Here’s the pitch:  “A bad action movie—with puppets!”  Here’s the result:  a bad action movie with puppets.  Team America, ostensibly a superhero supergroup, destroys a plethora of UNESCO World Heritage sites in order to save them.  This irritates the Film Actors Guild (F.A.G.), the members of which, led by Alec Baldwin, organize world leaders against Team America and for peace.  But this plays right into the hands of Kim Jong Il, who plots to destroy the world while its dignitaries are enjoying a stage show starring the likes of Janeane Garofalo and Sean Penn.  (Which raises the question, “When’s the last time anyone enjoyed Janeane Garofalo or Sean Penn?”)  The only one who can save the world is Gary, a Broadway actor whose juvenile thespianism indirectly got his brother eaten by gorillas.  Can Gary conquer his fears and stop the madman?

Trey Parker and Matt Stone deliver a note-perfect rendition of American action clichés, from the flags spattered all over Team America’s G.I.-Joe-style vehicles to the members’ homophobic homoeroticism.  The problem is, they get so invested in imitation that they forget the mockery.  They seem to think the clichés will be funny because they’re acted out by puppets, which is like saying Friends was funny because they had a chimp.  Passing for humor are gross-out set pieces that punctuate long stretches of conventional action.  When Lisa poops on Gary during their mid-movie humpathon, the camera zeroes in on stringy brown turds that squirt from a plastic butt and fall onto Gary’s grinning, open-eyed face.  This basically rips off the joke from South Park:  Bigger, Longer, Uncut, but this time around the set-up is too blunt to be funny.

Matt and Trey have been treading comedic water for a while now.  Ever since That’s My Bush!, they’ve shown more interest in aping Hollywood crap than they have in parodying it.  They’ve also gotten into the lazy habit of assuming that F-bombs are funny just because fourth graders drop them.  When I was in fourth grade, my classmates and I said “fuck” on a daily basis.  We weren’t trying to be funny; that was just how we talked.  The creators of South Park have forgotten that.  From producing some of the most hilarious stuff I’ve ever seen, they’ve come all the way to being lazy schlockmeisters whose obligatory nods toward their incendiary roots are both obnoxious and out-of-place.  Make a Barbra Streisand movie, guys.  At least that’ll be honest.

Our cat, Hank, decided at 5:15 this morning that my wife and I should definitely get out of bed.

He communicated this by repeatedly jumping on the bed, meowing, and scratching my wife’s face. Normally, I would think this was no big deal, except she insisted on giving a running commentary of it to me which interfered with my sleep.

After a few minutes of this, Pulao got up and closed the door to the bedroom, which was a good idea, but Hank doesn’t quite grasp the closed-door concept. He scratched the door, rattled it, and meowed; all much more loudly than you would expect a medium-sized animal to be able to do.

Luckily, he has a short attention span, so after ten minutes of scratching, rattling, and meowing, he grew tired of it and wandered off through the apartment.

But unluckily, Hank has a very short attention span, so after about 5 minutes of wandering through the apartment he thought: “What was I doing? Oh yeah.” Scratch. Rattle. Meow. Repeat indefinitely.

This made me think about when I have children, and how Hank disturbing my sleep might be like having a baby.

But really, more like a special baby, who will never learn to talk, or feed himself, or draw birthday cards for me very well.

So, Cats v. Babies. Thoughts?

While teleconferencing at work, I jotted down a list of actually-used platitudes and business speak. I think if you take all the “real” words out of the conversation, you can still tell pretty much what’s going on:

Left holding the bag
Dealt a bad hand
Coming on board (many times)
Troubled spots
Didn’t let the ball drop
Coming on board (many times)
Break bread
Swimming upstream
Full-court press
The bad guys have our money in their pockets — we’re going to go after it
Coming on board (many times)
Leveraging the business
I see the light at the end of the tunnel

Try commenting with a quick translation. With actual words.

Matt is proud to announce the birth of 1999 Chevrolet Prizm.  Prizm has his father’s headlights and power locks, his father’s automatic transmission, parking brake, glove compartment, and rear-window defroster, and also his father’s air conditioning and AM/FM stereo.  A mutant gene resulted in power windows and a CD player.  The mother declined to identify herself or her contributions, but may have had something to do with Prizm’s 62,000-mile odometer reading.

After a month’s hard labor on Matt’s part, the birth attendants decided to extract Prizm surgically through the checking account.  Fortunately, there were no complications, except for a continued checking-account discharge expected to last up to two years.

At work, we just got done with a 134-minute teleconference meeting where absolutely nothing was decided. I mean no one decision could be said to have been made, per se.

It’s times like these, which is pretty much every workday, when I like to read a daily helping of meta-Marmaduke, where Joe Mathlete explains today’s Marmaduke cartoon (in 500 words or less).

I’ve always joked that every Marmaduke cartoon, throughout histroy, could be paraphrased with the same 6 words: “That is a really big dog.” But Mr. Mathlete proves that there is much more going on in those single-panels than you might have thought.

Here are three gems:

Marmaduke and the Dog-Catchers
Marmaduke Ruins his Owner’s Life
Marmaduke and the Elevator Repairman

Go Democrats!

And now to more important things: YouTube & Hamsters

From the Wall Street Journal:

Coming to Your TV — Homemade Hamster Videos?

Web sites like YouTube have vaulted into the vanguard of Internet entertainment by providing a medium for people to post videos of practically any imaginable activity, from bizarre pet antics to teenagers riding shopping carts into walls.

Now some of the country’s largest telecom operators, including Comcast Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc., are trying to determine if there’s a business in putting such videos on television.

On Monday, Comcast launched a trial version of ziddio.com, a Web site that uses contests to attract homegrown videos, with the best then available for Comcast’s video-on-demand TV service. Verizon, meantime, is close to a deal with YouTube, according to people familiar with the matter. If it happens, Verizon TV subscribers are likely to be able to watch the top YouTube videos of the day for a fee.

…

Some small-time producers see some value in being on TV. Jessica Wells runs a hamster shelter in New York, and recently added videos to the shelter’s Web site that were produced by site visitors. She’d like to see them go on TV to help her raise funds and to educate viewers on proper hamster treatment. Ms. Wells says some of her videos get hundreds of hits. “People are continuously underestimating either how much free time people have or how much people are intrigued by other people’s lives,” she says.

[since the article needs a subscription, the full text is after the jump... mainly just business-y stuff]

(more…)

I hope everyone who can vote is voting today. And I hope you vote for the good guys. I’m swinging wildly between optimism and pessimism from minute to minute, to the point that I may soon need a hamburger / some drugs to calm me down. Time to go to Burger King.

• U.S. Cops Sue Over Drug-Spiked Burgers

Meanwhile, here’s a good news / bad news round-up for election day:

• Republicans closing gap as U.S. votes.” 
• Democrats concerned about races they thought they had in the bag.”
• In better news from Virginia, Jim Webb supposedly surged ahead of thuggy George Allen in the final polls. 
• In the sad-to-admit-it department, Joe Lieberman continued to have a solid lead over Democrat candidate Lamont. Can someone tell me what’s wrong with Connecticut?
• A conservative news site says the Dems will take it all and win both houses. That said, the same site has a lot of headlines talking about a Republican surge in the final hours of polling yesterday. But how do you define a surge? And who gets to define it?
• The Hill, a Congressional journal, published a variety of predictions from the political establishment. Overall it still looks good for Dems.

And finally, I liked this take from Toronto Star, detailing what a possible Dem win would look like, and how it might impact Canada. One thing I liked about this article is that the writer acknowledged what so few in the U.S. establishment see, but what’s been clear for a long time to much of the rest of the world: the current roster of U.S. Dems are so moderate that they’re right of center. In Canada, they’d be in the Conservative party. When I reflect on that, I’m reminded how far right the U.S. has gone in recent years.

Which brings me back to wildly jumping between optimism and pessimism today. Here’s to the political pendulum swinging—ever so slightly—in a better direction. Pretty please?

Sufjan Stevens, Illinois (2005)

Talkdemonic, Beat Romantic (2006)

Victory at Sea, All Your Things Are Gone (2005)

Young People, All at Once (2006)

First off, I should say that this post is several years past its expiration date. It’s like I see a requiem for indie rock in some magazine or another every year, so I shouldn’t annoy anyone by adding my voice to the chorus now. But the sheer mediocrity of three of my recent CD orders left me with no other way to review them than by clustering them into a eulogy. And I threw in Sufjan Stevens for good measure.

So what is “indie rock”? I’ll assign Sufjan Stevens, Talkdemonic, Victory at Sea, and Young People to that genre because they’re all vaguely poppish (which is almost like being rock) and they’re all on indie labels. But stylistically, I don’t think “indie rock” means anything anymore; at this point it designates only a mode of distribution. The underground network of independent labels and distributors, which used to deliver specifically non-commercial rock, has (with the help of online music retailing) stepped into the void created by the major music conglomerates’ continual swallowing of smaller labels. Signing to an independent label is no longer a statement of musical ideals: it’s a viable career move. You won’t have a #1 album, but you can still get your music to the masses.

Which is a shame, because the perpetrators of these albums really don’t need to be heard. Take Talkdemonic. The duo comprises a fiddler, Lisa Molinaro, and a multi-instrumentalist mastermind, Kevin O’Connor. Beat Romantic, the liner notes helpfully tell me, is “the second Talkdemonic record.” Released on the ironically named Arena Rock label, it features lovely cover art of white-barked birch trunks in a row under a canopy of green leaves. And the music sounds like it was recorded in a bedroom with a Starbucks latte at hand. It’s offensively inoffensive. A reviewer might refer to “delicately plucked acoustic guitar,” “whispers of organ,” “reedy violin.” I might put this on in the background while I’m surfing the Internet, then get frustrated halfway through and exchange the CD for something else. The only one of these sixteen instrumental tracks I could identify after it has passed is “White Gymnasium,” thanks to the nautical flute line that graces it. The album is very polished and very pretty, and I mean that in the worst way possible.

For something equally low in energy, trying Young People’s All at Once. After about five listens, I finally cottoned on to who Young People sounds like: Cat Power. Katie isn’t as good a singer as Chan Marshall, but she does offer the same wispy, alcoholic vocal haze; I don’t think she delivers a single song in full voice. It makes me tune out, so I’m not sure I can remember any of the lyrics. These might be lines from “Slow-Moving Storm”: “Angel bright and fair / Take me to your care.” Or they might not be. It’s her voice that mires All at Once in the realm of passionless music I don’t care about. They have some interesting musical ideas, like the distortion-drowned piano riff of “Reapers,” but too many of those ideas meander into collapse. They sound like they got bored while recording; why should I be interested while listening?

I think Victory at Sea’s album, All Your Things Are Gone, is the clearest sign that anything underground about the indie world has long since been abolished. The band starts off with some trendy angular post-punk (“No Reason to Stay,” “Cecille”) before moving into strange storytelling (“The Letter”), but finally softens to reveal itself as a purveyor of Carole King adult-contemporary piano pop (“Turn It Around” onward: six songs out of ten). This kind of music isn’t in vogue right now, but there’s no stylistic weirdness that would prevent Victory at Sea from having a hit single. All Your Things Are Gone is a 2005 release, so it’s past its sell-by date already, but may I suggest “Bored Otherwise” as the potential hit that could have led listeners to this filler-packed extravaganza?

Speaking of hits, filler, and piano pop: Sufjan Stevens. I’m not as in touch with indie politics as I used to be—blame the dullness of the music—so I might be wrong about this, but I think Stevens is today’s biggest indie star. He got enough press on what was probably an off-the-cuff comment about making an album for each of the fifty states that he decided to follow his love letter to Michigan with 2005’s study of Illinois. Even the outtakes got great reviews.

But I must say, I’m not impressed. First of all, Illinois doesn’t have any moves on it that weren’t already in display on Michigan—I suppose Stevens has his Beatles-style “Revolution” with the electrified Superman song, whose title I will not exhaust my fingers by typing, but Stevens’s distorted guitar work only reminds me of the excruciating, incomprehensibly reissued A Sun Came! Otherwise, there’s a lot of the Charlie-Brown-soundtrack piano, orchestral instrumentation, softly sung melodies, and pensive lyrics that have long stocked Stevens’s releases. The musicianship has come a long way since Michigan, in that there’s no spit-filled trumpet here, but then the bedroom-recording aesthetic was part of the charm of early Sufjan (and if Talkdemonic had left some rough edges unsanded, their bland instrumental pop might have had more character).

The word I want to use to describe Illinois is “professional.” And that’s part of the problem. “Professional” implies a received standard, an external framework of values. “Professional” demands a pre-established sound and promises a primarily financial reward. So here’s a word to describe Stevens: “accomplished.” As in “mission.” He found a career path and he’s treading it to the usual terminus.

This is why indie isn’t indie anymore. Underground rock was supposed to be about finding your own voice, about making your own noise. Early indie bands (I’m thinking of those profiled in Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life: Black Flag, Minutemen, Mission of Burma) went independent because they had to—major labels weren’t willing to take a chance on their weird music. There’s no reason a major label wouldn’t want to take a chance on Stevens. He’s cute, friendly, low-budget, and has already proven himself. Stevens may decide he wants to stick with Asthmatic Kitty, but that doesn’t mean he’s underground. If you need proof, just get The Avalanche (outtakes from Illinois). I haven’t heard it and I’m not going to, but: recording 150 minutes of music for a single album and then releasing the outtakes separately, as if even your rejects are gems? Smells like Fleetwood Mac to me.

Campaigns are getting dirtier and dirtier — I thought some of the Minnesota races’ ads were bad, but Senator Allen’s staff here literally stoops pretty low, wrestling a constituent to the floor. With a headlock.

As you may have heard in video above, CNN reports that Mike Stark, the guy with the backpack who was roughed up, was a “protester.” Mr. Stark, in a letter to a local news station here, identifies himself as a “law student at the University of Virginia, a marine, and a citizen journalist.” You might know him better as one of the bloggers at Daily KOS.

Senator George Allen from Virginia is the macaca guy. You know: the guy who called the Indian guy “Macaca.” At a stump speech, Allen referred to S. R. Sidarth, a volunteer for his opponent’s camp in the audience, as “Macaca, or whatever his name is.” Then, later, “let’s give a welcome to Macaca here.”

A macaca is a kind of monkey. Which seemed a very idiosyncratic type of racism. Who calls somebody a monkey, and if you call them a monkey, who specifies the genus/species? But, as an article in the New Yorker recently pointed out, “macaca” is a very common racial slur in Tunisia. Where the cosmopolitan Senator Allen grew up. Ah. Well, then.

But, after macaca and a spate of blogger-beating, Democratic challenger James Webb has pulled a slight 4% lead in the polls. So if constituents have to be beaten and insulted, at least there could be a bright side. Track all you favorite Senate races at the fine, fine site, www.electoral-vote.com (thanks, LeftPedal!).

It’s a pirate movie, and that’s it.  Anything you saw in Pirates of the Caribbean, you could pretty much see here first.  But despite its lack of ambition, Cutthroat Island is nowhere near bad enough that it should have ended Geena Davis’s career.  It keeps its feet firmly planted in B-Movie Land, whether with the incongruously lipsticked British governor-general or with the immortal line of Marion-Berry-esque dialogue, “Bitch stole my map!”  Which is delivered with a perfect poker face by Frank Langella, who doesn’t seem to care that he’s in B-Movie Land. 

Davis, by contrast, doesn’t seem to notice that she’s in B-Movie Land, at least not until the climactic put-down that explains the reason behind the name of Langella’s arch-pirate:  “Bad Dawg!”  But if she’s not exactly the most watchable B-actress—odd for someone who starred in Earth Girls Are Easy—she doesn’t send the thing down the drain, either.  Maybe that’s because this isn’t the kind of movie that relies on finely tuned thespianism (the accents don’t even seem to originate on the same continent).  Basically, what’s great about Cutthroat Island is that it knows it’s a cheesy historical action movie and doesn’t demand an Academy Award anyway, RUSSELL “MAXIMUS” CROWE.