Lohan: I Want To Adopt

In a recent interview in Marie Claire LL mentioned that she, like every other woman in America, would be thrilled to adopt kids. Of course, there's an election year subtext here since Lindsay only recently announced that she is in a lesbian relationship with DJ Samantha Ronson. Well, girl, you look great--even when you're sitting next to that basement-dweller, who, by the way, looks exactly like my younger brother did when he was nine. We don't know whether the next four years will see the rights of homosexual couples expanded, but we do know this: we want you to be happy, Lindsay, and to have everything your heart desires--and God do we want to see you in movies again.

Lindsay Lohan Struck By Motorcycle

Holy shit--last night LL got hit by a motorcycle as she left some club in New York. According to the Post, she and Samantha Ronson were crossing 32nd Street when Lindsay was struck by a moving motorcycle. She was taken to Beth Israel Medical Center, treated and released at 4 a.m. this morning. Apparently she's fine, thank God.

In Appreciation Of Ohio Girls

I love Ohio girls. They just wear whatever was on their bedroom floor and they always smell like powdered sugar and sunscreen. They don't talk about politics or world issues, and they don't care about tapas or fancy cocktails. You never have to buy them anything, because the bars just give them drink tickets on weekends. They constantly use language that would make a sailor blush and they'll kiss you right in front of their boyfriends. They just want to play drinking games and watch TV and they never ask you what you do for a living--because they can remember the day you got into law school.

Normally I Stand Up For Texas, But...

By the way, I just thought I should let all of you cultural studies majors and all of you religious people know that if you live in Texas and you want to abuse your daughter you can pin her on the floor and hurt her for a few hours and if you're a Christian or something you can tell the cops it was an exorcism and the state supreme court will let you go scott free. Oh, and, as a lawyer, I can tell you that the court's claim that this case is really "a dispute over religious conduct that would unconstitutionally entangle the court in church doctrine" is h*******t.

Newsflash: Lindsay Lohan Shows You Her Tummy

OK, so I'm tired of all of the "sign of the times" jokes about fistfights at gas stations or gas stations refusing credit cards or people renting tankers to try to steal a bunch of gas from gas stations. If you want proof positive that shit is totally fucked up in our country right now and that everyone is totally desperate for some glimmer of niceness while everything else rides to hell on its fixed-gear bike, look no further: today a google news search for "Lohan" resulted in no preemptively critical assessment of a film in preproduction, no provacative speculation about a lesbian affair with a DJ--in fact, it turned up nothing more than an item declaring that paparazzi went apeshit recently when LL fanned her shirt to air out on a hot day. Pathetic. That's how collectively desperate we, as a society, are for some Lindsay. We'll take anything; another fucking Christmas album, a peak at a belly button--it's all the same to us. On the other hand, I can honestly say that if global warming means that LL will randomly pull her shirt up more often I will personally gag Al Gore and develop fart-inducing cow food. Now eat something, girl; you look like 'Manda Bynes.

R.I.P. Brendan Scanlon, AKA: SOLVE

FYI for out-of-towners:

Man charged in stabbing death of Chicago street artist

Associated Press
4:24 AM CDT, June 16, 2008

CHICAGO - A Cook County judge has ordered a Chicago man held on $500,000 bond in the stabbing death of one of the city's best-known street artists.

Prosecutors filed first-degree murder charges Sunday against 24-year-old Kirk Tobolski, who allegedly stabbed 24-year-old Brendan Scanlon in the heart early Saturday morning.

Scanlon's parents in Wisconsin said their son worked for a Chicago graphic design and advertising firm.

But Scanlon was best known for the often enigmatic street art he stenciled onto such places as the backs of stop signs and the glass of newspaper boxes -- usually signed with the alias "SOLVE."

On one occasion he installed a television set in a rapid transit train. Its screen bore the stenciled message, "We are experiencing legal difficulties."

Lindsay To Be A Missionary?

You know, I always kind of felt like there was some little way that LL reminded me of my mom. This little charmer with a heart of gold (pictured here flipping you off) is set to do missionary work in India next year. Yeah; according to daddy, she's going to be doing stuff to help out with some "child sexual slavery" issues and helping victims of AIDS in India with a church group next February. Only according to Lindsay's people, this is just something her dad made up. Oh well: you're not old enough of an actress to have to do humanitarian work abroad to impress people, Lindsay. You just keep being you, and we'll keep loving you for it.

Required Listening

Preferably as loud as possible.

I Don't Buy It

I recently decided I'm not going to buy things anymore. Part of it is because months ago I noticed myself deliberately trying to ease my frustration with the working world or whatever else was stressing me out at the moment by means of purchasing goods (specifically DVDs at Borders) and part of it is because a light went on in my head the other day when I followed a link from FARK.com to a cnn article about dumpster diving for food. I mean, of course I'm going to keep spending money on some things, but not a lot of things. I wrote out a list of stuff I can get or do for free, and it is pretty surprising how it covers most of my needs and wants. And, of course, instead of spending all of my disposable income on things I don't need or want like people tend to do, I can always invest it. Everybody knows the best things in life are free--why do we spend so much money on stupid shit?

Still apprehensive? Check out the youtube files for this hilarious episode of Never Mind The Buzzcocks, a comedic BBC pop music quiz show, and tell me you've had more fun with something you once paid money for:

Nymag.com Crashes Under The Enormous Weight Of Lindsay Lohan's Tits

According to the Red Eye, nymag.com recorded 20 million hits on Monday and Tuesday for the nude photographs of Lindsay Lohan presently posted on the website. That's 2,000% more traffic than the site had one year ago. Eventually the traffic built up to such an extent that the site crashed harder than LL t-boning a paparazzo in her Mercedes.

I Told You They Were Real!

I'm not going to go on and on about this, but New York Magazine is publishing nudie pictures of LL in it's next issue. Photographer Ben Stern had Lindsay do a mock-up of Marilyn Monroe's iconic "Last Sitting" shoot, telling LL that they would be shown in a museum or a solo show or something, and then he just sold them to a magazine. Anyway, LL's publicist is just like, "suck it; take a look at that and try to tell me they're fake." The issue isn't on stands yet, but it looks like it's going to make a big splash. Earlier today when I called the Borders on State Street to see if they carried New York Magazine, the clerk, who clearly had been fielding calls like this all day was like "you want the Lindsay Lohan issue? It's not here yet." It just goes to show that Lindsay Lohan kicks an endless amount of ass. I'm really glad someone's giving her a break, even if it is in a "but you have to get naked" way.

Update: I just checked the pictures out on nymag.com, and a couple of them actually made me weak in the knees. I'm really tempted to post one here, but, out of a sense of propriety, I will refrain. You should really check it out though.

Viva La Boosh!

So, the only thing I really give a fuck about right now is The Mighty Boosh, a 30-minute BBC sitcom/psychedelic adventure created by these two guys Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt. A few months ago a friend of mine showed me an episode he had TiVo'd, and at first it really creaped me out, but after a couple viewings I started to fully embrace the Boosh, and now I crave it every night. It's pointless to try to explain the show to a non-Boosher. But if you like Gary Numan, magic, feathered hair, bizarre home-made monster costumes, Polo mints and strawberry shoelaces, obligatory ho-downs, learning a brand-new language of British slang (bonus: including "fetch" meaning "cool," like in Mean Girls) and really, really hot female extras, you owe it to yourself give it a shot. Seriously: don't fuck this one up--you need the Boosh.

Visit the official Mighty Boosh website.

Does This Mean...There Is A God?

I'm not sure if this is proof of God's existence - or proof that God is truly dead - but Anton LeVey's "Black House," for decades the San Francisco headquarters of LeVey's Church of Satan, has now been supplanted by a really fucking ugly condo duplex.

Fuck, Yes! LL To Publish Her Diary

Lindsay Lohan is planning to one-up all of her mouthy former bodyguards by going ahead and publishing all of the lurid details of her descent into addiction and nymphomania herself. I can't wait; this is going to be so sweet! No word yet on when it comes out or who will publish it, but believe you me I'll keep you updated.

LL To Participate In Scared Straight Program At Morgue

This summer Lindsay Lohan will visit a morgue as part of the plea deal she struck with the court in her drunk driving case. The visit is part of a "scared straight"-style class conducted by the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office, in which a couple dozen other DUI perpetrators will participate. Lindsay and her classmates will all have to confront dead bodies at the morgue as an object lesson in the possible consequences of driving drunk. As I'm sure you will remember, Lindsay was arrested twice last year on DUI charges and pleaded guilty in August to misdemeanor drunken driving and cocaine possession charges. LL has also performed many hours of community service and served a day in jail as part of the plea deal.

"Sugar, Sugar": The One That Started It All?

What's your favorite song? Mine's "Sugar, Sugar." You know that song, right? It's pretty awesome, isn't it? It probably won't surprise you to hear that it topped the charts both in America and in the UK when it was released in 1969--but did you know that Billboard ranked it as the #1 single of the entire year? So, it beat out all singles released in 1969 by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Jackson 5 and Stevie Wonder, for instance. When I was in high school I used to spend a lot of time riding around in my friend Jason's car, listening to 104.3 (which used to be an oldies station) on his disintegrating car stereo. Invariably "Sugar, Sugar" would come on at some point in the day, and we would turn it up and rock out. Back then we used to joke that "Sugar, Sugar" was the first indiepop song because the simple chord progression (C Major--F Major--G Major), the fuzzbox lead guitar, and the amateurish-sounding female vocal interjections reminded us of the songs on the 7 inches I had ordered from Slumberland and the Bus Stop Label. Actually "Sugar, Sugar" was the opposite of amateurish; it was written by Brill Building mainstay Jeff Barry, who also penned "Be My Baby," and (yes the sleeve of my copy of End Of The Century confirms he also wrote) "Baby, I Love You." Ellie Greenwich, Barry's partner in writing "Baby, I Love You" didn't help write "Sugar, Sugar"--but is one of the studio musicians who performed on the record. I could have guessed all of this stuff, but what I had no idea about is that The Archies, who "perform" "Sugar, Sugar" are the characters from Archie Comics, who somehow sang Brill Building pop songs on I guess a TV show. So that's why they didn't tour.

Ten Reasons To Be Mod In 2008

I know you've been thinking about it for a long time; we all have. But I'm hoping maybe this year's the year. Let's all buy parkas and Chelsea boots and exclusively hang out with girls with pixie cuts--like we used to in high school. Not convinced? Well, for your perusal I have compiled this list of why you and I should finally take the plunge and be mods in 2008.

10) It's the only counterculture where no one will mind that we don't give a shit about anything besides hair gel and name brand clothes. It's pretty disingenuous to embrace some kind of bohemian counterculture and then spend $75 on a haircut and $150 on jeans. When you're a mod, you won't have to feel a tinge of guilt for your zealous consumerism.

9) Vespas get 70 miles to the gallon. That makes for economical transportation no matter how long this Iraq thing takes. Keep your gas money and spend it on hairspray.

8) It's the only thing you can do that will truly piss off your hippie parents. Keep your hair above your ears and wear a tie everyday. It will eat them up inside.

7) You can't get AIDS from popping pills. Just ask Stiv Bators' ghost.

6) 1960's American R&B is still the greatest music ever recorded. The best thing you can say about any of the records that have been recorded since is that they remind you of how good Stax and Motown were.

5) Every woman looks beautiful with short hair. Admittedly counter-intuitive, but undeniably true.

4) We'll be all ready for ska's fourth wave. It will arrive any day now.

3) Even Brooks Brothers sells peg leg suits these days. Unfortunately they cost like $1900.00. Fortunately 501's and tennis sweaters work just as well.

2) Rock and Roll sucks and people who listen to it deserve to get beaten up. Go back to Liverpool, assholes.

1) If you are mod, nice girls will look at you expectantly as they eat ice cream. Just look at that--it looks like the most fun I've ever seen in my entire life.

The Return Of Love Rock?

After about eight years of that whole black-on-black, angry, politico-rock horse shit, it's starting to look like we might be able to wear whatever we want and start listening to good music again. I have no idea what caused it, but what I call "the dark age" of rock-as-monolith, bands with dress codes, vegetarianism as a musical movement, and, of course, dire cynicism about love and sex, seems to be, well, no longer hip. How do I know this? What could possibly make me so brash as to hope for this? Witness the title of the forthcoming album by Xiu Xiu, Women As Lovers. Would that have ever flown in 2000? No, ma'am. And just look at the cover art; it's more love rock than anything I've seen since Heather Lewis sang on The Wedding Present's Watusi album. Sell your Stones records, pull out your Cat's Miaow CDs, and keep your fingers crossed.

Newsflash: Lohan Likes To Fuck Italian Men

MSNBC's obvious department has been working hard on its story about one Alessandro diNunzio's comments about the night he spent with Lindsay Lohan recently while she was at the Capri Film Festival, reporting what we all could have guessed about LL: that she's really bright and funny and flexible, that her sexual aggressiveness does a poor job of disguising her insecurities, that she (like all truly attractive women) wears mismatched underwear, and that she hopes that having sex with "nice boys" will help her put her alcoholism behind her. Congratulations, Mr. diNunzio--but, buddy, I would have fucked her for so much longer than "one-and-a-half hours."

I Fucking Dare You To Buy Tender Forever's Wider

My prediction that women will start dressing like butch lesbians to attract men has already come true, and, although I knew it was going to be hot (check out the picture), I wasn't ready for this. Yesterday when I dropped by Reckless Records on the way home from the Loop I was thrilled to find a copy of Tender Forever's new LP Wider. K Records has been repping Wider pretty hard on its website recently, and I vowed to buy a copy after visiting the act's myspace page and being confronted with the cover of Justin Timberlake's "My Love" that plays as soon as the page loads. It might cause an involuntary roll of the eyes to see a K act categorize itself as "Soul" on its myspace page, but take my word for it: the tag is appropriate.

Tender Forever is the stage name of multi-instrumentalist Melanie Valera. Valera's music career started in a girl group cover band (ironically, that would be the ideal culmination of the music career of my dreams) in her native Bordeaux, France. So, like The Softies or Black Tambourine, Valera's songwriting is largely informed by Phil Spector-like compositions. But this isn't the late 80's, and Wider isn't that kind of K record. The fact that Valera lists Cody Chestnutt among the brief list of influences on Tender Forever's myspace page and the fact that she would cover a Justin Timberlake song conclusively shows that she is totally dedicated to soul and the institution of the love song and that she is perfectly willing to subvert counterculture expectations to maximize their effect. So she dances, flirts, (reportedly) gets emotional on stage, uses a drum machine--whatever it takes. And she musters up quite an amount of swagger, but the really compelling thing here is the vulnerability. Here is a person with apparently little musical training who is going to walk onto a stage, set up a laptop and start dancing and singing her heart out about love. And in true DIY fashion, all of the fragility, the awkwardness, all of the vulnerability just make the record more sexy.

I believe in the love song as an institution, like, say, Elvis Costello does. If you must know, last night I put on headphones and listened to The Ramones' cover of Phil Spector's "Baby I Love You" six times in a row before going to bed. But Valera's songs are even more about love than your typical love song; they're about finding a secret place in the back yard to kiss, about how fast your heart is beating and about how "like war," broken hearts last forever. They're about how even if you break my heart I'm willing to take all of that pain for the chance to be in love with you for just a little while. You know, I don't think I've ever heard any woman besides maybe Diana Ross talk about her "heart" as much as Valera does. Hearing the word repeatedly as I listen to this record sort of puts me in a trance, and by the fifth time I hear it I just want to fuck.

So, everybody agrees that independent records are a great way to learn things by example, right? The counterculture is overflowing with all kinds of people who learned how to dress or how to play guitar or to run a distro or that they should be anti-colonialists or anarchists or vegetarians or whatever just from listening to records. But here's a record that may actually inspire you to do something that matters in your life. And that's the powerful thing about this record--the thing that might have you on edge when you listen to it--because it might actually change you, or give you an ultimatum. Because Melanie Valera may actually get in your face, dance around and tell you that if you're not taking a big chance, then you're not actually in love right now.

Published December 2007. $10 if ordered directly from K Records.

www.kpunk.com

P.S.: Here's a Spanish language review of Wider from a blog called Fuck Me I'm Twee.

DVD Review: Bobby (2006)

Yesterday, as I checked the mail at my P.O. Box, there was a little disc-mailer containing a case-less DVD of Emilio Estevez's 2006 film Bobby. As a devotee to Lindsay Lohan's film career, I had purchased the thing used over the internet, with a sort of "better late than never" attitude. Bobby is an interesting case. The film was quite well-received, winning several awards (Best break-out actress: Lindsay Lohan) Yet the movie did nothing at the box office and sold less DVDs than I Know Who Killed Me. Maybe that's because the movie is--well--boring, slowly imploding under the weight of the distractingly and confusingly star-studded cast. A useful and, I think, inevitable, exercise is to compare and contrast the movie with another Lohan-graced flop, Georgia Rule. And, after only a little reflection, I can confidently say that the Rule is the finer film.

Strangely, the two movies are, in many ways, sort of mirror images of each other, or opposite sides of the same coin. Georgia Rule stars Felicity Huffman as a delusional alcoholic; Bobby stars Williams H. Macy as a self-righteous prick. In Bobby, Lindsay Lohan has a bit part as a woman who selflessly marries some schmuck so he doesn't have to go to Vietnam, then (wait for it...) falls in love with him, whereas in Georgia Rule LL stars as a monumentally selfish girl who becomes intrigued with the possibility of preventing a Mormon boy from going on his mission, then realizes she's become dependent on his Platonic companionship. Both films feature particularly trying, extremely mannered direction--Emilio Estevez channeling Robert Altman, corralling dozens of actors and extras as his camera people do their 100th down-the-hall-and-around-the-corner-and-into-a-different-room take, and Gary Marshall being, well, overly Gary Marshall I guess. Bobby (supposedly) received a seven-minute standing ovation at The Venice Film Festival; Georgia Rule was universally panned by critics and audiences alike. Bobby is like a 3-ring circus with a million things happening at once, while Georgia Rule's story has one moving part. Perhaps most importantly, both movies are great examples of how people totally steeped in Hollywood's weird pseudo-reality can take any subject matter and make it utterly unrelatable to anyone born outside the TMZ.

Either way, for all of the films' parallel fuck ups, Bobby is the bigger fuck up of the two films. Bobby is one of those Hollywood back-patting circle-jerks that can only appeal to Los Angeles County liberals who truly believe that giving lip service to race issues and supporting one fabulously wealthy, magazine-cover-handsome man forty years ago makes them monumentally Good people forever. Georgia Rule, by contrast, pandered to absolutely no one--one might say to a fault. To Georgia Rule's credit, the film was able to take extremely commonly-treaded subject matter and make a huge splash with it. Even if the impression Georgia Rule left the audience with was one of confusion or even disgust, it makes more of an impression than Bobby, which is able to take an exceptionally exciting subject matter and do nothing but make a yawn-fest for all non-Venetians. Honestly, why do I give a shit that the hotel's retired doorman is really good at chess? And why the fuck is he hanging out with Harry Belafonte? Is Harry Belafonte paying himself in this movie? And by that point, you've lost the viewer for good. I don't mean to totally shit on Bobby, because there are some nice things about it; Christian Slater is quite good as the (admittedly totally one-dimensional) racist kitchen and hospitality manager, and the few brief scenes featuring Nick Cannon as the temperamental, hard-ass young black RFK campaign worker are awesome. I guess, when it comes down to it, the main problem with Bobby is the same simple problem the viewer encounters with most Hollywood movies--not enough Lindsay!

2008 Sees Launch Of Whisky-Themed Wiki

On the first of this year one Ian Buxton launched Whiskipedia.org, initially utilizing content provided by whisky author Gavin Smith. I, for one, am excited that there will be a free, centralized, and exponentially growing source of information about whisky on the internet.

AEM Bargain Bin Selection #2: The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem's In Person At Carnegie Hall

$0.49, Reckless Records. My friend Brendan's family is so Irish that I learned about The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem while sitting around the dinner table at their house. Put simply, this act is the gold standard when it comes to recording artists of Irish folk music, and the record of their 1963 concert in New York was a breakthrough record with regard the entire genre for American listeners. I was shocked to find this admittedly scratched up copy neglected in Reckless's bargain bin, and thrilled to listen to it's anthem in celebration of the IRA and what must be an unusually ribald rendition of Galway Bay. And, of course, it's even more fun to listen to it after a few drinks.