So I actually saw "The Girl Next Door" and it's a good flick. Elisha Cuthbert is more or less perfect looking, so that's good, but it's actually not a complete guilty pleasure flick...it has some vaguely redeeming qualities, namely that it continually does things which you expect to lead to a really dumb and horrible ending, but then they don't. I actually would have been willing to pay full price in the theaters to have seen this movie. It has the raunchiness of the American Pie-type flicks, but then also this Ferris Buehler-esque side. I suppose some people might not really like it though, like people who are not men.

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From random pictures and watching USC games I always figured Matt Leinart was a pretty good-looking dude, but I have to say his head looked absolutely enormous at the Heisman Trophy presentation. I think part of it is that he has a huge head, and part that he had a bad haircut here which really emphasized how huge his melon is. FYI, Reggie Bush is my favorite random college player, though I had no expectation he would win. I was secretly glad the OU boys were shutout...sorry, twins.



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ABC is playing a lot of promos for "Alias," a show which I don't have a problem with (Jennifer Garner is pretty hot) but don't watch, and I have a comment on something I always notice about these ads. Invariably they show Jennifer Garner wearing some outragous outfit and with some really bizarre haircut, apparently being a spy in disguise or something. Well, I understand that people watching the show want to see different, kinky flavors of her without having to sacrifice their wholesome image of her. But if you were a spy wouldn't you want to look really average and inconspicuous? I know I know, suspension of disbelief, blah blah...

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I've long had an irrational, uninformed hatred of cartoons (I don't watch them because I hate them, but how can I hate them if I don't watch them? Hmmm...). As most of you know, I've never seen any of the Disney cartoon movies, nor have I ever seen one of those Pixar-type movies (though I did see the last two minutes of Shrek on TV once). Sorry, I just can't be reasoned with on this issue. I find Spongebob Squarepants is even more offensive because it seems like adults really like it too. So I had mixed emotions when I saw that both Wilco and the Flaming Lips had songs on the soundtrack to the Spongebob movie. But as it turns out the Flaming Lips song is REALLY good, even though it's blatantly about Spongebob. It's tough to expect much from a song called "Patrick and Spongebob Confront the Psychic Wall of Energy," but you should.

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The best album (best = favorite) album I don't own is Kent's Vapen och Ammunition but I don't really hold myself accountable for that one because I have all the mp3s and it's only available as a $22 import which I only saw once and haven't seen since. It's the newest album by my fave Swedish band Kent, who never bothered doing an English version because English-speaking people suck and never bought the albums they did do in English (I have both Isola and Hagnesta Hill. They make very accesible alt-pop-guitar rock, and whenever I force people to listen to it they invariably like it, but I guess that's not enough. Their translated stuff often has corny lyrics, but it's catchy as fuck and I don't mind listening to the Swedish versions either because there's something fun about memorizing songs in a language you don't know.

I'll look for it occasionally at Newbury Comics and if I see it again I'll buy it, but it just hasn't happened so far. And so it goes. Anyway, Kent aside, the album I should definitely own which I don't is Beck's Sea Change, which I don't own because the twins played the shit out of it senior year and there was no point in me buying it and playing the shit out of it myself. But anyway, I now own it because it was being sold for $10 at Newbury yesterday. I should have just wished for it for xmas, but I'm a strong believer in efficiency and I knew that my mom wouldn't find it for that price. I guess that suggests I believe in efficiency more than free shit, which I don't, so damn.

I don't really plan on listening to it because I already know what's on it, but I it was high time I pad Beck's pocket with my hard-earned money. Strangely, this seems logical to me. It is odd that I own no Beck CDs, because I've always liked Beck a lot.

One thing I don't normally do is buy EPs or singles from bands when they have covered most of the songs on LPs that I already own. I don't know, as much as I like collecting CDs from bands I like, blowing $20 on an Australian import of Radiohead's "High and Dry" single just doesn't appeal to me (My favorite imports are the Japanese import LPs which have maybe one additional bonus track but cost about $30). Perhaps these things used to interest me, but now that I actually earn more money than I need (and like music even more than previously) it doesn't anymore. Go figure. But in spite of this I actually bought M83's "Run Into Flowers" single yesterday. It only has the title track and three remixes of it, but I absolutely love "Run Into Flowers" and I also liked the cover art. M83 used Justine Kurland's "Snow Angels" on the cover of Dead Cities, Red Seas, and Lost Ghosts, and it's probably my favorite album cover ever. Anyway, for the single they have another Justine Kurland photo, this time of random people lying around in a forest (inferior to the LP, but still decent). Hey, if you find something that works, go with it. I actually have 5' by 5' rasterized version of the Dead Cities cover on my wall, though most people will probably look at it and think it's a bunch of dead kids lying in a field. Fuck.


Being pretentious and artsy is fun!

Anyway, the single is actually pretty good, as all the remixes work pretty well. I think my main rules regarding remixes is that rock bands should generally not be remixed. A band like Interpol often has remixes done, and this sounds like a decent idea but I've never heard a remix of theirs which I actually liked. The remixer inevitably takes out too much of the vocal track or pulls one of the guitar or bass parts, and the whole reason they're good is that they actually have all these things working well together. M83 is different though because while they have elements of rock (read: guitars, drums) they're really an electronic outfit. What makes "Run Into Flowers" great is the overall texture that results from from combining a series of sounds--organs, beats, and two vocal parts which are more or less samples. I think what makes electronic music is good is generally the use of a more basic "sound"; you can try to distill great rock music into a terrific riff or a great lyric, but it's normally more than that. I think fundamentally electronic music has to appeal to the listener on a far more basic level, because the music is more basic. I don't blame people who dismiss electronic music as too repetitive or emotionally bankrupt, because most of it is. But Dead Cities has this remarkably warm, emotionally engaging quality that sets it apart. And the remixes manage to snip just enough of that and rearrange it into something which can retain those basic building blocks that are so great and do something fresh with them.

The ironic part is that I just spent a while jerking M83 off, yet last week I downloaded their forthcoming album, Before the Dawn Heals Us, and it kind of blows (it's available on SoulSeek). It's due for release January 25th, at which point I'll probably buy it. It should be noted that I had the mp3s of "Gone" and "In Church" for a few months before Dead Cities came out in the US, and I wasn't blown away by them at first. That said, the new album seems to have this kind of dinky cheesiness that the last just didn't have. It's not totally shocking if you read/hear Anthony Gonzalez speak about his music though; he sounds like a quaint little French guy who doesn't really know why people like his music in the first place, so I guess we should expect him to not know how to keep making music people like. Stay tuned.