>> The Movie Binge's first review is up, of X-Men: The Last Stand. We all chipped in our thoughts on this one; mine are at the end of the entry. I'm planning to expand on my feelings about the movie here sometime this week... desperate X-pedantry will no doubt ensue. Steel yourselves!

Oh, and crazy nerds with an XBox 360 should note that we're having an X-Men trivia contest over at TMB; if you can answer all five questions at the end of the review, then you might win yourself a copy of the official X-Men game. Prove your geek-mettle!

>> 

• Jackson Pollock at the Guggenheim: Works of Swirls and Pixie Dust - New York Times
  I need to go see this. (There's an ulterior motive.)
  (tags: jacksonpollock art museums nyc todo guggenheim nyt)

>> 

• BRYAN LEE O'MALLEY ON SCOTT PILGRIM 3 - NEWSARAMA
  New Scott Pilgrim is out Wednesday. I am SO going to go buy it on my lunch break. I have a gleeful nerd boner for this book.
  (tags: comics scottpilgrim interviews)

>> 

• Home on the Range: A Corridor for Wildlife - New York Times
  How to create environments that sustain both human and animal populations, with the Canadian Rockies as a test case. I wish I had money to give to this initiative.
  (tags: science canada nature conservation environment nyt)

>> I am a crazy person. But I'm in good company.

I've signed on to be a part of The Movie Binge, a group weblog which has shouldered the task of seeing and reviewing every single movie released between Memorial Day and Labor Day. That's 80+ films. We're nuts, I tell you, nuts. The reviews kick in this weekend with X-Men 3: The Last Stand (which we'll all be seeing together), and will be dribbling steadily from our slack-jawed lips throughout the season. So join us, won't you. And if you see us at a theatre near you, buy us Twizzlers.

And speaking of movie blogs -- J.M. has started a new site to replace the departed 10.15 -- Take The City And Run. Show some love.

>> 

• NEWSARAMA.COM: FCBD'S FREE SCOTT PILGRIM
  Read the whole 17-page SCOTT PILGRIM story from Free Comic Book Day. W00t!
  (tags: comics scottpilgrim)

>> Yes, I am well aware that I broke my pledge. I'm not happy about it. I do promise to write something on the subject this weekend... I'm dogsitting, so I'll have plenty of free time. Too much, most likely. Unless I break down and buy the new Super Mario DS game, in which case all that free time will immediately evaporate. But I can't afford that from both a personal and a financial perspective, so hopefully my resolve will remain strong...

It's been quite a week.

>> 

• NYO - Slope Opera
  The beef between North and South Brooklyn. To be honest, South Brooklyn is like a whole other city to me... and I do have a subtle, but unshakable, grudge against Park Slope. (Also, this article should really be titled "Oh, White People.")
  (tags: nyc brooklyn feuds)
• DC Direct - Batman Statue by Paul Pope
  OK, I reeeaaaallly don't want to turn into a guy who buys comic-book statues, and there's no place for it in my apartment, but this is GORGEOUS. Batman: Year 100 is one of the best things we're publishing.
  (tags: batman comics dccomics collecting)

>> 

• The Absorbascon: Everybody, sing along!
  The dorkiest thing I've ever read. But if I'd been drinking milk, it would've shot out my nose.
  (tags: dccomics comics humor blogs infinitecrisis pantha violence geoff!johns!)

>> 

• The House Next Door: Charting The New World
  Comparison between the initially-released 150-minute and theatrical/DVD 135-minute cuts of THE NEW WORLD, which might've been my favorite movie from last year.
  (tags: film movies terrencemalick)
• Bozo the Clown - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  The subject of today's lunch-table conversation. I feel there's a great novel waiting to be written about the people who played Bozo the Clown.
  (tags: clowns tv wikipedia)
• Achewood - May 16, 2006
  BATHS ONLY.
  (tags: robertsmith thecure webcomics music comics humor bathing)

>> Just so's you know, the Twilight Singers' new album, Powder Burns, is out on CD tomorrow. It's been up on iTunes for a few weeks, and it was the first full album I've ever bought there knowing full well that I'd be buying the hard copy too. The exclusive bonus track ("They Ride") was the key tipping-point in that situation, but I also just wanted to hear the record as soon as possible... in any event, it's good stuff, and I recommend that you pick up a copy. If you want to try a few tracks out first, the band's MySpace page has "Bonnie Brae," "Forty Dollars," and "There's Been An Accident" up for listening, and all three are excellent. I'm seeing them play here in NYC on June 1st, which I also recommend; I've seen two other Twilight shows in the past and they're a great, great live act. OK, frantic plugging over, back about your regular business...

>> Well, I didn't make it to the gym -- something else distracted me. But I did do all my laundry, and cleaned the apartment from top to bottom, so I do feel slightly renewed and ready to face the week. For a lot of reasons (that I hope to outline in a post sometime soon), I feel like I need to kind of throw myself into the next week, working as hard as I can and getting as much done as possible. It's a test of sorts, which I'm genuinely curious to see how I perform on.

Oh, and I'm seeing Goldfrapp again tomorrow at Irving Plaza, so hooray for that. I suspect it'll be more or less exactly the same show I saw back in December, but considering the facts that (a.) that show was completely awesome and (b.) my love for Goldfrapp has grown fivefold since I took in that concert, I'm definitely thinking it'll be a worthy outing. I'm not sure if it's sold out, but it couldn't hurt to check Ticketmaster if you want to go (and if you know what's good for you, you do want to)...

>> Details are sketchy, but we've heard reports that I ate an entire dozen donuts today. More as we get it.

Seriously, today was a fucking disgusting day of lethargy for me, despite the beautiful weather (I blame our recent acquisition of The Simpsons: Hit & Run for GameCube), though it counterbalances yesterday's day of boating, boozing, dancing, and more, I suppose. Ashley and her crew of fellow Pratt grads rented a NY Water Taxi (one of their friends had connections within the organization), had it catered (with delicious Thai) and had it take us around the rivers -- leaving the Fulton Ferry Landing and going up the East River around Roosevelt Island, back out to the Statue of Liberty, and up the Hudson to see that ridiculously massive new cruise ship that I can't be bothered to look up the name of. In any event, it was a fun way to see the city (and one's drunken friends). Boats remind me of Florida, and obviously one doesn't get much of a chance to be on the water in New York (unless you live in Staten Island and ride the ferry every day, I guess), so it was a pleasant change of pace -- and it was fun to see the burnt-out wreckage of the warehouse at the end of our street from the river... after the boat we went a-clubbin', which was worthwhile purely for the chance to finally dance to Nelly Furtado's amazing "Promiscuous" in a room full of hot, shirtless boys. More like that for the rest of the summer, please.

Anyway, tomorrow must be a Day of Accomplishments if I'm going to feel even remotely human in the coming week -- gym, laundry, house-cleaning, et cetera. So I'm sure I'll be checking in at about 2PM, after I've rolled out of bed, decided to put both of those things off for a while, and considered -- and rejected -- bathing.

>> 

• Polite Dissent » A Unit of Continuity: comics, medicine, and medical comics
  Being a proposal to create a unit of measurement entitled the Geoff, used to describe the amount of past continuity one needs to know in order to enjoy a comic-book story.
  (tags: comics superheroes geoff!johns! blogs)

>> 

• emotion lotion : buttons, pop culture.
  Someone needs to buy me a bunch of these. I think you can figure out which.
  (tags: buttons pins wishlist fashion r.e.m. neworder andersoncooper)

>> What a weird mood I'm in tonight. Not much else to say about that, unless you can read between the lines.

Anyway, unless inspiration strikes while I'm at work tomorrow (shh, don't tell the boss), I may have to break my post-a-day pledge tomorrow night -- I'm leaving directly from work for my roommate Ashley's graduation party (yay, congratulations!), which is taking place on a boat in the harbor (which, even though it's apparently going to pour rain all day tomorrow, should be totally sweet). That may transform directly into a boy's night out with the queer-mo crew, which means after I leave home tomorrow morning I won't be back until after midnight (hopefully even later, hur hur hur). So please, don't think less of me, though you've every right to. I'm starting to come down with a case of Blogs-That-Are-About-Something Envy, so the itch to write a post with a purpose is developing. Bear with me.

>> Not really feeling any better today, unfortunately; the congestion now has a sinister sibling in the form of a persistent cough. But Grant Morrison's Skrull Kill Krew is out in TPB today, and I'm relying on that to turn this whole week around. My social calendar is quite full over the next five days, so I'm hoping I start feeling better rather quickly... there's drinking to be done, and Sudafed and booze don't mix!

And yes, I'm aware that this is a lame entry, but remember: personal blogging is inherently lame. When I have an opinion on something vaguely valuable, I'll share it, but right now, my only opinions are on the subject of mucus. (Namely, I hate it.)

>> 

• 52 Pickup
  One more 52 link -- Douglas Wolk, comics critic for Salon, will be blogging his thoughts about every issue of 52. Keen!
  (tags: comics dccomics superheroes reviews blogs)
• Pitchfork: Daily Music News - David Bowie Curates New Festival
  Bowie will be curating "The High Line Festival" in May 2007, ten days of music/film/etc. surrounding the opening of the new High Line park. Awesome!
  (tags: music concerts davidbowie nyc highline)

>> I appear to have been smacked in the face with the common-cold stick. At least I hope it's a cold, and not allergies; supposedly we're in the grips of the WORST ALLERGY SEASON EVAR but I've never been allergic before. In any event, the moral of the story is that I'm stuffed full of enough snot to fill forty-eight hours of Nickelodeon programming, so instead of going down to the gym for the membership thing on my lunch break, I'm going to have to march over to Duane Reade and clean them out of Sudafed. Sigh. Thank you to the people who already wrote and harassed me, though. You keep me honest. ;-D

At least the sore throat is gone. This is a plus.

>> 

• DAILY PLANET 52 WEEK SPECIAL
  Awesome, AWESOME website for the weekly series 52 (blogged here in the past). It's easy to whore your employer's product shamelessly when it's this good.
  (tags: comics dccomics 52)
• Salon.com Books | Hooray for spandex!
  More comic book links! Seriously, this is a great essay on the nature and purpose of superhero universes and crossovers. I promise it's worthwhile.
  (tags: comics dccomics marvel superheroes salon)

>> OK, I do have one topic for the day I can blog about, and that is to ask a favor of you, my dear readers. Set yourself a little reminder, and at 2:15 PM Eastern time tomorrow afternoon, send me an e-mail and bitch at me to get my gym membership changed. I've had an employee discount available to me for a while now that could be saving me $20 a month, but I have to actually go to my gym to get my membership changed, and the membership personnel are only at the gym until 5PM (and I don't get out of work until 6:30 PM), and I'm normally too lazy to sacrifice any of the time on my lunch break to this errand. But at this point, I could have saved sixty bucks, and I could really use sixty bucks right now. So it's time to stop being completely lame; tomorrow I must get this sorted out once and for all. Help to push me over the edge of inaction, won't you?

>> Hahahahaha! I never said I wouldn't cheat and use memes to fill the month. Consider yourselves taken advantage of!

The meme in question (stolen from Erin's LiveJournal): "Go to Wikipedia and look up your birth day (excluding the year). List three facts, two births and one death in your journal, including the year." Alrighty then!

March 23 Facts:

Events:
1775 - American Revolutionary War: Patrick Henry delivers his famous speech -"give me liberty or give me death" at St. John's Church in Richmond, Virginia.
1839 - First recorded use of "OK" as an abbreviation for "oll korrect" in the Boston Morning Post.
2001 - The Russian Mir space station is disposed of, breaking up in the atmosphere before falling into the southern Pacific Ocean near Fiji.

Births:
1910 - Akira Kurosawa, Japanese film director (d. 1998)
1912 - Wernher von Braun, German-born physicist and engineer (d. 1977)

Death:
1964 - Peter Lorre, Hungarian-born actor (b. 1904)

>> This weekend, while thoroughly pleasant when taken altogether, has been a curious pile-up of tiny disappointments. To wit:

• On Friday night, I fell asleep shortly after arriving home from work, and therefore missed going out dancing with friends;
• On Saturday afternoon, I could not find a copy of Scott Pilgrim to save my life;
• Sunday morning, I utterly failed at making pancakes (Pancakes! How hard are they! But no, I had to keep burning them... eventually I wrenched out a few edible ones, but the effort-to-pancake-yield ratio should have been a lot lower);
• Sunday afternoon, Target could not sell me the last package of picture-hanging adhesive they had in the store, because it didn't have a UPC on it, therefore ensuring the doom of my fifth (no joke) effort to hang those damn framed t-shirts in my bedroom;

And now I'm off to see Mission: Impossible III, which I'm pretty sure will soon appear in the dictionary next to the word "disappointment" (Either that, or X-Men 3 will). I'll let you know if I'm wrong, but I doubt I will be. (SPOILERS: On the plus side, I understand that I might get to see Keri Russell's head explode? That's something, at least...)

>> Sigh. I was *not* successful in getting my hands on the Scott Pilgrim book, despite going to three different stores. (I think I knew this already, but today confirmed it: St. Mark's Comics sucks. They didn't even order Scott Pilgrim, under the logic that independent comics are for people who already like comics, not new customers. WTF? If there is one comic that's being published right now that I would give out to the average young, hip New Yorker, it's Scott Pilgrim! What a fucking waste.) So if anyone wound up with an extra copy somehow, you can be my best friend forever. (BFF!)

However, I *do* have a bunch of copies of the Superman/Batman freebie, so if anyone wants one and didn't get it, you know who to call. And I did get a haircut and a cheesesteak this afternoon, so y'know, the afternoon's not a total waste.

>> Art School Confidential opens tonight in NY and LA (where a shocking number of my readers reside, I suspect), and I recommend you all go see it. (I'm only just now getting around to posting my thoughts on it, you see, having watched it about a month ago at the Clowes/Zwigoff screening I linked here a while back -- they're quite a funny pair, if you ever get the chance to see one or both of them speak in person). It's getting some very poor reviews, which I found a bit surprising, but I definitely disagree with a lot of them. There are criticisms to be made -- the filmmaking's not exactly flashy, and it doesn't have the same kind of crackle that Ghost World had -- but overall, I think critics are reacting to the nihilism of the film with a surprisingly puerile negativity. Nihilism can be totally, totally funny, people! Critics seem to have gone in expecting a story arc that isn't really there -- about halfway through the film, the main character's arc zigs considerably off the path you might perhaps be expecting, and that seems to make them uncomfortable. Sure, you could've gotten a rewarding film out of the road expected to be travelled, but if you've ever read a Dan Clowes comic, the ending you get should not be surprising at all. It's black humor, and there's not a lot to love about any of the human beings you'll encounter in the movie, but sometimes that's the point, y'know?

Anyway. You won't die if you wait until it's on DVD, but if you're looking for an alternative to the Tom Cruise Pretends To Be A Human Being Show, you could certainly do worse than Art School. And that's my glowing recommendation.

>> 

• Water Taxi Beach
  Sweet! New summer hangout in the neighborhood! (Not such a bad walk over the bridge...) Man, that food sounds good right now.
  (tags: nyc queens food longislandcity neighborhood beach)
• Quicksilver plug-ins for Google Calendar and Gmail - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
  Nice. I don't use Quicksilver all that much, to be honest (I really only use it to find files quickly on my Panther Mac), but this does add a welcome bit of functionality...
  (tags: software mac osx google gmail calendar organization quicksilver)

>> Don't forget -- Free Comic Book Day is this Saturday, May 6th. Stop into your (hopefully) friendly neighborhood comics shop (most are participating, some aren't -- you can check by typing in your zip code at the link above, or checking the master list of participating international stores) on Saturday, and pick up an armload of free books -- every major publisher participates at this point, producing one-off specials or reprints to be given away free to anybody who wants 'em. This year, DC is offering the pleasantly insane Superman/Batman #1 (with gorgeous, gorgeous animation-esque art by Ed McGuinness, who's definitely in my Top 10 of artists working right now) and the very kid-friendly Justice League Unlimited #1. And God knows I must, must, must get my hands on the Oni Press Scott Pilgrim freebie (Vol. 3 comes out this month! I friggin' adore this comic)!

I'll be putting in an appearance at Forbidden Planet here in NYC sometime on Saturday, and I urge you and yours to do the same at your local store -- everybody loves free shit, right? (And I'm probably going to drop a depressing amount of money on that Uncanny X-Men Omnibus Vol. 1 hardcover, if FP still has it in stock when I get there... "free" comic book day my ass! No visit to a comic book store is "free" when you're Chris Conroy.)

>> 

• It's just like Chili, right? | Ask MetaFilter
  An explanation of the "alarm" system in the classification of fires. I'd wondered about this yesterday too, of course.
  (tags: askmefi fire disasters)
• comicfoundry.com - PRODUCTION // WEEKLY COMIC IS 52 TIMES HARDER
  Fantastic interview with Steve Wacker, the editor of the wildly ambitious (and, having just read #1, I can safely say wildly excellent) weekly series 52. Steve's a cool guy.
  (tags: comics dccomics 52 superheroes interviews)

>> Bart just made a pledge to write a non-linklog post every day this month, and it's indirectly shamed me into taking on the same vow. It's only a matter of time before I break that vow, but I'm going to give it an at-least half-hearted try. (Sadly, I don't have the same level of... distraction in my life that he does to use as an excuse, but hey).

I can't make this one count for tomorrow, right? Sigh. Don't expect miracles... there ain't much goin' on with me these days, but I'll try to tart up whatever I can to make it postworthy... Man, I know how to market! Anyway, it's the least I can do for the few brave souls who still stop in here every day... I know I've been neglecting my personal writing lately, and I could use the added discipline and focus. Let's see what comes of it... together! (Group hug)

>> 

• Firefighters Battle Brooklyn Warehouse Blaze - New York Times
  The NYT coverage of the fire in my neighborhood -- the largest in NYC for eleven years (not including 9/11).
  (tags: nyc brooklyn greenpoint disasters fire nyt neighborhood)
• Apple - Trailers - Superman Returns
  Please remember to help pay my salary on June 30th. (Conflict of interests aside, this actually looks pretty friggin' sweet.)
  (tags: film movies superman comics dccomics video)
• On Cyclops and the male gaze... (plasticbag.org)
  I love Cyclops, and I do think what Tom's talking about is present in the character, though it's a slight overstatement (and has only really emerged recently).
  (tags: comics xmen marvel blogs)

>> 

• Bryant Park | Calendar | Summer Film Festival
  Including M.A.S.H., BULLITT, and THE BIRDS.
  (tags: nyc film movies todo calendar)
• NY1: Top Stories - Massive Fire Engulfs Brooklyn Warehouse
  This is less than two blocks from my apartment. So, uh, let's hope my house doesn't burn down, shall we?
  (tags: nyc greenpoint brooklyn fire disasters neighborhood)

>> 

• Koalas = Bitches
  "Koalas aren't hard they some little bitches... If a koala goes in the water it won't be able to breathe with its little short ass." This is pure comedy.
  (tags: koalas humor brutalidiocy)
• mininova : TV Shows > Other > 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner with Stephen Colbert and Pres. Bush (TVRip.SoS)
  Torrent of Colbert's hilariously savage White House Press Corps speech.
  (tags: humor politics video stephencolbert bittorrent)