There’s No Way This Will Be Good

Will I still watch it? Morbid curiosity compels me to check out the first episode.

Best YouTube comment …

I’m getting “Vyvyan from the Young Ones” vibes from this – and not in a good way.

Someone else made the astute observation that Rotten was always more sardonic than angry. The tone is all wrong.

No Matter How Hard You Try

You’re not going to make Crocs cool. I somehow got subscribed to a ridiculously overpriced MAN’S MAN clothing and apparel site (Huckberry – the name says it all) not too long ago. Their copywriters breathlessly oversell everything, but this one really made me chuckle.

Crocs are the shoes that can bring everyone together—from the creative directors we follow for style tips, to our parents, to our buddy who’s really into bowhunting. Over the past couple years, their unreasonably comfy slip-ons have floated into our everyday footwear rotations and aren’t leaving anytime soon. Which is why we’ve been looking forward to their new batch of near-weightless clogs outfitted for the colder months with all-terrain soles, cozy sherpa linings, and Realtree and Mossy Oak camo.

No.

What’s Your Sign Girl?

Chilton was an underrated guitarist. Feeling nostalgic for the late Nineties today …

From 1999 performance at Memphis’ Cooper-Young Festival. With Ron Easley – bass & background vocals, and Richard Dworkin – drums. Video by David Julian Leonard.

This Is Not As Funny As I Think It Is

In my humble-yet-accurate opinion, Red Dead Redemption 2 is a glitchy fiasco, and its gameplay can generously be described as clunky. I bought into the hype upon its release (How bad can it be with a 97 on Metacritic?) and was almost immediately disappointed. It’s beautiful and open-ended, yes, but I found it boring. And the AI sucks. Anyway, enjoy these deaths or don’t. You prolly won’t, you sumbitch.

25 Or Schulz To 4

The Monkeystador family station wagon, in addition to Beatles ’62-’66, featured a Chicago 8-track tape. Probably Chicago’s Greatest Hits. Enjoy.

”The original recording features an electric guitar solo using a wah-wah pedal by Chicago guitarist Terry Kath, and a lead vocal line in the Aeolian mode.”

The Greatest Internet Comment About Star Wars Ever

Tickets purchased, expectations lowered. Sigh. The Rise of Skywalker is currently hovering at a 53 on Metacritic.

And, submitted for your approval, a rare and wonderfully insightful thought plucked from the Internet. (Birth. Movies. Death., specifically.)

I couldn’t agree more.

If you go back and look at George Lucas’ “Star Wars” from in the context of 1977, it fits right into the canon of New Hollywood greats. But while his contemporaries were pulling from the French New Wave or Italian neorealisim, George Lucas cribbed influences from Kurosawa, Flash Gordon, John Ford, Joseph Campbell. It felt personal, in its own strange way, driven by the point of view of one auteur. As timeless as it seemed, it felt current and relevant to the outside world; its not hard to draw a comparison to the Vietnam war watching Star Wars, fresh on the minds of every American in the late 70s. It took risks, even when it was traveling in cliches and archetypes, and went on to inspire multiple generations of creativity.

But somewhere along the way, Star Wars became just another risk averse IP in our increasingly IP-driven world. As its universe expanded, it ironically put on a cap on the possibilities of what “Star Wars” could mean. It is now Star Wars as product, “market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified until they’re ready for consumption” as Martin Scorsese recently put it. Where once Star Wars drew on the outside world, its now merely about itself and its finite number of themes and ideas. The films that once showed audiences things they’d never seen before is now just another franchise built to deliver exactly what we remember, forever and ever, until we’re all dead.