Pop Culture Lunch Box Gains Syndication at Yahoo!

Hi Pop Culture Lunch Box readers. Exciting news: As of today, Yahoo! is now picking up some of my blog posts, so please GO HERE and browse some of my early contributions to bump up my hit count, leave comments, and basically show the love so that my writing picks up steam on the Yahoo! Contributor Network.


Thanks for the help, and for continuing reading. My blog continues to grow, and readership is up over 3,300 hits per month, so I'm gratified that so many people are enjoying!

Paul

Will Self Asks Whether to Live Alone or Together

"Flytopia" is the second short story I've delved into from the Will Self collection called The Undivided Self. And what a pleasure.

The story opens with Jonathan Priestly, "an indexer by profession," playing pool against himself in a bar. His girlfriend, Joy, has been visiting the city for several days away from their country town.

Jonathan's house is oddly filled with all kinds of flies and bugs. Sometimes they are worse than others. But after his pool-playing evening, he wakes up, stumbles into the kitchen, looks down into the sink, and finds a group of silverfish lining up to spell the words "welcome to flytopia" to him.

They continue to communicate with him by forming large packs to spell sentences, and they note that flytopia is a place where humans and insects live in harmony. Occasionally, the bugs misspell words and need to be reminded to rearrange themselves to be grammatically correct.

The flies begin the attempt at harmony by asking Jonathan to remove the fly-paper he has laid out. He is contemplating such a concession when he notices his bed has been spotlessly made. Mites flow off the pillows to make the bed even more perfect. Later, various kinds of bugs clean his toilet, give him a facial, and cleanse his entire body. Their next request is whether they can have the entire second bedroom to themselves.

Jonathan eventually decides to give them the second bedroom. He also begins to feed them meat, and when they ask him for "more meat," he replies that he'll think about it. Suddenly, Joy's cab pulls up out front. Jonathan is so happy in his new living situation that he is revolted by the sound of her voice. She asks him for a fiver for the cab and he tells her there might be a pile of change in the spare bedroom. She enters the room, Jonathan hears the "oppressive, giant, fluttering hum, as she is engulfed, then he rises and and goes out to pay the cab."

Pretty sicko, but still a very interesting and quirky take on the eternal conflict for people on whether to live alone in harmony with themselves and nature or to have other humans in their intimate spaces.

****1/2 out of ***** stars

Classic Reads: Watership Down Rabbits Jump Into Action

Find the other parts of this ongoing series of "Classic Reads" in the Books section.

When Hazel, the leader of a warren of rabbits, and his little brother Fiver arrive at a field of blood, Fiver predicts an apocalypse and that they need to flee. They decide to save as many of their fellow rabbits as they can, and 10 of them are able to escape.


This group's adventure entails avoiding a farmer who is using the most plump bunnies for lard in his food. They travel for two days and reach a hillside known as "Watership Down." Fiver's prophesy of doom ended up being correct, as their old home is gassed soon after they leave.


The rabbits set out on a crusade to help other animals. They care for a black gull until its injured wing heals. They free penned rabbits. Hazel gets shot but survives in a drain until Fiver rescues him. Later on, Hazel almost gets killed by a cat.


Watership Down is no doubt a classic and is Penguin Books' best-selling novel ever. Written in 1972 by Richard Adams, the author never really wrote any other classic books. And this one is still not at the level of Animal Farm, George Orwell's superior and similarly-themed tale of animals rebelling against humans.

Blogwatch: Happy Valentine's Day (From Some Interesting Characters)

There are a lot of funny tributes to love out there, and most of the best ones are at the Awkward Family Photos site. This is a must-follow site on the web.

Controlling Matt Damon Through The Adjustment Bureau

The Adjustment Bureau's weakness may be that it doesn't make us care enough about the two main characters in love. However, we know that Matt Damon and Emily Blunt need each other's love more than they respectively need the presidency of the United States and dancing glory.

That adds just enough of the human touch to the techie action that attempts to swoon these two lovebirds apart from each other. And the doors that lead the couple throughout different parts of New York City and the clues Anthony Mackie, one of the members of the Adjustment Bureau's team, gives to Damon along the way make for a very cool, suspenseful, and mysterious film that is well worth a couple of hours of your time.

The movie is loosely based on "Adjustment Team," a short story by one of my favorite sci-fi writers, Philip K. Dick. Damon plays a hot politician rather than the real-estate salesman portrayed in the original story. The film's ending is not quite as fulfilling as I had hoped, but the intriguing premise develops nicely throughout and we end up satisfyingly learning enough about how certain people are being controlled by powerful forces.

**** out of ***** stars

Hannah and Her Sisters Provides a Glimpse of Woody Allen's Future Direction

One of those Woody Allen movies that somehow escaped my notice until this weekend is 1986's Hannah and Her Sisters. And while I have to say that it doesn't quite make my list of the top 21 Woody Allen movies, it takes a valuable look at a strange post-disco-swinger, hungover-from-AIDS era and highlights typically great acting from Woody himself, Michael Caine, Mia Farrow, and many others.

Farrow is Hannah, who has sons with an impotent Allen, but they've divorced, and Farrow has remarried Caine. They love each other, but Caine has an affair with Hannah's sister. Allen later gets married to Hannah's other sister. That's really all you need to know about the story. The rest is completed nicely by the usual talkiness injected into Woody's movies.

This is a period when he seemed to be moving from more humor to more drama. The excessive drama of this one is admittedly a little off-putting, and I think the best parts remain Allen's scenes, where his neurotic humor is front and center.

Interestingly, Hannah and Her Sisters was Woody's biggest box-office success until last year's Midnight in Paris. It was nominated for best picture, and Caine and Diane Wiest took home the rare double-Academy Awards for best supporting actor and actress. At the time of its release, Roger Ebert called it Allen's best movie.

***1/2 out of ***** stars

Muscle-Car-Heads Start Your Engines: Van Halen Returns to Your Boom Box

I was not too impressed with my first listen of the new Van Halen album, A Different Kind of Truth, but hey, it represents the landmark reunion of Diamond David Lee Roth and the recently wayward Van Halen boys. This is a truly significant moment in pop-culture history, so I'll undoubtedly give it more spins before deciding not to buy it. 

Incidentally, allmusic.com claims this is the first 4-star-plus release from Van Hagar since 1986's 5150, so there's that. There's also this: my enthusiastic nut of a VH-fan friend, D. Mathews, offered these insights. He's already informed me he's getting tickets to see them live yet again.

-------------

I picked up the new Van Halen disc:

It is waaaaaaaay better than I thought.

Not only does it evoke great memories of road parties and keggers, cruising in the ‘Stang, air guitars in ET’s basement, riding in the Barton’s and King’s station wagons holding a boom box listening to Diver Down, and plenty o’ other good memories. But the simple fact is ... it's also quite good. The bar was set high for these guys and how it would be received, and dang if they didn’t just about clear it with this CD. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it's cheesy good blues swagger glitzy guitar god rock.

It's more early VH than later ... heavier, faster, more prog. It's got poppy sweet moments, but it's muscle-car madness at its core. Watch your speed while driving.

Bottoms Up indeed!

Yours in rock,

DM

Jeff Mangum Soars Into U Street's Lincoln Theater

My brother claims Jeff Mangum's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (by his band Neutral Milk Hotel) is the greatest album of the 1990s, I would only agree to so much as it being in the top 10. Regardless, it meant my brother was dead-set on paying big bucks to get front-row center seats at the Lincoln Theater on U Street in DC on Saturday night. It also meant he needed to drag me with him. It was worth every penny. This show was a *****-star treat.

And my friend Fran Chung wrote such a great DCist review for the Friday show that I'm reprinting it here. The only difference between the Friday and Saturday shows seems to have been that the show I saw Saturday featured more singing along by the audience, which was as into it as I can imagine a critical mass of well-mannered hipsters ever could be.

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Having bypassed D.C. in favor of Baltimore last September, Jeff Mangum finally made his long-awaited return to a local stage on Friday night, playing his first show in the District since 1998, the year his former bandNeutral Milk Hotel released its incomparable magnum opus, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Kicking off a sold-out two-night stand at the Lincoln Theatre, the reclusive singer-songwriter delivered a memorable, mostly solo-acoustic performance, regaling an adoring (though surprisingly reserved) crowd with some of the most beloved songs in the indie-rock canon.

After erstwhile Neutral Milk Hotel member Julian Koster’s The Music Tapes warmed up the crowd with a whimsically entertaining set of art-pop/prop-comedy, Mangum took the stage and threw his distinctively resonant voice headlong into “Two-Headed Boy, Part Two,” Aeroplane’s wistful final track. As the seated audience applauded warmly, Mangum announced that “it’s okay to sing along,” though only a smattering of fans took up his offer during the ensuing acoustic rendition of “Holland, 1945,” an evocative ode to Anne Frank which sounded a bit subdued without the overdriven guitars and propulsive drumming that helped give the studio recording its ecstatic kick.

Though much of the set list was rightly devoted to songs from the richly allusive Aeroplane, Mangum also played a few selections from Neutral Milk Hotel’s 1996 album, On Avery Island, including the choppy “Gardenhead / Leave Me Alone,” adding a couple of deeper cuts such as “Engine,” to which Koster contributed touches of ethereal singing saw. The post-Aeroplane track “Little Birds” was a stunning mid-set highpoint, Mangum’s vocals sonorously enveloping the theatre as he chanted haunting, dirge-like melodies, his words conjuring a harrowing, surrealistic tale of child abuse.

From there, the performance began to pick up momentum as Mangum worked through a sequence of his most indelible compositions. The infectious “The King of Carrot Flowers, Part One” segued directly into the effusive opening incantation -- “I love you, Jesus Christ! / Jesus Christ, I love you!” -- of “The King of Carrot Flowers, Parts Two and Three.” Mangum gamely hummed the song’s rousing trumpet line, and while his staccato acoustic strumming couldn’t generate the careening, fuzzed-out exhilaration of the album track, it did enough to get a few intrepid fans dancing in the aisles. Much of the crowd clapped along to “Ghost” and added their (still timid) voices to “Two-Headed Boy” but listened in rapt silence during the plaintively magisterial “Oh, Comely,” Mangum giving his most poignant vocal performance of the evening.

Capping the main set (and showing where Beirut’s Zach Condon probably learned a few of his tricks), Koster and the rest of The Music Tapes paraded out to add trumpet, marching drum, and accordion to Aeroplane’s Balkan-flavored “The Fool,” drawing a standing ovation from the suddenly invigorated crowd. Koster stayed on during the encore, coaxing some theremin-like atmospherics from his saw during “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea,” Mangum strumming jangly chords as he declaimed joyfully existentialist lyrics about “how strange it is to be anything at all.” The majority of the audience refused to leave after that stirring anthem, cheering ardently for a second encore which came in the form of On Avery Island’s spirited “Song Against Sex.”

It was probably the most cathartic and synergistic moment of a performance that, while not quite sublime, ultimately held its own in the face of years of fervent expectation. 

The Top 10 Jason Bateman Movies

Who would have thought that all those episodes of Little House on the Prairie, Silver Spoons, and The Hogan Family would have led to something great. But that's just the case with Jason Bateman. I'll go ahead and say it: he's my favorite comedy actor. Take a look at this slate of powerhouse laugh-a-thons:

10. The Change-Up (2011)
09. Horrible Bosses (2011)
08. The Switch (2010)
07. Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (2004)
06. Couples Retreat (2009)
05. Extract (2009)
04. Up in the Air (2009)
03. Juno (2007)
02. Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)
01. Arrested Development (I know, it's a TV show, but it's unbeatable, and supposedly there will be a movie version someday)

What do you think?

Bateman and Reynolds Surprisingly Bring the Laughs in The Change-Up

I went into watching The Change-Up with surprisingly low expectations. You know me: I love stupid comedies, especially the ones starring Jason Bateman.

But this one looked to be so bad and unoriginal. And although it is indeed pretty stupid, it's much more aligned with the "bromance" or even "chick-flick" genre than is usually expected of these kinds of silly productions.

Bateman plays a family man who has been too focused on his high-powered lawyer job. He sleepwalks through the abuse that his baby twins shoot at him. Into his mouth, to be semi-specific.

Ryan Reynolds (Adventureland, The Proposal, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle), like Bateman, is lovable and funny. He plays a stoned playboy. The plot of the two of them switching bodies is admittedly lame, but these two work well as a comedy team, and The Change-Up proves to be a great option for a brain-dead Netflix night of laughs.

***1/2 out of ***** stars