Indie Pedant's Day

This is that thing I do where I regurgitate a bunch of thoughts and reflections from the past week or so..

In the pop culture acquisitions, I've added Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day, which is huge. I noticed it was only $7 on Amazon. They must be blowing it out. I also ordered the out-of-print Robocop Criterion Edition from an Amazon seller.

Instead of watching that, however, this week I finished up The Prisoner! It's taken me about three weeks or so, during a really busy time of the year where I've been bringing work home. It's been kind of a reward. I really loved the series and agree it was ahead of its time and pretty revolutionary, and certainly influential. McGoohan is a great anti-hero. My pal ADD, a longtime devotee, was very curious about what I thought of the finale, and I liked it fine. It's a glorious mess and gets kitschy where the rest of the series didn't very often, but I thought overall McGoohan did a great job with it, resolving things but really opening the series up for multiple interpretations. The theme of the series of course was the struggle for individuality and maintaining one's identity, so it really wouldn't have made sense to just answer all the questions the show had kept going over its previous episodes, right? Better to raise more questions. I think McGoohan had a strong vision but also, like many artists, was smart enough to know what to leave out, what to leave ambiguous, and what to include on gut instinct without consciously understanding why it fit. It's nerds who need answers.

Rich Johnston invited me to join LinkedIn, which I did, without really knowing what it's about. Some sort of networking thing. It also let me know that there's one coworker already joined. She's not one of my favorite people, but I asked her what it was about and she said she'd never used it, so I guess she just signs up for things like I do. For someone in marketing, her replies to me are always terse and dull. Maybe she just doesn't like me.

The new Beastie Boys cd, The Mix-Up, is a pretty tasty collection of instrumentals. That Check Your Head period where they were playing these kinds of jams is one of my favorites of theirs, much moreso than the electronic direction they went in on the past two discs, so this is fun even without the rhymes.

Finally watched the Mike Judge film, Idiocracy, with Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph. I actually wanted to watch Ozu's Floating Weeds, which I just bought, but I've had the same Netflix discs sitting here for a month and I felt I needed to blow one out. Idiocracy is funny if crude (the crudeness of the future is the point, really) and the film deserved a better fate.

I also like the new Loudon Wainwright III cd, Strange Weirdos, which is sort of the soundtrack to Knocked Up but the songs in the movie are instrumental versions. Good stuff, very warm and smart and melodic, and with some help from near-geniuses Richard Thompson and Van Dyke Parks.

I'm not ashamed to say one of my favorite songs is Lulu's "To Sir With Love" and I'd probably sing it karaoke with a couple drinks.

Upcoming cds to watch for: The Chemical Brothers' We Are The Night (bonus tracks on the iTunes version) and Interpol's...I forget what the title of that one is. I have been listening to the new White Stripes and it's good, but hasn't quite grabbed me like Elephant did. I listen to LCD Soundsystem's The Sound of Silver a lot, though.

Off to do a couple reviews