Like oh my god

It's not dating well, the homophobia of Moon's discourse about her English teacher, "Mr. Bufu," but it makes me laugh anyway.

Police action

Time to introduce a new series to Back With Interest. It's called Stars on 45. It features cover art from seven-inch vinyl records I collected in, oh, 1988, mostly. To ring in the new year, I give you this obscurity.

To everything there is a season dept.

Impressed by Mariah Carey's unsmiling performance as a social worker in Precious, I asked Ereck as we left the theater, "NOW can we see Glitter?" (Answer: Yes.)

The last roundup

Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a fitting swansong for Heath Ledger. Read my review.

Dialog

K: Do you like [Paul Simon's] Graceland?
E: I think I did, but --
K: -- it came to seem hopelessly bourgeois?
E: Yes.
K: That's why I like it.

Good word

"Tom Carson got [Gina] Arnold's goat when he pointed out, in the wake of 1986's putatively progressive Lifes Rich Pageant, what seems undeniable -- that R.E.M.'s 'tendentious appeals to a cloudily glorious past' and 'wishful confusion of cultural might-have-beens with historical truth' were 'the emotional syntax of Reaganism, pure and simple.' Not that R.E.M. were Reaganites, of course (you knew that, right?) -- just that they didn't escape Reaganism's cultural climate. Fans of both band and pol shared the habit of closing their rapidly moving eyes and wishing stuff would go away, not to mention a disdain for the moral weaklings on the other side of the fence."

-- Robert Christgau

Pensée

Something struck me last night as I watched Hannah Montana: The Movie, a Walt Disney Pictures picture. There are two scenes involving carnival rides. On the one hand that seems very Disney, since Disney is all about rides. On the other hand, Walt Disney conceived his theme parks as an orderly, controlled alternative to old-style amusement parks and their carnival rides.