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Musical Oldth

When I was in college (of course), my pal Mark & I talked about launching some sorta alt-culture ‘zine. Our only condition was that it would have nothing to do with music, because we could hold our own in just about any other field, but alt-music is the one field where you’ll always get demolished by someone who’s more “indie” than you. It was the early ’90’s, and people cared about that stuff then; get over it.

Nowadays, I need the occasional reminder that I’m old (38), out of touch, and otherwise unhip. Contemporary music is a great way to demolish any of my illusions that I can keep up with the kids. In that vein, I was happy that Pitchfork published its list of the top 500 tracks of the decade.

Since Matlock was just about to start, I skipped to the top 20, where I discovered that . . . I’m old, out of touch and otherwise unhip!

So, for your entertainment & edification, let’s count down Pitchfork’s top 20 tracks of the decade in terms of whether or not I ever heard them!

SONGS I HAVE NEVER EVER HEARD

20. The Walkmen – “The Rat”

19. R. Kelly – “Ignition (Remix)”

18. Hercules and Love Affair – “Blind”

17. Annie – “Heartbeat”

16. The Rapture – “House of Jealous Lovers”

15. The Knife – “Heartbeats”

13. LCD Soundsystem – “Losing My Edge”

9. Animal Collective – “My Girls”

8. Radiohead – “Idioteque”

6. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – “Maps”

5. Daft Punk – “One More Time”

2. LCD Soundsystem – “All My Friends”

SONGS I HAVE HEARD (WITH MY HEARING AID)

14. Jay-Z – “99 Problems”

12. OutKast – “Hey Ya!”

11. Gnarls Barkley – “Crazy”

10. Arcade Fire – “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)”

7. Missy Elliott – “Get Ur Freak On”

4. Beyoncé [ft. Jay-Z] – “Crazy in Love”

3. M.I.A. [ft. Bun B and Rich Boy] – “Paper Planes (Diplo Remix)”

1. OutKast – “B.O.B.”

Weirdly enough, almost all the music that I do know from that list is by black artists, while almost every 0-fer was from white artists. This leads me to conclude that

  1. I’m racist,
  2. “YEAH!” by Usher, Lil’ Jon and Ludacris should’ve been somewhere in the top 100, and
  3. whitey made some shitty music this decade.

For what it’s worth, I’ve never even heard of the following bands from the list:

  1. The Walkmen
  2. Hercules and Love Affair
  3. Annie
  4. The Rapture
  5. The Knife
  6. Animal Collective

The only reason I know LCD Soundsystem is because Slate suckered me into buying their music. I hated their record so much I went back to check if the article was originally published on April Fools Day. If these other artists are anything like that, then I understand why the recording industry is collapsing.

I only know Arcade Fire because Robert Wilonsky mentioned that their song is used in the first trailer for Where The Wild Things Are. It turned out that I had one of their albums (Funeral) in my iTunes library, and I think it’s pretty good.

Oh, and I think “Hey Ya!” and “Crazy” should have been #1 and #2.

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Lost in the Supermarket: El Jibarito is el Jefe edition

Is it cheating to run a Lost in the Supermarket from the “ethnic foods” aisle? Not when it features the smiley Puerto Rican Walt Whitman-homage guy! According to Wikipedia, El Jibarito is a sandwich that was invented in Puerto Rico in 1991, so I like to think of this can’s mascot as Puerto Rico’s foremost practitioner of the menage a, um, tres:

I was hoping that “Pois Congo” meant something more exciting than “Congo peas,” but life is filled with disappointment.

See the whole Lost in the Supermarket series!

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Inglourious ROI

With their “media empire” on the verge of collapse, the Weinstein brothers were pulling out all the stops to promote the opening of Inglourious Basterds last week. They’ve even played the contrition card in explaining to the NYTimes that they lost their focus after leaving Disney and starting their own company, using investor money to buy a fashion line, invest in a TV channel and a social networking site, and other activities that don’t qualify as making movies people would pay to see. (Here’s a fun takedown of that article, at the AV Club.)

So it must be gratifying to them that the new Tarantino movie was #1 at the box office this weekend, with nearly $38 million in tickets sold. The marketing is a bit misleading, since the Basterds — a squad of Jewish-American soldiers who ambush and scalp Nazis in occupied France — don’t actually get much screen time. But that’s a minor quibble. I still enjoyed the heck out of the film; it just wasn’t the movie it was marketed as. (I’m assuming the 4-hour DVD version will have plenty more carnage.)

Which leads me to this WSJ article about the movie’s performance and its marketing. It highlights the problems the Weinstein Co. still faces, but the article also seems to have buried the lede:

Part of the success of “Inglourious Basterds,” which was directed by Quentin Tarantino, comes from its $35 million marketing campaign, which Weinstein Co. executives say Harvey Weinstein approached with a renewed focus after missing the mark of previous campaigns. Last year for example, the company used stick figure drawings to sell Kevin Smith’s “Zack and Miri Make a Porno,” which underperformed at the box office.

Let me see if I have this correct: the film grossed $38 million domestically and the marketing cost $35 million? With another $27 million in overseas sales, the movie made $65 million last weekend.

If that $35 mil. covers worldwide marketing, then they spent 54 cents for every dollar in ticket sales. If it was only for the domestic campaign, then it was almost 1 dollar spent for 1 dollar in sales (which are shared with the movie theaters).

Between this marketing campaign and the movie’s production cost of $65-70 million, that means this big success is still $35-40 million behind the 8-ball. Sure, there a lot of other revenue streams to help them close the gap, but this is probably not a good model for running a business.

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What It Is: 8/24/09

What I’m reading: Moby Dick and The Jew of New York.

What I’m listening to: The Lexicon of Love, by ABC, and Give Up, by The Postal Service.

What I’m watching: Inglourious Basterds at a 1:30 p.m. matinee on opening day. I enjoyed the heck out of it, but it really wasn’t about the Basterds and the baseball-bat-to-the-head marketing of it. I don’t really get the spelling thing, but “Variations on Interrogations” probably wasn’t commercial enough. And, yeah, Christoph Waltz’s performance is fantastic.

What I’m drinking: Cascade Mountain Gin & Q Tonic.

What Rufus is up to: Meeting his cousins in New England! (pictures to come)

Where I’m going: Up to Wappingers Falls next weekend for my friends’ 10th anniversary bash. Rufus will have to deal with another longish car ride (as in, over an hour).

What I’m happy about: Having dinner with an old pal from grad school, getting to see my cousins in CT, and seeing an old college friend, all in the span of 65 (or so) hours.

What I’m sad about: That the position at which I lie on my loveseat in order to rub Rufus’ belly and still read from my laptop is wreaking havoc on my neck/shoulders.

What I’m worried about: That realism isn’t realism.

What I’m pondering: What it means that the only book I’m interested in from either of these previews (1, 2) of next season’s releases is R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis.

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Classic Comics Criticism: Black Hole Son-In-Law

My in-laws’ tradition (on my wife’s dad’s side) for the big family gathering on Christmas eve is that everyone draws the name of another family-member and buys a present for that person. This is probably totally normal to the rest of you, but it’s an alien concept to me because

a) I’m Jewish, and

b) I don’t have much extended family on this continent, so there was never any mass gift-giving event.

Two years ago, my father-in-law drew my name and smartly went to my Amazon wish list to find something for me. So, surrounded by my new in-laws, most of whose names I can’t keep straight, I opened my gift and discovered . . . the hardcover collection of Charles Burns’ amazing serial, Black Hole!

What a great gift! I immediately thanked my father-in-law, started flipping through the book, and then asked, “You, uh, you didn’t read this, didja?”

Here’s a review I wrote of the fifth issue in that serial:

From TCJ #203, April, 1998:

Black Hole #5 • Charles Burns • Fantagraphics, $3.95

burnstailI’m sure glad I didn’t go to high school with Charles Burns. Black Hole harkens back to Burns’ “teen plague” strips, but this time Burns has dropped most of the sci-fi elements that filled his earlier work, keeping only the sexually-transmitted plague that causes strange and awful physical mutations to teens. The comic is a compelling, creepy look at the social interactions and sexual longings of the painful period of American life. The latest installment revolves around a conversation between a girl who’s got the plague and the guy who infected her. The episode narrated by the infected girl, delves into a flashback of her experience with the plague, developing into a rumination on her status as sexual pariah. Taken as a metaphor for teenage pregnancy, HIV, STDs and every other sexual secret we keep, the concept of teen plague has grown increasingly effective as the series has gone on. Through the awkwardness of their dialogue, Burns conveys the fragility of these kids’ lives, illustrating the mixture of sexual longing and confusion that characterizes our high school years. Visually, the book is a treat, albeit a dark one. While burns has refined his art style, it’s not overly different from his past work. His page layouts are more imaginative, and that’s probably a function of drawing for the comic book page and not for the dimensions of a syndicated strip.

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Outsourcing is a Hit!

Three weeks ago, I wrote about CIA Director Leon Panetta’s “I’m not here to talk about the past” op-ed piece, in which the agency was just following orders for the previous 8 years. Mr. Panetta was writing because of an uproar over a secret “jihadist” assassination program that had been devised during a previous regime. He canceled the program the day after he found out about it, and reported it to Congress, noting that it had never been put into operation and had not been used to assassinate members of Al Qaeda.

It always felt like a piece of the story was missing, and now we might have that missing piece. According to the NYTimes, the program also employed an outside contractor, Blackwater USA, for “planning, training and surveillance.” And, well . . .

It is unclear whether the C.I.A. had planned to use the contractors to actually capture or kill Qaeda operatives, or just to help with training and surveillance in the program. American spy agencies have in recent years outsourced some highly controversial work, including the interrogation of prisoners. But government officials said that bringing outsiders into a program with lethal authority raised deep concerns about accountability in covert operations.

Now, the main point of my day job is that organizations should stick to their core competencies. You know: “If there’s a function that you can’t do well in-house, then you should look to outsource it.” Still, I can see where a privatized hit team getting captured on foreign soil might create some problems. Fortunately,

Blackwater’s work on the program actually ended years before Mr. Panetta took over the agency, after senior C.I.A. officials themselves questioned the wisdom of using outsiders in a targeted killing program.

So, good for Mr. Panetta for ending the program the day he found out about it, but I’m afraid this (or programs like it) is going to be like Pete Rose’s slow-motion confession about gambling on baseball: the admissions will keep getting a little worse and a little worse.

Read all about it.

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Shred It Up

Rufus having fun with the packaging from Amy’s Crate & Barrel order:

Right at the end, I say his safe word.