Hilton Als on Michael Jackson

Mad Expectations

I can only wonder how much aspiring actors envy Johnny Depp's career trajectory. He overcame fame and drug addiction in his youth, he dated Winona Rider only to turn around and marry a hottie french model (starring in indie fodder between presumably epic sex sessions), and now he gets to pull in the benjamins by playing ridiculous crazies in Tim Burton fetish fantasies. My expectations for Willy Wonka were high, and well..."fool me once, shame on you, fool me...you can't get fooled again."

NB: An entirely different discussion is warranted w/r/t the new push for 3D as the new industry strategy to bring in the bigger bucks. Releasing Captain Eo is the clear first step in creating upward synergies and robust revenue streams.

Observation

Sometimes, white people are "cool".  Othertimes, they're Thom Yorke.

p. e. d. a.

More Fighting

ESPN genius Bill Simmons' new podcast is about UFC. I can listen to Simmons talk about anything, but I wonder and worry about UFC’s mainstream sustainability. My brother sent me an e-mail this morning including the phrase “double flying kneed.” Can we allow this to be the new “home run” or “slam dunk”?

Fighting

An insect occasionally appears in my office building’s 6th floor men’s room the likes of which I haven’t seen anywhere else in the world. Imagine an armored ant-fly hybrid, superlean, with four wide-reaching spiderish legs. This bug intimidates at first sight both by its strangeness and apparent battle-readiness.

And it’s fast. To swat it, one combines the skills of a soccer goalie, who guesses which way to leap and stop a penalty kick, and a quarterback leading his pass to hit a receiver in motion. And that’s just for the jump; if this bug gets airborne, any attack is hopeless.

We have split our two epic melees. Once I expertly stopped him on the mirror. Satisfied, slowly pulling away the wad of tissue paper, I found him very much alive and in motion. Fearfully I dropped the tissue into the sink and—forgive me—opened the faucet. The bug climbed to floating tissuetop as water gathered, lifting his white island. He considered his options and—so help me—charged into the water, down to the tissue’s southern pole and down the drain. He took his chances in the rivering chaos of the drain! Then today I found one (the same?!) above the towel dispenser. I cocked the dispenser handle once, ripped, and struck. The enemy leapt onto my black jacket. Terrified, with my enemy camouflaged and close, I spun and shook (and screamed? who can remember?), inverted my pockets, hassled my sleeves. I caught sight of him on the floor and the firstlings of my heart were the firstlings of my foot; the worthy adversary lay flat.

I continue to do my bit for containment.

Up

Check out Up director Peter Docter’s insights on storytelling and the image.

"Be constructive with your blues"

The idea is simple: name the top 15 albums that have impacted your life. You can define this mandate however you like (e.g. albums that have influenced your sense of good music; albums that you associate with heart-felt and stoned pseudo-epiphanies; albums that still inspire you to put the proverbial headphones on the provervial head of Zach Braff). But please be honest. I am positive you can create a list of 15 albums that's incredibly esoteric and hipster, but this isn't an LES speak easy. Asshole.

Two rules:

(A) Comment with your own list. If you're embarassed, you can comment anonymously. (See (B) infra.)

(B) Don't list anything by the Eagles. I hate the fucking Eagles.

My list (stream of conscious):

(1) Neutral Milk Hotel - In An Aeroplane Over The Sea.
(2) Modest Mouse - The Moon & Antarctica

(3) The Beatles - The Beatles ("White Album")

(4) Pink Floyd - Meddle

(5) Radiohead - Kid A

(6) Beck - Sea Change

(7) Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - I See A Darkness

(8) Charles Mingus - Black Saint and Sinner Lady

(9) Elliott Smith - Either/Or

(10) Tom Waits - Rain Dogs

(11) Pavement - Terror Twilight

(12) Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

(13) DJ Shadow - Endtroducing

(14) Rolling Stones - Sticky Fingers

(15) Sigur Ros - Agaetis Byrjun

Soda-Meyer

Nice to see that the folks at the National Review blog, the Corner, have quickly eschewed boring substantive critiques of our new Supreme Court nominee in favor of their more finely honed habit of being enormous assholes.

Mark Krikorian (pronounced DOOSH-bag) says that since emphasizing the last syllable of Sotomayor is "unnatural" to the American palate, the good judge should stop being such a racist and put the emphasis on the first:

Part of our success in assimilation has been to leave whole areas of culture up to the individual, so that newcomers have whatever cuisine or religion or so on they want, limiting the demand for conformity to a smaller field than most other places would. But one of the areas where conformity is appropriate is how your new countrymen say your name, since that's not something the rest of us can just ignore, unlike what church you go to or what you eat for lunch. And there are basically two options — the newcomer adapts to us, or we adapt to him. And multiculturalism means there's a lot more of the latter going on than there should be.

It's a nice, succinct illustration of how the rightwing's rejection of "identity politics" is really a angry rejection of identities ("You can have your little culture, Paco, but just don't put it where I can see it").

Putting aside how grating it is to hear somebody who was born in New York in the 1940s described as a newcomer, there really isn't any single American palate for Sotomayor's name to vex--any linguist would tell you that there are hundreds of them. Hispanic-Americans, many of whose families have been here for centuries, have no problem with SotomaYOR. Neither, I'm certain, do most people in the Bronx and greater NYC, where Sotomayor and 8 million of her friends reside, nor do the millions of non-Hispanic-Americans who know Spanish, etc. Krikorian evidently thinks everyone talks like Tom Brokaw, or that the country would be better if they just would already.

His post is also a good example of how misguided you can be and still get prized conservative web real estate. Krikorian gives us two options: (1) they adapt to us or (2) we adapt to them. It's obvious, however, that for most people that idiotic binary is not how we live our lives. Learning a name is not "adaptation." It's learning. We do it all the time with new names at basically no cost to us. You only need to hear once that Ralph Fiennes is Rafe and then you move on. Justice Scalia is Scal-EE-ah and not SCAL-ia, and it probably took the world ten minutes at his confirmation hearing to figure out the syllabic shift. John Boehner shouldn't have to go through life with a hard-on stuck on the end of his John, so he doesn't. And Colin Powell gets to have an unprecedented and inexplicable pronunciation of his first name, no questions asked. This is the world we live in.

Adaptation would be asking people to roll the last R and pronounce the middle T with the soft "Th" sound preferred in Spanish. That would require Kirkorian to pick up entirely new consonants. Nobody, least of all Sonia Sotomayor, would require this of non-Spanish speakers. The good judge would surely bristle at hearing how badly people like Krikorian would butcher the r and the t (I'm speaking with a great deal of experience on this count--far worse than careless bumpkin mispronunciations of my name are those who try to roll the r and end up sounding like they're flirting with me).

Saying SotomaYOR is so incredibly easy that I get the feeling Krikorian's issue has nothing to do with pronunciation. I wonder what his real problem could be...