Ever since they came up on a Pandora station of mine i’ve been meaning to get into Beach House but was sort of waiting for more autumnal weather to do it. As it’s been sort of chilly the past few days now seems as good a time as any. Especially since, loathe as i am to link to pitchfork on anything, there’s a bunch of videos from Beach House up on their pitchfork.tv feature. Here are the clips:

and here’s the official vid for their song “Heart of Chambers:”

imagine living in a world where what basically amounts to mega man music could be heard on the radio.

On paper at least, there’s something that appeals to me about the idea of a weed-themed action comedy. This has to do, perhaps, with the incongruity of stoners wielding automatic weapons. The potential humor value of this premise was, I think, effectively captured in a scene from Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels in which an erstwhile passed-out hippie draped in tapestries emerges out of her drug haze, gets up from a similarly tapestry-strewn couch which was providing her with camouflage, and opens fire on some guys with a fearsomely large gun. I found this scene hilarious in the theater, and I will not apologize for that. (more…)

A rousing success last night seeing this movie. I figured I’d share some random thoughts I’ve been thinking of.

• I realized that it upsets me that saturday morning cartoons are no more not because I think it’s something that kids today should enjoy but because, in all likelihood, if they hadn’t stopped showing them I wouldn’t have stopped watching them.
• Did you ever call “pounds” libs?

While I have been interested in economics and economic regulation for a while now, I have no real expertise in this area, beyond four or so courses in college.  Despite these deficiencies, I’ve been following the U.S.’s unfolding economic crisis with a combination of fear and intense intellectual curiosity.  A couple of weeks ago I was working on a piece for Roaring Shark on how the current state of the economy is painting perennial defenders of the free market (The Economist editorial board and David Brooks, specifically) into an intellectual corner, causing them to make some fairly substantial concessions in attempting to square their views with the current climate, which seems downright hostile to deregulation, trade liberalization, and a generally hands-off approach on the part of the government.  As I procrastinated, the editorials I was going to quote became less recent and the post eventually lost its timeliness, so I’ve decided to focus here on another aspect of the economic downturn: the various narratives currently being employed to “explain” the implosion of the real estate market, rocketing commodity prices, and related problems in the financial services and mortgage industries.  Here are a few storylines I’ve noticed:  (more…)

While I was in Indiana, I ended up buying a crapload of albums to help mitigate the all-Coldplay all-the-time that was happening in my Dad’s car. Normally I really hate doing that because buying more than one album at a time inevitably means that one or another album gets shafted. In this case, though, I think I’ve actually been able to give each album its due, and hopefully each one will end up on here at some point. First up, though is Maritime by Minotaur Shock. This was introduced to me by way of Pandora Radio. Here’s a Youtube of one of the songs off the album, “Vigo Bay,” which I had initially hoped was a reference to Viggo Mortensen before realizing I had the name spelled all wrong, and was more likely a (more boring) reference to Vigo, Spain.

more below the cut:
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