The New Boredom

Everybody act like they forgot about Dre.

But that’s no excuse for my 6+ year hiatus from one of America’s best bands: Wilco.

I first got into Wilco my junior year of high school listening to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. As I recall it was one of the few CD’s I purchased based solely on the cover art. See I was pretty dumb with my paychecks back then (and it’s not like I have got much better about that). I would get paid from my shitty bike shop job and head to the 2nd hand record store where I would shuffle through the week’s new inventory of used cd’s. One day I saw those two skyscrapers in sepia staring back at me and the familiar band name clicked. I got the cd and it played on repeat for the next week month.

I listened to all the Wilco I could get my hands on for a while but then strangely, about the time I went to college, I dropped them completely. Maybe I was too busy with the standard dorm room fare of Iron and Wine and getting to the Neutral Milk Hotel party late and making up for lost time there.

In the last month I have steadily rediscovered my love for Wilco. They employ some serious cliches in some of their songs but do so with such genuine interest and passion for music that the cliches seem fresh and renewed.

American music has some pretty deep roots in folk and country but few bands have modernized that ancestry as well as Wilco. I’m really glad I re-stumbled upon what’s left of my Wilco collection and it’s quickly catching up on the play counts of The Black Keys and Lucero.

I’m sorry for forgetting about Wilco. If you can forgive this offense, maybe we can still be friends?

It’s time to come clean with another apology for you all. Transparency is a hot new concept and I want you, the reader, to not feel like I am hiding anything in this vaporous, substance-less blog called The New Boredom.

Here it goes.

I’m Sorry For: initially liking the film Garden State.

Whew, good to get that off the old twelve hair chest.

Now for the explanation. First of all, many of you who know me in 3D are all quite familiar with my ultimate distaste for Zach Braff, headlining man-child and director of Garden State. However, in 2004 I had not really been exposed to him in any quantity (as far as I was concerned, Scrubs didn’t exist). Many things in my life have been initially well received and later hated. Photoshop would be an example of something I liked at first but have long since grown to despise. In the years following my theatrical viewing of Garden State, I have come to know Zach Braff as a role model for all men stuck in a state of arrested development, clinging to an I Don’t Wanna Grow Up attitude that has pervaded my generation. My generation is full of asshole guys that want mommy to make their bed and rely on the safety net built by our ancestors to catch us when we invariably fall while fucking around well into our late 20’s and beyond. Well guess what, generation, that safety net was bullshit and it’s gone. Maybe you’ve accidentally read the news lately, the world economy has shit the bed, that safety net was a myth. Now is a time to take care of business, not ride a wave of false hopes.

The movie had an excellent sound track. This set the tone for the pillaging of the indie scene for soundtrack material for years to come. I act like this is a problem but it’s better than the 90’s in which you were required by federal law to have a god damn Third Eye Blind song in the first 20 minutes of your movie. But that doesn’t give you a free pass to claim that The Shins will change your life. I like The Shins just fine, but if they cause such a commotion that listening to them changes your life then chances are good that you lead an existence about as exciting as a beige chair in the waiting area of the DMV. Simply employing good music to accent your film, doesn’t make it a good film.

Likewise, employing Natalie Portman doesn’t make your movie good. She’s done great stuff over the years from The Professional to Closer and pretty much any straight guy will admit she’s cute. But, like Braff’s man-child persona, Portman’s roll has helped solidify a character type that does no one any good. The overly quirky, ridiculously cute girl next door is a myth that has dumped copious fuel on the fires of man-child guys’ hearts, ultimately setting them up for disastrous love lives that will bring the man-child no satisfaction and leave the normal-quirky, regularly cute girl next door with a broken heart. Even Natalie Portman couldn’t save this movie.

What I once thought were subtle hints and details about Garden State have come to reveal themselves as ham-fisted attempts at nuance. The self reflexivity of Braff’s character being a failed actor in the film is not so much a zany post-modern stab at reality as it is a self fulfilling prophecy. Braff’s character family name is Largeman… as in Large-Man. If that’s subtle, then I’m Batman. It worked over half a century ago for Arthur Miller to call his lead character in Death Of A Salesman Willy Loman, the low-man on the totem pole of the American Dream, but the attempted irony of calling Braff’s character Largeman is about as crafty as performing brain surgery with a hand grenade.

For all its clumsiness, the film is well lit and well shot thanks to a proficient cinematographer. This isn’t much of a compliment though since the same can be said of almost every terrible movie. If the budget is there, it will at least look proficient in terms of technical presentation. Braff taking big hearty bites from the Wes Anderson dish of slow-motion, wide and centered compositions, and overall set/art direction tells me that at least he knows to steal from the best of his peers.

The cinematographer later shot another sappy love story, though one that is actually a good movie- Dan In Real Life. That film was the struggling middle aged guy meets awesome woman and falls in love with antics movie that Ben Stiller vehicles should have been from Meet the Parents to that shit one with Jennifer Aniston to the upcoming sure-to-be-atrocity Little Fockers. Dan In Real Life had a good cast conveying honest to goodness character development in lead roles and in good supporting characters, sappy wholesome goodness combined with a dose of reality, and put it together into something decent that even Dane Cook couldn’t ruin. Garden State plays more like an exercise in seeing how much sad faced Zach Braff you can fit into a film. Apparently not enough because they essentially had to make a sequel: The Last Kiss.

A well played supporting roll by Peter Sarsgaard, a fantastic but completely unfitting cameo by Method Man, Natalie Portman’s cuteness, a good soundtrack, and proficient cinematography just couldn’t keep this catastrophe floating. This stone only skipped a short distance for me before sinking into the abyss of mediocrity. I’m sorry for initially liking Garden State. Please forgive me.

I’d like to start up a new column here at The New Boredom reserved for apologies called, quite uncreatively, I’m Sorry For: in which I’d like to get some figurative, and sometimes frighteningly literal, monkeys off my back. It can certainly be a cathartic release to admit one’s ample flaws, and as part of my ongoing struggle to be a better (or at least less awful) person, I’d like to use this public space to come clean with you readers and indeed, the world.

Today’s apology: I’m sorry that I don’t have a TV. More specifically, I’m sorry that in the past I have boasted or touted my lack of television ownership among friends, family, and worst of all- on social network profiles. A tawdry attempt to make myself seem somehow more cultured or sophisticated, the claim is roughly equivalent to carrying a bubble pipe:

no. not me.

I used to try justifying my supposedly unique and falsely righteous position by telling people, with my nose high in the air, that I “simply didn’t have time for TV,” which has always been a big load of shit. I have plenty of time to sit around a spend hours of time wandering the back alleys of the internet or skimming through unread magazines, surely resulting in a net loss of productivity. I’ve taken countless naps on perfectly nice days. I became a professional trials rider. Yes, I had time indeed.

Somehow the hipster pecker-faced mentality that TV was the source of all our modern evils was a kool-aid that I drank, even though the thought alone of drinking kool-aid makes me want to puke in my lap. Cursing the medium for the content is an offense that no person even remotely influenced by common sense should ever be guilty of.

My parents’ generation was raised on television as well but mostly on less than a half dozen channels. My entire generation was raised on an angry Bruce Banner of TV with dozens, sometimes hundreds of channels pumping out content at our young faces. Like it or not, TV is an integral part of my generation’s identity. A hipster becomes an asshole by choice and even the biggest and most defiant asshole still knows references to television like: Patty Mayonnaise, Mulder and Scully, and Kurt Loader.

While television may be the means of delivery for a staggering amount of trashy and mind numbing programing, it doesn’t make the little box, or now, the thin thingy hanging on the wall, in and of itself- evil. I’ve spent my lifetime sifting through the dirt and have found many jewels that serve as anchors in my memory timeline. I recall music videos all the time that are indicative of my youth (back when MTV still played videos, children born after 1998 won’t know of this fabled time). The Smashing Pumpkins‘ parody of George Mellies’ Voyage to the Moon and that kid spinning down the hill inside of a giant tire. That doll on the grill in Black Hole Sun. All the people coming out of the trunk of Coolio’s car. The little penny hardaway puppets in No Diggity. The high school society rules and soapy dude asses in Popular. This list could go on for hours and have all been absorbed as little facets of my own identity.

Few things have served to bridge generations like tv and thanks to entire networks devoted to re-runs, I am familiar with such cultural icons as Vinny Barbarino and Horseshack, the Fonz, Walter Cronkite, Rudy Huxtable, and Adam West. I can share a Welcome Back, Kotter joke with someone from an older generation the same way that I can share an opinion on a Shakespeare play.

Thank the all powerful Atheismo that a good deal of tv has found its way to the internet. For one, linking drives up traffic to this stupid blog, and for another- I no longer have to own a tv to enjoy tv. I can watch a good deal of really great tv content on my computer now. There’s no excuse to act all high and mighty about not owning a tv now that you can see 30 Rock and Arrested Development online.

I’m sorry that I have blown my own pretentious horn in the past regarding TV. I hope that TV and you all will forgive me.