I'm ruining it. RIGHT NOW.

Until this moment, the words "inert zune" returned only one result in a google search. Still, it's a lovely phrase, for any number of reasons.

More like AWESOME W. K.!

Got myself all distracted from writing this morning when it occurred to me to pursue Andrew WK records that I hadn't heard, and in fact hadn't been released in the US. So of course we end up on wikipedia after a while:

and down the rabbit hole we go, decoding http://www.awk.dudeguy.com/STEEV%20MIKE.htm (which is a nested number-letter code that works out to 'there is one more coming') and some more hunting around reveals 'the story so far' as told by someone who writes like a maniac:

http://awilkeskrier.homestead.com/   (take heart, it's an incredibly long page, and manages to get a little bit less interesting as it goes)

So, Mr. WK not only makes such brilliant music as "It's Time to Party" and "Party Hard," apparently puts on performance art pieces that end up as party-concerts in addition to great big tours that go on for years (even when he's stuck in a wheelchair because he broke his foot jumping around on stage), and somehow has a live action TV show on Cartoon Network, where he combines teams of kids and really big explosives, but he's also got his own Conspiracy Theory (re: he's an actor playing Andrew playing music written by some evil faceless shadowy figure?) or more likely his own ARG (since every one of the sites with crazy codes and stuff on them are owned by his production company.)?  Hey, leave some awesome for the fish, huh?

Rocket Fizz!

Hey, so a sodapop shoppe opened up nearby! It's called Rocket Fizz.  They sell:

• Kind of terrible plastic toys
• Slightly out of the way candies
• 500+ varieties of soda pop, microbrew root beers, and almost all in fancy glass bottles!

If I were just advertising for them, I'd mention the little coin-op ride for kids, the free-play pinball machine, or the forthcoming patio for hanging around and enjoying cold drinks.

I like it, I think it's good.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="375" caption="Rocket Fizz!"][/caption]

#1,477: Moonwalker

Deliberately let this lay a while.  Starting back in with the easy post.

• 3 Dev Adam, Death Warrior, The Eliminators, and Hands of Steel - 4 of the fine feature films, at least half of which are Turkish, presented to me via Doc Mock's Movie Mausoleum, an internet show that combines a big of the ol' Ghoulardi and a bit of the MST3K via a bunch of UCB-LA guests.
• Hearts of Darkness and Coda - two documentaries about Francis Ford Coppola, shooting Apocalypse Now and Youth Without Youth, as shot by his wife, Eleanor.  It's understandable that FFC would feel like some of the footage might make him look bad, but there was nothing particularly damning or shocking in-context, and having read Eleanor's book Notes, not too many surprises.  Strongly recommended to fans of the series Firefly, for Brando's read on the line "I swallowed a bug."
• Mr. Majestyk and The Mechanic - a Bronson double feature at the New Beverly.  The Mechanic is almost completely great.  Bronson badassing around as a professional hitman, and an ending that made the whole theater cheer.  Mr. Majestyk features Bronson as a melon farmer with a disinterest in taking any guff from the local hoods.  Contains graphic scenes of violence done to watermelons.
• Sunset Blvd. and Queen Kelly - amazing that I hadn't seen Sunset Blvd yet, since I have it on DVD, and may have even been assigned to watch it at some point.  A cool double feature, Queen Kelly is the film Norma makes Joe watch in her living room.  It was an actual film Gloria Swanson had made (but not completed) as her own career was in decline, and was actually directed by Erich von Stroheim.  The restoration was kind of boring, actually, but still neat.
• Animal Crackers and Duck Soup - another New Beverly double feature!  I'd wanted to see how the Marx Bros played with an audience, since they worked out a lot of their material on stage in advance of filming, and left the same pauses for laughter on the screen.  If anything, the pauses weren't long enough and there were lines I couldn't hear.  There was a lot of great stuff in both, but I'm especially curious about the things that looked like mistakes and improvisations, and whether they were or not.  Groucho's occasional asides not to the camera, but to someone just off camera, the bit where at the end of a long take he gets his character's name wrong and they work it in, and Margaret Dumont just laughing away during Harpo's closeups in the card game, to name 3 examples.
• Life with the Dice Bag - a largely uninteresting and unflattering homemade doc about tabletop RPG fans.
• Hoop Dreams - an exciting and surprising doc about two young would-be NBA stars, via Hulu.
• Last Tango in Paris - at least watching this helped me to get a reference made in a recent issue of The Bugle.  Also via Hulu.
• Hellboy II - I didn't really like the first one, but I think I like this one better.  I haven't read the comics, but maybe it's more true to the source material than the original, which was more or less Men in Black 3.  Even more surprising, how good Seth McFarlane's character was.
• The Man with Two Brains - the earlier flavor of Steve Martin comedy, this had at least 4 or 5 really stand out gags that I really really liked.  Murmuring, and a bit about retiring, and the 19th century Indian rubber vase.  Steve Martin has made a lot more comedies (and more of them were actually good) than most (all?) of the actors coming up in that era that we remember as comedians, I think.  Your Robin Williams?  Your Eddie Murphy?
• The Horribly Slow Murderer With the Incredibly Inefficient Weapon - I thought I'd heard of this somewhere before, but I couldn't say where.  It seemed like it just had to go on my list, a title like that.
• X-Men Origins: Wolverine - Even though the previous three X-Men movies were mostly about Wolverine, this one adds in some additional contrary backstory.  It's pretty much bound to be a wash though, since we know he a) lives and b) won't remember anything that happens.  I guess I kind of appreciate making Sabretooth less of a caveman.  Curious waste of deadpool though.
• Terminator Salvation - this movie isn't anything.  It's not even bad, it's just a big empty naught sign.  Nothing happens, no story is added to the existing mythos, and there is no reason why the audience might care about anyone on screen, nor are they challenged to at any point.  Supposedly the title meant something before folks started meddling, and while the 'real ending' that was removed after someone told the internet last year might have been intriguing, that would have ended up seeming pretty out of place in the final product.
• Le Voyage dans la Lune - always good to learn about the hard sci-fi and special effects masterpieces that have gone before, to better understand those coming soon, to a theater near you!
• Star Trek - is one such example.  This movie was way better than it deserved to be.  I hadn't previously thought of Abrams as a good director (nor a bad one, his notoriety simply isn't based in directing) but this was so well made that I barely noticed it was written by some guys that write things I don't like at all.  I found myself agreeing quite a bit with this article about the movie.
• Up - oh boy did I ever like this movie!  I missed a free screening due to foolishness beyond my control, but I got out on opening day (but not on the first attempt - lots of sold out screenings near me) for a 3D screening.  I can't remember the last movie I enjoyed so much in a theater.  I went in knowing almost nothing about the plot except what the teaser trailer revealed (a house and some balloons) and got the most adventurey, violent, sad, delightful, funny Pixar feature to date.  Even the short that preceded it (Partly Cloudy) was simultaneously touching and laugh out loud funny.  Also perhaps the best use of 3D for storytelling purposes I've seen so far (some scenes in the 3D cut are just in 2D, because that's what serves the story).  Can't say enough nice things about it.  With the expanded 10 nominees, even with the animated feature category, this deserves a best picture nod.  The only downside is that 3 of the next 5 announced Pixar releases are sequels.  They'll probably even be good, but when a director can do such great work with original IP, it seems like a waste to go back to wells already tapped.
• Moonwalker - I think I'd seen this before, but it wasn't on the list.  I've been a Michael Jackson fan almost literally all my life, and with his scheduled return to performing in two weeks, I sure thought I was going to get to see him live in a big crazy world tour next year.  Alas.
• Moon - This is terrific, but not getting a very wide release, I think.  You should keep an eye out to see if it's going to turn up near you.  Very solid, interesting, and fun all by itself, but even more so to someone who happens to be writing stories about a guy stuck in space alone lately.  Bonus points for the robot, for including some of my own inside jokes by chance, and for making the 'answer' a reasonable extrapolation of events, not a mind-bending twist.  The movie is not about it's "twist," which is why it's given out fairly clearly fairly early.

This was a good batch, and I think it's turning out to be a good year for movies, and there's still like 15 movies slated for '09 that I think I might like to go see.  No real summer blockbusters though, except maybe Up.  I guess that's the strike for you.

What's neighborly?

Ceteris Paribus. Which is to say, all else being equal, if you're some economist or guy who likes to make arguments based on inconvenient terminology (like an economist).  All else being equal, I prefered "can only sleep with the TV set to maximum volume" guy to "vomiting out a window or perhaps off a balcony" guy, as neighbors go.  

Or so I thought.  VOAW(OPOAB)-guy has been going for about 12 hours now, which has taken on comic proportions, even if the scream while vomiting and a second later, the splash of said vomit isn't any less horrible than it was last night. 

And on that note, please allow me to introduce you to a short post written on Oct 12, 2008, that never got past the draft button:

This might be a difference of living in the city vs. the suburbs, but when I was growing up, if the kids down the street were screaming their heads off, it was part of whatever game they were playing, and you ignored it.

Not the case at a friend's house a few months ago, in a fairly suburban corner of LA, when the neighbor kid started screaming his head off.  Our host dropped everything to go to the back yard and yell 'are you okay?' for a little while, and then went around to go knock at the neighbor's door and see how things were going. Seemed strange, but only to a few of us.  To the rest, we seemed monstrous for being inclined to ignore it.

But what happens when max-volume-TV-neighbor can go to bed and leave some horror movie on, with a woman in distress screaming "HELP ME! HELP ME PLEASE! SOMEBODY! SOMEBODY HELP!" at 2 am?  What's neighborly then?

Maybe the thing to do is to just let one of the other neighbors take care of it.  Relying on 'someone else' to call the cops, or to put out that fire, or to cure cancer is typically a recipe for disaster, but we can rest assured that one nearby neighbor is on the case.  Angry-yelling-out-the-window-guy moved in somewhere around here lately, and I like him.

The family with the new baby does a pretty good job, and the baby doesn't cry very often, but when it does, angry-window-yelling-guy is on top of it.  Someone's gotta tell that baby to shut up, after all, or it'll never stop crying!  He makes me feel like I live in a movie about New York in the 1970s.  There're two girls fighting about something right now, about 1:30am, and angry-guy set 'em straight: "You're both assholes," proclaims he, "now shut up!"