Theater am Kurfurstendamm, conductor Hans Sommer

Weill's wife, Lotte Lenya, joined the cast of Mahagonny when it premiered in Berlin in 1931. Here's a medley of songs from a 1932 Berlin performance of the opera, including a bit of "Alabama-Song." This track is taken from O Moon of Alabama, a compilation of original recordings of Weill songs.

Also:

Puppets!

Watch Mahagonny on DVD

MP3: Listen to this crazy-ass thing I found that is apparently Sigourney Weaver and Christopher Durang doing a bit from their Brecht/Weill-tribute show Das Lusitania Songspiel on a 1986 episode of Saturday Night Live.



(MP3 disclaimer: All MP3s offered on this site are for evaluation purposes only--i.e. download them, listen to them, decide whether you would like to purchase the music from a friendly retailer, and then delete them. All MP3s will be available for one week after they are posted. If you are an artist or represent an artist or label whose music appears here, and you would like your music removed, just let me know.)

SPINE EXTRA | A bitter laugh in the face of so much misery

Internet comics-reviewing standards applied to other works of art:

"Irises" by Vincent Van Gogh | $53.9 million for one stinking picture? It took like three seconds to read this. Very poor value, especially when compared to that Starving Artists Sidewalk Sale down the street that sells art by the pound. I can put a sailboat painting in every room of my house for like twenty-five bucks. Beat that, No-Ear.

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner | I can't believe it! I heard the rumors, but I just couldn't believe that Faulkner would do what they said he would do! SPOILERS IF YOU HAVEN'T READ IT!! He went and killed Quentin Compson, my favorite character, who I've loved ever since he appeared in Absalom, Absalom! Why, Faulkner, why? Quentin had SO MUCH potential--why kill him off when other writers could still tell great stories about him? I don't think I'll be reading any more Faulkner after this travesty, thank you very much.

Macbeth by William Shakespeare | I think I'm over Shakespeare. At first his Marlowe-influenced dialogue style was a breath of fresh air--I loved Hamlet--but what worked for a conflicted Danish prince just falls flat when it's coming out of the mouth of a murderous Scotsman. I'm having trouble telling Macbeth from Macduff from Banquo; they all talk in iambic pentameter! And going back to reread Hamlet, I realize I have some of the same problems there. For example, it was really hard to tell Rosencrantz and Guildenstern apart sometimes.

And Fanboy Rampage sort of beat me to this one, but here goes anyway:

The Gospel of John | A complete and total retcon of Jesus's life. First of all, I don't understand why you'd want to remake the Gospel of Matthew in the first place, but if you do, you should at least respect the original author's vision! John takes NuTestament decompression to the extreme here, starting not at Jesus's birth but at the creation of the universe! Now he wants to rewrite Genesis too? The hubris of this guy. And John's Jesus is hardly the character we've come to know and love--he doesn't use his trademark witty parables, he ministers for three years instead of one, and he carries his own cross instead of Simon. There's just so much wrong here. But the worst part is that John emphasizes Jesus's deity over his humanity--he's more "super" than "man." This is not the Jesus I grew up with.

EVERYTHING IDOL | Qualifying Round, Heat 20

Whatever minimal creative juices it takes to put together a new Adventure of Lil' Gardner & Robot Jesus are not flowing tonight, so try to hold back your tears and accept this special comics-related round of Everything Idol in its stead.




1. Superman | Pros: The first, the greatest, the archetype, the benchmark. Cons: A boring goody two-shoes.




2. Batman | Pros: The world's greatest detective, the perfect human being, has a really cool costume. Cons: Batman has no cons, but those Schumacher movies didn't do him any favors.




3. Spider-Man | Pros: Easiest superhero for nerds to identify with, also has a pretty cool costume, responsible for that Kirsten Dunst-in-the-rain scene from the movie. Cons: He's a whiny little bitch.




4. The X-Men | Pros: Mutants serve as handy metaphor for any oppressed minority, decades-long soap opera strangely compelling, OMG d00d Wovlerine is TEH ROXXORS!!! Cons: Repressed-minority metaphor has outlived its usefulness, many plots from decades-long soap opera still unresolved and make little sense when they are, OMG d00d Wovlerine is TEH SUXXORS!!!

Polls close Thursday, September 23 at midnight.

EVERYTHING IDOL | Qualifying Round, Heat 19

The Daily Show wins Heat 18, so Jon Stewart and co. move on to Round 2 of the ongoing competition to determine The Best Thing Ever. Here are the Round 2 contenders so far:

Kitties
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Air conditioning
Bob Dylan, 1965-66
Star Wars: the original trilogy
The Simpsons
The stories of Raymond Carver
Home cooking
The lightbulb
Homicide: Life on the Street
Ping-Pong
Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
Scissors
Google.com
Sex
US Postal Service
Chocolate-chip cookies
The Lord of the Rings (the movies)
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
Email
Rushmore
In the Aeroplane over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel
Fight Club
Beef
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

And the losers' brackets are shaping up thusly:

FILM: Boogie Nights, Edward Scissorhands, Lawrence of Arabia, Pulp Fiction
MUSIC: Surfer Rosa by the Pixies, Otis Redding's oeuvre, Automatic for the People by R.E.M., "Georgia on My Mind" by Ray Charles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles, The Velvet Underground's four studio albums, iPod/iTunes, London Calling by The Clash, Led Zeppelin IV by Led Zeppelin, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars by David Bowie, The Boatman's Call by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
TV: Monty Python's Flying Circus, The Sopranos, Freaks and Geeks, Mr. Show with Bob and David
LITERATURE: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, Inferno by Dante Alighieri
FOOD & DRINK: apple pie a la mode, Guinness Stout, pizza delivery, Coca-Cola, NyQuil, bourbon, chicken, seafood, pork, macaroni & cheese
OTHER: shoes, eBay.com, Mapquest.com, Weather.com, money, power, fame, that picture of Johnny Cash flipping the bird, righteous indignation, correct spelling, carpet, dinosaurs, nemeses

And now, a special edition of Everything Idol: Which is the best information-storage medium? U-decide:




1. Printed matter, i.e. books | Pros: Elegant, portable, make you look smart. Cons: Heavy, take up a lot of space, so 18th-century.




2. Celluloid film, moving and still | Pros: Development process blends science and art in a strangely satisfying way (something to do with the red light and chemicals), good at capturing the souls of technologically primitive people, creates a most delightful illusion of movement when unspooled in front of a light source at 24 frames per second. Cons: Expensive yet flimsy, a magnet for fingerprints and dust, synonymous with creepy loners and/or serial killers (see One Hour Photo, 8mm, Seven).




3. Grooved vinyl, aka records | Pros: Hipster cache, "warm" sound, gatefold sleeves for wink-wink, nudge-nudge. Cons: Easily breakable, nearly obsolete, supposed "warmth" generated by a series of annoying pops and hisses.




4. Magnetic tape, aka cassettes and VHS tapes | Pros: Still the easiest way to record from a TV, mixtapes still more fun than mix CDs. Cons: See that word "still?" They won't be much longer.




5. Optical discs, aka CDs and DVDs | Pros: Can hold lots of information in a small space, hard to break, oh so shiny. Cons: Cold, impersonal, sterile, the first step toward the chilling dystopian future envisioned in such films as Demolition Man.




6. Whatever's in iPods and Tivo boxes (high-capacity hard drives, I assume) | Pros: Can hold lots and lots of information in a small space, makes Tivo and iPods possible. Cons: I don't understand it, so it must be magic! Burn the witch!

Polls close Monday, September 20 at midnight.

SPEAKER | Start spreadin' the news

This month's GLFC Mix Tape Central Electric Boogaloo theme is "Songs about a Place." It looks like the place my CD is going to focus on is Tennessee, but I've compiled some playlists for other places as well. Like, for instance, New York.

There are plenty of great songs about New York--hell, there are plenty of bands that are about New York. The songs of The Ramones, Interpol, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and TV on the Radio, to name a few, always seem to be about New York even when they're not explicitly about the city. New York is like California in that any band that's around for more than one album is going to write a song about it. It's in the rock handbook, so look it up.

(For the record, the greatest song about New York, as well as the greatest song about Christmas, is the Pogues' "Fairytale of New York," but I'm sure I don't have to post that here for you guys.)

"Daddy Don't Live in That New York City No More" by Steely Dan
From Katy Lied, one of the handful of albums that made up Gardner's Summer of 1997: The Soundtrack. (The others were Pulp's Different Class, Prodigy's The Fat of the Land, Ben Folds Five's Whatever and Ever Amen, Nick Cave and the Bad Seed's The Boatman's Call, and my "I Hate Work" mix tapes. And, embarrassingly, the Spawn soundtrack.) I remember buying this album because it was listed in an article in CMJ New Music Monthly about fun things to do over the summer. The music-magazine geeks out there will realize that that particular issue of CMJNMM came out in the summer of 1996.

Does any of that have a point? Not really. I think Katy Lied is probably the best Steely Dan album--it's pitched midway between the more conventional '70s rock of their first few albums and the jazz-rock wankery of Aja. "Daddy Don't Live etc." is a pretty standard example of the Dan's oeuvre. Mafia fans take note: this song is about a guy who gets whacked in Hackensack (that would be why he doesn't live in New York City no more).

"Survival Car" by Fountains of Wayne
Everybody loves FoW now, thanks to "Stacy's Mom," but their1996 self-titled debut album remains a criminally underappreciated slice of perfect power-pop. This brief gem is an adrenalized fantasy about driving all over Manhattan like "the young folks do in West Coast towns." Meanwhile, yours truly is discovering the New York-ish joys of walking in LA.

REMINDER FOR MYSELF

Download: Ben Lee's "Float On"

EVERYTHING IDOL | Qualifying Round, Heat 18

It falls to me to break the tie between mac & cheese and His Dark Materials, so HDM moves on to Round 2 of the ongoing competition to determine The Best Thing Ever. Here are the Round 2 contenders so far:

Kitties
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Air conditioning
Bob Dylan, 1965-66
Star Wars: the original trilogy
The Simpsons
The stories of Raymond Carver
Home cooking
The lightbulb
Homicide: Life on the Street
Ping-Pong
Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
Scissors
Google.com
Sex
US Postal Service
Chocolate-chip cookies
The Lord of the Rings (the movies)
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
Email
Rushmore
In the Aeroplane over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel
Fight Club
Beef
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman

And the losers' brackets are shaping up thusly:

FILM: Boogie Nights, Edward Scissorhands, Lawrence of Arabia
MUSIC: Surfer Rosa by the Pixies, Otis Redding's oeuvre, Automatic for the People by R.E.M., "Georgia on My Mind" by Ray Charles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles, The Velvet Underground's four studio albums, iPod/iTunes, London Calling by The Clash, Led Zeppelin IV by Led Zeppelin, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars by David Bowie, The Boatman's Call by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
TV: Monty Python's Flying Circus, The Sopranos, Freaks and Geeks, Mr. Show with Bob and David
LITERATURE: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, Inferno by Dante Alighieri
FOOD & DRINK: apple pie a la mode, Guinness Stout, pizza delivery, Coca-Cola, NyQuil, bourbon, chicken, seafood, pork
OTHER: shoes, eBay.com, Mapquest.com, Weather.com, money, power, fame, that picture of Johnny Cash flipping the bird, righteous indignation, correct spelling, carpet

Here are the next four contestants, as suggested by you:




1. Dinosaurs | Kings of the food chain, till a little something called Homo sapiens stepped up and showed 'em what's up.




2. Pulp Fiction, directed by Quentin Tarantino |
VINCENT: Jules, did you ever hear the philosophy that once a man admits he's wrong, then he's automatically forgiven of that wrongdoing?
JULES: Man, get out of my face with that shit. The motherfucker who said that never had to pick up itty bitty pieces of skull on account of your dumb ass.




3. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart | Why? Watch this.




4. Nemeses | They give the hero's life meaning. If you don't have one, that's probably why you haven't accomplished anything.

Polls close Monday, September 13 at midnight. Remember, you can still nominate your favorite things for the title of Best Thing Ever.

SPEAKER | You work your side of the street, and I'll work mine



Steve McQueen, grades 6-7

A little while ago I talked a little about Bullitt and told you to check out the score by Lalo Schifrin. Never say I did nothing for you, because here's a little taste of that score:

"Bullitt, main title (movie version)"
This theme is so good (as is the Pablo Ferro-designed title sequence that accompanies it) that it's hard for the rest of the movie to live up to it. It perfectly captures the tense, off-kilter vibe of the movie as well as the brief stabs of violence and action, permeated throughout with the utter coolness of Steve McQueen. In his liner notes for the 2000 reissue of the Bullitt score, Nick Redman notes "The theme for Bullitt fits the character like a Savile Row tailor. Everything we need to know is there. He's sleek, smooth, hard, but clued-in, street-smart, worldly. Calm, precise, ordered and unruffled, even as the action heats up." That's a pretty fair description of McQueen's performance, but I think that if the movie didn't have Schifrin's score to back up those qualities, Frank Bullitt would be nothing more than a footnote as the most laconic cop in movie history. Schifrin provides the conflicted, effortlessly cool inner monologue that McQueen only hints at.

"Bullitt, guitar solo"
The 2000 reissue also includes this arrangement of the title them for solo jazz guitar. Put this on at your next cocktail party where you expect someone to get shot.

In a semi-hilarious coincidence, when my iTunes library is sorted by Artist Name, the song immediately following the Bullitt score is "Steve McQueen" by Lampchop. I'm having a hell of a time understanding what singer Kurt Wagner is saying here, so I'll leave it to you to figure out what exactly it has to do with McQueen. (From Aw Cmon.)

Look sharp.

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Also, for those of you in the brand spankin' new GLFC Mix Tape Central CD-Swapping Hootenanny, this month's theme, as suggested by my dad, is Songs about a Place. I'm making the CD as we speak, so look for it in your mailboxes in a few weeks. Songs about Places will probably be the theme for the next few Speakers too.

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Speaking of Dad, he's guest-blogged a few NW Georgia-related MP3s at Honey, Where You Been So Long, though for some reason he's identified as "Alan," which is most definitely not his name. Innocent typo or mysterious dual identity? Developing...

MICROFICTION | The Return of Ultiman

"It's like if one toddler told another toddler that a hot stove would feel good, so they both put their hands on the hot stove, and of course it's hot, so the second toddler takes his hand away and refuses to put his hand back, but the first toddler keeps his hand on there, even though it's on fire, and ridicules the second toddler for 'flip-flopping' on the whole hot-stove issue. 'I mean, before you knew the hot stove would hurt your hand you wanted to touch it. Why are you changing your mind? Why can't you be decisive, like me?' That's what the first toddler is saying. And then, like, the kids' mom rewards him for burning his hand off.

"Am I crazy? I know I'm just a simple woodland creature, but that's what this is like, right?"

Boswell and I don't agree on a lot of things, but I have to admit, he had a point. I can't take much more of this convention. It's nice of Boswell to invite us all over to watch it on his plasma and drink his homebrew, but it's just not the Super Bowl. I mean, at this point I'd take a preseason game. Plus Ultiman has been giving me the stink-eye all night, and he's got that special vision that turns people inside-out and sets them on fire, so I don't particularly want him looking at me too long.

So I tell Boswell thanks for the beer and the company, but I got to get home to check on Jacqueline. Ever since Ultiman resurrected himself, things between me and Jackie have been kind of strained. I guess I should have known he'd be coming back. When you're from the future, I guess there aren't many surprises. And he didn't even do that inside-out-fire-vision thing on the Cap'n, even though everybody knows he's the one who killed him in the first place. Ultiman seems to think I'm the one who put that cutlass in his back, but I keep telling him I don't even own a cutlass, and there's only one undead pirate in the neighborhood that I know of.

TruckoTron's stopped in the middle of the road. As I walk past him he asks for a jump. I tell him to wait while I get the car. I don't even think I have any cables. I should just leave him there in the road.

When I get back to the house Jackie is in Lisa's old sewing room. I ask her what she's doing, and she just holds up this thing that looks like one of her old majorette uniforms. Except it's got a big "J" sewn on the chest. I ask her what the "J" is for, and she just laughs and says I wouldn't understand. I figure I might as well go give TruckoTron a jump.

There are cables in the trunk of the Civic, and I have no idea where they came from. I drive back up Arbor to where TruckoTron's stopped and I hook us up. I don't even know if the Civic has enough juice to get him going, but after a couple tries he starts right up. He tells me we should go get a beer sometime, and I tell him sure. I ask him if has kids, any little scooters running around, and he says he can't--he's the only MorphoBot left on the planet. I laugh and tell him he's lucky, but I know as I'm saying it that it's the wrong thing to say.

TruckoTron drives away. I get back in the Civic but now it won't start. I see somebody walking up the street in the rearview mirror. It's Ultiman. He passes the car and doesn't say a word. He just stares at me. I think my left pinky finger is starting to heat up.

He keeps walking down the street till I can't see him anymore. He's already moved on into the future, and I'm still stuck here.

I AM STUPID

Somebody please go listen the James Boys song "The Horse" and tell me where I've heard that horn part before. Another '60s soul song? A commercial? A sample somewhere? This is killing me.