“Now, now, my good man, this is no time for making enemies.”
—Voltaire, on his deathbed, when asked by a priest to renounce Satan
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From the category archives:
Arts & Culture
Thanks to Spotify I’ve been digging back into the punk and post-punk bands of my youth (and a few I missed along the way). I’ve also be re-learning the myths, reading as much about the time, the music and the people as I can. This image accompanied the Minor Threat’s self-titled first album in 1981, and has since become iconic (Nike even tried to steal it back in 2005). Turns out the photo is of Alec MacKaye, younger brother to Minor Threat front man Ian. I guess it was just a photo somebody took at some D.C. party in 1980 or something. Everything about the photo–the scuffed boots, the shorn head, the tattered trench, the trash in the background–says punk rock. Sort of. While MacKaye looks wasted, Minor Threat were the leaders of the “straight edge” movement, which swept the nation in the early 80s, preaching the clean lifestyle (no booze, no drugs, no sex).
So it leaves one to wonder–was the younger MacKaye not a straight edge? Was the photo set up? Or maybe he was just tired.
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Photo by Noel Vasquez/Getty Images
After his ugly split with NBC last winter, Conan O’Brien hit the road with “The Legally Prohibited From Being Funny On Television Tour,” playing to 33 cities across the United States (and Canada). As is the modern way, the tour was turned into a comedy documentary called Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop, which debuted this weekend at Austin’s SXSW film festival (it also picked up a unique three-platform distribution deal there on Tuesday).
We realize you may be uncertain as to whether to invest your time and effort into the film, which is equal parts comedic showcase, therapy session and 89-minute vanity project. So to help you decide, we reviewed three of the early reviews:
For John DeFore at The Hollywood Reporter, “Can’t Stop is as entertaining as any showbiz doc in recent memory.” Predictably, the reviewer found the off-stage footage more emotionally revealing than the staged antics. Still, the level of gloom he ascribes to O’Brien is probably revealing even to Conan loyalists:
Sublimated via humor or not, the performer is clearly working through some anger. O’Brien comes clean in informal interviews, admitting how furious he is about NBC’s rejection. But angry or not, the nonstop improvisations we see here — as he brainstorms material for the tour, tries to survive meet-and-greets and frets about his performances backstage — are clearly fueled by a kind of manic near-desperation, a sink-or-swim career moment.
Joe Leydon at Variety places more focus on Conan’s stage persona, citing lines, reviewing the performance and noting some of the stars Conan recruited to join him at various stops:
More often than not, O’Brien appears to be having the time of his life onstage — interacting with longtime sidekick Andy Richter, cutting up with guest stars (including Jim Carry, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart), and vigorously and quite capably performing covers of country and rockabilly tunes with his band and two backup singers. He comes off as genuinely surprised — and extremely grateful — that, for the first time in his showbiz career, people actually are paying to see him perform.
Perhaps the closest to a pan comes from blogger Matt Patches at Cinema Blend, who notes that, “The title says it all: [Conan] can’t stop — and it’s to his own dismay.” His advice for deciding on whether to see the film involves knowing where you stand on the great Coco divide of 2010/11:
Depending on how strong your love is for Team Coco, you’ll either find Can’t Stop to be a captivating (and still funny) portrait of Conan emotional roller coaster ride or an uncomfortable window into a comedic hero’s stream of consciousness.
As the old Steve Martin album title has it, “comedy is not pretty!”
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I did a reading last night at KGB Bar, as part of a series called “True Stories” (the theme of the specific reading was “Comedy Night”). Given this, I read a comedic piece. It went well, etc. etc. After the reading the event curators had me and my co-reader (Dave Hill) do a short q-and-a session. At first nobody seemed to get it, but then the audience warmed up and we had some fun. One person–a man in a fedora who I would later learn worked in pubic radio–ask why there were so few outlets for humor writing.
His question stumped me (and Dave). Certainly there is no shortage of comedy or comedic shows or sites that offer humorous videos. And there is The Onion, which is consistently brilliant. But short of McSweeney’s, The Morning News and Shouts & Murmurs, there are very few outlets for humor writing. The back pages of both GQ and Esquire do humor as well, but these are rarities nowadays.
There is no current equivalent to Spy, to Punch, to the National Lampoon. And I don’t know why.
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Chuck Klosterman and Jonathan Franzen get on a train together in Philadelphia…It sounds like the start of a math story problem or a bad joke, but it’s actually the premise of this revealing interview. The piece has many excellent parts that delve head first into the lit-crit fray, but my favorite is Franzen’s indictment of Michiko Kakutani. Sounds about right to me:
“It’s not my responsibility if some people are tone deaf to irony,” he says. “The lead book reviewer for The New York Times [Pulitzer Prize winner Michiko Kakutani] is utterly tone-deaf when it comes to irony. She just can’t hear it. Which you’d think would disqualify her from reviewing books for a blog in Kansas City, let alone The New York Times. But there you go. There’s always going to be a percentage of the populace who doesn’t get irony and will therefore not get 75 percent of good literature.”
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There’s this:
Which is a riff on this (one of the most famous record covers ever):
Which is, in turn, a riff on this (a perfectly lovely photo of the Queen from 1977):
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Sir Tim-Berners Lee’s original proposal for something he called the “hypertext project.”
The memorandum would, of course, be acted upon, eventually growing into the Internet as we know it. Without it you wouldn’t be reading these words. Think about that as you carve into your organic, locally-sourced turkey tomorrow.
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50 Cent’s “In Da Club” translated into the Queen’s English (via Kottke)
When I arrive in my Mercedes-Benz
I find the nightclub is full of actors
Basically, a lot of different people want to have sex with me
And I mean A LOT
I fear change
Xzibit is preparing a marijuana cigarette
I am very good at interpretive dance
Gunshot injuries have had no effect on my gait
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“I am particularly glad to no longer be asked when the Beatles are coming to iTunes.”
-Ringo Starr, from the Apple press release
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“Pain or damage don’t end the world, or despair, or fuckin’ beatings. The world ends when you’re dead. Until then, you got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man — and give some back.”
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