Mountain Dew Billboard

I just saw a shocking billboard, in which there was a ball and chain attached to a can of Mountain Dew, and then it looked like a person was attached to, or crushed by, the big (green) iron ball! As weird as this is for an ad, I guess it's at least being kind of honest-- it's just going right out and saying, yes, this soda is full of caffeine and sugar, and it's addictive! I mean, I kind of like Mountain Dew in that way-- it tells it like it is. Mountain: redneck, cracker, peckerwood. Dew: looks like piss. Lots of sugar. Lots of caffeine. Not subtle. But still, that ball and chain thing is kind of nuts. But I guess if cigarette companies were still allowed to advertise, they'd be doing much the same thing.

Random Answering Machine Review

I called this dude who shall remain anonymous, his answering machine, and apparently he is reading an ENTIRE novel! I don't now how often he changes the message, and I can't figure out what the novel is yet, but I kind of think it's something obscure by that guy, John Barth. Perhaps "Sabbatical" or maybe that one about the goat. But it's kind of really Catholic, too, so I don't know.

(one warning, AT&T will bill you for a 900 call, which can be quite pricy, as all of you phone sex pervs will know).

--Ray Speen

MALCOLM X Directed by Spike Lee

Anyone that has ever read the Malcolm X biography, one of the best pieces of literature (true biography or not) of the 20th century, knows how disappointing Spike Lee's film interpretation is. The actors are miscast and perform as if they were on a stage, not in front of a camera. Denzel Washinton is just way too soft to ever prove a convincing role of an angst ridden Malcolm X. He looks like he spent his teens in a spa in LA, not on the streets of Boston/Harlem. The acting falls flat in so many of the beginning gangster scenes it becomes laughable. Samuel L. Jackson would have proved to be a much more believable Malcolm X, not for his similar looks, but for the true anger he is able to possess on film.

Spike Lee relies heavily on the format of overly produced Hollywood Films, and the genius he once had becomes lost with the availability of a large budget. The film reads more like the Warren Beatty/Madonna film "Bugsy" with saturated ridiculous costumes that try hard to convey a sense of time and place, close up shots of under-directed actors spouting an overly dramatized script, and people that look more like cartoon characters than complex individuals. This movie overly romanticizes the story of Malcolm X, making him seem more like a superhero than a deeply complex human being who had been diagnosed schizophrenic.

And where was Alex Haley?

CD Review: Fall Out Boy "Infinity On High"

I wish I wasn't listening to this, and I don't know why I am-- I think I read something interesting about this band somewhere-- but I can't remember what. Maybe it was something like one guy writes the lyrics and another one sings them-- like The Who-- but I might be wrong about that. I don’t' really care at this point, but this record is unlistenable. I'm going to listen to the whole thing, though, just out of some masochistic sense of something.

They are very young-- there are a lot of pictures of them on the little CD booklet-- I'd say barely 20. And they are very popular. It seems dangerous to call yourself "boy" in the name of your band. When you're playing at classic rock revival festivals 30 years from now, that's bound to be embarrassing. But I guess it worked out okay for Sonic Youth.

The good thing about listening to this, anyway, is that now I have a name to put with a type of music I might hear blasting annoyingly in bars, or out of a car, or on a movie soundtrack-- or a band that I happen to see on a show like "Conan"-- where the band members are all overacting, trying to really look like they are possessed by "rock." You always know that there probably is at least one guy in the band that just wants to say fuck it and stand still, but he's probably under contract to move back and forth and grimace with fake emotion.

And now I want to apologize to anyone who has happened to read this and for that reason has had their attention drawn to this band and their music and for that reason has had to suffer as much as I have while listening to this vomit-inducing compact disk.