The Week in Yeah #3: Reign of Terror.

The Week in Yeah is Emerald Miasma's weekly round-up of the good, the bad, and the incomprehensible of pop culture, the world at large, and life in general, as seen by me.

-

Football season is nigh upon us. This is my secular Christmas (or insert your particular denomination's festivities here), and I get gifts for 19 weeks. What did I do to deserve such an embarrassment of riches? Now, to be fair, as a Browns fan it's more like 4 weeks of riches, but its riches nonetheless. I love football. It's not the purest sport by any stretch of the imagination (and I mean that in a structural sense, not a moral one. Even though its definitely not the morally purest either), but its so much fun to watch. This obviously leaves me highly conflicted over its current state. All the news about CTE came to a head today as a settlement was reached to award former players (4500 of them) with $765 million in restitution. It's more than sad, and obviously not enough. Jim McMahon today is horrifying, and anyone that has heard Bernie Kosar announce a Browns game can tell you how tragic brain injuries are. But I am part of the problem (once again), because I'm not going to stop watching. I'm not a good person, but I do love football.

So, football is my vice. It's been that way long before the moral ambiguity was a factor. It has led me to seek out extremes to satiate my gridiron desires. Namely the worst extreme: Fantasy Football. The fastest way to alienate friends and family breaks down like this:

1. Fantasy Football

2. Risk on PSN

3. Anime

4. Showing Pictures of Your Relatives

5. Hitting Them With Folding Chairs, Bret Hart Style

I have a friend. He is one of the nicest people I know. He is in my league. Therefore, HE IS MY NEMESIS. My brother joined my league this year. We are no longer blood. He has AP, and I had to draft him for him as he has a real job. This is not acceptable. There are no 'FRIENDS' in fantasy football. There are no 'BROTHERS'. There is only you. You. The magnificent bastard that will hoist the fucking chalice of the gods by season's end. That is if RG3's fucking knee doesn't crumple under the shellacked carpet squares that constitute FedEx Field. One can only pray.

Podcast News! The Long Shot Podcast ended their sixth season, and lose rising star Eddie Pepitone in the process. I love Eddie Pepitone, so the news is bad enough, but according to the crew it may be the end of the show altogether. That's not sad. That's a goddamn tragedy. Sean Conroy is one of the best improvisers in the world and one of the best hosts in the medium. Amber Kenny is a bubbly, hilarious treasure whose saccharine nature belies the fact that she  has the wit and confidence to stand eye-to-eye with two of the most intense figures in comedy today. And Jaime Flam. Oh, sweet Jaime. The seemingly hapless, oft-scorned comedy booker with a head full of dreams and a heart big enough for all the ladies of L.A. The podcast world would be at a severe loss if The LoShoPo decided to fold up shop.

Also on the podcast tip (but don't tell Scarpling that), The Best Show of WFMU has begun doing sound collages based around the Suicide classic 'Frankie Teardrop'. It's basically one of the greatest things to ever be put out over the radio. Using the tense, electronic hum of 'Frankie Teardrop' as a base, Tom Scharpling has made insane collages over the past several weeks. Here's just a few of the clips he's incorporated into his collages:

- A live recording of Pigpen from The Grateful Dead

- James Franco in 'Spring Breakers'

- Chuck Woolery selling catheters and arthritis cream

- Andrew Dice Clay talking to Tom Green

- Andrew Dice Clay from CD 2 of 'The Day the Laughter Died'

- Kelsey Grammer falling of a stage

- Seth Green on Marc Maron's 'WTF' podcast

- Michael Richards' apology on Letterman

- The word 'SOME' from Smash Mouth's 'All-Star'

- Aimee Mann's song 'One'

- AP Mike doing 'Dennis'

There's many more, and hopefully he'll continue this for quite a while.

Music! Not much this week. Ghostface Killah and Adrian Younge's Twelve Reasons to Die is excellent, but you knew that already. It's the man behind the Black Dynamite soundtrack and Tony Fucking Starks. It would take a concerted effort to make it anything but awesome. Deap Vally is getting panned pretty bad right now, but I really enjoy their new album. Yeah, they sound like the White Stripes, Black Keys, Heart etc. Who cares? They're fun like those bands too. Stripped-down girl rock? Yep.

The Week in Yeah #2: Thieving Misogyists and Fast Cars.

The Week in Yeah is Emerald Miasma's weekly round-up of the good, the bad, and the incomprehensible of pop culture, the world at large, and life in general, as seen by me.

So, Robin Thicke is now apparently a thing. Great. Awesome. Just what I wanted. The son of an ungodly wealthy man that made his bones being the dad on 'Growing Pains' is now one of the most important musicians in the world. I hear 'Blurred Lines' everywhere, and it makes me uncomfortable. A lot has been said about the song's misogynist bent, and I tend to agree mostly due to the idea that a song uses the term 'domesticate' to describe a woman. Oh, and the insanely demeaning video, lets not bury the lead I suppose. I'm not the biggest champion of women's rights, but I can pretty definitively say that any video where naked women have cars ramping around on their asses, have some dude blow smoke in their faces, and get chased around with comically big syringes (and indeed, it is quite comedic in its oversizedness) over a backdrop of mylar balloons spelling "Robin Thicke has a big dick" is pretty firmly in the misogynist camp.

-
Robin Thicke is also a thief according to some (OK, many if you count internet commenters). It seems that the beat to 'Blurred Lines' is pretty similar to the beat to the Marvin Gaye song 'Got to Give it Up'. As well as the Funkadelic song 'Sexy Ways'. Bridgeport Music, the rights owners of both songs thinks that they're so similar that its threatened to sue for infringement. This led Thicke, Pharrell Williams, and T.I. to sue the rights owners preemptively to prevent further litigation on 'Blurred Lines'. Now, at first I thought that he totally ripped off 'Got to Give it Up'. But as I kept listening, I don't see it as theft. Too many differences. Its one notch above the 'Ice Ice Baby'/'Under Pressure' comparison. Now, is it wildly unoriginal? Of course. As for 'Sexy Ways', George Clinton says it isn't the same, and he would know better than most. The whole thing is just gross, and it makes me angry that I have to side with Thicke on something he clearly instigated by writing an unoriginal song.
-
On to movies. I finally saw Antichrist after years of putting it off. Its obviously a very pretty film that is well done, graphic and unsettling. That's kind of the rub on it. Beyond that, I'm still not clear on what I'm supposed to take away from the film. To keep on the topic of misogyny (and don't I just love doing that), I can easily see why someone would have a misogynist interpretation of this film. Charlotte Gainsbourg is making Willem Dafoe jizz blood by crushing his balls with a rock. I, like most men, am anti-dick crushing. Put it on my picket sign: 'No Dick-Crushing'. She also states that its in a woman's nature to be evil and anchors him to a grindstone so he CAN'T LEAVE (subtle). All very valid reasons to call this movie misogynistic. But I don't know if I see it that way. I mean, Willem Dafoe is pretty much a dick in this movie, and not the crushed kind, but the kind that would take a grieving mother off medication, assign himself as her new therapist and throw her into SEVERE immersion therapy by force. Her child fell to his death while they were fucking in the shower. That's like 30 years of therapy or something. Now Sigmund Fucking Freud over here wants her to lie down in tall grass (probably riddled with Lyme Disease ridden ticks) and jump in fucking creeks. DICK MOVE, BRO. AAAAAND when his improbable therapy actually seems to have worked, he just kind of brushes it off like it wasn't THE BIGGEST DEAL IN THAT WOMAN'S LIFE. Mix in the weird research she was doing on witch trials or whatever and some manner of haunted woods and sure she's going to go insane. In the end, I can understand calling the film misogynistic, but I think its more of an indictment on men. Goddamn complex movies making me think and shit. WHERE ARE THE FUCKIN' CAR CHASES, LARS? Also, CHAOS REIGNS.

-
Speaking of car chases (and on a much lighter note), I watched the original Gone in Sixty Seconds recently, and I HIGHLY recommend seeing it. No plot. Fuck a plot. That shit weighed down the remake. No backstory either really. All you need to know is that a dude needs 48 super expensive cars in five days, so he hires a group of car thieves/insurance defrauders to steal those cars. Who is this dude? Why does he need them? Not sure. Don't care. Doesn't matter. They manage to steal all the cars except a yellow 1973 Ford Mustang. Unfortunately, our main thief (named MAINDRIAN 'VICINSKI' PACE. Now that's a fucking name, bro.) gets caught stealing the last car. This leads to a THIRTY-FOUR MINUTE CAR CHASE. So great. The director/star/stunt coordinator of the film is a man named H.B. Halicki, one of Hollywood's greatest lunatics. Halicki had his own auto body shop at 17 and then parlayed that into a salvage yard at 21. After achieving so much, he just kind of decided to make a movie, and 'Gone in Sixty Seconds' was born. Halicki insisted on doing all the batshit stunts in this film and his subsequent films. In fact, he compacted 10 vertebrae doing the climactic stunt of this movie, and eventually died doing a stunt for the sequel. The sequel went unfinished, but was eventually released by his widow. The sequel also features THIS.


Dope.
-
MUSIC! I'd say its fair everyone knows about Run the Jewels at this point. The El-P and Killer Mike project has become an odds on favorite as rap album of the year, and I can't really argue. As good as Czarface, Durag Dynasty and several other raps albums this year are, this is simply a cut above. Its El-P and Killer Mike at their best. Dethscalator is a band on the excellent Riot Season Records that just released their newest album "Racial Golf Course No Bitches". Like most of Riot Seasons releases, this is a heavy, noisy record. There's a big Jesus Lizard influence here, along with some Mindflayer and Gunslingers thrown in as well. No one's been able to make 8-Bit music work for them as well as Anamanaguchi has. Straight 8-Bit projects don't have enough depth (pardon the pun) to make them more viable to the general public, bands like The Depreciation Guild have tried integrating the genre into their work to varying levels of success, but Anamanaguchi is just so damn good at crafting melody out of old consoles. This is an excellent follow up to their 'Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World: The Game OST' and a must own for any chiptune fan. Finally, an album I have been listening to a lot that's not from this year. One of the weirdest albums made in recent memory was the soundtrack that accompanied Teen Mom Farrah Abraham's 'My Teenage Dream Ended'. There have been a lot of miscues in this girl's life (sadly, almost all of them recorded for posterity), and this is often pointed to as the biggest of them all. Well, those that realize that it happened say that. Its seriously hard to find this album anymore as its been stricken from her already tarnished record. Critics of this album call it laughably awful, and empirically yes the album is technically a mess. Her voice is so over-autotuned that it sounds like she's drowning in pixels. That said, I think that works to the album's advantage. This album plays like a deep therapy session. She's a confused single mother that most likely didn't realize what she was opening herself up to by going on MTV. Her child's father is dead as well, which can't help matters. In other words, she's got a lot of shit to unpack and she kind of did it on this record. 'My Teenage Dream Ended' is uncomfortably honest, which is why I don't have a hard time comparing this album to other works of outsider music like Daniel Johnston. the offer to do an album may have been presented for cynical, money-making reasons, but Abraham kind of fucked everyone on that and made something completely honest and unmarketable. Good for her.
-

The Week in Yeah #1: Throw Yrself Off the Fuckin' Balcony.

The Week in Yeah is Emerald Miasma's weekly round-up of the good, the bad, and the incomprehensible of pop culture, the world at large, and life in general, as seen by me.

 

 Breaking Bad returned yesterday for the back half of its final season, and errrbody's freaking the fuck out about it. The show has become the most important thing for white people to talk about since that one Jason Mraz album. I am willfully behind on the show because I don't think its nearly as world-beating as everyone else does. Its a solid show and its good to see Bob Odenkirk doing things, but that show relies on a Magonlia-esque fuckton of coincidences to get to where it needs to go. That Season 2 finale? Fuck Off. For a show that prides itself in gritty realism, it sure drops the ball HARD sometimes. Also, the venerable duo of Tom Scharpling and Mike Lisk pointed out that Walt and Jesse have the relationship of Moe and Curly about 70% of the time, minus the head-bonking. I'll watch it eventually, but not before I get caught up on the giant stack of movies I haven't watched that taunts me every day.
-
I have been re-watching Deadwood. Goddammit I love Deadwood. You should watch Deadwood, that is if you're MAN ENOUGH TO HANDLE DEADWOOD. Deadwood isn't for the faint of heart. Its an onslaught of dense, overly poetic, intensely vile dialogue interspersed with scenes of extreme violence, dirty, oft-malformed characters and DRINKING. There's so much goddamn drinking in Deadwood that it would kill the entire staff of Sterling Cooper in a matter of hours. Its also one of the last shows without an anti-hero lead that I can remember. Seth Bullock, while fiery in temperament, is a truly just man that suffers often for the greater good of the camp. I know that the anti-hero ideal is a reactionary movement brought on by writers wanting to show shades of gray in today's world, which seems to be composed of nothing but. I guess I kind of miss the balance of having an honorable hero though, because there's really none of them left on TV. Also, Al Swerengen. The show has Al Swerengen. That's enough right there.
-

-
Its become increasingly harder for an older movie to sneak up on me and knock me the fuck over.
I've seen a lot of the classics of 'midnight' cinema, and I feel like I know the rest at least by reputation. Of course, this can be difficult when the movie in question has been buried away in secrecy for over two decades with no real wide release. That's where Miami Connection was since 1988, forgotten with no distribution. But recently the folks in charge over at the famed Alamo Drafthouse not only began screening the film at their theatres, but released the film on Blu-Ray. Thank God for that, because my life would be significantly worse without this movie in it. Florida is in chaos (well, more chaos than usual) in the late 80's. Miami's drug trade is under siege from a biker backed cadre of ninjas that can easily dispatch even the most well-armed thugs. Yeah, think about that. A BIKER/NINJA SUPERGANG. Who could possibly stop them? You guessed it, Frank Stallone. No, wait, no. Its a Tae-Kwon-Do themed band called Dragon Sound. Sure, why the fuck not? They're to clean up the streets with Tae-Kwon-Do, rock and the power of friendship, and do it while enduring the rigors of life at The University of Central Florida. For a movie that gets ripped for being incompetent and cheesy, this film does an excellent job at portraying the various cultures of late 80's Florida. The movie is a beautiful assortment of Korean, Biker, Fat Redneck, and Gay culture, and while I'm pretty sure the Gay aspect of this movie was not intended, it certainly shines through. This isn't camp though. Far from it. The film is dense with action, which is done incredibly well. The dialogue is silly, but its strangely endearing. Its one of the least cynical action movies of its time. The central message of the film is that if you believe in yourself and you believe in your friends, then you can do anything. Even take down a massive drug ring ran by bikers and ninjas.
-


-
I watched Spring Breakers as well, and damn its good. Harmony Korine replaced fluorescent lighting for dayglo and neon and cast Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens instead of Chole Sevigny? Yeah, I'm on board. James Franco as Riff Raff is just icing. Its worth it just to see Franco's "Look at My Shit!" monologue. I hope someday that it ends up along side "Measure for Measure" in famous acting monologues.
-
Before Wilson Yip directed Ip Man, perhaps the most well-regarded kung-fu movie of the 2000s, he directed Biozombie. I've wanted to see this for some time now, and it was not god awful to my surprise. In a chemical weapons demo gone bad, a man flees from a monstrous zombie only to be hit by two dudes that work at a mall's bootleg DVD stand. Fearing they killed him, the two load him into their trunk, but not before making him drink the soda he was carrying to try and revive him. Unfortunately, it wasn't soda, but rather the reanimation agent from the test disguised as a soda can. They drive back to the mall, and then... CHAOS! Its pretty solid for an Asian zombie movie, which are almost all fucking unwatchable, with the noted exceptions of Wild Zero (RAD!) and Stacy (FUCKED!). Well worth a watch.
-
Finally, I also watched House (or Hausu) on Criterion Blu-Ray. Psycho-sexual Horror-drama as done by Hanna-Barbara? Yeah, I'm down. I was down years before you asked the question.
-
MUSIC! Lots of music to recommend this week. I've mostly been listening to 2013 releases, and its shaping up to be a pretty great year in music. First off, CZARFACE. 7L & Esoteric teamed up with Inspectah Deck for some comic book mischief. Dope, obviously. The new Robedoor 'Primal Sphere' is definitely the most accessible of his releases, and is also one of his best. Now, when I say accessible, I mean that it has coherent drumming to accompany the intense drone. Its similar to 'Bermuda Drain' by Prurient in that it seems to mark a new, incredible chapter in Robedoor's discography. 'Total Nite' by Merchandise is a great gothic release of swirling dark energy. Kind of half way between Soft Kill and Clockcleaner. Pretty solid. Finally, Boris' 'Praparat' is something like the 25th release by these guys. Its bound to be relegated into the same category as their Dronevil/Vein/Thing That Solomon Overlooked releases, which is to say soon forgotten, but totally awesome.
-