I have been a huge fan of “Weird Al” Yankovic for my entire Goddamned life, and I will be seeing him in concert in Indianapolis tomorrow night, at the same venue I saw the Counting Crows at a couple of weeks ago. I would really appreciate it if the world would stop getting worse until the show is over. If the asteroid is coming, that’s fine, but don’t hit us until, like, 11:00 PM. The show should be over by then.
In other news, I’m really glad I’m going to be out of town tomorrow, because I keep getting into deeply stupid little spats online with deeply stupid people, and I need a fucking cleanse badly. I’m driving to Indy and back– my wife has the newer, nicer car at the moment, and so she has inherited long-distance driving responsibilities along with it– but I need to not be on my phone in the car, so I’m going to do the driving.
I was about to explain one of the spats, but Christ, you don’t need it. I was hoping to share some of the stupid with you so you could appreciate it from afar, but instead, I’m not going to make your world dumber. I’m a Goddamned saint.
In other other news, IU just cut my major, because the governor told them to, and I’ve spent a significant amount of my non-online time in the last 48 hours trying to decide how I’m going to handle it when they announce they’re building an ICE concentration camp in Elkhart. There was talk of one going in during the last time this pigfucker was in office, and it ended up not happening, but I’m pretty sure it’s inevitable now. This is gonna be the start of my supervillain arc, or at least my “tries to sabotage something, fails, and is arrested immediately” arc.
Mental note: delete that paragraph before doing anything.
My son and I are having a movie day for Father’s Day, and I’m finally getting him to watch the Lord of the Rings movies, en route to eventually conning him into reading the books. So I’m going to make this quick; I assume you can find it within yourselves to forgive me.
Dinner was at the Bosphorous Cafe, and dinner made the trip worth it all by itself. The damn show could have been rained out and driving down just for Turkish food would have been completely fine. I had Lamb Mediterranean, along with a pile of other stuff. Absolutely delicious. And the first things I noticed when we walked in was a relative lack of white people and a table or two speaking Arabic, which is always a good sign in any restaurant featuring non-American cuisine.
We had really good seats:
That’s without any kind of zoom happening, and there were huge screens on either side of the stage, so … yeah, great seats. And we’ll be back in a few weeks for Weird Al, and we have better seats for that show.
The openers, the Gaslight Anthem, weren’t bad at all, and they played a deep Pearl Jam/Mother Love Bone cut called Chloe Dancer, which … well, I figured out who my people in the crowd were really fast.
The Crows hit the stage at 9:03. Here’s the set list, if you’re a fan. They did four songs from the new album, all of the ones I wanted to hear except for one– they didn’t play Bobby and the Rat Kings, which is one of my favorites. We got an acoustic set and a few piano songs over nearly a two hour show. Adam had to stop a song because he sneezed. And the crowd got really into the show:
… assuming, that is, that the Indianapolis police department doesn’t decide to turn the protests violent. I’m only a teeny bit worried about it; I bought the concert tickets well before the No Kings protests were a thing, and I’ll be traveling right during when most of them are going on, but I assume that particularly in a city the size of Indianapolis nobody’s gonna be super concerned with the official start and end time. I’ve never seen the Crows live, but I’ve downloaded a bunch of their shows and I’m expecting a really good show. And I’m planning on hitting the Lego store on the way home on Sunday, so Father’s Day is gonna be lit.
Last night I texted my wife and said that I wanted to go to an Italian place called Carrabba’s for dinner tonight. It’s a chain but they’re not exactly ubiquitous, so if you haven’t heard of them don’t worry about it. What you need to know is I didn’t actually want one of their entrees– they do a ridiculous carrot cake and I actually wanted some of that. Bek agreed and so the three of us headed off for Italian after she got home from work.
We walked in and immediately something felt off. We were seated immediately and made a sort of half-confused eye contact on the way to our table, then after being at the table for a moment she leaned over to me and asked if the place had seriously remodeled since we’d been in there last. I remembered the decor, but it wasn’t matching with what I had in my head. Then we got the menus and that’s when I realized it– we were in the wrong damn restaurant. So I’d said I wanted to go to Carrabba’s, and we’d gone to Carrabba’s, but what I actually wanted was Papa Vino’s, which is a much more local place (only three locations total, all within an hour of each other) that was a block away. The really ridiculous thing is that my wife was also thinking of Papa Vino’s, and had made the exact same mistake I’d had– when I said Carrabba’s, she heard that, and drove to that place, all the while expecting it to be Papa Vino’s when we walked in.
Anyway, we’re cowards, so once we’d been seated the notion of getting up and leaving was unimaginable, and it turns out the lobster ravioli at Carrabba’s is pretty good, but I didn’t get my God damned carrot cake. I mean, come on. Look at this:
So, yeah, we have to have Italian again next week, I guess.
I don’t remember the last time I wrote a movie review. It’s been a while, I can tell you that.(*) The thing about me reviewing movies– and if you’ve been around, you’ve seen me say this before– is that I have to guard against my own enthusiasm a lot of the time. There are plenty of times when I’ve written a movie review quickly after watching the movie and in retrospect it’s been more positive than maybe it would have been if I’d waited a few days.
Last night, after watching Ryan Coogler’s new film Sinners, I commented to my wife (and posted on BlueSky, I believe) that I’d have been more positive about it had I never seen From Dusk Till Dawn. And since FDtD is easily the movie’s most obvious point of comparison, let’s go straight at this: the two movies are similar enough that you could tell me Sinners was deliberately meant as a remake and I wouldn’t be surprised at all. That might feel like a slam; it’s not, as From Dusk Till Dawn is a great movie. But that’s where I was; I enjoyed Sinners quite a bit but I felt like in large part I’d seen it before.
I’m sitting here right now, fifteen or so hours later and having slept on it, wishing I’d bought the thing instead of renting it, because I want to watch it again.
Sinners is that rarest of things: a movie that’s growing on me. I think I’m just going to assume that everything Ryan Coogler makes for the rest of his life is going to be gold; Michael B. Jordan is amazing playing two of the three leads in twins Smoke and Stack,(**) and the entire supporting cast ranges from solid to outstanding– I haven’t seen Delroy Lindo in anything recently, and I could watch that man read the phone book. I’m not familiar with Wunmi Mosaku, but her Annie is tremendous, and Hailee Steinfeld disappears into her role thoroughly enough that it took a good 2/3 of the movie before I realized who she was.
(A quick word about that: apparently there are people mad about Steinfeld being cast as this character, who says at one point that her “daddy’s daddy was half Black,” which makes her an eighth Black. The fact that Americans have a word for someone who is 1/8 Black is part and parcel of how fucked up this country is, and light-skinned Black people moving away and quietly passing into the white community has been a real thing for going on two centuries in this country. Steinfeld herself is literally an eighth Black. She is the exact race of the character she portrays. Pick up a book, Goddammit.)
Anyway, I always forget to talk about the plot so let’s do that: it’s 1930-something, somewhere in Mississippi, and Jordan’s Smoke and Stack have returned to their hometown after leaving years ago, loaded with cash and guns and planning on opening a juke joint. The first half of the movie is getting ready to open, pulling everyone else into their orbit, including the actual main character, Miles Caton’s Sammie, himself an extraordinarily talented blues musician. Sammie is Smoke and Stack’s younger cousin. They open up the joint to a successful first night, and then everything goes directly to Hell in more or less exactly the same way it did in From Dusk Till Dawn, and if you haven’t seen FDtD and don’t know the twist (although they haven’t done much to hide it) I’m not going to go any further than that.
Other stuff: everyone’s praised the music, for good reason, although Buddy Guy’s 88-year-old voice coming out of Sammie’s mouth is a little odd. Guy actually shows up in person in a stinger at the end of the movie, so don’t turn it off when the credits roll, although you probably won’t be in enough of a hurry to turn it off that you’ll miss it. The movie is almost a musical but not quite. There are numbers, but they make more sense in context than, say, Alexander Hamilton randomly bursting into song.
(Okay, yeah, it’s a musical, but it’s not the type of musical that people who don’t like musicals should avoid. Just fuckin’ trust me, please, plus blues musicals are amazing, as it turns out.)
So, yeah. Two thumbs up. Check it out. But it’s only five bucks more to buy it from Amazon Prime than to rent it, so buy it; you’ll want to watch it again.
(*) It was over a year ago, and ludicrously enough, it was Abigail, which I also compared to From Dusk Till Dawn.
(**) I would not have called myself an MBJ hater, but I’ve never quite gotten the hype about the guy? I mean, he’s good, but he’s got the reputation of the second coming of Denzel Washington or something, and I haven’t seen that from him yet. Okay, y’all. I get it now. Plus, not for nothin, he’s insanely sexy in this movie. Do what you want with that information.
WordPress appears to be having technical issues tonight, so I’m gonna just toss this up– gotta keep that streak going– and call it a night. The boy downloaded Nightreign tonight and watching him play has proven quite amusing so I’m going to go do that. Hopefully this will actually post.
(Randomly: listening to a Pearl Jam concert from May 8th of this year. I swear, Eddie Vedder has not correctly remembered the lyrics to Wishlist even a single time in his entire career.)
So my car’s in the shop. It’s been intermittently reluctant to start; I haven’t been stranded anywhere yet but my wife drove me to work a couple of days last week and it’s been clear that something needs fixed before it gets worse.
Today we dropped the car off and I picked up a rental. It’s a black Toyota Rav4; perhaps not exactly the model being pictured up there, but close enough.
I absolutely could not get the radio to work. I sat in the parking lot of the rental place for a few minutes trying to make music happen, and when it didn’t, rather than going inside and asking about it or, like, reporting it as a potential defect, I just drove home, intermittently fiddling with the audio settings at stoplights and when it didn’t seem likely to immediately cause me to crash.
I got into my driveway, still sans music, and realized I’d forgotten to get the garage clicker from my car before dropping it off. I sent my wife a text to open the garage door and, hey, come meet me in the driveway too; I have a weird problem.
Then I fiddled for another couple of minutes, cut the engine and went to check the mail.
By the time I got back to the car my wife was outside.
“This is the weirdest thing,” I said. “I can’t get the radio to work.” I’d been able to play music from my phone, but still no radio.
I started the car and the radio came on immediately. Naturally, it was … startlingly loud.
Okay, so this time it’s really-really the first day of spring, the calendar says so, so instead of 70 degrees and beautiful like it’s been who knows how many days recently, we had fucking snow. Again. And there’s more expected later this week.
That said? This wasn’t a bad day at all. Work was productive– actual teaching happened in all of my classes, which is always nice, especially after how messy yesterday was. I bought tickets to a Counting Crows show in June, meaning that I’ll be seeing both the Counting Crows and Weird Al Yankovic at the same facility within three weeks this summer, and to be honest I can’t decide which show I’m more excited about. I’m seeing Weird Al with my family and the Crows with one of my oldest friends, which is going to be super cool.
And then I came home and since I got tomorrow’s planning done at work (!!!) I had time to shoot some Nazis. This poor bastard up here got killed with a grenade, dropped neatly at his feet from a bush a dozen meters away, and blew up both him and his friend. He ragdolled into the barbed wire, which I find incredibly hilarious for some reason. I never found the other dude’s body, which I assume was blown directly to Hell.
There’s probably something really creepy about how relaxing I find WWII-based sniper games; there is something incredibly cathartic about blowing a Nazi’s face off (in high-definition, bullet-cam, slow-motion detail) from 300 meters away with no one the wiser about where you were or where the bullet came from. It’s okay, see, not because it’s a video game, but because Nazis aren’t human beings.
I really shoulda booby-trapped that guy’s body, though. Maybe I’ll go back. I left a trail of destruction behind me so who knows if there’s even anyone alive to find him (no one heard the grenade) but they’d cut back to it if something happened. It would be worth it. There are always more grenades, right?
