Goodbye 2007

This video, of skinny screaming Springsteen, has embedding disabled, check it here.

I need the arbitrary line of a new year right now. Wallpaper your room, Zeno, it's time to persistently start again!

110,000 Results

Just anecdotal feedback:

In Defense of Milk Crates

Oh, you mean that furniture is not "age-appropriate"?

quote:
Wendy Savage is, Linney said, “Just a mess. I know a lot of people like this, sort of arrested development people, who are knocking on 40 and still living like college students with the milk crates that are the coffee tables and that sort of stuff.”

Check it here.

No way is that a coffee table, man. That's my armoire!

I'm Sticking With You

"I'm sticking with you/cause I'm made out of glue"
Velvets

How can both Juno & The Savages use this song on their soundtracks? Well, they can, and do, to great effect,and it's OK with me (not like anybody asked). What great films. It's been a long time. No spoilers here, but I have been a Tamara Jenkins fan since I saw her perform in Baal and then later a performance piece at The Brattle back in 1887. Her vision is crackily funny, serious, real, no shit.

I didn't connect Jason Reitman, director of Juno, to Thank You For Smoking, until after I saw the film. It's not as battle scarred, maybe it's the Song Of Innocence to The Savages' Song Of Experience.

Disgusting fish from China

Looks like Soylent Green is our only hope, check this NYT article out.

Quote:

China produces about 70 percent of the farmed fish in the world, harvested at thousands of giant factory-style farms that extend along the entire eastern seaboard of the country. Farmers mass-produce seafood just offshore, but mostly on land, and in lakes, ponds, rivers and reservoirs, or in huge rectangular fish ponds dug into the earth.

"They'll be a major supplier not just to the U.S., but to the world," said Richard Stavis, the chairman of Stavis Seafoods, an American company that imports Chinese catfish, tilapia and frog legs. China began emerging as a seafood power in the 1990s as rapid economic growth became the top priority in the country. But environmental experts say that headlong pursuit of higher gross domestic product has devastated Chinese water quality and endangered the country's food supply.

In Guangdong Province in southern China, fish contaminated with toxic chemicals like DDT are already creating health problems. "There are heavy metals, mercury and flame retardants in fish samples we've tested," said Ming Hung Wong, a professor of biology at Hong Kong Baptist University. "We've got to stop the pollutants entering the food system." More than half of the rivers in China are too polluted to serve as a source of drinking water. The biggest lakes in the country regularly succumb to harmful algal blooms. Seafood producers are part of the problem, environmental experts say. Enormous aquaculture farms concentrate fish waste, pesticides and veterinary drugs in their ponds and discharge the contaminated water into rivers, streams and coastal areas, often with no treatment.

Oh Shit, To Be Human Again

"People have too many sexy-looking leather date books in their lives and not enough spaced-out moments in stretched-out T-shirts, listening to the magical emanations of other heads." Cintra Wilson on Daniel Johnston, see here.

Here is a Pere Ubu video (via Alan Partlow) that reminded me of that quote.




"Let's watch the whole world just goin slow/Let's watch the whole world goin slow..."

Keep reading Monty

Grownup meditation on Hanukah's violent roots

Here is Chanukah and Adult Faith by Danya Ruttenberg What does it take to celebrate a holiday with such violent roots? (via Jewschool).

My own (facile, off-the-cuff, blogged in short) take:
"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend"-- The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.