Defensive Indifference

I love pop culture, but this is the only way I can muster the energy to do anything like this, so bear with me. It’s movie reviews in 10 words or less.

Land of the Dead: Had higher hopes for zombies with intelligence.

Resident Evil: Best movie adaptation of a video game ever.

Righteous Kill: Heat is spinning in its grave.

Mongol: Reading subtitles was totally worth it.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno: Kevin Smith made good movies once upon a time.

Choke: Failed in every way to live up to the book.

Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist: Charming enough.

Burn After Reading: If the Coen Brothers made a snuff film I’d watch.

RocknRolla: Every bit as good as Snatch and Lock Stock

Role Models: Who knew Stifler could still be funny?

Milk: The thing about biopics is you know the ending already.

Body of Lies: Crowe, Leo and Scott. Hard to beat that team.

Punisher: War Zone: Gore is awesome when it’s not torture porn.

Appaloosa: How’d this end up so boring?

The Spirit: A bad acid trip with hot chicks.

Sex Drive: Why didn’t this get as much hype as Hangover?

Probably the most sensible take I have seen anywhere, mainstream or not-so-mainstream. He keyed it off the Sosa “revelation” which actually surprised me a little bit in how quickly everyone recoiled and moved on. (I knew there would be a point when that would happen, it still surprised me when it finally did.)

Anyway, Buster used to drive me mad, particularly when I was a college kid who drank too much and spent too much time on message boards honing my sabermetric skills, but since I’ve gotten in the business I’ve grown to respect him more and more by the year. The whole thing is worth a read, but this was the key part to me:

Ibanez insists he’s clean, and we have no reason to doubt his word. Assuming he is clean, the circumstances are wildly unfair to him. But those elements were not put in place by Morris, who just happens to be part of a generation that does its communicating via e-mail and Twitter and blogs — rather than through word of mouth, as a lot of writers did in the late ’90s and the earlier part of this decade, as they stood alongside batting cages and speculated on who did steroids and who didn’t.

I don’t much care for the whole thing — steroids and blog-v.-MSM — because both are so played out. I’ve long compared the bloggers-vs.-journalists things to the scouts-vs.-statistics debate that raged in baseball right after “Moneyball” came out. It was a false dichotomy. Both skills have enormous utility, and any team that would ignore one or the other instead of using both was being willfully stupid. And in fact, just like scouting and sabermetrics, “blogs” (whatever that means anymore, considering it’s only a medium) and mainstream should be symbiotic, not constantly feuding.

What annoys the living daylights out of me, though, is when people just line up on a topic based on the medium they made their name in, which is, by and large, what happened with the Morris thing. It reminded me of a classic Chris Rock bit from one of his standup specials, a special I happened to be in attendance for:

Morris was too casual in his speculation, and he should have been more aware that anything you write can filter through the world pretty quickly, but where was the responsibility of the Philly Inquirer? This never would have been a story if they didn’t take a blogger’s idle speculation and run with it, and the funny thing is that even though John Gonzalez hid behind all of his journalistic training — training I have too, just so we’re being clear here — and judged from his post as one of those responsible journalists who would never speculate like Morris did, the Inquirer cleaned up on this story. It wasn’t just Morris who got a bunch of attention and went on ESPN and got mentioned in wire stories. It was Gonzalez and the Inquirer too.

This and this seem related. Or maybe it’s just an athlete-wide problem. Either way, it’s hard to love the media-athlete relationship these days and the direction it is heading.

… At least with me. I went online tonight poised to cancel my account with eMusic, which generally I have enjoyed, but had really outlived its usefulness for me, only to find that it will be adding 200,000 tracks in July, including an assortment of more mainstream artists.

Good timing.

eMusic has been wonderful for an indie music fan like myself, but I’ve found it difficult to find a lot of fresh indie music there, particularly the more popular acts which have made the jump to more mainstream themselves. (I’ve got a societal theory about this, but we’ll leave that for later.) In fact, I’m so on top of the indie scene that I’ve found myself going back and filling out my collection with some more classic oversights (Black Crowes, Rod Stewart, Don Henley just as a few examples), so it’s an awfully good thing, especially for my business with the company, that eMusic will be making The Byrds, Journey, Michael Jackson, Alice in Chains and on and on available for general consumption.

In honor, a track from the last great album I downloaded from eMusic, and perhaps my favorite album of the year so far.

Gutted and devastated. That’s all there is to say. Newcastle United have been relegated. The end of one journey is the beginning of another. I’ll leave it to Alan Shearer, who says it better than I ever could and I hope is the full-time manager come August.

Billy Beane chatted over at FanHouse this afternoon. The whole thing is worth reading, but this was my favorite part:

jon welland: Who is going to win more games in 2009: dallas braden or tottenham hotspur?!

Billy Beane: For our sake, I hope it’s Braden. But ‘Arry Rednap’s late push has the Spurs raising the bar a bit.

There are many reasons I like Beane, but near the top has to be his love of soccer. Back in the old days I could laugh at Spurs’ ineptitude and dysfunctionality. Now? Not so much.

I started supporting Newcastle United Football Club more than two years ago. I became a fan for a variety of reasons. I became friends with someone from the Toon. I was attracted to the passion of the fans in the North East, who keep coming back year after year, false dawn after false dawn. Mostly, I was searching for the organic, irrational, wonderful experience of being a fan.

Since I became the MLB editor for AOL and later FanHouse, being a baseball fan hasn’t been the same. That’s not a complaint, nor is it a negative. I still love the sport, but it’s a much bigger, less compartmentalized part of my life than it used to be, and as you constantly think about stories from different angles and get to know people in the sport, that provincial pride you get rooting for a specific team dulls significantly.

Newcastle was my big way to get that feeling back.

Now I am facing perhaps my biggest challenge as a sports fan ever.

Read the rest of this entry »

Thinking these things and saying them (in public, for all to see and for all-time) are two different things entirely.

Suddenly, Buzz Bissinger, spittle and all, talking about the mean-spiritedness and crudeness in the blogosphere doesn’t seem so crazy, at least for the next few hours. The jokes at With Leather are completely indefensible.

And please also note when I say “Bloggers,” I don’t mean bloggers. I mean the jackass clique that forms what I think of as the mainstream blogosphere. Obviously there are many great bloggers out there who I adore and far outnumber those idiots.