Picture of the Week

I can't even begin to tell you how good this makes me feel.

It's like the Holy Spirit riding across a ray of sunshine on a winged horse made of baby smiles and Lexapro.

Listening Post

Never underestimate the power of a good anthem.

Here's AM Taxi's Fed Up.

Quote of the Day

"There's no one who wants this over more than I do. I would like my life back."

-- BP CEO Tony Hayward

Really, jackass? You want your life back? You know who else does? Every fisherman along the Louisiana coast, whose means of supporting himself and his family has been strangled by your monumental fuck-up. And seeing as how you're raking in around 4.5 mil a year, I'd say your life's pretty damn good regardless.

(via Cesca)

Listening Post

Back in the early 90s -- when the various members of the Seattle scene ruled the musical landscape, regularly playing on each other's albums and creating incestuous side projects -- a band called Brad released a terrific album called Shame. The members of Brad included Stone Gossard, Regan Hagar of Malfunkshun, and vocalist Shawn Smith, who became the go-to soulful voice for one 90s band after another. (His noteworthy work includes Satchel's masterpiece of melancholy, Suffering, and the Lo-Fi Allstars' remix of Pigeonhed's Battleflag.)

The story behind why the band chose the name Brad is the stuff of rock legend: They apparently wanted to name themselves Shame, but were sued by a guy named Brad Wilson who claimed that he had already taken the name for his own band -- surely you remember them -- and so, out of spite, or just as a really great joke, Gossard and company decided to call themselves "Brad."

Thank God Vevo finally made this clip available for embed, because I've been waiting for it for a very long time. Here's the gorgeous opening track from the debut Brad album -- Buttercup.

Bad Sex

Look, we all know that the cosmo-swilling cougar crowd and the younger women who -- for reasons I'll never fully understand -- aspire to be a part of that one day, will make Sex and the City 2: The Sands of Time a massive success at the box office this weekend. That's the bad news. The good news is that, believe it or not, the movie is apparently so indefensibly bad that it may eventually be known as the singular event that drove a much-needed stake through the heart of these kinds of films -- the female fantasy rom-coms that I've ridiculed ad nauseam around here over the past few years -- and ended their reign of terror in Hollywood. Given that Sex and the City really does stand as the Fairy Godmother (or is it bitchy, Crawford-esque Step Mother?) of this entire genre, if even it sucks harder than Samantha trying to convince herself she's still 25, what hope do those other Carrie-come-lately movies have?

For those of you who will be lucky/smart enough to never suffer through Sex and the City 2, the Huffington Post has compiled some of the best lines from some of the worst reviews for it.

And keep in mind, as of Friday, this movie had a Rotten Tomatoes ranking of just 8%.

"This film is an epic eyesore. It's as if they set out to make a movie that said, 'You're right! We are hideous!'"

-- David Edelstein, New York magazine

"The ugly smell of unexamined privilege hangs over this film like the smoke from cheap incense... Your watch will tell you that a shade less than two and a half hours have elapsed, but you may be shocked at just how much older you feel when the whole thing is over."

-- AO Scott, The New York Times

"The women-too old now to pout, whine and babble about their wet dreams, affluent and successful for reasons that are never clear-are all vain, narcissistic, selfish, superficial and really rather stupid. The actors work hard to perform triage, but they've been playing these roles so long they've grown moss."

-- Rex Reed, The New York Observer

"As tasteless as an Arabian cathouse, as worn-out as your 1998 flip-flops and as hideous as the mom jeans Carrie wears with a belly-baring gingham top, 'Sex and the City 2' is two of the worst movies of the year... Despite its 'Lawrence of Arabia' length, this film -- the Sexless and the Self-Pitying -- is as unfunny and shapeless as another famed desert epic. Just think of it as 'Bitchtar.'"

-- Kyle Smith, The New York Post

"The movie's visual style is arthritic. Director Michael Patrick King covers the sitcom dialogue by dutifully cutting back and forth to whoever is speaking... Carrie narrates the film, providing useful guidelines for those challenged by its intricacies. Sample: 'Later that day, Big and I arrived home.'"

-- Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times

"Thanks to writer-director Michael Patrick King, I now have a fair idea how it might feel to be stoned to death with scented candles."

-- Cliff Doerksen, The Chicago Reader

"I sensed a claustrophobic panic growing at the screening I attended. Like Martin Sheen waking from his uneasy slumber in Apocalypse Now and thinking: 'Shit, I'm still in Saigon,' various members of the audience would emerge from their periodic reveries and mumble out loud: 'Shit, Carrie and her friends and by that token, we the audience, are still in Abu Dhabi.'"

-- Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian UK

"What might I have done wrong, in a past life or in this one, that I deserve to have my eyeballs seared by Sarah Jessica Parker's loony desert-princess getups? ... To gaze upon a couple of amazingly well-groomed camels and realize that they have better hairdos than the human movie stars astride them?"

-- Stephanie Zacharek, (who now inexplicably writes for moveline.com)

"It would have been more merciful for writer-director Michael Patrick King to have rented Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda out to the 'Saw' franchise, or to Rob Zombie, so we could watch them get shot in the head or skinned alive by Arkansas rednecks. Instead of that, we get something that's truly sadistic: the SATC girls as haggard specters, haunted by their freewheeling '90s past and stupefied by the demands of work, marriage and/or motherhood. This bloated, incoherent movie mimics an SATC episode in structure -- vague social relevance at the beginning and the end, conspicuous consumption in the middle -- with virtually none of the wit or panache, and seems devoted to destroying our affection for these characters."

-- Andrew O'Hehir, in the one review you have to read start-to-finish in Salon.com

And my personal favorite:

"If this is what modern womanhood means, then just fucking veil me and sew up all my holes. Good night."

-- Lindy West, Salon.com

Sunday Sacrilege

And then there's this clip that, I promise you, will haunt you every second your head is resting on a pillow:



(via Christian Nightmares)

Mirror, Mirror

You know, I've been debating all week what to do with this little item -- whether I should make it the focus of some long-winded diatribe, do a general point-and-laugh, or maybe just put it out there as a kind of Moment of Zen, considering that it really is open to such a wide variety of comic/ironic interpretation.

The fact is, though, that I couldn't simply leave it alone -- if only because doing so would be undeniably conspicuous, given what you've come to expect from the material on this site.

So I'll just say this: Chances are by now you've heard that last weekend Sarah Palin spoke at a retail real estate convention in Las Vegas. Depending on whom you believe, she either brought down the house with her unmatched skills at giving a sloppy backseat blow-job to the entire notion of unimpeded Randian capitalism, or she plowed the conductor-less Palin Express right into a brick wall by doing what essentially amounted to her usual tightly-scripted "Palin in 2012" stump speech, and not much else. To be honest, it really doesn't matter one way or the other whether Palin scored a hit or a miss with the real estate crowd; the fact remains that the group wanted to hear from Palin -- who, mind you, generally gets six-figures to speak publicly -- to begin with.

What's also worth mentioning, by the way, is that among that crowd was my soon-to-be ex-wife, Jayne. She's the executive assistant to the CEO of the organization which hosted the event, and that means that she was at least tangentially associated with the Palin speaking engagement.

Do I find this kind of funny? Well, in the words of Palin herself: You betcha. Especially considering how much Jayne purports to loathe and stand in diametric political opposition to Palin.

So in the end, I guess I have to look at it this way: A self-described "small town girl," who through sheer luck and no tiny amount of well-disguised ambition managed to ascend to heights far beyond her humble upbringing; a woman who's little more than a compulsively lying opportunist whose amoral narcissism knows no bounds and who will go to any length to further her career and to afford herself the lifestyle she believes she deserves; someone who uses her looks and charm as a weapon and likely had an entire room full of old, wealthy white guys eating out of her hand with nothing more than a wink and a smile -- this person was the center of attention, and even though it probably ate her alive inside, out of decorum and propriety, Jayne couldn't say a thing. She had to remain completely silent.

I can't imagine what that felt like.