It's Bad News

One of the nice things about my building is that we get to see the security feed from the lobby as a channel on our cable line up, and they play NPR over it, so I can listen to This American Life without having to own a radio, sparing me from ever accidentally tuning into a boisterous, pseudo-authoritative morning DJ humouring some C-rate porn star's breathy stories of her wild life, all while his sidekick laughs that same exact laugh that all radio sidekicks laugh in every market in the country (it's terrifying, like there's a clone army of small little men with pony tails, who just cackle at anything. "Would you like onions on that sir?" "Ha-ha!" "Sir please" "Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha..." "Please sir, there are children present"). One of the perks of this is that one night, as I was watching the police taser and restrain one of our students, high on angel dust, after he had started broadly attacking guests at a party, I realized that I was listening to Greg Kot, author of the Wilco biography Learning How To Die, talking about the greatest albums that were never released. It was almost as entertaining as watching my school mate have a security guard's knee shoved into his back, but then they put on those plastic hand cuff things and the kid just started roaring his head back, and well, there really isn't much that can compete with that. Except of course, this.

But I've stuck with Sound Opinions, and now listen to the show weekly, either over my super exciting security feed on Saturday or as a Podcast on Monday. Look at me, with my fancy words. Podcast. Next thing you know I'll be going on about my robot butler. Actually, why don't we have robot butlers yet? They can carry us, but they can't clean for us? Just one more way 'The Jetsons' set me up for a life of disappointment. Shenanigans man, fucking shenanigans. It's a cool show though, a mix of reviews, random discussions about music, and artist interviews. They talk to Jenny Lewis this week, and even have some of her live tracks up on their site. Hopefully they'll be enough to keep you from crying as 'Portions For Foxes' is butchered in the ads for the new Lohan cinematic masterpiece. I'm super excited for this movie, but then I'm a sucker for an original concept.

I've also begun listening to KRCW's The Treatment a weekly film interview show hosted by Elvis Mitchell. Elvis Mitchell always bothered me a bit with his smarmy film guy act (especially when I caught him on the Today Show saying he thought Scarlett Johansson was fine as an actress 'as long as she didn't say anything'. Dick.), but one thing he was good for was an interesting interview, since he actually knew what he was talking about most of the time. And that's what he's doing on 'The Treatment' (instead of working for Columbia Pictures, the reason he was rumoured to have left the times in the first place), talking to people ranging from David Mamet to Rian Johnson about film. Speaking of Rian Johnson, have you seen 'Brick' yet? Or bought it's soundtrack yet? Because you need to. Go ahead. I'll wait.